Twin cracks of manmade thunder clapped out from the manor, recognizable as the telltale sound of kingdom-issue armor teleporting in. It was the same sound that the Tayan soldiers’ armor had made when evacuating us from the primordial, at least.

The air near us fractured, magic pressure flooding the area, and the thunder cracked again, much closer and deafeningly loud.

Lord Alzaq was back, and he’d brought reinforcements.

He stood a ways back from the fight, at least ten meters behind the oathholder that was furthest from me. Next to him stood one of the special armored oathholders that had accompanied him on his way out earlier. On a second glance at the soldier guarding the noble, I realized that the runic patterns on his black plate were significantly more complex than those of the ones I’d been fighting just now—much closer to Faye’s multipurpose behemoth of armor than the still lethally efficient ones that the others here had.

Almost as concerningly, he’d added three new soldiers to his coterie. These wore the same basic black steel as the other oathholders, but numbers were numbers and as much as they were less of a threat than the special armor, they were still a force multiplier and they were still oathholders.

There were twelve of them now. I wanted to count Lord Alzaq out of the fight, but the fact of the matter was that I didn’t know if he was a combatant or not. He’d been controlling Faye, so he presumably had a high-level oath to Ditas, and that meant that I couldn’t ignore him if he chose to enter the battle.

I’d been slowly whittling away at their numbers, four dead by my hand already, and even then I was the worse for wear. The returning oathholder—I designated them as the special armor in my mind—looked to be as big a problem as Faye, who had almost managed to fully defeat me even when I had been backed up by the jester’s power.

Can I take them? No. I was no fool. Earlier, when I had been fresh off Alto’s murder, my oath more aligned than usual? Perhaps. As I was now, though, bruised and burning and spasming from the electric shock I’d just been hit with? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t even be able to win against the special armor one-on-one in this state, let alone twelve oathholders at once, especially now that I had all their attention.

That only left a few options, none of them good. I banished the idea of surrender even as it crossed my thoughts—that way laid an execution and the glorification of the Alzaq name.

Conversation it was, then. “Where’d your other buddy go? Ran off?”

Not my best, I admitted, especially given that he’d left with two soldiers and returned with four, but I wasn’t thinking properly straight right now. My ribs ached where I’d been hit and I was still feeling the aftereffects of the magic in that blow, the burning of the shock not having quite left my system. I couldn’t unclench my hands, either.

“Far from it,” Alzaq said haughtily, hands tucked behind his back. “He rides for the ball.”

The ball? I coughed, and the action sent a red-hot ray of flame through my insides. “What do you mean—what do you mean by that?”

“You should know,” the noble sneered. “The man is of my personal guard. He carries the information I do.”

Pieces slowly fell into place, the shaken gears in my head beginning to spin again. The information that Lord Alzaq had—

“You sent him to talk about me.” It wasn’t a question.

“If my timing is correct, he already has.” I couldn’t properly see Alzaq’s face in the dimness of the night, but I could imagine the shit-eating grin on his face from the tone of his voice.

Fuck. Fuck.

“Gods fucking damn you,” I growled, low enough that nobody would be able to hear me.

“Ah, at last,” the noble laughed, not kindly. “The dead girl finally reacts.”

Stupid Ditas oath bullshit. Enhanced hearing of some kind, which probably also meant his other physical attributes were enhanced as well.

I couldn’t focus on the fight, my thoughts sticking on Alzaq’s words. The guard he’d sent to the ball. The timing of it.

Everyone would know. I could almost step into the traitor noble’s shoes, picture his thought process. Of course Lord Alzaq arriving to the ball right after the Tempet man’s gambit—Alzaq’s gambit, now that I thought about it, the true perpetrator cloaked by a collaborator’s treachery—that would be suspect. But a guard? One that might be willing to spread the word about a renegade former noble—of House Byron, at that—stirring up more trouble?

I couldn’t move my fingers, so I grit my teeth, hard enough that I might’ve chipped one.

