not until the end; always

The high summer sun blistered down upon the palace grounds, and Saskia hoped beyond hope that the Censor would not feel her sweating through the stiff fabric of her gown when next he found some pretense to touch the small of her back. The royal terraces were crawling with legionaries in red and black and white-robed dignitaries, all arranged in perfect lines; the soldiers faceless under their helms, like puppets awaiting the tug of command on their strings. 

Saskia had chosen for her own armour a somber dress in the current Nhalmascan style—a gift from the Censor himself—far better suited for the dreary Ilsabardian mountain climes than the dry highland summer. Miserably, she hoped her mother would never see what imperial taste had wrought upon her homeland’s traditional fashions.

She was not alone in wishing the assembly would end before it had even begun. Behind her, a bureaucrat complained of the heat and openly longed for home; his neighbour muttered back snidely that “we wouldn’t have gotten this horrid little posting if not for your indiscretions with Lord Nerva’s favourite, Magnus,” which Saskia committed to memory in case it proved useful. She lifted a hand to her forehead under the pretense of shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked about the terrace, and surreptitiously wiped sweat from her shining brow.

“I hope you’re not feeling faint, my dear,” said goe Tullius; how artfully he spun himself a fable to justify his steadying hand on her back.

“Thank you, Censor. It is quite hot today.”

“Indeed. I have been invited to the palace by the viceroy’s entourage after this little display; you should join me for refreshments. I shall see to your every need.”

He had worn his most expensive cologne today, likely for her benefit; Saskia could smell the notes of vetiver on the breeze. She smiled, as she always did.

“You are too kind. I wish I could accept, but surely the viceroy—”

“Would be a fool not to wish to be graced by your presence. You have been a staunch ally to his rule; a provincial flower grown beautiful under His Radiance’s sun.” A traitor and a liar and a seductress. A Resistance spy. “I must insist, for your company is the sweetest of my days in these uncivilized lands.”

“Then I would fain accept, my lord.”

The Censor nodded, showing his most handsome smile, and tucked her hand into the crook of his arm with a pat that was almost paternal. Heat drummed inside Saskia’s ears, but she forced herself into closer contact with him.

“Ah. At last,” he said as the viceroy’s airship landed.

There are no mirrors in this broken world; no men like him in its reflections.

Only a man with a face may see himself in another. The Emissary has long since forgotten the shape of his own. Too many he has worn, too many he has seen; he has been and been and been, endlessly, until all he knows to hold himself together is that he is a saint of duty.

The Griffin is in his own way without shadow; he is also teeming with ghosts. He is all broken memories, chipped away by time: a faceless man living behind a mask, hooded in white. Not a mirror, but a fragmented retelling.

His burdens have voices and cries the Emissary almost recognizes. Lesser beasts—but beasts nonetheless.

/

The Emissary is no merchant, and the Griffin no haggling buyer. They speak not of the cost.

/

Under the cold light of the moon—and the blind, chained gaze of the one true god—a man gives his heart and the lives of his people to a new god, and it is not enough.

As She has done for eons, She sings.

“I’m done,” Sihtric said, unfurling from the positively crustacean sitting position he had been working in.

Pavane held out a hand. “Let’s see it, then.”

Sihtric slid over his worksheet with an expression that was just short of smug and immediately began spinning his pencil on his thumb. He was a smart lad, and Pavane knew for a fact that he was already making quite an impression with his professors—no small feat in the Studium of all places—but he still went so chaotically about writing down his reasonings that decoding his worksheets just about required a cipher key. It was impossible to separate one formula from another at a glance.

What Pavane did notice at a glance, however, was the name Sihtric had written at the top of the page, alongside his student identification.

He looked up.

“What?” Sihtric said warily. “I thought I did good.”

“Does Sairsel know?” Pavane said, turning the worksheet over and tapping a finger against his name. “Sihtric Selsson.”

Sihtric got that darling little look on his face he had when he felt sheepish about something and shook his head. “You can’t be in the Studium without a surname, turns out. And I didn’t want them to just saddle me with ‘Salt’ like I was nobody’s child, so…” he said with a shrug, pulling his knees up to his chest. “D’you think he’ll be all right with it, like?”

“I think he’ll be honoured, Sihtric.”

