Dear Diary,

"Redemption needs penitence,

If you don't know you did wrong,

You can't try to do better."

Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Redemption

Yeah, I think this whole book is gonna be another back and forth, only this time instead of back and forth between 'judging fairly' and 'equal opportunity', it's gonna be 'give others second chances' and 'stop doing the same damn dumb shit every time'. Because if I'm gonna be a Goddess of Redemption, I gotta make sure that I'm backing continuous improvement, not Endless Fuckup Works. So that means leaning just as hard on 'own your fuckups' as I do on 'fucking up is not a capital offense'.

I mean, think about how fucked up a world that would be for a second. If the moment you fucked up you were over and done. Nobody I know would have made it out of diapers. Even if you only started the clock once somebody passed the increasingly arbitrary 'adulthood' line, I'm pretty sure the only people who would hit their next birthday would be the deeply repressed sorts who never do anything differently any day of the week, because they're on the spectrum or have OCD or, like, bought into religion way too hard way too young or something.

Let's face it, most of us screw up all the fuckin' time. Some people are clumsy, some people lack skills, some people have no filter between their intrusive thoughts and the world. Hell, mostly we're just all imperfect human beings tryna survive and maybe thrive with a vastly insufficient understanding of the laws of physics and how they apply to us. All that's before we even add in like, written laws from governments and shit. Social 'rules', where people are just making shit up as they go along, and pretending afterward like there's some universal 'rules' that social interactions follow.

Yeah, there are some broad strokes. Don't hurt people who haven't hurt you or yours. Help people when you can. Don't leave a mess behind yourself if you can clean it up. Don't hide shit when you fuck up, because then instead of at least somebody fixing it, it winds up festering and getting worse. Try to do better tomorrow than you did yesterday. Make sure everybody gets a fortune cookie before the end of the meal. All that good stuff.

So yesterday, kinda late in the day, Orla and Marylin and I got to the townhouse owned by House Crow. It also happened to be the first place I remember after my memories of the Aquarium in my original Camden.

The place was an absolute wreck. Something had hit it hard, almost like it had been shelled. Except if it had been hit by one of the New Jersey... Black Dragon's sixteen inch shells, there wouldn't be a building here any more. This was... different. The upper half of the front wall had collapsed, and lay in two halves inside the bottom floor. Something had punched a hole through it, but it looked like a corner had been melted off of it. The bottom half of the front wall was missing, although there was a door with a fancy crow symbol half embedded into the front wall of an abandoned building across the street.

I'd come to atop the half of the front wall still lying in the entryway of the townhouse. I say 'entryway', but the room took up most of the first floor. Looking around the melted off section of wall, I saw a plain square room, one that would have only had one entrance if the ceiling hadn't been caved in. The room had almost no light, and I saw everything in the room in a kind of weird wireframe.

"Shall we try to find the master of the house's office? If there's any correspondence or record books, it might at least tell us whether any of the House of Crow were in residence; if not, that tells us they either left in good order or abandoned the house long before the general evacuation from the City."

I nodded, trying to figure out what I was looking at without going into the basement. "Sure. Orla, stick with her, keep her safe?"

"Hah! See! Even your own High Priestess knows you need a sitter!"

"Be nice, Orla. Marylin's been doing a bang up job for Loki here in Calverton."

"Thank you, Champion!"

The sounds of the two of them bickering faded into the back areas of the house. I waved Marie forward, and when she came up next to me, I asked her, "can you see anything down in that hole?"

She blinked, stared, shifted her head and blinked a few more times. "Cold."

"Okay. Cool. So there's nothing alive down there. Good to know." In the gloom and sudden cold as the sun dipped below the horizon, I tried to piece together how shit had fallen apart into the basement. Seeing nothing but shapes helped a little with that, I think. "Okay, check me on this. Something came through the upper front wall. Caved it the fuck in. At some point later something cut a corner off it."

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"Blade."

Something told me she wasn't talking about a piece of sharpened steel. A moment's thought and I asked, "like those things Karen had?" At Marie's nod, I said, "Cool. Okay, so..." I put a hand under the front wall, braced my feet, and lifted it. Figured I might be able to at least see under it, and surprised the fuck out of myself when it flipped clean across the room. "Whoa. Don't know my own strength."

"Literally." Marie chuckled.

