September, 1098

I raise my hand and brush my fingers over the cold keratin of the beak.

The ash-grey beast towers beside me, misty blue wings folded against corded muscle. I run my hand through the mane that hides its faceless head, and it leans into the touch, a low thrum humming against my palm. A lethal extension of my will. No hesitation, no weakness.

Past its shoulder, I scan the ruined lobby.

The empire's grandeur has been reduced to rubble. A toppled grand piano lies in the foreground, its lid shattered, its ivory keys spilling across the cracked floor tiles. Ornate stone columns stretch to a shadowed mezzanine, their classical facades peeling. Dust turns in the dim light. Near the center of the room an oil lantern flickers on a small table, lighting a makeshift camp of torn leather couches, scattered military crates, and a discarded plate of food on a folding chair.

Behind the ruined reception desk, a faded paper calendar is nailed to the peeling plaster. The dates stop at September. The current month.

I turn my back on the piano and face the squad of Royal Court soldiers standing at attention.

Their white armor is scarred by the ash of the occupation. I brush my Arts against them. No bleeding-heart hesitation — fermented zeal for a homeland, rusted iron, and a cold edge underneath that I take for loyalty. I wouldn't tolerate less.

"We have intel this hotel is a Glasgow hideout," I command. "We clear it out for the Regent!"

The soldiers strike their chests in unison.

"Yes, Ma'am!"

They break formation and filter out across the lobby, boots crunching over broken tiles and glass. The thud of Kazdelian iron kicking in reinforced doors echoes through the hollow halls as they sweep the ground floor and the mezzanine above.

I stand in the middle of it, hands at my sides. Beside me the Fear Beast shrieks, ready to tear apart anyone who resists the Regent's will.

"Let go of me! You damned Sarkaz!"

The shout comes ragged through the stale dust, echoing down from the mezzanine.

Armored boots follow it. One of the soldiers appears at the top of the grand staircase with his hand around a prisoner's collar, and drags the Feline man down the cracked marble steps, the captive's shoes scraping against the debris.

The soldier shoves him forward, forcing him to his knees at my feet.

"Ma'am, here's one," he reports, his voice muffled behind his iron visor.

The man gasps for breath, his clothes torn and grey with the ash of the capital. He lifts his head, looking past the hem of my uniform, up my posture, until he finds the lopsided horns on my crown.

His pupils contract to pinpricks.

"A Djall…?!" he chokes out. His voice fractures into a high-pitched wheeze as he scrambles backward, hands slipping on the shattered tiles. "Please… please don't eat my brain…"

The taste of him floods the lobby. Rusted iron, and the sweet rotting nectar of terror.

"Oh, your fear…" I tilt my head and look down at his trembling form, smiling. "…tastes so sweet."

I step closer, my heels clicking against the marble.

"Let's see what your deepest secrets are."

I don't wait for him to scream again. I throw my channels open and plunge into his mind, tearing past his panicked defenses.

His recent thoughts blur past me.

A dark, cramped room. The smell of stale bread and unwashed clothes. A woman clutching a crying child in the lightless corner of an abandoned apartment complex.

They're hiding, praying our patrols march past their shattered windows. He was out scavenging for them, acting as eyes and ears for whatever remnant of Glasgow still thinks it can reclaim this city.

The memory is so mundane it's barely worth the reach. I snap the tether shut and pull back out of his head.

He collapses forward, gasping like a man pulled out of water, and clutches his head.

"He's just an informant," I state.

I look down at him and raise a hand — one finger, levelled at the kneeling man.

My Fear Beast doesn't hesitate. It lunges with a liquid grace, wings flaring in the dim light, and closes the distance before he can move.

The sound of flesh and bone giving way is wet and absolute. The beast drives a claw through his chest, through his heart, and out the other side.

His gasping stops. The nectar of his terror flatlines into an empty void.

The beast jerks its claw back and lets the body slump onto the marble. Dark crimson pools around the shattered ivory keys of the piano.

I lower my hand and look past the corpse to the soldier waiting at attention.

"Continue the sweep," I order. "Leave no one alive."

Walking the lobby, I catch sight of a bundle of fabric.

I pick it up. A plushie, worn and slightly torn. An Aslan.

I…

No. No one can see me with a plushie that symbolizes the enemy.

I toss it as far as I can.

It lands in the dust near the toppled piano, one stitched paw turned up toward the shadowed mezzanine.

I stare at it until the quiet breaks into the sounds of a struggle.

Two more figures are shoved out. They hit the cracked floor hard, gasping against the cold stone.

"Ma'am, there are two more Felines," the soldiers report.

I look down at them, shivering in the ash-choked air. I don't need to open my channels all the way. There's nothing in either of them but the instinct to live and the fear of dying. No tactical secrets. No rebel plots.

"Like before. They have nothing useful."

My Fear Beast doesn't need another command. The executions are instant, a necessary cleansing for our future.

I turn away before the bodies finish slumping to the floor. There's no point sweeping here anymore. I look to the remaining squad.

"Head back to the factories," I command. "I will report back to command."

"Yes, Ma'am!"

They break formation again, boots crunching rhythmically over the debris as they move to secure the industrial sectors, and the silence of the occupied capital closes over me.

I turn my gaze down the avenue. The evening sun dips low, bleeding gold across the deserted street, throwing long shadows over the cracked asphalt and the peeling facades of the abandoned Victorian buildings. Metal barricades and discarded cargo crates litter the thoroughfare, monuments to an empire brought to its knees.

I look past the brickwork and the ruins, tracing the hazy skyline until my gaze locks onto the structure dominating the distance.

The Shard.

Three hundred stories of architecture, piercing the bruised clouds. It was the grand palace of the empire's royalty once, a symbol of their global reach. Now it's been repurposed. It stands as the beacon of our future homeland.

It isn't just a monument. It's the extension of Kazdel's wrath: from that tower the Regent can summon Catastrophes at will, pulling Originium storms out of the sky onto anyone who resists, so long as we have an airship positioned to pinpoint the coordinates. Unyielding power.

Pale ash and plaster have settled on the dark fabric of my uniform.

With slow, deliberate movements, I brush my sleeves clean.

I straighten my spine and begin my march down the golden-lit street, toward the Shard, ready to report to the Regent.

Displaced air snaps behind me. My Fear Beast doesn't wait for a command — it darts to my back and whips an arm out to swat something out of the air.

Metal clatters against the cracked pavement.

I turn slowly, my posture rigid. A steel-tipped crossbow bolt rests in the dust a few paces away.

I scan the shadowed Victorian facades along the avenue. But before I can find a shattered window or a darkened rooftop to put a sniper in, the air in the street shifts.

Something new bleeds out of the ruined husk of a nearby building and hits my channels like a projectile: freshly tilled earth, roasted root vegetables, the heat of a pressurized steam engine. Under all of it, vitality.

My Fear Beast thrums and leans into my side. Whoever is in that building is no informant.

The building's barricade explodes outward in dust and splintered wood.

A Vouivre woman rushes into the golden-lit avenue. A mane of fiery red hair frames her face, matching the crimson of her shirt and the red accents on her dark military coat. She carries a gun-lance venting steam, and her dark horns jut from her crown.

She lunges at me with the force of a siege engine.

I take a calculated step backward.

My Fear Beast intercepts, wings flaring, muscle absorbing the impact as it parries the gun-lance with a screech.

She bounces off the parry with forged-steel agility, plants her black shoes in the cracked pavement, raises the barrel, and aims it at my chest. All that sun-baked heat compresses into a single point of focus.

Then her eyes lock onto my face.

They track past my Kazdelian uniform, over my features, and stop on the lopsided horns on my crown and the spade-tipped tail behind me.

The steam engine of her stutters. The vitality in her shatters into bewilderment.

"What?" The tip of the gun-lance dips a fraction, her combat stance unraveling.

I don't know why she hesitates, and I don't care.

I raise my hand and point one finger at her.

My Fear Beast lunges with a shriek, sweeping its claws down in an arc meant to tear her apart.

Her survival instincts override the paralysis. She throws herself backward, twisting away, and the claws carve through empty air, missing her torso by millimeters and sparking off the asphalt where she stood.

She hits the ground, scrambles back with her red hair whipping, and hoists the gun-lance.

"Retreat!" she orders, her voice ringing across the ruined avenue to the sniper still hidden in the shadows.

She doesn't look back, darting into the labyrinth of ruined Victorian architecture.

I watch the dust settle where she and her sniper vanished. Her description goes in my briefing.

The remnant forces are getting bolder. Their skirmishes and hit-and-run tactics have been fiercer since July — the month I first woke inside the fortified walls of the Shard.

I resume my march, turning my head to look at the Arts Creation lumbering faithfully at my side.

The ash-grey beast keeps pace. I reach out and brush the mane that hides its head, and it leans into the touch with that same low thrum against my palm. My protector.

And the only certainty I have.

Because past the beast, my mind is an empty vault.

I don't remember much of my life before I woke in July. Whenever I try to look past the bruised skies of Londinium there's only a black void, stripped of faces, names, warmth.

But the Confessarii and the commanders filled that void with the truth.

They told me what had happened to my mind. I was captured by our enemies — a pharmaceutical front called Rhodes Island — and held prisoner, my Sarkaz blood and my Arts exploited, until the Royal Court breached their defenses, rescued me, and brought me home where I belong.

I'm a Djall, and I'm part of the Royal Court. Since my rescue they've taught me how to act, how to harness my empathic Arts, how to fight a world that refuses to let us have a homeland. They gave me a purpose and a blade when I had nothing but empty memories. I won't fail them.

The golden sunlight fades, eclipsed by the mass of architecture looming ahead.

I'm almost at the Shard.

It throws a sweeping shadow over the avenue, plunging the Victorian street into cold twilight. Reinforced barricades and armed Sarkaz patrols line the perimeter, guarding the heart of our future. I straighten my spine, my Fear Beast shadowing every step, and walk to the gates to deliver my report to the Regent.

I cross the fortified threshold and enter the main room of the Shard after a long elevator ride.

The interior is imposing. Geometric pillars of pale concrete and dark metal stretch to the vaulted ceiling, lit by intersecting bars of white light. A polished walkway runs down the center of the cavernous hall, flanked by recessed control pits full of humming monitors and tactical displays. At the far end, framed by the pillars, rests the seat of our power.

Standing before me, dominating the hall, is our twin hope. The rulers of the Sarkaz.

I take a steady breath. The clash of their presences is immediate.

From the Regent, Theresis, it's a monolith of iron. He stands broad-shouldered in a heavy black military coat lined with fur, a dark cape cascading over his armored left arm. He tastes of ancient steel forged in the hottest fires of war.

From the woman beside him, Theresa, it's different. She is breathtaking, dressed in a flowing white gown with dark, jagged crystalline accents, her long pinkish-white hair spilling around her black horns.

An ocean of unconditional love, and tainted. Woven through the warmth is a sorrow deep enough to hurt: crushed ash, spilled blood, the weight of a million weeping ghosts.

I keep my spine straight and shove the phantom ache down. I bow lightly before the two.

"Regent," I announce, my voice echoing against the pillars. "I have urgent reports on our recent operations."

Theresis and Theresa turn slowly from the tactical displays to face me.

Theresa looks at me — at my horns first, then my face.

The second they meet mine, the pain in her spikes and crashes into me — raw devastation, hollow guilt. I clench my jaw to keep my knees from shaking under it.

Yet her expression stays composed. Her smile is gentle and flawless.

The Regent is quiet a moment. His calculating gaze sweeps over my uniform and over the Fear Beast waiting obediently in the shadows behind me.

"Report, Lita," the Regent commands. The word drops into the hall with the weight of an iron anvil.

"The purported Glasgow safe house in the industrial sector was just three low-level informants," I state. "They've been dealt with."

"But on my way back," I continue, "a Vouivre woman ambushed me, along with a hidden sniper. She was heavily armed, wielding a gun-lance. But… she hesitated when she saw me, and retreated."

I wait in the echoing silence of the hall for his judgment.

"Hesitation is a fatal flaw," Theresis states, his voice a blade cutting through the hall. "If this remnant forces herself to pause at the sight of a Djall, you will not give her the luxury of a second thought."

He steps forward, the black cape shifting over his shoulder. "Sweep the industrial sectors. Hunt this Vouivre and her sniper down. When you find her, use that hesitation. End her before she remembers her resolve."

"Yes, Regent," I reply.

I bow deeply to the twin rulers of Kazdel, turn on my heel, and leave the monolithic room behind.

I walk back to the elevator. The iron gravity of Theresis lifts off my shoulders.

The other presence doesn't.

My mind catches on the ghost of Theresa. It clings to my channels like damp ash — spilled blood, crushed crystalline ash, and a guilt that had saturated all that love.

I slow my pace, my brow furrowing. My fingers tighten on the fabric of my uniform.

Why?

Why did that sorrow spike the second she saw my face?

I'm a Djall of the Royal Court. They rescued me from the hypocrites of Rhodes Island. I'm wielding my Arts to carve out a future for our people.

I'm helping her build our new home.

My Fear Beast hums and brushes its arm against my side to ground me.

I reach out and run my hand through its mane.

A slow breath in, and the taste of Theresa's sorrow goes down with it, locked away in a dark corner of my mind.

I can't afford to be distracted by the burdens of royalty. The Regent gave me a direct order. There's a fiery-haired Vouivre hiding in the ruins of Londinium, and I have a sector to sweep.

The bruised twilight of the capital has been swallowed by night.

I march alone down the cracked asphalt, my Fear Beast keeping silent pace. The sector is a labyrinth of brick structures and smog-choked smokestacks, iron bridges stretching between the facilities, shadows pooling beneath them under the few working streetlamps. A solitary red train car sits dead on the tracks in the distance, abandoned.

A big playground to sweep for pests, by myself.

Theresis gave me a purpose when my mind was nothing but a void. He gave me a place within the Royal Court. I can't fail him.

The entrance of a massive, silent processing plant looms ahead, its doors forced open, hinges warped by explosives.

The Confessarii told me in my briefings that the Victorians were arrogant enough to sabotage their own manufacturing rather than let us use it. I cross the threshold. Inside is an echoing graveyard of rusted iron and stagnant water. Corroded pipes snake across the flooded, debris-strewn floor, leaking dark fluid into the murky puddles. The steel support beams are warped, the catwalks above shattered, their jagged edges hanging in the shadows. It smells of wet rust, stale oil, and cold, dead earth.

I step over a cylindrical pipe blocking the path, my heels splashing into the shallow water, and close my eyes for a second to throw my channels open and sweep the dark factory for the Vouivre.

A clatter. Faint — a boot scraping loose rubble, echoing down from the shadowed catwalks above.

My Fear Beast hisses.

"Show yourself!"

I wait for panic to bleed into the air. For the nectar of terror, or the heat of a desperate ambush.

But the air stays dead. Nothing.

I track carefully, my steps echoing against the damp concrete of the factory floor.

For a long stretch, the void holds. I weave through the shadows of the rusted machinery, sweeping the dark. Then a ripple disturbs the oil-scented air, and a taste comes through.

Not the Vouivre's kinetic heat. Cold stretched leather, and the taut snap of coiled tension.

It's moving.

I follow it off the flooded floor and up the grated iron stairs toward the upper control rooms. The rusted corridors above are shadowed corners and shattered monitors. I walk down the hall, letting my Arts brush the steel, and as I pass a reinforced security door the taste spikes, concentrated enough to vibrate through the metal paneling.

"Tear it down," I command.

The door is ripped off its hinges with a metallic screech and thrown into the dark room beyond like a discarded toy.

Inside, lit only by the moonlight bleeding through a shattered skylight, is a Feline sniper.

He's dressed for urban warfare — olive-green military coat over grey tactical trousers, asymmetrical grey plating on one shoulder and his chest. Dark, messy hair frames a pale face, and his ears are pinned flat against his head. His long tail whips behind his black combat boots.

The second the door breaches, he raises his crossbow.

Thwack. The bolt slices through the air toward my chest.

My Fear Beast intercepts. The bolt strikes the dense manifestation of Originium energy and ricochets into the shadows with a dull clatter.

The sniper scrambles backward, boots slipping on the rusted floor as he tries to notch another bolt. My Fear Beast hisses and stalks into the room.

The coiled tension in him shatters.

What bleeds off him now is sweet — the rotting, fermented nectar of panic, laced with the metallic tang of helplessness.

"Stop," I order.

The Fear Beast stops, its claws hovering centimeters from his throat. The sniper collapses against the control consoles, his chest heaving.

I step into the room, my heels clicking softly against the grating. I tilt my head and look down at his shivering form with a smile.

"Let's see your biggest fears."

I don't wait for him to protest, and sink into the darkest corners of his mind.

I find it immediately. A memory so devastating it has burned itself into the core of him.

The Londinium Secondary Defense Artillery.

I taste the roar of the empire's ultimate weapon. I feel his helplessness as he watched from a high sniper's nest — the Regent commandeering the artilleries, and turning them inward. The blinding heat as the shells came down on his own people. His squad screaming as they were annihilated in a firestorm of Kazdel's wrath, reduced to ash while he could do nothing but watch.

A masterpiece of despair.

I snap the tether shut and pull my mind back out of his head.

If this is the hell that broke him, I'll make him live it again.

I gather the terror of the memory — the roar, the heat, the despair — and push it outward to manifest his nightmare into reality.

The rusted control room warps.

The ceiling tears away into a bruised, blood-red sky. The air superheats in a fraction of a second, smelling of scorching ozone and pulverized concrete.

BOOM.

A concussive roar shakes the foundations of the factory. Pillars of white-hot artillery fire rain down inside the room, tearing through phantom steel, shattering the floor around him. The shockwaves are dense enough to hit him like a collapsing building.

"No! NO!" he screams, dropping his crossbow.

He covers his head with his hands and curls into a ball on the floor as the shrieks of the artillery deafen him. Phantom embers and ash blanket the room. The illusory screams of his annihilated squad echo from the burning shadows, synchronized with the impacts.

I stand untouched in the center of the manifested firestorm, watching him break under the weight of the Regent's power.

The rotting nectar of his panic saturates my senses. A decadent feast.

"Thank you for the meal," I murmur.

With a deliberate thought, I snap the empathic tether shut.

The roar of the artillery cuts out. The blood-red sky tears apart and dissolves back into the damp, shadowed ceiling of the rusted control room. The shockwaves and the suffocating heat evaporate, replaced by the freezing, stale draft of the ruined factory.

The sniper stays on the floor, curled into a ball, his hands still clamped over his ears, his fingers digging into his dark hair.

I step closer.

"Now tell me," I command. "Where is the Vouivre woman?"

He doesn't answer. He doesn't even look up at me. He just whimpers, a broken, wet sound. I brush my Arts against him, but what's left is ruined — a stagnant puddle of shattered glass and freezing ash. His mind has fractured under the weight of his own memories.

