fics by aester

The person staring back at him from the mirror has his cheekbones, his bright purple hair, and his burgundy eyes. They have the long-healed scar on one of his hands from the last time he attempted to carve something out of wood and the still-healing burn on the other hand from when he tried to make eggs the other day and hot oil sprang out of the pan onto his palm. Their hair is braided back in an intricate style that he decidedly does not style his in and their face has been subtly powdered and contoured to polish it into a sharp-eyed weapon, soft as rose petals. Rivendellian gold sparkles from their ears and their neck and their wrists and their fingers, and their formal silks are carefully dyed the violet-silver of their chosen deity. The only thing Xornoth recognizes is their dark canvas pants.

Xornoth scowls. They scowl back.

“Bitch,” he says at them. Their lips curl to spit the word simultaneously.

“That’s not very nice.” Xornoth watches the figure of his brother come up from behind the false version of himself in the mirror. In stark contrast, Scott looks far too at ease with the ceremonial robes he wears, gold dripping from his body and doing more for his modesty than the cyan-white silks he wears.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Xornoth grumbles.

“You talked yourself into it,” Scott corrects, straightening out the fabric on Xornoth’s shoulders. “I’m surprised you were able to hold out for this long, honestly.”

“A century and a half of service to this wretched kingdom, and yet I’m still being dressed like a doll and paraded in front of the very rulers I’ve fought to be here.” Xornoth glares down his reflection and fantasizes about tearing his hands through his hair, sending jeweled hair pins flying across the room, and he imagines ripping these robes off and clawing the delicate gold that rests on him and disintegrating it all with a single thought—

He doesn’t do any of this. He just gives himself one last baleful look, awkwardly dusts off the robes that Scott is still artfully arranging on him, and turns away.

“If I stand here one more second,” he declares, “I think I’ll set this palace on fire.”

Scott has the audacity to laugh at that. “We wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

 •♚•

 Xornoth of Rivendell is the firstborn of his mother. He was born as a spring storm subsided, and five minutes later he was joined by his brother Ascorith. When his hair colored, he gave his claim to the throne to his twin and threw himself into training with the castle guard. While Scott’s tutors drilled him in the native languages used by Empires across the lands, Xornoth was being nearly run through by enthusiastic knights who would later brag about how any who tried to attack their princex would find themselves bleeding out in the dirt. At their maturity, Scott was declared Crown Prince of Rivendell and Xornoth was declared Commander of its forces. Scott prayed to Aeor for guidance in his diplomacy, and Xornoth sought out Exor for his overwhelming force and dominance on the battlefield. For more than a century, their kingdom spoke proudly of its twin kings, the Dark Stag and Ice King of Rivendell, of how they balanced each other out perfectly, of how the kingdom was stronger for it.

And now, that same kingdom excitedly cracked the foundation of that strength and dressed itself up to serve Xornoth on a serving platter to some other Empire.

“Stop whining,” Scott says.

“I didn’t say anything,” Xornoth bites back.

“You didn’t have to; I can practically read your mind.” Scott stops walking, and after a couple of confused steps, Xornoth turns to look back at him.

For the first time in a while, the confidence that usually bleeds from Scott slows to uncertainty. “Xornoth, we don’t actually have to do this,” he says. “We can work through whatever political quagmire calling this off so abruptly will cause, but Rivendell isn’t more important than you are.”

“Where was all of this a week ago?” Xornoth asks.

Scott shakes his head slightly while slowly taking the last few steps that would bring them next to each other. “Honestly, I didn’t think you hated the idea this much. Stupid of me, I know, but I thought you were playing it up just to complain.”

Reluctantly, Xornoth could understand. He would be the type to do something like that. He shrugs. “It just feels stupid to give up what makes us so powerful like this. It feels like trading our stability for dependence on another Empire.”

Scott looks at him strangely. “Xornoth, tell me the truth. Do you think my marriage to Jimmy weakens us?”

Xornoth can see where this is going. “No,” he grumbles, rolling his eyes.

“Does my marriage to Jimmy mean I put the Codlands before Rivendell in any political maneuvering?”

Xornoth tries not to look too grumpy. “No.”

Scott doesn’t look as smug at this admittance as Xornoth would have thought he’d be. “So why would your being married do anything worse?”

Xornoth picks at one of the golden chains around his neck. “It just feels wrong,” he says. “I’ve given so much of myself to Rivendell. I can’t imagine giving as much for somewhere else.”

“You’ll always be of Rivendell,” Scott says firmly. “You don’t have to do this ‘for Rivendell’ if you’re going to be unhappy.”

“Everything I’ve ever done is for our kingdom, Scott,” Xornoth says, “even being sold off to some ruler with a superiority complex.” They stand in front of the doors to the grand ballroom.

Scott sighs. “If you’re sure.” 

He lifts his hands to the doors, and with one last second of hesitation, he pushes them open.

 •♚•

 It takes Xornoth half an hour to feel like his smile is beginning to peel off.

“You look like a plucked goose,” the ruler of the Grimlands tells him. He looks ruffled, his hair all flyaways and his face covered in a thin layer of redstone powder except for two perfect ovals around his eyes. His red tie is crooked, the blazer thrown over his button-up open and its pockets filled with something that ruins its silhouette. He’s wearing a pair of chunky leather boots that Xornoth deeply envies. 

“Be nice,” Scott admonishes from behind a glass of wine. “They look far better than you would even if you’d actually cleaned up for once.”

“He’s got you there, fWhip,” the woman beside him says. She’s got matching red hair, though hers is less vibrant (perhaps because it isn’t filled with redstone), and she’s wearing an elegant green dress and a simple purple cloak. The rulers of the twin Empires of the Grimlands and the Crystal Cliffs had run up to them almost immediately upon their entrance, deftly cutting off the more pompous looking nobles who seemed prepared to descend on them. Xornoth makes a mental note to ask Scott whether they all became friends over being twins, which sounds like a really stupid reason to make friends with someone.

“Just because you all don’t have my rugged good looks doesn’t mean you have to be this obviously jealous of me,” fWhip says, preening slightly. “I don’t need to try to look good.”

Scott turns a withering gaze over to the Archwizard of the Crystal Cliffs. “Gem, if I managed to wrestle my meathead brother into something suitable for this, you should have at least gotten yours a new suit or something.”

She gives him an equally disparaging look. “Do you think I could force this lug to do anything?”

“I’m glad you’re here,” fWhip says to Xornoth in a stage whisper. “Usually, they just team up against me.”

Xornoth doesn’t think he’s said anything outside of the occasional “yes” or “no” to him before, but he just gives fWhip an awkward nod and hums in assent.

“Stop flirting with him,” Gem says bluntly.

fWhip makes a series of unflattering sputtering sounds. “I wasn’t flirting, I was commiserating,” he says defensively.

“Sounds like someone who was flirting would say,” Gem fires back. She turns an apologetic gaze at Xornoth. “Was he flirting?”

Xornoth blinks. “Um. If he was, he was doing a piss-poor job at it.”

“Xornoth wouldn’t know flirting if it smacked them on the ass,” Scott says to Gem. He glances back at his brother. “And don’t say ‘piss’ at a formal gathering.”

