I don’t know how long I kneel there, holding my sister’s corpse. I haven’t just failed to repay my debt. I got my family killed. I can’t imagine a more inexcusable failure. I should have killed them sooner. I should have killed those child-abusing bastards the moment I saw them. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

Eventually I start to get my senses back, start to actually think again. I fucked up. This is just like Penta. Someone died, again, because I tried to do the right thing, the humane thing, the slow thing. Maybe I’m just too weak to make it work. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter why. I don’t… I don’t have time for this. It’s the same mistake as Penta, but it has the same solution as Penta. I can fix this. I just need to get Angelien’s body somewhere safe, to get Penelope to preserve it, and then figure out immortality. Fucking easy, right?

I need… a sack. Or a blanket. Something to hide the corpse. I head into the shack, a pang of bitter nostalgia hitting me as I find the wads of cloth that once served as my bed. I wrap Angelien’s fragile body up, disguising her as a huge wad of rags. It might not fool everyone, but… well, it doesn’t really have to. I’ve seen people carrying around children’s corpses before. No one likes to ask why. It’s never a fun story.

I bet ‘killed by a street thug’ would be a pretty common answer if people did ask, though.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I feel like I might just kill the next damn person I see, so with Angelien in my arms I stomp back towards the hunter’s guild, carefully feeling out the area in front of me so I don’t run into anyone. How am I going to break the news to Lyn? To Rowan? How are they going to react?

Weren’t the Broken Drakens supposed to protect my family in exchange for Lyn working for them?

A bit of the rage I feel at myself condenses, focusing in another direction. They are. Lyn said that was the condition. Why would they let this happen? Is it because I missed that idiotic meeting with Sky? I’m a goddamn hunter, they know that! Sometimes I have to leave! Stupid bastards can’t take over the city if a bunch of monsters sack it. These dumbfucks can’t be that shortsighted, right? Right?

So either Lyn and Rowan did something to piss them off or… the Drakens are just fucking incompetent. You know what? Fuck it. It doesn’t matter why. I’m going to rip their whole organization into shards and corpses.

...As soon as I make sure Angelien’s body is safe. I have to go back to Penelope. She can help. She has to. The return to the hunter’s guild is slow, methodical, and automatic. I barely even think about where my steps are taking me, barely even notice the tears still running down my face. I hate this. I hate myself.

Fury and despair boil inside my soul. I can’t take it anymore. I’m tired of failure after failure. I’m tired of reacting, waiting, going with the flow, and letting things happen to me. It’s those disgusting old habits from my early life rearing their ugly head again, isn’t it? I only look at what’s in front of me, only consider immediate problems and immediate survival. For everything else, I rely on others. Anyone that steps forward and tries even a little just pushes me around. I never really changed from that powerless orphan girl, in the end.

Another thought passes through my mind, unwanted and unbidden. Why do I even care? People die. I’ve seen the deaths of hundreds of acquaintances, many of them children just like Angelien. I never even knew her that well. I… should have, though. Right? That would be the human thing to do. To actually know your fucking family. I don’t deserve to be thinking of her as a sister.

Then again, I don’t think of myself as a human anymore. I used to, but I haven’t for a long time. I started getting the feeling something wasn’t right ever since I got my talent, and when I hatched… well, it’s obvious now. My soul has fucking tentacles, it isn’t even remotely human in the first place. Though my body is, and that’s… wrong. It’s just wrong somehow. I promised Rowan I wouldn’t lose my humanity, but it really doesn’t seem to be working out well for me. Maybe I never had any in the first place.

Oh. I’ve made it back to the Hunter’s guild. I feel for Penelope, finding her in the infirmary along with a few other souls I recognize but lack the mental wherewithal to immediately place. Something grassy? A brown soul that roils with purple fire? A fragmented soul, not yet woken up? The one soul I place immediately is Claretta’s; I walked right next to it for the whole trip home, after all. It’s an odd soul, fragmented and broken in places, but nowhere near to the degree of Fulvia’s shattered mess. ...Right, that’s the unconscious girl’s name. Fulvia. Funny I remember that name but not my own brother’s.

