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There is already one family dead on this bitter night in Blumenthal. The Grieves are cold in their mill, their necks ringed with the marks of thick fingers around their throats miles down the road, and in the home of the Becke family, three vipers are sitting down to dinner.

“Mutti, let me get the wine,” Astrid stands as her mother, as is her way, fills each plate with plentiful helpings from each chipped serving dish and tureen and passes it over to the two boys. They brought out the fine dishware for this- our daughter is graduating Academy! How lovely it is to have a wizard in our family!

Poison is woman’s work and Astrid has found herself adverse to being associated with the typically feminine. Once Bren had called her beautiful and she had turned up her nose and asked him to call her handsome, instead. It was not lesser to be a woman, even in Zemni Fields where most women were content to tend to their houses and the division of labor was merely habit than something enforced by rigid expectation of gender roles and both of her parents were women anyway and thus she had lived in an exception to these unspoken rules, but she still felt being the only girl in a trio made her stand out too much. Ikithon used her as an example for the other two too often, as if the big strong men would break harder to see her trembling. It never quite worked the way he wanted, but it did give Astrid a strong aversion to being viewed through feminine lenses.

And yet here she is with the rat poison she had ferreted from the mill’s supplies, having decided that after watching Eadwulf personally dispatch his parents she wanted distance from the act. She glares at the pellets in her hand and then drops them one by one into the bottle of wine that would have cost her parents’ a sizable chunk of coin to purchase- all to celebrate their precious girl, as if they did not spit in the eye of the Empire she served.

She, Wulf, and Bren do not drink any of the wine in their cups, swirling it around and toasting, but always filling her mothers’ glasses as they ask for more. It has been so long since they indulged and so they glut themselves on it until Mama suddenly freezes, her eyes going wide. She coughs delicately at first and then bloody foam pools on the corners of her pretty lips. She staggers back, upsetting the chair, and is dead before she hits the stones.

Mutti follows, her body giving out slower. She rises to go to her pretty blonde wife, but then clutches her stomach in agony as the poison eats away at it. She grips the table to support herself while the three vipers stare at her, wine in hand, smiling as if they know a secret. Mutti does not see the boys- only her handsome daughter with her serpent-green eyes and her boyishly shorn hair, so different from the little girl running wild through the barley.

“You are not my Astrid.” She raises a thin finger and points it at her, accusingly, her glasses reflecting the candlelight until they flash white like the tail of a frightened deer, signaling to a herd that no longer exists. “Changeling.”

And then she dies and the Empire is stronger for it.

There was a bar called the Armored Bear in Rexxentrum and it was an establishment known to be cursed. It was housed in a large white-bricked building in the Shimmer Ward built some twenty years ago in some new architectural style that was all the rage in Emon and shared its space with a curio shop and an accountant’s office that had remained open since its conception, but the space in the corner now housing the aforementioned tavern had changed owners no less than sixty times, each one renaming and rebranding it. For whatever reason, the little hole in the wall tavern space could not keep business and everyone who tried to be the one to make it profitable had failed miserably. The Armored Bear was the most recent, holding steady at a record-breaking two years on novelty alone because they brought a Tal’Dorei flair to the space, but people still whispered about curses, wondering how long until these proud, lofty western sorts went back across the sea and left it vacant again for someone else to try their luck.

It was easier to assign it a curse than it was to think logically- the building was built to accommodate Tal’Dorei weather, so it was stifling in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. The apartments above the three businesses had remained devoid of anything but excess storage and rats and the occasional desperate beggar who came in through the back stairs. Curio shops and accountants were not meant for lingering and so they could operate under these conditions perfectly fine, but no one wanted to be miserable while trying to enjoy a pint. The Armored Bear hadn’t bested a curse- it simply adjusted to cater to people who were fine with extremes and was, honestly, probably laundering money to the Myriad anyway.

Astrid was more certain of this than ever when she and Eadwulf walked in and the bartender began to sweat despite the tavern being colder within than it was without. She shook fresh snow out of her hair and walked to the back. The barmaid that took their order had a black eye and looked at Astrid with sympathy when she turned her head and revealed her scar. She ignored the look- she was finished with pity and sympathy. She wanted to rage against something and perhaps be raged at in kind.

“What will we do?” Eadwulf asked her, finally, after so long in miserable silence. They had just finished watching Bren expose the entire Volstrucker program on the streets of Rexxentrum, the last ten Weltzschmerz running to aid him as if they wouldn’t come running back to the two of them when they realized they had nowhere else to go. He had not exposed the two of them directly, but there was no way of hiding it. If Astrid’s sleeves rode up, the world would have new scars to look at and they would know where they came from and wonder what crimes she had committed that she did not confess them alongside Bren.

“Nothing has changed,” she said, simply. Wulf raised a thick brow.

“The Assembly will be dismantled. There is nothing left for us here. We could go elsewhere, Astrid. Marquet, perhaps. You would excel in Yios.”

That was more words than Wulf usually spoke at once, which told her everything about how he was feeling- desperate, cornered, an animal worrying that he will be caged. They were trapped at the bottom of a high tower they believed they were racing up and the ladder was gone. Bren was willing to walk away from this Empire and not touch it again, knowing what he had done to it, but Astrid was not nearly so cowardly. If I have failed this Empire somehow, then it is up to me to fix it my way.

“I do not want Yios, Wulf,” she muttered into her stein, the foam brushing her lips. “I want the place I was born in. I want the future I was promised when I let that man torture me.”

Eadwulf fell silent. In another corner of the tavern, two men were talking loudly. “No, no, that’s a changeling, Perry.”

“Wot? What do you mean? It’s the same difference, innit?”

“No, it ain’t.” The older man rubbed at his graying beard. “A changeling is when a fey takes your baby and puts one of its own in its place.”

A third man, middle aged and exhausted, at their table sighed. “A changeling is when a human and a fey fuck and make a baby that can shapeshift.”

“Thought that was a doppelganger,” Perry squinted.

“It is and it isn’t, but- fuck, we’re gettin’ off the point here. I’m talkin’ about cuckoos, right? They’re birds that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and they get too big and crowd out the other baby birds until they starve.”

“And that ain’t the same logic as a changeling?”

“No, ‘cause a changeling can mimic a human, but the cuckoo can’t hide what it is.”

“So why do the mama birds keep feedin’ it, then? Can’t they tell it ain’t one of theirs.”

“It’s an egg in their nest- what else would it be? They ain’t smart, Perry.”

“Right, right, but it’s the principle of the fact- it ain’t a curse, it ain’t a blight, it’s just nature,” the older man nodded towards his compatriot while Perry continued to squint, confused. The conversation continued, pointlessly, but Astrid drifted away, lost in memory. She had never forgotten Mutti’s face in that horrific moment at their dinner when her far weaker Mama swooned as the poison took hold and the way she had looked when she pointed at her.

Changeling.

She had been so convinced that she was not the daughter she raised, that Ikithon had killed her darling baby girl and replaced her with a wicked, evil thing, but more and more Astrid had come to realize she had always been this way, constantly told she was limited and determined to prove otherwise. She had always been a cuckoo, stuck in a small nest, craving more than what anyone would or could give her, and no one had been smart enough to see it, calling her a curse as if nature didn’t make more sense.

She wondered, idly, if Ikithon had shown her more consideration, how many would she have pushed out of the nest to maintain his attention? Even Wulf? Even Bren?

Perhaps it was time to embrace what she was and find a new nest to infiltrate.

There are only three Volstrucker left in Rexxentrum with two on the wind- one still loyal, deep undercover in Xhorhas, and one traitor that has consumed Ikithon so utterly that Astrid believes the old man will go mad with obsession. He tasks Miriam to be his annex as he deals with violent headaches and dizzy spells and no expense is spared for clerics to attempt to heal of him of the burns that cover the left half of his body. Unlike her, Ikithon does not wear the mantle of Bren’s anger with pride, though Miriam puts on a grand show to pretend she does in his stead, which Astrid considers to be disingenuous and her attempting to put her in her place- you’re not special because you want people to know you’re scarred. I can do that too..