“You just said ‘ass’.”

“I never said I couldn’t say ‘ass’.”

“Don’t say ‘ass’ at a formal gathering, Scott,” Gem says in a shockingly good imitation of the elven king’s bored drone.

“Fine.”

Silence settles over them as they sip on their drinks. “Aren’t you supposed to be meeting people?” Gem asks Xornoth. “If you’re supposed to be getting married for politics or whatever?”

“Hell if I know.” He ignores his brother’s shushing. “I’ve met you two, haven’t I?”

“No offense, but I’m not interested,” she deadpans.

“None taken. I’m gay.”

“Glad we’ve cleared this up.” Gem glances around the room. “I mean, if you’re going husband-searching, you’ve got a nice selection here, I guess. No one came with me from the Crystal Cliffs, but I see a few of the higher nobles from the Grimlands and Mythland, if you want to be introduced.”

“Absolutely not,” Scott cuts in. “I’m keeping Sausage far away from this one.”

“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Gem says. “Just a little ambitious, but who isn’t?”

“Ambition is fine, but I think Xornoth would set Mythland on fire if he had the slightest inkling that Sausage wanted to attack Rivendell, and that’d be too many political nightmares in one event.”

“You have to be exaggerating,” Gem says.

“I would,” Xornoth adds helpfully.

“He would,” Scott echoes.

fWhip’s eyes are sparkling— actually sparkling, as if they’re ocean waves reflecting the sunrise. Xornoth didn’t think human eyes could do that.

“We’re keeping them away from your Empire too, then,” Gem says, jabbing fWhip’s cheek. “I’m not letting another pyromaniac by that powder keg you inherited from Dad.”

He pouts.

Scott notices Xornoth’s fidgeting pick up about now and sends him off to the table of unfilling finger foods to nibble from whatever stack of cheese and fruits and crackers he’s prepared for this event. He rolls his eyes at the suggestion but still makes his way over, making stilted conversation as various strangers come up and titter over him. At one point, he stuffs an entire bunch of grapes into his mouth to avoid responding to one particularly pushy woman’s questions about his place in Rivendell’s succession. It becomes a sea of faces that he doesn’t quite absorb, relegating himself to nodding vaguely as people jabber at him and drift away.

“Vultures, the lot of them.”

Xornoth glances at the latest interloper and has to hold himself back from a double-take. The man who joined him is somehow wearing even less than he and Scott are. His outfit almost completely relies on a sheer crimson cloak to preserve his modesty, and his pants stop mid-thigh, though a string of turquoise pendants circles his waist, holding up more crimson fabric fashioned into a mockery of a light skirt that flows to his knees. Bronze pauldrons shaped into feline paws grip his shoulders, claws out, and a pair of bright scarlet parrot wings peeks out from under his cloak.

Xornoth quickly looks away before he’s caught staring at this stranger’s legs. “It’s what they’re taught to do,” he says. “Cozy up to whoever’s available and powerful.”

“Mm, I guess that’s true.” The man shifts closer, a wing twitching, and Xornoth feels a stray end of his cloak brush against his arm almost imperceptibly. He wonders if he can get away with grabbing a handful of walnuts and absolutely sprinting out of here and back to his room. “I can see why they’d be interested in you.” He pokes a cheese cube with a toothpick and carefully slides it into his mouth. Xornoth quickly looks away.

“I don’t,” Xornoth says. He ends up taking far too many crackers and backing away. The man shifts over again.

“There you are, Xornoth.” He feels his shoulders sag in relief as Gem walks up to join them. “Scott was wondering why you hadn’t come back yet.” 

“He’s been getting accosted by everyone’s courts,” the man says to her. He’s still leaning against the table. “I don’t blame them, of course. If I had any fewer manners, who knows what I’d have said?” He winks at Xornoth, who glances away to give Gem a pleading look.

“Joey, you’re scaring him,” Gem says, sounding amused. Xornoth wonders if his mortification is what’s amusing her or if she’s just used to the antics she’s seeing

The man— Joey— laughs with an abandon that would better fit the top of a tree than the ballroom that they’re currently in. “Am I?” he says, and his words resonate like a cat’s purr more than a human voice. “What a shame— and I hoped we would get along.”

Xornoth wonders if he can get away with the grape trick again.

“You can be a lot,” Gem says, sipping on a glass of wine.

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind,” Joey says, chin tipped back to look up at Xornoth (and when did he get so close that he had to look up at him?). “I can’t be the scariest thing that he’s ever met.” He winks. 

Xornoth hopes his face isn’t as red as it feels like it is.

Gem takes pity on him (finally) and draws Joey in a conversation about alliances and trade agreements and whatever else it is that rulers of nations discuss, and Xornoth is able to slink away and flee back to where Scott and fWhip chat idly amongst themselves. They’ve been joined by a few other rulers: Katherine of House Blossom, who smiles at him sleepily, and Scott’s own husband.

“Hey, Xornoth,” Katherine says, idly brushing pollen off of her shoulder. “You look frazzled.”

“Do I?” he says distractedly.

“You do,” Scott says, eyeing him critically. “Your gold is all off and your silks aren’t symmetrical anymore.” Exasperation spills from every gesture as he rearranges Xornoth’s clothes.

Xornoth lets him fuss over him for a few seconds before irritably waving him off. “Honestly, I think I’m done for today,” he says. “I’m going to get out of all of this and head down to the stables or something. Go for a ride.”

“Won’t that be seen as impolite?” Jimmy asks. He’s foregone the usual clay mask he wears, but he’s wearing the illusion of a human man with bottomless black eyes rather than his typical somewhat monstrous appearance. There’s a violently red poppy tucked into his lapel, and as ill-fitting as it is, Xornoth knows he will at best ignore anyone who points it out. “Some of the nobles here are pretty stuffy; they might kick up a fuss.”

“Let them fuss,” Scott declared, tucking his hand into the crook of Jimmy’s elbow. “They’re here for us, not the other way around. If they aren’t interesting enough to make Xornoth want to stick around and talk to them, then they don’t have a leg to stand on.” He glances at him. “Just try to make it back by sunset, I think.”

Xornoth nods to Scott gratefully before walking out of the hall, uncaring of being seen. He doesn’t bother cleaning the makeup off of his face while he pulls on a silver tunic and black surcoat, leaving the flimsy gold and silks in a pile on a chair rather than figuring out how to hang them up properly. 

He catches his reflection in the mirror as he pulls his boots on. His face looks strange, as softened as it is especially juxtaposed with his far coarser clothes, and he rubs the color off of his mouth as he heads out. It stains his hand red, but that’s a far more familiar sight so he doesn’t bear it any mind. He flings on a black cloak just in case the wind gets too biting.

Xornoth doesn’t realize he’s being followed until he’s leading his steed out of her stall and he hears a quiet gasp. He whips around to see a wide-eyed Joey, his mouth slack-jawed.

“What is that?” he asks.

It’s a reasonable question, Xornoth supposes. He runs a hand through stiff silver fur, shushing her as she shakes her head at the interruption.

“This is Calliope,” he says, his voice low so as to not startle her. “I raised her from a fawn.”

