the flicker in your peripheral

"A joyous day, my darling sapling, but so too a sorrowful one," Feo Ul says. She and Seto lead Sabre to a nest tucked into the ruins, sheltered with intent. A single egg smaller than those she saw the Amaro crowding around lays upon a bed of gentle runes and feathers, kept warm with magic rather than a creature's body heat.

"Its mother did not survive," Feo Ul says, the grief in their voice allowed to seep through. "And Seto thought, why not offer the dear creature a chance it would not have been afforded otherwise? Hurry now, hurry now, they're due to hatch any moment!"

A little orphan not even hatched. It prods at something deep within Sabre she seldom allows to surface.

Sabre kneels at the edge of the nest, little twigs poking her knees. Gentle as air, she places her hand on the surface of the egg. The shell is smooth, dappled with faint spots, and warm to the touch.

Simple memories flow around her like water. Warmth; shadow; light. A chirruping speech she does not understand, yet she senses the urgency in it. Coldness; coldness. Movement, then warmth once more.

Something touches the palm of her hand and her eyes snap open. A little snout works the jagged edge of the shell it has managed to breech. It peeps a tiny sound. Sabre pulls her hand back while it nibbles at the edge of its egg until it has broken enough free to clumsily spill onto the edges of the nest. It waddles close, fluffing up damp, downy feathers as it noses under her hand once more.

Set free the creature built up from bones and let it swim; watch the ink work walk out the door with its patron, living on skin. Holding tightly will stifle the creation. They both agree on this.

Give me your hand. Give me your aether.

In the crucible of a fight, umbral and umbral amplify one another. So long have they pulled at each end, the rope in their center fraying. Foolish. Together, there is an outpouring, a bottle spilling over table's edge, a high tide surging. Battle makes a different sort. They sweep through like a tide, a pen imprinting a page; once dried, the ground will remember their tread and their message. Remember.

Do not come closer.

The lines are just the same on the body. I could make you according to that darkness. We could remake ourselves in your image.

What do you see?

Sabre's brow furrows. Mnemosyne has spent little time at all on these lands, and most of it has been within Sabre's reach. Mnemosyne sees this confusion and smiles at it in that way that reminds Sabre some of her teeth are pointed.

"Have you so little trust in me?" Mnemosyne says. "We're not far now. Tread a little longer in my footsteps and I'll lead you somewhere lovely."

—

Lovely is perhaps subjective. They stand amidst a copse of trees upon a measure of land more leveled out than the incline of their hike. The pause in movement has Sabre freezing; the sweat beneath her layers grows clammy and sticks. While the trees help some, they'll need truer shelter to pass the night with a blizzard overhead.

Mnemosyne walks the perimeter of the space until she reaches the end of her own footsteps. Satisfied in her assessment, she joins Sabre more closely to the center. Pushes her shoulder to nudge her a few steps sideways, and Sabre allows herself to be directed.

Mnemosyne sweeps an arm out to the side, and the snow slides away with it. Beneath the blanket, as if it has been there the whole time, a burning hearth emerges. A brilliant fire already burns within it, brightening the clearing and chasing immediate warmth into the area. The wall around it stretches up just above Mnemosyne's head before it breaks away; it joins to a corner at ninety degrees to block the worst of the wind, though the damage looks not unlike what many structures in the Brume resembled after a dragon attack.

"This place," Mnemosyne says, "is quite rich with aether. Surely you feel it? I cannot recall my whole palace in my current state, but a warm fire, at least, ought to keep my darling shard from losing her fingers to frostbite, don't you think?"

"You made this?" Sabre's eyes skate across the portion of the wall. The brick around it is carved with little patterns; the mortar beneath is chosen in a color to compliment the brick. The hearth itself is inlaid with beautiful ironwork depicting twisting undersea life. She knows instantly this was not a split-second creation. The detail is that of a painting rendered to realism.

"I did. Down to the bricks." Mnemosyne sighs. The firelight turns her pale hair golden. "It was one of my greatest creations. A pity most of it was lost when you dragged night back to the First."

Sabre's mind spins. Creation, she knows, is the pride of many ancients. She does not know the expanse of Mnemosyne's castle, but if it anything like the rest of her, it must have been the extravagant kind she'd need a whole wall to depict in mural.

"Why was it lost?" Sabre asks, to clarify the rest.

"You've an affinity for dark-aspected aether, do you not? You do, because I do," Mnemosyne says. "I built a kindgom upon such Darkness. I'll be satisfied if you prostrate yourself appropriately."

