He dreamt that he was back in Darkfall, at the mercy of the Empress. His hands were chained and held high, leaving him to dangle. A thousand fangs surrounded the throne room in a dark sapphire swarm. They were blue shadows watching him in dark judgement and their eyes were made of blazing cyan balls of flame. The Empress stood from her stone throne and looked down upon him in condemnation. He heard himself pleading and begging for mercy. He felt elongated tiger claws of steel slashing against his back, and he wept streams of endless tears.
“Stop crying,” he heard the ghost in the lion helm order from behind. “Tigers do not cry.” He slashed and slashed and slashed until Hideo felt his skinless, fleshless, and exposed spine catch the chill in the wind.
When he thought he had awoken, he saw shadow men standing around his bed in a dark and colourless room. Their faceless heads tilted in unison and the one closest to his bedside grabbed him by the throat. He heard an endless white noise as the shadow man’s face slowly morphed into Hiroko’s. She wept tears of blood as her grip tightened around his windpipe.
He awakened in the same bed within the same colourless bedchamber, his vision blurred. The shadow men were no longer there. Instead of Hiroko’s bloody face, he saw a young woman with her hair hidden under a dark mauve hood. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. She bolted from her chair and ran out of the door. “By the spirits!” he could faintly hear her exclaim. Her panicked voice was muffled in his ears. “Someone! Find Evalina!” Everything turned dark again.
He then found himself in King Sigismund’s council chamber. All the Royalists were slumped over the table, their blood joining and mixing over the canvas and taking the shape of a red ram’s head. Countess Woodard’s snow-white coiffed hair was undone and sprawled over the blood. Julian Reeve still had a smirk on his face despite his throat having been ripped apart. King Sigismund had dozens of daggers pierced into his back, crimson lines trickling down the collar of his golden doublet. His crown had been bolted into his head with iron nails. Behind the slain King, he saw the man in the raptor skull mask. The hooded monster had Rosamund Greenfire in front of him, his clawed hand caressing her neck. The Princess's eyes were pleading, and tears were running down her cheeks.
“Don’t do this,” Hideo could hear himself helplessly beg.
“The Empress sent a scared little kitten,” was the Hooded Raptor’s response.
He awoke again before he could see what would unfold and thanked the spirits for sparing him the sight of it. He turned his head to see the same young priestess sitting on a small wooden chair by his bedside, fast asleep. He grabbed her arm. She jolted and gasped. Words were a battle. “The.. Vis…”
She stood and reached into the bedside desk without saying anything to him. His body felt weak, and the slightest movement was a struggle. “The Viscount…” he finally finished. “Is he…” he felt a mild and sharp stinging pain in the side of his arm. “Please…” he pleaded. “The Viscount…” She shushed him soothingly and whispered a chant. Soon Hideo fell into another bottomless slumber.
He was somewhere familiar, laying in the soft snow. Beside him was a glistening, flowing lake of pure sapphire water that he remembered fondly. He stood and slowly walked into the lake, submerging himself in the comforting ooze of the thick liquid. Just as he began to settle, he was pulled under by something.
When he reemerged, he was at the end of a dinner table, staring into a dry bowl of oats. He sat there alone listening to the muffled bashes and shouts from behind the bedroom door. Glass smashed as the door flung open, freeing the shrieks and cries. Hideo’s face was slammed into the bowl, which was now filled with blood. “I’ll teach you to run away,” he heard a familiar voice growl from above him. The blood started to absorb his entire being.
The grip against his head loosened and when he gasped for air, he found himself in a throne room draped over the bodies of fallen guardsmen. Some were in plated armour and kabutos, others in golden galeas and crimson armour. When he crawled out of the bloody puddle, he noticed that there were dozens of corpses sprawled everywhere. He approached one of the dead men. The guard’s face had been burnt, and a spear was sticking out of his belly. The blade had cut through the armour with one supernatural thrust. No human strength could have been capable of such a thing. The guard’s eyes opened, and he grabbed Hideo tightly with fire in his eyes. “Titan Tiger,” he said in unparalleled fear. Hideo felt his hands begin to vibrate and burn, yet he could not control them. Fierce blue sparks started flailing around up to his forearms. The lighting tore into his skin and he could hear a hideous crackling. He smelt his own flesh as the wild sparks consumed him. He screamed and begged for it to stop, but the guard had already died from his wound and there was no one left alive to hear him.
Hideo awoke again. The young priestess was reading a leather-bound book. When she noticed that he had reawakened, she promptly left her chair and reached into the desk again. He knew what she was retrieving. Another of those needles that would send him back into a nightmarish hell. Hideo panicked. He snapped his arm forward and grabbed her wrist tightly with the grip of a python. “Not. Another. One.” Each word was as hard as stone and was said through clenched teeth. The young priestess gaped at him and wrested her wrist away. She dashed from the bedchamber, leaving Hideo alone in the silence. He tried to push himself up. He felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. He noticed the intricate stitches laced around the wound where the steel raptor claw had dug into his upper arm. For some foolish reason, he decided to touch it. He immediately regretted the decision and hissed at the acidic sting.
