“And I’ll be sure to name my price for that as well. Farewell, Ironheart.” Mirena spoke through the bugs’ clicks and hisses and buzzes, and the moment the call ended, she released her control of the swarm, breathing out a deep sigh as she let the bundled cloud of chitin and wings scatter away from the crystal.

She was getting better at doing that, but progress remained glacial. And unpleasant. She rubbed chitin fingers into the edges of her eyelids, trying to soothe that persistent pressure and stall its inevitable build-up to a migraine.

It was an ability that was barely worth the pain and trouble in her opinion, considering that all it did was make her a range-limited version of Arach and her spiders.

There weren’t supposed to be any side effects like a headache, but she was an unfinished project when Ghoul and Holocaust got her out, at least according to her file. It was entirely likely that her body wasn’t quite at the stage where she should be doing what she was, but Ghoul needed her.

So even if it rankled her to live up to the name Tillenhall had given her, she could endure being ‘Hive Controller’ if it meant they could keep themselves in the loop. Informants were only as good as their paycheck told them to be.

The Struggler’s Mantle were the only ones whose info she could somewhat trust, but for the most part, it was just her and Ghoul gathering intel.

Mostly her.

It wasn’t like anyone else could do information gathering like her, not in their group. Holocaust was the exact opposite of ‘inconspicuous’ and currently half-comatose, and Ghoul himself was busy all twenty four hours of the day, every day.

So she would control as many bugs as there were in her range, and use their eyes and ears for their own purposes. She just hoped Ghoul knew what he was doing by telling her to lie to Ironheart. Whatever the hell he wanted a wolf for. She moved a swarm into her work room, keeping only a few fire beetles on Holo’s body, both to absorb her heat and to notify her if she started thrashing or waking up again.

Now, she had a ‘face to face’ meeting to attend.

She checked her belts and pouches, her grenades, field generators, her enchantments, the bodysleeve spider silk armor, one by one, and then waited for the swarm to settle around her into the most nightmarish image she could come up with. She took her mask off, the falsehood of her humanity, and set it on the table, letting plague and horror make a new one for her.

The Stranger.

A robed, hooded figure, whose face was but a mess of holes and writhing insects with two large black holes for eyes.

A persona that she both felt fondness and bitterness towards.

Gnats and flies and moths and cockroaches and bees and a million other things settled on her, around her, in the folds of her robes, atop her face. Writhing centipedes covered in spikes and glowing green with acid coiled around her fingers. Arrow wasps lined her mandibles.

She closed her eyes.

The swarm mixed and swirled, settling into a shape. The Stranger opened their eyes, fireflies lighting up on the bottom of the insect-formed pits. A million points of view expanded in her mind, each insect’s muddled senses, muffled sounds, thousands of them. She was going to have a horrid migraine later, but for now, The Stranger had business to attend to.

“Be good, Holo.” Mirena murmured under her new mask, and with a flare of mana, The Stranger teleported out of their base.

Ghoul finally reached the hole in the Dungeon’s wall, innocuous, mere stone and fading cobbles from a collapsed bridge remaining, and for one last time, leapt up with his hands, thirty, fifty feet, and grabbed a hold of the protruding brick.

It cracked a little, so he reinforced it with a brief flare of Tagma, and nimbly swung himself up. Seemingly abandoned, far out of the way of anything else, and without any way of reaching it beyond climbing or teleporting. It was little wonder they had difficulty finding her den.

Elizabeth’s pet had given him many boons, thankfully. After all, in the maw of a ghoul, flesh had memory, lifeforce, flesh had inklings of soul. And even if the fuzzy memories would fade all too quickly from his mind, Ghoul knew how to catalog such things in mediums less fickle.

He walked forward in the pitch black tunnel.

Reality dismissed his very existence as Tagma stripped him off the world’s mind, his passing leaving neither footsteps nor a brush of wind and breath. A hundred and one eyes swerved, rolling, jerking and racing around the quickly widening tunnel, opening to a vast cavern. Forgotten mining facilities and sparse gutted machinery were sprawled across a hundred feet forward on the path. Abandoned worker suits, helmets, lights, buckets and carts were sprinkled across the area.

Another eye rolled, glaring into the distance, at a construct of mana, an illusion.

He took the first half of a step.

