The announcer’s call was proclaimed with such fervour and bombast that Kagura could feel the vibrations in her very bones; and yet, she was still taken aback, immobile with shock, when the mystel, Kai’ri Nhul, bull-rushed Katsumi with no more than the span of a heartbeat between the action and the call to begin. Kagura genuinely hadn’t expected such a reckless, impulsive, and unambiguously foolhardy manoeuvre to start off the fight, especially since she was certain the mystel had seen Katsumi in combat before, and she saw that her friend was similarly disarmed, which allowed Kai’ri to land the first blow—directly to Katsumi’s solar plexus.

Her leader’s armour took the blow wonderfully (a touch too wonderfully, in Kagura’s opinion, even considering it was made of mithril), but the force combined with the flat-footed shock to send her staggering backwards a step. She worked to recover her footing, but not quickly enough to prevent the mystel from capitalising on the sudden opening, delivering an uppercut capable of punching a hole in a steel plate that caught her in the chin. Bright-eyed, tipsy off of battle’s heady spirits, and utterly enraptured by the temptation of a quick, clean victory, Kai’ri made to press his advantage, committing to an axe kick that, if it landed, would be brutal to the point of potentially deciding the match.

But he had miscalculated.

The kick met Katsumi’s arm, where it stopped, even as the diffusion of impact formed a subtle crater in the spongy earth of the ground beneath their feet. Kai’ri, dumbfounded and for a crucial moment helpless, could not stop Katsumi’s one-handed upswing, Deatheater cutting through the air to catch him dead to rights. But with a harsh buzz, his image flickered, and he was gone.

He reappeared instantaneously, having put ten sword lengths’ worth of distance between himself and Katsumi. The black-red wave from the dark sword was still screaming towards him, however, and so his image flickered again, and again he was out of the way, his eyes wide, his blood running hot, and his breathing heavy with the suddenness of the danger. The wave, forgotten, careened heedlessly into the wall, where an interlocking pattern of spectral green tetragrams flickered into existence around its impact and forced it to dissipate. Protective spells to keep spectators safe. Clever.

Katsumi’s brow furrowed slightly, but Kagura knew her too well to think she’d let herself be caught off-guard like that again, reversing her seething black blade into a modified icepick grip. With another harsh buzz, the mystel used that movement technique again, driving a fully primed haymaker sparking with golden energy like lightning into Katsumi’s form; it struck dead against a honeycomb pattern of violet-red hexagons that sparked to life before her defensively-raised arm and reversed blade, however, and in that one moment of vulnerability, her other hand conjured a cluster of seven small black-red orbs, a scattershot that at this close of a range crashed into Kai’ri’s body to devastating effect.

The impact of the reprisal of dark magic was enough to lift the mystel completely off of his feet, arcing through the air to leave a stream of pinkish saliva that was driven out of him, but he recovered his senses, and in mid-air, he flickered out again. He appeared once more, one hundred sword lengths worth of distance between himself and Katsumi, who hadn’t moved from her position of her own power even once, and shook out his hand. Even from this range, Kagura could see the scorch marks and raw, livid flesh on his knuckles, which only confirmed her supposition. Now that his initial tactic had failed, Kai’ri Nhul had switched to actively using his aura to close the gap in power; but his proficiency in the practise was limited, and the failed blow caused the offensive-aspected aura to backfire and damage his hand.

Katsumi resumed a more normal one-handed grip, and with her other hand, she gathered mana, unformed, dangerously volatile, and ready to be shaped into a spell on a moment’s notice. Kai’ri, seeing this, was no longer so keen on closing the distance, visibly wincing at what Kagura supposed must have been the very thought of it. But so absorbed into the exchange had she become that she had all but forgotten her company, and was rudely alerted to it when Kyomi let loose a sound akin to a strangled waterfowl’s dying squawk. “What the ever-living… I didn’t teach her that! How the fuck does she know dark magic?!”

Irritated at the abrupt nature of the interruption, Kagura took a moment to find levity in the fact that, in her astonishment, the kitsune had forgotten to keep up the ruse of her rabbit ears being at all genuine, the vulpine qualities of their motion revealing the truth of the illusion to any who cared to pay attention—so, basically, only Kagura noticed, but it was still funny, so she didn’t really let that get her down. Her mood thus balanced, she smirked at her sister in all but blood, and chuckled. “Maybe she figured it out on her own.”

“That should be impossible…”

“Not necessarily. Someone had to discover how to do it first, without direct instruction,” Kagura shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past our dear leader to have to start out reinventing the wheel, only to make this much progress—that is, assuming it’s as meteoric a leap as your attitude seems to suggest. I’m far from an expert on magic, after all. And really, even if it was truly impossible, do you honestly think she’d let that stop her?”

“That would explain why she’s casting nonverbally…” Kyomi fretted. “Any instructional text, or fuck, most teachers of magic would endorse an incantation or invocation of some variety, so the fact that she’s eschewing that convention…”

“Kyomi, you’re my friend and I want to be respectful of this little existential crisis you got going here,” Kagura interjected. “But I’m kind of trying to watch? This was just about to get good when you started into your freak-out.”

“Fine…” she sighed. “I guess I can worry about this later.”

“Pretty much,” Kagura affirmed, returning her attention to the fight. Thankfully, she hadn’t missed much—Kai’ri had taken to circling, cautiously testing the waters around Katsumi, which Kagura supposed was prudent, given that nonverbal casting was, according to Kyomi, something that most people, most magicians even, believed to be impossible; couple that with the fact that Kai’ri was obviously closely related to the other mystel, the black mage, and Kagura was willing to wager he had no idea what he was dealing with.

“Well? Why have you relented?” Katsumi asked, speaking for the first time since the fight began, the spells set up around the arena catching her voice and making it audible across the stands. “What ails you? Your fighting spirit was splendid up until now. Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly lost your nerve?”

Kai’ri didn’t respond, his face stoic even as his eyes feverishly flickered hither and yon across the arena.

Katsumi sighed, shaking her head in some confluence of exasperation and resignation. “We will get nowhere if you simply refuse to fight. In fact, such reluctance might be seen as grounds for forfeiture, and I don’t think either of us wants that. So then, shall I motivate you?”

The mana in her hand coalesced at her word, a deeper darkness than before forming in its sudden depths; then she cast the hand out, and from her grasp came a cluster of cascading black and red comets, twisting and dancing as they surged forth and homed in on her target. The unearthly howl that tore itself free of them as the streaking orbs delighted in the savage ecstasy of their own chaos was but an expression of their celerity, and in that moment, there was no escape for Kai’ri Nhul unless he used his technique again—something of which, judging by how his eyes widened to the size of saucers at the sight of the spell, he was well-aware.

Blazing to life for an instant with refulgent aura, the mystel’s image flickered once more, bursting onto the scene on the opposite end of the arena, before digging his feet in and charging with a desperate battle-cry at Katsumi, his strides augmented by aura until they resembled the legendary depictions of shukuchi. The sparks of aura streaming off of Kai’ri tore up the ground around him as magnetism ran amok, his heart blazing in battle, as he gathered his life energy in one fist, and then thrust it forth, shunting the energy in Katsumi’s general direction. It tore a stream of destruction directly through where Katsumi had been, but now was no longer; at last, Kai’ri’s attack had forced her to move.

And, as Kai’ri realised too late, she had chosen to move him into danger.

The dark wave that was flung from her sword with a downward swing pushed him to flicker out of its path, and his laboured breathing betrayed his flagging stamina. His eyes were wild, and his fingers twitched, seemingly involuntarily, as though lightning was coursing through his body, his muscles spasming and recoiling wildly. If Kagura’s eyes did not deceive her, he seemed delirious, feverish, and she could imagine he could hear his heart pounding in his ears, his vision clouded as though perceived through a haze; yet, her instincts called out to her, drawing her attention to the power that began to collect, swirling about itself and surging in the boy’s body, rapidly reaching critical mass.

Something momentous was about to transpire. She could feel it in her blood.

“I have to win…”

One voice became two. “I refuse to fall here!”

“I refuse to fall here!”

Katsumi could feel it, the pull from deep inside her chest, as though it was impaled on a meathook by which she was tugged along. The darkness, the bloodlust, the despair, the hunger… It was a tempest of energy that sparked in the air around the mystel and then erupted forth, swallowing his form whole, and in the moment before the column of darkness swallowed him, she could see the slit-pupiled eyes of a serpent, awash with rancour, staring back at her from the starless black sea of his sclera.

The dark pillar of deep and twisting shadows stretched skyward, for the span of a few heartbeats blotting out the sun itself. And then, it dissipated, leaving behind a beast out of myth. Standing at twice the height of a moderately tall man, carapaced in layers of black plates from beneath which came accents of livid red, was a serpent’s tail, thick and muscular and with aquatic fins and frills of that same sanguine hue. Halfway up the body, it split, and from the stout midsection of its form came nine heads, each equal parts snake and eel, their mouths filled with rows of vicious fangs that dripped with a vile green fluid that Katsumi knew immediately to be dangerously flammable. Upon each head was a single bone-white mask, decorated with almost tribalistic markings, and from the eye sockets came the smouldering crimson that she had glimpsed moments prior. The snake heads noticed her, and, deploying their saurian crests, bellowed their reptilian challenge at her.

Ordinarily, perhaps there was a chance that she would be hesitant, desiring to take some time to figure out how she was going to approach this new challenge. But the rhythm of battle, a tune of savage and deadly dance, low and percussive and alluring, rang through her mind, and in its wake, any indecision was swept away. She lifted her chin up, letting Deatheater rest in one hand as a wave of icy flame engulfed her from within, and approached, calm and composed, without an ounce of fear to be found within or without. Each step was slow, deliberate, and more than a little foreboding, the inner stillness and diamond serenity she felt within pouring its way outwards in waves. As she drew closer, the hydra slinked back to gain distance, clearly doing its best to maintain its threatening display, but cowed in her presence despite itself.

A small smile, equal parts kind and threatening, emerged, and she let it break into the open, the sight of it clearly cowing the hydra further. Good; on some level, it knew who here was the master. Now came the time to soothe and coax.

“Calm yourself, Khalnril. I bade you run amok, did I not?” she reminded the beast, her tones even and intimate, neither rising nor falling, even as her strides continued to close the distance. “And I daresay you have had your fun. But now, it is time for this exercise to come, at last, to an end. You have done well, though you have yet further to go. Come—you have been through an ordeal, and you must rest.”

She had grown close enough for any of the nine heads to strike forth and swallow her whole, but her confidence that the hydra knew better was nothing short of absolute. The central head bowed, exposing a hole in its crown that seemed to go entirely through the head, the rim of it beginning to glisten with black sludge with the viscosity of crude oil, and in this exposition, it had tendered its submission. Understanding this, Katsumi sheathed Deatheater, and while one hand went to the corner of the head’s jaw at the edge of the mask, the other went to the snout, a gesture of conciliation that caused the hydra’s eyes to slide shut beneath the mask. “Succumb now to your respite. Have peace in knowing it is well-earned.”

