Lisbette looked so small and fragile on the ground, far away from the ferocious child he had come to know The ground around her was cracked and smoking, jagged bits of rock poking up through her hair and undoubtedly into her back. Her little face was slack and pale—almost translucent. Her evening dress had been ripped and torn to shreds. He wasn’t quite sure where the ragged ends were, though, under all that blood.

Oh gods, there was so much blood.

Lysander had seen blood in his time. He’d seen men cleaved in two or riddled with holes, more mush than flesh, but he’d never seen something so wrong as this. Nothing compared to the broken, bleeding rag doll that was the First Daughter of the North. His little niece, his charge, his responsibility, was so still. The fire that raged inside of her couldn’t be seen now; without her decorum and graces and bridled fury, his Betsy was just a child.

He half-stumbled, half-dropped to her side, ignoring the still flopping and twitching tentacle Lycrarose had severed from the hellhound. Skin strong as steel was nothing against the superhuman strength of the Steel Rose.

When his older sister had plucked him from the back of his horse mid-stride and kept running, he’d thought that would be the end of him. She was going to kill him right then and there for blindly following impulse without thinking about his own duty. His one, true duty: to protect the line of the Drakuhl family.

But she’d merely slung him over her shoulder like a bag of grain. There was no time for blame, not for Duchess Drakuhl. There was only time for action. He was a just another piece on the board for her, someone who would be useful in keeping her wayward heir alive until reinforcements could join them.

The sight of his niece speared on the end of a hellhound’s hooks hadn’t managed to hit him before Lycrarose had already swung her sword straight through its flesh. The beast screamed with fury and pain, but Lycra had rolled him off her shoulder and met its surging form with all the chill of a dead star. He could feel the impact in his bones, but Lycrarose didn’t budge.

He was sometimes called a genius when it came to magic, but that was the result of endless studying and his innate curiosity. His older sister was a true genius in the way only geniuses could be—effortlessly natural. She could no more comprehend his inability to copy her mana-strengthening technique than he could peek inside her mind to see how she really worked.

It was just who she was. The might of Drakuhl sat well on her shoulders.

Trusting his safety to his sister, he half-stumbled, half-fell beside the fallen form of his niece. He held a hand over her mouth and pressed his ear to her little chest. She drew no breath, and her pulse was struggling to keep going. It felt like his own lungs were seizing up.

This is my fault, he thought. He despaired.

“Lycra, she’s- she’s really bad– ,” he tried to call with his throat thick with tears.

“Do your best,” she called back.

“Lycra!”

“LYSANDER!” She roared.

He shut up, taken aback.

She looked at him, just a small glance over her shoulder. It hit like a dagger, right to the heart. Her eyes burned like coals.

“Do. Your. Best,” she mouthed, with a look that promised he would die if Bette did.

That was fair. That was more than fair.

Then she was fighting again, moving faster still, dodging teeth and tentacles while scoring lines across the thick black flesh of the monsters. She had just returned from a tour of the barrier, and had run the whole damn way here, but she kept at as if she’d just been resting the whole time.

It only looked effortless because it was Lycrarose doing it, he knew. One wrong move and they’d all end up dead.

She was trusting him to take care of her daughter while she held the line. She could have grabbed Lisbette and dropped him here, but Bette likely wouldn’t survive long enough to make it back to help. She’d done the calculations and she knew where they stood. He wouldn’t survive in close quarters with the hellhounds. She couldn’t keep her daughter from slipping out of her mortal shell.

She was counting on him.

Simun is coming with the rest of my party, he thought. The old man had volunteered to join them despite the danger. He was the little Lady’s dedicated physician, after all, he had said.

She had managed to remain alive. Now he had to keep her that way.

Healing magic was not his forté. Lysander was a war mage by trade, but he’d studied magic with enough fervor that even other fields hadn’t been safe from him. He knew enough to help the field medics on the battlefield.

