The Three Ouellets

The Three Ouellets


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Fact
All locations in this quest exist, including Ankhas, Ettermire, and the Fields of Khu'fein. All historical events and lore are canonically confirmed by Alerar - The Basics The Timeline of Althanas and The Codex of Thayne Lore. This quest is simply an expansion of some of those events.

All bunnying has been planned and approved.

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“We are not interrogating you!”

“Yes you are!”

“No! We just want to know more about you. We're tired of this. We're tired of the same vague story of your past. We want to know more!” Maelle said to her mother in a raised voice. “Do we have aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents? When are we going to get to know?”

“You won't get to know anything at all at the rate you're going!” Alix's emerald eyes grew wide and she retreated across the main deck of The International to finish her share of the ship work. Even in her roused emotional state, she was able to float across the hardwood floor with uncanny grace. “Your father and I have told you everything we can within safe boundaries.”

“But which part of it is a lie?” A quiet but piercing voice emerged beside Alix. She looked up to see her middle child's sinister smirk. Ludivine continued as she tied a rope along the bowsprit of the ship. “It's one thing to withhold information, but to lie to your own children... Tisk tisk. So which part is it?”

Alix remained silent as she scrubbed down the chrome railing of the ship. “The original name of this ship couldn't have been The International.” Ludivine said. Alix continued to ignore. “This ship in all its might is too solid to be as old as you say it is.” Ludivine went on and Alix continued to scrub. “Is it your age you're lying about?” Alix froze.

“Now that was a low blow, Lu.” Esme finally intervened as he and Vespasian sat at the edge of the ship's helm overlooking the action. “You didn't say that because it may have been a lie. You said that to insult your mother, which I will not tolerate. A healthy curiosity about your heritage is understandable and acceptable, but save the verbal attacks for your enemies.”

“I'm glad you could finally step in, dearest husband of mine.” Alix said as she threw the used cloth overboard. She decided not to turn around. Instead she decided to distract herself with the beautiful view of Etheria Port. Hopefully the earthen hues, the golden sunset, and the less than savory smells of the busy harbor would calm her down. And perhaps keeping her back turned towards her eldest daughter Maelle would keep the truth hidden.

Maelle was an especially talented interrogator because she didn't have to pressure her targets into telling her the truth. With her background in applied psychology she could spot if anyone was lying to her, she could find the emotion behind the words, and from there she could simply use deductive reasoning. However, a good spy, like every single member of the Villeneuve family was able to throw her off with proper acting and inserting a bit of truth into their lies if they ever saw it fit to lie to each other, which was a rare occurrence. Maelle couldn't get past her mother's wall unless she could get an emotional rise out of her, which she had already done by double teaming her alongside Ludivine, the black sheep of the family. It didn't help Alix that her husband and son simply watched from above in apparent amusement. With all of this around her, the Villeneuve Matriarch was too angry to meticulously watch her body language, eye contact, and voice tonality the way she needed to.

“By the way, honey, I am helping. I'm distracting the boy. If he was involved it would be Hell for you, so you're welcome.” Vespasian handed him a paper bag from which he extracted potato chips of blue hue. He stuffed a handful in his mouth and spoke with a muffled enunciation. “These are some good chips. A little bit sweeter than the conventional kind. Only in Alerar, eh?”

“What nations did the the two of you hail from, mother? Just give us something, please.” Maelle said in a calm voice. It was almost as if she was allowing some sort of catharsis to enter the arena of emotion. “Was it Corone, Alerar, Raiaera? We just know that given the lives we lead, we could loose the two of you tomorrow. I believe I even speak for Vespasian when I say we don't want to have to wonder for the rest of our lives. We love you. Put some thought into it. We've got a mission to go to.”

Maelle made her exit and her other siblings followed behind. Esme joined his wife at the edge of the ship as she ran her fingers through her auburn hair. He rested his hand on Alix's back as the two of them watched their three children disappear into the sea chaos that was Etheria Port. “You knew that was going to happen sooner or later, right.”

“Yea.” Alix said as she sighed in relief. She lay her head on Esme's shoulder. “I suspect this little mission of theirs is a front. They're going to find out about us. My worry is how much are they going to find out?”

“To find out every detail of our lives before we met would lead them into some dangerous territory that even they wouldn't dare cross into.” Esme said as he comforted his wife. “They're smart. They could just as easily wait for the right moment, and that moment certainly isn't right now.”

“I just can't believe Maelle.” Alix said with a sigh. “I would have expected some kind of antagonism like this from Ludivine, but Maelle? That surprised me. It was an unconventional tactic.”

“And which one of our children is good with the unconventional tactics?” Esme said with a laugh.

Alix straightened up as she folded her arms. “Vespasian! Do you think he's behind it this time?”

“Yes. I do.” Esme turned and paced towards the middle of the ship. “This will be the first time, as far as we know, that Vespasian has been involved in the investigation. You and I have done a very good job of raising three very capable children. I have a feeling that together they're going to make some real headway.”

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With his eyes closed and his ears more or less deafened, Vespasian was able to take in the full pleasure of his drink. As he tilted his head back his nose was able to fit conveniently within the rim of a large wine glass. His nostrils became filled with Khu’fein blackberries, Kachuck minerals, and Ettermire tar. His tongue followed suit as it explored a wealth of complexity with layers of velvety soft fruit and cedar flavors. Vespasian enjoyed his first sip and returned back to the real world. He opened his eyes to the smiling bartender as he peeked above the black liquid glass, and opened his ears to the symphony of organized chaos around him though his immediate company was silent.

“Bwael. Bwael.” Vespasian said with a sultry smile as he raised his glass to the ashen bartender. His pointy ears flickered in excitement. “I’ll pay you extra to take the glasses along with us. We’re due for the next rail car.”

“Go. The glass is on me.” The bartender said with a thick Aleraran accent. The land’s language was a beautiful one, but these people could make Trade sound abstract. “I dare not hold my favorite three Humans back, eh.”

“Thanks, Jhinrae.” The three said in unison as they left the local inn and reentered the wave of activity outside. They made their way towards the rising pillars of smoke in the distance. That’s where their ride to Ettermire would be.

“So, Maelle,” Vespasian said as he led the trio through the crowd while amazingly holding the glass of red wine still. “What’d you get?”

“You’re not going to believe this. Our two Human parents were born into noble families of two very not Human countries.” Maelle said before she took a sip of the platinum liquid that was her sweet plum wine.

“So we’ve been looking in the wrong places all these years?” Ludivine said as she grasped her bronze glass of whiskey. “Salvar and Corone would be the only Althanas countries with an established lineage of Human nobility. Were Mother and Father even nobility?”

“That part was the truth. When I asked about Salvar and Corone earlier in the confrontation, the corner of Mother’s mouth twitched. It was like a half second smile, which meant I was going in the wrong direction and she enjoyed sending me on a wild goose chase. It’s when I mentioned Alerar and Raiaera that her body language became reclusive. Did you two notice that?”

“No. We don’t notice half the things you do.” Ludivine said with a roll of her jade eyes. “But if you’re right that begs a question. Are the two people we know today occupying the original form they were born in?”

“The answer to that is no.” Maelle said as a mischievous smile more worthy of her younger siblings emerged. “Lu, you were on to something when you hounded Mother about the age of the ship and her age. So much so that Father saw it fit to intervene. They’ve been lying about their age and the ship’s age. It’s safe to assume that they acquired a new ship before I was born at the latest.”

“Alright. This changes our approach.” Vespasian could imagine that. Each member of the family had in their possession a small sketchbook containing drawings of different Althanas peoples. When they looked upon these drawings and lay to rest they would wake up as said person. This was not illusionary magic, this was complete and utter biological transformation, which was confirmed on a recent mission when Vespasian used a secret Aleraran invention to examine his own cells. If a Villeneuve’s biology was changed then their age was changed as well, and their parents could have cheated natural death for thousands of years. “Does everything else in the story check out?”

“As far as I can tell. They met each other, fell in love, faked their death by way of house fire but were too hasty to leave any kind of body behind. But now we have a potential of thousands of years to look into.” Maelle paused and her face suddenly grew somber and her amber eyes seemed to gloss over. “I feel bad about the way I did that to her. I knew I would have been able to do that for years now, but I didn’t do it. She’s our Mother, not our target.”

“I know.” Vespasian placed a hand on Maelle’s shoulder and looked at Ludivine with a face of gratitude. “If I could have done it I wouldn’t have put the two of you up to it. We’ve made some real progress already. I promise your actions won’t be in vain.”

“Where are we going?” Ludivine said as the three passed under a wrought steel archway. Before them stood a colossal chain of wooden boxes that stretched further than the eye could see. They had windows, roofs, and giant steel wheels. There was a strange smell, a smell of something burning, but it was a mystery as to exactly what it was.

“We’re still going to Ankhas.” Vespasian said as he flashed a piece of paper to a guard clad in the colors of his nation. “This revelation won’t change our plans too much.”

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Two days later the Villeneuves entered the South entrance of the Library of Ettermire. The great azure lit dome of the library hung far above them almost mimicking the sky itself. They could tell they were in a library for as soon as they stepped in Maelle’s sensitive nose took in the dust of a thousand years and reacted in a sneeze more befitting an Orc. Her younger siblings nearly leaped out of their grey cloaks, just as she almost exploded out of her own.

“So what’s the plan?” Ludivine said as she floated silently into a valley of bookcases. She became satiated in the shadow caused by the tall structure. “What are we looking for?”

“We’re looking for the cold cases, preferably the ones dealing with arson.” Vespasian said as he took in his surroundings and handed Maelle a handkerchief.

“Fire is very common in an industrial nation.” Maelle took the cloth and wiped her nose. “There must be thousands of reported cases, and that’s not counting the ones that may not have been reported.”

“Well then let me help you out. We’re looking for a case of unsolved arson regarding a noble residence where a body was never found between fifty years ago and seventy five hundred years ago. Be lenient with your Aleraran vocabulary. I don’t think the word arson goes back too far.”

“What!?” The two women said in unison.

“I know that sounds like a lot.” Vespasian said with his hands in the air. “But it’s not when you look at the numbers. The nobility of Alerar has always occupied half a percentage point of the population. That’s at most eighty thousand Dark Elves with a life expectancy of five to six thousand years, a notoriously high socioeconomic status, and a birthrate of approximately two surviving children per mother. Add that with suspicious arson with a body missing and we’ll have narrowed it down quite a bit.”

“This was your plan?” Ludivine said from the shadows. Vespasian could see her cloaked silhouette and could tell she had her hands on her hips. He simply nodded. “In that case we’re going to need some assistance. Does this library have any staff?”

“I think so.” Maelle made her way across the center of the building near an immense desk, where alongside a mountain of books was a young woman of pale complexion and flat black hair. “Sjaad'ur uns'aa, lle'warin. Udos inbal natha ves dubo ilindith pholor udossta rahi, lu' udos zhahen nictus dos gumash tlu d' xxizz... Qualla. Udos orn'la tlu mal'rak wun dosst n'belaern.”

Quote:

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Translation
Maelle, prior reply: “Excuse me, miss. We have a very hard task on our hands, and we were hopping you could be of help. Please. We would forever be in your debt.”

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Somewhere deep in the hundred-billion-piece orchestra of grinding gears and firing neurons that was her mind, Lillian had registered a voice from the outside world as nothing more than a point of aberrant data. In her defense, it had been days since her last confabulation with another sentient entity, a dire lack of interpersonal communication that her recent stints in the library of Ettermire had done nothing to remedy. Moreover, there was an unspoken rule here in these scholar-hallowed grounds that no soul was to invade another’s intellectual space, which was, point of fact, often defined by endless stacks of books, scripts and reams of paper arranged in a generally circular array around the subject – much like the one surrounding her right now, a bulwark rarely failing. Thus, in light of that, the mere notion that someone could have actually spoken to her was ludicrous.

Just as her brain prepared to discard this seemingly-irrelevant packet of information, however, the girl’s eyes wandered up in an attempt to dispel any reasonable doubt. Much to her surprise, she instead found a comely woman with eyes like wells of amber, so brilliant at the surface yet somehow far too deep to even fathom. Lillian stared on at the stranger, almost rudely so, the endless dangling motion of her legs now stilled underneath the rosewood table. From the depths of her mind, Lillian was trawling back the woman’s request verbatim so that she could piece together a proper reply. Oddly enough, instead of answering that she did not in fact work here, as would have any self-involved scholar, the teenager decided on taking an altogether different route.

“Del heen! Lu'oh xal usstan xxizz dos? Gi, lueth udos shlu'ta telanth wun lil rivvin xanalress, ka dos hull'phir.”

Seeing the relief and delight on the older woman’s face had been a guilty pleasure for the girl, who knew all too well about her bad habit of being kind to a fault and seeking the acknowledgement of others everywhere she went. It was not the first time she had put aside her own projects to provide others her experience and expertise for such trivial reasons, and it seemed it would definitely not be the last. At this point, she shot up to a stand and rapidly sidled barefoot around the huge worktable that had been dwarfing her all this time, stopping short of her interlocutor by an arm's length. “Oh, and I’m Lillian Sesthal, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Likewise. My name is Maelle Ouellet, and these are my siblings, Vespasian and Ludivine,” she replied with a warm and disarming smile, distracting the girl from the fact that her brother and sister had almost given a reaction to this denomination. “We’re looking for records of any and all unresolved cases of arson that have occurred here in Alerar, within the past… seven millennia.” At that, Maelle gave her an apologetic look, the sincerity of which made the younger girl chuckle in good heart.

“You’d usually go to the constables or the dousing department for this kind of information,” Lillian began, left index tapping her chin in mild musing. Before the siblings could finish their concert of sighing and dejection, she lifted that very same finger in silent interruption, a dollish grin playing across her rosy lips. “But… every other month, they send their documents to be transcribed here at the scriptorium. You should find copies of all unclassified documents pertaining to, among other things, arson, larceny, robbery, aggravated assault, murder and workplace violence from the past few thousand years in one of the underground archives that are accessible to the public. Vault Thirty-Three, to be exact.”

Maelle positively beamed from ear to ear and her siblings expressed their glee by slapping each other’s upraised palm, a strange but entertaining gesture to Lillian. “We can’t thank you enough for this. This reflects very well on the quality of the staff here at Ankhas.”

“Oh! No, I don’t work here,” Lillian said in a hurry to clear the misunderstanding, shaking her hands and head in emphasis.

“Really? How do you remember everything about this place so well, then?”

“I-It’s not that I spend an excessive amount of my free time poring over every book I come across and perusing every nook and cranny of this library to the point of making myself sick but recovering just enough by the end of the night that I’m ready for a second wind and can thus repeat the same wearisome process over and over without actually losing grasp of my sanity or anything,” she began in one breath, “I just… I have a good memory. Really good. The, uhm… eidetic kind?”

When a decidedly long lapse of time carried without any break of silence, Lillian tried to salvage what she could, rubbing toe to ankle in discomfort as she gave the marbled floor a downcast look. “I also have a tendency to be overly verbose and circumlocutious. Sorry.”

“No! No need to apologize.” Maelle said in an assuasive tone, almost as would a mother to a child on the verge of tears. “In fact, it could really help us – your memory, that is. Would you mind assisting us for a while? I have a feeling the reference librarians here will not be capable to help us as well as you could.”

Having perfectly read the unassuming girl, Maelle had managed to align every word that could sway her to their side. “I would be glad to help,” she murmured with the dawn of a smile, until she realized she had been barefoot all this time. Sheepishly, Lillian raised an index to plead for a moment while she sidled back to her seat and recovered her boots. After slipping them on, she looked back at the trio with an adventurous beam. “Ready! Oh, and don’t worry, it’s not like these books are going to vanish while I’m away. It’s one amongst the many unspoken rules of Ankhas.” She paused to think, then said with a queasy look: “Actually, if you’re planning on coming back here one day, you should probably learn some of them.”

“Will do. Though, what is it that you’ve been studying so hard? We might be able to help you a little, to pay you back. He might not look like it, but Ves is quite adept in social sciences and mathematics.”

“Well, I’m studying the applications of superfluids on power transmission and generation as well as the slowing of light via high refractive indices, among other things. It’s all mostly theoretical right now, but I’m especially interested in using their property of overcoming friction by surface interaction to ignore gravity without loss of energy!

“But… maybe another time,” Lillian answered after yet another awkward moment. “Let me show you the way. I’ll help you look through the files, too.”

Out of Character:

Translation Lillian: “Of course! How may I help you? Oh, and we can talk in the common language, if you prefer.”

Maelle performed her usual superfluous acquainting ritual as her two younger siblings sat back and watched her work her magic. What Lillian the Little Librarian may not have noticed was the subtle way Maelle matched her apologetic tone with her own shy manner, how Maelle synchronized her body language with her own reclusive movements, and how Maelle worded every statement for the intent purpose of convincing her that they were two birds of the same feather. Vespasian and Ludivine couldn't help but snicker in the distance when they heard the girl's mouth churn out words like an Aleraran engine pumped out steam. Lillian's circumlocutious language left Maelle's brain in the dust, but within a moment or two the librarian was in their service. Vespasian was able to do the same thing, but over a much longer amount of time. Ludivine never truly bothered to charm unless it was a target she intended on assassinating in bed.

Maelle's vice was being too nice for she offered Vespasian's services as a study buddy, which he wouldn't have minded until he heard what he might have had the displeasure of studying. “Hell no!” He muttered to Ludivine. “I am not studying theoretical chemistry and applied optics.”

“You knew what she was talking about?” Ludivine said as she crossed her arms and stared the girl down. “That alone warrants your obligation to study with her. I don't know what it is with you and Maelle's incessant need to negotiate. I would have just asked her to help, and if she refused I'd put a blade to her throat and ask her one more time.”

“Now why would you do that to a bite-sized version of yourself?” It was about time someone said it. This Lillian resembled Ludivine in several ways. She was petite, pale, and had long black hair just like the Villeneuve middle child. The most prominent of these similarities, however, were the eyes. Even though Ludivine's were jade and Lillian's were blue, they both had a hint of sinister intent in their stare. “You could teach her some styling tips.”

“I could feed the skinny bitch a few ham sandwiches.” Ludivine said just before the overly petite Lillian came within hearing range. She smiled and allowed the librarian to lead them down a spiral set of metal stairs that made a clanking noise with every step. She didn't much like noisy surfaces. They gave her position away.

The quartet went down three floors, and the three Ouellets, the surname Lillian now knew them by, were all doing the same thing. While on the outside it may have looked like they were taking in the sights of a new and wondrous place, on the inside they were doing what their parents taught them. They were scanning every detail and committing it to memory as best they could, counting every step it took for them to get down to the third basement floor, checking every possible exit, hiding place, and vantage point, and they were even sizing up their new friend. Paranoia was a good thing for a clandestine agent. Vault Thirty-Three wasn't really a vault, which pleased them since a vault was a tactical deathtrap. It was simply the third study room on the third floor down.

As soon as they entered Vespasian assumed lead once again. “Okay here's what we need. Maelle if you could sort out all of the unsolved arson cases regarding noble residences, Lillian if you could sort out all of the missing persons cases regarding noble identity, Ludivine and I will wait for the two of you to hand us the files and we'll see if we can find a match.”

“You'll wait. I'll wander.” Ludivine said with a scowl at her brother. He nodded in approval. She knew her true role in this trio.

Ludivine didn't have the intellectual prowess her baby brother did, nor did she have the charisma her older sister had. What she lacked in those qualities she more than made up for in combat and tactics, and she knew, just like the other two knew but sometimes forgot, that it was wise for a team to always have a lookout. What better lookout would there be than a petite little Human girl, innocently perusing the bookshelves. Who would have thought that the smallest member of the family would be considered the muscle?

Every few seconds Ludivine would peek in between bookends and around corners at the staircase and the dark corners of the room. It was a lot larger than originally thought. The room itself actually wrapped around the entire structure of the building. Thus below the first floor, where the bookshelves formed a spoke wheel around the center structure, were more wheels. That was valuable tactical information, which Ludivine kept in her mind as she continued to scout on. She ran her fingernail along the railing of the staircase they had just used, and that was when her keen ears registered several voices being carried by the curved walls. She would have paid them no mind had it not been for the obvious anxiety in their tones. Tonality was something Maelle was trying to get her to catch on to, and these voices sounded like cellos in dark tones, which she was told was a sign of anxiety. She glanced back at the vault where Vespasian was now burried in a pile of files attempting to sort them out like a jigsaw puzzle. It was almost as if he was able to read her mind for he glanced up just before she looked away. She nodded her head in the direction she was going, and he signaled confirmation.

It was time for the Little Scandal to do what she did best.

When they had first set foot in Vault Thirty-Three, none of them had truly realized what an overwhelming task it would be to sift through an era of accumulated documents. The impeccable tidiness of the chamber was one of the foremost factors that brought on this deception; each and every of the black-marbled flagstones had been polished to nigh a mirror’s shine, and there was not a speck of dust to be seen, giving the vast archives a false measure of emptiness. Though the filing cabinets were many, they merely lined the walls like a pageant of unobtrusive adornments, their matte black panels almost melding with the backdrop. Only a massive slab of dark granite stood in the chamber’s heart to offset the illusionary void, and it was there that Maelle, Vespasian and Lillian had begun their colossal task.

They had endeavored to be efficient and diligent in their work, with Maelle flitting through all relevant cabinets on arson while Lillian search on the opposite end of the room for any case of unresolved disappearances, both focused on victims of noble lineage. Their drive had been commendable, but the more they did, the more they realized how much more was left to do. Vespasian’s growing frown noted how the piles he now had to pore through had become sizeable and ever-growing. Lillian saw his hands hover atop a stack, stopping short of the yellowed folder in dark contemplation.

“At our current rate, with an average of five minutes per cabinet drawer, with four drawers per cabinet and an estimate of fifteen relevant cabinets, it will take us up to five hours to sort out every pertinent file,” Lillian told him after a perfunctory calculation. It was no feat of observation that she had known his very thoughts: it was obvious they were all wondering the same thing. “I didn’t take into account the actual perusal and analysis of these files, naturally. Could be a few extra hours. Could be we’ll be sleeping here tonight.”

“I was afraid of that,” Vespasian muttered after a sigh, his hand smacking the folder in defeat; he had reached the very same conclusion. A deep breath later and he flipped the cover open, resuming his work with a second wind. “It might be better for us to think of a more sophisticated methodology. We’re in no particular hurry, but staying confined here well into the wee hours of the morning isn’t the most encouraging notion.”

“Lu’s got good instincts, having left when she did,” Maelle pointed out, partly amused but mostly annoyed. She leaned over the drawer again, sweeping her long, mahogany hair back with a sigh. “We should have seen it coming.”

“Um,” Lillian interjected without much conviction, feeling rather rude by interrupting. “I’m sorry, but as much as I want to help, I can’t stay for a whole night, or even five hours.” When she noticed what a blow those words had been to the two siblings, Lillian quickly corrected herself. “No! It’s not what you’re thinking. I just meant that I do have a system that could be of assistance in our current predicament. I didn’t mention it until now because… well, it’s not the most pleasant system for me.”

“That’s excellent,” Maelle said, quite relieved. “What do you need us to do?”

“This might sound demeaning but… opening and closing drawers.” After a silent round of blinking, she decided to be a thimble more elaborate. “They are quite heavy and difficult to pull for me.”

“Oh.” Though dubious, Maelle did just that, and beyond that simple act was a preternatural phenomenon.

The moment it had clanked open, Lillian produced a pair of exceptionally thin gloves from the pockets of her summer dress, gauzy little things that looked better suited on the hands of a surgeon. She slipped them on and dove into the drawer, expertly fingering the folders open and flitting through the pages without dawdling on one for more than a fraction of a second. There was an intricacy to those hundreds of minute and economic movements that reminded her of a seamstress’ hands, a deftness most unexpected in this girl. Vespasian had unknowingly risen from his seat, standing in a half-crouch as he watched her work, seeing the flitting of paper reflected into deadened eyes that processed and absorbed with the frightening efficiency of a machine.

Every once in a while, she would remove a folder she had already flitted through from the drawer and throw it atop the cabinet. Reaching the end of the drawer, she would merely draw back, watch Maelle shove the drawer to a close and pull the next out, and step in again. Every twenty five seconds or so, she would step back and step in as Maelle repeated the same motions over and over.

“Can... can you actually understand anything you read like that?” Vespasian asked after a stretch of dumbstruck silence, now wholly incredulous. “How do you even read at that speed?”

