There were gunshots at night—always gunshots to jolt him awake, and rarely would he ever hear them alone. Gunshots tended to hunt in pairs, at the least, jumping unsuspecting prey before slinking back into a crumbling alleyway.

The higher cracks of the obtuse police revolvers, however, rarely took the assassin's route, and a flurry of retaliatory shots was bound to follow their cries.

On particularly bad days, Alis would cover his ears as automatic fire rang through the streets the entire night, getting louder, closer, until at any moment, the boots of a search party would come running up the stairs.

Alis couldn’t carry a weapon in case of that exact possibility. Besides the brass knuckles, he had no other line of defence.

He had been sitting in that humbling third-storey room, listening to the gunshots raging outside for years, surviving through another sleepless night only to wake up and deliver another letter or receive another parcel.

Alis never saw wands so far out from the city. The enemy he was best at countering, the only enemy he could fight without being riddled with bullet holes first.

He had been sitting in his humbling third-storey room, wondering if he was being the person Iris had hoped he’d be, wondering if that boy who had stumbled into Excala almost three years ago still held with him any merit.

Alis had lost his train of thought somewhere between the four hundredth and five hundredth daily errand, the routine giving him an excuse to say he was doing something.

Doing something. Sacrificing something for a cause he wanted to believe in.

Two colours. Those didn’t waver, and that meant he couldn’t afford to either.

Alis stood from his bed, the oddly silent night falling on deaf ears as he dressed and grabbed his pre-packed briefcase. A few more clothes than he had needed for his job interview the day before, as many as he could fit before the buckles could barely hold themselves.

He only allowed himself the soft moonlight to see which loop his tie was supposed to pass through next, paranoid that even his desk lamp’s light bleeding under his door could give away his position.

Sneaking away; another thing he learnt during his time in the army that had almost become as natural as breathing. Where the floorboards moaned, what woke the other residents, which hinges creaked and which ones squealed. It was all somewhere in the back of his head, knowledge obtained without him ever knowing.

He passed through his room’s door he had purposefully left ajar, his briefcase in one hand and his shoes in the other. Closing it shut behind him save for the click of the handle, he pressed onto the second floor.

It only took a single glance at Ryan to know he wasn’t someone who lived on the premises; his residence was in the city, a sixteenth-storey flat where he could keep his enemies close, and his finances closer. That left his office unattended at night, the only defence being a meagre key he kept in his coat pocket.

Not all his skills were developed in the army, lockpicking being the more notable addition to his toolset. He needed intelligence to satisfy his other allegiance, a demanding beast that lay further westward down the Northern Chain. Small, but its appetite grew by the day.

Opening Ryan’s cabinet of secrets had become just about the only way to keep it at bay.

He circumvented each unstable floorboard, placing his toes where the planks and nails met the scaffolding, the moon his shepherd.

He rounded the desk, crouching and placing his shoes on the floor. Six drawers, two on each side. Ryan’s filing methods were meticulously unorganised; only he knew where something was at any one time. For someone with brass knuckles in his jacket, brute force was something he detested when problem-solving.

Not that he could negotiate with a cabinet lock, let alone six.

He got to work, using an out-of-shape paperclip to feel the pins and massage them into place—six pins, and no way to bypass the lock easily without making a small racket. He dug a little deeper into his head for the pin positions of the top right drawer. Or were they the top left?

Only one way to find out.

He made swift work of the pins, locking four into place before beginning work on a fifth that didn’t seem to budge.

“Ah…right,” he whispered as he rectified his mistake and heard the lock click into place.

Sliding open the drawer, he began to search through the contents with his off-hand. Outright stealing the photographs would have him implicated by the morning; the best he could do without getting caught was to memorise anything significant.

Next drawer: still nothing of note, just records of finances and bills.

Third drawer, a bundle of documents caught his eye. Pinned together with a paperclip was a typewritten letter from an informant, expressing their desire to do ‘something for the cause’, much like Alis was.

“Spy plane…Sidos…Northern Chain Ridge…photographs taken near Finn’s Road, Harlet and Robert’s Pass…Target unclear.”

He committed the information to memory, finding the photographs still resting in their envelope behind the letter.

Alis bit his lips. To claim a spy plane was flying over Sidos needed enough evidence to convince two countries at once.

Building one bridge meant burning the other permanently.

He heard gunshots from beyond the windows that seemed to all but blend into the midnight soundscape. His nightly lullaby, a distant tremor that he could do nothing about but wait for it to finally get him.

He took the evidence and stuffed it into his coat jacket.

Alis stormed down the street, keeping the sound of his heels against the damp pavement to a minimum, hopping between streetlights like shelter from the rain. Leheg station was not far, but in such a cramped neighbourhood where every second building housed a small village, a lot could happen in a ten-minute walk.