"I don't suppose her highness has a rug to sit upon?" Sabre says. Mnemosyne's laugh is vicious.

"Oh, you are cold, you demanding thing." Her hand waves again, and a set of armchairs in rosy pink velvet sweep into the space as if carried from the wind. "You'll lend me your power if you want blankets."

They pull the armchairs right up close to the hearth. The blizzard still sings above them, but this strange pocket Mnemosyne has created in the clearing feels far milder.

After a while, in the lulling glow of the fire and the constant rush of the wind, Sabre raises her voice enough to say, "How much of my aether would it take to see the whole thing?"

Duty is duty is duty, and she finds her enjoyments within it. There is plenty of opportunity for her own endeavors. But the joy comes from being at Eury's side. From their joined hands as she pulls them along; from the perfectly cool waves she invites them into; from the perfect place back-to-back beneath evening stars.

So it goes that when her duty to the star tries to demand of her beyond what she would ever condone, she must make a safe place that can never be touched. For her. For them. She works her castle from the inside out to fortify it against any magick and catastrophe she can fathom. She fathoms many, and reinforces the walls, improves the hiding place, and stokes all the key points with her aether. It is a labor of weeks, months, as the rest of the world degrades, hers does not have to.

Until it does.

No one is ready for the moment the star fractures. She still feels she should have been. When she senses it, she throws herself into the golden light of their best spell to search for them. Be in because they have gone so far in their own searches, or because the aethercurrents are so badly disrupted—regardless. She does not find them.

Nearly too late she throws herself into the shadowy gate of her palace. Her bones jar with the force of her sprinting. As the unmaking of the star rocks her castle like storm winds looking to pry her from her home, she takes a breath and dives into the pool.

These waters are so imbued with her aether she does not dissolve, but it is a near thing. She is seldom aware. When she is, when she permits herself, she fixes their face in her mind.

"Sabre? Ready to go?"

"Of course," she says, her eyes lingering in the mirror as she turns away. She used to see little in one, averting her eyes to miss the precise shape of the colors. She still does not understand the picture as she does when looking at another, but what she does see—the flash of red in her hair, the reflective blue piping on the jacket—speaks of well-placed detail. She smiles, at that.

—

Eutrope is in the hospital garden—or what passes for a garden in Solution Nine. A very manicured square of turf with a few trees has been partitioned in the middle of the bench-lined space. One of these benches seats the heavyweight contender in her own branded sweatsuit, her hair swept back into a messy bun. Her sneakers look new.

"I'm leaving an a few days," says Sabre, when they've offered the slightly-stilted pleasantries of two who are barely acquainted, "I invited your sisters to come with me—to the Doman countryside. The invitation extends to you."

Eutrope folds her arms. "You think I can travel like this?"

"Can you? Can Wicked Thunder not choose when she takes a reprieve from the hospital? Yaana said you were done with treatments for the next few months."

"I don't even know anything about Doma," says Eutrope.

But only nearly. Yaana's aether is always bold, just as her feelings roll cleanly from her shoulders. It's not just the presence of it that attracts attention, but the way it's choppy like a paper crushed into a ball.

"Yaana?" Sabre calls. At her side, her brother spots her, too, and waves. They've not met properly, but he knows her from stories, and she, likewise.

Yaana hesitates before walking over, which is the bigger indicator something is wrong. As she approaches, she wipes her eyes quickly, but the shine left is obvious. "Hi, Sabre. This your brother?"

"This is Touya," she says, nodding. "Touya, Yaana. Brother—she likes the one in the purple can from the machine third on the left, just there. Would you…?"

Touya smiles with ease and understanding. "Of course. Here, you keep these." He passes over the bubbles, then ruffles her hair on his exit.

"Come, sit," Sabre says. "It's good soap. The bubbles hold a little while before they pop."

Yaana comes to sit beside her, and as Sabre dips the soap and blows a pearl string of bubbles, Yaana is most certainly crying again. Asking prematurely can end in worse disaster, so Sabre keeps to her task.

"The lights from all the displays cast such lovely colors on them," Sabre says on the next round. "You could nearly see your reflection."

Yaana laughs a little. "Keep some for Neyuni. She'd love them."

Her brother comes back with Yaana's preferred drink. She and Touya have not always known how to work in tandem with one another, but she knows they each have their ways in caring for another. He sits easily at Yaana's other side and talks with Sabre about the bubbles until Yaana is able to sip her drink and her tears lessen. As she regains her composure, the story falls from her lips.

"Eutrope isn't getting better," Yaana says miserably. "I went to see her today and we got into a big fight. The first few days it was easy since I was just happy she was alive. Now all that's worn off and she's frustrated and everything I say is wrong."

