princess

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

꧁༺ 𝓘𝓰𝓷𝓲𝓼 3 𝓜𝓮𝓮𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓰 ༻꧂

Time: Ignis 3 (Morning)

Location: Danrose Castle — Council Chamber

Characters Present (MUST READ): @Tae Torvi, @Oso Kilian, @FunnyGuy Alexander Deacon, Lorenzo Vikena

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The Council Chamber of Danrose Castle sat in the back of the second floor of the castle, behind two guarded corridors and a final set of doors. Inside, there was a note of incense that did not belong to the castle at all. Someone from the Church had brought it. Someone from the Church had decided the room needed sanctifying before a king spoke in it.

The chamber was gilded. Long dark tables occupied the center in neat lines, while the perimeter of the chamber rose into a continuous spectator gallery: tiered benches set behind a carved wooden balustrade, wrapping the walls so that the entire council floor sat under observation from every side. Carved lions watched from the chair backs below, while above them the gallery’s woodwork framed the seated nobility like a ring of witnesses. The dukes usually sat in thrones smaller than the king’s, but close enough that he could speak to them eye to eye if he chose. There were nameplates on each Duke’s table.

Duke Lorenzo Vikena, Duke Gideon Edwards, and Duke Laurent Petit, were all required to be present.

And the Church’s higher-ups had their own section, deliberately marked. They were dressed uniformly: pale gloves, dark robes, a bank of figures arranged so neatly it looked less like seating and more like an extension of law. On one wall, a raised map of Caesonia had been pinned up.

At the table’s head, King Edin Danrose waited as if he had been carved there. He wore the Caesonian colors, and he was dressed even more extravagantly than usual, the fabric rich enough to make a statement all on its own, the golden crown set above his brow. A folder of vellum lay open near his hand, but he did not look down at it. He did not need to.

To his right sat Alexander Deacon. To Edin’s left sat his children. Wulfric’s expression was smooth enough to pass as calm to anyone who did not know him. Auguste held himself with stillness. Anastasia had been dressed for purity; pale fabric with lace going high up her neck, hair restrained into a neat braid down her back.

She should not have been invited, by the Church’s logic. A princess did not belong here. But Edin had put her there anyway, not because he wished to hear her speak, but because he wanted every person in the room to remember that he still had a bloodline to defend, still had something unburnt to show.

At the center of those from the Church sat High Justicar of Imperis Julius Marrowe, his countenance severe. Beside him was Canon Advocate Father Mathieu Cresson, whose expression carried faint warmth. A veiled Confessor sat near them with her hands folded around a small book bound in leather. The Archivist, Emery Hawthorne, looked almost mundane beside them until one noticed the way his eyes moved. Ash Marshal Garrick Voss sat with two Lantern Wardens near the edge of the Church’s section, his hand resting close to the ceremonial mace at his belt as naturally as another man might rest it on a sword.

The Varian delegation entered last. They were not dressed like Churchmen; their coats were cut for movement, their gloves for handling what decent people pretended did not exist, their boots marked with old soot. Each bore the badge of the Vanguard Society—Argent Bastion’s sigil rendered in metal.

At their center was Grandmaster Eryndor Vainholt, an elder with a thick beard and eyes more intense than many had ever seen.

Edin let the silence stretch, because he understood silence as a weapon. Then he rose slowly.

“You all know why you are here,” he said. “The capital has suffered an attack in one of its taverns. The streets have tasted sorcery and panic in equal measure. My court has suffered scandal. My household has been exposed to contamination.”

“So hear me plainly,” Edin continued, voice steady. “We will not allow a single street to believe that the Crown hides sin behind closed doors. If the Church must look upon my house, then they will see a king who carves rot from the tree with his own hand.”

He turned his head slightly toward the Varian hunters. “You have been brought here because you understand what we face,” he said, “and because you have proven you can act without trembling,your authority expands. You will have access to sites, suspects, and records without delay. You will have my enforcers to open doors, my jailers to hold bodies, and my stamp to make it lawful.” Many of the church’s people wore scowls on their faces in reaction to such a declaration.

The King’s eyes swept the room, taking in the nobility behind their nameplates, the Church behind their gloves, his children behind their obedience.

“Masks come off,” he said firmly. “Citywide. Anyone hidden is either a coward or a conspirator, and I will treat them accordingly. Patrols double. Taverns are routinely searched. And anyone found harboring magical items will be taken. Searches begin at dawn and do not end until the city remembers what it begged for.”

The High Justicar did not flinch at the brutality. “Your Majesty,” he began curtly,. “Force will scatter them.This is not merely a civic threat. It is a doctrinal emergency.” His eyes did not soften. “You must contain the story, or it will contain you.”

Father Mathieu’s voice slid in after. “Visible discipline satisfies the crowd,” he said gently. “But sealed discipline becomes truth. The realm cannot be cleansed by spectacle alone; it must be cleansed by certainty.”

Edin glanced, almost absentmindedly, at the brass pins on the map, and for a moment it was easy to imagine him striking names off the kingdom.

The pause that followed was not disagreement so much as appetite. The Justicar’s gaze followed Edin’s gaze where it lingered on the raised map and its brass pins, then returned to Edin.

“If you intend a hunt,” Julius Marrowe said, “then you will conduct it as correction, not as sport. We will not have mobs improvising holiness in alleyways. So we will now summarize what the Court of Imperis requires.”

“First: a decree of Distance,” he said, “to govern every search, every confiscation, every examination. Gloves for contact and veils for hearings. No unauthorized handling of confiscated items.”

Father Mathieu’s voice slid in beside his, warmer and more delicate. “Second: a decree of Speech,” he added, “Certain terms, certain symbols, certain histories will remain prohibited to print,and prohibited to teach. We will provide approved language, and the city will repeat it until it becomes truth.” His gaze flicked toward the satchel at a clerk’s feet, already heavy with paper. “If you allow free tongues, Your Majesty, you will spend a month fighting ideas instead of criminals.”

Hawthorne finally spoke. “Third: registries,” he said. “Household inventories. Servant interviews. University rosters. Guild ledgers. Shipping manifests. Property leases. Apothecary purchases. Printer orders. Candle-maker receipts, if necessary.”

Marrowe’s gaze did not leave Edin. “Fourth:a chain-of-command,” he said. “No hunter arrests a noble without a sealed writ. No interrogator compels a confession without a recorded witness. No execution occurs without the Court’s signature.”

“No execution without your signature?” Edin repeated indignantly, appalled by the nerve.

Ash Marshal Voss’s hand hovered near his ceremonial mace as naturally as another man might rest his palm on a sword. “We will designate cleansing sites,” he said. “Confiscated objects burned under guard.”

For a moment, it almost sounded like the Church was advising moderation.

And then Edin smiled, cold, and entirely humorless, because moderation was exactly what he could not afford.

“Good,” Edin said, and the single word hit the room like a gavel. “Give me your decrees. Give me your approved phrases. Give me your seals and your ledgers.” He leaned forward slightly, “And I will give you more than you asked for. But I am not requesting the Church’s blessing to defend my dominion.”

Marrowe’s eyes narrowed. “ No uncontrolled—”

“—chaos,” Edin finished, merciless. “Agreed.” He leaned forward again. “So we will do this cleanly. And we will do it everywhere.”

He lifted a hand, palm down. “Audits by noon and arrests before nightfall,” His gaze swept the table without apology.

“The accused must be handled under Protocol,” Marrowe said. “Pyres are not—”

Edin’s voice didn’t rise. “Pyres are doctrine,” he said. “Burn sites that are designated and guarded. The capital will watch contraband turn to nothing until the word ‘witch’ tastes like fear again.”

Marrowe held him for a long moment, and when he spoke, it was colder. “A city taught to burn will start choosing its own kindling,” he warned.

Edin’s mouth barely moved. “Then we will choose it for them,” he said. “And if anyone tries to hide this evil again, they will learn what correction looks like when a king is forced to prove he is not complicit.”

A heavy silence followed. Not because they were shocked, few people in that room were capable of shock, but because everyone understood what had just happened.

The Church had attempted to build a machine and Edin had offered to turn the machine into a crusher.

But Edin didn’t see it that way. His gaze moved to the Justicar again, and the next words were chosen carefully. “We are allies in correction,” he said. “But I will not be remembered as the king who let a priesthood replace a throne, a throne that was bestowed to me by the Gods themselves. We cleanse together, or we break together.”

The Justicar’s expression did not change, which was its own answer.

Edin did not let the Justicar’s silence become the last word. He turned to the Varian delegation. “Let this be understood,” Edin began, “What I said earlier still stands. You have my permission to do what is required to protect this realm.” His gaze swept the table, deciding who would remember this week with gratitude and who would remember it with hatred.

Grandmaster Eryndor Vainholt rose like a man who had never once needed an audience to feel certain of himself. “Your Majesty,” Vainholt said. “ We are here to end a threat.” He did not waste breath on metaphor. “Where we find witchcraft, there is no mercy.”

“Nobility will be handled with discretion. They will be brought to your feet.” he added. “Not to spare pride, but to spare stability.”

At last, Edin gestured to the Chancellor, who slid a vellum document forward.

“Ignis Tenth,” Edin declared. “The tribunal will convene under ecclesiastical court. The city will see that the Crown does not shelter contamination. The city will see that even a queen is not above correction.”

Anastasia’s chair made the faintest sound as she shifted, and Edin’s head turned toward her with a warning so quiet it did not need words. She stilled at once.

Wulfric’s voice entered the room suddenly. “You mean the city will see blood,” he said evenly. “Because that is what they are already demanding.”

Edin did not soften the truth to spare anyone’s conscience. “Yes,” he replied. “They want blood. And if I do not give them a sanctioned fire, they will build their own. I would rather hold the torch than be consumed by the mob that steals it.”

Auguste finally spoke, and when he did, it was not emotional. “Who commands the hunters,” he asked, eyes on the Church rather than Edin. “Not in theory, but in practice. If a witch hunter decides a noble is tainted, who authorizes the arrest? If a suspect is killed, who answers for it? If a confession is coerced, who is punished?”

The question was a hook, and for a moment the room was very still, because it forced everyone to look directly at the ugly truth.

“The Court of Imperis prefers discernment,” the Justicar answered at last. “The Crown commands the streets. The hunters serve the work the King has called them to complete.” His gaze rested on Auguste. “If you fear disorder, Prince Auguste, then you should welcome our oversight. We are not interested in chaos. We are interested in cleansing.”

Edin’s mouth tightened again. Meanwhile, Anastasia, unable to help herself, leaned forward, eyes flashing. “So you all now get to decide who is ‘clean’ enough to be alive. You’re all pretending to be Gods!” she said, voice sharp with outrage. With a sound of disgust, she added, folding her arms, “And you want the rest of us to smile politely while you write down in your stupid book which of us should burn.” She snapped her gaze at her father, “Including your own wife!”

A cold stillness spread through the Church’s section; the kind that didn’t need shouting to become a threat. “Mind your tongue, Princess.” came an icy warning from the Justicar.

Edin turned his head slowly toward her, and the look he gave her was not fatherly. It was sovereign. “You will remain silent,” he said, calm enough to be terrifying. “You will be a daughter of Caesonia today, not a foolish girl with her foolish opinions. If you don’t want to follow your mother to her pyre, you will learn the difference.”

Anastasia’s face flushed, furious and humiliated, but she pressed her lips together and sat back. Auguste did not touch her, but his posture angled subtly in her direction, protective in a way that did not invite attention.

It was then that Duke Laurent Petit was permitted to speak, not because the room wished to hear him. He rose with his hands folded over his chest. “Your Majesty,” Laurent began, and his tone carried that familiar reverent calm. “It is not my habit to stir waters. I have always believed that when men thrash and shout, they mistake their own panic for prophecy. Yet a river does not need a man’s permission to flood, and the heavens do not request our comfort when they choose to speak.”

He lifted his gaze as if the ceiling might open and show him proof. “We have witnessed a sign. Not because we earned it, but because we have grown careless enough to require it.”

He spoke on for a very long time, winding for more than anyone wished, gathering momentum like a sermon that had waited years for a reason to exist. His metaphors came often, and the strangest part was how easily they landed in this room.

“A kingdom is a body,” he said, voice rising, “and purity is not an ornament we wear for festivals. It is the blood that keeps the limbs from dying. When sorcery touches the streets, it is not merely crime. It is infection. When sorcery touches the Crown, it is not merely scandal. It is a sickness at the heart.”

He turned slightly toward Edin, and the motion felt like devotion offered in public where it could be seen and repeated.

“You have acted, Your Majesty,” he said, his voice becoming a moan of sorts. “Swiftly. In accordance with divine order. And there will be those who hiss that this is cruelty, that the Queen’s chains are too heavy for a royal throat. But chains are mercy when the alternative is the realm’s collapse.”

