Crow had heard about people doing strange things when injured. Insisting they could walk on a broken leg, panicking and being certain they’d die from a minor scratch, even attempting to claw out bloody chunks of their wound to clean it themselves in a daze.

He’d visited Amelia fearing that he’d be greeted with one of those very stories come to life. When he knocked upon her door, however, he was greeted by a shockingly lucid voice.

“Come in.” It called out. Happily, chirpily. Familiar.

He twisted the handle and made his way inside, and if it weren’t for his experience seeing the worst of Gem’s own injuries, he may have stepped back in shock at the sight he beheld.

Amelia lay strewn about her sofa, a blanket had been placed over her- he imagined to ward off the immense cold that came from such wounds- and her head was resting on the arm. He couldn’t see the worst of her damage, but it was still clear on her face.

Burst lips, a nose shattered so brutally as to leave parts of it protruding from the skin, and the sickly paleness that came to the skin of any who suffered such damage. His breath caught in his throat as he stared at her, and then she pulled it the rest of the way out as she spoke.

“Hi Crow!” The girl greeted him, wincing slightly, no doubt at the pain that came from simply speaking.

It was hard to speak, harder still to do so without addressing the obvious matter of her wounds, and yet Crow realised that it would be cruel to answer her familiarity by reminding her of them. Swallowing the acidic cocktail of emotions that threatened to burn through his throat, he spoke.

“Hello Amelia.”

Hesitating, he added.

“I watched your fight.”

He nearly flinched as he said it, realising how close it was to the matter of her injuries only after the words had left his mouth. Much to his surprise, however, the girl’s grin widened rather than withered.

“It was cool wasn’t it? I didn’t expect to find anything as powerful as I am here, but that orc was really tough. I actually thought I might die at one point. I guess I was lucky it was so stupid.”

She giggled at that, unrestrained and carefree. Like a child with a new toy. Crow could think of no appropriate response to the girl’s apparent enthusiasm, and so he said nothing.

“Faroah was really angry that we lost though.” She continued, more quietly. Her face fell as she spoke, pretty smile turning to a concerned frown. It seemed to desaturate her, like watching the colours be drained from a painting.

Crow finally found his words.

“Lots of people were angry about that. It’s hard to see someone fight a monster to a stand-still and then get disqualified, plenty of them seem to think the organisers have a bias against you.”

She nodded absently at that.

“They probably do. I don’t really mind though, this is just a game after all. When’s your next task by the way?”

For a moment, Crow was left astray. Unsure whether to focus on the fact that Amelia had taken someone else’s place, a place which may well have pulled them into a life they could find nowhere else, only for the sake of enjoying a game.

In the end, he found the comment about its organisers to be of far more intrigue.

“Tomorrow.” He answered, hurrying past the question before adding. “What do you mean when you say the organisers probably have something against you?”

Amelia shrugged at that.

“Oh, uncle Jack says lots of people would. We tend to scare people.”

“What do you mean by that? Who is we?”

She scrunched her face up, clearly thinking.

“I’m not supposed to tell you…”

It occurred to Crow that even after all their conversations, he still knew very little about Amelia. The realisation pushed him to ask again, even as the thought of her injuries sent guilt twisting down into his gut.

“Why not?” He asked, though it sounded like a demand to him. “Amelia, I don't know anything about you.”

“That’s because it’s a normal, boring story.” She countered. “Besides, I don’t want to talk about it- definitely not now.”

Crow wanted to argue, to push harder, but each time he thought of something to say, he remembered the sight of her ribs.

“Alright.” He relented.

***

Astra knew full well that she was being stupid. Amelia was a nice girl, if a bit strange. She was polite, trusting and as friendly a person as she’d ever met.

And she was, without any reasonable doubt, a bloodthirsty monster.

Normal people didn’t fight like that. Move unimpaired with bones stabbing out of them, grin as they crushed a skull underfoot. Perhaps it was a temperament that only came upon her in battle, but it was a temperament the girl was capable of nonetheless.

That made Amelia dangerous enough that Astra wasn’t going to let Crow visit her alone.