Evalina Doucet stormed into the bedchamber. Her mauve hood was not donned, allowing her stringy chestnut hair to flow freely. Her violet eyes were sharp and had a focused fury upon them. “Gabriella spent days and nights by your bedside watching over you and in repayment you decided to frighten the daylights out of her.” She tossed a towel at him. “Wipe the sweat off your face.” She stormed out of the bedchamber.
Hideo did as he was bid and suddenly felt immensely guilty. He lifted his upper body and grunted during the whole movement. He was bruised and beaten. After a few long hours, Evalina finally returned. The Priestess held a tray in her hands. She lightly placed it on Hideo’s lap. There was hard bread, cheese and an assortment of lettuce, tomato, and various other cold vegetables. “How long have I been dead to the world?” he asked, too ashamed to look into Evalina’s violet eyes.
“Two nights,” she answered. “This is the third morning.” Without asking, she lifted his head up and pressed the palm of her hand against his forehead. Her skin felt warm. “You no longer have a fever,” she said. “I don’t think you have quite comprehended how lucky you are.”
Hideo stared at the untouched tray of food in indifference. “How did I get here?”
“That hooded archer whom you are apparently acquainted with brought you here,” she said with a peeved voice. “She was incredibly rude to my sisters and even threatened one of them with her life when she tried to unmask you. It was not for any nefarious reasons, I might add. We wanted to see the state your face was in. You had been poisoned.”
“I know,” Hideo said, feeling great shame. “Raptor venom.”
“Velociraptor venom,” she curtly corrected him. She patted down and straightened the side of the bed and sat at its edge. “How you ended up with that in your system in a northern city is a mystery to me. Your friend also refuses to leave. Do you know the amount of danger you keep putting myself and my sisters in?”
“If the City Watch ever finds out, tell them I threatened you and that you had no choice.”
The Priestess frowned, and her violet eyes flickered. “How noble of you,” she said scornfully. “What about the people who did this to you?”
Hideo murmured something inaudible in reluctance.
“What was that?” she snapped.
“It was one man,” Hideo admitted aloud. “One man did this to me. He does not know about this place. Amaya is smart enough to not allow herself to be followed.”
That seemed to placate and calm the Priestess somewhat. She sighed and placed a hand on his leg. “I didn’t think I could help you. I thought the venom had been inside you for too long.” Her voice was trembling slightly. “Maybe Pax does favour you for some benign reason.”
Hideo gulped and cleared his throat, which felt dry and hoarse from days of misuse. “What happened to Viscount Reynard Woodard?” he finally brought himself to ask.
Evalina remained silent for a while, avoiding his gaze until he finally prompted her. “Evalina, is the Viscount alive?” he persisted.
She met his eyes with a gloomy look crossing over her like a dark winter night. “The Viscount’s body was discovered outside the lib-”
“Dammit!” Hideo upended the tray in a fury and lettuce went flying across the bedchamber. As his blood cooled, he felt the unpleasant silence that he had unleashed into the room, an uncomfortable aura that he and the Priestess had to wallow in.
Evalina was morose, her voice icy and tight. “I see that you do not have an appetite,” she said stiffly. She gathered the tray and slapped the various scattered vegetables on top of it. “I shall return when you have regained some composure.”
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The Priestess was stopped from leaving as Hideo lightly grabbed her long, dangling purple sleeve. “No, Evalina, I’m sorry,” he apologised desperately. “Please, don’t leave me alone here.”
Her icy violet eyes seemed to melt, and her tight and withdrawn demeanour loosened. She let out a sigh and knelt beside the creaking bed he had spent multiple nights in. She lightly placed a hand around the stitches in his arm, studying them intently. Hideo winced. Even the faintest touch sent a zap of pain down his arm. “Do your best not to touch them,” she spoke more warmly than before. “The wound will become very itchy.”
He nodded sullenly.
“If you do not wish to be alone, you can see your archer friend upstairs,” she offered. “If you would convince her that you’re recovering gracefully and that she can leave, then I would consider your debt repaid.”
Hideo was able to stand. Just. The process took so long that Evalina lost her patience and brought his arm around her shoulder. She kept him stable as he took delicate steps out of the bedchamber and up the small stone stairway. “Your muscles haven’t been used for some time,” she said reassuringly to him as they ascended. “However, you should be able to walk and move as normal sooner rather than later.”
