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The Blood Prince - chapter 1

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Princess Azilah tapped her fingers impatiently against the table as she stared at the intricately designed windows, trying to block out the sound of the High Priest. Tall, graceful arches surrounded an exquisite piece of stained glass, but the bright colours did nothing to lessen her irritation.

It wasn’t fair, she thought, that she should be stuck in class while everyone else was having fun. She wasn’t even learning anything useful.

Outside in the city, it was market day. Regardless of the heavy heat and the rain, a thousand lanterns had been lit in the lower levels of town. She could just about see their glimmer from the corner of the window if she craned her neck far enough. Colourful stalls offering all sorts of delightful products had popped up overnight in every corner. The rain had been long in coming this year, but now that it was here the crops would start to grow again. Everyone was celebrating, faint snatches of music and the hum of voices reaching her ears.

She could almost see it if she closed her eyes. Humans and dragumens alike would be pouring in from all sides at this hour. Laughter and the sound of coins jingled for luck would fill the air. She had good memories of many such markets over the years.

But right now, in the highest tower of the castle, she was stuck in her weekly language class with the rest of the royal children. By the time it finished and she was able to run down to the market, most of the truly interesting things would be sold out.

She ran her hands through her long hair with a frustrated huff. Her thoughts turned to her best friend and tomodaë servant, Anzu. Usually, he was the first to suggest running off to the market as soon as class ended. But today, he hadn’t talked about it at all. She peeked at him out of the corner of her eyes.

There was something wrong with him. It showed in the line of his shoulders and the tension in his tail. For weeks now, he’d been sulky and withdrawn.

It is always disturbing to discover that the person whom you know best in the world is keeping a secret from you. A month ago, Azilah would have thought it was impossible for her to not know something about Anzu. He was an open book to her.

And yet it was becoming evident that something had upset him, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was. It wasn’t about the horrible suffering of their people at the hands of the Three Kings – something that pained them both. She was aware of that. They often spoke about it, loudly and at length. Even if something new had cropped up in that regard, Anzu would have told her right away.

No, this quiet and gloomy hurt was new, and it worried her.

She was wrenched out of her contemplation when a sudden voice spoke right next to her ear. “Azilah, you have a mistranslation here.”

She almost jumped right out of her skin. The old priest who was in charge of their class leaned over her shoulder and touched her parchment, smearing her ink with his finger. She wondered how long he had been there.

High Priest Eldrick looked like an owl that was ruffled and irritated in the morning light. He had squinty eyes and a hunched frame, and could turn his head almost all the way back on his neck. The white of his feather wings was starting to fade to brown near the edges, and his tail was always a little dirty from where it trailed in the dust of the library. She’d never seen him fly, but she’d heard that he was near silent in the air. In any case, when on the ground, he had the tendency to walk softly behind people and then speak up suddenly. Most people found this habit unsettling, especially his students.

She waited until he removed his finger before reading the passage aloud.

“‘Seeing that men and dragons could not live in peace, on the third year the gods sent their favourite daughter and her four guardians to lead a new ruling species, half dragon and half human.’”

“‘Alanth’ in this context translates to a word of endearment and not ‘favourite’,” he explained. “‘Favourite’ would mean that they had more than one daughter. However, no other children are mentioned in the Book other than the Sons. Redo that part. And be careful next time, your ink is smeared. Show some application, please.” And with that, he moved on to the next desk.

She twitched in irritation and stretched her tail to her left. Anzu’s coarser one met hers halfway between their chairs. Her smooth white scales rubbed against his rough, squarish orange ones comfortingly. Over the desk, he was the picture of concentration, all gleaming glasses and hunched shoulders. His fingers, always fidgety, were still for once. However, she could see that his ears were red from tugging at his earrings earlier, and that his hair was sticking up from running his hands through it. This sudden stillness could only mean simmering anger.

“Sumik!” the priest bellowed from the other side of the room. “What are you doing?”

“Writing down a translation…?”

Priest Eldrick’s gaze darkened in anger. Sumik looked up at his uncle with wide eyes, suddenly realizing that his genuine confusion could be taken for cheek.

“I know that you know every word of the standard text, young man, and that you also know that what you’re writing down is inaccurate. Are you even taking this assignment seriously?”

“I… um…”

Sumik’s eyes flickered towards the young woman sitting at the desk next to his own. Daliyah met his gaze and gave him an encouraging smile. She was beautiful, with skin only fractionally lighter than his and long, shiny hair. The scales on her wings were glittering in the light of the fire ramps around the room. He seemed to take comfort in their shared glance and took a deep breath.

“It’s not inaccurate, sir. It’s a direct translation, whereas the standard edition has been modified for readability and… and flow, and so this is…” Faltering, he added meekly, “This is more accurate in a sense. Sir.”

Sumik bit his lip and hung his head. His wings twitched, curling closer to his body. He looked like he wanted to disappear and Azilah felt a pang of sympathy for him. She could attest that it wasn’t easy being a Child of Inheritance to a strict family.

The old man slammed his hands down on the lacquered wood of the desk. Sumik recoiled with a squeak. Priest Eldrick leaned in.

“You wrote of the Daughter’s guardians that ‘One was a Red Demon who commanded flame as shield and sword; One was a Child of the Sea, born in ice and cold; One was a Shadow, bright as moon and dark as night; and One was Innocent and carried the gods’ might’ – which doesn’t make any sense! Give me the translation for this passage, Sumik. The correct one.”

The boy fumbled around his desk and pulled out an old leather-bound book. He opened it to a spot where the spine was broken and the ink faded. Rubbing his sweaty hands on his thighs, Sumik cleared his throat. “‘Red was merciless, shield and sword aflame;

Blue from ice and cold on sea was given claim; Black was shadow of bright moon and dark night; and White the immaculate spoke of the gods’ might.’”

The Priest nodded. “Yes. This is the correct version. This translation has been made by learned scholars, people who actually know what they are saying – unlike you, boy. The only translation that makes sense is the one approved by the Order. The point of this assignment is to make you understand the thought process that led to our current understanding of the Book.”

He moved to the head of the class, where the large, round windows haloed his frame from behind. The whole class was forced to squint at him. “Who can tell me the ways in which Sumik’s translation was heretical?”

“He focused on details and not the message,” mumbled Daliyah, sharing another glance with the dragumen in question.

“Because the shadow can’t be both bright and dark at the same time?” tried one of Azilah’s sisters, Princess Munn.

“Because he called the Red a demon,” said Florenna. “He’s mixing up his mythologies.”

Anzu’s tail curled around Azilah’s and squeezed. “Is this a language class or a religion class?” he grumbled under his breath. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

“I’m the one who signed you up,” she reminded him – something that she rather regretted now. She’d wanted to learn more about her ancestors’ language, but if she had known who would be teaching the class, she would have balked. “You must be spending way too much time with Seskie, talking like that.”

She felt his tail tense and pull away. Azilah looked at him, shocked. Was he mad at her? She tried to glance at his face, but it was tilted down so his hair fell over his glasses and obscured his eyes from view. Frowning, she turned back towards the front of the class.

“As for the Red guardian,” the Priest was saying, “he could not possibly have a shield and sword made of flames! No one can control the elements with that degree of accuracy. Not to mention that a sword made of fire would be both useless and ridiculous…”

“But it would be impressive. I’m sure my boss could figure out how to do that.” In the open doorway stood a young dragumen with pale blue hair and a bored expression. He leaned against the frame. He was all long legs and easy grace, and when he crossed his arms, his sleeves shifted to reveal delicate silver bracelets adorned with rubies. He was wearing royal servant garb in the reds of his master, for all that the rest of him was blue. His long tail of azure scales was sweeping the tiled floor behind his feet, and his lack of wings gave him a tragically handsome air. He was a lone sea serpent, stuck living on land like some human. A soft sigh went through the classroom, as though every student there was a little bit in love with him.

Anzu slammed his book closed and violently shoved his glasses up his nose. “What is it with today’s lesson?” he grumbled.

Azilah didn’t share his anger at the interruption. Unlike her tomodaë, she wasn’t fond of spending long hours cooped up inside with books as her sole company. Plus, watching Seskie rile up the old Priest was always fun.

As if on cue, the man whirled towards the intruder with a glare. “Your master is but a pretentious little Child of Pleasure! I’ll believe his exploits when I see them and not a second before. How dare you interrupt my class, you heretical Bleah?”

Azilah hissed a breath, but Seskie didn’t even flinch at the slur. She knew that he got a lot of it in the castle. Blues weren’t exactly well liked, even in the capital.

“I’m looking for my boss. Have you seen him?”

“Your master, you mean? Some tomodaë you are! How could you not know where he is? Don’t you have the Mark of Loyalty on your back? It ought to tell you where he is at all times – or does your science forbid you from believing in it as well?”

Azilah had to fight not to smile. It appeared the High Priest still hadn’t gotten over their “science says your dusty old book is wrong” argument. Well, Seskie could be mighty convincing when he wanted to, and some things in the Sacred Texts did sound a bit far-fetched. It was no wonder that Gangav, Seskie’s “boss”, refused to come to class these days. Instead, the Red prince stole the languages books and disappeared with them for weeks on end, but never when the priest could see him.

Seskie sighed and uncrossed his arms. “Never mind. He must be out and about somewhere, getting drunk. Or fighting. Or getting some.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or all three, knowing him. I should check the chapel.”

He made a move to leave.

“What? Why would the prince be getting drunk in the chapel?” cried the old man.

Seskie gave him a look.

Priest Eldrick shoved him out of the way, barking a tense “Stay here” to his students as he hurried down the hall to the tower stairs. The somehow angry echo of his footsteps faded as he drew further away from the classroom.

Seskie turned back to the seven students and raised a fine eyebrow. With sounds of laughter and cries of “Freedom!”, Azilah’s family and friends left the room. She rose to gather her things.

“Thanks!” she told him with a smile. He inclined his head at her, and then his eyes fixed on a point over her shoulder and lingered for a moment. Azilah struggled for something to say. Seskie was always a pleasure to talk to, full of dry wit and sarcasm, but he was very quiet by nature and it was difficult to get more than a few words out of him.

“So!” she said with forced cheer, trying to fill the silence that had descended upon them. “Did you really manage to lose a fire prince?”

His gaze snapped back to her. “He’s at the market.”

And then he didn’t say anything else. Her smile wavered. She and Seskie were friends, technically. They ran in the same circles and had known each other since infancy. Yet they never really seemed to have anything to talk about, despite her best efforts. She knew that he liked her, as much as he ever liked anyone. And she definitely liked him. But somehow that never translated into the same ease that she had with Anzu or even Gangav. Her private theory was that Seskie was just too beautiful for small talk.

“On his own? My wings, he’s going to start a riot!” she said, trying for levity. “Right, Anzu? Anzu?”

Her tomodaë raised his head from where he had been staring pensively at the fire ramp next to him. “I’m sorry, what?”

She frowned. “Are you all right?”

Azilah distantly heard Seskie excuse himself from the room as she moved towards Anzu’s desk. She felt relieved, then guilty about it, until concern for her tomodaë took precedence in her thoughts.

He hadn’t picked up his books nor capped his ink bottle. He looked for all the world as if he had every intention of staying there with his parchments all afternoon.

“You’ve been tense all day. Is it something I did?”

“No, I just…” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair.

Azilah gathered up her skirts and hopped up to sit on the edge of his desk. She didn’t like seeing Anzu upset. He was her oldest friend, and as her tomodaë, he was more than a servant. He was her protector and dearest companion. They were never apart, and if he was troubled, then so was she.

Were they in a less public space, she would have pulled up a chair and sat with their sides pressed together, or even plopped herself right down in his lap. Most dragumens, when given the opportunity, tend to flock together and forgo personal space, sharing warmth and easy affection with touches and hugs. They were tactile beings. But twenty years of upbringing in the strict atmosphere of the castle had taught Azilah and Anzu to maintain their distance when around other people, lest they be seen as improper. According to the court, physical contact was seen as a Red behaviour, and an undesirable one at that.

She reached out and smoothed Anzu’s rust-coloured hair back in place. He looked up at her, and then his amber eyes shot to the door. It had been left ajar, but everyone else had long since disappeared down the stairs or taken to the skies from the balcony. Once he’d checked that they were alone, some of the tension drained out of his shoulders. He closed his eyes and leaned his cheek into her palm.

His desk was located at the far back corner of the class, from where he could see the door and every other seat. Azilah wished she got to sit next to the windows. She certainly craned her head to see out of them far more than he did, and the rays of light that fell through the colourful panes delighted her. But princesses never got to pick first. Anzu’s seat was in a prized spot; tomodaës liked to be aware of the goings-on of a room. They said that once you started bodyguard training, the habits never left you. Not to mention that, being a corner seat, it received heat from two of the fire ramps that ran along the walls near the ceiling. A very cozy spot for a fire dragumen indeed, now that she thought about it. The fires had been roaring all day, across the whole castle, to dispel the humidity brought about by the rain. By now the air in the room was as dry and toasty as the inside of an oven. She smiled fondly.

“Is it the rain? Is that why you’re in a funny mood?”

“No.” he said. “Well, yes. But, no.”

Her delicate eyebrows raised towards her hairline. “Yes but no?”

“I just – I don’t see what we’re doing here!” he finally blurted out.

She reared back in shock at his raised voice.

He turned his head away from her hand and stood up so fast that his stool clattered behind him. “Have you looked outside recently? People are starving!”

