Author: Lurina

175: Blood of the Covenant (𒐀) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

1:39 PM | Lavyrinthikos | September 25th | 1608 COVENANT

What had gone wrong? Despite their efforts, there were too many possibilities to say definitively. Perhaps they'd been using the Power to hide and Taharqa had somehow botched the Anomaly-Divining Arcana. Perhaps there was an underground part of the facility they'd overlooked in the scope of their scans. Perhaps there was a second entrance, and they'd only just returned to the facility moments ago.

It was academic, Lamu supposed.

Everything else that happened in that facility happened over barely more than a minute. She identified the culprit before Taharqa's body was even finished falling to the floor; a man, bald and emaciated looking, looking out at them from one of the archways leading to the outer hall, dressed all but in rags. Though clearly exhausted, there was a look of focused mania in his eyes - tearful and bloodshot, likely on account of exposure to the demiplane's atmosphere - and in his right hand he was clutching a lit blowtorch connected to a small gas tank.

An impromptu scepter.

In the reddened half-light of the Chamber, the man appeared strikingly grotesque-- Monstrous, even, like he was some forgotten demon sealed in her by the world's creators, disturbed from some eldritch slumber by their intrusion. How raw, how inspiring! Lamu's mind filled with a cacophony of unwanted ideas and feelings; fear and novelty that bled into composition that bled into mathematics, echoing through her consciousness like the tolling of a bell.

Lamu cursed her brain for fixating on this, because obviously the situation was extremely bad. The man wasn't wearing an arcane interpreter, either, which meant he wasn't from the new generation; he was a grafted arcanist, and all that entailed. There was a very good chance he'd kill them all.

"You can't," she thought she heard the man utter in hoarse whisper, in that brief moment before it all happened. "I won't let you take them."

Bao was already reaching for his pistol, his hands moving with a speed Lamu hadn't expected given his usual reliance on Gudrun - did he have a martial background, too? He'd only ever talked about his work in logistics - but the arcanist was faster. He fired off a discharge of energy from his scepter with crude but functional accuracy, the eris streaking across the building's interior like a bolt of red lightning and melting the weapon and about half of Bao's hand on its way to the far wall. He screamed in agony and fear, falling backwards to the ground as the molten metal spilled to the floor and the flesh along the rest of his arm cooked.

Modern compression suits were designed to prevent even relatively major damage from compromising the wearer's oxygen supply, sealing themselves automatically when possible and, when it wasn't, tightening around the area to buy as much time as possible. But Bao's suit was so worn down that it was practically falling apart, and unlike their assailant, he didn't have the Power to shield him. Within five minutes, he'd lose consciousness. Within ten, he'd be dead.

Of course, that wouldn't be an issue. At this rate, he was going to die much faster than that.

Lamu threw herself to the ground instinctively, taking cover behind the terminal, while the arcanist prepared another incantation - something to manifest extreme cold, she managed to pick up, probably the same thing he'd done to Taharqa - but before he had a chance to finish, a white flash struck the room as Gudrun shot at his skull from behind, using the inner wall as cover. The man's head flinched sharply, but was unharmed. He had a barrier, likely a skin-tight application of the Energy-Nullifying Arcana.

Lamu's heart was racing. It wouldn't be able to take many shots like that-- With such a crude supply of eris, the barrier had to be weak. Gudrun was strong; she might actually be able to kill him. She prayed she could kill him, since it would mean she wouldn't have to take what was rapidly becoming the logical course of action.

Unfortunately, the man had a trick up his sleeve.

Though it was unpopular in modern era of ranged weapons and automatons and eris sealed into scepters at an obscene density, in the days of the Mourning Period, it had been common to use the Power to temporarily augment one's physical body for the purpose of combat; fortify muscle, enhance balance and posture, increase the density of flesh and bone. In those days arcanists had relied on open flames for their casting, which weren't exactly reliable in a combat situation, making a fight less about what you cast in the moment and more about what you'd cast before it started. In modern terms these techniques would have been called Egoist Biomancy if they were still respectable enough to be taught.

Whoever this was had adapted to his circumstances. He leapt backwards towards the origin of the shot in a sharp, fluid motion, grabbing Gudrun's arm before she had time to fully withdraw to cover. She fought back with impressive strength - twisting both their arms around enough to fire another hit, this time in his chest - but after that he grabbed the rifle with his other hand and crushed it like it was made of paper.

