I blinked. My back was against one of the supporting pillars in Fort Tomb. Everything around me was wet. Puddles had formed in the craters made by the Angler Knight’s earlier attacks.

“You’re a hard woman to kill,” a smoky voice said. “I love the obstinate ones, it seems.”

I tilted my head. Coughed up at least four cups worth of brackish water—the salt overly bitter on my tongue. My vision focused ahead of me where the Angler Knight stood in the center of the room. A gourd in his hand—and that’s when the memories came back.

Water. Endless blinding bright water dripping in power far beyond that of a viscount. I blinked. Dark water, infinite gloom, a fraction of Abyss realized beyond the Underside. My body tumbling, battered, spun in chaotic shifting flows. I squeezed my eyes until they were narrow as a needle. There, at the center where water rippled in a shifting aquatic wall, was the Angler Knight, at home in the flood he’d dumped into Fort Tomb. A flash of raspberry—Amber. I tried to swim. Thrust out Mother’s Last Smile. I didn’t know if she caught it. The water flung me into a pillar. Pummeled me until all was dark.

He said, “Ah, the memories always come back.”

“Amber,” I said, my voice hoarse.

I received a groan in acknowledgment, and—risking the possibility of further attack—took my eyes off the Angler Knight to seek out Amber. She wasn’t to my right, which turned out to be where Sphinx was; her coat wet and bedraggled with one wing folded over on itself—broken—and puncture marks dotting her side.

“Sphinx,” I said, “what happened to you?”

“She—a soldier—fought with a Baron,” the Angler Knight answered. “A foregone conclusion really that she wasn’t likely to win—.”

“I asked her!”

Sphinx said, “He speaks truth in fragments Nadia. I did not win my bout, but neither was I so horribly trounced. A difference between one who holds the gate—soldier though I am—and one who swims in craven shallows.”

“A loss is a loss,” the Angler Knight said.

I laid a hand against her side. Felt her wince even at my gentle touch, and despite how sodden we both were I could still feel the heat in her blood as it warmed my fingers. A burning sensation that aroused what amounted to nerves in my spirit where—though low and smoldering—the flame of the Inviolate Star still flickered and ate at the ties of fate that would’ve lashed my broken body to the floor. Forbidding me from continuing a fight only my heart could maintain.

“It’s only a loss when we’re dead,” I shot back.

Then I cast my eyes to the left where Amber lay. One hand clutching the shaft of Mother’s Last Smile and the other wrapped around Melissa. Just past them was Lupe who’d been swept into a cell door whose bars she’d latched onto. Everyone was accounted for, and, judging by how their bodies still rose and fell in rhythmic fashion, they were all alive. We survived.

“Why?” I asked, my attention returned to the Angler Knight.

“If you need a moment for the tide to return your wits, I can wait,” he said. “It’d be easier than making guesses as to your one-word question.”

I flipped him off. “Alls below, you talk too much,” I said. “Why didn’t you kill me, or them for that matter?”

He leaned against the overturned catwalk he’d attempted to beat me with earlier. Considered my question while swirling the flood that his gourd contained.

“Caution,” he answered.

“Now where did your wits go?” I asked. “One-word answers are the worst.”

“You said I talked too much, so forgive me for my attempt at short, simple answers,” he said. “When it’s come to killing people, I haven’t had the best luck this week. Everyone’s just so tenacious in this city. I’ll think I’ve done in an opponent only for them to rise back up to continue in pointless struggle. You’re the worst example of that.”

“Alright, but that doesn’t explain why you didn’t finish us off.”

“I wanted to confirm if I already did, but at a safe distance. Didn’t want to take the chance that you were faking and would just pop up ready to skewer my heart.”

I scoffed, “So out of fear I’d kill you because I was pretending to be dead. You decided to wait and give me the chance to rise up and still kill you? They don’t teach math in that cult of yours?”

“They teach enough,” he said, and gestured at the distance between the two of us. “From where I stand your glaive isn’t long enough to reach me, but the Memories of the Diluvian World are very much capable of reaching you.”

He was right—and it pissed me off. Each time we’d come to blows it always came back to this fundamental issue, distance. The first time we fought, I couldn’t get near him because of that damn field-spell. Now when I finally solved that problem, he flipped the board on me revealing that he could finish me off at a distance. While for me the rules were still the same—get in close and stab away.

“What even is that thing anyways?” I asked.