“Why?” I asked, the word slipping from my tongue before I could stop myself. “Why me?”

“The Byron child has the audacity to ask a true noble why she was targeted?” Alzaq replied. “Did your House ever inform their targets as to the reasons why they were to be tortured to death? Enlighten me.”

“I’m not a Byron,” I protested, the argument sounding desperate even to my own ears. “Not anymore.”

“And yet Byron blood flows in your veins,” Alzaq shot back. "Else, why would you seek my head?”

Okay, my attempted murder of the man had probably contributed to Alzaq’s dedication to ruining me. That… was probably my bad. Not that I wouldn’t try it again, of course.

“Perhaps I seek your head because you’re a damn traitor,” I said.

“Oh, am I?” Lord Alzaq challenged, confident to the point of arrogance. “That is not what the nobility will hear tonight.”

The numb disbelief that I’d been managing to keep myself in shattered at that line, and the gravity of my situation closed in on me.

I was, in a word, fucked. I’d already run through the scenario in my head earlier, but I’d managed to put it aside in order to get myself focused for the fight. Now, it came crashing back, the hypotheticals flooding my mind seeming more and more like realities with every passing moment.

Exile at best. Execution the likeliest. If Lord Alzaq had his way, I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t get off with an easy death. No matter what, I was going to have to flee. That meant leaving the University, leaving the life I’d made.

It meant leaving Jasmine.

Despair threatened to drown me, a black curtain of hopelessness stretching itself across my eyes, and it almost felt nostalgic.

“The last person to make me feel this way,” I muttered, “Was named Lord Wilson Byron.”

“A shrewd man,” Lord Alzaq said, his voice hard. “You may be joining him soon. Say hello to him for me, will you?”

I could escape, that much I knew. I wasn’t out of magic quite yet, and that crater-forming trick I’d used earlier wouldn’t lose too much effectiveness even after they’d seen it in action once.

I could escape, but I couldn’t. I should have run, but I wouldn’t. My thoughts kept looping back to that damned noble girl. Her voice, her warmth, her company. As much as I’d been alone for a decade or more, I’d grown used to Jasmine, the short month and a half we’d spent together feeling like much, much longer.

Lord Alzaq was still blabbering on about something or another, gloating over me, and that growing despair receded, replaced by black hatred. He couldn’t just stop at trying to kill me, could he? No, this noble was going to destroy everything I had built for myself, end the only friendship I’d managed since childhood.

And he was going to do it all with a smile on his face.

Rage coursed through me, and I redirected it. Anger was unproductive, but there was a similarly powerful motion that I could harness.

I funneled everything I had into my hatred. Given my current mental state, it really didn’t take too much effort.

I hated Lord Alzaq, for taking my life away from me like this. The Crown, for their shitty terms all those years ago that would get me killed or worse today. The nobles, for being trained in combat but not raising a single godsdamned finger to help me. The adventurers, for not being strong enough. Myself, for allowing this fucking mess to happen in the first place.

I was a murderer of a girl pretending at being the noble I once was, and it had come around to bite me.

My skin felt chilly even though the night was warm yet. The heat of rage had passed through me and gone, my emotions condensing into a dense black ball of hatred that I could almost palpably feel in my heart.

A memory bubbled to the surface of my tumultuous mind. An image, one of Lord Wilson Byron standing over me with a bloodied club.

Unacceptable, he’d said, and for once I was in agreement.

Unacceptable.

I will make them pay.

I barely even had to think to pull the magic from the air. The threads hummed with power and malice, an ancient crime made manifest as magic, and my oath hummed with them. It was like night and day. If I’d been trying to play an old, scratchy violin before, I was using a brand new one now—a beautifully tuned one, at that. I drew on my reserves and did not find them wanting.

The noble must’ve felt the alignment, because he finally shut up. Lord Alzaq retreated, turning his back on me and walking away casually. He gestured over to his special armored oathholder and said something to them, but I didn’t catch the words. My oath crackled in my ears, malicious hatred positively itching to be used.

