romance club catalog

SHAKESPEARE'S CODE

The Witch & The Inquisitor by @reneedenoailles |🎨| Amabelle Norfolk x Abraham Darnby | TW: suggestive content | T

Black Widow by @reneedenoailles |🎨| Amabell Norfolk, Edward Pembroke, Ralph Suffolk, Abraham Darnby, Hobello | TW: flash, murder, blood | M

HEAVEN'S SECRET

Revelations of Divine Love by @waiting4sunrise |🖊️| OC x Eragon | G

LEGEND OF THE WILLOW

Mei Hattori by @ladylamrian-archive |👤| Mei Hattori | G

SHADOWS OF SAINTFOUR 2: TIMELESS

Jealousy by @isazmelt |🎨🏳️‍🌈| Nadine Ross x Penelope 'Poppy' Emerson | G

THE THUNDERSTORMS SAGA

Love, Shadow and Catastrophe After the Wedding Banquet by @masamunewaifu |🎨| Tiss ey Vedtree x Tai ey Eini Lono Wed Vain Firkain | TW: flashing visuals, implied violence, sexual imagery and poisoning/drugging themes | M

HEAVEN'S SECRET: REQUIEM

Tomorrow Never Came by @dmitryan |🎨🏳️‍🌈| Dmitry Lloyd x Yan | TW: flickering lights, cigarettes | T

Losing You by @dmitryan |🎨| Lane | TW: flickering lights | G

HEAVEN'S SECRET 3: ETERNITY'S END

To Caress by @blatantliez |🎨| Audrey x Cassiel | G

WATERLILY

Fabian Reyes Aesthetic by @de4thstar |🎨| Fabian Reyes | T

It has been four years since Tiffany Romano got married to Julian.

It has also been four years since she left Hyacinth Pierce crying in the rain.

That should ease up the pain. It should make her mothers smile of approval feel earned. But it doesn't.

So she now spends her days either shopping or staying in a separate bedroom than Julien.She's a bit grateful that Julian understood. He's also grateful that she understood that the engagement's purpose  was to appease her mother.

She was currently cruising around  Windrose Bay hearing the local radio until the presenter interrupted an ad about her mother`s boutique.

We interrupt this ad for some fresh hits.

Hello there Chappell Roan decided to bless us with this new hit, Good Luck Babe! 

This song was requested by ******************

There began the cheerful upbeat song, which Tiffany couldn't help but to remember the days when she and Hyacinth listened to Electra Heart on repeat.

Why am I thinking about her all of a sudden?

It's fine, it's cool

You can say that we are nothing, but you know the truth

And guess I'm the fool

With her arms out like an angel through the car sunroof 

Hyacinth and Tiffany hid away in  Tiffany`s room as the party with Tiffany herself threw to celebrate that her parents will be out of town and off the grid.

{It`s only casual.} Hyacinth said while looking down on Tiffany`s lips. Tiffany at that time only smirked, {Oh you wanted long term? Darling you just made my expectations for you low}

Hyacinth only looked at her, {Still trying to reach that dream huh? The trophy wife dream huh?}

Tiffany Romano kissed Hyacinth Pierce as some song played out and learnt a few things about herself.

She really likes kissing girls

She likes this way more than she should be

She's beginning to realise that [casual] was going to be the death of her

I don't wanna call it off

But you don't wanna call it love

You only wanna be the one that I call "baby" 

At the same party after kissing her , Tiffany sees Hyacinth dancing with Luna and feels her entire being heat up. 

She felt mad.

She had no reason to feel mad

You can kiss a hundred boys in bars

Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling

Tiffany tried. She really tried to kiss boys, to delude herself that the high she felt every time she kissed was there with boys she was normal.

Till this day she's still trying to convince herself that she's normal

You can say it's just the way you are

Make a new excuse, 'nother stupid reason

Every time they kissed Tiffany made sure that Hyacinth's words  are in her head

{Casual}

Its casual

Even if her heart says otherwise.

Good luck, babe (Well, good luck)

Well, good luck, babe (Well, good luck)

You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

Good luck, babe (Well, good luck)

Well, good luck, babe (Well, good luck)

I'm cliché, who cares?

It's a sexually explicit kind of love affair

{I heard that Cecelia is out}

Tiffany heard her father say one night at dinner. Mr. Romano made it compulsory that 8pm was mandatory family dinner. An hour of small talks ,backhanded compliments made by her mother .

 These moments were the time Tiffany would be reminded that she's different from her family, especially from her mother.

{Out how?}asked Declan, ever the detective. Fuck, it always annoyed Tiffany about their parents hiding about whos actually  the favorite.

{Shes…a…}

Immediately everyone knew what Mrs Romano was referring to.

Declan shrugged, {Good for her}

Mrs Romano turned to him,{Im not shocked about your reaction Declan, I'm surprised that your sister hasn't said anything ,after all she's quite a chatterbox.}

Tiffany looked at her mother, {How so?}

{You're spending an awful time with that girl from the Fairchilds.}

{Weren't you the one preaching about having allies?}

{Yet you chose somebody who wouldn't give us any benefit.}

Declan slammed his fist on the table and looked at mother, {Every fucking relationship has to be a transaction does it?}

And I cry, it's not fair

This was one of the few moments Tiffany wished she was like Declan.

Being loyal to a fault

I just need a little lovin', I just need a little air 

Later on she would see Cecelia and another woman happily walking down the beach holding their hands.

Tiffany Romano wishes to be like them.

Casual, fuck that word.

Think I'm gonna call it off

Even if you call it love

I just wanna love someone who calls me "baby 

The chorus repeats as Tiffany reaches towards the end of the town as memories hit her.

Dear diary

I really like hyacinth pierce.

I think I'm a homosexual.

This casual business is going to end me.

Dear diary

I should have not kissed Hyacinth Pierce, mother is going to be mad at me.

I stole one of Declan's books, Carol. I want what they have.

Dear diary

Im sorry i made Hyacinth sad

I love her and it scares me

Oh Dear diary

What have I done?

When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night

With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife

{And do you TIFFANY ROMANO take Julian SANDERS as your lawful wedded husband…}

Tiffany looked at Hyacinth one last time,the other woman wiping her tears.

{I DO}

And when you think about me all of those years ago

You're standing face to face with "I told you so"

You know I hate to say, I told you so

You know I hate to say, but I told you so

As Tiffany and Julien shared their first dance her eyes went to Hyacinth who was dancing with her Brother. Hyacinth looked at her as if remembering what happened at the bachelorette party three days before the wedding.

{So you finally did it?}{Did what ?}

{You made your mother happy}

{I made myself happy. After all you said it was casual.}

You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

As the song ended Tiffany Romano-Sanders spent 46 minutes crying and wishing for a way to go back to the way they were. 

Dear diary 

My name is Tiffany Romano and I am a closeted lesbian who misses her situationship.

In another life I had the courage to live my truth and love the woman I love.

Dear Hyacinth my love I'm sorry

Yours 

Trigger Warning: Implied Intimacy

Tag list: @rc-catalog

SHAKESPEARE'S CODE

The Witch & The Inquisitor by @reneedenoailles |🎨| Amabelle Norfolk x Abraham Darnby | TW: suggestive content | T

Black Widow by @reneedenoailles |🎨| Amabell Norfolk, Edward Pembroke, Ralph Suffolk, Abraham Darnby, Hobello | TW: flash, murder, blood | M

HEAVEN'S SECRET

Revelations of Divine Love by @waiting4sunrise |🖊️| OC x Eragon | G

LEGEND OF THE WILLOW

Mei Hattori by @ladylamrian-archive |👤| Mei Hattori | G

SHADOWS OF SAINTFOUR 2: TIMELESS

Jealousy by @isazmelt |🎨🏳️‍🌈| Nadine Ross x Penelope 'Poppy' Emerson | G

THE THUNDERSTORMS SAGA

Love, Shadow and Catastrophe After the Wedding Banquet by @masamunewaifu |🎨| Tiss ey Vedtree x Tai ey Eini Lono Wed Vain Firkain | TW: flashing visuals, implied violence, sexual imagery and poisoning/drugging themes | M

HEAVEN'S SECRET: REQUIEM

Tomorrow Never Came by @dmitryan |🎨🏳️‍🌈| Dmitry Lloyd x Yan | TW: flickering lights, cigarettes | T

Losing You by @dmitryan |🎨| Lane | TW: flickering lights | G

HEAVEN'S SECRET 3: ETERNITY'S END

To Caress by @blatantliez |🎨| Audrey x Cassiel | G

WATERLILY

Fabian Reyes Aesthetic by @de4thstar |🎨| Fabian Reyes | T

The summons found her like all of Ivo's calls. Quietly, through the wrong door. This time, at an hour when the body has finally surrendered to rest and resents being called back from it.

Lou was halfway through a stale roll in the Assistant Corps mess when Prior's aide appeared at her shoulder, and she knew before he even opened his mouth that her one free night had just been confiscated. People did not move that fast through the Center carrying good news. 

Good news could afford to stroll.

"He wants you in his study," the aide said. "Now."

She finished the roll first. A small rebellion. The only kind the chip in her neck still permitted her.

Prior Ivo Martin did not look up when she came in, and that was in itself a kind of courtesy. He had learned, somewhere in his ascent, that men in his position made a room flinch simply by lifting their eyes. But he disliked making rooms flinch. So he let her cross the study at her own pace while the cello on the gramophone wound down its slow, aching phrase, and only when the needle lifted did he set aside the file.

"Reed." His voice was quiet. It was always quiet; it never needed to be otherwise. "I have a tedious favor to ask, and the discourtesy to ask it at this hour."

"You've got the whole Corps for favors."

"I have the whole Corps for orders. This is a different animal." The faintest movement at the corner of his mouth — there and gone, so dry that a person not paying attention would have missed it entirely. "Inquisitor Joncière and his wife will attend a Council reception tonight. As you know, there were three threats against ranking Inquisitors this month. Two of them had teeth. I would prefer not to spend tomorrow drafting a eulogy for a man I dislike, which would oblige me to lie warmly and at length." A pause. "You would keep them alive. Until the door is locked behind them and the night has nothing left to offer anyone."

Lou’s lips thinned. "Stone's the one you'd send. An empath reads a crowd."

"Stone reads a crowd by bleeding into it. I want eyes tonight, not an open wound walking through a party." He let the silence sit for a moment, not rushing to fill it. He aimed for content to let the quiet do his work. Then, he went on more plainly: "And you already know how to stand in a room with Joncière without losing your nerve, which is a rarer skill than the Corps pretends. I'd sooner trust the asset he can't intimidate."

Lou spent a second silently thinking, until she crossed her arms. "He can't stand me."

"He cannot stand anyone. He merely fails to respect most of them. You, he respects and resents in roughly equal measure, which from Mark Joncière is nearly a marriage proposal." Now he looked at her, and the clinical surface thinned just enough to show the strategist underneath. "His wife will be there as well. Letitia. You won't have met her. She paints, she charms, she runs that household like a small, beautiful country. I have no specific reason to distrust her." A beat, weighted, the way his pauses always carried more than the words around them. "I have made it a habit not to distrust people for no reason. It has cost me, once or twice. Keep your eyes open in that house, Reed. Not for tonight's knife. For the shape of the place."

It was, she thought, the most honest thing a powerful man had ever said to her face. He did not dress it in rank. He did not make her grateful for it. He simply handed it over. Plain.

"And if I say no?" she said, testing. "If I'd rather have my night and let Joncière fend for himself."

Something almost like approval moved through him. "Then you have your night, and I find someone else, and nothing follows you for it. I'd think less of you for fearing the question than for answering it wrong." The dry flicker again. "You may quote me. No one will believe you."

She almost smiled, but didn't. On principle.

"Get them home," Ivo said, and lowered the needle back onto the vinyl. Lou knew better than anyone that this was the dismissal. "And watch your own back as closely as theirs. It is the one I'd miss."