He might not have spoken to Sairsel in moons, but he’d known him well enough to at least be certain of this much of his heart. And none of this concerned him, really, but he felt a blossom of pride and affection for the two of them nonetheless.

“You should tell him,” he added gently. “He ought to know.”

“I will! I will,” Sihtric said.

“Waiting for the right moment?”

“Yeah.”

Pavane made a noise at the back of his throat, then returned to the worksheet. After a moment, he handed it back. “Start over.”

“I got it wrong?”

“You got it right at the end there, but you shouldn’t have; you skipped two steps. And no, I’m not telling you which. Brilliance doesn’t excuse sloppiness.”

On the empty, unseen stage, Zenos laid his hands upon him, and it felt nothing like how Sairsel had expected. The skin was tipped with cold—then again, it was winter, and so was his—but warm with blood underneath; the touch was curious rather than violent.

With him Sairsel had a strange freedom to speak his thoughts, so instead of wondering he said aloud, “Have you ever even touched someone you weren’t fighting?”

“No,” Zenos said, fingers splaying out against the stem of his neck. Then he amended, “The Butcher. Her deference was a poor act; she bowed her head to me when she ought to have been snapping like a caged beast. I made her look at me.”

Sairsel shuddered under his skin for Fordola, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. He was a statue, locked in stone; a tree, rooted deep in the earth. Zenos covered the marble of his throat with his palm, thumb to the running sap of his pulse, fingers to his jaw. For the first time, vulnerable as he was, he wasn’t afraid. As simple as it might have been, Zenos crushing his windpipe was unthinkable in that moment.

“What about me now?” he asked the empty theatre, because Zenos was pressed against his back. The shape of him was palpable, perfectly defined by touch alone.

One hand moved down his chest to pause pressed against his heart and feeling his breath. He wanted to be touched.

This was his last attempt at killing Emet-Selch.

Sihtric hadn’t kept count; every one of his failed assassinations had been provoked by unfettered emotion, the product of rage or fear or heartbreak spilling over and out of him like boiling water from a pot. Impulse made for poor planning, and even poorer recall of one’s missteps.

(By Emet-Selch’s count, the boy’s fits of aggression numbered, at this point, thirteen.)

More often than not, he’d been reactionary, and if Sairsel had been there—his belly made a knot of itself and tears pushed hard behind his eyes every time Sihtric thought of him—he would have reminded him that an impatient hunter was a hungry hunter. And he would’ve been right, of course, because Sihtric was hungry: vengeance was a starving thing.

I name thee Theron, my Lightwarden, he heard Emet-Selch say in his nightmares as Sairsel transformed over and over and over again, and forgive thee thy wandering. He both feared and wanted to understand why there had been such dissatisfaction in the Ascian’s voice, how he could be so rueful of the success of his own cruelty as if it were Sairsel’s fault.

For once, though, Sihtric’s fear was greater than his curiosity. If Emet-Selch died before he understood, he could live with it, because he’d at least have succeeded, and he wouldn’t have to live with him.

The plan wasn’t a very elaborate one, but it was at least a plan. Rather than bite and snap like the feral little thing he’d been when he first met Sairsel, or opportunistically try to push Emet-Selch off of one of the tall buildings in his dead city, he waited for the right moment. And while he waited, he stole a stylus off of the absurdly tall desk in the Bureau of the Architect—

“I will pretend I saw nothing,” the shade called Hythlodaeus said, with a lilt to his strange echoing voice that sounded almost playful—

and sat by himself and remembered the Dark. He traced the runes tattooed on his arm with the stylus, recalling how something inside him had come alive when the Saintsmaker had inked that call to the Dark into his skin, until he could just make out a faint glow under the black lines.

the locked tomb au.

The room they locked him into wasn’t exactly a cell, per se.

Well. It wasn’t a prison, ontologically—though it did lock from the outside, he didn’t get to choose when he left it, and they had put him in there because he was a flight risk. But there weren’t bars on the window (mainly because there was no window, and that was the primary factor that would chip away at his sanity; the solitude wasn’t much of a punishment) and his toilet and sink were both separate and inside a little cabinet rather than in the room where he slept, so there was that. 

He was given the illusion of agency through a shelf stocked with nutrient paste and basic dry ingredients so that he could manage his own meals, bland as they were; they also let him access the sonic cleaners every other day for the sake of hygiene, which he had to admit was much more diligent than he was in washing with water when in the wilds. His cot was thin and hard and the blankets scratchy, but it was clean and free of vermin. He had a little lamp by his bedside and the ceiling fixtures first attuned to, then maintained, his circadian rhythms. 

