“Typically when you set out to find something, even if it’s something you run into every day, you will find that the mere act of searching has rendered your quarry invisible, intangible, and possibly even unreal. There will be no signs of where it might be, no signs of its passing, and no clue as to its existence in general.

The one exception to this seems to be when you set out in search of trouble. As this is, in general, a phenomenally bad idea, only the most foolhardy of people ever make the attempt. Their fortune is that while they are clearly lacking wisdom, so too is trouble, which is often all too eager to be found, even when its discovery will be to the regret of all the parties involved.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame trying, unsuccessfully, to convince a toddler of his acquaintance that they did not, in fact, wish to chase after the kitty they had just seen.

I wasn’t sure why I was holding Idrina’s hand. I wasn’t sure why she was holding mine either. I’d made the gesture without thinking about only to have it become the only thing I could think about. What was worse, my usual conversational strategy of ‘remain silent and let the other person take all the risks and do all the heavy lifting’ was not even slightly viable to use with Idrina.

We’d walked through about half the Academy’s campus, in silence, holding hands because neither of us apparently knew how to let go, before we saw something which gave us a reason to. 

Nelphas Lightstone had gathered a group of sycophants and was holding court before them on the steps to an abandoned dormitory which had formerly belonged to House Dryleaf.

I turned to glance at Idrina to see if she was still okay with our plan of action. It was one thing to be in trouble with a House she’d officially renounced, accumulating additional charges like we planned too was all too likely to convince the Heads of the Houses to get serious about the nasty things they had in store for us.

Idrina was, of course, undeterred. Before she could step forward though I raised our hands, questioning if she wanted to let go now that we were on the brink of needing them to be free.

I hadn’t expected the small shake of her head that she gave, or the happy little trill that bubbled up inside me on seeing it.

I mean, she wasn’t wrong that we didn’t really need both hands free to deal with someone like Nelphas, so I suppose it could have simply been an intentional handicap to keep the proceedings from being too boring, but it was still nice. For some reason.

“Oh, and who is this?” Nelphas barked out, interrupting some self aggrandizing story which resembled the truth only where they both involved Nelphas utilizing a large pile of money to solve his problems.

As per our plan, we ignored him and kept walking.

It’s what you’re suppose to do with tyrants and bullies right? Just ignore them. Words aren’t a crime, and we can’t expect people to remain civil at all times.

For the record, we knew exactly how poorly the ‘ignore him like he’s meaningless’ strategy would work with Nelphas. While we hadn’t counted on running into him specifically, the overall plan was more or less foolproof for this stage given a Nelphas-sort of audience.

The important thing was, that by ignoring him we accomplished two things at once. First, we essentially punched him in his oh-so-fragile narcissistic ego and, perhaps more importantly, second, we established as a truthful narrative that we were not the ones who provoked the conflict that was to come. 

At least not in a legal sense.

“Looks like we’ve got some scummy intruders trying to sneak back in where they’re not wanted. Little bits of rotten trash who should have been smart enough to stay in the garbage pit where they belonged.”

That was when I saw the wisdom of continuing to hold hands with Idrina. As long as we were joined together, we didn’t have to worry that the other one was going to snap and begin the inevitable battle before us.

Nelphas, bless the poor idiot, directed his cohort to part before him and then fan out to surround us. It was meant to be a menacing display. An immediate show of his dominance not only over them but us as well.

I fought very bravely to keep the wolfish grin I was feeling off my face. It was not easy.

“We’re here on official House business. Step aside,” I said, doing my best to channel Idrina’s calm, emotionless demeanor.

Nelphas laughed. It was the sort of cruel laughter of unearned superiority which told everyone around him that he feared nothing, and was going to take great joy in pulling the wings from the butterflies who flittered before him.

“And why would I do that?” he said, walking close to loom over me. “I deserve to be here after all. No name trash like you should be on the ground licking my boots clean. And your little friend there should be lower than that. Why, I could save Ironbriar all the bother and pass sentence on you myself.”

“You do not have standing to speak in this matter,” I said, fighting to remain as blank as possible. If even a hint of my glee leaked through, I was pretty sure Nelphas would have had the foresight to start questioning the terrible life choices he was in the process of making.

Despite my poor acting skills though, Nelphas was far too committed to the illusion he’d spun of his own importance and competence to question just how deeply in over his head he already was.

It helped of course that in simply stating the plain legal truth of the matter, I’d also managed to puncture his ego in one of the sensitive bits with the implication that he didn’t have the right to speak to me.

“Oh yeah? Well it looks like I’m standing right here. So what are you going to do about it?” Nelphas puffed out his chest as though he was some form of particularly dim bird. His hangers on loved the display, and started cheering him on, giving him the ego boost he craved and degrading his survival instincts even further.

“She will do nothing,” Idrina said. “As the Head of House Riverbond she is not obligated to deal with subordinate members of other Houses directly. Should a person lacking in significance pose an impediment or danger to her however, any member of House Riverbond is free to act in her support or defense.”

We’d read a lot of law books over the course of the day. Not enough to practice law, but enough to cover the specific situations we expected to arise (or cause). 

“Oh no,” Nelphas said with comically feigned concern, “The murderer Ironbriar kicked to the curb is threatening me too. Wow, what do you think folks? Can she get away with that?”

Idrina squeezed my hand to stop me from going after him right then and there.

Which was good.

I mean, I was definitely going to stick to the plan.

And I definitely hadn’t been shifting my weight and the muscle mass in my arms. 

Because that would have been a preemptive attack on my part and somewhat harder to justify in the court.

“I repeat, step aside,” I said.

“And I repeat; or what you puny little freak?”

That was probably all that we needed. Probably but I wanted more. 

“Are you offering insult to the Head of House Riverbond?” Idrina asked.

There was a right answer to that question.

“And what if I am?” Nelphas said, which was not the right answer.

“Then I would ask if you speak for House Lightstone, or if you intend to divorce yourself from them?” Idrina asked and I could feel all of the tension drain away from her as the scent of sweat and chainmail oil rose.

“Divorce myself from House Lightstone?” Nelphas laughed again and spun around raising his hands to encourage his supporters to laugh with him. “You think I’d give up my House? For you? You two are nothing more than common road scum. Your precious little house is a fake and a lie and everyone knows it. Ironbriar is going to cut you to little pieces and then stitch you back up into something useful.”

That was interesting.

We’d only gone fishing for a grudge against House Lightstone, and Nelphas, gift that he was, had given us so much more.

He knew about the Clockwork Souls program. Which meant House Lightstone did too.

Narla hadn’t been sure of that, but she’d suspected it was true. Lightstone would never have allowed Ironbriar to develop a weapons program which could give them such an overwhelming advantage against the other Great Houses unless Lightstone was the one holding the final leash.

Thanks to Nelphas’ blustering we had our first line of admissible proof to present as justification for the rest of our ‘inquiries’.

“Or maybe I’ll save them the trouble,” Nelphas said, turning back to us with magic swirling around his right hand.

The cheering from his fan club had pushed him exactly where I’d hoped it would, but I still could barely believe it.

It was my turn to squeeze Idrina’s hand, cutting off what would have been a rather final response to Nelphas’ provocation.

“Look at that!” he said. “Now they’re all terrified. What do you think? Maybe they don’t have to die? Maybe Ironbriar will only want them hobbled so they can’t get away?”

He aimed his right hand down at my left knee.

It was amusing that he thought I would notice his poison bolt, but for a future recounting it needed to remain clear that he, at least, thought he was threatening me with a permanent bodily injury.

“Even posturing harm against the Head of a House is an actionable crime,” I said. “As you claim to speak for House Lightstone, any actual commission of a crime against the Head of House Riverbond will automatically be judged an act of war.”

He laughed again. For one last time.

“Do you think House Lightstone, my House, the greatest of all the Houses cares about a war with you? With the worthless, pathetic delusion you’ve come up with?” 

I was making him mad. More than mad in fact. By remaining entirely unafraid of him, I was making him incandescent with rage.

And that was entirely intentional.

“I think you spend time with words because you fear the cost of your deeds,” I said and let go of Idrina’s hand. 

There are techniques one can use to deescalate potentially violent situations. 

This was the opposite of those techniques.

And it worked like a charm.

Nelphas’ eyes flew wide open as the fact that I was not only baiting him, but also going to make him look like a powerless fool in front of his sycophants finally dawned on him.

He fired the poison bolt he’d gathered at point blank range into my chest.

Honestly, he should have stuck with my knee. Those are fiendishly difficult to get just right. Especially with the little improvements I insist on having in mine.

Instead, his poison bolt struck me with enough force to give a ballista a run for its money.

And, as the name implied, it tried to paralyzed every nerves in my body, and then melt them.

Which was silly.

Why would I let it do that?

I absorbed the pointless thing in order to make sure none of it splattered onto Idrina and then smiled as the screaming started.

Nelphas had an impressive set of lungs it turned out.

And Idrina had an impressive amount of restraint.

I’d had to argue, vociferously, that allowing one of the students to attack me was a crucial part of the plan. Only by soaking an attack which should have been fatal would I be able to make an irrefutable case that another of the Great Houses has declared war on me. Anything less could have been “miscommunication” or “children misbehaving”.

Idrina and Narla had countered that allowing me to soak the attack was irresponsible and that it was both their job to defend me and to deal out retribution on my behalf.

None of us had been happy with the compromise we’d reached, but, as it turned out, Nelphas was the least happy of us all.

Since he’d misused his right hand, Idrina had take it away from him. I hadn’t actually seen her move, but watching Nelphas scream at the stump where he’d previously had five of his best friends was something of a balm to my soul.

From here on out, I expected trouble was going to learn an important lesson that if we were looking for it, it should really start running.

“The webs of political intrigue grow no more fascinating after you’ve watched them break and rebond time and again for centuries. As the years go by the details change, who is enmeshed with what interests, and who plots against whom, but the overall pattern remains depressingly the same. 

It seems like any group with more than two people in it must inevitably form a snarl of conflicting loyalties and layered deceits, and try though I might to walk those paths with the care the Imperial Commandment which binds me to this world demands, even I have found the dance tiring on more than a few occasions.

Lately, even when I am not exhausted by the pointless drama of it all, has a singular thought crossed my mind – webs constrain, webs tangle, and webs block you from where you wish to go. Do you know what else webs do though?

They burn.”

– Glenmorda Tinbellus Enika of the Reaper’s Mercy uttering the last words ever heard by Sherrif Lazgo Ironbriar of Sounding Deeps.

It was well past sundown by the time Mellina had laid out her plan for us and we’d gone back and forth on each of the points were someone either thought they had a better idea, or simply objected to the risks involved. Okay, to be fair, I was the one doing most of the latter, and in the end I was forced to, reluctantly, agree that I wasn’t going to be able to do everything by myself with no risk to anyone else.

No matter how much I wanted to try.

There was just one point that hit me at the end of our discussion though that seemed odd.

“Why, or maybe how, would House Ironbriar send Holman as their champion?” I asked. “He’s part of House Astrologia isn’t he?”

I was pretty sure he’d been introduced like that but he’d also been the one to speak for House Ironbriar when Idrina had been sent to a trial by combat.

“He’s an Intercessor,” Enika said, as though that explained everything.

“Technically a Most Honorable Intercessor,” Mellina said but continued since she could see how confused I was. “Holman was born a member of House Astrologia but part of the function of an Intercessor is to take on the burdens of the Great Houses where political neutrality is desirable. They’re intended to advance the ‘legal and just causes of the House’ they’re contracted by while remaining committed to the Empire above all of them.”

“That’s why he spoke for Idrina at her trial?” I asked.

“Yes. House Ironbriar retained his services after the admissions were complete,” Idrina said.

“That’s probably my fault right?” Ilyan asked.

