Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The hot Fire air, stifling in the evening gloom, blows through the academy courtyard. It bears a foul odour from the buildings, rot and something alchemical. The moonlight overhead is wan, almost green-tinted. The end of the year is fast approaching and that means the way of How Things Should Be is stretched thin.

Not that the living dead girl and Adorjan’s daughter are much concerned with that. Watchful, alert, the Abyssal drops into a half-mocking curtsey. “Oh, but where are my manners?” she says, and she sounds almost as if she’s making fun of herself. “You can call me... hmm. Well, I ain’t... I haven’t a name anymore, but my title is the Damsel Draped in the Last Star’s Lonely Sigh. But no doubt you’ll find that too much of a mouthful... handful?”

She rolls her shoulders, bouncing slightly on her toes and something about that movement isn’t quite normal. The joints in her shoulders rotate further than they should.

“Let’s go with Damsel, I guess. Because no one wants to be called ‘Drape-y’ which you probably would, being a clown and all, and both ‘Last Star’ and ‘Lonely Sigh’ are just regular redneck names and I don’t want you mistaking me for one of them.”

Her teeth are very white in the moonlight, from under her hood. A lock of white hair falls forwards, out from under the black garment, and she huffs it out of the way in an irritated way.

“Now, you?”

Black-clad in her haori and knee-high boots, with bright bolts of red showing through at her thighs, down the side of her boots and in the embroidery slashed across her torso, Eko looks like a bleeding figure cut from the night. The only bits of white on her show in glimpses; her bird-skull mask with its swept-back crest of silver feathers, the arrow-sleeved top beneath her haori, the white silk cord it’s belted with.

Circling very slightly to put the Damsel between her and Lady One-Eye, she drops into a flourishing bow - her bestie Asarin having of course made sure she knew how to bow as a Shogunate lady should. The Damsel’s curtsy matches neither Shogunate etiquette nor any of the curtseys Eko knows that take advantage of big floofy skirts, but is still appropriately formal and fancy. Sadly Eko has no skirt to respond with, so a bow it is. She performs it perfectly, snapping her sleeves out to the sides before bringing her hands together and lowering her head just enough to show respect to an adversary without going so far as to imply submission.

If they’re trading title for title, she conveys, then she is the Princess of the Ruin, because she’s absolutely not going to give her true name to the Dead when it might be used against her like her blood already was. She’s also Margravine of the Glyphstone Wastes, and a few other fun titles besides. But ‘Princess’ sounds a bit too mocking and ‘Margravine’ is a mouthful, soooo... she taps the beak of her mask thoughtfully, then brightens. Has the Damsel ever heard the story of the eagle and the wren? It’s a fun one, so ‘Wren’ will do for a nickname today.

That draws a cackle from her. “So who’s the eagle you’re borrowing that height from, my lady Wren?” the Damsel enquires, showing those white teeth with pronounced canines.

Well, right now, Eko points out with a flippant flick of her hair, she seems to be sitting prettily on top of Lady One-Eye’s head, given how the big bad nephwrack was giving herself airs and all and then lost her magic oar and had to go asking her boss for help. But that’s more of a temporary perch while she’s in the area. More like a grouchy crow than a proper eagle.

“It’s true, I do like crows. And ravens! And raitons!” the Damsel says brightly, ignoring the way Lady One-Eye hisses at the jibe. “I always have! They’re so clever. And they know their friends.” She raises a hand, and in out of the darkness, in a clatter of feathers, comes a large black bird. It lands on her wrist, and turns its head to face Eko. There are several eyes on that side, pale and phosphorescent, and more than that Eko can hear that this isn’t a bird. There’s a spirit occupying the construct-body. “They’re nicer than people.”

Oh, those things are absolutely going to try to peck her eyes out, Eko immediately identifies. She gives a cautious thumbs up. Clever birds are definitely always fun to have around. Corvids aren’t really her thing, but she knows someone who’d love them if they weren’t quite so spooky and undead.

... well, okay, she acknowledges privately to herself. As much as Eko loves her little sister, she has to admit that Calesco is in fact a dark, dour, depressing disaster who gets tragically doki-doki for deeply inappropriate girls all the time, so there’s a very real possibility that she would, in fact, fall for this Damsel and then get all melodramatic about it, phobia of the Dead or no. But in order to protect her beloved imouto, Eko’s not going to mention that part. Really, it’s probably for the best that she’s the one here dealing with this, rather than any of her other siblings who’d totally muck it up.

“Undead, dead, y’know, everyone aaaaalways makes such a big deal about that. Everyone alive, that is. But they change their mind as soon as they die and realise how things are. After all, everyone’s going to die some time.” The Damsel cocks her head. “Even you, Wren the Demon. You’re going to die some day. And you’ll get to live on in death if your boss-self dies at the same time. Isn’t that sad? There’s so much beauty in death. A flash of colour in a grey landscape. Getting to exist on, when the world says you should’ve died. Escaping the bits of the world that are too bright and too noisy and too frantic.”

Excuse you, Eko huffs, tossing her hair and folding her arms haughtily. She has no plans on dying anytime ever. And calling her greater self her boss is rude, y’know. They basically only came into the world so that... Wren (her hands stutter slightly as she remembers just in time not to sign her real name) - so that Wren could exist and brighten up everyone’s days with her fun and laughter and whimsy.

Although, although, she adds, hastily holding up a finger. While they’re on the subject of bosses and selves, the Damsel said something about her lady wanting a trophy, and Wren has a few points of clarification she’d like to ask for so long as they’re having a nice polite conversation an’ all. Like: how’s ‘trophy’ being defined here? Is Super Formal Scary Ghost Boss Lady talking more along the lines of go-fetch-this-nephwrack-a-cool-spooky-nautical-themed-artefact-replacement, or is she talking more along the lines of bring-me-that-hilarious-and-super-fashionable-demon’s-eyeballs? And on a related note, are they gonna have a cool dramatic fight to first blood about it and if Wren should happen to get the first blow in the Damsel will show deathly honour and stuff by acknowledging her win and letting her go, or is this going to be more of a situation where she’s not going to stop attacking until Wren either runs away or kills her?

These things are very important to know, Eko confides, tapping the hooked bone beak of her bird mask and nodding firmly. Fighting for her life - or eyeballs, as the case may be - against an enemy who won’t stop for anything short of dismemberment is very different from an honourable duel to first blood where her foe will accept it if she wins. Lady One-Eye, for instance? Totes the first kind, which is why Wren had to cut her up a bunch when they fought before. And if she’s not sure she can trust that this is the second kind of duel, she’s gonna have to treat it as the first.

Lady One-Eye starts slightly towards her, but then flinches. And Eko doesn’t see any gesture from the Damsel, which means either they have a way of communicating that Eko can’t pick up on (which is the right of any girl), or the Damsel made it clear that if this powerful nephwrack interfered something bad’d happen to her.

“If I were to kill you now,” the Damsel says easily, with almost a note of friendship in her voice, “you wouldn’t be defeated, would you? Even if I ended you forever, you’d just be gone. Dead. Forgotten. You wouldn’t despair. You wouldn’t abandon your hopes and ideals. Just killing someone doesn’t end who they are.” A little noise escapes her, a giggle wrapped in a sob. “Just look at me. Dead and still walking.

“No no no, my lady’d be piqued if I just killed you now. She likes it when we develop rivalries. When we find someone who lets us hone our edges against, in fight. When we build ourselves up and up, until the whetstone breaks. Lady Wren of Hell, don’t worry. I won’t kill you until you want to die. When it becomes a mercy.”

Eko... hesitates. It’s nice to know that she doesn’t need to worry about being killed to double-death, and she was kind of enjoying the tense-but-witty banter, but the way the Damsel’s voice wobbles and the things she’s letting slip in her phrasing...

She takes a tiny step closer, relaxing her wary combat stance a little and reaching out to the girl. And the Damsel is a girl, Eko is pretty sure. Not a woman grown. She’s not foolish enough to get close and try to actually make contact, but the shift from cheerful bravado to genuine concern comes across in the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head.

Hey, her outstretched hand tells the Damsel, in intimate meaning that - unlike the digs she’s been making so far - is for her and her alone. Is she... okay?

The Damsel stiffens up, hands going up in a reflective moment of shock. The moment jolts her head back, and Eko sees her face properly for the first time. Her hair is as white as snow, and her ears are vulpine, suggesting that maybe it wasn’t just the motion of her head that knocked off her hood, it was her ears pricking up warily. Her skin is dark, but a slightly wan and unhealthy-looking shade, and her eyes are a fierce orange, shaded with mourning kohl.

The colour of her eyes might be fierce, but just for a moment, the set of them isn’t. Eko’s gesture, simple as it was, slipped past her walls. Then;

“I’m gonna beat you. With my fists. I’m gonna beat you and I don’t know when I’m gonna stop.”

Yep, she’s definitely rattled because that came out in rough street-Firetongue. But also maybe that might sorta maybe ended the talky bit here. Because Eko touched a sore spot and it looks like the Damsel really doesn’t want her doing that again.

Fortunately, Eko is an old hand at this big sistering thing. She’s been around the block a few times, and also the world. She’s been there for a good half dozen little siblings getting their feet under them and learning how to make their opinions and objections loudly known, and pretty much all of them have tried to beat the stuffing out of her at least once as part of that process.

All this to say, she knows how to recognise the signs of a little sister getting angry in the not-so-adorably-tsun-tsun and much more actually-trying-to-set-you-on-fire way, and responds accordingly: with long-practiced reflexes honed to a razor’s edge under Ney’s annoying tutelage and her own flawless grasp of threat assessment.

And all of that to say: duelling this girl seems a bad idea. Which is why Eko’s whipped out a surprise bolas and winged it at the Damsel’s legs to tie her up (hah hah) while Eko makes a run for the academy doors before the young deathknight has even finished her sentence.