He strode to the wide windows and gestured outside. “Look at that! The rains should have started a month ago! No one was expecting the monsoon to be late; no one was prepared! Granaries have been empty for weeks and we’re not doing anything about it!” He smacked the glass. “What if the rain had never come at all? What would we have done?”

She frowned. She knew what he was getting at, and she didn’t like it any more than he did. “Nothing, I suppose,” she spat bitterly. The kings wouldn’t have moved an inch, not even in the face of their own people’s starvation.

He threw his hands up in the air. “Nothing! I’ve heard that people in the Summer Valley got so desperate that they had to hunt in the Wasteland.”

Her eyebrows hit her hairline. That was news to her. There was nothing in the Wasteland but rocks and a slow death. If the situation had gotten that bad… But still, that didn’t change what they could do about it. Which was a big fat load of nothing. And she knew that he knew that too.

Anzu turned back towards her, wild-eyed and agitated. She stared at him. There really wasn’t much else that she could say. They had discussed it a thousand times. He sagged.

“We’re translating texts and Gangav is getting drunk. I just… How long are we going to stay here and do nothing while the poor are dying? I remember being poor, Azilah.” His voiced cracked. He looked away.

She rose and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. She could also see these things, but there wasn’t a lot that she could do. She was the third in line to the White throne. As a Child of Inheritance, a child born of married parents, she would one day marry out of duty. What she could do was make sure that she married an influential person and hope that they would listen to what she and her tomodaë had to say. Until then, she knew that neither her father nor her elder siblings would listen to a word from her.

Choosing her own tomodaë, after the death of Old Beth, had been an allowance that her late mother had managed to bargain for her. She was considered a spoiled brat by the court for introducing a commoner to the castle as her servant. Her luck had held, though, and he had passed all of the tests thrown his way and proven his worth. Still, her opinion meant absolutely nothing to anyone these days. If she wanted to effect real, meaningful change, then she had to wait until Gangav was on the Red throne – as, despite his indiscretions, he was the only she trusted to rule correctly – and she had married someone influential.

The court was a farce; there was no denying that. To the royals, all that mattered was that today was hunting day for the Red King and his court. Tonight, in the Red wing of the castle, there would be fresh meat. Her father would use it to try and curry favour with the other kings, and leave barely any for his own to eat. The Three Kings system, structured in a way that neither of them could take a decision without the agreement of one of the other two, was becoming more and more of a hindrance and less of a failsafe as the years turned. It had been centuries since a law had passed without turning into a long game of warring influences and ego stroking.

None of the Three Kings cared about anything but themselves. None saw the death toll of hunger and poverty. Or perhaps they just didn’t care. The poor and the servants were humans, after all, and humans didn’t matter. Azilah knew that this wasn’t true, but most dragumens thought themselves high and mighty. The Gods had created them to rule, had they not? Except she wouldn’t call any of what they were doing ruling.

Just last week, the wheat reserves had failed in Fredegast and the kings had let the local lords deal with the famine. Even the lords were starting to be angered at the lack of royal involvement.

In the end, it was a human northerner, some disgraced royal from the neighbouring country of Lask, who had finally ended the crisis. She’d thrown around money like candy, and now everybody loved her. It hadn’t made Azilah’s father happy. Some interloping human had no business messing around with his country, in his opinion. But in one month, a supposedly insignificant human had garnered more respect than all of the dragumens in the court, and that didn’t bode well for the current monarchy.

“The kings that govern us don’t care about what happens to commoners, and you father is by far the most cruel of the three,” muttered Anzu, echoing her thoughts. “You joke about riots, but sometimes I…” He stopped himself. Swallowed. “If it was the gods who gave them power, then they should take it back. No offense, Az, but your family doesn’t deserve to rule.”

She squeezed his shoulder. These words were not something that a royal tomodaë should say, but she really couldn’t blame him. Even she, born in grace, could see faults in the indifference of the court. How frustrating must it be, she wondered, for someone born and raised in the dirt of the poorest streets in town.

When Azilah met Anzu, he had never set foot on any of the roof bridges of the city. People like him, orphans and homeless, were not allowed up in the higher levels. He lived deep down in the maze of buildings and walkways that was the lower city, near the ground. At that level, it was impossible to see the sky. The rays of the sun were reflected a thousand times by giant mirrors, and by the time they reached the ground the light had a muddy quality to it. Torches burned day and night, turning the meandering streets into a smoky and dangerous landscape. Whereas people up above preferred to decorate their houses with stained glass and clear quartz, those below preferred crystals and mosses that came with their own glow. Anzu had been as opaque and intangible as the world he came from when she met him, lit by some queer inner light that was impossible to figure out. He had emerged into her life like mist from a dream, and sometimes she still feared that he might slip through her fingers.

When he’d first seen the castle, rising up proudly over the rest of the city, he had been agape. Everything, from the large windows to the curved archways, was new to him, and the terraces and levels only accessible by flying had delighted him.

Dragumens were meant to fly. Anzu had had to learn the way that kids in his circumstances did: by jumping out of windows. He had never even had a flight ceremony. At fifteen, he had never flown in the sky. She had never been able to wrap her head around that.

His leathery wings had been thin and weak, used for gliding in narrow alleys. They were shorter than most, hanging down just past his knees, and she’d always wondered if it was the lack of food or his parentage that was responsible for it. His skin had been sickly pale under the dirt and you could have counted his every rib through his ripped shirt. He had personally known hunger and misery. Even now, ten years later, he still thought in what ifs and worst-case scenarios. He had none of the carelessness of the people born in the castle. It had taken him a long time to stop hiding food in his rooms, and he still had the intense dislike of rats born from having to compete with them for food and shelter. Eventually, his wings had filled in and his skin received enough sun and care to take on the beautiful ochre colour it was now, just a shade darker than her own olive skin. But even then, he was still at heart that serious, tough child of the street – and he would always be.

“Look,” she tried, “how about tomorrow you and I go out to give bread and soup? I’m pretty sure that the castle’s reserves can take it. We can set up on the terrace near the crystal bridge. It’s got a nice parapet we can hide under, and we can warm up the soup over the fire fountains. We can go ask the head cook for supplies after my evening bath. The dinner rush will be long over, they shouldn’t be too busy then.”

He looked at her. It wasn’t a solution to the problem and they both knew it, but she didn’t know what else to do.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “yeah, we can do that.”

[blam-marie]

Married to the Evil Wizard King - 03

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The ride to Evil Castle was interminably long. Autumn realized that she didn’t actually know how large the forest was, or how wide the land of the Wizard King. Most of the maps she had seen in her life had taken the attitude of ‘well, here is the Evil Bad Place. Don’t go in.’

She didn’t even know if there was something behind the wizard’s kingdom. Obviously, she could see the mountains in the distance; but did his domain stretch all the way to the foot of them? Was it all forest, or did he have his own private bit of prairie to enjoy? She supposed that if she did marry him — in the unlikely event of that happening — then she would have to learn all of that. It would be her kingdom, too. Talk about upwards mobility, she thought with a smidge of hysteria. As the third sister, Autumn had never expected to either inherit the throne of Veld or marry into another royal family. She had always been the one meant to marry for diplomacy. How wild would it be if she did manage to snag the Evil King and become his queen? She would brag about it at every family dinner for the rest of time, she decided. She would have more than earned that right.

The forest was a disturbing place to be in. Even though it was midday, the dense canopy of the trees covered the sky, casting them in deep shadows. The vegetation rustled unnaturally in front of them, opening a path, and then shook itself closed behind their carriage as if they had never been there at all. A fine mist curled lazily in between the trees, making it difficult to see more than ten steps ahead. Autumn wasn’t too interested in the view, anyhow. Shapes kept moving in the periphery of her vision and she was terrified that she would turn her head and see a spirit coming towards them.

Up until that point, Autumn hadn’t been really scared of the spirits. Certainly, they could kill her. But so could a bad fall, a nasty head cold, or a particularly determined raccoon. Taking the proper precautions, like not wandering out of the castle after nightfall, had always been more than enough to protect her. But she was no longer protected by the castle, here. She was entirely in the spirit’s domain, and protected only by the word of an evil, untrustworthy wizard. The architect of Esternia’s first betrayal.

She pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders and tried to think of anything else. Mathematics. Poetry. Diplomacy.

“So what’s your name?,” she asked, tilting her head back to look at the knight with the deer antlers.

They weren’t quite sitting back to back. They’d both unconsciously huddled a bit on the left of their bench, so that their shoulders pressed side to side over the low backrest. It was almost intimate. Stretching her neck backwards like this, Autumn could get a good look at his face. He was looking straight ahead, monitoring the horse. The underside of his jaw was fuzzy, and his throat worked as he seemed to need to think about her question.

“I don’t think that I have one,” he said after a moment. “I am a construct.”

“What’s that?”

“It is a creature made of magic. I’ve been grown from a deer’s heart, you see, made to serve the King and obey his commands. There are a few of us, in the castle.”

“Why a deer?”

He shrugged. The hard lines of his pauldrons rustled against the embroidered velvet of her sleeve.

“I don’t know. Deers are noble, I suppose, and perhaps the King didn’t want to scare you off by sending a wolf for a guard.”

Autumn made an agreeing noise, even though she thought it unlikely. The Wizard King had probably just grabbed whatever he’d had lying about after a hunt.

“And the King didn’t name you?” she asked, bothered by this information for some reason that she couldn’t quite figure out. “He made you, but he didn’t name you?”

A shrug again.

“Do you want one?”

The knight glanced at her in surprise. “What, a name?,” he said. “I… I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought about it.”

He was silent for a few seconds. Autumn realized that she’d been staring at him, and shifted around until she was kneeling on her bench. She crossed her arms over the backrest and watched the forest endlessly part in front of their horse.

“I don’t think so,” he eventually decided. “I think names are so you have someone to be when you’re not working, right? That way you don’t have to be a — a knight, or a princess, or a king all of the time.”

She hummed. She’d never seen it like this before, but it was true that sometimes she had to be Autumn the princess, and sometimes she was Autumn the woman, and neither of them were really quite the same person. She wondered how many more Autumns there could be. She thought about being ‘Autumn the Evil Wizard Queen’, and figured that it had a nice ring to it, despite being nothing more than a fantasy.

“But the thing is,” he continued, “I haven’t really been anything yet. I was made only a little under two years ago, for a purpose that has been out of my grasp until now. I think that I’d like to try to be the knight that I’ve been created to be, first. Then we’ll see.”

Autumn leaned her head on her arms and glanced up at him again. He had such a handsome face, it was hard not to look at him. “Just two years, really? You look all grown-up to me.”

The knight shrugged again, a delicate blush rising up on his cheeks. “Thank you. I remember being a deer, although less and less by the day. But being a construct is new. As I understand it, I was made for you.”

She blinked. A cold shiver rolled down her spine, like someone had just poured ice shavings down the collar of her dress. “What do you mean, you were made for me?”

“Constructs exist to obey the King’s commands. But I’ve only got the one command, and it’s to protect you. It is my reason for being, inscribed into the very fabric of the spell that created me. It will remain so until you either leave, die, or until He unmakes me. I have to admit,” he added quietly, “these have been long years, awaiting your arrival.”

“I—I don’t understand,” she stammered. “You didn’t know that I would come here, a year ago. No one did.”

“We knew that someone would come. We did not know that it would be you yet, your highness, but we knew that we were due for a princess. I was created in anticipation of you, and have waited my entire life to begin my task.”

Autumn swallowed. She thought for a moment, but could not quite figure out how she felt about all of this, aside from ’troubled’. She asked instead, “and what are you supposed to protect me from, anyhow?”

There was only one thing that was a danger to her here, and it was the Wizard King himself. The knight kept his eyes on the horses but bent his head towards her. His cheek was only a few inches away from the top of her head, now.

“From the spectres, my lady. They’re everywhere, and they’ll kill any living thing that comes in here unless they belong to the King. They’re only being kept at bay, now, because you are with me and I am an extension of him.”

She blinked. If he meant the spirits, then didn’t the King control them? Couldn’t he just order them not to attack her?

“How to you mean, belong to him?,” she asked. The word left a bad taste in her mouth.

“Because of his curse,” he explained, his tone solemn as if his words now held deadly weight. “The Wizard King cannot have that which does not belong to him. It means that no one can live on his lands unless they tie themselves to him in magic and blood. Otherwise, they are fated to die a horrible death.”

Autumn blinked again. That was new information. Since when was the Evil Wizard King cursed? From the way that the knight had said it, it didn’t really sound like something that he’d done to himself, but—

“Who cursed him?” she asked, bewildered.

“I don’t know,” said the knight. “All I know is that I’m here to protect you from the consequences of that curse until you belong to the King properly.”

She didn’t particularly want to belong to him, but now Autumn could see why it might become necessary. She glanced at the darkness between the trees again and shivered. Maybe the King had been cursed as a punishment for creating the spectres, or for calling them from whatever place they came from. Cannot have what does not belong… Maybe it explained why this land seemed to be all dark forest as far as the eye could see. Autumn had never been in a forest before that she couldn’t walk from one side to the other in less than an hour. But these woods seemed to go on and on. This place wasn’t a forest that had a name and could be mapped. It was wilderness pure and proper, and she was quickly coming to the realization that it could swallow her whole if she let it.

“Does anyone live here?,” she wondered quietly. “Aside from the King and the other constructs?”

“No one else, no.”

