It was during the tournament of firs, in the year eighty-four after the war of the firantes, that the technique of the Imperatrix’ botte was seen for the first time. The most beautiful woman of the Empire of Ja was battling against the prince of Fir, in the quarterfinals, and used an unknown technique to win. The botte is also known as the Imperatrix’ dance, this latter description defining it much better, as it seems to be a series of useless moves, only having artistic value. But, despite this technique not being the one changing my mind about the impossibility of there being a perfect, unavoidable strike, the Imperatrix’ dance is indubitably fearsome. The dance does not have any superfluous movements, the rhythm of the technique being itself paramount to perform it correctly. The Imperatrix attributed her technique to the Goddess Lebe and taught her closest guards about how perspectives were actually the real danger created by her technique. To dodge the thrown dagger is a rather easy affair when the opponent knows about the botte, but the point is less to hit your target, and more to make the enemy think that they can use the “unnecessary” moves of the dance as an opportunity to attack. This is when the true godly wisdom of the technique will show itself, as any attempt at attacking during the dance will invariably be missed, and whether you know about the technique at that point will not matter in the end results.

Competitions for weapon masters around the world, Remulus of Thiers.

“Nay? How do you feel?”

The Legio did not answer her friend immediately. To watch the Blizzard of Hi crash unto the tent, even if it was greatly diminished in destructiveness due to where they had set up camp, was putting her in a contemplative mood. Numerous buried memories, a decade old or more, were pushed back into her conscious mind, things Nay could now see with a new point of view, due to her maturity and experience gained after all these years. It was as if all the emotions that had been associated with her cloudy past were getting clearer. As if they regained their right to exist, but were also calmed down by the time that had passed.

“Weird.” She finally answered.

“Uhuh. Want to tell me about it?”

The young girl with cloudy eyes met the blue ones of her friend. “I…maybe. I think. What is my Rreico telling you?”

The Duchess’ right eyebrow rose in a questioning look. “I don’t know. You didn’t teach me how to differentiate my perception of Rreico with my normal one.”

“What’s your perception telling you then?”

Trinne held her mouth shut for an instant. She paused to open the tent door very slightly to peek outside. The wind and snow were living out there in a harmonious maelstrom, and despite it being the middle of the afternoon, there was almost no light, preventing the young redhead from seeing anything more than snowflakes dancing around.

Inside, the only light source was their oil lamp, hanging in the centre of their refuge’s ceiling.

Had they been in the Canyon, the winds of the Blizzard would have blown them away like scattered leaves, but the two women weren’t inside the Canyon. They could not leave the Unbroken Ones though, not yet. To kill an angel had not resolved all their problems, something both women understood when their emotions had calmed.

So Nay had shown Trinne the way of the Leïns.

Which explained the trembling in the hands of the Duchess, even hours later. The young redhead had disliked climbing the Unbroken Ones with a passion.

“Don’t let the cold get in, please.” Nay asked.

Trinne nodded, closing the little opening back up.

The two women watched each other in silence for one more minute, before Trinne finally decided to answer Nay’s question.

“I feel that you’re sad…no. Nostalgic? Angry. Tense. Not nervous though. Sometimes when I look at you, it’s like I’m laying in a field at night, and I’m looking at the immensity of the dark sky. It’s oppressive, as if I’m crushed by infinity. But generally, I’m concentrating on all the stars, captivated, and I forget all about the nothingness surrounding them. Right now, when I look at you, it’s as if I wasn’t outside but inside, and looking at the sky through a window where rain is flowing down on it.”

Nay blinked. “You see the stars? But it’s raining?”

“A starry sky yes. Under the rain. It’s just a feeling though but…”

“No. My Rreico, to my eyes at least, is just the night. But you’re seeing stars?”

Trinne nodded.

“So…you see my Rreico differently from how I see it.”

“I’m probably doing something wrong then, you are…”

Nay raised her right hand as she shook her head. “The opposite Trinne. Dad never told me that you could look at your own Rreico. I thought he simply forgot to tell me, or that it wasn’t important, or that there was a secret reason but…No. It’s just because you can’t. What I’m sensing is the power inside of me that isn’t my own. That’s the only thing I feel. Lisana said the same thing you did. I just couldn’t understand why.” The master Legio smiled. “A starry night, eh? I was worried about you being disgusted by my Rreico if you felt it, but that isn’t so bad.”

“It isn’t. Is Rreico something as specific as this? For a person I mean. What do I feel like?”

“Ha. You’re like a big machine of cogs, with the smell of oil, all of it inside a giant bed of flowers of all types and colours.”

“Flowers!? I’m like flowers to you?!” Trinne shouted, offended.

Nay softly laughed.

Only the wind accompanied her for a while.

“I can’t express it better than that.” Nay finally said.

“What? My flowers?”

“No. Nostalgic. Angry. On the edge. My Rreico being troubled, like underwater.”

Trinne didn’t answer.