No sooner had the final sounds of the command left her mouth than did a snapping sound emanate from the central mask, and in the next moment, a jagged crack split it in twain. Like the shattering of glass, the fracture spread rapidly, and then the white bone-like structure, thin as a hair, shattered, the shards dissipating into dust as the monstrous form was swallowed, stripped off as cascading rivers of black energy and sucked into the location of the hole on the hydra’s main head. With each moment this process continued, bit by bit the form of Kai’ri Nhul was once more revealed, until at last, his tattered gi, singed and ragged with the residue of her own dark magic (for which she had discovered a surprising level of both aptitude and affinity), though it hung off of him with only the most passing of acquaintances, was the only thing that concealed his ruddy-hued pale skin, now ashen with fatigue. His eyes sparkled with recognition now as he looked upon her for some reason, and he opened his mouth to speak, but only a breathy “Your Majesty” tumbled out before his legs gave out from under him, and, most unceremoniously, he collapsed.

Katsumi caught him, calm and steady, and then led him to lie down safely on the ground to recover all that strength he had just managed to spontaneously expend, bringing the hand that clutched a heretofore unseen blade in a death-grip over to the front of his chest. Slowly, she ensured his head was rested properly, before standing once again and swinging her gaze to the announcer’s booth, struck by the realisation that she could count the wrinkles the Bantamoori woman, Cassandra, was attempting to conceal rather expertly with cosmetics, as she stood awaiting the declaration of her victory.

The moment she saw the glaze of astonishment fade from the hume woman’s eyes, she swung her gaze away. In a sudden fit of adventurous spontaneity, and in the spirit of friendly competition, she fixed her gaze on Ástríðr, and gently bit her lower lip in a way that she hoped looked as alluring and seductive as she intended. It was in that moment, she realised, belatedly, that her canines had elongated into sizeable fangs, while a quick swipe of her tongue confirmed that her incisors, and indeed the rest of her teeth, had followed suit, a mouthful of vicious enamel that was still small enough to fit into her skull with no noticeable issues whatsoever, but only just; the feeling of those razor-sharp points pressing, however gently, into the soft flesh of her lip was a sensation as distinctive as it was seemingly unique. Committed nevertheless to this course, she put some extra smoulder into her gaze as she locked eyes with Ástríðr’s, and gave her a very deliberate wink.

“Good people of the Free Cities, the first match of the first round is over! The victor is Katsumi of the Fallen Rain, of Maelnaulde’s Order of the Laughing Tree!”

He was dying. He knew this. He knew it as surely as he knew the truth of his own flesh.

Initially, he hadn’t wished to believe it, had wished to do everything he could to avoid confronting it, but in this, he was taught an old lesson learned anew: one could only ever ignore the facts, never escape them. And the fact of the matter was that Casimir Hartigan was dying, and there was, in truth, absolutely nothing he could do about it.

Before coming to Maelnaulde in a fit of uncharacteristic altruism and goodwill, which he was moment by moment learning to regret with a passion, he had thought he knew pain. Now, he found himself laughing at that babe swaddled in the velveteen blanket of ignorance he had once been with a vehemence not far removed from unambiguous vitriol. It was like locusts under his skin, an entire swarm compacted into the boundaries of his flesh and trying desperately to escape, by devouring him if need be. If he breathed, a death-rattle of a wheeze was the best he could accomplish, along with intermittent fits of a wracking, violent cough that felt like his ribs were being pried open by force, the soft tissue at the joints cauterised with a callous and sadistic lingering thrust from a white-hot poker as they were exposed. Such fits left his hands not only drenched in blood, but also flecked with pinkish bits of what he knew was gore, as though a particularly unscrupulous butcher was in the process of mincing his still-breathing lungs.

A hard mass pressed against his diaphragm, and his vocal cords felt as though they were trying to produce sound while thoroughly entangled with boughs of hemlock emaciated into vines by sprigs of mistletoe. Unnaturally potent acid boiled through his veins, gnawing at his arteries and eating its way out at all times, waking or sleeping, even as they scorched and scalded every bit of his body through which the fluid passed. He had not slept in days, and delirium crept in at the corners of his mind; ingesting food only made him more ravenous, and his thirst was insatiable, though his body’s capacity to hold fluids remained finite. And now, even the sweet release of death was denied him, his limbs bound up in a straitjacket he now lacked the vitality or clarity of mind to successfully escape, and then bound by lengths of chain to a chair and thus to a wall in such a way that he could not begin to fathom how he might employ them to hang himself—though certainly not for a lack of trying. Indeed, he had placed more effort towards suicide in the past four days of captivity than he had devoted to any other endeavour in which he had at any other point of his short, young life been engaged, and all to no avail.

The chamber around him was dark and windowless, the walls and floor made from stone that was more regular and perfect in its geometry than he knew could possibly be natural. As a professional thief, he had taken the time to befriend stonemasons, blacksmiths, carpenters, artisans and tradesmen of all varieties, in search of any secrets and knowledge he could make use of in the execution of better and more daring heists, a choice which had paid dividends over the years and to which he credited his survival more so than almost any other choice he had made, and the ones that ranked above it could be counted on one hand with fingers left over. The masons in particular had taken the time to stress to him the inherent irregularity and imperfection in stone of all varieties, no matter how well-concealed those faults might be. And yet, in flagrant defiance of that knowledge, stone without fault surrounded him on all sides, enclosing him in blindness, trapping him within the flaming shackles of his own agony.

Then the chamber’s single door opened, and light, brilliant, radiant, and blinding, entered to meet his eyes for the first time in what felt like an eternity. It seared into him, adding to the litany of his excruciation a sensation like the blows of a blacksmith’s hammer to his mind within his skull. This was how it was that food and drink were given to him on a regular basis, seemingly in tune with when his pain of deprivation would spike highest, though it did nothing to allay the undercurrents; and as his eyes began to adjust, slowly, he looked up and saw that, to his horror, not only had his lavender hair grown substantially to the point where his bangs hung like deathly pendula in his vision, but also parts of it had gone bone-white. Not a bleaching or even new growth—from the top of what he could see down to the very limits of his tips, it was as though all colour had been drained from it in a flash of a moment, leaving behind something that was as strong as his normal hair if not stronger, in direct contrast to the unspeakably horrific ruin he felt gestating beneath his skin, but completely and utterly stark white. Like freshly-driven snow, or bone, stripped and bleached by the mercurial whims of a boundless desert.

“You always flinch the same way, you know. It was funny the first few times, but now it’s just gotten stale. You have to have figured out by now that it’s never not going to be a candle.”

Any incidental motion Casimir was performing halted, and he went perfectly still, caught in that exact moment in repose, petrified and flash-frozen, a perfect unliving, unchanging image of a subject. He knew that voice—of course he did; one did not simply cease to recognise the tones of his most ardent tormentor, after all.

They danced into the room in a gestalt between some grotesque mockery of seduction and a perversely dissonant innocent frolic. The crimson and gold raiment was nowhere to be found, and in its place was a rich burgundy jerkin over a billowing white blouse with lace cuffs, black riding tights and leather shoes of the same colour; they then set aside the tallow candle and drew nearer, placing hands gloved in black leather onto their hips with a short ‘hmph,’ and then bent over to bring their face level with his own.

The sudden proximity between their faces triggered an animal fight-or-flight instinct that forced him to flinch back violently, almost banging his head on the hard surface behind him and rescued only by their intervention, hands that radiated cold like the grave even through the leather of the gloves curling around the back of his head and neck to arrest his motion as gently but firmly as necessary.

“Now, now,” came the softly chiding sing-song tones of their mocking, mad voice, slipping like death rattles between grey, dead lips, undulating like maggots, yet stretched thin like a flayed man’s hide across the ghastly visage, now familiar, but no less repulsive. “We can’t have you damaging this body, now, so do be more careful. I would hate to have to take more precautions, but I will! I will if I must. A naughty, rebellious subject must be taught obedience, after all! It would not do to have an unruly host, no it would not.”

Were he not so restrained, Casimir would have had a full-body shudder at the prospect of suffering yet more of this foul creature’s ‘precautions.’ As he was, the denial of that catharsis bothered him in a way by which he did not know he could be disturbed.

“Now, are we ready to behave? Hmm? Or must I discipline you like some rowdy child?”

Powerless to do anything else, including speak, Casimir nodded his head.

“Wonderful! It is my goal to have you as pliant as a lamb before long, and it would be in your best interest to comply. I would be very cross if you were to embarrass me before Mother.” With that final admonition, the creature straightened and stepped back, their hands returning jauntily to their hips. The countenance that faced Casimir was worse than he had first glimpsed, the veins varicose to the point of bulging as though attempting to escape the skin, pulsing in time with an unseen heart, and black as ink, especially against the stark parchment-white of the flesh, a startling contrast despite how strained, faded, waxy, and half-translucent said skin appeared to be. The worst of the veins were clustered around the eyes, however, and it was like a twisted system of roots, squirming and writhing around sockets that contained two blood-red eyes with slits for pupils, in stark relief against sclera that were black as pitch. It was the eyes that were far and away the most vivid parts of their face, to an uncomfortable degree—as though the eyes were the only part still living, trapped and confined within the body of a corpse in a torturous and eternal Perdition of waking death. The hair that tumbled from their head to frame this horror was black like the ink of a squid, and indeed, even delirious with pain as he was, Casimir noticed that, beginning at the roots, there was stark white peaking through, the black fading gradually as if the hue was achieved through means of a dye—which would in any other circumstance concern him, as the same colour was on their eyebrows and their eyelashes.

Being a captive audience to the creature reminded Casimir of one of the few things he remembered from an old friend, an actress who was later raped by a highborn senator and left to die in an alley for daring to deny him in the first place, as was a beautiful commoner’s lot. In the theatre, she had explained, there were commonly accepted to be eight types of love, and if he was to speculate, the creature before him embodied the sixth type. Mania. Whoever this ‘Mother’ was, they were nothing short of obsessed with her, and he was willing to bet the creature’s hair was dyed black in her image.

He noticed the creature had bent before him with a smile that was a horrid mockery of indulgence upon their face a fraction of a moment before they flicked him in the forehead, hard enough to hurt, but not to damage. And hurt it did, sending a white-hot poker around his eye and through the back of the socket, lighting up with agony as if the brain itself could feel pain. “You know, it’s rather impolite not to pay attention when someone’s talking to you, and Mother detests rudeness. I daresay I would be remiss were I to allow you to form any bad habits.

