Though Ástríðr loved and looked up to her mother, there had always been a distance there, a boundary she dared not cross, not because she thought she would be begrudged the chance to become closer to the woman who gave birth to her, but rather because the former dancer, laying claim to citizenship in a nation long since fallen—the last citizen of Lycoris besides Tsuyu having perished half a century before the beginning of the Great War—was in many ways larger than life. There was a quiet power that radiated off of her, capable of suffocating a room given time, a sense of inevitability to her existence that made her difficult to approach even if she had literally given birth to the one seeking her counsel.

As a result, when Ástríðr wondered one day, rather idly, what love was, what it was like, it was not to her mother she went, but to her father, who, despite being chronologically far older than his physical appearance would suggest, was immensely more approachable than the head of their family unit. Tandem was somewhat famously inarticulate concerning matters of the heart, but this led to her getting some of the most succinct, simple, complicated, and at the time, frustrating, advice anyone had ever offered.

“Love is hard to explain, and it’s different for everyone. But for me, kid…there was my life before I met Tsuyu, and my life after I met Tsuyu. I think that’s the best way I can put it.”

It was frustrating at the time, because the idea that meeting a single person could so thoroughly recontextualise the world around her was all but anathema to Ástríðr’s worldview at the time, and had continued to be thoroughly anathema to her…

Until four days ago, when Katsumi had wandered into her life.

Now she understood. And on a similarly deep and intrinsic level, she knew now that if she lived a thousand thousand years, she would never be able to find words that better described how she was feeling right then than the words he had used himself.

There was a portrait of passion painted on the pallour of Katsumi’s skin. Blotches of red patched their way across her limbs and midsection, bruises just beginning to form, and Ástríðr would have felt just the slightest bit uncomfortable if each and every one did not bring to the forefront of her mind the vivid memory of how her love had writhed and gasped and moaned at every point before she had finally collapsed from exhaustion.

Ástríðr’s hunger for her was not sated, but it had subsided for a moment, simmering instead of boiling over, and it was such that the elf believed that she could ravish her love without interruption from that moment until the end of time, and never successfully satisfy that ravenous craving that roared awake at the touch of alabaster skin and scale, at the brushing of silky raven locks through her fingers, at the piercing of saturnine smoulders and the dull throb in her abdomen at tantalysing, almost bacchanalian whimpers slipping free of the temptation rendered into flesh that was Katsumi’s mouth, all of which seemed, at times, to be unconsciously committed to quietly, passively urging Ástríðr on to ever greater veneries.

Now Katsumi’s tail slithered about Ástríðr’s thigh in the girl’s slumber, and though the sensation of the prehensile scaled appendage moving against her of its own accord denied Ástríðr the ability to cool her racing blood enough to finally find rest herself, she could not say with any degree of honesty that she would rather have it any other way.

Absently, the elf’s hands trailed across the other’s body, one hand playing with her hair and stroking the apparently very sensitive hard horns that served in place of ears, the other dancing down the softly heaving abdomen, flesh moving over shockingly little muscle with each inhale and exhale. Each spot that made Katsumi’s lithe, unconscious form shiver and shudder, Ástríðr made sure to note and memorise to find later. Her substantial sexual prowess served well enough to allow her to brute force her way through every other sexual encounter she had had, but not this one; no matter how well she did, how wondrous and fantastical the reactions she managed to tease out of the drahn’s inexperienced yet promising body, there was a secondary hunger, adjacent to the first, which desired, coveted really, those heights of sensation that lay far above and beyond anything the girl had known to be possible. The very thought of the sorts of slatternly faces she might be able to cause her beloved to make was enough to stoke the elf’s fires to astonishing, almost empyrean rebirth.

Just then, Katsumi shifted in her sleep and pressed herself closer to Ástríðr, fully flush and beginning to snuggle into her larger form. Firmly nestled between the halves of the girl’s surprisingly plush rear as she was now, Ástríðr froze as parts of her throbbed eagerly. It seemed on some level, her body was not content with allowing the girl to rest. It took a few moments for Ástríðr’s mind to calm from its blank state, and while she was still mulling over how uncomfortable even considering taking that liberty made her, which was strange enough for her, her lover turned over and fixed Ástríðr with a bleary, lidded violet gaze. “You’re very insistent.”

“You’re very desirable,” Ástríðr shot back on reflex, shocked to realise that perhaps for the first time in her life, she truly meant it. “Go back to sleep, love.”

Katsumi, flushed in a rose hue and smiling indulgently, not conscious enough to affect her normal level of mortification, turned fully over and nestled Ástríðr in between her thighs. “I was a maiden when first you bedded me, not an idiot. If I was uncomfortable with the idea of you taking your pleasure on me while I sleep, I would not have slept the night.”