Sabre knows Eutrope little, but it seems each time, she has appeared truculent and defensive. She had the grace to offer apology for hunting after Sabre's soul the last time they met, but was spirited away before anything else.

Perhaps Alisaie might offer insight, or even Alphinaud or Y'shtola. These things will take time, however, and the twins are due to depart Tural sooner than later.

"How poor is her condition?" Touya asks. He's the only one alive who could ask it so courteously.

Yaana shakes her head. "I don't know. She's not—not dying—but she's weaker."

"Could she travel?"

"I…don't know. Why do you ask?"

"I live very near to a natural hot spring," Touya says, "and my home is a mountain village with fresh air and water abundant. I imagine…it may be hard for your sister to heal in a place that has caused her so much pain."

Yaana's eyes widen with comprehension. Twelve bless her brother—he had offered aloud the sort of understanding Sabre usually only uncovers through sketching.

"We couldn't impose," Yaana says.

"On the contrary; hosting visitors is a great joy of mine."

"I—she might say no to me," Yaana says.

"I'll ask her." Sabre's voice already brooks no room for argument, steady as her steel.

"It doesn't have the give like the ones in the gym," she's saying. A thread of a whine ties up her voice. Annoyance, perhaps, but Touya worries she's hurt herself.

"Your follow-through is enough to knock a man out," he says. "Many lose their drive, consciously or not, at the end of a swing."

Touya touches her shoulder for a moment to settle her frenetic energy. He examines the gouge in the straw where her fist disappears, then the angle. He has to crowd her a little to get close enough to start picking away at the twin and the straw, widening the gap. She doesn't seem to mind the closeness, another skill no doubt learned through practice and the feedback of another.

"I'm just used to the feral soul," Yaana says.

"I imagine it would change your perspective, when one harbors enough energy to become all but a primal," Touya says. "Better I learn that now, rather than during a spar."

"I wouldn't have punched through you," Yaana says with confidence. "Your sister would kill me."

He still cannot quite believe the vision of his sister as an impassive arbiter, yet she herself has said some the same. It twists something within him he does not like. The gentle young girl he knows from childhood was capable, yes, but unsuited for violence. So it goes, he supposes, that the young man he'd been was just as ill-equipped. Perhaps it was inevitable that they be molded such. If it had not been Garlean occupation, if it had not been separation—the world was awash in war and trial when they were young. Such inevitability does not bring him comfort.

He has certainly made a further mess of the dummy while lost in his thoughts. His fingers are dry from the stray and red at the tips.

"Here, try now," Touya says. Straw enough to make a bird's nest litters the ground at their feet.

Yaana's tug is experimental this time, but her face brightens. Another pull and her hand comes free, though not without a hiss; tiny little scratches left their parting favors on the back of her arm and hand. She's wearing wraps, but only to the wrist. She closes and opens her fingers, the motion cautious in a way her swing certainly wasn't.

"Let's take a look at your hand," Touya says, "before both your sister and mine turn their wrath upon me."

It makes Yaana laugh, her bright green eyes shining. She goes with him easily to the sidelines where he motions for her to have a seat on the deck of the supply building.

She lets Touya unwrap her hand, then frown at her hand. Amidst the calluses, amidst the little imperfections that speak of how long she's been working at this, her skin is darkened with something suspiciously like bruising as he unwinds the wraps.

"Holding back didn't cut it in the ring," Yaana says. A touch of defensiveness burdens her voice. "Or out of it, according to my sister."

Despite himself, Touya nods. "War demanded the same. I understand. Mine used to look like this often. It was a badge of pride, at the time. Now I get scolded."

He's aware of Yaana's eyes on his face, aware of a deeper thought churning in her mind. She may come from a different land, but according to his sister, she knew her share of hardships. He wonders if these feral souls, though entrenched in entertainment as they were supposed to be, provided their own manner of rebellion. He wonders, briefly, if that leader ever feared an army enlivened so powerfully.

"I hope you're not trying to tell me to hold back," she says, her voice muted.

"No," Touya says, "that will only make you miserable. What you need is to learn redirection." He clears his throat—he's not here to lecture her, yet the words came easily. "So I've been told."

"Oh, and what are you hiding under your knuckle wraps, then?" Yaana says.

He decides to oblige her; they are not so different. His hands are knobbly, a few fingers less aligned in their joints than they used to be, with a crosshatch of scarring that makes his hands look rendered in his sister's charcoal style. Yaana is scarred less, but the shape of her hands belies just as much wear.