The House of God, the Necrolord Prime, was infinitely generous with its indentures, and its Kindly Prince immeasurably epithetical.

Sairsel could almost have been happy in this particular state of captivity, if not for all the captivity. And the fact that he had been visited by one of God’s Saints after the first full day they had left him in pitch darkness, which had suitably unhinged him, and told in the Abyssal Celebrant’s disaffected voice that plucking him out of his refuge with his family had now given them quite an easy target to mete out punishment if he stepped even one toe out of line.

cw: gore

They had not stepped out into the World—here the wide corridors and tall halls of the palace beyond their cold and quiet Walls—for years until it was all empty. There was a war on, apparently, and it was all because of that little quirk of their family of cannibalizing itself; Glauca’s words, not Absidia’s. Glauca had the way with words.

It was Absidia who had listened from the spaces between the Walls and said, “The Emperor is dead again,” as though the Emperor had only ever been one man who was meant to die again and again. Little difference did the man’s name make to them: they spent the first reign in confinement, and the second in confinement, too. Politics were made not to touch them, for they were political pawns, gone to dust before they could ever join the burned-down board.

But when the second Emperor died—not the first who had been three men, but the one who had only ever been half of one—Absidia attached meaning and gravity to that fact, and they crawled out from behind their Walls and into the World.

Absidia walked and walked. Glauca stood still. She drifted through the World only moments and found the Emperor in the empty throne room, this place which begat another war and this corpse that had begat them. It was the first time their lord father was a thing of flesh before her, blue-lipped and stiff and crusted with his own dark blood.

His flesh fascinated her. She would have liked to see it when their darling brother’s work was fresh and Father’s skin did not slough into the split cavity of his neck, to have gotten a clearer view of the tendons and white bone that still connected his head to the rest of his body. As it was now, a gory black mess, she missed a great deal of detail.

“Baby, this is vile,” Absidia said chidingly when she returned to Glauca’s side after her exploration of the World yielded nothing more than different sorts of Walls. She reached for her sister’s thin arm and hugged it with both of her own, tangling their bodies into one in remembrance of their time in the womb. “Why did he not finish the job?”

Saskia was bathing when Neesa stole into her flat.

The intrusions no longer scared her; for the sake of Saskia’s ever-fraying nerves and Neesa’s own safety, after Saskia had emerged from a doorway with a butcher’s knife in hand, she made a habit of announcing herself with short, hissing bursts between her lips, as though calling a cat.

“In here,” Saskia called in a worn voice like a blunted knife. She made an effort to smile when Neesa came in, but Neesa had a good eye for truth-finding and not even her lovely liar could dupe her. Not after so many moons spent in each other’s company.

But Neesa wasn’t such a stickler for truth that she would ruin her own visit so quickly by demanding honesty when Saskia would rather feign gladness at seeing her. She watched Saskia’s pretty fingers trace unseen patterns along the water’s surface, droplets glistening on the metal of her rings, and chose her approach.

“Feeling fancy,” she said, sitting down on the tiles beside the tub and bracing an arm on the edge. Saskia had picked some sweet-smelling bathing oils, herby and delicate: Neesa already wanted to press her nose to her skin and taste them from her body.

Saskia said nothing and leaned forward to hug her knees to her chest. And of course Neesa wanted to ask what weighed on her, but it would likely be imperial business, and she never wanted to hear unless she was listening with her lord’s ears. So she just pressed her cheek against her arm and trailed the fingers of her other hand down the warm, smooth line of Saskia’s spine.

“Would you like it if I joined you?”

The boy was still feverish in recovery from his last trials, and the Saintsmaker’s subsequent walk in his memories. It was in these times that they guarded him most fiercely: to watch for adverse effects, or for the delayed onset of manifestations they so eagerly awaited.

This was the ninth solstice since his birth; the passing of every year, of the sun’s apex in the unseen sky above the Lightless, left them with less time. The fourteenth inched ever closer, every day taking the boy towards the one where the Saintsmaker foresaw he would become.

The frequency of his illnesses grew with each trial, but the Saintsmaker refused to lose hope. The Dark around them spoke to the Light in him, coaxing it, nurturing it; when the Light would answer, he could finally rise to becoming the saint who would guard the Dark.