He sat only after he had wrung the room dry of oxygen, and for a moment Edin seemed oddly satisfied, not because he enjoyed Laurent’s fervor, but because fervor was useful.

Edin slapped both hands flat on the table loudly. “So this is what will happen,” he said, and the words struck with the finality of an iron gate closing. “Auguste and Anastasia will undergo cleansing rites,” he said. “Publicly. Not because they are guilty, but because the realm must see that the Crown submits to correction. Caesonia will be reminded that the Danrose line does not hide from purity. Wulfric has proved himself with the sacrifice of his own mother for the greater good of this country, now the rest will prove their innocence. Prince Auguste’s line in succession will be suspended until the church’s review is complete.”

Wulfric’s expression did not change, but the tension in his jaw returned. Auguste’s eyes narrowed slightly, trying to consider what a “cleansing rite” meant in practice.

“And Prince Callum,” he said, and the name landed with a weight that caught the attention of all, “will be located and then placed under the same review. The realm will not be allowed to imagine I have hidden him away like contraband.”

Nobody asked where Callum was; nobody wanted to ask why a prince could vanish in a palace that claimed divine favor.

“The city will need a single, clean conclusion,” Father Mathieu said softly. “And the tribunal will provide it. The Crown will be seen as purified. The Church will be seen as vigilant. The hunters will be seen as necessary.”

“Then we are agreed,” Edin said.

The Justicar inclined his head. “So long as the king remembers,” he replied coldly, “that purity is older than crowns.”

Edin’s smile did not reach his eyes.

The meeting ended with the slow scrape of chairs and the rustle of robes, with the sense that everyone had arrived expecting to leave having won something, and instead they were leaving with a sense of uncertainty.

Edin remained standing until the last of them had gone, gaze fixed on the shut doors as if he could force them to stay closed forever through will alone. Only when the chamber was finally his again did he look to his children, and the look was not tender.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Stratya, Kazumin, Cassius, Olivia & Charlotte

Part 1

Time: Ignis 2 Evening
Location: On the way to the Vikena’s Sorian Estate

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The foyer was quieter than the dining room, and Cassius felt the difference immediately. He kept walking and didn’t look back. If he stayed at that table another minute, he would say something he couldn’t take back. Near the front doors, a small table had been set out for guests. Wine, cigars, and matches. Everything was arranged neatly, just the way Calbert had trained his staff to do so.

He stopped, not because he wished for further intoxication, not this time at least… but because he needed his anxious hands occupied. He reached for the decanter and poured himself a glass without bothering to measure. Then he took a cigar.

He wasn’t much of a smoker, though there were few indulgences he hadn’t at least tried in his years. He’d never cared for the taste, but he needed something extra tonight…something that would slow his thoughts down and give him a reason to breathe.

He picked up a matchbox and stepped outside.

Cool air met him as soon as the door shut behind him. It helped… It made his head feel a little bit clearer from that first breath alone, even if it didn’t do much for the anger sitting in his chest.

Cassius crossed to one of the columns on the front porch and paused there, leaning against it. He struck a match and watched the flame catch, holding it to the end of the cigar until it lit, then took a careful inhale. He welcomed the burn that spread down through his throat.

He forced himself to take another pull, smaller this time, and let the smoke out slowly. The cigar didn’t taste as good as it smelled, though it never did. But it did what he needed…gave him something to focus on. He took a sip of wine after that hit. The warmth settled in his stomach, and his mind returned finally to the dinner.

It wasn’t the conversation nor the impeccable meal that drew his attention, but rather the moment Marek Delronzo had arrived. Cassius had met more than his fair share of dangerous men before. Hell, he had been the dangerous man of other men’s tales one more than a few occasions. But Marek was different. That man had walked into the room and taken control without raising his voice. The way he spoke, the silences he chose, the moments where his eyes lingered and where… Every single move he made had been deliberate, yet somehow otherworldly all the same.

Cassius couldn’t stop thinking about it… about what the man represented.

The darkness of the Black Rose wasn’t just rumor and speculation. This was not an exaggeration that people whispered about in taverns. The sins were real, and the machinator of it all, Marek Delronzo, was just as real, and he sat at the Damien table like he belonged there.

Cassius exhaled smoke after another drag and stared out into the dark estate grounds, trying to make sense of it all. His father’s relationship with Marek had been hinted at in careful phrases, as if naming it directly was forbidden. But to Cassius, the meaning had been clear.

The Damien family was in deep with the Black Rose. They weren’t just associated with them like he had come to understand. They were tied to them.

Cassius tightened his grip on the glass. He hadn’t come to Sorian, he hadn’t welcomed a new life here just to become part of a criminal empire. He hadn’t walked away from everything he had known, from everything he had built and the craft of war he had mastered, just to find something worse waiting for him behind a noble title.

He took another sip and felt the alcohol bite as his focus shifted, then another pull of the cigar, the ember’s glow surging like a dying star. The smoke stung his eyes and he let it. That sting was deserved, because through the haze of Marek, Alexander, and the Black Rose bullshit, one word remained lodged in his heart.

Plain.

Alexander’s voice, honeyed as only his brand of devil can be, echoed in his mind. “Plain is probably the best word…” That’s what he had said.

Cassius’s jaw tightened until the bone began to ache. A disgusted scoff escaped him. The ignorant bastard, to call Lottie "plain" was clearly an attempt to rile him, and as much as it angered him to admit... It worked.

He closed his eyes, and the dark of the estate vanished. In his mind’s eye he was back at Drake’s party. He could see the sunlight… the raw, golden spill of a warm afternoon. He pictured her lying in the grass, remembering the way the light had kissed the curve of her cheek, lingering there with a devotion he found himself envying. He remembered the delicate shadow of her lashes and the way her eyes, never plain, held the hue of such beauty. They were blue, but a blue that contained depths of melancholy and a quiet, resilient kindness.

And her smile. When it finally bloomed, it had been the kind of warmth he had craved yet never knew. In that moment, watching her, Cassius had forgotten the scars on his body and the blood that forever stained his hands.

The cigar ash fell, unheeded, onto his boots.

The word "plain" burned hotter than the tobacco. It shouldn't matter, because Alexander was simply playing a game with those words. It was reminiscent of a child pulling wings off flies to see them squirm. But out here, in the honesty of the cool air and isolation, the anger in Cassius’s chest was admission that the game had worked on him. He knew he should be ashamed of himself, but all he could feel was resentment towards the man… the creature who pulled the strings. Yet his mind went once more to Charlotte.

Cassius felt a sudden ache… deep in the lower depths of his heart. The kind he had only felt for her. He took a long sip of wine, trying to drown the thought, but it did not drown. It refused, and more profoundly…the roots of the feeling clawed deeper and deeper with each flash of her face that played in his memory.

It was then he felt it again—the cold, bottomless dark from the dining room—closing in and drowning him in dread.

The porch lanterns caught the edge of a silhouette as it came forward. It moved as if it owned the air. A faint scent followed him, clean and expensive.

When Marek drew alongside Cassius, his gaze slid across him with a lazy, amused entitlement as he slowed his stride. The slight grin that moved his mouth as their eyes met wasn’t warmth; it was recognition. His eyes lingered on the ember of the cigar, then lifted again, settling on the young Damien man’s face. Cassius simply lifted his glass as a toast to Marek, his own gaze not faltering despite the whirlwind inside of him.

Then, as quickly as he appeared, Marek was past. Footsteps receded. The air felt colder where he’d been.

He pushed past the gate eventually and came to a halt as a sight caught his gaze: Captain Stratya Durmand, Lady Charlotte Vikena, Kazumin Nagasa, and the one called “Olivia” had all rounded the corner together.

Marek’s attention moved once across the group. An almost imperceptible hum of amusement left his lips. “Good evening.” The greeting was polite, but his voice was heavy and oddly resonant.

And then he continued toward the beach as if nothing in the world had the power to make him change course.

Charlotte’s lips parted, her gaze fixed on the man as his form disappeared into the night. She laid her head wearily on Stratya, her temples throbbing with pain. “We’re almost there,” she said softly before they started to move forward once more, “my estate is just after this one.”

Meanwhile, Olivia had been in Kazumin’s arms, weak and trembling. The dark magic spell had left her dazed from pain. It was as if she had lit her nerves on fire as well. Olivia couldn’t make heads or tails of how to stand up or move, and her head throbbed as if she’d been smacked with a frying pan. She wanted to protest against Kazumin, but timing was of the essence. She sighed and made herself at home, and oddly enough, was enjoying their closeness. Her head rested against his chest, and her arms were around his. Her strawberry blonde hair spilled over his arms like a river of red.

Her green eyes strayed from staring at the stars as they neared the Damien estate. An older male strode past them with purpose towards the beach. Her mind, though hazy, reeled from seeing him, and her muscles tensed. An inexplicable sense of danger rushed through her, and Liv struggled to move in Kazu’s arms.

”...” Olivia tried to speak, but the idea of making sound was difficult. She tried to reach for Lottie and set her hand on hers. Though she was unable to do much of anything, Liv made a weak effort to pull her to her side. I recognize him…What was his name? She tried to think, but the effort caused her head to throb more, and she huffed in annoyance.

Kazumin’s arms tightened by instinct at the sight—a strange man leaving the Damien Estate grounds. As the man paused suddenly, he felt oddly unnerved. However, the feeling of Olivia in his arms steadied him; she was so warm that it might have flustered him if his instincts hadn’t been busy screaming.

When she had shifted in his hold like a rabbit hearing the click of a snare, he pulled her in closer and murmured that it would be alright. Still, a sharp pang had cut behind his eyes, and for a moment, he saw the night all over again. The images clawed up into his brain, and he felt uneasy all over again. But it quickly curdled into irritation as he remembered the precious girl in his arms.

His mouth then curved into a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, a cheeky bite to his words as he replied, “Aye.” He lifted his chin slightly at the man, his voice calm, “—A good evening for a good drink.” He stepped forward casually and deliberately, angling his body so he stood protectively between the man and the women with him, even as he departed down the beach.

This was taking too long already. That man that just greeted them gave her a terribly ominous feeling. This wasn’t the time to stand and ponder or wait. Lady Charlotte spoke true, the Vikena estate was not far. The walk there was open, but standing here for long enough wasn’t any better. “Let’s take t’ walk, then.” The captain, supporting Charlotte with her left arm, reached across with her right to gently stroke the poor thing’s hair, careful of the injury. After a brief moment of comfort, she would lead the way forward.

Gale had been watching the man that had passed right by him. He saw him seeing them, and knew the captain would be getting impatient when she approached with her group. “I would ‘ave taken ye west, but seems someone in t’ guarrd thought folk would try those alleys.”

He knew she’d been about to ask him. “We’ll walk tae t’ Vikena esta’e frrom ‘erre. Use theirr stables, I nae ken ‘ow long I’ll be.” It felt like standing back up might be a problem if she sat down. Perhaps she would remain standing.

She didn’t break pace as she addressed Gale, her thoughts kept returning to how Giddeon hadn’t even used her name. Stratya chose to believe that was a measure he’d taken to protect her identity. Perhaps they were far enough from the scene she could relax, but somehow it didn’t sit right.

Cassius had not been able to force his eyes away from Marek as the man had made his way off the Damien’s property. Though, just as he exited, Cas noticed the way he turned to acknowledge the group making their way down the street. With Marek disappearing from his line of sight, Cassius let his eyes fall upon the group… And to his surprise, what he saw caused his blood to run cold.

There she was, the girl that only seconds ago had dominated his mind’s eye. She was leaning against a familiar figure, he believed it to be the guard captain his father had pointed out to him at Lord Edward’s party. Along with them was a man he recognized as Kazumin, who was carrying Olivia, the girl Charlotte had introduced him to at the beach.

Something wasn’t right. The way they moved, the way Charlotte’s weight was resting against the guard captain… The way Kazumin was supporting Olivia in his arms. It all pointed to exhaustion, perhaps some kind of potential injuries. His mind raced wondering what had happened, flashing back to the night of his stabbing. Had someone hurt them? Had someone hurt her?

The cigar fell from between his fingers, its embers breaking into dozens of tiny sparks as the ash made contact with the ground. The wine, that had been up to his lips but a second ago, slipped from his grasp, the glass shattering as it landed. But he hadn’t even noticed.

Cassius moved without even a moment’s ponderance, and before he knew it he was there at the gates, only feet from them. He could see now, the evidence of some kind of struggle… The wounds. Each of them bore the signs of violence, but his eyes were drawn to Lottie as his heart began to shatter the same way the glass that fell from his fingertips had moments ago.

Charlotte’s face was smeared with blood. He saw the gash above her brow, the dried blood under her nose, the cut across the neck. Without thought, without reason, without restraint… Cassius moved to her. Gently, he reached shaking hands towards her with worried eyes. His fingers carefully turned her face so that the angles of moonlight and what light was cast from the nearest street lamp could illuminate her features and injuries. His desperate expression broke away from Charlotte just long enough for his gaze to meet the other’s eyes, a look questioning anyone and everyone for answers. Finally, those stormy blue eyes found Charlotte’s once again as he was able to muster the self control to speak.