“Now that I think about it… I have not yet taken the time to introduce myself properly, have I? That would explain the gormless look on your face. Ah, silly me! I hope you will accept my most heartfelt contrition! Mother always says that self-flagellation is useless in these cases… Eh-hem!” The creature rose back to their full height once more, clearing their throat and aping a supercilious pose. When they spoke, the voice that came forth was airy, like a gust passing through hollow reeds. “I am, at the moment, known as Loki. Mother gave me a different name, of course, but, well, I would hardly be an attentive servant were I to even attempt to disclose such a thing! You have been referring to me correctly in your mind, I see, though I cannot say I’m surprised—after all, a host lacking in intelligence would be a poor choice, even were the need too pressing and urgent for me to be entirely as selective as I would like. But rejoice! Out of all the candidates I have chosen for this next shift of mine, you alone have proven worthy of becoming my new host! This is a momentous occasion for you, having passed the final test! That is, this chamber, of course. Absolute darkness and silence, broken up by only momentary reprieves from total isolation is considered a cruel and unusual punishment by some, and to be fair, it is, but it is also a remarkably reliable method of assessment. The fact that you remain sane and lucid even after all you’ve been through and continue to suffer tells me that I made the correct choice, and for that, Mother shall reward us both.”

Casimir coughed, and it wracked his chest like all the rest, but this time, blood and bits of his lungs were ejaculated further, landing at a point on the floor only just shy of Loki’s shoes. Loki’s next expression was a disturbing melange of demeaning kindness and fervid, mad glee, a near-feral grin contorting itself into a half-aborted attempt at soothing conciliation. “I see the metamorphosis is proceeding apace. But there there, worry not; the worst is nearly over, after all. This is a cause for celebration and rejoicing. You are nearly prepared.

“What grows inside you now is something wretched, yet made glorious in Mother’s dark embrace, a mycelium grown of a single microscopic spore, the strongest of a mouthful of them. That mycelium is precipitating a metamorphosis, beginning in the lungs and expanding outwards from there, throughout every part of your fragile little mortal body. Flesh that is rendered obsolete is consumed to fuel the process of morphing that which shall be kept into a more appropriate, much more durable, organ, while the food I have given you is specially prepared to give that little spore the nutrients and resources required to rebuild you from the inside out, the water laced with minerals to that same end. After all, have you ever known a mushroom to sprout in a place that is not both dark and moist?” Loki explained in a terrifyingly patient tone of voice, heedless or ignorant of the creeping dread that rose anew from its exile in the back of Casimir’s mind. “The existence of your skin provides one requirement, the darkness, but the level of moisture must be both established and maintained. Both in their entirety go to the metamorphosis, of course, which is why you’re feeling so hungry and thirsty all the time, regardless of how recently or how much you just ate. That is your squishy mortal body telling you it’s not being fed or hydrated, that its native elements are wasting away and deteriorating from the deprivation, so no need to be concerned or worried about it. In time, it shall subside. In time, all you are shall be the wonder that is even now changing you into a…more perfect form of life, one best suited to being in Mother’s service.

“So don’t fret, my beloved host; no longer shall you be alone in the world, a pariah, without anyone to love you or believe in you.” As their voice gradually lowered to a muttered whisper, Loki’s hand reached out and caressed Casimir’s forehead, soaked in cold sweat, drifting down to his temple to push a lock of white hair out of his face as they drew closer, straddling his lap and bringing their faces together in a moment of tender, horrifying intimacy. “None of Mother’s children are more exalted than we; soon enough, you shall partake of Mother’s love, receiving the glory of Her favour, and in the ecstasy of Her, you shall find that it shall be all you’ve ever wanted, all you’ve ever dreamed.

“Indeed, dearest sibling, you’ll find that it shall be all that you shall ever need…”

The moment Ástríðr had first laid eyes upon Yasha of the Red Branch, the confrontation before her now seemed…predestined, almost, as though something in her very blood recognised the other woman as her first obstacle, the first barrier to be conquered and surmounted. Indeed, the tribeswoman of the Felmarch Highlands possessed a strength to her that Ástríðr was loath to allow to pass without at least making an attempt at contesting it, and after watching her beloved Katsumi dispatch her own first opponent with such grace and celerity, her blood ran ever hotter, the determination to prove her strength roaring in her ears.

And so it was with a shadow of the blood-joy Tandem had oft described, a hereditary trait from the ancestral homeland of their house, that she rode the wave of the warp spell, as well as the vertigo associated therewith, that brought her down to the ground of the arena, across from this first opponent—her first adversary. She couldn’t stop the toothy grin that split her face, and so she did not so much as bother with the attempt; though, she was a touch confused, she had to confess, as she looked upon the weapon that Yasha had belted to her side, and felt something within her, akin to and yet apart from the rage with which she was so well acquainted, stir within her and rouse in her chest, a long-slumbering beast at last beginning to emerge from its protracted hibernation, equal parts drowsy and famished. The blade itself was curved like an uchigatana, she remembered they were called, one of the weapons of the Far East, while the guard was swept back to defend the fingers in something like the fashion of a sabre, but none of its peculiarities of form were what disturbed her so, of that much she felt she could be assured.

The sound of the highlander clearing her throat brought Ástríðr out of her odd fixation, just in time for her eyes to meet Yasha’s silver before those same silver eyes slid shut, replaced upon the opening with eyes very much like Katsumi’s, albeit a duller, less vibrant shade of red. When she spoke, she spoke with two voices, one melodic lilt layered atop the other, more resonant tone; and while Ástríðr’s ears recognised none of the words that came forth, the tongue unfamiliar in her hearing, comprehension came all the same. “I am Sieðreyj, and by the grace of Her Majesty, to whom all the creatures of the night are beloved, it is with the title of Azure Dragoon that I am ennobled. As blood calls to blood, so do I salute you. May Her favour dwell within me, and may my strength do Her honour.”

“What’s that language you’re speaking? I can understand it, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before…” Ástríðr found herself asking, her brain wracking itself for answers despite the knowledge that it would find nothing satisfactory. “And I’d introduce myself, but we both know you already know who I am.” Though I have a sinking feeling you know that more than I…

“…So you have yet to awaken. A pity. I should have liked to pit my spirit against that magnificent strength of yours, but I fear it must be deferred. No matter; I shall bring my all to bear regardless! Indeed, to do aught else is to dishonour Her Majesty, and to all those who live and die to keep the faith, there exists no greater sin.” The highlander, who was quite obviously not what she seemed by this point, shook her head ruefully, reaching to her shoulder and drawing forth her massive longsword, her hair that flowed in the robust breeze seeming to flicker between silver and the bright hue of the skies themselves. “I use the Low Speech of Phantasia, that which is given to us by Her Majesty’s grace, that we might speak without risk of undue harm. The High Speech is not for mortal ears to hear, nor for mortal planes to suffer. Worlds have ended for less. But enough talk. Your fighting spirit will tell those things, dark and furtive, which your tongue stalls to utter. Have at you!”

This, Ástríðr could work with. She lowered her visor until it clicked shut, her grin baring her teeth as she brandished Eisentänzer, and in the percussive thudding of her heartbeat, she was nearly able to hear the finely-worked metal calling out to taste blood, to drown in the crimson tide. “I couldn’t agree more! Rip and tear, until it is done…”

“Until it is done,” nodded Yasha, or Sieðreyj, as she named herself. “Hence our contest, hither the hour, moment for moment shall I answer your fighting spirit with mine own!”

The announcer called, and in a fraction of an instant, Sieðreyj was bearing down upon her with red eyes flashing, longsword crashing into an arc that was artful in its brutality; it was all Ástríðr could do to catch the blade between one of the beards and the haft, striking on the blade’s cobalt instead of the more malleable metal of the shaft. Even this proved barely sufficient, however, and she found herself having to step away from the blow, lest she be driven to her knees by its relentless force. She could not contest the blow, and to look at her opponent was to stare into the face of effortless composure, of obvious and self-evident ease.

Not for the first time, Ástríðr relaxed her reflex to control and shackle her anger, instead letting it rise like an earthquake’s upheaval, the rage of the Fire-mountain itself. A growling snarl rumbled in the back of her throat, and she put give into the axe, only to then swing it back up harder, the moment of rest resulting in the highlander’s blade becoming misaligned and then flying free.

The upswing came swiftly enough that no mortal combatant, no matter how skilled, could have evaded it; yet it connected with nothing but air all the same, Sieðreyj recovering without so much as a moment of hesitation and swinging hard for Ástríðr’s side, now exposed. Ástríðr’s riposte already accelerated past what was possible absent some level of magical enhancement, and Sieðreyj’s sword struck in a fraction of even that functionally infinitesimal span; there was no way for her to evade it.

The blade connected with bone-shattering, metal-shearing force, but Rhiannon’s superior forgework held in spite of that, if only just. Still, it managed to drive a large gasp of air directly out of Ástríðr’s lungs, leaving a bruise that would smart viciously as it purpled, together with the possibility of a cracked rib. The pain shot her rage ever further, her fury drowning out even the worst of her hurts, as she weathered the assault without flinching, and brought Eisentänzer back down in a fatal stroke that would assuredly split her enemy’s head in twain.

In a flash, however, the highlander brought her longsword back, and in a startled bid for a moment’s clemency, she raised it high, their blades clashing in an ear-ringing clamour that left a chip to fly, white-hot and sparking, from Eisentänzer, even as it bit deep into the edge of the same weapon that denied it its tithe of blood to no less spectacular an effect. Without missing a beat, however, the swordswoman wrenched her blade to the side, dislodging Ástríðr’s axe and sending it flying. The blood-joy flared, her aura sparking as she readied the reprisal of her signature weaponskill, Gale Force, but then the longsword’s pommel crashed into her solar plexus, driving the air out of her and dispelling her gathered aura. On her back foot, she was left wide-open for one blade-strike, then two, following in a mordhau that crashed hard into her shoulder and brought her, finally, to her knees.

In that moment, her humiliation at this seeming-defeat drowned out the pain of her fractured, possibly broken, clavicle, and commingled with her anger, kerosene on the lit tinder of her hate. The floodgates yawned wide, and she was barely even aware of her hand, the same one as her broken collarbone, reaching up to grab hold of Sieðreyj’s blade, the metal turning red-hot and shrieking as the jötunn-forged magic seared away, the weapon reduced to so much steel as it melted and sloughed away between her fingers. She flatly did not notice the clatter as the heat warped the hilt, springing free of the site of the bone-breaking impact. She knew the pain that seared like cinders and ash through the veins that led to her eyes, the eyes themselves now alight as brazen coals; she knew the bloody heat that scorched her from within, the smouldering site where lightning struck earth and left grass, and it was by these that she was consumed.

Her grip on the haft of her greataxe tightened as she rose from her single knee, the turf beneath her withering away in the heat, the earth upon which she stood drying and cracking in a broadening ring of devastation. Her aura raged, wrath and ruin intertwining in a self-sustaining caduceus, sparking with fulminating embers that swept the debris and soil upwards in its twisting eddies and currents.