“What, no villages or cities?,” she cried in astonishment. “No peasants or nobles? Really? The Wizard King is a king of none?”

“That doesn’t mean that he’s not powerful,” he was quick to warn her, his voice stern and cutting.

Autumn shrank back. The knight was looking at her properly now, twisted in his seat, and he was scowling. “You have no reason to fear him, your Highness, but do not underestimate him. He is the Wizard King. As long as you’re on his lands, he gets to preside over your life or death.”

His gaze on her was intense, burning with a wealth of emotions, and Autumn felt liquid fire curl its way down her spine. Her breath caught and she had to look away lest she say something ill-advised. She wished that she had met this brave and bold knight under other circumstances. Her eyes landed on his large hands clenched around the horses’ reins. They were shaking.

“Are you scared of him?” she inquired quietly.

The heat of his stare finally slid away from the side of her face. He looked forward once more. The side of his arm, pressed to her shoulder, was still as tense as an iron rod.

“Of course I am. The King made me, and can unmake me at any time,” he replied just as quietly. “If I don’t displease him, then he’ll send me to meet the armies that constantly try to invade. I will be forced to kill his enemies before being killed myself. And sometimes, he just gets bored. Constructs that haven’t done anything wrong disappear with no warning. He makes new ones and he doesn’t say anything about it, leaving us to wonder.”

Autumn felt sick. She sat back down on her bench, properly back-to-back with the knight once more, and huddled into her cloak. They journeyed the rest of the way in thick silence.

[blam-marie]

SwordBright - 3

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Katarina entered her bedroom and gently closed the door behind her, still somewhat bewildered. SwordBright was acting oddly, she thought, which in all honesty might have been the understatement of the century.

They’d never showed up to her apartment before, for one. In the year or so they’d known each other, as superhero and super villain, they’d never even had what you could call a pleasant chat. Oh, they’d bantered a lot, and trash talked each other with the affection and respect that came with knowing that this other person was going to become your great Nemesis. But it had always been work-related. They’d never interacted witch each other in their civilian clothes before, and Karry hadn’t expected the hero to even so much as recognize her without the makeup and the fangs. No one ever had.

Granted, she would recognize SwordBright anywhere, but that came with the territory, being what she was. Karry was a vampire in the same way as hot fudge was a gravy; only in a very technical sense, and the comparison was mildly upsetting. But she did have an excellent sense of smell, and SwordBright smelled like no one else that she had ever encountered.

They smelled good, that bastard.

And now they were puttering in her apartment, no doubt spreading their smell all around, touching all of her magical items without even being affected by them, and Karry snarled at the thought. She wrenched open her closet and quickly grabbed the darkest, most intimidating dress that she could find. She slithered into it, then grabbed a blood red chocker off her desk and tied it around her throat. She considered taking a minute to put on some makeup, perhaps some crimson lipstick or light foundation to conceal her deathly pallor, then changed her mind. She didn’t want to look like she was putting in effort to appear presentable, not when it was them who was trespassing on her territory.

Although she did admit their very presence here made her curious. The very fact that they not only knew where she lived but had also known how to get the elevator to take them there lent credence to their unlikely time travel story.

She’d been so stunned when she’d opened the door, truth be told, that she’d completely forgotten to just kill them on the spot, which should have been her first reaction. By the time she’d gathered herself, curiosity had also reared its ugly head, and now she was somewhat invested in this strange tale they were bringing to her.

She was having the weirdest day, to be quite honest. She’d been snapped awake less than an hour earlier by a strong wave of magic invading her body, leaving her tingling and breathless. She hadn’t felt magic like that in centuries, and had revelled in it. It had drowned her in waves of bliss and contentment, and she had luxuriated in it without question, too overwhelmed to care as to its source.

By the time she’d managed to catch her breath, there SwordBright was, knocking at her door as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Her toes were still curling a little on the cold floor, the after-effect of the magic not quite done dissipating, but she didn’t have the time to deal with it. She swooped down the corridor and stormed into her living room, where the hero quickly snatched their hand away from a priceless (and very cursed) vase on a side table.

Karry glared at them and crossed her arms. It was midly off-putting to see her Nemesis without their helmet, looking so young and fresh without the bravado that having their sword in hand seemed to inspire in them. Out of their leather jacket, in nothing but a soft red t-shirt, they looked more like some confused teenager had wandered off the street. They were wearing combat boots, their hands were heavily covered with rings, and their soft brown hair was curling over their ears. They looked like some baby punk that should be at home, listening to that godawful korean pop music that was so popular right now and saving for a tattoo, not out in the street saving the world. Or worse, standing in the middle of a vampire’s apartment without even having the decency to look ashamed about it.

“Out with it, then.”

SwordBright looked at her, hesitated, then bit their lips. “I don’t know where to begin,” they finally admitted softly.

She rolled her eyes. “You had a lot to say in the corridor. How about you start at the beginning? Why are you here?”

They shifted a bit on their feet, and then seemed to take a decision, and sank down into her leather couch, arms and legs akimbo like a doll whose strings had been cut. They rubbed both hands down their face, and then let out a strangled, slightly hysterical laugh.

“It’s a long story,” they said. “But basically a Tyrant is going to rise to power and then end the world and I need your help to stop him.”

She blinked. “I’m going to need more than that. Help you how? And why me?”

They removed their hands from their face, and stared at her for what seemed like several long minutes. Their expression was… odd. Karry didn’t know how to read it, and she shifted uneasily on her feet. Even their aura was opaque in a way that she had seldom seen an human be able to achieve. Finally, SwordBright looked away.

“Do you have any coffee? Or something stronger?” they mumbled.

She might have felt offended at being ordered around her own house, but the mood here had taken such a sudden drop toward something heavy and uncomfortable that she crossed through the room without a word.

She busied herself in the kitchen, starting her fancy coffee machine and looking for mugs.

“You’re the most powerful person I know,” came the hero’s voice from the living room, quiet as if they hadn’t really meant for her to hear it. “Too powerful.”

She put both mugs on the counter, then reached for the small metal tin that was hiding at the very back of the cupboard. Gingerly, Karry added some cyanide powder to SwordBright’s mug then swirled the liquid with a disposable straw that she then tossed into the trash. They’d be immune to it, probably, as they were to everything else, but it was the principle of the thing. You just didn’t have coffee with your Nemesis without at least paying lip service to the idea of trying to kill them. It was in the Super Villain’s handbook or something.

She brought the coffee back to the living room, and SwordBright took their cup gratefully. Their hands did not brush, and yet Katarina felt a shiver go through her anyway at the small smile they gave her. She sat on the furthest chair away from them.

“So, a Tyrant,” she said, trying to regain control of the situation. She felt like everything was slipping out of her fingers. This should not happen. She was the Vampire Queen. She should have killed them already. “And how does that concern me?”

They shifted on the couch, blowing on their coffee but not yet taking a sip. “He’ll end the world. I mean, maybe not. But he’ll be responsible for the death of pretty much everyone in North America. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but. I know you don’t want that. I mean, you need people to worship you, don’t you? That can’t happen if everyone’s dead.”

Karry froze in the act of taking a sip, then forced herself to continue the movement lest the hero notice something amiss. Need people to worship her, they’d said, not want. That was a distinction that most people didn’t bother to make when trying to assert her motivation. That was too close to the truth of her for comfort. And yet, she could see in their eyes that they knew perfectly well what they’d just said. Worse, that there was more they weren’t saying.

“What’s your plan, then?” she asked, watching them carefully over the rim of her cup. “You want to stop the Tyrant how?”

They licked their lips, then took a sip of their coffee. Their eyes lit up, and they looked down a it in surprise.

“Oh, that’s good! Did you add anything to this? A flavoured syrup?”

She frowned. “I asked you a question.”

“Speaking of questions, and coffee, you wouldn’t happen to know if I’m working at Timmies right now, would you? Only, I don’t remember very well, this was thirty years ago but I still don’t want to be fired…”

“Stop changing the subject, SwordBright.”

“Oh,” they said, with a fake laugh and a wave, “you can call me Oasis, you know…”

“Oasis. Stop stalling.”

Their grin froze, and then they deflated, sinking down into the couch cushions. They put their coffee mug on the table, and then rubbed a hand down their face. When they looked at her again, they looked weary. Something in their eyes was old and tired, and it was a look that did not sit well on their young face.

“The Tyrant would be about eleven years old now,” they said, inflecting theirs words as if it was the beginning of a sentence, but then not adding anything to it.

“… and?”

Their eyes flickered, as if they wanted to look away but then forced themselves to hold her gaze. They set their jaw.

“And I always felt that if you have the chance to kill baby Hitler, then you should take it. Morals be damned.”

She blinked and reared back. They weren’t joking. She took a peek at their aura, just to make sure, and it was blacker than she’d ever seen from them. She almost fell off of her chair. They weren’t supposed to be dark, and in pain. They were SwordBright.

 They’d said they were from the future, a dark and terrible one, but this was the first time in this conversation that she truly believed it.

“That’s not something I thought I’d ever hear you say,” she remarked flippantly, trying to regain control of the conversation. “New policy?”

“No,” they said, and then apparently ran out of whatever determination they had had to hold her gaze. Their eyes slid away and landed on their abandoned coffee cup. “I always felt like that. Like sometimes violence is required to save the world. It’s just that… When the time came to act, I used to always chicken out. I was…”

They trailed off, and rubbed a hand on their face again. “I was so young. The ‘me’ you know now was a coward. When there was the need for it, I couldn’t start a riot, I couldn’t punch a cop in the face, I couldn’t bring myself to deviate from the expected ‘good superhero’ behaviour. But then the world got really bad, and there was basically a war in the streets. I had to step up. Eventually peaceful solutions just stop working, you know? But even then, I failed.”

There was a short pause. Oasis reached out and touched their mug, running their hand over the rim like the gesture comforted them somewhat. They still looked like they had more to say, like they were considering their words with the utmost seriousness, and Karry resolved to wait them out.

“And even now I’m not sure I can kill baby Hitler, even though the Tyrant will destroy millions of lives,” they continued after a while. “But the world’s running out of time. There’s something that’s going to happen this year. I don’t know what, or when, but in every interview he always said that what set him on his path happened when he was eleven. The media used to think that he meant his interest in politics, but I think he meant his will to take over the world. Whatever it is that will make him the Tyrant, it’s going to happen soon. I have to stop him before that happens. I don’t know yet what form it’ll take, if I’ll have to… I don’t know. But I’ll do whatever it takes.”

They cradled their hands to their chest and slid down the couch with a world-weary sigh, like the will to sit up straight had deserted them. “I still kinda don’t want to murder him, though. I just. I don’t want to do it. Some hero I am.”

Karry set down her own empty cup, starting to get a better grasp on the situation. “And so you came to me. You want me to kill this child?”

She’d be offended, but then again, it was perfectly logical. If you needed a murder to be done, then you hired a murderer. She’d thought this entire affair had been one of friendship, of standing together against the end of the world, but she’d been wrong. This was business. She pulled her dress down her knees briskly, wondering if perhaps she shouldn’t have worn something that showed a tad bit less leg.

Oasis let out a long, bone shuddering sigh. “No. No, I’ve taken this upon myself, it’s my responsibility and I’ll see it through. I came to you because he’ll use your necklace.”

She froze.

Quite without conscious input, her claws unsheathed, and she straightened up in her chair, ready to fight. She fixed her gaze on the hero, aware that her pupils were dilating, and of the roaring of stolen blood in her ears.

No one was supposed to know about her necklace. No one knew about it, actually. She was certain; she’d spent centuries looking for it.

When she’d been shoved into this mortal body, all of her dark essence entrapped and bound by magic, a necklace had been made. A singular, blood-red stone in a bed of silver runes, meant to control her. And it had, for several decades; but one day she’d returned from war to find her captors dead, decimated by nameless enemies. And her necklace nowhere to be found. She’d waited, and fretted, expecting it to be used any minute to bring her under new, even more cruel control. But it had never happened, and she’d been forced to admit that it had perhaps only been taken as a spoil of war, its new owners none the wiser as to what it truly was. What she truly was, and the power she could bring them should they call upon her.

She’d looked for it for centuries now, eventually ending up in Toronto, where the trail had gone cold.

“My necklace?” she asked, layers upon layers of cold threat in her voice.

But Oasis wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t even paying attention. They were still staring at their cup of coffee, now doubtlessly gone cold, and nodded miserably.

“I didn’t understand,” they said, “Not at first. When you stole it from that museum and started wearing it all the time, I thought you were taunting me for not having been able to stop your robbery.”

Museum. The word echoed in her ears, pounded in time with her human blood.

“What museum?”

“But then the Tyrant took it from you, and he started using it, and…” They looked up at her, anguish in their gaze strong enough to rival her own. “and it controls you, doesn’t it? Whatever you are.”

“What museum”, she repeated, slowly. Dangerously. Pulling all of her thrall up like a veil around her even though it would slide off SwordBright like water and ducks. “Tell me.”

They held her gaze, something of their dread seeming to evaporate, replaced by determination. “The Royal Ontario Museum. It’s a new exhibit, and it’ll open next week.”

Something pounded in her chest. Her heart? She wasn’t aware that it even still worked. She felt light-headed all of a sudden, and sank back in her seat, fingers tightening over the chair’s arms and claws ripping through the expensive red leather. Next week. Her necklace.

