[thecynosure]

Good job, traveler.

The Cynosure is a multidimensional transmission of epic fantasy imbued with the importance-of-self that marks the hidden oracularity of science fiction all wrapped in the comfortable armor of a natural love for life that is the true backdrop to our existence, delivered through complex shifting stanzas of specific, lucid descriptions and character-subjective self-analysis.

Shades of Vastness

Book One - The Cynosure

By Edwin Leskin

Prologue:

Life

Things appear to be their own.

Within those things one may determine that they are, or that they aren’t, and either analysis reveals the other, implying that things both are, and are not. On a planet called Niadwe among six other planets orbiting a star and having two satellites orbiting itself, there was once upon a time a person striving alongside a great many things that when viewed, seemed to be their own. Yet, in the light of day all that is seen by the eye on a world is merely a literal reflection of that light, the radiation of the star that subsists the things that themselves ingest and reflect it. Thus, is life more than a temporary bounding of light? Is, is not. And as a thing must be wholly dependent on systems of other things to be a thing itself, always both downwards and upwards, the ordering mechanisms that produce the ubiquity of strata of independent components that unwittingly become dependant on each other to form further orders of different, grander components suggests an inherent complexity to reality that erodes any ontological territories we rightfully claim, that blurs so sensibly the physical sciences and the felt self. The how of gravity is completely discoverable; but the why seems utterly ineffable. And yet miraculously, or even holier, evidently, as we move through the realms of order, we find these immaculate individual Things. Envision a little mite crawling on a skin cell at the tip of your father’s finger; or the pinpoint nucleus of every lonely atom, so very far from every other. Consider then a quickburning star rocketing through a wide throng of its blistering peers; or a vast shifting galaxy undulating like a deific jellyfish across the void, coursing on the dark current. They rise unique, indivisible, perfect slaves. For all anything does is governed by cosmic and chemical collisions, the happenstance machinations of the four fundamental forces. Yet, the heart knows undeniably as the head that every force and every thing must absolutely belie some great, unifying, tough, everscaling law. An architecture, a system, a truth, a pure method transcending physicality and subjectivity with the single spear of inherent transrational meaning necessitated by the most essential form of form itself:

You at the center of all things.

Part 0: The Acid Drake

Chapter 1:

The World in Her Heart

She rose, and the world rose with her.

It stretched from the wordless I to the infinite me; matured from the manifest we to the already existent all. Reality became her body. She remembered the world, it implied itself outward. Composing things as thought and feeling she blinked open and relaxed into the captured infinity of the creature self.

The person next to her became real. Her head hummed with the beautiful immensity of the chosen other. She pet the back of her mate as he lay in silent morning slumber and let the goodness of him and of her with him and of the great banded us that they made cultivate in her mind. Not even a year knowing him, and yet they spoke of the future openly. But it was good in that way, in the way that things should have been, needed to be, the way that other loves held as an ideal, like a magnetic compass always hunting for a pole, readjusting towards a truth that was impossible to find but that she miraculously had. His reflection, his acceptance, his strength, their affection, their resplendence, their peace had been a brilliant part of the final act in a long fought personal war against many of the habits of youth, the distractions and follies of uncertainty. With the seas of her wild life stilled she did at last look to the dilating horizon, and yet upon that endless boundary gathered a dark and roiling mass whose complex internal form was revealed only in surprised intervals by a chaotic, tameless lightning.

A storm called yearning.

The woman was left to think in the reticent moments before the world began its endless churn. It was a morning where she found her mind wide, stretching at something hidden. Some days she woke into a panic of thought, like most people probably did, like she was probably going to result to any moment. Some days she woke into the fog of waking itself, ponderous dreams fading, her mind stumbling to grip a firm reality and pleading childishly for discorporation. But some mornings, mornings like this, she awoke into the great question of her life.

The question that everyone shares.

She saw herself and who she was, and she saw herself and who she could be. The veiled images rose up, great silhouettes in which shifting shadows gestured at form and chaos in erratic turn. A thousand thousand meanings and actions swirled within, all of them a reflection of an unformed reality, a darkness created by the light of every story, every person, every happening in the world shining on her yet unmanifest potential. It was both her speculative terror and her bestriding pride to feel, to know, to thirst for what she could be. She had proved it before small, she would prove it again large.

Great, great, great, her heart pounded.

Unfocused, she carried herself to a fancy of thought spurred by the untold answer to the question, and everything fell beneath some obscure destiny. She saw an answer, a way towards the fruition of her need. Like the storm itself she built her inward vision to a tall dark height. The woman became the killer. Her long burnished hair was fire. She was a tyrant who stole the meaning of the world from the ground and held it in her hand. People feared her. She moved among them deftly. They surrendered. The world was hers; as she would make it.

Wait, she thought. I've ended up at the wrong place.

A guilty hesitance bloomed like a flower stepped on in great hurry, urging her to slow, to realign, to seek the truth that is not forced.

The world is not mine. I am sorry, she said inward to nothing, to everything.

I am not that.

I am…

Her mind stretched out into blue air on silver brilliant days forever, starred nights bending towards the question that has no answer.

Eriennen sighed, calm and long, relaxing into herself.

She was what she was in that very moment, and all she would be and could be, and all she had been both known and unseen, and all the world's things as they live and breathe, were just as just as things were right then, and that, that very being of things as Niadwe presented them, that was what she was, and naught else. So was her belief, thus she reminded herself.

...I am the world.

She sat with that let and all the visions of who she was and was not come in and placate themselves in the world in her heart, the heart of Niadwe, which was not separate in that moment’s imagining. The yearning passed. Or rather it changed, coming down to the land and spreading among all things. Then as it always has and always will life with all its little tasks and feelings took form from the infinite fabric of the mind and whatever depth of being stirred in the natal moments of the day was lost.

Reposing back to her pillow and looking at nothing she flitted from vision to vision, thought to thought, all aspects of life vying for attention in her waking experience: she was going on vacation today, last night she had dreamed she had to kill an injured animal and everyone watched her do it, she probably wanted to have sex with Devenu this morning, breakfast, she needed to check in with Ualfa at the yard before she left, the championship she was planning was going to be excellent, the championship was going to be awful, she desperately needed funding for it, she already secured a huge amount from Devenu’s family, the Deeses, she wasn’t even half way there, she had enough to pay all the workers, the faces of her workers when she told them they would only get half pay half a decade ago the last time she had tried to throw a championship, anxiety, the smashed face of a teenage boy, his jaw ripped open where her metal fist had entered, making him scream forever in his death, Argvalent dead in her arms, his face morphing to Devenu’s, murdered in vengeance for something she had done, Devenu alive being Devenu, happiness, more than happiness, she wanted him, she was ovulating, she had to urinate, Sulu was mad that everyone was going on vacation, she was rich enough to quit her job, she should quit and go on a real vacation, an endless one like before, she loved her job, loved the people she worked with, loved the danger and the importance and the perfectly lawful lawlessness of it all, it wasn’t enough, she was bored, she wanted more, she wanted to be that woman, the person at the center of things, all eyes on her.

Great, great, great...

Devenu groaned.

Eriennen was happy that his rising chose which thought she should entertain first and she held him. They played at waking each other; she gripped his back as he tumbled until she was atop him. She laughed, he grumbled. He tried to elbow himself up but she was too strong, outright stronger than the man without doubt. She would never put it to test. Men were prideful beasts; her’s self-awaredly and quite happily so. She didn't have to cast him down to feel tall anyway. She was tall within herself. They were tall together.

He growled and flipped himself, looking at her with his dark face and black bushy beard and then his yellow-irised eyes slitted feral and shined desire. He drew her in and kissed her and Eriennen let herself be taken in by the kiss and the motion of his body and she let him put her under him and they made love, not with arbitrary ferocity or simpering slow sweetness but with something between; a conjoined motion that was at once strong and loving, forceful and giving, the way that only they could do it, the way they both wanted it, deep and natural in the core of their animal souls grinding into each other faster and faster then slower and deeper until she forgot everything and they released and unleashed everything together and their foreheads met and they looked into each other’s eyes at no distance, letting each other be all that was but just for one glorious moment where the whole world was the edge of their twin being.

Afterwards Eriennen felt very good.

They bathed in a huge wooden tub that sat in the same room as the lush bed under light of metal-bracketed magic lamps which poked through holes in the decorative gold and blue carpet hanging on her cream-colored sandstone walls. The lamps had a suspended crystal within that burned a reposed red light, materializing and then casting black sand into little trays weaving downward to create a stepped cascade in the air that fell to a hole in the dark oiled bluewood floor. As they washed themselves and talked Eriennen could hear through a high open window the sounds of men shouting, the lapping of waves, and the clunks of balsa hooves and aldar cats on the boardwalk that lined the whole southern port of Frina Raltas just beyond her walls. The city was already alive.

“I’ve been asking friends about the expansion,” Eriennen said smoothly.

“What are they saying?” Devenu half-shouted.

“What do you think? The young people want new, fun places to get drunk and work. Apartments too, remember?”

“We’re going to do all that on the hill when we tear it apart, but it won’t happen quickly.”

“Nothing happens quickly,” Eriennen said. She dunked her face in the water, bubbling air through her large bronze nose and curved lips. It was warm.

“Truths,” he muttered, “It doesn’t. The burdgmers are divided. My mother, her whole coven of crones, most of the financiers, half the small quarsmel, burning everyone is against it.”

“Still?”

Devenu rolled his head back then gestured in the air with his hands as if they were heavy. “Now they say we should request a Need from the Councillatium if we are going expand the city. We don’t need a more Molwean merchant groups with shops here. We’ve got good Reenan’s, good Frinan’s ready to do great things.”

“Don’t worry Dev. If enough of the city makes it to vote, the feather will drop your way,” Eriennen said.

“You know the city well.”

“It’s my favorite place in the world.”

“My favorite place is with you,” Devenu said. They touched each other’s backs and sides with care under the water. After a calm while, Devenu continued. “I trust your opinion, but I do think we have to do everything we can. I want to be the arm of those good Southerners that saw a wall and said, let’s build beyond it, you know?”

“I know,” she said.

“We should ask the islands to participate in the vote. I discussed it at open calling yesterday and people liked the idea.”

“Oh,” she considered, “like Bunnin? Where I happen to be going today?”

“Ah,” Devenu said, “I guess so.”

“Am I a burdgemers clerk?”

“No,” he drew close and whispered, “no, no, you’re the woman of the city.”

She laughed and scratched his beard, “and you are an idiot. I’m just me, and I won’t do it, you can manage a letter, or come yourself.” She wouldn’t participate in his games of state.

“I want to come Eri. I want to come very much.”

“We only have to work the first two days. if you really want to come we will put the sun on our backs and play in the sand my beast.”

“I’d have to be in seven directions, there are two hundred feathers dropping in the next few stretch. But I’ll send a burn. Sorry I asked. Though if you happen to pass by the burdgmer house-”

“-Send your burn,” she cut in, then touched his cheek. “If they need convincing shake me three times. I’ll stop on the way back. But I am just a person to them.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Are you going back to go to the Little Three?”

She sat back and up and flashed her teeth in excitement. The trip had solidified quickly, she was glad to share the details. “First day in Bunnin, then the next two on an island in a bay by Glacier Kay. We’ll have a view of sunset between those cliffs, remember? Karga said a Detreadi Palo chef built a home nearby, he cooks in the evenings high up in the jungle.”

“I’ve never had real Palond food,” he said and drew in very close to her, “I want to come with you.”

“To Palond?” she said, lips pressed up against his neck.

“No,” he frowned in mock hurt, “on vacation, after your job, to the Bunns Isles.”

“Then come with me my love.” She said and smiled.

“On the ship with you?”

“No, not on the ship. You can take one of yours though.”

“Why not on the ship?”

She gave him an angled look and pulled back enough to separate their faces but remain in his arms. He knew smarter paths to walk than asking for details. “First because its a private transport with no civilians, and again because it's got a dark beast on it, a big one from what I've heard.”

“What kind?”

She breathed out through her nose, “we don’t know. Just that its big, and that is the way that it is.” She said it all matter of factly because it was nothing new to her, and because that’s what it was, a dark beast. A true monster, taken from one of the four discreet places that a person could find them. Areas on each of the four landmasses where the fullness of humanity suddenly broke. Once the fiends had operated little different then roaming natural predators. But they had over millenia been pushed into their homes, the strange places each with crystalline geographical phenomenon. As the monsters had, by order or design depending on ones’ myth or science, remained in their relatively small, dangerous natural habitats, the human world had built walls around them, and mostly let them be. Surely, there had been campaigns for glory, wealth, logistics, and thrill over the thousands of years of human development, but aside from fringe interest, the people of the Niadwe had relegated the strange and unnatural reality of the fiends to the back of their cultural awareness, integrating them into colloquial thought and word and myth. A world where one knew there were monsters in a hidden place that wasn’t hidden. An open hiding of violence. A horror nestled within beauty, just like a person. Though, there was business in them, and people did extract them for commerce, service, research, or manufacturing, and it so happened that Eriennen had seen the monsters, had known them, had even once been to Reena’s dark wildland Veldras Valley, and thus belonged to that part of the culture general, the people who found it daring, interesting, sexy even, to familiarize themselves with what the ancient evil looked like up close. Devenu knew all of this, knew the woman he was dealing with, knew what she had chosen to deal with herself. Still, he had never quite retired his incredulity at the admittedly risky tasks that she took simply as a good day’s working, and talk of dark beasts didn’t fail to rouse him.

He shook his head. “And that is the way that it is, ha! You don’t even know what it is. I should check with the Ship Call, they’ll have the list, are you all letting-”

“No we’re-”

“-just anyone-”

“Love-”

“-bring anything-”

“-Devy!” she said loud enough to break his anger, “its okay, everything's fine. we’re safe.”

“Alright,” he said, “I believe you.” He pouted, “I just-”

“-I know, I know,” she cooed and drew up towards him and kissed his neck.

Devenu diverted, “I don’t like things coming into my city that I don’t know about.”

My city? She thought, and chose not to observe. For Devenu was one of many Burdgmers all making decisions of law together, as had been imposed on the world, with its four great nations, then their own separate states, towns, and communities all continually forming around the popular rule of All in their own messy, intricate, individual ways; as they had chosen together and apart. She raised an eyebrow at him. “You know you do know about it, do you know that? The client has free passage in your town my king, might as well be fruit pickers on the Mainway.”

He smiled at the defunct title in any circumstance then frowned, “who is it?”

“DemWa.”

“Logis?” He said. DemWa Logis was a smaller but not uncommon charter transport company in the Southern seas. His face took on a fresh worry, “who hired them? That makes all the difference of what kind of thing they are doing. They have some hard sailors there, some seem more like pirates or military men.”

She knew he was correct, and absolutely did not care.

“Not sure, this one is Sulu and Karga’s job.”

“Is that any better?” He said and Eriennen laughed. “Do you know what they are doing with the beast? What are you even doing there?”

“We are just a tax my sweet sweet man for bringing the thing to port at all. You know us, we pry the side. They have twenty guards already,” she leaned in towards him, “it will be safe. It’s that huge blue seaship out there. Biggest at port today. Me, Karga, and Dryf have a companion liftship so we’ll be in the sky and I will be,” she put her hands up in the air and gestured around her fine room, an all-in meant for living, eating, and sleeping in a single space, “in private luxury.”

He paused, feigned a scoff, turned his nose up and said, “I might still look into it.”

She splashed him and he splashed her back.

They kissed again.

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

“Please be safe,” he said.

She arched her brows and let out a single staccato sarcastic laugh, “Karga and I are always safe, it's everyone else that's in danger.”

“I know,” Devenu said, “I know what you two can do. All I mean to say is to be careful. You don’t know what's in the hull of that ship.”

The day was brilliant and bright. The sun gleamed white in an aqua sky with strapping clouds shooting overhead on a swift wind. The ocean glimmered with endless little piercing lights as it danced out towards a hopeful horizon adorned by islands. There was a happenstance symphony of shouts and laughs and steady percussive music from roaming streetcorner pipedrum players and the deeper bellied moaning of ships where they moored at Sulu’s port and groaned against the subtle tides of the small world. Thirty tall wingmasts sat at the docks and another fifty or more anchored out at sea spotting the ocean with manicolored pointing and bending sails. There were pale trading men from Northern Cirilan in beards and tight, layered cloth clothing whipping balsas who grunted, shaking their four-horned heads and flipping their double-tassled tails, two blue eyes sullying forward dumb. Eriennen saw a stately group of dark, oiled, wealthy Central Myrus Neyan women in angular robes with gold chains holding them in place, each with a huge brimmed hat decorated with lace hangings, smooth skin punctuated with intricate gold tattoos walking carefully and readying for vacation in the southern port city. Behind them two maids and a guard with a halberd followed, faces drawn with the day’s work. Valdonian merchants with flaxen skin and sheer red full-body robes stood still in conversation that included only them and their wealthy Reenan counterparts while their children and families sat in tight stones circle and minded each other. Frina Raltans with arms and sides and legs exposed in combinations of flowing and skin-tight thin light-pastel colored fabrics and hair braided or wrapped or covered in caps or flowing free too and some with long scarves and balsa leather bags and some in leather, even metal armor, a few swords and a ubiquity of belts with pouches upon pouches on all of them talked loudly and walked fast or careless like water everywhere. She laughed as she watched a laconic mage in a bright green cowl foul a Lift of a crate from the side of a tall black ship as his mates hollered at him to stop. The great chest hit a rope and flipped, spilling its shiny contents into the sea. The men hoisted the mage overboard to take a swim and he yelped and then made a great splash that got a group of children playing with oars for swords wet and they screamed and ran as children did. Tan-skin city guards under employ by the local Burdgmers passed smiling or frowning up and down the wood and stone docks on leather-armored aldar cats, the great riding beasts with yellow eyes and huge furry paws in blue and purple coats, while Sulu’s men took notes at every corner in white robes with little caps. Liftships floating still in the sky, their hulls many colors and of various sleek designs like blades in the air, gathered at a tall skyport on the eastern end of the docks, two blue towers with white lines of magic crystal in dashing patterns up their sides that at times shimmered just out of seeing, then the ships went north to dock beyond of the walls at the skypark. The bustling city itself seen from the docks was beautiful today, as it was every day, the City of Flags, Frina Raltas. More than three hundred triangular flags on white rope blew in the wind, hoisted from every towered and stepped and sloped and flat building wrought from widecut smooth sandstone, most with moulded balconies and flat, occupiable roofs sitting chairs and benches and plants and stretched shade covers on chains over them, some even with pools or clay ovens and tall chimneys that puffed lazy smoke into the sky. The flags were dyed in every color the eye might see as they sloped up from the shore on the town’s broad hill giving the impression of a city of castles. The world gathered at the Reenan port of Frina Raltas there on the cusp of the Southern Seas, a taste of every land upon a pristine plate.

