Among the rubble of the destroyed houses near the royal castle of Mournvalley, the forces of Coquelicot had begun to gather around some sort of commotion. The curious necromancers formed a large circle around their leader and her nine closest students. Phthalo, Sapphire and Teal were kneeling in front of the new ruler of the necromancers, waiting for her to say something as the other inquisitors awkwardly avoided looking at them.

Coquelicot paced back and forth in front of them, every now and then stopping to stare at one of them. Sighing and frowning while tapping together the fingers from two of her still bloody arms, that she had just used to tear apart the royals one by one. This continued for a few minutes, which no doubt felt like hours for the kneeling inquisitors. “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed in you three.” She finally said, as if she was scolding some misbehaving children and stopped pacing. “Revenge is something I understand far too well and normally it’s something I encourage wholeheartedly, but loyalty and reason must always come before all else. Yet your misguided attempt to kill Anastacia suggests that you lack both. The girl might not be easy to deal with, but she is without a doubt our most important ally and one that I had given my word to. As my inquisitors, my word is your word, and an inquisitor that can’t keep their word is worthless to me. Not that your idiocy ends there; You dared to attack another inquisitor!” She disciplined the trio slowly raising her voice along the way.

After Periwinkle had been dragged up from the moat and patched up some more, he had then given a full report on what had happened on the rooftop, heavily emphasizing that everything was Phthalo’s fault. While everyone agreed that Phthalo was out of line, being the group’s tattletale didn’t help his already unstable position in it. He had since been tasked with watching over Anastacia in case she woke up.

“Does any of you have anything to say before I give my verdict?” Coquelicot said and stared Phthalo.

Despite the silent protests of the other two, Phthalo stood up. “Madame Coquelicot, I can not on good conscience allow these two to take blame for what happened. The plan was mine alone, I was the only one who acted on it and pressured Sapphire and Teal to join me despite their objections. Any consequences should fall on my shoulders alone.” He recited a plead he had worded and gone through in his head for a hundred times, fully aware of what it could lead to. “I ask you to take into account that Alice was a dear friend to every inquisitor, and her death nothing short of unjust and cruel. My mind was clouded by anger and grief, and I would never go against your word again.”

It was more or less what Coquelicot had expected, her students were an extremely tightly knit group and there was absolutely zero chance that one of them wouldn’t take the fall to protect the others if they would be spared thanks to that. “Very well. Teal, Sapphire, you are excused, but do not think i've forgotten this.” She shrugged and gestured for the two to rise. “Now then, dear Phthalo, I’ve spent time and effort to train you from nothing more than a guardsman, and this is how you reward me? With betrayal? If it was just an attempt at Anastacia’s life, I would have more mercy to spare, but you went too far. I do not care who attacks one of my inquisitors, I will always consider it as an attack directed at me, and by intending to harm Periwinkle, you intended to harm me. So let us see how you fare with that.” She stated sternly before gesturing for the crowd to stand back.

“Excuse me?” Phthalo said. “I’m not sure I understand.”

Coquelicot took a few steps away from her student and spread her arms to their full reach. “If there’s one thing we need to accept, it is that might is right. Perhaps you are correct, and Anastacia does deserve death, as does Periwinkle. I am not beyond self-doubt, so I will grant you the chance to prove yourself right. Do you require any weaponry to support your case?” She asked and started adjusting the straps of her harness under her robes.

Teal was about to say something to protest what was about to happen but was silenced by his teammates and pulled into the crowd with Sapphire. As much as they would have preferred for things to not turn ugly, none of the inquisitors could say that they disagreed with their leader completely. Phthalo had acted without thought and only managed to double the number of inquisitors that would be lost over Alice’s death.

Not a single necromancer present actually thought that Phthalo stood a chance against the last red inquisitor, and the entire trial was held just to make the matter public and avoid the unrest that would have ensued if Coquelicot just rippied one of her students in half for seemingly no reason.

Upon his request, one of the corpses of the royals was dragged to Phthalo to be used as material. Not fighting back would have been such an extreme insult that it would have rid him of any fame he had gained during the rebellion and turned his death from a painless one into hours of torture.

“’Phthalo the Vengeful’ is the name I’ll give to you in the book of inquisitors. It shall be written directly under ‘Alice, first of the new inquisition’, perhaps that will help you find her in what comes after.” Coquelicot declared and bowed to her opponent.

