#virenina

[belafujoshisdead]

who cares how slow you are at art. when it looks this sick before its even finished

[spiribia]

would LOVE to see ms. virenina kittyfied if you’re still doing these 🩷

[belafujoshisdead]

[belafujoshisdead]

[belafujoshisdead]

6, 21, 37

oc questions!

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?

a lot of the character dynamics and drama in the story my characters are from comes from the interactions + inner workings of a bunch of royal and noble families from another world, so i'm not sure if any of my characters really fit this! usually when characters from this story look alike it's because they're related. but i bet a lot of royals or nobles use body doubles from time to time and that's something i should explore more maybe 👀

21. Your most artistic OC

virenina and asaau, who are executioners, both consider themselves as artists in the way they carry out their role (as do most executioners - on tei ura it's referred to as the red art). vene, the main antagonist and virenina's father, calls what he does science, but works more like an artist or magician than any legitimate scientist, especially after he goes from 'single person' to 'sea of cloned bodies.' he's descended from a house bloodroyal that's basically a clan of mad scientists it's fun

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human

virenina and vene are both on parallel roads to monstrous divinity (or divine monstrosity. depends on who you ask)! virenina is bound to an entity called ai naa that slowly eats away at her humanity and leaves something shining and terrible in its place. vene is forging his own artificial divinity through endless scientific self-cannibalism (by way of constantly 'consuming' his own cloned bodies in experiments)

[belafujoshisdead]

get yourself a man who - actually do not get a husband like this ever what is wrong with you

[belafujoshisdead]

But How Is He Going to Die?

Orialu learns of her father's impending execution, and struggles to process it. Her solution: get into a spear fight.

(NOTE: Set two years before the events of Concerning Tauhrelil's Finery. In this sequence, Virenina is still going by Orialu, the name given to her by her mother.)

On the first day of the storm-season falling between the seventy-first and second years of Tei Ura's two hundred fifty-seventh kai, Orialu of House Ilisaf went with her mother and grandmother and younger sister to the Heavenfacing Court. They brought with them a handful of Ilisaafi aunts, and one uncle, who of course brought their husbands and children in turn; they brought another handful of retainers, ladies bearing the vessel house names of Icarian and Orunen, Irimias and Yaaharal. And of course they brought a brace of servants, to fetch and carry food and drink and silks and messages, so that no royal eye need peel itself away and miss even an instant of tonight's red spectacle.

For weeks, Orialu had lived within a heady cloud of excitement and a kind of sparkling dread. The closer the date of execution drew, the denser the cloud became; by the time that night arrived, it had choked every other thought in her head. Ai Naa was a low simmering in her mind: warm and lax from the satiation he knew was to come, and releasing sharp pops and bursts of saw-toothed anticipation all the same.

They were going to kill her father.

Two weeks ago, a trident force headed by First Spear Seket had breached the bone-white walls of Vene Ilisaf ni Tauhrelil's laboratory and spilled its bloody secrets for all of Tei Ura to see. From her mother's house in the Ilisaafi courtlands, Orialu had watched the Opaline City's seven high jurists gather about the entrails of her father's work and divine his fate. They found their verdict with an unheard-of swiftness, and on the day of sentencing, all seven came arrayed in masks and robes as white as the broken laboratory walls. Orialu knew the meaning of that, even before the jurists proclaimed her father's sentence: death upon the Court. Unanimous. The voice of the crowds and the venarchs' panel could have tipped the verdict otherwise, but the voice had called for death with ninety-seven point four percent of its strength, and all forty-nine venarchic panelists had voted the same. In seven weeks counted from the night of the verdict, Orialu would go to the Heavenfacing Court to watch her father die.

Orialu was nineteen, only two years away from stacking her third pyre and attaining full adulthood; even so, none of her elders would tell her exactly what her father had done. She knew he'd killed his test subjects; she knew that in itself was enough to earn death upon the Court. What Orialu didn't know was what her father done to earn death upon the Court so fast. Ai Naa echoed her frustration, dripped curiosity into her mind like slaver; her beloved hungered for blood in all its forms, even if was only the blood-soaked details of her father's atrocities.

You can't even taste that kind, so shut up, she'd told him, and then forced him back into the depths of her mind. You'll see the real thing on execution night.

Real slaver had welled up in her mouth then, but the tide of hunger had slowly receded.

At least, Orialu reminded herself, she was far from the only one who wished to know more and didn't. The records of Vene's arrest were sealed indefinitely, the spears and their cohort bloodsworn to deepest secrecy about what they'd witnessed behind those white walls. Even her Tauhrelil cousins said they didn't know…and if a Tauhrelil actually admitted she didn't know the details of the latest scientific horror-scandal, she was probably telling the truth.

Of course her cousins could have been lying, but Ai Naa granted Orialu a constant and exquisite awareness of the living blood flowing through everyone around her. She could hear it pouring through the body, sense the soft percussion of a pulse, see it glowing red through the skin if she looked too long, even smell it when her beloved's hunger bled into her own. With each cousin she'd asked, Orialu had honed in on their blood and listened for a quickening pulse; for a tightening of the veins; for anything that might indicate they were lying; and each time she'd heard nothing. They could have just been skilled at lying, Orialu supposed, only she knew her cousin Viretani spent too much time with a scalpel in her hand to devote that much time to the liar's art. Vetsa was too busy with marriage-making to even be worth asking. And Vecari was twelve, too young to do anything as high-skill as suppress a guilty pulse.

"To be honest," Viretani had said when Orialu asked, "I'd been thinking of asking you." She'd sounded annoyed to be admitting even that much. "Even if they wouldn't tell his niece, I thought they might at least tell his daughter."

Viretani and Vecari were the daughters, and Vetsa the son, of Virieh, the current Tauhrelil family head, Orialu's aunt, Vene's elder sister; if they didn't know, then Orialu could be all but certain that nobody her age did. Asking an elder outright was more likely to get her laughed at or scolded for impertinence than it was to get her any answers. And so, like most of Tei Ura, all Orialu knew of her father's crimes were the bits and pieces that Virieh VI Tauhrelil and her council had declared fit for release.

--------

As the seven weeks leading up to Vene's execution crept by, Orialu's anticipation and Ai Naa's hunger crept higher. The two energies folded into one and became a seething restlessness that filled Orialu's every cell. She knew the feeling intimately; though restraining Ai Naa was, by now, second nature to her, her beloved was forever testing her control, and never more so than when he sensed a chance at blood. Hunger made him swell like a tide. Ai Naa was always hungry, Ai Naa was hunger, but sometimes that hunger grew beyond the usual constant low roar in her mind and became sharper, or rose higher, or burned hotter. No matter what shape his heightened hunger took, it all translated to greater strain on her mind and too much offbleed ra saturating her body, and that all meant the same thing for Orialu.

It meant that her usual habit of pacing turned into her stalking through every room and hall and garden of her mother's house, for the seething feeling was always worse when she was forced to remain still. It meant that she had to hold onto her own temper as if it were a glass grenade. It meant that cousins and friends and servants, and even some of her elder kin, treated her with polite distance or, worse, a kind of fearful delicacy, as if they could sense the grenade themselves and feared it detonating; it meant that they gave Ai Naa's anchor an even wider berth than normal. It meant that Orialu's lessons went from trial to torment, as she was forced to sit and listen and forbidden to leave until her work was done; and because her mind was so full of crawling, restless energy, it took her twice as long to finish that work, only for her teachers to then inform her that it contained twice as many errors as normal, and now she must fix it here, and here, and here –

Orialu hadn't bitten a teacher since she was seven years old, but every day of Ai Naa straining against her control made it harder to refrain. The only thing that helped was Orialu's lessons with the spear.

It was said on Tei Ura – or at least, in the Ilisaafi courtlands – that a paired spirit's anchor represented the shape of their human half's soul. Kiresyata Kohare Kuur, Orialu's instructor in the art of the spear, was one of the only members of the Ilisaf court who seemed to actually believe it. Most members of the court treated Ai Naa's anchor as an unfortunate appendage, something dangerous and undesirable to be tolerated only out of respect for Orialu's most rarefied pedigree. Carry about that spear if you must, she could feel them thinking, so long as you carry it all the way to the Throne Refulgent. But Syata Kuur was different. More than anyone else, Syata Kuur seemed to see Ai Naa's anchor the same way Orialu did: as an extension of herself.

More importantly, Syata Kuur was the only instructor her mother had been able to find who'd been willing to train a student incapable of using any training weapon. Until Kuur, every potential teacher had seen Ai Naa's anchor and immediately declined the job.

In her mother's house, Orialu always carried the spear in a case. It was a lovely thing, carved from black and fragrant netori wood, the color a seamless match for the wood of Ai Naa's spear-haft, while the inside was lined with unicorn hide the dark-rusted red of old blood ink. Instead of a handle, the case had a hollow cut into one of its long edges, exposing the haft, so that Orialu could grasp and carry it directly. Ai Naa hated to go too long without feeling her skin on his anchor.

And Orialu hated the case. The concealment chafed at her. As soon as she stepped into the chamber where she took her lessons with Syata Kuur, she snapped open the case and pulled her beloved's anchor free.

The lesson room was elegant in a way different from most of the Ilisaf court. The court was built from pale stone shaped into cubes and prisms and columns, then hollowed out into great high-ceilinged halls and courtyards and colonnades, adorned with balconies and gardens, and scored with exquisite geometric carvings; the overall impression was one of both monolithic strength and airy delicacy. Banners of captive light woven like silk hung in high archways and between columns, while longer sheets of it draped in curves from the hall-ceilings and stretched from roof to roof overhead in the courtyards, dying the pale stone in a rainbow of dawnlight colors: gold and orange, rose and royal fuchsia, blood-red and moon-blue. Fresh air flowed through every room and carried with it a low current of incense, and of the faint ozone smell caused by a great deal of captured light gathered in one place.

The walls of Syata Kuur's lesson room were hewn from the same pale stone, but in place of carvings, these walls were covered in a translucent, tinted layer of impact gel; should a practice match turn intense enough to send someone flying, the gel ensured that both their bones and the masonry would remain intact. Behind the tinted gel, the stone panels making up the walls were ordered by color, gradating from white at the doors, to pearl-grey at the room's center, to palest bluestone where the chamber faced out upon the bicolored tiles and flowering pools of the Two Sisters' Terrace. The floors were polished wood, not inlaid stone; the only captive light was a handful of color-neutral floating spheres.

Out of all the rooms in all the buildings of the Ilisaf court, Syata Kuur's lesson room might have been the least ilisaafi. Orialu, with her Tauhrelil teal-black hair and Tauhrelil cut-bronze features and Tauhrelil cyan star-marks, felt more at ease there than she did in any other chambers save her own. The fact that Syata Kuur had entered the room behind her and was swinging a blade at the back of her head did nothing to change that.

It would be a wooden practice blade, of course; no instructor would risk training the heir to a house bloodroyal with live steel. Still, the lesson had begun, a blade was a blade, and a beheading short-spear crashing into the back of your head fucking hurt, no matter what it was made of.

Their lesson commenced, as it always did these days, with a sparring match.

"Beheading short-spear!" Orialu called, and then dropped and rolled forward, turning as she rose so that she faced Syata Kuur with her own spear in hand and a grin on her face. "Ha! How many right guesses in a row does that make now?" But Syata Kuur gave only a small, approving smile before closing the distance Orialu had put between them. Orialu's blood fairly sang through her veins; this was the kind of lesson she was made for, not lectures or readings or decorum drills. The first ringing of blade against blade filled her ears, sweet as any music. Her grin widened as she and Syata Kuur exchanged a flurry of strikes. The wood of Ai Naa's spearshaft was warm and alive under her hands, and the rings adorning the crossguard chimed in counterpoint to every movement, every blow.

"Head, left," Syata Kuur's voice cut through the music, but Orialu knew that game well. The truth was in one's movements, and Kuur had taught her to read those long ago. Torso, right, and Syata Kuur's wooden blade slammed into Ai Naa's spearshaft instead of Orialu's ribcage. "Head, overhead!" Shoulder, left. Their blades rang together. "Knee, left!" Head, right. Syata Kuur's blade hit her spearshaft again with a loud crack. "Torso, center!" Torso – hey, he's not lying about this one! Orialu pivoted to the side, away from the thrust aimed at her solar plexus, and whipped her own blade at Syata Kuur's head. Before his face turned away, she caught another small, approving smile.

The dance sped up. Syata Kuur's false cues came faster and faster, then fell off entirely. Now the only sounds between them were the hissing of breath and of blades through air. And without Syata Kuur's words to distract her, Orialu had room to think.

If I could just do this forever, she thought. Ai Naa surged in excited agreement; Orialu channeled it into an especially vicious swipe at her teacher. No sitting for lectures, no politics, no inheritance, no… The thought spun on, until Syata Kuur broke it by nearly disarming her. Orialu kept her grip on Ai Naa's anchor, barely, and pressed forward with another attack. If I could just become a kiresyata, like Kuur – master the art, fight every day, for a living – or…or…

What Orialu wanted more than anything, so much that she didn't even dare voice it to herself, was to become one of the Seven Spears; to practice the red art and dispense mortal justice upon the Heavenfacing Court. Of course, it could never happen; even becoming a kiresyata, a blade-sage, was out of the question. Perhaps if she'd been a son, or even just second-born…but Orialu was the firstborn daughter of Orisai VII Ilisaf, and would one day inherit the Throne Refulgent. Her path had been drawn for her before birth.

Orialu knew all that well, but here, now, none of it crossed her mind. Instead, thinking of the Seven Spears reminded her of her father.

What did he do? Syata Kuur drove her back one step, two. Will they tell me after he's dead? In seven years? Never? Her thoughts began to poison her movement. The dance was breaking down. Who's going to kill him? Syata Kuur struck her on the collarbone. Pain bloomed hot and red under Orialu's skin, promising a spectacular purpling later on. Who's going to kill my father? She gritted her teeth and kept fighting. Ai Naa licked the pain from her neurons, savoring, never alleviating, never, never.

How's he going to die?

Orialu missed her parry. Syata Kuur's blade crashed into her thigh. Another bruise for later. Fourth Spear Irimias sometimes amputates the legs – the burning wire – will they give Father the wire? Syata Kuur struck again. Orialu got her own blade up in time to block him, barely.

But the fight was already lost. That one thought unlocked a dozen more like it; now every blow from her teacher made Orialu wonder if this, perhaps, was how they would kill her father upon the Heavenfacing Court. Her focus was dissolving, even as Syata Kuur's attacks came faster still. Orialu knew he was driving her backward again, but it was all she could do to keep his blade off her, and even there she was slipping. She couldn't help it. When Syata Kuur thrust at her ribs, Orialu pictured a blade piercing her father's heart. He side-swept at her arm; Orialu pictured the blade traveling further, cutting into her father's lungs, drowning him in blood. Syata Kuur swung at her neck, and Orialu saw her father's body fall to its knees before his own severed head.

The more Orialu thought in red, the more Ai Naa thrashed hungrily against her restraint. Her focus wasn't just dissolving, it was lost. Her body was moving automatically now, and perhaps a kiresyata like Kuur could win in such a state, but Syata Kuur had practiced his art for decades to become a blade-sage; Orialu was nineteen, and had only been allowed to practice the blade these past five years.

And then the movement stopped.

Orialu came back to herself and found that she was pinned against the wall of the lesson room with a bloody lip, an aching body, and Syata Kuur's wooden spearpoint at the hollow of her throat.

"That," Syata Kuur said levelly, "was not sparring. That was desperation."

A hot, shaking feeling swept over Orialu. Her lone eye burned; her empty socket twinged with a needle-sharp pain. Without thinking, she grasped her teacher's spear, wrenched it from his hands, and threw it wildly away, not even looking where it went. Her chest heaved up and down with quick, harsh breaths. Whether it was from the lesson or from what she was feeling, Orialu couldn't say, nor did she care to think about it.

Shame flooded her almost before Syata Kuur's spear left her hands. They both listened as it hit the ground and clattered away across the tiles of the Two Sisters' Terrace.