He glanced at the gourd. “Oh, this, a conceptual weapon—like your glaive—though one better suited for me than yours is to you. Mine is made from the tears of Marduk’s entity of the time when all was water and everything drowned in the Abyss. Yours, by the look of it, is derived from Upheaval—a poor fit seeing as your own Court is far from that.”

“What’s my Court have to do with anything?”

“It’s everything,” he said. “The power of a conceptual weapon is derived from the circumstances that made it—often from an entity. In this case, mine being formed by a Marquis puts it only two steps below the power of a Sovereign.”

“Answers or fuck off and kill me,” I groaned. “Hearing you jerk off your boss is just inhumane.”

“Alls below, show some respect you—,” his assistant yelled.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Suffice to say, while the power of a conceptual weapon is set by its creation. None of that matters if the wielder fails to resonate with it appropriately. Thus failing to draw out said power. A matching Court makes for an easy resonance. Even a matching Principle would help.”

Mother’s Last Smile rolled deeper into my grip as my fingers clenched around it—I had neither. All the power of a Sovereign slept within the glaive and I’d teased out barely any of it. My mood sank as air refused to flow into my lungs, the grip of something akin to terror pressing its fingers around them in an enforced stillness. He wasn’t that far away from me, but when I looked up I could only see an Abyss between me and him.

“Now you get it,” he said.

“Yeah, that sounds like the kind of absolutist dreck, Marduk would say,” Amber said.

Hauling Melissa’s shivering—and now very much conscious—body, she climbed up the glaive’s shaft and propped herself up on her knees while leaning against the pillar that held my back up. She slid forward resting her chin on my shoulder. One of her eyes was swollen shut, but the other still burned with a bright resolve.

“You’re a Baron,” he said. “What could you possibly know?”

“I know enough that between here and the infinite mysteries of the Underside things are hardly so simple as matching a Court,” she said. “They’re a metaphor, Temple.”

Lupe called out, “They’re a lesson, Nadia, to something deeper and richer than people like him could ever believe in. I don’t match half the Courts that compose my song, but it’s still strong.”

Melissa laid a hand over mine, tightening my grip on Mother’s Last Smile.

She said, “You were such a bitch about us asking you to not use the spell that, according to you, ‘let you get close to her.’ If you refused to let us put limits on you, why let him?”

“You’re all a horrible influence,” he said. “Spitting on life each time it holds its hand out to you. There’s no honor or award for rushing to fall beneath the shadow of Death.”

He punctuated his words with a stomp of his foot shattering the floor beneath him—was he throwing a tantrum? Most likely he wasn’t, but the thought of it pulled a laugh out of me. I tried to cover my mouth, but it was just too funny. He was stomping and proclaiming how I should just give up and yet there he stood so far away because…he was afraid.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

I said, “You. Trying so hard to convince us to give up, give in, and just submit. Unfortunately, we only do that after establishing consent and a safeword.”

“Comedy won’t kill me,” he growled.

“No, but I can,” I said. “You said it yourself, you’re cruel and a coward. This must be the coward in you—trying so hard to get me to give in, and coming pretty close to be honest, because you know that I can maybe do it.”

Gently, I pushed Amber’s head from my shoulder and shifted my hand out from beneath Melissa’s. Sphinx shuffled over and helped prop me back to my feet—I needed her and the glaive just to stand. Though as I found my footing, both literal and emotional, the star in my heart flared as if struck by the hammer of a lighter. Fwoosh. Chalcedony flame surged across my skin like I was coated in oil.

“Yeah,” I said, “I can maybe do it.”

“Really, where two Barons and a soldier failed, you—a singular soldier—think you’ll make a difference?” he asked.

“You’ll be surprised what a single soldier can do,” I said, as memories shoved logs to the flame in my spirit. “As a single soldier with only three spells, I killed forty Lurkers.”

Sure, I was on the run, scrabbling, and afraid out of my mind the entire time, but I did it.

I said, “As a single soldier I forced an entire team in the first test to expend nearly everything they had just to try and put me down.”

It was one of the worst fights I’d ever taken. The curse was probably in me by then, and Ina’s team did put me down in the end. Though, with help, I got back up and sent them running.

“Alls below, if you look at most of the people in these cells—I, a single soldier—was the one who put them down so these girls could capture them,” I said. “All because they—like you—dared to harm one of the people I love in this world.”

With each memory, my flames grew and I took a step forward. The first was heavy and pained—more of a shuffle really. My second one was lighter, but I still needed to lean on the glaive and Sphinx. It was the third that saw my spine straighten out, my chin lift, and saw my body burn. He may have shoved my hopes into an Abyss, but right now I was going to bring to him a Revelation.