“She’s beautiful,” Joey says, cautiously stepping forward. “I think I expected her to be—”

“Darker?” Xornoth snorts quietly. “I have no idea who came up with that stupid moniker, but it wasn’t me.”

“I don’t know, it’s kind of a sexy nickname.” The coquettish tone is back in his voice. Xornoth chooses, once again, to ignore how his throat dries. “The Dark Stag of Rivendell. It sounds like something out of a novel.”

“Not the kind of novel I’d want to be in,” Xornoth says, saddling Calliope with practiced hands. 

“It’s the kind of novel I’d read,” Joey says.

Xornoth sighs, tightening one last strap before glancing over his shoulder at him. “Look, Joey—”

“Ooh, say my name again.”

“Can you be serious for just ten seconds?” Xornoth asks. He doesn’t know if he sounds more exasperated or frustrated, but he sees the smirk slip off of Joey’s face, replaced by confusion and, for some reason, concern. “I need to explain something to you, and I just need ten seconds of your serious attention, and then you can go back to whatever the fuck this is.” He gestures vaguely towards Joey.

The sly light leaves Joey’s gaze, replaced by something more… curious isn’t the right word. There’s a cautious interest, along with something far sharper than he’s worn all evening, and underneath it all, a thinly veiled level of desire that marks his expression. He cocks his head to one side and stands up slightly straighter, and Xornoth can finally recognize how this man might lead an entire population of elemental mages.

“Go on,” he says.

Xornoth busies himself by finding Calliope’s brush and carefully working out tangles in her coat. “I’ve never done this,” he says, gesturing vaguely between the two of them. “It’s not that I don’t want to or anything. Scott and I were raised on the same histories of all of the Empires, and practically every one has their own version of a tragic romance somewhere in their royal genealogies. The Grimlands and the Crystal Cliffs and their Empires reunited after being sundered thanks to the love of a noble and a princess. The stories that Mezalea was once an island ruled by a man who loved the ocean, who died of grief when it retreated from his shores. Even now, Scott and Jimmy are writing their own story— when they married, all of the nobles clung to the tragic romance of two star-crossed lovers separated by their political duties to different lands. It isn’t like that, as you’re well aware; theirs is a respectful and trusting and, yes, loving marriage, but they’re just as aware of the politics required to convince both Rivendell and the Codlands to allow it. Nothing is as romantic as it first seems, and I feel like you’re being swept up in an image you conjured of me from my reputation and whatever Scott wrote on the invitations to that stupid ball.” 

Xornoth takes a moment to gently dissuade Calliope from eating his hair. “I’m not a romantic person. I’ve never dreamed of marriage, I’ve never courted anyone, formally or not; hell, I’ve never even had a sweetheart or anything more than a momentary flitting attraction. I’ve never sought it out the way Scott dreamed of that sort of domestic nonsense.”

“Is there a reason why not?”

Xornoth hesitates over his initial impulsive answer before sighing. “It just never felt like something I’d get, I guess,” he says. “I’m the soldier of the two of us. My lot in life is leading armies into deadly battles and coming home either victorious or on my shield. Seems like a waste of someone’s time to court them and promise my life to them when it could be cut short at any point.”

“I don’t think it would be,” Joey says. He cautiously steps forward, eyeing the deer, but Calliope is an intelligent creature and simply lowers her head to look right back at him. “Your life doesn’t have to be defined by your death. Isn’t it better to know what love is, at least a little bit, than to live in fear of hurting someone for your entire life?”

Xornoth drops his hands. He does not turn to look at Joey. “Maybe,” he says through a dry throat. He shoves the bubbling half-thoughts forming in his head, the dangerous ones that want to hope and believe in Joey’s words, especially given who’s telling them to him, and swings himself up onto Calliope’s back.

“Do you want to ride with me?” he asks Joey, a hand stretched towards him. It’s an offer thrown out somewhat impulsively, though it’s also one he’s given hundreds of times before and been denied each time. Calliope is faster than Scott’s mount, sacrificing comfort and ease for a whirlwind of speed that takes one’s breath away and exchanges it for heart-pounding adrenaline. It’s visible in every single one of her wiry muscles and in the way her eyes seem perpetually widened with glee. Xornoth wouldn’t insult himself by saying his reputation isn’t built on his fighting prowess, but he’s not sure how much of it is thanks to the sight of him pounding onto a battlefield, axe held aloft as Calliope soars across land to deliver him unto his enemies. Even the saddle he draped on her is steeped in war, the wider make of it designed to help cart an injured person back to a medic tent.

Knowing all of this, it’s a complete surprise when Joey says nothing, takes his hand, and hoists himself onto the saddle behind Xornoth after only a moment of hesitation.

Xornoth chooses not to read into this. Instead, he realizes just how violently Joey is shivering and unclasps his cloak to throw over the other ruler’s head.

“What?”

“Just take it. In case you, uh, get cold.” Xornoth glances over his shoulder at Joey, who’s awkwardly holding onto the edge of the saddle. “It gets pretty brisk up here.”

“Tell me about it,” Joey says, his voice clearing as he quickly puts the cloak on. Xornoth tries to ignore the feeling of his breath against his neck. “Honestly, I wish the guy that founded my Empire thought about other climates when he decided that this is what our formal wear would look like. The funny part is that it’s still almost too much to wear in the jungle sometimes.”

Xornoth adds this to the list of Things Joey Says That Should Garner Further Thought But Won’t, At Least Right Now. Instead, he focuses on gently leading Calliope down to a well-trodden path. She snorts excitedly.

“Let’s take it a bit easy for a bit,” he whispers into her ear. “Wouldn’t want to lose our passenger.”

“What?”

Calliope takes off as though her hooves summon the winter wind itself.

The wind bites just as much as Xornoth knew it would as it whips into his eyes and past his ears. Calliope leaps through the mountainous forests surrounding Rivendell with an ease that Xornoth has only recently begun to share, and she revels in long, soaring leaps rather than her typical death-defying speeds. A blessing, perhaps, especially for the Emperor who had immediately latched himself onto Xornoth’s waist and tucked his face into the crook of his neck as soon as Calliope started forward. 

For once, there is nothing sensual about Joey’s gesture; Xornoth could tell that the rapid rise and fall of the chest pressed against his back is due to some combination of panic and surprise rather than the desire or interest he had worn earlier, and the grip around him begins to choke him as it becomes immediately clear that Calliope won’t be slowing down at any point soon.

“Joey, you realize that you’re fine, right?”

His arms tighten even further in response.

Xornoth winces. “I really need you to let go a bit.”

“Why? Are you going to throw me off?” Joey’s much better at showing emotion in his voice than hiding it; his terror is practically palpable, as much as he’s attempting to veil it in indignance.

“Of course not,” Xornoth says. “I just can’t really breathe.”

Joey huffs. “That sounds like your problem. My problem is that I’m on your hellbeast and she’s going to throw me off if I don’t hang on!”

Calliope seems to take a bit of offense to the ‘hellbeast’ comment. She abruptly ducks her chin down and begins flying across the ground, her feet a blur as she tears through the snowmelt. She becomes a smoke-smudge more than a beast, pelting up mountainsides and leaping off to thunder through gullies with a single-minded pursuit for speed, soaring off of cliffs that lurch into forests only to pound back into the ground a handful of exhilarating seconds later.

