[b]Yuki![/b] The absence of Aadya, the Rock upon a Mountain, is thick. Now that the oppressive thickness of the sauna is almost dissipated, it is the shape of where she is not that fills the room. There are tears on your arm and a twitching Eclair in your grasp and somewhere, outside, there is a lot of drumming and foot-stamping and "[i]hiyaaaaah![/i]" and we must hope, together, that Hazel is having a wonderful time. If you must suffer here, alone in the dark, then perhaps he will get the chance to shine all the brighter up on that stage, starlight dripping from his antlers. This goes on for an indeterminate time. You shiver as the dampness on your skin settles in properly. Then a vision in indescribable colors enters, slithering in and doubling back to shut the door behind her for the sake of privacy. Underneath the still-open skylight, she is brilliant, and the darkness is all the thicker around her in contrast. There is a new bruise on her throat in the shape of someone's fangs and she is somewhat more disheveled than when you saw her last, but she has no care for her appearance in this moment. "Oh, [i]Yuki,[/i]" she says, and sweeps you up. It is an effort for her to bear both of you up into her coils together, but she strains herself and gets her sequins underneath you, wrapping her arms around the two of you to share warmth. "When Aadya told me you needed me, I didn't think... what happened?" Her voice aches with concern for [i]you.[/i] There is applause and laughter and foot-stomping up above and she doesn't even think about it. Bereft of Purnima's dress, picked out to make you a pawn in their game, there is nothing that stands between the two of you but that Eclair is still in your arms, that Purnima's lips have made a bruise on her neck, that she might be the one who tames the Golden Fawn. She will hold you through any tears you have. Do you kiss her? [hr] [b]Eclair![/b] [i]Timtam laughs as much as she can with her windpipe constricted. Her smile is manic, her eyes wide, daring you to punish her more, to try and force some insight out of your dreaming mind (of which she must merely be a part). Her fingers writhe and she snaps at the air in front of your nose, drumming one heel on the floor beneath the two of you. This threatens to spiral into nightmare. There is a sound of wings behind you. A presence, vast and enshrouding. The feathers on these wings, if you would turn your head, are the some color as your hair. Timtam cocks her head, and her eyes reflect your face like mirrors. The sort of thing that would, in most proper Thellamie stories, be what Yuki calls a "jump scare," to be wrestling with one of the Mirrorfolk. Or a dream that has, in some small way, become one of the unreal people on the edge of existence. There is a sound of wings behind you. "...I am in love," she sighs. Under your fingers, her neck is the color of your hair. "Am I not allowed to be, Eclair Espoir? I am so much in love that I am a monstrously selfish thing, because when I empty myself out there will be so much more room for everything I get back. And because I am selfish there is room for you in here, too, after I have been cruel to you, after you have been cruel to me, after we play tug-of-war with your broken and my broken." Her hands are yours. She pulls you close with her legs instead. Her blood throbs quick and mirror-silver through her thighs. You can see your whole face inside her eyes, and the vast wings of The Hero's Reflection behind you, and that hooked beak on the very edge of her eyes. Must a reflection of the Hero's heart by necessity be everything the wrong way around, as in a mirror? Or is there something Heronish about the beast behind you? Something that yearns to understand you in order to help you, strange creature of the right-way-round? "You can't stop me," she says. You have her throat. She cannot kiss you, teasingly or wantonly or distractingly or otherwise. "Our narrator likes me too much, even if she hopes I don't win. She has to give me a chance, yah? A chance for my happily-ever-after." Her sigh is like a maiden's first flutter of love. "For [b]our[/b] happily-ever-after."[/i] [hr] [b]Handmaidens![/b] BRAVE ADVENTURERS, YOUR TASK IS TO [infiltrate] THE DREAD FASTNESS OF [the Boar's Ossuary] WHICH MAY BE FOUND [by following signs of bone on the very edge of the Khaganate]. ONCE YOU HAVE FACED THE [bored Khaganate legbreakers] WITHIN, YOU WILL RECEIVE [the damsel-in-distress, Sister Juniper] AS WELL AS [two chests full of things which have been lost and forgotten on the edge of the world] AND [a gold star for being good girls]. [Heron would have a plan. She'd lead you all into the Stacks, now a nightmare zone full of living trees and undead minions of the Rot Star, and fight her way to the Cool Skeleton Collection, which she would have Tsane assemble into a doorway out into the Ossuary. Then she'd use stealth and archery in order to disable the legbreakers without triggering an alarm, have a fight with the lieutenant that the Khatun left there with orders to kill first and ask questions later, and then comically take her time trying to figure out how to untie Sister Juniper while being a naughty flirt.] [You cannot take the roads between hubs. Not when time is this painfully of the essence. You must ride out into the hateful Tanglewood and overcome its influence to make your own road. This will require starlight squeezed from the Golden Fawn's antlers and worked into occult tools in order to make a bubble of reality in the Outside fragile enough to go at significant speed towards the Ossuary - at the speed of plot, one might say.] [Alternatively, Sayanastia might be able to eat the distance between Vespergift and the Ossuary. This will be dangerous, particularly given how she returned to form tonight. She might lose herself, or rather, might find herself and be lost in old memories and perils. I foresee a risk of Sister Juniper being tossed from one captor to another, one who would clasp her gently in dreadful claws and consider ways of transforming her into the crux of some new and wicked plot.] [But don't mind me and my wicked wiles! My dastardly schemes. My nefarious plots. Really, is it so hard to believe that I'm a bleeding heart every now and then?] [hr] [b]Hazel![/b] As uncomfortably close explosions rock the hall (wow, cool special effects, don't mind Alcideo forming a bucket brigade as tremor after tremor rocks Vesper Victoria's on the other side of the street, isn't it unfortunate how these things just keep happening to Vespergift), you are grabbed and pulled by the wrist, away from Olesya, into the arms of... Starglasses. A grin full of diamond braces. An insistent tug that leads you exactly where Khanum Negodincia wants you. In the center of all this magnificent dance, suddenly she's tugging you along like a planet, a wandering star, narrowly evading heartblades and kicking legs as she throws her head back and laughs. Her dress has a plume of lace pinned to it, lace torn away from other dresses and kept as a trophy. She has black studded boots on that she delights in stamp, stamp, stamping. Olesya is coming after the two of you but she's having to try and keep time and continue to be part of the dance lest it dissolves, which leaves Negodincia free to pull you along in an erratic orbit as she cackles and narrowly misses disaster over and over again. Out of everyone who's had you tonight (thus far), she's easily the most gleeful to [i]have[/i] you. True, in the same way that one might be gleeful to have a new trophy, but listen to her laugh, feel the way she drags you along, and narrowly evade her attempt to slap a collar on you as she comes back in so close you can smell the fruity cocktails on her breath. A bone-rattling climax (which keeps going, explosion after explosion outside echoing the drums), and the howling of the pack all around, both happen as she gives up and falls backwards, pulling you along with her, on [i]top[/i] of her, onto the ballroom floor (which still smells of Walking Elm smoke). She looks at you. Not only at you, because you can tell that a flustered Olesya is above you, but definitely you're part of it. And then she kisses you like she can steal you away from her big sister if she does it hard enough. Like you're candy that she's licking in order to make everyone here give you to her. Like someone who has seen a lot of kissing but hasn't had a lot of time to practice. And very definitely like someone who thinks that sloppy kisses are good civilization. Take a String on her somewhere in there.