No resistance left in him. No tactical secrets to mine. Just the empty shell of a man who has already died inside.

"Broken already?"

He's useless. I look past his shivering form to the ash-grey Arts Creation waiting faithfully in the shadows.

"Dispose of him," I order.

A wet crunch of bone echoes against the control room walls, and the whimpering stops. The stale taste of his trauma flatlines into an empty void.

I turn my back on the pooling crimson, step over the shattered steel door, and leave the silent control room behind.

Out on the rusted catwalks overlooking the factory floor, I pause my march along the groaning rail.

I turn to the Arts Creation and brush my fingers against its beak, then run my hand through the mane.

"As long as I'm fed, you can exist," I murmur into the damp, industrial gloom.

I look past its folded wings, scanning the labyrinth of corroded pipes and shattered support beams sprawling across the floor below.

"But where could they be?" I ask quietly, tracking the shadows beneath the warped catwalks. "That must have been a scout."

If a sniper was stationed in the upper control rooms, he was covering an approach. The fiery-haired Vouivre wouldn't be hiding in the exposed upper levels.

"Sometimes I do wish you could talk," I whisper. I withdraw my hand, letting my fingers drop to my side. "But I guess you're just me. My emotions."

I straighten my spine.

"Come," I command.

The low hum of the beast ceases as it falls into step behind me. Together we descend the rusted iron stairs, heading deeper into the waterlogged dark of the factory to flush the remnant resistance out of their hole.

The dark of the processing plant yielded nothing. I spent hours wading through stagnant, oil-slicked water and tearing apart rusted catwalks, but the fiery-haired Vouivre and her sniper had slipped through the labyrinth.

Frustrated and smelling of wet rust, I gave up the search and marched back through the ash-choked avenues of the capital, into the shadow of the Shard.

I suppose I'll rest for today.

The reinforced elevator takes me up to the residential levels. The doors hiss apart on my assigned quarters — a utilitarian room; cold walls, a heavy bed, no clutter.

I don't bother removing my uniform. I step forward and crash onto the mattress. My Fear Beast dissolves into the shadows of the room, back into the quiet recesses of my mind, as the exhaustion catches up to me.

I close my eyes.

Just as the void of sleep pulls me under, the air in the room shifts.

It reaches me before the door opens — a sweeping ocean of unconditional love.

My eyes snap open. The exhaustion evaporates.

I scramble backward on the mattress and push myself up into a kneeling posture as the doors slide apart.

Standing on the threshold is Theresa.

"Your… your majesty!" I gasp, throwing myself forward into a deep bow. My heart hammers against my ribs.

Why is she here?

Theresa steps into the room, the door hissing shut behind her. The sorrow coming off her is paralyzing, yet her expression stays composed.

"Please. Just call me Theresa."

I keep my head bowed, hands tense on my knees.

"Can I help, Theresa?" I ask, keeping my tone respectful.

She walks to the edge of my bed. The rustle of her gown fills the quiet room.

She reaches out. Her fingers brush my hair, warm, tracing the curve of my horns.

The second she touches me, the guilt in her spikes. It tastes like a hollow apology screamed into a void.

"You've been working so hard in the ash," Theresa says. "But this cold iron you wear… this cruelty they've asked you to wield… it doesn't suit the shape of your true self."

"I'm a Djall of the Royal Court," I reply, reciting the truth the Confessarii gave me. "I fight to reclaim our home."

Theresa's hand drops to my cheek. The ocean of her love wraps around me until my throat tightens.

"Kazdel… yes. We all bleed for our home," Theresa sighs, the sound fragile. "But your hands weren't meant to be stained with this blood. I look at you, and I don't see the executioner my brother wishes you to be."

I stare at her. The Confessarii told me my past was a blank slate, erased by the hypocrites of Rhodes Island, and that my only purpose was the slaughter of our enemies. Yet the co-ruler of the Sarkaz looks at me as if she's mourning someone already dead.

"I know a soul that reaches out to heal, not to tear apart," Theresa continues, her voice trembling with a nostalgia I can't follow. "A child who anchors those in the dark, who builds sanctuaries instead of slaughterhouses. The Confessarii can weave their shadows over your memories, they can force you to command monsters… but they can't change the warmth of your heart."

"I… I don't understand." My fingers dig into the mattress. "I don't remember any warmth. I only remember waking up here."

Theresa closes her eyes.

"I know." The tragedy in her presses down on my shoulders. She leans forward and rests her forehead against mine.

"Don't let the dark they placed in your mind become the only truth you see. You're a child born out of a heart that was aiming for the light. And no matter what uniform they force you to wear, no matter what they tell you… you are so loved."

She pulls back, her eyes lingering on my face.

Before I can form a response, before I can ask what she means or who she thinks I am, she turns away and walks back to the threshold.

I'm left staring at the empty doorway. The scent of crushed ash and weeping ghosts dissipates.

I can't sleep.

The mattress feels like a slab of iron beneath me. I stare up at the shadowed ceiling of my assigned quarters, but all I can see are her pink-hued eyes.

How could Theresa know who I am?

I met her for the first time in the grand hall of the Shard today. Yet she walked into my room, touched my horns, and looked at me as if she were mourning someone she'd known her entire life.

I don't remember any warmth. I only remember waking in July under the bruised skies of Londinium, with a void where my life used to be.

Just go to sleep, Lita, I say to myself.

I force my breathing to slow. I want the void to pull me under.

But the void lifts.

The emptiness refuses to hold me, and I'm awake again in the dark.

I sit up at the edge of my bed.

This can't be allowed to fracture my resolve. I'm a soldier of the Regent, and he gave me a direct command.

The Vouivre is still out there, and I need to find her.

I swing my legs over the side of the mattress.

The shadows in the corner of my room shift and pool, and the ash-grey Arts Creation of my Fear Beast materializes to stand faithfully at my side.

I push Theresa's unconditional love back down.

I'm Lita, and I have a job to do.

Night still blankets the ruined city as I leave the shadow of the Shard behind.

I march back through the ash-choked avenues, my heels crunching over the debris. The air is still. Back at the flooded industrial sector, I bypass the rusted processing plant for the one structure I hadn't swept: the solitary red train car sitting dead on its tracks in the distance.

As I step within a few meters of the rusted metal chassis, the air shifts.

I taste her.

The Vouivre woman.

"Tear the door…"

Before I can finish ordering my Fear Beast to strike, the iron door of the train car explodes outward in a spray of rusted shrapnel.

She bursts out of the dark, hair whipping through the freezing air, and lunges before I can take a step backward.

She slams into me and twists me around, driving me face-first into the cracked asphalt. The impact knocks the breath out of my lungs, the pavement biting into my cheek as she pins me flat. Her weight is immovable.

"Let go of me!" I hiss.

My Fear Beast doesn't hesitate. It screeches, metal on metal, loud enough to vibrate the ruined asphalt, and lunges at her with its claws raised to tear her head from her shoulders.

Then something new bleeds into the avenue.

It doesn't crash into me like her heat. It slips into the air in silence — dark blackberry tea and cold obsidian, the stillness of a mountaintop, overlaid with a streak of focus.

A voice cuts through the night, calm and resonant, carrying the weight of ancient law.

"Ḫulliq, pušuṭ lāna."

A crack echoes through the cold air. My Fear Beast unravels, reduced to a mist of energy that vanishes into the night wind.

"What!" I scream. "How dare you hurt him!"

I struggle, dragging my face against the cracked asphalt to look past her shoulder.

Stepping out of the shadowed threshold of the train car is the source of that mountain cold.

He's a Sarkaz. A Banshee. Tall, composed, dressed in a dark tactical uniform with blue inner linings and asymmetrical straps, layered beneath a long black cloak whose pointed, geometric tails float around his legs. Grey windswept hair frames his face, and jagged dark horns branch from his crown. In one gloved hand he twirls a sleek, dark stylus.

He looks at me.

But it isn't his silent Arts or his presence that makes my breath catch. It's the crisp white lettering across his dark collar and the white rook pinned to his shoulder.

The insignias of the hypocrites who held me prisoner. The enemies who erased my past and forced the Royal Court to rescue me.

"Rhodes Island?!"

"You traitor!" I yell, my voice tearing through the ash-choked night.

He's a Sarkaz. He shares the blood of our ancestors. Yet he wears the insignia of the hypocrites who steal our memories and fight to keep us from reclaiming our homeland.

He doesn't flinch.

I look back at the Vouivre pinning me to the asphalt.

Her hair brushes my cheek, saturated with the smell of sun-baked earth and pressurized steam. To do anything I need to free my hands, or at least shift my weight enough to channel my Originium Arts into a manifestation. But she doesn't give — a statue of forged steel, her knees pressing my limbs into the ruins.

If I can't move my body, I'll move her mind.

I throw my empathic channels open and aim the spear of my Arts into the roaring heat of her emotions, ready to plunge into the abyss of her consciousness and drag whatever rotting trauma she hides to the surface.

"Let's see how you feel about…"

He steps forward, his shoes making almost no sound against the pavement, and raises the dark stylus in his hand.

"Kakkab šēri, nūr nēmeqi."

The incantation is a quiet, resonant hum, but it hits my mind with the force of a physical blow. The sensory world collapses. The tapestry of flavors is gone, and a sterile light floods my empathic channels — a wall of conceptual clarity that severs me from every emotion around me.

I gasp, my body arching against the pavement as my mind is gagged. The tastes of fear, resolve, and sorrow are just… gone. I'm left blind in the dark.

He lowers his hand.

"You will manipulate no minds here," he says. The words are an iron cage, without malice but heavy with finality. He turns his focus toward the woman holding me down. "Bagpipe, please, escort our guest back to the camp."

"Aye."

Her voice is remarkably bright.

She shifts her weight off my back just enough to yank me upward. With practiced efficiency, Bagpipe forces my hands behind my back, securing my wrists like iron shackles. I struggle against her hold, my shoes scraping uselessly against the cracked asphalt.

"Let go of me!" I snarl, twisting my shoulders to break free.

Bagpipe doesn't tighten her grip, but she holds me firm. She looks at me, and her tone softens into a gentle, rural cadence.

"Easy now, Lethe," she soothes, her Taran accent thick and rolling. "Dinna fash yourself. You're just gonna pull a muscle thrashing aboot like a caught beast. We arenae gonna hurt you, promise. Just come along quietly, lass, alright?"

The name lands like an insult.

"Lethe? I'm Lita!" I glare daggers at her. The Confessarii warned me about this. They told me Rhodes Island would try to trap me in the fabricated life they'd forced on me. I won't let them overwrite my truth.

He turns his back on the ruined train car, his cloak shifting weightlessly in the cold night wind.

"Walk," he commands.

The word isn't a request; it's a gravitational force. Bagpipe hauls me forward, my heels stumbling over the debris as I'm made to march.

The journey through the night is quiet. Without my Fear Beast shadowing my steps, and with my empathic channels gagged by his sterile light, I'm hollow. I can't taste the fear of the shadows or the resolve of my captors. For the first time since waking up in July, I'm blind to the world, reduced to the cold wind biting my face and the crunch of our footsteps.

We walk for kilometers, steadily away from the imposing shadow of the Shard, leaving the towering titan of our future homeland behind in the bruised smog.

Eventually we cross into a desolate sector of the capital. The ruined Victorian architecture here is different from the rest of the city.

Jagged clusters of black Originium crystals jut from the melted asphalt and shattered brickwork. The buildings are warped, hollowed out by heat, their classical facades reduced to glassed craters and pulverized concrete. The metallic smell of scorching ozone still lingers in the freezing air. I know this devastation. A Catastrophe-struck zone — the localized wrath pulled out of the sky by the Regent's power.

We pick our way through the craters until he leads us toward the hollowed-out husk of a commercial building.

Its roof is caved in, but the reinforced walls still stand, throwing a deep shadow off the street. Bagpipe marches me across the threshold, our boots echoing against the warped tiles of the interior.

Hidden inside the shell of the building is a makeshift forward camp, neatly organized. Low-emission tactical lights pick out a cluster of heavy, insulated grey tents and stacked equipment crates.

And printed across the canvas of every tent, glowing faintly in the dim light, is the same insignia stitched onto his clothing.

The white rook. The mark of Rhodes Island.

Bagpipe shoves me through the insulated canvas flaps of the largest tent in the camp.

The interior is a contrast to the apocalyptic ruins outside, bathed in the low-emission glow of tactical monitors and a single swaying lantern hung from the reinforced frame. The air is warm, and smells of dry canvas and stale coffee.

Two figures stand over a makeshift table covered in sprawling topographical maps of Londinium. One is buried in a heavy dark coat and a tactical hood, their face hidden behind a dark visor.

The other is a young Cautus girl.

At the sound of our entrance, she turns around.

The second she sees me, she freezes.

I don't need my Arts to read the devastation that shatters her composure.

She takes in the fabric of my Kazdelian uniform, the military cut of my coat, then the horns on my crown. Her hands, nine dark rings across them, tremble as she grips the edge of the tactical table to keep herself upright.

"It's really you…" The words fracture in the warm air of the tent. "When Bagpipe said she saw you in Londinium… I didn't want to believe it…"

I refuse to be looked at with that weeping pity. I'm not a tragedy; I'm a Djall of the Royal Court.

She swallows hard and forces her trembling hands off the edge of the table, taking a shaky breath, her focus never leaving my face.

"Logos… Bagpipe… Doctor…" she says, her voice wavering under the weight of her grief before she forces it back into a steady, commanding cadence. "If you don't mind, I want… some time, just the two of us."

Behind me, Bagpipe's grip on my wrists loosens. She steps back.

"Are you sure, boss?" Bagpipe asks.

She doesn't look away from me.

"Yes."

The command is quiet, but it carries an undeniable authority.

Logos turns without a single word. The hooded figure, Doctor, turns and walks out into the cold.

Bagpipe gives me one last, calculated glare.

The heavy canvas flaps swing shut behind them.

I'm left alone in the dim light of the command tent.

The wall of light in my mind begins to crack.

Logos's gag is fading. The sensory world rushes back in.

Bagpipe had called her "boss."

This girl, standing unarmed in front of me, is the enemy commander. She is the leader. If I strike her down right here, right now, I land a decapitating blow for the Regent. I can end this.

I bare my teeth, expecting the stagnant rot of deception, or the cold detachment of a mastermind.

Instead, the flavor crashes into me like a collapsing building.

Spun sugar. But the sweetness is drowning, saturated in an ocean of aching sorrow. There is no malice in her mind. There is no deception. Just a raw, bleeding-heart grief that radiates off her frame like heat.

Why?

Why do you look at me with that weeping pity?! Why don't you draw a weapon and strike me down?! You're my enemy!

A panicked rage boils up in my throat. It's a lie. It has to be a lie. This is their trap. They want to imprison me again, to chain me in the dark and make me their docile, hollow puppet.

I close my eyes and force the phantom ache of her sorrow away. I need a weapon. I need my protector.

Reaching into the dark corners of my consciousness, I try to pull the dense, psychic ash together. I need to summon my only friend. I need the ash-grey beast to materialize, to tear through this warm tent and paint the topographical maps in her blood.

"Lita."

The name cuts through the quiet air.

My eyes snap open.

She takes a single, slow step forward. She doesn't raise her hands to defend herself.

"You don't have to be Lethe," she says, her voice trembling but clear. "You've always been Lita, after all."

My focus splinters.

She… she isn't fighting me. She isn't trying to erase who I am. She's validating the only name I know.

I stare at her. She just stands there in the dim light. No guards. No armor. Just a girl with heavy dark rings on her fingers and a heart bleeding spun sugar and sorrow.

I raise my hand, my fingers curling into a trembling claw.

I can do this. I can summon the beast. I will kill her. I will fulfill my duty to the Royal Court.

I try to pull the ash together, to summon the rage required to execute an enemy of the state.

Her sorrow floods my empathic channels, washing away the ash and the iron. It short-circuits my Arts, drowning my resolve in a paralyzing sweetness. My hand drops a fraction. My breathing fractures into shallow gasps.

I cannot kill her.

I cannot focus.

Why?

Why does she feel like Theresa…

Why…

I jam my fingers into my ears, pressing hard enough against my skull that it hurts. But it's useless. I can block the sound of her voice. I can't block the tastes.

The spun sugar and the sorrow bleed straight into my empathic channels, bypassing my physical senses — a drowning tide that refuses to let me go.

"How…" I gasp. "How do you know 'Lita'?! No one ever told you that name! What… what Arts are you using?! Stop manipulating me!"

I stumble backward. My heels catch the edge of a heavy equipment crate, and I collapse against the insulated wall of the tent. Scrambling into the darkest corner I can find, I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my legs, squeezing myself into a trembling ball.

This is it for me.

There's no way for me to run. Bagpipe's forged-steel strength, Logos's obliteration… and now this girl who can dismantle my Arts with nothing but a bleeding heart.

Why? Why are they so strong?

"Just kill me," I whisper. My fingers dig into the fabric of my uniform until my knuckles turn white, and I squeeze my eyes shut. "Please… just kill me. I don't… I don't want to be a chained animal…"

The rustle of clothing approaches. She kneels in front of me, closing the distance until her presence envelops me.

"I will never do such a thing, Lita."

Why is she so gentle…

Theresa… is this… is this actually your plan…?

I open my eyes and look up at her through the blurred, stinging vision of my own unshed tears.

"Why…" I can't understand the shape of her being. "Why… why do you want me…?"

She reaches out. She doesn't grab my wrists, doesn't force me into iron shackles. Her ring-clad hand brushes my cheek. Her grief washes over me, so warm that it makes my chest ache.

"Because," she whispers, her eyes brimming with a quiet sorrow, "we have been friends."

"You're lying…"

I scramble further back, pressing myself against the canvas wall until the night air from the Catastrophe-struck zone bites through the fabric.

"You're lying!" My voice fractures.

She doesn't flinch. The drowning tide of spun sugar and aching sorrow coming off her doesn't waver. She just looks at me, her eyes glistening.

"Just take a break, Lita."

She turns her head toward the sealed flaps of the tent.

"Raidian… if you will."

The canvas flaps part. The freezing air of the ruined city rushes in, and something new bleeds into my fractured empathic channels behind it.

Sun-warmed linen and polished oak — safe, comforting, anchored by a density that doesn't move. But right now that grounding warmth is submerged in a heavy layer of grief.

She steps into the tent, a tall Liberi woman with four arms, the lower pair sleek and mechanical. Her lower hands are tucked quietly against her sides, her upper hands adjusting the collar of her coat. She finds me, huddled in the corner on the floor.

The second she looks at me, her expression shatters into the same weeping pity the Cautus girl holds.

