Stepping into the Black Palace and out of the serenity of the preserved wilderness outside shrouded Ike in a feeling he couldn’t possibly describe. The comparison simply didn’t exist in his vocabulary, his memory. Perhaps the closest word he could use to describe the feeling was comfort, but even that would be a lie. Comfort for the muckraker was being too tired for the body to recognize bugs crawling on the skin, splinters sticking through the sheets, or the ache of sore muscles and rumbling stomach.

The walls were painted in the softest earth tones without a stroke of the brush to be seen, with dark paneling running along the bottom. The doorway led into a foyer with checkered stone tile flooring, two wide staircases leading to a second floor with pale burgundy carpeted steps.

A blend of aromatic spices and someone’s song played on the air. This place was older than even the monastery, but nothing felt stale, or corrupt. Stepping inside felt like coming home.

The realization was hollow for Ike, who had never known home. Really the only familiarity in the entire place was also the only stain, a flurry of muddy footprints leading deeper into the mansion between the staircases. Ike almost started drifting that way until a hand grabbed above his elbow and reminded him who he was here for.

“Let’s hurry. I have no intention of meeting the rabble today, the room is this way,” Nerinai said.

She let go suddenly and started leading him to the right, towards a pair of double doors and a pitch black one on the side.

Heading up to the room immediately made sense. Ike was tired, and maybe they’d have a chance to talk about what came next. Most of all Ike was curious about how she intended to deal with other people, people who weren’t her immediate lessers.

Though Nerinai pushed her way through the door on the right and Ike was just behind her, his pea brain mind got distracted by a noise. The rise and fall of unfamiliar voices coming through a crack in those double doors. Poor, stupid Ike, who was already breaking the vow he’d just made, went to see who it was. At least the doors opened easily enough without a creak to give him away.

Inside- past the hot air slapping Ike’s face- four figures crouched around a lit fireplace at the other end of the room. The fire was the only light, and a thick blanket covered the one large window. A bunch of couches and comfortable recliners crouched all over the room at odd angles on colorful rugs. They cast deeper shadows than they should have.

So far they hadn’t noticed him, so Ike pressed his luck a little and moved himself further into the room, just behind a short table with a lamp on top. Being closer he realized the figures weren’t just sitting there to warm themselves. The rug was rolled back, and on the wooden floor that it covered was a large black circle in red paint. The shamans were drawing a ward that Ike couldn’t fully recognize.

There was something that looked like a stop rune, and maybe something with blight? The one book he’d ever read on the subject was still a fleeting memory. He was practically half over the table trying to make something out when a crash broke the subtle silence of the room.

What followed was a short gasp and curse from the other side of the room, and Ike fumbling around on the ground with a shattered lamp and fallen table.

“Shit. Sorry!” He forced a smile at the rising figures to try and make up. “Just, tripped. You know.”

He put his head down and furiously shoveled ceramic pieces into a pile, his shovel sticking into his back at an odd angle, adrenaline pumping in his veins sending every nerve on a caged up frenzy.

Some great pair of hands clamped onto Ikes shoulders. He was vaguely aware of his eyelids widening before those hands jerked him up and carried him across the room to a wall sufficient enough to press his body up against. Ike was turned around and shoved back again, temporarily staring out into nothing but black until the light from a newly lit lantern nearly blinded him.

Those big hands belonged to a terrifying woman very too close to Ike’s face. His mouth formed an o as he looked from her to the other four shamans. Thankfully she was the only one who looked capable of pulling him into two pieces, but none of the others were very welcoming or friendly in their expressions. ON the left was a darker woman holding up the lantern who looked simply perturbed, then on the right was a pair. One with blonde hair shaved on the sides and the scolding look of a pissed nun, and the other one fanatically in front of her like a rabid street cat, holding up a crooked dagger at Ike’s throat.

All Ike could manage, besides looking between the four of them, was “Uh, hm.” They did not seem enthused.

“Didn’t we tell you dirty bastards to stay out of this room?”

Just as Ike was going to try and answer the knife lady, the one holding him up pushed him back and barked another question at him. “Who are you? Start talking or I swear-”

“Rosa! Enough! Look at his chest,” said the one with the blond hair and suitingly snobby voice. Ike figured she reminded him a lot of the monks at the Black Monastery.

Rosa let him go and backed away. Ike stood there like a dumb animal while the others either studied or grabbed at the metal piece on his chest. He was content to let them do so. In fact his mind was frankly numb in the presence of these odd people who could certainly kill him with less than a flick of their wrists, dressed in their thick black wool coats.

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He pushed himself against the wall, half listening to their quiet conversation among themselves. Nerinai stepped through the room, and pissing her off was a much more frightening thought than the four shamans. One of them said something to the other, and before Ike could figure out what the knife was pressed up against his throat.

“Back off!” Ike never thought he would be happy to hear her shout.

The knife came away from his neck in an instant and the shamans spread out. They completely forgot about Ike and started kneeling down to Nerinai, who Ike watched go from madder than the fire in the hearth to indignation and stuck to her place by the door.

