Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Sklonda, for the first time in fifteen years, is serious about liking someone. Now, that someone happens to be an enormous devil from the Nine Hells, but, at this point, who the fuck cares? At least she knows what she’s getting into this time. 

It helps, in a way, that Gorthalax is a dad too. It helps that he’s just as invested in Fig as she is in Riz. It’s a transparent, unspoken knowledge between them as they drift through the summer, feeling tentatively through the first steps of a relationship. There is a mutual recognition that nothing will ever be more important for the other person than their kid. Either of them would kill or die for their children; to sacrifice something as simple as a budding relationship would be easy. 

But, somehow, the understanding that they are not even close to the most important thing in the other person’s life brings them closer together. Life is busy. Everything is hectic. There are always more balls up in the air than there are hands with which to catch them all. There’s never enough time, and so it makes what time they do carve out for each other more significant, more meaningful. 

To no one’s surprise, the news that Gorthalax and Sklonda are going to put a label on it and start actually dating after a few months of going on dates but dodging the word, delights Fig beyond belief. She is ecstatic. She keeps talking about a twelve-step plan to get every single one of the Bad Kids to be a sibling of hers in some capacity. 

Riz is a bit more reserved, which they also expected. 

Sklonda had been a bit surprised by just how much Riz’s opinion seemed to matter to Gorthalax, but he had explained, “You all are a complete family, and it’s always an adjustment to add someone else to that. Fig has already got the hang of big changes in that department, but Riz doesn’t. He is your most important person, and one of my daughter’s most important people, and, I think, all around a remarkably rooted person for his age. I value his opinion, and I certainly don’t want to make him uncomfortable by avoiding a conversation with him about this.”

And, well. If Sklonda had to pick a moment that it spilled over from a crush into something serious, something she might even call love, it would be then.  

It goes like this: it is a Sunday afternoon and they’re in the Gukgaks' apartment, the same walls and peeling paint and broken window and coffee-stained dining table. The fan still creaks and the AC still doesn’t work, but the window is wide to let in the summer air, and it feels like something new is starting. 

Fig, Riz, and Sklonda are sitting at the kitchen table, Riz and Sklonda in the normal chairs, Fig in one of the folding chairs that “mysteriously” began to appear around when Riz’s friends started hanging around last year. Sklonda and Sandra Lynn are both politely pretending to not notice the change in camping chairs at Sandra Lynn’s house. 

Even on the floor, Gorthalax’s horns still stand taller than either her or Riz’s heads from their positions in the chairs. He is sitting cross-legged on the scuffed floor, hooves folded up beneath him, shoulders folded in and wings down and tucked away. It is, Sklonda has come to see, the position he takes when he is very nervous about the outcome of the interaction he’s about to have. 

It’s honestly a little hilarious to see him so scared of his daughter and her son. Sklonda, personally, has few fears about the course of this conversation. Then again, she’s had about fourteen more years with her kid than he has, so she probably feels a little more stable about gauging her kid’s reaction at this point. She is very kindly refraining from teasing him until after the conversation ends.

Gorthalax clears his throat. His wings flap a little bit before tucking back in even tighter than before. “So,” he says, “how are you all?”

“Not really all that different than we were when you saw us this morning,” Riz says.

Sklonda tries very hard not to grin like an idiot as Gorthalax shuffles, and probably fails. 

“You had a good time at the pool?” 

All of the kids had convened at the apartment earlier to take the bus down to the public pool, enjoying the tail end of summer before school starts up again. It had been a rare morning off of work, waking up to Gorthalax in the kitchen, making pancakes on the stove and chatting with Riz, satisfying some of his endless curiosity about the inner machinations of the universe. (But what’s the actual process of a soul transferring to different planes through death? How do people get where they’re supposed to go? How often do people go to the wrong place?)

Her son, bless him, is supremely bad at small talk, but Gorthalax, who fell by rejecting temperance, is more than willing to indulge his desire to know everything. Which means she walks out to find Gorthalax very carefully sprinkling blueberries into pancake batter, explaining the process of inter-planar soul transferral, and Riz, perched on the counter, tail swinging, ears perked up, notebook sitting on his lap as he twirls a pencil through his fingers and watches Gorthalax with rapt attention. They both turn to look at her, smiles so different but both so warm, and Sklonda thinks she could be very happy like this.

The rest of the kids roll in in a mess of flip flops (Kristen), overflowing tote bags (Gorgug), and comically oversized, heart-shaped sunglasses (Fig). There’s a lot of shouting and giggling and shoving and then they’re all tumbling out of the doorway, goodbyes tossed over their shoulders as they exit, Kristen spraying crumbs everywhere as she shouts through a blueberry pancake sticking out of her mouth like a dog with a frisbee. Riz gives her a hug, and then chases his friends out the door with Adaine, her calling out, “Gods help me, you all will put on sunscreen, or else!”

They’re gone all day, and Sklonda and Gorthalax sit in the soft quiet. He helps her study for the online classes she wants to take, putting away credits toward her law degree. Turns out, dating a devil of the Nine Hells who made contracts for a living for thousands of years means that you have a pretty good resource for help. 

The kids roll back in in the late afternoon, golden hour creeping in through the open blinds and following them in with sun-kissed laughter. The rest of the kids depart, leaving only Fig and Riz and the faint, lingering smell of chlorine. 

“Fig burned herself,” Riz says immediately. “And so did Kristen.”

“How was I supposed to know I needed to reapply three different times?” 

“Adaine and I told you to! And you dunked us in the deep end!” 

“That was not the deep end,” Fig says, reaching over to mess with his chlorine-crusted curls. “You’re just our little guy.” 

Her voice is so fond that Sklonda can’t even be mad about it. She does clear her throat though, before they can devolve into full squabbles like kindergarteners. Both of them turn to look at her, and though their bodies are so different, their expressions are near-identical mirrors of one another, wide eyes and attentive openness. 

“We wanted to talk to you all about something,” Sklonda says. 

Immediately, Fig’s face breaks into a smile caught somewhere between a knowing smirk and golden-retriever excitement. “Yes?” she says, stretching the middle syllable out like taffy, fangs glinting in her grin. 

“So,” Gorthalax says, tail flicking rapidly, back and forth, back and forth. “Sklonda and I have been going out for a few months now, and we’re making it official. We’re dating.”

Fig leaps out of the lawn chair, pumping her fist and whooping. “Hell yeah!” she cries, delighted. “My sibling plan is working! Oh, and I’m super happy for you all, obviously.”

Gorthalax and Sklonda turn to Riz, whose body language is mostly unchanged. “Congrats,” he says with a smile, and it’s nothing like the effusive exuberance Fig is giving off, but Sklonda knows him well enough to read the settled contentment in his shoulders, and knows that he is being genuine.

“We just wanted to check in with everyone before we start spreading the news,” Gorthalax continues slowly, carefully. 

Riz blinks. His eyes narrow. He looks from her to him and back again. “Why?” he asks. “This is a you guys thing.”

“Well,” he responds, even, measured, but so deeply nervous, “I know that this is the first time that this has happened for your mom, and, by extension, you, in a long time. It’s a change. I wanted to check in and make sure that you know you can talk to us if there’s anything you’re worried about.”

Riz’s ears flick. His mouth opens. His brows furrow in incredulity. “Gorthalax. Are you asking our blessing to date?”

Sklonda counts to ten to keep from bursting into giggles. 

“Because, I mean, this really is not a choice that I get an opinion on. You’re adults, you can do what you want. But, like, even if my opinion did matter, I like you. You’re nice to Mom. I’m okay with you all dating.” He shrugs. “Honestly, I kind of thought you already were. This feels like having a baby shower after the baby is born. We already knew.”

He looks Gorthalax up and down, and meets his eyes. They harden for a brief moment, flashing with a faint sheen of light, and she sees both Fig and Gorthalax exhale, an involuntary shiver running through them at the sudden pulse of celestial magic. (Sklonda wishes, not for the first time, that she could feel it like a cleric. That she could know what it feels like to touch the casual electrical current of her son’s soul.)

“And, you know that if you ever try anything, she has a gun and is not afraid to use it.”

“I know,” Gorthalax says, not unthinkingly, but with the depth of someone who watched her shoot at a dragon. 

Riz nods. “Cool.” He turns to Sklonda, yellow eyes soft. “Mom. I want you to be happy. Does he make you happy?”

Sklonda lets out a deep breath. She thinks about the pancakes in the fridge, the ones Gorthalax can’t eat but made anyway for her kid before she was even awake. She thinks about the stack of study guides and notes in her briefcase annotated with dark red ink and flowing cursive. She thinks about a week ago, when they went out for coffee in the middle of the night after she got off work and her eyelids kept trying to glue themselves together but her chest was so warm that she didn’t want to sleep. 

“Yes, kiddo,” she says, “he does.”

Riz smiles. “Okay,” he says. He turns to Gorthalax. “Welcome to the family. There’s a whopping three of us.”

“Not anymore,” Fig sing-songs, bouncing over to sweep Gorthalax into a hug, then Sklonda, then Riz. She smells like cinnamon and cloves and pool water. 

“You’re stuck with us forever!” she trills, gleeful, and Riz laughs. 

All of the tension dissolves from Gorthalax’s posture, wings opening slightly, back straightening. He laughs in tandem, low and rumbling and so, so relieved. He glances over at Sklonda, and she takes his hand, grinning. 

It’s something new. She doesn’t know where it’s going to take them, can’t see the ocean the river is spilling toward, but for now, it’s enough. It’s more than enough. 

—

It goes like this: Pok Askandi falls, and falls, and falls. The Bottomless Pit is aptly named. 

He’s done this plenty of times, been a “damned soul,” retrieved some piece of information, returned to Bytopia, rinse and repeat. It’s stressful, in a good way. But this mission is proving a first. 

There are countless entrances to the Nine Hells. The Bottomless Pit is an easy access point. Or, it would be, if the devil were here. 

Pok has been falling for weeks now. Where the hell is Gorthalax the Insatiable? And what is it that could be more important to him than his domain?

Chapter Text

It goes like this: summer rolls past like honey, thick and slow and sugary sweet, and Riz, for the first time ever, has more friends than he knows what to do with. It’s an adjustment, to be sure. 

Last summer, he spent days bouncing around his apartment and visiting the Luckstone household, alternately being friend-babysitted by Penny and helping her babysit her veritable army of younger siblings. 

This summer, Penny is off with her new friends, and Riz is with his friends, and he misses her, but it’s hard to hate anything about his life in between barbeques and sleepovers at the repaired Faeth home, cooking with Adaine at Jawbone’s apartment and having dance contests at Fabian’s house and all the other things that come with tripping into having five best friends out of nowhere. 

And so the summer passes, a haze of sun-soaked days and nights like syrup, cool and sweet and sticky with humidity. He bullies his friends into wearing sunscreen whenever possible, and rubs aloe on their backs when they don’t. He is at once miles less busy and monumentally busier than when school was going on, because he’s not doing schoolwork anymore, but going out with his friends is more intense than any schoolwork ever has been. Intense in a good way, but still intense. 

(Not that he would ever admit it to his friends or his mom, but sometimes Riz still feels like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting to be the punchline of a joke that’s never coming. Sometimes it’s still hard to think that these people actually like him, that they actually want him around for more reasons than to just be useful. At this point, he knows it must be true, but the terrified, distrusting little kid that lives curled up in his ribs is still halfway waiting for his luck to run out.) 

All of which leads him to here, scrambling off the bus at the last stop by the highway in the late afternoon, briefcase swinging behind him. He steps through the scraggly, pale yellow grasses on the side of the road, brambled tops hooking at his pants and brushing at his tail, which swings high above the tops. He glances both ways, heat shimmering up off the road in undulating waves, and sprints across the cracked asphalt of the highway as fast as he dares, the yellow lines giving way to sidewalk, weeds muscling up through the old concrete. He follows the meandering, poorly poured sidewalk down to where the Faeth home springs up. 

It was damaged in the fires at the end of last year, but it’s been repaired all but perfectly. Sandra Lynn, besides being a wonderful ranger, is a startlingly competent renovator, and the Bad Kids have all spent a good chunk of days at each other’s houses, helping tear up floorboards and replace linoleum and paint over walls. So the Faeth home is back in great condition, and is an excellent place to hang out. 

Fig has been making up for a year of radio silence interspersed with outbursts of cynical rage by alternating between the Faeth home and Gilear’s apartment, and dragging all her friends out to the house. Riz recognizes it for the attempt it is to include her in her daughter’s life, and he thinks Sandra Lynn does too, because she seems thrilled any time they come over. 

There’s no motorcycle in the driveway as Riz walks up, which makes sense. He is always on time, and Fabian is chronically an hour late whenever possible. He calls it “fashionably late.” Adaine calls it “stupid.” Riz is probably going to get a text in forty-five minutes asking if he needs to be picked up. 

The only car in the driveway is Jawbone’s steel-blue clunker with the duct tape around the back bumper and the wolf sticker on the back windshield. Riz grins.

He skips up the porch steps, still with that new-paint whiteness but tracked over with the mud of Sandra Lynn’s boots. He gets into the shade of the porch and is approaching the door, screen closed and heavy wood open behind it, letting warm air coast into the home, when his ears flick up at a sudden crash and excited screech from within the house. 

He fully abandons his briefcase on the porch and dives behind one of the wicker chairs, folding himself into a crack between a flower pot and the wall only seconds before Adaine and Fig come hurtling out of the doorway, shrieking war cries. 

From his hiding spot, he can’t see them, but he can picture Fig’s face of indignation as she cries, “Hey! That’s cheating! You can’t use rogue stuff!” 

Riz closes his eyes, opens his fingers, and tries to channel his focus, centers his being on the faint pulse of Fig’s magic, the infernal heartbeat of campfires and cinnamon. He’s close enough that his Message goes through, even though he can’t see her. All is fair in love and water balloon war, he says, listening to Fig groan and convey it to Adaine, who only laughs. 

A week ago, Kristen had used her years of being a camp counselor for good, and introduced Adaine to the magic of water balloons. Ever since, she has taken a singular glee in pelting them with balloons at any given opportunity. None of the rest of them have gotten annoyed enough with her to ask her to stop yet, not with how hard it makes her laugh, fills her with light from the inside out. There is, Riz thinks, a unique kind of joy that she takes from being able to be mean to her friends in a way that means she loves them. 

“Riz,” Adaine says, “we promise not to hit you if you promise to help us hit Fabian.” 

He pops up from behind the flower pot immediately, holding out his hand to shake. “Deal,” he says. 

Adaine and Fig shake his hand, the former solemnly and the latter grinning like the devil she came from. “Pleasure doing business with you,” she says smugly. 

Fabian’s ridiculous ability to dodge has made water balloon battles truly a battle. It has proven exhaustingly difficult for anyone to hit him with their atrocious aim. Anyone but Riz, that is, who can snipe just about anything, even with a plastic balloon. 

Fig and Adaine tuck their water balloons away, and start dragging him into the house with an excited, “Come on, come on!” They each grab one of his hands, and Adaine scoops up his briefcase as they tear in, the screen door swinging shut with a bang behind them. 

Inside the house is all paneled wood, a line of mud-soaked boots discarded at the entry, jackets hanging on hooks on the wall. The girls drag him through to the living room, Adaine tossing his briefcase onto the couch. 

“Holy shit,” Riz says, looking at the ten-gallon bucket in the living room full of water balloons. “You all are really gonna soak everyone.”

“Wrong,” Fig says cheerfully, and pulls him into a side-hug. “ We are gonna soak everyone.”

“Uh-oh,” Sandra Lynn says, trailing in through the back door, looking at them with a mix of bemusement and exasperation. Jawbone follows her in. “Tell me you did not get the marksman in on this mess.” 

“We have to get Fabian, Mom!” Fig says. “It’s very important! Riz is the only one who can!”

“Hi, Sandra Lynn,” Riz says with a wave. He might as well be polite up until the point where he and her daughter and their friends soak her house. 

“Hi, Riz,” she replies, amused. “We’re going to eat later, so do you need any snacks or anything to hold you over?”

“I brought coconut cookies,” Adaine says.

“At this rate, our apartment is going to be more baked good than apartment by the time school starts,” Jawbone laughs, pulling Adaine into a quick hug. “It’s awesome.” She drops her head onto his shoulder, glowing a little bit. 

“I’ll take a cookie,” Riz says, and follows Sandra Lynn into the kitchen. They all end up on the stools at the counter with handfuls of cookies and glasses of water after Jawbone asks if Riz has had any actual water today, not coffee. He waffles too long, and so all of them get water. 

“It’s important to stay hydrated,” he reminds them all. “Water keeps all the other systems running, you hear me? This one time, I was out with a buddy of mine, and we had been plastered for coming up on a week, y’know? A real bender.”

All three kids exchange looks caught between exasperation and trepidation. There’s no telling where Jawbone’s stories will end up, or how relatively scarring they will be. 

“And we were out raising some hell, you know, getting into fights, stealing from stores. We stole a whole carton of energy drinks from this little convenience store and went down to the train tracks to shotgun the drinks and run over the tracks howling.”

Sandra Lynn, leaned against the kitchen sink, arms folded over her chest, looks baffled and amused and sickeningly affectionate. 

“And my buddy, he chugs three cans and a bottle of liquor in three minutes, runs across the train tracks, and vomits up blood. We had to take him to the hospital, full stomach pump. He can’t drink energy drinks to this day. You get what I’m trying to say?”

Now, never let it be said that Riz Gukgak cannot follow confusing or contradictory lines of information. Conspiracies are his jam. He’s a licensed private investigator. But even he can’t tell how that could possibly relate to their conversation. 

“...Is this still supposed to have something to do with water?” Adaine asks for the whole group, eyebrows furrowed. 

“Well, yeah!” he says enthusiastically. “‘Cause none of that would have happened if we had been drinking water, you hear me? We have to regulate substances. Have a drink of something else, follow it up with water. Drink responsibly, and never mix energy drinks with alcohol.” 

He looks over them all, tail wagging, ears pricked up to face them, and Riz resists the urge to burst into hysterical laughter. Truly, Jawbone’s ability to turn a nonsensical story into quite good advice is unparalleled, even if the stories make Riz deeply uncomfortable in a way he can’t explain. 

“Okay,” Sandra Lynn says, a smile tugging at her face and eyes, “eat your cookies. And drink your water.”

“Hydration,” Jawbone says, nodding solemnly.

Fig is the first to crack, bursting into laughter and spraying coconut cookie crumbs all over the counter. Adaine quickly follows. Riz just shakes his head, grinning at his friends and their weird, growing family. He scarfs down a few cookies, sugary and tropical, if a little burned at the edges. He drinks water. It would definitely be better if it were coffee to dip his cookies in, but he’ll make do so Jawbone stops watching him, waiting for him to finish. 

When he puts down the empty glass, Jawbone nods approvingly, and returns his full attention to his own cookies. Riz breathes a sigh of relief. His plan to forever avoid talking about himself with their guidance counselor/Adaine’s dad has been going pretty well so far. 

He can’t quite understand why the rest of them are so willing to do it. Whenever he so much as thinks about talking with him about his feelings, spiders erupt on his spine and his bones go cold. But that’s normal, and he’s handling it by avoiding it altogether. A great plan, in his opinion. 

Luckily, Fig starts chattering on about the latest song she’s written. Fig and the Cig Figs are starting to take off locally, the gigs they’ve been playing all summer gaining millions of streams online. A few songs have played on the radio, and there’s a record label involved now, that Gorthalax is handling. 

Riz knows, from conversations at the breakfast table that he tries desperately not to make weird, that the devil is in the process of wringing out an advantageous contract with the label, reading the fine print religiously and making copious edits. Gorthalax’s years of writing out detailed contracts with damned souls for power have really given the Cig Figs a leg up in the music industry; there will be no unsuspecting contract violations. 

The doorbell rings about fifteen minutes later, and Fig interrupts her own conversation to streak off to the door and return with Gorgug and Kristen. They have also, apparently, been conscripted to the Attacking Fabian force, and join the others at the counter easily. 

Kristen spots the cookies, and immediately tries to steal the one Riz is holding straight out of his hands. 

In response, he snatches the cookie away and snaps his fangs at her, a sharp click and a warning hiss, full of playful undertones that she definitely can’t hear. 

Jawbone’s ear flicks, and he chuffs a wolfish laugh that tells Riz he definitely heard the subtones of play and affection. 

Kristen does not recoil. She does not tell him to be more civilized or mind his fangs or not be so aggressive. She laughs, and grabs at his arm again, saying, “Come on, just a bite!” and when he hisses at her again, she hisses right back, all clumsy vowels and wide grin like a newborn goblin. It’s hilariously adorable in a way he would not even know how to express to her. 

Gorgug slides in next to Adaine, who hands him a cookie calmly as Riz and Kristen wrestle over his own cookie, nevermind that there’s still a whole Tupperware full of them. Sometimes, he is figuring out, it’s about the fun of it all. Sometimes, it’s about the way he nips Kristen’s arm playfully and she tugs on his tail and a subsonic purr hums in his chest the whole time. 

About fifteen minutes after that, Riz’s crystal buzzes. the hangman and i are going to fig’s. we’re passing by strongtower on the way. need a ride? 

Riz taps out a, nah, already here. thanks though

He looks up at his friends, and says, “He’s on his way.” Fig, Kristen, and Adaine erupt into war cries, all tearing out of their seats and flooding into the living room to load themselves up with water balloons. 

Gorgug and Riz exchange grins as Fig steals a bandana from Sandra Lynn’s closet and wraps it around her forehead, tying it so that it sits in a band across the base of her horns, holding back her bangs. She insists on giving Adaine and Kristen “battle bandanas” too, and then they all scatter to find hiding places as Sandra Lynn and Jawbone laugh from the kitchen. 

Gorgug and Kristen post up in the entry hallway. Adaine and Fig go outside, hiding in the bushes. Riz crawls straight out of an upper story window and hides on the roof, flattening himself onto the hot tiles in the shade of an overhang. Sunlight puddles on the ceiling and drips off to color the porch below. Wind blows warm and earthen over the roof, tugging at his curls and kissing his cheeks on the way past. Laughter ripples up from either side of the house, his sharp ears plucking it out of the noise of the birds and the crickets and the roar of the highway, a compass swinging back to magnetic north. 

A distant sound rolls over the asphalt. His ears flick up. The hum grows into the steady roar of a motorcycle. He grins as the Hangman tears into the driveway, swinging to a halt, flames bubbling out of the pipes. Fabian swings himself off the Hangman.

For a moment, everything is silent. And then-

“YAAAAAAHHHHH!!!” Fig shouts, tearing around the corner of the building and launching a water balloon at Fabian. 

He leaps sideways, and it explodes against the front wheel of the Hangman. 

Adaine swings around the other side and throws another balloon at him, only for him to dodge again.

Riz grins, hefting his own balloon and eying his shot.

Fabian tosses his head back with a snort, brushing dust off his shirt. “Really, I don’t know when you all will learn. I am simply too athletic and cool to be conquered by your silly plastic ballo-”

Riz winds up, and fires the water balloon like a bullet. 

Fabian chokes on water, leaping into the air and yelping, shrill and undignified, pompous speech cut off by a sudden dousing. 

All the others dissolve into peals of laughter. He can hear Kristen howling with laughter even from inside the house. 

Fabian looks up at the roof, betrayal written all over his face, mouth hanging open, eye wide with indignation. “The Ball,” he exclaims. “How could you collaborate with the enemy like this?!” 

Riz throws another water balloon. It explodes on his shirt, soaking him for a second time. He grins. “You’re late,” he calls. “I have made my alliances.”

Fabian shakes water off himself like a dog, and says, “Fine! War it is. You shall learn to fear the name Seacaster.”

He loses the water war handedly. Turns out, even Fabian and all his dexterity can’t beat the combined forces of four normal teenagers and a rogue sharpshooter in a water balloon war. 

By the end, the sun is going down, and all of them are thoroughly soaked in water and dust, mixing into mud on their skin. Riz is grinning from ear-to-ear, and when Gorgug gently wipes a streak of gritty mud gunk off his nose, he feels like fireworks. 

They all drift back inside, and Sandra Lynn, when she sees them, turns to Jawbone and says, “Next date night is on you. Told you they would get muddy.”

He just shrugs in response and says, “Ah, well. A little mud here and there is good for you.” He turns to address the kids and asks, “Did you all have fun?”

Adaine, still giggling, says, “So much,” and all the rest of them smile. Fig and Kristen high-five, and even Fabian gives a begrudging huff of affection. 

“Okay,” Sandra Lynn says, clapping her hands. “You all go change, and then we’ll do the fire and dinner, yeah?”

They didn’t really bring many other changes of clothes, but at this point, there’s a mix of six different wardrobes scattered throughout almost as many homes. When Fig, Kristen, Adaine, and Riz had all been more-or-less living at Strongtower Luxury Apartments, their wardrobes had done a fair bit of mixing, and that mix has persisted even as they scattered to different households. And then, with Gorgug practicing at Fig’s house all the time, and Fabian’s general tendency to lose track of things because he just has so many things, all of them have at least some clothing at the Faeth home.

It means that Riz ends up in one of his old sleep shirts with the words Bastion City Police Department that he stole from his mom and Fig stole from him, and one of Fig’s pairs of sweatpants, rolled up five times around his ankles. 

Adaine ends up in some of Fig’s old clothing, all pastels and colorful leggings. 

Kristen takes an oversized sweatshirt and uses it as a shirt, along with one of her own pairs of pants. 

Fabian, despite his own grumbling, ends up in a pair of sweatpants and one of Sandra Lynn’s shirts. 

Gorgug ends up in Kristen’s pants and one of his own hoodies that got left at the Faeth home one time. 

Fig, looking at all of them, declares them, “So cute, guys, this is adorable,” and makes them all take a picture together. Riz is solidly eighty percent sure she’s going to print it out and put it on her wall later. It makes his insides suspiciously mushy. 

They traipse back downstairs, following the smell of wood smoke out to the backyard, where Jawbone is watching Sandra Lynn coax a fire to life with stars in his eyes. She carefully scrapes together the high flames in the middle and builds up some beds of smaller flame around the outside, setting up a grill grate over the edge of one bed of coals. She stands up, wiping off her hands and planting them on her hips. “Alright,” she says, smiling at them. “Who wants to make some dinner?” 

On the picnic table that looks like it’s been here for decades, she has set up a station for hotdogs and another station with ground beef and peppers, carrots, mushrooms, and a variety of spices.

“I can show you all how to make a camp dinner, if you want,” she offers. 

“Camp dinner?” Adaine asks curiously. 

Sandra Lynn nods at the ground beef and vegetables. “Yeah. I make them sometimes out on long missions. Fun little construct-your-own-meal things.”

Her eyes light up. “I would love to learn that!” 

Fig, Adaine, Kristen, Riz, and Gorgug all crowd around Sandra Lynn as she shows them how to make a camp dinner. She lays out strips of aluminum foil for each person and makes shallow bowls out of them, showing them how to take handfuls of meat and as many vegetables as desired. As she sprinkles chili flakes and garlic salt on her mix in the aluminum foil, she explains, “You really put as much or as little as you want in. It’s very much cooking by ear. There’s no wrong way to do it.”

Kristen accidentally opens the cap on the chili pepper, dumping a solid five tablespoons into her own meal, and blanching as she looks down at it. “Oops.”

Sandra Lynn sighs. “I stand corrected.”

Kristen makes a new meal. 

Sandra Lynn shows them how to put another layer of aluminum foil on top and fold in all the edges super tightly. A marker is passed around, and they all write their names on their packets. She piles up the little packaged meals and takes them over, laying them carefully on the grate over the fire, explaining that all the cooking will happen inside just from sitting by the fire. 

Fabian watches the whole process with a vaguely nauseous expression on his face as they scoop out ground beef and vegetables by hand to put in their own packages. 

“Come on, Fabian, the fire is going to cook everything out anyway,” Kristen says. 

“Wimp,” Adaine says, teasing fondly. 

Fabian sniffs loudly, folding his arms over his chest. “Well, excuse me for not wanting to touch raw meat your hands have been all over.”

Privately, Riz sees the slight tinge of fear in his eyes, sees the way he eyes Kristen’s discarded meal. He puts together that Fabian has no idea what spices would even go well together, let alone in what proportions. He doesn’t know, and is too embarrassed to ask for help. 

Silently, Riz sets up another aluminum foil bowl, and starts filling it with beef. He sprinkles in some potatoes and bell peppers, only going for the green, avoiding the red. He adds in some carrots, but skips the mushrooms. He sprinkles in a good amount of cayenne, garlic salt, and chili pepper. He closes up the package with another sheet of aluminum, using his claws to fold up and flatten down the edges into a good seal. He scribbles, Fabian , on top of the foil, and brings it over to Sandra Lynn. 

She looks down at the package, and then back up at Riz, her eyes softening. She smiles at him, and says, “You’re a good one,” her voice low and soft and knowing in a way that makes Riz’s face go hot, his ears dipping down in embarrassed recognition. 

He smiles back at her, small and seen. He slinks back over to where Kristen and Fig are unfolding lawn chairs around the fire, and finds Fabian watching him, his face caught somewhere between surprise and vulnerable appreciation, a vast longing and breathlessness that Riz recognizes, something from his own chest reflected back at him on his best friend's face. 

When Fabian catches Riz looking, of course, he schools his face back into something far less vulnerable. That’s fine. Riz is good at loving people with actions rather than words. Fabian doesn’t have to say it. 

The meals cook, filling the air with the smell of spice and warm meat along with the thick curl of wood smoke that hangs around all of them. Kristen teaches Gorgug one of her old summer camp clapping songs, and within five minutes, Gorgug is better at keeping the beat of the song than she is, which just makes her grin and laugh. 

Riz sits on the ground with his back to Adaine’s legs, watching Gorgug and Kristen play and Fig and Fabian load up fire skewers with marshmallows. Sandra Lynn sighs and says, “Only two before dinner, guys,” only for Fig to stick her tongue out and shove five onto her skewer. 

When the meals come off the fire, Sandra Lynn tells them all to be very careful, because they’re very hot, and passes them out. They shove for elbow room at the picnic table, and laugh when Fabian tries to eat his way too fast and scalds his mouth. 

Riz scarfs his entire meal down in less than twenty seconds, and then starts roasting marshmallows as the rest of them finish up. He roasts a few marshmallows to golden-brown over the coals and distributes s'mores to his friends, before shoving his own marshmallows directly into the fire and then tearing into them, char and all. 

His friends finish their meals and then their s’mores, and move on to roasting their own marshmallows. Kristen scorches hers on purpose. Fabian scorches his on accident. Gorgug teaches Adaine how to roast them to golden perfection, her face creased in concentration as she rotates it carefully over the lowest flames. Fig eats her marshmallows without toasting them, shoving as many into her mouth as can fit. 

The sky drips from an orange-gold to soft pink to a gradient of purples, bleeding inevitably into the inky purple-blues of night. The stars come out, so many more here than he can see from Strongtower, and Sandra Lynn shows them constellations, picking out the Boar and the Dragon and the Sisters, who chase each other across the sky and never catch up. 

Fig spreads out blankets and they collapse into a pile together, stargazing. Fig’s horns end up stabbing into Riz’s ribs, and Kristen’s arm ends up flopped over his stomach. His head is resting on Fabian’s chest, every breath making him rise and fall. 

Crickets chirp and owls call distantly. Creatures skitter through the grasses and creep through the trees. Mosquitoes bite at his tail. The stars wink down at them, the cosmos spread in a panoramic arc above them. Sandra Lynn’s voice is a low hum from the chair she is sharing with Jawbone as she points out each constellation in turn, and tells them some of the stories behind them.

His friends are all around him, warm and heavy and reassuring. Night embraces them on every side like a hug, like a shield. The sky is endless, and the summer feels just as open and full of possibility even as the pages turn closer and closer to the end. His friends breathe under him, around him, and the night, for once, is calling. For the first time in months of sleepovers, Riz is the first to fall asleep.

—

The first day of their sophomore year of high school proves miles less eventful than their freshman year. 

For one, no one in their party dies, so they’re already off to a monumentally better start. 

Second, no one dunks Riz in a trash can. This, admittedly, is more of a personal victory, but it’s a big one for him, so he’s counting it. 

There is no chaos of a corn monster in the cafeteria, no looming threat of a missing friend, no ever-present gavel hanging over his head, waiting to sound the verdict on his existence as a friendless loser. He and his friends meet up on the quad before the welcome assembly, Fabian toting drinks for all of them that Cathilda made to go. 

They go to the assembly and mostly zone out on Arthur Aguefort’s impassioned speech about chronomancy and adventuring conduct and being unforgiving instruments of violence and mayhem. Riz sips his black coffee and watches Kristen and Fig play rock paper scissors until it develops into a wrestling contest to get the other one in a headlock, and thinks they’ll probably be fine. The gym has been mostly repaired by now, but, after all, this is the place he killed a dragon last spring. 

Riz collects the basic cipher and syllabus for his first day of Rogue Class and goes to crash in Fabian’s backpack to work on it, listening to the distant, reassuring hubbub of squeaking sneakers and crashing metal that comes from the Fighter Class. 

He is scribbling out the last few lines of his syllabus as the sounds of Fighter Class wrap up, the slashing of swords and clanging of halberds filtering into chatter and the zipping of backpacks. 

A sudden wash of light pours over Riz as Fabian opens his backpack and sighs. “Really, The Ball?” he asks. “How long have you even been in here?” 

Riz shrugs, double checking the cipher, tail flicking among Fabian’s mess of papers. “Probably at least an hour.” He looks up at his friend, who is covered in sweat and creased with exasperation in a way that is clearly actually amusement. He hands him the change of clothes that is the one new thing in the backpack since summer. “You should really clean out your old papers from last year.”

“Alright, that’s enough out of you,” Fabian says, and zips Riz back into the backpack, leaving him in the warm darkness with a massive grin. 

He takes fifteen minutes to clean up and change and then comes back, swinging his backpack, and Riz by extension, up onto his shoulders. Curled up in the muted light, his back to Fabian’s and the hubbub of the world kept at a manageable length, he takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, deeply content. 

Maybe it’s weird to enjoy being back at school, but Riz, sue him, likes to do things. School is just doing things, and doing them with his friends. He kind of loves it. 

Riz’s brain has been unconsciously tracking Fabian’s turns as he walks through the school, and so he registers the exact turn into the cafeteria, along with the sudden smell of food and the roar of conversation that is ever so slightly different from that of the hallways. Fabian makes a beeline for their unofficially designated table, and then-

“Oof,” Riz says, all the breath whooshing out of him in the dizzying swing of vertigo as Fabian swings his backpack off his shoulder and drops the whole thing on the table. 

“Fabian,” Adaine’s scolding voice says outside as he shoves aside papers in a search for the zipper. “Tell me you did not just drop Riz on the table like a stack of books.”

He finds the zipper, opening the backpack and slithering out onto the table in a tumble of crumpled papers and plastic water bottles. “I’m all good,” he says breathlessly. “Hi, Adaine, how have your classes been so far?” 

She shakes her head fondly, pulling him off the top of the table to drop him into a seat next to her. “Fine,” she says. “How about you? Been very productive in Fighter Class, have you?” 

“Oh, very,” he says seriously. “I already finished decoding the syllabus for this year. Apparently we’re doing an arcane unlocking unit. I would love to pick your brain for that.” 

She lights up. “Oh, yes, please. Actually, Professor Runestaff was telling us that we’re going to be doing a collaborative research essay, talking about how the incorporation of spells within other subclasses can be useful, even if the magic is not the main focus. I know most of my classmates are going to be focusing on fighter examples, bladesingers or magical enhancements on barbarian weapons and the like, but I was hoping I could talk to you about some of the potential benefits in rogue work. That is, if that’s alright with you.”

“Of course you would find nerd detective work more fascinating than the intricacies of fighting,” Fabian says, pulling out one of Cathilda’s elegantly made sandwiches, reeking of some kind of flowery elven condiment. “No accounting for taste.”

“You do realize that if I asked you, you would have to help me with writing an actual essay, don’t you?” Adaine asks dryly, leveling him with a look that could fry an egg over the table.

He stops, sandwich halfway to his mouth, and does a full-face grimace so intense it makes his eyepatch scrunch up for a moment. “Nevermind. Carry on in your ways of nerdom. Please do harass The Ball instead of me.”

“Who’s harassing who?” says a sudden voice, and the whole table rattles as Fig throws herself down, followed by a much more sedate Gorgug. 

“Fabian is harassing us,” Adaine says, at the exact same time that Fabian says, “Adaine is harassing The Ball.”

“No one is harassing anyone,” Riz says, waving his hands around. “Adaine was asking me for help on a project that I am interested in, because it is cool.”

“Nerds,” Fabian says through a mouthful of sandwich, choking as Adaine kicks him under the table.

“What’s your project about?” Gorgug asks curiously, beginning to pick at his lunch tray, but looking at Adaine and Riz with open curiosity. 

“The incorporation of magic into other classes,” she says, starting to eat her own food. “Most of the class will be looking at fighters and stuff, but I thought it might be interesting to look at rogues with Riz.”

“Wow, that does sound cool.” He looks over at Riz, tilting his head, birdlike. “I know you learned the Message spell recently. Do you think you’ll learn any more spells?”

He blinks. He considers this. He has come a long way from the Riz that existed at this time a year ago, nearly friendless and terrified of his own magic, perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop, damming up all the water inside of him. 

These days, he’s much more comfortable with his own power. Magic is no longer the monster under the bed, waiting to pull him in. 

And, he will admit, learning Message with Adaine had been fun. It had been its own adventure, hunched over her spellbook, learning the somatic components, watching her be comfortable and proud in her own teaching ability, the absolute thrill of sharing when he first cast it successfully, Adaine’s voice rippling back to him like an echo through water. 

(That’s another thing they found out. Riz’s magic, whatever flavor it comes in, inherent, divine power or the shared, taught magic of normal wizardry, reflects water in every form. He doesn’t know how he spent so long pretending it was anything short of inexorable.) 

Still, he thinks about it. Thinks about the Message spell. Thinks about what it would be like to learn more, to take the power inside of him and put it to something useful. Just one more tool of many. 

He thinks about it, and his fingers itch, his heart pumping faster, his tail swinging. It’s the thrill of finding a good clue, of chasing down a good mystery. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think I might.”

Then Kristen drops down at the table with her own tray of cafeteria food, and says, “Okay, so what is the deal? Do they serve corn glop every year on the first day? What is this?” She stabs the corn with a spoon, and says, “I have turned my back on corn, and now it is haunting me.”

Her eyes are so wide, her hair frizzy in its ponytail, strands flying loose around her face, and she looks so melodramatically betrayed that Riz can’t help but snort, which in turn sets off Fig into a laughing fit, followed closely by Adaine and Gorgug. 

And so lunch rolls on, fluorescent lighting high above the plastic tables as Kristen and Fabian argue about who has the more disgusting food, and Riz listens to Gorgug tell Adaine and Fig how Barbarian Class went. 

A year ago, the start of their freshman year crashed and burned in this room, collapsing in on itself along with a corn monster and the death of three staff members. He watches Kristen drive Fabian to insanity with a shit eating grin, watches Gorgug and Adaine compare class schedules as Fig Prestidigitations tiny flowers into a crown on his head around his headphones, and he thinks this year is going to be better. 

—

The late summer sun beats down like a baseball bat on Kristen’s neck and shoulders, scorching her pale skin into something raw and pink. Only her face is protected, a small pool of shade dripping over her nose and cheeks from the brim of the hat Riz had pulled onto her head, exasperated, when she halfheartedly put on another weak coat of sunscreen. 

They’re at a picnic table in the park, her and Riz and Tracker, all collapsed on the creaking, splintered wood. Riz is reviewing one of his personal PI cases, scribbling out little notes in one of his journals and flipping through three or four manila folders of clues. Tracker is reading some article on how to put together a compelling Instagram page, saying that maybe having one would help with Yes? 

Kristen should be being productive. Really, she should. She could do her Cleric Class homework. She’s pretty sure she has an essay on the theoretical consequence of evangelism making worship harder to maintain due in a few days. She could be helping Tracker figure out how to do an Instagram page. Instead, she’s just sitting here watching her favorite people get things done, their single-minded focus pushing them further toward their goals while she watches. 

Sometimes, Kristen fears that they’re running a marathon, and she is the one who comes out of the gate too strong and then flags halfway through, and her friends are perpetually just dragging her over the finish line. Other times, she fears that she’s not running the marathon at all, that she’s one of the people cheering on the sidelines, maybe handing out snacks. Well meaning, and supportive, but ultimately not much of a contribution to the final success.

So instead of trying to get something done, and then inevitably becoming even more paralyzed by her own lack of ability and drive, she’s sitting in the afternoon sunlight, burning to a crisp and trying to memorize every little feature of Riz and Tracker’s focus. She catalogues the way Riz’s tail swings lazily in thought, and more aggressively as he appears to put something together. She watches the way Tracker’s curls spill over her forehead and out from behind her ear, deep brown tinged gold around the edges, and the way her nose wrinkles up, just slightly, in concentration.

She commits all of this to memory, and thinks that this is, if not a productive use of her time, then at least a more satisfying use of it. 

As if she can feel Kristen’s attention, Tracker looks up and sideways. Her eyes crinkle up at the edges as she smiles, caught between pleased and embarrassed. “What’s up?”

“You’re beautiful,” Kristen says honestly. 

Riz looks up from his files, dark brows dipping as he narrows his sharp eyes at them. “You all aren’t going to start making out, are you?”

“What? Pfft. Of course not,” she blusters immediately, as if she hadn’t been just considering it. 

Tracker snorts. “We’ll keep the PDA to a minimum for you.”

“Thanks,” Riz says. He looks back down at his clues and cringes. “I’ve got enough to gross me out here.”

“Is that the same case as last week? The one with the genasi woman?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Why is that unfortunate?” Kristen asks.

His ears flatten back against his head and he lets out a low, throaty noise that conveys deep disgust. “Well, her husband is definitely cheating on her, for one.”

Both Kristen and Tracker make identical full-body winces. 

“Whoof,” Kristen says. “That’s rough.”

“For one?” Tracker says, alarmed. “What’s two?”

Riz peels his lips back and hisses slightly. “I think he’s also stealing money from their shared business.”

Tracker buries her face in one hand and sighs. “Why are people awful?”

Behind them, a young human girl walking with her dog gives Riz a side-eye and crosses the path to jog in the opposite direction rather than past him. Kristen’s stomach twists. “I don’t know,” she says quietly, reaching over to rub Tracker’s back.

“So, what are you gonna do?” she asks Riz, resurfacing from her hand. 

He frowns, tail swinging. “Well, I’m going to have to look through all their bank statements and stuff, find some proof that he’s been tampering with the books. Compare total expenditures with logs in the registers with the recorded weekly and monthly profits.”

“Sounds tedious,” Tracker observes. 

“Oh, this is the fun part,” Riz says, lighting up. “I love bank statements. They’re so nice and concise. I can cross-reference everything and log it all myself. I’m gonna make a spreadsheet,” he says excitedly, grinning, sharp teeth glinting in the light. 

Kristen can’t help it. She laughs a little, not in a demeaning way, but in an appreciative way. He is so strange and meticulous and good; he thinks spreadsheets are fun and keeps human-sized hats in his briefcase for his friends who refuse to put on sunscreen. He might, Kristen thinks, be her favorite person. 

Then his smile dims. “I will have to tell Mrs. Peterson that her husband is cheating eventually, though. Do you think I should do it now, or wait until I have proof of the embezzlement?”

Tracker hums contemplatively, biting her lower lip with one slightly-too-sharp canine. Kristen eyes it, distracted, tongueing over the slight cut on her lower lip from that same tooth earlier today. 

“I would wait,” she says. “Because, like, if she gets super mad and tells him that she knows, he might try to cover up any financial stuff he’s done, which would make your job harder. Besides, it’s not like he can unmake this bed. He’s cheated. Done. That will be true no matter when you tell her. If you can give her all of her closure at once, that would probably be the way I would go.”

Riz nods, chewing on his own lip in a reflection of Tracker. “Yeah, good point. Thanks.”

She nods. “Anytime.” She sets her crystal down and leans over the table, elbows on chipped paint. “Hey, I meant to ask. Have you given any more thought as to maybe coming to that event on Friday?”

Kristen perks up, turning to look at him. Riz half-winces, one ear dipping and the other fully flattening against his head. His tail stills for half a moment before swinging again. 

She lets out a breath, slowly. Of course, she’s not going to speak for him, but she can sort of see where this is going. 

“Um,” he says, his voice higher, sweat beginning to bead up on his forehead. “Yeah, I just- It really seems more like a thing for clerics, right?”

“It’s for anyone,” Tracker says. “It’s just a group exchange. Yeah, most of the attendees will be clerics, but there are others, paladins, even just normal devotees. Nobody would bat an eye at you.” She pauses. “Well, they would, because you’re cool, but nobody would judge you. I swear, I go all the time, and nobody is going to this thing with a mindset of bigotry.”

Tracker had, several weeks ago, invited both Kristen and Riz to an event called Stories of the Sacred. It seems, for all intents and purposes, like a divinity support group. A bunch of people, mainly clerics, but anyone is welcome, all get together and exchange tales of their experiences with the divine. This could be of their own personal relationship with their deities, things they’ve heard of from friends, or curiosities that they want other opinions on. 

It had been immediately clear, both to Kristen and Riz, that this was something quite special for Tracker. She had admitted, with a fair bit of vulnerability, “It really helped me after I got bitten, when I was trying to figure out where I stood with the Church of Sol. It’s what helped lead me to Galicaea.”

She had invited both of them to come and speak about their experiences, saying, “I know it helped me, and it might be nice for you. You absolutely don’t have to, though, if you don’t want to.” (It had also been quite clear that she really, really wanted them to.) 

Kristen is going. She’s going to talk about Yes? and probably about her journey out of the Church of Helio. She’s hoping it might start to help get the word out about Yes?

Riz is… well. 

Riz shifts where he’s been sitting on his briefcase, the picnic table too low for him without it. He looks down at Tracker’s hands on the table, avoiding her eyes. “It sounds really cool, but I don’t know that I would really have that much to contribute. I’m not a cleric. I don’t have a personal relationship to any god.”

“You have a personal connection with Kirizayak.”

An ear flicks. “I don’t speak to her.”

“That doesn’t matter. You have a personal connection to her. She matters to you in a way that holds significance for you as an individual. That’s very special and important, just as much as any cleric relationship. And you’re aasimar. That’s worth something.”

He sighs, finally raising his eyes to look at her. “I know that this is really important to you, and I don’t want to make you feel bad by going and being really uncomfortable. But I think I would be really uncomfortable. I know that-” He pauses, collecting his thoughts. “I know that for you two, divinity is something to be shared. It’s something collective. For me, it’s- well, it’s personal. I don’t really want to share it with a whole room of people. I’m sorry.”

Tracker deflates, but his genuinely remorseful tone seems to take most of the sting out of the rejection. She smiles, disappointed, but not accusing or upset at him. “Okay,” she says. “Sorry. I don’t mean to push. I just… what you shared about your religion with me was really special and impactful. It meant a lot to me. And I think it could mean a lot to other people, too.”

Riz’s discomfort softens into empathy and understanding. He offers Tracker a small smile. “It meant a lot to me too, to share with you and for you to share with me. But it meant a lot, in part, because it was just us. You know? It was a private connection. I don’t think it would mean as much to me in a big group like that. I- It says a lot about you guys that I shared that with you.”

There’s an almost pleading edge to his voice. A begging to be heard and understood. A desperation to please understand the difference between them without feeling wounded about it. 

Tracker’s edges all smooth out, going liquid and fond. She reaches over the table to take his hand, and for a brief moment, Kristen catches a glimpse of dark fur and ivory claws as she encloses his small hand in her own. “Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Yours is different. And that’s beautiful.” She smiles at him. “Thank you, again, for trusting us with it.”

He sighs, his bunched up shoulders falling in relief. “You all are worth it.”

Kristen swallows, her body tight with love. In many ways, Tracker and Riz are quite different, but in many others, they are similar, similar enough to slot together, puzzle pieces that line up along the edges they share as they both click into place next to Kristen. 

“It’s okay,” Tracker says after a moment, a flash of fanged grin as she flashes her eyes over at Kristen, teasing. “Kristen can talk enough for both of you on Friday.”

Kristen squawks with indignation as Riz squawks with laughter. 

“Listen here,” she says, reaching over to mess up Tracker’s hair. Her girlfriend responds by yanking the hat down over her eyes and vaulting over the table to hide behind Riz, using his tiny shoulders as the world’s most ineffectual shield. 

Kristen shoves the hat back up out of her eyes, light pouring down around them as Riz tries to scoop up all his papers to protect them and Tracker dissolves into giggles. Her freckles are burning and the earth is warm and dusty and the sun is creeping lower toward the horizon. It’s late summer, and she has so much work still to do, but with these two beside her, it all feels possible, eventually. 

Chapter Text

It goes like this: the sweet-tea heat of summer drips into the campfire ember warmth of fall, and school rolls on. 

Rogue Class is easy. Riz solves puzzles like breathing, and even if he has yet to find the teacher, the assignments they leave are more fun than anything. Challenging at times, to be sure, but a challenge has only ever made his brain more eager to solve the problem. 

His PI cases are going well, too. He gets the evidence of Mr. Peterson’s theft, and tells Ms. formerly-Peterson, currently Swanlight, about that and the affair. (The divorce is as swift as it is brutal, and leans heavily in Ms. Swanlight’s favor. When he explains that his mom is studying to be a lawyer, she even lets him take notes about the proceedings. She also sends him off with butterscotch cookies for himself and his friends. Really, Mr. Peterson fucked up. Ms. Swanlight is great.)

He helps a bugbear woman figure out who broke into her apartment after the police refuse to do anything. He gets her the evidence she needs, and between his advice and his mom’s internal pressure in the system, they get it pushed through. 

A tiefling man recruits him to help identify the teens who keep vandalizing his storefront. Riz takes careful pictures of the scrawlings ( Go back to Hell, demon!), and then carefully tucks them away in the most boring labeled folders he has, burying them in the bottom of a file box when he’s done. He does not tell his friends about that particular case. 

He notices that he’s starting to attract a certain type of clientele. Word is getting out in certain circles about the goblin PI who will help when the police refuse to. Riz can’t entirely tell if his former clients are telling others, or if the Cubbys are recommending him to people. 

But either way, people keep coming, more and more people who have exhausted all other avenues, screamed into the void of local law enforcement and gotten not even so much as an echo in return. And Riz takes them. He gives them his best, because someone has to. 

And in the meantime-

Riz opens the door and slides in to find his mom sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a comical amount of papers and with her law school board propped up against the kitchen table, coffee mug in hand. 

She looks up, a few strands of hair falling loose from the bun on top of her head. She smiles at him, circles under her eyes dark but affection genuine. “Hey, sweetie. How was school?”

 “Fine. You're working on the scholarship board without me?” he asks, feeling mildly betrayed. 

Sklonda snorts. She looks at him, her face caught halfway between concerned exasperation and intense fondness. “You know, most kids don’t ask to help with their parent’s scholarship applications.”

Riz drops his briefcase on the ground and trails through the living room. He brushes some papers aside with his foot and drops, cross-legged, into the maelstrom. “Since when have we been most people?” He flicks his tail at her, and hums a low, tell-me-more subtone. “Have you narrowed down any more of the schools?”

She sets down her mug and pushes a stack of papers at him, and he immediately starts scanning the highlighted front page. “Pringlaci fell through. I looked at it and there just won’t be enough scholarship opportunities to be worth it. I’m still looking at Sarona and Taluve Carson.”

Riz hums. He flips a page, scanning the application requirements. “You liked those more anyway, right?”

“I did,” she says. “But having a backup never hurts. Or even a backup to your backup.”

For all his mom occasionally bemoans his paranoia, he mostly got it from her. He learned it young. Plans will fall through. When they do, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try something new. Have enough backups, and eventually something will stick. The Gukgak method has pretty much always been to have too many eggs in too many baskets, but it has yet to (seriously) fail them so far, so he’s pretty sure they’re just going to keep going with it. 

His eyes flicker down the paper, noting the various scholarships available. He roots through the papers to dig out a highlighter. Pulling off the cap with his teeth, he highlights one she missed, and says around the cap, “So, are there ones you’ve started on?” but the words come out all mumbled past the plastic. 

She leans over and tugs the cap out from between his fangs with an amused smile. She sticks it on the end of the highlighter. “Yeah. I’ve started on some of the information segments of the Taluve Carson application.”

Riz arches an eyebrow. 

She stares. 

He stares back. 

She sighs. “And the essay,” she admits. 

Riz sets down the papers and highlighter to make grabby hands at her. 

She sighs again, more gustily. “Sweetie, I really don’t want to be giving you more homework.” She runs a hand through her hair, making it stick up out of the bun in tall loops along her scalp. “I know you’re doing great in your classes, and I’m so proud of you, but-”

“Come on, Mom, I have time to read an essay.”

“ But,” Sklonda says more forcefully, fixing him with a sharp eyed gaze, yellow irises flashing behind her glasses, “I know that you’re giving yourself a lot of work with your cases, too. And some ambition is great, kiddo. There’s always room to push yourself, but there’s a thin line between pushing yourself and overworking yourself.”

Riz wants very much to tell her that he knows that, and that he also knows that she’s a big hypocrite. That feels like it would come out meaner than he intends, though, so he bites his tongue about all the times she comes home as the sun is already rising, the times he leaves food out for her and it’s still untouched in the morning, the way she’s about to do law school and detective work and parenting all at once. 

“Mom,” he says instead of all that. “It’s really fine. I’ll just add it to the pile.”

Her eyes narrow. “The pile? What is the pile, Riz?”

Oh. Whoops. 

“Oh, you know, I just read through my friends’ essays sometimes. Just as, like, a grammar check.” And also essay revisions, and sometimes he writes whole essays for Kristen. 

He likes that. He likes feeling useful. He likes being able to take care of his friends in a way that makes their lives better. 

Somehow, he feels like his mom would not share his sentiment. 

“It’s all really minor stuff,” he lies, and then does not lie when he says, “I want to read your essay. It’ll be way more concise than their stuff. It’ll be fun.”

Sklonda watches him for a long moment, wide, slitted eyes narrowed in suspicion. She scans his whole face, and he tries to look as trustworthy and capable of extra work as possible. He’s not sure how successful he is, but he tries. 

Finally, her scrutiny relaxes, and her shoulders slump with a sigh. “This all feels a little silly. Backwards. Parents are supposed to help their kids with college applications, not the other way around.”

Riz shrugs. “We always do stuff the weird way. It always gets done.”

She looks at him, and he knows her down to her gory details and bad habits, knows every shade of her sunset. He recognizes the intense fondness battling with a tired, sad sort of guilt in her expression. He wants to do everything to wipe that guilt away. 

“I never want to give you more things to worry about,” she says finally. “You’re my kid. I’m supposed to make your life easier.” 

He looks at the line of her shoulders, slumped but still so strong, about to shoulder one more uphill battle, the latest in a long line, pushing the rock up the hill, pulling the sky back into place along her spine. He looks at the bags under her eyes and her hair, falling in long strands down her neck. 

“You’re my mom,” he says back. “Am I not allowed to want to help you too?”

Sklonda looks- well, she looks dangerously close to tears, which was not his intention, and is deeply panic inducing. He starts sweating.

Finally, she just leans over and kisses his forehead. She leans back, roots through her papers, and pulls out three battered sheets of loose leaf paper, all covered in chicken scratch, the first draft done in pencil. A quick glance across the paper reveals a first round of annotations done in red pen. 

“Essay,” she says. “Put it in the pile.”

“Sure, sure, the pile,” Riz says distractedly, trying to read the prompt out of the corner of his eye while still nodding at her. “That is where it will go.”

She leans over to snap her fingers in front of his face. “Riz. Sweetie. This is not a priority. Okay? All of your homework comes first, and even any proofreading for your friends. This is the bottom of the pile. Promise me. This comes after your other stuff.”

He nods fervently. “Uh-huh. Sure. Got it. Bottom of the pile.” He stands up out of the loose drifts of paper, tiptoeing through the haphazardly organized reams of print-outs. He grabs his briefcase, popping it open. 

He swipes a hand through the extradimensional space, the peculiar tug like gravity molasses pulling at his wrist. As always, the thing he is searching for more or less materializes in his hand. He pulls it out, a manila folder labeled ‘Essays, Research Papers, etc.: Kristen, Fabian, Fig.’ There's a much smaller subsection of the folder labeled, 'Adaine, Gorgug.'

He walks back over and collapses on the floor next to his mom once more, curling his tail around his ankles, spreading the folder out on his crossed legs. He leans over her to grab her mug. Light pours out of his fingers to drip down and puddle ethereally on the floor, throwing gold and pink highlights over all the papers and the curve of his mom’s nose. The cold coffee in the mug starts to steam gently, radiant energy seeping from his fingers into the cup and the liquid. After a few quiet moments, energy pouring through Riz like an eddying creek, he hands her mug back to her. 

In the fading light from the now evaporating puddles of energy, her yellow eyes are golden around the edges, like his, her smile crooked and fond. “Thanks, kiddo,” she says softly. She takes a sip and nods her chin at the papers on his lap. “What’s that?” 

“The pile,” Riz says, flipping open the folder and pulling out Kristen’s first draft for one of her essays. He pulls out a pen, uncapping it. “I’ve got to get to the bottom.”

His mom laughs, bright and a little breathless, and from the corner of his eye he can see her shake her head, smiling from ear to ear. 

He edits Kristen’s first draft in record time, scribbling in advice and alterations above her bubbly handwriting, glitter gel pen he stole from Fig hanging above Kristen’s pencil marks. He moves on through the pile, a completed essay Gorgug wanted him to proofread, scanning through and catching only a few spelling mistakes. 

The one that takes him the longest is the beginning part of Adaine’s collaborative essay. She’s only just started to outline the objectives of the project, including a few spells he’ll be learning as part of it. She has written down a few spells for him to look over, their vague descriptions and some small annotations about potential uses.

He scans the spells, and her annotations, and his mind immediately starts working. Mage Hand alone would have immense potential to aid stealing objects, maybe even manipulating them in rooms without having to physically be in them. Invisibility, obviously, would have endless uses with sneaking into places. An interesting backup plan, to be sure, and Riz does love a good backup plan. Fig uses Disguise Self plenty chaotically, but it could be useful, too. Silvery Barbs could be interesting, too, as an effect on moments of perception, to help with hiding in plain sight. 

The possibilities, honestly, are endless. Riz starts scribbling some of the more promising ones in the margins, cramped handwriting squeezing from the blue line to the edge of the page. He’s honestly very excited about this project, but he focuses mainly on Mage Hand. Best to start with cantrips and see how that goes. 

While he works, his mom works beside him, both of them sitting in silence save for the scribble of pens and the squeak of highlighters. He sneaks a glance, and she’s intently scanning the requirements for Sarona Online University. 

She refuses to say it to him, perhaps not wanting to speak anything into the world before she knows it’s even possible, but he knows she has a favorite option. Sarona would be her first choice, if they could get the scholarships to enroll her. So, gods help him, they are getting those scholarships. 

He sets all his papers aside to put back in his briefcase later, and moves on to her essay. 

The prompt, a classic, asks for a description of a personal challenge and how you overcame it. Riz, in general, thinks these sorts of questions are stupid. He understands the logic behind it, yes, but if he were a college application evaluator, he would be much more interested in knowing what challenges prospective students would want to tackle after their education, rather than a challenge they’ve already conquered. But maybe that’s just him, refusing to look back, barreling on forever to the next case, the next moment, the next impossible hill to climb. 

He’s expecting something about being a single parent, or maybe something about the challenges she faced as a kid trying to get education, a sad parallel to their state of affairs now. 

Instead, what he finds penciled out in his mom’s chicken scratch handwriting, so much like his own, is an emotional challenge. I have held a job with the police force for over two decades now, she writes, the page crinkled from how many times she wrote, erased, and rewrote these lines, trying to make them perfect, trying to exorcize them like a cleric removing a demon. 

In those years, I have grown from a beat cop to a detective to a chief. I have solved murders and robberies, processed drunk college kids at three in the morning and uprooted a cult system. Yet, throughout all of this, my biggest challenge was never the paperwork or the long hours or even the hard work of crime-solving. The hardest part was unburying the parts of myself I killed to get it all done, the morals I abandoned for the sake of security. 