Raidian crosses the tent in a few long strides. I try to summon my Fear Beast to defend myself, but my mind is a ruined mess. My Arts are dead in the water. I can't focus.

She kneels beside me. Her lower arms slide around my shoulders, her upper hands cupping my arms, and she lifts me with an effortless strength.

"Let… let me… go…" I choke out.

I try to thrash against her hold, but there's none of the forged-steel brutality Bagpipe had when she pinned me to the asphalt. It's just… warm. It's an embrace. My struggle is useless, my limbs heavy and numb.

I look up at her face. Her eyes are red, shimmering with unshed tears in the dim light.

"Why…" The word scrapes out of my throat, wet and broken. "Why… why do you all feel bad for me…?"

I am a soldier of the Military Commission.

I am a Djall of the Royal Court.

I am the enemy.

Why do they refuse to hate me?

Raidian doesn't answer. One of her upper hands shifts, her fingers working methodically through my messy hair, untangling the strands caught around my horns. The touch sends a phantom spike of nostalgia through me.

What…

Why do I feel… that…

She guides me to my feet, taking my numb weight against her side as she leads me toward the exit of the command tent.

"Because you are our Lita." Raidian's voice trembles with an aching tenderness as she guides me out into the freezing night. "And we wouldn't let anyone convince you otherwise."

Raidian guides me out of the tent. I stumble, my knees weak and my mind a ruined mess.

A few meters away, Bagpipe stands guard near the perimeter of the makeshift camp, leaning against a stack of military crates with her gun-lance resting by her side. She still pulses with that explosive, sun-baked heat. But there's no hostility aimed at me.

Logos, who obliterated my Fear Beast without effort, sits on a nearby crate. He looks unbothered by my presence. He isn't even looking at me, and his presence bleeds quietly into the cold air.

The hooded figure stops. What comes off him is sharp and biting — dark, over-steeped black tea and cold iron, clouded by the muted flavor of melting snow and thick grey fog. He watches me for a long moment in silence. Then, without a word of condemnation or command, he turns around and walks back into the tent.

My fingers dig into the sleeves of my Kazdelian uniform.

"Please…" My voice tears through the cold air. I look between Raidian, Bagpipe, and Logos. "Please, just hate me…"

I beg them. I need them to draw their weapons, to chain me, to strike me, to treat me like the enemy I am. I'm a Djall of the Royal Court…

But none of them do. Bagpipe offers a sad, quiet sigh. Logos turns a page on the book he's reading, ignoring my plea.

Then a heavy crunch of boots on cracked asphalt echoes from the dark perimeter.

Something new bleeds out of the warped ruins of the Catastrophe-struck zone and crashes into my empathic channels with the roaring intensity of a Catastrophe. Heavy machine grease, roaring exhaust, and unapologetic fire.

A tall, black-haired Feline woman steps into the dim light of the camp, dressed in heavily scarred tactical gear, a massive chainsaw resting casually in her grip.

I stare at the jagged, oiled teeth of her weapon.

This is it. This is my executioner.

They've finally realized I can't be reasoned with. They brought their brute to strike me down. I shut my eyes and brace for the brutality about to tear me apart.

The rhythmic thud of her boots stops right in front of me. The roaring fire of her engulfs me.

I wait for the chainsaw to roar.

Instead, a large, calloused hand drops heavily onto my head.

It doesn't strike me. It playfully ruffles my messy hair, messing up the strands Raidian had just untangled.

"Kiddo!" Her voice booms across the quiet camp without a trace of hostility — bright, rowdy, warm. "Glad you're safe! Welcome back."

My eyes snap open.

I stare up at her grinning face.

My hands drop to my sides. The phantom ache in my chest shatters.

"No…" I whisper, my voice cracking into a wheeze. "No…"

I raise my trembling hands, press them flat against her scarred tactical gear, and with whatever strength I have left try to shove her heavy frame away.

"This… this isn't my home!" I yell, my voice tearing raw through the night air. "I live in the Shard! I'm your enemy!"

I expect her to bare her teeth, expect the chainsaw to roar to life and cut me down. Instead, her roaring fire softens into a steady, protective warmth that refuses to burn me.

She catches my wrists gently, stopping my thrashing without effort.

"It's okay, kiddo," she says softly, the rowdy brightness in her tone melting into a grounding patience. "You're just confused. Have some rest. You're safe here."

"I am a Royal Court…" I sob, the words choking me.

Behind me, Raidian's hold shifts. She pulls me flush against her side, her lower arms wrapping securely around my shoulders. Sun-warmed linen and polished oak envelop me, an anchor against my collapsing reality.

"You are our Lita," Raidian murmurs into my messy hair, her voice thick and trembling. "I promised your mom to keep you safe… I lost you twice already… I will not lose you a third time."

The word pierces the void of my mind.

The Confessarii told me I had nothing. They told me my mind was stripped clean of faces, names, warmth, that my only purpose was my bloodline, that I belonged to the Royal Court.

But… mom?

"My mom…?" The question comes out wet, broken, impossibly small. I look up into Raidian's red, shimmering eyes. "I have… a mom?"

One of Raidian's upper hands moves, her fingers cupping my cheek.

"Yes…" Raidian whispers, the unshed tears in her eyes finally spilling over and tracking down her face in the dim light. "You have two. One who birthed you, and one who loves you with her entire being right now…"

A mother who birthed me. A mother who loves me.

I reach into my consciousness. I try to find the Kazdelian iron. I try to find the Regent's truth. I try to find the ash-grey Fear Beast to protect me from this paralyzing sweetness.

But there's nothing there.

My knees give out. Raidian takes my numb weight, guiding me down until we're both kneeling on the cracked asphalt.

"I don't remember…" I weep, burying my face in her coat, my fingers digging into the fabric. "I don't remember anything…"

"It's okay to cry, Lita…" Her upper hand strokes my back while she holds me against her side.

I cry.

I weep with a ragged intensity until my throat is raw and my lungs ache. I cry until I can't anymore, my body drained of adrenaline and tension, leaving nothing but a hollow, shivering shell.

When the exhaustion finally drags me under, Raidian lifts my numb weight and carries me back inside the forward camp, through the flaps of one of the insulated grey tents. The air inside is warm and smells of dry canvas. She lays me down on a small, utilitarian cot and pulls a thick blanket over my shoulders.

I lie there, staring at the dark canvas ceiling. Beyond the insulated flaps, muffled voices filter into the quiet room.

"Is it possible to transfer her back to the landship, Amiya?" an unknown woman asks. Her voice carries a mechanical exhaustion, but no hostility.

"We can try," the Cautus girl, Amiya, answers softly. Even through the canvas, the spun sugar and the aching sorrow of her bleed into the night air. "Ms. Closure…"

"It's going to be hard," the unknown woman, Closure, interrupts with a frustrated sigh. "Any transport will be obliterated by the artilleries the moment they leave the city."

"She can stay here with Kal'tsit," a new voice rings out. A man's voice, low and steadfast, carrying the quiet density of a shadow. "I will keep the camp hidden."

Kal'tsit.

"Thank you, Misery…" Amiya says softly.

The Confessarii warned me about that name. Kal'tsit is the arch-enemy — the architect of my imprisonment, the one who steals Sarkaz memories and keeps us chained in the dark!

Panic re-ignites.

"I knew it…" I gasp, my breath hitching as I kick the heavy blanket off my legs.

I struggle off the bed, my hands slipping against the metal frame of the cot as I force myself upward. I have to get out of this tent. I have to run before the ice traps me.

"I knew it!" I yell, my voice fracturing in terror. "You're just disarming me… so Kal'tsit can chain me again!"

Before my feet can touch the ground, Raidian is there. Her arms wrap around me, catching my thrashing limbs, and she pins my shoulders back against the mattress, gently but without give.

"Just rest… Lita…" Raidian soothes, her voice a quiet anchor in the dim light. She reaches out, brushing the tear-soaked hair away from my eyes. "You can meet her yourself tomorrow…"

I stop thrashing. My muscles are spent.

"I…" My voice is a broken whisper. I stare up at the dim canvas ceiling, the tears still spilling from the corners of my eyes and soaking into the mattress. "Why… why… you can't just fight me…"

Raidian's upper hand keeps stroking my messy hair.

"Why should we, Lita?" she asks softly, her voice thick with that same weeping pity Amiya carried.

"Because…" I choke on the words, the Confessarii's truth fracturing. "I… I am your enemy… you are my enemy…"

Raidian leans down, her forehead resting against the side of my head.

"We never were and never will be, Lita," she murmurs into the quiet room.

I don't have the strength to argue anymore. I turn on my side, curling up into a small, trembling ball beneath the blanket with my arms and my tail wrapped around my legs. Raidian doesn't stop me, just adjusts the covers so I'm shielded from the draft of the zone.

If they aren't the enemy… if Amiya, who bleeds spun sugar, and Raidian, who holds me so warmly, aren't my captors… then what is the truth? Are the Confessarii the ones who placed the void in my mind? Was Theresa right about the cold iron I was forced to wear?

Is my entire life just a lie?

My mind shuts down.

The void rises up to swallow me, and this time I don't fight it.

Exhaustion pulls me under.

The void of sleep recedes, leaving me disoriented.

I open my eyes on an unfamiliar canvas ceiling. My body aches, and the fabric of my uniform is stiff against my skin. I roll off the small cot.

I push past the insulated canvas flaps of the tent.

The freezing night has passed. The bruised, ash-choked daylight of Londinium bleeds down through the caved-in roof of the hollowed-out commercial building. It looks like midday already.

I scan the perimeter. The makeshift forward camp is eerily quiet. Bagpipe, Logos, and Amiya are nowhere to be seen, and there's none of the tactical presence from last night. The camp looks almost empty.

This is my chance.

I am a Djall of the Royal Court. I am not their prisoner, and I am not their friend. The command tent is unguarded. I can slip in, steal the topographical maps of Londinium right off their tactical table, and march back to the shadow of the Shard. The Regent gets the intel, and I prove my loyalty to our cause.

I take a deliberate step toward the command tent.

But before my heels land on the cracked asphalt, a familiar flavor bleeds into the stale air: sun-warmed linen and polished oak, anchored by a comforting density.

"Good morning, Lita."

I flinch and spin around.

Raidian steps out of the flaps of an adjacent grey tent, looking at me with a gentle smile. Her lower hands are tucked against her sides; one of her upper hands holds a small, steaming metal bowl.

"Are you hungry?" she asks.

My heart hammers against my ribs. My grand escape plan stalls.

"Good… morning… Raidian…" I stammer.

Right on cue, my stomach lets out a hollow growl. I haven't eaten since yesterday afternoon, long before I started sweeping the flooded processing plant. My body betrays me.

Raidian's smile widens.

"We have some oats." She steps closer, offering the bowl with one of her hands. "It's not much, but it'll fill you up."

I reach out, my fingers moving toward the warm metal. But before my skin brushes the bowl, my hands stop.

It has to be poisoned.

This food must be laced with sedatives. Keep her fed, keep her dull, keep her grateful.

I jerk my hands back and press them against the fabric of my uniform.

Raidian doesn't frown, and she doesn't retract the offering. She just stands there in the ash-choked daylight, patiently holding the bowl out to me.

I sweep her presence for the trap, waiting for the rusted iron of malice to bleed into the air.

But there's nothing.

What crashes into my senses is safe. Sun-warmed linen and polished oak, anchored by that density. No deception, no malice. Just the heavy, weeping layer of grief, woven through with tenderness.

Why?

Why doesn't she have ulterior motives? Why do they all refuse to act like enemies?

My stomach growls again.

Slowly, my posture breaks. I reach out a second time, my fingers wrapping around the warm metal. Raidian lets go easily, her hands retreating to rest against her sides.

Holding the bowl close, I pick up the small metal spoon and scoop a tiny, calculated amount of the oats. One careful bite, ready to spit it out at the first hint of bitter medicine or sedative.

Instead, a rich sweetness blooms on my tongue.

There's honey in it.

The warmth spreads down my throat, melting the hollow ache in my chest.

I dig the spoon back in and inhale the rest. The oats vanish in seconds, the spoon scraping loudly against the bottom as I chase the last drops of honey.

I lower the bowl, my hands still trembling against the chill of the morning air.

"Thank… thank you," I whisper.

Raidian's gentle smile softens further.

"You're welcome, Lita."

I look down at the empty metal in my hands. "…where should I put the bowl?"

"Just leave it on the crate, Lita," she answers softly.

I step forward and set the bowl on a nearby stack of reinforced military supplies, the metal clinking against the hard plastic.

Raidian looks at me.

"Do you want to meet Kal'tsit?"

The name spikes my heart rate.

Kal'tsit.

The architect of all Sarkaz suffering.

Raidian's posture is unguarded. The camp around us is quiet.

I am still a Djall of the Royal Court.

Maybe this is my chance.

I could get rid of our biggest enemy — strike her down right here, tear the head off the snake, cripple Rhodes Island permanently.

"Okay…" I reply, forcing my voice steady, hiding the resolve locking into place.

Raidian turns and leads the way. I follow close behind, my heels crunching against the cracked asphalt, to a heavily insulated, sterile-white medical tent near the center of the camp.

I square my shoulders and straighten my spine. My fingers curl into fists. I brace myself to face an imposing monster of a commander.

Raidian pulls back the heavy canvas flaps. I step inside, my muscles coiled and ready to strike.

But my breath catches.

There is no monster. There is no mastermind waiting to chain me in the dark.

Lying on a field cot is a pale Feline woman, perfectly still, hooked to an array of life-support monitors and intravenous drips, their low-emission screens casting a sickly glow over her drawn features. Her eyes are closed. White bandages wrap tightly around her torso, and a thick stain of crimson has already soaked through the fabric, pooling over the wound.

I brace for the stagnant rot of deception to flood my senses.

Instead, what bleeds off her broken frame is catastrophe.

Beneath the sterile smell of the tent, her resonance is ancient — a towering glacier, cold iron, deep history, old paper. But the glacier is shattering. It tastes of cracked ice melting into stagnant rainwater, of that ancient paper crumbling into ash, saturated with the acidic tang of trauma.

It's the resonance of a dying star, flickering against a black void. Her density has been hollowed out, reduced to a rusted wire stretched to its breaking point.

There's no threat here. No architect of suffering. Just a bleeding woman clinging to the edge of life.

My hands drop to my sides. My assassination plan shatters against the quiet hum of her heart monitor.

"You… you have to be tricking me!"

I stumble backward, my heel catching on the metal leg of a supply tray, and point a trembling finger at the cot. "This is a trick! An illusion! The Confessarii warned me about your deceptions!"

But the agony bleeding off her is unfiltered reality. The shattered glacier, the freezing rainwater, the bitter ash of her fading vitality.

She tastes real…

My hand drops.

"Lita…" Raidian murmurs.

She steps up beside me, one hand resting gently against my back.

I can't make myself look anywhere but the dark crimson spreading across Kal'tsit's white bandages.

"How…" The word scrapes out of my dry throat, barely audible over the beeping of the life-support machines. "How did she…"

Raidian's upper hands, the real ones, clasp each other.

"They were storming the Shard," she explains, her voice trembling. "Theresis ambushed them. He was aiming for Amiya… and Kal'tsit blocked it."

Theresis. The Regent. The monolith of ancient iron who gave me my purpose.

He aimed his blade at Amiya.

And Kal'tsit — the architect of all Sarkaz suffering, the mastermind I was told wanted to keep us chained in the dark — had thrown herself in front of that blade to save her.

"What… no…"

The truth the Confessarii built inside my head fractures.

If Theresis is the one slaughtering the innocent, and Kal'tsit is the one dying to protect the girl who loves me… then what does that make me?

I look down.

At my own hands. At the immaculate fabric of my Royal Court uniform — the uniform of the Regent's executioners. I remember the Feline informants I slaughtered in the lobby. I remember the sniper whose mind I broke…

Theresa's voice echoes in the quiet corners of my mind.

My hands begin to shake.

I look up at Raidian, my vision blurring with hot tears.

"Raidian…" My voice cracks into a wheeze. My fingers curl inward, nails digging into my palms hard enough to draw blood. "Am I… am I… the bad guy…?"

"Look at me, Lita," she commands.

I force my eyes up, looking at her through the sting and the blur.

Raidian's expression is composed.

"I…" My voice trembles, unable to form a defense.

"I was born in Ursus," Raidian states, her voice steady in the quiet hum of the medical tent. "I was what they called a prodigy. I can read brain waves with my Arts. I worked as an interrogator… for the world's most brutal military. I had… I had done things… Lita…"

I stare at her. I brush my Arts against her, expecting a lie. But the truth of her words crashes into me. The sun-warmed linen and polished oak parts for a fraction of a second, revealing an ancient scar buried in her: freezing, blood-soaked snow, rusted iron chains, a lightless abyss of suffering.

A flavor of unapologetic cruelty.

I look at the woman who just fed me warm honey oats and stroked my hair while I wept, and I can't reconcile that warmth with the abyss of an Ursine military interrogator.

"Why…" I whisper, the word fragile. "Why are you here…"

Raidian softens, the heavy grief rising back to the front of her.

"I fled to Leithanien after I understood what the Infected are truly going through…" she explains, her tone carrying the echo of a distant lifetime. "I had a luxurious life there."

My brow furrows. I look around the canvas walls, at the low-emission tactical lights, and back to Kal'tsit clinging to life on the cot.

"But… you're in a war zone now…"

If she had escaped the darkness and found safety, why come back to the ash and the blood?

Raidian reaches out. Her hand cups my cheek, her thumb wiping away a fresh tear.

"I was not satisfied with my safe life," she murmurs. "I joined Theresa, her Babel… it's there I met people who are truly trying for a better future."

"Like your birth mother… Lethia," Raidian whispers.

Lethia.

I had a mother…

A mother who fought side by side with her against the darkness.

Raidian leans down, her forehead coming to rest against mine. Her warmth envelops me.

"…that's also where I met you… Lita."

"Raidian…" My mind tries to piece the shattered fragments together. "You said… you were with Theresa… but Theresa is with the Regent… Theresis now… Why are you fighting against us… I mean… them…"

Raidian's expression tightens. The unshed tears in her eyes threaten to spill over again, deepening into a well of grief. Her warm hands stay firm on my shoulders, grounding me.

"That… we are still trying to understand too, Lita," she says, her voice a wavering anchor in the sterile hum of the tent. "Theresis killed… Theresa during the fall of Babel."

"That is also the night your mother was killed by the Confessarii…" she whispers, the tragedy in her pressing down on my shoulders. "We don't know why Theresa is alive, and we don't know why she's standing beside Theresis now."

Theresis killed his own sister?

The Confessarii slaughtered my mother?

"You're lying… You have to be! They… they couldn't have… no… no… please tell me this isn't true!"