When the clerics can do nothing, Ikithon covers his ugliness in illusion magic, while the two birds of prey in his care circle each other, each desperately wanting what the other has- Miriam to be a perfected version of what a Volstrucker could be; Astrid to be close enough to Ikithon to kill him.

There is talk of finding new potential students to fill in the ranks of the Volstrucker who were lost, but what comes to Trent’s tower in the Candles are not bright young minds fresh from the Academy, but twenty-six children ranging from fourteen to barely twenty, all of them filthy and fresh from the streets or clean and prettied up in brothel girl silks or falling somewhere in between. Most must have been pulled from the Mudtop Ward, but a few Astrid knows came directly from Zemni Fields because she recognizes people she once knew in her youth in their eyes and the shape of their mouths- grown-up versions of the toddling infants who had been there when she was just a tailor’s daughter. In their eyes, she sees herself in braids holding them as babies while Mutti measures their mothers for new dresses.

He has found new ways to hurt her, it seems, despite the fact that she has done nothing to disappoint her. The truth of it- and it is a painful truth- that she will discover later is that none of this had anything to do with her at all.

Trent explains that these children will be the Weltschmerz, a new group of Eldritch Knights, not wizard assassins like the Volstrucker. He chose them from the fields and the streets and the brothels because they are strong and desperate and hungry. It is Eadwulf and Astrid’s task to train them- her in magic, him in swordplay. They will be attending the Academy, though that is only a smokescreen. It occurs to Astrid that this is not something he got permission for.

They are not elite agents for the crown as the Volstrucker were, but a strike force built to torment Bren. All of this, always, for Bren and only Bren. Trent claims that it is to bring him to his full potential, that he is not angry or disappointed but believes that Bren is growing. Astrid knows better. This is vengeance, pure and simple.

And all the while, she is an afterthought.

There were twenty-five Weltzsmerz of the original twenty-six that went into Aeor, eyes opened to the limitless potential of something great and terrifying and beyond evil that even Astrid in her boundless ambition could not say she was not happy to have been passed over for. Only ten walked out, eyes opened to the reality of the world and ready and willing to follow a new leader.

They chose Bren, as far as she was concerned, when they joined him at his pulpit and caused the collapse of the Assembly, leaving Astrid, her secrets promised to be hidden beneath her long sleeves, with no ladder to grasp and no tower to scale. As expected, they came to her when it became clear to them that Bren had no desire to lead. He exposed the rot in the Empire and now her people would make its judgments and claims, while he walked away. Like a coward. Like a failure.

And so they came to Astrid. She’d call herself the consummate second choice, but that would imply she had ever been chosen at all in her life. To be chosen second was a greater insult. Better to be ignored than to be the consolation prize.

She had known this would happen, had rehearsed a speech to give them when she turned them away at her door, but one look at Wulf peering over her shoulder, his thick brows furrowed in quiet sympathy and she cracked. He was all she had left in the world and like abandoned puppies, he could not see them left to crawl back to where they came from as if anyone in their position could ever lead a normal life. Even if she handed them gold and sent them off on a ship to another continent, they were not meant for the world any longer. Once something has been broken, it cannot be left in the wild. Bren was the exception.

He often was.

So she sighed and she brought them into her home and she fed them, these miserable souls, and she pondered what she would make of them and herself and Wulf, these wild birds with their clipped wings and their cunning eyes.

These mage-killers in a society that now feared mages.

It came to her so suddenly she had burst out laughing, startling Wulf as he stared into the fire, and was unable to explain for five minutes, so overwhelmed with how obvious it was. There was no Assembly, no. She would never be an Archmage the way she had dreamed of in this new version of her Empire, but the Empire yet remained and Dwendal was losing control of it. He had gone so long with the necessary evil of Ludinus that he no longer knew how to rule without him. A parasitic symbiosis now in disarray, like a hound with a tick whose bite made it feel alive suddenly languishing in its anemia the second there is nothing left but an itch. Left to his own devices, he would be vulnerable to the promises of more wizards he could distrust and make use of. He would be even more vulnerable to one who came bearing dogs built specifically to kill his most ardent enemy now that the war was coming to a close and all he had was the shattered remains of his credibility as a ruler.

His nest of owls was in dire need of a cuckoo to keep other cuckoos out of it while he was in this liminal space of his rule.

There is yet more to the story. Before Trent takes to covering himself in illusions and pretending to be fine even when he must leave events early and his hands shake too much to put the crystals under the skin of his new recruits, there is a time when Astrid thinks that she won’t be the one ignored, that Ikithon has something special planned for her and only her. She knows he is in need of someone who understands, someone who can lead, someone who has been right there the whole time, bold and eager to please and suffering with dignity.

When he does, in the end, choose Miriam, the imperfect creation, of course Miriam is cruel about it, standing over her with their complimentary scars and that misty glass eye that she thinks makes her so much more desirable because it means she suffered more.

“Why did you think it would be you, Astrid?” She laughs. “He has only ever loved Bren.”

Miriam thinks herself Bren’s precursor, a fact she both resents and loves, because in Bren’s absence she remains the favorite. Eadwulf and Astrid are only the spares, the glorious accessories to Bren’s rising star. She called him Roschen to demean him, but also to single him out- she is the Dornroschen, the dark and wicked Briar Rose, and Bren is her little shadow.

Astrid wonders if she picked poison to kill her parents because it was Miriam’s weapon of choice. She thinks of their identical haircuts, their matching scars, and hates and hates and hates how she modeled so much of herself based on someone else who succeeded and yet was still passed over. She is not even the perfected version of a poor prototype, just a cheap imitation. Even the things she had first, Miriam now wears better.

An older Volstruckter who died before the rest were lost, before Bren ever broke, one who had been part of the original flock that birthed Miriam and was nearly dead from Residuum poisoning by the time Astrid met them, had said that Miriam fought Trent at every opportunity, that her survival was out of spite.

”Her suffering was so beautiful to him,” the mage with their veins glowing with poison, their muscles so atrophied they had needed a wheelchair to get around had told her with the wistful tone of someone who was still loyal to that which killed them. ”The rest of us did what he wanted and never fought.”

And because Astrid didn’t break, because Astrid didn’t suffer, she was of no use to him. She was for breaking, not to be broken. Maybe he knew he couldn’t, that she was made of stronger stuff. Eadwulf, obviously, was as sturdy as an oak and used religion as his shield, claiming that it was his Fate to be put through these trials and that the Matron would not give him a destiny he could not handle, but she had no excuses, nothing but stubborn pride and an endless fount of determination and ambition.

Maybe it scares him a little that she will not bow. Maybe that makes her better than Bren and Miriam both and it is not for lack of strength, conviction, or ambition that she is passed over, because that miserable old fool has decided she is unfit for his world born of cruelty. Rather than break in order to be reforged into that perfected form of crystalized potential that Ikithon craves in his pupils, she has been perfect from the start. He cannot fathom someone who will not tell him no, because the most dedicated hounds, to him, are the ones waiting for the moment to bite.

And the most terrifying birds are the ones who have found their way into your nest, acting as if they have always belonged there and refusing to conform to the others in your care, constantly demanding more.

As she stews in her disappointment and fear that Ikithon has figured her out, she wonders how many times patriotism and loyalty kept her from poisoning his meals when she had the opportunity and if she could do it now while he was still dismissing her and if his suffering would be what strengthened her the way he seemed so content to believe theirs strengthened him.

In the end, she decides to wait.

There was a Volstrucker in the castle, handsome and blonde and wearing her scars proudly, as obvious to anyone looking as something as Other as a cuckoo in a starling’s nest, and yet she was allowed in, the gates thrown wide for her and her procession. She had stood before King Dwendal and told him the answer to his concerns about whether or not Ludinus would return and strike at his soft underbelly when he least expected it because he had not realized the extent the adder had poisoned his well. He was reticent, of course. She had prepared her speech with the knowledge that he would disagree and fight her at every turn, but, as expected, his eyes landed hungrily on Eadwulf’s sturdy frame, on the good Empire youth standing behind them with their swords and their maze-like tattoos covered by long white sleeves. She looked every part a wizard, but they looked like soldiers, hungry hunting dogs wishing for a task. He could not have his hounds without the one who held their leash. She was an acceptable evil in exchange.

