Usually and unfortunately, when Octavia’s ears rang and her head spun, it was a byproduct of the hazy violet agony that sought to ruin her life. This time, it was every complication at once, multiplied by one thousand. For a moment, she outright couldn’t hear, the ringing in her ears settling in alongside dizziness. Her eyes watered, besieged by true smoke and dust still lingering before her. Bits of something solid, miniscule and peppered across her body as they were, draped her from head to toe. Everything ached, the impact with the hard marble below leaving her bruised muscles pounding painfully.
She wasn’t sure if she’d hit her head. Still, whatever blinding flash had followed in a split instant was enough to give her double vision for a while longer. It was only as her thoughts began to solidify and time freed her senses from their standstill that she noticed the emptiness in her hand, squeezing for nothing.
Stradivaria was there, still wedged firmly between her arm and her body. Viola was not, her soft fingers having fled in the time it took to blink.
“Viola?” Octavia cried, sputtering as trespassing dust struggled to sneak into her mouth.
“I’m…here!” she heard, a soft call from a place unseen. Octavia cursed her limited visibility, struggling to raise one flailing hand.
“Where are you?” she tried desperately, the ringing in her ears gradually settling.
The voice that answered her wasn’t Viola’s. It wasn’t a voice at all, really. Instead, she caught an agonizing scream that dug deep into her stomach, endless and piercing. It surged with enough raw anguish that Octavia wished her ears would ring again.
“Octavia?” she heard Viola call to her at last.
They definitely weren't Viola’s cries--particularly not at that level of horror and ferocity. “I’m here,” Octavia reiterated in turn. “What happened?”
The dust, at last, was settling, and her watery eyes were free to rationalize. The lights that previously blinded her had largely dimmed above, still shining artificially down upon her with a muted glow. Every movement of her extremities touched upon something jagged and uneven. She ran her shaking fingers along the once-cool marble below, now notably hot to the touch all around. It didn’t quite burn, although the shift in temperature was jarring enough to make her twitch.
When she struggled her way into a sitting position, one of her forearms stung. On further inspection, her dress had been slashed, a patch of blue shredded just above a sizable abrasion. It wept, bleeding in the slightest. Octavia winced. The torturous screaming was ceaseless, and she still couldn’t pinpoint it. It stung her ears far worse.
“Is everyone okay?” came Madrigal’s voice, horrified.
“What was that?” Octavia called to her. She doubted she’d get a valid answer.
“Oh my God.”
With the three short, curt words she’d caught from Josiah, his safety verified in some capacity, Octavia was both relieved and unnerved to hear the disbelief in his voice. “Josiah?”
She earned nothing more from him. All she found was ever more screaming, unbearable in the way it was beginning to make her heart race. Distantly, she heard rustling and movement in place of words.
“Josiah, what’s wrong?” Octavia asked again, panic poisoning her veins.
“Don’t come over here,” he shot back instantly.
That wasn’t a deterrent. Frankly, it sparked more of a morbid curiosity than anything. She fought to peel herself off the newly-uneven flooring faster, coughing with the effort of dispelling haunting dust.
“What is it?” Viola asked hurriedly in her stead.
Madrigal’s strangled whimper was nearly inaudible over the relentless screams, now mixed with ragged breaths of great distress. Octavia’s heart dropped into her stomach. It was her fault for disobeying the singular demand Josiah had given her.
“Oh my God!” Viola cried, much the same.
“I said stay back!” Josiah snapped.
Already, he was hard at work, his hands moving quickly as the supplies he’d just refreshed were put to good use. Octavia had always wondered if tourniquets were painful, for how plain, thin rope would dig so tightly into bare skin. She supposed Harper’s clothing helped with that, somewhat. It hadn’t spared him in any capacity otherwise.
Where Octavia had gotten off with minor injuries, largely in the form of bloodied scrapes and throbbing bruises, Harper had put her tiny suffering to shame. If the marble flooring had been sharp and uneven beneath her, at most, then it was outright shattered adjacent to him. Fractured shards of what was once swirling stone were scattered haphazardly around the boy. It was fitting, then, that his radius to such a blow had brought brutality in equal measure, punishing him with torture that made Octavia’s stomach churn just to witness.
Truthfully, it could’ve been far worse, and Harper was lucky his right leg hadn’t been blasted clean off his body. It still didn’t make the wound he was left with any more tolerable, a deep, bloodied crevice that plunged well into his calf and wrapped neatly around to his shin. It wasn’t even bloodied so much as it was exposed, giving way to unsettlingly-thick pockets of skin, muscle and possibly bone that Octavia was well aware she wasn’t meant to be seeing. As could be expected, they wept fervently, leaking in earnest through the well-annihilated brown trousers that had once clung to his legs instead.
Shredded as they were, the laceration was outright gaping, battered by flakes of the same sharp marble that had managed to crawl inside somewhere along the way. The scattered gashes adjacent to the wound that echoed the same, shallow by comparison and yet still oozing in their own right, only compounded his agony. “Gruesome” was hardly a word that did the sight justice. It was downright sickening. His screams were an understatement.
With her eyes wide with horror and her throat burning from nausea, Octavia couldn’t help herself. “Harper!” she screamed on her own.
“You have to move your hands,” she heard Josiah murmur.