My hands ball into trembling fists and I strike at her, beating them against the fabric of her coat, my strength evaporating. A useless assault. I want to hurt her, to push her away, to break this new reality before it finishes breaking me.

She was an interrogator…

She has to be manipulating me.

I search for the trap. I pray to taste the stagnant rot of a lie, the rusted iron of deception, the cold detachment of a Rhodes Island mastermind working a prisoner of war.

But there is nothing.

What bleeds off her is reality, and it's still safe. Only now that density is submerged under a drowning ocean of agony.

She has no lies to give me. She's just hurting, mourning the ghost of a queen and the memory of my mother.

Raidian doesn't fight back. She doesn't even flinch against my strikes. Her hands simply catch my wrists and stop the thrashing. Her touch is painfully warm.

"Let's leave the tent, Lita." Her voice is thick with sorrow. She glances back at the sickly glow of the life-support monitors and the beeping keeping Kal'tsit alive. "Kal'tsit needs to rest. We can talk more outside."

She doesn't wait for me to argue. I don't have the strength to, anyway. Raidian takes my numb weight and guides me away from the broken, bleeding mastermind I had once been ordered to hate, out through the insulated canvas flaps and back into the ruined city.

I sit blankly on a heavy, reinforced military crate.

The ash-choked daylight of Londinium bleeds down through the ruined canopy of the commercial building, but I can't feel its warmth. The pitch-black void I had been so terrified of has been replaced by a mountain of guilt.

Why…

I stare at the cracked asphalt between my black heels.

Why can this not be a lie? Why…

Why do my Arts have to show me the truth…

Raidian's hand enters my peripheral vision, holding a small metal cup.

"Here. Some water, Lita."

I reach out, my fingers wrapping around the cold metal. My hands shake enough that the water sloshes against the rim. I bring the cup closer to my chest and look down into the shallow, still depths.

Staring back at me is a stranger.

The face of a monster.

I see the lopsided horns resting on my crown. I see a smug little executioner who believed every word she was told. I see the girl who didn't hesitate to summon an ash-grey Fear Beast to pierce the heart of a terrified Feline informant who was only trying to feed a hiding family. I see the girl who gleefully dragged a broken sniper through the blinding firestorm of his worst trauma just to taste the rot of his panic.

I slaughtered innocents.

And I did it all for the Regent and his Confessarii…

The butchers who murdered my own mother.

The phantom taste of the informant's blood coats the back of my throat. I'm the bad guy. Their puppet. They made me into a weapon and pointed me at the only people who ever loved me.

A heavy, burning drop escapes my eyelashes.

It falls.

The tear strikes the surface of the water with a quiet plink. The surface ripples outward, shattering the reflection of the monster into a hundred weeping pieces.

My grip on the cup is rigid, my knuckles bloodless as the ripples settle. I can't look away from the distorted reflection of my lopsided horns, my woodsmoke grey hair, my misty blue eyes.

Sun-warmed linen and polished oak wraps around me. Raidian leans in closer, her lower hands cradling my wrists while one of her upper hands reaches out, warm fingers brushing against mine.

With a quiet tenderness, she pries the cold metal cup loose.

"Here," she murmurs, adjusting her hold and offering the rim back toward my lips. "Drink it slowly."

I lean forward, hollow and mechanical, part my dry, cracked lips, and take a slow, trembling sip. Then another.

The cold water slides down a throat that feels coated in crushed ash. The sensation grounds me, and I realize how thirsty I am. My body takes the water greedily, desperate for something that isn't the metallic tang of blood or the rot of terror.

A few more frantic sips and I pull back, my breath hitching as another tear spills down my cheek.

"I am a monster…" The whisper tears itself out of my throat, raw and broken. "I tasted their fear… and I liked it… I smiled, Raidian. I am a monster."

Raidian lowers the cup and sets it aside on the crate.

Then her warm palms cup my face, her thumbs brushing away the wet tracking down my cheeks.

"No, Lita," she states, her voice carrying the density of polished oak. "You are not."

I shake my head against her hold. "But I killed them! I…"

"Look at me," Raidian interrupts, quiet but with an authority I can't refuse. She leans in, forcing me to look into her shimmering, tear-filled eyes. "A monster does not weep for the people it has struck down. A monster does not shatter under the weight of its own actions."

Her thumbs stroke my cheekbones, slow and rhythmic.

"The Confessarii poured their shadows into your mind. They erased your warmth, forced you to wear their iron, and commanded you to tear the world apart. They wanted to build an executioner," she says, her voice trembling, thick with love. "But your heart is breaking right now because you know it was wrong. That pain you're feeling? That guilt?"

She pulls back a fraction.

"That is the proof their conditioning failed. That is the proof you are still our Lita," she whispers into the air. "Because a true monster would never feel this much remorse."

I stay silent. Raidian's words echo in the space between us.

I lower my gaze and stare down at myself.

The immaculate white fabric of the military dress. The deep grey coat that breaks sharply at my waist, cut for efficiency. The dark black stockings and the black heels.

It doesn't feel like armor anymore. It feels like a cage of cold iron, the heavy manifestation of my sins.

"I…" I whisper, my fingers curling into the pristine white fabric, suddenly desperate to tear it off my body. "I'm still wearing their uniform…"

The weight of the Royal Court's aesthetic burns against my skin.

Raidian squeezes my shoulder.

"You can wear Amiya's spares if you want, Lita," she offers, her tone casual. "You two are basically the same size."

My head snaps up.

"I can?" I stammer, my mind short-circuiting at the suggestion. "She's the leader of the enemy…"

I flinch, my own programmed vocabulary betraying me, and bite my tongue, my voice shrinking into a wheeze.

"…sorry, I mean Rhodes Island… I am…"

I can't finish the sentence. I am the one who stood in your command tent last night, trying to summon a beast to tear Amiya apart. I am the assassin who just contemplated killing Kal'tsit on her deathbed. I don't deserve to wear Amiya's clothes. I don't deserve the spun sugar and boundless sorrow she poured over me.

Raidian simply smiles, soft and gentle, and smooths down the messy strands of my hair.

"You are one of us. Go ahead and change, Lita."

She lifts a neatly folded pile of fabric from the crate beside her and offers it to me. I take it, my arms wrapping around the bundle like a shield.

Without another word, I turn and walk back into the grey tent where I had slept.

The heavy canvas flaps swing shut, sealing me into the dim, quiet space. The cold draft of the zone bites at the edges of the room.

I set the pile down on the small cot. With stiff, trembling fingers, I unfasten the deep grey coat of my Royal Court uniform. It feels impossibly heavy now, the fabric rigid. I let it slip from my shoulders and drop to the floor in a lifeless heap, strip off the sterile white dress, peel away the dark stockings, and kick off the sharp black heels.

I stand shivering in the dim light, staring down at the discarded Kazdelian iron. It looks like a shed skin. The skin of a monster.

I turn my back on it and reach for the pile on the cot.

I put on Amiya's clothes slowly. First a white, lightly knit sweater, soft, without the starched rigidity of the Regent's aesthetic. A dark ruffled cravat secures around the collar, framing my neck without choking it. Then a dark blue pleated plaid skirt, and a pair of dark, opaque tights that wrap warmly around my legs, far more yielding than the uniform I just shed.

I reach for the outerwear: a heavy, slightly oversized black jacket, secured with tactical straps and a bright yellow zipper pull. As I slide my arms through the wide cuffs, a flash of vivid blue lining catches my eye inside the coat.

Finally I step into a pair of dark leather oxfords with silver buckled straps. They're soft, quiet, and steady against the floor.

I stand still in the quiet tent.

My eyes fall to the front of the black jacket. Running vertically down the left side, printed across a bright teal panel, are bold white letters.

I reach up and trace my fingers over the vinyl print, feeling the shape of the words.

RHODES ISLAND.

I am wearing the mark of the enemy.

The hypocrites the Confessarii had warned me would chain me in the dark.

I stare at the white lettering resting right over my heart.

They are…

My fingers curl inward, gripping the teal panel.

They fed me. They held me while I wept. Amiya looked at me with nothing but grief, and her dying commander threw herself in front of the Regent's blade to save her.

Why…

I close my eyes, and a hot tear slips down my cheek and soaks into the dark ruffled collar.

Why do they have to exist…

Why couldn't they just be the monsters Theresis told me they were? Why did they have to be so kind that my own sins feel too heavy to breathe around?

"Lita?"

Raidian's voice filters through the canvas. "Are you okay in there?"

I wipe my eyes with the oversized black sleeve and force my ragged breathing to steady.

"Ye… yes…" I call back, my voice a fractured whisper.

One last look at the Royal Court uniform piled on the floor. I leave it in the shadows and push past the flaps, out into the bruised daylight in the colors of Rhodes Island. "I finished."

The oversized Rhodes Island jacket shifts around my shoulders.

Raidian looks up from the stack of military crates and takes me in.

"Looks good," she says, a fragile smile in her voice. "Welcome back, Lita."

My fingers tighten around the long, dark sleeves. I look down at my shoes.

"I… I'm back?" I whisper. The words feel foreign on my tongue.

Raidian's hands briefly clasp together. "You can take as long as you need, Lita. But our colors fit you much better."

She doesn't push me for a revelation. With a soft exhale she turns back to a makeshift tactical table covered in low-emission communication terminals, adjusting dials and encrypted frequencies, her hands methodical, establishing contact through the ash-choked skies of Londinium.

I stand near the edge of the tent, watching her work.

The sun-warmed linen and polished oak bleeds steadily into the air. I think about the way she held me last night, anchoring me when my programmed reality shattered.

I lost you twice already… I will not lose you a third time.

The words cut through the fog of my guilt.

I take a hesitant step forward, my soft oxfords silent against the cracked asphalt.

"Raidian… sorry…" I start, my voice small. She pauses her calibration, turning her head to listen. "You mentioned you lost me twice… what do you mean?"

Raidian's hands freeze over the communication dials.

The drowning layer of grief surges back to the front of her. She lowers her head and takes a slow, shaky breath.

"Ah… well," she begins, her voice trembling. "When Babel fell… I didn't find you in the landship… I failed Lethia."

"But then, in 1096…" she continues, resting heavily on the edge of the terminal. "They found you in a Catastrophe-struck zone in Kazdel. You didn't remember anything anymore."

1096. That was two and a half years ago.

"But you eventually found your home with us." She turns to look at me. "Then, of course, you were abducted sometime recently… sometime in late July, or early August this year, presumably. Our communication with the landship is very limited right now. We didn't even know it had happened until Bagpipe saw you."

I pull the long sleeves over my knuckles.

"Raidian…"

"Can I tell you something…" I whisper, my eyes dropping to the cracked pavement between my shoes.

"Of course, Lita," she answers.

I take a slow, shaky breath.

"I don't know what to believe anymore…" I confess, the words fracturing as they leave my throat. "The Confessarii… they told me my mind was a blank slate because you erased it. They told me you were hypocrites keeping us chained in the dark. They gave me a blade and told me I was saving my home."

I look up, my vision blurring. "But… but when I look at you… when I taste the air around you all… none of it makes sense. I don't feel any malice. I only feel…"

Love.

I can't bring myself to say the word.

Raidian turns fully away from the terminal and pats the empty space on the crate beside her.

"Lita, come sit with me."

I stare at the empty spot. It's directly in front of the active tactical table, its low-emission screens displaying topographical maps of Londinium, glowing logistical routes, and the encrypted radio frequencies of the resistance.

I take a trembling step forward.

"Is it really okay?" I ask. "You're showing me… communication intel…"

I look at the maps, the tactical advantage laid bare in front of me.

"Raidian, I am a Djall of the Royal Court," I stammer, trying to warn her of my own programmed danger. "I just spent the last month killing informants for less than this! What if… what if I just memorize these coordinates? What if I just walk out of here and tell the Regent exactly where everyone is hiding…"

The air stays safe. Raidian doesn't scramble to cover the screens. She doesn't draw a weapon to threaten me into silence. The density of her presence doesn't waver.

She just looks at me, an ocean of tenderness.

"Will you?" Raidian asks quietly.

I stare at her and search my chest for the fermented zealotry of Kazdel — for the resolve to memorize the map, summon my Fear Beast, strike her down and run back to the shadow of the Shard.

I find nothing.

My shoulders collapse.

"I…" I choke on the word and shake my head, my hands rising to grip the lapels of the Rhodes Island jacket. "I… I… I cannot…"

I step forward, my legs giving out just as I reach the crates, and collapse onto the seat beside her, curling inward.

Raidian's arms wrap around my shoulders, pulling me flush against her side, her fingers stroking my hair. She holds me right there, unguarded in front of the tactical maps, anchoring me to the truth that I am finally home.

I stare blankly at the tactical table. The screens are littered with blinking markers and overlapping frequency signals, an overwhelming picture of the ruined capital.

My eyes trace the different insignias dotting the topography.

"There's so many…" I whisper. I point a finger at the scattered clusters of resistance. "Reunion… Dublinn… Glasgow… Eartha… the Dukes' armies outside the walls and Rhodes Island… everyone is fighting against the Regent…"

I had been told Kazdel was fighting a righteous war against a world that wanted us dead. But when I look at all these markers, all these different people standing up to the Shard, what the Confessarii told me crumbles a little more.

Raidian's hand keeps stroking my hair.

"He is leading the world down a very dark path, Lita," she says softly, with a melancholic certainty.

I look up from the map to meet her gaze.

"I…"

But before I can say what's on my mind, the air erupts into a chaotic, overlapping blend of resonances.

Amiya bursts through the threshold first. Right behind her is Doctor, obscured in his dark coat and tactical hood.

But the third figure is new.

She's a Vampire, a Sarkaz like me, with dark, unkempt hair and sharp mechanical gear strapped across her frame. The second she steps near, a distinct flavor floods my senses: the frantic static of sparking copper wire and heavy machine grease, steeped in a rich, velvet wave of dark cherry syrup. She carries a mechanical exhaustion, and beneath it a fast, chaotic intellect.

"Raidian, Lita, Misery!" Amiya calls out, her voice tight with breathless tension.

I shrink back against Raidian's side.

From the shadows at the edge of the zone just outside the camp, the air shifts without a sound.

A slender Sarkaz man appears. He bleeds right out of the darkness, composed, a manifestation of stealth. His empathic signature is unlike anything I have ever felt: a lightless void, freezing granite, the quiet density of a moonless night. A phantom.

"What's happening?" Misery asks, his voice low and steadfast, carrying that same cold density of a shadow.

Doctor steps up to the tactical table, his gloved hands tapping a command into the terminal. The map shifts, revealing a series of red markers converging on our sector.

"There have been more patrols here." Amiya's sorrowful resonance spikes with an acidic bite of adrenaline. "We need to move."

The Regent's patrols. My former comrades. If they find us here they'll slaughter everyone in this camp — the girl who gave me her coat, and the woman holding me right now.

Raidian stands up, her expression flashing with worry.

"What about Kal'tsit?" she asks, her voice trembling.

Closure steps up. "Shining and Nightingale have found a safe house with the help of Eartha," she answers, her tone sharp and focused. "They can look after her."

Amiya turns from the tactical table and catches sight of the jacket and the sweater I'm wearing.

"Oh, Lita, you changed!" A strained smile pulls at the corners of her mouth. "It looks good on you. But… we don't have time to catch up."

She turns her focus back to the threat.

Doctor steps into the center of the command tent. The clouded fog and sharp iron of his presence anchors the room's panic. He doesn't waste a second, his voice muffled beneath the dark hood but carrying a pragmatic authority.

"Pack up the slates, communicators, and all Arts Units," Doctor orders. "Gather all the essential medicines. Closure, Raidian, Misery, scrub the camp. Erase every digital footprint and burn the ciphers. We leave the canvas and the crates. This needs to look exactly like a group of desperate refugees who survived the Catastrophe, not a Rhodes Island forward base."

Raidian and Misery break off, moving with efficiency to dismantle the communication hubs.

Closure flies toward the medical supplies.

"Logos, Shining, and Nightingale are coming soon to transport Kal," she reports, shoving sterile bandages and saline drips into a heavy duffel bag.

I stand frozen near the crates.

The Royal Court patrols are coming. My former squad. The concussive thud of Kazdelian boots I proudly commanded just yesterday. If I slip out through the back of the tent right now, I could run straight toward them. I could escape this guilt and return to the simplicity of my old life.

This is my chance to run.

I look down at the bright teal panel on my chest and the bold white letters printed across the jacket. To the pleated plaid skirt and the soft leather oxfords.

I can tell them this is just to blend in, I tell myself. I can run to the patrol commander, salute at strict attention, and say I stole the enemy commander's clothes as a tactical disguise. I can tell Theresis I infiltrated their forward camp to map their coordinates for the artilleries. It would be a flawless excuse. I would be welcomed back as a hero of Kazdel.

The whole opposition, dismantled from the inside.

I try to summon the cold logic of the Confessarii.

But staring at the Rhodes Island insignias, the thought of leading the Regent's blades to this camp doesn't fill me with loyalty — it just makes me sick.

Amiya and Raidian both stop what they're doing.

The urgent rustling stalls. They both look directly at me.

"Lita…" Amiya says softly, her voice thick with worry.

I force my spine straight.

"I… I'm okay!" I stammer, my voice cracking in the quiet. I shake my head, trying to push the traitorous thoughts back into the void. "I just… sorry…"

Doctor pauses his typing at the terminal.

"She should go to the safe house too," Doctor orders, his voice muffled beneath the hood but final.

"That… that might be for the best…" Amiya agrees softly. "It's too dangerous for her to stay on the move with us."

Before I can process the command, the air in the tent goes silent.

Logos is as composed as before.

But he isn't alone.

Following close behind him are two Sarkaz women.

The second they step into the tent, two new flavors crash into my channels.

From the pale, blonde-haired one leaning heavily on a staff, the resonance is fragile. She tastes of shattered spun glass and cold medicinal ether, hollowed out by a floating emptiness. A ghost drifting through a waking dream.

But it's the woman supporting her that paralyzes me.

She's tall, wielding a heavy sword, her face half-hidden by a sweeping hood and dark horns. At first her flavor is radiant — warm sunlight and penitent devotion. But beneath that warmth, buried at the core of her, is an older echo.

Freezing surgical steel, embalming fluid, and old congealed blood trapped in a lightless crypt.

My lungs seize.

I scramble backward, my oxfords slipping on the cracked asphalt, and crash into the crates behind me, shrinking into the darkest corner. My arms come up over my head, my whole body shaking. My tail winds around my legs.

"She… she… she is a Confessarius!" I scream, my voice tearing raw through the sterile air of the camp.

She freezes in her tracks.

She looks at my trembling frame with a quiet sorrow.