I gestured upwards and ruin came forth, wreathing my body. My fingers unclenched, shock disappearing from my body as my magic met another’s and consumed it.

Twelve oathholders alive. Eleven, not counting Lord Alzaq. I only cared about one, but if anyone cared to get in my way I was going to have words with them.

I took a step forward. Eleven armored oathholders tensed with that single motion, and I laughed, the sound bitter and cold. All this for a single girl.

The Alzaq noble was still getting away. I put my right foot in front of my left, then my left in front of my right. Every motion was mechanical, measured, and calculated. At this speed, I would slightly outpace Alzaq. I’d catch up to him before he made it out of the manor.

There was, of course, the problem of the small army between us. As I took my fourth step, one of the oathholders at the center of the garden square we were in gestured, scrambling up the fountain. Heedless of the water pouring onto their armor, the oathholder stood atop the fountain and began to cast, a pure white runic pattern of a frame visibly forming in front of their eyes.

I shot magic at them, a stream of ruin pouring forth from my outstretched right hand, and still I advanced. Three separate walls of force materialized themeselves in front of the fountain, absorbing the brunt of the magic.

Those weren’t shield spells, I was pretty sure. As my magic slammed into them, they gave, the first layer tearing apart like it was paper. Despite that, it weakened the blast more than a regular shield would have, even an overcharged one, and the second layer resisted it far more. A blast powerful enough to tear through armor and reduce a dozen separate people to ash stopped in its tracks. I recognized the effect. They’d cast the unimaginatively named Adaptive Wall, a sixth-class Ceretian spell that was exclusive to the Tayan nobility and military, I was fairly sure. Not a hard counter to my ruin, but it was going to be a massive pain to deal with alone.

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Another oathholder charged me as magic clashed and the shields held steady. This one had been breaking my shield apart earlier, a massive mace in hand.

Engaging in melee combat with an oath-aligned Lily was going to be their last mistake.

Adrenaline pumped through my veins, and the world almost seemed to slow down as the mace-wielder ran towards me, the mace complementing their equally massive frame.

Nobody was casting any protection for this person. I suspected they were all using structured spells—nothing that they could adapt on the fly like my loose-frame shields.

I willed raw power to form in my hands, amplifying the aura of magic surrounding me in the same motion, and I charged forth as well.

The mace-wielder flinched as I ran. Had they been expecting me to run away?

Too bad for them. I channeled the hatred flowing through me, tempering it from raw emotion into a blade with intent.

I focused on pulling from my oath into my hands and then leapt, swinging wildly with little form or grace to my movements.

Whatever the other oathholder had been expecting, it hadn’t been that. They didn’t even have their mace ready to swing as the distance between us shrank to nothing, and the promised attack never came.

I plunged my fists into their armor, meeting resistance at first but ultimately punching through in an instant. I barely penetrated the flesh beneath with my punch, and that was enough. Another burst of magic sealed the deal, and I hit the ground next to the dying oathholder, using their fallen armored frame as cover while they disintegrated from the inside out.

A projectile of some sort whistled through the air, and it was only the dead soldier’s armor that kept it from hitting me. It was an arrow, I saw, the shaft sticking out of the black steel enough that I could see the feathers at the end of it.

I squinted. It was a little hard to see, the sun having fully set and the oathlights around the flower maze being rather spaced out, but even in the dim light I could see that shaft was thicker than a normal arrow.

It glowed blue as I watched, a rune pattern forming on it. A heartbeat passed, and it pulsed with power.

The dead soldier’s armor rose into the air all of a sudden, and then I was falling up.

Fuck off. Irritation mixed with the hatred, and I did my best to remove the impurity, folding it into the same emotion. Once I had the proper mindset again, I lashed out with magic.

It was a time-delayed spell by an Und oathholder, maybe with an Aedi oath involved there too. The same Naan’ti one that had been used by one of the oathholders that ambushed Orchid’s crew, I recognized.