And, to Xornoth, it is exhilarating. It’s oddly comforting to feel the air whip against his face and his hair fill with mist as Calliope strains against herself, refusing to accept that she can’t fly. Scott’s always called him crazy for encouraging his steed’s sprinting (“She could break her legs, Xornoth! What if you’re stranded miles away from the castle, with a deer with a broken leg?” “Well, I don’t know what you would do, but personally I would just pray to Exor for an hour of his greater blessing, be imbued with godly strength and wings, and fly back with her.” “Oh my gods, you’re so annoying.”) but Calliope runs like she was born to do nothing else, and Xornoth can’t begrudge her that.

He can, however, begrudge Joey the grip around his waist that he hasn’t loosened at all. 

“Joey, do you trust me?” Xornoth shouts back at him.

“I don’t know! Will you throw me off if I say no?!” Joey’s words are muffled by Xornoth’s surcoat.

“Of course not! That would be the height of impropriety.” Xornoth gently guides Calliope to dashing up one of the steepest cliff faces, and she tenses in anticipatory recognition.

Joey laughs a little too desperately. “I mean, I’m trusting you with my life right now, aren’t I?” he says.

“How incredibly romantic.” The words come out teasing rather than sardonic. Surprisingly, his flowery expectations don’t bother Xornoth as much as it had in the stables. “If you trust me, look up.”

There's hesitation. Then, miraculously, Xornoth feels Joey’s head tip up, his chin sliding against his shoulder. His body tenses around Xornoth’s as he registers the white-silver sky and the slate that makes up the mountain range Rivendell’s castle is built in.

And then Calliope reaches the zenith of the peak.

And leaps and begins to dive down.

Joey shrieks, but when he squeezes Xornoth again, he doesn’t try to avert his gaze. Xornoth shouts something wordless as well, the sound spiraling into the air as Calliope maneuvers herself through the air and begins running almost vertically down the other side of the cliff. She somehow manages to keep her balance while fluidly moving down a vein of quartz crystals that grow out of the side of the rock, splintering off bits of the clear mineral as she goes. 

“This is insane!” Joey yells in Xornoth’s ear.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Xornoth yells back.

Joey smacks his chest painlessly before returning the hand around Xornoth’s midsection. “Don’t make fun of me,” he says, and Xornoth can just imagine his pout.

What the hell. Xornoth chances a smirk over his shoulder and catches startled green eyes. “Don’t make it so easy for me, then,” he says.

He feels more than he hears Joey’s breath catch in the back of his throat, and then Calliope is leaping into a waterfall and racing along with the spray and Xornoth turns his attention back to her and whatever crazy idea she’s gotten this time.

Calliope leaps out of the waterfall in time to land rather gracefully on solid ground and slows herself to a careful trot, breathing heavily beneath Xornoth. He pats the side of her neck gently. “One of these days, you won’t exhaust yourself doing some crazy stunt,” he says to her, fondness creeping past the chastisement in his voice. She brushes his words off and calmly walks through the sparse trees as if she hadn’t just run straight down a vertical surface moments before.

“Does she want to do that every time you take her out?” Joey asks. His grip on Xornoth has slackened a lot, but he keeps his arms wrapped around Xornoth and at this point, he thinks it would be strange if he moved them.

Xornoth sighs. “Usually she wants to do much worse. She thinks she could run on the clouds, if only the mountains were tall enough to let her reach them.”

“To be fair, that would look super magical,” Joey says. He rests his chin on Xornoth’s shoulder. “I bet Calliope would be the only deer brave enough to find out.”

Calliope perks up slightly at that. 

“No,” Xornoth says gently, swatting Calliope’s ears when she irritably huffs at him.

They make it back to Rivendell in decent time. Xornoth’s heart sinks a bit when he realizes that the ball is still somehow going on.

“How haven’t they left yet?” he mutters to himself, sliding out of Calliope’s saddle with a practiced ease.

“We were only gone for like twenty minutes,” Joey says, an edge of sympathy leaking into his words. “I’m sure Scott didn’t want to start actively clearing everyone out until half the party left of their own accord, as well.”

Xornoth sighs. “I hate politics,” he grumbles.

That prompts a laugh from Joey, the most genuine one Xornoth’s heard all day, and he turns to see the Lost Emperor sitting side-saddle on Calliope still. “That was wild,” he says. “I had no idea what I was supposed to expect and somehow you still exceeded my expectations.”

“Is this where I say ‘thank you’?” Xornoth says. He goes to put a footstool down for Joey to jump down on, but instead Joey somehow maneuvers himself into Xornoth’s arms with a delicate flourish and gets down from there. He unclips his borrowed cloak and holds it in his arms.

“If you want to.” 

Joey falls silent as he turns to Xornoth. It doesn’t escape him that Joey’s eyes are absolutely wandering. After a few seconds of bewilderment, it finally occurs to Xornoth that his traitorous mount ran down a waterfall with him leading her, and he wonders just how much the stupidly fine clothes that Scott insists on are clinging to him. 

Might as well own it. “Like what you see?”

“Mhmm.” Joey’s eyes finally meet Xornoth’s, and the sly smirk from the canape table sneaks back onto his face. “I know you were basically shirtless before, but somehow this is better.”

Xornoth rolls his eyes. “I’m going to choose to ignore that,” he says, reaching an arm out for the cloak. Joey hands it over but lets his hand linger on Xornoth’s forearm as he takes it, and at this point Xornoth is wise enough to his flirtations that he lets this roll off of him without any fuss. “Do you need help getting back inside?”

“I’ll take help from you for anything, anytime,” Joey replies with a purr.

“Noted,” Xornoth says drily. He hangs Calliope’s saddle on its hook, gives her one last handful of clover, and ushers Joey back inside.

“I did want to ask you something,” Joey says, the coy tone mostly gone but his voice still light.

Xornoth hums in response.

“You seem— I guess, more relaxed now? You’re not snapping at me for saying anything.” Joey raises an eyebrow. “I’d ask you to my marital bed to see how far I can push it, but I have the feeling you’d take that far too seriously.”

“Do you not want me to take such a request seriously?” Xornoth asks. 

For the first time, Joey stutters to a halt, his eyes wide as he stares at Xornoth. Xornoth takes a moment to admire them; they’re the same shade as the moss that lines the room the Rune Blade is kept in along with Rivendell’s other ancient artifacts. He patiently waits for the Lost Emperor to regain his senses.

“Okay. I can’t say I was expecting that.”

Xornoth raises an eyebrow. “To answer your previous question,” he says, “I hate these sorts of events. Half of the reason I let Scott take the throne after our parents abdicated was because I didn’t want to have to deal with these things, and he’s always enjoyed them more. Frankly, I wouldn’t have shown up to this ball if it wasn’t technically for me.

“And if you actually meant the implications of what you were saying— I grew up with Scott. I’ve known him for more than a century. I’ve heard him say practically every innuendo under the skies, and the ones he hasn’t said Jimmy’s wandered into on accident. Just because I’m aware of them doesn’t mean I myself am fond of making them.”