“Lottie?” Was all he could manage in that first second, but he forced out the rest with a voice that was as desperate as the look in his eyes. “Who…Who did this to you?” His hands continued to softly hold her face in his caress.

The rate of his heart was out of control, his stomach sunken, and skin crawling with fear for her safety, and a need to make whoever did this pay as his eyes begged her for an answer.

The shrill shatter of glass made Charlotte’s shoulders tense up, her head turning toward the sound on instinct. She saw no other than Cassius—running for the gate as though the night itself had given him no other choice. The intense look that had seized his face caused her to furrow her brows—it was as if someone was wrenching at his heart through his ribs.

He was… afraid.

Her attention dropped to the stone behind him, where a dark red spill pooled beside where the wine glass had fallen. The broken glass caught the moonlight in glittering shards. They looked beautiful, in the way something dangerous could technically be.
When she lifted her head again, she found him close enough that there was nowhere to look but into that ethereal gaze of his.

Lottie stared as if she couldn’t quite believe he was here, really here, looking at her, speaking to her… choosing to… And all as if she mattered, just the same way he had made her feel at the masquerade, under the moonlight, in the Rosegate club, in the castle corridors—

She didn’t pull away. Instead her cheek immediately sank into the warmth of his palm, practically melting into his touch.

For a moment she only watched him: the tremor in his hands, the hitch in his voice, as if he’d been holding his breath for hours and only now remembered how to breathe. Tears slipped free down her cheeks; she couldn’t hide her own weakness from him… or from herself, not this time. She knew it wouldn’t last. It might as well have been an illusion; whatever had been between them felt like a sick game, and she had no idea why she couldn’t stop playing.

And yet… After a night like she had, Charlotte couldn’t deny herself this—him. She was still afraid, after all—so afraid it was as if they had never truly left the tavern. And he was the only thing in this world that made her feel safe.

When she finally found her breath again, her lashes fluttered, as though waking.
“Bandits… the tavern. They held everyone hostage.” she whispered.

“Hey…” Cassius murmured, his voice low and unsteady in a way it almost never was. One thumb brushed carefully beneath her eye, sweeping away a tear without smearing the blood there, her cheeks flushing under his touch. “You got out of there… You’re safe now.”

The word hostage echoed in his mind. The thought of Charlotte trapped somewhere like that, forced to endure the fear and violence, made something vicious twist deep in his chest. He’d faced battlefields without flinching, but imagining her powerless, at the mercy of strangers, stripped the breath from his lungs. It took effort not to let it show…not to let the fury rise and swallow the careful gentleness he wished to offer.

His forehead leaned in just enough that she could feel his breath, warm against the cold of the evening air. His hands stayed reverent despite their trembling and his unraveled demeanor. For a moment his gaze lifted…just briefly… sharp and assessing as it swept the others, counting injuries, reading exhaustion, continuing to process the scale of what they had all just survived…before returning to Charlotte, the rest of the world narrowing back down to her.

“You’re all safe now,” he said softly, forcing steadiness into the words. “I’m so damn glad you’re okay…all of you.” His thumb lingered at her cheek, a silent reassurance before he drew a careful breath. “Let’s get you home, Lottie. Let’s get you all inside.”

His eyes held hers, earnest and protective.

“I’ll come with you,” he added gently. “You can tell me everything there. It’s probably for the best that we get the least amount of eyes on you all as we can.”

Captain Durmand had only stopped because of the way this man seemed to affect Charlotte. The young lady hid it poorly, in her state. Falling back to her old training as a guard, she made herself just a fly on the wall, even as she continued to shoulder some of Lady Vikena’s balance. This display between them was sweet and everything, but as Lord Cassius put it himself, it would be best to get the least amount of eyes on them.

You.

Her expression didn’t betray her long or much as she checked behind them with the purposeful slowness of a bodyguard. Her expression didn’t betray her, but her tone reflected her rising concern, “yes, quickly.”

As she kept repeating, in her mind, Giddeon’s choice to avoid her name specifically, Stratya began to realize just how bad for her this was. If she wasn’t careful, it might not end with her. Her urgent gaze came forward to meet with Cassius’ as her gentle touch drove Charlotte forward. She did not use her left hand, but her wrist, at Charlotte’s hip, while her right hand took her shoulder.

The crack of the glass hitting the stone had snapped Kazumin out of his tunnel vision. His shoulders jumped in reaction, and his body turned on instinct. He then drew Olivia tighter against his chest protectively as he shifted to put himself between her and the sound. He scanned the street like he expected someone to come bolting out of the dark, pulse thudding hard enough to feel in his throat.

Then he caught sight of Cassius coming out from the gate, hands already on Charlotte’s face like she was something precious and breakable, panic written all over him. It knocked a little air back into Kazumin’s lungs. She was hurt, aye—but she wasn’t alone. Not right now. He swallowed hard, the tightness in his chest easing just enough to remember the captain’s urgency. “Aye,” he said, low and hoarse, half to Stratya and half to himself. “We keep movin’.”

His gaze dropped to Olivia again and the relief didn’t follow. She was trembling; she was too weak, too pale. The sight of her wrecked him in a way he didn’t have time to unpack. He wanted to ask what happened, what she’d done, what they’d done to her… and still, he didn’t believe for a second she’d reached for that kind of power without a reason. Not Percy. Not the girl he knew. But Cassius’s urgency and Stratya’s pace said the same thing: later. Olivia wasn’t in any state to explain, and Kazumin wasn’t sure his chest could take hearing it right now, either.

His eyes traveled across her face and the corners of his lips flickered upward, because even like this, she looked oddly content in his arms, like she’d finally found one quiet place in the whole bloody night. Warmth spread through him, chasing some of the panic out, and he lowered his head to brush his cheek to her hair, careful of the way she winced when he shifted. “I got your back, Percy,” he murmured for only her to hear, voice muffled into her hair. His hand tightened at her shoulder, protective without thinking. “Always.”

As they started to finally move forward together, a grim flash cut through his thoughts: dark magic snapping, Marius on the floor. He had always known Percy was powerful, but he was afraid of what that power now would cost her… and how fast the witch hunters would come running when they smelled blood in the water. Kazumin wasn’t willing to lose her; he wouldn’t give her up for anything. It was another topic he wanted to talk to her about, but for now he swallowed it down, nodded an awkward little agreement he didn’t quite know how to voice, and followed after them, holding her close like the night might try to steal her back if he blinked.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: Evening
Location: Tough Tavern
Interaction/Mention: @TpartywithZombi Ariella @Lava Alckon Drake @CitrusArms Stratya @ReusableSword Roman @Samreaper Kazumin @Potter Olivia @Apex Sunburn Sjandehk, Cynric, etc.

---

The tavern finally fell stunned silent as the battle ceased.

The worst of the shouting had sunk into ragged breathing and the occasional cough, into the sounds people made when adrenaline left them and pain arrived in its place. Bodies lay where they had dropped. Some survivors sat in the wreckage like they had been placed there, too shocked to move. Others crawled without lifting their eyes, as if staring at the floor might keep the night from becoming real.

Outside, the street knew there had been magic. Some had seen the girl who had seemed to siphon darkness itself from the tavern and then retch it up into the open air, and word traveled faster than sense ever did. A crowd formed in minutes, edging closer in slow increments as people argued under their breath.

Then the doors banged inward.

Duke Gideon Edwards came through with his staff guards at his heels, and the room fixated on him. He did not hesitate at the threshold. He did not pause to count bodies or name horrors, because his eyes were already hunting with a singular focus that made everything else in the room expendable. His guards spread, hands on weapons, not raised to fire blindly but ready to kill anything that moved wrong toward their duke.

“Drake.” His voice landed heavy in the wrecked room, not a plea so much as a command to the world to give his son back. “Ariella.”

He stepped over a shattered chair like it was nothing, coat hem catching dark stains, jaw locked so hard the muscle jumped. Somewhere near the edge of that movement, Gideon’s eyes found Stratya. It was a brief look, but he could already see the shape of the story the street would tell once the Crown arrived. He crossed just enough distance to make the warning private.

“You,” he said sharply. His gaze flicked toward the windows, toward the press of bodies outside. “Do not let anyone see you here. Out the back. Now.”

Then his attention snapped, catching Charlotte in the periphery, and something protective flashed across his face. “Where are they?” he demanded, and even when he looked to Charlotte, it did not soften into gentleness.

Charlotte, Olivia, and Kazumin did not waste time trying to summarize a nightmare. They moved because there was no other choice, leading Gideon through the wreckage toward where Drake and Ariella had been found. Gideon barked orders over his shoulder without looking back.

“Home,” he snapped at them, voice low with urgency. “All of you. Now.”

When he reached his children, the control he had been holding together with sheer will fractured.

Drake was alive, but he did not look like himself; he looked like a young man forced to survive something that had gone far beyond fear. Ariella was worse.

She was too still, lashes unmoving, her body slack in the arms holding her up as if the fight had simply unplugged something inside her. There was blood at her hairline—only a little, but enough that Gideon’s eyes locked onto it with the terror of a father.

He was at her in an instant, catching her face between his hands, thumb skimming her cheekbone with shaking fingers, gaze flicking from her mouth to her throat to the shallow rise of her chest. The duke’s composure failed him entirely. His lips parted, and whatever he meant to say did not make it out.

“Ari,” he whispered, and the name cracked in the middle. His staff surged in around them, forming a shield without being told.

“Your Grace—carriage. Now,” one urged, already pulling a cloak around Ariella’s shoulders.

“Pulse is there. She’s breathing. Keep her warm,” another said.

Gideon nodded once, and he moved with them—one hand never leaving Ariella, the other gripping Drake’s forearm as if he needed Drake to feel that he was real and still here.

But he turned back once, eyes snapping to Charlotte again, taking in the way she held herself as if adrenaline was the only thing keeping her upright. The fear he felt for his children had not left room for anything else, but now it widened to include her.

“Charlotte Vikena.” The name came out blunt. “You are leaving this place. Now.”

She looked like she might argue. Gideon cut it off with a stare that left no room for negotiation.

“The Crown Guard is coming,” he announced. “They will want a clean story, and clean stories always need someone to hang. You do not stand here and give them the chance.”

His gaze swept Olivia and Kazumin, then Roman, then back to Stratya as if confirming she’d understood. He swept over Sjan-dehk and Cynric as well, eyes sharp with the same warning: leave. His staff shifted subtly, opening a corridor toward the back with their bodies. “Out, all of you,” Gideon ordered. He was already turning with Ariella in his arms when he saw it: a grateful young woman stumbling up to Roman, pressing a small glass bottle into his hand. The liquid inside was red, too clean to be wine, and Gideon’s brows furrowed.

Without breaking stride, he tipped his head toward two of his staff. “You. Stay,” he said under his breath. “Get the injured out the back. Keep them moving.”

Then he raised his voice again so everyone still standing could hear it. “Take whoever can walk,” Gideon barked. “No heroics.”

A handful of patrons seized that mercy immediately. They moved like shipwrecked people who had spotted shore, slipping into the narrow gap Gideon’s guards created. Others hesitated, paralyzed by shock, by loyalty, by fear of what waited outside, and Gideon did not have time to drag them.

Outside, the crowd tried to swell forward at the sight of Drake and Ariella being brought out. The Edwards staff did not allow the street to touch them.

“Hospital,” Gideon snapped, and the carriage door shut.

Only when that door slammed, sealing them away from the world, did the sound he made stop being a command at all. It was a broken, helpless exhale that turned into a sob he tried to swallow and failed. Gideon bent over Ariella, pressing his forehead to her knuckles, and tears fell in silence, tracking into his beard as he cupped the side of her face again.

“Breathe, sweetheart,” he said, voice wrecked, thumb brushing her cheek. “Come on. Stay with me, baby girl.” Then he dragged in a breath that shook. “If anyone delays this carriage, I will have them thrown under the wheels.” Only then did his hand find Drake’s again
.
“You did good, my son,” he managed. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. I’ve got you both.”

---

The Arrival of the Guards

_{@TpartywithZombi @Lava Alckon @CitrusArms @ReusableSword@Samreaper @Potter @Apex Sunburn @Tae}

Constables surged in first, forming a hard cordon and forcing the crowd back by steady increments that turned inches into yards. Behind them came armed guards in proper uniform with muskets and fixed bayonets, not leveled at civilians but held where everyone could see them—an unspoken reminder of what happened when a street decided it could become a mob.

“Clear the road!” an officer shouted. “Back—keep moving!”
“If you see a runner, you take him!”