She’s fast. Really fast. Fast enough to start moving even before Eko’s released the well-made bolas she requisitioned from the Blades weapon cache. And more than that, she’s not quite solid; her black garment comes apart into a murder of cawing raitons as she throws herself backwards. But she’s not quite as fast as the Joyful Wind and more importantly she dodges to her right just like Eko guessed she would. Which means the heavy weighted cord wraps around both her legs and wraps them up, and she faceplants with a squawk.

Oh, that isn’t ladylike language. That’s a mix of Firetongue swearing and Low Realm, which Eko doesn’t really speak but she is pretty sure from context is more swearing.

It’s a very well-made bolas, but Eko isn’t particularly hopeful about it doing more than slowing the Damsel down for a few seconds, so she doesn’t even take a moment to congratulate herself for being right about the spooky corvids, instead focusing all her effort on sprinting for the building.

Because the thing is, Eko’s not here to fight the Damsel. Or even Lady One-Eye, as satisfying as it would be to cut her up again. In fact, fighting either of them sounds (outside of the front of confidence she was putting on for Yuu) quite bad for her health, to say nothing of fighting them together.

No, Eko is here to fuck things up for the necromancers in advance of the naib’s attack. And the guard schedule Ney wrote down for her probably isn’t useful anymore given this was turned into a trap for her, and it’s possible that they’ve evacuated all the targets he gave her as well, but at the very least she can cut up all the books and set the libraries on fire and maybe break or steal all the spooky dark sceptres and evil medallions she can find.

She just has to do so, like, really quickly. Before the furious undead monsters behind her catch up.

Lady One-Eye doesn’t sound like she’s moving, though. The Damsel has probably claimed this fight. And Eko instinctively suspects that she’s not going to help the Damsel out, because given that flinch the Damsel’s put the fear of… uh, herself into Lady One-Eye, so she’s probs gonna not help her and make the Damsel own whatever happens, which is—

Time slows just a little bit more than it should as she passes through the open doors. Not the way it is when she’s still, because she’s moving fast. It slows the way it does when she’s in danger. And more; she hears the click of some wicked little mechanism activating, and fun-with-Vali-honed instincts immediately propel her into a two-metre front handspring to get clear of the ground.

She’s just in time. Eko barely clears it before the floor just inside the entrance erupts in jagged metal scrap spikes - ah, yes, she realises as she turns a somersault in mid-air. She broke a cobweb-thin strand stretched between two stakes as she ran between them; too fine for her to even hear it snap over the sound of the Damsel’s cursing. Then that triggered the clicky mechanism and sent up the spikes. Which are barbed. Clearly intended to stab through the feet.

Rude. Eko’s bolas wasn’t bladed at all! Now, admittedly she’d complained to Ney about that, and only settled down when he’d pointed out that if it was, people she got with it could cut themselves free with the sharp parts. But still!

She directs a very reproachful look back at the apparently-dangerously-clever young lady as she lands, which unfortunately coincides perfectly with said dangerously-clever young lady breaking out of the bolas with the help of her ghostly crows pecking it apart.

Hmm. Yes.

Time to run.

The desecrated remains of the long-abandoned Dragon King temple are as still as the grave, or possibly stiller given what Zamash is like. Eko isn’t rude enough to disturb it. She’s silent. She doesn’t leave footsteps. She’s hard to follow. And so she can pause for a moment to think quickly in boring time.

Right-right. What had Ney said? Oh yeah, her order of priority is... right! The necromancers in attendance, who she needs to kill before the big battle so they won’t be able to oppose the naib’s sorcerers. If she can’t kill them, then any anchors she can wreck that will remove their access to some of their spells - evil cursed staffs carved from bone, tarnished gold amulets representing their membership of the academy, ghostly allies who they call upon to work their foul magics, etcetera. Failing that, all of the blasphemous books in the library, which as a bonus may also impact or outright negate the value of the academy as a School if they need any of that junk.

So she dredges up what she can remember about guards and stuff, and what she needs to look for, and skips out flitting like something-that-isn’t-a-ghost-because-she’s-a-superior-form-of-life. There’s lots of wards and sneaky things designed to hide the presence of people and things to make rooms appear filled when they aren’t, but against the keenness of her senses the very falsity of the necromantic deception spells stands out. She can find the little cowering spirits of necromancers and their mortal blood-bag acolytes, hiding in a well-protected chamber that was probably once the template-name-thingie for the Dragon Kings. A site of power to anchor their stuff in.

Except something else catches her attention. A familiar melody played in a minor key. Her mama really likes those spells that let her hide things away in pocket realms, and Eko knows that the one she made Eko’s compass-sanctum with is - temporarily, obviously - outside of her reach. But she can hear a similar formation, and that isn’t with the main body of the necromancers.

Oh ho. Oh ho ho. Eko’s eyes sparkle as she cuts along a corridor towards the melody. That sounds rather like a hidden fallback chamber that’s meant to be even more secure than the one where the majority of the necromancers are; a place protected both through obscurity and by the chasm between realms that leaves no way to access a sanctum whose entrance doesn’t even physically exist until commanded.

Or, you know, protected by both of those things against people who can’t hear the minor chords of its shape and nature and who don’t own a pretty knife that lets them cut their way into anywhere they want to go. Tee hee.

And what might you want to hide in such a place if not the most critical and essential of your assets? Someone or something you’re willing to sacrifice every single lesser necromancer and mortal to preserve, so that an assassin who hits the main chamber might think they’d gotten everyone and look no further. Mama loves that kind of sleight of hand, giving people a satisfying victory so that they stop trying for more and her real plans continue forward mostly-unhindered.

Well, that sounds like the Damsel or whoever else is in charge of security here - apparently having banked on the possibility that Eko might slip past her in the courtyard, which given the circumstances was smart - has decided that whatever’s in this sanctum is more valuable than all the other necromancers combined. That if Eko manages to beat her and massacre all of them in the main chamber, it still won’t be a total loss as long as the hidden sanctum remains unmolested. That the group is expendable in extremis, but whoever or whatever is hiding in that pocket-realm is so vital to the shahbanu’s battle plans that they are not.

And that’s really just an invitation to go stab them, isn’t it?

She follows the melody of the world-inversion, making sure to twist back on herself and sometimes double back and head out through windows and sprint along the wall, just to make it more fun for the Damsel trying to follow her. It leads her to the high-vaulted, arched basements that now that she looks at it aren’t so much a basement as a reinforcement to hold the weight of the false mountain up. Interesting! But also not for now! Oh well! It’s dark down here and sound echoes, hinting at the time-worn inhuman remnants of the art made before man. More pertinent is the little shrine she finds here, resting in the nook of ancient Dragon King sculptings eroded by time. And at the centre of it is a conspicuously skull-shaped empty space, from which the melody is coming from within.

Eko nods in approval. Obviously to get in, you have to hunt down the right skull, which probably has some kind of meaning for the maker of this place. When you put it here, it opens up the gate. Excellent theming, good effort. Nice lair where the real hidden master of the university hides himself. She’s going to give this a... 7.8 out of 10.

But she kinda sorta doesn’t have time to find the skull that opens this, so she’s going to have to just set herself against the magics here and use the knife Adorjan gave her as a birthing gift for dealing with situations exactly like this. Which was very thoughtful of her father, or at the very least was an intuitive foresight in the mind of a titan which happened to work out. Much of a likeness, really.

Though... she takes a moment to examine the scene with a critical eye before making her move. Hmm. Hmm. What’s anchoring this little sanctum? If she destroys the shrine, will that shred it and collapse the pocket-realm into nothingness, or eject everything inside Elsewhere, or whatever else happens to the contents of a miniature world when you break the spell sustaining it?

... well, it doesn’t seem to be an artefact like mama uses, or if it is then it’s not obvious. So it’s probably rooted in the collective power of the school and its knowledge or the potent magic of the Dragon King temple or something, none of which is easily destroyable.

So, in she goes! Örömi is made for this kind of thing, and Eko has spent quite a lot of time this past year or so playing with mama’s compass-sanctum and loading it up with stolen loot, so she’s had time to get familiar. She knows just how to angle her knife along the weft of the ephemeral fibres the sanctum is woven from, and then it’s just a matter of keeping the tension and motion smooth enough that Örömi slides through without snagging and twisting her wrist at the end to open up the gash so she can dart inside.

And not a moment too soon, because she can hear the stalking footsteps of the Damsel. They’re interesting because her feet aren’t quite human. Her steps aren’t what you’d expect, and those boots must be expensive custom ones to fit that gait. But Eko slips in through the clean slice in the fabric of the world she makes, so clean that it seals immediately behind her.

Within the master’s sanctum, it is dark, and dry, and musty. The walls are smooth and polished, but there’s something about their lines that’s reminiscent of bone even if they’re made of stone. The atrium is small and compact and packed with books, and there are steps leading down, lit by ghostly blue lanterns that exist like sketches in the air.

Eko takes the steps two at a time, and comes down into the main room of this place outside the world. Which is a horror show. Jars of organs preserved in vicious fluids hang from chains draped from the ceiling, swaying gently to-and-fro. Some of them are human organs, but others are clearly the moliated remnants of ghosts. No, scratch that - the entire ghost has been reshaped down into the organ. A single eye in the nearest jar stares mutely at Eko. And more than that, the furnishings, the decor, all of it; it’s a dark metal, and maybe someone else might be fooled as to what it is, but Eko isn’t.

She can hear the soulsteel scream faintly.

Hunched over a dark metal desk is an emaciated yet famine-bloated figure. His arms are too long and too thin, such that if he was standing upright they would certainly reach the floor, but his paunch is swollen and desperate. His spectral flesh is close-wrapped over the bones, giving him the look of a corpse where someone has removed all the meat and all the muscle and all the fluids and left only bone wrapped tightly in skin. His skull-head bares sharp teeth, and the sockets of his eyes are filled with an awful burning pyreflame which matches the candles stuck in his headdress.

He is

THE MASTER OF THE CREMATORY FLAME

and he mutters to himself, pouring over his mechanisms and his books in a dry, scratchy voice.