Paradise.

They took their morning meeting at a raised pavilion right on the docks by the water where Sulu her employer liked to lunch throughout the day in warmhalf. Eriennen relaxed in a soft blue cloth cropped shirt and billowing white pants with no shoes on a green couch and sipped a tea from puripuri root, making her mouth tingle and giving her a little spike of life. It was immodestly early for the drug, but she did not care, for the day was shaping out long even now.

She peered up at Sulu.

Directly behind the huge tanned bald man in a white shirt and red leather ankle-length skirt was a wooden board with a sign and a painted picture of him hoisted high on the building where Eriennen and Karga had their apartments and did their work. The sign rhymed with itself in Reenan and read, "SULU’S SOUTHERN SPECIAL DELIVERIES AND WARSPORTS.” Next to the words was the visage of the balding owner of the ports in a rudimentary colorful line drawing. His round head was hairless, his jaw and nose wide, a bushy white beard around it, and the picture was smiling so broad that the eyes were closed and a great set of white teeth gleamed. Next to the head was a sigil, red bird with four wings, as birds sometimes had, and in its single large talon was a small fat sword.

By contrast, the real Sulu’s face right before her was drawn into a cutting, vicious, and well-practiced scowl. "Oy! Pull that shade son! It's hotter than your mother at dewdrop. Rages it is, hurry!" A young clerk scrambled and pulled a shade cover over them, tying it to a post.

"Sulu, thank you. I would like to read to us gathered the notes for today." Karga began in his thick Southern Myrus Neyan accent, curved like a smooth stone. Eriennen smiled at him, her best friend in the world, seated in a chair that was too small for his hulking frame. He wore leather armor, for Karga was nearly never without armor during the work day, and his huge bald dark head, not dissimilar from Sulu’s, was angled down as he frowned at a stack of papers through the tiny glasses he had come to wear. Like a huge boy, she thought.

"No you beasting can't," Sulu interrupted, then looked at Eriennen and grunted, "I want Eri to read them. Diathur, you don't do anything around here anymore do you? What am I paying you for? Karga does all the planning, and you are supposed to be the Arch."

"Sulu, I think-" Karga started.

"-You think too much you big bastard," Sulu yelled.

"Master," Eriennen said in a sweet voice prompting Sulu to roll his eyes. "It's simple, and it's just like I’ve said. I don't want to do logistics anymore, and have no intent of owning these ports when you finally fuss yourself to death. Karga, by contrast, not only enjoys this stuff, wants to own his own ventures, is good at it as I am, better actually, but also," she pointed at Karga's bald head, then dragged her finger across the sky to point it at Sulu's, "he may just be literally turning into you. With the power of your two massive, shining brains, I'm sure we will be fine."

"Oh is that so?" Sulu said and laughed, throwing down a writing stick, "then again, why are you the boss of all this?"

"I-"

"-No no, not why. How, remind me how you are the Arch at all?"

"Ah!" Eriennen said and raised her glass to her lips, sipped the bitter drug, then lifted it in the air, "I am exhibiting the greatest trait of leadership one can accomplish."

Sulu groaned.

"Delegation!" She spread her arms as if all was solved.

"Delegation, delegation.... you sanding aldar bitch, splitting, beasting, hellsheld woman," Sulu put his head in his hands as he rattled off the litany of curses.

"Listen Sulu," Karga said, "it is better this way. Eriennen is good at envisioning what we should be doing to move forward. I am good at planning it, see? We are yours." Sulu grumbled sullen at the floor. It was not uncommon, but today his anger was curiously pronounced. If it was due to their leaving then Eriennen found his concern wanting, for they left at least a stretch each intersection. If it was because this trip was a stretch instead of a day due to their taking extra time to relax, well he could get as mad as he wanted and Eriennen could care as little as she cared, which was little.

"Sulu," Karga commanded, suddenly stern, "we have work to do. Eriennen and I have put in double hours for days preparing to leave. Now, the notes, please." As he spoke Eriennen reached under the firesilk-carpeted table between the three people. From a tray beneath she pulled an abused and dusty bottle of brillwine uncapped a few nights prior and passed it to Sulu. He grumbled, then smiled, took the bottle, looked at it, raised his bushy eyebrows, grumbled again, smiled again, shrugged his huge shoulders, unstopped it, took a long drink, belched, weezed, then sat back and nodded to Karga to begin.

"We don't have too much to look through today," Karga said and gathered himself up with a jiggle. "First, for the next four days Ualfa is taking both mine and Eriennen's posts in the yard. We only have two special deliveries using our people, one being that," he pointed at a huge blue vessel with three tall red sails they were leaving with today at port near them. Silhouettes of armed men shifted on the decks. "And the other en route being a personal guard for a Councillator that wanted to travel the Gharab Mainway from here all the way to the capital. We should have a bird from them sometime this morning." Sulu grunted in ambiguous affirmation and sipped his brill. Karga continued, "now, at the warsports room all of our teachers are ready with lessons, and we don't have any incoming or graduating students. Eriennen is going to go over there and give a review of our ten students in mid session just after this, right?" He didn't wait for her to answer or for Sulu to berate anyone present for any number of reasons he was always able muster. "Good, the next here is for you," Karga said and bowed to her, "sister?"

It begins now, she thought, and if you don’t want to play the game, I’ll play with someone else. She drew herself up on the couch and smiled, "brother." She nodded to Karga, then cleared her throat. "Sulu, I did it."

“Did what?” he said.

“Secured the money.”

“For the championship?”

“Yes.”

“Five hundred hundreds?”

“One hundred and seventy.” She turned up her chin.

Sulu began to scowl but then his mouth bounced to a grin, “Devenu?”

“The sigil of the Deese’s will fly next to yours on the banners,” she said.

“Did you get it last night?”

“Last stretch, we wanted to get papers before I told you.”

Karga presented two fine green sheets of Ingo-pulp pressed parchment from his stack, and balanced a call stone to house of Deese on them. Sulu nodded in appreciation. The gold-infused magic crystal shone in the daylight despite the sun, a direct line to send burning bird to the Call Master at the offices of the estate. He received them without reading and held the stack and stone out to the air at his side. A moment later a worker in white was folding them into his robes.

“Sands,” Sulu said and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. He laughed and shook his head, “alright, okay. You win Diathur, I guess we are doing it then. If you can get the rest.”

“Oh we certainly are, and I certainly can.”

“Well,” Sulu said and took a drink of his brill, then spit half to the side, “you know what you are doing at least.”

“And this time I have Karga to look after the numbers.”

“Well he is good for some things. Still healing, shield magic?”

"Still magic," she said. It was a sticking point. Sulu wanted to see men cutting and bashing and bleeding each other towards death. Truthfully, she did too. But that wasn’t selling. Such things had come to be seen as archaic; piquing hollow, base, distubring interests and were therefore fading from the thick and flashy world of the then. Yet, magic, magic was very much in style in all sorts of ways. It always was. To do a proper combative magic tournament, a real Sportium, well she would have to be planning three years out at least just for the permits. You needed paperwork to set off military grade displays of magic around a populace, a lot of it. But the lighter stuff, not so much. And you didn’t have to ban Flame, Ice, Lift, or any of it, as long as you weren’t inviting it to be used by more than five people in the same ring at once. There hadn't been an official international ledger-recognized Restoration and Shield tournament in Southern Reena in recorded history, and nowhere for decades since the Kings reigned. It would sell. It has to, she thought.

Eriennen stood.

"That all?" Sulu said.

"I’d bet the next items on Karga's list aren’t my fight."

"As always your wisdom foretells true things,” Karga said with pomp, “next is temporary staffing for the docks today, then the Cattholds, rookery bookings, deliveries next two stretch, and-"

Eriennen shot a finger out fast and touched it to Karga’s lips, “I'll be off to the Warsports. Then I'll need to pack." She smiled down at him and patted his jaw twice, he smiled back at her.

Sulu took a long drink of his brillwine and sighed with fatherly magnanimity, "no, no, you did good, I'll miss you this week girl." She kissed the top of Karga’s head, then Sulu’s, then she walked down the dais, threw the rest of her puripuri into the sea, slammed the cup into the chest of a tall serving man, and strode to one of the large doors under Sulu's office’s sign. This one was painted roughly in gold on red, a huge axe and sword crossing each other consumed in flames.

Metal sang its meeting song as it met metal in the meeting place of the Warsports Room; an atrium open to the sky with eight alcoves for classes. It was full all year with two-month programs training young men and women with very rich parents about how to be not-just-so young men and women. Eriennen stood next to Ualfa and watched two of her students spar with dull blades, both the gold-skinned sons of northern Reenan merchants from the capital Molwea. One was tall, one short, the shorter strong, the taller fast.

The one of height was giving no quarter, he stabbed and whipped his blade back and forth in a flurry of strikes. The stout boy pedaled backwards barely able to block the blows, grunting, retreating, giving way, stumbling. The large boy stopped and yelled, "fight me!"

To Eriennen’s shock and anger, he stabbed at the other fighter's face and missed his eye by an inch, knocking air instead as his adversary dropped his weapon and went to the ground, cowering.

"End!" Ualfa shouted. The woman was short with blonde hair and wore white stained leather armor in the sunlight. Over the past two years she had risen from one of the company mages that went on excursions to a teacher and now to Eriennen and Karga’s primary aid in the yard. Ualfa was also visibly pregnant. Eriennen thought she had never looked more beautiful.

Eriennen shook her head, "we're not supposed to do faces out here boy, you know that? Terfalen?" She looked at the boy’s blade teacher and raised her shoulders, questioning.

Terfalaen shrugged back in his decades old military Cirilanian plate armor. “Boys got an edge to him sharp like the sword grand. Think ah should beat him dull?" Eriennen groaned. It had been this way. Imnu seemed to be training as much in harassment of the rules as he was in harassment of opponents. Terfalen was as proficient at training young people with a sword as Eriennen imagined anyone might be. But, he was not about manners. That was assured. The other teachers kept Imnu in line, but in the yard he was a terror. “Maybe,” Terfalen said low and she heard the soldier then, “you should sit him down, remind him of the rules.” So that’s one vote for blood, she thought.

Ualfa looked at her, "they need more time. And that one needs a lesson, not the first time he has done something like that."

“I know,” Eriennen said and weighed her options and feelings. She had been too removed this session of classes. I’m getting bored of it, she said to herself, and let the idea pass through her. What to do? I don’t like it, she thought, and after a quick review found too much wrong with the notion of leaving for vacation with this self-important young wealthy man’s son elevating his bullying to outright assault and rule breaking. It needed to stop, hard. She looked at him and wondered what degree of scare he could take and what kind of shame he was due. She chose deathly and brutal, respectively. And that’s two for blood, Eriennen nodded. "Clear onward boys!”

The youths approached her sweating.

"How are you both on your studies. How’s the debate and sailing and the diplomacy going?"

"It's good Arch," Imnu barked.

"And how about the quiet one?" She asked Ualfa before the other boy could respond. This wasn’t worldly education, this was leadership training. People needed to remember that. I need to do better at reminding them, she thought.

"Both of them are doing well in every area aside from the blade. Bonngs here is having trouble with defense, and Imnu is, well you saw. He can't control himself," Ualfa reported.

The tall boy raised his chin, "I merely-"

"-Silence!" Eriennen yelled. "The adults are talking. The fighters, your teachers, are talking. Imnu, do you think you're a fighter?"

"I am," he said.

“Let's fight then."

The boy hesitated, "With you?"

"Scared?"

"No, honored."

She drew close to him, very close, and looked at his chin. It barely had a hair on it. She laughed and shook her head. “You shouldn't be. This is a punishment," Eriennen turned and took a step back, then spun slowly and addressed the crowd, "and here is your sentence."

The woman wrapped her hair into itself to make a tight bun as she strolled to a wall on the east side of the yard where weapons hung, then pulled a sword free. The blade was sharp, battle ready. Sweating, sunbeaten students in the yard sang a chorus of oohs. She cocked her head at the boy and began a slow stroll towards him, flipping the blade over on itself from right to left, cutting expert circular lines in the air. “You will take in hand this sword. We will fight, I know you want a chance to prove yourself. If you can cut me twice, and I mean blood, then we'll elevate you to precept tomorrow, and your graduation can happen at your choosing.” She paused and made a show of considering. "And, I'll give you a job if you want it. Assistant to a clerk or something in the deliveries. We'll even write a glowing review to your father." She approached him still sliding the blade through air in dancer's arcs. To his credit, the boy didn't show any fear. She stopped right before him and turned the hilt. Imnu took it and nodded at the sword, hardening his face. "Finally, Imnu,” Eriennen said, “do you know how to ride?"

"Cats?"

"Cats."

"Yes."

"Good, I'll give you a pick from our stables. There's a huge white short-haired Valdonian that you would look like a new king on." Teachers and students whistled and looked at each other in surprise. "And if I win," she shouted, "we tell you and your friend’s fathers that our normal three-cross training wasn't enough, that you need an extra one, with double pay.” The stout beaten boy groaned from the sidelines, but the one she would face stood strong. She turned and nodded, hands clasped behind her back, no weapon to use and donning no armor.

"Begin," she said.

The boy twisted his face, "you aren't going to use your metal fists?" Hammerfists, metal fists, great fists, the weapons had many names and were worn by those brutal and reckless, as she had been when she came to love, hate, and use them as a younger woman.

"No, I'll use my..." she pulled her hands before her and turned them over, inspecting them, "…fist fists."

The crowd murmured in laughter.

"Now fight me!" She yelled and entered into that place between rapid analysis and complete thoughtlessness that was the essence of response and attack, the mind of battle.

The boy looked around at his colleagues, eyebrows arched, then blew air through his lips. He approached her with an overhead stance, trying a few quick strong swings out too far to touch her. The blade whispered on the wind. She didn't blink, she didn't move, she stared the other fighter in the eyes. The boy hesitated for a moment then stood up tall and shook his head. He spit then snarled and she saw a rage shift into his features. He didn't like the game she was playing. He likely wouldn't like what happened next either. The fighter approached her and went for a stab at her stomach. It was a quick thrust that she could have seen being followed by another and then maybe a lateral slice at her arms.

He wouldn't get the chance.

She tilted her torso so the blade couldn't hit her then shot her left hand out and grabbed the sword near the pommel strong enough to cut her palm. The slice of the blade and the release of the blood made her heart jump and her stomach dip as if she was falling in air for a moment. The boy's eyes went wide in surprise and he tried to pull back for a minuscule instant.

She was too fast.

Eriennen reached out with her right hand and threw a Lift into it that made her feel like the fist itself and the rest of her body went light. Her vision faded into a wavy eminence of energy bundled into her arm, the universe hazily rebounded to a temporary writhing construction that mirrored the feeling of her strength. She caught the boy at his neck and in one motion lifted him off the ground, choking him. Her sleeve fell to reveal a bicep that was corded with lean tight muscle and bearing white clashes of scars and patches from old blades and hot fire. They were the continuing tale of a life of movement and violence; each course line a word in a history of hurt and healing. From the scar on her chin in a tight white curve to the missing small toe on her left foot there were a thousand bloody pasts adhered to a visible form.

The yard gasped, but Imnu could not. He lost his grip on the sword and dropped his hold on it. She flipped it to wield and leveled the blade out at the teachers who were suddenly advancing on her and they slowed, circling.

They knew what could happen.

The woman choked the boy hard for a moment unfairly. His eyes went wide and his legs kicked. He clawed at her face then beat at her arm then began to pry at her hand. Spit flew in the air and he gurgled, turning his reddening face up to the sky. She took the kicks with joy, hardening her stomach, letting his boot rip a pant leg, watching his eyes dart around in mortal panic.

"Eri!" Ualfa yelled and Eriennen turned, still holding the boy in the air, and pointed the sword at her.

“You do what that woman tells you,” she commanded. “We told you we don’t do heads, remember? Think being a man means being strong? Well I’m strong, you’re weak. Being a man means being in control. Too bad...” her arm burned, she grunted out the words, “I’m not!” She threw him to the dirt and dropped the sword. Eriennen grabbed her wrist with her cut hand, spreading the blood on her left hand to her right, wincing at the mess of it. The yard relaxed, teachers and students gripping each other and making shows of relief, some laughing, others visibly angry. Terfalen was doubled over in cackles, coughing through them so hard he started to wretch. Almost similarly, the boy she had humiliated writhed in the dust and spit blood onto the ground before rolling into a ball and taking his hands to his eyes as he wailed out sobs. “My father-”

"-Your father's a hundred clears away, for another six stretch, not two." Eriennen approached Ualfa and presented her hand. "Heal me first," she said low, "and don't stand there with your mouth open, you said he needed a lesson. I just taught him what his mother forgot to, that’s all."

Ualfa snorted a laugh and shook her head. "Better get you on that vacation."

"Please.”

“Still, your lesson speaks better from your mouth than your hand.”

She’s right, she thought. Such force was unnecessary, cruel even, both justified and unjustifiable; outmoded. She cringed at herself, doubting, regretting suddenly. “I’ll take him out on the water when I get back. I'll bring Karga, some boys just need a daddy and that's how it is. We will all talk about how to take that fire he has and turn it into forge.”

Ualfa nodded. It was a nod of approval. Eriennen was then, for a moment, aware that though she was leader in title, here in the yard Ualfa’s rule was both law and religion. She should get paid more, Eriennen thought. The woman poured water on Eriennen's hand from a pouch on her side and stilled it into a swirling mass.

"Be still," Ualfa said and closed her eyes. Eriennen envisioned her hand healed. Then her hand was not hers for a moment, or rather it became a shared thing, like another body, another being, was overlaid on top of it, Ualfa's being. The water shimmered, and then a strange sensation like a thousand little tingling parts of her flesh came alive. She watched herself heal through a mechanism that was not seeing; strange translucent vivisections of a deep and bright application of energy.

They stood like that for a time while the Warsports Room got back to its business. When it was done Eriennen gave Ualfa a hug and wished her well then spent a few minutes talking to her colleagues and students, making sure to tell Imnu he had performed bravely, yet that his actions had been dangerous and that he must change course, and Stobbs that he must stand taller, be bolder. She let them talk for a while then left by the east wall, a small red door to the Southern Special Deliveries. There she found Karga and listened to reports from their clerks in the high, bright, ornamented office.

After choosing gear, drawing up a map with a small team, and debriefing with her mage Dryfylwyft she parted from Karga for the afternoon with a mutual kiss on the cheek and went to the top floor, the third, where her wide lavish apartment overlooked the sea; right up against it as she had always dreamed she might have when she was a child. Eriennen began packing her clothes and the things she wanted to bring. She did so with both hands, regardless that one had just been cut deep not an hour earlier. Yet, due to Ualfa’s Restoration magic both hands were fine to use as any other day. The only difference was that the left one now had a white line all along the palm. One more word in the odd script. She looked at it then closed her fist; the scar would never fade.