Reaching into reality’s innards with ice cold fingers, Tagma’s thick, cloying essence oozed from his frozen heart. His foot and shoulder twisted as he squeezed himself through a fold in space, one footstep to carry him a mile, so long as he could see it. And he had more than enough eyes to keep everything in sight.

He took the second half of a step, and saw the illusion shift behind him from the sudden disturbance, the cavern’s entrance that he left behind now barely a blink of dim light in the distance. Here though, there was more than enough light. An illusion that hid from the outside, and lit up on the inside.

He idly wondered if there was a chance to persuade one of Elizabeth’s pets, whichever one made this, to do some work for him.

After this visit, he doubted it.

Thralls lined the outer walls of the colossal manor, their minds as empty as their eyes, their imprints on the human consciousness all but erased. An eye swerved up, past blacksteel spires and half-lit windows, tracing runes and a crafted, simple mind, artificial, hovering in the sky. A mana detection field that covered the estate, just beneath the illusion. Alarm circuits, mana conduits racing through the air, blind to human eyes.

Convenient, that he did not have mana. Only this bizarre energy he’d dubbed Tagma, a strange opposite to Qi, and a thing that nobody in the world seemed to know even existed.

He couldn’t complain much. Qi was so much louder than Tagma. So much harder to hide.

Another eye rolled up, to the right. The buzz and static of a radio connection struggling to connect, its waves whispering of curt words, spread across his sight, each different frequency another shade in a palette of colors that he could not even describe to himself, much less to others.

A forty foot tall gate of flower-and-thorn textured metal stood in his way, flanked by four thralls, both a work of art he didn’t care enough to appreciate. Another eye glanced at the electricity racing through each inch of the gates and fences, arcing beneath the surrounding metal’s surface. He stared at the double doors far beyond the entrance, past the gate.

Another step, a yank at space as he felt it fold beneath him, and he was in front of the wooden doors.

A kick to the lock sent them inside the manor in the form of a hundred broken pieces, and he allowed the world to notice him again, idly watching the mana signals start to flare along invisible, immaterial lines as they tried to warn their creators of an intruder.

He took a few steps, just enough to be inside the manor itself, and folded his hands behind his back, waiting. A hundred different gadgets, grenades, and artifacts were buried within his new buttoned coat, dimensional storage cuffs and time-freeze bombs, all manner of things that could render this place into rubble within less than ten seconds.

But he wasn’t here for that. For the moment, he appreciated the architecture. A long hallway, lined with metal pillars that had been shaped into flower and ocean wave patterns from the top to the bottom, a dark red carpet in the center of the open foyer, and a staircase that split into two, beneath which were iron doors.

He stared through them, waiting.

It took a mere ten seconds for the first monster to tumble through one such metal door, a hideous thing not unlike a gargantuan bat mixed with a ram and something vaguely muscled and scaled, fur lining most of the creature and scales covering the weak points. Its flat, triangle shaped nose flared as it smelled for him, only to give up when nothing entered its nose but broken wood and the vague scent of blood.

Two beady eyes locked onto him.

It shrieked and dug its wings’ claws into the floor to lunge forward, only for the mirror-smooth floor to resist its grip and send it forward in more of a lazy jump. Then it raised its wings off the floor, kicked with its legs, and managed to almost fly for about ten feet.

It was a slow, stupid thing. But it wasn’t Tillenhall’s. So that left one of his suspicions yet unanswered.

After another few seconds of the bat creature rushing at him, covering the massive distance of the entrance, it finally got close enough, and folded its wings in a rough imitation of arms, raising them skywards to smash him into the floor.

Tagma pooled at his left leg, into the ground, anchoring him.

He twisted his waist, idly watching the ton of muscle that was about to hit him, and with a twist of his torso and shoulders, kicked with his right.

With speed that most wouldn't see with the naked eye, his leg slammed through the leg-thick wings, through the left side of its chest and shoulder, the point of his foot digging through organs and flesh before tearing free in a sound not unlike an explosion. The creature didn’t get to vocalize its reaction, flying back thirty feet in a flailing spin as its gore splattered all over the second floor railing, the pillars, and the smooth marble floor, blood dripping down the metal flowers.

Its mangled corpse rolled to a stop, and did not rise again. He lowered his leg from the odd crane-like position, his arms still behind his back, and waited, watching. Two more like the one he’d just killed were bounding up from the dungeons, each accompanied by three things that looked like a mixture between a rat and an oversized monkey-dog, clambering all over the bat creatures as if they were riding it.