She outlines it all in concise, brutal brushstrokes. The girls who filed reports that were never processed, whose bodies showed up in the morgue weeks later, whose killers were never sentenced. The cases that vanished because the defense had money, the strings she felt pulling behind the scenes but could never see. The way she had to work ten times harder than anyone else to receive half the recognition. The way she was never allowed to be lenient, to recognize the humanity in others, to be a person instead of a gavel and an executioner’s axe all at once. The way they were taught to shoot first, and ask questions later. The way that hesitation was not allowed, and doubt was choked to death in the coils of the ever-hungry snake of the department. The way it was never, never enough. 

I joined the force because I wanted to make a difference. Only once I was in it could I see it for what it was: a farce, a joke, punishment masquerading as justice. By the time I saw what I was becoming, it felt far too late to back out. 

Inside the system, there is no space for doubt. There is no room for confusion, or questioning. It is an echo chamber of cruelty that erases all sympathy, strangles empathy to leave only apathy and a satisfaction derived from a false sense of power. 

It tried to strip away all my moral convictions, my belief in others, and sense of truth and equality. And for a very long time, I let it, because I felt that I could not leave. That it wasn’t worth the risk. 

After two decades, I’m finally done. It is worth the risk. 

The help that I wanted is a help I never achieved. The long hours, the degrading comments, the erasure of my values, all of it was for nothing. I never made the difference I wanted to. 

My challenge is still going. I’m trying to get out. I am falling back into my morals, my convictions, my belief in others. It can’t be too late for me to choose a different path. I still want to make a difference, and I will. I will make it so.

She wraps up, the writing growing less erased in the final lines, the demon exorcized, the evil pulled out like a rotten tooth, nothing as raw or as true in the conclusion. 

It doesn’t matter. Riz is still shaking by the time he finishes, his thumbs pressing so hard into the paper that his claws are nearly tearing it. He takes Fig’s gel pen and fixes a few spelling errors, advises a few sentence rearrangements in sparkly purple ink. He marks through a few words in a few places, erasing the unnecessary details to streamline his mother’s statements from daggers to the stomach into bullets to the heart, slicing away all the embellishments to make it something brutal and raw and true, full of drive and the Gukgak stubbornness that refuses anyone who tells them they can’t do something. 

He finishes and sets down the essay, still shaking all over, feeling like a dam about to overflow, like the heavy weight of a swollen storm cloud, full of lightning and just waiting for the first raindrop to fall.

He looks up, and finds his mom already looking at him. The sun has set at some point during their work session, leaving only the dusky purple-gold hues of sunset through the windows. The last of the light is bouncing off his mom’s glasses, sliding down the bridge of her nose. She’s biting her lip, tapping a pen, and when he meets her eyes, she smiles, quietly nervous, and says, “Thoughts?”

Riz sets the paper aside, and climbs straight over her piles of study guides on the floor to pull her into a crushing hug, wrapping his tail around her waist and burying his face in her neck to purr right up against her collarbone, filling the air with the low hum of subtones, all pride and a deep, certain love. 

She hugs him back immediately, arms raising instinctively, cradling the back of his head and wrapping tight around his shoulders. She purrs back, her own subtones rich with affection and gratitude. 

“Good essay, Mom,” he whispers into the joint of her neck and shoulder, blinking back tears. “I’m glad you’re gonna be happy.”

She melts in his arms, but holds him tighter. He’s a small person, but somehow, he always feels smallest in her hugs, or maybe she just feels bigger. 

“ Happier, kiddo,” she corrects, speech vibrating with the purr that’s still rumbling through her chest. “I’m already happy.”

—

“I think we should add some goblin gods.”

Riz looks up from his crystal, where he’s neck deep in a website about the elven god of preservation and eternity. “What?” he asks, bemused. 

Kristen, hands on her hips, is surveying the Heavenstigation Board, which is quickly becoming less of a board and more a series of loosely organized research papers with a board as a fun index for it. Her eyes are narrowed, her nose wrinkled up with concentration. “We should add some goblin gods.” 

Tracker, who is sprawled out on the couch, alternating between looking at her crystal and watching Kristen bounce between research and rambling like a pendulum, looks up. She’s not an active member of what Kristen has dubbed the Heavenstigation, but she’s interested in the stuff they’re doing, so she’s started hanging around as they do their research, occasionally offering her own cleric expertise or just general wisdom to counteract Kristen’s chaos. Now, though, she sits up. She looks suddenly interested in a way that makes Riz nervous. 

“Um. Why?” Riz says. “We haven’t even polished off the elven pantheon yet, let alone the ten million human gods. Goblin gods are a hard left turn. They’ve got almost nothing to do with the gods we’re looking at.”

“Well, duh,” Kristen says. “That’s why I want to look at them.”

Riz closes his eyes and counts to five. His friend’s research methods are unorthodox, to be sure. She will take fourteen segues and eight detours through various, barely related other subjects before finally circling back around to her original topic. 

But this isn’t a school project with a deadline. They’re doing this for fun. And Kristen’s way, however roundabout, usually unearths some interesting, if not very relevant side facts, and occasionally connects extraneous ideas in a way so poignant and ingenious that it reshapes the way Riz thinks about it forever. 

He thinks, sometimes, that she thinks she might be a little bit of a dumbass, but while that might occasionally be true, she’s also a remarkably insightful devotee, and an incredibly talented cleric. So, in matters of religious investigation, he tends to hear her out. 

“Explain,” he says, and Kristen straightens up, flicking her hair behind her shoulders and fixing him with her full attention. 

“Okay, so, the elven and human pantheons are pretty close, yeah? Because they evolved in such close proximity and intermixed a lot throughout the years. Like how Galicaea is an elven goddess, but she’s also a werewolf goddess, and that bleeds across elven-human cultural boundaries. And Sol and Galicaea are technically human and elven deities, respectively, but they’re both part of the celestial spheres, so they’re like, kind of related.” She glances over at Tracker. “Do I have that right?”

Tracker nods, a little thoughtfully. “Yeah. Sol and Galicaea are both astronomical-based deities, so I guess they’re in the same pantheon in that sense, even if they exist in different cultural pantheons.”

“Sweet,” Kristen says, and turns back to Riz. “So, here’s what I’m thinking. Goblin deities are pretty far removed from the elven and human pantheons. So, maybe, we take a break from Galicaea and Sol and stuff and take a look at goblin deities. They’re really different culturally, but if we can find any similarities, we’ll have a pretty good base for understanding the foundations of divinity in any pantheon.”

He thinks this over. It makes sense, in a roundabout, Kristen sort of way. Hells, it even makes sense in a normal, non-Kristen sort of way. It’s concise, practiced, thought-out. It’s an organized argument. Which makes it deeply, deeply suspicious. 

Riz narrows his eyes at her, evaluating the way she keeps hopping from one foot to another, trying desperately to look casual and failing miserably. “What are you actually up to?” he says.

Kristen lets out a high-pitched laugh, fingers clenching and unclenching. “ Whaaaaaat,” she says, “Me, up to something? I’m not up to anything.”

Tracker winces, one eye closing as she looks at her. “Babe. That was the least suspicious you’ve ever been about anything.”

She deflates, sighing. “I can’t lie to him! I feel like he’s fully dissecting me with his glare.”

Riz turns to Tracker. “You’re in on this too?” Her being in on the scheme could either mean that it’s much less chaotic than he was assuming, or that it is that chaotic, and Tracker thinks it’s justified enough to be on board. The latter would be much worse for Riz than the former. Usually, Tracker is just helping to wrangle Kristen. When they work together, they’re honestly kind of terrifying. 

“A little bit,” she admits, waving her hand in a so-so motion. “I’m curious, I admit, but probably less gung-ho about it than Kristen is.”

Interesting. Riz swivels back around to Kristen, trying to channel the full force of his mom’s you can’t lie to me face. 

She holds up for all of ten seconds before she caves. “Okay,” she says, holding up her hands, “but you can’t get mad.”

“Off to a great start,” Riz says dryly. 

Kristen makes an apologetic face at him, an anticipatory sort of flinch. “I want to figure out what plane your magic is coming from.” Unspoken: I want to figure out what plane your dad is from. 

He blinks up at her. He’s sitting on the floor, craning his neck to look up at her standing above him, watching the nervous shuffle from side to side. Usually, he doesn’t really feel how much smaller than his friends he is. Now, though, he feels incredibly small. 

“Why?” he demands finally, feeling like an animal with its whole vulnerable stomach showing. 

Kristen’s face softens, some bit of recognition flickering across her expression. In a moment of kindness that Riz can barely quantify, she drops to the floor to join him, cross legged, putting her eyes much closer to his level. “Why not?” she asks. “We’ve looked at everything else.”

“We definitely have not. There are countless gods, we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

She smacks his knee lightly. “You know what I mean.” She tugs at her t-shirt, a brand new eye-melting tie dye that they made over the summer, Yes? written on it in Sharpie. “We found my answer. Don’t you want to know yours?”

“I won’t find any answers in whatever plane my magic comes from, Kristen. I have plenty of better things to do than worry about that.”

She looks at him, her green eyes caught between sharp perception and empathy. For all her near-supernatural ability to sometimes fail to read a room, to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, trip over her feet and end up with them in her mouth, she can be startlingly insightful at times. He thinks she can see it, probably, the whole embarrassing heart of it. 

It’s been a while since him being aasimar has tripped him up, has tangled claws around his throat and pulled down and threatened to drag him under the surface. He’s fine with himself now, really. He’s good. He’s made his peace with his magic. It’s the rest that still trips him up. The questions that he’s never answered. The questions that he knows he could answer, if he tried. 

Kristen is right. If he really tried, he could probably find out. But for once, the fear is stronger than the curiosity, suffocating all the air out of his drive to know. He doesn’t want to look, because what if he looks, and he doesn’t like what he finds? 

It’s humiliating, and entirely too raw. He won’t say it. He won’t. Not that it matters. He thinks she can probably see it anyway. 

“Okay,” she says finally, after a long, heavy moment of silence that pulls all three of them down, down, down. “We won’t research your plane, specifically. But, like, can we still do goblin gods? I’m kind of tired of the astronomical pantheon, and your gods seem cool as hell.”

Tracker smiles from the couch, raising a hand. “I second that. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about your gods.”

Riz looks between the two of them, Kristen’s quiet understanding and Tracker’s steady curiosity, both of them encouraging. 

“Oh, come on, babe, do puppy eyes!” Kristen says suddenly, excited, and drops down on her elbows to hit Riz with a truly pitiful puppy dog expression, eyes wide and sparkly, mouth pulled down in pleading. She is, to her credit, kind of infuriatingly cute, with her spray of freckles and faded sunburn and wide green eyes. 

Tracker snorts, a sound made distinctly wolflike in the space between her amusement and agreement. “The things I do for you,” she says, amused, and before Riz can so much as blink, there’s a full wolf leaping off the couch to land on the floor, peering up at Riz with drooped ears and a pleading expression. To really hammer the final nail home, she lets out a low, mournful whine.

Riz sucks in a breath through his teeth, ears flattening back against his head. He stabs a clawed finger at Tracker. “You are a dirty traitor. That is cheating, and you know it.”

She offers him a sly, lupine grin, showing off two rows of perfect fangs, yellow eyes glowing with amusement. Her whines, as a werewolf, aren’t close enough to be mistaken for any goblin tones, whether those are overtones like hisses or growls or the subtones of the more inner, vibrational noises, but they’re close enough to invoke a deep, pathological response in him, and she knows it, too, the little shit. 

His tail lashes and he looks at them both in fond disgust. “Drop the puppy eyes. We’ll talk about goblin gods.”

Kristen cheers. Tracker throws her massive, furry head back and howls at the ceiling in a way that is probably going to earn them a noise complaint later. Whatever. 

Tracker pads around the coffee table, her limbs shrinking and folding back into a human skeleton. She settles down next to Kristen and helps dig out some clean notebooks, all while Riz shakes his head and starts shuffling through the papers they had discarded over the table and floor. 

He shoves all the Galicaea papers into one folder and the Sol papers into another, organizing the smaller members of their respective pantheons by domain, Helio with the gods of agriculture, Orthenea, the elven goddess of the stars, in with the the gods of the planets and the daytime. 

As he does, he frowns. He glances over the folders. Galicaea for the moon, Sol for the sun. Orthenea for the stars. A human god, Alopi, for the daytime. There’s something missing here, some piece of the puzzle neglected, a gap in the picture that tugs at the back of his brain. 

He looks up to find Tracker and Kristen wrestling over a pen in a way that really means they’re about ten seconds from beginning to make out. He grimaces. No regrets about interrupting this. 

“Hey, Tracker?” he says, pointedly enough that both of the girls stop, looking, if not ashamed of their activities, at least vaguely embarrassed about making Riz uncomfortable. 

“Yeah?” she replies, disentangling herself from Kristen’s octopus hug grip, pen clutched victoriously in hand. “What’s up?”

Riz looks down at the folder again and then back up at her. “Does Galicaea have a satellite deity like Alopi? You know, like, a god not of the stars or the moon, but of the night?”

She stops. She frowns, the look creasing her face, deep furrows appearing between her brows. “I-” She stops. “Hmm. Not that I know of. It would make sense if there were one, I suppose. But I’ve never heard of one exclusively for night. Not in Galicaea’s pantheon, at least.”

Kristen and Riz exchange baffled glances. “None at all?” she asks. 

Tracker considers this for a long moment, thinking hard. “No,” she says finally. “I don’t know any, and if there were one, I would definitely know. Maybe night is just inherently part of Galicaea’s domain, as the moon goddess.”

“Huh.” He looks down at the folders. It’s an answer, one from someone he trusts to tell the truth as she knows it. But looking down at the papers, the lack feels… uncomfortable. 

It scratches something deep inside him, some sense of investigative intuition. He can’t shake the sense of doubt that accompanies the idea of Galicaea as the night goddess. He feels like there’s something missing. 

Then again, he’s a remarkably paranoid person. His mind is probably playing tricks on him. He trusts Tracker. 

He sets the folders down in their designated piles. He steps past them to drop into a circle with Kristen and Tracker, their knees brushing. Tracker has a notebook and the pen she won in the wrestling match. Kristen has a piece of printer paper and a crayon. He has no idea how she got it. 

Both of them look at him, expectant, encouraging, eager. 

His stomach flops, but not in a bad way. It’s still strange to him, strange that anyone, let alone two humans, would want to hold the parts of his soul that Elmville has always found the least palatable, to look at the part of his soul deemed monstrous and see it as something divine, something with just as much worth as the other pantheons. 

“Come on, come on,” Kristen says, wiggling with delight, and she kicks him lightly. She’s beaming from ear to ear, eyes crinkled up in her smile. “Tell us about your cool gods.”

“Please,” Tracker says, elbowing her girlfriend. 

“Oh, right. Please. Pretty please. The freakier, the better.”

Riz rolls his eyes, his tail swishing rapidly behind him. “You’re lucky I like you,” he says. “You want to hear about Tivikán?”

“What are they the god of?” Tracker asks. 

He grins. “Sacred consumption.”

Her mouth drops open with awe and a fair bit of excitement. 

Kristen gapes, eyes bugging out in her head. “You have a god of vengeance through sacred consumption? Dude. That is so cool.” She stops. “Wait. Holy fuck. Is that why you ate Kalvaxus?”

“It’s called tivikának. And yes.”

“That’s so fucking cool. Tell me all about it.”

He talks about it. It’s not- it’s not talking about him, exactly, but it’s adjacent enough to everything that shapes Riz that the stretch is uncomfortable. He talks about Tivikán, about the flesh and the soul and the relationship of one to the next. He talks about the way that consumption of flesh can either be an act of respect or an act of vengeance, and how it all depends on the context. He talks about all the things that have never been made palatable, the things that have never, ironically enough, been small enough for humans or elves to chew through. 

Kristen takes notes with crayon and all the seriousness of a college scholar. Tracker asks a multitude of questions about the practices. Kristen asks about how he practices. 

He tells them, a little hesitantly, about how shared meals are sacred, an act of care, and hopes desperately that Kristen doesn’t connect it with his tendency to hide away snacks for the others. It would be too exposing. Luckily, she seems too distracted by the details of respect and vengeance consumption to pay much attention to the shared meals. 

The day slips away like sand through a sieve. Riz talks and talks and talks, and Tracker and Kristen sometimes laugh, but never judge. Eventually, they abandon the Heavenstigation Board to have dinner, slapping together sandwiches and eating them around the scuffed table. Tracker, with her wolf habits, eats almost as sloppily as Riz, and Kristen at one point makes both of them laugh and spray crumbs everywhere.

At one point, Kristen wipes a smear of jelly off Tracker’s cheek, and then licks off the rest. Riz pretends to barf, and Tracker laughs and shoves Kristen away, grinning like the cat that got the cream. It’s not easy, exactly. But it’s good. 

Chapter Text

His friends have a secret. 

Riz doesn’t know what they’re keeping from him, but they’re keeping something a secret. For one, they all keep stopping talking whenever he walks into the room, and Fig has been weird about him coming over to her house, and he has definitely caught sight of a text message appearing on Fabian’s crystal in a chat that he is not in. Fabian snatched his crystal up pretty fast, but Riz is a rogue, and an investigator. He would be pretty bad at his job if he couldn’t remember brief flashes of clues. 

So, yeah. His friends have a secret. And a secret something at Fig’s house. And a secret chat that he’s not in. 

It’s fine. It’s totally fine. Riz is fine with this. 

It’s whatever, you know? So what if they’re maybe excluding him on something? It’s not as if he didn’t have his fair share of years with no friends at all. Friends who occasionally can’t handle him are still better than no friends at all. 

Riz very kindly refrains from making a conspiracy board about it. If they want to have something to themselves, that’s fine. He will be a good friend and let them have it. (And, if he doesn’t want to look at all these clues pasted up on a board, then that’s really his business.) 

He doesn’t try to watch for more evidence. No need to add to his own humiliation. The thing is, he can’t help it. He’s a rogue, and they’re all so, so bad at being sneaky. Almost painfully bad. 

Gorgug slips up and over the course of two days, tells him three different, wildly conflicting excuses for the same hour time slot in the afternoon. Fabian diverts all activities to his house even more obnoxiously than usual, and then has his closet door locked, when it’s usually open. Kristen keeps tripping as he walks into rooms and trying to shove something in her backpack. Fig is normal, mostly, but she’s also the best liar. Adaine also seems remarkably normal, but she also seems not as connected with the- whatever it is- as the rest of them. She keeps rolling her eyes whenever they fumble.

Riz- well, Riz really doesn’t know how to feel. Some part of him is convinced that whatever the secret is, it can’t be that bad, because Adaine has never been one to mince words or preserve feelings, even with people she dislikes. Especially with people she dislikes. 

If the party had run out of patience for him and his too-intense habits, she would have told him to his face, given it the respect of a clean kill. Instead, she’s still greeting him happily, still working with him on their shared paper for her class, still bringing him samples of her latest batch of baked goods.

So part of Riz thinks that all of his catastrophizing is probably a dramatization of the situation. The rest of him, the part that had exactly one friend who was also his babysitter until freshman year, is screaming hysterically. 

It’s all kind of got him down. He’s powering through, of course, but when he meets up with Adaine in the library for their weekly session to work on the joint paper, he’s feeling cranky and unhelpful, which annoys him even more than it’s annoying Adaine. 

Because he’s fine with this. He’s fine. He’s fine! He’s- 

“Are you okay?” Adaine asks him after his Mage Hand fails to fully corporealize for the fifth time. “Do you need a break?”

Jawbone’s latest quest has been instilling the value of breaks into their group. It has worked with Adaine and Fig, worked too well with Fabian and Kristen, and not worked on Gorgug or himself at all. 

Riz dismisses the half-formed Mage Hand with an “I’m fine,” that comes out far sharper than he intended it to be. 

Adaine fully sets down the book she had been holding and fixes him with an eagle-eyed look over the table. 

He attempts to shrink in on himself, like one of those little bugs that curls up into a ball and hides its whole stomach. 

“I’m not even going to pretend to go along with that,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

She purses her lips and gives him a Jawbone-esque look of vaguely concerned disapproval. “Riz,” she says. “You’ve been distracted. You’re never distracted. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

He shifts in his chair, sliding lower in the seat and hunching his shoulders so that his chin is vaguely level with his collarbones. Maybe Gorgug is onto something with the slouching. “This isn’t something you can fix. It’s fine. I’ll work through it.”

She leans forward and folds her arms over the table, lowering her face so she can look him in the eye. “Riz. I say this with all the love in my heart, but I am willing to play dirty.”

His head snaps up. “No, come on-”

“I am now very concerned about why you are upset and hiding it,” she says matter-of-factly. 

“Adaine, it’s not a big deal, you don’t have to-”

“And if you do not tell me what’s wrong, I will tell everyone else that something is wrong-”

Riz buries his face in his hands with a groan. 

“-and you will be left to fend off Fig and Kristen, too,” she finishes, distinctly smug at her problem-solving skills. 

He resurfaces from his hands to glare at her. 

She smiles back at him, serene. 

“You’re the worst,” he says. 

“I love you too. Now, what’s wrong?”

His stomach twists, wrung out like a towel and left stiff in some places and collapsed in others. He looks down at the table, at their papers spread out, the highlighters and Post-It notes scattered across the table. He blinks down at the notebooks, trying to collect himself. “I’m- I’m trying not to interrupt. I don’t know what you all are doing, but I know it’s- I know you’re doing something.”

Adaine sucks in a breath. “Oh.”

Riz swallows. “I mean, if you want to do stuff on your own, that’s fine, but, like, you’re all so bad at lying about it. It’s my job to notice things. I noticed.”

“ Oh,” she says again, and the sheer mortification in her voice is overwhelming. See? This is why he didn’t want to bring it up. Worse for everyone involved. 

“Gods above,” Adaine spits, exhausted and irritated. “See? I told them this was a bad idea.”

He looks up, startled, to find her face creased in distress. The expression gentles as they make eye contact, and she smiles at him, full of empathy and reassurance. “Would it make you feel better to know that we’re going to tell you when it’s done?”

Riz makes a face. “I don’t know.”

She hums, tapping her fingers on the table, bitten-off nails faint against the old wood. “Okay. Well. I can tell you that there’s nothing to worry about.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, because that’s going to help me not worry.”

Adaine balls up a Post-It note and throws it at his face. He ducks, and it bounces off his hat. “Have a little faith,” she says. “We love you. I love you. The others are dumbasses with stupid ideas, but they love you, too.”

He takes a deep breath. He’s never been great at having faith that he is appealing even when he isn’t useful, but having faith in his friends? That part is easy. He doesn’t have to convince his brain to believe that they want him around. He just has to convince it to believe Adaine. 

“Okay,” he says. He breathes, in, out. He straightens up. Gukgak stubborn, he thinks, letting it replace a paper skeleton with steel. “Okay.” He shuffles his papers, makes eye contact with Adaine, and says, “Let’s try this again.”

He pulls at the magic, channels the lake into a dam, into a sluice, pressurizes it down into the punishing stream of a fire hose. It comes with the vicious power of a jet of water, and the deadly accuracy of a bullet. 

The Mage Hand cracks into existence faster than it ever has before, and Adaine whoops as loudly as she dares in the library, grinning from ear-to-ear. This time, it’s not hard to return it. 

A week later, they’re all at lunch on a Friday, Kristen and Fabian arm-wrestling because she challenged him and he refused to back down. It’s a little embarrassing, honestly, how well she’s holding her own. She wins something like forty-percent of the matches, and Riz is watching in real time as his best friend’s fighter pride suffers in the losses against the party cleric. 

Gorgug is watching them, headphones fully over his ears to avoid the outraged stream of insults Fabian is spitting, and the responding outpouring of inflammatory nonsense from Kristen, shit-eating grin on her face. At this point, Riz knows she doesn’t even care about winning; she just wants to see how many of Fabian’s buttons she can push. She’s succeeding wildly. 

Adaine is also watching with vague amusement as Fig pretends to hold a microphone and MC, Prestidigitating her voice to be an octave lower and crackly with fake microphone static. 

“You are a cleric,” Fabian says, voice strained and teeth gritted as he attempts to wrestle Kristen’s arm down. “There is no reason for you to be embarrassing yourself in a physical contest with me. I watched you trip over your own backpack strap this morning, this is ridiculous.”

“ Aaaaand Mister Seacaster attempts to disrupt his opponent with shit-talk,” Fig commentates, one hand pressed to her ear and the other holding on to thin air in front of her. “This strategy has failed him wildly in the past seventeen rounds. We all admire his bravery in attempting the same fruitless strategy for the eighteenth time in a row. And how will Miss Applebees respond?”

Kristen grins at Fabian, all straight teeth and summer-freckles, muscles straining to keep her wrist from hitting the table. “Sounds like someone’s bitter that a backpack can beat me more than you can. Hey, by the way, have you ever tried corn dogs with Skittles?”

“Have I ever- what?!”

With a sudden burst of energy and a heave of her arm, she rears forward and steals his moment of bafflement to slam his wrist back against the table.

“WE HAVE A WINNER!” Fig exclaims, throwing her hands up. Her still-active Prestidigitation summons the sound of a roaring crowd. “Ladies and gentlefolk, give it up for our underdog, Kristen Chilis Applebees, for her eighth win of the afternoon!”

She slaps her hands on the table and stands up, throwing her hands in the air and taking a victory lap of the cafeteria table, whooping obnoxiously the whole time. 

Their table earns a few mixed glares from nearby tables from it, and Riz shrinks lower in his seat, half-hiding from the heated looks. He is, of course, naturally connected to whatever the rest of his party does, but he tries to avoid associating his face with their most obnoxious moments, a leftover habit of paranoia from the days when people would steal his briefcase or dump him in trash cans. 

Still, he laughs with everyone else as Fabian starts protesting loudly, overshadowed by Kristen’s exuberant triumph. Finally, she completes her lap and throws herself down in her seat again. She comes in with more force than she intended, hitting the seat at speeds of planar reentry. She lets out a startled shriek and nearly slips straight off the plastic disk of her seat. She is only prevented from toppling to the ground by Gorgug catching her with both hands. 

She collides with his chest and cranes her neck back to grin up at him, saying, “Thanks, man. You’re a good bro.”

Gorgug flushes dark green and shifts Kristen to drop her back on her own seat, which squeaks in protest. “You could go a little slower next time,” he says. 

“I will not,” she replies cheerfully. “I appreciate you, though!”

“You cheated,” Fabian accuses, jabbing a finger at her over the table.

Kristen flips hair over her shoulder and hits him with a smug, provoking, eldest sister shithead sort of grin. “I don’t know, man. I think you just lost.”

He looks poised to start issuing smoke out of his ears at any given moment. He opens his mouth, presumably to fire back at Kristen, probably challenging her to another round, but is interrupted by Gorgug clearing his throat. 

The two squabblers look over at him. He glances at the clock mounted on the far wall of the cafeteria, makes a pointed expression, and says, “Don’t we have to, you know-” He makes a vague, circular gesture with his hands. 

Riz is immediately on high alert, and that’s before Kristen and Fabian both try and fail not to look over at him. 

Fig shoots up, a dazzling smile breaking over her face. “Oh, right!” She dismisses her Prestidigitation with a flick of her hand and a faint wave of cinnamon. She fixes Riz with the full force of her attention, and, back in her normal voice, says, “Hey, you wanna come over to my house tonight? We’re having a barbeque. Mom’s gonna make ribs.”

He freezes, his tail stopping mid-swing behind him and raising to attention, lining up with his spine. He flicks his ears and narrows his eyes at her. Unbidden, his brain starts trying to snap the clues together. Fig’s house being off limits for weeks and suddenly reopening, all the secrets from his friends, this barbeque. Are the ribs a clue? What’s the common link? There must be an explanation.

“A barbeque?” he asks, unable to fully disguise the suspicious edge to his voice. 

A spark of recognition flashes through Fig’s eyes, a slight burst of alarm mixed with anticipation. He watches her switch into full actress mode. “Yeah! I totally kept begging Mom to make ribs and she said she would do it if we made a day out of it. All of you are invited. Jawbone and Tracker are coming too, I think.”

“I’m free for a barbeque!” Kristen chirps. 

“You live with them,” Adaine observes, dryly amused. “But I’m also free to come, especially if Jawbone is driving.”

“I’ll come,” Gorgug says quietly. 

Fabian heaves a sigh. “I suppose I can clear my busy schedule.”

Everyone else politely pretends not to know that Fabian’s schedule is totally clear this afternoon after Gorthalax canceled bloodrush practice to squeeze in a date with Sklonda.

Hmm. Interesting. On the one hand, he can absolutely see Fig pestering Sandra Lynn into a barbeque. On the other hand, if this is part of the whole secret, then that is a lot of people to be in on it. 

On the third hand, he really, really likes Sandra Lynn’s ribs.

He glances sideways and finds everyone watching him with poorly disguised enthusiasm. Kristen is all but vibrating with excitement. Fabian looks as if he’s trying very hard to seem as if he doesn’t care, but is deeply invested in the conversation. Gorgug just looks vaguely nervous, in an upbeat sort of way. 

Finally, he meets Adaine’s eyes. She looks calm, no anxiety, just a full, flowering affection. She smiles at him, blue eyes sparkling. It’s conspiratorial, and deeply reassuring. 

Have a little faith. 

Riz takes a deep breath. He turns back to Fig, who is still waiting on an answer. “What time?”

The table tries and fails not to give a very confusing cheer. 

The bell rings and they all scatter to their various classes. The rest of the school day passes in a vaguely stressful melting pot of rogue activities that are too easy, editing sessions of papers he’s already looked over four times, and a constant, unrelenting worry about a totally normal hangout with his friends. 

He takes the bus home with Gorgug, as per usual, and they sit in companionable silence. His presence, so calm and soothing, takes the edge off of some of Riz’s nerves. 

When he gets home, the nerves resurface, and he rearranges one of his case boards in a fit of frenetic energy. He’s managed to completely rearrange the web of clues on the board and down three cups of coffee by the time the door rattles and his mom walks in, sliding her shoes off her feet and flexing out her claws. 

“Hey, sweetie,” she says with a smile. “How was school?”

“Fine,” Riz says, examining the board. “Cool. Great. I finished my essay for class and I finished editing Gorgug’s essay for his class and I rearranged my case board, so I feel like I’m close to a breakthrough. Also, I’m going to a barbeque at Fig’s house at six.” Also, my friends have a secret and I might be about to find out and it’s stressing me out, but I’ve got it under control.

His mom stops in the living room on the threadbare carpet and narrows her eyes at him a little. She strides closer, looking him up and down. “Riz. How many cups of coffee have you had since you got home?”

“Just three,” he says, bouncing on his heels. “And I had a sandwich with one, which should balance out, so that one barely even counts.”

“I- oh, kiddo,” she says, concerned. “That is not how that works at all.” She scoops up his coffee mug and begins to move away. 

“Hey, no, Mom, I wasn’t-”

She stops him by dumping it down the sink. 

“-done with that,” he finishes lamely.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Sweetie. Do I need to put in a rule about maximum coffee consumption?”

“All rules that apply to me apply to you,” he reminds her. “That’s the deal.”

She grimaces, and he knows he’s got her. “Moderation, kiddo,” she says, her voice a little pleading. “Just a little moderation.”

Riz nods, too fast, still vibrating from his coffee. “Moderation. Yup. Sure. I can do that.” He looks at the time display on the microwave, the arcanotech numbers flashing 4:39 at him. “I won't have another cup of coffee until I leave for Fig's.” 

His mom purses her lips, a well-worn expression of worry. She sighs. “Okay, kiddo. We'll start there.”

She pulls her hair out of the tight bun she sometimes wears to work, running her claws through it. “Are you sleeping over at Fig’s?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

She hums. “And you’re okay getting over there? Do you need me to drive you?”

“I can take the bus,” he tells her. “You have a date.”

Sklonda laughs a little, and a low hum ripples from her chest, a subtone of I know something you don’t. 

It makes Riz narrow his eyes at her. He’s debating the merits of pulling out an interrogation lamp and questioning her on what she knows when his musings are interrupted by a knock at the door. 

His mom opens it, and Gorthalax ducks, turning his head sideways to fit into the apartment. He straightens up somewhat once he’s inside, trying to keep his horns from scraping the ceiling. 

He meets Riz’s eyes immediately, and smiles, campfire embers in his bright green irises. “Hey, kiddo,” he rumbles, voice like tectonic plates. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” he replies, bouncing on his heels. “I rearranged my Jatyina case board. I think I’m close to a breakthrough.”

“Jatyina,” Gorthalax muses, leaning over to get a glimpse at Riz’s board, which at the moment looks more like a murder scene of red string than anything else. “Is that the bugbear woman? With the breaking-and-entering?”

“Hobgoblin,” he corrects. “But, yeah. I’ve already investigated all the cameras in the area, so now I think I need to go through and cross-reference all the common figures in the footage, see if anyone was casing her store for a while before the robbery. It could take hours.”

He’s aware that being giddy about examining hours worth of crappy video footage is a little unusual, but, well, Riz has never claimed to be normal.

“Sounds like you’ve got a solid plan,” Gorthalax says. “And, hey, I’m gonna be over on Sunday. Do you still want me to break down the legalities of archdevil territorial disputes for you?”

Riz perks up. “Yes, please. Kristen and I never finished that section of the Heavenstigation Board.” Plus, any time he had tried to look up information of the legal structure of the Nine Hells on his own, he got a bunch of very conflicting academic resources, and truckloads of racist literature from Highcourt clerics that smear devils, demons, and tieflings alike. After the fifth time he tried to research on his own and nearly sent himself into a frenzy, he decided to just wait for Gorthalax to have some free time to keep breaking it down. 

“I know you’re going over for a sleepover at Fig’s house,” the devil says. “Do you need a ride?”

Riz pauses. He looks up at Gorthalax. “How do you know about the sleepover?” he asks suspiciously.

Gorthalax actually looks like he might be about to start sweating, but Sklonda just sighs. “Riz. Kiddo. Fig is his daughter. You are my kid. We speak to each other, and generally keep up to date on where our children will be. This is a remarkable level of paranoia, even for you. What’s going on?”

The sheer concern on her face is almost enough to make him crack and say, My friends are keeping a secret from me and I’m worried they might not like me anymore and also I keep waiting for the borders to reopen so that we can get back to working on the Nightmare King case and the stress is piling up and you just banned me from coffee. 

Almost. 

Instead, he says, “Nothing. I’m good. Just a long week, you know? Been scraping by on my four hours.” He forces a laugh, and sees neither his mom nor Gorthalax buy it. If anything, it makes the two of them look more concerned. 

They exchange looks, and Riz wonders how much of a distraction he would have to cause to make them stop communicating with each other psychically about him. 

Finally, his mom looks back at him, and says, “Okay, sweetie. Whatever you say. I am going to ask that you get at least six hours of sleep tonight, though.”

Riz’s lips flicker back in a slight attempt to bare his teeth, and a displeased rumble comes from his chest. But, then again, he’s going to be at Fig’s. Weird secrets or no, he usually ends up sandwiched underneath someone, using their body as a strangely shaped weighted blanket. Usually, he sleeps better for it. Six hours might be doable.

He settles for, “I’ll try,” and watches his mom nod and accept it. She walks over to wrap him up in a brief, tight hug, dropping a kiss in his hair. She walks back over to the doorway and starts pulling on her flats, tucking her claws up carefully into the shoes. She forgoes her work heels, something she’s started doing more and more on dates. 

She stands up and pulls up her purse, stopping to look at him. “Text me when you leave for Fig’s house-”

“-and when I get there,” he finishes easily. He waves a hand at her. “I know the drill. Have a good date.”

She smiles and purrs at him, the noise deep and reassuring. 

“We’ll see you later,” Gorthalax says, clapping the back of Riz’s shoulder carefully. (The first time he tried, Riz went flying, and face planted in the dirt. It was not either of their best moments.) 

His mom and Gorthalax leave the apartment. The door latches behind him, leaving a heavy click hanging in the air. And then Riz is alone with his case board and the numbers on the microwave and his own head. 

He manages to be still and quiet for all of ten seconds. Then he gives up, and starts reviewing video footage. 

He scans through grainy CCTV footage for just under an hour, noting down common figures and times and entry points in a notebook. He draws a diagram of the crystal surveillance and its blind spots. It’s a shitty diagram, probably, but it gives him enough of an idea to work with. 

At around 5:30, he packs up his things, shoving them into files and pushing them into his briefcase. He scans through his drawers and pulls out some of his more casual clothing to shove in the briefcase as well. They all have toiletries that live at Fig’s house, a side effect of them practically living there over the summer.

At 5:42, he elbows out of the lobby of Strongtower, shooting off a text to his mom to tell her he’s on his way to Fig’s. He shoots up as the bus pulls into the curb, and boards. On the way to her house, he sits with his briefcase in his lap, watching a human man attempt to wrangle the three kids climbing all over him, laughing and chiding them about safe procedures on a bus. 

One of the kids, only two or three, catches Riz watching, and blows a raspberry at him. Riz wrinkles up his nose, and blows one back. The kid dissolves into giggles, and when the dad looks over to see who the girl was looking at, Riz flushes, shrinks down in his seat, and avoids eye contact. 

The bus pulls up, right on schedule, to the last stop before the highway, and he swings off into the crisp fall air, briefcase smacking at his hip as it swings on its strap. The bus peels away, breeze sloughing away from the metal sides as it gains speed to head back toward inner Elmville. Riz glances both ways, and sprints across the road in a gap between cars. 

He follows the cracked pavement on the other side, meandering with the flow of the concrete up to the Faeth home. He reaches the driveway, Jawbone’s car and the Hangman parked within. He gives the Hangman a wide berth, so as not to step on the motorcycle’s metaphorical toes.

He makes it to the stairs, and then stops dead. 

Wind ambles past, unconcerned, sending dead leaves skittering over the porch. In the backyard, Baxter makes a loud, birdlike trill. Grass, aged past the golden tinge of summer into the shriveled yellow of fall, rustles and scrapes against itself. It’s a perfect, picturesque fall day. 

Something is terribly wrong. Riz should definitely be able to hear his friends yelling by now. No house with Fig, Kristen, and Fabian in it is ever silent like this. 

He’s been on edge all week. This is the breaking point. 

Riz slides behind Jawbone’s car, crouching in the shadow of it to hide. He reaches into his briefcase, and pulls out the Sword of Shadows. With the track record of him and his friends, he wouldn’t be surprised if they got attacked by monsters at a barbeque and there’s something lying in ambush inside. If he needs it, he wants a quick escape at the ready. 

Swinging his briefcase behind his back on its strap and pulling his sword into a ready stance, he begins to creep along the edge of the house. He reaches the side door that enters into the laundry room, and eases it open as quietly as he can. The handle, several years past due for oiling, whines in protest and Riz winces. He slips into the soft shadows of the laundry room, crouching beside baskets overflowing with Fig’s band t-shirts and Kristen’s recent experimentation in tropical print. 

He crouches for a minute, straining his hearing, trying to perceive anything from the other rooms. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get much from it. There is still no noise to indicate the presence of his friends. A bad sign, probably. 

He creeps out of the laundry room, clinging to the shadows. He can feel his magic responding to his stress, bubbling up under the skin of his palms and itching to be set free. He tells it to shush. This is rogue time. 

The hallway looks no different than usual. The floor has faint smears of mud on it, a recurring feature of the Faeth home; no matter how many times Sandra Lynn mops, as a ranger, she always just tracks more mud in eventually. 

The lights are off inside the house, a fact that only adds to Riz’s paranoia about the whole situation. He scans the corners as he emerges carefully into the shadows of the base of the stairwell. 

He looks for any sign of a struggle, but there’s nothing. If anything, the house is cleaner than usual. Where are Fig’s shoes everywhere? Where are Kristen’s religious books, usually left helter-skelter over every end table with space for them? Where is the faint but undeniable evidence of two fairly messy teenage girls? It’s like they cleaned up their things. But that can’t be right. Riz is pretty sure Kristen, for one, would rather die than actually clean up her scattered things. 

Nerves rising with every second, tail stiff with panic, he slides from the stairs into the kitchen, flattening himself against the wall. He strains again, and this time- yes, that’s definitely Fabian, aggressively shushing someone. Another voice, Fig for sure, shushes him back, far louder than he shushed her to begin with, which prompts a furious chorus of, “Shut up!” and “You’re being too loud!” and “Can you all not stop acting like two year olds for five minutes?” and “Now, kiddos, let’s be nice to each other. Mean words won’t solve anything here.”

Riz’s tail droops, some of the panic ebbing away. Yup, those are his friends, for sure, all accounted for, and at least Jawbone and Sandra Lynn, judging from the resulting snort after his kind admonishment. So, maybe there hasn’t been a massive calamity. But what in the Nine Hells are they doing?

With less paranoia, but still plenty of caution, he creeps over the chipped tile of the kitchen floor to round the counter and spill out into the living room. What he finds is an absolutely hysterical picture of his friends, crouching like ineffectual pack animals waiting to ambush their prey. 

Off to his side, crouched behind the couch, Fabian and Fig have clearly abandoned their initial objective to make faces at each other, and as he watches, Fig drags her bottom eyelids down and bares her teeth, making him cringe back.

Adaine is half-crouched beside an armchair with Jawbone, and Sandra Lynn against the wall next to them. 

Gorgug is hiding behind an end table, clutching some kind of cannon? Riz honestly isn’t sure. He’s on the wrong side to see the view from the front door, but he’s entirely sure that most of Gorgug’s body would still be visible. 

Kristen is flattened against the wall next to the hallway that leads to the front door, waiting with an evil grin and what looks very much like an air horn. It’s clearly taking all of her self-restraint not to burst into giggles. 

Tracker is next to Kristen, snickering at her girlfriend. 

The truly baffling part of the whole scenario, besides the sheer absurdity of it all, is the presence of his mom, Yvoni, and Gorthalax. His mom and Gorthalax are absolutely supposed to be on a date tonight, and Riz knows for sure that Yvoni teaches a defense class on Fridays. 

Tentatively abandoning the idea that his friends and all of their parental figures have been possessed or otherwise replaced by malicious entities, he lowers his sword and steps out into the living room, coming out of hiding. “What the hell are you all doing?” Riz asks. 

The whole room screams. Fig and Fabian shriek, whipping around. Sandra Lynn jumps and accidentally trips over her boyfriend’s leg. Kristen falls over with a terrified yelp. Gorgug’s cannon goes off with a percussive boom. Yvoni throws up a shield without even thinking.

Everyone whips around to face Riz just as he himself screams and jumps about a foot in the air, a response to the sheer violence of the room’s reaction. 

For a moment, they all stare at each other in the semi-darkness, all of them in various states of standing or crouching, clutching their hearts or each other's arms as confetti pirouettes in lazy circles toward the ground from Gorgug’s cannon. 

“What,” Riz says, quite eloquently for the way his heart is trying to beat its way out of his chest, “the fuck.”

“Um,” Gorgug says, recovering the fastest. “Happy birthday?”

Kristen blows the air horn. 

He blinks. “What?”

His mom, on the other side of the room, gives him a look halfway between intense fondness and deep concern. “Riz. Kiddo. Tell me you did not forget your birthday.”

And, okay, well, maybe a little bit, but not really! His birthday isn’t for another week, really. And he certainly hadn’t expected any of his friends to remember. 

Last year, his and Gorgug’s birthdays had happened in the middle of the chaos with the Harvestmen, and Riz had, well, mostly forgotten about it until his mom came home early for his birthday dinner. He had adamantly pretended that he had not forgotten. He hadn’t told his friends until several weeks had passed, and even then, they only found out because Adaine had noticed that he called himself fifteen. They had all been indignant that they had missed it, and that he hadn’t told them, and had promptly organized a very late birthday sleepover at Fabian’s house. They had promised to go overboard for the next year, but Riz hadn’t thought they were serious about it. Clearly, they were. 

His eyes bug out and his jaw drops as the dots connect in his head. “Wait,” he demands, tail lashing, “is this the secret?”

“Secret?” Kristen asks. 

“Yeah!” he exclaims. “The secret! The secret thing that you have the separate group chat for and have been lying about!”

“You knew about that?” Fig says, dismayed. 

Fabian rolls his eyes and fully stands up. “See? I told you all that he would find out.”

Across the room, he sees Yvoni close her eyes and Sklonda bury her face in her hands. 

“We thought it would be fun to surprise you,” Gorgug says sheepishly. 

“This has been stressing me out for weeks.”

“Oh, hells,” Fig frets. “I’m so sorry! That was not the intention.”

Gorgug stands up, brushing some confetti off his shoulders where it has twirled down to land on his hoodie. He smiles at Riz. “Should we just do a normal party next year?”

He deflates, all the tension leaving him. “Yes, please.”

“Okay,” he smiles back. 

“Normal party,” Adaine says, nodding. “Noted.” She blinks at him. “Can we scream Happy Birthday now? I really wanted to do that part.”

Riz laughs. A little faith, he thinks, his worries ebbing away. His friends made him a birthday party. “Go for it,” he says. 

Everyone breaks into excited chatter until Fig shouts, “HEY!” to silence them all, and then says, “On three, okay?”

The whole room counts down, Fig leading the chorus, and on three, they all shout, “ HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” loud enough to rattle the picture frames on the walls. Kristen blows her air horn at the end, punctuating the cheering and clapping with a deafening drone. 

It’s so loud that Riz is helpless to stop his ears from flattening back against his head, and a grin from spreading over his face. He feels himself blush, his insides warm and sparkling, like sunlight skipping over a stream and turning rocks into puddles of heat.

After Kristen’s air horn peters out, his friends mob him, dragging him deeper into the living room. He gets swept from one hug to the next, feeling Fabian and Gorgug’s warm strength, Fig and Kristen’s overflowing exuberance, Adaine’s quiet satisfaction. Eventually, he gets swept up to his mom, who folds him up in a hug and kisses his forehead, whispering, “Happy Birthday, kiddo,” in Goblin, and Yvoni, who cups his face and smiles at him and whispers, “Love you, squirt.”

After everyone has gotten their hugs in, Sandra Lynn stands up and clears her throat. “Alright, I’m gonna go out and check on the ribs. There are snacks in the kitchen if you all want while you wait.”

The adults all trail outside after Sandra Lynn, and the kids scatter to the kitchen, Riz letting himself be pulled along in the cresting wave of his friends’ chatter. They spill out around the counter and into the kitchen, and Fig snatches up a stack of paper bowls and starts pouring tortilla chips into them. 

“No, come on, have some taste, Fig,” Fabian complains as she shakes chips out into the bowls. “There are Lays right there.” 

She raises an eyebrow at him and shakes tortilla chips even more aggressively into the bowls. “If you want a different kind, you can get it yourself.”

“Yeah, Fabian,” Adaine teases, “Don’t be lazy.” She reaches over and snatches up a bowl of chips. 

Kristen scoops up the salsa jar and opens it, dumping salsa directly on top of the chips in her own bowl that she steals from the lineup. She offers it to Adaine, and says, “Want me to get yours, too?”

She grimaces at the jar, salsa dribbling down the sides from Kristen’s uneven pouring. “No, I’ll get it.” She casts Mage Hand, the spectral conjuration scooping the salsa out of Kristen’s hand. Adaine tilts her chips to one side of the bowl and pours salsa in a neat puddle in the other side. 

“Me too?” Gorgug says shyly, holding out his bowl, tilting it to the side. 

She smiles, and her Mage Hand pours salsa into his bowl, too, before setting the jar neatly down on the counter. 

“I wanna try Kristen’s method,” Fig declares, snatching up the salsa and dumping it wholesale on her chips, cackling. 

“Hell yeah,” Kristen says through a mouthful of chips, spraying crumbs everywhere. She offers an enthusiastic thumbs up as Fig picks up an overflowing chip and shovels it into her mouth. 

Fabian lets out an exasperated sigh, dragging over a bowl of tortilla chips and saying, “You all are going to choke on that.” He takes a bite with no salsa at all, and Kristen boos. 

“Lame!” she calls. “You have to put something on it.”

“Yeah,” Fig agrees, nodding fervently. “Condiments are necessary for chips. We have guacamole.” She waves a hand at one of the Tupperware on the counter, where Riz recognizes Yvoni’s handiwork. 

Immediately, he makes his own Mage Hand and pulls. The guacamole slides over the counter to drop off the edge and into his hands. He cracks it open and breathes in the rich smell of cilantro and fresh avocado. He sighs in satisfaction. 

Fabian leans over the counter to look down at Riz. “The Ball? Can I have some?” 

Riz clutches the Tupperware to his chest, and hisses good naturedly. 

“Alright,” he declares. “I am taking that guacamole, The Ball.” He lunges, arms outstretched, and Riz dodges, chips in one hand, dish in the other, and breaks for the back porch, Fabian rushing after him. 

Riz breaks out into the afternoon air with Fabian yelling, “You have to share, The Ball!” and the rest of his friends cheering, “Run, Riz!” from the kitchen as they take chase, sprinting after Fabian.

Riz tears through the yard past the adults, Fabian racing after him, shouting, “You can’t have all of it, you sentient garbage disposal!”

He glances back to see the rest of their friends pour out onto the porch, whooping and hollering. Kristen tries to leap straight off the stairs, trips, and sprays salsa everywhere on the way down before leaping back up and shouting, “I’m okay!”

They scatter into the yard, splitting into a peanut section to heckle Fabian, consisting of Adaine, Fig, and Tracker, and an amused bystander out of Gorgug. Kristen puts down her chip bowl and streaks out over the field, shoelaces on her boots flapping, to help retrieve the guacamole. 

Eventually, Riz relents, and lets his friends help themselves to the guacamole, but by the time they’ve reached a truce, he, Fabian, and Kristen are all open-mouthed panting, collapsed in the grass as their friends eat chips around them. 

Fig and Adaine take a solid five minutes to throw chips at them, and when Sandra Lynn asks them to not play with their food, Adaine pulls little plastic juggling balls out of her jacket to throw at her. When they’re done, the grass is littered with colorful plastic balls, and both girls have salsa in their hair. Adaine is giggling so hard she can barely breathe, and Fig looks absurdly proud. 

Riz remembers when she had no idea how to be a kid, waiting for punishment around every corner for wanting to enjoy her life. It feels so distant now. He knows she’s not done, of course, not done growing or changing or being a kid, but sometimes he thinks about how far she has come, and fills with pride for his friend. 

When Sandra Lynn calls them for ribs, they all crowd up around the picnic table, splinters and creaking wood and all. He ends up crushed between Fabian and Adaine, half sitting in Fabian’s lap, his tail curled around Adaine on the bench. Sandra Lynn passes out plates of ribs, reminding everyone to “eat carefully, please. These are still very hot.”

She’s well-intentioned, but has also clearly learned nothing from a summer full of barbeques and grill nonsense. As soon as the plates are in front of them, they’re off to the races. 

Riz finishes off his plate in just under two minutes, and smears barbeque sauce everywhere. His mom eats similarly fast. No one cares. No one makes weird comments. No one stares. His friends are all equally invested in their own ribs, and besides, Jawbone finishes pretty quickly after they do. 

No one even blinks an eye when Riz uses his claws to crack open the bones and begin to suck out the marrow. They watched him do it once, at the start of the summer, decided it was cool as hell, and have not really given it second thoughts since. 

After a minute, he realizes that he can only hear the crack of bone from his own place, and carefully leans out from between Fabian and Adaine to make eye contact with his mom, who is sitting in a lawn chair with the rest of the adults. 

She catches his eye, and he tilts his head at her, flicking one ear. She blinks back, slowly. Her ears lower, ever so slightly. 

Riz huffs. He hums a low subtone, comfort and encouragement vibrating his chest. He cracks open a bone and sucks it clean. He turns back to the table, trying not to push. 

A minute later, he hears a sharp, telltale snap, and glances out of the corner of his eye to see his mom biting open a bone, and Yvoni looking delighted. He smiles, and turns back to his friends to watch Kristen wipe barbeque sauce off Tracker’s nose with her thumb. 

After everyone is stuffed full of ribs and chips and skewers of grilled vegetables, they all drift inside, back to the living room. All of his friends are shoving and chattering, bouncing up and down with excitement as they drop into an impromptu circle, Fig chanting, “Presents! Presents! Presents!”

Adaine hands over a carefully wrapped package, the paper shiny and holographic and taped down neatly at the edges. Riz uses the edge of his claw to carefully slice through the tape and unfold it, ignoring Kristen’s calls to “Just rip it!” He slides the paper off. Sitting in his hands is a leather-bound book, small and unassuming, faint gold embossing on the edges and the spine. 

“It’s beautiful,” he says, opening it to thumb through the blank pages. 

“I got it because it matched your briefcase,” she says shyly. “It’s- well, I thought you could put your spells in there. If you want to keep learning them.”

Riz looks up from the book, with its thick, sturdy pages and soft cover, up to Adaine, who looks caught between being intensely pleased and deeply nervous. His throat closes up, his heart tapping out a little dance in his chest. She got him a spellbook. “Thanks, Adaine,” he says, his voice thick. 

The rest of the gifts are just as meaningful. 

Fig hands him a thin box, vibrating with excitement, and when he opens it to find a CD, she explodes out to say, “I recorded you some instrumental tracks! So you can listen while you do school work or work on cases, and the words won’t distract you! Mom showed me how to burn CDs. It’s so cool.”

Fabian hands over a bag with tissue paper protruding from the top, dedicatedly pretending not to flush, averting his eyes and saying, “It’s really nothing. I don’t know why we must make such a big deal out of this process.” Riz pulls out a compass, and several beautifully illustrated books on star navigation. He wonders, for a brief moment, how Fabian remembered him mentioning he wanted to know how to do that, and then realizes that these books are old, well cared for yet equally well loved. These probably came from the Hangman ship while it still sailed. 

Gorgug hands over a carefully wrapped box, and Riz unwraps it to find within a small, gnomish-built camera. He leans over Riz’s shoulder to point out the different lenses and explain that this one shows heat signatures, this one is good for low-lighting, this one is good for long-distance shots. “Mine kind of goes with Kristen’s, too,” he says, and at Riz’s inquisitive look, just smiles. 

Kristen is the last to go, bounding over and haphazardly fishing something out of her bag, nearly falling on her face as she tries to turn around too fast, hiding it behind her back. “Okay,” she says, bouncing eagerly. “I didn’t wrap it, because I just finished, like, yesterday night, which is honestly pretty good for me! Also, Tracker helped.”

Riz looks over, and Tracker smiles, knowing. 

She pulls out one hand and flaps it at Riz, saying, “Close your eyes, close your eyes!”

He closes his eyes. 

“And hold out your hands!” 

He does, snorting a little at his friend. Something heavy drops into his hands.

“Okay, open!”

He does. 

In his hands is a thick, journal-esque book. The cover is a lavender purple, plastered with glued-on illustrations of magnifying glasses and coffee cups and stacks of books. With an encouraging nod from Kristen, he flips it open. The first page says, For my very favorite investigation partner. He keeps flipping. 

The book is chock-full of pictures. Some of them have clearly been pilfered from his friends’ crystals: silly shots of Kristen and Fabian doing food tricks at the lunch table; some selfies of Fig and Gorgug on stage; pictures Adaine had taken, smug, after Riz fell asleep at study sessions with her. Others he recognizes immediately from his mom’s photo collections, copies of him and her from years past. Still more must have been requisitioned from Yvoni: some extremely old photos of his mom, photos of him and Yvoni and his mom all together. There are no pictures of just him, always him and someone he loves. 

As he flips past photo after photo, all of them taped down, fingerprints visible through the clear material, surrounded by silly doodles in pilfered gel pen or tiny comments in Kristen’s bubbly handwriting, he feels his breathing grow shaky. “Kristen?” he manages to get out, looking up at her. “How…?” He feels embarrassingly close to tears. 

She smiles at him, scraping wisps of hair behind her ear. “This one was a group effort,” she says. “I kind of stole pictures from everyone. I know how to print pictures now, Riz. You can go to the store and they just do it. Isn’t that wild? Also, I wrote it in there a ton, but you were quite possibly the cutest baby I have ever seen. Those ears? Adorable.” 

She leans over and flips the journal open to the last half of the book. The pages are blank. “And, look! You can fill the rest of it with whatever you want.” She winks at him. “Gorgug’s camera should help with that.” She offers him a high five, which Gorgug returns with a shy smile.

“So,” Kristen says, grinning. She taps her hands on her thighs, legs crossed on the floor. “Do you like it?”

Riz looks from her, down to the pages, covered in fingerprints and smeared ink and silly pictures, back up to her and constellations of freckles across her nose, the way some of them get lost in the crinkles of her smile. “I love it,” he says thickly, and what he really means is, I love you, I love you, I love you. 

He sniffs, closes his book, and sets it carefully aside in a protected pile with the rest of his gifts. “Okay. Hugs now.” He practically crawls into Kristen’s lap, wrapping his arms around her neck. 

A second later, Fig cheers, “Group hug!” and both he and Kristen sway sideways as a ballistic tiefling missile hits them from the side, wrapping around them like an octopus. Gorgug joins, his arms big enough to wrap around all of them. There’s a distinct shuffle as Adaine drags Fabian in, a feat that Riz knows would be impossible if Fabian weren’t allowing it. 

In the middle of it, cheek and ear pressed up against Kristen’s neck, Gorgug’s chest rising and falling along his spine, Fig’s hand warm on his shoulder, Adaine and Fabian’s breathing layered around the outside, Riz thinks that this is probably the most people who have ever loved him, all of his most important people in one room. He breathes, and the world shifts and slots into place. 

He closes his eyes. He’s someone who has spent his whole life chasing question after question, unturning more and more every time. If these people are the only consistent answer he ever gets, that will be more than enough.

He gets a hug from Tracker, too, after the group hug disbands, holds her tight and whispers, “Thank you,” into her ear. “That was probably a lot of work.”

She squeezes him back, strong, and whispers back, “You’re worth it. Happy Birthday, Riz.” 

They have cake, a chocolate and strawberry-frosted concoction that Adaine had made. They sing Happy Birthday in Common, and then everyone stands and lets his mom and Yvoni call out the rendition in Goblin, complete with clapping and the long throat-call at the end, Yvoni substituting in a whistle for the noise her anatomy can’t produce. After so many years with them, she is passable in Goblin, and knows Happy Birthday by heart. 

They all cheer when he blows out the candles, Kristen, Fig, Fabian, and Tracker whooping obnoxiously over the crowd. 

Fig ropes everyone into a game of Monopoly, and all the kids scatter around and fight over the little figurines. It devolves along team lines, Riz pairing up with Gorgug and Tracker. At Kristen’s betrayed face, she shrugs and says, “All is fair in love and war, babe. I’m gonna crush you.”

“Oh, give it your best shot!” Kristen says back with a huff, linking elbows with Fig. “We’re gonna crush you.”

“This is going to go horribly,” Adaine says gleefully. “Come on, Fabian. Let’s lose in style.”

They do, indeed, lose in style. They cause problems with scattered properties across the board, high-stacked properties that cost a lot. Fig and Kristen quickly begin to lose all of their money, and Tracker and Riz systematically buy out the board, Riz’s strategy and Tracker’s ruthlessness conquering the fake economic world. 

As Tracker confiscates another two hundred fake gold pieces from a grumbling Fabian, she says, “Man, imagine if we could get rich this effortlessly in real life,” and he dissolves into peals of laughter, watching her toothy, pleased grin. 

Sometimes around midnight, his mom, Yvoni, and Gorthalax trail back into the room, peeking in on where they have switched from Monopoly to a quickly devolving game of Cards Against Creatures. His mom meets his eye, and he scrambles up and out of the mess of limbs and blankets. He races over to them. 

She smiles at him, reaching out to run a hand through his curls. “Hey, kiddo. We’re gonna head out.”

“Okay,” he says, and goes eagerly as she folds him into a hug. He presses his cheek against her shoulder, her hair brushing at his face, and purrs, deep and rich and full of choked-up, overwhelmed love. 

She purrs back, vibrates his chest with her cello-rich tones, a steadied reflection of his own sentiment. “Love you, kiddo,” she says. She lets go and hands him off to Yvoni. 

Riz forgoes the crouch, climbing straight up her legs to hang off her shoulders like a koala. She wraps him up in a hug immediately, pressing a lipsticked kiss to the side of his forehead. “You’ve got good friends, squirt,” she tells him. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” he says, breathing in her lilac perfume and the faint coppery tang of her magic.

She sets him down, and Gorthalax smiles down at him, patting Riz’s back gently. “Happy Birthday, Riz.”

The adults head out, and Riz smiles as he watches them chatter their way out the door. And then his friends are shouting, and he’s going back in to find them screaming over a card Gorgug put in. 

That night, all of them crash in the living room, mattresses pushed edge-to-edge on the floor, arms draping off of couches, pillows and blankets piled up and tucked in around them. 

Riz carefully, lovingly tucks away all of his gifts in his briefcase, pausing only to pull out the camera. It fits perfectly in his hands, so much more manageable that the cameras for larger creatures. He laughs, breathless and adoring. 

