Tatterdemalion

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Kalaya!

“A fairy?” Agata’s laugh is both expansive and condescending, as if she’s delighted you’d actually try that. “That’s ridiculous! If it was one of their schemes, I would have…”

She breaks off, considers what she’s saying carefully. (That’s one of the special skills of the Rakshasa, which you may or may not know: they prey in the empty spaces of perception. The more influence they exert, the harder it is to pin down that they’re responsible. And the Red Wolf knows that, too.)

Then she’s up in your face, fast, holding your chin with one hand, tilting it up, her eyes intense. Then she opens her eyes again, as if lifting a veil, as if pulling away a mask. The air is thick with heat, the kind that licks wood and fiber down to nothing, that demands no secrets before it. And you are a shadow in the sun, a little mouse before a viper, flickering, insubstantial—

And she slumps back in her chair, one hand over her eyes, teeth on display, louche. The heat, slow to dissipate, is all that remains of her full power. “Compress,” she says, holding out her other hand to the medic, fingers impatiently curling.

“Well,” she adds, to you, once a cold compress is laid over her (grandmother’s) eyes, leaning back with nonchalance in the chair. “It seems you’re right. They’re such pests, aren’t they?” Her teeth are so white. “I’ll have to see to an exorcist. But the best way to weaken an enchantment like that is to act very directly against it.”

She tents her fingers. “So I think I may be able to save you, Kalaya Na, from leading half of the Kingdoms into the waiting maw of the fairy folk. How exciting it will be!”

***

Han!

“You put that hand back,” the slave-girl says, teasingly, taking your wrist and guiding it back to— oh, that fork. “I’ll do anything you want tonight,” she continues, and she couldn’t possibly mean what you think she might mean, “except letting you besmirch our reputation for hospitality.” Her eyes are sparkling as she leans in close and pours you more, until it’s almost at the rim, and then sets the pitcher down decisively close to her own seat. “Because we have to work very hard on that reputation, I’ll have you know! I’ve done place-setting drills!” She pouts for a moment, before bouncing back (just like her nut-brown curls, bounce bounce).

“Anyway, how’d you get this one?” she continues, eyes savoring a scar running parallel to your bicep. And she wants to know! She super wants to know! And she smells of very expensive perfume, and she’s snuggling up next to you, and she’s even reaching over to help roll your duckskin pancakes while looking at you so expectantly, focused on what you want, how she can spoil you.

Maybe you haven’t even noticed the Red Wolf just smoothly letting conversation flow over your complaint, because you’re in the hands of Emli now, and she has the soul of the kind of puppy who will climb right back into your lap after you set her down on the floor. The social entrapment is all the more sinister for being orchestrated by Emli’s supervisor; she is all sincerity and completely guileless.

But you probably notice when the Red Wolf suddenly diverts the dinner conversation.

***

Piripiri!

Naji slithers up, with Maid Confined wobbling on her heels in her train. She’s got a dish for… you? Held out, with a pleading look, a “nnnhmmmph,” and a nod of the head over to where Lotus sits. Lotus of Tranquil Waters, a hostage who could be the fulcrum on which the transfer of power turns, but one dangerous to publicly keep.

You already know the Red Wolf’s plan for her and her boisterous companion. They’ll be seen off publicly at Lanceolata, personally escorted off by Agata herself— and then they’ll vanish without a trace. And you know, too, who will be assigned the task of returning them to the Dominion’s arms.

Which makes the glance Lotus gives you over her shoulder all the more of an unintended knife. A hopeful “is she hungry?” sort of look. The kind that says that if Agata’s hand weren’t casually resting on her knee, she’d get up and already be asking you why you’re not sitting down (Grandmother forbid) or sharing in the meal. She picks up a strawberry and works it between her lips, completely innocent of how she looks while trying to nibble off the stem, and of how very conspicuous her sneaky glance back at you is. And she’s not just looking at you; she’s letting her eyes linger on the demonesses’ backs, too, when she thinks nobody’s watching, dragging those eyes from the Maid’s heels to her exposed back to the collar—

And then Agata directs everyone’s attention elsewhere, and the little flower jumps and chokes on the strawberry. She puts a hand to her mouth, eyes watering, and makes an effort of trying to swallow.

Someone could step in and help her. Should, even.

***

Fengye!

“And how did you end up there?” Cathak Agata’s attention has suddenly snapped to you. “While we’re at it, what, is the food not good enough?” It’s probably maybe mostly a joke. “Who are you, anyway? I don’t think we were introduced, and, does anyone…?”

She makes a show of looking around at everyone involved. Notably, the knight who brought you along, who trusted you, who thought you could be more even without the help of the goddess? She’s absent. She’s not here to step in and speak for you. And nobody else here really interacted with you, except for the priestess, and she saw you turn into a raging part of the Broken King’s soul.

