She’d always been a prodigy, my Arianna. I remember that warm summer day where we first met; I had stolen from her because she looked an easy mark, and I’d almost made off with her father’s money before she’d dropped enough water on my head to send me, and her father’s money, right down the storm drain.

  Though she’d lost me in that event, she’d caught up with me but a small handful of days later. I hadn’t been able to move that much gold at once as a foundling, and she’d found me by literally tracking the aether that’d been imprinted upon the gold, which at the time I’d neither known about, nor understood how one could find something they couldn’t see.

  Why she hadn’t called the guards on me, well it was probably because she was rather headstrong as a young girl, and she’d wanted her money back with her father none-the-wiser. She should have departed from my life at that moment, and I should have never seen her again, but I’d been the first to successfully steal from her despite many attempts, and she was most curious as to how I’d done it.

  The how was easy, as I was no master at the craft of pickpocketing: I simply had no aura — a cursed child I’d been called, and the Mother would endlessly tell me that I was lucky to have been taken in at all, as I was illegitimate, and it was only that someone had paid good money for them to look the other way — and in this way I had been able to evade her magically enhanced sight.

  The fact that I had no aether to protect me rather fascinated her, and though the only thing I’d ever done for her attention was to have been born the way I was: she’d asked me if she could experiment upon my person.

  How dreadfully villainous it’d sounded to me then, but how was a poor urchin who’d lived off the scraps of society, and who’d never experienced a parent’s love to stand before the whims of the rich and learned? I couldn’t help but to agree to the attentions of a young girl so rich that she could ask such a question with so bright a smile upon her face.

  At times, taking a risk can rather pay off, and when one has so very little to lose, and they stand to gain so very much: it wasn’t at all unusual to see the wretched bodies of those risk-takers dumped in the river en masse. Never would they dump them upriver, where all the holy and precocious sorts lived, but downstream lay the seedy underbelly of the city, and the more clandestine activities of the Clans could be observed daily.

  I was luckier than that lot, that much is certain, though I very easily could have been among them, and infact a part of me at the time somewhat longed to be. She would come by that house of death where children would disappear every day, and she would go away with me for her ‘experiments’, which were largely just an excuse for her to get out of that palace to play.

  My repeated interactions with Arianna had brought the Mother to see more value in me, and soon I was off the streets, and I found myself being tutored, if only so the Mother could better get in with the Cardinal, or more specifically: with his money.

  At first, although Arriana had an incredible amount of aether to work with: she wasn’t terribly gifted with control, and so accidents were prone to occur. That’s how we'd met Carmen actually: by setting her hair on fire as she’d been laying in a field of grass, just vacantly staring up at the sky.

  Time passed, and I had become apprenticed to a local doctor, and as we’d grown older Arianna wasn’t around to play as much anymore, but we could still see her accidents as her magical power grew exponentially with age, and such sights as pillars of fire in the sky, or sudden rainstorms would accompany every failure of control.

  Being the Cardinal’s daughter, she was from an old and powerful Clan, and was the result of the union of two great mystics, even if she was the seventh of that lot. But those lonelier days of standoffish distance came to a close as she dueled the firstborn, and defeated him soundly.

  How she’d babbled to us about that duel; apparently The Pope himself had been in attendance, and so she was destined for ‘the greatest of things like ever’. Though she made me chuckle so, I certainly was in no mind to disagree, and a year passed by again accompanied by the charming daily presence of my unknowing benefactor, over which she taught me so much about magic that I can never forget its principles.

  The things she had been doing since we died… they were impossible, physically they could not be done, due to the very mechanics by which aether was drawn into objects, such that they resembled great orbs of aura which each could be interacted with individually.

  Particularly clever and gifted sorcerers had long theorized that it was possible to control aether on the very molecular level, or perhaps even the elemental itself… but even if Arianna had become capable of such a thing: in no understanding of science could a person join two objects together seamlessly, and with magical effort alone.

  The orbs repelled each other in a very magnetic sense: they must always be a certain distance apart, and so while a rock might be shaped by magic into smaller pieces of itself: it could not be made to join another rock. Set upon, certainly… but what Arianna had done to the door went well beyond the theoretically possible, and was outside of everything she’d ever told me before.

  “… Well,” she’d started, sounding extremely hesitant to explain herself, an unusual enough thing, for normally she so loved to talk about the arcane, “It’s like… sort of your fault, I think.”

  I blinked a moment, and I felt an annoyance bubbling to the surface, but before I could snap back at my beloved, she’d again sent out that dark power, and she’d made a door-sized hole in one of the outside walls of the room.

  “Fresh air will do us good, right?” her voice alighted my ears like a song of insecurity, and it rightly shut down the explosion of irritation I’d been about to unleash. Then she continued with a smile I could hear, “You’re always telling me to get out more.”