“Carry the... no no no, that won’t do, the inflammation necrocyte won’t be viable yet, I try to tell her it won’t work but she doesn’t listen...”

Eko doesn’t believe he knows she’s here. And unlike Lady One-Eye, she can’t see any nasty sneaky murder-chains that might be looking to defend him. Still, he’s strong. She can hear that much. Stronger than her, in his awful deafening stillness.

She remembers her training. All of Keris’s children are assassins. Even the ones you wouldn’t think it of like Rathan or Vali; they might not use their skills, they might have even let them decay through lack of practice, but they all learned them. Grandma Dulmea made sure they were taught.

And even though it was boooooring sometimes, it was fun at others to learn the way of the assassin from her; the four arts of the garotte, knife and needle; how to blend into the background and pass beneath notice; what to look for when assessing a target; when to stay concealed and when to strike. She only needed to chase Eko down with her many bodies a few times for the really dull bits, like which poisons to slip into people’s tea (blasphemy: tiny cups of very sweet tea should be sacred and inviolate), who is and isn’t important in the circles of the Demon City (yawn; who cares), or where all bits of cutlery and crockery go during tea ceremonies and formal meals (Eko is pretty sure that one doesn’t actually have anything to do with assassinating people).

Now, Eko puts that training to use, assessing this puissant ghost as she skulks at the back of the room. He’s not so powerful that she won’t be able to kill him, she thinks. The challenge is going to be doing it before he pulls some kind of cunning trick or calls for help. And also before the Damsel gets fed up with laying traps outside the entrance (which Eko probably needs to start planning for; she’s probably really mad at this point after following Eko’s fun and whimsical trail all over the academy) and goes hunting for the skull that’ll let her open the door.

She takes her moment, darting in - not leading with Örömi, but with both feet. When she lands a double-footed drop-kick in the small of his back, she sends him sprawling over his heavy weighted desk and immediately follows up by smashing Örömi’s black pommel into the back of his skull, driving it into the table with a very satisfying wham. But that wasn’t what she was listening for. What she was listening for was the crackle of dry bones. He is a powerful enough ghost that he can hold himself together through sheer willpower, but now he’s forced to. His ephemeral corpus is the equivalent of winded, and she can see him loose and half-decohered, wisps of hissing blue candle flame escaping from where the lines between him and everything else are blurred.

From his desk, he twists and his bony face is a rictus mask of hatred, those empty eye sockets filled with hungry flame. “Guards!” he cries out in a wheeze, bony arms raised up in a defensive crouch. “Assassin! Save me!”

The lights go out. The lights go out because the lights pour out of their glass jars, rising up into the shape of spectral lions wrought from pyreflame. Their roars are the roar of a bone-fire; their presence eats the heat from the air and the wan light they shed casts long and dancing shadows across the walls.

Wow, Eko thinks, it’d be really inconvenient if sight was the sense she relied on most.

Still, even without the darkness hindering her movements, she’s about to have to deal with a whole bunch of very unfriendly kitty-cats. So before they can get to her, she switches her grip on her pretty knife back to normal and slashes a flurry of deep wounds across the old ghost’s back, twisting her wrist viciously to tear at his essence pathways and leave them bleeding out like arteries. Ectoplasm sprays in glowing blue across Eko’s mask and dress as she sinks the knife in time and time again, ripping his substance to shreds as she carves him up. The only thing that stops her finishing him off there and then the bull-rush of the first lion, its teeth gnashing and snapping as it tries to tear into her.

She laughs in delight and yanks the wheezing, bleeding ghost around, throwing him towards them as she herself springs back, forcing them to take care not to trample him as they rush at her. They are slow, and their teeth, while sharp, can’t fasten on her. But their bulk is enough to force her away from their master, just slightly. Wheezing and rasping, ectoplasm gushing from his many wounds, he runs his hands through the injuries until his skeletal hands are wet with his own essence. Weakly, he thrusts those hands aloft. “Dark mistress, queen of herons, hear my plea,” he begins. His voice resonates eerily, felt more in the bones than the ears; his words of power shake the fabric of the world the way Eko’s heard from mama sometimes, when she casts the powerful spells. Spells of the Sapphire circle.

Eko can’t be having with that, and dives back into the fray to shut him up. There’s no space to manoeuvre around the lions guarding him, so she just goes through them instead. There are too many of the pyreflame beasts for such a small space; they get in each other’s way, and Eko takes full advantage of their bulk and lack of speed to kick one in the eye, elbow another in the throat, stab clean through the third’s swiping paw, release a spray of needles down the fourth’s gaping jaws and whip a fifth square on its cold, sickly-blue nose before twisting to slash a line down its flank.

She can clean these jokers up in seconds once she can focus her full attention on them. She just needs to kill the Master first, before he can get that spell off. Her dancing blade drives them back, but the chanting of the necromancer-ghost, still bleeding ectoplasm, is rising in pitch, the voice leaking from the rents in his form.

“... spread your black feathers around me and bring me through the darkest paths...”

The tide of the fight turns. There are too many of the lions. They’re getting in each other’s way, but not as much as they’re getting in hers. Eko gives ground in the face of their fangs and claws, falling back towards the opposite wall as they push forward, a burning wall of ghostly fire between her and their master.

Or at least, that’s what she lets them think they’re doing. But her retreat isn’t involuntary; it’s tactical. She’s not being forced away. She’s getting space for a run-up.

Eko’s heels touch the back wall, and just as she did against Lady One-Eye, she braces her foot against it, pushes off, and lets herself become a cutting wind.

She blows over the room as a laughing blood-streaked gale, and her image is in many places at once.Here she drives Örömi into the back of one lion and severs its spine, there she slides gracefully under another’s front legs to gut it. But the Joyful Wind is densest around the Master, and by the time she has blown past there is almost nothing of him left. Just ectoplasm smeared in her wake and tattered ribbons of corpus, bleeding out their ephemeral nature into the wind.

For just a moment, he tries to reform, tries to pull himself back together, this necromancer who has supped deep in the rotten wells of the Underworld. But the Joyful Wind cuts away such stagnant attachments, and he cannot reform, cannot return to whatever tumour-vault in the cursed Labyrinth that he has marked with his dark rites. His last wordless cry is a curse, and he is gone.

And the lions are gone too, snuffed out by the death of their master.

And the room shakes and quakes, sudden violet-glowing cracks appearing in the soulsteel. Ooo-er, Eko thinks, he must’ve tied this place to some dark contract of his or maybe his learning or some junk like that. Something that really sorta came apart when he... uh, came apart.

Time to go. Yep yep, definitely time to go. Looting the place would have been fun but honestly everything here is icky and also she cut most of it apart as a gale. All the moliated organ-ghosts are free now, their jars smashed, their corpuses dissolving to hopefully pass into Lethe and move on. She doesn’t know what’ll happen to the soulsteel, if any of it is real rather than a sorcerous conjuration, but she doesn’t want it either way.

Eko sprints back up the stairs, taking them three at a time in her haste. The books- ah, the books. Her hair lashes out and snatches at a few of them as she passes. Two fail to come free, too tightly packed on the shelves to slide out; all she gets are scraps of the spines torn free. The third she fumbles; it’s lighter than she’s expecting and the yank from her hair sends it spinning across the room to rebound off the wall, just out of reach and therefore lost forever. The fourth - a fat, hefty thing going by the weight - she just about manages to keep her grip on, wrapping it up in a loop of hair and reeling it in to slap against her back.

But there’s no time to see what her prize is; she’s not willing to stop or even slow down. She hits the black door of the sanctum blade-first, ripping her Windcutter down through the scar she left on the entrance when she entered and forcing her way out through the rent before the fibres have even finished parting. If she tears open some of her scabs, so be it. She’ll heal from chafing. She’s not so sure she’ll heal from being caught in a pocket-realm collapse.

The violet light behind her grows stronger and stronger, and doesn’t stop even once she throws herself out, rolling and flipping to her feet. It licks at her, cold and burning. It doesn’t want to let her go. But it must, as with a scream the rift closes, drawn down by the death of its master. Swallowed, perhaps, by the depths of the Underworld.

Or perhaps not! After all, Eko flensed his attachments from him. It is a gift of hers and her sister, one that does not come from inherited power from Keris. But it is inherited power, nonetheless.

The fading, bruise-like glow still lingers like a scar on the overturned altar. And it illuminates the overturned Damsel, who threw herself out of the way of the rupture or possibly maybe sorta had Eko run into her and from the scattered bits of junk and a seeing-lens crystal was up to something. Maybe trying to break in. Maybe wondering why Eko’s trail ended there, which is something that’s kinda maybe not the best.

Right, Eko thinks to herself. Yes. The Damsel. The Damsel who was following her. The Damsel who was following her and who she told herself she needed to plan for and then didn’t. That Damsel.

Whoops.

Oh well. She waves sheepishly. Hello again! Hopefully that explosion didn’t hurt; she wasn’t really expecting the secret hiding place she found to suddenly collapse like that. Very well done finding her, though! Obviously the Damsel is very good at hide-and-seek!

Anyway, she adds, jerking her thumb over her shoulder and edging towards the door. Since the Damsel found her, that probably makes Wren the seeker now or something, so she’s just gonna go off and… get on with that. Bye!

Eko is fast on her feet. The Damsel is faster, exploding from her prone position, almost seeming to flicker between her motions without passing through the intervening space. And as the world slows and Eko’s nerves scream, she can see the Damsel’s hands move through the air like a slow fuse and unfold. What looked like flesh is revealed to be carefully painted porcelain and leather. There are more fingers there than there should be, and some of them are blades and there are syringes and spider-like pedipalps and cunning grinding mechanisms. Maybe a tool, but a tool in the same way as a knife is a tool, i.e. stabbing is something you can use it for.

Eko twists away from the literal knife-hands like the wind, parts of her body separating into ribbons and then reforming at a safer distance. But she needn’t have bothered. She might have hit the Damsel harder than she realised, because Eko is pretty sure she sees the exact moment the Damsel finds she twisted her ankle in the fall. It’s the moment when she tries to push off from that foot and it gives way and she goes sprawling again. Which is definitely not a sign she’s out of the fight, ‘cause, well, Mama can definitely fight through a twisted ankle, but finding that your joint can’t hold your weight at the exact moment you put weight on it has gotta suck.

