Archive of Our Own

Whoever said that memories keep good company and don’t talk back was a fucking liar.

Stay, stay, stay.

Henry awoke to a small sob outside his door, and to no one’s surprise, Arianna was sitting cross-legged in front of it, tiny face, blotchy cheeks, and wide eyes staring up at him in mounting horror. “No, no,” she gasped, falling against his legs, and clutching onto the fabric of his sleep pants.

“Please don’t tell father I woke you,” she whispered. Henry sighed as he gathered her in his arms, closing the door with his foot.

“I’d never, ever do that, Arianna,” he assured her. He laid back down on his bed, Arianna against his chest, pulling the blankets over them, “You’re six, Arianna. You shouldn’t know what a bastard is yet, but that man’s a bastard and one day we’ll get out of here and become someone, all three of us. Mom, too. I promise. All four of us.”

They basked in the silence of the night stretching above them, before Henry sliced through it.

“Stay, stay, stay,” he sang.

“Always, always, always,” she answered.

And she would. She would have followed him to the graveyard, even at six, if he’d asked. But of course, he never did. And she fell hard, watching as he took a step back without her.

Stay, stay, stay.

Before he’d met the wrong end of her spell circle, he’d agreed to let the humans stay—that’s a lie, with the spell circle, Arianna didn’t use magic to kill her father: that would be too quick. She’d used a kitchen knife, and she’d pinned him to the floor, driving it through his throat in a moment of burning hurt, her cheeks red from where he’d struck her.

But they said it was magic. Because that sounded better. Children could have outbursts of magic. Wrong place, wrong time. The stern hand tight on Arianna’s shoulder reminded her that if she dared step out of line again, they’d find what made her strike out and cut it clean out of her.

So, Arianna was boosting herself up on the compost, her feet arched and feather light as she dropped through the open window and into the kitchen.

She shifted the sack slung over her shoulder and sauntered towards the pantry, ready to reward herself with a midnight helping of bread.

Except she wasn’t alone. She dropped into a crouch, studying the crumpled form in the darkest corner. It took her a moment, but the round ears peeking through dark hair gave him away.

“Phillip?” she asked, reaching out her hand.

“Go away,” he hissed, “Witch.”

Arianna curled her legs under her ass, and she stayed.

Stay, stay, stay.

Henry’s been dead for six days and it’s not long enough—Arianna’s wounds haven’t scabbed over and she’s lying on the cold, hard ground of her bedroom when she hears a choked sob outside her door. And because Henry wasn’t there anymore, and she was the second oldest, and she’d already pushed herself to her feet: she wiped at her eyes with her sleeve, stinking of sweat and dirt and blood and she was never going to be able to wash that out of—

She clicks open the door and finds Ellie.

And finds that Ellie really, really didn’t expect her to still be here.

“I—”

I thought you left already.

She doesn’t need to say it.

Arianna knows.

And she tries to feel ashamed, but if she feels anything: it’s a phantom hand around her throat. This house was never a home to her, and she wants to be able to stay for Ellie—but she’s not strong enough.

However, she is strong enough to open her arms wide and start humming.

Stay, stay, stay, she begs as Ellie throws herself into her side, clutching at her clothes and Arianna waddles to her bed, dropping both of them into it.

Her hand’s in Ellie’s hair, and Ellie’s mumbling against her chest. Arianna keeps scratching circles. “I miss him,” Ellie says, “Mama says I shouldn’t, but I miss him so much.”

The stars shimmer and collapse and die in the night sky blanketing them, and Arianna’s rage is burning steadily in her chest—she’s seeing the same black at the corners of her vision as when she killed their father, but she can’t do that again.

She wants to, but she can’t. She’s too old to strike out. She’s not going to bury her mother as a casualty of her father’s rage. So, instead she tries to be someone worthy of this:

“Listen to me,” she orders, and she hates that Ellie stiffens under her words and touches, “And listen well. You’re allowed to grieve him. You don’t need anyone to tell you that your feelings are valid, because they’ll always be, by virtue of simply being yours. Of being experienced.”

And in the smallest voice, she adds: “And I miss him too—he’s, he’s why I can’t stay here. I… I love you and—and I, you know I would never leave you, right? You can always come to me.”

Stay, stay, stay, Ellie’s even breaths sing back to her.

Always, always, always, she fucking lies.

Stay, stay, stay.

She’s crouched on the bar table, swinging a half-drunk bottle of cheap alcohol around, her arms around Caleb’s neck and Phillip trying to knock her off her perch and she’s giggling and thinking that if she just stays here, the faint voices of disapproval from around them, the orange-gold glow of the firebee lights and the people that maybe became her family—maybe, just maybe, she’ll be okay.

Stay, stay, stay.

Stay, stay.

Stay.

Stay, stay,

Stay, stay, stay.

Stay, stay.

Stay.

Always, always.

Three can keep a secret if two are dead.

Arianna died three hundred years ago. Arianna is waiting for him at her spot, sitting at the edge of the Knee, and she’s uncorking the bottle with her teeth.

“You’re late, Phillip,” she chides.

He sits down next to her, their hips clicking together. She looks just like she did the last time he saw her alive, twenty-eight and furious, but she’s pulled her hair back and there’s a little black blood decorating her cheek. He reaches out to wipe it away and Arianna snarls at him but doesn’t move away.

His ribs ache as he moves, as he speaks, “Who did this to you?”

“You.”

“I’m sorry about him, he’s a hassle.”

Usually, Arianna would grin. Arianna had always had a dark sense of humour, and it only got worse after death—when she took permanent residence in his subconscious. Her colours flicker back and forth when he touches her—one blink, and she’s as vibrant as she was the day he lost her, another and she’s the pale blue of the rest of the ghosts.

He doesn’t know why she’s manifested differently. He supposes that it’s the fire he recognised in her long ago, he supposes that she’s decided that if she’s going to haunt him, she’s going to be most visceral one.

She doesn’t just want to drive a knife through his chest. She wants to twist it.

She’s frowning.

“You’re still wearing your mask,” she states. “You usually take your mask off when we speak.”

“You do that because I force you to. Have you lost your fear of me? Your reverence?”

He’s very conscious of her words, and her hands moving to where she knows the clasps are. His fly away from her face and grab her by the wrists. Arianna huffs. “It’s worse,” she says to no one in particular. She’s not asking him. She doesn’t have to. They’ve played this game for three hundred years, perhaps even longer.

“It’s gotten worse. I want to see. I want to see how you continue to fragment yourself.”

He sighs, but he releases his grip on her.

“Why did you have to be the one that survived in here, Arianna? Why could it not have been him?”

Arianna tsks. “You’re not a very good host,” she answers, as her fingers move behind his cut ears, feather-light, “And I’m not a very good houseguest. We would drive him mad with our bickering. It would not be as before.”

“I suppose not.”

The mask dropped to the ground, and Arianna didn’t hide her gasp. Her hands flew to her mouth, trying to choke another one. He was sure it was unwilling, but he noticed tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

“Phillip…”

All traces of her previous cockiness are burned away, and she sounds so painfully like Caleb that he almost allows her to gather him in her arms, as Caleb used to. But she’s not Caleb.

She’s just Arianna, and she never chose to be here.

She gathers her knees against her chest and turns back to regard the sunrise. “It’s beautiful,” she tries to change the subject, “It’s a pity that it’s only like this when you’re melodramatic and drunk. I’m stuck here all the time, you’re not. You should try and be a better host.”

He doesn’t put his mask on, but he gathers it against his chest, moving closer to her once again. His lips quirk ever so slightly upwards as he speaks, “Will you,” he asks, “Try to be a better houseguest, then? Stop invading my memories and trying to change them? It’s getting very annoying to keep picking up a ghost who’s crying over being unable to touch anything.”

Arianna scoffs, but Phillip can tell that he’s struck a nerve by how her nose twitches. She’s done that since she was at least sixteen, and she’s not even close to sixteen anymore.

“I haven’t visited those since the last time. You are not missing anything.”

“I’m aware. I appreciate it.”

She snarls and wags the bottle, stealing his attention away from the landscape of her face—and the war unfolding on it. “We should be drinking,” she says, “I shouldn’t be entertaining your bullshit. I’m just bored because you’re the only one who speaks to me. You’re the only one who…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but Phillip knows what she would say:

You’re the only one who makes me feel real.

And Arianna was never his; he never wished for her to be, in the way that his brother did—he was never attracted to her, she never managed to bewitch him into betraying his goals, their mission—but she had been his friend, powerful, cunning, terrifying—but she’d been his friend, and as the world forgot his true name, he found himself missing spending time with her.

And he was still alive.

Arianna had been dead for hundreds of years.

He didn’t for a second think that her tolerance of him came from fondness—it came from nostalgia being a bitter liar that made you remember things as better than they were.

“The Collector’s a fucking asshole,” Arianna says as she pulls glasses from her hair. “They don’t want to tell me shit, and they just laugh and talk about being able to manifest physically.”

She spits. Uncorks the bottle with her teeth.

“I can do that too! I did that once. I can haunt your ass in mirrored surfaces just like they can. They just… have more energy and time than I do.”

She pours him a glass.

“It’s a pity that ghosts can’t poison things, but at least I can choose what it tastes like.”

She hands him the glass, and he takes it without hesitation. Arianna’s always had better taste in drink than him. His brother used to always say that, used to sling his arm around her shoulders in their kitchen as Arianna struggled to uncork a bottle, hissing at it as she wrapped her fist around the neck of it.