“Katsumi…”

The girl’s arms wrapped sleepily around Ástríðr’s broad back. “Come to me, my love. Take succour in me and find rest. You need it just like the rest of us. I give you leave, carte blanche, whenever you should find yourself in need of it.”

Ástríðr saw red and rose, those words filtering through her mind; Katsumi’s lips finding her own, moving lazily and with a drowsy languor, was the shattering of the final seal of her self-control. She moved to engulf her lover, and saw Paradise as the girl’s folds parted to welcome her.

And so that was how Ástríðr at last managed to subside into a trance, nestled within her lover’s wet warmth, nimble, slender digits dancing absently across her scarred skin and lulling her to sweet respite.

At last, all was well.

Midday was fast approaching when the summons came. Yuriya, ever-diligent, had risen with the dawn and brought Kagura out to the small-to-moderate-sized lot behind the bordello, seeing to the vii’s training until the younger woman was too worn and exhausted to hold her sword steady, her hands trembling despite her will, her skin slick with perspiration, at which point, the Sword Saint gave her lover leave to bathe; and it was in such a position that Ástríðr found her, sitting at one of the tavern tables and drinking as much water as Tandem could get into her hands, freshly-bathed for certain, but evoking the image of a half-drowned dog from her shivering.

Yuriya, ineffable and indomitable as always, leaned upright against a far corner of the room, toying with a Far Eastern dagger, a tantō, Ástríðr recalled. Her aunt had always been intrigued by the weaponry native to lands and peoples half a world away, and this was no different; her weapon of choice, a massive sword called an ōdachi by the name of Onimaru that was rumoured to be not only one of the five greatest blades in the Far East, but also the most malevolent, was propped up in its lacquered foreign scabbard against the wall next to her.

“Kyomi is still abed, I presume?”

Ástríðr only just managed to suppress a flinch; for the life of her, she could never grow accustomed to how quietly her mother could move when she wished to do so.

To his credit, Father was not so affected. “She had a bit of a night, and yesterday was hardly spent idle. I thought it would be fine if she took a few hours’ extra rest; the potions will get her out and about, but they will not prevent the damage incurred from straining her body beyond what she’s used to, and I thought we’d rather have her healthy.”

“Mm,” Mother intoned, and Ástríðr could see her nodding in her mind’s eye. With a whisper of expensive silk, the other woman glided past her and down into the tavern proper. “You made the correct decision. And Ástríðr, dear, I trust your night was…enlightening?”

Ástríðr had gone through a phase when she was younger of hating that knowing glint of mischief in the jade of her mother’s eyes that showed whenever a plot or scheme of hers bore fruit, but that exact glint was so quintessentially Tsuyu that she eventually came to the conclusion that it was not worth the energy holding that much enmity towards such an inevitability demanded. Not to mention, this time Mother had a right to be so quietly gleeful. Ástríðr sighed and nodded, a faint smile on her face that broadened unconsciously as she recalled Katsumi’s beautifully debauched body in soft repose. “Very much so…”

Mother’s smile at that moment was so stereotypically matronly that it was unlike her, and it threw Ástríðr just a bit off-balance. “I’m glad to hear it. And from that I am led to believe that you left our newcomer intact, which, to coin an old phrase, ‘sparks joy.’”

Tsuyu turned away from her, and as she moved, Ástríðr could see the quiet fatigue in her gait, a crack forming in her armour of preternatural elegance. As the older woman reached the bar, the words bubbled free of the elf’s mouth. “How was last night after we retired? I apologise for leaving you so suddenly short-staffed…”

Mother had her kiseru in between her lips, snapping her fingers to call forth the spark of magic needed to set the kizami alight. She made a dismissive gesture with her free hand once the spark caught, and inhaled the smoke before letting it pass from her lungs, slow and steady. “Think nothing of it. It was my intent to present a situation that would allow you two to find your nerve and finally resolve all the lingering tension in the air the past three days. And besides, I think we both know your contrition is only skin-deep~.”

The light of devious innuendo and good-natured mockery shone in Tsuyu’s eyes, and Ástríðr could only sigh. This was the mother she knew. “You’re correct.”

Tsuyu snorted. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”

A knock sounded at the door, and the already quiet room fell into a tense silence. Mother wheeled around and shot off rapid-fire hand signals to her husband and her sister-in-law as she approached the door. Tandem moved quickly to the back, to arm himself and remain in hiding should an assailant be attempting to gain entry, in the unlikely event that Aunt Yuriya alone, who was herself surreptitiously moving closer to her blade, could not stop them.

“Hello?! I come bearing a message from our honoured prince and the sovereign of our beloved city, Her Grace Mercédès Charlotte Lucerne!”