They never did.

Later she left, like she always would. She left to hear the thronging chorus of the universe, an illuminated infinite externality shining on and shone by the pure fact of her being. And yet, if she could have heard the whole song, if maybe her mind were even more grand and complex than ours are, like a god or a great machine, she might have heard a new note swelling low. A name whispered through an unfelt plane, whispered to every cell in every creature on the planet, whispered through an unimaginable field that encased and was encased by the world. And the world itself? It turned on its axis, it revolved around its center, as all things do.

Chapter 2:

The Jump, The Blue, and The Beast

The spear was hard to see in the failing light.

It almost hit her, and would have killed her if it had. Eriennen’s body seemed to respond of its own volition and she stepped right then grabbed across towards her left shoulder. The weapon froze in her clenched fist. She twirled it around her head then poised the missile to launch by her right ear.

"I don't like the captain," she said over the wind. Below, the great merchant ship Demwa Blue fled through the deep wild water like a mounted man driving through a crowd. Above, their sharp flyer shot on the wind like a bird of prey in hunt. It was a sleek black wooden thing with two long wings and side windows. Metal brackets twisted elegantly from its sharp wedged tip back along the hull and met around a cage containing a faceted magic crystal trained to Lift straight on at ten clears per fourling. All the ships in house at Southern Special Deliveries were out with other teams, so this one was new. It didn’t have a name; less and less did those days. Or, rather it did not have a name as Eriennen would have it. The Shipping Call knew it as Short 4-9. Eriennen had renamed it to her crew when they’d rented it from a young work-wealthy man in black robes with oiled skin at the SkyPark in Frina Raltas. He called it Short because it was one of his small fleet, the fourth of nine ships.

She called it The Jump.

Eriennen threw the spear underhand at Karga’s head. The brute barely moved, just turned his face and caught the long pole at its end with a gauntlet as it whipped past him, bringing it to a halt in midair with a soft thwip. "Me either. Neither does Dryfylwyft."

"That old rock doesn't like anyone," she sneered. Dryfylwyft was the mage on their team the past few stretch, currently sleeping in the small hold below. He was old, a good healer, better with Water and Ice, and not as much Fire, Wind, or Internal or External Lift, though impressively to anyone he did have a bit of all of them. That was how they traveled at their smallest team composition. A big one to take the hits, a fighter that could get the killing done, and a mage to do everything else. Unfortunately, in this case the last element was one of the most disagreeable men Eriennen had ever met. But he was good in the field and he was a senior member of the group, a wartime buddy of Sulu’s. That's worth something, she would say to herself. Plus, she tended liked him as much as she hated him.

"True," Karga said then flipped the spear in his hand, raised an eyebrow at it, and hurled it at her with a cutting grunt. He held nothing back, the beast in black armor never did when it came to warring. The spear made for her leg. Eriennen raised her foot and stomped down quick, slamming the shaft to the ground and it cracked like a whip as it landed flat. She reached down in her red leather sparring harness and broke the spear where her foot pinned it with a hard pull. Then she held up the bottom piece and tossed it to Karga. Eriennen brought her left foot under the tip of the bladed shaft that remained and flipped it into her hands.

They dueled like killers.

Karga was the bladesman, so his strikes were quick and calculated, driving at weak points in her defense and vulnerable parts of the body in an endless barrage. She had to riposte after hard won parries to get anything in. He slammed again and again at her sides and head, knees and hands. It didn't matter that she had the end of the spear with the blade, it only made her grip feel more shaky as she parried and blocked. He danced her back on the ship, striking her shoulder then trying to kick at her chest. She gave his armor a nice new dent as she fainted a high block then spun the bladed speartip in a circle, catching his vambrace. She would have put it right through his neck in a real fight. In retribution he spun on her and landed a twirling blow in her stomach hard enough to bruise ribs.

"Yield!" She yelled and danced sideways grabbing her belly in a flash of pain. Karga laughed loud and booming into the cold air high above the deep sea stretch to the southern isles. It hurt worse than she wanted to admit. In a flash she considered throwing down the spear and boxing him in the head, but that would get complicated. "We were just sparring you beast. I would have won, I did win actually. That hit would have been you two hands higher."

"You said yield, Eri," Karga said then sat on the bench lining the wall and reached to the command dais, keeping his gaze on her. She spit on the floor and they looked at each other with hard stares as adversaries, combatants for a moment more and then both relaxed into smiles. He pushed the throttle up and they picked up speed, then he turned the ship slightly so they could see the last fading golden haze of the sun on the horizon as the day died to the deepening night. She got off the floor and sat next to him, shielding herself from the wind in his shadow. She let the pain in her side sink in, and breathed it out.

"The men on this ship, they’re tough,” she said.

"They’re soldiers,” Karga said.

“Three of them were in the Reenan guard from who I’ve talked to.”

“Not the captain, he’s Oployesv, from the other side of Dennsh Bay in Zemed, I can hear it. He’s a true asshole.”

She noted this cultural posturing, this ingrained animosity, and moved past it. “I wonder what they’re doing with it,” she said.

“Research?”

“Maybe. This whole operation is dark, shadows. I wish we knew.” In her mind she heard Devenu. You were right, she thought.

“What they are doing or what it is?”

“I don’t care what they’re doing,” Eriennen said then paused and shrugged, “well, almost. No matter what, it’d be better to know what we are dealing with if anything happens.”

“Hopefully their guards will be enough if so.” Karga said.

“Well, there sure are a lot of them.”

He looked down at her with his golden eyes, a line of worry there on his brow, "I did catch a glimpse of a cargo map, no name on the thing. But the cage it's in might be the length of this liftship."

That was concerning. Both of them had exhausted what small amount of espionage they could manage, but no one had been forthcoming and the hold of the ship was closed to them.

“That is big. You don’t think it's a skyspear do you?”

“Hope not, maybe a burn whip?” he said.

“No, the cage is long. A burnwhip sits with its four pincers splayed out, like a starlet fish lays, remember.”

“That is correct. Then it must be a dragon.”

“Oh of course Karga, a dragon.”

He smiled, “a drake?”

Erennen whistled, “what kind is the question.”

“One I’d never like to answer”.

“Me neither. Is there anything else on board?”

"A few boxes marked with the word, deployables," Karga said and waved a hand.

Deployables, the word had a meaning she couldn't remember. She had heard it somewhere. It was a call sign for something, something she'd learned in passing. But for what? Her heart spoke she wouldn't have liked the answer if she could recall it. With that information tilting the scale towards danger she decided it was time. Time to force Karga’s secrets into the daylight.

"You’ve been sly Karga.”

He froze.

“You’ve avoided telling me who the client is on their end. I noticed the omission on the map yesterday. That’s against our rules, the rules you set and that I have followed and enforced because you set them. It's in contradiction to our Need. We are clear like water with each other. That's my requirement, remember? Who is it?”

Surprisingly, Karga smiled. “Corpi Kirpin, that technically is our client as well, when Obvi did the job three moons in the The Otrodono had them stop by and give a stack callstone to the Corpi Transport Office.”

"Karga!” She said and tapped his leg with her knuckles. She was shocked from the first word. They had never been able to break into any business with the Big Three, the magic mining companies that most of the twenty seven states in the great four nations relied on.

"I am very happy,” he grinned. “They have a pending request for specialists in dark beast transport. After some conversation they said they would put us on the next boat that was carrying a beast out of Frina."

"Does Sulu know? You should have told me, brother."

"I wanted to surprise you. Sorry Arch. I was going to tell you yesterday but I waited to see how things felt.” He bounced his eyebrows, “they don’t feel great, so I didn’t say anything.”

“That's unstrategic.”

“I know.”

“We don’t do that.”

“If it had changed any element of the actual mission I would have, you know this. I truly did want it to be a surprise for you.

“I understand,” she said, mildly satisfied.

“As for Sulu he isn't showing it but I think he is very proud, didn’t have a hard time keeping it from you so he can’t be too excited though. You know him, such new business, well.” Karga hummed then breathed out hard. “We might need some serious changes if we can become the provider of these services for Corpi."

"And you’d be the right one to make those changes. You know I would support you, you do know that? Don’t you?"

“I do. Thank you.”

“As long as you tell me what’s happening.”

“Commanded,” Karga said, then stood and bowed to both knees in his fashion before her.

“Good,” she replied gravely, but within she was not upset. Karga was taking stances, making moves, expanding, innovating; all of it was good and welcome. Though, he had erred in his concept of a surprise.

He stood and steadied himself with a hand on the ceiling of the ship, then sat again. His expression fell sullen. "It is strange though. I don't think the people I talked to really communicated with DemWa. They work with them a lot it seems, like us. But I’ve never seen this ship. Have you?”

“No.”

“Must be the biggest DemWa’s got.”

“By far,” she said and felt an anxiety creep into her throat.

“Things are strange, though. May not just be that.” He said and clicked his tongue.

Things were strange. The captain was immediately curt and almost hostile, a gruff older man with a brow that seemed permanently contracted to sternness. Then the presence of both a dozen armed men and an unknown living nightmare trapped in the hull all contributed to a tense day and a half of sailing. I don't like any of it, Eriennen thought. "I want to get off here and get to the beach," she said.

"Me too, I think I'll have to investigate further next time I take a contract for them. Sometimes I don't know whether to trust the big players."

"Well, let's become big players ourselves," she said. Karga laughed, a deep sound that she loved, then he stood and grabbed the commands, kicking the bladed end of the spear she had dueled with to the side. Her eyes glanced over the spear head, it was intricate and ornamental, a relic from the All War.

Then she remembered something. She remembered what the word Deployables on a cargo list might mean. Eriennen had heard the Reenan guard use it when she was accompanying an escort along the Gharab Mainway north around the time she’d begun working at the Southern Special Deliveries.

It was a military term.

It meant, "weapons."

When darkness was whole and once again the stars revealed their endless rule, the team slept in The Jump as it sat on the Blue’s float bay. The broad barge trailed the ship and hovered off the water by power of four Lift crystals in boxy wooden arrays. Those arrays both lifted the barge and pulled toward the ship enough to reduce drag. By contract they were confined to their flyer at night, and slept out on the floor where her and Karga had fought. Dryf went from sleep in the hull to sleep on the deck and barely said a word, aside from a brief stint of talking ill towards the captain with them by cutting insults and incredulous proclamations, such banter ever the skill of working and traveling folk the world over.

Karga left the waking world soon after. So, Eriennen spent her time before sleep bundled on the floor on a silk and catfluff cot, listening to the dark ocean.

She meditated, imaging herself drawing up swirling energy from beneath the sea and forming it into the shapes of the Mind Seals, those old tools of The Heart of The World, the religion that had persisted in Reena longer and quieter than all others. It had come from the same bedrock as the great religion of Valdonis, The One, just as the people of Reena had over four thousand years prior traveled from Valdonis themselves. The Heart of the World had evolved in Reena, had survived the various localized hero-mythos of the city-state Sea Kings, to return after the Joyful Unification of King Irva, becoming the Seven-Directional God, The Sight of Niadwe. The seventh direction, inward, was still the same Heart. Yet the Sight did not include the oral demitext, the iterative visions, explained by each practitioner in their own way but amounting to similar experiences, of the Mind Seals. Eriennen’s parents didn’t have gods really, less Reenans did all the time, and thus she had learned the ancient Reenan practice where she had learned everything: from the artists, students, and criminals of Cobi King, Long Town, who were true Reenans she felt because they cared to really live their lives and not cower from the future, though that was all two short and yet impossibly long lifetimes ago. This socio-historical construction was present in her fathoming, from the personal relation, to the imminent history, but in order to perform the act she had to let it all fade. The context had to be realized to be as illusory as the vision, both real in different shades even if for her only. She had to make herself a pure field within which she could act upon her reality.

Eriennen summoned the Seals of peace, then strength, in complex mindborn arrangements of circles and triangles and wisps of light and she breathed that imagined force out to the sky, bending her mind towards the shape she desired of it. Her experience reformed around those ideals, those deep actions of coalescing a thought and an energy within. She was, for a calm delicious while, exactly who she wanted to be.

Yet it did not last. After some trite lazy wandering about her head, the last thoughts she had before sleep accidentally forgot peace and indulged in strength; a dark imbalance.

The thoughts regarded The Jump, the Blue, and the beast. She played closed-eye strategies in her mind for fighting whatever was in the hull along a couple different scenarios. She imagined having to take down the whole thing, kill everyone too, and would do it by using Dryf to boost a Fire in the array of The Jump, then crash it into the other ship. This would destroy the beast and eliminate as much personnel and infrastructure as possible. She finally imagined dueling the captain through the small towns of the Bunns Isles, killing him with a crushing blow to the chest. They were good dark thoughts in their own way, warborn thoughts hardening her for the trials of the next day.

Yet, those thoughts were a tentative solace only till sleep. That night she dreamt she had the body of a dead man in her room in Frina Raltas, and the dead man was all dead men she had ever made, the horrid lifeless creations of a murderer. She had to hide it from everyone, Devenu included, and she was deeply ashamed. So, like more and more nights were ending up, Eriennen woke in the dark with a twisting sickness in her heart and strangely tasted a metallic flavor under her tongue that inexplicably mirrored her soul as it recoiled from the violence that she had wielded. The terror that had come to pass by needs of how she had constructed her life, a brutal extension of what she had chosen to value, and what to let die. Eriennen quivered against the disgust that infected her soul as she gazed at what she had been, and she tried to hold onto the true vision of the next woman she would be against the darkness. She only found sleep again when she decided to gaze out the long window and saw the other worlds, the bright yellow gem of the planet Orik and right next to it the Red Traveler, the home of the gods or maybe a god itself depending on your religion, its longer bright red shape, yet octogonal when seen through a telescope, though still pinpoint small to a person on the ground, bending towards an immutable, odd course across the void.

"How are you getting that thing off the ship without a dock?" She asked. They stood on the dark decking, her in blue and white light plate armors with shallow points at the shoulders and knees, metal fists strapped to hip. The white morning sun cast a stark clean too-bright look about the world. A cool air still blew from the night’s end, and the little pyramidal buildings poking from the trees at Bunnin, the port of the isles, were flying by quickly as they bounded through the shallower waters near land like something was chasing them. To Eriennen and Karga’s concern the Blue had skipped their listed rendezvous at the main town.

"That isn't for you to worry about. I’ve been to this cut, and we didn’t say where we were docking, you assumed it. You can stay on the ship for all I care woman,” the captain responded.

Karga shot a black-gauntleted hand out in the air and spoke in a similar accent to the man. "Captain, we are here to help, we are specialists hired by your company."

The captain sneered, "specialists," he spit and shook his head, "the men who hired you always want some specialist to get involved. I've worked for Corpi for a decade, I'm the specialist. You are just the good idea of a man sitting hundreds of clears from here, a man who isn't here now." He put a green leathered glove on the hilt of a metal warpick strapped to his belt, then another on a short sword at the other side. He was a hard man, he'd fought for Imseli surely, likely well, she thought. He was made the old way, voice low and grave, smart and a killer by looks, visage dark like Karga but with the close-eyes of the Oployesvi, the state that encompassed the Temedral desert in Southern Myrus, deep descendants of the Kemenenden, who had conquered the lands Karga’s people came from south of the Dennal Bay in ancient times.

"Alright," Eriennen said, "alright, that's fine. But we do know what we are doing and we are under our own contract to see this through. We will follow you inland till the delivery at your facility, we can stay out of the way, then we come back and grab our lift and we'll be gone. If you need any doubled magic Dryfylwyft here can help."

Dryfylwyft was leaning on his long white trigger staff in a state seemingly near sleep; close enough so to be highly offensive, but not quite ever enough for anyone to say anything about it. The man had clearly perfected the stance, which made him shorter but still left him towering over most men like a thin tree near breaking; a vision of apathy. He waved a hand from under his wide cloak and brushed a long silver braided lock of hair from his lined and crackled face. “At your service my grand captain."

The captain of DemWa Blue tilted back and looked at the sky then let out a groan. “Just stay out of the way, and forget anything you see. That should be in your burning contract, right?"

Karga glared, "it is."

When they made it to the private anchor site Eriennen couldn’t decide whether to laugh or truly begin considering abandoning the mission. It just a wild uninhabited beachline with a rough and recent hewn path cutting into the jungle. Great yellow, green, and purple trees shot towards the sky, and she could hear the groans and high calls of the forest even a hundred feet out to water. Eriennen and her companions sat on the bow watching the crew prepare to unload the beast. They had a large access to the hull open and were arranging a line of magic crystals on the side of the ship that faced the land.

"Are those-" she began.

"Arrays," Dryfylwyft broke in confidently.

"What for?" They were now setting up metal tables and placing the huge cut crystals on them.

"I don’t know. What kind of crazy balsa shit does Sulu have us doing?" Dryfylwyft asked. Eriennen and Karga shared a wincing glance. But, if the men on the ship’s purpose was sinister, they hid it well. Everything seemed fairly normal and the crew were obviously trained for this kind of work, dropping their tough energy of the past day and carefully tending to the creation of the structure. They bent down, inspected little elements of the metal brackets, shook them lightly, and gathered a few feet back to collectively appreciate their work and pat each other on the shoulder or hold their hands out to create new structures in air that they discussed amiably. They were excited, Eriennen could see, and that made her excited as well, though as she was excitement and anxiety were close enough to melt into each other. When she glanced at Karga, she saw only the latter on his face. His lips were tight; this was in some way his job, and she saw he felt that weight now.

“There’s the boy,” Dryfylwyft said and clicked his tongue. A man had emerged from the hold with a stave; a mage. He had a trim black shirt on and a long white skirt with open sides. His hair was silver and like Dryfylwyft’s, braided.

“Oh!” Eriennen said, “is that your… brother? Or do all aging mages have to wear that hair?”

“Split your ass Eri my braids are Reenan, done up in Brillafeh, this is jungle style woman.”

“And what are those?”

“Cirilan, Knoliga itself, lot of those boys up there have ah, minerals in their hair, see?” He said, and she could tell that there were gleaming jewels scattered around the other man’s head. “Aldar bitch,” he whispered.

“And I’ll claw your eyes soldier,” she darted her head at him, but the old man just spit over the side of the ship.

“Mmm,” Karga hummed with satisfaction, “they are going to move the cage to shore with the array. That’s all.” Eriennen could see he was correct.

“Lift you think?” Dryfylwyft asked.

“Water maybe,” Eriennen said, “not enough rock for a Lift if the thing is as big as we think it is.” As if in response to the mention there was a groaning sound and she watched men pull from either side of the hold on black ropes connected to gears. A huge cage on wheels rose from below, wood top and bottom and thick iron bars all along. Within was a monstrous bundle, likely a ships sail, and whatever restes was chained into itself, laying still. Dryfylwyft groaned.