"I could rely on precious little," Touya says. "But on myself, I could always depend."

Her door slides open with a whisper; when she steps into the hallway, she's greeted by the faint scent of clove oil; the sense someone else is up. Stepping into the sitting room reveals a lit lantern at the far end, her brother's silhouette hunched over what must be a blade, hard at work.

She holds her position. His concentration precludes his noticing of her, and for a moment, she feels a child again, watching her brother from the doorway, unable to bring herself to announce her presence.

That only brought her regret, last time, so she takes a step. In her softest voice, she says, "What blade is that?"

Her brother's shoulders stiffen. He looks up, the gleam in his pale gold eyes reflecting from her own. The lantern light makes them molten. "Sorry. I didn't think I'd wake you."

"I was still up." Her feet are silent over the hardwood, then the tatami. She sits down in the traditional way with folded knees and patient hands. Her brother angles the blade to catch the light just as it caught his eyes; the wave of the hamon is severe—beautiful—but the most wicked edge she's seen. Oboro had warned her, once, that a blade too sharpened was given to weakness.

"Here." Touya lifts a hand for the scabbard, passing it over to her. She takes the laquered surface carefully in both hands, eyes drawn immediately to the gold-painted imagery sealed within it. What appeared black at a distance is instead the blue of a pre-dawn sky; a lighter, paler blue and white make up the wrapped cords around it.

"Hien had this made for me after the conflict," Touya says. "I told him it was far too extravagant, but he insisted I have it."

It's not the one he displays in the main room of the house. She's stolen glances at that one. Assumed, based on the wear, it was the blade he carried into battle. This one seems made for ceremony, yet her brother has honed it as if he is to be executioner. Sabre sets it down gently, trying to rub the smudge of her fingerprint away with a sleeve.

"And what creature in the garden has earned your ire that you would prepare it thus?" Sabre says.

Her brother smiles briefly, but she's losing his gaze to the blade again. "I never wanted to hold one again. I don't know how you do it."

The distance of his voice lets her in a little. He's blue with memory, dipping his fingers into it to see if it's as warm as he remembers. She was very different, then, but she lost her diffidence in gradual strokes. He never saw the journey, just the end result.

"I'm more ruthless, I suppose," she says. She means it as fact. Reflection. Something Fray has told her wryly, with all the backing of encouragement. For someone as reticent as she'd been, a little ruthlessness hadn't gone awry. It bristles a little, sure, but as blades are put to fire before the quenching, so too did her spirit need the temperance. But Touya's spirit goes shocking white like it's been bleached.

"No, that's not what I meant," he says, voice choked. "That's not what I meant at all. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have implied something so awful."

Wind shakes the house. If Fray were still alive, they'd need to come inside. She senses them near the door. Of course they want to hear this.

"Touya…" Sabre says.

"I wish you didn't have to be," he says. "I wish I'd never stayed behind. Then you wouldn't have had to change yourself."

Her breath catches. There is something familiar about the way he hunches over his blade. Not familial. Like a mirror. Like she must have looked slumped in the Brume, crying next to a corpse. She doubts the handle of the blade will do as much for him as the stone that warmed her palm. The careful folds of his clothing are loose, open and chaotic. His hair is getting in his eyes.

"Can I take that?" she says. He passes it wordlessly, and with perfect etiquette. Her dear brother. She may have been nervous, small and shy, but his has always been the gentler spirit. She takes the blade and sheathes it; he doesn't need to know how satisfying she finds the slide of metal into its resting place. How she feels the artistry in it, when he clearly remains snagged on the bloodshed it represents.

For their gratefulness to have one another back, openness between them is another matter. It is so painful, she knows, to speak of anything beyond the present and the future. He still has open wounds where their adolescence is concerned, where the duty he appointed to himself led to disaster. He was only a child, though he thought himself a man grown. A child makes mistakes. His, unfortunately, cost more than a bruise and a lecture.

The disaster would have happened regardless, she thinks, but Touya has no reason to believe this. It would probably make things worse.

Sabre gets up a step, but doesn't leave. She sits down once more at his back, gently resting against his. She lays the blade across her crossed legs like a bridge as if she means to keep watch. This puts her closer to Fray.

"The change was right," she says. " To remain as I had been would have been like erasing on the page until it tore. Better to turn it, instead."

"Don't say that just for my sake."

"I'm claiming it for my own," she says. Her words come out as expert as the painting in the lacquer and the balance of the blade. By contrast, her brother may as well be clasping the blade in his palm every time he sinks into these thoughts, bleeding himself as if it will improve the shine.