There was a collective exhale. Estinien’s voice was familiar, and they knew that no threat stood at their door; Dame Rienna’s squire was more likely to come for lessons on traditional Lycorian flower arrangement from Madam Tsuyu than to have the idea of harming any of them so much as cross his mind. He was airy, flighty, and more than a little timid, but he was also dependable, trustworthy, and loyal.

Mother opened the door wide, greeting the rail-thin boy with a plum-hued smile. “Well then, this is a surprise! Your master was here just last night, but never gave us cause to expect you. Do come in and make yourself comfortable, Estinien. It’s been too long. How can we help you? Tutelage? Succour? Sustenance?”

“None, Lady Tsuyu, as I do not come to fraternise, but rather I am here on official business, I’m afraid,” Estinien replied smoothly. He handed forth a sealed scroll. “A missive of official summons, for one Lady Katsumi of the Fallen Rain. I was told I would find her here.”

The relief that had suffused Ástríðr flashed to ice in her veins. What business did Sonja’s paramour have with her beloved…?

The ice blazed to sudden searing heat.

An odd sound, like the death-cries of a waterfowl after its neck had been wrung, reached Ástríðr’s ears the next moment, and then she felt the creaking shudder of a rigid structure on the verge of shattering, somewhere between stone and wood. Faintly, she could feel things on her hands, with no more purchase or strength than the swatting paw of a common house-cat. And then she returned to herself fully.

She knew this state. She had tried to avoid entering it the previous night, in fact; though she could not remember a time before she met Katsumi that she was not angry, there were times in her life when that very same tempestuous, volatile ire reached new and unspoken heights. In those times, the rage ground against itself like a blade on a whetstone, until finally it honed itself to an edge keen as a razor; in that moment, she entered into a state of fury so absolute that it was all but indistinguishable from monastic peace. A state of hyper-awareness, equal and opposite to the state of contemplation she had sometimes heard called ‘zen,’ was what awaited her in those moments, signalling the complete repurposing of all of her mental faculties, bent in their entirety towards slaughter. Of course, in those times that she could remember that feeling, she also recalled that it took a little bit to work up to that altered state of mind, and over time, she had learned to identify the signs and work towards curtailing them with all haste.

And yet since the first time she bedded Katsumi, this was the third time that that switch occurred without buildup or warning; instantaneously, almost, she was that unstoppable slayer that exemplified what she became when that feeling took hold.

Before she knew it, she was the Storm.

And now, as she stood there, fully across the room before anyone around her was able to react, her fingers wrapped around Estinien’s pale throat in an iron grip, closing a little more with every failed and aborted breath he took, she at once knew both that she should be very worried about this phenomenon and that she did not care one whit what she should do. This miserable scum had acted on orders that would have, in all likelihood, brought harm to Katsumi, and that simply would not do.

“It’s interesting, you know, Estinien, how many different and unique colours a person’s face can turn when they are deprived of air. I’d imagine that, were I given to portraiture, such distinct and vivid hues would be nothing short of inspirational,” Ástríðr mused conversationally. “One wonders how many more you might shift into given time and sufficient…prodding, shall we say?”

The squire wheezed pitifully, his fingers scrambling with a dying man’s frantic strength to pry her fingers from his neck.

She made a wordless sound of admonition. “It seems that either our good knight-captain has been remiss in her tutelage, or you have been remiss in your attention to your studies. I mean, really, what else could possibly explain how your hands are currently prying at your throat, the place where any experienced combatant will gladly tell you until they themselves are blue in the face that your hands are of the least use in situations like these? Though, of course, I suppose it’s ultimately academic; there is no means that you could possibly bring to bear as you are at the moment that will save your life.”

“Can’t…breathe…!”

“Oh, hush now. No need to be so boorishly dramatic. At this rate, your neck will shatter and be reduced to so much bone-dust long before you truly manage to suffocate to death,” Ástríðr chided. “I wonder…if I apply enough force, when your neck snaps, will the broken parts of your spine be launched in different directions? I’d imagine it’d be quite diverting to watch, seeing the remains of your neck pop up through your mouth while the rest of your spine shoots out of your arse… Shall we put it to the test, then, Estinien, you and I? I must admit, I am greatly looking forward to the results, one way or the other…”

A hand settled onto her shoulder, and that single touch sapped the murder from her veins. A calm, true calm, settled upon Ástríðr with all the swift force of a gale. As she turned her head to regard the person who had touched her in this state, she knew even before she caught sight of her that it was Katsumi. Anyone else would have lost an arm at best.

True to her instincts, there she was, half-dressed but resplendent. Her violet eyes held neither judgement nor fear; understanding and a plea were what the elf saw in her love’s gaze. She acquiesced, releasing the squire and letting him fall to the ground in a heap, scrabbling at his collar and gasping for air to fill his starved lungs.