“Here we go,” Eriennen whispered, and found her heart pounding. The mage with silver hair walked out before the array, then surveyed it with a smug frown visible from a distance. The man put his hand on two of the stones at the front, and then the entire array shot alive, shimmering rainbows of half-seen radiation. There was a clear silence that often preceded great use of magic, and then with a thunderous, deep, almost guttural whooshing, the water of the sea began to rise. It conjured up in a writhing gurgling form as if alive and arranged itself in a line from the side of the ship out in a slight slope some hundred feet to land. The shallow waters nearer the shore disappeared, coming up into the block and forming tiny tidepools while the ship floated beyond the dropoff of the ocean’s shelf.

The mage screamed and then the air grew hot and with a thunderous cracking that sent beast and bird flying into the air and forest, the water froze into a perfectly flat and keenly balanced ice walkway right towards the shore. Eriennen thought she saw it’s top was frosted, or wrinkled.

“Deasvuda La,” Karga said, some saying Eriennen didn’t know and was too distracted to ask about. She had heard of industrial application of magic like this, but hadn’t seen it yet with this sort of stark utility. Arrays like these, or others that could mold Fire to a course, and then all types of new bond Lifting were propelling forward development in the mining world and other industries at rapid paces. To see it out here was truly excellent, and suddenly gave a grandeur to the mission that had been lacking, and she found herself fascinated. She danced around the idea of building a city of ice created and sustained by such an array and smiled to herself.

No one on her team said a word as the workers rolled the cage onto the walkway, followed by four great crates. Then the mage got behind them as two men wheeled up a small mobile Lift array. The maged inspected it, then put his hands on the control stones, they glowed. There was a low moaning sound and then the mage and the men and the monster and the boxes began to move slowly down the frozen path towards the sand and the jungle.

"Are our revered specialists still coming to give their essential expertise?" The captain shouted out to them.

"What an asshole," Dryfylwyft said, threw his staff over his shoulder and sauntered towards the ice. Eriennen and Karga stood, looked at each others with hard stares and followed.

If you knew how to fight against magic, or better yet just how to use it, or even best if you lived in a very cold place, you got to learn how to walk on ice. Eriennen had done a little of most of those so she put her steps firmly straight down onto the huge block as her team followed behind the thirty or so men with the crates and beast leading from the front. She had been right, the top was frosted in a way that made the going easy; slow, but easy. Yet, it was awkward being up in the air walking on ice with a huge chained beast right before her. Dangerous in a way that would be fun in retrospect, she hoped, but was terrifying in the moment.

"Maybe we should have taken their suggestion and got to vacation early, eh?” She said over her shoulder, then sipped a small perfectly spherical stone bowl with a stopper. The Puri went down hard. Haven’t been sleeping, she had said to herself when she began working on it soon after rising.

"Are you drinking root right now?" Dryfylwyft said and she saw him look back at Karga in the rear.

“Eri,” Karga said in dissapointed baritone.

Eriennen stopped and turned to her companions, “look, the captain told us to stay on the ship and no one cares we’re here, so I’m not going to put on a show for them. They’ve got this incredible bridge making thing, don’t think they much need us. Mostly though, I’m tired and in a few hours we’ll be off, so a little juice on the job today can’t hurt, not me at least. Do you want some or not?” She handed the bowl out to Dryfylwyft.

He smiled broadly, eyebrows arching in appreciative surprise while behind him Karga was rolling his eyes and muttering to himself in Southern Myrean. “Well!” Dryfylwyft said, “really having some fun are we? But this is a vacation and you know I’d never refuse an order, or a such kind offer,” he took the bowl and began to raise it to his mouth, pausing to say, “I had a cup of Brill for breakfast anyway, for my mood you see?” The old man laughed then went to take a drink of the lively drug. Yet, he did not get a chance to.

For, in that exact moment and all at once, the ice walkway exploded.

Like a glacier struck by the hammer of a god and without pretense or anything at all to prepare them the entire huge structure cracked downwards into hundreds of pieces and everything; the soldiers, the crated monster, and Eriennen and her friends were suddenly falling through air with shards of ice whipping past. She screamed out a word, "No!" But it ended in a wail that was echoed by all, becoming a chorus of horror.

Dryfyltwyft swung his stave and Eriennen saw the fresh spikes of ice around them scatter. But in midair, she and the mage smashed together and when they hit the ground instead the of ice it was the spike on her knee went as far as it could go into the fleshy part of his thigh. Her side hit the ground hard and she tasted the salted weighty warmth of blood. She pulled the spike and Dryfylwyft screamed.

Face down against the wet sand, shocked, horrified at the existent and imminent catastrophes. Eriennen let herself experience a brief interlocuting moment where she felt herself as the nexus upon which the world must change. The change of the world bent red towards chaos, death, and battle, and she was the point of order; the mechanism both formed from and forming the next thing that would happen. Time to fight, she thought, and the storm raged within.

"You whore! Who needs a damned spike on their knee anyway, vain bitch!" Dryfylwyft yelled, body half smushed into the sand by her weight.

She ignored the insult, stood and yelled, "get up!" And lifted him clean out of the sand with a grunt and grabbed his arms. "Plug that with ice and hold our line, heal up at the shore.” She slapped him on the shoulder as his expression both soured and hardened at once and then trudged towards Karga, glancing over her shoulder. What had just been a tidy retinue of soldiers and sailors was now a chaotic ruin of broken men, limbs all bent and backs fractured by ice. The smashed crates poured out swords and spears and shields and staves in a glacial flood as the boxes sunk into what would soon again become the sea. Out beyond them, the beast’s cage could no longer be called such. The bars had bent, the top cracking open under its own weight. The huge tarp covering the monster was moving, chains sliding farther than they should have been. That thing is going to wake up and get loose, she thought and hit the sand next to Karga. He was flat on his back, half submerged in his black armor.

"Karga!" she yelled at him. He was breathing. She slapped at his face and he sputtered in half consciousness. "Karga!" she hollered again. The screams of pain behind her were turning into moans as shock fled the fallen men and their wounds came to bare their torture against them.

"Eriennen! It’s moving!" Dryfylwyft shouted, "I can’t stand long."

She turned to the field of battle soon come, “stay up Dryf, Karga’s out.” Men were scrambling to the shore, some were unconscious and sinking in the sand as Karga was; Dryfylwyft was shaking, she could see it from ten feet away. The waterlogged sand beneath him took on a surly red.

"Get to me!" she heard a man yell, it was the captain of The Blue. He was holding down the tarp on the beast which flailed more violently now, "we need the sedative! Every man grab a chain! Where's the mage? The mage!"

"Karga!" Eriennen said and turned to him then slapped his face hard. He woke with an angry growl. "There you are." He sat up and breathed shakily. "Can you walk?" He looked at her, his yellowgold eyes rolling then stopping on hers, then he turned and scanned about for his greatsword, finding it and gripping the leather-wrapped handle.

"Dryfylwyft you're bleeding," he yelled.

The old mage turned towards them, "oh really? Thanks for telling me!"

She helped Karga to his feet and they held each other’s armor for a brief instant and stared at each other, letting the fierceness rise, connecting and becoming one before the battle. They shook each other and growled, then punched each others sternums. Eriennen breathed in the iron-born forge-hot clarity of the urgency of the moment, the threat of what was to happen giving her power, then she turned and gave her orders while stretching her shoulder.

"We’re going to help them get the thing down or kill it if we can’t. We’re of our own command, don’t take an order from the captain unless I give the yes. Dryfylwyft! Freeze some of the water a few feet down to give us better footing then go help with the chains.” The men that could stand were gathering around the huge broken crate and trying to keep the tarp in place. Dryfylwyft grunted then set about the task, digging his hands into the sand, letting his trigger staff fall to the side

"Alright Karga, with me!"

She moved forward, still trudging through the sand, little shells and sea creatures shivering in the deadly sunlight. Before her the captain's men were wildly pulling the chains and trying to hold down the hidden monster. It was moving faster now. Then there was then a new wail, a scream of pitious agony, and from one of the sludges of weapons the mage crawled, bleeding from everywhere.

"Adeyoon! The sedative!" The captain yelled, but the other man just cried, grabbing his face and stumbling about then leaning on the moving shape of the covered beast and yelping in fear when it pushed him off.

"My eyes!" Adeyoon the mage screamed.

“Where is the sedative!" The captain yelled.

The mage pointed a shaky finger at nothing in particular. "One of the crates! Blue bag!"

"This thing’s coming alive captain!" A young man on a chain screamed, then broke his hold and ran to the shore. The captain didn't hesitate, the moment the man began to run a side sword was in his hand. "Deserter!" he yelled, but the man gave him a wide berth and scrambled towards the treeline. The captain let go of his chain and took a lunge towards him.

"No," Eriennen yelled as she and Karga fought to reach them, "killing him might wake it!" But as she said it she knew it would do nothing to stop him, for this crew was operating under vague military standard, and disobedience in combat was an untenable martial rebellion to Imseli’s warriors. It was a long shadow of the war, the potential in every man to become a collective, destructive machine. The soldier turned just in time to get his hands up before the captains blade hit them in a hard swing, severing one and leaving the other dangling at the wrist. The man cried out for a moment, but his yell was cut short when tip of the sword went in his stomach and out his back. Eriennen put out a hand to signal Karga to pause and they watched the man die then looked at the covered monster.

Like a wave far at sea seems an unorganized and ephemeral thing, a happenstance, non-aligned movement of mere matter, the beast had thus far been shifting in little fits, not as a whole. Yet, no sooner had that man been killed by the captain did the tsunami take form, the wave seen, becoming a thing in true, and suddenly all along the tarp there was a hard ripple, a creature trying to raise itself, and she knew the beast woke.

“We’ve got to kill it,” Karga said.

“Yes we do!” She yelled and reached to her back, where along her spine was always hidden a tight iron bar, and she pulled it out and raised it up and began walking forward again, then yelled out “men, listen to me! Grab a weapon, all of you, if you find the sedative, give it to your captain, but if you don’t just get something and stab the beast before its loose.”

"Before it gets free, we’ve got to kill it!" Karga roared, his accent thick in the haze of his pain.

"No!" The captain yelled to them from the shore and she saw even at that distance there was murder fresh in his eyes. "It has to be alive!"

"So do we!" She screamed back. She saw the men looking over from their chains to the boxes of gleaming war tools. Eriennen made it to the first crate, heart thrashing irregularly for a moment as she stepped around a man with his top half had sunken into the sand, and whose torso sprung from the ground with such casual causal reposition, that it looked like a thing never belonging to a man, a plant made of legs, and there was a fleeting flash of terrible knowing that, for some reason, she’d remember that strange sight for the rest of her life. She put her cudgel on a loop at her belt and grabbed an armful of sinking weapons, not minding if they cut into the leather between her gauntlets and pauldrons, then tossed them at the feet of two unarmed men up against the monster and turned to Karga, “Get to the front! Between the captain and the men, give them weapons and hold him off. I’ll-”

But before the next word landed every ear and every eye was made to turn towards the monster. For, from its broken cage came a roar, and one as such that no one there and only a cursed few the world over or ever in history had heard. It was the sparkflying scream of ten thousand metals ripped in every direction, an impossibly high yet nauseatingly low explosion of sound that rent the air and shook the chest. The hidden beast froze, seemed to swell in its sack against the chains, and then the top of the tarp grew suddenly dark. A geyser of bright green liquid burst through the covering and into the sky then fell in shimmering, viscous rain and everything it touched hissed then burst to hot white flames. The cage, the sand, the tarp, and the men about it, all were consumed. Those who were hit by the terrible spew dashed into the sands, screaming the infanticidal wail of the burned living. The captain dropped his pick and went to his knees. Something huge whipped into the sky and sounded again it's terrible song. It was a broad lizard head on a long stout neck, its face and entire body formed from intricately overlapping spiked silver plating that coursed like a frozen river upwards to a massive razor-toothed maw below red eyes that gleamed like fire even in the day.

“What is that thing!" Dryfylwyft yelped from behind her.

"Karga you were right," she yelled back.

Karga slammed down the visor on his helm, “It’s an Acid Drake. What are my orders?"

Orders? She thought. Die. That seemed to be the most natural order. Run. Scream. Retire and never put yourself by my side again old friend.

The acid drake swung its metalscale behemoth head about, grinding up a growl and choosing its first target; the mage. The mighty thing bent its neck over its body then whipped its face down and took half and more of the man in one bite then pulled him up into the sky. Chaos thronged in the heart of the crew, and those who could walk or were not dead or shocked to stillness began to run. The beast glowed, all along its body inbetween the metal scales, a pulsing sick green light, and it spewed its acid into, onto, straight through the man in its mouth. He flailed in an awful rattle as every muscle in his body contracted at once, wildly shaking about as the acid burned away his clothes, then his skin, and on through flesh and when the monster flung the body to the side it was only smoking bones wrapped in burnt meat. So horrible was the sight that men stopped and stared, or screamed like children. Dryfylwyft started muttering prayers to the four Rages in a guterall Cirilanian. Even Karga, that great fighter, stepped back, sword loosening in his hand.

But Eriennen stood still.

The order she should have given was "Retreat!" That was the one that made sense. But, she found then that she did not want to retreat. Some complex part of her mind had focused her being in a way that was at once completely familiar, and also new and fresh and blindingly bright. The familiar part was the thrill of an oncoming challenge, a fight, the kind of high only available in combat, her favorite pained drug. But the new part, well the new part wasn't something completely new, it was instead an evolution of something that had been growing, forming, emerging within her. It was that storm, a roiling mass of need that circled the horizon. She had not let it come to pass against her. At bay, she could want it, but didn't have to deal with what it meant, with what she had to admit it was.

Often the true dream, the one that forms early and remanifests in both the seizing and failing to seize at its instances of opportunity, is perfectly simple. As time goes on the dream becomes molded and complicated by reality, and then the real life opportunities become the dream. Advancement within the structure of the world that already exists and is available becomes critically important, it even shines with a glint of the magic of the old dream. Rightfully so, for that is how a happy life can be achieved in a sensible manner. But look deep enough into the heart with as little as possible going on in the head and there is a vast watershed of silent potential that exists unavoidably as proof that the original vision, the legendary one, the big one, that one that is unique, still lives within at an evolved state to match your current being, waiting to pour into reality through an action.

Thus it was in her heart.

So now as she stared at the most horrifying adversary she had ever known, that she likely would ever face, it was as if the great long held dream had emerged into life, had distilled, crystallized into the form of the dreaded acid drake just as a lightning strike takes a storm and makes it something visceral and literally grounded, tangible in its destructive power, something you can feel and hear. Her experience reorganized around that context, and as happens when suddenly the self, the world, and purpose all align, she found that both her need and the fulfillment of that need were all that mattered. For even in that evolved world, where many things had replaced the sword as paramount conquests of civilization, there was no denying a fact. To kill a drake was something great. And that was what the storm yearned for.

Greatness for all to see... at any and all cost.

"Karga, can you get out of the way if it sprays?" She asked. The demon was now consumed in its flaming chains, trying to rise against them.

Karga turned towards her, she could see his eyes wide in the slit of his helm. "Yes Arch," he said.

She breathed, one long breath, and envisioned in a flash some convergent boundary of the tectonic plates of her mind and heart crash together. A white mountain of energy rose from the core of Niadwe into her, through her, and she pushed her attention wholly out into the world. She forced her felt focus and her subtle self far, far as it could go into the sky and the ground, then gripped the edge of her being, the world composed of a playing field of her own raw potential. Thus consumed, she bent her will, and all her mind, and her body most of all to a single point: kill the monster.

She gave her orders.

“Dryf! Draw up Water from the sand and try to trap as much of the monster’s body in Ice as you can. Work along the chains.”

“I’m…” he stammered. He was pale, still shaking, “I’m stabbed bad Eri.”

“And I’ll stab you again!” She yelled, “you run and we all die, this thing is going to wreck the island if its loosed.”

He nodded, face grimacing.

“Karga! Get out in front. Up on the beach where you can walk. Try to keep it occupied. Get a hit on it when you can, focus on staying out of the fire.”

“Clear. Coming?” He said to her.

“No brother. I’m getting on top. Now, go!”

Karga dashed off in wide stances trying to not sink, making it round the writhing monster that now bit at its chains. A few gates in and he began to lunge in deific steps, and she knew he was running Lift. Careful, she thought. His ability to react would be lessened until his Lift was through. Dryfylwyft went to the sand next to her among the sea’s feast of weapons and the blood of dead and dying men. Water was starting to rise, and the old man shook, snarled, cried crackling cries. The ocean thickly crept a few feet up the monster’s long back. Eriennen looked around, considering grabbing a longer weapon from the sand, and chose instead one of the great heavy chains that the beast had thrown off, pulling it to give her slack to work, then she paused and tried to cool down, staying still, waiting for her moment, breathing in hard enough through her nose that the air felt cold even in the crushing Southern heat.

Karga didn’t wait for anything.

He cleared the distance to the front of the monster and before it even noticed he was coming threw his momentum and the strength of his arms into a smashing sidewards slash. Jagged scales and green blood exploded high into the air. Good, get it, get it, Eriennen thought, and despite herself hoped he might just kill the thing before anything else happened. It was a futile wish and the thought was barely done when a four fingered left claw slashed out through the beast’s covering to strike the fighter. But Karga was quick, and brought his sword back along the same arc against the monster’s talons, severing a long shiny finger that burned in the sand as it fell. The beast howled, started up, found itself trapped again and went to bite its attacker. Karga struck it on the nose and instead of chomping the beast could only smash the side of its head against him. Karga rolled to the side with the impact and yelled in pain.

“Hurry!” Eriennen screamed at Dryfylwyft then scanned the treeline for aid, finding none. The living men were just standing about, scared and awed at the defense. Dryfylwyft howled again with his effort, the water a writhing mass along the back of the beast. It was a lot for one man in his condition, she saw. Eriennen knelt and put a hand on her companion’s shoulder, she felt him still, then suddenly heave and with a snap the shell of Water became a barrier of Ice.

“Get to the other men,” Eriennen said, and squeezed his shoulder. The bleeding mage began to crawl to shore.

Eriennen looked at the monster, turning its back into topography. She calculated, then backed up, ran, and leapt. Clean like a cat, chain in hand, she flew through the air and when she met the ice she sunk herself in with the spikes on her knees and elbows, then crawled along the beast as it snaked its head from side to side, facing down its forward opponent. The acid drake reared up, coiling from the base of its neck. It howled its terrible grinding roar and the two sharp eyes gleamed red again as its scales began to glow, brighter than before. The drake brought its head to the apex of the strike just as Eriennen reached its neck and in one smooth arc flung the chain around it, catching the other side, pressing her boots into its metallic flesh, and then she reared up all of her strength.

Eriennen pulled to restrain the mighty foe.

