The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

I expect many of you will have been waiting for this chapter. As of the last one, the Greenfields have gotten their secrets out and pretty much accepted what they've all become.

Now, it's time to make it official. To properly seal their new lifestyle, to set the course for what kind of family they're going to be from now on.

And you can probably imagine what that is going to involve.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/45

“Batty,” He leans into her. “What are you saying to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how, I—I don’t know. But it can’t happen like this. I don’t want to be accountable. Not for this. If we are doomed, then let’s be doomed some other way. We have to find another way. We can’t let things turn like this for your people.” She’s on her feet now, silhouetted in front of the projector’s teal catastrophe. “We have to save them.”

Her tail lashes. He looks up into her fierce eyes. “Save them from what?”

“The Empire,” she says.

This time, her Impossible Hope of finding another way leads Sykora to dig deep.

”Save Earth from the Empire?” Grantyde wears a confused grin like it’s HAK plate. “We are the Empire. We’re saving Earth from itself. Aren’t we?”

“We’re dooming millions,” Sykora says. “You heard Hyax.”

“I did,” he says. “I was naive enough to imagine it’d be some other way, but the more I think about it, the more I understand how idiotic I was being. We were always going to break everything. All we can do is be there to clean it up afterwards. And I heard Vora, too. The number in the dark.”

He sighs. Sykora watches the lights turning off one by one behind her husband’s eyes, like a home being vacated.

“We can mitigate,” he says. “We can make it worth it. That’s what I’m holding onto.”

“No.” Sykora’s stomach is on the floor. “No, Grantyde, you—this isn’t what’s in your heart. I know it’s not.”

“What’s in my heart.” He laughs softly. “That’s so interesting, that Maekyonites and Taiikari both put stuff in there, when it’s just… stuff. Blood.” He crouches. “I’ll be okay, Batty. Not for a while, maybe. But we’ll—”

“We won’t,” Sykora insists. “Grantyde, I can’t do this. We can’t. Not without mangling ourselves beyond recognition.”

He chuckles ruefully. “So what, we cancel the invasion?” His eyes narrow at the defiant fold of Sykora’s arms, then widen. “We—Batty, are you serious?”

Sykora nods.

“We can’t,” he says.

“There’s precedent.”

“No, I mean—it—they’ll fucking kill us.” He seems to catch up with what she’s saying. “There’s precedent?”

“The Mandate,” Sykora says.

Her pause for effect is ineffectual...

Her pause for effect is ineffectual on her husband, who tilts his head in confusion. Of course he would—when would he have heard of the Mandate systems? This guilty chapter in the Taiikari history books is rarely flipped to.

“Before we’d developed the ZKZs, when Taiikari conquest wasn’t a simple game of waiting and warheads, the most dangerous annexations cost millions of warriors,” she explains. “There were territories we judged too dangerous to conquer. When the Empire concluded that a war for annexation would be unacceptably deadly for its citizens. These aliens were permitted stewardship over their own local systems, though any who meant to travel beyond their own star had to become Imperial citizens first.”

“So a truce, basically?”

“A treaty,” she says. “They remained sovereign over themselves and their system, and left the firmament to us, and joined when they were ready. But it was their call.”

“What happened to them when the ZKZs came along?”

“By then, the Mandate systems had been almost entirely absorbed,” Sykora says. “They’d been given a choice, and they ran the numbers and took it.”

“And now that’s all gone away.”

“Of course it has. Resistance to the Empire is no longer a question. There hasn’t been a single Mandate issued in kilos and kilos. How could there be, when no world can resist us? And even when it was an option, it was saved for planets which had a hope of damaging us. Doing it to Maekyon, to a world that’s barely discovered the sweep, would be far beyond any Mandate in Taiikari history.”

“So it’s unthinkable.”

“It is,” Sykora says. “But I’m thinking it.”

She hops onto the table and stands defiantly within the wireframe of Maekyon.

“If the Empress insists that the Maekyonites are already her subjects, then they are as under her protection as anyone,” she says. “We must judge their losses with the same scrutiny we’d use to judge the loss of Taiikari lives. And by this metric I judge the contest too destructive. And I must offer the Mandate to Maekyon.”

He gawks. He’s reacting to this heresy with such sense. Like a Taiikari would, she thinks, and tries to keep the despair from showing. “How?” he asks.

“I’m a Princess Margrave,” she insists. “We do it by me doing it, and damn the consequences.”

“We can’t just damn the consequences. They’ll—”

“They’ll circle me and snap at me,” she says. “They’ll rip me apart, if they can, I’m sure. The Mandates were the nearest the Empire ever came to surrender. Offering one to Maekyon? They’d think me mad. And God help me, I may be. I must be. But I don’t care. I survived for a decacycle of deprivation at the hands of your species and returned and claimed my throne again. I am the first Princess Margrave of the void sectors. The first wife to a free husband, the first mother to children of Maekyonite and Taiikari blood. I am Sykora of the Black Pike. I am not afraid of them.”

“The Peerage isn’t what scares me. The Empress.”

“The Empress?” She laughs, to hide the anxiety. “The Empress likes me.”

“She’s testing you. All the time, she’s testing. It’s the game, isn’t it? The one that determines the successor. If you don’t—if this doesn’t happen, if we do this, you’re out, surely. I think you’re out of the running.”

“So what?” she demands, and when he can furnish no response but an agog stare she presses on: “So what if I’m not Empress? So what if I lose this silly little competition?”

“Sykora.” Grantyde stands to get face-to-face with her. He’s wearing his anticomps, still. He hasn’t stopped wearing them, even after the reveal. She doesn’t understand why. She loves his eyes. “What happens once she dies? This Empire. It’s… if whoever is next isn’t like her, doesn’t think like she does, like you do, it’s a fucking nightmare. A nightmare within our lifetimes. That our children endure for centuries.”

“Grantyde, I haven’t told this to you because—” She steels herself to banish that juvenile teeter from her voice. She is a Princess Margrave. “Because I feared that when I did it would break your heart. You have such faith in me. Such ambition. But I am incapable of being Empress. I cannot do it.”

“You’re not incapable,” he says. “You’re the greatest Princess I know. You’d be incredible. There’s so many things we thought we couldn’t do, and we’ve done them.”

“We have. And it’s been so wonderful. I’ve had so many dreams for myself that I’ve put aside into this unlit place of the unthinkable, and you’ve found them and brought into the light. But this has never been one of them. Never ever.” Her compressing insides allow her a tight laugh. “My lovely man. Have you ever once heard me desire it? I don’t want to be the Empress. I’ve never wanted to be Empress.”

“If it’s a question of Taiikari loyalty—”

“It is,” she says. “But not in the way you mean, I don’t think. The Empress must be loyal to the Empire above all things. The Empress must place the Empire in front of everything. Everything. And I can’t do it.”

She extends her hand. Obediently he steps forward, and she nests her touch along his jaw.

“You or the Pike? If I had to choose. Do you remember?”

He nods.

“That was the hardest question of my life,” she says. “And I thank every God in the grand vault of the firmament that I didn’t have to answer it. But this? You or the Imperial seat? This isn’t hard at all, dove.”

She smiles, though her stomach is turning itself upside down over finally saying the words that she’s kept inside so long.

“I need my people. I need my Pike. I need to rule my sector and run my voidship and pop out a Staff Clash team’s worth of Maekyonite-blooded babies. That wasteland we saw in the Empress’s daemon, that misery, that lack of love. I can’t live that. Yours and Vora’s and Waian’s and Hyax’s and the children—my God, the children, I can feel it from them already. They can’t even say my name and there’s so much love. I wouldn’t trade it for a hundred Empires. I’ve become such a creature of love. I swim in it. If I’m taken out, I’ll die. I will never be Empress. If it was offered, I would turn it down, and if it was forced upon me I would seek escape with the same desperation I fled from my last prison.”

Her hand shivers. Her palm is damp with sweat.

“I will not allow you to change into whatever was required to conquer Maekyon,” she says. “I will not allow Grant Hyde to disappear in that way. I will not lose you. I will take the Mandate as my starting line, and I will find another path. I will burn all my capital with the Empress. I will convince her again, just as I have before, of the exceptionalism Maekyon presents. And if the Empress will not allow it—”

Then what, Sykora of the Black Pike? What will you do? What can you do? Can you even imagine?

Grantyde abrogates whatever dark conclusion she might have reached by sweeping her off her feet and into his arms.

“I’m sorry.” He lays kiss after scratchy kiss on her face. “I’m sorry, Batty. I never—I won’t disappear. I didn’t know. I’m so goddamn sorry.”

“Grant, no.” But her throat is leaping, giddy at the crumpling-up and throwing-away of the careful Taiikari norm. “Grant, you can’t say that—”

“Whatever,” he grunts, and boosts her higher, kissing her neck, her chest. “In English, then. I’m sorry. I love you.”

He takes hold of the sheer leggings she’s wearing under her uniform, nails digging into the thin fabric at the tail hole; she yelps with the crackling sound as he shreds them open. The chilly air stings the exposed skin of her rear momentarily before his giant, warm hands clamp tightly on her and squeeze. His palms were as covered in nervous sweat as hers; but the shaking’s stopped.

He slides her gasping onto the table and it’s all she can do to unclasp her uniform before her brute of a husband rips that from her, too. He kisses her exposed stomach, the tightening peaks of her breasts, her trembling lips. She fumbles with the catch of his belt. She tugs insistently on his anticomps and he gets the message, helps her tear them from his face. His big beautiful brown eyes shine with tears.

“Thank you,” he whispers into her ear, which quirks straight at the shivery sensation his dusty voice sends down her spine. “You pulled me back. I’m back. Thank you so fucking much.”

“Grant,” she pants. “Grant, wait—wait, we can’t do it here—”

His hands were journeying south from her ass, ready to flip her thighs up into their favorite place. They freeze.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Not really.”

He laughs and raises her hips until the small of her back is in the air and her tail is dangling.

From there, it goes the same sort of place as TGF, albeit behind spoiler tags in the RR edition.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...sible-hope
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2526304/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

“Here’s what I don’t get about pirates.” Annalise prodded at her scar. “You’re a man of justice, Sunshine. No tears shed on the scaffold.”

“Sure.”

“But everyone goes away with the fairies when it’s pirates,” she said. “Even you.”

“To a point,” Tiago said. “I still would’ve killed him. Just let him do a monologue or two first.”

“We did,” Seth said.

“Piracy is a fanciful crime,” Ofelia mused. “Sky piracy doubly so. You say murder or assault, and your listener rightly frowns. But say piracy and you put stars in eyes. Who among us can’t relate to the urge to light out with a crew of vagabonds, quomodocunquizing across the United Territories in a baldrick and a ruffled shirt?”

“That’s not a word,” Tiago said.

“Shirt?”

“The quo- thing.”

“That’s absolutely a word,” Ofelia said. “When one hears of a pirate, one imagines living the life of the perpetrator, and not the victim. But the latter outnumber the former, always. And you die just the same at the hands of a rakish avatar of freedom as you do in the maw of a seraph. It’s the sense of belonging, I suppose. To an iconoclastic community.”

Belonging.

“Belonging.” Seth picked a blade of grass into pieces as he thought. “What if it’s belonging?”

Tiago lifted a brow. “What if what’s belonging?”

“When I used my Darkness up there,” Seth said. “One of them saw me and I… I told him he didn’t, I guess? Or that I was just minding my own business. And what you told me. About how a Darkness works. It’s what you long for. And I thought: what if my Darkness ends up being, I dunno. Summoning an image of Annalise’s butt.”

Tiago scoffed. Annalise tried to turn her laugh into some kind of irritated exhalation, but he’d gotten her with that one.

“And then after today, I thought, what if it’s tweaking the noses of the powerful? Or being a perfect liar? But that’s not what that was, I don’t think. It didn’t feel like I was lying, it felt like… like I was making it true.” He let the torn-up grass sprinkle to the ground. “I guess—if I really thought about it—I’ve always wanted to feel like I belong. To exist someplace, without being told to clear out or explain myself or whatever. To be accepted, I guess. Does that make any sense at all? Would it be ridiculous if my Darkness is belonging somewhere super-hard? Hard enough to fool people?”

Annalise stared at him in astonished silence.

Tiago cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. That’d make some sense, I guess.”

“I hope you don’t take this as emasculating,” Ofelia said. “But that’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard.”

“We’ll need to verify that,” Tiago said. “We’ll work out some testing. And maybe build up your endurance. First time always knocks you on your ass, but you’ll get used to it.”

“Aye, well.” Annalise started as though shook awake, and clambered off the circle cloth. “That’s for later. Need you and your sister to head down the hill to ol’ Sheepfuck. Someone has to go tell the Corregidor—the Karla, whatever—we found our man and more besides.”

“What about the stormship?” Tiago asked, helping his mother to fold the magic circle lengthwise.

“Ship’ll keep.” Annalise ruffled her son’s hair. “Don’t you worry, Sunshine. I won’t sink it without ya.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...7-darkness
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2531287/

[Mamorien]

More Headless Over Heels.

The scaffold creaked under the heavy stride of the Verdugo as her shadow fell across the kneeling woman. “Do you love your people, Jesska il Maksdotir?”

The waxen-faced sacrifice blinked away her sweat. “I do.”

“Do you repent your crimes against them?”

“I do.”

“Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?”

“I do.”

Annalise whistled toward Jesska’s blind spot. “Ho, there, Tiago. Pass me the sword.”

Jesska turned her head in confusion to Tiago where he stood gauntly to one side—didn’t the woman behind her already have her black blade ready?—and Annalise struck.

The village of Tondarre reacted with a healthy ohh! Only a couple of screams, no whooping or clapping. Seth, observing from the carriage’s threshold at the rear of the crowd, was developing a theory that you could tell how the year had been in a village by the sound their assembly made when the head went flying.

“Why does she do that?” he asked the placid girl at his side as she flipped the hasped broach of her traveler’s cloak open and shut. “The fake-out?”

“It positions them right,” Ofelia said. “If they stay put, they hunch sometimes, or dart, or the muscle is tense with the anticipation of the blade. The al Ydrises don’t swing twice.”