This is Eko’s sincere belief. It’s not even a skill issue thing.

A flash of temper breaks out as she makes it to the door and pauses there, pointing back at the Damsel furiously. The violent swipe of her arm, her hunched shoulders and the way her head jerks as she bares her teeth behind the mask all clearly convey her frustration and concern.

She doesn’t want to fight! Not just because the Damsel is probably way stronger than Lady One-Eye, but because she doesn’t want to hurt her! Not even if the Damsel is attacking her with necrosurgery hands! Enough horrible things have already happened to the Damsel, and Wren doesn’t want to be the cause of more! Is that so hard to believe?

Even if this is just a twisted ankle, her stabbing finger emphasises, that’s one twisted ankle too many, so... so the Damsel should just stay there and not try to run around on it! And yes! Wren knows she’s still going to! But let it be known that she disapproves!

That draws a barking, slightly wet laugh from the Damsel. “You don’t want to fight me, because you know you’ll lose and--” she trails off, and the laugh comes back, stronger and less sickly, and showing more incisor. “Oh, no-no-no-no! You’re not following someone else’s plans, are you? You’re just running around, causing trouble.” She pushes herself up to one knee, resting on her knuckled fist. “And that means,” she tilts her head, “you’re not working for Taym Matah. You’re not bound. Because in all those booooooring talks about politics and junk, oh ho, yes, everyone says he’s a control freak. He wouldn’t send a demon lord out to ‘just cause trouble’. And he wouldn’t let his lords and ladies do it either, which means either there’s some other demonologist on his side or...”

She spits blood, and rolls her shoulders. A bruised half-filled circle can briefly be seen on her forehead, sullen in the gloom.

“You’re a free agent, aincha?”

Eko considers the politics of this conclusion getting back to the big bad deathlord who’s backing the shahbanu from the Underworld, decides she doesn’t really care what they conclude given she’ll be leaving Taira soon, and gives the Damsel an encouraging thumbs up.

She’s totally right about the naib being a stuffy boring control freak, Eko confides with a tap to her mask’s beak. And what’s more - she lets her hair sway slightly to show off the thick book she stole from the sanctum before pulling it back to rest close against her back - he’s totally unreasonable about perfectly innocent harmless demon lords who just want to learn things and study from the big smart guy everyone goes on and on about borrowing books from his library.

Now, one might argue that Wren didn’t return any of the books she borrowed, but! But, she waves her finger insistently, can she really be blamed for that when she had to take an unplanned trip out of Malra and spend some time down in Pershwa on very short notice just after borrowing them? No, she shakes her head emphatically. No she cannot. If he hadn’t been so upset, maybe she’d have been able to give all of the books back!

... okay, probably not. But he still didn’t have to put all those guards and angry solar automata on all his libraries. Rude.

“So who’s the one really telling you what to do an’ aiming you?” and those words are a bear-trap, showing this mean little Damsel sets nasty traps with words as well as with razor wire and springs and trip cords. “In Hell or here?”

Eko shrugs cheerfully. Her Greater Self made a deal with one of her allies and sent Wren off from Hell to Creation to guard them for a bit and then go off for a special top-priority mission that the ally didn’t know about. Which was unrelated to the whole Tairan civil war dealie, before the Damsel asks. And Wren did that aaaaages ago, and nothing’s forcing her to go back, so for the past few seasons she’s pretty much just been doing whatever she wants.

She pauses. If she continues that thought on to the next one, there is a very good chance that the Damsel is going to try to punch her in the face with scary murder-hands again. But... it does need to be said.

The Damsel could do that too, she points out, shifting her weight back and preparing to bolt through the door. Just run off and do whatever she wants. It sounds like her boss-lady is super scary, but the Damsel is obviously really clever; she could probably find somewhere beyond her lady’s reach. Or at least some friends who could help her protect herself and keep her freedom.

The response comes whip-fast and razor-sharp. “Of course you’d just run away. She gave me power. I’d be dead if it wasn’t for her. Really totally dead. Don’t you have any loyalty? To your ‘greater self’?” The Damsel is shifting, testing her weight.

The bone mask tilts at an angle that’s just slightly too far to be human. What kind of question is that? Of course Wren is loyal to her Greater Self. But ‘loyal’ isn’t the same as ‘obedient’. And anyway, Eko adds, tracing a miserable downward twist of the mouth under the hook of the beak. Her Greater Self doesn’t usually ask her to do stuff that makes her miserable; she gets to have fun both back home and when she’s out and about in Creation. Kinda sounds like the same doesn’t hold true for the Damsel. How much are power and life-in-death worth if you can’t enjoy having them?

Actually... yeah. Eko pauses at that, twitching as it brings the anger from earlier back to the surface. She stomps her foot, her motions getting jerkier as she shakes her fist at the kneeling foxgirl readying herself to pounce.

It’s a demand and an outraged denouncement wrapped into one. What does she think she’s playing at, huh? If she would have been dead without her lady’s intervention, then every day is a gift; every moment is precious! If this is her second chance at life and she has the power to make what she likes of it, then it’s her responsibility to make it something good! She should do what makes her happy! Chase things that interest her, make friends with peers and strangers, eat yummy food, solve puzzles, pull pranks for the fun of it! She should seek out what brings her joy and build her second chance around those things! She may say she has a duty to her lady, but she has a bigger one to herself!

Most mortals don’t get to take the Second Breath when they die! They just end and that’s it; their part on the stage is over, all their potential and hopes and dreams are lost! How dare the Damsel stay sad and lonely, chained up in a place she doesn’t enjoy being? If she’s not going to cherish this precious opportunity, if she’s not going to take advantage of the chance to do everything death would have robbed her of - in short, if she’s going to waste this impossible gift - then why shouldn’t it have gone to someone who’d value it more?

Eko doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s got places to be, people to stab, plunder to steal. But the Damsel had better think about what she said! Bolting off down the corridor (and taking the wall rather than the floor to avoid any more traps), she leaves the Damsel to her twisted ankle and her lady’s orders. Hopefully, she’ll shape up and stop hurting herself, both physically and emotionally.

(Realistically, she’s probably going to get angry and come after Eko again. Little sisters aren’t very good at listening, and the Damsel is definitely little-sister shaped. But at least Eko tried.)

It is for the best that she chose to run, because as she’s passing through the door she hears the whipping noise of a handful of... something? And then there’s noise and smoke and a few ouchy painful shards pattering off her back. Those were definitely firedust firecrackers, the kind people burn at Calibration to scare off spirits, but on alchemical performance-enhancing drugs. The noise is ringing in Eko’s ears and she’s got soot and cinders all over her back and there’s something about the smell of the smoke clinging to her that... yep, that’s bone-ash, that’s definitely bone ash. So, like a super genius Eko reckons they’re weird underworld firecrackers that use bone ash and firedust and maybe they’re literally made to hurt spirits.

Probably don’t want to get hit by them.

Grumbling vindictively, Eko makes sure to throw in a lot more swerving out of windows, running up the wall to the next floor and generally making the trail she isn’t leaving a pain to follow on her way towards the big chamber where they’re keeping all the necromancers. Despite all the stabbing and tense confrontation, it hasn’t actually been that long since she heard them there, and they haven’t moved since, still cowering in a warded space they think is safe (and feeling scared despite that).

Which means what’s going to happen next is entirely their own fault, really.

Gritting her teeth, the Damsel Draped in the Last Star’s Lonely Sigh lets her hands slide back together into something that could almost be human once more. A twitch, and her left ring finger unscrews into a wicked looking needle, that she loads with an ampoule of her own concoction. She barely feels the prick as she injects the contents into the site of the injury, and the pain of ligaments and tissue knotting itself back together is nothing. She’s been torn apart. Pain fades away in comparison to that.

Pain also doesn’t matter much in the face of the shaking rage she has towards that demon that calls itself Wren. A feral noise escapes her and she throws back her head, grinding the balls of her palms into her screwed-shut eyes.

Maybe that was the pain, actually. Hard to tell sometimes. It talks to her. It’s her friend, but it’s her enemy too sometimes. Kind of how it goes. All friends are secretly enemies.

She drops back to all fours, panting and gasping. Works her ankle. It can move freely again. Of all the fucking stupid things. She knows the demon didn’t know that impact would hit right where she’d hurt her leg earlier today at Sabah II’s hands and over-stress a ligament she’d already stitched together once today. Doesn’t matter. She’s taken a hit of coldflesh. It won’t bother her even if it gets hurt again.

The rage is still there. Hasn’t gone away, so it probably was the rage, not the pain. “Didn’t lose to her,” she growls, pulling herself upright. “She keeps on running away. Doesn’t stand. Doesn’t fight. Which means she knows she’ll lose. Or,” a thought comes in out of the echo of the pain, “she’s got something that means more than a fair fight. Damn her. Ha! She is damned. She’s a demon.”

Hell. Hell-hell-hell-hell-hell. She hates the word. The name. The place. She hates it because her ladyship has told her about it and so’s the pain and what they’ve told her is this: this is where the cowards went, the ones who ran away, the ones who gave up and gave in. The ones so damn scared of death that it damned them forever. So this is Wren, a coward who runs away and steals and lies and cheats-

-not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, that’s how you make a living but she has power ‘cause she butchered the Master of the Crematory Flame and he’d been like “I have power! The very secrets of death itself are mine to command” and it’s clear that wasn’t worth piss which is what she’d been thinking anyway; Wren! Yes! Wren has power, so acting like a sneak thief and coward who’s weak is just proof that she’s like hell. Like the demons. Like Ixy. Who ran away and got power from the ones who ran away.

Thoughts to keep away from. She has to stay focused.

“Master of the Crematory Flame: dead. Wren: gotten away twice. And she keeps on saying things as if she knows me. As if she’s been watching me. How long has she been watching me?”

