[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/zhp2XL5.png[/img]

[color=firebrick][b]"As a ruby, her edges perfected, emerges from the sand and returns not hence..."[/b][/color][/center]

Evil Eye paused. The answer to that question—who was that friend—had been so obvious, its asking caught her off guard. But then, she laughed, in the way that Evil Eye laughed when on the hunt for miseria to fuel her stores of misfortune. [color=firebrick][b]"You're right. I don't care at all!"[/b][/color] She laughed and laughed, like the irredeemable villainesses she had adored as a child, and tried to emulate when she forsook the empty promises of light for the tangible substance of darkness.

They fell generously—the tears she had been holding back to pour out against Ashbringer, as a goddess might pour out her cup of wrath once mercy had dried up. It was as if Black Gate had suddenly struck an infinite well of malice deep within Evil Eye. But whether or not that well truly existed, and whatever she might have done after tapping into it—those answers would be cut off as the girls returned, ostensibly, to the real world.

[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/BoV0R6X.png[/img]

[color=firebrick][b]"...what fellowship does brilliance have with the vain sayings of the simple?"[/b][/color][/center]

A certain clarity filled Kiyo's thoughts as she arose from her sleep. She might have expected to have merely emerged from one layer of sleep into another with a false awakening, but the uncertainty of her eyes was assuaged by the guarantor of reality: a familiar pain, which brought with it a paradoxical kind of comfort. Kiyo was, at a glance, the perfect mirror of the girl who had cheerily skipped through the halls on a good pair of feet—that is to say, something like her everyday self.

[color=firebrick][b]"What do you care? You admitted it yourself, that we were never friends."[/b][/color] A genuine reaction to Black Gate's question came out with no regard for caution at all. The girl who might have been the most likely to remain on the ground and pretend to still be sleeping rose first, tears still lingering on her cheeks. Kiyo herself seemed surprised to find them there, gathering them up with her fingers and inspecting them, as if considering how best to dispense with them.