“Not reading, processing,” she replied mechanically, without losing a beat in her work. “I take pictures. Let my brain sort out the rest. Process of elimination. Discard every file that contains no mention of a royal or a noble title. Discard all remaining files whose victims are not noble. Whose bodies were found.” Though she had spoken brokenly, Lillian seemed to have been convincing enough, as Vespasian merely watched the piles accumulate, happy to see that there were still very few. A look from Maelle was all he needed to remember his own task, however, and he sat back to work on the stacks he had already been given.

A little less than twenty five minutes later, the last of the filing cabinets clanged to a close. Exhausted, Lillian propped her back on one of them, and slowly slid down to sit on the floor. Maelle herself had worked quite a sweat, and she realized that the smaller girl would have collapsed halfway through the process if she had not asked for her help.

“Twelve files, but one final step,” Lillian said between huffs and puffs as she massaged her sore forearms. Her fingers felt on fire, but at least she seemed glad to have worn her gloves. Without them, she was not sure how many pints of blood she would have lost through paper cuts. Maelle then extended her a hand, which she gladly accepted.

“Help me spread all the papers on the floor,” Lillian asked Maelle, taking all previously picked files to the spotless floor. With the little girl’s assurance that there would be no problem, they strewed them out haphazardly until each and every leaf was visible. “I require an overall view of the information remaining. Any out-of-place detail that I missed in the first run-through will become readily obvious, and can thus be discarded. I would do so mentally, but I no longer have the energy to think on that level.”

“It’s a relief to hear that: anymore and I’d have to label you a machine,” Vespasian said after pushing his chair back and exhaling all of his pent-up stress, popping a few vertebrae in the occasion. “I finished on my end: one Luana Selvis Eleriaxim, daughter of Burgraf Armand Eleriaxim. Reported missing seven hundred and eighty-eight years ago after their summer resort in Etheria Port burned down. Most everything was ash by the time fire-dousers came. The belatedness was unprecedented in their records, which might be explained by some expert tampering. No corpse found on the premises.”

“We have two, here,” Lillian called out as she carefully knelt past a dozen or so files. “First is Princess Izlav Elemmire Chath, a cousin several times removed from the king. Went missing on the first year of the Demon Wars, or 3047 of the Coronari a Lindale – about two thousand years ago. Her mansion was burned down, but surprisingly, no charred remains were discovered that could belong either to her or her servants.”

“Is this the other?” Maelle asked while pointing at a file right beneath her eyes, to which Lillian replied with a nod. “Freiherr Jaelim Valaris, missing since the late summer of 4158 C.L., about eleven hundred years before Izlav. This is probably the oddest case of the three: disappeared without a trace after the entirety of his bedroom went ablaze. The rest of his manor was intact. The report also mentions that among the list of suspects could be foreigners, since no technology in Alerar was capable of causing that kind of controlled damage, and the only magic anyone deigned to use at the time was industrial alchemy.”

“And by that, they mean Raiaerans,” Lillian added. “Their branches of magic could be the culprit, which is why they pursued this case for near a century before it went cold. Not one single similar incident in all of Alerar’s recorded history.”

“Three exceptionally suspicious cases,” Vespasian murmured, deep in musing. “Though right now, let’s just be glad there aren’t more. But… you’re certain you haven’t missed any?”

“Positive,” Lillian replied simply as she took to a stand, flattening the crimps from her dress. She then began picking up the papers strewn about, absently reorganizing them in the correct order and folders. “If by some astonishing strike of bad luck, you come to a dead-end in all three cases, I can review the whole of what I’ve looked through by adding and changing certain parameters for differing results.”

“Good to know, albeit strange to hear. Your manner of speech became unusually sedate.”

“One among the several drawbacks of this method. As I said, fairly unpleasant, but fortunately temporary.” At this, she attempted a smile, but in contrast with the deadened glaze of her eyes, it came off as unnatural and almost blood-curdling, like the fanged grin of a demented beast. Granted, a very small and frail-looking beast, but a beast nonetheless.

“Thank you so much, Lillian,” Maelle said with genuine gratitude, drawing the girl into a light embrace. “You don’t know how helpful you’ve been to us. Without you, we’d probably have gone bald looking through all this.”

“I-It’s a pleasure,” Lillian said, her pale cheeks flushing a slightly rosy hue. The feeling that she had managed to make a difference in other people’s lives, no matter how small, had always been a driving force for her. For one, it was much more promising than making a difference in her own; she had tried, very often, but to no avail. Every step further was answered by several pushes backwards, as if the universe itself was loathe to let her breathe. After living one tragedy after another and inviting misery with every attempt at company, the girl had effectively given up. Everything was a matter of catch and release – long enough for immediate satisfaction, but short enough never to get hurt. Unlike most people, Lillian could not forget, and that included the pains of the past. No wound ever scarred in her heart, and no wound truly ever stopped aching.

A crestfallen gleam had crept into her eyes just then, as her brooding and a wave of painful memories began to overwhelm her. Lillian shook herself, trying to push any resurgence of negativity back to the recesses of her mind, long enough to leave the archives without breaking down into a heap on the floor. “Well, this was fun. If you ever need any additional help, I’ll still be here for a few weeks.”

Alas, just as she was about to head for the door, it swung open with vehemence, startling the teenager. From the other side, Ludivine came rushing into the archives, a look of urgency steepled to a point in those somber jade eyes.

“Oh, no,” Maelle said after a mere glance, the rising distress clear in her expression. “You come bearing ill-tides, don’t you.”

Ludivine only nodded.

Ludivine made her way into her prime habitat - the darkness. It was here in the shadowy abyss between the bookcases that she was at her best. Her feet became light feathers so she could not be heard. Her midnight blue attire melted into the shadows like liquid so she could not be seen. Here, in what seemed to be a higher plane of existence, Ludivine was free from all five senses available to most sentient creatures, thus she was free from all judgment. The voices became clearer as she seemed to float from shadow to shadow. It became evident that there were three of them. Two were taking a more aggressive tone, while the other was pleading. She could even make out a statement or two.

“We don't want those.” a man blurted out in a muffled growl that masked his true voice. “We want what's under the exhibit.”

“These are worth more.” an older man yelped. He had a thick accent that emphasized the consonants more than the vowels. He wasn't used to speaking Trade. “Honest.”

“In that case, we'll take them both. I don't want to use this.” the second theif, possibly a woman said. A familiar click filled Ludivine's ears. She didn't need her vision to know that someone had a firearm in their possession, but she confirmed it when she approached an opening. In the distance three figures stood around a platform on which a jewelry set was showcased.

These were the crown jewels of the late Queen Valsharess. The set included a tiara, several bracelets, and a necklace. They were minimalist compared to the outlandish jewelry even nobles below her boasted, but that was probably why they fit her so well. Valsharess was a humble, low-profile Queen who ruled from behind the curtain. Simple mythril sets with straightforward designs and pure diamond centerpieces fit the late Queen's career to a tee. The crown jewels were worth hundreds of thousands in any currency, but they were surrounded by artifacts that could have easily been worth millions. Why did these two heavily cloaked, but obviously Human men insist on taking the crown jewels? More importantly, how were they going to get out of the library knowing that security here was most tedious. There were guards at every exit, each armed with a firearm and required to check anyone who came in or out.

The Aleraran librarian knelt down on to the base of the platform and grasped its sides. The struggle in his face showed as he rotated the heavy thing counter clockwise, then pushed it aside to reveal a square hole in the floor. He reached into the hole and pulled out a black chest that he could hold with two hands. The crook raised his pistol and held it there a moment until the librarian got the picture, who then unlocked the chest with his master key and revealed an exact replica of the Crown Jewels of Valsharess. This must have been the real copy, but it was stated earlier that the replica was worth more, so why did these crooks insist on having this one?

Ludivine drifted away slowly and quietly until she was sure she was out of hearing range. It was then that she moved with more haste and alarm. She had no problem with thieves. She, being a realist, considered herself to be a thief at times. Spies were nothing but criminals working for a governing entity. Thieves, however, only wanted one thing. Money. They took things for their monetary value. Villains wanted something else, and it was obvious to her that these guys wanted more than just money from the crown jewels. That was what gave Ludivine alarm. She almost knocked the little girl over when she swung the door open.

“We have two Human malefactors armed with army issue flintlock pistols. They've come to steal the Crown Jewels, replica and original. They sounded Coronian.” Vespasian and Maelle looked at each other, then looked at her. Vespasian shrugged his shoulders. In their world they often had to let criminals get away with doing bad things because being the heroes would compromise their cover. Ludivine would have to give them something interesting. “They're thieves that don't want money!”

“Why didn't you say that in the first place?” Maelle said as she stood up. “Lillian, I take it you know the layout of this place pretty well. What would be the three best routes of escape?”

“Uhm, wha… huh?”

Lillian was positively flummoxed by this most unusual turn of events: while the last thing she could remember with some measure of coherence was saying that she was leaving and that it was very nice to have met this only slightly suspicious trio of siblings, the girl was now being requisitioned again, this time in a role no less vulgar than that of a divining rod. Even so, she complied with their demands, focusing her thoughts on predicting what route these alleged thieves would take – something that at least required some sort of scientific basis compared to mere water witching.

“Aside from the four cardinal entrances to Ankhas, there are very few architectural points of exit. As far as I know, the windows are locked in permanence and are made of alchemically-enhanced glass, leaving only two rather than three: the emergency escape tunnel in the underground and the door leading to the rooftop, where they might slip down the rubbish chutes that were used during recent repairs.”

“Only two exits to worry about, then.” Vespasian eyed both his sisters, and a succinct exchange of either glares or gleams decided their positions. Maelle and Ludivine had already begun rushing up the spiral stairway to head for the rooftop when Lillian interrupted them.

“But it doesn’t make any sense! All library-owned items and artifacts are tagged by sorcery, and would activate the security field once they pass through it, thus alerting the guards: whichever route they choose, the alarm will sound, and the library will lock down!”

“Is that a fact?” Vespasian turned to the girl, eyebrows quirked in a mix of doubt and anxiety. “I’d assume the Crown Jewels would be surrounded by countless security measures, which means they were deactivated somehow.”

“A librarian was with them,” Ludivine shouted down from the top of the stairway, her tone laden with impatience. “If he can remove those jewels, then surely he can deactivate the field!”

“No, he can’t! Specific members of the library staff can deactivate the security measures in order to move them from display to storage and vice-versa, but that’s all: only the curator has the power to shut it down!”

“Then what?” Ludivine snarled, striking the wrought-iron banister with her palms. The jade of her eyes had focused onto Lillian’s, dark with the cold and silent rage of a professional kept from doing their job. “What bright idea do you suggest?”

“Don’t you get it?” Lillian cried out, now pulling the leash on her own rising temper. “The alarm will sound! You have proof they had a rat on their side, unwilling or not!”

“They plan on tripping the alarm!” Maelle exclaimed, finally understanding what conclusion Lillian had come to. “It’s a diversion, and if they have one accomplice, then they could easily have more!”

“You mean the guards? Then…”

“We can figure out the rest after we stop them, Ves.” At that, Ludivine disappeared behind the door leading to the ground floor, while Vespasian, Maelle and Lillian followed closely. “There, at the northern entrance: I see them!” They heard their sister utter from the front, seeing only a flitting blur as she soundlessly ran from shadow to shadow.

Lillian looked over to the arch that was the entrance, still bathed in the light sepia of an early afternoon. Approaching it were two figures, wearing cloaks of black gossamer, yet wearing their hoods down. The only one whose face she could clearly see was the taller of the two, with dark hair in a princely cut and even darker eyes – not at all the profile of a thief, but of a noble. It was while she attempted to study him that she noticed him slipping something into the duffel bag of a hurried scholar, also heading out for the northern gate.

And, just as she had predicted, the wailing of a siren flooded the library like a tidal wave. A swarm of guards thundered past them, homing in on the shrill screams of an old man in the throes of confusion. One guard had tackled him, crushing him under the weight of his armor and against the cold marble tiles. In the ruckus, she heard the clank of steel, the ruffle of cloth, the groans of struggle, and perhaps even the breaking of a few sexagenarian ribs. Lillian also heard a most unusual click – like the terse sound of an engaged mechanism. “Shield your eyes!”

There was only the ongoing wail of sirens and a wall of pure, blinding light. Then, the heavy clanging of metal bars, falling all around the library. Lillian had protected her sight in time, having once heard the particular sound of this device right before going painfully blind. When the flash was gone, she could see a number of guards with their hands clamped shut over their eyes, while the scholar and his tackler lay motionless on the floor, their sides burned to the flesh by the heat that had been given off. Of the thieves, she could find no sign.

“They’ve escaped,” she said with a defeated sigh, her shoulders slumping as she stopped to rest for a moment, breathless from the run. “The guards on their side must have slipped them out before the lockdown.”

After recovering her breath, Lillian ran ahead of the siblings, who had stopped for a reason she could not fathom. She threw herself down on her knees and crawled next to the unconscious men, to check for heartbeats. They were weak, but still alive. She lay one hand over each burn wound, careful not to touch and infect them. Before she could do anything, however, the battleaxes of the other recovered guards swooshed down to cross at her neck.

“Trying to help your accomplice?” one of them whispered, the hatred seething through his grit teeth.

“No. Just the victims.”

“Don’t even- ”

“Stop,” said the other, realization clear in his voice. In a hurry, he removed the ax head from her throat. “Let her work.”

Lillian had not even noticed when the second axe slowly drew away from her neck, so focused was she on the sorcery that was unraveling beneath the palms of her hands. When she removed them, transparent webs of darkness had overtaken the wounds, smoking black as the flesh underneath seemed to mend before their very eyes. Without even checking to see if she had successfully saved them, Lillian drew herself up to a stand, then began fishing something out of her pockets.

The first guard withered as she handed to him the seven-pointed brass star that was the Mazzra Medal of Honor – one he knew had been recently given to a civilian that had saved the library, and perhaps even all of Ettermire, from absolute ruination at the hands of otherworldly entities that had been unleashed from the heart of this very library. “You’ve been tricked. The real thieves escaped after planting a decoy artifact in this man’s bag, as well as a blinding contraption. One of the two was a man with mid-length dark hair, high cheekbones and dark eyes; he and his companion both sported a gossamer cloak – I believe many of you remember seeing them before the alarm went off, but can no longer find them. However, they also had accomplices, and I believe they were among the guards stationed at this entrance.”

“You dare question our integri– ”

“You ‘dared’ question mine, but do you see me holding it against you? This is not a hunch, this is fact. Those who had no hand in this treason must have realized this by now as well: they would never have gotten away before the barriers fell if they did not have help from the inside.” She saw the acquiescent nods from many of them, and knew there was only one thing left to say to have their full cooperation. “I am fully aware this medal gives me no real authority, but if it is proof of anything at all, it is that I hold the best interests of Ettermire at heart. I would not make these accusations were I not certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were true.”

“What do you need?” asked the guard that had first recognized her: he knew her well, and had been there on the day the library had been invaded. While he had not seen the girl accomplish any of the deeds that had been sung through the streets for days following that ordeal, he had seen her on the day she was given that medal - had seen her scowl at being given the mask of a mere figurehead in a ceremony that had only been a diversion to their own failings. Everyone had felt the charade, but a false or undeserving hero would either have gone along with it, or not noticed it at all. To see her use the medal with a clear statement that it symbolized nothing beyond her true desire to help, rather than as an officious mark of false authority, made him trust her enough to have it rub off on his colleagues, bit by bit.

“I apologize, but we will need to question all of you: the accomplices will know where the thieves have escaped. I know this kind of task is usually assigned to your superiors, but… you can see where following protocols would do us no good.”

The three Ouellets stood and watched with a strange mix of amusement, wonder, and fear. They didn’t make it up to the top floor in time to become victims of a flash bomb, and as spies their first instinct was to hang back and observe before taking action, which gave them moment to observe Lillian in a rare light. In a matter of mere moments this timid little freelance librarian was able to command the respect of the entire Ankhas security detail. These were men nearly three times her size and probably centuries her senior, yet she was looking down upon all of them.

“Impressive.” Maelle leaned on the makeshift tower of pages and leather spines she found Lillian under less than an hour ago. “We should consider ourselves lucky. I'm pretty sure we would have been in the middle of a fight right now.”

“What's so bad about that?” Ludivine said as she crossed her arms. She allowed her hair to hang over one eye, which made her look even more menacing than usual. “Those thieves would be at our mercy right now, and the whole crime would have been prevented.”

“Like you have mercy to spare, Lu. You use it all to coexist with the likes of us. Besides...” Maelle's cheeky smile slowly melted away into a lifeless glare. “One of those firearms could have been used on us. One of us could have been dead.”

A moment of silence followed as a disturbing memory flooded their minds. It wasn't too long ago that Ludivine suffered a gunshot wound that nearly killed her. She was at the mercy of a corrupt Graf and his night-prowling entourage, but survived the attack. It was the next morning in the infirmary that Vespasian broke down into tears at the sight of his sister in a hospital bed. The gunshot victim herself was the first one to snap back into reality. “So what's the plan, Ves?”

“Depends.” Vespasian said as he sat on the table near Lillian's mountain of books. He watched as the girl rounded up eight guards and the rest of the security detail confiscated their arms. “Maelle, when you were interrogating Mom you said that you knew you were guessing wrong when she smiled a little, right?”

“Yes. It was only for a split second, but it let me know that I was going in the wrong direction. When people are hiding the truth they'll get a kick out of you taking wrong guesses, but they won't show it for long.”

“Do you think you could do the same thing on a larger scale here?”

“Yes, but we'd need one on one observation. Any signs of enjoyment will pop in and out in the blink of an eye. There are only three of us, and one of us is going to have to play the dummy interrogator, which leaves only two of us to observe two out of seven possible suspects.”

“Would we be able to repeat the process if we get it wrong the first time?”

“We would have to surprise them. Shock brings out truth in all. Every wall, every defense mechanism goes down when a person is surprised.” Maelle watched in admiration as Lillian continued to take charge of the security forces of Ankhas. That kind of respect was real because it was earned. All she had was fake respect brought upon by confidence tricks. She looked at Vespasian, who had a sinister grin on his face more fit for Ludivine. “You've got a plan.”

“I've got a plan. We’ll spit them up into two groups of four, and take turns interrogating them. I’ll play the decoy, and after a few moments of questioning I’ll pick out a random member of the group to accuse.”

“Make it the one complying with Lillian right now.” Maelle said as she pointed to the guard who confiscated the others’ weapons and put them out of reach. Other members of the Ankhas security force began to gather around to keep the peace. “It’s not likely he’s a traitor. That’ll shock the loyal ones and relieve the disloyal ones.”

“Will do. You two and Lillian will be there to observe the other three. We’re bound to find one, and that’s all we need.” Vespasian said as the sisters nodded in agreement. He signaled for the girl to come over. “Lillian.”

“Wait! Before we do this.” Ludivine said as she started for the opposite side of the room. She moved with such intention that it alerted the other two, and they were compelled to follow as she leaped up on top of one of the long tables. Now they knew she was preparing for something. Her ascent to a higher place was like a cobra showing its hood. She stopped in front of a Dark Elf who had just emerged from the lower floor, clad in the colors of Ankhas staff. They had never seen an Elf with eyes so wide. Ludivine wasted little time. “Why did they steal the Crown Jewels?”

“I am…” The librarian, a slender ashen Elf of adult age, was clearly still in shock. The man lived in Ettermire though. Petty crime was a part of life here. It must have been what they stole that shook him to the bone. “I am not at liberty to discuss that with you.”

Ludivine’s jade eyes widened to match the librarians, but not out of fear. This was from enthusiasm. This librarian had set her free. All she needed was for someone to not comply with her, someone to say ‘no’ so that she had the freedom to do things her way. Force and intimidation. Her right hand crossed over to her left side where the handle of her blade lay, and the sword strapped across the small of her back loosened in its scabbard. Just as she stepped to the edge of the table Maelle imprisoned her within a cell of civility once again.

“Wait.” The eldest sister said quietly as she placed her hand on Ludivine’s foot. She then turned to the librarian. They didn’t have the time to charm him into talking to them, but perhaps he would talk to a respected individual like Lillian. “Will you tell her? She has authority.”

He nodded. Ludvine’s shoulders slouched in disappointment.

“No worries, sister.” Vespasian said. “You’ll get your chance.”

“You summoned me?” The timid voice resembling a clarinet sounded from behind them Lillian had finally caught up to them, and just in time.

“Yes.” Maelle said as her face suddenly transformed into the epitome of sadness. “This poor guy was the one the robbers forced to disarm the security magic in place. He has something urgent to tell you and only you. We’re going to leave you two alone now?”

The three siblings started for the crime scene. Ludivine waited until she was out of earshot of the girl before she spoke. “Don’t we need her permission to interrogate before we actually do it?”

“She already gave us permission. Didn’t you hear her say ‘we’ when she motioned questioning? She was talking about us. Nevertheless” Vespasian said. “What she doesn’t know won’t kill her.”

Lillian smiled at her little brother's deceit while Maelle shook her head. Both followed his lead, which was becoming more and more common these days. Even though Vespasian was the least experienced spy in the family he was the most intellectually gifted and the most balanced. Everyone had their niche. For example Maelle was a fine grifter and negotiator, and Ludivine was a skilled assassin and turning out to be a good thief at times. Vespasian was turning out to be a jack of all trades, and while everyone knew how to solve a problem their way and everyone knew what they could do by themselves, he knew what they were capable of together. To them he was a mastermind even if he didn't know it yet.

“You, you, you, and you.” Vespasian said as he pointed at four of the eight suspects. “Lillian has given us authority to question everyone. We'd like to speak to the four of you first. Right this way.”

“Let's make this as quick as we possibly can.” Vespasian said as he led them out of hearing range of the others, which ended up being quite a distance due to the acoustics of the library. He had them take seats along one of the tables. He sat across from them and his sisters sat behind him leering at them one by one. “As you may know the thieves have stolen something extremely valuable to the library. Now I know this isn't saying much coming from a Human like myself, but I can guarantee you that if one of you comes clean with some information that will help us get the stolen items back we will work something out. No limbs severed, no death sentences. Jail time? Yes. But not much. We just need as much information as we can get to catch the real thieves.”

“Vespasian?” That timid little clarinet voice came chiming in once again. They looked over to see Lillian signaling for him to come. His face exuded a pleasant smile as he stood. She reminded him of an innocent version of Ludivine.

“That didn't take long at all.” He said as they walked away. “What did he need to tell you? Is it something you can tell us? Something we can use?”

“It isn't good news, but it is something you can use. Act like I'm telling you everything you need to know.” Lillian said in a lowered voice as her icy eyes pierced him with alarm. “The diamonds set in the original Crown Jewels of Valsharess were used in the Battle of Khu'fein to seal the Valinthe tribe away in the Anti Firmament more than seven thousand years ago. For generations those diamonds have been set in the Monarchs' crown jewels for who has better protection than the King or Queen. When Edari'axa took the throne he opted for a brand new set and decided not to include the diamonds, and Valsharess' set to Ankhas. Knowing the Jewels' potential a few Grafs created a replica worth more in monetary value than the originals.”

“The original set's ability makes it priceless. That King is going to be the end of this country. Thanks Lillian. You've been helpful all day.” Vespasian returned to the interrogation area where the four guards waited. His sisters hadn't uttered a word, which was a wise move. For the culprits a moment of silence was like an hour. He sat down, waited a moment, then began to dangle the bait. “We have been informed by one of the suspects that the diamonds set in the Crown Jewels of the late Queen were used in the Battle of Khu'fein. You know your history, don't you boys? It's why the Fields have such a reputation for instability. Tens of thousands of Valinthe are sitting on the other side of reality. Not dead, just trapped and angry. Your thieves are going to set them free.”

“Ves.” Maelle said. “We've got one. Lu...”

A blur of midnight blue shot across the table engulfing the guard at the far right. His chair toppled back, and he tumbled to the ground as an obsidian mist exploded into reality and buried him and his attacker in darkness. The mist was harmless, only impairing the vision, but the deadly assassin inside it was far from harmless. Noises of struggle and strife could be heard, but only the guard grunted and cried in shock... then pain.

“Alright! Alright!” A deep voice cried in a thick accent. The mist subsided and revealed a chilling scene of Ludivine standing above an olive skinned guard with a blackened eye and a few cuts to his clothing. He was tending to his right arm. It was fully covered, so Vespasian couldn't tell exactly what his sister had done to it. “They are. They are bringing the Valinthe back, but they need the Arch Bones of the Death Gate. I don't know anything else.”