“Thank you,” Katsumi whispered to her, reaching in to kiss her cheek, and finding herself stymied when her horns prodded into the elf’s face with her lips still several centimetres from their target. The girl made to retreat, and Ástríðr could feel the mortification rolling off of her. When she paid attention, her love was quite transparent to her, she mused; she turned her head before Katsumi could truly begin her retreat, and struck with serpentine celerity, catching the drahn’s faded-bruise lips with her own. Sparks flew in her veins, and in that moment, she knew that the only things she found more enervating than that contact also revolved around Katsumi.

When she broke the kiss, the girl’s eyes were glazed, her stare vacant and addled. Within moments, however, she returned to herself with an almost violent flush, shaking her head as though deterring insects. The amethyst orbs fixated on Estinien, finding focus in his harried form after a few beats with an avian glint.

“I hear tell that I’ve been summoned by the prince. Is that true?” Estinien made to speak, but a sharp look from Katsumi killed the words in his mangled throat. “I have no time for your likely unintelligible croaking. Nod your head or shake it. There is no need to speak.”

The squire nodded.

Katsumi bobbed her head in curt affirmation. “Thank you. Then I shall respond to her address, indirect though it may have been. You may tell the prince she may expect me anon. You are not to breathe a word to anyone on the subject of what transpired here. Is that clear?”

The squire opened his mouth again, but Katsumi huffed. “One word from you and I allow Ástríðr to put her theory to the test, is that clear? Kami, I see why you are still a squire if you exhibit this much difficulty in remembering and following such simple instructions. You may nod, or you may shake your head. No more.”

The squire nodded again, before succumbing to a hideous fit of coughing that racked his body.

Katsumi smiled, but in it he found no mirth, only knives. “Very good. Now, I sincerely doubt this was your only task for the day, so you’d best be about your duties, my dear esquire. Run along now, boy. I’d hate to be responsible for anything untoward to come your way. I trust I am understood?”

Estinien looked as though he was about to speak, but another cough ripped its way out of his chest, and he nodded weakly.

“Well look at that. You can be taught. There may yet be hope for you,” Katsumi mused. Then she looked at him sharply. “Why are you still here? Shove off.”

Estinien nodded frantically and stood, bowed, and all but ran out of the door.

“You’re not going.”

Katsumi gave a shoulder-heaving sigh as she stood. Her trousers were on, her chest bound once again, and Ástríðr, having lived wearing brassieres for most of her life and even having to get them custom-made as her breasts continued to swell in spite of her musculature, could not fathom how the girl had managed such an intricate binding in such a short period of time, given that she had been sound asleep in the elf’s bed less than a quarter of an hour ago. “I am going, and unfortunately, I do not believe we have much of a choice. I want…I need to learn more about this woman who calls herself my sister, and how much both she and the prince know. About me, about the Apostles, about this entire situation. And even if that wasn’t the case, the prince is someone who gets what she wants, one way or another. I have no doubt that if the information she has that I lack failed to act as a sufficient lure, the next time she sends someone, it won’t be a request. She wants something from me, I think, and I have to find out what it is. And besides…she doesn’t want to hurt me. I’m not certain how, but I’m sure of it, that she would do anything in her power to ensure I do not come to harm, at least until I am no longer useful to her. If pressed, I’d call it instinct.”

Ástríðr glared, crossing her arms beneath her substantial bust. “Fine. But you’re not going alone.”

“I’ll go with her.”

Her head whipped around, Katsumi’s proximity all that stopped her from charging over there and tearing the limbs off of her sister. The image of the gaze Sonja had given Katsumi the previous night…the very memory of it boiled Ástríðr’s blood. “Is there any particular reason you’ve decided to forfeit your life today, dear sister?”

Sonja looked for all the world to be profoundly unaffected. “I could ask the same question of you, dear sister. You forget yourself. Access to the Coronet is strictly regulated, and the Silvern Basilica, together with its grounds, are invitation-only. As I am the only one here with a standing invitation, I am the only one the Crown Knights will allow to escort her.”

“Burn the Crown Knights. If they try and stop me, I’ll be able to climb the walls with a mountain made from their corpses!”

“True, sister, you could take the Crown Knights in a fight. All of them at once, even, and come out victorious to boot. I’ll grant you that.” Sonja’s smile narrowed, and something ever so slightly cruel lurked in her gaze. “But could you guarantee her survival in the process, I wonder? Can you guarantee that you could kill them all and keep her safe at the same time? You’re good, sister. Far better than me, even. But you’re not that good.”

Ástríðr saw red, but Katsumi grabbed her shoulder, and once again, despite the obvious discrepancy in physical strength, the restraint might as well have been iron for how thoroughly it shackled her impulse to lunge for her sister’s throat.