“But you can.”

“Of course, I can.” As they step into the castle, Xornoth dries them both off with barely a flicker of thought and a rush of warmth through his veins. He wonders what Exor would think of all of this as he offers the crook of his arm for Joey to take and leads him back to the ballroom.

“My my, your highness,” he says, the sly tone back in his voice as he leans into Xornoth’s arm. They’ve reentered the ballroom at this point. “Making a statement?”

“Yes, a statement that visiting royals should be accompanied by a chaperone so they don’t find themselves with particularly sticky fingers.” Xornoth doesn’t catch what he says until he’s standing next to his brother, who at some point ushered his group to sitting at a table set up for both kings on a dais at the back of the room.

“Who’s got sticky fingers?” Scott says. He’s clearly had at least one more flute of champagne from how he’s leaning into Jimmy, who for his part is glancing around a tiny bit nervously but diligently holding his husband by the waist. Gem and fWhip are still with them, though they’re now joined by the third member of their historic alliance, a man Xornoth has definitely led armies to threaten when Scott was still wrangling the final details of his nuptial agreements with Jimmy. Katherine isn’t there currently, but a small plate of grape stems and apple bits implies her lingering presence.

“Definitely not me,” Xornoth replies.

“Well, I’d hope so,” Scott says. “Even if you were gone for long enough.”

“I was wondering where you went off to, Joey,” Gem says, delicately cutting into whatever Scott was about to say next. “What were the two of you doing?”

“Xorny was taking me for a ride on their magnificent beast,” Joey says with a wink, arm curling more firmly around Xornoth’s bicep.

“Do not say it like that,” he says deadpan as Jimmy chokes on a half-eaten cheese cube and Sausage barks out a startled laugh that soon turns into an out-of-control cackle.

Joey actually flutters his eyelashes at him. “What do you mean?” he asks with a slight pout. “It was the longest, roughest ride I’ve ever been on. I could barely keep up.”

“He’s being crass. Calliope ran us down a waterfall,” Xornoth says to Scott, who gains a calculating gleam in his eye that Xornoth has learned to fear.

“Sorry, did you say that your deer ran down a waterfall?” Sausage says. “How the heck did she do that?!”

“On her hooves. Very rapidly.”

“Your deer can do that here?”

Xornoth is beginning to feel the prickle on the back of his neck from nobles staring at his far drabber clothes, at the flyaways of his hair, and at Joey, who is burrowing into his side far less subtly than he must think he’s being. A buzzing is settling into his ears, a sharp sound that slowly digs into his head. He carefully extricates his arm, nods to the group, and quietly dismisses himself for the night.

 •♚•

 Xornoth expects that to be the end of it, to be honest: a single night of mostly one-sided flirtation followed by nothing truly happening, leading to Scott’s council of stuffy advisors throwing their hands up in defeat and leaving him alone for the rest of his life.

So when Scott walks into his room with a parrot holding a letter and the smuggest grin that Xornoth has ever seen, he barely holds himself back from throwing something at him and snatches the letter from the bird’s beak. Even without seeing the seal on the letter (it’s intricate and detailed and just on the knife’s edge of being ostentatious), Xornoth knows who sent this.

“Has Joey always been like this?” he asks with a grumble, idly whisking a sliver of his gift from Exor into a thin claw that effortlessly slides through the wax.

“Yes and no,” Scott says, sitting on Xornoth’s desk. “Yes, in that he’s an outgoing and flirtatious guy. No, in that he’s never sent a follow-up letter.”

“This is when you try to convince me to give him a chance, isn’t it?” Xornoth can’t keep the mild bitter tone out of his voice. He doesn’t open the letter. He considers just setting the letter on fire without reading it.

“Of course not. You don’t need to hear that from me.” Scott gestures towards the letter. “What did he say?”

Xornoth glowers at him half-heartedly before slowly opening the letter and glancing through its contents.

“Well?” Scott prompts.

“Don’t you have laws to write?” Xornoth mutters.

“That’s after lunch,” he says. “I get the whole morning to bother my favorite big sibling.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Xornoth ponders the letter, walks over to his desk, and takes out a sheet of paper (decent quality, not as amazing as a formal invitation would be but not of such shoddy make that it’d be taken as an insult), a wax seal (his personal one, not one of Rivendell at large), and a pen. He stares at the writing materials for a second longer.

“I’m growing old here,” Scott says with a sigh, sliding off of the desk and onto the sofa a few feet away. 

“He thanked me for taking him to see Calliope and wants to meet for dinner sometime,” Xornoth says distractedly. “That’s all he asked for. No mention of politics or beneficial partnerships or uniting families or anything.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “Just… unexpected, I guess.” He begins penning a response (short but not curt, with none of the innuendos of the previous night but enough of the implications to make one pause).

“Unexpected sounds good enough,” Scott says. “You need unexpected in your life.”

There’s an odd tone in Scott’s voice, one that Xornoth resolves is far too sly, a joke bubbling in implications and sideways glances. Xornoth raises an eyebrow at him as he dries the ink with a single thought, seals the letter, and hands it off to the parrot, who gently takes it from him and flies out an open window.

“He’ll be good for you, Xorny.” Scott lingers on the bastardization of his name.

This game was meant to be a punishment for the sun, the fickle sun who amused himself by setting mortals on each other with arbitrary rules and seeding the earth's soil with blood. It’s not that their Courts are so fond of mortals that this is a sin but more that it’s tasteless to cast yourself in such a game and emerge victorious. It’s bad enough that you would participate in such a trivial exercise. It’s worse to declare yourself winner over those of breakable flesh and bone.

So let us have a new game, the Courts declared, and let one of the Unseelie be a participant. Surely, you can still triumph, Seelie Prince, the Courts taunted. Surely, our youngest of the moon will shatter under the weight of your accomplishments.

“It’s a pity that our Kings have decided that this is my punishment and that we’re to go against each other,” the sun tells the moon. “I think we’d be quite a good team.”

The moon laughs at his words. “We would, we would,” she allows, “but that’s not how the game goes.”

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When the sun plays a game, he finds others who will stand by him, orbit around him, fawn over him in some cases. This game is no different.

“Yellow already?” he mutters to himself, and he feels the universe laughing at him. “Oh, laugh it up,” he scowls to a bush. The bush does not respond.

“Grian, are you talking to yourself again?” The sun turns to see a man who wanted him dead in a past game (incidentally, the game that ended with him being forced into this predicament).

The sun watches, stunned, as the five people who found him whip out spyglasses, train them on him, and shout “AHA!” in unison. They wait for him to react with more than just empty blinking.

“You’ve joined us at a weird time, not going to lie,” Martyn says casually, pocketing his spyglass.

The sun trains his gaze on the one who is new to the game, the one who doesn’t know of his reputation or his ensnaring words. He steals him away from another and weaves a deal with a handful of fish and a silver tongue. The mortals may think their verbal contracts are more than enough to bind themselves to each other, but the sun knows the rules of the Courts as well as he knows his own name and he draws them under his spell and whisks them away to the south.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When the moon plays a game, she finds one other to revolve around, someone whose brilliance will in turn inspire her own. This game is no different.

“Yellow already?” she asks.

