-Da / 1n-

'I met with all the

2 x 7 x 13

to repeat again

what you have learned.

To tell what you do

and have done

and why.'

-Aj /102-

'Aj

has performed correctly?'

-Da / 1n-

'The future

ever snarls

in tangles of complexity.

We shall see.'

Aida and Ghillie reached the Neck just as the first two men cleared the guidelines. A burst of sound hurtled one backwards off the shell while another rushed towards Ghillie. She reached into her Ghillie suit and threw her hand towards him. He flinched to the side before realizing her hand had been empty. The real needle flew true, piercing the side of his neck. He crumpled bonelessly mid-stride.

The archer covering behind a bony fin leaned out and loosed an arrow at Ghillie. She sprawled out as it flew, then sprang back to her feet as it caromed off the shell behind them. Three men rushed across the final span with reckless abandon. Aida rushed towards them, hoping to catch them before they cleared it, the resonance building greater in her strings with every passing second.

Later, she pieced together what she'd done, but in the moment it all happened at the level of instinct and reaction. She reached the guide line anchor points just as one of the men hurtled himself towards her with a knife in hand. At the moment she began to unleash a blast of sonic fury to hurl him back, she saw caught the archer aiming at her, drawing his bow, and releasing in a fast motion. In a burst of panic, she amplified the resonance and skewed it to not only include the ruffian leaping towards her but also the archer and arrow both.

She'd learned she could unleash a few waves of the building sound-energy and conserve the rest, but in split second of reactionary indecision she threw everything she had and more in a single, radiating blast.

Ghillie crashed to the ground at her side, hands clamped over her ears as Aida's piercing cry turned the man into a reddish mist, disintegrated the arrow, and took care of the archer. Took care of him, that is, by shattering the first few neck vertebrae. The whole massive turtle shell lurched a half-a-meter as the bony bridge leading to the turtle skull tore free. Vertebrae lower in the chain twisted, sheared, cracked, and all came down in a thundering mass of yellowed bone and torn rope.

Stupefied by her own accidental power, Aida nearly fell after it in her bewildered state. Fortunately, Ghillie yanked her away and dragged her back as screams and shouts echoed from below. A billowing cloud of bone dust swirled up, engulfing everything.

When it cleared, Aida walked slowly to the shell's lip, peering over. Futilely, it turned out, as everything below still swirled in dust. She clutched the choker strings, part exultant, part horrified.

"Told you it would be better if we handled it," Ryk said, grinning as he strode towards her. A few swings of his spear flicked most of the blood clean from its long, bladed point. A glance at the shell's mouth revealed a few crumpled bodies and the last traces of figures fleeing into the dark interior.

Aida wrapped Ryk up in a hug, shaking as the adrenaline rush washed away and the realization that not only had a couple dozen dudes come to the One-Eighth to kill her - or worse, were recruited locally - but that she'd accidentally wrought massive destruction. Again.

Flashbacks to Optimime's on Jadeye thundered through her. The toppling tenement. Terrified bellows of the falling royal strider. People's screams of pain and fear. A thousand shattering glass panes. She hadn't though about any of it in weeks, yet the sounds and images hit her as if it had just happened. When the worst of it passed, a wave of guilt over all the people she'd hurt or killed back then settled in its place.

"Join the crowd," she mumbled, visions of the burning Wicker Way, battle carnage at the collapsing Thorn Cupola, and flu-desiccated, emaciated corpses piling up at the Crowmen's pens around the far side of the turtle poured an extra thousand helpings of guilt into her guts.

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Ryk pulled her away and held her at arms length, looking her over critically. Aliasara, Viviana, and Alerestro stood a short distance away, looking between her and her destructive handiwork. Aliasara regarded her with awe, Viviana a glowing approval, while Alerestro stroked his chin and stared vaguely past her as though running calculations in his head.

"Tears?" Ryk said, brushing one from her cheek. "Didn't we just win?"

"If this is what winning looks like, I can't imagine what we'd be going through if we were losing," she said, wrenching away from him and stepping recklessly-close to the shell's edge. She gestured out over the ragged "town" huddled about the shell. "All these people trusting me to save them only to die from the pandemic I so thoughtfully provided or dying from lack of the food I can't. Then they gather close to me for safety and I drop a few tons of turtle bone on their heads. Who knows how many I just killed or maimed?"

"Seven," Ryk said, a smile twitching across his lips and crinkling laugh-lines at his eye-corners. God he was gorgeous.

"Hopefully not including our poor Valeer? Her... home was down there." She'd almost said 'pen' given the state of the living arrangements they'd set up to keep her from wandering off and dying in the Tangle. Who knew the poor old Valeer who'd been garroted by Braid was such a capable specimen? The thought wandered her mind back to the grisly masks Ocyl had gifted her that now sat somewhere with all her other things in her platform palace.

"Seven who came to kill the Valeer."

"What?" A hot, sulfurous breeze hit and Aida suddenly realized how close she stood to a drop even a Dynast was unlikely to survive. She moved away to stand closer to Ryk, staring into his pale blue eyes with some vague hope she'd somehow see the futures he saw by looking into them. "Kill the Valeer? What did she ever do to anyone?"

"Schemes scrawl all across The Book as the Dynasts strive to rip and tear each other's plans wherever they can. The Rags don't have the might or wealth of the Ancients, but they do possess an unnatural collection of mancers. Most of those look normal enough to hide out amid menials." He glanced at the Thorn, sprouting from the turtle's now-slightly-skewed skull. "It's not just us, here, who were targeted. Valeers and 'nail repositories all across the Book became targets of Rag mancer assassins and saboteurs."