“What does she whisper to them? The reluctant ones?”

“I’m not sure,” Ofelia said. “Mother’s actually never executed me, if you can believe it.”

“It does beggar belief.”

“Thank you, Jesska.” Annalise passed a palm over the corpse’s gray eyes and shut them forever. She pulled a rag from her belt pouch and wiped the wide span of her steel. “With that, folks, we’re done. On behalf of the Legion and the Sorcerer General, I thank you all for your loyalty, and wish you as warm and safe a winter as Ms. Maksdotir’s sacrifice has earned you. We’ll see you next year.”

Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!

The sword hissed back into its scabbard. The prisoners who had earned a punishment gentler than its mercy were corralled from the scaffold. Annalise waved aside a hermandati gauntlet on offer to ease her passage to the ground, and hopped down instead, her boots splashing into the mud.

Corregidor Tannon valiantly attempted warmth from as far as one could reasonably excuse. “Madam Verdugo. It’s such a privilege to finally make your acquaintance.” The guy had a pair of long gloves on and a scarf cinched up past his chin, which he took every second breath from. The proper Corregidor maneuver was to invite the new Verdugo to stay in the manor. Tannon’s training did pitched battle with his terror of catching the soul-sickness from this huge unlit woman. “I would love to. Er. Well, that is to say, it would be such an honor to invite you and your retinue to stay, in, in whichever, uh—we, we understand Ms. il Maksdotir lived alone, and perhaps—”

“It’s been grand to meet you, Corregidor.” With a merciful smile and a wave, Annalise released Tannon from the metaphorical meathook he dangled from. “Truly it has. But if it’s all the same to you, we’ve got to be on the hoof again. It’s a chock-a-block schedule. So unless there’s any pressing business—”

“Of course, Madam Verdugo!” Tannon was so loud and abrupt it brought a startled flush to his own face. “Of course. Wouldn’t dream of keeping you. Yes. Uh, be well.”

Annalise mirrored his relief as she departed Tondarre’s emptying plaza, Tiago in tow. Seth moved aside; she caught his hand and tugged him with her into the carriage. “Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered urgently. Ofelia scurried in after them. The spring steel of the carriage’s black-lacquer driver box squeaked beneath Tiago’s hasty clamber to the reins.

Ofelia banged her palm on the front-facing window’s diamond lattice. “Go, go!”

Tiago cracked the reins; Draco and Draka huffed into motion. Demetrius, tethered into their train, knickered with annoyed confusion at the haste.

“Not yet. Not yet, dammit. They might hear us.” Annalise indicated a scaffwood tree split along its midpoint like a tuning fork. “Once we’re past that.”

The carriage trundled past the tree. Tiago stood on his seat and proclaimed it in his praise the Verdugo voice: “Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!”

Annalise seized Seth and showered the side of his face with kisses; Tiago banged his fist on the roof; even Ofelia couldn’t help but bounce in her seat and punch the air.

“Thank you, Jesska, for number fifty,” Annalise cried, “Thank you, Plainlands, and smell you later! Thank you, Draco and Draka and Demetrius and whatever Seth is naming his! And thank you, Sunshine and Feeli and Seth il fucking Gutierre because we did it!”

They cheered, and broke out the red wine and the nice cups that were wrapped in newsprint and stuck inside a munition breastplate for safe-keeping, and Seth was exactly where he belonged.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...lers-haven
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2532866/

[Mamorien]

And now on Headless Over Heels, a musical interlude.

Out in the brightly lit center of the taphouse they’d cleared the crockery from a banquet table, and a pair of musicians—a mitegrinder and a fiddler—were taking requests. “Don’t be shy, now!” The mitegrinder snapped shut the trap on his boxy instrument’s toggle and its low drone began. “For a solitar we’ll play what you please. For a brace we’ll play it sober.”

“Hey!” Seth whistled and waved a score coin. “Do The Verdugo and the Maiden!”

“Where’d you get that—” Annalise patted her pocket. “Oh, you blighter.”

“C’mon,” Seth said. “This is your profession’s anthem. Don’t tell me you don’t love it.”

Annalise snatched her purse back from him with a dry laugh. “I dunno if I’ve heard it, pet.”

The musicians were looking askance at the clutch of unlit. “Begging your pardon, master.” The fiddler’s swallow bobbed his instrument where it lay at his neck. “Perhaps it’s not a song for a mixed crowd.”

“She loves it. Don’t worry about it.” Seth added a second score to his palm. “C’mon now. You gonna catch these?”

Annalise scoffed. “How the feck d’you keep robbing me.”

“You need to pay me more regularly.”

“He’s got the Forked Tongue on his back,” Ofelia called to the dithering players. “He’ll join in.”

“C’mon then, goodman,” the fiddler cried. “And bring your braces.”

Seth balked. “Oh, hold on now. It’s, uh—it’s not active.”

“Yes it is.” Ofelia gave him a kick forward from their booth. “Get up on that table, Mr. il Gutierre. That’s an order.”

“You don’t give me orders.”

“I do,” Annalise said. “And I’m apparently paying good money for this. Get up there, Seth.”

Seth scrambled onto the table as the music rose, and with his new colleagues, he sang.

The Verdugo with his thirsty sword came riding on his bay...

The Verdugo with his thirsty sword came riding on his bay

Sing who’s the one whose pretty head I’ll have for me today

He startled himself with the sound of his own voice. The Forked Tongue hadn’t applied much to his conversation; maybe a bit more bass to his brogue, but nothing more. He’d been vaguely disappointed. Now, though, singing, he felt it. Felt all the imperfections stripped away as if by an acidic bright dip bath. Annalise beamed.

And up the scaffwood he did climb, and whistling all the way

The Legion calls and one must fall whose head I’ll take today

A head, a head, a pretty head! A head for me today!

Seth had never been particularly afraid to sing, especially once you got some corn whiskey in him. But he wasn’t a singer. Not a one you’d beg to hear, or toss braces at his feet. And yet here they were. Clattering by the toes of his boots. He laughed aloud at the joy of it. He was soaring like a songbird over the hairy-headed revelry. He was good.

Forward came a maiden fair with dainty doily dread

O Verdugo all in black, O mercy lord, she said

My father stole a stallion, yet I’d weep to see him dead

So spare the man your thirsty sword and take my maiden head

O take, and take, and take again! And take my maiden head!

There were four more verses, each more obvious than the last. By the finale Seth had been outfitted with not one but two straw hats.

And okay: when the reels and dances began, the first girl who offered her arm blanched with sudden remembrance and snatched it back before it could graze unlit skin. But Seth already knew who he wanted to dance with, and she never hesitated to touch him.

“Was it worth your scores, Madam Verdugo?” he asked, as she twirled him off the table.

“It was a bleeding slag,” she said. “But I love how you sang it.”

Her utter fearlessness of the world’s attention, when she kissed him, screamed in the face of his thief training. A life spent in the shadows, now dragged into the light and kissed by a gorgeous, indulgent giant. It would take practice to get used to this.

Wet, wonderful practice, he reflected, as Annalise led him back toward the table from whence they’d come.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...the-maiden
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2536840/

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

With the Greenfields having officially accepted their new lifestyle, now we see them branching out to their nearest and dearest outside the immediate family. Over the course of a week, it's time to see how they incorporate everyone who's been a part of their transition become a part of what they have become.

It looks like all is working out for the best...

...or are there still some threats lurking in the corners?

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/46

Princess of the Void.

Master Sergeant Ajax is in his cabin, sitting in front of his and Meena’s portable terminal. The flotilla drama they were watching last night is still on screen, paused where he fell asleep—Meena paused it on a frozen image of a weeping woman, her horns half-cocked, a pistol in her hand.

He blinks. He doesn’t remember how he got here.

His anticomps are raised to his forehead. In his lap is one of his wife’s stuffed animals, an adorably bug-eyed throok with orange felt skin, with a big patch that’s turned pale and threadbare on its middle left leg. Ronax really loves chewing that bit, and to Ajax’s pleased surprise, Meena just giggles when he does and doesn’t flash the boy to stop.

In his hand is a datawafer. WATCH ME is written on it in thick-lined memorandum ink.

All right, Meen.

Is this some kind of romantic gesture from his wife? “All right, Meen,” he murmurs, and slides the wafer into the terminal’s bank, anticipating something adorably pornographic.

The Prince of the Pike’s face fills the screen. Ajax nearly jumps out of his skin.

The screen tilts and the massive Maekyonite backs away, seemingly satisfied with the camera he’s just set up. Behind him is a view of his cabin. Her Majesty and their children are missing. There’s nobody inside but Grantyde.

And—as the cabin door slides open—Ajax. He watches himself on the recorded video step into the room and salute. “Majesty.”

He has no memory of this.

Grantyde indicates an ornate gulwood seat. “Have a seat, Master Sergeant.”

Video Ajax sits stiffly in the chair. It’s worth as much as the HAK armor he’s wearing.

Grantyde sits across from him and points at the camera. “I’d like your permission to record you, Ajax.”

“You’re always recording me,” Ajax says.

“Yeah, but this recording is special. This one, nobody but you will see. So if you’re watching this in the future I need to order you to do it alone. Just in case.” Grantyde waves at the camera. “Pardon the trouble, Meen, but please leave the room.”

Ajax looks over his shoulder. He’s alone in the cabin except for Karinax, who’s in his crib sleeping. He presumes Grantyde would make an exception. He turns back to the screen, where his digital doppelganger is sitting in attentive, impersonal silence, Grantyde’s reflection in his visor.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Grantyde says. “About a lot of things. Recently, I mean. I’ve been thinking about the ways I’ve changed, and how I’ll have to keep changing, and sometimes about the ways I don’t think I’d like to change at all, actually. I’ve been rushing. That’s understandable, you might say, in my position.”

Ajax doesn’t say that—he says nothing at all, in fact.

“But if I think about it,” Grantyde says. “If I look back at my first days on the Pike, more than any promise that was made to me or exception established in my name, it was you who changed me first. You made me realize I could live here, Ajax.”

He pauses, then, in invitation for Ajax to speak. Ajax doesn’t. Modern Ajax congratulates himself for how formally he’s following procedure on the recording.

“You’re my friend,” Grantyde says. “Maybe my best friend, if wives don’t count. And it took me decacycles to get there, to have someone I could count as much a friend as a subject in the way I counted you, and I need it back. Whenever I picture my kids’ childhood it’s them being best friends with yours. And I think at one point, you pictured the same.”

Another pause. This time, Recording-Ajax fills the silence with a brief “Majesty.”

“I thought I was being responsible trying to keep my distance.” Grantyde threads his fingers behind his head and sits back. “But, well—like I said. I’ve been thinking. And I think I’m done trying. So it’s either me order you to be my friend again—that’s a joke—or this.”

The watching Ajax feels his shoulders load with tension. The recording Ajax stiffens, too. “What is this, Majesty?”

“This is me explaining myself,” Grantyde says. “This is the truth you deserve about what happened the day I was compelled, even though it’s—”

The screen flickers. The timestamp in the corner jumps ahead by five minutes. Ajax watches the skip in time knock him into a forward lean, hands clasped tightly. His helmet is off, now, by his feet on the floor, a look of muted shock on his own face.

“—et it now?” Grantyde asks. “Why I had to do what I did, and play along with it and keep this from you?”

Video Ajax stares down at his hands. “Hellfire,” he mutters.

Grantyde laughs drily. “Imagine how I felt.”

Whatever this video skipped so thoroughly dumbfounded Ajax that all he can respond with is another “Hellfire. Fuckin’ hellfire.” He snaps partially out of it. “How long has—”

The video jumps.

“Now I’m giving you the choice,” Grantyde is sitting back down and handing Ajax a glass of water. “I will let you hold this thing, with the knowledge that it’s a monstrous breach of secrecy and—”

A digital click accompanies another jump.

“But I’m guessing that’s causing you some distress.”

“Yes. Yeah.” Onscreen Ajax takes a sip of water. His legs are hooked beneath his seat, tail wrapped round its base, like the grav’s been shut off and he’s holding himself to the floor. “I mean—I can handle it.”

“I know you can,” Grantyde says. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

“But wait.” Ajax looks up. “ If you—”

The tape skips forward again, another minute.

“—top talking about it in concrete terms at this point, please,” Grantyde says. “I’m gonna need to edit this myself, and I barely know how.”

“Couldn’t the Chief Engineer? Unless… nobody knows you’re doing this, do they?”

Grantyde shakes his big shaggy head. “Just you, Jax. Though I might tell Kora if you decide to keep this in your brain.”

“As opposed to…” The light goes on for video Ajax at the same time as it does for the guy watching it back. “You’re gonna compel me.”

“That’s your other option,” Grantyde says. “Meena’s waiting outside. I can get her in here right now and ask her to remove your memory of what we talked about here. Then I’ll give you this recording, with the sensitive shit cut out of it. And you can watch it, and know that I trusted you enough to tell you. That I trust you with my life, and the life of my family, and the Pike. And that I’m sorry for what happened and the cycles of distance it’s made, and I need my friend back. So if you can be satisfied by this shadow of the truth, we can flash the rest away. But if you need an explanation, you have it now. And I’ll let it stay in your head.”

Video Ajax is statue-still.

“Jax?” Grantyde prompts.

“I’m thinking.”

“Take your time. Do you have any more quest—”

Another jump. They’re both on their feet now, shaking hands.

“—ver again,” Grantyde says. That’s a promise.”

Ajax watches himself shift his grip on the handshake and pull the Prince of the Black Pike into a hug. What the fuck are you thinking, he wants to ask himself, but Grantyde smiles and thumps him on the back.

“Thank you, Majesty,” video Ajax says. “Thank you, I—it’s been such a fucking hole in my head. It shouldn’t have been. I’m not… I didn’t deserve—”

“Yes, you did,” Grant says. “I love you, man.”

“I love you too,” Ajax says—shouts? The audio just boomed so hard that it clipped at the edge. “Edit that shit out.”

Grantyde laughs. “No way. I’m turning it way up. And putting it two more ti—”

“I love you too. I love you too.”