He dropped the remains to the floor and, with inhuman precision, brought the edge of the hand down on her arm again, slicing through it as if he was wielding a scimitar. A streak of blood painted the wall violet, but Gudrun merely grunted, jutting her head forward in a headbutt, managing to take him off guard and knocking his skull against the side of the archway.

But unarmed, between an arcanist and a normal human, it was a foregone conclusion. Ignoring a kick to his abdomen, the man grabbed her by the throat and thrust them both almost a full meter into the air, then - making use of the low gravity with practiced ease - flipped and slammed her down to the ground, something in her upper back area making a sickening crack.

Lamu cursed to herself.

Bao rose back to his feet, grabbing some piece of metal equipment adjacent to one of the tanks and making a desperate attack at the arcanist's back. The man saw it coming - Divination? Just good hearing? - and threw himself up from Gudrun's prone body with his palms, then brought his leg up and kicked at Bao's chest with the force and speed of a horse. He backed sharply away, but it was too late; the blow still managed to half-connect with his left rib cage, shattering it and probably destroying one of his lungs.

He turned back to Gudrun, raising a fist over her head--

Lamu stood up, Taharqa's scepter in hand, and thrust one of the tanks at the man's back with the Object-Manipulating Arcana. Once again, he seemed aware of what was happening too soon, but she still saw the shock and fear in his eyes when he spun, dodging it by the skin of his teeth. It smashed into the far wall, shattering glass in every direction, and before he had a chance to recover, she chanted and traced the Air-Thrusting Arcana, throwing him back against it. She saw the barrier break down.

She was better than he was; she could tell, even just in these few moments. But offensive arcana burned through eris quickly, and she still had to get back to civilization. This would need to end quickly and efficiently. Something cheap, something that couldn't be dodged, something fast...

Wait. no. Did it need to be fast?

Lamu took a gamble, She started casting her incantation, and the man began his own. Fortunately, as she'd hoped, he didn't try to create a new barrier, even a simple one like the Matter-Repulsing Arcana, but took a gamble of his own to end the fight as quickly as possible-- Though notably, he avoided using another discharge attack. Instead he went for the Swift-Carving Arcana, likely trying to puncture a hole in her helmet. He probably hadn't realized she could trace cast; from that perspective, it was the easiest way to end the fight.

Right as he was about to finish, though, Lamu ducked. If she'd been wrong and he'd kept casting, it would have been over right then and there. But instead, he stammered and awkwardly amended it, prolonging the cast without committing.

He didn't want to damage the terminal.

The man sprinted forward to try and finish the cast point-blank - where it would hit her and only her - but Lamu scrambled around the terminal, trying to buy herself a couple more seconds. By the time he had line of sight, her incantation was ready. She spoke the terminating word of the Hydrocarbon-Conjuring Arcana, filling a chunk of the air around the blowtorch with methane, and threw herself towards the wall with all the strength in her legs.

It was a good thing, too, because the blast was bigger than she'd expected; it must have been the high oxygen levels of the environment. The small tank burst into a huge fireball that swallowed the man's body wholesale, and he screamed in agony, thrown backwards. The smell of roasted human flesh - surprisingly nice, honestly, kind of sweet - filled the facility.

But the fight wasn't over quite yet; so long as he was conscious, he could still incant from his own vitality and finish her off, then heal himself later. After all, if he'd been surviving out here for as long as it appeared, he had to have a lot more gas stashed away somewhere. So before he had had a chance to recover, Lamu looked around for a shard of broken glass that looked relatively big and easy to handle, lifted it up with the Object-Manipulating Arcana - those physical incantations were probably still active - then ran over to his smoking form.

Then, hesitating for only a few moments as she saw his maimed face - half of his lip burned away, yet still trying to form the words of an incantation - she plunged it deep into his throat, then raked it across.

Finally, he stopped moving.

Lamu stared at the corpse for longer than the fight had probably even lasted, breathing heavily, eyes wide. Time felt like it had stopped in the haze of adrenaline.

Then, she heard a voice behind her.

"L-Lamu," Bao gurgled, like he was drowning.

She turned her head sharply towards him, shocked not because was alive - although the second wound he'd taken had seemed even more fatal than the first - but because her mind had gone so blank that she'd genuinely forgotten there were other people here aside from herself and the man she'd just butchered like a goat.

He was mortally wounded, and looked bad. While his damaged hand had been mostly cauterized by the heat of the blast, the blow to his chest was visibly bleeding even through the suit - fluid couldn't escape the material (an artificed silk variant), but she could see it there, bulging and tinting the exterior red, already flowing in steaks to escape from the damaged section. If he'd been a more handsome man, the sight might have had a more aesthetic quality, but he was old and never clearly had distinction therapy. His face was one she'd seen a thousand times before, literally, and it wasn't even one of the good ones. Overly wide, with a flat nose.