"That could have hurt someone," said Syata Kuur, looking at her with black eyes that gave away nothing.

Orialu turned away from his gaze and pressed her cheek into the impact gel lining the wall. Sank into its yielding coolness. Licked the blood from her lip and swallowed twice: once for the blood, and again for the spit that filled her mouth as Ai Naa tasted her blood through her own tongue.

It wasn't Kuur's fault she'd lost the sparring match.

Orialu sank slowly down the wall, ignoring the way her battered muscles ached in protest. She hung her head down, her forehead against her knees. Ai Naa's spear rested on the floor at her side.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Fuck."

"You're better than this," Syata Kuur said after a short silence, and Orialu knew he meant it in more ways than one. "What happened?"

Orialu let out a jagged half-laugh, her head still lowered.

"This is a laughing matter to you?" Though Kuur's voice was carefully neutral, Orialu could still hear a faint note of disapproval. Somehow, that hurt more than the bruises did. Her hand found the shaft of Ai Naa's anchor and gripped it tight. Orialu looked back up at her teacher, a grin already forming on her lips.

"Come on, Syata, don't you read the news?" She'd meant to sound more apologetic, but the words came out wrong, all arch and prickly. "What kind of blade-sage doesn't know what the Seven Spears are up to?" Ai Naa simmered happily in the heat of her sudden anger; Orialu's temper had run away with her, and taken her tongue with it. "They made my father leave his lab recently, perhaps you've heard about it. Or maybe noticed his name on the red banners? Oh, wait – he's bloodroyal! He probably gets a banner all to himself!" Another jagged laugh escaped her. "My father's been dead for weeks, Syata! The only reason his family hasn't held his funeral yet is because they're waiting to get his body back from the Court!"

The person known as Vene Ilisaf ni Tauhrelil had died the night the high jurists handed down their verdict. Her father was no longer her father, he was nothing but a corpse still in possession of its heartbeat, and soon one of the Seven Spears would extinguish that, too.

"I kept wondering…during our fight, I kept wondering, which Spear's going to…or how…I…" Now Orialu held Ai Naa's spear in both hands, hugging it as close to herself as the narrow shaft would allow. "Do you think they'll cut off his head? I think they might cut off his head."

Outside, on the terrace, rain began to fall. The mirror surface of the pool dissolved into ripples, and raindrops struck the floating lilies and made their petals shiver. The motions of falling rain and flowers drew Orialu's eye, and for a moment she just watched; looking at the rain was easier than looking her teacher in the face.

"I think," Syata Kuur said almost gently, "that I should dismiss you for today."

She could smell wet stone, humid air. The terrace tiles gleamed slickly under a coating of rainwater. Then Orialu noticed something else that was coated in rain: her teacher's spear, which she'd wrenched from his hand in a fit of pique. It rested at the very edge of the pool, just short of falling in; the wooden blade hung over the water, rain-beaded and dripping.

Something about the sight of it lying there gave Orialu an ache in her throat and made her mouth turn down at the corners. She pushed herself up from the floor with Ai Naa's spear and then stepped out onto the terrace. By the time she reached the pool, her hair and clothes were damp all the way through, and her cheeks were coated in warm water. Orialu knelt by the pool with Ai Naa's spear in one hand, then gathered up Syata Kuur's in the other. She couldn't see her reflection in either rain-rippled surface, neither the terrace pool nor Syata Kuur's blade. For that, Orialu was glad.

By the time she returned to the lesson room, the ache in her throat was gone, and it was easier to control her face. Orialu felt Kuur's eyes on her as she tracked water across his floor.

"Here," she said, and held his short-spear out to him, blade pointed down. "I'm sorry."

Orialu watched Kuur's copper-skinned hand close around the haft of his weapon. Don't say anything to me. Please. Her control was back, but it was fragile, and if Kuur said the wrong thing, Orialu thought she might start crying. She would have rather ripped out her own fingernails with her teeth.

Perhaps Kuur sensed her feelings. That, or he's afraid to say the wrong thing to a bloodroyal. Orialu forced the thought aside. As soon as Syata Kuur took the weapon from her hand, she strode past him and crossed the room, her eye fixated on the door. She wanted to run to it, but doing so would have felt too much like weakness, and she'd already shown her teacher a shameful amount of that today.

At the door, Orialu stopped and turned. No matter how badly the lesson had gone, she still owed Syata Kuur gratitude for taking the time to teach her. And with how badly today's lesson had gone, there was one more thing Orialu was afraid of, one thing of which she needed to make sure. She knelt to replace Ai Naa's anchor in its case, then stood straight and raised her head and tucked one arm behind her back.

"Thank you, Syata," she said, bowing at the waist, and then, after she'd risen again: "Three days? The usual time?"

Syata Kuur always kept a firm lid on his expressions, and Orialu stood too far away to make out any hints, but she saw his answering nod clear enough. Orialu hadn't thought she'd be able to smile for the rest of today, yet she felt one rise to her face now. It felt strange and fragile, but still better than what she'd been feeling before.

Only after Orialu had slid the door to the lesson room shut did she remember that she was bruised, aching, and covered in scrapes and dried sweat. And my clothes are all soaked from the rain, it feels disgusting. Between the aches and the dirt and the damp, Orialu decided, a hot bath was very much in order. She set off in search of it, exhausted, yet somehow feeling lighter than she had since the night she'd heard of her father's verdict.

[belafujoshisdead]

Regarding Tauhrelil’s Bond

Asaau learns the depths of wrongness between Virenina and Ai Naa, and questions if he can stand to know it.

Asaau knew what she meant. How could he not? They had reached Ai Naa's anchor, the spear in the ground, the thing rimed in burning light.

And, behind it, the wound in the earth.

I can't look, Asaau thought helplessly, and another part of him answered: You must.

"You probably figured this out on your own already," Virenina said as they walked, "but autokinesis isn't really one of my powers. Not the way most people think it is, anyway. It's more like a…side effect, of my real power. Or maybe a byproduct."

"Byproduct," Asaau repeated, somewhat faintly. It made sense, given what she'd just shown him, but even so, it chilled him to hear Virenina call the power of sustained flight a mere byproduct. Part of Asaau wondered, faintly, how long it would take him to adjust to this new and inhuman sense of scale. Perhaps he never would.

"My real power," Virenina told him, "is restraint."

He knew what she meant. The killing light, the awful pressure, the screams, the screams, the screams, he knew – and still, Asaau had to press his lips together to hold back a hideously ill-timed laugh. To hear Virenina, of all people, declare that her greatest power was restraint was the final little absurdity that threatened to snap his fraying self-control.

"What I showed you just now was nothing," Virenina said, and the urge to laugh died within him as swiftly and sharply as if decapitated. "If there's an end to Ai Naa, I've never found it. I've never even come close. Some people have a hard time channeling because they drain their reserves too fast. For me, though…"

"Too much?" It was such a simple, obvious guess that Asaau felt stupid for even voicing it, but anything was better than letting Virenina drift back into silence.

"Before we paired," she said, "Ai Naa could only taste blood through mind-echoes and secondhand dreams. Then, suddenly – " Virenina mimed shock with a widened eye, a splaying of the hands. "A body!" She spun on one heel so that she walked backwards facing Asaau, grinning, arms flung wide, telegraphing exultation. "Flesh and feeling! Skin and sensation! A tongue to taste with, a mouth to devour…"

Her arms fell slowly back to her sides. Her hands tightened into fists.

"My mouth." Her grin stiffened; her lone eye shone with fury. "My mouth, my tongue, my body – "

She stopped and drew in a long breath through her teeth, then exhaled with a hiss that reminded Asaau of steam escaping a volcanic vent.

"Seket." Virenina fell back into walking alongside him. Her voice sounded almost cheerful, almost like her usual self. "You love quizzing me so much, now it's your turn to answer for once." She tossed back her head, then folded her hands before her the way Asaau often did himself. When she spoke again, she imitated the smooth, soft-edged propriety that colored his own voice. "Recall, if you will," said Virenina in her Asaau-voice, "the introduction to Urasyata Utsaya Reim's Foundations of the Unseen Art. In what terms does Syata Reim describe the nature of a paired human?"

Well, she has to be feeling better if she's back to needling you. But Asaau was too tired to manage more than a brief flicker of annoyance. He wasn't sure if it was at her imitation of his voice, or at the basic nature of her question. Oh, just give her an answer. If it helps her to explain…

"A gate," he said. "Syata Reim posits that the enmeshment of body and soul allows a paired human to act as a conduit. By bonding to the soul enmeshed in the body, the paired spirit becomes enmeshed in turn and may then flow from the unseen world to ours. With the introduction of a stable third object, an anchor – "

"Oh, we'll talk about anchors soon, just you wait," said Virenina, with all the cheer of a merrily crackling funeral pyre. Then, slipping back into her Asaau-voice, her playing-teacher voice: "But why a gate? Why not a bridge, a passage, a way-path?"

Why those three counterexamples? Asaau asked himself, and from there soon had his answer.

"One may simply walk over a bridge or along a path," he said, "but a gate must be opened. And a paired spirit – though connected to our world through a human soul, it can't simply flow across from the unseen world. Even a paired spirit must still will itself across the – the gap, so to speak, between its world and ours, and its partner must let it cross. Or desire it to, at least…their wills must align. The gate must unlock."

"Or be forced open," said Virenina.

Asaau tried to say something in response and managed only a faint movement of his lips. His face felt numb, bloodless. Ahead he could make out the first far-off glitter of moonlight dripping down cold metal.

"Through me," said Virenina, "Ai Naa can finally touch the world of flesh and blood. Imagine if your soul was grown from the seed of red hunger, Seket, and suddenly for the first time you can really taste this thing you've spent gods know how many thousands of years starving for…but only when the royal slitting cunt of a human you're paired with lets you." She was grinning again, grinning, a bright hateful crescent of teeth that glittered like her distant blade. "Wouldn't it make your hunger even worse? Wouldn't you be furious? All that pulsating bright red life hanging just out of your reach, wouldn't you try to force your way across so you could just eat?"

"I don't know," Asaau said, faintly, tremulously. "I…"

I can't, he wanted to tell her. His mind had been forced to accept as real one impossible horror after another. He was beginning to wonder, genuinely, how much more he could stand. It's too much. Let me turn back, let me unknow it. The words piled up on his tongue, festered behind his closed lips, and oh, gods in their graves, how could he say them to Virenina? How could he tell her it was too much for him, when she was the one fused by the soul to Ai Naa? Forgive me, Tauhrelil, I know you've trusted me with your most terrible secret, but you must understand, it's so very upsetting to listen to…

"My real power," Virenina said again, "is restraint. Every minute of every day."

Asaau tried to focus on her words, in spite how much he didn't want to hear them. Better to focus on her words than on the shrinking distance between himself and Ai Naa's anchor.

"But it's a power, right? So there's going to be offbleed – don't worry, I won't quiz you on circulation theory…"

Better to focus on her words than on how the moon's silver light gave way to green where the spearblade bit into rock. On how that green light sank sizzling into his vision like acid if he looked for more than a moment.

"My concentration limit is pretty inhuman, but it's still, you know, a limit. I have to vent the offbleed sometime, and – most people, they can just do that without even thinking, you know? Like breathing. Me, though…I don't know what kind of Tehariel wave Ai Naa puts out, but I'm not about to risk hitting innocent people with it. Why do you think I had you watch from so far away? I had to get you out of my radius."

Her radius, Asaau thought, and another chill swept through his flesh. With power like that, she could crown herself in blood and rule the world entire…but only if she wished to reign over a court of the dead. His mind wove him an image against his will, of Virenina enthroned above a roiling sea of blood, clutching Ai Naa's anchor in one hand like a scepter, alone with her paired monster and everything it wanted. Asaau shook his head once, sharply. Cut that thread, before it strangles you.

With an effort, he wrenched himself out of his mind and back into the present, where a low green glow now tinged the air, rising from the ground where the killing light had struck. Asaau made half a reach for the darkglass lenses before realizing that the groundglow didn't burn when he looked. The spear. It burns only when reflected from the spear. That was – that was good. It was useful. He could do something with that, change his actions, make it more bearable. Just look away, Asaau told himself. You don't have to see it. You don't have to touch it. She would never let you touch it.

"If most paired humans are like a gate, I'm more like…secondary containment," Virenina went on. "Ra, vaara, his, mine, it doesn't matter – he can't do anything if I don't let it into the anchor. The body is full of hollow places." She seemed to be talking half to herself now. "You have to think about it like containment. Where can I store it? Lots of holes in bone marrow. Every cell can be a little vessel, if you let it, but I like to keep it in the bones. Less risk if I get cut."

"In your body?!" Asaau repeated, horrified, then: "Wait." Something was beginning to occur to him. "Wait – so when you fight, that means – "

"I guess it's still Ai Naa's power, if it came from him," said Virenina, "but he doesn't fight with me. Not really. The control, the release, every broken bone or bruised organ I've ever given out – that's me. I'm just using his power to fuel it. If I actually brought him out, tried to use him in a fight…well, you can probably imagine it yourself by now." Her grin looked closer to a grimace. "Like detonating a fusion bomb to snuff out a candle."

Asaau knew what she meant. How could he not? They had reached Ai Naa's anchor, the spear in the ground, the thing rimed in burning light.

And, behind it, the wound in the earth.

I can't look, Asaau thought helplessly, and another part of him answered: You must.

But before he could, Virenina's arm was out in front of him, barring his way. "Wait here," she told him, and then closed the distance between her and the spear alone. Asaau kept his eyes on the quietly lit ground and watched as their shadows became one. Listened to the wind, to the distant sea, to metal scraping free of rock, to Virenina murmuring "Partner mine," to anything but the chiming of metal rings striking together. A blade-shadow slid past his vision and melted into the shape of Virenina, until it was nothing but a point rising from one dark shoulder.

When her shadow was gone, when her footsteps stopped beside him, when he knew he wouldn't see the spear; only then did Asaau finally look up.

The first thing his eyes found was the molten channel carved down the cliff face; its edges frothed with shapes his mind could only understand as boiling rock suddenly frozen in time. His eyes followed it up, and up, to the rim of the cliff and the raw new half-moon cut into it, and then dropped to the ground. Dropped further. And here, at last, was the source of the glow.

Asaau stepped forward, hoping desperately that his eyes had misled him, knowing already that they saw it true. At the foot of the cliff, at the bottom of the channel, lay the open mouth of a sheer-sided pit, a column of emptiness punched down and down through solid rock. Bottomless, his mind whispered, but no, no, the light had to come from somewhere; there had to be a bottom, something at the bottom, some source for this green light that shone wetly up the gleaming-raw sides of the pit and spilled over its molten lip and colored the ground, the air…

The world shifted; the lip of the pit fell closer. For a moment Asaau veered toward panic, until he realized he'd simply fallen to his knees. In horror, certainly, but also in a kind of defeat; for he saw now that a last, desperate part of him had been hoping that all this might somehow still be a trick of the mind. No longer. Now the proof was burned and blasted into the same rock he felt beneath his hands and knees. The wound in the earth made it real.

"I don't know how deep it goes, so don't ask," Virenina said from behind him. "Get away from there, Seket. You don't have to make yourself keep looking."

Any bloodroyal worth his pedigree should have been able to go in one smooth motion from kneebound to standing. Asaau had done so more times than he could ever hope to count, tried to now, and failed. He had to brace himself with his palms before his knees would unfold. Slowly, he turned his head, and hoped with all his heart that he wouldn't flinch at the sight of Ai Naa's spearblade hovering behind Virenina's head.

He didn't. It wasn't there.

"Don't look up," she said. "I have him – " She cast her lone eye skyward and twirled one upraised forefinger.

Asaau, of course, immediately looked up, and then hurriedly snatched his gaze groundward once more, before he could catch the very sight she was trying to spare him.

"I thought that you…" he started. "That is, wasn't he – calling you back? Didn't you need to…reunite?"

