Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“They didn’t need me.”

It’s a clear, temperate Vaugardian Tuesday, the world’s been saved again, and so there is light. The King’s pathetic security blanket starscape disappears, first, eaten up by disappear!, and leaves behind nothing but pale sky. In the square, the Change God’s bulb head finishes detonating; the river runs once more; the celebrating Dormontians stutter back into the hymns they were still singing mid-freeze and gasp, and fall like dominoes, and laugh and cry and et cetera.

With a sound like boiling water spilled on a frigid kitchen floor, the Favor Tree comes back to life. Sudden temperature differentials disturb the canopy around you and rip leaves from the branches to swirl in beautiful, utterly-predictable curlicues. Wind blasts stardust’s ragged hair into their face and does nothing to you at all.

“They didn’t – need me.”

It’s all very happy, yes, beautiful, poetic, et cetera. But you’re sick of happy endings, and you have your task. When their fingers leave your collar and your choke-proof throat to seize fistfuls of the Tree’s branches, you stop miming strangulation and speak: “Stardust.”

“Loop.”

“Stardust,” you say, doing your cute little lilt, because even right now you have standards. “Have you figured it out yet?”

It’s clear that the reset’s coming. Victory over the King wasn’t your intended teaching-tool for this lesson – the Housemaiden had a big emotional revelation and learned some ersatz of her big friendship shield after digging through Euphrasie’s office, to your surprise – but fortunately for you, stardust’s about as torn up about definitive proof that he’s the Saviors’ deadweight appendix as he would be if all his friends were dead. That’s what he’s like!

“Loop,” they say, “They – I – they beat the King on their own.” Already, the air’s gone cloying and treacle-heavy. “They – I got them all killed so many times, and now – they don’t – they never needed me?” Stardust raises their head and fixes you with one gimlet eye, a four-pointed Universe eikon seared into their retina, breath coming shaky. “They died so many times because of me and now –”

You resist rolling your eyes. There’s something so regressive about stardust when he’s like this, expression smeared and softened, not hardened, by repeated shocks – like some moon-faced infant who misses the keys you’ve been jangling in their face. Any new deprivation must be forever. Where are the sparkles! Are they coming back! Why would you do this!

“You can tell what’s about to happen,” you tell them, cruelly refusing them their jangly keys. “But everyone survived the King. And they certainly haven’t had enough time for a tete-a-tete with the Head Housemaiden, have they?”

He says something strangled.

“It’s not their deaths that cause it. Not quite yours, either. It seems that Euphrasie might be a little, teensy dark herring in our mystery!” And that might be a little too flippant, too mean. But it all blends into the same sludge of recrimination once it’s through those ears, you know! It’s likely just coincidence that stardust raises their balled fists to their face as you speak, still not crying but halfway to jamming knuckles into their eyes, or ripping out a few more tufts of sweat-sodden, leaf-filled hair.

You reach for their hands and take them softly before they can do either, your thumbs on the pad of their palm and fingers curling up their outer wrist. Not for the first time, you’re thankful for their lack of a flinch response to you, even if it’s a reminder that you’re a charcoal outline of a corpse and not a person. “Stardust. Why are you about to loop? You’re not talking to the Head Housemaiden. Not a single member of your party is dead. Why are you about to loop?”

“If they, if they don’t – need me – Loop. Loop. I wasn’t supposed to be here, I’ve been – I’m – they never needed me.”

Sigh. Sigh! Like you’re not aware! Way to fixate on the least relevant detail!!! “Well. We’ll be back to the start soon enough. You’ll have plenty of time to figure out what this means, stardust.” You give their hands an extra squeeze for good measure. Because you’re so nice.

“Because of me – because I was – because I was so pathetically – I needed – I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t need them –”

The sweetness is sour, rancid – that’s normal – it’s the end – that’s normal!

Except, he opens his grip; it’s a subtle motion, and you wouldn’t have caught it if you hadn’t been trained by years of third-floor trips to always watch the hands.

Their glove contains the most pathetic, crumpled leaf you’ve ever seen, caught out of the air by pure chance in the updraft, or maybe ripped off the Favor Tree during their little freakout. By coincidence, it’s held just barely equidistant between your faces.