Then the person he came here to see teleported on the high point of the stairs opposite him.

Wreathed in a dozen different spells and effects, a scaled tail and two massive curling horns of obsidian-colored bone curled over her head like a crown while a skin tight halter top dress barely contained her curves, leaving little to nothing to the imagination, cutting off mid-thigh.

Her lips curled into an annoyed sneer. Had he caught her while she was at a social event?

“Elizabeth.” He greeted, and her tail lashed behind her, as immaculate as the rest of her. The monsters below halted, and immediately reversed direction, as did the hundred or so rushing thralls behind him, all of them turning around to calmly walk back to their stations.

“Ghoul.” She greeted back, annoyance fading into a searching look, her amber-slitted eyes scrutinizing him. The lack of violence between them likely confused her. Good. He wanted her unbalanced, off her tempo.

An eye not unlike a black pearl peered into her surface thoughts. She had assumed he was here to try and kill her because of her betrayal. She was correct on about half of that, but she didn’t need to know that yet. Above him, on the third floor’s balcony, he saw a gargantuan spider leg slowly curl over the railing.

“Arach. Did you receive my message?” He asked, and the leg stiffened, before retreating over the railing, and reappearing on the opposite end of the third floor, behind Elizabeth.

Then the leg was followed by seven more, each several feet long and pointy as spears, revealing a woman seemingly fused with a giant black widow spider, her body sunken into the spider to the waist in the middle of its back.

She was as pitch black as the spider half, and with her skin looking only a little softer than the spider’s chitin. Eight beady red eyes covered her head and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail as a black corset and the conservative top half of a dress covered her supposed modesty.

Neither of her two sets of eyes swayed from their dead stare on the floor as they slowly slid down, but he knew that that was simply because her little children were tucked into every nook and cranny of the manor, watching him with a hundred little eyes.

The spider gently touched down on the left side of the stairs leading to the first floor, a few feet behind Elizabeth, the joints of its legs reaching six feet tall on their own, and the woman on top of it almost ten. The string detached. Then she hurriedly skittered behind Elizabeth as if trying to hide her massive form behind her mother, her hands clasped over her stomach as she hunched forward.

She was scared.

Elizabeth stiffened a little, eyes narrowing. Her finger twitched. It seemed like her other children were coming as well, barring Miaro.

“She did. Are you here to collect?” She asked with a lidded look of warning.

“Yes. But not in the way you’re probably thinking. I’m here to talk about your betrayal, and the problems it has caused us, then negotiate. Also, unless you want them to die, wrangle your children when they get here. I won’t let them attack me just because they can’t hurt me.” He warned, and her eyes chilled as her bronze-scaled tail went very, very still.

He gestured to her office, on the third floor opposite the door.

“Shall we?”

She took a deep breath. Then visibly relaxed, even as she kept weaving a dozen different new spells to hold at her fingertips.

“We shall. Arach, go gather your siblings and children, and stay outside. Just in case.” She calmly spoke, her gaze making it no secret that she was telling him to be careful about trying anything in her office.

Not that he was planning to.

A dragon-blooded vampire was something he wasn’t even sure he could beat one on one, even if Elizabeth was young compared to the usual for her kind. They might be equally matched.

But she wasn’t sure of that, and he could always slaughter her children if she tried anything. In her mind, they would probably help her should he decide to try and kill her, when in truth, they’d just be a very, very good meal.

A spell activated to Elizabeth’s side, a rainbow-rimmed portal that made him wish that at least half of his eyes could squint. A lavish, dark wooden office contained within, varnished and polished to perfection by a blank-eyed thrall woman that hurried out of sight.

He wordlessly stepped forward.

“First. I want to ask why you took such a chance. It seems out of character for you.” Ghoul said from atop the side of the armchair she had presented him.

A very low one, designed to pull a small power play by making her guests look up at her. Of course, Ghoul just kicked it onto its side before sitting on its left arm and putting his filthy boots on her desk, legs spread and elbows on his knees, his hands steepled in front of him.

“Sometimes you have to shoot before you see the target.” She easily replied.

“And sometimes, you have to finish what you shouldn’t have started.” Ghoul fired back immediately, and she inwardly tensed just a little, before working a long sigh out of her nose as she supported her cheekbone with the back of her hand, doing her best to appear bored.

Which meant that she did look bored. She was quite good at acting in her not at all humble opinion.