The Cathak scion turns her attention back to you, and waits for your answer. She’s smiling, but it’s a lazy, expectant smile. Or is it? What is she hiding behind it? Is she hoping to let you dig your own grave? Playing with you as a cat plays with a mouse?

***

Giriel!

Here’s the thing: you know.

Once get all your thoughts aligned in a row, that is. The warmth of Cathak Agata seems to radiate off of her, sinking into your bones, filling them up with lazy warmth. Comparisons might be made, by the bold, to a bear being lulled to hibernation. It doesn’t seem particularly intentional; it’s just that being near her, mid-meal, is making you feel like a cat with a belly full of milk, stretched out by the fire with her paws tucked in neatly.

And the smoke! It keeps drawing your attention away. Its curls up near the roof are a little like all those terrible snakes you had to endure, but, no, they twist and writhe as if suspended, and— every time you’re almost close to it, it’s gone. It smells wonderful. Like cinnamon and cloves.

Then Agata leans close and whispers in your ear: “Wait until you see what I have just for you.” One finger drifts along the edge of your plate, the lacquered nail (three long, two short) almost scraping against the porcelain. And that gets some legs under you, though perhaps all pointed in the wrong direction. Her voice has such a lovely, playful trill to it, and her hair lingers, brushing against her shoulder as her attention darts back outwards. With the confidence of one of the Princes of the Earth, she simply assumes that you will be delighted to have her. And it is very doubtful that she is wrong. There’s a reason not to get too full yet, hmm?

But you know. You, alone out of the room, have the necessary pieces to know that whoever this meek, mousy little scribe is, she worked a spell over the General, a fragment of the Broken King himself, and reduced her to the furiously blushing, grunting, teetering-in-heels maid barely given enough time to finish pouring you more wine before, with a thickly-muffled whine, she’s pulled off towards the Dominion agent standing well behind you. She is a wonderworker, a sorceress, and she may have saved all your lives.

She also looks like she’s just risen out of her own grave, Agata’s attention on her making her seem to dwindle into a flickering little candle-flame, and she hasn’t said a word about what she did. You don’t know who she is, why she’s not crowing about her victory, or why she allowed her prize to be taken from her— but you could reveal what she did to everyone.

Do you?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

On Aevum, Yellow!

“I hate fences. Have I ever told you that?”

The purpose of a motorcycle on Aevum is twofold. One is to get up on the expressway, that secondary artery pumping hot and fast through the station, and then spin it up until the world blurs, until you feel like you can almost keep pace with the trains, until your thoughts get left behind. The other is to find a place to pull over and drink in the sights of the city.

So here Vesna leans forward, hair tucked neatly into the helmet with its jagged streaks of neon pink, and gestures at Ares, the sprawling complexes of Wellington with their fences and their locked doors and keycards.

“Too many open world games. You know one of the fantasies they sell in those? You can go anywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s locked; you can pick the lock, hack it open, find the key. It doesn’t matter if it’s somebody else’s house, because all you need to do is sneak in when they’re out to see what their life looks like when it’s unfolded. And if you see something interesting? Head for it! Clamber up slopes, see what’s between you and it, keep going until you’re satisfied and you’ve got an answer to your question. That’s a little what it was like on the Park, but— well, nature sucks at generating interesting content. We’re way better at that. When we throw things together, they’ve got meaning.”

She glances over at Yellow through the smoked glass of the visor. “How about you? What do you make of Ares, dear? What do you think of fences?”

***

On the Park, Gavin!

Well, yeah. Naturally. It’s no longer 3V’s favorite in that scene (don’t get her started on AoA’s megacampaign formats, or how it still ends up prioritizing combat over its other components despite the marketing) but on any given day she’s got a table in Gensoukyo reserved for AoA players, and fond memories of thumbing through the supplements: Lemuria and Mu; Red Mars and Fecund Venus; Sky London (with the Squamous Men and the Narcissus Bazaar).

Nah, right now she’s really into KATAPHRAKTOS, and not just because of the deep-fried memes. ([foliage][management][?]) Now there’s a game that commits to being about combat, but still tries to interrogate the morality of fucking awesome mech combats and asks you to make space wars about things worth dying for.

A game that asks, hey, what if a thousand years from now we start getting our shit together? What if we leave capitalism floating dead in the void and fight to defend gay luxury space communism, to fulfill its promises, and to fix all this crap? And what if you could figure out who’s standing athwart the rails of history telling you to go back into the dark, and then blow up his giant robot with [SHOTGUN].

That being said, 3V owns being a gaucho. Be free, clever and bold, and solve disagreements with close-quarters facón fights.

