“Meeting new people is always a such a bother. You only have one chance to make a first impression, and there are so many questions which influence what that first impression will be. Is black the proper color for an afternoon gathering? What about Blood Red? What if it’s actual blood? What if it’s the host’s blood? Is that more or less acceptable than if it’s your own? 

You spend so long dithering about things like that that it’s just so easy to miss the truly important questions like ‘will they be trying to kill me with poison or have people figured out that will never work’ and ‘if they have figured out that poisons are useless, will they graduate to fire next or go straight to silvered axes’? 

Honestly, you go in hoping for the axes and all you wind up with is tea cakes nine times out of ten. It’s so terribly disappointing that it always seems simpler to lounge at home and leave a few axes lying around in case any random assassin should get to feeling creative.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame whilst nibbling on his third arsenic cake at an Imperial Winter Faire.

The Empress Eternal was frozen in perfect ice. Eternal because nothing could change within the grip of the absolute cold she’d conjured to save the Empire. That was supposed to have been her end. An Eternal figurehead caught in her last great act.  I hadn’t been sure if I believed that as a kid but I could see her motionless form right in front of me as mute and unchanging testimony to her final deed. 

I could also see her wandering around the room like she owned the place.

Which, I guess she did.

It was weird. I hadn’t been particularly impressed with any of the instructors at the Academy, or the representatives of the Great Houses, or even Doxle when it came right down to it. I mean, I understood that they were all powerful in terms of either their authority, their personal power, or both, but despite that it had been relatively easy to consider them an obstacle at worst and a resource at best.

I didn’t have that illusion to cling to with the Empress.

It wasn’t that she was burning with power, or looming over me like a mountain of menace. To a casual observer, she looked like a woman a few years older than me, who had been stuck in her room for too long and was moping about, terribly bored with it all.

That was all true as long as a ‘few years older’ was allowed to encompass ‘more than three centuries” and ‘stuck in her room’ was enough to cover being entombed in never-melting ice. 

The terribly bored part though seemed spot on.

“Seriously, the furniture may technically be Imperial Artifacts of yore, but it’s still fairly comfy,” The Empress Eternal said.

I looked over to Doxle, wondering for the briefest of moments if this was a really good illusion he was casting.

It wasn’t.

I knew that and he confirmed it with a subtle smile and a nod to say that ‘taking a seat’ was fine in the presence of her Imperial whatever-her-honorifics should be.

I glanced back to the Empress because, you know, politeness never hurt when dealing with someone that could squash me like a bug.

She echoed Doxle’s nod, so I sat down in the seat nearest to me and the door. I didn’t have a prayer of making it out of the room if things went poorly, but sometimes clinging to the illusion of hope is the best you can do.

“So, what brings you here Betrothed?” the Empress asked.

She was looking at Doxle when she asked that which was better than the alternative but nearly as perplexing, since, as far as I knew, the Empire didn’t have a history of marrying it’s leaders off to demons.

“Why to beg a favor, oh dearest Breaker of My Heart,” Doxle said, plopping into a seat a moment before the Empress climbed over the back of one of the chairs and dropped into it in a posture that said ‘dignity is for other people’.

I was relatively sure I hadn’t heard that exchange correctly. I couldn’t remember the Clockwork Cosmos smushing me so badly that my ability to process language was lost, but that seemed like a more plausible answer than interpreting their words directly.

“You could just come by to say ‘hello’ once in a while you know,” the Empress said leaning her head back over the arm of the chair until she was staring at the floor.

“Oh? Am I invited to tea again?” Doxle asked. “It’s been ages since we’ve had tea.”

“Yes. Why is that?” the Empress asked without lifting her head.

“You slapped me into Mt. Helion and banished me from your sight for a year and a day,” Doxle said.

“Mt. Helion is what, two days ride from here?” the Empress asked.

“Four,” Doxle said. “To be fair I did deserve it. I always do.”

“Oh come here you idiot,” she said and shifted up into a normal sitting position, throwing her arms wide in the process.”

Doxle hesitated, his eyes looking everywhere except at her.

“I haven’t earned your forgiveness yet,” he said.

“It’s been two years, I’ve already forgotten what we were arguing about,” the Empress said, twiddling her fingers to show he should accept her embrace.

“I’m still working on debts a bit older than that,” he said.

The Empress Eternal rolled her eyes at that. “Don’t make me make it an Imperial Decree.”

Doxle let a rueful smile break across his lips and rose from his seat to accept the Empress’s hug.

Except when he embraced her it was as though she was made of smoke.

Which made sense. I could see her body ten feet away from us standing in the same spot she’d stood for centuries (probably?).

“You two are married?” I asked before I could stop and consider what a terrible idea it was to draw their attention away from each other.