“—mes right here.”

Ajax points toward himself in the future. “This is where you’re recording from?”

“Yep.”

The camera shifts as the Ajax of the past picks it up. “Master Sergeant,” he says, sternly. “I’m electing to remove the memory of the explanation His Majesty gave us. But I am stating directly to you, in the future, that it satisfied me. And if you’re watching this and you insist on maintaining your distance, stop being a dumb asshole.”

“And let me know when you’ve watched this,” Grantyde’s voice from over Ajax’s armored shoulder. “Please.”

“Sure.” The camera jolts around. “Catch.”

“Wait Jax wait that’s expens—”

The video feed ends.

Without meaning to, Ajax has been crushing the hell out of his wife’s stuffy. He tosses it back onto their comfy little nest with the rest as he stands.

He puts his anticomps back on and exits the cabin.

Where are you going? he inquires of his feet. They’re pointing him toward the sleek pillars of the lifts, where they rise like a needle from the center of the hab ring. Towards the command deck, and the Prince he thought he knew, and then thought he didn’t.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...7-watch-me
WHILE I WASN'T LOOKING: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2552101/

[Mamorien]

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I get to update you on two several Headless Over Heels chapters!

After the bit I excerpted from Thursday's chapter, the al Ydrises got the United Territories version of a telegram, which prompted precision F-strikes from Annalise, Tiago, Ofelia and Seth in order:

Skywire Bulletin — Highest Priority — All Legion Agents Exark & Superior

Seraph breach reported upon Central Plainland Corridor route. Traced inbound to Shaheill, to reach on 6th Drozt at 2100.

The seraph Enna-Belum has breached the deathspell. Blackfeather, est 20 tons, moderately wounded on front right appendage. Containment efforts have failed. Immediate interdiction requested.

May the 100 Saints preserve you.

Since it's a seraph-hunt, Annalise switched to her seraph-hunting head, Anna, who is now getting a tour of the local perimeter from (and inflicting her bottomless reservoirs of patience and tact on) Simon il Teremi, acting interim undersecretary to Shaheill's "indisposed" corregidor, while Seth and the twins liaise with the professed Chief Hermandat, Simon's probably-niece-or-something Riccana.

Seth detached from the shadows and joined the twins. Riccana cast a look across the three unlit. “So you’re the Verdugo’s retinue?”

“And her children, yes,” Ofelia said. “And Seth’s her Seth.”

“She doesn’t have to worry about me.” Riccana tucked her helmet under her arm and unbound the messy bun beneath it. “I’m older than I look.”

“We know the feeling,” Ofelia said.

“I suppose you do.” Riccana inclined her head; her ginger hair cascaded in unruly ringlets. “Pardon me, sirs. Here I am talking like you might not all be twice my age.”

“We’re not,” Tiago said, at the same time as Ofelia said “We’re forty.”

“We’re not,” Tiago repeated.

Riccana had a pretty smile, even if (and this was new information to him) she was much younger than Seth’s preference.

“Pardon our Verdugo’s snippiness,” he said. “It was a long ride and she’s not in her right head.”

Ofelia released a humored hm. Riccana shook her hair out and pinned it up again, tighter this time. “I can imagine.”

“Do you have any idea why the blackfeather is coming for Shaheill?” Tiago asked. “If we know what it’s here for, we might be able to outthink it. They’re not exactly brilliant tacticians.”

“I don’t suppose you need to be, when you’re twenty tons,” Riccana said. “As far as what makes Shaheill special, it’s only a few streets over, sir, if it please you to see.”

Tiago tilted his head. “Lead on, Chief Hermandat.”

Here we are. The treasure of Shaheill.

“To be honest, everything is a few streets over when you’re in a place like Shaheill,” Riccana said, as they walked its wide, tidy streets. “We’re not exactly a destination.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Tiago said. “If you’re worth attacking, you’re worth defending.”

“I didn’t mean to put the place down. Lived here all my life, after all.” A stray strand of ginger hair slipped Riccana’s bun and into her heart-shaped face. She tsked and pinned it back up, and Seth was even more convinced that all my life could hardly be more than a pair of decades, if that. How’d a stripling end up the Chief Hermandat? “And we have this to our name.” She came to a wooden fence painted the same cheerful orange as her hair, pushed it open, and saluted. “Here we are. The treasure of Shaheill.”

Seth cast a curious look around the field into which they walked. The furrows in the ground were dotted not with crops or hedgerows but with domes of terracotta clay, each as tall as a man. “You’re growing clay?”

“Press your ear to it.” Riccana tilted her head against the closest clay structure. “Like this.”

Tiago mirrored her motion. His brows knitted. “What in the Saints’ name is that?”

Seth laid his cheek on the coarse clay. Within the dome something was clicking and popping. It almost sounded like a Prossimo popmite silo.

Riccana grinned. “That, milord, is rhubarb. The forced rhubarb of Shaheill. The Teremis have been growing it for decades. It comes up in the pitched dark, pushing out all pale from the ground an inch a day. Fast enough you can hear it.”

“You’re shitting me,” Tiago said.

“No, no, I’ve actually heard of this.” Seth listened harder. Another echoing pop. “Didn’t put the name to the thing until she mentioned it, but I knew a chef who swore by it. Sweet and tender. I always wondered how it’d be to cook with it.”

“Best rhubarb in the Plainlands,” Riccana said, with evident pride. “We grow all through the frost and harvest it by candlelight. It never sees the sun 'til it's on your fancy city plates.”

“You have time to work on the farm while you’re Chief Hermandatting?” Ofelia asked.

Riccana’s smile wilted. “Well—it’s a quiet town, usually. As I said.”

“Ignore my sister,” Tiago said. “She noses in. Gets it from Mother. You go on ahead and get your people to the muster hall. We’ll catch up.”

Ricanna saluted. “Sir.” She turned on her heel with perhaps a touch too much military formalism and set off through Shaheill’s mitelit streets, following the whispering, jostling flow of its citizenry.

“She’s rather cute, isn’t she?” Ofelia’s elbow prodded her brother. “And she called you sir, Tiago.”

“I am making it a gleaming-sharp point not to get attached to any of these people,” Tiago said. “A blackfeather. Here to murder everyone for what, rhubarb. Fuck my life.”

“It’s very special rhubarb,” Ofelia said. “Unlit, you might say.”

“You might.” Tiago frowned at the palisade that surrounded the town. Atop its wooden walkways, torches were lighting a circle of flickering fulmination around Shaheill. Like a ritual circle. “I’d hoped we might understand something about what’s coming. Some way to be cheeky. As though there was any reason for a blackfeather to come to a village other than to raze it to the ground.”

“So why?” Seth asked. “Why Shaheill?”

“We can wonder once we’re on the other side of this,” Tiago said. “If we survive it.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...f-shaheill
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2544540/

Today, before they get to the matter of How We Kill It, there's a question of seniority to discuss.

“She’s rather short, for a CH,” Ofelia said.

“This thing’s the size of a townhouse,” Tiago said. “We’re all short.” He crossed past his sister, back to the muster yard’s concrete ring as its nervous irregulars filled it with supplies.

Seth and Ofelia followed him past precarious racks of two-story anchorpikes, a patchwork pile of surplus platemail, a hodgepodge of edged weaponry, and a heavy barrel with a splash of angry orange paint on its lid. This last item Tiago opened, and frowned into. “Is this all the powder we’ve got?

A blond hermandat, his armor close-fitted and meticulously polished, saluted beside the stock. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you have a powder cannon?” Ofelia asked.

The man’s shine dimmed. “We have rifles.”

“That’ll tickle it, anyway,” Ofelia said.

Tiago lifted a pane of polished onyx from the supply pile, its octagonal edge bordered in riveted steel. “And just this one animaxis?”

“Yes, sir,” the hermandat said. “Sorry, sir.”

Tiago returned it to its crooked place on the stack. “No, no, just… try not to go unlit, I suppose. We can only catch one soul.”

Sir, may I speak of something indelicate?

The shiny hermandat ahem’d. “Sir, may I speak of something indelicate?”

“It’s an indelicate night.”

“That woman is not the Chief Hermandat, sir. Our Chief vacated the village along with the Corregidor when the skywire came in. Riccana wasn’t next in line, either. She’s—”

“She’s what?” Tiago’s eyes narrowed. “What are you telling me this for? Who was next in line?”

“I was, sir. I’m the—”

“Why did you not speak up sooner?”

“I—well, I—she was insubordinate, and I was waiting for an officer to—”

“What order was she insubordinate to, little man?” Tiago’s glare was as black as a seraph cavern. “What did you tell these people to do, that she could overrule you in their heads? We’re all a day away from saving the entire territory or dying the worst possible way anyone can fucking die, and you think I’m about to lock up the only woman with the balls to do something about it?”

“I—forgive me. I thought you should be made aware.”

“It’s time for you to fuck off,” Tiago said.

“Sir—”

“Fuck off,” Tiago repeated. “Back to your post, or you can desert with your chickenshit CH.”

The tin soldier clanked fretfully back into line. Seth took up his former position at Tiago’s ear. “What are we thinking?”

“We’re thinking that skywire better catch wide and drag more bodies in.” Tiago scratched the wispy pubescent hairs on his upper lip. “Because if this is all we have to stop a blackfeather, we are fucked with a capital fuck.”

“I’m thinking that half-pint impostor scouring the town has caught my brother’s eye,” Ofelia said. “Sadly shadowed as it is. That was very gallant, Tiago.”

“Shut up, Feeli.”

“He’s got your inclination in reverse, Seth,” Ofelia said. “He enjoys looming over ladies.”

“The Legion should be here in force to stop this blackfeather, and they’re not, and she’s just a rhubarb farmer, and she and hers are standing in front of it anyway,” Tiago said. “If you want to hear I admire her bravery, then whatever. I do.”

“Admiring her bravery. Uh huh.” Ofelia leaned Seth’s way. “Do all Plainlanders keep their bravery in their round, perky butts, or is that just Shaheill?”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...we-kill-it
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2546330/

[Mamorien]

Today on or in Headless Over Heels, Seth prepares to stand against Enna-Belum, even though the acting officials can only offer him a Red Cloth and a pointed stick.

Ofelia stared at the cloth, as Simon handed it off to Seth and Seth tied it to his wrist. “You’re really doing this.”

Seth’s forearm, thin as it was, required a double-bind to secure the fabric. “You don’t need to sound so surprised.”

“I don’t sound like anything,” Ofelia said. “I work very prudently to be as monotone as possible, for the sake of my aesthetic.”

“Well, yes. I am really doing this.”

“It’s a bitter waste of your value if you die, Mr. il Gutierre,” Ofelia said. “Rather like placing a splendid mouser in a swimming competition with an eel.”

“That is the craziest fucking metaphor I’ve ever heard, Ms. al Ydris, and it won’t stop me.”

“Oh, you needn’t stop.” Ofelia’s willowy fingers brushed the knot he’d tied to himself. “Just don’t die, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Good.” Ofelia smiled vaguely. “I would miss you very much.”

“Feeli!” Tiago was descending the palisade. He waved his arms at her. “They found the sorcerer!”

“Ah, Saints.” Ofelia broke into a jog back toward the clustered village streets. “Come on, Seth.”

By the time they’d arrived at the sorcerer’s house—a bungalow that ought to be quite pretty, with dried vines tangling its window and peeling paint on the door—a crowd had gathered. At its fore stood Anna al Ydris, her goliath arms crossed. Little redheaded Riccana and two fellow hermandati were tugging a stubbly, threadbare man out of its darkened interior. “Goodman, come on. Please just see her.”

The sorcerer staggered out the rest of the way, swatting the hands that bore him like they were insects landing on his shoulders. “Off me. Off me, damn you all. I’m going.”

“You’re the Shaheill sorcerer,” Anna said. “Robert il Magnard.”

Yes. I am a sorcerer, yes. Worst fucking thing that ever happened to me.

“Yes. I am a sorcerer, yes.” The man’s bloodshot eyes clambered up Anna then dropped back down to her boots. “Worst fucking thing that ever happened to me.”

Anna’s stone face showed little pity. “Your Legion is calling you again to serve, Robert.”

“I’m not fit,” he mumbled.

“Stand up. Stop muttering.”

Robert made a credible effort at both. “Said I’m not fit, Madam Verdugo. I’ve got a hangover.”

“You won’t, by the time you’re needed.”

“By the time I’m needed I intend to be drunk, Madam Verdugo.” Robert laughed, high and cracked; he sounded like a gamefowl getting run over. “I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t look at it, I can’t fight it, I can’t do a thing. Cut my fucking head off and be done.”

Anna looked about ready to do just that. Tiago intervened from past the great black scabbard on her back. “Have you forgotten the spell?”

“Have I forgotten. Got your fucking fancy ink crawling around all over your fancy arm and you think you know how magic works. I haven’t fucking forgotten the spell, boy. I dream the spell. I’ll forget my father’s name before I forget the spell. It’s everywhere. Over everything. Like looking at the sun too long. They brand it to the inside of your skull.”

“Don’t be pathetic, il Magnard.” Anna’s murani fangs were showing now. “You’ve got a pension and a house so that the Legion can depend on you for these situations.”

“Aye, a pension. A pension and a jumpy neighbor who pretends he’s not being paid threebrace a week to blow my brains out if I hold my hands out wrong. A pension and a head full of—” Robert’s poeticism tripped over his enlarged liver. “Of shit. Shit and blood.”

“If you won’t serve for the Legion,” Tiago said, “then you—”

“You made a match out of me!” Robert spat a discolored lob into the dirt at Tiago’s feet. “And now you want me normal? To eat three squares and tiddly-um down to the shops and go hmmm I wonder what’s at market today? You expect me to hold a lover with these hands? A child? A fucking job? A fucking life? When all they have to do is—”

His hands shot up and forward. A ringing out of screams and shouts. Tiago ducked, lunged, slide tackled the man to the ground, and wrenched those gnarled weapon-hands behind Robert’s back.

