Alta could feel the energies swirling in the surroundings as the intruder lifted the body of the deceased Patron of the Grey and offered it them, a mocking smile on his face. The effect was immediate; both Aether and Nether responded to whatever intent this intruder held in his wizened heart. Grey lightning crackled between the broken body in his hands and the golden specter floating behind him.

Lucretia pressed her lips into a thin line. The forelegs of the Ancient Weaver twitched. Azriel raised her spear-

-and the intruder tossed the corpse back down on the ground. It slumped against the slope of the crater and then slid partially back toward him. There was a strange fizzling and the gathering energy began to disperse. Alta felt a sense of relief, but strangely, the look of worry on Lucretia’s face intensified.

The intruder beamed around at them all. “However, I don’t wish to force my way into this interesting venture; as a show of good faith, I will forgo this opportunity. But truly, you should dispose of that body. With how much ambient Nether is present inside of this isolated space, something will mutate onto that eventually, if you simply leave it to the elements.”

Lucretia measured the intruder for several seconds. Then she nodded slowly. “I understand and have received your intentions I believe. I will arrange a meeting between you and Randidly Ghosthound. It truly seems like you have some… familiarity with what we do here.”

The intruder responded only with a sharp smile.

*****

With a low hum, the final restrictions that lay across the Frost Matriarch shattered into motes of impotent light. She rubbed her wrists, looking around at the surroundings with a wistful expression. Outside through the wide-open archways, the expanse of pristine frozen tundra glittered. This place… this ruse has been nice. In a way, I think I really grew to believe that ice possessed such a compelling, natural beauty.

Even if I did resent the way it preserved everything. It is a bandaid, nothing more. When locked under ice, old wounds never get the chance to heal.

The Frost Matriarch took several tentative steps from her frozen throne without encountering anything else; Don Beigon hadn’t left any other restrictions on her person or in the surrounding area. It seemed that the madman truly intended to leave her here for Randidly Ghosthound.

That name caused her face to crease. “Randidly Ghosthound… is it a coincidence that everything started to roll right after you arrived at the Nexus? All of this conflict bubbling to the surface was always inevitable, but still. And that body of yours… A different context warps everything, even while the patterns repeat themselves. I hope you make better choices in subordinates than Elhume did.”

The Frost Matriarch walked out of the viewing hall and down through the wide passages of her palace. She moved with an arm outstretched, tracing the lines of the tall frozen pillars. Currently, there was no need to rush. Through her efforts, she managed to escape the restrictions after only five hours, rather than the twenty-four Don Beigon intended. The man was strong, but his image couldn’t truly grip her.

After all, the Frost Matriarch didn’t exist.

She went down a shadowed side hallway and reached a locked door. She tapped a finger against the heavy metal binding, inducing a rapid rust and disintegration. Beyond the open door was a staircase that led down to an old chamber. A breath of ancient air wafted outward and the Frost Matriarch kept her mouth tightly shut. Then she descended, her ice slippers tinklings against the heavy stone stairs.

Her destination was the old chamber at the bottom. That room with the complicated Engraving on the floor was the first construction of this entire compound. This room served as the foundation.

As she walked into the middle and activated the array, her thoughts turned to Claudette Beigon. Speaking of ironies… how strange that you somehow came to me to learn how to strengthen your image. I wonder if you ever noticed that the reason I could help you so much was not due to the cold you radiated, but because of all the things that you hid within the depths of yourself…

The Frost Matriarch melted. Her translucent skin turned liquid and dripped onto the ground. Soon she was a miniature rainstorm, her body pitter-pattering itself to oblivion. Strong bands of Aether and Nether that had bound this identity in place were methodically peeled away by the array.

Soon, a robust and athletic humanoid with a thick black mane of hair looked down at her slender arms. There, raven-black feathers glittered in the sinking illumination from the Engraving. She opened her beak and released a long sigh. But what can I say now? I gave my word to the devil. I knew this day would come eventually. A life for a life. He kept his word, so I will keep mine.

The Patron of Feathers stretched out her long wings behind her back. The joints and cartilage creaked, after being preserved in ice for two thousand years. Yet there was no discomfort, just familiar strength. She had never been the most powerful of the Patrons, but the combination of her unique wings and scales made her unrivaled in mobility.

It was her effortless ability to fly that inspired the original idea for the Nexus Ways.

Just once, she flapped her wings. The ripples spread outward through the thin cracks in space, showing her how porous even her carefully created citadel was before her long-sealed abilities. In the next moment, the emotions she had long ignored rushed to the surface. For longer than the Patron wanted to admit, she collapsed into a heap and simply wept.

Her tears joined her melted former body on the ground; it was impossible to differentiate between the source of the liquid.

Eventually though, she forced herself to stand. She didn’t have much time. Already, the geas reared its head and urged her to fulfill her end of the bargain. A life for a life. It needled at her body, a persistent parasite, and the Patron of Feathers paused in her movements for a few seconds to experience its efforts to compel her.

Underneath the observation of her gaze, a healthy feather at the end of her arm twitched. Then, slowly the feather fell out of her body and drifted down to touch the ground. In a few more seconds, it began to rot. The effect would be unnoticeable, but the fulfilling freedom of flight would now be slightly restricted in the future.