It did nothing.

She just wasn’t strong enough, even with a Lift that bundled her up into herself and swole her arms enough to nearly break the strap on her vambrace. The beast lowered its maw despite her effort and blasted acid at her best friend. She was thrown against the spikes, one cutting the high part of her shoulder and another slicing her face below the eye. Karga nearly died right there. The acid was like venom from a serpent, it shot out quick and he didn’t have time to move to the side. Sometimes its be daring or die. So he rolled forward and under the beam of pain and coming to his knees roared and hit the thing in the neck again, further down and on the other side. The blood burst to fire in the air this time, the monster screamed and recoiled against its metal and magic cages. Eriennen barely held on as it bucked and watched helplessly as a new claw, this one on the right, ripped free of its bonds and smashed clean into Karga with the flat of its palm sending him flying almost to the cut into the trees. She saw him land hard and, heart dropping, and expected him to stay there… maybe forever. But Karga Ande Ke Brisi was a harder thing than that, and she cheered him as he struggled to his feet swaying then lunged forth to rejoin the worsening struggle. Its time, she thought, I’ve got to end it, I’ve got to meet the need of the moment. Nothing else, only me now for a moment.... and the world faded away.

She was going to Lift as hard as she could until she died or succeeded in restraining the beast.

Lift, and the other magics to some degree, were felt as a stepping forward, a coalescence of small scale bits of effect compounded into a motion, controlled by a perceiver that must fragment themselves into the distributed thing that subsisted the thing that was doing the act or having the act done to it, no one was ever quite sure. There was a tenuous dance there, a dance to stay within the self. For, move too far into that momentarily focused net instance of energy exchange and one became just that. Just that. A fire to burn out, a little splash of water, a trite gust of wind, the person they had been all their lives dying of brain hemorrhage moments after. Those that had almost died doing magic generally said they felt like they nearly just stopped existing, came unfrayed, popped like a bubble, and they described a broken and shimmering world in which they could do nothing, and yet were everything that was happening. Eriennen knew all about it, she’d seen and heard it all.

She even thought she’d been close before.

Eriennen pulled the chains, then stepped forward into herself, into the act of the pull, becoming her arms and the chains themselves, deeper than ever before.

All at once the world was a fractalated, multicolor field of shifting shapes, somehow both swirling and uniform. Something coiled through the shapes and the colors and as it passed them the shapes seemed to form it, for they were all that existed to even present the form of the thing passing through them, but also only seemed to exist as things, as individual things, when the wave was passing through them at all, and that infinite scape of little units that both responded to and created the wave that ripped through them was then the core way the universe seemed to function, maybe had always seemed to function, and she knew that Eriennen was the thing that had rippled the wave, and that She, whatever she was now, a thing that was Eriennen and was also a thing unnamed, though the two things were not separate, had stepped into the affected things, the shapes, infecting the things that the wave rippled through, pushing them in an infinitely small way to a collective movement. There was a compounding registering of raw information coursing through that strange metascape that almost looked, though there was nearly no looking to be done anymore, like arms and chains and arms gripping at chains, huge arms, wide and deep as the sky like the self in the mind, bones and veins and nerves and metal and muscles especially, the arms and the chains were all there were. She had no idea what she was doing, or what she was, she was Eriennen and she was also this new world constructed of a thing happening, these arms, these chains, pulling back, they stretched both inward and outward forever. Behind them, the blinding pattern that constructed it all began to bleed to a blackness replacing a then-seen-as-it-disappeared white pure energy. The blackness was the nothingness, was the ceasing to be an existential focus, a center of something, and she knew her death was riding her down… but the arms, the chains, the thing they pulled at; they were important. They were very important. She knew then, without really knowing it and fully immersed in that insane hall of strength she had become within her Lift, that her aim had been accomplished, though what that aim actually was escaped her, for she barely had a mind anymore. The blackness grew, grew, shaded over everything with a terrible vastness; but then as it came to meet her and swallow her down it slowed at the end, and the heart of her, some point from which she truly operated, was too strong to give up on itself as a thing, and the blackness became calmly complex, visible light, revealing the world. Slowly she realized that she was a person, a person at the very edge of their physical limit. Every muscle was tight and flexed, she had ripped the leather belts on her armor, her helmet crunched around her head which pounded like an earthquake, sweat poured from every pore, her eyes were wild, her teeth fanging and tongue shaking, and she was trying to do something, had done it already even. She was a person, standing on top of a monster, and she had managed to pull its head back by a chain all the way to her own.

Now, she thought.

Then, “now!” She screamed, "hit him!"

Karga charged roaring, blade tip forward, and with a grand thrust sent it into, right through the beast’s neck. A triangle of metal popped between her feet. The wound undammed a deluge of acid, and Karga’s sword burned away as he rolled to the side. All she had to do now was hold on till it died.

We did it, she thought, I did it.

But they hadn’t, and she hadn’t, and the acid drake still lived.

The thing had finally found the strength to break its cages.

With a start that made her hug the monster and drop her chain she was slammed to her belly, suddenly gripping its neck to stay on at all. Her cheek went cold and she closed her eyes against a shower of Ice shards. A chain loosened then slammed down on her leg pulling tight and for a brief terrifying moment while the beast rose into the air on its four, thick, muscled metal-scaled legs, she thought it would be broken. But the snare slacked and fell away. She turned her head, still holding, to see arcing into the air a wild double tail that split at its middle and came to flails, huge barbs with spikes as big as spear heads. The tail shook nimbly and began to sway.

There was a pause, and she saw the whites of the eyes of the ship’s crew flash by as beast charged into the forest and she then was really riding.

She cursed and gripped tight. The drake darted in fits along the trail, stabbing soldiers and breaking young trees in its wrath. Men screamed high among the sounds of the carnage.

“Karga!” She yelled and looked down back the path. He was running towards her, pointing to his chest. He was trying to say something, but before she could hear it the beast’s deadly tail rose up and poised to strike down at her. Her eyes went wide and when the tail slashed she flipped to the side and by some small, life-sparing miracle of chance and forced error the demon’s barbs hit the same wound that Karga’s sword had made and stuck in. The weapon pulled itself out and returned to being a tail, thinking it better not to stab its master. Her evil steed burst wildly from the treeline into a cleared rocky field with a circular series of old, stone pyramidal buildings and new unstained wooden shacks adorned with flags affixed to roofs with the shield and vial of Corpi Kirpin Multi. Right before her was a group of men with weapons running towards the commotion. But, seeing what was coming they turned, falling and scrambling, dropping their spears and yelling for others to run.

It fell among them like an asteroid, leaving no chances. The beast leapt up and pounced on two men at once, pinning them under its great claws, crushing the chest of one and fingering through the neck off the other, severing his head. The drake then used its huge right claw to swipe the men sideways, throwing them into the three others as they retreated, sending the comrades sprawling in the rocks and grass. The beast turned away from them, and Eriennen looked back to a full view of the terrible tail rising then slamming down again and again and again on the five men, grinding them up, cutting them to pieces, bashing, disgorging, and goring them, taking five whole men and crushing them into one bloody inhuman ball of flesh. Viscera and rock flew into the sky as the men wailed out their deaths. Then the monster turned and in three wolfing bites swallowed the dismembered bodies in its mouth. Eriennen could feel the neck muscles under the scale swell as they went down its throat and she tasted stomach acid in her mouth and her jaw loosened. She vomited up black puri root and a breakfast of oil, bulmberry, and cured balsa meat on the back of the monster, trying to turn her mind from horror to a strategy.

She could see the little research site was full of civilians, just working people, not fighters. They ran but it would likely do them no good.

They’ll all die, she thought, everyone on this island is going to die if I don’t do something. She wanted it all to stop now very badly; very deeply didn’t want to watch more men die. For it was more weight added to her soul, a darker world with each passing. It had to end now. She tensed her body to prepare, then all at once jumped up along the neck as far as she could go and, swinging around it, slammed the tip of her metal fist into the dark beast’s eye, exploding a black hot goo around her weapon. The thing screeched and coiled and for a second she thought she might have hit through its brain.

But she hadn’t.

Eriennen smashed into the dirt and rocks and grass and blood. The shock of the landing stunned her, for she was weak, and she rolled and moaned, holding her stomach and coughing till she could breath. Her brain was boiling in her skull. Pain swarmed her, fatigue, and she opened her eyes.

The huge one-eyed demon was perfectly still, looking right at her. Still in a way that things almost never were, frozen wholly, and then there was a new sound from it. A wavering click, clock, clack, that rippled through a softer version of its strange, horrible scream. Laughter? She thought hazily. Maybe. She smiled a bit back at it. I didn’t know monsters could laugh. Though I laugh and I’m a… no. No I'm not, she thought, and tears welled in her eyes. The Acid Drake reared up to strike its final blow, its acid fire, plate scales all aglow, and she knew it was over. She had never been more sure of her death. Yet, she found she wasn't scared. Her body was scared surely, terrified, she was urinating even now in her armor she realized hazily. But that was the body. She wasn’t scared.

She was just... dead.

That's what vanity and a pension for grandeur gets you, she thought. You don’t end up a Twanito, you don’t end up a legend. You die. That’s it. What was that the old warrior had said? Would have said? Heroes die young. Soldiers fight steady. Soldiers, everyone was one or a child of one these days, and she conceptualized briefly a world of very nice people that, for some reason, had to ruin it all and kill each other all the time, and she was part of it, a world of smiling killers, she thought. That's all we are, and yet, no, it is a world of happy, good things too, good people, and a beautiful place for them, and the soldiers, weren't they revolutionaries too? Had not the All War, that consortium of death, ended with self-governance across the planet? Had not the bad became the good? I am good too, she thought dumbly, and wasn’t sure. She thought of Devenu, his smile, his love filled her mind, she thought of her parents, then Karga, Ualfa, Sulu, everyone, and then of Niadwe, the aqua world. It was time to return. Too soon. She’d assumed she had much more to do. Much more, unimaginably great things; but death comes, she thought, it comes and comes and no one can fight it. I’ve been death’s friend all along, she said to herself, and oh world I am sorry for it, for your children should not die by each others hands, and yet they do, and I am the one who kills them. I ate the darkness. It should have meant something. I should have been better. She had tried, and she had failed; but, in those final moments she considered that her life had as a whole been well-lived. She had been to many places, had become good at more than one thing, had loved many men, had loved one truly, had started poor and become fairly wealthy, had been maybe the greatest single combatant in the world in her prime, that she’d ever met at least, maybe even now. No, surely even now, I bet, she thought, and that’s worth something, isn’t it? Isn’t it? A dark twisting worth but a worth the same. She was just built for it, though she was built for something else too. And though she wanted more, wanted her legend, wanted to be good in that epic way, the very wanting of it was an achievement in itself. To want greatness, to truly want it, was better than many people ended up, she assumed.

I’m proud of you, she said to herself… but even then it was both true and untrue. Regardless, Eriennen decided she would die well, so she looked her death in its eyes so directly she thought she saw it hesitate.

Time to die, she said to herself, goodbye my love, and did not know if she meant Devenu or everything that ever was and ever will be and there was a feeling that those two things were not really different, the whole and the part; the man she loved, and the universe.

She gazed at her doom, and no more tears fell...

...And then she saw it.

In the core of the beast, right in the center of it, there was something glowing a brighter green than all the rest of its body. Something in its chest. It's crystal heart, she realized, like a dragon. Karga had been trying to tell her, he likely had seen it when he’d gotten close and stabbed it. She hadn’t known drake’s had those, maybe no one did. She then had a flash of self-satisfaction within her that she had had the gall to die bravely, and so romantically, at all.

She shot her entire body up and forward with the very last of herself and hit the beast with her metal fist, right in its heart. The spike pressed in, breaking scale, then her whole fist sunk, and the heart shattered, exploding out with a swirling green and red and black smog into the air that burned at her eyes. She pulled back.

Like a man knocked unconscious the beast shut off.

It's scales stopped glowing, and it rattled once, arced into the sky, and its head began to shake, sputtering around in odd contorted directions. It froze, perfectly still again, taught, reaching high, claws up like a drowning man stretching for air, life, and then all at once it slumped to the ground with the matter-of-fact grace of the dead. Eriennen fell back and looked at her weapon. The metal fist melted away and she flung it to the side. She laid on the ground heaving and blinked at the pristine aquamarine sky.

Eriennen laughed.

She laughed though men were dead next to her, her energy too spent to care anymore. She cried with her laughter and in the shock of all the violence. She let her head fall to the side so she could smell the grass of her world and she wept gently feeling like a dead, precious thing. Karga found her and lifted her into his arms.

She was smiling.

Chapter Three:

A Good Soak

"I always said I'd come back to Reena once I found a man elsewhere. Didn't want to find one here no. The men here are all soft, sorry bout that Karjee, but I bet you bathe with flower petals duncha ya big beasty! No no, I said Cirilan or a sailing man, that's what I've always said. Cirilan or a sailing man. They make real men out there in them cold hills and sprawling forests in the North, and the sea, well the sea will make a man out of a boy quicker than even I can. Woo! That was a funny one wasn't it? But anyway Eri, like I said it was always Cirilan or a sailing man, and now it seems I've found both! Though, come to say it aloud I guess Dryffie is born Reenan, aincha Dryffie? Doesn't matter though, Cirilian, sailing man, Reenan man, doesn't matter at all anymore. The moment I found him there bleeding out on the beach I knew he was mine. Had to have him, positively. Getting bored down there anyway, those folks on the Bunns isles are relaxed, too damn relaxed! Wake up, fish, take a nap, eat, take a nap, drink, take a nap. Niadwe's Traveler high in the sky I'll tell you they don't do anything but nap down there it's ridiculous absolutely ridiculous, oh Eri, did you want another drink?" Selveni asked.

Eriennen wasn't listening.

She hadn’t been listening for days. Kind days of relaxation, hard days of siphoning shock, surreal days of drunken sunshine with a sickness under them, and then looming before those, casting shadow, the wild day of the fight itself with horror of the massacre and the inevitable twisting bureaucracy that followed right after she had regained consciousness. First, a long talk with the two burdgmers of the island, who looked no different from any other fisherman, and their nepotistic but genuinely interested heads of local government. It was a stressful, painful moment; for there were dead men on the once public land that was granted lease to Corpi Kirpin Multi in a contract drawn by both Myrean merchants and Reenan officials. The leaders of the Bunns Isles soon began talking about their options to retake the land, and were prepared to bring in the Reenan Councillatium. For some reason Eriennen found herself trying to convince them they didn’t need to worry about any of it, but she ended up sounding pleading and they asked her to sit down on the grass and rest twice, not far from where the others had died. There were still some faint screams, muffled, softer; the low moan that all injured mammals make came rumbling like a strange far off thunder. Thus, the captain of The Blue and Karga swayed the island officials to peace while Eriennen was eschewed as the raving woman. She realized that they were afraid of her maybe more than anything, and she looked down to find her hands shaking and bloody. Like claws. In the end, when she remembered to fulfill Devenu’s request and asked if the two burdgmers would vote in a Frina Raltan election about the expansion of the city, they thought she was confused.

That, Erinennen had hoped, would be the worst of it.

But in the afternoon like a cloud of blood Valdonian diplomats cruised from the southern skies in the great stateship Copper Father. It hovered, casual, ominous, until it was met by a black flat utility liftship with the shield and vial of Corpi on its wing and soon after by a golden-plated Reenan high flyer with a Councillator from Molwea (she never learned which one) and Sulu’s fixer Kruxl. Three different young, dismissive clerks told her that she would have to speak in person up top, and that everyone would likely be rushed to international court in a capital city, which one was some point of speculation. The novice clerks all wanted to be the underling that snagged the in-person opening statements for their better. But, Kruxl had done something and she was ultimately only asked to write a report on parchment. She did so, biting back rage and childish tears for her weariness, and Kruxl took it up to the ships.

Then matters were solved over her head.

There was a moment when they traveled in The Jump through the purple evening to their rented domicile out on a small rocky island in a shallow, clear bay where she suddenly felt very odd for having brushed so close to the hard tangibilities of governance. She was both relieved and for some reason, embarrassed.

The days beyond that dark one held frank conversations and laughter alike, normal afternoons of swimming and talking and smiling with her friends; strange mornings of sitting with herself, and her body, and the mending world, all a dichotomous swirl, a pause to heal trauma. Yet, the oddest, most surreal, surprising thing, even more unbelievable than the shattering of the ice bridge and the fight with the beast itself, was that somehow among the chaos Dryfylwyf had, to even his own shock, fallen in love.

A tough dark woman named Selveni, a skilled fisher, drinkmaker, seamstress, and downward priestess from Molwea living in the Bunns Isles, scooped him up off the beach and took him back to her island hovel. She was loud, aggressive, funny. And Dryfylwyft? Well Eriennen had never seen him so happy. But to think of it I’ve never seen him so well fucked either, she’d considered.

Yet, the woman was a talker.

While one woman talked another didn’t quite listen, the group laid out on a flat, recessed section of The Jump’s roof in the sunshine, high above the flag and sandstone collage of Frina Raltas on the midday of their return. The wind was calm, birds and ships crossed lazy in the air and on the sea. Devenu wrote that he was surveying the expansion site north of the city, so she was glad to delay as much as she could, and also not just for the joy of relaxing. She had a couple pieces of bad news to deliver to Sulu beyond what he already knew, and he would have ten fold the anger to return at her. For, Dryfylwyft was quitting, cashing out, going to start a life with less danger and with more Selveni.

"Eri? Ya listenin’?"

"Of course Selveni,"

"Selly, please. I’ve known you a stretch."

"Selly, yes."

"So?"

"So what?"

"Another drink?"

“Sure.”

“All around? Of course. Now it’s time for my favorite, absolutely favorite family concoction, first we take buslin leaf...” and Selveni began to rattle off the recipe and its origins. Her mother had invented it during the war, a camp planner traveling in the military festival cityboats that accompanied foreign Reenan campaigns at the rear, supporting the first joint Valdonian and Reenan front against their embattled behemoth peers, years before they would become enemies too. They had pincered and driven the ships all the way to the Northern Clears, a permanent semi-contiguous ice bridge, wide and shifting, between Myrus Ney and Cirilan. The men killed each other there for five months in a vicious battle through perpetual whiteout; red blood on white snow, screams on the wind. Riveting, Eriennen assumed.

She still wasn’t listening

She was instead looking at two things.

The first was a real thing, the calm aqua sky blanketed in soaring cirrus, one high flyer small and resolute passing close to The Limit deep through the skein of atmosphere. The second thing was an imagined thing, a map of the world in her mind’s eye transposed across the blue. Reena in the center, Valdonis in the south, Cirilan sprawling in the northeast, and Myrus Ney Dominating the West, water blue and green and aqua between everything. On her lap sat the Pure Copy leafs of the last stretch, fanned out in their full circle, Rightward facing up; for today the international news was all Rightward, which was somewhat rare.