She should have heard something in it. She had spent her life learning to obey the part of an order that kept her breathing and let the rest fall to the floor unheard. Tonight that skill would do her no good at all.

She had been bickering with Mark Joncière for two months across the Prior's security perimeter, and she still wasn't used to him.

He met her at the door of his apartment — the whole floor of the building, naturally, the Pures stacking their excess toward the sky as though height were a kind of virtue — and looked at her the way he looked at every psionic the Corps sent into his orbit: a useful tool of uncertain reliability that he had not personally requested, and could not yet send back.

"Reed." He said her name like he filed a report. "Of all the assets Martin could have spared."

"Missed you too, Joncière. Two whole days without you telling me my perimeter timings are sloppy. I was starting to heal."

"Your perimeter timings are sloppy. By four seconds, at the east gate, consistently." He turned into the apartment without inviting her to follow, which was its own kind of invitation. "Six meters tonight. You don't speak unless spoken to. I'd say it to anyone."

"You'd say it gentler to anyone. I bring out your best material."

The corner of his mouth did something. The architecture where a smile might one day be built, if the man ever broke ground. He didn't deny it, which from Mark Joncière was practically a concession written in blood.

The apartment was an obscenity, and she catalogued it as she has done with every room she entered. Exits. Sightlines. The weight of the objects she could throw without lifting a hand. A wall of glass held the whole burning sprawl of New Paris at arm's length, neon bleeding pink and violet across pale floors. A piano nobody touched. And the paintings — real ones, oils worth more than the entire Termitary block where she'd learned to walk — hung along the corridor like a family that had simply exhausted every other method of spending.

"You're scowling at the Rothko," a voice observed from the end of the hall.

Letitia Joncière came down the corridor in a long fall of dove-gray silk, and Lou's threat assessment recalibrated and came back uncertain, which never happened. The woman moved like water that had studied for a very long time how to find the lowest and most graceful path. 

Lou had been told, in the elevator of her own mind, to play the part. She tried a joke instead. "Don't worry, I'm not here to steal the art. Couldn't fit it down the Termitary stairwell."

It fell flat. Both of them. Mark's expression did not move and Letitia's polished smile did not falter and the silence afterward had a temperature to it, and Lou thought, right, these are not my people, and adjusted.

For some reason, this affected Lou more than it should.

"I'm scowling at the price," Lou said, trying to recover.

"Mm. So am I, most mornings." Letitia stopped at a careful distance, hands folded one over the other. "I was told we're to be guarded tonight, but never mentioned that our guardian would have opinions about the art."

"Opinions are free. It's the only thing in this room that is."

For half a second the elegant composure slipped into something warmer and far more dangerous. Amusement. Quick and unguarded but gone again before it could be held to account. Lou filed it away with the rest of the things she should not have let herself notice.

"Forgive me," Letitia said, rescaling the balance in the room similar to a hostess — smoothly, before the guest can feel the seam. "We're not often visited by anyone Ivo trusts. It puts Mark on edge, and Mark on edge puts the whole house there. You'll find we're warmer once the wine's been opened." Her gaze settled on Lou, courteous and unhurried and, underneath it, reading. "I'm Letitia. You're the one my husband complains about. He does it almost fondly, which I've never once heard him manage."

"That's the rumor going around. Lou Reed."

"I know. He's said it more this month than he's said my mother's name in a decade." A graceful little turn of the wrist that dismissed the observation even as she made it. "I paint. You'll be desperately bored by me within the hour. Most of Mark's colleagues are." She smiled, and it was lovely, and it gave away precisely nothing. "I think you'll be an interesting evening, Miss Reed."

Across the wide pale room, Mark was watching the two of them with an expression Lou could not read at all. And Mark, by now, after two months, was a man she could very nearly always read. That single fact unsettled her more than anything else in the whole gleaming obscene apartment. 

Keep your eyes open for the shape of the place, Ivo had said. Lou kept her coat on, and filed the watercolor paper away with the rest of the things she didn't yet understand.

The reception was as dangerous as a room full of smiling people always is, and nothing happened, which is the single most exhausting variety of danger there is.

Lou kept her six meters. She watched hands, inner seams of coats where a thin blade would like to ride, and the slow tidal currents of the crowd that formed, then broke, then re-formed around the powerful. She watched the Pure aristocracy of the Center drift past Mark Joncière trailing that particular deference people reserve for men who can end them with a signature and a held breath; little half-bows, eyes that slid respectfully down and away, laughter pitched a careful degree too warm. They smiled at him and they feared him and not one of them actually saw him, and while standing there at her professional distance, Lou found that she could not stop seeing him. It was becoming a problem. She catalogued it as one and kept watching anyway.

He hated all of it. She could read it in the rigid honesty of his shoulders, in the surgical economy with which he closed each conversation down before it could bloom into anything more. He performed nothing. There was no pleasure, no interest. Not even the small social lies that greased every other body in the room. When a perfumed deacon tried to flatter him over some recent and apparently admired sentencing, Mark flatly said, It was procedure, not artistry, and turned and walked away mid-compliment. Lou had to fold her startled laugh into the shape of a cough and swallow the whole thing down whole. And when she looked up from doing it, Mark was already looking back at her across the heads of the crowd, as if he had said it to her as well. As though in a hall packed wall to wall with people who would never in a thousand years get the joke, he had located the single person present who would, and had wanted, badly, to watch it land on her.

And it did land. Low and quiet, somewhere under the sternum, in the small locked place where she did not, as a rule, let things land.

And Letitia. She moved through the reception like a woman born to it, because she had been. A crystal glass held loose and forgotten in one hand, a precisely calibrated word for everyone who approached, that lovely closed-border smile fixed and flawless. But every so often, across the shifting heads of the crowd, her eyes would find Lou where she stood against the cold marble of the wall, and would settle, and hold. And there was nothing closed about that look at all. It was the look of a woman studying something she had already privately decided she wanted — to paint. Twice their eyes caught and held a beat past anything defensible, and the second time, it was Letitia who refused to look away first, who let the contact stretch and burn until Lou felt the heat climb the back of her neck again. This time it had nothing to do whatsoever with embarrassment, and they both knew it.

Lou understood somewhere around the slow poisoned middle of the second hour, in trouble of a kind that nothing she went through until now had ever once prepared her for. The husband across the room, making her laugh without moving his face, finding her in the crowd to share a joke no one else could hear. The wife drifting the room's far currents, watching her like a held and waiting breath. Two separate gravities, each with its own distinct and terrible pull, and Lou standing at the precise unlucky point in space where the two fields crossed and reinforced and would not let her go.

People fall into it, Ivo had told her — of the household — Keep your eyes open. Her eyes were wide open. Turns out, that was exactly the problem. She could see every inch of the trap and she could not, for the life of her, make her feet step back out of it.

Late, in the dead slack water of the evening, near the long table of barely touched wine, Mark came at last to rest against the wall beside her. Close. Closer than the job could possibly justify. Close enough to let it be known that it was a decision and not an accident. She was abruptly, acutely aware of the warmth of him radiating along her side, and the clean austere scent of him beneath the cold cathedral incense of the room.

"You're not bored," he said, low, pitched for her alone under the murmur of the crowd. "The Corps always glaze over at these things within the hour. Their eyes go flat. Yours haven't."

"I'm reading every person in this room for the one most likely to put a knife in you. Best party game anyone's ever handed me. Beats the canapés."

"And? Your assessment."

"Deacon by the east window's got something heavy riding in his left coat pocket, but it's just a flask, not a blade; he's just a drunk hiding it from his wife. The thin man near your wife keeps checking the main door every ninety seconds; he's waiting on someone who isn't going to come, probably a mistress who thought better of it. Nobody in this room actually wants you dead tonight." She tilted her head, not looking at him, every nerve she owned aware of him. "Well, they all want you dead, in theory. Comfortable abstract wanting. None of them want it enough to spoil a good evening over it."

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again his voice had dropped into a register she had never once heard come across a radio. "You read me like that, too. From the very first week. Across a checkpoint, half a city block of floodlit dark between us, and you'd know my mood before I had finished deciding I was in one." A pause. "I told myself at the time that it was unnerving. That I disliked it. I have, very recently, begun to suspect that I was lying to myself on both counts."

She turned her head then, and found him already turned toward her, already looking. She didn't have a word ready for that. Or she had several and discarded each one before it reached her mouth, because every one of them was a door she wasn't sure she was allowed to open in a hall full of deacons. 

He said seen, in that worn-through voice, standing close enough to be a scandal. But her first thought — her treacherous, unprofessional, deeply inconvenient first thought — was not of him. It was of his wife. Of the way Letitia had looked at her across the room all evening. I find that I have been attentive, he was saying, and Lou turned the sentence over and over in the dark of her own head, hunting it for the second meaning, and could not for the life of her decide whether she was inventing some warmth in it, or whether it had been set there on purpose.

"And what name would that be," she said at last, carefully, giving nothing away, testing the ice before she trusted her weight to it. "The right one. The one you reassigned it to."

He didn't answer right away. He only looked at her. It wasn't that flat, assessing look she'd survived for two months, this was a look that wanted something from her. Across the room, Lou felt rather than saw Letitia turn toward them. She could feel that frank artist's gaze, and Lou braced, out of long reflex, for the cold. For the particular cruelty of a powerful wife who has just watched her powerful husband lean too close to the help.

Instead, when she made herself meet Letitia's eyes across the whole length of the crowded room, the woman lifted her glass. A fraction of an inch. Toward them. Toward both of them. And she smiled. And there was nothing closed in it now, nothing careful or composed or held in reserve. Only something warm, certain and faintly, knowingly amused, the private smile of a woman watching a thing she has already decided to permit unfold at last into the open.

Lou's pulse did something complicated and entirely unprofessional, low in her throat.

Get them home, she reminded herself, sternly, uselessly. That's the whole of the job. That's all this is.

She did not, even then, with the warning still ringing in her own head, fully believe herself.

They went home near midnight, and her orders were as plain as they could be. See them locked safely in, confirm the perimeter, then leave. She fully intended to do exactly that. She had every intention in the entire world. She would think later, intentions lying somewhere she had no business lying are organic paper: fine, rare, and worth a very great deal. Good for absolutely nothing at all the moment the rain finally gets to them.

But the heavy door swept shut behind the three of them, and the apartment was suddenly quiet and gold-lit after the white glare and the cold incense of the reception. The lower city was glowing its endless colors through the great glass wall, and Letitia was already crossing toward the bar with unhurried proprietary grace. 

And Mark, who did not traffic in pleasantries and had not in the two solid months of acquaintance ever offered Lou a soft word that wasn't immediately armored in an insult, said it simply.

"Sit. Before you go." 

It came out rougher than an order ever should. It was as if a much longer sentence was supposed to come out afterwards. A sentence floating in his chest all night and could not, for his life, get the remainder of it past his teeth.

And Lou had spent her entire watchful life learning to tell an order from the soft thing hiding folded up inside it.

And she was tired. Bone-tired. And the couch ran deep and inviting as a riverbed. And here it was warm. And two people were looking at her as though she were something that had been quietly missing from the room for a long while.

So she sat.

"I don't drink on the job," she said, and took the heavy crystal glass Letitia pressed into her hand — the wine in it dark as old blood, thick with something fruited and strong — and she drank.

Letitia folded herself down onto the couch beside her. Deliberately, unmistakably close — Lou could catch the scent of her now, beneath the wine: turpentine and rose, paint and perfume, the working artist and the aristocrat's wife layered together in one warm breath. She did not speak right away, but turned her own glass slowly by its slender stem, watching the colors of the city smear across the glass, and when she finally did speak, her voice had shed the hostess entirely.

