In the middle of the night, beneath gentle drizzles, Marinor Mycroft was brought from her quarters to the Grand Master’s Archivum to hear a dead woman speak.

The nightmare I had was warmer than this life, she thought on her way through the dark, deserted corridors, all a blur to her still-weary eyes. She dreamt the world at its end, though in the usual manner of dreams the details departed her soon after waking, leaving behind only images and sensations. In the dream she knew she would soon die, the skies bleeding deep black, suddenly benighted, stars unlike those bequeathed to them by heaven. How she knew the end was to come, Marinor could not tell, but in dreams and in haunting the knowing was sufficient. Though it had been dreadful, she was not alone in that nightmare. Mannaig was with her, and Emeri, Cyrilda, Patricia…

Now, surrounded by fellow Blossoms who had survived by mere chance, she was alone. All of us are alone now. It was a farce, pretending the Red Rose still lived, but Marinor had no choice but to play along, having given her life for her Rose, relinquishing her family and home for something greater.

“Are we all that remains?” She asked, counting the Blossoms by her side. There were not enough of them in the Grand Master’s office for the room to be crowded. Less than twenty, though she could not bear to count in full, as though an exact number would make all the losses more real.

“In our Tower, yes,” said Princess Sayuri. “A handful remain in the Academy, trying to accommodate for all the suddenly-vacant seats. Most of the staff, however, was comprised of outsiders, so things didn’t go to hell like they did here.”

“We have managed to contact most of our embassies and outposts abroad,” Aissa showed a list of names. “As would be expected by probability alone, two to three Blossoms have survived in most of our major territories, with some exceptions. Tawarasato is completely unguarded by our Rose, seeing as Princess Sayuri is safe here. But the Blossoms stationed there are all gone now. And Kesver had the good fortune of having six Blossoms survive, quite remarkable for a small territory.”

Marinor did not see how anything could be considered good fortune now, but kept her words to herself. She noticed, then, that someone appeared to be missing.

“Shouldn’t Dorthea be here?” She asked. The souring faces around her indicated that something was amiss.

“It was Dorthea that located this,” said Sieglinde, pointing to the gleaming green gemstone upon the Grand Master’s desk. “Mostly undamaged, though it was dropped fairly roughly when… When Grand Master Yazhu died and let go of it.”

“Let’s not waste time skirting around the truth,” said Elanor. “Dorthea Johansen tried to throw herself off a window after finding Yazhu’s words crystallized here, interrupted by her untimely death. Faustyna just barely stopped her, and when prevented from ending her life, Dorthea began to-”

“To say some very concerning things,” said Faustyna. “Unseemly things that no Blossom should say.”

“Tell me,” Marinor demanded. “There is no point in hiding horrible truths now.”

“Beloved Dorthea proposed we make a bonfire of Cartasinde and die together in the flames,” Elanor shrugged. “Unproductive and excessive, naturally. But grief drives people to madness, so it’s regrettably not entirely unexpected.”

“She is locked in her quarters for her safety,” said Sieglinde, “and the safety of others as well. Typically, if a Blossom were to sincerely propose attacking the Empire’s capital for no reason but to kill millions of innocents before we perish, she would be put to trial and likely executed, but-”

“But we don’t have our courts anymore,” Elanor remarked. “The High Arbitratrix is dead, and so are all her underlings. Given the current circumstances, none of us were particularly willing to put down one of our kind.”

“Dorthea Johansen has served our Rose for ten years,” Henriette Valchenza finally spoke, more softly than Marinor expected. “Grand Master Yazhu was her close friend, and everyone else she knew has also died. Despair leads us all to moments of weakness and leads us to turn our backs to our better selves. But we can always find ourselves again. So let us give Dorthea the chance.”

“And if she cannot find her way?” Aissa asked, to no response.

Marinor stepped towards the Grand Master’s desk. Documents were placed neatly over its surface, though that was more likely to be the doing of Henriette than Yazhu’s. The dying had more urgent concerns than tidiness, Marinor expected. It was the gem, however, that was of importance here. An Orb of Proxy, it was a recently developed sort of magecraft, idealized by Academy researchers, utilizing the principles of Farspeech, but rather than requiring complex runic arrays to connect speakers between vast distances, the gemstone acted as a replacement for a listener, imprinting upon it the speaker’s voice for later consultation. Were it not for the obscenely prohibitive cost of all the materials required, it might actually have practical use, but, for now, it was mainly a curiosity.