Of course he said yes to her terms.

And now she was here in these walls, rife with the decay of an age dying. You could smell the rot in the halls, hidden by an overwhelming amount of musk and oud perfume. She preferred it to the smell of daffodils and roses and all the pretty little flowers Trent had kept in his windowboxes, in neat little rows in his gardens. When the people of Rexxentrum rushed the Candles and tore through the deserted towers, hunting for justice before the Crownsguard called a halt to the riots and the Soul slipped in to steal everything that Astrid hadn’t already taken in anticipation of this very moment, she had smiled to herself from the shadows as she watched their muddy boots trample Trent’s garden into oblivion. His legacy was so tarnished not even the good he put into the world went unsullied.

And now she was here, holding his legacy in both hands and using it as a rope to replace the ladder Bren kicked away when he revealed Trent’s machinations and exposed the Assembly’s crimes to the public. She climbed it, hand over hand, into Castle Ungebroch and found herself a place among the soldiers. Eadwulf was Captain of the Weltzschmerz, but she was the Commander of what was effectively a witch-hunting squadron. Find Ludinus. Find the missing Assembly members. Find anyone who would undermine my reign.

And like a good cuckoo, she preened her feathers and cooed a starling’s song and Dwendal, the same way he had fallen to Ludinus, fell to her.

It wouldn’t last. The old man was wily beneath his arrogance and foolhardy belief that a mutual enemy made a mutual friend. And she was hardly going to stop her ascent halfway. She had to keep going.

She had not expected to find someone else in the castle climbing the same tower.

Princess Suria was a vision, no truer paragon of what a Dwendalian noble could be with her wheat-colored hair turning artfully silver and her sharp gray eyes like mountain clouds swollen with rain. Her own perfume was heavy and exotic- neroli and pear and amber and likely imported straight from Marquet. The smell of it made Astrid’s eyes water, not from the intensity, but from the way the pear stood out stark over the other scents and yanked on her memory. Mutti had given Mama, heavy with pregnancy at the time, a bottle of expensive perfume with notes of pear, bought with coppers she had pinched for a whole year for Barren Eve. The bottle had lasted until Astrid was five with how carefully Mama used it. Now every time she smelled pears, her stomach flipped, expecting to find Mama at her left shoulder and a holiday celebration on the rise.

Astrid brushed off the effects, bowing low to hide the stinging tears until she could get them under control and to calm the fluttering of her heart. Suria was smiling when she stood straighter, amused, and only discipline killed the heat that wanted to rise to her cheeks at the shame of being looked at like a pet hiding its piss puddle on the carpet with its own tail.

“You’ve been wandering around as if you own the place,” Suria said, with neither judgment nor approval. She had a stately, neutral tone of voice that had likely come from years of making certain whatever politics she held were not held so fervently that she could be considered dangerous. The granite cliffs of her eyes spoke to a thousand bitten tongues. Instantly, Astrid’s shame fled.

She was not the first cuckoo in this nest.

The best response to even the vaguest idea of an accusation was none at all. Astrid tilted her head, making it impossible to ignore the scarred side of her face. Suria didn’t flinch from it. In fact, she took a step forward.

“You want so much, don’t you? Do you think I don’t recognize it, even in someone below me? You were born in the barley and I was born beneath a rose trellis and yet we still hunger for that little bit more than what we were supposed to have. I shouldn’t have been a princess and you shouldn’t have been what you are, and yet here we are. And if we managed to get this far, how much farther can we go still?”

Spoken like a true manipulator. Astrid had fallen victim to such honeyed words before, though Trent had never crafted them so personally. She could claim herself immune all she liked, but she was seen by someone of a similar station, who understood what the others did not because they had been the same. Not the spare. Not the example. Not the weak link in the chain whose sole purpose was to prove how much stronger the other links were.

She could be cautious and eager for the camaraderie. Just like her, Suria had also longed for someone who understood and had finally discovered her perfect match.

“Tell me, your highness,” Astrid murmured. “Is it you or your husband that is at fault for not being able to conceive?”

Suria’s eyes darkened. She was pushing too close to an age where bearing children would be impossible for a human and the rumors across Rexxentrum blamed her for being barren, because no one wished to cast aspersions on whether their king had sired a son who could not continue his line.

“It isn’t me. I know it isn’t. The clerics and healers and doctors have all said it is my husband and yet Dwendal still insists that they’re lying.”

“Strange how they continue to pass blame on you and yet Dwendal has not insisted his son seek another wife.” Anyone with sense would see the math didn’t add up. Suria smiled wickedly- a test had been passed. Yes, Astrid was clever and Astrid knew what it was like to be in a position to not be listened to. Suria was lowerborn. She was a cog in the Dwendalian machine- a lovely, highborn cog, but so far beneath the great Dwendalian line that her entire existence was only meant to make the rest of it work. Like Astrid she had been placed politically in a position where she could never advance and would always be looked down upon.

Oh yes, this could be a match made in the Hells, themselves.

Suria looked Astrid over carefully. “I think with everything that is happening, the Dwendalian line has had its day, ja?”

Astrid would not incriminate herself by giving an enthusiastic yes, but her own wicked grin, tugging at the edges of her scars, could not be contained. “What would you ask of me, an assassin and a wizard, to do about it, your highness?”

“I want a child so I have claim to the throne.” Suria spread her fingers over her empty womb, a soft smile playing across her features- more than the ambition she truly did desire motherhood. A child could be many things. It was beneficial to her that Astrid only see the child as a pawn that could get them both to the top. “Anything else that happens is precisely what they deserve for how they have treated me. Can you do that? Can you find a way to help me conceive? And in return, I will give you what Ludinus Da’leth had.”

Higher and farther than even Trent Ikithon had ever reached. Astrid pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth to stifle a hiss of pleasure. At last the world had turned over and showed her its belly.

“I will do what I can, your highness.”

Suria shook her head. “I will give you the opportunity to do more. You are no longer the mere commander of those Assembly-hunting dogs. Your large and imposing wolf can do that all on his own. From now on, you are bound to me and me alone.”

She should have balked at that- recoiled and snarled and snapped her beak and mantled her feathers. But she had once longed for solace from Bren and Wulf and now Wulf was content and Bren had fled and she was all alone with her ambitions. Suria wanted a promise that Astrid would not take this to Dwendal and Astrid wanted more than just the soldiers’ commons. If she wanted to walk these halls as freely as she wished, she needed to have someone’s ear and a task for the crown that was far more pressing than watching for the snakes at the door.

She lifted her hand, her sleeve riding up to expose her tattoos- an implicit threat; a bird flashing its colors in a threat display. Suria saw it for what it was and shook her hand with the one bearing her wedding ring- two women groomed as tools showing off the claws of their station as they made a devil’s agreement to destroy an Empire from the inside out.

There are twenty-six members of the Weltschmerz and only five of them are truly feminine, the rest a hodgepodle of performative masculinity, right down to the ones whose genders are as incomprehensible as their patriotism isn’t. Astrid identifies more with the filthy farm girls with their bound breasts and shorn hair with hate for the Xhorhassian scourge and a love of the Empire in their eyes than she does the five girls yanked by their silks out of the Mudtop Ward’s favorite brothel, but those girls do not come to her wanting. They eye her up like stray cats scenting the desperate butcher’s ill intent. Perhaps they know that they are the starlings and she is the cuckoo that will push them out of the nest when they beg for scraps at Ikithon’s feet. They are not cuckoos, themselves. She can already tell.

The brothel girls are only here because they no longer want to survive falling into the arms of the rich and powerful who want to hide their shame in the muddy ward. These she learns are the real cuckoos in the nest that Trent has built, but they are disguised as pretty, delicate songbirds with silk ribbons in their hair and long fingers made to caress, to stroke, that long to sink their talons into the exposed throats of the bastards who lie on top of them, hungry and needy and seeing them as little more than dolls for their pleasure.