A fitting price for a bargain she had regretted taking even before the deal had been completed.

The words of the command were still fresh in her mind, preserved as well as everything else inside of the Patron of Feathers had been. When the time comes, you’ll have to kill the Nether bastard that shows up to destabilize things. His appearance is inevitable. Go to the Experimental Station, the weapon should be done by the time he shows up. Use it. I want to make sure it works before we turn it on Pine.

So clear, so direct. She could still see his searing eyes, his ambition. But Words were just words, the Patron of Feathers knew. They were weak and feeble. So she could twist the geas, just a bit.

But first, movement. The freedom that she had so long denied herself, because of her own guilt. She beat her wings once, twice, first shattering the stone room that had unfrozen her and the second obliterating the icy world around her. The Frost Matriarch’s disappearance needed to be complete. A horrible, hungry darkness surged through her body, remembering the wild days of her youth. For once, she didn’t suppress those impulses; today, she was on the warpath.

She raised her head and shrieked, before slithering through the space between words.

When she emerged, she moved past thousands of buzzing porcelain automatons, their heavy arms spinning lazily around their bodies. She passed through the storage facility into Experiment Station proper, which hummed with constant, electrical energy running through the delicate machinery. The doors hissed and opened for her, as though they had been waiting for her arrival.

She walked straight forward, even as floating porcelain automatons hummed past and walked down the branching intersections of the base. In the deepest corner of the base, there was a curious stillness that made her instincts wary. The ‘weapon’ could be nowhere else but this final room.

The final set of doors opened, grinding instead of moving silently due to the thicker barrier against whatever waited within. Not allowing herself to overthink the process, the Patron of Feathers stepped forward. Complex terminals along the walls of the all-metal room beeped and monitored the central area tirelessly. On top of that, a sophisticated Engraving covered the floor, isolating and suppressing energy within the area. Even the Patron of the Feathers’ image wilted slightly before its glowering presence.

On top of a steel pedestal sat a talisman, made of six small knucklebones covered in even smaller script and tied together with maroon leather. Looking at the thing made the Patron of Feathers want to vomit, but she followed the geas and picked the object up. It was almost weightless. Her fingers burned just to touch it.

Bound Aether within the talisman was forcefully propelled along flows of Nether principles. The shape was one of Aether, filled with captured Nether. This was a tool of pure unmaking.

She beat her wings again, tearing through the suppressing of the Engraving and ignoring the shriek of warnings behind her; she knew that facility had already served its purpose. She felt no qualms about leaving a mess in her wake.

In the next minute, she appeared above the Engraving Guild compound. She licked her lips; this was the portion that required the most luck. She couldn’t be sure that any powerful Nether individual here would be acting against his wishes at this moment, but if anyone were-

Begrudgingly, she allowed her perception to spread out. Her long tongue flicked out from her beak and tasted the space. She smiled in pleased satisfaction as she felt someone deep within the Engraving Guild compound assembling the pieces and resources to make an attempt on the Pinnacle. My, my, how naughty. It seems the Orthodox Factions can’t be trusted at all. Nether bastard, indeed.

The geas flared to life as it found a target. After all, words were weak, preserved or not.

The Patron of Feathers beat her wings and slithered further downward, moving past all the Nether Rituals and defensive Engravings that stood in her way. In only a split second, she had reached Lathis N’Gick, who looked sharply up from his meditation at the arrival.

Shock spread rapidly across his face. He lowered his hands, leaving the Nether Ritual on the table in front of them half-finished. “Apep?! I cannot believe- Is that really you? How-”

The Patron of Feathers raised the small bone talisman. A mysterious voice seemed to whisper in her ear, reading the sinister verses off the bones and filling her head with their chaotic sounds. The inscriptions were in a language that the Patron had heard before but never understood because it predated the Nexus. Her skin crawled and her ears began to ring; suddenly, her hand was slick with sweat.

A drop of liquid fell off of the trembling fingers on the bone talisman, staining the dry wooden floor of Lathis’ personal workshop.

Lathis realized the threat just as the six bones activated and folded him in on himself in six different ways. The process was like nothing, like flipping a coin in the air and not even caring which way it would land.

She watched him die and then felt the concentrated fulcrum of the Nether Lattice in his body be torn in half, a paper banner that accidentally ended up in the path of a bull. The floor on which Lathis had been standing cracked, but otherwise the room remained remarkably affected by the powerful talisman.

Of course, as the Nether energy supplied by the various apprentices began to sputter and fail as the Nether Lattice began to collapse, alarms began to shrilly whine across the compound. With the geas fading in her chests and the horrid whispers intensifying in her ears, the Patron of Feathers beat her wings again and escaped that place and fled to deep space.

Only the whispers followed her, taking up more and more of her mind. She looked grimly down at the bone talisman. The various bones trembled, the ill-will they contained beginning to infect her. The geas was gone, but now she needed to pay the price for misusing the two energies.

Honestly, the Patron of Feathers expected something like this; she had never expected that he would let her go after doing his dirty work.

As the volume of the whispers rose, taking small bites at the edge of her sanity, the Patron of Feathers sent one last message. Tell your father that it’s almost time to wake up. A change is coming. For all of us.

Then she shut herself off from the world and prepared for a long struggle; the end might be inevitable, but she didn’t intend to go down without a fight.