“Savage Onslaught!” she roared, tearing across the field and leaving a ravine in her wake, teeth of stone spiking up and away from her path to either side of her as she slammed directly into her opponent, shoulder-first. Sieðreyj was blindsided, struck directly in the chest and blown backwards with a wheeling of arms as she did her best to regain her balance. Ástríðr did not fail to press her advantage, however, and, securing both hands on the haft, retracted her axe and sent it careening forth with a cry of, “GALE FORCE!”

The three whirling saw-blades of fulminating energy converged on her target, sending her staggering backwards as gouts of blood sprayed forth from the wounds of her body, splattering audibly all around them as she stumbled into a retreat, before going to one knee herself.

It was a sort of delirium that Ástríðr felt, then; a heat beneath her skin that turned the gentle yet insistent breeze boreal, her arms prickling with gooseflesh even underneath the layers of her sorely-tested armour, her body trembling with tension and with the heady power her fury granted her, a power she had only ever attempted to use in short bursts before—for several good reasons, admittedly—and that she was now reaching her record on duration for, putting a strain on her body that it was unaccustomed to bearing. It was difficult, then, to remain standing, her breathing heavy as her heart thudded out of time, deafening her to the world around her and setting her tunnelled-in perception awash with vivid focus beyond what her mind was prepared to deal with. It sent her sanity reeling, and only instinct allowed her to take steps forward, her chest heaving, to deal the final blow to her opponent. But there was one thing her newly-enhanced senses could not manage to miss, and it was enough to make her hesitate:

Sieðreyj was grinning.

It was a thing easily missed amidst the furor, blood flowing freely down the face and body of her foe in rich, vibrant streams of rosewood liquid—several shades darker than blood ought to be, she knew, and reminding her, oddly enough, of Katsumi’s black ichor as it dripped onto the ground with a small rising gust of steam; yet, the highlander’s countenance was not one of pain, but rather of elation, or perhaps lust, her breathing heavy and her lips peeled back in a savage, feral rictus of mania.

“Yes… Your strength is splendid…” she gasped out as she used the brief pause of Ástríðr’s hesitation to haul herself to her feet, staggering for a moment herself before bringing her hands up to sweep her hair, no longer silver and now fully the powder-blue Ástríðr could only assume was the highlander’s natural colour, back away from her face, leaving behind faint streaks of burgundy on her pastel locks. “Aye, this will do. This will do…”

“Draw your blade. Let’s finish this,” Ástríðr growled, barely able to find it within herself to speak and having to almost force even that much out.

Sieðreyj, for her part, regarded Ástríðr with a mixture of incredulity and seething contempt at the statement. “In light of your apparent ignorance, I will forgive the insult just this once. Know that there are few things more degrading than what you just suggested. I refuse to debase myself in such a manner, and to besmirch Her Majesty’s indulgence. Further offences of that sort shall be paid their forfeits in blood. But if you are so eager to see, well, I suppose I’m feeling quite gracious enough on that score to oblige you…”

With that, her hand flew to the blade at her side, drawing her sword from its scabbard in a slow but steady, fluid motion, full of such gravitas and weight of ceremony that Ástríðr herself thought she felt moved—and then the power flooded forth, an almost physical force that buffeted her like the winds at the edge of the eye of a hurricane, waves of empyrean heat that passed each moment into the wavering heat-distortion of desert sands.

We give ourselves to the Flame, and by our commingled ashes are we reborn as one…

Before she could react to the sudden imposition of that phrase into the forefront of her mind, Sieðreyj, whose powder-blue hair thrashed in time with the metaphysical heat-wind, and whose piercing crimson stare fixed directly on Ástríðr seemingly had yet to even entertain the concept of breaking away, turned the point of her strange sword skyward; and in the moment it aligned with the late morning sun, a blinding light ignited, so brilliant that it was as if she was witnessing the birth of a new star. The light descended down the length of the blade as she drew it down into a pose that, were the weapon a rapier, Ástríðr would have called a salute, and the moment it touched the guard, the length of metal came ablaze, a withering mane of electric blue and bright orange, almost white, flame. Finally, she swept the blade down to her feet, which were now hovering from the ground by the height of a man, and then was engulfed in her entirety in a ball of blazing, white-hot orange and electric blue fire.

For several moments, the fiery, perditious chrysalis pulsed, novas of solar flame lashing out in all directions, only to find themselves immediately arrested at the barrier of the arena’s wards; then, with a shrill, primordial cry, the air was rent asunder, and the star fell.

The ball of fire burst, a miniature supernova that bombarded her stance with a withering multicoloured inferno. From the core, then, emerged a towering, armoured, semi-humanoid figure, hovering, legless, in the air and spanning three metres from the pointed tips of its ‘tail-feathers’ to the top of its head. The colour of a blood orange were the plates, enameled at the edges with designs of feathers seemingly wrought from burnished gold, interspersed with cyan gemstones that were awash with swirling, flickering magic. The closed helm, which was styled into an abstraction of the profile of the head of some unknown avian species, betrayed no human features; from the cuirass, itself curiously conforming to the bust she presumed was beneath, came long tassets resembling overlarge tailfeathers; and from the illuminated pauldrons came massive feathers, true feathers that glowed like embers, upon which could be beheld all the many hues of flame. On one arm, covered entirely with the same stylised armour, was a kite shield bearing a shrieking bird’s head in golden relief, and in her other was borne a blade, an arming sword that was similarly alien in design to the rest of the creature’s form, and with backswept gold feathers that served as a quillon for the red-hot blade, seeming almost fresh from the forge.

It was a phoenix. A phoenix confined to its best approximation of a human form, granted, but a phoenix nonetheless.

“My feathers are flight everlasting; my down, endless rebirth! Tremble at my ardour, and bear witness to the pride of the demon race!” cried her opponent, both voices splitting and intertwining to form new words and nuances, moments before she dove into a headlong charge against Ástríðr’s beaten, sluggish body.

Ástríðr had mere moments, and with those moments, she stomped on the ground to awaken the land to her defence; the earth, alarmed, rose to defend her, but it could not stand before the reckless, unrelenting dive of the beast of living flame that descended to the battlefield, radiant shield raised, brilliant blade flashing with primal furor. The antediluvian mountain that emerged to defend her sublimated instantly, and she alone remained to bear the overwhelming brunt of the infernal assault—a task that was beyond her, which sent her sailing through the air at the attempt. The rage ascended at last past rage, and into the razor’s edge of murderous intent, pure, distilled, and undiluted; in that moment, switching her grip on the haft so that the broken shoulder would bear the brunt of it, she dug the head of her axe into the ground, tearing up a good chunk of earth and aggravating the break so painfully that the watering of her eyes blinded her for a moment, even through the armour of her fury-beyond-fury, but finally stopping her flight and allowing her feet to touch terra firma once more.

Sieðreyj—for who else could it be?—was once more on the charge, and Ástríðr had to make a few snap decisions regarding her strategy in this match. For someone whose idea of strategy, she had to admit to herself, was more or less limited to charging the enemy head-on and destroying them with the brute force she so excelled in bringing to bear, this was something of a unique challenge. Every part of her mind and every instinct she knew of screamed at her to mount her best defence and weather the storm, regardless of the fact that the evidence of her senses testified to the virtual and practical impossibility of such a course of action; her strongest method of defence, what was for all intents and purposes her trump card, to awaken the land to be her aegis, had just proven to be insufficient, and she could not retreat from the living flame that pursued her with the celerity of a comet and the unwavering precise accuracy of a curse.

Then another voice, a more intrinsic instinct from a deeper and more guttural place so far within her that in seeking it, she delved through a world’s worth of hidden depths, gave her a truly ridiculous and reckless answer, that remained her best path to victory nonetheless: to answer violence with violence, to advance instead of retreat, to meet this monstrous opponent’s fighting spirit with her own…

To dig deep, and haul…

Taking a deep breath to brace herself, to centre her fury, whittling it down to a narrow, unnaturally acute focus, she charged into the streaking comet, Eisentänzer’s bloody revelry sobered to a harrowing exaltation of a Day of Wrath as her hands strangled the haft, jostling her injuries both overt and subtle in a teeth-gritting flare of agony as blood from an unnoticed head wound streamed freely beneath her visor to sting her eyes.

She wound the axe back, and unleashed its killing intent with a grim cry, a harrowing proclamation of “Storm King’s Rampant!”

The weapon swung hard like a pendulum, striking the ground and sparking up a spike of red-hot stone as the blade careened up at an angle, sparks flying as its thirst for violence burst forth from the weapon itself and surged its savagery into the opponent who got into range at just the right moment to catch it fully on her chest.

…Or at least, such was the plan.

Her attack rung out, strong and clean as a pure tone, but half the sparks came forth as the greataxe struck against the breastplate with enough force to shred any metal, only to fail to penetrate and divert wildly off of course, the bearded head she used now half-melted into slag as it phased into the follow-through. Meanwhile, the phoenix had enough time to cock her sword back with the blade blazing, the Mortal Flame itself coating the weapon; the instant Ástríðr realised her attack was ineffective, the sword descended, slashing with the speed of a thunderclap to catch her in the abdomen.

Ástríðr stomped her heel into the ground and threw herself as far back as she could as quickly as she could manage, but the slash turned out to fire forth a wave of energy her instincts insisted was nothing short of absolute death. She woke the land once more, putting a wall of stone between her and the attack no less than two metres thick at its thinnest point, but when the wave collided with it, though it stopped, the stone swelled and erupted, firing razor-sharp shards of superheated stone in all directions, too fast and too erratic for her to evade. Finally even Rhiannon’s forgework gave way, the stone cutting the metal wide open and biting deep into her flesh, some of them only the breadth of a few hairs removed from bone. Her inner thigh, her uninjured bicep, and the side of her chest beneath the broken shoulder were the worst, the last coming so close to her lung that it was the Devil’s own luck that she wasn’t immediately mortally wounded.

Then she caught Sieðreyj bringing her kite shield in front of her chest, and in the bird’s screeching beak, she saw a ball of azure energy growing rapidly in size and magnitude, her danger-sense mounting at an exponentially accelerating rate.

Oh, fuck…

The column of energy fired with a sound that was nothing short of horrific, like the fabric of reality itself screaming in pain as it was distorted, warped, and torn with the beam’s passage. In its progression, Ástríðr could see time unfurled, her past, present, and shades of things that may yet be laying plain and revealed to her, time in that moment clearly just as tortured and tormented as space. She saw the shade of her sister, older than her by two or three years at the time and long since lost; she witnessed when Sonja tried to weasel her way into their family, to dare to think she could ever replace the sister she lost that night forever; she saw the rage, the fury, the carnage, the ennui…

And she saw Katsumi.