"How…" The word is barely audible.

She pauses, then lowers her head in humility.

"My apologies," she says softly, her voice steady, carrying the sheltering weight of sunlight. "I am no longer identified by that term. I am a medic. My name is Shining."

"What…"

My arms loosen from around my head. I lower my hands, my fingers still trembling.

A medic?

I uncurl my body, my eyes darting around the low-emission light of the forward camp.

I look at Shining. A Confessarius.

I look at Logos. A Banshee, standing composed.

I look at Closure. A Vampire.

I look at Misery, then at Nightingale.

They are all Sarkaz.

Logos and Closure are even of Royal Court bloodlines, just like me.

The Confessarii told me Rhodes Island was a hypocritical front. They told me it stole Sarkaz memories, exploited our blood, kept us chained in the dark as docile, hollow puppets.

But I look at their wrists, and there are no iron shackles. I look at their eyes, and there is no indoctrinated emptiness. They move with efficiency, driven by loyalty. They're fighting for Rhodes Island. They're risking their lives in a Catastrophe-struck zone to protect Amiya and to save the commander bleeding out on a cot.

They are not chained. They chose to be here.

Which means the only one ever kept in the dark… was me.

"We don't have time," Doctor says, slicing through my revelation.

His command is muffled and flat.

"Logos, transport Kal'tsit and Lita to the safe house with Shining and Nightingale."

He steps out of the shadows.

"Consider it a success," Logos says.

Not an acknowledgment. The words carry the weight of ancient law.

"Follow me," he commands.

He turns and moves into the bruised, ash-choked daylight of Londinium without a sound.

I fall into step behind him.

Behind me, the crunch of debris marks the passage of the others.

Shining walks with Kal'tsit's broken, bleeding weight braced against her frame. Even with her sword resting at her side, her movements are gentle.

Kal'tsit's glacier of a presence is still shattering. The dark crimson stain spreading across her white bandages is a reality that makes my chest ache.

But she isn't fading.

Nightingale walks beside them, leaning on her Arts Unit. As we move I feel the volume of her Arts bleeding into the air — a dense barrier of Originium energy.

I expect it to burn, to taste of the scorching ozone of a Catastrophe. It doesn't. It's healing. It wraps around Kal'tsit's fading glacier, a sanctuary of light that holds the dying star together in the dark.

We wade through the ruins of the sector. The Victorian architecture here is warped and hollowed out, the streets littered with clusters of black Originium crystals.

I sweep the shadows of the collapsed buildings and the rusted alleyways for the fermented zealotry and rusted iron of the Regent's patrols.

I find nothing. The air is empty of Kazdelian hostility.

"I… I don't taste any patrols nearby," I say, my voice hesitant in the cold air.

Logos doesn't break his stride, doesn't turn his head.

"Your mind is still clouded, Lita." His voice cuts through the ruined avenue.

I falter, my oxfords catching on a piece of shattered brickwork.

"I… I don't know…" I stammer.

Does he mean my Arts are failing? Or that the void the Confessarii poured into my head is still filtering my reality? I search the area again, terrified that my own programmed blindness will lead these people into a slaughter. I am a monster who can't even rely on her own senses anymore.

Shining pauses her steady march.

She turns her head, the fabric of her hood shifting as she looks at me.

The radiant warmth of her swells, saturated with an empathetic sorrow.

"Another…" Shining breathes out. "Another child whose warmth they tried to bury in their crypt."

She adjusts Kal'tsit's weight.

"You're not broken, Lita," she adds softly, that sheltering sunlight settling over me. "You're just finally waking up from their long, terrible dream."

"I… I think I'm awake," I whisper, my fingers tightening on the Rhodes Island jacket.

"You are Lita," Shining affirms. There's no judgment in it, only that sheltering weight of sunlight that defies the crypt at her core.

We walk another ten minutes in heavy silence, navigating deeper into the desolate labyrinth.

"Liz, do you need a break?" Shining asks quietly, slowing a fraction so as not to jar Kal'tsit's broken frame.

Nightingale pauses, her hands still on her focal unit. She takes a shallow breath, the barrier of her healing Arts never wavering around Kal'tsit.

"I… I am fine. Thank you," Nightingale says, her voice fragile, anchored by a quiet determination.

I stare at them, my oxfords halting on the cracked pavement.

They're talking to each other. Checking on each other, in the middle of an occupied war zone.

Why are they so nice?

I think of my life in the monolithic shadow of the Shard. Of boots thudding through grand, hollow halls.

In all the time I spent marching through ash-choked avenues, wielding my Fear Beast to eliminate terrified informants and shatter the minds of the resistance… no one ever asked me how I felt. No one asked if I was tired after hours of wading through stagnant, oil-slicked water in rusted processing plants. The Regent commanded, and I obeyed.

The only person who ever checked on me… was Theresa.

She was the only one who looked at me.

Actually looked at me.

My vision blurs with fresh tears.

Logos doesn't turn his body. He shifts his head, glancing back over his shoulder.

"Lita. Keep up. Time is short," Logos commands.

His voice is calm and resonant.

I stare at his cloak. The mountain of guilt anchors me to the cracked pavement.

"Wouldn't it be easier… to just leave me here…"

The steady crunch of debris stops.

Shining and Nightingale halt their careful march. The ruined avenue stills.

Unable to look at any of them, I stare at the white Rhodes Island letters.

"I am an executioner…"

I squeeze my eyes shut, a hot tear spilling down my cheek to soak into the dark ruffled cravat at my neck.

"I'm just a burden… a liability. I might even be a spy and not know it. If you leave me behind in this zone, you can move faster. You won't have to worry about me dragging you down…" I gesture toward Kal'tsit, broken in Shining's arms. "You can save Kal'tsit… You can save the people who actually deserve to live!"

I wait for Logos to agree.

I wait for his logic to conclude that my life is worthless beside the supreme commander of Rhodes Island.

Instead the crunch of footsteps returns. Not walking away.

Logos steps back toward me.

"Ease and rightness are rarely the same path," Logos states. "The Royal Court discards its tools the moment they become inconvenient or hesitant. They strip away your warmth and replace it with coldness, precisely because it is easier to command a hollow puppet than a person with a conscience."

His expression doesn't change.

"Rhodes Island does not abandon its own," he continues, his voice a gravitational force. "We do not trade lives for convenience. Leaving you here would betray the reason we are fighting."

"You are not a liability to us, Lita," Shining adds, holding Kal'tsit's bandaged frame secure. "Kal'tsit threw herself in front of the Regent's blade to protect the future. And you… you are that future. We will carry both of you out of this ash, together."

"We will protect you." Nightingale nods weakly.

"I…"

"Wipe your eyes, Lita," Logos orders, turning his back to me once more. "The safe house is not far. Walk."

I scrub the tears away with my sleeve, force my spine straight, and draw a shaky breath.

"Okay," I whisper.

I step forward, falling into step behind his stride.

We press deeper into the apocalyptic scar of Londinium.

Beside me, Nightingale's steps begin to falter. The volume of Arts she's projecting to hold Kal'tsit's dying star together is taking its toll on her. The shattered spun glass and cold medicinal ether of her shivers, hollowing out.

She sways, leaning heavily against Shining's side to keep upright.

Shining does not miss a step. She adjusts her hold, her hood shifting as she supports both Kal'tsit and Nightingale with an effortless devotion.

"I will find you a wheelchair once we are safe, Liz."

"Thank you…" Nightingale's voice fractures like cracked crystal in the cold air.

Then everything stills.

Logos stops, his stride ceasing without a sound. The mountain cold of him deepens, tasting of obsidian.

"Halt," he commands, low. "Patrols. We hide, do not engage."

A second later, I feel them.

The wave crashes into me, the same flavor I bathed in just yesterday: fermented zealotry, rusted iron, the loyalty of Kazdel. Royal Court boots begin to thud down the desolate thoroughfare, synchronized, marching with efficiency.

Shining moves fast. We duck off the exposed street into the hollowed-out husk of a collapsed apartment building, where the debris offers deep shadow.

Shining kneels behind the destroyed masonry and sets Kal'tsit's bleeding body flat against the cold rubble.

Logos and Nightingale press into the darkness beside them.

I drop to the ground and scramble back until I hit the ruined brickwork, pulling my knees to my chest, my tail coiled around my ankles.

I squeeze my eyes shut, burying my face in the white knit of Amiya's Rhodes Island sweater.

The rhythmic crunch of the patrol draws closer. I know what they look like — the scarred white armor, the iron visors, the Royal Court swords.

If I look past this shattered wall I will see my former comrades. I will see my own unforgivable sins marching through the ash.

I cannot look. I cannot face them.

I clamp my palms over my ears.

"No…" The word escapes as a wet gasp, betraying my attempt to stay silent in the shadows.

I start to sob, the heaving tearing through me.

The air shifts with a composed stillness.

"Pussim, qāt šīmti," Logos declares.

A barrier of metaphysical obsidian and mountain stillness sweeps over our small cluster in the dark.

"They… they taste different… why…"

I think back to their loyalty here… and to what they tasted like near me…

"No…" I weep blindly, my voice fracturing. "I'm just a monster… the common soldiers… they were more scared of me than the resistance…"

I remember it clearly now. The way the Royal Court soldiers stood at strict attention.

The dread bleeding off them whenever I commanded my Fear Beast to strike. I thought it was the loyalty of Kazdel. It wasn't.

They were terrified of the Djall who could plunge into their minds and eat their fears.

They were terrified of me.

Through the void of my self-pity, a touch breaks through.

A warm hand rests against my back.

It begins to pat, slow and steady and rhythmic.

The flavor wrapping around my shivering frame is sunlight.

She doesn't speak. She just pats my back.

"They are moving away," Logos observes, with a quiet certainty.

I let the tears fall a minute longer, the salt and ash mixing. The hand on my back doesn't rush me.

Eventually the heaving in my chest slows into shallow, trembling gasps, and I scrub the rest of the wetness from my eyes with the sleeve of Amiya's jacket.

Shining and Nightingale reach out, guiding my numb weight to my feet. Nightingale sways, and still projects the dense barrier of healing Arts holding Kal'tsit's fading glacier together. Shining adjusts the bandaged weight against her side, balancing it with grace.

"The safe house is not far now, everyone," Shining says, a steady comfort in the cold air. "It is inside the tube."

Logos raises his stylus, pointing toward a crumbling subterranean entrance half-buried beneath the pulverized concrete of a collapsed Victorian facade.

We follow him down into the underground.

As we descend the ruined steps, the ash-choked daylight of Londinium is swallowed by a cavernous industrial abyss. We step onto a wet concrete landing and the subterranean view unfolds — a desolate, multi-tiered labyrinth. The tube network is a hollowed-out intersection of rusted steel and shadowed concrete pillars, zig-zagging metal staircases and skeletal catwalks stretched across hazy chasms.

The darkness is broken only by a few caged work lights resting on the damp floors, their sterile glow throwing long shadows across stacked wooden crates and metal scaffolding. The air down here is heavy and stagnant, smelling of old machine grease, wet dust, and the trapped heat of the underground.

I step past a glowing work light at the edge of the platform, staying as close to Nightingale's side as I can.

I keep my eyes on the rusted metal grating.

"So it is true," I say, my voice echoing faintly against the concrete pillars. "The resistance is hiding in the underground sectors of the nomadic plates."

"Theresis is focused on controlling the factories for his war efforts," Logos states. "Patrols rarely come down here."

I know.

I know they rarely come down here, because I led one of those rare patrols into these exact tunnels last week. The only time I came down here.

I don't want to tell them. I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste copper.

My mind drags me back to the dark of a tunnel just like this one. A group of Eartha resistance members huddled behind a barricade of stacked wooden crates. I remember the moment my Arts tore past their defenses. I remember sifting through their thoughts for the coordinates of Rhodes Island's forward camps.

None of them knew where Rhodes Island was hiding. They were useless to the Regent's intelligence.

And because they were useless… they didn't stand a chance.

I remember the screech of my Fear Beast, and the wet sound of flesh and bone giving way in the dark.

The mountain of guilt presses down on my chest, threatening to lock my legs here on the catwalk.

No.

Lita. Focus.

I shut my eyes for a second and shove the memory of my sins back down into the void. I can't break down again. Shining and Nightingale are exhausting themselves to keep Kal'tsit alive. I can't be a burden to them.

My legs keep moving, following close behind the barrier of Nightingale's healing Arts, deeper into the underground.

We navigate past the rusted, groaning catwalks and descend until we reach a reinforced steel door tucked into the deepest shadows of the maintenance sector.

Standing guard in front of the hidden entrance is a Feline man, clutching a makeshift sword.

The second he sees our group emerge from the dark, his posture stiffens. The taste bleeding off him is unmistakable to me — the sweet rotting nectar of terror, laced with the metallic tang of helplessness.

He takes in Logos's frame, Shining's sweeping hood, Nightingale's horns, and then locks onto the lopsided horns on my crown.

He thinks he is about to die exactly like the Eartha resistance members I slaughtered in these very tunnels.

I shrink back. I want to disappear, to pull the heavy collar up over my face and my horns so I don't have to taste his fear anymore.

Then his eyes catch the bold, white "RHODES ISLAND" lettering printed across Logos's uniform and mine.

The coiled tension in him shatters. His shoulders drop, and the rotting panic gives way to relief. He lowers his weapon, his hands trembling.

"Sorry… Rhodes Island," he stammers, his voice fracturing in the damp air. He presses his back flat to the rusted wall to give us as much space as he can. "I was told to expect… Sarkaz, I didn't know…"

Shining steps forward.

"Is there a bed?" she asks, adjusting Kal'tsit's bleeding weight against her side. The crimson stain on the white bandages is spreading fast.

His eyes widen at the sight of the blood. He scrambles to pull the steel lever of the maintenance door, forcing it open with a metallic groan.

"Ah, yes." He gestures into the dimly lit room beyond. "We have moved in some equipment. It is not much. But that's all we could manage. I will leave this to you now."

"Thank you," Shining replies.

The Eartha guard gives us one last nervous look before he flees down the dark tunnel, his boots splashing through the stagnant puddles.

We cross the threshold into the hidden maintenance room and seal the iron door behind us.

Shining carries Kal'tsit to the makeshift field bed in the center of the dim room.

Behind them, the barrier of Originium energy finally dissipates.

Nightingale sags. With nothing left to hold together, she releases her grip on her staff and hollows out into an exhausted emptiness. She stumbles toward a rusted metal folding chair in the corner and drops into it, her hands limp on her lap, staring at the floor.

Logos remains standing near the reinforced steel door.

"I will secure the perimeter," he states, his voice calm and resonant, carrying the weight of ancient law. "The Military Commission actively tracks residual Arts usage. I must weave a conceptual silence over this sector so the patrols remain blind to us."

He reaches for the iron lever, then pauses, turning his head to look at me.

"You had an opportunity to defect back to the Royal Court when the patrols passed us," Logos observes, his tone devoid of malice or judgment. "Yet you chose to remain in the shadows with us."

Before I can formulate a response he steps backward into the pitch-black tunnel, and the steel door shuts behind him with a clank.

I'm left alone with the two medics and the dying mastermind I had once been ordered to hate.

Shining throws back her sweeping hood, revealing her dark horns and pale hair. She leans over Kal'tsit, her hands methodical as she begins to unravel the blood-soaked bandages.

"Lita," Shining calls out, steady and commanding. "I need your help. Fetch me the saline drips, the sterile gauze, and the surgical scissors from that equipment crate."

My oxfords are fused to the cracked concrete. I stare at the crate she's pointing to, then down at my own trembling hands in the oversized sleeves.

Fetch the medical supplies…

All I see are the hands of a monster. The fingers that pointed to summon a Fear Beast. The hands that tore through the minds of Kazdel's enemies and terrified informants.

I stumble backward and press my hands against my chest.

"I… I… I don't know…" The words tear themselves out of me. I look at Kal'tsit's bleeding form, the guilt closing my airway. "What if… what if I hurt her…"

Shining's hands stop moving over the wounds.

She turns fully toward me and holds her hands out in the harsh light of the caged work lamps. Her palms are already stained with Kal'tsit's blood.

"Look at my hands, Lita," Shining says quietly, an anchor in the damp room.

I force my eyes up, past my own trembling fingers to hers.

"I was a Confessarius," Shining states, her tone devoid of deception. "The sword at my side is a blade designed to sever the soul itself. My hands were forged in the darkest shadows of Kazdel. I have done far worse things in my past than you could imagine."

"But I chose to lay that darkness down," Shining continues, looking into my tear-filled eyes. "I am no longer an executioner. I am a medic now. Our pasts do not have to be our prisons, Lita. Our hands can learn to heal."

She lowers her hands and turns back to Kal'tsit on the bed.

"Do not try to carry the weight of the entire world right now," Shining instructs, with an undeniable tenderness. "Just focus on the small things you can do in this exact moment. Fetch the supplies. Hand them to me. That is all I ask of you."

I look down at my hands again.

If Shining can use hers to save a life, then maybe I don't have to be a monster forever.

My fingers uncurl.

"Okay…" I whisper, taking a hesitant step toward the stacked metal crates. "Okay… if you trust me…"

I work until my body aches.

I scramble back and forth across the concrete, handing Shining everything she asks for — the saline drips, the sterile gauze, the surgical tools, gripped like lifelines. Whenever something requires a delicate touch or precise mixing, Nightingale is right there. She leans heavily over the makeshift table beside me, and exhausted as she is, her hands guide mine, her touch tasting faintly of cold medicinal ether. She doesn't judge the shaking of my wrists. She just helps me.

I lose track of time in the dark of the maintenance room. I don't know how long we fight the dark crimson stain.

Finally, Shining ties off a fresh, clean swath of white bandages.

"She is stable for now," Shining says, exhaling slowly as she steps back from the field bed. She turns her head to look at me. "Take a break."

I lean against the crates, still catching my breath.

The two medics are spent. Nightingale is slumped back into the rusted folding chair, spun glass on the verge of shattering. Shining is wiping the blood from her hands, her devotion carrying the weight of exhaustion.

I push off the crates and walk softly across the room, find a supply box in the corner, and grab three bottles of water, cradling the cold plastic against the jacket.

I go to the chair first and hold a bottle out to her.

"Here, some water," I say softly in the harsh, caged light. I hesitate, remembering the name Shining used on the ruined avenue. "Liz, right?"

Nightingale lifts her head, that floating emptiness settling on the bottle, and takes the plastic from my hand.

"Yes…" Her voice fractures like cracked crystal. A faint warmth touches her. "Thank you."

I nod and walk over to the field bed.

Shining is sitting on the edge of a nearby crate, her sword resting at her side. I hold the second bottle out to her.

"Here, for you, Shining," I say, my voice steadying a little more.