Curled into a ball as he was, his red-stained fingers grasping desperately at what of the wound they could cover, his breathing was rapid. Against the floor, Harper shook his head with just as much desperation, his cap brushing against the speckles of marble that scratched his face. He gritted his teeth, somewhere between sobbing and whimpering.
“I have to be able to see it,” Josiah continued softly, laying his hands upon Harper’s trembling wrists. “If you don’t move, I’m gonna have to hold you down. Don’t make me do that.”
Were it Octavia, she probably would’ve required the latter. Harper never failed to amaze her, in that aspect, his fingers retreating in the slowest. The accompaniment of slower breathing, still racked with sounds of uncontrollable pain, still wasn’t enough to ease her own suffering. She would’ve dropped to her knees at his side, holding onto him for dear life, had Viola not beaten her to it.
The Maestra clasped one of his bloodied hands in both of her own, her eyes flooding with as much terror as Octavia’s. “Harper,” she said simply, frantically.
His eyes met hers, teary and leaking much the same as his injury. “It hurts,” Harper sobbed. “A lot.”
Viola raised her eyes to Josiah instead, still just as panicked. “What the hell happened?”
He’d chosen to attend to the smaller lacerations first, dabbing at them one by one with wet gauze that left Harper flinching. “I have no idea. Something exploded, I think. From under us.”
“How?” Viola asked.
Josiah shook his head, already delving back into his bag once more. “I don’t know. It barely even damaged the friggin’ walls. I’m just as confused as you are, I promise.”
His words were more than true, and Octavia hadn’t even realized until they’d left his mouth. It was as he’d said, more or less--the damage to the white, barren embrace of the hall was limited, mostly confined to the tattered marble below. The blackened patches of paint that peeled from the walls were the only true indicators of damage, the architecture otherwise structurally sound. Well-intact as it was, the mysterious explosion had hardly made a dent. The concept of a disgusting little blast gifted personally to her alone was disorienting.
“Did a pipe burst or something?” Viola tried.
“There’s no way a pipe bursting did that,” Josiah countered.
“Don’t…move,” she could hear Harper strain through those same gritted teeth, his breathing still exceedingly labored as his shoulders rose and fell quickly.
Viola squeezed his hand. “Take it easy,” she pleaded. “Don’t talk.”
Slowly, with notable effort, he shook his head once more as tears splashed against his bangs. “Might…be more…of them.”
Viola recoiled. “What?”
Octavia’s stomach hurt. “More…explosions? Or…whatever that was?”
“You think it was intentional?” Viola asked, wincing along with Harper's jolts of pain.
Even still, he found the strength to nod, grunting in distress as Josiah attended to his smaller injuries. “I…It wouldn’t be…out of the question.”
“Why the hell would someone try to blow up the building?” Josiah asked, somewhat louder than necessary. “If it’s Drey’s people, what’s the point in damaging his own place?”
“But what else could it be?” Viola argued. “He has a point!”
The idea of an intentional assault, even in passing, was enough to lead Octavia’s fingers into place along Stradivaria’s frets. “I-I…we should go. This was a bad idea.”
“Don’t!” Harper interrupted sharply, his voice pointed enough to startle Octavia. “We’re…already here. We've made it…this far. Please don’t stop...just because of--”
He never finished. His words were replaced once more by the same bloodcurdling screams of agony as Josiah adjusted his lower leg. Even Josiah wasn’t immune to Harper's pain given sound, his face strained. “Sorry. I have to.”
No amount of Viola endlessly gripping Harper’s hand was alleviating his torture, her own eyes watering instead. “Just hang in there, okay? It’s…gonna get better.”
To Octavia’s immense surprise, he nodded slowly, hollow eyes leaking in earnest out of reflex. “I’ll…be okay,” he breathed, his voice wobbling.
The tiniest sound of Madrigal’s own soft breathing at her side, ragged as it was in turn, drew Octavia’s eyes for a moment. Deathly quiet as she’d been, she’d hardly made so much as a single motion. Instead, the Maestra was frozen still in place beside her as she drank in Harper’s agony with wide-eyed dread. She, too, was no stranger to the panic that came with their situation, if the look on her face was any indication.
Octavia watched the way, regardless, that her own trembling fingers inched towards the strings of Lyra’s Repose, cradled delicately in her arms even now. With her terrified gaze locked on Harper alone, her breath quickened, tears pricking at the edges of her eyes. When the very tip of her index finger had just begun to brush against one copper string, Harper’s wandering, half-lidded gaze beat Octavia to the revelation by seconds.
“No!” he screamed, tearing his hand away from Viola’s. It was with another scream, instead born once more of relentless hurt, that he threw both of his stained palms down firmly over his open wound. Again did he grit his teeth, struggling in vain to stifle the cries of pain that erupted involuntarily. This time, the fierce glare with which he pinned Madrigal spoke to something different, even in the midst of his suffering.
Madrigal’s lip quivered, her fingers still over the harp. “But Harper!”
Harper shook his head, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t you dare!”
The bitter tears that teased the corners of Madrigal’s own eyes escaped, slipping down her cheeks. “Harper, please!”
“I won’t let you!” he growled.
“But I want to!” she sobbed. “It’s my decision!”