"A little of my blood on the blade keeps him quiet," said Virenina. Asaau's stomach tilted sickly. "For a while. That's how I left it behind, earlier, when I came back for you after…" She pointed over his shoulder, toward the pit. The look on her face suggested she was waiting for some sort of reaction from him, but by now Asaau had been reacting to so much for so long that he felt nearly spent. Of course Virenina fed her partner her own blood. That might have sickened Asaau, but after everything else he'd learned tonight, it certainly didn't surprise him. What else was she meant to do to pacify the spirit of red hunger?

"There's a few more things you should probably know," Virenina went on, "but nothing that can't be said in private back in the Opaline City. We can leave right now, if you want, but…"

Then she trailed off and just looked at him, her brow furrowed, her teal-black lips twisted into a thin, dark line. She looks almost worried. Asaau knew there had to be a reason, but he couldn't think for long enough to find it. His mind was clouded with exhaustion and, once the words 'Opaline City' left Virenina's mouth, with sudden longing.

"Please," said Asaau. "Let's leave, Tauhrelil." Then, to cover up the desperation he heard in his own voice: "We've already been gone a whole day, after all. Your audience may well die from want of you if we keep them waiting much longer."

He expected her to grin at that. Instead she only looked pained.

"Seket," she said, in a voice that matched the look on her face. "I flew us out here."

"Fl – oh." His face must have cracked like a porcelain teacup, judging from the quick, hurt way Virenina dropped her gaze, but the guilt it caused him quickly gave way to a fresh surge of dread. Flying us, she'd have to – the spear… Asaau fought the urge to look back at the pit, and made himself breathe slowly, but there was nothing he could do about sudden, sick speed of his pulse. Au Melai save me, I can't go near that thing, not after…but how else will we…?

"We could go back overland," Virenina offered, still looking at the ground. Her voice sounded almost small. "I could keep you safe."

Asaau almost wanted to say yes – until he tried to imagine how long it might take to cover a mile of the Shattered Lands by foot, and how many days the miles might amount to. We'd have to sleep out here. The thought alone was almost enough to make him shudder. Though he had no doubt that Virenina could keep him safe from whatever horrors the Shattered Lands held – at least physically – a horror survived was still a horror, and Asaau had already seen enough tonight to haunt him the rest of his life.

If they flew, it would at least be over quickly. He suspected it was the best he could hope for.

"Take us back to the Ring," he said at last. "By air, if you would."

For a moment, Virenina's lone eye glimmered in such a way that Asaau thought she might cry. Instead she blinked once, hard, and stepped his way. It fell to Asaau to close the distance between them, to come near enough that she could pick him up the same way she had before.

"Close your eyes," she warned him. There was no need for Asaau to ask why. He waited blindly; heard and sensed Ai Naa's anchor arrowing downward through the night; felt Virenina step up and onto its waiting haft.

"I'm sorry," she said, quieter than Asaau had ever heard her speak before. "For – everything."

She took off before he could say anything; and then, for the second time that night, the only thing Asaau heard was the wind.

[belafujoshisdead]

(Please Don’t) Fly Me to the Moon

In which Asaau suffers the indignities of spirit-based air travel.

(Continuation of The Edge of the World is a Cold Blue Ring)

“You’re going to haul me through the sky like air freight, aren’t you.” “We can pretend you’re my navigator if it makes you feel better. Now do you – ” Her mouth twisted. He knew she was trying not to laugh. “D’you want to be carried like a bridegroom or a grainsack?” “No,” said Asaau, wretchedly.

“Open communications,” Ilare said weakly to the machine above. The luxtruder pressed out a bright, blank panel of light and floated it down to them. “Ilare the sixth, head of House Tehariel, first among Key-Bearers and Warden of the Third Satellite, requests an audience with Her Wisdom Virieh, sixth of that exalted name, Venarch of House Tauhrelil and all bloodlines suppliant, Sage of the Red Chambers, Lady Regnant of the Nightglass Tower and Keeper of the Deepest Vault.”

Virenina made an impatient cranking motion with one hand – go on, go on.

“...And inform my venarch that this concerns her niece’s campaign in the Opaline City.”

The panel hovered just above one end of the glass tabletop, so that all three of them had to half-turn to see it. Light rippled softly across its surface with each word Ilare spoke, before settling into a slower, more rhythmic shifting – a waiting-pattern. Finally the whole panel darkened to pure black, save for two lines of glowing turquoise, one over the other: the bottom line spanned the screen unbroken, while the one above it split sharply upwards into twin tapering tines. The Tauhrelil insignia.

“Tehariel. Speak.”

The voice that gave the order sounded a great deal like Virenina’s – full of easy authority as only a lady bloodroyal’s could be, and possessing a certain raw-edged depth – but where Virenina’s voice was bold and lively, this one was tempered with cool restraint. At the sound of it, Ilare placed her fingers delicately on the tabletop and touched her forehead to the glass between them. Either she was driven by some courtly survival instinct, or else Virieh could see them, even if they couldn’t see her.

Asaau lowered his eyes in polite deference, if only to be safe. From the corner of his eye, he saw Virenina lean forward.

“My lady Virieh,” Ilare started –

“Auntie,” said Virenina, sweetly. The way she spoke made Asaau picture a shark sidling up to be petted as if it thought itself a housecat. Ilare started up from her bow, looking as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

“Nina,” said Virieh’s voice, in tones that reminded Asaau of much the same thing.

Across the table, Ilare now looked at Asaau with a tinge of desperation, as if he were the only sane person left in the room. Asaau kept his eyes averted, grateful that Virieh’s presence gave him an excuse to do so – otherwise, Ilare might have caught a glint of amusement. Don’t you simply adore dealing with Tauhrelils, Lady Ilare?

“I’m in the middle of a rather…temperamental experiment, my dear.” The Tauhrelil insignia glow-pulsed on the screen in time with Virieh’s speech. “So tell me – quickly – why you’re on the Ring instead of in the Opaline City. Is the First Spear with you?”

“He wants to take us both into the Shattered Lands. Lady Ilare is afraid to permit it.”

Like Vene – like so many Tauhrelils – Virieh had taken augmentations for her eyes, that they might better serve her in the laboratory, and had the glowing scarlet pupils to show it. Even the warmest of looks from a Tauhrelil who’d given her eyes to the knife still felt rather like being targeted by a laser sight. Though Virieh was thousands of miles away – though her family’s insignia hid her face – Asaau felt those eyes trained on him now.

“First Spear Seket. Explain.”

“My lady Virieh. I’m sure you remember the incident with the trial chamber.” Your family’s accountants certainly do, at any rate. “Yet Virenina must be tested, one way or another. I’m sure you understand.” He let the words hang between them for a moment. “Had there been any other op – ”

“Is this necessary for my niece’s campaign?”

We interrupted the Tauhrelil family head mid-experiment, Asaau told himself. Count yourself lucky that the only cutting-off she’s doing to anyone is the verbal sort.

“It is, my lady.”

“Then go. Was that all?”

Asaau opened his mouth to speak –

“Just don’t make Lady Ilare pay for it if I die.” This time it was Virenina who cut him off. Asaau closed his mouth, ignored the feeling that rose unbidden of being slighted, reminded himself that her right to address Virieh outweighed his. “She had no part in this until Seket and I dragged her into it.”

“Very well, you have my word. Let the record of this conversation be my oath.” A pause. “And Nina?”

“Yes, Auntie?” Virenina grinned at the faceless screen and sat up straighter, head cocked, hands clasped between her knees in a mockery of schoolgirl attentiveness.

“Do try not to die.”

With that, the Tauhrelil insignia blinked out, and the panel faded away to nothing.

“There!” Virenina said brightly, and turned to look at Ilare, who rested her forearms on the table as if it were all that kept her from sinking through the floor. “An oath on record, two witnesses bloodroyal – now she can’t punish you for letting us in even if I really do get killed.” She rose, smiling, spear in hand. Asaau rose with her. “That should help you sleep, right?”

Ilare didn’t look up.

“You are – too kind. My lady.”

As he took his first step into the Shattered Lands, Asaau waited for the same fear that had found him on the Ring to seize him anew.

Virenina waited several yards ahead. She’d strode in as easily as if this place belonged to her family, too, and had only stopped when she’d realized Asaau was lagging behind. Asaau closed the distance between them, bracing himself all the while for the same cold, breathless sub-panic he’d felt before. For worse. After all, he’d felt that earlier fear at the borderlands, and now they were inside – it would happen now, or perhaps with the next step, and if not that one, then surely the next…

By the time he’d caught up to Virenina, Asaau was still waiting. Of course he was afraid – but what he felt on this side of the Ring was lighter, sharper, closer to unease than true fear.

He knew, now, another part of why the Ring had unsettled him so deeply. He’d known it had looked wrong, but only now that Shattered Lands air had thoroughly filled his airways with the scents of rain-damp earth, of stone and sea, of flowers and decay, did Asaau realize – the Ring had even smelled wrong.

Did it have any scent at all? he wondered, and felt suddenly, briefly, as if his lungs would never be full. He breathed in again, and again, as deeply as he could manage without making noise; this was one thing he couldn’t stand to have Virenina needle him over, not now. As Asaau’s lungs drank in the air, his eyes drank in plants and sky and the glow of living things. The Shattered Lands, despite their danger, were a relief to his senses. They had crossed over into the great wound on the face of Tei Ura, the charnel-pit of the gods, and somehow Asaau’s heart rate was actually coming down.

Mercifully, the lands didn’t strain his mind up close the way they did from afar; it was easier when he could only see what lay before him. Asaau noticed as they walked that Shattered Lands grass felt no different underfoot than grass anywhere else on Tei Ura. You are wearing shoes, though. He felt a sudden, absurd urge to sit down and remove them, so he could truly know whether grass felt the same on both sides of the Ring –

“Did we have to do it like that?” Virenina’s voice stopped him mid-thought.

“Do – what?”

“Lying to her,” she said. “Scaring her into doing what we wanted.”

Tehariel? Asaau nearly stopped walking. Why in the world was Virenina worried about her? Virieh had sworn on record that she wouldn’t punish Ilare, even if Virenina died. Should anything happen to Ilare, her blood would be on Virieh’s hands, not theirs.

“You’ve never had a problem with intimidation before,” said Asaau.

“Yeah, when it was opponents,” Virenina shot back, “or practice kills, or people who were really asking for it – ” She broke off and ran one hand through her hair, as if trying to comb through her own thoughts. “They all signed up for it. Or at least deserved it.” Virenina pointed back the way they’d come. “She didn’t.”

“But she did.”

Virenina stared at him.

“She’s a Tehariel,” Asaau said. “Born into a vessel house. And you, bloodroyal twice over – firstborn daughter of the Throne Refulgent, niece to one venarch, granddaughter to another – it is her place to fear you.”

“I gave up that throne when I took my father’s name.” Virenina’s expression was stony. The rings of Ai Naa’s anchor clinked. They were walking, Asaau reminded himself – they were walking, the ground was growing rougher – “It’s Orineimu’s now.”

It was – the least important part of what he’d said, but the Shattered Lands were no place to hold an argument. Besides, Asaau told himself, you should have known better than to make so much as a sidelong mention of Orisai. Not here. Not now. Virenina’s unshared secret burned brighter in his mind with every step they took. He would not risk her willingness to tell him, not after they’d come all this way.

“We should discuss something else.” The thought of her secret reminded him, and Asaau was only too glad to turn to another topic. Being next to Virenina had begun to feel a bit too much like being near a gathering stormcloud. “Where – ”

“ – Are we going? Where am I showing you?” A certain sharp-edged humor crept back into her voice. “I know what kind of place we need. But finding it – oh, you’re going to love that part.”

Yes, Asaau thought wearily, I’m sure to love it almost as much as one loves the smell of corpseflowers in full bloom.

“For now, just keep up with me,” Virenina was saying as she led them further in, through thickening green and gathering mist that clung thin and wet-glittering to all it touched. Water soon pearled upon his armored gloves, on Virenina’s chestplate, in her hair, even in Asaau’s eyelashes. “We need open air, stable ground.” She pushed aside a heavy, dripping veil of lacelike fronds and waited for Asaau to pass before her. “So we’re going to have to go some place higher up, I mean – just look at this shit, right?”

She gave the hanging fronds a demonstrative tug, and was promptly doused in a shower of collected mistwater. For a moment, Virenina just stood there, her lone eye covered in a fall of sodden hair, one hand still frozen mid-pull among the leaves. With her free hand, she pushed back her hair and looked Asaau full in the face, grimly, as if accepting some bitter fate.

And then let go of the leaves. Another downpour hit her as they bounced back into place.

“I know you know me well enough to pthfthh,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” said Asaau while Virenina finished spitting out water. “I could never pthfthh if I didn’t know you as well as I do.”

“I know you know me well enough to know this already,” Virenina started again, voice now dripping sarcasm in place of rainwater, “but that was so totally, completely intentional of me. Also? Shut up.” Her lips had been doing their telltale trying-not-to-smile twitch; now she broke into another grin. “Just for that, I’m dragging us back to that thing I said you’d love a second ago. You figure it out yet?”

Why must I be the one to say it? Asaau glanced briefly heavenward. Very well, Seket, just give her what she wants. It’s easier that way.

“You mentioned high ground,” he told her. “That alone makes me suspect it’s exactly as I feared. Especially since we haven’t the time to climb an entire mountain, or to scale a stone table…” Asaau gave a small sigh. “And, of course, you love to amuse yourself by injuring my sense of dignity.”

He paused a moment, if only because he wanted so dearly to be wrong.

“You’re going to haul me through the sky like air freight, aren’t you.”

“We can pretend you’re my navigator if it makes you feel better. Now do you – ” Her mouth twisted. He knew she was trying not to laugh. “D’you want to be carried like a bridegroom or a grainsack?”

“No,” said Asaau, wretchedly.

“Backpack?”

“I think what I’d really like is to kill you for making me think about this.”

“I could try carrying you over both shoulders, you know, like a mantle or something – ”

“I’m curious,” said Asaau. “Is this you trying to help, by coming up with more options? Or are you simply enjoying this?”

“I don’t know,” Virenina replied with an open-handed shrug. “Both?”

“Just – ” Asaau touched one hand to his brow. He knew there was no dignified way to go about this. That didn’t make accepting it any easier. “Pick whichever way you think you’re least likely to drop me,” he said at last.

“Alright!” Virenina said brightly, and then scooped Asaau up in her arms almost faster than he could blink. He kept forgetting that she wasn’t just taller than him now, but stronger, too. Stronger than she has any right to be, Asaau thought. She lifted him as if he weighed next to nothing, so suddenly that he let out a startled, indignant noise entirely against his will. For a mercy, Virenina ignored it.

“Put your arms above mine,” she said as she jumped onto Ai Naa’s anchor, which had moved itself to hover, waiting, a few inches over the ground. Asaau expected to feel them both bob up and down when she landed on it, if only slightly. Instead it remained as solidly in place as if somehow nailed into thin air. “And hold onto me tight, you hear? Rather have you strangle me a little than fall.” The spear rose slowly through the air, and Asaau’s concerns of dignity fell away behind it. He clung to her.

“But don’t worry,” Virenina said, and pushed his head down against the front of her armor. Her hand on the back of his head was almost gentle. “If you fall, I’ll catch you.”

Then she accelerated.

Asaau pressed his eyes closed and his face against her as the world vanished in a rush of wind. He didn’t want to see how high they were. He didn’t want to see the terrible speed at which Virenina flew. He didn’t want to see an ocean of empty air, and he especially didn’t want to see how the only thing between him and it was the shaft of a single spear. In fact, he didn’t want to so much as think about those things, and so instead Asaau held onto Virenina tight as he could and filled his mind with the last thing she’d said before taking off.

I’ll catch you. I’ll catch you. I’ll catch you.

[belafujoshisdead]

The Edge of the World Is a Cold Blue Ring

In which Virenina and Asaau visit the Ring, view the Shattered Lands, and ruin a scientist’s day.

(Continuation of Concerning Tauhrelil’s Finery)

“Open communications,” Ilare said weakly. “Ilare the sixth, head of House Tehariel, first among Key-Bearers and Warden of the Third Satellite, requests an audience with Her Wisdom Virieh, sixth of her name, Venarch of House Tauhrelil and all bloodlines suppliant, Sage of the Red Chambers, Lady Regnant of the Nightglass Tower and Keeper of the Deepest Vault.”

