✮ ✮ ✮ The Meeting, Several Hours Earlier ✮ ✮ ✮

⸂Welcome,⸃ the man said as he rose, his extravagant robes spreading wide as he opened his arms in greeting. Where everyone else in the room, even the other officials seated to either side of him, were either dressed for battle or still in morning loungewear, this man looked like a royal. His outfit wasn’t quite the excessive, heavy layers of a Dion royal, but they were by far the most fanciful thing Emilia had seen in this world. The sheer black of his clothing, glittering under the light cast by the windows behind him, put even the Stringer Matriarch’s clothing to shame.

The man smiled and Emilia suppressed a shudder. It wasn’t that the smile didn’t meet his eyes, the way so many fake smiles were given away. It was that it did, and yet the man seemed wrong. Not the wrongness of a black knot or someone like Sk’lar. Something else. Something other that made her want to grab the kids and run as far and fast as she could.

If she didn’t think they’d be killed before they could even reach the doors, she might have tried.

This man—this entire place; there was something wrong with it, creeping through the air as an unseen force, flickering into this world for moments as the man talked, his voice an oozing, sweet manipulation that seemed intent to press at Emilia’s mind, looking for a gap it couldn’t find.

It found that gap in others, in the Clarity members spread through the room. She could see the way they shuddered, their eyes flickering with awareness before melting away, their smiles of unyielding love for their leader falling to confusion and concern before sliding back just as something filled them back up.

V’s hand tightened around hers. Astra’s flicked up for the barest of moments from her game with Caro, their own eyebrows pulled together and Emilia could feel them searching the aethernet for answers to some unvoiced question.

And Gale? Gale looked like she was about to be sick, her body shrinking as she pulled so close to Emilia that she practically climbed into her lap.

Yeah, this so wasn’t good.

✮ ✮ ✮ Present ✮ ✮ ✮

“I don’t like this,” Emilia grumbled, scuffing her foot over the ground as they prepared to leave. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

V shot her a look, one that said he didn’t like it any more than she did. ⸂Sorry,⸃ he said before turning back to his bag and stuffing more items into it. ⸂It’s my fault we ended up here. I didn’t realize they were this… militant.⸃ V huffed, forcing more items into his bag. Some he shrunk down using his core, but as Emilia’s own experiments over their days apart had shown her, it wasn’t such an easy thing to do to items that didn’t have a natural flow of magic through them. In other words, normal clothing? All but impossible to shrink.

“I don’t blame you,” Emilia assured him. She didn’t, but this situation… wasn’t good. Being with the Risen Guard still might very well have been better than this, although who knew how that would have turned out as the days dragged on.

V struggled to get another item into his bag, and Emilia stepped forward, waving him off as she rearranged several of the items. The man was frustrated with himself and taking it out on his innocent bag. Said bag had followed him through his disappearance in the Livery Labyrinth, appearing at his feet once he and the children—who were currently being housed in a city level above them—came to.

They had wound up in another section of the labyrinth and worked their way through it—something that V was resolutely refusing to talk about. ⸂I told you,⸃ he had told her during their brief discussion of it, ⸂I have too many terrible skills from my years in blackaether raids.⸃

Emilia hadn’t asked about it again, seeing in the way the man was staring absently into space that whatever had happened hadn’t been good. He had informed her that all of them had escaped the labyrinth physically unharmed—which wasn’t exactly the most encouraging news she’d heard—before being found by the group they were now marching into what would almost certainly become a war with.

When she had informed V that escaping with only some psychological trauma meant his group had escaped their trek with fewer injuries than her own group had, the man had been horrified. It had taken a moment to calm him down, while she told him about what had happened during the rest of the labyrinth and the city that followed—about the random Enclave member, Boundary, Conrad and his brother.

V had been glad to hear the asshole who had caused the stampede was dead, even if he wasn’t enthusiastic about her budding friendships with Conrad—not that it was guaranteed they would see each other again—or Boundary. The other visitor had been so upset that Emilia had neglected to tell him about her ability to contact Boundary, nor had she mentioned Carne… or Benny touching the heartcore and getting dragged into whatever that mess was.