Anyway, Claretta’s soul is strange because it has no color. Most souls seem to have something that feels like a color to me, but hers is all pressure and sound. A soul of music personified, obviously related to her musical metamancy talent that Penelope kept babbling about during the trip. Yet there’s something wrong with it, a twisting, fetid feeling like her very spirit is trying to destroy itself. It’s a frustrating and uncomfortable experience for my senses, though given recent experiences I now find myself capable of interpreting it. Claretta hates herself. I think she hates her talent, especially, which is pretty weird. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of someone hating their talent.

My idle, distracted musings carry me into the infirmary. Claretta’s despair is a pleasant thing to think about when the alternative is the corpse in my arms. I start to put faces and names to the souls I failed to recognize earlier: the grassy one is Penelope’s biomancer friend, and the brown and purple fiery one is…

...First Lord Erebus? What’s Penelope’s fiancé doing here? From the sound of their conversation, that’s exactly what Penelope wants to know as well.

“—not at all acceptable. I barely got an hour of sleep before they woke me up to come down here, and you think you can just drag me away? You shouldn’t even be here, Johann, this is my business. Not yours.”

I’ve only seen Lord Erebus once, so his thin, bird-like features and pale complexion surprise me again. What strikes me this time around, however, something that I didn’t really think about too much the last time I saw him, is how much older he is than Penelope. He’s probably at least thirty years old, and I’m fairly certain Penelope isn’t even twenty. All of these thoughts pass through my head with a perfect blandness, a fog over my mind dulling the impact of every impression. The tall man wears a fancy black suit, his words and tone all the perfect picture of politeness.

“I hardly see the issue of inviting my wife-to-be to dinner on the day of her triumphant return,” he answers, unfazed in the face of Penelope’s irritation. The man is so clearly used to dealing with her, it almost feels like his soul is rolling its eyes.

“Well I regret to inform you that now is not a good time, Johann. In fact, there likely will not be a good time for at least a month. Between dealing with missions, healing the victims of our scouting excursions, investigating the creatures dropped by Hiverock and my own research it should be obvious that I am too busy for such frivolities! You should be too!”

“Penelope, please! You know I work hard for this city. But a certain degree of occasional relaxation improves my ability to do so, it doesn’t lessen it. The same goes for anyone. Besides, these sorts of jobs… are they truly the best use of your abilities?”

“I, and no other, will be the judge of—”

Penelope cuts off her words, noticing my approach for the first time. Her angry expression melts instantly, shifting to surprise, confusion, and then a deep concern. Her true feelings even match her face.

“...Vita?” she prompts, carefully and quietly, as if her words would somehow break me.

“I, um. I brought...” I stutter, words failing me completely as I try to think of an excuse. Something about a delivery for her? She can buy corpses legally, right? I hadn’t really thought about the fact that other people would be here.

Penelope simply walks forward, slowly reaching a hand up and lightly brushing her thumb between my nose and eye, smearing something wet.

Oh yeah.

I’m still crying.

Much of what happens after that is a blur. I find myself pouring tears into the front of Penelope’s shirt, clutching the rich fabric desperately when someone finally pries the corpse from my arms. My team arrives at some point, Norah, Bently and Orville all there to witness me at my lowest. I vaguely recognize the sound of someone singing ring out through the infirmary, Claretta taking over healing duties from a wheelchair to her obvious dismay. Penelope shuffles myself and my team out of the room, holding my sister’s corpse in her arms. I want her to give it back. It’s mine. It’s my failure. ...Though, didn’t I come here to give it to her in the first place?

It’s so hard to look anyone in the eyes. Penelope’s pity, Orville’s horror, Bently’s shock and despair, Norah’s quiet grief… I hate all of it. I don’t want to see the look on anyone’s faces, or worse, feel those emotions deep within their souls. I feel crowded. I need space. ...Not that there’s anywhere in the city like that. I retreat upstairs instead, collapsing in a ball on my bed as I curl around Rosco. Where did I even get this damn bird, anyway? I love him so much. The first friend I could rely on. The first thing that was ever mine. I’ll fuck up and break him too, someday. I suppose I already did once, when the Mistwatcher killed him.