“Saintsmaker,” said the boy in a small, croaking voice. Unprompted, unbidden. “Who’s Prometheus again?”

“Prometheus?” they asked in return.

“It’s been stuck in my head since I got sick.”

His point of reference was the illness, for he no longer had the memories of the trials. The Saintsmaker felt an involuntary twitch in their metal hand, like a leap of the heart: this was the first time. The first echo of the trials lingering in his consciousness, a phantom pain promising a beginning. 

And the Saintsmaker had no knowledge of the name the boy spoke; the Dark had no answer. They had never thought that to be blind might be so exhilarating, but they contained their hunger for the signs of his awakening.

“Where might you have heard of this Prometheus before?” they asked calmly, taking the same voice they always did to prompt him to look within—to grasp for answers himself that he might find what surrounded them. “Think well.”

“I can’t think,” the boy said, raising a hand to his head. His fingers always sought the place the Saintsmaker’s had touched for their walk in his memories, instinctual; he squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the blanket closer around his small shoulders. “I must have read it in one of your books, yeah,” he decided at last. “Will you remind me when I’m better so I can look?”

The Saintsmaker stroked the boy’s hair with their metal hand. “I will, sun-child. Now rest this weary head of yours,” they said, knowing full well that no book of theirs bore the name Prometheus within its pages.

But they would make certain to remind him to look for this name, for not even the Dark knew what he might find alongside it.

It was not the first time Bastian oen Valendia had been stolen from the very castrum in the dark of night, nor would it be the last. Now that they finally had a ship again—Bastian would not ask which imperial fleet had been relieved of one of its vessels so that they would tell him no lies—the pirates had an even easier time of it, at least in their escape; in the morning, the duplicarius would alert his pilus to the malfunctioning searchlights on the eastern walls, and all would be well in Castrum Valnaini again.

In the meantime, the pirates led one more successful heist, and their prize had a few hours’ freedom to be no more than Bastian Valendia again. For all their efforts, they deserved better company than he: too long he spent alone up on the deck as they flew together to whichever locale they had chosen for this particular outing, watching the stars pass him by in silence.

He hadn’t always been such a contemplative man; perhaps Stjr remembered this. Perhaps that was why she stole him.

Perhaps it was for the very same reason she had taken up with her young companion—to fill the silences—and why she put herself again and again in Bastian’s path with him: to remind him of what once was.

Asterion had a very particular walk: a determined sort of stride, but never so quick as to seem hurried. He was a man whose every trait was honed towards appearing unbothered, a shield that was desperately difficult to penetrate. Bastian was beginning to have a keen familiarity for so much of him; he recognized those steps coming up on the deck without turning, or a single word being spoken.

He was also no Viera. Stjr, too, was uniquely recognizable.

“We’ll be arriving in Radz-at-Han soon,” Asterion said as he settled beside Bastian. “Stjr’s banished me from the helm of my own ship.”

“Thavnair? How exotic,” Bastian said, unsuited to light-heartedness as he was. He gazed down at Asterion’s hands where his wrists were crossed over the railing, idly spinning the multi-coloured rings on his fingers. “These are new.”

Asterion held up the fingers of one hand to better display them. “They are indeed,” he said with a self-satisfied look Bastian didn’t understand straight away. “Plunder from a monastery.”

When he understood, Bastian straightened his spine, turning his body towards Asterion’s—which only made the pirate’s sly smirk widen. “Not the one in Golmore.”

“The same.”

“That was you?” Bastian asked, like a fool. He couldn’t believe Stjr, of all people, had agreed to such a plan.

“The IVth is aware, then? How did your legatus take it—fuming, I hope? Did he sweat?” Asterion said, managing some impossible balance of smugness and eagerness. When Bastian only gave him a flat look, he smiled again to himself and found some honesty.  “‘A day late and ten gil short,’ my father always said of me. If I can make Noah van Gabranth feel that way even once, I’ll sell my ship for parts and retire to a fat and happy life on the coast.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Perhaps not that last bit.”

There was no taming a wanderer from his life—not one to whom wandering itself was the appeal. Bastian knew this of Asterion and Stjr both. But some trace of melancholy lingered in Asterion’s eyes, in spite of all he did to veil it from even himself; that Bastian should make out its shape and colour was in itself a wonder.