“I won’t let you do that to yourself!” Harper snapped with surprising clarity, his breath still impaired as he winced with every movement.
Madrigal shook her head. “It won’t take that much away, I know it!”
“Your life is precious!” he cried. “All of it! It doesn’t matter how much! I won’t let you do this!”
Harper's frantic, sharp eyes shot to Octavia’s instead, full of determination she didn’t expect in the depths of his suffering. “Octavia, don’t let her! You have to make sure she doesn’t do it!”
“It’ll heal,” Josiah offered to the sobbing Maestra, far softer by comparison. “It’s…fixable. He’ll be fine with enough time. It’s not gonna feel good, but he’ll get better. This won’t kill him. You don’t have to hurt yourself like that.”
“But it’s my lifespan,” Madrigal whimpered, her sorrow splashing against the golds of Lyra’s Repose. “I should get to pick what to do with it!”
Harper opted for a gentler tone instead, grunting with hurt as Josiah pushed his hands away once more. “Please, I’ll be okay! This is…nothing. I’ve been through way worse than this. There’s…so many wonderful things you should do with your life instead. A little pain is worth us spending more of that life together, okay?”
Madrigal sniffled. “I don’t want you to hurt at all. I can help.”
He struggled to smile, a futile effort compromised viciously by his agony. Still, the sentiment was there. “Octavia…needs you right now, more than…I do. She needs you and Viola. Please, keep going. For…me, okay?”
Viola shook her head, still on her knees at his side. “I don’t feel right about leaving you alone here.”
“I have…Josiah,” Harper breathed.
“Josiah isn’t a Maestro.”
The boy in question pursed his lips, drawing a glassy, maroon bottle from his canvas bag. He sighed. “She’s not wrong. You…might want to hold her hand again. This isn’t gonna feel too good. Sorry in advance.”
Harper obliged, squeezing Viola’s hand once more. The Maestra didn’t resist, offering the same with both hands in turn. When Josiah tipped the bottle carefully above the horrific gash that blighted the majority of Harper’s lower leg, his torturous screams were back the instant its liquid splashed into the crevice. They were possibly even worse, accompanied by the need for Josiah to physically hold his thigh in place as he struggled to escape the intolerable burning.
The Maestro clapped one hand over his own mouth desperately, a half-hearted effort to stifle his own uncontrollable cries. Given the way he was still meeting Madrigal’s eyes, Octavia figured the action was at least somewhat related. It didn’t keep her from sobbing again.
“Madrigal, I need you,” Octavia tried, doing what she could to steal the girl’s attention. “I…need you, okay?”
The Maestra’s shoulders shook, and she still couldn’t tear her eyes from Harper’s suffering. “I-I…”
“I need…someone at my side,” Octavia spoke slowly, willing her own voice to remain as steady as possible. “I need someone to stay with me. I trust you. I need you. Please, Madrigal.”
Madrigal nodded with another sniffle, her gaze still confiscated. “O-Okay. Okay.”
Viola rubbed her thumb tenderly against the back of Harper’s hand, a weak gesture of comfort that still somehow offered something of merit. With her hand stroking his cheek as he winced his way through Josiah’s ministrations, she managed to split her attention. “It’s…like he said. This may not be the only one. There might be more explosives, if that’s what that was.”
“In the floor, right?” Octavia murmured, her eyes wandering up the length of the hallway. “Like, beneath it?”
For the distance they’d actually traveled, it was still a sizable distance more to even the second turn. Past it, she could still see no further. Whatever lay beyond was equally as intimidating--if not downright horrifying, given their newest predicament. Octavia still hadn’t fully wrapped her head around the idea that it was intentional. She didn’t dare begin to entertain the “how” that came with it.
“You’re…gonna have to watch your step,” Viola added.
Octavia’s eyes scanned the marble before her. It was one more nauseating thought to add to the pile. “There’s nothing that stands out. It’s all just flat.”
“So there’s no way to tell if there’s even something down there?” Josiah asked.
“As much as I’d like to imagine this was a freak accident, I have a feeling it wasn’t,” Viola continued. “I don’t…feel good about the idea of assuming there’s nothing.”
Josiah narrowed his eyes. “How much of the building ended up like this, exactly? Are we reading too much into this, too?”
“You can…check,” Harper murmured in between groans of pain, blinking slowly. “Hit…the floor…from here.”
Octavia, too, blinked. “That could work, I think. I…do you think my light would set one off, if it was there?”
Madrigal shook her head. “I don’t think I’d be able to.”
“How hard does your light hit?” Josiah asked. “Physically.”
She paused. “I-I mean…it depends what I’m hitting. I’ve…never tried to hit marble before. I don’t know if I could actually pierce it.”
“It’s worth a shot, right?”
He had a point. “I can try, but I’m worried about the recoil if I actually do hit something. I don’t know how far it’ll…blow up.”
Viola’s eyes were on her partner, resting at Harper’s side uselessly. “I think I can do something about that. If anything happens, I’ve got it. Can you…aim around me?”
“What do you mean?”
With shaky steps, Viola pushed herself to her feet, her lingering touch upon Harper’s cheek a nod to reluctance. The crunched marble below her had not been kind to her skin, her delicate knees red and indented. She stumbled somewhat, wincing as she stretched. Silver Brevada settled into her hands, and she demonstrated her point regardless.