“He's telling the truth.” Maelle said as she stood up with her hands on her hips. “He doesn't know anything else. I don't think anyone knows where the thieves went.”

“I agree. He and his fellow traitors have been informed on a need to know basis.” Vespasian stood up with her and signaled for the rest of Ankhas security to apprehend him. He met up with Lillian back at her mountain of books. His sisters weren't far behind. “Well we found out what they're up to. They want to bring back the Valinthe as you may have gathered already, but they need the Arch Bones of the Death Gate in order to get it done.”

“They need more than that.” Lillian said as her eyes darted into space. Vespasian assumed she was scanning the vast reaches of her personal knowledge for a determinative detail. “Theoretically if one wanted to they could send souls to or from the Anti Firmament with a single ritual, however it must be proportionate to the number of souls they want to send. If they want to bring back ten thousand Valinthe they would need an experienced Thayne priest for every five hundred souls or so, and the Gate would have to be quite large. One thing is for certain. The ritual would have to take place at the exact same location as the first one.”

“I'm sure the authorities have been alerted but we need to stop this from happening.” Vespasian said without any objection from his sisters. “We need information, but all my contacts are in fields that don't concern this.”

“All I have are government contacts.” Maelle said with her hands in the air. “And if Edari'axa's people let it get this far then they know nothing about it.”

“I believe I can help.” Ludivine said with a refreshed look on her face. Attacking that guard was a relief for her. It was almost as if she had just finished having sex. “I have an informant we can talk to. We need to get to The Bottomless Pit.”

“The shady little brother of El'inssring. So be it.” Before they stepped out Vespasian turned to Lillian. “You coming?”

When she heard that question, Lillian felt the call of adventure tugging at her heart, compelling the naïve little girl inside her to undertake yet another task that by all odds was too grand for her to handle. So many times before, she had abandoned herself to it without a second thought, revelling in the potential to experience things most people never encounter in their lifetimes; but in the years following the departure from her home of Fallien, the naïve girl had grown slightly more jaded. Every time she had succumbed to the call, it robbed her of something dear to her heart, and killed a little bit of herself. She had come to know so much, and so many people; she had accomplished so many things, saved so many lives, and risked her own so many times. Yet, even so, Lillian regretted none of these meetings and sacrifices, and were she given the choice to undo them, she would leave things exactly as they were. However, at the end of the day, she was forced to face the facts.

All she had was herself.

She heard herself lie, then, in a voice of bittersweet abandon. “Without question.” The answer fit so naturally with the honesty of her smile, but an attentive soul might have seen through those periwinkle eyes the faint breaking of her heart. Lillian knew all too well this was much bigger than herself, and that no matter how much the next few hours would shatter her, it was all for the sake of others – like it had always been, and always would be.

As the siblings were being ushered out of the library while the guards lifted the barred gate partway, Lillian began to follow suit when a hand lightly, almost shamefully rasped against her shoulder. Quietly, she turned her head askance, to see the librarian that had been forced to betray his own kith and kin under some unknown duress. His pale eyes, like blossoms of hydrangea, held beneath the shame a layer of sorrow restrained, almost as if he knew the turmoil within her.

The dark elf, however, did not address it, and she did not know whether she felt relief at that or an even deeper despondency. “Young miss, there is more I must tell you before you leave: as I’ve told you, the diamonds set in the genuine Crown Jewels are indispensable to the ritual, but the twenty priests they will need for a ritual of this size and the corresponding twenty bones from which the Arch will be built are not subject to such requirements of uniqueness.”

“Then any will do?” she asked, the worry born from this newfound information overshadowing any emotion she had felt before. “Then if they know what they’re doing…”

“Which, from my educated guess, they do,” continued the librarian, mirroring her anxiety, “they may have already found most, if not all of the necessary pieces for the ritual...”

“And the Valinthe may very well walk the streets of Ettermire within mere hours,” Lillian concluded, her tone laden with gravity. “Then we had best make haste.”

After picking up her backpack and a long, tubular item wrapped in cloth from her worktable, Lillian made her way to the exit, flooded with the gaslight from the streets, where the siblings had been waiting. As she slightly crouched to pass beneath the half-raised gateway, she turned back to the librarian, openly remarking something that had been bothering her for quite a while, now. “You know, for a country that tries to have nothing to do with magic beyond archiving and the few practical defensive knickknacks, it surprises me that the internal dangers you’re most often exposed to are sorcerous in nature.”

“Make not the mistake, young miss,” the librarian answered gravely. “This is not sorcery: it is religion.” She had thought it mere jest at first, but that cautionary glare in his eyes proved otherwise. As she ducked under the wrought-iron bars, she felt a surge of unease clutching at her chest. Still, even with this dreadful sense of foreboding, she would not turn her back on Alerar.

She would not turn a blind eye as the closest thing she had to a home teetered once more on the verge of ruination.

:::::

“This, uhm, this informant… can he be trusted?”

As they walked under the cover of night, illuminated only at rare intervals by the gleam of pipe-fed gaslight through the lampposts that lined the streets, the question went for a moment unanswered. Ludivine was staring her shier, more unassuming and diminutive counterpart down, almost as if those very same words the girl had spoken were flitting through her own mind, however aimed at Lillian instead. “Trust means much less in this business than good results, and the latter he provides. But in your words, yes: he can be trusted.” The assassin spared her another patronizing glance before adding: “You, however…”

“Ludi!” came Maelle’s irate interjection, cutting her short. “I apologize on behalf of my sister, Lillian. She didn’t mean to– ”

“To question what worth she is beyond deskwork and high-speed avoidance of paper cuts? I do mean it.” Without breaking her silent stride, without even looking back to show the girl any care beyond mere annoyance, she went on. “We won’t be able to work: she’ll slow us down.”

“How can you say that? If it weren’t for her, we’d still be down in the archives, pulling our hair out in hopes of finding clues!”

“I’d still have been on the lookout, and I’d still have found the thieves in the middle of their tryst. We’d have put our personal search aside for this, and you know it as much as I do.”

“Ludi,” Vespasian spoke this time, his tone as calm and assuasive as he could make it in hopes of tempering his sister. He held her lightly by the upper-arm, carefully pulling her back without alarming her honed instincts. “We’ve already talked about this: it was thanks to her that we avoided a clash with the guards. If they’d used their firearms…”

Ludivine violently shrugged her shoulder, pushing his hand away. “Don’t keep hanging that over me,” she murmured, almost hissing between her teeth. “This time, we’d have found a way. I’m not saying she didn’t make some things easy, but this isn’t about efficient filing methods and psych tactics anymore. Healing isn’t going to cut it when blood is spraying every which way, and believe me, this is what this night will most likely shape up to become: an utter blood bath.” For the first time since their argument began, Ludivine spun on the balls of her heels, sweeping her arm in the girl’s direction as her siblings’ eyes followed the motion. “Are you really going to let her risk her life like… wait.”

“Where is she?” Maelle asked, bewildered by her sudden disappearance. Then, it struck her. “You... you don’t think she left while we…”

“Debated her usefulness like some sort of army-knife?” Vespasian ended his sister's sentence dejectedly, pressing a palm against his face in a mixture of shame, guilt and regret. “That was terrible. I can’t believe we…”

“What’s the hold-up?” came a lilting, singsong voice from up ahead. They all turned as one, only to see that dollish face under the soft glare of a lamplight, arms crossed at the back, smiling at them. “People have questioned things much worse than my worth in a fight. Being compared to an army-knife is actually a compliment compared to that: I’m very versatile.”

“When did you get there?” Ludivine asked, her voice laden with a smidgeon of suspicion, but most of it was defensiveness from an unseen threat. “You couldn’t have actually rounded through and alley and ran all the way back just for a prank. I’ve seen you run in Ankhas: back then, you were sweating after walking up the stairway, but now you haven’t broken a sweat.”

“I walked up here while you three weren’t looking is all.”

“I’d have noticed you: it’s my job to notice, and not be noticed.”

“And it’s my life,” Lillian replied simply, but without a single hint of amusement. The words had been heavy with grief and stifled anger, and her stare colder than they had ever seen to this moment. “Nowadays, the library is the place in which I spend the least time. Even outside, I… pick up things.”

Vespasian smirked at that, remembering what the girl had said before. “Versatile, hm?” He could feel she had truncated the explanation, if only to vex Ludivine by confronting her in what she held as one of her greatest prides. To be matched on those grounds of predilection by a person she thought as nothing more than a meeker version of herself... it was definitely a straightforward way of alleviating any doubts as to her skills outside the stuffy walls of Ankhas. Perhaps at the expense of any future friendship with the assassin, but then again, who really did make friends with his sister?

“Lillian, I apologize… sincerely,” he added. “I understand if you no longer wish to aid us. We’ve already asked so much, and have only repaid you with oafish inconsideration.”

“Far from that,” she said in a hurry, eyes melting and turning sheepish. “It was more entertaining than insulting, I have to admit!” the girl exclaimed with a nervous chuckle, which she did her best to smother out quickly. Meeting eyes with the middle child of the Ouellets, she felt she needed to say one last thing. “And, also… thank you, Ludivine. For worrying about me. I really do appreciate it.”

Alas, just as she had expected, the assassin turned her gaze away. Deep inside, she had wished that both issues of trust and animosity would be resolved this way, but it seemed as if she would have to make do with only the former. It was the price to pay for treading on the woman’s pride, she knew.

“We… we’d better hurry.” As Lillian turned away to face the half-light that spanned beyond, they could see her fade somewhat, even under the glare of the lamps. It was as though the essence of her existence depended on what faith the girl had in herself, that every moment she was struggling to keep her body from being spirited away. Perhaps, they thought, this was part of the mystery behind her prior prestidigitation. No smoke, no mirrors. Only shadows of hurt, and the mask of a smile.

A moment of awkward silence dominated the air even though they were outside and among the busy Aleraran Capital. Ludivine looked at her siblings, who were both staring at her. They sensed her wounded pride like a shark smelling blood in the water, and they proceeded to strike albeit very subtly. Their blank faces slowly molded like clay, cheeks rose, eyes took on a twinkle, and dimples caved in, to expose faces of pure joy. It was extremely difficult for anyone to successfully strike a nerve with her due to years of judgmental berating by their parents. They didn't approve of the way she did her job. She was an assassin and a seductress who had more kills and more time in bed under her belt than anyone else in the family combined. Alix and Esme never approved, so they did everything they could to pull her away from her devious methods, including every conceivable way to damage her self-esteem. Instead of giving in, however, she grew stronger.

The black sheep of the family crossed her arms in front of her chest and started after Lillian. Her face, her body language, even her angry strut indicated that she was about to strike at the young scholar, but her siblings knew that she knew better. Instead Ludivine passed her and sent her a nasty look as she went by. It was a subtle reminder that this was her part of the mission.

The party followed Ludivine for half a mile through the colorful city of Ettermire. One wouldn't think that the industrious Dark Elves would make their capital an intensely hued metropolis, but it wasn't intentional. The various factories around the city spewed flames out of their chimneys, thus creating a brilliant golden canopy around the clock. Iron and chrome archways and clock towers were meticulously kept and had a luminosity of their own. Several varieties of fire-proof brick, which made up most of the buildings, created a rich tapestry of warm colors ranging from neutral to brown. Finally the streetlamps, all installed in different eras of the city's past created a rainbow tinted catwalk for the flamboyantly dressed pedestrians. The smell of sulfur and other factory substances saturated the air with a pepper like scent so strong that it could almost be tasted when one inhaled. It was almost as exotic as the spices of Fallien. The most beautiful woman in the world was the one who didn't know she was beautiful at all.

“You know,” Maelle said as she crept up closely behind Vespasian. “If we're going to stop this from happening we may have to draw some blood. I'll be the first to tell you not to judge a book by its cover so I think we need to at least read the first couple of pages on this one.”

Vespasian nodded his head and picked up the pace until he was right beside Lillian. “As rude as she was, and again I apologize on behalf of the entire family, Ludivine has a point. We may end up in some pretty sticky situations, and we need to know if you can defend yourself.”

Lillian looked back at him obliquely as they walked, and he thought he caught a wave of unease in those pale blue eyes, as if she would rather keep such matters close to the heart. "From what little I've seen of you all, I know you can understand why I'd much rather keep certain things about myself in the dark." She stopped to consider, mulling over her next words carefully. "Do you see that trash barrel, under that faulty lamppost?" she asked, pointing to the flickering light far ahead on the opposite street while unsheathing a blade from the rope belt about her waist.

"Yes, that's well over sixty feet away, but..."

Before he could finish, he heard the sharp whisk of wind and the hollow thunk of punctured wood. When he looked, he saw that not only had the knife struck true, but that the embedded cut had quite nearly sliced the bin in half. "Please, tell me that this was enough."

“It'll have to do.” Ludivine said casually as she turned the corner. They made their way towards a brick complex with a formidable crowd around the front. To the inexperienced, The Bottomless Pit was nothing more than another bar, but those familiar with the city knew that it was the core of Alerar's underground. “Vespasian, take her with you around the back alley. Her long range abilities will compliment you well when my man comes running.”

“Right.” Vespasian waved Lillian to follow as he made his way along the edge of the crowd and descended into the shadows between the buildings. Maelle knew the plan well as she stayed in the street in front of the building.

“Our target will make a retreat into this alley.” Vespasian said as the two of them stopped about thirty feet into the alley. “When he does I need you to wait for him to get at least ten feet into the alley before you give him a warning strike...”

Lillian merely nodded her understanding, punctuating it with the silent unsheathing of two aesthetically opposite knives. These were different from the dirk she had thrown and subsequently recovered in her prior demonstration, to the bewildered eyes of the onlookers that had witnessed this blatant act of vandalism: rather than cut from cillu glass, their matte black and glossy white blades were forged from pure prevalida and their edges had been serrated to an almost wicked degree. Knowing these would be more fitting for the task at hand, she twirled them once by the hole in each tang and receded into the darkness of the alley, her pale silhouette swallowed whole as if by living shadows.

Vespasian could guess she had taken refuge behind either the piles of foul-smelling sundries that lined the brick passage or the galvanized dumpster that was overflowing with broken bottles, but the action seemed oddly redundant. He had already lost track of her, as if by magic; in fact, he no longer had any doubt that this stealth and her previous vanishing act were sorcerous in nature. Perhaps, he mused, his sister’s wounded ego could be soothed by the notion that the mousy librarian had only managed her deception with the assistance of greater powers. After careful consideration, however, he decided to keep that little tidbit of information to himself: there was no point in prematurely ending the rare sight of a humbled Ludivine, after all.

He himself decided to crouch behind a nearby stack of straw-bundled crates, likely discarded after being emptied of their lower-class ale imports. Then was the wait: for a minute that had felt like ten, there was nary a sound save for the shady bustle on the streets by the evening ragtag. It all came muffled to the ears of the two lying in wait, so focused they were on the chipped, whitewashed door that lead into the back alley.

There was a low thumping, clumsy, hurried. It grew into a series of muted thuds, until it became the clear thundering of boots against wailing floorboards. The door flung open in a storm of heaving breaths and heavy foot falls as a bulky dark elf with umber skin came tumbling out, lumbering feet bending the three-step stairway that brought him to the brick alley. Another tripped down the wooden flight, scrawny head flattening against the back of the bouncer before he righted himself, frightened eyes buzzing every which way as if the end of days had finally come. The larger of the two spied to the left, hoping to make a break for it into the public eye of the busy streets, but his hopes were shattered when Maelle waltzed into view, blocking his path to freedom. He turned heels at once and dashed for the right, hopping over gutted bags of trash in his escape, with the other bumbling in tow.

Ten steps into his mad dash, he saw a ghastly face spring from the darkness, cutting through him with its sharp-blue eyes so wide and eerie. Two blades rose threateningly, seemingly floating in midair before flashing as one was thrown. Chips of rock pelted his chest from beneath, and as he looked down, the elf saw a blade of white, burrowed halfway into the stone ground, still oscillating. Lillian readied herself deliberately for another throw, in case the warning had been insufficient, but the bouncer was no dolt. In a final act of desperation, he spun back, but rather than seeing Maelle spontaneously vanish, he saw her ranks joined by that deadly vixen with dead, jade eyes. “Vith,” he cursed between grit teeth.

His companion did not have the clarity of mind to see defeat as he had, however. Seeing that the knife-thrower was nothing more than a child, he bolted in her direction, hoping to knock her out before she could take aim. Instead, he felt his throat ram against something that reminded him of a steel bar; his feet left the ground to fly, but the rest of his body came slamming down with unforgiving violence. Vespasian stood casually beside the gangly elf, right arm outstretched and as straight as a clothesline.

“Hm,” Vespasian began with a corner smile.“You walked right into that one.”

The Elf of burnt sienna complexion looked down at his assistant and opened his arms in a quizzical gesture. It was rhetorical as he was mocking the foolish henchman. “Seriously?... Seriously!”

“Tye.” Ludivine said with a nod of greeting as she put her hands on her hips. “It's been too long.”

“Alright. Alright. Let me guess.” For an Aleraran, the bouncer simply referred to as Tye had a surprisingly clear trader's tongue. It was as if Common was his first language. “You've either come to kill me, or you've come to get some information that will end up killing me. Either way let me know who you're after and we'll decide based on whether or not I like the bastards your after.”

“Neither,” Ludivine said with a dry face and an even dryer tone. “You actually have the chance to save your country. You may even be hailed as a hero after today.”

“Oh really?” Tye looked at Maelle. “Does that earn me a date with you, pretty lady?”

“In your hasty retreat, you ended up emasculating yourself thus destroying any chance of getting together with me. Sorry. I can't help my hormones. But hey...” Maelle said as she shrugged her shoulders. “You may still have a chance with her. Although you may not be occupying the role of the man in that situation.”

“Hey.” Ludivine said mirroring her sister. “If I have an itch.”

”A contagious itch...” Tye mumbled.

Everyone reacted as if they themselves had been punched in the stomach. A look of sheer pain was only a facade for Maelle as she desperately wanted to burst out in laughter. Vespasian turned away and leaned towards Lillian, who was covering her mouth with one hand and her stomach with another. “This must not be her day.”

Ludivine stood there like a statue unfazed by the verbal potshot. “Oh now Tye, you know I'm a clean girl. Or else you'd still be experiencing a stinging sensation in your anal region every time you sit down.”

“Gi shu!” The black clad henchman said from the ground as he burst out in laughter with everyone else. “Il della dos, ilhar vith'rell.”

“Shut up!” Tye kicked his subordinate in the side, but it didn't keep him from continuing his laughter. “You know what? You just killed every chance of getting your information. This judging panel is biased anyways. What the Hell is this? A family reunion? You even have an anorexic version of yourself cheering you on. I've got nothing to say to you.”

“Then speak to me.” Vespasian said as he tended to his stomach. “I'll be candid with you. We just witnessed the theft of the Crown Jewels of Valsheress: the real ones. We need to know everything everyone else doesn't know about the Valinthe tribe.”

The bouncer's eyebrows shot for the skies in surprise. He looked back at Ludivine for confirmation and the assassin nodded. “They're not extinct. There's something that everyone else doesn't know.”

They stood there in silence as they waited for him to continue. His henchman attempted to stand and Vespasian put a foot on his back, pinning him down once more. “Keep going.”

“You know about the battle of Khu'Fein, where we sealed about ten thousand of them in the Anti Firmament, right?” Everyone nodded. The bouncer continued suddenly transforming from a wisecracking man of the streets to a well educated conspiracy theorist. “Well think about it. If you're going after ten thousand it's easy to miss, say a couple of hundred, women, children, elderly and injured, right? Some historians say that several hundred Valinthe escaped and scattered around the world. A couple of hundred might not seem like much, but it's all you need to maintain genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding. Everyone here knows about Thoracis Rakarth, right? Did you know that he was a Valinthe? Most say he was the last of them, but I personally don't believe that. Even if he was the last of them, there's so much more to a culture than just lineage and bloodlines. There are beliefs and ideals, and if someone was able to keep that alive, then there's going to be thoughts of revenge.”

“Why did the Dark Elves and the Dwarves deem it necessary to take such a great measure?” Lillian asked.

“This is my favorite part. What made the Valinthe different from other Human races is that every one of them was born with a supernatural ability that corresponded with their personality. Everyone knows that a personality is like a fingerprint. No two are the same, so that made them difficult as hell for anyone else to take down. Ten thousand of these guys would be a serious security threat to us today, much less back then when we were armed with the standard weapons. That's all I got, but I can get more before the day is over.” Tye turned to Ludivine. “Which flag are you rolling under?”

“Ouellet.” She said as she stuck her nose in the air.

“This here is beyond the petty mess we're into. If someone's trying to bring them back, that'll be everyone's asses. If something's going down, I'll make sure you know.” The bouncer began to smile. “Now let me go and do my job.”

Ludivine stepped aside as Vespasian stepped back. The bouncer and his assistant returned to their posts, although just about everyone they were denying access to made their way into the bar. It was now Vespasian's turn to work his connections, and luckily for them those connections weren't far away.

“On to El'inssring.” He said as he shoved his hand high into the air and took his rightful place at the front of the group. It was amazing how Ettermire's notorious underground seemed completely indistinguishable from the rest of the city. The Bottomless Pit's reputation preceded it, but at first glance it was just a normal establishment that seemed a little bit more popular than the others. The Villeneuves, or the Ouellets as Lillian knew them, knew better. El'inssring was to the Bottomless Pit as Vespasian was to Ludivine: luxurious, welcoming, and still retaining a small semblance of innocence. It was the place where the youngest spy of the family met most of his contacts, not just because this was where the majority of them spent their leisure time, but because he liked it too. Only the finest of drinks, food, and women. It was not a surprise when the three siblings saw two very familiar faces loitering in front of the establishment.

The Villeneuve parents were known to spend their free time here as well. They sat at a table for two at the patio outside the famous Inn.

“Well look who we have here. Isn't this a crazy coincidence?” Alix Villeneuve said as she leaned back and took a sip of some fine wine that matched her hair. Her hazel eyes still held a tint of contempt for her children for doing what they did to her. “How goes the investigation?”

“It's going very well.” Ludivine said, with the original confrontation still fresh in her mind. “In fact we've made major headway. We know more than we ever have thanks to Lillian here.”

“We have something a little bit more pressing on our hands.” Vespasian said as he pulled a couple of chairs from the other tables for the ladies to have a seat. Even in dire circumstances he was a gentleman. “I'm going to run inside, but I'll be right back.”

“Hello, Lillian. I'm Alix and this is Esme, as my son so politely introduced us. We are the lucky parents of the trio you have so wisely chosen as your company” She leaned in to her husband. “Did I give birth to a fourth child and not know it?”

“I'm sure you've noticed by now that Vespasian is the only sane one of our kids.” Before Lillian could sit down, Esme stood up and extended his hand in greeting. “He gets that from his father.”

Esme’s hand held the same, kind warmth that did his eyes; they reminded her of Maelle’s in shape, but of a much deeper hue like dark caramel. In every other way, however, he seemed to have been the major contributor to many of Vespasian’s facial markers, his bone and muscle structure, even his height, but his most reminiscent characteristic was that playful corner smile, of a purity and innocence that had uncovered the delights of mischief. She was also amazed by how young he looked, seeming much more of a brother to the youngest of the Ouellets, though the thought of remarking this out loud brought a slight flush to her cheeks, as she knew his children would no doubt tease her for it. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” she started, respectfully bowing her head to both parents. As she righted herself, however, confusion crossed her face as clearly as a question mark. “Wait, what’s wrong with Maelle?”

The both of them snickered, though Alix had subtly punctuated her laughs with a vitriolic tint. “Good work, Maelle: she didn't figure you out yet,” she said with a voice like treacle, so overly sweet that it could make them shudder. Lifting a fine crystal flute to her lush lips, she sneaked Ludivine a charged glance that could be translated to a mocking ‘but you’re no surprise’.

“Nothing wrong at all,” Esme said as he sat back down, lightly tapping the marble table with his palms in childish emphasis; he hoped this would alleviate the rising tension between his wife and eldest daughter. He had no worry for the middle child, however, seeing that Ludivine had not even feigned interest in listening to this bout of small talk that doubled for a verbal exchange of daggers. “I hope they’ve not incommoded you too much, though. They can be very pushy… Lillian? Are you quite alright?”

“Oh, uhm, yes, sorry,” she apologized mechanically, having barely returned from a long daze. It was not that she had tuned out in the middle of this familial fisticuff, but rather that once the initial surprise of meeting the parents of the increasingly suspicious Ouellet children had faded, she realized something that should have been readily obvious to her from the very start. Esme… she had seen him before. It was not a chance meeting in some random crowd in a random city she had toured during her travels, but something recent, even excessively fresh in a memory that was already photographic.