“Not all of us are lucky enough to start out with more than three lives,” the mortal says, clawing into the stone.

“I suppose so,” she says idly, feeling the universe brush against her like a wayward cat as she follows him down the tunnel he carves. 

He eyes her with some measure of avarice. “Pearl, can we make a deal?”

The moon takes a moment to admire the sun. He’s found some of the most exploitable humans that she’s ever met for this silly game of his.

“A deal?” she says, feigning uncertain interest. “Like some sort of bargain?”

“Yeah. What can I do to get a life from you?”

She studies golden eyes. “What would you do for a life?”

He laughs. “At this point? Anything.”

The moon feels her grin twist into a smirk. “I can work with ‘anything’. What was your name, again?”

She barters Scott’s time for one of her lives, a shimmering polished thing that a human would not be able to discern from the bleeding hearts they offer. She wonders what a human in possession of a fae’s life will be able to accomplish.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun doesn’t realize what the Kings of the Courts have done to his game until Joel leads his court to a narrow cave and tries to drop them down a concealed hole.

The mortals call it ‘the boogeyman curse’ as if invoking the name of a childhood monster eases its insidiousness, but when the universe curls in one of them and threatens to throw him to red in the span of a single day, it’s swiftly made less a terrifying inconvenience and more of an existential threat to them all. The sun takes charcoal and scrawls on the walls of a cave by their home to note the tendencies of the creature lurking in the shadows of the world.

It feels fitting, somehow, that a world where lives are thrown around like pennies into a wishing well would hold some inky dark thing that curls up in your marrow and demands its own payment. The sun clenches his heart and sends fiery light through his veins to burn it out.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When another human deigns to infringe on the moon’s property (and Scott is her property now, by virtue of his name and his dealings), it’s easy to turn her wrath on the mortal. She’s tempted to turn him into a fish and leave him to flounder on land, scales gleaming red until he drowns on air, but she holds herself back just long enough to simply send a sword through his chest. She’s vindictive enough to make it feel like ten swords and kind enough to let his suffering end in an instant.

Scott comes to with a spray of blood out of his mouth. She grimaces. Humans are so breakable, even as you put them back together.

The moon doesn’t make Scott weave together a new deal to give him another of her shimmering, pristine lives. She waves off his grateful entreaties; when you own something, it’s your responsibility to fix it when it breaks. 

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun first turns red when he follows the one he stole from another above where the world’s boundaries lie. They begin twisting stone to their own destructive purposes and soon forget the world they reside in. His ally is sharp but still mortal and doesn’t realize the danger he led the sun into until it’s too late. An arrow flies, and he crashes to the ground explosively, an Icarus with no wings.

When the sun turns red, he’s forced to trade his court for a single person. He awakes in the place he secreted himself away in, away from the iron that his court (former court, and the words taste bitter with realization) is now barring their windows with, and quietly imbues the pack of wolves he coaxed into the earth with his strength.

He finds his killer standing in the wilderness, staring around with a wild eye. “Hey, Grian. Do you want to be friends?”

It’s not the one he would choose but it’s the one who chooses him. The sun binds him retroactively with the life lost and whatever meager trust gained and leaves him to his chaos.

He goes back to that highest peak to find his items along with a message begging for mercy. He finds his former ally cowering in their creation, completed after his demise, and though he offers a deal (a life for a bond, as is possible here in this world where life is malleable) it’s denied and he’s forced to leave none the richer.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The moon’s champion (and he is her champion now, by virtue of his loyalty won with nothing of hers given) regales her with the tale of his infiltration into the sun’s lands, tells her that he slid through iron bars with a form not quite his own and snatched up whatever valuable he could while the sun’s former court bickered among themselves. She files away into the back of her mind that even if humans are imbued with something innately fey, they can still bypass whatever protections they themselves lay out.

“I want to invade the reds,” Scott says, interrupting her thoughts.

The moon admires what her champion has become. She wonders idly what would happen if she granted him a third of her incandescent lives as she mulls this proposal over.

“Actually, that might not be a bad idea,” she says thoughtfully. “They’ll be scattered elsewhere, trying to cause chaos, and we can easily sneak into whatever they consider their base.”

His eyes glint silver and she recognizes his grin. “Exactly.”

When they find a pack of dogs hidden in a hole in the ground, the moon coaxes her champion into pouring liquid fire on the hapless animals and while she voices upset she watches him indulge with inhuman glee.

She can’t quite hold back the cruel cackle when she finds out they belonged to the sun. How ironic, she thinks, that the hounds of the sun perish to fire.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun strong-arms his way out of red and rejoins his court, which he learns almost immediately collapsed without him. He’s not particularly surprised but that doesn’t mean he’s not disappointed. The mortals are kinder than he is, though, and they try to revive old bonds rather than finding new allies to connect with.

He narrows in on the one loosely bound to him, again. There’s a sense that in other worlds, the black-haired man who dogs his footsteps would be more than just an extension of his will, but in this world of green and yellow and red, there’s nothing else that the sun wants him to be. The two of them delve into the earth and brave hellish skies together, and he wonders if this man could be champion to him the way the moon has found hers. It isn’t the way of his Court to determine a single champion, but the moon and her own have survived comfortably enough that it’s tempting.

The choice is taken from him when the world settles into the bones of the man and whispers to him to try and blow everyone up in a burst of violently orchid energy.

The sun hadn’t thought too hard about why that particular member of his court wanted to build his cage in the sky, but before he can question him, another mortal tears him down for killing his own ally. His court does not recover.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The world makes the moon play the game along with the mortals, and when bloodlust sinks into her bones, she feels the urge to twist and warp and destroy claw at the back of her throat. She looks over at her champion and the other mortal that has inexorably begun orbiting her and they see the gleam in her eyes and trust in her word that she will not kill them.

The first time the curse fully settles in the moon’s body, she is taken so off-guard that she seizes and collapses to the ground, forcing her champion and their ally to continue their plans without her and report back the news of four fallen foes. She learns later that the creature leaked from her body and seized another’s life while she lay unaware and left, satisfied. Good, she thinks. Maybe it’ll think better than to do that again.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun finds himself cornered by two fallen members of his court and cajoled into possibly springing a trap hidden in the floors of their old strongholds. It’s ridiculous at first, to hear the two mortals attempt to snare him with their turns of phrase. The sun amuses them, allowing them to think their words are stronger than the butterfly wings they actually are. It’s when one decides to attempt to push him into the trap that the latent affection he felt for them is burned away in prideful outrage, and the sun is the one to drive a sword into the back of the man he once wished to make his champion.

He’s barely able to appreciate his endeavor when a third ally goes turncoat thanks to the machinations of the world, and he falls to the ground choking on air when his magic isn’t enough to save him from an arrow through the throat.

The sun rises, red anew, and his fury is more than enough to fuel him if the adrenaline pumping through him isn’t. He claws into the ground and unearths a long forgotten set of secrets based both in those he stole from their keepers and a treasure granted to him by the final extant member of his court. In exchange, he brings the man with him to share glory as he summons doom to the one who dared to raise an axe against his own. He fades into the breeze and traces a temporary containment circle with his blood around the white fortress he plans to decimate.