“Tauhrelil, how are we getting there?” “You already said it.” “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.” “I’m a Tauhrelil,” she told him. “We’ll go in through the Ring.” Finally, finally, she turned her head and looked at him. “Can’t believe you want to test me in the Shattered Lands, by the way. I mean, that’s just insanity. Are you trying to get me killed, Seket?” As far as Asaau was concerned, there was no truly plausible excuse to enter the Shattered Lands, but he supposed Virenina’s came closer than most. And after that disaster in the trial chamber… The other six candidates had all passed through it. Asaau couldn’t present Virenina alongside them untried – as her sponsor, it would destroy his reputation. But if you came back from the Shattered Lands alive, he thought, then no one could say she hasn’t walked through the pyre. Au Melai’s smoking mirror, only a Tauhrelil would think of this. And the Ring belonged to the Tauhrelil family. If any of the seven houses bloodroyal were mad enough to accept the idea of using the Shattered Lands as a trial ground, it was them. “Why, I thought this would excite you, Tauhrelil,” Asaau said. “But if you don’t believe you can handle it…” “Come on, Seket, even I can tell that that was bait. Now you’re just insulting my intelligence.” She was grinning again. “Hey, can I insult you back? Make it even?” “You must be nervous, if you’re actually asking my permission before insulting me.” “Can I insult you twice?” “You could, but it would be more useful to decide where on the Ring we’re going.” After all, the Ring was not once place so much as a constellation of them, all held together by a single name – a great circle-chain of research stations at the edge of the human world, Tei Ura’s shield against the Shattered Lands and the strangenesses they bred. The seven greatest links on that chain were known to most as the Satellites; they held the Ring together, and were held together in turn by the substations, those many smaller links that bridged the gap from one satellite to the next. “The Third Satellite is closest,” Virenina said. “We’ll get on the vacrail, take a private car, then once we’re there – ” “The vacuum rail?” Virenina looked over at him. “Oh, sorry, that too common for you? Seats haunted by the ghosts of too many unroyal asses? Look, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of places at the Ring where you can sterilize yourself after, get rid of that nasty people-born-without-a-pedigree smell.” “That’s not the issue.” Actually it was, more or less, but she’d made him feel too ridiculous to admit it. “I simply – teleporting would be faster, that’s all.” “Yeah, I know,” Virenina said, and came to a stop. “Come on, Seket, you think the vacrail would be my first choice? Think I love the idea of spending a couple hours in a little metal capsule shooting through an airless tube?” “Well, I imagine you’ll at least enjoy the part where we travel at thousands of miles an hour.” “I won’t even be able to feel it!” “Very well, you’ll experience a safe, stable transit at several times the speed of sound with minimal risk of injury or death. I’m sure this will cause you no shortage of agony.” “It really will. So glad you understand. And teleporting would cause me worse. If it’s a choice between that or the agony of safe transit, I know which one I’m picking.” She gave a brief toss of her head, as if throwing the whole argument behind her. “You can’t visit the Ring unannounced without a Tauhrelil to get you in. I can hardly show up for a training mission without my instructor. You can’t fly, I can’t port over. And that means our fastest way of getting there is…?” “The vacuum rail,” Asaau sighed. “Hey,” Virenina said cheerfully, “at least we’ll both hate it.” She turned once more to the door, stepped towards it – “Tauhrelil, wait.” Asaau felt almost guilty seeing Virenina’s frustrated, full-body twitch as she stopped in place yet again, but even so: “Your spear regalia,” he went on. “You won’t be unveiling it to the public until the finalists’ tournament. If we’re going anywhere, you should change first.” Asaau looked down at the long, layered skirts of his own distaff regalia. “We both should.” He turned to go – “Seket, wait.” Now it was Asaau’s turn to startle and stop. He could feel annoyance showing itself on his face as he turned to look at Virenina, and so he expected her to be grinning. Instead, she looked serious. “Bring dark lenses,” she told him. “Or a veil. Something to shield your eyes.” ​ Asaau’s distaff regalia – what he wore for his public appearances, for his clients, for bloodless work – was yards of layered, trailing silk skirts in his family’s colors, cool violet and night-deep blue, with black and gold to round out the palette. He typically wore it with his knife, gold jewelry, and little else; in the Opaline City, with its rainforests and its bath-warm air, bare chests and skirts were the fashion for women and men alike. Now, though, he traded it for something more practical. Not his spear regalia, which belonged to the arena; instead Asaau chose a plain, dark durata silk shirt and pants, armored gloves, and grip-soled boots. Over the shirt went a vest lined with impact gel. Durata silk could easily stop a blade and would be armor enough for most of his body, but it would do little against crushing force. Should he fall, or worse… Asaau put the thought from his mind and went to meet Virenina, who, for her part, had changed into a plainer approximation of her spear regalia. She’d swapped out the dress for a sleeveless top, and the molded, blue-black armor marked with her family’s sigil for standard-issue chitin plate in a dull, dark grey. In place of her regalia’s full-leg boots, she wore a pair of normal combat boots, along with more standard plate over her calves and thighs. Ai Naa’s anchor hovered at her back, as always, its shining blade just visible behind Virenina’s head. Stepping off the vacuum rail and into the station, Asaau was glad he’d insisted they both change before going. Though night on the Ring was nearly as warm as in the Opaline City, Asaau felt a chill…but as he and Virenina left the rail station and entered the Third Satellite proper, Asaau realized that the chill had little and less to do with cold. From venule to vessel to bloodroyal, it was every noble house’s duty to cultivate beauty, to return their wealth to the world. The Third Satellite was overseen by House Tehariel, one of the seven vessel houses sworn to the Tauhrelil family…and yet, no matter how long he looked, Asaau’s eyes could find nothing in their surroundings to love. The lines of the buildings belonging to the Third Satellite were cleanly drawn, but relentless in their uniform straightness. Every surface was cut and ground to flat perfection. The lush, rain-jeweled colors of the Opaline City were gone, replaced by moon-white stone, bright naked metal, broad planes of flawless glass…and, underlying everything, the endless cold blue hum of the Ring’s luminous edge. Had the Ring been simply ugly, perhaps Asaau wouldn’t have found it so unsettling, but ugly was the wrong word; empty came closer. The Ring was bereft of adornment, lunar in its sterility, a place of pure purpose. It glowed against the night like a dead reef in a dark sea. The Ring was inhuman. Yes, and the Shattered Lands will be worse, Asaau told himself. Whatever awaited them beyond the Ring, lingering here wouldn’t make facing it any easier. He drew in a slow, silent breath, then turned to face Virenina. “Well?” “Atrium,” she said, and tilted her head: over there. Asaau’s gaze followed hers across the pale, empty courtyard, to a building that stood like an envoy before the rest. The two of them had barely started forward before its doors slid open, releasing a lone figure in black skirts and a white lab coat who approached them as quickly as dignity would allow. Asaau would have waited for them to close the distance, but Virenina had already begun walking again, clearly intending to meet them halfway. Asaau followed, if only to preserve the fiction that he and Virenina had planned this excursion together. With seven feet still between them, the other noble sank to one knee and raised her opposite hand in a single, smooth motion, eyes lowered. She had to have been from a vessel house; a venule would have gone to both knees, while bloodroyals knelt only to gods and fellow royalty. “Blood of my venarch,” the woman said to Virenina. “You honor us with your presence, yet we have failed to honor you in turn. We beg your forgiveness for this poorest of welcomes.” Asaau stood beside and just behind Virenina, waiting. Though the Third Satellite was overseen by House Tehariel, it belonged to House Tauhrelil…and Asaau was a Seket. For him to speak before Virenina here, in her own family’s domain, would have been a grave insult. “We should be asking your forgiveness,” Virenina said. “We didn’t exactly give you a warning.” Asaau bit back the urge to correct her; a bloodroyal had the right to survey her own territory whenever she pleased. Virenina took the woman’s upraised hand in one of her own and lifted it gently. “Rise, Lady Ilare. A greeting from the head of House Tehariel and Warden of the Third Satellite is more than enough honor on its own.” Part of Asaau wished he could have seen the mad scramble their arrival must have set off. Everyone! The bloodroyals are coming! Quick, send out the highest-ranking official we have! “You are too kind to this humble vessel,” said Ilare, even as she rose and finally met Virenina’s gaze with her own. Up close, she revealed herself to be a tall, spare woman with sun-starved olive skin, pale blue starspots, and a lean face animated by quick, dark eyes. Her hair, tied into a businesslike knot behind her head, looked as if it would gleam slate-blue under brighter light, the same way Virenina’s did teal, or Asaau’s violet. “I pray you will tell me if I might in any way assist you during your visit,” she went on. “Your word is my command.” “Words are exactly what I want,” said Virenina. “Where can we speak privately?” She took half a step back on the we, aligning herself with Asaau, and Ilare’s eyes slid over to him for the first time. The look in her eyes never wavered, but Asaau recognized a certain tension in the skin around them, and for a moment he almost pitied her. An unannounced visit from two bloodroyals, one of them her own venarch’s niece, would have taken years off anyone’s life. “Of course.” Ilare’s voice remained admirably steady. “My quarters are but a short distance from here. Please, this way.” Asaau didn’t know whether the walk to Ilare’s quarters felt so long because it was spent in silence, or because there was so little to see along the way. Despite their different shapes, every building still managed to look the same to him. The spaces between them should have overflowed with fountains and gardens; they should have glowed with lanterns and captive light. Instead, those emptinesses stood untouched. Something cold and heavy settled in Asaau’s stomach as he realized that, since they’d arrived at the Third Satellite, he hadn’t seen a single bird or bat or dragonet. Not even so much as an insect. He might have wondered why, but their surroundings were all the answer he needed: there was no place for them to live. Beside him, Virenina seemed unbothered. Asaau would have paid dearly to know what she was thinking. Was he letting himself fall victim to his own nerves, or did this place feel as wrong to her as it did to him? Maybe others could have guessed – people paired with greater spirits, able to cultivate the right powers – but, like most bonded spirits, Asaau’s hadn’t even been strong enough to survive pairing and earn a name, let alone fuel any abilities beyond human. Useless – Something nudged his side. Virenina’s elbow. She was offering him her arm; Asaau must not have been hiding his discomfort as well as he’d thought. It shamed him that she’d sensed his weakness, shamed him worse to acknowledge that weakness by taking her arm, but he found himself unable to refuse…and somehow, with his hands on her arm, it was easier to breathe. The night was sweltering, yet in that moment, Virenina felt like the last warm thing in the world. At last, Ilare brought them to a building that, even to Asaau, stood out from the rest – a three-sided, glass-striped column tall enough that anyone at the top would see all the Third Satellite spread out below, and a fair expanse of the Tauhrelil pillar lands besides. The tower faced them on a point; the broadest of its sides faced the Shattered Lands themselves. Only after Ilare had led them inside could Asaau finally let go of Virenina. The Satellite’s buildings turned out to be just as coldly designed on the inside as they were out, every bit as empty of life and color, but it was easier to bear indoors – perhaps because it didn’t threaten to send his mind spinning the way it had under the open sky. By the time they’d reached the uppermost floor of the tower, Asaau felt as if he’d regained control of himself. Below them he could see the whole of the Third Satellite, in all its pale desolation, but so too could he see the dark forests stretching far beyond it. Ilare’s quarters were at the back of the tower, along the side that faced out upon the Shattered Lands. The wall there was one great window, and as Ilare closed the door behind them, Virenina cut straight across the room to stand before it. Asaau joined her, and for a moment could do nothing but stare. No two stories could agree on how the Shattered Lands had come to be – only that they had existed since the time of living gods, when rivers ran red and stars fell as petals from the heavens. Some said the lands were a wound carved on the face of Tei Ura during the last battle between gods. To others, it had been only one god, the same one who had cracked Tei Ura’s moon in two. Still others said it had been no god at all – that it had been a meteor, a disease, a long-forgotten weapon. Asaau’s own family held that the Shattered Lands were the work of Ane’ai Ket, the cauldron from which he’d raised hosts of monsters and plagues, that he might seize the throne of the Many-Colored Palace from his sister Au Melai…but as Asaau looked down at the Shattered Lands, every story he’d heard of their origin fled his mind. None could ever have prepared him to look down and see. It was as if some divine fist had caved a pit into the world’s surface and set a fire inside, stoked it until the broken pieces within had twisted and melted together, and then finally sown fresh life atop the ruins. Great black tables and blocks of stone leaned this way and that; where their edges touched, they ran together like wax, tying the lands together in a dripping fretwork of stone arches. Greenery covered the stonetops like mountain snow, frothed and flowered down the sides, and spilled curtains of vines into empty air, down to the waters welling up between the worldshards like blood beneath a half-healed scab. Above the water, mountains split abruptly into crooked cliffs, which leaned drunkenly together into deep caverns, which reopened to the skies as canyons, which crumbled into islets, which amassed and arose from the waters as mountains… There were too many shapes; it was as if his brain were about to be sick. Land simply didn’t work that way. Asaau stopped trying to make sense of it before he could be sick in truth, looked over at Virenina instead, and was fully unsurprised to see her lone eye gleaming with excitement. That said, it seemed Asaau’s tolerance for looking at an expanse of land that defied all physical sense had run out at about the same time as Virenina’s tolerance for standing still and not talking. Already she was turning away from the window to face Ilare, whose smile told Asaau that their reactions were far from new to her. “Of course, I should have offered you both refreshment first,” she said, “but most visitors gravitate towards the view. I find it much ruder to interrupt a novel experience than to wait a few moments before offering tea, don’t you?” Asaau wasn’t certain he agreed – the choice between tea or sensory terror was, to him, an easy one – but Virenina looked as if she agreed enough for both of them. “We have no servants on the Ring,” Ilare went on, “so I’m afraid bottled drinks are all I can offer, but there is tea, at least – I have sunpeel, bluelace blend, dragonsblood – or water, if you would prefer. No alcohol, sadly…” More’s the pity, Asaau thought. “The bluelace, if you please,” he said. To his side, he heard Virenina ask for water. Ilare showed them to a broad glass table, then seated them beside one another and set their chosen drinks before them. Only after she’d made enough of a show of hospitality did Ilare finally sit down herself, facing them across the table with the Shattered Lands at her back. “My lady Virenina,” she said, and gave a brief, gentle bow of her head. “First Spear.” Asaau received a shallower nod. “What is it that brings you on such a sudden visit to the edge of the world? Forgive me for asking so gracelessly, but my curiosity is a torment.” She gave a small, drily helpless smile. “You wished to exchange words with me. I confess, it has become a shared desire.” “Seket.” Virenina turned to Asaau. “Indulge her, won’t you? Seeing as this was your idea.” It was your idea to pretend this was my idea. And Asaau had agreed to it – more fool him. Of course he understood why they’d agreed to do it this way – as the actual Spear and Virenina’s instructor, he had to be the one to actually propose this madness to Ilare – but really, Virenina was enjoying pretending to be the sane one far too much. “Do forgive me,” Asaau said, without returning Virenina’s look, “if I have some difficulty deciding where to start.” He folded his hands just so on his lap. “My lady. You are a busy woman, I know. Warden of the Third Satellite is a heavy title to bear. Though the role I play has little in common with yours, I know what it is to have lives hanging in the balance of one’s work. Pulling you away from yours is not something I do lightly.” Ilare looked on wordlessly as he spoke, her dark eyes shining with interest. Had their situation allowed it, Asaau might have smiled. Your curiosity torments you, does it? How kind of you to tell me so. “But a question for you first, if you would,” he went on. “How closely do you follow the selection cycle?” “The making of a new Spear affects all of Tei Ura,” Ilare replied. “I’d be a fool not to follow it as closely as time allows. Especially this cycle – ” At that, Ilare cut herself off and dropped her gaze. Asaau could guess exactly where she was trying not to look. “Go ahead. Say it.” Virenina leaned in towards Ilare. “No? That’s okay. I can say it for you.” Her grin was utterly mirthless. Light gleamed against the blades of her teeth. “Vene V Tauhrelil should have died on the Heavenfacing Court. Instead he murdered the Spear tasked with serving him mortal justice. That he managed to vanish afterwards is just salt in the fucking wound.” The curse fairly ripped its way out of her mouth. Asaau saw Ilare flinch. “My father’s actions will taint the name of House Tauhrelil for generations unless someone steps forward to purge the rot. Everyone knows what he did, Lady Ilare. I’m trying to set it right.” Asaau was almost horrified, until he saw what Virenina was really doing. Of course – a vessel who feared angering the blood of her venarch was a vessel who didn’t ask too many questions. Did you have any concerns about my candidate’s sincerity, Tehariel? About the nature of our mission? You’d best voice them carefully. “Forgive us, my lady. I’m sure you didn’t intend to stick your fingers into an open wound.” It was Asaau’s turn again, and he poured the words on like a salve, soothing and smoothing Ilare’s frayed nerves. “But it is that same wound that brings us here. Tauhrelil hopes to fill it by replacing the Spear her father took from us. Never has she given me cause to question the strength of her conviction, nor her aptitude for the red art…but I cannot yet declare her truly ready, even though the selection cycle’s final act is close at hand. If Tauhrelil wishes to restore her family’s honor, I must be certain she is not too much like…” Vene, he thought, and kept his face still and pleasant in spite of it. “Like her father,” he finished. “To do that,” Asaau went on, after the briefest of pauses, “I must see her in – well, in peril. I must see how she functions in the worst of circumstances, with no allies and no aid. Only then will I be able to see what she is truly made of.” “Of course,” Ilare said. Asaau watched her swallow faintly. “Of course. I believe I understand. You – you wish to test her in the Shattered Lands.” Her eyes met Asaau’s for half a heartbeat, even darted over to Virenina, as if hoping one of them would tell her she’d guessed wrong. “We ask a great deal, I know,” Asaau said. “Please believe me when I say that I have exhausted every other option. Regular training was never designed to push candidates to such extremes. The risk, you understand – to ensure their survival, we have always saved the worst of it for simulated training. However – ” He pressed his hands together. “Tauhrelil breaks the simulations.” “Breaks them,” Ilare repeated numbly. “That is, she’s broken the trial chamber,” Asaau said. “Not intentionally, and not even through any fault of her own, truly – but simulated training is meant to force a candidate to draw out their full potential, both in physical combat and, if one is capable, in channeling. Tauhrelil has tremendous raw ability as a channeler. Though it makes her a strong candidate in the selection cycle, it also means that she’s capable of channeling enough vaara to overload the chamber’s feedback circuit and cause a meltdown…and if Tauhrelil must restrain herself to avoid causing one, it defeats the entire purpose of simulated training. There is no place for restraint in a simulation, my lady. How can we truly test a candidate who still holds part of themselves back?” “Is there no place else you might go?” Ilare asked. “I mean no disrespect, please, but – the Valley of Teeth, the Whitestone Labyrinth, the ruins of Dimerinan – Tei Ura has no shortage of dangerous places, surely you could…” “I considered them all, and more,” Asaau replied, “but Tauhrelil suffers from teleportation sickness, and only the Shattered Lands may be reached by vacuum rail. The time it would take us to reach the others…the eye of the public is as ardent as it is fickle. Frivolous as such a concern may seem, the fact remains that disappearing now, as the selection cycle nears its peak, would be career suicide. Tauhrelil has given too much of herself in this for me to risk throwing away her hopes over such a careless mistake.” “There is no way you might – test her yourself, somehow? Or – or hire someone…?” I’ve just told you she can channel enough vaara to destroy a mechanism built expressly to contain it, Asaau thought, would you care to imagine what she can do to a human brain – but Virenina saved him the trouble of having to hold his tongue. “Your anchor is connected to you. With you all the time,” she said. “It might not be part of your body, but it’s part of you, right?” She drew the prayer spear from where it rested behind her, against the chairback. Asaau readied himself, fully expecting her to slam it to the ground, but Virenina brought it down quietly. I suppose she feels she’s already scared Ilare enough. “This is mine,” Virenina told Ilare, and tipped the blade gently sideways, set the rings beneath it chiming. “How can I fight with any other weapon, when I have one that’s a part of me? You might as well cut off my hand and stitch on someone else’s.” She relaxed her grip on the anchor, but kept it before her – leaned it back against her own shoulder, rested her cheek along its haft. “You heard the First Spear. No holding back, he said. No restraint. Hire someone? Fine, but we might have to pay their descendants reparations instead of them a wage – it’d be a miracle if I didn’t kill somebody.” That vicious challenge of a grin was long gone; now she was grave-somber. “I’m aiming to become Seventh Spear, Lady Ilare, not a murderer. I will not stain this blade with undeserving blood.” “Of course,” Ilare said, looking at her hands, and said nothing else for several long moments. At last, she looked up at them. “If you die,” she said quietly, “the venarch will kill me.” “Only if it comes as a nasty shock,” Virenina said. “Come to think of it – my lady aunt is the one backing my campaign, isn’t she?” She tapped a finger to her chin in mock-thoughtfulness. “I think my patron really should know if I’m doing something like this. Has the right, more like, after everything she’s done for me. Be awfully ungrateful of me if I died out there without even giving her the courtesy of an advance warning. Why don’t we call her right now? She’ll probably answer if she thinks it’s the head of House Tehariel.” Virenina was grinning again. “She’ll definitely answer once she knows it’s about me.” If you’re so certain Lady Virieh would approve, why didn’t we contact her first? One of these days, he and Virenina would need to have a serious talk about planning before acting. Another one. Perhaps it might actually sink in this time. Yes, he thought, and perhaps afterwards Au Melai will descend from the moon and bring you to the Many-Colored Palace herself. Ilare was looking at Virenina with something like horror – probably at the prospect of having to deal with three bloodroyals in one day – and Virenina was still talking. “Lady Ilare. If it’s royal retribution you’re afraid of, just let me talk to her.” She leaned past the shaft of her spear and pressed her gaze to Ilare’s. “Listen – even if I died in the Shattered Lands, it wouldn’t be your fault. I chose to go on this mission, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine. You know that. The First Spear knows it. I know it. Let me make sure our reigning venarch knows it, too. Otherwise, if anything happens, all she’ll know is that the last place anyone saw me alive was the Third Satellite.” Ilare blanched. “Exactly,” said Virenina. After one last moment of hesitation, Ilare raised her hand and waved it like a limp flag of surrender, drawing Asaau’s eyes for the first time to the ceiling-mounted luxtruder glinting overhead. He hadn’t noticed it till now simply because its presence was scarcely more noteworthy than the ceiling itself. Captive light was the Ilisaf family’s gift to the world, used near everywhere on Tei Ura, and devices to control and shape it were plentiful as threads in a tapestry. “Open communications,” Ilare said weakly to the machine above. The luxtruder pressed out a bright, blank panel of light and floated it down to them. “Ilare the sixth, head of House Tehariel, first among Key-Bearers and Warden of the Third Satellite, requests an audience with.” She swallowed. “With Her Wisdom Virieh, sixth of her name. Venarch of House Tauhrelil and all bloodlines suppliant, Sage of the Red Chambers, Lady Regnant of the Nightglass Tower and Keeper of the Deepest Vault.”