She looked at Ike and he shrugged.

“What did you do? Didn’t we already have this conversation, guardian?” The last word enunciated with a shudder of anger.

Ike shuffled his feet. He looked from her to the shattered lamp, then to the shamans still silently kneeling, then back to the door. “I don’t- the door was open!”

“So?”

“So, I just, you know-”

“Complete cooperation.”

“Yes, but-”

“No buts, this is not the time nor place for buts, that is a privilege which you have worn dangerously thin with your own brazen stupidity and ignorance-”

“My lady,” ventured one of the shamans. The righteous one. “Did you mention this one as your guardian? Please, for you both, I am deeply sorry at the way my people acted.”

“Next time, pay closer attention to the people that you so quickly rush to stab.” The Raveness picked her way through the crowd. She grabbed the hem of his robe and yanked his head down so she could whisper into his ear. He flinched away, so she pulled him even closer. Close enough that her cheek brushed against his, and the words were deceptively warm and breathed against his ear.

“Do you think I want to be in a room with these sycophants, let alone find my guardian at their whim? These people are miserably attentive. You idiot. Pretend I’ve just told you something incredibly important and keep your mouth shut for the rest of your foreseeable life around these women or by the will of the Carrion Cross I will have that little woman's knife snip out the chords that allow you to speak at all. Do you understand?”

Ike’s entire chest was burning with an indefinable feeling. Not to mention his mind, which was utterly blank.

She whispered somehow even more harshly, with force, “Answer!”

“Mhm.”

“Idiot.”

She shoved the indomitably stupid guardian back and turned to face her so-called sycophants. Ike was still reeling over their little conversation. So little of what she did made sense to him, but why try to push these people away? Free help wasn’t something to scoff at. Ike once heard a man say “You don’t turn away a sword in your defense, no matter who’s blood is on it,” and figured that applied here pretty well. Though, hopefully, these people weren’t carrying around the blood of others.

The four of them rose to their feet by the door. Nerinai was clearly itching to go and would have had they not been blocking the door. The leader of the group stepped forward, as Ike figured from the way she kept approaching Nerinai.

“My lady, if you would, the Crows have come here simply to offer assistance. We’d heard… rumors, that you wouldn't be attended by a guardian.” She looked back to her comrades. “We simply couldn’t stand by and let you do such a thing without at least offering to help.”

“You’ve offered. You are unnecessary. If you wouldn’t mind, Kassandra of Telin, today has been particularly long. My guardian and I ought to rest.”

Kassandra nodded her head furiously, and Ike took the moment to whisper a question to Nerinai.

“You know her?”

“Obviously.”

“How?”

“She’s a shaman, and Follower of the Carrion Cross. I’ve personally attended the ritual for almost each and every one.”

The two of them spoke quietly enough that the others wouldn’t hear. Looking like they were talking about something critical was bonus points. “The important ones, anyways,” she finished.

That explained her constant disappearance all the time. Maybe. Ike couldn’t be sure and wasn’t about to push his already thin luck by asking another question.

So far the room was still locked in its friendly stalemate. Leave it to the Raveness to turn a pledge of support into an argument. The paint was still wet on the wards, which Nerinai walked over to study. Ike followed a little drearily, still trying to make out a single pattern in the whole configuration.

“Explain,” she said to nobody in particular.

Before anyone else, the quiet and awfully stealthy shaman sidled up beside Nerinai. When she spoke, it came out as barely a whisper, and so quick that Ike missed at least half of what she said to the crackle of the fireplace.

“The symbols were painted with First accuracy, the premier of the highest arts and symbology any of us could manage as a unit. The ink is madder root mixed with black ichor, painted with the hand of the shaman. Twelve patterns. Fifteen symbols to each, mixing the wards against demons and illness, and corruption and cut spire pollution. Designed by me and my sisters to protect the building, with our own blood, spread out through the building we’ve done two and plan on a dozen more as per the acceptance of your grace-”

“Yes, fine.” Nerinai looked at the rest of the shamans, her face haunted by the shadows that made her exhaustion look so much worse than usual. “Do whatever it is you think can be helpful but keep out of my way. That is non negotiable, and goes for every single one of you. Though I doubt you’ll really listen to a word of advice, I suggest leaving immediately. There is no guarantee for your lives.”

With that macabre declaration, she marched out of the room with Ike partially in tow. Just at the doors, he paused inside of them and flashed an apologetic smile at the women before shutting the door behind himself.

Nerinai made her way to the door they were originally supposed to walk through and held it open. “Are you done?”

“Yeah, sorry.” The tone of her voice didn’t have any of the anger she had just minutes ago.

Every time Ike made a mistake he expected her to lash out at him. Make his blood boil, turn him to a frog, slit his throat, even passively tell him to leave and never return. Instead she suffered all his idiocy and that hurt more than a punishment, because Ike knew he could do better and simply hadn’t. For so long it had been the easy path, and there was nobody really worth changing for.