It didn’t try to refute it. The other side of her that had so liberally borrowed her voice and limbs chose the one time Iris truly wanted answers to stay silent. It had killed Caynes, done more than kill him, before shrinking back into whatever wretched corner of her mind it had crawled out from.

It had left her with a truth; one that made too much sense to Iris’s spiralling mind.

She took a step forward, the armour hanging off her body like rotted flesh weighing heavily on her joints, already tired from a lifetime’s worth of abuse. The gas around her was nauseating, the purple acting on its own accord like a life support system to keep the wretched joke going for another second longer.

Destruction. What a joke. After she’d lamented for months over her part in destroying the FSA. Every time she hadn’t gone as far, giving in to her base instincts and letting herself loose had been the abnormality.

Even now, as she stepped from the hole in the library wall and dropped to the courtyard in a still-unharmed heap, she was merely pretending. Pretending she wanted to solve the situation instead of destroying every belligerent and ending it altogether.

How simple it was for her. And who could blame her? It was her nature, after all.

She clutched her stomach, unsure of when she’d vomit in her mask but preparing for it. She couldn’t help but look back at every moment she’d wanted to defeat someone, spare someone, bring them to justice or let them rot.

Her feeling of wanting to help Alis had felt so genuine. Her infatuation with Crestana had felt so sincere.

There was a consistent pulse of Aether coming from somewhere distant. It drew on her attention like morbid curiosity to a car crash, yet it had blended in with gas before. Suddenly, it felt clear, so clear she questioned if her senses had ever worked until that moment.

She moved towards it like a corpse twitching on muscle reflexes. Her body followed whatever felt most stimulating while the gas kept her alive. Her brain was elsewhere, entirely elsewhere, still reeling from Caynes’s parting gift.

Her legs took her under the court’s gates and along the stone pathways towards the Great Hall. The Aether was concentrated there, and Iris recalled what Caynes had said, what Crestana had been made to endure. A conduit, whatever that fate entailed.

A conduit for all the Aether the hundreds of humans had collected. It needed no explanation, no proof. The fact that Iris could believe such a story only proved Wesper’s ramblings. The world was rotten, twisted, and unjust, where fathers sacrificed their daughters for a utopian daydream.

Maybe Caynes was right, maybe she was late in burning it all. Maybe she could start now.

She swung open the doors with her finger and stepped inside, where the cool embrace of untainted air was waiting to greet her. She shed her protective layer of gas as red light streamed in from the stained-glass windows, casting blood-red interpretations of their art onto the procession below.

Beaks on their knees, entranced in some sort of prayer. Their Aether was weak, barely enough to sustain them. The surplus was all being pulled towards the girl on the stage, the nexus that serves as the root of the problem.

Whether she liked it or not, it was right there, the stem ready to be snipped.

Iris wasn’t even conscious of herself moving forward, stepping past the half-dead bodies lined up like the headstones of a cemetery. All she could think about was what would come once she got there and stood over Crestana, the power to end the ritual in her hands.

The power but not the strength. The strength to force onto someone the ultimate sacrifice or leave potential thousands to die for the sake of one. Ethics and morals dictated different things. Even her mother’s advice—to live selfishly—was failing her.

Crestana was as far gone as those who had subjected her to the morbid fate, only from a traumatic influx rather than a debilitating absence. The invasive stream of Aether had petrified her. Iris wasn’t an Aetherologist, so that was all she could say. If there was life, it was so resolutely buried Iris had no confidence in finding it, at least while Crestana still lived.

The innocently spry girl who had hidden it all underneath her mask, the device made to ease communication had served as her prison. It had robbed her of her humanity. As ironic as that sounded, it was true.

Not knowing who one really was, being afraid of the consequences if the ugly truth was revealed. Iris wanted to say she understood it, but shared situations weren’t shared experiences, experiences her client had endured for her whole life.

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Iris crouched beside her, watching how her hair splayed around her head like a flower and how every fingernail had grown out of place by a few days. All curses, no matter how inconsequential they were.

She could almost say it was peaceful if not for the situation and the debilitating current of Aether running through her.

“I’m sorry,” Iris managed to whisper through a throat drier than she thought possible.

She leaned closer out of instinct, checking for vitals that weren’t there even if she were alive. Her signature, the small beat of Aether that defined her as her was smothered, unsalvageable. She could feel it all flowing through space like a nauseating odour, nothing more. Nothing she could command her beast to destroy.

“I’m sorry that I can’t do anything.”

Crippling indecision. Iris had failed at protecting her client, and now she couldn’t even kill her to stop it. There was nothing more to say. There was nothing more to an overdue apology for something she could no longer make up for.

Her lips trembled. She wanted to speak, say something worth saying while she still could before her indecision gave way to her nature, while she still had a semblance of herself.

