"When I was younger, there was an urban legend in Zefirous, of the reaper who prowled the darkest nights, a beast without sight whose fangs were the only greeting any unfortunate enough to meet it would receive.

That legend mostly proliferated in the poorer areas of town at first, but over the years it had become so prevalent that parents used it to scare their children when they refused to go to bed. It was that widespread amongst the townspeople.

The few of us who knew of the truth about the legend always had a hard time holding our laughter each time we heard someone else mention it." - Annelise Creussens, Governor of Zefirous, circa 41 FP.

It was a boring night, thought Karenina as she lifted her water bag and took a quick gulp of the cheap, watery ale inside it. For all that the city was supposedly under siege, life for her and her ilk had gone on mostly unchanged. The nobles had conscripted many of the poorer folk, but stayed their hand away from the criminals.

They had not trusted them.

Nor should they, thought the young woman as she absentmindedly flicked a knife into the air and caught it on its way down. There was no love lost between the denizens of the city's thriving underworld and the government, only a mutual tolerance that was brought about by circumstances more than anything.

Karenina herself knew she would be all too happy to stab one of those pompous noble types in the gut if she were given the chance to do so. Probably why she drew her current assignment to guard the path leading to the smuggler's cave down in the sewers. With tensions running high Varsha probably didn't want to risk the hotheads causing an accident.

Which was why most of them were in the sewers, bored out of their minds and nursing their limited supply of ale. The smuggler's cave was a path nobody except their organization or the smugglers they cooperated with knew of, and Karenina doubted any of them would be coming with the city under siege and all.

The ten of them, all thugs and cutthroats of the worst kind the city has to offer, were sitting around a small bonfire, on crates and broken barrels and other such trash. It was their fortune that the smuggler's cave was underneath one of the sparsely occupied sections of the city, so it had not stunk too badly even in the sewers.

"Bloody hell," cursed Cassie, the short-haired girl who was probably the closest thing to a friend Karenina had. The two of them were the same age, and had even shared the same background. Orphans picked up and made into child beggars, violated by their asshole of an overseer when they were young, and working with Varsha, who had taken them under her wing, after said asshole was found dead with a dagger in his throat one day. "I'm all outta booze! Somebody fucking share me some booze!"

"God-King's hairy armpit, Cass," lamented Arne, Cassie's on-again off-again boyfriend, who was laughing as he twirled his thin mustache out of habit. He was one of Varsha's early subordinates, four years older than both girls, and had joined Varsha after she took down the organization she was part of and put it beneath her heels. "I swear you gotta have a second stomach for booze or something. You've been drinking way more than any of us, girl."

His needling was understandable, since he was almost twice Cassie's size, yet at the same time, the slim, small girl always ate and drank more than he ever could, as if her stomach was a bottomless pit.

Both Cassie and Karenina had worked under Varsha as her blades in the dark. Their job was often to get close to their target undetected, then leave them with either a weeping smile on their throats, or a knife under the ribs. The two of them were some of Varsha's most trusted people, all of whom were children who had once grown up under her care, but they were also trouble magnets and prone to violence at the drop of a hat.

"Just pass me yer boozebag or fuck me or something you nitwit," said Cassie with an exasperated sigh. All of them were bored out of their minds, which was to be expected. "It's so bloody fucking boring to be doing jack shit nothing down here."

"No fucking on the job," interjected Karenina with a giggle from the side. The way Cassie and her boyfriend bickered was old hat to her by then. At least it brought some amusement to help them tide over the boredom.

They were all busy chuckling and amusing themselves over the couple's antics that none of them detected the intruders until it was too late. Karenina thought that if Varsha had witnessed their bungling that night, she would have their hides.

Before any of them could react, strong, slender hands pulled Karenina down from her seat and into the stone below. A group of cloaked strangers - just three, really - charged out from the smuggler's cave, and the next thing they knew, another of the cloaked strangers had Ryan's neck pressed against a wicked curved blade, while the third had a pair of axes hovering a hair's width away from Cassie and Arne's faces. The edges of those axes seemed to be coated in night itself, an eerie look that made neither of the threatened figures dare to move even the slightest bit.

The first thought that went through Karenina's head was that this wasn't supposed to happen. They had a multitude of traps and tripwires installed in the maze between where they were and the underground lake where they usually met the smugglers. Strangers shouldn't be able to navigate that without tripping at least some of them.

Her next thought was that she was screwed, as a razor-sharp blade was pointed directly at her throat, a mere hair's width away, while the cloaked figure rested a second blade at Lucien's throat with their other hand.

"Nobody move!" she heard one of the strangers, a woman, bark out in some surprisingly flawless Holy Kingdom tongue. She also saw how Vash tried to grab his crossbow, but was brought to a halt by an arrow that pierced the stone wall just in front of his eyes.

They had more people in the tunnels, Karenina thought, as the woman repeated her warning in a tone that promised death to those who refused to listen. For some reason however, Karenina thought the voice sounded somewhat familiar, but she couldn't place where she had heard it before.

From her position, sprawled on the ground and kept there by the blade just over her throat, she could not see the cloaked woman's features, as her cloak had hidden a good part of her face from sight. However, what the woman said next jogged her memory of the past, and she finally realized where she had heard the voice before.

"Wait… Nina? What are you doing here?" asked the cloaked woman with some incredulity in her voice. She then turned her face towards Karenina - though noticeably not looking at her - and withdrew her blade as she lowered the cowl of her cloak, revealing a mess of straw-blond hair.

The way the woman stared into nothingness, that shade of hair, and the way she called her - only Karenina's closest friends called her Nina, most calling her Karen or Rennie instead, and Karenina only had few of those - all merged into a figure she had not seen for a decade, yet was still recognizable to her even so.

"Reed?" she asked with some trepidation in her voice. "Is that you?"