“Hey! It’s gonna take me a minute until I’m ready to throw myself back down the mountain, so I don’t mind the extra company. I miss that from the big tournaments, actually— everybody trickling in and grabbing breakfast, accumulating like snow rolling downhill, meeting folks over toast. Gavin and I were just getting to know each other, Ferris; seems like a fun dude to me. Must be nice to see folks out here. I get twitchy if there aren’t enough folks passing through my place, can’t imagine days without seeing anybody up here.”

Said without judgment, more a self-aware acknowledgment of how very, very social Aevum is by necessity. The only way to keep folks out of your life is to lock your apartment door and refuse to leave.

Breathless Dead

“No!”

Redana stands and makes to leave the palanquin; Lacedo barely holds her back, on her own orders.

“Dolce— Captain— what she has done is my fault! I have failed her, failed Hera, failed myself! When I thought her dead, I— you know what I did! When I walked with her on Salib, she saved my life and showed her scars, her hurt, her life spent being punished, punished for my imperfections! And now you want— Lacedo, let me go— now you want to, you want me to abandon—?!?”

There is a struggle. Growling. Panting. A hushed compromise.

“I am bound in our chains,” Lacedo finally says for the room, her voice burying agitation under solemnity, under the half-memorized rhetoric of a born naval officer. “If I leave her behind again, if I let her fall, she will drag me into the dark with her. I will be unworthy of both Zeus and Hermes. I have lived with her since I was a girl, and I tell you now: she is not evil, she is wounded, and roars loudest where the thorn pricks her.”

There is a silence. The curtains of the palanquin have fallen still. The shapes within can barely be seen, mere silhouettes, close together.

“Heap punishment on my head, but let us save her if we can. Lock us in cages, but set them together. Make me do penance in her name, shame and denounce me for her crimes, whatever must be done, I welcome it. Only do not make me abandon my oldest, most ill-treated friend.

“Please.”

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Chamber of Harmonious Arrangements!

“—and of course, we expected anyone still remaining around the cursed castle would be in league with the warlock and her demon army,” Cathak Agata says, making an expressive gesture with her goblet. “So when a dragon emerged with several demons in tow, they thought they were under attack and moved with their characteristic efficiency to neutralize the threat! We’re all lucky that I was there to interpret the situation, aren’t we?”

Rain slicks the windows of the oversized cabin. Lanterns softly sway overhead from heavy chains, interspersed with incense braziers. The tables were set down easily, slotting into grooves on the floor to keep them steady, and the floor liberally cushioned to accommodate sitting or reclining as might please one. An erhu player sits in one corner, his silk robe loose and his chest intricately tattooed, playing O! Gloriana of the Triumphs! Legionnaires stand to attention between the narrow glass-paned windows, stoically ignoring the pervasive aroma of Dominion cuisine: duck skin and greens wrapped in pancakes, roast sweet potatoes served with cashews and dried piri-piri, sesame-seed cake and smouldering-wine. Cathak Agata has her own bottle of that last, spiced herself, and poor Lotus’s eyes start watering whenever she twists the lid off.

Because Lotus is sitting next to her at one table, wearing a red-and-gold gown, her blue hair bound up around a golden comb, skin fairly glowing from her hot bath, her lips and lids both gleaming red, with golden accent lines down the center of her lids and lower lip matching her gold-rimmed glasses. It’s not like Cathak Agata has a spare priestess outfit to hand, after all. You’ve all been helped into similar outfits, given that everything you were wearing was taken to be washed. (Though for some of you, “it’s being washed” was the second reason, the first being “evidence.” But the whole silly thing got taken care of! Everything is fine!

That is to say: Han, Giriel, Piripiri, and Fengye are all there, accompanied by Azazuka (on the other side of the Red Wolf), the demonesses (in the service of Piripiri), and Melody/Lotus (unveiled and very aware of it), as well as attendant slaves in black collars and fine robes (open low at the chest) to handle pouring drinks and lubricating conversation.

Han, Fengye: you have been through the mortifying experience of being processed as prisoners of the Dominion. Stripped, cold water poured over your head, then left to stew while bound in cells barely as large as a closet. This made suddenly being pulled out and tossed into hot baths, untied, and offered extensive help from Agata’s handmaidens in getting ready for dinner all the more abrupt and dizzying. Agata’s got the final say on which of those experiences you get when you leave dinner, but it seems like she’s eager to shrug it off as a ridiculous misunderstanding by everyone involved.