Her solace.

Her world.

Her guiding star, beautiful and ethereal as the moon.

In a moment, her life would end; she knew that. She was glad to depart with it, with all of it. She was glad to leave behind the shadow where her sister ought to be, the grotesque mockery she was forced to pretend was her twin, all the pain and anguish and finally numbness that her life had descended to, a dirge in monochrome. But Katsumi, and Katsumi alone, she refused, under any circumstances, to relinquish.

In the space between one beat of her heart and the next, the world paled to shades of grey, and time ground to an immediate halt, a single moment stretched out interminably—into eternity itself, if need be. That thing within her, that thing that told her to advance and not retreat, with a scraping and a biting and a growling dug itself out of the buried recesses of her being, exhumed and rising from its living burial. That creature of anger and hate, of savagery and brutality, of gleeful carnage and joyous murder, rarely seen but deeply felt, burst forth from her chest and clawed its way into its rightful place in her heart, its influence racing through her veins and staking its claim upon her blood. Into her lungs came the hot breath, and in her throat rumbled the rolling growl of the beast itself, the truth of what she was, the slumbering fiend she had forsaken for the mortality she pretended to, a lie of the highest order to bury the beauteous truth that lay just beneath her skin.

Hate is our gift to one another. And through hate, all things are possible…

Duchess Jeanne Evalach Galatyn—or Maria, when she didn’t feel like doing the whole song and dance that came as part and parcel with pretending to be so much less than she was, to be a mortal of all things—hadn’t expected to find much that could hold her attention in this very tournament. She was here to do a favour for her mistress, the lady to whom she, as well as every celestial who was not named Rienna tol Ciencia, was bound in service, and those weren’t usually meant to be fun little romps of any variety. Her expectation was to bear witness to a litany of unrelenting boredom for three days’ worth of flashy, vapid martial arts exhibitions, and participate in a ceremony of staged nuptials, chicanery that would be revealed as such the moment Emily, or Princess Emilia Tremere Greywing as the mortals of this world knew her, was successfully recovered from whatever cosmic calamity had befallen Vlindrel and its young king, Emily’s current younger brother, Reinhardt Foltest Greywing.

The one thing she did not expect was to lay eyes upon one woman, who held her gaze in such inescapable rapture Maria could not fathom this woman being anyone other than her one true love.

There was, however, one slight snarl the situation presented. And believe it or not, it actually wasn’t ‘Gareth’s’ insufferable gloating in the immediate aftermath of her imprinting upon this stranger, imprinting like she was some hatchling, fresh from the egg and still strewn with bits of broken shell; rather, it was something that, while significantly less annoying, was nonetheless substantially more complicated.

The woman in question, according to ‘Gareth’, though she went by the cover identity of Yasha, an outcast and pariah of the hill-tribes of the Felmarch Highlands, was, in truth, a demon by the name of Sieðreyj. This in and of itself was a problem, as though they had never been enemies, not truly, having fought side-by-side against the calamitous menace of the faeries in the War of Iron, angels and demons still shared quite the complicated relationship. It largely stemmed from a series of irreconcilable differences regarding ideology and culture, leaving demons intrinsically distrustful of angels, and angels unable to understand, thus unable to control, and thus equally unable to trust demons, she knew, had seen it in the tells, however well concealed, of the two Blades of the Queen with whom she had shared proximity at some point; but if that was all that divided them, she would not have minded swallowing her pride and begging Charlotte’s indulgence to simply take Sieðreyj as a lover, albeit under the guise of ‘plaything’, and spirit her away back to Yal’yarla with her.

No, the bombshell that threw a wrench in that plan was not simply the fact that Sieðreyj was a demon, nor even that she owed her allegiance to Phantasia, the nightmarish necropolis that demons somehow managed to proudly call home, the savages; it was that Sieðreyj was the Azure Dragoon, one of the generals of Phantasia, peers only to the Blades of the Queen in terms of how esteemed a position they held.

What was perhaps more infuriating than having such a tangled skein of a web separating her from her one true love was the fact that there was no joy, no snark, no spark of glibness in ‘Gareth’s’ voice as the Blade of the Queen the mortals called ‘Death’s Own’ explained to some appreciable degree of detail what the position Sieðreyj occupied meant. She was the commander of the Royal Dragoons, the elite corps of knights who flew into battle astride none other than the mighty dragons, those scaly, winged, sentient engines of nigh-unimaginable destruction, all of whom counted none other than the Demon King herself as their progenitor, the origin of their entire misbegotten race. Of those charged with the care and aid of the Demon King’s own descendants, the very first of her children, Sieðreyj was the one Her Royal Demon-ness trusted the most implicitly. That meant that there could be no sudden relocation, and no indulgence of Charlotte’s would give her carte blanche to secure the yoke of the woman she now could not so much as stomach the thought of living without.

‘Gareth’ translated the speech Sieðreyj gave to greet her opponent, a friend of Charlotte’s she wasn’t particularly interested in knowing, almost automatically, and without giving any sort of further context. Low Phantasian, as the Blade had explained at one point, for High Phantasian did not translate, and no attempt to do so could be made—the same magic that made it so that all demon children knew it from birth, which even she had to admit was bloody useful, also made it so that no one not aligned with Phantasia could ever learn it, and no one of Phantasia could so much as make an attempt to teach it; those who severed ties with the nation also lost the very language of their birth, and words that once meant so much became eldritch syllables, unknown and unknowable. It was certainly brutal, and met with her begrudging approval—insofar as a demon could warrant such a thing, of course—yet, to hear ‘Gareth’ translate, and to know the words that came from her unsuspecting intended’s lips, she gathered that, in Sieðreyj’s case, she would sooner die than sever ties with the necropolis she apparently called home. Yet another nail in her coffin, she supposed.

And now she stared, mouth hanging open, as the woman that had so thoroughly captured her mind and heart without so much as a word transformed, and instead of the repulsion she typically felt at the forms of demons she had encountered in the past, now she could feel tears stinging her eyes as she beheld the grandeur of the phoenix’s cry, certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sight of Sieðreyj awash with her own demonic power was, to her, more beautiful than even the elegant splendour the city of her residence prided itself on. And she hated that certainty with a passion that burned nearly as intensely as the knowledge that that certainty had become a truth to her, carved upon the fabric of her soul.

“What does she think she’s doing…?!” ‘Gareth’ hissed, his voice harsh and slightly panicked as Sieðreyj brought her shield forth across her chest, an azure glow rising in contrast to the world around them, in moments building until it outshone the sun itself. “Using Flare Wave was bad enough—a Particle Beam would be significant overkill, though maybe understandable if she wanted to be decisive about it—but a Zero-Form Particle Beam? Here?”

“The fuck are you on about, Bitch Tits?” Maria groused finally, in that moment irritable enough to surpass even her own vaunted benchmark of, admittedly sadistic, flippancy. It would not be inaccurate to say that she was in no mood for this.

Even worse, her glorified fucktoy ignored her, turning instead to address Charlotte, his bearing all business and his demeanour swallowed whole by the station of Blade of the Queen, and the sense of duty, however misplaced, that came with it. “How strong are the wards around the arena?”

It seemed Charlotte understood, to some degree at least, what was causing him to freak out in such an irritating manner. “I contacted the Blackwoods specifically to build them. I haven’t seen Rhonwen, but Taliesin and Myfanwy have assured me that all three of them have worked on the defences, and short of the impossible, they will hold against any assault, magical or otherwise. Does that satisfy you?”

‘Gareth’ breathed a sigh of relief. “It does. Thank you. Instincts aside for the moment, I begin to understand why Her Majesty holds you in such high esteem.”

“Would that my own servants were as understanding of my position,” Charlotte sighed with an exasperated huff. “All the same, thank you, I suppose.”

Finally, Maria’s frustration boiled over. She stalked up to ‘Gareth’ and grabbed him by the collar, slamming him against the nearby wall. “You have ten seconds to explain to me what the fuck is going on before I bless you halfway to oblivion.”

She fully expected Charlotte to order her away, or for Rienna to draw her sword to make her daughter’s displeasure known. But it seemed that today was full of surprises, as in that moment, ‘Gareth’s’ hazel eyes slid closed and bolted back open to livid crimson, pupils narrowed to slits and sclera black as the night sky; in the next moment, his hands landed on her wrists and peeled her grasp free of his collar with shocking strength. “There is a time and a place for your games, Maria. This is neither of them. I am not yours to command. The charade must come to a close.”

“Why you…?!” Maria reeled, seething as her anger and frustration shot high enough for her to shake loose the long chain that bound her cross to the inside of her forearm, brandishing it as it dangled freely into the open, while ‘Gareth’ remained unmoved. A moment later, she found herself shackled to Charlotte’s throne, much to both her and her mistress’s surprise, and thus unable to wipe that look off of ‘Gareth’s’ face. “What the fuck…?!”

“Fifteen seconds,” ‘Gareth’ adamantly proclaimed. “I’m impressed.”

“What, you think you’re the only one who’s learned a few new tricks?” Rydia snapped waspishly, alerting Maria to the fact that the dark woman had moved across the box.

“Hardly. I’m glad you’ve grown. It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten how fervently you always hated to stagnate, after all,” the rebellious demon replied earnestly.

“How did you manage to gauge that?” Aranea asked, a subtle note of bewilderment in her voice.

At this, ‘Gareth’ favoured the blonde with a rakish grin that fit far more neatly on his pretty face. “The Old Blood is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be…unnatural.”

“As charming as it is to be spoken for, to witness glorified infants nearly coming to blows, and to hear…whatever that was,” said Myfanwy Blackwood, forgotten for how furtively she managed to blend into the background, as she waved in ‘Gareth’s’ general direction. “I feel it is important to indicate a few salient points: first, Maria dear, you could just approach Sieðreyj and have this all work itself out; amusing as I find it to have you deeming demons little more than savages and then in the space of the same thought lament not being able to adhere to their internal courtship rituals, it did get stale after the fourth picosecond. Second, I think it would behoove you to have as many healers as you can spare ready to receive your good-sister.”

“I thought your tiresome little meetings with that moron were a farce,” Junna remarked.

“They are,” ‘Gareth’ interjected softly, but firmly. “The woman Sieðreyj faces now is no mere mortal to be played with and discarded. She is what we call the Shura, the Bloody-Handed Beast of the Storm—a monster even amongst demons, whose hatred, fury, and capacity for violence far surpasses even the most battle-hungry members of our race.”

In that moment, a deep darkness and a wave of murderous intent so incredibly dense that it qualified as a physical force swept over all of them. The sun darkened as thunderheads black as pitch swept in on unnaturally swift winds, incredible forks of lightning striking the ground and ringing out in thunder so loud that, even from this distance, it was like standing right beside a line of cannon as they fired, the sound-wave’s concussive force causing even Rydia to stagger, flailing and ungainly.