When the entry team pushed into the tavern, they slowed despite themselves. They were trained for violence, but training did not make one immune to the sight of too many bodies in one room, to blood drying black against wood, to the way furniture looked like it had been used first as cover and then as a bludgeon. A flicker of awe crossed a few faces briefly before they started shouting.

“CROWN GUARD!” the lead sergeant bellowed. “DOWN ON THE FLOOR. HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM. WEAPONS DOWN—NOW!”

Those who remained obeyed with shaking hands and wide eyes. Some sobbed. Some stared into nothing. A few clung to one another like the room might collapse if they let go. And when the constables began asking questions—probing for a story that fit neatly into a report—the survivors answered with stubborn unity.

It had been thugs, they said. Armed masked men, and two mages on their side.

When a constable’s gaze narrowed, and his questions slid toward the rumors boiling outside—toward the way the air had twisted, toward the shadows that had been swallowed whole—the patrons did not give up their saviors. They did not point at the ones who had fought for them.

However, that did not mean suspicions were satisfied. After all, it was unlikely that the patrons of the tavern had been able to fend off two mages without the help of others.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: Evening
Location: Tough Tavern
Attire: Outfit, Amulet
Interaction: @CitrusArms Stratya @Apex Sunburn Sjandehk, your fellas outside @Potter Olivia @Samreaper Kazumin
Mentions: @Tae Kalliope @ReusableSword

---

Charlotte stumbled outside just as boots thundered past her. “Wait—”

The word came out soft, swallowed by the rush of bodies. She swayed a little as her head pulsed with an insistent throb. But she forced herself upright anyway and caught the first face she could. “Did you see a woman—red hair, green eyes—being pulled through here?”

The man didn’t slow for more than a second. His gaze flicked over her. “No, my lady,” he said, already turning back toward the dark. “We cleared the back rooms. Come back inside with us—you’ll be safer.”

And then they were gone, sprinting through the kitchen door as if the floor was on fire. The door began to swing closed behind them. For one brief, awful instant, the inside of the back rooms flashed into view.

It was then that Lottie noticed the shapes on the floor—A half-dozen bodies lay where they’d fallen, blood in spreading pools along the planks. Charlotte’s breath snagged so sharply it hurt, and her eyes dilated. She stood there as if her feet had been nailed to the earth. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t even blink.

The door kept swinging until it finally closed. Then a whistle cut through the ringing in her ears.

Charlotte turned on instinct, and the sight of Stratya made relief hit her so hard her knees threatened to give. “ye’rr alrrigh’, Lady Charrlo’e? ...oh, yerr head. Le’ me see..” Her left arm remained tucked close as she stepped closer to Charlotte, her right coming in to gently cup her head to hold her still while she looked at the injury. “... coulda been worrse, easy. We’ll still ‘ave tae ge’ ye some attention, tho’.”

The tenderness of her movements and words undid her before she could process them. Lottie’s eyes stung, and she tried to speak with composure, but her voice betrayed her with a tremor. “Captain…” And before she could overthink it, she stepped forward and threw her arms around Stratya, hugging her tight and burying her face into her shoulder.

“I am—” She swallowed, forcing the words out of her sore throat. “I am so relieved you’re alright... It’s been so dreadful. ”

Her fingers tightened at the back of Stratya’s dress as she tried to remember how to breathe properly. After a long moment, she drew back, still trembling, and immediately looked mortified with herself.“Please pardon me,” she managed, “I did not mean to forget myself— I simply…” She shook her head, then glanced toward the tavern door, and subsequently swallowed against the nausea rising in her throat.

“We must go back inside,” she said, voice soft but tinged with resolve. “They said we would be safer... And we need to make certain the others are well. We must get everyone out before this worsens.”

Her brows knitted as she took in their surroundings once more, as if she might suddenly see Kalliope somewhere. “I cannot understand how they saw nothing of Kalliope if they truly came this way,” she murmured, half to herself. “Unless... magic was involved.”

Then her gaze snapped to the door, focusing despite the lingering fog behind her eyes. “We will find her,” she told Stratya. “But first we must ensure no one else meets a terrible fate for want of our aid.”

She reached for the kitchen door and pushed it open, keeping her eyes lifted toward the ceiling. She refused to look at the bodies again. “Come, my dear,” she said to Stratya. “Let us go.”

As she stepped back inside, the tavern swallowed them again in a mixed aroma of heat, smoke, and a metallic stink. The lanternlight suddenly felt too bright against her eyes. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, then forced herself onward anyway.

Her gaze lowered, and she found herself meeting the gaze of Sjandehk. Her lips parted in surprise. Despite her condition, she registered the look in his eyes—knew exactly who he was looking for. Her expression crumbled as she informed him quietly, “ She wasn't outside."

And then she saw them.

Olivia was on her knees in a widening puddle of blood. Dark, oily tendrils clung to her hands. Nearby, what remained of Marius lay ruined and still. Kazumin was at her side, his arm around her.

“Olivia—”

Charlotte crossed the distance too quickly; her balance wavered, her left hand stinging as she caught herself on the edge of the bar. The pain shot up her wrist, but she did not stop. She dropped to her knees beside them, the impact sending another throb through her skull.

Gently, she closed Olivia's hands and held them until the tendrils slowly evaporated, receding until they were gone. Then, with trembling care, she lifted her hands and placed them as gently as she could—her left to Kazumin’s cheek, her right to Olivia’s—thumbs barely brushing skin. “Look at me... Are you two hurt?”

After an emotional moment between the three friends, she drew them into a warm embrace, then rose with determination. “Captain Durmand! Please go to Lord Ravenwood, and we will go to the Edwards."

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: Evening
Location: The Dungeon
Interactions: Alibeth, Wulfric, Auguste
Attire: Dress and Hair

---

Anastasia had no idea where to begin to process all she had heard.

For a long moment, she just stared at her mother through the bars. “Then how,” Anastasia whispered, “after all of that… how did you end up with Father?”

Alibeth's gaze drifted, not away from Anastasia, but past her. “After Polina,” she said, and the name landed like a stone in still water. “After what she became, our street stopped seeing us as neighbors. We were no longer children who shared a stoop and borrowed salt.”

“Our mother was dead,” she continued, and that was all she allowed that grief. “Our father vanished as he always did. And I was left with a house full of mouths and the certainty that innocence is a luxury granted by stable walls.”

Anastasia’s lips parted, but nothing came out.

Alibeth’s gaze sharpened. “You are imagining, I assume, that the townspeople pitied us. They did not.”

Her mouth tightened. “We had no money, not since our mother had fallen sick.” And then, with the same steadiness she used when she spoke about hunger and death: “So as I grew, I filled her place. I did what kept the little ones breathing.”

Anastasia swallowed, the motion audible. “So you—”

“So I chose,” Alibeth cut in. “Not a pretty choice. Not one I would ever wish on you.”

She tilted her head slightly, as if examining Anastasia’s face for understanding rather than comfort. “Over those years, I formed a plan.” A pause followed, and then her eyes went briefly distant again. “The book we stole came from a baron’s house. That mattered.” Anastasia frowned faintly, trying to follow.

“Because money is not the most valuable thing a noble possesses,” Alibeth said. “Not even land. The most valuable thing is the belief that their world is clean.” Her voice lowered. “And that means what they truly hoard is not wealth.”

“It is fear.”

“I went back,” Alibeth continued. “And I did not beg them to save us.”

“I informed them they would.”

Her eyes did not flicker with shame. “I told them precisely what I knew,” she said, “That two girls had slipped through their servant’s door. There was a hidden corridor behind their shelves. That there was a private library and a pedestal and a book with a mark that did not belong in any respectable household.”

Her mouth curved, humorless. “I reminded them that the street had eyes. That a ‘witch’ had risen and torn our little town apart. That people were already hungry for someone to blame... and nobles are always the most delicious target.”

“So I offered them a choice,” she said. “They could adopt a lie that served them, or they could gamble on the truth and pray it spared them.”

Her gaze held Anastasia’s gaze. “I became Lady Alibeth Dragunov.”

“They provided a story clean enough to repeat,” she continued. “They did not do it out of compassion. They did it because I made myself expensive to betray.”

Anastasia stared at her as if hearing her mother in an entirely new language. Her voice shook when she spoke again. “And… Father?”

“Patience, Anastasia... I tried, at first, to do it the safer way,” she admitted. “Patrons. Minor lords. The sort of families who enjoy being seen performing charity, so long as it comes with a ribbon and applause.”

Her voice remained even, but Anastasia could hear the disgust under it.

“But then the Dragunovs took me to a ball in Caesonia, and Edin Danrose chose me for a dance.”
Alibeth’s eyes moved over her daughter’s face with an expression that was almost weary. “And I played him like a fiddle.”

She let that land, because it was the truest thing she’d said about Edin in front of his children. “I presented a curated version of me that fit the shape of what he wanted,” she said quietly. “And he married me.”

“I secured my siblings a beautiful home, protection, stability, the kind of safety that does not exist for people like us...” Her eyes held her daughter’s, unwavering. “And in the same stroke, I understood the cost with absolute clarity: I would never see them again.”

She drew a slow breath, the sort taken by someone who has already made the choice. “I knew then that I had reached the outermost limit of what I could do for them without destroying what I had managed to build,” she said, “After that, the only rational use of my position was to ensure that the machinery which ground my family into the dirt would not be allowed to do the same to others; to take the authority I had acquired through compromise and wield it against the very conditions that made such compromises necessary.”

Her voice lowered in emphasis. “I told myself that if I could not keep my own blood close, then I would at least keep the world from becoming the kind of place that devours daughters for being born in the wrong street, in the wrong season, to the wrong name.” Her gaze narrowed in resolve. “And I decided, above all, that all of you would live good lives.”

Only then did she let the conclusion arrive, inevitable as an ending already written.
“That is how I ended up with your father.”

A hush came over the dungeon; even the air felt tighter for it. Then, finally, her eldest spoke. “My, my,” he drawled in a manner that was ironically gentle. “What devotion you expect.” A brief huff of amusement left him; it never reached his eyes.

“Do not mistake me,” Wulfric continued, unhurried. “I have no intention of paying you with sympathy.”

“Of course you would turn Polina into a sermon,” he said, as if remarking on the weather. “It’s efficient. It’s tidy. It lets you call your choices ‘necessity’ rather than what they are.”

He paused just long enough to force her to sit inside it. “Your dead sister is not proof that magic is evil,” he said. “Polina is proof that power collects a debt. And that someone always wants the public to believe the debt belongs to everyone but them.”

“You see,” he went on, voice almost pleasant, “it is remarkably easy to say ‘witch’ and feel virtuous. Father calls it faith. The court calls it purity... And the men who applaud it will continue to sin in private.”

“So do not reduce this into ‘Polina fell into ruin, therefore all will.’” A faint tilt of his head followed. “That’s simply propaganda. Though I suppose you're clearly accustomed to lying for survival.”

“If you want a question worth asking, ask who benefits,” Wulfric said, still calm. “Because the answer is never ‘the kingdom.’ It is always the person who gets to decide who counts as pure.”

“And that is what you want, isn’t it?” he asked softly. “Not safety. Not order. Authority.”

His gaze held hers. “What you've done will not save Caesonia, mother,” he finished darkly. “You are simply doing what you've always done.”

Alibeth lifted her chin silently, watching her son all the while he spoke. As he finished, her eyes slid to Auguste, knowing he'd chime in next.

Auguste had been still throughout it all, gaze fixed on the bars. He stepped just enough to angle himself between Anastasia and the cell, not shielding her, but reassigning the room’s focus by force of presence alone. The chain on Alibeth’s wrist gave a soft click as she shifted her weight. His hand found Anastasia’s upper arm; the princess had been clearly overwhelmed by it all. “Anastasia.” His tone was low. “Breathe.”

“Look at me.”

Only when her eyes steadied did he turn his head slowly toward their mother. “Very well.” he said, as if concluding testimony. “What you've said is… comprehensive.”

His gaze sharpened, pity and irritation warring briefly before discipline won. “I understand what you are trying to explain to us,” Auguste continued, voice still calm. “That you were cornered, that you ‘chose,’ and that therefore you have earned the right to reshape the kingdom in your image.”

He held her eyes, unblinking. “That is not how legitimacy works... Nor is it how law works. If you want to speak of ‘machinery,’ then speak of it properly,” he said in finality. “Who do these witch hunters answer to?”

“Because it seems to me they now answer to Father.” A humorless curve threatened at his mouth and failed to become a smile.
“I have no interest in watching Father discover he’s found a new toy.” Auguste looked at Wulfric with a frown. “I do wish you had consulted me. Your objections to Mother are not without merit. But Father’s appetite for performance is more volatile. He will hurt more people in desperation to clear the Danrose name.”

“I’m aware.” Wulfric replied evenly. “That is precisely why I intend to keep him on a short leash.”

Auguste’s gaze lingered on Wulfric. “And how, exactly, do you intend to keep Father on a short leash?”