Like calls to like. They are mean, vicious cruel little things and they see in her the same hatred for Ikithon that they feel. They knew not what they were doing when he picked out the strongest and hungriest from the flock of caged birds in the Voliere and offered them the chance to attend the Academy, but by the time the first incisions were made and the crystals were placed beneath their skin, it was too late and they swallowed the pain as they had swallowed all previous pain. They learned enough magic to pretty up their ink and hide it beneath their white robes and Academy uniforms so Ikithon will never see, but the first time Astrid sees Guss Ramiel’s sleeve ride up and sees the black markings have been turned to gold, she finally accepts that she is among her flock.

Tinsel, Guss, Lillian, Severine, and Julia. Her girls. Her fellow cuckoos. Her only allies besides Eadwulf who concerns himself with the training of the other Weltschmerz, turning them into soldiers and magical warriors whose sole goal is protection, but really they are only here to punish a lost sheep. She hates them all, but in finding affection for these girls she finds affection for the ones who step aside, because they fear she will upset the delicate balance and return them to lives of mediocrity. They do not know they are set up for slaughter. They can never know. She is not capable of telling him.

But her flock know and have always known, because they know what it is like to be discarded, ignored, crafted as something to pleasure or harm another. Tinsel was an eldest daughter to a family that wanted a son and when they got that son they sent her away to find her own fortune and all she found was Madame Dubois at the Voliere who gestured her in and promised her room and board and then never let her go. Guss escaped from an awful place in the Hespet only to fall back into the arms of another cruel madame when there was no job she could do as well as sex work, damned eternally to something she’d been forced into. Severine who left Othe because her parents could not handle the person she was and how it did not match the person they believed her to be and found safety in the Voliere because at least she was accepted. Julia who was constantly belittled and never allowed to be smart or ambitious or anything but pretty and dumb and strong.

And Lillian, the youngest of them all- too young to be in the position she was in, covered in burn scars underneath her clothes and starved so much that she was smaller than she should be, all because her family hurt her to make her other siblings behave, as if she were born solely to be the victim that made others act.

She is all of them and they are all of her, and they open their arms and embrace her as an elder sister, and they ask her, how do we make him go away.

And all Astrid can say, because she knows how dangerous and clever and aware of her ministrations Ikithon can be is, slowly.

There was no slow death quite like Assassin’s Folly.

It was a difficult poison, courted only by the very stupid or the very ambitious, so rare as to keep those who use it clean of suspicion, especially if they were sparing in their doses. One drop in a teacup once a week and you’d have a dead man in a year and no one would think anything of it, especially if the man was old. No cleric could stave off the ravages of time. His organs failing was simply the Raven Queen cutting the strings that tethered his fate to this world. Tragic.

Astrid had tried to grow it in Ambition’s Call or out in the gardens near Ikithon’s country home in the hopes of camouflaging it among the bastard’s precious daffodils, but it would not take to the soil anywhere but along the Silver Falls. If he knew what she had tied to do, he kept his silence. With all the subtle punishments she had endured disguised as teaching exercises, she could not longer keep track of what was there for her to learn from or was merely inflicted because she was Astrid. She settled the debate by learning from all of it.

She did not try to poison him because he had too many vipers on hand to not know how to avoid it, but that slow death could be a fitting end for another old man. She worked tirelessly every day teleporting to Silver Falls, taking cuttings, brewing the delicate poison with her knees in the mud, her mouth covered by her scarf. She would then return, sweaty and filthy, and pass the vial to Schultz, the princess’s personal butler, who would have it dropped in Dwendal’s cup in time for afternoon tea. By the time the cups were served and the teacakes arranged, Astrid was there in her robes of Dwendalian red, her lengthening hair done up in a circlet crown braided with sprigs of barley as a sign of patriotism. A good, clean wholesome woman of the Empire- pay no mind to her scars or the component pouch on her hip. She was no Assembly mage, but a glorified hedgewitch for the daugher-in-law he was growing to resent.

Over and over the same scenario played out- Eidys, bored and disinterested and complaining of the pretext that Dwendal actually cared about them; Suria determined to convince her father-in-law that he would have his heir and Astrid was the key; and Dwendal staring at her the whole time with utter contempt.

She relished in his contempt, because it was honesty she had never received from anyone else. People lied to her and called her pretty or called her strong or called her everything under the sun but they offered her no opportunity to accompany such praise. She was pretty (she still preferred handsome) yet no man nor woman had offered a hand to her other than Wulf or Bren; she was strong yet she was so often overlooked; she was everything and yet she was treated like nothing.

Dwendal looked at her and saw a threat. She wore his crest and the suggestion of the barley crown of a Zemni Fields Highsummer Lady and yet these were all distractions to hide her wolf’s teeth. She was a mage and the mages he had resented and made use of for ages had caused strife in his Empire. He saw her as a part of a system he had abolished who had found an excuse to slip free by offering him protection from those who escaped his justice. No wolf had ever become a sheepdog. He watched her closely and she preened her cuckoo’s feathers, because even knowing what she was, he saw value in feeding her and keeping her in his nest.

He saw value in her, which was a kind of love she had not had from someone above her in so long. And that was the trick- the knife under the ribs. You cannot kill that which does not love you in some way.

There was nothing to be done in the aftermath of the so-called Mighty Nein’s escape from the Lionett estate but to walk away. Thoreau Lionett dogs their heels as they walk back through the manor to the front door to collect their gathered soldiers who had spread out to cover all avenues.

“You’re not going to chase after them?” He asks, hesitantly, as if there is a part of him that hopes she will say no. Parental affection and patriotism can rarely coincide, so she wonders if there is another reason why he wants them to spare the rod and spoil his child.

She finds she doesn’t care and Eadwulf disavows him of the notion that any of them ever will. The Weltzschmerz fall into lockstep as they head out the front door in their uniforms of white and red, murmuring their disappointment at not getting to finally do what they had been created for.

Bren had seen them. Bren would know what was coming for him.

But she had also seen Bren.

Astrid orders the Weltzschmerz to retire to a tavern while she and Eadwulf send messages to Trent. The answer is exactly what she expects- she was right to stand down and not pursue them into the mountains. She lets the sending stone fall into her bag and falls against a dogwood tree gone dead with the kiss of fall in the air.

Eadwulf is always quiet, but his head so rarely is. He looks around to see if they are alone and whispers his thoughts out loud. “He was surprised.”

“We should not have survived. We were like ghosts to him.” She feels smaller all of a sudden, like she’s a child wearing these black robes, her tattoos are merely done up in charcoal. The three of them did not know each other as children beyond in passing- the miller’s son, the Ermendrud boy, the tailor’s daughter. Sometimes she wonders what it would have been like if they had been friends from the start, if that bond had started early enough that they could define it outside of what Trent made of them. Seeing Bren outside of the covenant is a knife in her heart. She feels a more bitter sting at his betrayal than she ever did about her mothers’ if that betrayal had even really existed. She still does not want to linger on the idea that Bren was right.

“I do not think he wanted to kill us, Astrid.”

“But he would have and we would have killed him and there is nothing else to it. We do what we must, Wulf. For the good of the Empire.”

He stares at the back of her head when she turns and walks away. Trent’s voice pops into her head. It takes less than twenty-five words for Trent to confirm his orders, but to dress her down, he comes at her from his favorite angle- mind games. He could wait until she is back, but no, that would be too easy. Better he do it here while she still has orders to follow and children to lead.

He accuses her of hesitating, contradicts Eadwulf as if he had been listening in somehow and likely was- Miriam had insisted they remove their Veilers on away missions, because she and Wulf couldn’t be trusted, that perhaps the reason Wulf teleported them away and they survived with minimal damage was because they had been warned. Every time she slips her Veiler back on, she sees Miriam’s distrust in her rise.

As she remains useful and her suffering has not yet ripened enough for Trent’s pleasure, she cannot be executed for her failures to follow orders. She slips the Veiler on to remove Miriam’s eye from her and stalks to the tavern.