Phthalo smiled. “It’s not a bad name to die under, Coquelicot, end of the immortal reign.” He calmly said and bowed in response.

With roughly ten meters between them, the two necromancers stared at each other, gauging each other’s strength, and waiting for one to make a move to signal the beginning of what was going to be a short fight. Phthalo found himself against a brick wall that was not going to budge no matter how hard he pushed, while Coquelicot pushed as much of her strength into her arms as she could.

What finally set them off was Coqulicot suddenly kneeling and using all six of her arms to launch herself at the younger inquisitor at an incredible speed. A trap set by phthalo proved to be too slow and by the time the corpse on the ground exploded into a pillar of bone fragments and flesh, Coquelicot had already gotten past it and cleaved through his upper body with all three of her left arms, turning it into a fine mist of blood just by the incredible force of her punches.

As the final pieces of what used to be an inquisitor rained down on the crowd of necromancers, they all began to wander off back to whatever tasks they had been doing before getting distracted by the commotion. Only the few that were responsible for cleaning up the gore stuck around to sort out the mess that had been created.

Coquelicot sat down on a piece of rubble from one of the houses and closed her eyes, moving too quickly was always a bit disorienting and not completely painless. Though her arms were well supported so that any force they imparted to her body, was evenly spread on a large area and wouldn’t rip her apart, it was still far from comfortable. While recuperating from the fight and the fact that she had to kill one of her own students, she couldn’t help but to feel like they had forgotten something.

“We’ve gone through the castle and the buildings around it, made sure no one escaped, recovered Anastacia and tossed Amaranth into the material pile. What have I missed?” She pondered out loud. “I’m sure it wasn’t anything too impor-“

Her thought was interrupted by a horrible, jarring machinelike wail from the distance. She peered into the horizon and could just barely make out a small glowing light blue dot.

“Ah, yes! We forgot the simulacrum.” She realized and hastily hopped on her undead horse and began racing towards the dot.

She was soon joined by her remaining students, excluding Periwinkle who was supposed to stay with Anastacia no matter what happened. All of them had heard the chilling scream of the simulacrum and guessed its origin.

“I don’t have the faintest clue how Anastacia was able to tame it, but we have to consider that whatever she did, might have worn off and the simulacrum is now hostile, so prepare for a fight.” Coquelicot instructed them as they closed in on the light blue glow.

When they reached it, what they found was obviously confused and enraged King. Covered in blood and bits of some low-ranking necromancer that had been responsible for guarding the area, the glowing lines of his armor almost blinded the necromancers and seemed to slowly spread out along the ground from here he stood. A few pieces of his armor had also moved slightly, giving him an even bulkier shape than usual and from somewhere inside him, came a series completely unharmonized ticking sounds accompanied by what sounded like the crackling of fire.

Coquelicot jumped down from her mount and slowly approached the machine with her arms readied in case King chose to attack. “Hey there, remember me?” She asked as calmly as she could. “I didn’t know you could make that much noise.” As her eyes got used to the glow, she noticed that the blood on King’s body was slowly boiling and sizzling.

Next to the simulacrum was one of Amaranth’s dragons, though it had been ripped to shreds and crushed beyond recovery. Having faced a few of his kind before, Coquelicot knew that a feat like that was not supposed to be within the abilities of a normal human-sized simulacrum.

“You must be worried about Anastacia, right? She’s fine, a bit beaten up but alive and will no doubt recover soon enough.” She continued soothing King in a calm tone and slowly moved even closer. Almost touching the glowing lines that spread from the simulacrum, she could feel the heat radiating from him.

King responded by staring at the necromancers motionlessly for what seemed like ages, before finally letting out another ‘scream’, that turned out to be steam escaping from the gaps between his armor plates. Slowly he began walking up to the one addressing him, stopping only a few centimeters away from her, he towered over Coquelicot and stared down into her eyes, clearly looking for any signs of weakness or deceit.

The scorching heat emitted by King made the high necromancer feel like she was hugging a lit stove, but she wasn’t the type to waver or step down from a challenge and continued to stare back at the simulacrum. “Calm down and I will take you to her.” She stated just as calmly as before.

Suddenly the glowing lines on the ground began to retract back towards King and dim down in the process. The heat he emitted began to die down as well when his pieces slid back to their original places.