"I am going to say something now," she said, "and I would like the two of you to do me the very great kindness of letting me finish all of it before either of you ruins it with cleverness. You're each so dreadfully quick. It is exhausting to be near, and it is also, if I'm honest, fully half of why I have not been able to stop looking at her all evening." A breath, drawn and released. "I married a man who keeps a single locked room somewhere inside himself, and lets no living soul anywhere near the door of it. I made my peace with that arrangement years ago — truly, and without bitterness; we are fond, Mark and I, in the careful cool way that two people are fond who have long since forgotten how to be anything warmer to each other. I have my paintings. He has his work, and his protocol, and his terrible necessary duty. The house is very beautiful and it is very cold, and I had stopped, some long time ago, expecting either of those things to ever change."

Mark had gone utterly still by the glass wall, the neon moving over the dark planes of him. "Letitia."

"I'm not finished. And you knew perfectly well that I wasn't." Gentle and implacable. The velvet glove with nothing cruel in the hand inside it: no hidden blade, only a woman who had been so terribly careful for so terribly long, and who had decided to simply stop. 

Her eyes came to Lou and settled there. "And then he mentioned you. The second time, three days ago, when the detail roster came through his study and he read your name off it aloud without meaning to. And I watched the locked room open. By an inch. One single inch — over a sarcastic, stubborn, slum-born psionic who is not the least bit afraid of him." Her composed voice frayed, and for just a moment something raw showed plainly beneath all the years of careful polish. 

"I have been married to that locked door for eleven years, Lou Reed. I have knocked, and I have waited, and I have learned not to. I have never once seen it open. Not for me. Not for anyone." A pause. "And I find that I am not interested, not even a little, not even out of wounded pride, in resenting the thing that finally opened it. I find that I would so much rather come and stand in the warmth of the open door than go on guarding the cold of the closed one by myself for another decade."

The silence that came after had real and considerable weight to it. It pressed on the warm air of the room.

Lou looked at her — this composed, careful, achingly lovely woman, come undone at exactly one seam, just enough to be unbearably and suddenly real — and then she looked past her to Mark, who could not seem to lift his eyes up from the dark glass.

"That true?" she softly asked him. All the practiced banter gone clean out of it now.

 Mark Joncière, who used words as blunt instruments, who in his entire disciplined life had never once knowingly wasted a single one of them, turned at last from the window. And he did not reach for the mask. She watched him decide not to reach for it. She watched the deciding cost him something palpable. Watched the muscle work once in his jaw, and watched him pay the price anyway, fully, without flinching from the bill.

"You have been a thorn in my perimeter for two months," he said. "You are insubordinate. Your timings are four seconds slow at the east gate, every single night, and you have never once apologized for it. And you are the only person in all of New Paris who speaks to me as though I am a man, and not a sentence waiting to be read aloud over the strapped-down body of someone who can no longer run." 

His voice warmed through, right along the edge, the last of the clinical sand worn away to show the grain beneath. "I did not have a word for what that was. I assigned it to irritation, because that was the only drawer I owned that was anywhere near the right size to hold it. My wife — who is a lot more honest than I am, and very much more observant than either of us would prefer — has informed me, at some length, that I filed it wrong." He held her eyes across the small warm distance, and did not look away. "I have wanted you for some weeks now. I am reliably informed that I am permitted to say so out loud. So I am saying it. Badly, I have no doubt. I did warn you that I was a wall."

The thing in Lou's chest that she kept locked came loose all at once, the bolt sliding back without her permission. She set her heavy glass down very, very carefully on the marble of the low table, because her hands had abruptly decided to be unsteady, and she would be damned twice over before she let them shake around a full glass of red in front of these two.

"This," she said, and her voice was not nearly as flat as she wanted it to be, "is a spectacularly bad idea. You both know that. You're an Inquisitor. You" — to Letitia — "are the wife of an Inquisitor, with eleven years and a name and a lot to lose. And I am Corps property, with a chip in my neck, and a curfew and a barracks cot, and tomorrow morning there are going to be a hundred separate reasons that none of this can possibly have happened."

"Tomorrow," Letitia agreed, softly, "will be absolutely full of reasons. It always is. Reasons are the one thing this city manufactures in true abundance." She reached over, unhurried, and she tucked a stray strand of hair back behind Lou's ear — the gesture of a woman who has all the time in the world and won't waste any of it — and her manicured fingertip grazed the small puckered chip-scar at the side of Lou's throat.

Yet Lou did not flinch. She did not pull her hand back the way the Pures always, always did — impure, marked, other, not one of us, never one of us. Letitia's fingertips traced the rough edge of the old scar once with tenderness, as though she had spent the whole evening wanting to study at her leisure. 

And that was the precise moment Lou understood, with total bodily certainty, that she was not going to leave this apartment tonight.

 "But tonight is not tomorrow. Tonight, there are three people in a single warm room, who have spent far, far too long being careful, and exactly one beautifully bad idea sitting in the middle of us. And I have always found, in my experience, that the worst ideas keep the best ones warm through the night. Stay, Lou. Be reckless with us. Just the once. Let the house find out, after all these years, what it feels like to be warm."

Lou had not stood up from the couch. She noticed that fact, distantly, from somewhere outside herself. She had been entirely free to stand and leave from the very first minute she sat down, but her body had, on its own authority, declined to take the option.

She looked down at Letitia's hand, still resting feather-light against her throat. She looked up at Mark, who had crossed half the wide room toward her without her even marking the movement. Mark, who in two whole months had never once stepped inside arm's reach of her on purpose was now close enough that she could see his pulse going hard at the side of his jaw.

"My report," she said, weakly, the very last of her armor, "is going to be an absolute nightmare to write."

"I write the reports," Mark said. "I am exceptionally good at them." And the great cold Inquisitor of New Paris, the man who had filed her under irritation for two solid months for the simple reason that he had owned no other drawer the right size to hold her, closed the last of the distance between them, and kissed her. Neither careful, nor clinical. It was nothing that she could have read off of him across a floodlit checkpoint in the cold. 

And she stopped, for the first time in her entire watchful, calculating, exit-mapping life, paying the slightest attention to where the doors were.

What then passed between the three of them was unhurried, tender, and entirely their own thing.

Mark’s hand found Lou’s, their fingers interlacing with such heat that it sent a shiver racing up her frame. He kissed the way he argued. Without preamble or apology, every motion of him meant exactly what it was supposed to, and nothing held back in reverse. Underneath all that severity, Lou found a man who had not let himself want a single thing in years, and who had run out of reasons not to.

And Letitia did not watch from the cool edge of it like a treacherous, half-braced part of Lou had expected her to. She was woven all the way through it, completely present, with her clever well maintained hands and her low, warm voice at the shell of Lou’s ear.

They drew her down between them. The bedroom was a held breath of glass and white silk - like the rest of the apartment - and the city’s pink, violet, and deep electric blue poured in through its single great window wall, spilling and pooling across the sheets like watercolor bleeding into paper.

In the quiet afterglow, Lou's fingers brushed the bedside table, discovering an actual sheaf of rare organic paper—its fibrous texture unmistakable, forbidden outside elite circles. She traced the edge of the sheet hesitantly, the fibers cool and alive beneath her touch like no synthetic parchment could ever. Letitia stirred beside her, and pressed a lingering kiss to Lou's temple. "You're not just the Inquisitor's blade tonight," she murmured, voice husky with spent desire. "You're ours." Mark stepped in behind as his arm tightened around Lou's waist, his chest warm against her back, his breath stirring the fine hairs at her nape as he echoed the sentiment with quiet reverence, fingers splaying over the curve of her breast in a gesture more protective than possessive. 

Letitia drew Lou even closer, her dark hair spilling over bare shoulders. She shed the formal dress, revealing the elegant curve of her breasts and the slick heat already gathering between her thighs. Mark’s hands were gliding over Lou’s hips to unfasten her garments, exposing the taut lines of her form. They moved together onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, Letitia’s mouth claiming Lou’s in a deep kiss. Her fingers traced down to part the folds of her pussy, stroking the swollen clit with slow, insistent circles that drew soft gasps. Mark’s cock, now hard and throbbing, pressed against Lou, as he kissed the nape of her neck. His hand started guiding her own to wrap around his length, but Letitia quickly batted his hand away.

”Switch.” Letitia grinned, breaking the kiss and leaving Lou to catch her breath.

Letitia shifted with fluid grace, moving to press against Lou's back, her body molding close as her hands slid around to cup Lou's breasts. Mark eased forward to face her, his sharp features softened by the low light, his cock still brushing Lou’s thigh as he drew her into a deep kiss that tasted of shared heat and quiet longing. 

The paper remained on the table, its presence a quiet shadow that tempered the glow even as pleasure crested again, Lou arching between her lovers with a soft cry, their bodies locked in tenderness until release left them breathless and entwined. Mark's arm draped over her waist, Letitia's kisses lingering at her nape, yet the forbidden sheet's texture lingered in Lou's thoughts, a reminder that this sanctuary held its own veiled fractures amid New Paris's watchful fog.

Lou's lithe frame trembled between them, her cunt slick and aching under the dual press of their bodies; Mark's fingers parted her folds with tender precision, circling her swollen clit while Letitia's breath warmed her neck, one hand drifting down to guide Mark's length against Lou's entrance in a slow, mutual thrust that filled her with aching fullness.

She felt truly valued in that moment. Not as a tool, but as the woman whose gasps and shivers drew their reverent touches; Mark's hips rocking into her with measured depth, his hands framing her face as he whispered her name like a secret, Letitia's fingers joining his at her clit to heighten every sensation, the three of them moving in seamless rhythm. Lou's hands wandered freely, stroking Mark's chest and reaching back to clutch Letitia's thigh, her eyes half-lidded with the rush of connection that thawed years of isolation. Each shared moan and slick glide was affirming that she was wanted for her own desire, not her gifts. 

Lou lay between them in the soft wreck of the silk, the heat of them banked close on either side of her — Mark's heavy arm a slow certain weight across her waist, Letitia's slow even breath stirring the short hair at her shoulder — and finally remembered that she read every single room she entered for the fastest way back out of it. The world had gone quiet. Stood down.

"I have to go back," she said, at last, after a long and unmeasured while. She said it to the high dark ceiling. She did not move so much as a finger toward leaving. "Termitary curfew. The chip logs me through the gate by midnight, or it logs me as missing, and missing is a word that gets a psionic looked for in ways she doesn't come back from."

"Mm." Letitia's fingers were tracing slow idle shapes against the bare skin of her stomach. The absent, drifting way a brush moves across a page when the painter no longer focused on the painting and started thinking about something else entirely. "Or you stay. And Mark writes one of his beautiful, meticulous, utterly unimpeachable procedural notes. And a Corps asset is duly documented as having remained on protective detail at the Joncière residence overnight, exactly as the elevated threat assessment so clearly and so urgently required." The city lights caught and pooled in her dark eyes. "He is terribly, terribly good at paperwork, my husband. I do believe he will positively relish lying, for the first time in his life, in a genuinely warm cause."

"It is not lying," Mark said, low, into the back of her neck, and she felt the words travel through the whole length of her more than she heard them in the dark. "The threat assessment did require it. It is, in every particular, correct." A pause. And then, lower still, pitched for her and her alone — the radio-voice, and the checkpoint-voice, and underneath both of them, a third voice she had never once heard him use: "Stay. I have spent too long telling myself, every single night, that you were a complication I would be glad to finally be rid of. I would like, for one night, to stop being right about that."

"You're both completely ridiculous," Lou said, and was genuinely alarmed to discover that she meant it tenderly. "This is the single worst-defended safehouse in all of New Paris. Your assigned guard is hopelessly compromised."

"Comprehensively compromised," Letitia agreed, with open delight and a thread of real, unguarded laughter running bright through it now. "And I compromised her myself, I'll have you know. Personally. Over the wine. With a speech I had been quietly rehearsing in my own head from the precise moment the elevator doors slid open on her magnificent scowling face. You merely arrived at the end and finished the job, darling. You always were so much better at endings than you ever were at beginnings."

"Reed." Mark's arm tightened across her, drawing the whole improbable warm tangle of the three of them in closer against the white. "Stop looking for the exits. Just this night. The details are relieved."