When they entered the Pax chapel’s large and looming hall, they found Amaya arguing with the younger priestess Hideo had so cruelly scared away. The Archer’s zaffre hood was donned over her head. “… How do I know that he is even still here and that you haven’t handed him over to the City Watch?” Amaya’s soothing voice and smile were juxtaposed with venomous undertones.
“Pull your hood down, Amaya,” Hideo sternly ordered, as Evalina helped him step past the giant bronze Pax statue. The looming bronze deity appeared to watch over them in anger. With Evalina’s support, he was able to limp down the rows of old wooden benches and beside the pillar where the Archer was causing yet another ruckus. “These are good people here,” he assured her. “You can trust them.”
Amaya did as she was bid and pulled her hood back, shaking her dark shaggy hair about as it was freed from its shrouded confines. The morning sunlight that broke through the windows unveiled her scarred face in all its ghastly detail. Deep sporadic scratch marks glowed a gaudy red under the illumination and when she smiled, the scars scrunched together, displaying both a beautiful and terrifying gaze. “Greetings, my fellow fang,” she said with her usual feigned warmth. “Did you enjoy your little nap?” The Blue Archer tilted her head at Gabriella. “I might have been a tad paranoid. I apologise.”
Gabriella’s face began to glow, but it swiftly died away when Amaya then asked, “Well, what are you waiting for? A treat?” The scarred Archer scowled. “Piss off and leave us in peace.”
The young priestess nodded timidly and took her leave. As she passed him and Evalina, Hideo called out. “Thank you for taking care of me whilst I was indisposed.” He turned to face Gabriella but then felt the stab wound sting in protest and his muscles ached across his body in unison. Evalina pressed her hand against his stomach to keep him steady. “I’m sorry I was so harsh when I awoke.” He gestured to his torso, which was once again covered in bandages. “As you can see, I came out of a rather unpleasant ordeal.”
Gabriella gave a wan smile and another uncomfortable bow before briskly retreating across the hall and through an oaken door that gave way to the priestesses’ chambers. Hideo grunted and winced as he slowly took a seat on one of the wooden benches. He politely motioned for Evalina to release her grip as he managed to ease himself into a decent position. His arm stung, and he felt an acidic heat lash around it for a brief moment before the pain faded.
As he was settling, Amaya strolled closer to the bronze statue of Pax, gazing up at the goliath structure. “This place was a strange request to go for refuge,” she commented. “I thought you were a sceptic that didn’t believe in godly magic?”
“Evalina has helped me once before,” Hideo said, giving Amaya a reproachful look. “She has saved my life twice now and the way you have been comporting yourself in her chapel is an embarrassment to me.”
She turned away from the Pax statue. The scars across her face seemed to turn redder at the slight. “Let me make certain that I am understanding you correctly. I rescued you from dying a slow and painful death and in return, you are chiding me?”
“How did Reynard Woodard die, Amaya?” Hideo asked directly and without preliminary pleasantries.
She mused over the question for some time. “You saw it for yourself. He had been poisoned by the Thane of the Inferno. We could not help him.”
“What happened to him after the Thane poisoned him?” Hideo asked, feeling the heat rise in his voice. It almost became modulated. “I asked you to follow and free Reynard Woodard. You must have seen what happened.”
Amaya rested her knee against one of the long benches, as if this was just a casual and nonchalant discussion. “I tried to do as you bid me. I freed the hostages and managed to get the Viscount outside of the library.”
“Amaya,” Hideo asked slowly and gravely. “What did you do to him after?”
Her scarred face scowled at him. She took her knee off the bench and slowly walked towards him, an unpleasant resonance in her voice. “I didn’t kill him. I ended his suffering. I was left with little choice when you turned up to pass out in a puddle in front of me, pleading for my aid.”
The pain was instantly forgotten as Hideo leapt from the bench with a most unnerving fury upon him. Amaya did not seem the least bit perturbed by his fearsome reaction, which only made him angrier. He paced towards her until his face was mere inches from her scarred one. “Perhaps you’ve got things mixed up? The Empress ordered us to protect the Royalists, not slit their throats!”
“You had both been poisoned,” Amaya said calmly and with a shrug. “It was either Reynard or you. Where is your gratitude? If you were the one who succumbed to the poison, then there would be no one to protect the rest of the Royalists?”
“You could have protected them,” Hideo said, sharply pointing his scarred finger inches from the Archer’s scarred nose. “Your blood debt is to help me protect them. Surely the debt is still binding, even after I am gone?”
The Blue Archer tilted her head, an eerie glint in her cornflower blue eyes. “You’re right,” she seemed to agree with an unsettling cadence. “Perhaps I should have ended your suffering instead of the Viscount’s. I would have been handling things far better if I had been the one making the decisions since we both arrived in this damned city. For starters, I would not have picked a fight with the Thane of the Inferno Clan by myself. I wouldn’t be going off fighting the Thieves Guild and other crime lords in some petty attempt at chivalry, and I wouldn’t be allowing myself to become attached to these pompous rich charlatans.”