“What do you think?” Karga asked, and passed her the stone pipe. She inhaled and experienced an immediate rush; scintillating lights popped behind her eyes. She blew out the musty smoke and gripped the woven tapestry they laid on with both hands, panting through a pleasurable jitter that rocked and rolled her from head to foot. She arched and smiled tight, then made a vague low sound.

“I-” She began and paused, thinking out of the boshk smoke. Slowly at first, a few of The Pure Copy’s succinct headlines became movement upon her vision. The Abstituence, the order to raise no standing army, had been over for four years, and now, on the thirtieth anniversary of the All War, armies were being raised again in good sport and cheer, as if everyone had earned it. Her map began to dance.

“I…” In the southern Scaled Sea, Valdonis was a small, jungled, templed jewel in her mind, rising from the ocean with huge trees and burnished pyramids in straight lines. The Valdonian Councillatium was going to vote on refitting state transport and merchant vessels for defense. It was expected to pass. She saw little ships gather around the rock, men in metal glinting on them. Yet, just north of that and east across the sea near the Arm of Skall, the southernmost of the five states of the eastern continent Cirilan, lights danced at each other high in the air, buzzing with purple and green flashes. The freshly updated Cirilanian Liftforce was holding wargames in the sea. And north of Reena which shone like a diamond in the ocean of her mind’s eye, the great red and blue tapestry of the vast western continent Myrus Ney had extended its bounds like light from a fire out beyond open waters to makes claim to the rocky Trillose Course as a . Shouldn’t that be Reena’s territory? She thought sharply. Just because it's north of The Grave, the sad huge black and tan slab out at sea, didn’t mean it was outside of the area that Eriennen considered Reenan waters. A greater notion of Reena than what the maps said surely, but still. If The Grave, the sight of the last battle of The All War and its ultimate end, the place where all sides lost and won, belonged to anyone, it was her people. Her good, free, passionate, islandborn, sunkissed kin and those who would join them. Yet, I, and we, should watch ourselves. I bet Corpi encouraged that Myrean claim to Trilosse, she thought. And here I am just getting done doing their work for them.

“What’s Molwea going to do about it?” She asked Karga hazily.

“Ow!” Dryfylwyft shouted and Eriennen whipped her head to see him recoiling from a smack on his white-haired chest.

“You’re not listening!” Selveni said.

His face twitched then settled, “sorry my little aldar.”

“So, the third time she made it when she was captured,” Selveni carried on, “this for the handle of the Myrean northern forces himself, she added balmberry!”

Eriennen turned back to Karga to find his face drawn. The big man shook his head. “About what? Trillose? Look Inward.”

She flipped to the last to the page of the leafs and read the call line.

“Council approves mixed military, commercial, and transport barge system to be created in the Near Sea”

“Right below The Grave?” she asked Karga.

He nodded.

“Think we will try to claim Trillose?”

He shrugged.

Selveni put a glass next to her, still chattering, and Eriennen drained it quickly. The drink was pulpy, tart, delicious. She sighed and looked back to the sky.

Her life arranged glimpses of itself across the imagined map, and the geography of place became periods of time. Up in Cobi King where she was raised things were then comfortably, yet forcibly peaceful across the world. But now, as she looked at her time in Molwea as a young woman, and then out at Niadwe from the South of Reena, and through her various travels in the four great nations, the twenty three states, fluidity had grown to become friction. For the people of the world had gotten beyond that period of rebuilding as she was growing up through a mixing together; borrowing, sharing, taking, and giving. Just as the Rule of All had joined the localized mechanisms of government through a loose unity of form, the people of Niadwe had been joined through their choice, their choosing of their own hands; and the hands of the neighbor, so often scorned, were welcomed. Yet now, her mind tingled the idea out to itself through a satisfactory haze of drink and boshk smoke, each man is a king, each woman a queen! And the Councils were like dens of kings of queens, and the burdgmers and even the merchants too. Oh especially them. The criminals too, yes she knew. And all that growing upwards, that prosperity, had built things back to heights that demanded serious defending, that relied on both interlocution and obfuscation. Eriennen saw spikes forming, shifting peaks of people with power. She remembered something her father, an organizer of a multi-family union of smithies and he himself a dealer of metals, had said at the last Warmhalf Festival during Crone’s Crossing, on a boat carrying a few families over the calm wide River Staywith, between the rocky low jungle of Eastern Cobi King and the vast writhing jungle of Brillafeh. “The people of this world may be more free than when I was a boy, but they are more selfish too.” She assumed it was true, for he said it so somberly, as if having some painful private proof.

Her mind bounced up, crashed in waves of remembrances and analysis; prosperity and profit oscillated on a scale that tipped wildly in both directions across the map that intersected time and self in four dimensions as all maps do. She considered the corruptions of even Frina’s burdgmers as she knew them, like shadows to their accomplishments. Those shadows always were, ever would be, a coalescence or a redirection of money and influence. A few cycles of elected politicians and burgeoning industry had created a new, more fluid, more potent global and interlocal meta-positioning board that provided Needs for the people as a function of profit and its true result: Position itself. What resulted from that? Then she saw them: glinting, metal, cold; she saw blades and spears pouring from the crates in the sands, and she saw men on the beach dying.

How strange.

How… sensible? She thought and recoiled.

How dishonorably, horribly, strangely sensible that, in this period of utter prosperity, the Councils were choosing, even Reena’s civilian draft, to build back their armies. She considered the past few days, applied this macro-analysis to what had happened on the Bunns. A megalithic private mining company from Myrus Ney had moved weapons and a dark beast to a research sight on the single Reenan colony, more a vassal state, that was the Bunns Isles. Kruxl had said it was a known and approved thing, part of Corpi’s fledgling contract with Reena, good business in general, and Frina Raltas itself had contributed the labour to build the facility she had saved that day. One of her friends, an older man she and Devenu liked to dance with, had even worked on it. He’d told her about it stretches ago, but she hadn’t remembered.

The weapons, Karga discovered, were for research themselves. Something about new alloys. Deeper, the grateful captain of Demwa Blue divulged that there had been a small contingent on the ship that she hadn’t seen. Two quiet, witty men meant to oversee the sale of those weapons after testing to the Valdonian trading partners of the customary, vassal, tribal-turned-burdgmer government of the small Bunns Isles, Reena's only little colony, where the rules only half-applied. And the origin of those men? The weapons? They hadn’t been at the origin port in Myrus Ney. No, they were picked up in Frina Raltas halfway through the journey. Reena and Valdonis were then playing at giving each other weapons. She saw the two island countries communicating as organisms through that action, feeling through their capability for lethal aid after it had been so ruined, using private enterprise as proxy to process and evolve their ever-mending relations.

Such connections were being felt through, dabbled at, like predators at play everywhere out there across the world, she assumed; and there was something there she couldn't see too, it danced through an arc of analysis that rested at the cycles of the waves of human organization, spinning wide. There was a question of total mass; teetering, imploding, exploding, evolving. She could not weigh it all, the future was veiled and too big, terrifyingly big as it always is. But there was something more graspable, this close-as-the-flesh need for profit. The absolute necessity of position. There was power in mobilization, in sharpening the claws.

She thought of her mother, an artist and part owner in a fruit export operation, who purported that Reena had over extended itself in the war, that things could have gone like they did without loss of her people’s blood. She remembered something she had said the last time she had been in Cobi King for the God's Eyes that happened every Coldhalf, when Orik, the Winter Hearts, the Red Traveler, and the Light River arranged in a line in the sky, as they strutted into town at midnight balancing drums on their head for the sunrise Heartbeat. “The only thing the Myreans have in common is war, so they will fight to stay together. The only thing the Cirilanians have in common is pride, so they will fight to respect each other. The only thing the Valdonians have in common is culture, so they will fight to prove they exist. We have nothing, we have everything in common here, we do not need, did not need to go to war to understand ourselves.” Eriennen’s grandfather, and his brother too, had died at sea like so many. Old soldiers, Twanito’s men. She envisioned the depths of the ocean, dark, undulating, and diving closer in her mind's eye, saw that the deep shadows were really a blanket of shifting skeletons, arms stretched, grasping upwards through the cold.

“What do you think?” Karga asked.

She arched her back, let her sweat-soaked hair fall on her shoulders, then sighed long, thinking and for a moment catching more of Selveni’s ramble.

“So, I took her lesson. Just like she did all those years ago I poisoned it. The tart covers the taste. The asshole was out in a few steps and off I went. Good one ah Dryffie?” Selveni said proudly.

Dryfylwyft cackled.

“I think,” Eriennen said evenly, “that the Great Calling may have looked like Restoration, when it was only a suture.”

“You are a woman of extreme opinions. Another All War will not happen my friend,” Karga said and spit over the side of the liftship.

She laughed at the irony of his statement, “why not?”

“Because the people. The people opened their eyes to see that war was fruitless. That rulership was wrong.”

“No,” she said and sat all the way up, suddenly annoyed in her drunkenness, “the people decided that war was fruitless, the people decided those rulers were wrong, remember? Their children still rule! Granted they are only a small part of the councils. But the world is changing quick Karga, as it does, and sometimes change brings you right back to where you were, right to your worst and all the… ah, the growth you've had I guess, it only gives you a bigger thing to let fall apart. See?”

“Still,” Karga said shrugging, “you have to admit that the general consensus is towards peace. Peace between nations for the normal men and women of Niadwe. We all have a… well a shared interest.” He smiled and gestured at the wonderful world about them; tall sky, low hill, silver ocean, wide wind, small city. He took the pipe from her hand, where she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it.

“Sure,” she assented.

“You know, you should consider reading some of the new Copydown. The thinkers of the cities have great analysis of this stuff. These single lines, they don’t go deep enough.” He beat the rest of papers still on his lap with his hand.

“I like to conduct my own analysis. I know it's expedient, but The Pure Copy is just that, pure reporting-”

“-Eri!” Selvi yelled

“I’ll take it,” she replied.

“Take what?” Selly asked.

“I’ll take another drink-”

“-Shit it’s going to hit us!” Selveni screamed.

There was a rush of wind and a red and gold flyer passed within feet of The Jump blasting quick into the air. Everyone turned and froze. The craft turned and angled down, a clean steel three-shot shatter cannon on its nose pointed right at her ready to kill

“Ualfa?” Eriennen yelled.

It was Sulu’s personal flyer Quicken, and the blonde woman waived from within. She popped open the thick glass hatch and hollered over the wind. “Don’t you look nice?”

Eriennen stood and inspected her own nudity in mock surprise. “Come to join us?”

“I would ground the ship. Have you been getting Sulu’s burns? He’s been sending them for a quarter pass, then I noticed they were coming up here.”

“The catchment is on the side, we put ours in it too, we can’t see them,” Karga shouted.

“What does he want?” Eriennen asked.

“Says it's an emergency, you and Karga are to report.”

“I’ll take the ship back,” Dryfywyft said joyously.

“An emergency?” Erennen asked.

“Two hours ago it was a problem, now it’s an emergency,” Ualfa said, “hop in!”

“I’m splitting drunk,” Eriennen moaned.

“You’re welcome!” Selveni cheered.

The Southern Special Deliveries office was a large room, both comfy and elegant, with high windows near the ceiling. One staircase stretched in the back, and a few tall doors ran this way and that, to the Warsports yard, the store rooms, and an especially fine work of indoor plumbing. The floor was made from polished black wood that stretched into columns up the old stone walls, forming a rounded roof like a grand ribcage. Small gargoyles lept from under windows and in corners, keeping watch. In the office their six counters and clerks toiled casually; one in a black robe behind a large front desk of smoothed opalite, the rest gathered about a huge round table discussing plans, maps, promotions, deals, and other fine points of the business that had, in recent years, diversified to a shipping broker and a private parcel insurance firm as well guarded transport, owing to Sulu transforming his contract for the Need of the docks into a well-integrated referral program with the Forecall, where Witnessers notarized public record and clerks filed transportation manifests for taxation and general oversight. He had even given the administrative body a second location in the town free of rent on the east end of the pier by the skyport, which was one of the liveliest, most luxurious places to have an office those days, half the country was saying so.

Thus, the Special Deliveries had first pick of any entity coming through Frina Raltas on sea, sky, or land, that needed a transportation partner that was dealing with “complex circumstances,” as Karga liked to say; while the Warsports yard got to hang advertisements on the desks of transportation officials that encouraged “classical education and training for a changing world,” that was Ualfa’s work, and, “discounted rates on Halfhalf seaside rentals for watchful parents,” the last element a private project conjured by Eriennen from Devenu’s network of ever-absent colleagues.

Karga and Eriennen, hastily robed in the simple red tongas and chest wraps they had worn during their reprieve, were met with warm welcomes from the workers, their friends. They hugged and kissed her and called her sister. They congratulated her on a job well done; messy, but spectacular, and she and Karga quickly ate some saltbread fishcakes that sat on a stone slab out for workers, visitors, anyone. As had been the fashion in most of Reena for most of the time people had been there.

Even back when the days and nights had been longer, when the Darksun blackened the sky at careful interval, and the Traveler carried light through the would-be-night. Back when Molwea, The Flying Rock, was Dafleac, The Crystal Garden, and Frina Raltas, Come Friend, was Lamomena, the City of Black and White, each ruled Sea Kings. Before that and after it, Reenans kept a little food, at least some fruit, out for people; just like the island did for them.

They hadn’t even made it to the top step when Sulu's office door flew open and his head materialized broad, bald, bearded and blazing. She prepared for him to yell but instead he brought a great finger to his lips.

“Silence!" He whispered and beckoned them, standing aside.

His room looked empty, the paintings of old wars and young women sat quietly on the walls. The high shelves with books and trinkets and pictures and mirrors and weapons and bones and jars overfilling them looked no different than any other day. His huge red chair was empty and the great dark desk with intricate little models and statues on it all looked placid. The window was ever covered. The lamp always burning. The musk? Eternally permeated. Yet today there was something new.

The thing on the floor looked like a small mound of harry rags, a lump of interwoven cloths, some grubby and stained, others fine in shimmering blues and golds. A white tangle of hairs protruded from one side, a thick and shaggy beard. There was a soft snoring from it, a swelling note, whispering music .

Sulu closed the door and shushed them past Karga’s office, a personal library with a sparse gymnasium, and the door to the stairs up to her lovely apartments. They came out to the small balcony that looked over the Warsports. The ring of steel and the hum of voices greeted them along with the arching vista of stones and flags and shining seas beyond, boats to the clear, dipping beyond the horizon.

As expected, Sulu was raging. "Where have you been girl?"

“We aren’t working today,” Eriennen said.

“Your command was that we could wait-” Karga began.

Sulu smacked him on the chest. “You’re supposed to keep your catchment on you.”

“We put them in-”

Sulu smacked him again. “I don’t care!” Sulu said. “You’re here now.” His voice calmed seeing the growing threat on Karga’s face. “Everything go alright?”

“With what?” Eriennen asked.

“With what? With the mess you’ve thrown us all into out there in the Bunns!” He asked.

“We didn’t-” She began.

“Doesn’t matter,” Sulu cut in again and waved a hand. “Kruxl already told me, and you got my burn? I told you to relax. So relax. You deserve it. But don’t relax if I need you! Alright? You did good though, very good. Killing a drake, well that is something special isn’t it.”

“I-”

"Wait," Sulu interrupted, "where's Dryfylwyft?"

"Oh, yes," Eriennen began, then looked at Karga, "tell him."

Karga frowned, "well..." He started and fell short.

"Well what? I want the splitting mage up here too.”

"Dryfylwyft is quitting," Karga said.

Sulu laughed once, high and loud. "What did you do?" He glared at Eriennen.

"Me? Why me?"

"Because you probably almost got him killed, didn't you."

"We all almost got killed. But I guess I did stab him."

"Stab him?"

"Right in the leg, meaty parts," she tapped her thigh.

"That wasn’t in the report! Why?"

"Accident,” she said.

"Oh that's great, good job Arch, magnificent. Look I'll talk to him, we're old friends, I'll get him to stay."

Karga broke in, "no, he’s really off this time. Found a woman."

Sulu guffawed. "Well that's a joke!"

"It's not," Eriennen said, “he actually did."

Sulu's frown deepened, "you're serious?"

"Unbelievable, I know."

"He hasn't seen any part of a woman that wasn't working in twenty years!"

"Well, now he has. Jealous?”

"No!" Sulu shouted, then leaned on the railing as if trying to keep himself from jumping. "Alright fine, we'll find another, I was just talking with Terb and Ualfa about bringing on a little help anyway, should only be… well,” the older man scratched his chin and began muttering to himself, and kept doing so as if they were not there.

"Sulu?” Eriennen asked. “What's this about?" His face still half-blank, she elaborated, “the sleeper within”.

Sulu snapped to attention, mouth bouncing away from the traditional scowl.

"Right, right, oh!" He looked at the sky and pumped his fists, breathing hard. "Listen to this. The one in there sends ahead three days ago by burning bird closed with a Farsee bank seal,"

“Wow," Eriennen said. “Exclusive.”

"First things, no word of this. He's got a special permissive straight from the Archament to make sure no one talks beyond our organization, alright?" Sulu said, then opened up his hands to deliver the news. "He is here to interview us for a job.”

The statement had no effect.

"What's the job?" She asked.

"Well, the splitting interview's the job for now! He's paying us to follow you and Karga around for a day or two. That's it, think you can manage?"

"Follow us?" Karga said.

"Fifteen strips just for that," Sulu said smiling.

It was a nice sum, probably one of the hardworking men and women downstairs’ Longyearly stipend. But Eriennen didn't care about fifteen strips, she didn't even care about one. What I care about is to not be thrown into the maelstrom of work right after such a lovely, relaxing, and yet very hard few days of bliss and difficult healing, she thought.

"So he follows us around then maybe will pay us for another job? That doesn't make sense Sulu. Don’t be a gullible little boy.” She looked at Karga and laughed, threw her hand up, then turned back to Sulu as if some conclusion had been reached. “It’s obvious he's an imposter feeding you money. A government agent secretly looking into your overstuffed books. Any of your enemies, really. Probably a competitor stealing my brilliant strategum." Whether or not that hypothesis was at all valid she didn't care. An idea had come into her mind, an idea of how to spend the rest of her day, and it didn't involve Sulu, interviews, or clients. Sulu took his head in his hands, growling.

“Wait!” Karga interceded before he could explode. "Eriennen, how about we just have this meeting? It sounds interesting. Then we can go do something fun, or even better, sleep."

Eriennen stuck her chin in the air, "I want to go to Devenu's house and take a bath in the water rooms. Let's do that."

Sulu rolled his eyes. "We've got money literally laying on the floor in my office you’re going to walk right by it to take a bath."

"Yeah," she shrugged.