She’d looked for it for over three hundreds years in screaming, agonizing solitude and there they were, that bright idiot, just giving her the answer as if they didn’t know what it was worth to her. What’s she’d have done to retrieve it. How she’d have tortured the answer out of them if that’s what it would have taken.

On the other side of her glass table, in her stupidly posh living room, Oasis leaned forward, steel eyed and serious, as if they were about to share a secret.

“I thought we could steal it first, and then deal with the Tyrant. What do you say?”

[blam-marie]

Married to the Evil Wizard King - 03

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The creature that stepped out of the carriage was nothing like Autumn had expected. He was slender, for one. Tall, but not large or intimidating, even with the antlers — actual antlers, like those of a deer — that seemed to grow out of his head. He almost seemed to hesitate as he looked at all of them assembled at the edge of the wood.

He wore a padded leather armour in the deep blacks that she had expected from the Evil King, but cut through with bright, surprising shades of brown and silver. A sword hung at his belt marked him for a knight, or at least some manner of guard. His dark mask was smooth, and carved in simple shapes. She had expected it to be scary, but there was nothing remarkable or threatening about it at all. It was, in fact, strikingly devoid of personality. She felt oddly annoyed that the plays and paintings depicting the king’s servants in grotesque and off-putting face coverings had apparently lied to her.

Then the creature did the most peculiar thing. As they waited in tense silence, he reached up to his mask — and removed it. There was a collective intake of breath. She had never heard of such a thing happening before.

He lowered his hands and went to tie the laces of the mask at his belt. See could see his face now, and it was the face of a man barely out of boyhood and unsure of himself. His movements has the gentleness of uncertainty, and his lips looked bitten and raw. He had russet hair and the hint of a beard, as well as large dark eyes. His ears, she noticed as he turned his head to survey them, were inhumanly long and pointed at the tip.

“Which one of you is Princess Autumn?”

That was terribly rude, as far as greetings went. The knight hadn’t acknowledged her mother the queen at all, and had skipped at least twenty minutes of what she considered prerequisite small talk before getting to the matter at hand. In court, he would have been skewered for this lack of etiquette. But really, what else could they expect from one of the Wizard King’s beasts?

She took a deep breath and jutted her chin up. “That would be me,” she said.

The creature looked at her, his large eyes not quite human, but expressive nonetheless. He looked… eager. His bearing became lighter, his shoulders relaxed. He bowed to her, now incongruously courteous. She dug her nails into her sister’s palms.

“It is an honour to meet you, your Highness,” he said, straightening up. “I am a construct of the Wizard King. He has sent me to escort you to his castle; as long as you are with me, you will be granted safe passage through his lands.”

He ran his eyes over the rest of her assembled family and seemed to hesitate for an instant. “In two months’ time, if need be, more constructs will be sent to bring your family up to the castle for your wedding.”

If need be. She exchanged a glance with her mother. The Queen’s lips pressed together as something hard overtook her expression.

“Right,” said the woman. “Well then, let’s get going. We don’t have all day.”

She bent to grab one of Autumn’s bags and boldly dragged it up to the carriage. The knight seemed to startle at that, and he hurried up to wrestle the luggage out of the aging queen’s hands. They had chosen to forego servants for this, preferring to send Autumn off with only her family and close friends as witnesses. On the heels of her mother, her brothers-in-law busied themselves while Autumn exchanged one last teary hug with her sisters and ladies-in-waiting.

She really didn’t have that much left to her name. A few bags, a trunk. Some jewels and letters stuffed into her pockets. Autumn had had to leave most of her books behind, although she had chosen to bring a few journals and some ink with her, just in case she actually had the chance to fill them.

After the teary goodbyes came the dry ones. Her in-laws bowed and shook their heads. Her mother tugged at her brooch again and told her with firm certainty that they would see each other again in two months’ time.

Autumn smiled and nodded, kept the screams and tears firmly lodged right behind her teeth, and then climbed into the carriage box with as much dignity as she could still muster.

The vehicle was a small affair, with only two wheels and a small padded bench for her to sit on with her back to the driver, luggage at her feet. It wasn’t an enclosed box, as she had come to expect carriages to be, but it did have a pointed little wooden roof held up by four posts. There was moss growing on the top of it, a testament to how seldom it was used. She batted away a vine that snaked down to the bench with irritation. The knight, whose eyes had never strayed from her the entire time, climbed up into the front seat. He picked up the reins of the pitch-black horse, shifted his weight. Hesitated, again.

“Do you need more time?,” he whispered to her, low enough that her family wouldn’t hear.

Autumn blinked her dry eyes. Her sisters had both turned away by now, clinging to their husbands and wailing. Her (former) ladies-in-waiting looked devastated. Her mother the queen was glaring up at the sun, hands clenched. It occurred to her, belatedly, that she would die in the same land and at the same hands that had killed her father. She felt some sort of way about this, but decided to turn away from those emotions instead of considering them, as they would not be useful for the task that awaited her.

“I’m fine,” she answered, just as quietly. “Let’s go.”

[blam-marie]

Four Liars (in space)

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If I go to sleep right now, I’ll have four hours of rest before I need to be up.

The ventilation was making that noise again. A sort of metallic VWOOMP VWOOMP VWOOMP reminiscent of one of these big helicopters that had ferried Chuck around in basic training. He remembered being sick in one of those helicopters. Good times.

Nearby, Johnson was snoring loudly. Chuck could hear him straight through his thirty-decibel noise reduction custom earplugs, as if the other man was laying right next to him and not two whole bunks away. But at least Johnson’s snoring was constant, and somewhat on a rhythm. On a good night, Chuck could almost manage to ignore it. He just had to pretend hard enough that it was just… the soothing sound of waves on the sea or something. If the sea sounded a little bit like a rusted lawnmower.

Which, you know, maybe it did! It wasn’t like Chuck had ever seen the sea in person. Any sea. Did different seas sound differently? He should ask Bee. She would probably know. Or he could even go and seek out the answer in person one day. Maybe. It was something to consider for the bucket list.

Anyway, Johnson’s snoring was fine. It was fine! A little annoying, maybe, but Chuck could handle it.

Bouchard, on the other hand, kept taking deep, irregular whistling breaths. He would stop breathing for a few seconds, then release all of his air with a short, disgusting, wet nose-cough sound that drove Chuck straight up the wall. Bouchard had the bunk right on top of his, and sometimes, he fantasized about climbing up there and smothering him with his own military-standard crappy pillow. With the noises he made at night, no one would suspect Chuck, right? They might think that Bouchard had just finally given up the ghost on his own. Well, one could hope.

Although a suspicious, night-time death in the dormitories would create a lot of paperwork and presumably Chuck would be the one who would have to deal with it, so that might not be such a good idea after all.

In the middle of the room, Evans tossed and turned, as usual. The three rows of bunk beds were barely an arm length apart, and the man was so tall that he’d once managed to actually spin 90 degrees and kick Chuck in his sleep. The only silver lining of that incident was that it had given Chuck a good reason to show up to work sleep deprived the following morning. Everyone figured that Evans’ baby skin was probably sensitive to something in the fabric of the sheets and that’s why he wiggled around so much, but command was yet to do anything about it. Past evidence suggested that they probably never would. It wasn’t like comfort was of any great importance here.

Chuck checked his watch then clenched his eyes shut in despair. The tiny glow in the dark screen indicated that it was some time past one AM, which meant that if he got to sleep right then he might still get four hours of sleep before the morning shift. Then the day crowd would rotate into the room and someone else would be using his assigned bunk for the next eight hours, followed by someone else until it was his turn again.

Maybe he should just stop thinking so hard about sleep — maybe if he thought about literally anything else, sleep would just magically come, like it seemed to do for other people. His best friend, Bee, kept telling him that she just laid down at night and closed her eyes and sleep came within five minutes for her. In his opinion, she was probably lying. There was no way that sleep just ‘came’ within five minutes. There must have been a trick. She said she just stopped thinking. Who just stops thinking? Thinking was a constant background process in the machine that he called his brain and sure, there were tricks to make that process take less energy or attention but there wasn’t a way to stop it. So either Bee was trying to describe something else (likely), or she really was programmed differently than he was (also likely). Or she just straight-up temporarily died every night (not very likely, although she would make one terrifying vampire).

 Chuck flipped his pillow to the cold side and started thinking about filling forms. That was a safe and boring topic, right? Boring was good, boring meant that his brain might slow down.

Forty excruciating minutes later, Chuck checked his watch again and almost screamed. He was still not sleeping, and now he’d reminded himself of how annoyed he was that the ventilation filters were listed on the equipment request form and not the maintenance order, even though changing them was part of the maintenance team’s duties. Which meant that every time they needed new filters they would have to ask him to edit the equipment forms for them, and then the equipment supervisor would be pissed that Chuck had messed with his files. Which Chuck wouldn’t have to do if that asshole just picked up his goddamn comm every once in a while and updated his files himself!

 Blasted ventilation. Blasted maintenance team. Blasted god damned bunker and blasted god damned cold war.

Chuck flipped his pillow again and turned to face the wall, pulling his scratchy woollen blanket up to his face. He very sternly told himself to not think about the war, because that was a sure way to stay awake for the rest of the night and he did not need that. Besides, he wasn’t worried about the war. He wasn’t!

Worrying about the war was a responsibility for other people. For all the good that did, since the cold war wasn’t even about Castula. Their neighbour, The Free Radiant Empire of Elunar (F.R.E.E.), had somehow managed to piss off New Vakalos, and now the two giant powers were threatening each other with world-destroying weapons. What did that have to do with Castula? Chuck didn’t know, but somehow by virtue of being allied with FREE, they were now also in danger of dying via rocket to the face. It was kind of unfair. Still, not exactly a problem that he, specifically, could do anything about. And he didn’t like worrying about stuff that he had no impact on.

His problems were more in the range of filling badly designed forms about ventilation filters. He had suggested a change to the forms, but everything took months to be processed around here, and also no one was very inclined to listen to a lone sergeant that looked like death warmed over. Chuck knew that it would considerably help his career if he was less sleep-deprived, but that wouldn’t happen as long as he had to sleep in a bunker dorm room with five other soldiers that snored, farted, and / or had undiagnosed sleep apnea.

Chuck glared at the bottom of Bouchard’s bunk as the seconds ticked by agonizingly slowly. The ventilation clanged again. That was new.

When he had first seen this bunk room, it had seemed to him like a silent tomb. Eighty feet underground, on the lowest floor of a state-of-the-art military facility, it was a room about the same size as his grandmother’s bathroom in which someone had shoved enough beds for six people. The walls felt heavy, the ceiling was low, and it was pretty much impossible to forget all of the tens of thousands of pounds of rock, steel and concrete sitting right on top of his head. Back then, the ventilation had run smoothly, and the corridors were still empty of the beehive of human activity that their sheer size promised. The bunk room was enclosed in a perfectly claustrophobic silence that promised an equal chance of the best sleep of his life or a panic attack.

But then Bouchard, his future personal nemesis, had poked his head into the room behind him. Upon seeing the poster on the wall warning them about “enemy agents subverting them via sexual promiscuity”, he’d let out a noise between a snort and a braying laugh. Chuck had not known peace since.

He’d tried everything. Meditation. Reiki. Over-the-counter sleeping aids. What had come the closer to working was Johnson’s grandmother’s “sleepytime tea”, but while it made Chuck’s body immensely tired and relaxed, his brain still felt like it was hooked up to a car battery. The contrast between a dead-tired body and an overly active mind made for a profoundly unpleasant experience. The obvious next step should have been professional sleeping aids, but the bunker’s heartless on-site doctor refused to prescribe them to him, on the pretext that Chuck might get addicted. Figured. You get one measly footnote on your medical file about a history of substance abuse — not even his own, mind you! A relative getting too enthusiastic about self-medicating their chronic pain, which as far as he was concerned seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do! — and suddenly nobody wanted to prescribe anyone anything for the next three to four generations.

It was all such bull. Getting a bit too reliant on sleeping aids still seemed like a much better solution than hitting his head with a baseball bat just so his brain would stop, which he was four seconds away from doing, but alas. As long as the insomnia didn’t impact his performance, the higher-ups didn’t see it as a problem. And Chuck was too much of a professional to let it impact his performance, so it seemed that he was trapped in a hell of his own making for at least the foreseeable future.

Nearby, one of the sleeping soldiers mumbled something and turned over. Chuck checked his watch. If he fell asleep now, he would get three hours of rest. He could function on three hours, right?

[blam-marie]

Holy shit guys, I just merged my smashwords accounts with draft2digital, and look at this landing page they generated for my book!

They are tracking WAY more retailers than I bothered to do on my own website, woah

[blam-marie]

All the prints I will have available at the Montreal Comics Festival and on the Toronto Comics Festival Digital Marketplace! (Links to come soon)

Sorry for the bad quality, I just Glazed these images and I think I chose a setting that was too high whoops!

[blam-marie]

Married to the Evil Wizard King - 02

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All things considered, Autumn didn’t mind living in a land bordering the kingdom of a Dark Wizard King. It was the sort of thing that you just eventually got used to. ‘Oh, have you heard that all of the sheep in the south pasture have been eaten by evil spirits? I hope the farmers don’t raise their prices again, I was hoping to cook some lamb for the pot roast…’ That sort of thing. People just couldn’t live in fear all of the time, and the Dark King had been part of the decor for a thousand years, after all. He was even somewhat predictable; war would be followed by anger, then a bride, then a period of peace, and then war again. Rinse and repeat.