“Ghoul, I understand attachment. I understand revenge. But you are not unreasonable, generally speaking. You probably understand that this was-”

“An opportunity. The time was ripe, the environment was perfect. You would complete several goals with one lucky swing of circumstance. You knew Holocaust would not care about collateral damage. You knew you could abuse her fear of capture by trying to set her to sleep for maximum results. You knew you could use the distraction to open the way for Ironheart’s rats to decipher the portal locks the Kingdom uses, at least in the short time they had before the portals started melting and exploding. You knew tensions were just enough to provoke this war you’ve been after this entire time. You would get your war, you would give Ironheart an opportunity and claim a favor for yourself.”

He tilted his head, then straightened it, whatever he’d heard quickly losing his interest.

“You also knew that me and my own, we had no interest in participating in this war, so you wished to see if you could provoke us into fighting the kingdom by making us public enemy number one. A very smart move all around. But if one single thing went wrong, you would show your hand with little to nothing to show for it. I suppose I respect that gamble of fate.” Ghoul said, as calm as always, sounding more like he was talking about the weather than a potential war between themselves.

She nodded with a bored look on her face, not showing her alarm at just how much the bastard knew.

How? Did he have a genuine [Clairvoyant] in his pocket? The kingdom had one on commission terms, and even they could barely afford her services for all but the most important of things.

None of what he knew was ever mentioned besides face-to-face and mana-channel communication crystals. Which were secure enough to make even herself struggle a little in intercepting messages.

“I am indeed not. And I know you care not for pleasantries, so I’ll be blunt. Why did you come here, knowing all this? I was expecting you to try and kill us. Judging by the fact my boy is still alive, albeit barely, you’re more amicable to diplomacy than you usually are with those you might see as enemies.” She offered, languidly uncrossing her legs and crossing them once more in the opposite direction, leaning back in her chair and puffing her chest out a little.

Force of habit, really. She knew he wouldn’t look. She was never sure where his gaze was directed and trying to use her magical senses to figure out just gave her a headache, but she knew it wasn’t on her figure.

“Salvaging this is possible, despite my desire to be… rash.” He said, not moving an inch as he spoke.

“I’ll be blunt too, I suppose. I don’t particularly want to fight you, not until Tillenhall and everything that house owns is ashes and dust. And your stunt has cost us a lot. So you will repay us. Unless you’d rather we focus on you first. I have three simple demands in exchange.” He started, and she raised a single eyebrow at him, curled like a cat’s back before a strike. “Before that, explain your end goal to me. Your condition for all this to have been worth it, a victory.”

Her second eyebrow joined the first.

“That’s an awful lot to ask for with nothing but vague platitudes to offer me in return.” She hummed, glancing down to observe her nails.

“I will offer you nothing but a guarantee that you will not find your children hanging off their entrails from a white-feathered banner.” He dryly shot back, and she slowly turned still, her serpentine eyes boring into the numbers scrawled onto metal, where eyes should be, slowly narrowing.

Threatening to drag The Dove down here was unwise for even himself, but he could evade them much more easily than she and her own could. Somehow.

“Bold threat to make in my own home, corpse.” She icily intoned.

“It is.” He simply stated, and she settled her unamused, slit-eyed glare onto his faceplate.

She might be able to take him in a fight. But it would never be a certainty of which of them would win. It would never be a certainty how many of her children and creations he’d kill before dying either, so even if she won, there was a good chance she might not have really won.

And she knew full well he meant every word.

“The goal is to instill House Kervile upon the throne, and become one of their keys to power. The spear, shield, and cloak and dagger so to speak. The second key is Fata Morgana and his Crow's church on the religious front, and the third would be the East Xhilatni Interseas Trade company, which would take over as the main trading force. That would be a ‘victory’.” She admitted, feeling like she’d just been forced into swallowing something sour.

He tilted his head a bit, then nodded.

“House Kervile is beloved by the common people, especially with the Crow church’s backing. But I don’t believe you. You don’t settle for seconds. You would either be using House Kervile as a proxy to lead the country from the shadows, or hold something over them to make sure they only do as you say. Free of the Six-Winged Dove’s pressure and free to access all you could need to strengthen your covenant, without being in public scrutiny or bound to much duty beyond replacing The Guard, essentially. A good plan. One I’m not even disapproving of. I’d like The Dove to have its wings clipped as much as anyone else. Assuming you achieve your goals, somehow. And of your other… ‘allies’?” He asked, in a tone that made it abundantly clear he knew they were no such thing, not really.