  Stress has always had this effect on relationships, such that partners who might go years without having raised their voices at each other might one day suddenly explode over the pettiest of matters, and I rather didn’t desire to shout at her over any further trivialities; I was better than that. I sighed, and nodded in acquiescence, and I could hear her giggle a little as I went out the door into the… night.

  Outside was oddly bright, despite it being the new moon. Strangely, I could see everything near as if daylight, and even the colours — which reason told me should have faded with the absence of the the sun’s intense light — seemed to somehow shine with an unbelievably vivid appearance, as if I had lived all my life in a desaturated world, and had only now come to see.

  The stars shone so brightly, and they enchanted me such that I mindlessly stepped away from the ambient aetherlamps, and I felt the night breeze breathe upon my exposed arms and neck, and the whole experience rather titillated me for a while. I might have stood there the whole night through, rooted with fascination, if Arianna hadn’t interrupted my reverie with a soft affectation on her voice,

  “Well, that’s certainly different, actually not a half bad place to start, Mira are you listening?”

  “How could I not, Rianna?” I felt her absolutely boil inside me with indignation, but it seemed that she too was rather unwilling to escalate our current stresses in the face of such calm, so I heard her breathing deeply for a while, and it seemed almost as if some of the colour around me had flowed towards me as she inhaled.

  Though my repeated ignoring of her all day long had rather affected her, as still I could feel a slight umbrage at my thoughtless remark, finally she spoke again, using common truths more as a way to calm herself down than to communicate,

  “Okay, so, you know how I used to do this; focus on the object, envision my change, will that it happen, and then aether would be consumed proportional to my understanding and such, right? So…”

  She took another deep breath as she got to the meat of the matter,

  “So actually, when I channel my aether now, it sort of… goes through you; actually it’s really weird, because I’ve never heard of aether turning black before, it’s supposed to be visible only through enhanced vision, but it’s like seriously physical, and-”

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  “Rianna,” I interrupted her likely minutes-long tangential interest, “Focus, you said it was my fault, so tell me how, please?”

  Embarrassment flooded through her, Mercy if she was before me and blushing like this: I might have become similarly distracted, but she explained even through her bashfulness,

  “Er, right, sorry, um. So, I channel it through you, kind of can’t not right no-focus right, anyhow, I channel it through you, and it like, warps… and the next thing I know, when I look at an object, and envision my change, and finally will it so: it seems I absorb the aether inside it, and then I push it back through in the desired way, and it snaps back into the new shape, which is how I did the thing with the door.”

  Goodness but she can be hard to parse when she’s interested in something, but I tried my best to put it together, and I asked her to confirm if I had the right of it,

  “So you channel it through me, and that allows you to drain objects of their aether, which means you’re able to ignore the law of separation?”

  “Yeah, basically, but that’s not all!” She just bubbled with excitement, and I felt myself instinctively bracing as she continued to yammer on in her enthusiasm,

  “I can take everything, Mira! Everything! Like the towel, and the gore, and your clothes, and stuff! This is such a scientific milestone, not that I’m fast looking to recreate it mind you, can’t go sacrificing whole cities just to try to do it again, but you know how you ate like, that whole entire human, eugh, still can’t believe you ate his di-”

  “Rianna!” I shouted, for I rather didn’t want to be reminded of it, though I also shivered with disgust. I could feel her forming an apology inside myself, but I didn’t really need it. I felt that I knew where she was going with this, so I asked,

  “You think that I’m some kind of spatial anomaly now, like a black hole, but for aether?”

  “Well… basically,” she began, and she seemed lost in thought for a bit, so I took the opportunity to sit on the grass and look up at the stars, when another thought sprung up at me.

  “Hey Rianna?” I asked, “Why is the grass still here?”

  Anger swelled within me such that I felt I might burst from its ferocity, and she spat, “Those damned bastards; they undid like ninety percent of my spellwork when they showed up! Ninety! No they just couldn’t have left me the protections I’d tailored to everyone, somehow Petyr of all people didn’t get sucked in, and instead I get the damned grass!!!!!”

  It was easy to see that she was really a little beyond frustrated, which would have been fine: I was rather inclined to let her let it all out, but her feelings now had an effect upon my feelings, and I felt my world going red again.

  Her tirade of ever-accelerating expletives began to fade into the background for me despite myself, and I rather needed her to calm down, so I begged her,

  “Honey, I really need you to calm down, right now, if you could, please?”

  “How can I possibly be fucking calm?! They fucked us, the-” came her immediate answer, but then I heard a soft ‘oh, oh sorry’, and I could feel her dialing back her anger at such a speed that although the haze lingered in my eyes a while after: it felt suddenly much more manageable, but my want for the living still stood as preeminent in my mind, and I had yesterday involuntarily thought of a solution for it, so I asked her,

  “Honey? Thanks, but given that vampires eat the living: do you think that vampires can eat livestock?”