Lamu had always wondered how he ended up in a place like this. It was a different story nowadays, of course, but back when he'd have been young, you had to try not to have built some manner of comfortable life for yourself by the time you'd reached your third century. And unlike Gudrun - and sometimes Taharqa, as cautious as he was - he didn't seem to have much of a taste for adventure, only financial returns. Even a criminal his age would have had better places to hide. What was he doing, here in the gutter of the world, leading a bunch of kids?

It was in hyper-stressful situations like this that all the work she'd put into herself seemed to crumble in an instant; a cracked mask, a flaking coat of paint. Even though she could have just as easily asked that question about herself, she shouldn't see herself in him any more than she could in a potted plant. It felt like the gulf between their minds might as well have divided the Milky Way from Andromeda. She couldn't discern what face from her library she should wear.

"Sir," Lamu said mutedly.

"Y-- Ugh-- You're an arcanist?" He said, pained. His eyes were tearing up too - the gas was starting to reach his helmet. "Why did you never..." He shook his head. "Never mind. You need to-- Need to heal me. Stop this bleeding." A hoarse, desperate cough, accompanied by blood splattered on the inside of his helmet. "The suit... we'll figure something out after that."

Lamu stared at him for a moment. Even if they'd been going on these missions for over a year together, she didn't know Bao-- Not really. He'd been friendly, but her overriding impression was that he cared about self-preservation first and foremost.

She glanced to the side. Gudrun, she noticed, was still breathing, but didn't seem to be conscious.

"Lamu?" He called out again, breathing heavily. "Come on, I need to--"

10:19 PM | Last Respite, Thyellikos | September 30th | 1608 COVENANT

"Hey," Gudrun called out to the bartender. "Get me another Chitrapahti's Remorse."

"Of course, ma'am," the Lluateci man replied lazily, reaching for a bottle of rum and taking out another apricot from the wooden bowl they were set in.

"And more syrup this time! Treat me like I'm a kid in a candy store. I wanna feel that shit on my goddamn teeth." She laughed to herself. "You want anything, Lamu?"

"I'm... good for now, I think," she said, with a small smile.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Come on! You can't keep on nursing that toffee whiskey forever," Gudrun chided her. "I swear, you keep on sipping, but that things looked like it's got about a third left in it for like a half hour, now."

"Eh," she said, swirling the fluid around. "I guess I'm just-- I'm not really feeling it."

Gudrun looked at her with a smirk that softened over the course of a few seconds, then sighed.

The two of them were in a bar at the edge of the world, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. The Thyellikos, the first plane the Ironworkers had constructed that wasn't an imitation of spherical Earth, was something of a turning point in their efforts - the last plane to fail as a habitable space, but the first where it happened for banal reasons rather than fundamentally broken physics.

It had been designed as a giant, hollow sphere with a small sun at its center and a habitable inner surface; a concept that had been explored for Earth's own star in the Imperial Era, but forsaken (in lieu of a comparatively modest ring structure reminiscent of the Diakos, if on a much grander scale) due to concerns of physical practicality. The ironworkers took another crack at it, but unfortunately it ended in much the same way that had always been feared-- The sphere eventually broke apart under the gravitational force, the pieces smashing into one another until they formed a discordant cloud.

In the old world this is where the story would have ended - a star circled by an orb of space junk, most succumbing to terminal orbit quickly on account of their size and shape, with the remainder eventually forming planets over the course of billions of years. But of course, the Ironworkers had only ever been able to imitate conventional gravity, and in this case that had been accomplished by defining the 'sun' as a sort of special object rather than trying to create a universal rule. So instead, the fragments tried to hold their position unnaturally, creating a catastrophic mess of unnatural friction as they pushed one another out of the way, got thrown out of position, then swung back around again like a dynamo.

The result was something like a colossal interstellar tempest; fire, lightning and ice raging around chunks of stray earth, eternally combining and breaking apart, all circling an inferno at the core. This was the root of the name 'Thyellikos', or storm world.

A lucky minority of chunks had, at the early stage when the cyclone was still forming, been pushed far enough away from their initial positions that they managed to attain stable 'orbits' far enough from the rest that they were safe from further collisions. And an extreme minority of these - a half-dozen, perhaps, if that - maintained the appropriate position and centrifugal momentum to be potentially habitable by humans.