“We’d get rid of them, of course. Every crime lord, gang, and general undesirable. The Syndicate the Dungeon Barons have formed is a shoddy council formed by necessity and haste. It’ll crumble into infighting the moment we win, and I’ll just mop them up one by one before they realize they’re a dying breed.” She replied with an easy shrug, hiding how much she wished to remove Ghoul’s head from his shoulders.

She didn’t like being questioned like this. But she had betrayed him by making Arach trail Holocaust and prodding her into kicking down the first domino, and judging from his decades-long crusade to destroy Tillenhall, he was unlikely to ever forget it, so she could do the minimum and try to smooth things over a little. He didn’t seem inclined to be her mortal enemy, but this was a game of interests. She couldn’t be sure.

“I see. My demands are simple, and we’ll seal them in a magical contract, of course. First, unless you want me and whoever follows me to be your enemies until the end of time, you will give us every tiny shred of information you have on House Tillenhall, and you will not ever, for any reason, interfere with what we do with that information. And if we fight alongside you against the upper city, you will even actively assist us in destroying Tillenhall, completely and utterly. And nothing, absolutely nothing that they have worked on, researched, or accomplished, will ever see the light of day. They will be scrubbed off the history books.” He proposed, and she hummed, staring into space as she considered it.

She was planning on getting rid of House Tillenhall anyway. They were too prideful, too secretive, and too powerful for her or any of her genuine allies to be comfortable with the idea of their prolonged existence. Sure, she would lose something of great value, especially considering the possibilities of House Tillenhall’s magic-tech mixed bioengineering and her own monsters created from witchcraft, but was it worth it to keep a viper around just because one wished to milk its venom?

In her mind she’d plotted for it to be a fast, decisive strike that would ruin them before they could get their bearings, but she’d take what she could get. Then she could use her considerably more weighty resources to get rid of Seven-Six-Two, should it be needed.

Because she had the feeling Ghoul would actively work against her until the end of time the moment Tillenhall was done for. The man’s entire drive and purpose seemed laser-focused on vengeance, and she’d slighted him quite heavily by double-crossing him.

It was necessary, and she’d do it again if it meant getting the same wonderful results it had reaped for her, but that was the obvious negative to it all. And if Ghoul and his team did get involved, having the chance to essentially buy Ghoul’s combat power, even if only once, all in exchange for something that aligned with her goals regardless, like helping them mop up every last Tillenhall associate?

It wasn’t a steal of a deal, due to all the trouble it would cause her, but it was surprisingly even-handed.

After another short moment of thinking, she nodded.

“Accepted.”

“Good. Second demand. I want your arm, and I want Arach’s legs. Four of them. If not, four pints of blood would work. I won’t reveal details, but your opportunistic backstab did a number on Holocaust. So, I have to pick up the slack a little. I’m sure you understand.” He said mildly.

She paused, her eyes slowly narrowing as she tapped her nails on the desk.

The way he worded it made it sound like it would be quite a power-up to consume parts of her. And he would be right, if what little she understood of his absurd nature was right.

Additionally, she was not an idiot. She was a vampire, they made blood magic, and they were thus equally capable of making sure it couldn’t be used against them. She also knew that they were magical creatures, so any attempt at biochemistry would be quite wasted on them, and nobody capable of it existed outside House Tillenhall.

People that Ghoul would rather skin alive than talk to.

So there was little to no risk to give into this demand.

The thought of her child hobbling around the manor with half her legs made her inwardly seethe with fury, but she could accept it. They’d grow back in a few days, and amputations were painless with Percilicus around, bless his blood-encrusted leaves.

“Would this demand satisfy that promise of ‘drinking her blood’ that you made?” She asked, and he nodded.

“Water under the bridge, so on and so forth.”

“Accepted.”

“Good. Third demand. There will be some people and a beast that will likely come to your attention soon for various reasons. I’ll be helping them along, but they must be independent of us. Me, and you. You will help them from the shadows as well, however. Try to curry favor, communicate with them if you please, but do not try to ingratiate them to you, nor try to bring them into your fold, and of course, if they ask, do not let them into your fold. In less formal words, keep your claws off of them, but help them along. All within reason, of course. I do not expect you to show yourself to the world just to keep strangers alive. But a nudge and a prod in the right places can make a lot of difference. Resources and connections, especially.” He said, and as if sensing her apprehension somehow, shrugged and continued.