“I…I want to spar with you again. Like last time. I know…it was serious. But it was fun. I had fun, and I want to have more fun with you. I want to eat lunch with…while you’re next to me again in the courtyard by the stairs. I want you to come to my house, my real house. It’s nicer, and there’s so much space outside, nothing like the city.”

She was crying under her mask. She couldn’t even tell she was crying anymore.

“The Aether I felt from you when you hugged Dad and I…I want to feel that again. You seemed so happy.”

Her head fell onto Crestana’s chest as she spent her last moments of humanity crying. Her beast circled around her, waiting for the inevitable moment to arrive.

“I want to see you happy. It made me happy.”

Iris heard the snap of her beast’s jaw. She squinted, waiting for the chest she had rested her head on to disappear. But it was still there, still and cold, but there.

Iris looked up at her beast, a limp Sigil hanging in its mouth the same size as the ones she’d purged from Crestana’s body. The Sigil shattered, and Iris realised her mistake.

She jumped on Crestana, grabbing her by the shoulders and shouting.

“Crestana? Can you hear me?”

No response. Iris tried again, desperate now that there was a small semblance of hope.

“Crestana! I’m here. I’m here so follow my voice!”

She lifted Crestana upright and held her between her arms, rocking her back and forth.

“Please don’t go. Stay here.”

She squeezed as the flow of Aether died. Strand by strand, the torrent disassembled, leaving a single, small beat in the centre. It was alone; it was fading.

“I don’t care if you never want to see me again, as long as you live.”

She broke down, unsure of how to hold onto the small pulse of Aether and preserve it. She couldn’t do such a thing, she knew that all too well now.

“I don’t want you to die. Please.”

Through her tears, she could barely feel it, the small fluttering thing that felt like a raindrop through her fingers. Feeble, but that’s what she was. A feeble thing like anyone else trying to live up to an impossible ask. That’s all her life had been. That was just too cruel.

“I’ve never seen you cry before.”

Iris heard it, but she refused to believe it. She couldn’t open her eyes. The thought of the voice being a trick of her mind was worse than anything else...

“Don’t forget how to cry, Iris. Whatever you are…as long as you can cry, you’ll be a girl. You’ll be my friend.”

The antlers caught the lightning as the Queen galloped headfirst into the Spirit of Spirits, piercing it with hundreds of tonnes and millions of volts. Uncaring of the rain of fire from her troops, she dug the ends of her thorny horns into the deity’s flesh and swung it towards the barrage, displacing the air and creating another great gust of wind.

A cloud of smoke sped towards Evalyn, materialising into her mentor as it dropped to the ground.

“How are you,” he asked, refusing to break eye contact with the battle.

“Never better,” Evalyn said, observing as the barrage beat down on the trapped Spirit.

She looked closer, noticing something between the explosions. Ripples across the skin, both from the puncture wounds and the shelling. The pearlescent skin was wavering as though desperately trying to hold on to its colour.

“Something’s happening,” Evalyn surmised. “I don’t know what, but it’s weakened.”

“I’ll take it that now’s our change then,” Colte said, inhaling until his ribs creaked like ageing wood, ready to snap at any moment. Fireballs flew from his mouth upon his exhale and curved like meteors towards each flailing limb, setting them ablaze like city fires spreading through a wooden town.

He controlled the flames, keeping them away from the Queen as each appendage thrashed and shrivelled.

Evalyn felt the Spirit’s chokehold on her weaken as the flames grew brighter and the Queen’s spears dug deeper. She took her stand, compiling the levels of her power one after another. Cascading warmth, the heat of a thousand furnaces built up inside her chest and radiated outwards.

“For the desires your summoners could not fulfil or the wishes no one could grant them, I am sorry.”

Her armour sprang into being, interlocking across her body, feverish for battle.

“For the desires your destruction will fulfil and the wishes your demise will grant, I am sorry.”

Her markings grew hot, and her feet left the ground as her golden glow outshone the sun.

“In this world without gods or divinity, the one closest to such titles has taken your opposite side. That is all there is, and all there ever will be.”

The Queen retreated, and her colossal form faded with the wind, leaving the weakened Spirits of Spirits with little time to react.

Her Mind Palace spread across the world for a few moments before retreating into her armour, collapsing onto itself in a cataclysmic concentration of energy. There was no sound besides its choral hum, no light besides its golden aura. The world was nothing but her.

“Act VI: Resolution.”

Darminjung floated across the sky. The Steel Whale’s muse and the embodiment of its cause.

Hope, for a city that would desperately need it, a family that would rely on it more than ever.

Everything was about to change, and Evalyn would carry that sorrow with her as her patron Spirit crashed into the hopes and wishes of her enemy.