“Of eld, in the days before the War of Iron, when the Demon King travelled to grant us minds and free us from our hunger, the Shura ruled over her domain with a leaden grip, forks of lightning turning sand to glass and sending weaker demons scattering for cover and shelter,” ‘Gareth’ continued, undeterred, his crimson gaze focused upon the spectacle and also a dozen worlds away. “Entire generations of legions of our bestial kin fought, killed, and were devoured in the dark caverns, only for the strongest to venture forth to challenge their tyrant, and be devoured for their trouble. Only the Demon King, our Mother of Night, willingly travelled to the mountains, leaving her fledgeling nation behind to challenge the might of the mountain-god alone. It was a battle that lasted the turn of a moon, unrelenting and unending, but finally, she conquered the beast, and as with so many others, granted the Shura a mind, and with it, clemency. To this day, it is said that only the Demon King is so beloved of the beast that her touch alone may quell her fury.”

As the last word left the demon’s mouth, a malefic howling roar drowned out even the deafening thunder, a sound best described as the sonic manifestation of the concept of absolute terror.

The next moment, there was a sound that was like reality itself was tearing, and ‘Gareth’ was right beside her, effortlessly severing the bindings that Rydia used the power of Crimson Queen to restrain her with; then, he yanked her to her feet by her shoulder, and dragged her over to the balcony quite roughly. “It’s time you realised what you’re dealing with, Maria. I was content to allow you to labour under your misapprehensions about our kind, but now that the nature of your true love bond has dragged you face-first into our world, it’s important that you witness your new normal from a safe distance, because Sieðreyj is a precious friend of mine, and so help me, if you manage to wind up dead, I will cut my way into the Garden of Death to drag you back by the ear to make you pay for hurting her, alone if need be.

And here his smirk became sinister as he tossed her firmly to the railing, though not hard enough that she was in any actual danger of falling over it. “Though, I wager the other Blades of the Queen won’t be far behind, together with the generals, and Her Majesty. Now, watch.”

Maria was dumbfounded by the metamorphosis as ‘Gareth’ walked back to his preferred vantage point, but at his sharp look, she turned her head back to the duel, and gasped at what she beheld.

Everything in the arena in a straight column from Sieðreyj’s last position to the boundary of the wards was reduced to superheated liquid glass, white-hot and bubbling. And now, Sieðreyj was little more than a flaming streak, shooting from one end of the arena to the other in an attempt to combat the monstrosity that now occupied the middle of the battle space. A massive creature the size of a cathedral with verdant green flesh, it was no reptile despite the savagery of its features, its hide more leather than scales. It ambled about on four powerful legs, massive hands and feet adorned with brutal black claws, and behind it swung a great fleshy tail, thick and muscular, adorned with a series of webbed spines as a crest, while its back bore a crest of what looked like protruding weaponised vertebrae, spiking out of its skin so far that three men could stand atop each other from the platform of its back and only then reach the peak of one of the monstrous protrusions. The head was at once angular and box-like, more overt spikes and horns flaring from the back of it in a more unambiguous crest, its mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth longer than most pikes; the hammer-headed lower jaw’s asymmetry with the upper jaw simply added to the depiction of savagery, the flared nostrils of the snout and the deep purple of its mouth coming together with the rest of the body to form an image altogether less disturbing than a single feature—the eyes, pupils round like a mortal’s, yet contracted to a pinpoint, an island in a sea of blood-red iris, all of which was forced wide, giving the impression of awareness consumed into a bottomless abyss of carnal frenzy and murderous madness.

The beast’s bulk was deceptive, for as it snapped, its jaws narrowly missing Sieðreyj, Maria realised that it was every bit as swift as her mate. Every so often, Sieðreyj would pause for a moment, bring up her shield, and blast the broad side of the beast with what she could only assume was the same attack ‘Gareth’ had called the Zero-Form Particle Beam—though she was at a loss concerning whatever that meant—but each time, little more than a singe mark was left on the beast’s thick hide, only ever alerting it to her position at best, and annoying it into redoubling its dogged pursuit of her at worst.

“Would you like an explanation?” came ‘Gareth’s’ voice once more, still firm with the duty of his station.

“I thought you were just going to launch into one,” Maria remarked absently, on the edge of her proverbial seat otherwise.

“You don’t take kindly to being reminded of your ignorance, even if it’s in good faith,” he replied stoically. “And while I wouldn’t dare to extrapolate anecdotal evidence to the entirety of your people, I will say that within that anecdotal evidence, I have never met a celestial who did.”

Maria wanted to get angry, but the tension of the moment was pulling too much of her emotional energy elsewhere for her to get that reaction past the idea phase, so she merely huffed. “You know what? Fair enough. What did you mean with what you said? Flare Storm and Molecule Beam and whatnot.”

As soon as those words were out of her mouth, she winced; she hadn’t intended to throw that bit of flippancy in there—force of habit, perhaps, but a potentially very inconvenient one in situations like this. ‘Gareth’, however, refused to rise to the bait, unintentional though it was.

“Warlike as we are, a demon is not merely limited to the use of physical armaments and the raw power of our physical forms,” he began, his gaze remaining fixed on the arena as the course of combat continued. “We are equipped with a variety of techniques for the augmentation of our combat prowess, the usage of which is revealed to us through instinct. The first and simplest of these abilities is the Particle Beam, where we compress our aura with the intent to destroy, and then release it forth once it reaches critical mass. Flare Wave is more advanced, firing essentially multiple Particle Beams simultaneously, compressed into a wave of destruction. The Zero-Form Particle Beam is the second-strongest of them all, and it can only be used by a demon in their Revelation form. Though the theoretical potency of each of these abilities is static, the actual effect is proportional to the power of the demon using it, and for Sieðreyj, who is a peer of the Blades of the Queen…a single Zero-Form Particle Beam could potentially reduce a continent like Deist to a flat sheet of glass.”

Maria’s jaw wanted to drop, but she didn’t let it. She would not indulge in such a trite cliche, as genuinely warranted as it might have felt at that moment. “And she used that…to end a non-lethal tournament duel?!”

‘Gareth’s’ nod was almost audible. “Now you understand why I was so perplexed. Yet, blood calls out to blood, and our instincts are significantly sharper amidst the rush of combat. It seems that, excessive though it seemed, Sieðreyj made the correct call.”

Maria nodded, digesting the information for about four seconds before her eyes widened in mounting horror as the beast’s mouth opened, and in its maw coalesced a massive ball of crackling lime-green energy. “And what do you call that…?!”

“Bad… Very, very bad…” ‘Gareth’ whirled around to hurriedly interrogate Rydia on the subject of where something he called his ‘Devil Sword’ was, while Maria looked on, virtually powerless, as Sieðreyj visibly awakened to the situation, bringing forth her shield just in time to weather the harrowing assault of the beast’s Particle Beam, the column of fulminating destruction crashing into her and pushing her up against the far wall in the flash of a moment.

When the beast relented, Sieðreyj was breathing heavily, judging by the rise and fall of her chest, though the injuries she incurred were clearly burning away to leave her renewed. The problem was that the beast noticed this, too, and it reared back to charge an even larger Particle Beam, which she could only assume was its own Zero-Form; and in her senses, it was clear that this terrifying power was more than enough to annihilate her newly-discovered life-mate.

Death’s Own returned to her side a moment later, holding a vaguely sword-shaped bundle wrapped in canvas in his grasp and looking significantly more harried than usual. “What’s going on?”

“That green…thing just used a Particle Beam, and now it’s gearing up to use a Zero-Form variant, if I’m seeing this right,” she replied.

“Aye, that’s a Zero-Form Particle Beam charging, alright… Wait…”

Sieðreyj spiralled into the air, spreading her wings in a burst of feathers; one of these feathers was caught on the flat of her sword’s blade, and as the weapon came alight, bright as a newborn star, she moved it so that the point was poised right above the top of her kite shield, ready to be plunged into a compartment behind the bulwark at a moment’s notice.

“She’s using the Ultra variant. Fuck,” ‘Gareth’ swore as Sieðreyj’s sword slid into her shield, the screaming bird beak relief’s maw burning with the barely-constrained power of a supernova. Without a moment’s hesitation, he climbed up onto the balcony, seemingly to jump down into the sheer drop.

“What are you doing?!” Maria cried.

“I need to get down there so that I can stop this!” he yelled back at her.

“But you said it yourself! The Shura was beyond all of you except your Demon King or whatever!”

‘Gareth’ shook his head, more resolute than she’d ever seen him. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll think of something. Sieðreyj’s my friend, I’m not about to let this happen to her.”

“That strength of yours is admirable, but it won’t be necessary, child,” Myfanwy spoke once again, stepping up to him and smoothly but firmly yanking him back from the railing. “You can just sit and watch. If I know your silly little monarch, which I do, she will have this well in hand presently.”

“What…?!” ‘Gareth’ protested, his voice half-strangled with shock. Then his eyes widened, and he whipped his head back around at some unknown cue, and Maria made sure to follow his gaze.

It took a moment for her to pick up on it, but as an archangel charged with the defence of their sovereign, she had mastered archery and all its associated faculties, so it didn’t take her very long to be able to pick out the rapidly descending object. A black streak tore through the air, hitting the ground with a resonant crash like an earthquake, a harsh crater torn into the arena and an upsurge of dirt, mud, and dust flying high enough to obscure it.

And yet, when she focused, she managed to pick out a diminutive, slender frame, a figure with eyes like the hearts of a pair of old stars, ponderous and gargantuan with age, preparing for the single infinitesimal moment of incalculable destruction that would be the final stage of their eons-long lives; judging by ‘Gareth’s’ choked gasp, he recognised them.

Myfanwy smirked, slicking her hair back flamboyantly. The mirth visibly bubbled up inside of her, her eyes shining with a razor-edged glint, and genuine, diaphragm-deep laughter flowed forth, a sound that was at once exuberant, menacing, and unmistakably sinister.

“Ah… Took her long enough.”

For perhaps the first time, Katsumi noted that each time that sense of deathly calm that cowed even Yuriya the Sword Saint descended upon her, it grew a little stronger. From that bemused, analytical place the sensation revealed within her, she likened it to practising one of those skills one never really lost, dusting the rust and erosion from the core faculty that remained steadfast and clad in iron. Distantly, she knew she was going to be yelled at by Kyomi for committing to this absolutely insane course of action, but in her scramble to aid Ástríðr, driven by instinct instead of any higher function or conscious knowledge, she had discovered and exploited a feature of the wards and simply could not bear to stay her own hand any longer.

She supposed that any sane individual who had been forced into this course of action could only hope and pray that they would not die on impact, that whatever spell they employed to make this deed possible would not fail; Katsumi, however, felt no need to hope, for she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that her own spell, Fell Veil, could and would bear the brunt of it with energy to spare. It was of her own devising, after all, and she had double and triple checked her work on it—though she supposed that spell-crafting was not the sort of thing Kyomi had intended when she had offered to teach Katsumi ‘a little’ black magic.