In place of wrath though, they both laughed.

“Never, and certainly not to each other,” the Empress said, her form appearing solid once again as Doxle moved back from the hug.

“She wouldn’t have me,” Doxle said with a mock-wounded air.

“Revisionist history!” The Empress’s faked shock spoke to the sort of history that might have suggested they were an old married couple, but try as I might I just could not see that. “Who proposed to who?”

“In truth and fairness I must admit that you were the one who made the offer of matrimony to my most unworthy self,” Doxle said. “Though you must admit that it was done only under great duress and that I was not the one who suggested breaking the engagement off.”

“No, I suppose you were not,” the Empress said. “You were convinced the misery we would inflict on each other was inescapable.”

“Not inescapable. I knew many methods you could have escaped from me, some few of which would have even left me in a state approximating life. I just wasn’t quite clever enough to see how we might both avoid the dreadful bonds we were destined to be shackled by.”

“We were blessed then,” the Empress said and cast a glance back towards the ice, wherein other figures stood, shrouded in the impenetrable frost.

“And we will be again,” Doxle said, his voice tender and serious despite their earlier playful banter.

“You say that every time you know?” the Empress said.

“I have only a few guiding stars left,” he said with a quiet smile and a glance to the figures in the ice.

It didn’t escape me that they’d looked at different figures in the ice and the implications of that involved the sort of thing that would probably have been a huge scandal centuries back.

“What favor is it you would beg of me then?” the Empress asked, “knowing that I am indebted to you in ways beyond the reach of numbers to count.”

“Not so,” Doxle said. “You owe me nothing, and never will. You gave me everything and more than I was ever worth.”

“On that we shall never agree as you gave me far more than you can ever know, and all my heart had ever desired,” the Empress said.

“As I say, we are blessed.”

It was great listening to them talk about things I lacked even the slightest bit of context to understand. True, they might as well have been speaking an alien language but the important bit was they were not talking about, or evening noticing, me.

“That just leave the question of our good Lady Riverbond,” the Empress said, slouching to look over at me, because that’s how my luck runs.

“What question?” I asked, my feet frozen to the floor.

“What you need,” the Empress asked in a surprisingly kind tone. “Reminiscing with Doxxy is fun, but he really did take that banishment thing seriously and if he’s decided to forgive me for it, I can only imagine it’s because you need something.”

“Oh, uh,” I said because I am smart and able to form coherent thoughts like a normal human. “Money,” I managed to form the whole entire word on my own and then followed it up with a few more. “I need money.”

“Oh? Well that’s easy,” she raised her hand to snap her fingers, “You can have the Imperial Treasury, it’s not like I’m using it at the moment.”

Before she could finish the snap, Doxle caught her attention with a gesture to stop.

“Not that much,” he said. “She needs enough to make House Riverbond viable at the Academy. We don’t want to put every Great House against her if we don’t have to.”

The Empress chuckled at that. Just a regular little laugh, like Doxle was being a silly old goat.

“Doxxy, they’re going to be against her no matter what she does. If I give her all my money…” 

“She still won’t have a fighting chance,” he said. “For now, she just needs House Riverbond’s escrow accounts, and only enough of those to support a one or two handfuls of Academy students.”

“Riverbond’s fortunes were never that big, but that’s still only a tiny drop,” the Empress said.

“Which will paint only a tiny target on her back,” Doxle said and looked to me for support.

“I’m not sure I even need that much,” I said. “I may not be staying at the Academy much longer.”

It wasn’t a decision I’d put a lot of thought into, but it made sense at first blush. I’d joined the Academy searching for Trina and I’d managed to find her. In doing so though I’d learned for sure that she wasn’t at the Academy.

In theory, if Yarrin could help me find the right book and the twins were willing to work the seance, I might be able to leave the Academy before two more sunrises passed.

I wasn’t expecting that to be the case of course.

With the chaos I’d encountered over just the last few days, it was hard to imagine that the rest of my tenure at the Academy would be smooth and trouble free. If nothing else, I expected whoever had setup the apparatus in the Clockwork Cosmos to be more than mildly upset with me. Like ‘unbridle rage with a side order of vengeful homicide’ levels of mildly upset.

None of that would matter, probably, in theory, if I could contact Trina again and find out where she’ gone and how she’d survived all these years.

Assuming she would tell me.

She’d called me her sister when we’d met. She hadn’t even thought I was human then. Or maybe she had. Or maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she’d considered me her sister because that’s what she needed then, or because she’d seen what I could become. We never got to learn what her magic was. It had been so long though she would only just barely be the Katrina Riverbond that I’d known. So I couldn’t be sure of what she’d tell me, or whether she’d even want me to come with her.

But I could hope she would.