“It’s all of our faults,” Mellina said. “We all broke with our Houses that day. Or reestablished one in Kati’s case. Holman was convenient for them to acquire because he already had a connection to us. They would have been thinking all along to use him against us in some manner, this is simply the most direct approach they could take.”

“Couldn’t he just say no?” I asked.

“Of course. He’s free to do as he wishes,” Enika said. 

“But then he’ll be hauled before the High Council and forced to explain what Imperial Edict House Ironbriar violated to cause him to refuse a lawful order. If he doesn’t have a legally viable complaint against Ironbriar, they would strip him of his Most Honorable status.”

“So he’d lose his job?” I asked.

“And his head,” Enika said. “Intercessors are not allowed to have lapses in judgment.”

I shook my head, not in disbelief but ever deepening exasperation.

“Is every Imperial rule designed for maximum cruelty?” I asked.

“Not a single one was designed for cruelty,” Doxle said. “The cruelty is the work of later hands, and is remarkable mostly in how comprehensive it is.”

“The beheading part, for example, was added almost a hundred years after the addendum which required that Intercessors be stripped of rank if they were found to be guilty of “being subverted to the favor of any entity other than the Imperial throne,” Enika said.

“So what happens to him when we show what Ironbriar has been doing?” I asked.

“He might be executed. Might not,” Enika said. “The laws are specific in the various and horrible punishments they suggest, but the enforcement and infliction of those punishments varies wildly, based usually on how influential the culprit is.”

“And how influential is Holman?” I asked.

“Oh that doesn’t matter,” Enika said. “Ironbriar, should there be anything left of it, will ensure that he doesn’t live long enough to stand trial. It’s the same plan they have for you largely because it’s worked for them in the past and they don’t believe in changing tactics when they don’t need to.”

I recalled how touchy Enika and Idrina had been about Ironbriar’s honor and insults against it when we first met. Or rather how touchy they’d appeared to be. Hearing Enika bad mouth her former employers and sensing no new spikes of rage from Idrina gave credence to the idea that they’d been far more focused on taking the measure of “Doxle’s new pactling”.

Or at least Enika had. Idrina’s emotions were still a maelstrom of conflicting heartbeats, though after a long day of discussion they’d spun down a lot from where they’d been the last time we’d talked.

I sighed, dreading the possibility of even more talking, but I had to asked the question anyways. “Do we need to plan on rescuing him too then?”

Doxle chuckled at the idea and continued massaging Enika’s scalp as she sat in front of him. “No. Holman’s quite adept at keeping himself out of trouble and, when it comes to it, I suspect we’ll want him positioned wherever he chooses to be rather than somewhere safe and fighting to get free.”

“He agrees with that,” Ilyan said.

We all turned to look at him with the same question on our faces. He’d been silent during most of the planning so I’d sort of forgotten he was there, and I don’t think any of us expected that he’d been doing anything of value while we spoke.

“Who agrees with what?” Doxle asked, without pausing the scalp massage he was providing.

“Holman,” Ilyan said. “He agrees that we should leave him where he is. He says he’ll be fine.”

“And how, exactly, would Holman know to answer that particular question?” Enika asked.

“Because I asked him?” Ilyan said, holding up the scroll he’d been scribbling away on.

It was my mistake that I’d assumed he was doodling little cartoon images or something. When he turned the page to us, I saw the most recent bit of three different conversation threads he’d been having.

“Who have you been messaging?” Idrina asked. If she’d posed the question in that manner to anyone else, I would have assumed she had selected ‘murder’ as the reply to the wrong answer, with Ilyan though the aggravation seemed like it was a siblings thing.

“I checked with Holman just now, but I’ve been writing to Ula and Chase for a while now,” Ilyan said, gesturing to the top two sections of the scroll, both of which were forming new words and erasing old ones as we spoke.

“Ula?” I asked, thinking the name sounded familiar.

“Yeah. You remember. We met them after you…uh,” he said with a quick glance at Enika who did not know the ‘uh’ in question.

Fortunately I did, and the ‘uh’ reminded me of who Ula was as well. Ula Zarn of House Farsail, who had the flawless beauty of a statue without being a blockhead at all. Also, possibly, the leader of the ‘Empress’s Last Guard’. Most of that was probably stuff Enika already knew, but out of respect for Ula and the other’s privacy I drew the conversation away from that detail.

“After I invaded the research quarter,” I said. “They were a help in getting us home but why message them?”

“We need contacts outside the city,” Ilyan said. “I’ve got some and I know those two do too,” he nodded at Doxle and Enika, “but those aren’t exactly a secret. We’ll need some new connections right? Ones Ironbriar and Lightstone and the rest don’t know about? Ula’s been making some suggestions and thinks she can arrange a few meetings. I’m supposed to be having dinner with one of them later tonight.”

“You should take backup,” Narla said. “Just in case.”

“Yeah. I was hoping to bring both of you,” he threw an one arm around Yarrin and one onto Narla’s shoulder. “If you wanted to join me that is?”

“Like you need to ask,” Narla said, while Yarrin just nodded.

“I will guard our Head of House then,” Idrina said and for a moment she and Narla exchanging a challenging stare before Narla gave a small nod of agreement.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean my job now is literally ‘get in trouble without killing anyone’.”

“Without killing anyone else unless you must,” Idrina said. 

Mellina was, for some unfathomable reason, trying to hide a smirk. “I could help with that, but the information we need is not going to steal itself.”

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I asked, genuine concern rising inside me for the thousandth time at the thought at what everyone else was tasked with doing.

“Would you like me to say I’ve seen a vision of this turning out just fine?” Mellina asked.

“Sure. I like comforting lies like that.”

“And what makes you think it would be a lie?” she asked.

“Because you’ve made it clear how and why foresight is useless, and I know you’re too smart to base your actions off it,” I said, hoping that meant she was also smart enough to be right about her evaluations without it.

“I never said it was useless, just that what is foreseen only rarely comes to pass.”

“But you haven’t had a vision about this,” I said, guessing rather than hoping that was true.

“Or I’ve had hundreds,” Mellina said. “Both are equally frustrating, let me assure you. In this case however, it isn’t prophecy but rather my own talents I‘ll be relying on.”

“And you’re sure I can’t come with you?” I asked.

“You need to be out causing trouble,” she said. “And disguising two is more difficult than one.”

“Okay. Just make sure you come back,” I  said. “All of you.”

I couldn’t get over how maddeningly worried I was over a bunch of people who’d been complete strangers to me up until a few days ago. 

Had I been that desperate for family that the moment any potential siblings, or cousins or whatever they were, showed up my heart was going to latch right onto them and not let go?

Apparently the answer was ‘yes’, but my heart remembered the pain that came with family too and was fighting against that as much as it was fighting to hold onto them. 

So I was a mess.

Nothing new there.

Turning to Idrina I asked, “Ready to go out with me?”

She gave a little blink at the question, which was a big reaction comparatively speaking, and then nodded with an “If you are.”

“Well, trouble’s not going to make itself,” I said and stood up, which seemed to be the sign people were waiting for that we could finally get to work.

Doxle and Enika were the only two who remained where they were, with Enika asking, “Oh my, the children are away. Whatever will we do to occupy our time?”

She meant it to sound flirty and suggestive, but they were going to fight. Not emotionally or verbally. Regular fighting. Like with swords and daggers. Enika had been itching to do that all day according to her body language, and Doxle seemed to be inclined to humor her from his.

I’d call them weirdos except for the part where both Narla and Idrina wanted to fight me still and, as I came to trust them more, I was sort of intrigued to find out how that would go too.

Offering my hand to Idrina, I headed out the door which would lead us back to the Academy’s grounds. The ones where we weren’t, officially, allowed to be anymore. 

It seemed like a good option for getting into the right kind of trouble, though when Idrina took my hand a spark jumped up my arm that made me wonder if I hadn’t found all the trouble I could handle already, right beside me.

“The only thing less agreeable than the company of perfect strangers is enduring the attention of those to whom you are known.

Happily, having rid myself of the most ill-conceived martial vows in the history of the institution, the one thing I need never tolerate again is the presence of a husband.”

– Glenmorda Tinbellus Enika of the Reaper’s Mercy addressing a roaring tavern on the occasion of the formal dissolution of her matrimonial vows to a fellow Imperial Advisor whom she refused to name.

I was pretty sure Enika wanted to kill Doxle. It wasn’t a scent thing – Imperial Advisor’s seemed to lie through the scent as a matter of course – it was more of a vibe she radiated.

Of course sitting plopped casually on his lap didn’t exactly support that vibe but it was still there. If it had been focused against anyone else, I would have had problems believing the little cues I was picking up, but given that her completely unexpressed ire was directed against Doxle I was willing to give my disbelief a bit of suspension.

“Were you planning to swear fealty to House Riverbond too?” I asked her, fully aware of how ridiculous the idea was, but with how my life was going any answer seemed as reasonable as any other.

“I should think not,” Enika said lazily finding a path through each word as though she was making up her mind as she spoke. “I’ve just broken one set of fealty agreements, and former employers can become so cranky when they believe you’ve betrayed them.”

“To be clear though, you are betraying them are you not?” Doxle asked.

“Well, yes of course, but its unseemingly to make them overly aware of the fact,” Enika said. “One never knows what favors one may need in the future.”

“Wait, I don’t get it,” Ilyan said. “Why are you here?”

“For you of course,” Enika said. “The both of you.”

“You betrayed our House for us?” Idrina asked.

“Not at all,” Enika said. “This is your House is it not? I am quite good at noticing when bounds of fealty snap and I am sure yours broke almost together last night.”

“So we made you do this?” Ilyan asked.

“He’s adorable isn’t he?” Enika said, turning to face Doxle so closely that their noses touched.

“Indeed. I would have thought you picked them for the sister but you’re devilishly clever sometimes, did I ever mention that?” Doxle asked.

“Now, now,” Enika said. “Flattery will get you stabbed.”

“Few can be so lucky as to perish so well,” Doxle said.

“I didn’t say I’d be kind enough to make the wound fatal did I?”

“Now who’s flirting?” Doxle said.

“Do you two need us to give you the room?” I asked. “We can go plan our war somewhere else if you like?”

“Oh, it’s not going to be a war,” Enika said.

“Because they’re going to crush us before we can fight back?” I asked. It seemed to be the most likely outcome of all this I could see, but that didn’t diminish my desire to see it through. 

The Great Houses had murdered my sister, and every new thing I learned about them just made me hate them more. They were a terrible system of governance for the Empire, and they encouraging systems like the Imperial Academy which seemed to exist for no other purpose than to consume the best and brightest of the Empire and produce easily manipulatable shells for the Great Houses to use and dispose of as they saw fit.

“Because war between the Great Houses is simply not allowed,” Enika said.

“There’s precedence for it,” Yarrin said, holding up the book he’d been reading. “House Yellowleaf legally erased House Coldmourn through an officially declared war.”

“And House Lightstone declared war on House Greyfall two years ago,” Narla said, gesturing with her book.

“Yellowleaf’s squabble with Coldmourn was unusual since they were both subsidiaries of Greendell,” Enika said. “Also that war occurred prior to the Calamity. It’s not a scenario which will occur again.”

“Lightstone’s war on Greyfall is more representative of how wars are handled today,” Doxle said. “No organized fighting, just a few strategic assassinations and diplomacy over contract negotiations which could have been handled without the bloodshed.”

“The bloodshed was the entire point of the war though,” Enika said. “Remember Jobar Lightstone had been humiliated by Fredrar Greyfall at the previous years Winterfest.”

“Oh yes. That was a lovely time,” Doxle said.

“No it wasn’t,” Enika said. “It rained when it should have snowed and half the food spoiled in the unseasonably warm weather.”

“The wine however was excellent, as was the company,” Doxle said.

“You spent the night with the cleaning staff, helping them clean!” Enika said.

