In a flash, light showers gave way to sunshine, and Iris watched the coy pitter-patter tickling the glass stamped out under a torrent of heat and blue. Over the border, halfway there in a sense.

Crestana had barely woken up that morning, using her two caretakers as makeshift crutches from their room to the bus stop, and had held onto Iris’s hand the entire journey through Excala station.

Still lethargic, her friend had found temporary perch on Iris’s shoulder as the Excala Express rocked the trio back and forth. Her shutters were tight, but she seemed more at peace than in the morning. They had shaken her as though she were under a curse until Alis confessed he felt too guilty to continue. Iris couldn’t disagree, but kept it a secret that her eagerness to get to their address had overwritten the concern for her friend.

Still, Crestana wasn’t a light sleeper, considering not all Spirits required it, yet even then….

“It’s like her shutters are glued shut,” Alis commented.

“Maybe we can put a little sign that says ‘closed for business’ on her forehead.

“That’s…a horrible idea,” he managed, holding in a smirk, eyes considering the possibility. “Do you think she’d get mad?”

“If she noticed? Probably. She’d act all disappointed in ‘my character’ and get revenge a day later.”

“Sounds like you’re taking from experience.”

“No…those times were all accidents. She said she'd get mad at repeat offences."

She reminisced on all she could remember, watching her fingers intertwine with Crestana’s milky black.

“You found a good friend, even if she talks like a cop.”

She found Alis observing her from the seat beside them, eyes blissfully observant. She scrunched her face as the train rolled over a bump in the tracks. “I thought you’d be jealous.”

“Why would I be jealous? People can have more than one friend.”

There was something unsatisfying about that answer, but Iris couldn’t figure out what. She had an inkling it was the sort of thing Crestana had a knack for.

“But….”

“But what?” Iris asked, too eager to pounce.

“…no. It’s stupid.”

Another bump. The drawing tube lying across their laps dislodged itself from its comfortable position. Alis lunged for it, but Iris’s end fell past her knees before she could react.

The metal clattered against the floor.

Silent judgement and a few weary eyes flicked their ways. She gave a wry smile, something Elliot had pointed out was a hand-me-down from her mother, and that seemed to do the trick of deterring the attention.

“Why is it stupid?” Iris asked, repositioning the hilt of the sword against her waist.

“Why?” he asked, reluctantly. “I don’t know. It feels like it would only make sense to me.”

“If it makes sense, it makes sense. If it doesn’t…we can laugh at it.”

“I don’t exactly like the idea of you laughing at it,” he chuckled, fiddling with his end of the sword.

“All right. I won’t laugh. Deal?”

She held out a hand across their sleeping princess. Alis looked her expression up and down, before taking the hand.

“I thought you’d give a smile or something while playing a joke like that.”

“What joke?”

“…I—”

“We made a deal.”

“Uh…okay. I just thought that…I was missing out on something when I read your last letter. Like…almost three years we’d been going back and forth about ourselves, topic after topic, and I thought I knew you well enough.”

“I think you do,” she said. “There isn’t much to me.”

Alis’s line faltered, and Iris, for some reason, regretted her words. She pursed her lips and turned it back towards the floor.

“The things that make you tick, Iris. I don’t know what it is, but I see it in people. No one I knew from my barracks had that. If they did, they got beaten out pretty early.”

She saw from the corner of her eye his fingers curling into round shapes, crushing invisible insects between each one.

“But I know that there’s small things you do…or…ways you act without realising, that other people know about. I know you…through your letters, through you, but I don’t know you through me.”

“I see,” Iris muttered, finding herself smiling at the sentiment. “I…sort of get it. I think.”

“Well I don't,” Alis admitted. He turned his attention to the windows, exhaling the small frustration through his nostrils. They flared like a dog’s as his shoulders relaxed, slumping into the Express’s ancient cushioning.

His eyes found hers again.

“What?”

“Hm?”

“You’re staring.”

“Oh. Okay.”

His eyes flicked away again, this time hesitating, more conscious of their surroundings.

Thunder. The green and blue landscape that sprawled out before her flashed purple to a rapturous clap. Wrath of God: to Iris, that was the only thing in her vocabulary that she could consider mighty enough to block out the sun.

Wrath. That certainly fit the situation like a glove.