He takes a sip, and immediately recoils.

“Why did you choose your wedding wine?!”

Arianna tsks.

“It wasn’t the one we ended up choosing. You would have known if you’d attended.”

He rolls his eyes. Arianna keeps talking.

“This was the one you and I tried, without Caleb. You know, before you murdered him and trapped me in your mind.”

“I didn’t… put you here.”

And that’s the truth. He doesn’t know if she believes him, but it’s the truth.

He didn’t kill Arianna in life, disease took her—he even looked for a cure for her. And he didn’t put her here, either. He—

He wouldn’t have.

To have his mind infected with such sin as her own; well, he hoped that ridding the world of the evils of the Boiling Isles would grant him forgiveness for keeping Arianna around.

†

Arianna’s never understood the art of backing down.

Arianna’s always said it was the other way around.

He’s shopping at a market that almost looks to him as a prophet and he hears of a commotion on the other side, and then a yell that could only be hers.

He arrives just in time to see her stand in front of a juvenile demon, shielding it with her body.

“Arianna,” he sighed as soon as he entered the square. She parried Blue Fang’s strikes, ducking away from an oversized arm—more a log than anything, but she stumbles over her feet and slams her head against the ground. Before she (he, he, he, he should) can cry out, Blue Fang buries a spike of ice in her chest, stabbing upwards and a little too close to where the crack in Caleb’s ribs is, still.

He doesn’t yell out something in protest because that’s a way to lose the element of surprise and he needs it. He’s not as strong as Arianna is.

He slides up behind, drops a couple of pages worth of fire glyphs and slams them against Blue Fang’s back.

He doesn’t care what happens next to Blue Fang, he crosses the distance between Arianna’s crumped form and crouches next to it. The kid demon behind her chitters something about finding a healer and he nods as he wraps his fingers around the ice.

“I’m sorry,” he says before he pulls and tries not to remember, “This is going to hurt like a bitch.”

He begs and pleads and begs for the sinner’s life in front of the healer and the healer nods and says that the injury’s bad and that he shouldn’t expect her to survive, says that she might have a problem with her bile sac and there’s not a lot that Phillip remembers from his conversation, but he remembers this:

“Her bile sac?” he questions, knowing that it’s where witches draw their magic from, the distinction that makes them impossible to become fully human, to be something he can save.

The healer nods again, and Phillip glances at Arianna, laid out on the ground of his cave. “Her name’s Arianna Clawthorne, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s a powerful witch, I’ve heard about her, and yet, her innate magic’s not reacting to any of the healing I’ve tried, it’s not reacting to the injury or even her body’s cries for aid, even when I’ve encouraged it to. And yet, I cannot find the issue with the bile sac, but it must be so.”

“Usually, witches with such… issues, well, they don’t live long. For various reasons, whether it be heart trouble, an injury that’s just a little too severe, a bad bout of the Common Mould—it’s a riskier life. And it seems like your friend has a habit of taking risks on top of that.”

That was putting it lightly.

He healer says that he shouldn’t keep her in the cave.

Phillip argues but eventually slings her over his shoulder and carries her back to her own home, laying her out in her own bed and collapsing to his knees, gripping her hand, and begging her to stay.

Blanketed by the night, he coughs out a prayer for a sinner, for the last holder of his brother’s memory, next to him.

Phillip’s cooking up griffin eggs when he hears Arianna’s breathing change, and he stops humming under his breath.

He didn’t realise when he’d started, but he chokes it down, flips the last one off the pan, drops it onto the plate and pads to the bedroom. Arianna’s house is small, shitty and every second board creaks, but if he’s being honest—he currently lives in a cave, and he’s had the night to learn which ones not to step on.

As soon as he steps into the dark room, he sees the glint of a dagger and he chuckles.

“It’s awfully rude to consider stabbing someone who’s making you eggs, Arianna,” he chides, and she answers him with a snarl, delightful in the mornings, as always.

She, despite the raging stab wound, pushes herself out of the bed and he doesn’t stop her, because that’s a way he knows he’ll earn a dagger between the ribs. Even if she flinched away and ran the last time they fought, he’s not sure she’ll do the same, if he gives her a reason. If he gives her pity, pity she doesn’t deserve anyways.

Really, he should have left her in the street and let God do what He wanted with her.

But Phillip didn’t.

And he’ll atone for that later, but now he watches the blankets pool around her waist and a wince run up her body.

He can see the cogs in her mind turning, and almost supplies it with the fuel of what happened, but her gaze seems to have settled on realisation, and she growls:

“Why the fuck are you in my fucking house, Phillip?” she gasps, “Here to finish the job?”

Her eyes are a burning challenge, despite being unable to stand. More terrifyingly so, despite her being unable to stand, it wasn’t a glare that Phillip wished to test.

He tsks.

“Of course, not,” he answers, still leaning against the doorjamb, the plate in his hand. “I simply missed an old friend and was passing through when I heard of someone doing something so wondrously reckless that it could only be you, Arianna.”

She shifts her weight, and Phillip can see that she’s examining her abdomen. She better not rip anything, or he’s going to scream—he’d had to bitch and bitch at that healer, who’d frowned at his homey cave and insisted that he bring her somewhere that “wasn’t a fucking cave, what is wrong with you fucking humans, first you willingly live with giraffes”—And Phillip had questions. What the fuck was a giraffe?

“—And now you live in caves!”

Regardless, Phillip had eventually relented and broken into the house that he wasn’t supposed to know that Arianna had.

“Phillip,” she sighs, pulling him back to the present, “Did you fucking undress me and bandage my wounds?”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t anything, instead taking a step forward into the room, allowing her to slowly notice the plate of steaming eggs that he’s holding in front of his middle, a peace offering, a reminder that if she breaks him, she gets her food covered in human blood.

But she’d probably find that appetizing.

He tries to ignore the relief that surges through his body when she moves again, gathering her legs and making space on the bed. He tries to tell himself that the relief isn’t because she survived, but because he didn’t spend snails on something useless.

But he knows that he’s lying.

“Griffin eggs, huh?”

He grins, and it’s not as plastered on or fake as he’d have liked.

“I thought you deserved something expensive after getting beat up by some hop-a-punk hooligan demon.”

He sits on the edge of the bed next to her, their hips and thighs meeting. Arianna stares at the plate of eggs—and he wonders if she’s thinking that he poisoned them. He didn’t. Poison is more expensive than a healer’s time, and he’d paid for that. He’d paid for her to survive, and he was going to drill it into her head—that he’d invested in her survival like Pa had in the half-built church back home and now she better survive and make it a worthy one.  

And he did.

“What do you want, Phillip?”

Phillip sighs.

“You would have died if not for my intervention,” he says, “Without magic, your body cannot sustain your life. And you know it. Are you trying to join my dear brother in the grave?”

“Keep his name out of your damn mouth,” she hisses, but she pulls the eggs to her lap, whimpering.

“You know,” Phillip tries, “You could undo the spell. And you could save yourself all this pain. You could join me. I want you to join me, Arianna. I could show you the human realm. Just like he intended.”

He’s being honest. She would be a useful ally.

With or without magic, he had to admit that his lifestyle had taken a hit since they’d fallen out—Arianna understood the Boiling Isles in an innate way that he hoped never to, and she’d become friends with almost every criminal, who knew to stay out of her way.

However, it seemed that they’d also learned of her untimely fate.

He didn’t believe that Arianna deserved to reap the fruits of his labour, of his faith—he didn’t believe that she could be saved, but if she wanted to, if she wanted to work to earn it with God, Phillip would be glad to have her on his team, even if they’d always be a hand stretching out from Hell towards Heaven.

He wouldn’t light her pyre himself, but she would end in flames. Maybe, tinged with a little gold if she betrayed her kin and purged them from humanity.

The Lady Judas, dripping with black blood.

Arianna takes a bite of the eggs.

He doesn’t think that she’ll entertain his thought, and if she did—it would just be to insult him. But instead, she, between stuffing her face, answers: “Even if I wanted to,” she shoves another piece into her maw, “I wouldn’t be able to.”

Another.

“Even if I regretted my choice and I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of knowing if I do.” Another bite. “It was a permanent exchange. No takebacks. My magic for keeping the door out of your hands.”

Venom drips from her voice and onto the shallow remains of the eggs.

“Even if I dug up the whole Boiling Isles, I’d never find it. It’s gone. Vanished. Out of your hands. And I don’t give a damn if you kill me for it, because you’re not smart enough to build one without him. You’re going to die here. Right next to me. Hand in unlovable hand.”

And that’s where she’s wrong.

He’s not going to die here.

He’s certainly not going to die with her.

Caleb had always been the weaker of the two of them. His father never saw that, and always praised Caleb’s skill and compared it to Phillip’s lacking and even if Caleb tried to cheer him up, his own cheeks red from being struck even if he could have avoided it by saying nothing—well, it’d been apparent.

At home, Caleb had been the strong one. Here? Phillip. Caleb had fallen for the Isles’ tricks. Simple as that. Caleb always wanted to protect others, and it was one of the things that Phillip loved the most and dearest about him. And he suspected that’s how Arianna first sunk her claws into him.

Before she foolishly threw away her power—and he didn’t believe it when he first heard it through the grapevine, a witch like Arianna had nothing but her unnatural power, she would not give it up for misguided love. Her power was her life, because she wasn’t a child of God.

She wasn’t Caleb.