His fingers wrapped tighter around the brass knuckle fitted to his left hand.

Distant shouting and screaming, even such a small glimpse was all Alis ever wanted to experience of someone else’s domestic. He had enough of those when the murder would make it into the newspaper the next morning.

Like a beacon in a stormy sea, Leheg station’s lights spilt onto the surrounding street, and denizens unable or unwilling to sleep flocked to it like moths to a flame. Even with the added police presence, there wasn’t any stopping the nightly gathering.

A frisk search was likely, but the only things that proved a real risk of raising alarms were his knuckle dusters.

He took a moment to sidestep into a shadow, take the brass knuckles from his left hand and slip them into his boot. The shaft was too short to conceal a gun, and considering the events of that afternoon, guns were the officers’ main priority.

Alis approached them, his face too dialled into his current task to feign a smile. As expected, he was made to yield his briefcase and raise his arms. Both were armed with boxy submachine guns slung over their shoulders, squeaky clean and standard issue. Alis couldn’t help but think how much they’d be worth if a local gang or ULEF group stole them.

A decent amount, considering the buyer could source the ammunition.

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The first officer gave him the all clear, and the second returned his briefcase, bidding him another warning to ‘stay on the straight and narrow’.

“Straight and narrow,” Alis scoffed under his breath. “We’d all feel better if you’d just told us to stick to the green markings.”

No colouring outside the lines.

The bodies of that afternoon’s assassination had been whisked away with the subway train, bloodstains and all. Besides the extra worker bees in blue uniforms, their stingers even larger, there wasn’t a single sign of the Leheg boys and their supposed retribution.

But Alis soon stood corrected as out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a police badge sewn onto a draping trench coat, bony hands holding loosely onto a crooked wooden wand. No scars marred his clean-shaven face, and his combed back hair was so perfectly waxed, it seemed to move as a part of his skull.

But that same man was standing over two bodies Alis recognised as the perpetrators he’d walked past that morning, and knew that they had stood no chance.

Alis kept the man in the corner of his eye, resisting the magnetic urge to look for a second longer.

His fingers trembled, itching for the brass knuckles.

Doing something. Killing one of them would mean more than everything he’d done in the past few years; he’d be able to see the victory then and there.

He swallowed his urge and kept walking, taking a place in the corner of the platform as the announcement for his train sounded over the intercom.

Iris couldn’t even find the energy to huddle inside her bomber jacket even as the icy winds lapped at her feet like cold ocean waves, the snow leaving small, itching cuts on her skin.

It was a dream, after all, one she hadn’t visited lately, seeing as they always followed her into the daytime. Dreams so desperate for attention and respect that it made her living life hell.

That’s what she got for breaking down a door last time.

Tetrica Resonances, some writing that shared her name.

Karaxian mountains, someplace she was intimately familiar with, even if her dreams got them wrong.

Karaxian mountains, but in the shape of the Northern Chain. Where she’d died.

A smaller version of herself, yes, one that had gone stumbling into a cruel daydream only to be buried by layers of death white. But that smaller version of herself was limited by her words. ‘Death’ was a brash concept, easy to grasp and equate to endings in general.

Iris had thought on it since, wondering if the mountains—whichever range they happened to be—weren’t exactly where she died. Perhaps she was more than twelve, soon to be thirteen.

Could one destroy themselves? Die in a different sense. Could one…piece themselves back together one brick at a time, layering on the mortar, hoping and praying to anything good that this time around, it would stick and hold tight?

Iris felt it was very possible. Iris felt that she had to do it before she exploded.

The icy winds lapped at her legs like a warm river in summer, inviting her closer, to take another look at the shimmering city down the cliffside and beyond the grass.

She decided to oblige, just this once.

Looking back down the hallway, she counted that the same number of doors were open as when she arrived that night.

There were, although how many doors remained closed was never exactly clear. Less than ten, more than five at first glance, but if ever she began counting, her mind would lose track after the seventh or eighth.

The markings along her arms and her back glowed a faint purple, and her hair began to disintegrate centimetre by centimetre. Considering how little she ever used for combat, Evalyn had made her get a haircut to trim the fraying ends and shape her fringe into something that less resembled thick curtains. Her second haircut, apparently, although she struggled to remember the first.

The small shaking body at the end of the hall was changing almost by the day, although the bloodstained cloth sewn into their faces stayed the same. That night, it was Alis, the shrivelled-up, skeletal figure a far cry from the boy she remembered or the words she kept in her desk drawer.

The ring on her finger wouldn’t be fooled by a cheap imitation, even if it tugged at her own throat for a reaction.

Her beast caught up to her, coiling around her waist before she got a chance to grab onto it and haul herself onto its back. Melding her hands into its skin, she asked it to start moving.