But just because she could tolerate his existence, that didn’t mean that she wanted to be married to the man. Or eaten, or used in a dark magic ritual, or whatever it was that he did with the women sent to him.

“You must see this as a betrayal,” said her mother as she fussed uselessly with the fastening of her cloak. She kept opening and closing the brooch at her daughter’s throat as if the exact fold of the woollen cloth could change anything about what would happen next.

It was a nice brooch, as such things went. It was round, made of brass and engraved with the head of a stag, with a small ruby inset in between its antlers. Her sister Spring had given it to her for her birthday some years back, and now she wished that her mother would stop touching it. The only reason she was even wearing her cloak at all was because the summer had been a cold one, and that was because — well, because the wizard was angry. The one that she was due to marry.

They were assembled on the edge of the woods, shivering in the wind. All of her belongings had been packed, most of it discarded. She wouldn’t need much where she was going. In a few minutes, one of the servants of the king would appear and take her into the dark recesses of the trees. From there on they would allegedly make their way to the Wizard King’s castle, and then supposedly she would get to meet him. Or the creature would quickly and quietly slice her throat a few miles into the woods and bring up her heart for his master to eat. There was no way to know, really.

“Of course not,” she deadpanned. “All the little girls dream of being sacrificed to the Evil Wizard King.”

“All the smart little girls know that it’s a possibility, at least,” snapped back her mother. “Instead of daydreaming about algebra.”

“Geometry,” she muttered. “I daydream about geometry and I make beautiful sewing patterns.”

“Yes,” sighed the queen, suddenly deflating. “And we could have found you a nice husband just on the strength of that skill. But I’ve not chosen you for the Wizard King for your sewing patterns, child. And I’ve not chosen you because you’re an obedient, demure little thing. I’ve chosen you because you’re a handful.”

“Wow. Thank you, Mother.”

Far away, the rustle of an approaching carriage could be heard coming from the woods. There was no road here, nor even a path between the trees. Thorny bushes were packed so tight on the edge of the woods that one might mistake them for a solid wall from afar. But Autumn had heard that the trees of the cursed forest could move, and that once one of the king’s creatures approached, branches and trunks would simply spring apart to let them pass. It might have been an interesting sight to see on any other day, if it had not meant the prelude for her death. The queen grabbed her cloak tighter and spoke with urgency.

“No, listen to me, my daughter. You are the most willful woman I’ve ever met. We hired a bard for your birthday, and you bit him.”

“He knows what he did,” she hissed, wondering where her mother was going with this.

“We taught you embroidery, and you used the needles to stab the scullery maid.”

“She was an assassin sent to kill you!”

“We showed you poetry, and you turned to mathematics instead.”

“I studied both!,” she felt compelled to point out. She knew what the poetry was for, it wasn’t like she’d just ignored it altogether.

“My point,” continued her mother, “is that you have never listened to anyone in your life and you will not listen to the Wizard King now.”

Autumn felt her eyebrows rise in surprise. “You want me to die faster? Is that what you want? I thought the whole point — ostensibly — was for me to cajole him into a marriage.”

“You will die regardless,” retorted her mother, brutal as she’d always been. “Whether you secure the marriage or not, whether now or in ten years. The bastard has killed my husband, and he will kill my daughter. It cannot be avoided, and I won’t feed you some hogwash about how your sacrifice will save the rest of your people. You already know all of that. What I am telling you now, instead, is that when your death is inevitable, you don’t have to go easy. Give him hell. And secure the marriage before he kills you, if you can.”

The rustling grew louder.

“Understand that your father failed, ten years ago. I am under significant pressure from the other kingdoms to make up for that failure in any way possible. But if I am going to send anyone into a rat’s nest, then I will send a viper. Remember what I told you before. Do not give in to him.”

Autumn nodded. Her mother was referring to the only other conversation that they’d had on the subject of her sacrifice to the Evil King after it had been announced.  The old woman had slipped into her bedroom after dusk to whisper urgently at her, as if the only real conversation she could have with her daughter had to be hidden in the dead of night, away from prying ears.

“Don’t let him touch you until your wedding night,” had been the brunt of her advice.

“Are we really still pretending that a marriage is going to happen?,” she’d spat, bruised and tired already at the thought of two months of trials and the reward of a certain death.

“You are about to enter a land where magic is real, and it has rules,” had cautioned her mother. “And one of the core rules of magic is that it works with what you give it. We are not pretending to the universe that a wedding will happen. We are telling it so.”

“Right. And as with any proper wedding, I have to go into it a proper maiden.”

“You haven’t been a proper maiden since you were of age,” had scorned her mother, and Autumn had felt her cheeks burn. The queen hadn’t been meant to know about the cook’s son. Or the viscount’s cousin. Or the knight(s).

“We are far past questions of propriety,” she had continued. “This is a matter of magic. Consumption is a powerful act. Once you eat of his land, you will belong to it. There is nothing we can do about that. You will be there for two months, and you have to feed yourself. But once you eat of him, you’ll belong to him, too. And you cannot allow that to happen before you’ve secured the wedding.”

“Right. Because…?”

“Because it involves a contract; and a contract signed on lands where the magic is alive and words become reality…” she had trailed off and raised her eyebrows meaningfully.

“… It will make his word unbreakable,” Autumn had breathed in realization. “You want me to make him swear us protection, out loud and on paper, during a sacred ceremony. While standing in a castle made out of magic. Shit. Okay.”

“Yes. And then I want you to seal the whole thing with the oldest, most powerful ritual at your disposal. I am not asking as your mother; I am asking as your queen. I want you to lure the Wizard King into a vow and to put the seal of your own body on it. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know,” she had told her mother honestly, mind reeling. “None of the other girls ever managed. But I can try.”

The fact that she might not even get the opportunity to try, or that she might not get a choice in the matter, had been such a clear evidence that neither of them had felt the need to point it out.

Her sisters had a different idea about things. The day after she had promised her mother that she wouldn’t spread her legs for the Wizard King until he’d wedded her in front of her whole family and kingdom, Summer and Winter had cornered her in the music room.

“You have to mount him the first chance you get,” had been their piece of advice.

It was a matter of magic, they had claimed, because all everyone ever wanted to talk about was magic. That, or sex. To be entirely honest, Autumn didn’t even know if sleeping with the Evil King was even a possibility in the first place. He had been alive for a thousand years! Maybe he wasn’t even human anymore, by now. Or he was really old.

In any case, Summer and Winter’s argument had been that if the Evil Wizard King was about to stake a claim on her, then her only option was to cut him off at the knees and stake a claim first. It would be a bold move, she had to admit. Like biting a cat that was about to bite you and then watching it try to process what had just happened. She might even have agreed with them, if it hadn’t been for the promise she’d just made her mother.

Still, it was an option to keep in the back pocket. Autumn liked having options. ‘Don’t die’ was an obvious one. ‘Stay a maiden’ might or might not be doable. ‘Mount the guy on his own evil wizard throne to make a point’ was terribly unsubtle, but at least she was reasonably sure that he wouldn’t see it coming.

As she stood on the edge of the forest waiting for her ride into hell to come and pick her up, Autumn reflected that this was probably not in any way, shape, or form what her mother meant when she said, ‘give the Dark King a hard time’. She tried to keep in a hysterical chuckle.

Hand in hand with Summer and Winter, she wished that their eldest sister, Spring, were here to say goodbye too. But she’d only recently given birth, and her husband (some chump of a duke) thought it too dangerous to bring their child near the forest. Never mind that the spirits hadn’t been seen for months. Never mind that she could have left the baby at home for a few minutes. Never mind that she would never see Autumn again, and that her child would never have the chance to meet his aunt now.

Never mind that Autumn was almost certainly going to die. But at least she would die with her head held high, after having given her best shot at securing a wedding vow out of the most evil man on the planet.

[blam-marie]

Decided to change my approach with these guys. Only the Anakin/Vader one is finished, the rest are still at the sketching stage. Let me know what you think in the comments!

[blam-marie]

SKIN DEEP chapter 1

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Louison left the river for the fourth time of her life on a hot August day. She pulled herself from the waves to the sandy shore alone, with no one to witness the beginning of her journey. Her siblings had broken the ancient traditions by refusing to accompany her to land. They were terrified of what would wait for her there. She didn’t share their worry. Louison knew the world of men well, and she would manage on her own. But then, it wasn’t as if she had much choice.

Far away, beyond the rocks that bordered the little sandy beach, she could see the menacing bell tower of St. Adalbert Sur Mer piercing the sky. The small church’s metal roof gleamed like a lighthouse under the heavy sun, a pinprick of light presiding over a quiet village with a dark secret.

That secret was the reason that Louison was here. Three times over the summer, the naked, lifeless body of one of her siblings had been found in the river. Naked, and cradled in cement. It was a crime that no one could discover, aside from those who lived in the waves. For the St. Lawrence’s clans, this meant war. To steal a pelt was one thing; but to throw the skinned bodies of Selkies back in the water to be found by their families? That was just unimaginably cruel.

Three times already, Louison had been sent to land to investigate the disappearance of a sibling. She was her clan’s emissary, like her mother and grandmother before her. This time, however, the problem at hand was much worse than a missing selkie, trapped by a human out of cruelty disguised as love. There was no one to save and no sibling to reunite with their family. Louison, for the first time in her life, had to solve a murder.

She was afraid, of course. But she couldn’t let fear take hold of her. The clan’s matriarch herself had assigned her this mission, and Louison was determined to see it through. She would find out who was responsible for this and drag them into the waves. Sedna could decide their fate.

Taking advantage of the high tide, she slid forward onto the smooth pebbles of the beach. The day was warm, but there was no one in sight. Humans, following strange customs, usually disappeared from the shores towards the end of summer, when their offspring returned to the learning places that they called schools.

Once she’d left the water, the transformation took her. Her body stretched, her almost three hundred pounds of bone and flesh splitting into perfectly plump arms and legs. It was never pleasant, but she endured the shift stoically.

From as far back as their history could recall, the transformation had always been a group ritual. That day, under the uncaring glare of the sun, Louison had only herself. She used her sharp claws to tear at her chest, slashing awkwardly at the fur on her ribs until she could grab a handful and rip it off. The pale, damp skin of her new breasts rose towards the sky as she heaved under the morning light. With salt on her lips and the sun in her eyes, she struggled out of her pelt with as much grace as a salmon stuck in a fishing net. For Louison, every second spent in the open was a second too long. She knew that on this beach, she was a target. Someone could spot her at any moment. Had she had the choice, she would have preferred to land at Selkie’s Cove, a small shallow bay surrounded by rocks a few kilometres from St. Adalbert Sur Mer. She could have hidden in any of the caves dotting the cliffs there, and would have had all the time in the world to shift into human form.

Unfortunately, it was the very place where her sisters had last been seen alive. Selkie’s Cove was definitely somewhere where her investigation would take her, but not before she could put on some clothes and establish her cover in town.

Louison rolled onto her knees and looked around her warily. There was no one in sight. She got her feet under her, her legs trembling with the effort needed to stand after months spent in the river. Louison, unlike other selkies, practised walking often. She knew what movements to make and how to shift her weight from one foot to the other, even when she was rusty.

It was her mother that had insisted on this training. She used to warn her about growing slow, about spending too long on the beach after leaving the water. It was dangerous. Keeping that danger in mind, Louison picked up her fur pelt and folded it carefully under her arm.

The wind coming from the river made her shiver despite the warmth of the sun on her naked skin. To the east, a line of pebbles separated the beach from the bike path. She started painstakingly walking towards it. Her steps gradually grew more sure on the wet sand and large rocks until she had a decent stride going. At the bend of the path, where the sand gave way to yellowing grass, stood a small wooden structure. It was nothing more than the municipal employee’s shed, and yet Louison knew that she would find what she was looking for inside of it. Old Gustave had worked all his life to keep the beach clean and welcoming. Although it had never been part of his official functions, he had also gotten into the habit of keeping clothes and other useful things inside his shed. Especially after his wedding to the beautiful and tragic Armande.

Louison had liked Armande. Her mother had investigated her disappearance from the clan, once. It was one of the only times when it had had a happy ending for everyone involved. Of course, Armande hadn’t lived long on land. That just wasn’t where their specie thrived. But she had been happy here, and that is what mattered. Gustave had never taken her pelt — nor touched it, as far as she knew.

Few humans respected the Great Taboo. For that, the clan gave him their tentative trust.

The shed wasn’t locked. Louison pushed the door with effort, the old hinges covered by layers of rust and salt. The place was full with tools, machines, and who knew what else, all carefully kept on high metal shelves. In a corner, behind an abandoned lawn mower, was a plastic bin on which someone had painted “lost & found”. Louison had a moment of fondness for Gustave. There were piles of clothes inside, all of them carefully folded and apparently sorted by sizes. A couple of shoes and boots were also lined up under a work bench nearby. Behind the clothes bin was an old metal locker. Upon inspection, a padlock and its key had been left inside.

Louison placed her pelt on the highest shelf with reverence. She hastened to shut the door before she could change her mind. The sharp snap of the padlock locking was at once reassuring and terrifying. She gnashed her teeth and forced herself to walk away from the locker, back towards the bin. She had to find something to wear that would support the cover that she and her siblings had come up with.