With that out of the way, I saw a pillar or column that had collapsed and had been laying under it. I rolled that aside to get a clear view into the basement. The room was pretty empty, just a simple chair and desk, both smashed to shit. The chair in particular looked like something from Ikea that had been put together by two chimpanzees hopped up on acid and cocaine. Something else lay between them, half under the desk. In fact, the desk had kind of collapsed onto it. Seriously, it looked like whatever it was had hit the desk at highway speeds and just crunched under it.

My brain kinda flickered, free associating as the wheels spun from lack of anything resembling coherent input. Highway speeds. Cars. High speed collisions. Black Dragon. Sixteen inch...

"ORLA! MARYLIN! GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE!" I pushed Marie behind me. "Marie! Get. Them. Out!"

She evaporated, and I stood stock still, trying to figure out if me manhandling the remains of the building up here had done anything to upset the very un-exploded warhead down in the basement.

"Champion!" Orla called from outside on the street. "What's going on?"

"Unexploded sixteen inch shell from the Black Dragon! It's in the basement here... I don't think it's..." I heard something, almost like a setting sound, down in the basement. "Oh, shit, EVACUATE!"

I turned and ran. Thankfully, I saw the other three running in front of me. Then Marie appeared behind them, grabbed them, and disappeared. I remembered that I did not in fact need to run. Before I could put any kind of Teleport shenanigans into action, something slammed into my shoulder. I stepped, pushing as hard as I could when my tele didn't port.

Heat. Pressure. Pain. Then I hit the bed with the mirrors face first.

Siobhan?

Yes, Tabitha?

I think I need a Healer in the bedroom.

I heard her behind me, her voice receding with every word. "So we're going to be playing at that Oh Dear Sweet Canta what happ..."

And then everything went black.

I woke up in a pile of warm little bodies in the Academy Suite office. Okay, one big purring body under my head, one small adult on either side of me, and six little ones piled in everywhere they could find room. I looked over at my right shoulder, half expecting to see a complete lack of shoulder. Instead I had a scar I didn't remember seeing there before, a big ropy one that started right at the top of my tit and looped over to where I couldn't see it any more.

"Ow." That didn't seem to cover the amount of ache my shoulder threw at me. "Fuck. Fuck and ow."

Siobhan bounced upright, blinked twice, then fell on me. Okay, not 'fell' in the tripped or attacked sense, but she definitely had some intent to land a kiss on every part of my face. "Tabitha! Oh, thank Canta." Then she grabbed a bolster and whacked me on the head. "Don't scare me like that!"

At that point Saffron started her little kissing and licking thing along my other side, and Isnomi managed to get herself upright. "What happened?"

"Mama blow hewthelf up!"

Before I could respond to that, Marie's droll, "Twice." left me lying there with my mouth gaping open.

Eventually Saffron did not come to my rescue. "Tabitha, I cannot believe I am having to tell you this a second time, but attempting to Translocate with Cold Iron embedded in your flesh is highly contraindicated."

I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could converse, I had to make an important announcement. "Ow. Fuckin' hell, ow. Also, I am beginning to dislike Cold Iron intensely."

"For what it's worth, the Fae would agree with you. Do you remember finding anything in the Crow Townhouse?"

I shrugged. "Looked like a cell, or maybe a panic room? Underground room with one entrance, but the ceiling had broken or caved. That's where the shell was."

"Shells."

"Dafuq?"

"After we had you Healed, Marie informed us there were two explosions within the townhouse. Both seemingly of similar strength, one from that room you found, the other from closer to the back. The Calvert sisters wish to thank you, by the way."

I shrugged, and immediately regretted it. "Not like I remember saving either of them."

"Except you did it again." At my confused look, Saffron explained, "had you not sent Marie to evacuate them, they would have wound up right in the center of the second blast."

"Oh. Well. Yeah, okay, they can buy me dinner or something when I'm up to doing something more strenuous than laying here and moaning." A sudden thought struck me as I felt the sun drop below the horizon. "How long was I out?"

"It's sunset on Saturnday, love. We've just put the children to bed a few minutes ago, and a certain Menace ought to be getting back to sleep if she knows what's good for her."

Fake snoring filled the room along with the regular quiet kind. "So... what's next?"

She smiled, shifted, and the four of us lay on the mirrored bed. A moment later Marie slid a big covered tray onto the bed as the other two propped me up with some pillows and bolsters. "Next, my love, we feed you, pamper you, and put you back to sleep, because until the Trolls are done excavating the Crow Townhouse and Conrad has sifted through whatever information they find, there's little for you to do."

Y'know, I may be six kinds of stubborn, but even I'm not stupid enough to interfere with being pampered by three lovelies bent on testing the limits of my appetite.

Much.