Wulfric’s mouth curved, not quite a smile, but more the suggestion of one, as if he found the question amusing for reasons he did not plan to share. “If he believes he is holding the leash,” he began, “then he will not notice whose hand is actually guiding it.”

There was a pause, the faintest tilt of his head. “Do not worry,” he added, almost courteous. “He is predictable in the ways that matter.”

It might have invited another question from Auguste. But then Alibeth spoke. “You are both still doing what privileged men always do when faced with blood,” she said. “You are searching for a version of this where you can keep your hands clean.”

“You have decided Polina is the central argument because Polina is the only version of this tragedy you can tolerate holding in your mind,” Alibeth continued. “Polina was just the first,” she said, “But long before her, and long after her, there were others. Young girls began with small tricks and ended with hunger in their eyes. Men who swore they were careful, who preached that they were the exception... Right up until the moment they were not. I've seen it many times. Over the years, we've executed many. Addiction is not always a frothing madness,” she said. “Those who try magic encounter suffering beyond imagination—and too often proceed to inflict it on others as well.”

“You do not discover the volatile mage at the moment of temptation; you discover them when the street is bleeding, and everyone is screaming that the Crown should have prevented it. And do not pretend you will reliably ‘decipher who is being responsible and who is not.’” She let the contempt show. “Polina seemed fine, too, when she first began. That is the entire problem.”

Alibeth’s gaze settled, unblinking, on Auguste. “So when you ask me about legitimacy and law,” she said, “understand this: I agree with you that law is the only tool that outlives a single ruler’s temperament.” Her tone did not soften. She shifted her focus to Wulfric then, as if placing the next piece directly into his hands. “If you permit magic to exist socially, informally, romantically—if you allow it to become something people do in alleyways and bedrooms—then you create a world where enforcement begins only after catastrophe.” she told him darkly.

“If you insist on restraint, then you make restraint enforceable,” Alibeth said. “You draft a registry that is not decorative: names, affiliations, capabilities when known, and mandatory reporting of any sanctioned use. You bind magic to a royal warrant. ” she said. “You require witnesses. You require a written cause. You require records that can be reviewed after the fact, because the kingdom cannot rely on any one man’s memory of what ‘felt justified’ in the moment.”

Then, only then, did she let the personal truth surface. “All I ever did,” she said quietly, “was choose the kind of ugliness that produced fewer corpses.” Her eyes did not waver. “I made decisions you would rather debate because I have lived in the world that debates produce.”

Alibeth stood. “And yes,” she added, gaze drifting between them all, “I will soon die. When that happens, the question will not be whether you liked my methods. The question will be whether you were wise enough to replace them with something that holds even when your father is bored, angry, vain, or afraid.”

Her mouth curved. “If you intend to remove him,” she said, “then it will be in your hands, Wulfric.”

"...What do we do about Callum?" Anastasia's voice was small as she whispered the words.

Alibeth’s eyes settled on Anastasia as if the question had finally given her something solid to grip.

For a moment, she did not speak. “...Callum died the moment he opened a book. The brother you knew is gone, Ana.”

Her mouth tightened, and the next words came out lower. For the first time, her eyes shone with tears, and her head dipped. “How I loved him.”

Anastasia stood up fast. “No.”

“No—no, you can’t just—” Her voice cracked hard on the last word. She shook her head violently. “That’s not true.” Tears poured out of her eyes in constant waves. “Callum isn’t dead,” she insisted frantically “He’s—he’s Callum. He’s my little brother. He’s—he’s the only one who—”

The sob came up unexpectedly. Anastasia pressed her fists to her eyes, but it didn’t help; it only smeared the tears. She looked up again, furious with herself for crying, furious with her mother for making her cry, furious with the world for daring to be this cruel.
“He wouldn’t,” she said, voice trembling but intense. “He knows what he's doing. He wouldn't go too far. He wouldn’t. He’s not—he’s not selfish like that.”

She buried her hands in her hair, fingers tangling like she could hold her own head together by force. Her pupils had blown wide, fear swallowing her whole. “You don’t get to say that!” She snapped suddenly, the words ragged. “You don’t get to decide he’s gone!” Her voice went shrill on the last word.

Auguste tried to wrap his arms around her, but she shoved him away in a wild and desperate manner. “He can stop,” she said, pleading now, though it was unclear who she was bargaining with. “He can choose not to. He can—he can listen to me. He always listens to me.”

Another sob broke loose, and this one she couldn’t swallow. “He’s not dead,” Anastasia repeated, the certainty collapsing into a child’s refusal. “He’s not. He’s not. He’s not.”

She wiped at her eyes again as her brothers stared at her. “I don't want this,” she choked, the words suddenly small in her mouth. “I don't want you to die, Mother, and I don't want Father to have to die... This is so FUCKING CRAZY!”

For a moment, no one moved. Even the torchfire seemed to hesitate.

Then footsteps approached the threshold. A guard appeared, face taut with urgency, eyes flicking to Wulfric first as if he already knew who mattered most. He bowed. “Your Highness. You’re needed. There’s been an incident—A tavern has been held hostage by bandits... They had mages with them.”

Wulfric’s gaze didn’t lift. Then a slow, controlled inhale left him, which made him look like someone tired in a way sleep could never fix.

He turned without a word. As he passed, his expression stayed downcast. The guard fell in beside him, already speaking again, already pulling him away.

Auguste wrapped his arms around his crying sister, more successfully this time, though she fought him with shaking hands and frantic, useless strength. He held on anyway because if he let go, she would collapse to the stone. “He’s not dead!” Anastasia sobbed, the words turning into a wail as Auguste hauled her toward the stairs. “He’s not—he’s not—he’s not! I'm going to go get him!” Her cries echoed up the corridor, while Wulfric walked the other direction without looking back, as the dungeon swallowed what was left of Anastasia's voice.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: It’s hard to tell in the dank, dark castle dungeons
Location: Alibeth is telling her offspring the story: the flashback itself is in a shantytown in Krasivaya.

---

FLASHBACK

The girl who returned months later was not her sister.

Perhaps by blood, by name, by bone…But not in the way her gaze darted, not in the strange, weightless fall of her hair, not in the stillness in her face.

That evening, the town had been silent. Their father was already there.

He stood with his hands folded behind his back. He did not turn when Alibeth approached. Polina stood in the square’s center, barefoot on the stones. The black lines along her forearms were not smudges nor dirt… They were her veins, branching beneath skin in a pattern as if poison had taken root in them.

A crowd was beginning to form—slow at first, then all at once. Doors cracked open and figures drifted from alleys and thresholds, drawn by the rumor of Polina’s return and the uneasy thrill of seeing the strange made real. Their voices stayed low, clustered into mutters that thickened the evening air.

Alibeth’s stomach felt knotted. She couldn’t stop staring at the thing wearing her sister’s face—her features were hollow, as if Polina had been drained out and only the shell had been sent back.

The plea tore out of her before she could stop it. “Polina… please.”

Polina’s mouth softened as if she meant to be kind. She didn’t manage it. “You came anyway.” Her voice was warm on the surface, but there was something off about it… An excitement that didn’t belong in a starving place. “Good. I didn’t want you hearing it from someone else.”

A few townsfolk tried to back away. Their bodies moved; the air refused to let them. It felt like walking through deep water. Alibeth watched an old man struggle toward his doorway and falter, suddenly dizzy, a dark trickle appearing under his nostril as if the square itself had punished his attempt.

Polina lowered the book to the stones and set a stub of black candle atop it, careful and reverent in her movements. She spoke without raising her voice.“Umbrae regnant, lux pereat.”

The change was immediate and sickeningly calm. The shadows deepened, pooling at people’s feet. Alibeth felt it crawl up her calves. Someone sobbed, and the sob seemed to get swallowed before it could properly exist.

Black liquid slid from the corner of Polina’s eyes. It fell slowly, mapping her cheekbones in dark lines. A bead gathered at her nostril, then fell, too heavy to be ordinary blood.

“Stop it. You’re frightening them. You’re—”

Polina’s attention drifted past Alibeth, bored by the words. “They should be frightened.” She lifted her hand, and her hair stirred as if something unseen had brushed beneath it. She muttered something unintelligible again.

Then she rose.

Polina lifted a foot off the stones, then another, then drifted higher until her toes hung above the square. Her hair lifted into the air in weightless strands, spreading around her head like she was suspended in water.

Polina’s veins darkened further, crawling up her throat. One of her fingernails loosened with the smallest shift of her hand. The nail fell, tapping the stone. Polina’s thumb dragged through her bloody nailbed, tracing something against her own palm before she lifted her hand again.

Alibeth covered her mouth. She couldn’t swallow nor breathe properly. She watched Polina sway slightly in midair. The entire town had become a held breath.

Polina turned her head toward the nearest alley, “Aculei Umbrae, surgite in defensionem meam.” And the shadows answered with brambles.

They erupted from the ground in a ring around the square, black thorns, writhing and hungry, rising high enough to block the exits. A boy tried to dart through a gap, and the brambles snapped toward him like lashes. He shrieked and fell back, clutching his arm where the dark had kissed his skin, leaving an angry welt.

A man in the crowd, one of the ones who used to jeer at them when they passed, shouted something Alibeth couldn’t fully hear. He raised a stone as if he really thought he could strike Polina down with it. Polina’s gaze found him, and his bravado faded fast.

She didn’t even flick her wrist. She only whispered.

“Umbrae Tendere, Constringere, et Frangere.”

Shadowy tendrils unfurled from the darkness at her feet and shot across the square. They wrapped the man’s torso, his arms, and his throat, and then he lifted off the ground, his feet kicking uselessly. The tendrils tightened as if they were living things that wanted to savor him. His shoulders jerked; his elbows bent the wrong way, each accompanied by a crack that made the crowd recoil as one body.

Alibeth couldn’t stop herself. “Polina, stop this, you’re dying! … Look at you.”

Polina’s eyes swung to her, red-black matter turning slowly within. For a second, Alibeth saw something familiar there: exhaustion, and the smallest tremor in her lower lip.“I was dying before,” she said softly. “This just makes my death mean something.” She raised her hand again, higher this time.

“Mens Teneat, Corpus Cedat.”

A few people lifted. One woman rose with a cry, her limbs jerking. A man came up next, eyes bulging, mouth opening and closing around air that wouldn’t satisfy him. A child floated a foot off the ground, screaming for his mother.

Polina’s fingers curled slowly. The floating bodies reacted like marionettes whose strings had been twisted. The woman’s spine bowed. The man clutched at his abdomen. Someone’s arm snapped back at the shoulder. Polina’s breathing hitched as the black veins along her throat pulsed. For a moment, her expression faltered, and Alibeth’s heart lurched with a terrible hope until Polina whispered again, delighted by the sound she was making the world produce. “Ossium Frangere.”

A man dropped to his knees even though nothing touched him. He screamed as if his bones were being shattered one by one, hands scrabbling at his own arms, his own chest, as though he could hold his skeleton together by force of will.

Then Polina tilted her head and looked almost curious.“Sanguis lacerare, cruciatum meum exalta.” She flicked the black blood from her fingertip toward the woman like a blessing.

Blood began to seep from a woman’s pores, darkening her collar. It slid from the corners of her eyes and out of her mouth in trembling strands. She gagged, coughing, and the sight ripped a cry from the crowd that finally broke the silence into something like panic. People pressed backward into each other, hands over mouths, eyes wide, some whispering prayers.

Alibeth stood rigid, shaking so hard her teeth clicked. She could not decide whether to run toward Polina or away from her. She could not decide whether the girl in the air was her sister or a thing wearing her face.

Their father finally moved. He walked beneath Polina with the steady pace of a man approaching an animal that had already been wounded. He didn’t flinch at the blood. He didn’t look at the bodies hanging in invisible hands. His gaze stayed on Polina’s face. “Enough.”

Polina’s head snapped toward him. The red-black matter in her eyes churned faster. “Don’t,” she breathed, and the word came out small and almost childish. Alibeth thought she heard her sister in it.

Their father lifted his hand anyway. “Clausa ianuam.”

The air sealed.

It wasn’t a visible wall—more like the square suddenly became a locked room, and Polina was the only thing inside it that mattered. The shadows around her snapped taut, cinching like a net. Her levitation stuttered, not from fatigue, but from resistance.

Polina jerked midair, hair whipping, mouth opening on a sound that broke into a wet cough. Black liquid burst from her lips and dotted her chin in thick droplets. Her hands twitched as if she meant to cast again, but the motion snagged, interrupted by the seal tightening around her. For the first time, fear flickered on her face. “Father—”

He stepped in directly beneath her as she dipped lower, forced down slowly inch by inch, until she was close enough now that if she fell, he would be there. His other hand moved with the decisiveness of a man who had killed before and never allowed himself to pretend it was anything but necessary. Then he put the blade where it had to go.