He turns to see Fabian pushing pillows at Fig to support her horned head on the mattresses, Adaine and Kristen flopped over one another on the couch with Tracker, and Gorgug distributing blankets to everyone. 

Riz holds up his camera, and snaps a picture. Then he tucks his camera away in his briefcase with all the rest. He scrambles over the mattress to flop in next to Fabian. 

He gets six hours. He wakes up to pale, pre-dawn sunlight, his leg asleep under Fabian’s, Fig cuddled up against his back, Kristen, Tracker, and Gorgug snoring on the other side as Adaine trances peacefully on the couch. He listens to their breathing, to their heartbeats, to the distant melodies of songbirds greeting the sun. He thinks he would like to do this forever.

Chapter Text

It goes like this: cinnamon fall rolls into peppermint winter, wind full of teeth ripping across the streets and swirling around the lamps of downtown Elmville. Riz and his mom tape cardboard and plastic over the faulty seals on the windows, and double the blankets on their beds. Yvoni comes over once a week to make a giant pot of soup and put it in the fridge, endless microwaving material. 

Riz, nerves steadily increasing the longer the borders of Solace stay closed and their progress on the Nightmare King’s crown shrivels up, does the only thing he can think to do: he buckles down and investigates. 

He’s deep into his second day of mostly ignoring the messages on his crystal and obsessively scanning through all of his clues about the case when he hears a knock on the door. His head snaps up, and he turns to look at the door from where he is hunched under the table, his files spread out around him. He’s given up on suppressing his instincts, and has fully caved to the urge to curl up in a dark, protected space. 

It’s a goblin thing, he’s been told, something his mom does sometimes when she’s very stressed, a habit Riz has picked up on. To that end, the lights in the apartment are off, and the table has been draped in blankets to make a cave of calming, extra deep darkness beneath it. It soothes the edges of his frayed nerves. 

Still, he has yet to do this in front of his friends. They’ve made blanket forts a few times, and, after they realized it made Riz fall asleep a little bit easier, they have started doing them more and more in increasingly unsubtle ways, the latest ploy in their crusade to make him sleep more. But they’ve never seen him do this: make a little hidey hole and curl up, blocking out the world to narrow his vision even more.

He probably looks totally crazy, he thinks. Sitting in the dark surrounded by blankets and file papers, running on two hours of sleep and four cups of coffee in the last two hours. He runs a hand through his hair, trying to scrape out the matted curls, and debates pretending that he’s asleep. No, that’s dumb. His friends would never buy it. 

The knocking at the door resumes, and Adaine’s voice, muffled through the wood, calls out, “Riz? Are you in there?”

Riz takes a deep breath. He breathes through the uncertainty about her reaction. It’s just Adaine. It’s just Adaine. Have a little faith. 

He digs his way out from under the table, carefully avoiding his stacks of files and his coffee mug, and trails his way across the apartment to swing open the door. 

On the other side, Adaine is wrapped up and waiting patiently with two steaming to-go cups. She’s layered up in her Jacket of Useful Things over at least two different sweaters, at least one of which looks like it was stolen from Jawbone. She’s wearing well-worn leather boots, hand-me-downs from Sandra Lynn. There’s an unevenly knitted scarf wrapped around her neck and a hat pulled low over her ears, but despite all of this, her hair is windswept and her cheeks and nose flushed with cold. 

Riz, in his slacks, socks, and mom’s old university hoodie, feels distinctly off-balance. “Uh,” he says. “Hey?”

“Hi!” she says brightly, beaming at him. She holds out one of the cups for him. Immediately, he can smell the coffee in it. “I got black for you.”

Never one to turn down coffee, he accepts the cup. “This feels like the lead-up to a bribe,” he says suspiciously. 

“Oh, it is,” she says cheerfully. “You have taken my coffee, and so now you have to let me in to help with the research.”

Riz blinks. He stares up at her and her star-speckled smile. “How did you know I was doing research?” he asks, baffled. 

“Well, you stopped answering any of our texts,” she says breezily. “Which reminds me-” With her free hand, she pulls out her crystal and snaps a picture of him, typing something out rapidly and sending it off with a whoosh. “Some proof of life for the others,” she says. “Fabian was about ready to launch search parties.”

Shame swoops low through his stomach like a seabird. He doesn’t mean to drop off the radar as if he’s died sometimes. It just gets lost in the shuffle. If they had called, he would have picked up. 

Just to check, he asks, “Did you all call me?” 

“No,” she says. “We figured you were busy. But I’m here to help. And also to make sure you have eaten. When was the last time you ate?”

“Uhhhh…” He tries to recall. Did he have something for breakfast? “What time is it?” he asks. Surely it can’t be any later than four o’clock. 

“Nearly eight,” Adaine says. 

Oh, he thinks. Whoops. 

“I had breakfast?” Riz says tentatively. 

She sighs. She breezes past him into the apartment. “Alright. First things first, we’re feeding you.”

Riz follows her, watching her toe off her boots onto the welcome mat, setting down her tea on a side table to begin unwinding her scarf and various jackets. “It’s really not that bad,” he says. “I haven’t even done anything all day.”

Adaine gives him a withering look. “You and I both know that the brain demands a lot of energy. Even if all you’re doing all day is thinking, you still need food.”

“Every day you turn into a slightly meaner version of Jawbone,” he observes, and watches as she beams. 

“Thanks,” she says. She looks around at the pitch-black apartment. “Why are all the lights off?”

“Uhhh,” he replies, eloquently. She has darkvision too, but Riz knows all his friends are a little less comfortable with it than he is. They certainly would never study without the lights on. 

As he thinks this, she reaches over to the wall and flips the light on. He winces as the sudden flood of illumination dazzles his eyes, long-used to the reassuring dark of the apartment. He blinks rapidly to clear his vision, looking up at her. 

“There we go,” she says, turning around. “That’s better. I-” She stops. She tilts her head. “Riz?” she asks. “Why is your table covered in blankets?” She steps closer and crouches to look at his mess of file stacks on the ground. She pushes at one with her finger, and then turns to look at him, confused. 

He flushes, his ears tipping down. He shuffles on his feet and clears his throat. “It’s, uh- Sometimes it helps, you know? Spaces that are small and dark. It helps me focus. It feels-” Safe. Right. Protected. “-good,” he finishes lamely. 

“Oh,” she says. For a long moment, she looks at him, her blue eyes sharp and perceptive. “Okay. You were working?” 

“On the Nightmare King case.” 

She straightens up. “Oh, thank the gods. I’m starting to get worried that the others are forgetting.”

“You don’t have to worry about me forgetting,” Riz promises. “I’m way too paranoid.”

She makes a face at him. “Well, that’s- I mean, yes, but that’s concerning, too.”

“I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want you to eat three meals a day.”

Riz wrinkles up his nose. 

Adaine rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she says. She walks across the apartment and opens the fridge, crouching to examine all the shelves. She brightens, pulling out the giant pot from the bottom shelf. “Is this chili?” she asks. 

“Yvoni’s,” he confirms. 

She plops the pot on the counter and begins pulling out a much smaller pot to set on the stove. As she digs out a serving spoon from the drawer by the stove, she says, “Your moms are so cool.”

He feels himself blush, embarrassment and a warm pride fighting in his chest. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, they are.”

Adaine scoops chili out of the massive pot and into the smaller one, turning on the stove to begin to heat it up. “Have you had any water today?” she asks. 

“Why am I being interrogated in my own home?” Riz asks the ceiling. 

“That’s a no,” she sighs. She stirs the chili, giving him a disappointed look. “You know, your brain works better if you take care of your body too.” 

“I take care of my body,” he says defensively. “It’s not like I drank nothing. I had coffee.” At her withering look, he says, “It really isn’t that bad.”

“You’re having water with your chili,” she says. She waves the spoon at him. “Tell me what you’ve found?”

Riz perks up. All his other friends either eventually tune him out or eventually start to lose him if he talks about his cases for long enough. Not Adaine, though. 

Hmm. Maybe it would be good to bounce these ideas off of her. 

He scrambles over to his blanket cave, pulling out the files he had been examining, and walks over to sit on the platform that she stands awkwardly over to stir the chili. He shuffles the papers in his hand and clears his throat. “Okay, so, I’ve been trying to narrow down the actual frame of time during which the crown could have been taken, so we have something to work with.”

Adaine nods along, listening intently as she stokes the chili back to warmth on the stove, eventually dishing it out into two bowls. She digs spoons out of a drawer as Riz rambles on about the window of time between when Aguefort’s office was opened and when he recast the wards. She fills up two glasses of water from the sink, and forgoes cleaning off the table to just turn around and sit next to him on the platform. She organizes all his files and sets them on the floor to protect them, then places down the bowls. 

She snatches his papers out of his hands, replacing it with a bowl of chili. “Pause to eat,” she says, but, as it turns out, she doesn’t have to tell him twice. As soon as the smell of Yvoni’s chili hits him up close, and he’s no longer focusing on his papers, his whole body floods with the urges that he has been unconsciously suppressing for hours. 

His hunger bowls him over with an urgency that is almost a possession. He snatches up his spoon and starts shoveling it into his mouth as fast as he can, partially scorching the roof of his mouth as he does. 

Adaine eats too, at a much more sedate pace, taking the time to blow on her spoonfuls. Still, there’s a pleased sort of smile on her face that Riz has come to associate with his friends tricking him into doing things like eating or sleeping or generally taking care of himself in a way that he doesn’t tend to. He generally thinks they overreact about the state of his physical welfare, but if it makes them happy, he’ll sleep and eat and drink water every once in a while, even if it’s a little begrudging. 

Riz polishes off his chili in record time, and Adaine nods at the stove and says, “There’s more still in the pot.”

 A surge of gratefulness for his friend’s thoughtfulness pours through him, and he purrs without really meaning to. He gets up, dumps the rest of the pre-warmed chili into his bowl, and sits back down next to her. He starts in, but his eating speed is a normal sort of goblin fast this time, not his extra-fast, I-haven’t-eaten-in-over-ten-hours speed. 

“So,” she says around a mouthful of chili, eyes on the ceiling as she is deep in thought, “the crown theoretically could have been stolen over a stretch of many weeks, but it probably was stolen very quickly after we broke the wards on the office-”

“-because Aguefort probably would have noticed someone breaking into his office if it had been more recent than that,” Riz agrees, licking chili off his teeth. 

Adaine sighs. “That doesn’t give us as much as I’d like.”

“No, but it gives us something. A narrow time window is actually better in terms of looking at suspects. And we can rule out all of the teachers who were sucked into the school system palimpsests at the time.”

“You would suspect all the teachers? Don’t tell me you’re following in Fig’s footsteps.”

Riz shakes his head fondly. “No. But, they were people with access to the building. I don’t think any of them had something to do with the Nightmare King. I mean, it’s possible, I guess, but this feels mostly only tangentially related to Aguefort, in the sense that the school is where the crown was stolen from. Still, since they had access, we have to theoretically consider them, but then we can scratch them off.”

“I suppose.” Her spoon scrapes at the bottom of her now mostly empty bowl, contemplative. “What would anyone get from working with the Nightmare King?” Adaine wonders aloud. “I mean, I can’t imagine he’s a terribly pleasant boss.”

“Immunity from nightmares?” he hazards as a guess. “Who knows? Maybe they just don’t care.” It’s been a long time since Riz tried to understand why people chase power that comes from a place of cruelty. He’s never understood it, and he doubts he ever will. 

He turns to look at her. “Have you gotten anything?”

She hums. “I’m trying to find literature about him. There’s not much, to be honest. I’m having to scroll through the digital copies of some of the special collections libraries in Bastion City. There’s some quite old manuscripts that have mentions here and there, but for the most part, he appears to be a bit of a taboo. People haven’t written about him. Speak not the name, or some such idea.”

“Huh. That’s annoying.”

“You have no idea. Plus, most of the manuscripts that do mention him are in languages I don’t speak, so then I’m running Comprehend Languages, but I’m not entirely sure that translates perfectly. What if something mistranslates?” She shakes her head, frustrated. “I’m reading a fae text at the moment, and I feel like I’m missing something, some kind of context in the words that Comprehend Languages isn’t getting.”

“Why do you think that?” It is, of course, a distinct possibility. Even magic is fallible, and Comprehend Languages doesn’t always catch all the subtones of certain words or phrases, layers of meaning lost in the gap between contextual comprehension and artificial comprehension. But there might be something to examine in why it’s falling short, some clue that could help them.

Adaine sighs, and allows Riz to take her bowl. He stands up and brings them to the sink as she gestures with her hands to say, “It’s so strange, because I was reading a text from an undead source, and they referred to the Nightmare King as fae. But the way the fae texts are writing about him, it’s- there’s some difference in the way they speak about other fae and the way they speak about him. Almost like they don’t think he’s fae either.”

Riz frowns, dumping soap into the bowls and beginning to scrub at them with a washcloth. “So, wait. If he’s not fae, and he’s not undead-”

“-then what is he?” she says, frustrated. “That’s the million gold piece question, isn’t it?” She sighs. “Ah, well. I’ll keep looking.”

“That’s all we can do until the borders open,” he says. He scrubs with more fire than is strictly necessary at some chili crusted on the lip of one of the bowls. “I feel like we’re just running in place here,” he says, his voice a mirror of her own reflection. “Just treading water instead of swimming.”

She sighs. “Yeah, I know. I’m feeling it too.” 

Riz doesn’t do well with stalling. This feels uncomfortably like the space last winter between the Harvestmen and the arcade, when the case wasn’t developing, and it was just him sitting with two handfuls of trails, watching them grow colder by the day, waiting for something, anything to change it up. 

He knows that there’s not a ton they can do until the borders reopen. All their big leads are outside of Solace. But he’s never been comfortable twiddling his thumbs, and he’s not comfortable with it now. He needs something to do.

He knows that Adaine has been enjoying the quiet, settling into her life with Jawbone and Tracker. She’s learning how to cook. Her repertoire of baked goods grows by the week. She’s figuring out how to go school shopping with an adult who wants to help her pick out folders and try on new clothes. She’s learning how to invite friends over to her house, to know that they’re welcome there. 

She’s setting down a new, stronger foundation for herself. It’s wonderful and magical to see, and Riz is so, so happy for her. He knows she has appreciated this breathing time. But he also knows that she hates waiting for the other shoe to drop. He knows that she wants to get this Nightmare King business done so she can get on with her life. 

So here they are, the Nerd Squad, sitting in a kitchen on a Saturday night, working on a case cold enough that if it were food, it would need to be reheated like their chili. 

Riz finishes cleaning the dishes, setting them in the drying rack and wiping off his hands on a dish towel. He stoops and picks up his papers. “I’m gonna get back to it,” he says. “You can totally stay if you want.”

Adaine smiles. “Yeah. Maybe I can bounce some ideas off you.” She looks over at the table, still draped in blankets. “Is there-” her ears flick, just barely, and she blushes a little. “Is there room for one more in your blanket table?”

Riz bluescreens. He had just assumed that they would dismantle it. “You… want to be in the blanket cave?”

She shrugs. “It looks comfy.”

He blinks. “I… Yeah, that’s fine, I guess. If you’re sure. It might be a little tight.”

“I’m okay with that,” she says. 

He takes his papers and walks over, stepping delicately through his maze of other files. He slides under the table into the reassuring shroud of shadow, curling his tail neatly around his legs. 

Adaine follows, carefully stepping through the files and leaning down. Unlike Riz, she has to fully crouch to go under the table, getting down on her knees and ducking her head. She shuffles under, turning to sit down next to him. She situates herself, folding her legs up and pulling out her crystal. Then she waves her hand, and a second later, Riz hears the light switch flick off. 

He blinks, his darkvision coming into focus immediately, Adaine’s face washed into cool grays and silvers. 

“Why did you turn the light off?” he asks. 

She looks over at him, pupils dilated in the dark to aid her own darkvision. “Oh, sorry. They were off when I came in. I just assumed… do you want them back on?”

He knows, from over a year of being her friend, that though Adaine can see perfectly well in the dark, it’s never been comfortable for her like it is for him. She turned the lights off for him. 

A surge of affection washes through him. Sometimes, Riz still wonders how he got lucky enough to have people like this in his life. 

He doesn’t think about it. He holds out his hand, and watches as the stained-glass seams of green across his skin go molten gold and fiery silver. Light seeps from his face-up palm, globules of blue and gold and purple-pink magic drifting up out of his skin to hang in the air like water droplets in zero gravity. They cast the blanket cave in faint, sunset illumination, draping Adaine in mosaic lighting that softens out her features and flashes off her eyes. 

“There,” he says. 

She laughs, breathless and awed, and touches one of the globules delicately with her index finger. It splits, fanning out from an apple-sized shape into dozens of blueberry-sized spheres, curling around her palm. She shakes her head, and says, “Your magic is beautiful. You know that, right?”

He looks at her, at the joy still clinging stubbornly to her face, at the few droplets that have circled back to orbit her head like a mini halo. “Yeah,” he says shyly. “I know that now.”

Adaine nods firmly. “Good.” Then she dips back down to her crystal to keep looking at the text about the Nightmare King. 

Riz returns to his papers, trying to figure out the mechanics of what the crown itself is made of, and what the magical properties are. 

They sit together in companionable silence, occasionally tossing ideas off of each other. Maybe it’s the food. Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s just Adaine, and the way her presence makes everything feel a little bit more possible, the mountains left to climb a little bit less steep. Whatever it is, Riz is more productive in the following hours than he has been all weekend. 

—

Fabian hits the ground hard, his head smacking against the dirt. He rolls onto his side, spits out some blood, and heaves himself to his feet. He drops into a ready stance and says, “Again.” 

Gorgug lowers his axe, panting heavily, and his brows furrow, concerned. “Are you sure? You look pretty wiped.” 

“I am fine,” he says. 

Riz, sitting on the patio, calls out, “You look like you could use a break.”

Fabian grits his teeth, and tries to remind himself that his friends are being nice and supportive and taking care of him, as friends should. It’s not their fault that people being nice and supportive is sometimes so fucking irritating. “I am fine, The Ball,” he says tersely. “I am no Gorgug, but I can take a hit or seven.” He brandishes the Sword of the Seacasters at Gorgug, and says, “ Again,” pointedly. 

To Gorgug’s credit, he doesn’t hesitate this time. He shakes out his shoulders, charges, and swings his axe down. 

Fabian leaps out of the way, the axe swinging past his head close enough that he feels the wind pass by. All of them are good enough, at this point, to spar nonlethally with no real worries, but there’s still the real adrenaline rush. Shockingly enough, knowing that it’s your friend swinging an axe at you does not make an axe coming at you any less scary. 

Gorgug takes another swing, that Fabian just barely manages to deflect with the flat of his sword. He lunges, terrifyingly fast, and this time, the axe connects, biting into the meat of Fabian’s thigh. 

It’s not a particularly deep hit; Gorgug isn’t trying to hurt him too badly, especially with none of their healer friends on scene. But still, it’s wide, and immediately starts gushing blood. 

Fabian takes a step back, getting into position for his own hit, and the wound smarts viciously. He winces, and lunges. 

Gorgug steps neatly sideways, into Fabian’s right: into his blind spot. He whiffs, his sword slashing through empty air, and he swings his head around to find Gorgug, swinging again. 

His friend deflects the hit with the handle of his greataxe, and retaliates with a brutal swipe, the flat of the massive blade colliding with Fabian’s ribs and slamming him back several feet. There’s a nasty crunch in Fabian’s chest, and all the air rushes out of him. 

They exchange another few rounds of blows, Gorgug constantly shifting to be in Fabian’s blind spot, Fabian fumbling time and time again as he loses line of sight, his neck sore from swinging around. He does get a few glancing hits in, but it’s vastly outnumbered by Gorgug’s consistent pounding, able to hit far more often than he misses with the advantage of being out of Fabian’s sight. 

Eventually, Gorgug abandons his axe, and kicks Fabian in the ribs so hard he falls sideways and smashes into the ground, wheezing. No weapon here, just pure barbarian strength. 

He lays in the dirt for a second, curled up to protect his side, just breathing in through the sweat and blood and frustration. 

Dirt crunches under Gorgug’s feet as he approaches, crouching down to pull Fabian up from the ground. His hands, so big, slide under Fabian’s armpits, mindful of his bruised ribs, and he helps Fabian up. It’s embarrassing, both in execution and in reassurance. He wants to lean into the touch, but that would be too weird, probably. 

Gorgug helps him to his feet, putting weight gingerly on his injured leg. His friend’s face is wrinkled up with concern. It throws the crows’ feet around his eyes into sharper relief. Between that and his spray of white hairs, he looks much older than he should. “You’re taking a break,” he commands. 

“I am perfectly fine to keep going,” Fabian insists. 

“I will sit on you if that’s what it takes,” Gorgug says seriously. 

He stops to consider this. “I’ll take a break,” he acquiesces. 

Gorgug had already been taller than Fabian when they started freshman year, and since then he’s grown even more. Now he’s a solid five inches taller than Fabian, and could absolutely sit on him if he wanted to. It would be uncomfortable for both of them, so best just to avoid that and accept the break. 

He settles down heavily on the edge of the patio, Gorgug settling down next to him, and immediately Riz descends in a flurry of antiseptic and butterfly bandages. He gets Fabian first, despite his halfhearted protests. When he tries to get Riz to do Gorgug first, both of them say, “Shut up, Fabian,” in such perfect unison that he can do nothing but seal his lips shut and let Riz’s single-minded dedication clear the gunk out of his wounds. 

He finishes up with Fabian, pulling out some painkillers from his medic kit, passing them to him with a stern look eerily reminiscent of Sklonda, and then moves on to wash out Gorgug’s scrapes. He doesn’t use Healing Hands yet. He usually saves that for the end of their sessions, to get the biggest things that his medic kit can’t quite help with. 

Fabian sits with a bottle of water, letting cold air bite at his cheeks and nose, sweat cooling into uncomfortable slickness in his athletic underlayers. He sips his water and watches Riz wipe at Gorgug’s scratches with antiseptic, tail swishing in concentration. 

They’re outside because he had wanted the slight burn of the winter air in his lungs, had wanted to feel everything, too loud and too much, as close to battle simulation as he can get. 

After nearly half a year of fighter classes with people who can barely keep up with him, clinging to his line of sight and swinging at him nervously, already anticipating the brutal return of his own swings, Fabian had snapped. He doesn’t want to be coddled. He doesn’t want to be treated with kindness. He wants to fucking get better. 

It took him so long to get used to the loss of depth perception in his day-to-day life. He would miss the sink when he tried to reach for it, would accidentally push glasses off of tables or trip up the stairs. It was embarrassing. It was so fucking frustrating. But he had learned. He had gotten better at it, sink-or-swim. 

But that’s only in day-to-day life. His fighting is still suffering, and all the kids in his grade’s fighter classes are either too nervous or too inexperienced to really challenge him. Turns out, if you don’t spend your whole first year fighting cults and battling dragons, you don’t advance as fast. Who knew? 

All of which is to say, Fabian finally snapped the other day in class, swung too hard at another student, and was pulled aside by the teacher. When she had asked him why he was lashing out, he had snapped, “They aren’t helping me. I’m not getting better. They’re all being polite. They’re staying in my vision. People won’t do that in a real fight. I can’t expect that in a real fight. I have to be on my A-game, and these kids won’t give me anything useful.”

Ms. Jones’s eyes had done a peculiar flash of frustration-irritation before smoothing over into understanding and a fair bit of sympathy. “You want to be challenged.” 

“I want to be ready,” Fabian had said. “I’m never going to get better at fighting with half of my old field of vision unless people use that lack of vision against me. Tell the others to be mean about it.”

Ms. Jones had sighed. “They’re probably not going to be comfortable with that, Fabian.” And then, when he had opened his mouth to protest, she had raised a hand and stopped him, leveling him with a serious look. “But I have a better idea. Ask your party.” 

“What?”

“Ask your party,” she had said. “You have a strong range of different classes, each of which have different types of attacks that you need to readjust to fighting. Plus, they’re much more likely to be able to challenge you like you want. Ask them to fight. Tell them to stay in your blind spot. Get used to it with people who know how to push your limits. Try it, and see if that helps. If it doesn’t, we’ll go back to the drawing board, and I’ll help you work something out, Fabian. Okay?” 

So here he is, out in his yard on a winter day, frost crusted over the topiary as Riz and Gorgug trade off turns attacking him with increasingly tricky and brutal attacks. 

As he watches, Riz finishes patching up Gorgug with his pilfered medkit and drops back down to sit on the steps. He slides into Gorgug’s side, wedging himself under Gorgug’s arm and shrinking down into his jacket. 

Riz is the most bundled up of any of them, tucked into a sweater under a thick winter jacket, ears pinned up under a hat and scarf wrapped up to swallow the bottom half of his face. His tail has a special wrap to protect the thin appendage from the biting chill. It’s kind of hilariously adorable. 

Gorgug and Fabian are less cocooned in winter gear, just thermal underlayers and thick sweatshirts and sweatpants. Cathilda had insisted on a hat for Fabian, and Gorgug’s sweatshirt hood is up and tied securely to protect his head in lieu of a hat. 

Fabian finishes his bottle of water and stands up, brushing himself off and picking up his sword. “Alright, The Ball,” he says. “I have rested, and you have attended to both of us. Let’s go.” He’s itching to go again, to fill the gaps between his bruises and his old expertise. 

Riz looks up, upturned nose apple-green and splotchy from the cold. He fixes him with an unimpressed look. “Ten minute break minimum,” he says. “Cathilda’s orders.”

“She doesn’t have to know,” Fabian wheedles. 

“I am not disrespecting Cathilda like that. She’s too nice.”

“And kind of scary,” Gorgug adds. 

Riz nods. “And kind of scary. Sit down.”

Fabian sits down. He sulks. Ms. Jones’s voice echoes in his head, so he does stretches with Gorgug as Riz chatters on about his latest PI case, filling the silence with reassuring white noise. 

Fabian often pretends to be disinterested in Riz’s cases, but he knows it’s a farce, and he knows Riz knows too. Sometimes, when it’s late at night and all he can feel is the walls closing in and the awful tugging resistance of his father’s sword entering his chest to split out the other side, he calls Riz. 

He always picks up faster than Fabian can imagine. After the third time, Fabian didn’t even have to say anything. Riz just heard the ragged breathing on the other end of the line, and started talking, filled up the empty space of Fabian’s bedroom with the crackle of crystal static and endless chatter about the people he is helping. He has a way of reinflating the walls around Fabian, talking the panic back into nothingness. 

Riz is smarter than Fabian thinks he will ever be, but even just watching his brain rush past, a comet streaking past to its eventual cosmic destination, is a strange honor. So he listens to him talk about his latest connection in his case, and pretends like he doesn’t already know all these details by heart from late nights staring at the ceiling, Riz on the other end of the crystal talking his demons to sleep. 

After ten minutes of admittedly somewhat soothing chatter (though Fabian would die before admitting it), he reaches over to shove at his friend’s shoulder and say, “It’s been my prescribed ten minutes, The Ball. Let’s go.”

Riz takes a moment to check his battered watch, probably making sure his own butchered sense of time is not helping Fabian cheat out of his break early. Apparently satisfied, he stands up, shaking out his tail, his hat twitching as his ears try to flick beneath it. “Okay,” he says. 

Fabian stands up, cracking his back and groaning, “Finally.” It’s mostly for show, though. Listening to Riz ramble has taken the edge off of his frustration. He feels a little calmer now, more centered. The sting of the winter air is still there, but it’s less of a bite now, more of a frosted coating. 

Riz pulls the Sword of Shadows out from the sheath on his belt. It hums in his hand, darkness beginning to curl around the blade like water vapor. 

All of the rest of them have tried out the sword at one point or another. Adaine had been half-decent at it. Kristen had nearly chopped her own arm off with it. It’s too small, really, for Gorgug to use, and much smaller than Fabian is used to, but both he and Fig had proved passable with it. But it’s never responded to anyone else like it responds to Riz. 

The magic of the blade reacts with his internal magic in a way as baffling as it is fascinating, and none of the rest of them have been able to replicate it. And then there’s the fact that he killed Kalvaxus with it. It’s a unilateral, unspoken understanding within the Bad Kids that though Riz’s main weapon is his gun, the Sword of Shadows is terrifying, and unequivocally his. 

Riz hefts the sword in his hand, tail swishing. “Before we start,” he says, meeting Fabian’s eyes, “I think you should change something.” He has that sharp look in his eye, like he’s going to cut right to the heart. “Use your ears more,” he says. “Rely on your hearing. Yours should still be better than the average human’s. Use it. You seem like you’re trying to compensate with sight alone. Don’t.”

He huffs. “What is that, sage rogue advice?”

“Sage goblin advice, actually,” Riz says, and lunges so fast that Fabian barely manages to deflect his blade. The Sword of Shadows explodes with darkness as it collides with the Sword of the Seacasters. 

Fabian shoves Riz off of him with a flick of his sword, dropping weight into it and launching his much smaller friend away. “Hah!” he cries. “You’ll have to try harder than-”

Riz grins, all fangs, and practically vanishes into thin air.

“-that,” he finishes lamely, staring at the space where his friend disappeared. He swings sideways through his blind spot, once, twice, and collides with nothing. 

There’s a sudden hiss of swinging metal, and Riz’s sword slices into the back of his calf, a long, thin score that stings as he whips around with a yelp of pain. He makes eye contact with Riz just long enough to see that his friend’s sword is beginning to fully take form as a paradox, currents of shadow streaming out, darkened by a sunset light building between them. Fabian catches a glimpse of this, and then he vanishes once more without a trace. 

He always forgets, somehow, that sparring with Riz is like this. Mostly, it’s Riz flashing in and out of hiding, swinging in to engage with a flurry of blows if Fabian is fast enough to catch him, or to deliver a brutal attack before vanishing again. Sometimes, if he hides quite poorly, Fabian can find him and attack him on his own. Or at least, he used to be able to. Now he’s mostly swinging through thin air, cursing, shouting things like, “How are you so sneaky?!” at thin air while Gorgug shouts things like, “You got this!” from the sidelines. (It’s perpetually unclear who he is cheering for, exactly.) 

After the tenth time he swings through thin air and is answered by his friend’s disembodied voice, “Almost!” the frustration is beginning to creep back in. Riz pops back in, slashing at his stomach, and dives sideways into Fabian’s blind spot. 

He remembers, suddenly, what Riz had said earlier. Sage goblin advice. Use all your senses. 

He takes a deep breath, and tries to flick his right ear sideways, to fan it out like he watches Riz’s satellite dish ears move. It’s hard. It’s a stretch. As a half-elf, he doesn’t quite have all the same, tiny muscles in the ears and around the temples to position like a full elf, and he certainly doesn’t have a goblin’s range of ear motion. But he gets it out there, and-

The slight swish of a tail. The faint hiss of breath. 

Fabian swings, and Riz yelps as the blade bites into his arm. He swears and nearly drops his blade. Fabian swings again, and hits once more, Riz Uncanny Dodging back so that it only skims over him. Still, he grins, tail swinging wildly, and cries, “Better!” before lunging in and stabbing deep into Fabian’s forearm. 

They keep trading blows, a vicious, bloody game of hide-and-seek, a brutal fighter and a talented rogue. The Sword of Shadows, which is a shortsword for anyone else in their group, is much closer to a longsword for Riz, but he’s taken to it with an enthusiasm that quickly outmatched the adjustment period. Now, he’s just as scary with his sword as he is with his gun. Give Fabian a stubborn monster that takes a few hits any day over a talented rogue. 

Riz tests Fabian’s limits in a way Gorgug can’t, pushing him not just to use his senses, but to rely on them, to stretch them. He misses his friend more than he hits, but as they go on, Riz staying firmly out of vision, Fabian gets better at hearing him, at identifying the passing sounds of a body in motion. He starts to learn how to construct the shape of a person with sound alone, to stab into the darkness and know that there is something there. 

Sparring with Riz is not as quick and brutal as sparring with Gorgug; it’s more delicate, a choreographed dance rather than a back-alley fistfight. 

Finally, when they’re surging into their final push before they come down, there’s a blast of light, and Fabian watches Riz surge into the air on ethereal, stained-glass wings. 

He lets Fabian take aerial shots, experience a flying opponent, abandoning his gun to shoot blasts of vicious, scalding energy, light searing at Fabian’s nose and leaving spots in his vision. 

He slices at Riz’s wings, at his legs, at his tail. For once, he is the one that has to look up, up, up to meet Riz’s eyes. 

(He wants to ask Riz if his neck ever hurts. He wants to know how he is so small, and so perpetually unafraid of how big everything else is. 

Some days, his father’s legacy bears down on him like the weight of an ocean, pulling him down to the seafloor, and here is Riz, whose magic feels like water, who can peel away from the ground as if it is unimportant, can rise into the sky like he was made for it. He wants to ask Riz how he can stand looking up at everyone all the time. He wants to ask Riz what it feels like to fly. 

He won’t, of course. But he wants to.) 

Riz swoops in circles around his head, clinging to his blind spot, Fabian chasing the sound of the air and the streaks of light left behind, chasing chasing chasing him and his halo and the way that he turns the whole vastness of the sky into an unimportant backdrop. He deals wounds like shards of ice and the unforgiving crush of ocean waves, and Fabian cannot follow him up, so he counts. 

Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one. 

Riz throws a blast of magic that glances off Fabian’s shoulder with a sharp sting. 

Fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four. 

Fabian shoots off a crossbow bolt that Riz dodges, swooping under and then back up, into the right of his vision. 

Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven.

Riz throws down a spray of radiant magic, purples and golds in a roiling wave that scorches the faint dusting of snow into nothingness and singes the edges of Fabian’s sweatshirt. 

Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. 

Fabian drops his crossbow and the Sword of the Seacasters onto the scorched earth, metal clanging, and lunges forward, blind, on sound alone, as Riz’s Radiant Soul runs out. He opens his arms, and clings tight as sixty pounds of best friend drops into him. 

Riz lets out a little whoof as he hits Fabian’s arms and chests, a little rumble of an inhuman noise startled loose by the impact. It’s adorably endearing in a way that he would die before admitting. 

“The Ball,” he says, exasperated. “You have got to keep better track of how long that lasts.” 

Riz twists in his arms to look at him, hat slipping sideways over his forehead, a few sweaty curls peeking out from under the edges. “Yeah, I know,” he says. His tail thwaps against Fabian’s thigh as it swishes back and forth. “I’m not totally used to it yet.”

“Well, you need to start practicing,” he says. I might not always be there to catch you, he does not say. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he replies flippantly. He shifts again in Fabian’s arms, wincing as the adjustment tugs at one of the places where he landed a hit, a slice along his ribs. There’s a streak of blood across his arm, and a blooming bruise on his cheek. And, well, he knows Riz can tank much more serious hits than the sparring blows they were trading, but Fabian is always a little more hesitant about sparring with anyone that isn’t Gorgug, any of his friends that aren’t built to take it and keep going. 

Riz bites down on a wince as he turns to face him fully. His spotlight eyes trail over Fabian’s face, taking note of bruises like he categorizes clues. He lifts up his hands, cupping his face. His hands are rough and icy, gun calluses and poor circulation, claws resting more gently than true fingertips, kind in the way that deliberate kindness feels stronger. 

Fabian gets a close-up as Riz’s eyes light up, gold and silver illuminating his whole face and trailing out through his markings, a lighthouse slicing through the dark. His magic rolls through Fabian like the gentle lapping of seashore waves, passing over him and taking away the pain with its retreat. He feels his bruises fade, feels the trails of scorched skin grow anew, feels the lacerations from the Sword of Shadows and Gorgug’s axe stitch themselves such. The stabbing pain lessens to a dull ache, not perfectly healed, but close. 

Fabian scowls, relieved, but also irritated. “I thought you were going to use Healing Hands on yourself this time.”

“ You said I should use Healing Hands on myself this time,” Riz points out. “I never agreed that I would. You just assumed I would listen to you.” 

“Well, you almost always do!” 

He rolls his eyes. “This will be deeply shocking, but I do have the ability to do what I want.”

Fabian wants to say that it’s not, actually, all that shocking that Riz would choose to heal his friends over himself. It’s actually one of the most Riz moves possible. It is frustrating, though. Even if he’s more wounded, he’s usually still more hardy, the advantage of being a fighter as opposed to a rogue. He would always rather Riz heal himself. It’s probably never going to happen, but he would certainly like it. 

He just huffs, scoops Riz higher into his arms, and strides across the lawn to drop him down into Gorgug’s lap. Gorgug, to his credit, already has Riz’s med kit ready and waiting, and immediately begins tending to Riz with the same kind of attention he had given them earlier. Fabian leaves the two of them there to go back and retrieve his sword and hand crossbow, and comes back to Gorgug wiping off Riz’s ribs, his shirt hitched up, grimacing at both the antiseptic and the cold. 

Gorgug is saying, “-should make you a timer, so that it warns you before your Radiant Soul runs out.” He finishes wiping off Riz’s scratch, and tapes down some gauze over it. Fabian notes with vague interest that his celestial markings wrap around his ribs before fading away into nothingness on his stomach. He wonders if they cover Riz’s back like they do his arms and tail.

Riz drops his shirt again, gratefully wrapping his jacket back around himself, and says, “That’s not a bad idea. Do you think that’s something you or your parents would be able to make?” 

Gorgug tips his small head to the side to wipe at a scratch on his cheek and put a band-aid over it. “Probably,” he says. “I can definitely ask.”

“It’s no big deal if they can’t,” Riz says. 

“I’m asking,” Gorgug says firmly. “You would have fallen if Fabian hadn’t caught you. Imagine if that happened when you were higher up off the ground?” There’s a current of worry to his voice that Fabian understands intimately. 

Being front-line fighters means that he and Gorgug are fine to tank half a dozen hits for their friends and keep going with no problems. There’s something singularly satisfying about knowing you can protect your friends from other physical dangers. The downside of it is that you suddenly become hyper-aware of the limitations of that ability. 

Because, well, he can’t always protect them. Not from everything. Not from things like area of effect spells, or from charms, or from gravity itself. These days, Fabian lives in terror of how breakable some of his friends are; he knows that, in the grand scheme of things, they’re remarkably durable, but compared to Gorgug or himself, they’re fragile in a way that scares the two of them shitless. Not that they have ever or would ever say it out loud, but the understanding there is mutual and strong.

Gorgug finishes wrapping some gauze around Riz’s forearm and taping it down. “You should go see Kristen before you go back home,” he says. “Just so she can heal you up a little.” 

Riz tugs his sleeve back down over the wound. “I’ll be fine.” 

“Your mom will flip if you come home like that,” he says, pointing the bottle of antiseptic at him.

Riz stops. His hat twitches as one of his ears flicks with displeasure beneath the knitted surface. He frowns. 

Gorgug raises an eyebrow at him. 

Waging war against Riz’s refusal to ask for help is an admirable, and never-ceasing project. Fabian admires him for starting it this time. 

He sits down next to them on the patio, the stones cold even through his pants. “I can drive you over on the Hangman so you don’t have to take the bus,” he offers. 

Riz turns his side-eye on Fabian, something that is perpetually more effective than any of the rest of them with his slitted pupils. “I really don’t need it.” 

He scoffs, both out of fierce disagreement and a need to look absolutely self-interested to have any hope of Riz agreeing. Usually, the only way to get him to accept help is to trick him into thinking that it’s actually to someone else’s benefit. 

So Fabian leans back, palms flat on the patio, and says, “The Ball, this is nothing short of an act of self-preservation. You have two mothers who would kill me if I returned you to them in anything less than mint condition. Please, for the sake of my own skin, allow our cleric to do her job. Yes? knows all she’s probably doing right now is making out with her girlfriend. She could use something productive to do.”

Behind Riz, Gorgug gives him an impressed thumbs-up for some excellent framing. He’s always been less subtle about it than Fabian, falling more into earnestness than the true manipulation that Riz’s stubbornness requires. 

The Ball himself eyes Fabian for a long moment, eyes sharp and narrowed, scanning for anything that might indicate that he’s doing something for reasons other than his own best interests. The thing is, Fabian isn’t even totally lying: he thinks Sklonda and Yvoni actually would be pissed if their kid came back from a friendly spar limping and covered in blood. But also, he just doesn’t like the idea of Riz in unnecessary pain, and he knows Kristen would agree. 

Finally, Riz must judge that Fabian’s statement is close enough to the truth to be satisfactory, and his silent examination relaxes. He slouches forward to drop his elbows on his knees, tail swishing over the neatly gridlocked stones of the patio. “Okay,” he sighs. “But you better talk down the Hangman before I get on.”

Fabian sighs, a mix of satisfaction at him agreeing and anticipatory frustration at the thought of arguing with the Hangman about Riz, again. He’s never been able to explain to his motorcycle the ways in which Riz and all his jagged, overenthusiastic edges actually smooth out Fabian’s. There’s just no describing the ways Riz settles him when he can barely understand it himself. So instead of ever finding a way to make the two of them okay, he’s just constantly bartering temporary truces between his best friend and his infernal mount. 

“Yes, yes,” he says. “I will handle the Hangman.” 

He looks out over the massive sprawl of the lawn, immaculately groomed hedges, magically preserved against the winter chill, topiary surging out of the ground to stab at the air with his father’s face and his- Fabian’s- the Seacaster’s sword. The ache in his chest is a faint drone, steady as a flatline. His not-eye itches. He wonders if his father struggled after he lost his, wonders if he ever flinched or expected his vision to be wider than it was. He wishes he could have asked. 

It’s strange, a little, how the most understanding that ever existed between Fabian and his father was in his final moments. Fabian’s sword through his father’s chest, both of them watching in half, neither of them had ever seen each other as clearly as that before, and they likely never would again. His Papa is conquering hell, and he is writing his own story, and the world goes on. Fabian’s chest aches. He wishes he could ask him about his eye. It would have been so much easier, now, a relationship made understanding too late. 

Some days, it all gets so heavy that Fabian just wants to sink, and sink, and sink, let the water swallow him up. And then Riz’s voice whispers in his head, We endure, and he keeps swimming. 

They all sit in silence for a moment, breathing in the sharp edges of the winter air, the sun creeping low along the horizon, dipping down far earlier than it should. The whole world seems to sleep faster in winter. Finally, Gorgug breaks the quiet peace with a gentle, “So, did this help?”

Fabian takes a deep breath. He’s more banged up than he usually is after a simple sparring session. Even after Riz’s heal, he still feels a little raw, a little unbalanced. But he feels challenged, also, in a way that he had been missing. The ache is an old, familiar friend, one that walks hand-in-hand with improvement. 

Fabian smiles. He looks over at his friends, who are both watching him intently, expectantly. “Yes,” he says. “This helped. Thank you.”

Both of them smile, tusks and fangs and two pairs of yellow irises in delighted eyes. 

“Same time next week?” Riz asks. 

And Fabian laughs, laughs at his friend like a heartbeat, like a lighthouse, like water that he breathes instead of drowns in. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“I’m bringing the girls too,” he says. “Kicking your ass should be an equal opportunity event.”

“Fig’ll like that,” Gorgug says. “Give her a chance to exercise her new sibling rights.”

“Do not,” Fabian threatens, and both of his friends laugh. The winter air is cold and the sun is sinking on the horizon and his limbs ache and it’s all heavy, but Fabian endures. He endures. 

—

It goes like this: the week before winter break, Adaine turns in her paper about application of magic use in rogue work, citing the work that she has done with Riz, and gets a begrudging A from Professor Runestaff. 

Two days later, Riz opens his Rogue Class folder, and an envelope falls out into his lap. He opens it with a fair amount of suspicion, and finds a printed letter. 

Mr. Gukgak, it says. The quality of your work in my class continues to be excellent, but I have noticed a marked shift in your approach to the class activities. I stole a copy of your friend’s essay from Professor Runestaff. Impressive. I have gone to the liberty of changing your records with the school. You are now listed as an Arcane Trickster. If you feel this change does not accurately reflect your development, you may submit a Subclass Change Request Form through the front office. Keep up the good work. Maybe take a Xanax, or smoke some weed. Your work ethic stresses me out. Best regards. 

Riz stares at the paper for a long moment. 

Arcane Trickster. 

He rolls the words over his tongue without speaking them aloud, lets them sit. He waits for it to chafe. It doesn’t. It fits, fits like the feel of his briefcase handle, like the rush of finding a clue that makes something click into place. It feels right. 

Riz folds up the paper and tucks it back into his folder. He does not submit a Subclass Change Request Form. He takes a moment to thank the Rogue Teacher, wherever they are. And then he goes on.

—

It goes like this: Sklonda’s application comes back, accepted. She gets her financial aid. She enrolls for spring classes at Sarona Online University, pre-law track. 

Yvoni and Riz bake a cake, and have her blow out candles like it’s a birthday. And, somehow, it kind of does feel like one. Happy birthday to the rest of her life. 

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Fig and the Cig Figs get off the stage at the Black Pit, the applause still ringing in her ears, eyes still flashing from the strobe lights. Fig is soaked in sweat and her blood is on fire in the best way, all passion and drive and the fierce rush of playing with her best friend and her dad. She gets off stage, and she and Gorgug trip backstage, pushing at one another and giggling, the adrenaline thick and fast, and her mom is standing backstage with Jawbone, the Thistlesprings, all her friends, and Lola Embers. 

The first true Fig and the Cig Figs album dropped two weeks ago, and has cracked the top five on Solesian charts. It keeps climbing. Last time Fig checked, it was at number three, but who knows? It might be number two now. The response has been astounding. 

The Bad Kids had a listening party at the Thistlespring Tree the week before the album dropped to the public. They had listened to Fig’s voice and Gorgug’s drums and her dad’s guitar through the speakers Wilma and Digby had set up, and Fig had closed her eyes and felt it in her chest like a second heartbeat. 

Her friends had laughed and cheered and sung along to all the songs, because they knew them already, came to every concert and sat with her through long nights and homework-filled afternoons as she wrote and rewrote lyrics, turned her songbook into more pencil scribbles and eraser marks than blank page. They had been there for the start and the middle and they sung through the end for her, and Fig was burning, burning, burning, brighter and brighter forever. 

Her friends loved her songs when they were just a few hummed melodies, and they love them now in their fully realized form. Now, the rest of Solace loves them too. It’s thrilling, and a little terrifying.

She and Gorgug get off stage and Lola drowns out all her friends with a drawled, “Oh, you were fantastic, sweetie, just wonderful, they ate you up. You’re a natural.” 

Adaine shoots her a side eye, but all the rest of her friends are just watching Fig and Gorgug. Riz gives them an encouraging, double thumbs up, eyes flashing and tail swishing. Fabian swings an arm around Gorgug’s shoulders and loudly declares that they are doing a fine job of writing their faces on the world, and Kristen smacks an excited kiss against Fig’s cheek and says, “You were fucking hot, girl. Like, cool and sexy and awesome.”

Fig laughs, loud and messy, and glances over at Tracker, who grins and says, “She’s right, you know.”

Usually, there would be an afterparty of some kind, something a little wild and full of laughter. This time, there’s just her and her friends, loitering in the rooms backstage, waiting. There’s a fierce current of joy in the air, and an equally strong undercurrent of melancholia. This is the last time they’ll all be in a room together for a while. 

Fig ends up on the floor with her back to a couch, Kristen fully sitting on her lap, saying, “I have to soak up all the energy I can get from you before you abandon us!”

Gorgug is on the couch, Adaine and Riz sitting in a pile on his lap, Fabian off to the side. Tracker sits down next to Fig and holds Kristen’s hand. They sprawl out together and waste an hour chattering about nothing, trying to burn through all the developments in their lives since they saw each other yesterday night, a contradictory sort of direction to the conversation as they try to fill each other in on everything but also stretch the time like taffy, make the moment last a little longer. 

They get two hours, in the end, before Sandra Lynn is the one to say, gently, “If you all want to get to Bastion City before morning, it’s probably about time to go.” 

All of the kids stop. Kristen’s arm, thrown loosely around the back of Fig’s neck and shoulders, tightens, clinging on. On the couch, Riz hisses slightly, a faint noise that slices the silence like a knife. 

“She’s probably right,” Gorgug says quietly, his voice laced with understanding and sadness. 

“This is stupid,” Kristen says. “I love that you’re successful, and that people love you, but also, I hate it. We called dibs first.” 

“It’s just a couple months,” Adaine says, but she also sounds deeply unhappy, trying to make the best of a situation that’s not ideal. Her lips are tipped down with dissatisfaction, and she’s tapping her fingers together rhythmically, a surefire sign of anxiety. 

Fig feels her stomach twist. She wants to do this tour. She does. There’s no rush like the stage, like playing with Gorgug and her dad, the seamlessness of it all making her whole. She wants to tour. She wants to play. She just kind of also wants to pack up all her friends in Riz’s briefcase and drag them along with her. She hasn’t even left yet, and she already misses them. 

As if sensing her emotions, Gorgug says, “We’ll text you all the time. And do video calls.”

“You had better,” Fabian grumbles. “It would hardly be appropriate to abandon your party without even any entertainment.”

“I’ll take Fabian’s crystal off of Do Not Disturb,” Riz stage-whispers. 

Fabian squawks in indignation, launching into a tirade about privacy, to which Riz responds that he regularly shows up without warning at their homes, so privacy is a bit of a moot point. Kristen laughs and Adaine rolls her eyes with a smile and Fig and Gorgug share a look, fond and melancholic, missing these people before they’re even gone. 

“Alright, kiddos,” Jawbone rumbles, leaning down to pull Adaine and Riz as a joint unit off of Gorgug’s lap. “It’s time for them to get on the road. We don’t want them to be too wiped out to jam tomorrow.”

“Sleep is important before a big show,” Gorthalax agrees, his voice a subsonic rumble in Fig’s chest. 

So, with much grumbling and dragging of their feet, Fig and Gorgug and all their friends start to troop out to the parking lot of the Black Pit. There’s a bus waiting in one corner of the parking lot, long and sleek and black, a one-way trip to the rest of Fig’s life, no going back. They loiter in the parking lot for another thirty minutes or so, drawn-out goodbyes and extremely unsubtle attempts to get in a few more minutes. Lola Embers looks increasingly irritated with the dawdling, going on about their tight schedule, but Sandra Lynn, Jawbone, and Gorthalax stall pretty successfully. 

Gorgug and Fig get individual hugs from each of their friends. Kristen is effusive, bubbly and so warm, a certified older sister hug. Adaine and Fabian are both calm, stable, warm. Fabian is sniffly, and denies it furiously. Fig scoops Riz straight up into her arms to get a hug, lifting him so he can wrap arms around her neck and flatten an ear against her cheek. He whispers into her ear, “Call any time. I mean it. Any time. I’ll pick up. Promise,” and she blinks back tears, because she knows how much he means it. 

“I will.”

After a long moment of warmth and shared hugs, Riz leans back in her arms to look her in the face. “Hey,” he says. “I got you a present.” 

Fig’s eyebrows shoot up. “You did?”

Riz nods solemnly, an image undermined by his tail, which is whipping back and forth behind him. He places his small hands on either side of her face, cupping her cheeks. His eyes light up, marking glowing like rivers of flame. 

Light curls around his fingers, and Fig tastes celestial magic like creek water and the smell of earth just after it rains, when everything is fresh and new and cut like diamonds. She feels herself break out, a rash sprawled out in the shape of her friend’s hands on her cheeks. 

Riz grins, shit-eating, and says, “Something to remember me by.”

Fig laughs, a noise that bursts free like fireworks. She pulls him closer and smacks a huge lipstick mark on his forehead, peppering it with a bit of Thaumaturgy to make the imprint of her lips glow just like his markings. He bursts out laughing, and she watches green dots pebble out around it. “What an excellent idea, Mr. Gukgak,” she says. 

Kristen shouts, “Group hug!” and then collides with Fig and Riz. There’s a collective burst of laughter and good-natured grumbling, and then there’s Adaine and Gorgug and Fabian, all of them crushed in together, overlapping limbs and shared heartbeats and collective breath. 

Fig takes a deep breath, and says, “I know I don’t say this a lot-”

“Only every week-”

“You absolutely do.”

“-but I really love you guys.”

“We love you too,” Adaine says firmly, unshakable. Love from her always feels inevitable, like part of the destiny she is weaving. 

“Call us all the time,” says Kristen, crying a little. 

Fabian, crying even more than Kristen, says, “We will miss you. Wreak some havoc in our name.”

Fig grins. “Will do.”

Fig gets a hug from Jawbone, who tells her, “Have a good time. Remember to have fun responsibly,” and one from Sandra Lynn, who holds her close and kisses her forehead where her scalp bleeds into one of her horns.

Her mom hugs her tightly and says, “Kick it in the ass, sweetie. I’m so proud of you.” 

Fig blinks away tears, and says, “Thanks, mom. You’ll call, right?”

“Every week,” she promises. “And text you all the time. You’ll be sick of me by the time your tour is done.”

I’ll miss you more than I’m ever irritated with you, Fig thinks, because even in the throes of their arguments, even at their most strained, even when she was so angry she could be a one-man volcano, part of the anger was just that she missed her so much. Fig knows her mom as a whole, complicated person now, and knows she’ll miss her even more for it. 

Fig and Gorgug board the bus, finally, much to Lola’s relief. Gorthalax is teleporting to Bastion City, going to reserve the hotel rooms and hammer out some venue arrangements. He’s too big for the tour bus, really, but he’s proven fine to just teleport places. 

Gorgug picks a window seat, and Fig ignores all the many other seats to crush right next to him and stare out the window with him. The bus peels away from the curb with a hiss of hydraulics and a rocking movement that makes both Fig and Gorgug sway and bump shoulders. Standing on the sidewalk and spilling over onto the cracked pavement of the parking lot, Fig and Gorgug’s parents and all their friends stand, waving. Kristen, Riz, and Adaine throw their hands skyward, and half a dozen light cantrips streak up to explode in silent waves of color that paint the whole parking lot in shades of yellow and purple and electric blue. Fig and Gorgug laugh, and they crane their necks all the way out of the parking lot and down the first stretch of road until their family is eclipsed by the backdrop of downtown Elmville. 

Fig drops her head on Gorgug’s shoulder, and cries, mascara streaking down her cheeks. He wraps an arm around her shoulder, and lets her cry out the strange mix of overwhelming love and loneliness from an absence that hasn’t even happened. He rubs her back, and when she finally runs out of tears, she straightens up, scrubbing ineffectually at her cheeks, and says, “Sorry about that.”

Gorgug says, “Don’t be. I want to take care of you.” And then, because he’s Gorgug, and he’s insightful in a way that she thinks he doesn’t even realize, he says, “I miss them already too. But we’ll bother them every day.” He reaches out and helps wipe some mascara off her face. “And I’m sure Kristen is going to send us twice as many bad memes now.”

That gets a laugh, and Fig grins, and it’s messy and wet and the start of something wonderful. 

—

It goes like this: mornings blur into nights, days into days, weeks into weeks. Everything becomes a white-hot rush of sugar, the burn of the spotlights, the glare in her eyes. Fig sings with venues full of people, overflowing, and they sing along, worship in every syllable. Fig plays until her fingertips burn, and her blood is boiling. 

She feels like the sun, eclipsing herself every night, Fig and all her problems and all her insecurities and all her fears swallowed up into the glow and the roar of Fig and the Cig Figs. The stage lights come on, and the audience roars and pounds their feet as they come into view, and then it’s just Fig and her friend and her dad and the guitar in her hands, in her chest, in every beat of her heart. 

They go to Bastion City, to Palmero, to Narati. They bounce up and down and all over Solace. She and Gorgug share matching bunks in the tour bus, and she learns how to sleep with the sound of his breathing and the faint, tinny echo of metal music through headphones. They play cards in the darkness, sitting across from each other on the floor, swaying with the stop and go of the traffic. They share sodas and refill each other’s waters and get meals at all-night diners in the wee hours of the morning, coming down off the high of shows. 

Sometimes, they stop to get snacks from vending machines, and she has flashbacks so vivid and real that she’s practically back in freshman year, living in Strongtower and eating crackers out of the vending machine with Riz and Adaine and Kristen, all of them sitting on the cracked steps of the building watching the cars fly past.  She misses them, misses them like a limb, and they text incessantly every day, and video call at least twice a week, but Fig just wants to sit in a room with them and feel their presence. 

And then there are the parties. 

Now, listen. Fig knows she doesn’t have the most healthy habits anymore. She gets that itch if she goes too long without a clove. She can tell the difference between cheap and expensive alcohol by taste alone, can sometimes identify brands. That’s probably not normal, or good. She’s self-aware enough to know that, at least. Self-aware, but not brave enough to stop it, yet. If there’s nothing else she can do right, Figueroth Faeth can commit to her mistakes. 

So. The parties. 

Lola Embers throws afterparties. It’s a whole thing. “Networking, sweetie, networking,” she drawls, tapping away on her phone to organize yet another function, find yet another venue. The tour keeps adding dates, and keeps nearly filling stadiums. “It can never hurt to have more friends, Fig. You want all the friends. Connections make the world go round.”

So she throws parties, and people come, they flock, really, all of them eager to rub elbows with the up-and-coming rock star. Fig puts on a good face, greets them, charms them, gives them the whispers and the lipsticked grin and the dazzling meeting they want. Fig is good at putting on faces, especially if they aren’t her own. Sincerity makes her uncomfortable, but this? She was born to do this. 

People come to her parties to feel special, to feel important, to feel powerful. Fig laughs at their jokes, and cracks a few of her own with tongue and teeth too sharp, follows it up with a grin like a spotlight and a quick shot, drowns out the people she dislikes with a casual dismissiveness, renders them obsolete by deeming them unimportant. The power is intoxicating. It’s terrifying. 

Fig dances and she sings. She drinks straight from the bottle and leaves lipstick stains on the lips of the glasses and of random people in dark corners. She burns, brilliant and overwhelming, the center of every show, the sun itself. She networks, and she parties, and it’s fun, because it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. 

At the parties, she keeps an ear out. She hasn’t forgotten about their quest, and if she’s going to network, she might as well network in more than one way. She keeps an ear out for anything about the Nightmare King. 

She overhears half of a conversation between two people with swept-back hair and loose ties, hears one of them say, “-and you know they’re still pushing back on the reclaiming movement. Still wary of the Shadow Cat.”

The other one laughs, too loud and too forceful. Downright cocky, he replies, “Hilarious. I love people like that. Imagine postponing work for something that’s practically a ghost story.”

“Ridiculous,” the first one agrees, running their hand nervously through their hair, unease laced through their absolute confidence. 

After that, Fig keeps listening for word of this Shadow Cat. She catches a few conversations here and there, some from people who speak quietly in dark corners, disguising their concern, tucking away for the shade of privacy. More common are the ones who laugh too loud and speak too confidently, manifesting some kind of bravado that could not more clearly be faked. 

The parties are messy, and Fig is messy. She gets drunk and throws up in bathrooms, Gorgug holding back her hair and rubbing at her back. Gorthalax switches out her drinks for water every time she turns her back, disposing of her drinks and handing her unopened bottles. She always drinks those too, to take care of her boys, who are so worried at the parties, and then she eventually finds another drink for herself when they vanish into the crowd. It’s not good and it’s not healthy, but Fig never claimed to be either of those things. 

Besides, the parties are the less important part. The important part is the music. It’s the heartbeat of silence in the switch between songs. It’s the first beat as Gorgug comes back in on the drums. It’s the way her dad’s guitar hangs above hers, a ferocious harmony. It’s the way her bass hums in her hands like a breathing creature, the way the song curls out of her throat to hang in the air. It’s the way everyone in the room sings back at her. It’s the way that, for those few hours when Fig is on stage, she is nothing but music itself, all hot blood and drum heartbeat. When she’s up there, in those lights, she is not making the music; the music is making her. And any amount of shitty parties is worth that. 

—

It goes like this: Fig and the Cig Figs sell out their first show, every seat filled, in a huge city called Crest Harbor for the third week of their tour. They come onto the stage in a burst of fire and a roar of applause that cuts straight through Fig’s in-ears. Gorgug comes in with a steady beat, matching her grin through the flame-red strobe lights. Fig slides in with low curls through the bass, magic like a campfire in her bones. Gorthalax comes in, electric guitar hanging overtop like a cloud. 

They build to a crescendo, dipping in and out, an intuitive musical dance, trust honed through battles and countless shows. They build up, up, up. Fig rips out a lick on the bass that shakes the rafters and fills the whole venue with strands of magic like cinnamon and embers. She steps up to the mic, and laughs, “Well, hey there, Crest Harbor. You know, this is our first real full house. Sold-out venue. How are we feeling about that?” And the stadium roars, noise like an earthquake. 

Fig laughs, the sun, bright and burning and untouchable, and she thinks that this is probably what it feels like to be a god. 