“She’s right, you know,” Yuriya said at last, her tone laconic and edged with flippancy. “You’re not that good. Like it or not, if you want the stray you’ve taken to bed to remain breathing and intact, Sonja’s your best option. Your only option, in fact, unless you’re willing to let her go alone and take her chances with the route that she doesn’t know, through a city she’s only lived in for, what, four days? Without a map?”

“You’ve made your point,” Ástríðr bit out, her jaw working in impotent fury. “But Sonja, if there’s so much as a scratch on her when you bring her back to me—which you will—I don’t care how she got it or who gave it to her. The bonds of our sorority will not save you from me. Am. I. Clear?”

“…Translucent.”

The Rouge went on for quite a while.

Intellectually, Katsumi knew this. It had taken her quite a while to make it to the Drunken Whore that first night, as the shadows lengthened and the sun faded into memory. Yet, since then, the company had always been at least somewhat pleasant, so it never quite hit home for her just how large Maelnaulde was. To walk from one end of the city to the other could easily take a day and a half, which was, to Katsumi’s mind, at least, an absurd size for any sort of settlement. And the Rouge was far and away the largest part of the city.

Sonja was not pleasant company in the slightest. The silence between them was tense and drew out like a blade. The paladin had her sword and her shield, explaining through terse and clipped speech, as though acknowledging her as a living being worthy of regard was a great ordeal, that she was known to the Crown Knights and was therefore allowed to bear arms in their presence, a privilege that she, as a newcomer, lacked.

And so, naked as she felt without it—and not in a good way—she left Deatheater behind.

“So tell me, drahn. How would you describe your relationship with my sister?”

Sonja’s question snapped Katsumi’s attention to her, and after the moment it took to register the query passed, her face felt aflame, and a swell of emotion surged forth, filling her to bursting with refulgence. A small sound, more akin to the utterance of a small rodent than a sentient creature, escaped her throat; she coughed and averted her gaze forcibly to cover her slip. Her mind swam and suddenly her clothes felt too tight, too constricting on her, chafing against suddenly-sensitive flesh, causing her to squirm ever so slightly as she searched frantically for the least-incriminating phrasing she could employ to describe her feelings on the subject to the elf who stood before her. “Well…Ástríðr and I… I suppose you could say we’re…entangled?”

Sonja’s shoulders tensed, and Katsumi got the distinct impression that what she had said was the wrong answer. She tried again.

“N-not that I find being bound to her particularly restrictive, you understand, and I would be lying if I were to say it was at all unpleasant… In fact, certain aspects of our entanglement could be described as…” Flashes of the passion of the previous night raced through her mind, and she felt as though she was on the verge of spontaneous combustion. She finished with a soft, “…rather uniquely pleasant…”

“And if you encountered a threat to her? Let us suppose, for example, that your ‘entanglement,’ as you so delicately put it, puts my sister at risk. How would you handle such a situation?” Sonja replied.

Katsumi began to open her mouth, but her breath stalled on her tongue. As recently as the previous day, the answer would have been apparent: she would have removed herself from the situation, one way or another. It was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

And yet…

And yet the way Ástríðr had looked at her, it had been as though she was the only girl in the world—not in the poetic sense she had read in sappy romance novels and the bodice rippers she pretended not to like, referring to how her lover’s attention was focused on Katsumi to the exclusion of all else, but rather, in an almost literal context, as though without Katsumi in it, Ástríðr genuinely believed that all the world had to offer was solitude. She remembered, then, how Ástríðr had clung to her in the night; even as her fingers left trails of fire down the porcelain of Katsumi’s flesh, Ástríðr clutched her as though thinking she was a falsehood that would be carried away on a night wind, a shade of a fevered dream that would slip her grasp upon awakening.

No one had ever looked at her like that.

No one had ever held her like that.

Hel, she could not remember anyone ever holding her, period. Not Haruhi, and certainly not anyone before or after her.

And when she considered the actual course of action, not in abstract, but in tactile, practical terms…

“…Intellectually, I understand that the best course of action to pursue would be to remove myself from the equation. If I pose a threat, I should do all in my power to nullify that threat, as it would be…the right and moral thing to do. And yet…the very idea of it makes me ill. Even now, I speak around the bile in my gorge at the thought,” Katsumi replied with complete candour, supposing that Sonja was merely concerned but well-meaning. “Even if it is true that leaving would be the selfless and righteous thing to do, I do not possess the strength to so much as contemplate it, let alone perform it. If I am honest and candid with myself, I will only be able to bring myself to leave her side if she explicitly orders me away, at which point I shall be left with no choice but to confront a fate I fear worse than my own slow and withering end.”