“See?” Robert’s cracked cry was suspended halfway between laughter and weeping. “See? Let me up. Let me saintsfucking up, boy.” He struggled to his feet, though Tiago stayed at his back, still pinning his arms. “You ruined me. You colorless bastards. You made a match out of me and you sent me home to a paper world, and I’m still burning.”

Tears cut through the grime on his face.

“I’m still burning,” he sobbed. “What the fuck do I do?”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-red-cloth
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2550895/

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

With the Greenfields having accepted their new way of life, now it's time to face the future and what comes next for them.

Especially when some pretty big upheavals are coming in their lives. A few unfriendly faces with unsettled grudges are not about to let things lie and are determined to make trouble for this family.

How are they going to handle this? What are they going to do now?

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/47

Princess of the Void.

”The woman plotting our downfall followed the protocol and procedure set before her to the letter.” Sykora hops from her throne. “She trusted in precedent, and when precedent failed she trusted in her sense of fealty and duty to protect her sanity from the unspeakable task that was set before it. But she trusted in vain.”

She paces the table, her tail switching back and forth with each step. Grant watches her and realizes this must be how it felt to kneel in fealty to Joan of Arc or Hatshepsut. He is not sure his wife has ever looked quite so beautiful.

“She murdered millions and broke her own mind into pieces.” Sykora reaches past Waian and plucks the bag of nuts off the table. “Now she sees the servants of the Empress as the same genocidal automata she proved to be. I will show her that the strength of the Taiikari Empire rests not merely in our fealty to Zithra XIX, but in Zithra’s faith in her servants, and the power she has vested into our hands.” She roots around in the bag and produces a handful. “I will demonstrate to her that she did not fail on Malkest because of the Empire, but because of her own weakness.”

“But she followed the Empress’s order.” Vora’s puzzlement is fermenting into unease. None of them have realized quite what Sykora is saying.

“She did,” Grant says, as his wife chews and swallows. “But the Empress ordered her wrong.”

A stunned silence around the command table. Vora breaks it again, her voice high and tight with uncertainty. “That’s… that’s a dangerous thing to say, Majesty.”

“Do you presume Her High Majesty would disagree?” Sykora returns the bag to its place by her paralyzed chief engineer. “Do you think she considers Malkest a victory?”

“No, of course not, but…”

“She has been working for kilocycles now to bring the great bulwark of the Empire into a new era,” Sykora says. “She has done so through deeply unorthodox means. It is time for us to square our shoulders to the great glacier and help her push. I would sooner risk her displeasure at the venture’s onset than bring her despair at its conclusion.”

Waian’s lips are tightly pulled, into the anticipatory beginning of a grin or a grimace. “Kora,” she says. “Grantyde. Kids. What are you saying?”

The Mandate of Maekyon.

“Grantyde and I are moving to cancel the annexation of Maekyon,” Sykora says. “The Black Pike sector will recognize it as a Mandate system and we will stand as its protector until its people integrate fully into the Imperial firmament of their own volition.”

“Gods of the fucking firmament.” Behind the cherry-red frames of her glasses, Vora’s eyes dilate. “You—this—we can’t.”

Sykora takes her heiress’s hand. “We can, Vora. We must be brave. But we can.”

“This is tantamount to treason, Majesty.” Lomanza’s emotionless countenance remains on, but something in her body language makes it clear how threadbare the mask is becoming. “By many metrics it is indivisible from treason. Our duty is to annex Maekyon.”

“Our duty is to turn Maekyon imperial, and we will,” Grant says. “Eventually. But we aren’t here to take what they won’t give.”

“Majesty.” Lomanza rotates to him with machinist precision. “With all the considerable respect you are due, this closeness you have to the situation—of your homeworld, after all—”

“It was my idea, Majordomo,” Sykora says. “My husband had to be convinced. Convinced to save his world. This is my point. This is why I am sure. Who is the only true rival to a dutiful servant in devotion?”

“A hunk?” Waian ventures.

“A lover,” Sykora says. “We will win Maekyon the way I won my Maekyonite. We will show them the glory of our people and the wonders that we offer; we will place our faith in their hands and our oath of stewardship at their feet; we will open our arms wide.”

“We’ll steal them a really expensive guitar.” Waian’s the only member of the command group with a smile on.

“And we will hope.” Sykora approaches Grant and stands beside him. “With the desperate courage of a love’s confession. And when they choose us, our bond will be stronger than any coerced shackle could ever be. We will make them fall in love with us.”

She radiates confidence. But her tail is wrapped so tightly around Grant’s wrist that it’s leaving a mark.

“Now take that to the Empress, if you wish, Majordomo,” she says. “I know she’s awaiting your next report on me. I don’t care.”

“Majesty, I’m—”

“I don’t care,” Sykora repeats. “I bear you no ill will. I fully intend to present my plan within the tenday, regardless. We must have it in-hand before we arrive in Maekyon’s orbit for our grand reveal. You are sworn to obey her, so obey her. Spy on me. Warn her. But you are sworn to obey me, too. And I command you to aid me in the venture I decree. Find me the legal backing for a Mandate.”

“This will be a significant challenge.” Rare emotion is on Lomanza’s face. Grant’s never seen her this distressed. “All the files are older than the dataframes on which they’d sit. I’d have to search museums.”

“Then search them.” Sykora’s ironclad stare reminds Grant of the Empress, whenever she removes her glasses and shows her true face. “I’ll not be deterred. Hyax, Waian, Vora. You will reorganize your working groups into a tricameral committee and deliver me a blueprint for a modern Mandate stewardship. I refuse to bring the Empress some archaic scheme from the pre-membranal days. We don’t need razor fidelity, but I want this path to take us forward, not back. Presume, at the drafting stage, ready cooperation from Maekyon’s governments in the facilitation of citizenship for any Maekyonite who seeks a place in the Empire.”

Hyax snorts. “Not fucking likely.”

“I know it’s not,” Sykora says. “But we have a tenday until we’re in Maekyon’s orbit, and I need to put this up in front of Her High Majesty with enough time to revise all my bloody speeches and get my hair done up. We need something that can stand on its feet and sing for its supper. We’ll bolster it later, once the waters are rising. That crotchety Egon individual can help, perhaps.”

“The UN is kinda…” Grant wiggles his hand. “I mean… it’s better to have them than not have them, of course, but—”

“What do you mean?” Waian asks.

“We should focus on the superpowers for this,” Grant says. “Egon there onscreen is sure to be useful, but he’s not, like, the leader of the free world. I don’t think.” He rubs his chin. “I mean—I could be entirely wrong about the way my planet’s governments work. That was a common enough anxiety we all had. Have. A lot of conspiracy theories about the UN. We—”

“Boss.” Waian interrupts. “Boss, what I’m asking is what does UN stand for?”

“United Nations.”

“Ohhh.” She gives her forehead a light tap. “Cause it’s in Maekyonite. Had me confused for a second.”

“I’ve gotten used to ZKZ. You’ll catch on.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...of-maekyon
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2552105/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels; Seth surrenders the red cloth and meets The Blue Ekadao.

“Tell me why,” he said. “Tell me the real reason why and maybe I’ll go hide like you’re asking me to.”

“Fuck you. I don’t know what the fuck you want from me. If this is because I said you weren’t strong—”

“This is because I just found a family and now I want to help keep them alive,” Seth said. “But if you’re honest with me—”

“Honest with you about what?”

“Just say you love me and you’re worried about me, and I’ll hide. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

“If you go and get your skinny ass killed, then Annalise will—”

“You, Anna. You say it, and I’ll go be the coward you’re pretending I still am.”

“Do you think I like being this?” Anna raked her fingers against her heavy black gambeson. “This evil asshole? I hate being Anna. I want to rip my own fucking head off. It was barely tolerable before your whiny little ass showed up and now it’s torture. So please, Seth, if please is what you want to hear, please take the fucking cloth off and go be safe somewhere and stay out of my sight until I can be the woman you love again.”

“You’re the woman I love right this second.”

“Then please.” Her voice was suddenly so small and unsure. “I can’t. I can’t be like this, when I’m her. I can’t think about how smashed-up Anna is. It’s like when you look at the wound and realize how bad it hurts. I can’t be a person.”

Anna’s not for winning over. She’s a big arsehole cudgel I bash seraphs with. She’s the bits of me I don’t enjoy being. Don’t worry about Anna. She isn’t good for us.

He unwrapped the cloth from his arm and held it out to her. The spiky vitality returned to her; she snatched it from his hand. “Now get the fuck off my wall,” she said. “You want to be useful, you go to the inroad by the square, and you keep a tally of how many more bodies we get.”

“All right,” Seth said. “I see any sorcerers, I’ll send them your way.”

“Good,” she said, and then, like it was an afterthought, “You’re not a coward. That’s true.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re rash.”

“I’ll take that,” Seth said, and left her there in the slowly brightening street.

The horse had a lizard on top of it.

He arrived at Shaheill’s outskirts and exchanged brief words with the clerk at its signpost, who left him her clipboard and departed for her bed with some relief. He didn’t realize how tired he was until the slivering sun peered pryingly above the treetops on the other side of the road. He wasn’t sure how long he stood; he might have microslept between his blinks. He was beginning to consider a catnap slumped against Shaheill’s road sign when a horse and its attendant cloud of dust crested a far hill.

Seth gave his own face a light cuff and tried not to slouch. He traced the horse’s approach and then hit himself again, harder this time, to ensure he was not dreaming.

The horse had a lizard on top of it.

Seth blinked and wiped his eyes. The lizard was still there.

The lizard slowed their ride before Seth and leaned forward in its saddle. Beneath a draping riding cloak of heavy felt, it was unclothed, but lizards usually are, Seth supposed, even if they tend not to bipedalism or equestrianism, for that matter. There was nothing untoward to see on its cream-scaled belly regardless.

“I greet you,” it said, in an unexpectedly smooth and pleasant voice. “I am the Blue Ekadao.”

“Hello,” Seth said, and decided not to point out that the Blue Ekadao was copper-colored, mostly, with bits of green on its forelegs. “I’m Seth il Gutierre. Welcome to sunny Shaheill.”

The Blue Ekadao reached into—his? her? their?—saddlebag and produced a sheaf of papers crowned by the same pink card that had guided the al Ydris clan to Shaheill’s gates. “I received a skywire requiring my presence in Shaheill. I bring my papers and a stamped dictum that I am a Sorcerer Subofficiyant of the Legion, trained in the siege spell. I trust this will ensure remuneration for my time.”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “Probably.”

“Splendid.” The Blue Ekadao climbed from their saddle, tail straight out for balance. “Then I am at your command.”

Seth took her horse’s tether. The beast seemed skittish, and relieved to be rid of its rider. “You’re a sarkanian, aren’t you?”

“I have been told so by those who would know,” the Blue Ekadao said. “And I see no reason they’d lie.”

“You know you’re the first sarkanian I ever met?”

“This is often the case.” Their face did not move the way a mammal’s would. It wore the same toothy grin it had the entire time. “I will tell you then that I am a male sarkanian. I imagine you were wondering. There are very few of us—ten times fewer than our sisters. You are triply blessed this morning. Your first sarkanian, your first sarkanian man, and an accomplished sorcerer.”

“Yes. That is extremely a blessing.” Seth scanned the area by the roadside for an al Ydris or an il Teremi to hand this conversation off to, and came up blank. Just fellow humans, gawking at the unlit and the reptile. “Honestly, you’ve come at the perfect time.”

“I must also tell you that I do not like how humans smell most of the time,” the Blue Ekadao said. “So please keep your distance if possible.”

“Oh.” Seth backed up. “Uh, sorry.”

“It is not your fault. My kind speak through scent as strongly as through words, and humans are incapable of modulating their bouquet. Unless they’ve bathed recently, humans smell deeply offended. Constantly.” He made a chittering noise. “It certainly brings a touch of awkwardness to our communications, no? That was a laugh.”

Seth laughed as well, though this conversation would be feeling awkward if he smelled like poise and peonies. “I can see how it might.”

“I have come here to kill a blackfeather, or die to it.” The Blue Ekadao’s clawed feet scraped the cobblestones. “Pray lead me to where I am needed.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...lue-ekadao
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2558710/

[Mamorien]

After the excerpted part of yesterday's Headless Over Heels, the knowledge that sarkanian mages are usually stormcallers gave Seth what he had to admit was an incredibly stupid idea. Turns out the active head agrees.

“No,” Anna said.

“Anna—”

“No. I will not allow it.” Her whiskers twitched. She tried to keep them as still as she could—Seth had called them cute once.

“We’re wasting time.” Seth tightened the noseband on his nameless horse’s bridle. By the roadside, his would-be traveling companion, the lizard wizard, waited quite still atop his unsettled horse. “If I go now, I can make it there and back before sunset. I’m at a gallop until Tondarre. We trade horses there and ride hard to Shipfarrok, we’re there by three, and then we go at full clip till we’re back at Shaheill’s gate. It can work.”

“How do you fucking know?” Anna demanded. “You don’t know horses and you don’t know stormships. Who told you this?”

“Tiago knows horses.” Seth pointed to her son where he sat and gnawed his Larrot Provisions jerky stick, his legs dangling from the slats of the south gate watch platform. “And the Blue Ekadao knows stormships.”

“Somewhat,” the lizard said.

“Tiago doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Anna shot her traitorous boy a withering look. “And we need Ekadao’s siege spells. If he isn’t—”

“The Blue Ekadao,” the sarkanian said.

“What?”

The sarkanian gave a brief wave with the tip of his tail. “Kindly refer to me as the Blue Ekadao.”

Anna dialed the frigidity of her frown to gale force.

The Blue Ekadao tilted his head. “Is something wrong?”

“She’s scowling at you,” Seth said drily. “As a threat.”

“Pardon me, Madam Verdugo.” The Blue Ekadao dipped his head in an apologetic bow. “As a son of Sarkani, I am unskilled at reading the expressions of kindred with facial muscles. But your subordinate asked and I answered.”

Seth’s composure was tilted a few degrees askew by subordinate. Anna liked the Blue Ekadao a little better. “Do you know how to fly a stormship?” she asked.

“Somewhat, Madam Verdugo, but not well.”