"Yeah? Fancy some water?" He mocked.

"Yeah, why not?"

"Well then let's all go," Sulu said feigning excitement, "we can bring the splitting client!"

"Sure!" She said, shifting her voice calm. "Who doesn't love a good soak?”

Yet, before Sulu could retort, a new voice erupted from the floor, one she’d never heard before. It was high, almost squealing halfway between crackled laughing and a broken snore.

"Oh!” The little man screeched. “A soak! Yes yes, who doesn't love a good soak? Not this man, no. A soak sounds nice, soften the bones and all that yup! I'd like nothing more, and everyone's invited Sulu says. Right Sulu, right?" He was graphically, almost concerningly short in a mottle of silver blue robes and a fitted cap with studs on the sides, white hair springing from everywhere, including a long little nose below tiny blue eyes. She hadn't seen him approach. None of them had.

"Sulu?" He continued, barely having given time for a response to his question. "We're all invited? Yes? To... Devenu's? A burdgmer, wow, what an honor to be invited! His family lives in one of those big mansions up by the skypark I assume, ay? A soak in the water rooms, and everyone’s invited! Yes yes, right Sulu?"

"I..." Sulu stumbled, looking at Eriennen in confusion. Karga’s mouth was hanging open.

She smirked at Sulu then said, "of course.” Eriennen turned and bowed to the little man, "grand?"

"I’m Chompy!" He yelled then turned and blistered down the hallway right out of sight. After a stunned silence, Eriennen and Karga exploded into laughter. It was short lived.

"Shut it and run after him!" Sulu barked. But the order proved challenging when they came down the stairs to find a group of confused colleagues and no client.

“Shit,” Karga cursed, grabbing a few more fishcakes.

They investigated urgently on the docks, talking to happy beggars and dour guards, colorful musicians and quick-footed clerks, even the indifferent crews of nearby ships. Not a man or woman had seen him. After a brief, bewildered, yet snacky conference the pair started towards Devenu’s far across town with the stilted temerity and jittering need of those who have lost something important.

The companions reached the middle point of the docks having seen a bit of everything but what they were looking for. The Sea gate in splendid copper and stone rose above them. On it, flowering vines wove between variations of depictions of common auguries of the Seven Directions; fish, sea current, crone, knife, the planet Orik, nightshade plant, the sun. The main road Foraht shot from the Sea gate and all the way through Frina Raltas, under the Wing Gate, and beyond as it rose the long first hill, became the great Gharab Mainway, stretching the length of Reena, The Island, like a huge serpent writhing in the heart of the sea.

A voice rang out loud and clear.

“Looking for something?”

It issued from a thin, handsome man in a very nice cart. Two huge red and white aldar cats lounged before it in the sunshine, long fluffy ears twitching, each with a leather control harness overworked in little stones. The cart had deep blue tarp siding and was built from an intricate metal cage that flexed out on its sides and came to a pyramid, a crystal array; the cart floated just feet off the ground calm as a planet in the night sky.

The man matched the cart quite well. He was Cirilanian by looks, reddish-white skin tanned by Reena’s sun with golden hair shining, almost floating around him. He was robed exceedingly fashionably as the most socially astute, globalized youth could really even hope to be, she recognized at once; in white overlapping shalls with yellow stitching stretching geometrically all along them, casual and graceful. Most of his chest was exposed, and a large black circle tattoo covered his left pectoral. The jewels on his hands gleamed many colors. He was young looking, not more than twenty Long, wearing a fine mustache twisted at its ends and a beard tightly woven to a braid. On his nose sat half-circle spectacles, a red stone mounted on the bridge between challenging, mirthful eyes.

“How do you know we are looking?” Karga asked.

“Well, not only do you look like you are looking for something, what with all that looking about grand, but also I know quite specifically what you are looking for.”

“Well, then,” Eriennen offered, “where is he?”

“The little man? He said he was off to a meeting.”

“I don’t think he knows where he is going,” Eriennen said.

“He often doesn’t.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because,” and the man nodded back at the cart, then pulled up a smoking stick and took a long puff, letting clouds burst and obscure him, “I’m his driver, Goltas.”

“Well Goltas, what’s his name then?” Karga asked.

“Chompy.”

“Alright,” Eriennen said coming closer, “where did he go?”

At this the man frowned, “I’m sorry to say, but you will have to guess.”

She spit.

“But, but!” The driver said quick, “I do have some hints. The old man loves guessing games, he plays them, and other games, all the time.”

“Play on then,” Karga said.

The driver bent low, and then rising up again, sported a metal helmet. It was a simple bronze dome with a trim of fur and a long studded spike pressing into the air. “Where,” the man began arms outspread, “might this moldy oldy helmet come from?”

“Cirilan,” Karga stated after pausing, “like you.”

“Very good, glad I’m here now though. I do like the sun and the surf, though I don’t think the same can be said for this helmet. All rusted now… or is that its age? Next question. Who was the… likely owner. An approximation, not looking for names here, unless you’ve got them, which would be very impressive.”

Eriennen thought a moment, stepping closer. She looked at the hard triangular patterns carved into the metal, the warm fur. “It’s a Vrisingdan relic, or fashioned after such, I think.”

“Very, very good,” the young man orated thoughtfully, then jumped up with a start wild enough to bounce the helmet right off his head. The thing went tumbling out of sight. He faulted for a brief moment then and Eriennen got the sense that he had only loosely planned the scene. “And who were the Vrisingda?”

She responded with a friendly frankness. “Up in Cirilan, in the west of the east, they were the clans of the Glass Mountains, that came and fought the Naal and all the tribes they had conquered at the lake Nashem Ka.”

“That's old history, before the magic came to those lands,” he said.

“Just as magic came to those lands,” Karga corrected.

“Right again,” the man said and then put his hand in the air, questioning. “And of the Vrisignda, those old, cold, hairy beasts, what was the name of their leaders?”

“The Skull Kings,” Eriennen replied quickly. For, she knew the histories of the world, always listening and debating when they were discussed during Mind Call, the open-air schooling customary in Reena, back in Cobi King during her youth. She had even visited classes in Molwea; whether to learn further or to hold on to some of the bittersweet hope of what learning means to a child she was never sure.

“Yes! Skull Kings! Yes!” The driver said, eyes wide, rolling his hands, urging her forward. “And so…” He faltered.

“And so?” Eriennen said.

“So…”

“So… where?” Karga offered.

“Right!” Goltas exclaimed, and clapped his hands together. “Where does one keep one’s skull?”

“In his head?” Karga asked.

“Right once more, and that? Well that’s your hint,” the driver said, then laid back, sighing with exhaustion, and wreathed his face in smoke again.

Eriennen and Karga shared a quizzical glance.

“Is he in the cart?” She asked.

“Yup!” A cackling voice yelled from beneath the tarp.

Chompy sat within, staring, perched upon a line of crates. The moment they crossed the threshold he looked quickly at many points on their bodies and faces. It unsettled her. Before him on the floor were cushions and what looked at first like garbage.

Yet, she then saw that it was things for playing games.

Round cards and many-faceted dice, little figures and smooth stones, boards and scales and bowls. Some she recognized, many more she did not. Eriennen thought for a moment, heart swinging up and down, that there was a reason to them, a pattern, as if despite their randomness, which could only be achieved by true carelessness, was some meta-game, a game of games, like divination with a betting table or a science of fate. And who was the one playing it? This man; the one who gamepieced the games.

“Kick that trash aside,” he said. She blinked and decided he was just a messy person, likely with a notable gambling problem. “And sit, yes. We have a little business before our business!” They sat, the cart was airy with mesh windows and rollable flaps, but still smelled of spices and paper and metal.

“Chompy,” Karga intoned, “thank you for having us.”

“You are welcome, but I won’t have had you yet. Here,” he said quick and tossed two papers their way. It was the silence order that Sulu had signed, directed from the Archament, the group leadership of the civilian military of the country. “Do you both acknowledge that by your Arch’s signature we won’t be talking about anything we agree to? Good,” he said to their nods. “Now, fifteen strip has been given to your company for the privilege of your time, yes, and this time will be used to interview you for a job. It is not a Archament job, no military, I’ll be clear. My silence order was merely drafted by the Archament officials. I do private business.” Eriennen made to speak but the man cut her off, “-but before we get to that, I have some errands the town that I’d like you to accompany me on, and during that little adventure, I would like to hear about your most recent adventure. I would like to hear how you killed that Drake.”

This man is a government agent building a case for Reviewers in the capital, Eriennen thought, maybe he’s a Reviewer himself, and she was so sure of the thought that she chose to operate wholly under that assumption. Until then she was actively considering cancelling the interview, yet now she knew she could not. Kruxl had told her to answer anyone who came asking honestly, to keep her story consistent, public, and to report to him immediately after. Plus, she thought, there probably is a government contract in this. I did do something great, amazing. I did kill a Drake. I’d want me too.

She smirked, “I’d love to tell the tale. What business do you have in town?”

“Have you two dropped feathers this stretch?”

“I have,” Karga said.

“No,” Eriennen said.

“Let’s do it together, and then I will need to stop by a shop run by a very special manufacturer, and then, oh!” The little man’s face lit up, “to the baths?”

Eriennen nodded and smiled, for she and her friends and colleagues were always welcome to them, but the expression wavered as, without breaking gaze Chompy pulled a small parchment from behind him with a clean line of the hand and laid it on the crate. He wrote something on it with a coal nub, reached into his waist pouch and produced a burning bird (a slick of wood with a pointed magic crystal on its front like an arrow and a small cage on the back), stuffed the paper in the catchment, smacked the crystal on the crate to activate it, then parted the flap of fabric leading to the driver’s bench and let it whip into the air.

“Goltas!” Chompy yelled.

“Yes grand?” The driver replied.

“Onward,” he said and then turned to them. “Let’s sit on the porch in the back out in the air, it's stuffy in here. Just kick all that aside, yes.”

They made their way through the pleasant murmuring and casual density of the seaside city while Eriennen recounted her tale, the little man laughing the whole time, even when the story didn’t warrant it. He laughed when the mage was eaten, he laughed when she thought she was going to die. Karga, for all his politeness, couldn’t help but frown down at him.

The carriage stopped at The Choice. Little baskets ran all along the circular wall that ensconced the Small Quarsmell, three conical towers with stairwells twisting along their outsides to chambers where the burdgmers and public officials made their rulings. Eriennen and Chompy received their feathers from a severe woman in a high booth, then went to make their votes. Each of the Needs being determined was written upon parchment over baskets for yes and no. They surveyed the mundane choices of the city and the country quietly. Eriennen saw nothing that surprised her. They both chose similarly on most counts, but she sensed that where they did not Chompy was stiff, as if making a calculation. They did not discuss it though, for no one ever talked while dropping feathers.

The two people paused at the west end of The Choice, where old steps made a long-honored oratory stage for the business folk, tradespeople, social organizers and family groups of the town. A small, jovial man and a tall, sleepy-looking woman were discussing a project to link the top floors of four two-story homes as a place for craftspeople to vend their glinting creations in the Northwestern residential area The Peace. Eriennen saw a group of those craftsmen on the steps, among them an older gentleman who had made her favorite earrings. They were bone, shaped hexagonally like the Traveler up close, but open in the middle with a hanging raw celestite termination. She waved to him.

On Bright Star, the frenzied, jumbling mercantile row perpendicular to the western beach of Sunhall Bay, they stopped so the new client could enter a shop marked with a left hand that manufactured medical and scientific apparatus. He came out with a huge parcel balanced on his head. Karga exclaimed and stood to help him, but the man just laughed and with a wave of his hand floated the package off his head, Lifting it into the carriage. He did it with such effortlessness that Eriennen couldn’t help but hiss. It was a truly extraordinary little gesture, incredibly neat. For, External Lift was by nature a sliding, unwieldy thing. A mage then, she thought, and a talented one.

Gently, the cats strolled and licked the air, tails twitching and playing at their backs, while Goltas sung to them. The carriage made its way back to the main square on Forath, businesses and apartments rising up all around it. The open center was adorned with a statue of King Irva uniting the sun and moon, surrounded by spears with fruit on their ends, pointing in fans of seven. Women and men made small ceremony as casual priestesses and playful shaman, and three lithe young men danced on a stage in silk. Passerbyes burned herbs or smoked stick and ate fruit for a moment’s respite while the open air market bustled in the midday heat.

Then east out of the square along street called The Balsa’s Ear they went, and the houses grew grander, the youths plumper, the music more shrill, and the people dressed in darker and darker robes with shinier, larger jewels. Up northeast, near the wall that separated the town from the Skypark, along the fine cobbled road with sloping designs inlayed in azure blue, they came at last to the great house of the Deeses, nestled among its grandiose peers.

It was an old home with many additions centered at a great octagonal atrium, two floors rising round with well-furnished rooms. A steepled archway rose above black steps; and above that, mounted near the roof, a huge metal basin contained a burning crystal that danced red fire into the air and poured black sand in a shower that split at the steeple, collecting into trays that sloped down into the ground. At the center was a huge purple door with words in cast metal mounted on it: Frina Raltas qa Reena, Come Friend of The Island. For some reason, Eriennen was embarrassed by the opulence, just as she had been after not having to appear before the authorities. She counted herself among those of culture both more middling and more rich of heart than that, where the artists and adventurers and merchants grew from, where great banding communities of people living vividly phased into being through the blessings of family and love and work and pain and play. Where the people strived.

This mansion had little in common with most. Though, there were good people in it, and to her that counted more than anything. Plus, she was one comfortable in many circumstances, the best people tended to be by her approximation. She guessed their new client was much the same. Chompy had fallen asleep and then later cracked awake when she wasn’t looking, and he seemed now genuinely excited to be visiting the new place, childlike almost. A guard opened the door with a smile and a nod, and the moment she crossed it she realized that Devenu was there.

It was an indefinable knowing, a quality of the soft light, a hint of something on the air, a pleasant weight to the space just told her he was close. Eriennen forgot all worries and came to him as he stood talking with his mother in the atrium. They held each other for a long time, him jealous of the world for having had her for days, angry at it for having almost killed her, angry too at her for forbidding him from rushing to Bunns Isles. He pressed her in towards him and growled, rumbling through his chest, and whimpered slightly, just softly, letting her know he could break for her. She gripped him and imprinted herself in his touch, she filled him with life and was filled by him, she shrank into his chest and arms, she expanded into the air with him, she relaxed into herself, they coalesced, stepping through the portal of love, reunited.

“Friends!” Devenu shouted at the people around them, turning, “you are all wel...” And then pausing, looked troubled through misty eyes. For, Chompy and Mother Deese had occupied a quite private stance on a couch, two guards staring at them with smiles. Dietr giggled and patted Chompy’s hand.

“Mother,” Devenu said, striding. Eriennen shot Goltas a wary look while he lounged on a couch, but he just shrugged and smiled and then motioned at his smoking stick as if to ask if he could light it, then pulled a pop crystal out of his shall and lit it anyway.

“Ah, son. Yes?” Dietr said.

“Do you know this client of Eriennen’s?”

“Hello son. My name is Chompy. And I will say that the reports of your illustrious mother are quite true, yup!”

Devenu scowled, yet before he could respond Mother Deese interjected. “Now now, Devenu. I have a suitor, not a husband.” She turned her goldendark chin up, and then stood, stretching her back to full height. Luxurious purple robes cascaded around her. “You and I are due at the Forecall in a tenth passing, we will have alls dining with us it seems.” To that Goltas made an appreciative mumble. “Let's go and come back early. Eriennen," she said. Eriennen snapped to attention. "Entertain your guests as you please.”

“Thank you Mother Deese,” Karga said before she could. She glanced at him, annoyed, but he was basking in the light of the impressive matriarch, as any man tended to.

"Ah!" Ditre exclaimed, clapping her hands together, "and grand Chompy, if you ever whisper the things you just did to me without my express request I’m sure my suitor Jom Briff will have you killed. I don't know where you come from, probably the capital with that name of yours, but here in Frina, here up on Balsa’s Ear we look down on such advances, and the burdgmers, for all their equalist moral rigidity, are quite likely to give an old soldier like Jom a light sentence.” She turned to begin her departure. Yet, she did not do so quickly and Chompy said one last little quip, unheard by the small crowd. In reply the old powerful woman laughed high and girlish. Eriennen knew that laugh. Devenu did not looked pleased. Eriennen was simply confused, but then found that, no, she was mostly just bemused. For, the day had become very interesting.

Later her confusion was cleared, at least as to why Dietr had seemed so amenable. Relaxed in the baths and now talking openly, her bemusement and interest had only grown. The little man Chompy was nothing short of addictively spectacular. Each sentence and quip, each word and laugh, each moment rolled right into the next with a joyous cadence that made her feel like she was dancing or flying.

It all began with stories, an old Reenan tradition.

Karga presented a kindhearted telling of the period of his life when he found and trained his cat Lulama. He was working with a group fulfilling a Need to restore an old public light house on the Eastern coast of Reena a few dozen clears below Brillafeh, mostly to just get away after two years of troubles in Molwea and a sorrowful twenty in Myrus Ney before that. The cat had re-wilded itself. At first she would not respond to him, but then he began singing to her in Myrean, in a dialect, and in the songs, of his distinct homeland Dennsh bay. She knew every song, would coo and swoon to him when he sung them. She knew many commands in his own tongue, the language of his mother. It was a miracle, an impossibility. “Like finding a lost sibling...” He said and then shook his head, gesturing to Eriennen.

She shared their favorite story to tell, wanting to cheer Karga after he had brushed so close to the deep wound. It was a particularly interesting tale of being caught by pirates while transporting an inheritance in one of the early jobs she commanded after Argvalent’s murder. Its climax came with the release of a zoo containing captured dark beasts on an island hideout near The Glittering Steps. It was a massacre, and an exciting one. They commandeered the flagship of the small pirate armada only to realize two Shredders, with their vertical snouts and huge grotesque back third leg, had gotten aboard. “In the end... we took the lifeboat!” She finished to laughter and a new round of drinks, aside from Goltas who already slept, wrapped in a tapestry on the tile.

Chompy shared a story of winning an old Cirilanian castle in a pieces game up in the farmlands east of Nashem Ka. It was an ancient, crumbling, Naalian castle, one of the few not turned to a Knoliga research center. The woman was the best player in the whole Nashem state, maybe the best in Cirilan. When he pulled off an extremely rare full enclosure on the manor’s Fire board, she challenged him to a “death throw,” the Cirilanian tradition of doing a simple flip of a gamestrip, double or nothing. The double, the woman said, was half their family wealth and the middle daughter’s hand in marriage. He had played to spite her, and lost the castle as quickly as he had won it. “I was younger then, so I tried the daughter anyway,” he completed and burst into cackles.