She didn’t die for misguided love.

She had simply moved on and was trying to sink her claws into the last Wittebane remaining. Trying to prevent his goals. The work of God. Or, so he’d at least believed at first.

Now, he thought Arianna was deceived, not by herself, but by the simple circumstances and terms of her existence. It was tragic: without the blood coursing through her veins, she would have been a good person. She would have been someone who could have worked alongside him for salvation, and actually benefitted.

Instead, Arianna’s condition had used Caleb’s too-tender heart against him from the day he first laid eyes on her. She pretended that it wasn’t her that set the Gravesfield town hall on fire, or the church, because she couldn’t make a portal. She had to make it with them, she had to learn from them, soak it up so she could do it now again, even without magic.

As if she hadn’t used her portal door/spell/whatever to cause chaos in their colony whenever she could.

It was the beginning of the end when she bewitched Caleb.

He had told Philip that the best way to hunt her family was to get her to trust them. So, they’d played sports and learned from the brother, the older sister and the little sister with the flaming hair and blossoming power.

And Phillip could feel himself falling into her orbit, too. And now, he was stuck grabbing her leg as she fell into Satan’s grasp and falling on his knees in the evening and arguing that the ends justify the means, that otherwise, he wouldn’t feel the drop in his chest when she was in danger, when he held a blade against her throat, when she would die.

Because he did not mourn creatures of evil.

But he did mourn opportunities. And Arianna was a great one.

Every opportunity he had to kill her, Caleb said to wait.

And so, one night he took her brother, because he’d waited long enough and he had to pay for his sins with the blood of the wicked.

And he’d still fallen deeper. He should have come to his senses when he saw the dead golden eyes staring up at him, but he didn’t. Instead, the witch ran away to join their travelling party, and when Caleb silently asked him if he wanted her there, he didn’t hesitate.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

And he’d drunk with the witch. Played sport with the witch. Ran through the woods with the witch. Laughed with the witch. Saved the witch’s life. Made the witch eggs. Paced at night and allowed the witch to show him a taste of divinity through flight, through magic.

Years later, Phillip tried to reason with Caleb.

Tried to make him come back home.

And it didn’t work.

And he didn’t have any choice after that.

Her curse was too strong, too great, and Caleb was lost to her. Caleb had chosen her over him, Caleb would always choose her over him. And she’d managed to slink away, she’d managed to survive, and she’d managed to hide his brother’s life’s work from him and left him stranded in a world of the Devil’s finest minions.

The vile sorceress studied him, her hip touching his.

“Well,” he acquiesces, trying to clear his mind, “I hope my eggs are as good as Caleb’s. I’m not going to kill you because you’re not a threat to me. You’re powerless and you what’ll happen if you somehow find a way to step out of line.”

What would happen is that her remaining family, even if she didn’t speak to anyone other than her sister, would go up in flames.

“You’re too smart to test that boundary.”

And he wouldn’t just leave her alive because she wasn’t a threat to his plans. He would leave her alive because he wanted her to live to see him bring her home to its knees. He wanted her to live without Caleb, because when she’d sat in his castle, in the cave that would become his grand castle, Arianna’s grief had been as real as his and when the anger from that realisation that subsided, he was left with a clear promise:

If he had to live without Caleb, so did she.

Death was too cheap a punishment.

“And I will find another way to return home, Arianna. Mark my words. Whether you cooperate or not, you have not won. You are stuck here, watching me, knowing that you cannot hold a candle to me. You could not even strike out against me for invading your home.”

The knife tucked under her pillow finds its home in her hand, and Arianna twists her wrist and body, trying to slide the knife into the gap she’s created, only to watch Phillip’s abdomen fucking turn black and dodge her blow.

With a gasp, he grasps her arm, the plate of eggs clattering to the floor as he spins her around, trapping her against his body, her back on the bed and a swirling black edge against her stomach.

He grins.

“I’m not nearly as helpless as you remember, Arianna.”

“I can fucking tell.”

Arianna wraps her legs around his middle and with strength he doesn’t know how she gathered, throws him to the ground, landing on top of him and straddling him. He quirks his brow and she surprises him by striking, punching him right above his browbone.

He watches her in shock.

“That’s for Caleb,” she growls.

“You’d do so much worse if it’s for Caleb. It’s three years since he died, and I have to go and save you from fights you could have taken before.”

She punches him again.

“What kind of fucked game is this?” she pants, her eyes wet, “Why won’t you just let me d—live my life?!”

He struggles under her, nicking her cheek with his hand, black slicing through to red and Arianna slams his head against the floor and they roll, snarling at each other, downright pulling at each other’s hair like petulant children. Arianna kicks his back, hard, and barely manages to stop her knife.

He takes a breath. “I know you.”

She stabs through the mud of his arm, and commands it to lunge at her chest but she slides down. so he stains the ceiling and Arianna goes back for round two with the knife, and he manages to swat it out of her hand.

“The fuck you don’t.”

She knees him in the groin, and he crumples into himself, Arianna jerking to her feet and running from the room, into the hallway.

When she’s out of the room, he lets out a scream and he knows that she’ll still hear him, but he’s not going to give her the satisfaction of watching. He staggers up, gripping the wall and following her.

Little does he know that the witch was waiting for him around the corner, and she slams a plate into the side of his skull, and he feels himself retreating to the floor, but he grabs onto her knees and topples her with him.

Arianna lands on top of him with a whimper, her injured abdomen slamming against his thigh and he fumbles for a piece of the shattered plate, finding it and driving it through her shoulder blades as she screams. She answers and bites down on his thigh, drawing blood.

His vision crinkles at the edges, but he knows that it’s a half-hearted fight.

“Get up,” he snarls, “Get up and fight me. I’ve seen how you fight.”

Arianna pants under him, and it’s too close to something he’s done before, someone else’s head on his lap, someone else breathing heavily.

He shakes his head.

“Fuck off,” she grits out, “Fucking leave. Fucking leave me alone.”

“Oh,” he chides smoothly, tasting copper, “I get what I want sooner or later, Arianna.”

“Perhaps, you should think about that?”

“I’m going to think about ripping you apart.”

He chuckles to himself, and gazes down at her, the blood dripping sluggishly from her shoulder. “Then get up and do something about it.”

“Whose side do you plan to be on when I’m finished?”

She launches herself at him with a grunt, her teeth stained red with blood, and they clatter to the floor, Phillip feeling the shards of porcelain cut through his shirt and the fragile skin of his back. Arianna’s hands are around his throat and the world’s going black and spinning and he can still feel that plate in the side of his head, and he wonders if it’s bleeding, he thinks it is—

Arianna loosens her grip.

“My own,” she replies.

“My own side.”

She drops down on her back next to him, gasping for air.

“Fucking stab wound,” she hisses. “Fucking asshole.”

His eyes dance with amusement, black stars glittering against her water-stained ceiling, their chests rapidly rising and falling, “Excellent. You may prove yourself useful yet.”

Her hand flops against her chest and Phillip turns to regard her, noticing the red bleeding through her bandages. He frowns.

“I don’t want to play your game, Phillip. But,” her eyes glint in the light, “Thanks for reminding who I am.”

†

In his dreams, she comes back. She kneels next to Caleb, and she rips up his shirt, puts pressure on the wound and yells for Phillip to fetch a healer, already rolling blue circle after blue circle over his chest, but fixing’s never been as fun as breaking, and Phillip’s feet burn as he runs into town.  

And he does. He does find a healer, and Arianna helps heft the gurney up, and she sits with her back to the wall and she doesn’t speak to him for hours but she doesn’t ask him to leave.

Eventually, she turns to him and asks, “So,” she clicks her tongue, “Did you manage to hash it out? Did you do as I asked you and did you fix it? Are you brothers again?”

And Phillip nods, against all his best judgement.

And so, Arianna teaches him how to play paper football while Caleb’s still on bedrest and they never talk about it again and the world grows sharper and sharper and they’re living in Hell, but he stays. And she stays. And even he stays.

†

She digs her fingers into the wet dirt, feels the power shake the ground and she works her pleas out from the very back of her throat, where her desperation and grief curl around her throat, her words getting stuck in the brambles.

She’s crying again and the sky above her is threatening rain, but she doesn’t care if she burns. Maybe the door will burn with her. Maybe everything will burn with her, burn into nothing and then they could pour her ashes back to life and she’d dance across the wind with Caleb.

Please, please, she cries. Her body cracks and breaks and she shudders under the weight of her grief, she cries for Caleb, she cries for her brother, even for her father, she cries for all the things she did, all the things she didn’t do.

It burns her, and she pushes more through the earth, she feels the Boiling Isles sing to her and she screams back.

†

Phillip steps out in the rain and he screams.

Caleb’s ripping off a piece of his shirt when they’re found by a witch who tilts his head like a curious cat, and he’s holding a blue sheen over his head. He drops his arm as he enters the cave and it vanishes as if it’s never been there when he crouches next to Phillip, and in a voice that reminds Phillip of soft, fur rugs, asks:

“Can I see your arm, sweetflea?”

He hesitates at first, but Caleb encourages him to hold it out and it’s surrounded by a small ring of blue and it stops hurting.

He grins up at the man, only to flinch as his grotesque ears twitch.

“My name’s Henry,” he says, “Pardon my manners, but you two look like humans. We ain’t meant to have humans in these parts—”

Caleb’s fists jerk up and he pushes himself in front of Phillip.