"You have every right to be angry," says her brother.

"I was. But you weren't there for it," she says. He hunches further, so she drops her head back until it rests against his spine.

She rarely looks at her brother long enough to see the essence beneath him. Perhaps it's unfair to look while his back is turned, but she wants to know.

Summer grass. Open skies. The sound of a saw, of hammer and nail, of feet pounding in unison. A repaired beam that splits again. The grip and grit of tar to fill it in again; a prayer that it hold steady. A blade that won't break in the same way, no matter how he wishes. Why is it only the gentle things fracture?

"You have an ink brush?" she asks.

The back of his neck is the most exposed part of him, and perhaps he feels that's fitting. He wallows like he wishes to be struck down, so she sees her intuition is right. She yanks at his collar a little. Her hand shakes a fraction. She's never offered something like this to him, but she starts drawing.

She's not listening. Yaana has no idea how a woman who knows to turn at the rustle of a shadow can be so out of it. She does this with Sugar Riot's graffiti, too, made them late on more than one occasion. She says a picture on the tomephone isn't good enough to study.

Sabre scans down the row with a finger, pausing thoughtfully on the third row towards the center. The clink of coins passes over her fingers so deftly Yaana didn't even see her take her purse out. The button she presses blinks twice in response, the machine whirring to life to spiral out her drink.

Yaana wanders over as Sabre crouches down to retrieve it out of the bottom of the machine. Sabre holds it in both hands, rotating it slowly, so Yaana drops her chin over her friend's shoulder.

"What'd you get?"

"Agua de pe-piña," says Sabre, turning until the lettering comes into view. Her accent comes on a little, drawing the vowels wrong to Yaana's ears, but what must be right to her own.

"Oh, sour. Maybe you'll like this one."

"Maybe." The can depicts a smiling man with waves of dark hair in an apron patterned with limes and cucumber slices; he holds a proper glass of the drink. When she cracks the top, no fizz buzzes out. She sips it thoughtfully, and at least her expression doesn't immediately crumple. She's looking at the can again, so Yaana takes moment to get her own drink.

"What sort of stuff d'you normally drink?" Yaana says.

"Whatever I'm offered." A pause. Then: "At home, tea. Barley, green. Sake, sometimes—a rice wine."

"Bitter," Yaana says, with a wrinkle of her own nose. She fishes her Yyasulani Fizz out of the machine and stands back up. "This isn't your first language, right?"

"It's not." She's holding the can above her eye line, peering at a design stamped on the underside of it.

"Did you study at the Studium, like Koana? I heard that's not uncommon."

Sabre shakes her head. "I had to learn the language just as you had to learn to fight," she says after a long moment. Her fingers pinch the metal tab on the top of her drink and wiggle until the metal creases and breaks free. "To do otherwise would have been disastrous."

Sabre's the last thing from an open book, but it's easy to see Yaana found a touchy subject. Her friend's face closes off, her eyes seem to dull, and her voice slides from quiet thoughtfulness into a distant monotone. Yaana takes a few gulps of her own drink, the carbonation chastising her.

"You told me once," Sabre says, "that it looked easy for me to step into the ring. I was flattered you thought so. No step of my journey has been, though I confess the Arcadion has been far from the most harrowing."

Fighting an without a regulator against a parade of feral souls, and she says things like this. Yaana's seen first hand the grace she carries herself with and the steady confidence that backs her. Seen the huge shadows that rise like the ocean at a gesture of her fingers, not to mention the blade that will steal in close anyway. Yaana's about to say as much, but she recalls another evening, instead.

"That night I found you when the power was out," Yaana says. "How did that rank?"

There is an unmistakable chill in her voice now, fog rolling in. "Higher than I wanted."

They didn't speak about the incident after the fact. They're not so different in age, but all of a sudden she feels out of her depth. "What…happened after that?"

"It was taken care of." Sabre sighs, leaning back against the vending machine. Her drink hangs casually from her finger as she folds her arms.

Not for the first time, Yaana is reminded that beneath the gaudy neon veneer, Solution Nine was raised up by a war monger. That they only just resolved the Arcadion's corruption.

Sabre sighs. She touches the ends of her hair, the red gleaming through. She came back with the underside dyed. Perfect for a champion match, Yaana had thought. She still wears the jacket with the reflective piping when she's here, the one Yaana helped her pick out. She's been a good friend. So why does Yaana feel, suddenly, she's looking at a stranger?