He’d left much earlier than Astra, however. While Xeno had her distracted with another stupid request- that was another thing she had to worry about. The girl had seen first-hand how vicious the task had been, and she’d remained unwavering in her desire to take part in one.

She purged thoughts of the fae from her head, and redoubled her pace. Xeno was a problem Astra could take the rest of the day dealing with, Crow was in the presence of Amelia even as she hurried towards him. There was no comparing the urgency of the two.

Though her pace was quickened, Astra was still keenly aware of time dragging by as she walked. And the fact that Crow had likely arrived at his destination before she’d even set off, so long and distracting had her argument with Xeno been.

It was scarcely a surprise to meet him in the corridor, walking away from the very place she’d been half-jogging towards.

***

Karma watched the Wrathman leave, burying her guilt as she did.

Her threat would work. She knew that much, saw it on his face. The one good thing about being seen as a monster, was that it made outrageous threats like that all the more convincing.

Granted, there had been no small amount of truth to it. The Dwellers did have exquisitely advanced technology, and their fortress was the perfect place to try and take with Wrathmen in place of mystics.

Most importantly of all, the Dwellers of Thol’vadam were allies of the Jaxif Faction. A group of rogue Wrathmen sacking them to make a living off their plundered machinery upon deserting was one of the few pretenses under which their assets could be seized by force.

Not that Karma had the authority to do such a thing in the first place. As infuriating as it was, Locke’s ignorance towards her particular situation made it shockingly easy to feign power she didn’t actually possess.

But then, feigning such things had always been quite a large part of her life.

She supposed, in the end, what mattered wasn’t whether her power was truly there or not. Merely that she managed to convince people it was. There were few Immortals who needed to demonstrate their magic to cling to whatever influence they’d acquired, after all.

With a sigh, Karma turned back to the parchment stacked atop her desk.

Apparently her investigation into the murder of Tamaias had not made her exempt from her duties as an organiser. It had taken her the better part of the day to get through the administrative documents alone, and the fact that she’d had so much of her time eaten by serving as announcer in the day’s task had not helped one iota.

Finances would be the death of her, she decided. They were simple enough on their own- keep track of the recorded prices of supplies purchased for the Sieve, then allocate its nigh-inexhaustible budget towards paying for them.

Of course, things were rarely so simple. Gathering resources from across all the three continents meant trusting a lot of strangers who were very far away to do most of the actual negotiating. Such people were rarely as sharp as the Immortals commanding them, which led to many inferior products at inflated prices.

These inferior products often expired far more quickly than expected, the perfect example being the portent-fangs that, despite having cost some nineteen thousand stars, had revealed themselves to be improperly preserved. The venomous magic infusing them had broken down, leaving them no more dangerous than any other chunk of edged ivory.

Such losses needed to be replenished, lest the Sieve’s running be disrupted as the reliquary depleted regardless of its contestants. And that replenishment demanded yet more money from the stockpiles.

That money required much paperwork to transfer, as well as extensive records to ensure other organisers did not try to spend it twice.

And that was before it could be used to hire transportation for yet more subordinates to negotiate yet more of the needed material.

Those nineteen thousand stars had quickly doubled, then tripled on top of that. And the duty of moderating their expenditure fell to Karma.

Granted, having two million stars from which to draw the required wealth made things easier. In fact, such an amount would have been more than enough to maintain the Sieve.

Right up until some arsehole had destroyed a tenth of Bermuda.

Karma was surprised at the speed with which the single spark of anger she felt at the incident burned into a bonfire. It was of great inconvenience, but far worse was the toll in life. As best as the surveyors could take it, some ten thousand lives had been lost in the bout.

It was better than it could have been, had the conflict raged through a more densely populated area of equal size, there may well have been tens of times as many dead. A rush of disgust crawled down her spine regardless.

Olympus was not a Solifate nation, nor did the religion hold much sway in Dewlz as a whole, but Karma didn’t need to hold the belief in magic-related death being an unnatural abomination to dislike the idea.