The palace was still in disarray after the chaos of the last few bells; Saskia knew she would not have been able to stride in uninterrupted as she had otherwise. In any case, she had no desire to let herself be stopped by any of the Commander’s men—not after today. She was making straight for the infirmary, and no one would dissuade her from it.

Her anxiety and frustration only increased tenfold when she finally reached the right hallway—which should not, by rights, have already been familiar to her—and nearly marched straight into the wall that was Raubahn Aldynn himself.

Saskia stopped herself just short of colliding with him and briefly looked up, too proud to meet his eyes. “Commander,” she said coolly, in a tone Morgana would have been delighted to hear from her twenty years ago—perhaps not now that it was directed at her lover.

She made to walk on past him, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. Her body’s first instinct was fear: a man of his bulk, of his martial fame, and her with nothing but Neesa’s needle in her boot; even with only one arm, the objective danger he posed was evident to every part of her that had survived the occupation. But quickly enough, fear gave way to renewed defiance; the contempt with which she looked up at him was enough to make him release her at once.

“The chirurgeons will allow no one inside,” Raubahn said in a calm voice that belied his distress. “Not even I.”

“Will she live?”

Almost imperceptibly, his jaw trembled; Saskia could feel the exhaustion coming off of him as though his aether had been made material, but she refused her natural impulse towards sympathy. “It’s too early to tell.”

“Well,” Saskia said, and found no other words she wanted to say to him. She was about to turn on her heel and blindly head back to the theatre and the comfort of Neesa’s arms when Raubahn spoke again.

“How did you know to come?” he asked—only to answer his own question. “Let me guess: your elusive Resistance contact.”

“If you must know, it was Grand Steward Riot who told me of Morgana’s condition. And before you start doubting Ashelia’s devotion again: it isn’t like she tells me of everything that goes on between these walls. She only contacted me because she understands that I still care deeply for Morgana’s well-being.”

Raubahn’s eyes narrowed at her. “Before I start doubting her devotion again?”

“Perhaps if your council had actually listened to Ashelia instead of casting doubt upon her every move regarding the Undercity, it wouldn’t have come to this,” Saskia snapped, “and Morgana wouldn’t be on death’s door having protected a man so desperate to prove himself still strong enough to lead he forgets his own duty to her!”

Raubahn looked as though he had taken an unexpected blow—the sort that only made a man fight harder, angrier. It was the first Saskia saw of the hot-tempered man who had made his reputation as the fiery leader of the Immortal Flames.

“This coming from a woman who has done nothing but obfuscate in service to a game of subterfuge she no longer needs to play,” he replied harshly. “All this to thwart the very same council you accuse—which, so very recently, accused you of abetting the Empire. When Tibost’s people began to clamour for retribution, who do you think argued for your contributions to the Resistance? Whose voice joined Ashelia’s to give credibility to your Undercity contact in spite of your continued refusal to name your allies within my ranks?” His voice rose, resounding within the hallway: “Bark at me again about the sort of man I am, and I may finally give you reason to doubt that I could be anything but an ally to you.”

Saskia flinched again in the face of his anger, but she was her mothers’ daughter, and she stood her ground. 

“Is that all? Because you defended me against that farce of a list, I should be grateful that Morgana again has been grievously wounded in your service in spite of your duty as a man to protect her?”

“Morgana chose this position. I would never disrespect her by acting as though my duty to protect her supersedes her duty—”

“‘She chose this,’” Saskia repeated scornfully. “How many times will you tell yourself this before you find the words wanting? Or perhaps you already do. Perhaps your anger towards me is only a shade of your anger at your own failure—”

“Enough, you two,” said Ashelia as she quickly strode from one end of the hallway to them, commanding as though she were not two decades younger than them; this was the Grand Steward speaking. She drew near, keeping her voice quiet so as not to carry. “I know this is a difficult time,” she said, giving Raubahn a meaningful look, “but there are better places for this conversation, unless you want the whole palace to wonder whether all this isn’t much more personal than it seemed five minutes ago.”

“Isn’t it?” Saskia asked, not tearing her gaze from Raubahn.

“I think sailors have more interesting stories than sky pirates, generally.”