‘Wither,’ the mortals call the creature of blackened skin and wizened face that he summons with the powder of bodies lost to the Nether and skulls stolen from monsters raised from the dead. The sun thinks this name too plain for it. He would call it something more befitting its danger: leviathan, behemoth, apocalypse. 

Perhaps this is why he wasn’t tasked with naming it, he ponders.

It doesn’t take the wither too long to break through the wards that the sun built. He watches as the man he hoped to kill flees from it, summoning whatever allies he has left. It takes the efforts of almost all of the surviving mortals to take the creature down, and one of them takes its glassy heart and builds a device out of it that carves a bright white light into the night sky.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When Scott loses his penultimate life, the moon feels the curse rip it out from her. One of the connections that bind him to her nearly tears, fraying to a thin thread, but the other holds strong even as the world dictates that he cannot serve her at her side while she glows amber. The moon watches as the yellow bleeds from him, as he blinks away golden tears that turn his eyes bloodshot. The other mortals chase him from their haven, even as he turns back to stare at her.

It feels strange, not having her champion beside her. The moon rubs her arms and winces at the phantom limb of Scott’s presence, the presence of someone who would rather allow the world to violently thrum through him than to strike down one he called ally.

The others who claim themselves ‘yellow’ don’t understand her plight. To them, Scott is simply another enemy turned red, bleeding with the murderous intent of the world, and she should be grateful that he’s been ripped away from her before his base urges overwhelm his humanity. The moon doesn’t explain to them that’s not how deals work. The moon doesn’t explain how, in that moment, she belonged to him as much as he belonged to her.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun summons his old ally through the bond he once wove with the man. His eyes are somehow far more bloodshot this time than they had been the first time the two of them were red together, and when Joel demands his gunpowder, the sun acquiesces easily.

He’s handed a crossbow primed with strange white ammunition. When the sun pulls the trigger, it whistles through the air before exploding in a burst of blue light.

He turns back to his champion (and he is his champion now, by virtue of this gift and the bond that they tied together). He grins. “Shall we hunt Etho, then?”

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The second time the curse settles in the moon’s bones, she has no champion but has a court (though they do not know) and she leads them to their death with honeyed words and promises of wealth. She rains fire down upon her court and feels the foreign presence within her tighten its grip on her throat before relenting and fading back into the universe. She runs a hand across her neck lightly, remembering the feeling of that frigid claw sinking into the soft flesh there and tearing something ineffable out of her.

“I only killed one of you? What a waste,” she says.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun gazes upon the moon’s champion, who still stares wistfully into what he thinks is the horizon and what the sun knows is towards his patron. It’s almost too easy to follow the mortal’s connection back to the Unseelie and whisper to his own companion to abandon their hunt and seek her death instead.

It’s only fair that the two of them, inhuman as they are, stay equals at the end of this strange game.

When her light turns red, the moon immediately throws witchcraft at them and the sun ushers his champion away. The moon’s champion stays behind with his keeper, as the sun expected. He wonders how their next clash will go.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 So says the sun to the moon: “Do you think you’re going to win?”

So says the moon to the sun: “Well, that isn’t the point, is it?”

So says the sun to the moon: “So you’d let someone else win?”

So says the moon to the sun: “I never said  that. You know that a victory by my own is my victory.”

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 Neither of them will win. Of course not. The Kings wouldn’t have allowed that to happen, anyhow.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 One of them does win, eventually. The moon through her champion strikes down the sun even as she herself readies crystallized moonlight to lance through his throat, and before she can blink he’s forced himself up with some inner strength that is completely his own and fells the sun’s champion in a second push. Vindictive glee clings to the line between the moon and her champion, for the sun’s champion had been the one who first tore mortality out of her own. Afterwards, the moon grows pensive.

It feels strange to eclipse the sun in this manner, but this is the game he wrote and she plays by its rules. 

All semblance of humanity drops from their shoulders and they scatter throughout the lands for one final battle between them all. The moon understands now, now that they’re in this last fight, why the sun couldn’t help but win in the first iteration of this game. She would want to rule this world herself, this world of choices and deals and promises broken as easily as one shatters the glass of a potion bottle.

That’s not in the game’s rules, though, and she bows out with minimal effort and a spatter of diaphanous ichor that melts into the rust of blood within milliseconds. 

Of course, this isn’t out of altruism. Why would it be?

The moon goes to her champion, whose heart pumps not-blood not-ichor through the bastardized life that she used to bind him to her at the very start of the game, and whispers to him strength and vitality. His hair is matted, scarlet crystals hovering around his head, and his eyes are wild as he chases after someone he once called friend.

“Ren!” he screams, his voice raw. “Stop running!”

“Leave me alone!” Ren yelps as Scott chases him through the treetops. “Go after Martyn! Why are you coming for me?”

“I have to— you killed Pearl!” her champion calls, and the moon smiles smugly at the sun. She wonders if Scott knows how sweet his loyalty tastes.

“If we do this again,” the sun mutters, glaring down at the bickering mortals as they slash into flesh and stumble after each other, “you’re not to be paired with him.”

“Not teamed with you, not teamed with Scott,” the moon idly counts on her fingers. “You’re adding a whole lot of rules to this mess, and just for me.”

“It makes it more fun. Surely, you’ve realized that.” 

The sun and the moon watch as the moon’s champion tears down the final mortal. He crumples in his armor, as worn and cracked as it is from the fighting he had just been embroiled in, and he gazes at the night sky, directly at the full moon over his head.

“One more thing—” he says to it.

“Absolutely not,” the sun snarls, and the moon’s champion collapses, blood shimmering opalescent on the grass as it pours from his mouth.

“Hey!” the moon says. “He was mine.” She kneels by her champion and stares at his broken form.

“Was is the operative word there,” the sun says, floating into the sky. He looks at the carnage dismissively. “The game is done. We go back to our Courts now.”

“And that’s it?” the moon says. “You don’t do anything for the mortals you used for this?”

“What is there to do?” The sun glances back at the world around them, at the sky stained orange by the sunrise. “They’ll wake up in their own worlds as if this was all a bad dream, and they’ll remember bits and pieces of it as they go about their days. Some of them are kings in their regular lives, did you know that? Others are gods. They all choose to go through this charade to remember what being truly mortal is like.”

“‘Truly mortal’?” the moon draws out. “Is that all this is to them? Some false reality, some living parable that provides a moral at the end of the day?”

“Who knows?” the sun says. “Mortals choose to think in tens of millions of different ways. The ones here aren't foolish to the ways of the world, but they are ignorant. Scott didn’t know the depth of meaning of making a deal with an Unseelie; all he knew was that he’d be one death farther from being an instrument of death in a hostile world.”

The moon stares at the sun. “But this is real. He made a deal with me, and I bound him to me with that. He and I will find each other by virtue of that oath, wherever he exists in the universe under our Courts.”

“This is real. You’re not wrong about that. It’s just not completely real to him. He doesn’t perceive this as real, even if it is.” The sun lands on the top of Ren’s castle. He stares at the glimmering amethyst that the moon had stolen and placed here as remuneration. “This was all real. This is all real. This will continue to be real, even when the Courts fall. That’s immutable.”