Magic, and power in general, was a test. Anyone who turned it on those who couldn’t defend themselves with that same supernatural force were, in her eyes, the greatest of failures.

She took the anger, disgust and bitterness brewing towards that unidentified killer and carefully sectioned it away into its own corner of her mind. Such strong emotions may well prove useful, but such a time was certainly not when Karma was investigating the one they were aimed at.

Say one thing about Immortals, and it would be that they were fond of ordering things. As their years advanced, so too did their punctiliousness. Everything had to be accounted for, regulated and, of course, recorded.

As infuriating as such obsessiveness was to deal with in others, here it made Karma’s job considerably easier.

There were extensive writings on those dwelling within Bermuda, at least the permanent residents. And one of the most well-gathered details was the number of mystics, as well as the scales, spheres and abilities of each.

Even with the most scrutinous surveying, such information was impossible to get wholly correct. And the Sieve, having temporarily increased Bermuda’s population by half, ensured that the city was filled to the brim with new hands, wielding new magic.

All the same, there was power in knowledge of any sort. Knowing the established mystics of the city would serve as a potential clue.

The documents had been lacquered, and the lacquering had been an uncommon variety. Made not with Cutaris or Utalis, but Manamis. Magic of the mind. In this case it served to react directly to the thoughts of whoever beheld it.

Key words seemed to glow as Karma sifted for them. Useful for filtering through them by the thousand, but not serving to reduce their number even slightly. Which was why, even with such a rare, difficult and ingenious lacquering aiding her, she had been working at the task with no returns for a truly frustrating amount of time.

There were millions of people in Bermuda, even just counting the permanent residents. Scores of thousands of mystics among them. Such factors might have made it an impossible task to sort through them, at least on her own, but Karma had done such things before.

She knew how to break an impossibly large endeavour down into an irritatingly large triviality.

For a start, she was looking for mystics powerful enough to overcome the observational effects of the Quanturn. She knew little about the World-Breaker, but for it to overcome the anti-scrying effects lacquered about her own quarters, its observational effects would need to be of at least Fable level.

So she was sifting through Immortals.

Motive seemed an excellent thing to go by, and yet it was both impossible to work such a specific filter with the lacquering and impossible for Karma herself to evaluate such a thing in all of the hundreds of Bermudan Immortals.

With that in mind, she resigned herself to merely narrowing it down further.

The Manamis sphere was surely used in such a deception as was used against Zilch, and it was a blessedly rare talent. By the time Karma had gone through all of the various books, taking note of over a hundred names, she had slimmed them down to only three names.

Granted, those three names were extracted purely from those who lived in Bermuda before the Sieve. It was entirely possible Tamaias had been slain by one of those who came only for the event. Once more, Karma was forced to work only with the information she had.

Her spies were gathering information on which Immortals had entered the city, her assistants their magics. But such a task would take days, perhaps weeks, even with all her subordinates. If nothing else, she could rest easy knowing that Pyrhic was investigating those who might have hidden their abilities from any surveys.

That was a slight consolation, though.

Karma felt her eyes grow heavy, and she closed them as her face fell into her arms. It seemed that no matter how quickly or efficiently she worked, there would always be a hundred more things that needed doing.

Best hurry up and get them finished, then.

***

Flint had been concerned about how he’d act in the presence of Pyrhic. That he’d give away something of his true feelings regarding their employer.

Well, his employer, her owner.

He’d seen the look in her eyes when she spoke of Alabaster, recognised the utter infatuation for what it was. It wasn’t the sort of thing that made him eager to bring up the woman’s darker facets.

Thankfully, he was saved from needing to at all. Without even realising it, he’d buried his thoughts under the stony look of neutrality familiar to privates across all of Mirandis, and she’d apparently been none the wiser.

“We’ll be visiting some less dangerous areas this time.” She’d informed them as they left. “And as our trick with the carriage is unlikely to work a second time, we don’t need to walk the entire way either.”

Flint considered himself an enthusiast of both not needing to march and not almost dying, and so both of these revelations came as quite a pleasant surprise to him. They quickly climbed into the carriage, heading on their way without further delay.

