I’d never been arrested before. I’d never even seen the inside of a police building. Headquarters? Whatever they were called. I’d urged everyone to come quietly. Tilly had growled angrily at people. Morgana had, thankfully, been unconscious. We were led by the tip of spear and arrow across the city. The previously bustling overhangs and walkways were empty. It was strange to see the city this way. If you didn’t focus, it just looked like an overgrown forest.

We arrived at a large, old tree, and Mellie groaned. I assumed it was nothing good, but few good things started with “You’re under arrest” so I had realistic expectations. We were led down to older parts of the tree that had almost fossilized, into what I could only assume were cells. It was the bars and locks that did the trick. Sabine was shackled with an iron that seemed to hiss the closer I got to it. It burned unpleasantly when I touched it. The metal bars of our cell were made of the same stuff.

“I wouldn’t touch those if I were you,” Mellie said as I looked at them closely. I was just interested in them. I wondered if there was an enchantment or if the metal itself was special for some reason. And what was making that hissing noise.

“I… I wasn’t going to,” I said, ducking to turn around. The ceiling was a little low for me, but I doubted they’d been expecting to imprison someone as tall as me. The only creatures I’d seen that approached my height had been Centaur, and they didn’t climb trees very well. The others sat down against the walls of the cell. Everyone seemed alert. Nobody acted defeated. We had our mission, that hadn’t changed, and I got the feeling the others were ready to start a prison break if I gave the word. Erza nodded at me. I shook my head gently and she gave a soft nod in a response. I hoped the unspoken conversation that had just taken place between us had been understood the same way by both parties.

“Do we do this?” I’d understood Erza’s nod to be.

“No, let’s let this play out,” I’d tried to say by shaking my head.

“Good idea, I approve and understand,” Erza had hopefully nodded again.

She sat down with the others, clearly ready for action, but she closed her eyes and I relaxed a little bit. We seemed to be on the same page. I sat down to look at Sabine, wondering if the manacles would hurt when she woke up.

What I wasn’t expecting was for her to go “Psst” when I got in close. I looked at her. She opened one eye, managed to somehow wink with it, and then closed it again.

“Sabine?” I whispered.

“I do not want them to know just how easy it was for me to shrug that off. I’ll just be ‘asleep’ a little while longer,” she said softly. The smile in her voice told me not to worry about her shackles. She was propped up against a wall, so if I sat down next to her she was out of sight of the guards and I could talk to her.

Morgana was lying down opposite us in the cell. She was also manacled, and I wondered why they hadn’t done the same thing to me, or any of the others. I looked at her with a mixture of still-present frustration and pity. It was hard to stay mad at someone who was unconscious and locked up.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Sabine. I knew about her history, but she seemed… There was something broken about her. The way she moved, like she and the rest of reality were only distant acquaintances. I had no doubt that, if it hadn’t been for the magic, she would already be out of here with no trace of her breaking out. Sabine looked at her for a moment between her eyelashes.

“She’s dead,” she said softly. That, of course, didn’t answer the question.

“So are you, love,” I said. “And you’re nothing like that.”

Sabine breathed quietly. I wondered if she’d genuinely passed out until she started speaking again. “She’s just a body, a mind, and just the hint of a soul,” she said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Sabine grimaced. Clearly this was uncomfortable to talk about. Whether that was because the subject matter itself was taboo or because of her own less-than-alive state, I couldn’t tell.

“When… when people die, their soul doesn’t just go. In a sense it begins to dissolve, into wherever we go when we pass on. When someone reanimates a body, how much of their soul is left determines how much of that person is left.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She paused for a moment and bit her lip.

“Is that why you’re still, well, you?”

She nodded.

“You brought me back almost immediately. Though if I understand correctly, from what you’ve told me, you first reanimated me without my soul, and then granted it back to me. And some things were lost, there.”

I nodded. I felt guilty, still, for having hurt her back then, even if it’d been self defense. Hurting Sabine was still one of my greatest regrets.

“That’s why I spent so long in the throne room afterwards. The soul dissolves into… everything. So there’s still traces. Gathering what I could, as much as I could, I’m mostly whole again. Mostly.” She touched the back of her own hand. “I’ll never be warm again…” she said softly. “But at least I can feel warmth. Taste food.” She leaned her head against my arm. “Touch you.”

It was hard not to cry. Too hard, in fact, and I gave her a little tear-stained kiss on top of her head. She sighed and softly nudged my arm for a moment, then seemed to slip out of her reverie, and back into her explanation.

“Usually, when people are brought back, it’s just a body. If the head is mostly intact, there might even be a mind there. You could talk to it, but it wouldn’t be a person. Talking to someone like that is like asking a clerk to read you from a book. There’s no feelings there anymore.” She paused. “Magic can make a body move, but it needs an intact mind to remember things, and a soul to feel things.”

I nodded towards her. “And you have both.”

“Yeah,” she smiled. “Though it was… it was a close call.”