And just like the dead man in front of me, it fell apart when it came into contact with my oath. I was in a foul mood tonight, a lonely kind of hate filling me, and my god was rewarding me for it. The armor and I fell back to the ground less than a second after the spell finished activating. I burned my momentum properly this time, my roll a clean and smooth one that didn’t involve any further rib-bruising or arm-flaying.

I rose to my feet, my oath burning bright with hatred and a hint of bloodlust.

Eleven enemies left, ten of which were actively fighting me. I wreathed myself in ruin again, and I walked through the dead oathholder, the armor crumbling like water in the rain now that it no longer had someone to feed it power.

The remaining ten of them looked a little more hesistant to take me on now. I grinned, and there was a maniacal edge to that grin.

“Don’t get in my way,” I announced unsteadily. “Let me get—“

Air screamed, a harsh wind slapping me in the face out of nowhere.

The oathholder that had been shielded by an Adaptive Wall hadn’t been idle. I cut myself off midsentence, glancing at them. Was the wind effect theirs?

No, there was another spell structure growing in their hands. They hadn’t cast yet.

Wait, I knew this wind. I’d been penned in by it, just a few days ago.

Before I could think more on this new information, the oathholder standing atop the fountain finished their spell, white traces of energy solidifying in their hands.

I created and threw more magic, not even pausing for a moment to consider my reserves, and yet the Adaptive Wall held.

The oathholder finished their spell and my world became light and sound.

I couldn’t see. My entire field of vision had been replaced by searing white, as if I’d been staring straight into the sun. I blinked to no avail, trying to get the afterimage out of my eyes. It didn’t decrease in intensity.

I couldn’t hear, either. The noise in the air had reached a fever pitch and kept going, increasing in volume until it peaked at a sudden, sharp scream. It hadn’t lasted very long, but it had been brutally loud. There was nothing in my ears now but ringing. I winced, the hint of a migraine coming on. Hopefully, the effect wouldn’t last too long.

I could, however, still feel, both physically and with my oath. Hot tears oozed out of my eyes, brought on by the spell’s brightness.

More importantly, the other oathholders either hadn’t been affected or had had precautions to prevent themselves from getting hit like I had. My magic sense was on edge tonight, refined by my alignment, and I could feel the shape of not just my own oath but that of those around me. Every single enemy was readying further spells.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. That word was becoming a good deal more common in my thoughts these past few hours, and for good reason at that.

Blind and Deafen were both classical or proto-Ceretian structured spells, I knew, which meant that their effects relied a lot less on the specific god an oathholder had, sacrificing unique effects for universal accessibility. I’d read more than my fair share of spellbook literature from the Byron library when I had still had access to it, and I still remembered much of it. These two spells went hand-in-hand, and they had once been standard fare on the battlefield. They’d stopped, however, because they were so damn easy to protect yourself against. Just apply a layer of magic to the eyes and ears—not even a shield was needed, unstructured would work just fine—and the effect would fail to take properly.

And what had I done? I’d stared at the forming spell and shot towards it.

Alright, that was enough. I added that tinge of self-hatred to the burgeoning mess of emotion within me, then moved on. There’d be time for more reflection later, assuming I survived this.

Adapt and overcome. If I couldn’t see the path I was taking, couldn’t hear the enemies running at me, then I would simply have to remove everything in my way.

I drew on thoughts of Jasmine as my magic flared. With a fresh wave of hate coursing in me—this time with a much more noticeably melancholic tinge of loneliness—I pushed out, aiming blasts of unstructured magic at every single target I could sense. Opposing spells pushed back, my ruin meeting structured opposition at every corner, and so I pushed harder.

A shield or a wall or a particularly sturdy piece of armor broke, and my pseudo-spell claimed a victim. Or at least, it probably did. The oath signature emanating from that general direction was gone, so it was that or the oathholder had suddenly broken their contract with their god.