A curiosity that better served a dying woman than bringing quill to paper would have. Henriette placed a delicate finger upon the Orb of Proxy, and, once all present assented, a spiral gesture intensified the light and called forth Yazhu’s voice. Though the woman was completely gone, this last ghost remained.

“I’ve little time, and will be brief. If a Blossom remains after this, I hope this message is found. Elsewise, all is lost. I don’t know if I’ll feel it, when it comes. I’ve unlocked my archives and have left my keys on my desk, next to a journal I kept. Should you be an outsider, I urge you not to pursue the secrets there, but know you won’t heed my words. If a Blossom, study my journal first, then the archives. The documents sitting upon the reading table closest to the door are ones I’ve selected to be of importance. I also scrawled a list of possible successors. Given the circumstances, you might… You might want to disregard my opinions. If a single Blossom remained to find this message, that’ll be enough. That’s all that shall matter. I pray you’ll have secured the Lumenvasculum; if you haven’t done that already, do so. Just… There’s no time,” her voice grew heavy with despair. “No time. No time to explain everything. So many secrets and so many centuries of history… Don’t start over. You can’t start over. The Tower is too important. It must not fall. Beyond the Veil,” her words came out with urgency, too urgent for Marinor to make any sense of them. “Yes, look there, and the Wound, and I wonder if you can’t get help from… Ah, no, no… I’m sorry, I… I don’t know how to possibly tell you everything I have to. The crying… I hear it, I hear all the voices, less than they were before. Please, please, someone has to survive… Please, Dorthea, please live… You have to live. After what you did to me, you of all people deserve to live in this doomed world. Heh, if it were only you, you alone of the Blossoms, living to watch everything die… I wouldn’t mind, no, you and that traitor Sylesia, Lenne, your whole coven of whores. If I’d known-”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

There was a lingering, painful silence after that. Then, the gem’s lights faded, and its surface turned dim and cold. Marinor wondered who would have the courage to break this silence, but she shouldn’t have been surprised that after some instants, Elanor offered her words:

“Yazhu would save her last breath for the sake of cursing someone, yes,” she said. “Lucky her, I suppose.”

“Better than she deserved,” silver-haired Milsanne Hyryssa spat out her words with scorn. Even now she still had the insufferable habit of always having a hand resting on her sword’s pommel, an obsidian rose that Marinor always found tasteless. “Still, she had the grace to leave behind some documents and her journal.”

“Not all,” said Henriette. “I inspected everything. In the archive you’ll find a brazier with distinctly recent ashes, and some yearly ledges are missing.”

“Unbelievable,” said Marinor. Tasked with the Treasury, she would have certainly appreciated comparing the forged ledgers found in her office with those the former Grand Master had chosen to replace. “Why could she have possibly done that? To preserve her reputation? Did she think there was a chance she might survive? Wait, no, she would have disposed of them immediately if she considered it so important to destroy them.”

“I’m sure our gracious Grand Master would have wanted the survivors to focus on more important things than in continuing an investigation into all those missing funds,” Milsanne’s tone remained venomous. “Pay no mind to where six hundred million ryals were diverted to, that is of no consequence. She would have burned that evidence before leaving her message to us, and that… That is so petty it beggars belief. We wouldn’t have the means to continue the investigation, and yet she felt it so important to maintain her lies…”

“Well, she was a piece of work,” said Elanor. “I did not vote for her, I’d like that to be recorded for posterity. Still, I suppose I understand why poor Dorthea tried to make herself fly. Your whole coven of whores, Yazhu said… They were only doing their job, and Yazhu still blames them for uncovering her crimes? Very audacious of her.”

“They are all dead, save for Dorthea herself,” Sieglinde pointed out. “I did not know Miss Johansen personally, and this whole affair happened mainly while I was absent… I assume she was close to the Grand Master?”

“You could say that,” Henriette said. “She was Yazhu’s protégée, or, rather, one of them. Curious, I would not have expected the Grand Master to have singled her out like that, as Dorthea was only one of several Blossoms to make their accusations public. Mayhaps they had history together, for Johansen to be so affected. Either way, the girl’s homicidal tendencies were… Unexpected, to put it lightly. Did she wrestle with demons unknown, or was it merely a matter of thinking that, as our Order is surely dead and the world doomed, we might as well go out in a spiral of death and destruction? I shall have to question her during a later occasion.”