I squeeze my stuffed animal tight, trying to shut off my senses by sheer force of will. Even if I can close my tear-filled eyes, however, the eye of my soul remains eternally open, gazing about the inside of my room with its mostly-monochrome sight. Only the souls of Penelope’s rats have color to my inner eye, and it’s them I find myself focusing on. Her past subjects all died, but she gathered a new batch from somewhere and has been experimenting on them since well before our last mission. Penelope has apparently gotten quite good at lobotomizing things, and all four of her test subjects successfully had the “useless” parts of their brain removed without issue.

Something about them… annoys me now. Disturbs me, even. Something about them is so wrong, I want to kill them and take their souls immediately. I try to tear my inner eye away to look at something else, but my senses still feel them regardless. They’re just not right. It’s like the souls aren’t moving as they should.

I think I finally see what it is, delving deep to view them at the most detailed level. They’re not growing. Other than undead, I’ve never seen a soul that doesn’t. Even the Nawra, who rapidly consume their souls outside of a body, just as rapidly increase their size within one. But these rats aren’t losing soul size or gaining it. They’re just… stagnant. This is probably big news. I should get off my bed and go tell her about it.

Of course, like the failure I am, I don’t. I don’t move the slightest inch until Norah knocks on the door and lets herself in.

“Hey, um, Vita? Sorry, uh… you doing okay?”

“No,” I mumble.

“...Right, sorry. Of course not. Look, I hate to bother you, but um… First Lord Erebus is asking for you?”

“Tell him to fuck off,” I snap.

There’s a pause.

“...No,” Norah answers eventually. “I, uh, will not do that.”

Oh, right. First Lord Erebus is important. Also he’s technically my employer. Somehow this manages to be enough of a push to get my ass out of bed and head downstairs. I’m not even remotely within Penelope’s guidelines for how I should look when talking to a first lord, what with my messy hair, puffy eyes and borrowed clothes from a boy who, while not as tall as my other options, still has the better part of a foot on my height.

I’m also still clutching a stuffed crow, but I don’t see how that could offend anybody.

“Miss Vita,” Lord Erebus addresses politely when he sees me. “My condolences.”

“What do you want?” I grumble bluntly.

I feel a flash of irritation from the man when he hears my words, but he lets it pass over him and continues as if nothing was ever amiss.

“If you would be so kind, I’d like you to lead me to the facility you’ve been working with Penelope in. I’m afraid my future wife has already left without me.”

I almost, almost say “yeah, because she doesn’t like you,” but a small bit of survival instinct chokes that down into my throat. Whatever, I may as well. I need a distraction anyway.

“...Right, okay. Follow me.”

I stomp out of the hunter’s guild, Lord Erebus easily keeping pace with his much longer legs.

“Incidentally, I was wondering,” the man says pleasantly, “have you ever heard the name ‘Ars’ before?”

What kind of random-ass question is that?

“No,” I answer honestly. “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“You sure? Didn’t I ask you that the first time we met?”

Why would he ask me if I know some random guy at our interview?

“No, I’m pretty sure you didn’t, Lord Erebus.”

“Hmm. Alright. Never mind, then.”

The man seems oddly smug about that entire interaction, but I just think he’s a huge weirdo. Whatever. As long as he keeps the Templars off my back, I don’t really care. I’ve got way bigger problems and I’m in no condition to be dealing with them now, but one in particular I don’t have a choice in. Namely: how the hell am I going to keep this dude out of our blasphemy basement? I didn’t expect this Erebus guy to be so hands-on, and we definitely don’t want him sinking his teeth into our animancy pie. We’re almost to the research building. How am I supposed to—

I stop walking for a second, the last thing I want to feel right now pinging on my senses. No, not now. I can’t do this yet. Why does she have to be here? How did she find me?

What’s Lyn doing heading my way?