Baraway, the Putrid Prince, a pillar of Crystalline, shrinks below his workbench. He falls on his back, chest heaving, green sludge running down his lips and crusting his cheeks.

“Snail killers,” he rasps as a snot-colored bubble pops from his mouth. “I knew it was you coming, Vagrant. I would have joined you, but damn-” he coughs. “Those bastards got to me first.”

Seskone, The Vagrant King, kneels to his old friend. “Who?”

“The Hodshells.” Another cough and another step closer to death. “Those pricks. They already got the rest of the pillars. I’m the last.”

Seskone knows that. He heard the hooded assassins had killed the six members of Crystalline’s ruling council. This only means that the Hodshells know of Seskone’s uprising and will stop him from assuming his rightful place atop Crystalline.

It is what Seskone would have done: attacking your enemy’s family first. Though Baraway is unrelated to Seskone by blood, their bond through time drives deep. Baraway may as well be Seskone’s father.

Baraway was barely thirty when he joined Crystalline’s ruling council, and Seskone was a teenager. Now, sprawled and dying on the floor, Baraway is at least fifty but seems one hundred. The poison has taken its toll quickly.

The remnants of a struggle lie around them, extending beyond the prince’s lab to the rest of the autumn residence. The bodies of the Hodshells posing as house staff lie in piles a dozen high. Seskone orders them to be stripped, their weapons seized, and their coins to be spent on the uprising. When his men drag the corpses out and burn them, he does not blink.

Still on the ground, Baraway shifts. “You’ve assembled quite the team,” he croaks, seeing Quoreflux walking in. “A potsoul? Gods. Have we stooped that low?”

Quore has the presence of mind not to lash out against Seskone’s dying friend—or father. The distinction between mentor and parent became unclear after all the things Baraway had taught Seskone.

“Hold out here,” Seskone tells Quore once the brunt of the assault is complete. “And get me an antidote!”

“There’s no antidote for this,” Baraway manages. “It’s my concoction. Those bastards.”

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Seskone sees the bubbling vats and beakers on the workbenches now. He wants to topple them all over or drink them to end all this loss.

He doesn’t say he’s too late, but Seskone feels the words vibrating in his bones. He could have saved this dying patriarch if he had begun the uprising earlier. Instead, he had wallowed outside those palisade walls, traversing the lands aimlessly, trying to avoid his responsibility.

He wouldn’t do that again.

“Old friend,” Seskone says. “I…” The words don’t come. Nothing comes but regret at his indecision.

Baraway coughs and it’s a shallow attempt to stay alive. “We did our best... to hold what you started. We upheld your instructions. We never meant for it to come to this.”

“Don’t blame yourself.” Then, “You never thought I’d return?”

The dying man shakes his head. “I wished upon life geysers and upon rivers. I wished stalks of grain were compass needles to indicate your coming. I searched for signs everywhere.” Baraway wretches a sludgy pool from his mouth. “We all did, Vagrant King.”

Baraway still considers Seskone a king, even after all this time. This fact only drives the knife deeper into Seskone’s soul.

The man sifts around for Seskone’s hand, finds it, and squeezes. “Please do a better job than we ever could.”

His eyes close. His head falls over.

Seskone stands above Baraway for a long time, listening not to the footsteps of his mercenaries storming through the prince’s residence but to the bubbling of his dead friend’s alchemical mixtures. He switches the burners off, concluding the man’s experiments. Baraway had sought to use these chemical weapons against the Hodshells, but the Hodshells knew this first.

Seskone’s other friends—his family—would suffer the same fate.

It would be so easy to give up now, so early into the process. He could walk away again.

Quore opens the door, speaks to a messenger, and then returns to Seskone. “The compound is secure.”

Another foothold, then. Another place to plan and plot and use to take back Crystalline from the Hodshells. When the Hodshells figure out Seskone has taken Baraway’s residence, they’ll be on the move again, continuing their band of pillaging and guerrilla tactics. All Seskone knows is fleeing, but soon, he’ll strike.

He has to.

Baraway’s body already begins its crumble, disintegrating into a pool of green matching the shade he had spat. There’ll be no need to burn the man, and this reality of skipping a burial hits Seskone the hardest.

A family bound by time and responsibility, but still family. Seskone had often felt a connection to the people of Crystalline, but it paled in comparison to the bond he shared with his ruling council.

Baraway was family, and family was more important than anything.