Even Duffy Bracken was not quite sure how he crossed the room so quickly. After months of constant remorse, pain, and sorrow, he suddenly felt exonerated. He felt, though he was now plummeting, quite alive.

“Oh,” he said.

Something had driven him to heroism he did not know he still possessed. Something had driven him to sing in his heart, and not his lungs. Something had driven him to cast aside his cane in a maelstrom of pulse light, and draw instead a dagger into his grip. The vernal vault sang malice in the bedroom long after he had stepped up onto the balcony’s solitary chair, and tumbled headfirst into the midnight chill.

“Oh bugger.” His accent abandoned all notion of class, and abruptly turned into a plucky Scara Brae twang that would have been hard for anyone but the street urchins of his homeland isle to comprehend.

His curse accompanied a cry of pain as he lashed his blade over his shoulder. With sickening accuracy, it struck the back of his shirt with little in the way of grace. It cut through cloth, skin, and sinew with ease. It came unceremoniously to a standstill as his leap reached its apex.

Through alms and arias, Duffy felt the power of his companion’s overwhelm him. First, he heard Ruby’s sultry voice rattle in his eardrums. He felt warm, heated, and complete beneath her glare.

“For friends I will burn…” he whispered. Time seemed to slow as his head began to err forwards, and his blade began to drag back in the windfall of his descent.

Secondly he felt the ancient blood magic of Lao Sheng stir in his gullet. It made his oesophagus taste like blood, and his breath smell like abrupt decay. With all the strength he could muster, Duffy tensed so that the power rose up from his stomach into his shoulder. He instantly felt the pain of self-sacrifice, and arched his back in a cry of pain as the spell came to fruition.

“For friends I will fly on wings anew!” he roared, no longer shocked, scared, and alone at the moment of his imminent death. The cackle of Ags left his mind, replaced instead with a choral song that funeral pyres blazed to, and kings and queens were remembered by.

The third and final borrowing of power came in the form of his own survival instinct. Long ago, he had been a lithe little street urchin, a thief by another name, and a true romantic. He had done everything in his power in those formative years to make people like him. He had bent, quite literally backwards, in dark alleyways and royal courts to appease the masses. Though the masses were now called the Orlouge clan, and his royal courtship was now with Aimer and not a prince fancy and free, Duffy leant into his tumble and committed himself to his act.

A bloodied wing sprouted from the wound on his shoulder without ceremony.

“For friends, I will defy death…” he screamed, a choral undertone carrying his voice out across the languishing cityscape. Slate roves rattled, moonlit windows paved, and nosey neighbours twitched behind curtains, uncertain wherever or not looking out into the dark would spell an untimely end for their espionage career.

He curved with a rush of blood to the head that made him dizzy and nauseous, stretched out his arms, disbanded his blade, and took Aimer into his confidence. The smell of blood overwhelmed the bard as he tried to see through flailing, pleated, well-tailored cloth to the street below. He crashed, legs flailing, arms weakening, and ran for several steps before he, and Aimer, both collapsed in a whirlwind of arms, legs, and carnal sprays of thick red blood.

Though no-one saw them land, the immensity of the air felt as if a thousand spying eyes were pressing down from the heavens. Still begrudgingly alive, and as yet, undefeated, Duffy Bracken lay prone on his back, with a flamboyant, and heart warmed man strewn across him unceremoniously. He glared, vision blurred, body wrecked, directly up at the balcony.

For just a brief moment, he could have sworn he saw a moose staring down at him, wink, and then vanish inside.

“I fucking hate heights…” he spat, blood thick on his tongue, sweat lathered over every inch of his skin, and his heart pounding. The bloodied wing was no more than a red tattoo on the cobblestones and discarded refuse, a remnant of the providence of Akashima, and a testament to the lengths that Caned But Able would go to show people the heart of the matter.