His noble traits, his stalwart posture; that dark hair in a cut fit for a prince, and those even darker eyes. There was no mistake: he was the thief from the library of Eterrmire. What is more, from her height and ectomorphic build, Lillian would not be surprised if Alix had been his shrouded partner in crime. “I’m very sorry, but I’ll have to excuse myself for a moment,” she said contritely as she rose from the cherry seat she had only taken moments ago. “I wouldn’t want to be a bother while you take care of brief- uhm, catching up with each other.”

She bowed again, deeper this time before she made her way inside El’inssring, her boots padding along the alabaster terrace in muted clicks. Meeting her halfway inside was Vespasian, who had just parted ways with a wily and stunning young blonde in an elegant dress of red taffeta, who was clinging almost suggestively to her escort for the night, a fine but somewhat statuesque dark elf. Likely was she a past partner in whatever business the Ouellets dealt with in their everyday lives, who from the looks of it found satisfaction in more than the young man’s good results. As Vespasian stepped away from the lustrous bar after picking up a pewter platter laden with a variety of drinks – no doubt favorites of his sisters and his own, with a virgin strawberry cocktail for the librarian – Lillian rushed to him, the alarm in her eyes dipping his spirits for the space of an instant. “I thought you looked like you might like a strawberry drink.”

“No, I mean yes I do, I love… how can I look like I like strawberries?” she asked, eyebrows quirking inquisitively. “But no, that’s not what I came to tell you: Ves, it’s your father…”

“Did he offend you? Believe me, anything he says can be taken as innocently as it sounds. He really is just like that. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

“No, Ves, listen to me!” Lillian cried out between a whisper and a shout, tightening her lilywhite fists in exasperation. “Your father, he’s the thief from Ankhas! I saw his face, and barring a shape-shifter that stole his face or an oddly coincidental illusion, there’s no mistaking it.” There was a question in his look, but he knew there was no need to ask. Yes, she was certain of it beyond the shadow of a doubt. “Oh, and… your mother very well might have been his partner.”

There was something akin to the flicking of a switch in his dark eyes, and rather than the bewilderment and betrayal that she had expected to see, there was a very familiar gleam: that of cold, hard calculations, and the emotionless weighing of both cause and repercussion. Finally, he spoke, his voice stern and resolved. “Let’s have a talk with my parents.”

Self control was the main difference between Vespasian and his sisters. Because she faced so much deception with others Maelle couldn't help keeping her heart on her shoulder. Lucky for those around her, she was calm for the most part and it took something significant, like this, to push her over the edge. In this situation she would have approached her parents with a raised voice and tear-glazed eyes. Ludivine wouldn't have been any better. She often appeared completely devoid of emotion, but reality was the contrary. She simply expressed it in an unconventional way, sex and violence. Had Lillian approached her about their parents there would have been a fight outside. Vespasian wanted to scream at his mother and father. He wanted to punch them both in the face, but he had the control to do neither. Instead, after a moment of disbelief, Vespasian continued out the door and to the patio.

What Esme Villeneuve was just accused of doing was a transgression of a critical family rule, which was to never knowingly partake in any activity that could directly lead to the collapse of one of the five major powers of the known world. The reason the Villeneuve's had been able to operate for such a long time was not because they were able to fool everyone into thinking they were just a prominent merchant family, but because the major governments believed that they could trust them. At any time the King of Alerar could have a troop raid their ship, have them imprisoned, or just as easily killed, and he would have enough solid evidence to make a case against them for the major crimes they committed in the name of the state. But he didn't... Probably because he was so sheltered that he didn't even know about them, but if he did he still wouldn't because they lied, cheated, stole, and murdered in all the right places and all the right times to help him and the High Graf reestablish the nation. Esme could have destroyed all of that today.

Vespasian went outside to the patio and pulled a seat out for Lillian before he took his own and served the drinks; a sweet martini for Maelle, a hard double shot of vodka for Ludivine, a virgin strawberry cocktail for Lillian, and a high gravity white ale for himself. The eldest of the siblings divulged the day's wild happenings as she eyed her ruby red martini, and the parents were clearly disturbed. For the first time in his life Vespasian saw the perpetual sarcastic smirk that was his mother's face fade into a morbid frown as she glanced at his father, whose easygoing demeanor became increasingly anxious. Lillian mirrored that anxiety as she sat there between Vespasian and Esme. His parents' actions told him everything he needed to know, but he had to wait for his sister. If he could sense their discomfort then Maelle definitely could, and she would eventually address it.

Maelle's words faded away as Vespasian took a quick scan of the area. No one else was using the patio area. It was simply them and an area of wrought iron and wicker furniture. Pedestrian traffic was low but it was late afternoon so it would become heavier within the hour. A certain bartender opened the oak double door but didn't approach the table. Vespasian got up and greeted him with a handshake, and suddenly there was an ink stained napkin in his right hand.

"D'jal ghil a l' toha draeval lu' t'yin dos joros bauth nindolen lodias?” The bartender whispered with wide eyes of terror. “Nindol h'ros hass'l jalbol bwael. Tlu pholor dosst i'dol 'zil ulnin 'zil dos shlu'ta."

“F'sarn taudl, abbil. Folbol zhah aluin harl ves ulnin.” Vespasian whispered. He did his best to express his apologies in his tone. “Ka Usstan shlu'ta inbau dosst heru'nga ol orn tlu whol l' bwael d'lil Kruk. Usstan iglata.”

"Inbau ol 'zil feir tarthe dal ghil 'zil queelas 'zil dos shlu'ta, lu' Dorn shar'tleg natha naut'kyn sol ulu ol. Nindel's 'zil mzilt 'zil Usstan shlu'ta xun whol dos" The bartender disappeared behind the door as Vespasian opened the napkin and read its contents. Moments earlier when he went into the bar to order he wrote a series of words down on a napkin for this particular bartender. They read.

Ehtnilav
Egats
Tnemnrevog
Epyt

The bartender responded in kind.

Ehtnilav
Egats: decnavda
Tnemnrevog: elttil
Epyt: nwonknu

It took him a moment, but Vespasian read it as follows.

Valinthe
Stage: Advanced
Government: Little
Type: Unknown

The bartender, being a mid level government informant, knew that there was a plot to bring the Valinthe back. That plot was in its advanced stages. The government was doing little to prevent it, but that wasn't all bad. Some situations didn't call for massive armies. In fact massive armies could make a situation worse. Nevertheless whatever Alerar's government was doing about the situation, Vespasian's informant didn't know. The spy put the napkin in his pocket, but didn't take his seat again. Instead he reached for his beer and chugged it down as fast as his throat would allow him. Everyone took that as a sign. Vespasian spent his money on premium ale like this to enjoy it, not to inhale it.

“Way to go Ves.” Esme said as he patted his son on the stomach. “I didn't know you had it in you to down a beer like that. I knew Ludivine did, but she's rubbing off on you in a good way.”

Esme had taken the bait, which was uncharacteristic of him. He was so nervous about Maelle speaking of his theft of the Crown Jewels that he was desperate for a change of subject. Perhaps now Maelle would address their nervous behavior.

“Are you two okay?” Maelle said. Her first assumption was that they were in the interlude of a dangerous mission and they just forgot all the necessary signals and codes to ask for help. “Is there something we can do?”

“We could relieve our Father of the Crown Jewels.” Vespasian said as he stood behind his sisters, who were both blown back in their own little ways. Ludivine sat up in awareness. Maelle began to cover her mouth as she couldn't close it due to the anvil jaw. “Do you realize what those are for?”

“Vespasian, Maelle, Ludivine...” Esme said as he sat up. “Return to the ship now.”

A shadow appeared over Vespasian's eyes as he winced in genuine shock. Their parents never spoke to them like children, even when they were actually children. They were always too smart, too aware of their surroundings to be left in the dark about anything. That was why they so adamantly sought their parent's origin. Perhaps Esme thought this would be a way of keeping them at bay. Instead it insulted their intelligence and provoked them further.

“You're in on this too.” Maelle said as she crossed her arms and looked at Alix. That wasn't a question. It was a bold statement.

“Why? Because you read me?”

“Because I know you!” Maelle blurted out with tears filling up her eyes. She began to slowly rise from her chair. Esme and Alix did the same. “Or at least I thought I did.”

A moment passed like an hour as the two sides stood and stared, one waiting for the other to make a move. The air became thick with tension, and hot with anger. It was all broken by the sound of a chair screeching back and away from the scene. Lillian moved away from them with her strawberry cocktail pressed to her chest. This may have been the most awkward family moment she was witnessing, but what made it even worse was the fact that this wasn't even her family.

“Give us the Jewels.” Vespasian said with a calm intensity.

“You can't begin to understand what's going on here.” Alix said as she crossed her right arm over to her left side. Her middle daughter did the same. Ludivine was past words. She didn't know what to say, but she knew whose side she was on.

“You're about to bring chaos down on this country. Things have just gotten good for these people.” Two rivers of tears began to flow down Maelle's cheeks. “Why would you even accept a mission like this?”

“Like your mother said.” Esme put his hand behind his back. “You can't begin to understand. The scope of what's going on here is beyond you.”

“You've insulted our intelligence for the last time.” Vespasian drew his International Rapier. It sang a soprano note as it reflected the sun. So much for self control. “You must be looking for a fight.”

Suddenly a force launched Esme off his feet with a subsonic thud, and the battle was on. Alix and Ludivine both moved like lighting as their blades clashed with a deafening ring. Vespasian jumped on the table and followed Esme as he cannoned back to the red brick wall of El'inssring. The Villeneuve Patriarch contorted his body so his feet could land on the wall and he could spring off of it as if it were the ground itself to spear his son. Just in the nick of time Vespasian was able to dodge the charge by leaping from the table and landing behind his father as he turned and swung vertically. His blade met Esme's buckler, which he then used to push Vespasian back. Meanwhile Ludivine and Alix took their battle to the middle of the street, where they exchanged fast and elaborate attacks with duplicate Wakizashi blades.

“Lillian.” Maelle said, barely able to speak for her lips trembled terribly. She pressed her hand forward again as she walked around the table towards her father. The invisible force that she commanded caused Esme to stumble to the side, but he simply rolled back to his feet. “This is more than a family tiff. This is the survival of a nation that has only just now begun to stabilize.”

Out of Character:

Translations Bartender: "All of you here at the same time and then you ask about these people? This can't mean anything good. Be on your way as soon as you can." Vespasian: “I'm sorry, friend. Something is going down very soon. If I can get your support it will be for the good of the State. I promise.” Bartender: "Get it as far away from here as quickly as you can, and I'll turn a blind eye to it. That's as much as I can do for you"

Lillian had watched the events unfold in complete astonishment, still holding onto her glass as if it were the only thing still grounding her to reality. She had gone through much in her life, but this was the very first time she had ever seen members of such an agreeable family deal with their tensions by resorting to out-and-out violence. Of course, the girl was no fool, and she understood perfectly well that Alerar’s survival being threatened was at the very least an attenuating circumstance. Yet, because of some deep-running scar in her heart, because of a weakness of mind she could not shake off, Lillian was unable to intervene. Even as her eyes trained from Ludivine, who brought her short blade down to flash and spark against her mother’s own, to the sight of Vespasian being pushed back from the terrace by his father’s buckler, she hoped and prayed that they would somehow be victorious without her help.

It was Maelle’s voice that brought her back from that faraway land of wishful thinking. To know it herself was one thing, but to hear the woman speak those words, eyes still swollen from her tears, was a waking slap in the face. Lillian vividly recalled her resolve at the library, recalled how willing she was to give up whatever was hers to sacrifice for the success of their endeavor. For this to happen, she had no choice but to enter the fray.

She looked to the streets, utterly vacant save for the clash between mother and daughter, just in time to see Ludivine tossed to the ground, her body bleeding from superficial gashes and small puncture wounds that riddled her body. Though Ludivine took after her mother in terms of skill, Alix had not entered this battle with the rage and overwhelming violence for which her daughter was notorious: she was efficient and methodical, having robbed the younger assassin of strength and vivacity with the surgical precision of each and every whittling strike. It was too late for her.

Vespasian and Maelle were not faring much better: while she had summoned some unknown, invisible force to wallop Esme to the side, the eldest daughter had not seen in time the swift arc of lightning that the man had subsequently sung into existence. The bolt struck her dead in the chest, to the alarm of both father and son: he had not meant to hit such a dangerous area. Esme watched in still terror as Maelle crumbled to the floor, too shocked to see Vespasian charge towards him with nothing but outrage. Alix, however, no longer hampered by her psychotic adversary, was already upon the young man.

The pommel of her wakizashi slammed against the back of his neck, but her aim had been slightly off, mostly due to the butt of the glass cup that struck her temple just then, and partly because a pink spray that smelled of strawberries had blinded her at the very same time. The woman stumbled back, wiping the beverage from her eyes and flaxen hair in confusion while anxiously patting the sore spot. Though the glass did not quite shatter on impact, it had slashed skin and left a bleeding trail. Bewildered as well, Esme looked to the left, only to see the librarian standing next to a decorative fern, her arm outstretched and her hand missing one virgin cocktail.

“This isn’t your business,” he said as quietly as he could, though there was no denying the rising anger he had tried to conceal – his beloved had been injured before his very eyes, after all. “Leave us be, Lillian. We’ve already had to hurt our children. Don’t force us hurt you too.”

“Every time,” she began, her gaze pleading. “Every time this happened in history, things could have been easier if people had just explained themselves. If only you would, this one time… then I might step aside.”

“We can’t let you hear it,” Esme replied with downcast eyes. When he finally looked up to meet hers, he readied his buckler and rapier. “I’m sorry.” Alix had now recovered, and she joined her husband’s side with her short blade drawn and her other hand on the scabbard. One last try at intimidation, Lillian guessed. She could not blame them, and to a certain extent, she appreciated their warped form of kindness. Still, she was not fazed: even after seeing the pair's rapid dismissal of their offspring, she knew that the three Ouellets had only lost so unequivocally due to the extent of their indignation.

Lillian could not afford to make the same mistake, and that was further made clear when the two lunged in a hurry to dispose of her. Having waited for them to make the first move, she simply crouched, picking up the fern by its fired clay pot and swinging it toward the oncoming charge. They broke away from one another to avoid it, realizing too late that they should have cleaved through or deflected it, considering its weight and size. Lillian had capitalized on the diversion to dash away and on their separation to engage Alix. The woman did not shy from the challenge, bringing her blade to bear as she bolted for the girl.

The challenge had been a feint. Instead of closing the distance, Lillian jumped back while swinging her arm in a downward arc for another throw. This time, however, there was no cup, no pot, only a deadly glass dirk that flew faster than the wind. Alix had barely any time to dodge the blade as she was already running, but she threw her weight to the left in the nick of time. Esme, however, had been caught unawares, finding himself in its direct trajectory. Smothering an oath, he hefted the buckler high and away, letting the dirk glance off rather than taking the brunt of its force, sensing that it might have otherwise punctured through the steel and into his arm.

And just as the dirk angled off his shield, Alix let loose a scream of pain. The cloth of her sleeve was sliced cleanly, and so was the pale skin underneath. Her blood trailed after the dagger, and it was then that they noticed a thin thread in its wake. They had been fooled by a threefold trick: Lillian had aimed so that Alix would step to the left, and with Esme wearing his buckler on the left arm, she knew his deflection would send the blade in the same direction, thus allowing the thread to slice into his wife. No matter if one, both, or none of them dodged the dirk, one was bound to bleed.

They had sorely underestimated the girl, and Esme could now see just why his children had allowed her to follow them beyond the sanctuary of Ankhas. This, however, only harried him to change his tactics. “Alix,” he whispered, but something ethereal now laced his words. As he spoke, a song came to life, reminiscent both of cavernous maws swallowing the wind, and of sacred fire born anew. Alix began to shine, her whole body exuding a halo of light that lasted the blink of an eye. When it faded, the woman dashed forward again, her footsteps soundless against the stone even as her speed doubled, invested as it was with the blessing of an Aglarlin song. Lillian cursed inaudibly as she backpedaled, but a screen of smoke burst right at her feet: she had not even seen her throw the pepper bomb. Before it could compromise her sight, Lillian tugged on the thread affixed to her dirk, letting it fly back into her palm. One ample sideways swing and a sorcerous wind was summoned, the crescent-shaped gust blowing away the obfuscating smoke. Much to her dismay, Alix was nowhere in sight.

A shadow from behind, and a chill shot across her spine. Lillian pivoted on one heel and raised her dirk high overhead, its edge meeting the downward path of Alix’ wakizashi. Her speed was not the only thing that Esme had empowered: the sheer force of the strike was enough for her knees to buckle, and one even struck harshly against the coarse ground. The assassin saw this and instantly pulled back, readying a thrust that would pierce her shoulder through and through.

As the blood rushed through her heart and head, Lillian felt the world slowing. The point of her opponent’s blade slid through stilled time, but the librarian still managed to draw her own weapon down, letting its broader flat rest against her right forearm. The short blade struck the glass dirk, pushing it away before it slid off to slash the girl’s arm. Lillian clamped her teeth as she threw her body back, letting the force of the blow carry her away while swinging one leg up with the added momentum. Whit a resounding thump, the tip of her boot struck the woman square in the ribcage.

Alas, with her body arched back, it was painfully easy to see Esme tower over her, his buckler raised and poised to strike. The steel swooped like a pendulum and struck flatly against her right cheek. She felt the bones in her neck pulled taut as her skull almost broke away from the spine. Blood threaded from her lips, and her shoulder struck the floor with a loud crack. She rolled a few feet away, her back hitting the wrought-iron bars that kept customers from climbing on or hopping off the terrace. Dizzied and struggling to rise, Lillian saw too late the stream of sparkling flames and the handful of pepper bombs that converged towards her.

Tongues of fire danced amidst a tower of smoke, shrouding the girl completely. Esme and Alix watched with both worry and relief, hoping that the girl had not died but content that they would not have to fight her any longer. Esme waited a moment for good measure before beginning a song to summon a small, localized downpour to douse the fire, but before he could finish the aria, he heard – and felt – a terrible rumbling, like thunder from below. The wall of smoke broke as pebbles and rocks flew outward like bullets. Esme sang in shrill surprise, raising a shield to protect them both from the hail of stones.

Lillian’s face broke out from the dispelled smoke like a ghostly apparition, the arctic blue of her eyes now ringed with a strange, sanguine red. Esme and Alix prepared themselves for another toss of her enchanted dagger, but the girl lunged instead, one fist drawn back in preparation for a simple punch. They almost felt like laughing until they heard the flagstones break beneath each of her steps, and pure alarm reigned in their eyes when she closed the distance as fast as Alix had before, while invested with her husband's song-magic. Esme sang as loud as he could, his voice carrying out through the city like a booming echo: the barrier he had previously summoned now shone like a sphere of golden fire, and it seemed to radiate like an earthbound sun when her fist collided against it with the force of a battering ram.

Lillian was thrown back by the ensuing explosion, feeling a great ring course deep into the bones of her arm. The barrier had broken into flaming shards, sending the couple flying back as well. They all recovered in time, avoiding a fall, and were now staring at one another across that distance in cold appraisal. Neither saw the girl as an innocent and unassuming teenager anymore. It felt wrong, but after what they saw, they could not help but think her a monster.

Groans came from three directions, and they snapped back to attention. Vespasian had recovered from the strike that would have knocked him out for a few more hours, had Alix' aim not been impaired. Ludivine was picking herself up from the streets, acerbically refusing any help from the few passersby that still roamed these streets. Maelle herself was drawing to her feet; she had one hand pressed shakily against her jolted heart, but she was very much alive.

“I kept them busy while you slept,” Lillian quipped lowly to the three returning Ouellets, her voice quavering as she tended to her charred knuckles. Now that they had all cooled off and that Lillian was committed to ending this feud, the odds were in their favor. With her blood-red eyes still riveted on their parents like those of a predator, she addressed them. “Are you ready to talk?”

“Oh they aren't talking.” Ludivine said as she shoved off the assistance of a shocked passerby. The three children stood up at the same time with new resolve and cleared heads. Their parents brought them to temporary defeat because they were heated from the betrayal, but now they were focused. Esme and Alix didn't know their children as well as they thought they did, and they were going to prove that now. “I don't want them to talk. Do you, Maelle?”

“Not anymore,” Maelle said as an incandescent aura of tangerine hue radiated from her body. She wiggled her fingers frantically as she straightened up. Just beyond them translucent heat waves caused little ripples in the fabric of the universe. Tears no longer ran down her face. Her voice was back to its calm tone. She forced herself to keep her composure. It was the only way they were going to hold their own against their parents. “Did you think we wouldn't prepare ourselves for a day like this? Vespasian.”

“I only have one thing to say...” Vespasian said as he tended to the back of his head. The three children had been working separate from the parents quite a bit these past couple of years, and they had their fair share of confrontations. They learned to work as a trio away from the watchful eye of Esme and Alix, and now they realized they had to coordinate. “Maestro!”

Esme and Alix knew it was code for something, but they didn't know what. Maelle was building up her power, Vespasian and Ludivine were charging for them, but there had to be more to it than that. Esme's tenor voice echoed through the streets once more as Alix dug into her battle stance yet again. Maelle condensed her aura into two spheres of white light and launched them from the palm of her hands. Esme brought his buckler, which was now latched to his left forearm in front as a sapphire tower shield of pressurized water formed on top of it. Alix took refuge behind him as the two heated projectiles hit the tower shield with a snake's hiss and became nothing more than steam, but they knew better. More was on the way, so Esme was forced to occupy his song magic with this defensive measure.

Ludivine closed in as her mist began to emerge and grab at her body like the tentacles of a black nautilus. Alix launched another pepper bomb hoping that their ally would launch one of her daggers in Ludivine’s defense. The resulting explosion would spread its contents through the air, and Ludivine would run straight through it not only temporarily impairing her vision, but also irritating the several minor cuts and bruises she had taken on. To the matriarch’s dismay Lillian sent a strong gust of wind to veer the projectile off course. Her pepper bomb passed Ludivine and exploded as it hit the sidewalk near some onlookers. The group of Alerarans jumped back in shock. Ludivine made it to her mother, and her dark mist swallowed them both up just as quickly. Instead of there being a cacophony of clashing steel and grunting lady warriors, Ludivine leaped out of her mist for her father, who was then forced to defend himself from both his daughters.

Vespasian had done the same thing, going after his mother instead of his father. Once he got within striking distance of Alix he slowed from a charge to a confident strut looking down his nose at his own mother. Her eyes showed her contempt for the gesture as she swung her wakazishi overhead. Vespasian deflected it with an overhead strike of his forearm with such velocity that it blew Alix back a few steps. It was easy for even her to forget about the steel laden International Bracer hidden under Vespasian’s left sleeve. He followed up with a shoulder charge further isolating Alix from the protection of her husband.

The second round of the Villeneuve battle royal was a complete turnaround. Vespasian continued to overpower Alix with high-velocity counterattacks, balance bewildering parries, and long reaching swings. She often forgot that her son’s blade was more than just a regular rapier that was only capable of stabbing. She often got cut using defensive maneuvers that only worked against stabs. Ludivine was able to consistently outwit Esme’s reflexes, inflicting the same cuts and bruises her mother had just a few moments before. For every one strike Esme attempted, Ludivine was able to make two, and due to his particular circumstances he was only able to stand tall when he moved, while Ludivine was able to strike high and low. All the while Maelle kept sending a barrage of her concentrated aura at the matriarch forcing him to use his magic defensively. The trio, with the critical assistance of Lillian, was able to overpower and outnumber their parents.

Suddenly there came a deafening clap of thunder that brought it all to a halt. Four men and three women, all Human stood in the distance armed with the latest flintlock rifles. They were dressed in Coronian clothing, tunics, pants and boots, and their weapons were raised at the Villeneuve children. However, they were all standing. One name came to mind. The Three Ouellets cried it out in unison… "Lillian!"

They had emerged from the crossway behind, sneaking along the guardrail of El’inssring without notice. Engaged as they were in their battle, the Ouellets had no time to notice a suspicious band of foreigners clad in sullen attires, and Lillian only afforded a glance over her shoulder when she heard the sound of a cocking flintlock. What she first saw was the silver tip of a firearm shining under the lamplight, then the man that was aiming it into the melee; but just as she had seen him, so had he seen her. Before the girl could alert the others, he adjusted his aim and pulled the trigger.