[belafujoshisdead]

Concerning Tauhrelil's Finery

In which Asaau's attempt to convince Virenina to wear a nicer dress spirals wildly out of control. (2.7k)

“Seket.” Virenina’s paired spirit, Ai Naa, had anchored himself to the physical world through a prayer spear nearly as long as Virenina was tall, with a beheader’s blade and a crossguard ornamented by half a dozen metal rings. Now those rings clinked softly together, though Virenina hadn’t touched her partner’s anchor. “You have a problem with my regalia. Tell me.” Asaau finally looked at Virenina instead of her clothing. “It is, perhaps, overly...forward.” “Forward.” “No one will be able to see you in it without thinking of combat.” Virenina stared at him. “We kill people and duel each other for a living.”

“It certainly suits you,” Asaau said as he slowly circled Virenina yet again. “But…”

“But?”

Asaau stopped in front of his understudy and gave her new-made regalia another long, critical look. It did suit her; even he could admit that the Tauhrelil family’s blue-shining black and glowing teal looked far better on Virenina than her mother’s red-violet and gold ever had. And it suited her every bit as well in form as in color. The full-leg boots took her appearance from tall to impossibly tall, while the chitin-polymer plate armoring her upper body made her look even more powerfully built than she was already. If Asaau hadn’t already dreaded the thought of one day fighting Virenina, seeing her in her spear regalia would have made him start.

That Virenina knew how to craft an image was beyond question. The problem was that she’d only crafted one.

“It’s not too late, you know. There’s still time to have a second set made – ”

“Seket.” Virenina’s paired spirit, Ai Naa, had anchored himself to the physical world through a prayer spear nearly as long as Virenina was tall, with a beheader’s blade and a crossguard ornamented by half a dozen metal rings. Now those rings clinked softly together, though Virenina hadn’t touched her partner’s anchor. “You have a problem with my regalia. Tell me.”

Asaau finally looked at Virenina instead of her clothing. “It is, perhaps, overly...forward.”

“Forward.”

“No one will be able to see you in it without thinking of combat.”

Virenina stared at him.

“We kill people and duel each other for a living.”

“And this regalia is perfect for arena wear, truly,” Asaau said. “But the red work isn’t the only kind a Spear does, Tauhrelil. Those we meet with outside of the arena don’t always wish to be reminded of what we do within it – ”

“Well, that makes them fucking idiots.”

“Tauhrelil – ” Asaau’s hand moved to his brow in a momentary, self-steadying gesture. “Your contempt is – understandable, but for the love of every long-departed god, do not say things like that where your audience can hear you.”

“I know that much,” Virenina said, and the rings adorning Ai Naa’s anchor clinked again. “They’re the idiots, not me, I just said. Do I need to explain to you why I thought I could get away with calling them that when it’s the two of us alone, or were you going to finish telling me why it’s bad for someone who kills for a living to dress like it?”

Asaau inhaled slowly and willed his expression not to change. The more he reacted, the more she’d needle.

“The arena may be a Spear's domain,” he tried again, “but those you deal with outside it will have certain expectations. And anyone of sufficient status to meet a Spear – to meet you – will have especially rigid expectations. Expectations for behavior.” He gave Virenina a pointed look. “For speech.” He gave her a second look. “And for appearance. Especially in the Opaline City. I mean it, Tauhrelil, it’s not too late to commission a set of distaff regalia. You carry two houses bloodroyal in your veins – surely you must realize that people of our station expect a Spear to receive them in finery, not combat armor – ”

“Hey!” Virenina said, as if protesting. As if overprotesting. Her teal-black lips twitched in a way Asaau knew meant she was trying not to grin.

“What,” said Asaau, in spite of himself.

“The dress is silk.”

Asaau stared at her. Virenina stared back and flicked the long skirt panel at her front. It barely moved.

“Durata silk,” Asaau said at last, “does not count. It stops being finery when it can stop a knife blade, Tauhrelil.”

“See, that's fucking stupid too, ’cause with how often we murder each other up here – ”

“Tauhrelil!”

Virenina grinned. Her teeth gleamed under the lights – triangular razors. Asaau wanted to groan and rest his head in his hands at having given her the satisfaction of snapping, but at least she might listen for the next few minutes, now that she felt she’d won this one-sided game she constantly played with him –

“Here’s the thing, Seket,” she was saying.

– He should be so lucky.

“Sometimes the best way to use a rule is to break it. You’re my mentor, you’ve been tracking my numbers – so you know I’m fucking crushing the other finalists, in the ring and out of it. You know me, Seket. You think I’d be doing anywhere near as good as I am if I stuck to pure tradition?”

“As well as I am.”

Virenina snorted. “I know I’m right when all you can criticize is my grammar. Now listen. You say my regalia is too forward. Say it reminds people too much of what we do. I say: look at this.” She drew Ai Naa’s anchor from its usual place, mind-pinned against her back, and slammed it upright on the ground before her. This time the rings struck one another with a long, metallic keening that seemed to linger in Asaau’s ears long after it should have faded away.

“The shape of my soul,” she said to him. “Look at it, Seket. Try to tell me it was made for anything but spilling blood.”

Asaau felt too strangely, suddenly unbalanced to try telling her anything. He was no longer certain what was going on, only that it was no longer about the outfit.

“Spears of Justice, they call us. Did you ever know a spear to dress itself in silk? Does a spear pretend it isn’t made for killing?”

That ghostly metal-on-metal ringing was in his ears again, had maybe never left. Asaau swallowed thickly; his spine felt at once terribly hot and cold as ice.

“Strip away all that Opaline finery, Seket, all the ritual and the tradition, all those thousands of years of gilding and filing down the teeth – strip it all away and look at what we do out there. Spilling blood, fighting, killing our own, just to keep this world from tearing itself apart.” Virenina’s voice was so soft and terrible that Asaau almost wished she would shout. “When we wrap our eyes in fine silks and pretend otherwise, we spit in the faces of the dead.”

Worse than the ringing was the feeling of Virenina’s right eye boring into him: the steel-sparking grey iris, the white-hot light of her pupil. But the heat of her right eye was nothing compared to the feeling of her left. Her left was nothing but an empty socket, covered by a patch. Her left was an empty socket, covered by a patch, and something saw him through it – 

Then Virenina stepped back from him and looked away, and Asaau released a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding, and all at once the spell was broken.

“See? I know what I’m doing, Seket.”

It was the kind of thing she usually said while grinning. Instead her lips were pressed into a thin, dark slash, and she had yet to look back at him.

“I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Tauhrelil…” said Asaau. “I – you’ve never – what was that?”

The words fell unanswered into the quiet between them.

“Well, it – certainly worked, whatever it was. Some new technique? Have you been studying without me?” Asaau put a hand to his face and injected his voice with feigned wonder. “Gods be risen from their graves! My prayers, answered at last!”

Virenina remained silent, unsmiling. Her appearance had always been fullbloodedly her father’s, but never had Asaau seen Virenina resemble Vene so fully and herself so little. Something like desperation pushed Asaau a step closer to her, forced more words from his throat.

“I am – your mentor.” His hands moved quickly one over the other, as if trying to spin words from thin air. “And a mentor should be able to – that is – if something troubles you, you should…”

“What,” Virenina said in a low, raw voice. She still wouldn’t look at him. “Talk to you about it?”

I want to know how my daughter is doing, Orisai’s voice echoed in his mind. Even if she still refuses to see me. Give me something I might tell Orineimu – she’s never stopped asking after her elder sister.

Which had, of course, been a polite veiling of what they’d both known to be Orisai’s true orders: spy on my daughter for me. Asaau had told Virenina as much when she’d asked to become his understudy, warned her, and Virenina had laughed. Tell her everything, she’d said. Let my mother see exactly how wrong she was – and she’d said it with such blazing, open confidence that Asaau had believed her. Perhaps Virenina was young and foolish enough to have truly believed that such an arrangement could have worked…but Asaau was old enough to be her father, and an even bigger fool for agreeing with her.

And yet – she’d seemed so very certain. And gods forgive him, but Asaau trusted none of his five fellow Spears to be Virenina’s mentor; if he barely understood Virenina, the others understood her not at all. Nuremid was infatuated with her to the point of uselessness. The other four regarded her with varying combinations of amusement, incredulity, and disgust. Who else did that leave? Who but him could truly help her? Who but him would have been willing to mentor Vene’s daughter, when Vene had killed the very Spear whose place she now sought?

Who else did Virenina have?

“I could keep one thing from her.”

The words were out almost before Asaau knew he was saying them. Virenina’s lone eye flicked up in surprise. Stayed on him. Wary. Considering.

“You’ve never kept anything from my mother, Seket. Why change that now?”

“Orisai,” he said carefully, “is one person. But a Spear…as a Spear, I owe a duty to millions. A duty that I must not – that I refuse to fail.” Not again, he nearly said, and kept it in, barely. “Part of that duty right now is to help you succeed. If there’s something I as your mentor must know, that you can only tell me if I refuse to tell Orisai, then so be it.”