The brothel girls who stick to her side like burrs in her cloak are waiting outside, mugs of mulled wine in their hands. Julia almost drops hers in her enthusiasm to wave her over and Astrid feels her heart lurch. She gives Eadwulf a look and he almost smiles, definitely nods, and slips inside to drink with the others.

Tinsel shoves an extra mug into her hands. “Are we really not following?”

“No. Mt. Mentiri is dangerous. He wants us to come back.”

Guss sighs and throws herself dramatically over a rusted chair in one of the few outdoor seating spaces. “Ugh. Really? Does he not trust us?”

He does not trust me. Astrid sips her drink. It tastes like Harvest’s Close in Rexxentrum with Eadwulf walking between her and Bren with his hands in their pockets. It tastes like dancing until the hall closes and they spill out into the street to dance more under the moon. It tastes like everything she can never have again. “He has other plans.”

“And what about you?” Tinsel pitches forwards to whisper into her ear. Astrid nearly drops her wine in an attempt to make absolute certain that the Veiler has attuned itself to her and is working. “We’re ready to get rid of him when you are.”

She looks at their needy, hungry faces. It is so strange to have people who would kill for her at her word. It’s a taste of what Trent has and it is bitter, because she knows too much. These girls were made to die. They are just too young to realize it. She can use them however she sees fit, but they are going to die in the pursuit of her goals. They will make that man vanish and not all, if any, will see what that world will look like. She hasn’t had the heart to tell them. Maybe she never will.

She’ll still use them, because that’s what she was made to do. The timing just has to be right.

So she sips her wine and she remembers things she shouldn’t and she tries not to think of how easily these girls will be crushed under Trent’s boot and how she will lead them there and how part of her loves them and wishes there were a world where she could have saved them. “Not yet.”

There was a fundamental truth that all men in power were remarkably similar. Dwendal and Ludinus, especially, were too much alike and that was why the Assembly had been allowed to keep so much power despite his distrust. They were old fools, caught believing that they were the last of something and that nothing that followed them would ever be as great. Nothing would grow so long as these massive oaks remained to choke the life out of everything and so they must be ripped out to prove that they were never that special and that their belief that they were made them stupid and clouded.

But the Cobalt Soul required a more subtle approach to weeding out the corruption, tending the gardens with care and patience, even after Beauregard Lionett had kicked down their doors and demanded more transparency. We’ve always been open to the public, but do the public know to use our resources? Does the average person need to get a fucking library card before information that might be pertinent gets to them?And so the people finally had a hand in making themselves heard, of expressing their dissatisfaction, of making Dwendal realize that for all his power, he was not unique in all the world nor any greater than the next imperialist monarch. Like they had with Ludinus and the Assembly, the people could turn on him.

Watching the peace talks between the Empire and the Dynasty play out was like watching a stage drama. Information made its way into the hands of the people and when Dwendal made his speeches, there was always someone braving the Crownsguard to demand some new answer. After the first two times these people were violently silenced, martyrs were made of them and Dwendal learned to bite his tongue and listen. Slowly a council of elected representatives from the working class was being built, spurred on by Beauregard Lionett and those like her, so that Dwendal might best consider their needs in the aftermath of this war.

It was pointless, in Astrid’s opinion. The minute Dwendal’s favor shifted he would dismantle everything, set his roots deeper, and refuse to bend. Right now it behooved him to prove that everything that had happened occurred due to Ludinus who started the war and convinced Dwendal it was a vicious, cruel attack that was entirely unprovoked. He had to do everything Ludinus wouldn’t do.

And he was doing it while the poison slowly ate away at him. It garnered him a lot of sympathy, Astrid disdained to admit. People saw their king standing on the balcony of Castle Unglebroch with his lustrous beard all patchy and his hair falling out and his teeth loosened in their moorings that every time his tongue pressed against them when he spoke they were in danger of falling out. No one suspected poison, or if they did, they kept it to themselves. They saw a man wrought with the stress of his station, miserable at how things had played out. Those who were not pushing for new regulations and royal decrees that could benefit the working class were painting him as a tragic figure and the Soul could do nothing to disprove it.

As much as it disgusted her, Astrid couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome- a frail old martyr stirred less suspicion than a despot coughing into his handkerchief during his hateful speeches. If Dwendal died and Suria could become pregnant with Eidys’s child and Eidys faded similarly under the weight of his father’s crown, then her baby would be uplifted. Change would come to the Empire, because a lack of it killed their king and prince. Astrid could see the patterns unfurling before her as she worked in the Shadows to speed up a process that the Cobalt Soul had no hope of untangling.

And then Expositor Lionett invited her and Eadwulf out for a drink.

She accepted it out of politeness but told Wulf that they would not be speaking with her about anything that was not related to their work. They had already made it plain that what Bren had done they disagreed with. It was the right thing to do for the people and the wrong thing to do for their friendship. He could not have it both ways.

She still insisted that Beau meet them in their once-favored beer hall rather than the Armored Bear, their clandestine meeting shielded by a crush of bodies and the loud raucous singing of the locals. Beau arrived in her vestments, a shock of blue in the earth tones of the crowd. She slid into the seat across from Astrid, nodded to Wulf, and picked up the warm beer they had already ordered for her, but refused to drink it.

“So the treaty is getting signed in a few weeks. On the flagship of Stone’s Throw Shipping, if you can believe that.”

Astrid and Eadwulf exchanged glances. “And was that Bren’s idea?”

She narrowed her cut-glass blue eyes at her. “Caleb has put the Empire in the hands of everyone else. He can’t touch it without feeling dirty. It was my idea.”

“You are doing what he won’t,” Eadwulf murmured, his tone leaving them with no indication of whether or not he approved.

“What he can’t,” she corrected, tightly. Not for the first time Astrid felt as if Beauregard was judging her for not being so eager to take her hands off the reins and let the people who hadn’t scarred the Empire handle things. The pyre burned regardless. Turning his back on it did not stop the sacrifices. Only those willing to remain could choose what actually ended up burning up. “I just thought you’d like to know before everything’s made official. He’ll be there because the Nein are handling the diplomatic shit because we’re neutral third parties.”

Doubtful, but what did it matter? They were all pretending like they weren’t doing something other than what their public facing presentation demanded of them. The Nein were chosen because the Nein exposed the Assembly and brought to light the corruption that had been brewing under Ludinus’s thumb. The people respected them right now. It had nothing to do with neutrality- it was just good optics. Dwendal wouldn’t have agreed if it didn’t make him look good to stand beside the Mighty Nein and claim they had opened his eyes. It was one of many reasons why the public was warming back up to him.

Beau eyed her up as she and Eadwulf sipped pointedly. She still hadn’t touched her own drink. “The treaty signing is in three weeks. It’d be really fucked if Dwendal’s not feeling up to going after all the work we put in to negotiate this.”

She stood up and left the beer hall, her untouched drink serving as a message: I know what you’re doing. Be smart about it.

There is no warning when Trent finally tips over the final edge and loses himself to the madness.

He was going mad for a long time since the incident in Nicodranas, but it had always been a controlled sort of madness. The madness that Astrid could pass off as dementia, an old man falling apart in his old age, spurred on by a sudden and debilitating brain injury. Frustrating because it did not hinder his cruelty or his wiles any, merely made him more fixated, desperate, and sometimes stupid. His world had narrowed solely to Bren. Nothing mattered but leashing his wayward hound and inhaling the bouquet of his suffering like it might fix him somehow.

And then… he simply snaps.

The snap is as controlled as anything else within Ikithon. He rises one morning with the sun and brings them all together- his last three Volstrucker and his Weltzschmerz. He tells them that he has seen how the Empire can be saved, how much greater it could be. Wizards from the Age of Arcanum had reached out to him across time and space and told him he could bring Bren and his ilk to heel.

Eadwulf curses under his breath when Trent drops his illusion and exposes his unruined flesh to show off the bright red eyes- the same eyes that covered Bren’s tiefling lover. That alone is enough to make Astrid believe that something has shifted somewhere, that Trent has become a convenient pawn. She would laugh if it didn’t scare her so much. The dread makes it impossible to feel anything else.