Henry chuckles. “I ain’t going to hurt ya,” he assures them, “I’m asking because it’s dangerous to be out here with magic, and not a whole lot of people know a whole lot about humans. I just know it because my little sisters love the stories from the library and eventually you run out of fiction and have to delve into the factual. But humans are way more interesting than Deadwardian barristers if you catch my drift.”

Phillip absolutely doesn’t.

“Tell me, how do two human boys end up in the Boiling Isles—”

“We were led here,” Caleb snarls, not moving, “By one of your kind.”

“Well, shit,” Henry says, “The rain looks like it’s going to stick around a while, and I don’t know if you’d be comfortable coming home with me, but I promise you that my family’s kind and won’t make you into a stew. And you’d get out of the rain. That you know, you can’t go out in.”

Henry Clawthorne guides them through the treacherous forest, protects them from the rains with a shield of glittering blue and invites them to stay the night.

And Caleb says yes.

And Phillip nods along with Caleb.

It’s just temporary, Caleb whispers. Just temporary. Until they find a way out of here.

And can bring back more men and end it.

And go down in history.

Together.

†

It takes three days since they last speak, since she staggers out of his castle in the morning, since she doesn’t say goodbye and knows that she never will.

She’s done what she intended to, and she’s cried what she’ll allow herself to. She can cry later, she can cry when she knows she’s succeeded.

Arianna knew that he would come. And she intended to be waiting for him.

She dragged one chair into the middle of the abandoned house, mould curling up the wooden walls, and threw herself onto it, splaying her legs and breathing heavily.

If she pulled this off, it would be one for the books.

If she pulled this off, she would live another fifty years without the love of her life and her son. But she had to be the one who survived. She had made a promise, and she had to keep it.

She waits for him, the blood drying against her thighs.

He arrives in the morning, crazed and deprived.

She throws him a small hunk of Palistrom wood. He doesn’t thank her, he doesn’t say anything, he grabs it, cracks it in two and breathes in as the sickening green smoke rises.

His gaze refocuses on her. “You did something.”

She nods.

She did do something. More than something.

She grins at him. A real shit-eating one, and she brightens at how much she knows he hates it. How she knows him well enough to tell, even when he tries to play his bullshit role of a stoic statesman. He’s not. He’s a scared child who never grew up.

Arianna’s going to survive.

“Your child,” he says.

“My child is dead. I didn’t intend to kill him, but I lost him after my magic. It was—”

Phillip finishes her sentence for her.

“Too much for your body to handle? Do you expect me to believe that?”

Arianna shrugs. Bites her lip.

“You can know,” she says, “I know that you know how. I don’t want to speak about it. But you know if I lie to you. Sadly. You have done something stupid and short-sighted, I fear.”

She gestures to the cracked wood on the floor.

“I don’t fear,” she corrects, “I know. Because I know you. And you know me.”

Her eyes meet his, and she forces herself not to flinch or soften at the fact that they’re criminally similar to Caleb’s and that it really, really hasn’t been long enough since she didn’t know it would be the last time that she saw them. She hopes she hurts him too.

Arianna’s eyes are the colour of the flames that took him.

†

“This is my sister, Ellie,” Henry introduces and Caleb smiles at her. Phillip just glares.

“And my sister—”

Henry sighs.

“Ellie, where in the Titan’s name is Arianna?”

Ellie shrugs.

“I didn’t see her leave.”

Henry throws his hands in the air.

“It’s Arianna! When do you ever see Arianna leave?!”

He turns to Phillip and Caleb, facepalming, “Well,” he says, “I know my little sister well enough to know that she’s not in school and probably training on the beach and now I have to go and get her, will you be good here with Ellie? My mam’s already at work, I’m the one that makes sure that everyone eats and goes to school. There’s eggs on the table and you can take whatever you want from the pantry.”

They nod, but ten minutes later, Caleb’s sneaking out the backdoor for reasons Phillip didn’t entirely understand when Caleb hurriedly told him them—and now he’s awkwardly tugging at his shirt and trying to figure out whether he’s expected to talk to Ellie.

†

Seventeen days.

Arianna staggered up to the shop in the corner of the Bonesborough market, where there’d be less witnesses if this got ugly, with as much confidence as she could muster. Even if she’d made breakfast at midnight and fallen in love strangers, even if she’d danced on bar tables, spilling apple blood onto her white dress—Arianna understood the importance of appearances.

And with Caleb’s billowing black suit, even if she was leaning heavily on her staff, she’d argue that she’d just done it to shut her palisman up. Casa was her partner, but she was also a falcon and a little too smart for her own good.

She’d give Arianna shit for what she was doing, so it was best that she stayed still on the head of the staff. Even if it just made Arianna look more like the frail, crippled widow she feared becoming when she caught sight of her reflection.

It was a work in progress. She was a work in progress. She’d been shattered, and now she had to rebuild herself, brick by brick. The words thudded through her head, echoing around the corners of her mind and gave her the final push she needed to shove the door to the building that was ostensibly that of a blacksmith.

The man inside was reed-thin and had a thick red moustache and Arianna spotted four sharp objects that she could use to kill him, a chisel, a pair of scissors, a curved knife, a hot poker. Perhaps he did more than blacksmithing. She’d prefer the curved knife, resting against the hardwood counter in front of sheets of dangling metal.

“I’m closed, come back in an hour,” the man spoke out, head turned to a collection of tools Arianna didn’t particularly care for hanging at the side wall. Arianna said nothing, instead leaning on her staff and glared.

“Did ya hear me? I don’t open early, girl—”

The man turned around and stopped when he saw who was standing across from him, staring at him like she could unhinge her jaw and swallow him whole. And was trying very hard not to give into that compulsion. Arianna had been a lanky child before adventuring forced her to finally bulk up—and she’d absolutely dropped weight recently, returning to her childhood physique with disdain, but she hid it well.

And she knew that the look in her eyes could terrify. She intended it to. She intended to boil down her pain and burn with her gaze alone.

She didn’t give a shit about when he opened his shop. She cared about completing her goal before Phillip heard that she was skulking around again, and because village witches have nothing to do and he’s trying to paint himself as a local legend—they absolutely would.

The word would travel, and Arianna would just have to be quicker.

She cared about the scheme she was cooking together, the steps she needed to take to bring Phillip fucking Wittebane to his knees and punt him into the Boiling Sea when he tried to plead her forgiveness.

She would find everything he cared for and drown it, throw it into the waves and make him watch it dissolve into wet, floating flesh and nothing more.

She would cut off Phillip’s fingers, she thought. For fun. Because she knew it was painful. She would find what the man loved and burn it to the ground, tear out its eyes and tongues and throats and feed them to him. She would take his legacy and his power and his body and she would burn it alive, magic or no magic.

Arianna was in front of a blacksmith, and that was her first step. She could spend the evening thinking about how to make Phillip’s life miserable, for now, she had to give Casa a break from supporting her as she walked.

Her lips curled up into an imitation of a smile while vengeance burned through her veins. “I’m sure you can make time for me, Donal.”

He swallowed, obviously trying to figure out how Arianna knew his name. And whether he wanted her to.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said, and Arianna supposed that was putting it simply. She felt conflicted; between the pride of staking her claim to her identity, of showing this piece of shit and the world and Phillip and whatever the fuck was waiting for her in the hereafter that they had not managed to cow her—but there was a small voice at the back of her mind, one that had an accent and reminisced about picking apples on her big brother’s shoulders and how she’d flushed red for days when Caleb asked her out.

“What do you want?”

Arianna raised the staff in her hand. “I need a cane,” she answered simply, “To give my palisman a break.”

She’d stolen a decent one a few days prior, but she’d already managed to break it. It’d been of decent quality, stolen from a stand in one of the wealthier parts of Bonesborough, atop one of the Fingers, where all the rich could look down at the peasants. It was a wooden cane—the sort that one of those bastards would use as their legs grew old and weary, a sign of a life well lived.

It wasn’t what Arianna deserved, nor what she wanted, and she’d broken it by driving it into the skull of a demon with an obnoxious red fang who’d tried to steal her bag.

“Make me one,” she ordered, “And I want it weighted.”

Donal stuttered over his words. “Alright, alright, Ms. Clawthorne, how heavy? Ya don’t want it to be too heavy while yer walkin’ roujnd these parts, ya know these can be scary parts, ya wanna get ‘way fast—”

“Weighted to break bones.”

Arianna raised a brow. “Be creative with the head. I like crows. Make it easy to grip onto. I’ll be back for it in an hour. Don’t make me regret coming to you.”

She turned to leave the shop, but Donal yelped behind her. “I don’t even know yer height!”

Arianna glared at him over her shoulder. “Fucking guess. And you better hope I’ll be happy with the result, or I’ll use your skull to test whether you know how to follow customer specifications.”

She left and slammed Donal’s door behind her, the man looking as though he was about to have a panic attack through the glass. It cracked at the top. But he’d be able to fix that, too. Arianna didn’t quite care.

She’d expected to be proud of the fear she could cause. Or for that small voice to grow louder and cry out at the harm she’d caused. But she didn’t feel anything at all.

The rage had burned away, and left her with the sinking feeling that she, Arianna Clawthorne, had ordered a cane that wasn’t her staff or one she’d stolen because she expected to be using one for a while. Losing your magic as an adult was a bitch, truly.

She forced herself to breathe through it, rubbing her finger over Casa’s head, feeling it through her gloves that hid the scarring that hadn’t quite healed right.

