Barathiel shook his head. The memory need not go any farther as far as he was concerned. He took his two bags in hand and climbed up the stairs up to the western dongon where his personal quarters were maintained on the second story of the branching wing.

A walkway with a picaresque view of the hunting yards joined the central manor to the far tower. He was near the entrance door when he heard two female voices cackling.

One breathless and high-pitched, Brietess, the other low, nasal and dusk, the albino Sgoëthe princess.

He darted quietly through the entrance, shuffled up the ring of stairs leading to the bed chamber's floor and he hid in an unlit water closet.

The tone of their conversation turned more somber while he found a hiding place.

"I so need it, Leresai."

He heard his sister plead.

"Even here," Brietess continued, "in my own damn home, all I can feel is this emptiness inside of me. It is like an arid field abandoned of all life. I need a communion so I can feel whole again.

"This all feels so strange to me now. Even the smell of the wild strawberries by the clover grove doesn't draw me back to a sense of familiarity with this place. Or, Rhoethella, forgive me for saying this, even these people."

Barathiel's gut clinched to these words. These people.

Barathiel could see the albino as he glimpsed into his sister's chamber. Her mouth twisted and folded against her chin and the lines sprinkled on her forehead gave years to her appearance as she spoke.

"Oh, Brietess. That is really sad."

"I'm only being honest with you."

"I know you are. I wasn't a model daughter on my return home to our castle above Tos-Fervarrynn. Yet, I did settle in for several months and I became part and partial to my family again."

"Why did you leave the second time?"

Leresai folded her arms and shrugged. She leaned her head with her hair falling down and looked up towards the ceiling. She smiled.

"Rhoethella came looking for me. She paid a visit to our castle while I was out hunting giants on the glaciers. She asked my father to intercede in my training."

"Training?"

Leresai's laugh more than hinted at an archaic gallantry. She seemed of another century to Barathiel's sensibilities.

She cleared her throat.

"In the Midvries, and Ninci, and even the Suüdlands, a father can still get high prospectus for his daughter after Temple. They're even places where Demoiselles are preferred as our experience is valued, but I digress."

Brietess touched her arm. Her hand olive against the utter whiteness of the albino.

"They can't marry you off where you are from," Brietess asked her tone near righteous.

"Whenever have I said I've ever wanted to be married off? But, you are correct, in the Northern Isles, we who have been committed to the ordeal of Temple or known as Broken Sisters."

"That's terrible," Brietess gasped.

"Perhaps, but my people are still horrified by the demands of the Sœurarchy. We have never come to accept it. The demand of the allegiance to any god. Still, it isn't like I can't rise in an honored profession."

"This training?"

"That's right, a huntress. You would call me a jaeger, monster slayer, here in the Midvries. I was living on the glacier rifts attempting to score an isolated kill all on my own, so I could claim the head and hands of a giant to bring back to my father as trophies for his Great Hall. I was stalking a brood, hoping to isolate one in a snow drift in the late day when Rhoethella appeared on a ridgeline and approached me.

"That was eleven years ago, and here I am, still in her service. Nonetheless to say, she was quite persuasive. Brietess, I am still my father's daughter. I still venture to the Northern Isles to see him and the rest of my family nearly every year. I still sing, drink and pummel with my cousins.

"No retreat into sacred communion has ever changed that. Has never even threatened that. But, in you, it has. I don't feel comfortable leading you down this path."

"Let me decide that for myself, Leresai."

"You're not the only one with a decision to make in this matter, Brie." Leresai's fingers clenched against a drawer top she leaned against.

"I'm not a natural-born adventurous like yourself. It is plainly obvious, why are you laughing?"

The Sgoëthe's fingers flexed freely now the tension between the two women broke.

"Those kobolds…"

"Bandit bastards," Brietess sputtered. "Little menses whiffing freaks."

"You pursue Temple further, Brie, you'll experience much, much worse than a troupe of three foot tall lizardmen grabbing at your cooch while you are riding uncomfortably along a road on the way out of the old Nin."

"Neither it seems," Brietess nearly yelled, her pitch high, her voice flustered, "that it is Rhoethella's will for me to ever bond with my family again. Perhaps, you can because it wasn't necessary for her to cut that line off. Your family wasn't holding you back."

Leresai held her head down as she stood erect. She looked to Barathiel to be a defeated woman.

"Until Rhoethella says otherwise, at least try."

His sister backed Leresai up against the wall, giving him a better view of both women for Barathiel to observe. Brietess stood on her toes and forced the Sgoëthe to accept her kiss.