Taken care of. She said something like that to Tyrant, too, when he told her not to bloody her hands. Her shadows had moved far, far faster than his scythe could hope to, and showed a seasoned man his own naivety.

Yaana laughs out of awkwardness. "How'd I convince you to help me out, anyway?"

"Yaana." Sabre says. Her voice is still low, but the tone has changed again. Far-off, but no longer like she's upset. "It was important to me. Your worry for your sister was more than enough. And your ire. I've known both, too."

"Your brother drive you crazy too?"

"Less, now. But neither did I forgive him overnight."

And how she lands on that needling thought in the back of Yaana's mind, she'll never know, but it's uncanny.

"So please," Sabre says, "don't make an image of me like the one that played on the screens."

Yaana nods slowly. A long moment stretches between them, but then she says, with a bit of a taunt, "You didn't finish your drink."

The grimace on her face chases away some of the storm. She pulls up the can to look at it with apology. "…I know."

Yaana takes the opportunity to swipe it from her; with her free hand, she grabs one of Sabre's. "Come on," she says. "The snacks are on the other side of the courtyard."

"Halmarut," Mnemosyne calls, her voice long and lazy. "If you get knocked over by a wave, you'll be dragged out. This current is dreadful."

"Then I won't be knocked over," replies Halmarut over her shoulder. She did not bother to tie her hair, and her umbrella is nowhere in sight; her red hair is plastered to her face and back. It matters little, since she's waded nearly to the hip into the ocean. In one hand, she grasps several lengths of seaweed. The bag at her hip is similarly stuffed with the flora of the coastline. "How far do I have to go for coral?"

"Farther than I'd let you," Mnemosyne replies. "And as I told you—coral 'tis not a plant!"

"But it looks like one, and I'd surely love to study it!"

They have to yell to hear one another; truly the sky is incensed this day, lashing down with all the might it can muster. Then, a crack of lightning—no, the strike of water upon rock, so sudden and sharp it shakes the earth, and she sees Halmarut stumble.

Those waves are getting high. The tide laps at her feet, where before she had been standing at a distance to the ocean. She will not hear the end of it if Halmarut is swept out to sea, so Mnemosyne trots into the water, steps adjusting for the greedy drag of the waves, until she can grab her companion by the arm.

"We have outstayed our welcome," Mnemosyne says, tugging on Halmarut. The wind, in turn, yanks violently on her umbrella, and Mnemosyne grimaces in keeping hold of it. Another wave surges towards them, this one enough to make even Mnemosyne brace. Her fingers are nearly numb grasping onto Halmarut while the water strike her lower back.

"Hold on, hold on—I dropped something—"

"It's already gone! You'll not find—"

This wave crashes overhead. Mnemosyne holds her breath, gasps when the wave finishes its arc, and staggers. The umbrella tears from her hands only to bang against the back of her ankles moments later.

"We're going," Mnemosyne says, bracing her legs.

"All right, all right—"

The ocean heaves. Mnemosyne fumbles for Halmarut's hand for better leverage, pulling her along—

It is not the ocean they have tread upon. The shape rises darkly from the waves, wider than a building in Amaurot's business district, water rolling from its scales, rain chasing ocean droplets. The long, sharp jaw is more draconic than anything else. Two bright eyes burn at the sides of its head, green like some of the strange plants Halmarut said could be found at certain depths. Still, higher it rises; enough water sloughs from it to drown a settlement. At Mnemosyne's feet, the water flees with fervor. Her feet sink a little into the sand with the strength of her brace.

"Look—at that!" Mnemosyne says, and there is more wonder in her voice than fear.

"Heaven and earth," Halmarut says, her voice properly aghast. "What manner of creature—?"

"An incredible beast! The jaw alone could snap up a whole ship! How far the length of its body must run—do you think it serpentine? Or perhaps limbed?"

Truly glorious! A laugh of fascination rings from Mnemosyne, her attention glittering. Rare is a creature such as this—it must reign from the true depths of the water. Its scales are wrought with unique curvature, like a creator carved it with the care of marble. Those eyes, too: unearthly, captivating. Why has it risen to greet them? Is it intelligent? Is it starved?

"Mnemosyne!" Halmarut has grabbed onto her arm. She tugs, shakes, and a bit of the seaweed she was grasping flaps coldly against Mnemosyne's neck. "If I am not allowed to look for coral, you certainly aren't going out to sea with that thing!"

"I am just committing its shape to memory before we—"

That jaw snaps open with a roar profoundly draconic. Then, gracefully, lowers its head until the lower jaw is submerged. What sort of behavior…?

Water rushes towards it. Towards that maw.