“I’m not doing a trade circuit on it,” Seth said. “I’m not using its guns. I’m not even trying to land the fucking thing. I’m crashing it into the big bastard.”

“There will be other sorcerers, mother,” Tiago said. “And if it works, it’ll kill the thing deader than a dozen siege spells.”

“You don’t want me on the front.” Seth hung his gaudy new saber from his horse’s harness. “Okay. Good. I’m glad, if you want to hear that. I was putting on a brave face and maybe doing a bit of a tantrum, but I was terrified. I’m not built for a stand-up fight with a blackfeather. You’re right about that. And I’m right about this.”

If he wanted to abandon her and find some novel way to die, then fine.

Anna wouldn’t flail out here for his amusement like a fish on a hook. If he wanted to abandon her and find some novel way to die, then fine. “Fine,” she snapped.

She was stalking away when Seth said “Wait,” and it was as if he’d tugged a tether round her neck the way it stilled her. Her ears flattened again. Why the fuck was she waiting for him?

For a moment he seemed as surprised as she did. He recovered quickly. “If something happens, I’m not about to let one of us go out without telling you I love you.”

Tiago rolled his eyes and continued chewing his meat-leather.

“You don’t have to say it back,” Seth said. “Fine. Whatever. But I don’t care if you’re wearing the head that makes you an asshole. I love you.”

“I won’t say it back,” she said. “Because then you’ll feel all good and ready to die and you’re not fucking allowed, you pigheaded prick. If you want to hear it, you stay here, or you come home.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll come home, then. Be right back, T.”

“Enough with the T thing.” Tiago pointed his jerky in accusation. “I sided with you, il Gutierre.”

Seth climbed his pony. “Ofelia’s saying it now. It’s terminal.”

Anna couldn’t be around this laughy talky jokey shit. She didn’t wait to see Seth and his new pet sarkanian take the road. She skulked back into Shaheill, remembering when Tiago had mistrusted the thief as much as she had. A stupid jealousy. Not her place to feel it. You are not a person, you are a munition. Stop tainting yourself with thought. Do your job and go away again.

She could smell him. Why could she still smell him? From her belt pouch, she dug the red flag that he’d had tied around his arm, and scowled at it, mad at his stupid juvenile stunt all over again.

It smelled like him.

She tossed it to the ground, then picked it up again and stuffed it back into her pouch. No need to let cloth go to waste. She’d return this one to the stash.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...escendants
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2560512/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

“I’m the Verdugo’s boyfriend.”

“Her?” Sarkanian emotions remained protean and strange to Seth, but the incredulity in the Blue Ekadao’s her was unmistakable. “I thought myself habilitated to humanity, but you have given me much to learn. She seemed far more eager to twist your head off than give you her belly in ardor.”

“She’s… not always such a jerk,” Seth said. “She switches heads. That’s her Darkness.”

“Ahh.” A smell like freshly cut grass from the Blue Ekadao. “This seems complex.”

“Sorta. Never boring, though.”

“Surely not. It is as if you have your own knfz in one woman.”

“You understand I don’t know what that word means, man.”

“Eh, a Sarkani thing. A result of our asymmetry. Each male has many lovers.”

“Like a harem?”

“If you say so.”

“I dunno if she’d be thrilled to be called that,” Seth said. “Well, maybe Lisa.”

“I have thought now and then of becoming unlit for the benefit of its longevity and power,” the Blue Ekadao mused. “But this is a female pursuit in my lands, as most pursuits are besides the insemination of one’s knfz. A mateable sarkanian male is quite the commodity. I am, as I have told you, in the minority.”

“I remember,” Seth said. It was the fourth time the Ekadao had mentioned it.

“It is not the fashion for a male to sally forth in this way. There is a perfumed tent full of eager would-be mothers who lack me.”

“Sounds a bit like you’re bragging, the Blue Ekadao.”

The Blue Ekadao’s tail swished, further getting to his thoroughly gotten-to horse. “It is a brag, yes. I am glad that came through without the scent cue.”

The long lozenge of the stormship sat derelict where Tiago had touched it down, in the shadow of the ridge upon which Shipfarrok sat. Grounded and inanimate as it was, it put Seth again in mind of a fish—a dead one, this time, drifted to the pooling silt.

And, like a corpse, scavengers were picking at it.

And, like a corpse, scavengers were picking at it.

“Hey,” Seth murmured, and then “Hey!” as he spurred his colt into another bruising gallop.

A pair of Sheepfuckians—a man and a woman—had harnessed a mule to a peeled-out edge of sheet metal, and now smoked hand-rolled marshmallow root cigs as their beast of burden grunted and pulled at the loosening panel.

Seth reeled his ride to a halt and ogled the piebald patches missing from across the fuselage. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Getting a new roof,” the woman said.

“Y’blew the old one down when you parked the big fucker.” The man tapped his smoke’s ash away. “So, then.”

“Untie your animal.” Seth hopped from his horse and landed on both feet in the spongy topsoil. “Don’t touch the ship.”

The man hocked a loogie to the earth. “Who’re you, boy?”

“I’m Legion,” Seth said, which was about as true as it needed to be. “And that’s Legion property. So get some other fucking roof, please.”

He jogged toward the village, leading his horse by its calfskin reins. The Blue Ekadao gave a bow to the perplexed Shipfarrok folk and rode after him.

Karla the not-Corregidor was sitting with both mud-caked boots up on the fence rail in her cottage’s front yard, at the center of Shipfarrok’s ring of homes. She watched without alarm as Seth came to a halt by the fencepost. It had been repaired with the heavy-gauge rivets that had once adorned the stormship’s cockpit door.

“Karla,” Seth said.

“What’s-your-face,” Karla replied.

“You were told to leave the stormship where it was until the Legion could retrieve it.”

“We have,” Karla said.

Seth spun to take in the center of Shipfarrok’s ring of homes. “That man is saintfucking grilling on a piece of it.”

“Aye, well. Cleaned it first. We cleaned it, Gunter?”

The thick-browed man at the grill made a grunting sound like “Fuh.”

Karla nodded her satisfaction. “You can have some cracklings, goodman, if it’ll calm you down.”

“That would be most pleasing,” the Blue Ekadao said.

“Anyway.” Karla detached herself from her porch and strolled to the improvised grill to prod at the fire beneath it. “You left it here, and its descent knocked over half the paddocks. It’s a lot to rebuild at once. And the thing’s just been lying about.”

“The thing is a miracle of modern fucking magitech,” Seth said. “And you’re grilling on it.”

The Blue Ekadao diverted his attention from the sizzling meat. “I do not mean to undermine your apposite wrath, friend il Gutierre, but most of these panels will not be needed for the brief and eventful life you’ve planned for this vessel.”

Karla folded her arms. “What’s that he means, then?”

“We are crashing the stormship into a seraph,” The Blue Ekadao said.

Karla snorted. “Ah, well. Can see why you’re wanting it all spick and span then.”

“We’re gonna push the whole way,” Seth said. “I can’t have it shaking apart in the sky, Karla.”

“Your lizard says it won’t,” Karla said.

“We will be needing this piece, however.” The Blue Ekadao pointed to the rooftop Annalise had hauled a tree off when they were last in Shipfarrok. “This is a propeller blade.”

Seth balled his hands into fists. “You took the propeller?”

“All right, goodman.” Karla just smirked at Seth’s consternation. He wished he were Annalise’s height. “Haven’t seen a stormship before, have we. We’ll get that taken down and refitted, won’t we, Gunter?”

“Fuh,” Gunter said again, which sounded unpromising to Seth, but he was up and fetching a ladder.

“There is another somewhere,” the Blue Ekadao continued. “I saw two missing. You see by its sibling that it will be longer and thinner than the rest. It will have rivet holes on its edge.”

Seth inspected the scrap’s narrow shape as Gunter gathered a team to retrieve it. “Anything like that in Shipfarrok?”

Karla, who’d taken over from Gunter at the grill, turned a crackling length of sheep-belly. An answer was skulking behind her eyes, trying not to show itself.

“Please, Karla,” Seth said. “Please. Every minute we spend on this is—”

“Soya il Mandrak,” Karla said. “The widow Soya il Mandrak. She has that piece.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-propeller
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2564189/

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

It's the moment of crisis. Justin has come back and now holds something that can ruin the lives of the Greenfields and everyone they love. What are they going to do now?

But of course, trust Raven to come up with a plan.

And if all goes well, Justin is not the only one with a little well-deserved justice coming his way, as Keiko is due to give Barry what he's earned from his abuses too.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/48

Princess of the Void.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...-belong-to
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2565654/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels cuts back to the Verdugo as she and the good kindred of Shaheill face Enna-Belum.

Anna’s drawing had captured Enna-Belum’s silhouette acceptably enough, by her estimation. There was the head bedecked with horns, there the heavy knuckle-walking front legs and the digitigrade predator’s haunches. There were the spines along his shoulders and studding his back. There was the size, just as she’d promised, a train car’s worth of flesh and an army’s worth of hatred packed into a bovine’s worth of brains.

But the sounds of dismay from her warriors taught her that she had come nowhere near a proper depiction. Who could? What sane hand could reproduce the face that hung beneath those horns? Or faces perhaps, it was hard to tell. A confusion of loose, flabby features, as though a card table’s worth of leather-skinned old veterans had been flensed and sewn together with only the vaguest idea of a human face’s proper contours. This nightmare conglomeration hung like fleshy curtains from the thing’s skull, curling and flexing as it approached like the puckering of lips, the eight filmy eyes a concentric spiral around its leech-sucker mouth.

“Saints sanctify us.” A blond-bearded man tapped the guy next to him. “Arvind. You could’ve warned us your mother’s visiting.”

“Tighten up,” Anna said, over the stricken laughter that drew out of the spearline, but it was on instinct. Better they be laughing than wailing.

The Sorrow of the Northmarch.

Enna-Belum loped toward Shaheill’s forward palisade, his vertical maw splitting his gormless face open like an orchid, his ring of eyes fixed.

Anna glared back. Hello again, you big blackfeathered asshole. Come again to die at the hands of the Legion? We’ll oblige you.

The initial attack in the battle for Shaheill came from its kindred, and it issued forth from the trees all around the wide, dug-through clearing. Arrows whistled from hiding places high in the boughs. Unseen rifles cracked. Enna-Belum let out an ursine bark of confusion as they pockmarked him, some finding his face, others falling below, none landing more than shallow pits or thin lacerations.

Two loose skirmisher columns spilled from the trees, sprinting into place and dropping to staggered double-deep firing lines. Closer to the monster, more accurate, and positioned—Saints be kind—to draw him into one of the dozen or more pit traps they’d spent the night preparing for him.

Ofelia was in the left column; Anna could see her. Right, she thought, meanly: go right. Enna-Belum could not have heard her, surely; there were seraphs that could, even if you’d never spoken aloud, but not blackfeathers. He went right regardless, breaking from his loping jog into full gallop.

And now it began.

The first terrified skirmishers broke away, sprinting for the trees, and even a tyrant like Anna couldn’t fault them, could only commend them for their haste, because here he came, his earthquake run gaining velocity. There was a pit trap waiting for him, but his strides were so colossal that they must have cleared its boards, and now he was on its other side, among them, bellowing and bristling.

He caught a woman in his zipper jaws, hefted her into the air, slammed her back to the ground and knocked her limbs into ragdoll uselessness, slammed her again and cut off her howling terror as her ribcage collapsed and pulped her heart. His foreclaw seized another fighter who took a puncturing talon through the chest and had the misfortune not to die immediately. The monster launched the impaled man with trebuchet force into the palisade, headfirst, and his skull cracked like a hen’s egg on contact, wild eye hanging out on its glistening stalk. His lips moved for a terrible second as if he was still there, still seeking for a last word, and then he was dead.

From the raging beast’s blindside, another volley belched fire and billowed smoke. Quarrels stuck from the rubbery skin of Enna-Belum’s neck. He reeled around from the squad’s fleeing remnants and caught a sling-pot to the face; it burst open in a caustic cloud of quicklime. It burned into his mouth and his blanked eyes and the weeping wounds on his face and he let out an unnervingly human scream, high and stripped, and charged at his new attackers.

The rolling rifle smoke drifted and curled at the edge of Ofelia’s sable cloak where she stood amid the line, cranking another quarrel into her crossbow, all calm concentration, as though she’d fired at a doe rather than a demon.

The urge to break ranks and go sprinting toward her daughter nearly sent Anna stumbling, but it was too late, Enna-Belum would reach the skirmishers before she would, and Ofelia would be another broken doll, jaw slackened by death or torn from its housing—

The ground broke open with a timbershaking crack. Enna-Belum’s knuckled forelimb punched through the boards and the mat of topsoil, and crashed through into the dug-out trench below and its thicket of sharpened stakes. He yowled, scrambling and raking and upturning a fountain of blackened earth, and tugged free a mangled, perforated claw.

But he wasn’t dying.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...enna-belum
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2571401/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

“I spent the whole ride dreading what I’d come back to.” Seth plucked petals from his new marigolds as they passed Shaheill’s square, where jade-laden saintspeakers were unfolding cots and raising white canvas triage tents. “Coming back and seeing you there, you and Feeli and Tiago—the world took a boot off my chest. So if you’re getting ready to chew me out, I’ll bear it, but I need you to know that I’ll never regret it.”

Anna’s ears flared straight outward. “Chew you out for killing a blackfeather? That’s what you think of me?”

“I’m just going off prior experience here,” Seth said.

“Shut up.”

“But if you wanted to give me a slap on the back instead—”

“Shut up,” Anna hissed. “Miyalakam niap kei.”

Is that Murani for shut up?

He grinned. “Is that Murani for shut up? Because it’s a lot of extra syllables.”

“It’s telling you where I want to slap you.”

His smile did not shrink. “Oh yeah? Where’s that?”

Anna stopped in place. Seth nearly bumped into her, as did a lady in an apron toting a whole roasted pig. She mumbled a “yer pardon, Madam Verdugo,” as she skittered away.

“I am not for this,” Anna said.

Seth stepped back to give her space. “Pork?”