Lou would turn over and over again in the long gray weeks that came after, back down in the Termitary, every single time the city above her lit itself violet through the smog over the slum roofs. And she ached, low, private and furious, for a warmth she had no right to and could not for the life of her stop wanting. The strange thing was that she did. She actually did. The girl with walls of stone now lays perfectly still in a Pure's enormous bed, between an Inquisitor she had known of nothing but insults and a woman she had known for the bare length of a single evening. Qnd she let herself — just this once — be somewhere she did not need to leave. Be still. Be rooted. Just for a season, her father might have said, in another life, in another city, to another girl. Just to see.

Across the cold, sleeping Center, he sat solitary in his lamplit study, bearing a city’s weight and a surplus of secrets. He would never ask where she had been; he, of all people, understood the bitter price of an hour spent as neither instrument nor property. He had told her to watch the house for its shape, to study that strange, deckled watercolor paper in the hall, the way it drank the light. One day, its meaning would emerge, a revelation she would desperately wish she had never been clever enough to decipher. But that was a grief for another time. 

Tomorrow was already burdened with its own reasons, and they, every last one, could wait until the light came.

Tonight the house was only warm. For once, she let it be warm, and asked it for nothing more.

The lamps had gone steady again in their sconces. Beyond the great glass wall, New Paris burned on through its thousand indifferent colors and knew nothing. Cared for nothing. For what had finally, after so long, come quietly unlocked in one warm apartment near the very top of the world.

Lou closed her eyes.

"One night."

'I can hardly believe you convinced me to do this... you are aware of the consequences we shall face if we are found out, yes?' The boy's wings arc in the sweet, summer breeze; trembling, almost. His eyes are narrowed as he glances behind them, like he thinks they're being followed.

The girl ahead of him laughs, her light hair streaming behind her in the wind. She smiles, dimpled cheeks and bright eyes. 'We will not be found! Besides, you need to have more fun. We're their best students, they'll never say a word to us. Perhaps the Seraph might give us a slap on the wrist if he realizes.'

The boy catches up with her. Their school shoes click against the rocky ground as the two run with almost reckless abandon, wind in their hair and sunlight in their eyes. She laughs again, exhilarated.

'Eliza was telling me, but Earth has five oceans,' she says, breathless. 'We have far more than they do, but theirs are more full of life.'

'Technically, we have life in our oceans too.'

'We haven't explored as much as the humans do. I envy them. They are such an ingenious species.'

The boy stops. The idea of being envious of humans, of all creatures, simply does not make sense. 'Of humans? I truly thought you better.'

'So mean,' she coos at him. She slips her slim hand into his larger one and tugs him forth. 'They're not so bad.'

'Well, of course, they're not bad —' He gently interlocks their fingers, slowing her down a bit before she trips. 'They are simply not worthy of your envy.'

This is met with more giggling. She's positively giddy, drunk on delight. And as always when he is with her, her joy is contagious, and he can feel his own lips stretch into a smile.

'The oceans on Earth have memories,' she says, voice rich with intrigue.

'They are bodies of water on a planet with no power. They cannot.'

'They remember the hands which touch their waters,' she corrects him gently, 'and the laughter by their shores. They remember and then they wait. The oceans can never be alone.'

He scoffs, contemptuous. 'I highly doubt that. It's probably another fairy tale made up by the humans.'

'How cynical, angel,' she teases, her voice airy as she frees her hand, scampering out of his reach. It’s like her very being cannot wait a second to reach the sea. 'Like one of those fearsome figures Sienna likes to hear about.'

'I'm offended that you should liken me to such a character from my younger sister's fanciful stories.' The girl opens her mouth to reply, but just then the air picks up, the wind ruffling through their uniforms, their wings; the sea finally coming into view. The glittering light reflects off of a blinding surface, crystalline clear.

Elated at having reached their destination at last, the girl approaches first. A gathering of daylilies tickles her silken robe as she sits by the edge. She tilts her head back, stopping at the edge of the water and dipping her legs in. She recoils with a squeal. 'Oh, it's cold!'

He's a little more careful than she is, and he tests the water with his hand first. 'It's icy. But it's to be expected, isn't it?'

She frowns, before a hint of mischief sparks in her eyes. Almost casually, she puts her palms into the water and then splashes them down loudly. Water soaks his sleeve.

He blinks at her, perplexed. 'You —'

'Oh, I wonder how that happened.' She shrugs coyly, trying to fight her grin. 'Your uniform got wet, how sad.'

His lips tug into a smile. 'How sad, indeed.' And then he cups some of the water in his hands and launches it right at her knees. She shrieks in outrage, already reaching for rebuttal. The Academy's best, most promising students, fight like little children, each trying to push the other into the depths themselves. The sea itself is calm, small waves lapping against their ankles as if egging them them on.

Once their fervor dies down a little, she lets out a slow, loose breath, panting, doused with water. Her eyes are shining, her face pink. 'Once we graduate, I want to live by the sea,' she whispers. Her mouth is set, as if she’s already decided this.

He sits back, hands braced against the sand, breathless. At her words, his smile drops. What she asks is impossible — but he’s never been able to deny her. Still, he tries, 'It's so far from the Citadel, we'll have to make a voyage everyday.'

'So we can... please?' She moves closer, poking his hand with a finger, looking up at him with big, pleading eyes. ‘Our every afternoon could be like this.’

He can’t help it — he smiles affectionately, dusting his sand-splattered, wet uniform. They’re both positively filthy and yet he regrets absolutely nothing. 'I'd love to discuss this with you —' he says this patiently and ignores her pout — 'but we're so late for class that we are definitely found out.'

Their escapade is noticed upon their return to the Academy; after all, they're soaked through. Drenched; the loose silk clinging to their bodies, cheeks flushed, hair dripping. The scolding they get is almost legendary, but the giddy students don't care, still riding the high of a stolen afternoon.

What they do not realize is that an ocean on Earth is the same as an ocean in Heaven, the same weary soul. Time passes fast; and after millennia have gone by, after the sun that used to shine so brightly is replaced by endless gray, the sea still remembers. The children have grown into grim adults, and they have not walked these shores for a long, long time. But the sea, lonely and storming, still remembers the laughter that used to grace its side, the eager hands splashing its waters. The sea always remembers, and there it lies, still waiting.

Waiting for them to come back.

i was originally going to write a whole fanfic but i got tired... so here is a lazy moodboard with a lazier drabble... also listen. listen ok. if floating islands are a thing so are oceans. 'oh but wouldn't the water fall' you know the solution? heaven isn't even in the clouds. the world of the immortals is separate, with hell being underground. thank u for the tedtalk. mwah.

‘Are you sure we’re at the right place?’ Dmitry already has a hand on his pistol, his gaze wary. ‘There are no people here.’

‘I don’t know.’ Rosalind’s words feel sluggish, even to her own mind. ‘The Book just says the spear is our ultimate weapon and that only the chosen one will be able to wield it.’

‘Okay.’ Greg takes a few steps past the crumbling gate of the once-beautiful estate. He looks down at the coordinates scrawled upon a piece of paper. ‘The spear should be about a hundred-foot radius from here. Let’s, uh… let’s go inside?’

‘Alright, so, Anhea, Greg, Cain, and Rosalind can check the house,’ Dmitry nods to the garden, ‘and Yan, Anna, Pileon, and I are going to investigate the grounds.’ No one seems very enthusiastic, but they don’t exactly have many options. As they walk up the driveway, the wreckage only becomes more apparent. Shredded leaves and broken rocks crack underneath their feet, and an expensive car lays on its side, windows broken, doors removed. Greg and Cain go up the staircase to the front door first.

‘It’s open,’ Cain says apathetically. The angel’s cruel, beautiful face is intent with focus. The squad looks at the front door, which is hanging off of its hinge and painted with blood and dirt, and then looks back at Cain.

He arches a brow. ‘Well? Was anything said about it being in good condition?’

Greg grimaces, nudges some of the debris aside, and goes first. They follow behind him, strangely silent, a little tense under the oppressive quiet everywhere. The atmosphere is so still that no one speaks very much, afraid of shattering the gloomy, sorrowful peace. The house itself seems to carry an air of longing; a yearning for the light and laughter that must have filled its halls once upon a time — or so it seems to Rosalind.

Astrea’s halls are silent, its walls caved in, its windows shattered. In the foyer, a portrait is dangling, half-on, half-off. Rosalind peers at it — four men, what looks like; all in old, aristocratic clothing. The portrait itself is torn and damaged, and she can’t exactly make out their faces, but one of them…

He looks like Aurora’s boss, she thinks, before jolting herself out of it. That’s ridiculous — after all, why would Aurora’s boss have a portrait of himself and three other men hanging up in their workplace? As if awakening from a dream, she tugs on Cain’s sleeve.

He slows his steps and glances back at her. ‘Yes?’

‘Help me look around,’ she urges. ‘I know this place. My Auro — someone I used to know… she worked here.’

Rosalind will not let herself say her friend’s name. She won’t even think about Aurora. But she feels agitated already, and her heart is sinking deeper and deeper with the knowledge that if she hasn’t been found by any of the human settlements, then she’s probably dead.

Cain glances at the painting, too — and freezes, his blue eyes widening. He places his hand on the gilded frame, his long fingers trembling. ‘Who did you say your friend worked for again?’

‘Astrea’s Detective Agency,’ Rosalind says, confused. ‘Why? Did you know these people?’

‘Know them?’ Cain laughs, the sound mirthless. ‘This man —’ Cain taps the blonde figure, ‘ — is Mikael. He’s the commander of Shepha’s armies; or was, I suppose. I’ve never met him, I only knew of him — most people do. And this angel is Raphael, Shepha’s darling… the demons, I don’t know.’

Rosalind goes still, her mind scrambling. So her friend had known all along, what was to come. Did she give Rosalind the book to prepare her? Was it her plan or the immortals’? Aurora, she thinks. Why didn’t you tell me? I’m stumbling around in the dark like this, but you always held the light. Why aren’t you here now?

Before she can interrogate him any further, Cain stops by the first door and tries the handle. ‘It’s locked,’ he says with some resolve. ‘Step back, Rosalind.’

She knows he’s probably just going to force the lock, or use that inhumane strength to break down the door, but god — she can’t bear for Aurora’s last home to be any more broken than it is already. ‘No,’ she says softly, and then louder, ‘no. Let me. I can open it.’

Graciously, Cain lets go of the doorknob and falls behind her. His voice is as condescendingly smooth as always. ‘Do you not hold faith in my abilities, Rosalind?’

‘You’re an angel, Cain. What else would I feel for you but faith?’ Deftly, she slides her hairpins out and examines them. They’re sharp, and a little bent. Good enough.

She inserts a pin into the lock and begins to twist it. Cain is right behind her, his hands by his sides, and yet she is so acutely aware of his presence that it almost hurts. His voice lowers into the familiar, rolling syllables of Latin. ‘Quid est fides sine fiducia?’

‘Mox ero omnino fidelis cultor quem postulas — if you let me investigate in peace,’ she grumbles, parroting it back and jamming the pin deeper.

Cain laughs, the sound smooth, mellifluous. ‘Non auderem te tamquam adoratorem meum postulare. I much prefer you as —’

‘Hah!’ The lock gives way, and the smooth oak door falls open. Rosalind grins, momentarily cheered by success and also by getting Cain to shut up. The angel falls silent, and Anhea shoulders him aside, seemingly tiring of waiting.

‘God, watching you two flirt is so insufferable. The fools on the Council are rolling around in their shallow graves witnessing a lowlife angel go for someone so far out of his league.’ She sneers, glaring at a sulking Cain. Anhea, Pileon, and Cain all talk in a strange way — of someone who was used to speaking in a polished cadence that soon adopted informality. Sometimes they’re poised and almost terrifyingly otherworldly; other times, they talk just like the humans do.

‘I don’t have to mind the Council,’ Cain says, ‘since there’s not much left of them anyways.’