“Yes, and none of the nobility knew I was there. It was delightful! Such a shame they turned me down though, I really thought we could continue like that for quite a while.”

“Turn him down for what?” Narla asked.

“Marriage,” Enika said. “He tried to marry all four of them at once.”

“How much wine did you have?” Ilyan asked.

“Far too little, I assure you,” Doxle said. “If I’d gotten another bottle of two in me, I still think I could have made a compelling enough case to win over at least three of them.”

“Wouldn’t a war work just as well in this case?” I asked, trying to drag the conversation back somewhere in the vague vicinity of the problem Ironbriar posed.

“You’re think to assassinate the heads of Ironbriar and negotiate with the rest?” Idrina asked.

Saying yes to that would have gotten me stabbed as recently as the day before. From the expression Idrina wore and the focused commitment her scent bore though I almost thought an assassination job was exactly what she was hoping for.

“We talked about me fighting their Champion, but we don’t know who that will be,” I said. “With the protections Ironbriar has I think that’s going to be the mostly likely step they take.”

“No,” Narla said.

“No,” Idrina said.

“No,” Enika said.

And all three meant something different by it.

I held up my hand to stop the inevitable rush of chaos, and, shockingly, it worked. Since I could only hold for them so long, I nodded to Narla to allow her to explain.

“No, we didn’t talk about having you fight their Champion,” Narla said. “As the head of the House, you’re too important for that now. That’s my job and, you will let me do it.”

I wasn’t willing to concede that point just yep but it wasn’t an important fight to have yet either, so I nodded to Idrina next.

“I can tell you who they will send as a Champion if it comes to that,” she said. “They’ll send Holman.”

“That cannot be a good thing,” I said, asking for elaboration as much as confirmation.

“It’s not. It will be punishment for him siding with me,” Idrina said. “Either he will kill our Champion and then inflict whatever consequences Ironbriar desires on the rest of us, or, more likely, we will kill him.”

“Which would rid you of a friend,” Enika said. “That is indeed what they would do if they were going to send a Champion to fight you in some official capacity, but it will not come to that. Ironbriar is not the most powerful, or the most clever of Houses but they are savvy enough to prevent this from entering any arena where there exists a chance of failure for them.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t give them that much credit,” Doxle said. “Clearly they will try to ensure that all routes lead to their victory, but there are always some eventualities which are difficult to plan for.”

“Yes, that’s rather why I’m here,” Enika said.

“I thought it was the appetizers?”

“Those as well,” Enika said, licking a dab of whipped cream from her lips before continuing. “Before House Riverbond’s declaration of war is accepted, they will call for a hearing by the High Council to determine the legitimacy of Riverbond’s claim.”

“We can give testimony as to the insults done to House Riverbond,” Idrina said.

“Oh, it’s not the claims in the war declaration they will question. It’s hers,” Enika said. “As she has not been formally recognized in the Court of the Empress, they will advance the claim that she does not have the standing to speak for House Riverbond, and without that can enjoy none of the rights of a House citizen, much less the privileges of a Head of House.”

“I made several compelling arguments on that point already,” Doxle said.

“Yes, but those won’t matter since they will be killing her well before she shows up for her confirmation hearings,” Enika said.

“Then she probably shouldn’t go to that, right?” Ilyan asked.

“In which case the High Council will have no choice but to rule against her,” Enika said. “It’s not terribly brilliant but it does grant them victory in either case.”

“I’m not all that easy to kill,” I said, knowing I was tempting fate by making that particular claim. “And wouldn’t an attempt on my life more-or-less confirm the claim House Riverbond is making?”

“In the eventuality of the attempt being unsuccessful, the assassins, should any be locatable, will be discovered to be members of no house and in the employ of ‘unnamed foreign powers’. Should they succeed, the assassins will, in all likelihood be found dead with similar results for investigations into their backgrounds.”

Ilyan wasn’t terribly surprised by this but looked upset at the idea. Idrina looked entirely unmoved but her scent said she was stewing in a ball of rage and despair.

I really need to get her alone somewhere.

And say what I had no idea, but my instincts were screaming to get her somewhere that mask she was wearing could crack before everything inside her just exploded.

Not that I could blame her for wanting to explode.

If anything I couldn’t fathom how she hadn’t already done so. Even allowing me to “take her hostage” had been a monumental leap given the years of dedication and tireless work she’d given to her House. 

From her skill, I knew she’d endured as much training in a day as most children managed to do in a year. If I was able to match her in any manner, it was only because holding my human shape had effectively been training for me every moment of the day, and if I was being honest Idrina’s command of her magic was simply flat out better than my own.

All of that could have been explained by devotion though, something which the Great Houses were always eager to extract from their children. The mask she wore was something else though. That didn’t come from hard work. That came from pain. And it wasn’t the pain of training herself and pushing past so many of her limits that I’m sure she’d lost count.

The training itself was something she endured rather than endure the pain she was being offered. 

I looked for the scars but there were none there. It wasn’t her body her family had hurt. It was her soul. Ilyan had to have seen it too. That was why he’d finally left. How long could you endure a family who hated a sister that you loved?

And Idrina? Who had endured that even more directly? Who’d believed in her House even when that family never believed in her? Never acknowledged how amazing she was? In whose esteem she could never rise even while she fought endless to rise in her own? What kind of shards would it shatter one’s soul into to finally break free of all that? To finally admit, if only just enough to take action, that the vision of acceptance you’d been chasing your whole life was nothing more than a lie dangled before you by those who should have been so much better?

I couldn’t know if any of that was true, but I could make absolutely certain that, whether she chose to remove it or not, the mask Idrina wore would never be necessary in my House.

“It would seem that we have a relatively simple task ahead of us then,” Mellina said.

“You’re professed goal is to wage war on one of the Great Houses of the Empire and you believe it to be a simple task?” Enika said. “Do enlighten us as to how that will be accomplished.”

“Why one step at a time of course,” Mellina said, meeting Enika’s gaze with the sort of confidence that was only found in someone with a plan they knew would work.

“Whether my enemies come for me as singularly deadly threats or as a nuisance of armies, the same is true of them all. To the last, they are under the impression that they, somehow, are the most dangerous thing I shall ever have to face in my life.

It’s quite absurd of course. How could they possibly be the most perilous encounter in any given day, or at all likely to be the ones who manage to bring about my downfall, when I must greet everyday by first looking in the mirror and spying the one who is unequivocally the most dangerous menace to my health and sanity.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, speaking at the trial Farmer Jedri Brownsaw of Cedarbrook against the charges that Jedri had filched two pails of milk from his neighbor when he’d only paid for one, moments before the 5th Imperial Legion stormed through Cedarbrook, reducing all the buildings in town, save the courthouse, to rubble and kindling.

I hadn’t planned to fall asleep. In fact, falling asleep put a significant kink in my plans. I needed that time to deal with all the problems which were still waiting there for me when I woke up. If I was being honest with myself though, and there is a first time for everything I suppose, I really did need the rest.

I can ‘sleep’ faster than most people because I can handle the detoxification and regenerative elements of sleep as fast as I’m willing to spend magic on them. That’s great for waking up feeling physically refreshed. It is much less great for waking up with a clear head though. 

If I spend five minutes seriously working on it, I can put my body in pretty good shape (well, five minutes if it hasn’t been literally put through a meat grinder). Five minutes of noodling on the problems before me though typically means it will take me at least ten minutes longer than it otherwise would have to come up with the solution for them.

To really clear my brain out, I need to give it time to work on my problems without “Worry” and “Anxiety” tag teaming against all the useful part of my mind. 

On this particular occasion though, my night’s sleep had given me something better than a fresh line of attack on my problems. The images of the other world – my other world – lingered as clear as any waking memory in my mind. So much so that I was reasonably sure it hadn’t actually been a dream but something more fundamental.

Each ‘dream image’ was darkness wrapped in shadows, but the memories held so much more than that. I hadn’t needed to see the vast and formless others which had swum around me. There wasn’t anything of them to see after all, but touching them? Moving through them? Feeling the ever changing flow within me that was the heart of my magic and the heart of me, and finding that essence moving and shifting in time with theirs?

I’d forgotten, or maybe never known, just how vast that side of myself was. 

My people, well my original people, after my declaration to the formless others I had to admit that I had people here too, and that I’d had them for a long time now. My first family though? They played and swam and danced their ever changing lives in the epipelagic reaches because the light let them change in new ways.

In the darkness of the bathypelagic, there was no shifting of colors, there was no fine patterns and every swirling textures on skin or fin or wing to tail. Much like they’d found new modes of expression and being in the sun touched waters, living on the surface world and staying in one solid form for so long, I’d discovered even more subtle modes of expression as well. 

I’d learned to be one thing, or one sort of thing, so well that the changes I’d embraced changed me in turn. I would never be fully at home in the depths of the ocean of magic which had spawned me. Despite those changes though, I still carried my past with me. I was no longer a creature solely of the Boundless Deeps, but in me their currents still flowed, and, most importantly, to them I could still speak.

That put so many ideas in my head that they all but crowded out the previous nights worries. 

Which was bad.

I knew the things I’d been worried about were legitimate concerns, and ignoring them to flit off after a half baked baker’s dozen of thoughts would only lead to disaster.

So I went to go find my friends.

Housemates.

Eh, friends. As long as I was on a roll of not lying to myself, I might as well drop that one too I supposed.

They were, for a change, not in the dining room. They were still eating of course. In a house with cooks like Sea Cotton, Piney, and Pastries there was basically no reason not to stuff your face with snacks at all times.

Okay, there may have been some reasons, but it wasn’t like we didn’t have a higher-than-average calorie-burn-rate given the sort of nonsense we’d been getting up to.

“Hey, you’re awake!” Ilyan said, being the first to notice me as he chomped down on a cinnamon cookie which smelled delicious even from where I was standing.

“Yeah, what time is it?” I asked, curious at how much sunlight was streaming in through the windows.

“Around noon?” Narla said, without looking up from the foot-thick tome which was spread on the table in front of her. Everyone else had one or more similar doorstoppers in front of them and were similarly engrossed in their contents.

Even Idrina.

“Did I miss something? I thought our instructors were going to be running us ragged for school drills or something?” I asked, stepping over to the tray that had the current selection of treats and grabbing a cake that had seven layers, chocolate, and some kind of raspberry wonderfulness going on.

“Not today,” Yarrin said.

“They expelled us,” Narla said. 

I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me as being a possibility.

“On what grounds?” It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them. Honestly, on reflection, I was surprised we’d made it past the first day. I was legitimately curious what completely bonkers reason the Academy’s administration had come up with for denying us the education which, I think, we’d already paid for though.

“Imperial Academy cadets are not allowed to serve as active duty soldiers,” Idrina said.

Which, okay, that made some amount of sense, except for the glaringly obvious problem with the statement.

“You’re not active duty soldiers though?” It was a question regardless of the grammatical construction.

“We are since we declared war on House Ironbriar,” Mellina said, passing me one of the textbooks when I took the seat on the couch beside her and adjacent to the chair Idrina was sitting in.

‘A History of House Dryleaf; Amended’ seemed an odd choice of reading assignments, until I remembered what, or rather who, had happened to the former Great House.

“So, and I know we talked about this, I’m just curious, who declared war on Ironbriar?” I asked, flipping through the first few pages of the roughly thousand page book as I chomped on the cake. As breakfasts went my inner wolf pup grumbled at the lack of meat, but my outer young human woman was delighted with the sweetness and the easy carbs.

“Officially, you did, but I submitted the paperwork for you,” Mellina said. “I’m your Senseshal now as a note. You can fire me whenever you like.”

I laughed at that, which earned me a sideways glance of confusion.

“You seriously think I’d let you get out that for all the gold in the Imperial Palace?” I asked. “I’ll say you can quit whenever you like, but Grammy did not raise any idiots. I am not firing anybody in this room from anything.”