On the largest of these, in a glass bubble of atmosphere, was the town of Last Respite, the frontier of human civilization in the Lower Planes. Originally a research outpost, it had grown over the course of the past century into a settlement of a little under 60,000 people. Scholars, False Iron salvagers, people who wanted to escape the world - but most of all, delvers and their suppliers. Unless you had the resources to hire a private arcanist capable of cross-planar travel, all expeditions to the Lavyrinthikos began here, at a gateway maintained by the Magonaut's Guild.

It was, in Lamu's opinion, among the worst places she'd ever lived: Simultaneously ugly, uncomfortable, and expensive. Especially the last one-- Forget the gateway, the Magonauts took a cut of luxury debt for all the stuff the settlement imported from the Upper Planes, which happened to be, well, everything. Even food and drink weren't free here; you had to buy a subscription to the grocer. Delvers especially were fleeced since they were known to be desperate, with something like a rifle or portable logic engine costing as much as an automatic carriage would on the Mimikos.

As for the rest, the buildings were simple things wrought of the same red-tinted igneous stone that comprised the rock they were built on, and there were few amenities but the bare essentials. The literally-named Drop-at-the-Rim, built at the dome's edge right before the ground sloped down into black oblivion, was one of the few exceptions. A researcher's bar, too upmarket for most delvers, it was actually relatively nice. The obsidian bar was lit by a mix of blue and yellow light, and the decor was mostly modernist Ysaran; rounded, metallic, and well-cushioned. There were papyrus decorations hanging from the ceiling that made it look like it'd recently hosted a party, but at this hour the place was largely empty. The logic bridge was playing Inotian slow pop.

It was Lamu's first time. She didn't dislike it.

The waiter finished pouring Gudrun's drink, placing the sugary red and orange concoction in front of her. She reached for it with her right hand, but missed, brushing against the glass and spilling a little on the counter.

"Ugh, this fucking thing," she said, pulling it back and slapping the palm with her other hand. "I bet that quack at the clinic screwed up the surgery somehow."

"You just need to give it time," Lamu reassured her. "Let your brain adjust to the new nerves."

The other woman just shook her head. "Nearly 30 years in the Conmi, and this is how I end up losing my cloning virginity. Sliced up by some freak who didn't even have a scepter, and managed to go native on a plane with nobody in it." She snorted. "Skin is still too damn soft, to boot. Does that get better?"

"Eventually," Lamu said, taking a very small sip of her drink. "So long as you use it enough."

Gudrun raised an eyebrow. "Had a part replaced before?"

"Just a few fingers," Lamu told her. "Got caught in a machine."

"Go figure." She sighed, looking down at her new hand and squeezing a fist. "Man. Feels like I'm feeling up a baby's butt." She shook her head, quickly grabbing the glass with her old one and and took a long drink.

Out of gear, Gudrun was surprisingly skinny and frail-looking for the impression she gave off, only 5'4 and without much in the way of muscle. Her face was even small for a Rhunbardi, with soft eyes and a wide nose that looked like it belonged on someone else's face. Her hair was the color of old bark, and she was always smiling.

This would probably be their last meeting, but it was only the third time that Lamu had seen her face. Normally, she liked to keep business and social affairs separate, and the group had been the no-questions-asked sort from the very start.

It wasn't that she was opposed to the idea, exactly. Even if the others sometimes rubbed her the wrong way, she would have liked to have spent more time together, regardless of if there was never any chance of it being much more than that. Despite everything - everything - that had gone amiss with her life, the idea of just sitting around with people and doing normal stuff retained the strange appeal it had developed over the course of the past century and change. A group of friends meeting to talk about their days. Make small talk. Maybe watch a drama.

But she didn't know how to encourage such a thing, especially among a group with so little in common. No matter how hard she tried, and what else she was capable of, her thoughts would not move at those angles. It was a shame.

Gudrun exhaled as she finished drinking, her face flushing, and thrust the glass quickly back down. "I hope I wasn't being too much of an asshole dragging you out here," she said.

"No, it's okay," Lamu said automatically, shaking her head. "It's... a nice change. And I haven't gone out drinking in-- In a long time."

"You don't have to tread around it," Gudrun said, shaking her head. "It's no big deal. Need to have the right kinda brain to mournebrate, I guess."

Lamu blinked, confused. "Mournebrate."

"Yeah," Gudrun affirmed. "Like. Mourn-celebrate, y'know?" She chuckled to herself.

"Oh." Lamu laughed awkwardly.