Oh. Oh my.

"Run," Mnemosyne says. "Run, run —let's go, hurry now!"

The water tries to trip them as they sprint in retreat. All of those waves that pushed the tide out must be part of its hunting behavior—there are several yalms yet they must recross, and each is perilous as a rope meant to trip them.

And Halmarut is far less adept at running on sand amidst the tide as Mnemosyne, and there is not time to think when she stumbles. Mnemosyne holds fast to her hand, a yelp slipping from her throat, and she must test this new hypothesis of hers now before they are swallowed.

Think of a place. All this water—the fountain in the courtyard behind Emet-Selch's apartment. She knows it well. Had studied it from every angle. Could draw it, recreate it perfectly, down to the temperature at the time of day. Hold it in her mind—

Mnemosyne's aether flashes a rare gold, and she and Halmarut are gone from the sea.

They can't land comfortable in the fountain. Halmarut sloshes over the side, falling into the grass, while Mnemosyne is left to avoid knocking over the lovely carving of the catfish spitting water from the center.

"Oh, no," Halmarut says. "I got freshwater on the samples. Oh, dear…"

Mnemosyne sits down in the fountain with laughter bubbling up again. She may have had to abandon the specimen, but her aether trick worked! They are half a world away in a blink! They have not been devoured.

"Azem! What on earth are you doing?"

A flash of lightning reveals a shadow in his peripheral. He steels himself and does not look at it. All the guesses at who he might see, and none of them he wants to see any clearer than his own reflection. He sees them, sometimes, in an amalgamation of shadows in his home at night, or in the moments tearing from sleep to waking. Another flash brings it closer—

"Oi." The voice does not belong to Asahi sas Brutus, but the suddenness makes his breath catch anyway. "You lose something out here?"

Touya looks up from his crouch to find his sister's friend Yaana, her silhouette practically bursting from the muddle of the rain. All her clothes are brighter than any flower or bird nature has to offer, and she holds an umbrella that throws even the dim light around like the iridescent shell of a beetle. She throws off the afterimage of worse shadows with ease, and Touya's heart slows.

"Oh, no. Just my concentration, it seems," Touya says. He's pleased his voice comes out pleasant, even after his musings.

Yaana walks up, her shoes no doubt going to soak through, but stands at the edge of the puddle with him. It takes a moment for her to make sure she doesn't hit her umbrella into his.

"This is nicer than Yyasulani," she says. "The rain falls so hard you can't even see your feet."

She holds up a hand, claws bared, making a face down at the puddle. She grins too widely to be contemplating scars or confronting herself. She makes herself laugh, and Touya finds himself smiling in turn. She takes her tomephone from her pocket, a more complex model than even the one his sister has, and aims it at the puddle. When she pulls it up again, she holds it for Touya to see. The rendering is even more smeared captured in the tiny mind's eye of the device, Touya's own color indistinguishable from the water, Yaana's jacket the only landmark.

"Damn, that didn't work," she says. Her thumb skates over a button, and suddenly Touya is looking at a tiny image of himself and Yaana as if in a mirror. "All right. C'mere—I'll send this to your sister so she can stop worrying."

Touya blinks at the tiny display. "She was worried?"

"I think so. It's hard to tell with her. Here, smile!"

Yaana grins again, practiced; Touya laughs with surprise, his expression more surprised than joyful, but she laughs too and snaps the picture.

"I only went for a walk," Touya says in his own defense.

"Before the sun even rose, in the rain?" She shrugs, navigating quick menus into the message thread marked with his sister's moniker. "Eutrope used to do laps on the treadmill late a night when things got to her. We really are thankful you let us come to stay—sorry if it's a lot of guests."

Touya pauses blankly before realizing she has come to a conclusion that does not exist. "Having the three of you stay, if anything, has eased my hours," Touya says. "The reason I came out this morning…isn't related."

"Would you fancy that," Yaana says. "I thought you'd be like Sabre, getting all tired after two or three people. I won't feel bad, then. Well, Mr. Sociable, if that's the case, I've been wanting to spar you for days."

"You have?"

"Mhmm. Sabre got me good a few times in the ring and credited you for her nasty left hook. Besides, you look like you could've used a few more minutes moping when I showed up."

I wasn't moping," he says, with greater fire.

"Course not. Just like my sister wasn't."

Sabre ties up her hair; the ends skim the back of her neck like it used to when she kept it cropped. She sheds any clothing on her torso and drapes it over the corner hook. Bare skin becomes a mundanity here, and she doesn't spare hers a second thought. In the angled mirror, the neon lights turn her into a mural of blended colors. It's so strange to see herself painted this way, when her self-portraits are always inks and charcoals, but that is why she came to her mentor in the first place. The bias of her own self has no place in permanence on her skin.