“Good. I will retain the position of House Militia Commander then,” Idrina said without any emotional embellishment.

I nodded in agreement for a good second and a half before her words fully translated in my brain, at which point I froze mid-nod and turned to her, my hand raised to ask a question that my brain, mouth, and lips seemed incapable of forming.

“I’m your Diplomatic Attache,” Ilyan said, plopping down on the sofa opposite us, in between Narla and Yarrin. How he managed to cuddle up to them both was as intriguing as it seemed to be unconscious for him.

Still not able to form words properly, I turned to him and gave him the same look I’d been querying his sister with.

“It’s no bid deal,” he said. “I just know Damiana – she was the courier they sent over the with the charges, so we talked for a bit while your House Archivist and Seneschal drew up the response.”

“Archivist?” I asked, to which Yarrin, of course, raised his head and hand in answer to the question.

“Right, of course,” I said. It was the most sensible role for him and he was the most sensible one to fill it.

“And you? Got a job you’d like yet?” I asked, meeting Narla’s gaze.

“Yep,” she said, straightening up to her full sitting height. “House Executioner.”

Again, I couldn’t argue that it fit for her. Wasn’t sure I was going to have any executions that I was planning on ordering, or that I’d be willing to let anyone else bear the burden of it if I did, but she definitely projected the sort of power your want from a House Executioner.

“And House Champion,” Narla said, shooting a challenging glance in Idrina direction.

Idrina scowled but did not respond. From her scent, I knew the matter was far from settled between them, and, I suspected, was not something I wanted to get in the middle of unless I really had to.

“Right, right,” I said. “So, just one thing. Don’t you need to officially be members of a House to take on governmental roles. I don’t think student bonds qualify for that. Do they?”

“No. They don’t,” Yarrin said.

“Which is why you’ve adopted us,” Mellina said.

“I’m sorry, I’ve what now?” I asked, staring at my…my children? No that definitely did not sound right. Especially not for…

“We renounced our former houses,” Yarrin said said. “Doxle witnessed our pledge of Imperial fealty to make it official. It was the only option if we want to participate in the war on your side.”

“That’s not true,” Idrina said. “Technically she could have hired us as unhoused mercenaries.”

“But then if the High Council declared this Private and Restricted, we would have been cut off with no appeal,” Narla said.

“Not that they’d do that without a massive bribe on our part,” Ilyan said.

“Or a direct order from the Empress,” Mellina said.

“That’s only a technicality,” Yarrin said. “The Empress hasn’t had a voice in the High Council since the Calamity.”

“Well, she’s been dead since then hasn’t she?” Ilyan said. “I mean, we saw with your sister that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have an opinion on things but…”

“She’s not dead,” I said. “It’s not life as we know it, but she and the others she cast the spell with? They are very much alive.”

“Can we use that somehow?” Narla asked.

“If she hasn’t been able or willing to speak to the High Council in three hundred years, I’m guessing she won’t, or can’t, make an exception for us,” Yarrin said.

“It’s not that she won’t or can’t,” Doxle said, sauntering into the room with an unusual amount of smoke wafting from his otherwise pristine suit. “The High Council knows she’s there, and she can communicate with them directly if she chooses to, but until she can put in an appearance in body as well as spirit, they are free to continue to brand her projection as being of uncertain provenance and as likely to be a subterfuge by one of the lesser houses or even an unbound spirit.”

“They’ve done that?” Narla asked.

“Consistently since the day after the Calamity,” Doxle said. “We’ve had a few discussions on the subject, but the bylaws of the High Council are remarkably clear on the need for physical representation, and the Houses have been uncommonly united on that front for centuries now. It is a remarkable testament to their ability to work together which they utterly fail to recognize or replicate in any other endeavor.”

“So you took all of their fealty oaths?” I asked him as he collapsed into the remaining open chain in our little circle.

“In your name of course,” he said. “I trust you do not disapprove.”

“Not at all,” I said. “And it was all of them? No one took the mercenary option instead?”

“Oddly that was the case,” Doxle said. “I tried to stress how much wealthier they would become individually if we had to pay for their services, but I was an unconvincing advocate for the mercenary position it would seem.”

“And so everyone here joined what is almost certainly a doomed project to take on a power structure which has been in place for longer than our collective ages put together?” I asked.

“Well, you would need to count me out of that list for the calculation to be true,” Doxle said.

“And me as well,” Glenmorda Tinbellus Enika of the Reaper’s Mercy, aka one of Doxle’s ex’s and Idrina and Ilyan’s pacted Advisor, said, wandering into the room holding a tray she was sampling from liberally, before plopping down into Doxle’s lap.

“I don’t know why people think I am inept at schemes and plans. I assure you that I am among the most brilliant of tacticians, my stunning intellect rivaled only by…umm…no…the name will come to me. If I could just stop spinning.  Yes, there is it, or, hmm, perhaps not. What was I saying? Oh right. No one…yes, no one rivals me. I always have my enemies right where they want me and can catch myself at unawares at the exact moment of my choosing.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, blind drunk, hanging suspended from a noose around one foot, covered in tar and cotton candy, with various profanities strategically painted across his naked body, approximately thirty seconds from single handedly the defeating the garrison at Breaktide.

Fighting. I’d been doing so much of it that as I watched Idrina vanish from my room I had to wonder if that was what we’d been doing? 

Had I won? She was gone, but that didn’t feel like a win. If it wasn’t a win though what was the alternative?

Was I supposed to run after her and drag her back to my room?

That couldn’t be the right thing to do, despite how tempting it was.

Maybe I was supposed to check in with the others? With Ilyan? Of all of us, he’d be the one most likely to understand what was going on. 

“Hi, why did your sister run away from me? She doesn’t hate me does she?” I was going to say literally none of that to him, ever. The questions were stupid, I didn’t need the answers, and they weren’t important.

What mattered was that someone at House Ironbriar had mad their move, and they’d been nice and predictable about it.

I knew I should go downstairs and talk with the others about it. I’d somehow wound up as the ‘leader’, and they might want to talk about continuing with our plans. I could provide my input and make sure that people like Narla and Ilyan got to make contributions that would be taken seriously.

Instead I collapsed onto my bed.

I wasn’t going to sleep. There was no worry of that happening since I was far too wound up. Sagging into the mattress though? That sounded like it was exactly my speed.

A flood of problems stormed into my mind as I lay there, each one demanding that I get up and deal with them.

The charges needed an answer, an official one in fact, since we were going to play this as one House against another, where Ironbriar clearly wanted to consider this an individual matter so they could prosecute me in their courts and inflict whatever punishment they deemed fit.

Also, the Clockworking process was something that we needed to understand more fully in order to be sure that when we shut it down, it would stay shut down.

That was going to mean another trip to the Clockwork Cosmos. Or, more likely, several trips. Those were probably going to be my job as well, since I was demonstrably able to survive there.

Grammy was out there as well. No relation to the Clockwork Cosmos. Or at least none that I knew of? Then again I hadn’t known that she’d apparently erased an entire Great House on her own, so there were clearly some things I did not know about the woman who’d raised me and was largely responsible for everything human that was in me. 

The woman I was going to need to tell, after more than a decade, that I wasn’t who I’d been claiming to be, and that her granddaughter was long dead.

Why had I ever thought impersonating Trina was a good idea?

Had it ever really been for her? 

That was what I had told myself over the years. That I’d pretended to be my sister because it would spare Grammy the pain of the loss that I’d felt. There was more to it than that though. By taking Trina’s place, I’d gotten a family and someone to care for me and watch over me and teach me the things I needed to know.

I could have stayed as a little wolf pup. That wasn’t my true form any more than Trina’s was, but it had grown comfortable after I’d worn it for a few years with her. Grammy wouldn’t have set me adrift on my own even as a pup. I would have been fed and cared for. I might have been allowed to stay in the house. Grammy might even have turned to me for support – puppies can be very cuddly, and I could have stayed like that for as long as Grammy needed me, or would put up with me.

I didn’t have to lie to her. Not for either one of us.

I couldn’t take back that I had though and with how far out my secret had gotten, I had to tell her the truth. She was going to hear about it and it had to come from me. 

So I could get out of bed and do that.

And if I was going to get out of bed, I could run after Idrina.

If she needed to fight me, we could fight. If she needed to leave, I could free her from whatever shackles of obligation she felt kept her chained to the house. Or to me. I knew nothing I did would put a smile on her face. She was too practiced at controlling her emotions for that. It wasn’t her lips that I needed to see happy though, it was her heart. 

No, I wasn’t about to ask myself ‘why her’? Yes, I knew there were a lot of people, even several in the house, who weren’t smiling for one reason or another. So why didn’t I want to go help them? I mean I did, but why did helping Idrina seem so important? Because she’d just been here? Because for as desperately as she worked to be the perfect daughter of her house, she was the biggest misfit of us all? Because I was…?

I might have completed that though. Or I might not have finished any of them. I couldn’t really tell because while I was completely incapable of finding sleep, sleep had no problems finding me.

From the thoughts that were spiralling around in my head it would have been reasonable to expect that my dreams would have been some mishmash of Idrina and my grandmother chasing me down for murdering random Ironbriars. Or the Clockwork Cosmos putting me on trial for the crimes I haven’t had a chance to commit against House Ironbriar. Basically a melange of all my worries whirled together and amplified by anxiety and the weird brain chemistry of sleep.

As it turned out though, my dreams weren’t of anything that I’d fallen asleep thinking about. 

Instead I dreamed of darkness.

It wasn’t the darkness of night, or of sightlessness though. It was the rich, weighty darkness of the depths.

I’d swum from this darkness. It was familiar and I knew I’d risen up from it. 

What can rise can fall again though.

Except, I couldn’t remember falling. 

I clung to the memories of my life in the waking world as though they had the power to buoy me up the surface of the unfathomably vast ocean which surrounded me.

I wasn’t meant for the surface of course. Playing on the ocean’s edge was only supposed to be an occasional thing. What had I become that I spent so long there?

Ten years? Had I breathed air for ten years? My dream rejected that. I couldn’t have walked on the surface of a world for ten years? No one could be apart from flow for that long? No one could hold onto anything across all those days upon days.

The surface wasn’t where I belonged. I was meant to be down in the flow, where my body could melt away and the entire ocean would support me, rather than having to stand on my own, rigid feet, constantly fighting against the gravity of my life.

Except the ocean wasn’t supporting me. It was drawing me ever lower, towards something which loomed beyond the borders of the world through presence alone.

I’d sunk and been wrapped up in bathypelagic gloom. I was beyond the cares of the surface and deeper than the reach of the brightest light, and in my dream that felt like coming home.

Because I wasn’t alone.

I’d felt the great alien powers which flowed around me before, but this time they weren’t so alien or threatening.

With currents as broad as a continent, they swept away the lies of form I’d been clinging to. My body, my identity, my name? I didn’t need those. They weren’t me. They were limits I’d accepted on what should have been an endlessly flowing spirit.

The storm of thoughts which had assailed me?

I could be free of all that.

I could let it all blow away somewhere far above, up on the surface which was so far away. Up in the light I could no longer see.

In the falling currents of the bathypelagic, I could feel my dream washing away the reality of what I’d been and what I was. Though they were so much bigger than I, so much more than I could comprehend, I felt the unseen ones calling me back to the endless, changing flow that was my true birthright.

They did not love me. They did not know me at all. But still they offered to make me whole once more. To forgive my wayward wanderings and welcome me back to the boundless seas where I would never have to endure anything again. Where I could simply be, and be anything I wished.

I don’t think they expected me to refuse them.

I don’t know that I expected to refuse them.

What they offered was endless peace. Freedom from everything and the power to be anything I wished.  Ten years hadn’t been enough to make me forget what that felt like, and I would spend a lifetime or more before part of me stopped yearning for it.

But a lifetime is what I’d earned for myself.