What followed its gentle song was the welcome, radiating chill of wondrous ice, scraping along the annihilated marble below as it steadily charted a path towards the ceiling. Rising high, Octavia watched on with surprise as Viola’s soft trilling crafted a thickened wall of crystal, blessed with all the strength and gorgeous shading of a glacier.
In the empty, elongated hallway, every note echoed off the brilliant white that surrounded them. Even the flaking black that plagued the Maestros was graced in equal measure. Her frozen barrier didn’t climb high enough to kiss the ceiling proper, instead stalling several feet from its apex. What that left Octavia with was a narrow, symmetrical gap, spanning the full length of the hallway from thrice her height. She tilted her head.
“What are you doing?” Octavia asked.
“Aim above me,” Viola instructed. “You have good aim. Go through the gap and hit the floor. If anything happens, we should be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, the flute still level with her lips. “Yeah. Go for it.”
Octavia wasn’t a fan of this idea. Still, if it came down to trusting the durability of Viola’s ice, then it was something she could put her faith in. That left her with Stradivaria in hand, still raised and ready upon her shoulder. She eyed the gap above her carefully, planning the single strike she’d get to attempt.
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What light she’d be forced to piece together would be strong, quick, and piercing, should she hope to challenge marble itself. She’d been successful with material masonry before. Granted, it was weaker. Granted, she was in SIAR. Granted, in this particular Hell, she couldn’t count on anything. She had to at least try.
Octavia drew back Stradivaria’s bow across the strings. “Ready?”
Viola nodded. “Ready.”
It was more so a question meant for the other three, given how her wandering eyes touched upon each. She was relieved to see them nod anyway. With their silent permission, Octavia found her beloved rays, sharp and valiant in all of their radiant glory. White-hot starlight pulsed against her skin, and it took effort to concentrate on one alone. She stole a deep breath as her fingertips burned, aching with the pressure of bottled, searing heat as she pumped every ounce of brilliance forward.
It would take effort to weigh down her strike in one shot alone. With the most delicate back-and-forth motions of the bow she could muster, rocking against the strings gently, she tensed whatever burning energy her anxious hands could tolerate. Her little ray was the tiniest of arrows, at this angle. Octavia lined up her shot, tilting her head back in the slightest as she fixated on the gap. Aiming wasn’t the hard part.
She threw caution to the wind and fired, putting her faith in whatever skill she’d been cultivating for weeks. With a sharp slash of the bow across vibrating copper beneath, her singular burst of light erupted forward. It charged on without hesitation, carving a perfect parabola that made her heart skip a beat.
Octavia simultaneously relished the developing quality of her steering and loathed the context under which it was being perfected. To her immense surprise, distance had done nothing to compromise the lasting composition of her beautiful ray. It was nearly enhanced, by comparison, accelerating ever faster as it crashed to the floor with far fiercer momentum than expected.
That was a good thing, as she’d learned that her light could crunch through even polished stone today. That was a bad thing, as it hardly took her light at all to send the corridor into explosive chaos again.
Octavia praised whatever god would listen that Viola, too, had developed as a Maestra splendidly. Her barrier held fast against the rampaging shockwave of the blast, a miracle in and of itself. The ear-shattering boom made Octavia jump, far louder than the one that had cursed them previously.
Opaque as Viola’s ice was, segments were still vaguely translucent enough for her to peer through. Running towards the wall that spared her from bursting death surely left her appearing insane. She was far, far more concerned about the dual sets of marble-studded craters, parallel splatters of blackened paint shaming walls once crisp mere seconds ago. Her eyes widened in horror.
“There’s more than one,” Octavia said frantically. “There’s…I don’t know how many!”
Josiah swore. “I’m not even sure how safe I feel going back if we were to give up, at this point! We could’ve just gotten lucky coming in!”
“Are the walls reinforced or something?” Viola asked. “They’re holding up perfectly fine. I’d expect something like this to cause a lot more damage.”
Octavia narrowed her eyes. “It’s SIAR. This was his dream. It makes sense he’d build it to last.”
“Octavia,” Viola began hesitantly, “what do we…do from here?”
The path of return was safe--ideally. Were they to retreat, they could still regroup. They could plan another approach. They’d still be in Solenford, and they’d agreed not to return to Coda anytime soon. Harper’s injury, above all else, was extremely concerning. Octavia bit her lip. The idea of something awaiting them on the way out was petrifying. Maybe she was overthinking. Maybe she wasn’t. Even devoid of a human touch, SIAR was still finding ways to crush her to pieces.
“Let’s keep going.”
Madrigal’s words were sharp and resolute at the strangest time. It was enough to shake Octavia, watching on as the girl trailed her fingers down the length of Viola’s glacier.
“You…want to keep going?” Octavia repeated quietly.
The Spirited Maestra spared her of words, nodding once instead.
“You’re gonna go through that?” Josiah shouted. “A friggin’ minefield?”
“You’re going to get killed! At the very least, you’re gonna get seriously hurt!” Viola cried in turn.
“I have an idea,” Madrigal said.
“You realize you don’t get any do-overs if that idea doesn’t work, right?” Josiah snapped.
His harsh words didn’t shake her, her soft eyes and softer voice offered to Octavia instead. “I have an idea, but Octavia has to trust me.”