"Whenever it's a choice between feeling good or bad about something, I always choose to feel good, if it makes me look like an asshole," Gudrun went on. "That's my policy. Was Bao's, too, based on how he always used to talk about his last big score, where they lost their scout to another team."

"You mean, this is what he would have wanted?" Lamu asked. "Us to enjoy the payoff?"

"Pah! Didn't say that." She swirled her drink, looking down at it. "Knowing him, guy would probably be pissed we're not spending it all on a giant grave."

Lamu nodded, her lips curling downward slightly as her eyes wandered to the colorful drink bottles behind the bar.

After what had happened, she'd had some time to look through the artifices in the facility properly. She'd destroyed the ones related to Induction, but there was a surprising amount instead pertaining to the facility's secondary function of growing human bodies. She'd brought these back, and they'd manage to find a much higher buyer than she'd expected - apparently there were things about how the Ironworkers stabilized iron in the body that still weren't well-understood, and there was a lot of value in retracing their steps.

Split between both of them, it translated to a lot of luxury debt and even property shares. Enough to live off, even down here, for a couple good years.

But regardless of how Gudrun was taking it, it was difficult for her to feel much in the way of triumph.

"Plus, I wasn't talking about celebrating the money so much as celebrating you," she continued, tipping her glass towards Lamu. With the economy now so segregated, 'money' had crept back into parlance outside of the Freeholds and the Paritist nations when talking about luxury debt. "Without you pulling a move on that guy, I'd probably be in the stomach of one of those creepy-ass bug-faced giraffes by now. If I were you, I would have told me to get fucked instead of giving me my take."

"We all got there together. It was a team effort, like every other time," Lamu said quietly. "Besides, you and Bao did most of the work for me, bringing whatever barrier he had down. All I did was shoot him in the back while he was focused on you. Plus, if our signal hadn't been picked up by the Magonauts--"

"God, how did someone like you end up doing this?" Gudrun asked, shaking her head. "You'll never find another team if you're that fucking modest."

She glanced at her. "Maybe I just don't want you as an enemy."

Gudrun grinned. "I could believe that, at least." She looked at her curiously for a moment, tapping her fingers against the side of the counter. "You feel bad about the way it went down?"

"Do I..." Lamu hesitated for a moment before composing herself. "Well. Yeah. Obviously." She glanced downward, tightening the grip around her glass. "He was right behind Tarq when it happened, and we were talking. I could have warned him, if I'd been paying attention to my surroundings." She frowned slightly. "And Bao--"

"Don't blame yourself for what happened to that asshole," Gudrun cut her off. "Last thing I remember is that stupid stunt he tried to pull. Like, what the hell was he thinking, trying to start a brawl with that psycho? If he'd had sense, the first thing he would have done in the whole fight was call for the golem."

Lamu couldn't, or at least didn't, see the point in arguing with that. It would have been smarter to call for Ariadne, since he was the only one who could have given it commands. At the same time, he couldn't exactly be blamed for taking actions with the most immediate potential for ending the situation, considering said situation was one where they could all have been killed within seconds.

More to the point, his last ill-fated attack had obviously been more about saving Gudrun than anything. But she couldn't say that.

"I could have done more," Lamu opted to say instead.

"And so could I. And so could they, before they screwed up and got themselves killed." Gudrun retorted, and shrugged. "But nobody did! That's life for you. Sometimes nobody does the thing. Can't be fuckin' helped." She took another sharp drink.

"I suppose you're used to this sort of thing?" the other woman asked. "Since you were in the military?"

"Nah, I never used to screw up like this back then. Would've nailed that fucker while he was still in the air." She pointed at Lamu. "Only happened this time because I've gone soft."

"I... more meant people you worked with dying," Lamu replied flatly.

"Oh." She blinked, seeming confused for a moment, before recognition flashed in her eyes. "Oh yeah, for sure. 'Don't sign up if you're not prepared to go home in a bag,' all that crap."

Lamu nodded slowly. The possibility that Gudrun had secretly been some sort of government assassin was steadily rising in her mind.

"I guess I haven't really been thinking about how this must all feel on your end," Gudrun continued. "You said you worked in, what, logic engine design?"

"Mmhmm," Lamu hummed, taking another very small sip. Even if she didn't feel particularly like getting drunk around another person, she would have to order another pretty soon, just to avoid seeming strange. "Script writing. I didn't do hardware much."

"God, I couldn't come up with a more office-ass job if I tried," she said, amused. "I'm guessing you didn't see a lot of fatalities."