That night, she throws up alone in a hotel bathroom, drops her head on the lip of the toilet seat, her horns tugging her neck down, sick on expensive vodka and cheap fame, her body like an open wound. She misses her mom. She misses her friends. She even misses school, going just to skip class and spend all day bouncing between every class but the bard one. She’s never been this brilliant or this beloved or this lonely. 

Every day is a party. Every day is a celebration. Every day is bigger and brighter and better than the last, and all Fig wants to do is lay on the floor of her home and watch her friends tear each other apart with Just Dance. She wants to fill up on whatever baked good Adaine has churned out this week (she sent photos earlier, of strawberry cupcakes with messy little swirls of neon icing) and she wants to wrestle with Kristen for the TV remote and she wants to listen to her friends chatter about nothing.

Instead, she’s in the bathroom of a hotel room, puking up vodka, knuckles split from punching some asshole who thought that just because she kissed some people, she would want to kiss him. His nose has crunched under her fist; gods know Fig has broken more for less. It had felt righteous in the moment, but now she just feels nauseous and homesick. 

The tiles are cool under her knees, skirt hiked up around the places where she has scraped herself and tacked on band-aids. The toilet seat rests against her forehead. Her spine feels heavy, her skin scraped raw. Gorgug and Gorthalax went to bed hours ago. She doesn’t want to wake them up, not for something as silly as making her feel less homesick. She won’t bother them, not for that. 

Her crystal, discarded on the floor, winks up at her, taunting and reassuring, a mockery and a lifeline all at once. Fig considers muscling through, sitting all night long with the toilet and the whispers in her head. But then she caves. 

It’s four-thirty in the morning, and she calls the only person in the world she knows is still awake. He picks up on the first ring.

“Fig?” Riz’s voice echoes across the immaculate, empty tiles of the bathroom. “Everything okay?”

Fig bursts into hysterical sobs. 

“Whoah,” he says, startled. “Fig, hey, Fig.”

She sobs harder, incoherent and sick with missing them all, wanting so badly for him to be here. She can see the look on his face, the way his dark, strong eyebrows would pull down and his pupils would spasm with concern, his tail lashing. She can all but see him, but he’s not here. It’s just her and her crystal and an empty bathroom and her friend, half a country away.

He tries to get her attention a few more times, unsuccessfully. Finally, after the third time he tries to coax out an answer and Fig sobs right over the tone of his voice, he shouts, “ FIG!” and the sharpness of it startles her so badly that she sits up, her forehead leaving the seat of the toilet. 

She hiccups a, “Yeah?” 

“Tell me right now whether or not you are in physical danger,” he says, his voice all blunt edges. A business-man, straight to the point, a rogue categorizing danger for his party. 

Fig takes a deep breath, and then another. “No,” she says wetly. “No, I’m not in danger.” 

As she says it, speaking the words into existence, she actually feels some of the weight disappear. That’s right. She’s not in real danger. She’s lonely. She’s lonely and that’s fixable.

Riz sighs in relief. “Okay. Okay. Good.” There’s a moment of quiet. “What’s wrong?” 

Fig closes her eyes, tears slipping free. Everything. Nothing. Everyone here thinks they know her, and she can feel herself becoming someone else for them. The music is wild and free and perfect, and she wants to chase it everywhere, even if it tears her up. She feels perfect on stage, perfect and infallible, like the stage lights chase away her flaws. She feels like a god. She’s flying higher and higher, and she never wants to come down. It scares the shit out of her. 

She opens her mouth to tell him all this, and what comes out is, “I miss you all,” and that’s the truth, too, so maybe that’s good enough. Maybe Riz can glue her back together with just that. 

Riz stays silent for a long moment, and she thinks he can probably hear all the things she’s leaving out. He doesn’t push, though. He just says, very gently, “We miss you, too. I keep having to talk Kristen out of trying to freeze Adaine’s cupcakes for you. They would taste awful, and Adaine has already said she’ll make you all more, but Kristen wants to freeze them for you all to have when you get back.”

Fig laughs, wet, but genuine. “She probably just wants to see what a frozen cupcake would taste like.” 

“Oh, for sure.”

“I punched someone today,” Fig blurts, needing to confess it to someone. “At an after-party.”

“Ah,” Riz says. “I wondered if you would have one. Sold-out show. Congrats. We were all super excited. The guy you punched. Did he deserve it?”

Alcohol breath and a leering smile and a conviction that she would want him. The crunch of his nose. “Yeah. Yeah, he did.”

“Okay then,” he says. “Good job.”

She laughs. She shuffles away from the toilet to sit back with her shoulder blades against the varnished sink cabinets. She tips her head back, lets her horns dig into the elegant wood. She doesn’t bother to be careful. At this point, she can more than afford to pay for any repairs. “Can you just, like, talk to me?” Fig asks him, looking at the ceiling and trying to picture the ceiling of the Gukgak’s apartment, trying to put herself there with Riz and all his frantic, strangely stable energy. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Sure,” he says immediately. “Do you want to hear about my latest case?”

“Tell me everything.”

And he does. 

Riz tells her about a kobold woman who came forward and asked him to help expose her cousin for trying to forge documents to get her to yield rights to the family bakery. He talks about a changed will that he is working on proving false by identifying the different chemical makeup of the pen that was used to alter it after it had already been submitted. He talks about the feud of the family, detailing the sordid affairs of adultery, of thievery, of ruined barbeques and sworn downfalls. It’s almost certainly a violation of privacy for Riz’s case, but who is Fig going to tell? This is just for her. 

So she sits in the bathroom with her head tipped back against the cabinets, mascara and tears crusted in streaks down her cheeks, tiles smooth against her legs. She sits and Riz, on speaker, talks and talks and talks, laying out all the facts of a case that reads more like a soap opera than anything else. His voice echoes off the tiles and surrounds her, wrapping around all her bruises and sour edges, making the faint aftertaste of vodka and bile fade into the background. If she closes her eyes, it’s almost like he’s sitting next to her. 

An hour slips past in the strange space where she exists with one foot in the hotel bathroom and one foot in Riz’s apartment, neither here nor there. Eventually, she rises, leaves the bathroom with the click of a door, phone in hand. She drags the comforter off the bed with one hand, uprooting the sheets to make a tangled mess. She wraps it around her shoulders and trails out to the balcony, because these are the kinds of hotels they stay at now, ones with individual rooms and glass double doors that lead out onto balconies.

Fig collapses into a chair wedged between a glass-topped coffee table and the immaculately painted wall. She tucks herself up in all the edges of the comforter until she is the infernal center of a blanket burrito. 

Crest Harbor is on the northern coast of Solace, a layered city of skyscrapers that fade into small, weather-worn houses as the city tapers off to the shoreline. The shallows are full of massive stretches of magical crystal that jut out of the waves like the long, spiny backs of a shoal of sea creatures, the crests for which the city is named. The water, where it rushes around the crystals, is multicolored, waves forming a kaleidoscopic undulation across the surface. In the darkness, the whole coast glows.

She holds her phone against her ear, nose going numb in the predawn chill. She looks out over the ocean and the shimmering, twisting zones of tidal light. Riz switches from his case, when he runs out of updates, to telling her about the latest goings-on in the school. 

Fabian is doing better than ever in his fighter class, the ongoing sparring sessions going well. The other day, Kristen threw her styrofoam lunch tray across the cafeteria, and somehow managed to correctly dunk it in the trash can, earning a round of standing applause from the entire teenage populace of the room, and a sharp scolding from the lunch lad. Adaine is thinking about experimenting with making her own caramel, as she’s running out of simple new cupcake recipes. 

Riz talks and talks and talks, and Fig watches the sun creep over the horizon, and she breathes and breathes and breathes. The dawn sun blinks lazy eyes across the sky, demarcating the border between sky and sea. The air grows warmer, gradually, rays of sun kissing her nose and cheeks. Riz talks and talks and talks, and Fig feels real once more, feels grounded. 

When he finally stops, he says, “Hey, Fig. It’s like 7:30, basically. The bus swings through in like ten minutes. Are you good?”

She blinks. 7:30? She looks at her crystal, and sure enough, 7:32. Riz has been talking to her for three hours, mostly nonstop. She feels a sudden swoop of shame. 

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “I’m good. I’m good. I actually feel a lot better, thank you. Sorry I took up so much of your time.”

“Fig,” he says, voice serious, so much older than he is. “Don’t be sorry. This is why I said you could call anytime. That still stands. Call me. I mean it. I’m good at spiraling. We can spiral together.”

He’s so earnest about it that she can’t help but laugh. She closes her eyes and smiles, warm from the sun and from her friend, holding her even hundreds of miles away. “You really are our angel. You know that, right?”

They’re separated by nearly a whole country, skies and rivers and hills, but Fig can see his blush as clearly as if he were standing next to her. She can practically track the dip and rise of his ears. “Shut up,” he says. 

“Our little blessing,” Fig teases. “Our miracle.” 

“I will hang up on you.”

“A gift from Kristen’s frat bro ex-god.”

“Fig, I am hanging up.”

“No, no!” Fig laughs. “I mean, yes. Yeah. Go get ready for school. School is important for you.” 

“School is important for everyone.”

She ignores that. “Do you still have to get dressed?”

“I’ve been dressed since before you called.” 

Fig makes a mental note to call Adaine and tell her to start tricking Riz into taking more naps. She’s good at doing it on purpose, and good at casually suggesting locations for him to nap during the school day. Sometimes he gets in an hour or two in someone’s backpack, most often Fabian or Gorgug’s. 

“Seriously, though,” he says, his voice laced through with concern. “Are you good?”

She breathes. She looks out over the ocean, over the sparkling waves and the sun, rising triumphant into the heavens. She breathes, and it feels easier than before. She feels right again. The closer she gets to feeling like a god, the harder she falls back into her loved ones, trying to get back to the ground. It’s a relief to know that Riz will always be there to pull her back down, to get her feet on solid foundations. 

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m good.” And what she means is I love you I love you I love you. 

“I’ll pick up whenever,” he says. “Call me if you need to talk. Or if you need someone to talk.” And what he means is I love you I love you I love you. 

“Go to school, nerd,” she says, voice thick with adoration.

“Go eat breakfast, jerk,” he says back, sharp edges filed off with unwavering devotion. 

“Only if you eat too,” she says. “Something other than coffee, Riz.”

“I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up.”

“Food! Food, Riz!”

Her crystal beeps as he hangs up and the line drops. “I’ll get you, Gukgak,” she says under her breath, and flicks open her messages to send Kristen a text saying, I don’t think Riz is having breakfast. annoy him into eating something plz

She gets a text back within seconds, Kristen saying, o captain my captain with a little salute emoji. 

Fig looks out over the skyline, at the city beginning to rouse itself, salt air and spring sunshine soaking everything in honey and amber. She breathes. 

When she gets to the breakfast buffet half an hour later, Gorgug looks up from his pastries and his eyebrows immediately rise. Fig had halfheartedly washed her face off in the bathroom sink before coming out, but she’s pretty sure she still looks like shit, raccoon eyes and thick bags, her eyes swollen from crying and lack of sleep. 

“What happened?” he asks, eyes dark with worry. “Are you okay?”

“It was something stupid,” she says. “I took care of it.”

Gorgug gets up and brings her back a glass of water and an orange. He sets the water down in front of her and starts peeling the orange to shove slices into her hands. “Did you sleep at all?”

“No,” she says, and then, at his noise of dismay, “It’s fine. I’ll sleep on the bus later.”

“Why didn’t you come and get me?” he asks. He sounds hurt. 

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Fig says. She drinks some of her water, so he’ll stop looking like a kicked puppy. 

“So you just had a bad night alone? That’s not a better option, Fig.”

“I wasn’t alone,” she says, smiling at him crookedly. “Riz got me.”

Gorgug stops working at the orange, one finger pushed up beneath the peel. He looks at her, and the worry melts away into understanding and relief. He smiles. “Oh. How is he?”

“Skipping breakfast,” Fig says. “I’m getting Kristen to try to coerce him into eating, and Adaine to force feed him if that doesn’t work.”

He nods solemnly. “She would.” He hands her some orange slices, and she starts devouring them. 

An hour later, as they’re packing up to board the bus, Fig’s crystal chimes. She checks the message in the group chat, and nearly falls over laughing. It’s a selfie from Kristen, only her eyes and forehead visible in the photo, a smug cant to her eyebrows, and a very grumpy Riz in the background, reluctantly making his way through a granola bar and an apple.

Fig is still grinning when she gets on the bus.

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Yvoni is happy with her work now. That shouldn’t be as revolutionary as it is, but even a year removed from a resignation that was never in the plan, it still feels remarkable. 

If you had asked Yvoni, in the year before Riz’s freshman year, if she was happy with her work, she would have told you that she was. She would have been a liar, of course, but not even she would have known that. Only with the revealing clarity of looking at her career in the rearview could she recognize how long she had been dissatisfied with it. Hindsight is 20/20, and all that. It’s much easier to admit that you made a mistake in the past than it is to admit that you’re making a mistake in the present. 

Is it embarrassing that it took her own kid being in the system she was upholding to make her reevaluate her position? Yeah, a little bit. Admittedly, she could have been quicker on the uptake. But she got there in the end. She’s pretty sure that’s what Riz would say, anyway, and that’s what is worth the most to her. 

She and Sklonda haven’t really talked about it very much. It’s one of the things spoken in the margins of the conversations, in the gaps of one paragraph of discussion to the next. Yvoni gets a new job and Sklonda applies for a law program and life goes on. They get better. They do better. 

Yvoni picks up one of the mats from the yoga class and sprays it off, wiping it down and waving it a few times before rolling it up. A few of the stragglers trail out of the room with a cheerful, “See you next week!” that she returns easily. 

She keeps going, trailing through the room, spraying off and picking up the communal mats. She slots each of them into their designated spots, a cubby rack in the back of the aerobics room. 

Lots of her coworkers at the Silverleaf Gym hate picking up. They don’t like going through at the end. They drag their feet and paint the air blue with complaints about people too lazy to pick up after themselves. 

Yvoni doesn’t quite understand it. Whether or not others are lazy is beside the point. There’s something deeply reassuring about putting things away, about organizing them once the work is done. She likes putting the world back into place, cleaning up all the mess. Putting the mats and weights away is meditative, in a way. 

She slots the last mat into a cubby and sweeps her curls over her shoulder, sweat tacky on her skin. She walks out, flicking off the light in the aerobics room and trailing back into the main area of the gym. It’s midafternoon, spring light pouring in through the windows. The crowd of after-school teens is beginning to come in, short waves of sweaty kids mocking each other and moving in clumps to various areas of equipment. 

She skirts around a group of boys loudly arguing over who can bench the most, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. Her own kid, of course, is more than a handful, but it’s in a very different way. 

Yvoni thinks her and Sklonda’s lives would probably be a little easier if the extent of Riz’s unhappy habits were being too invested in his muscle mass. That’s not the case, but even so, she wouldn’t want him to be different. She’ll take him exactly as he is, late nights and coffee addictions, obsessive habits and overly literal focus, all of it.

She walks up to the desk, where Katalina is scrolling through her crystal, unbothered. Yvoni reaches the counter, and reaches over to knock on the hard plastic next to Katalina’s spiky elbow. She looks up and pops her gum. “Hey, hot stuff. Got yoga all wrapped up?”

Yvoni passes the program sign-in sheet over the desk. She takes it, mindful of her claws, and scans it. “Good turnout,” she observes. “You’ve been pulling people in.” She grins, all daggered fangs and spiky frills. She winks. “I can see why.”

“I’ll get you in there to stare at my butt too someday,” she says back, offering a toothy grin of her own. She flicks hair over her shoulder. “I think you’re avoiding it because you can’t handle me.”

“Wanna make that bet?” Katalina says. 

For a moment, they stare each other down, gazes locked. Then both of them burst into laughter. 

When Yvoni had started at the gym after quitting the force, Katalina had been the one to show her the ropes. She’s not the boss in any way, just disgustingly competent at handling the gym bros. She had been a good candidate to get Yvoni used to the flow of things. 

She’s also a vicious flirt. She had held off on launching her attack for the duration of the training period, in what Yvoni retroactively recognizes as a titanic feat of will. Immediately after, though, she had launched her attack. She flirts with everyone, is the thing. Every single member of the gym staff, unless they have expressed discomfort. No one is safe unless they ask her to stop.

The first time she had said, “And, honestly, hon, I would tap that ass so fucking hard. Hot shit,” she had winked, clearly expecting Yvoni to not quite know what to do with it. 

So when Yvoni had replied, “Honestly hilarious that you think you’ll get to the ass without going down on me first. You gotta earn the ass, sweetheart,” the dragonborn had nearly fallen off her chair. 

It’s been a long time since Yvoni has been interested in anything other than passing flirtations and booty calls. She’s busy, okay? And, well, she’s satisfied, is the thing. Sklonda isn’t a romantic partner, exactly, but she’s Yvoni’s partner, for all intents and purposes. They share life and problems, fight and make up and love each other with more dedication than any romantic relationship Yvoni has ever had. And that’s not even counting Riz. And, gods, how could you not count Riz? 

Yvoni has a partner and a kid and she goes out a few times a month to dance with strangers and fuck or be fucked and then go on with her life. She’s used to flirtation with nothing behind it. Playing this game with Katalina is fun. It’s interesting. It makes something respond in Yvoni’s stomach, makes her spine tingle like her tongue after spicy food. It’s good, the push and pull of it. 

Katalina opens the computer with a few deft clicks of the mouse. She navigates to the log as Yvoni rounds the counter to snatch up her water bottle. 

She settles, one hip against the counter, to watch Katalina begin efficiently logging in the names of the sign-in sheet. She takes a long drink of her water bottle, undercut by the rhythmic clicking of the keyboard. It’s soothing, honestly. Her life is bookended by people who are ruthlessly competent and brutally single-minded. She’s used to people who are too much, too soon, all the time. She thinks it’s why she hit it off with Katalina so well. 

“You got any other clients today?” Katalina asks, absently blowing another bubble with her gum as she switches to another line in the log. 

“One at seven, one at eight,” Yvoni says. “Supposed to be working the floor until then.”

“Lucky fuckers out there,” she says. “Get sexily competent eye candy to yell them into better form.”

“Like those teenage boys listen to anything out of my mouth,” Yvoni says, rolling her eyes. It’s one of the downsides of working in a gym. Some of the boys, and even the men, don’t want to listen to her. It’s frustrating in the moment, but it makes it all the more rewarding that her self-defense classes are starting to bring in more girls, and keep them. They’re seeing more and more recurring names on the sign-in sheets every week. 

It’s rewarding in a similar way to the flirtations with Katalina; it settles in the bottom of her stomach, thick and sweet and hungry. It makes the burn worth it. 

She feels it when the sixty year old woman benches more today than she did yesterday, and grins wider for it. She feels it when the young girls in the boxing class throw a good punch and cheer for each other. She feels it when the yoga class breathes out together at the peak of a stretch. There’s the burn and then the simmer into satisfaction. It makes her feel like she’s doing something. Like she’s affecting other people’s lives. She likes doing that in a good way now. 

Her crystal buzzes in her back pocket. 

She ignores it, letting the cool air from the AC over the desk wash over her sticky shoulders. 

Her crystal buzzes again. 

She lets it go. “Hey, you think we’ll need to add another yoga section soon?” 

Katalina pops a bubble, shrugs. The gesture sends light skittering across her deep indigo scales, shimmers of iridescent purple and blue rippling down like the feathers of a starling. It’s annoyingly distracting. “Who knows? If you keep pulling in people like this, probably.” She flicks her eyes over and grins, flicking a forked tongue through her teeth. “Can’t exactly blame the good people of Elmville for the turnout. Views this fine are in short supply.” 

Yvoni snorts, nearly spilling water all down the front of her tank top. “Sure.”

She taps out a few more names and then says, “Seriously, though, you’ve been doing a great job. You’re bringing in a ton of people. They really might add another section.” 

That sticky sweet pride pours through her, hungry for more. 

“If they did add another section, would you want to teach that one too?” she asks. 

Yvoni hums. “Probably,” she admits. “I like it. It’s soothing.”

“Yeah, that’s generally the point.”

Her crystal buzzes again, and this time Katalina makes a rumble in the depths of her throat that reminds Yvoni of Sklonda and Riz’s purrs. “You’re sure popular today,” she says, with a pointed look down at Yvoni’s pocket. “Might wanna check that, hot stuff.”

“What are you, the text police?” she laughs, but pulls out her crystal nonetheless. She taps the screen and waits for the light to ripple up from within. The home screen comes up. A few notifications, all from the basic news alerts. Stock market change, inclement weather tomorrow. 

There’s a text from Riz that she pulls down with her thumb, clicking into her chat with him and going to take a drink of water. She freezes with her water bottle halfway to her mouth. 

SOS SOS SOS 

YVONI

YVONI HELP

YOUR PARENTS ARE AT MY APARTMENT

HELP WHAT DO I DO

okay i let them in because they were already here when i got to the door and i couldn’t NOT let them in

Mom isn’t going to be home until twelve at least

I know you’re at work but please tell me how to politely kick them out. there must be a way

okay I know you’re done with yoga now so WHAT DO I DO

“Oh gods,” Yvoni says, suddenly nauseous. “Oh fuck. Oh gods.”

Katalina rolls back in her chair, looking over. At Yvoni’s tone, her face has dropped from casually flirtatious to cautiously concerned. “Everything okay?”

“No,” she says, shoving up off the counter and capping her water bottle frantically. “No, everything is not okay. I need you to call my clients later and cancel for me.” She types out, Riz, stay right fucking there, I’m coming. 

She doesn’t wait for a reply, pocketing her crystal and breaking into a run for the staff room. She throws the door open and skids in, snatching up her bag from her cubby and whipping around. 

Katalina appears in the doorway, looking startled. “Hey, whoah, what the fuck is going on?”

“My parents have cornered my kid alone in his apartment and there’s a very real possibility that he will fucking shoot them,” Yvoni says. “By the way, I’m taking off for the rest of the day, so if you could log me off, that would be great.” She curses the fact that she never got strong enough to use Teleport. She slashes her hand through the air to cast Sending, swearing viciously. “Lon,” she says, throwing her words through space straight into Sklonda’s mind, “ My bitch parents are at the apartment with Riz. I’m handling it. Going now. Thought you should know.” She has words left, but what is even left to say? 

Katalina hears her say this, and her brows shoot up. All of her spines raise, fins puffing out to make her larger and sharper. “Wait, hold the fuck on. Your parents might shoot your kid, or your kid might shoot your parents?”

“The latter,” Yvoni snaps. “And they would fucking deserve it. I gotta go. Fuck. I took the bus this morning.” She knows there isn’t one for at least another ten minutes, and every minute that her parents are with Riz unsupervised is a minute too many.

“Okay,” Katalina says, waving her hands around. “I’ll come back to the fact that your kid has a projectile weapon later. This seems bad. Give me one minute to grab my shit and log us out, and I’ll drive you.”

Yvoni stops. “Seriously?”

“That okay?”

“Fuck yes, please,” she blurts, her eyes wide. “Holy shit, you’re a lifesaver.”

Katalina swoops past and scoops up her messenger bag from her cubby, huge, fishlike tail swinging behind her. She throws it over her shoulder and they both hurtle out of the staff room. She stops at the desk to scribble them both out on the log and write something on a Post-It note. 

At that moment, the Sending message to Sklonda returns, her friend’s voice echoing in her mind. “ Fuck,” Sklonda says, succinctly. “ Make sure he doesn’t kill them. Verbally punch your mom for me. Tell me when you get there.” And then, at the end, a three word phrase in Goblin that means fire heart. 

Yvoni’s back straightens, the panic smoothing out into an icy-hot concentration. Fire heart. She’s got this. 

“JASON!” Katalina yells into the weight room on their way out. “I’m driving Yvoni out! Family emergency!” She sweeps out without waiting for a response. Towering above the rest of the gym at a solid nine feet tall, everyone else skitters out of her way as she powers through, tail lashing, fins extended like a pufferfish. Yvoni keeps on the heels of her tail, letting her plow through the scattered groups of people. 

They burst out into the parking lot, blinking fiercely in the sudden burst of sunlight. Katalina takes a sharp left and plows over to a truck parked in the side of the parking lot. She clicks it open with her keychain and hoists herself up into the driver’s seat, Yvoni hopping into the passenger’s without a second thought. The inside of the car is shockingly clean, and smells vaguely of lavender from the air freshener hanging off the rearview mirror. 

Katalina says, “Where’s your apartment?”

“Downtown. Strongtower Luxury Apartments.”

She makes a low growl of agreement. “Ah, I know where that is. I got you.” She throws the truck into reverse, and peels out of the parking lot throwing up dust. It’s a scarily fast ride back to Strongtower, but still feels entirely too long for Yvoni’s nerves. 

Her knee refuses to stop bouncing. She gnaws at her lip, and keeps flipping through her spellbook. She has to remind herself that her parents, however nasty, would almost certainly not physically attack Riz. It’s not as comforting as she would like.

Katalina swings into the parking lot around Strongtower so fast that Yvoni halfway smacks against the passenger seat window. Still, she’s out of the car before it’s even fully parked. She tears across the parking lot, the click of the truck locking behind her, and then heavy footsteps as Katalina chases after. She blasts through the entryway to the building and books it for the elevator. As soon as Katalina is in, she jams the close button. 

They stand, shoulder-to-shoulder. The elevator chimes with a disgusting amount of cheer for each floor. Yvoni waits, waits, waits. And then, when she estimates five hundred feet, she grabs Katalina’s elbow and says, “I hope your stomach is strong.”

“What does that me-”

Katalina trips through the Dimension Door in a burst of forest-green magic to nearly collapse against Yvoni with a yelp, appearing on the dingy carpet of the correct floor. She’s moving as soon as Katalina is on her feet again, tearing down the hallway. She throws the door of the apartment open and blasts in like a missile. 

The door smacks against the wall with the sheer force that she throws it open. All three members of the apartment jump. Yvoni’s tunnel vision skips straight over her parents to focus on Riz, standing closest to the door. His tail is stiff, raised at an alarmed angle, his ears flattened back against his head. His shoulders are hiked up around his ears as he stares across the apartment at her parents, sitting at the table. 

A quick scan of her kid shows her that, while deeply, deeply uncomfortable, he doesn’t look hurt at all, but the way his hand is hovering around the handle of his arquebus isn’t particularly reassuring either. He whips around, along with her parents, when she comes barrelling in. As soon as his eyes find hers, his shoulders drop a solid half foot, and his tail starts swishing through the air. He sighs, “Yvoni,” and she catches the bitten-off beginning of a “Thank the gods,” that dies unsaid between his teeth when he closes his mouth. 

Yvoni’s father, at the table, purses his lip in a sort of wince. Her mother stands up, the chair screeching as she pushes it back. She smiles at Yvoni as if everything is fine. Yvoni sees red. 

“Darling,” Clara Themansaya says with an angelic, unbothered smile. “We thought you wouldn’t be back until later. We heard you had some… client meetings?”

Yvoni cuts across the apartment with three long strides, dropping herself directly in the middle of her mother’s eyeline to Riz. “I canceled,” she says icily, “when I found out my parents went to the trouble of inviting themselves into my kid’s apartment without so much as a call.”

“Well,” she replies tersely, “perhaps we would have if you were to ever respond to any sort of correspondence from us. Believe me, I take no joy from loitering here waiting for you. You certainly haven’t given any indication that we would be welcome at your doorstep.”

She feels rather than sees Riz relax behind her at her presence, vanishing into the depths of her shadow. An ally within five feet, Yvoni thinks, only a little hysterically. The thought that he could get off a sneak attack shot on her parents probably shouldn’t be reassuring. It is, though. 

Katalina moves into the apartment, stooping to get her horns under the doorframe and then straightening up, all nine feet of scales and muscles, fins puffed out. 

Yvoni’s mother stops as the dragonborn enters, her dark eyes flashing dangerously. “Ah,” Clara says. “And who would this be?”

Yvoni glances back to find Katalina semi-frozen, but she’s not looking where she expected. Her gaze is stuck on Riz, sharp green eyes wide, nictitating membranes pulled over her eyes to stare, unblinking. She looks caught between surprise and something else Yvoni can’t quite identify. 

“Katalina Ariti,” Yvoni says. “I work with her. She drove me.”

That snaps Katalina out of her trance, and she shakes herself off and moves deeper into the apartment to place herself behind and slightly to the side of Yvoni’s shoulder, helping hide Riz behind her enormous, spiky bulk. “A pleasure,” she drawls, in a tone that suggests it is anything but, accent crystallizing into a honey-thick layer of sound. She meets Clara’s gaze, unblinking, and Yvoni blesses her ability to read the room. 

Riz’s voice sounds off in Yvoni’s head, a Message spell coming in from behind. They haven’t, like, done anything, he says. They’re just being weird and passive aggressive like normal. The tone, skittish and unconvincing, gives him away.

Yvoni balls up her fists, nails cutting into her palms. Green sparks flicker across her fingers, creeping up her wrists. Sure, kiddo. I’m gonna show them the door, yeah? 

Riz sighs, a little guilty, a little relieved. Up to you. 

“Yvoni,” her father says, tone less aggressive than Clara’s, pleading in a way that somehow pisses her off even more. As if she’s the one being unreasonable here. “We want to speak to you. We would, of course, love to not have to travel cities and impose on your… friends, but how else are we supposed to reach you? You refuse to answer our calls, and then we find out from our neighbor of all people that you’ve made a career change. What would you have us do?”

“I would have you leave me well the fuck alone,” Yvoni snaps. “That’s generally the point of dodging people’s calls, Yaleneth.”

Her father flinches back at the use of his name, ears twitching for a moment before switching into the posturing for chastisement. “Yvonima,” he says. “There’s no need for that, please. We’re expressing concern.”

The thing about Yaleneth Themansaya is that he thinks he is the most reasonable one in any conversation between the three of them, and while he might be the calmest, there’s nothing reasonable about his perspective, or Clara’s. The thing about Yvoni’s parents is that her mother is the more biting of the two, all sharp words that Yvoni can return barb for barb, disdainful of how Yvoni has chosen to live her life, and who she has chosen to live it with. Her father is not disdainful, is not biting, but his words end up being all the more cruel for it, because he’s so goddamn worried about a life that makes her happy, so convinced that she would be better if she could just do it the way he wants. 

Of the two of them, Yvoni hates her mother more, but where Clara’s sniping is a persistent needling, Yaleneth’s concern is a knife lodged in her stomach that he twists around and proclaims necessary to cut out the bad parts. 

“Y’know,” Katalina drawls, words sugary sweet and laced with arsenic, “Seems like there are plenty of people lined up to give concern. You sure you’re giving something she needs? No one wants to bring the fifth egg when the recipe only needed four.” 

Behind them, Riz lets out a startled snort of laughter. Clara’s eyes narrow in on Katalina, venomous. “I don’t believe I asked you, dragon,” she says, her voice icy. 

Katalina straightens, her spines somehow managing to extend even further. “Oh,” she says, her voice full of realization. “I see you.” 

There’s a devastating cut of disdainful understanding to it, a dawning comprehension that is humiliating and reassuring all at once. Yvoni isn’t imagining this. She isn’t overreacting. 

Katalina takes a deep breath, and steam begins to bubble out of her nostrils, rolling up in spirals through the air to drift across the ceiling. “You didn’t ask me, sweetheart,” she says, cloyingly sweet, wielding a guise of politeness like a surgical scalpel. “But I call ‘em like I see ‘em, and if you don’t mind me saying, I don’t think you’re particularly welcome here. Wouldn’t want to impose on this kind young man, would you? I’m sure he’s got things to do. Schoolwork and all that. You know how it is.”

“Oh, fuck,” Riz says behind them. “I totally forgot about my Solesian Lit essay.” It’s so genuine, the distress so surprising, that Yvoni almost laughs.

Clara’s lips purse. “It’s improper for young people to swear.”

“I’ve killed so many people, and the swearing is what you have a problem with?” Riz mutters. 

Katalina laughs. 

Yaleneth stands up with a sigh. “Yvonima, this is an overreaction. We have caused no harm here. But I can tell that we are not welcome. We will leave, if that is what you would like-”

“Yes, please. Immediately.” 

“-but we would like to speak with you before we go.” 

Yvoni grits her teeth. “And if I say no?” 

“Then we will not leave.”

Katalina hisses, a low, draconic noise of warning, steam bubbling from her lips. Clara’s hand drifts down toward her spellbook, eyes unmoving from Katalina. Behind them, she hears the faint sound of an arquebus pulled from a holster. 

Gods damn it. She refuses to wreck the Gukgaks' apartment by actually getting into a magical fight with her parents here and now. 

“We’ll talk outside,” she says, baring her teeth. She waves a hand through the air, green sparks crackling around her fingertips. “Get out. I’ll meet you outside.”

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” Katalina says cheerfully. 

Clara’s lips flatten into an unforgiving line. She scoops up her purse off the table and stalks over the door. She pauses, fingers on the handle, glancing down at Riz. “Best of luck with your… schooling,” she says, her voice neutral. 

Riz’s eyes flash, catlike, pupils narrowed to slits. “Okay,” he says. The response is lukewarm enough to be cutting on its own. 

Clara walks out, ice trailing in her wake. 

Yaleneth picks up his coat and walks out much less irritably. He pauses in the doorway to look back at the three of them standing in a line like interlocking shields, and his face looks something like regret. “I’ll see you outside, Yvonima,” he says, and then disappears down the hallway. 

When the door clicks shut, all three people in the apartment deflate, releasing their breath in a huge whoosh. Riz loses a full half foot of nervous height, shoulders slumping. “Holy shit,” he says. “That was awful. I can’t believe they actually came here.”

“Scales and stars,” Katalina swears. “I haven’t had an interaction that rancid in years. What the fuck.” 

Yvoni flexes her fingers, trying to shake off the little green flickers of electricity, and mostly failing. “Riz,” she says seriously, and he turns to look at her, metallic, feline eyes wide. “Are you okay?” 

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just a little rattled, I think.” A pause. “I never thought they would actually come here.”

That makes two of us, Yvoni thinks. “Did they say anything nasty?” 

Riz winces. “I mean, just the usual stuff. Kinda passive aggressive. Sniffy. You know.” He’s trying to be subtle about it. Unfortunately, he has the worst poker face of any rogue she’s ever met, which is really saying something, considering she knew his mom first. Deception isn’t exactly Riz’s strong suit. 

Yvoni lets out a breath through gritted teeth. “Got it. They said something shitty that you don’t want to tell me.” 

Riz pales. “Uh. No.”

She sighs. She leans down to hug him, folding him up in her arms and breathing in the ever-present smell of coffee and the faint aura of creek water. 

He falls into it easily, rubbing at her back. “Are you okay?” he asks. 

Yvoni breathes, breathes, breathes. Her magic sits in the back of her throat, coating her tongue with copper and the taste of forest earth. “I’ll be all good as soon as they’re gone, kiddo,” she says. She releases him, pushing up to her feet. 

Katalina meets her eyes, slitted green eyes understanding, calm. The confrontational edge left with Yvoni’s parents, leaving only a steady presence of calm. “You gotta go deal with that,” she says. “You want me out there with you, or you want me to chill here?”

“That’s not-” Yvoni says. “Thanks for driving me, but don’t feel like you have to stay. I know this is a lot. You can go if you want.”

She snorts, steam rolling out of her nostrils in a thick cloud. “Honey, I already checked out at the gym. I got nowhere to be. And you seem stressed the fuck out. I can chill with Riz if it would make you feel better.” She looks down. “And if that’s okay with you. I’d get it if you’ve had enough of people being in your apartment.”

Riz blinks, his tail swishing back and forth. “I’m fine with you staying for a minute,” he says. 

Katalina throws him a thumbs up. 

Yvoni lets out a breath. “Yeah. Okay. That would be great, actually.” She moves to the door. “I’m gonna go handle this.”

Riz watches her go, nervous, but as the door shuts, she hears him ask Katalina, “So, do you want a drink or something?”

Yvoni storms down through the apartment building, taking the stairs in a futile attempt to burn off some of the fury before she reaches the bottom. It does nothing. She bursts out of the lobby of Strongtower, hair beginning to lift up around her head under the force of her magical electricity. The spring sunlight is turning the concrete sidewalks into lazy puddles of heat, car exhaust thick in the air. Her parents are standing by the lobby doors, looking deeply out of place with their spellbooks in hand, looking around distrustfully. 

It makes Yvoni’s rage bubble over into an apoplectic explosion. “What,” she snarls, “the fuck is your problem? Where do you get off, harassing my kid at his own home because I won’t pick up your calls?”

“Yvomina,” Clara scoffs. “Please. That child is many things, but he’s hardly yours.”

“We want to catch up,” Yaleneth says, more diplomatically. He puts a gentle hand on his wife’s arm. “We wanted to take you out for dinner, but didn’t know how to reach you. We thought this would be the easiest way.”

“The easiest way?” Yvoni says incredulously. “Are you a wizard or are you not? You have a fucking Sending spell. Use it!”

“Would you have responded?” Clara cuts in, brutal. “Or would you have left it hanging, cutting us out in just one more way?”

One of Riz and Sklonda’s neighbors veers around them on the sidewalk to enter the building, furiously avoiding eye contact. 

“I would have used it to tell you to fuck off,” Yvoni says. “No need to come all this way so I could say it to your face.” 

“Darling, we are worried,” he says. “Whatever our other disagreements, surely we can agree that changing careers like this is drastic. You were stable.”

“I am stable.”

“Working at a gym?” he asks dubiously. 

“Yes!” she shrieks. “Yes, at a gym! And you know what? I feel way happier now. I don’t come home feeling sick. But that is beside the point, which is that you chose to harass a sixteen year old at his home because you couldn’t reach me. Even as delusional as your views of the world are, surely we have got to agree that’s too far. Please tell me you know that’s too far.”

“Please,” Clara scoffs. “We were hardly harassing him. There’s not a scratch on the boy.”

“That is not a defense,” Yvoni hisses. Her mouth tastes like blood, like electricity. “That is not a defense in the slightest.”

“Yvomina,” she snaps. “We have tolerated this for far too long. Enough is enough. You wanted to move cities? Fine. You wanted to support your friend in having a young child? Alright. But, please, darling, at some point we must give up the charade. This has to stop. You’re playing house with a goblin woman who couldn’t even find a husband, ignoring all the people who would love to give you a real family. Be realistic, Yvomina. Do you honestly think that when anyone looks at that boy, they think he’s yours?”

Even Yaleneth winces at that. He pulls on his wife’s arm, and steps forward. “Please, darling. Let us take you to dinner. We can talk.”

Yvoni’s nails are cutting into her palms. She wishes she had fangs like Riz, like Sklonda. She wants to bite, wants to claw, wants to burst into tears and melt into the concrete forever. The air crackles like copper, like lightning, like blood. “I’m not talking about anything. Not with you. You have two mouths and no ears. You haven’t heard me for fifteen fucking years. Why should I keep trying?”

Clara’s lips flatten. “You are selfish,” she says, voice thick with tears. “Selfish and ungrateful.”

Yvoni feels her face twist into something ugly, something wounded, something that seeks only to return the pain it has been dealt. “Eyeless, earless, tongueless,” she snarls, the goblin insult righteous on her tongue, and then spits on the ground at her mother’s feet. She meets her mother’s tears with flame. “I’ll die before I remake my life to make it palatable for you.”

Clara lets out a sob and storms away down the street. 

Yvoni stands, straight spine and spring sunlight, with her father. He stands there, looking stricken with grief. “Yvonima,” he starts, and then stops. 

He’s never looked this old. High elven through and through, he’ll outlive her and Clara, see the sky change for centuries after they are gone, but in this moment, he seems already that old, as if he’s skipped the middle to go straight to the end. 

“Yvoni,” he says, and it spikes down her spine. “Our darling girl. We’ve always wanted the best for you.”

“You want the best for yourselves,” she says. “I have found the best for me. You’re the only one who doesn’t get that.”

“We want to save you.”

“I don’t need saving.”

He meets her eyes, sorrowful. “Your mother had a vision. She wanted it so badly. She wanted to have a grandchild someday.”

The injustice of it all flares in Yvoni’s chest, tightens her ribs around her broken heart like a vice. It’s always like digging shrapnel out of a closed-over wound, talking with her parents. The worst part of it all, she thinks, is that they’re so sure they’re right. They’re so sure that one day she’ll come to her senses. That she’ll regret it. 

“I already gave her a grandchild,” Yvoni says, words like gavels, like an executioner’s axe. “He is brave and smart and kind and wonderful, and he makes me better every day that he is in my life. I helped raise him and I watched him become a person separate from anyone else. 

“I gave you a grandchild already. It’s not my fault you decided he wasn’t elven or human enough.”

Yaleneth looks down, like he can’t meet her eyes, can’t handle the loathing there. 

And then, because Yvoni has never been a woman of forgiveness, she says, “You always told me the story of you and Momma like it was magic. How your parents said you would ruin the bloodline with a human woman. How they said no and you married her anyway. You told that like it was a fucking legend. So it’s fine when you want to have a family with a human woman, but when I have one with a goblin woman, that’s a mistake? That’s wrong?” She laughs, low and cruel, twisting the knife in the stomach where it’s lodged, wound for wound, disdain for disdain. “Congratulations, Daddy. All this time, and you’ve finally done it. You’ve made your parents proud.”

At that, his eyes flick back up, and he physically recoils, his face horrified and betrayed. Good, Yvoni thinks, spiteful satisfaction sticky sweet. 

“If either of you ever corner my kid ever again,” she warns, “I will kill you myself. Go home.”

She does not wait for an answer. She walks back into the building, heart pounding, electricity in place of blood. She reaches the correct floor, and walks out. She stands in the hallway for a minute trying to regain control of her heart rate. She stands with the worn-out carpet and the flickering lightbulbs in their sconces, and tries, tries, tries to make her pulse settle, tries to swallow the anger, to make it smaller, less poisonous. 

She closes her eyes, nails nearly drawing blood from her palms, magic like copper and forest dirt thick in the air. Even through her shuttered eyelids, she can see the green glow. Bile coats her tongue. She tries to make it settle.

(Yvoni has made all her choices, and she regrets not a one of them. She’s happy with her life and with her family, and if Clara and Yaleneth don’t want her with those parts, then she doesn’t want them at all. Still, she wishes she could take the part of herself that wants them to want her and choke the life out of it. She wishes she could take the part of herself that misses them and pull it up by the roots.) 

Eventually, she takes a deep breath. She pulls her nails out of her palms. She walks down the hallway, breathing, breathing. She opens the door and walks in to find Katalina sitting at the kitchen table, watching Riz intently. 

Riz is standing, tail swinging, explaining the premise of the book he’s reading for Solesian Lit. There’s a tilt to his voice, a speed that indicates the remnants of a tension he has yet to shake off. As Yvoni enters, she hears him say, “-and so the man dies, and his brother and sister are left to battle over the empire of the family business that neither of them are equipped to run anyway. And the end implies that they will fall into the same trap that their father did, and pour their whole lives into the project of the business, and die lonely and dissatisfied.”

Katalina makes a face. “Damn,” she says. “That’s bleak, sugarpie. And this is a classic?” She sounds incredibly dubious. 

“It’s well written,” Riz says. “Just kinda depressing.”

She hums. “I’ll take your word for it, sugarpie. Doesn’t sound like my kinda book.”

“Fabian and Adaine hate it,” he says. “Kristen and Fig cried though.”

Yvoni stops in the doorway to take in the two of them, so small and so big, tails and spikes and fangs. She wonders how her parents never looked at the world long enough to see the worth in that. She wonders how they never grew up to be anything more than little kids making monsters under the bed of anything different than themselves. 

Riz looks over, his ears pinning back slightly. “Hey,” he says nervously. “How did it go?”

Yvoni sighs, crossing the apartment to sit down in the chair next to Katalina. “They’re going back to Red Valley. Or maybe they’re not. I don’t give a shit. They’re not coming back here.”

“You’re not getting dinner with them?” There’s a complicated sort of twist to Riz’s words, and undercurrent she can’t pin down. 

She scowls. “No, I’m not.”

His ears dip even lower, and his shoulders hunch. His tail pulls in to curl around his left ankle. “Sorry,” he murmurs. 

She looks at him, his downcast eyes, his curled-in tail, and finds, to her own surprise, guilt in the slope of his stance. “Oh, squirt,” she says. She does a quick evaluation of his body language, judging that he probably doesn’t super want to be picked up at the moment. She course-corrects and leaves him to stand there, instead saying, “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, kiddo. They’ve had plenty of chances to make different choices, and they haven’t. They don’t get to weasel back in without changing, and they sure as hell don’t get to harass you as leverage to do it. That’s a no-go.”

“She’s right, sugarpie,” Katalina says, tail swinging. “I don’t even have all the context, but I know that ain’t it. This behavior was not okay.”

Riz opens his mouth as if to say something, and then seems to think better of it. He closes his mouth again. “Okay,” he says, and then nothing more.

Yvoni feels a sharp pang in the bottom of her lungs. She hates knowing that there are things he feels like he can’t share, things that she can’t help with, but she also knows that there is no faster way to make him clam up than to push. 

So she just says, “Taken care of now.” 

“Sorry I made you come from work,” he says. “I know you like Anna and Josey.”

She sees Katalina’s brows raise as Riz casually drops her client’s names, and remembers how funny it is to watch someone meet her kid for the first time, strange and hyper-focused and so attentive. 

“It’ll be fine,” she says dismissively. “They’re both nice. They’ll understand. This was more important.”

Riz’s tail swishes unhappily, and Yvoni reminds him, “Would you be mad if Kristen called you to help deal with her parents?”

He scowls, his dark brows furrowing, yellow-gold eyes narrowing at her. “You shouldn’t be able to use that against me.”

She laughs. “Wow, look at that. No comeback. I have stumped the PI. That’s how you know I won this argument, squirt.” She tests the edges of the waters, leaning over to ruffle the few curls she can reach, spilling out from under the brim of his hat. 

He ducks away with a slight hiss, and Yvoni’s shoulders relax. That’s a good reaction, actually. Worse would be him stiffening and having no response. 

She knows she can’t hear all the subtones of goblin purrs and hisses, knows that there is a whole language there that is lost on her ears. But still, after nearly two decades of being around Sklonda and Riz, she can pick up more than just the basics, can interpret some of the slight variations she can pick up on. 

This hiss in particular is more playful than serious, a slight buzz to it to take off the edge. Her still-snarling insides begin to settle some at the implication that he’s beginning to come down from the stress of the situation. 

In response to the hiss, she bares her teeth at him and hisses right back, earning an exasperated sort of giggle from Riz and an open bark of laughter from Katalina. 

In the end, they both stay for dinner, Yvoni because she refuses to leave Riz alone until Sklonda gets back home, and who knows when that will be? Katalina, because she already checked out from work, and appears to be having a fine time chatting with Riz. She seems delighted with his strange single-mindedness and hilarious mix of teenage ridiculousness and grizzled detective sentiment. 

Yvoni makes quesadillas at the counter as Katalina explains the variations in anatomical pressure points between species to a fascinated Riz, who has somehow managed to reveal that she used to be a masseuse within three hours of knowing her, something Yvoni hasn’t known all year. 

Yvoni puts chicken and spicy peppers in hers and Riz’s quesadillas, and they both gently mock Katalina when she asks to have them removed. “You can breathe boiling water, but jalapeño peppers are too much for you?” Yvoni laughs. 

Katalina blows out a burst of steam and says, “Burn-proof does not mean capsaicin-proof, hot stuff. Congrats on the superior mouth, I guess.”

Sklonda gets home early, around eleven. She comes in, her mouth set in a tense line, face creased with worry, and stops short in surprise at the entryway at the sight of a random woman hunched over Riz’s shoulder, reading his Solesian Lit essay, saying, “I think you spelled demarcation wrong there, sugarpie,” and Yvoni answering texts on the other side of the table. 

“Who in the Nine Hells are you?” Sklonda says bluntly, and Katalina turns, straightening and taking a few steps back from Riz. 

“Katalina Ariti, ma’am,” she says, voice perfectly polite. “So sorry to intrude. I drove Yvoni over earlier.”

Sklonda straightens. “Oh. Katalina. From the gym. Yes, I’ve heard about you.” 

“Oh, have you?” she says, voice suddenly smug. 

Yvoni makes eye contact with Sklonda and makes a slit-throat gesture. 

She snorts, rolling her eyes fondly. Riz, at the table, makes a face. His mother slides past Katalina to swoop over and kiss his forehead, dropping her briefcase down next to the chair. She looks him in the eye and says, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” he says, looking down at his essay intently. 

Sklonda looks to Yvoni and arches a single eyebrow. Yvoni nods. 

“Okay,” she accepts. Then, still looking at Yvoni, “Are you okay?”

Riz’s head raises at this. Yvoni takes a deep breath, looking at her two most important people, at their mirrored faces and eyes, made identical with deliberate care. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m good.”

In the lull of silence, both of them watching Yvoni with searchlight eyes, Katalina coughs suddenly. They all turn to look, and she’s standing near the door, pulling her bag up onto her shoulder, tail swinging slowly and carefully so as not to knock anything off end tables. “Alright,” she says. “Lovely dinner, thank y’all, but now that your momma’s home, I think I oughta get out of y’all’s hair.” She points a clawed thumb at the door. “I’ll let myself out.” 

Yvoni stands up without thinking. “I’ll walk you out.” 

Katalina looks… actually, Yvoni can’t quite decipher the look on her face right now. She says, “Sure. Thanks.” She glances back at Riz and says, “Nice to meet you, sugarpie. Good luck with your essay,” her voice a deep, caramel rumble.

Riz waves. “Nice to meet you too.”

Katalina walks out, and Yvoni follows. They trail through the dimly-lit hallways to the elevator, and ride down in silence that isn’t quite tense, but it’s necessarily comfortable either. She doesn’t know how to read it, honestly. 

They reach the lobby, and walk out of the glass doors into the cool spring night. Distant engines purr, arcanotech street lamps flooding the sidewalk with uneven puddles of light. Katalina stops on the sidewalk before the parking lot, and tilts her snout back to look up at the sky, inky-black and sliced up by the tops of buildings, stars obscured by light pollution. The beauty is masked, but still striking. 

She breathes, and Yvoni waits, waits for the words she knows are coming. 

For a moment, they stand in the silence, Katalina staring at the sky, Yvoni staring at Katalina. Finally, she breaks the silence with a soft, “Your kid is the Dragoneater?”

Yvoni freezes. Fuck. She straightens her spine, curling her hands into fists. “If you’ve got a problem with Riz-” 

“Whoah,” she says, taking a step back and holding up her webbed hands in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t go putting words in my mouth. I don’t have any problem with Riz. It just took me by surprise.” She pauses for a moment, and then laughs a little, wide-eyed. “Honestly, he’s a little famous in dragonborn circles. A fair chunk of us hated that fucker Kalvaxus. Gave us all a bad name. We cheered when he died the first time, and we cheered when he died the second time. It’s just…” 

She shakes her head. Her brow furrows, spines raising, distressed. “I guess I knew they were high schoolers. They were adventurers, though. I figured they would be… He’s so small.” 

Oh, Yvoni thinks. He’s so young, Katalina does not say, but Yvoni hears it anyway. “Yeah,” she agrees quietly. “He is.”

She lives in fear of it. There’s no stopping Riz from doing whatever he will do, and there’s no denying the sheer talent of him and his friends. But, but, but. Sometimes talent is not enough. Sometimes the adventurers die anyway. It’s an unspoken terror, shared in the quiet moments between herself and Sklonda. 

He’s so small. He’s so young. He might not come back one day. Luck is a fickle, fleeting thing. Riz doesn’t play with luck, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t play with him. 

“How do you deal with it?” Katalina asks. 

Yvoni snorts. “I’ll deal with it when he’s dead,” she says. “Until then, no point.”

She hums. “I suppose.” Her eyes dart sideways at Yvoni. “And Sklonda?”

“She worries.”

“No, that’s not-” Here, she could swear she sees Katalina blush. “I mean, like, what’s the deal with you and her? Are you raising Riz together? It seemed like that, from the way your parents were talking, but you two don’t seem… together.”

“Ah,” Yvoni says. She sits down on the curb, and Katalina follows, tucking her tail under her digitigrade ankles. She looks up at the segmented darkness, the endless expanse of it. “We’re not together. Not like that, at least. She’s my partner, for sure, but more in a life sense than a romantic sense. She’s my best friend. And Riz is-”

Less than a year old, snoring gently against her chest. Five and climbing up her back to sit on her shoulder. Ten and starting to fill his closet with tiny button-downs and slacks. Fourteen and being forced to sleep four hours a night. Sixteen and larger than life and still just a kid, still just her kid, still just the person she taught how to tie his shoes and how to braid and how to get rid of a brain freeze by putting his tongue on the roof of his mouth. 

“Riz is mine in every way that counts,” she says. “He and Sklonda are more than enough for me. And my parents have never forgiven any of us for that. I’ve made all my choices, and never had a reason to regret any of them.”

They sit in silence for a moment, just the parking lot and the starless sky and the low buzz of the streetlamps. Then Katalina says, “Well, clearly, you’ve done a good job. He loves you a lot. He’s wonderful. And as far as your parents go, fuck them. You’re living a life that you’re happy with. That’s a brave choice, and I have a lot of respect for it.” 

Yvoni looks over at her, and finds her eyes already fixed on her, knowing. She breathes out, and feels something spark to life in her chest, an electrical current not unlike one she felt nearly twenty years ago in a police precinct, fighting a newcomer in the break room for the dregs of the coffee pot. 

Yvoni’s school of magic is Conjuration, but this, she thinks, is the closest she’ll ever come to feeling true Divination: an iron certainty that someone is going to be one of her people, that any road from here on out will inevitably include this person. She felt it with Sklonda in the Elmville police station, and she felt it in the hospital when she held Riz for the first time, and she feels it now, in a darkened parking lot on a humid spring night, Katalina’s tail brushing up against her ankle. 

“Thank you for driving me,” she says. 

Katalina smiles. “Any time.”

“Careful,” Yvoni says. “I might take you up on that.”

“I’m counting on it.” She reaches over and squeezes her shoulder, brief and warm. She stands up and walks into the parking lot. Her door squeaks as it opens, and the slam of it closing echoes over the whole parking lot. The headlights flash in a mechanical salute as her truck pulls out of the cracked asphalt lot, vanishing down the streets. 

Yvoni breathes, breathes, breathes. She looks up at the starless sky, at the infinity that she can’t see past the clouds. Just because she can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. She believes in the gods, of course, but belief and faith are different things. 

She doesn’t have a specific god, but she looks up at the night, and knows that there are a hundred thousand universes where her life is different, where she does not have the people she loves in this one, where her life is maybe less complicated and probably not nearly as full of joy. So she looks at the sky and she breathes and she tries to speak to chance itself, to the luck of being here in this world.

“Thank you,” she says to nothing and to everything, chest tight and eyes watery and heart whole, whole, whole. “I love my life. I love the people in it. Even when it’s hard, I love it. Thank you.”

And then she gets up off the pavement, and walks back inside to her kid and her partner and the life she loves. 

—

It goes like this: spring break comes, and the borders open, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Chapter Text

It goes like this: the Fig and the Cig Figs bus rolls back into town, and Fig can barely sit down. She’s bouncing off the insides of the bus as they rumble past the Welcome to Elmville! sign, Gorgug watching her with faint amusement, Lola with deep exasperation. 

It’s hardly Fig’s fault. Tour is great. Tour is fantastic. But tour does not have her mom or her non-bandmate friends, and after several months of bouncing across Solace, rubbing elbows with people who are looking for the next big connection, she’s ready to see people who have seen her drool onto a pillow at a sleepover and trip over cafeteria tables and crash a hot rod. She’s ready to see people who love her without the stage lights. She’s ready to see the other Bad Kids. 

By the time they pull to a bouncing halt over the uneven driveway of Mordred Manor, Fig is practically screeching with excitement, and Gorgug is openly laughing at her. She kicks open the door, spills out, spits out something about how no one should treat her any differently now that she’s a rock star, and immediately starts crushing everyone in hugs. It smoothes over the burn of absence, soothes the cravings of withdrawal. 

She hugs them and gives out Cig Figs merch and means, I missed you, I missed you, I missed you. 

—

They’re all crushed up in the living room of Mordred Manor, sprawled out on the couch and the floor, a tangled expanse of teenage limbs and greasy napkins as they plow through several boxes of pizza. It starts there.

It’s easy to lie, in the end. Fabian makes a stab about getting kisses in, and about having done it more than the others, and then Fig is talking about how many people she’s kissed at hospitals and on tour, and Gorgug has Zelda and Kristen has Tracker and Riz is right back in middle school, trying to figure out what about him doesn’t work in the same way that everyone else does. 

Why can’t he make friends? Why can’t he keep them? Why does kissing matter so much to everyone when there is so much of the world to see and experience? Why is it so important? Why can’t he feel it like they can?

All he knows is that he can once more see himself falling behind the curve, can see everyone else changing in some way he can’t keep up with. He knows the end of this story. This story ends with everyone else growing up and growing away and leaving him behind with all the parts of himself that don’t work like they should. 

And Riz doesn’t want that, can’t stand that, refuses to look at the potential of it. He can’t do it now, again, with these people who matter so much to him. So he lies. It’s not a good lie, but it’s easy, and it lets him pretend like he gets it as they talk about kisses and crushes, as Gorgug thinks about a cell signal generator for Zelda and they interrogate Skrank about drama with the Maidens. 

Baron from the Baronies. It’s a band-aid solution, to be sure, but it feels harmless enough. What’s the worst that could happen?

—

Fig fills them in on some of the things she heard on tour about the Nightmare King. “A lot of people out in that direction had some stuff to say about him,” she says, waving her piece of pizza around as she gesticulates with her hands, “and I’ve got people I can stay with in that direction, by the way. Like, folks that have said I’m free to drop in whenever.”

Adaine dodges a piece of pepperoni that flies off of her pizza, and it promptly smacks Kristen in the nose instead. Kristen peels it off her face and eats it, unbothered. 

“And people who talked about him were weird about it,” she says. “You know, like, when someone is so nervous that they overcorrect into weird, overconfident posturing? They were pretty much all doing that. They mentioned a couple people, like, servants of the Nightmare King and stuff. They kept mentioning a Shadow Cat? Whoever that is? It was a little unclear, but they seemed super scared of them.”

Riz pauses in the middle of scarfing down his third slice of pizza. Shadow Cat. Shadow Cat. 

Adaine meets his eyes, tilting her head a bit, birdlike. Her eyes flash blue.

Shadow Cat. 

A flash of buried memory resurfaces, dark fur and sharp yellow eyes, something old, very old. It’s hazy, like a picture seen through a cloud of smoke, but there’s something there. 

Adaine leans in, ears raising into an inquisitive sort of posture. “Is that ringing a bell?” she asks. 

Riz’s tail flicks, and he lowers his pizza. “Maybe? I think so. I’ll have to check something later. I’ll get back to you.”

She hums, leaning back again. “Alright. Let me know.”

Shadow Cat, he thinks as he finishes his pizza. Shadow Cat. How does he know a Shadow Cat?

—

It comes to him later, in his office. He’s at his desk, packing up some of his conspiracy boards into his briefcase. He’ll need all his Nightmare King information on their quest. He’s folding up one of the boards and tucking it into the depths of the holding bag. He walks past his desk and spots, in the corner of his vision, the edge of a lavender purple book. He pauses. He stops and walks over to it.

The photo album from Kristen slides out easily, glued-on illustrations of magnifying glasses and books on the cover. He flips through it, briefly, grinning at the menagerie of photos. He closes it, and, after a moment of consideration, tucks it away in his briefcase. 

Shadow Cat, he thinks, and the puzzle piece clicks into place. 

He glances over at his sword, propped against the edge of the desk in its thin sheath. A sword made by tabaxi ninja. He does know a cat like that, maybe. 

He looks over at some of his boxes of personal effects, and walks over. He rifles through the first box, skimming through some of the more personal effects of the Kalvaxus case, pictures of Penny and some of the evidence he compiled about Kristen after the Harvestmen fiasco. It’s not in there, so he sets it aside. 

He goes through two more boxes, labeled Organizational Files and Reference Books respectively, before hitting the bottom box, labeled, Make it comfy, kiddo, in his mom’s handwriting. He digs through, unearthing a collection of well-loved mugs, some cork board to stick up a photo board, and, at the bottom, a collection of photos that didn’t make it into Kristen’s photo album.