A moment later, her confidence in her own work proved well-founded; the defensive magic absorbed the relatively small but body-shattering energy of her landing, allowing her to alight gracefully amidst the crater of her impact. Yet, upon the dust clearing, she realised that there was no stopping the destructive energy once it got started; and so she resolved simply to weather the storm betwixt the two, digging deep into that pit of deepest darkness within her to bring it forth. She did not need to call the name of this spell—nor for any of the magics she found herself using, in truth, for she found that she knew each spell so keenly that, like an eager hound, they came at her command without her needing to make so much as a sound—and it leapt to her fingers, emboldened at the surge of energy black as pitch and boundless as the night sky, taking that surge as an offering in the casting as it realised itself. A ball around herself, it became, a sphere constructed of a violet-red honeycomb configuration of black energy, closing not a moment too soon, as finally both attacks tore themselves free of the combatants to slam into the boundaries of Fell Veil in a harrowing bombardment, the magic creaking and straining under the power being poured into its destruction. But it could not fail; this magic was all that stood between her and certain annihilation, and so she bent her mind and will solely to the strengthening of this magic, pouring more and more of that seemingly-inexhaustible pool of darkness within herself into the shield spell.

Her blood boiled, leaping, joyous, and alive in her veins, searing its way throughout her entire body, changing it as it went; she could feel the dull ache as her nails extended into claws, her horns lengthening, her teeth growing once again into fangs to rend and tear, scales creeping along her limbs as her eyes saw so much that it burned. The pain was like nothing else she had ever felt, both the azure that distorted space and time with the sheer incalculable magnitude of its destructive energy, and the breath that was perhaps not so advanced a technique but seemed very nearly as volatile and disastrous, eating their way through Fell Veil’s barrier at an alarming rate, forcing her to escalate its replenishment, which sent a stronger surge of agony through her that would have sent her directly to her knees were she not so focused on this single moment of truth.

Devour the light…

There was a thump-thump somewhere near the centre of her chest, together with a shearing sensation, like a crack had formed in something important, buried deep within her; and suddenly the force of the dark that poured so readily out of her escalated, a trickle surging into a tidal wave. It was as though some part of her being had become unshackled, the chain’s sudden slackening sending it flying and crashing into other sealed-away parts of herself, destroying large portions of the mechanisms by which they were contained, though not quite enough to have them burst free of their own accords. Still, veins of black and bright, sickly green spread quickly from her hands along the spell itself, revitalising and reinforcing as it went even as her nerves shrieked in protest at the sudden and extreme spike in the already untenable level of strain.

Devour the light…

On a desperate lark, she inhaled and slowed her breathing, asserting a steady and specific rhythm to it; she was told that her aura could be rejuvenated through breathing, and in that moment, her lungs slid directly into the very rhythm that she knew would be her salvation.

It was a difficult sensation to explain, what transpired once the air in her body had been entirely replaced with that of her amended respiration—as though suddenly, she was breathing for two, three, twelve, two hundred, a legion of herself, while they also breathed for her. The rhythm was percussive and resonant, a sympathetic vibration that traversed all the different versions of her from all possibilities, all worlds united in this one singular endeavour.

The pain still tore through her—perhaps that was intrinsic to what she was doing—but she could feel no harm come to her, the resurgent levels of aura coursing through her body not simply healing, but goading and invigorating, the fatigue torn unceremoniously from every part of her that ached and wore. It was in a similar vein to eating something prohibitively spicey, in that there was only pain, but the knowledge that no true damage was being done allowed her to seize that pain by its throat and put it in its place. Experimentally, she went deeper and deeper into that resonant rhythm, eliminating mistakes further and further until it was not simply her repeated beyond counting copying each others’ breathing, but rather that they shared one set of lungs, one breath, repeated across infinity not as individual instances, but as a singular, unique, unified point.

Something like forks of lightning tore themselves free of her, brilliant scarlet and redder than blood, with an almost deafening yet profoundly soothing sound, lashing from her skin to greater and greater degrees; and with it, the tidal wave of black and green lost the hesitance she hadn’t noticed the presence of and tore through her without fear, the energy that poured off of her as red lightning rendering her impervious to its incidental harm. Fell Veil expanded rapidly, and with it, the suppressive fire against which she had been defending tapered off quickly, leaving the two combatants thoroughly nonplussed by what had just happened.

“What…?! How…?!” cried the phoenix-knight, the first to voice her incredulity.

Katsumi did not respond, not yet; she locked her painfully sharp eyes onto those of the beast into which Ástríðr had transformed, and began to take calm, steady steps towards her. The stare she had, awash with a mad thirst for carnage and violence, fixed upon her, and at the sight of her, or perhaps merely the sense, that gaze seemed to flinch in recognition.

Katsumi lifted her hands, but not to show that she was unarmed; rather, she sought to demonstrate that she had not been harmed, that Ástríðr, even awash with new impulse and potent instinct, had not hurt her. “Hush, my love. I am well. You could never do me harm—and you did not. I am whole. So come to me once more. Let me make you whole again.”

Ástríðr seemed to almost whimper, and she ambled carefully, each step heavy with the sudden sagging sensation of exhaustion, over to her, lowering her head and nuzzling her snout against Katsumi’s small body, nearly pushing her to the ground; yet Katsumi held her footing without so much as a sway, and brought her hands to Ástríðr’s bestial head, rubbing in small, soothing circles. “You could never hurt me, I said; yourself, however, is quite a different matter. That was a foolish thing you did, my love. Rest now, and let us heal you. Return to me…”

Ástríðr’s eyes slid closed, and as with Khalnril, the form tore away from her in a massive surge of power, returning to some unseen part of her body where Katsumi knew a hole lay, a corresponding one now forever carved somewhere on the body of her Ástríðr—a realisation that came with a few major caveats, a rite of passage reached too soon and passed too quickly to be in any way safe. Soon, Ástríðr was once more in the form she knew, beaten, bloody, injured and all but naked, but otherwise alive. Her gaze was unfocused, flickering between glassy blindness and sharp recognition, but she managed a crooked grin. “Hey…”

Katsumi favoured her with a small, genuine smile, relief surging even through the calm; it did not stymie even when Ástríðr swayed on her feet, her face going slack and her eyes sliding shut as she collapsed into Katsumi. This was expected. Katsumi caught her, and laid her out on the ground, assessing the situation very carefully, though the prognosis was grim to say the least.

“How does she fare, Your Majesty?”

“Not well,” she answered Sieðreyj, now once again walking upon two legs, her sword returning to her side, without even a pause. “Her soul was taxed far beyond what it could safely handle. Get physickers, chirurgeons, anyone practised in the curative arts you can find, and bring them here. They will be needed.”

“Will she survive until I have returned?”

“I will personally make sure of it,” Katsumi vowed.

“Your will be done,” Sieðreyj replied, bowing low and running off to find help.

“And Sieðreyj? Congratulations on your victory.”

Sieðreyj halted mid-step, taking a shuddering breath, and finally saying, “…Would that it were under more auspicious portent, Your Majesty.”

“Indeed, indeed,” she muttered to herself, paying no heed to the fact that Sieðreyj, in her commendable haste, was now beyond the furthest extent of her hearing. She needed to bolster the expended energies of Ástríðr’s soul if she was to survive, for even now she was fading fast; so, she visualised what she herself had done for Matoya just a few days prior, and immersed herself in that single, resonant breath, the event in that single moment becoming the focal point of all Creation. The lightning sparked and came roaring, and she made her hand into a knife-like blade, aiming for Ástríðr’s heart and striking with all the speed she could muster, and shunting all her excess aura into Ástríðr’s body at the physical contact against her skin.

Ástríðr’s body jolted with the sudden influx of energy, but Katsumi watched as her own aura flooded the brave, reckless woman’s heart, racing from there throughout her bloodstream to all the parts of her. The heart became steadier, the breathing smoother, certain death becoming merely a prolonged regenerative coma. Yet, one more thing remained.

Off to the side, there was a sword, cruel and curved and savage, frothing with rage and hatred and carnage and murder, yet beautiful all the same; she strode over to it, and gingerly picked it up from the ground, making a mental note to apologise profusely to Ástríðr for this transgression, with the post-script of hoping she would come to understand the nature of the taboo she nonetheless knew she had just broken by the time she expected herself to apologise for breaking it, before placing it upon her chest and bringing her hands to grasp it. “Keep it close to you, my love. It is a precious thing.”

With that, she lowered herself into seiza, monitoring Ástríðr’s condition as she waited for further aid to get to them.

The first to come through into the arena was actually a duo—Cassandra, she recognised, together with Haruhi, both of them gawking as they saw for themselves the state that Ástríðr now languished in. Katsumi acknowledged them as they approached with an abrupt nod, refusing to take her sight away from the state of Ástríðr’s soul for even a moment more than necessary.

“The ember is dim yet, but it has been duly kindled and the tinder is alight. Fuel and more shall come to it in time, but time it shall take,” Katsumi informed Cassandra without preamble.

Cassandra’s gawking transformed into something that to her seemed equal parts stricken and nonplussed. “…what?”

“The light of her soul,” she sighed, elaborating. “She has exhausted quite a bit of it, her aura so thoroughly exhausted that her soul was sacrificing itself to produce more so as to avoid death, ironically growing closer to death in so doing. I have taken the liberty of introducing a not insignificant quantity of my own, and it seems to not have been rejected. Thank the heavens for small mercies, I suppose.”

“Mami, what is she talking about?” Cassandra asked Haruhi, distressed confusion heavy in her tone.

“Cassandra, please see to her vitals and her physical condition. She speaks on matters of which there is no reasonable expectation of your comprehension,” Haruhi instructed Cassandra, who gratefully went about the work for which she was trained. Then she turned her attention to Katsumi, and said, “Cassandra here is a doctor, and in matters of the natural sciences she is formidable. Her knowledge of magic is also far from insignificant, though it is weighed heavily towards different varieties of spell damage and how best to treat them, with means alchemical, sorcerous, and mundane. The state of your lover’s soul is beyond her ken, and indeed, to the layperson, it might even sound like mysticism.”

Katsumi nodded, digesting this for a few moments. “And you?”

“I am learned in the matters of the higher mysteries, sister; I understand that of which you speak, if only in an academic capacity,” Haruhi professed ruefully. “There are not many who would wilfully learn of and apply the methods you employ simply by instinct, I’m afraid. The closest fields of study comparable to what you are doing are arts that are considered to border quite perilously on animism, and that is a border from which most individuals of learning are, and desire to remain, far removed.”

“And you are not most individuals of learning, I take it?”

“Quite,” Haruhi confirmed.