She sped across the frantic green plains, blades of grass all whipping about in a hysterical dance, trying to run away from the crystal city only to find they were rooted to the ground.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Through her hair’s furious flurry, Iris watched the vermin scatter and the birds evacuate in disorderly clusters.

Heat. Light. Rapturous clap. Purple tore past the city limits and streaked the endless green carpet with an ugly, flaming, black scar. More came, rupturing her ears each time.

She sped towards it all the same, unsure of what else she was supposed to do.

Heat. Light. She could feel the tingling of the air close by, hear the air burn once the sensation delivered on its promise, and watch as her hair followed the air rushing to take the place of its fallen brethren.

The Spirit City closed in around her as she took the familiar route through its vague streets, now clogged with rubble as monuments to its once greatness toppled one after another. The pieces shattered like glass, each expelling its ricocheting shrapnel until it saturated the air, biting at Iris’s armour.

She reached its centre where a man had once stood, dressed in white, teaching Spirits of spoken language. No sign of him remained, nor of the era of peace he inhabited. It was deserted, sparing her from even seeing the bodies.

The sound dispersed between the remaining towers, and Iris felt she’d reached the eye of the storm. Muffled, deceptively quiet chaos lay outwards—she stood where destruction had already passed, under the perpetrator itself.

Iris dismounted, struggling to find the point of origin. She doubted if there had been one to begin with, seeing as none of her previous visits had allowed her even a glimpse.

The thunder continued as the air grew thick with invisible shards that hurt to breathe. She released more of her hair, fuelling it with energy and dismantling it into gas. Ventilating her armour, she kept the air in her mask clear.

Breathing. Her own respiration and the blood circulating through the cartilage in her ear were, for a brief moment in history, the only sounds in the world. Paradoxical calm, permeated by an intense atmosphere of Aether buzzing like ants underneath her skin.

Purple. Her purple. The Spirit of Destruction’s purple.

Yet that man had called her the patron Spirit; his tongue implied some due approbation. Reverence she could understand, but admiration?

Another flash of lightning, several more toppling monuments.

No bodies, no cries, but her blind servitude to her nature only brought one answer—she had ruined that glass city long ago, toppled it to rubble.

The city in Iris’s dreams was no longer so grand. Flattened and forgotten before it could reach the written word.

“How long was I out for?”

“Half hour. Crestana, you were gone for several half hours.”

“Sorry sarge.”

“Head in the game Private, we’re at Sidos station.”

The whistle blared, and the three swayed together as the train came to a stop. Steam rose, and Sidos City’s epicentre peered through the veil of white.

Bustle, footsteps, and a signature undercurrent of tension that, in her mind, defined the city. Perhaps the people were just high-strung because even without S.H.I.A., everyone walked like a terrorist cell was on the loose.

Well, close enough.

They disembarked, keeping single file, weaving out of the station. Alis, Crestana, Iris. Her eyes wouldn’t stop flicking from face to face, measuring the height of their nose and reading the depth of their eyes, each mundane face only served to sour her hunches.

She felt herself take a gasp of fresh air as they exited the current of people. But the space was wide where she could only remember further funnelling—bodies pressed into the allotted space between parallel iron railings, builders waving them along with signs and gestures.

No. The town square was done.

“Iris? What’s wrong?” Crestana called.

“Nothing,” she lied, tearing her eyes off the fountain’s statues. “Found a map yet?”

“Here!” Alis called from behind her. Standing at a kiosk, he held a sprawling map up to his chest.

“It’s probably the simplest layout to a city I’ve ever seen,” he muttered as Iris and Crestana closed the distance. “Straight grid lines the whole way through.”

He followed the index, opening to a later page marked ‘Rodana’ and traced his finger along the streets like a maze in the morning newspaper. A double tap.

“Here, roughly.”

“How far is it?” Crestana asked.

“Not long, why?”

“No reason, I just wanted to ask—”

“You were passed out cold, Crestana,” Alis pressed. “Are you okay?”

“Excuse me? No, I just needed rest I’m—”

“Crestana,” Iris said, and they found each other’s eyes.

“I’m. Fine,” Crestana insisted. “Fine now, anyway. I got my sleep.”

Iris saw her hand reach for the end of her drawing tube, grasping at it like they would confiscate it.

“Let’s be careful,” Iris commanded, “and stay behind me. Don’t argue.”