“Then swear,” Virenina said. “Swear to me you’ll never tell her.”

“Will a red oath do?”

“Don’t spill blood around me right now.”

“What?”

“Swear on something else.”

Asaau wanted to pursue her earlier comment, but Virenina’s trust was a fragile and fleeting thing. Whatever she kept from him was eating her. If he didn’t learn it now, Asaau feared it would haunt him the rest of his life.

“I swear,” he said, “that what you tell me now, I will never tell Orisai. I swear it on the ashes of my ancestor, the Gardener King Aira. I swear it on the divine memory of Au Melai Menaitetauri-Ket, mother of my line, may the moon her tomb and mirror shatter now if I lie.”

Virenina looked at him for so long and so quietly that Asaau almost wondered if she’d heard him at all.

“Well,” she said at last, “I don’t hear the moon coming down. Let’s go.” She strode past him and out the room, Ai Naa’s anchor still in one hand.

“Go where?” Asaau asked.

Virenina paused in the doorframe. When she answered, she didn’t look back.

“The Shattered Lands.”

Her answer bred yet more questions; first among them was Are you insane?, followed in quick succession by Please say I misheard you, Do you wish us dead?, and Are you insane?! Somehow, looking at Virenina’s back, Asaau could voice none of them. She stood too straight. Her shoulders were too set. Every question but one died in his throat.

He followed her. It was several minutes of walking without speaking before he could bring himself to ask.

“Why there? I’ll still go with you,” he hastened to add, “and I’m sure you have your reasons, but – of all places…”

“I can’t say anything else right now, Seket. You’ll understand when we’re there.”

Asaau might have argued, but it was all he could do to maintain his composure. The unbalanced feeling was back again. Everything was going too much, too fast: one moment they’d been talking about – fucking clothing, and somehow that had turned into Virenina dragging him off to the most ra-poisoned place on Tei Ura to share a secret that she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, discuss within the Opaline City. A secret that she’d made him swear on his family’s god to keep.

As he thought more about Virenina’s non-answer, something else occurred to him. Though Asaau was loath to try her with any more questions, he had to ask, especially since he wasn’t certain it had occurred to Virenina herself. After all, it was easy to think nothing of a thousands-mile distance or a vāra-sensing barrier when one could fly.

“Tauhrelil, how are we getting there?”

“You already said it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“I’m a Tauhrelil,” she told him. “We’ll go in through the Ring.” Finally, finally, she turned her head and looked at him. “You’re crazy for taking us on a training mission in the Shattered Lands, by the way. Totally crazy. You know the point of a hostile territory simulation is that the danger’s simulated, right?”

So that was the lie she wanted him to agree to. Well – there was no truly plausible excuse to venture into the Shattered Lands, as far as Asaau was concerned, but he supposed Virenina’s came closer than most. And this lie was simple – easily remembered, easily repeated – easy to improvise off of, if he had to. Most importantly, the Ring belonged to the Tauhrelil family…and if any of the houses bloodroyal were mad enough to accept the idea of using the Shattered Lands as a training ground, it was them.

“Why, I thought this would excite you, Tauhrelil,” Asaau said. “But if you don’t believe you can handle it…”

“Come on, Seket, even I can tell that that was bait. Now you’re just insulting my intelligence.” She was grinning again. “Hey, can I insult you back? Make it even?”

“You must be nervous, if you’re actually asking my permission before insulting me.”

“Can I insult you twice?”

“You could, but it would be more productive to help us decide which part of the Ring – ”

“Tehariel is the closest main satellite,” Virenina cut in. “We’ll get on the vacrail, take a private car to Tehariel, then once we’re there – ”

“The vacuum rail?”

Virenina looked over at him. “Oh, sorry, that too common for you? Seats haunted by the ghosts of too many unroyal asses? Look, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of places at the Ring where you can sterilize yourself, get rid of that nasty people-born-without-a-pedigree smell.”

“That’s not the issue.” Actually it was, more or less, but she’d made him feel too ridiculous to admit it. “I simply – teleporting would be faster, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I know,” Virenina said, and came to a stop. “Listen, you think vacrail would be my first choice? Think I love the idea of spending a couple hours in a little metal capsule shooting through an airless tube?”

“Well, I imagine you’ll at least enjoy the part where we travel at thousands of miles an hour.”

“I won’t even be able to feel it!”

“Very well, you’ll experience a safe, stable transit at several times the speed of sound with a minimal risk of injury or death. I’m sure this will cause you no shortage of agony.”

“It really will. So glad you understand. And teleporting would cause me worse, Seket. I’d rather deal with the agony of safe transit than the agony of teleportation sickness.” She gave a brief toss of her head, as if throwing the whole argument behind her. “So. You can’t visit the Ring unannounced without a Tauhrelil to get you in. I can’t show up for a training mission without my mentor. You can’t fly, I can’t port over. And that means our fastest way of getting there is…?”

“The vacuum rail,” Asaau sighed.

“Hey,” Virenina said cheerfully, as she resumed leading them along. “At least we’ll both hate it.”

[belafujoshisdead]

you can hardly tell orialu has unmedicated adhd

“I hated you, back in the press gauntlet,” Orialu said to her. “Thought you were scum. But now I just feel sorry for you.”

Attari didn’t know what to say to that. She cast her eyes downward and briefly inclined her head in acknowledgment.

“Oh, look at me, won’t you?” the venarch’s daughter said. Attari’s head snapped up at once. She raised her eyes haltingly to Orialu’s face. “Mother said I shouldn’t even bother coming here at all, you know? That I should just leave everything to Ca’unaal and the inquest committee. But you’re the first person I’ve ever had arrested, so I thought I should see the whole process through. Do we always seal people’s anchors away from them for days like that?” For a moment, Orialu’s eye lost some of its sharpness. She looked almost troubled. “That’s fucked up.”

“I…” Attari started, for some answer seemed to be expected of her, “I, ah…”

Ca’unaal, help me, she pleaded internally, you’d know the answer to her last question, at least. But Rialu was silent. Is he leaving me to answer alone on purpose? Or does he just not want to step in on a bloodroyal’s conversation?

“Did you know you’re all over the news?” Orialu said.

[belafujoshisdead]

Snakesick

Orialu and Orineimu have a slumber party.

----

Orialu had never especially liked her chambers, but at least there she had some semblance of privacy, and a few personal touches all her own. In her bedroom was the vanity before which Orialu stood on days when she could do her makeup as she wished instead of submitting to House Ilisaf’s stylists. Across the room, on the other side of her bed, the wall was taken up by shelves full of holotapes: stageplays, reenacted myths, duels and executions from years past, lectures on anatomy and theater-craft and channeling and combat, all of them seventy-seven times more interesting than the lessons Orialu was forced to sit through during the day. In the back, next to her bed, was an archway, beyond which lay her solitarium, with its mirrored wall for her to check her form when she moved through spear drills alone, and a figure-stand upon which she could set training dummies made of false bone and gelflesh to practice her cuts.

But even with those touches, the bones of Orialu’s rooms were still ilisaafi, made of the same kind of stone carved into the same kind of shapes as the rest of her mother’s court. Your court too, one day, don’t forget, she thought, and immediately felt like throwing something.

Still, there was one thing to be said for her chambers: they were one of the only places other than Syata Kuur’s lesson room where she needn’t confine Ai Naa’s anchor to its case.

The first thing Orialu had done upon reaching her rooms was call a servant to bring her a set of cold compresses. The second thing she’d done was start thinking about what she might say at court tomorrow; most reporters would be focused on her mother, but someone was bound to point a microphone at the heir to House Ilisaf as well. That had set her pacing, as thinking so often did. Even the soreness in her muscles couldn’t override her need for movement. By the time a servant showed up with the cold compresses she’d called for, asking where she’d like them, Orialu was so deeply buried in thought that all she could do was thank them distractedly while pointing at her vanity. As soon as the servant laid down the compresses and left, Orialu forgot them entirely.

She paced back and forth, and forth and back, and back and forth some more, her feet padding silently against the marbled pink-and-violet floors. Orialu already knew what she should say: that she didn’t want her royal father to die, but he had to answer for his sins. That she didn’t want to believe him capable of what he’d done, but the evidence was undeniable. That the high jurists’ verdict and the votes of the venarchs’ panel and the voice of the crowd all outweighed whatever she felt. That her heart bled for her father’s house as they reeled from this blow to their family name, and that she trusted the greater blood of House Tauhrelil to prevail in her veins over whatever madness had infected her father.

All of it was true, yet none of it felt like enough. Was there nothing more between them? Orialu rifled through her memories of her father, back and back with increasing desperation, and found only silence.

It wasn’t as if she wanted him to die. If someone had given Orialu a choice between having her father dead or alive, she would have chosen the latter without hesitation. She wanted to watch him be killed even less. But the longer she thought about it, the more Orialu realized that that was all the further it went. It didn’t seem right. A daughter about to lose her father should be saddened; she should be fighting not to weep like a son. She should be furious at whatever was taking her parent from her. She should feel hollow, as if half the living blood were being drained from her body.

Weep for a father who never so much as smiled at you, Orialu thought, and instead felt her lips peel back reflexively into a grin. Rage at the loss of your father, never mind that you remember his absences more than anything else. Her hand tightened around Ai Naa’s spearshaft. When had she picked it up? How long had she been holding it? Mourn the death of your father, who gave you these tauhreliili features and then disappeared into his lab full-time – except for when Mother dragged him out. Guess she should have done that more often, but it’s a little late to course-correct now, isn’t it?

Vene’s death wouldn’t be much different from Vene’s living absence. She would watch her father die upon the Court, and perhaps some people would speak to her differently afterwards, but her daily life would barely change. That made Orialu want to weep, or laugh wildly, or maybe just scream.

To one side of Orialu’s rooms stood a set of glass doors, and beyond them a balcony of pale stone, half-glowing under the moonlight. Orialu threw the doors open, though she felt more like just smashing through them, and stalked out onto the balcony.

It was a beautiful, still night. Below the balcony, her mother’s court spread out in a splendor of colored lanterns and captive light. What was it Mother said? In House Ilisaf, dawn reigns eternal, no matter how black the night. I think she was quoting someone. Orialu shook her head sharply and looked up, breathed deep. Maybe the Ilisaf court was all dawnlight forever, but the sky above it was as dark as the night sky anywhere else on Tei Ura. The split moon hanging over her head hung just the same over the rest of the world; the same glittering sea of stars would look down on her no matter where on the planet she stood.

Looking at the moon was better than pacing the floors of her rooms, letting her brain chew itself to bloody shreds. Maybe if she was lucky and looked hard enough, she’d see a shooting star, or a lunar relay rocketing up the transit tethers that linked Tei Ura to its moon. Orialu sank a mental nail through Ai Naa’s anchor, pinning it in midair, and perched atop it, face tipped skyward. A warm breeze washed over her, scented with night-blooming flowers and the leftover rain-smell of that afternoon’s storm.

Perfect night for flying, part of her whispered, and Ai Naa responded with a flare of excitement. She could feel the spear-shaft all but thrumming under her thighs. Stop that, she ought to have said, and then followed it up by wrestling Ai Naa back into silence, but instead Orialu let the spear bob a little higher in the air. Then a little more. The night wind smelled so fresh, so free…the spear rose a little higher, and if she glided forward just a little she would clear the parapet…

The sound of glass chimes broke into her thoughts. Orialu swore, hopped back down to the balcony, and pulled Ai Naa’s anchor down to her side. Who the scabbing fuck is trying to get into my rooms at this hour?

“Can I come in?” Orineimu asked when Orialu opened the door. “Please? I can’t sleep.”

“Of course you can,” Orialu said, her irritation evaporating like morning dew. She leaned Ai Naa’s anchor against the wall and stood aside so her sister could enter. “You alright, Neimu? You look upset.”

Orineimu waited until Orialu had closed the door. As soon as it hissed shut, Orineimu’s face crumpled into a frown, and tears began to bead in her gray eyes.

“I don’t want to go to court tomorrow,” she said, her voice trembling. Orialu’s heart cramped at the sound of it, and she fought to keep a frown to match Orineimu’s off her face. At nineteen, Orialu had already begun her second growth phase, but Orineimu had yet to hit hers, and so barely came up to Orialu’s chest. Orialu had to go to her knees before she could hug her sister. As soon as she did, Orineimu threw her arms around her in return and pressed her face against Orialu’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Orialu said, and had to keep her own voice from trembling. “You need to cry? Go ahead. It’s just us in here.” She tried to smile, even though Orineimu wouldn’t see it. “As future head of House Ilisaf, I hereby decree that my baby sister can cry in my personal chambers as much as she wants.”

Orineimu’s shoulders hitched in what could have been a sob or a giggle. Then she was crying in earnest, leaking hot silent tears against Orialu’s shirt.

“It’s not just about court, is it,” said Orialu after her sister’s sobs had tapered off.

Orineimu pushed back from her, damp-eyed and sniffling. “Do you have any tissues?”

“Oh, take this, you’ve already been using it,” Orialu said, and pulled off her shirt. “What’s a few more wet patches, am I right? Just throw it in the laundry chute when you’re done.”

“That’s gross,” said Orineimu, but took it anyway, and as Orialu was putting on a fresh shirt, she heard Orineimu blow her nose.

“So,” Orialu said as she returned to her sister’s side, clean-shirted, “do you want to talk about it? Or do you want a distraction, instead?”

“I…” Orineimu looked at the floor and bit her lip.

“You don’t have to answer me,” Orialu cut in. “Let’s not even think about it right now. Want to watch something?” She gestured at her wall of holotapes before another thought struck her. “When was dinner – like six hours ago, right? You hungry?”

Orineimu looked up at her sister, clearly wanting to say yes, and clearly worried all the same. “It’s so late,” she said. “We really shouldn’t…”

“Sure, we shouldn’t,” said Orialu, “but doesn’t eating spicy snakemeat and watching Phantoms of the Shadowed Sea with your sister sound better than going back to your room?”

Orineimu stuck out her tongue at that. “You like spicy snake,” she said.

“And you like seared sweetbelly ants and melon rice, want me to order those too?”

“Well…” Orineimu glanced up at her sister and picked at a seam on her linen nightdress.

“Do it, come on,” Orialu said, and grinned. “Be bad with me.”

“…Can we get some nectar ice, too?”

“You can.” It was Orialu’s turn to stick out her tongue, which finally got a smile out of Orineimu. Nectar ice wasn’t truly made of nectar, only flavored with it, but it was still sweet enough that the thought of eating it made Orialu want to gag.

Orialu picked out Phantoms from the wall of holotapes and handed it to her sister. Then she picked up her cellband from where it had indeed being lying abandoned by her bedside all day, tapped it awake, and found thirteen messages from Rahelai, each one containing more question marks and desperation than the last. Orialu cursed internally and keyed off a quick reply – I didn’t lose my band and I know about court tomorrow, don’t worry – before sending another message to the kitchens for the food. Behind her, she heard the holocaster hum to life, and then a swelling of waves and a shiver of strings as Phantoms began to play.

Orineimu was already seated on the bed, but her gaze was focused on the holocast display. While her sister’s back was turned, Orialu retrieved Ai Naa’s anchor from where she’d leaned it against the wall, then slid it under the bed; her beloved would have to go without her touch for the next few hours, but the closer she kept him, the easier it was to bear. And now that that’s taken care of…

“WATCH OUT!” Orialu yelled, and then threw herself belly-first onto the bed hard enough to make Orineimu tip over, which finally got her to laugh aloud. Satisfied, Orialu propped herself up on her elbows to watch the cast. Beside her, she felt Orineimu adopt the same pose.

Orialu had always liked holocasts better than two-dimensional recordings. With a flat screening, you could really only sit and look. With a cast, it was like having a theater right there in your room, as long as you ignored the part where everything was a captive light projection instead of flesh-and-blood actors. You could get up and walk right into the picture to get a closer look, or rotate the display and watch everything from a different angle, and there was something about the depth of a three-dimensional cast that held Orialu’s attention better than screens ever could.