He sits down at his desk, opening the photo album to flip through it. It’s mostly old photos, things from early on in Riz’s childhood, five or younger, generally. He flips through, a photo here of Riz standing on a stool next to Yvoni, her teaching him how to cook soup, a photo there of his mom trying to pull a winter hat down over his ears, Riz pouting furiously, the whole photo slightly blurry from Yvoni laughing behind it. He goes further back, to when Riz was only barely a year old, passes a picture of his mom trying to scrub mud out of hair in the kitchen sink, flicks past one of himself and Yvoni snoring together on a couch. 

He skims further back, into the photos from before he was born, ones of his mom and Yvoni clubbing, faded photos from his mom’s first days in university, on and on. And then he finds it. He pulls it out, running a claw over the edge of the picture, worn soft with age.

It’s a photo of his mom and a tabaxi woman, standing outside of a bar, the streetlights falling sideways onto them, neon signs flashing and painting them in arcanotech hues. The bar sign reads Swooping Swallow in slanting purple writing on the windows behind them, strobe lights caught in the amber of the photo, trapped in a spray of hazy technicolor. 

Riz’s mom looks young. This was probably a few years before he was born, if he had to guess, just from the age of the physical photo, and the cut of his mom’s hair. Her bangs are longer, hanging down to frame her face, and her hair is longer too, pulled back in a loose ponytail, spilling over her shoulder and halfway down her back. She’s in a beautiful, silvery sort of dress, purse over one shoulder, heels in her hand, bare, thick-padded feet on the sidewalk. She has her arm thrown up at a diagonal around a taller tabaxi woman in a dark blue cocktail dress, all sleek black fur and wry amusement in sharp yellow eyes. The tabaxi woman has one paw gesturing toward the bar sign, a sly sort of smile on her face, and Sklonda is openly laughing. 

He stares at the photo for a moment, taking in the sight of his mom before years of worry lines started to take up residence on her face. There are still lines, of course, but they’re from laughter, here. It puts a longing sort of twist in his stomach, wondering what could get her to laugh like that again. 

Then he sets that aside, and starts thinking like an investigator. There’s something off about the picture, something strange about the tabaxi woman. Now that he can see it, can look at her, he sort of remembers her, in a vague, early-memory sort of way. He vaguely remembers those features, soft and distinctly reminiscent of a housecat, remembers the gestured outlines of a voice without any particular words that survived the passage of time. 

He flips over the photo, glancing at the back. Sure enough, Yvoni seems to have taken the picture, judging from her loose cursive over the back. Lon and K, Swooping Swallow.

Hmm. He can’t quite recall the name, but a K sounds right. He remembers, sort of, an old friend of his mom who spotted an opening for a job in Elmville for her, and this woman seems to fit that.

He flips it back over. This photo is… wrong. His mom looks fine, looks normal. But the tabaxi woman looks almost superimposed over the frame. It’s as if a brand-new picture were placed in part over a copy of the same photo from twenty years earlier. The sun damage is inconsistent, and, the closer he looks, there are places within the picture itself where the lighting behaves strangely, flickers of neon light from the bar signs filtering through where there should be only shadow from another person. 

He stares at it for a long, long moment. He can’t find anything inherently magical about it. It’s just strange. It doesn’t quite make sense. 

He would maybe be more inclined, on a normal day, to dismiss it as an irregularly aged, generally nice photo of his mom, but, well. Shadow Cat. He has a feeling, a gut twitch saying that this is something. 

He makes a mental note to show it to Adaine the next morning. Maybe Identify or Detect Magic will be able to see something he can’t. 

He closes and pushes aside the old photo album, setting down the one photograph on his desk. He pulls out a testing kit, and circles around the tabaxi woman a few times with a chemical marker. The pungent smell hits his nostrils, red seeping into the picture. He leans back, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head, flicking his tail out. 

And something creaks in the other room.

Riz stops. “Mom?” There is no response. “Mom, I’ll be home in a little bit, okay?” he says. 

Wait, he realizes, hand drifting to his gun. That wasn’t the room with the main door. 

He feels his tail raise into an alarm position, ears flattening back against his head, and he shrinks back into a shadow, drifting into the other room. 

There is a standing mirror in the other room. It has a beautifully embellished frame, tarnished copper like vines and claws around the corners. And it absolutely should not be there. 

He creeps closer, using the mirror to look through the room, watching the altering planes of his office drift through the surface. He creeps closer. Closer. Closer. He reaches the edge of the mirror, and reaches behind, claws brushing through the darkness of the gap between the mirror and the wall. He touches nothing, which could be good, or could be very, very bad. 

He looks out over the dead silence of the room, only the faint ticking of an analog clock mounted on the wall and the distant sound of traffic. His heartbeat is loud in his ears. Nothing moves, and after a long moment, he steps out in front of the mirror.

That, it turns out, is a mistake. He knows, as soon as he moves, that his reflection is wrong. 

At first, he does not move, just addresses it in the periphery of his vision. And it speaks back to him, from the space behind the mirror, inside of the mirror, from nowhere at all. 

A mannequin stares back at him, bleached, deadened skin like bone or ivory, flat eyes, slitted nostrils, long, thin mouth. Shredding through the back of a prim little vest is a pair of barbed, skeletal wing bones. The glass distorts under the weight of its articulated palms as it leans forward, looking through at him.

Plenty of people have romance partners, is the thing. It’s normal. It’s a normal thing. 

It’s made decidedly less normal when the romance partner in question is a nightmare creature staring at you through a mirror, and when they are, as previously mentioned, a nightmare creature born of lies. 

Because the truths about Baron from the Baronies are as follows: one, they are Riz’s romance partner; two, they are from the Baronies; three, their name is Baron; and four, they are not real, not real, not real, a fictional person Riz made up to stave off a fear for another day. 

(It’s a fascinating moment of oversight, he realizes now, to think that postponing fear would work in a quest dealing with the Nightmare King.) 

So, yeah, Baron is not real. Except also, he is very, very real, looking at Riz from the other side of the mirror, staring with eyes that are dead and hands that are hungry. 

And Riz, half frozen with terror, stares back, and does the only thing he can think to do. He snaps his mother’s gun up, and shoots the mirror. 

The mirror shatters into a million splinters, flashing shards of silver crashing to the ground and stabbing into the empty bones protruding from the shoulder blades, making wings with jagged shards of mirror for feathers. It leaves the ornate frame yawning open like a mouth, and the creature lunges through the newly opened gateway.

They hit him in the chest, sending both of them crashing to the ground. A shot goes off as they both go down, bullet flying wide. His head slams against the ground, stars flashing in his vision as he twists and snarls, claws snagging in their clothing and scraping against hard plating. In a panic, he pulls sharply on his innate magic, dragging it to the surface. It roars up, a spray of radiant light that feels like boiling water in his veins.

Baron lets out a snarl, an eerie rattle, a twisted imitation of goblin noise. Where the light hits them, it leaves deep, charred streaks in the bone-like surface of the mannequin. They make a scolding sort of tsk-tsk noise and say, “You are being very mean to your romance partner, Riz Gukgak! This is not acceptable behavior!” Articulated, ice-cold fingers wrap around Riz’s throat, and twist, twist, twist. 

His windpipe croaks dangerously, and pain lances down his spine as his vertebrae extend nearly to the point of shattering. He catches dozens of broken glimpses of his own reflection in the new mirror wings, and his neck is approaching a sickening angle. A spike of raw, animal panic swallows down the magic, and he frantically slaps at the ground. “I tap! I tap! I give up!” His voice comes out in a strangled croak, but that appears to be enough for Baron. 

Unyielding hands clamp down around his ankle, and then another set around his hips, and around his shoulders, and his legs, pulling in half a dozen places, pressure from unseen hands with vice-like grip. 

Baron drags him backward toward the mirror, singsonging the whole time, as Riz claws desperately at the floorboards, leaving furrowed gouges in the wood. His ankles hit the mirror, a murky, viscous feeling curling over them, and he remembers, in a flash of panic, the photo, the photo of his mom. He flicks it out, and watches it skid over the floor into a crack in a few floorboards, only the worn edge sticking out. 

His claws jerk painfully as Baron pulls him fully into the mirror. It’s just cool enough to be cold, the inside of it eerie and mercurial, trails of silvery liquid that hang, motionless, like sea currents gone dead.

Hands and hands and hands turn Riz around, staring into blank, crawling eyes. “Now,” they say, voice like everything Riz is so scared of, “you are going to make up more things, Riz Gukgak.”

—

When Sklonda gets up, early in the morning before the sun has fully risen, she wakes up alone. Gorthalax, as a full pit fiend, doesn’t fully sleep, really, but it’s not unusual for him to spend the night in the room, quietly reading or working on his own things, and be there when Sklonda wakes up. 

That’s not the case this morning. The room is quiet and still, the curtains drawn. 

Sklonda creeps out into the apartment, looking out across the living room in shades of pre-dawn gray. She’s not surprised, exactly, to find Riz’s bed empty, but there’s still that strange falling sense of failure when she sees it. 

Most days, she feels like she’s wildly out of her depths, trying to make something work that she’s not equipped for. She doesn’t know how to help Riz with his magic, doesn’t know how to help him adventure more safely, doesn’t know how to help him sleep. She sighs and pulls out her crystal, shoots off a text to Riz that says, Four hours minimum, kiddo. You need sleep before an adventure. She sends it, and then, after a moment of heavy silence, alone in her empty apartment, sends another one to say, Swing by before you take off, okay, sweetie? 

She clicks into a different chat, and shoots off a text to Gorthalax, saying, Will I see you later?

She pockets her crystal with a sigh, scrapes her hair out of her face. “I’m definitely doing this right,” she says, trying to make it real by saying it. “I’m doing all of this right.”

—

Fabian dreams about falling into darkness, and it’s probably normal to be wary after something like that.

He calls Riz, not worried, exactly, but maybe a little concerned. It’s certainly not normal for him to be earlier than The Ball to get places. 

He calls Riz, and it goes straight to voicemail.

Fabian lowers the phone, looking to his friends, minus Fig, because Fig is gone too, and says, “Something is very wrong.”

—

They get to Strongtower, after much honking and shouting from other people on the roads as Gorgug parks the car. Adaine peels up to the lobby, worry thick in her throat. It’s easy, really. It’s what she did with Riz all of last semester. Magic for rogue purposes. The Mage Hand forms on the other side of the locked lobby door, and she lets them into the building. 

They all peel up to Riz’s office, and come in to a scene of chaos. There are papers scattered everywhere, an explosion of half-unpacked boxes. There are bullet holes in the wall, evidence of Riz’s arquebus. The gun itself is abandoned on the floor, his briefcase and sword both near his desk. Thick sprays of scorched wood trail out from one area on the ground, a half-formed imprint of a stained-glass wing burned into the boards, like a transformation started but didn’t finish. Celestial magic hangs thick and choking in the air. But the thing that makes her pulse spike and her palms grow cold and clammy is the claw marks. Frantic, splintered gouges that trail across the floorboards, furrows from heavy, cliff-climbing claws, as if someone dragged him straight across the floor. 

She feels her ears flatten back against her skull, posturing gone. She did her research over the Nightmare King, and this is textbook. Mysterious, horrifying disappearances, people vanishing into the night. She looks down at the floorboards, the splinters of wood, something dragging one of her best friends across the floor. And she spots something poking out of the edge of a floorboard. 

Adaine crouches and pinches the corner of- is it paper? -in her hands, and pulls. A photo slides out of the crack between the boards, and she tilts it. It’s an old photo, sun-worn and vaguely soft around the edges. It’s a picture of Sklonda, much younger, in a nice dress with her heels in her hand, standing in front of a bar called the Swooping Swallow. Her face is crinkled up with laughter, eyes twinkling at the camera. 

Like always, when she looks at pictures of a younger Sklonda, Adaine is struck by how much Riz looks like his mother. But the photo is alarming in a strange sort of way, Sklonda laughing at some joke lost to time. And her arm is thrown up at an angle to wrap around nothing. There are a few bracelets hanging off of Sklonda’s wrist that look normal, as if they’re not pressing up against anything, but Adaine can tell, just from the way Sklonda is standing and laughing, that it’s not a bit. There’s something she is missing, something that Sklonda knew in that moment. Something that, judging from Riz’s red marker, circling the empty space over and over, clearly he knew too. 

The picture is creepy. The room is creepy. The absence of Riz is oppressive, until Adaine casts Detect Magic on the mirror, and suddenly, the presence of him is even worse.

—

The thing in the mirror, in the room, is not Riz. It’s not Riz. It can’t be Riz. It’s too broken and ruined and soulless to be Riz, the limbs swiveling and the face carved open and eyes too bloody. 

Kristen knows Riz, her Riz. And this fucking thing isn’t him. 

It feels good to banish it. Right. Kristen has learned doubt with Riz at her side every step of the way. She uses it now, doubt like a knife, like a shield. If this thing will take Riz from them, then she will take it out of everything.

—

Yvoni’s crystal rings. And rings. And rings. 

Yvoni buries her head under the blankets, trying to ignore it straight into silence. 

It rings. And rings. And rings.

Katalina, on the other side of the bed, says, “I think someone’s trying to reach you.” Her voice is an amused, honey-deep rumble through Yvoni’s back. 

Yvoni grumbles. She surfaces from her blanket cocoon, flailing her arm around on the nightstand. Her hand smacks against her crystal, and she rolls over onto her back, bringing it up to her ear. She accepts the call, and grumbles out a grouchy sort of, “Whassat?” 

“YVONI!” shouts a voice through the phone, and she jumps with a yelp, shooting up in bed. “Yvoni, help! Do you have a scrying spell?”

Yvoni’s sleep-addled mind scrambles to try and identify the voice. “...Adaine?” 

“Yes!” she cries. “Do you have a scrying spell?”

Yvoni shakes her head, trying to clear up her scrambled thoughts. “A scrying- sweetheart, is everything okay? What’s going on?” 

“Riz is missing,” Adaine says, and Yvoni feels her heart stop. “And so is Fig. She took her tour bus and left, and we’re checking in on Riz’s apartment, and there’s evidence of a fight but no actual blood, or anything? But then there was a monster in the mirror and then it wasn’t in the mirror, and it looked like Riz, but it was wrong and broken and it wasn’t Riz, and Kristen banished it, and so I cast Locate Creature but I couldn’t find Riz, so at least he wasn’t within one thousand feet of me, but I know you’re a powerful wizard and so I was wondering if you had a scrying spell and could scry on him maybe?”

Yvoni blinks, trying to parse through and condense that whole wall of scrambled information. “Okay. Okay. So, Riz and Fig are gone, and you want me to scry on them?”

“Yes. I figured it would be easier for you to find Riz though.”

It would. It definitely would. “Yeah,” Yvoni says. “Yeah, yes, I have scrying. Listen, sweetheart, does Sklonda know? And Sandra Lynn?” 

“Yes,” she says. “But neither of them could scry.”

Yvoni fully straightens up, and feels the last dregs of sleep fall away from her as her pulse ticks up. “Okay. Alright, sweetheart. Call them and give them an update. I’ll try to scry on Riz, and I’ll either call or meet you all somewhere to tell you what I get back from it, okay?”

“Okay. Okay. Alright. Thank you.”

“Adaine?” 

“Yes?”

“Take a deep breath for me, sweetheart, you’re hyperventilating.”

On the other end of the line, there’s a shuffle, the faint sound of extra voices, and something about a Boggy? Adaine starts breathing more evenly. “Thank you, Yvoni,” she says after a moment, more settled. 

“Any time, kiddo. Listen, I’m gonna go and do this spell, you go and start getting stuff together, yeah?” 

Adaine agrees, and hangs up a moment later, leaving Yvoni with her pounding heart and Katalina, who has sat up in the bed to look at her during the course of the conversation, eyes sharp and fins raised in spiky alertness. “Everything okay?” she asks.

Yvoni throws off the blankets pooled around her waist and slides out of bed, snagging Katalina’s discarded tank top off the floor and pulling it over her chest to wear like a dress. “My son is an adventurer,” she snaps, ears low with tension. “Nothing will ever be okay ever again.” She snags her arcane focus, an antique golden watch, off the side table, and then she storms out of the room, swearing under hear breath about stupid adventuring academies and stupid Nightmare Kings and stupid Arthur Aguefort, who can’t clean up his own fucking messes, and leaves kids to do it instead.

The good news is, Yvoni does have Scrying prepped. Because her kid is going on a journey outside of the country, and Yvoni, sue her, is full of a paranoid need to check on him. If crystals won’t work, then she’ll be a helicopter wizard parent. 

She comes out into her living room and scans over the area, the early morning light slanting in through the windows, the glasses and plates still discarded on the table from last night, the picture frames tacked up on the walls.

In the first few years after Riz had been born, she and Sklonda had tossed around the idea of moving in together, but ultimately decided not to, because Yvoni- well, to be perfectly honest, Yvoni likes having sex, and has it on the semi-regular. It turned out to be easier, in the long run, for her to just keep her own apartment, but that’s not to say that Sklonda and Riz aren’t over plenty. Her apartment has been filled with forgotten items for nearly two decades now. It shouldn’t be that hard to find something of Riz’s here. 

She spins a circle, scanning through the area. Sure enough, on one of the end tables in a corner, she finds a half-full coffee mug and a book, loose-leaf papers crammed in between the pages and covered in Riz’s chicken scratch. She picks up the book in one hand and the mug in the other, and drops down onto the couch. It’s not, strictly speaking, necessary to have something of Riz’s to scry on him. She knows him top to bottom, inside and out, knows him down to his blind spots and bitten claws. But an item of his will only help, and body matter is even better.

Katalina creeps out of the bedroom. She’s pulled on her boxers, but with Yvoni wearing her shirt, her chest is bare. Her fins and spines have settled down some, but there’s still worry tight on her face. In the morning light, her purple scales are iridescent and galactic, trailing from deep indigo into a pale lavender around her stomach and the soft underside of her neck. It makes Yvoni stop to catch her breath, and she takes a moment to silently curse the fact that they didn’t get to get a third round in this morning. 

But what really makes her throat close up tight is the way Katalina steps closer and asks, “Is there any way I can help?” tail swinging nervously behind her.

Yvoni smiles, rueful and grateful. “No. This one’s all me.” She looks down at the things in her hands. “And Riz.”

She settles the book on her lap, flipping open to one of the loose-leaf papers. She traces the ink, smeared with impatience, with one finger. With the other hand, she traces her thumb around the inside of the lip of the cup. She feels a tug, sharp and tinged with Riz’s magical imprint, a few days removed, but still there. Magic lingers long and fierce in the body, in the blood, and even in the spit. 

She closes her eyes, pulling up the feeling of Riz’s magic in her mind, like a creek in the woods in the summer, water spilling over rocks, rounding down the sharp edges, like something calm and cool and inevitable, the beginning and end of everything. Come on, squirt, she thinks, and presses down onto the paper, into the mug. Where are you?

Her watch grows warm against her wrist, green flaring into existence and burning, brilliant, even through her eyelids. Yvoni casts Scrying. 

She was the second person to hold him, after the nurses and Sklonda. She has bandaged cuts and kept kindergarten art, taught him how to cook and watched him turn into a whole person, strange and funny and wonderful. There is nothing, anywhere, that could stop her from seeing him. 

The spell takes hold, latches on. Yvoni opens her eyes, and stares through the fabric of the universe itself to see-

Oh. Something is wrong. Yvoni has scried on people before, and it has been something she can see, as if through a screen, like a projection in front of her. This is… not that. 

Yvoni opens her eyes, and she is there. Wherever there is. The spell latched on, so it’s not a different plane, but she understands, in some strange, intuitive sense, that it’s not exactly the same plane, either. She is standing in an endless, shifting expanse of silver. She’s up to her ankles in viscous, eerily reflective water. No, she realizes as she looks down at it, sees her own face stare back at her, distorted in the surface. Not water. Mercury. 

The mercury extends endlessly like a shallow wading pool, but in some places, it peels away from the flat plane in massive rivers to trail up in defiance of gravity, splitting away into smaller and smaller streams as they flow through the air, making a massive web of frozen, almost-water that trails up forever.

She looks back up. Out along the horizon, if it can be called that, the world fades into darkness in all directions. She is wreathed in a faint, summer-green glow, her magic holding her here, but this place, whatever it is, pulls at the edges of her magic like fangs, like mouths, swallowing the light like a greedy maw. 

When she tips her head back and looks up, the world goes on, up and up and up. But an infinite distance above her, and yet also close enough to reach out and touch, hangs the ceiling, which is nothing but an identical sea of mercurial silver, with those same rivers peeling away to flow between the layers of existence. But the most disturbing part is the other woman, hanging from the ceiling, looking down at Yvoni through the web of silver with wide eyes and a summer-green glow, scared and angry and sick-looking. 

“Fuck,” Yvoni whispers to nothing and no one in particular. A mirror, Adaine had mentioned. Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is the Mirror Realm. 

Plane-shifts are one thing. The Mirror Realm? That thing is its own can of worms. It’s not a whole plane on its own, just a parallel realm that runs through planes, connecting in odd places. Once, centuries ago, there were Mirrorwalkers who could use the realm to travel in the same way that wizards can teleport. But it hasn’t been safe in nearly eight-hundred years. It’s a place where reflections are real, and visions are lies, and nightmares breathe like living creatures. 

It makes sense, in a twisted sort of way, that the Nightmare King could theoretically access the realm, if not himself then through his minions. It makes sense, also, that scrying in on the Mirror Realm would make a weird effect. It makes sense, but it’s bad fucking news. 

Yvoni sets aside her crawling sensation of foreboding and looks down, away from the mirror reflection of herself high above, ignores the way she can now see her reflection beginning to become more reflections. Riz. She has to find Riz. 

For once, she curses the fact that she never figured out how to be quiet. She tries to channel some of Sklonda or Riz’s rogue stealth and creep through the mercury water quietly. She makes an annoying amount of splashing noises. Clearly, she’s not a very good rogue. 

The whole world here is tinted with silver, pale metallics and whites in amongst the lurking darkness. It’s disturbing, but it is, in a way, helpful. It means that she spots him fairly quickly. 

Riz is about one hundred feet away from her, half-submerged in the layer of mercury. His face is turned away from her, only a glimpse of shirt and arm and a half-protruding knee visible through the silver gunk. He’s alarmingly still. It makes her stop dead for a second, and then abandon all attempts at stealth to break out in a run. 

Yvoni is only about twenty feet away when something hits her ankle, and she trips. She goes down in a spray of mercury and a slew of curse words, and whips around to try and spot what she tripped on. And freezes, because sticking out of the silver is a dripping, bone-white hand. 

A laugh comes from nowhere and everywhere, echoing a thousand times over, reflections on reflections on reflections of something too large and too disjointed and far, far too much like bone beginning to ooze out of the rivers of mercury, like some giant skeletal system of the entire realm. “No, no,” says a voice like a thousand nightmares. “You should not be here. I still need Riz Gukgak to make things up for me.”

Yvoni looks up as something enormous and monstrous, reflected into hundreds of versions of the one fear, begins to crawl free of the mercury, and thousands of hollow black eyes turn to look at her from every direction. She swears and looks over at Riz, still unmoving in the liquid. Closer now, she realizes that the ripples beneath the surface and not the natural current, but the movement of hands, too many hands. They break through the surface, wrapping around his neck and arms and legs, and pull. Riz vanishes under the surface of the mercury, and Yvoni comes back to her true body to the sound of a bellowing roar and a shattering sound. 

She blinks, blinded by the sudden light and heaving with terror, and whips her head around, to where Katalina is standing in front of the melted remains of the mirror on the back of the front door. The dragonborn’s eyes are wide, all her fins flared out to add layers of spikes around her, inflated like a pufferfish. Surrounded by puddles of melted mirror and watery acid from a breath weapon, she meets Yvoni’s eyes and says, “Shit. Fuck. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Some creepy fucking mannequin thing showed up in the glass and I melted the mirror to dissolve the reflection. I thought that might stop it from coming through.”

Yvoni tries to remember how to breathe. “Good call,” she croaks. “Smart not to break it.” She stands up on legs like jelly, and looks down at the puddles of silver around the doors. They reflect nothing anymore, mixed and congealed with dragon acid as they are. It still takes a great feat of will to not throw up all over her floor. “I need to get dressed.” 

She walks back to her room, pulling off her bonnet with shaky hands and beginning to dig through drawers for the first things she can find. 

Katalina appears behind her in the doorway and says, “Is Riz okay?” 

Yvoni stops halfway through pulling a pair of jeans up over her hips. She looks over her shoulder at Katalina. “He’s alive,” she says bluntly. 

The brutal honesty of the response hits on her drooping shoulders. She sighs and stoops over, scooping up the shirt that Yvoni has just chucked back onto the floor after shedding it again. “Okay,” she says. “I’m driving. Let’s go tell your partner your kid is alive, I guess.”

—

They’re standing with Sklonda on the sidewalk outside the mall when a blue truck pulls up and parks, dark paint shimmering in the sun. The passenger door swings open, and Yvoni spills out, looking as disheveled as Kristen has ever seen her. 

Usually, Riz’s second mom looks perfectly put together, coordinated jewelry, nice clothes, take-no-shit attitude. Right now, she’s in paint-stained jeans and an old, well-worn university tank top, which is easily the most casual outfit she’s ever seen her in. Her aura is still very much take-no-shit, but there’s a tenseness to her walk that normally isn’t there. 

The driver’s side door swings open, and Kristen feels her eyes go wide as a nine-foot dragonborn woman hops down, walking across the parking lot in Yvoni’s wake, long, muscular tail swinging behind her. She takes one look at the woman, drooping muscle tank top and wrinkled pants, and has to fight the urge to laugh in solidarity. Ah, the walk of shame clothes. Kristen has been there many times. 

As soon as Sklonda spots Yvoni, she does a full spin to face her. They exchange a look, no Message spell here, just sheer partner communication, the kind she’s seen between Jawbone and Sandra Lynn, and, a few times, long ago, between her parents.

Sklonda must not like what she sees, because her pupils narrow from normal ovals to inky slits in her yellow irises, and her ears flatten back against her head. 

Yvoni draws up next to them, and Kristen can taste her magic in the air, thick around her with her distress. Her tongue coats over with copper and rich earth. 

Adaine is the one to cut to the chase. “Could you scry on Riz?”

Everyone falls silent, turning to Yvoni hopefully. 

Yvoni grimaces and does another one of those silent exchanges with Sklonda, some argument that the rest of them are not privy to. Sklonda must win, because Yvoni turns back to them with a sigh. “Alright. Well. I’ve got good news, bad news, and… just news, I guess.”

“What’s the good news?” Gorgug asks, brows furrowed with concern. 

“Riz is alive.”

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. 

“What’s the bad news?” Fabian asks tersely, after the relief passes. 

Yvoni’s eyes flash green. Her lips flatten. The dragonborn woman reaches over and puts a massive, clawed hand on her shoulder. “The bad news,” she says, her voice deadly and deadly serious, “is that you all need to be extremely fucking careful. My spell found Riz in the Mirror Realm. Even just looking in on it nearly let something come through one of the mirrors in my apartment. That realm has been warped for a long time, and the Nightmare King can use it, apparently.”

Choking silence descends, and then everyone erupts into overlapping chatter. 

“The Mirror-”

“What the fuck-”

“-and your spell showed you him or-”

“How did he get-”

“-should have melted down that fucking mirror for scrap-”

“How are we supposed to-”

“EVERYONE BE QUIET!” Sandra Lynn roars above the hubbub, and everyone stops, looking chastened. She glares around at all of them and says, “Ask questions in an organized fashion, please.” 

The Mirror Realm, Kristen thinks. Shit. That’s very bad. 

“That’s the good news and the bad news,” Sklonda asks, lips pursed. She looks a little nauseous. “What’s the neither-good-nor-bad news?”

“I don’t think he’s in the Mirror Realm anymore,” Yvoni says. “My spell cut off, but I’m pretty sure I watched him get pulled back out of the realm. My intuition is that whatever force was holding him there has either released or got spooked by me spying on it. I don’t think any of you all will have to go into the Mirror Realm to retrieve him, or anything, but I also don’t know where he is now, or what kind of trouble he might be in. I won’t be able to scry again until tomorrow, so I can give you more information then.”

“I think the best case scenario is that by tomorrow he’ll just be back with us, and you won’t have to do that,” Adaine says.

“That would be the best case scenario,” Yvoni agrees. “But I tend to prepare for the worst. So I’ll stock it again tomorrow, and if you need me to scry, you give me a call.”

Kristen looks over at Sklonda. She still looks a little sick to her stomach, but the fear has mostly been eclipsed by an expression she’s seen on Riz’s face a thousand times before, furrowed brows and narrowed eyes, intense concentration in every wrinkle, trying to make something work. 

“Not in the Mirror Realm anymore,” she murmurs. “Hmm. Alright.” She looks up at the kids and says, “Well, that’s not a great situation, but Riz is pretty good at making the best of bad situations. Nothing would be able to keep him tied up for long. My bet is that as soon as he’s back on his feet again, he’ll be chasing down Fig. If you find her, you’ll probably find him.”

Kristen recognizes the stubborn set of her jaw for what it is: an absolute refusal to believe in the possibility that her kid might be gone. She recognizes it for a reflection of what her own face is probably doing right now as well. Riz and Fig are going to be fine, godsdammit, because the Bad Kids are going to make sure that they are. 

But while she’s here…

“Speaking of Riz,” she says, reaching into her pocket and digging past empty wrappers and loose change. “We found something in his office, and we were hoping you could tell us about it.” She hands over the photo Adaine found. “Why were you putting out your arm like that? What was the joke?”

Sklonda takes it, and her eyes go wide. “Wow, this is an old one,” she murmurs. She scans it, and looks up at Kristen, confused. “What do you mean, why did I have my arm up?”

She frowns. “You have your arm up around that area Riz circled, but there’s nothing there.”

Sklonda’s lips part, her nose wrinkling up. “What do you mean, there’s nothing there?”

Yvoni takes a step forward, peering down over Sklonda’s shoulder. “Oh, shit,” she says. “That is an old one. That’s Kalina, right?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Wait,” Adaine says, stepping forward and waving her hands. “Do you mean to say that you see someone there? In the empty space?” 

“Well, it wouldn’t be empty for us, but yes, I guess,” Sklonda says. She holds up the photo.  “Can you all not see someone there?”

“No,” Adaine says. “There’s nothing. Just a big red circle.”

Sandra Lynn looks at it, and says, “I can see someone,” she says. 

Yvoni’s dragonborn- friend? Partner?- steps up and looks down at it. “It’s some tabaxi lady,” she says with a shrug. 

“What the fuck?” Fabian mutters under his breath. 

“You said her name is Kalina?” Kristen asks. 

“Yeah,” Sklonda says. “She works with Solace’s government sometimes. She’s originally from Fallinel, but I knew her through a friend back in Bastion City. She got me the job here in Elmville.”

“Huh,” Kristen says.

“Maybe it’s something where you have to have met her before to see her?” Gorgug suggests. “Have you all met Kalina before?”

“I met her many times,” Sklonda says. 

“I knew her through Lon,” Yvoni says. “But, yeah, I met her.” She gestures at the picture. “I’m the one who took that.”

“I’ve never met this woman before,” Sandra Lynn says. 

The dragonborn shrugs. “Neither have I. Pretty sure I would remember. Those are pretty distinctive features for tabaxi.”

Kristen tries to make it add up, and draws a blank. Four adult women, all different races, different ages, some of whom have met her before, some who haven’t. But it can’t just be that adult women can see her, because Cathilda can’t. There’s no common variable that makes sense. She wishes, desperately, that Riz were here, that she could compare it with him and his investigator’s mind. She’s not supposed to be investigating things without her partner, dammit.

“Did Riz ever meet her?” 

Sklonda frowns. “Yeah, he did, a couple times. She stopped by for a visit on occasion when he was really young. But she hasn’t come by for years.”

“Was she, like, weird about him, at all?” Kristen asks. 

Sklonda and Yvoni exchange uneasy looks. “I mean, it was strange that she swung by,” Sklonda admits. “I mostly knew her through others. And she seemed to like Riz well enough, but that didn’t seem weird at the time.”

“You had to either be stupid or evil to dislike Riz as a little kid,” Yvoni says. “He was adorable.”

Oh, Kristen knows. Back when she was making Riz’s birthday scrapbook, she got the distinct pleasure of going through all his baby photos with Sklonda. But something about an infrequent friend coming by, possibly just to see Riz, makes her hairs stand on end. She doesn’t like the empty space in the photo, and she doesn’t like the person they’ve woven together just with words. 

Sklonda hands the photo back and says, “Well, clearly, Riz figured something out,” tapping one claw on the red circle in the picture. “If you find him, I bet you’ll find some answers.”

“I always do,” Kristen murmurs, looking down at Sklonda of twenty or so years ago, bright and flashing and looking more like Riz than ever. She looks at the empty space and thinks, What are you hiding? 

As they peel out of the parking lot for Bastion City and the Hotel Cavalier, leaving behind Sklonda and Yvoni and the dragonborn, who she never got a name for, she looks out the window at the highway, at the homes and trees blurring past. She cradles Riz’s briefcase, taken from his office, in her lap, and thinks, Come on, Riz. Where are you?

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Riz wakes up, once, sometime in the nebulous space between his office and the warped reflection and the broken mirror, and the hotel, which comes later. 

He wakes up, and it is all pressing hands, all empty eyes, all haunting voice. Make me new things, Riz Gukgak. Tell me new lies, Riz Gukgak. Give me something beautiful, Riz Gukgak, and I will make it true. You will not be alone anymore. You will never be alone. You will never be lacking. What are you afraid of, Riz Gukgak? 

And Riz says, No. No. There is nothing beautiful about you. I am not alone. I am not lacking. I am not afraid.

And it is the Mirror Realm, so his words become reflections become pictures of himself, endlessly echoing his own words back and forth. And it is the Mirror Realm, where lies are reality, so he says it, and here, it is almost even true. 

Baron pushes and presses and chokes, but Riz has nothing to lose in here, has nothing that is not disposable. His own terrified face judges him hundreds of times over from the cracked fragments of their mirror wings, but he doesn’t owe those reflections anything at all. He says things, and perhaps they are lies, but they are lies about Riz himself, not false stories to flesh out this skeleton manifestation. He gives Baron nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and when they get so angry that they throttle him back into unconsciousness, Riz takes it as the gift it is.

The next time he wakes up, there are hands pulling him out through a mirror, and everything feels hazy and broken. There’s lots of yelling, and arguing, one voice cutting above the rest to say, “-defeats the point of a human sacrifice if you kill the damn thing first. Be careful, idiots!” 

That snaps Riz out of his daze very fast. He snaps up to a menagerie of demons swarming around him. And he fights. He snarls and bites and claws and flails, weaponless but for the sheer desperation of an animal with its leg caught in a bear trap. 

He fails, of course. He burned his celestial power earlier, trying, also unsuccessfully, to fight Baron, so now, he has only his claws and teeth and his arcane magic, and against half a dozen demons with partial armor, that doesn’t count for much. He manages to fully bite off one of the fingers of the vrocks, and downs another one with Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, and for his efforts earns a few hits and twice as many demons holding onto his various limbs.

They drag him across the room and shackle him up to an altar, which definitely does not bode well for him. This whole situation is really bad. He doesn’t even really know how much time has passed, or whether or not it’s even the same day. He doesn’t think the demons would take very kindly to him asking for the time.

He tries to look around, tries to see what the ritual is, tries to figure out what all of this is. Maybe it’s the panic, or maybe it’s the poor vantage point, or maybe it’s the fact that he’s pretty sure he’s been lightly concussed at some point, but he can’t figure it out. The part of his brain that is not freaking the fuck out takes a distracted moment to lament that he and Kristen never researched satanic rituals, and that he never asked Gorthalax about abyssal practices. 

He tunes back in to the demons arguing again, one of them saying, “-kind of unnecessary, don’t you think?”

He looks over to see the demon who seems more in charge, the cambion, approaching. There’s an evil sort of glint in their eye, and they look down at him like something they want to dissect for fun. “I don’t play with Arcane Tricksters,” they say. “And besides,” they add, lifting up a band of gleaming metal and flicking it open, “the screaming is always so annoying.”

When the collar closes around Riz’s throat and locks, he can feel all the sound in his chest evaporate like a river run dry. Some kind of Silence spell, he realizes, to inhibit spellcasting. And that’s pretty much the last rational thought he has before descending into sheer, animalistic terror. 

When Fig shows up, he has a brief, cruel spark of hope that is swallowed up into horror at the sight of her eyes, swollen and hollow. She looks at him without recognition, stands beside the demons and takes the knife they hand her and stares at him like a woman who sees nothing, like she would eat him mechanically and never taste a thing.

Riz, bruised and exhausted and terrified, screams and screams and screams until his throat feels raw and his lunges ache. He never makes a single sound.

—

It goes like this: Fig is having the best, worst dream of her life. 

Gorgug is not her drummer, her dad is not playing alongside her. There are different bandmates, ones she does not care about, ones she does not introduce when she comes on stage. The stadiums scream for her and her alone, roar her name until it is louder than thunder, louder than the sky. She cranks up the amp and plays until her fingers bleed. She throws up blood during intermission and reapplies lipstick, walks back out with a thousand-watt grin rivaled only by the brilliance of every camera on her. 

(She sends Lola Embers an email, books a hotel.)  

The lights are blinding, photographers and press screaming into microphones from a distance, unable to breach the wall of bodyguards. Fans scream and froth at the mouth when she goes out, held back by barricades and shouting above it. They love her, they love her, they love her. The world is in a love affair with Fig the rock star, and no one in the world loves Fig herself. Or at least, no one in the world loves Fig enough for her to give this up for them. 

(She shatters a jewelry store, steals a ruby.) 

She’s so successful. She rakes in millions and burns the money by the thousands, drinks and cars and crystals that she smashes against brick walls. Her mother calls, her friends call, and Fig breaks her crystal, gets a new one, keeps her number the same just to ignore their calls forever. Eventually, the calls stop coming.

(She summons her father, plays a riff on the guitar, picks up a ruby in an empty parking lot.) 

The lights of the cameras blur together with the stage lights blur together with the club lights, flashing and spotlighting and strobing her life into a carnival-esque up and down ride of neon lights and motion sickness. She kisses older men in bars and throws up in hotel bathrooms, drinks herself into blackouts and smokes until her lungs ache, snorts lines of drugs off the stomachs of other people, laughs and screams and cries and burns brighter than ever, burns like a forest as it turns to ash, burns like a star as it self-immolates. The party never stops, and Fig doesn’t want it to. 

(She checks into the Hotel Cavalier, hands over her ruby and heads to the lower penthouse, where Riz is strapped to an altar.) 

Fig is in every headline. Everyone wants to know who she’s dating, what she’s wearing, when the next album will be out. She drops singles and hops record companies just because she can. She features on other people’s songs, eclipses them in their own discographies. Her pedestal is so, so high, and she’s never going to fall. She keeps going higher, keeps pulling in deals, turns down sponsorships for fun, throws temper tantrums online and watches them gain millions of views, watches her fame become a beast that will swallow her whole. 

(The demons hand her a knife, and she takes it.)

She buys a house, and then another one, and then another. She plays seventeen stadiums back to back, sells out every one, makes the floor rattle with her magic, hears the tidal wave of adoration when the crowd screams her lyrics, screams her name. She is more than an artist to them, more than an idol. She is a god. 

Who cares if they don’t want actual Fig, the one who throws up in bathrooms and sometimes cries through parties and puts on other faces just to feel safe? They want this Fig, the one that’s shiny and fierce and always has a fanged smile and another party to go to. She is a god to them, and if there’s one thing she learned from a cleric and an aasimar she outgrew, it’s that divinity is lonely. This just means she’s doing it right.

And when the nights are long and her bed is cold because she slept on the bathroom floor and woke up in a puddle of puke, that’s fine, because she’s Fig Faeth, the most famous bard in the world, and she has everything she could ever want, except any kind of connection with anyone else. It’s all worth it. For the music, for the fame, for the cameras. Anything to keep everyone screaming her name. 

In some other world, she would have sat on the bathroom floor and called a friend late at night to settle the nausea of loneliness, to ward off the illness of isolation. But not in this world. In this world, she needs nothing, and no one. 

(Riz screams, and screams, and screams, a voice of all empty, lingering silences. Fig hears nothing.) 

—

Adaine hits Fig with a Dispel Magic that makes the room shake and the air tremble, and turns to face the place where the cambion looked, Riz’s sword in hand, and sees nothing.

—

Riz looks sideways as the elevator dings and he feels the ripple of Adaine’s magic. He makes eye contact with a pair of slitted eyes and a shadowed body in the corner. The eyes roll, and a voice, as if right in Riz’s ear, whispers, “Catch you later, kid.”

—

Fig wakes up from a dream that is not a dream, and feels her brain scramble as it tries to catch up with everything it just processed, the hazy motions she did as if part of routine. She drops the knife to hit the ritually painted floor with a clang. Her bass is still, somehow, on her back, so she does the only thing she can possibly think to do. She lunges forward, grabs Riz’s shoulders, and Dimension Doors out of the room. 

They rematerialize surrounded by jackets and shelves, in what Fig guesses must be the coat check. She’s cradling Riz against her chest, heartbeat hummingbird fast in her chest as she realizes what just almost happened. 

“Oh gods,” she says. “Oh gods. Oh fuck. Are you okay?” She pushes on his shoulders to look him up and down. The coat check is dark, so it’s not great viewing conditions, but what she can see isn’t good. His clothes are disheveled, and she’s pretty sure she can spot bruises blooming on his skin.

Riz frantically waves his hands around, gesturing at nothing and moving his lips, which is about the time that Fig remembers the collar. She starts, “Okay, okay, fuck, let me look at tha-”

From outside the coat check, where there is screaming and the clang of blades, Gorgug’s voice screams, “GILEAR IS DEAD!”

Fig freezes. “WHAT?!”

—

When Riz appears next to her in the fight, stealing his gun straight out of the holster where Kristen has put it on her waist for safekeeping, she doesn’t think much of it. So what if he’s a little quiet? He’s a rogue. His whole thing is hiding in battle.

It’s only when the fight is over, and they’ve all beat a full retreat out of the hotel to collapse in a parking lot a block away, that Kristen realizes something is wrong. She yanks Fig into a big hug, which she collapses into, sniffling, and goes to hug Riz, when she stops. “What the fuck,” she says. “What the fuck. What the actual fuck is that?”

Riz, eyes wide and face bruised, looking as frazzled as Kristen has ever seen him, dodges her hands as she reaches for him and gestures violently for where his briefcase is resting, slung sideways over her shoulder. 

It’s about this time that everyone else looks over, and Fabian spares them all the moment of questioning by cutting to the chase with a succinct and horrified, “Is that a fucking collar?” Within seconds, everyone breaks into a round of concerned shouting. 

Kristen realizes what it is after only a moment of thought. It’s like a cruel joke: how do you stop an Arcane Trickster from getting out of someplace? Well, if you can’t chop off the head, might as well chop off the magic. 

She launches a Dispel Magic at it with a viciousness that startles even herself. She’s done with the fucking Riz monster in the mirror, done with the nightmares possessing her friends, done with this fucking collar stealing Riz’s voice. She feels the spell bounce off without so much as scratching the Silence effect. 

Riz, in response, snarls in frustration, and gestures more violently for his briefcase. Kristen scrambles to hand it over, smacking herself in the face with the strap on the way. Riz flicks it open and shoves a hand into the extradimensional space, coming back up with a lockpick. 

The shouting dies down into a concerned murmur as everyone watches Riz feel over the surface of the collar with his fingers until he finds the lock, and then fiddles with it. After thirty seconds or so, there’s a sharp click , and Riz flicks it open and rips it off. He throws the metal on the ground with a vindictive clatter, and with a voice hoarse from futile use, shouts, “ FUCK!” 

Kristen moves in without hesitation. “Can I take a look at that?” she asks. 

Riz’s tail lashes. “It was just a Silence spell. I’m fine.” A pause. “No. Fuck. I’m not fine. That was a lie. That was bad and awful and I hated it.” His hands, laced through with scars, are shaking. 

“I’m taking a look,” Kristen says insistently, and very carefully puts one hand on his cheek to tilt his head up so she can look at his neck. He tilts his chin up, and she gets to see the expanse of it. Surprisingly, she can’t spot any marks left from the collar. Maybe it was a little loose. What she does spot is two deep, bruised handprints wrapped around his windpipe. They look too small to be human, or to have come from the demons, but she feels her eyes widen anyway. 

“Fuck,” she says, and without preamble, casts Cure Wounds, feels her magic weave itself into his flesh and meet up with his to become a shimmering, burbling flow of power, stitching up the worst of the injuries. She feels, through the spell, the other places on his body that were bruised or beaten, a topography of aches being washed away with her magic. The bruises ripple through purple blues to yellow-greens back to a green only slightly darker than the rest of his neck. When he looks back down, he looks much better, if still frazzled, but it makes Kristen’s skin crawl that her spell didn’t erase the bruising entirely. 

Riz meets her eyes. He takes a shaky breath and says, “Thanks. And, uh, thanks for, you know.” He gestures at his briefcase and his gun. 

“Hey, any time,” she says. “Who would The Ball be without his briefcase? Plus, I need you to have a gun to shoot people for me.”

It doesn’t quite earn a laugh, which is how she knows he’s truly rattled. 

Tracker slides in on the other side, and says quietly, “Do you mind if I-?”

Riz nods, and she touches his shoulder. His skin goes pale and shimmering, as if washed over with gentle moonlight, and when it fades, the last of the bruising is gone. 

“Thanks,” he says after a moment. He looks up at Tracker. “You’re coming?” There’s a surprised, hopeful sort of lilt to his voice that makes Kristen relax and Tracker grin. 

“Yeah, I’m coming. That cool?”

“That’s very cool,” he says. 

“Never hurts to have another healer,” Tracker says. 

“Yeah, but we’d want you even if you weren’t.” 

She stops and sniffs, her eyes looking suspiciously watery. Then she says, “Flattery won’t get you out of telling us what happened.” 

Riz winces. “I figured.” 

“Also,” Adaine chimes in from the side, “you should really call your moms. They’re very worried.”

“Oh fuck.”

—

Sklonda and Yvoni are in the middle of a very, very tense dinner when her crystal rings. She whips it out of her pocket and barely sees Riz’s name on the screen before she accepts. She swipes it onto the speaker and says, “Riz? Riz, kiddo, is that you?” her heart pounding in her ears. 

“Hey, Mom,” Riz’s voice echoes through the speaker, and Yvoni actually puts her head down on the table with a sigh of relief. 

Sklonda flattens a hand against the table, and forces air into her lungs, forces her crushed pottery heart to reform back into a whole vessel. “Oh my gods,” she says, her blood pressure still trying to revolt against her body. “I’ve been calling. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m…” 

There is a pause here, where Yvoni raises her head and Sklonda feels her blood run cold. Their eyes meet. 

On the other end of the line, Riz takes a shaky breath. When he speaks, his voice cracks, and Sklonda realizes that it’s not just the quality of the call making her imagine it; he really does sound like he’s been screaming. “Actually, no,” he says, a devastating faultline of raw, postponed terror in it. “No, it was really bad. There was a huge mix-up. I got captured by some monster that came out of the mirror, and then they tried to use me as some kind of human sacrifice.”

“I tried to kill him!” Fig’s voice calls through the phone, sounding devastated and full of self-loathing. “Hi, Sklonda.”

Yvoni chokes on half of a hysterical, humorless laugh.

“Hi, Fig,” she calls. “Are you safe too?”

“Yeah, but no one else is, not while I’m around.”

“It’s-” Riz starts, and then there’s a soft, Give me the phone, a faint shuffling.

“Hey, Sklonda, it’s Sandra Lynn,” says the elven woman, voice far clearer and firmer than either kid. 

“Sandra Lynn,” Sklonda sighs in relief. “Hey. Everybody’s in one piece?”

“Everyone’s whole and well,” she says. “It was some sort of demonic sacrifice situation, but we got everyone out before anything went truly wrong. Riz was in a bit of a bind, but Fig got possessed, it seems.”

“Fuck,” Yvoni mutters. “As if the damn Mirror Realm weren’t enough.”

“They were trying to use Fig to hurt Riz?” Sklonda says, eyes closed. Compartmentalize. Focus. Get it together, Gukgak. 

“Yeah. Adaine hit her with a Dispel Magic before anything truly bad happened.”

“Still,” Yvoni mutters. “What a way to fuck a person up. Have them almost ritually murder one of their best friends.”

“Be sure to take care of them,” Sklonda says. “Watch all those kids.” Because that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? They’re adventurers, and capable ones at that, but at the end of the day, still kids, still just their kids. Sklonda spent all summer watching them drift in and out of her apartment, leaving behind sweaters and freshly baked goods with sloppy, icing smiley faces. She spent all summer watching them put on sunscreen and then put on aloe when they forgot the sunscreen. Stars and faultlines, they’re just kids. 

“I will,” Sandra Lynn says, her voice full of an iron determination and a heavy, kindred understanding, one mother to another. “Okay, I’m gonna hand you back. Take care, Sklonda.”

There’s a shuffle, and then Riz says, “Hey, Mom,” again. “So, I wanted to ask about the woman in this picture, the one of you. What do you know about the Shadow Cat?”

“Shadow Cat,” Sklonda says, rolling the name over her tongue. Not inaccurate, she supposes, but- “Well, her name’s Kalina.”

“Kalina. Okay. And, is there any reason she would want to sacrifice me? Because she was there when I was about to be sacrificed.”

Sklonda blinks. She exchanges baffled looks with Yvoni. “Sweetie, I knew Kalina mostly in passing, but- wait, she was there?” Her bafflement turns into incredulity. 

“Yeah,” Riz says. “I saw her slipping through the shadows.”

Sklonda is reeling. “Was she trying to help you?”

“She certainly didn’t seem like she was.” 

What the fuck? mouths Yvoni, looking startled and a little furious. Because, well, Sklonda has met Kalina in person probably less than thirty times throughout her whole life, but Kalina has met Riz, saw him while he was little, listened intently to his baby babbling and blew raspberries at him to make him giggle. 

And perhaps that was passing kindness to a baby, but there seemed to be a certain kind of affection there. She might not have gone out of her way to know him, but Sklonda, if she had to hedge her bets, probably would have said that Kalina liked Riz enough to help him. Her bets are changing, now, albeit with a fair bit of confusion. 

“She attacked you?” Sklonda asks. 

“No,” Riz says. “She was just… there. It seemed like maybe she was a little bit in charge?”

“Bitch,” Yvoni breathes, sounding betrayed. 

“Okay,” Sklonda says, scrambling. “I- look, sweetie, I haven’t seen Kalina since you were three or four. She was a friend of a friend through the department that I met after I worked a case that ended up being of interest to the Fallinel government, some trading scandal that happened in the harbor back when I still worked in Bastion City. She was a Fallinel state agent, one that I worked with to wrap up that case, and then saw on and off throughout the years after that, always pretty infrequently. 

“She ended up finding an opening in Elmville in the police department, and recommended it for me, but that was more of a professional favor than anything. Our relationship was pretty professional on the whole. She was only around you, I think, a handful of times when you were a baby.”

She remembers, now, a conversation, memory faded with the passage of years, Kalina flicking her ears and watching Sklonda bounce Riz, asking about the father, making a passing joke about spinning a wheel to determine the divine pantheon when Sklonda admitted she didn’t know much. It had felt normal at the time. Now, with the sudden paranoia and image of her child almost sacrificed on an altar, it makes her skin crawl. 

“I mean, I didn’t work with her all the time,” she explains. “Only on cases that were of extreme interest to Fallinel, and I think that was only because she asked to handle some of those.” 

She remembers Kalina once, sitting on Sklonda’s desk, tail flicking above the papers, languid and unbothered as ever, saying, I like working with you, Sklonda. No bullshit with you, just focus. I can appreciate someone who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty to get something done. 

All of Kalina’s words were like that, layered in some subtle way, razor edges hidden in between the sugared friendliness. She always sounded like she knew more than you did, and knew what you would do, like nothing could ever touch her. She always sounded like she knew exactly what made you tick, and there was always some twist in the subtext of her words just waiting to be brought to the surface. 

At the time, Sklonda had chalked it up to Kalina being strange, and being an agent of the state. That would make a person twisty like that. Now, she’s having very different thoughts about her former, half-partner.

“And Yvoni?” Riz asks.

Yvoni sits up, leaning in towards the phone. “Squirt, I only knew Kalina through your mom. I met her, shit, just the one time, I think. She showed up when we were hanging out at the bar in that photo, just to say hi and see how Sklonda was settling in. It was a weird interaction, but I ended up taking that picture for them. Beyond that, I never knew her.”

“Huh. Alright. Did she have any powers where she could, like, turn into shadows?” Riz asks, unaware of the spiral he’s sent her into, reevaluating every interaction she ever had with a woman she hasn’t seen in over a decade. 

“Well, she’s one of the best,” Sklonda says. “She can be completely invisible. She has ways of getting around wards and abjurations. She was almost impossible to scry on. I mean, truly, nearly impossible. And she had connections all over the place. There were very few large organizations that didn’t have one or two people she could call in a favor with.”

That was why, no matter how strange she was, Sklonda had always taken to working with Kalina so well. Because she was just so damn effective. She knew people who knew people who knew people. She could make things happen, could get information that should be impossible to get. She was brutally, ruthlessly efficient at anything she put her mind to, which is exactly why the idea of her being a potential enemy for Riz is so frightening.

“...Okay,” Riz says after a long time. “And you haven’t seen her in a long time?”

Sklonda racks her brain. No, the last time she saw Kalina, she thinks Riz had been about four, so- “Gosh, sweetie, no. I mean, not in twelve years, at least. Maybe more.”

“And that last time, was it anything significant, or…?”

“No, I mean, it wasn’t-” Sklonda stops. Her ears ring. She remembers that day, remembers staying late at the precinct, walking into the break room to find Kalina leaning against a table. They had exchanged pleasantries, nothing big. Kalina had asked about Riz in that polite way that people ask parents about their kids and the parents respond overenthusiastically. And then it was straight to business, and she asked- 

“She asked about a ship log,” she says. “She asked about any records on an elven ship.”

Silence. And then, from the other end, Adaine’s voice, faintly, “Did she ask about the ship the Oracle drowned on?”

The Cerulean. 

When Riz had dug up the records about the Harpy last year, had cross-referenced and double-checked sightings and schematics and historical dates, had put together that the Harpy and the Cerulean were one and the same, Sklonda had been shocked and impressed, but hadn’t thought much of it afterward. But thinking back, yes. Yes, she had heard that name before, when a passing professional friend asking to see if Solace's systems had any records of the Cerulean. 

“Yes,” she says, alarmed. “Yes, she asked about that ship. She wanted to know if our systems knew anything about it. There wasn’t much, and she went on her way. I never saw her again.”

Riz blows out a nervous breath that hisses through the speaker. “Okay, well, thanks, Mom. Thanks, Yvoni.”

“No problem, squirt,” Yvoni says. “And, hey, listen. I might be scrying on you here or there, just to check in when you don’t have service. For my own sanity.”

“Sounds good,” he says. “Can’t hurt to have an extra set of friendly eyes on the situation.”

Sklonda closes her eyes. “Alright, kiddo. Listen, I love you. Thank you for calling. Stay safe, don’t get captured again.”

“I’ll try,” he says. “I love you guys.”

Sklonda and Yvoni chorus an I love you, and then hang up. They sit in silence for a long moment, dinner forgotten between them. Sklonda tries to make her breathing normal once again. The air conditioning hisses. A car roars past outside. 

“Did I majorly misjudge something important?” Sklonda asks. 

Yvoni breathes out slowly, purses her lips into a harsh line. Her slightly pointed ears flick. “Can I be real, Lon?” When she nods, she says, “I only met the woman the one time, but… She gave me weird vibes, to be honest. Not that I’m not glad you’re here, believe me, I can’t imagine my life without you or Riz, but why would a Fallinel state agent have so many connections in local Solesian government? Why would she point out a position to you? Seems like there must be bigger fish, right? 

“And it was fucking weird that she came to see Riz. I remember you telling me she asked stuff about his dad, stuff that didn’t seem relevant to a casual work colleague. It all just reeked a little to me. I thought she was kind of creepy back then, but then she fell off the face of the earth, so I didn’t worry about it too much. No sense worrying about a person who isn’t there, right? But now, with this about her being a Shadow Cat or something-” Yvoni shakes her head. “I don’t like it.”

Sklonda bites her lip, feels her ears flatten back against her skull. An involuntary growl rattles through her chest. “I don’t like it either,” she says. 

She pushes up from her seat and walks over to a closet. She swings the door open with a protesting shriek of long-unoiled hinges. She digs through boxes of winter clothes, recently put back away, and past boxes of keepsakes tucked away, to dig out from the very back her boxes of old case files, from the few years before and after Riz was born. She looks back at Yvoni. “Wanna help me try to track down a secret agent?” 

Yvoni laughs, shakes her head. “Someday we’ll do something normal, just you wait.” She crosses the room and sits down next to Sklonda, drags out a few files, and starts flipping through. 

Sklonda sighs. “I’m gonna need a board for this.”

—

Tracker’s Moon Haven is strange and beautiful, folds collapsing into extradimensional rooms, like a magical blanket fort filled with pockets of Fig’s friends. The air feels like a warm summer night, and even with all the lights extinguished, everything seems a little bit soaked through with moonlight. 

Fig, dodging concerned looks from her mom and her friends, goes into the van and weaves through the shifting maze of blanket rooms to find the one buried the deepest in the extradimensional space. She finds one tucked four pockets deep into the magical construct, the blankets draped into a small little triangular roof and a cushy, hollowed-out floor, a few pillows haphazardly pushed up against the edges. 

She curls up into the dip in the floor, soft and squishy, drops her head on a pillow and curls her whole body around her father’s gem. She cups it in her hands to watch red light trickle out of the maelstrom center of the gem, black and red like a blood-streaked thunderstorm. 

Fig sniffs, tries to swallow the oncoming sting of tears. It’s fine. She’s fine. She’s gotten her father out of gems before. She’ll get him out. She will. 

She tries to swallow the hazy memories of the shock on her father’s face as he was sucked into the crystal, tries to forget what Riz looked like pleading silently, her knife poised over him. It wasn’t her, everyone said. But it was, wasn’t it? Her magic, her hands, her stupid dream of fame and glory and power. 

Sure, something had happened to Riz too, but he had been attacked. He hadn’t done the attacking. Fig would much rather deal with the threat of one of her possessed friends attacking her than live with the knowledge that one of her friends almost died, and it was almost her fault. 

No matter what anyone says, they didn’t succumb to their dreams, and Fig did. She curls around the ruby and tries not to cry as the voices in her head, smug and cruel, whisper, Your fault. Should have been stronger. Should have been better. Should have fought harder. 

She lays there for a long time, sniffling, which is perhaps why she doesn’t hear him coming. There’s a disturbance in the faint, silvery moonlight emanating from the room as one of the blankets peels back. 

In the dark, watercolor gray shades of her darkvision, Riz’s yellow-gold and silver eyes are a shock of color, a homing beacon against the backdrop of his shadowed figure. “Hey,” he says. “Can I come in?”

Fig sniffs, tries to subtly wipe away any evidence of tears, as if he doesn’t already know all the most embarrassing things about her. “You probably shouldn’t,” she says sullenly. “I might get possessed and try to ritually sacrifice you again.”

Riz frowns, but comes in anyway, sliding down into the blanket pile to bump against her hip. “You won’t get possessed again. Not in here. Can’t you feel it?” He looks up at the silvery, ambient glow. “This is some powerful magic.”

Fig sniffs. “Tracker’s cool.”

“She’s very cool,” he agrees. His tail whisks back and forth through the blankets. He turns magnifying glass eyes on her. “Are you okay?” 

“Am I okay?” she exclaims. “I nearly cut you open like a piece of fruit, and you’re asking me if I’m okay?”

Riz looks a little embarrassed, but mostly just stubborn. “Yeah,” he says. “When have you all not been the most important thing for me?”

Fig tries not to bawl, which mostly turns into a very stubborn few moments of her sniffing and wiping her eyes and cheeks, cradling her father’s ruby. “I almost hurt you,” she whispers. “I did hurt my dad. Why aren’t you scared of me?”

“I’m scared of everything, all the time,” he says seriously. “I don’t have time to be scared of you all too. Plus-” he pauses and looks away, swallows hard, “-even when you were… I could tell it wasn’t really you. I knew it wasn’t you. You wouldn’t have… Yeah. I was scared the spell was going to make you hurt me, but part of what was so scary about all that was that I was afraid for you. You weren’t-” 

He blows out a breath, his ears pinning back against his skull, and when he speaks again, his voice is small and fragile. “You weren’t there, Fig. I looked in your eyes, and you were out of my reach, and there was nothing I could do about it, and that was awful. That was so bad.” He curls his hands into fists, and his markings flash briefly. “I’m supposed to be the one who helps you all get out of tight corners. And I couldn’t.”