Nay continued. “The clan never went as south as this, from what I can remember at least, but the roads of the mountains are all the same. The sight, or more like the complete lack of sight…it was my daily life. I was the sole child. The youngest person after me had to be thirty, thirty-five maybe. It was hard to tell with all the Firante enchantments letting someone change their physical appearance or act as a youth elixir.

“Of youth?”

“I think, yes. After all, Hyn isn’t a mage, but she was born way before the war of the Firantes, and even now she doesn’t look a day over forty.”

“But…the Firante enchantments…”

“Use the sacrifice of living Rreicos to work. Yes. Not surprising that she doesn’t recharge her tattoos anymore.”

Trinne didn’t add anything, but the two women knew what the implications of this revelation meant. The Imperatrix had avoided the passing of time at the cost of human lives? Worse, their souls?

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“I didn’t learn how to use that magic, though. To be honest, no one really cared about me. I had two parents, but thinking about it, they were definitely not my real parents. I don’t think I was ever supposed to wake up. That’s what I remember them saying. I wasn’t supposed to grow old, become more powerful, and potentially uncontrollable. What’s more, they hated me. I think it was linked to the fact that I was the only child, but honestly, I’m not sure anymore, no one said anything to me. Well, except that I was supposed to hate the biggunine. Bigguniniesse? I’m not sure. Humans, to translate roughly, or to be more specific, human men and the women protecting them.”

“…Firantes in real life seem as charming as how they seem in the stories.”

“Oh. That’s nothing. The clan was mainly surviving by raiding the nomadic tribes north of the Unbroken Ones. I was too young, fortunately, to remember any, but I do have flashbacks about the prisoners. They didn’t live long. Everything they say about the Firantes…it’s true. Well, except they aren’t monstrous creatures. Human beings like you and me, a clan only composed of women, using an atrocious type of enchanting, and capable of using the miracle of Lebe perfectly.”

“The one able to modify the human body? The one the Lebe priests use to torture and heal?”

Nay nodded, catching her breath for a moment before continuing. “In any case, I think I had a grandmother. I can only remember her eyes and the fact that she couldn’t hear and talk. She was the only one nice to me. Without her, I think I would’ve rapidly become as worse as any other Firante. Marke wouldn’t have hesitated in killing a little girl like that one. I would not have been saved. Then again, without the clan to teach me how to fight, how they forced me to k…” Nay paused. Something that did not exist was fiercely gripping her throat.

Trinne put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to, Nay. Not all at once. Take a break.”

“I…yes.” Nay felt the tension lower a bit. “Without the clan and its horrors, I wouldn’t have survived. I hate what they made me do, but because of it, at the very least, I managed to flee. The angel did not catch me. So I’m nostalgic. Because I remember some of the very rare things that I liked here. I’m angry because of all those adults so completely overcome by hatred that they tried to drag me down their path of senseless vengeance. And I’m tense because…because of what’s to come. Even here, plunged deep in my past. The angels know.”

Trinne clenched her hand in the Legio’s. “Yes.”

“It was like Doria said. There were two Rreicos. One disappeared normally, the one that felt like a wild animal, but the other one, the smart one, the calculating one…it grew weaker, but didn’t vanish. The other angels know that I’m alive. They know I’m here."

“That we are here. I do believe that unfortunately, whatever is pushing them to hunt you, it didn’t stop them from considering me a prime target to kill after I made the angel of the Plateau flee. I’m on their list.” Trinne corrected her, a dark look growing on her face.

“That is pushing them…”

“Well, yes. Doria did tell us that the angels respected pacts signed with them, but they are frankly too hostile and animalistic for me to imagine that they are doing all of this to respect a contract a century old. Maybe it’s because you slipped away? It’s a dark spot on their pride?”

Nay thought about it in a frenzy. Her breathing hitched. She could feel the turmoil of the freezing winds around her, carrying pieces of a puzzle that were finally completing in her head.

“Yeah. It’s true. Pride. It explains why they hunt you and me. But then…why did they attack the clan?”

Trinne paused, reaching back in surprise. “Why…that’s true. It had been a century already…and also. Why are they staying here? If there is one thing I gathered about those things, it’s that the angels are cruel and voracious. So why are they staying in the least populated place in this corner of the world? It seems to me that they would like nothing more than to raze a city.”

And, although it had only been a theory until now, the two women concluded at the same time: “Rö is still alive.” “The conqueror is still alive.”

The young red-haired woman smiled. “And we even know where he is.”

“Erm…ah!” The Legio understood what her friend meant.

“A place with a strange door made out of hovering lava, somewhere in the Unbroken Ones.” Trinne said.

“Where I die.” Nay swallowed although her mouth was dry.

Trinne shook her head left to right. “Definitely not. It is a hypothesis, and it is a bad one. I’m a Legio now, Lisana is a Legio. If Trayx witnessed the end of the Legios with his vision of a Cathedral in the snow, then we would need to bring Lisana there, and for the three of us to die. I don’t see you bringing your sister in what has to be the heart of angel territory.”

That was a point the master Legio could not refute.

“So.” Trinne continued. “We have a plan then. You saw the place, yes?”