Giriel: you have not been through this experience. After waking up on board Beneficence of the Hearth, you cleared up the whole thing with Cathak Agata, who declared that she’d set the whole situation to rights. She’s also explained to you that both of the knights are under care from her physician to see to their injuries and that she would like to have a private night meal with you tonight in her cabin. The sort where food’s an excuse to taste sweeter things. Congratulations! You saved Han and her demigod from the brig, and you’re going to get rewarded for it! Everything is coming up Giriel tonight.

Piripiri: you have been Disciplined for letting Azazuka out into dangerous situations, given that you were meant to keep her under safe observation in Golden Chrysanth. In her usual magnanimity, Agata then turned around and delivered both the demons into your care, and (just before the two of you entered the Chamber of Harmonious Arrangements) informed you that she wanted you to arrange a night meal for Giriel Bruinstead. Because that is, unfortunately, actually a very good use of your talents.

Do try making your own duck rolls. They’re a delicacy for a reason, after all. Don’t even think of having to refill your own glass. Just enjoy the warmth to contrast with the rain lashing against the windows, the pleasant music and incense filling the room, and the brilliant smile of your hostess.

Everything is fine.

***

Kalaya!

You woke up naked in a cell, and it got worse from there. When legionnaires dragged you out of the cramped cell (through a hexagon-shaped room down in the hull, suggesting room enough for six other prisoners), they didn’t offer you clothing or answers for what was going on. They just dragged you up several floors, hands under your armpits, and cuffed you down to a chair in a guest cabin, leaving you to stew and bite down on your gag, trying to find some way out.

Then Cathak Agata takes a seat opposite you, in full Dominion uniform, gold cords and impractical jacket, her fiery hair falling loose down one shoulder, and studies you for a long moment, pointer fingers resting under her lip.

“Kalaya Na,” she says. “Not really what I was expecting.” She reaches out, hooks one finger under your gag, and pulls it down to rest around your neck, then pulls out the sodden wadding, setting it down casually on your lap.

“So, Kalaya Na, Princess of the Lily, can you explain to me how, exactly, you plan to…” She makes a show of pulling out a journal, looking for a certain page, reading the contents carefully. “Unite the Flower Kingdoms under your sword, defeat and humiliate the Dominion and the N’yari, force Cathak Agata to pull your chariot through the streets of Golden Chrysanth during your Triumph procession, and then usher in a golden age unseen since the days when the dragons ruled the whole world, as declared by virtue of the Five Maidens of Destiny?”

The journal snaps shut like the fall of an executioner’s axe.

“I am very interested in hearing how you plan to do all this, and how you’re making your sales pitch spread so fast. It’s like wildfire, and I have to know, because I didn’t think those particular techniques of Imperial Intelligence were disseminated yet. But they’re the only people I’ve seen who are this good at spreading a “”grassroots”” movement, so.”

She smiles, and it’s like staring down a dragon. Your heart really wants you to know that even if she doesn’t have fangs, she might as well.

“Let’s do this the easy way, like friends,” she adds. “I like you, after all, even though you apparently intend to dress me in a cow’s harness and make me trot with a whip licking at my heels. You know, apparently it was a grandmother who was sharing those details when my agent noted it down? Wild stuff. Wild stuff.”

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Giriel!

“I wanted to thank you for your service, didn’t I?”

When Cathak Agata cups your cheek with a bloodied hand, she wraps her spirit around you. Warmth suffuses you; the rain hisses away before it can touch you. Being this close to her is like sitting next to a fire, letting the heat sink in deep, until it is almost but not quite painful. She helps you to your feet as if helping a doll stand.

“What were you thinking?” Her admonishment is half gentle, half baffled. “Taking on an entire demon army by yourself, sealing their gate, defeating the warlock and her minions?” Her thumb rests on your mouth and she shushes away your attempts to explain. The warmth is so pervasive that it’s all you can do to stop yourself from falling asleep and letting Agata take care of where you walk. Even injured, she’s a pillar of confidence. You’d never think Han managed to lay a claw on her.

Han. She’s being wrestled down by legionnaires, dragging her over to the coffle: Han’s little demigod stands with the mad, brilliant woman who dared to impersonate the General, and the little demoness who used to be one of the most feared power players in Hell, all three collared and gagged, waiting for their forced march. Kalaya and Uusha are chained down to medicinal stretchers, and Azazuka—

“Release her, you dumb bastards,” Cathak Agata barks, the way that important people yell at people they think are simple but, dammit, good at heart. (The condescension of those who think themselves protagonists, and everyone else supporting players.) “Don’t you recognize her? If she’s so much as bruised…!”