Nine obstacles remaining. One enemy. There was a single impression of an oath that was actively leaving the area rather than joining the fight, and I moved towards it. As I walked, I blasted the surrounding area with my magic, heedless of how deeply I was drawing from my reserves. There wouldn’t be anything to trip over in my blindness if there wasn’t anything in the area, period.

I felt six—no, three oathholders, each with an already cast spell—enemies approaching me through the magic in the air. It was a fickle sense, fluctuating in effectiveness with every passing moment, and I could barely tell the oathholders apart from their spells.

Still, it was better than nothing, and I had a direction. I created a wasteful blast, one that expended far too much energy in order to cover a wide cone, and I fired it.

There had been six signatures in my immediate vicinity, and though I couldn’t hear or see the darkness of ruin, I could feel four of those signatures wink out in an instant. The last oathholder created another piece of magic, their first one shattering as they did, and they survived.

I could almost see them now, the worst of the Blind spell beginning to wear off. Still not much vision afforded to me, unfortunately, but fuzzy patches of darkness were joining the flat expanse of light. This particular shape strode toward me with reckless abandon.

Alright. I had no idea what the spell they’d cast was, but I could assume it was a barrier of some sort. I took a critical second to think about my next action, on whether my next action was going to fuck up another crucial moment.

I strode forward, adding even more of my rapidly-draining reserves to the ruinous maelstrom surrounding me. I had to work on my decision-making, I knew that, but this was a simple case of retreat or attack. That spell could very well be one that hard countered my oath, but I was going to press on. If I retreated now, all of this would have been for nothing.

Lord Alzaq had been allowed to survive for far too long, and I would die before turning my back on finally putting an end to his story.

Another magical signature appeared, forming a little off to the side. I whirled on it, firing a condensed sphere at it. Once again, I couldn’t visually confirm the effect of anything, but I felt my magic dissipate and the signature was no more.

I turned back to the attacking oathholder and continued my charge. My eyesight was returning incredibly slowly, so I wasn’t totally sure what I was looking at, but it almost appeared as if the armored oath I was pursuing was… retreating?

Almost too late, I realized that I’d just passed another two areas that had been exuding magical power. I stopped in my tracks, abandoning my chase to throw up two walls of magic on either side of me. With the increased flexibility that alignment granted me, I manipulated it in an attempt to mirror the Adaptive Wall spell, less dense at the outermost layer of the magic but then gradually compacting as it got closer and closer to me.

My magic shattered before I could experiment with it further, the two oathholders that I’d passed by tossing spells at me simultaneously.

All at once, my hearing returned, the ringing disappearing as quickly as it had come. The Deafen spell had worn off.

The sounds of the battlefield were overwhelming. Multiple spells were being cast simultaneously, people were running this way and that, and our surroundings were being torn up with every passing moment. Regaining my hearing was almost as disorienting as losing it had been.

I had two new targets to fight, but the sounds around me were making it hard to pinpoint where they were.

A spell hit me in the back, travelling too quickly to register in my magic sense. It wasn’t a terribly powerful one, weakened by the wreath of Inome’s power that I’d wrapped around myself, but it knocked me off balance and it hurt like a motherfucker.

Another spell, another piece of magic appeared, another vague shape charged me, another person was behind me another enemy was attacking another threat another another another—

It was too much. There were too many of them, and they were trained too well. Despite all my advantages, despite my aligned oath, I was still only class five and I was still just one person.

But I couldn’t give up. Not now, when the man I needed to murder was almost within my reach.

“It is hopeless!” the noble in question shouted, his words barely reaching my ears. “Give up!”

Seriously? Had he not been teleported out yet so he could fucking gloat? I growled in frustration.

My hate hadn’t burned any less bright this whole fight, but I was running out of magic. No matter how aligned I was, I couldn’t help the fact that my capacity just wasn’t that high.

The fight was starting to blur together. Twenty seconds could have passed or three minutes. I wasn’t sure anymore, and somewhere along the way I had gone from fighting to kill to fighting for my life.