"Seriously, what did you even do to end up here? Slip a discord script into a mass-production echo maze? Sell government data to the Emps?" Emps as in 'Empyrean', as in Lluateci and Uana.

She frowned. "Gudrun--"

"I know, I know, I ain't being serious," she said, throwing her hands up. Her new arm went at a strange angle, bonking into one of the aforementioned papyrus decorations; a little frill in the shape of a flower. "I'm just saying, you're a fucking enigma by the standards of this place. Bao, Tarq... no disrespect, but I've met like ten of them down here, at least. The deserter, the old boss run off his turf, they're practically template. But you?" She scoffed. "You're awkward in such a normal person way. It's adorable, it makes me wanna punch you."

Lamu didn't know what to say to that, her face forming an uncomfortable half-smile. "I'm not..."

She trailed off, the bar falling silent for a moment.

"Ah, c'mon," Gudrun said, deflating. "Don't look at me like that. Now I feel like an asshole."

"I-It's okay," Lamu said. "Just. Don't punch me, please. I'm not very strong."

She'd meant the remark as a joke, but she must have got the intonation wrong, because Gudrun slumped down to the bar, resting her head against her arms. (That, or she was just drunk.) "Do you think it's screwed up of me? That I'm not that bothered about what happened to them?"

Lamu flattened her lips, hesitating for a moment, but then shook her head. "...no, I don't think so," she said. "If it doesn't bother you, it doesn't bother you. There's no point in beating yourself up because you don't feel a feeling."

Gudrun seemed to think on this for a moment, then rolled her shoulders. "I guess. Gotta live your truth, and all that other self-help horseshit."

That wasn't quite what Lamu had meant, but she didn't correct her.

"Well, if it'll help you feel better, let's do a toast." The other woman carefully lifted her glass, still lying against the bar. "To Tarq and Bao. One of you was kinda a pussy and the other one had some weird crush on me despite clearly being like three times my age, but you seemed like good guys in the grand scheme of things. You were pretty decent at your jobs compared to the useless fuckos on my last team. May you be living it up in heaven, or whatever. I guess his next incarnation for Bao. I don't know how that shit is supposed to work." She inclined her glass. "Cheers."

Lamu pressed her own glass into it, ignoring the racially-loaded remark. "Cheers," she said softly. She finished draining her toffee whiskey.

About a half-minute passed without either of them saying anything. Then, Gudrun let out a long groan that abruptly transitioned into an enthusiastic 'hup'. She pushed herself upright.

"Welp," she said, clapping her hands together. "I'm gonna take a piss."

And then she left, heading to the rear of the bar.

Once she was gone, Lamu let herself relax a little, all expression leaving her face. She looked down into her glass, in which only a sliver of ice remained, skirting the edge at her touch, riding the infinitesimal amount of pale brown fluid left at the bottom. Gudrun was, as always, crude, but here in safety with just the two of them, she found it wasn't bothering her as much. She found herself feeling a surprising amount of regret that they had never become friends.

Of course, that was eclipsed by guilt, regret. Though there was no saying for sure, Lamu didn't feel like she experienced these the same way that others did-- It was less an emotional matter and more an unsquared equation, a piece of illogic in her self-construction, that forced its way back into her frame of attention over and over like an angry itch. She had not honored the goals that she had decided were important, and it stung.

But there was nothing to be done. She had amassed so many itches they all blurred together into one throbbing mass, contracting her world. She was a cornered animal; as a trauma metaphor, but also in a literal sense where she was probably going to be arrested.

What would she do now? Despite the reward, this experience had definitely brought the briefly-theoretical risks of delving into sharp relief. Would it be better to go back to working support in Last Respite, or to head to the guild tomorrow and start looking for a new team?

Would Gudrun be looking for one, too? That was a thought, actually. Maybe they wouldn't be separated after all.

As she was ruminating on this idea, the waiter stepped away to the other side of the bar to serve a new customer, and she heard someone stand up from a table and approach from behind. At first she assumed this was just another person moving to order, but then they came very close, and stopped.

"Good evening, miss." A man's voice, suave and confident. "Might I have a moment?"

She didn't turn to look at him, and so didn't frown, but this was an irksome development. He was probably going to hit on her. She couldn't think of another reason to approach someone you didn't know in a bar at a whim.

"...sorry, I'm with someone," she said. "They've just stepped away for a second."

"Pardon me. I won't take up much of your time," he said annoyingly.

But then he said something else.

"You are Miss Lilith of Eshkalon, if I'm not mistaken?"

And the world stopped.