While the two bicker, Rosalind pushes the heavy door aside and enters what looks like a fancy storage closet. Gemstones gleam, and gold shines, despite the heavy layer of dust on everything. Cain and Anhea both stop abruptly, their wings rustling.

‘The amount of enchanted items here,’ Anhea says slowly, her tone hushed. ‘Shepha serva nos. Look at that.’

Both the immortals look uneasy; a frown creases Cain’s face, and Anhea makes a low sound in their throat as she walks in, brushing her hand over the glass displays. She tugs Cain aside, motioning to them. ‘Can you feel it?’

‘Their energy? Yes,’ Cain murmurs, clenching one hand into a fist. ‘Not all of them are mystical, but…’

‘Enough of them are. Rosalind, what kind of place is this?’

Rosalind swallows, unable to offer an explanation. To her, it’s not much; she can’t feel anything. It’s like the back of one of those fancy, luxury jewelry stores Aurora might’ve frequented; after all, her old friend always used to be so put together. Brushing a hand over the carefully curated countertops, she catches sight of a pearl bracelet, strung with teal beads.

Aurora’s. It even has the indented A resting on a golden bead, the same gentle blue threaded in between. Rosalind dazedly feels for her own — the only relic from her old life that survived, the same as Aurora’s except with an R and misty gray interwoven. She turns to the two questioning angels and shakes her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she offers quietly, her voice sounding pathetically small to her own ears. ‘I’ve never been here either.’

In hindsight, there’s no reason to be thrown off by a bracelet. Aurora had gotten the set for them as a graduating gift and presented it with a teasing, ‘Now you won’t be able to forget me when you run away to Siberia.’ But the truth is that Rosalind could not have forgotten her even if she had tried. Aurora was always bright, eternal; impossible to forget. She slips the pendant into her pocket and clears her throat. ‘The spear is clearly not in the storage room, let’s move on.’

‘You go,’ Anhea says, her eyes still fixed on the items. ‘We’ll catch up.’

Rosalind’s feelings of unease only increase as she walks through the halls. his house feels like a ghost house, and every time she touches it, she gets the sense that she is intruding on something special. Quickly, while Greg tries (and fails) to open a jammed closet, she flings open the next unlocked door she sees.

It’s a large living room, elegant and pristine — or so it must have been, once upon a time. A gleaming chandelier lies shattered on its side, the cushions of the enormous plush couch are torn and their cotton filling is scattered, and the garden-facing glass window is destroyed. The level of carnage is so severe that it almost scares Rosalind.

Greg’s hand lands on her shoulder. ‘Enjoying the scenery?’

She snorts. ‘As you can see, it’s a completely picturesque place. I wonder how rich these people were.’

‘Must’ve been a good amount, because there’s a sunroom on the upper floor,’ Greg says calmly, squatting down and beginning to rummage through the debris. ‘And the garden is practically a jungle. Maybe we’ll have more success if we split up and tackle two floors at a time.’

She pauses. ‘Not a bad idea, Greg. Okay, I’m going to go do the first floor. I’ll take Anhea with me.’

‘Don’t leave me with Cain,’ Greg protests, and she laughs, blowing him a mock kiss before leaving to find Anhea, setting him to the task of decluttering the living room alone. As soon as Rosalind steps into the hallway, however, she is met with Anhea’s sneer. The angel spreads her wings wide, the tips trembling, as she snatches Rosalind’s hand.

‘I can’t bear Cain, we’re going upstairs,’ she says bitterly, practically dragging Rosalind to the ornate, spiraling staircase. ‘Does he have to have a retort for everything I say?’

Rosalind bites back a laugh. Cain seems to have a talent of driving people to their last nerve, her included. ‘You and Greg are the same. Where is he right now?’

‘Greg is normal, at least. Still in the infernal storage room. I don’t know what he’s hoping to find. I couldn’t determine much.’ The staircase is, just like everything else in the manor, a thing of lost, ethereal beauty. Cracked panels of stained glass line the wall above, and dense vines wrap around the twisting railing. Anhea flutters her wings and rises a bit, brushing her hand over the glass. The look on her face is incomprehensible — on the brink of mourning.

‘What is it?’ Rosalind asks, craning her neck upwards.

‘This stained glass…’ Anhea comes back to ground and plunges into the gloom of the staircase, reaching for her flashlight. ‘It’s nothing. In Hell, glass-making is an artform, and considering that David and some other demon lived here… well, I was just wondering where they are now.’

Rosalind doesn’t know what to say to that. She hasn’t considered it a lot, how the immortals might sometimes miss their home. They don’t speak about it a lot either, and on Cain’s side he seems to prefer being on Earth. She and Anhea make their way upstairs in silence until Rosalind speaks. ‘Who’s David? And what do you know about the others?’

‘David is the son of Azrael,’ Anhea’s brow twists, as if trying to recall a memory. ‘Azrael used to be Satan, and he was awful. Truly cruel. Heaven makes sure to emphasize it.’

The other girl hums, running a hand over the railing. ‘Then don’t tell me, I want to hear something lighthearted. About Heaven.’

Anhea casts her a surprised glance. ‘What about it?’

‘Since Heaven’s in the sky, how do you guys live? Do your settlements float?’

‘…There’s no need to say settlements, Heaven isn’t backwards.’ Anhea turns on her flashlight and scans the first floor hallway. It’s dark and eerie here, and Rosalind can hear the rain pitter-pattering against the windows. ‘Similar to how you people have continents, we have them too. It’s just that ours float. And there aren’t settlements, more so huge territories and cities.’

‘Oh. So like huge, flying… chunks of rock?’

‘They’re really huge,’ Anhea says, amusement light in her tone. ‘But let’s save that for when we’re out of here.’

Rosalind flushes and moves to follow the angel as the two tread across the floor. Anhea swivels the light towards the walls — the wallpaper here is blackened and scorched, burned away entirely in some places. It looks like the aftermath of a terrible fire; even the floor here is charred beneath her shoes.

‘Woah,’ Rosalind breathes out slowly, reaching out her hand to touch the burn marks. But Anhea swats it away almost harshly.

‘Don’t touch it,’ she warns. ‘This was not a common fire.’ Anhea’s hands begin to glow as she checks each and every mark herself, gritting her teeth as she continues. Finally, she draws her hands away, frowning.

‘This… must’ve been a powerful demon,’ Anhea says slowly. ‘I can feel the left-over energy lingering in these marks.’

‘So a super mighty demon just… what? Pulled up here and burned the the first floor?’ Rosalind rubs the bridge of her nose. ‘Whatever. I’m not even gonna ask you what energy is.’ With everything else that had happened, this didn’t even crack top ten. Gingerly, the two women make their way down the hallway, until they reach the first door. Anhea opens the door and steps inside.

The first thing that Rosalind thinks is, whoever lived here, their favorite color was red. There’s stained glass here too — from the tips of the balcony doors to the windows. The bed is made and the maroon sheets tucked in with militant precision, the drapes are pulled back with a neat little curtain tie-back, a man’s coat folded halfway over the bed bench, and an oil painting hanging on the wall, depicting an especially rainy day.

‘A demon’s room, you think?’

‘It has to be,’ Anhea responds. ‘Owing to the glass. But let’s split up. You go check another room.’

Rosalind gives a mock salute and saunters off. As she leaves, her mind wanders — if all the employees of Astrea lived in the estate, did Aurora do that too? And if she did, could Rosalind find her room? Going against her own better judgment, she runs past the second, third, and fourth door she sees. The soles of her ballet flats slap against the scorched floor with a reproachful scuff as she finally rounds the corner and bursts into the fifth room.

It’s immediately clear who lived here.

Perhaps it’s only clear to Rosalind, who did live with Aurora once upon a time, but anyone who would’ve known Aurora could’ve guessed this was her bedroom. Everything is so distinctly her; from the cheerful, pale blue curtains and the endless array of potted plants and flowers to the large, arcing windows and the messy, unmade bed, as if Aurora had slept in it only recently. Her book is still lying open on her nightstand, page folded; her slippers are scattered over her carpeted floor, and a bulging bag of makeup sits upon the vanity.

It’s hers. It’s really hers.

Breath catching in her throat, grief overwhelming her, Rosalind takes one step in, then two. Her head is spinning, hands shaking. She feels overcome with dizziness, her throat constricting as she looks around desperately. The sheets are white, dotted with periwinkle blossoms, and on the corner stand hangs a dark brown jumpsuit. The spear clearly isn’t here.

But Rosalind goes deeper anyways. She opens the closet, runs her hands over Aurora’s dresses and stockings and skirts, imagining her refined, put-together friend doing the same many months prior. She examines everything she can — the books piled up on the shelf, the clothes folded haphazardly on the chaise, the way the vanity stool is pulled out to the side. This place is untouched, preserved; left as a monument to the woman who laughed and cried and screamed and lived the last few months of her life in it.

Suddenly feeling sick, Rosalind slams the door shut behind her.

She has to get out of here; she can’t stand it anymore. She jumps over a few steps of the staircase as she runs downstairs, chest heaving, and suddenly slams into Dmitry.

He reaches out to steady her, instantly on his guard. ‘Rosalind?’

‘Sorry,’ she pants, unable to get enough air into her lungs. With one hand, she rubs at her aching chest. ‘I-It’s nothing. Anhea is looking upstairs. Did you find anything in the garden?’

Dmitry lets her go, eyebrows still raised, but answers her question as if nothing’s wrong. ‘There’s nothing in the garden. Maybe we made a mistake with the coordinates, Rosal —’

‘No,’ she cuts him off. ‘No, we didn’t. Go help Anhea. It’s meant to be here. I’ll find it.’ She doesn’t wait for his response, instead turning and sprinting through the house like a mad thing. She skips the half-destroyed kitchen and nearly flings herself out of the house before forcing herself to stop, catching sight of a half-open door and peeking inside.

It’s an office, the same one she’d spoken to Aurora’s boss in. The windows here face the garden, the trees brushing against the glass invitingly, but what catches Rosalind’s attention are the insect corpses beneath her feet, and how every plant in here is devoured and shredded; almost as if there was a —

‘A locust invasion?’ She says out loud, incredulous. ‘In the middle of the city?’

A little more gingerly, she begins to examine the room. Spacious and tasteful, the office is in relatively good condition compared to the rest of the house. A laptop sits half open on the desk, a book lying on its front next to it; as if the man had just stepped out for a quick break during his workday and would return any minute. A mug full of pens with the proclamation ‘World’s #1 Boss’ — Rosalind stifles a smile — and a paperweight adorn the front of the table. She brushes a hand over the remnants of the workplace before starting to walk away.

She’s stopped in her tracks by a very familiar lilac cardigan, neatly folded and placed on an armchair. Aurora’s clothes, wrinkled and old, in her boss’ office…

‘Oh, God.’ Rosalind’s eyes widen, jaw dropping. ‘Aurora…’

‘What happened to you?’ Cain’s sudden interjection makes her shriek, her heart nearly jumping out of her skin.

‘Jesus — Cain!’ She gasps, steadying herself by holding on to the table. ‘A warning would be nice!’

‘Dmitry says you came tumbling down the stairs like a wild bramble, all wild-eyed and heaving. Can’t I leave you even for a little while?’

Rosalind glares at him, crossing her arms across her chest. ‘I told you Aurora worked here.’

He nods.

‘Well, I just…’ She doesn’t know why she’s telling him this so easily; her and Cain are always locked in a game of tug-of-war, pushing and pulling at each other’s defenses until one of them coaxes information out of the other. Honestly, the ratio of flirting to connection here is really off, she reflects. ‘I found her old bedroom upstairs.’

The look in Cain’s eyes is incomprehensible, his mouth curved into his familiar teasing smirk. But he does not poke at her for more details, or ask her why that meant she had to run away and leave Anhea to take care of the first floor by herself. Instead, he motions to the cardigan. ‘Your friend’s?’

‘Apparently, she was entangled with her boss,’ Rosalind confirms.