August was the perfect month to move into St. Adalbert Sur Mer. Every fall, dozens of students that attended CEGEP in the neighbouring town came here to find cheap apartments. They filled the village with new faces. There wouldn’t be a better moment to slip in unnoticed. Louison, with her large honest eyes and round face, figured that she could pose as a student of marine biology, which would give her the perfect cover to carry out her investigation.

She pulled out a few plaid shirts and some pants from the bin, then chose a sturdy-looking pair of boots. All of the clothes were visibly second-hand, but that would only serve to help sell her “poor student” image. She pushed aside everything that was too brightly coloured or had a different cut than she recognized. Fashion had doubtlessly changed a lot since the last time that she’d come on land, and she hoped that she wasn’t making a mistake with her choices.

She didn’t want to have to come back to the shed to pick something else. Too many selkies on land made the mistake of visiting the place where they had stashed their pelts too often. It wasn’t subtle, and increased the chances that someone would follow them there. Better not to take that risk.

Lastly, Louison went to the work bench and started to check the drawers. She hoped that Gustave’s generosity would have extended to leaving her some money, just enough so that she could find a place to sleep while on land. With a serial killer on the loose, the last thing she wanted was to have to return to the river every night and risk being noticed.

Fortunately, the park ranger was a generous man. A few bills had been slipped under a flower pot, as well as the flyer for the local youth hostel. She bit her lip, trying to think of the best way to show her gratefulness to the old man. Louison picked a pair of scissors from the tools on a shelf nearby and cut a lock of her dark hair, which she tucked under the flower pot where the money had been. He would know what it meant; the clan now owned him a debt.

And the clan took its debts very seriously.

[blam-marie]

A Metaphor's Guide to Rewriting Destiny

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We hurried to the hotel’s coach house, where we took one of the nondescript carriages that were used to ferry around paying guests at their convenience. Our same coachman as on the first night took the reins and Jeanne, perhaps having gotten into her head that she ought to keep an eye on me, begged us to wait as she changed into her footman attire before catching up to us outside.

Compassion and two of the scholars climbed inside of the cabin after me. There was an air of heavy expectation as the carriage rumbled over cobblestones as we undertook our journey. The men tried to draw me into conversation but I did not have the patience for it. I shut them down and they lapsed into tense silence.

Sat on the seat facing mine, Compassion watched me with dark, pensive eyes. We had never been companions but I had tried to kill him many times, and we kept aware of each other’s work. This situation was unlike either of us. But few knew what I did outside of the times when Walls actively deployed me as their Rage, and few believed the rumors of what Compassion got up to outside of the sanctuary of the various temples and monasteries where he kept incarnating. That was because they did not understand what Compassion truly was. I did. I had asked myself the day before, when wondering how he had known how to take down a magical barrier, ‘compassion for whom’. That was a flawed question. The answer was ‘yes’. It was ‘everyone’, or ‘whoever happened to be in front of him at any given moment’. Regardless of who that person actually was.

I was not surprised that he was involved in this brewing revolution. What surprised me was that he was not involved more. He did not care about politics but he cared very, very much that people were suffering.

Unfortunately, here and now, it was me that he was focused on. My suffering which he sought to diminish or ease. I clenched my hands into fists and stared out of the window. I didn’t want this. It would have been better for everyone if he had cut me loose at the gate of the Lighthouse and turned his purpose towards those who actually wanted him. I was keeping him from them now. I was restless under his attention. I never should have pushed him into the cell and extracted his promise to help.

I closed my eyes. I tried to remind myself that I was doing this for Astoria, that I owed her this at least. I tried to lie to myself that there was still something that I could do for her, that my efforts were not too little and far too late. It didn’t help.

I wished that I could simply set this city ablaze with everyone in it and never have to look upon it and its misery ever again. There was a time when I would have. When torching vast swatches of land instead of pretending to be a nice little civilized Exemplar who played by the rules was an option that was open to me. But not anymore. The world had gotten too complicated. I had made too many ties, gathered too many stories to keep locked behind my breast, safe from the world and the passage of time.

I had gotten soft. And tired.

This exhaustion was exactly what made Compassion so dangerous to me. His purpose was the end of mine, and therefore it was he that would be the end of me, some day. This had not been prophesized, nor was it written down anywhere for anyone to see. But I knew it, and I suspected that he did too.

After three thousand years I was well aware by now that my destiny was set in stone, and could not be rewritten by will nor stubbornness alone. There were some who believed that Anydrite was not truly gone, and that one day she would return and call back her aspects to her, and that this would be the end of the Exemplars. Others believed that if only the three hundred of us could just gather at the same place at the same time, then our powers would be pulled out of us and she would be re-formed. But these were ridiculous and fanciful notions, formed by minds who had not been suited to immortality and strained under its weight.

We were nearing our destination. As our carriage slowed down, I set my jaw and told myself firmly that whatever end awaited me, today was not that day. I caught Compassion’s eyes again. He seemed to sense my renewed resolve, for it was he who lowered his gaze now.

We rolled to a stop in front of some manner of factory. The door opened, and Compassion turned to our boy leader.

“I will speak to the workers here. Don’t wait up.”

He stepped out. Then a tall man in faded clothes emerged from the factory’s shadowed doorway. He exchanged a nod with the Exemplar and climbed up into our carriage to take his place. Jeanne closed the door firmly behind him. We felt the coach dip as she climbed back onto her perch at the rear. The two scholars greeted the man, who seemed rather exasperated with them. He shot me and intrigued look, but as no one had yet introduced me, he chose instead to sit next to our charismatic blonde leader. He removed his hat and ran a hand over his bald head.

“I appreciate your kindness in bringing me to the train station,” he began before anyone could say anything. “But if this is another attempt at convincing me, I will remind you that my position is perfectly clear—”

“The situation has changed,” interrupted the leader of our cause.

“Jean-François...” cautioned the other scholar under his breath.

Jean-François twitched a hand towards him, as if ordering him to settle down and let him work.

“I apologize for being so candid,” he told the man whom I assumed was Ambreville, “but we will not gain anything by hiding behind manners and double-speak.”

The other man sighed. “Speak plainly then. What exactly has happened that is so important that it could change my decision?”

Jean-François and the other scholar turned to me then and waited. Perhaps they thought that I would speak, or at the very least lift my veil. I did no such thing. I had been a propaganda piece for longer than they both had been alive. I knew how best to play my part. I raised my chin and tilted my head to the light coming through the window, knowing that the glow of my inhuman golden eyes would shine through the dark fabric.

Ambreville noticed, and his expression fell into frank astonishment.

“Another? But I thought... Compassion...” he gestured back the way we had come.

“She is nothing like Compassion,” said Jean-François, leaning in. His eyes glowed almost as much as mine in the shadowed interior of the carriage. “Mr. Jules-Honoré Ambreville, let me introduce you to the Exemplar of Rage.”

***

As expected, my presence had the desired effect. They spoke animatedly the rest of the ride to the train station. I kept my eyed fixed on the man I had been brought here to convince, my posture confident but alert, my hands loose on my cane. I knew how to give the impression of a predator, coiled dangerously in the darkness. It made men’s pulses race, sweat gather at their temple, their breathing grow shallow. Their entire body trembled in terror, when they knew me their enemy, or excitement, when they thought me their tool.

Sometimes, I even had that effect on other Exemplars, who really should know better. Or perhaps they were stirred because they knew me and what I was capable of. I wondered whether I could arouse such turmoil in Compassion if I really applied myself to it. It seemed unlikely. He did not seem a man easily threatened, and he was not foolish enough to think that I could be controlled.

As expected, I did not need to speak to Ambreville, nor was I asked to. As the conversation washed over me, I let my mind wander. There had been a time when I would have cared about such things. The first of me had been a king, a leader of men. He would have had much to say about this revolution. But that had been the first and last time that I had had any such power. Every one of me afterwards had been part of the lesser, the downtrotten, the ones who did not have a voice until I started stabbing in their names. The world seemed different from that angle, desperation more cruel, pain more raw. Lessons had been learned.

[blam-marie]

SwordBright 2

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The vampire Queen, or Karry, as she preferred to be known when she wasn’t dressed up in red leather and terrorizing a crowd, lived in an extremely expensive apartment in downtown Toronto. No one was supposed to know where she lived, or even what she called herself outside of her villainous activities. But as Oasis entered the elevator of the incredibly posh building, they wondered how no one had ever made the connection. Everything in here screamed rich, casual disdain of one’s fellow beings, from the actual chandeliers on the ceiling of the lobby to the valet that went around parking people’s cars, like this was some sort of five stars hotel people just happened to live in year round.

Oasis looked at the mirrored panels on the elevator walls, reflecting them infinitely from all sides. Gosh, but Karry must have hated this place. She was such a snob that she couldn’t stand to live anywhere less dramatic, but she must have hated it all the same. She really was much more of a ‘haunted manor in the forest’ kinda gal. She definitely wasn’t a mirror kinda gal, and mirrors weren’t usually all that fond of her, either. Especially those backed in silver.

At this point in time, technically, Oasis didn’t know her that well. Their Nemesis-hood was still in it’s infancy, so to speak. That was about to change. Oasis had thirty years of forewarning, and not a lot of patience left. They were sure Karry would understand. They would make her understand.

They exited the common elevator into a beautiful hallway, and went straight to the other, private elevator hiding between two tall and lush potted plants. This one had a keypad, and went to the penthouse, where no one but Karry and the building staff had access.

Without even the slightest hesitation, Oasis keyed in the password, certain that Karry hadn’t changed it once in thirty years. She was a creature of habit, as most vampires were, and Oasis planned on putting their knowledge of those habits to very good use.

***

The small reception room that waited at the other end of that elevator was as posh and ridiculous as the rest of the building, but on the front door of the penthouse itself was finally something that indicated who might live here. Oasis stared at the brass knocker, amused and oddly charmed. Smack in the middle of the door, clashing horribly against it’s white blandness, was a large metallic bat holding a ring in its claws. It must have shocked the building staff quite badly when she’d gotten it installed, unless they’d chalked it off to rich eccentricity. And really, if she’d lived here any amount of time, they must have eventually gotten used to her quirks. Everything in the apartment beyond, Oasis knew, was either cursed, gave out the appearance of being cursed, or seemed to have been custom-made with the words “rich gothic lady” in mind. It had been a bit terrifying at first, but once Oasis had gotten used to it, they’d found it to be quite charming. A bit nerdy, even, in the way only themed weddings and dracula cosplayers could be.

Oasis took a hold of the knocker and let it fall three times on it’s base, the rich brass sound echoing into the apartment beyond. They fell back on their heels, something like nerves finally working their way through their body.

After a few minutes, during which they considered knocking again, the door was wrenched open. Karry stood on the other side, dishevelled and confused, as if she couldn’t quite understand what was going on. She looked like she’d been sleeping, her long black hair tousled, her face cleaned of her usual heavy makeup. A soft-looking, deep red silk bathrobe was wrapped hastily around her body, its gaping collar and short length revealing long expenses of white skin.

Oasis looked her up and down, just to be a prat, and raised their eyebrows.

“It’s three in the afternoon.”

Karry’s mouth, which had been gaping open, closed with a snap. Then, she pulled the top of her robe more firmly closed and scowled at them.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I need your help.”

Karry looked like the world had just turned upside down. “What?” She looked around, as if reassuring herself that reality was still in place, and then repeated “What?” slightly louder.

Oasis sighed. They really didn’t have time for this.

“Look,” they began. “I know we were trying to kill each other, like, yesterday, but I’ve just travelled backward in time. I’m from thirty years in the future, and I need your help. The future is shit, alright? Like, end of the world shit. And we need to stop that from happening.”

“The future,” she mouthed, then “we?”

Oasis was starting to get annoyed. It was hard for them to see her like that, to see her alive, if that word even applied to someone like her. Even though it had all gone downhill between the two of them in the end, Karry had still been a big part of their world for something like three decades, and they’d missed her after the end of the world. The faster she got on with the program and helped them, the better it would be for everyone involved. They had thirty years before the event, but still. Every minute counted.

Not to mention that they didn’t really look forward to the weirdness that was sure to happen now that she didn’t remember any of their shared past/future. Oasis didn’t have the first clue how to talk to a person that they knew, but that didn’t know them. Not properly, anyway. But at least they knew that they wouldn’t have the chance to properly connect with her while standing in the middle of the corridor.

“Look, I just know you, okay?” they huffed, waving a hand in the air. “I know this is something you’ll want to help me with. Just let me in!”

Karry seemed to shake herself, and then stood more firmly into the entrance of the door, blocking the apartment beyond with her slim frame. Her hands, loose at her side, twitched, as if she was seconds away from unsheathing the claws Oasis knew from experience were deathly sharp. This was her battle stance, they knew, or close to it, and they weren’t sure whether to be wary, or relieved that the gravity of the situation finally seemed to be sinking in. Even if she did look disarmingly soft in her thin bathrobe.

“Why should I help you? Are we friends in the future or something?”

“No,” they said, honestly, although they weren’t quite sure how to describe what they’d been, once upon a time before the end. “It’s more like… Do you watch anime?”

She blinked at their apparent non-sequitur, but she wasn’t closing the door yet. Besides, Oasis had seen how she dressed, so they went on before she could answer: “you know how in an anime, the season one villain ends up being small fish next to the season seven villain, and then they just sort of become like a weird murderous uncle - or aunt I guess - to the main cast?”

Karry frowned at them, and they shifted awkwardly in place. Why couldn’t she just be chill, for pete’s sake? They hadn’t even brought their sword.