She could feel the population density rise the more steps she took into Rodana district. The atmosphere, saturated with sweat, ate away at the fringes of her consciousness. Open windows carried out into the narrow corridors whispers of personal lives. They listened like voyeurs to the chatter, shouting, laughing, crying, and watched shirts and underwear flutter along laundry strings roped between opposite balconies.

Alis held the map in his off-hand, refusing to even take a peek at it once the streets became claustrophobic, and the invisible eyes from above overwhelming. Crestana followed behind him, keeping her eyes over his shoulders as Iris brought up the rear, tuning one ear towards the world behind them.

Alis turned left, and the two followed. Much of the same, more of the sweat. The sun was struggling to find them so low to the ground.

“This is the street,” Alis muttered under his breath. “It’s unfortunate, but we couldn’t look more like tourists if we tried. Best behaviour from here on out.”

“Yes sir,” Iris replied.

“Yes sarge,” Crestana echoed, and the disappointment seemed to wind Alis’s retaliation.

Alis approached the alcohol-stained door and opened it, feigning the mindless certitude of a local resident as they stepped through. Iris on the other hand couldn’t tell where the building it belonged to began and ended.

A damp, dimply lit hallway, four doors to either side of them, and a staircase by the end of the walkway.

“Room five oh two, it said. I hope you two were itching for some cardio.”

They started up the stairs, the sole of Alis’s boots producing such a creak she could’ve sworn she saw a shoe-shaped dent imparted on the wood. Crestana came next and to much the same ruckus. Thin walls, almost as paper-thin as the ones in her Mind Palace. The stairs’ arthritic groaning acted like a warning alarm.

Her hair stood on its ends, her way of getting her weapons ready.

Two. Three. Four. All much of the same, but devoid of the same life they had glimpsed out on the street as though straying from the stairs’ warning calls.

Fifth floor saw no change in scenery either besides a nagging hunch that the lights had lost their strength. Five oh two, to their left.

“Crestana?”

“I can try, but there's not enough shadow.”

She positioned herself beside the door, pressing her back to the wall as Iris took the lead. Avoiding a compromising position, she cosied up to the other wall—albeit just as paper-thin—and pressed a hand against the keyhole. She nodded.

Alis raised a hand to the door and knocked.

No response.

He knocked again.

“Excuse me! Raymond electrical! The landlord hired me to check your switchboard.”

Another knock to no response.

He nodded to Iris, and the thimbles already in place applied the faintest amount of pressure to the lock's pins. It clicked, and Alis pushed the door open a sliver.

Crestana ventured first, disappearing into the ample shadow as the two waited outside. One second turned into two, then a quiet three as tiny footsteps scrambled in the walls.

The door creaked ajar, and they took their cue, slipping through the gap. Alis closed and locked the door behind them as Iris’s eyes fell upon the room itself.

Empty besides the bare necessities required to pass as a home. A dining table, four chairs, and a fireplace still fresh with smouldering ash. Sullied dishes and paper bags took up residence in the sinks and atop counters, and a fan encased in wire mesh rested lazily by the windowsill. The view only afforded them a sliver of sunlight, and the glow of the light above dribbled a sickening yellow.

“It’s a safe house,” Alis whispered. “Someone’s been using it, though.”

“The scientist?” Crestana wondered out loud.

“Maybe,” he replied, walking into the kitchen. “The stuff on the plates is still fresh.”

“What are we supposed to find here?” Iris asked, crouching before the fireplace. “They’re probably burning evidence anyway.”

“I doubt he was all too concerned about making it easy for us,” Crestana sighed, opening the door to an adjacent room. “As long as he left something behind.”

“I can still complain,” Iris muttered, standing back up. “It’s who lives here that we’re after then.”

“Seems to be the case. They’re out for the moment, though.”

“Is there a floor above us, Alis?”

“No. Checked the mailboxes. Must be roof access.”

“Then what do we do, do we wait here?” Crestana asked, emerging from the far room.

“I guess so, except—”

Crestana muffled Iris’s mouth and raised a finger to her mask. “Aether. Behind the door.”

Iris strained her ears as Crestana undid her drawing tube’s strap and Alis slid on his knuckle dusters.

Hair on its ends. Blood about to boil over.

The lock clicked ajar. Inch by inch. Wood gave way to dim corridor.

Nothing…

“It’s running,” Crestana hissed. “Downstairs, now!”