“Now I must take sail, sister mine,” Captain Arevai Renenn, the heroine of Phantoms, was saying, “and return what was stolen to its rightful place. You must head the family in my absence. When you see my sails again, you will know the curse is lifted…”

The food came just as Captain Renenn and her seventy-seven sailors were facing the Harrowing Cliffs, the first of the many disasters that plagued their journey. Orialu took the platters from the servant who’d brought them and bore the steaming trays straight to her bed, the foot of which was carved stone and broad enough to use as a table, as long as they were careful. Orialu lifted one cover and exposed Orineimu’s food: fried river rice dotted with bits of charred melon, fresh-cooked and still steaming; ants with crispy bodies and bellies fat with honey; a lacquered bowl of shaved ice drizzled with nectar syrup and garnished with edible flowers.

“Your sweets, sweet sister,” she said, and pushed the tray a little ways towards Orineimu before opening her own. Chunks of snakemeat glistened up at her, stewed in a spicy-salty red sauce made with dragonbreath peppers and a touch of culinary venom. The cooks had sent up a little jar of pepper oil along with the meat, in case for some reason the sauce wasn’t searing-hot enough on its own. There were vegetables, too, but Orialu ignored them. Ai Naa had tastes, specific tastes; her beloved fed on pain and flesh, and the food of humans sickened him.

Sometimes, though, he’d take burning spices and red-dripping meat in place of – but thinking of what Ai Naa wanted would only worsen Orialu’s chances of keeping the food down. Instead of thinking, Orialu speared a long strip of snakemeat, dropped it into her mouth, and felt her tongue take flame. She swallowed and reached for another. The more she ate now, the better her odds of actually getting some of it digested before Ai Naa made her throw it back up. If he did, Orialu reminded herself; he didn’t always make her. Sometimes, she got to keep everything she ate.

But the older she got, the less often it happened.

Please. Thinking it made Orialu feel dirty, weak, but she couldn’t stop the thoughts any more than she could stop her own heartbeat. Please, I’m having such a nice time with Neimu right now, let me keep it down, tonight at least…

Her beloved didn’t answer; he was too busy basking in the capsaicin blaze that filled Orialu’s mouth and savoring the feeling of flesh sliding down her throat. Maybe she would get to keep what she ate tonight, maybe the spiceburn and the meat dripping red would satisfy him enough, but there was no way for her to find out except to count down the hours – after four, it was usually safe – and wait.

Half an hour passed; Orialu finished her dish of snake as Captain Renenn’s first mate dueled the first mate of the pirate vessel Serpent Star. “Oh, I hate this part,” Orineimu whispered as Renenn’s woman fell, and Renenn and her crew lined up and submitted to capture. Orineimu put down her spoon and watched the next part through her fingers: Captain Renenn violating the verdict of the duel by killing the pirate captain with a hidden knife. Her sailors wavering a moment, before joining her and killing off the rest of the Serpent Star’s crew. It was too choreographed and story-stylized to hit Orialu in the gut, but she couldn’t blame Orineimu for hiding her face; her sister had never shared her stomach for blood.

You don’t fucking say, Orialu thought, and had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing wildly.

An hour gone. Renenn and her crew were making their way through the hazards of the Seaborne Forest. Orineimu’s food was half-gone and her eyes were half-closed; she seemed to be drowsing in between bites of nectar ice. Half an hour later, she was asleep. Orialu debated waking her up – they were coming up on Renenn’s interlude in the unseen world, and she knew it was Orineimu’s favorite part – but with court tomorrow, her sister needed the sleep. And if Orialu did lose her food later, it would be best if Orineimu were too busy dreaming to hear the vomit.

Orialu looked down at her sister. She’d fallen asleep with her head at the foot of Orialu’s bed, her hair in her face, the nectar ice spoon still in her hand and drooling a little sticky-sweet puddle onto Orialu’s sheets. Orialu tucked the blanket over Orineimu, then reached under the bed with one hand. Ai Naa’s anchor was there, not on the floor, but pressed to the underside of the bedframe, as if trying to force its way through so that they could reunite.

Orialu shifted so that she lay on her stomach. So that it was easier to reach the spear. She put her hand under the bed again and found the spear shaft. Curled her fingers around it. It would have been easier to just pull the spear up onto the bed with her. Orineimu was fast asleep and wouldn’t have noticed…but something about the thought of having Ai Naa’s anchor in her bed while her little sister was in it made Orialu’s skin crawl.

Be easier to just get out of the bed. Only she’d put on the cast to watch with Orineimu, and getting up before it was over felt like abandonment. Neimu’s asleep, Orialu reminded herself, she won’t know if you get up. Even so, Orialu waited until the cast had ended before carefully extricating herself from the bed. As soon as she was up and standing, Ai Naa’s anchor fairly flew into her hand. The rings adorning the crossguard jangled as the spear’s shaft smacked against her palm, making Orialu freeze momentarily. Only when she was sure that the noise hadn’t woken Orineimu did she step away.

It had been over two hours since Orialu had eaten her snakemeat, over two hours without even a flicker of nausea, and she’d begun to hope, faintly, cautiously, that she’d get to keep it after all. But she’d scarcely taken two steps from her bed with the spear in hand before her stomach began to churn in a way that Orialu recognized only too well. Perhaps the motion of getting up had set it off, or perhaps reuniting with the anchor let her beloved impose his hunger upon her more easily. Or maybe he was never going to let you have it in the first place. She supposed she should be grateful that Ai Naa had waited until after Orineimu was asleep to reject the food. Orialu hooked two fingers through the rings of the spear to keep them silenced, then half-ran for the bathroom, her other hand pressed to her mouth, desperately swallowing to keep the vomit at bay until she’d closed the door behind her. Then she knelt in front of the toilet, still holding the spear with one hand, pulling back her hair with the other, and retched up all she’d eaten. Tears stood out in her right eye, and behind her eye patch, a hot needle of pain stabbed at the ruined tear duct of her empty socket. Orialu told herself it was only because of the pain, for, mixed as it now was with stomach acid, the searing pepper sauce burned twice as much coming up as it had going down. Soon the food was all out of her; soon she was bringing up acid alone. Only then did Ai Naa let it end.

Orialu sat back and stared into the porcelain bowl, her stomach empty, her throat burning. The snakemeat glistened back up at her, half-digested, swimming in red.

“Fuck you,” she said hoarsely, and spat into the bowl. “I’m still not feeding you for another two weeks.”

The spear-rings twitched under her fingers. Orialu clenched her hand and forced them into stillness. She stared at the pulped meat, at the red sauce mixed with water and bile. In the dim half-light of the bathroom, it looked like a pool of blood; and because Orialu’s eye and mind saw it as blood, Ai Naa saw it the same way.

And so Orialu’s stomach clenched again, this time in hunger.

Orialu waited for it to pass. Then she gathered her legs under her and stood, flushed away the vomit, and went back to her bedroom. Orineimu was still deep asleep, motionless save for the soft up-and-down of her breathing, which Orialu could see even from across the room. She pulled her eye away before Ai Naa could make her start hearing her sister’s heartbeat, too.

With her beloved’s hunger still haunting her, it was safer to leave the room entirely, but if Orialu stepped out of her chambers, someone might see, and then word might make it back to her mother. Up night-walking, when I should be resting up for tomorrow’s session at court. Another mark against me, no matter how good of an excuse I can think up. Orialu sighed and turned to the balcony doors. She slid one open as quietly as she could, peeked over to make sure the sound hadn’t disturbed Orineimu, and then stepped out onto the balcony.

She sat there, alone save for Ai Naa and his spear in her lap, and stared at the sky, waiting for the hunger to fade. She watched as the moon sank; as the horizon lightened; as sunlight began to bleach the stars from the sky one by one.

When the sun was up and the hunger had faded, she went in to wake Orineimu, so that the two of them could prepare for court.

Well, I’ll get her some breakfast first, Orialu thought. And if she asks why I’m not getting anything…I woke up first. I ate already.

She told herself that it wasn’t fully a lie.

[belafujoshisdead]

Aitsulilla and Orineimu

Orialu visits the baths and receives an important reminder – one that leaves her doubting her own fitness to inherit the Throne Refulgent.

"I can undress myself," Orialu said. "But can you have a clean version of this – " She pulled at her own sweaty, rain-damp clothes. " – ready for me when I'm done?"

The bath attendant stepped back and left her to undress. Perhaps Orialu might have needed her help if she'd just come from a session at court, or from some Opaline City theater. But Orialu had been sparring, and so she had no complex folds or delicate chains to undo, no costly fabrics that must be carefully removed and stored away; she had a shirt, pants, and sandals. She let them all fall to the floor of the changing room in a careless pile, then stepped out into the baths proper, naked save for the patch covering the hollow socket that had once been her left eye. And Ai Naa's anchor in its case, of course, but that didn't count. That was part of her. Besides, I'm carrying it, not wearing it.

There were only a few people using the baths at this time of day, but Orialu knew more would come soon. Afternoon was just tipping over into evening, and evening was when most people came to bathe. Orialu felt the gazes of those already bathing keenly as she walked over to the thin sheets of water that poured smoothly from carved spouts set high on the red-and-purple tiled walls. It wasn't her body they stared at – after all, everyone on this side of the baths was naked – but the scrapes and blossoming bruises painting it. Go ahead and stare. Orialu felt the corners of her mouth twitch up into a smile. So unbecoming of Lady Orisai's heir, right? Scandalous, even. It was all she could do not to laugh. Go ahead, say something. Any of you!

None did. Whether it was because they feared her mother's name or the spear she carried, Orialu didn't know, nor did it particularly matter at that moment. She found an unclaimed space under the shower-falls, picked the closest to scentless she could find from the soaps offered by the dispensers, and set to work rinsing the sweat and traces of dried blood from her skin. Scandalizing everyone with a bodyful of bruises was fun; scandalizing everyone by polluting the water in the shared baths would have just been disgusting.

Orialu stepped out from under the water, twisted her wet hair into a coil, and clipped it up behind her head, then picked up Ai Naa's anchor-case and went over to the bathing pools. Her muscles were begging her for a long soak in the hot end, which of course was where most of the other bathers were, too. Cool water for the morning bath, warm for the evening. Every Ilisaf grandmother and elder aunt insisted that it was best for one's skin, part of the recipe for beauty. I'll be telling my own granddaughters the same thing someday, if Mother has her way. The thought filled Orialu with cold revulsion. She quietly pressed the hard edge of the spear case into the bruise growing along one thigh and let the pain pull her back to the present.

Get out of your head and into the fucking bath already, Orialu told herself. Her eye scanned the pools again. Early as it was, even the so-called busy end of the baths wasn't too densely crowded, and there was plenty of space for Orialu to slip in and soak in unaccompanied silence. She nearly chose just such a space, until her eye fell on cousin Aitsulilla.

As Orialu stepped into the water beside her cousin, Aitsulilla raised one delicate brow. Like the rest of the hair on her head, it was a properly ilisaafi shade of darkest magenta. So much of Aitsulilla was so much more properly ilisaafi than Orialu: the elegant oval of her face, the green of her eyes, the smooth straightness of her hair. Her star-marks were a tinted few degrees blue from the true Ilisaf pink by the genes of her Icarian bridefather, but that was still worlds closer than Orialu's pure Tauhrelil turquoise glow.

Yet Orialu was House Ilisaf's heir, and Aitsulilla, thanks to her father's gender, would only inherit if Orialu and her sister Orineimu both set aside their own claims to the Throne Refulgent. And even then, she'd have to fight for it. Plenty of our elders might prefer a female-line descendant from further up the family tree, a proper Ori-something, instead of poor male-descended Aitsulilla. Who was two years older than Orialu and would be galled to know Orialu was thinking of her this way; as far as Orialu was concerned, that only made it funnier. So sorry, cousin. Take it up with Mother if you must. She was the one born female, so it's her fault I get to inherit instead of you.

Orialu set down Ai Naa's anchor-case beside the bath, then sank into the water next to Aitsulilla with a long sigh. Her muscles throbbed as they drank in the heat; it was as if she could feel them relaxing one red fiber at a time. For a moment, she just sat with her eye closed and soaked, submerged to the neck, her head tipped back against the rim of the bath.

"Must you bring that thing here, as well?"

Orialu didn't begrudge Aitsulilla the remark; if she hadn't broken the silence, Orialu would have eventually done it herself. Each of them enjoyed needling the other far too much to stay quiet for long.

"You're wearing your anchor," Orialu shot back. Even the anchor of Aitsulilla's paired spirit, a slender golden chain, was more properly ilisaafi than Orialu's spear. But my spear belonged to House Ilisaf for thousands of years before Ai Naa claimed it, and your chain was only made for you fourteen years ago. "Why should I abandon mine?" Orialu went on, and grinned. "Not afraid of a little wood and metal, are you, cousin?"

"Hardly," said Aitsulilla, convincingly enough, but Orialu knew that if she so much as feigned at opening the anchor-case, Aitsulilla would stiffen and shy away. Like everyone else in this family. Ai Naa saw it differently, and told her so by bleeding an image into her mind: a prey animal, frozen in fear.

No. Orialu forced the image away. Not her. Not family. Not human. Despite the heat of the bath, fear touched a momentary cold finger to her spine. She'd fed her beloved not even two weeks ago. Our spear lesson must have stirred him up again, Orialu told herself. My blood is still cooling down, that's all. I just need to…

" – Cousin?"

Fuck. Aitsulilla had been saying something, and Orialu had missed it entirely.

"Sorry," Orialu drawled, eye closed. "The water just feels so good. I forgot to pay attention to whatever you were saying to me." It wasn't fully a lie. The bath did feel incredible. She had forgotten to keep paying attention to her cousin.

"I was saying," Aitsulilla repeated, with a peevishness that made Orialu want to smile, "that since you love spears so very much, surely you must have an opinion on which Spear they'll pick to serve your father his fate upon the Court."

You're an idiot for thinking you could escape it, even for an hour or two. Her father was husband to the head of House Ilisaf; of course his execution was on the minds and tongues of all the family. But Orialu knew the ways of her mother's court well; anything she said or did that hinted at weakness could become a weapon in Aitsulilla's hands later on. There was no way she could show her cousin any of what she'd shown earlier to Syata Kuur.

"Nuremid," said Orialu at once. Aitsulilla laughed. "No, only playing. I'd say Seket, but he already led the arrest, and did you see the interview he gave after?" Aitsulilla didn't answer. "Did you?" Orialu repeated.

"Yes," Aitsulilla said; Orialu could almost hear the cloaked annoyance in her voice. Second Spear Seket was her favorite among the seven. Orialu knew it, and Aitsulilla knew that Orialu knew, which was exactly why Orialu enjoyed making her admit it out loud.

"So?" she pressed. "Didn't he seem a little off to you? Whenever he talked, I kept thinking of – a cracked mirror, or something."

"He did seem…brittle," Aitsulilla admitted.

Aitsulilla could tell because, like almost every woman on Tei Ura and most of the men, she wanted the Second Spear, and so watched him whenever she got the chance. Orialu could tell because she followed all seven of the Spears on principle. That, and both my parents are close with Seket…or were, anyway. I suppose only Mother is, now.

"Brittle, yeah!" Orialu said, smacking the surface of the water with one hand. Aitsulilla frowned sharply as droplets spattered her face. "That's it! Like he'd break if they pushed him too far. Now, I don't know what Seket saw in Father's lab any more than you do – I've tried to find out, believe me – but the way he trailed off, when they asked? It had to be bad. Bad enough to make our oh-so-polished Second Spear lose his train of thought on camera…so I don't think it's going to be him. Do you?"

"Perhaps not," Aitsulilla said after chewing on it a moment, deliberately not-looking at Orialu's grin as she spoke. "Go on, then, and tell me who you think they will use. I know it's what you want to do."