Their lips pressed tight, Leresai spread her long fingers against Brietess' derriere to rub against her closer.

When their lips parted after a long minute, Leresai pushed her back gently. With a cherub's smile wicked on her face, Brietess' eyes attentive and dark, she gazed in Leresai's own

"I need this, now. With Barathiel here, I have to have this. You do not understand the pressure this puts upon me, I'll be better tomorrow, but right now, I am numb to the whole damn world. You cannot deny me this."

"What has your brother to do with it? Last night, we were with your father, uncle and cousins laughing it up at that water hole. You didn't seem all that uncomfortable, then. But today, you're so reserved, aloof to everything and everyone but me."

"I'm afraid... I'll be tempted to retreat to our childhood when Barathiel and I were inseparable. I'll grow comfortable with this place, all over again.

"Before I even know it, I'll find myself bethroft to a random hedgelord shoved off to some Nin backwater to be a stranger's broodward for the rest of my days wondering what it is like to be by Leresai's side riding about city to city, venture to venture, a free woman."

"But Brietess, with my obligations, I'm anything but a free woman," Leresai answered.

Her head bowed down as Brietess approached her. Barathiel's sister came back into his view. She now stood nude in front of the Sgoëthe.

She grabbed Leresai's breast, pushing them out of the corset from beneath the black otter leathers. Brietess kissed, sucked and bit on the albino's nipples.

Each time she pulled them back with her teeth, the nipples jerked in place with a little more definition than before. Within a minute they were as scarlet red as those of a Suüdlands nude danseur from the bruising.

All the while, Leresai leaned her head back against the wall with her eyes blinking in long arched strides. Platinum lashes flowing along.

Brietess dug her hand in the front side of Leresai's pants; her other hand reached into her own midnight bush. Barathiel could hear the tiny rhythmic sound of wet flesh caressed as she masturbated herself. His sister's stomach firm and supple twitched with her every motion.

He averted his eyes up to her face when his curiosity turned to arousal. With her eyes closed, she seemed … happy. Content in a way Barathiel never seen, nor had known his twin to be capable.

"I can't deny you anything," Leresai whispered. "Communion, you shall have" she let out with a short intake of breath.

Leresai's words were soon followed by a reedy moan exhaled from her arched throat. Brietess looked around her brow furrowed in concern.

"We can't do this here, Barathiel will be setting up his quarters after he stops by to pay Laïdra a visit."

"Laïdra, your mother?"

"That's right. I can still hear her play. She hasn't stopped at all this eve. I have a secret place set up for ritual magic. Grab that oil lamp, Leresai, and those blankets. I have a few tubes of blood hidden under the closet mat."

Leresai shook her head.

"The things you get that cousin of yours to do for you."

Leresai pushed her breasts back down into the corset and buttoned up the cendal robe.

Brietess pulled the night gown over her nude form. Her thighs squirmed from side to side as she covered her small hard breasts and lush midnight black bush with the clinging material.

The Sgoëthe placed an overcoat over Brietess' shoulders. Leresai's figure was quite womanly, Barathiel carefully observed.

If his sister wasn't involved he would thoroughly enjoy the sight of an exotic Sgoëthe princess nude in his home. His fingers chaffed at the surface of the castle stones as he leaned against the wall.

His nerves flared hot in the dark closet.

He knew the secret place, Brietess mentioned. Growing up in the Old Meander, it was once her astrologer's laboratory, it was once her alchemist's chamber, it was once her witch's lair.

Whatever fancy filled her wild and dark imagination, as a girl, she transformed the room in kind. Knowing this, none of her recent actions should have come to him as much of a surprise.

The two women made their way down the opposite end of the hall, as Barathiel expected of them. They would climb a stairway to the donjon that over looked the northern end of the hunting yard below.

As an agent of Obisvyrre he felt duty-bound to follow the two and observe the communion, but he wasn't just a disinterested party merely reporting intelligence on a subject under their scrutiny.

It was his sister and her female lover involved in what little Obisvyrre knew of Sœurarchal communion. Blood magic, sex magic was all of which they could be certain.

The loyal soldier of the Obisvyrre had to recuse himself. He had seen enough of his sister in the throes of passion to be discombobulated for an entire evening.

The slushing noise of her fingers smacking her own loins he could hear clearly at an otherwise quiet moment. He shook his head, almost ill. His own sister's thighs glistened wet. Or did he just imagine that detail?

Infernal Mothers be damned. I can't stop thinking about it!

Barathiel rushed to his chamber. He needed a drink. For this evening, only one concoction would do.