She could become a myth. A phantom. Those were always hard to kill. She was going to win. She was going to have her revenge. And then she was going to die. As she left the market and started walking towards the Right Fingers, the cold look on her face kept stragglers avoiding her like the plague. Rather unfortunate, really. She wouldn’t have minded picking a few pockets before she returned for her cane.

†

It’s three days since they’ve last spoken, and Arianna’s already caused him problems.

Arianna’s sitting in the middle of a house she doesn’t live in, seemingly just waiting for him to find her. He doesn’t know if it’s because she wants to die, or because she wants him to. There’s blood crusted against her thighs, and she’s still wearing the dress she ran away from him in.

If he leans close to her, he’s sure he’d be able to smell the smoke.

She throws him some palistrom, and he knows why she refuses to give him what he craves—but the gesture brings him off the reeling desperation that he’s felt since that day, a cool and cleansing breath. He lets his eyes slip closed, and when he opens them to hers, he understands why all roads lead him here.

She opens her eyes into his and everything feels better.

And he came here to kill her, that much is true, he came here to tie up loose ends, but his gaze wanders to legs and ice settles at the base of his spine.

“You did something.”

Arianna nods and Phillip’s world shatters.

I miss seeing the red on your face when I made you blush, but I think it’s fine! It’s cool!

He’s playing with a loose thread from his shirt and Arianna’s snarling at his frizzy hair, sitting on her knees behind him as she tries to braid it.

She grins behind him, chuckling to herself as she tugs at a strand—but she knows his hair well, and him even better. It’s never painful, instead a comforting reminder that she’s still there.

“Lean your head a little bit more back,” she orders, “You know, I’m always amazed by this mop. It looks so big and then you brush it and there’s nothing!”

Phillip takes another sip from his glass of not-quite-wedding wine to mask his laugh. “It’s called getting old,” he answers, hating the childish, playful inflection in his voice but he still doesn’t manage to bite it back. He can feel Arianna’s cold against his scalp, because she’s dead and she didn’t stay and it’s been four hundred years—

“It absolutely is not,” Arianna chides back, tsking. “The volume is a con by your unconditioned knots of impressive girth.”

“But!” she clicks her tongue, “It’s so dead and straight, straighter and deader than me—”

Phillip stiffens, trying not to notice the way his hands are shaking with some emotion that leaves a coppery taste in his mouth.

Arianna notices. “I’m sorry, that was a shitty thing to say. I just wanted to say that we could braid it intricately in a way mine never could.”

“You know… I wouldn’t hate to—”

“It wouldn’t be disadvantageous to—”

“We could spend more time together like this, if you want to—”

Arianna interrupts him, her hands still in his hair, “No.”

“I don’t want to. I hate you for what you did, Phillip.

“When did it get so complicated, Arianna?”

“When you made it so.”

“It wasn’t my responsibility to save you from yourself.”

†

It was twenty-eight days since Caleb died, and she was sitting on the beach with her sister, watching the world turn.

“My husband thinks that I should leave you to fend for yourself because you’re a bad influence, and apparently corrupting me,” Ellie confessed as the twilight faded. Arianna stared past the small fire, at the glinting edges of the waves, as she remembered the small village and door that opened into a whole other world.

“He’d be a fool to think I could involve you in anything you didn’t wish to do. Do you think so?”

“No. But he’s not the only one.”

Arianna scoffed at the memory of their mother’s dinner proclamation that she’d gotten what she deserved, and her pinched expression when she realised who’d just overheard. “Obviously,” she answered, “But that doesn’t mean that they’re right. What do you think?”

Ellie didn’t pursue her insult to her mother—she’d always been more interested in preserving the relationship. Up until twenty-eight days ago, Arianna had all the family she needed. Arianna let the conversation hang over the rhythmic clashing of the waves reaching the shores, forever and evermore.

“Mother wants me to leave,” Arianna finally confessed, her gaze pointedly not on Ellie’s.

“Leave Bonesborough?”

Arianna looked up at the glittering stars. “Leave the Boiling Isles.”

Go somewhere she couldn’t get them into trouble, she didn’t add. She didn’t find a reason to. Their mother was a hypocrite and Ellie knew it. As if it was safer for her family, with all the gossip her mother collected from the vacationing patrons at the inn, how all her kids were good pickpockets because of it.

Her mother had done what she needed to survive, and she hadn’t been dealt the best hand in life—but she wasn’t a fucking saint, and every time she tried to act like one, Arianna thought of burning her stupid doilies.

Arianna could help because Arianna was going to stop Phillip. Her mother might not have taken her seriously, might have called her hysterical, might have said a lot of things that hurt more than that and that Arianna didn’t want to think about because she was so, so tired of crying—

But Arianna could and would help.

Because otherwise, she’d fall apart. And she’d have lost everything for no damn good reason.

“Will you?” she could feel Ellie’s eyes on her.

“No.” Never.

†

He’s donating his old diaries—heavily redacted, of course; he’s ripped out every mention of Caleb and Arianna and the act they committed together—because something has to entice that human and her aunt to come to the past and give him the light glyph.

After all, he needs it. After all, it’s essential. And he wouldn’t have found it on his own. So, he donates to make sure that he does. He’s got two concealment stones around his neck, and he can’t help but raise his brow when he hears a bipedal demon with an enormous nose and untamed red hair behind him mention the words Arianna Clawthorne and journals and historical exhibition and sad beautiful tragic.

He slinks across the library, through the door and twenty minutes and a little charm later, drops into a chair with a stack of notebooks that stink of smoke.

He spreads them out and opens a black one with a small red cardinal drawn with exceptional detail and skill on the cover. Underneath it, were the initials ACW. Funny, he hadn’t known Arianna to pick up art.

Phillip, she writes, and he doesn’t stop reading.

I know I’m probably better off on my own, but I don’t want to be alone. I wish it wasn’t four in the morning and I wish I wasn’t standing in front of the mirror, reminding myself that I had to do it. That the bravest thing I ever did was reject my memory of you.

Because sometimes, in the middle of the night, it feels like I’m back there again, sleeping under the stars and feeling like I could have the world in the palm of my hand and maybe that wasn’t bad and I fucking miss you.

I miss everything! I miss Caleb! I fucking miss Caleb and you took him from and yet I still miss you. Yet, I can’t aim straight when I have you on the ground and it would only take one strike. I just wish you’d been a better man.

He always said that he liked me because I knew what I wanted out of this life. But I don’t. I don’t. All I have is my rage and it’s not holding me together like it used to. I’m not twenty-eight anymore.

I DON’T WANT TO MISS YOU LIKE THIS.
I DON’T WANT TO MISS YOU LIKE THIS.
I DON’T WANT TO MISS YOU LIKE THIS.

I want to be flaming anger, I want to go back to being twenty-eight and dripping with righteous anger because I hate you, I hate you so fucking much but you’re the only person left who remembers me when I was better.

Fuck you.

At least I know I gave you my best and we both know you can’t say you did the same.

He doesn’t read any more.

And he reminds himself, once he takes control of this wretched place, to create an archive of forbidden books where only he can thread.

†

Life.

“Here’s good,” she tells him, and she lets go of his hand to back up a few steps, so she has room to unfurl to her full her height without clipping him. “Alright, Wittebane: you ready to have your fucking mind blown?”

He chuckles, some of the dazed anticipation leaving his face as her taunting brings him back to the moment. And her. “You can try, Clawthorne.”

“Well,” she smirks, “Then I’ve already won a thousand times over, haven’t I?”

Arianna straightens up and closes her eyes. There’s no need to summon it, or bargain: it practically pounces at her from the darkness, and, in her mind’s eye, its form sinks into her with a gentle caress, and everything goes bright.

Her eyes flash open as fire dances along every nerve and she knows by Caleb’s shocked expression that her sclera’s gone black and the change is taking place in the blink of an eye.

It’s still painful: she thinks that transforming’s always going to be painful, but she’s gotten used to it. Her mind and her body, because there’s a distinct lack of hangover effect that slinks up to grab her when she transforms back. Her back and legs take the worst of it, her spine’s stretching out into nothing, the abomination consuming her and allowing her to explode her form out from it as her limbs elongate and twist into their new shapes.

It's over more quickly than ever, and as soon as she’s done transforming, the pain disappears.

Practice really does make perfect; she thinks with a grin. Maybe her prissy sister was onto something. Although, she’s sure that sis wouldn’t approve of her using that philosophy to turn herself into ‘somehow more dangerous goop’.

Arianna looks down at Caleb and barely conceals a smug laugh: his eyes are nearly as wide and round as baubles, and his jaw looks like it’s about to dislocate with how far it’s dropped. “Pretty hot, huh?”

“Oh.”

One of Caleb’s knees start to buckle, and he nearly stumbles sideways, catching himself with only minor embarrassment. Arianna giggles. “Arianna,” he says, his voice breathless and full of awe as he looks up at her, “You’re stunning.”

†

A short list of Arianna’s frustration with Phillip’s absolute lack of experience with raising decent children:

Arianna’s sitting perched on a precarious edge of the Knee in Phillip’s memories, because she’s dead and can’t get any deader, she argued.

“You’re bitching less about the new one,” Arianna notes, “Did you already throw him away and did I just miss the ceremony this time?”

Dark humour. Her sister had always hated it. Henry had secretly loved it.

“He doesn’t speak yet,” Phillip answers simply.

“How old is?”

“He’s five, but sometimes human children don’t talk until they’re seven and that’s fine.”