Octavia clenched Stradivaria tighter, her fingertips aching as the strings dug into her skin. “I-I…what do you mean?”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Madrigal?”
The Maestra smiled weakly. “Viola…should stay here, with Josiah and Harper. They need someone to keep them safe, so I’ll go with you. I won’t leave your side.”
Viola could hardly cobble objections together. “Are you really sure about this? We can always try again another--”
“This is our chance,” Madrigal countered. “It’s empty, and it’s quiet. Even if there’s things like this that try to hurt us, there’s no one chasing us this time. We’re already here, and maybe we can find out all about what’s been happening to everyone. We’re so close. We can’t give up now.”
With her eyes on Octavia once more, her smile was genuine and bright. “Besides, in storybooks, when there’s this much keeping someone away, there must be something wonderful on the other side, right?”
Octavia scoffed. Still, she couldn’t suppress a soft smile of her own. “I don’t think ‘wonderful’ is the word you’re looking for, here.”
“Let’s…keep trying, and keep fighting,” Madrigal said, her voice somewhat more firm. “I won’t let you down, okay? I won’t let…anyone down.”
Her gaze wandered to Harper. Pained as his own smile was, faint and strained as Josiah wound bandage after bandage around his leg, it was a smile he fought to craft all the same.
“That’s my girl,” Harper breathed.
Madrigal beamed in earnest, hugging Lyra’s Repose to her chest. Even muted, devoid of bubbles and laughs and endless love, Madrigal herself was contagious. It was warm. Octavia stole what she could.
“What do we need to do, then?” Octavia finally asked.
Madrigal’s eyes flickered to Viola. “I need Viola to let us get to the other side of the ice.”
The Soulful Maestra winced. “You don’t know if there’s something immediately on the other side.”
“If there was, I think it would’ve gone off when you first made the wall. We don’t need to go that far. We just need to stand right on the other side.”
It still wasn’t enough to fully assuage Viola’s fears, if the look on her face was any indication. Still, she sighed. With several quick breaths into Silver Brevada, so, too, came subtle cracks in her ice that Octavia had to squint to observe. Crawling in subtly from both the left and right expanses of her wide glacier, they fanned out across the edges of the barrier. Delicate notes left them splintering into ever more deltas with soft, nearly inaudible crunches. It never inched inwards further than the absolute outskirts, localized only to two narrow widths of crystal.
Viola trilled. They shattered. A rain of precise, clean-cut crystal splashed down onto the marble below, almost beautiful in the way it graced what intact flooring remained.
What that left the Maestras with was two equally-narrow gaps, just barely sizable enough to squeeze past on either side. Madrigal took the left. Octavia took the right, her face pressed nearly flat against the chilling ice as she sidestepped her way through. There was a comfort that came with being so close to Viola’s protective ice. She lost that comfort the moment she came out the other side. Not for a moment did she part with what was left, physically or otherwise. Clinging did little for her nerves.
“Please, for the love of God, be careful!” she heard Viola cry. “You better come back in one piece, do you hear me? Both of you!”
“It’s okay, Viola,” she heard Madrigal call back. “The Magical Madrigal will protect the Ambassador with everything she’s got. I won’t fail.”
“You need to be safe, too, you know!”
“I will.”
“What about you guys?” Octavia asked loudly, worry pooling in every word.
“We’ll be fine,” she heard of Josiah. “We’ll wait. If something happens, we can protect ourselves. It’s…not safe for us to move around too much right now. We’ll be okay here, I promise.”
It wasn’t a reassuring answer. It was still an answer, regardless. Putting faith in his words was a struggle, for how she added a new knot to the collection in her stomach every second. It was beginning to hurt.
Madrigal offered Octavia a smile once more, her own back pressed flat against Viola’s ice. “Promise you’ll trust me, okay?”
Octavia gulped. She nodded, Stradivaria nestled comfortably on her shoulder.
“You won’t need Stradivaria. It’s easier if you just hold him like normal.”
Octavia raised an eyebrow. “I…what’s your plan, exactly?”
“Take a deep breath.”
Confused, she obliged. It had never exactly helped her before.
In turn, Madrigal took one herself. Octavia watched as she raised Lyra’s Repose into position, her fingers settling calmly upon each string with little hesitation.
“Don’t move for a minute,” the Maestra murmured.
Octavia nodded, growing more anxious by the second. Either immune to her distress or overwhelmingly aware, the Spirited Maestra played softly and without remorse. Slow plucks at vibrating copper gave way to a gentle breeze that ruffled the hem of Octavia’s skirt. Madrigal’s breathing was steady, evenly-paced as her movements gradually quickened. Note by note, the speeding song born of her strumming drifted through the air in time with a rippling gust.
What had seconds ago been a delicate, cooling wind now intensified rapidly into a gushing storm that whipped against the back of Octavia’s legs--and her back, overall. Her efforts to remain flat against Viola’s icy shield were largely faltering, the tempest that rushed past her ears stinging her calves with stray bits of marble. Her braids, just as well, were assailed by the ruthless gale, spurred harshly forwards as they pulled against the remainder of her hair.
She braced her boots against the shattered floor, bending her knees and digging her heels in as she battled to keep from tumbling in full. For as lovely as Madrigal’s fierce, crystalline ballad was, her wind never failed to rattle Octavia.