Shining looks at the water, then up at my face. The ancient echo of the crypt buried at her core is silent. All that comes off her is tenderness. She reaches out and takes the bottle.

"Thank you, Lita," Shining says.

We sit in silence for a while. The only sounds in the dim maintenance room are condensation dripping from the concrete ceiling and Kal'tsit's ragged breathing on the bed. I unscrew the cap of my own bottle and take a slow sip.

A metallic squeak pierces the quiet.

The heavy iron handle on the reinforced door begins to turn.

Shining tenses. The exhausted slump of her shoulders vanishes, her hand dropping to the hilt of the sword at her side.

I don't panic. Before she can draw her blade, I taste it bleeding through the iron.

Spun sugar, steeped in an ocean of aching sorrow.

And right beside it, a grounding anchor. Black tea and cold iron, under all that fog.

"Amiya and Doctor," I say quickly, lowering my water bottle.

Shining exhales, her hand releasing the hilt.

The door swings open with a groan and Amiya rushes across the threshold. Doctor follows close behind, pulling the steel door shut. They are both breathing hard, their clothes dusted with the pale ash of the ruined city.

Amiya takes in the caged light of the room — Nightingale, me, then Kal'tsit's heavily bandaged, stable form on the field bed. The acidic bite of adrenaline in her recedes.

"Everyone made it." Amiya's shoulders sag with relief.

Doctor steps further into the room.

"There are more patrols around this sector now," Doctor observes. "They are aggressively sweeping the underground tube networks."

If they're sweeping the underground, deploying troops into the dark, it isn't to look for scattered Eartha resistance members.

My fingers tighten around the water bottle, the thin plastic crinkling in the quiet room.

I was a Djall of the Royal Court. I was the Regent's executioner.

And I just vanished.

"…they… are hunting for me…" I stammer, the mountain of guilt pressing down again. "…they have to be…"

"Lita…" Amiya steps toward me, her ring-clad hands reaching out as if she wants to comfort me. The weeping pity of her washes over me.

I brought this upon them. The Regent's blades are sweeping toward the people who just risked their lives to save me, and I led them here.

I look up at Doctor, hoping for a denial.

But he just stands there in the dim light.

"It is likely," Doctor confirms.

Amiya lets out a long, trembling sigh and rubs her temples. Her ears droop.

"Doctor. Maybe we should just retreat…" Her voice echoes faintly against the rusted steel walls. "Eartha, Glasgow, Reunion, Dublinn… the casualties are just mounting day by day…"

She looks down at her shoes, the weight of the occupation pressing on her shoulders. "And the Grand Dukes' mobile cities and landships are just sitting outside the walls. Unable… unwilling to act…"

Doctor stands still, his tactical hood and dark visor giving nothing away.

"Moving Kal'tsit is too much risk," Doctor states.

Then he turns slightly.

"We should move Lita back to the landship."

Back to the landship.

"Are… are you going to lock me away?!" I gasp, scrambling backward until my back hits the cold, damp concrete of the wall. "I… I…"

"No! No… Lita," Amiya cries out. She rushes forward, her hands raised in a non-threatening gesture. The drowning ocean of her unconditional grief washes over my senses. "It is not safe for you here in Londinium, the Military Commission is looking for you…"

Amiya stops a few paces away.

"And we are stretched as thin as we are already," she adds, her voice trembling. "And we haven't even made a dent in the occupation."

I stare at her.

My shoulders collapse.

"Sorry… I am not that useful…"

Amiya closes the final distance between us and rests her hand gently over mine, over the crinkled plastic bottle.

"You are useful." Her voice is thick with tenderness. "But your battleground is back on the landship in the Convalescent Garden, Lita."

I nod weakly.

Amiya turns her head back to Doctor.

"But how do we smuggle her out?" Amiya asks.

Doctor doesn't hesitate.

"Blaze and Raidian."

They are elite. They are powerful.

"Are you sure…?" I whisper, shrinking back against the damp concrete wall. "They are worth far more than me…"

"Don't you ever say that again!" Amiya interrupts.

"There are so many people waiting for you back on the landship," Amiya continues, her voice trembling with the weight of her sincerity. "Suzuran, Podenco, Perfumer, Caladria, Mint, Eyjafjalla…"

"I… I… really?" I gasp, my voice small. The idea that a whole group of people is waiting for a monster like me doesn't fit inside my head.

"Yes," Amiya answers, her tone holding not a single bit of deception.

Doctor turns toward the door.

"I'll contact them." Doctor pushes the iron lever down. The door groans open just enough for the hooded figure to slip out into the dark tunnels, sealing us back inside the maintenance room.

The moment the door clicks shut, the authority of the "enemy commander" drops out of Amiya's frame.

She lets out a long, ragged exhale and collapses. She slumps down next to me on the cracked concrete, her back hitting the rusted wall, and pulls her knees up, her hands resting limply in her lap. She looks so young, swallowed by the burden of leading this fractured resistance against the Regent.

I sit still beside her.

I look at the damp, cramped maintenance room. I look at Nightingale, hollowed out on a folding chair. I look at Shining, sitting tiredly beside the makeshift field bed. I look at Amiya, slumped against the wall with a heart full of sorrow.

Then I think of the monolithic titan of the Shard. The endless legions of armored Sarkaz patrols, the Originium artilleries that can tear the sky open, the cold iron of Theresis's power.

"…the Confessarii said Rhodes Island is the evil superpower…" I whisper at the floor. "But…"

But there's no superpower here. No ruthless mastermind chaining people in the dark. Just a small, exhausted group huddled in a rusted subterranean box, bleeding to protect the world — and me from the real monsters above.

"Lita…" Amiya murmurs, her voice small against the walls. "Theresis has occupied Londinium since 1094…"

She rests her chin on her knees, staring into the concrete.

"We're trying to topple a wall with chisels right now." The words crack under the weight she carries. "Because we failed to take the Shard…"

The Shard.

Just yesterday I had marched down the ash-choked avenues of the capital and looked up at those three hundred stories with pride. The beating heart of our future homeland. A monument to our righteous survival.

"They told me…" I start, my voice tearing raw through the quiet room. "The Confessarii… they told me they fought a glorious battle against the Tower Knights and the Steam Knights. They said they wiped them out in hard-won combat to secure the capital for our people."

Amiya's long ears droop further.

"It's not untrue…" Amiya turns her head to look at me. "But the Military Commission didn't break through the walls in a siege. They were invited in."

"Invited?"

"By one of the Victorian Grand Dukes," Amiya explains, her voice trembling. "Then, with the Dukes' help, Theresis destroyed the parliamentary forces from the inside. The Steam Knights didn't fall in a fair fight, Lita. They were betrayed."

So there was no glorious battle. No brave last stand against a world that hated us. Someone just held the door open, and the Military Commission walked in and started killing.

Amiya looks back down at the damp concrete.

"Then Theresis turned on the Dukes and killed them," she adds, the finality of it dropping into the room like an iron anvil.

"Is everything…" I choke on the words, a hot tear spilling down my cheek to soak into the cravat around my neck. "Is everything they told me… a lie?"

Across the cramped room, a composed voice answers.

Shining shifts beside the makeshift field bed.

"They tell you what fits their design," Shining states quietly.

"They strip away your truth, and they pour their shadows into the void to make you the shape they need," she continues, her voice steady in the damp air. "To them, you were never Lita. You were simply a blade."

I bury my face in my knees, the way Amiya is doing. The mountain of guilt sits down on my lungs. I was a design. A puppet, and the ones pulling my strings were the same butchers who murdered my mother. They used my Arts to tear into terrified people who were only trying to survive the Regent and all his lies.

A warm, ring-clad hand rests over mine.

Amiya just holds my trembling hand in the dark.

I don't want to talk after that.

I just sit on the cracked concrete. Amiya doesn't push me to speak. Her hand stays draped over mine.

Everyone is quiet.

The only sounds in the maintenance room are condensation dripping from the rusted pipes and Kal'tsit's ragged breathing. For a long stretch, the room is submerged in mourning silence.

That is, until the iron lever of the reinforced door groans downward.

The door swings open, and the air in the cramped room erupts. Doctor steps through first. Right behind the hooded tactician, a roaring wave crashes into me.

It tastes of heavy machine grease, roaring exhaust, and unapologetic fire.

Blaze steps into the caged light of the maintenance room, heavily geared, her chainsaw resting on her shoulder. She takes one look at me cuddled against the damp wall in Amiya's oversized Rhodes Island jacket, and a rowdy grin breaks across her face.

"Well kiddo," Blaze says, her loud, warm voice cutting through the heavy air of the underground. "Looks like you're getting the Blaze Express experience once again."

I blink, wide-eyed.

"Blaze… express?" I repeat.

She chuckles, a rumbling sound, and winks, her grin widening into something chaotic. "Oh, you'll see."

Right behind her, sun-warmed linen and polished oak bleed into the air. Raidian enters the room, an encrypted communications terminal in her hands, her expression locked into a dense focus.

"I'll jam their signals," Raidian states, her voice carrying a steady certainty. She looks at me. "Ready, Lita?"

I stare at them. They're risking their lives to smuggle me out of an occupied capital.

I take a slow, shaky breath.

Scrambling up from the concrete floor, I turn back to the center of the room.

I plant my feet together and press my hands flat against my chest, right over the bold white "RHODES ISLAND" lettering.

And I bow.

I bend deeply at the waist, folding my spine all the way down in gratitude.

"Thank… thank you…" The words scrape out, fracturing under the weight of my guilt. A fresh tear slips from my eyelashes and hits the damp concrete below. "…for saving me. I hope… I can live up to the… chance you gave me."

The air shifts. The ocean of Amiya's aching sorrow parts just enough to let a warmth shine through.

Amiya stands up from the floor and brushes the pulverized ash from her dark blue skirt.

"I know you will, Lita," Amiya says softly.

Blaze lets out a tiny, exaggerated sniff.

"That's enough sentimentality for today," Blaze declares.

Then, without a second of warning, my entire world turns horizontal.

Blaze steps forward, her arm shoots out around my waist, and she hoists me right off the cracked floor with zero effort, tucking me under her arm like a sack of supplies.

"Eh?!" I yelp, my face suddenly parallel to the damp floor. "Let go of me! I am Royal Court! I am nobility! This is unacceptable!"

I kick and wriggle. My oxfords kick wildly at empty air, my tail whipping around in protest. I push against her tactical gear, but her grip is an anchor.

"Sure, sure you are, Lita," Blaze laughs, adjusting my weight against her side. "This is way faster. We don't have time to waste."

Behind us, the mourning silence of the subterranean room shatters.

Raidian covers her mouth with one of her upper hands and lets out a soft giggle.

Amiya giggles too.

I crane my neck, my face burning as I hang from Blaze's side. Even Nightingale, still slumped in the folding chair, manages a smile. Beside her, Shining's expression softens with amusement.

Blaze and Raidian turn to the center of the room and trade a last look with Amiya and the hooded Doctor.

"All packed up?" Raidian asks, her voice steady, her hands securing the encrypted communications terminal she'll use to mask our escape. "Let's go."

Blaze shifts her grip on my waist and hoists me a little higher.

"Try to keep up, Raidian," she challenges with a grin.

With me still tucked firmly under her arm like a captured package, they march out.

We cross the threshold, leaving the maintenance room behind. The reinforced door groans shut, plunging us back into the damp dark of the subterranean tube network. Blaze moves fast. I bounce against her side, my vision a dizzying blur of rusted metal staircases, deep chasms, and concrete pillars.

Despite the stagnant smell of old machine grease and wet dust in the tunnels, the air right around me is a different world — Raidian's sun-warmed linen and polished oak, wrapped in Blaze's roaring, protective warmth.

"Why…" I whisper, barely audible over the rhythmic thud of Blaze's boots on the cracked concrete. "Why do you all have to taste safe…"

Blaze doesn't break her stride.

"You've been with us for two and a half years by now, kiddo," Blaze says.

"I don't know how or when they kidnapped you," Blaze continues, the rowdy edge in her voice dropping into something fierce. "But I'd have torn right through the Shard if I knew."

I crane my neck up and look at the side of Blaze's face in the dim shadows of the underground.

I expect the hollow bravado of a soldier exaggerating their loyalty. I wait for the stagnant rot of deception to bleed into the air.

Instead I hit a wall of truth.

The machine grease and fire radiating off her burns with certainty. Blaze means it. She's ready to burn down the Regent and his entire army just to drag me out of here.

My head drops in defeat, my cheek resting against the tactical pouch on Blaze's hip.

"You people are crazy… I am a pureblood… I am being kidnapped by a Feline with a chainsaw and a Liberi with two extra mechanical arms."

The horizontal blur of the subterranean tube network flashes past as Blaze carries me through the dark.

Then that forward momentum snaps.

Blaze stops on a dime.

My whole body jerks forward with the inertia, swinging like a pendulum beneath her arm.

"Woah! Bl…" I yelp, far too loudly against the steel walls.

Before the syllable finishes leaving my lips, a hand slaps over my mouth. Not a strike — a clamp, tasting of heavy machine grease and focus.

Blaze and Raidian pivot into the shadow of a concrete pillar. Blaze presses her back flat against the cold stone, holding me against her hip, her hand still over my mouth. Raidian crouches low beside us, the encrypted terminal in her lower hands, her upper hands hovering at the folds of her coat.

The air in the tunnel shifts.

Before I even see them, a wave crashes into the air.

I know this taste too well.

I turn my head and peer around the edge of Blaze's tactical gear, into the distance.

Marching down one of the catwalks are seven Sarkaz.

Six of them are heavily armored infantry, in the immaculate white armor of Kazdel, accented with geometric shoulder plating and dark grey utility belts. Their faces are hidden beneath featureless white hoods, save for a blood-red visor cutting through the subterranean gloom. They march in strict unison, gauntlets gripping their blades.

But it's the figure walking at the back of the formation that freezes the blood in my veins.

A Caster, draped in sweeping white and grey robes, their face hidden beneath a heavy white hood with a pointed black crest. In their hand is an ornate staff crackling with bright purple Originium energy, lighting the damp walls with an unnatural glow.

My heart hammers against my ribs.

These aren't standard occupation troops. The pristine white armor, the composed discipline — I know exactly who they are. The elite of Kazdel's wrath.

Blaze slowly removes her hand from my mouth.

"They're the Regent's personal guard…" I whisper, my fingers digging into Blaze. "They are not normal patrols."

Blaze's roaring fire compresses into a tight, lethal coil.

"We know," Blaze whispers back, a low rumble in the dark. "That's why we hide."

The thuds of Kazdelian boots draw closer, echoing with rhythmic precision against the damp walls.

I press myself against Blaze's side, making my frame as small as it will go in the pitch-black shadow of the pillar. The air thickens. The fermented zealotry and rusted iron of the Royal Court patrol washes over us, so thick I can almost taste the metal of their drawn blades.

The patrol stops a few meters from our hiding spot.

One of the armored infantrymen points toward a cross-section of the catwalk and speaks.

"Nar'em qe ha-šamat."

"Za'dareq?"

The words are sharp and alien to my ears. It's Kazdelian.

I bite my lip. The Confessarii had told me I was a Djall of the Royal Court, a pureblood noble fighting to reclaim our ancestral homeland. Yet listening to my former comrades coordinate their sweep, I don't understand a single syllable of our native tongue. They never bothered to teach me the language of my people. They only taught me how to be their executioner.

I only know how to speak Victorian.

The Caster in the white hood answers with a low, commanding rasp, pointing that crackling purple staff down the adjacent tunnel.

"Ana daraggi šanîm alkā."

"They don't know we're here," Raidian says, her voice barely audible.

The boots resume their march. The flavor of Kazdelian loyalty recedes down the rusted metal catwalk until the glow of the Caster's staff fades into the shadows of the underground network.

I let out a ragged, trembling exhale, my shoulders sagging.

"How…" I whisper, turning to look at Raidian in the dark. "How do you know, Raidian?"

Raidian lowers her encrypted communications terminal.

"I can read brainwaves, remember?" she answers.

My heart stops.

My face flushes with a sudden heat.

"Oh… wait…" I shrink away from her, twisting the fabric of my oversized jacket. "So back in the tent… you knew when…"

"When you were thinking of plotting against us?" Raidian finishes the sentence for me.

She just smiles in the dark. A soft, gentle smile.

"Of course," Raidian whispers, her tone carrying a quiet, affectionate amusement. "You have to try a lot harder to trick me, Lita."

I stare at her, paralyzed.

She knew. She read the exact shape of my traitorous thoughts. She knew I was debating tearing their resistance apart and handing them over to the butchers of the Royal Court.

A hot tear pricks the corner of my eye.

Blaze lets out a stifled snort from above me, her arm tightening around my waist.

"Don't worry, kiddo," Blaze says quietly. "We're used to you being a little menace. Now hold on tight, the Express is making up for lost time."

Before I can process her amusement, Blaze's boots dig into the cracked concrete and she explodes forward.

She breaks into a dead sprint, a velocity that drops my stomach out of me. She claps her hand back over my mouth to keep me from yelping again.

I groan into her palm, my vision dissolving into a smear of rusted iron, damp shadows, and blurring work lights.

I'm so dead.

We tear through the subterranean labyrinth for what feels like an eternity before the momentum snaps again.

Blaze skids to a halt, the soles of her boots tearing a screech out of the wet floor, and drops her hand from my mouth.

I gasp for air, my chest heaving against her side. The tunnel terminates in a blockade of collapsed concrete and twisted, groaning steel. We're standing in a dead end.

A few moments later, footsteps crunch behind us.

Raidian catches up, stepping into the dim, caged light. After that sprint through the tube network she isn't even breathing hard. Her expression is still locked into that gentle smile, untouched by the panic of the chase.

One of Raidian's upper hands raises, pointing toward a crumbling, half-buried staircase choked with shattered masonry.

"Does that lead outside?" Blaze asks, staring at the choked steps.

Raidian pauses, her lower hands adjusting her terminal. "This should be near the backside of the defense wall," she states softly.

Blaze huffs. The chaotic grin returns to her face.

"Well," Blaze rumbles, her voice vibrating with a kinetic thrill. "Hold on tight, kiddo."

"What?"

Before I can finish the word, Blaze hoists me upward. I squeak as my center of gravity flips, and she catches me and repositions me over her shoulder.

I scramble in panic, my arms wrapping around her neck and my tail hooking around her waist, and bury my face in the fabric of her shirt.

Then she reaches back.

Her hand grips the handle of the chainsaw strapped to her back, and she yanks the starter cord.

The weapon doesn't just turn on; it roars to life with a metallic shriek that shakes the dust straight off the ceiling. The air in the cramped tunnel superheats. The heavy machine grease and roaring exhaust that always radiates off her erupts — a geyser of fire, orders of magnitude past anything I've tasted from her before.