The roar of thunder boomed across a cloudless night. The ground shifted beneath her feet, or so she thought until the she saw the vast canvas of the sky stretch before her eyes like a silken veil over a dying sunset. Something hard struck the back of her skull, coarse and cold and smelling of industrial grime. Her vision jolted then, splitting and blurring from the raw shock to her head, but the real pain came from someplace else. There was ravenous fire burning in her chest, and an agony that radiated through her ribs like chain lightning. When she pressed a quavering hand over the sore point, she felt something warm and wet. “Did… I…”

Before she could finish, the siblings saw the light leave her eyes as they closed. Her body slumped and her hand dropped to the side, the inside of her palm stained with fresh blood. They screamed her name then, knowing full well that she could not hear them call. “Who in hell are you people?” Vespasian snarled as he turned to the seven humans, all of which were now aiming their own weapons at the three. Only one subtle sign from Esme had stayed their hands. “Why did you shoot her?”

His parents met the strangers halfway across the vacant road, hiding their own anger under frigid eyes. “Was that really necessary?” Alix asked, though it was clear from the authority of her tone that it was more of a reproach. “She was… harmless.”

“Doesn’t matter, does it?” answered one of the cloaked gunslingers. “She was going to alert these three stooges. Seemed like a good enough reason, you know, at the time,” he continued, referring to Esme’s previous request of sparing the three, which had saved them from being gunned down without a second thought. “Who’re they, anyway?”

“Just kids who wanted to pick a fight,” Alix said lowly, looking away from her children in dismissal.

Maelle scowled at that, but she said nothing. She was at Lillian’s side now, hands hovering above the dark wound in her chest in hesitation. Even after seeing that bloodied spot, she could not accept what she saw as truth: her face was so peaceful, it only looked as if she were sleeping. Seeing this, Ludivine grunted angrily and shoved her sister aside, steady hands clutching the neckline of the girl’s dress. She tore at the hem to get a clearer view of the damage done, hoping with all her might that the bullet had either been stopped by the sternum, glanced off her ribs or missed her vital organs by some miraculous stroke of luck. What she saw, however, was a darkening puncture above the left bosom, right where the heart would be. “Damn it.”

“What is that?” Maelle asked out of the blue, the uncharacteristic curiosity shocking even Ludivine’s sensibilities, as she felt this was a most inappropriate time to notice skin abnormalities of any sort. “No, I mean it. There’s… there’s something stuck in there.”

Upon hearing that, Ludivine hurriedly swung her head back, the dark locks of her hair whipping about in counterpoint. Her jades eyes scanned the wound again, and she could not believe she had missed something so obvious. “It’s barely bleeding… something must-”

The two cried out in terror as Lillian gasped awake like the living dead. The girl coughed madly, hacking a few drops of blood while she tightly gripped her chest, almost as if to stop it from exploding. Tears streamed out as she cried in agony. Vespasian rushed to see what was happening, but Maelle bade him to stop – the girl’s chest was partially bare, after all. The two sisters were baffled by this, but they helped nonetheless, removing the backpack that had broken her fall and supporting the girl’s back to relieve whatever pressure she was putting on her ribcage. “Lillian, you’re… you’re alive?” Maelle said, ending what had begun as an exclamation of joy and relief by a query of utter disbelief.

“Questionably,” the girl tried to quip, but the tears flowed out midway and she crumpled over like a leaf. “I th- ugh!” she groaned, kicking her legs in spasm by mistake, which only aggravated her state. She breathed deeply, hoping to calm her nerves. “I think... my ribs are broken…”

Ludivine hissed at that: “You’re lucky you don’t have a punctured heart, so suck it up.” Lillian immediately complied, too frightened to question whether that was relief or annoyance she was hearing in the assassin’s voice. “But… how?”

“I… when I fought your mother,” she whispered wanly, her words inaudible to the foreigners. “I was afraid she’d try to stab me in the heart, so…” Lillian paused, one shaking hand reaching for the wound. She tugged at the corners of the skin, wincing terribly, until she drew out a thick black net of webs. Caught within was the flattened bullet, which dropped with a ‘plink’ to the cobbles of the street. The moment it was removed, the sisters saw black mist seethe from the wound, and were wide-eyed as they watched the flesh begin to mend. “I weaved some webs under my skin and... and over my ribcage. Spread the impact... which explains the fractures.”

Just as her wits recovered, Lillian remembered what had caused her injury in the first place. She looked frantically from side to side, until she noticed the man that had shot her stare as if he had just seen the ghost of victims past. He drew his flintlock shakily, trying to aim; Lillian recoiled, bringing her arms up as a feeble form of defense. Yet, there had been no detonation. Alix had her hand on the man’s arm, which had been pushed aside to avoid any nervous misfire.

“Arrête”, the woman murmured in a language she had never heard before. “Tu ne vois pas que tu gaspilles tes balles?”

Seeing the man’s hesitance, Esme supported his wife by stepping in. “Ça ira, ces vauriens ne nous embêteront plus.”

Lillian wondered what they were saying, but the language itself was a greater mystery to her. One look at the three siblings, however, revealed something unforeseen. “Have you… heard this before?”

Out of Character:

Translations Alix: “Stop. Don’t you see you’re wasting your bullets?” Esme: “It's alright, those brats won’t bother us anymore.”

“Move.” Vespasian said as he shoved his sisters aside and knelt down to the wounded girl. Lillian immediately moved to cover up, which was a wise choice because he wasn't going to let that stop him from tending to her. He scooped one hand under her knees and the other went around to her right underarm. “We all need to get out of here.”

“But wait.” Lillian said. She was confused. They heard her question. “Do you-”

“Yes. Don't worry about it.” Vespasian whispered just before he stood straight up with Lillian in his hands. He smiled. “You must be twenty pounds of nothing in a ten pound package.”

All the while Maelle and Ludivine kept their eyes on Lillian, but their ears on their parents. The aggressive henchman with the firearm spoke again. "On a reçu la marchandise au coin de rue, mais on a entendu un fracas venant d'ici, alors on a pensé venir vous aider."

"Très bien.” Esme said. “On peut partir maintenant. Vous deux, amenez votre explorateur de mondes au palais. Et vous deux, allez chercher les sorciers à la place principale. Ceux qui restent, suivez-moi jusqu'à la cachette au sud de la ville. On fera nos préparations là-bas... et rangez ces satanés fusils avant qu'on ne se fasse pendre par les gendarmes!"

“We need to go.” Vespasian looked to the horizon. The stars were beginning to unveil themselves as the sun's final light began to retreat. It was almost time. “Lu, is your safe house close?”

“How close is close?” Ludivine mumbled. It was clear that the majority of her attention was still on the conversation. The Villeneuves often used a broken language as code to communicate with each other. As far as she knew it only consisted of twenty five words, but those words were now being used in what seemed to be a full blown language. She was able to make a few of them out. “It's about thirty minutes from here.”

“Too far. We need somewhere to go...” A great brass horn sounded off and echoed throughout the city. “Now. That's the shift signal for all the factories in town. It's officially rush hour.”

“Fine. Follow me.” Ludivine turned and made her way into the alley and the others followed suit. One of the foreign henchmen called attention to their retreat and offered to pursue, but Alix held him back with a mere command. “We just need to disappear for a short amount of time, right?”

Vespasian nodded. When he was certain they were out of hearing range, he looked over to Maelle. “What did you get from that talk. All I was able to get was 'two' and 'damn'. They were talking too fast for me.”

“I got 'palace'. Then 'main square', and... 'safe house'.” Maelle glanced back to make sure no one was following them into the brick valley. “Do you think they meant Mother's safe house on the south side?”

“I would say so, because 'south' is what I got in addition to 'sorcerer'... Wait.” Ludivine halted the party with a fist in the air. She backpedaled a little bit and took a quick look back at their parents. They split up into three groups, which confirmed her assumption. “They've split up. Probably heading to those three locations.”

“They did that on purpose. You guys know that, right?” Maelle said as she smiled with a tear stained face. “They knew we knew some of those words. They taught them to us, and they're not stupid. If they didn't want us to know what they were doing next we wouldn't have heard a thing.”

“So they were communicating to us?” Ludivine said as she crossed her arms. She looked back at Vespasian as they continued to walk. “What did you find out from your informant?”

“That the government knew about this, and they're doing little to deal with it. The exact details of their preventative measures are unknown.” Vespasian's eyes turned to the sky as a faint smile appeared on his face. “That's it. They are the preventative measure! The Alerarans planted them as a sleeper cell, and they're just waiting for the command to strike.”

“I - I hate to be the devil's advocate here.” Lillian said from the arms of Vespasian. She was so light he almost forgot she was there. “How long have you three known this code?”

Vespasian and Maelle turned to Ludivine. Her exploits in the spy trade began quite early when she unintentionally placed herself in the middle of one of her mother's assassination plots at the age of eight. Strange circumstances led Ludivine to witness Alix kill an Akashiman noble and two of his mistresses in cold blood thus making her the first of the Villeneuve children to know the family secret. It was that code language that brought her to that scene. “At least seventeen years now.”

“Therefore we have puzzle pieces that don't seem to fit.” Lillian said as she adjusted her left arm to ease some of her pain. Her mysterious spider-like magic was now beginning to do work mending her partially ripped dress. The crew emerged from the other side of the alley and merged with a massive current of pedestrians. She now had to speak over the hustle and bustle of rush hour. “You have this code that you've used for seventeen years, a full language that includes some of that code, a government sting operation... and has it occurred to anyone that they are speaking the language of the tribe?” She was careful not to speak the Valinthe name.

“Yea. It did.” Vespasian had a conflicted face. “That would mean the operation would have been in place for seventeen years at the least. You're right. These pieces don't really fit. Lu, where the Hell are we going?”

“Back there.” She pointed above the crowd they were engulfed in to a sign that said it all. The Bottomless Pit

Again.

Out of Character:

Translations Henchman: We got your dropped goods around the corner, but we heard some commotion so we thought we’d come to help. Esme: Good. Let’s get out of here then. You two go get your plane walker near the palace, you two go get the sorcerers at the main square, the rest of us will return to my safe house at the south of town. We’ll be setting everything up there… And put those damn things away before you get us all hanged!

“You guys are real assholes, you know that?”

Tye was less than ecstatic to see the siblings return to his establishment so soon. Not only had they not given his pride any time to recover from their previous encounter, but they had come like old friends seeking hospitality, any memory of the mortifying ordeal they put him through wiped clean from their doe eyes. That they came bearing one injured was, he liked to believe, the only reason he even deigned let them walk into his beloved home and meal-ticket. “This ain’t that busy a night, so you can take one of the VIP rooms… but I expect you to do whatever it is you need to do, pack up and vamoose, got it?”

“We won’t be long,” Vespasian answered in earnest, giving the bouncer no further consideration once permission to enter was given. He stepped over the doorsill and into a grungy barroom that catered to the usual throng of shady personages. Any measure of good lighting seem a luxury that the Bottomless Pit could not afford, but a single whiff of the environs was enough to persuade him that one could navigate this locale by foul smell alone. Maelle stepped in next, carrying Lillian’s backpack and the object she had kept securely wrapped in some fine cloth; her contempt for these shady venues was clear on her face, quite unlike Ludivine who sauntered in as if it were the throne room of a grand castle and she were its one and only queen. She waved a hand under Tye’s nose, then snapped her fingers thrice before he grudgingly slapped a brass key into it.

Lillian did her best not to look at the patrons, their hooting and whistling more than enough to paint a picture. Being carried in a man’s arms into one room of Alerar’s seediest underbelly was an understandably misleading image, but the sheer vulgarity of their comments and... suggestions was enough for her to momentarily forget her pain. Moreover, Vespasian’s refusal at letting her walk the rest of the way left her feeling quite helpless.

Grunts and groans came from the center of room, the only area with decent light fixtures available. There was a large iron cage there, and inside was a ring covered in powder and blood, some of it freshly sprayed from the bleeding face of an Aleraran prizefighter. Screams of both joy and discontent came from the surrounding audience in a barbaric choir as the caged men pummeled each other to bloody pulps. As was rapidly becoming the norm, only Ludivine seemed to take pleasure in this form of entertainment.

The screams and bloodshed were filtered out once Ludivine closed the door and locked it from the inside. Vespasian carefully set the librarian on the only bed available, although its sheer size made her look even smaller than she already was – most likely was it meant to welcome quite a few under its sheets, and definitely not children on a family outing. Maelle had opted to sit next to Lillian, in case the girl required any help, while Vespasian took a seat at one end of a divan with its stuffing spilling out. Ludivine soon joined him, sitting at the opposite end. One cursory look about the purported VIP room and he sighed: a sty by any other name would look and smell as dreadful, and here was the stinking proof.

“Before anything, Lillian…” he began gravely, leaning forward with his fingers knit. “I want you to know you can back out of this any time. We never meant to drag you into any of this.” Vespasian did not deign meet her gaze, clearly still troubled by the gunshot wound she had suffered moments ago.

“I have my own reasons for wanting to save Alerar, so I’m not going to run away,” she said with her own corner smile, trying to hide that she was still wincing from her fractures. She saw the look of protest on his face, but knew he would not go against her decision. “Thanks for the concern, though.”

After that, silence weighed heavy for what seemed an eternity, until Lillian tentatively broke the ice. “So… I gather you three aren’t the run-of-the-mill family?”

Vespasian grinned at that, his features somewhat softening from their previous gravity. After all they had been through today, that sort of light question was a most refreshing understatement. “No, I guess we aren’t, are we?”

“Code languages, reasonable paranoia, contacts in every social class, parents involved in a mission of vital importance to the nation… I’m sure you’re not typical government-workers, either.”

“Considering the circumstances, there’s really no point in hiding it,” Vespasian said in a tone that threw caution to the wind. “We’re spies.”

“I do all of the government’s diplomatic work,” Maelle continued.

“I do all of the government’s leg work,” Vespasian added.

“I do all of the government’s dirty work,” Ludivine concluded.

“That… that sounds about right,” Lillian said after a few speechless moments, blinking all the while. It had taken her by surprise that they trusted her enough to share such crucial information as easily as if they had been listing pet names and favourite colors.

“You’re hardly the standard-edition librarian yourself,” Maelle told her with a quirking eyebrow. “To think you took them both on at the same time… I don’t think I ever saw my parents panic like that.”

“But really… healing webs, enchanted daggers, sorcerous stealth and the strength of an ox? Just what are you? Heck, you took a bullet to the heart.”

“Ludi…” Vespasian chimed in, feeling that his sister might be flying off the handle again.

“Hey, hey.” She lifted a hand to stop him in his tracks. “I’m just asking to know where I can get myself some of that.”

“Well… I am curious about that,” he said after a moment's consideration. “If you have anything else you’ve held back, knowing it might be critical for whatever comes next.”

“Without going into otiose details, well…” She weighed her words, hoping to simplify the explanation as much as she could, truncating any extraneous information such as the nature and origins of her abilities. “Have you ever heard of… of wendigoes?” The three Ouellets visibly drew back at that, inching away from the girl as a reflex. “I guess you have. But rest assured, I don’t… I don’t eat people. Small samples of organic or certain metaphysical materials are enough for me to absorb a person’s powers.”

“Like... blood?” the middle child asked, intrigued. Lillian only nodded, almost shamefully. “Hey,” she began, a lewd smile spreading across her lips. “If you think about it… couldn’t it also work with– ”

“Ludi!” Maelle shouted in indignation, while Vespasian only looked away, uncomfortable.

“What?” Lillian asked innocently, feeling that she was left out of some inside joke. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Ludivine replied with a playful sigh. “But let’s just say that if I were you, I’d have another very good reason to do the things I already enjoy…”

“Moving on,” Vespasian cut in hurriedly. “Does this mean if we gave you some of our blood now, you’d be able to get our own powers?”

“Unfortunately, no. I need some time to process them, and I’ve learned from experience that in most circumstances, I can only deal with two at once, which I already am.”

“Then, do you have anything else under your sleeve?” Maelle asked, scooting over to the girl in genuine curiosity.

“Nothing… dependable,” Lillian said lowly, recalling the first power that had ever manifested in her. It was the direct corollary of her thirst for knowledge intermingling with her abilities: she could summon any random magical effect from a literal soup of incomplete knowledge on the arcane arts. The rub, however, was that it truly was random, and could be completely detrimental to her in the end. Most of the time, failure to cast this spell resulted in her being struck with a localized bolt of lightning. Needless to say that she only made marginal use of it, considering her utter lack of masochistic tendencies. “But I do have some knickknacks that might be of help!”

She groaned to a seated position, but Maelle stopped her from straining herself further, asking instead for what she needed. Lillian thanked her, pointing to the bag and cloth-wrapped object she had carried in. Rummaging through it, she produced a surprisingly large array of varied items, from the expected books and manuscripts to the unexpected collection of knives. What came out of the lot, however, were the black and white daggers she had used to ambush Tye and a pendant sporting a hefty chunk of green and spotted amber, which itself encapsulated a strange beetle with three horns.

“I had these daggers enchanted in Dheathain, at the Cearnaigh Criostal: the black one infects those with an affinity to light or otherwise ‘clean’ magic with a magical poison, while the white one does the opposite. When they’re put together, however…” She paused, snapping both daggers into one through hidden locks. The resulting dagger took on the clear-tinted blue of the prevalida from which it was forged. “The poison affects just about anyone. In any form, it causes from light-headedness to fainting, depending on the seriousness of the injury, and it can disrupt any magic the one wounded by it tries to cast. As for the pendant… it quadruples your strength for about five to ten minutes before it needs to recharge for half a day.”

Ludivine raised one hand, beating Vespasian to the punch. “I call all of those.”

Lillian smiled, noticing the half-concealed disappointment on his face. “I’ve still got something you might like, Ves. I carry it around even if its cumbersome and I rarely use it, since it’s important to me.” She picked the wrapped item from the bed, unfurling it before their eyes. Beneath the cover was a scintillating rapier of delyn, with fine silver inlays on the guard and hilt. One glance was enough to tell it was of masterwork quality.

“I like,” he said as Maelle relieved the librarian of the sword and handed it to him. The strength of its fine leather grip, the balance between blade and hilt, even the whistling as it cut through the air with a vacuum was marvelous. More importantly, the weight was about the same as his International Rapier, and he knew it would take little to no time to adapt. “I like a lot.”

Lillian rummaged through her bag again, turning it inside out for some other precious tool that she could lend the eldest sister. Maelle then stayed her hand, smiling kindly at the girl’s consideration. “It’s alright, I won’t need anything. Weapons and physical combat aren’t my forte.”

“I just wish there was something else I could do…” Lillian touched the healed wound on her chest through the fabric, and her eyes flashed: an idea had come to her. “And there is. Wait just a moment…”

:::::

“Good riddance,” Tye said to the siblings as they stepped into the streets after staying no more than an hour. He was perplexed to see the girl they had brought in so spry on her feet when she seemed close to dead before, but he knew not to ask questions no one would answer. He could find out through other channels, though he did not particularly care for it. As he waited at the front entrance, the bouncer leaned against the door’s frame, the old and chipped wood creaking under the bulk.

“Oh, this isn’t the last time you’ll see any of us, Tye.” Ludivine said in a mocking voice, spinning around her indexes a pair of oddly familiar daggers by the hole in their tang.

“To my everlasting disappointment, yeah. Now mosey on, will ya?” And so did the four comply, setting off into the smoke-smeared streets. “And good luck, you bastards.”

“Alright, ladies, we’re headed to the safe house.” Vespasian said as he sheathed the newly acquired rapier. He decided to hang it off of his right side, while his International Rapier stayed on his left. That way if he found it necessary to use both blades, he could use his primary blade with his more coordinated right hand, and Lillian’s blade with his left.

“Hold on. What?” Maelle said with hands that made a halting gesture as they passed under the streetlamps. The shift rush was nearly over, and pedestrian traffic was lowering again. Now the streets were occupied by a sparse population of nightlife patrons. “Don’t you think we should be moving to intercept one of the other groups? If they’re moving on foot we can still stop them from making it to the safe house. That’ll stop the ritual altogether.”

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Lillian said as she seemed to have to jog to keep up with Vespasian’s hasty strut. “We could avert a national crisis with such a preventative measure.”

“If we make our move now, we’ll compromise a certain couple’s cover.” He stopped under a blue streetlamp to take a look at the ladies. “I have a feeling Alerar wants all of these people in one place to get rid of them once and for all. Whatever’s happening at the safe house can’t be the main deal. If these people can bring back the entire tribe, they will. We need to see what’s going to be done about that, and we need to prepare to support that effort. Maelle, we need a glyph that reverses the polarity of magic, and we need several copies, large and small.”

“I need one night to compose it.” Maelle paused to think. “I’m probably going to need a few different versions just in case. Then it’ll probably take the first part of the day tomorrow to complete a few copies.”

“We’ll work with what we have when we need it.” Vespasian turned to Ludivine. “Keep in touch with Tye. See if he can mobilize some underground forces for us. We might need to use them. I have a feeling Alerar’s people are going to be ill prepared.”

“Most government yuppies are.” Ludivine said with a scowl. The other two siblings laughed and agreed, but they appreciated that fallacy. If the governing powers of the world weren’t so conventional in their tactics, people like the Villeneuves wouldn’t even be necessary. “So what are we doing right now?”

“Recon.” Vespasian said with a troubled face and a note of exasperation in his voice. The Villeneuve Transformation was on his mind. If they didn’t have to gather information immediately he would have certainly preferred to take advantage of the family secret. The three of them would look at one of their mother’s drawings, go to sleep, wake up the next day as completely different people, and even Lillian wouldn’t recognize them. That way they could hide in plain sight, but they had to get to the safe house now. “When we get there we need to stay out of sight and just watch, but one of us needs to be within earshot of our people… Or maybe two of us. Lillian and Ludivine, we’ll need you to get close.”

“This sounds like a steak out to me. I have an idea. Follow me.” Maelle took the lead as she adopted a jovial gait. “There’s a high society clubhouse about a block down from here. These are the people who are dropped off by bovine drawn carriages…”

“Maelle Ouellet, are you suggesting we steal a carriage?” Ludivine said as she crossed her arms. Her scowl turned into a rarely seen smile. It was still sinister, but there was a sense of pride there never before seen. “Now you’re beginning to think like me.”

Maelle chose to ignore the compliment as it doubled up as mockery. Within a few moments they were passing in front of a large white brick building adorned with colorful decorations. The establishment’s patrons were just as colorful as they stepped out of their oxen drawn carriages draped in dyed coats and ornate gowns. A line of ox drawn carriages was sauntering in front of the building. They would move along slowly until they were in front of the hostess, allow their aristocratic passengers to exit then move along. Alerar’s equine deficiency worked to their advantage at this point. Almost everyone used slow but steady bovine animals as transportation. They had a large variety of carriages to choose from, but they needed a coach – a large closed, two oxen drawn carriage with a roof that would cover even the driver if need be. They found their match near the front of the line.

Maelle signaled Ludivine to target the large black and gold vehicle, and the assassin did so. She moved next to the carriage as it sauntered along and got the driver’s attention. “Hey how do you drive this thing?” She asked without looking.

The driver glanced at her with a mix of bewilderment and offense. “Verbal commands…” He paused for a moment waiting for her to respond. When she didn’t he continued. The others quietly climbed into the empty coach and adjusted the drapes. “Get up means go, woah means stop, gee means turn to the right, and haw means turn to the left. Wha-“

The butt of Ludivine’s blade struck the back of the driver’s head before he could respond. His body fell limp and the two oxen began to veer in different directions. Ludivine quickly grabbed the reigns and commanded them to stop so she could discard the driver in the alley.

“Lu!” Maelle yelled with an angry face as she stuck her head out of the carriage. “You didn’t!”

“He’s just knocked out.” Ludivine hissed as she dragged the man on the ground by one arm. ”Pain in the ass.”

Lillian drew back a fold of the window drapes as the whirs and clicks of the carriage slowed to a stop, catching through the window a first glimpse of the hideout. The picture she had constructed in the wildness of her imagination, that of a rickety old warehouse standing gritty and old on the outskirts of the city, infested with moss and rust and rats as all shady locales are wont to be, was quite a ways off-mark from the reality she now faced. In its stead was a three-story townhouse with mottled sienna walls like stucco and fired burgundy bricks that lined its doors, windows, rooftop and ridges.

Surrounding the rich estate were varieties of resplendent underbrush, from the flowering violets of spirea shrubs to the pale blues and purples of hydrangea bushes, all well-tended for and recently pruned. While it had none of the trappings of the customary criminal safe houses, its ostentatious nobility made it stand out from the industrial architecture of Alerar as a haven from sin. That made it much more successful a façade than what she had envisioned, all things considered.