Rygdea dropped a heavy piece of machinery—one that suspiciously looked as though it were essential to the running of the ship, and should be inside it rather than on the deck, but what did she know?—and gave Lebreau his most affronted stare, grinding their conversation to a complete halt. 

“She says to the sky pira—” (a narrow-eyed pause as he remembered his usual insistence that he was no pirate) “—airship captain.”

Lebreau smiled in a manner he called know-it-all and leaned against the gunwale, tossing the apple she’d stolen from the galley up in the air once before sinking her teeth into it.

“I grew up around sailors, you know,” she said around a mouthful. It was a thick, humid day; the sort where the wind was dead on the ground. This high up, there was never no wind, but today it tasted different: heavier, less wild. A sailor’s curse. “They see so much of the world. You should hear the things I’ve heard them say they pulled out of the sea—like there’s nothing but monsters down there.”

There’s monsters everywhere, darling, the captain almost replied, but decided against it. Playful irritation always suited him better, with her.

“Then why are you up here eating my rations instead of some unlucky seadog’s ship?” he said, pointing his wrench accusingly at Lebreau.

“The sea isn’t where I’m going to find out about my past,” she replied, heavy with meaning; she fixed Rygdea with a serious stare he pointedly avoided by renewing his attention towards his tinkering.

“The past ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, girly-girl.” It wasn’t the first time they were having some version of this conversation; every time, Rygdea sounded more tired. “Trust me. It’s full of complications, and at your age, you should be running as fast as you can from complications so they don’t catch up with you when you’re my age.”

“Am I a complication to you, then?”

“Without a doubt,” he said, not hesitating for a moment. “A complication and a pain in my ass.” At her sulking look, he suggested brightly: “Drop you off in Limsa next time we fly over Vylbrand, then?”

“Not a chance,” Lebreau said determinedly. “I know you’re hoping I’ll forget, but you made me a promise and I’m holding you to it.”

The promise was this: one day, when she was ready, he would tell her why he had taken her to the orphanage—and she was determined to be whatever he needed her to be so that he could think of her as ready. And in the meantime, she got to be on a ship. It wasn’t all so bad.

Rygdea only shook his head at her.

“You’ve got grease on your nose.”

“Huh?” he said, rubbing greasy fingers on the perfectly clean bridge of his nose.

“Ha,” Lebreau said.

She quickly made her exit back down before the galley before he could think to saddle her with gun maintenance as punishment; if she cooked something good enough, he’d probably forget. 

(note: this is a continuation of last week’s extra credit entry)

The city was already lost by the time Wulfric made it to the surface. He’d raced through tunnels rocked by blasts above, run past frantic folk being ushered to safety by sigil-bearers whose territories didn’t risk collapsing over their people’s heads—it was already hell below, but it was worse above.

He faltered for two steps, once he was fully out of the tunnels. It was the fire-rain sky: the same he’d seen in Nhalmasque all those years ago, the black of their ships blotting out the stars with wave after wave of soldiers. For a moment he was powerless again, gripped by a boy’s fear until the sounds of gunfire shook the soldier awake. A new spike of adrenaline, and he was running again, barely aware of the tingling numbness shooting down from his right shoulder to his fingertips.

It was still a long way to his family. He cut through the alleyways like an Undercity shadow, like a Glaive infiltrator; he ignored the screams that would have forced him to fight and waste time he didn’t have. 

The imperials had already barricaded the stairs that would have taken him straight to the house. Wulfric swore from between his teeth and veered west, thinking to cut through the theatre district; a blast sounded close enough to make his ears ring and send him sprawling onto the cobblestones, arms covering his head. The ground shook from a tumble of bricks just ahead of him: an archway had crumbled into the side of a nearby building.

A blessing of destruction. Sidestepping a body mangled by stone, Wulfric sprinted up the ledge the fallen bricks offered him and jumped, catching the edge of the roof and dragging himself up. Half of his body resisted the effort, grown clumsy from age and two decades of skulking underground, but quickly remembered itself. Climbing had been easy, once. 

He set to running again, his path far clearer now from above—and the burning city, too, was clearer. Smoke rose from Barrel Street, he realized with a cold stab of fear. There was no time to doubt the jump without the use of magic—but Stars, he felt empty, so fucking pale compared to the man he had once been—as he leapt from rooftop to rooftop. Soon he was back in the streets below, just a few strides from Rinomy’s, his knee shrieking with pain from some wrong move in his landing,

But he didn’t stop. He could only run and pray it would be empty.