He swallowed the anxiety and fear, and forced himself to examine his six-year-old niece as though she were one of his guards.

Her arm was the most obvious of injuries. It was broken in several places, at least, if not partially crushed. He didn’t know what had caused that, but it was not a normal wound by any means. Still, it wasn’t life threatening. The skin wasn’t broken too badly, and he could reset bones with his magic.

The more dangerous injury was the bladed tendril stabbed clean through her side. Blood leaked from the torn edges of tissue and skin, but the majority of the damage was being held back by the flesh of the limb. Ironically, if that beast had managed to pull itself free of her skin before Lycrarose had severed it, Lisbette would have bled out before he could do anything.

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The thing that hurt her was now keeping her alive.

There were other wounds, as well, but most were trivial by comparison. He had to deal with the gaping hole in her side first. He had to stop the bleeding.

Easier said than done. Highly-trained and skilled physicians could stitch closed individual blood vessels with their magic, like tiny ligatures, but he couldn’t copy that method. Not only did Lysander not have the precision necessary for the maneuver, he also didn’t have the benefit of a pool of purified, concentrated mana collected over a lifetime. If his own mana scraped against hers and tore her mana system to shreds, it would kill her as surely as bleeding out would.

On the battlefield, they would pack the wound with cotton. He could seal the gaps in her flesh, at least, with his magic.

He drew a sigil in the dirt. Immediately, the water-natured mana in the area began to creep towards him, as if it was curious about what he was doing. He willed his own mana to take shape, and the mana around them followed suit, folding and copying until a film of frost had formed along the edge of the wound.

Fire would have been better, to sear it shut, but Lysander was no fire mage. This would have to do. It would be temporary, anyway, a bandage until the real help arrived.

The ice began to melt, even as he fed it with his own mana.

“No, no, no what are you doing?” He hissed. He couldn’t mess up elementary water magic like this. Not now, not when he needed it so badly.

Then he felt it. His mana, and the mana has was using from the world around him, was being drawn into the stump of the hellhound. It was still eating mana, even detached from the beast!

Shit, was it eating her mana too? If it fucked up the circulation, that would be just as bad as Lysander shredding it himself. Without properly flowing mana, nothing could heal. If it was pulling it right out of her channels, there would be nothing left in the body! The spirit would detach and she’d be just as dead as if her physical body had perished!

Lysander doubled down, sending his magic into the tentacle. Instead of a smooth rime, he willed it into crystal blades, jagged little specks to rip and tear the evil thing to shreds. As long as all the meat was still there, it would plug the wound still. He just had to make it stop.

“Stop eating my niece,” he told it. If the tentacle heard him, it didn’t reply.

“If the gods were ever kind,” he prayed, desperately, to the universe around them, “if they ever loved their creation, look kindly upon it now. Let thy will and mine be one. Let it prevail. If the gods of old can hear pleas in their eternal slumber, hear mine now: save Lisbette! Don’t let this happen! Gods, don’t take her yet.”

Mana was not, as far as he could tell from any experiment, sentient. It didn’t act with its own will, nor did it seem capable of reasoning. Mana had a sort of… mindfulness, though. It had a presence. Maybe it didn’t think, but it had a way of taking someone’s thoughts and amplifying them. At its core, that’s what magic was. Prayers had always been the first spells for that very reason. The act of wishing and believing so hard that reality bent.

“Please,” he whispered, hands pressed to his niece’s bloody abdomen. “Please have mercy.”

There was a shift. A momentary blip, an eddy of confusion, and then mana was being pulled twice as hard. He lost his grip on it, and the shape fell apart in his hands and mind.

No, that is the opposite of what I wanted!

But the direction was different. It wasn’t the lump of monster flesh that was taking in mana. It was something else.

It was Bette.

He watched, incredulous and disbelieving, as the blood dripping from her wounds slowed and then stopped. He couldn’t feel her mana, but gods, he could see it. A haze of light, like a halo, fuzzed around her wounds. The air popped and sizzled, and the skin began to close. Steam hissed from the hellhound’s limb as whatever it was that Bette’s body was doing began to consume it. As far as he could tell, it was even using the flesh to rebuild what had been torn out.