When she managed to turn her head, fighting the force of the storm against her bare skin, Madrigal at her side was encountering resistance even to her own song. She played on unhindered, each masterful pluck and strum precise and immaculate all the same. It still didn’t keep her, too, rooted firmly, and she herself was forced to brace. Her sandals slid against the marble surface underfoot, dangerously smooth. Even so, she successfully fought to keep still, her curls viciously compromised by the gale that blasted them in turn.
They stood fast in the eye of a little storm, nestled firmly against their backs. Battling to remain steady was growing ever more difficult, for how each gust seemed to stream yet quicker. Octavia could’ve sworn she heard Madrigal grunting with effort, slender fingers moving so swiftly over Lyra’s strings that she wondered if they’d outright snap. It was all she could do to blink, her eyes buffeted by wind that had even managed to blight her face from behind.
“Promise that you trust me!” she heard Madrigal cry above the tempest, her song never ceasing.
It took everything Octavia had to physically nod. “I trust you!”
Madrigal fixed her eyes squarely ahead, gazing down the lengthy expanse of open corridor that awaited. “We’re gonna run!”
Octavia’s eyes pooled with terror. “What?”
“You’re already fast!” she called above her gales once more. “You’re gonna go even faster than that! We’re gonna go together!”
“Are you sure?” Octavia cried.
A plan to disperse the explosives had been her first guess, either individually or via some chain reaction. A plan to find an alternate route was equally as plausible. She had not, under any circumstance, anticipated a plan that involved sprinting through the literal minefield. As to exactly how many eager explosives awaited her underfoot, she didn’t want to know. For as much trust as she’d granted Madrigal, Octavia was beginning to regret her decision.
“Hold onto Stradivaria and don’t stop running! Run as fast as you can and don’t look back! I’ll keep up with you, no matter what, so trust me!”
“Madrigal!” Octavia cried simply, offering the girl her own horrified gaze.
She caught it. It meant nothing. At the very least, all it warranted in return was the same soft smile as always. “You promised you’d trust me!”
Octavia hesitated, gripping either portion of Stradivaria harshly enough to hurt her hands. Whether or not she was lying was debatable. “I-I…I’ll trust you! I trust you!”
Madrigal beamed. “Remember, don’t look back! No matter what, keep running!”
Octavia nodded, unable to still her heart as it pounded desperately against the walls of her chest. “Okay!”
With her fingers still flying, Madrigal’s eyes narrowed. The Spirited girl winced somewhat as she fought to grow her soft song ever louder. The force of the gale at Octavia’s back was becoming outright painful, the tiny vortexes of marble smacking into the back of her legs surely leaving welts. “Ready?”
No, she wasn’t. The question was deranged. Still, of this alone, she was perfect. It was natural and thoughtless, on a physical level. Stradivaria in hand meant little, and her legs would fight where her light could not. Octavia lowered her body close to the floor, exhaling sharply as she, too, glared down the other end of the far-too-long corridor. It was at least twenty straight seconds of sprinting, at her speed. For what lay underfoot, that much was an eternity.
Harper was faster. Josiah could keep up. Viola’s athletic abilities were almost non-existent, and Renato’s were of a different flavor entirely. Octavia was still unsure how fast he actually ran. Madrigal, then, was a mystery. She’d never considered the need to crack it. It left prayer.
Her fear was undeniable, not localized to her own well-being by any means. Still, “trust” was a heavy word, and she’d been throwing it around quite a bit lately. She had to try.
Against her best judgment, with every fiber of her being pleading for the opposite, Octavia nodded. “Ready!”
Madrigal counted her down. Every number was torture. Three was regret. Two was fear. One was wondering what she was even doing here. Zero was the fastest she’d ever run in her entire life.
With her eyes not daring to leave the sanctity of the furthest wall, the pounding of her boots against the slick marble below was nearly inaudible above the roar of the tempest that spurned her onwards. Her propulsion was explosive in its own right, blasting her forth with such ferocity that her already-notable running speed was perhaps all that kept her on her feet. She didn’t run to escape the wind. Instead, she fell in sync with it, welcoming the relentless rush of the storm pressing with devastating force against her back.
Despite her fixation, Octavia could hardly see her goal, her eyes watering from the sheer swiftness with which she’d been blessed. She couldn’t turn her head. She couldn’t speak. She could barely breathe, lest her unbelievable forward momentum steal the air from her lungs. She could only run, the equally-ferocious and endless song of a determined harp still semi-audible even now. Somewhere at her side, a bit less than parallel, Octavia knew another Maestra was there.
It was muted somewhat by the other sounds she’d expected, contrasting starkly with swift winds and harsh notes. She’d been completely and utterly correct in her assumptions regarding the peppering of ever more explosives underneath. The way by which they took deadly turns assaulting her from below was horrifying. If she were to count the number by sounds alone, it would take her too long to conclude. The term “minefield” had been startlingly accurate. It was sheer luck, or perhaps skill she wasn’t intended to possess, that kept Octavia's limbs attached and her life intact as she passed them over with heavy steps.