“And then they just, I guess,” they continued, now committed to this weird rambly explanation of theirs, “they become sort of allied with the main characters even though they still have their own evil plans and stuff but they don’t want to see the world destroyed, you know? It’s like that. It’s been like that between us for years.”

She frowned at them for a little bit longer, and then her hands relaxed, a minute twitching that someone who hadn’t spent as much time fighting her as Oasis might not even have noticed. “Like Zuko?” she asked.

“What? No!”, they said, somehow offended by that remark, as though the sanctity of cartoon storytelling was of any great importance, right now. “Zuko had a full on redemption arc! We — you — It was never like that.”

“… Like Vegeta, then?”

Oasis blinked. “I never really watched Dragonball,” they admitted sheepishly.

“Me neither,” she retorted with indignant irritation. “You’re the one who brought anime into this!”

“Forget anime,” they said, waving their hands around, fully aware that this conversation had somewhat gotten away from them. “Can I just come in?”

Karry rolled her eyes and finally, blessedly, moved away from the door.

“Come in. Get comfortable, or whatever. I’m going to go get dressed. This doesn’t seem like a conversation to be had naked.”

Oasis, despite their weariness, despite their pain and anxiety and the looming end of the world, still managed to blush at that comment, betrayed by a twenty years old body that still felt too young and too fresh. Karry seemed to notice, and huffed softly as she disappeared into the recess of her apartment.

[blam-marie]

A Metaphor's Guide to Rewriting Destiny

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I returned to the hotel’s staff quarters just in time to interrupt what seemed to be a heated debate between Compassion and our hosts. The scholars, whom I had only met in passing and whose name I had not bothered to remember, seemed agitated. They were crowded into the staff kitchen and blocked my way towards the stairs to the basement, where the hotel’s workers shared a few cramped rooms. Of those workers, only four or five were present, and they stayed in the back of the kitchen, clustered around the stove. Whatever it was that the scholars were proposing, they did not seem to like it very much, and neither did Compassion.

Jeanne, whose opinion I already trusted more than any man’s here, stood hesitantly near the door. When I walked in, she gave a sigh of relief.

“Where have you been!” she hissed.

Compassion heard her and spared me a glance. Then another, his gaze flicking down to my new cane then back up at my face with a questioning look. My hands tightened on the pommel and I raised an eyebrow. How interesting that he had recognized the hidden weapon at a glance. Once more, the Exemplar of being-nice-to-people showed surprising hidden depths.

The others in the room noticed Compassion’s distraction and looked over as well. Once they saw me, a great clamor rose, everybody trying to speak at once. Then one of the young men — the one who seemed to be in charge of this circus —, yelled for silence and they settled down.

“Miss Rage,” he began, spreading his hands imploringly at me. “We require your help, and time is of the essence.”

“Mrs.,” I corrected coldly.

“My apologies?”

“It is Mrs. Rage,” I repeated. “But go on.”

He seemed thrown off balance, and once more my accoutrements seemed to cause the room a great amount of discomfort and consternation. But he rallied valiantly, and started anew: “Mrs. Rage, you need to come with us at once. There is a man about to leave Lutèce, and he must see you before his train departs. It is of the utmost importance.”

“Why?”

“He is the leader of a trade union in the provinces,” supplied Compassion calmly. “And he has refused to join the anti-monarchist’s crusade unless they can prove to him that their movement has teeth, and is not just made up of words. They want to parade you in front of him like a propaganda piece.”

“That is not what we said!” argued the young man. He was tall and lean, blonde, and looked very charismatic — in a dangerous sort of way. I had known too many charming young men capable of leading others into horrors to ever be able to trust his ilk. “We simply want him to meet her, that’s all,” he insisted.

“You do not want me to speak,” I said, “because I know nothing about your movement nor would I be able to speak convincingly about it. You simply want me to be there so that you can prove that I am on your side. It does sound very much like being a propaganda piece.”

Not that it mattered very much to me, so used was I to it. But I wanted to see if the boy would be honest enough to admit it, or if he was so far up his own hubris that he did not even realize what he was truly asking me for.

He looked at me beseechingly. “We are planning a large demonstration in the streets on Liberty day. When the entirely of Lutèce walks to the parliament, the minister will have no choice but to recognize the will of the people and resign! Then, nothing will be able to stop us. We can take the palace as well, and make even the king see that we’ve had enough! But for that to work, we need people to overcome their fear and walk with us! And if we cannot find enough courage in Lutèce, then I am willing to look elsewhere. Jules-Honoré Ambreville has strong ties with the rail workers — if we convince him to help, then he could bring in people from all over Theos to join the march. It could double or even triple our numbers! We need his support, but so far we’ve not managed to convince him that it would be worth his and his people’s time. If we can just show him that we mean business, that we have a decent chance of succeeding — that we mean it… why, we could rewrite the course of Theos’ history!”

Throughout the room, people were now standing straighter, their eyes shining with hope and fervor. I almost rolled my eyes at them. What we had here was a zealot, and a convincing one at that. How wonderful. I had been right in my first estimation of the situation; this young man could lead sheep into slaughter, and they would thank him for it. He had a knack for good speeches, and what’s worse, he seemed to strongly believe in what he was saying. And now, not satisfied with leading men, he wanted to appear to his allies with Rage at his side as well. It was undeniable that my presence would lend weight to his cause. But I wondered whether he was truly prepared for the cost of that weight. Bright-eyed idealists seldom were.

I also wondered what he was doing in academia. Give this man a battalion, and he would lead it. Give him a country, and he would bring it either to glory or to ruin, or both. Give him a revolution… well, the result remained to be seen.

“Having an Exemplar on your side is far from a convincing enough argument,” argued Compassion. “It is grandstanding, and if Ambreville has any sense he will see right through it. You will only harm your own cause by relying on boasts rather than substance. I did not bring Rage here for her to be a chess piece for you to use.”

I was about to interject, but Jeanne was faster. She stepped towards Compassion and snapped: “Are you going to make all of her decisions for her, or are you going to let her speak?!”

Compassion’s eyes widened, then caught mine. A silent communication passed between us. He already knew what I was about to answer, just as surely as I knew why he had tried to oppose it. He did not wish for me to be used like a thing. Unfortunately for his poor sensitivities, I was so used to it that it barely even registered anymore. He winced and inclined his head.

“I apologize for overstepping. It is your choice, of course.”

“Then let’s go. You said time was of the essence, didn’t you?”

I turned heels and stalked out of the room, forcing them all to scramble after me. I took a small pleasure in making them hurry to catch up, throwing their well-practiced countenances in disarray, knowing that I had just locked myself into a passive role for the foreseeable future but wanting them to remember that I still had a spine.

[blam-marie]

Married to the Evil Wizard King - 01

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When Autumn was a little girl, she and her sisters used to climb into their mother’s bed at sunset and beg her for stories. The queen wasn’t a great storyteller, and she didn’t have the patience to learn many different tales. But there was one that she knew by heart, and it was the story of why their land was cursed.

Once upon a time, there was a great king who undertook a perilous journey across the mountains to find a new land for his people, who had been chased from their home by war. He discovered the vast prairies of Esternia, and split the land into four kingdoms, one for each of his sons. But his court wizard was an evil, twisted man, who also wanted a kingdom for his own.

There are many versions of this story, which ascribe many different sins, desires, or dark deeds to the wizard. But what they all agree on is that one night, in the height of summer, the Evil Wizard slit his king’s throat and used his blood in a dark ritual meant to bind the land of Esternia to his will.

The four sons brought their armies together to avenge their father, and managed to drive the wizard back to a dark forest at the foot of the mountains. There, it is said that he lured them into an ambush. The wizard killed each of the four sons, and their bones he ground into dust, and this dust he used to salt the limits of the forest. He claimed that long, dark stretch of land as his kingdom, and declared that no living being could cross into the woods without his curse befalling them.

Since that day, a thousand years ago, the Evil Wizard King has haunted the borders of Esternia, cutting their people off from the mountains and the lands beyond. For a thousand years, the four kingdoms have had to walk the tightrope between placating him and suffering his wrath. Sometimes, evil spirits pour out of his lands, slipping out from between the trees and slaughtering everything in their path. Other times, droughts befall the kingdoms for months — or even years. In his cruelty, the wizard banishes all clouds from the sky and holds back the rain, so that the sun burns their harvest down in the fields.

Every few decades, the monarchs of the four kingdoms decide to fight back; they raise their armies and march upon the forest, intent on ridding the land of the wizard king once and for all. They always fail. The knights and soldiers make their ways into the trees, and do not come back. The years immediately afterwards are always dark ones. The spirits come in greater numbers; the earth shakes under their feet.

Inevitably, this is then followed by another bout of placating. The remaining royal families bow and scrape; they send tribute to the forest in a bid for forgiveness. Vast riches in elaborately carved coffers, the finest fruits of their orchards, and richly embroidered textiles get piled up on chariots and brought to the very edge of the trees for a tense hand-off.

The king, himself, never appears. Twisted, dark creatures emerge from the forest in his stead. These strike fear in all who see them, for they seem to be neither men nor beasts, but something in between. They wear dark clay masks to cover their faces but their horns, claws and sometimes even hooves mark them for the unnatural things they are. No one knows how these servants of the king come to be, whether he creates them of whole cloth or grows them out of animals — or worse, whether they were once people and this is what his curse does to those who breach his forest. No one has ever dared ask. In any case, these servants seldom talk. They accept the tributes wordlessly then dissapear back into the woods, never to be seen again.

Eventually, the wrath of the king stops coming down on the prairies so heavily, and life goes on.

But there is one type of tributes that always get a reaction from the creatures, and seem to warrant the attention of the Dark King himself: brides.

Every few years, one of the kingdoms will try their hand at finding the Evil Wizard King a wife. They will put forward a princess — or a duchess, or any number of pretty well bred young maiden — and offer the Dark King some agreement regarding alliances or succession, in the vain hopes that he will act like a proper king, for once, and engage in a spot of diplomacy. The answer is always the same: the poor young thing is invited to his castle for ‘consideration’. If she is still — well, the word he uses is ‘eligible’, but everyone knows it means ‘alive’ — if she is still eligible in two months’ time, then the Wizard King will agree to a wedding.

No maiden has yet reached the two-month mark. None of these offers are ever sincere, in any case. The girls are merely another tribute to be given away as a necessary sacrifice to appease a capricious neighbour. The girls chosen are usually sick and already dying, or they volunteer for reasons no one dares to ask about. It has been a long time since a girl went unwilling to the forest, not that this makes the whole thing any less of a tragedy. Merely a more palatable one.

No one knows what, exactly, the Evil Wizard King does with the princesses and maidens and other assorted young girls that are sent up to his castle. Perhaps he does marry them. Or he uses them in dark magic rituals­. Or he eats them. But there is one thing that everyone knows for certain: things calm down when a wife is sent to him, so surely he must be doing something with them.

When Autumn was fifteen years old, her father went to war.

When she was twenty-five, her mother decided that she was pretty enough — and expendable enough — to be sent as an offering to the Dark King.

[blam-marie]

SwordBright 01

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Oasis Park was wet, confused, and thirty years out of time. Flat on their back on the cold concrete of the walkway, they stared at the grey sky uncomprehendingly for several minutes. They had more or less forgotten that rain used to be a thing in this part of the world. Damned climate change. Still, the cold September rain drenching them head to toe was a blessing, in a way.

For the first, it indicated that the time travel had been successful. For the second, the rain had forced most people in the streets to seek shelter inside, and thus, no one had seen them suddenly collapse and then gasp for air as thirty years of future memories snapped to place in their mind.

Fat raindrops rolled down their faces like tears, the smell and sound of Toronto so overpowering as to be alien for a second. Between the tall buildings stretching over their head, they could just barely see the tip of the needle tower, still standing and, incredibly, intact.

It was a very inconvenient place to arrive in the past, they realized as they slowly sat up, their entire backside now drenched from laying on the wet pavement for however long it had been. Had they taken the time to think about it beforehand, they might have timed it better. Chosen to do this at night, perhaps, when their younger self had been reclining in a bed and not standing in a street in full view of everyone. They looked around themselves and saw their messenger bag laying a few feet away. Had they been on their way to work? It was hard to say. What, to this body, had happened just a few minutes ago was lost in the fog of thirty years of brand new memories all trying to make space in their brain at once.

Perhaps, they considered, this had been a badly conceived plan. They’d been running on desperation and trauma, a feeling of sickening urgency that now felt mildly like nausea and would probably settle into a truly impressive case of PTSD once their head felt less like a scrambled egg.

That is to say that they hadn’t really had the time to plan their little trip to the past all that well, and the day of their arrival had been more important, in the grand scheme of things, than the hour or even the place of it. Besides, they’d forgotten to take other people and their possible reactions into account. They had, quite frankly, forgotten people altogether.

What an awful thing to forget.

For their defence, in the future people were an optional feature of cities. Most of Canada and America, that they knew of, was void of people, and communications had been too spotty in their last months to confirm the state of the rest of the world, but it hadn’t looked good.

With a sigh, Oasis stood up, turned up the collar of their jacket and started walking toward the promising light of a convenience store in the distance. If they could just get their hand on a newspaper (and oh, the cliche of that), they could check the date and reassure themself that they hadn’t accidentally tossed themselves too far back, or too little.