“The fuck no it ain’t—”

But Arianna’s cut off when Phillip offers to show her pictures of disturbingly complicated pieces of woodwork for being done by a five-year-old, and Arianna’s eyes are wet because she thinks of Caleb, and how he’d carve inane shit into the dining table without even thinking about it if she’d let him.

And she did.

She liked it.

It was theirs.

And he told her that it made him feel less anxious, carving when her sister and mother visited and Arianna had chuckled and asked him if he’d just used it as a good excuse to avoid her admittedly terrifying family but she’d written it behind her ears, anyways.

She’s watching a scout that’s suddenly exceptionally underpaid scrape an impressive amount of child vomit off the tiles of Belos’ throne room, and she decides to see if there’s any reflective surfaces where she can chide Phillip from.

He’d gotten rid of all the ones in the room he skulked off to turn into a muddy puddle, and Arianna was still pissed about that.

She doesn’t even have to say anything when she finds him. She just shifts her weight, crosses her arms and glares at him from the mirror.

“Sometimes children throw up in crowded places! This is sadly, normal.”

“I think Steve really wants to beg to differ. I think Steve regrets not taking up that offer to hunt down that one weirdly mean Stonesleeper now.”

Arianna gestures to Hunter’s drawers, all filled with the same outfit.

“Children should have fifteen identical copies of the same outfit, it’s soothing for them.”

“The fact that you managed to raise, what is it? Sixteen of these is a fucking miracle. I don’t understand it, and I sadly have all the trauma from witnessing it.”

Arianna ran a hand through her curls. “Remember when you spent three nights drunkenly arguing to me that children hate to meet new people and scream when you try to cut their hair, as if you didn’t live in a house with my demon sister who did both of those things with fucking glee?”

Arianna gestures to Hunter’s sleeping face and said, “That’s a fucked-up kid, man. And you’re just going to pour more fucked-up-juice into him until you tear him in two again and force me to mourn him, and then you do the definition of insanity by doing the same thing and expecting the same result.”

She shrugs. “Well, I hope you enjoy putting the poor boy through endless handwriting exercises and making him recite the Titan’s Prayer—and man, as soon as I heard about that, fuck I regret not punching you more when I could—until he has curly handwriting and smooth speech and a hatred for you, because that’s all you're getting.”

“You ain’t getting Caleb back, but enjoy playing house, I guess.”

†

Her abdomen still burned like a bitch when she moved too quickly, but she couldn’t wait any longer.

Arianna hunted down her own mother directly; she did not go through a broker because she made the informed decision that it was too important to entrust to any she knew of. And she was not interested in slinking around the shadows grovelling for recommendations and trying to fall headfirst back into her roots.

Arianna did not warn her mother of her impending visit either; Elizabat would be dead twenty times over without Arianna, so she owed her a debt. And her mother knew her well enough to know that Arianna would not willingly see her unless the world was on fire.

As soon as she stepped through the creaking doorframe, she could tell that Elizabat through the meeting aberrant and that she watched Arianna carefully for it. That was nothing she was not familiar with, and the stretched-out glances rolled right off her skin like water droplets from a beast’s back.

“I’ve been informed that there’s interest brewing to take control of the Boiling Isles. By Phillip,” she opened flatly as she pulled out a kitchen chair and fell into it. Her side was still smarting from losing her magic, and she had noticed that her stamina had worsened too. Previously, she would have been able to run up the hill holding her childhood home without breaking a sweat.

Now, she had to stop four times to catch her breath, and once to sit down on the grass, pretending that she was just enjoying the view and black spots were not dancing in the corner of her eyes.

There were two good things about her mother. The first was that Arianna was pretty sure, at least before she lost her magic (but she hadn’t dared to find the right words to say that yet) that they were evenly matched enough that both of them knew, if it came down to it, a fight between them would kill both. The second was that there was no need for a preamble.

The quicker Arianna left her the kitchen, the better. Arianna had her father’s nose, and rage, too. She knew her mother did not like looking at her, and she knew it was not entirely her fault.

It did not mean she was not hurt, every time her mother winced when their eyes met.

Anyways, Elizabat did not appreciate bullshit, and preferred to get to the bottom of a matter as quickly as possible, which Arianna greatly respected. The bad things about her mother was that she was no fool, and certainly not naïve.

“You have been informed by who?” she asked, steepling her fingers in front of her and levelling her flaming gaze at Arianna. Caleb had joked that her mother could smell fear.

“Did Caleb tell you this?”  

Fuck.

Well, there was no need to lie. Arianna smirked and took up the challenge. There was no inflection in Elizabat’s tone, but she did not need it to understand that it better be a damn good source to avoid a tongue-lashing or even a formal reprimand as if her mother still had power over her, for wasting her precious time, as if her mother did anything other than bake for her sister’s children and husband, who she liked much more than anything Arianna could produce.

“Caleb is dead,” Arianna answered coolly, “Phillip killed Caleb and he tried to kill me, too.”

“So,” she clicked her tongue, “I didn’t hear it from Caleb. Because I buried Caleb.”

Arianna did not know where her husband’s bones were. She presumed that they perished in the blaze, and she presumed that she would have too, had her sister not pulled her out, had her sister not disregarded her screaming pleas to leave her there.

To let her die.

Arianna was no fool.

She had crawled back from death; she had lost her magic and her hand had been forced into making a promise to a madman. She had not staggered away from the jaws of death just to wither into an old crone, telling stories about a time where everything was golden as Phillip burned the world to ashes and embers.

She had to find a way to force his hand. And that started with her mother.

“I can’t say,” she replied, her voice even. Two could play this game and there was no way that she would admit that Phillip himself visited her in a house he should have been unable to access and assumed that she would have carried a child to term, because that was a can of worm-demons she did not intend to put in Elizabat’s hands.

Only the Titan knew what she would do with them, but Arianna knew her well enough to be sure it was nothing good.

This is the last time, I swear.

The first grimwalker doesn’t survive its own creation.

He goes elbows-deep in his big brother’s chest cavity, and he doesn’t get anything out of it. It reaches out to him from the pool, a malformed hand begging for touch, and Phillip jerks back, slamming against the wall and knocking himself to the ground.

†

The wine glass hangs from her hand, and she’s giggling at her own joke, her cheeks flushed red. “Let’s play a game,” she says, her voice slurred. She spins the glass around, frowning when it dares to still be empty.

Phillip grabs the bottle, and she raises her glass to him, and he tops her up and she’s twenty-seven and she’s still alive and bitching at him and not understanding the gravity of her situation and that he can’t drink wine with demons.

Arianna swirls the wine in her glass, watching it as if it’ll spill her a secret. “Let’s say ten things we hate about each other. One by one.”

Phillip chuckles to himself and pours another glass.

“I need to be drunker for this,” he says simply when she raises her brow.

“I wasn’t going to say anything about it,” she answers, “I don’t even know if you can get drunk inside of your own mind.”

“I fucking hope so.”

He takes a sip, and his nose still scrunches at the taste.

“I’ll start. Ten, you’re selfish.”  

She sticks out her tongue and exaggeratedly imitates stabbing her own abdomen. Very dramatically. She croaks out a death rattle and Phillip knows what he’s going to say, after he’s done trying to swallow the wine and not choking on it because he had to bite back a laugh.

“You’re so childish, Arianna. You never take anything seriously.”

(That’s a lie. One of the reasons he feared her in life was because of her conviction, harder than steel. But death and memory had defanged her, and they were sitting on the Knee as he wanted to remember it, staring out at the unpolluted sky and he revered her, but he didn’t fear her.)

(What he means to say: no matter what I do, you never take me seriously. You speak to me like it’s still back then, and then you snap me in half. You and I will always be back then.)

Arianna rolls her eyes as if she knows. “Nine, you’re jaded. So fucking jaded. Caleb used to say that I sucked for it. I think that’s rude. I was never as bad as you, even at thirteen before I’d learned to do my eyeliner right. And I was never allowed your leeway, even at thirteen.”

“Nine, you make decisions based on emotion.”

“Eight, you don’t.”

He glares at her, and she sticks her tongue out in answer.

“Eight, you still don’t know how to make a proper flapjack.”

“Seven, you don’t know how to braid your hair.”

“Seven, you drown oceans with your determination. You’re a relentless bitch who’s impossible to catch.”

They’re yelling now.

“Six, you’re toxic and I don’t trust you!”  

“Six, you still have daddy issues!”

“Ha! I have mommy issues too! Five, you never listen to me, so you didn’t realise that!”

“Five, you always make assumptions about me and think you’re so much better than me!”

They’re almost nose-to-nose, and Phillip hasn’t grinned this widely in years. Arianna mirrors him, and he hasn’t felt this light in years, either.

Arianna giggles. “Four, you didn’t come to my wedding even if you made me pick a wine I didn’t fucking like!”

He didn’t know that.

“You never told me that you didn’t like it! You lied! You’re a liar!” his face splits open in a genuine, consuming cackle, “Finally! Prissy perfect Ari, admitted to lying! Welcome down to my level! Four! That’s four!”

Arianna pricks his nose with a giggle. “You know I lie all the fucking time, remember when we snuck out to the Ribs to chase slitherbeasts without Caleb because he’d get too distracted by the snow?”

“God, yes.”

They rarely talk about Caleb. It’s a sore spot. Even though Arianna can’t kill him in here, her hands are very cold and very tight against his throat when she lunges at him, and her legs wrap around his waist, keeping him there. It reminds him too much of things they’d done, of things they’d left unsaid.