For all she knew, he could exist as a spy within Carne’s followers for years. She had said goodbye like they would see each other again before she left, but there was no way to guarantee that. Benny may decide to never relay any information to Boundary and the Risen Guard—and indeed, Benny’s messages were still the same as they’d been since those first few messages—or one day, the boy could pop out with information about how Carne was going to overthrow the Risen Guard and put his cult of followers in charge of the city system. Emilia rather thought the latter was more likely, but the more time Benny spent inside that group, the more likely it was that he would come to see their views as correct.

It wasn’t fair that Benny had ended up in such a position, nor was it fair to her or Boundary to know they had put him there. V didn’t deserve to be there, either, worrying about a boy whose fate was out of their hands—whose fate he had had no part in shaping.

So, no, she wasn’t going to be telling him about that. They already had enough to worry about.

The meeting they had been forced to attend had been strange, more a vitriol filled call to action and motivational speech than anything. Between V and Phlostra, Emilia had already learned this group was effectively a vigilante group, existing somewhere between the Risen Guard and Enclave as their shared, if somewhat secret, enemy. Most of its members were former Enclave members and their descendants, especially among those they were now teaming up with, even if that teaming up was largely against their will.

Unlike the Enclave itself, which had fractured into more and more families with vastly different goals and philosophies over the last few visitations, the group they now found themselves associated with—Clarity—had a solid goal: to clear the world of corruption.

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That alone put Emilia off. Corruption was all but inescapable. Even in places like Falrion, which had cracked down on anyone who held views opposing the will of the government, a faction willing to overthrow that government had managed to come into being. Some might say that it was only due to the war: exposure to outside forces had allowed views contrary to the government’s stance to bubble into existence.

Emilia didn’t think it was that simple, and even if it was, no one existed in a complete vacuum. Even if Clarity managed to weed out all of this world’s corruption—⸂to erase both the Risen Guard and the Enclave members who refuse to join our cause,⸃ as it had been put in the meeting—visitations would still occur. People from her world would still bring in their views and opinions, and even if Clarity attempted to kill them all before they could corrupt any locals, they were unlikely to succeed so easily. Then, there were still other city systems out there to contend with. Emilia knew the city systems didn’t interact much, but just their existence was enough.

People would escape Clarity’s cleanse of corruption. Those people would return for vengeance one day. There was no way around such things. Neither Ajarni—the man who had spent the majority of the meeting talking with the passion of a zealot about Clarity’s mission and goals, softly riling everyone up with blank faced motivation and manipulation before relating stupidly vague details of their plan to the group—nor Phlostra had wanted to hear her thoughts on the matter.

She and V were visitors. They were there to help fight and to search for a way to gain a blessing, and hopefully remove the blood curse from the world. That was partially why they were being dragged along on this strike against one of the most powerful and vicious Enclave families: allegedly, one of their Harbingers had gained system access.

All the visitors who Clarity had accumulated—twelve, as of the meeting—were to accompany the group and try to figure out how the Ingogia family’s Harbinger had gained that access. Members of Clarity would also be searching, of course. They would search the grounds of the Ingogia family estate and question the members, while the visitors questioned this Harbinger of theirs.

Did they have a choice in the matter? Not really. They could leave—take the kids and travel back up the tunnel to the world above, present themselves to the Risen Guard, or search out the labyrinth access point and hope they ended up somewhere where they wouldn’t immediately be killed.

Emilia wasn’t convinced they’d make it to the end of that tunnel. No one had threatened them, but there was a vibe—one that said: if you endanger our group and plan, we will gladly snuff you out. She didn’t blame V for this turn of events, even if a little part of her wanted to. After all, she’d done the same thing, hadn’t she? Teamed up with Boundary and allowed to children to be taken by a combination of Carne and the Risen Guard in an attempt to keep them safe…

Speaking of whom…

[Emilia: do you know anything about a group called clarity?]

Emilia made her way back to her own room to grab her weapons in preparation for leaving as she waited for Boundary to respond. She considered asking Honey as well—after all, the trainee might actually know some people who had jumped off the Enclave ship for Clarity—but when she opened the girl’s messages she was, once again, bombarded by a million messages.