“I am not for banter,” she said. “I am not for confessions, or flirtations. I am not for any of the things you try on me. I am a vessel for horrible things, and I want to go away now, because I don’t know how to—”

She’d run out of road. She dithered.

Seth rolled a marigold between his smudged fingers, and Anna hated it, how insufferably sympathetic he was trying to be. “We don’t have to speak. We can just… I can wait for you. Or we can just sit.”

“I don’t want to just sit.” She was resolute in her refusal to look at him. “I want to… be good to you. And thank you. And I don’t know how, and Annalise does. So shut up until I’m her again.”

“I reckon that’s about the most beautiful thank you I’ve ever gotten, Anna,” he said, with that awful softness and that smarmy little smile, and she hated the traitorous lungs in her chest for how labored their air became.

Whatever venom Anna was doubtlessly about to spill all over her petulant little thief refluxed down her throat.

Someone screamed. The pressure-shifting snap-whumph of a fireball, cast and blooming. A bright flash threw across the siding of the roadhouse a street away.

In the carriage’s direction.

Whatever venom Anna was doubtlessly about to spill all over her petulant little thief refluxed down her throat. She sprinted.

A fresh-faced hermandati boy came clanking toward her as she rounded the block. “It was Robert. He—”

Anna bowled past the would-be helper. The roadhouse’s side had been blown open. Crumpled in its cracked masonry was Robert il Magnard, the drunkard sorcerer. Before him, scattered across a dozen paces, chunks of blackened carapace and sizzling flesh.

A seraph?

Demetrius released an enraged neigh, and Anna rubbernecked toward the stable. A squat, three-legged yellowfeather was clattering away from the carriage, half-singed, with a heavy crack in its carapace from the vicious kick Anna’s warhorse had just given it. It looked at Anna with its ugly jellyfish eyes and squealed aquatically, like a drowning pig.

Anna did not waste time in thought. The executioner sword was still in the carriage; her pike was in pieces somewhere on the field behind her. She seized the fancy little saber at Seth’s waist and drew it from his scabbard before he had a moment to protest; with her stolen sword she dove for the miserable little seraph. It chittered and screeched and bared misshapen fangs, but it was nothing but a yellowfeather, and this was the perfect opportunity to vent the awful weightless feeling by chopping it to pieces, which Anna did.

When the saber stuck in its neck—bastard thief doesn’t sharpen it enough—she plunged her boot into its scrawny chestpiece to shove it from the edge. It stumbled backward, fountaining blackened blood, and exsanguinated into a foaming, twitching mess before her.

She cleaned the blade’s edge on her muddy black breeches and shoved it back into Seth’s limp hands. “What the fuck,” he said. “Is he dead?”

“Your saber cuts like a butter knife,” Anna said. “Sharpen it. Is who dead?”

Seth hurried to Robert il Magnard’s side and fumbled at the man’s neck for a pulse. “Alive. And smelling profoundly pickled.”

“That’s the man as I understand him.”

“I reckon this is another seraph he killed right here.” Seth prodded the charred carapace with the tip of his returned saber. “Guess even a soused sorcerer can be useful for something.”

The toe of Anna’s trench boot turned the newly dead seraph over and found, in the pool of blood, the object it had sought in the carriage.

The severed head of Sister Niama al Tars.

“What’s that—ah, Saints.” Seth looked away from the rotting head and its frayed yellow hair. “That thing? Again?”

Anna patted Demetrius calm again, shushing his croaking equine protests. “Get someone for the drunkard,” she said. “I’m changing.”

“We should tell someone.”

“So fucking tell someone,” she snapped, and before he could bid her stay longer (with that voice, that fucking voice, why won’t he shut up), she summited the black grille steps into the carriage.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...or-shut-up
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2573507/

[Mamorien]

Last time, on Headless Over Heels...

He kissed her, and she kissed him back, despite the gruesome effluvial stains they were both soaked in. “If I stay lying here,” he whispered, “I think I’m gonna fall asleep.”

She replied with an enervated “hmm.”

He hmmed back.

Annalise was too bleeding tired to say what she wanted to, which was either right-o, we oughta get a move on, or will you marry me and be my husband, she wasn’t sure which. Her eyes drooped shut.

The hammering of a fist on a door. “Mom.” It was Tiago. Bang bang bang.

Annalise groaned as her fox shifted in her arms. “Fecking what,” she called.

“Need you in the square,” Tiago called.

“Can’t you do whatever it is?”

“No.” Tiago had carefully pruned all emotion from himself before he’d come to her. “I’m sorry, mom. I can’t do it. It has to be you.”

Here was a worry worth the waking. With great effort, Annalise raised her head to the window. “What’s happening, sunshine?”

“The deep-wounded are starting to unlight.” All the victory cheer had left Tiago’s face. The dour, dark-eyed soldier was back in residence. “We have one animaxis. We can catch one soul. Someone has to decide whose.”

And now, the continuation.

The village square’s conversion to a field hospital was more-or-less complete by their arrival. Vast white mushrooms grown up from the cobbles after a strange and terrible storm. A black-haired, leathery woman sat on her haunches outside the largest of these new growths, smoking a cigarette and gazing with cold neutrality at her hand, which shook like an autumn leaf about to dislodge.

Ofelia stood next to her, with a bummed smoke in her mouth and a dog-eared book under her arm. “The poppy juice does an amazing job,” she said. “I’d expected more screaming.”

“The screaming shan’t be missed,” the woman said, half paying attention to the unlit girl.

Ofelia trapped her cigarette between her teeth and waved to her approaching family. “They’re using this amazing anodyne in there, Mother. Dolores says it’s made from poppies.”

“Verdugo al Kanap was rattling on about this stuff last winter,” Annalise said. “Glad to see it’s moving south. The wonders of technology. Beats the hell out of a slug of whiskey and a dowel in the mouth, I reckon.”

Dolores surveyed the gathered retinue with dispassion. “You’re here to pick, then.”

Tiago nodded. “Where’s the animaxis?”

“Ursula.” The woman stood and whistled. “Ho. Ursula. Bring the soul mirror.”

Yes, Madam Dolores.

A mousy girl in a saintspeaker’s tunic jumped to, with a clatter of carved hundred-charms. “Yes, Madam Dolores.”

“Four of ‘em,” Dolores said. “You want my advice, pick a Teremi.”

“Thanks for the council.” Annalise held her hand out to her daughter. “Let me see that cig.”

Ofelia pouted. “Mother.”

“Just a puff. Swear to the saints.”

Ofelia passed Annalise her cigarette. The Verdugo flicked it to the ground and crushed it under her boot heel. Ofelia exhaled her exasperation. “You are awful and evil.”

“Don’t pick the habit up. Love you, girleen.” Annalise ducked into the triage tent.

Seth followed, and the twins came after. “I don’t know what you see in her,” Ofelia said.

Inside the canvas was stained in shades of carnelian and rust. A low murmur surrounded them as healers sutured and stitched and wrapped gauze around broken skin, or set twisted limbs into splint. Ofelia was right about the screams, or lack thereof. It would take years of sorcerous study to take the pain away; the little silver ampules the healers carried did the trick in half a minute and a workmanlike poke.

The scarecrow ward was at the tent’s far end, tied off with hemp. Four of them, as Dolores had said. A woman Seth didn’t recognize who was lying very still in her cot, the gray already creeping along her throat. A heavy, hirsuite man sitting up with a notebook, tongue stuck out as he scratched into it with a fountain pen.

Riccana lay by a circular cut-out in the canvas, breathing shallow. Her face was pallid. Sweat beaded on her brow. Tiago’s attempted look of glowering detachment snagged on her like a hooked fish. Seth remembered the excuses he’d found to be near the little ginger-haired woman, who now sweated and twisted at the rim of consciousness, clinging to the ragged tail of her departing soul.

Simon sat near her, eased back in a woodframe and canvas chair. He gave the incoming retinue a woozy smile and a wave with the one arm he had left. The other was tied off now at the elbow. The blood on its dressing was already as dark as ink. The whole limb had gone from ruddy pink to a pallid gray. “Welcome to the ward,” Simon said. “Relaxing, no?”

The writing man snorted.

“I suppose you know why we’re here,” Annalise said. Ursula the junior saintspeaker tarried at the edge of the rope divider, the polished onyx animaxis under her arm. “All of you did heroes’ work today. And had the Saints their seat, we’d have animaxi for all of yous. But—”

Simon interrupted. “It has to be Riccy.”

Annalise bit the rest of her speech back. The unlit retinue’s collective gaze fell on the girl, who whimpered weakly as if halfway hearing her name.

“Moora there hasn’t woke up yet,” Simon said. “And probably won’t. But Alain agrees.”

“I said Simon,” Alain the writer grunted. His voice was weighed down on its corners by the anodyne. “Seems to me he has the better chance at walking again. But Simon said Riccy. So.”

“And not you?” Seth asked.

“Nah.” Alain indicated the lumpy sheets below. “It’s a horror down there. Nothing will work the way it’s supposed to anymore, they say. Not a thing you want to see the one time, let alone every day. Not a life you stick around for. Back to the wheel for me. While died a hero is still on the table. And before I find out how it is to take a shit without half the plumbing.” He smirked at some uncontrolled reaction on Seth’s face. “See what I mean?”

Annalise knelt by the il Teremis. “She’s further gone than you are. Alain’s not wrong.”

“She’s young,” Simon said. “She’ll come back. She’ll survive this and anything else she faces. I know she will. I wasn’t all that, not in the end. Didn’t get much done. Didn’t go anywhere, didn’t do much. Grew some tasty rhubarb. I always wondered whether there ought to be more. And then more came, and it was fucking awful.”

“I’m sorry, Simon,” Ofelia said, quietly.

“Ah, it’s fine. I’ll blame the seraphs, on balance.” With his one remaining hand, Simon stroked a sweaty lock of Riccana’s hair behind her ear. “Riccy’s the one who deserves the chances. Whatever’s left to her, she deserves. I’ve never been to the Necropolis, and I suppose now I never will, but surely they know how to fix a broken soldier.”

“Most of the way,” Annalise said. “Most of the time.”

“Bring Riccy’s soul with you, then. Bring her with you. Anyway.” He croaked a wraith of a laugh holding up his stump. “You’d save the most person by percentage.”

Annalise didn’t join in the laugh, but she managed a smile, at least. “We’ll take care of her Simon,” she said. “You have my word.”

Tiago let out a long exhale behind Seth, who did him the favor of pretending not to notice. Simon slumped into his seat, eyes heavy-lidded. “Good.” Something loosened in his face. They were all on threadbare hours of sleep, but he looked tiredest of all. “That’s good, then.”

“One last question,” Annalise said. “Or request, I suppose. From the Legion.” She tapped her palm against the pommel on her sword’s back. “It’d be fast, gents. The al Ydrises don’t swing twice.”

Alain shook his head. “They say I have an hour or so, and I have letters to write. Apparently if you take enough anodyne at once it gives you a sleep you don’t come out of. That sounds better than a sword. And I’ve given the Legion enough, I reckon. You get to the Necropolis, tell General il Nekropoli he’s welcome. Bunch’ve peasants did what his fancy deathspell couldn’t.”

Annalise chuckled at the casual treason. “I will, yeah.”

“I’ll donate my head.” Simon eased out of his seat. “Why not? Let’s get as much use as we can out of this shit sandwich.” He affected an unsteady bow. “Lead on, Madam Verdugo. Let’s not get this tent any stickier.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...8-animaxis
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2577689/

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

We're now kicking of the Gathering, a big weekend event for the Greenfields and all their nearest and dearest to come together for their own special kind of bonding activity. This is day one, where the participants will be split off into random groupings, just whomever with whomever is in the same group. Let's see what kind of roulette combinations we get.

In other news, the paid version of the story on ZBookStore has been updated, not only with a new round of editing, but it now includes an additional bonus story, "College Days," chronicling the ensuing year at college after the end of the story proper. It has been broken into multiple parts so as to chronologically wrap around the existing bonus story "A Greenfield Family Christmas" which takes place in the middle of it. If you've already purchased the book, you should be able to download the new version for free; if you still haven't, now's the perfect time!

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/49

Princess of the Void.

“No, hold on. Shit, gimme a second.” Ipqen pops the lid of her beer can and stomps with purpose to the console. “You know what I’mma play? Me and Ruaq been listening to some Maekyonite music.”

“Oh, shit.” Grant sits further back on the floor. “Whatcha got?”

“I got all kinds of stuff. Chief Engineer slipped me a download of the cultural immersion packet.” Ipqen pauses her scroll. “Was she not supposed to do that?”

“Dunno,” Grant says. “Probably not.”

“It is off to the brig with her,” Ajax says, solemnly, into his half-empty beer.

“Overruled,” Grant says. This is the fifth time they’ve done this stupid routine and it’s only getting funnier as he gets drunker.

Ipqen queues up a song. “This one. Fuck yeah.” She nods along earnestly to the ripping guitars on its intro. “Now lemme ask you, what is making that racket?”

We were meant to live for so much more.

“That’s an electric guitar,” Grant says. “With the distortion way up.”

“It sounds like a planet getting torn in half. It sounds fatidic. Right?” she demands of Ajax.

“Uh, yeah,” the Master Sergeant says. “Sounds good.”

“You’re such a flightless bird, man,” Ipqen says.

“Ipqen.” Grant tries to shut down the vibration of his held laugh. “This is Meant to Live by Switchfoot.”

“And that’s… is that a bad thing?” Ipqen’s heavy brow furrows as the distorted Christian post-grunge fills the cabin.

“It is off to the brig with Switchfoot,” Ajax says, solemnly.

“No. No, I love—I mean, it was kind of a one-hit wonder, I think, and it’s Christian rock, but yeah.” Grant bobs his head along to the crunchy breakdown. “I can fuck with some Switchfoot. Love the chorus.”

“Wiiiwur menta live for so much moooore,” Ipqen sings, in butchered English. “This shit has me on the peak.”

“What’s its brain effect?” Ajax asks.

Ipqen takes the space of a swig to check in with herself. “Makes me wanna—like—break something. And then put it back together with really colorful tape.”