The pressurized heat rolling off her bakes the stagnant moisture out of the subterranean air and makes my skin flush.

She takes the choked staircase at a run, climbing flight after flight up through the gutted building above until a slab of reinforced concrete seals the way to the roof. She raises the roaring, jagged teeth of the chainsaw toward it.

"We're taking a shortcut."

Boom!

An explosion of kinetic energy shatters the gloom. Blaze's chainsaw tears into the concrete slab overhead, her Arts superheating the air.

"Hot! Hot!" I yelp, squeezing my eyes shut and burying my face in the thick fabric of her shirt. The thermal shockwave washes over us, baking the damp stairwell dry.

With a final metallic shriek, the slab gives way.

Blaze doesn't even break her stride. She vaults over the glowing, molten debris and carries me right through the breach. Raidian follows close behind, composed.

The stagnant, oil-slicked air that followed us up from the tunnels is ripped away and replaced by the biting wind of the capital. We're outside.

Blaze climbs up onto a wide, desolate rooftop. I peek my eyes open and look out across the flat, pale concrete, dotted with square ventilation fans and scattered military crates. The bruised, ash-choked clouds hang low over the city.

But my gaze is pulled to the horizon. Piercing the overcast sky, dominating the ruined skyline, is a towering skyscraper.

"Is that the Shard in the distance?" I whisper, the dread of the Regent's power still shaking my voice.

"Yep," Raidian says.

"Well kiddo, no time for sightseeing," Blaze rumbles, her chaotic grin returning as she hefts me a little higher on her shoulder. "If you want, I'll send you postcards later."

Before I can process the joke, Blaze takes off again. She crosses the rooftop in a blur and launches us toward the structure ahead: the backside of Londinium's outer defense wall, the unending thing that has kept the city safe for centuries.

Rusted, zig-zagging maintenance staircases and skeletal metal catwalks stretch up the sheer concrete face. Blaze and Raidian don't hesitate. They scale the iron steps, climbing higher and higher into the wind.

I peer down over Blaze's back. The ruined streets of the capital fall away beneath us into a hazy drop of dozens of meters. My stomach hollows out.

"This is so tall…" I whimper, squeezing my arms and tail tighter around Blaze.

Blaze just laughs, her roaring fire wrapping around my shivering frame, keeping the wind off.

Finally her boots hit reinforced steel. We crest the top of the wall, vault the barricades, and land on the front-facing battlements.

I lift my head, my eyes widening at the scale of the Victorian engineering spread out in front of us.

Resting on angular platforms of pale concrete and dark metal are the defensive batteries. The artillery cannons are monolithic, their long dark steel barrels angled toward the bruised sky. Long blue banners emblazoned with the crests of the empire hang from the muzzles, fluttering in the smog-choked wind rolling over the fortifications.

These are the batteries. The weapons that have kept the Grand Dukes' mobile cities and armies paralyzed at bay.

I look out past the angular barrels.

The ash-choked clouds part just enough to show the scale of the war. The Victorian wastelands stretch out to a broken horizon.

Littering the scorched earth below are the skeletons of destroyed Victorian landships — colossal, multi-tiered mobile cities halted in their tracks, their armored prows tilted up toward the sky like the gravestones of dead titans. Black smoke still rises from their shattered hulls. The Grand Dukes' failed assaults against the batteries' localized wrath.

This is what I was fighting for. A graveyard of twisted metal.

Before the weight of it can sink into my chest, the air shifts.

"There are too many patrols here," Raidian says quietly.

Her hands adjust the encrypted terminal while her gaze sweeps the long, exposed stretch of the battlements.

Blaze doesn't flinch.

"Hop on, Raidian," Blaze rumbles, shifting my weight against her side. "And make sure Lita doesn't scream."

"Okay," Raidian answers, her voice steady.

I blink in horror.

"What?" I stammer, my tail whipping against Blaze's leg. "What's…"

Raidian steps smoothly up to Blaze's side. Her lower arms lock around the heavy tactical harness. Then one of her upper hands reaches over and clamps firmly, gently, over my mouth.

Raidian looks into my terrified eyes, and winks. A soft, unbothered wink.

Blaze's boots dig into the pale concrete.

She runs.

The pressurized heat of her Arts flares up again, but this time there's nothing to cut through. She sprints toward the unprotected edge of the battlement. The drop to the destroyed wastelands rushes up to meet us.

Stop! STOP!

I scream against Raidian's palm, my fingers digging white-knuckled into Blaze's coat.

She doesn't slow down.

Blaze's boots hit the very lip of the concrete precipice.

Then she just jumps.

We launch off the top of the defensive wall, leaving the reinforced steel behind. Gravity vanishes. The ash-choked wind turns into a roar as we plummet into the yawning abyss of the destroyed Victorian landscape, falling almost a hundred meters.

I… I…

Maybe I should have stayed with the Military Commission.

The thought flashes through my mind as the scorched wasteland rushes up at us. The velocity of the freefall threatens to tear the breath out of my lungs, but Raidian's hand stays clamped over my mouth.

Over the roar of the wind, Blaze's voice booms out, chaotic and unbothered.

"Don't worry, Lita! The Blaze Express has airbags!"

Airbags?!

My muffled shriek is swallowed by the wind.

Then the air superheats. The pressurized heat blasts downward, building a localized thermal updraft beneath us, pushing back against gravity like an atmospheric cushion.

I can feel the velocity of our fall slowing, the force pressing against my chest as we near the earth.

It isn't exactly a feather-light landing.

Blaze's boots hit the pulverized wasteland with a concussive thud.

The kinetic shockwave of the impact ripples straight up through her gear. My white-knuckled grip on her coat shatters. I'm jolted right off her shoulder.

Forward through the hot, ash-choked air, arms wheeling.

I crash headfirst into the scorched dirt.

My upper body is buried in the dry, pulverized earth, but my spade-tipped tail stays stubbornly wrapped around Blaze's waist like a rigid lifeline.

For a long second, the only sounds are the hiss of residual heat venting from Blaze's gear and the crunch of Raidian landing on her feet nearby.

I groan, my voice muffled by a mouthful of dirt.

Pushing my hands against the ground, I pull my head backward. With a dull pop, my horns come out of the dirt. I sit up on my knees, spitting out the bitter ash and wiping the grime off my face with the oversized sleeves of Amiya's jacket.

I glare up at Blaze in misery.

"…remind me to never, ever, ever let you carry me again," I wheeze, my voice cracking in the air.

Blaze simply rests her hands on her hips. There isn't a trace of guilt in the fire coming off her. She just flashes that rowdy grin down at me.

"No promises, kiddo."

I sit there in the pulverized dirt, my tail finally, begrudgingly uncoiling from around Blaze's waist, and brush the heavy ash off the jacket.

I point a trembling, dirt-covered finger at the two of them, trying to summon the cold authority of a pureblood Kazdelian noble.

"I… I… I am going to go back to the Shard… and report you all…" I stammer, my voice carrying weakly across the graveyard of destroyed Victorian landships.

Nothing in the air registers alarm. Raidian doesn't even look up from her communications terminal.

Blaze casually slings her chainsaw back onto her harness, reaches down, grabs me by the back of the jacket collar, and hoists me onto my feet as if I weigh nothing.

"Time to walk, kiddo," Blaze says, her grin undisturbed by my attempt at treason. "We're one day's trek away from a safe pick-up spot."

Raidian's lower hands keep methodically adjusting the encrypted frequencies.

"I'll get in contact with the landship."

I stand there, my oxfords sinking into the scorched earth, and rub the dirt off my horns.

Back down the wasteland, the Shard still pierces the ash-choked sky, surrounded by the Regent's wrath. Then I look at the two Rhodes Island elites who risked their lives to smuggle me out of an occupied war zone.

I let out a defeated sigh, my shoulders sagging under the oversized black jacket.

"Fine…" I mumble, trudging into step behind Blaze.

The ash-choked daylight bleeds into a heavy twilight as we trek across the destroyed wastelands.

Scorched earth crunches under our footsteps. I pull Amiya's oversized black jacket tighter around my shoulders, shivering as the wind whips across the flat expanse, and look out past the graveyard of skeletal mobile cities.

Looming on the horizon are the silhouettes of the Grand Dukes' landships and their entrenched armies, motionless and heavily armed in the descending dark. It looks like the edge of an impending apocalypse — a Catastrophe waiting to crash against the shadow of the Shard.

"How are you holding up, Lita?"

Blaze's voice cuts through the wind. She walks a few paces ahead of us, her chainsaw strapped to her back.

I stare down at the cracked dirt, twisting the bright yellow zipper pull of Amiya's jacket.

"I… I am still not sure…" I stammer, my voice small in the empty wasteland. I look up at her. "I mean… all my memories are of my time with the Military Commission. I… I have no memory before July…"

The only life I remember living is the one where I marched through the capital in Kazdelian uniform, wielding my Fear Beast to shatter the minds of terrified innocents.

Blaze doesn't break her stride, but she turns her head and offers me a grounding smile.

"Don't think too hard about it," Blaze rumbles, her voice vibrating with warmth. "When you're back on Rhodes Island, you'll get a lot more memories."

My tail droops dead behind me. I look down at my hands.

"Do I… really deserve this…?" I whisper.

Beside me, Raidian matches my pace.

"Lita," Raidian says softly, her voice carrying a dense certainty. "If we don't save our own who lost their way, how can we claim to be a sanctuary for those who were drowning in the dark but want to reach for the light?"

I look up at her.

"Even if you blow up our landship, we will still love you," Raidian adds.

Her upper hands casually adjust the collar of her coat.

"…Probably."

My oxfords stop dead in the dirt.

I expect a solemn gravity. Instead Raidian tastes teasing — a playful, carbonated spark dancing right over the top of the polished oak.

"I knew it!" I yell, my voice tearing across the graveyard of landships.

I point an accusatory finger at her.

"This is a trap!" I gasp, taking an exaggerated step backward. "I am getting kidnapped! This is brainwashing! You just want to take me back to Rhodes Island to study my pureblood brain!"

Blaze bursts into a booming laugh that rattles the cold air. Raidian just smiles that soft smile of hers.

I keep glaring at them, my hands balled into fists at my sides.

Do I… really mean it?

I look at them.

I look at their Rhodes Island uniforms. If not for the RHODES ISLAND lettering in black on Blaze's white jacket and the Elite Ops patch on Raidian's dark blue coat, I wouldn't know they are from the same organization.

Then I look at Amiya's outfit.

It's all so different.

They're all allowed to be themselves while fighting for a shared future…

My accusations…

I don't mean a single word of it.

We keep on walking.

The bruised clouds finally part enough to let the night settle over the lands.

I look up. The twin moons hang pale and distant, their silver light barely piercing the smog, spilling weakly over the graveyard of destroyed landships and casting skeletal shadows across the pulverized earth.

I'm exhausted. Every muscle aches from the adrenaline, the terror, and the toll of the day.

"Are… are we not going to camp?" I ask.

Blaze, a few paces ahead, glances back over her shoulder.

"Well, we don't exactly have camping gear, kiddo," Blaze says, her warm voice cutting through the dark. "We just need to push through the night."

She stops and turns to face me. That rowdy grin flashes in the moonlight.

"You can always hop on my back if you're tired. The Blaze Express has night routes, too."

The phantom sensation of a hundred-meter, stomach-dropping freefall flashes through my mind. I take a deliberate step backward, my tail pinning itself against my leg.

"I… I am fine, thank you!" I stammer, shaking my head so fast my horns blur. "I can walk! I am walking very well right now!"

Blaze lets out a rumbling laugh that shakes the dust in the air, then turns back to lead the way.

I let out a small sigh of relief and fall back into step beside Raidian.

As we crest a ridge of scorched earth, the horizon opens up again. Out in the moonlit dark, motionless, stand the monolithic silhouettes of the Grand Dukes' war machines — mountains of armed steel, their entrenched armies forming a ring around the capital.

I look at the distant shadows.

"The Dukes' armies… Have they been there since July?"

July. The month my memories began. The month I woke inside the fortified walls of the Shard and was told those armies were rabid dogs waiting to slaughter our people.

"Longer," Raidian answers.

I keep my eyes on the landships. They have the firepower to level Londinium ten times over, and they just sit there in the mud, paralyzed.

"Are they just scared of the Shard?" I ask, twisting the bright yellow zipper pull of the jacket. "I mean… I understand why they wouldn't want to march into a Catastrophe."

For a moment the only sound is our shoes crunching against the scorched dirt.

Then Raidian sighs.

It's a slow exhale, and it carries too much. The sun-warmed linen and polished oak of her thickens, and something settles over it — exhaustion, grief, old cold rain on cracked stone.

"Lita…" Raidian begins, her voice trembling in the quiet.

She looks out at the sprawling armies with a sorrow she doesn't bother to hide.

"If… if you don't want to tell me, you don't have to," I add, shrinking back. I don't want to make her explain the nightmares of the world.

"No, it is just…" Raidian shakes her head, her eyes reflecting the faint light of the twin moons. "They are not just waiting because of the Catastrophes, Lita. They are too busy pointing their cannons at each other."

I look at her. "What do you mean?"

Raidian stops beside me. The wind catches the edges of her coat as she looks at me.

"The Grand Dukes are not a united front," Raidian explains. "They are competing for the throne. If one Duke launches an assault on Londinium and takes heavy casualties from the Shard's artificial Catastrophes and Londinium's defense artilleries, the other Dukes won't step in to help them. They will simply wait for them to die, and then march over their corpses to claim the capital for themselves."

I look at the landships again.

They're letting their own capital burn. They're letting the Regent and the Military Commission occupy their homeland, slaughter their citizens, build weapons that can make Catastrophes — all because every Duke is scared another one will beat them to the throne.

"That's why we are here, Lita," Raidian says, her voice an anchor in the empty wasteland. "Rhodes Island is here to stop the occupation, yes. But we are also trying to stop Victoria from completely devolving into a full civil war. If Theresis falls, but the Dukes immediately tear each other apart… the ash will never settle."

The Confessarii made it all sound so simple. Kazdel was the good side, just fighting to survive, and the whole rest of the world was one big enemy that wanted us dead.

But the rest of the world isn't one big anything. It's just broken countries and greedy nobles, and grown-ups who'll let people die if it keeps them on top.

And then there's Rhodes Island.

How impossible their mission is makes my chest ache.

"…you're all trying to save everyone, even the people who won't stop fighting each other," I whisper.

Blaze's boots crunch against the dirt as she steps back toward us and ruffles my hair.

"That's the job description, kiddo," Blaze says softly, her grin melting into pride. "And we intend to get it done."

"Well, let's keep going, Lita. Hot cocoa awaits you," Raidian adds.

"Cocoa…?" I repeat, the word alien on my tongue. I look down at my hands. "What's that?"

The Military Commission never gave me treats. Ration bars for sustenance, and then my true meals… my true nourishment…

"I… I only feed on the fear of others…" I remember the sickening satisfaction they conditioned me to feel. "I don't… eat normal things…"

Raidian doesn't flinch. She reaches out and brushes the ash from my shoulder.

"You will see, Lita," she promises.

We alter our course, steering away from the open plains of the wasteland. To avoid the Grand Dukes' entrenched armies we move toward the jagged edge of a withered Victorian forest. The trees here are dead, their leafless branches clawing at the smog-choked sky like skeletal fingers. The shadows of the woods swallow us, concealment from the war tearing the country apart.

I pull the jacket tighter around myself.

"Lita…"

I freeze.

The voice slips into my ear. A woman's voice — faint, ethereal, gentle.

I spin around.

There's nothing. The air is dead.

"What's wrong, Lita?" Raidian asks, stopping mid-step. The polished oak of her sharpens with concern.

I look into the void between the twisted trunks, my breath hitching.

"I… I thought I heard something…"

I turn back to face them and try to force my muscles to relax.

"Lita…"

It happens again, closer this time — as if she's standing over my shoulder.

I whip around, panic rising.

Blaze doesn't ask questions. The shing of her chainsaw rings out through the dead woods and she steps in front of me, boots planted in the dirt. Her fire compresses into a protective coil. She doesn't rev the engine, to keep our stealth, but her grip on the handle doesn't waver.

"Dendie. Axie," Raidian commands. Her voice drops its warmth for the efficiency of a Rhodes Island elite.

Two mechanical drones deploy from the folds of her dark blue coat with a quiet hum. One is shaped like a toy fish, swimming weightlessly through the cold night air; the other is a miniature toy plane. They dart outward into the dead trees, their low-emission lenses sweeping the pitch-black perimeter.

I press my back against Blaze, my heart hammering against my ribs. I wait for Raidian's drones to spot the Royal Court Caster. I wait for the ambush.

"I don't sense anyone nearby," Raidian states quietly, her eyes opening. She looks directly at me, the tactical tension in her frame shifting into confusion. "There are no readable waves. No Arts signatures."

I look past the toy fish floating silently in the dark.

If there's no one out there… whose voice is calling my name?

"Lita… why do you… leave me?"

I turn around.

Standing a few paces away, framed by the twisted branches of the dead woods, is a woman.

She looks like a grown reflection of me. The same woodsmoke grey hair, pulled back into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck. The same face, softened by age and by sadness.

But her horns are different. Where mine sit lopsided on my crown, hers are symmetrical.

"Why do you…" the woman whispers, her lips barely moving, yet the sound vibrates against my eardrums.

"What…" I stammer, my eyes wide. "Who…"

My legs give out. I stumble backward, my oxfords catching on a gnarled root, and pitch back, bracing for the hard ground.

But I don't fall.

Raidian catches me. Her arms wrap around my waist, pulling me flush against her side, and the sun-warmed linen and polished oak of her anchors me.

"Lita?" Raidian asks, her voice tight. "There is no one here."

"I…" I raise a trembling hand and point at the woman standing in the shadows. "I see her… right there!"

But there's nothing coming off her at all.

No rusted iron. No spun sugar. No fear, no resolve, no sorrow. No taste. Everything alive has a taste, and she has none.

"No…" I gasp, pressing myself deeper into Raidian's coat. My hands fly up against the sides of my head. "There's no taste! Get out of my head! Get out!"

She doesn't vanish. She doesn't react to my screaming. She just looks at me with those mournful eyes.

"Why…" her voice fractures. "I am your mom… Lethia…"

Lethia.

The name Raidian spoke in the medical tent. The mother I never knew. The mother the Confessarii slaughtered the night Babel fell.

She takes a step closer. Her shoes make no sound against the dry underbrush.

"I love you, Lita."

The words are supposed to be warm. Coming from a ghost with no taste at all, they're torture.

"No!" I scream, burying my face in Raidian's shoulder to block out the symmetrical horns and the haunting face. "You are not real!"