Without a word, Lillian slipped from the carriage, crossing the street with nary a sound before her boots ground against the graveled entryway. As she did, Maelle and Vespasian waved her good luck before closing the door behind her, pulling the velvet drapes just enough to observe what would follow through an interstice. Ludivine had done the same from the coachman’s seat, effortlessly catching up with the smaller girl, but her own padded footwear doing little to soften the grinding of pebbles underfoot. They made their way to the bushes as slowly and silently as they could, peeking through any undraped window for a sign of the thieves.

Near the front door, they stumbled upon one such window, alerted by the flicker of candles from within. They approached, both wrapping themselves in tendrils of shadows until they seemed to melt into the darkness. A closer glance revealed that some of the same Coronian men and women in black cloaks they had encountered before were holding them still and aloft. None were speaking, and Lillian’s heart began to race. Had she been wrong? Was the ritual not unfolding in the fields of Khu’fein, but right here and right now?

Before she could reassess the situation, a sudden flash came from inside. The flames turned from golden orange to an eerie purple before flaring up. A wave of uncanny light flooded the night in that instant, the lambent rays fading under the starlight shortly after. Lillian and Ludivine had shielded their eyes in time, and when they peered through the window once more, they specifically noticed the apparition of two men who did not previously occupy the candlelit chambers.

One was clearly Esme, but the other was a slightly shorter man that he supported, hunched over not from age but from a protracted fatigue. His complexion was barely tan, but his dour expression was dark and ominous. The two seemed deep in conversation, but their whispers could reach neither of the stalkers in the dark. The pair, however, soon moved out of the room, and moments later a terse click could be heard from the entrance. They were leaving.

“Just feel fortunate you're free, Ilyat,” Lillian heard Esme speak from the front doors. “We've waited a long time for this chance.”

“But her... I not believe,” the stranger began in broken Common, his tone clearly distraught. He made his way down the stairs with effort, beseeming an old man that relied on Esme as a crutch. “I look at picture, and next morning I am still self. I not change. I was… not her love. Not even a friend to her.”

“But she's here now. She's worked all this time to free you. That has to count for something.”

“Perhaps. If things... if events... is 'events' right word? If events were different, she would be dead.”

Esme laughed heartily, hiding a growing concern behind the loud exaggeration. “Good thing you didn't kill her. She's been preserving your memory ever since the event. She's the reason you're back, Ilyat.”

The stranger pondered this, before answering with deep suspicion. “We… will see.”

The cloaked foreigners followed the two closely, the last of which locked the door to the estate and waved a hand in front of the gargoyle-head knocker. Its eyes glowed a faceted red before fading away, announcing the activation of any series of gruesome traps and security measures. There would be no way of entering without detection, now.

Turning to face Ludivine, Lillian removed the veil of shadows about her face. Without speaking, she slowly mouthed the words to her query, unsure of how to proceed. “What should we do now?”

A long moment of silence passed in which the far off percussion of operating factories echoed throughout the city and served as ambient noise. Passing pedestrians only saw a kaleidoscope of multicolored rays coming from the streetlights. The two stealth ladies dwelled in the dark vacuum just beyond them. Lillian awaited her answer. “… Ludivine?”

“I’m thinking. “ She blurted out just as a local passed them. He jumped at the sound of a voice that had no body to it. His skin could have turned Raiaeran white. Ludivine poked her face into the light. Her eyebrows wrinkled as she attempted to find a sign. “Where’s Mom? We need to tell Vespasian. Come on.”

“Who was that man?” Lillian said as she followed Ludivine across the street. “I don’t remember seeing him before, and he looked weak, as though he’d been through something. Do you think he was-“

“Listen, bite size,” Ludivine abruptly halted in the street. She made sure to keep her voice down. “I’m an assassin, a seductress, and sometimes a thief. I’m not an information broker like my sister or a mastermind like my brother. When I have information I don’t try to make anything of it. I just relay it to someone like them. So when we go in there all we do is tell them exactly what we saw and heard. Nothing else. Got that?”

Lillian nodded bashfully and they started for the carriage once more. They entered through the black veil and sat across from a slouching Vespasian, who was cracking the curtain open to look through with his left hand, and holding up an orb of light with his right. He was supplying light to Maelle, who had a small sketchbook in her lap, in which she was inscribing an abstract design of feminine curves and floral shapes.

“That was quick.” Vespasian glanced at the two of them with a troubled look upon his face. “Maybe a little too quick.”

Lillian was surprisingly the first to speak up as she quoted the conversation between Esme and Ilyat word for word. Ludivine added what she could, but added that their mother wasn’t seen with them.

“You know what that sounds like?” Vespasian said as he looked to Maelle. “It sounds like this Ilyat knows about the transformation. ‘I look at picture, and next morning I am still self. I not change.’ Doesn’t that sound like someone who expects the benefits to you?”

“Yea, but it’s obvious he was Valinthe.” Maelle mumbled as she was mostly focused on her inscription. “Everything Dad was saying indicates that Ilyat has been gone somewhere for a long time and they had been working a long time to get him back.”

“Lu.” Vespasian sat up and practically stuck his head out of the opening. Even thought the townhome was dark, there was still movement inside. He could see where the light of the ever more dominating cerulean moon met the shadows of a moving figure. “You didn’t mention Mom. As far as we know she’s still in the safe house, right?”

“Right.”

“How about we go in there and ask her how old she is?” Vespasian said. Maelle dropped her pen, and Ludivine straightened up. Lillian was a smart girl. Stumbling across a plot to bring down Alerar wasn’t a coincidence, including her in the effort to stop it was risky, telling her that they were spies was pushing it, but what Vespasian just said was a roundabout way of informing Lillian of the most private family secret of them all. He glanced at the girls and rolled his eyes. “Oh please. We might as well tell her. She’s probably going to figure it all out by the time this is all over anyways.”

“Wonderful.” Ludivine said with a scowl. “Within a few hours a mere asset is induced as a friend worthy of such information by the baby of the family.”

“If you don’t feel comfortable relaying this information to me, I’ll gladly look the other way,” Lillian said from her corner of the carriage.

“You’re too intelligent. You couldn’t look the other way if you wanted to.” Vespasian glanced at his sisters, who were both staring him down with a razor sharp eye. “How else are we going to continue?”

A moment of silence dominated once again. Ludivine crossed her arms and dropped her head, allowing her sable locks to hide her face. That was her silent resignation from the situation. That way when the wrong decision was made she could at least escape partial blame. Maelle rubbed her temple and released a sigh of stress. Vespasian was right. There was no way of getting around it anymore. If Lillian was going to be an effective ally in this case, she needed to know more than what she knew.

As the eldest of the siblings, she decided to speak. “Our mother makes sketches for us that have transformative powers. They’re images of different races and ethnic groups throughout Althanas. All we have to do is look at them before we go to sleep, and when we wake up the next morning we are the person in the sketch. These transformations are not just skin deep. We change all the way to our core, and with that being said we take on the age of the person. One can fend off aging using these sketches to take them back to the age of the person in the sketch, thus allowing them to live longer than the oldest elves.”

“You ran into us at Ankhas while we were looking into the origins of our parents.” Vespasian took it from there. “Now if we look into the context of that conversation between Ilyat and our father, we could say that she was alive back when the Valinthe were around. Ilyat may have desired to be the beneficiary of her ability, which is limited to our mother’s loved ones. That’s a strong stipulation, because a person doesn’t have full control over whom they have love for, whether it be romantic or brotherly.

“So…” Lillian took a moment to process the information, probably not in a logical sense but in an emotional sense. “Your mother is more than seven thousand years old?”

The possibility wasn’t real until it was said. Ludivine emerged from her sable security blanket of hair, Maelle covered her mouth as her jaw dropped, and Vespasian dropped his head on the wall beside him. They all looked at Lillian, the purveyor of reality, no matter how unreal it felt.

“Seven thousand two hundred and forty three to be exact.” A familiar feminine voice came from outside the carriage. Alix Villeneuve was leaning against Vespasian’s side. She still managed to find a sarcastic twist to the epic situation. “I age fantastically well, don’t I? And you should guess your father’s age. Hint: I bagged me a younger man.”

“Ves!” Maelle hit his little brother in the shoulder. “You were supposed to be on the lookout. What the Hell?”

“You had him on the lookout? That was a mistake.” Ludivine said with the closest thing to a smirk on her face. “She was probably watching him while he was watching her. When he stopped watching, she moved. I do it to you guys all the time. I get it from her, even though I’m better at it.”

“My snot nose of a middle daughter is right, I’m afraid,” Alix budged her way into the dark carriage. “But we have more pressing matters. I need you three… you… four.”

“And here we thought you had everything under control.” Ludivine said with a sarcastic tone. She was learning from her mother.

“We did.”

“So you’re the government’s sleeper cell?” Vespasian said as he made room for his mother.

“We are, but there’s been an unforeseen turn of events. The enchanted diamonds were taken to several locations in the city where they’ve been used to bring back Ilyat’s clique.” The carriage was silent, a cue for her to elaborate. “The Valinthe built their lives around the unique ability of each individual, and often formed small teams of people who complimented each other called cliques. When applied to combat, a clique can be quite formidable. Ilyat, the man you watched leave with your father is Chieftain of all the Valinthe because his clique was the most dangerous of them all. They could easily take down a modern Aleraran unit, guns and all. The plan was to get all the Valinthe revolutionaries in one spot and plow them down with firearms, but that’s not going to happen now.”

“Let me guess.” Vespasian said as he slouched back. Almost immediately Alix grabbed him by his collar and forced him to sit up like a dutiful mother. He was twenty four years old and still felt like a child. “You gave your government contact the go and now there’s a scout following Ilyat wherever he goes, and since you’re a lowly Human, they’re not likely to hold off on the attack if you told them to.” Alix nodded. “So what are we going to do?”

“We need to intercept the rituals.” Lillian said with the utmost alarm. “Or at least stop the clique from reuniting.”

“That would be close to impossible, Ludivine Junior. Although the effort would be noble,” Alix made the effort to reach across the carriage to pat the librarian on the head. “I have no knowledge of the locations, and they’re probably complete already. Ilyat will be reunited with his clique within the hour.” The matriarch puckered her lips in contemplation. “I have one better though. The revolutionaries aren’t all heading to the ritual site until tomorrow. I say we head to the ritual site and face him with our own clique.”

“So that confirms it.” Lillian said with a confident bass in her voice that had never been heard before. “You’re Valinthe. How else would you know the location of the ritual site?”

“Smart.” Alix narrowed her hazel eyes as she nodded her head and folded her arms. “Are you sure you’re not one of my daughters? I’d be less motivated to kill you once this is all over if you were.”

Lillian straightened up in paranoia. Vespasian quickly alleviated the situation.

“She’s joking. She’s joking.” Vespasian said as he squeezed through. “I’ll drive. Mom, give me directions. In fact, why don’t you join me?”

“Why?” Alix said with an innocent look on her face. Vespasian shot a nasty look at her. She laughed as she began to move. “I was joking, wasn’t I?”

Time had worn on since their departure from the city of Ettermire, and the shroud of night had long been dispelled by the morning’s break. The flatlands rolled along the frames of the carriage windows, an alternating panorama of grass fields and arid plains that could not escape from an endless and tedious cycle. With all the cautionary legends and old wives’ tales she had read on the region, Lillian had expected a smidgeon of flash and pomp from the fabled Fields of Khu’fein. What few disturbances in the fabric of time and space she had actually seen could be summed up to eddies in the skies, coming and going like swirling puffs of summer haze – hardly anything to warrant tacking to its name the age-old admonition that ‘many have traveled there, but few have ever returned’. From what she had seen thus far, death by disappointment and sheer boredom seemed the only possible explanation for that caveat.

Looking away from the window, the librarian fished into a small wooden box that lay on the carriage floor, feeling a cold breath emanate from its opening. With a gleeful smile, she produced from it a loaf of bread packed with slices of ham and cucumbers, wrapped in a sheet of kraft paper. Having kept her hunger in check since the previous night, she deservedly chomped on one end, although the bite mark had been so small it seemed the sandwich had merely been gnawed on.

“Whoa, careful there or you might choke,” Ludivine quipped in a melodramatic voice, a hand over her mouth in feigned concern. It was not long before she broke out of character with a snort, her laughter continuing as she heartily chugged from one of the glass bottles they had bought with the rest of the food. The ham sandwiches, of course, had been her own humorous suggestions.

“I have to say I was getting worried there,” Alix began with genuine worry, looking at Lillian with solemn eyes. “After seeing you fast for ten hours, I was beginning to think you just didn’t eat. That’s not healthy for a girl your age – for a girl any age.”

“I just,” she began sheepishly, averting her gaze from the Ouellets, knowing full well they would mock her for her reason. “I didn’t want us to have to stop on the way to the ritual site, is all...”

“And that’s very considerate of you,” Vespasian said from the front of the carriage, looking back through the open window that separated the driver from the passengers, his corner smile hiding none of his amusement. “Still, we’d rather have to stop a minute or two during the trip instead of having you faint once we get there.”

“A girl can’t live with a bird’s appetite,” Alix went on, the admonishing tone in her voice thickening with every second. “You might think thin is the way to go at first, but what men aren’t saying is that they actually don’t mind a little– ”

“Mother, please!” Maelle exclaimed from her seat next to Lillian, lifting her eyes from the parchment she was writing on for the first time in hours. “You’ve had this talk with both Ludivine and I, and I promise you, it’s still as gross as it was the first two times! Look, you’re even making Ves uncomfortable,” she continued, pointing to the cadet that seemed to shy away while he drove from his private section of the carriage.

“Bah, collateral damage,” Alix said dismissively. As she looked the girl down from head to toe, however, she did a double take, and resumed her inspection with a more appraising eye. “Although, if you look closely, Lillian… where it matters, you’re actually much fuller than I thought…”

“Okay!” Lillian cried out with a breaking voice, setting her sandwich on her lap before clapping her hands with a diversionary enthusiasm she had learned from Esme. “Let’s talk tactics, shall we?”

“Seconded,” Vespasian stepped in, glad to know he was not the only one made uncomfortable by this conversation. There was no doubt from the look in his eyes that he was dourly missing his father at this moment, trapped as he was amongst women with too much time on their hands, and not much to do with it. “Once we get to the ritual site – assuming we get there first – we’ll need to prepare as fast and as efficiently as possible. Making use of Maelle’s scripture is a no-brainer, but is there anything else we can do to put the odds on our side?”

“Could we perhaps try and destroy the bones? That would disrupt the ritual, if not ruin it completely,” Maelle suggested while still scribbling furiously on the vellum.

“I considered that option, but if what the librarian at Ankhas told me is any indication, then the twenty bones used for the gate are gigantic.” Lillian seemed lost deep in thought, as if racking her mind for any plan that could bring success to Maelle's proposition. After a moment, she knew it was in vain. “With that kind of size, I can only imagine they used the remains of an ancient dragon or some other such colossus. I doubt we’d even be able to move them, let alone break them.”

“I’ve got a question,” Ludivine interrupted out of the blue, her jade eyes lost in the skies. She was watching the clouds, puffy white brushes drifting from frame to frame on a canvas of pastel blue. “How did they bring back this Ilyat guy, or anyone from his clique, inside Ettermire? You said they could only do that at the ritual site.” While it was a relevant question, Ludivine did not seem to care much for an answer. The notion that she had brought up something that had not been discussed yet seemed to be enough for her, and so she returned to her cloud-gazing, sipping twice from her bottle before taking a long, hearty quaff.

“If you want to bring back ten thousand from the Anti-Firmament, then the ritual site is the only reasonable place to do it – not because there’s some intrinsic quality or magical imprint to the location itself, but because the extremely rare components are already there,” Alix answered, her previous motherly tone replaced with an unfamiliar gravity. “Like junior here guessed, the bones of an ancient dragon were used. You couldn’t even hope to find a live one seven thousand years ago, and even if they had, killing one was out of the question on top of being utterly impossible. Therefore, they had to use the only fossils Alerar had, found buried underneath L’Renor Harlilen. With that taken into consideration, wouldn’t you agree that it’s much easier to use the very same bones from the first ritual than to go around knocking on the doors of cataclysmic beasts, asking for a donation of their baby teeth?”

“So… you’re basically saying that theoretically, the complete revival could be done anywhere, but practically, the ritual site is the only logical candidate.” Lillian was taking it all in, rubbing at her chin as she did. “However, selective revival of a handful can be done anywhere with smaller bones, though even those were so rare that they could only find enough for Ilyat and his clique, who would in return tell them the exact location of the ritual and thus, the Bone Gate.”

“In a nutshell… yes,” Alix answered, saying no more. The atmosphere had dropped in the past minutes, and Lillian almost regretted not humoring the woman about her budding curves before. Almost.

“I’m glad we’ll be sleeping smarter tonight, but we still need a game plan,” Vespasian reminded them. “We know that Ilyat’s going to unknowingly lead Alerar’s strike force to the site, but if they don’t make it, we’ll have to buy ourselves some time.”

“You can leave that to me, son,” Alix whispered, the smile that stretched across her mouth bearing a cold and unforgiving quality like they had never seen before. “Ilyat’s going to want to talk to me, and I have my own choice words for him. In that time, take cover and do what you need to do.”

“Alright, then I guess all that’s left to know is… what powers does Ilyat and his clique have? We’ll need to know this in order to plan an effective counterattack, if necessary.”

“I’ll tell you, but you’ll need to sleep first. We still have quite a ways to go before reaching the ritual site, and everyone needs to be hale and hearty once we get there… and Maelle, I know you can’t afford a shut-eye yet, but your father will help you get through what’s to come once he gets there.”

“Why can’t we know now? It’d give us more time to devise a plan.”

“Because, Vespasian,” Alix retorted, harshly at first, but her tone soon quelled to an understanding softness that clutched at their hearts. “If I tell you now… you’ll never be able to sleep.”

No one spoke after that. Maelle was still industriously working on her scripture, but the anxiety in her amber eyes was now as clear as broad daylight. Vespasian had found nothing more to say, and had returned his eyes to the empty trail ahead; he decided he would take heed to his mother’s suggestion, once Ludivine was well-rested enough to replace him at the reins of the carriage. Lillian looked at her lap, no longer finding any allure in the meal she had put down, but she did her best to finish it without choking – she would need the strength. Ludivine, seeing that the girl was almost teary-eyed once done, handed her the bottle she had been drinking from. With a nod of thanks, she accepted it, and washed her mouth in one long draft. She almost spewed it all out when she felt the sting of malt prickle all the way down her throat, much to Ludivine’s mocking amusement.

And it wasn’t long before the alcohol made her woozy, and robbed her of her consciousness – Lillian always had been a teetotaler. In this instance, however, she had been grateful for that: with all of her worries, she never would have found the courage to sleep otherwise.

:::::

Somewhere in the Fields of Khu’fein was a range of small hillocks, some grassy foothills while others were bald patches of desiccated earth. What was not visible to the eye, however, was that many of them were arranged in a perfect circle that spanned far beyond what one could see. More than mere knobs, they were burial mounds, barrows not only for the bones of a millennial beast, but for the souls of myriad victims.

Lillian found a modicum comfort in the knowledge that sunset was over half an hour away: were it nighttime already, the ritual site would have done short work of her taut nerves. Here, the disturbances were greater than anywhere else in the Fields, and the girl was now very much afraid. The air seemed charged with dread and despair, and everywhere she looked, shadows danced at the corner of her eyes, vanishing like haze whenever she tried to focus on them. Every step here sent a chill through her blood, and she felt as if treading not upon a graveyard, but on a ditch where thousands had been left to die, piled upon one another to decay in gruesome unison.

They had arrived two hours ago, leaving the carriage far out of sight before walking the rest of the distance to one of the hillocks in the ceremonial array. With her help, they had managed to dig into the hill far enough to strike the tip of what seemed to be the rib of a titan, and Maelle had begun imbuing it with the glyphs she had worked on for the better part of a day. Looking to the center of the ritual site, about a hundred yards away from the Ouellet children, she saw Alix sitting near a campfire, no doubt to make her location easier to spot by Esme and, unfortunately, Ilyat. The idea of leaving her alone to deal with this did not sit well with Lillian, but they had no say in the matter. And so, they all waited in apprehension behind the steep hill, hidden from sight, until finally… they came.

A faint flash of ethereal light bathed the hills in a blue halo, and a silent rift tore through space. From it walked out a man she had never seen before, but clearly the one to have accomplished this feat of spatial transportation. The band of revolutionaries followed closely behind, far more numerous than they had been during their first encounter. Sullen-robed men and women were next to make their appearance, and those were without a doubt the sorcerers and priests upon whom the ritual would depend. At last, Esme walked out from the portal, followed by Ilyat and four of his fellow revived kinsmen. No longer did the chieftain hobble like an old man, and he stood tall and proud, taller than even Esme and with a fire in his eyes so bright and harsh it could have razed the plain to dust and ashes. Now freed from the shackles of the Anti-Firmament, he had been restored to his prior might and glory.

“I was hoping he’d still be crotchety like before… and they have a planeswalker? This… this is bad. That means whoever was on Ilyat’s tail will have lost track of him by now.” Lillian turned to Ludivine and Vespasian, dearly hoping for one of them to contradict her assessment of the situation.

“Dad… he must have taken that into account. He’ll have alerted the strike force, somehow.” Yet, as he spoke, Vespasian did not have the confidence he usually boasted. His words seemed to hinge only on wishful thinking… or, perhaps, faith. Lillian wished to believe him, but a lifetime of lost hopes had conditioned her to assume the worst. With fear tightening around her chest, she looked back to Alix, who had stood up to approach the arriving men and women.

There, at the very heart of the ritual site that had bound so many to eternal torment, the two met again. Ilyat gazed into her eyes, the inferno that raged within burning brighter than ever before... until Alix greeted him with words he had never expected to hear.

“Bonsoir, chéri.”

Out of Character:

Translations Alix: “Evening, darling.”

“No need to continue, Alix.” A rather unremarkable Human man with glasses said from the Valinthe Chieftain's side. They stopped a good ten yards away from Alix. It was a gesture of suspicion in the Valinthe culture to stop exactly ten yards away from a person after making verbal contact. They no longer trusted Alix. He continued as he adjusted his glasses. “Ilyat has no desire to speak with you.”

“You're welcome, Sacha.” Alix said as she shifted her weight and crossed her arms. She was now a very different woman from when they knew her seven thousand years ago. Back then, she was full of fear, and she would have begged for forgiveness for not freeing them sooner. Now she had grown out of the habit of apologizing, and this baffled Ilyat and his four friends. “All of you. You're very welcome.”

“For what?” Sacha, the intellectual man with glasses said. He was the only member of the clique who could speak reasonable Tradespeak, but they all understood it just fine.

“For freeing you.” Alix' wide hazel eyes sent beams of rage towards the quintet of men.

“Your tone of voice. It is... It is not so polite.” A lithe man with plain white clothing and bright features tried to speak. His sky blue eyes searched for the proper words to say. “Lacks respect for superiors. You would suffer beating if we rule.”

“But you don't, Alain.” Alix said with a steady stance.

“Maybe we should all agree to disagree and get on with the ritual.” Esme stepped in, placing himself between the two sides. “The faster we bring your brothers and sisters back, the faster we can rule the world.”

“World domination was never our intention.” Sacha said with a plain sophistication.

“We just exterminate Elf.” said Gilles, a dark man with dreadlocks and silver irises.

“So instead of reviving megalomaniacs, I'm reviving racists? I was hoping for an equal opportunity destroyer here.” Esme said with a sly smirk. The others paused and looked at him. Piercing his confidence with their judgmental glares. “Joke! Joke! It was a joke.” He turned to the crowd behind him and shouted over the ambient hum of conversation. “I need all the sorcerers to line up along the opening of the arch. Complete the circle that the hills create. You, take the diamonds and spread them out evenly along the hills.”

One hundred yards to the east, Vespasian, Lillian, and Ludivine lay belly down on the emerald bed of tall grass. They were just at the top of the ridge giving them the ability to see what was going on in the center between Alix and the clique. It was when Esme ordered the orange robed men to take their positions that they found it necessary to move to the other side of the ridge.

“Smart. You know, they probably had the bones buried when they performed the original ritual too.” Vespasian said with a smile of admiration. Even in this dire situation he was able to appreciate the cleverness of others. “As far as I know nothing about it stipulates that they needed to be exposed.”