This manages to shock him. He raises his brows with an astonished laugh, running a hand over his jaw. ‘Praise Shepha. Upright, faithful, archangel Mikael fell for a human.’

‘Next time you visit us,’ Aurora’s boss had said, his hand firm and strong when he shook hers, ‘don’t just stay in the house, but take a walk around our grounds. The garden is especially beautiful.’ At the time, she had simply taken it as the man being eccentric and strange, but the wheels of her fogged-up mind begin to spin. He had definitely been leaving her a clue.

Rosalind scowls at Cain and makes a beeline for the garden, him on her heels. He’s still chuckling, and she glances back at him with a zip-it gesture. He obediently presses his lips into a line and pretends to throw away the key.

The garden has long since fallen into neglect; overgrown and wild. Creeping vines crawl over the wreckage, blossoms of marigold litter the ground, and a thick layer of moss carpets everything. It’s like a place from a book, an alternate reality, and Rosalind slows her steps as she wades deeper into the darkness. Rounding the corner, a broken fountain appears out of nowhere, and and atop it, a statue of a woman is perched. Her stone dress is crumbling, and some part of her rocky shoulder is chipped away. In her hands rests what they’ve been searching for — a large, elegant spear.

‘God, are the others blind?’ She murmurs scornfully, clambering onto the bench beneath. ‘Cain, help.’

‘What exactly am I to help you with, sinner?’

‘…Cain.’

The angel’s mirthful eyes gleam in the dark. ‘I can’t see anything. It’s just a statue.’

‘No! Don’t you see the spear?’ For a moment, Rosalind wonders if she’s undergoing some sort of grief-induced hallucinations. ‘It’s right there.’ She grabs the spear and wrenches at it with all her might, expecting it to be firmly pressed into the stone, but it comes loose easily, fitting into her hands like a puzzle piece.

An expression of surprise overcomes Cain’s features, his shoulders hunching ever so slightly. ‘Oh.’

‘Oh,’ Rosalind echoes. ‘Now all that’s left is to end the apocalypse, save humanity, and restore the Earth. No big deal.’

‘Glad to see you well, sinner. Let’s get out of here.’

The squad is waiting for them at the gate, exhausted yet relieved. Anna exhales into her gloved hands, tapping her foot against the ground. ‘Finally, about damn time. We’ve been waiting here forever.’

‘I wonder why only I could see it,’ Rosalind says meaningfully to Cain, as the squad takes turns ooh-ing and aah-ing at the spear (mostly Greg and Anna, truthfully). Cain hums, stretching his wings out.

‘Mikael — or any one of them — could have just disguised it, hidden it under a shield of their power till the chosen one came along. To prevent the wrong person from taking it —’

Cain’s face goes slack, his voice dying as if choked out. Rosalind looks back at him in confusion. ‘Cain?’

Abruptly, he stumbles, falling to his knees, a groan of agony leaving his lips with his head bent. An ominous red glow swirls around him, as if preparing to devour him alive. Rosalind screams, grabbing onto his shoulders, but he pushes her away, eyes clouded.

‘Anhea! Pileon!’ Rosalind calls for help almost desperately, trying to hold on to him as best as she can. Already, she can hear the tell-tale shrieks of abominations in the distance, and the cries of what sound like people. Astrea looms over them coldly, a spectator of their grief, and in the back of her mind Rosalind wonders if this is how Aurora died too.

Because she knows in her soul that her friend is dead. Intimately, as if she herself had seen it, she can spin out the scene for herself. Cain will die here too, and Astrea will claim another soul, a scepter of mourning. It is a pre-destined story, written far before either her or Aurora got the chance to decide. There’s nothing left to do, only follow the script they’ve been set on.

Ignoring Cain’s feral protests, she keeps a firm hand upon his shoulders, begging him to snap out of it. Maybe Aurora’s death was only a casualty; just another name to add to the never-ending list of lives claimed by the immortal world. Maybe Aurora had died alone and scared, isolated in this large, strange house. Rosalind hadn’t been there for it, but she will not let that happen to Cain. She refuses.

Cain’s eyes go red, his fingertips gleam with power, and then everything goes black.

‘Stubborn, cruel angel,’ Sadie mutters to herself, harshly rustling through the notes on the desk. ‘We all told you going to the masquerade was a bad idea, and yet you made us go, and now what? Layla pays the price, not you.’

Her goal is to find the blueprint of the Academy that Eragon showed them last time. If he won’t send someone to rescue Layla, Sadie will do it herself, because leaving Layla to the Horseman of Hunger is not an option. Just imagining what he could be subjecting her to sends shivers down her spine. Mammon had wearily suggested that Hunger had kept Layla due to her half-breed lineage, but Sadie remembers the pitiless, fascinated look in the Horseman’s dark eyes as he held her friend.

As soon as the thought strikes her, she shuts it down. No way, Sadie, she tells herself. He’s an ancient socially inept entity, and he’s currently destroying our world. He feels nothing for Layla.

Incensed, Sadie searches with renewed vigor. 'Damn it,' she says out loud. It's not on the table. Sighing, she gives up and moves to the set of drawers beneath his desk, but instantly winces at the weight on her leg. Ever since Plague’s torture before the battle, her muscles have ached constantly; and Hunger’s influence only makes the pain worse. Her body acutely remembers the copper tang settling in her mouth, the screams she held back as Plague’s clawed nails dug into her skin.

Plague stops at nothing, Malbonte had told her, and she'd dived headfirst into trouble regardless of that asshole's warning. She had sorely regretted it when Plague peeled her very flesh away and dug at sheer bone to find the stone; and even more so when weeks later, her leg still hadn't healed right.

Sadie forces the gruesome memories away. Okay, let’s see.

The first drawer doesn’t contain anything that she’s looking for. There’s notes on locations of Heaven, a few gem-encrusted pens, and a ring. Sadie picks up the ring and examines it; it’s exactly a copy of the one Eragon wears day-to-day, a band of gold with diamonds twisted upon its top. She frowns, considering.

He has two of the same rings? Alright, odd… Leaving that thought to dwell on — after all, she has no time! — she moves on to the second one. Again, nothing special, and definitely not that stupid blueprint she’s so desperately after. Agitatedly, she shoves it closed and tries to tug open the third, but it’s —

Locked. Ugh. Sadie rubs the bridge of her nose, irritated. Her curiosity spikes; she doubts the map is inside, but what could Eragon be keeping that is so special it’s locked behind an energy valve? Of course she has to know. Malbonte often used to say that Sadie’s need to investigate and insert herself into everything was her flaw, but the opinions of her estranged husband no longer concern her.

Or they do, she just tries not to think about him a lot.

She sends a swirl of her silvery-blue energy into the mechanism and smiles with some satisfaction as the drawer falls open. Inside are a stack of letters, and a lock of hair. The sight of it makes Sadie falter as she picks it up. Tied with a ribbon and as red as Sadie’s own, down to the same wave pattern, the similarity is almost eerie.

It’s okay, she tells herself, beginning to feel uneasy. She reaches for a letter and opens it, eyes flicking over the letters written in a woman’s rushed, curving hand; and it’s a short passage, as if the writer couldn’t bear to sit still long enough to write a long one.

Dearest, the letter begins,

The days here are so long and arduous without you that I find myself positively aching for intrigue. I do hope the Citadel hasn’t bored you into Nonexistence yet, and I suppose I shall have to stand corrected in front of you that a vacation like this is only entertaining if I do not go alone — another thing you were right about it.

I’ll be returning soon, I think by next week. Despite the silence, it’s lovely here; the quiet might do me some good, as you keep saying I’m restless. Personally, I think you’re too cautious. To want to explore this wide world of ours is hardly a fault, and I’m sad you had to return so soon.

Then again, that is why I am returning too, because I miss you almost acutely, the ache pronounced against my heart. Every morning I regret the simple fact that I do not wake up in your arms. Ah, writing this is making my longing worse. I suppose Mother and Father were right — I’m powerless against my own impulses. Perhaps that makes me weak, but I do not mind being weak for you.

Wait for me, my love.

Sadie blinks. She reads it again and then for a third time. She scoffs, closes her eyes and opens them, as if that’ll somehow change what she’s seeing.

‘Dearest?’ She says aloud, almost laughing to herself out of shock. ‘My love? God, Eragon has a lover — who knew!’ Holding the paper up, she glances at the name written at the bottom: Annaliese.

Annaliese, Annaliese… In her ten years of ruling, Sadie hasn’t heard of her. Carefully wrapping up the first letter, she quickly takes the second, eager to find answers to the many questions running through her mind.

My love, this one says.

It’s infuriating that we have to be so far apart from each other, isn’t it? How I wish I might fight the Council on your behalf; sending you to the Far Lands, so soon! Already I can picture your glare — how I miss it. Do not fret so; I shan’t do anything of the sort. To my greatest displeasure, after all, I have unfortunately been handed this arduous task.

The Academy has asked for my help in deciphering old texts that they’ve found. I suppose the texts themselves may be interesting, but principal Anastasia and Satan are both breathing down my neck. I do not understand our people and their obsession with urgency — we are immortal, after all! We’ve got nothing but time.

Upsetting how we’re being disturbed, in what Vasaria tells me humans call ‘the honeymoon period’. Such funny people. Well, it gives me something to do, and keeps the mind occupied, as you say. Eliza visits quite often, and she brings her daughter with her sometimes too — Mimi is a little darling, the sweetest baby I’ve laid my eyes upon. I hope whatever you’re finding in the Far Lands is even half as entertaining as what the Citadel is presenting — never a dull moment here.

Although gathering from your most recent letter, you’re really bored, as I do not know you to have a particular affinity for rambling on and on about fauna and flora in your usual state. Amicus is missing you too. He refuses to eat most days until hunger compels the stubborn creature. And I miss you too, as always… come back, and come back quickly. That’s an order.

‘Oh my god,’ Sadie says quietly, a laugh bubbling up in her throat, despite there being nothing funny here. Eragon has a lover — Their cold-hearted, perpertually stone-faced leader has a lover. Sadie’s seen plenty of shocking things in the past few months, but this might just take the cake.

She analyzes it more carefully. This woman — Annaliese — mentions Mimi as a baby and Eliza, which means this must’ve been long ago. She apparently worked for the Academy, and the principal at the time was an angel named Anastasia. Sadie collects all these details and files them away in her mind, ready to interrogate Rebecca upon her return.

For now, she turns her attention to the third letter.

This next one is once again shorter, and Annaliese’s handwriting is messier, hurried. As if she’d written it in a rush. My dearest, it reads,

I confess I am afraid.

The ladies have told me of the rumors… I know, I know. I shouldn’t listen to the rumors. The envy oozes off of them, I can practically taste it. But I daresay these are no simple rumors. Sonellion grows more pronounced in his arrogance by the day, and I have reason to believe he hides half-breeds from the eyes of Shepha. He even sends immortal women pregnant with half-breeds down to Earth, knowing full well they won’t survive.

I’ve not said any of this to the Council. My concern is not the half-breeds, or the fact that Sonellion is doing something illegal, but simply how cruel he is, and how they must be suffering. Throne Fencio came by to see me the other day with plentiful evidence against Sonellion; and it’s a convincing case: in his memories, I saw it for myself. There was so much blood…

Perhaps you shall tell me it’s none of my concern, or that I shouldn’t go near Sonellion. I’m hardly fragile, Eragon. And I hate the thought of innocent children suffering for their parents’ sins. Please.

Please put an end to it — please. As for the rumors, I shan’t dare to put them on paper. These are uneasy days, and I constantly feel my heart racing, my hands shaking. I wait for you endlessly, here in our grand city, alone in our home. Who else shall I turn to in my despair, if not you?

Come back. Do not leave me so.

Rumors of Sonellion’s hiding half-breeds, Fencio finding evidence… this must’ve been before the death of Dino’s mother, but after Dino was born. The information only confuses Sadie further. It’s useless to her now, and it’s not exactly relevant to her needs, so she puts the letter back without much thought and finally opens the last. This is it, she tells herself. I’ll go after this. Screw that blueprint, I can’t find it anywhere. Guess I'm going to go in blind.