Fig sits up. “Hey. That’s not fair. You were really in trouble. You shouldn’t feel bad about that. I don’t blame you.”

“Well, I don’t blame you either.”

“Yeah, but-” It’s always my fault when good things break. I’m good at shattering my family. You all are only the latest casualty in a long line of things that I have ruined by touching them.

“I can hear you thinking mean thoughts about yourself,” he says. “And I want you to know that, even if they feel real and scary, none of us would agree with them.”

Fig hiccups, and tears run down her face. She looks at him, at all the planes of his face, the sharp jaw and strong cheekbones, a face that looks more and more like the picture of his mom with every passing day, beautiful and shining and deadly like a scalpel. 

The Gukgaks, Fig thinks, are made to surgically slice out the rotten parts of what they touch, make it better with the precision of a knife and the ruthlessness of a bullet. Riz is a sneak attack, all concentrated focus to destroy what opposes him. Fig is a Shatter spell through an amp, devastation for anything unlucky enough to be near her.

“How can you stand it?” she blurts. 

“How can I stand what?”

“Me. Me and all my mess.”

Riz’s face falls, devastation washing over his features for a brief moment before he swallows it. “You’re really mean to yourself,” he says, and Fig winces. He leans forward, balancing his forearms on his crossed knees. “I like your mess, and Kristen’s mess, and Fabian’s mess. Or, well, not that I like the mess, but- I love you all, and when you need help with the mess, I can help you with that, and that’s-” He shakes his head. “You’re my friend. And I love you. Is that not enough of a reason?”

She wipes at her nose. “Of course that’s enough,” she says. She does not say the other part, which is that she’s so scared that one day he and all the rest of her friends will wake up and realize they fell in love with a Fig who is way cooler and smarter and braver than the reality of her. 

“Besides the part where I was actually hurting people I care about, the worst part about the dream,” she says, to the only person so far who understands even a little bit, “was that I liked it. I was so successful and famous and powerful that I never needed to talk to anyone. And so I didn’t, and that was awful, but I still wanted it. I still liked it.” 

Fig had been all alone, so, so alone, and it had been so lonely and painful and humiliating, but it was still so much less scary than having people to lose. “I should have called you,” she whispers, the failure thick on her tongue, in her lungs, in her bones. Her father’s gem is warm in her hands. “In the dream. I should have called you and I didn’t.”

Riz reaches out through the covers, peels one hand away from the ruby, holds it tight enough that his claws cut into her palm, the pain sharp and grounding. “That was a dream,” he says, voice immovable. “This is real. And in real life, you did call. And I’ll always pick up.”

Fig clings to him, a lifeline. “Our angel strikes again,” she jokes, just to watch him blush in real time. His ears flick and his tail swishes, and she loves him, loves him, loves him. 

“Shut up,” he says, and squeezes her hand harder. He looks down at the ruby, and says, “Can I see?” holding out his other hand. 

She hands it over. If her dad isn’t safe with Riz, she doesn’t know where he is. 

The ruby is big enough that he has to spread his fingers to hold it with one hand. The black gem settles in his hand, and where it touches his palm, red light pours out from the center to pool along the edge. Riz’s markings, on the outside, flare bright enough to illuminate the inside of their pocket of the Moon Haven, and at the very innermost edge of the jewel, the red light turns golden. 

Riz’s eyes flare, brilliant and lit from within, and his halo backlights his head for a brief moment. Gold light flickers down the rivers of red, vanishing into the depths of the ruby. She feels his magic in her chest, like clear, running water, like a creek deep in the mountains, like the pull of a lake deeper than vision can clear. 

Fig’s breath catches. “Did you just…?”

He looks up at her, feline eyes still glowing faintly. He shrugs, looking a little embarrassed. “I wasn’t actually breaking the curse, so the ruby was totally fine. I have no idea if it reached him, but I figured he could use a little healing.” A pause. “It really, really sucks to be stuck in a crystal.”

Fig reaches out, and drags her friend into a hug, wrapping herself around his back. The ruby ends up stabbing awkwardly into her stomach, and Riz is bony and sharp-edged as ever, and she can feel a rash beginning to prickle over her skin from his magic, and she feels so full of love that she could die from it, a love grander and greater than planets and planes and universes. Fig was made to love her friends, she thinks, and every time, they prove it worth it. 

Riz wraps his tail around her waist and drops his cheek on her shoulder, purring weakly deep in his chest. 

After a long few moments, Fig pulls back, and he hands her the ruby back. She takes it, holds it. She looks down it, at the red tendrils connecting her to the center of the gem. She still feels like it’s her fault, mostly, but if Riz says it isn’t, then her dad probably would too. If nothing else, the most important thing now is just to focus on getting him out.

“You should go to sleep,” he suggests gently. “You’ve had a long day.”

“I was asleep for most of it,” she grumbles. 

“That doesn’t count and you know it.”

She looks up, squinting at him. “Are you going to sleep?” she asks, deeply suspicious. 

Riz’s ears pin back against his head. “Definitely,” he lies, and then seems to process that he just lied. “Wait. No, I-” He sighs. “I hate this. I hate this so much. No, I’m not going to sleep, probably.”

Fig wipes away the last of her tears. Her eyes feel puffy and dry, but she feels like having this conversation with Riz has fixed something in her, has taken the infection out of the wound. “I’ll sleep if you do,” she says. 

He narrows his eyes at her, pointing a clawed finger at her. “This is bribery,” he says. 

“Yup.” She opens her arms. “Get in here!”

“I should really check on the… people outside! Yeah, I should check on Adaine.”

“Mom is with Adaine,” Fig points out. “She’s fine.”

“I should-”

“You leave me no choice!” she declares solemnly, and then grabs his tail, still loosely wrapped around her waist, and uses it to drag him straight into her arms with a yelp. She boxes him in and rolls over on top of him, crushing him with her body, because if there’s one way to keep Riz pinned down, it’s to make him lift stuff. He has many talents, but strength is not one of them. 

“Fig,” he complains. “That’s my spine! You can’t just pull on it.”

She smooches his cheek in apology. “Sorry.”

He wiggles ineffectually, his ear flicking her cheek. “Come on. I’m good!” 

“I am enforcing the four hours minimum rule,” she says. “Your mom will be so proud of me. And if you don’t sleep tonight, I will cast a Sleep spell on you tomorrow. Don’t try me.” 

Riz heaves a sigh, and stops wiggling. “Fine. Can we at least readjust?” 

They end up flipping over to be on their sides in the blanket pit, facing one another, his tail flopped over her ankles, her arm thrown over his side. He’s close enough that she can feel his warmth under the blankets they drag out from the endless mess of blanket. It’s reassuring. He does not fall asleep before her, but she’s trusting him to really, really try to sleep. She goes down easy, exhausted from battle and crying and being used as a puppet for most of the day. She sleeps with her dad’s ruby curled up against her stomach, Riz right next to her, and it’s nothing like her dream, which is what makes it so scary, and so good. She’s not alone, after all. 

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Riz knew, logically, that the Celestine Sea was enormous. But knowing that and witnessing it are two different things. 

The Van Boat, as Gorgug calls it, peels away from the shore, cutting through the waves and leaving Bastion City in the rearview mirror, windows splattered with seafoam, the floor swaying with the pull of the water. They get weird looks from some of the other small ships in the harbor, jet skis and motor boats giving them a delicate berth, passengers turning to gawk at the modified van.

Gorgug ignores them with the single-minded focus of someone trying to pass a driver’s test for the first time. He navigates the Van Boat away into the choppier ocean, leaving the harbor behind and transforming the sprawling metropolis behind them into a jewel-speckled string of lights along the coast. 

They coast out beyond the harbor, sheltering in the extradimensional spaces of the Moon Haven, sans magic circle, which stays up in the trunk of the Van Boat even during the day, so that they don’t all lose their minds from close quarters. 

But once they’ve sailed half the day away, Riz cracks a window. Salt air sprays his face, patterns over his cheeks and tugs at his hair. He wiggles out and clambers up to the top of the van. He stands on the roof, the metal not even dipping beneath his weight. He looks out, and the ocean unfurls to each corner of the horizon. It’s full of glittering waves, gentle curls of white foam and sunshine in dappled patterns over the shifting surface. 

The air smells of salt and fish and clean, fresh sunlight. There is water as far as the eyes can see, sea bleeding into the sky. It’s overwhelmingly massive, and terrifyingly beautiful. It’s picturesque. It’s perfect. It’s a vacation begging to happen. 

And so, of course, Riz goes down into the depths of the Van Boat, and starts to spiral. 

He reemerges an hour later, feverish and throwing anagrams at the wall. 

“Night Yorb!” Gorgug crows triumphantly after he says Night Orby, and Riz writes it down. 

That night, Riz ends up with Gorgug in the front seats. Everyone else has mostly retired, vanishing into the depths of the freshly enchanted Moon Haven. Gorgug is driving, deeper and deeper into the ocean, out past the horizon. And Riz is sitting in the passenger seat, occasionally switching the music or to a podcast. 

A while ago, they switched to just let the Van Boat play what he wants, and so soft ukulele music is filtering through the speakers, the volume turned down low. It’s mellow and soothing, music to lull teenagers to sleep. It puts Riz’s teeth on edge. But he says nothing.

He sits with one hand wrapped around the edge of a notebook, the other, a pilfered pink gel pen, alternating between tapping on the paper and scribbling out potential meanings of the Night Yorb. It doesn’t feel super relevant, honestly, but it’s something to do so that he doesn’t have to stare out at the ocean and feel tranquil. He’s pretty sure he would combust. 

He’s in the middle of scribbling down his fiftieth theory about the Night Yorb (an ancient fiend? Trapped in some gem? With a night domain? Possible, he supposes, if unlikely) when Gorgug says softly, “What are you doing?”

Riz pauses, lifting the pen and turning to look at Gorgug. “Oh, I’m writing down theories on the Night Yorb,” he says. “Do you have any?”

He thinks for a long moment, and then says seriously, “Maybe a Yorb is some kind of magical beast, and this one likes the night.”

It’s not any worse as a theory than anything he has thought of himself, so he scribbles it down. Yorb: magical beast? Likes the night? Night powers? 

“Do you think that the Night Yorb will actually be important for the Nightmare King case?” Gorgug asks curiously.

Riz shrugs, unsure why he feels self-conscious. “I don’t know. It might. Can’t hurt to be prepared, right?”

He hums. He looks over at him, his yellow and black eyes knowing in a way that makes Riz want to curl in on himself and hide. “You’re always prepared. I’m sure that if we do end up fighting this Night Yorb, you’ll make sure we’re ready.”

The speakers crackle. “Hey, broskis,” the Hangvan says, voice with a slightly more nervous edge than normal. “Listen, I know that it’s late, and it’s chill time, but you really gotta stop saying the name of the Night Yorb.”

Both of them look at the speakers, and then at each other. “Right,” Riz says. “Sorry.” He looks at the dashboard, at the glowing blue panels. His stomach twists, and he looks down at his paper, at his theories scribbled out, nearly illegible, more blanks and question marks than anything else, all feral speculation and baseless ideas because that’s better than stopping.

The silence sits for a moment, and then Gorgug reaches over and flicks a switch on the dashboard. A few of the blue lights on the panels vanish. “Riz,” he asks. “Do you… not like the Van Boat?”

“What? I love the van.” Even if it’s a metal can floating in the middle of the ocean with no lifeboats, and they’re all dead without it. 

“Not the van,” Gorgug clarifies. “The Van Boat. The celestial. You’re always quiet when he talks. And you keep making faces.”

Fuck. He forgets, sometimes, that Gorgug is like Fig. You can’t be upset around them and not expect them to sniff it out, though her approach is more relentless, and his is more gentle. Fig won’t let you ignore your problems. She will shoulder them with you without asking. Gorgug, though, will calmly and carefully do his best to pull it all out.

“Do you not like him?” he asks, and then, clarifying with a wave at the panel, says, “He can’t hear us right now.”

Riz stares out the front window at the waves cresting, the moonlight like shoals of silver fish darting over the whitecaps. The expanse of water is inky, the night like velvet speckled with gems. The stars are so much brighter out here. 

“No,” he says quietly. “I don’t not like the Van Boat.”

Silence. Waves splash against the metal. Ukulele music hangs between them. 

“So, what’s up?” he asks. “Something about him is bothering you.”

Riz curls his tail tightly around his legs, folded on the seat. He looks down from the stars back to his paper. His papers, his incoherent ramblings, his spiraling conspiracy theories, those he can handle. 

“Is he okay with it?” he asks finally, quietly. 

“Okay with what?”

“Being in there. In the gem. Is he okay with it? Or are we trapping him just like Gorthalax?”

The music hangs between them, soft and gentle and awful, awful, because what if he doesn’t want to be there? What if he wants to get out? 

Gorgug reaches out, and flicks the switch again. The blue on the panels lights back up. “Hey, Van Boat?” he asks. 

“What’s good, my dude?” the Hangvan replies, languid as ever. 

“Do you like it in there? In the crystal, I mean. Are you okay?”

There’s a pause, and a satisfied sigh. “Oh, yeah, man, I’m good. It’s all chill, and this van is super cool. I’m just hanging out.”

“Okay,” Gorgug says easily. “But, you know that if you ever wanted to get out, we could help you with that too.”

The Hangvan does not respond for a long, long moment. Riz’s breath is caught up in his lungs, his heart pounding. 

Finally, the voice through the speakers says, “Well, gosh, guys, that’s super, super nice. You all are really thoughtful. But I’m okay. It’s all cool. I like this van.”

“How?” Riz blurts before he can stop himself. “How are you so- so calm about it? How is it all cool?”

“Well,” the Hangvan says easily, “I’m an angel of chill times. The beach, late night campfires. A cool breeze and warm sun. I’m just naturally a very laid-back guy. And I like to help people, but in a low-key way. So I can help the van run, and I can play cool, calm music to get everyone to go to sleep, and that’s helpful. Rest can be holy, dude. And I can still talk to you guys, and help you all. Pretty sweet deal, as far as I’m concerned.”

Riz takes a deep breath, and then another, and then another, tries to remember Adaine’s breathing exercises. In three, hold four, out five. In three, hold four, out five. Sometimes, it feels like he can’t get any air at all, like his lungs are shrinking, like someone closed up his throat while he wasn’t looking, and now he’s choking. But it’s fine. It’s fine. 

“Okay,” Gorgug says into the air. “Thanks, Van Boat.” 

“Any time, man.” 

He flips the switch to turn off the panel, and puts the van into park, reaching over the cupholders full of water bottles and empty yogurt containers. He plants a large hand on Riz’s back, splayed out between his shoulder blades. “Hey, keep breathing,” he says. “Good job. You heard him. It’s all good. He’s okay.” He pauses. “It’s not like the palimpsest,” he says quietly. “Okay? It’s not like the palimpsest.”

In three, hold four, out five. In three, hold four, out five. 

“I don’t get it,” he wheezes, his lungs tight, so tight. “I don’t get how anyone could- it’s not- there’s just nothing. There’s just nothing forever and ever and ever. How is he okay?”

Gorgug rubs circles on Riz’s back, firm pressure and gentle words. “He’s the angel of chill times,” he says with a shrug. “Sounds like doing very little forever and having a lazy time while occasionally chatting with others is, like, his perfect world.”

Riz shakes his head, ears flat against his head, tail tight around his legs. In three, hold four, out five. “I don’t get it. I don’t…” He trails off into a whine, burying his face in his hands. 

Gorgug lets it sit, lets him regain some paltry control of his breathing. He looks up, finally, to find the world mostly unchanged. The moonlight is still kissing the waves. The water is still rolling by. And his friend is leaning over the seat, rubbing circles on his back, watching him with kind eyes. 

He reaches over, takes Riz’s notebook right off his lap, closes it, and tucks it into the side of the door, ignoring Riz’s complaints. He reaches behind into the middle row of seats to pull out a blanket. He reaches over and tucks it around Riz, wrapping him up as best he can over the seat. He has, at least, the advantage of being so strong that Riz can’t really stop him. 

Once he deems Riz sufficiently tucked in, he sits back into the driver’s seat. He dutifully adjusts his mirror, and says, “You don’t have to ‘get it’ yet. But he’s right about one thing. Rest is important. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to do it.”

Riz is-

Riz is emotional and terrified. He is floating in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight. Just a metal can between himself and drowning. He is tucked into the passenger seat with a blanket from his friend and soft ukulele music from an angel who likes the endless emptiness of a crystal.

“Did you know that some sharks never sleep at all?” he says to Gorgug, to the angel in the van, to the wide universe and the ocean and the stars in the sky. “They breathe by moving, catch the oxygen when the water passes over their gills. If they stopped swimming, they would suffocate. They have gills, but they would still drown. So they never sleep at all. They just swim for their whole entire lives.”

“Some birds sleep in the air,” Gorgug offers right back. “They fly for weeks without ever touching the ground. They lock their wings and let the air carry them, and then they sleep, right there in the air.”

He looks out over the waves, the stars, the border where horizon meets sky. “Don’t they fall?” he asks. 

“No,” Gorgug says. “They just coast, and the ocean winds carry them. Their whole body is built like that, to just glide and trust the sky to hold them. They can stay in the air for months, and just sleep in little bursts for about ten seconds or so. They use half of their brain, and nap on the updrafts. My parents and I watched a documentary about it when Gorbag and Roz came to visit for the Moonar Yulenear. Apparently Gorbag likes birds a lot.”

Riz blinks rapidly. “Birds are cool,” he murmurs. 

“Do you want to find a documentary for us to listen to?”

“Sure.” He scrolls through his crystal, trying to find the podcasts he keeps downloaded. “I have one about the mechanics of an arcane watch,” he offers, thinking of Gorgug’s growing interest in tinkering. 

“That sounds good.”

Riz clicks play, and leans back against the headrest as the narrator begins introducing the podcast. As he does, Gorgug says, “You can sleep. I’m a very responsible driver.”

He laughs, and buries himself deeper in the blanket. The podcast drawls on about the mechanics of the first water-powered clocks, and then the modern analog clock, before finally getting into the mechanics of crystal-powered timekeeping. Gorgug hums slightly through the whole thing, drums his thumbs on the sun-faded steering wheel. Moonlight bounces off the waves, and the water rolls by, and the stars peer down from the embrace of the night sky. Riz sleeps, and he dreams about wings, about updrafts, about the sky itself holding him up. 

—

The next day, the sun is still bright and sparkling, but the wind is stronger, the waves higher, choppier. They let Cathilda take the wheel, using the settings in the van to raise the pedals to her level, a reminder that this van was first used by two gnomes. 

The kids all pile out on the roof in the early morning light. Adaine has pulled swimsuits for them all from her jacket, as well as a fleet of life jackets, and Riz and Adaine spend a whole ten minutes bullying Fig, Kristen, and Tracker into wearing life jackets in the choppy waves. 

Tracker complains that she’s a good swimmer, and Fig and Kristen complain that it’ll ruin the vibes, but by the end of the argument, Adaine and Riz are both nearing a conniption, so the girls all begrudgingly put on life jackets. Gorgug puts his on easily, and with a fair bit of relief, and Ragh pulls his on with a, “Hell yeah! Boat safety, dude! Hoot growl!” 

Fabian flat-out refuses to put his on, so Gorgug and Ragh team up to pin him down and forcibly put him into one. The whole time, Ragh is shouting, “You gotta respect the ocean, dude! Safety first!” over Fabian’s furious insistence that he is the son of a pirate, he doesn’t need a life jacket, this is so embarrassing. At the end, they are left with a very grumpy Fabian and all of the girls cackling. Riz pulls his camera out of his briefcase to snap a few candid photos. 

He gets one of Gorgug throwing Fabian off the roof of the van into the waves, one of all the girls jumping together with a whoop, one of Ragh dousing everyone with a cannonball. He gets a few photos of everyone but himself in the water, cheering and posing for the camera. He resolves to print them all out at the end of the quest and put them in his scrapbook.

He sits on the roof of the van, letting his legs hang over the edge on the metal, almost scorchingly hot from the sun. Kristen starts a splashing fight with Gorgug, Ragh, and Tracker, which she promptly loses when Tracker convinces the boys to team up on her. She dunks her girlfriend under the water and Kristen resurfaces, spluttering seawater and shouting, “Betrayal! Betrayal!” as Tracker howls with laughter. 

Sandra Lynn is on the roof with Riz, sitting in the saddle on Baxter’s back, watching and swooping in to scoop up any of the kids who drift too far from the boat. She’s watching with a mix of deep fondness and amused exasperation. 

At one point, Tracker abandons her quest to dunk her girlfriend as many times as possible to swim over to the side of the van. She hadn’t been exaggerating, she really is a good swimmer, all clean, efficient breast strokes and strong kicking. She drifts up next to the van and flips onto her back to grin up at Riz. “You sufficiently cooking from the sun up there?” 

Riz snorts. “Sure. You sufficiently satisfied with your splashing?” 

“Nope,” Tracker says, popping the p. “I have one person left to get.” 

He stands up and walks away from the edge as Tracker tries to lunge out of the water and snag his ankle. “No thanks.”

 “Aw, come on, Riz,” calls Fig from a few meters away where she and Adaine are having a competition over who can do the better impression of an otter. “Get in! Don’t you want to be able to say you swam in the middle of the Celestine Sea?”

“That has zero appeal for me,” he says. 

“It could make you sound cool, The Ball,” Fabian calls from a little further out. 

“Nothing will ever make me cool,” Riz says, prompting a round of boos from his friends. But he’s not wrong, really. He’s a badass and he knows it. He likes who he is and how his life is. He has friends he loves and family that is good for him. But no amount of badass behavior will ever make him cool in the same sense that Fabian or Fig are cool.

“You can add it to your list of experiences,” Adaine says, doing a very convincing otter impression, holding Fig’s hand. “You should probably know what sea water tastes like, as a private investigator. What if it comes up in a case one day?”

“In landlocked Elmville?” he says flatly. 

Kristen pops up with a shit-eating grin, looking at him. “Yeah, Riz. What if you need it for a case and you don’t know it and then you can’t solve the mystery?” 

Both girls look smugger than cats that got the cream, massive, evil grins on their faces. They have the look of two women who know they have won. 

Riz heaves a sigh and flicks his tail back and forth. “I hate you all,” he says, to a massive round of cheers. 

“Do a cannonball!” Tracker shouts. 

“Do a cannon Ball!” Gorgug cheers, giggling. 

“Cannon Ball!” Ragh shouts, pumping his arms. The others pick it up almost immediately, descending into a chant of, “Cannon Ball! Cannon Ball! Cannon Ball!”

Riz takes a running leap off the side of the van and cannonballs into the waves. The water crashes over his head, popping in his ears and surging up his nose to fill his mouth with the taste of salt and brine. His life jacket pulls him back up quite fast, and he breaks the surface in a spray of seafoam to a deafening round of cheers from all his friends. He wipes water away from his face and starts to say, “Are you happy now, you-”

A hand hits the back of his head, and dunks him under the water. When he resurfaces, spluttering, to raucous laughter, he turns around to see Tracker, grinning with a mouthful of fangs and yellow eyes wide with joy. “Yup,” she says. “Very happy.”

“I’m gonna get you,” he says through a grin. 

“Bring it on!” 

After another half hour or so, they all cluster back onto the roof of the van, and take turns jumping off the side and letting Adaine launch them even higher into the air with the Gust cantrip. It only throws them about five feet or so, but everyone shrieks and cheers and whoops when they resurface in the ocean, and Adaine is giggling furiously, and everyone is smiling wider than he’s seen since they started the quest, even Gorgug, finally, after a long night and morning of thick heartsickness. So Riz watches, content, and even jumps himself a few times.

After a few hours, they all descend back into the depths of the van, slightly sunburnt and totally exhausted. They Prestidigitation to scrub the salt and ocean off of themselves, and then all collapse in different parts of the Moon Haven to relax for the rest of the day, except for Gorgug, who ends up back in the driver’s seat, and Fabian, who retreats back up to the roof of the van to just sit. 

Riz whittles away most of the day going over and over his boards, interrupted on occasion as one of the girls drag him into a card game before he retreats again. There’s nothing to do, and as soon as they’re not swimming all of their energy away, the low, ever present layer of tense anticipation returns. It feels wrong to not do anything, but there’s truly not much to do in the van. It’s just a waiting game as they cut through the ocean. 

When Cathilda calls everyone out of the depths of the blankets to serve dinner, beautifully grilled fish, gorgeously seasoned vegetables, and some kind of fruit tea, Riz takes a plate for himself, a bottle full of the tea, and another plate, and tells Cathilda quietly, “I’ll take this up to Fabian.” 

The halfling woman’s face softens, her eyes kind and knowing, appreciative in a way that he isn’t prepared for. She reaches out and pats his cheek gently, and says, “Alright then, Master Riz. That is very kind of you. He’s quite lucky to have you.”

Riz blushes, and just scrambles out onto the roof. Fabian is sitting at the back, next to the Hangman and Baxter, who is curled up in a ball of feathers, snoozing. He takes a moment, as he approaches, to be thankful that gryphons can’t be affected by this Nightmare King sleep nonsense. He doesn’t want to fight Baxter at all. 

As he draws nearer, Fabian’s thousand-yard stare along the horizon swivels to look at him. Riz holds out the plate for him. “Cathilda served dinner.” 

“Ah,” he replies, taking the plate. “Thank you, The Ball.”

“You want company, or no?” 

The engine of the Hangman revs, and the motorcycle growls, “Master, do not let The Ball eat with us. Send him away to annoy someone else.”

There’s a brief flare of hurt in his chest, but it’s soothed by Fabian saying, “Hush, Hangman. The Ball is more than welcome to eat with us.” He pats the roof of the van with one hand, and Riz sits down. 

It takes him less than a minute to devour his own food, vegetables first and then fish, leaving the rich, salty taste for last so that it can linger. When he finishes, he licks off his lips and sits back, paper plate crumpled up and tucked away. Fabian picks at his food for much longer. He doesn’t seem dejected, exactly, but a bit contemplative in a way that Fabian usually isn’t. 

Riz lets it sit until Fabian finishes his food and sits back with a satisfied sigh to say, “So, what’s up?”

“Well, quest for the Nightmare King and all that. Though this has been a surprisingly restful interlude. If this is adventuring, I could get used to it.” 

He turns to give his friend a look, one eyebrow raising, one ear swiveled toward Fabian and the other cutting down at an angle. 

Fabian, to his credit, does look a little abashed at this. He looks out along the horizon, where the sun is beginning to lower, creeping toward the sea and turning the sky into rivers of fiery gold and purple and cotton-candy pink. He sighs. “I’m thinking of my Papa.”

Ah, Riz thinks. “Ah,” he says. “Yeah. I can see why.” 

He looks out over the waves, white-capped and even higher now than earlier. This is the deep ocean, no land for hundreds and hundreds of miles. “The world is so endless out here,” he says, his voice a bit awed. “Papa and Mama settled in Solace before I was born, but he spent so much of his life here. No land in sight, just the sun and the stars and the ocean.”

Riz looks out over it, the world an unending panorama of water and sky. “It’s really big,” he says. 

“So was he,” Fabian says, his voice equally proud and melancholy. “I wish… I wish I could have seen that part of him while he was here. It was such a massive part of who he was, and I just… never saw it. Not really. He was more than a man. He was a legendary beast of the sea, just like the kraken or the sirens. It almost feels like he would have been more real if he hadn’t been real at all, you know?” He shakes his head ruefully. “I’m not making sense.”

Riz looks out over the sea. “No,” he says softly. “That makes total sense.” 

Somewhere past the sky, past this plane, layered out through the universe, is a man who made him and then never came back, an angel who walked the earth once and decided that was enough. His mom talks with a complicated sort of fondness about the man she knew for one night, laced through with a frustrated sort of bitterness that she knew who- what he was only in hindsight. 

Somewhere past the sky is a being who made Riz and never looked back, a celestial who filled him with light and left him to drown in it. Sklonda said he looked goblin, said he claimed to be named Pok, but who knows the truth? He’s realest in his absence, realest in the fact that he feels too legendary to possibly be real. 

Fabian walks in the footsteps of the greatest pirate who ever lived, raised on tales of traveling a sea he never saw from the bow of a ship that he has only ever known from land. Riz walks in the footsteps of heaven itself, the glory of the upper planes haunting his every moment, hounded by ideas of a place he has never seen and gods that were never his. 

Fabian has spent a long time trying to live up to Bill Seacaster’s legacy. Riz looked at the empty space where a parent could have been, and refused to chase it. Different approaches, but really, experiences not so different. 

So, yeah. It makes sense to Riz. He gets it.

“I don’t think we even really saw each other until the very end,” Fabian says. “And now all I have is the stories, and his ship, and the sea. That’s the closest I’ll get.”

Riz looks over at him. He reaches over and taps the eyepatch with one claw, looks Fabian in the eye. “You have a lot more than that. He loves you. That never stopped. He’s out there raising literal hell and probably telling everyone he’s Fabian Aramais Seacaster’s father like some mom at a wine night.”

That gets a laugh out of Fabian, who swats Riz’s hand away. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, blushing. 

“I’m not.” He gestures out at the ocean. “He decided that all of this was less important than you. That’s what you have. You’re the most important thing he ever did.” Riz has his own opinions about Bill and Hallariel, but it is, at least, certain that they love him in a ferocious, complicated kind of way. 

“And, you know,” he ventures after a long moment, hesitantly, “you don’t have to be your dad. I know you want to write your name on the face of the world and all that, but you can also be just Fabian, and that’s important too.” He wants Fabian to know that he has nothing to prove, that he doesn’t have to fill his father’s shoes or maintain his legacy, that he is enough just for being in the world. That he is their friend, and that’s good enough. 

Fabian huffs and says, “I am not going to be just Fabian.” He gestures out at the wide sea. “My father conquered the whole ocean, and my mother conquered him. What is the point of it all if I’m not just as good?” 

The point is that we love you, Riz thinks. He sighs. “You will be. You already are.”

He nods, fiercely, and Riz knows that Fabian didn’t hear him at all. That’s okay. They have time to convince him yet. He looks out over the endless sea and the endless sky, arching above them forever, forever, forever. He watches the sky bleed into the sea, daylight embracing the encroaching night, dipping the striated clouds in rich colors. It occurs to Riz that he should take a picture. 

He says, “I’ll be back,” and crawls back down into the van. He re-emerges a minute later, the birthday camera from Gorgug strung around his neck on its strap. He snaps a picture of Fabian quickly, and then turns to get a picture of the sunset from the van. 

It’s dazzling, truly. He wishes he could get a picture from higher up. 

He tips his head back, and stares up, up, up, to where the blue sky is slowly changing color, stars beginning to creep out. 

He can get a picture from higher up. 

They’re probably not fighting anyone else tonight. And isn’t everyone always telling him to do stuff for himself more often, stuff that isn’t work? A scrapbook counts as a hobby, right? 

Riz reaches for the magic deep inside of him, touches the well and pulls the water to the surface, lets the rivers overflow. His wings peel out of his back, flaring out behind him. He looks back at one, briefly. 

It looks like stained glass cut straight from a church window, black borders and glowing panels of rich, glass-tinted light. They’re beautiful in a way that is a little bit surprising to him. He can’t really see his halo. His wings are the closest he’s ever gotten. They’re not true angel wings, not the feathery white creations in any of the searchable depictions of aasimar or celestials. They’re not real angel wings, but they’re his, and they’re- “Cool,” he murmurs. 

Fabian, still sprawled over the roof with Baxter, who has raised his head to look at the spectacle, grins at Riz. “Very cool.”

He grins back, a little shyly, and says, “Be back in a minute.” And he leaps straight into the air. 

Flying takes Riz’s stomach out from under him. He’s not as fast, in his Radiant Soul transformation, as he would be if Adaine were to cast Fly on him. It’s only about as fast as he is, but despite his wings being insubstantial, it feels more real like this, more solid. He can feel his stained glass wings as if they are true limbs, can feel the way they push the air down and pull it past. He can feel the magic in his blood, in his veins, pumping out to fill every part of him. 

He climbs into the air as fast as he can move, the van and the sea falling away at a startling speed. He shoots up, up, up. The air grows cooler, the wind stronger, and still he climbs, a meteor in reverse, a streak of holy light in the darkness. 

Eventually, he angles his wings down and slides into a sideways motion, coasting to a halt. He flaps his wings in a back motion. He hangs, suspended, nearly five hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. 

From this vantage point, the inky tones of the sea are gilded with quartz and gold, a river of fire that trails across the shrinking waves to the horizon line. The sun is a single, lazy eye of pure flame, lidded with clouds as it begins to blink to sleep. The sunset spreads across the sky like a wing outstretched, feathers leaving streaks of rosy pink and sharp yellow across the clouds, orange and purple bleeding through the backdrop of the sky. 

From here, the sea is the whole world, and the heavens are the arched ceiling of everything. It’s all water, and the sheer power of it takes Riz’s breath away. He takes a few pictures, and then stares for as long as he dares, counting in his head. 

At forty-five seconds from his first transformation, he flips upside down, tucks his wings in, and drops. The wind rips tears from his eyes and he laughs as he falls, gravity returning him to the earth, the sheer giddiness of no more anticipation. He really does love it when there’s nothing left to worry about. Fight. Run. Fall. The other shoe drops, and there is nothing left to fear, there is only what it is. 

Riz falls, and falls, and falls, the ocean hurtling toward him like a train. At the last second, he snaps his wings open and jolts up. He glides around the back of the van in a huge semi-circle, close enough to feel the spray of the water. He rounds the side and flaps up, his feet dropping down onto the metal. His wings tuck back against his back, cool and reassuring, and a second later, evaporate into motes of light like a spray of mist. He grins at Fabian. “Hey.”

“Nine Hells, The Ball,” Fabian swears viciously, crossing the van to grab him by the shoulders and shake him slightly. “Do you enjoy giving me a heart attack?”

“Yes,” he says immediately. “It’s hilarious.”

Fabian huffs, releasing his shoulders and flouncing over to drop dramatically back down to the roof, crossing his arms over his chest. “You,” he says, “are going to be the reason I drop dead of stress at seventeen.”

“Yeah, right,” Riz says. He walks over and drops down next to him, curling his tail around his friend’s back. “You wanna see my pictures?” he asks, holding up his camera. 

Fabian sniffs. “I suppose I could take a look.”

Eventually, they’ll go inside and Riz will think about birds and try to sleep. But for now, they sit on the roof and look at photos of the sunset, and everything feels alright.

—

As they drift through the fog the next day, Tracker jokingly suggests, “Should we sing Nintey-nine Bottles of Beer on the Boat?”

In unison, every one of the Bad Kids shouts, “NO!”

Tracker looks baffled. “Why not?”

“Never again,” Adaine whispers. 

“What happened in the Elmville police department stays in the Elmville police department,” Kristen says seriously. 

“What?” Tracker and Sandra Lynn ask in unison.

“Never, ever again,” Fig says, and all six of them shudder. “Never again.”

—

Ten minutes later, they see the maw too late. 

And Leviathan herself swallows them up.

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Leviathan is so massive that she seems like a dozen separate places, and so broken that she is beautiful. She’s an architectural nightmare, a mess of stitched-together shipwrecks, hulls broken back into wholeness. Riz can see the structural support beams held together with rusty nails, can feel the magic woven into the depths of the foundations. She’s a monstrosity of a ship, and a health hazard of a city, held together by bobby-pins, tape, and sheer spite. It’s kind of the coolest thing Riz has ever seen. 

They trail through the alleys of the city, following a tiefling boy with a hero-worship crush on Fabian and a deep investment in a devilish multi-level marketing scheme. The air rings with gunshots and reeks of salt-rotting boards and gunpowder. Everyone is sun-worn and sea-stained, chapped lips and sharp eyes, loud laughter and hands that stay on holstered guns at hips. 

The wooden streets are lined with gaping doorways painted with sigils and the figureheads of ships. The buildings, constructed of recycled pirate ships, shoot up in dizzying, tilted layers, rigging hanging between the streets, clothing hanging out to dry next to lanterns that alternately glow with magical light or drip oil onto the planks and passerby below. Faded names, painted with love decades and decades ago, curl across the sides of buildings. Here, it’s not hard to see how Bill Seacaster might have gotten the idea to drag his ship straight from the sea and build his home around it. 

Leviathan is beautiful in the sense of a body built with the bones on the outside; the truth of her is bared in the sharp afternoon light, brutal functionality and ruthless efficiency, no time for frills. The beauty is in the chaos of it all. 

They get weird looks, a bunch of Solesian teens in a place up to the gills with weather-worn pirates. They trail down into Cannon Court, a subterranean, shifting maze of cobbled stones and barrels and dwarven sailors, all eying them with deep suspicion. 

Riz is startled and terrified when one drags him aside and starts hissing slurs, breath foul and eyes accusatory, looking to shoot the monster under the bed with a pistol. He’s surprised, somehow, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. He and Fig and Kristen terrorize the man straight into the ocean, and after that Riz walks in the middle of the group, his friends forming a bristling wall between him and the general population. Under their judgemental eyes, he feels like a cockroach, like a rat scurrying through the underbelly of a ship, vermin to be dealt with before it can multiply. 

He thinks he should be used to this by now. He should be used to the hate. 

He isn’t. He never is.

They reach the Gold Gardens, a sprawling campus of brothels and casinos and taverns. This is the most traditionally beautiful part of the city so far, golden as its name. The buildings are washed with peeling paint, but the windows are bright with warmth, laughter and music washing out from every corner. The air itself feels healthier, somehow. Kinder.

Alistair guides them in through the doors, and the noise multiplies. The ceiling is arched, several ships flipped upside down and renovated to make a massive, twisting space with polished, paneled wood and low, shimmering lantern light. There are alabaster hookahs littered throughout the tables, and a long bar overflowing with pirates shouting and laughing and drinking. The air is thick with different kinds of smoke, sweet tobacco and a lingering taste of magic alongside the slight stink of sweaty bodies. Fiddle music ripples out from a wood elf in the corner, letting the music carry them in a lively dance. It’s rowdy, and lovely, in a shocking, pirate city sort of way.

Alistair asks, “So, do you all know Garthy?” shooting Riz a look he can’t quite interpret. 

“They’re a friend of my father’s,” Fabian says confidently. 

“Right,” he says. “Well, they’re right over there.” He gestures at a table in a corner, with a secluded, more purposeful sort of energy, clearly an owner’s table. There are pirates milling about it, chatting with a person Riz can’t quite see from this vantage. 

They trail closer, all of Riz’s friends skirting around the edges of his space, still keeping him in the middle. They get about halfway across the bar when suddenly Tracker stops in her tracks, Kristen hitting her back, and Fig, still disguised as a pirate, hitting hers. “Holy shit,” she says, her voice a little awed. 

Riz pushes through, ducking under Tracker’s arm, and gets his first true look at Garthy O’Brien. They’re sprawled out in their cushioned chair like a cat lying in a sunbeam. They have a tall, muscular build, flowing pants, and a spray of undercut, black hair. Their chest is bare, green skin and faint scars overlaid with floral, runic tattoos, all sharp edges against elegant vines and petals. The tattoos shimmer like actual gold, and they’re draped in golden necklaces and bracelets and rings to complement it. 

Trying to focus on the tattoos makes Riz’s head hurt, for some reason. He’s trying to figure out if the runes might be enchanted, when Garthy turns their head and the whole world grinds to a stop. 

Their sclera are inky, midnight black, their irises twin halos of glowing gold ringing their black pupils. It’s the same glow, the same unearthly shine that has met Riz in every mirror he’s ever seen himself in. 

Garthy O’Brien is aasimar. Garthy O’Brien is a half-orc aasimar. 

Garthy themself scans the group, gaze piercing even through the distance and the haze of hookah smoke. They look over everyone, and turn their head, looking Riz dead in the eye. Their eyebrows shoot up, and he watches a brief flash of shock flicker over their face, an expression that Riz feels reflected in the sharp, sudden pull deep in his stomach. 

For a moment, the two of them just stare, one set of golden eyes to another. Riz understands, with a flicker of intuition, that Garthy is a difficult person to catch on the back foot, and yet they have both unbalanced each other here, so startling to see someone like them. And then they regain composure, the shock vanishing from their face. They smile, celestial eyes and shimmering makeup, and beckon lazily with one hand. 

“Holy shit,” Kristen says, gleeful, and leads the charge across the room to the table. Riz and the rest of them hurry to follow, weaving through the tables recklessly toward Garthy.

When they come to a stop at the side of the table, Garthy grins at them, half-orc tusks and sparkling lipstick. “Alistair, lovey,” they drawl, voice honeyed and effortless. “You’ve brought such interesting company.” 

They hold a hand out and Alistair bounces over, beaming with delight, saying, “See? You pay for the spells, and people know who you are.”

They look back at the group and say, “Well, welcome one and all to the Gold Gardens. If I can be of any service to you all, I trust that you’ll let me know.” 

Fig shakes his head, her Disguise Self melting off of her. She steps forward, red eyes glowing with excitement, and says, “Hi, Garthy. Figueroth Faeth. You’re an aasimar.” 

Garthy laughs a little, even their amusement languid. “Astute observation, lovey. I can see you have some experience with an aasimar of your own.” They turn to look at him, posture still relaxed, but eyes sharp with attention. “And you are?”

“Riz Gukgak,” he says, staring back at them with an equal amount of attention. 

“Well, delighted to make your acquaintance, lovey,” they say. They glance between Riz and Fig, tapping their fingers on the table. “You all seem a close group,” they say conversationally. “Fascinating to see the two of you together.” They flick a finger between Riz and Fig. “You know, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of meeting a few other aasimar throughout my life, and they don’t tend to get along too well with tieflings.”

Riz blinks, flicking his tail. “They must not have found the right tieflings,” he replies easily. 

Garthy smiles. “Right answer, lovey.”

There’s a suspiciously loud sniff beside him, and he looks over to see Fig with watery eyes. She punches him in the shoulder and says, “You’re going to ruin my reputation as a hardcore, trust-no-one rock star.”

“No one thinks of you like that,” Adaine says dismissively. “Hardcore? Sure. Trust-no-one? Definitely not.”

“They totally do! I’m a lone wolf in the eyes of the public!” 

“You went on tour with your best friend and your father,” Fabian points out. “You’re hardly a closed book.”

Riz, tuning out his friends as they tread back into familiar territory, (bickering over Fig’s relative “aloofness”) turns back to look at Garthy. The proprietor of the Gold Gardens is watching them with thinly veiled amusement. There’s an air about them that instantly sets Riz at ease, a sense of familiarity that makes little sense. To be honest, their energy reminds him quite a bit of Yvoni.

Garthy meets his eyes once more, and Riz asks, “So, you’ve met other aasimar?”

Because, well, he knew, of course, that there were other aasimar out there, but Elmville is an insular place, and Riz’s social circle has never been particularly large, despite his best efforts to make friends. He’s never really seen another one, never even heard of one beyond in passing. And that’s not even counting- gods, he never could have created Garthy O’Brien in his mind. 

They lean forward, one elbow on the table. “Of course, lovey,” they say. They sweep an expansive hand out at the raucous pirate revelry still surrounding them. “I get to know a great many people running a place like this. The Gold Gardens have a knack for attracting a bit of everything, and I’m not an inexperienced traveler myself. I’ve seen a bit of everything.” They tilt their head, an edge of that awed sort of smile tugging at their lips. “It takes quite a bit to surprise me, but I’ll admit, lovey, you’re a bit singular. Never thought I’d meet one quite like you.”

Never thought I’d meet one like me, Riz hears, the unspoken thunderclap resonating between their chests. It’s strange, in a way, to hear confirmation that even amongst aasimar, he is rare, but it feels like an afterthought in the shadow of Garthy and the way they effortlessly take up space, someone enormous and holy and utterly certain of their place, monster and angel made into one being that has claimed divinity for itself. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, chest tight in a new, poignant kind of way. “Life’s full of surprises.”

“Indeed it is, lovey, indeed it is.” Garthy laughs. “Can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure of welcoming someone Bytopic in my establishment, but there must be a first time for everything, right? Can’t say you seem like a terrible person to start with.”

The whole world stops. The noise of the bar dissolves into a faint ringing in his ears, just the roar of his heartbeat and the thunder of waves inside his bones. He stares. “Say that again?” he whispers.

“Bytopic?” Kristen’s voice cuts through the ringing, full of lightning-bolt shock. “Bytopic, as in…?” 

Riz realizes, belatedly, that their whole group has gone so silent they could hear a pin drop, were it not for the other pirates in the room. 

Garthy freezes. Their eyes go comically wide, and the irises ripple with kaleidoscopic shades of lighter and darker gold. “Ah,” they say softly, their voice thick with a complicated mix of surprise and remorse and empathy. “Apologies, lovey. I have… misjudged the situation.”

Bytopic. Riz’s mind swirls, frantic. Bytopic. 

Flashbacks. The Heavenstigation Board. Kristen’s mild obsession with the upper planes, her wheedling to try to find Riz’s. The layers, the different names for them in different languages. Bytopic. 

“Bytopia,” Riz says, dizzy with it. “That’s where I’m from?”

Garthy pauses. Their gaze flickers over the rest of the group, behind Riz. He doesn’t dare to turn and look, doesn’t think he could handle their reactions too. “Well, if I had to hazard a guess, darling, yes. I’ve had the distinct pleasure to visit a great many of the Upper Planes, and my visit to Bytopia was brief, but the magical signature is quite distinct. You feel like that plane.” They meet Riz’s gaze, their brows furrowed with guilt. “I’m so sorry, lovey. I assumed you would have known.”

They all stand in silence, Riz trying to process that, trying to remember anything he can about Bytopia. There’s not much, honestly. He had mostly ignored Kristen when she tried to push him into researching it. Suddenly, that avoidance feels, if not silly, then at the very least, completely useless. 

(Is it better, he wonders, to know where half of you is from, and know you have no connection to it at all? Or is it better to wander through the universe without that pressure, forever wanting and refusing to know in equal measure? Can’t ever fall short of your personal heaven if you don’t know which one is yours. Can’t ever find yours if you don’t know which to aim for.)

“Fuck,” Kristen says, looking sick. “Shit. Fuck. I know I wanted to know this, but now you look so sad that I take it back! Jeez. Does this place serve alcohol?” she asks Garthy. “I’m too sober to deal with this.” And without hesitation, she reaches back and snatches an illithid’s mead right out from under his tentacles. 

—

Later, after the confrontation with Whitclaw and the talk with Garthy and the scuffle at the van, they troop back into the Gold Gardens. Gilear is whining and Cathilda is helping him hobble along. Sandra Lynn vanishes into the depths of the bar, presumably to get trashed. 

Riz is about to start weaving through the bar, perhaps to find Adaine, when Garthy materializes at his shoulder. “‘Scuse me, lovey,” they say, looking down at him. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like a word in private.” 

Riz hesitates, looking up, trying to get a read on them. They’ve been nothing but helpful and accommodating so far, but they’ve also proven themself to be an incredibly powerful magic-user, one that commands a remarkable amount of respect, no small feat on a pirate city. 

Garthy, perhaps sensing his hesitation, softens. “It’s nothing bad, lovey. And if you’d rather we talk somewhere public, or not at all, that’s fine as well. The last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable.”

Riz tries to remind himself that his paranoia, while often justified, is probably unnecessary here. “No, that’s fine. We can go somewhere private.”

Garthy inclines their head, and he follows them through the floor. Pirates pause their revelry to move out of Garthy’s way as they stride through, and Riz half-jogs to keep up with their long strides, skittering in their shadow to avoid attention. He still draws a few strange looks from some of the pirates, but it seems no one is willing to try anything in Garthy’s presence. 

They end up back in the same hookah lounge as before, but this time, when Garthy sits down, they don’t go to smoke. They wait until Riz pushes himself into a seat, watching attentively. He eyes them, trying to get a grasp of the situation. Their brows are furrowed, their gold eyes a bit dimmer than before, leaned forward on one elbow. 

Once Riz is settled, they say, their voice gentle, “I feel that I owe you an apology, lovey. I can’t help but sense that I dropped a bit of a bomb on you earlier that never got addressed in the wake of your friends’... excitement.”

“Excitement is one way to put it,” he grumbles, already mentally trying to make a list of what he knows about James Whitclaw, and what could possibly be helpful in a fight against a mind flayer. Then he thinks about what Garthy just said, and the irritation dissolves into exhaustion. “I… yeah. It was… a little bit of a bomb. It’s fine. You weren’t trying to do it.”

“Of course not,” they say. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect you.” They pause, long and weighty. “I take it your celestial parent hasn’t been around much.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Riz says. The bitter part of his brain whispers, If he had been around a minute less, you might not even have happened. 

“Can I ask how they were around?” Garthy asks delicately.

He blows out a breath through his fangs, lets the air come out sliced into ribbons. “Mom said he looked like a goblin,” he says after a long moment. “Said he said his name was Pok. It was a… one time thing. They met in a bar. Went out. He said, apparently, that he was on a short work trip. They went their separate ways. Mom didn’t even know he was a celestial until I came out.”

“Ah,” Garthy sighs, an involuntary, punched-out note of sympathy. “And you’ve never heard anything more from him?”

Riz shakes his head. “But it’s fine,” he says fiercely. “Mom is enough for me.”

They sigh, and tilt their head at him. “Oh, darling,” they say. “It isn’t about enough. I’m sure she’s enough for you. But being enough is not the same as understanding, yeah?” They smile, sad. “It’s a lonely life, isn’t it? Being half of something no one can touch.”

Riz looks down at his hands, digs his claws into his palms. His chest closes up, a peculiar echo of freshman year, when he was just starting to click with Kristen, the flayed-raw, carved-open sensation of being seen. “Yeah,” he murmurs. 

“So, then, it’s not an issue of her being enough for you. I’m sure she’s lovely. But she can’t help you with that aspect of yourself. It’s okay to have different people who can understand and support the different parts of you. That’s quite healthy, I think. So it’s good, you know, to have some kind of connection to something that can understand that part of you.” 

He nods. “Yeah,” he agrees, his voice rougher than he would have liked. “I mean…  it really sucked, for a long time. I have a… she’s my mom’s friend, but she’s really more like a second mom. And she’s a wizard, but that’s not my magic, you know?” 

Garthy nods encouragingly. 

“So that was really lonely. But now I have Kristen, and even Tracker, and it’s… they get it more. What it’s like to just have it inside of you. So it’s been really cool to have that, and for some reason, it’s reassuring that they don’t have all the answers either. Like, okay, maybe I’m not weird for not knowing how any of this works. Maybe it’s not weird that I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I mean, practically all Kristen does is question her religion and think about the world, and that’s really meaningful for her. So, I get what you’re saying.” He looks up at Garthy, curling his tail around his ankles. “Did you know your celestial parent?” 

They lean back, bracelets clinking against each other, and get a distant, nostalgic look on their face. “Well, technically, I had a half-orc parent, and a Zajiri, celestial parent, yeah? And they were my biological parents, or, as biological as a celestial child can be. Because celestials are all energy given physical form, so aasimar are more magic-induced blessings than true impregnation. 

“But I knew my biological mother until she passed, and I did know my other parent, though my interactions with them were more sparing. Angels don’t often walk the Prime Material in any sort of permanent fashion. Nonetheless, I did have a relationship with them. 

“My strongest connection, though, was with my adopted mother after my biological mother passed. She had some celestial blood of her own, and was a remarkably powerful wizard even without accounting for that. So she could share her experiences, and could also physically share the Upper Planes with me through magic. So I had a few sources of input and understanding throughout my life. 

“Much like yours, they came in great part from people whose experiences were not exactly the same as mine, but were still meaningful. But speaking with my Zajiri parent and maintaining that connection has been quite impactful for me. There is something, I think, to knowing where you come from. What you do with that knowledge afterward is entirely up to you, but I find it is almost always better to have the whole scope of the situation within your grasp.”

They fall silent for a minute, letting Riz absorb that. He thinks about his mom, thinks about Yvoni. Thinks about Kristen’s doubt and Tracker’s faith, both of them holy. It’s beautiful to see, certainly. But it’s not his, not exactly. Where does he fall, between the Prime Material and this distant Upper Plane where he supposedly came from? A blessing, Garthy had said. 

Riz thinks about the Heavenstigation Board. All the angles. All the information. He takes a deep breath. He looks up at Garthy, at their shimmering eyes and spiky tattoos, glowing under the dim, warm light of the lounge. “What do you know about Bytopia?” he asks. 

Garthy taps their fingers on the backrest of their booth, humming slightly. “Well, lovey, I’ll preface this by saying that I don’t know as much about that plane as some of the other Upper Planes.”

“That’s fine. I’ll take what you can give me.”

Their eyes soften. “Alright, darling.” They pause for a moment, clearly thinking. “Bytopia,” they say slowly, “is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the dual Upper Planes, which is to say, it has two layers that sort of reflect each other. Think of it like if a continent were cut in half, and folded like a sandwich, so that the two landscapes face one another, and there’s a layer of atmosphere in the middle, like the center of the sandwich. The atmosphere of one layer is the jelly, and the other is the peanut butter, yeah? And where they meet in the middle, gravity switches. 

“So there are some mountains that go from the surface of one layer, all the way up through the sky, to become another mountain on the surface of the other layer, and if you climb from the bottom up to the top of one layer, the gravity switches, and you can climb back down to the other surface of the other layer.” 

Riz blinks. His brain is trying to construct a diagram. “Okay,” he says. “Two layers of land that face each other, and halfway through the air between the layers, gravity switches? So you can stand on the surface of either layer without falling, and you can cross between the layers by crossing the gravity border?”

“Exactly,” they confirm. “One of the layers is pretty temperate, mild weather, very picturesque. And the other has a much harsher climate, but still beautiful, in that harsh weather is sometimes pretty, you know?”

He thinks of harsh thunderstorms, the ones that make the power go out and the buildings creak and the trees stoop under the gale. Terrifying, but in a way that is a little alluring. He always wonders what it would feel like to stand in that. Wonders what it would be like to see a hurricane from the eye. “Yeah,” he says.

Garthy smiles. “As far as the people, I know it’s pretty famous for being a realm of hard work. Of intense dedication. Folks who spend their whole life going and then get to heaven and decide they aren’t done yet.”

“...That does sound like me,” Riz admits, only a little begrudgingly. 

They laugh. “I know that it’s not dedicated necessarily to any specific pantheon. So I can’t say, exactly, what kind of angel your father was, though I will say, those lovely markings you’ve got there-” they gesture at Riz’s web of stained-glass, spiderweb lines, “-are more typically indicative, in my experience, of a risen soul, which Bytopia also has plenty of. Souls that were mortal, and rose to the heavens after their death.”

Riz nods. “Right. Kirizdue.” At their eyebrow raise, he elaborates, “For my people, it’s the goblin word for a risen soul.”

“Ah,” they say. They look him over for a long moment, mouth quirked up to the side, gaze hovering between confused and amused. “You know, lovey, I can’t help but get the feeling that I’m telling you things you already know. Not that I’m complaining. I enjoy a good, multi-religious conversation as much as the next person, but I feel that you might not have needed my input here.”

Riz hunches his shoulders, pressing his ears back against his head. “I-” he starts, and then falls silent. Because, well, they’re right. Riz has a funny tendency to think about things even when he isn’t thinking about them. The harder he tries to relax, to think about something else, the harder his brain tries to solve the puzzle. 

This is his oldest puzzle, the mental clue board that his brain has been rearranging and considering since he was old enough to understand that it meant something that his father was a celestial. This is the mystery that has haunted Riz’s every step, the shadow that has had one hand on his throat, taunting, through every dark moment. And he has very purposefully tried to never think about, which, of course, means that he thinks about it all the time, the uncertainty of his own history coloring every moment of unmoored silence in his soul. 

“I think,” he says slowly, “that I tried to not think about it so hard that I ended up thinking about it a lot. And you’re just… confirming what I never actually said aloud to myself.”

“Ah,” Garthy agrees. Empathy colors their voice like one of Kristen’s tie dyes. “I can understand that. It’s quite scary, isn’t it, lovey? To be all alone in the dark.”

“It’s not the dark that gets me.” Riz is a rogue. Riz loves the dark. Darkness is his cloak and his sword, his gun and his shield. It’s the alone part that terrifies him. 

He looks at Garthy. They’re so much older than he is. They’re filled out, heavy, lean musculature beginning to gain soft edges, chiseled shoulders and a soft pudge around the stomach. Laid out, they look elegant and regal, like some sort of beast of prey sprawled out in their territory, unbothered. Gold makeup and gold eyes, celestial tattoos mingling with a spray of jewelry, they have moved themself to balance the tightrope wire of mortality and divinity and stand on it, laughing.

Garthy is not goblin, but there’s enough overlap between the sorts of monstrous that the two of them are that this is the closest Riz has ever come to a reflection. He’s spent his whole life chasing down as much knowledge as he can hold, clinging to information with all the jealousy of a dragon and its hoard. There’s so much that he wants to ask, so much that he wants to know, so much that Garthy might have answers for, but they would be here all night, and so much of what he wants to ask is so embarrassing, so he won’t do all that. 

Instead, he settles for the most important part. “How do you sit with it?” he asks. “When does it start to be something that you have, instead of something that has you?”

Their eyes soften, their whole posture opening like a flower. They smile, soft and sad, knowing and proud. They lean forward into their elbows and tap one of Riz’s claws on the table with one finger. “I’m going to let you in on a secret, lovey,” they say. “It’s all monster. It’s all holy. And it’s up to you which one you want. You can take one, or both, or neither, and any option is just fine, as long as you can live with it. But once you choose, you have it, and it doesn’t have you.”

Riz looks down at their hands, markings and claws, tattoos and gold rings, green on green in the low lantern light. He looks up at them. “Which one did you choose?”

Garthy grins, tusks and gold lipstick and eyes that burn like molten ore. “I’m Zajiri, lovey. We take everything that makes us feel good. I took all of it. And you know? There’s something to being a holy monster. 

“I don’t think I’d be half as happy if I tried to be something appealing to everyone. I can entertain anyone who comes in my establishment, but I stopped trying to satisfy everyone with my own life a long time ago. That’s a losing battle, lovey. No, I rather like who I am.” 

Riz breathes in, breathes out. He flexes his claws, feels the pulse of magic under his skin. It lingers, long and fierce, like the humidity of rain sticking around long after the puddles have evaporated. 

He thinks about splitting a dragon apart with a sword wreathed in shadow and the light from inside of himself. He thinks about the crunch of bone and flesh beneath his teeth, thinks about what dragon meat felt like, thick in his stomach. He thinks about cleaning up his friends with a medkit and stitching them up with holy light. He thinks about heating up his mom’s coffee cups in the early hours of the morning, when the sky is still dark and the world is still holding its breath, waiting for morning. 

All of it. He wants all of it. 

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Thank you.” For talking to him. For understanding. For existing, as someone who made it past the teenage confusion, to just be here, happy and whole and comfortable. For being proof that there’s a future for him. 

Garthy smiles, like they heard every syllable of the gratitude Riz didn’t say. “Any time, lovey. Any time.” They pause. “Can I ask you a question, darling? If it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Sure.”

“You’re chasing down the Crown of the Nightmare King for a grade. For a school quest. There are easier things. Surely there are other adventurers who could do this, ones older and more experienced. Why not ask for help? Why do it yourself?”

Riz pauses to think about this. He really tries. Why do it? It’s so much work, and for what? When someone else, someone older and wiser and stronger could do it?

“I mean, I really do need A’s for my classes this year,” he says seriously. “And, I mean, we were technically the ones who broke the seal on Aguefort’s office, so, this is kinda our fault. We should clean it up.” He pauses. 

“But, also,” he says slowly, voice heavy, “someone else could do it, but how am I supposed to know that they will? Someone has to do it. And if the way to make sure it gets done is doing it ourselves, that’s what we’re gonna do. There’s no world where I let bad things happen on the off chance that someone else might be around to stop them.”

Garthy looks at him for a long time, gaze searching. Finally, they sigh and shake their head, and Riz catches notes of pride and sadness all mixed together. “You all are doing a very noble thing for a world that, I suspect, has not been terribly kind to any of you. That is very brave. I wish that this had been a world where you could have been brave kids, instead of brave heroes.” 

“I’m okay with my life,” Riz says.

They smile, and squeeze his hand. “Well, that’s all we can hope for, isn’t it, darling?”

He looks down at the tattoos scrawled over the back of Garthy’s palm, creeping up their arm to wrap over their collarbones like ivy. 