His voice was cold and low, “Those are quite the accomplishments.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You want to know how I did them all?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I slammed the butt of Mother’s Last Smile into the floor. The white metal of its blade blazed with a luminescence that rivaled—no, not rivaled—it outshone my own fire. On this point, a point my Mom had raised me with my entire life, I was in tune with my glaive.

“The trick,” I said, “is to always move forward. No matter the cuts, the bruises, or the beatings. Keep moving forward. Shatter every constraint anyone tries to place upon you. Until you flip the impossible into possible.”

“That’s it then?” he asked. “Forward, always forward? That’s the philosophy of a lunatic. You leave no room for compromise. You inspire—no, you infect—everyone around you with this confidence in something baseless.”

He looked past me, and yelled, “You’ll all die on the altar of her madness. That’s the only place this way of hers leads. For all that I might be a villain, a coward, I wouldn’t risk all of you for the life of just one—one, who I might say is still alive.”

“She’s still alive!” he yelled at me.

Around him, the world was cold and heavy. His field-spell twisting the moisture in the air into the crystalline structure of snowflakes, flash-freezing the puddles, and entombing the walls and debris in ice. All while his own assistant buckled beneath the pressure that he imbued into his every word.

He said, “I see you now. A selfish woman whose obstinance is born from a disregard for everyone who’ll burn to feed your fire. A dragon of a woman.”

“Who’s the one whose power is hurting their ally, right now?” I asked.

The Angler Knight glanced down to his kneeling assistant. Her head lifted and fell in jerky motions as she attempted to even meet his gaze.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Sure you are,” I said, then looked back to him. “That’s the difference between you and I—maybe it’s why you’re so good at the pressure part of Abyss—you live as a knight bearing a burden that crushes you, and still you accept it with your ‘compromises’ despite getting nowhere. Rather than risk it all to gain it all, you risk nothing and lose everything.”

I swept my arms out wide to gesture at myself, my friends, this battlefield even.

Then said, “It’s why you’re trying so hard to make us give up—cause you already did. Not in this fight, but a long time ago you gave the fuck up. That’s what compromising is after all. Now you just crave to have that decision validated for you.”

“That’s a dim view on compromise,” he said.

I shrugged. “It happens when you see five people kill a godtender. After that, is a soldier killing a Baron really that impossible?”

“I suppose it’s not,” he said. “Though their circumstances are different than yours. I must be insane to do the same thing and hope for a different result, but just take your girls and go.”

I yelled back over my shoulder, “If you all want to go, you can, but I’m seeing this to the end.”

Amber yelled, “I’m here if you’ll have me, Temple.”

“For those still under the boot of Lurkers like him,” Lupe yelled, “I’m staying to witness his end!”

Melissa said, “I love you,” and that was all the answer I needed.

“I did try, for you,” I said, to the Angler Knight. “Guess you really are insane.”

Glaive in hand, the two of us burning bright, I took my stance. Sphinx walked within my spirit and shifted its fibers, unfurling her wings out my back. Her only thought being one spoken in unison with my own, forward, always forward.

“Even the best generals know when to retreat,” the Angler Knight said, hefting his conceptual weapon.

“Pity then that I’m a mere soldier,” I said.

We stood there on the precipice of violence. Hyper-aware of the other as the rest of the world muted itself. He stepped forward and forward again. An advance that froze all he passed and brought a pressure down upon anything in his vicinity. He only stopped when the tip of my glaive and his chest just barely kissed the other.

“Start up the shrine,” he said. “We’re leaving when this is done.”

His assistant followed that order—I didn’t watch her, just heard the shuffling of her feet and the dull thud of the shrine against the floor.

“Girls, head to the second floor if you can,” I called out.

“On it,” Melissa yelled back.

Then I heard them shuffle and groan as they moved their broken bodies to a nearby staircase. Metallic thuds of footsteps going upstairs to watch from the gallery.

Ice crept around me, encircling me, but never capable of touching me. Darkness fell around me like I’d been wrapped in the wings of a great bird—he couldn’t blind me, but he could steal away any light that dared to try and enter…well, any light but my own. None of this shook me. I had eyes only for him, and this close I saw him better than ever.