I was going to lose.

I started taking hits, and they weren’t soft ones. I blocked what I could, weakened what I couldn’t, and in the process I even managed to kill a single soldier that got too cocky, but it wasn’t enough. This was becoming a battle of attrition, one that they would easily win. The only upside was that my vision was slowly returning over the course of long minutes—by now, I could almost see properly with the exception of a bright afterimage in the center of my vision.

I didn’t want to retreat. Retreat meant that no matter what, Alzaq would remain, would continue spreading the news about the surviving Byron child.

Unfortunately, it was looking like my only option at this point.

I’d thought I’d gotten a handle on myself, but a fresh coat of despair decided to apply itself to me as I realized that it was over.

It didn’t replace the icy hate still swirling in my heart, but it colored it. I was going to be alone, and a fair bit of it was my own fault.

Why hadn’t I tried to solve this another way? Couldn’t I have prepared a response, some way to show myself as a former Byron without inciting the rage of the nobility? If nobody else, I was sure Jasmine would have understood if I had bothered to explain.

I could picture her now, hearing the news. I could almost see the disappointment on her face, the feeling of betrayal that was sure to come with the revelation.

I’d spent twelve damn years living without a single personal connection to my name, and yet I had never felt the crush of loneliness like I did right now. It was a singularly isolating sensation, and there was a pressure building in my chest that I couldn’t quantify.

Gods fucking damn it all. All of that hatred, all of that power, and what did I have to show for it? Six or seven bodies to my name tonight, none of them important.

At some times, one must understand when to cut their losses. At others, one must fight until the end. My father’s words, and for once I could think of them and not direct my hatred at him. He was long dead, and there still existed a living noble that deserved my ire more.

I could get an inkling of an understanding of my father, now. I still didn’t know what he had fought for, but when I once could not understand why he would stab the kingdom in the back, I knew now that there were some things that we would move heaven and earth to protect.

At this moment, I couldn’t care less about the people around me. I wanted to remove any threat there was to Jasmine, to keep her from getting away from me. If I’d been told to assassinate the Crowned King himself to keep her, I would’ve done it within a heartbeat.

I thought back on my father, on the travesties he’d executed all those years ago, and I managed to do it without a hint of disgust.

It felt like a betrayal of myself, going against the principles I’d held myself to for so long, and yet I could look at the actions of Lord Byron and believe that I would follow in his footsteps one day.

That feeling joined the mess of emotion at my core. Loneliness and self-betrayal and oh so much hatred mixed together to become… I didn’t know what it became, but it wasn’t pleasant and it wasn’t familiar.

I did my best to push my thoughts aside, but they remained there, lingering over my every action like a storm cloud over a park, coloring my every movement.

Deep breath in.

One last push, and then I need to go. I was actively being pushed back now. Lord Alzaq wasn’t even trying to retreat anymore, simply watching as my offense was slowly taken apart.

I reached for my magic, and I pulled deep. This whole time, I’d been oath-aligned, making everything easier for me, but this time felt different.

My oath felt further and closer at the same time. Less magic came when I willed it forth, but it felt stronger.

Using my hands, I pulled even harder on the threads, and something gave. A thousand thousand images travelled through my mind in an instant, scenes of murder and betrayal and ruin all at once, and then a thread disappeared.

Ah. So that’s how it is.

An understanding clicked in my mind. I’d been looking at the puzzle wrong this whole time, hadn’t I?

It was like looking at an inked drawing of two women a second time and realizing that it depicted a wine glass.

Nishi had been right. There was a level of communication in my oath, in those threads of magic, and I could harness it.

I pulled on threads, infusing them with my own thoughts. It was an act of desperation, one that I had never even tried before, but it felt right.

The ideas I added to it were haphazard. A statement of intent. A nostalgic reminiscence. A hateful speech.

At the heart of it all, a cry for help.

I screamed, my oath working overtime to weave the threads together, and the world shivered with my [QUERY].