Riz has never really gotten it, when Fabian or Kristen or Fig talk about people being hot. He doesn’t really understand the difference between pretty and hot, can’t figure out where the delineation of sexy falls separate from hot. It all makes his skin crawl a little. 

But he can understand beauty, from an objectively aesthetic viewpoint. He can appreciate people in the same way that he might loosely admire art in a museum. He can see Garthy’s general appeal. They really are beautiful, unapologetic about their own existence. 

Riz looks at the tattoos for a long moment. He traces over the sharp edges of the floral designs, the angular patterns of the runes, and his headache, strangely enough, starts to come back. He’s staring at one along Garthy’s wrist, razored ink and calligraphy floral, delight in everything-

Riz freezes. He pulls their wrist closer. “What the fuck,” he says. 

“Oh, you like that one?” they ask breezily. “Good choice. Something my parent said to me once. I liked it so much I had it tattooed.”

“No, that’s not- I mean, that’s cool, but why can I read it?” He turns to stare at Garthy’s chest intently, mapping the curl of runes that drapes over their shoulders to trail down their sides. He stares, trying to will it into making sense. He catches a few words here and there. Love. Peace. Satisfaction. Passion. Mostly he just gets a worse headache. 

Garthy laughs, bright and warm like sticky summer nights. “You’re aasimar, lovey, of course you can read it. Didn’t you know?”

“No,” he says, trying furiously to decipher the tattoos. 

“Well, there’s two types of languages, yeah?” they explain. “There’s learned, which is what we typically think of. Common, Orcish, Goblin, Elvish, so on and so forth. Those are languages you learn through exposure and practice. But the second type is inherited language. Infernal and Celestial are both examples of that. It’s a more biological language. Something that can be learned by any, but some, who carry the magic or the bloodline, inherently comprehend it. Your friend Fig could read Infernal without learning it. You can read Celestial without learning it.”

Riz’s temples are pounding. “It’s giving me a headache.”

“Oh, lovey, that’s because you’re trying too hard. You can’t brute force this. Try to relax a little.” 

He looks up at them. “I am really bad at that.” 

They snort. “I can see that. Give it your best shot.”

“But how?” he says, frustrated. “It makes no sense!” Biological language? The idea is stupid. He’s spoken Goblin and Common since before he can remember, but that didn’t magically happen, he knows. It goes against every rule of language to just understand one. The words aren’t even translating themselves, the meaning just appears in his head, an understanding as natural as if he had learned it as a child. It makes no sense. 

Garthy smiles warmly. “It’s magic, lovey. Of course it doesn’t make sense. We don’t have to understand everything to find it beautiful. Just sit back and enjoy the mystery of it all.”

Riz takes a deep, frustrated breath. His head is aching and his jaw is tight, his shoulders high. He forces his jaw to unclench, makes his shoulders sit lower. He thinks about Kristen, about her love for everything, even if she doesn’t understand it. Questions to answers to more questions, he thinks. It’s all okay. It’s all magic. It’s all his.

He opens his eyes. He looks at Garthy’s tattoos. He doesn’t force it. Just enjoy the mystery of it all, he thinks. And the meanings just slide into his head, just float up from the depths as if they had always been there, which, he supposes, they have. 

Mostly, their tattoos are Zajiri sayings, about pleasure and enjoyment, things that are good and beautiful. There are some that make Riz flush and look away, but most of them are just… good. Kind. Full of appreciation for life. He catches a few lines of script that detail which specific flowers in the designs are in dedication of other people, people that must have been particularly meaningful to them. He catches half of what must be a name vanishing around the slope of their ribs, and can’t quite make it out. He decides that probably isn’t his business. 

After he’s read everything he can reasonably see, he looks back up at Garthy. “They really are cool,” he says. 

“Well, thank you, lovey,” they say. “You know, I’m partial to the Zajiri dialect of Celestial, but I’m pretty sure our tattoo folks know some more. If you’ve got any interest at all, one of the ladies, Parkala, might know some Bytopic. You get one tattoo free with the room, but if you decide you want more, consider them on the house.”

Riz looks up at them, raw power and settled confidence, beautiful and immovable and satisfied with their own skin in a way maybe he will be one day. “I’m really glad I met you,” he says. 

They smile, their face softening. “I’m glad I met you too, lovey.”

“I’m not getting a tattoo though,” Riz says. 

Garthy shrugs. “No skin off my nose, darling. But I wouldn’t speak so soon if I were you. The night’s barely started.”

—

It’s been a stressful fucking day. An emotional roller coaster like no other. Riz feels scraped raw and bloody, covered in open rashes and exhausted to his bones. 

Ragh tells him it’ll make his brain even bigger. That he’ll understand more. 

Maybe that’s not the best course of action here, but Riz has never been one for self-preservation. 

Fuck it. He takes the dragon spice. It burns, makes his eyes water and his nose flare in protest. Ragh and Fabian cheer, and he feels… not relaxed exactly, but curious to see what this will feel like. 

After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

—

It’s easy to find Parkala. Riz is solving mysteries he wasn’t even aware of before now. His brain has never been this big. Finding one hired tattoo artist is easy. 

Parkala is a tall, orcish woman in the back with an undercut, a nose ring, and sleeve tattoos that vanish up into a flowing white tank top.

Riz pushes his Nightmare King boards covered in clues up onto her table and says, “I need all of this on me. I can’t forget about any of it. I want it as tattoos, that way I’ll never forget, I can just look at my skin and remember.” He’s pretty sure he’s sweating. It’s a feat of will that he’s even still standing here and not ascending to godhood with how much of the universe he suddenly understands.

Parkala raises one slitted eyebrow at him and leans in, eyes narrowed. “Kid, are you high?”

“Very,” he says. “And this is incredibly important.” 

She eyes his boards with a dubious eye. “You want… all of this?” 

“All of it,” he confirms. 

She sighs and turns back to him. “Alright, kid. But if you wake up in the morning pissed, it ain’t my problem, you got me?”

“It’s okay, I would never harass you about your job,” he says. “I hate inconveniencing customer service workers.”

She snorts with amusement. “Alright, kid. Shirt off. I’m gonna need a lot of canvas for this.”

Riz looks at his boards, at the tattoo setup, at the lights and Parkala’s tattoos. He thinks about Garthy’s tattoos. Pleasure and beauty and desire. Temptation in a holy sense. He gets to choose what he wants. 

“Hey,” he says. “Garthy said that you know some dialects of Celestial?” 

Parkala, who has begun sorting through his clues on his board, stops. She turns to look at him and raises an eyebrow, gaze skirting over his eyes and his markings. “I do. You wanting something Celestial?”

He meets her eyes, tilts his head. “Do you think I could get all of this in Bytopic? Garthy said it’s on the house.”

Parkala grins. She flips a pen through her fingers, and magic flickers across tattoos. Faith tattoos, he realizes. Something orcish. He’s looking at a cleric. “Now we’re talking, kid,” she says. 

—

Later, amid the heart-stopping terror, Riz does not even have the time or space to have any feelings about Garthy and their neon outline wings.

They find Fabian hanging from ropes, blood dripping through his hair, like an omen of death painted over the sky and the stench of sea air. He’s eerily silent as they load him in the van and traipse back to the Gold Gardens, wrung dry and helpless, mistakes and despair hanging in a miasma throughout the rooms. It feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel, like trying to wring blood from a stone to find even an iota of energy. 

Riz’s magic roars along the inside of his skin, eroding him from the inside out, a need to protect and no way to do it. He takes his gun and his sword and goes into Fabian’s room, curls up in a cushy chair against the edge of the room, armed to the teeth, ears pricked. His tattoos itch.

He listens to the distant call of gulls, the melodies of drunken pirates singing in the streets, the steady, defeated whisper of Fabian’s breathing. He lets the rumble of the Hangman and the siren call of Fabian’s proof of life lull him into an uneasy sleep. He dreams of running through the endless, maze-like streets of Leviathan as the buildings crumble into the sea, a rat on the sinking ship. 

He wakes up in a state of sleep paralysis, chest crushed like the structures of his dreams. The room is thick with sea air and the stench of spilled oil. Fabian is gone, the Hangman collapsed, sword through the engine, oil slick like blood on the floor. And there are two slitted yellow eyes looking right into his. 

“Hi, Riz,” says Kalina. “How you doing?”

Chapter Text

Riz stares up at the Shadow Cat, struggling to breathe, some distant part of his hind brain shrieking in sheer, animal panic. 

Kalina stares back, ears flicked toward him, smile familiar, friendly. The most disturbing part of it all, he decides, is her pupils, the way they’re dilated, swallowing up more of her irises than they should. Like Riz is either family, or prey.

He scrambles to collect his thoughts. No time for animal panic now. 

Past the vice grip of the paralysis on his lungs, and the weight of a whole person on his chest, he chokes out, “What did you do to Fabian?” It comes out broken and thorny, scraping at his throat. Screaming for help is off the table. He’s on his own.

Kalina huffs, an amused, catlike noise. Her tail swings back and forth, lazy. “Oh, no, I can’t take any credit for that, I didn’t do anything to Fabian. That was the boss.”

Riz tries to breathe. He feels like he might be suffocating, but there’s no time for that, no time for anything as inefficient as dying. “You work for the Nightmare King?” he whispers past his closed-up throat. 

She tilts her head and smiles, softly amused, like an adult indulging a toddler. “Yeah, kiddo, I work for the Nightmare King. That’s right.” She surveys his face, and he can feel it like the edge of a knife peeling back his skin in flaps to see what’s underneath. “You have grown, by the way. I mean, truly, just the spitting image of your mother and father, a perfect combo of the two.”

Riz can almost feel his heart stop beating. And then the fear and the confusion bubbles over into something white-hot and scalding, something closer to loathing than panic. “You’re hilarious,” he hisses. “Where did-” 

Kalina shifts on her haunches, leaning forward to get even closer to his face, the claws of her thumbs brushing against his throat. “You think I’m joking?” she says. “Oh, kiddo. I do a lot of things quite happily, but I’m not a joker.”

He swallows. “You worked with my mom. You couldn’t have known my father. He’s a celestial.”

“Oh, he’s a celestial now,” she says. “That wasn’t always the case. He rose to the Upper Planes, remember, kiddo? A risen soul. I knew him back before he decided to make himself an angel. Knew him back when he was a too-curious guy running himself into the ground and sticking his nose in messes he couldn’t clean up.” Her claws press deeper. “Honestly remarkable that you ended up exactly the same without ever even meeting the guy. Stubborn makes stubborn, I guess.”

He stares up at her, tries to gauge her truthfulness from her body language. She’s one of the best, his mom had said. So either she’s an excellent liar, or she’s telling the truth. 

Kalina sighs. “You don’t believe me. Well, that’s fine. It’s true.” She tips her head at him and smiles, unbothered. “Pok was the same way. Needed evidence to believe things. Had to go hunting for his clues. It’s what got him killed in the end, that he couldn’t leave well enough alone. Personally, I’m hoping you’ll take more after your mom. She’ll run herself into the ground, but even in her twenties, she was better at picking reasonable ways to kill herself.”

Riz’s heart, running like a rabbit in his ribcage, tries to pull a full mutiny. She’s the Shadow Cat, his mind scrambles. She has fingers in everything, and she’s impossible to catch. And she had been there when Riz was young, according to his mom. It makes sense that she could tell a good story, that she could even get her hands on the name his mom got from the celestial. It doesn’t mean she’s not full of shit. 

Riz drags his mind back to the task at hand, forces himself to focus. “My mom trusted you,” he says, accusing. 

She laughs. “Oh, no she didn’t. Not really. We worked together, and she was friendly enough. But there was no trust there. I appreciated that. Smart woman.”

“What are you doing?”

“What am I doing? You said it, Riz. Come on. I work for the Nightmare King.”

“Why?” He can’t understand it. All the nightmares, all the fear, broken mirrors and shadows that kill, and for what?

“Is that an honest question? Why?” Kalina asks, incredulous. “He grants me unlimited power. All that I am and all that I’m capable of doing, he gave to me. Do you really not understand why a person might do things that benefitted them? 

“I know that you only do things to kind of distract yourself from how deeply alone you feel because your dad was never around, I get that. The Maidens, and then you find the Maidens, and then it’s on to the next thing, and the conspiracy board, and you don’t sleep, and you’re digging, digging, digging— it’s like when you were in that palimpsest. You will dig until your own hands bleed because the second you slow down you will have to deal with the fact that he didn’t want you enough to stay. Sorry, bud.”

Kalina looks like this is more than just a mission. She looks like this is fun. A game of cat and mouse that she’s sure she’ll always win. It makes Riz’s stomach twist. She’s playing with his insides like a ball of yarn.

“So we gotta talk about you and your friends coming for this crown, because that’s gonna be a no-go from us.”

He scrambles for any kind of sense. He’s still wrung-out, exhausted from the drugs and the tattoos and running through Leviathan after Fabian. “Wh- what do you-” he stutters.

“What do I want? I just said it. Pack it in. This one’s not you, chief.” She sighs. “Now, I know that I’m talking to the most obstinate one in the group. I do get that, for sure. You came by it honest on both sides. And I’ll admit, I’ve been having a hard time breaking through whatever these runes are, but you guys seem to have fucked up badly enough that it seems whatever spell was keeping me out wore off and now we’re back here.” 

Is she the source of the dreams? If the Moon Haven is keeping Kalina specifically out, and when she comes back, so do the dreams, then…

“So it’s not the Nightmare King. It’s you that’s— you can come into our dreams?”

She raises a brow. “Are you dreaming right now? You wanna pinch yourself? Oh, no, you can’t, you’re paralyzed. I’m sorry.” She sits back, tail swishing through the air. “Well, I just want to see if we can talk reason,” she says, as if Riz is being an irritating business partner. “You guys want to get this crown back. That can’t happen. Where do we find compromise here? ‘Cause they’re restraining your buddy Ragh out there, and while they’re doing that, Fabian slipped out the window. So, I would say cut your losses at one dead friend. That would be me, but we can go for more if you want.”

Rage bubbles up in his chest, in his crushed lungs, burns under his skin like boiling water. Fuck that. He’s a protector. 

His fingers close around the hilt of his sword, and he tries to look intimidating, tries to scald her like the magic is scalding him. “How about no dead friends?” he says, and vanishes from beneath her. 

He hits the ground in the campus of the Gold Gardens, arms frozen, and feels something shatter in his shoulder. The paralysis doesn’t end. He scans for Fabian, but there’s nothing, no one, just an empty square and the distant roar of drunken pirates. 

He’s trying to figure out which way Fabian might have gone, and is about two seconds away from just picking a direction and Misty Stepping on his own, when Kalina strolls out of an alley, looking absolutely unbothered. She looks around, glancing through the square. “Ah, bud,” she says, voice full of mocking sympathy. “Yeah, he’s been gone. That’s my bad. I should have given you the timeline on that. That’s my mistake.”

She steps closer, closer, until she’s standing right over Riz, looking down at him. Her pupils flicker, growing slightly, and his stomach flips with the confirmation that she’s enjoying this. “So, we definitely clocked some kind of eye contact when you were about to be sacrificed, right?”

“...Yeah.” 

Kalina hums, considering, and flexes her claws. “You seem like a guy that likes information. Is there any kind of information I can offer you?”

Alarm bells ring in his head. “What do you want in return?”

“Buddy, we’re just talking right now. I’m trying to help you see reason.”

Riz’s fingers itch. His skin itches. His tattoos itch. His magic bubbles, a pot about to boil over. He feels his eyes begin to glow more fiercely. “I want to know where the crown is,” he says. “I want to know where Fabian is. I want to know why people are coming for us in our sleep.” I want to know how to make sure you’ll never hurt my friends ever again.

Kalina raises a brow at him. “Why do you assume I know where the crown is?”

All of the air rushes out of him. The crown. Arianwen. Coming to Leviathan because she can’t get places. Fuck. “You don’t know where the crown is. Oh boy.”

“That’s not what I said. I said, why do you think I know where the crown is? I would correct you, but I don’t think you’re gonna believe me.”

“I think I know where the crown is, and you have handily defeated me even after I said my cool one-liner, so I assume you also figured it out.”

She stares at him for a long moment. One ear flicks. Her nose twitches. “What do you see… happening from here?” she asks. “Because I do wanna get this sorted out, but I am- Look, I think you can see I have no tricks up my sleeve, right?” she says, holding up her hands in a gesture of innocence that Riz would laugh at if he weren’t so terrified. 

“I’m not doing anything. I’m not casting any spells on you. I’m not murdering you right here on the ground, right?” she continues, with the air of a slightly frustrated friend trying to do him a favor. “I want this to be resolved amicably. The issue that I’m feeling right now is that I wanna know what needs to happen for you guys to give this up. And if you don’t give it up, then I just guess I wanna say this is gonna get so much worse.”

Riz’s heart is trying to beat itself to death in his chest. His shoulder sends spikes of pain up through his neck and down his spine with every breath. He still can’t move, body betraying him. 

Ragh is possessed. Fabian is gone, possibly dead. Zelda is mad at Gorgug, and Fig’s dad and Riz’s sort-of-friend is trapped in a ruby. Arianwen is running around, associated with the crown, dragging up all kinds of old wounds in Adaine. They’ve barely started and they’re already drowning in this. And, well. Riz helped Adaine with the historical research. He knows the tales of the Nightmare King. He knows that this is going to get worse. He knew all along. 

(It’s what got him killed in the end, Kalina had said, a long-simmering joy glinting in her slitted eyes, that he couldn’t leave well enough alone. Reveling in the pain of some long-dead other person. 

Riz thinks she’s a liar and a manipulator. And maybe there is some grain of truth to her story, but whatever truth there is, she is twisting it to suit herself, of that much he is certain. The one thing he knows, knows in his gut, understands to be true in every sense of the word, is that she wasn’t lying about one thing: whoever she thinks was Riz’s father, she got killed. Which gives Riz his answer.)

“We can’t give it up.”

Kalina laughs. “What, you can’t take an F? You can’t repeat the year? Buddy, what are you talking about?”

His magic burns in his chest, in his veins. Protect, protect, protect. “We can’t give it up because it would be wrong,” he says. 

“It would be wrong? Wow, okay. Well, what’s right about you and all your friends dying? Seems like Arthur Aguefort’s got everything figured out. He’s got a bunch of kids going out there and putting themselves in harm’s way, getting their lives taken, and for what? What do you care what happens in Sylvaire, the Forest of the Nightmare King?”

Now, Riz thinks Arthur Aguefort has six out of seven screws loose in his head, but he isn’t the one killing Fabian and possessing Ragh. So Kalina can shove that defense up her ass, for all he cares. 

“It’s not gonna end there,” he says. “If we don’t stop this, then you’ll do this to the next adventuring party that comes after you.”

She looks down at him, her mouth curving in a displeased arc. “Well, you seem pretty set in your ways. Can’t say I’m surprised, what with your two bloodlines, but I will say that I’m disappointed.” She crouches down to sit right over him, raking her eyes over his face. “Do you know who I am?” she asks. 

Riz takes a deep, sharp breath, trying to get some kind of scent off of her, something, anything that he could use to identify her later, but he can’t get anything. All he smells is sea air and the stink of boards that are eternally soaking in the ocean. “I know that you worked with my mother,” he says cautiously. 

She nods, a reminiscent sort of smile flitting across her face. “Sklonda Gukgak. A good woman. I always did like working with her. No bullshit with that one. And I had the distinct pleasure of working with your father before he died. When you happened, gods, kid, I was so surprised. Should’ve known Pok would be the posthumous gift that keeps on giving. He never did know when to call it quits. And, you know, I even had my doubts when you were little, but the older you get-” She shakes her head with a whistle, and reaches out to drag a single, clawed forefinger over his cheek and down his jaw, “-no mistaking that face, kiddo.”

Riz’s stomach twists. He tries to pull away, but his body is still refusing to cooperate, so there’s nowhere to go. She’s really doubling down on this part, which makes him a little nauseous. Because if she’s lying, she’s the damn best liar he’s ever met. And if she’s not lying… well. Riz will burn that bridge when he gets to it.

“You say you knew him,” he tries. “What went wrong between you two?”

She raises both brows this time. Her face is mostly unchanged, but her ears flick slightly, her tail stilling just barely before resuming its lazy sway. “Nothing went wrong between us,” she says. “But he asked the wrong questions. Chased the wrong things.” She eyes him for a long moment, and then smiles. “How about this? Let’s do a little information swap. You ask me a question about your dad, you answer a question of mine.”

Riz’s fingers spasm. If he could move more than two muscles in his entire body, he would be shaking. This is officially too fucking much. His friends are out fighting each other or dying. He’s alone, paralyzed, in a courtyard. And there’s a servant of the Nightmare King crouched over his body, offering him knowledge about his long-dead, risen celestial father. The one he never met. The one he knows nothing about. 

For as much as he doesn’t want to know, he’s suddenly confronted with the knowledge that he desperately does want to know, wants to know with a fervor that consumes and melds with the old desire to know nothing. He wants it, and yet he’s scared of it. 

Kalina said Riz is like him. Did this man take his coffee black? How did he dress? How did he laugh? What was his face like, if Riz supposedly looks so much like him? What was he like, before he was a celestial? Did he want kids? Did he not want Riz? 

He stares up at Kalina and her razor-edged eyes and her smug smile, taking a victory lap around a conversation she thinks she’s already won. She might be lying. But she might be telling the truth. Riz could learn about his father. For the first time in his life, he could know more of the story than a name and a proof inked into his skin. 

And he realizes it doesn’t matter. Riz’s father, whatever he is, wherever he is, has never been, and will never be, more important than the physical, tangible people he loves that are already in his life.

He curls spasming fingers into fists, the only movement he can achieve. He digs his claws into his skin until he feels hot blood begin to pool out of the fresh wounds. He narrows his eyes at Kalina, and watches as the world around him begins brighten, light spilling over the wooden planks and inlaid stones as his markings flare firework-bright in his skin, his eyes burning, his magic pushing under his skin until it begins to bubble and overflow. 

Fuck this. He’s not playing this game. Riz refuses to be haunted by the ghost of a man who was never around. Fabian is still out there. He still has people to protect. 

He watches Kalina’s eyes widen, and the light seems to hit her in a staggered sort of glitch, as if the Shadow Cat’s shadows had staved them off for a second. “I don’t think now is the time to get nostalgic about the hypotheticals of someone I never knew anyway,” he says. “I don’t care about that. I want to know that my friends are okay. My father was never here, and he never will be. If you want information you have to… I would need to know that they were safe.” 

Kalina stares down at him, yellow eyes reflecting the light of Riz’s own markings back to him, a being of secondary light against cavernous shadows. He catches, on her face, the briefest flash of something like surprise that melts into something like a begrudging fondness before vanishing back into her evaluative expression. 

“Know that who was safe?” she asks. “You want me to help your friend Fabian out? I can make sure he doesn’t die. It’s not too late. But I’m gonna need everything. I’m gonna need everything you know.”

And Riz, with no options left, desperate only to stop the train before it’s fully off the tracks, tells her everything. Even the things he hadn’t meant to. 

“Fabian’s alive. He’s at the edge of the city,” she tells him at the end, and smiles, mocking. “If you wanna run, go, little goblin-scurry around to find him you can do that. I appreciate this. Don’t keep looking for the crown, or we are going to kill every last one of you.” 

She leans down and taps a claw on his collarbone, uncomfortably close to his throat. “I’ll admit it, kid. Working with your dad was fun. Killing him was more fun. I’m really hoping it doesn’t come to that with you, but, hey, at the end of the day, what’s one more dead goblin to me?” She stands up and brushes herself off. “But you do have some time to talk it over, because I’m gonna head out and kill Lydia Barkrock. So, take care.”

And she vanishes into shadow. 

The paralysis ebbs out of his limbs a few minutes later, and Riz drags his jerking body to its feet, pain spiking up and down from his shoulder, stomach twisted into knots with guilt. He takes fifteen seconds to retch into a corner of the Gold Gardens that has clearly been used for a vomit dumping grounds by several drunkards already, and then tears back into the building to find everyone else. 

—

Later, after Fabian is back and Garthy has healed his shoulder and scraped the last of the paralysis from his limbs, he goes into the bathroom. He looks into the mirror at his face, longer and more angular than his mother’s, but still with her jaw and her nose and her eyes. He tries to see someone, anyone else in it, but there’s nothing to see. The only people he’s ever seen in the mirror are himself and his mother’s echoes. 

He traces a finger over the place he remembers Kalina touching, the place where he remembers feeling the sharp drag of her claw. 

There is no claw mark on his face.

—

The next day, as the van trundles over wooden planks toward the library, Fig corners him in a backseat. Riz is flattened against the wall next to Kristen, both of them doing what he’s sure is a very bad job of pretending not to watch Fabian with concern, and Fig swings her leg over the seats and climbs back, fully dropping in Kristen’s lap. 

Kristen’s arms immediately come up to wrap around Fig’s waist as the van goes over a rough bump, and all of the people inside swing to the right and then back to the left as it stabilizes. Riz sort of wishes they could have just walked.

Fig pats Kristen’s arm in silent thanks and then corners Riz with a look. “Hey.”

“Hey?” he says, trying to look extremely mentally stable and not at all emotionally compromised. 

“Are you good?”

Fuck. He must not be doing as good an impression as he thought. “Totally. Why?”

She hits him with a deeply unimpressed look, bangs hanging down around her face. They’re getting pretty neat with their longer length, looking more even, which means it’s only a matter of time before she takes a pair of kitchen scissors to them. “Riz. You saw the scary cat lady. And she totally manipulated you in a way that’s really coercive and scary, and you had no way of knowing if she would hold up her end of the bargain.” 

She glances over her shoulder at the rows of seats in front of them, where Cathilda is battling Fabian’s hypothermia with an army of blankets and hot water bottles. She leans in and adopts a stage whisper that still carries more than Riz would like. “I mean, I know we’re, like, all worrying about Fabian a super ton right now, but that’s still a really bad thing that happened to you, and I wanted to check in.” She turns red eyes back to him, brows furrowed with concern. “So, like, are you okay?”

He hunches his shoulders, folding in on himself. His tail, trapped between his thigh and Kristen’s, lashes a few times before curling around his own ankle. He forgoes verbal speech altogether and points at Fig with one finger. Through the Message cantrip, he says, I’m… I just… what if I got Lydia killed? How do I live with that?

Fig droops, her shoulders falling. She blows out a breath through her teeth. Her fangs look sharper by the day. She Messages him back. We all make mistakes.

His stomach twists. Yeah. But when the mistakes are his, they feel a lot less forgivable. Because what is the point of him being their rogue if he can’t even tell a decent lie? What is the point of him being here if he isn’t helpful? How is he ever supposed to look Ragh in the eye again if his mother is dead? They could have avoided this whole mess if Riz were just better. 

This feels pretty big to be a mistake, he tells her. Pretty sure getting someone killed is fuck-up material. 

Fig’s frown deepens, goes from something generally destroyed to something furious. Hey, she says. Fuck that. No. This cat bitch can play with our dreams and whatever, but she doesn’t get to convince you that it’s your fault when you’re awake, too. You weren’t trying to hurt Lydia. You were up against a wall trying to save your friend’s life. Which you did. If Kalina decides to kill someone, that’s on her, not you. 

But I-

No buts. She got you to say something. That doesn’t make the damage she does later your fault. And besides, this might all be a moot point. We don’t even know that Lydia’s dead. Kalina could be bluffing. 

(Smug eyes, a smugger smile, like this is a fun game, like she’s been waiting for this. Like Riz is only the latest in a long line of toys to play with and then break.)

Bile rises in the back of his throat. He looks down at his hands, claws and markings, and realizes that they’re shaking. Yeah, he says. She might be bluffing.

Fig reaches out and grabs his shoulder, makes him look up at her. Her eyes are dark with concern. Deep bags fall below her eyes. Thick strands are coming free from her braid. They had a long night and a harried morning. She looks tired, and sad. 

("I guess I just wanna say, this is gonna get so much worse.")

Hey, she says. We’ve been through a lot of scary stuff before, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you this rattled. Are you sure that’s all?

Riz takes a deep breath. 

Kalina’s bluffing. She’s absolutely bluffing. She’s lying, trying to get some kind of handhold in a group that has figured out how to keep her out at night. There’s no sense in getting everyone all worked up over nothing. There’s no reason for him to care this much about the potential of someone who never mattered anyway, in the grand scheme of his life. 

Typical bad guy posturing, he says. Nothing a seasoned adventurer can’t handle.

Fig’s lips purse. She stares at him for a long moment, rogue to bard, liar to liar. Sometimes, Riz wonders if the reason they both sort of see through each other is because they’re both trying so hard to speak their lives into existence. He wonders if one mask cancels out the other. 

She turns to Kristen, and the two of them exchange a rapid conversation through Messages, which Riz, through great force of will, does not eavesdrop on with his own cantrip. He watches Kristen’s brow furrow, and her nose wrinkle, and the two of them make increasingly ridiculous faces at one another before they both turn to him with eyes that are entirely too sharp, entirely too knowing. 

Okay, Fig Messages, her face still full of concern. But you know that I’m here for you, right? Scary cat lady and all. Whatever’s going on. 

And Riz, despite how much he desperately wants to put all of this in the rearview and never think about it again, is overcome with a surge of gratefulness to have her in his life. He really does love her, he thinks. Yeah, he says. I know. Thank you.

Kristen Messages him, and says, I’m going to refrain from grilling you because I think that would make you clam up worse, but let it be known that I am also here if you need to have a totally normal, chill conversation about scary cat behavior.

We have never had a totally normal, chill conversation between the two of us, ever, Riz tells her. But thank you.

Kristen reaches out and picks up his hand. She runs her other hand up his forearm, absently rubbing a thumb over the freshly inked lines. 

After Garthy healed him last night, fixing up his shoulder that shattered in the fall, they had given him an approving look and said very gently, “Unorthodox look, lovey. You make it work.” They had smiled in a way that felt private and sad and knowing and proud all at once. 

The excess from their healing spell had folded right over into Riz’s tattoos, and mostly erased the need for typical tattoo protection. The skin feels decently normal, the raw itchiness gone. But they’re still there, sprawled over his skin in a cramped map. 

Kristen examines them, tracing the edge of her thumb along one of the words. “They’re pretty,” she says. 

Fig grins. “Your mom is gonna freak.”

Riz groans. “Don’t remind me.”

“If you want, I bet we could track down some tattoo removal guys,” she offers. “Man, on tour, I watched all kinds of people do stupid shit they regretted in the morning. This is fixable.”

He winces. Yeah, he bets she did watch people do stupid shit they regretted on tour. They did the late night calls, and while Fig never outlined situations in miniature brushstrokes, only painting pictures with broad, gestural motions, he got the general idea. Drugs and mistakes and waking up the next morning to learn that you’ve done something you shouldn’t have. It’s definitely a little embarrassing to be a part of that, to be lumped in with tour experiences after all his nights of private, crippling concern for Fig in that environment. He’s kind of a hypocrite. 

And yet…

Kristen eyes him. The morning has barely begun, and already strands of hair are slipping free from her ponytail, glowing in the early morning light that slants through the van windows. “Do you want it fixed?” she asks, with a voice like she already knows the answer. 

He looks down at his tattoos, wrapping around his forearms. They vanish down into his shirt, he knows, scrawled up and down his back and sides and dripping over his collarbones like ivy. The ink is dark on the outside, twin borders around a thin, fine line of gold on the inside. 

Bytopic is an elegantly written dialect of celestial. The sharp edges of the runes of the Zajiri dialect have been filed away, and the words are made distinct by overlapping the runes of each syllable, and connecting the words themselves through thin lines. The style forces the script to flow like water, unbroken, cursive taken to the max, interspersed with little diagrams or images pulled from his clue board. And Riz can read this dialect even better than Zajiri. It comes faster, less painful, fits more closely. 

Parkala, when putting them in, had expertly fit everything in along the gaps between his markings. A body full of tattoos, and not a one of them scratches through his web of divine birthmarks, every meandering line perfectly preserved. Like it hasn’t changed anything about Riz himself, but is only filling in the gaps.

“I know I never want to be that high ever again,” he confesses, looking up to them. “That was bad. I knew everything. I think my brain isn’t big enough to handle that. But…” 

He thinks of Garthy, calm and self-assured, claiming their birthright with their inherent magic and inking it on their skin, daring anyone to say otherwise. He looks at the script, sharp and smooth, fitting in like it was born to be there. 

“I think I want to sit with these for a while,” he says quietly. “Figure out how I feel about them.”

He might not ever be connected to Bytopia itself. He might not ever know who his father was, or why he left, or if Kalina is lying. He might not know anything at all, but Garthy said he gets to choose. He thinks of Fig last year, hunting down her dad, desperate for answers. And she got hers, but Riz might not. He might never know. 

No matter what he does, he is aasimar. He is divine. Him and Kristen and Fig, the top and the bottom and the middle of the coin, all together. Maybe he can still have this part of his history even if nothing else. Maybe he can make that his. He’ll have to wait and see. 

He looks back up at the girls to find them both smiling at him, Kristen knowing, Fig delighted. “Hell yeah,” she says, and punches him in the shoulder. “They’re kinda hot, honestly.”

“Shut up,” Riz laughs. “How long do you think I can get away with hiding them from Mom?”

“Oh, buddy,” Kristen says. “You might just be screwed there.”

The van sways as it trundles over yet another bump, and Riz sways with it, follows the center of gravity and doesn’t fall, laughs with Kristen as Fig nearly slips off her lap and loudly curses pirate city infrastructure. They trail on toward the Compass Points Library. Surely, Riz thinks, they must be on the Leviathan upswing now. After all, things can’t possibly get worse, can they?

Chapter Text

It goes like this: things get worse. 

The Row and the Ruction are bloody and brutal, raw strength and vicious pack hatred. 

Cathilda the Black steps out, a streak of steel and mourning clothes, terror itself made mortal and all the more frightening for it. But still, Whitclaw drops half their group with a slash of his blade, stuns them into uselessness with hatred alone, and Riz is confronted, once again, with the shortcomings of his own class. Built only to inflict targeted, devastating damage, the best thing he can do for his party is ignore them, keep hitting the elves that have appeared in the Ruction, break the concentration spells, steal the crown. 

It goes like this: they fight, desperate, and it isn’t enough. Adaine vanishes in a flurry of motes of light, and if Riz had any air left in his lungs, he would have screamed. 

Furious and out of time, out of options, past the point of protection and moving straight into spite, he swoops through the rigging of the Ruction on incorporeal wings to shoot Whitclaw. He slices past, trying the grab the crown, and Whitclaw shoots him point blank, sits up, and cuts Riz clean out of the air.

—

It goes like this: Adaine is gone, and Fabian and Kristen are still stunned, and Gorgug is being crushed under the weight of the wounds he has taken. Sandra Lynn falls through the Ruction, hits the ground with an awful crack, and not even ten seconds later, Whitclaw nearly cuts Riz clean in half. 

Her best friend falls through the rigging to crash to the floor next to her mom, both of them draining of life, and the panic that sweeps through Fig is something bigger and broader than the whole world. 

She launches a Healing Word at her mother, and screams, “Mom! Get Riz! He’s my husband in real life!” 

Later, she will be unable to recall why she said that, or even really that she did say it. All she knows is that her best friend is dying next to her mother on the floor, and the refusal of that comes from something vaster than her entire universe. 

—

Ayda, hands and eyes full of flame, teleports them to Fallinel. 

The trees tower toward the sky, monoliths of age. There are no fallen leaves, no scraggly bushes. The forest floor is a smooth carpet of grass. The boughs of trees are sprinkled with blooming flowers, picturesque and delicate. It’s an abundance of beauty as far as the eye can see. 

It makes Riz’s skin crawl. He hates it on instinct alone. It is beautiful in the idealized sense of nature, impersonal and artificial, sterile in a way that reminds him of hospital wards. The high elves of Fallinel have had thousands of years here, and they have taken those years to scrub out every perceived flaw, pruned every thorn and ripped out every weed, so that the end result is more akin to the skeleton of a forest than a true forest. 

The elves took everything messy and imperfect about nature and crushed it like a bug under their heel, leaving something supernaturally beautiful and entirely without soul. It makes Riz wonder just how they’ll handle this group, tieflings and goblins and half-orcs and halflings and humans mixed in with elves all the same. 

Turns out, the answer is broadly indifference, which is honestly better than Riz could have hoped. Kei Lumennura is full of teenage elves drifting through with an apathy that makes him want to barf. Telemaine calls them out-of-control, calls them crazy and horny, and maybe the horny part is true, but the rest… 

Well, Riz is hardly a partier, but even he had done crazier stuff by the time he was fourteen. Everyone here moves like a snail. He wonders if Adaine would have been like this if she had stayed in Fallinel. He doubts it. 

Then he decides to stop thinking of Adaine altogether except in terms of planning a rescue mission, because thinking about Adaine just makes him ache from his ears to his toes. He really needs all of his friends to stop getting kidnapped, thank you very much. If they could lay off it for a couple years, or preferably forever, that would be great. 

After the third time he tries to take a lap of the building complex, and some teenage elf with a vaguely curious expression and generally unbothered demeanor tries to grab his tail, or stares too long at his skin and eyes and fangs, or, gods forbid, tries to grab his ear, he stalks back to the van and ensconces himself inside, resolving to not leave again until the next morning. Because if some idiot who’s never seen a goblin before tries to touch him one more time, he’s going to shoot the stupid fucker straight through the head, and he doubts Fabian’s grandfather would appreciate that. 

So he buries himself in a back pocket of the Moon Haven and starts digging through his briefcase to find the maps of the elven homeland that he knows are in there. A few weeks before their quest, he was filling his briefcase up with as many maps as he could get his hands on of Fallinel, Solace, and the Celestine Sea (of which there were many) and the Forest of the Nightmare King (of which there were infuriatingly few, for obvious reasons). 

He spends a few hours poring over the maps, trying to find some other prisons in Fallinel. They know Aelwyn is at Calethriel Tower, but who’s to say Adaine is certainly there too? If he were transporting a prisoner, he would send them somewhere he knew there was no one even slightly willing to help them. 

If luck is on their side, Adaine will be at Calethriel Tower because the elves in charge seemed powerful, but not particularly aware of who they were fucking with. Riz doesn’t much believe in luck though. He believes in fate, and with their divination wizard gone, how is he even supposed to believe in that? 

Have a little faith, Adaine’s voice whispers in his mind, and he sets down his pen to rub at his temples and stave off tears. He has a slight headache from staring at the maps, and he wants to either scream or hit something. Fuck this country and fuck these stupid elves and fuck these maps. 

It’s a good thing, Riz thinks bitterly, that he’s not a cleric. He doesn’t have enough faith for that. 

There’s a rustle from the blankets, and one of his ears swivels toward the noise to try to identify it. There’s soft breathing, the movement of the blankets around the rooms, but no tripping or cursing, which rules out… most of their party, to be honest. The only people who truly move gracefully in the small quarters of the Moon Haven are Riz, who benefits from being under four and a half feet tall, and the person who made it. 

Sure enough, the blankets part, and Tracker pokes her head in. Her eyes look bloodshot with lack of sleep, her face pinched with frustration, but the tension eases as she meets his eyes. “Hey,” she says. 

“Hey,” he replies.

“Long night?”

“That’s the only kind I have.”

Tracker frowns at that, but doesn’t immediately launch into a tirade about healthy sleep habits. Riz counts it as a win. “You mind if I come in?” she asks, voice a little hesitant. 

Without responding verbally, he shoves aside some of his maps to make room for her. “It might be a little tight,” he warns. He picked one of the smallest rooms, farthest back in the Moon Haven. 

She scoots in, folding her limbs up expertly. “That’s okay,” she says. She picks up one of his maps to look at it. “What are you up to?”

“Looking for more prison locations,” he says, scanning one of the maps to try to intuit where prison locations would be through sheer force of will. His maps are mostly geographical. Great for navigating, bad for finding kidnapped friends. 

“I thought the whole point of being here was going to Calethriel Tower,” Tracker says, her voice suddenly tight. 

“That is the point,” he says. “We know Aelwyn is here. We’re betting that Adaine is probably here too. But probability and certainty are very different things. I’d like to at least have some kind of backup location to check if this falls through.”

“Oh,” she says. “That makes… an infuriating amount of sense. Fucking Fallinel.”

“Fucking Fallinel,” he agrees.

“I just assumed… in the name of Galicaea, if we came here for no fucking reason-” She breaks off as her speech dissolves into a wolflike snarl, lips curling up to bare teeth sharpening into fangs. Her eyes flash yellow as she does. 

Riz fully looks up, setting down his maps. “Okay. What’s going on? What did you come here to talk to me about?”

Tracker looks a little embarrassed for a second, before she fully peels back her lips to growl under her breath, a deep, subsonic noise that only Riz would have been able to hear. She runs a hand through her short curls, clenching and unclenching her other fist. “Does Kristen ever…” she starts. “Does she ever, like, really piss you off? Don’t you just want to grab her by the throat and shake her sometimes?”

“At least once a week,” Riz says. “Why? What did she do?”

“She told me Sandra Lynn slept with Garthy,” she says hotly. “And then avoided telling me because she didn’t know how.”

Riz blinks. “Oh. That’s all?”

Tracker’s jaw drops, and she whips around to face him, incredulous. “You knew too? How did everyone know about this before me?!”

“Well, I mean, I was with her,” he says. “On rogue duty, I guess. Not that it went very well.” He eyes Tracker, her bitten lip and bloodshot eyes and the tense arch of her shoulders. “Are you just upset that she didn’t tell you? Because, honestly, that seems like Sandra Lynn’s business. And I can tell you it was super awkward. Kristen tried to ask Sandra Lynn about it, and she said something about how they shouldn’t do that, because right now Kristen is technically her boss.”

She pauses. Something about his demeanor seems to be taming the frustration some, allowing her to compose her thoughts. “I mean…” She lets out an annoyed breath. “Okay, I mean, I can get that, but, like. It’s Kristen. She’s doing it in the Kristen way, you know?”

“You’re gonna need to give me more to work with than ‘the Kristen way’.”

Tracker sighs. “I mean. You know how sometimes, you try to talk to Kristen about something hard, or something heavy, and she just, like, jokes her way around it? She’s so open and supportive about everyone else, but when it comes to stuff that affects her and her own life, she doesn’t know how to handle anything without laughing her way through it or ignoring it forever. And with little stuff, that’s fine, but with big, complicated, emotional stuff, the weight is too much, and the bottom just kind of gives out. You can’t laugh your way through everything.”

She looks up at him, eyes wide, hurt and desperate and imploring. Her face begs for some kind of validation, some kind of acknowledgement from one of the other people who would burn down the world for Kristen Applebees, flaws and all. 

And Riz remembers the hurt of Kristen not knowing what being Ka’liyah meant back in freshman year, how she laughed her way through it. He remembers picking her up in the middle of the night with only a few changes of clothes and a joke ready to launch, something hollow behind her plastered-on smile. 

He sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, I know. She has a bad habit of making things a joke so that she can handle them, or just ignoring them altogether.” His tail flicks through the blankets behind him as he tries to compose his thoughts on Kristen and the complicated, multifaceted way she exists in his world. 

He’s seen her brush serious things off as jokes. He’s seen her take jokes seriously. He’s seen her dominate in battle. He’s seen her trip over her own shoelaces and fall face-first into her own coffee. He’s seen her throw on a smile wider than the sun in the daylight and he’s seen her grow solemn and contemplative and full of wisdom in the wee hours of the night where nothing should make any sense at all.

But he thinks of her tendency to brush things off with a laugh, and he thinks of pulling into a gas station in the middle of the night, the headlights of his mom’s car bouncing over Kristen’s form, hunched over a plastic picnic table, turning her pale skin to alabaster and her red hair to living flame. He remembers the way her smile did not reach her eyes. 

“I don’t know that it’s a good habit,” he says. “And I see what you mean about it being bad for communication and bad for relationships. But I think that’s it’s, like, a little bit of a life raft, you know? You took the hard things that happened to you, and it made you more serious. She took the hard things that happened to her, and it made her more playful. It’s all just survival. It’s a response to something really bad.” He looks at her. “I know you got kicked out too. I know you remember what that feels like.”

Tracker takes a deep breath, and her shoulders fall, anger and guilt warring in her eyes. 

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” he says. “I totally get why you feel the way you do, and I think that’s pretty normal. I know sometimes I get irritated with her for the same reason. But sometimes it helps to remember why someone does something, even if that doesn’t make it better.”

“Yeah,” she murmurs. 

If Riz is being honest, he gets it. Their approaches are different, but he’s probably far closer to Kristen than to Tracker. Tracker took her trauma and opened herself wide, became vast and beautiful and full of love. Kristen and Riz took theirs and curled in around their vulnerable stomachs like wounded animals, folded their hearts up someplace the world is less likely to touch it. 

Riz runs and Kristen laughs and they stay up together late at night and let their heaviness sit together, let the weight of it all sit on their shoulders. Their pain holds hands in the darkness, and melts into something invisible in the light. Riz doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to really be mad at Kristen and her tendency to bat away reality with humor. Irritated, maybe, but not mad. It would be too much like hating his own reflection. It would be too much like hating Kristen herself, and he could never, ever do that. 

“Talk to her,” he suggests. “She avoids conversations if left to her own devices, but if you tell her she needs to make a change to have a healthy relationship with you, she’ll listen.” He looks at Tracker, at her downcast eyes and mussed curls and slumped shoulders. “She loves you,” he says. “This is just her stuff.”

She looks up at him, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “Do you ever…” she starts. She pauses, chewing on her lip. “Do you ever worry that you’ll do all the work in a relationship, and it won’t matter anyway? That it won’t last anyway?” 

Riz’s chest goes cold. His lungs tighten up. 

Middle school lunch tables and long nights with Penny and longer nights with Kristen, sprawled out with a board and seventeen tabs of religious ceremonies, trying to make sense of something that makes no sense at all. Cases where all the tiny details made up the picture, where everything mattered and everything affected the end. Popsicles in the summer heat and games at the high school lunch table and a photo book in his briefcase full of fleeting moments preserved forever. 

“...I worry about relationships ending,” he admits. “I worry about losing people.” He spent so many years lonelier than he could ever explain. Going back to that would be something almost worse than death. But, but, but. “But I don’t think that just because something ends means that the work you put in doesn’t matter. I think everything matters.” He looks down at his hands. After a full year, the scars from the palimpsest are silvery against his skin. “It all matters to me,” he says quietly. 

For a long moment, neither of them says anything. Riz sits and stares at his hands and traces the soft lull of Tracker’s breathing. His tail curls in tightly against his side. The blankets of the extradimensional space coat everything in a faint sheen of moonlight. In the faint aura, like some kind of silver or some sort of water under the moon, his skin looks like stone, his scars like ore buried in the rock. 

It’s beautiful, to have come from something so desperate, something so brutal. He wonders if maybe there’s something wrong with him, and the way he loves. He wonders if it’s normal to love with scars and with teeth. He thinks maybe he’s the wrong person to be giving out any kind of relationship advice. 

Finally, after a minute of quiet, Tracker says, “Yeah. You’re right. We’ll… we’ll talk more.” She shakes her head. “I really do love her,” she says, quiet, embarrassed, lonely. “I just get frustrated with her sometimes.”

“I think that’s how it goes with everyone,” he says. “Everyone gets frustrated with people they love.”

She scratches at a scab on her knee, looking down at her crossed legs. “It’s just… it’s like, I love her, and so I want to be good at this, and sometimes I worry that she’s so busy running away from herself that she isn’t as worried about it as I am. And so sometimes I get pissed when she doesn’t talk to me about the hard stuff.”

Riz’s throat closes up. His fingers ache. His tail twitches. His head throbs. He sees what is behind the wall, hears the fear that Tracker refuses to voice. He gets it. It’s terrifying to worry that you love someone more than they love you. 

“Kristen does run away from herself,” he admits. “But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t worry about being good to you. You just have to give her a minute to let her body catch up to her brain. She runs a lot, but at the end of the day, she’s running to you.”

Tracker snorts and looks up at him. She looks exhausted, but less in a frustrated way, and more in a settled sort of way. He doesn’t know how, exactly, but he thinks this may have helped her, even if just by giving her a space to talk about Kristen with someone else who loves her, and understands all the frustrating parts too. 

“She’s running to you too,” she says pointedly, half amused and half tired. Maybe Riz is imagining the slightly bitter, envious tinge to her voice. 

He feels his ears tip down, feels his tail curl in closer. He hunches his shoulders, folding his claws up into the center of his hands, removing all the sharp edges. Anything to get her to stop looking so hurt. He smiles, tries to make it genuine. It feels like plastic wrap stretched past structural integrity on his face. “For now.”

(A tiny, sneering part of his brain whispers that Tracker has nothing to worry about, that there’s nothing to feel bitter over. Even with all their troubles, Tracker is Kristen’s girlfriend. If this were a movie, Riz would be the poor attempt at comedy in the background, an extra in the love story, a side character waiting to be eclipsed. The part of himself that is snarling and ungenerous wants to tell Tracker that she should just let Riz have his time with Kristen before everything else inevitably becomes more important to her than him.

But Riz is usually stronger than his worst impulses, even in the late hours of the night. Especially then. Sometimes he thinks that he was made to exist in the dark hours of the day, with the stars and the shadows and the endless sky. So he doesn’t say any of that.) 

Tracker looks down at his maps, still scattered over the tiny room. She sighs, brushing the edge of one with her thumb. “You’re so prepared. How do you always do it?”

“It’s a special skill I have called intense paranoia.”

She laughs, loud and wolflike, undignified. For a split second, the blankets glow brighter around them, suffusing the air with moonlight. She looks over at him, and her dark brown eyes flash yellow for a moment. She grins, still tired, but genuine. “You’re funny.”

His tail flicks. “I try,” he says. “I don’t think anybody else really agreed for a long time.”

She hums. “They didn’t have good taste, then.” She smiles at him. “Thanks. For talking with me. Can I give you a hug?”

Riz forgoes verbal agreement to climb straight over and wrap his arms around her neck. He squeezes, trying to convey reassurance. She and Kristen will be fine, he thinks. Even if this is the end of their partnership, which he doubts, they’re both too good of people to end on a truly ugly note. They’ll still be friends, he thinks, even if it takes a minute. 

Tracker hugs him back, tight with werewolf strength. He purrs against her, and she growls back at him, a cadence that he recognizes as an attempted imitation of his own subtones, the ones she can almost pick out with her enhanced hearing. 

When Riz finally draws back, she looks suspiciously close to tears, but satisfied. He’ll count it as a win. 

He rubs at his temples, and picks back up a map. “Okay. I’m gonna keep looking at these.” 

“Riz. I don’t think you’re going to be able to intuit where prisons are just from topographical maps.”

He squints harder at the little blue lines representing the rivers of Fallinel, willing the throbbing in his head to cease. “I can try.”

“You look like you have a headache.”

“I do. It probably means I need some coffee. That usually helps.” Less so, lately, but it’s still coffee, so he drinks it anyway. 

Tracker huffs and pulls the map out of his hands. She shuffles closer. “Stay still, you little workaholic,” she says, and puts a hand on either side of his head, near his temples. She carefully avoids touching his ears, a kindness he doesn’t know if she understands the depths of. 

Her hands glow slightly, eyes going yellow as moonlight filters through her skin. Tracker’s magic tastes like fireflies on a summer night, and the full moon in a sky empty of clouds. 

The ache fades, and her hands retract. Riz touches the side of his head absentmindedly. “Thanks,” he says. “That feels a lot better.” 

“Good,” she says. “As payment for my services, I am requesting that you stop staring at maps and going to sleep.”

“But Adaine-”

“Is not going to be helped by you driving yourself to exhaustion looking for her,” she says firmly. “Besides, I just healed your headache, and went to all the trouble of setting up this beautiful system of blanket rooms.” She waves a hand around at the Moon Haven, and the magic pulses at her touch. “I will be super offended if you put my awesome magic to waste.”

“Are you guilt tripping me into going to sleep?” he asks incredulously, gaping at her. 

“Yup,” she says. “Hireling duties. Gotta make sure you don’t keel over into a fight and go to sleep.”

Riz huffs. He snatches his map back, and very grumpily begins folding them all up. “Unbelievable. I didn’t pay you to tell me to go to sleep.”

“Nah, but I’m pretty sure the others would support me.”

He doesn’t comment, but wrinkles up his nose, and it makes her laugh. She shakes her head, looking deeply amused and a little sheepish. She brushes some curls behind her ear and says, “Look. I’ll get out of your hair now. But, uh, really. Thanks for this.”

“Anytime,” he replies immediately, and is surprised by how much he means it. He really does like Tracker. She bids him goodnight, and vanishes to go sleep in her own pocket of the Moon Haven. 

Riz curls up on his side, dragging a blanket up over himself and wrapping his tail around his legs. He stares at the drape of the blankets, the fall of the shadows and the luminescence of the moon magic drifting out from the fabric. He tries to sleep. After all, they have a friend to get back tomorrow. 

—

It goes like this: there’s a blur of heat and sheet dancing and a fever that Riz feels under his skin, not unlike a second magic as he and Gorgug and Fabian shatter statues and battle elementals to collapse the magical sources of Calethriel Tower. They feel almost more like one person than three, calling back and forth, “Spring break! I believe in you! Spring break!”

Fabian catches a fire elemental in his sheet, swings it into a tango dip. Sparks flare around his skin and deep in the fluttering folds of the sheet. He looks electric, looks like how Fig does when she wields flame, as if there is no world that is right without this. It’s beautiful. 

Fabian kisses the elemental, swallows the spark of magic. For a moment, as he swallows, his throat and lungs glow from inside his body, organs outlined against his skin, visible even through his shirt. He stands back up, sheet sparking around him, gone a fiery golden, and when he meets Riz’s eyes, it’s the most right he’s looked since Leviathan. It’s maybe the most right he’s ever been.

—

It goes like this: they get back to the van, parked in the meeting place, and Ayda teleports them all back to Kei Lumennura. Riz climbs Adaine to wrap his arms around her neck and squeeze, eyes closed tight. “Don’t you ever do that to us again,” he says. 

Adaine squeezes back, just as tight, and says, “You know I can’t promise you that.”

“We’ll take more danger in a fight if it means you’re with us,” he says. 

“And I would take any amount of danger to protect you all,” she says back. “You should know that by now.”

He does. He loves and hates her for it. He doesn’t ever want his friends to pick his safety over theirs. He supposes that’s probably the one thing they all have in common. 

—

It goes like this: Adaine goes to clean Aelwyn up, a broken, confused, guilty sister unsure of why she is receiving kindness. She comes back with Aelwyn, a broken, snarling, freshly restored sister with thousands of walls and no way to escape her own labyrinth. 

She puts Aelwyn, unconscious, in the van. She looks down at her sister, battered and broken and cruel, again, cruel through the fault of their parents, cruel through bitter and hollow survival, and her intestines twist into a knot of roiling fury. Even out, even free of her parents and her ruined home and the toxicity that crept its way down into the bedrock of her mind, they are still here, ruining everything. Ruining her, and ruining Aelwyn. 

Arianwen and Angwyn may not have managed to make her evil, but the foundations of her mind and her soul are built on rocks made of anger and shaped by cruelty. There is something uniquely brutal inside Adaine, something that crawled up through her parents to dig claws into the bottom of her chest and lurk there forever, tainting every breath she ever takes. 

Forgiveness and kindness she will choose whenever she likes, but neither of them are in her nature. Adaine is, after all, Aelwyn’s sister. 

She casts Detect Thoughts, and is rebuffed from Aelwyn’s mind. She casts it again, and this time she crawls inside, crawls back into a mind that is not unlike her own, twisted and built on cruelty and fear. She walks it easily. 

Aelwyn’s mind is hazy, memories dreamlike. Colors blend and blur and shift, bleed into one another like ink spilling in water, a drawing ruined before it was finished. The sharpest thing in her memories is the image of the Shadow Cat herself. 

The only thing Adaine has ever seen in the picture of Riz’s mom is Sklonda, Sklonda and an armful of nothing, but there is no doubt in her mind that this is Kalina. Aelwyn’s hazy dreamscape has actually gone the other way with Kalina, rendered her in such a way that her edges are razor-sharp, that she looks almost too real, as if Aelwyn herself believes Kalina to be larger than life. 

Adaine memorizes the soft, housecat features that look like they’ve been etched with jagged glass, the slitted yellow eyes, the wide ears, the tail that curls behind her, black fur glossy even in the shadows of her cloak. 

She slides out of Aelwyn’s mind, and, still possessed with that fury, the monster that is her past pushing her to ruthlessness, closing itself around her will and shaping it into something unforgiving, Adaine casts Scry. She reaches through fate itself, through everything that ever could be, and tells the universe what will be. 

Kalina fails to prevent it, and Adaine sees-

-a person in a tavern by the sea, the call of gulls outside, the warmth of a honeyed drink on their tongue-

-a man in a council meeting in a Fallinel government building looking at a report with a picture of Arthur Aguefort, fierce discussion ringing in his ears-

-a warrior stalking through the Red Waste, sun pounding like hammers on their shoulders-

-a woman in an office typing away at a computer, jaw cramping with a yawn-

-a man in robes falling in silken waves, standing in a room full of starlight and elven architecture, opening his mouth to say-

-a ranger stalking silently through a twisted forest near the border of Sylvaire, wolf companion trailing after her, the crackle of branches and the distant chirp of birdsong from every direction-

-a massive beast, festering claw marks along its back, leg dragging as if broken beyond repair, ambling through a forest choked with vines and twisted tree trunks- 

-a merchant hawking wares, shouting to an open-air market, trying to catch the eyes of passerby to tempt them closer-

-a fisherman deep in the Swamps of Ruin, tail swinging as he regards the cattail-choked water with a sharp eye, hefting a harpoon higher as he goes to throw-

-Sklonda rifling through papers with Yvoni, running a hand through her hair, looking more like Riz than she ever has with her face creased in a frown, coffee abandoned beside her as she says, “I just don’t get how she could have covered her own tracks so thou”-

-a boy running through the streets of an old-fashioned town, halfling architecture mixed with dwarven stonework, leaping over a fruit cart and whooping as half a dozen other small boys race after him-

-a man walking quickly down a long hallway, suit pristine and face alight with fury, snapping, “I don’t understand how we still don’t have a handle on Arthur Aguefort, is there no one in the world who can control him?” as a woman with a Council of Chosen badge follows him, saying, “Sir, we are doing our best, but”-

-a person perched in the rigging of Crow’s Keep on Leviathan, leaning dangerously far over the side, salt air whipping over their face as they take a too-long drink from a bottle of whiskey-

-the sorcery teacher in a classroom at Aguefort, desks shoved out of the way for lack of need, trying to force some semblance of calm into a club group full of students pestering him for answers about the school’s funding, Jace saying, “Okay, okay, calm down, I don’t have all the answers either”- 

-Riz, in the van, face sharp with worry, ears flicking up and down as if they can’t decide where to be-

-Tracker, hovering between Kristen and Riz, one hand drifting toward Kristen’s back-

-Sandra Lynn, outside the van, refilling her water flask in a stream and purifying it with a quickly murmured spell-

-Kristen, looking at Adaine, her face attentive, the freckled span of her nose and her coppery hair flying in wisps out of her ponytail-

-a wood elf, lying in between hills of roots in a forest of shadowed, scaly bark and thorned vines, open claw wounds filled with rot and crawling with bugs, eyes empty and streaks of blood crusted down their cheeks, vines crawling along their body like extra limbs, and they stand as if possessed and they grab a spear and scrape something into the ground, and they turn to look at her and the ground reads, Hello, Adaine. Glad you could join me -

-Kristen, looking at Adaine, her face startled and eyes wide with concern, halfway reaching toward Adaine, confused and scared-

Kristen, in Adaine’s real eyes, overlaid with the differing perspective of the Scrying spell, looks at Adaine, a dual mirror of one of her favorite people in the world, made utterly terrifying through circumstance. 

And then they put it together. Disease. Some kind of blood-borne magic that lets you see Kalina. It makes so much sense, and yet it makes no sense at all. It’s completely and utterly terrifying. 

Sandra Lynn to Tracker to Kristen. Ragh who came with it already. Riz who came with it already. 

(Her friends are sick with some kind of magical illness. Her friends are sick, and Adaine has never been so devastated by her own lack of knowledge in healing. Wizards, she thinks, are good at fixing things. They are no good at fixing people.)

—

It goes like this: Kristen tells Tracker everything. They walk in the forest and Kristen tells her about a goddess of mystery who was slaughtered for the sake of expansion, for the sake of the growth of the Church of Galicaea. Kristen tells her about a lost goddess, about her goddess’s sister. She tells her about lies and about warnings that were ignored, a tragedy that could have been avoided, violence and devastating consequences and the diaspora of an entire people, all because the elven Church of Galicaea could not be satisfied with what it had. Violence for violence and cruelty for power. 