I wonder how incisive said questioning shall be, Marinor thought but had the good sense to keep her silence. Still, one woman’s madness was hardly their greatest priority for the time being, so keeping Johansen restrained - and preferably sedated - was as much of a solution as they were likely to find now.

“What of her successors?” Marinor asked. “Who in that list still lives?”

“Almost no one,” said Aissa. “Were it not for Sieglinde’s name being in this selection, I would have assumed that this is a list of cronies who helped her siphon our funds, but further questioning of those of us that remain showed that every single Blossom suggested for the position of interim Grand Master was, indeed, a honorable and commendable candidate. Too bad they’re almost all dead.”

“Nevertheless we will ignore her suggestions,” said Sieglinde. “She did not have our Rose’s best interests at heart, and a woman who was about to be ousted of her position does not rightfully have the authority to appoint an emergency substitute.”

“You’ve no desire to lead?” Marinor asked.

“If I put my name forward and were elected by my peers, I would lead our Rose,” she responded. “That is our way. But, right now, we do not need a Grand Master. Diminished and scattered as we are, I believe this would accumulate an excess of authority and power in a single person. Even the best intentions would reshape our Order in undesirable ways. Without a full Council and without a proper chain of command, that position would rule like a despot, unquestioned.”

“Very admirable,” said Henriette. “Still, since you are not the Grand Master, you cannot declare that we shall have no Grand Master. This we too shall put to a vote.”

“Of course, let’s hold a vote to see if we should hold a vote. Very tidy,” Elanor said. “It’s plain to see, to me, that we should simply continue to do what we have done thus far, picking up pieces as best as we can. Go wherever our skills are demanded. Because the truth is that we don’t have the numbers to even begin discussing positions and offices beyond the barest minimum. We don’t need a full Council and a Grand Master, we need to get things done, and all of us have to know what she needs to do. When the Founders were facing darkness, there was no one there to tell them what duties needed doing, no one to tell them they each needed a badge of office before doing what needed to be done.”

“Miss Hilssgar can speak sense, after all,” said Faustyna, her distaste unconcealed, “when she is not uttering improprieties. I can tend to the eyrie. Let me choose two or three girls who have the aptitude for riding pegasi and we can expedite the retrieval of artifacts from deserted Rectories and outposts.”

“If you’ll give me a day,” Marinor approached her, feeling somewhat intoxicated by her drive to act rather than keep on ruminating on past follies, “I can provide you with a list of particularly important items to retrieve. And I could prepare writs to forgive certain debts in exchange for aid, with everyone’s agreement.”

“Yes, that seems promising,” said Henriette. “Though we may not like it, we might have to hasten our recruiting process, and I do believe that several of our partners might agree that relinquishing their debts for the small price of allowing us to select promising aspirants amidst the populace.”

That was just what Marinor had in mind, which brought a smile to her lips. Cooperation between the Red Rose and the nations brought into its fold was a thornier subject than it appeared on the surface, and the Rose had learned over the ages that it was best to maintain a cordial and light-handed approach lest they gave rise to waves of mass hysteria as common folk began to fear that the Blossoms were coming to claim their children. In less enlightened parts of the world, even in supposedly civilized countries, fools still whispered of distant, fabled times when the Blossoms would steal away children to indoctrinate as their own. They say the same of the fae, but have never seen that reclusive folk. Opportunists always ignite these easily-molded minds into furors, all to undermine our authority and claim it for their own. It could be harder to convince people that the Blossoms only wanted to save them than to actually help them.

We have always had to force the world to be better. That was their duty and privilege, even now. Marinor had promised never to forget that, when alongside Emeri she first saw the walls of Cartasinde in the horizon, when they pledged to return home to Loclain, that land always so immersed in troubles, always in need of saviors, always safeguarded by the Red Rose from demons and the fools who tried to bind them. Emeri had said something quite beautiful, at the time, a message Marinor would have wished to preserve for posterity…

Odd, how she struggled to remember it now, how distant it suddenly was. She thought of Emeri by her side in their carriage, thought of her eyes, but the color slipped her mind. Was she smiling, then? Marinor was quite certain she was, but that smile existed now only as memory. Though there were still matters to attend to, she departed the office in a hurry, when Henriette meant to listen to Yazhu’s words again. She could not think of her responsibilities right now, only the voices she could no longer hear, the memories of which she desperately clung to, though by now they were already fading.