After throwing his bags on his bed, Barathiel brought out a bottle of Deadsift brandy. He drew out one small goblet worth of it, impatiently swallowed it down hard.

It hit instantly. The colors of the room seeped into one another until they were overly saturated where everything became indistinguishable to him.

For a moment the terracotta walls thumped in a pulse forward and back slowly like a human's heart. He nearly staggered, and had to hold onto a table.

Evocation was easy in those days. The small man appeared in robes, grey wool over blue cotton in a matching azure-blue cap.

"Evening, young Salugarr."

"The afterlife faring well this day, Maester Lyoneid?

Renua Lyoneid chuckled.

"As I have explained to you before, I'm not dead. Only aslant in my vitaechemical dimensionality. This body is no more ethereal than yours. Horseshit sticks to my shoes as it does your very own."

The wizard sat on a chest with his left hand firmly holding his staff in front of him. He worked his jowls beneath his beard as he closed his eyes to meditate for a moment.

He typically did this when coming back into being to survey the aether around for what it could tell him.

Finally he opened his eyes to ask Barathiel the necessary question.

"I suppose there's nothing I can say to get you to spy on your sister while she is engaged in that unholy practice they call communion."

Barathiel paced the chamber.

"Are not all things sanctioned by the gods holy," he deflected.

Renua slackened his posture as he squinted at Barathiel with his dominant eye.

"One day you will understand our imperative in full. It's embedded in even the name of our society. And when you do come to understand our purpose a minor diversion such as sexual longings for that lovely sister you have won't set you back."

Barathiel shrugged, not letting the accusation up end his demeanor.

"Embedded in the name? The name refers to the Grand Diversion, as you call it. Obisvyrre, the Fiery Abyss. That to which we are doomed for seizing this very day as our own and caring nothing for the ultimate ends of the gods.

"We lose our soul's loci through our meandering ways until we are no longer even worthy of the peace awaiting us in Oblivion."

Renua smiled and he chuckled. Barathiel doubted the sincerity with which the wizard presented in his relaxed demeanor. He was merely changing his tact.

"No, my friend, young Salugarr. It has a meaning well beyond diversion."

He stopped for a moment. Barathiel noticed Renua's pale green eyes staring intently at him.

"You look so much like your paternal grandfather. Shame you never got to know him very well. Would have saved us a lot of trouble. Such is Life," The wizard emphasized the last phrase with a toss of his head.

He gestured towards the painting. The landscape within blurred gray, slowly turned black with streaks of midnight blue reaching eerily forward like cold lightning slowed down to the speed of relaxed breathing as it unfolded and retraced back.

"Obisvyrre," Renua continued. "Is what the Suüd playwrights call tedjosz ynchnt, a double intention. For us, those of the clique, operatives as opposed to agents, it refers to our purpose, to push the Sœurarchy back into the Abyss from whence they came. For they are not gods, merely extraordinary powerful demons."

"God's, demons, what's the difference."

"Everything!" Renua now spoke with sudden animation. "Gods have souls, like humans have souls. As you mentioned, loci. Part and parcel to the hidden map underlying the mundane world, they have a connection, ultimately responsibility, to this world. When they do it harm, they do themselves harm.

"Demons are transitory spirits. The world will always be a plaything only to serve their own amusement. All living souls native to Mundi are cheapened for it.

"The only reason these demons haven't burned us all to a crisp with the power they have obtained through the temples that sustain them is that at one point, Rhoethella convinced the others it would be highly amusing to overthrow the Patriarch, Izdun, and mimic the gods of vanquished days. It is merely a romance for them. A fancy which they will someday grow bored."

"How do you know all of this? It sounds merely speculative. After all, they do need the blood ritual to sustain their existence, whereas, demons feed directly from human souls. Also, Rhoethella was born of an elf and a human parent, how could she be a demon, and not merely possessed by one?"

"Death's Embrace, the ritual to obtain godhood, corrupts them to the base element of their souls. I can prove everything I said to you but those are questions for another day, Young Salugarr. There is no time at the moment. How about this, then, I, as you are aware, can't walk very far out of your purview and maintain existence in this material world."

"Ironic, for such a powerful mage to be so bound, isn't it?

"Very much so. But, as I was saying, would you be willing to get close enough to where the communion is supposed to take place so I can witness it in your stead?"

"No. I would still hear the sexual intercourse."

"Stuff your ears!"

"I can still smell the sex. I could smell it on them from the little they did in there. He pointed to the chamber across the hall. No. Let's forget about it. I need to get a hold of myself."

Renua's arms flared out. "It's a missed opportunity."