"So those men who just came to kill us up here were just a distraction?" She pressed her hands to her head. "Why did you all pick me again? I'm not cut out for all these grand plans, strategies, ruses, feints, ploys, and whatever. I can barely keep this place running without a thousand other Dynasts interfering much less think about what everyone else is planning!"

Ryk moved close and wrapped her in his arms. She pulled away not because she wanted to, but because a smear of blood on his bare upper arm wiped on her cheek.

"Don't worry, it's not mine," he said. He walked towards the corpse of one of the men he'd dispatched while Ghillie and Aida fought at the Neck, ripped a shred of tunic free, and wiped the blood away.

She followed him, shaking now from a growing feeling of anger alongside the adrenaline. "Was the Valeer among those seven? Did I just kill the poor thing?"

For the first time, Ryk's smile annoyed rather than delighted. "Of course not. We stuck a female rotter in her pen wearing her sack. The mancer assassin and his cronies thought they pulled their mission off perfectly only to discover to their immediate chagrin that they killed a corpse. They only had a moment to lament it because then you... what was the expression I've heard you use? You completely boned them. Hard."

"Hilarious. So this complete destruction I caused was just part of your plan? If you knew they were coming, why didn't we just ambush them down at the Valeer's pen?"

His smile faded as he tossed the bloody scrap to the wind. Watched it flutter down towards the broken heap below that once was the Neck. "The mancer they sent here was incredibly potent. Arcer. Highly trained. It had to be this way or people would die."

After blinking a few times, she gestured towards the bloody corpse at their feet. "People would die?"

He shrugged. "People you care about would die. Aside from a couple handfuls of assassins and thugs plus a rotter which was already dead."

"How far out did you plan this?" Aida said, her mind beginning to race even as her body began to calm. She thrust an accusing finger towards Alerestro and Viviana. "Did you send them to seduce me and keep me here just to be sure we were attacked at the right time? So I would screw up and destroy everything just to kill those assassins? Did you even enjoy yourself or were you just counting down the minutes until we were ambushed?"

His glanced took in the tent which hosted their amorous adventure, then Alerestro, Viviana, and finally back to Aida. "Those things aren't mutually exclusive."

She crossed her arms and leveled her coolest look on him. "Now I'm going to wonder every time we're having sex if your there for me or if you're just setting a trap for my enemies. If we have sex again, that is."

Innocence writ across his features as he held his arms wide towards her. "Everything I do is for you, my love. I die for you, remember?"

"Argh! I can't hear that right now." She raised her hands towards him and looked away. "That's dirty fighting, bringing up your death while I'm pissed off at you."

"It's true."

"Maybe it will be true, but it isn't yet." She stepped close to him and looked deep into his eyes. "Are you a Fatalist or a Inevitable? Are you doomed to die or are you martyring yourself for the sake of some precious, horrible future?"

"Please don't say what you're about to say." He tried to hug her, but she stepped away. Anger clashed with a bizarre feeling of anxiety cross with sorrow.

"If we're all so certain you're going to die, what's the point? Wouldn't it just make everything easier if we just ended it here? Go out together like Romeo and Juliet?" She realized belatedly he'd have no idea who they were, but figured he'd get the point.

He did. It hit him hard, even though he clearly knew in advance what she was going to say. "Everything I do and have done is for you. You are my one love and the Savior of Dynasties besides. Either would be worth dying for, are worth dying for, but I'd rather focus on the living now than the dying later."

"Then why did you bring it up?"

They stood facing one another, both heaving with welters of conflicting emotions. Her vision blurred through a smear of tears.

"Ahem. Dynast Aida," Alerestro finally said.

Aida jumped and turned, having completely forgotten in the intensity of the past few minutes that the other three were there. "What Alerestro? You have something to interject into our relationship? See if you can't make it more confusing than it already is?"

Vivianna slepped towards her, but Aida stepped away, stumbling over a corpse and half-crashing into Aliasara. Her friend wrapped her arm around Aida's shoulders and held her tight, humming the old lullaby that Aida loved.

"Never, Dynast. We seek only to bring you comfort, aid, and succor," Alerestro said, shaking his head. He pointed towards the turtle skull and the slowly-enlarging Thorn atop it. "Someone comes."

Aida groaned and buried her head in Aliasara's shoulder. For a long moment, she just focused on breathing as Aliasara stroked her hair and hummed. Then she took a deep breath, kissed Aliasara on the cheek, flashed her a quick, grateful smile, and turned towards the nets running down from the shell. At least they seemed to be still intact and well-anchored.

"Hopefully these are whole the whole way down," she said, tugging at one of them. "Good thing Dynasts don't need to sleep 'cause there's never a goddamn minute to rest."

She turned to Ryk. "This an invading Legion, gaggle of assassins, or just the usual desperate, sick, starving horde coming here to die?"

"None of those," Ryk said, taking a tentative step towards her and raising an arm. "Something better. Hopeful."

Her raised hand stopped him. "Nope. Not right now. Got to figure some shit out before I talk to you again. Do I die if I try to climb this?"

"No," he said, face falling. Their age difference usually didn't cross her mind much, but he looked so much like a heartbroken college kid at that moment, she suddenly felt like a cradle-robber.

"Fine," she said, grabbing the rope and scrambling down much faster than was probably safe. "With how good that last few have been, can't wait to see what sort of surprise comes next."