Sonja nodded, her posture and what little Katsumi could see of her expression a mask of careful neutrality. Then, abruptly, and almost without warning, Sonja drew her armaments and whirled around to face Katsumi in one swift motion, raising her spatha to the level of the much shorter drahn’s throat. “…Sonja?”

“We shared a womb, my sister and I. Did you know that?” Sonja began. “Ever since we were born, we have been bound, our fates intertwined to the point of defying all extrication. My sister is the strength of the mountain, and through her veins runs the fury of the storm that rages on its summit. I, in contrast, am unyielding as the earth. Since we were children, it has ever been my solemn duty to defend her from all those who would do her harm, whether by intent or incompetence or simple happenstance. It is that duty that led to the paladin’s powers being the gift granted by the Crystal. I exist to defend those I hold dear, do you understand?

“Even now merely giving you this much galls me, agitates the hate that roils in my gut. A vulgar thing such as you deserves no explanation, merely culling. I tell this to you now despite that, in acknowledgement of the love my sister bears you, however misguided it might be. Your very existence is a poison, a blight, a pestilent malefaction, and given time, you will bring sorrow and destruction to all that you touch, all that you draw in with your honeyed words and foul form, however fair it may seem. You will ruin her. And for that, I cannot countenance your continued existence.

“I had hoped that even now, in your final moments, you would have the decency to offer words of scorn that my sister might purge your vile infection from her heart. But I suppose I was a fool to expect even that much from such a spiteful, knavish little churl. No matter. I shall find the words to deceive her, and make her believe you cursed her in the hour of your demise. A mere peccadillo in the grand scheme of things, a meagre price to pay to see her once more at peace and out of danger.”

Shock rooted Katsumi to the spot, the words flowing forth from Sonja with such vitriol, her voice containing such malice and loathing that it took her aback. Was this the true Sonja? Was the soft-spoken, unassuming paladin merely an act? A farce, then?

She felt herself in those moments go through the familiar motions. She was no stranger to betrayal, intimately familiar with the ardour of duplicity as she was, and her mind worked to convince her that she had earned this, that this was the moment to which her entire life had built. Friendless, devoid of kin, forsaking all that she was meant to protect—a cowardly, selfish, weak creature as deserving of being purged as Sonja seemed to believe she was.

As Sonja’s blade began to rise, prepared to descend and send her spiralling into the oblivion that was all that awaited one such as her, unwelcome, unwanted, unloved as she was…

Wait.

It was as though time began to dilate, and the world bled to monochrome, but she could pay it no mind; threads of stark, contrasting, saturated hues of warmth and hearth and carousing laced through her view.

Suddenly it was the previous night, and as she stepped free of the tables once more, finally getting the rhythm of serving the patrons, her eyes moved in spite of her, fixating on Ástríðr as though she was the source of all in the world Katsumi considered life. The determination in the elf’s gaze was perplexing, but before Katsumi could so much as form a phrase to inquire regarding Ástríðr’s business on this floor, her lips crashed into Katsumi’s own, searing passion and emotion into her, racing along every synapse to even the furthest appendage and extremity. It was charged, it was scorching, it was brilliant…

Ástríðr…

I shall return to you, my love, no matter what—even should the path to your side lie across your sister’s corpse…

Katsumi called.

Deatheater answered.

Yuriya the Sword Saint was not a woman given to sentiment. After the memory of the faces of the children she had watched die in her own youth began to fade and grow muddled, any sort of vulnerability had seemed an idiotic weakness to court. She had walked the world, slain men beyond counting, found mastery, found family, found love; and yet, by that point she had walked too far down this path of blood to ever truly understand things like sentiment.

When she told her little brother’s wife and their former comrade, Tsuyu, that she was going to find someone new to kill, it was not a lie; as enjoyable as it was to watch Kagura struggle, grow, learn, and flourish under her tutelage, she was still a woman with needs, after all, and she knew that Tsuyu of all people understood that. The fact that her idiot niece’s little execution routine happened to take place in her unspoken territory was, while amusing, pure happenstance. The fact that the stray, the imitation that was but a pale, mocking shade of the one who had inspired her to cling to life and excel centuries ago, was the one who was to be slain did not move her one way or another.

But she thought it would behoove her to at least bear witness to what was about to transpire, if only because Tsuyu had this odd fixation on her children, trueborn and adopted, and if she found that Yuriya had seen this happen and not told her, she would put a barrier between the Sword Saint and her young lover, and as strong as Yuriya was, not even she stood a chance against an incensed Tsuyu. None of them did.

This in mind, she leapt up onto a nearby roof, getting as close as she could to watch the transpirings while still avoiding detection—people tended to be less likely to act if they had reason to believe they were being watched. Typical.

Her spineless idiot niece finally finished her blather, raising her sword to kill the stray, sealing her own death warrant in the process—not that Yuriya had reason to believe Sonja cared about such things at that particular moment.