In the ocean, I could exist, but I wouldn’t be myself. I would be whatever nebulous, formless thing the forces around me inclined me to be. If I was pushed downwards, I would flow downwards. If I those around me wanted me to be smaller, I would shrink.

And that wasn’t me.

Not anymore.

No light illuminates the depths. No light but that which those sunk down bring with them.

I did not fight the unseen ones.

I did not rebuff them.

I did not hurl defiance at the fate they offered me.

They were not my enemy. They did not mean me harm.

They were powerful and vast and inimical to what I had become, what I chose to be, but they were not something I needed to fight.

They were a part of one of my worlds, and a part of me, but only a part. I could touch their world, as they could touch me, but we would never be joined together into one thing, not again.

Stretching out my hand – because I had a hand again – I touched them, showing things so vast as to burst beyond the definitions of any words I could hold them with, that I was not as they remembered me. That I was not what I’d known myself to be.

My birthright remained as mine. I hadn’t lost what I was. I was still a part of their world.

But I was also part of another. 

My nameless changing self, child and innocent that it had been, had changed beyond the boundaries of a boundless changing people. My human self? Well that was still a work in progress, as all human selves are, but I was proud of what I’d built and that pride lit the seas around me, shining like a star to guide me home.

And it was good to have a guide to follow back.

Shining a light right above the Abyssopelagic is a wonderful method of attracting an intriguing class of predators from beyond the limits of reason and sanity.

As my dream faded, I forgot those predators, dreams being wonderful at denying things like that entry into the waking world, but I recalled the conversation I’d had with the unseen ones.

They hadn’t abandoned me and that set some interesting gears turning in my brain.

“My greatest work? The hardest endeavor I have ever undertaken? Why I assure you it is a simple matter to name. No spell I have cast, or duel I have fought comes close to earning that title. The grand tests of my youth? The ones I studied and practice for until my fingers were raw and my eyes bled? Child’s play. The burdens of my position as First among the Empress’s Advisors? As light as a feather. Staying married for three whole weeks to my own doppleganger? While we tried at every moment to destroy each other? Including the acid pool we pushed each other into during the reception without giving away that we were anything but madly in love with ourselves? Like unto a vacation of bliss.

Far harder than any of those, so taxing that even with all these centuries of innumerable attempts I can claim no victory at it, is the dread task of resting both when and where I am supposed to.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame attempting and failing to talk an Imperial Nurse into  allowing him to leave his hospital room before his physicians would allow it.

I was wanted for murder. That wasn’t terribly surprising. I was far more shocked that I was wanted for being myself. Out of everything that had happened to me over the last few days, that was left me feeling the most disconnected from reality.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe my housemates…my friends. I’d been really careful in fixing up the olfactory center in my brain and my nasal cavity. I could smell the honesty of their appreciation and the lack of, what would have been entirely sensible, fear on their part.

They knew who I was, who I wasn’t, what I was (mostly) (somewhat) (a little), and what I wasn’t, and they still wanted to be around me. None of them even wanted to kill me. I mean Narla and Idrina were still eager to fight me, but there was a disturbing lack of malice or homicidal undertones to their desire.

A normal girl wouldn’t have found that so shocking. If Trina had lived and taken her rightful place…well if that had happened she definitely wouldn’t have been where I was. My sister, even when she was a little girl, had been far too wise to get herself embroiled in the ridiculousness that was the politics and machinations of the Great Houses. 

I wasn’t that wise – demonstrably – but had I been the girl I’d been claiming to be, I probably wouldn’t have had such a hard time believing what my senses were telling me about my friends. If I’d been the girl I’d claimed to be though, I wouldn’t have spent the last decade convincing myself that anyone who learned my secret would work to see me destroyed instantly.

To be fair to my younger self, and my present self for that matter, I hadn’t been entirely wrong. The group of weirdos I’d gathered into my house – or taken hostage in Idrina’s case – were not particularly representative of what the ‘average Imperial citizen’ was like. No one in their right mind, for example, hitched their fate to a last heir of Great House which had been all but destroyed. I absolutely lacked the power to keep them safe, the prestige to assure them a position in high society, and the wealth to allow them to live as equals to the siblings and cousins they’d left behind.

And none of them cared. Each of them seemed to prefer that in fact. They’d walked away from lives that other people routinely killed and died to attain, and not a one of them was looking back.

So, on reflection, I felt like I should forgive myself for feeling a bit adrift from the world. Too much had changed, both in my circumstances and in me, to not require some time to process it all. 

As I floated in the tub that Pastries had filled for me, I let my body absorb the warmth and the heavenly fragrances both while my mind slowly, oh so very slowly, began to untangle itself.

The future was terrifying. I couldn’t deny that. I more-or-less couldn’t even face it.

And that was okay.

The future wasn’t here. It would come in it’s own time and I would face it then whether or not I gave it space in my thoughts while I was floating and drifting.

I would adjust to people accepting me too.

Someday.

I’d have to become someone new for that to be true, and I wasn’t ready to be anyone but who I was at the moment, and that was okay too. 

I didn’t need to be my future self. Her time was still to come. All I needed to do was hold the image of who she was, who I wanted her to be, in my mind and use it as a guiding star to chart my course.

I’d fail at that too of course. Because that’s how life works. We try. We fail. We try something new. Maybe we learn something. Maybe we refuse to learn. With each step though, we build up some parts of who we are and cast aside others. 

I bobbed along, letting my mind wander through fields of thought like that, hoping that if I gave it the freedom to go where it needed to and the quiet to let it say what it needed to, I’d be able to clear away at least some of the thoughts I’d been shoving off to ‘think about later’.

That didn’t work either of course. The mind, or at least my mind, isn’t like a filing cabinet you can move stuff into and out of at will. The things I’d pushed off I either wasn’t ready to deal with yet, or had forgotten, or had been changed enough by my experienced since I pushed them away that they’d resurface as something else entirely.

I’m not sure how long I rested like that. Not as long as I needed, or as long as I would have liked, but probably longer than I should have. It was at least long enough though that when there was a knock on the door I didn’t leap out of the bath in Dire Wolf form.

“I’m still alive,” I said, loud enough to carry through the nice solid wood in between me and whoever was interrupting my bath.

It was probably Doxle. He seemed to have a talent for interrupting, and I hadn’t heard from him since we’d gotten back home. 

I braced myself and marshaled all of the entirely reasonable explanations I was going to need to give for the entirely unreasonable things I’d done and, more importantly, intended to do in the near future.

“I am glad to hear that,” Idrina said through the door.

That got me up quickly.

I wasn’t worried about her attacking me in the bath. I knew her better than that by this point. What I was worried about, I definitely could not say.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked, drying my hair as quickly as I could.

“The charges against you have been delivered,” Idrina said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. We’d been expecting that, and the speed with which they’d been drawn up said that House Ironbriar, or at least one of the members of it’s internal council had been enraged and foolish enough to act against me without spending the time to get the back of their other Great Houses.

“That’s excellent,” I said, and then remembered the other important element we’d been counting on. “Do the charges mention you or your brother?”

I slipped into my clothes in a blink, morphing myself as needed to slither into them without impediment, before opening the door so that we could talk face to face.

Idrina was waiting for me a tactically sound distance back, standing with her hands folded comfortably at her waist.

“No mention is made in the charges which were presented of either Ilyan or myself,” she said. Her gaze was focused at an indeterminate point behind me somewhere, and her scent was all but screaming ‘conflicted’.

“That’s good news too, isn’t it?” I said, confused over what could be bothering her. “I thought you and Mellina said that if they didn’t mention you two in the charges officially it would be because they planned to focus solely on me.”

The idea, as they’d explained it, had been that in my role as the Head of House Riverbond, any charges against me would fundamentally sweep up any other wrong doing of those “under my auspices”. It was expected that if one of my subordinates was guilty of some wrongdoing, that the bill would be sent to me and I would be free to inflict whatever punishment I chose to on the unlucky fool who’d cost me whatever resources were required to pay off the charges once the case was settled.

“With no charges made against us, Ilyan and I are free to return to our House without fear of official censure.” Idrina should have looked happy about that. 

Or not. She didn’t really do ‘happy’ from what I’d seen. But she should have smelled happy about it. Instead, she smelled more conflicted than ever.

“Is that what you want?” I asked.

“As your hostages, we are more valuable,” she said, and even I was able to catch that she’d dodged the question.

“That’s not true,” I said, objecting to a very specific part of what she’d said. “You’re value doesn’t depend on me or anyone else. You’re valuable no matter where you are or why you’re there. Ilyan too.”

“I owe…”

I didn’t let her get that thought out at all.

“You owe no one,” I said. “Or, wait, no, you owe yourself, and that’s it.”

She glared at me.

Which was good.

And she smelled annoyed.

Also good.

A short while ago I would have been afraid to aggravate her like that. Just like she’d punched the stupid out of my face though, I decided she needed me to punch it out of her emotions.

“You need us to stay,” she said, the slightest hint of anger peeking through her words.

“Nope. I want you to stay. But that doesn’t mean you should.”

She blinked and fought to control what looked like a variety of emotions from showing on her face.

“If you stay, I want it to be because it’s what’s right for you,” I said. “I want you to stay because you are frankly amazing, and you’ve shown me things no one else could. I want you to stay because I don’t want to be your enemy. I was afraid of your strength before, but strong enemies aren’t something to run from.”

“You would embrace me then? Because of my strength?” she asked, her scent firmly back in the realm of deep confusion.

“I respect your strength. I admire the work you’ve done to develop it. But that’s only the smallest part of what makes you amazing,” I said.

“And if I could never pledge my strength to you cause?” she asked. “If I vowed never to fight with you?”

“I would want you not the slightest bit less,” I said. “Make the vow right now, and I’ll be glad to prove it to you.”

“You think I wouldn’t keep it? That you could suborn me as you’ve suborned my brother?” she said and I couldn’t tell which answer she was hoping I’d make.

“Idrina, on my life and power, I would never ask you to break a vow, or ever believe I could change your heart. I’ve seen you. I know you. I can only imagine how much pain that would cause you and even that is terrible.”

That made her angry.

Which was weird.

She hid it completely on her face and in her body but buried deep down some quality rage was burning hotter than the sun.

Without another word, she gave a formal nod, spun on her heel and marched out of my room, leaving me perplexed where I’d gone wrong and why she was so mad at me.

Or was I was the one she was mad at at all?

“It’s challenging to rise from bed each day, greet the morning light with even a modicum of awareness, and not observe a hundred and one different reasons why the world should be allowed, or even encouraged, to burn right down to the ground.

My preferred solution to this problem is simply not to rise until it’s the next day. Apocalypse’s are so much work to engineer after all and sleeping in winds up being so much more agreeable to both myself and others.

On those days when I am forced to rise and confront the teeth grindingly horrible stupidity of the world around me, I am forced to fall back on the next strongest bulwark against invoking armageddon – namely that, for as full of malice and cruelty as the world may be, there are people in it who deserve better, some few of whom I may or may not harbor the smallest possible bits of appreciation for and whom I am loathe to see any further misery inflicted on.

Saving the world for myself? Why, no, that would be ridiculous. I clearly do not deserve a better world.

For many reasons.

No, it is simply not something I can lay claim to.

But that doesn’t mean I have to accept the world as it is. 

Not when I can make it better for them.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame lecturing a very confused assassin who thought his quarry was a simple farmer who’d been caught unaware in a tavern at dusk.

I was setting myself up for a battle. No holds barred. Knockdown and knockout. Winner take all. On one side there was me. On the other side there was, basically, everyone else.

You’d think that would have given me a clue that I wasn’t thinking clearly.

You would be wrong if so.

You would also think I must have had some profound and well considered reason for setting myself against Mellina, Idrina, Yarrin, and even Ilyan, any one of whom could probably beat me one-on-one (maybe not Ilyan, at least not without time to seduce a whole army of followers). It would be entirely reasonable to take my opposition to them as proof that I had rock solid ground to support my arguments with.