The Angler Knight’s armor was scarred and blemished—a veteran of so many fights. The tips of his fingers drummed—nervously?—against his thigh. While his attention remained on my face—at least as far as I could tell. I wonder if he was reading me the way I was reading him. Did he see how my grip kept being adjusted? My palms, sweaty even as my body burned. Did he see how my chest didn’t move? I was holding my breath like an idiot. Did he notice how my eyes kept flicking to that helm of his? Did he know how much calmer it would’ve made me to know the face of my enemy?

A fight was a conversation—and no good conversation happens when someone is cloaked in anonymity. Though he had said he was a coward—he wore a mask after all. I was a coward when I’d worn mine, and it led to my curse, my pain, and the condition I question I might ever be free of. Angler Knight, I wonder—even now—what did your mask lead you to?

The shrine activated, and that scream played backward of a mother bringing life into the world was the herald with which we’d send the other from it.

I thrust forward—it would only take a slide of my foot and a few inches to pierce his chest. An agony’s worth of time compared to the mercy needed to tip one’s hand and spill a drop of water.

It exploded releasing a flood that ruined my stance, pummeled my chest, and carried me back to my pillar slamming me against it like a student slamming a test on their teacher’s desk—so happy that they were done. When the water receded I fell back to the floor. The flood had pinned me a few feet from it.

“Retreat,” the Angler Knight said.

I rose to my feet. He tilted his hand. Again the flood waters came to smash into me for my hubris. How dark the waters were. How lightless. Then they receded and I fell to the ground.

“Retreat.”

I rose again. He tilted his hand. The flood waters were so cold, and lonely. Memories of a world without touch, without love, and nothing to appreciate the light. Then they receded and I fell to the ground.

“Re—,” he started.

“No,” I said. “That’s not this fight.”

I leaned back on my feet, kneeling, but my head unbowed.

“Why do you want me to kill you so badly?” he asked. “Is living with one defeat that intolerable?”

“Maybe a little,” I said. “Not because losing is bad—that’s just life—but accepting defeat into your heart is a poison. It seeps into the muscles of your body and spirit. Saps away at any strength you could possibly produce.”

“And you need strength that badly?”

“I do. The road I walk is beyond you. Beyond this test. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’m going to try. All I know is that it’ll be impossible if I let someone like you seduce me into the fantasy of defeat,” I said. “That’s what this fight is: compromise or commitment. Either you make me compromise…”

A bitter laugh came from him. “Or you make me commit to taking your life.”

“See, you do get it,” I said. “It should come easy for you. What knight doesn’t want to slay a dragon?”

“Then we continue.”

I rose to my feet, but as I did I gave Sphinx a new instruction.

We’re trying something new this time, I said. Ignite an Inviolate Star.

“You already have one,” she said within my spirit.

Yeah, and you’re going to light a second one. Let’s see what a dualcast of it does.

She was quiet, and for a brief moment, I thought she’d disagree. Force me to find some other method. Yet, strangely and for some ineffable reason, she didn’t. Instead, I felt her cry and ignite the second Inviolate Star without comment.

It burst into its fullness though I didn’t feel it burn within my body like I normally did. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything at all as its flames shot through my spirit toward some distant recess that I had lived my entire life barely aware of. It wasn’t like I could visibly see this place, but if I was to try and describe it it was like the silk farms the Knitcrofts ran. A big barn—though this place was more like a void made of a million colors—and at the center of it suspended by so many threads was a cocoon composed of those same threads.

I felt my awareness glide along those threads and saw memories flash through them. A child me clutching yellowed sheets. Mom and Dad holding my hands as they spun me in a circle. Omensday nights on the temple steps watching as fireworks burst above the town. My mother squeezing my hand as she said, “This is what it means to be a human being, sweetie. Never forget this,” before a pair of hands unseen pulled me away from them—why was I screaming? All of these threads went up in flames. Yet from within the cocoon was a light that burned brighter than any of them—a slumbering silhouette.

Suddenly my sight Divi*** and I beheld two worlds. Through my right eye, I saw the Angler Knight as he tipped his hand. Spilling a droplet of water that, soon as it hit the floor, would release another flood to carry me away. Through my left eye, I saw something else—a cabin, a bed, a form beneath a blanket slumbering.

“Hand it over,” I said.

The thing beneath the blanket asked, “Hand over what?”

“The power that’s mine,” I answered. “That stuff you gave me back at the ERO facility, I want all of it right now.”

The thing beneath the blanket laughed, “Hmm, okay, I suppose I’ve slept long enough.”

Then whatever lurked beneath the blanket threw off the comforter. Its face invisible to me, it walked around my body before slipping into place where I stood—though a bit offset of myself. All that we shared was my left eye which blazed with so much power it was truly aflame in the flickering hue of chalcedony and the bright gray—nearly silver—of a far off horizon.