“I fucking missed this,” Grant says. “I missed you guys. Oh, no. I’m getting maudlin.”

“Do it, man.” Ipqen turns the music down. “Maudle shit up. You want something slower?”

“No, I’m fine. I just want—I need to be Grant somewhere. You know? Not just with Sykora. I mean, I love her so goddamn much.”

Ipqen’s great big palm braces his back. “Course you do.”

”And my kids. Holy shit.” Grant’s eyes sting. Don’t cry in front of your servants, But his voice is starting to shake. ”But it’s not the same. Or I don’t know. But they can’t be the only ones. Batty can’t be the only one I feel normal around. That’s not fair to—to her. Or me. Or to anyone.”

“Who’s Batty?” Ipqen whispers to Ajax, who shushes her.

”I just need to feel normal sometimes,” Grant says. ”I need to feel like nobody’s scared of me. Like you’re hanging out with me because you want to and I’m one of you. And without it I came so, so close to turning into something horrible. Into someone I couldn’t bear to be. I’m so—it’s so stupid. Forget it. I’m out-of-practice on being drunk. I’m…” He laughs despairingly. “I’m out of practice on being Grant.”

“If you need to be Grant, Maj—uh—Grant.” Ajax is trying as hard as his unwaveringly loyal Taiikari brain will allow. “If you need that, then you can have it.”

“Can I…” Grant hiccups. “Can I be fucking scared, then, too?”

“Why, Grant?” Ajax raises his anticomps. His goldenrod eyes are heavy with concern. “You worried about your world?”

“I feel that,” Ipqen says. “I was pissing myself when you went for Eqtora. But it worked out. Yeah? You’ll find a way.”

“We have,” Grant says. “And I think… I mean, it’ll be hard as fuck, but it’ll work, I think.”

“It will,” Ajax says. “Your servants will ensure it.”

“That’s not what I’m scared of.”

Grant lifts his palm from his beer and rests it on his forehead, feels the condensation, tries to ground himself here and now in the company of his friends.

“I’m scared of what comes first,” he says.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...nt-to-live
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2579822/

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

A convocation was held for the dead in Shaheill’s square, once the last of the wounded were taken to their own beds or gave up their battles. The mourners insisted on bringing their unlit guests to the front of the crowd to stand with the banged-up, bandaged defenders. Every crowd that Seth had attended lately, in the shadow of the scaffold, had come to observe an execution. Odd to gather now, when the killing had already been done.

The dozen dead were arrayed in a semicircle before the scaffwood, wrapped in plant-fiber shrouds. You could tell which were Shaheilli by the trinkets and remembrances their weeping families had laden them with. The warriors who had joined from the further villages and garrisons had only the flowers and the generic icons about them, or scrimshawed tokens furnished by their comrades; nobody else knew much about them, save for how they had died.

Saint-Worship preached the sacredness of returning the departed shells to the cycles of the earth, just as the spirit returned to the Wheel. The burial cloaks were made to rot with the corpses. The bodies were bare beneath them and dusted with an apothecarial concoction meant to soften them and speed the return to loam.

There were no popmite farms in Shaheill; otherwise the shrouded bodies might have been lowered into them, to feed the insatiable larvae. The dead would be buried in the fields instead, that they might make the crops grow. The il Teremis who had died, they’d put below the rhubarb.

Moora and Alain they’d burn, to keep the unlit blood from climbing the roots of their crops. A smaller pyre, separate from Enna-Belum’s vast and foul blaze, surrounded by charm poles and laden flowers.

A pretty saintspeaker cenobiyant stood atop the scaffold where Annalise would usually tread, her hair bound up in the six needles, her eyes painted with the forest-green lines of the lakrimat. Her hands and feet dipped in the ceremonial mud. She was young, barely out of her teens, and on her face was the fundamental tranquility of a girl at a funeral for whom death would not be real for a decade or more.

O Preliyat!

She sang, high and lyrical:

O Preliyat!

Oculat tuat Rotama purganiy itery et Mundum conspizya

O, Preliyat!

Risat tuati Rotama silakti itery et Mundum audizya

Preliyat was Necrocantati for warrior. O Preliyat was a song for the valorous dead of the Legion, exhorting them to move swiftly through the wheel and bless the world with their eyes and voices once more. The carved and lacquered charm-statues, held aloft on poles by the saintspeaker’s solemn akathists, were Legion saints: St. Silas of the Sword, St. Kander of the Seal and Scale. But these weren’t legionnaires they were composting, and they’d sworn no oaths. Most weren’t even Hermandati. They were farmers and farriers and families, and the Legion was supposed to keep them safe, and it hadn’t. And now they were gone.

This was a show of respect, probably, or meant as one. From the glistening tears in the crowd and the voices joining in the song, it was working that way. Seth averted his eyes to the dirt. His singing voice was golden now, thanks to his hexentat. Something stopped him from lending it.

Annalise caught his downcast glance and gave him the tiniest of nods. Her fingers threaded between his. She wasn’t singing either.

Why wear a suit of plate to the beach?

By the service’s end, departure from Shaheill was out of the question. Celebrations had begun, and tearful reunions and copious drinking, but this was not for the al Ydrises and Seth il Gutierre. Unanimously and voicelessly, they trundled their exhausted selves to bed.

There were rooms for them at the roadhouse, and the twins gladly took them to avoid having to clean the clutter the thieving seraph had left. Annalise and Seth took advantage of the inn’s bathtubs, but then retired to their tent. Seth had come to prefer it to a roadhouse bedroom. He could see the stars faintly through the fabric, and the cold night air forced him closer against the big soft furnace of Annalise al Ydris’s unlit heart.

Annalise crawled into the quilt with him, and pulled him halfway atop her. Her hands wandered to their preferred places on the small of his back and the nape of his neck. “I wanna fuck you,” she mumbled.

“I wanna get fucked,” he responded, as numbed by weariness as she was.

Her responding laugh was heavy with fatigue. “But I’m so tired.”

He kissed her collarbone. “I’ll still be fuckable in the morning.”

They managed a kiss, at least, slovenly and sloppy, and okay, now Seth was a little hard, but he was still mostly exhausted.

“Can I ask you something?” he whispered.

She nodded.

“What do you tell them? The ones who are afraid before you execute them.”

“Sorry, Seth. Can’t say. It’s not something for the living to hear.” She tightened her hold on him. Her fingers made grooves in his silver skin. “And I’m gonna keep you alive for a long, long time. If I can keep you from crashing bleeding stormships into all our problems.”

“Thank you for letting me go.”

“Thank you for coming back,” she replied. “And thank the Saints Anna didn’t pull your bleeding head off.”

“About Anna.” Seth hesitated, then plowed on. “I don’t think there should be a you that hurts, Annalise. I get that it’s what she’s for, I just… you’ve seen so much, and been through so much, and you got your head back above water. No pun intended. Maybe there’s a way for her, too.”

“G’way outta that, Seth. It’s no problem. If I’m Anna, it’s cause there’s some screeching evil to be stabbed up, so that’s already made a right mess of whatever day’s to be had.”

“Have you ever put her on and…I dunno. Had a vacation?”

His eyes were shut now, but he heard the skepticism tinging her voice. “Why wear a suit of plate to the beach?”

“I feel bad for her, I guess. And I wonder if there’s a way to make her feel better.”

“My wee goldenheart.” Another sleepy chuckle. “Her is me. Remember? You’re making her feel better right now.”

If that’s true, Seth thought, then her pain’s still inside you, too. Even when her head was bleached bone, that same hopeless hurt dwelt in his lover. Anna just brought it closer to the surface.

“I guess so,” he said aloud, but to himself, he swore a private oath, and beseeched St. Kander to witness it:

He would find a way to make that mean, miserable Murani huntress smile. He’d seen its ghost a few times on Anna’s face, in the moments before she’d shut it down. He’d bring it back and bid it stay. He’d make Anna happy.

Somehow.

And okay, he’d have to do it while she fought whatever seraph she’d been screwed on to kill. Such details were best addressed in the moment.

Maybe they said a few more words to one another, maybe they didn’t; the next thing Seth could remember was waking up in the middle of the night on his back. The stars were glittering emeralds beneath the deathspell’s dome. He knew what it meant, by now, to be roused awake like this. Annalise had turned onto her side and was twitching and whimpering, caught in one of her fits.

He inched closer to her, bracing himself. Here came the springloaded bearhug, and she snatched him into her arms. It was painfully tight for a few seconds, and then Annalise’s spasming muscles relaxed—not enough to free him, but he didn’t mind. Ease returned to her.

He made himself as comfortable as he could in her protective clutch, her massive tattooed arm replacing his pillow.

He kissed her nose. She’d stayed asleep through the tremors. He whispered “I love you” anyway.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...o-preliyat
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2586403/

[Jinx999]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/538299...adult=true

Gushing Succubus: In The Shadow Of Her Wings

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

The sun reached its apex and began its downward path. The carriage and its attendant wagon was passing a ring of sacraliths. Someone had taken a chisel to their caps, and defaced the rough-hewn, blobby faces of the Plainland protogods who had abandoned the world to the seraphs. Seth had never seen any of these intact, but in places along the roads they remained: the holy-world equivalent of a mummified thief hung in a gibbet to warn the rest.

It was here, beside the mangled gods of the old world, that Riccana il Teremi awoke for the first time since her soul was ripped from her.

By the time Annalise had gotten Draco and Draka to a halt, Riccana was sitting up and screaming. They hurried from the carriage to the wagon, where Tiago had dismounted, presumably to help the girl off the wagon. For his troubles he was being kicked repeatedly in the chest.

“Let me off,” Riccana barked. “Don’t touch me.”

“Okay.” Tiago backed away, hands up. “Okay, not touching. But you’re still only partway healed. If you exert yourself too hard—”

Riccana tipped out of the wagon and fell on her face.

You should have been touching.

“You should have been touching,” Ofelia noted. Tiago wiped the straw-strewn footprint off his black tunic.

Demetrius’s startlingly blue eyes stared with skepticism at the carework girl who clung to the edge of his wagon as she dragged herself upright again. “Where are we? Where’d you take me? Where’s Shaheill?”

“Poor girl.” Annalise gave a matronly tut of her tongue. “You really ought to be sitting. There’s a carriage, if you like. Very expensive cushions in there.”

“No. No, I—” Riccana teetered and came close to falling again. She found her footing before Tiago could help her and scowled at him. “No. I have to go back—they—the blackfeather. I can’t leave them.”

“The blackfeather is gone,” Annalise said. “You and your people killed it.”

If they were being fair, Seth killed it. But he kept his mouth shut.

”Gone?“ Riccana swiped the chaos of her curls away from her face. Straw drifted out of it. ”We… we won?”

”That’s right.” Annalise smiled encouragingly. ”A big bleeding blackfeather broke through the deathspell and the first village it came to killed it dead. No massacres, no burning burgs. Might well be the only time that’s ever happened. And that’s cause of Shaheill. And its sacrifices.”

“Its—” Riccana’s hands went to her midsection. She looked down at them, and their pale-as-chalk skin.

She did fall then, onto her rear, wide black gaze fixed to her hands like they were covered in blood. Like the bleached skin on them belonged to someone else.

“You won’t go scarecrow,” Tiago said. “You would have already if it was a danger. Shaheill lent you their last animaxis. There was never a question of who’d get it.”

Shaheill, he’d said, because she wasn’t ready to hear Simon.

“My soul,” Riccana mumbled, barely audible.

“It’s here.” Ofelia emerged from the carriage and held the animaxis out. ”Safe.”

Riccana took the mirrored animaxis and gazed into its surface. A facet caught the light and glinted unearthly emerald.

She held it at an angle where the obsidian surface caught the light and resolved into just enough reflection that she could make herself out. The bright white pupils burned in her murky image like twinned candle flames.

She stood and went walking into the woods, as stiff and derelict as if her soul had never been snared. She left the animaxis in the dirt.

“We can’t take you back,” Annalise called. “I’m sorry.”

She made no indication of having heard. Tiago moved a hesitant halfspan, then stood rooted, fists clenching and unclenching. Ofelia touched his arm, all traces of mirth at her brother’s expense gone. “She’ll come around.”

Tiago attempted to recapture his nonchalance with an ineffective shrug.

“Seth,” Annalise murmured. “Would you follow her, love? Unobtrusive-like? She deserves her time, but we can’t lose track of her.”

He nodded, kissed her shoulder, and took off after Riccana, secreting himself behind oak and between shadows. The newly minted unlit girl’s march gradually lost its purpose, and ended at a mossy stone. She sat upon it and wept.

He was so afraid.

Seth stood on the other side of a thick tree trunk to wait out the storm. When it began to subside he stepped into the path and onto a twig, for politeness’s sake.

Riccana turned, face shining in the dappled light.

“Hey,” Seth said.

Riccana’s sorrow had burnt itself into flat gray ash. “You’re the boyfriend.”

Seth quarter-bowed. “Seth il Gutierre. Craven cutpurse and amateur stormship pilot. And pretty new at this unlit thing, too. Fresh turned a few weeks ago. So if you’re—”

“How many did we lose, Seth il Gutierre?”

“Maybe let’s focus on you for a moment, yeah?”

“How many,” Riccana repeated.

Seth sighed and gave up the bedside manner. “About a dozen.”

”How many Teremis?”

“Two whose name I didn’t catch,” Seth said. “And Simon.”

Silence but for Riccana’s heavy breathing. A woodpecker drilled its way into the canopy.

“He was so afraid, when he was the one in command,” she said, eventually. “I told him not to be. That the Legion would come. That they’d take care of us. And when that didn’t come true, when it was just…” She looked him up and down. “When it was just you, and we had to do it ourselves. I said I’d take care of him instead. And that was wrong, too.”

She returned to her hands, her new favorite staring target.

“He was so afraid,” she whispered.

“He wasn’t afraid at the end,” Seth said.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.” Seth thought of Simon’s request, and gave the man a silent apology; his niece deserved the truth. “He asked us to tell you it was on the field with a pointy stick. But the truth is it was after, and he was turning. And it was between the two of you. And he picked you. So.”

She stayed motionless.