Figuring that the situation was under control, Coquelicot sent her inquisitors back to their duties and gave the simulacrum a bit of room. “Heck of day, huh? I don’t know when you were thrown all the way back here, so in case you didn’t know, Anastacia took care of Amaranth but got her arm broken in the process and a bit of a concussion. I have Periwinkle and my best caregivers watching over her.” She said, not really understanding why the machine would care in the first place, but still felt like it needed to know.

King started to wipe off the blood and meat from his armor, but not really making any progress.

“Allow me.” The necromancer said after watching the simulacrum work in vain for a while, and the burnt blood started to fall off as dry red dust as she took control of it. “I do not know what or who you are, but I’m starting to doubt that you are just a simple simulacrum. Perhaps one day I will have the time to solve that mystery, but right now I have more pressing matters to attend to. That said, I think it’s about time for Mournvalley to distance ourselves from Anastacia, so I’ll leave watching over her to you, consider it a repayment for the killing one of my men before we got to you.”

Once King had cooled off a bit, they returned to the camp where Anastacia was being treated, on the way there, Coquelicot shared her plans for the necromancer kingdom with the simulacrum. Something about King made it feel like he actually acknowledged what was said to him and compelled her to chat, much like she would with a living person, strengthening her suspicion about King being unusual in some way instead of just broken or malfunctioning. She could definitely see why Anastacia liked having him around, though it felt extremely weird to not be able to sense him at all.

Anastacia had been dragged into one of the supply tents of the camp and laid down in a pile of unused bedding. The bones in her hand had been pulled back into their places and the whole thing had been tied to a few splints to make sure they would stay straight as they healed. Luckily the wound on her head was relatively small and didn’t require any attention beyond cleaning the blood off her hair.

While waiting for further instructions, Periwinkle went through the bag of books Anastacia had stolen from the castle. None of them seemed like anything too valuable or important, which made him wonder why Anastacia had bothered to take them. While flipping through the smallest of the three books, a pitch-black feather fell from between the pages onto his lap. The color immediately reminded him of the strange crow that had given him the enchanted ring that had saved Anastacia on the roof.

“Who are you?” He muttered and spun the feather between his fingers. The next few months would no doubt be extremely busy for the new inquisition since they would be enforcing the new laws until things settled down, but after that Periwinkle was going to figure out what Noir was about. He hid the feather in his pocket and returned the bag next to the unconscious necromancer. The books she had chosen going missing wouldn’t cause too much issues, so he figured it would be better to just let Anastacia have them – Mournvalley owed her that much at least.

He could feel Coquelicot approaching the tent and started inspecting the rings on Anastacia’s fingers to seem more hardworking. “These rings are quite interesting don’t you think? Probably worth more than a small manor.” He said when he heard the tent’s door flap open, but immediately started screaming for his life when the simulacrum stepped in and triggered the of traumas from the previous beatdown. Periwinkle stumbled away from Anastacia and retreated into the corner of the tent.

“Such a brave inquisitor you are.” Coquelicot commented and glared at the cowering Periwinkle. “I dealt with the Phthalo situation. I don’t think it’ll come up for me again, but if I were you, I’d lay low for a while. The others aren’t exactly pleased.”

Periwinkle nodded and slowly got back up, keeping an eye on King the entire time.

In reality the simulacrum was far too preoccupied with finally finding Anastacia to even notice the frightened inquisitor. He sat down next to her and stared at the unconscious necromancer in complete silence.

“You should take the rings off her. They might have saved her, but I don’t want to know what happens if she wakes up with them still on.” Coquelicot suggested and began going through the crates in the tent, almost all of them contained small vials of liquid, varying in color and shape. Finally finding what she was looking for, she carefully tapped the small vial with her finger until she could see something moving in the bright red fluid. “Periwinkle, tell the alchemists to make a batch of the blood larva broth, these are almost dead.”

“What do you need that for? Shouldn’t we try to wake her up?” Periwinkle asked and started peering through the remaining vials with his lantern.

Blood larva broth was exactly what it sounded like, a bunch of larvae in a broth that was mostly made of blood. As long as the larvae were alive they released a gas that, when mixed with air, was extremely effective way to knock someone out for a short and predictable amount of time.

Coquelicot sighed. “I want to say that it’s for keeping Anastacia out cold until I can get her to the priestess, so she doesn’t have to deal with the pain and all that, but honestly she’s just very annoying and I don’t want to deal with her – before there’s at least a few innocent bystanders to keep her at bay, that is.”