Miriam is the first to volunteer to see what he sees. The Weltzshmerz do not get to volunteer- Trent forces it on them one by one. Astrid hangs back and watches her girls’ terrified faces as they are called up. There is nothing that Trent touches that won’t leave a scar on the psyche. She can do nothing for them as they walk back to her, shaking, frantically whispering about the voices and how Trent is in all of their heads and he can speak with their mouths. No power is worth this. Tinsel has tears in her eyes when she tells her that she could have stopped this. They could have killed him long ago if she had been willing to make a move.

And Astrid realizes that she has always been terrified of Trent, because Trent has no use for her. He would not keep her alive if she fought, unlike Bren who is always fighting and Eadwulf who never would. She isn’t ready to accept the world in which she fails to kill him and he turns her into dust, because that is all she has ever been to him.

And in that hesitation she has damned people who might have helped her, might have redeemed her, might have done something.

Trent does not ask her to take up the eyes and invite the Somnovem in. He doesn’t ask Eadwulf either, but his lack of interest in her as part of his newfound hive is especially pointed.

Her destiny was sealed on the day he decided who she, Bren, and Wulf were going to be to him. She must die so the other two can be reforged. What either of them does next is entirely by Trent’s design and with no input from the Somnovem. He has enough sense to know the circle he wishes to complete.

It’s not shocking that it is Eadwulf who tells her that they could run. He has always felt the turn of the world more strongly, because he is solid and sturdy and unambitious and thus does not look so far ahead and stays quiet so he can hear everything being said and take it in.

“Don’t you want to meet your dashing swordsman again?” She asks, dryly. Wulf looks at her with narrowed-eye concern.

“I can find any fight I like. This one might kill us.” He touches the broach on his collar. “I feel something from her. She does not approve of this madness.”

Religious loyalty will always supersede the loyalty of anything else. Astrid has resented Eadwulf’s Matron for no reason beyond that he has a voice that guides him that doesn’t sound like Trent. Now she finds she could kiss her mask where she stands for validating the ominous shift in the air.

“We are not safe until he is dead, Eadwulf. This could kill him too.”

“It could.”

There is no getting around it. They are going to Eiselcross. They are going to Bren. They are going to see what can be done about their miserable fates.

There is no warning when the world that Astrid is building for herself shifts on its axis and new trouble comes forth. The Octovirate did not sneak quietly into that good night after the harrowing encounter in Eiselcross. She had heard that they had left, seeking out touchstones in Vasselheim to try and ground themselves to their new timeline. Rumors had come to her from people she could trust and even Beauregard, herself, when the occasion came that their paths crossed, that they had planted themselves at the feet of the Cobalt Vault to deliver their truth as they saw it. With no one to corroborate but the gods themselves and a few people who had touched the madness of an Age of Arcanum hivemind and thus couldn’t be trusted as witnesses, that truth went into historical fact. Exandrian scholars could not get enough of the living relics that walked among them.

And then one of them came to her, specifically.

Thiago Lucci was a dangerous man, one of the most dangerous she had ever seen. She saw the shape of who Trent Ikithon had been in the form of this aging Elven man hanging onto his youthful good looks with both hands. Jet black hair starting to turn gray, laughlines around his sharp blue eyes, the faint brush of a pencil-thin mustache above lips that would have made a lesser woman swoon. She would not lie and say she didn’t find him attractive, but she had touched flames before and still bore the scars. Lucci was a controlled blaze that invited her in and she always kept her hands in her pockets when he came closer to her.

“I have heard you have had some trouble recently,” he mused as he took in the state of her home, unkempt because in a fit of paranoia she had fired her housekeeper. His Common was stilted, awkward and he spoke like he was constantly shaking off the dregs of Draconic for the sake of the poor souls who did not speak the proper language of the enlightened. She watched him like a hawk from behind her desk, wishing he had come on a day when Eadwulf had been visiting while simultaneously being glad that Wulf was not here at all.

“I would not call it trouble, herr Lucci. I have been assigned a task and I am finding it difficult to fulfill it.”

Lucci’s eyes sparked. Only desperation would have led her to admitting her faults. Between having to cease her dosing of Dwendal for the sake of the peace treaty and Suria’s growing impatience with a solution to her empty womb, she was running out of chances.

If she believed in coincidences, she would say that his arrival was fortuitous, but she was certain that something gotten back to him somehow. He served the same role in his order that Trent served in the Assembly- all he would need was a rumor and he would find out what machinations someone was engineering.

And he would want his hands all over them.

“The princess wishes for a child. That is a deep longing, indeed, mea columba.”

My dove. She tensed underneath the weight of the endearment, bristling at the implication that she could be called anything but what she was. Even Trent had known what she was. That was surely why he had singled her out as the piece that didn’t fit- the cuckoo he had plucked and convinced the other two broken falcons in his flock of predators was one of their own just to get them attached to her. A cuckoo could never be a falcon. Her only job was to push them out of the nest one way or the other.

And now she was his dove, a pretty bird, a symbol of purity and peace. She bristled. “Why are you here, herr Lucci?”

He smiled, paced to her desk, and planted his hands flat against the Pearlbow oak as he leaned in closer. “Would you believe that I wish to help you? I believe you are in a position to help us. We could do these favors for each other.”

Seven Age of Arcanum wizards were hungering for a place in the Dwendalian Empire, echoes of the Assembly that had been cast out. She could have laughed. “You should know there is no place in this Empire for your kind.”

“Our kind,” he corrected. “You convinced him to consider you. I am certain you can do the same for us.” He lifted his hand and she leaned back, expecting that he might touch her, but he only reached over to pluck her pen from its inkwell and begin to scribble something on a loose pit of parchment. Arcane circles. Diagrams. Draconic script in a hand accustomed to calligraphy. He finished off the last sigil with a flourish and pushed it towards her. “This will not help you with the princess. I would need… more from you for that, of course. It is, however, an old spell from a school that I see has been lost to time. It is not much, but I hope you will see in it my value to you.”

The worst thing to offer a mage was new magic. She had quite missed the boat on Dunamancy. Bren’s talent for it left her with an awful taste in her mouth whenever she considered stealing spells from the school from Trent’s old spellbook, currently in her possession- the one thing she did not let the Cobalt Soul or Bren take.

This was magic that even Trent Ikithon did not possess.

He left her with the spell to pick it apart. It was a blend of necromancy and enchantment. A horrific cocktail that allowed a person to not only control another person, but to possess them. It could bypass the limitations that geasa and other charm spells had that prevented a person from self-harming under orders and left them fully malleable. Once she figured out the spell itself, she began to unravel what other spells in the school might exist and how they might work.

Lucci was back the next day and she had not had slept, her eyes manic and wild and a bit terrified at her potential discoveries. “You have crafted magic that damages the very soul.”

“Damages? Oh no, my lady!” Lucci laughed. “The School of Anima has no spells that can kill.”

“Not directly.” She could not hide the smile on her face. How clever he and his ilk must feel to know that they have crafted a way to murder with their hands clean. To claim that magic could not make a person take their own life so there was no way that suicide could have been anything but genuine. A spell to possess a person to make them speak your own words and turn them into a true puppet. Even a geasa had limitations. This put a person’s body fully in your hands because you removed their soul, their will, everything but the meat, itself.

She could only imagine how much worse it could get.

She was dealing with a dangerous man, indeed, to be in Ikithon’s shoes and wield a power that blended his two favorite schools, but unlike Trent he saw value in her, in sharing this information with her. What good would it do her to deny him, knowing how he could shunt her soul from her body and make her his clay should she refuse him? Why not say yes and accept that, for once, she had been considered as someone worthy, rather than skip to the part where she became another man’s tool while believing, all the while, that she was her own person and that she still had the will to hate and fight and tear the eyes from her masters? She could swallow her pride for a bit longer and pretend to be his dove come to bring new ideas and fresh peace between Dwendal and these ancient wizards. He clearly did not recognize her for what she truly was.

She dug her fingers into the woodgrain as if they were talons and her smile became tighter, her dreams became clearer, and her hatred for men like this dimmed to an ember she would stoke when she was closer to the top. “What do you want me to do for you, herr Lucci?”

