Candles flickered faintly, casting glimmer’s echoes across pearly jade, shadows unnoticeable amidst the marching stillness of a thousand statues. Draperies hung still and perfect under the careful ministrations of the unseen servants- a picture from a tapestry, perfection made manifest in this little slice of paradise- yet, still so human. A jade panel or two held the occasional scrape and crack, the floor ever so often scuffed and worn under the many years of heavy traffic.

Here, at night, there was little but the darkness of a palace asleep- a tranquil serenity broken only- by the aborted wanderings of a duo as a fox stiffened, keening in sudden pain in the once-quiet. Kensho frowned down at the creature, rubbing two fingers in a vaguely soothing motion across her head. “Hey? What’s wrong, Inari?”

The fox shook her head, glaring at the ceiling for a moment before staring distractedly off into the distance, only shrinking back into awareness as a guard scowled at them in passing.

“I don’t want them to look at you like that- with…” she frowned. Inari didn’t look worried about the guard- she looked… it was an expression she hadn’t seen on the fox before. She looked furious. “Let's get back to our rooms, then you can try and tell me what’s wrong.” Silently they prowled back, slipping past the guards to throw open the doors to their chambers.

“Kensho… I’m sleep- sleeping. You’re such an… you…” Kisoi grumbled something against the sudden light, rolling over as the other warrior shut the door and lit the lamps. “What are you doing this late- does it- do you have to mrff-” with that she was really awake. Having a fox’s paw stuffed down your mouth tended to do that.

“Inari’s worried, for some reason, and I thought it would be best to get you involved.

“Inari’s a fox…” Kisoi withered under Kensho’s supremely unimpressed glare. “...right. Fox worried, you want us to figure out why. Charades?”

“Sadly this is a bit too serious for that.” Both of them stared in complete and total shock at the characters being neatly scribed down onto a blank scroll by the deft motions of Inari’s tail. “I’d rather not see you two die again.” The early reveal was almost worth it, for how absolutely broken Kisoi looked.

Kensho, on the other hand, looked so very smug. “Just a fox?”

“Just a fox my-”

“The magistrate is a traitor to the throne.” The words captured their attention instantly, erasing what remnants of good humor remained in the room. “The specifics elude me- honestly, trying to escape me- but I know he’s working with the Cherry Shrine bandits, likely to fund some campaign or futile resistance or something.”

“...the stories about fox-spirits, about… were real? I- I…”

“Not at all-'' and how enjoyable it was, to see her face morph from shock to confusion, to rage and spluttering uncertainty and back to shock, cycling on repeat until Kensho’s raucous laughter was too much to ignore and a pillow got stuffed in her face. “As far as I’m aware, there are absolutely no metaphysical beings, deities, kami, spirits, or magic in this universe whatsoever. Just humans.”

“You’re not human.”

“Very observant, Kisoi-” repeat, shock-confusion-rage-embarrassed spluttering, a significantly larger pillow impacting Kensho’s face this time. “I’m the sole exception. We can talk about this later, when the topic of traitorous magistrates gets trampled by your ego, Kensho’s adorability, and my general perfection.”

“Yeah… notably- what?” Kensho nodded in agreement with her for once- “not that I’m doubting the magical, reality defying fox, but this is the imperial magistrate we’re talking about- they’re not chosen for anything but their loyalty. It’s going to be a bit better hidden than the Cherry Shrine insurgency.”

“We’ve got two options- one, retreat in the most boring and mundane way possible, without doing anything to help anyone. In a cowardly way. Like cowards-”

Kensho sighed. “We get it.”

“Or, we could do the whole Cherry Shrine thing, but on a bit more than a quarter of the entire empire, and if we play it right, then we might even be able to stop a war.” To Kensho, her grin was positively malicious, the last characters drawn down with viscous lines. “The magistrate will have wished he’d known better than to oppose me.”

………

The first thing she did was look at the tax records. Well, not actually- the first and most important thing she did was get some sleep, because rebelling against an overly petty and way too obviously evil rebellion wasn’t the sort of thing people did on little rest. When she woke up, then- then she went to look at the tax records.

In an appropriately sneaky way, of course. How she managed to search through hundreds of misfiled and poorly organized manifests without getting noticed, she’d blame on the guards until the end of time and beyond. Honestly, a fox dragging a tome half its size from the shelves should have drawn at least some attention, but nobody seemed to mind. Or see.

{ISON-II note- APC liaison: Perhaps you have simply overestimated the skills of base biological humans. Without conceptual energies, they’re perception is incredibly limited against your several billion years of practice.}

“I didn’t practice sneaking out books! Or…” well, there was that one universe with almost no magic where the entire plan to eliminate Sija had been to burn down a particular sacred forest without getting noticed, and another one where the subspace freighter guards had been all too trigger happy against ‘biological contamination, elimination protocol activated.’ And that one time there’d been a family stealth war contest with the other Seraphim, where she’d been the lynchpin of her own forces… “I can see what you mean.” Jumping from shadow to shadow with nary a sound, she still couldn't help but be astonished as she sailed mere feet above the librarian's head. "Inattentive fools, the lot of them."

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

{ISON-II note APC liaison: Wry agreement.}

The second thing she did was find the armory. Not the main armory, where the guards marched ever vigilant and the weaponry gleamed in bejeweled sunlight, but a secondary storage beneath the wine-cellars where crate upon crate of crudely forged spears sat waiting for the conscriptions. It was a massive place, yet unguarded by dint of its secrecy- a solemn silence of heavy darkness, the scent of earth and acrid metal thick upon the air.