Nay nodded.

“Clear enough to teleport us there?”

The Legio nodded a second time.

The young redhead grimaced. “That’s a thing already. But it would be best to know where it is exactly. To create a door in the middle of an angel nest is suicidal. What’s more, if Rö is there, it is very likely that he will become our enemy…mhh. Let me think about it, if we…” The Legio stopped listening, as her friend had stopped talking to her now and was simply speaking to herself out loud.

There was something else. A mural in her mind. Something that had been building inside of herself since her first lesson on the Rreico. Because perceiving the rhythm of life was only the first step. The ultimate goal was something much deeper, much more complex. Something that no one other than Vestigio or Jormun had ever reached. No one, until that fateful day under the shadow of the Ducal plateau.

That day where she witnessed what the Commandare Redrick Darkstar accomplished. The paroxysm of his art of the blades.

She saw it. She felt it. It was an implacable truth that had inscribed itself in the Rreico of that moment under the Shadowrock cliff. It had dug itself deep into the cut in half boulder on top of the Ducal plateau. It had pierced Quar Birrebus, the Commandare’s second, in such a way that he would always be bewitched by its inevitability. It had even lasted twenty years inside the war wound of Archibald Grosstachier. And it was also written inside of her, almost certainly until she died.

Still, it was only now that Nay asked herself the question.

How did her father protect her?

Because, even with his sacrifice, Marke should never have managed to do it. She understood that now. But he didn’t just protect her, he also taught her his very last lesson, one that was only becoming clear now.

Because, how had he done it?

Strangely, she knew that in this tragic moment, there was the solution to their current dead end. Nay felt it. A certainty coming from the deepest parts of herself. And also from everything around her.

The Rreico of all.

The soul of the world.

The Legio stood up.

Nay saw.

She saw all of those moments that did not make sense to her become obvious. The colour of her grand-mother’s eyes. The empty caravan at the back, behind the kitchen-carriage. The deep fear that Ra’fa had suffered when Marke had left them alone in Gîte for the first two weeks after their arrival.

They meant something, and Nay could almost touch their meaning. But she held back. She knew that, should she open her Rreico to all that she lived, she would be overwhelmed, and Trinne would be alone to face the angels.

Ra’fa’s tattoo was too obvious though. The sense of that memory was way too evident and was also too much similar to her own life for her to avoid it. Her mother had fled life as a monster trainer. A life of violence that she had rejected, only to then become forced into the role of a Jewel apprentice. Until, after many sacrifices, she finally found the way she loved.

It was strange how much Nay was like her mother, despite them not sharing any blood.

The relationship between Marke and the Commandare, Joanna’s sadness, Carle’s despair. There had been so many clues, but she couldn’t explore them, not then and not now. Vestigio’s mistakes, Jormun’s fears. Quar’s fake hatred, his grieving heart.

The Imperatrix.

Oh, Hyn had let so many secrets escape. In her face and body. In her rhythm of life.

Nay could have lost days only revisiting the memories that she had of her godmother.

Everything had been told. Those were only some of the most obvious ones.

But Nay came back to the moment that was important right now.

Marke didn’t die in vain.

If he knew, if he had been able to see so far into the future with his Rreico or if it was pure randomness, Nay would never know, but her father’s sacrifice hadn’t only been to protect her from Redrick Darkstar.

“Nay?” Trinne looked at her with confusion. The new Legio was feeling her friend’s Rreico, and she didn’t recognize it. The starry night was far away now, and felt mysterious and filled with impossibilities.

The young woman with cloudy eyes smiled at her.

“Do you trust me?” She asked.

“Always.” Trinne answered with no hesitation.

And the master Legio knew that it was true. That in the eyes of her Hani there was a loyalty that would only ever weaken if Nay ceased to be herself.

“Take my hand.” She said.

More than two-thousand miles away from there, in the deepest parts of the Hymere jungle, far down into the entrails of the world, on a calm sea where the dead danced, a very alive man rose.

“Mhh. Is it now then?” Trayx questioned out loud, knowing quite well that all those that listened to him would never respond.

“In the penumbra of the unknown,

I abandon,

To reach what I never could,

I escape what should.”

Nay chanted the miracle of the door. The mural inside of herself was almost complete, but she knew it would not stay that way. Or at least, she would not let it stay that way. She was not Jormun, she was not a God.

As the echo of her last word rang in the tent, the sound of her voice muffled the tempest outside, so much so that the Hi blizzard seemingly vanished, leaving only an oppressive and unnatural silence. Just in front of the little tent that had sheltered the two young women stood a crystal and glass door.

Trinne didn’t try to stop Nay when she stepped forward. The Duchess followed her friend towards the conqueror’s door despite the image of its destination: A cathedral under the ice, with at its centre a giant portal made out of flowing lava levitating above the ground, and in front a throne of bones and wood. But unlike in Trayx’ vision, there was someone sitting on the throne. And the structure of the cathedral was filled with angelic shadows, the dark silhouettes only broken by the reflection of magnificent eyes.