"With so many disaffected Temple sisters throughout our many lands how can Obisvyrre possibly not know the ritual in its practice, intention, and purpose?"

"We don't know how it is we don't know." Renua's voice grew exasperated. "We only know their memory of what occurs is directly proportional to their commitment to the Sœurarchy."

"I'm sorry. I can't do it. Not this evening. I gather myself better over the course of this week, we'll arrange something. Brietess will certainly demand it again. But, not tonight."

"Fine. Understandable even." Renua stood up. "Why did you summon me? There are better ways of getting well and truly fucked -," the wizard pointed to a pocket in Barathiel's coat with the bag of opium curings and dried marijuana leaves intended for smoking occasions of a more dedicated nature. "- if you have a need to forget the sight of one's naked sister in her joyful throes of sexual stimulation."

Barathiel motioned for the wizard to follow.

"Glad you got around to asking. I want to go hunting."

After a hesitant second, Renua breathed out a long, "ah...," his voice went up in a high pitch and his tone lightened. Barathiel turned to face Renua's mischievous smile.

"A huntress of giants. You have a commonality with this Leresai the Enigmatic that you wish to expand upon. Why wouldn't a young man long for his sister's mistress and teacher. Perfectly natural."

The Enigmatic. That's what skipped his memory earlier. It was said she was an extraordinary agencier. Greatly feared in certain quarters.

"Perhaps, you are right. I would like to ask her to go-a-hunting, and not embarrass myself given the years it has been since I've hunted anything more sporting than fawns in the forests of your family estates."

"Next time you're at the palace, take a little walk into the marshland to the southern end. There is a wyvern there I would like you to take care of for me."

"You jest."

Renua began to follow. "If those really were my giblets they found and put in a box in our family mausoleum, I wouldn't be here now in any physical capacity."

They transversed along one of the exterior walls that gave the Old Meander its distinctive appearance. Before they entered one connecting rotunda, Renua whispered to Barathiel.

"Keep to the shadows and remain quiet as we pass the next set of double doors."

Barathiel thought it a curious request given they traveled on the opposite side of the hunting grounds to avoid the two women, but he did as instructed. Renua placed a hand on his shoulder.

When he felt a jolt of electricity, Barathiel looked at his own hands. They were spectral blue, camouflaged to the walls of the counter levered walkway above the ground floor. They walked forward. Why all the mystery?

Then he understood. He could see into the chambers below from slits cut for the purpose of air circulation in the walkway floor.

Gathered in the corner of a small out-of-the-way office, Tereth and Thiel set with a pair of guests. The two other men, one ancient and the other appeared perhaps a decade older than Barathiel.

Both of the men exuded a thuggish air in their demeanor; sutured twist of rings in their ears and studded sapphires flanked on their noses like eastern Mooring raiders of another long gone era.

They wore long black coats over cobalt blue chainmail. Tattoos along the length of their necks. A pair of dangerous men. The elder assuredly a Ko Laga Majeur.

On the low-lying glass table in front of the quartet of schemers a map set, along with a ceremonial dagger used in common contracts, a stack of coins and a scroll on which Thiel was intently scribing. His father was speaking, his eyes cast directly at his guests.

After they passed by and left the donjon tower through the double doors on the opposite side, Renua turned to him. His eyes were ramose.

"Obisvyrre business. Ugly, ugly Obisvyrre business," Renua continued. "It is the reason your father and Uncle did not include you."

Barathiel nodded, "I understand."

As he turned to continue, Renua gently tugged at his arm.

"One day, young Solugarr, it's going to be necessary for you to wrest control of Obisvyrre from your father and uncle. The direction they are setting for us will eventually, inevitably prove disastrous."

"I'm juggling too much, Renua."

"I know, but what you just witnessed will have consequences for you no matter if you do not understand it. Could you promise me one thing? Never mention it, either to Thiel or Tareth. Spare yourself that much grief, at least."

They came to the terrace steps leading down to the hunting grounds. Barathiel stopped.

"What grief?"

"You don't want to find out how ruthless your father can be in keeping secrets secret.

"Ruthlessness serves him as Thiel's right hand very well. In that regard, your father is very effective. Recklessness, though, that accompanies his disposition all too well, will eventually overwhelm everything else."

"Come along," Barathiel nodded towards the steps. He realized Rena was studying him to gauge his reaction.

"Come along. All in due time. We have sport ahead of us."

Renua nodded with loosened jowls above a craned neck.

"All in due time, but make good use of your summer here. Keep your ears open for matters just like those. It will prove instructive."