So vast, halfway full and only building up evermore for some petty conflict or another. It would have been beneath her notice, probably- but the magistrate had dared to strike against someone above her station- she would not let that go unpaid. For blood, blood-

It would be a little funny, too, when they got to the imperial capital with proof of treason. She couldn't wait to see the faces of the Black Mountain Shrine seneschal- he was going to be absolutely apoplectic over the praise she'd ensured was heaped on Kensho's head. There would be absolutely no way to keep them from the shrine, and she'd be able to stick around and assume her time-honored role as a petty annoyance for decades.

The third and final thing she did was keep Kisoi from suicide by perceptive samurai after they stumbled across one another near the gatehouse. Honestly, Kitsune didn't know if it was possible to be less stealthy- it was as if she'd forgotten she'd been trained as a warrior.

She'd had to carefully redirect five guards with little more than a whisper of wind and a wish, and the one who'd been standing right next to the several hundred foot drop in a conveniently concealing shadow… well, he'd been asking for it. Three servants were held back in the hallway to make a gap in the guard rotation- an unfortunate food spill that interfered in their duties- and someone had been lax when refilling the lamps, leading to one spilling flaming oil over the hardwood floor, starting a small fire that caused enough commotion to allow Kisoi to slip unnoticed back into the palace at large.

Exhausting.

………

It had been for a bad drawing. An incredibly poor sketch of the gatehouse- little more than a child's scrabble of vaguely conjoined squares and an indication that there was, in fact, two rooms and a watchpost in the tower. Something that would have been obvious for any visitor.

Sighing, Kitsune snapped the paper between her jaws, ripping it away from Kisoi's prying grasp. "This is atrocious-" and against a fox's sharp claws, the next-best-thing-to-purposely-misleading intelligence was torn to shreds. "Next time, let me do the intelligence gathering. The amount of times I had to save you…" at least she had the decency to look somewhat sheepish.

"I just read books. If Inari was able to figure out a treasonous plot by the magistrate, then she's able to solve it." Her voice dropped to a whisper, faux-horrified, scandalized- "we're accessories, Kisoi."

"Oh. By kami- that actually summarizes our situation so well." Kisoi, for her part, sounded genuinely horrified.

"Got lost in a forest, read my map to get out of there. Unable to survey an enemy fortress- get your strangely competent pet fox to do it for you. About to get killed by a treasonous magistrate? Get roped into this-

"Stop. No…" Kisoi dropped her head into her hands, mumbling incoherently. "My poor ego can't take much more of those. How can I call myself a stuck up noble if I got rescued by my pet fox?

"The capitol will find you the laughingstock of the century. I can already imagine-" she switched to a far more courtly font, characters spiraling into calligraphy of absolute artistic beauty as she distinctly ignored Kisoi's pained groan- "The Legend of The Brat and The Fox."

"I'm not a brat-"

"The Legend of the Incredibly Bratty and 'Noble' Warrior, and the Divine, Blessed, Fox." A pause- "I actually am divine, so that would be a joke in bad taste."

"You're in bad taste."

Kensho just laughed.

......... (Interlude)

Tyoki was a servant. That's all she was, no matter what the pear-shucker down by the river insinuated in that particularly nasally tone of his, or how her sister would wink at her and laugh in that way she'd never quite managed to understand. She scrubs the jade tiling on the walls- that's her entire job. It was the job of her father before her and his mother, an ancestral duty perceived in the honor of their name, all the way back to when the magistrate's architects had first installed the famous jade walls.

Ah, she could go on about the walls for a long, long- did you know the mine where they were quarried from was actually turned into a shrine- Jade Shrine. Some of the best masons in the land- and the sakura trees there were truly beautiful. The third generation cleaner in their family had sent a variety of cherry found on one of his vacations to the capital to Jade Shrine, claiming that it would 'accent the pale stone nicely indeed'…

That was aside from the point. The point was that her day had been going… exceptionally poorly. One of the servers, a seventh generation immigrant from the northern provinces- had foolishly let one of the nobles' dinners slip from their hand and sully the perfect floors- and the jade walls.

She'd barely stepped back to start wiping up the mess when the floor-cleaner stooped down to help the food server, blocking the venerable guard from his patrol, causing the guard to get caught in a whispered shouting match between the server and floor-cleaner on which of them should move. An argument that lasted for nearly thirty seconds, when the guard just decided to just push past- spilling food all over the walls. The jade walls!

What an absolute travesty.

Then, as if her day hadn't already been enough, one of the lamplighters had clearly failed to report a critical issue with the illumination, causing flaming oil to pour from a collapsing lantern, spilling across the floors and splashing against her precious jade walls. With a gasp of rage she lept at the fire, casting her suddy bucket onto the flames in a desperate attempt to quell the fire to quiescence. Needless to say, she'd had a few quite panic-laden minutes as servants rushed to the scene of the fire with as much water as they could bring from the wells in short notice.

Leaving behind a burnt corridor, cracked panels that would have to be replaced, and not to mention food stains, Tyoki considered that she might- might be able to get some rest at last. Upon hearing her summons from the head servant, she realized that her hopes had been significantly more fantastical than she'd previously thought.

Sighing, she turned back to the palace proper with that long-mastered weary yet diligent expression plastered over her face. What a poor twenty second generation servant had to do around these parts for their jade walls- oh the jade walls… she could speak on them for days and days-