The plan, simply put, was this: go back to the past, and prevent the future from happening the same way as it had before. Prevent the Tyrant from coming to power, destroy the items of powers he’d used, save the world from destruction, etc.

A more detailed version of it included getting their sword from their apartment at some point, as a superhero known for their sword could hardly go superheroing without their signature weapon. But that bit involved running into their roommate (and cousin), who would be alive at this point in time, and that… that could wait. Until such a time as Oasis wouldn’t burst into tears upon seeing her, at least. They’d need significant time to prepare themselves for this particular encounter.

They entered the convenience store with a relieved sigh, only to immediately freeze once the cashier greeted them. Oasis managed to groan out something approximating a greeting, if one was very generous, and fled to hide between the tall shelves.

People. Their heart was beating wildly. And here they had thought that seeing other humans again would be a relief, but now all they could conjure up was dread. They closed their eyes and leaned their forehead against the cool glass of the beer fridge. What a mess. They’d need to get a therapist, they supposed, if they wanted to be able to go through any of this.

They had been to many specialists before, in their long career as a superhero. But not very recently. It’s not like there had even been any therapists left between the end of the world and when they’d finally managed to find a way back. But perhaps they should accomplish their mission beforehand. Any sane person, upon hearing their story, might try and stop them, and that was the last thing that Oasis wanted.

Yes, they thought firmly. Mission first, and then if I’m still alive, therapy later.

They eventually managed to make their traitorous legs work, and emerged from behind the shelves to grab a newspaper at the front, where the cashier could see them. Heart beating, they tried as hard as they could to ignore his curious gaze, and looked for the date.

September 24th, 2017. Well. It worked. That was what they’d been aiming for, wasn’t it? Then why weren’t they… why did everything still feel so wrong?

They stared, unseeingly, at the front page of the newspaper for a bit, feeling like their hands weren’t really their own, and like the entire world around them was coated in cotton and getting further away. Flat on the ground, their feet felt like they were levitating. Long minutes passed, stretching into eons in between each heartbeat. Eventually, they blinked.

Under their hands, the photo on the front page resolved into something clearer, and they stared at the grinning, maniacal face of a super villain as their world slowly realigned itself.

‘The Vampire Queen strikes again’, read the headline, and eventually Oasis managed to feel enough like themselves to smile a bit. They flipped through to the article, reading it diagonally, just to refresh their memory of this particular event. The Vampire Queen, as she’d been called by the papers, wasn’t just any super villain. She was their super villain. Their Nemesis.

Well, SwordBright’s nemesis to be exact, but Oasis had been donning the mask for so long, now, that they didn’t really know where the hero ended and the person began. And the Vampire Queen was an integral part of the plan that had led them here. An infinitely easier part than going back to their apartment, that was for sure.

They wouldn’t even need their sword for this.

[blam-marie]

A Metaphor's Guide to Rewriting Destiny

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In the morning, Compassion left to join the scholars wherever it was that they worked. He told me that he wanted to get a clearer idea of the situation in the city, especially now that I had escaped. But I couldn’t come with, for fairly obvious reasons.

I hated staying behind. Inaction had never suited me. I spent all morning pacing in the staff’s common room until finally Jeanne took pity on me and showed me upstairs to the guests’ bathroom. I didn’t feel like I needed another bath so soon, but clearly she felt otherwise. She left me there while she went back to work, and warned me sternly to not wander around.

I had no intention to simply stay put and wait for her return. I had done far too much of that in the early days of this manifestation, back when the holy fire of my essence still struggled to settle in this new form. I would never let myself feel this vulnerable again — until the next time I was forced to by the cycle of death and rebirth, that is.

The hotel was an old and beautiful building, but it exhibited signs of being slightly past its prime. The gilded furniture was just out of date, the elaborate paintings on the ceiling could have done with being retouched, the carpets showed wear. It hovered at the edge of what could be a steady decline or a spectacular renewal, should it receive the proper care. I found a window at the end of a corridor and stood watching life pass me by on the other side of the panes. The streets were crowded, but none of the crowd lingered. People were moving with that very specific nervousness that I knew meant they were afraid of behaving in any manner that could be seen as suspicious. A small group of teenagers kept gravitating to eachother to exchange a handful of words then flitting away like starlings, glancing at their surroundings with no subtlety at all.

I sighed. This city was a powderkeg. I didn’t want to be here.

As I turned away from the window, I almost bumped into a man coming the other way. He swerved with a muttered apology, then froze in his tracks. He turned back to me. I tensed, all of my muscles singing in anticipation of a fight.

“Mrs. Wright?”

The name was so unexpected that I felt my entire body lock in place. No one had called me that in quite a long time. “Come again?”

The man was staring at me with wide astonished eyes, taking in not just my face, but also my entire body. “It is you,” he murmured. “Oh, my dear, I am so sorry. You have my condolences.”

I blinked. Then I remembered the window’s dress and veil. Sour bile flooded the back of my throat.

The man was still talking. “What happened? If that is not too personal a thing to ask?”

“Who are you?” I blurted out.

“Oh, do forgive me. I am Guillaume Lavoile. I was friends with your late husband. We met at a reception at Felicitate manor… oh, a very long time ago, now.” He patted his stomach and laughed, although it lacked any humour. “I was much younger and thinner, then.”

The name unearthed a memory in my brain.

“The french novelist. You exchanged letters. We were supposed to visit you, four years ago.”

“Yes! Exactly! But you never arrived…”

“No. We had an accident. He died.”

His eyes widened again. “Four years ago? But…” He stared at my clothing again, which were those of deep mourning. “Well, I suppose that four years is so very little time, in the grand scheme of things…”

“It was nice meeting you,” I said, then turned to leave.

He touched my shoulder, but fortunately for him did not grab it.

“Wait!”

I waited.

“My dear Mrs. Wright, would you like to sit down with me? I’m here to meet with a writing group, but I am certain they can make do without me for the afternoon…”

I have no idea what possessed me to agree, but soon enough I found myself sitting in a beautiful common room with Mr. Lavoile, on a plush settee in front of a fireplace, with a glass of wine in hand. Perhaps it was because the man kept calling me Mrs. Wright. It had been my husband’s last name, not mine. Hearing it applied to me should have chafed — it certainly did, back when he was still alive. But today, somehow, it felt bittersweet.

I eyed the man as he took place next to me. He had a round jovial face, with flushed skin that could have been explained away, had the texture of his curly hair not given him away. He should have shaved it; it was painting a target on his back. The Theosians could not possibly be kind to him. Unlike Compassion who had made an effort to be forgettable, Lavoile was dressed in the latest fashion. An elegant cane with a silver handle was passed from hand to hand with insousiance as he sat; clearly an accessory rather than a necessity.

I had no recollection of meeting him face to face, but if it had happened at Felicitate manor, then I was not surprised that the memory would have slipped my mind. I had not been at my best back then. I did remember his penmanship; Ambrose used to read his correspondance out loud at the dinner table, and there had been quite a lot of it.

As his name brushed my mind, I had to close my eyes and collect myself.

Ambrose.

Ambrose Wright.

The late Ambrose Wright. Of which I was now the widow. Around me, the world kept turning, with no regard for how things had broken apart for me.

“Are you not concerned?” I was compelled to ask.

“What about?”

“I am Rage.”

“Yes…? And why would that be concerning?”

“Your city is not exactly… stable, right now.”

He scoffed. “If it was not well known that Rage is Wallen I could call you Theosian. There has always been much of what you represent in this city. I would not call that a bad thing. Besides, you are more than this. I would not insult you by reducing you only to a purpose that you have been assigned.”

An assigned purpose. I had never heard it put this way. Much was always made of the shape of our natures, but never about whether or not we had chosen these natures. I did not respond for long enough that my companion felt some need to clarify his meaning.

“Your husband always wrote so beautifully of you,” he said softly. “Always, he spoke of the woman within the Exemplar.”

This did not comfort me. I had warned Ambrose many times against using me as his muse. There was three thousand years of me that he did not understand, compared to the scant decade that we had known each other.

“He was a poet,” I dismissed. “A born liar. His craft was to make things more interesting than they really are.”

Lavoile looked amused. “Ah, but all the best lies have a grain of truth in them. And nothing can inspire such verses that is not interesting. You are a story, my dear. Stories that are predictable do not get told. They need heart to be alive. Truly, you will not convince me that you are made of rage alone, and nothing else.”

“Wish that was not the case,” I muttered.

Lavoile watched me in silence for a few minutes, then asked the question that I had been dreading.

“Where were you, these last few years? What happened?”

I tried to find a succinct way of explaining my situation that would not lead to too many follow-up questions.

“My presence in Theos has been deemed dangerous. Not everyone shares your belief that I am anything other than a carrier of anger and strife. I have been made a guest of the Lighthouse.”

His eyes widened and he jumped to his feet. “That is outrageous! Without a trial?! How did I not know about this?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you truly so high in politics that you would expect to be told these things?”

He could have been. I had missed rather a lot these last few years. But last I remembered, Guillaume Lavoile was a novelist and what’s more, an editorialist, which I understood to be as mortal enemies to politicians. Not the sort of person that the king would rush to inform about my presence in Theos.

“Yes, yes I am!” he said. “I am a citizen of this country, am I not? No one should be detained — especially not in the Lighthouse, and especially not an Exemplar — without it being publicly available information!”

I stared at him with bemusement and a little awe. “You are peddling dreams! In what kingdom would that ever possibly be the case?”

“Dreams are what civilisations are built on, my friend. The future and the past need not be the same.” He shook his head. “I will write a bulletin at once and decry the injustice of your imprisonment. The people need to know.”

“No!” I snapped. “You will do no such thing. Unless you want my daughter’s blood on your hands.”

“Your daughter? How do you mean?”

“She was taken,” I informed him flatly. “To ensure my compliance. Now that I am loose, I need to get her back as quickly as possible, before the king decides to punish her in my stead.”

Lavoile’s face coloured in anger. “How dare he!” he boomed. “She is but a child!”

I flicked a glance at the entrance to the common room. We were alone for now, but if he kept exclaiming this loudly then we would not be for long. The man seemed to realize this as well. He dropped back to his seat and leant towards me.

“How long ago have you escaped?”

“Yesterday.”

Realization crossed his face. “The banquet. I wondered why it had not been posponed. Mind, I didn’t want it to be. It’s important to hold on to our stances, even despite the king’s tiranny. But now I wonder… was it meant as a distraction? To cover your rescue?”

I nodded. He gasped.

“Brilliant! On, that is well done. It will make a very good story someday, if you would honour me with the telling of it. In the meantime, I am assuming your daughter is held somewhere close to the king?”

“In the palace itself, if I am not mistaken.”

“Good,” he said. “I mean, not that it is a good thing,” he clarified when he saw me tense, “but good in the sense that I think I may be able to find you a way in. A friend of mine, you see, if the art teacher of the Duchess of Camerise, the king’s daughter-in-law. I can ask him whether he knows anything that could help.”

I hissed in a breath. “You would do that?”

“Of course. What has happened to you is revolting. Such a thing should not have happened in Theos. Whatever it takes to fix it, know that I am on your side. I will help you see it through.”

My heart was doing something strange in my chest. Compassion offering help to me made sense. But this… It was entirely unexpected.

“I don’t know what to say.”

He waved a hand as if to wave my words aside. “You do not have to say anything, aside from perhaps this: where can I find you again once I have news to share?”

“I am staying in the basement here, with the staff.”

Something dark crossed his face.

“Of course. That is always where they want to put people like us. But we will not stay down. We will always come back up and force them to look at us.”

I did not agree with that ’we’ of his. I would have been perfectly content if no one looked at me again for the rest of my immortal life. I was not Spite, I didn’t burn to prove myself. I wanted it to be socially acceptable to stab people who looked at me wrong, that was all.

“Come and stay with me,” he continued. “I have a small appartment here in Lutèce. It will be my honour to host you and you will be much more comfortable.”

“Thank you, but no. The basement will do. And besides, I am not here alone.”

“Is Peace with you?” he asked.

I startled. The question was so unexpected that I almost asked him to repeat himself, certain that I had heard him incorrectly. I tried to control my reaction, but could not quite prevent myself from sounding strangled when I replied. “Why would you think that?”

“Oh, I am sorry for assuming. But, well, there are rumours that she was seen in Theos. Four years ago I believe, right around the time you dissapeared. I simply wondered if…”

“We crossed paths,” I interrupted brusquely. “Four years ago, yes. But I am not with her now.”

He nodded. “Then may I ask who…?”

“Compassion.”

His eyes brightened. “Ah! A decent ally to have in these troubled times.”

I growled. “Only in theory, I assure you. In practice he is most irritating.”

“Yes, I imagine you and he would be as fire and water,” he laughed.

We lapsed into silence for a few seconds. Then, seemingly coming to a decision, Lavoile picked up his cane and held it out to me.

“I want you to have this.”

I held his gaze as I placed a hand slowly on the silver pommel. I pushed on it, then twisted the cap. I felt him chuckle as I pulled out the long metallic lenght of a blade. I inclined it this way and that, examining the craftmanship. Then I sheathed it back inside of its ebony tube before taking it from his hand.

“Thank you.”

My new friend nodded. He stood up once more.

“I should leave, now. I will return once I have news. But before I go….” He held a hand out between us, brushing the edge of my veil. “May I?”

I held still. Gently, Lavoile folded up the crepe fabric and bent over to drop a single kiss on my brow.

“When you find those who have hurt you,” he murmured, “Strike true.”