She hasn’t, says the pain. You’d have known. Even now she can smell her spoor in the air. It’s cutting and sharp and there’s just a hint of old blood about it. But there’s something off about that blood. It’s not something she’s smelled before, and that means that she hasn’t been watching her.

“She knows I’m alone,” she hisses. “She’s just doing the market soothsayer’s trick. Reading me. Guessing.”

Even if she’d talked like she knew her. Which she doesn’t. No one knows the Damsel. She’s so alone. No one can ever care for a dead girl like her, a corpse stitched back together, unless they’re already dead too.

So she hasn’t been spying on her. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been being fed the things to say.

“The Jackal,” she whispers, eyes rolling back. “He’s around. They say he is. People die like he’s around. You can’t prove it’s him so it’s him.” Her razor-nails dig into the flesh of her thigh, tearing through her garb. “Even her ladyship says he’s good. She says he might be good enough to kill herself. She don’t say that about practically nobody.”

Her arm spasms, thumping against her chest like a staccato beat. A cold and gold memory that isn’t hers flickers at the edge of recollection. “Who was he? The Jackal? Which one of them was he? One of the ones who ran or one of the ones who died? But he’s working with Wren. Or she’s working with him.” She can’t prove it but she knows it; it’s an intuitive leap of the kind that had kept her alive for years right up until it hadn’t.

She feels the passage of dark feathers. Her ladyship is watching her. Maybe drawn by her name, or the thoughts of her even if she hadn’t used her name. A cold hand brushes the top of her head, almost softly.

“I don’t know how she thinks,” she begins, cocking her head. “She doesn’t have a plan. She doesn’t have a plan. That doesn’t make her strong. It just means she’ll do things because she feels like it. I saw her. She didn’t go to kill the Master until she decided to and then he was dead. But-but-but she’ll run off to destroy more things. More things that’ll hurt her maj’s plans. She’s going to kill the other ones, the underlings, the apprentices and the dedicates and the ghost-witches and the ones who were hollow puppets for the Master an’ all of those. She’s already on her way. And she’ll do it ‘cause they suck. They’re weak.” She laughs, drawing a scalpel-finger down the neck of her dress just to hear the cloth rip. It soothes her. Even if it shows the stitching (elegant, of course, her ladyship would accept nothing else) all over her torso and limbs where her ladyship pieced her back together when she brought her back.

“So?” the image of the Black Heron prompts her. “What must you do?”

“Go to where she will be. When she kills the apprentices and the adepts, she’ll decide to go somewhere else. And she stole the Master’s book.” She bares her incisors. “She likes books.”

“There you go,” her lady says. “Get in her head. Then claw her open and get in her chest. Get strong, young mistress. Understand her. Kill her - but first break her. Death is patient. Be patient. And wait for her where she must go.”

Sometimes she wonders if the visions of the Black Heron are just remembering her teaching. Not at moments like this. Her lady is always watching.

Wren would never understand that.

It turns out that it’s not even that hard to massacre an entire room full of necromancer ghosts and their death-touched mortal bodyguards. Really! Oh, sure, the chamber is protected by heavy wards and also thick stone walls and a big strong single door with no other ways in or out. But this is an old Dragon King temple, and Eko is pretty sure this particular room probably wasn’t intended to be a panic room by its original builders, it was just the most defensible one for that use. Maybe it was some old ritual chamber or something - the point is, it’s not built like a proper panic room would be. There are vulnerabilities. And because there’s only one door, they’re all expecting any threat to come in through that way.

As such, when Eko locates a spot on the floor above where the stone ceiling is thinner than the walls, cuts a neat little circle in it and silently drops down at the back of the chamber, she manages to slit at least a dozen throats before most of the necromancers and bodyguards have even realised she’s there. Easy peasy! And by the time she’s done splattering blood and ectoplasm all over the walls and inhaling all the bodies, the Damsel hasn’t even shown up! Clearly, Eko was too fast for her! Hah!

She’s in a very good mood as she departs the protected chamber, whistling silently and merrily to herself as she goes looking for the library. All she’s got left on her mission plan is some light-to-moderate arson, and then she’ll have accomplished all of her goals here with no problem even in the face of an unexpected nephwrack and deathknight surprising her. Ney will have to pay her a bonus for that kind of performance! And maybe even say he’s really proud of her!

Ahem, what was she saying? Oh right; maybe she should detour and see if she can surprise Lady One-Eye and stab her to death on the way out? She’s been a bit of a let-down as a nemesis here; the Damsel might be a better one. Speaking of whom; she’s still around somewhere, probably. It would certainly be nice if she’d actually taken Eko’s wise and valuable advice and decided to stay put and rest that twisted ankle, but frankly if a girl like that has actually listened to some good big-sisterly advice and behaved herself rather than getting mad and defiant about things then Eko will personally eat one of her masks tonight.

Hmm, hmm. And she could possibly maybe cause some real trouble if she goes off to support the shahbanu while Ney and Mashy and whoever Orange Blossom sent are fighting her. Yeah, yeah, that could maybe risk Ney getting hurt, or the Damsel getting killed - and as much as she’s tried to stab Eko (several times), she’s just a kid really and hasn’t doubled and tripled down on spreading death and war and suffering over most of a country like her senpai. (Wait. Is the shahbanu her senpai? The Damsel was here in response to Lady One-Eye’s loss to Eko, and Lady One-Eye was working for the shahbanu, but does that mean the shahbanu and the Damsel are part of the same group, or just that the shahbanu was hiring from the Damsel’s lady? Something to ask Ney later; they can put their heads together and figure it out together.) Anyway, in that case maybe after she’s done torching the library, Eko should double back and see if she can bait the Damsel into following her towards the treasury by saying she’s going to raid it, and keep her out of the rest of the fight that way. She can even justify her plundering the treasury to Ney by saying she was tying up a vital enemy asset!

She’s a little distracted by all these good ideas, and so when the world slows to a crawl in the exhilaration of danger as she jumps in through the narrow library window, it’s only then that she realises that the little chiming noise she’d been hearing was the noise of springs under quite incredible tension. Tension that has just been released by the breaking of the glass, sending razor-sharp shards of metal and wire scything in a way which looks beautiful in slow motion.

Beautiful and also like it’s going to really hurt.

Serendipity; it does! Red hot lines scrawl themselves across her body where metal tears through her haori and the meat under it. It hurts in a much more immediate way than the usual pain she lives with, and the world doesn’t speed up again so she’s still in danger and-

\- there! Rising out of the shadows that are darker than they should be, exactly where the metal blades aren’t is the Damsel. She’s tattered and her dress is torn and Eko is pretty sure she didn’t do that, but her forehead is bleeding from an open wound shaped like the rising sun and the crows follow in the wake of the scything metal. Eko is barely fast enough to avoid being caught by surprise and taking a very literal knife hand through the throat, but she still feels on the back foot.

So she pivots. People always seem surprised at how fast she can do that. Eko’s supernatural grace tells momentum and inertia to get hung as a single brush of one foot across the floor takes her from retreating along a diagonal from the Damsel’s knife-hand to darting in below the dead girl’s guard. Questions like balance and leverage quietly look the other way and pretend not to see the way her lunge leans her so far forward she’s almost horizontal, ducking under those lethal fingers and slashing vertically upwards with Örömi’s flashing blade.

Örömi finds nothing but shadows, the darkness swirling around in the form of cawing crows that peck at Eko with their substanceless beaks. But she can hear the click of feet behind her and isn’t caught unaware when the Damsel comes in from behind with her knife hands. She turns to wind an instant before the blades bite, and all the Damsel accomplishes is to disrupt the swirling red gusts that curl in on themselves and reform behind her as she swipes through them.

But Eko is definitely on the back foot now, and she can feel it; the cawing all around her and the shadows are trying to drown her senses, shot through with striated red. Catching herself on the fist not holding Örömi, she handsprings forward. The Damsel’s shoulder provides a split-second foothold to jump off, the middle shelf of a nearby bookcase gives her another, and then she’s on top of it and sprinting away across the top of the stacks.

For the first time, Eko gets a good look at Zamash’s Library of the Dead.

It’s not that she didn’t know it was big. The echoes told her that before she ever set foot in it. But she’d underestimated how big. The whole library is one gargantuan open space that must go right up to the top of the pyramid, or very nearly. Enormous balconies and mezzanines jut out from the walls all the way up in a double-spiral, meeting on one wall or the other every half-floor before diverging once again. And every wall is covered in books. Every wall. They stretch from the floor of each mezzanine to the very underside of the next - two, three bookcases high in some places, with sliding ladders to reach the upper shelves. Even that’s not enough space for all the knowledge contained here; there are freestanding bookcases dotting the larger mezzanines; row upon row of them on the ground floor where Eko is now. In some places she can even see books piled up in corners where there was no space for them on the shelves.

This can’t all be necromancy. There’s just too much. Has the shahbanu been stockpiling all the books and records of her empire here?

Maybe so, maybe not, but there’s certainly enough necromantic lore here that it’s affecting the stage’s set-dressing. The air is unnaturally still, shadows swallow sound, and the way the stacks muffle noise is a few shades shy of natural. Everything is dark and gloomy; the bookcases are ebony banded by iron and the balustrades are decorated with carved wooden statues of contorted ghosts and skeletons.

Eko takes it all in at a glance, focusing more on getting some distance from the Damsel. It is getting very tempting to stop being so nice to the girl and go give her a good retaliatory stabbing, irrespective of how sad her life and death have been. But that’s not what she’s here for, and would involve getting into a close-quarters knife fight with those wicked, clever hands.

Instead, Eko contemplates the cold blue fire burning in iron lanterns that hang at the end of each row of bookcases. The light they cast is cool and dim, not so much illuminating the library as stirring its shadows. But Eko has seen a bunch of different kinds of fire. In her experience, whatever weird traits they have, you can generally rely on most kinds to do what fire is good at. She feels a little bad for burning this many books and destroying this much knowledge, and she’ll probably feel worse later when she has the chance to think back on it. No doubt the naib has copies of a lot of the histories and junk up in Malra, but a lot is still going to be lost here, and not all of it will be icky horrible necromancy.