It reminds him that Arianna’s hands are cold because she’s dead.

“I lived through sixty years of your bullshit where I could have undone it.” Arianna wraps her arms around her knees and sighs deeply, before furiously wiping at her eyes. “And I didn’t. I failed. I didn’t manage to save them. And you’ve hurt my people. My homeland.”

Phillip didn’t know what to do. He moved to touch her shoulder in a gesture he remembered her doing once, when he’d cried about never seeing the human realm again, but stopped halfway, because he wasn’t sixteen anymore and he wasn’t Arianna and Arianna wasn’t him.

“Arianna,” he tries, “You’re the most powerful witch I’ve ever met. Your… your father wasn’t lying when he said that your power rivalled a Titan’s… back when we first met. This was inevitable, you shouldn’t feel bad for being unable to stop it, because if anyone could, it would have been you. And you couldn’t because it’s not something one can stop. I just regret that I have been unable to make you understand the importance before you left m—died.”

Arianna sniffs and stares at him with red-rimmed eyes. “You’re an asshole,” she says, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“That makes me feel worse.”

†

Arianna, like a child, refused to show herself to him for long enough, after his words, that he thought she might have finally decided to liberate his mind from her.

But one morning, he woke up to footsteps in a dark, empty bedroom.

His staff illuminated the room in a blood-red glow, and there wasn’t a threat alive or dead or skulking in his floor-length mirror, gilded and decorated with birds and sigil of the Emperor’s Coven.

He pushed himself out of bed, and resigned himself to, despite the shaking in his limbs, to go about his day. He had to speak to Hunter about his failure, and that wouldn’t wait, lest Hunter fall into the wrong hands and follow his predecessors to the grave.

†

Phillip looked away first.

It was all Arianna’s fault.

But how could he blame her, the settling sun gentle around her as she stepped through the window, her braid flipped over her shoulder as she lowered her hood with a dangerous grin, her eyes glowing with mirth as she took in the scene?

Phillip couldn’t bring himself to scowl as the young raven flew from his desk to perch at her shoulder, and nosed—beaked, really—at the embroidery at the edge of it.

“Are you having staring contests with my birds again?”

Phillip pushed the staff into the corner of his desk. He could work on it later. “One,” he argued, “They’re not your birds. You don’t live here anymore and you hide from Caleb whenever he comes over.”

“I do not!” she squawked indignantly.

“You absolutely do.”

“And what if I was having a staring contest? What would you do?”

Arianna sat on the edge of his desk, in the spot he’d just cleared, pulling her knees against her chest, and resting her head on the sharps of them. “I’d laugh at you.”

“Then yes.”

She laughed; Phillip leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, letting the sound wash over him as she soundlessly grabbed the staff: the only reason he knew she did was the sharp dash of air as she spun it, as she played with it.

When he opened his eyes again, the raven was still atop her shoulder as she rested one of her feet on a handle of one of Phillip’s many open drawers. He looked at her dirt-scuffed boot instead of the raven that had jumped onto one of her hands and was examining the staff with a curiosity that mirrored Arianna’s.

“And this is supposed to make magic?” she asked. “Even for a human?”

“Yes,” he chided, “But it doesn’t work yet.”

Arianna smirked. “Then, should we call Caleb and try and make it work?”

“I didn’t think that you two got along right now.”

The raven chittered and Arianna’s kind eyes regarded it.

“I thought it was stupid to ruin a good thing because of a petty disagreement,” Arianna answered, “So, I decided to stay, if you’ll still have me, that is.”

The light caught the raven’s fluttering wings as it studied her, as it pecked at her slim fingers.

Yes, he shouldn’t be here. Arianna was a thousand vices wrapped into a smile, witch hunters didn’t make friends with witches, but witch hunters didn’t get stuck in a world of witches and no power of their own. So, he allowed himself to smile and agree with her and keep this fragile moment of peace, of Caleb and Arianna’s laughter when he inevitably set something on fire and Arianna being the only reason they didn’t burn down another cottage.

Caleb’s solid hand on his shoulder, however, reminded him that he would always have a higher purpose. One this world would never understand.

†

Arianna stumbles out of a memory of beasts and caves and barely managing to escape and it’s one of the few that Phillip hasn’t burned to the ground yet, so she took her time, breathing in the sea air after they’d resurfaced and collapsed against the sand air, listening to the “demented Boiling Isles seagulls, seriously, how are they worse than human seagulls, Philly, how is that possible?” birds squawk above them.

And maybe Arianna was just a sucker for birds, or maybe she was still burning off the high of having survived another thing she shouldn’t, but she said, “You’re my best friends.”

And now, she was four hundred years old and curled up on the sand crying to the sound of her past self saying that and seething with rage at Phillip for keeping that.

For keeping the words that he didn’t fucking deserve. So, she staggered out and she quickly realised that she’d spent too long in there, because the mindscape was on fucking fire.

She didn’t know why, but she joined Child Phillip, named either Philly or Babybel in her head, depending on her mood, and tried to stomp out the flames with her boot and for some reason, her foot didn’t just go through them like the memories.

“Ew,” she said, picking goop off her sole. “This is fucking disgusting. You’re fucking disgusting, Phillip. Do you fucking hear me?”

She flicked it at a portrait of a dead Golden Guard. “This is fucking disgusting. Stop with this shit.”

Sometimes, Babybel was just Phillip fucking with her. Or the palisman beast that she cried for, and that she cried to cradle, and that she ran from when it decided to attempt eating her—which was always. She didn’t know what would happen if it succeeded, but she wasn’t eager to find out.

Somehow, she was sure that they, for her part in this shit, had a much worse fate planned for than the one she currently occupied.

So, she ran. And sometimes, Babybel was Phillip being an asshole. And other times, the silent blue spectre seemed real in the same way that she did. A real person, trapped in the freefall of Phillip’s mind, and she sauntered into memories with sunsets and places to watch them, and they watched the sunset together, because Arianna had always liked sunsets, and this kid spoke much less than the Phillip she knew as an adult, but not much less than the child she remembered in bursts.

She remembered him in flashbacks and echoes, and it seemed that Phillip did, too. She didn’t always have company, but she tried when she did.

Arianna remembered sitting cross-legged on one of the Fingers with a weird rock formation on it and only a single, suspiciously handheld-sized missing piece, and trying to teach Phillip the snippets of sign language she knew. Which was less than ideal because she’d occasionally cast a spell.

She made the abomination hand her the satchel she’d brought, and she pulled out a canteen of apple blood and apple juice—she could thankfully tell the difference by the smell—and then she flicked her wrist and they went back to what they were doing, Arianna giggling at the interruption and Phillip looking at her like she an idiot.

She’d tried back then, and she’d try now.

It hadn’t saved her then and it wouldn’t save her now, but it made her feel like she was doing something.

Babybel poked her thigh, pushing her back into her body.

He holds out a small piece of blank paper, seemingly very insistent that she touches it.

She crouches down to his level. “What’s this?” she asks as she takes it, flipping it over in her hand to find a glyph. “Oh,” she says.

“How did that get in here? Did you draw it?”

Babybel slowly shakes his head, gesturing to the corridor of broken Golden Guards.

“Fuck no,” she answers, “Not fucking going in there.”

She knows Phillip’s type. Even if they’re in the grimy basement of his mind instead of his grand hall of lies above them, Arianna knows that they don’t just lie to trick others: they lie to trick themselves. She’s not sure that she’d get the truth of what happened, even if she dared to search for it. Even if she had the strength remaining to search for it.

In a moment of nostalgia, her finger ghosts against the outline of the glyph, and she watches in horror and amazement as it bursts into light.

“Oh,” she says, feeling the fire reignite inside of her, “This changes the game.”

She grins at Philly.

“Say, would you know where I’d hunt down the motherfucking Collector at this hour?”

“We have terms to renegotiate.”

†

Sin is a tricky beast. Tricky to understand, trickier to eradicate.

The sixteenth grimwalker had tried to kill him.

Phillip had to admit that he—it caught him by surprise. He never managed to discover how it found out enough information of the Day of Unity to decide that they didn’t just need to talk, but that Emperor needed to die, but it happened.

It tried to kill him, and that was that.

One moment, it was speaking to him in the same reverent tone that he demanded from everyone, even long before taking his rightful role. Its head was bowed, and it would have been so easy for Phillip to snap its neck, and when his chest jerked, it rose, offering its arm, as he—it, had so many times before.

They were in his throne room, surrounded by his most trusted witches—even if the thought of trusting anyone with that coursing through their veins brought bile to his tongue.

And then, instead of walking off to offer him a palisman, as it should—he, no it, had the guts and audacity to stab him.

He felt the blood leaking through his robes before he saw it, before he really felt the pain, and it twisted the knife and pulled out, just like he’d done. He hadn’t bled since he carved his ears into points, and Arianna had sighed at him through the cracked glass and if she’d ever managed to reach out through it—it would have been then.

If she’d ever come close to escaping her prison, it would have been then. She reached out, and she cooed that his brother wouldn’t have wanted this, and he hissed at her that she didn’t have any fucking idea what Caleb would have wanted because she hadn’t fucking known Caleb, she’d just taken him and she’d vanished when he said that, like a child who didn’t know how to face the consequences of her actions.

Or, so he thought. She’d moved to sit cross-legged in the reflection of the waterfall.