In less than the time it took to blink, hardly a temporal distance between the moment she lifted her foot from the marble, they’d erupted in full. In her immediate wake, massive chunks of yet more swirling marble hurtled upwards towards the ceiling in every direction. The blazing, superheated shockwaves stung her ankles, even blasted by Madrigal’s unwavering gale as they already were.
Again and again the process repeated. Every boom of each localized burst that threatened her life missed her by literal inches, newly-born pebbles of flooring splashing against her calves. She never looked back, pained as she was. To stop was to die. To hesitate was to die. If she could feel the wind that shot her down the corridor, Madrigal was surely at her side.
Octavia didn’t bother counting the distance to the other side by time. She still at least clung to the vague estimate she’d thrown together previously. Where she’d once assumed twenty seconds’ worth of sprinting, she instead was content to halve her guess. The corner turn that rapidly approached, thick masonry that abruptly terminated her momentum, veered to the left in a manner that she dreaded.
The moment her steps followed suit, the two Maestras would be blinded as to what followed. There was a non-zero chance that whatever awaited could kill her. Her current and exceedingly deadly situation was enough of an indicator. If nothing else, she opted to adhere to Madrigal’s philosophy to the bitter end. There was nothing to do but run. She could only hope that Madrigal came to the same decision, ultimately. Where the floor exploded below her, Octavia's heart threatened to explode within.
Mere feet from the wall itself, she skidded, her boots scraping hard enough against the marble to elicit a terrible squeak. When Madrigal’s wind abruptly shifted its current, following her decision as it continued to assault her back, it was enough to confirm the expectation of Octavia’s choice. She counted her blessings on every star in the sky that, in the moment of her turning momentum, her tiny slowdown hadn’t ended with one less foot attached to her body.
There was no room for reprieve, regardless. She’d have to drink in what was before her while in the process of tackling it blindly. The pursuing explosions, invisible as they were, trailed in the wake of her dash, clawing at the threads of her life each time her soles scraped the floor.
It was just as bright, more of the same monotonous white that lured her deeper into the depths of SIAR with every frantic step. It terminated, eventually. Octavia initially believed it to be a dead end, a radiant wall of silver sparkling beneath the light that graced the lengthy corridor. It rapidly approached. It was no wall. It was solid, it was sealed, it was iron, and--if looks were anything to go by--it was fortified.
It was inescapable, and she was barreling towards it as fast as her unstoppable sprint could carry her. Octavia's eyes widened in utter terror. Her speed left no time to raise Stradivaria, let alone channel her light in a desperate attempt to break through. She could hardly move her arms as it was, the storm still bursting at her back much as death still burst at her feet. Was she still supposed to be running?
“Take my hands!” she heard distantly, breathlessly.
For you and you alone.
The song that her ears had clung to so desperately in the midst of her race through Hell had shifted in an instant. It was just as quick and just as unbending, the tempest that roared forth from each note still dominating in every way. Still, there was something more that Octavia initially couldn’t place. There was a sharper tone. With it came a more vicious lick to every pluck and ping that tinged the stirring air.
Sonorous as it was, the ballad skirted the threshold of audible pain as her breath was nearly sucked from her lungs. Octavia was cutting it dangerously close, seconds from a full and lethal collision with the steel barrier that awaited her ahead. She battled to resist the overpowering urge to squeeze her eyes shut. It was inevitable.
She would’ve been startled by the unfathomably-sudden gust crashing into the iron before her, had she not been spurned forth too fast to muster a recoil. It crunched and creaked beneath the pressure of the blast, a gushing gale that pushed forever without mercy. The groaning steel bent, budged, and folded, firm and yet not all at once.
She’d expected the effort of channeling such fearsome winds to leave Madrigal crying out high above the cacophony of chaos. Instead, Octavia found only human silence in the face of metallic punishment. It didn’t erupt, nor did it crumple in full. It wasn't blasted inwards, nor was it sucked outwards. The gaps that it did leave were enough, peeled downwards from the threshold haphazardly. It went low. One reasonably-high jump would be enough to clear what remained below her. It was possible.
Octavia barely had time to contemplate the idea. She was upon the metal seconds later, her body moving before her thoughts could. She didn’t jump so much as she did dive, her feet slipping out from beneath her at the last possible second as she tumbled forwards. With Stradivaria in hand, her balance was nonexistent. She bashed one knee hard against what was left of the iron door on the way down. Octavia cried out in pain as she rolled several times over along the floor, the impact against the hard surface unkind both to her limbs and to a violin driven into soft skin. She groaned.
It took her a moment to process the absence of sound--freedom from explosions, freedom from gusts attacking her ears, and freedom from the song that had guided her way. The latter was a source of panic. She scrambled to her feet, her position irrelevant in the face of isolation.
“Where are you?” Octavia cried.
“I’m here,” she heard softly.
Octavia’s neck ached from the speed at which she snapped her head behind her. She breathed an immense sigh of relief at the well-intact buns, curls, and gentle smile that endured at her back. Madrigal, too, rose from the swirling marble, somewhat grayed beneath the dimmer lighting. “I’m with you.”
Adrenaline poisoned Octavia’s blood in excess, and her heart raced in place of herself. Regardless, she found at least one small victory in the form of Madrigal’s safety. For that, there was warmth. The weakest traces of a smile teased the corners of her lips.
“Where are we?” Madrigal murmured.