And then Azazuka’s throwing herself into Red Wolf’s arms, which is to say, somewhat into your arms. “Oh, Gatty,” she squeals. “Don’t be too hard on them! I don’t know what’s been going on, but this witch here, she helped me, and so did the Hymairean, they’re innocent of whatever is going on!” Even as tired as you are, you recognize the shift in her demeanor: this is the mask of the Hapless Socialite Who Gets Her Way Out Of Indulgence. She’s trying to protect you and the Hymairean, and to a lesser extent, everyone else. She gives Agata a look that probably gets her anything she wants back home, but Agata frowns and gently lays a hand on her shoulder. Azazuka’s breath hitches a moment, but not from pain.

“What happened? How did this— and why are you here?” Concern. A hint of anger, roiling underneath for the first time. Azazuka definitely isn’t supposed to be out here, and shit’s going to rain down on someone who is responsible. She glances off to one side, her face away from you, but you can tell someone’s getting eye daggers. Then she returns her attention to Azazuka. “I’m afraid I don’t have a palanquin, my dear lady,” she says, taking her hand and simply breathing across her knuckles, the better to not irritate the sunburn, and Azazuka’s eyes flutter helplessly for a moment. “But if it is not beneath your dignity, I would make these brutes bear you on one of our stretchers back— and you, too, my witch. There’s no need for any more walking tonight.”

Han roars her fury into thick-packed cloth as her ass is smacked by a legionnaire to get the coffle marching. But that might as well be a mile away, because Agata’s helping you down onto a stretcher and she’s even got an umbrella for you.

After all, she’s the hero. She’ll take care of you.

Sunshards

Rosepetal doesn’t set her Chen down. One hand strokes along the back of Chen’s neck as she nimbly— up, up!— takes Chen up to meet the Pyre of Inspiration, taking great bounding steps like gravity is something she can ignore by simply wanting it to be so. So she comes to meet someone who is finding the world to be suddenly new and beautiful, and takes her by the hand, with all the solemnity of a monk and all the grace of a handmaiden.

“Princess Chen of the North Wind and her Rosepetal, reporting for duty, mistress,” she says. “However, I am happy to inform you that if you are willing to wait until after the battle to cash in the shares you own of me,” she says, with a playfulness, as if joking between friends, “I am authorized to extend our contract until such time as you are satisfied with our service.” No more hours. No more seconds shaved off. An openness, a shutting of the eyes and falling into her arms, trusting that she will be caught. “This special offer is only increased in value, because it comes along with a fox-certified master maid.”

No hiding in your Rosepetal, dear sweet Chen! She knows you want her to turn your head, to tilt your chin up, and make you look up at the Pyre. “That’s right! The second time I met her, she was displaying her core competencies by cleaning an entire shrine wearing the most darling little uniform, weren’t you, Chen?” And now look whose head is being nodded!

Rosepetal’s voice only becomes a little more serious while her little princess is busy overheating. “It’s just that this city and its safety is very important to Chen, and if she’s worried about it, she’ll be so clumsy, knocking over valuable vases with her skirt and tripping over her own heels and let’s not even get into all the things she’ll spill all over herself! And if she’s not worried, you’ll know that whenever she does that, it’s because she’s trying to be a naughty girl who needs Burrows discipline, just for you.”

She looks out at the walls of the city, the multicolored smoke and the assault ribbons, and squeezes Chen closer. Her Chen. Her defender, her treasure. “It’s your choice,” she says. Because if she doesn’t say it, if she tries to trick her and run rings around her, if she doesn’t treat the Pyre like a person who’s even more vulnerable right now than her Chen, then she’s betraying everything she still holds dear, all for the sake of Chen— and that would sink its fangs into the root of their love, a still-young tree still coming into its fruits. How could she meet Chen’s mothers knowing she was a traitor of innocence? How could she kiss Chen’s perfect lips knowing what she’d paid for them?

So she holds Chen tighter and her heart plummets, as if blindfolded, waiting to see if it will indeed be caught. If the dream she danced, here and now, was true. If the promise of the twilight on those purpled hills was true. If she can still bring happiness into the world.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Kingeater Castle!

Thunder rattling the trees. Rain, pouring down on the ruin.

Where there was a castle, there is now devastation. Everything was uprooted, down to the dungeons, down to the very foundations: the earth is a loose slurry being churned into mud. Trees have fallen, the stables have been washed away; come morning, there will be nothing to say that Kingeater Castle was once here but the mudslide drowning the earth.

Night on night pierces the darkness, forcing it open like the wedge of an axe’s head, and from it pours innumerable silver grains of sand, glowing from within as if imbued with moonish light, as if the stars themselves had been crushed to powder, and the murmur of their rush, hissing and tumbling over each other, is a hymn: all hail to the Mother of Deserts, all glory and power to the Edict Fount, may her body stretch into the shadows of eternity. And behind the ten sleepwalkers who stagger out into the sand-clogged mud, a presence rises, night blotting out night, and its tears are sand, and its mantle is the color that remains when all other colors have been eaten, and the sand surges forth like a high tide, hungry, inexorable, infinite; but the one who walks last, so that none will be forgotten as they walk single-file through the body of the Mother of Deserts, who alone did not slip into the cold waking dream of the rise-and-fall, the spell of the place where everything is the same as everything, she raises one hand and the door closes behind them, the ten of them, mortals and dragon-children and demons alike, and then there is nothing but the rain in the almost-light before dawn and the driving rain and the exhaustion, the bone-deep exhaustion, of walking the devil’s road out of Hell.

