Chandra's mind was already reeling with the consequences of what she had done. She knew that the Lady was lying and had gotten what she wanted, but she did, also, trust that the woman would try to help, later. If she didn't deliver the report to the master, she felt the spell would punish her, but it was out of her hands; she also had no idea if, in the end, the Lady was really on her side, or just using her. From the start, she had been after the secret to the metal; that much was clear.

What Chandra really wanted was time to process everything. The last thing she needed was more complications... and of course, one had to step right into the room as soon as Janinda left.

The man was tall, with white hair, in incredible shape, and he had a gentle cast to his features that Chandra's assassin training--now temporarily resurfaced, although her grip on it felt tenuous--immediately distrusted. He scrambled in through the narrow panel by the floor, then put his hands up in a sign of mock surrender as he rose to his feet. "Good day," he said very quietly, "I am here to help, I promise."

"Are you here to serve the Master?" Chandra could not keep the annoyance out of her voice. Anything not helping her serve the master was endangering her life in at least two different ways right now.

"Sure. The Master wanted me to make sure this glyph was done correctly. Would you confirm that?" Wilke, very tenderly, offered her a very familiar looking scrap of paper.

Chandra had not finished it. She didn't have the magical strength required. But it had been finished, and beautifully done, with the elemental energies balanced as carefully as she would have done it herself. She couldn't keep the confusion from her face as she took the paper into her hands. "This... was not meant to be for the Master."

"The Master only wants to know if it was done correctly," Wilke kept his face even. "Yes or no?"

"I cannot... answer that question." Something in Chandra refused to let--

An open-hand slap across the face sent Chandra stumbling into the wall. Her head rang, her fingers immediately felt numb, but more than anything, what she felt was that something bent.

"Yes or no?" Wilke's voice was somewhere between confused, apologetic, and concealing great excitement.

"Yes." Chandra didn't even need to think about the answer. In that moment, there were no safeguards there to tell her whose side she was supposed to be on. They would re-settle in just a moment, but...

A flare of light in the dark caught the spellcard in her hand on fire, and it instantly ignited. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Chandra felt a bolt of lightning tear through her fingertips, up her arms, and into her head. She held her mind stock-still as bolts of yellow fury tore through the columns of liquid fire that were burned into her mind. They flew past her mind, then back, swirling around, smashing line after line of spell apart, freeing her of one restriction after another.

The last thing that fell apart was somehow outside of her. It was as though a burning crown she had never seen nor felt the weight of broke into sharp-edged pieces and fell off of her head, leaving her...

Empty.

That was the immediate reaction: she had just lost a companion. An awful, terrifying, disgusting torturer of a companion, but one she had not been without in many, many long years. A companion who had been with her in her worst moments, and been with her in the moments that were not so bad.

But the other half of the feeling was the return of something she had been nursing for so long; that second heartbeat, that thrum within her sparks. Her training as a Ti-mana had trained her for a long time to be one half of a pair, until death. She looked to that second heartbeat and expected to find a telepathic channel to another living being. Perhaps her partner, all along, had been waiting--

But of course it wasn't true. Her partner was dead. It had been almost five years, and he hadn't come. What she found instead was a telepathic channel to something that was not alive. A man that had, in his dying moments, sworn an oath of service to a god--any god--so that he could remain. Whether a god had heard that oath or not, here he was.

"You alright?" The man standing next to her offered a hand. "I'm not sure we should stay. My name is Wilke d'Matria, and I'm with the Yunian Order of Masters. We are here to stop the Egrethore family."

Egrethore. Somehow, Chandra felt like she hadn't heard the word in a very long time. Memories flowed through her brain like a flood of sludgy, cold, dying blood from a frostbitten limb. Every memory, every word, every thought that appeared in her brain stopped some other thought dead in its tracks. At first she thought that Egrethore meant the people who she was serving. Then, she thought that Egrethore meant the people who had killed her partner. Then, it was the people who had tortured her. Then, it was the ones she was hired to assassinate.

And then, she realized all those different people were actually the same few people.

There had been a trade--metallurgy knowledge for an assassination. A standard six-cell was sent out--two wings, each led by one of a pair of elites. Her pair, and her leader, were to kill the Egrethore family in the night.

But the leader was shocked in the middle of action. Her partner had died; she would not be of much use. It should not have been, because the other half of the cell was supposed to be doing the trade, not the kill. They must have been betrayed.

But the timing could not have been worse. Chandra had just blasted her way into the boy's bedchamber. Her momentum carried her forward; this wasn't the time to back off, but the time to accomplish the mission at all costs. The boy's face when he saw her was filled with cruel malice, and he used a spell, of a kind she had never seen, and grasped at her heart. He should not have been able to reach her, not through her shields, but he did.

Chandra's partner leaped through the window after her. They were trained for this. One person would draw the attention, the other would strike. She remembered the boy turning, his face manic in the moonlight, and a fist-sized beam of flame took her partner in the chest. The shield blocked it, as it should have. He tumbled and turned, his hands preparing more spellcards.

And Chandra... did something. A hand on her heart turned her body to face her partner, and she stepped close and stabbed him.

She killed him. The spell the boy put on her controlled her.

They stayed awake that night. He played with her body. He played with her mind. Made her watch as her own body tore apart her partner. He laughed. He hated her so much, and she hated him so much, hated being alive.

He took her to a place she could not escape. After that was a nightmare, a long unending nightmare that she was only now waking up from. The thought that she--not Roan, not the Wizard, but she herself--had been burying this whole time was that one moment, that one thrust of the knife. She had been controlled by Roan. She had been controlled by the Wizard. But all that paled in comparison to seeing her other half torn open by her own hand.

When Chandra could bear to raise her head, she discovered that the wall next to her had been split open and collapsed entirely--how long ago, she wasn't sure. Wilke sat on a pile of rubble, with three guards laid out in the hallway, all with shining armor and holding crossbows. He was watching her.

"Ready to go?" was all he asked.

It took her another couple minutes and several deep breaths. As she stood, it dawned on her just how much weaker she was; she was trained to climb straight up the side of a building this size with nothing but claws and willpower, but now she could barely stand without wobbling unsteadily.

"Great. Come on, the others will want to meet you. Especially Rin, I think." Wilke gestured. "This way."