You would be wrong there too.

Looking from one of them to the next, I couldn’t have offered any rational explanation why I was so opposed to them being part of the “tear a Great House to pieces party” I’d burned into my dance card.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want their help. Taking on a Great House was far more than I could possibly handle on my own.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them either. I’d told them enough about me that they could basically erase me from society, and possibly existence, if they put their minds to it, and yet I knew they wouldn’t.

And I knew they were capable. I had no idea how I’d ended up with a group of housemates who were all so exceptionally talented. I certainly hadn’t applied any kind of rigorous screening process to the strays I collected. Really, I hadn’t even collected them. They’d sort of collected me.

So I wasn’t responsible for what was going to happen to them if they followed me down a path that couldn’t possibly lead anywhere good even if it was the only even marginally sane course of action there was.

That should have been enough for my conscience right?

No one would blame me when they got hurt, and permanently disabled, and killed.

It wouldn’t be my fault.

Except…

Except I’d already lived for a decade knowing that something horrible had been my fault even though no one had ever blamed me for it. 

I knew I could lie myself out of any consequences for my actions and never face the anger and disgust that I deserved to endure. 

So that was it then, right?

Everything was great. 

I had all the bases covered. No matter what happened, I didn’t need to worry.

Yep, definitely, except not a word of that was true, and I’d been willing to fight till I was exhausted to convince the people around me of that fact.

But then Trina had asked her question and knocked all the ground out from under me.

“Why can’t I just run away too?” I asked, trying to compute something that was innumerable.

“Yeah,” Trina said. “You’re afraid of what’s going to happen to your friends here? I’m not going to argue you’re wrong, and I don’t think they will either. They know as well as you do the kinds of things the Great Houses will do to stop you, or against you if you succeed. Grammy had a reason for retreating to the forest and living in a fortress of her own making after what she did, and I don’t think either one of us imagine we could match her at her prime. So why don’t you all go somewhere safer.”

It looked like Idrina had an answer for that but she held her lips shut and focused on me, I guess more interested in the wrong answer I was going to give than the right one she held.

Not that I had even a wrong answer available.

I could have babbled off the first thing that came to my mind, but I hadn’t missed the lessons Grammy had taught me. She’d never expressed her philosophy in words but she’d lived it so clearly that I couldn’t help but hear and understand it.

‘If you don’t know an answer, wait to speak until you understand the question and yourself.”

So I did.

A breath in. My eyes closed.

Why was it that I couldn’t run away?

Or could I?

I tried to imagine fleeing to some foreign shore. 

I could take them all with me. House Riverbond had the funds to pay for a journey anywhere in the world and the means to live comfortably once we got there. The Great Houses wouldn’t be happy to have a threat lingering on their periphery but their ability to project force into the Stoneling lands or other distant countries was limited enough that we’d make short work of any assassins they sent after us.

It wouldn’t be a bad life either. There were plenty of places outside the Empire which could use our help. Peoples the Empire had little contact with and ones it had entirely too much contact with.

So why not leave and go help them?

Why fight a doomed battle?

I opened my eyes and glanced at Trina.

Was I doing this for her?

Was this revenge on the Great Houses for taking her from me? Had I known, on some level, that their were responsible this whole time?

No. I hadn’t. I didn’t hate them for Trina’s death. Or I hadn’t. That was rapidly changing the more I thought about it, but it wasn’t the central reason why I couldn’t leave this behind.

“If I run, no one is ever going to fix this,” I said.

“Are you sure this can be fixed?” Trina asked. “Are you even sure you know what needs to be fixed at this point? Or how to fix it?”

“No. I’m not,” I said. “What the Great Houses are doing? How they treat people and how many people still support them? Maybe that’s a sign that there isn’t anything left to salvage. Maybe there’s no point to any of this and nothing will ever get better no matter what we do.”

No one interrupted me even though I let a silent moment pass to allow them to.

“Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Unless I try I’ll never know, and if I don’t try I’ll always have to wonder if there wasn’t something I could have done to make things better. I’ll always wonder if I couldn’t have been better.”

I paused again and again they let me continue.

“I couldn’t save you. I’ve spent ten years crushed by that. Even a decade of guilt over not being enough is better than what I would have felt if I hadn’t even tried though,” I said. “I think if I hadn’t done anything, my heart would have died that day too and, even if it sucks, I’d rather have a wounded heart than a one that had crumbled to unfeeling ash.”

Mellina put her hand on my left shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her approaching but my instincts were strangely accepting of her.

“Do you see now why this needs to be all of us?” she asked.

And I did.

Curse them all, I did.

“You deserve better than this,” I said, playing the last gambit I could think of because it was true for all of them. Narla too, and she needed to hear it as well, but I only had my audience at hand to work with.

“So does everyone,” Ilyan said, stepping in close as well, with Yarrin at his side.

“We’re as afraid as you are,” Yarrin said. “But we’re in this together with you.”

I may have flapped my jaw a few times trying to find a coherent response to that.

“Why me though?” I finally asked, hating how it sounded as the words escaped from my lips.

“Because you inspired them,” Idrina said.

“How?” I wasn’t inspirational. I wasn’t even real. Not like they were.

I saw a dangerous flash shoot across Idrina’s expression as those thoughts crossed my mind, and I reconsidered them in light of her previous demonstration.

Maybe I was a little bit real.

Maybe I was more like them than I’d understood.

“You got into an arena with her, and then got back up afterwards,” Ilyan said, gesturing towards his sister. “So don’t try to pretend you’re not brave.”

“You avenged Kelthas,” Yarrin said. “So we’ve seen your compassion too.”

“I ripped that guy apart though! How was that compassionate?” I could still feel his heart like a warm squishy blob in my hand if I thought about it.

“You cared enough about a common born boy to bring his killer to immediate and irrevocably justice,” Mellina said. “And you saved who knows how many other applicants from meeting the same fate.”

“And you are loyal and true,” Idrina said, almost sounding as though she was embarrassed to give that particular compliment. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to summon your sister to speak with us.”

Ilyan glance over at his sister with a surprised expression and a scent of amazement that I couldn’t make out either.

“I know what you think you’re not,” Trina said. “If I’d been around, I’d have spent the last ten years convincing you how much more ‘what you are’ matters than what you’re not, but we lost that time. I can’t make it up to you or make any demands of you. It wouldn’t be fair because there’s nothing I can give you in return. All I can do is ask that you not miss spending the next ten years with people who will show you what I couldn’t.”

I glanced around from one of my friends to the next. 

They all had small smiles and were waiting for Trina’s words to sink into my thick thick skull. 

Well, almost all of them. Vena and Hemaphora were watching from the sidelines but nodded in agreement with Trina when I glanced over at them. Idrina however was looking away.

She didn’t smell angry or appalled at the idea. If anything she smelled nervous, which really didn’t make any sense.

It was possible that I’d miswired something in my brain. Connecting neural pathways had taken a fair bit of practice, and learning to use them was an ongoing process. 

Which pretty much defined all of the rest of me.

I had friends. Or so it seemed.

That was new.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them.

Protecting them wasn’t it though. At least not how I’d gotten fixated on what I could have done to protect Trina.

They had as much stake in making our world a better place as I did, and I needed to respect that, and respect them by asking for their help when I needed it not trying to go it all alone.

“In that case,” I said giving them the best smile my weary face could manage. “Which Great House are we going to take down first?”

“It is one of the great challenges of life to slay one’s own inner demons. The things we fear, the things which drive us into rage, the things which lead us to despair, they all prove remarkably resilient to the slings and arrows we can bring against them.

‘I will not be afraid of him’ we say, and yet even years later our knees still turn to jello when a voice is raised and our spirit shrinks as though the fear we overcame long ago can choose to rise from its grave whenever it pleases.

I have no secret weapons to fight such battles, except perhaps for one. It is possible, in some cases at least, that our demons are not what we need to fight.

The fear which steals away our strength? It is not our enemy. It is our guardian from a time when we were too weak to stand against the peril which inspires it. It cannot be slain, because there will always be things which we are too weak to stand against. In place of the sword then our only weapon may be an embrace.

Accept that we are weak, accept that there are things which hurt us, and that those things are sometimes ourselves. In acceptance, I have never found a balm against those woes, the fear remains, the anger burns, but beside them there is understanding. They are not the whole of the world, and not the part I must choose to listen to.

My demons do their work guarding me with the small tools they have, it is up to me to listen to what they have to say and choose what tools I will take up.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame in an unsent letter to the Empress Eternal.

I thought I was alone in possessing what should have been incredibly forbidden knowledge about opening the sort of rifts Reaving Storms caused. Or if not alone that it at least wasn’t common knowledge. As it turned out I was correct about the “not common knowledge” part, but I’d failed to account for how weird my housemates were.

“The Great Houses,” Yarrin said. “They create unnatural storms all the time.”

“For the hunts,” Idrina said.

“And less savory purposes,” Mellina said.

I couldn’t see them but I knew none of them were wearing particularly pleased expressions.

“I thought, based on the how often they bang on about being the only ones who can protect the Empire from the storms, that they were supposed to be in charge of shutting down the Reaving Storms,” I said. “Isn’t that the whole point of the Soul Kindled Wards on the city?”

“That is why the wards exist,” Trina said. “And there are natural Reaving Storms which occur. Storms which are as dangerous as we were always told. Just not for the reason the Great Houses cite.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “No wait, I don’t want to.”

“What’s there to guess about?” Mellina asked. “They do it for power, and the natural storms offer that power to everyone, or at least everyone who can avoid getting killed.”

“Storms are where the materials to make and sustain their enchanted equipment comes from,” Yarrin said. 

“Also how troublesome enemies can be disposed of,” Mellina said.

“Or the offspring of enemies you bear a grudge against but are too cowardly to target directly,” Trina said.

“Who.” It was only technically a question. In actuality it was a promise, a contract which would finish off at least one of the Great Houses in the exact same manner Grammy had ended Dryfall. All it needed was a name affixed to it.

“If I tell you, you’re going to destroy yourself trying to get revenge for me, aren’t you?” Trina asked. 

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m going to destroy them trying to get revenge for me. Revenge won’t do you any good at all, right?”

“Neither will my sister losing her life,” Trina said.

“I’m not particularly easy to kill,” I said. The others had missed the ridiculous levels of damage I’d endured in the Clockwork Cosmos, but I suspect Trina had seen a good portion of it.

“The one’s responsible for the storm that killed me could manage it,” she said. “Also, if I could beg an indulgence, ripping them limb from limb might be satisfying in the moment, but it won’t stop the damage they’re doing.”

I grumbled. Trina was a better person than I was. I’d known that since she first took me in. Also a smarter one. My first instinct being to bite my problems was, I felt, not entirely unreasonable. Hers tended to be just a bit wiser though.

“From a purely personal standpoint too, if you kill them, they’ll only suffer for a brief while. Take apart their power and destroy their position though and they will suffer for the rest of their miserable little lives, which I would like to watch.”

Trina was smarter than me. I’d never mistaken that for being more merciful though. Which, I suppose, proved that she was a rightful decedent of Grammy’s bloodline. 

“That leaves room for us to help with the process,” Mellina said, reminding me that she bore a striking resemblance to Trina in terms of both intelligence and mercilessness.

I pictured seeing Mellina standing beside Trina and decided I did not like that image at all though.

“You can’t,” I said. “I know you are all in danger, but this can’t be your fight.”

“And why is that?” Idrina asked. There was danger in her tone, and probably no good answer I could give, so I went with the truth.

“I’m not supposed to be in this world,” I said, throwing my stupid reservations to the winds. What did it matter? They probably knew what I was already anyways. “This isn’t my home, so if I die here, it’s okay. The world won’t have lost anything it needed. That’s not true for any of you. You’re all supposed to be here. This is where you belong.”

