Karma had been waiting for her fence to get back about procuring the necessary arcstock crystals. Time flowing like sludge, she’d been working through the logistics of continuing a political attack on Unity Eden when she felt the presence.

It was far from the strongest she’d experienced, in fact of all the Immortals she’d met it was closer to the weaker end than most. And yet the magical signature shook her to her very core.

There was fury to it, a hot and frenzied kind. Intent, too. Any Immortal could prevent such things from being apparent simply through their magical output, the fact that she could sense the almost murderous hate from this one implied one of two things.

That she was being allowed to pick up on such details, or the presence belonged to a mystic of the highest category who had been filled with such anger, such hate, that they either couldn’t or didn’t care to hide it from others.

For one moment, one frightful, heart-seizing moment, the terror rushing through her mind and destabilizing her thoughts almost convinced her that she was sensing Tamaias’ killer. Perhaps something worse.

Thoughts of rotted, obliterated corpses flashed before her eyes. Flesh withered like dried jerky, hollow eye sockets gazing desperately at the sky. The victims of the God Hunter. Immortals brimming with power and vitalised by magic enough to sustain their youth for eternities, reduced to ruined husks.

Slain so thoroughly and ubiquitously as to cast the very shadow which had hung over the meeting following Tamais’ death. The shadow which had instilled fear enough into each of the ageless organisers for Karma to twist their goals to her advantage.

Realising it had been several seconds since her last breath, Karma exhaled and abated the burning in her lungs. The act seemed to calm her, the coolness producing enough ice to dam the flood of panic on the verge of overtaking her.

It was not the God Hunter, such a thing was ridiculous. They would not have avoided capture for a year by behaving in such an indiscreet way. Likewise, it was unlikely to be the same person responsible for slaying Tamaias, unless their magic had somehow become over a dozen times weaker since the act.

Concentrating on tracking the arcane beacon’s movement, Karma realised only one thing about it. One unshakable fact amidst the black sea of ignorance and mystery. Whoever that vortex of hate and magic belonged to, they were heading right for Gem.

Her fence barked a question, but Karma didn’t hear it over the sound of rushing wind and her thundering heart as she took off into a sprint, stone floor cracking under the strain of her every stride.

***

Astra assumed that, if anyone else had returned, they would be in Xeno’s room, keeping Gem company. For a moment she considered making a beeline for her own quarters, but quickly caved in and opened the far door.

She was quite surprised to see the entirety of her team gathered around the furniture as she stepped in, and more so to see the rather befuddled way Crow was sitting, as though his body were trying to relax against his wishes.

Unity was sitting similarly, in the same way that a horse was similar to a pony. The boy appeared to have consumed so much alcohol that, aside from it being obvious with only a glance, he had begun the process of being transmuted into liquid.

Splaying himself out limply in all directions, he was, by Astra’s assessment, roughly halfway there.

She didn’t say anything as she stepped in and closed the door behind her, simply made her way to the nearest unoccupied seat and claimed it. Xeno smiled as she did so.

“Astra, we’ve been waiting for you!”

Her first instinct was to panic, frantic mind convincing her that there’d been a dozen appointments she’d all missed. Xeno continued talking as though nothing were amiss, however, and Astra realised that nothing probably was.

Turning to Crow, Xeno gestured as if for him to move.

“Well, she’s here. Go on. What were you going to tell us all?”

Crow frowned for a second, his booze-addled brain apparently taking quite a while to pick through his memories and recall what she was referring to. A moment later his face lit up in a grin, apparently he’d remembered.

“Oh!” He practically chirped. “Right. Yes, thank you Xeno.”

Astra didn’t miss the way his smile quickly melted away, nor how he licked his lips nervously- a gesture she’d seen him make a thousand times when they were children, usually before doing or saying something reckless.

Face now devoid of cheer and as level as an executioner’s, he spoke.

“I want to make a request. I say request, it’s really more of a… well, I suppose a demand. So, sorry about that.”

Frowning slightly, Xeno spoke before anyone else.

“What’s your demand?” She asked.

It took Crow several long seconds to force the words out.

“If the Sieve continues, and there are more tasks, then I want to be entered into all of them.”

Xeno didn’t speak. Astra didn’t speak. She couldn’t see the Gemini’s face, not from the exact angle of her seat, but the blanket of frozen silence enveloping the room told her that she, also, did not speak.

It took the better part of half a minute for the glacial quietude to be shattered, crystalised stillness flying as shrapnel in all directions as Unity’s half-laughing, high-pitched voice rang out.

“You know Crow, you have the amazing talent to take perfectly sound advice and, upon filtering it through the space between your ears and your brain, somehow transform it into the most mind-shatteringly idiotic interpretation you possibly could.”

Not having the context to know what specific advice Unity was referring to, Astra simply concentrated on the fact of the matter. Her brother’s apparent suicidal urges.

“Are you insane?” She snapped, far more angrily than had been intended. “Do you plan on just burning all of our credits away?”

The magical healing she and the Gemini had managed was greatly enhanced by the use of relics. Despite this, Astra hadn’t noticed the difference a few days of non-magical recuperation had made in her teammate.