  “Err, sorry, you know, I don’t really know,” Arianna said, but I felt a pondering feeling pressing out at me, “but I’m supposing you’re keen on finding out?”

  A black mist appeared in my hands, and I raised them to see what she was giving me, only to almost recoil in shock when a knife and a goblet with a string in it were deposited in them.

  “What?” she asked as if perplexed by my reaction, “Sheep are gross, it was the sheep right? Anyways, I’m not watching you do that with your mouth, I swear to God I’d rather you eat Lisset than to see that. Actually I may want to see that anyways…”

  ‘Mercy, Arianna, you are such a pervert, whatever am I to do with you?’, I thought, and I found my voice working in conjunction,

  “Mercy, Rianna, you are such a pervert… just what am I to do with you?”

  “Don’t even answer, Rianna,” I was sure I didn’t want to hear anything she might say at that point, and I reiterated to be sure, “don’t even answer.”

  Thankfully, she was quiet aside from the mixture of feelings that I felt from her as always, a little shyness, a lot of interest, and still more ponderous emotions seemed to be expressing themselves inside me.

  The journey to the sheep was slower than it might have been yesterday, for they had quite wandered from their pen since then, but they couldn’t have hidden from me now if they’d tried, for I could taste the echoes of their life that hung in the air.

  Rianna spoke up more seriously around the time I spotted them, “Together, we’re a bit like a spacial and aetherial anomaly I guess, though I don’t really know. It seems I’m able to pull objects inside you, and I can infinitely warp them inside, before putting them back out however I want them. It’s unique, Mira, it’s so utterly unique that I’ve never heard of it before, and I’m really excited to figure out what we can do with it, obviously, I’m always — sorry, I'm babbling.”

  “It’s okay, Rianna, you know I like your babbling most times.” I felt myself smiling, and I paused a moment to pet the red gem that housed my beloved, and I could hear her purr a little, so either she was having me on, or I actually could touch her in some way. I wasn’t one to be deterred for long though, as I was nearing the sheep now, and I finished elucidating, “It’s only when I’m trying to sleep, or to get a specific answer out of you that I get irritated, and I’m sorry for that.”

  “Mmmn,” she answered me, goodness she sounded so cozy as to almost distract me from what I was doing, but I needed to know if I was able to be safe around people more than I needed another ‘therapeutic session’ for science’s sake.

  I felt dreadful about it, as I stood before the sheep, for I’d really very rarely been the one of us to kill things. I heard her murmur to me then, “Want me to do it?”, but I shook my head, and it would seem that she understood well enough to give me silent comfort for a bit.

  After all, if this worked, I had no way of knowing how much I might need, and so I apologized to the poor sheep, even though I knew it was for my benefit alone,

  “I’m sorry dear, this is going to be terribly uncomfortable I’m afraid. Rianna? Mind binding him down for me, and maybe cleaning the skin around his neck?”

  A black mist rose rapidly around the sheep, and although it was startled immensely, it was not able to react in time before earth had shot up to hold it immobile. Its panicked bleating affected my heart, and I almost turned away from the process, but I knew I needed to do this, otherwise I would have to go off into the night alone and disappear.

  I tied the twine tightly around the sheep’s neck, such that the veins rather made themselves known, and a watery black mist scrubbed him all down his neck. I braced myself for the red haze that might follow, and I made the puncture as light as I could.

  Redness smothered my vision for a few moments, but I held strong against it, either a worrisome sign that this wouldn’t work, or an excellent sign that I could better contain one of the beasts inside me, and my goblet soon overflowed with blood, which I was not near so capable of stopping myself from partaking of.

  The taste was almost divine, even though it came from a sheep, and it rather made me wonder how the blood of humans must taste. But I was shortly back for a second gobletful, and then a third, and by the fourth I’d almost felt myself overcome with a desire to drink from the source, but I’d strangled it with all my willpower, and I forced myself to untie the twine that bound the sheep's neck, and I was sure he'd heal shortly.

  “Feeling better?” I heard Rianna ask with a touch of concern, and I smiled deeply, for indeed I did. I felt a million times better than I had but ten minutes earlier, or rather… I felt like the animal that called me to bleed the living had gone quiet.

  “It worked, Rianna,” I gushed with happiness as tears fell from my eyes, “I don’t have to kill anyone, I can… I can still be a doctor. I’m better for sure, my love.”

  I felt the sun shine inside me, and I knew that her heart just soared for me, and she asked,

  “Then, shall we go see Luca?”

  The warmth that glowed within me just pulsed to a heat that couldn’t be contained, and I said,

  “Yes, let’s go see our son.”