Both my eyes were focused back inside Fort Tomb right as the droplet of water hit the floor. A flood exploded, surged toward me with a vengeful froth, but I only had eyes on my glaive. Mother’s Last Smile had never been so bright before—you couldn’t even tell its tip was metal—and though I’d canceled the Omensight it seemed my left eye could still make out enough. The power coming from my glaive was such that the tapestry of the world—whose texture I could just barely perceive—warped around the smile of my Sovereign mother.

I turned to the rushing flood, raised my glaive with two left hands—one Real, whose fingers were tipped with claws, and the other Conceptual, with the addition of scales made of alternating metals. I rotated the glaive to a horizontal position and back to vertical as if a key to unlocking a way forward. Then I spoke in a register both Real and Conceptual—a language I’d only heard spoken by the White Womb.

“Crosscut Heaven.”

The wall of water before me was Divi*** into four perfect quadrants. Where once there was a flood, a shard of some old diluvian world where the Abyss ruled, now there was just water that passed me by. In that aquatic corridor, I set my eyes on the Angler Knight, I’m coming for you.

My Conceptual limbs lifted their hands up bidding an army of sliding doors to arise from nothing—they resembled the shoji from the house—trapping the Angler Knight. He slammed his body against the doors, but they wouldn’t budge any more than one could slam your shoulder against the Earth’s curvature. We were in a Realspace that was Divi*** from the rest of Realspace.

“Go,” he hissed.

His assistant tried to argue, “I can’t abandon you—.”

“You can, you will, and damn it, do it for me. My final order.”

She cried, but lifted up the shrine hustling down the Staircase it had created. The sight of her running made my tail swish with glee—I had a tail?

“Focus, Nadia,” Sphinx chastised, from within myself.

I nodded and exhaled a breath that spawned an evanescent cloud of chalcedony fire. There was so much new about this, and I committed to myself that I’d take the time to figure it out after I saw to the Angler Knight.

“Well then, commitment or compromise,” he declared.

Flames licked out the side of my mouth as I bared my fangs. My Conceptual hands swung through the air conducting a number of changes on myself. Divi**** my mass, the effect of friction on my body, and the density of the air between me and him. While with my Real hands I grasped my blazing glaive and bent my knees. A stance fit for a final charge. Mother’s Last Smile aimed for him.

Sphinx’s wings released an Atomic Glory that burned hard and steady like the Old World rockets needed to enter space. Though I was better than a rocket. I was a shooting star, a blazing dragon, the cutting stroke of Divisi** realized if for only this moment. Mine was a crown of stars sharpened into swords, a bright horn curved from my temple, and as I flew forward those Conceptual hands steadied my grip ready to finally put an end to my old foe.

It was a beautiful moment, and he fucked up! The Angler Knight who’d stood with the point of my glaive to his chest, who’d gone blow for blow with me, who’d flipped the board and pushed me into a corner—he gave up! He gave up. His hands unclenched and he didn’t even try to cause another flood. Didn’t even try to put his power against mine. Instead, he compromised.

The sight of it—him at peace and arms still—confused me. In the half-second that I crossed the distance between us, shoji burning away as I passed each one, my glaive’s point tipped low away from his heart. I struck. The blade sliced through his armor. His conweave. His flesh. His organs. Out his back.

We fell. He wasn’t trying to stand strong and resist after all. Tipped back down the Staircase—it was little more than a hole in the ground, if there were literal stairs I didn’t feel them. In our fall it became an ascension up toward an Abyss of infinite watery darkness. The only light being the glittering towers that sat upon the back of a massive luminescent entity.

“Why?” I screamed in the White Womb’s language.

I pulled myself forward up the glaive. My Conceptual hands laid themselves on the Angler Knight’s helm—I’d at least see his face! Like a flower, it bloomed. Metal petals unfurling, blonde hair verging white undulating in the water—the kind of hair that could be dyed in any color, but was so unwilling to be tamed. Perfectly framing a face that was handsome and square with a scar that cut through his lips in a manner some girls would call roguish.

There was no smirk though, but instead an expression of sheer anguish. Eyes that were otherwise patient and broad as an ocean were red and beaded from crying. Those lips which I’d only kissed once—brief and chaste—pulled back into a somber grimace. Did he look like this the entire time we fought?

“You need to aim better, Orchard,” Sinaya said. “Wounds like this are just agony.”