“Is your sister standing in front of you?” Idrina asked.

It wasn’t the response I’d been expecting, and as I struggled to figure out why she wanted to know Idrina answered for me.

“Yeah, we’re about an arm’s length apart,” she said.

“Thank you,” Idrina replied and I heard heard her swing a hand through that space. “As I expected.”

Then she hit me right in the face.

I’m not talking a light slap either.

She just full on decked me.

“What the?” I said, knitting my shattered nose and jaw back together.

“Apparently you are of this world,” Idrina said with absolutely zero remorse in her voice.

Violence is really not a great language. There’s all kinds of problems with letting your fists do the talking for you, and it’s not at all acceptable to hit people to make a point. You can can cause serious injury and/or severe psychological trauma. If it had been anyone else I would have been having some words with her, but as I picked myself up I met her gaze and understood what she was saying.

It wasn’t okay that she’d hit me because I had less worth, or wasn’t a person, or any idiocy like that. I understood what she was saying because as much as it looked like she’d hurt me, we both knew that a hit like that was no more serious than tousling my hair given who and what I was. As for my mental state, again, she seemed to know my limits there. Emotional stuff, like with Trina, took me apart. Silly physical things though? Well, she’d already speared me through the heart and I didn’t feel any particular lasting trauma over that. A little bop on the nose? Maybe if she’d used one of her spears I’d have been mad, but we both knew she hadn’t intended to hurt me, just to provide some undeniable proof that I was wrong about the claims I was making. I wasn’t a native to the material realm, but it had seeped into me. I had become something other than I’d been by living the life I had. Something new, and this world was as much my home as anywhere was.

Trina looked like she got that too, though she could have just been shaking her head at what an idiot I was being.

“Uh, why can I see you all again?” I asked, catching what had changed right away.

“She disrupted the spell,” Yarrin said, a pained wince in his voice.

“No she didn’t,” I said. “Trina’s still here, I can see her just fine.”

“You…you can?” Yarrin asked.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to go,” Vena said.

“The spell is broken,” Hemaphora said. “At least, we think it is?”

“Kati, can you still hear me?” Trina said, and from their expressions I could tell everyone else heard that too.

“Uh, yeah, she hit me in the face, not the ears,” I said, as confused as the rest of them. The thing was though, we were confused about different things. I couldn’t tell why they thought the spell was broken when I could clearly still feel it wrapped around me.

“It’s her eyes,” Idrina said, stepping in close to look deep into them.

I blinked. My eyes felt fine. Enspelled still, but fine.

“Huh, yeah, that’s not what they looked like before,” Trina said. “Kati, did you eat the spell that was on you?”

“Did I what?”

“You didn’t want the spell to drop right?”

“Yeah. I don’t want you to go.” That seemed pretty simple to guess. Her point about me eating the spell left me picking at the idea though.

Which almost immediately showed me that she was right.

“Oh,” I said when I saw what I’d done. That probably wasn’t good?

“What happened?” Ilyan asked.

“She’s absorbed the spell entirely,” Yarrin said. “She can see both worlds at once now.”

“And is acting as an open conduit between them,” Idrina said, shifting into a more guarded stance.

“We’ll need to help her close the spell down,” Mellina said. “This place has too many ghosts for it to be safe to walk around like that.”

“Not yet!” I stepped back. Unnecessarily. They weren’t about to tackle me and rip the magic away or anything.

“Not yet,” Trina said. “But soon. It’s not safe for either of us to keep this channel open for too long.”

“Not safe why?” I asked, willing to kill and/or eat whatever I needed to in order to draw these fleeing moments out as long as possible.

“There are creatures on my side who look for openings into the material world, and I’d rather not encounter any of them. Certainly not in the numbers that would be drawn to a living rift between the worlds.”

I wanted to object that I could protect her, but Idrina had apparently slapped the stupid out of me for the moment. I had no idea what kind of trouble would find Trina if I held her here for too long. Conversely, now that I was able to study the spell that I’d absorbed more closely, I felt like I had a somewhat decent chance of replicating it on my own. And a really good chance if I had Vena and Hemaphora’s help.

“We should make this quick then,” I said. “I need to know who murdered you, and who’s behind turning people into Clockwork Souls.”

“We all do,” Mellina said. “Unless you still think we’re not a part of this.”

“I…” Okay, so Idrina hadn’t smacked all the stupid out of me. “I know why I need to do this.”

“Do you?” Trina asked.

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t begin to follow the point she was making.

“You’re thinking that everyone else in this room doesn’t need to be a part of this, because you’re the one who’s stirred up the hornet’s nest,” Trina said, stalking around to stand beside Idrina. “You think they can just run away and be safe somewhere. That the risks they take are so much greater than yours, and that they shouldn’t trust you since you’ve only just met. Does that about sum things up?”

It did. She really must have been watching me all these years to know me that well I decided. 

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“Why can’t you run away with them then?” Trina asked. “You know how much power and influence the Great Houses have. Any of of the people here can tell you about the kind of magics they possess which could easily end even you. Why can’t you all do the sensible thing and focus on surviving?”

I hadn’t actually asked myself that question.

And from the looks on everyone’s faces, I really needed to.

“There are plots and schemes and machinations around us all of the time. Many of them are dire and dreadful, but the truth is many of them are doomed to failure too. For all that people are terrible and filled with malice and greed, they are also, quite dependably, monumentally stupid.

It is possible to foil a dozen horrible plots before breakfast through with the following tried and true plan; do nothing and allow them to self-destruct, all on their own, under the weight of the plethora of staggeringly obvious things the perpetrators will have failed to account for.

Oh, certainly sometimes there are conspiracies which are well thought out. Amusingly at least half of those also self implode, generally due to the fact that if someone is selfish enough to work towards a wicked aim, they are more likely than not to be selfish and wicked enough to be uninterested in sharing the revenue from said conspiracy with any of their compatriots.

What of the remainder? The ones where neither incompetence, nor greed, can successfully undermine them alone? Well, the perpetrators of those plots are the what we like to refer to ‘the people in power’. Foiling their plots is somewhat more difficult, though also vastly more fulfilling.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, speaking to Duke Rudello Grayfall shortly before the latter’s arrest and conviction on charges of Sedition and High Treason.

When a dead girl says she has to tell you something so you can prevent other people from getting deaded too, it pays to listen to her. I didn’t have any practical experience to back that up, I was pretty certain it was a good rule to live by nonetheless.

So I shut up and let Trina talk.

“Something’s going to kill us?” Ilyan asked.

I didn’t jump out of my skin at that. I mean, I am capable of jumping out of my skin. I think. I’ve never tried it but the phrase always seemed like an interesting challenge.

Anyways.

I reacted calmly and rationally.

“Please don’t kill him,” Vena said.

“It would be such a terrible waste of blood,” Hemaphora said.

That was not an unreasonable request, so I sheathed my claws, turned my teeth back from fangs, and relaxed my muscles back down into their usual bulk and configuration.

“You didn’t know we were still here? Did you?” Mellina asked.

When I built my body, I was trying to mimic Trina’s, so including autonomic functions like blushing was both an attempt to better pass as her and an artistic challenge. From how my face heated up, I felt I was owed an award of some kind for the work I’d done.

“I can hear you, but I can’t see any of you,” I said, this time with actual calm in my voice.

“You haven’t left the room you were in,” Mellina said. “But your eyes do look a little odd?”

“That’s part of the spell,” Yarrin said. “It’s so she can see her sister.”

“Shouldn’t her ears look weird too then?” Ilyan asked.

It wasn’t the worst question but it also wasn’t the question I wanted an answer to.

“Can you all hear Trina?” I asked.

“She is your sister?” Idrina asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“We can hear her as clearly as you do then I believe,” she said.

“Good. So they’re going to die?” I asked, hoping to make space for Trina to answer again.

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” Trina said. She had a small, amused smile on her face, I think at the blush I was still wearing. Her smile faded as she continued speaking though. “You saw what happened to the two knights? That effect was powered by the two souls you rescued. Two souls which hadn’t been allowed to die. That’s what they wish to do to you.”

There were about a thousand questions that jumped to mind about that, but I kept them to myself, more than happy to listen to Trina’s voice over my own.

“They also powered the weapons and armor on the Cadets during the trials, didn’t they?” Mellina asked.

“Yes. That was a field test for the units to see how the magics performed in the hands of less skilled casters,” Trina said.

“How do you know this?” Idrina asked.

“I’ve been dead for ten years now, but I haven’t been gone for any of them,” Trina said.

“Because of Kati?” Yarrin asked.

“Partially. She made what could have been an excruciating situation much easier. It was how I died that allowed me to do what I’ve done for the last decade though.”

“You’ve been acting as a spy?” Mellina asked.

“A liaison,” Trina said. “As you’ve seen, there are people in the living world who tamper with the dead. Just so are there people who would see them punished for the crimes they commit. People both of the living world and beyond.”

“So you can do this kind of thing with them too?” Ilyan asked.

“Speak freely like this?” Trina laughed. “Not on my best day. Or theirs. Without my sister to act as a conduit, none of this would be possible. Since it is though, you all are our best chance to stop any more ghosts from being bound into the Clockwork Realm. Unfortunately, for your sakes, that also means you will be the absolute highest of priority targets to be eliminated, or even better, eliminated and bound into the Clockwork Realm to serve as puppets to cover up the failing parts of this scheme.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that the people who are responsible for all this are somehow only aware of me?” I asked.

“Not from the whispers I’ve been hearing,” Trina said. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re their primary target, but these aren’t people who are big on showing restraint.”

A chill gripped me heart.

“Grammy! What about her? Is she in danger too?” I asked, rising to my feet.

“Grammy’s okay,” Trina said. “I checked on her just a few minutes ago.”

“Will they send people after her though?” I wanted to hop into a carriage and ride back home right away. Okay. No. I wanted to change into my fastest form and run there on my own. Trina held out a steading hand though and that’s all it took to root me in place.

“Grammy’s well protected,” she said. “Also, I think the Great Houses are still terrified of her.”

“What? Why?” I asked.

“You remember when my parents were killed?” Trina said. “Grammy went away for a little bit after that?”

“Yeah, I thought that was weird, but I was just a wolf pup at the time, so I couldn’t do much about it,” I said.

“I couldn’t either, and I thought the same thing,” Trina said. “I was able to find out what happened later though, well, after I died. Do you know where she went? House Dryleaf, and then on to the court of Baron Boath Lightstone.”

“Umm, isn’t House Dryleaf a dead house though?” Ilyan asked.

“It wasn’t before Grammy, Doxle, and a few other Imperial Advisor’s gave them a ‘visit’,” Trina said.

“As I recall Baron Boath was lost on an ocean voyage though?” Idrina said.

“Yes. No need to have a traditional open casket funeral when the deceased body has been claimed by the waves,” Trina said. “Or is not in a fit state for anyone with a pulse to look at. That was the report anyway. I didn’t get to see what was left of the body myself obviously.”

“Doxle did all that?” I asked.

“Grammy did all that. Doxle and the Imperial Advisors were there simply to sanction the affair and provide witness to the other Great Houses.”

“Your grandmother sounds awesome,” Ilyan said.

“She is,” Trina and I said at the same time.

I thought back to the years I’d spent with her, especially the ones where it had been just the two of us and the household staff. Had she given any sense of being the terrifying force of nature that Trina spoke of? Had she ever smelled like one?

No. No she hadn’t.

Was I sure she couldn’t hide her scent like Doxle could though?

No. No I was not.

In fact, as I picked through old memories, a lot of odd discrepancies started coming back to me. Grammy had always seemed restrained. Always. No one is ‘always’ anything. Not unless they are wearing a very specific kind of mask, one which they’ve chosen to embody fully and which has grown so comfortable than their core identity begins to blend with the illusion, even if they retain their more bestial self within for the moments when its needed.