‘My dearest Eragon,’ Sadie mutters. Simply reading that makes her shudder with disgust.

I think you already know what I shall say.

I can picture it now — you, at your desk, in that infernal office of yours that keeps you away from me all the time. I can picture the way you shall grip this paper, creasing it with the hands I have kissed; the way your brow shall furrow, and your mouth twist just so with your anger: or your despair. I find myself reliving every detail of you, every time my pen touches paper, every time my lungs draw breath.

You have ruined me.

But you know as well as I do, I must leave. It is like you always say, that everything has its due time, and time always takes its course, does it not, Eragon? I will say that I am dragging my sentences out, scrambling for words. I do not wish to leave you. You are dearest to me. I want to press these words to your soul, imprint them so you never forget me.

I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

I’m tired of pretending everything is alright. I’m tired of this morally right ridiculousness in the Citadel. I used to say I was envious of the mortals, remember? I’m so tired of waiting to feel alive. It’s a nonsensical thought, isn’t it… After all, we are immortal — we live forever. But being alive is different from just breathing. I suppose when you are in Heaven, when you are as high as you can go, you pretend to not see beneath you. Silk and jewels and dappled sunlight; the polished marble floors of the Citadel that ignore the blood soaked into them. For how long are we going to ignore it? How long will we pretend that we don’t see it? It’s breaking me, Eragon. It has been for a while.

I do not blame you, but I know you will blame yourself. I have started this letter about six times now, thinking of how to break your heart in the kindest way I can. But I can only give you what I always have — the truth. It’ll never leave me; death changes nothing, absolutely nothing. I’m here. What happened in the garden, the halls, the nurseries — all here. It’s my fault and our faults. We’ve made our bed, now we have only to lie in it.

I have no regrets and all apologies. In the end, this is what I am, I suppose. A restless, vapid angel, just like any other. It’s all I can give you: I love you. I will never come back to the Citadel. I will never see you again. And I have no choice but to live with that.

Eragon, my love, my brave angel. You must live with it too.

The letter flutters to the ground, and Sadie stares at it, her hand going limp. There are tears in her eyes, but she can hardly remember when she started crying. She picks it up, almost reverent. Whereas the other letters were in almost pristine condition, their corners still sharp, this one is creased and wrinkled and bent and folded. Beneath it is another sheet of paper, but Sadie does not reach for it.

She simply wraps the letters up and puts everything back in order almost mindlessly, too stunned to think, and practically flees the office before she collides with someone.

‘Sadie?’ She’s met with Rebecca’s piercing gaze, the older woman reaching out to steady her. ‘Why are you crying?’

God. Sadie reaches up and wipes her cheeks, forcing a wan smile. Eragon is talking to Mammon, standing behind Rebecca, and Sadie’s stomach swoops at the sight of him — she can’t bear looking him in the eye. ‘I’m okay,’ she tells Rebecca, hurriedly, already stepping in the opposite direction. ‘It’s nothing.’

Rebecca opens her mouth to respond, but before she can, they hear Mimi’s overjoyed cry and the sound of Adi whooping. Sammy runs down the hall and grabs Sadie by the hands. ‘Layla is back!’

Eragon instantly strides outside, and Rebecca runs behind him. Sadie follows, heart hammering in her throat, and all the while as she stands outside and Rebecca holds Layla close, she can only think of the letters. The echo of a desperate woman, an angel writing to her lover, pleading. Why had Annaliese chosen to leave? What drove her to condemn the Citadel, especially with a Seraphim by her side? It’s like the words have followed Sadie, echoing in her mind; she imagines the woman’s voice, resigned and weary. We’ve made our bed, now we must lie in it.

Layla disentangles herself from her mother, and Sadie steps up. Still standing with the grace that only Layla seems to be able to maintain, her long, golden hair is loose down her back and she’s clad in the type of dress Plague usually wears — thin straps, tight silhouttes. She’s trembling, deep blue eyes downcast, lips wobbling; and she holds onto her own self with shaky hands. But it is not any of this that draws their attention, not that which makes Sadie recoil, which makes Mimi draw in a sharp breath.

There is a collar around Layla’s neck, rubies pressed around the gold. The sight of it might've jolted Sadie to the present, but all she can think about is the ring, left there to rot in a drawer, diamonds in a shining frame. Had Annaliese left Eragon her ring on purpose? Did he wear his own, still, because he could not truly let go?

‘Layla,’ Sadie says slowly. She wants to ask her so many questions. Why are you wearing a collar? Did he make you? Did he hurt you? Are you alright? Silly, pointless questions; most of which to she can already guess the answers. But Layla is in no mood for interrogation.

‘Death is here,’ she whispers back, eyes wide and tired. Her wings spread in a wide arc; the golden tips shivering. ‘He is here for us.’

Sadie’s hungry eyes devour the sight after so long spent in the dark. Everyone she thought dead is returned. Fencio with an arm on Dino’s shoulder; Torendo and the familiar condescension in his posture, Satan and his glowering, venomous face; Eragon, on bleeding knees before his old throne, hands bound behind his back, head bowed and teeth gritted.

On Plague’s left is Lucifer, with a vice-grip on Mimi’s wrist. Both of them are pale, but whereas Mimi is bloodied and bruised, Lucifer is as unharmed as he was when Sadie last saw him. He looks tormented, however; a haunted gleam in his red eyes. Most of the angels and demons of the Council lie dead on the floor, their remains splattered everywhere. The air is sick with rot, a permeating smell that clings to her body; but the realization that splinters any last shred of control she may have had is that Layla is nowhere to be seen. Sadie feels a desperate, overpowering impulse to run over and see if any of those corpses sprawled face-down are her friend’s. Her heart sinks.

Please let Layla be okay. Please, please, please. She doesn’t even know who she’s praying to, but she chants the words inside her mind, holding on for all she’s worth.

Meanwhile, a hollow-eyed thrall wrenches the previous Chief Councilor’s head back by his white hair and forces him to look up at Plague. Eragon’s glacial-blue eyes shift upwards, but it is not the Horsewoman he looks at. Instead, his harsh, condemning glare falls upon Malbonte, who is standing motionless at Plague’s right hand with an impassive face. Their gazes lock, seemingly able to convey a thousand words of their shared disdain without speaking any of them out loud.

A cry of horror wedges in Sadie’s throat, but she’s incapable of making any sound. If even Malbonte has bent the knee to Plague… terror paralyzes her body, and she freezes, fixing her stare upon her own feet. She doesn’t think she has the courage in her to look up.

The abominable creature on the throne, on the other hand, seems almost giddy with delight. She hauls one of the Seraphim angels over by his wings, cackling at his pained cry and the desperate flutter of his wings, and drops into the Chief Councilor’s seat.

‘Well!’ Her voice is a nasal, raspy wheeze; like the voice of someone who is very sick. Her too-large grin however, is anything but. Where her hands should be, there are only claws; and where there should be teeth are pointed, elongated fangs; and the whites of her eyes are completely black. She claps happily. ‘It was a nice place you had here. But it’s much better now.’

No one dares to answer. The only sound in the hall is the wind shrieking outside and the branches of trees snapping clean in half. At this silence, Plague pouts. Scantily clad in a black cloth soaked through with blood, she makes for an almost obscene display; but Plague shows no shame, and nor does anyone expect her to. ‘Everyone is so boring,’ she says suddenly, but she doesn’t sound bored. In her voice is barely leashed anger.

‘What do you say, hm?’ She lifts one foot and stomps down on Seraph Raguel’s head. The angel’s scream is muffled as Plague grinds the heel of her boot into the meat of his cheek. ‘So tedious. Pathetic, too. No one here gave me a good fight… except you.’

She rotates her head in a full circle, the bones in her neck cracking sharply, and points a talon at Eragon. ‘Why so glum, Eragon? Are you not going to help your suffering fellow angels? What a Chief Councilor you are… or were, I’ve been told. But you're not very grateful. I bring you back from Nonexistence, and I don't even get a thank you.’

Eragon presses his lips together into a firm line, and Plague’s eyes narrow. She motions to the thrall. ‘Make him speak.’

The thrall places her hands on either side of Eragon’s head and presses down. Sadie can’t tell what force she applies, but the scream that crawls up the Seraph’s throat is raw, guttural with primal fear. It is a sound of pure agony, and people flinch, unable to look away, transfixed. Torendo smiles with smug satisfaction, and Malbonte directs his eyes downwards for the first time.

She’s mad. Insane, rabid, crazy. What does she want? What will she take? Sadie’s thoughts race too fast for her broken body to keep up with, and her legs buckle, forcing Pike to seize her. Even though the sound of her skirts rustling is minuscule amidst Eragon’s screams, Plague catches it. She snaps her head around again, her manic gaze locking onto Sadie’s. Her lips split into a wide grin.

‘Oh, Sadie, darling.’ Casually, almost dismissively, she flicks her wrist. Eragon goes flying into the walls with a loud crash and does not move again. A sharp inhale echoes through the hall, and this seems to bring Plague great joy. ‘Poor petal. Look at how pale you’ve become! Such lank hair, and my, those are some fearsome scars.’ She giggles coquettishly, but the sound is warped and distorted by her voice. ‘Come, girl.’

Sadie does not move. Her obstinance is partially due to fear, but also because now her mind is beginning to work, as if it had been doused with cold water, and the feeling replacing her fright is not self-preservation or horror. It is anger; visceral and real, almost calming in its burning passion. Pure, unadulterated rage.

Plague’s eerie black eyes focus on her, and her manic smile falls away. Her face is even more petrifying when she is calm. ‘You are a human,’ she says lethally. ‘And you think I’m giving you a choice?’

Before Sadie can respond, invisible ropes bind around Sadie’s weakened body and yank her to Plague’s feet. The Horsewoman reaches down and wrenches Sadie up by her arm, digging her claws into her skin just slightly. ‘Stay there, petal,’ she warns, ‘and pay attention. I want you to watch the show.’

Sadie turns pleading, imploring eyes upon her lover. Malbonte’s gaze flicks down to hers for the barest fraction of a second before he looks away. His expression is monotonous, and his voice is flat when he rebukes her, ‘Keep your eyes where you’ve been commanded.’

‘Malbonte,’ she whispers, achingly. ‘Why… why are you…’ She wants to ask him why he'd ever help the likes of Plague, but she can piece it together well enough. Malbonte is smart enough to gauge his chances, and Plague is just too formidable of an opponent. But it’s not just that; there’s a lot she’d like to ask him. Did you visit me when I was imprisoned? Try to make her let me go, fight her at all? Are you biding your time, or have you actually chosen to be on her side? Why won’t you protect your world? Protect me?

She knows him well enough to know he won’t offer her a single answer.

‘Do not speak until you have been spoken to,’ he says icily. He does not even glance at her, where she lies sprawled at his feet. He might as well be a completely different person to —

No. No, he isn’t a completely different person. This is just who Malbonte is and always have been: cold and focused, willing to set aside anyone for his goals. In their long ten years together, how many nights did she await him, only for him to favor his reports over her? How many times has she made excuses for him leaving her by herself in the Council, for ignoring her pitiful attempts to reach out? She’s always holding on to his sleeve, two steps behind him, waiting for him to turn back, look at her, and make her feel special and loved again.

The only one pretending here is me, she thinks to herself, pretending he's going to help me. I'm on my own, like always.

Plague, thankfully, does not notice their exchange. She graciously helps the Seraph Raguel up and then spreads her arms. ‘Okay, I’m going to give you a chance, since poor Eragon is taking a nap,’ she tells him. ‘Try to fight me. Even if you draw first blood, I’ll consider it a victory for you! Aren’t I nice?’

Raguel spits blood on the floor. ‘Vile creature,’ he says by way of reply. ‘You have no place here.’