As they travelled, Flint took out one of the new arcstock crystals he’d received. With the afternoon light humming through the windows it seemed almost to glow, breaking sunbeams down as they passed through its body and releasing them as a spray of wavering, less stable solar needles. With a start, he realised each of the impossibly-thin shafts was a different colour.

“A prismatic arcstock crystal.” Pyrhic breathed. Flint looked up at her, noting the mix of awe and fascination etched across her face.

“A what what?” He asked, perhaps a little dumbly. The question seemed to bring the ghost of a smile to her lips.

“A prismatic arcstock crystal. Basically the highest grade, or at least the highest that you’re likely to find with less wealth than a nation. That crystal’s capacity is probably more than all of your others combined, far more in fact.”

Flint looked back at the limpid stone in his hands, turning it and watching the refracted spectrum dance as it shone out of the side. He felt the sudden urge to empty it of its magic, pouring the arcane energies to a new container in the form of his own body.

He dismissed the notion. Even with such a stock of power, there was no sense in wasting it. Besides, the heightened reactions would make the journey take agonisingly long. Better by far to wait until he was climbing out of the cart, when there was a chance that violence was actually iminent.

It was just a shame that he’d been sent off too quickly to get used to the magic outside of real combat.

The sunlight died in the carriage by the time they reached their destination, the journey having taken them so long as to bring Ara twice as close to the horizon as it had been when they set off. Flint quickly extended his anti-magic, working to draw the power from the crystal and take it into himself.

The pressure he felt straining against his efforts was so great as to shock him.

He’d expected to face more resistance from the newer crystals than the old ones, moving more magic was always more difficult after all, but the extent still shocked him. A grin touched his lips as he redoubled his efforts.

Flint was still himself, he could depower an Avatar at twenty paces. It was scarcely more exertion on his part to squeeze out the crystal’s contents. And yet a gasp took him as he felt power fill him like powder in a cannon.

Very carefully, he took the handle of the carriage’s door and pushed- or rather nudged- it open. He could practically feel the wood quiver and groan under his slightest exertion regardless, every grain of the material clearly visible to his eyes as though his eyes were mere centimetres away, rather than feet.

The creaking of the door’s hinge was like the scraping of a cannon’s barrel against stone, something Flint had heard first-hand when an idiot mystic had misinterpreted his order to move one back in Wrath.

As Flint stepped out into the road, his grin widened. Could that idiot mystic, a gibbering fool with all the power in the world, have matched his strength, as he was now? He wasn’t entirely sure. Ridiculous as it was, he caught himself glancing around in search of something of comparable weight to an eighteen-pounder.

Of course, he found nothing close to sufficient.

His attention was drawn to one side by a bizarre sound. Long and low, almost rumbling. It was like an echo, a sharp sound dragged out long past its lifespan, and as his eyes fell on the source, Flint realised what he was hearing.

Pyrhic’s voice, or some mangled approximation. He’d heard people speak while his body was full of magic before, the tediously glacial rate was something he’d grown accustomed to, in fact as long as his senses were no more than doubled, it became difficult to even notice after a few minutes.

It had never been as strong as this, though. How much slower was she, or rather how much faster was Flint? Five times? Ten? Whatever the number, it made such a difference that he could scarcely even make out what she was saying.

Such a difference that in the time it took him to process everything, she hadn’t even finished enunciating a single syllable.

With a tightened jaw and a flash of irritation, Flint brought more anti-magic to bear, this time channeling it in his own body. He forced half of it back into the crystal, then another nine tenths of what was left.

To his amazement, Pyrhic’s voice was still clearly slower than usual. Albeit to a small enough extent that he could make out her sluggish words.

“-ippery.” She said, jarring him with how her voice suddenly sped up. “Be ready to project your anti-magic, you never know with their kind.”

Feeling as though he had the idiot mystic’s just moments after relinquishing his strength, Flint knew better than to hide his confusion.

“Uh, can you repeat that?” He asked, feeling fire dance beneath the skin of his face.

The woman seemed impatient, but obliged him nonetheless.