There was a beat of hesitation as Sonja’s sword reached the peak of its arc, as her niece made certain of her angle, before the blade swiftly began to descend.

There was a pulse, and Yuriya felt the spiralling threads of Causality shudder.

Her every thought ground to a halt. She knew this feeling, impossible though it seemed.

The fabric of the world flickered, and the cleaving spatha stopped short with a harsh, grating clash that rang out across this all-but-abandoned part of the Rouge. Then the stray opened her eyes, staring directly at her assailant, and as Yuriya leaned in to get a better view of the drahn’s gaze, driven by some unconscious impulse, she felt her heart skip a beat. This feeling…I haven’t felt this in centuries…

Then the floodgates opened. Sonja possessed an amount of killing intent that even Yuriya had to begrudgingly admit was impressive, given her niece’s age and upbringing, and her little brother struggled to teach his daughter once she learned to harness it. Anyone else would say that this diminutive little slip of a girl ought to have collapsed into a heap from the murderous energy leaping off of Sonja and suffocating her immediate vicinity, but Yuriya wasn’t anyone else.

The spatha was deflected to the side and towards the ground. The brief pause of the clash was just that; the harsh sound of it had only just reached Yuriya when the parry was completed. Her heart beat again, and now it raced. Sonja moved to attack again, her brow furrowing, but her spatha did not so much stop as it was moved, its course high in the air, every iota of force her niece had brought to bear against the stray being diverted away and throwing her off-balance as the paladin’s own blow wrenched her arm back.

The stray moved and pressed the attack, striking the flat of the black sword against Sonja’s knee with the force of a blacksmith’s metal-shaping, and sending her tumbling to the ground in a heap.

“Damn it!” Sonja spat, as she struggled to her feet, glaring balefully up at the stray. Said stray was decidedly unimpressed, her expression settled into untouchable, impassive serenity, a gaze Yuriya remembered had been levelled at her once, when she was an urchin, scrawny and scrappy and slight, on the streets of her home city. It radiated power beyond mortal comprehension, a certain superiority that did not need to be proven but simply was, existing as an even more irrefutable truth than the presence of the summer sun in midday. But while Yuriya had been shocked from catatonic ennui under the unfathomable weight of that gaze when first she confronted it, Sonja was only enraged.

The aspis led this time, in proper form, and with a shearing sound, Sonja’s peculiar power set to work, iron tearing itself from her blood into spikes, biting deep into the joint to hold the shattered knee in place. The spatha lashed forth rapidly, over and over again, and each time, the sword was deflected, going wide of its mark and dragging Sonja’s body along with it by the force of the blow for a moment before she could correct the displacement.

The strange stray gave ground with each step, a little more each time, but unlike Sonja, Yuriya saw that she was not particularly pressed; she could have stayed where she was and had precisely the same amount of difficulty in avoiding harm. Sonja pursued doggedly in turn, the power flowing through her turning her conviction into zeal. The spatha’s strikes were too strong and held too much power for the stray to guard against, slight as she was, and the solution the stray had was hauntingly familiar. There was only one being she knew of who parried in quite that fashion, and the look in the stray’s eye confirmed it.

The strength flowing through Sonja redoubled and intensified, as did the speed of her flurry and her cuts, to the point where her sword produced enough shearing force to cause a vacuum; when the displaced air rushed to fill the gap, it tore up the worn cobblestone with it. They were a blur that experienced professional soldiers would not be able to parse—and though Yuriya was so far above that level of proficiency that those that far beneath her were not even worth the effort they took to kill, miniscule though it was, the sight was still an impressive display considering one of them had only been wielding their weapon for a handful of days by this point. With this amount of force coming at her, the stray’s parrying sent streams of debris flying into nearby buildings, where they cratered walls and shattered windows as they ran amok. The technique Sonja was using, in building up momentum to strike harder and faster, was one Yuriya’s little brother was fond of, as it put him at an advantage against most foes, intensifying his assault as their stamina quickly burned away.

The downside to Sonja’s built-up speed, however, was its intricacy. An ordinary opponent would never be able to pick out the one point of her attack strategy that would make the entire thing collapse, and if Yuriya was honest with herself, the stray she had laid eyes upon the previous night would have been dead several times over by now, and was in a more general sense incapable of that feat. Yet, at the exact right moment, neither a hair too early nor a moment too late, the stray struck forth, weaving effortlessly through the assault to bash a specific point on Sonja’s sword arm and bloody Sonja’s face with a pair of well-placed pommel strikes that each resounded with the harsh crunch of breaking bone; Sonja’s arm slackened as the nerve cluster went dead in unison with her skull’s recoil, causing her to stagger, and giving the stray an in.