"Well, bloodroyals hardly ever get sent to die on the Court, right? So I thought they'd want to make an example of Father, seeing as it's such a rare opportunity." Orialu moved her head as if to toss back her hair, remembering only too late that it was all clipped up behind her head. "That's why I thought Irimias, at first. The Sunspinner and his wires – all the Court analysts say his way is the most painful of the seven, right? But then – " Orialu tapped one sharp-nailed finger against her own temple. Aitsulilla looked tired. "Then I thought, hey, Orialu, what's the Court going to consider first, blood or bloodroyalty? If a son of House Tauhrelil who's married to the head of House Ilisaf gets sent to the Court, would they really use the Fourth Spear to kill him? Or would they send the First?"

"What are you talking about?"

Bathwater lapped against the tiles as Orialu and Aitsulilla both startled at the new voice. Though she recognized it, Orialu turned to look all the same.

Even her own little sister looked more ilisaafi than Orialu did. Like Orialu, Orineimu had inherited their father's gray eyes and, at eleven, was already starting to show his sharp cheekbones. Unlike Orialu, she'd also inherited their mother's straight, sleek dark-magenta hair and pink star-marks. I was their test case, Orialu had always told her sister, jokingly, but I came out too tauhreliili. You, Neimu, you're just what Mother wanted.

"Alu," Orineimu said now, slipping into the water next to her sister and peering at her bruises, "are you alright?"

"Fine, fine," Orialu said breezily, waving one hand. "Syata Kuur just got the best of me today, that's all."

Orineimu was still looking at Orialu's bruises. "Will those go away in time for…?"

"Finish your sentences, Neimu," Orialu said casually, but inside a familiar sense of unease rippled through her. In time for what? Don't tell me I… "Trailing off all coy like that is what boys do."

Orineimu made a face at that, but it only lasted an instant before she remembered herself and reordered her features.

"Mother wants us both with her when she holds court tomorrow," Orineimu started again. "She's going to give a statement about Father, remember?"

"Oh – " Fuck me, Orialu nearly said, as the bottom of her stomach dropped out. " – of course," she finished aloud. "That's why I made sure to take a lesson with Syata Kuur today, to clear my head beforehand and all. A little spear therapeutics, yeah?"

No doubt a reminder about tomorrow's court appearance was already buzzing on her handport, which was lying abandoned – somewhere. Probably in my room. Again. And I bet it's full of frantic "don't forget about this" texts from poor Rahelai. Orialu never meant to ignore the aide who managed her and Orineimu's schedules, but it tended to happen when she kept forgetting her port. She never meant to do that, either, but she kept on forgetting anyway, no matter how hard she tried to be better about it.

You're so lucky your baby sister reminded you. Orialu's fists clenched beneath the water. Tawret's blood, an eleven-year-old is better than you at remembering these things. Why don't you just step aside and let Neimu inherit?

The warm, humid air of the baths pressed in hot and close, crowding her nose with the scents of a dozen different soaps and oils. The heat of the bathwater, so relaxing a moment ago, was suddenly intolerable. Orialu's heart began to race. Before she could stop herself, she splashed noisily to her feet. She turned it into a long stretch, ignoring the aches her muscles raised in protest. The gazes of her cousin and sister were weighing on her back, to say nothing of everyone else also using the baths; better to push through the pain than let anyone see her perturbed.

Orialu turned around to face Orineimu, who looked startled, and Aitsulilla, who looked annoyed to have gotten more water splashed in her face. Behind them, by the edge of the pool, waited Ai Naa's anchor-case. Somehow, looking at it made it easier for Orialu to breathe.

"I really should go practice what I'm going to say tomorrow," she said to both of them. After I think of what to say in the first place. "And start some cold compresses…" She looked down at her collarbone, her thigh, her ribs, her arm. "…well, everywhere."

"Will the bruises really go away that fast?" Orineimu said. A faint line of worry creased her brow. Backwards, Orialu thought, it's all backwards. You're the older sister, you should be worrying about her.

"No," said Orialu, "but that's what torcs are for, and arm cuffs, and silksleeves, drapes, skin creams, pearlpowder – the stylists will make it work, don't worry! Mother will have blood of them if they don't."

"But still…" Orineimu looked hesitant. "Mother won't be happy."

"Oh, when is Mother ever happy with me?" Orialu said, and grinned. "Trust me, Neimu. I may be a hot-headed idiot, but I know how to make the cameras like me. Even Aitsulilla can admit that much, can't you, cousin?" She stepped out of the bath and picked up Ai Naa's anchor case, then crouched down beside and just behind Aitsulilla, again ignoring the pain in her muscles to do it.

"Try and make her smile while I'm gone," Orialu murmured into her cousin's ear. "Please? Everything with Father, just – she needs it."

For a moment, there was nothing. Then Aitsulilla gave a minute nod that Orialu felt more than she saw.

Orialu straightened, let out a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding, and finally turned to leave.

[belafujoshisdead]

the spear ai naa takes for an anchor is a relic belonging to the ilisaf family and was used back then for the same purpose that nina uses it now, for executions. except virenina does her killing as one of the opaline city’s seven spears while the prayer spear's original owner did it as a warrior priestess/cult leader from several thousand years ago known as oricama the head-taker who used the spear both in battle and to execute human sacrifices

[belafujoshisdead]

Red Echoes

Virenina tries to give Asaau a breather. Asaau learns more of Ai Naa's nature, and considers a betrayal.

The whole thing was madness, yet Virenina's words made a certain sort of sense. Which was harder to accept: that she had some sort of freak anomaly for a paired spirit, or that the thing paired to her was no spirit at all? What else could it be?

God, some part of him whispered. But no. No. The time of living gods was long past. If a god had clawed its way from the grave, surely the world would have felt it.

"Seket?"

Asaau knew he should say something. He should at least look up at Virenina. He could not manage to so much as shift his eyes.

"I'm going to take the lenses off you. You don't need them anymore. Alright?"

He did want them off, Asaau realized, but he couldn't even nod to show he'd heard.

Virenina waited a few seconds, then went ahead and lifted the lenses from Asaau's face. She did it slowly, carefully, gripping the lenses between her thumb and forefinger while keeping the others curled away into fists. That struck him as odd. Why –

Oh.

He was still on the ground, at her feet, paralyzed like frozen prey. The fear must have been pouring from him in waves.

She was trying not to touch him.

"I'm going to sit down beside you," she informed him. "A few feet away. Sit up when you're…when you can."

When he could at last sit up and raise his head, Asaau found her looking at him.

For a while, they simply regarded one another across the distance between them, in a near-silence broken only by the faint hissing of distant sea and breeze-riffled leaves. At last Virenina opened her mouth to say something. Asaau braced himself to hear whatever it might be, but instead she looked at him silently a moment longer, then closed her mouth and dropped her gaze. That felt wrong enough to reach Asaau even through the fog of his own fear.

He noticed then, too, that there was no blade hovering behind her head. She'd left the spear behind. Relief welled up in him, and gratitude – and a stranger, half-painful feeling that lay beyond his ability to name.

She left the spear. It was considerate. It was as if she'd cut off her own arm and nailed it down before going to him. It fit, somehow, with the rest of what she'd done. Left the spear. Tried not to touch me. Warned me of her movements…

There was something tying her actions together, something that ran deeper than mere consideration. If he could only –

"Do I disgust you now?" Virenina asked him quietly, and all at once Asaau understood.

"No," he said, immediately, truthfully. "No."

It did not feel like enough, yet he could not think what else to say. His eyes kept finding the emptiness at Virenina's shoulder. She looked so strangely alone without the spear at her back.

"How…do you feel?" Virenina asked, then hesitated for the barest second before continuing: "Other than – afraid. I know what I – "

She is about to cut herself with her own tongue, I can sense it. Somehow, the idea was more than Asaau could stand.

"More than anything," he cut in, "I feel…I feel lost." More than anything was barely even a lie; by now the fear had gone from an all-consuming feeling to something that registered more like background radiation. "I've seen," he went on, "but I don't understand. How did you…?"

"Ai Naa," Virenina said. Her voice was half bitter curse, half lover's sigh. "My paired spirit. My other half. I didn't lie about that, at least. Everything else…" She ran one hand through her hair and gave a short dead laugh.

"That's – " Impossible, Asaau nearly said, and caught himself only just in time. Whose soul is it tethered to, Seket, yours or hers? " – Difficult," he said instead. "A difficult idea to – to take in. I believe you," he hastened to add, "but…"

"But you can't accept that a spirit could do that. Your mind rejects it, even after you saw it yourself."

Asaau could only nod.

"I know how it looks," Virenina said to him. "I do. But what else can it be?" She tapped off joint after joint on her fingers, counting. "He found me seven days into my seventh year. We made contact at a pale spire. He's bound to an anchor, the anchor is part of me. We share my life between us." She brought her hand down, clasped it around her other wrist. "If it's not a pairing, it looks enough like one to fool everyone I've met. To fool you. Fool me."

Her gaze fell to the ground again.

"The forms fit," she said. Almost pleaded. "Of what we are. It's just the scale that's wrong."

The whole thing was madness, yet Virenina's words made a certain sort of sense. Which was harder to accept: that she had some sort of freak anomaly for a paired spirit, or that the thing paired to her was no spirit at all? What else could it be?

God, some part of him whispered. But no. No. The time of living gods was long past. If a god had clawed its way from the grave, surely the world would have felt it.

"You've always told others that Ai Naa is unawakened," Asaau began, "but if that was part of the lie…"

"Oh, he's awake." Virenina said, and grinned sickly. "Awakened. That's what you really want to know, isn't it." Her shoulders shook, as if with laughter, though she voiced none. "What woke him. What called to him in the dreamsea."

Again, Asaau could only nod.

The unseen world of spirits shadowed all of Tei Ura – layered upon it, saturating it to the core, the animating soul to Tei Ura's anchoring body. Each world bled into the other, colored it, shaped it, fed it. One such bleeding was the dreamsea: a shadow dreamed upon the unseen world by humanity, pooled together from the uncountable liquid fragments of their thoughts and fears, their dreams and desires. An awakened spirit was one that had fixated on a handful of fragments from the dreamsea and then accreted a sense of self around them, layer by pearllike layer. To know those fragments was to know – or at least glimpse – an awakened spirit's nature.

"Red hunger," Virenina said at last.

Horror froze Asaau's heart in his chest. No, he wanted to say. A fragment that old, shared across myriad minds, fed for so many thousands of years by humanity's bloodiest dreams… No, that can't be, mustn't, it runs too deep. He wanted, needed, to deny it, but his breath had stilled in his lungs.

And Virenina was still talking.

"Sacrifice upon the Court," she was saying. "Throats torn open under fangs. Flesh devoured on the pyre. As long as it tastes of blood." Another laugh fell like a dead thing from her lips. "But it's funny. He never knew that taste until me. Until he had my tongue to learn from. It's kind of an honor, really." She was trying to grin again. "If you think about it. Thousands of years dreaming in red, but I gave him his first taste, I…he…"

One hand rose slowly to her face. Pressed itself over the black patch that covered what had once been her left eye.

Asaau wanted to say – to do – something – but seeing Virenina like this left him feeling as unsteady as the sea that hissed and swelled below them. Should he offer sympathy? He could try – but Virenina might well taste it as pity and spit it back in his face. Comfort her? But being comforted had always made Virenina squirm and snap, even as a child. Why should that change now? Perhaps he should simply ask her to keep going – but the way she kept trailing off made him hesitate. What if even the slightest push was too much?

Yet as worried as Asaau was about saying the wrong thing, the fixed and distant look in Virenina's lone eye worried him even more. And her face…her face had gone terribly still in a way that made Asaau think of Vene. Vene, consumed by his own red work, too entranced to eat or sleep. Vene, wandering forth from the Tauhrelil family crypt, drained half to death by a days-long neural dive into his ancestors' secrets. Vene, who had tried to stop for Asaau, tried to keep himself tethered…and in return, Asaau had failed him, let him slip away, and Vene had disappeared from Asaau's world entirely.

Not his daughter, too. Asaau looked at Virenina sitting in hollow silence and felt something like a rusted fishhook catching between his ribs. Why else had Au Melai drawn this thread between them, if not for a chance at restitution?

The gods may rise from their graves if you think it over much longer, just say something – !

"Virenina?"

He hadn't meant to use her given name unasked, but he could beg forgiveness for that impropriety later. At least now she was looking at him. Asaau scrambled in his head for something to say next – anything, anything, just get it out before she drifts away again – and came up, finally, against the reason that had brought them here to begin with.

"You would have taken this secret to your pyre if you could," Asaau said. "Am I wrong?"

Virenina shook her head slowly, shallowly.

"Perhaps there's another world where you've managed to do just that," he went on. "But in ours, they're still rebuilding the trial chamber – " At that, Virenina's lone eye filled with silent hurt. "For which I do not blame you," Asaau said quickly. "Not remotely. You did what the chamber was designed to make you do, nothing more – in fact, now that I've seen what you're…what you're capable of…I'm amazed that nothing worse happened."

They'd placed someone paired with a spirit grown on red hunger in the trial chamber. Now that he knew… Oh my dear dead gods, it could have been so much worse. The column of killing light flashed again in his mind. She could have…we could all have been…

"I could've killed everyone," Virenina said in a low, choked voice. "I shouldn't…I should never have…"

Part of Asaau agreed with her, but to say so now would have been too cruel. And the selection cycle – the final act is so close at hand. To abandon your candidate this late in the campaign would be suicide. What else can you do now but help her see it through?

Well – he could betray her. Tell someone else the truth of what Virenina was paired with, of what she could do. A doctor, a channeler, a scientist, a seer – someone who could help…yet even as the notion surfaced, Asaau was already discarding it. Finding someone who'd believe him would be a trial all its own, and that someone might tell another in turn; if word got out, even a twice-royal pedigree might not be enough to save Virenina from being made a research subject. Whatever she was, whatever she was paired with, it was beyond a rarity. Should they learn of it, even some of her own Tauhrelil relations might find scientific curiosity outweighing blood affinity; if not them, then someone, somewhere, was bound to be mad or greedy or foolish enough to try.

Then Virenina would of course attempt to escape. Asaau could see no way for that to end but in slaughter. Another laboratory piled with corpses, painted in red, and again it would be his fault –

No. The only way he could bear to go was forward.

"You've told me before," he said at last, "that you were made to be a Spear. That you can't see a life as anything else. Is that still true?"

"Yeah." Though Virenina's voice shook slightly, she answered almost at once.

"And I am your instructor," Asaau said. "Your sponsor in this campaign, here to help you succeed. Yes? So don't…" His hands twisted themselves together in his lap. Words usually came to him as easily as silk to a spider, but right now all the threads felt so hopelessly snarled. "That is – you're already forcing yourself by telling me anything at all – I don't wish to make this harder for you than it is already…"

He almost wished Virenina would interrupt him, but she only watched and waited. Asaau pulled his hands apart and refolded them on his lap, straightened his spine, breathed inward.

"You told me about – about your partner – for the sake of your career," he started again. "Whatever you still need to tell me…perhaps doing so would be easier if you thought of in that way. If I were to ask you, How does this affect your campaign…?"

A shift in Virenina's lone eye told him she'd gone from merely watching to thinking. Now it was Asaau's turn to wait and listen.

"That's…easier," she admitted. "Yeah. I can answer that. But first I – "

And then her face and body fell into sudden stillness as a strange movement seized her flesh – a kind of flinching underskin ripple that passed down the length of her, gone almost as soon as it began. Asaau wondered how violently Virenina would have let herself shudder if he hadn't been watching.

"Need to go back," she said, with a ragged edge to her voice that hadn't been there a moment ago. She paused a moment, swallowed sharply; when she spoke again, it was gone. "The spear."

Asaau's heart lurched; he'd been so focused on Virenina that he'd all but forgotten about her partner's anchor.

"I can't leave it any longer. I'm sorry."

"Don't be, it's part of you," Asaau said automatically, and started to get up.

"You don't have to come with me," said Virenina. "You'd see the aftermath of that – " She pointed skyward – "if you did. I can get it alone. You saw enough already, I don't want to make you…I can get it alone," she said again. "Or call it back to me from here."

He could wait alone in the dark for a second time. He could sit in place as a hungry blade came flying at him through the night.

Or he could go with Virenina, and see.