She nodded to Morgana again. “But sometimes people linger. Strong emotions don’t dissipate as easily. They can stay around for decades, centuries even. The body and the mind collapse, but the emotions stay.” She smiled softly. “There’s a… there’s a hill, not far from where I grew up, where two lovers are buried. They passed away more than a hundred years ago, together, but it’s said you can still feel them on warm summer nights.”

She smiled bashfully. “I used to go there as a little girl and dream of…” She petered off, obviously embarrassed. “Anyway.”

“She’s the old warrior princess. Her legend says she died with a curse on her lips. If even half of what they say about her is true, and Queen Eliza is as powerful as you are, then she’d have had no trouble reanimating a body and a mind. But she couldn’t create a soul. I am willing to stake my reputation on it that she banked on Serana’s rage still being a part of her. And without much of a soul, she’s that much more useful of a... ”

I wondered what word she was hesitating to use. Tool? Pawn? Morgana was an assassin, maybe the best one out there. I wondered how much of a spectre she would have been if there had been even less.

“So that’s all she has?” I asked.

Sabine nodded almost imperceptibly. “She’s just rage, now. Although… we don’t really know everything there is to know about souls yet. It’s possible she’ll recover something of who she was. It’s possible... “

I looked at Sabine, then at the form of Morgana. I hoped she was right. “You don’t sound convinced,” I whispered as the woman began to shift.

“That’s because I’m not,” Sabine said, and pretended to be knocked out cold again. Morgana sat up and groaned, but didn’t say anything. She just sat there, menacingly, experimentally tugging at her bindings and finding them to be impossible to remove.

“How are you feeling?” I asked Morgana. She looked at me suspiciously. She still didn’t know who I was, and the old queen would have probably never asked her about her wellbeing. I realized there were probably still tears on my face. Too late to care now.

“I am unable to escape my bonds,” she said mechanically. I’d wondered about those.

“Why just you two?” I asked her, and nodded to the ‘unconscious’ Sabine.

Morgana shrugged. It seemed like she hadn’t noticed Sabine until I’d pointed her out. “She’s a mage. I’m…”

She paused for a moment and smiled without any humour at all. Her teeth were very white.

“Dangerous.”

That was clearly an understatement. I felt like a mouse who had been locked up with a cat. Except that the cat hadn’t realized there was a mouse yet. I stopped that train of thought before the metaphor got away from me.

I turned to Mellie, who was failing to meditate with her legs crossed. She was entirely too fidgety to clear her mind, even I could tell that, and her breathing was much too fast.

“What’s going to happen next?” I asked.

She looked at me, then at the bars.

“I imagine they’ll let us stew for a minute, and then drag us in front of the Green Court.”

“The what?” Tilly asked.

Mellie shrugged. “Since the end of the ark-cities, we don’t really have royalty anymore,” she said. Morgana watched her intently out of the corner of her eye. Morgana had been royalty, and I wondered just how aware she was of the changes in Elf culture since her death. “But there needs to be a court. The Green Court decides on matters the law doesn’t outline.” She grimaced. “Do you get it? It’s both a royal and a legal court, without kings or lawyers.”

Oof.

“What will that mean for us?”

She shrugged again. “We’ll be presented before the court, we’ll have charges filed against us, and then we’ll plead our case. Then they’ll probably toss us off the tallest tree and consider that justice done.”

“Haha,” Kazumi said.

“I’m not kidding,” Mellie replied.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Just then, a cadre of guards and mages lined up in front of our cells. I suppose now was as good a time as any for judgement. Something told me the court wouldn’t take “that wasn’t me, that was the evil queen who used to be in this body but isn’t anymore” as a solid justification for the the threats that had been levied against Wydonia. I just hoped they’d hear us out.

We were slowly led all the way back up the tree. It took us much longer than I thought it would have for us to reach the top as the stairs wound slowly around the bark. The idea of treetop-cities was all well and good until you found yourself going up what felt like a mile of stairs. Clearly elevators hadn’t been invented yet. It did explain why nobody here seemed to be out of shape. I couldn’t help but wonder how they handled disabilities here, but I didn’t have much more time to contemplate that conundrum as we, finally, got to the top of the steps. Tilly groaned, her short legs having made the climb especially grueling, but none of us were particularly happy about how long the climb had taken.

We reached a platform on top of the tree. Its branches stretched out to all sides, but the trunk itself had broken off here, and over what must have been decades, this space had been polished until it almost shone. Upright bark, thick as brick walls, sheltered us from the wind. We heard it whistling overhead. Even with that, it was still colder, here. This high up, we were all unpleasantly reminded of the fact that we’d been arrested after we’d taken off our coats.

Before us, on a raised platform, stood two thrones. On them sat two Elf, looking exactly as regal and important (or self-important) as you’d expect from elven leaders, dressed in muted greens and browns that mimicked the leaves of the mangrove.

I wondered who’d speak first. I wondered what they’d say. What they’d accuse me, what they’d accuse all of us of. What punishments they had planned for us. The demon queen had been a genuine threat to Wydonia, and I feared their retribution would be swift and severe. I had no idea what they’d come up with.

“Good to see you again, Queen Eliza,” the one on the left said.

Well, it wasn’t that.