That can’t count, can it?

“I wish I didn’t need them,” says stardust, and lets it go.

Rituals must repeat, but a rhyme is a repetition, too.

If the Universe could ever hear you, it can’t any more. It’s a lobotomized thing, obedient, a pathetic, blindedly unimaginative literalist – like the Ka Buan doll you once saw at an exhibition, the one they called a karakuri ningyo. Lacquered hands on preset mechanical paths, with a pen in the pointer finger, writing lines to a script, unable to deviate, with no mind to deviate. It neither loves you nor hates you. Rituals do not draw its attention or let it hear your voice; they simply wind its key.

But you know – from the shape of those paths – that it had something like a mind, once. From its scent, sweetness gone to char on a hot stove, a punishment for desire. From the fragment of cosmic fire it gave you, already dead and festering when it fell, like the Universe couldn’t bear to touch you without severing its hand. From its ideal servant, you, cute little Loop: a mouthless, starving mayfly with fizzling insect-killing skin, designed to die within days of conception so that the stars wouldn’t have to touch grass too long.

The Universe knew disdain, once, for the flesh. As above, so below: like everything and everyone else, it will not touch you.

This is how you know stardust remains God’s little favorite: when the Universe grants their wish, there is no celestial audience to sneer down at them, and there is no dismembered astral heart drifting down on the breeze for you to destroy before it makes landfall. (You could. If it gave you a chance, you could.) The karakuri ningyo’s lacquered porcelain finger with its sharp pen-nib tip simply flicks along its preset mechanical path, and opens them like a soft-boiled egg.

For the second time in the day, there is light.

Chapter Text

What do you call a wooden block tower that stays standing, even if you take away all the blocks?

Despite the pace Mira’s set, you’re not even halfway down the skybridge to the Sun Terrace before stark snowy light pours through the windows, brighter than the world, like winter skipping spring’s place in line.

It’s havoc. Bonnie shrieks and trips over their boots. Mira’s ringed, layered shield pours over you before the floaters are out of your eyes. Madame, already off-balance from fever and vertigo, makes a strangled sound and signs Scissors III, painting a filament-thin strip of death across several meters of irreplaceable historical architecture and at least one Change God statue’s neck. It’s all you can do not to indulge your panic reaction and throw hands with, apparently, the entire horizon!

…and then that’s it. No explosions or distant screams; no delivery on all that dramatic ominous babble from the last fifteen minutes of pitched combat; no Resurrection Craft; no secret double King. You all spend a solid ten seconds standing there in battle stances (except for Bonnie, who helps Madame stay up without tossing her cookies, and Madame, who doesn’t toss them).

“…what was that?” you allow yourself.

“It wasn’t the Curse, I’d recognize the Curse…” Mira makes an experimental gesture, shoulders still up near to her ears. “Everyone’s still moving, at least in Dormont. Maybe we should – oh, no, Madame, please don’t use Scan Craft you have a migraine –“

Dark diamonds sparkle over Madame’s opaque glasses before anyone can stop her; she bites back a Ka Buan curse you think translates loosely to flecks of glass under my eyelashes and fingernails and staggers back from the window, looking wan. Bonnie shoves their weight into her again to keep her upright. “No useful information,” she reports. “I’d appreciate a – a – feh, a tonic…”

“You might want to consider lying down, too,” you say, on account of you’re aware of the common sequelae of neurological Craft abuse and too many of them are “a stroke.” “Take a load off, we’ll talk to m’dame Head Housemaiden and get answers – she just unfroze, right? Bet she’s way fresher on Craft than us right now.”

“Don’t be dumb or I’ll drop you,” adds Bonnie, which appears to clinch it.

Despite her gritted teeth, Madame shuts her eyes behind her opaque lenses (hopefully), and lays down against a pillar while Mira sits to monitor her condition and apply stopgap healing, eyes flicking insistently down the hall towards the rooftop access, worrying at her fingernails. For your part, you provide a travel pillow to keep Madame’s head elevated, make a dumb joke everyone can hiss imprecations over, then walk Bonnie down the rest of the skybridge, slowly, eyes peeled for more weird light shows.

“‘Za?”

“Yeah, Bonbon?”