“This might sound vague, but the contract demon will deal with any details and technicalities, of course. On both ends, until-”

“I know how a contract demon works, corpse.” She spoke, her voice terse, and he conceded the point with a tilt of his head.

“One change. You will help us deal with the Kingdom and whoever else it might drag down here as muscle, within reason that will be specified, in exchange for our help in extinguishing Tillenhall. No if’s about it. Your wording there seemed rather evasive.”

“Not good enough. I’ll happily lend you Holocaust for a few fights if you please, proportional to how much you help us, but me and my other members have too much on our plates that is too important. I’m only ever going to come fight the Kingdom if you personally come down and help me eviscerate Tillenhall. Tit for tat. As for Holocaust, if you do take her for a couple fights, you will give us notice beforehand to see if she can make it."

He shifted a little, as if stiff, making her wonder if he was acting more human on purpose for some reason.

"I will not send her into a desperate fight without intel or anything like that. I trust you understand that she’ll be retreating the moment things start looking bad, and that she is very hard to boss around. And if you try anything on her, no matter what it is or how you do it, I’ll make sure to give Tillenhall a break as I make sure everything and everyone you know dies screaming before coming for you.” He finished, his voice still as average and calm as ever.

Her lips curled into a mocking sneer as her brows raised.

“Do not presume you can do that much. But.” She emphasized as she dragged her spells back under her skin and let her mana thicken that paper-thin barrier that stopped them from exploding. “That is fair enough. Are we in agreement?”

“We are.”

He took a little box out of his pocket, and with a brief press of a button and a tilt of his head, a rectangular metal chest appeared over her desk and dropped on it with a heavy thud.

Trusting him not to be so stupid as to attack her immediately after hashing out a deal, and recognizing some of those runes on the box, she stayed her hand despite the lack of consent from her end.

A mechanism unlatched, and the chest opened and unfolded like a mechanical jewelry box with a hundred tiny little cabinets, each unfolding to show something different.

She could guess the nature of the objects, considering what he was here to do. The dry eye of a man who died screaming, a lock of children's hair, broken bottle pieces with flecks of blood on them, a roll of rusted chains, two hearts, each belonging to souls once bound by oaths, and a dozen more things as odd as the rest.

She scoffed as she leaned back in her chair.

“You want to summon the contract demon here? Now?” She asked, and he nodded as he twisted to the side and finally took his boots off the edge of her desk before standing upright, surveilling the floor for a good open spot.

“I’m a busy man, Lisa. More so even since you pulled your stunt.”

She felt her eye twitch.

“Do not. Call me that.” She carefully intoned as she got up, inwardly seething over that stupid nickname.

“Our friendship ended when you decided that chasing revenge was more important than helping me as I lay dying on the floor with a sword in my chest.” She forced out, and he turned his head towards her, just an inch, only to say the absolute last thing she ever expected him to say.

“I am sorry about that. Just as I know that inwardly, you are sorry about what you pulled on me and Holocaust. But we both know that were we to go back, we would do the exact same thing again. What we did, what we must do, and what we will do will not change. So let’s not get into that discussion, and just get this over with.” He finished, and she just stood there for a moment, blankly staring at him.

How certainly he said that, that she was sorry about what she had done, that took her entirely by surprise.

How did he know that?

Was he a psychic? She was warded against that, everything within a thousand feet of her dungeons were. He didn’t even have mana, he had no soul.

She narrowed her eyes in suspicion.

“Why do you think I’m sorry?” She asked, her impression of incredulity flawless.

And just like usual, it felt like he saw right through it. Somehow.

Fucking bastard.

He didn’t smile so much as bare his shark-teeth at her, a sight that made her horns itch to ram into his face.

“I know you and yours, Lisa. Now, if you could get a thrall you don’t mind losing? ” He said, and pulled his lips back down, reaching for the hearts, before turning around and kicking aside a Peranian rug that she quite liked.

Cleaning her office after this entire debacle was done would take her thralls ages…

She sent an order to a few of them, as well as a short list of items they’d need that Ghoul hadn’t brought. Then she mutely picked up every single ingredient with her mana, floating them around and skillfully setting them into a perfect four-tiered circle on the floor beside her desk.

Ghoul stared for a second, before mutely offering the hearts to her, which she spitefully took last.

Then they waited.

-

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