There are seven wizards standing before an army and not a one of them is as scared as they should be and something about that punches a hole through Astrid’s resolve. The air in Aeor is so cold that her fingers have gone numb beneath her gloves and all the miserable towers standing tall in the worst of the Empire winters is incomparable to the stinging redness in her cheeks and yet this is what she feels will freeze her solid- the cold eyes of these seven individuals, their robes brand new yet so ancient in design. She has only seen clothing like that, inlaid with magic and intricate scrollwork and dedication to excess, in artwork trying to extrapolate what the Age of Arcanum was like from the minimal texts left behind.

The leader is a elven woman with coiffed blonde hair with a staff made of pure onyx, jagged in her gloved hand and topped with a massive uncut sapphire. She should be freezing in those robes of blue and black with abjuration sigils shifting like ocean waves across the cloth, yet there is no sign of it.

Beside her, an Elvish man with messy brown hair and the same blue and black robes with enchanter’s sigils dancing across them holds his ancient wooden staff that cups its own uncut sapphire in a cage that looks as if it were made by the reaching branches of some old tree, monk-like, over his shoulders. He is the one who speaks first. “You know, if you’re going to steal from someone, you should really make absolutely certain they’re not gonna wake up. I don’t know what’s been happening for the last…” He screws up his pointed face, “well, we’ve sort of lost count, eh? But I know I don’t much care for it.”

Ikithon strolls forward, hands held open. There’s a glaze to his eyes that tells Astrid that he has asked the Somnovem to explain and gotten some sort of response. “You are Aeorans? I do not come here to steal. I come here to bring back the glory of your ancient reign.”

“Ancient,” a muscular half-elven wizard with the same general aura as Eadwulf scoffs into her palm. Unlike the others, she carries only a sword and her robes are cut for combat with no sigils to speak of. Beside her, a tall lithe shadar-kai conjurist with skin so pale she looks undead touches her shoulder with her free hand. Her staff is a topped with a demon’s skull with one sapphire in a single eye socket.

“We’ve been gone a very long time, it seems. You were not the one who woke us up. By whose authority do you claim to speak for Aeor, if not the Octovirate’s.”

“I speak for the Somnovem.”

The air drops ten degrees. Astrid’s chest restricts. She feels her blood turn to molasses in her veins. The hatred in the eyes of these wizards who are so much greater than she will ever be because they came from a time when magic was reckless and unchecked terrifies her. She cannot even feel the hope for Ikithon to be reduced to a smear on the stones because too much of her resents the idea of something greater than her being her undoing, as if she cannot even be granted this mercy.

A dark-haired older elf with a pencil mustache and robes bearing no sigil that Astrid can recognize strides forwards. His staff is made of metal, its head shaped into a circular, maze-like pattern of spirals with a single sapphire at its center, and he tips it towards Ikithon. “That was the wrong name to invoke here, domne.”

Astrid loses track of the fight that breaks out, her nose and mouth full of magical signatures that are so ancient and incomprehensible that her eyes water and her head aches from the scent of them. She backs away, hoping for cover, but before she can raise her hands, Ikithon has moved, the targeted spell having been deflected by an anti-magic field. By moving, he has left the majority of the Weltzschmerz open and vulnerable.

“We do not have time to waste. Becke, Grieve, Marchen- to me.”

Miriam disengages with the dark-haired elf with divination symbols and a staff with a crystal ball nesting in a circle of cut sapphires to rush to Ikithon’s side, nearly getting herself clocked in the back of the head when the wizard swings it at her hard. Astrid’s heart is pounding and she is sweating beneath her robes in a way that makes her feel ill.

She feels sicker still when Ikithon pulls Tinsel, Guss, Lilian, Julia, and Severine out of the pack to be his advance guard. The way he looks at her when he does it speaks volumes. It would feel like mercy if she didn’t know what they were running towards. I want you to see Bren kill them. I want to see what truly makes you break.

Astrid, the unbreakable cuckoo, the one shoving her way to the front and constantly denied but kept because somehow her nestmates valued her, protected her, wanted her. Ikithon does not want her, but he resents the idea that she has never actually broken. Her suffering has never been pure. She lacks Bren’s fire and Eadwulf’s quiet zealotry. She is and has always been her own creature. A finely honed weapon for the Empire, but operating with no wielder. Cuckoos are not falcons. They cannot be tamed as such.

But anything can be broken. The sorrow she feels is only tempered by the feeling of misery that she always knew it would come to this and thus she had already mourned these girls. He cannot hurt her and because he cannot hurt her she is still useless to him. Even in these last fleeting moments, she has failed him.

“The rest of you hold the line- for the Empire!”

They flee into the ruins, leaving children to die behind her and sending more to die in front of her, errant magic dying as it is stolen by Ikithon’s anti-magic field, and Astrid can do nothing but keep running towards what she suspects will be her ignoble ending.

There were seven ancient wizards strolling into Castle Unglebroch, dressed down in clothing more suitable for this time period, but with their extravagant staffs remained held in their hands, denoting them for precisely what they were even if nothing else did. They filed into the throne room and one by one bent the knee to King Dwendal who may have agreed to this meeting, but clearly hadn’t expected this great show of fealty right out of the gate. Astrid watched from her place beside Princess Suria, currently leaning so far out of her chair that she was in danger of tipping out of it, so curious by these relics in their midst.

“So. Lady Becke tells me you are refugees from Aeor?” Dwendal mused, drumming his fingers on his throne.

“Indeed we are.” Atticus Canaveri lifted his head, both hands on his staff. Over time Astrid had learned that he does most of the talking for the group with his lackadaisical, thickly accented swaying voice. “It’s very humbling, I must say.”

“And that humility has you begging at my door?” Dwendal leaned back. Suria did not, though her eyes glanced his way, flashing with barely restrained contempt.

“Father, please. Of all the places they could have begged indulgence, it’s our Empire they came to.”

Astrid held her breath, her eyes finding Lucci in the throng of wizards. He dared to take his eyes off the floor to wink at her.

“And what indulgence do they beg?” He asked. “And on their knees at that!”

Eidys coughed into his hand. “Ludinus never did that.”

“We come on our knees because we recognize we have no power in this time,” Titiana Brashaar, their leader, the abjuration wizard with her choked down pride and her eyes refusing to linger on anything but a spot on the marble, spoke. Her voice echoed and in that echo you could almost pretend you couldn’t tell she was gritting her teeth. “We find your Empire to be the most familiar to us.”

Dwendal laughed. “Why? Because it was in danger of becoming a mageocracy under my nose? Do you think I’m a fiddle, kind lady? Or did they play some simpler instrument in your time? I assure you I am neither.”

Canaveri rolled his eyes while Dwendal wasn’t looking at him. “Yes, yes, you’ve had a great injustice done to your Empire by that mess of an Assembly. We’re not asking to be a new Assembly. We want to help you in the hopes that you might find it in your heart to help us get our footing.”

Dwendal shifted, taking that in. There was no denying that for all his hatred of the Assembly, having magic that benefited him was an intoxicating addiction that he had been cut off from. Claiming he was above it all was easy, but Astrid saw the way he looked at her with envy and desire and only kept his mouth shut to avoid someone else taking advantage of his insecurities and failures the way Ludinus had. Little did he know she aimed bigger. “The people of the Empire are wary of wizards. I cannot maintain this Empire by allowing more to take part in the government. I would be replacing the Assembly with a new one.” What he didn’t say was he had only just gotten public appeal back. He couldn’t afford to lose face by assuming that his current optics would remain favorable if he turned around and invited more wizards in.

“We don’t need public acclaim,” Priscilla Scaevola, the terrifying shadar-kai, spoke up. “We are comfortable in the shadows. We only wish to live comfortably and if you can help us with that, we will help you in kind. There is a great deal we know that your Assembly could only dream of. Perhaps we could even help with your princess?”

Suria put on a grand show of hissing and showing her surprise. “Eidys, we could finally have a child.”

Eidys said nothing, but the way he looked at his father said everything.