That… wasn’t possible. And yet, there it was.

As ridiculous as flying in the sky, as insurmountable of the pull of gravity, Bette drank in the mana of the world and gave nothing back—she was not a well. She was a sinkhole, devouring everything.

Her eyes fluttered, halfway to opening, then shut again. He watched as she came to life bit by bit. She looked like she was suffering the worst pain imaginable, but she was alive!

“Bette! Lisbette, can you hear me?”

“…uhhhnnnc…,” she groaned. Her leg spasmed and her fingers twitched. She froze up, eyes going wide. Oh, she must be feeling that arm now. She jerked in his grip, and he pushed her down before she could even twitch away.

“Betsy, dear, don’t try to move,” he told her. “You’re… you’re miraculous, but you’re still a fucking mess. Do not move.”

“…rts…”

“I know, baby, I know it hurts a lot.” Now that he was sure his niece was not going to die, Lysander had the presence of mind to examine the battleground and assess the danger.

Lycrarose was an absolute beast, fending off both hellhounds with a savagery she rarely showed, even on the battlefield.

Her rapier was well-constructed manasteel, a kind of metal that conducts mana very well, but it was still a rapier. It was not meant to take heavy blows. Lycrarose should have been relying on her speed to keep her out of the monsters’ way. Instead, because she was defending her daughter and brother, she was using it to deflect blows. She braced it with her arm to keep the metal from bending and snapping back in her face, and the sleeve of her coat was torn to shreds. She wasn’t gravely injured, but she was bleeding freely. The skin of her forearm had seemingly been flayed clean off.

“…sander, AOE,” Bette mumbled beside him.

“What?”

“…mana-et…bla’kt…c’n’t see…”

Mana…blanket? Was that what she was saying? And the rest of it was… ‘can’t see’. The hellhounds, he thought, they can’t see. But what did that have to do with…

Oh.

She didn’t mean to tell him they were blind. She was saying ‘make it so they can’t see’.

A spell with enough area to encompass the fight, and the whole town if he can help it. It would help Lycrarose, who couldn’t do much while pinned down, and it would give him time to move her to a safer spot so he could join his elder sister in battle.

It didn’t have to be particularly thick or even. It didn’t have to be perfect. He just needed to stir the mana in the area, which was already volatile from the Horizon’s magic. It would set off a chain reaction that would make the battlefield look like fog to the hellhounds.

It wasn’t a finisher by any means, but it might be what she needs.

“…del…”

A beastkin was slinking towards them, blood dripping from his hands and face. Lysander reached for his dagger, but then stopped when he saw the child’s eyes. Red-rimmed, watery. A mirror to Bette’s glassy eyes in every way except color.

Just a little kid.

“You make one wrong move towards Her Highness,” Lysander growled, “and it’ll be the last thing you do.”

“My uncle told me to make sure that little girl gets out of here safe,” the child rasped. The claws on the ends of his fingers were extended. “We’re not leaving without her.”

They looked down at Bette, who despite her miraculous recovery, still looked like death, covered in blood and muck.

“It’s my fault she’s here in the first place,” the child said, a piteous whimper hiding somewhere under that gruff tone.

Lysander felt the last knot of suspicion come undone. He flashed the kid a smile.

“I highly doubt that. Lisbette was getting in here whether you helped or not.”

It was just like her. Just like her mother.

Gods-damned geniuses and their hare-brained schemes.

“Get her and yourself to safety. I have to help Her Majesty.”

The kid’s eyes widened into saucers.

“Yes, Bette is really a Princess,” Lysander told him, “and her mother really is Duchess Drakuhl. Now go.”

He turned to face the battle, putting faith in his niece’s stubborn ability to bend people to her will.

The real danger was not what was behind them, but what was ahead.