That was all it took for her to decide that, whether or not the man was trustworthy, he was at the very least a good time. We are getting paid to just sit around with him anyway, why not enjoy it? She thought. The unexpected was well loved by the advantageous, and with good reason too; happenstance was the edifice of opportunity more often than not, she knew. And the unique folk of the world were more likely to be magnets of important and interesting times, just like Niadwe held the coldyear moons and the Traveler in her path, just like the sun held Niadwe, a thing Eriennen liked to imagine she watched repeat in analogue through the realms of humans influence.

"So," she said flatly, fully settled. The long lovely introductions had given her an appetite for the meat of the situation. "Can we talk business?"

“Yes! Business!” Chompy shouted then stood out of the main tub, tonga dripping. “This is a very nice place Eriennen,” he said seriously.

“Thank you, but I can’t take the credit. These baths have been part of their home for decades.”

“Is their home your home?”

“My home is where I breathe,” she said.

Chompy smiled. “It is interesting,” he said then paused and began to walk a circle in the center of the three heated tubs. From where she sat he appeared to grow smaller and larger as he paced. “I didn’t know the Southern Special Deliveries Office kept itself so connected to power, governance, yes?”

“I have spent my life in every way one can. I have been in the dirt and I’ve been on the tower. Devenu is my partner first, before any of this.”

“I believe you,” he said. “Let’s talk of other powers then. What gods do you take Eriennen?”

“I take the heart of the world, I take Niadwe’s body for my own.”

Chompy smiled high and continued to pace. “I like the old way.”

“It is good,” she said.

“And you Karga?” He asked.

“I take the sciences first,” Karga said effortlessly, “and I take Amaquela the Stone Mother and Skeldeas the dragon, the gods of my home.”

“Ah! The sciences. Me too. But more the way the Palonds use the word. As someone who asks questions. In regards of the other, do you believe the Imseli’s are the reincarnation of Amaquela and the other heroes of The Sixteen?”

“I don’t think anyone really believes that,” Karga said.

“Have you ever seen Selwe, his daughter, the new Incarnate, speak? She looks like she could be, though I don’t think she believes she is. She seems more practical than that,” Chompy said.

“No, I have not seen Selwe. She is an unimportant person outside of the Otrodonash,” Karga said and then held up a hand out of the water, stopping the conversation. Eriennen frowned at him. “Chompy,” he said after a moment of consideration, “neither of us are involved in any business of any government, aside from how our actual business and personal lives may intersect at need.”

“Do you think I am involved in the government?”

“Oh yes,” Eriennen replied without hesitating. Karga hummed in agreement and put a metal cup to his lips, peering at the client with wide, frank eyes.

Chompy had stopped pacing. He looked pleased, as if he felt there could be a spark of kinship between them, a respect. Eriennen was suddenly filled with a sense of accomplishment, as if she had garnered the favor of a teacher. Then, as if to confirm her feeling he tightened his back and drew himself tall as he could, standing directly in the middle of the three pools of water, becoming the master.

There was a silence; his voice rang purer than before. Almost metallic, it echoed in wavy resonance with the water chamber.

He said their names slowly, summoning them, “Eriennen Reflanao Cobi Diether, Karga Ka Brisi Ande. Before we begin, I will be making sure now, yes, making sure that beyond the silence order from the Archament, beyond any standard procedures your cute little company might have, that you understand that what we are going to discuss is serious, and there is serious opportunity in it, yup! I know that I can’t keep you from telling your employer, whatever close counsel you keep,” he nodded up at the arched, mosaic ceiling, “the man who will inherit this house even, about whatever happens here. I have been having people keep secrets long enough to know they always tell one person outward. Its… human nature. But I have another set of rules, and I need these rules followed. I so desperately need them followed, that I must now, regrettably, show you what's at stake. The first thing-”

Without warning Eriennen felt hot, sweltering. Karga yelped and threw his drink in the air. The water swelled up, beginning to boil. Wind encased them in a circle.

“Stop!” She yelled and made to stand. But from the pools behind the friend-become-foe two tight fleets of Ice spikes rose in a hexagonal pattern, spinning, advancing.

Chompy laughed mirthlessly.

“You see,” his little voice cackled and boomed, “the first thing that's at stake is-”

“-You didn’t wait!” someone yelled.

It was Goltas, running around the pool and waving his arms. “You said you’d wait grand! You always do this! I wanted a chance to use the…” he looked at them over his shoulder, “thing.”

The water cooled, the ice faltered and dripped. “You were sleeping,” Chompy said.

“We aren’t all like you grand, we can’t all take a kick to the face and not wake up from a nap.”

Eriennen and Karga lunged out of the pool and into the fight. They only had a moment to react; training was kicking in. She spun towards his wind barrier and grabbed at her belt where a knife was concealed. She almost reached it when she felt something burning hot lash her foot and drag her back to the water. Not heat, cold. A shackle of hard ice around her legs. Karga was trapped too, and in just moments they were neatly placed right where they had been like no more than little fish.

“You’ve ruined it.” Chompy said flatly. The theatre went out of the attack. The Ice melted and splashed to the ground. The pools went from boil to simmer.

“I’ve ruined it? You didn’t even give me a chance!” Goltas said, and stomped away to his sleeping pad.

“Why don’t you try it now Goltas?” Chompy said.

“No,” he said and sat down, “I’ll show them later. I want it to be a surprise.”

“Oh come now friend,” Chompy intoned.

“No!” He yelled, “just get on with it-”

“What!” Eriennen shouted so loud that the two assailants recoiled, looking over at her as if seeing her for the first time, and also as if she had, by screaming, done something completely inappropriate “-are you doing!”

Chompy looked crestfallen, “I was going to say, your lives.”

“What?” Karga asked.

“I said I was going to show you the first thing that’s at stake, remember?” Chompy continued. “Then I did the fire and ice thing and was going to say, your lives. But more menacingly, you would have had to be there, had it happened.”

“Well aren’t you a regular Ragular,” she said through tight teeth, readying herself to fight again, “and the second thing?”

She thought she saw an anger pass through his features, but then it calmed and turned to sigh at Goltas’ back. “The second thing probably matters more to the both of you. For, there are fates worse than death, it’s true.” The man looked at his hands, as if distracted.

“Eriennen I have testimony from two people linking you to the murders of Batts Ak Monahi and Drivys Polsna, a couple more too, depending on the kind of case the reviewers want to build. Revenge is always worth it until you go to prison, ha! And Karga, I located the groundskeeper from the estate you burned down in Bishbaya, all those dead. Gruesome thing he said. I bought him out. He is ready to testify at the catch of a burn.”

A silence colder than ice fell, no one met another’s eyes. Her rage deflated into numbness. She tried to be surprised, she certainly should have been. But, once the words had come from his mouth it all seemed the most natural thing in the world. Of course he had the worst against them. Of course they were beaten. It was that way, he was playing that game. The game of position. “We understand,” she said flat, sobering quick for her adrenaline. “What do you want?” Karga was frowning, paused, irresolute, staring through the walls and into the past.

“That one always works, yup!” Chompy said. “First, I am not a Councillator’s agent, I am not a Reviewer, I am not from the Archament, none of that. I am on contract. I am on contract with Visionary Operational, a new arm of the Molwean guard that deals with international matters as they take place on Reenan soil, do you understand?” She wasn’t really sure.

“Sure,” she said.

“But, regardless of who I work for, it is my rules that I need followed under threat of,” he gestured to the air, “all of that we just discussed becoming known.”

“Then give us your rules old man,” she said cold, and stretched a hand to Karga under the water. He took it and squeezed.

“The first rule is this. I am going to say a word now, but you are not going to hear it, nope! Yet, if someone says it to you, you are going to think to yourself, “that is the word Chompy told me about” then you are going to tell me that someone said it, clear?”

Eriennen and Karga looked at each other, quizzical.

“No, I-”

“Next rule is-”

“-wait!” She said, “I still haven’t gotten the last part.”

“I already said it,” he said. “You don’t remember that I said it, just like I said, but I did say it! Just tell me if someone says it to you. Next rule, it is essential that you describe my physique accurately to others, wherever necessary.”

Karga laughed with noted incredulity and let go of her hand, then dunked his face in the water. He came up grumbling but she could see he was resigned to play along. “How do you mean?”

“I mean tell them exactly how I look if they ask after me. And the next rule is, if someone does come asking about me, you must send a bird immediately, next breath, to a call stone that I will give you.”

“Alright,” she said.

“Good!” Chompy said, “again, I am sorry to threaten like that. As I said, this is serious business. Those rules are serious. But like I also said, there is serious profit in it.”

“Yes, let’s start talking about that,” she said.

“From this point on, you are not required to continue working with me. At any point, any point at all, you can walk away and nothing will happen, as long as you keep my rules. Also, from this point on I am going to be paying you a lot of money.” He pattered over to his belt pouch and rifled through some parchment, coming to a red-dyed paper. Karga hummed appreciatively.

“This is an open transference paper from Farsee, I keep a couple on me. The wax seal is unique, imprinted with tiny particles of magicka-”

“We know.”

“Ah, of course. Now, let us discuss the situation.”

He rolled the paper and came back to the tub, hopping down into the warm water again and going to his drink. Absentmindedly, he spun his hand in the air and the Water came up, slowly freezing into a tetrahedron with a smaller tetrahedron within it, and smaller ones beyond that.

“At the center of this construction is-”

“-a contrived example?” Eriennen said and laughed. It was shared around the room. “How about we take that ice and put it in our cups, Chompy?”

Glasses refilled, tetrahedron disintegrated, things took a more familial turn. The board was set. The man knew their secrets, he was someone quite interesting by nature, he had a lot of money, connections to some powerful players, and ultimately her and Karga were the kind of people suited to such eccentricities. Also, if she was honest with herself, they were all getting along quite well. Goltas and Chompy were just their kind of people. She decided to forgo wrath at his many threats, and let Karga know with a palm downward that they were going to be friendly.

“If you want to hear about the first job,” Chompy began again after dripping brillwine through his mustache, “I’ll be having to pay you. Another ten strip each, and we get a new rule.”

“No sharing?” Karga said.

“No showing.”

“Showing what?”

“That the job,” Chompy said and raised his hands up, “is a job.”

“And if we don’t want to hear about it?” Eriennen asked.

“You get nothing aside from my rules, which you will keep until you are back in the ground. We then relax, drink, eat, share more stories, and then I leave after trying to get a call stone from Mother Deese.”

The joke angered to a mask. “Let’s hear it,” she said.

“Good,” Chompy said then paused and raising his head, seemed to think through a few variables. “Lets get right to it. I have a special job, it is in Veldras Valley. Eriennen I know you have been before. Northern route?”

“Correct,” she said, trying not to care about the degree to which she had been investigated by this man and whomever he truly represented. It was, again, part of the game she had found herself in. It was part of the givens. No use fighting that.

“You have detailed maps of the Northern Route, yes? From what I have discovered it was private mapping journey led by an aging former banker for the Irvan monarchy, a Bonrui Reb Dalbergast.”

“Yes,” she said, relaxing.

“Good. I have a job in the Valley.”

“On the Northern Route?”

“Nope!” He said.

They sipped their drinks.

“Are you going to-” Karga began.

“No again! But I will tell you this. The job has, let’s say it has a qualifying round. Like in your cat races Karga.”

“Are you going to keep doing that?” She asked.

“What?” He replied innocently.

“Telling us things we know about ourselves,” Karga replied.

“Its fun! Plus, I’m paying. Also, this qualifying round is fun as well. Others have been tested, and I don’t like the results. Half of them have gotten to this point, and gone no further. You have been chosen for this test, this qualifier, because we feel that you may qualify. Now, the specifics of the test are the most interesting part.”

“Are they?” Eriennen said.

“Absolutely! Because they simply do not exist! As you can tell, I have access to great amounts of money. You, like your mysterious peers, are people well suited to deploying such means to create something to show me that you are capable of the skills needed for my true mission, the one in Veldras. Veldras Valley where the dark beasts roam!” At this last phrase he bared his little white teeth and held his hands up as claws, then burst into laughter and smacked his belly.

“What are these skills?” Karga asked.

“Coordination,

Leadership,

Flexibility,

Delegation,

Strategy.”

Chompy said the words with a rote intonation that suggested he had memorized them, that he was repeating them, and Eriennen sensed that they had been qualities determined at greater counsel. How great? That’s the question, she thought.

“And… you just,” she said, excitement rising in her body, “want to give us money to make something happen that can show you these skills?”

“We have determined that it is the quickest way with the least amount of interference on our part. By giving money, we allow you to be the face of whatever coordination needs to take place for your display. By not controlling the variables, we see your ability to be creative within the context of a complex problem, yes? You create the board, and play yourself; we watch. I am a high level thinker, Eriennen. As are my employers. Go on, set the board, and don’t be boring; or no test, no job, and nothing else. Only my rules will exist beyond that, and I’ll be gone in the wind. So, do you have any big ideas that can show me what we need to see?”

Eriennen and Karga turned towards each other, her smirking, him wincing. She bounced her eyebrows, asking. He chuckled low, relenting.

She raised her chin, smiled wide.

“We’re throwing a tournament!”

The negotiations were quick, stabbing, ravenous. She divulged the ludicrous amount of needed investment, plus additional costs to cover pushing the thing up to take place in just two stretch. Karga looked like he was going to faint for rushing the planning. Chompy countered that he knew she had twice thrown a tourney in Molwea, the second time running out of funding. It had been a true calamity, she had to admit. But she was prepared, and Karga presented his well-tuned financial breakdown. In the end the thing that made the difference was that Chompy would actually make money from the event if it went at all well, and even more so that he could compete. Plus, he liked the idea of a shield and restoration tournament.

“It’s got nuance, appreciation for the art. I like it! Though, by the end we’ll be hungry to make each other bleed, you know that, do you?”

“Shield push or magic battle, the final five mageswill get to vote for their match.”

He wavered then, smiling down at the water. She knew the look. It was the look of someone about to spend a tremendous amount of money on one of her ideas. It was the why not, a beautiful resignation to the storm of chance and the profit of grandeur.

“I’ll do it!” He said.

A wave of pure joy leapt all through her body, she yelled and patted Karga’s shoulder like a drum.

“On one condition,” He said,

“Yes?” Eriennen asked, heart slowing and beginning to plummet.

“In the listings you are to refer to me as... The Great and Mysterious Chompy!”

“No!” Goltas shuoted, hitherto silent. He sprang to his feet. “That’s terrible!”

“No its not!” Chompy yelled. The two men walked towards each other, faces wild.

“Tell you what,” Goltas said, “let’s play Scales, ah grand? First to four gets to choose your name in the lists.” Without pause they scrambled to a sack Goltas had dragged from the wagons and started setting up a small tripod.

“Ah, Chompy,” Eriennen said. “Should we have Sulu follow up for contracts and payment?”

“Yes,” Karga continued. “Our counter Yubkim at the offices can prepare-”

“What?” Chompy yelled. “Oh, send them on to my call. For now just grab the open transference sheet from Farsee from my bag.”

“Alright.” Eriennen said, and shrugged at Karga. He dried his hands carefully and retrieved the paper.

“Chompy,” Karga began, handing it downward as the two men completed their scales for the game. “Here. As you requested-”

“Just fill it out yourself grand!” Goltas said, shewing him with a hand and then exploding boshk smoke out through coughs. He passed Chompy the pipe.

“Better listen to him Karga,” Chompy said, inhaling the smoke. “We’re playing here. It’s bet or get.”

“Bet or get! Bet or get!” The two strange men shouted together over and over again, fists pumping in the air, and then they played their game.

Dinner was lavish in the extreme after the normal fashion of the house. They took it in the gardens under the purple end of day and the coming diamonded night, while stylized, flowing statues of great men and women, creatures of legend, and old gods watched on. The group sat at a long table ensconced by smaller ones where the people working in the house ate, some of their families too. There were children running and screaming and laughing all night, for everyone sat together in the Reenan fashion. Everywhere in the country, from there in the sunny south to Brillafeh in the rainy midlands east of Veldras Valley. In the north where Molwea, The City of a Thousand Roads reigned they gathered too, out in the streets in the dirt and fire of Walltown up to the wild midcity foreign ports and through to the Quarsmell and the towers of the dead kings and The Last Queen people were joining to eat in groups with whatever friends and colleagues were available. They walked together out in raucous groups to homes and galleries and restaurants and rookeries and bars and barbers and inns and drug dens and brothels and music houses and places of business, everyone together. That was just what Reenan's did, no matter the fact that Reenans didn't all do one much of anything; didn't really speak one language, didn't look one way, didn't worship one strict theology, didn't care about the same things. Yet, they did care for the festival of life, the joy of being itself. They cared for The Island. It was an understood thing, a thing you got to know, got to love quick if you ever visited. Reenans took it, for better and worse, as evidence towards the fact of their self-ascribed height of cultural wisdom; the foresight to not worry too much. It was, after all, just how you lived in paradise.

Such it was that Sulu and Ualfa and her husband Barlee and even Dryfylwyft and Selveni were brought up for the meal and a surprise celebration. Chompy took every opportunity to flatter Mother Deese despite her suitor Jom Briff, a sleepy old soldier, present and gruff. Selveni told her entire life story in one ten minute romp that had everyone laughing and drinking and blushing. . They ate course after course of fresh sea catch and grilled balsa prepared by the guests themsevles at open air grills and by the constant flow of people in and out of the kitchen. Sulu even seemed half happy. They talked of the tourney. Eriennen and Karga let every particle of their plan now long building hit the table to be discussed, and she worked her mind as hard as she could to push up planning to accompany the timeframe. Though it was alarming to host it so soon, the truth is that the players in the game were particularly good at getting things done. A crucial part of their plan was hiring a management company, which was just good business, and Eriennen knew the best. She wrote a burning bird to the leader of the group right there at the table. Then they talked about the city, the country, the world, about life, and all got as drunk as the level of comfort would allow, which was encouragingly quite a lot. Devenu and Chompy got along well to her liking, they talked business and politics at a similar level of fervor. Chompy was hard on taxes, Devenu was hard on trade, but neither were hard on each other. It was the best evening Eriennen had in a long time, and she felt in her heart that she had reached a foothill, a door, a precipice, an artifice, an edifice of something great; the storm rippled its lightning in all directions, drawing towards her in its heart.

When the meal was done Eriennen offered to show Chompy to his rooms. She thanked him, and then a little pain stabbed at the back of her mind. She hadn't thought about the other part all evening; about what happened after the tourney. She knew she would be chosen for his job, she wouldn't let it be any other way. Whether she would take the job, well that wasn't a sure thing at all.

"What will we be doing in the Valley if this all works out?" She asked.

He looked up at her and his face showed at once a sour fondness and a bittersweet regret. As if he would have pitied her if he loved her, but didn’t and couldn’t.

"Something that I think you'll be pretty good at," he said.

She sighed.

For, she knew the answer; dark.

"Killing monsters."

End of Part 0