“Miss Vita?” a calm voice asks. “Miss Vita, you’ve stopped walking.”

I glance up at Lord Erebus’s face, blinking in shock. Right, yeah, I was leading him to… a place I don’t want him to go, like some kind of fucking moron. Lyn is rapidly approaching us, but before she gets in sight she stops, waiting around a corner. She must know I know she’s there. Maybe she wants to talk to me in private.

Which, y’know, I don’t want, because I got her daughter fucking killed.

“Miss Vita?” Lord Erebus prompts again. “Are you quite alright?”

I feel my jaw open a bit, the haze over my mind roiling slightly at the frankly moronic audacity of the question.

“Why the fuck,” I ask First Lord Johann Erebus, “would you think that I’m alright?”

He seems a bit shocked at that response. I do not care.

“Did you not just watch me carry my sister’s corpse into the room with you? Are you a fucking idiot? Did that just like… not register?”

He narrows his eyes a little, less than amused by my insults.

“I must admit, I never expected someone personally recommended by my fiancée to be so… childish. I understand and sympathize with your grief, young lady, but that is no reason to take your hostilities out on me.”

“Isn’t it?” I snap, any wisdom in my head about not pissing off a first lord thorougly scrubbed away, “If people like you were halfway fucking competent, the people of this city, my family, wouldn’t be surrounded by gangs and death and rot! You fucking said yourself you don’t need me to lead you to this damn place, but you’re making me do it anyway, while I’m grieving, just because you feel like you fucking can! I’m not the childish one here!”

“You are standing in the street and screaming at me while holding a stuffed animal,” he calmly points out.

“Leave. Rosco. Out of this,” I hiss, feeling my face scrunch up into a death glare. I can kill him too. I wonder if Penelope would prefer a Revenant husband over this fucking piece of work? I bet she probably would.

Erebus just stares at me like I’m some kind of frustrating puzzle for a moment before bowing his head with unexpected politeness.

“Apologies. I’ve imposed upon you during a time of extreme stress. I, personally, like to throw myself into work when I grieve, but this is clearly not your way. Out of respect for your situation, I will continue my business with you at another time.”

Of course, I can tell he’s actually fairly furious, but I’m currently incapable of giving a shit. He turns and departs without another word. Good riddance. The last thing Penelope and I need is someone poking their nose into our business. I’ll deal with him later.

Right now, I still have to face my mom. She emerges soon after Lord Erebus walks off, worry in her features and yet there’s a soft smile on her face. A smile. Looking at it claws my heart to shreds. I have to turn away. I can feel her pain, sharp and terrible, yet she’s still smiling for me.

“Vita,” Lyn greets softly.

“M… Lyn,” I answer back. I don’t deserve to call her mom.

“I heard what happened. From the kids.”

She moves forward, arms opening to hug me. To hug me. I step backwards.

“...Sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Lyn answers. But she’s wrong. I don’t want to hear it.

“F-follow me,” I manage to stutter. “Penelope has her.”

Her eyes go wide, hope entering her soul.

“Your biomancer friend?”

I wince.

“...She’s just preserving the body,” I clarify, choking up a little. Damn it, don’t cry again! “It’s not… sorry. I’m sorry.”

I step away, hurrying towards the facility. It’s okay if Lyn visits, I’ve already told her about it anyway and she knows a thing or two about subtlety. And it’s… well, it’s where Angelien’s body is. I couldn’t bear to keep her out. Together we head inside, heading down into the basement as I feel the Revenants scattering to their hiding spots. Penelope is there as well, unperturbed by our arrival. I open the lower door, walking in past the metal-ink runes that block every magical sense but my own from detecting this place.

Penelope is there, casting her spells on a tiny, naked body. Angelien’s shattered, twisted neck has been moved back into place, her body seeming almost peaceful. If not for the fact that I can tell it’s a soulless husk, I may have thought her asleep. Penelope looks up at us as we enter, raising a slight eyebrow.

“Vita. And… Miss Lyn. Welcome. I… sorry, but I’m not quite done. You’re welcome to watch, or not.”

Lyn steps forward, the agony in her soul becoming apparent on her features for the first time. She can’t keep her brave face in front of the body, tears starting to well in her eyes.

“Oh, Angelien,” she whispers, holding the corpse by the hand. “My brave little Angelien. I’m so sorry. I should have been there. I should have seen it.”

“Erm…” Penelope mutters, staring at my mother with an awkwardness beyond anything I’ve ever seen in the normally-composed woman. “I’m… terribly sorry, truly, but the work I’m doing is somewhat time-sensitive and I need you to, ah, let go of the body.”