But right now, this isn’t just about her mission; it’s about survival. She needs to give herself an advantage if she wants to survive. Jumping down from the dark wood of the bookcases, she slashes the chains of the next three lanterns she passes, spraying oil and embers onto their shelves, then reverses direction and throws all her momentum into a flying kick to topple the third stack into its neighbour and start a chain of dominoes back the way she came.

The fire rises, licking at the bookshelves, rising and coiling and biting. The blue flames are swiftly joined by orange, as the old dry books catch, the anti-moth preservatives burning brighter and spreading the flames faster and faster. Eko twists to cock her masked face at the Damsel, who hasn’t moved. Instead, she’s shed that long dress which was only slowing her down, stripping down to her under-chemise and petticoats, which shows the thin white scars all over her arms and legs in the mixed light of the flames. Her face is locked in a coldly arrogant look; her snow-white fur and ears are painted in the firelight; the shade-crows flock around her, boiling and broiling in the sullen reds and dull pre-dawn blues of her burning soul.

“I gave you plenty of chances to fight me,” the Damsel calls out. “Plenty of chances to be strong. To stand up for Hell, to stand up for all your friends and all that. But you always run. You’re so fucking scared, so fucking weak that you ain’t ever gonna stand and fight. Well, fair does. You probab’y can’t fight at all, outside throwing a punch and running for it. Just enough to keep yourself alive, but never risking it with anyone who might give you a proper fight.

“Shouldn’t be surprised. You ain’t got no pride at all. Nor nothin’ to be prideful of.”

Adorjan’s daughter stares at the dead girl through the hungry, flickering flames. For once, she’s still - not running, not fleeing, just standing straight and tall with her long, ribbon-like hair billowing behind her. Scarlet slits gleam deep in the sunken sockets of the bone bird mask.

Very deliberately, the demon Wren kicks over another bookshelf, sending it toppling over with a crash and a cascade of brittle paper. A thin wire tied to the shelf across the aisle snaps as it falls, and a spray of needles bursts out from one of the thick tomes. Wren just leans out of the way, catching the last one and flicking it over her shoulder contemptuously.

It’s an eloquent display, and it tells the Damsel all she needs to know. That Wren isn’t afraid of her - and isn’t scared of much at all. That she wasn’t running because she thought she’d lose, she was running because fighting the Damsel wasn’t worth her time. That she had no reason to indulge the girl in battle just for battle’s sake when her avid curiosity was leading her to explore and steal and learn. That if the Damsel has filled this whole library with traps, then that calculus has changed. Now she does have a reason to fight.

Mostly, though, it tells the Damsel that her taunt has landed perfectly. Wren’s tensed legs and lashing hair are exactly the reaction she wanted.

Snarling behind her mask, Eko throws herself into a sprint, rushing towards the Damsel where she stands ready to meet her. Blood-scent and racing wind follow her as she moves effortlessly over the toppled stacks, Örömi Windcutter’s curving blade gleams pale and hungry in her hand.

The gift Adorjan gave her daughter is as sharp as the Silent Wind herself.

The Damsel goes to melt away, but Eko is fast, too fast, and so she takes the blow on her forearms so it doesn’t take her throat, Örömi Windcutter throwing sparks as she slices against soulsteel mechanisms and iron-coated bone. Eko’s knife catches for a moment, and the Damsel snaps forwards like a hunting beast, jaw unhinging in that moment of stillness. Eko scoffs in her face, already peeling apart again into formless wind and ribbons that echo with mocking laughter as they part in front of the Damsel’s fangs.

But she’s not fast enough. Her limbs unravel, but her torso is still solid for the bite as it meets her skin. And then the Damsel’s teeth are in her shoulder and with terrible strength she lifts Eko off the ground with just her jaws, blood spurting from the wound down her gullet. The pain is intense, surreal, and both cold and hot at the same time. The Damsel spins her around, shaking her like a dog with a toy, and only then does she stab a knife hand into Eko’s side, tearing out a chunk of flesh from her shoulder and sending Eko flying into a bookshelf. Books cascade down on top of her as her limbs reform, and she looks up with hazy eyes at the Damsel, now soaked in Eko’s blood, as she spits out the hunk of meat. Eko’s shoulder and entire left side hurts, and more than it, it throbs in a sickening way.

The Damsel doesn’t say anything, but she beckons Eko towards her with a gesture that’s just as verbose as if Eko was saying it herself. And maybe it is, because she’s just drunk some of the cold blood of Elloge that also runs in Eko’s veins.

Come on.

Eko darts sideways. Her wounds don’t slow her; she runs with uncanny grace. And though she’s bleeding, the blood turns to a gust of scarlet in her wake as she flanks the Damsel, who spins to keep her in sight. Eko is faster, though. She’s behind her enemy, then on the other side, then in front of her again. Circling, circling, she spins a whirlwind around her rival, and while she failed to turn to wind in time to avoid the Damsel’s jaws, now there’s no such interruption. Soon she’s barely perceptible amidst the charnel-scented cyclone that whips up pages, scours bookcases and stifles the encroaching flames.

The Damsel doesn’t rush in. She just brings her arms up, the damaged one guarding, the other quickly and hastily making a few minor adjustments with indecent speed. She can clearly see how hurt Eko is, but isn’t underestimating her. If one of her arms isn’t working properly, it might be the end for her.

“See, this is it!” she calls out. “You ain’t a coward at heart, are you? You just got taught to be. But when it comes to it, you’re really in for the fight!”

The demon doesn’t reply. It’s not even laughing now. The half-seen figure among the swirling gusts peels away, and the cyclone winds follow her. For a moment, the Damsel thinks her damn cowardice is coming out again.

But her path. It’s curving. The wind that follows her scours the bookshelves and shreds the texts. That vicious white knife scythes through a staircase, which collapses with a crash. Wooden pillars erode to splintered poles as the scarlet gale swings around, making the mezzanines creak and sag uneasily.

This isn’t Wren running. This is Wren’s run-up.

The Damsel settles herself. She breathes deeply, calmly. All around her, the shadow crows settle, perching on overturned bookcases and ruined tables. The moonlight paints her in a pool of silver.

Her eyes are not calm. They are wild, manic. Blades slide in and out of her hands as she flexes her talon-fingers.

The moment Eko moves, she moves too.

Eko’s heart pulses. It makes her shoulder throb and ache. It doesn’t matter. She switched her blade to her other hand. Her muscles burn and her legs ache. Time crawls along, barely faster than her, and she can see the blood-soaked shape of the Damsel move. She’s moving so fast within the slowed time she’s almost moving as fast as Eko. The crows are moving even faster, even though their caws come out bassy and distorted.

There! The gleam of a needle extending from the webbing of one of the Damsel’s hand, thrust forwards. In the moonlight it gleams green. But Eko brings her knife around, Örömi cutting through the air with a sound like tearing silk, and when the Damsel goes to adjust her thrust Eko is already ahead of it, carried on the wind of her own passage. As a result, the Damsel’s thrust ends when Eko brings Örömi Windcutter down upon her forearm, and ceramic and soulsteel and iron and chains part. There is no time for the Damsel to scream, though, because Eko twists apart into ribbons and is suddenly behind her foe, her pirouette bringing the knife down again, right into that mass of complicated mechanisms in her other arm. Eko doesn’t like to gloat but she definitely grins a little when she turns Örömi like she’s a key and metal screams as it’s torn apart.

Too fast, even despite that, moving like a puppet on unseen strings the Damsel twists and moves in a way that nothing alive should. But Eko has seen that teeth-lunge before, and the Damsel is pulled into the rising knee of a beautiful and elegant young lady which leaves her crumbled up on the floor in a ball. And then Eko, in what’s not exactly her most lady-like moment, kicks her in the teeth because that bite fucking hurt.

The moment passes, time resumes its passage, and the Damsel is face down on the ground, drooling blood (some of it actually Eko’s), down one forearm and the other a broken mess of mechanisms and chains that can’t even clench.

Breathing hard, hurting, with tears of pain trickling down her face behind her mask, Eko sheathes her Windcutter and kneels down to roll the Damsel over. She can’t check her heartbeat, because she doesn’t have one. She can’t check her breathing, because she’s not sure the girl needs to do that either. But despite all the blood oozing from her mouth (which is very satisfying to see), she’s blinking dazedly and still twitching.

Alive, then. Or at least no deader than this morning. Good.

Eko stands, keeping one ear on the fire. It’s still spreading, though not as fast as she’d expected. Some kind of magic on the shelves, maybe. Or perhaps it’s just that the flames are having to fight the deadness of this place sapping their vitality and growth. She clutches her shoulder with her good hand, looking down at the Damsel. There’s no lighthearted playfulness in her body language anymore. Just weariness and anger, disappointment and pain.

Is she happy now? Now that she’s had a pointless fight over a stupid grudge for a dumb ghost who isn’t even here? Life is so much better if you just put things behind you and move on! Regrets and hatreds only weigh you down! Why couldn’t the Damsel just let it go?

“Yea’.” The voice comes out weakly. She’s missing a few teeth. “Yea’. ‘M happy. Coulda start’ wi’ thi’. Not wast’ so much ‘ime.” She pauses. “Gonna kill me n’?”

Eko throws her hands up in frustration, then hisses near-audibly at the pain. No! Of course she’s not going to kill her! She’s spent this whole time trying not to kill her, even while the Damsel was trying to stab her! Because despite how much of an ungrateful little brat she is, E- Wren feels bad for her and didn’t want to pile any more misery or suffering or pain on her shoulders! And she may have failed at that, but she’s not going to compound that by finishing her off! Not when she doesn’t have to!