“You're probably right.” Lillian said as she rose and dusted herself off. She seemed just as light-hearted as Vespasian. “I don't think they would have fallen for the trap otherwise.”

“Vespasian!” Ludivine blurted out. Unlike the other two, she was taking the situation quite seriously. “We're getting dangerously close to confrontation, and you still haven't given us a battle plan.”

“I have everything together except for one person. The sylph.” Vespasian said as he put one hand in his pocket and one hand on his chin. He drifted of in contemplation. “We need to get him out of the way first, or else the match up for the others will be useless.”

“What do you have so far?” Lillian put a pale hand on Vespasian's shoulder, but quickly withdrew it. For what reason Vespasian didn't know why. “Perhaps I can help.”

“I have something that will attract and conduct electricity...” The spy said as he drew the Librarian's rapier. “You see what I'm getting at, right?”

“Yes. You need a means of disposal? Here.” Lillian stood close to the blade and held her hands around it. “I can make these webs highly reactive to powerful magic. You'll have to get away quickly.”

“That's perfect. Ludivine, you're going after the star mage. His ability takes time, so I figure with your speed he'll be forced into a defensive posisiton.”

“The tall one?” Now, the assassin smiled as thoughts of battle filled her head. “He won't know what hit him.”

“Good news,” Maelle said as she approached. “I saw Alerar's army on the horizon while I was setting up the last glyph.”

“That is good news. Lillian, you go after the Soul Man. You'll know who he is once he starts using his magic. Maelle, you're taking on the healer. Keep him occupied just like you did with Dad in Ettermire. I'll go after the sylph. We'll leave Ilyat to Mom, which I'm not entirely comfortable with.” Vespasian paused and went over the plan in his head. “Alright. Maelle, you come with me. Lillian and Ludivine, you stay here, and wait for Dad to give us the cue... Good luck, everyone.”

The four hundred yard valley of the Death Gate was a teeming mass of Human activity. Valinthe Revolutionaries of all shapes and sizes scurried about. The sorcerers took their places and began flexing their voices for the arduous chanting to come. Laborers ran along the inner ridge of the hills placing the diamonds equidistant to one another. Esme held the crown of the late Valsheress in his hand. It was completely without its luster now, for the enchanted diamonds had a tendency to infect everything around them with a natural luminosity. A small army of Human men hovered around all these activities with a watchful eye. They carried smuggled flintlock rifles, the very invention of the people who imprisoned their ancestors. The core of this teeming mass of activity, however, was very still. Alix, Esme, and Ilyat's clique stood and watched their servants go to work.

“I'm curious.” Sacha said with a monotone voice that could barely be heard over the commotion. “Seven thousand years? Did it truly take you that long?”

“Did anyone tell you about those diamonds? They were on the body of every King and Queen of Alerar until just recently.” Alix made an effort to get rid of her bitter voice. She didn't like cutting this so close, but she couldn't let her mark know that. “What was it like in there?”

“Stagnant. Painfully stagnant. We just floated about as masses of ectoplasm and ethereal mist, trapped in a state of blood lust. The passing ages only fermented our rage.” Sacha glanced down at his body. “I quite like the fact that we were permitted our original bodies without decay. I thought we would come back completely deformed.”

“That's only for the undead, zombies and the like.” Esme said as he paced back and forth with a lazy saunter. “You weren't supposed to be in the Anti Firmament in the first place. To bring you back as undead would be... cheap on the part of the Thayne.” The Patriarch paused for a moment. His body language straightened up like a hunting dog catching scent of the fox. “Do you hear that?”

The rhythmical drumbeat of two hundred feet was not heard, but felt in the ground below them. Sacha was the first to say it. “Marching!”

Before anyone could say another word a barrage of ruby and sapphire uniforms arose by way of ashen and olive flesh along the crest of the hills. They rose their rifles in a unified dance of destruction, and unleashed a clap of thunder upon the Revolutionaries. The bullets from these contraptions carried through the air with such speed that the eye could not keep up with them as they pierced the soft human flesh of the numerous rebels. Nearly half of the company of Humans fell before they could retaliate. Cries of agony and panic dominated the air as the Humans rose their weapons and retaliated with a volley of their own, but their lack of training showed. A considerably smaller number of the Dark Elves fell, but like a well operated clock a new row emerged and fired again.

“Non!” Ilyat roared. He turned to Esme with the face of an angry lion. "Non! Donne l’ordre de battre en retraite!”

“Pull back!” Esme waved to the nearest officer. “Pull back!” His command echoed throughout the makeshift army and they began to do so. The Humans sprinted with fear from a wall of bullets and upshot grass and dust.

“Sacha, amplifie Alain.” Ilyat's russet hair whipped around as he gave each member of his clique his orders. The weak man with barely intelligible common speech was a far cry from what was seen here. What would follow his orders was the reason as to why he was the Chieftain of more than ten thousand Valinthe. “Alain, débarasse toi de leurs armes. Stéphane, Gilles et moi engageront l’offensive.”

Sacha adjusted his glasses as he approached Alain and whispered a few simple words in the Sylph's ear. His sky blue eyes became as radiant as a pair of binary suns as a passing breeze lifted his form out of existence. A hissing swarm of deadly iron bees approached after another clap of thunderous fire came from the hills. This time they were all headed straight towards the quintet of men. Alix and Esme sprinted back with the Revolutionaries as Alerar's bullets struck the ground with a thousand tiny thuds. Not one of those bullets made contact with flesh as the quintet of Valinthe warriors were mere shades of colorless ethereal mist. A single bolt of blue hot electricity flashed into existence and leaped from one firearm to another, rendering the entire center column of Aleraran attackers completely useless.

A terrifying snake of incandescent phosphorous emerged from mouth of Gilles as he nonchalantly walked up the hill. A stray bullet from one of the other columns grazed through his muted silver cloth and cut his right shoulder. It was no matter. His pet, now as large as him and still connected to his wide open mouth struck at a retreating soldier on the front line. Its glowing fangs sunk into the Dark Elf's left artery. The soldier writhed in pain as he became the sacrifice needed to instantly heal Gilles' cut. The second row of blue and red clad soldiers stepped forward to save their brethren, but Stephane would cut their salvation short as his hands rose to conduct the invisible forces of gravity. With a quick swipe of the hand a dark ripple of reality swept the ground in a growing arc of fifty feet, and although it was a weak force, it was enough to cause the soldiers to trip over themselves and each other. Ilyat dealt the final blow. With the simple flex of his muscles and a baritone grunt the earth in front of him regurgitated itself like a parting sea, burying at least forty soldiers alive and exposing part of the massive bone gate.

The Revolutionaries cheered in the temporary glory of their ancestors. Some took it upon themselves to join the battle again, and the others soon followed. Ilyat shook his head as his descendants charged past him to take the fight to Alerar. These new Valinthe would have to be taught to follow orders. Within the chaos he failed to notice the four figures approaching from between the columns of Alerar's soldiers.

“Ilyat. Chéri,” Alix shouted as she caught sight of a few familiar faces. She and Esme were now standing behind them, well away from the danger of the war scene. Ilyat could hear the voice of his betrothed even beyond the loud exchange of volleys and the monotone humming of the sorcerers. He and his clique turned around to face her. “Laisse moi te présenter ma clique.”

Out of Character:

Translations Ilyat: “No! Order them to retreat!” Ilyat: “Sacha, enhance Alain. Alain, go after the weapons. Stephane, Gilles, and I will mount the offensive.” Alix: “Ilyat, darling. Let me introduce you to my clique.”

Louder than the roar of gunfire, deeper than the ocean’s depths and reaching higher than the skies was the silencing boom of a supernatural song. Esme’s voice rode on waves of ether, chanting the ancient words to a sorcery of empowerment. The winds stilled, the stars froze, the earth shuddered under a solitary quake… and then came the silent light.

Their silhouettes were as solar eclipses, shrouded by darkness yet exuding halos so bright they threatened to blind those who dared look. Thus sheathed in light, they dashed toward Ilyat’s clique, plumes of dust and earth bursting behind their every charging step. Their paths diverged, and Maelle was the first the reach her target: Gilles, the man with serpentine eyes and a phosphorous tongue, who had sucked the life from his victims to recover from his own wounds. A haze formed about her slender form, the invisible aura she wielded fluctuating wildly as it was channeled into her palm, growing stronger with each fidgeting motion of her fingers. One explosive palm press was all it took to send a wall of heat towards him in a giant, crashing wave.

Seeing that the grass did not burn under its invisible advance, but instantly turned to ashes, Gilles only had enough time to abandon his offense, knitting his fingers together to form a swirling sphere of green smoke and sorcery about his person; he had erected the barrier just in time to prevent his own cremation. Unfortunately for him, he could do nothing else now, as defending himself against her onslaught took the whole of his focus: there would no more healing, no more killing.

As for Ludivine, her chosen target was Stéphane, the tall, gray-haired man with an air of unshakable serenity about him. Alix had told them that given enough time, he was the most powerful of them all, for he was not only the Valinthe’s most learned scholar in the knowledge of the universe, but also the only one whose power reflected a fundamental force that could reshape the world like no geomancer could ever hope to achieve. Thus, the fastest of them all had to fell him, and Ludivine was the only obvious choice for this monumental task.

The assassin zigzagged across the field, her speed enhanced by Esme’s song, fast enough to avoid the anomalies that were popping about the battlefield like mushrooms after a heavy rain. They were spheres of warped space, of heightened gravity, willed into existence by the simple pointing of Stéphane’s index finger. Ludivine could not afford her feet to touch any of those: she would be tripped by the gravitational differential, and that would make her vulnerable to something much, much worse. For now, all she could do was advance as best she could, finding any opening he would leave to get closer for the killing blow.

Lillian was upon the bald man with glasses that had first addressed Alix, Sacha. It was the same man that had somehow empowered his companions with whispered words, turning Gilles into an ophidian chimera and Alain, the nervous-looking youngster with striking blue eyes and frazzled blond hair, into a construct of wind and lightning. This Sacha was the most dangerous of them all, if only because he could make the strengths of his allies’ souls manifest in the physical world. As such, she had thrown her dirk, aiming for his heart as the sorcerous winds that slept in its glass core were roused awake and summoned to enhance its speed, buffet its flight and sharpen its edge.

The youngest of Ilyat’s clique, Alain, had seen the winds gather, had felt the surge of their power, and had smiled. His electrical body sizzled where he stood, and he shot a hand forward as the dagger soared. The motion of winds about its blade broke apart in chaos, only to be rearranged under his dominion: the glass dirk whirled about, cutting through the dusk sky like a boomerang on its return path. Lillian cursed, jumping out of the way in time to avoid the piercing blade as it stuck into the ground, hilt-deep. She bit her lower lip, chiding herself for having underestimated the range of his power: with such a powerful master of wind on their side, Lillian’s trademark weapon was rendered useless. As if that were not enough, he could still turn into a bolt of living lightning, and still had the power to phase his clique in and out of existence.

Lillian furrowed her brows, her expression one of dour resolve. If they were ever to defeat Ilyat's clique... the boy would have to die first.

“Aide-moi, Alain!” came the snake-man’s shout of frustration as he struggled still against Maelle’s unrelenting wave of heat. “Cette salope m’empêche de faire quoi que ce soit!”

“Entendu!” came the youth’s crackling, droning voice, syntonized as it was with the electrical oscillations of his body. Arcs of electricity tore across his form, and his vaguely humanoid shape was beginning to vanish as he prepared his second transformation into pure lightning. In that moment, Lillian, Ludivine and Maelle all gave a singular glance to Vespasian, who had remained on the sidelines… until this very moment.

Right before they heard the reverberating boom of thunder, Vespasian had tossed the Delyn rapier Lillian had lent him. The sword tumbled on itself, a feat only possible due to its masterwork balance, and when they heard the detonation, the sword had reached the path between Maelle and the lightning sylphid. Alain then cut across the field like a blue bolt, now too fast for anyone to even think of retaliating. As such, he had not realized until too late that there was rapier that now floated in the stillness of the air… that there was a slender length of metal now barring his path.

He felt himself sucked into the blade, felt the particles of his body uncontrollably drawn to the metal as they deviated to this new path of least resistance. It was a singular sensation to course into a solid object, but this he had done minutes ago to the firearms of the Aleraran columns, which had sizzled and burned under his high voltage. Yet, this blade would not submit to his power. Moreover, something else was strange about its make… upon its blade were webs of sorts, and because of their presence he felt his body fork between the two components: electricity within the blade, and the magic that bound him to this form within the spidery threads. And then, fearful realization dawned upon him.

“Putain de mer-”

First there was light, then a detonation that shook the very ground of the ritual site. The webs had been ignited by magic, and their unstable formula had made the threads extremely volatile. There was a scream of torture in the ether as Alain’s body was scattered across the field, the particles of electricity becoming blood and flesh once more. A mist of burnt fat and meaty droplets rained down on members of both cliques, and some shielded their eyes from pelting chips of carbonized bone. Along with his remains, the Delyn rapier clanged to the ground, seething with smoke and mist, but its innate resistance to magic had allowed it endured the shock.

“That’s one down,” Vespasian said with a smirk as he wiped a piece of Alain from his brow. Just as he spoke, the chants of the sorcerers that lined the circular array of hills had finally begun, drowning the battlefield in their ominous choir.

Out of Character:

Translations Gilles: “Help me, Alain! I can't do my job with this bitch getting in the way!” Alain: “Gotcha!” Alain: “Fucking shi-”

With Alain dead, Ilyat’s clique had lost their trump card. Having been the fastest of the five, the sylph could provide each of them assistance in the form of lightning, and any attack that would injure them all at once could be thwarted by his ability to make his allies incorporeal. Next on the list, however, was Sacha. Truth be told, he was the most troublesome of the five: without his power to externalize the strength of his clique’s souls, Alain would never have been able to accomplish either of those feats, but the scholarly Valinthe was too well defended by his allies for him to have been their first target.

‘But things are different now,’ Lillian thought to herself as she dashed for the bald, bespectacled man. Her glass dirk was back in her hands, razor sharp winds dancing about the blade as she readied herself to unleash another squall. A great crescent wind burst from the arc of her swing, shooting across the field like a flight of sparrows, intent on shredding the skin from his flesh.

But Sacha did not move. He stood his ground, baring his crooked teeth in arrogance as he reset his spectacles upon the bridge of his nose. A sweep of the hand and a few whispered words later, the sickle wind seemed to crash against an invisible wall... until she realized that it had simply dissolved, as if the force behind it had lost all cohesion. It was then that Lillian realized this must have been some unforeseen by-product of his power. Somehow, he had weakened the resolve behind it, breaking what natural force had powered the gust of wind. With that in mind, the girl stopped in her tracks, maintaining a defensive stance as she established a new plan.

“Your know of Alix’ power, do you not?” Sacha began amusedly, swiping his thumb across his nose in an act of arrogance. “It is a joke, centered on lies and deceit. But me? My power is real.” He advanced slowly, matching with Lillian’s pace of withdrawal. “I do not hide the truth under veils and guises… I reveal it to the whole world. And what truth? That of your soul: the face of its strength… or that of its weakness!”

Just as he finished speaking, his whole body began to quaver. Before her very eyes, she saw Sacha become taller and taller, saw the pate of his head grow infested with black veins. Mist steamed from his eyes, and she realized in horror that his eyelids were melting shut. Blood dripped from the creases of his forehead, eventually gushing forth as they burst open like a fresh slit, revealing a cyclopean eye, a dark violet like stale blood save for its pulsing red iris.

“What… what devilry is this?” Lillian muttered breathlessly, her fingers curling tightly around her dirk.

She heard him begin to whisper, and she felt a chill course through her like an arrow shot down her spine. The unintelligible whispers multiplied, and she heard them louder and louder within her mind. The dirk escaped from her loosening grasp, and she fell to her knees, clutching her temples in pain, fearing that her sanity was poised to escape… until she heard it.

‘You walk unknown, you live unseen, yet an atrocious fiend you have always been.’

‘Those who know you, they fear your touch, others wonder whether there can be such.’

‘Cold and elusive, haunting and bitter, you are their enemy: the invisible monster.’

Her eyes blinked open, and she saw that the world had become sullen and grey. Lillian looked at her hands, and she could only see their shimmering outlines, for her flesh and bones were now transparent. A ghost. Under his curse, she had become a being of ectoplasm, trapped and helpless in a world that had rejected her existence. She could do nothing, she could feel nothing save for the dust of the battlefield coursing through the ghastly shell of her heart.

“Such weakness in your soul, it is a pity to watch.” Sacha had walked towards her, towering over her kneeled ghost in condescension, scoffing as he watched her weaken, as he watched her shrink into nothingess, forgotten by all. “You were so insignificant before, people could barely notice you… and now, no matter how much you kick and scream, they never will again. Ha! Isn’t it delightful?”

“As if we’d forget her,” he heard Esme speak from behind. Sacha evaded the rapier just in time, feeling only a nick at his sides. The Valinthe escaped, expecting Esme to assail him with a flurry of strikes, but the man had stayed behind. Before Lillian even realized his presence, Esme renewed his song of empowerment; yet, there was something more to it this time, as if she heard her name among the lyrics – as if it had been dedicated to her. She felt the darkness that had overwhelmed her mind recede, felt the warm light of Esme’s voice purge it of Sacha’s corruption.

She felt her body return, felt the muscles catch onto bone. She felt the pull of her tendons and ligaments, the pulsing of blood through her heart and veins. There was a new shimmer to her self, and only then did she realize that the magic was having unforeseen effects. “Esme… it looks like there’s one more thing your song has improved.” Her ability to absorb other powers… he had somehow enhanced it. After enduring the Valinthe’s curse of enfeeblement, she had made it her own, though she knew full well the effect was merely temporary. One try was all she had, and after that, hit or miss, it would be lost to her forever.

Her eyes saw the world very differently now. No longer was it sullen and cold, but a true canvas of clashing colors in the countless men and women that now fought in the Fields of Khu’fein. She could see into them, see the truth of their selves, the faces of their souls… and most importantly, she could now see Sacha’s in perfect clarity.

Sacha heard her begin to whisper…

He fell to his knees, clutching his head as he writhed left and right, so wracked it was with pain. Her voice flooded his mind, drowned him, choked him. As his sanity left his mind, he could finally make out her words.

‘‘You whisper the secrets exhumed by your Eye; you see them as truth, and there is the lie.’

‘Behold your true self, as your mind is laid bare: crippled and blind do you kneel in despair,’

‘And of your proud delusions nothing remains, but a sad little man who shambles in chains.’

As her words sank into his mind, Sacha began to shrink and shrivel. His flesh became wiry, his frame was thinner, and his skin was covered in senescent spots. He knelt there, crippled and malformed, his robes too large for him. His third eye struggled to stay open, as if chained down by the burden of the counterfeit world he saw, blind to everything else. What was left of him was a wreck of a man, cowering in his frailty, shivering from the assaulting cold. His limbs were as twigs, withered and fragile, the color of dust, while his face reminded her of an oily rag, used and wrinkled by the wear of a world to which he had never belonged. Seeing him this way, Lillian could not help but pity the man.

Blood spurted from his chest as Esme’s rapier slid into his spine, severing his vertebrae. Death was almost instantaneous. Lillian watched his body fall in mute disbelief, but she eventually shook it off: the Ouellet patriarch had saved her from committing this murder, as that had been her task. Outrage was out of the question: no matter what, she could only be grateful for his mercy.

Their eyes crossed, and they knew things were as they should be. After her silent thanks and his mute acknowledgment, they broke contact, and sped off in opposite directions: Esme for Alix, and Lillian for Ludivine.

The chant vibrated through the tense atmosphere as an aural kaleidoscope of timbres that caused one's body to shiver. Esme's song of strength was now ambient noise compared to the massive choir's ominous summoning. The universe didn't hesitate to obey as the Anti-firmament leaked into their world. Its lifeless, muted state began to slowly spread across the sky above them like molasses.

The Valinthe Chieftain placed his right hand over his heart in a feeble attempt to quell its erratic pace as his left hand shielded his eyes from the rain that was his youngest brother. He inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of the fallen sylph's flesh and the sight of the fallen berserker's blood, then released a guttural scream of anguish. These attackers were as unconventional and as diverse as his people were, and they all held a familiar form in their faces. It was during that epiphany that time seemed to stop. They were the children of his betrothed, and in such a brief span of time he had experienced confusion, grief, and rage. He turned to see Alix standing in the distance with her blade in hand. She didn't look down. She didn't look away. She looked straight at him, and in that moment she silently confessed that this was all her doing. More than seven thousand years of fermented rage and bloodlust fueled his steps as he began to charge. Seven thousand years of fear fueled hers.

Stephane and Ludivine were at a stalemate. As the middle Villeneuve ducked, weaved, and rolled her way around the gravitational anomalies, the most powerful of the clique managed to keep a distance by steadily pacing back. It was a straightforward lunge that resulted in Ludivine landing flat on her stomach from the same gravitational trip line that did Alerar's finest in. She turned onto her back just in time to see the distorted space above her slowly descend. The feeling was unlike any other. It was as if the weight of the very air itself began to bear down on her entire body. Her limbs were not bound, but drastically hindered in movement. The assassin's head darted from side to side seeking a hole, a way out of some sort, but the escape came in the way of a simple reminder. Lillian's delicate voice reached beyond the cadence of gunshots carrying only two words... “The amulet!”

Ludivine glanced down at the green amber trinket attached to her neck. Its dark spots of age and the three horned beetle inside hid an amazing secret. A crooked grin crossed her face as a surge of unimaginable strength coursed through her veins and into her muscles. This invisible force that Stephane had pressed upon her was nothing more than a miniscule hindrance now, so the assassin immediately jumped to her feet and charged. The mage of the stars created every defense he could, but Ludivine passed through them like a curtain, each one of lighter fabric than the last, until her petite blade sliced through his jugular. She watched him drop with a satisfaction akin to a tigress having made a kill. That satisfaction was short lived as she noticed Stephane's life fluid ran gray upon the ground. The Anti-firmament was taking hold.

The choir of the Valinthe apocalypse had risen in volume and tone summoning the imprisoned army. All around silhouettes of lavender ectoplasm began to materialize and begin their walk back into the material world. Due to the conditions of the original ritual, it was assumed that the if these forms made it past the perimeters of the bone gates they would materialize. With that in mind Ludivine, Lillian, and Vespasian set out to cut their strolls short, sending blades through their figures and causing them to evaporate.

“Maelle!” Ludivine screamed. “Your booby trap.”

“Don't worry. It just needs more energy!” Vespasian said as he ran allowing his body to follow his blade through the purple material of several bodies, which in turn evaporated into nothingness. He halted and looked at his eldest sibling with concern. “Right, Maelle?”

Maelle was more than twenty yards away, but she could hear them clearly. She only responded with a shrug as she was occupied with a task of her own. Gilles, the dreadlocked snake man, was starting to fight back, cracking a flaming whip in the likeness of a snake in Maelle's direction during an ever increasing time lapse in between her own attacks. She was a negotiator, not a fighter, and it was beginning to show in her shallow breaths and weaker attacks. Eventually Gilles grew in confidence, and decided to strike the final blow. His jaw seemed to unhinge and open beyond anatomical possibility as an incandescent snake of monstrous proportion emerged from his mouth.

Within a split second it coiled, struck, and came within mere inches of devouring the young broker, but for some reason it stopped in front of her right index finger, which held at its tip a tiny ball of negative energy. Had the snake gone any further, the negative energy would have spread like a virus devouring it and its master. Gilles was at Maelle's mercy, but it was unfortunate that she couldn't spare any. With a hint of regret on her face she touched a fang of the snake. Its white body was quickly overtaken by a molten red rash that made its way back to the host, whose every orifice leaked of burning lava. He wasn't even able to scream, but that was Maelle's intention. Everything that had transpired in that duel was her intention. As the two exchanged blows she probed for he composition of Gilles' energy and changed hers to create a volatile reaction when the two came together. The conversion and the focusing of such energy took every fiber of her being, but killing someone took more.

The broker of nations dropped to her knees and hung her head to the ground as her stomach began to implode like a vortex. It was times like this that Maelle deserved the title of Black Sheep much more than Ludivine. She was the only one in the family that had such a physical and emotional aversion to taking a life.

“Maelle!” Vespasian screamed in between swings. “Help us take out the...”

“I've done my part! You... ugh...” Maelle's stomach emptied its contents out on the ground in the form of a bright beige soup of bread and meat chunks lightly sprinkled with salty tears of shame.

“You're right. You have done your part.” Vespasian stood up straight from his battle stance and nodded his head. He then looked to his mother and father. “I just hope they can do theirs.”