The beast flew close to the snow, its rigid lines cutting through the air and keeping the specks of ice from her face. Reaching where her legs had taken her in mere seconds, it kept going, past the cliff ledge and down the mountainside. They hugged the terrain, the fog’s retreat barely keeping up with their speed as they dodged each obstacle with never more than a millisecond to spare.

Green grass jumped at them, its child-like hue bursting through the grey fog and forcing Iris’s eyes closed. She felt her stomach drop as her beast changed direction all while maintaining its speed. The wind no longer bit at the skin on her face and legs, and instead, it seemed to run along the grass with her, like children prancing, playing.

Blue sky stretched from horizon to horizon, leaving the mountains behind her as a distant memory best forgotten, offering a less jagged, more rotund alternative. Clouds of great volume bubbled up to the edges of the world, some in great columns of white that seemed to know if there was a heaven in the sky.

But the city in front of her had the question of ‘heaven on earth’ more or less covered.

The shimmering towers scraped the sky in a more sincere sense than anything humanity had ever created, and each spire shared a similar hue, if not identical. Seeing them up close, they were closer to light jade and emerald than the lilac and silver she’d mistaken them for.

And 'city' was a misnomer. It felt more like a monument. Like a crystal had sprung from underneath the soil and basked in the sun ever since. Even with the wind rushing through her ears and rustling her hair, she could tell the city was silent.

No sound, not even Aether.

Her beast soon caught up with the city’s edges and began to slow, dodging through the irregular bases of each tower not much faster than the average taxi.

They stumbled on a clearing in the jagged, blinding forest. A round town square of sorts, although calling it such was not much more than a desperate attempt to make sense of something she couldn’t understand.

She tried to listen to the Aether again and look out for any pulses of speech and patterns. But there was none.

No pulses. But she was looking in the wrong place.

Speaking was an invention, and so was speaking through Aether. Besides knowing she might not be twelve going on thirteen, she knew nothing else about her age. A memory from a time when another form of communication dominated, something so utterly separate and removed from language Iris couldn’t even begin to fathom it.

That faint buzzing she had thought was her ears playing tricks on her. That faint murmur that filtered underneath even silence.

It turned into a scream. A scream of a million things without voices. A simple expression of fear and panic.

Iris opened her eyes, and a torrent of Spirits was rushing towards her, but unlike a king tide following the moon, they instead ran away from something. Something that Iris could mistake for the moon from a distance.

If its skin didn’t peel back to reveal a thousand worlds in a cavernous expanse.

She gritted her teeth as the Spirit of Spirit flooded her body with Aether. Her armour flickered on and off across her skin while she fought for control over herself, something the Spirits around her had no hope of doing. Their bodies warped like tumours, each extremity of their scaly, or soft, or stringy, or lanky, or esoteric bodies being pulled, mauled and stretched like clay to their extremes.

The invasive thing bore down on them as it toyed with their existence and made them something unnatural. Better, stronger, but at what cost?

Then the invasive thing bore down on Iris specifically, wondering why she appeared immune to its effects. Like all children in the playground, Iris knew what happened when they got bored watching the ant trail.

Fighting an enemy so big was Evalyn’s job. She had enough conviction to hold her ground. She could burn cities, after all. Iris wasn’t like that.

But Iris didn’t have to be; something else would be for her, something that shared her absolute power.

The same sound that echoed in her ears whenever her hair dissipated rang through the city like the chime of a town hall clock. The scene was silenced, and the seams of the almost perfect play began to crack. Iris could see just how flimsy the edges of the stage were.

Even so, the play itself was electric.

Purple gas streamed from the city’s borders, rushing high into the sky and isolating the city from the Spirit of Spirit’s influence. The barrier solidified, maintaining its transparency but severing the deity’s connection from the inhabitants.

The chime sounded again, and torrents of purple liquid flowed from the barrier in tendril-like jet streams, colliding with the Spirit of Spirits and clinging to it like a perfectly homogenous cloud of bees. She…whatever it was…began to drown it in midair.

Utter helplessness in a matter of seconds. What took the full might of the Steel Whale’s broadside and the combined efforts of Queen Amestris, Liam Colte and Evalyn Hardridge, just like that. The drop of a hat, the flip of a coin.

Then the chime sounded one final time, and Iris watched, or rather felt, as the liquid vaporised in a snap and only continued to grow hotter. The hairs on her skin stood up, holding their breath in anticipation for something to snap again, at any moment, like it was nothing more than the click of two fingers.

The gas began to glow, shivering in place, in reality. Bright purple, too bright for her to stand looking at.

Then, a clap of thunder cracked her hearing in two. The ball of lightning flashed so bright it outdid the sun for a fraction of a second, then disappeared. The light faded, leaving nothing behind but empty air.

Quiet once again.

Not even the wind dared to challenge that power.