The blood ran down his hand, and she frowned and now, the blood was running through his fingers and he thought that he was frowning through his mask, entranced by the pattens swirling through and out of him.

He found himself surprised that he had red blood.

Nothing particularly hurt and he wondered if this is how it felt for Caleb.

The feeling of the knife in his ribs had been sharp, but when it had been pulled out, there was just air rushing through, a distant numb sensation.

It cried out as it was thrown to the ground, the cracking of bone following.

“That’s a sick man!” he screamed.

“He needs to go down!” he screamed.

“He plans to—”

Screaming, screaming, guttural, desperate screaming. Silence.

Crunch.

The sound of a body being dragged away and the worried frowns of Terra Snapdragon, of all people.

He wondered if that’s how it felt when Caleb—

Belos shooed Terra away as he rose, letting the blood leave a trail behind him as he staggered towards the exit, everyone else dead silent.

“How could you?!” Caleb gasped, blood dripping from his lips.

“Arianna!” he cried out, “Arianna, run!”

“It hurts,” whimpered Caleb, his head in Phillip’s lap, lolling to the side, weakly raising his hand, coated with blood that glistened in the blaze’s orange light, “Oh, God, it hurts.”

Caleb’s hand trembled and began to fall, and Phillip intertwined his fingers with Caleb’s and held it up to the light again, watching the starlight gleam through it.

Phillip’s hands were shaking again, he dropped the knife again, his brother slumped to the ground again, and Phillip’s face was always reflected in the knife and the skies opened and cackled.

Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son for God. And God had intervened. Because it was merely a test of Abraham’s faith. He remembered the lessons in the schoolhouse. And because Isaac was as sinless as one could be. Not completely, no one was, but Isaac could work on it. So, Isaac didn’t have to die.

Killing Caleb was a test of Phillip’s faith, but God didn’t intervene because Caleb had sins. Caleb had kissed Satan’s cherry-tinged lips and he’d danced cheek-to-cheek down to Hell and Phillip had to prove that he wouldn’t follow.

So, Caleb died. And Phillip watched, his head in Phillip’s lap, one hand on his chest, the other arm splayed out, as his brother died.

“Phillip? How could you? This—this isn’t right—” Caleb asked in a hollow voice and Belos collapsed in his throne room, holding Caleb’s lifeless frame.

Belos opted to have the grimwalker—who had amazed everyone by surviving his severe head injury—petrified before he was well enough to cry out at the pain of the process.

He stood on a balcony and preached to the Boiling Isles about the temptations of wild magic, and how if the Golden Guard could fall prey, so could everyone.

No one was infallible.

Even the most dedicated, even the best men, could be lured in by dangerous wild witches and corrupted from the inside out with their sinful song, he told them, and they believed it. They cheered and hollered for the triumph against sin and the grimwalker died.

And it would be the last public petrification for thirty years.

Phillip wondered if it was fate, by now.

He wondered if his brother was always destined to damn himself, to betray Phillip for the sake of demons and monsters and girls with red hair who did their best at convincing you they weren’t dripping with sin, that they too were not monsters and that if you let your hair down, you wouldn’t die, but who lied. He wondered if his brother was rejecting him, even from beyond the grave.

He wondered if Caleb now hated him so much that he would prefer to live through Hell, over and over, a thousand rebirths, than to stay with him.

“May the Titan save his soul,” Belos told the Isles from his balcony, almost slipping up and using the wrong words, and convinced himself that he still believed it. That he still believed Caleb had something to salvage, that he hadn’t chosen to forsake his brother, forsake his Creator.

He blinks, and Arianna’s leaning against the railing. He blinks again, and she’s gone. Blinks, she’s there, the wind ruffling her hair.

“I think I know why I’m stuck with you and not Caleb,” she says, gazing out at the burning inferno in front of them, red sky, red people, blood rushing from every wound, blood spilling down the steps, “I think that’s because he was always too good for us.”

She clicked her tongue.

“You and I, on the other hand? We’re fucking monsters. Shitty people. Assholes. All the words. And I think,” she snapped her fingers and pointed behind her, towards the Titan’s head, “That whatever the fuck you’re masking that as knows. I think your God’s not just punishing me, but you.”

“You don’t deserve Caleb.”

Underneath them, the crowd had begun to dissipate, the world churning onwards, the cogs and gears driving the machine continuing to draw breath, the heart in the throne room continuing to beat.

“And neither do I. But at least I’ve realised that.”

†

He’s trying to braid his own hair in the bathroom mirror, and it would be easier if his hands weren’t shaking. If he was younger. Stay, stay, stay.

Arianna taps against the glass, shifting awkwardly.

“Hey,” she says.

“Sorry,” she says.

“C’mon, go into the bedroom where I can see you better and have your back to the mirror and I’ll teach you to do it yourself.”

He doesn’t know what to say, but his feet move.

“You know,” she grins as she drops into a crouch, her hands resting trapped against the glass. “Caleb’s the one who taught me how to braid. It was after one night where we had an argument and I’d thrown something at his head and I stormed off to bed and I’m pretty sure we almost broke up that night. I’d expected some dramatic leaving, but he stayed. And he slept on the couch.”

She grins to herself. “I said that we should talk about it, because not talking about things was what made my mother and father the wonderful developmentally fucked-up rectangles that spawned me, and he agreed, and I heard him rustle around for something. And then,”

She buckles over in laughter. “He comes out wearing my old grudgby helmet and says, with his hands on his hips,” Arianna attempts to imitate Caleb’s posture from her crouch, one leg splayed out, “Let’s talk!”

He raises his brow, wondering where she’s going. She doesn’t talk a lot about his brother, and he would appreciate it stays that way.

“And then he also,” Arianna answers him with a glare, “Teaches me how to braid, when he’s sure that I’m not going to punt the vase at him.”

She gestures to a chair. “Grab that,” she orders. And he does.

“I don’t need this from you,” he snarls. Arianna quirks a brow.

“Sure, you do,” she says simply, clicking her tongue, “That’s part of getting older, Phillip. About time it caught up on you.”

“Pull it over in front of the mirror,” she instructs, and he does, and he tells himself that it’s like with the Collector—sometimes, you have to do things to appease the ancient evil in your mind. And Arianna’s getting old enough to be considered ancient. Or at least forgotten.

“Why are you doing this?” he tries.

Arianna shrugs. “I know why we had to say goodbye like the back of my hand,” she answers, dropping from her crouch to sit cross-legged, and cracking her fingers, one-by-one, in the way she knew freaked Phillip out, “But I still miss you and I just wish that you could have been a better man, Phillip. I wish that you could have been my friend. I wish that you could have attended my wedding, maybe even found someone for yourself. Or… something than wasn’t this. Anything.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel, but he tastes copper on his tongue and smells smoke in the air.

Arianna sighs. “You’re my friend, and you’re not as annoying or finnicky as the Collector.”

“Sit your ass down.”

And he does.

“Separate your hair into three,” she says.

And he does.

And he braids, listening to her commentary from the mirror, growing annoyed every time she corrects him.

“That’s wrong, too. You’re making this prison even more miserable, c’mon, it’s under not over—”

He doesn’t know why she insists on bringing up her state. He didn’t put her there. He doesn’t understand why she thinks he did. She’s the wildest magic he’s ever seen, and she doesn’t give him power like the palismen do. She haunts him. He doesn’t want her there.

He wants her out.

Doesn’t he?

Yes.

“Remember when we fought, and you hesitated?”

“Yes.”

She continues, her tone sharp enough to cut through the fragile peace that always hangs around them:

“I wouldn’t hesitate again.”

The air changes after her words.

He tugs at his hair and Arianna hums when he does it right, tsks when he doesn’t and he knows that he has to pay for his vices, but he wishes her words would turn sweet again. She’s already a sin by virtue of her existence, and he keeps telling himself that he’s working on eradicating her.

But every time she’s encased, he sees Caleb’s last breaths and he drops her.

“Let him live,” Arianna orders and he knows who she’s talking about. Hunter. “Let him live or I will kill you with my bare hands.”

“You’re dead and stuck in my mind because you couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

“You never allowed me to be a mother,” Arianna rasps, tears glistening in her eyes, through the glass, “The fear of what you would do to him, or his world never allowed me to be a mother. I will not let you do it again.”

“You are dead,” he snarls, “You have been dead for three hundred years. You’re no mother and the whelp’s survival is not going to change that. Your descendants do not even remember your name.”

Arianna smiles. “And yet,” she ruffles his hair, frowning at the tangles, “You’re here, and I’m here, and I’ll be here for as long as you live. Haunting you. Remembering you.”

“You’re stuck with me.”

†

It’s four days since he spoke to Arianna about loving memory.

It’s a day since he learned that she was willing to lose the last piece of Caleb’s memory to keep him from his home. To be honest, he hadn’t been completely sure of what he was going to do after Caleb’s death and his acquisition of the portal.

He assumed that he’d return to the human realm, and maybe he’d bring back a band of Gravesfield’s best witch hunters, maybe he’d teach the bastards to stay out the human realm and that would be that. There’d be no need for bloodshed because humans would never meet demons again, and God could take care of them when Judgement came.

But Arianna had taken both his brother and his home from him.

Fighting demons was an act and pursuit of God, and Phillip was not—but Phillip would be a humble messenger to and servant of Him, and Phillip would carry out His bidding for Him, until he was called back to His grace.

The witches would die.

And Phillip would need an accomplice.