The black kriegsmesser leapt into action, four diagonal cuts landing in quick succession, before with a swing in the air that lead into a leaping pirouette that streamed with writhing, crackling scarlet-and-sable energy, the surprisingly nimble weapon brought itself tearing in a brutally elegant cleave across Sonja’s body. Her niece had the wherewithal to bring up her shield to take the brunt of the cut, but the sword sheared through her aspis and cut her nearly in twain.

Sonja staggered back and collapsed to her hands and knees, blood running freely from her gaping wounds. She gasped in pain and her chest heaved with the effort of breathing through the agony of having her torso rent open, but a pulse ran through the spilled blood on the pavement, and cruelly jagged slender spikes of iron twisted in the stray’s direction with a celerity that rendered them all but undodgeable.

The kriegsmesser wreathed itself in further writhing darkness, and a diagonal strike sent it leaping through the air, tearing across the road and leaving shrieking destruction in its wake. It consumed the iron spikes and continued undeterred, ripping up cobblestone as it went until it hit a building in the background. The darkness surged through the ramshackle establishment and set it to a shuddering collapse, kicking up quite a bit of dust in the process.

Yuriya didn’t miss Sonja rolling desperately out of the way of the rampaging wave of seething shadow, using the devastation as a cover to start casting Cure. A weak stream of luminous verdant energy chased itself around her feet, sometimes licking up to just below her knee, as the incantation fell from her niece’s lips; when the last word of the incantation was complete, motes of ghostly blue converged on her chest, knitting her wounds together almost instantaneously, and though not entirely, it returned enough vitality to her for her to stand, albeit shakily. She discarded her shield and switched her sword to her off-hand, the nerve juncture in her arm still all but inert and thus not nearly in fighting condition, and made ready to resume the engagement, determined to slay her sister’s lover.

Yuriya had seen everything she was willing to witness.

The stray came tearing through the debris-driven dust cloud in a leaping plunge, but Onimaru’s keen edge diverted her course. Sonja’s intervening lunge she caught with her off-hand, the spatha halting in its tracks; the sudden halt wrenched the sword from her idiot niece’s grasp, sending her body shooting forward, slamming her chest directly into Yuriya’s leg, raised in a perfect clothesline. “Now then. I’d say that’s quite enough rough-housing for today. Wouldn’t you agree, children?”

Just a bit further back from where she would have landed stood the stray, having managed to hit the ground and regain her footing with some modicum of grace and poise. Yuriya found herself afflicted with a weak impulse to smile at the nostalgia her posture brought to the forefront of the Sword Saint’s mind.

Then the stray’s mouth moved, and the bemused smirk it settled on sent an image flashing before Yuriya’s sight, long, wavy silver-white hair that flowed freely in the wind, a preternaturally beautiful countenance framing an icy, arctic stare, unerring and unflinching and utterly beyond mortality. “Look how the bloody flower descends to the field. My how you’ve grown, little one.”

Those words. Yuriya had forgotten what it felt like, the peculiar aversion to danger most mortals were accustomed to; yet, those words and that tone shocked into the Sword Saint the recollection of absolute, paralysing terror.

My lady liege…

Then the violet eyes, possessing exactly the same horrifying quality as the frost-hued stare of her youth, shifted from her to her idiot niece.

The girl thrust her weapon out to the side, where it dissipated into the Void from whence it had been drawn, and then approached Sonja. Kneeling down by the paladin’s side, the girl bearing the mantle of the last dark knight paralysed Sonja with the sheer force of her scrutiny. “You have had your say, Sonja, and when you did, I stood and I listened. Now I shall have my say, and you shall do as I did. Well, not quite.

“You seek to protect your sister, and that is the only reason you yet draw breath. What you fail to realise is Ástríðr’s heart, for it is embittered and jaded, and her every motion is near to being crushed under the weight of ennui. You believe I pose a threat to her person, but by slaying me, you pose a threat to her happiness, and that I cannot allow. And so I propose a bargain, in the name of the love we each bear towards her: you shall protect her person, and I her spirit. Should one of us perish, the other shall assume the vacant post. Would you be amenable to such an arrangement, Sonja? Nod or shake your head. You have come to too much harm for me to allow you speech in good conscience.”

Sonja glared balefully at the dark knight, who remained still and unmoved. Their eyes met for a pregnant moment, during which the girl’s killing intent swiftly engulfed Sonja’s and took on a physical weight with its intensity. Fear sparked in the eyes of Yuriya’s niece, and she nodded vigorously as she began to feel the air abate from around them, pressed thin with the passive, pervasive, and unrelenting force of the girl’s murderous aura.

The girl smiled. “Then we have an accord. As a token of good faith, this shall remain a secret between us. Ástríðr need never hear of what transpired today.”

“Oh? And what is this that I ‘need never hear of,’ my love?”