If Crow thought he could hold himself together by spending credits on healing items non-stop, he was sorely mistaken. Their previous tasks had been only days apart, and the more injured one was upon entering, the less able to defend themselves they’d be.

A devastating cycle. Devastating enough, in fact, that Astra was quite sure Crow wouldn’t be even suggesting entering it willingly were it not for the alcohol running through his blood.

She met her brother’s eyes, and was shocked to find a sturdy, rigid suret in place of unfocused drunkenness.

“I need to win the Eclipse’s Nectar,” he said softly.

It took every bit of her willpower not to leap to a stand and slap him across the face.

“Crow, this needs to stop. I know what you think-”

“NO!” Crow practically shouted, his face crimson with the clearly boiling blood beneath it. The abruptness of his scream shook Astra, stunning her into stupefaction. Silence gripped the room again. Silence enough that Crow’s inhalation was clearly audible.

“You don’t know what happened,” he said at last. By the calm of his voice, he’d regained his composure. “And it’s not your fault. You weren’t there, and I’ve been lying.”

“I’m sorry,” Xeno cut in, sounding uncharacteristically not-sorry, “but what exactly are the pair of you talking about? What wasn’t Astra there for?”

Astra went to answer, then paused. She found herself glancing at Crow, unwilling to share such a thing without his assent. The boy apparently took her meaning, nodding silently.

It hadn’t occurred to her until then how little she’d wanted to revisit the event, or rather how uneasy the thought of doing so in his presence made her.

“Well, Crow and I had an uncle. He was a mystic, like us, and quite a powerful one. A Gladiator.”

She paused as she mentioned his scale, then cursed silently upon not seeing so much as a hint of surprise in the faces of Unity and Xeno. Of course she hadn’t, they’d both grown up in Pangaea. They were probably more used to meeting Gladiators than Saints.

“He taught us a lot about magic, though so did most of the other mystics in Selsis. Mostly… Mostly he was just an uncle. Fun, always there if you needed to talk to something, sort of…”

Astra paused. It was difficult to put into words exactly why she’d loved him so much. Exactly what was so comforting about someone just a hair more distant from a parent, yet infinitely closer than a mere friend.

Glancing at Crow again, she saw the sadness in her brother’s eyes. It convinced her that moving on from the topic was more important than conveying the specifics.

“Well anyway, one day he took Crow and I to a festival in a place called…”

Try though she did to force the words out, they remained stuck in her throat.

“Serasis.” Crow said, his voice clinically emptied of all the emotion he must surely have been feeling. Astra didn’t miss the sudden changes in Xeno’s face. Glancing to Unity, she realised that even he looked shocked at the realisation.

Either the boy hadn’t known, or he was a very good actor.

“Serasis…” Came a voice from just outside Astra’s view, she craned her neck to look at the Gemini as the girl frowned and muttered.

“Where have I heard that name before?” She asked, seemingly to no one in particular. It was an innocent mistake, born from ignorance rather than malice. All the same, the sheer tactlessness of it made Astra want to get up and punch the girl.

“It’s a town in the north of Bermuda,” Unity Eden answered, and Astra braced herself for the bastard to say something revolting. “About a year ago there was an… attack.”

The Gemini’s face fell, apparently with realisation. Crow spoke up once more.

“Astra had left early on, Galad and I were still there when the… incident happened.”

Seeing the tightening of his fists and the clenching of his jaw, Astra forced down all feelings of guilt and finished the story for him.

“And Crow,” she said, “was the only survivor.”

The silence that followed lasted only so long as five heartbeats before it was broken by the Gemini.

“I don’t want to sound insensitive,” she said, voice rife with the hesitation that came hand in hand with one who was about to sound insensitive. “But… well, I’m wondering how exactly you survived?”

Crow didn’t answer for some time. He simply stared at the floor by his feet, as though doing so enough would cause a piece of parchment engraved with a detailed explanation to spontaneously materialise at the sight of his gaze.

It didn’t, of course, and yet neither Astra or anyone else even began to hurry him. They could surely detect the sensitivity of the topic through sheer instinct, and Astra knew of it because she knew of Crow.

All the times they’d spoken of Serasis, all the arguments, screamed and cried at one another for months on end, he had never once told her exactly how he’d been the only survivor.

At first she’d assumed it was because he was a mystic, and yet the more she thought about it, the less that made sense. There were surely more mystics there than just him, adults who had far more experience, no less. Even if there hadn’t been, what were the chances that he’d been able to protect himself in the time it took the massacre to occur?

Over time she’d decided never to ask. He’d have told her sometime over the year since the event, normally. That he hadn’t simply demonstrated how agonisingly sensitive the memory must still have been.

Now, though, at the Gemini’s simple, innocent question, Astra felt four hundred days of repressed curiosity return with a vengeance. She found herself at the edge of the sofa, a tremor of grotesque, morbid excitement running through her body at the thought that she might finally find out.

“Astra,” her brother said, snapping her attention back to him like the string of a crossbow. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I’ve been lying to you.”

She stared at the top of Crow’s head, the only part of him her eyes could touch with his face lowered as it was. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, he looked back up.

When he affixed his emerald green eyes onto hers, they seemed almost prismatic with tears.

“Here’s what actually happened at Serasis.”