(cw: body horror)

Sairsel has lost count of how many times it has come to this.

Sometimes he has his bow, and he wins; sometimes he has his gunblade, or a sword, and it isn’t enough—he isn’t enough; sometimes he chokes the life from Zenos with his bare hands and it doesn’t feel like winning.

‘Winning.’ As though the outcome of every cycle can be measured like the result of a game—as though there isn’t just a little more loss in every one.

He is tired of dying. He is tired of seeing the good in killing. Of thinking, it was either him or me.

(Maybe, says his lover’s head from his belt—the burden of death he never wants to be liberated from—the problem isn’t that it’s either you or him.)

“What do you mean?” Sairsel asks.

(Maybe it’s that it’s always you and him.)

“No need to be jealous for my sake, Viper.”

(Of the deranged fucking madman? Please. I know I’m all head and no heart these days, but I can’t exactly be bothered.)

For the first time in… gods, too many cycles, Sairsel finds it in him to smile. He allows himself a moment to lean back against a boulder—this time, they are in his domain, his hunting grounds—and unhook the head of his beloved from his belt. Only vaguely, he remembers his own horror at what he had become, with the axe in his hand to preserve the last of Pavane’s spirit, but his presence is now as mundane in its atrocity as it is a lifeline.

(You fell in love with a necromancer, he says as Sairsel touches his brow to his and closes his eyes. It comes with the territory.)

Sairsel only regrets that he never had a choice; that he still doesn’t.

He has finally understood why his grandmother called all her stories tragedies: no matter the telling, the way she would change the events at her young audience’s urging for a happier, or stranger, or more gruesome outcome, every story she told was an inevitability. Always the hero was trapped within it, she said, bringing them into complicity.

“When do we set him free?” Nairel had asked, once.

“When the story ends,” their grandmother replied.

Sairsel is still looking for his way out. The Hermit becomes the Fool, playing his part upon a stage he cannot bring himself to exit. And from the wings he hears movement, a shadow wending its way between the trees: the villain—the hero, the narrator—is come.

(Look alive, darling. Time to fight again.)

“What if I didn’t?” he asks, trading the head for his weapon—his gunblade, this time. He runs his fingers down the flat of the blade, along the keen edge of it, and thinks that there is no point to it. Zenos is near, now; if Sairsel had his bow, he could soon loose upon him.

(What are you saying? You’d just lie down and die?)

“Maybe I’ve just got it turned around. Maybe this isn’t how I deny him,” he says. And Zenos comes, death wrought in blood and gold, and smiles like he has found a prize. “What if I’ve just been accepting, all this time?”

Zenos raises his great and terrible blade, poised to strike, and Sairsel tosses his own aside. That is enough to make him falter, for doubt to part the cold fire.

With death at his throat, Sairsel gives nothing. “I’m more than this. I want something that isn’t this,” he admits, looking up and meeting the eyes that have been his every horror for too long. “I just can’t fathom that you could ever be a person. Someone who puts his head down at night and dreams of missing a lesson or replying to a letter far too late.”

(That’s the problem: he only dreams of a world on fire.)

“How can I make you understand that that’s what I am?”

“I know what you are,” Zenos says with disarming, indomitable certainty. Then he smiles again, cold and pale in his affection, and cradles Sairsel’s body with hand and blade. (Powerless, Pavane seethes.) “What if I told you I killed every living thing in your wood on my way to you?”

Rage flares inside Sairsel’s body in an instant, and he is trying to tear Zenos apart with teeth and bare hands again. And then the blade is inside his chest, cutting him open as though to reach his heart, and he joins all the other rotting things on the forest floor.

“My friend,” he hears as his body twitches, choking on his own blood, “I will accept you even in your moments of doubt.”

Sairsel wakes up in the water where Pavane drowned himself to bring him back to his broken body, the very first time. He stumbles to his feet shaking and weary, dragging himself from the riverbed, and runs a hand through his hair.

He takes a breath and picks up his bow from the grass, gritting his teeth in resignation.

(cw: mild sexual content at the end of the first part)

“Anything yet?” Seax asked from the bed.

Wulfric, sitting by the dwelling’s sole window, stifled a yawn. “No trace,” he reported. “How long did you say we had to watch for?”