“I said that this one’s likely to be slippery, and given that their skill set lies in deception and illusion, you should be prepared to project your field outwards at a moment’s notice. Don’t hold back, either. We can’t be sure how powerful this one is.”

“I’ll be ready.” Flint assured her, then hesitated before adding. “But I can’t put everything I have into it, sorry.”

“Why not?” She asked, though the question seemed more a demand.

“Because of you. If I release enough anti-magic to depower Immortals, you’ll get far more than just discomfort and anxiety.”

“I’m well aware of what to expect from a high level pariah-”

“No you aren’t,” he interrupted. The sight of her face falling from dismissal to confusion was fascinating, Flint’s accelerated senses showing him every crease and twitch of all the muscles lying beneath her skin.

He realised that there was no choice but to put it to her simply.

“If a mystic like you is caught in that much anti-magic, it’ll most likely kill you.”

That seemed to get the message across, even if it failed to include the fact that Flint could warp the direction of his aura with enough concentration, and with a nod Pyrhic made her way towards what Flint gathered was their destination.

A large building, three stories tall and made of cobble and mortar. It was too haphazard to have been built with magic, rare for one of its size.

Its doors were conversely small, made from aged, frail wood that seemed more suitable as kindling to Flint. The panels groaned and shook their agony as Pyrhic pushed them open, and the planked floor beneath dully thunked with every step she took inside.

Even with the reduced amount of magic he held, Flint’s senses were sharpened enough that her ruckus seemed at risk of waking the dead.

He followed her in, and was glad to have done so, for just as the woman reached the centre of the room he heard a blood-freezing sound. One that he’d heard ten thousand times before, and was unlikely ever to forget.

The clicking of a flintlock being set to full-cock, ready to fire.

His head turned to the source of the noise, guided by his preternatural senses, and his eyes came to rest upon an elderly man with pinched features, flesh like salted meat and the piercing blue eyes of a Pangaean.

“What are you doing in my house?” The man asked.

The coarse voice that whistled between his teeth surprised Flint with its weariness, and he was suddenly aware of the bone-white and time-thinned hair receding across his scalp.

It was a rare man who aged enough to show it in Wrath, but Flint reckoned this man and the sixty year-old colonel he’d served some years back to look alike in years.

“I’m here on the behalf of the Sieve’s organisers.” Pyrhic answered, her voice amazingly calm in spite of the peril. As she spoke, Flint carefully drew more magic into himself.

Whether it was the rush of sudden danger, or the power trickling into the already turbulent vortex of magic within him, the world seemed to slow as the man answered.

“And why exactly should I believe that?” The man answered, wrinkles in his skin multiplying by the narrowing of his eyes and the gritting of his teeth.

“Because if we were whoever you were expecting, whoever you have a gun prepared for, we’d probably have found some means of entrance less subtle than your front door.” Flint interrupted, flinching slightly as the barrel statically swivelled to level on him.

That seemed to set a thought boiling behind the man’s eyes, his weapon wavering slightly. It remained fixed at Flint’s face, however.

“Who did you think we were?” Pyrhic asked, her hands raised as if to gesture the barrel away from Flint.

As if her words were a trap, as if a trap of words could kill, the man hesitated, staring back at Pyrhic for a few agonisingly long moments before speaking.

“Gang.ers. Aren’t. You.” He replied, stretching each syllable out until they were closer to two seconds than one, gun still levelled at Flint, eyes still pointed at Pyrhic.

The perfect opportunity.

Just as Pyrhic’s mouth opened, yet just before the sluggish words could escape, Flint moved. He was five paces from the man, far too many to cross in less time than it would take to fire for even a startled enemy.

At least, less than Flint could have crossed before today.

By the time the man noticed his movement, Flint was halfway there. By the time his head had turned back to him, his finger beginning to squeeze down on the trigger, he had reached him. With one hand, Flint seized the barrel of the gun and yanked it upwards as hard as he could.

Metal screeched, and the man toppled back with the jarring force of the snatch- hands springing open as he dropped to the floor. His fall seemed to take an age.