Many of her messages were thoughts about what was happening through her day. Apparently it didn’t matter that Emilia had never actually responded to any of her messages, Honey was intent to scream into the void. That was fair—stars knew she’d done similar things to her friends, over the years. Currently, it was Sil who received the majority of her messages meant for the abyss—see one complaint about how she had stupidly spent too much money the night of the mech raid—but she sent Rafe a respectable amount as well.

Maybe once she was home, she’d start sending messages to Olivier as well. He’d been one of her go-to people for decades after they met, only a few years of awkward silence separating her messages, during the time directly following the conclusion of her case. She’d just been so convinced he hated her—that their time together during her case had been a momentary lapse of judgment, on his part, and he had been glad to be rid of her. Looking back on that time… yeah, she still had no idea what that had been about, especially when things had eventually mended between then, and then, after the war began, he had always been there for her.

Mostly, Emilia had just decided to think of Olivier as strange and difficult to understand. Now… she thought he might appreciate her rambling messages? Maybe? She would have to test his boundaries, of course. Sil never got messages about her time during the war, obviously, and while Rafe had handled the trauma of the war well enough, there were some things she wouldn’t subject even him to. Figuring out what and how much she could send Olivier would be a project, especially since there were a handful of things she couldn’t, under any circumstances, tell him about.

Probably best to set her Censor up to stop messages about certain subjects from being sent to the man.

Emilia had just finished reading a section of messages about more chaos Caro’s babysitter was exacting upon the world—or, specifically, a city called Hurland, which was apparently located on one of the highest floors. From what Honey could tell, the crazed woman had followed a rumour about Conrad—who the guards they knocked out had sketched a picture of—being there when something caught her attention.

She stilled, hand wrapped around the railing of the staircase she had been climbing, feet on different steps. Her eyes flicked upwards, searching for what had called her attention. Not a sound nor even energy floating absently through the aether. Something else, something more purposeful, something…

A feeling reached her, winding around her like a long-lost friend—or maybe, not so long-lost.

⸂Grab th’kids,⸃ a familiar voice said. ⸂I can give you a few minutes of privacy. Make ‘em count.⸃

Emilia was already racing up the stairs and pushing her way into the hallway. “Up,” she signed as she burst into the room. They hadn’t been there long, and she only had to throw a handful of items back into their bags as the kids scrambled up. Luckily, they had changed back into clothes more suited for travel since breakfast.

⸂What’s happening?⸃ Gale asked as she helped Caro and Astra into their shoes and coats. Emilia appreciated that she didn’t hesitate, not that she had expected the teenager to: they had also talked about how neither of them liked the situation, about how something felt wrong with the people of this place—about how much that wrongness reminded Gale of the feelings that seeped from Carne’s existence. As much as Gale hadn’t appreciated being held by the Risen Guard, this was no better.

Actually, scratch that. This was worse.

“We’re getting you out of here,” she signed, unsure how much the girl understood.

Astra apparently understood enough, however, her aethervoice sliding through each of them to tell the others they were leaving. Given the look she gave Emilia, she also understood the implication of her words: Emilia wasn’t going with them, not if she could help it.

Emilia switched several of her weapons into Gale’s bag and checked to make sure Caro’s {Blood Hair Clip} was secure before hauling Caro and Astra into her arms.

If that man said they only had a short window of time, Emilia believed him.

Gale grabbed the bags as they raced back through the hall to the stairs. Annoyingly, they'd have to go up, but this time it was mostly rough on Gale, her own increased level and {Blood Armour} enough to make climbing flight after flight after flight easy, even with Astra and Caro’s added weight.

Windows that graced the landings of the lower floors disappeared, signalling the transition into city levels. Doorways became rarer, the levels reaching dozens of floors up before the next entrance to a city level. Phlostra had pointed out the central elevator, several magic-powered elevators moving residents up and down in better times. As it was, the stress of visitors both inside the lower levels and the world as a whole, along with the growing conflict with the Risen Guard and Enclave, had led to a lockdown: unless you were needed, everyone was to remain in their home levels.

The staircases were more emergency exits, and no one entered them—no one was around to see what they were doing.

No one noticed Conrad sneaking into their home from stars knew where.