“I didn’t say.” That was why Wulfric had asked; he was trying to be polite. “It’s not very complicated. We just wait until that fuck Véland shows up, we teach him a lesson, we leave. Did you have to have your boot daddy explain simple assignments to you over and over back in your soldiering days, or are you just like that with me?”

Wulfric ignored the sour taste in his mouth and huffed out a breath, stretching out his legs. He kept his eyes on the movement out in the Sprawl; his focus on the Undercity always rooted out any discomfort he might have with the past before it could take.

“Far be it from me to be callous towards your friend’s plight—Véland does sound like a prime cock—but isn’t it entirely possible that he just won’t show? I mean, she’ll want to sleep in her bed eventually, won’t she?”

“She won’t be sleeping in that bed if she’s afraid he might come to steal into it,” Seax replied with a chill to her tone much unlike the unaffected attitude she had towards most things. “I’ve got her somewhere safe; she’ll be sleeping fine there.” 

And maybe she understood something Wulfric didn’t intend to communicate when he glanced at her, because she shook her head, clicked her tongue, and added, “Number of favours I owe her, I’ll stay a moon in her place to knife a man who’s got her scared if that’s what it takes—are we clear on that? If you’re so bored with being warm and dry for a few hours, I can stand watch on my own and you can fuck off.”

“That’s not what I was saying at all, Seax,” Wulfric said, as reasonably as he could make it sound, once it was evident Seax had finished speaking; if he’d learned anything from her since coming to the Undercity, it was that you didn’t interrupt someone like her, even if it was with the intent of correcting a misunderstanding.

“No? What are you saying, then?”

“Just that there are more efficient ways of fucking up a guy when you know his name, his face, his haunts and his friends.”

Seax liked that; her voice edged back towards the unbothered. “Ever so proactive,” she said lightly. “Normally, I would agree with you, but this is different. He gets a knife in a gutter, and that can be the work of any rotten fuck he’s gotten on the wrong side of this week. But he gets it in her house, and that teaches the whole neighbourhood: no one fucks with Eda and gets away with it. Not on my watch.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Wulfric said. 

“I know what you mean to do.”

Morgana’s fingers stilled on the straps of the armour. Intimately, she knew his discomfort as though it were her own: to face her back in this moment, to stare at the cloak upon her shoulders. Hers was no tattered flag of a broken nation; the pair of griffins rampant on her back, swords crossed, told another story entirely. A story of her own choosing, thick with echoes of the past. 

The dull black of the scales on her chest took on a blade-sharp gleam as she turned to look at him.

“Do you?” she asked, her derision so much like his own. He did not move from the shadows, not yet, to step forward into the biting of her light. “Are you going to do something about it?”

He opened his hands, showing them empty; there was no blade at his belt. There might be one, hidden in his sleeve, waiting for her to be near enough to plunge a dagger into her belly—and wouldn’t that be some irony? Him, of all people, deciding her end in this moment. Would he hold her as he did it?

“We already know how that story ends. Swords will never be enough.”

“You could try words. Try and conjure the reality you desire just by speaking as you did then,” Morgana said, as though handing him the secret to her own destruction could ever be so easy. “If anyone could ever know what it takes to make me change course, it’s you.”

“Are you asking for a way out?”

Morgana smiled, hardened by purpose. “No.”

“Then I’ll say nothing. I won’t speak of your madness, or of his heart,” Ilberd said, and finally stepped forward into the cold light of the full moon. “But I will say this: you had better be prepared.”

In his hand was not a blade, but it felt like a sacrifice. She took the mask from him in silence, holding it in both hands as she considered this, her last step before the abyss.

“It was never just for Ala Mhigo,” she said at length, “or your family, or our people. Was it?”

“Why?” Ilberd replied, turning it on her. “What is it for you?”

Morgana smiled again at that, and went on. “The actions, perhaps. The purpose. But the Griffin—that was for you.”

He did not need to speak his answer aloud; she already knew.

“Maybe you were right,” Morgana admitted thoughtfully. “Maybe we are the same.”

Ilberd watched as she put on the mask—as she pulled on the hood of her cloak and wholly disappeared inside the Griffin. He was as powerless as she had been then: his only purpose to witness, and to untangle the pieces of his soul from hers out of what would remain of Yiazmat.

“This will hurt, when it happens,” she warned him. “But know that I will make Zenos pay for the last time.”