It was not the weight of their stares that toppled the King’s resolve. Addiction was a hard animal to tame. Dwendal saw Astrid as being attached at the hip to the Assembly- dangerous and impossible to bend to conformity and her presence here as someone who might help felt weighted against him. These were desperate, ancient wizards whose sole contribution to the world existed as a novelty for researchers. They could hold no true station. They were at the mercy of whatever he chose to give them and he could rip it away just as easily. Never you mind that these were clever politicians. Never you mind that they had controlled something far, far more dangerous than his mere Empire. What was annexing and warmongering to people so determined that the gods feared them?

But they had fallen and his Empire hadn’t and therefore he was greater then they were. Arrogance would always be the downfall of men in power. Hubris killed Aeor and the worst of it still survived to tell the tale. Hubris would kill the Dwendalian Empire and there Astrid Becke would be with her own story.

The discussions went on into the evening over dinner and drinks. Somewhere in the middle, Lucci pulled Astrid aside and dared to kiss her hand in gratitude for her service.

“We could never have done this without you getting us this meeting.. How do I repay you, personally? The princess will have her child- Scaevola will see to it. She is quite adept at this. But you, mea columba are owed so much more.”

He called her his dove and yet she was and will always be a cuckoo. His nest was just as easy to push everything out that didn’t serve her as anyone else’s. This time she would not falter. This time she would not do everything right and still be denied. This time she would reach the top.

Yes, she was owed so much more and she would take even more than that. Trent had accepted madness into his mind when he embraced the power of nine ancient wizards. She would be far more careful in her dalliances. She would do this herself.

“I want you to teach me.”

There is a stand-off occurring at the Immensus Gate. Blood has been shed and the ten Weltzschmerz who were dragged, unceremoniously, to this point to show that the Octovirate are, in fact, somewhat merciful are looking to her and Eadwulf for help. All she can think about are the corpses of the girls who believed she could kill Ikithon and give them a better Empire for them to be free within and how she had failed them in every conceivable way.

She doesn’t have to fail anyone else. She and Wulf were content to remain out of it, allowing Bren’s friends to either die bloody or kill these wretched bastards, but the realization that she is responsible for these ten children because no one else will ever be makes her stand up and sigh and call down the dogs.

Unlike Ikithon she sees respect in their eyes when she steps up and explains the situation as she has come to understand it, finishing with a promise. “They only owe allegiance to these Somnovem because of what that bastard did to them. There are people on the other side of this Gate that will rend your enemies to dust. If they should fail, then I am certain you can clean up their mess yourself. It has been some time since you have properly rested.”

They are not in any state to fight a war right now. She doesn’t know if they even rested last night when the rest of them did- they still look tired and haggard, the strain of coming out of stasis weighing on them. Exhaustion. It’s a miracle they managed to kill as many as they did and further proof of how dangerous they are.

Bren’s four allies standing in front of the Immensus Gate glower at her, but they lay down their weapons and let their magic fizzle out. The dwarf lights a cigarette and turns her anger towards the Bladesinger who had hit her with the pommel of her sword as the Octovirate rushed in. “So what? We’re just gonna sit here and stare each other?”

The elf with the wooden staff uses it to gesticulate to the mess of the ruins. “I mean… someone can tell us what’s actually going on besides the whole… Somnovem bits.”

Astrid leaves the four idiots to try to explain what they know of Aeor and its fall and the subsequent scavenging of it therein. She walks away and gestures to Eadwulf to sit back down when he tries to follow her. She needs to be alone, to think about what comes next.

She does not get to be alone. The half-elf with the pencil mustache follows her. “That man did not understand your potential. If he did, he would have left you to fight us instead of leaving it solely to those children.”

Astrid doesn’t turn to look at him, but the smile that crosses her face is tight and barely holding back a scream. “Would I have won?”

“No. I think if you had fought, we would not have spared anyone. I think I would have been deeply disappointed to have had to waste such a powerful mage.”

She scoffs. “I do not respond to flattery.”

The wizard chuckles. “Yes, I recognize that accent. Zemniaz outlasted us all! What a feat. They were such humorless, practical bastards. You can imagine how easy it was to find our center when the first thing threatening us had that accent. If Lathras had survived to keep its culture intact I think we might have gone mad.”

“Speak plainly. I am not in the mood for poetry either.”

She glances behind her long enough to see him lift a hand in a placating gesture. “I have a gift for picking up things about the souls of others. You don’t belong with someone like that. How did you come to be here in this mess, a footsoldier in some madman’s army, not even used to her fullest potential?”

She finally turns on her heels to address him properly. She has never needed someone to tell her she was better than what she got handed to her. The validation is hollow, seeped in someone trying to manipulate her. He does not understand her. She does not smile or show her teeth. She does not downplay her feathers to pretend that she has ever been something else. “Do they know of cuckoos in Aeor?”

He shakes his head. The barest trace of a smile starts to pull on her lips. “It is a bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. Over time, it pushes out the actual hatchlings because it becomes too big and too demanding. I am what happens when someone intentionally puts a cuckoo in a nest it doesn’t belong in and tries to force it to be something else.”

And I am done being anything other than what I am.

There was, for the first time in months, an air of celebration carried throughout the Dwendalian Empire. News of Princess Suria’s pregnancy was spreading like wildfire and it felt as though everyone but the most wary and disillusioned had dropped the last remaining dregs of disdain for the Empire and picked patriotism back up. The War of Ash and Light had ended. The Cerberus Assembly, who surely had to have been the real villains, were in hiding and soon to be ferreted out and brought to justice by a special task force of mage-hunters. The councils and uplifting of working class and impoverished voices were finding purchase and people were content with them for what little they could truly do. The world moved on, as it so often did, and the Dwendalian Empire survived its darkest year intact.

It only had a handful of them left.

Dwendal’s health was waning again, though not from Assassin’s Folly. The man was… distant, almost disconnected from his body in his private hours, but when he needed to be the King, he was regal in bearing, stronger than he ever was. The public suspected that his son having an heir had a profound effect on him, while his inner circle suspected that he was realizing his time was ending. He often discussed abdicating before dismissing it entirely as an idle fancy. It was strange, but not so strange that it warranted suspicion. Dwendal was an old man and for all that he loved his power, the stress of everything could not have been said to not have affected him. His brief illness, never conceived of by anyone but Beauregard Lionett as poison, was often touted as the start of his spiral. He just never truly recovered from it.

No one suspected that perhaps Dwendal’s odd behavior was due to magic influence. Especially not after the Octovirate had brought it up as a potential excuse to Eidys themselves, but nothing they did and no cleric brought in to corroborate could find anything wrong with him. No known school of magic could cause his behavior, after all.

Suria was delighted, of course, beneath her grief and support for her husband in this difficult time. Her future was coming on faster. Within years, she was certain to be the sole ruler of the Dwendalian Empire, because Astrid would be there to make certain of it. No one looked at her twice. No one believed she was anything but the princess’s dear companion. Until she was at her pinnacle, she would remain unnoticed, hiding in the shadows, moving pieces on the board. Ludinus had never held this sort of power and Ikithon had never had this sort of imagination. She had surpassed them both and one day Ludinus would know it, at least. Ikithon could continue to rot in his pauper’s grave. She did not owe him proof that he was wrong.

Despite how well she went unnoticed, there was still someone else in this palace who knew Astrid too well, who might figure out what was moving behind the theater scrim of her machinations. She wasn’t surprised when she came out of a trance after possessing Dwendal’s body to deliver yet another speech some three months after she started doing this, slowly chipping away at him bit by bit to make way for the unveiling of a new regime, to find Eadwulf staring at her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He asked, no hint of judgment, though she wondered if he would judge her for this. She was undermining his goddess’s domain by diminishing a man’s soul by constantly possessing him. It was cruel of her to cross a line her last true friend would never cross with her, but she was never the same as him or Bren. She was always different.

She could not go back to pretending otherwise. If he had to peer behind the curtain to see her here, then he had to make peace with what she did behind it.

So she looked at him, with honest conviction in her eyes and said: “Finding my way to the top.”