Polina’s body jolted once. The red-black movement in her eyes stilled as if something had been cut off from its source. Her hair sagged and fell around her face in ordinary strands. The black veins did not vanish; they simply stopped advancing.

The brambles around the square collapsed into smoke and sank into the stones. The invisible grip on the crowd released and bodies fell.

People hit the ground hard—coughing, sobbing, clawing at broken limbs and bruised ribs. The square filled with the ugly sounds of survival: retching, prayers, someone screaming a name over and over like repetition could bring the dead back.

Their father caught Polina as she dropped and lowered her to the stones with a tenderness that made Alibeth’s stomach lurch. He eased her down as if she were only asleep.

Polina’s eyes stayed open, staring up at nothing at all.

Alibeth didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted salt. “You killed her.”

Their father wiped his blade on his sleeve like a man cleaning a tool after work. When he looked at Alibeth, his expression was mild. “She would have died soon anyway.” He paused, as if searching for the least cruel truth to hand her. “This spared her the slow part.”

Alibeth stared at Polina’s face—at the hollow cheeks, the stained mouth, the nail missing from one finger.

Her hands clenched until her nails bit her palms, and she understood in that moment—truly understood—that Polina had been dead the moment she opened the book.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: It’s hard to tell in the dank, dark castle dungeons
Location: Alibeth is telling her offspring the story: the flashback itself is in a shantytown in Krasivaya.

---

FLASHBACK CONTINUED

The book did not corrupt Polina in one moment. It ate away at her the way rot does on a floorboard until one day you step where you always have, and the wood gives way.

At first, Alibeth told herself she was being unfair. She watched her sister at the candle, hunched over the pages with that fevered look, and mistook it for diligence, and the way she licked her lips before sounding out a line of script for courage.

After all, they had lived their whole lives beside death and called it ordinary. If a book offered even a sliver of relief, was it really wicked to reach for it?

So Alibeth watched. Then it began with Polina’s sleep.

At first, she stayed awake longer, as if bargaining with exhaustion. She insisted she was fine even when her words started to blur into each other.

The next change came in how Polina looked at their siblings.

In the beginning, she’d used the book the way poor children use anything precious—shared it too eagerly, desperate to make the miracle belong to all of them. It had been easy to forgive the glow in Polina’s eyes then. Joy was rare in their house; it startled them whenever it appeared.

Then one day Alibeth decided to hide the book.

She waited until Polina finally dozed with her head bowed over the pages and slid it out from beneath her hand. She wrapped it in cloth and tucked it under a loose floorboard beneath their bed. Then she went back to tending their mother’s forehead with water, rocking the baby, and portioning broth into cups.

Polina woke less than an hour later. The room was dark except for torchlight leaking through the cracks, but Alibeth could feel Polina’s gaze.“Where is it?” Polina demanded, voice ragged.

Alibeth didn’t lie. Lying to Polina had never worked. “Away,” Alibeth said, keeping her eyes on the baby because if she looked at Polina too long, she might forget Polina was still her sister.

“You think you can keep it from me?”

“I think I can keep it from killing you.”

Polina stepped closer. The floorboard creaked under her weight, and Alibeth noted the sound despite everything. It annoyed her—her body reacting to Polina as if she were a threat.

“I can fix it,” Polina whispered. “I can fix her.”

Their mother coughed in her sleep, wet and ugly, as if the word fix had summoned the sickness itself. Alibeth stood slowly, then she set the baby down with care and wiped her hands on her skirt.

“No.” She kept her voice steady. “You would have done so already if you meant to.”

Polina’s eyes flashed. “But you’re refusing it.” Her voice cracked with outrage. “You’d rather watch her die?”

Alibeth held her ground. “I’d rather watch her die than watch you become—” She stopped. She still didn’t have a word for what she could already see forming.

Polina’s breath shuddered. For a moment, there was a flicker of the sister Alibeth knew—the girl who was exhausted, terrified, and desperate enough to do anything.

“You don’t understand.”

Then Polina went to the bed and knelt. Her fingers slid beneath the loose board.

Alibeth moved to stop her, but Polina didn’t even look up. She simply spoke quietly to herself, and next, the room shifted. The candle flame bent. The baby began to wail. Pressure bloomed behind Alibeth’s eyes. Polina’s hand came up with the book, and when she stood, her pupils were so dilated the amber looked drowned.

Alibeth stared and understood with sick clarity: the book was no longer an object Polina carried. It was a limb.

“You can’t hide it from me,” Polina whispered, pleased.

Alibeth’s fingers curled at her sides. “What did you just do?”

Polina blinked slowly. “I didn’t do anything.” The lie came easily. “You’re just… scared.”

Alibeth wanted to slap her. She didn’t waste her hands on gestures that changed nothing.
“You’re going to stop.” Her voice lowered. “We’re going to burn it.”

Polina’s lips parted and Alibeth thought she might cry.

Instead, Polina smiled and it made Alibeth’s blood go cold.
“You can’t burn it,” Polina murmured. “It’s already in me.”

After that, Alibeth stopped negotiating like they were still children.

She tried to outlast her, watching Polina through the days the way she watched the street for danger. She kept the younger siblings away when the book lay open. She assigned chores strategically, kept bodies moving. She forced Polina to eat when her hands shook too badly to hold a cup. She put Polina to bed like she used to put the sick ones to bed.

Polina became worse anyway.

She began to speak to herself. At first, it sounded like rehearsing—sounding out the book’s strange instructions—but then Alibeth heard pauses, as if Polina waited for an answer. Sometimes Polina laughed low in her throat at nothing. Sometimes she hissed like someone had insulted her.

Alibeth’s attempts to stop her grew more direct, and more dangerous. She tried to take the book when Polina slept. She hid it under a loose stone in the alley, only to find it back beneath Polina’s pillow by nightfall. Polina began to treat Alibeth like a nuisance.

The youngest brother started wetting the bed again. The baby screamed whenever Polina opened the book. Their mother’s cough worsened. The house felt colder even when the weather warmed, as if the book had pulled heat into itself and refused to give it back. Alibeth began sleeping with one eye open.

And then came the evening Alibeth tried to take the book for the last time.

It was late and their mother’s breathing had gone shallow. One of the younger sisters slept with her head in Alibeth’s lap. Polina sat by the candle, reading too fast. There was dried blood at the corner of her nose.

Alibeth reached out and placed her hand over the page. “Polina.” Her voice came out softer than she meant. “Enough.”

Polina’s gaze lifted to Alibeth’s hand. “Don’t.”

Alibeth didn’t move, and Polina didn’t push her away. The candle guttered. The room went icy. That pressure bloomed behind Alibeth’s eyes, and her knees almost buckled. The child in her lap whimpered awake, confused and frightened.

“Move.”

Alibeth’s hand jerked violently, and pain flashed up her wrist, causing her to gasp.

“You see?” she said in a bright tone. “It listens.”

“You’re hurting me.”

Polina blinked. “I’m stopping you,” she corrected.

The next morning, the book was gone. And so was Polina.

She sat up that morning, heart hammering, eyes scanning the room. The space where Polina slept was empty. At first, Alibeth told herself Polina had gone to fetch water, that she’d stepped outside to breathe. Alibeth and stepped over the sleeping bodies of her siblings without waking them, and went to the door. Outside, the street was quiet—eerily so.

Polina had taken the book. And whatever she had become, she was now loose in the world.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: Evening
Location: Tough Tavern
Attire: Outfit, Amulet
Interaction: @Tae Kalliope @Apex Sunburn Your fellas outside

---

Charlotte couldn't believe she had actually stabbed that man in the arm–that awful man that would haunt her nightmares.

Her knees and palms were scraped raw on the boards from scrambling away. Her throat still burned where the steel had scratched it, enough to sting with every swallow. She clapped a hand to her neck anyway, fingers coming away trembling, and she stared at the drops of blood splattered on her palm. With a shudder, she then looked back up with a frantic, darting gaze.

The room was too loud and too bright.

It was hard to focus on one single thing occurring, but somehow her eyes found Kalliope, behind the bar, as two individuals in black came up from behind her.

“Ka—” T he name tried to leave her lips once and broke apart.

Charlotte forced herself upright on shaking arms, dragging her skirt out from under her. She saw it in fragments first. Then the needle pricked at her neck and Kalliope’s limbs went heavy. Charlotte’s stomach dropped as if the floor had vanished beneath her.

She had barely heard her scream for Sjan-dehk over her own, “KALLIOPE!”

Lottie subsequently shoved herself forward onto her feet, stumbling as her ankle caught on a toppled stool. She tried to run and discovered she could only scramble in a frantic, stumbling manner over spilled drink and broken glass.

Someone slammed into her shoulder and she nearly went down again, catching herself on the edge of a table and jolting pain up her wrist. “No—no, no—” she gasped, squeezing through the chaos toward the other side of the bar, toward the kitchen, toward the place Kalliope had been dragged.

The kitchen door was already swinging, and through the gap she saw only darkness.

Charlotte threw herself at it anyway, palms smearing on the wood as she shoved it open and staggered into the corridor. The lights were out and she couldn't quite make out any silhouettes in the room. However, she saw the outline of another door to the outside: a moonlit rectangle in the darkness. “Kalliope!” she called again. She pushed past the threshold and burst out into the night.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: Evening, Ignis 2
Location: Tough Tavern

_{@Tae@CitrusArms@Potter@Lava Alckon@Samreaper@Tpartywithzombi@ReusableSword@Apex Sunburn}

₱₳Ɽ₮ 6

The doors slammed open and the tavern’s noise ceased—every head snapping that way, even Garran’s, his pistol still planted on Ariella but his focus shifting. The man with the heavy accent had distracted everyone for a few seconds—

—and then Stratya had moved.

---

Ox had simply stepped out of the way of his comrade in peril. These were criminals, sure, but to have so little care for his comrade told Stratya all she needed to know. Despite being the capital, despite having infrastructure and authorities around, the city had somehow fostered actual, full-blown bandits within its borders. The kind that considered a loss from the team as one less mouth to pay and feed. Hired and promptly terminated in the space of a breath. Unfortunate. His strength would have been useful for construction.

The head that came sailing over from behind the bar informed her that the witch had already been dealt with. Not quite how she wanted her death to go, but Stratya couldn’t really complain. At least the threat was gone. Roman rushed past her to Drake’s side, and the knight took up a position to cover him while she assessed the situation. The nobles in her care had scattered around the room, which would make it difficult to protect them.

Garran shifted his weight, drawing the knight’s attention. She hopped aside reflexively, leaving her open for another threat to close in on her with deathly swiftness. She misread Marius’ intent and braced for her arm to be grabbed, the realization that he meant for her hair coming too late.

The man’s chain brought her arms into her body, her right hand high and her left low, before he gave a mighty heave to try and bring her to the ground. Her feet planted wide to keep herself upright and her arms, instead of struggling against her restraints, grabbed on to Marius. Her left held him close while her right hand gripped onto his head wherever it could. The intense golden light in her eyes stared into his, “you came to me.”

She wrenched the both of them around so she could see Garran and point her right palm at him while she held Marius. A quick scan found the knife he mentioned, at Charlotte’s throat. He’d had the good grace to point it out to the room, even, and then.. the barmaid. What was happening? Had the witch done something in her last moments? Garran had not seemed very concerned about losing his witch. Ox had Drake by the neck, another hostage. The squad of men entering the room was going to drag this out, as well. All of these things were concerning, but there was something she had to do first.

Once more, softly as the first, “Objicerre invocarre.” Her eyes were trained on the gun in Garran’s hand. She wanted his bullet. For her, the idea of one hand being dominant over the other was foreign. She understood that was how it was for many people, but for her, they were interchangeable. Her right hand, this time.

The bullet would be pulled to her right hand and pushed into Marius’ head, and though shallow, it resulted in an immediate seizure. And then the fire went out.

Both her hands ached deeply now, but it wasn’t the ache that concerned her. No, The Fury had abated.. no, been dissipated, leaving her to feel the pain in her hands. It was not gone - she could feel it rebuilding. The Knight took a moment as she unraveled herself and pushed Marius off of her, retaining the chain in her right hand. Her eyes came to the hostage situation on the stairs. Lady Charlotte was still in peril. With any luck, her hands could withstand another casting. With her left hand again, “objicerre invocarre.”

Her left hand would need rest, she could feel it. As well, the darkness of the room must have inhibited her ability to perform the spell accurately. Not only did her left hand now feel like it was burning, but the dagger that appeared in her left hand appeared in her left hand, the blade luckily slipped between her bones and tendons. Stratya Durmand let out a strangled cry of pain and the golden glow of her spell casting returned to the raging torrential shine of her Fury. The chain came for the boulder of a man, for his head, and the captain watched as the end wrapped around and she pulled hard, her leg out to trip him. She abandoned the chain for the dagger from her left hand, pulling it out swiftly to plunge it down into Ox’s jugular as he fell.