Cassandra stood and turned to Haruhi. When she spoke, her voice was strained, and flecked with fragments of fear that glittered with all the false, ruinous lustre of pyrite. “Mami, my apologies for anything I might have ever said or thought about you, even in passing.”

“Why are you afraid, Doctor?” Katsumi inquired, curious.

Cassandra studiously refused to look back at her, and Haruhi sighed. “Your eyes, sis. Whatever you did earlier, its effects haven’t quite gone away.”

Katsumi ran an experimental lick across her teeth, and found them omnivorous in shape as usual, yet not at all in feeling, as though the existence of two sets of them existed in the same instant, occupying the same physical space, though only one metaphysical. Then she looked down at her hands, and glimpsed odd protrusions out of the ends of the plating on her fingers; underneath the metal, she found, that which she could only assume were her nails had gored through her usual gloves, and in peeling away her gloves, she saw that what lay atop her nail beds had been replaced. Ten claws greeted her, sharpened to points through the gentle sloping taper that indicated natural means, each opaque claw sporting the greyish-black matte hue of igneous obsidian. In a sudden spur of curiosity, she took her gauntlet and dragged a single claw down the already ruined plate, marvelling as the mythril parted as easily as passing a hot knife through warm butter. “Fascinating…”

“Can you retract it?”

Her attention flickered from her hands and the gauntlets to Cassandra, who flinched away from her acute gaze. Considering for a moment, she shook her head. “I do not believe I can, at least not at this juncture. At the moment, it appears as though my base form has been changed in a rather permanent fashion.”

Cassandra turned her back on Katsumi fully, doing her best to suppress the shivers that ran up and down her spine. She frowned, and then realised that her aura was spilling out rather haphazardly; in closing her eyes and focusing for a moment, then, she managed to resolve the issue, folding her aura back in on itself and confining it to the boundaries of her skin, allowing the doctor to relax—well, enough to be able to speak, at any rate.

“Your lover is stable, though signs of strain are consistent with her vitals having recently been in freefall. Whatever you’ve done, it’s worked, and as far as I can tell, it will continue to. She will need rest, and I believe by the time she’s healthy enough to even think about getting out of bed, she’ll need some manner of physical therapy to offset the atrophy.” Cassandra sighed with a shuddering, unsteady breath, still clearly shaken despite Katsumi’s correction of her mistake. Residual, then. “You managed to stave off the worst of the muscular degeneration, thankfully, but what was lost will still need to be rebuilt. If you will excuse me, I must be back and reporting to the powers that be. A few of my colleagues have sent their aides to transport her body away, and they’re waiting in the wings as we speak.”

Katsumi nodded absently, waving her hands in dismissal as Cassandra hurried away and Haruhi lingered. She could still feel the aura coiled inside of her, and the rhythm of breathing she had slipped into was so natural in feeling that it was as though her respiration had been labouring under asthma before, her subconscious gleefully adopting and propagating it as she slowly, gently infused Ástríðr with subtle, soothing pulses of her own excess aura, a somnolent and repeated reminder: I am here, my love. I yet remain by your side…

His voice amplified and face ashen, Professor Elessar at last cleared his throat. “The second match of the round is over! And what a rousing match it was! It was hard-fought, but the victor by unanimous decision is Yasha of the Felmarch, of Emberlet’s very own Red Branch! We shall have a brief intermission, and then the tourney shall commence anew, Dorothea Gremory of the Warriors of Light, aligned with the Republic of Bantamoor, against Master Matoya of the Magisterium of Sosaria, again of the Federation of Emberlet’s Red Branch. Look forward to it.”

For as long as she could personally remember, Dorothea Gremory had built a career on a single concept: that there was no obstacle that could not be conquered, no matter how grandiose or intricate, with a sufficient application of trickery, skill, and sheer boldfaced audacity. Only twice in her life had she ever been given reason to consider that perhaps the generalisation of that ideal was done in improper haste, to put it lightly, and while the first lay buried in the hidden depths of her girlhood years, the second now lay bare and brazen before her eyes.

Katsumi of the Fallen Rain was its name, she knew, or at least had managed to discern; according to what she had gleaned from her friend and teammate, Mami knew her better as Kuroyuri Homura. A beautiful girl that was about as outwardly animate as a porcelain doll, her bout against Kai’ri Nhul, a monastic adherent of the Way of the Closed Fist and a powerful combatant in his own right, had on its own proved that her seemingly delicate exterior concealed a formidable contender that Dorothea wasn’t certain she could defeat. Ordinarily, the uncertainty and risk would have spoken directly to her daring nature, an exhilarating challenge that would yield a tale grand enough to be doubted at every bar she might frequent. But these circumstances were very far from ordinary.

Dorothea was a magician. Perhaps she had not studied her youth away in the venerated halls of the Astrian Citadel, combing through its extensive archives for days and weeks on end, but one of the few positive things her…questionable upbringing had granted her was a passion for the mystic arts that bordered on bona fide obsession. She had gained the undisputed title of Prince of Thieves because of magic, breaching the impossible wards and impregnable defences of dozens if not hundreds of magicians in order to make off with rare spell-books and grimoires for her to study and commit the contents thereof to memory, and as a result, she knew for a fact that there was not a spell in existence of which she had not at least heard mention of. She had known that, rather, for in watching the doll girl battle Kai’ri Nhul, though she knew her friend’s younger sister was using magic, she failed to recognise a single spell that had been cast, and not even consulting Mami’s practically encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure and forbidden magic or her beloved Ardrea’s extensive mental catalogues of foreign sorcery had seemed to yield any leads, let alone conclusive results.

She could hardly have invented the spells she was using, the rational side of Dorothea’s mind argued with some degree of passion; after all, spell creation was by its nature an incredibly dangerous, insanely volatile, and prohibitively time-consuming endeavour. And yet, such an argument did not ring quite as true as it perhaps ought to have, for she found herself at a loss for even the suggestion that an alternative explanation existed at all. Kai’ri Nhul’s transformation and subsequent soothing was of rather less immediate import, as the mysteries of aura were nowhere near as extensively catalogued as the mysteries of sorcery, even here on the continent of Deist, where the association with animism it carried abroad seemed to hold little to no weight, so Dorothea had no expectation that she would be able to understand any of that at a glance; it was instead the woman’s usage of methods that flew directly in the face of everything Dorothea thought she knew that worked its way under her skin and cracked her usually immaculate composure upon which she mounted her rakish facade.

However, such concerns ceased to matter in the very next round, when, in order to avert what seemed to be an outcome of mutually-assured destruction via some aura technique of which she had no knowledge, not only had this woman managed to pass through a ward erected by a Blackwood, but also produce and maintain a shield strong enough to halt both of the incredibly destructive attacks, struggling fruitlessly against the seemingly-impossible barrier.

In summary, she faced the prospect of a foe with an arsenal drawn from esoterica and obscura far beyond even her ken, with the power to stop an aura technique of that magnitude, albeit with some difficulty, and the skill to find a fault in a ward set by the combined efforts of Rhonwen, Taliesin, and Myfanwy fuck-mothering Blackwood. She faced a foe against which simply trying would be insufficient, unlike any or all of even the most difficult battles she’d won to date, battles where the application of genuine effort all but guaranteed her victory. And so, gazing out upon her foe from the obfuscating cover of shadows, the great gears of Dorothea’s brilliant mind slowly but surely ground to life.

“She’s really something, isn’t she?”

Internally, Dorothea started; externally, she passed it off as though the womanly voice hadn’t just successfully snuck up behind her. There was no doubt about her success—she had a great deal of practise with concealing her involuntary reactions to call upon, after all. “Indeed. I find myself at something of a loss, as it happens.”

“Yeah… Hate to admit it, but I do, too,” the woman agreed, drawing her formidable form up alongside Dorothea’s more svelte frame. Out of the corner of her eye, the magician studied her sudden companion, finding a woman of a similar frame and in some ways colouring to her Vlindreli comrade, Ophelia; this would have been remarkably attractive to Dorothea, if not for the subtle, yet insistent feeling of artifice that seemed etched into every immaculate line and curve of her brazen yet stoic features. In many ways, standing next to this woman was akin to standing beside an automaton of magitech, and though her golden eyes were obviously staring straight ahead towards the scene they both beheld, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end one by one, as if some hidden assailant was training a loaded arbalest with unerring aim at the back of her head. “Katsumi’s an interesting one. She’s incredibly powerful, but you wouldn’t know it with how she carries herself. At first I thought it was an act, but no; as baffling as it may seem, she genuinely doesn’t seem to understand that not everyone can do the things she accomplishes with ease. Sophia Holstein.”

Dorothea’s brow arched halfway to her hairline at the…unique surname, but dismissed it; either it was in reference to a particularly sordid piece of family history, or a red herring, and so it was irrelevant either way. Still, whether or not the surname was genuine, the given one seemed to be, and so it would be rude of her to withhold her own name. “My name’s Dorothea Gremory. Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” replied Sophia, returning the pleasantry in the spirit with which it was given. “And now that we’re not strangers anymore, let me give you one piece of advice.”

“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but copious amounts of past experience has taught me to be wary of strangers bearing gifts,” Dorothea replied, somewhat flippantly.

Sophia shrugged, for all appearances completely insouciant. “Fair enough, I suppose, but you can take it or leave it. If you want to win against her, you need to do it quickly. No fucking around, no tricks, no playing with your food. End it, and make damn certain you end it fast.”

“…I’d appreciate having some more to go on…”

“Generally it’s poor form to give someone a gift they’ll wind up strangling themselves with, so I can’t exactly elaborate very much,” said Sophia, her deadpan tone removing any sort of apologetic quality her words might have had. “Just know that when you step into the ring with her, you’re on a timer, and when the announcers start the match, it starts ticking. Once it reaches zero, there is no path to victory for you.”

“End it quickly?” Dorothea chuckled. “Looks like that’ll be easier said than done.”

“Oh, immensely,” the taller woman affirmed. “But ‘incredibly difficult’ is quite a sight better odds than ‘factually impossible,’ wouldn’t you agree?”

“I suppose I must…” Dorothea sighed. “Isn’t this a fine kettle of fish to wake up in…”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Sophia chuckled. “I mean, there’s one incredibly obvious way you can come out of this alive, and maybe even victorious. It’s not exactly sporting, but I could tell you if you really want to know.”

Dorothea’s attention snapped to Sophia and zeroed in on her every word. “How.”

“The power of friendship.”

“…What?” Dorothea blurted out eloquently, far beyond nonplussed.

Sophia sighed and shrugged, shaking her head with a rueful chuckle that seemed eerily reminiscent of the echoing sound of a stone cast carelessly into a cavernous mausoleum. “Well, I guess it was worth a shot. It’s been nice meeting you, Dorothea. And don’t worry. At the very least, this’ll be entertaining to watch.”