The moon lands next to him and follows his gaze to the cold purple crystals carefully manipulated into an archway. “Then why won’t they think it is?” she asks, almost desperately.

“Because they won’t want to.” The sun sounds tired. “Because if this is real, then the fact that they wanted to kill their friends would be real. If this world is real, then the blood they spilled and shed is real, all of the death traps and the bloodlust and the base animal instinct is real. If this isn’t just a game, then the world played on preexisting instincts and didn’t insert its own will into them. What king could survive peacefully ruling over a kingdom if they knew that they were capable of murdering all who stood in their way?” He turns to her. “Do you know why I started playing this game?”

She shakes her head no.

“I was curious. How far would a mortal go for their own survival, given the chance?” They fly across the map, past lava that still flows sluggishly down rock outcrops and TNT carelessly left primed to explode. “Turns out, the answer is ‘rather far’.”

“Do you think you’ve found their limit?”

“In the face of possible victory? With the chance of revenge for events of past dreams? Of course not.”

“So you’ll host the game again?”

The sun cracked a grin. “Of course. After all, it’s just a game. Would you play again?”

The moon ponders before a beatific smile slowly starts to curl on her face. She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t have to.

After a second, a book slowly slides out from a bookshelf spine first, falling with a muffled thump on the gold carpet. As Scott watches, a chubby hand appears in the space where the book was. It awkwardly hangs there before more of the arm is shoved through, dislodging the books on either side of it, and twisting around to wave at him.

“You’re going to get in trouble,” Scott hisses, trying to hold back laughter.

Another hand appears and Scott watches his brother shove the two other books he’d loosened to the ground before hopping up on a shelf on his side. All he can see of the other boy is a lock of purple hair and a single dancing fuchsia eye.

“Hi, Scott,” he says, smiling toothily.

Scott smiles back, a giggle escaping despite his best attempts. “Hi, ▯▯▯▯.”

Before his twin can say anything, they hear a series of heavier footsteps making their way down the stone hallways. His twin lets out a squeak before hurriedly withdrawing from the bookshelf and scampering off. Scott’s about to loudly complain about cleaning up his mess when he reappears at the end of the shelf, rushing over to pick up the books he dropped down and shove them back in place.

“Don’t just stand there staring, idiot,” he says hurriedly. “Help me!”

“You did this to yourself,” Scott points out, but he puts his own book back before walking over and dutifully helping his brother clean up his mess before his parents noticed. He hears his father say something to the two of them, but he doesn’t recall those words.

There’s no continuation of this memory. It’s a single fragment, a piece of an idle childhood led by two boys who knew what their lives would be and how to seize it. It should be a perfect reflection of his childhood, of the simple joys that being young should give. Everything about it was polished in rose-tint, and yet he couldn’t view it that way.

Scott wonders why in even a memory so old and precious as this one, he cannot for the life of him remember his brother’s name.

 ☾○☽

 Scott first meets the heir of the Grimlands on her tour of the lands, the strange practice that some of the human Empires employed to ensure that the continuation of their bloodline was well-documented everywhere. She is one of the sharpest people he’s ever met despite being five years younger than him, and they fall into an easy rapport that translates well into letters. Scott soon finds himself looking forward to such letters, even when his brother teases him for being so interested in what a woman has to say.

“▯▯▯▯, I’m gay. We’re both gay.”

“And yet you’re talking to a woman?” His twin peers over his shoulder. “With such perfect, impressive penmanship?”

“Fuck off,” Scott says, pushing him away.

His brother gasps. “Oh, Exor,” he breathes. “Scott? Little Scotty? Perfect little baby boy Scotty said a  fuck word? Call the presses! Tell the papers!”

“Aeor’s antlers.” Scott is about to throw his hands in the air when he realizes that he’s still holding his quill. “Can I  please finish this letter?”

“Oh, so now you’d rather talk to a girl than your own dear darling brother?” His twin sticks his nose in the air and sniffs haughtily. “I see how it is, straightie.”

“That’s not— I’m not— how did you make ‘straightie’ sound like a slur?” Scott sputters.

“Who says it isn’t one?”

“Me! I say it!”

His twin pouts at him. “Oh, poo. I thought I got that one past you.”

“Leave me  alone, ▯▯▯▯,” Scott says, turning back to his letter. “I’m going to have to ask Father for permission to go into the archives to answer a question from here, and I’d rather write the rest of it up before doing that.”

“Nerd.” Before Scott can defend himself, his brother sweeps out of the room with one final, “See you later, idiot.”

“Nincompoop!” he shouts at the door.

“Who says ‘nincompoop’ anymore?” comes from down the hall.

“Boys! Stop shouting inside!” their dad calls from downstairs.

“Sorry, Dad!” 

 ☾○☽

  Hello, heir Scott! I hope you’re doing well— and yes, I know you hate your status being brought up, but cut a Grim heir some slack, I’ve got tutors breathing over my shoulder about this sort of formality.

To answer some of your questions: yes, multiples are well-documented in the Grim dynastic line. Some even say that our founder was himself a twin! Our succession isn’t guaranteed by birth order or anything, though; it’s not like the oldest of a set of triplets automatically is the most fit for ruling. Usually, any other siblings are trained in other tasks around the Empire so that the leader (the Count) can focus just on leading the Grimlands. There aren’t any set titles for the other positions those heirs attain; in the past few generations alone, there have been Smiths, Scientists, and even a Horsemaster, though that last one seems to be an exception and not a particularly historical example. 

None of this is the information you asked for. I’d erase it if I didn’t write it all in ink.

Most of the documented sets of multiples in my family are fraternal twins, but there have been identical twins as well. There is only one record of mirror image identical twins. Those two were the third Grim Count and her brother; according to that Count’s journals, he served as simply her Advisor, and together they expanded the Grimlands’ trade routes all the way to far-off Pixandria. Not too much of a concern anymore, of course, but back then it was truly an accomplishment. It’s said they wrote new legal proposals together, side by side, one writing with their right hand while the other corrected with their left. Fun anecdote, perhaps, but no real evidence to show for it.

I hope this helps your research.

 ☾○☽

 Scott has prayed to Aeor for as long as he could remember. He prays to Exor too, of course; you can’t deny one god over the other, even if you’re only the champion of one.

His twin joins him in his prayer today, and though Scott stares at him out of the corner of his eye, he doesn’t say anything about it until he’s standing and leaving the Church of Aeor and his twin is following behind.

“Are you good?” Scott asks, idly kicking a rock down the street.

“Yeah.” He sounds uncharacteristically downcast.

“You don’t sound very good,” Scott says.

His twin sighs loudly and glares at unlit candles at the side of the road. “Scott, have you ever thought about what it’ll be like when we become kings of this place?” he asks.

“Not really,” he admits. “We’d be living in the castle, I guess? And consulting Father about things that the court thinks are important. You’d be the one making the big decisions for Rivendell and I’d be talking to the other Empires for support. Just what the current Vaeorin and Xornoth do, I think.”

“I suppose.” His twin’s neck cranes as he stares at the sky. Scott looks at him with confusion before following his gaze up. “What’re you looking at?”

“Do you think the gods love us, Scott?” he asks.