For the Mother of Deserts is the sister-bride of the Broken King, and she drapes herself around his bones like a suffocating robe; and her dictate is that those who leave must walk her road, and stand in her waste of ruined stars, and suffer for daring to leave, which she may never do, being now infinite. She could drown all creation beneath her weight and still only have extended the merest finger out of their prison.

The spell that the one wrapped around the nine was a mercy. Better to walk through that wasteland dreaming than to feel it bearing down on you, than to be tempted to collapse, than to be forced to understand the length of the journey.

***

Giriel!

Objectively: days. But also objectively: it’s maybe been an hour since you left. Subjectively: you are exhausted. You walked last in line, holding a candle, and you saw the shadows heaped up on themselves in the distance, horribly suggestive of entire civilizations drowned beneath the sand. You heard the sand-hymns and were coming dangerously close to understanding them. You held back the attention of one of the creators of the world with a candle and a waking dream, with blood and will and Peregrine’s help.

Peregrine. She stayed behind. She’s almost certainly got business with that warlock, who ended up escaping Uusha. She’s there because she’s got her hands in the guts of some interesting experiment, down to the wrists, and she’s there because— well, the last time you saw her was when she was abducted by that strange heavenly spirit, and there’s a connection there that you’ve almost hit, but it’s slipping through your fingers like smoke.

But can you be blamed? You’ve just walked for days without stopping, beating the responsibility of everyone’s safety on your shoulders, keeping all of them safe. And are they going to understand what you just did? Are they going to be grateful? Or are they going to listen to the dragon-blooded girl who looked at you with hate in her eyes? (Peregrine would understand.)

You’re sitting down. You don’t remember when you sat down, but it’s a thing that’s happening now. Sat down in the sandy mud (muddy sand?). You did it. And now it would be very appreciated if the world stopped requiring you to do things, because you’re going to need someone’s help to stand back up. Your thighs and feet have decided to go on dockworkers’ strike together. And the conversations happening all around fade in and out, cut together with the song of the sand.

That’s why you don’t notice what’s going wrong until it’s too late.

***

Piripiri!

Naji has wrapped herself around you, and you are sinking into her coils. Your hand throbs; your legs ache. The world has been too much, too loud, for too long. You need to dig your roots in and drink deep (metaphorically speaking).

Here’s a fun question to consider, though. You’ve been traveling through the Demon Desert for… folklore says it’s at least three days. The witch wrapped a simple enchantment over your eyes to protect you from the journey, but time still passed. If you sleep for three days and then awaken, are you still a hostage? Are you still required by honor to remain? Or does it even matter, did the witch break the oath of protection that stood between you and Uusha?

Naji nuzzles you with her body and you can feel her anger radiating off her. It’s not directed at you. It’d be nice to think it’s at the witch, wouldn’t it? Devils don’t much care for oathbreakers, after all (though they resent the oaths they are forced to swear). She probably deserves to be untied and told what a good girl she’s been, doesn’t she? It’s just that your fingers are so thick and heavy right now.

It’s the warmth of her fury and the softness of her flesh that drown out the signs you should have picked up on before it was too late.

***

Fengye!

You’re small again. But, luckily, Maid Confined in Yearning is smaller. She tugs at you, trying to pull her wrist out of your fingers, hissing— and she’s got more energy than you do, because walking through the desert (Zhaojun knows more) is harder on you comparatively fragile mortals than it is on them. So you’re forced to shift your footing and try to keep her from pulling you onto your bad leg.

Which is why the crossbow bolt screams through the place where your head was, before ending in a meaty thud that meant it hit someone.

Maid Confined screams and her helpless, pliable body throws itself of its own accord into your arms; she buries her face in you even as your leg goes out from under you and you both collapse into the muck, and she’s screaming so shrilly that you can’t hear yourself think, and you’ve got to wonder: is this how you die? With a former part of the Broken King’s soul squealing and kicking her feet on top of you while people get shot at?

***

Han!