Octavia had been too distracted by their surprising survival to actually consider the question. The northwestern wing was most definitely not the storage unit. Of that, she was certain. The door here had been significantly fortified, by comparison. For what reason, she was initially unsure. It was, as she’d observed, dimmer, the lights overhead providing far more pitiful illumination than the onslaught of luminescence in the corridor. The room itself contrasted sharply with the emptiness of the hallway, filled nearly to the brim with its own flavor of belongings instead.
She blinked at the sight of racks, pedestals, shelves, cases, and every conceivable method of storage once again localized to one room. They were gathered in such excess that she did, briefly, wonder if there was more than one storage unit in SIAR. In the absolute worst case scenario, Octavia feared she’d misremembered which wing she’d tangled with Drey in. She dismissed the idea. She’d long since committed the exact place his corpse had fallen to memory. It wasn’t here.
The weapons were most notable, above all else. They were excessive, and greatly so, to a degree she couldn’t put into words. Every shape and flavor of weapon she could imagine had a place in the room at least once over. Nestled comfortably into one of many, many optional homes, steel glistened and varnish shone. A variable sea of violence stood at the ready--presumably, given the nature of Drey’s craft. Some were neatly divided, spears upon sharpened spears and honed knives of all styles among much of the same.
There were firearms. There were many, many firearms. There were enough that Octavia wondered if Drey was expanding his masteries prior to his demise. If his toll was anything to go by, he’d been fixated relentlessly upon refining his skill with blades. He embraced everything they came with, and she’d dealt with that much firsthand. The ranged weaponry was every bit as well-restored and shimmering as the flavors of edged steel they dwarfed in number. He’d undoubtedly had more planned for his dream, blood on his hands or otherwise. The less time Octavia spent imagining a gun pressed to Priscilla’s head, instead, the better.
It was a reflex to scan for more sharpened violence with her eyes, disgusting as the instinct was. There was a deep relief that came with her inability to spot a polearm once stolen from the Blessed City. For the sins it had witnessed itself, Octavia would’ve destroyed it, given the chance.
She didn’t recognize half of what she was looking at, somewhat dizzied by the incredible amount of vicious tools surrounding her at every angle. They climbed high upon the walls. They rested peacefully amongst cases tethered to the marble below. They even jutted from mixed, haphazard wooden crates, stacked and scattered about the massive room.
The sheer size of the place left it somewhat larger than the storage unit, if memory served. Even so, it felt far more crowded and suffocating. Octavia had all the room she needed to walk. Still, by content alone, it was overwhelming. Every color, every cultural style, every shade of decades and centuries past assailed her eyes with simultaneous glimmers and gleams. It was as marvelous as it was deadly.
For how desperately she’d battled to rack her memory, she’d forgotten the one place he’d boasted of directly to her face. She could still hear the passion in his voice, if she let it echo. If Octavia had her way, his voice would never haunt her again.
“The armory,” she spoke quietly at last. “SIAR’s armory.”
Madrigal, too, wasn't immune to the splendor of the room. “Wow,” she breathed.
“I…forgot it existed,” Octavia continued. “He told me about it once.”
“He never did learn to keep his mouth shut.”
The sudden voice was enough to make Octavia jump, even distant as it was. It was a reflex by which she raised Stradivaria to position in an instant, fingers tensed as she pressed hard against every string. Her other hand gripped the bow tightly, her eyes darting around the room in panic. At her side, Madrigal had done much the same, albeit with slightly less fright. Their third, unexpected companion continued well before they could even process pressing them.
“If he would’ve just kept to himself, he’d still be here to play with his toys. In a way, he had it coming. He always was a fool like that.”
She wasn’t hidden. She was practically in plain sight, and it was largely Octavia’s folly for missing her on her once-over of the armory’s glamor. Octavia blamed her positioning, the angle of a knife-studded shelf having done wonders to block her initial visage. Pinpointed by her low voice alone, she was more than visible with her back to the grayscale wall.
One sharpened heel dug into the masonry, her posture relaxed. Her hands pressed against the same, concealed as they were behind her back. With her head tilted slightly, cursing them with a piercing gaze, Octavia half-expected her to smile. She knew better. She’d never seen a smile on those lips, fleeting as she’d seen them at all.
“Maybe it’s cruel of me to say he deserved it, because he didn’t. He was a visionary. He was a great man. However, his arrogance was a folly that led him to mistakes he should’ve known better than to make,” she offered softly.
There was a part of Octavia that had expected to be surprised, or shout, or scream in the face of a disgusting revelation. She should’ve cried, she should’ve trembled, or she should’ve shown some sort of semblance of distress aside from the adrenaline slowly pooling in her bloodstream once more. Instead, all she found was the sick satisfaction that came with being exceedingly, impossibly correct. It didn’t matter to how awful of a place, nor how horrific of a conclusion her instincts had led her. In the end, it was exactly where she’d needed to be.
“Octavia, was it?” the woman muttered.
The Maestra nodded, narrowing her eyes. “I’m surprised you cared enough to remember,” she said disdainfully.
She scoffed. “At this point, I’d be remiss to forget, with the way you never seemed to evade his lips. Even now, he’d be scolding me about my manners if I didn’t at least try to recall a name.”
“If that’s the case,” Octavia breathed, “then it’s been a long time, Portia.”