“It’s all carmelly again,” they say, pan in hand.

“Huh?”

“Like with the frizzed-up Sadnesses. Remember?”

Meaning the crest-carriers, with their cartoon sun heads in their isolated House chambers. Bonnie did mention a weird odor after those fights, though none of you were all that focused on incidental stuff like that. Carmelly, meaning – “Caramelly?”

“Uh-huh. Caramel-y.” They over-pronounce it like they do when Madame corrects them. “Except it’s all gross and burnt.”

You sniff. The air is sweet, with a carbon aftertaste, like a candy apple might smell if you tried to toast it like a marshmallow. Not overwhelming, like the salt-tinged leaden fug around the King was – did you make the B.O. joke you’d thought of during the fight, or were you too busy setting your broken fingers? – but undeniably there. Undeniably everywhere, actually. Which is weird! There’s wildflowers out the window, now, that aren’t frozen! Hills of clover! Birdsong! Fresh spring breeze!

You breathe them in and, woof. Candy apple on fire.

“...guess so!”

No time to think about it.

The Head Housemaiden’s just like Mira described her: a gigantic, darkless dreadnought of cloudstuff hair, multiple heads on you in height, the works. From the base of the Sun Terrace staircase, she’s a perfect, ghostly silhouette against the spring sky, haloed by the sun. (You swallow down a joke about staging.)

That said, the effect’s kind of spoiled when you reach the top of the stairs, because she’s facing to the left-hand fence, towards Dormont, with her neck craned and her hands frozen in a prayer clap. Change eikons glitter in her eyes like twins to Mira’s, so maybe she’s already scanning.

She looks… not really absent, exactly? But less alert than you’d like, considering she’s your best option for serious healing. In fact, you get close enough that you can hear her soft voice, with a lilting musical accent, before she notices you at all.

“There’s no way we can undo it now,” she murmurs to herself.

“M’dame Head Housemaiden?”

Despite your best efforts to be gentle about it, the Head Housemaiden startles; Bonnie startles at your side, in time to her, and you grip their hand. “Oh! Oh – excuse me, I was…”

“Trying to figure out the big glowy light?” There’s no way we can undo it now is suggestive, to say the least, but it’d be a little aggressive to try to call her on it this fast.

“Well, yes, but… I suppose that can wait.” She turns and peers over your shoulders (which is a bizarre experience for you, but, well, she has several heads on you; you’re not much of an obstacle to her) like she’s expecting someone to be hiding there. “You must be the, or… a Savior of Vaugarde…”

“Yup, and we’ve all got plenty to chat about, and Mira’s been waiting forever to see you –” She visibly perks up, aw. “But we’d all really appreciate it if you could lend a hand treating m’dame Odile’s fever, first, before her brain dribbles out her ears.”

“Oh, oh – alright!”

Turns out she can book, too! “F-fast…”

To her credit, even distracted, teary-eyed and a little bit side-hugging Mira, m’dame Head Housemaiden triages Madame’s medical concerns – Craft exhaustion, Scan neurological feedback leading to debilitating migraine, general King damage, and balsa-wood brittle old lady bones – super fast, then picks out an anesthetic spell and two different specialized healing techniques in maybe five minutes of work. Also, she congratulates you on saving an entire country with zero casualties, which, objectively speaking, is an incredibly impressive thing you just did, even if it’s hard to focus on that.

“I’m not sure what that was,” she admits, as she crafts some kind of nested bone-fixing, brain-deworming super-spell with her hand laid over Madame’s closed eyelids. “I have theories, but nothing I’m all too confident in.”

“Like…?”

“Well… when I woke from the King’s Curse,” m’dame Head Housemaiden says, apropos of little, “I should have left the Sun Terrace, so that I could check on the damage he’d done to the House. I was still very concerned, given only a few seconds had passed for me – it would only have been natural. But, instead, I stayed put! Right up until monsieur…?”

“Isabeau,” you contribute.

“Until Isabeau – it’s nice to meet you, and thank you for all you’ve done for Mirabelle! – came and fetched me.” She looks pensive. “There was a reason, too. Like a speech I couldn’t remember rehearsing, or a message I’d been asked to deliver. It was very important that I say it to the correct person when they arrived… but when that bright light flashed, it just slipped away. All of a sudden, I felt ridiculous just standing there like a lump, when there are so many things that must need to be done!”