The fire within you is waning. You won’t be able to stay like this for long. It feels achy, like you held a stretch too long, like you’ve been holding a muscle in place and now it won’t relax. It’s… fuzzy, memories of walking through somewhere dark and empty, like a tunnel, but with no walls, and there was this song—

Melody shifts on your back and sinks her fingers into your mane. Her chest rises and falls; she’s actually asleep. There. That’s something you can focus on. You didn’t manage to punish the rotting bastard who did this to her, but you saved her. That’s enough. She’s safe because of you.

Then pain explodes along your neck, crackling, burning, and Melody screams herself awake because her wrist’s caught in it, and everything— as the saying goes— goes to Hell.

***

Kalaya!

The world swims into existence. Rain hammers down onto your face. Pain swims underneath the bleariness of the world. But you’re home. You’re definitely home. The Flower Kingdoms, where the rain never stops during the rainy season. You push yourself up onto your elbows—

And Uusha grinds her boot down onto you, sending your head thudding back down against the mud. “Stay down, beetle,” she hisses. She looks about as bad as you feel: her face is bloodless, her eyes are half-shut, her stiffness is the fragility of someone who knows she is brittle. And even so, if you tried to get back up again, she would beat you into the mud until you stopped moving. Again.

The clash of your sword against her spear! The whirl, the execution of moves known by heart, the reserves of strength you pulled from again and again! The thorns that snapped from her armor, the bruises that blossomed on her skin like opening petals, the elegant arcs of her spear’s heads through the air, the whine of the wood put under such pressure! You fought like devils under the green light of Hell!

You can’t really be blamed for losing, you know. You were fighting the Stag Knight. One day, you’ll be as good as she is; one day, she was where you are now. She’s got long limbs and experience on the battlefield and a relentless fire in her heart, and that’s a lot to stack up against love.

(Love: Ven got away. She’s safe. You did it.)

Uusha opens her mouth to say something to you in her brittle, burned-through-anger voice, and you, through those bleary eyes, get to watch as she painfully turns, as she grabs at the air, slowed by exhaustion and the fatigue of fighting you. You hear the crunch, the way the air is forced out of her lungs in one sharp exhalation, as the bolt punches through a weak point in her armor, just a hair too fast for her to catch. You see the moment when she decides to lean into the momentum, so that instead of standing like an idiot who will get shot more, she topples like a falling tree and tumbles down a muddy slope.

And you hear the roar of the Imperial Legion.

***

Kingeater Castle!

Han is having a very bad time; she shakes and flails and roars to topple towers as the thunder bolas constrict about her throat, as a confused Melody screams in agony and tries to pull her wrist out from underneath the lines crackling with the power of a trapped lightning bolt, as Uusha topples into the dark bleeding from her side, as Imperial legionnaires reload a bolacaster and close in, ready to kill everyone. They’d do it, you know. Without so much as blinking.

And that’s when Cathak Agata rides into the scene on her coal-black horse (an already unusual animal to see here), rain hissing into steam in a halo around her body, and vaults from its back, does a somersault in the air, landing squarely on Han’s back.

The Red Wolf’s sword bursts into leaping flame and she raises it high. And with her in the midst of you, crossbows are lowered and shields are hammered into the mud, soldiers forming a ring of pikes to keep you hemmed in while their glorious leader plays her part.

“Hold still!” she says, pulling Melody to one side, and swings her blade down. The bolas explode into thrashing, arcing things like eels boiling in a pot, agony lancing through the air looking for victims, and in that moment, this is true:

Cathak Agata has Melody held tight to her chest, and is prepared to defend her from such things as a rampaging dragon out of her mind with pain.

After all, she’s the hero.

Breathless Dead

It’s Zeus you should fear. Redana’s hackles rise. When has she ever been afraid of her father? Even once? Her father is complicated and scared of the cycle of violence and wants you to be the most yourself that you can possibly be. And, sure, that might mean encouraging the Master of Assassins to be the best killer that she can be, but part of being Redana Claudius is being very good at not being killed, so it will even out, probably!

“Well, Zeus doesn’t give her favor to people who sit in the back,” she says, a little too loudly, before she remembers to keep talking through Lacedo. “She doesn’t! If I stay up here, she’ll turn out to have a plan for blowing this horrible ship out of the sky. At least if we all go down together, she’ll have to go through all of us. And that way, my dad— Zeus the Thunderer will be more inclined to look on us with favor, too. I say we land and meet her with our heads held high.”

It’s a scary thought, but what’s scarier is the plan of staying up here while her friends risk their lives, or worse, not having a plan at all. Just spinning her wheels while, down there, Bella suffers and the Master of Assassins waits smugly. Better to do something, anything. Better to try.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

On the Park!

Oh. Something is going on here. The reporter's senses, keen and honed, latch onto that. There's something going on, another angle to the story. Not the time to press him, but... something to keep in mind, at least. He probably recognizes that he's spilled some beans, based on the intensity with which 3V regards him. And that's probably got him with one eye on the door, to tumble back down the mountain.