Before they closed the shop, Seiji started the aethercrystal space heater in the corner; the temperature isn't bad. She lingers by it until Seiji comes to join her, his white clothing bouncing colored shadows off every crease. He's become a two-tone rendering in this light, dynamic and strange. Just as shadow gathers around her when she works, colors come to bask in Seiji's presence when he is ready to put ink to skin.

"You don't want a hint?" he asks her with a grin. He balances his tray of ink, each tiny pot queued up to make a mosaic that only he knows the true composition of. Little neon honeycombs.

"No," Sabre says. "You're bad at hints. You give away the surprise."

The Light tried to ruin the artwork he's laid into her skin along with her body. As her hair grew out of the white shock; as her scars laid more calmly against her skin; the last remaining piece became the riot of blown out tattooing that once had been a gathering of branches. Lightning-struck, now, instead. She does not care if he sloughs them off to start anew or reforms them, only that it is her mentor that brings out what her body wishes to show.

"Whatever you say, sis," Seiji says. He balances on a stool that seems too small for his frame, but he's never once tipped it. "Get comfy. It's gonna be a while."

He starts on her right side where everything is worse. This is the only instruction she gave. The injury Zenos plagued her shoulder with seemed prelude to what she later endured atop Mt. Gulg, and after. There is regular scarring there along with the displaced ink, and it will likely ache by the end of the night. Better to render there, first.

Seiji's needle kneads like the razor-sharp paws of a contented cat. It has been so long since she last felt the prick of ink into her own skin.

She has endured so much; this small endurance, this parade of ink, should barely be enough to make her adrenaline rise. The hum of the aetheric heater lulls her just as the pinpricks do. She closes her eyes when they sting: of all the things she has endured, this is the only one she has chosen herself, and to make the choice at all moves something within her.

It is not slumber but trance she falls into. This familiar place pulls her own power from her, the shadows pooling on the floor like heavy mist. She feels them like an alley cat, comforting and watchful. The shop could fall away through the void. The faint scent of copper joins the ink and sweat. Every once in a while, Seiji nudges her into a different position: lift and arm; turn a shoulder; the sharpness of her ribs nearly pulls her back to herself, but the dull vibration at her bicep lulls her again. The chair was expertly crafted by an artisan that owed Seiji a favor, and she feels as good as weightless no matter how long the session seems to stretch.

In one of the longer lulls in sensation, she blinks to find Seiji in the center of the room, his own shirt now tied about his waist, as he chugs a glass of water. He could be an advert on a Solution Nine billboard, the planes of his musculature wrought by contrasting pink and blue light; the trail of condensation that slips through his fingers, follows the ridge of the vein on the back of his hand, and slides down the inside of his arm. If she remembers later, she'll sketch it out.

Time passes again. Her skin has stopped localizing the discomfort. Every inch of her exposed self seems alight like a sunburn. She feels as weak, she realizes, as if she took one on, too. This time, she does sleep.

A shift in the light wakes her. Gone are the neons, and instead, a crack of true daylight sneaks in past the edge of the curtains.

"Rise and shine," Seiji says. His voice is rough, but triumph gleams through. "You wanna see, right?"

She does. He helps her sit, makes her drink some water and nibble at a piece of jerky before he helps her to her feet. Once she's in front of the mirror, he opens the curtains.

Daylight blows out the image before her eyes settle into it. She finds familiar lines first, sees that Seiji has followed some of the most established branches and replanted them where they belong at the key junctions of her shoulders and torso. There are blossoms in some places, now, where before had been bare branch. He was uncharacteristically reserved in the colors he chose to use, but that simply speaks in how well he knows her taste. A well-placed carmine flower blossoms between two ribs; a lighter pink at her shoulder, caressing one of the worse scars. The petals are delicate; in other places, they are rendered like folded paper. Some of her harsher scars seemed well-given to origami, a different sort of artistry flowing along with the brushwork.

It will take her days to catalogue every detail, but she knows immediately he's done expert work.

"This is a new style," she says reverently.

"Well," he says, "I had to make sure it was good enough for you. I saw what you were sendin' your brother as sketches. Goddamn sis, you'd put me out of work if you weren't on sabbatical."

She has to sit, then. Her body is still settling with the aether and ink. After wrapping up the artwork to set, Seiji drops a blanket in her lap and tosses her one of his shirts, loose and light, to wear.