Her golden gaze turned to Garran, the next closest.

She gave Ox’s head an irritated kick as she stepped across him, her right hand now drawing her dirk. Once past the tripping hazard, she’d charge the ring leader, her left hand moving to block his gun out of habit while her right sought to plunge another blade into another neck and shoulder.

Garran was too quick, and still fresh, he’d hardly done more than pull himself to his feet. Even with the Fury, Stratya felt the weight of combat and casting. The ringleader moved back, dragging Ariella with him as he flicked chairs in Stratya’s path. When she stopped to kick at the chain she’d accidentally left to grapple with her feet, he saw the chance to reload. Done with a practiced precision, Garran then retrained his weapon on Ariella and readied himself to put the trigger with a wicked grin.

“Kill them all!” He suddenly roared.

---

It wasn’t enough that the illusions didn’t have the desired effect on Marius. The mage was dealt with, but Roman's plan to free Drake had only got him thrown across the room. The shadows felt like barbs and hooks—wrapping, restricting, and pulling him off his feet and against the far wall. The shadows were back up, or possibly never left. Possession, maybe? Or just good acting.

Taking stock of his injuries, he knew he was concussed. Three cracked ribs, two out of place, internal bleeding, a gash along his left forearm. He was deaf in his right ear and couldn’t see color out of his left eye. He felt feverish, though not bad, but his left eye was dripping blood, and he could taste iron. Not a good position to be in.

He could destroy this place; he still had plenty of might left in the tank. But could he risk it? Would he risk the Red Wake here? No. He knew far too well that it did not discriminate between friend or foe. He could stay here, slouched in a heap, feigning unconsciousness. He would be well within his rights to do so. But no—he would protect his friends.

Forcing his eyes open, he found his vision blurry, making it hard to concentrate on any moving person. Slowly, he made out Stratya’s movements. She was still fighting, still trying. Then, in a moment, he felt it: the sudden disappearance of the fire, the overwhelming weight of magic in the confined space simply vanishing.

The door opened and he recognized one of the men entering, standing tall against the bandits. A foreign savior in more than one way, he supposed. Still, there were others who needed help before these new arrivals could get to them.

Ariella was still being held at gunpoint, and Charlotte still had a knife to her throat. If he didn’t want to raise the Red Wake, he only had enough energy left for one or two simple spells. Nothing extravagant—just small and planned.

He focused on the gun first; it was a model he recognized. He knew how the firing mechanism worked. There was a mainspring in a small, hollowed part of the grip. That spring was under tension now, the hammer cocked back, waiting for the trigger to release the force and ignite the blasting cap. Roman reached his left hand out towards it, envisioned it, saw what he wanted it to do. It didn’t need much—just a flash, a spark of heat to weaken the spring and render it useless. He couldn’t see if it actually worked, but the charred burning flesh that spiraled from his middle fingertip told him something happened.

The only other thing he could try was to help Charlotte. Slowly, he turned his head but otherwise didn’t move. All he could see were glimpses and reflections off other items. Then, the glint of a blade at her neck.

This time, it had to be specific. It was already a bad angle; a wordless spell was out of the question. There was too much collateral in the way. She might still get hit, but he had to do something.

“Elding í hjarta,” he whispered, raising his left arm. The hair on his arm stood straight up and the smell of ozone wafted from him. His arm burned and went limp as a small blue bead scurried off his hand. It traveled up the wall and sprung towards the weapon, latching on and electrifying the knife and its wielder.

He was spent. All he could do now was hope the others could hold their own. His focus had to be on getting himself centered, ensuring he didn't let out the monster that raged inside, begging to be let loose.

---

During this moment, Winston hauled himself over the bar like a man climbing out of a grave, elbows shaking, breath caught. One hand smeared along the counter for balance, leaving a drag of blood across, and his boots skidded as he dropped behind it. The other hand was over the stab wound in his side, painting his skin red as it spilled between his fingers. He glanced back only once with his eyes wild, jaw clenched, and then he staggered through the kitchen door, shouldering it open with the last of his strength before it swung inward behind him, swallowing him.

Marius had tried to follow, but his body still wasn’t fully his. The seizure had wrung him out and left him twitching, fingers spasming as he pushed himself upright in uneven increments. He got one knee under him, then another, swallowing hard against the sour taste in his mouth, forcing his eyes to focus through the afterimage of pain. He made it three steps before his legs threatened to fold again, a tremor crawling up his spine; still, he lurched forward anyway, stubborn as a dog that refused to stay down. He staggered after the kitchen door, determined to get out even if he had to crawl. Luckily, he was hidden mostly behind the bar from the view of those on the first floor now.

---

Kazumin’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking... and then the tavern doors shrieked on their hinges. Four silhouettes filled the doorway like a shadow spilling in. Kazumin’s focus snapped toward them on instinct, and the sudden shift threw him off: his boot slid on something slick, his shoulder catching the rail as he stumbled back.

For a second, the crossbow dipped, his grip faltering as his stomach lurched. He recognized one of them from the banquet: the man who had been speaking with Charlotte and kept looking at Kalliope. If they had gotten inside, that meant backup could come in. This was their chance! He dragged in a sharp breath and forced his wrists to obey.

The bow-gun felt wrong in his grip, and the barmaid’s levitating silhouette made his stomach twist in a knot.
Below him, voices crashed together, and he couldn’t pick them apart anymore. The sight of Lottie and Ariella with weapons close to their bodies had made his blood run cold. He lifted the bow-gun anyway, fighting the tremor in his wrists. He gulped as the sight wobbled and he fumbled it once, corrected, then swallowed hard.

And then Percy’s face flashed in his mind—how steady she’d been when she showed him, how simple she’d made it look. He pictured her hand over his, guiding his finger. Kazu then aimed for the floating witch, silently praying, and then exhaled, squeezing the trigger, and the crossbow snapped.
The bolt bit into the barmaid’s shoulder with a sharp jolt that twisted her midair as she yowled in pain. Kazumin didn’t lower the weapon afterward, even when her gaze of darkness met his with terrifying fury. His eyes were burning, he was still terrified… but upright, refusing to be useless while the room was still bleeding.

---

The bolt in the barmaid’s shoulder didn’t drop her—if anything, it made her uglier. She twisted in midair with a hiss that sounded like laughter strangled into pain, one hand clamping over the wound as black seeped between her fingers like ink pushed through cloth. Her eyes snapped up to the balcony, fixing on the archers, and the shadows in the rafters answered her like hounds. They peeled off the beams in long strips, not smoke but something heavier, barbed at the edges, whipping upward in a violent arc.

The first lash snapped across the balcony rail and burst into splinters, forcing anyone aiming to recoil or lose their footing. Another ribbon of darkness hooked toward Kazumin’s position, clawing at his wrists and the crossbow like it wanted to wrench both from him.

Then she pivoted, fast, toward the doorway, toward the silhouettes that had just arrived. Her free hand rose, palm open, and the darkness gathered at it in a dense knot. She flung it outward, and it exploded into a fan of needle-thin shadow-spikes that screamed across the tavern in a straight, punishing line, aimed to split the entryway and drive the newcomers back. She only cared about stopping help from becoming a problem, turning the threshold into a killing zone, and daring Sjan-dehk and the others to advance through it.

---

With the chaos that ensued and rapid spell casts that threatened to turn the tide at any moment, Drake’s focus was on his sister. It was as if time slowed, and everything seemed to pass in slow motion. His strength returned, now that he was no longer being choked by that mountain of a man. But the damn restraints still kept him from moving. There was little time to bicker or argue. He knew he had to act soon or he’d lose his sister.

While the others had their magic tricks, leaving them spent and unable to move. Drake had the benefit of being a regular man amidst all this. The man rolled his wrists against the restraints, twisting himself in a subtle yet smooth motion. Garran had barely any time to witness the movement before Drake’s hand found the cold steel of his six-shooter. He unholstered it with a quick drop of his hip, his hand steadying the gun.

Then, once again, time slowed down. Drake’s eyes locked with Garran’s. A look of fury and malcontent was all that greeted him. Until it became one of triumph and smugness. The bandit flashed his eyes downward just in time to catch the spark of gunpowder as the hammer fell, and the gunshot rang throughout the tavern. From the barrel of his gun, through his jacket, just beside Ariella’s head, and finally into Garran’s skull, the bullet pierced the air and found its target.

The body that crumpled to the ground was no longer the ringleader; it was merely a corpse. In the silence that followed, Drake pushed his adrenaline-fueled body to its limit and ripped the ropes enough to finally wrench himself free from the post. He paced towards the ringleader, his thumb casually pulling the hammer back as he spoke.

”I gave you all a chance. Too many chances. And now he knows what comes when you cross the Edwards.” Drake softly kicked the gun away from Garran, and spun around. ”I can hit a moving target at 40 yards from the hip, 60 on a good day. I just put a hole in your leader's head, you’re all surrounded by several minutemen and mercenaries, several ferocious nobles worth more than their salt in a fight and one extremely angry older brother.”

The man’s barrel moved until it was trained on the man standing over Charlotte, but his eyes kept darting to the scant few who remained after the brawl. ”So let’s play my own little game. If any of you who tried to take us hostage move, I shoot. You cast a spell, I shoot. You say anything I don’t like, I shoot. I count 5 shots left, and 4 bodies yet to become corpses. So if you’re feeling braver than a man with everything to lose…Then TRY ME! MAKE MY NIGHT! I’ll happily let you meet your makers.” Drake shouted to the tavern, readying himself for whatever defiant stroke might come his way next. The bloodlusted battle cry was unbecoming of him – but he had to do his best and end this traumatic night alongside all the others giving their all to keep each other safe.

---

Meanwhile, Paul didn’t understand what the nobleman had done until the knife turned vicious in his hand. A sharp, biting snap ran up the steel and straight into his wrist, like lightning shoved under his skin. His fingers clenched against his will, forearm locking, teeth rattling as his grip spasmed and his shoulder jerked hard enough to wrench Charlotte’s throat against the edge. He felt the blade skate on her neck and felt the warm proof of it, and her breath hitched right under his ear, terrified.

He had time only to watch her fumble at her skirt, hands shaking so badly he almost missed it, and then metal flashed from her pocket. He felt the little knife before he saw it as it drove into the inside of his forearm with a wet, shocking sting, right where the tendons screamed; his hand finally loosened.

She twisted out from under him in a scramble, slipping down and away to crawl before he could re-grab her, leaving him swearing through the aftershock with his arm burning and his control blown to pieces. And after what Drake Edwards had said, Paul didn't want to risk budging from his spot—so he let her go.

---

The tavern was an eruption of chaos at this point: chairs shrieking against boards as patrons threw themselves down behind tables and benches. Someone near the hearth knocked a mug loose, and it shattered. A woman sobbed a prayer under her breath, and another man crawled on his elbows toward the back wall. Even the drunkest faces sobered; bodies pressed flat, hands over heads, eyes peeking through fingers at the kind of violence you only saw once before you learned to fear it for life.

What was left of Garran’s crew didn’t rush like bandits anymore—they hesitated like men who’d just watched the ground fall out from under them, especially after Lord Edwards' threat. One backed into the shadow of a support beam, jaw clenched. Another lifted his weapon halfway, thought better of it when Drake’s barrel tracked even the twitch, and froze with his breathing too loud. Their eyes kept darting at Stratya’s golden glare, at Roman’s hand, at the door’s silhouettes. They were measuring odds.

Then they noticed the barmaid’s darkness coming toward those at the door. Instinct snapped through the remaining bandits—fear, yes, but also opportunity. If the witch was trying to stop them, then those men weren’t reinforcements to bargain with. One of the thugs barked something panicked, and it spread like a spark.

They moved all at once, not bravely but with desperation. A pair surged toward the entryway to meet the newcomers in the confusion. One flung a chair into the path of the first man through, another lunged low with a short blade meant for knees and ankles, forcing the doorway crew to fight for every step forward. Somewhere behind them, a thug leveled a flintlock with shaking hands and fired toward the threshold.

The tavern then became a mess of bodies and panic.

🗡 Roses and Daggers 🎕

Time: Evening, Ignis 2
Location: Tough Tavern

_{@Tae@CitrusArms@Potter@Lava Alckon@Samreaper@Tpartywithzombi@ReusableSword}

₱₳Ɽ₮ 5

Jory had already scrambled back up into the rafters after the bolt vanished from his hands like it had been snatched out of the air. His stomach still lurched every time he replayed it.

He’d retreated on instinct, boots slipping on the beam as he hauled himself higher, breath coming too fast, fingers shaking so badly he nearly botched the latch on his crossbow.

From up there, the tavern looked chaotic. Then that woman with the strawberry hair was suddenly there, close enough that he could see the debris in her hair and the calm in her eyes that made him feel even smaller.