Alerar had one less thing to fear. The revolutionary army, a motley force of humans armed with outdated rifles, was all but defeated with nothing but a few pockets of fighters. Without the power of the Valinthe clique, the Aleraran army's numbers and discipline slowly but surely wore down the revolutionaries. As the untrained Humans fired and charged, the Dark Elves had formed a shallow three row formation at the crest of the horseshoe hillside. The front row would fire then retreat to the last row to reload as the next row would step up and fire. This cycle continued without fail. It was simple, straightforward, and successful. However, the battle was not over. A violet mist of emerging Valinthe began to cover the field, and Alerar's two hundred could not fire quickly enough to stop the thousands of figures materializing into existence.

But a figure appeared in the center of the scene, where the lifelessness of the Anti-firmament took its hold of the last of the firmament. A direling of epic proportion, clad in the fur of Berevar beasts. Bjormund, the Guardian of the Death Gate, towered over the escaping Valinthe tribe with a claymore that far surpassed his great wingspan. The Thayne Legend looked over his subjects and did... nothing. For more than seven millennia thousands of souls who weren't even supposed to be there pestered the fatigued guardian with their very presence. The Valinthe had not been properly killed by battle, time or disease, they could not enter any other realms. He was all the happier to allow them to leave him in peace. To make matters worse, the sorcerers were numerous and spread throughout the field, and now that the gates were open they would remain so until the very last of them stopped chanting. To target them would take everyone off of the task at hand, which was keeping the Valinthe from making it through the gates.

Now that Ilyat's clique was defeated, the siblings and Lillian could focus on exactly that. However, Maelle was spent, and Vespasian was distracted. He couldn't help but notice that his father simply watched as his mother fought the Chieftain of the Valinthe. He rushed in to help.

“Stay back, Vespasian.”

The youngest Villeneuve ignored his father's order until a spray of fire crossed his path. Had he moved any faster, he would have been burned alive. Esme was serious. Vespasian turned to his father with a flared face of rage. “Help her, Goddammit!”

“She made me promise not to interfere.” Esme's ever calm voice failed to hide the look of concern in his eyes. “She wants to face him on her own.”

“Fuck 'on her own'!” Vespasian paced back and forth like a caged beast. He was in rare form, as was everyone else. “You can't see she's scared?”

“That's exactly what this is about.” Esme said as he watched Alix battle with Ilyat, who was now clad in armor of rock. The calm predator that had bested Ludivine the day before had been replaced with a hesitant fighter who sacrificed an opening every time she found one. Her combinations were short, her recoveries from the blunt attack of Ilyat's rock fists were slow. The Chieftain could have killed her a long time ago. This was punishment. “The only thing she's ever feared in this world was him.”

“Ah. Now I get it.” Vespasian said in voice matching that of his father's serenity. “Now I see why you and Mom have always been such distant parents.”

“Don't you dare...”

“Not bad parents. Just distant. I'm not going to try and put a finger on how long the two of you have been in this world, but the twenty something that we have pales in comparison. I do know one thing. The two of you are lucky to have made it this far on your own.” Vespasian stepped up to within inches of his fathers face. “Get it through your head that people, be it Elves, Dwarves, Humans, and even the Gods themselves, aren't meant to be alone. Burn me if you want. I'm going to help my mother – your wife.”

Vespasian turned away and approached the battle. His mother was now kneeling on the ground with a bloody lip, her sword was nowhere to be seen, and her clothes were ripped in various places, exposing the black and blue marks of a battered and abused woman. Alix looked up and made eye contact with him. Her eyes were no longer the piercing hazel blades of the greatest woman he knew. They were the tear glazed windows to a soul reduced to nothing.

“Son.” Esme said from behind him.

Vespasian stopped... and sent her a message in the form of a smile. Fear no more.

“I got this.” Esme passed Vespasian, and he could hear a familiar song quietly escaping his lips.

“Dad.” Esme looked back at his son. He could hear the joy in his voice. “Ilyat's armor is summoned together with sedimentary rock. There are lots of little cracks and crevices.”

Smart, Esme thought to himself. He was just going to go in there and fight, but now his youngest had given him a good strategy. Having built up enough song magic he stopped his singing and continued to approach Ilyat, who was making a deliberately slow walk towards Alix. A thick mist of ethereal spirits began to surround them. “Hey, Ilyat. I'm the one who's been making love to your woman for the last seven thousand years.”

Ilyat didn't understand much Common, but he knew enough to know what Esme was saying. The Chieftain changed his path and charged for the Villeneuve patriarch, who didn't even bother to unsheathe his sword or strap on his buckler shield. Esme ducked an attempted clothesline by the Valinthe and several swings thereafter. Like his wife, Esme was clearly faster than Ilyat, but all Ilyat needed was one successful attack to gain the upper hand. But so did Esme.

The opening came after an attempted jab aimed at Esme's left temple. The patriarch managed to get his forearm between his head and the rock clad fist, but the velocity and the jagged knuckles managed to cause his left forearm to crack. At the same time Esme's right palm had reached Ilyat's abdomen, which did no harm to the man behind the armor at all. What the palm press carried with it was a unique use of Esme's song magic, water touch, which instantly soaked everything he touched from within.

The water quickly did its work, multiplying and pressurizing within the summoned armor of a million rocks and breaking it to pieces. Ilyat stumbled back as white jets of water shot out of the joints of his armor like geysers. A roar of rage came from behind the violet veil of mist, and then came Vespasian swinging his rapier. He cut across Ilyat's exposed back causing a river of blood to come fourth. The Chieftain cried in pain as he turned to lay eyes on Vespasian, who then thrust his blade through the diaphragm just under his ribcage.

Ilyat fell back on to the ground and the remaining pieces of armor shattered in to thousands of tiny pebbles. The wound on his back added to the pressure of this body caused an unbearable stinging sensation all around, but he was too preoccupied with the ever shortening breaths he was able to take. It was as if his lungs were made of lead. This lad who fell him knew what he was doing.

He could have struck anywhere, a thigh to immobilize him, his neck or head to instantly kill him, but he chose a slow and painful death for Ilyat. All so that he could see Alix standing over him victorious during his last moment. She lowered down to get a closer look at him... Or was she allowing him to get a closer look at her? Her eyes were not that of a helpless animal fearing for her life. They were piercing hazel blades cutting deep into his pride. It was the last thing he would ever see in this world.

Alix stood and looked to her husband with her trademark smirk. “I wanted to defeat him.”

Esme shrugged and smiled. “In a way... you did.”

An uneasy veil of silence had fallen over the battlefield when father and son dealt the killing blow. They had executed Ilyat, all for the sake of their family’s matriarch. The warrior chieftain had fallen to his knees amidst the granite rubble that had been his armor, gasping for breath, each inhale a storm of cold and arid pain. The fire in his eyes faded to the gutter of a candle; they glazed over, dark with confusion as the life left them. He was no longer the tall and proud man he had boasted to be; he had been reduced to a crawling husk, trembling from every limb, blood dripping from his quavering lip. And then finally, after a protracted time of suffering, it all came to a stop. Ilyat was no more.

The King of the Valinthe was dead.

The chants of the priests and sorcerers that circled the ritual site, however, did not cease. Even in the void left by their leader’s death, they went on for reasons unknown – perhaps out of duty, or simple loyalty to the man. Perhaps only greed for what they were promised. Whatever the case, they would not stop, and the purple hazes that walked away from the heart of the battlefield were approaching the small, hill-like ridges that delimited the seal currently entrapping the whole tribe of the Valinthe. Their features sharpened the closer they came, the violet blurs overtaken by static as demented eyes and twisted expressions blinked in and out of existence. In their faces, there was only madness.

“Maelle!” the rest of family screamed out, and even Lillian’s shrill and mousy voice had joined the desperate cry.

“Give it time!” the eldest of three yelled out in answer, hands still pressed against her mouth and midriff as she fought the creeping sense of death that had caught in her throat ever since she had killed Gilles. She was a broker, a negotiator, a grifter at worst – she could never stomach being a killer. Still, she did her best to push the dread away, if only to keep in touch with the reality at hand, and the impending sortie of ten thousand madmen. “Everyone get away from the hills!” she managed loud enough to be heard over the din of chatter and confusion.

Just as Vespasian thought of yelling that time was the one thing they were lacking, a sudden hum cut him short. It started low, coming from all sides, but it soon became a droning so shrill that every single person within the fields had brought their hands to their temples, clamping down with such intensity they threatened to crush their own skulls. Though it felt as if their eyes would turn to jelly, some had risked a glance toward the surrounding hills, to see the purple silhouettes of mist and static stop in their tracks… to see the several spots of light that shot out from the hilltops in rising pillars.

To see the blinding flash that tore through darkness.

Thunder struck from below, and the earth slipped from beneath their feet and knees. Blazing fire blotted out the night sky in towers of crimson and smoke. The heat was so intense they could feel its fuming breath from so far away. The several simultaneous explosions were not long to last, however, and soon a dry gale came blowing in from all sides. The chink of thousands and thousands of pellets surrounded them as bone shards rained from the heavens, painfully pelting their heads and skin like ice from a hailstorm.

The cries of ten thousand banshees tore across the fields. One by one, the ghastly silhouettes vanished in puffs and plumes of amethyst, sucked back from whence they came, disappearing into the earth upon which stood the Guardian of the Death Gate. They were siphoned away like murky waters down a drain, passing in between each soldier and revolutionary like a wind of death that desperately sought to clutch them in their intangible grasp. It was all in vain, and their heart-rending screams and millennial curses so vicious and petrifying that the weaker-minded had let their bladders go. Then, only Björmund was left, towering in the center of the battlefield, his tusks and giant claymore gleaming darkly in the lingering flames that now devoured the hills. His worn and weary face was crimpled with irritation, and the direling uttered a long, grunting sigh… and then he, too, vanished from the world.

The silence that followed was absolute.

The revolutionaries ended their struggle, lowering their arms as the Aleraran strike force ceased fire. Their gunfire had been consistently mowing through the ranks of the humans and Valinthe descendants for the better part of the final battle against Ilyat, but now, with the resurrection of the Valinthe foiled, their victory was incontestable. The dark elves rose in acclamation, their triumphant cries filling the night, and they raised their fists to the skies as their enemies sulked in defeat.

The rest of the Ouellet family had gathered around Maelle, who Lillian was helping to stand up. The eldest child had recovered enough from the trauma to face her parents and siblings, albeit with a wan face covered in a fine sheen of sweat. “Wow… Well, that… that was…” Esme began clumsily, fishing for the right words of awe.

“Brilliant,” Alix concluded with more confidence, though her tired eyes were as wide as her husband’s. “Brilliant work, Maelle. I genuinely didn’t know you’d come so far.”

“I didn’t, really…” she began without much commitment, still feeling feeble. “The glyph… I designed it to use the extra power that was weaved into the bones during the first ritual and the energy from the sorcerer’s incantations. They were basically big, magic magnets.”

“That sounds brilliant to me,” Lillian added innocently from beneath the much taller woman’s shoulder, as she had been acting as a crutch. Vespasian and Ludivine were quick to acquiesce, and it was with great relief that they all saw colors return to Maelle’s face.

“We did it,” Vespasian said at last, smiling with all his teeth as he exhaled a lifetime’s worth of stress. “We really did it.”

Ludivine hissed at her younger brother, staring him down with squinted eyes that gleamed like fiery jade. “Careful with what you say: there’s no wood to knock on.”

“I’ll have to agree,” Lillian said meekly, her eyes filled with a nervous shade of gravity and concern. “While not particularly superstitious, I am book-savvy.” They chuckled at that, much to the girl’s dismay – she had been serious, after all. Still, the laughter was quick to fade, and silence settled in awkwardly as the questions rose in their minds like warning flags.

“Mother…” Maelle began at last, the first to speak. “This, all of this…”

“I know, Maelle,” Alix answered lowly, solemnly. She met her daughter’s gaze head on, but it was obvious the matriarch was struggling not to look away in shame. “I owe you all an explanation…” She stopped at the first sound of an approaching commotion. The Aleranian strike force was rounding in the revolutionaries, and the squad leaders were approaching Alix and Esme, seeking to debrief with the spies. The whole sting operation had depended on them, after all.

“But not now… not here.”

One week later…

The main deck of The International was saturated by the silver light of the moon and the golden light of the gas lamps around the table. The combination of the two managed to give a flattering hue to even the palest of people, like Lillian Sesthal, who was the only outside guest at the Villeneuve dinner party. She knew their real family name now, and she knew the real family business. The librarian had proven herself a trustworthy friend of the family, and so she was invited to dine with them to share a special evening. The table was adorned with delectable entrees from all around the world. It was a truly international feast, and the savory assortment of aromas held steady in their noses despite the salty sea breeze of Etheria Port. Normally, the table would be a circus of clashing dishes and utensils, loud conversation, and even a flying piece of food here and there. Tonight, however, it was a silent mausoleum filled with awkward spirits, and rightfully so. Esme and Alix, each sitting at their respective end of the long table, were going to reveal their past.

“Okay. This is ridiculous.” Alix said with a partially full mouth as she tossed her napkin on the table. “I at least wanted to wait until desert to do this, but you’re all unbearable. We will cure your anticipatory anxiety, and when this is done please don’t torture me with your silence.”

“Oh we won’t.” Maelle mumbled before she filled her mouth with a piece of salmon.

“I’m not sure how much you all figured out, but I was born to a Valinthe family more than seven thousand years ago in the mountains of Kachuck. My family was prominent – the equivalent of a noble bloodline in other cultures, but that didn’t change how I or any other woman was treated. You see how slaves are treated in Salvar. We were treated worse, subject to frequent physical and sexual abuse as a way to wear us down psychologically. That way our abilities, which were directly linked to our personalities, would generally be weaker than the men’s abilities. You weren’t a Valinthe woman if you hadn’t been beaten or raped. I was a victim of both… several times. My older sister was beaten, raped and left for dead in public by a handful of elders after it was discovered that she had manifested pyrokinesis. Lucky for me, my transformation abilities were not seen as a threat, but perhaps they were a manifestation of my need to escape. Most women who had survived this treatment accepted it. They even encouraged it at times. I was one of them, until the Alerarans.

“Their first approach was diplomatic, but self righteous. I was fifteen, and newly betrothed to Ilyat. ‘Give us everything you have and we won’t wipe you off of the face of Althanas.’ They said. We didn’t even know that the word ‘Althanas’ meant. But one thing stood out to me. Their women spoke out of turn, they wielded swords, and enjoyed the same luxuries as the men. Although they weren’t quite equal, the Aleraran women were damn close, so I used my ability to transform into a Dark Elf and infiltrated their society.”

Alix cracked a smile with wide eyes of wonder as she stopped to sip a bit of wine. “The freedom they had, the respect and the love they were entitled was amazing.” That smile quickly disappeared from her face, and her voice was that of a weeping child. “It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair to be born in such a Hell! I must have done something horrible in my previous life to deserve to be born a Valinthe. Either way I orchestrated an escape amidst conflict between the Valinthe and Alerarans. I even probed the women in my life to see if they wanted to join me, but none of them wanted to leave even as they saw what I saw. The Alerarans and Dwarves became more desperate since they were locked in a stalemate, and I became more desperate when Ilyat, my husband to be, requested a drawing. As you know, my ability only works for loved ones, and I didn’t love him. I barely even knew him, and as I grew more and more resentful of my Valinthe sisters, they too would soon discover through my ability that I had lost love for them.”

“So that’s when you decided to seal them away.” Ludivine said quietly. “You were behind the largest ritual spell in known history.”

“And that’s what Ilyat meant when he said he didn’t transform.” Vespasian added.

“I was just a muse. The Elves and Dwarves did all the legwork. And yes. He must have attempted to transform the day before he and his forces fell into the trap. I lured the majority of the tribe to the Fields of Khu’fein, and the trap was set. I watched as men, women, and children were sent to the Anti-firmament. I was then free to be who I wanted to be, but knowing the laws of nature I knew that it was possible to bring them back. They weren’t sent there by way of death, so they could return. I took the form of an Aleraran, created the identity…”

“Princess Izlav Elemmire Chath.” Lillian said as she nodded her head. Her plate, still mostly full, was now in the center of the table. She seemed to have lost her appetite for now.

“Princess by day.” Alix said as she reached for Lillian’s plate. If the Librarian wasn’t going to finish the dinner she would. “Spy by night. I found out that a Raiaeran agent managed to abduct a few hundred of the Valinthe and place them in a secret enclave.”

“And that agent was me.” Esme finally chimed in as he stood and slowly walked around the table. “I was that agent, and for the next forty years, your mother and I were mortal enemies. I was setting this enclave up in Corone as a kill switch. If Alerar ever attempted to attack Raiaera in a defenseless state, I would send these remaining Valinthe to free their ancient brethren. Your mother attempted to kill them all, men, women, children several times. I foiled her plans several times, although I didn’t know the nature of the tribe since such information was above my pay grade. One day circumstances forced us to have a civil exchange, during which she revealed the Valinthe and herself. I informed my superiors of the Valinthe tribe’s nature, but they knew and had sent me to do the job anyway. After several appeals to the then paranoid Raiaeran state, I decided to team up with Alix and eliminate the Valinthe refugees. Unfortunately Raiaera’s agents saw us coming and relocated them.”

“Somewhere down the line we fell in love.” Esme was now standing behind Alix with his hands on her shoulders. “She designed an Aleraran form for me; I faked my death then relocated to Alerar. As the Elves of that country became more and more dark, the two of us updated our forms to fit in, and that’s when we realized that we could cheat death by taking on the age of said forms. Eventually we decided to work for ourselves, so Alix faked her death. It was also convenient for me because I contracted a deadly disease in my original Raiaeran form, so I had to abandon it. That was around two thousand years ago.”

“So we were on the right path?” Vespasian said with a smile.

“I would say so.” Esme said with a smirk. “There have been more than thirty Internationals, and no. They weren’t all named The International. Then there was the miracle twenty six years ago. Alix rarely used her original form, the form you see her in today. This form was thought to be infertile due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of the Valinthe. She was confirmed pregnant in the body of an eighteen year old Valinthe woman, and the child was Maelle. Then came Ludivine, and then Vespasian. We never thought we’d be able to have children, at least not while Alix occupied her original form, but here you are. All the while we kept our ears to the ground… watching… waiting for one of Raiaera’s agents to trigger the kill switch. It was triggered around a month ago.”

“Now Ilyat’s been properly killed…” said Vespasian.

“A major disaster was averted…” said Maelle.

“And the Valinthe are virtually dead because we have these…” said Ludivine as she raised her hand and dropped a handful of diamonds on an empty plate. They were the diamonds of the Crown Jewels of Valsheress, and without them, no one could perform a ritual that large.

“And now the Valinthe are gone…” Alix said as she sat back with a look of relief on her face. “For good.”

A moment of silence passed before a teary eyed Maelle stood up and approached her father. She wrapped her arms around his waist as he kissed her forehead. Alix joined in the embrace, as did Ludivine and Vespasian.

After a moment of embrace Esme popped his head out of the huddle and looked at Lillian, who was awkwardly sitting her seat. “Get your ass over here, Librarian. You deserve this too.”

It took the encouragement of five others, but Lillian Sesthal reluctantly rose from her chair with rose colored cheeks and entered the fray with a plum smile. The Villeneuve family cheered as they rocked side by side with the ship.

“Now…” Esme said. “Eat fast. This food is getting cold!”

Spoils
Thanks for following! We hope you enjoyed the read. If you did, then there’ll be more to come!

This here will be our little pool of spoils.

For The International

• Bonus XP, maybe? Or perhaps converting what GP gains I would get into XP? If not, that's alright.
• Also, any spoils requested by Ataraxis involving the Villeneuve family are permitted.
• Sitayamini Under Clothing – While at the Bottomless Pit, Lillian fashioned each of the Villeneuve children a crude but still stylish set of under clothing. Though not full-body, they cover the essential parts of their bodies (similar to the combination of a turtle-necked t-shirt and a pair of shorts). The weavings are made of Lillian’s trademark Sitayamini Silk, which were created at the strength of steel. This offers them good protection against slashing, slightly better protection against piercing, and no protection against blunt damage. She also tailored similar clothing for Alix and Esme as a gift.
• The Diamonds of Queen Valsharess – The centerpieces of the Crown Jewels of Queen Valsharess. Each member of the Villeneuve Family possesses one now. Using these, they can now communicate with each other telepathically no matter their respective locations on Althanas. They have enough for each member of the family, but spare ones for allies as well.

For Ataraxis

• Subdermal Cocoon – In order to protect her frail physique, Lillian developed over the months a network of extremely thin strands of interconnecting silk within her body. She basically weaved a layer of webs between her epidermis and dermis, thus giving her heightened protection her from slashing, though not quite as much against piercing damage. She is still just as vulnerable to blunt damage, however. Over her chest, the layer of webs also uses her thorax as support, allowing high-impact damage to spread out, though this would likely break all her ribs. It is the strength of her strongest threads (currently Dehlar).
• International Pass – As thanks for her help, and since she’s the only person who knows what the Villeneuve family truly does, Lillian can use the International as an NPC mode of transportation, as well as the Villeneuve family as minor NPCs so long as they aren't killed off (discussed with and approved by The International, as stated above).

Both

• Canon - we would like to request that this be considered for official Althanas canon, but only if you deem it worthy.

Quest Judging

The Three Ouellets

STORY ~ 22/30

Continuity ~ 8/10 While I did not get information about what the Villeneuve family had been up to prior to the events of this thread, they were introduced in such a way that it was completely unnecessary. Quite a feat, I must say. As well with Lillian. Further, the plot of the story held together nicely, and the backstory stands up to scrutiny quite well.
Setting ~ 7/10 While there was little actual description of the setting, in detail, there was sufficient for my mind to fill in the blanks and build scenes of the library, the café, and other places. As well, you made off-hand mention of specific features of scenery, and when action sequences took place, you reinforced those features through use, both advantageously and disadvantageously for your characters.
Pacing ~ 7/10 Started slow, but once it got going, the only reason I'd put it down was when my own life encroached. Wonderful. Toward the end of the climactic fight, however, it seemed to drag as you tried to extend that climax. Still, that was made up for by the fact that you didn't end there, but finished "one week later," when the backstory was confirmed (as almost exactly, except for specific details, what I had gathered throughout the thread). Finally, one thing that I always advocate is the need for collaboration between writers, and you two went above and beyond with that. I actually had to check each post to see who officially posted it.

CHARACTER ~ 23/30

Dialogue ~ 8/10 A little cliché at times, particularly with Ludivine, but otherwise great. And the dialogue for Ludivine can be chalked up to the archetypal nature of the character (see Persona). Otherwise, the speaking habits and patterns of the characters fit, to a T.
Action ~ 7/10 As I said in Pacing, the climax seemed to drag a bit, but I absolutely loved the fight at the café, particularly when Lillian finally jumped into action, and the titular Three Ouellets got their act together. This, as well as the minor details as the story progressed, and your use of Setting (see Setting), add up to a great score in this category.
Persona ~ 8/10 Within the first few posts I knew all the main characters as well as if I'd been reading story after story about them, and wanted to learn more and more about them. And I did! A lot of people have a hard time providing enough for this category when they have multiple characters, and others tend to do better when they're not focused on a single person. It looks like you've found your niches, respectively.

WRITING STYLE ~ 26/30

Technique ~ 8/10 You are both strong here. I'm accustomed to Ataraxis' style, but not to The International's. However, it was such that I was quick to find myself enjoying it. The aforementioned lag (see Pacing and Action) was in part due to ups and downs of technique. Your styles, as well, mixed well (again, see Pacing).
Mechanics ~ 9/10 Very few mistakes. You took grammatical risks, and they paid off. A couple of spelling errors were made, but only a couple.
Clarity ~ 9/10 Everything was clear, or became clear after a while. Not really much to say on that.

MISCELLANEOUS

Wild Card ~ 10/10 Highly enjoyable, and bonus points for extensive use of canon, including creative and imaginative expansion upon hinted canon.

TOTAL ~ 81

The International gains 1410 EXP (no gold, as requested, turned to EXP)
Ataraxis gains 5010 EXP and 352 GP

All requested spoils granted. The diamonds, however, cannot be sold, either by you or anyone to whom they are bestowed.

If you have any questions about the judgment or how you can improve, PM me or send me a message on AIM, screen name SuperSonicMatt1.

EXP and GP added!

The International leveled up!

Move pending Judges' Choice decision.

This thread is officially a Judges' Choice. Congratulations Ataraxis and The International!