“You’ve forgotten all of it?” Mira jingles one of her medallions, hand still pressed into Madame’s side and fulminating with Craft. “The King said some very strange things during our battle, and… it sounds almost like you had a premonition about it. Or a vision from the Change God…?”

“All of it! I don’t have even one lousy word. And you and I both know that the Change God is a very lazy deity, Mirabelle. I doubt they’d give me any kind of oracle.”

“If I can say something –?” The Head Housemaiden turns to you. “I guess you don’t remember, m’dame Head Housemaiden, but when I saw you, you said something like… there’s no way we can undo it now.”

“Oh?”

“Yup.”

“Hmm.” She meditates on that. “Undo what?”

“Was hoping you’d have an answer for that!”

“All that we’ve really done is save Vaugarde, and… I can’t imagine you’d want to go back and change that.” Mira rubs her temple. “If the flash made you forget, is that what can’t be undone? The whatever-it-is that caused it?”

“I suppose… what if –”

Because Madame’s who she is, she grips the Head Housemaiden’s wrist and says “Help me up” without so much as a groan to indicate she’s awake, and it’s only by virtue of your party’s full-body exhaustion that no one screams. There’s sweat on her brow and that particular worry indent she gets, you know, right there. She doesn’t look good.

“Madame Odile, I swear to Change –”

“Odile, is it? I would like to thank you, but you really should be resting –”

“We don’t have time for this. Help me up.”

“M’dame,” you try, trying not to let her anxiety get to you too hard, “What’s wrong?”

And. Well. Look. You’d love to be the guy who could be so in love that a missing crush was more important than his stress about the apocalypse. His priorities would be one hundred percent out of touch with reality, obviously, but you already picked an unrealistic kind of guy to be – a big dumb hero who’d quit his job to help a fretful Housemaiden and then also save the country, via the raw power of his big dumb heart. And you have done, not to be too self-congratulatory, a bang-up job of making that big dumb hero and his idiot heart exist!

But when Madame hisses “Siffrin,” it’s the first time you’ve thought about Sif since… about the third-floor landing. Definitely since the King, who for all his resemblance to them superficially – the hair shade and musical accent were hard to mistake – was way too overwhelmingly himself, a ceiling-height monster babbling ominous “Universe” nonsense and cheap dime-store philosophy, to rate a comparison to Sif. Also he was trying to kill you, and that was distracting. But you’re not distracted now.

Siffrin. Sif, who you couldn’t find before the Curse poured over Dormont like too much creamer over the dregs of lukewarm coffee. Sif, whose disappearance you have no actual explanation for. Sif, who – according to Mira – woke up looking like it was the end of the world for the first time since the world started ending. Sif, who’d have to still be in Dormont, frozen like everyone else until, what, fifteen minutes ago? He couldn’t have made it past the frozen woods. And whatever that flash was, it was coming from town.

You run.

Most of you understands that this is magical thinking, you know? Only – with everything you’ve learned about the undiscovered country – magical thinking apparently sometimes points to real, functional magic rituals frothing in your subconscious mind. Your thoughts go back to that moment, because you’ve been given an excuse to think about what you could’ve done differently. Sunny skies and celebrating villagers and laughter and tears and all of it. Mira’s hand in yours, always more calloused than anyone expects, taking the lead. Madame a few paces behind leaning on Euphrasie the beanpole. Bonnie, who didn’t understand.

When you see Sif’s hat blow through the Favor Tree clearing, shading your eyes against the sun, you’re not worried. You’re relieved! Kind of? All you really think is, well, he probably looks cute when he squints, but it’s tinged with relief. You slow down, even, and everyone slows down with you, rock that you are.

Because you’re outside the House, and the world’s already saved, and it’s windy. Losing a hat on a windy day doesn’t mean anything bad. Not to mention that Sif’s a long-time solo traveler and grown-crab adult, and isn’t going to run with scissors, slip on a banana peel and die just because none of your party’s there to babysit them. There’s not even a vague reason to worry, and so – because you’re, you know, capable of logic – you’re not worried, for once.