“So however you reckon he’d prefer you use this chance, do that,” he said. “I wish I knew him well enough to say what that means. Suppose I’ll defer to you.” He held his hand out. “Let me help you back.”

She recoiled from him, as if following the ingrained instinct not to touch the unlit. But that was her now, too, and haltingly she let him help her off the rock and back toward the carriage. “I need to know who else went. The other Teremis. I don’t care that I’ll never see any of them again.”

“We’ll find out for you,” he said. “I promise.”

She nodded at this. Entirely by accident, Seth was developing a trustworthy reputation. He quietly returned the three braces he’d removed from her back into her hip pocket.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The Necropolis. I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”

“I hear it’s smoggy shit.”

“Whatever else it is,” he said. “For us, I suppose it’s home.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-so-afraid
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2588915/

[Mamorien]

Before starting this week's Headless Over Heels, Dukerino had an announcement (which had already been pre-mulled on his discord).

I will be dropping the update frequency from 3 to 2 times a week, with no more updates on Tuesday. Really sorry that I have to do this but I've run low on the generous buffer with which I began this story and need to lower my output down to a sustainable pace that matches my rate of writing.

When the story started I'd intended to stay at 1.7 to 1.8k words a chapter, but they have evened out into my usual pace of roughly 2.2 to 2.5k words instead (with this one being 3k, for example!)

If I get my buffer back into a nice spot I will see about going back up to thrice a week! But at the moment, between this and PotV, I'm putting out more than 10,000 words most weeks and it's unfortunately not a pace I can sustain while working my day job. I hope some day to become a full time writer who can put out a billion chapters a day for you. Until then, please accept my apology and enjoy the chapter!

I know I enjoyed getting to see the al Ydris Estate.

It was smaller than Rohan il Agante’s big garish hall; that caught Seth by surprise. But it was many times older, and many times more expensive. He could tell within seconds. The tall A-frame center turret, ornamented with delicate blackstone roses. The clustered columns of metamorphic marble stone arch above the heavy wooden front door, with its tympanum displaying an image of a helmed and hauberked warrior standing boldly alone amidst a phantasmagoric host of seraphs. It was huge and beautiful and gothic and imposing, but somehow it was warm, too, outstretched and eager to welcome them. Something about it said home.

Just like its mistress, Seth realized, and the last of the shock faded. Suddenly he couldn’t imagine a woman like Annalise living anywhere else.

There were flowers growing wild and tall on the manor’s eaves, and lights on in the central circular window. They trooped inside, casting off their dusty boots. Tongue-and-groove paneling in rich blackstain mahogany wound its way at waist height down the corridor, sprouting upward at regular intervals in art deco arches to ensconce flylamps. Thick amber glass encased the bulbs, turning their pallid corpselight warm and caramel where it lay across the ivy-patterned sagebrush wallpaper. Seth had seen rich homes and sumptuously appointed hallways before—he’d run for his life through them. None of them had felt as cozy as Annalise’s.

They stopped by a door set into an A-framed archway, its crest topped with crossed pistols. A clawfooted seat was nuzzled into the hall’s opposite corner where a staircase led to the manor’s second floor, each step paneled on its front face with scenes of hunting hounds and foresters. Annalise tossed her coat onto the seat and hung her battered roadwarden hat on the globe atop the staircase’s banister. She swept into the pistol marked room. “Dalf!” came her ebullient cry. “You’ve made a menagerie of my drawing room.”

Milady, I am mortified.

“Milady, I am mortified.” A man’s lacquered voice babbled beneath her rummaging. Seth followed her into the drawing room and came face-to-face with a painted badger, its beady stare surprisingly vivid from its canvas underpainted in dim chiaroscuro. In the midst of a veritable gallery of oil paintings and the lumpy shapes of cloth-concealed furniture, a balding fellow with pince-nez glasses perched on his broad nose was desperately tidying. Lit, Seth noted with surprise. his skin a ruddy lit pink and his eyes tawny brown, not black.

“Your arrival came as a surprise, milady.” The man scurried through the room, yanking down paint-stained shrouds, packing easels and canvases into corded bundles. “I would never have allowed the manor to be in such a state for your return had I only known.”

“Such a state, he says.” Annalise followed him, looking over his shoulder at the paintings he fussily hid. “It’s as lovely as ever, Ydalf. Don’t fret.”

“Your study—”

“My study’s exactly why I didn’t send ahead. It was the only way I could finally get a gander at your work. Look at this one.” Annalise pulled a landscape from the floor and propped it onto an easel. “Gorgeous, eh, Seth?”

“Very,” Seth said. His idea of good art depended mostly on the frame it was stored in—the quickest and trustiest way of judging the market value on the fencing circuit, according to his mentors.

Annalise gave a shake of her head. “And the bashful blighter hides these if you give him the chance.”

Ydalf sighed with exasperation and gave up his attempt at retrieving his painting from its jovial captor, to continue tidying the room. “It’s not ready, milady.”

“G’way, Dalf. It’s gorgeous.” Annalise took a step back from the canvas. Her black gaze swept admiringly across it. “You’d never think it’s ready. It’s better like this. A wee bit rough, here and there. Alive.”

Ydalf took the drafter’s pencil from his ear and pointed it at the rich darkness of his painted forest. “You see the trees aren’t rendered right. It’s all a soup.”

“It’s textural.” Annalise tapped a knuckle on the trellis-carved frame of the room’s voluminous picture window. “I don’t need to see every tree here when I can see every tree there.”

“You really do overflatter me, Madam.”

“You got three days to finish this yoke, then I’m buying it from you and stationing it up above the mantle.” Said mantle’s current occupant was a brass statuette of a scowling Saint Jordulf, bucknaked and bearded, with a battleaxe held strategically before his junk. Annalise slid it to one side. “Gotta get this bleeding exhibitionist outta here, anyway.”

Ydalf undid his apron and piled it into the bundle of furniture coverings. “Why would you want a painted landscape of the same thing you can see out your window?”

“Sure look it, Dalf.” Annalise looked out past her faint reflection to the rolling acres before her. “That’ll all be snow and bare branches soon enough. Me, I’m only ever here when the leaves are already drying and dying. I’ll never see this place bedecked as beautifully as you do. Let this lovely work be my consolation, yeah? That’s what I want. Not the real view. Your view. If you’ll sell it to me, I’ll be grateful.”

Seeking someplace less humiliatingly complimentary to bank his obedience, the balding man turned to Seth. “Welcome to the Manor al Ydris, goodman. I apologize for its current disorder. Who might you be?”

“Seth here’s my new man,” Annalise said. “He’ll be living with us from now on.”

Ydalf smiled, without malice (and Seth made sure to check), and bowed. “Ydalf il Destine. Your servant, milord.”

“Surely not my servant.” Seth stuck his hand out. “Pleasure all the same.”

“Uh—I please beg pardon, milord.” With embarrassment, Ydalf patted the pocket of his smock and produced a linen glove from within. He tugged it on over his paint-stained fingers.

Seth wasn’t expecting such a fast and firm reminder of his lost light, here at the unlit capital of the continent. It didn’t escape him that this sober moment wouldn’t have happened if he’d accepted a bow rather than insisting on a handshake. He followed through regardless and pumped the man’s hand with enthusiasm, and even managed to smother the urge to find out what was on the end of that lovely little silver chain trailing out of Ydalf’s pocket.

“Don’t take any offense, love,” Annalise said. “The lit of the Necropolis are a careful lot. Going through life with so many unlit crossing their paths—it’s not like the countryside where you’ll shake a colorless hand once a year. They have to be judicious.”

Ofelia pulled at the corner of a lumpen white shroud and revealed a richly red leather armchair, its back stitched into a precise conch-shell crescent. “Where’s Miniara?”

“She, uh…” Ydalf’s lips pursed. Something about Ofelia’s attention discomfited him. “She’s upstairs.”

Ofelia stepped from the drawing room, to the curved foot of the manor’s wide, sunlit stairwell. “Miniara, dear,” she called. “Your lady is in residence. Come on your own time, but do come.”

Ydalf seemed to put his employer’s daughter out of his mind. “Shall I show your guests to their rooms, Madam Verdugo?”

“Seth’s staying in mine.” Annalise steered their stray Shaheilli guest by the shoulder to stand before Ydalf’s bespectacled eye. “Riccana has her pick of the lot. Will you go with Ydalf?”

Riccana nodded. She was still maintaining her stony silence, but as she followed Ydalf down the first floor hallway, her finger traced along the geometric banding carved into the wainscot at her waist. The wonder of being within all this Necropolitan wealth, showing through.

There was movement at the top of the staircase. A girl, in her late teens or early twenties, stood framed in the dramatic green of the second-floor circle window.

“Here she is.” Ofelia leaned against the staircase’s heavy banister.

“Mistress Ofelia.” The girl swallowed against her high, lacy collar. “Good—good afternoon, milady.”

“Come down here, Miniara.” Ofelia’s voice brooked no resistance, and the girl offered none. She descended the stairs with a tread trained in unobtrusiveness. Not a thief’s stance, though with a few adjustments she could passably get there. This was a servant—if the drawn-in, hesitant gait didn’t give it away, the primly pressed ankle-length onyx dress, with its high lacy collar and its silvery trim, did. Her downcast fawn eyes were large and framed with long, delicate lashes.

She wore lacy black gloves, so Seth couldn’t see her fingers—but the tips of her ears were pearly white. And her ringlets of chestnut hair darkened to jet at their edges. Here was a girl whose light was slowly, softly going out.

Ofelia’s gaze made the same trek his did, lingering on the girl’s hair, and the places it was out of place. “You were napping, weren’t you?”

“Your pardon, Mistress.” The girl swallowed against her lacy collar. “I—we did not know you were coming.”

“Your quarters are on this floor,” Ofelia said. “You’ve been sleeping in my room, haven’t you?”

“I—I—”

“Don’t stutter, Miniara.” Ofelia stepped closer to her maid. She was at least a head taller—the height difference reminded Seth of Seth. “Never think you can hide a thing from me, or that you have need to.”

Annalise rolled her eyes as she retrieved her heavy black boots from the corner she’d kicked them into. “Don’t terrorize the poor thing, Feeli.”

Ofelia acknowledged her mother with an absentminded wave. She remained razor-focused on the maid. “Have you been reading my books?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“And which was your favorite?”

“Moskava’s Arboretum, Mistress.”

”A lovely choice,” Ofelia murmured. Her gloved thumb found a strand of Miniara’s chestnut-to-black hair and tucked it behind the girl’s ear. “Do you have it with you?”

“I put them back on the shelves as soon as I’m done with them. Right where they were, I promise.”

“I don’t mean the book, Mini. You know I don’t.” Ofelia’s touch departed Miniara’s cheek; her palm hovered close and open. “Do you have it.”

Miniara’s breath was held too tightly in her throat to reply. She produced, from the breast pocket of her uniform, a folded square of black silk. A handkerchief. With painstaking slowness, Ofelia took the cloth from the quivering girl and brought it to her nose. She took a long, deep inhale. Her heavy eyelids fluttered.

“Kept by your heart, all this harvest season,” she murmured. Her fingers flexed into the silk. “What a splendid servant you have been for me.”

Miniara looked on the verge of fainting. “Thank you, Mistress,” she whispered.

“I think we must have a salon tonight,” Ofelia said. “Don’t you?”

“Anything you like, Mistress.”

“No.” Ofelia tsked. “No, dear Mini. That’s no answer to my question. Would you like it?”

A vivid blush colored Miniara’s face. “Very much.”

Ofelia’s eyes lidded further. “Very much, Mistress.”

“Yes, Mistress. Sorry, Mistress.”

Ofelia finally allowed a smile to creep across her face. “And would you read for us? From Arboretum, perhaps?”

“I—I would like to, Mistress. If you will allow me.”

“I do not allow it; I require it.” Ofelia fished a fistful of score coins from her purse and handed them over. “Off to the city with you, Miniara il Destine. To fetch the other ladies. And some wine, I think. Dark and dry. And something beautiful to wear tonight. Golden, to match your eyes.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” Annalise said, with cheery heedlessness at the moonfaced apprehension the offer summoned in Miniara. “Take you as far as the gate garrison. Need to let everyone know that I’m back. Get the parade ready, y’know.”

Seth chuckled. “Sure. Get me a sash to wear. Something like Chief Exark of Balloon Crashing.”

”I will, yeah.” She leaned forward expectantly. “Give us a kiss.”

He stood on tiptoes and laid a peck on her cheek. She tutted, held him still, and gave him a real kiss, one long enough that heat tinged his calves where they held him up to his statuesque lover’s lips. Heat tingled his face, too, when Annalise’s son cleared his throat pointedly.

“Are you kissing, or are you feeding him like a baby bird?” Ofelia asked.

Annalise tugged her tongue out of Seth’s mouth and shot a look down the sharp edge of her nose. “You just played out some sort’ve upstairs/downstairs maid fantasy in front of us.” She pointed at Tiago. “And you I sacrificed a soul for, so that the girl you’re crushing on could keep her ribs caged. So you can both houl yer whist while I give my perfectly normal boyfriend a perfectly normal kiss.”

“The perfectly normal boyfriend who’s our age,” Tiago observed.

“We’re in the Necropolis now, you wee dose.” Annalise laced her heavy black boots. “Age ain’t even a number here. C’mon then, Miss Miniara.” She held the door open for the trembly little maid. “I promise I’m far less scary than my daughter.”

“You should bring the head, if you can,” Seth said. “Get it somewhere secure before the damn thing causes another problem.”

Annalise sucked air through her gapped front teeth. “Ah, sure, that’s a good call. Gotta get it ready for Alice.”

“What does that entail?”

“Stripping the flesh, to start with,” she said. “And it’s a devil to do by hand or knife. I know someone with bugs that’ll get the job done. Manky little beetles.” She blew them a parting kiss. “Back sharpish, my beloveds.”

Miniara il Destine looked as though she was seeking a hole in the floorboards to crawl into. None presented itself, and the nervous maid accompanied the jolly Verdugo to the carriage.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...221-estate
coming to Scribble Hub at some point