“O-oh. Of course.” Lyn lets go and steps away, wiping her tears with a gloved hand. “What, um… are you doing, exactly?”

Penelope frowns, turning her attention back to the corpse.

“Well, that should be obvious, shouldn’t it? Vita, I assume you have her soul?”

“I-I, um. Yeah, I do,” I confirm. “Whole and intact.”

Instinctively I move a hand up to my lower sternum, feeling at the skin over which Angelien’s soul floats inside me, right above my own.

“Then we’re going to bring her back, of course,” Penelope finishes plainly. “Immortality research, remember?”

I take a step away.

“...Penelope, we can’t do that yet.”

“Sure we can,” she answers nonchalantly. “You’ve done it three times already.”

“No, I mean… I can bring her back as an undead, sure. But I’ll have to fuck with her soul! She’ll be forced to love me, and—”

“She’s your sister,” Lyn says softly. “She already loves you.”

“She’ll be dead!” I counter. “An undead servant! She won’t ever grow up, she won’t even be able to leave this stupid basement! We can do better. Penelope, weren’t we going to learn to bring people back to life?”

“Hey now, being dead isn’t so bad.”

Vitamin drops down from her hiding place in the ceiling, grinning with satisfaction as Lyn and Penelope both jump a little at her sudden appearance.

“Hey mom. Hey grandma.”

“...Vitamin?” Lyn guesses, quickly recovering from her shock.

“That would be me!” my zombie-clone-parasite-daughter confirms. “It does get a bit cramped down here in the basement, but the Doras and I are working on that. You two can come out, by the way. Grandma won’t bite.”

“I’m not a ‘Dora’ anymore,” Margarete complains, strolling in from the fridge area. She points at Angelien’s corpse. “Is that my new body? I’ll take it, but I was hoping for something less small.”

“It isn’t, and you will not let anything bad happen to it,” I growl at her. She snaps to attention and nods fervently. “What’s Vitamin talking about? You’re working on a way to leave here safely?”

“Since we have so much excess metal, we can adapt the same protections used on the building itself into tattoos,” Theodora explains, also entering the room. “Hypothetically it should let us walk around safely right under a Templar’s nose, as long as no one checks for a pulse.”

“I was hoping for permission to test it out first, if that’s okay, Mom,” Vitamin continues. “I’m the only one that’s not helping much by being cooped up in here, and I’m fast enough to run away and hide if things go badly.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” I huff, “but Angelien is still dead, and I’d still prefer to wait until we can make her alive again rather then irrevocably fuck up her soul! Theodora, back me up on this.”

I internally wince as I realize I worded that as an order, but the tattooed woman seems perfectly happy following it.

“Subjecting a child to mind-altering magic and forcing her into an eternity of servitude would be one of the most horrific breeches of human decency I can imagine.”

“Rude,” Vitamin comments, pulling a bug out of her ear and squishing it between her fingers.

“...The point is, I wholeheartedly agree with Vita. We should continue our research while she keeps the human souls inside her safe. I… recognize the desire to see the people you love again as soon as possible, but it would be better to wait. She may lose a few years in the interim, but she’ll at least still be herself when she comes out the other side.”

We digest that in silence for a while, Lyn nodding slowly as tears drip silently down her cheeks. I squeeze Rosco tighter, at least until Vitamin starts making grabby-hands at me. After a moment’s hesitation, I give her my bird-friend and pick her up instead, letting me hug both of them at once. Her body is cold, but her soul is wonderful. So comforting. So safe. She’ll never, ever hurt me.

“I disagree completely,” Penelope says suddenly. “A few years? Really? You think we’re going to figure out how to bring the dead back to life in a few years? Laughable. If we wait, Angelien will lose decades of her life, at the least! We’ve hit nothing but problems on this so far, and you know it. If we wait until we figure everything out, this girl would be coming back unchanged to a world where everyone she knows and loves is completely different, having moved on without her! That seems like a far crueler fate to me.”

“Oh please,” Theodora counters, rolling her eyes. “You just want another test subject.”

“Theodora, I’m not that callous,” Penelope snaps, genuinely offended. “My point stands regardless of my alleged motivations anyway.”

I scowl.

“...What sort of problems have you been having?” I ask. “Can I help out here more?”

Penelope shakes her head.

“Ultimately, our problem is that while we can reverse-engineer some of what you do, we’re still missing far, far too much. The biggest one is that your soul-sight isn’t a spell, so we can’t copy it to see what you see. So even if we learn how to modify souls, we’d have no way of determining whether anything we do is working. We’re completely blind on the animancy front, and the biomancy front is… well, let’s just say there are reasons no one on Verdantop has figured it out before. We need more information on animancy.”