Then my world shifts.

The biting wind of the dead wood vanishes. The smell of pulverized ash and dry dirt is erased from my senses.

I open my eyes. The skeletal trees of the dead woods have melted away.

I'm standing in a brightly lit corridor, sterile and utilitarian. The walls are brushed metal paneling and heavy octagonal doors. Exposed cables snake across the polished grey floor panels, and plastic sheets drape over the upper fixtures. Through the angular bulkhead doors at the end of the hall I can see into a cavernous industrial hangar.

It feels like the belly of a landship.

I look down at myself. I'm so much smaller. Amiya's oversized jacket is gone, replaced by simple, comfortable clothes. My hands are tiny.

I look up.

The woman is kneeling in front of me.

But she isn't the tasteless ghost from the woods anymore. What washes over me makes my small chest ache with how beautiful it is. Sun-warmed earth, blooming jasmine, the density of a sheltering hearth fire — nothing of fear or war or malice in any of it. It's what safety tastes like.

"Lita. What's wrong?" the woman asks, her voice warm and tangible.

"What… mom…?" The word slips out of my mouth, confused. My hands reach out and graze the soft fabric of her sleeve.

Before I can process the impossibility of it, the click of heels echoes down the metal corridor, and something new comes with it.

Aged red wine and ripening plums, laced with the vibrating static of a thousand whispered secrets and shadows.

I peek around my mother's shoulder. Walking toward us is a Vampire. She is striking, pale against her dark attire — a tailored black dress with a blood-red inner lining, thigh-high lace boots, dark winged motifs near her collar. She carries a curved scythe effortlessly at her side, the dark metal glinting under the corridor's harsh lights. Her pointed tail sways behind her as her crimson eyes find us.

"Good morning, Entelechia," mom greets her, her voice steady and warm.

"Morning, Lethia. Morning, little Lita," Entelechia replies.

"Are you leaving already?" mom asks, standing up and gently taking my small hand in hers.

"The intelligence is not going to gather itself," Entelechia replies, adjusting her grip on the scythe. "Someone has to keep an eye on the shadows."

A small blur of grey detaches itself from her sweeping coat and flutters through the air. A tiny beast. Before I can register its flight path it swoops down and lands on top of my head, its claws tangling softly in my hair.

"Eh?!" I yelp, my hands flying up to cover my head as I duck behind my mother's leg. "Don't bite me!"

Entelechia laughs, and the laugh tastes like wine bubbling.

"Little Garnet is just an Arts creation, Lita," Entelechia says, her eyes twinkling as she looks at my cowering form. "Don't worry. She doesn't bite."

"Lita!"

Raidian's voice tears me out of the corridor. The metal walls and my mother's sheltering smile shatter like glass and dump me back into the freezing, pitch-black reality of the dead Victorian woods.

A metallic screech vibrates through my skull.

I look up. Blaze is locked in a stalemate, the teeth of her chainsaw grinding against the crossguard of a steel sword, throwing sparks up into the dark canopy.

The wielder pushing against her is a nightmare out of my worst terrors — black armor over a long dark coat, a tattered sweeping cloak, a heavy hood and a bone-white skull mask. Jagged horns protrude from the cowl. The lightless silhouette of an executioner.

What comes off the armored figure is terror: freezing surgical steel, embalming fluid, and old congealed blood shut in a lightless crypt for centuries.

"A Confessarius guard?!" I yelp.

"There's another!" Raidian shouts.

Raidian's composure doesn't break. Her toy fish and toy plane whip around with a high-pitched whine and unload suppressive fire into the dark brush on our flank. The sharp crack of splintering branches, and a heavy armored shuffle echoing out of the deep shadows.

But the ghost clawing at my mind drowns all of it out.

"Lita… come back to us… please…"

My mother's tasteless voice slips through my empathic channels like a phantom blade.

"No…" I scramble backward in the dirt. I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my legs, squeezing myself small enough to shut the voices out.

Ahead of me, Blaze shoves her weight forward and pushes the first guard back.

She doesn't hesitate. She revs the chainsaw and her fire superheats the air, baking the cold wind into a thermal shockwave. The weapon comes around in a horizontal arc that cleaves through the trunks of the dead trees, and the wood combusts in embers and splintered timber.

But the Confessarius guard moves with a liquid agility. They weave under the superheated blade, the scorched, heavy timber crashing harmlessly to the forest floor behind them.

Across the clearing, the heavy crunch of boots on dead roots grows louder. The second armored guard comes through the smoke, long sword drawn and steady, undeterred by Raidian's suppression.

"Lita…" the phantom voice pleads one last time, echoing against the old blood and the surgical steel.

"No…" I weep into my knees, my tail wrapped tight around my ankles.

Crash!

Another screech tears through the dead woods as Blaze's chainsaw clashes against the first guard's sword. Orange sparks light up the black armor and the bone-white skull mask of the executioner.

The second guard lunges, the long blade sweeping in a silent arc toward Raidian. She weaves out of the path without losing her composure.

"Lita… come with mom, let's go home."

The tasteless voice slithers into my mind again.

"No…" I whimper, my whole body trembling against the dry earth.

"Blaze! Watch out, behind!" Raidian calls out, her voice cutting through the roaring exhaust of the chainsaw.

"Tsk." Blaze clicks her tongue and twists, bracing her boots in the dirt as the two lightless executioners begin to coordinate their strikes, working to flank her in the shadows.

"Lita, they are not your friends," the ghost of my mother whispers.

My fingers dig into the white knit of Amiya's sweater.

No.

"No… you're lying." My voice fractures, then rises, tearing raw through my throat. I force the truth up to the surface. "My home was with Babel… then Rhodes Island. Not the Military Commission…"

"Lita… please… you look so pained…"

The voice keeps on, ignoring the refusal in my heart, and the ghost steps closer through the dead, twisted trees.

"No…" I scream, my hands flying up over my ears. "I said no already! Just stop!"

The kinetic energy in the clearing stutters.

"What's this feeling…" Blaze grunts, her boots sliding backward in the dirt. She shakes her head, her grip on the chainsaw wavering. "Hard to focus…"

"Lita!"

Raidian's voice cuts through the static. She twists, dodging a sweeping blade strike from the second Confessarius guard — the dark steel misses her coat by millimeters — and rushes toward me, her hands sending the drones into another barrage to cover her.

Raidian slides into the dirt beside me, her sun-warmed linen and polished oak struggling to break through the venom of my despair.

"What are you doing, Lita!" Raidian calls out, her voice straining. "Stop pushing… bad memories!"

I look up.

Blaze is being pushed back.

The second armored executioner ignores the drone fire and stalks forward, closing the distance toward Raidian and me.

"No…" I say, my fingers digging into the dirt. "I'm not a weapon."

"Lita…" the tasteless ghost of my mother whispers, hovering right behind the advancing executioner. "It's your chance."

How dare they. How dare they take the memory of Lethia — the mother who fought for the light, the mother who loved me — and twist her into this hollow, manipulative thing.

"I'm not your toy!" I scream, glaring past the Confessarius guard at the tasteless phantom in the shadows. "You're not my mom! You're just… a corrupted projection!"

Right in front of me is Blaze's roaring fire and heavy machine grease. And the sun-warmed linen and polished oak of Raidian, anchoring me to the earth.

My mind reaches further, stretching across the ruined capital to the people waiting for me in the dark. The spun sugar of Amiya's weeping heart. Cold obsidian and a streak of focus from Logos. Shining's sheltering sunlight, Nightingale's shattered spun glass, the tilled earth and pressurized steam of Bagpipe.

They're real. Their warmth is real.

I scramble to my feet, oxfords planting into the pulverized dirt, and drop my hands from my ears, my tail lashing behind me. Past the tasteless ghost of my mother, my eyes lock onto the pitch-black armor of the Confessarius guards.

"You will not hurt them!"

I focus on a shape. A manifestation of everyone's will for the light.

My protector. Our protector.

The world distorts as my Arts flood the clearing. Bursting out of the shadows is a four-legged beast, easily twice my size, its pristine white hide unmarked by the ash and grime of Londinium. A white tail whips the cold wind behind it, and it unfurls two white wings stretched taut with a misty blue membrane.

It turns its head toward the advancing executioner. Faceless, its crown hidden under a wild, flowing mane of woodsmoke grey. Its jaw unhinges and it lets out a low, resonant roar that vibrates through the dirt.

It lunges at the Confessarius guard coming at us.

The white Arts Creation moves with a liquid grace, its wings flaring to close the distance, and bites.

But the guard has that same agility. He sidesteps, his tattered black cloak sweeping through the dead brush, and raises his steel sword, preparing to counterattack the Arts Creation's exposed flank.

Raidian doesn't waste time. She follows up my protector's assault, and her drones deliver a strike into the armor plating of his shoulder.

Crack!

The metallic sound of denting armor rings out through the dead woods. The guard flinches, his combat stance shattering under the force of Raidian's blow.

My beast takes the chance.

Before he can recover his balance the white Arts Creation pounces, throwing its weight forward and slamming him backward into the earth. Ash kicks up around them as its paws pin his arms flat against the dirt.

He struggles, but the beast's mass holds him.

Raidian takes the opening. She steps over the struggling executioner, her expression composed.

The strike from the toy plane drives through the bone-white skull mask and sinks into the darkness beneath.

He goes still. The scent of the lightless crypt flatlines into an empty void.

"Lita… why?" the ghost asks.

I ignore it. My hands ball into fists at my sides.

Crash — Blaze parries a heavy downward cleave from the remaining Confessarius guard.

My new Arts Creation doesn't wait for a command. The white, four-legged beast bounds across the earth, wings flaring as it circles the executioner, and lets out a low, thrumming growl.

The guard remains composed.

Then the bone-white skull mask shifts. He takes his eyes off Blaze to track the white Arts Creation.

Blaze takes the chance. She shifts her weight and drives her combat boot into the guard's chest plate with the force of a siege engine.

Armor dents with a crack that echoes through the clearing. The impact lifts him off his feet and throws him backward into the dirt, and his sword clatters uselessly against the dead roots.

Before he can fully hit the earth Blaze is on him. Her chainsaw shrieks, the engine revving as she drives the jagged teeth through his armor. The crypt bleeding off him flatlines, erased by the heat of her weapon.

The ghost disappears. The tasteless projection of my mother dissolves into a fine mist and vanishes into the dark, and the freezing weight in my mind lifts, leaving nothing but the biting wind.

The clearing falls quiet, save for the idling hum of Blaze's chainsaw. But both of them stay coiled, and Raidian's drones keep sweeping the pitch-black perimeter for anything still out there.

"Lita…" Raidian calls out, her voice tight. "Do you still see what you see?"

I take a slow, shaky breath.

"No," I say, my shoulders sagging as the adrenaline crashes. "It's all good now."

At my words the Arts Creation trots over to my side, lowering its faceless head and folding its misty blue wings against its flanks. It rubs its head against my leg with a soft, rumbling purr, and I reach down, my fingers sinking into the warmth of its mane.

Blaze powers down her chainsaw, the roar finally dying out. She rests the weapon over her shoulder and walks over.

"What is that, kiddo?" Blaze asks.

I look at the beautiful creature that just saved my life.

"Uhm… well…" I stammer, warmth flushing my cheeks. I scratch the beast gently. "It's an Arts Creation… I will call him… Nightmare Eater…"

I duck my head, self-conscious with both of them watching.

"…not original but… that's what it does."

"My head…"

The adrenaline that had been keeping my legs upright runs out. The dead Victorian woods blur into a dizzying smear and my knees buckle.

But I never hit the dirt. A pair of strong arms catch me before I can fall.

Then the world disappears.

I blink.

A harsh light pierces through my eyelids. I squeeze my eyes shut and peel them open again, vision blurred. The freezing wind, the pulverized ash, the skeletal Victorian landships — all gone.

"Where am I?" I ask, my voice a dry rasp that echoes strangely in the quiet.

I'm lying flat on my back on a rigid, mechanical bed. Turning my head, I take in a blue-tinted medical room: articulated scanners and multi-paned surgical lights looming over the bed from the ceiling, monitors and life-support terminals mounted to the walls, casting a clinical glow across the pristine floor.

Something new comes into the sterile air.

Cold copper and expensive wine, buzzing with a metallic hum of predatory curiosity.

A Vampire stands next to my bed. Long white hair, pointed ears, and a gaze that evaluates me with calculating focus. She wears a dark, asymmetrical coat with a white medical cross on the left arm, over a pleated white skirt and dark tights.

"Oh, look who's awake," she remarks, her voice dry and clinical. "I was just wondering how many times I have to do this."

The words land like a blow.

How many times I have to do this.

Rhodes Island is a hypocritical front. They steal Sarkaz memories. They chain you in the dark and make you a hollow puppet.

They brought me here to erase the truth I just learned. They're going to plunge me back into the void!

"No!" I scream.

I scramble backward across the crisp white sheets, pressing my back against the hard headboard, and throw my hands over my head with my eyes squeezed shut.

"Please don't wipe my memories!" I beg, my whole body shaking.

The air in the medical room stalls. The metallic buzz of predatory curiosity drops out of her, replaced by deadpan exasperation.

She lets out a long, heavy sigh.

"This is Rhodes Island, little anomaly," she states, looking at me with unfiltered boredom.

"I don't want to lose everything again…" I sob.

She sighs again.

"I need to draw blood, little anomaly," she states. She taps a glass vial. "If you keep cowering and making this difficult, I'm just going to use my fangs. It's faster."

Before I can process the threat of her fangs, the door of the medical room slides open with a pneumatic hiss.

"Lethe! My dear!"

A voice tears through the sterile air, thick with relief.

A short-haired Liberi woman flies across the room and throws her arms around me, pulling my trembling frame against her chest, hugging me tight enough to knock the breath out of my lungs.

"You were gone for almost two months…" she weeps, her voice cracking as she buries her face into my shoulder. "I thought… I thought…"

She tastes safe.

A sun-drenched field overflowing with warm honey and care.

But the moment is interrupted.

"Caladria," her clinical voice cuts through the warm honey. "Help me stabilize her. I need two vials."

Stabilize.

No… no… no… this is a trap…

They brought her here to hold me down while the blood is drained out of me and my mind is wiped.

"No!" I scream, thrashing in her arms. I press my hands flat against her chest, trying to push her away. "I'm not Lethe! And you just want to take my memories! Let me go!"

The second the words leave my mouth, the air shifts.

Caladria shatters. The sun-drenched field and warm honey are pierced by heartbreak — the raw, bleeding pain of a mother whose child looks at her as if she were a monster.

Why…

The pain crashes into me.

It's delicious…

My mouth waters at the taste of her shattered heart.

I am feeding on her pain. I am a monster.

"No! No! Lita, no!" I sob, my hands flying up to grip my own horns as I shake my head. "That's not delicious… I am a monster… I am a monster…"

I curl into a ball.

"Caladria," she says. "Remember, she goes by her birth name, Lita, now."

Caladria reaches out again, gently resting her warm hand over mine.

"Right…" Caladria wipes a tear from her own cheek, her voice trembling but gentle. "Sorry… Lita."

I uncurl myself from the trembling ball and look at her through the tears. Her hand stays resting over mine.

"Caladria…" I say, my voice still a raw, raspy wheeze. "Why do you… why do you taste like that…"

Caladria tilts her head, confused.

"What do you mean?" she asks softly, her voice catching. "Le… Lita?"

"I…" My fingers twitch beneath her warm palm. "You taste like… a mother who was protecting her child… exactly like the ones I killed in Londinium…"

I remember the desolate streets. I remember the Felines. I plunged into their minds, tasted the rotting nectar of their terror, and told my Fear Beast to tear them apart.

Caladria doesn't pull her hand away.

"Lita…" Caladria murmurs, her voice thick with unshed tears. "Well… you used to call me mom…"

I look at her. The white feathers near her temples, the gentle features, the undeniable fact of her race.

"But you're a Liberi…" I stammer into the quiet hum of the life-support monitors. "And Lethia… Lethia is my mom…"

The Confessarii slaughtered my mother the night Babel fell. She was a Sarkaz, a pureblood like me. How could Caladria claim that title?

But then I remember weeping on the cracked asphalt in the dead of night, held securely against Raidian's side, and her words cut through the fog.

You have two. One who birthed you, and one who loves you with her entire being right now…

"You are… you are her… Raidian told me…"

Caladria's expression softens into an ocean of tenderness. She leans forward and wraps her arms around my shoulders once more.

"You are home, my Lita," Caladria murmurs into my hair, her voice a steady anchor. "You are safe."

I want to melt into her embrace.

"But I am just a monster now…" I choke out, my tears spilling hot into her shirt. My hands stay curled between us, refusing to return the hug. "I don't deserve it…"

"I will still love you, Lita." There's no doubt anywhere in it. "If you allow me."

I squeeze my eyes shut.

It's a grace I don't know how to accept.

"I'm not sure yet… sorry…" I say, pulling back from her warmth, shrinking against the headboard.

Caladria lets me go easily, offering a devastated, endlessly patient smile.

"That's okay, Lita." She reaches up and wipes a tear from my cheek. "We have all the time in the world."

She turns her head toward the foot of the bed.

"But just as important, Lita," Caladria continues, her voice shifting into something gentle but clinical. "Dr. Warfarin needs blood to confirm you are healthy, and to see how your Oripathy has progressed… you must have been using your Arts a lot in Londinium."

I flinch and look past Caladria.

Dr. Warfarin is still standing there. Her eyes lock onto mine.

Caladria squeezes my shoulder and reaches into one of the modular pouches on her belt.

When she pulls her hand back out, she's holding a small, strawberry-flavored lollipop.

"Here," Caladria offers. She peels the plastic wrapper away and holds the candy out to me.

I blink, my racing thoughts stalling.

I look at the candy, then up at Caladria. My fingers uncurl from the white sheets.

"Thanks…"

I take the plastic stick and put the lollipop in my mouth. The artificial sweetness of the strawberry blooms on my tongue.

My shoulders drop.

A sharp pinch bites into the crook of my arm.

"Mmmph…!"

I squeak around the lollipop, my eyes flying wide open in betrayal. My free hand flies to my arm, but Caladria's hands are already there, holding my elbow steady so I don't tear the needle out.

Dr. Warfarin withdraws the needle and transfers the dark crimson into a clear glass vial.

She holds the vial up into the glare of the multi-paned surgical lights and swirls the glass, tracking the viscosity of the blood with unfiltered fascination.

"Well, your blood is still as exquisite as ever, little anomaly," Dr. Warfarin remarks.

She turns away, steps over to a glowing medical terminal, and slots the vial into an articulated scanner.

"Let's see if you fried that brain of yours in Londinium," she mutters dryly.

I don't know what Londinium did to my brain. I don't know what was in it before.