He does not let Plague retaliate before he hurls his first blow. His power is nothing to scoff at; after all, he is one of the Seraphim. Great spheres of energy burst out of him in crushing displays, nearly pulverizing the walls, but Plague deflects them with a mere flick of her finger. When they do hit her, she regenerates almost instantaneously.

The angel gapes for a split second before he regains his bearings. He begins to dodge her blows so expertly that his movements blur before Sadie’s eyes, and as he fights he lands hit after hit on Plague. He’s a formidable fighter, but even as he battles, Sadie’s heart sinks. There’s no chance.

Plague cackles madly, highly enjoying herself. Then her smile abruptly drops, and she grabs Raguel by the neck and slams him down into the ground. He screams and is unable to move; simply lying there, writhing and twisting. The Horsewoman scrapes a talon down his cheek.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ she coos. Torendo laughs patronizingly, and in that moment, Sadie does not know who she hates more — Torendo, or Plague.

‘Don’t worry, though. You’re no fun.’ And just as quickly as it began, she breaks his neck, tearing his head from his body with savage, monstrous strength. The angel’s headless corpse stands there for the blink of an eye before it collapses like a marionette with the strings cut, joining the array of dead bodies on the floor.

Sadie clamps her hands over her mouth, a terrible feeling of despair crawling up her throat. She thinks she can hear someone scream — it sounds like Mimi — but she feels powerless with the cuffs on her wrists, paralyzed and chained by this nightmarish monster. She knew Seraph Raguel, she even liked him well enough. It feels like yesterday that she was making some idle joke about something he said at the Council table, debating his suggestions, and now he’s dead.

Desperately, she tries to think of some way to protect herself. Plague said she wanted, what? Ashes and blood? She’s certainly got enough blood here, that’s for sure, but she seemed displeased when I didn’t cry in the dungeons. It clearly makes her happy when we’re upset.

Unwilling to show Plague any signs of distress, Sadie swallows her tears and closes her eyes tightly. The air hangs heavy, pungent and sickly-sweet with rot, and the scent clings to her skin and her hair as yet another reminder of every casualty in the room. For a few blessed seconds, Sadie actually manages to imagine the room away.

She’s jerked back to reality by Plague’s sharp face right in front of hers. Enraged, the Horsewoman digs her talons right into her leg, scowling, forcing her eyes open as Sadie shrieks. ‘I told you to watch the show, petal! Didn’t you like it?’

Sadie cries out in pain, blood streaming down her leg. God, it hurts like a bitch. But she won’t say she liked it, even as a lie, and saying no seems like a death sentence, so she goes for diplomacy, something Layla would say. ‘I daresay, mistress,’ she says, in the most servile tone she can muster, ‘I feel too weak to appreciate your show. The imprisonment was so lonely, and I wasn’t given anything to eat or drink down there in the dark.’

Plague lets go of her hair, considering. Then she smiles again, prancing around to the throne and stroking Malbonte’s arm. His jaw is clenched so tightly that Sadie wonders how his bones withstand it. ‘You’re sweet, aren’t you? It’s good that you know your place; it saves me so much trouble. It irritates me when people waste my time.’

As if you have anything important to be doing, Sadie thinks, just wreaking havoc. She’s suddenly glad Plague has not tried to read her mind yet.

The monster twitches as if she can sense Sadie’s thoughts, her bulging eyes alight with joy. ‘Shall I tell you a secret, petal?’ She does not wait for an answer before she keeps talking, ‘Your pretty friend is perfectly alive and unharmed. I saw the concern swimming in your big eyes when you came in, poor thing.’

A wave of relief so immense crashes into Sadie’s heart, that for a moment she almost feels lightheaded. Layla is alright, she’s alive, and she’s not hurt. But just as quickly as relief comes, worry takes its place; after all, Plague’s definition of alive-and-safe could be drastically different from Sadie’s version of it.

‘Oh, I’m keeping her in excellent condition! I did have to take her power away, though. Weren’t you happy to have it returned, puppy?’ She smiles up at Malbonte with apparent sincerity. She took Malbonte’s power from Layla? How? Why would she want Malbonte to be even stronger, unless he’s truly joined her side?

Malbonte makes a show of unclenching his jaw before he responds. ‘I was, mistress. Thank you,’ he says emotionlessly. Then he makes a subtle movement of his head towards Plague, staring down at Sadie.

Sadie knows what he means — thank her, give her your gratitude and your fealty — but she has no such plans. She swallows and moves to kneel properly before the Horsewoman, forcing her expression into docile, fearful submission. It’s not exactly difficult to fake. ‘Mistress, may I ask why she alone has been spared when the rest of the Council has been destroyed?’

Plague goes silent, and for half a second Sadie almost believes her time has come. But then Plague signals for her to come closer and leans in to whisper. ‘I’m saving her,’ she says conspiratorially, as if they are two friends in on a big secret. ‘For when my brothers arrive. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? What really intrigues me, however, are her lack of powers.’

‘…Your brothers?’ Sadie echoes. Not once did she think Layla’s beauty or vessel-like capabilities might doom her. If there are more creatures like Plague, then everyone and their mothers are effectively doomed.

‘Your world is pathetically weak, and it is on the path to disaster, but it does bring delightful amusement,’ Plague hums, as if cheered by the thought. ‘You’ll make for lovely pets and entertaining toys, I’m sure. Layla isn’t much different, is she, Lucifer?’

Lucifer. Layla’s husband has nothing but searing hatred written clearly over his face; his thumb brushes briefly over his own wedding ring before he bows his head. ‘No, mistress.’

‘It was silly of you to tie yourself to a human,’ Plague says disdainfully, never minding the fact that Layla is a Seraph, ‘but no matter. My brother will be greatly pleased by her, now that I’ve gotten rid of the strength that lowly little thing stole. And I, on the other hand, will enjoy the rest of you!’ She twists and squirms on the throne, beaming at the disarray before her eyes.

The grand hall lies in shambles. Angels and demons alike are dead; their corpses staining the once polished floors. Those who were supposed to be dead have returned, the most powerful of the Seraphim is unconscious, and the ruler of Hell has been effectively — if not literally — chained. Helplessness casts its shadow upon Sadie’s heart, a stronger force than before.

‘Yes,’ she whispers to herself, dazed. ‘The grand hall is unrecognizable, indeed.’

Its first occupants were an old, aristocratic family. Their lord was a sneering man, one who was rarely home — but the manor delighted in his lady wife and their little children; in the sounds of their eager giggling, their childish curiosity as their tiny hands pressed into the garden mud, the lady's gentle, amused reproach when they tumbled over each other in their play. It was all so vivid with color and with spirit — till the poor lady of the house succumbed to disease, and the lord took himself and his young children far, far away.

For a long while, no one visited the estate. The garden grew wild and overgrown, and the house fell into lonely despair, missing the lively souls that used to dwell in its halls. It longed for anyone to come live in it, turn it from a house into a home. As years of isolation passed, the estate almost gave up, convinced its prayers would never be answered. That was when they arrived.

The garden had been the first to notice their presence. The trees rustled, the bushes whispering, birds chattering away. Nature notices everything, and they especially noticed what these strange visitors tried to hide — the wings behind their back, the power in their souls, and the deep sorrow they all carried in their hearts. All of them had some heartbreak they were dragging around, and it was weighing them down, akin to how an animal sinks in water with a heavy stone tied to its leg.

From that day onwards, the house chose to accept them. It opened its gates to the newcomers, overjoyed at their arrival. It watched with interest as they wove together elaborate glass masterpieces to decorate its walls, put up the winged lady in the garden, and brought animals in to populate the grounds. It rejoiced as they laughed together, joked together, fought and then made up; it smiled upon their happy faces as they discovered human customs and whims. For a while, there was peace. Things were calm.

The estate as a whole protected them, delighted at the chaos that would take place when they gathered. And when one arrived after a long day of unsuccessful work, the garden would catch their frustration, like it always did. The wisteria would bend low, and the cats and mice and birds would poke their small heads through the foliage, and the lanterns would flicker a little brighter, as if to say, it's okay. Do not fret, tomorrow will come.

Tomorrow did come, and the day after that, and after that; until years upon years passed. With time, the inhabitants only grew more jaded, and the house only more anxious. Their times of joy seemed to be well and truly over, as never-ending quiet falls over the residence. The first shut himself away in his office more and more often; the second frequently stayed in the garden with his animals, the third always left the house and came back tipsy in the dead of night, and the fourth languished in the living room, pouring his misery out through his music.

Thus, as had happened once before, the estate began to worry, to ache for happier days.

And then she came.

Like a ray of sunlight peering through the clouds, she brushed the fog away with one simple smile. Her skepticism countering their zeal brought them out of their shells. She laughed, she joked, she fought and then apologized. Her light feet would run over the house's wooden floors in her rush to get ready, or she would scream in surprise as the stove flared to life with unexpected gusto, and the manor relaxed. Life was restored; both in its considerably more content residents and its energetic newest member.

But as old as the grounds are; as old as the manor is; they are used to the tragedy of life. They know that dawn does not last forever. As the poison mixed with her water, the house recoiled. It tried to warn her. The lights flashed wildly, and the birds tapped their little beaks against her window, but to no avail. She pulled her blanket away, a furrow of worry between her brows, and drank her glass in one go.

When she stood, she shuddered, uneasy on her feet, but she persevered. As she took her last breaths, kneeling in the garden she loved, her wolf howled achingly, and the house took on a guise of mourning, unwilling to let go, unwilling to say goodbye. Unwilling to abandon her, it protected her as she succumbed to the vile poison. Once again, the wisteria bent their slender, blossoming necks; her wolf pressed his forehead against her limp hand, and the bushes soaked up her blood. By the gate, the lanterns flickered.

The people do not come back. Her corpse vanishes as if it had never lain there, the rain washing away any traces of the gruesome scene. Silence falls upon the house for once; oppressive, never-ending quiet, but the house does not open its doors again — it cannot. Violent, oppressive monsters come down from the sky, and it is helpless to the chaos they set off in their wake.

And so, as the estate dies, it remembers the people who lived and loved in it; of the strange, closed off winged folk and the woman who restored life into them. As its walls cave in, as its roof is stripped of its tiles, and as the staircase is destroyed, it breathes its last. With every blow, its pulse slows, till only the garden is left, and even the lanterns have gone out.

SHAKESPEARE'S CODE

The Witch & The Inquisitor by @reneedenoailles |🎨| Amabelle Norfolk x Abraham Darnby | TW: suggestive content | T

Black Widow by @reneedenoailles |🎨| Amabell Norfolk, Edward Pembroke, Ralph Suffolk, Abraham Darnby, Hobello | TW: flash, murder, blood | M

HEAVEN'S SECRET

Revelations of Divine Love by @waiting4sunrise |🖊️| OC x Eragon | G

LEGEND OF THE WILLOW

Mei Hattori by @ladylamrian-archive |👤| Mei Hattori | G

SHADOWS OF SAINTFOUR 2: TIMELESS

Jealousy by @isazmelt |🎨🏳️‍🌈| Nadine Ross x Penelope 'Poppy' Emerson | G

THE THUNDERSTORMS SAGA

Love, Shadow and Catastrophe After the Wedding Banquet by @masamunewaifu |🎨| Tiss ey Vedtree x Tai ey Eini Lono Wed Vain Firkain | TW: flashing visuals, implied violence, sexual imagery and poisoning/drugging themes | M

HEAVEN'S SECRET: REQUIEM

Tomorrow Never Came by @dmitryan |🎨🏳️‍🌈| Dmitry Lloyd x Yan | TW: flickering lights, cigarettes | T

Losing You by @dmitryan |🎨| Lane | TW: flickering lights | G

HEAVEN'S SECRET 3: ETERNITY'S END

To Caress by @blatantliez |🎨| Audrey x Cassiel | G

WATERLILY

Fabian Reyes Aesthetic by @de4thstar |🎨| Fabian Reyes | T