If you’d worried, maybe it would’ve been enough. (This, incidentally, is where the magical thinking kicks in.) If you’d held them in your mind with all the ardent terror you could muster, from the bad old days of your lonely childhood through to the end. Your lucky number is seven. If you’d thought, find Sif, if you’d thought it seven times seven times, then, maybe…

Well, but you don’t.

And you meet someone else beneath the Favor Tree.

Chapter Text

Vaugarde has never had any real love for the monarchy. Or any real hatred, actually. The country was founded by a mish-mash of agrarian proto-Houses that decided to share their literature and fix up the roads, no royalty necessary. It’s just not very relevant to your culture!

But your mother always liked foreign fairy tales. The Chevaliers do things our way, she’d say. That was her reason for never attending Change festivals, and for raising you in a cottage that’s only technically part of Dormont; that was why she loved translated picture books from foreign countries, about knights and castles. And because you were a Chevalier, and not allowed to go to the library and check out anything good until you were a teenager (and then only barely), that was what you read!

When you met the King, for the second and last time, he wasn’t a good match for your mother’s picture-book royalty at all. Instead of a soft, paling beard, he had darkless, stringy hair that hung in huge unwholesome curtains, stained by the grime of months of Sadness foot traffic. Madame Odile had to burn it to get through and it took hours, starting fires and stopping them as they froze.

Though you only got a tiny glimpse of his eyes as he used his time-distorting shockwave, they weren’t rheumed with age, either. His pupils were marked with something like a Change eikon – the rings-in-rings that Euphrasie’s blessing branded into you – but his own personal insignia, instead, the same four-pointed losange embossed into his toboggan-sized pauldrons. He might’ve been younger than Madame Odile under the armor, going by his voice, which had a lot of bass but not a lot of middle-aged creakiness. You’re not even totally sure he was actually crying!

Not wise, either. He looked like he hadn’t blinked in a very long time.

The person under the Favor Tree looks almost like him. They have darkless hair, and the same accent, like slow music. They have his losange in their eyes, and a crown, though theirs is made from wildflowers and not jagged dark metal. But…

In foreign picture books, kings – whether they’re wise or wicked – have princesses for daughters. Your mother’s favorite was a book about a darkless-haired, pale girl, blessed to have rubies drip from her lips when she spoke. She stayed in a stone tower in their castle and all day long she sang, and each ruby was more beautiful than the last.

In the pictures, she didn’t look like her father at all. She had a delicate bow mouth, and from it fell a lustrously-shaded jewel, to fall into waiting hands below. No dirt under her fingernails or lines on her skin; she could’ve been eight or eighteen or thirty. Some clever storybook Craft gave her art a whole different texture, too, softer and shinier than the aging mid-shade paper around her. You were told not to touch her for fear of disrupting the spell. Like you’d break her.

One night you ripped out her page, took it into the backyard and buried it, and even though your mother scolded you terribly you could never really explain why.

That’s what the person under the Favor Tree looks like. Like they shouldn’t be able to touch the world; like they’re made of something you shouldn’t touch. Like, for them to be here, something must have broken, somewhere. Even though they’re soft-eyed and their arms are dusted with freckles and they’re smiling at you, your stomach turns into a pit as deep as the sea.

“Hello, saviors,” they say, and their cheek is speckled with blood spatter, mixed in with the freckles.

“...Frin?”

Bonnie’s voice shakes like yours would, if you could speak. If you knew what to say.

The Princess is wearing Siffrin’s cloak. There’s blood on that, too.

Madame Odile crafts her spell – she must’ve been preparing it from the moment she saw them. Craft Break aleph bubbles across their skin and releases their inner energies – the kind any kind of combative Craft can ignite into a runaway reaction by the principle of contagion. You make your sign and follow-up with your Rondo, twirling for momentum and ignoring Madame’s wrenching sound of distress. The Princess has maybe a second to process before your whippoorwill-springy blade nails them right in their side and hurls them butt over teakettle into a tree.

There’s none of the reverb you’d expect from a well-typed hit, though. In fact, the answering burst of defensive energy doesn’t smell like leaves, wet soil or scissors, or the King’s awful miasma of iron-salt Craft, edged with raw cane sugar. It smells like nothing at all.