She turns away, limping over to the hunk of meat the Damsel bit out of her shoulder, and picks it up. It dissolves into wind at her touch, though reclaiming it does nothing to stop the bleeding or make her feel any better. Still, she’s learned her lesson about leaving arcane links lying around. There’s still some blood on the floor, and the wire-trap, but the fire will see to that. And the blood left in the Damsel’s mouth won’t be usable by now, severed from its owner by the symbolic act of consumption.

With one last glance over her shoulder, Eko looks at where the Damsel is still lying supine, watching her. She jerks her chin towards the door. The Damsel’s legs still work fine. She should get somewhere safe. Away from the fire. And while she’s not going to apologise for it, Wren hopes she can repair her arms once she’s out of stabbing range.

The Damsel laughs at that, high and shrill and drooling blood. “Washnun gonna kill you after you stopped runnin’. Was gonna ‘till tha’ point,” she mumble-mutters. “‘Snot in the chivalry. You’re not despairin’ ye’.”

Eko scoffs. Sure. As if killing someone bit-by-bit, breaking them down and making them despair, destroying all their hopes and dreams, making them want to die - as if that’s any different to just killing them with extra steps. The Damsel should know that. She’s lived it. Or died it. And now she’s going around inflicting that misery on others. That’s worse, not better.

Whatever. Wren is done here. She turns away, and steps through the door.

Eko makes a much more discreet exit, finding the weakest point in the barrier and slicing through with Örömi Windcutter. The air feels different on the other side, without the same stagnancy of a place ensorcelled to keep spirits and spying eyes out. Her shoulder is a mess, crudely bandaged with ribbons she had on her, and she can feel her body blossoming with bruises already. It’s a weary effort to skip up a building and get away from immediate watchers.

At the edge of hearing comes the cla-click of a foot doing the boss-step, and then a gasp of breath. “Oh, Eko,” Yuu whispers, wrapping her arms around her and clinging on. “I couldn’t step to you and I knew-knew it was a trap but I could see that evil spook you told me ‘bout so I had to keep out because I knew you didn’t need me getting in trouble when I couldn’t bug out, because if I couldn’t boss-step to you maybe I couldn’t run away back home either and I know I left you alone but I was scared-”

Eko all but collapses into her best friend’s embrace. She’s trembling from exhaustion and pain, tears stain her face behind her mask, and her fingers tremble as she signs back one-handedly. It comes out mostly gibberish; her gestures are sloppy and she skips around without completing thoughts.

There are complaints about the Damsel in there, how she didn’t want her to hurt her and she was so stupid and why couldn’t she see how pointless the cycles of vengeance were? But before she gets around to explaining who she’s talking about, her subject has wandered to the library, how there was so much there, what was the shahbanu thinking, Eko didn’t want to destroy that much knowledge but she was on the back foot and had to get an advantage but it didn’t even end up helping all that much so it was all lost for nothing, and why’d Ney have to send her to do it in the first place-

“What happened? Who’s this Damsel?” Yuu’s lips curl down under her hooded spy mask. “Ney didn’t say nothing about someone with that name, and I’d sure as fuck have remembered some briefing thing about someone who could hurt you that bad... is that a bite out of your shoulder?”

Yuu pauses.

“Actually let’s get away further because I don’t want us being found when you’re like this. It’d be mega cringe.”

Eko allows herself one last sniffle, then pulls herself together and nods. Right. Yeah. Yuu has good ideas, as always. They decamp several blocks west, passing unnoticed over the rooftops like a quiet evening breeze, and find shelter in the shadow of a looming grotesque that’s fashioned as an inhumanly proportioned spectre leering down at the street below.

Yeah, so, Eko explains, unwrapping the hasty ribbon-bandage to show off her wound. Basically, it was a trap. A trap made just for her. That Lady One-Eye was there - it’s good that Yuu stayed clear; she’s bad news - and she apparently managed to keep enough of Eko’s blood intact to set up a Beckoning that lured her into the heavily-warded academy that she couldn’t easily get back out of. And it wasn’t just Lady One-Eye. There was a girl with her. One of the Underworld’s Chosen. Felt kinda like Lady One-Eye had gone whinging to her boss about losing her oar, and her lady-deathlord sent the Damsel Draped in the Last Star’s Lonely Sigh to beat Eko up and take a trophy of her defeat.

She doesn’t shorten the name, or struggle to remember it. Not at all. Eko suspects she’s going to remember the Damsel in vivid detail for quite a long time.

Anyway, they knew Eko was coming, and they’d had all the necromancers and stuff hide themselves away. And Lady One-Eye is her peer in strength, and the Damsel - for all that she’s obviously pretty newly Chosen - is stronger. But Eko is, in fact, really good, so she managed to get past them and lose the Damsel in the academy’s halls and find the super-secret hidden necromantic sanctum of the master of the school - an Onyx necromancer who was as strong if not stronger than Lady One-Eye - and stabbed him to death, then got away from the Damsel again when she was waiting for Eko as she escaped the collapsing sanctum, then slaughtered all the lesser necromancers in their heavily-warded chamber, then headed over to - Eko’s signs stutter for a moment in regret - to burn down the library. Which might not have just been the necromantic academy’s library, but also the central library for all of Zamash, and possibly the shahbanu’s entire empire.

Hopefully she had a bunch of copies made of all those beautiful books. Or the naib, maybe. It’d be heartbreaking if they were all lost forever. Bad enough that there were probably a bunch of first editions in there.

Anyway, the Damsel was waiting there with another of her nasty little traps, and between that and the subsequent fight, Eko got pretty badly hurt. But she still won. And she didn’t kill the Damsel, because that girl has obviously had far, far too many horrible things happen to her for Eko to want to hurt her even more, but she’s missing one of her prosthetic arms and Eko wrecked all the horrible little mechanisms in the other. And kicked her teeth in. So she’s not gonna be able to go support her senpai in the fight against Ney and Mashy and whoever else is going after the shahbanu.

“You’re not gonna be dumb enough to want to run in and help Ney, right?” Yuu immediately says. “Because right now I’m pretty sure a stiff breeze would knock you down. You’d probs lose a fight to Rathan in your state, and that’s low.”

Eko shakes her head, too drained even to be offended at the totally untrue slander. She’s already removed an Abyssal Exalt, a Greater Dead Onyx necromancer and a couple of dozen lesser necromancers from the fight. And possibly a Greater Dead nephwrack, depending on what Lady One-Eye does now that Eko outwitted her evil plan. That’s probably more of a contribution than most of the people on the battlefield will manage.

So no, she’s going to let Yuu help her do a better bandaging job than she managed one-handed while cutting her way through the wards of a corrupted Dragon King temple, and then they’re going to go do something away from the fighting. Possibly involving the treasury. Mama robbed Gem’s treasury a couple of years ago while Eko was working with Asarin in Hell, and also stole a bunch of stuff from the naib’s palace last time she was in Malra, so pulling a Tairan Treasury Heist to brag about would be a nice capstone to this mission. And if the shahbanu is preparing everything she has to meet the naib’s forces in the field, it probably won’t be too heavily guarded.

“If you promise to be very good and not strain yourself,” Yuu says, between licking Eko’s blood from her hands, “I did send Poncory to scout out that place with orders that I’d stab him if he got himself killed. He’s too stupid to know that can’t happen. Also annoying. Half of why I sent him was ‘cause he was whining when I was waiting for you.”

Ugh. Fiiiiine, drawls Eko with an exaggerated eyeroll as she submits to medical treatment. She’ll be good and behave and stay out of any scuffles and all that junk, and if it looks too well-protected they’ll just go vandalise something easy instead. She probably is going to have to call upon the mighty powers of Sorcery to get them in, but thankfully she can do that without moving very much.

It’ll be easy. Yuu’ll see.

The plan. The plan had been a good one. Sure, yes, there had been the moment when Eko had sort of been caught by a ghost-sentinel who had smelled the blood and the pain even through Eko’s disguise, but she’d been fast enough to lay a hand on that skull-faced man and leave his head full of the furious winds of her passion for fun. So he hadn’t really wanted to report her in the face of the joy and fun and desire to pull some of the hilarious pranks that were now filling his head.

She’ll let him go. Eventually. When she gets bored.

But then it turned out that Sabah II’s treasure vaults are sort of basically bare. The treasury of Gem, this is not, and neither is it the naib’s. The current accounts come in through Terema and leave again quickly.

But that makes sense. Taym Matah has the rich silver mines of Malra, and the borders of the Malran plateau are much more proof against the civil war. But Eko’s seen how the land is around Zamash. She’s seen how the bodies in graveyards have been conscripted in all these abandoned villages, and she’s seen how the war has reached the walls of Zamash. The necropolis here can’t have been cheap, but maybe given how much of it is made from local stone and by corvee (or necromantic) labour, they’re paying less for it than it might appear.

What silver here is a mishmash of coinages, from many countries. Many of these coins sound debased. The good quality silver has been spent on settling debts. There’s no jade. There’s a room that seems at first to be full of value, but its sound is leaden and dead. Those are grave goods, coins buried with the dead. Story is that they’ll melt away into dust and echoes in sunlight.

“This is a loada bullshit,” Poncory grouses, grabbing low-value coinage that’s more copper than silver by weight. “Couldn’t we have gone and knocked over the vault of a rich princess or whatnot?”

Eko is feeling a bit cheated by this too, after all the effort she put into this hilarious heist. There’s gotta be something worth her time here. She does find some oubliettes nearby; presumably the prisoners count as treasures of the shahbanu in a weird way, though most of the inhabitants are very dead. However, she does find one survivor, who introduces himself to the masked demon, the other masked demon, and the man-sized racoon demon (also masked) as one Hock Moncar, who’d come here with his mercenary band looking for a payout, had not been paid by the shahbanu, and might have done some plundering and pillaging when leaving for Malra to get what he was owed, which Sabah II had not taken well. Which is why he’s down here with a soulsteel mask bound around his head and his men are either corpse-slaves or sell-outs.

This is pretty valuable, Eko opines to Yuu when she ducks her head out. A mysterious man in a mask which means you can’t see his face is pretty good treasure to steal from an evil empress. And he’s got a mysterious backstory.