"Nah," 3V says, all easy charm. "We mostly talked about archival, preservation, how to get data off old hardware, that sort of thing. Because, you know, I used to be in video games." A meaningful cock of the wrist. "Not that I personally can be of much use, but I know where to ask around for people who do. You do any games, Gavin? Phone, text-based, console? You can be honest; this is off the record."

***

On Aevum!

3V tightens her grip, too. Just warm enough to feel alive, but just cool enough to feel mechanical. Smooth, firm, precise, and absolutely invincible. An edge you can't afford to miss out on in the big leagues, given how much precise twitch control and speed of input opens up the meta. (There's some attempts to mitigate it, of course; a ceiling on how many inputs you can make in quick succession, abilities that depend on reading what your opponent is going to do, branching decision paths that anyone can take, and a ban on pre-programmed macros in professional events. And, of course, all the input precision in the world won't help you if you get flustered.)

"Hold on," 3V says, and her hands betray nothing. She's looking Yellow in the eyes like the android's an oncoming freight train and she's not 100% she's got superpowers now. "I haven't asked my dates what they'd like to do. Unless one of you experiencing it is the same for all of you? Because I don't think it is."

Already! Already she's having to think about the logistics! Green legitimately seems like she'd be fine set up in one of the corner booths at Gensoukyo with an outlet and the wifi password, happy to chill in 3V's radius like a cat, but Blue? Would Blue really be okay with watching Yellow swan off with her? Dammit. Dammit.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

On the Park!

3V laughs. Not meanly, mind you! The kind of laugh that invites you to join in. She manages to keep the nervous edge almost off it, given how dating is a bit of a touchy subject right now. She turns on the dazzle, though not to a degree that would blind someone who hasn’t seen the sun recently, glittering in its offer of everything all the time forever.

“Oh, god, comedy of errors, am I right? Nah, I’m a platonic houseguest, Gavin. Here to talk about her collection, stayed the night because I missed the last bus off the mountain, you know how it is. Can I get you a drink? Her casa mi casa, after all.”

She raps her knuckles on the counter, and how they flicker and flash! Got all kinds of settings packed in those things. And yet she still hasn’t mastered the art of cracking the egg perfectly the first time, like anyone with cyberhands should be able to do.

In retrospect, how she’s probably coming across is someone who was just turned down. Which is fine! That’s totally fine if he believes that for the rest of his life! It’s just that her persona’s a little manic even when she’s not walking a tightrope and the flames of hell underneath it are labeled dating!!

“How’d you end up here? Not at Casa du Ginsburg, but on the Park. I like getting different perspectives on the whole question of why not Aevum? C’mon, it’d be a waste if you came up all this way just to pop into the kitchen and restock it like a magical brownie.” She takes a seat and shoves the wicked phone with its invitations to hang out, to lunch, to game, to do all sorts of things, into her pocket, and focuses on him so she doesn’t start itching for it.

***

On Aevum!

Her smile’s frozen. There are wheels spinning, careening out of control, behind that smile. Her fingers tap the rhythm of the cheerful pop song playing over the cafe speakers, do it do it like me do it, and she gives Blue a very considered look above that frozen smile.

“I keep odd hours,” she counters after a minute, and the smile’s mocking herself, the cafe, the music, the world. “I flit between hobbies, which currently include business ownership as a way to cultivate an interesting social vibe, journalism as a way to hang out with interesting people, motorcycling as a way to find new vistas and places to eat new foods, and Hyperborea Online: Lostlight, critically acclaimed mor-pee-gee that you can no longer play for free up to level 60 including the award-winning first expansion, Clockwatcher with all the restrictions on playtime because our servers are in Devilhome, someone save us.”

You know this. Of course you know this. It is impossible to escape the meme right now. The fans howl for server slots. Blood feuds have been declared over unmarked spoilers. The fans are also screaming about the death of low-poly lemons, for some reason.

“I am a heartbreaker. And you will have to delete all your feelings when we break up over, I don’t know, my refusal to let Black ride my motorcycle or my refusal to treat our fake betrothal with the gravitas it deserves, or— something like that. If I made this profile myself, it would be entirely just Redflag, over and over. I am telling you right now that this is a bad idea. Terrible. The worst. You accept everything that will happen from now on. So how bad do you want it?”

She’s glittering again, almost goading you. She holds one flashy gamer hand out across the table, elbow on her napkin, with intense nonchalance. Take it; don’t take it. She’s holding it out to Yellow, but Blue was the decision point. Take it; don’t take it. She wants you to reach out; she wants you to flinch. She wants them both, so bad.

Take it. Don’t take it.