When, at last, he hit the ground, it was a full yard from where he had been standing. That was when Flint realised his mistake- he was far faster than he’d been, and far, far stronger.

With a groan that seemed to last minutes, the man opened his eyes. Bright blue and darting, they screamed equal parts terror and defiance. For Flint, it was simply a relief to see he hadn’t snapped the old man’s spine or shattered his ribs.

“Go. On. Then.” he intoned, agonisingly. “Get. It. Over. With.”

“We’re not going to kill you, you arsehole.” Flint snapped, then resisted the urge to kick the man when he saw the look of perplexion on his face.

It’s not his fault he can’t understand me, I probably said all that in less than half a second.

“We. Aren’t. Gang.ers.” Pyrhic added. “I. Was. Tell.ing. The. Truth.”

That seemed to surprise the man, and the surprise began to bleed into realisation. Apparently, being at the mercy of his enemies and seeing them spare him made a stronger argument than either Pyrhic or Flint could have hoped to. It almost made him wish he’d attacked sooner.

Slowly, the man began to shift to his feet. Sensing that the danger was at least mitigated, Flint replaced more of his crystal’s magic back inside it. Hearing the old gunman speak in a way reminiscent of human beings was bizarrely relieving.

“Sorry about the gun.” He mumbled as he came to a stand.

Flint glanced at the weapon in his hand, noticing for the first time it's bell-shaped mouth. A blunderbuss. It had been a while since he’d seen one, they made poor weapons in Gol, where most everything a man would fight was tougher than any human.

Blunderbusses wouldn’t punch through the armour and muscle of an orc like muskets, but they’d just about cut a person-sized enemy in half with a good hit. A nasty weapon, and not one to use against combat mystics of even the lowliest calibre.

“It was understandable.” Pyrhic answered, soothingly. “You were merely being cautious, though I hope you don’t think words will earn forgiveness for nearly shooting an agent of Lady Alabaster herself.”

That pulled dark curtains across the man’s face, seeming to send his eyes shrinking with fear as he took a half-step back.

“You’re really working for the Princess?” He asked, quiet. Fearful.

“We are, and we’re here to ask you a few questions in regards to the death of Reginald Tamaias.”

That turned the man’s face another three shades paler and sent his mouth working like clockwork. It was only five minutes before they’d gotten from him everything he had, though none of it was useful.

As they left, Flint turned questioningly to Pyrhic.

“I believe he was telling the truth.” She said, answering his silent inquiry. “Immortals tend not to risk their lives needlessly, and that man’s terrified for his own as things are.”

“He was an Immortal?” He asked, feeling stupid that he needed to.

“Yes. I don’t blame you for not noticing, he was one of precious few Immortals who was born unfortunate enough to be limited to a single sphere.”

Flint pondered that, and realised he’d never given thought to whether such a thing could happen before. In his eyes, there had never been any point in wondering what Immortals could or couldn’t do- they simply arrived on a battlefield and then decided how the conflict would end.

It made sense, though. Both the man’s apparent age and his use of a gun. If he couldn’t make use of the spheres allowing him to strengthen himself, or rejuvenate his body, then an unaging form would serve only to keep him a frail old man for an eternity.

“You were of great help, by the way.” Pyrhic added. “The look on his face when he tried to use magic on you… I imagine that saved us a lot of work persuading him to talk.”

“He tried to use magic on me?”

“Oh yes, I’m not sure what kind but I nearly fainted at the feel of it. An Immortal is still an Immortal.”

Flint had thought he’d felt something pushing against him, now he knew what it was. As useful as his powers were, he couldn’t help but wish they came with the ability to sense magic, rather than its absence or resistance. It would surely leave him less ill-informed.

“So, where to next?” He asked, eager to change the subject away from his irritating magic-blindness.

“Next we’re headed back to ganger territory, though not as deeply as before.”

Wonderful, Flint thought. With Alabaster’s threat and fear for his comrades still burning fresh in his mind like molten iron, he very much relished the chance to vent his frustrations.

It was so much easier to beat street-rats than the daughter of an Emperor, after all.