It doesn’t matter that that’s impossible (though it is; living creatures can’t not have a Craft type). The Princess is already springing back to land on the solid soil beneath your feet, one hand to the side of their head – holding a wound? Did you hit them harder than you expected? (Siffrin never takes that cloak off. If you ripped it – or are they even – don’t think about that.)

Isabeau steps forward, face pale, ready to take the first strike. You clap, once, decisively, and your Absolute Prayer Field pours over your party – even though your chest is complaining horribly of cooldown neglect, the white-hot knot of overused Craft tightening. Rings in rings coat your vision, ready to reflect an attack. “Madame Odile,” you hiss, not turning around, “You can’t fight right now – even the Head Housemaiden’s spells can’t stop a stroke! Take Bonnie and –”

And then.

It’s like bells ringing, inside your head – like the House’s alarm system way back when, loud enough to wake the dead, if you were sleeping two inches away from it. Or strapped to it. With your already-taxed nerves and all the CARROT matrix transforms you had to run to cast your spell, you get an instant, head-splitting migraine.

Absolute Prayer Field soaks up a little of the trauma, but your shield’s not tuned to repulse everything – otherwise it couldn’t let in air, or light – and this isn’t a recognizable combative Craft. Less like a dagger than a sliver of glass from a shattered window, flung at just the right angle to go straight through your skull and splatter your brains in the fresh grass. It’s all you can do not to fall flat on your face and break your nose as the rings drool and melt around you; instead you sink to your knees, just barely held up by your rapier, driven an inch into the soil. Isabeau crumbles in front of you, gripping his ears, and from Bonnie’s wail of distress Madame Odile must’ve been taken down too.

One hit.

All it took them was one hit.

“Saviors…” Their voice is a lilt – a sigh.

Euphrasie, where’s Euphrasie –

“Maybe this is a good thing,” says the Princess. “A blessing in disguise.”

What?

“A fight can be a way of working off tension, can’t it? As a spar! A getting-to-know-you sort of thing.”

Healing Craft works its way through your bones.

The din in your head fades enough for you to raise your chin and see the Princess gesturing at you with a weird, contorted sign like a pair of horns. Healing you. It’s inexpert, with all the novice errors you were cautioned about in first-aid class, but they’ve dumped so much power into it that it just doesn’t matter. “If Miss Chevalier can get the rest of you on your feet, we can keep going,” they say, an awkward smile on their face. Blood drips into their eyelashes. “I won’t get so tough about it next go-round.”

“What…” Your head whips around – Bonnie’s still there, and unharmed, thank Change, but they’re also still there. Euphrasie is “What – what happened to, to Frin?”

The Princess sighs. “I would really prefer to wait until you’re all less mad to talk about that. Miss Chevalier? Can you get everyone up?”

“What…” You huff, a little, and try to steady your voice; unmedicated, with all your stress and emotions blended into a big tizzy slurry, it’s hard for you to tell whether it’s regular mortal terror or incredulous fury that’s making your legs shake. “What did you do to Euphrasie?”

“Don’t worry.” The Princess spins a finger, vaguely, in the air. “I wanted to talk to you all, first. So I spelled her not to find us. She’ll be stuck going in circles for a bit, yet, unless she figures out not to step on any cracks.”

“But Craft can’t…”

“We’ll add that to the explanation later.”

You don’t exactly have a better option. Your Rondo can capitalize on a weak enemy or build a jackpot, but it can’t carry a duel. So you craft Shining Life to get Isabeau back on his feet, and Bonnie dribbles their remaining quarter-of-a-crafted-water in Madame Odile’s mouth. No betraying inexplicable super-spell removes your head as you work; no freezing-cold Curse crawls up your legs to taunt you for trusting someone this obviously suspicious.

It’s not until you’re all on your feet – Isabeau pensive, eyes a little unfocused; Madame Odile barely upright; Bonnie with a two-handed death grip on their pan; Euphrasie, somehow, nowhere – that the Princess makes their sign again, pinky and thumb like a curved pair of bull’s horns, that same smile on their face, and eyes soft and deep as the sea. “Want to try again?”

You don’t even think they’re making fun.

You grit your teeth.

You try again.