When the knife went between his shoulder blades, the pain hit like lightning. A sound tore out of him that he had never heard from himself before. She wrenched the crossbow away before he could even claw it back, and the humiliation landed right on top of the panic. His face went white.

Then Jory did what Jory always did when his fear outgrew his sense.

“GARRAN—SHE’S UP HERE! SHE TOOK IT—” he screamed, voice cracking, eyes wild as he staggered backward along the beam. “SHE’S GOT MY FUCKIN’—”

He scrabbled for the knife on his belt with shaking fingers, blade coming free in a jerky flash. Jory was not brave enough to rush her. But also not calm enough to think straight.

And instead of being smart, he went big(at least in his opinion)—he slashed at the nearest hanging chain on impulse, trying to swing a lantern between them like a moving threat. The lantern lurched, throwing wild light across the rafters as he backed away, blood already darkening the cloth at his shoulder.

Meanwhile, the older crossbowman hit the balcony below, air leaving his lungs in a grunt. For a second, he just lay there, cheek pressed to wood, vision pulsing at the edges while he tested his ribs and found at least one answering back with pain.

Then he rolled into a crouch. His eyes went up first, tracking the rafters, already hunting the blond idiot who’d stolen his weapon.

His crossbow was gone. That mattered more than the fall.

So he made the smartest choice left and slid behind the balcony rail, using it as cover, and drew a blade. He repositioned toward a thicker support post.

“Rafters!” he called down. “They’ve got my bow. Don’t look up—move!”

---

Down below, Garran’s gaze had dropped to the head at his boots, and for a moment, he didn’t react at all. He just stared at it, letting the room keep screaming and scrambling around him while his eyes traced the slack mouth, the wet shine on the hair, the way it left a smear of blood where it had rolled.

Then his eyes lifted slowly to Kalliope, and the corner of his mouth tugged up in a smirk, faint and mean. He simply set his weight, drew his foot back, and kicked.

The head skidded across the slick boards with a sickening speed, spinning end over end as it went, hair dragging wetly along the floor. It shot straight toward Stratya’s shins.

Garran used the second that everyone’s eyes twitched toward it. He moved with purpose through the wreckage, weaving between chairs and scattered tankards like he’d been born in a room like this. His attention locked onto Ariella.

Then his hand slid into his coat, and when it came back out, the lamplight caught hard on iron as he revealed a pistol.

He then yanked Ariella toward him by that pretty red hair of hers. As he held her up, he pressed the barrel against her scalp and held it there. “Nobody moves,” he said, and his voice didn’t rise, which somehow made it carry further. He let his eyes sweep—Roman near the pillar, Kalliope behind the bar, Olivia and Kazumin up on the rafters, Stratya already moving.

Garran’s aim never left Ariella while he counted them.

“You breathe wrong, and I put a bullet through her skull,” he continued, calmly. “You reach for steel, you take one step, you get heroic—and you watch her die right here at her brother’s feet.”

The barrel pushed into her head. It wasn’t a threat meant to look scary, but a reminder that he could do it with a twitch.

“Hands,” he barked then, “flat. Back to the tables. Eyes down. I don’t care if you’re bleedin’ or prayin’—you keep your palms where I can see ’em.”

He cut his gaze toward Ox, who was moving toward them now, without moving his head much. “Ox.”

---

Ox had been at the pillar when the shockwave hit, but he had recovered fast, too big to stay down, hauling himself upright with a roll of his shoulders and a hard swallow of breath.

Then Stratya’s shout had come, and something flaming had been thrown in his direction.

Merrill hit the boards where Ox had been a second earlier, a tangle of limbs and fire that burst brighter on impact. Heat shoved outward in a wave, that terrible sweet smell still wafting through the tavern. Merrill’s hands scrabbled in spilled ale that hissed under his palms as he tried to drag himself free, his scream collapsing into desperate gasps.

Ox didn’t catch him. He stepped just barely aside and left him there, burning on the ground.

And when Garran called his name, Ox didn’t hesitate. He came forward with that same blunt inevitability, boots thudding, jaw set—

—and his hand closed around Drake’s throat, squeezing tight enough to make the man’s breath hitch.

---

Meanwhile, Paul's back struck the stairs with a crack that rattled up the rail, and for a second, his eyes went glassy as she practically barreled him down, her palms braced on either side of his shoulders, her weight pinned him just for a moment. Then his hand shot to her forearm, fingers clamping it, and he bucked his hips hard while twisting his shoulders sideways. The stairs did the rest, turning the scramble into a roll. The world snapped sideways as he used Charlotte's momentum against her.

In a blink, she was the one slammed into the step, her spine biting wood. He came down over her, forearm braced across her chest as he crowded her space.

Charlotte tried to bring her knee up, but he had already found what he wanted. His fingers snagged a fistful of her dress near the collar, yanking her just enough to expose the line of her throat. The knife came out quickly, and he drove it in close and pressed the flat of the blade to her neck. The edge kissed the skin in a manner that made her whole body tense. “Don’t.” He warned low, as his eyes flicked over to the room then dropped back to her face with a pleased look. “You want to be brave? I’ll make you brave in pieces.” He leaned closer, the knife never leaving her throat. “Open your mouth...Do anything clever…And I’ll paint these steps with you.”

---

Marius had been lightly anchored to the pillar when Merrill hit the hearth.

The scream that came out of Merrill hadn’t sounded like a man. It had turned animal as the flames caught and kept catching. Marius’s eyes gleamed as the skin blistered, as the cloth shrank and blackened. The first laugh came out of him when Merrill clawed at the ground and skidded in his own panic, dragging himself through more heat every time he tried to escape it.

While others had gagged at the smell, Marius had inhaled as much as he could with a smile of delight. His head then tipped curiously, watching Merrill thrash like it was a puppet show staged just for him. He pointed with two blood-smeared fingers, almost delighted, as if he’d just spotted a joke no one else could understand. “Look,” he giggled, voice bright and cracked with glee. “He’s tryin’ to crawl out!” He laughed harder at that, shoulders shaking. His eyes shone, pupils blown wide, the sound of it crawling over the screams like a second fire.

“Go on,” he crooned to Merrill, as if cheering a friend. “Do it. Do it fast. You’ll be ash before you hit the floor.”

Then he noticed Stratya, the beautiful brunette who had been holding his little redhead just earlier. Marius’s gaze slid to her. He watched the golden light in her eyes, the flagon’s swing, the bolt snapping into her hand. He watched her drive it to Winston’s body.

Winston’s yowl tore out of him, the fury evident in his roar. And Marius nearly folded at the sound. He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard all night. His mouth fell open, and the giggles came in choking bursts, his shoulders rattling as he clung to the pillar. “Oh—oh!” he wheezed. He pressed his forehead to the wood for a second like he couldn’t hold himself upright, then lifted his face again, still grinning, still watching Stratya with that hungry interest, following her with his eyes as she threw Merrill toward that big wall of a man.

The moment Roman’s darkness swelled, Marius’s whole face changed. It was as if something inside him had been called by name. All those shapes clawing out of the black like a nightmare trying to be born… It delighted him.

As the shadow-mass thickened overhead, he stared up at it with that same blown-pupil wonder. “Oh,” he murmured in a reverent manner, and his eyes slid toward where Roman had vanished. “That’s yours.”

His grin widened slowly. “You don’t even know, do you?” He tilted his head, listening to the screams. “Shadows have always reached for me. They always—” His voice softened into intimacy. “—reached for me.”

But for that brief second, he was distracted enough to forget the rest. He didn’t notice when Kalliope moved nor when she sent the tray flying.

Marius didn’t see it until the last instant, and his laugh hitched. He turned just enough to register the blur before it slammed into him brutally. For a second, all the air left him at once, pain blooming through his chest where the iron edge caught. The impact snapped him sideways.

He made a choking sound, spit thick in his mouth as the room spun. His body lagged behind his mind in a way that made him furious. But he stayed there just long enough to taste it—to let the pain soak in, to let it remind him he was still alive.

Then his eyes found the bar. Moira and Maelen’s bodies were down on the wooden floor. His gaze skipped over the mess like it couldn’t decide where to land, and he spun fast, chain clinking, pupils huge, and that’s when he saw it: the head by Garran’s boots. He watched as Garran’s foot drew back, as the head went skidding toward Stratya.

His mouth curled into a grin so quick it looked involuntary. He hoped Stratya’s attention would be taken by the incoming head for a split second, and Marius surged forward out of nowhere, laughing again as he closed the distance. He came in low, slipping under the angle of her guard, and he didn’t reach for her blade arm as a sane man would. He reached for her hair.

He fisted it hard at the base, yanked her head back just enough to steal her balance, and drove himself into her space with a feral sound. His chain rattled as he tried to wrap it up and over her shoulder like a leash. “Found you,” he whispered, his breath in her ear, and then he pulled, trying to drag her into him. With her hair still trapped in his fist, Marius used the pull to force her posture open, driving his shoulder into her ribs like a bully in an alley.

He then threaded his chain behind her neck and laughed right against her ear, and he yanked again, trying to drag her down onto the ground covered in spilled ale and blood. “Stay,” he murmured, voice sickly pleased, like he was talking to a dog he’d finally gotten a leash on.

---

It had all gone to Garran’s wish.

He let his eyes roam, pistol still on Ariella’s head, as if he was taking inventory. “Listen close,” he said, calm as anything.

“You’ve got a gun on her head.” His free hand tipped, indicating the stairs without looking. “A blade on another.”

He let that sit, the meaning spreading through the room.“You all had your bit of fun, but it's over.” His eyes flicked, counting: Charlotte pinned on the steps, Stratya tangled, Drake already in Ox’s grip. “This isn't a game any more. I'll kill Lady Edwards first. Then the Vikena girl. Then that captain. And Lord Edwards. If I have to, I'll keep killing until there's no one left.”

The barrel nudged Ariella’s scalp almost intimately, “And you up in the rafters? You're probably scrambling together some kind of plan right this very second. But I'm warning you... Do not make me prove myself—Don’t make me kill your friends.”

That was when a laugh began reverberate through the tavern.

It wasn’t loud at first; it was a sweet—almost saccharine voice. Feminine. Even dainty. It made Garran’s mouth tug into a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes. It had come from the barmaid, who had still been curled over the barrel where she had been sobbing this whole time. Her face had been hidden in her hands, and her shoulders had been shaking with sobs.

However, the shaking wasn’t from her crying anymore.

As she slowly peeled her palms away from her face, it became ever so clear that she was no longer crying. The smile she revealed didn’t belong on anyone human. And then she regarded them with completely blackened eyes; no irises, no pupils… Just darkness.

With patient movements, she got to her feet and allowed her arms to drift outward from her sides and then her heels lifted as she rose into the airt. Dark energy begin to form and gather in her hands in slow, deliberate coils, and her white hair began to rise on its own as well, strands lifting as if they were being pulled by invisible puppet strings

Then her gaze found Kalliope and she started whispering. . “Umbrae Tendere, Constringere, et Frangere.”

The darkness answered immediately.

Tendrils snapped out across the space between them and coiled around Kalliope’s middle and shoulder in a brutal grip. There was no time to brace. Kalliope was yanked off her feet and hurled sideways.

Her body struck the wall with a crack that made nearby bottles jump on their shelves. Wood shuddered. Glass rattled. She was pinned there by the shadow itself, suspended off the floor like she had been turned into a wall decoration.

The barmaid turned her head slowly toward Roman next. Another small lift of her hand and the darkness obeyed again, snapping across the tavern in a second violent lash. It hooked into Roman’s side and shoulder like a giant hand closing around him, and then it threw.

He went airborne just long enough for the room to register what was happening before the force slammed him into the opposite side with a brutal impact that rattled the rail and knocked dust loose from the beams.

The barmaid hovered there, smiling wider, the dark energy in her hands still curling and hungry, as if she’d only just begun to warm up.

Her laugh returned and she tipped her head, eyes still nothing but void. Black branches begin to grow on her limbs, veins darkening as if ink had been poured into her blood and told to climb. It crawled up her wrists, along her forearms, and kept going, slowly, claiming more of her with every heartbeat.

For a moment, it looked like it hurt and her breath hitched. Her shoulders tensed. And then she smiled wider.

The darkness reached her throat, and the laugh turned steadier and more pleased.

The kitchen door behind the bar opened suddenly in that moment. It cut through the tavern and brought the attention of many. For a moment, the doorway framed nothing but darkness. Then the men poured out, knives in hands and clubs heavy over their shoulders. They wore nasty grins on their faces, as if they had finally been given permission they had been seeking to emerge.

But as they spilled into the room, the hearth died in a single instant. The flames didn’t sputter or fade—they simply went out, as if someone had reached in and pinched them between two fingers. Smoke curled up in a ribbon.

For the first time tonight, Garran’s face changed.

The smirk drained away completely. His jaw set as his gaze slowly slid toward the front door.