Which is silly, of course. Who would do something like that?

A more disturbing thought occurred to me. After a decade of practice, I was reasonably good at noticing things like that about people. How good would I be when I reached Grammy’s age? And how likely was it that a little monster who’d been pretending to be wolf pup and had switched to pretending to be my grand daughter would be able to fool me?

The thought of running back home was not as urgent as it had been for some reason.

“If we’re going to fight back against this scheme of controlling people by binding them up as Clockwork Souls, we’ll need to know more about it,” Mellina said. “Who’s behind it, how they’re doing it, what weak points they might have.”

“Wait. Why are you fighting back against anything?” I asked. “I get…” I did not get it, so I tried a different approach. “This is dangerous. Truly dangerous. If I’d known…” If I’d known what I was doing, I would still have done all the same things. Or most of them.

“If you’d know we would be put in danger by your actions, you would have shielded us from harm? Spurned us and cast us away so that your enemies wouldn’t hurt us too?” Mellina asked.

“Exactly! None of you deserve to be in this boat. The last time a Great House was pissed off at my family, Trina’s parent’s died, and I don’t know if I can wipe out a Great House to avenge each of you. And I don’t want to have to avenge you at all!”

“That wasn’t the last time a Great House took someone from our family,” Trina said.

I turned to her, puzzled by who else they could have taken from us.

“You remember the Reaving Storm that I died in?” she said and a cold dread began to seep into my soul.

“No,” I said, not answering her question.

“It cracked the earth open and I tumbled in,” Trina said.

“No.” I said, not denying her account.

“It’s because I was killed within a Reaving Storm that my soul was able to linger on closer to the material world,” she said. “Three other realms where so nearby that when my spirit drifted free that I wound up too confused over which one was calling me, so I stayed close to this world.”

“Does that mean anyone who dies in the Reaving Storm becomes a ghost?” Ilyan asked.

“Not anyone,” Trina said. “Most Reaving Storms churn and swirl, the Transcendent Realms crashing about like sand in a shaking bowl. The spirits of people lost in natural storms may get jostled around a bit but the call of the Realm Beyond still reaches them. It’s when it’s just a few realms, and they’re held close to the material world that the call echoes too clearly from too many of them for a spirit to make out the path they should take. Those people wind up like me. If they’re lucky.”

“So what creates an unnatural storm?” I asked, hating that I already knew the answer. It wasn’t hard to figure out. 

The technique that I’d worked out for creating rifts and traveling between the realms, the one I’d used to get the zoo of Reaving Beasts home and to return home myself from the Clockwork Cosmos? At it’s heart it held the simple truth that what separated the material world from the other realms could be undone, and if that was true, then calling forth a storm was all too easy.

“There are days when the most effective form of communication I can manage involves incoherent screams flung out to echo against an empty and unknowing sky. On other occasions, I find myself able to wax eloquent for hours upon end, dazzling my audience with the bot mots and timely anecdotes which spill effortlessly from my lips. 

It may come as some surprise therefor that it is more often the wordless screams to an uncaring cosmos which express my desires with the most depth and clarity.

The problem is not me, you see, it’s everyone else, as is so often true of life. Words land on people’s ears and are often twisted around or forgotten before they can leave an impression. Blood curdling cries of rage however reach out to a deeper part of the mind. People hear words, but they listen to to screams, because what they are truly paying attention to are the emotions around them.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame to Shaela Ironbriar moments before her speech as the first Head of House to ascend to rulership after the Great Calamity.

It started with blood. That wasn’t a surprise. Not with who I’d been sent to for help with the spell.

“We paint a circle,” Vena said.

“We scribe a limit and a focus,” Hemaphora said.

“To hold the power we share.” Vena.

“To make tangible the desire we bring.” Hemaphora.

“In blood it is written.” One of them.

“So that the life that is may call to the life that was.” The other.

“Blood of the lost.” I wasn’t sure anymore.

“Blood of the one who remains.” Both of them?

“We don’t have Trina’s blood though,” I said, worried the spell would fail before we even began to cast it. “We never got her body back.”

“Her blood is yours. And yours is hers. You are family.” The room around us had gone dark as the blackest night and the voices I was hearing weren’t really sounding like the two girls I’d come to for help anymore.

That really should have been scary.

It really should not have felt like I’d come home.

Around me, I could smell the scents of my housemates but they were so very distant. I knew they were in the room with me, and it wasn’t a large room, but from how dim their scents had grown I suspected I could shout at the top of my voice and they would have to strain to hear me.

Where they were distant though, a swirl of inhuman scents were close enough to caress me. They did not smell kind, and they did not smell merciful, and I rather liked that about them. There was no artifice in their scent, no concealment. They were what they were and, in their own way, they were beautiful.

I, on other hand, felt a lie sitting unvoiced in my chest like a block of stone. I was going to ruin everything. The spell would fail all because I clung to something that I knew wasn’t true no matter how much I desired and needed it to be.

I tried to push it out past my lips, but the lie had stuck within me for so long that I couldn’t dislodge it.

“What if my blood is wrong?” I asked. It wasn’t an admission, but it was the closest I could come to one.

“Your magic cannot alter that which is.”

I wasn’t sure how they knew that. I wasn’t sure it was even true.

“At least not this.” 

“It’s not my magic I’m worried about,” I said, which absolutely was true. I’d been able to shift my blood into close enough matches to each of my housemates to pass Vena and Hemaphora’s earlier ritual. I was pretty sure I could mimic anything else they needed, except for the small problem that I needed to be able to sense the blood I was trying to replicate and Trina’s had been swallowed up by the earth ten years ago.

If I’d been thinking about it at the time, rather than being blinded by howling grief and mad to prevent Grammy from suffering the same pain, I might have been able to form myself into a duplicate of Trina even down to the level of the inner workings of her cell. 

Well, I might have been able to if I had the skill with my magic then that I did after practicing it constantly for a decade. I had to be fair to younger-me though, she’d done the best she could with the skills she had and it had worked well enough to fool everyone.

Or at least I think it had fooled everyone? That was another thought I didn’t have time to process, so onto the pile of vague worries it went.

“Worry is natural.” I think that was Hemaphora who said that. Maybe.

“We fear that which we desire. We run from belief in that which we need, lest desire and need break us when they are unfulfilled.”

“From this too you can run.”

“You need not cast beyond the veil.”

“You need not speak to the one who remains.”

“You may hold tight to the safety of grief and remain lost.”

“You’re heart is your own.”

“We are merely here to guide one soul to another.”

I thought they’d gotten something backwards there. I wasn’t the one who’d been lost. And Trina hadn’t remained with me.

Except…

“It’s not my grief I’m afraid of holding onto,” I said. “That will stay to remind me of my love for my sister whether I choose it or not. It’s me. My blood. It’s not my sisters. It’s not Trina’s.”

I couldn’t say anymore. It would break me.

“I’m not her sister.” Better to break than to lose her again.

I guess I expected a gasp of surprise. 

Maybe whispers of disbelief?

Laughter though? 

That did not fit.

Not at all.

“Oh how delightful.”

“We thank you so very much!”

It wasn’t some kind of generalized mirth.

They were laughing at me.

Deep, belly laughs.

I scowled, a perfectly natural wave of anger rising up to blot out any shame which I might or might not have been feeling.

“Poor, sweet dear,” one of them said.

“How deep has your needless suffering been?”

“How long have you been lost in that mistake?”

I thought they were asking about how long I’ve been pretending to be Trina.

But of course they weren’t.

I was just an idiot.

“I think ever since I died,” Trina said.

The rest of the world fell away.

My housemates scent wasn’t merely distant, it was gone.

The darkness of the room had swallowed the whole world but that didn’t matter.

Even without the sun or the stars, there was still light before me and it was her.

“H-how?” I believe I mentioned I’m an idiot. We’d already done this and yet the brain I’d built was clearly defective and ready to run through the stages of disbelief all over.

“Very simply,” Vena said.

“Your blood has been calling to her since we began,” Hemaphora said.

“Also, your friend is very clever,” Vena said.

“This spell is a delight,” Hemaphora said.

“To speak to our family again will be wonderful.”

“We thank you.”

“B-but..” I didn’t know how to argue with that.

I didn’t know why I wanted to argue with it either.

“Have you really thought you weren’t my sister this whole time?” Trina asked, patting the non-existent ground in front of where she was sitting.

“No, I, well, I mean, I…” There’s a reason I often resort to silence as my answer in conversations. “I pretended to be you. And I’m not. I never could be.”

I sat down opposite Trina, hoping she wasn’t going to turn away from me in punishment for my transgressions.

“Yeah, I’m so sorry for that,” she said. “That wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t fair to you, and I should have been there.”

Literally none of those words made sense. Not one of them. 

Did the dead speak their own language? One where all the means were mirrored and backwards?

“I took your life though?” I said. “That was my idea. No one made me do it.”

That made her scowl at me.

Which meant I was going to punished.

Which was fine.

I deserved it.

I closed my eyes anyways though.

Which is why the feel of two hands gently holding the side of my face came as a stomach liquifying shock.

“You. Did. Not. Take. My. Life.” She said the words with clear and solid force. Not anger. Not at me at any rate. 

“You didn’t kill me,” she said again, softer this time. “It wasn’t my time, and my death did not need to happen, but you, of all people, YOU, are not to blame.”

“I was too slow,” I said. “I tried, but I was too slow. I was too far away. If I hadn’t been too far away I would have been fast enough. I could have…I was supposed to save you.”

“No. No, hush.” Her arms wrapped around me and I felt small as a puppy again. “We don’t always have the power to save the people we love. It hurts, because being separated like this sucks, but the pain isn’t because you didn’t do enough. It’s because we’re apart. You did everything you could, and so much more. You gave me a reason to go on after my parents were killed. You gave me joy so many time when I would have been swept away by sadness. And even after I passed? You’ve inspired me so many times. I am so proud that you called yourself my sister. That you took care of Grammy for me. That you became this amazing person who figured out how do this! A way for us to talk? I’ve looked for that for so long and you figured it out within, what, a half a day of being told it was possible.”

I opened my eyes to find myself looking at her shoulder as Trina continued to hug me.

“So please,” she continued. “Don’t say you’re not my sister.” And now she was crying. “And don’t ever, ever regret what you did for Grammy. I gave you my name. I’m the one who wanted to share it with you, don’t you remember? ‘Katrina’ was too big for me. I just wanted to be Trina and you, well, Kati sounded better than Ka I guess. But it was my idea. So, yes, you pretended to be me, but do you really think there’s anyone else I would have wanted to do that? Or that I wouldn’t have wanted you to be safe and cared for? You are Kati Riverbond. For as long as you want to be. And you’re my sister forever. No matter what you want. Understood!”

For just a moment, she was the Imperious Eight Year Old that she’d been on rare occasions, and I was glad beyond words for it.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. 

Yeah, I know, kinda obvious, but words aren’t really my thing.

“I’ve been with you, as much as I can,” she said.

“How?” I asked, pulling back a little so I could see her face. 

It wasn’t the face I was used to seeing her wear. It wasn’t even the one I’d imagined she’d grow into (also known as the one I’d shaped for myself). What it was though was undeniably hers. And I love it.

“You made it easy,” she said. “You always kept me close to your heart, and if there’s one thing that’s simple for an only-somewhat-departed soul to do, it’s look back on the parts of the living world where they still matter.”

I hiccupped at that.

She hadn’t left me. 

I’d already cried about that. It was stupid. But I cried about it again anyways.

Cried and cried until something she’d just said caught my attention.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘only-somewhat-departed’? What happened to you?” I asked.

“That’s why we had to talk,” she said. “I need to tell you why I died, so you can make sure it stops happening to other people, your friends in particular.”