I nod, mind and emotions churning. The bubbling fury from before rises to the surface again as my gaze locks on Angelien’s corpse.

“...Then we keep waiting for now, while we get more information on animancy,” I say.

Penelope huffs.

“And how are we going to magically manifest a better understanding of animancy? You don’t even know how your own talents work.”

I scowl, eyes hard. It’s so simple. Everything fits together now. My path to setting things right, my path to protecting my family, and my path to getting stronger… they’re all the same.

“Easy. I’ll murder Capita, bring her back as a Revenant, and make her tell us everything she knows.”

There’s a short second of silence as Lyn’s breath catches, the rest of the room slowly picking up on the frank seriousness of my declaration.

“...Vita, if you go after Capita, the whole of the Broken Drakens will come after us,” Lyn warns.

“Good,” I growl, the sight of my sister’s snapped neck flashing in my memory.

The Drakens got away with abuse only on the promise that my family would be safe. That was the deal. That was their one responsibility. Their one reason to be more than fucking food. But no, they can’t even do that. They can’t even keep people from beating the shit out of children. They’re monsters, every last one, and I eat monsters.

“Let them come. I’m going to kill them too. All of them.”

Another silence answers me, but I’m convinced. I’m fucking tired of letting myself and my family get walked over. I won’t stand for it. Not a single second longer.

Lyn clears her throat.

“Um, Vita… you realize I’m technically a member of the Broken Drakens, right?”

I blink, my rage choking to a painful stop like half-vomited stomach acid.

“Well… I mean, obviously I didn’t mean you? You’re not a member because you want to be.”

Lyn has the audacity to grin a little.

“So, are you going to ask every single member of the Drakens if they wanted to be one before killing them, or…?”

“Yes, this seems more than a little extreme,” Penelope chimes in. “Where did that even come from? It makes for quite the dramatic declaration, but… perhaps, ah, lower the scope of your vengeance a tad?”

A blush blooms on my cheeks. Vitamin, the incorrigible rascal, starts to laugh.

“Well, I think it’s a good idea!” she agrees happily. “Let’s slaughter the bastards! It’ll be feel-good fun!”

“Yes, I don’t really know these ‘Broken Drakens’ at all, but they sound terrible,” Margarete concurs. “I imagine the city would be better off without them.”

Theodora opens her mouth to comment, then closes it, looking away. I sigh, almost emboldened by their support, but...

“No, Lyn and Penelope are right,” I admit. “Most people in the Drakens aren’t responsible for the nasty stuff. There’s probably a bunch of victims like my family.”

“Oh, I suppose that makes sense,” Margarette agrees again, because of course she does.

Vitamin also shrugs, clearly fine with this too. Theodora relaxes, however, her soul no longer warring with itself on whether to agree with me. It’s her that reminded me: the support is fake. Their opinions are fake, because I twisted them. I don’t know what to do about it. Should I stop listening to them, since they’ll just echo me? Or is ignoring their opinions because of that just going to dehumanize them even more?

“...We should at least kill Capita and Sky, though,” I say. “They’ve been fucking us and everyone else, and we’ve just been sitting back and letting them.”

“Screw that,” Lyn says. “Vita, the reason I haven’t killed the Drakens already is that Sky will fucking annihilate us if we try.”

“Then I’ll get stronger first,” I counter. “It’s not like we have to attack today. ...As much as I’d like to. What all can he do?”

“‘He?’ You mean Sky?” Lyn asks with confusion. “Um, the boss is a fucking crazy kineticist, I think. Talent, not learned. Really short range— at least I think so, don’t quote me on that— but with like, stupid power and speed. Can grab and move things nearby. Attacks get veered away and just don’t hit. And if you get close? Smash. Dead.”

Ugh, sounds like a nightmare for me or Lyn to fight. Although… if I’m strong enough to yank his soul out, I doubt a kineticist can divert my tentacles. Considering his soul-size, though… I’ll need to eat a lot.

In which case, I know exactly what to do.

We talk and plan for a while. The aching in my chest doesn’t go away, not with Angelien’s soul bobbing around inside, but Lyn… she seems so sure that I can help. That I can fix my horrible fuckup. She’s not mad at me at all. It’s horrible. Painful. Wrong. She shouldn’t be blaming herself for my failure. But at the same time… I can’t take her hope away from her. I have to live up to it. I have to make everything right.

When I leave, I immediately make my way back to the Hunter’s guild. My armor and weapons have been returned, placed where I normally put them while I sleep. I gratefully don them, go downstairs to eat as much as I can manage, and then head for the gates. I leave Skyhope, on my own, without a word to anyone, and head straight for the forest.

I’m hungry, and I’m done holding back.