“He just told us his backstory.”

Which could be a tissue of lies. Maybe he’s a handsome secret prince, Eko wisely opines.

“Did you just say ‘handsome’?”

Ha ha ha no what silliness, come on, let’s get him out of here, get him out of the mask, and also smash up some of the palace to make her pay for not having any money.

Yuu purses her lips. “When you say ‘smash up the palace’, you better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking-”

Eko’s grin is its own answer.

First, they need to get the kill-collar off their new friend’s neck, she declares, putting the heels of her palms together and stabbing her fingers inward. Removing the mask itself without removing Hock Moncar’s head along with it is going to be complicated, but there’s a wickedly nasty little mechanism down at the neck with a bunch of inwards-pointing soulsteel needles that are clearly set up to be driven into its captive’s throat on command. Looking it over, Eko wonders if the Damsel had any part in its design. It certainly matches her brand of vicious, complex clockwork. But then again, maybe this thing just comes from wherever she learned such malevolent crafts.

Regardless, Eko broke both her arms and now she turns her attention to breaking the collar. She is, after all, excellent at puzzle-solving—it’s one of the five arts of the Ruin, as she advertised herself to Ney back when he hired her—and she’s always enjoyed the design of traps and cunning mechanisms. Less so when they’re used to carve up her back, but she’ll probably find something to appreciate about even the Damsel’s work once she’s healed. For now, she puts her expertise to use destructively; after inspecting the collar closely and tapping it a few times to listen to its inner workings, it’s a fairly simple matter to pry up a few panels, take her Windcutter’s incredibly precise blade to its innards and carefully sever, pry up and dislodge the complicated little bars, pins, gears, cogs and springs that comprise the mechanism until it’s thoroughly wrecked, then pull the needles out one by one once she’s sure that touching them won’t trigger the trap.

Once that’s done, and they’ve helped the prisoner climb back out of the oubliette and into the treasury proper, Eko snaps her fingers. It’s all up to Yuu now, she announces gleefully. Yuu’ll be the hero who saves them all! They’ll all be counting on Yuu, and the going will be rough, but it’ll all turn out well in the end! Eko believes in Yuu!

“Did she poison me?” Hock groans, working his neck. The skin where the mask sat is raw and painful looking. “What’s going on? Why do you think I can get us out of here? I wouldn’t still be here if I could.”

Despite the nagging pain in her shoulder, Eko breaks into giggles. Poncory cackles, and even Yuu snickers, despite being all grouchy about her upcoming role. Not you, Eko mimes with deliberately exaggerated motions. You’re all hurt, same as Eko. She was talking to Yuu!

Yuu groans in protest, but dutifully takes off her hooded-spy mask and dons the wiry-haired, goat-like visage of a drudge with sloppily riveted iron scales down his cheeks and a drunken scowl plastered across his face.

“Uuuuugh, I hate it when you do this one,” she grumbles, affecting a bass rumble and slouching indolently. “Always makin’ me do the heavy lifting. Whoo, look at me, it’s my whole job to do manual labour for people. But that sucks and I’m lazy, so I’m just gonna half-ass it for a bit an’ then siddown an’ get drunk somewhere.”

Hush, bestie, Eko orders with a snap of her fingers and a pinching motion at Yuu’s lips. Carrying things is part of her duties as Eko’s best friend. It’s in their contract and everything. Grandma even witnessed it and everything. Well, she was present for it. Or at least it happened when she was nearby.

Point is, shut up; Eko is casting now. Also, Poncory, stop shovelling adulterated coinage into your tail and get over here.

It’s very frustrating that despite him being the perfect source for it, Eko can’t invoke the word Strength in its aspect of destruction, demolition and physical force from Vali, because she very inconveniently hasn’t seen him since learning how to copy and use the ontological descriptors whispered in the origin-tongue of existence. So instead she’s forced to evoke it from the (quite vivid) memory of the Garda Bird that blew up the Pershwan manse, which doesn’t fit quite as well but is probably good enough. The word Huge, on the other hand, with associations of towering height and imposing scale, is handily present in the very building she’s standing in, as well as the great pyramid of Zamash’s academy of the Dead. And for the word Escape in opposition to imprisonment, confinement and physical structures, she needs look no further than her new friend Hock Moncar. Last of all, though Poncory’s pilfered treasures are stowed away in the great paper scroll that is his tail, it’s still close enough that Eko can draw the word Carry from him with a nature of safekeeping, transportation and holding close.

Grow huge and strong, she orders Yuu in the signs that Creation was Shaped from. Carry them all away, and escape to safety.

Almost immediately, she realises she’s made a mistake. Not a big one! Very small! But... ugh, she should have invoked the word Strength from her Silurian dictionary, even if it would have been the boring mainstream way. Because there’s a little too much of the garda bird’s fiery nature in the strength she’s granted Yuu with this word, and as her friend glows scarlet-crimson, she starts to radiate heat like a stone drawn from the heart of a campfire. A bird-like mask of bloodflame forms over her drudge mask as she grows - and grows, and grows, swelling to the same immensity as the building’s corner towers. Soon she’s straining to fit into the room, and stoops to pick them up and cradle them to her chest for their escape. Eko, Poncory and Hock Moncar all fit within her cupped palms.

But those palms are hot enough that it feels like being trapped next to a bonfire. It’s not quite enough to burn them, but the cocoon of sweltering, stifling heat is punishingly intense. Maybe it’s not so bad for Hock Moncar, who’s been drowning in the chill of the grave for long enough that any warmth is a blessing (and is a Fire Aspect besides), and Poncory is at least in a better position next to the gap between Yuu’s thumbs. But for Eko, with her aching shoulder, sweat already beading under her clothes...

... uuuugh. Yeah, fine. She’ll use some of the boring dictionary words next time instead of relying entirely on her own.

The attack that comes from within the imperial palace is completely unexpected. No one expected a giant masked figure wreathed in blood-red flame to tear apart one of the palace interior walls, then turn and stomp across the sickly-sweet flowers of the gardens before shoulder-checking one of the towers, sending it tumbling to the ground.

“Woo!” cheers Poncory, pumping his furry fist in the air. “Let’s go back for the coins!”

Yuu ignores him, instead stooping to pick up a man-sized rock and pelt it at the nearest intact tower, sending the archers cowering away from the bombardment. Well, apart from the one she hit, who isn’t so much cowering as ‘flat’. The whistle of arrows pelted at her doesn’t stop, though, as the dead-eyed soldiers of the Tairan military swarm like ants whose nest has been disturbed. Yuu lets out a hiss of pain, covering her face with her free hand.

Then there’s the crackle and roar of fire. Hock Moncar, is leaning perilously out of Yuu’s hand and punching orange-white bolts of flame over at the archers. “Get us out of here,” he gasps between punches.

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Yuu responds, and vaults the next wall along, landing in the dead streets of the capital with a crack of stone, and then sets off at a rapid pace leaving deep-scarred burning footprints behind her.

Exhausted by her exertions and the nagging ache in her shoulder, Eko leans back against her bestie’s uncomfortably hot fingers. Time slips away a bit, dragging out in stillness but distant through the pain. She feels herself go briefly weightless again as they hurdle another set of walls, though, and then a third time as they clear the outer layer that rings the capital. That means they’re out, then, and retreating off to the fallback point, away from the cold, dead city.

Ney, she thinks smugly as she passes out from the pain falls into slumber, is gonna have one heck of a hard time topping this.

The force of the impact shoots through his sword arm, jarring all the way up into his shoulder. But there’s no time to feel it because he needs to be moving now because another blow is coming and he has to give ground just to avoid the tip. Mahshid is hurt, and he doesn’t even know how badly because he doesn’t have even a spare second to check between concentrating on his own defence. He’s never fought someone so fast, so deadly, so precise in their onslaught that every single blow could kill him.

She’s deadlier than Sabah II, and Ney has fought her before. He can compare the two.

Stepping in, he flicks the parasol out of the way and cuts to her chest. But there’s plate under that mantle of black feathers, and she catches his blade on her forearm, cloth tearing and sparks thrown up. Still, the strength he put behind the blow (costly, costly; he has to watch his stamina) forces her back a step and stops the parasol’s tip seeking his throat. His heart pounds, his breath rasps in his throat and his lungs gasp for air; her heart is still, she does not breathe and from what little he can see of her flesh she does not sweat or tremble.

The lady he’s fighting takes a step back, the tip of her parasol moving in a sinuous motion through the air, never ceasing to be a threat. “Good, very good,” she purrs, those blood-red lips all he can see of her face under a helm shaped like a bird’s skull. “You have no small talent, sir. But then again, I’ve heard stories from my lovely adorable students about you, Jackal. You’d have been so beautiful as one of mine. And,” the light shifts, and Mahshid charges in, fists raised, burning like the sun. The lady pivots on one foot and kicks the priestess in the face, letting the force of the impact carry her past to smash into the Tairan throne, “you’re so much more interesting than this meathead. You could always come serve me. Not my lovely Sabah, no. Me.”

Ney paces around to put the lady between him and Mahshid. If she turns to put Mahshid down, she’ll be turning her back on him - and if Mahshid isn’t out for the count, she might be able to land a blow while he occupies the lady’s attention. If that would even make a difference. “I’m afraid you have me at something of a disadvantage,” he says in his best affable voice.

“Of course I do. You’re very good, young man, but not good enough. You don’t have spies in the right places. You ignore the spiritual in favour of the physical, and this is not the right war for such an oversight.” She smiles, flickering away into mist and suddenly she’s behind him but he’s seen this before and he gets his blade in the way, thankful that Taym forged it for him because mere steel would have long since shattered under the force of her blows. It still sends him skidding back, and he has to twist to leap over the certainly-poisoned needles that she launches from her off-hand. They sink into the stone walls behind him with a sound like masonry picks.

“Oh, my! You are fun, young man. Very fun. If only you’d died when I was looking for a Day. I could have made a real masterpiece of you.

“And as for who I am? You may address me as

THE BLACK HERON