“Tread carefully, Amaya,” Hideo warned icily. “You have no right, not after you strung me along and lied to me about who Haytham Cutter had locked up in his dungeon in pursuit of your own personal vendetta.” He heard Evalina calling out, but he was too furious to pay attention to what the Priestess was exclaiming.
“I am trying to repay that debt, but you’re not making it very easy.” The scars across Amaya’s face looked far worse when she was cross. “Next time we confront the Inferno, use some common sense!”
“Next time?” Hideo chuckled nastily. “There isn’t a ‘Next time’ with us. You’ve proven time and time again that you are a liability.” He faintly heard Evalina calling out again, but ignored it.
“You have done the same for me,” Amaya said with a smug smirk. “Letting your emotions get the better of you is how you ended up with velociraptor venom in your veins and let us not forget about your little petulant and bloody outburst back in Star Snow-”
“I told you never to mention that night to me again!”
“Titan Tiger!” he heard Evalina cry out in a panic.
Hideo looked at her in confusion. Only then did he see that his hands were sparkling wildly. Small blue lightning bolts were swirling around not just his hands, but the entirety of his forearms. He flicked his arms back and forth in a desperate attempt to make them stop. It was a quenching fire. He started to panic and the moment he did; the lightning faded away into the cold draft. He felt faint and fell to his knees. The chapel seemed to turn upside down and one of the looming bronze faces of Pax was looking down upon him with fury.
Evalina and Amaya both stepped forward to pull him back up to his feet. He had lost most of his strength again, but had just about enough to push Amaya away from him, hoping that she would get the physical message. Evalina laid him back onto one of the nearby benches and lightly pressed the palm of her warm hand on his forehead. He found it profoundly soothing. “You need more time to heal,” the Priestess said with disquiet in her voice.
As Hideo started to regain himself and regather his bearings, he resumed his reproachful gaze at the Archer Assassin. He was still furious at her. But Evalina called him by his clan name. Amaya must still have had the decency and forethought not to utter his real name to any of the priestesses in the Pax chapel. “Amaya, I want you to leave,” he requested, not unkindly. “Your services are no longer required. Your blood debt is paid.”
“No, it isn’t,” she protested. “Look at yourself. The Inferno Clan still outnumber you greatly. You can barely stand, and King Sigismund’s council members are dropping like flies.”
“Amaya, please,” he said more assertively than aggressively. “Just leave me alone for a while.”
The Blue Archer gave Hideo a long, lingering glare. The thoughts that could have been tinkering inside her head were a pure mystery to him. “Very well,” she said after a long silence. “As you wish. Don’t keep me waiting… Titan Tiger.” Her voice was mocking as her footsteps echoed through the chapel’s hall and towards the exiting doors. They creaked hideously as she opened them. Her overbearing presence was replaced by a cold gust of wind that had entered upon her departure.
“I’m sorry about her,” Hideo apologised to the Priestess. He attempted to look deep into Evalina’s violet eyes, but she was too preoccupied with her long purple sleeves that she was anxiously fiddling with. She promptly stood to her feet and offered her hand to him.
“You need more bedrest,” she said, sounding more like a doctor than a friend. He accepted her hand, but did not wish to go back to sleep. He feared for what he might dream about.
She helped him back to his bedchamber and laid him on the hard and rocky mattress. Hideo watched her as she rummaged through the bedside desk to retrieve that dastardly syringe with the strange substance that he had grown to hate. “That isn’t Momentum, is it?” he asked her.
Her violet eyes flickered in genuine offence. “How could you even ask me that?”
“It was a jest,” he said quietly. “A bad one.” The liquid in the syringe was an opaque blue colour. If it was a narcotic, then it certainly was not one he had ever seen before.
She slowly injected his arm with the substance. As his eyes grew heavy and his mind weary, Hideo felt compelled to ask. “Evalina, why are you still doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Helping me. After all that, I have put you through. You could have just handed me to the City Watch the other night. You could have simply relieved yourself of my burden.”
She sat by the edge of the bed and lightly lifted his chin. Sleep was starting to take a hold of him. “Because the Priestesses of Pax believe in saving those that can be saved, and I believe there is something within you that is still worth saving.”
When he drifted away, the dreams were not as nightmarish as they were before. He was running free through the Arkovian forests of the Tandra, the embracing wind energising his stride. When he looked down, he did not see zaffre boots but giant white paws with black streaks. He grunted and skidded to a halt as he saw a Nanuqsaurus roaming through the leafless trees. He breathed out a flurry of striking blue lightning bolts and the reptilian beast fled. It felt right to be the king of the snows.