It’s a knife to the gut. It’s a punch to the face that breaks your nose and your rose-colored glasses all in one. It’s waking up as you hit the surface of ice-cold waves. 

Tracker reels, and Kristen sits beside her in the forest and lets her process, sits there in quiet, unyielding support. The golden light through the leaves filters through the canopy to brush over the planes of Kristen’s face and make her hair burn, fiery. Tracker looks at her, at her freckles and sharp chin and the way her face has gone solemn with depth in that way it does when she is feeling particularly profound. 

Tracker feels lost, and confused, and hurt, her stomach twisting. Someone has used her goddess to do harm. Someone has used her goddess to reap bloodshed. Someone has used her goddess to sacrifice an entire nation at the altar of power. And where does that leave Tracker? Where does that thirst for glory leave her and her faith?

She thinks about this and she looks at Kristen and- and-

Well. Tracker left her home when she was thirteen and her bones split out of her skin and she woke up with blood and skin caught between her teeth and her parents decided they didn’t want a monster for a daughter. She left home and left the Church of Sol, but the god of the sun had never mattered to her like Galicaea does now. It had been worship through habit, not true faith. Tracker had given up her home, and that had been a brutal, aching loss, but shedding her religion had been like putting cream on a rash until it went away. Mildly irritating until it was gone, and then it had just been relief. 

She hadn’t necessarily thought Kristen was being dramatic in all of her flailing after leaving the Church of Helio, her desperate research with Riz and the enduring habit of chasing answers down any rabbit hole she can fit herself into. But she hadn’t quite understood it. 

Now, though-

Kristen had been more than a cleric for Helio. She had been his Chosen. She had been his saint. And when she found out that it wasn’t what she thought, when she found out that there was something broken in her church, she had walked away, spine straight. 

Tracker’s faith has not even shattered, just been shaken, and she feels like shit. If this is even a fourth of how Kristen felt, leaving her church altogether, leaving behind everything like a drowning woman fleeing the ocean-

“This is maybe messed up to say,” she tells Kristen, and in her head she is speaking to every Kristen she has ever known, all the way back to the wide-eyed girl in a church camp tie-dye t-shirt in a bar, begging in the dark and seeking answers amongst strobe lights, “but I never really got-” She pauses, a wave of forgiveness rolling through her as she understands in retrospect the desperate flight of a girl with nowhere to go. “You’ve been through a lot of shit.”

And Kristen, Kristen who laughs everything off and dances her way around her own sincerity, responds with honesty. With compassion. With depth. With all the seriousness that Tracker had wanted from her, all the seriousness Riz had promised she would get if she just talked to her. 

She leans forward and touches her head to Kristen’s, closes her eyes and feels her heartbeat, feels the pulse of life from her partner, the fire and the willingness to change that she fell for. 

“Me being upset with you,” she tells Kristen, “is never, ever about me not loving you with my whole heart. Because I do.”

“I love you too,” Kristen says easily, and even if sometimes, that’s so, so hard to hold on to, here, now, it is the easiest thing that Tracker has ever had faith in.

Chapter Text

It goes like this: in the end, they decide there’s nothing left to do but research. 

Kristen has already snatched up all of Arianwen’s religious tomes, and Adaine, cross-legged across from Riz, has her head bent over a collection of arcane notes, hair falling past her ears into her face. 

Riz is left with the assorted collection of random other notes, all the gaps between the religious doctrine and the historical mechanics of spellcraft. It’s an area that is mostly raw detective work, which is honestly what he’s best at anyway. 

He pages through some of the most recent things. Recorded transactions regarding ship fare to Leviathan, some communication with the Court of Stars regarding Aelwyn, false promises that were never delivered, a double-crossing dance on both sides. 

Some of the oldest documents left for him are letters and age-worn records, official logs and mission breakdowns that read similarly to antiquated versions of his mom’s police reports. He considers it lucky that the documents are in Elvish. With how generally long-lived elves are as a species, there’s much less linguistic drift, so while the language is a bit old, it’s not so ancient that it becomes incomprehensible. 

Still, staring at the miniscule calligraphy creates the beginnings of a headache fairly quickly. He rubs at his temples as he skims through yet another paragraph of meaningless introductions in a letter. Stars and faultlines, why do high elves have to be so pompous? What’s the point in embellishing the script to this point? It’s bordering on gaudiness, and Riz knows that these documents were highly confidential. They were meant to be buried. There’s no need for them to be this fancy. 

He gets into the bottom of the letters and finds one that makes reference to a Landrin Lier. The name sounds more wood elf than high elf, and the letter reads that the witch traitor has been sentenced to execution for the sickness she has sown amongst our ranks. Rest assured, we have taken care of the matter. 

At the very least, it’s interesting. A wood elf in the high elven secret service, the Third Ring. At the very best, it’s a lead. 

He rifles through the papers, tunnel vision beginning to set in, the feeling of a good clue. He finds more letters about Landrin Lier, ones that start tame, with higher-ups mentioning the new introduction into the Third Ring with suspicion, and grow steadily less tame, ones where other agents mention healing sessions that are strange, that leave them feeling sick or nervous, reports that show Lier messing with medical records and erasing parts of her own past from public record. 

It culminates, finally, in a series of accounts of heresy, of espionage, and, far most horrifyingly, deliberate manipulation and spreading of what one report calls, a most insidious and difficult to remove illness. The ill effects seem few and far between, and do not appear to impact life in a daily sense, but nevertheless the disease has proven all but impossible to remove. We are enlisting the help of clerics of the Church of Galicaea to find a way to prevent the curse from spreading through transference of bodily fluids, and are conducting an active sweep of the Third Ring to identify those who may have received treatment from Lier. While we expect to find all those who have been infected within our own agencies, there is no telling how far this illness has already spread since its conception. We advise utmost caution. 

Riz has to read the report four times over in sheer disbelief. He can’t wrap his head around it. Kalina, brutal and manipulative and clearly someone who enjoys playing with her food before she eats it, is touching people through some kind of magical virus, and a wood elf, one who was forced out of her home in Sylvaire after the Nightmare King rose to power, helped spread her? Helped distribute an agent of the Nightmare King, the Shadow Cat herself? 

(Kalina, sitting on his chest, pupils blown wide with delight, smiling down at him with a disgusting familiarity. Kalina, telling him things he might have wanted to know, turning all of them rotten just because they come from her. Kalina, leaving him to choose whether to save his best friend or doom his friend’s mom.)

He can’t rationalize it. He can’t understand why anyone would choose to inflict her on more people. It’s not even just that she’s evil. It’s that she sucks. 

He skims through the last few pages of reports about Lier, thumbing through some first-hand accounts about dubious healing sessions, sifting through the official documentation of execution, and, finally, some paper recording the confirmed infected in the Third Court, detailing the vastly futile attempts to cure it. 

He flips to the bottom of the pile, some old logs of agents who checked out information. They’re water-logged from travel and wrinkled from thievery. Arianwen, for all her meticulousness regarding her own papers, is clearly not very good at keeping things in good condition after she steals them. 

He skims down the paper, dates from centuries ago at the top, growing steadily more recent toward the bottom. The names are all high elven at the top, but a few decades after the date he pegs as Lier’s death, wood elf names begin to crop up. At the bottom is Arianwen, who checked out the records during the October of their freshman year, around the time when Adaine started avoiding going home with a passion. He bares his teeth at Arianwen’s penmanship passingly, hoping she can somehow feel his hatred across the world. His eyes flick up above her name as he raises his head to move on, and-

Cursive, elegant but rushed, none of the excessive calligraphy of Arianwen’s writing. Pok Askandi, CoC, Fourth Council . The ink is dark and deliberate. Below it, in the same handwriting, Kalina, TR, Grand Court.

He feels like he might be paralyzed again, like the Shadow Cat might be sitting on his chest again, back for another round of grins and taunts. 

It can’t be. It can’t be. She was lying. She has to be lying. 

( I had the distinct pleasure of working with your father before he died, she had said back on Leviathan, face gloating like she knew she had won.) 

Riz tries to force his heart to beat at a normal pace. He takes a deep breath, and then another, and then another, ignoring the fact that it feels like all the oxygen was sucked out of the air when he wasn’t looking. She’s the Shadow Cat, he reminds himself. If anyone could tell a truly convincing lie, it would be her. And she has proven herself capable of manipulating what people see. She could be here right now, making him see things. 

He pushes the papers away, tips his head up toward the ceiling. He closes his eyes, pressing them shut until stars flash in his vision. He opens them, lights still superimposed over the world, and pulls the papers back to him. 

The cursive has not changed. Still elegant, still rushed, the k’s swooping and the t’s wide. Pok Askandi, the paper says to him, reflection taunting. 

He forces himself to breathe. Breathe, Riz, godsdammit, breathe. Adaine will definitely notice if he hyperventilates next to her, and then she’ll ask questions, and Riz will have to tell her about the comments, about the smile, about the name on the paper that would only mean anything to Fig. She’s the only one he’s ever really, truly talked about it with, and even that was a conversation swallowed up by the mess that was all of them in prison. He’s not even sure she would remember. 

All of which is to say that Riz is not hyperventilating, which means that he won’t have to explain anything to Adaine, and worry her for nothing, because it’s nothing. It’s nothing. It has to be. 

Riz is a rogue. He knows how this goes. The best lies are the ones grounded in truth, the ones that can half stand on their own. He knows that Pok Askandi was some agent for the Council of Chosen, a man who worked with Kalina up until he got too close, and then Kalina walked him straight into a grave. He knows that his mother slept with someone who claimed to be named Pok Askandi. He knows that celestials are no more bound to the truth than magical disease tabaxi. 

Riz’s father could have been a liar. Kalina is definitely a liar. And she has to be lying about this, because the alternative is… the alternative is…

It just can’t be possible. It’s too many things that line up too perfectly. Why would Kalina have separately known his mother and his father? The chances are all but impossible. 

Riz breathes. He breathes. He breathes. 

His lungs are doing that thing where they go too tight, as if someone has wrapped hands around his chest and crushed until his ribs are smaller than they should be, until everything inside of him is crushed up in a way that is painful and wrong. He can almost feel hands around his throat, choking. 

But it’s fine. It’s fine. Breathe, Riz. Just breathe. You’ll freak Adaine out for nothing.  

He struggles, claws for breath as he tucks the paper under the others, letting the stack of pilfered documents swallow up the inked name and all the hopeless possibilities that come with it. He digs his fingers into the edge of the table in the study room that he and Adaine are borrowing, leaves furrows that someone else will have to buff out. He would probably feel worse about it if he had any mental space left to dedicate to things besides not freaking the fuck out. 

He must not be doing a great job of pretending to be fine, because, as if his thoughts spoke it into existence, Adaine happens to glance up from her papers. She looks back down, and then jerks back up, her blue eyes snagging on him like fishhooks. “Riz? Is everything okay? You look a little pale.”

“I’m good,” he says, trying to subtly wipe away the cold sweat suddenly beading up. 

Her frown deepens, and she leans over the table, putting the back of her hand against his forehead. “You don’t feel warm,” she says. “Are you sick?”

In more ways than I can describe, he thinks hysterically. “No, no, I’m fine.” The best lies are built on truth. “This is just really freaky,” he says. He pushes over some of the papers. Not the paper, but a few of the other ones, detailing the history of Landrin Lier. Feeling particularly paranoid, he Messages her with a finger under the table, and says, There was a wood elf woman who was executed for heresy, pretending to be a part of the Church of Galicaea, but she wasn’t really. And as a healer for the Third Ring, she was using her position to spread whatever this Kalina disease is. 

Adaine’s eyebrows shoot up. She looks exactly as concerned and disgusted as he does. She Messages back, Ew. That’s disgusting. She scans over the papers. Gods, no wonder Kalina has eyes everywhere. If this thing spreads through fluids, and all of these people were carriers…

Both of them shudder, both at the thought of Kalina existing in that many people, a shadow that will never leave, but also at the general concept of that many people having sex. “Why are people so horny?” Adaine says aloud, face wrinkled. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “It seems bad. There’s so much cooler stuff to do than have sex.”

“And less gross stuff,” she agrees sagely. 

Riz looks down at the papers, considers the web. He Messages again, under the table, But I bet the web’s even bigger than just… people who had sex. I mean, Tracker got it from exchanging blood with Sandra Lynn. And, you know. There’s the kids.

Adaine tilts her head at him, mouth tipping. What do you mean?

My mom knew Kalina, he says. Knew her before I was even born. I had to get it somewhere, didn’t I? 

Understanding and horror flicker across her face. That’s… oh, I hate that, Riz. I really, really hate that. That’s so creepy. 

Riz snorts. Don’t need to tell me twice. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. And if I have it, it makes sense that there would be other kids who got it that way. 

For a long moment, Adaine is silent, eyes flicking over his face, wearing some expression he can’t quite unravel. Some complicated mix of sympathy and anger and even a quick flash of loathing. I need to kill this cat, she Messages. 

No kidding. 

By unspoken agreement, nothing more to say and yet still more horrors to uncover, they return to their papers. 

Riz starts flicking through medical diagrams, ritual notes. He scans one of the illustrations of a rune circle, and it flickers in his head, a strange recognition. He knows this. He looks more closely, skimming the notes again. 

All in Arianwen’s penmanship, cramped calligraphy and shitty scribbles of diagrams inked around the margins of equally questionable pages that look to be ripped and scavenged from other books. It details a ritual involving a gem with a fiend, and a sacrifice, dead for twenty-four hours. 

Unbidden, his mind conjures up an image of Fig standing over him with hollow, swollen eyes, knife raised to cut him open. He feels his ears flatten back against his head, and his tail raise up behind his back. He doesn’t fully realize he’s hissing until Adaine is leaning over to wave a hand in front of his face and say, “Riz? What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, trying to dispel the memory, reminding himself that it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. He’s fine. 

“I found the ritual they were trying to do at the Hotel Cavalier,” he says. He hands some of the most pertinent papers over, the ones with listed material components and Arianwen’s notes in the corner. “They were trying to get the gem into Kalina’s hands. Somehow.” Under the table, he Messages, They needed a sacrifice. I think it has to be someone infected. Someone who can see her. 

Adaine’s eyes flick, sharply, over the page. There’s a low, static crackle in the air, arcane energy coating Riz’s tongue like the energy in the air before lightning strikes. Her magic always tastes like the first bite of sour candy, something sharp that fades out sweet, and it always feels like pulling a string taut between his fingers. Here, it isn’t even intentional, but she’s so agitated that Riz feels it nonetheless. 

“What’s this about?” she says, tapping one of the words. Riz leans over to look at it. “Petrasmosis. It feels like I’ve heard that before.” 

“I think Ragh mentioned it at one point,” he says. “Something about his mom. It’s, like, the merging of a body with a crystal. It allows the gem to become a part of the body, so that there’s an exchange of energy.”

An exchange of energy. An exchange of blood. A combining of powers. To get it into Kalina’s hands. 

A chill runs down his spine as something horrifying occurs to him. Obviously, being ritually sacrificed wouldn’t be great, but it seems like this is an important factor in Kalina and Arianwen’s plan. An exchange of blood from a body into a gem back into the body, all in a dead puppet with no will left inside of it. Just blood. Just Kalina. 

Just Kalina, and all of the magic that came with the body. With both bodies. 

(What would the Shadow Cat have done, he wonders, with a marionette with all the combined power of a pit fiend and an aasimar? 

Magic is body, after all, and body is magic. Just because Riz would have been dead doesn’t mean his corpse wouldn’t have retained magic, so long as it was still functional. 

It’s a moot point now, but a completely terrifying one. Riz decides quite promptly to bury it at the bottom of his brain and never breathe a word of it to anyone.)

“So they need Gorthalax inside of a body that Kalina can control just to get past the barrier,” Adaine surmises. “And they need this ritual to get the ruby into a body.”

“Seems that way.” He looks over at her, only to find her face set into a stony expression, cruel and unforgiving. The light slanting in through the windows of Kei Lumennura turns her hair to gold and her blue eyes to chips of ice. The taste of sour candy grows in the air, all sour and no sweet. 

“And they tried to use you as the body,” she says, drumming her fingers on the table. Boggy, on the table next to her, goes very still, his expression no longer happy, but somewhat suspicious. 

“It didn’t work,” he reminds her quietly, and she looks over. “Thanks to you.”

Her eyes soften, and she reaches out to squeeze his hand, once, earning a few swishes of his tail in response. “Yeah. It didn’t work.” Her face hardens once more. “But that’s not the point. The point is that this fucking cat and my fucking mother tried to do it. They tried to do it to you. And for that, I’m going to make sure that when they go, it’s painful.”

She’s still holding his hand softly, but her expression is a knife, is the edge of an executioner’s axe. The Elven Oracle herself, declaring the end before it arrives, the omen and the herald and death itself, all at once. 

In this light, she looks like Aelwyn. 

And, well, who is Riz to judge? He knows what it’s like to be that, to feel that. He knows what it is to go past the event horizon, to swan dive into the black hole, to decide that enough is enough and commit cruelty in the name of a worst scenario that never came to pass. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again. 

So he just squeezes her hand back, understanding and support in the gesture. They sit together in a study room and research, nose to the grindstone, two trigger fingers waiting for targets. An angel and an oracle, heaven and fate, brutal retribution to the last. They make good monsters together, he thinks. 

—

It goes like this: Aelwyn vanishes, and takes Gorthalax with her. 

—

They teleport to Leviathan, and spend the night there, sleeping in the van and taking shifts on pirate watch, waiting for Ayda to regain her Teleport slot.

Fig, ears still echoing with the sound of Fathrethriel’s nose breaking, the crunch of his skull against her guitar, takes first shift, and then, when she trades off with Tracker for second watch, retreats into the Moon Haven and stares up at the sloping planes of the shimmering blanket fort. 

Kristen is still outside, using her full twenty-four hours to cast Hallow on the van. When Fig had been on watch, sitting on top of the van with Baxter, guitar across her lap, listening to the distant screams and raucous laughter of late-night Leviathan, Kristen had been circling the van with incense and honey. She had flicked crushed flower petals from Fallinel around the van, making slow loops and daubing honey on the sides of the metal. 

Sometimes she paused to kneel and press her forehead to the planks, murmuring rhythmic prayers in a circular, singsong fashion. They didn’t, Fig had noticed, sound like the same kind of prayers she had used back at the start of freshman year, the Helioic kind that she can drawl even in her sleep. No, these prayers had beat, had tempo, had a pulse like a heartbeat. Fig is pretty sure they were in Goblin, but she’s not going to ask. 

What Riz and Kristen share is beyond her, most times. All she knows is that outside, Kristen’s hummed prayer and the thick, musky scent of the incense mixing with the salt air had been a soothing white noise machine, something to make all of the spiteful whispers in Fig’s head shut up. 

There is always something deeply soothing about watching Kristen be their cleric. For all her doubts, religious and otherwise, Kristen is a woman of devotion, a woman of faith. When she’s being their cleric, when she’s summoning her magic, she finds a depth of calm that fills Fig with an awestruck, biting envy. 

Fig wishes she could believe in something like that. She wishes she were good like that. Instead, all she has are half a dozen masks of other people, sincerity made false with different faces, and the whispers in her head, telling her that if she were a better bard, a better friend, a better daughter, her dad would never have been in a gem at all. 

It takes her two hours to realize that her brain is not going to shut up by itself. The whispers just keep getting louder. But Kristen is busy with her Hallow spell, and Fig would feel weird intruding. So she goes looking for the other person who’s good at talking her to sleep. 

Navigating the Moon Haven is weird when everyone is already asleep. She’s trying not to make noise, but it’s all blankets and pillows and weird tunnels in here, so she makes even less noise than she expects, which makes her skin crawl. 

She pokes her head in on Adaine’s room, where she’s trancing with Boggy ribbiting softly in her lap, an imitation of snores. 

She finds Fabian, sprawled out on his back and snoring loudly in his own room. 

Gorgug and Tracker’s rooms are both empty, as they’re up on the roof keeping watch. 

Finally, on the fifth time, she pokes her head into a pocket wedged toward the back of the extradimensional space, and finds Riz. He’s curled up on his side, facing away from her, still in his normal clothes, tail tucked up around his legs. The sides of his chest are rising and falling evenly. His breathing is deep, slow. He’s sleeping, for once. 

Well. She doesn’t need to bother him that bad. He gets so little sleep as it is. 

She goes to ease back out of the room, but one of her horns snags on the blankets, and pulls all the rest of them along with it. Just slightly, but enough. 

Riz’s tail flicks, and then his ear, and then he’s picking his whole head up to roll over and blink at her with bleary, yellow-gold eyes. In the dark, with the slight glow of his eyes, it’s even easier than normal to see the way his slitted pupils dilate when he recognizes her. “Fig?” he croaks. “What’s up?” 

Guilt washes through her, sudden and bitter. Just one more thing you’re fucking up, whispers one of the voices in her head. She ignores how it sounds like her. 

“Sorry,” she says. “I was just leaving. I don’t wanna interrupt you.” 

He yawns, showcasing a mouth full of fangs that she is deeply envious of. He sits up, shaking out his ears with a quick flick. “No, don’t worry about it. What’s up?” Already, he looks far too awake to immediately go back to sleep. 

Fig curses herself, and resigns herself to having a conversation and then possibly casting Sleep on him to get him to go back to bed. She slides deeper into the pocket, the blankets dipping below her. As usual, Riz has picked a room in the back, a small, dark space. It’s the perfect size for him to curl up in and feel snug, which means it’s really a little too cramped for Fig and her horns. She shrinks down, folding up her spine to not scrape at the ceiling. 

Riz rubs the last of the sleep from his eyes and scoots closer, flopping his tail over so that the tufted end falls into Fig’s lap. “Is everything okay?” he asks. 

In the grayscale of her darkvision, his whole body looks washed-out, colored over with ink, leaving only his eyes as homing beacons, a splash of gold against the backdrop of blankets. “Yeah, I just… can’t sleep.”

He blinks at her. “That’s not usually like you,” he says. And then, “Is this about Gorthalax?”

Fig sniffs. She looks down at her fingers, examining her bitten nails. The gel polish from tour is still stubbornly clinging on, little professionally done orange and yellow flames against a sunset-red backdrop. It feels like they’re taunting her. “This is all my fault,” she whispers.

“What? No it’s not.” 

“It is, though. I put my dad in the ruby, and then I was dumb enough to fall for some stupid elf kid pulling a trick, and then I let Aelwyn steal the ruby from me- I just, I keep getting chances to fix it, and then I keep fucking it up more.” She runs a hand through her bangs, trying not to cry. “I did all of it. Me.” 

It’s you, whispers one of the voices in her head, a little gleeful but mostly just warning, a storm siren heralding the hurricane. You ruin everything you touch. You’ll ruin him too. Just wait and see.

“Fig,” says Riz, with a surprising amount of exasperation. “That’s dumb. You’re smarter than that. Come on.” 

Startled, she looks up, and he raises his eyebrows at her, looking bemused and a little tired. “You didn’t do that. You didn’t do any of that.”

“I did!”

He sighs. He flicks up one finger. “First, you may have put Gorthalax in the gem, but that was the Nightmare King making you do that. We’ve been over this.” He flicks up another finger. “Second, Fathrethriel can go fuck himself, but that wasn’t your fault either. The Shadow Cat tricked you into doing something that had bad consequences.” Another finger. “And third, you did not let Aelwyn steal the gem. She worked with a weird magic disease person to trick you and then steal the gem from you. It’s not a personal failing that you didn’t win a solo fight against a powerful wizard. Other people did that. It’s their fault.”

“I should have been more careful,” she whispers. 

The tip of Riz’s tail, in her lap, flicks as if his body wants to move, but it stays there. He fixes her with a look that reminds Fig eerily of Sklonda, a knife that cuts right to the core of you. “ Should have doesn’t matter now. We could have done a million things differently. Don’t you think I want to re-do that moment when I told Kalina about Ragh? I didn’t mean to. I should have done something different. But it happened and now we have to deal with it. Life goes on. We have to go on with it.” 

He tilts his head and reaches out to pat her knee with his hand. “And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Gorthalax would blame you for any of that, either. I spent a pretty decent amount of time with him too. He’s really calm. He gets it. Stuff happens. It’s not always going to be good stuff. You just have to keep going through it. Eventually there’s something different.”

She looks at him, and the weight of it lays on her shoulders, seeps into her bones, fills her up and drags her down. Right now, in the late hours and the endless, yawning confusion of the night, she can’t imagine how she could ever get up and keep going with all of this. And she looks at him, fangs and glowing eyes and the tail he’s keeping in her lap just to connect them. 

“How do you do it?” she asks. “How do you get through it all? My horns grew in, and everything just… everything just got so hard.” 

She remembers it still, remembers the first time one of the girls on the cheer squad noticed the bumps under her bangs and screeched until everyone looked. She remembers the way they all looked at her in the locker room. She remembers the way that shopkeepers started to give her second glances after her skin started turning red, the way that mall cops lurked closer, watched her more carefully.

The thing about it all is that Fig didn’t even realize how easy her life was until that ease was gone. She’ll never be able to go back, and she doesn’t think she would even want to, but some days, she wakes up and thinks about everything coming, a whole lifetime of this world that got harder for reasons that make no sense, and she just wants to cry. 

Sometimes, she’s jealous of Riz, for starting there. For never having to know what was lost. Then, usually within five seconds, she hates herself for thinking that at all, because that train of thought is pointless and cruel. 

But the thing is, Riz seems to have himself figured out, at least more than Fig, who puts on other people’s faces for moments of sincerity because her own is too tight, too real. 

Fig grew horns and tore Elmville apart at the seams, trying desperately to find a parent who could understand her, clawing and begging for some kind of empathy unburdened by her crumbling family. 

Riz has had markings his whole life, and yet he figured out his place with his magic just through himself. He didn’t need a father. Didn’t need to find someone only to lose them over and over again. 

So she asks, “How do you do it?” and hopes that he’ll have some kind of answer for her like he had for Kristen, something to make the hardship make sense.

Riz blows out a long breath through his fangs, blinks at her slowly. He smiles, and it’s a little sad, but there’s an underscore of steel to it. “What else is there to do? The world would really love for me to lay down and die.” He shrugs. “I decided there was nothing better to do than prove it wrong.” He looks at her, yellow eyes sharp and knowing. “I think that at some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to live with yesterday or tomorrow. I picked tomorrow.” 

She hears the unspoken question in it, one he already has an answer to. What are you picking? he asks. Will you just lay down and die? 

She thinks about her mom on the roof of the Hangvan, stars arched up above them like the ceiling of a cathedral vast as universes. If I’m bound to fuck this up eventually anyway, isn’t it better to just get it out of the way? 

Maybe she is fucking things up. Maybe she’s making all her mistakes now. Maybe she’ll be making mistakes forever. But Riz is right. She’s not the type to lay down and die. Fuck that. 

Fuck Kalina and fuck Fathrethriel and fuck Aelwyn. Fuck it all. She’s going to get her dad back and she’s going to get him out of the ruby and then maybe she’s going to destroy every ruby in the universe so that no one can ever put him back in a gem again. 

“You really think he wouldn’t be mad at me?” she asks quietly. 

Riz huffs, a slight laugh. “No, I don’t think he would be mad at you for not being omnipotent and all-powerful. He loves you. He wouldn’t blame you for this. No one is blaming you for this except you.” 

She tugs at his tail lightly. “Hey now. That sounds like you’re judging me.”

“I mean…” 

She leans over and ruffles his hair sharply, making moves as if to drag him into a headlock, and he dodges out of the way, snickering. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and then another. She takes root in the idea, in the confidence of it, in the absolute faith of her friend. 

Feeling slightly more calm, she looks at Riz again, and frowns. He looks… well, he almost never looks well-rested. It comes with the territory of being an insomniac and a coffee addict. But there’s an edge to it now, deeper under the skin than just standard exhaustion, or even quest exhaustion. His shoulders are slumped more than usual, his curls messier, the bags under his eyes darker. He looks like he’s waiting for a shoe to drop. 

“Hey,” she ventures, trying to tread carefully. Asking Riz about his mental health is a delicate tightrope to walk. Push too hard, and he won’t give you anything. Be too subtle, and he’ll get completely distracted and derail you. “Are you doing okay? You look kinda rough. Is the research getting to you?” 

He stiffens, his ears flattening back against his skull. He looks at her, eyes panicked, and she thinks, Shit. She had thought that was pretty subtle. At least, more subtle than saying, I know something’s bothering you and I also know you won’t tell us if left to your own devices, which was the other option. 

“I, uh…” he flails for a moment, which only makes Fig more suspicious. He’s an excellent rogue, but of the two of them, he is not the convincing liar. 

Finally, he sighs, and says, “Uh, yeah, I mean. It wasn’t great.” He drums his fingers on his thigh. “I, uh, found the notes Arianwen had pulled together for the ritual at the Hotel Cavalier. You know how Ragh said his mom has a crystal like, fused into her chest? It seems like the plan was to do that with Gorthalax’s gem, and, uh…”

“And you,” she finishes, eyes wide. Her stomach is rioting. “Oh, that’s so fucked. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugs. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not like it happened. But it was weird to read, and to know that was almost me.” He shakes his head. “I really hate Adaine’s mom.”

“I think the plan is to kill both her parents, if that helps,” Fig offers. 

He considers this, tail flicking back and forth. “Yeah, I think it does. Is that messed up?”

“Eh. We’ve done worse.”

“True.” 

She eyes him, looks him up and down, from the avoidant cant of his gaze to the slight tension still lingering in his shoulders. In the darkness, only the glow of his eyes and the faint silvery moonlight from the Moon Haven, he looks small. She knows, logically, that he is small, but he almost never feels it. 

The thing is, she thinks he’s telling her the truth. She just doesn’t think he’s telling her the whole truth. She doesn’t know how to get it out of him, though. She doesn’t know how to navigate the gap between pushing too hard and letting him suffer alone. The thing about Riz is that he will break before he bends, and Fig is so very, very good at breaking things. 

“You know I’m always here if there’s anything else, right?” she says, and she means, Please, please, please let me help you. 

He looks up and meets her eyes, bad at lying but not strong enough to stop, either. She knows the look. “I know. I appreciate it,” he says, and what he means is, I will try everything else first. 

She sighs, but accepts it, because she loves him and that means loving all of him, not just the parts that are easy for her. She’ll be there if anything else falls through, and she does believe that he knows that. That will have to be enough, for now. 

Riz scoots back, deeper into the hollow. “Do you want to sleep in here tonight?” he offers. 

Fig’s breath catches, and her eyes water. “Yes please,” she whispers. She slides in, and curls up on her side. 

Riz folds in next to her, his tail draped over her waist as he tucks all his limbs up into his namesake ball. Fig drags a blanket over the both of them, leaning over to halfway tuck him in with it, which makes him laugh a little bit, and gets a smile out of her.

He falls asleep pretty quickly, which is another tally under the running checklist of evidence for her Something Is Wrong With Riz Theory. Maybe if she presented her evidence to him in the form of a speech and a conspiracy board, he would take it seriously and tell her what’s really wrong. An idea to consider tomorrow, she thinks as she yawns wide enough that she feels her fangs scrape against her lips when she closes her mouth again. 

Here, with Riz’s breathing next to her, she finally manages to fall asleep. 

—

It goes like this: they teleport to Arborly, and the forest feels like a lying creature, watching them with thousands and thousands of eyes. Branches reach out like grasping hands, like mouths waiting to swallow them. It’s deeply disturbing. 

So, naturally, they go into the mansion of some music industry guy Fig rubbed elbows with once, and throw a rager. After all, it is Spring Break.

Chapter Text

It goes like this: by the time the shrimp party comes to a close, one hot tub is full of shellfish in various states of boiled, there’s tartar sauce smeared in mysterious corners of the house, and they’re all very effectively trashed. 

For someone who has spent so much of his life with his metaphorical shirt buttoned up to the top of his throat, Riz muses as they drag mattresses out to the yard, he’s really let loose a little on this trip. Then he thinks about the fact that he only felt safe enough to try any of it because his friends are here, and he dissolves into tears without any prompting, dropping his mattress halfway across the yard and sitting down on it to bury his face in his hands. 

Ragh, who is also in the process of dragging out mattresses (handling two easily, where Riz had been struggling to pull even one gnome-sized mattress), drops his load to the ground and crosses over to him, saying, “Hey, whoah, dude, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Riz wails into his hands, ears down and tail spasming behind him. “Nothing’s wrong! I love you guys so much!”

Even with his head in his hands, he hears Ragh sniff loudly, and he drops down on the mattress next to Riz. He wraps an arm around his shoulders and says, “I love you guys, too. And hey, crying? That’s cool, bro. That’s so cool. Let it all out, man. Hoot, growl.” 

He dissolves into even greater hysterics, leaning into Ragh’s side and sobbing so hard his whole body is shaking. Ragh just keeps rubbing rhythmic little circles on his back, saying, “There you go, bro, I got you. I got you, man.” 

“I’m really glad,” Riz hiccups desperately in between sobs, “that we’re friends now. I can’t… I don’t… I never thought I would have friends like you all.” 

He means it, too. Back in middle school, if you had told him that he would be friends with three kids on the bloodrush team, that they would love him and he would love them, that he would be friends with an ex-cleric of Helio and a badass wizard and a literal world-renowned rock star, he would have thought you were mocking him. And then he probably would have bitten you. 

The thing is, he still wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, and thinks for a moment that it was all a dream, that this can’t be his life. It makes no sense. It makes no sense that he has this many friends. He spent so long wishing for someone, anyone besides just Penny to want him, and now he has more friends than he really knows what to do with. 

Ragh sniffs, loudly, squeezes Riz closer, and says, “Dude. Dude. I'm pretty blasted right now, but like… I don’t really remember if I ever apologized. I’m sorry I dunked you in a trash can. That wasn’t cool. I had a lot of shit to work out, but that doesn’t make it okay.”

“I smelled like banana and old bagels all day,” he whispers. 

“Yeah, and like, that sucks, dude. I’m really, really sorry. You’re a cool little dude. Like, super smart, and funny, and nice, and, like, I’m sorry I wasn’t chill enough to be okay with you back then.” He hiccups with a slight sob, and says, “I’m really glad that we’re friends now, too. You all are so cool. My life is a lot better with you all in it.”

“I’m sorry Daybreak made your life so bad,” he says, swiping away tears from his cheeks that roll back down again just as fast. (The distant part of his brain that never stops working, that never shuts up, that haunts him through the night and all through the day, wonders if angel tears are some kind of material component, and should he maybe save them for Adaine? Or would that be weird?)

“Yeah, he was a bad dude,” Ragh rumbles. “But, like, you totally fucking. Boiled his brains in his head.”

“Charred him,” Riz mumbled. “Cooked him like an egg. On an-” he hiccups, grinning vindictively despite himself. “Like an egg on an angel stove.”

“Fuck yeah. I didn’t see it, but that was, like, totally cool. He totally had it coming.”

“Messed with Kristen. Messed with you. Fuck that. Stupid religious cults.”

“Stupid religious cults,” Ragh agrees. “You’re a good friend.” 

Riz swipes away more tears. Material components? Wasted time. Wasted emotion. He isn’t doing any of this right. All these friends, and he still can’t make himself turn away from the mystery, can’t make himself turn away from the questions, can’t stop analyzing his own blood, sweat, and tears for any kind of opportunity. Friends first, then clues, his mom’s voice echoes in his ear.

“I’m so bad at being friends with people,” he hiccups. “I can’t stop all the other stuff. It’s so hard for me to just appreciate it. I should be better at this.”

Ragh shakes his shoulders, makes him look up and stop wiping his eyes for a few moments. He meets Riz’s gaze, and his face is shadowed in the dark of the night and the mist. The stars can’t really be seen past the canopy, not this close to the Forest of the Nightmare King, but there’s still something holy about the velvety embrace of darkness. 

“Look, dude, there’s no right way to be friends with people,” he says. “You just gotta try your best and be good to them. And maybe you focus a lot on other stuff even when you’re with your friends, but you’re so, like… you learned how to use a medkit even though your party already has a cleric and a bard. You help people with their notes. You fuck up anybody who fucks with your party. And, like, I can’t speak for anybody else, but I know you’re totally good at being my friend, and I think all the others would agree.”

Riz sniffs, curls his tail around Ragh’s waist. “You’re really good at loving people,” he says. He drops his head against Ragh’s shoulder, leans his body in, and Ragh just pulls him closer and squeezes him. 

“Hell yeah, dude,” he says. “I was made for this shit. Loving people is the best.”

And they stay there for a long time, Ragh rubbing circles in his back and Riz purring, deep and throaty, rich with appreciation and affection in octaves beyond his friend’s hearing. 

Being drunk is strange, different from the lightning-strike clarity and impossible ascension of dragon spice. Alcohol takes the edges off the world, erodes away the sand beneath all of Riz’s dams, lets the water leak out and color everything. Riz is a weepy, maudlin drunk, he has discovered. He’s not sure if he likes it, the way the borders of the world bleed and blur together, the way everything feels impossibly big and impossibly important and impossible to do right. 

He’s not sure he likes the feeling of being drunk. The shrimp party was great, but he’s starting to think he was right, and that teen parties with spiked punch and alcohol in the coolers aren’t all they’re hyped up to be. Riz’s mouth tastes foul and his stomach is roiling from all the shellfish and he kind of thinks he’ll throw up at some point in the next hour. 

Still, he thinks, as he and his friends finally get all the mattresses up next to the range of the Hallow in the van, and collapse in piles of blankets, giggling and snoring and puking a little into the bushes. Still, he thinks as Ragh settles next to him and halfway tucks him in and hands him a glass of water to drink before bed. Maybe there’s at least one thing partying has got going for it. 

—

It goes like this: they watch Adaine’s Scry succeed, and then watch her reel back as someone dispells it. She blinks, her eyes wide and terrified, and looks sideways to where Kristen is standing with Tracker and Riz. She asks, through a Message cantrip that somehow manages to be a whisper, “Is she here? Can you see Kalina?”

All of them straighten. Kristen looks off into the shadows, the darkness puddled under the mangled canopies of the trees, and meets the gaze of a pair of yellow, slitted eyes. 

Her pulse skips and her blood roars in her ears. This is the woman that hurt Riz, that hurt Fabian, that infected her and her girlfriend and her friend. Kristen’s so scared, the fear a living creature just under her skin, but she’s also so angry, and in this moment the anger shoves aside all of the fear and takes the reins, pulls her in and makes her blood snarl.

She steps forward, putting Riz and Tracker behind her, and bares her teeth at the patch of darkness like she’ll grow fangs if she tries hard enough. “ Fuck you!” she shouts at the darkness, done hiding, done playing, so so scared and so so fucking done.

The eyes narrow, slitted pupils thin as blades. And Kalina steps out of the shadows.  

They trade barbs, snarl for snarl, fang for fang, Kristen laughing like a blade as her heart tries to hammer its way out of her chest. 

Kalina smiles, all teeth and no humor, none of the kindness Kristen now feels, after two years of Tracker and Riz and Fig, should come from a mouth of fangs. “Laugh it up,” she says, voice edging into something poisonous, “‘cause if you crack this case, and get to the other side of the wall, you, Riz, you’re all dead.” She steps closer, tail swinging, eyes boring holes in Kristen. “But to make it easy for you, because I want you to know that I’m right, I’ll take Tracker and Riz out first. I’ll make sure you see it happen.”

And when Kalina disappears, Kristen takes a shaky breath, and then whips around and shouts, “GUYS! I’m so scared! Hold me! Hold me!”

Tracker hits her first, practically tackles her to the ground and drops her full body weight onto Kristen, saying, “Babe, babe, I got you, you’re good, you’re good.”

Adaine flops on top of Tracker, adding more weight, pressing Kristen down until she almost feels real again. “You looked so cool!”

Riz flops down on top of Adaine, not adding all that much weight, but certainly being a reassuring presence, a reliable reminder that Kalina is full of shit and she hasn’t killed Riz yet. ( Yet, yet, yet, Kristen’s brain taunts her.)

Above them, Fig is darting through the area where Kalina was, swinging her arms and shouting, “Where was she? Where was she?” as Sandra Lynn scans the area, arrow nocked, bow raised. 

Kristen grabs for Tracker’s hand and, through her tears, blurts, “Tracker, she’s gonna kill you! She’s gonna kill you! She said she would kill you first!”

Tracker protests loudly, rubbing Kristen’s back and saying soothing words. 

Sandra Lynn steps over and says, “What did Kalina say to you?”

And Kristen tells them everything. 

At the end, looking as though she’s aged several years during the conversation, Sandra Lynn says, “That sounds really fucked up. Are you okay?”

Kristen considers it. She can hardly breathe under the friends piled on top of her, now also with Fig collapsed on top of Riz. She can hardly breathe and the grass is scratchy but they’re here and they’re alive and there’s no demon cat, so really, this is a win. “Now that I’m being dog-piled into the ground by all of my friends? Yes,” she says. 

Kristen rambles through a speech, dizzy and disoriented with shock and lingering fear, clinging in her blood like a painkiller, and as she finishes, she watches Riz get up, and walk over to the area where Kalina was standing. His ears are flicked up in an attentive position, his tail raised up behind him and swinging rhythmically.

He crouches down, gets low to the ground. He pulls out a magnifying glass, squints at it. Runs a claw across some of the blades of glass. Nothing. No proof. She can see it from the expression on his face, the look of gears turning in his head. 

Fig suggests a hologram, and Adaine mentions a counterspell. Fig says, “But this proves that at least she’s busy enough that she can’t physically be here herself.”

And Riz, brow furrowed, crouching in the grass, says, “Right. I don’t know if she’s ever physically been anywhere.” 

It makes a horrifying, terrifying amount of sense. They’ve been run in circles and tormented by a ghost of a disease, a consciousness buried in an infection, a magical entity lying dormant in the cells of living beings. 

They begin to delegate out tasks, split off into little groups to go do separate things. And the threat of separating, the threat of them, of any of them being out of her sight-

( I’m going to take out Tracker and Riz first.) 

“Hey, uh, can I talk to you two for a minute?” she asks, and pulls Tracker and Riz aside. 

Tracker is giving her the full weight of her concern, eyes dark with worry. Riz looks a little distracted, eyes flicking back and forth and tail lashing as he mutters under his breath. Understandable, she supposes. He is, after all, their investigator, and the Kalina stuff is closer to him than to anybody. It’s part of why the threat against him is so terrifying to her. Kalina has already proven that she can’t be normal about Riz. And Tracker is powerful, but, but, but.

“Hey, so, um,” Kristen starts, already anticipating a fight and a loss, but needing to try anyway. “I need to chain you two up in the Hangvan, and I need you to stay there.”

Tracker’s eyebrows shoot up, and Riz stops muttering under his breath to look up and give her his full attention. 

“I have to chain you up in the Hangvan,” she continues, “I’ll leave you snacks-”

“Sweetie, it’s not-” Tracker starts at the same time Riz says, “What are you talking about?”

“You can’t-”

“Sweetie, it’s not the full moon-”

“Can we go back to the chain you up in the van part? I’m very confused.”

“You have to be in the van for the rest of our lives-”

“Sweetie, what’s up-”

“I can’t lose you,” Kristen blurts, shocking both of them into silence. “I can’t lose either of you.” She feels like she’s going to be sick, like her insides are a soup left too long on the stove and now they’re all bubbling over the edges and making a mess. She could cry or puke or shred her fingernails against a tree until they bled and it wouldn’t be enough.

“She said that she would take you first,” she says desperately, trying to explain it to them, them and their shocked faces slowly melting into empathy that only makes Kristen more sick to her stomach. “There’s no way.”

Because, well, Kristen will never say that she loves some of her friends more than the others. Truthfully, the love for each of her friends bleeds into the love for all the rest of them, creates cathedrals and citadels and mountains of love, whole landscapes grander and greater than Kristen’s chest can contain. 

She loves all of her friends, but Tracker and Riz are the ones who make the universe make sense for her. They are the start and the end and the middle of every question that has ever given her meaning as she becomes her own person. Kristen loves her friends, but Tracker and Riz keep all her ruined edges stitched together long enough for the incisions to start healing once more. 

And Kristen knows, okay? She knows that they’re awesome and badass and they’ve both saved her more times than they can count. But the part of her that just met Kalina for the first time, the part that has seen Tracker bloodied and Riz with a collar around his neck killing his words before they’re even spoken? That part wants nothing more than to lock both of them up in the Hangvan forever and never let them leave, so that cat and her smile can never touch them.

Of all her friends, only Tracker and Riz and Ragh are infected, and she has a horrible, sinking feeling that that’s going to be a serious problem in the forest. 

“I have so many heals,” Kristen says, once more attempting to pitch her case. “I can just be the six part of the sixty nine.” She turns to Riz. “And, like, I mean, you’ve totally cracked this case already, so you’re pretty much done already, right?”

Riz looks her dead in the eyes, and says, “I’m not done until I’ve shot Kalina myself.”

“Babe,” Tracker says. “I love you with all my heart.”

“Good, put these handcuffs on.” 

She pushes the handcuffs away gently. “But there are only two conditions where I ever want you to handcuff me. One, we know.” 

She nods seriously. “When I’m Officer Kristen.” 

Riz makes a disgusted face, and cringes away from both of them, saying, “I did not need to know that.”

“And two-”

“When I need you to be safe.”

“When I’m werewolfing,” Tracker says firmly, and Kristen buries her face in her hands. 

“Kristen, if you try to touch me with those handcuffs, I will bite you,” Riz says with clear seriousness. 

She takes a deep breath, tries to make some semblance of composure from her soup brain, which has now reached an unparalleled boil and is flooding her mental kitchen with scorched soup. “You all are great,” she says. “And you’re so strong, and I get that, and I love you. This isn’t me discrediting you all. But she’s… she said she would kill you, and she’s in you. The others aren’t infected. You are.”

“So are you,” Riz points out. 

“Yeah, but that’s not- I have to keep you all safe,” Kristen says desperately. Because if she has to choose, herself or them, she will sacrifice herself every time. 

“Babe,” Tracker says gently, and reaches over to take one of Kristen’s hands, squeezing gently. “We feel the same way. That’s why we have to go. We can’t allow ourselves to stay behind for the same reason you don’t want us to go. What if something happens, and you need protecting? What then?” 

“I’d-” she flounders for a response, something, anything to convince them, but it’s a halfhearted attempt. Honestly, she had known from the start that this was a lost cause. 

“The whole point of us being here is to help each other,” Riz says, his face serious, knowing even in the lack of humor. “What use are we going to be on the sidelines?” Then he leans over to bump her hip. “Besides. Didn’t you pay attention in school? Never separate the party.”

Kristen looks at them, brown and green skin, sharp eyes, matching fangs poking slightly out of their lips, both of them waiting patiently for her to come to the conclusion they all knew was coming from the start. Walking with her as she runs herself in circles just for the sake of saying that she tried. 

Her two people. It’s a moment sweet like shared ice cream and just as bitterly cold. The thing about loving the people you go adventuring with, Kristen has discovered, is that the end of the world suddenly seems miles less terrifying than the end of your world. (Sometimes, Kristen worries that if she had to pick, then the world would just have to burn. She has reshaped the universe once before, created a god from nothing. She would do it again, if that’s what it took to keep these people.)

“Just promise me you’ll be extra, extra careful when we go in there,” Kristen begs.

“Not a problem,” Riz says. “I am constantly overflowing with paranoia.”

Tracker laughs, loud and sharp and wolflike, and says, “I promise.”

Kristen holds each of them by the hand and squeezes, tries to convey even a fraction of what they mean to her. Riz tips into her side and purrs, his tail winding around her ankle, and Tracker kisses her forehead gently. 

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” Tracker says, her voice quietly confident. 

And standing in the sun, bracketed on either side, Kristen almost believes her.

—

It goes like this: they wake up with forty bows pointed at their camp, and a wood elf woman staring at them all as if she would like nothing more than to grind them into the dirt beneath her heel. Riz knows the look. It’s nothing new.

Her eyes linger on Fig’s horns, even as she charms Nuathera the fox. Her eyes flick over Kristen and Tracker with suspicion, Gorgug and Ragh with distrust, and Riz with an expression of utmost befuddlement warring with disgust. He fights the urge to hiss, to bare his fangs, and, failing all that, to slink into Gorgug’s shadow and disappear. 

It’s nothing new. 

Eventually, their combined pleas and charms win out, and Nuathera gives them access to and assistance from everything in Arborly. 

Riz and Adaine go to the Owl and the Harp. They fumble through a social interaction at the desk, managing to somehow be both deeply unconvincing and deeply suspicious. They trail up the creaking, spiral staircase, the cheerful music from the lobby seeping up through the thin floorboards. They get to Arianwen’s room, and walk in to a gruesome, viscera-splattered arcane crime scene. 

“Oh, thank the gods,” Adaine says, straightening up and immediately beginning to scan the room, the brilliant white of the Elven Oracle creeping in around the edges of her sclera. 

“Finally,” Riz sighs, relieved, pulling some plastic gloves from his briefcase, snapping some on and handing them to Adaine. “This I can handle.”

She nods in serious agreement. “Give me a body over social duty any day.”

They paw through the room, turn it upside down, examine all the markings and the leftover scraps of paper. Riz looks at the chalk on the floor and the husks of candles and the blood smeared in streaks and puddles across the floor with an investigator’s eye. He looks at them with an investigator’s eye and pushes back the smell of smoke and the glow of a distant room and the image of Fig standing over him with a knife. 

Killian may have been a bastard and a horrible person, but no one deserves this. 

Adaine finds the scraps of a letter to her father, fixes them with Mending, holds the paper with shaking hands and eyes of ice. Riz holds her hand and they breathe together, Boggy ribbiting softly on her shoulder.

“At least,” she says hollowly after a moment, “this means my shitty parents didn’t kill Aelwyn for it.”

“Yeah,” Riz says quietly. He doesn’t say, Let’s not count our chickens yet, because it feels cruel, and unnecessary. Adaine knows. Just because Aelwyn isn’t walking around with a gem in her chest doesn’t mean she’s safe. 

“Riz?” Adaine asks quietly, staring at the image drawn on the wall of a skeletal figure crowned with thorns, candle wax dripping down the wood. “Do you think people can change?”

He holds her hand, takes a deep breath, wraps his tail around her ankle. He looks up at the picture of the Nightmare King, eyes hollow and all-knowing. Your fears know more about you than you do.

He thinks of Kristen, about her magic that went from summer sun to starry midnight. He thinks about Fabian, who lost himself in a city full of ocean air and found himself again in his feet and his body and the steady beat of his heart, came out with magic like honeysuckle and the warmth off beach sand. He thinks of Adaine herself, growing bolder and more settled. Adaine, cleaning Aelwyn’s hair in a hot springs, holding her shaking hands. 

“I do think people can change,” he says quietly. “But I think that they have to want to.” 

She considers this, eyes still focused on the bloody mural, unfocused. “Can we help them want to?” 

He squeezes her hand. “We can try.”

They leave the Owl and the Harp, go back to Holly Hill hand-in-hand, thinking about possibilities, and change. And they find Fig, waving around an infernal subpoena. 

—

“Has anyone seen my other shoe?” Kristen calls, weaving past through the chaos. 

Sandra Lynn calls back, “Sweetie, why did you take off your shoes?”

“Well, I wanted to put a foot in the hot tub. I wanted to see if it would smell like shrimp.” 

Fabian stops packing up his backpack, raises his head to look over at Kristen with an expression of disgust. “I’m sorry, you put only one foot in the hot tub and left your shoe on the other foot?”

Gorgug, who has been trying to track down all the loose socks they’ve strewn throughout Holly Hill, looks up and says, “Did it work? Did your foot smell like shrimp?”

“Not as much as I hoped,” Kristen pouts. 

Tracker rolls her eyes fondly, and as a fresh round of complaints with her girlfriend’s shrimp foot methodology crops up, she ducks out through the door of Holly Hill to weave across the yard. 

Even in this gnarled, intimidating section of forest, the yard of Holly Hill is mostly even and well-maintained. It makes Tracker’s stomach twist a little, to be honest. Any time a section of nature doesn’t behave like the rest of it, it feels a little bit like being in wolf form and having her fur brushed backwards. Something that just isn’t supposed to happen. 

But, she has to admit, it’s good for parking the van. The vehicle in question is sitting in the middle of the yard, still surrounded with mattresses left out from their night last night. They should probably take those inside before they leave. 

She swings one of the back doors open with a creak of hinges and steps up into the semi-darkness of the van. Everyone else is inside of Holly Hill, packing up their backpacks and bags that were strewn across the house in the party last night. That is, everyone who doesn’t obsessively keep all of their belongings in a Briefcase of Holding when they’re not in use. 

Tracker raps on the side of the van, the metal ringing in the soft silence. “Knock knock,” she says. 

Riz’s hand pops up from one of the middle rows of seats, waving. Tracker takes it as the invitation it is, and weaves through the seats to find him, cross-legged down in the gap between the seat and the floor, using the worn fabric surface of the seat as a desk for a menagerie of papers. 

Tracker sits down in a normal seat next to him, too large to truly copy his position. “Hey,” she says. 

“Hey,” he says, looking up at her. “How’s it going in there?”

“Kristen lost a shoe.” 

“How?”

“She stuck one foot in the hot tub.”

“Oh. To make it smell like shrimp?”

“Yup.” 

“How successful was it?”

Tracker tips her hand back and forth in a so-so motion. 

Riz snorts. “Sounds like Kristen.” His tail flicks, and he looks at her with the corners of his eyes. “What’s up?”

“Why are you out here?” she asks. 

He stills. He looks down at his papers, ears lowering against his head. “I can focus better. Less prying eyes.”

Ah, Tracker thinks. Right. The Hallow. He isn’t hiding from his friends and their noise, though she’s pretty sure he does do that sometimes. He’s hiding from Kalina. 

She can understand that. She’s only ever seen the picture, a woman with a sideways smirk and sharp eyes, arm thrown around Sklonda’s shoulders. But she’s heard some of the stuff she’s said to Riz, watched Kristen lose her shit and have a slight breakdown after a conversation with her. She’s weird about everyone, and weirder about Riz. 

Just thinking about her makes Tracker’s skin crawl. 

A disease. A magical disease. As if Tracker didn’t already have enough of those, a part of her thinks bitterly. She shushes that part, because godsdammit she is done thinking bad thoughts about her lycanthropy. 

“Makes sense,” is what she says finally. She leans over to look at the papers, and finds what looks like Fig’s subpoena, along with-

“Are those notes about the Nine Hells’ legal procedures?” she asks, baffled. 

“Yeah,” he says, tapping his claws on one of the papers and spinning a pencil through the fingers of his other hand, down and back, down and back. “They’re, uh- I asked Gorthalax about a lot of stuff. Cause, you know. He’s over a lot in the mornings, and after a long shift, usually I’m up before Mom, and he doesn’t sleep, so-” He shrugs, almost self-consciously. “We tend to talk.”

“And you talk about hellish legal proceedings?” she laughs. 

He shrinks down in his sheet, averting eye contact, and Tracker instantly has the sinking feeling of having said something wrong. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “I know it’s, like, a weird topic or whatever, but I’m not super good at smalltalk, so…”

Tracker curses herself. She forgets, sometimes, that Riz is not like Kristen. When someone steps onto an accidental bad memory or insecurity of Kristen’s, she inflates, gets bigger and brighter and laughs harder, tries to smack it away by turning it into a joke. Riz, when touching a bad memory or an insecurity, shrinks back and goes invisible, hides within himself. 

“Hey, that’s cool,” she course corrects. “I’m sure he likes that. Probably not many people ask about the Nine Hells with a lot of well-meaning curiosity.” 

He comes back out of where he has retreated into himself, tail flicking. “I hope so. I don’t really know how to hold a normal conversation with him after he comes out of my mom’s room.”

Tracker winces. “Whoof. Yeah, I’ve been there. When I first moved in with Uncle Jawbone, it was so weird. His one-night stands always tried to make conversation with me at the breakfast table.” 

One-night stands, and sometimes the people who came over for drugs, and sometimes people who came for the sex and left with drugs too anyway. He’s so much more stable now, and even back when there were people Tracker didn’t know in and out through the apartment all the time, no one tried to mess with her. There are, it seems, some perks to being a werewolf. Tracker’s bite is worse than her bark, and everyone who came through knew it, too.

Riz makes a sympathetic face. “I don’t think I could have looked any of them in the eye.”

“Oh, I usually didn’t.”

He snorts, one ear flicking, and Tracker is reminded once more of the quiet companionship between the two of them. He understands what it is to be labeled a monster, to take that and grip it with two clawed hands and turn it into a battle cry.

And, well. Tracker loves Kristen and the other Bad Kids dearly, loves Sandra Lynn and their new home full of runaways and misfits. But, but, but. 

But sometimes Tracker wants to grip Fig and Kristen by the shoulders and shake them until their middle class blindness falls away. Sometimes she wants to drag Fabian and Adaine through every shitty bus she’s ever taken, every laundromat where she did her clothes, every place where she worked to help pay rent before she was even fourteen. 

Fig struggled with waking up one day as something unholy, Adaine struggled when her rich parents vanished, and Kristen struggled when she left the Church of Helio. And Tracker gets that, Tracker empathizes with all of that, each one individually. 

But Riz is the one who gets it. Riz is the one who never questions her when they’re at the grocery store and she compares prices and gets store brand and dumps out coupons from her pocket. Riz grew up a latchkey kid of a parent trying their best. Riz is the one who also knows how to dumpster dive like he’s used it to get by. 

It’s hard to have religious problems. It’s hard to have queer problems. It’s hard to be a monster. It’s so, so much harder to do all of that and not have any money to back it up. It’s such a specific overlap of things that can make life harder, and it’s one they both fit in, and it’s something that makes it so easy to speak to him about it all.

Tracker has never had to explain that to Riz. He just understands. Which is, perhaps, why she feels most comfortable going to him with this, maybe even more comfortable than going to Kristen. 

She looks him up and down, his clawed feet tucked away under the seat, his tail laying in the middle of the aisle, his glowing eyes and his fangs. She thinks about his halo, thinks about all the boards tucked up in his briefcase, the Heavenstigation that is still ongoing. She takes a deep breath. 

“How did you come to terms with your magic?” she asks. “Even when it was hard, and confusing?”

He looks back at her, ears flicking to face her like radar dishes seeking signal. “Is this about the unnamed goddess?” 

Tracker shifts. There are crumbs in the seat, digging into her thighs below the hem of her shorts. “I just can’t stop thinking about it,” she admits. “I mean, I know that the version of Galicaea that the church from Fallinel worships isn’t my version, but… isn’t it still the same goddess?”

Riz fully sits up from his notes to fix Tracker with a piercing, evaluative gaze. For a moment, he’s silent, and then he says, “You mean, do the actions of that version of the goddess reflect on your religion?”

She digs her fingers into her palms. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. “Shoot me straight, please,” she says. “I want the truth. Even if it sucks.”

His face is solemn. He sighs. “Truth. Truth is… complicated.” His tail swings back and forth. “I can give you my truth.”

“That’s all I’m asking for,” she says. 

He’s silent for a long moment. It stretches between them like taffy, like sinew pulled taut, something sickly-sweet and true like flesh and blood. “Yes,” he says, and it’s a sympathetic, but unmoving answer. “Yes, I think the actions of the Church of Galicaea, even the elven version, reflect on your religion. But I don’t think it reflects on your faith.”

Tracker frowns. “Can you… can you explain that a little more? I’m not sure I’m following.”

Riz scrapes his notes together and pulls himself up from the ground to settle in the seat next to her, papers on his lap. “Look,” he says. “I don’t do religion like you and Kristen do. I’ve never been to a church. I don’t have a congregation. I don’t even have other people that I compare my beliefs with. There is no one to share my celestial magic with. So, the way you and I experience belief and magic is very different. Even if your connection to Galicaea mostly comes from your body, from your spirituality, you still engage with other clerics of her, right? Other believers? You have community through her?”

Her skin crawls, bugs moving under her skin, waiting to devour. “...I mean, yeah.”

He nods. “Alright. So, the way I see it, there are two categories of belief. There is religion, and there is faith. And sometimes they overlap, and sometimes they don’t. 

“Religion is the organization of reverence for some kind of idea or deity. A church, for example. And that can be as small as one church, or as large as every church that shares that belief, moving as a collective. When you interact with other clerics of Galicaea, or when you try to convince other people to also believe in Galicaea, that is religion.

“The other kind is faith. Faith is… individual. Personal. Deeply held beliefs that you would hold to yourself even if you never went to church ever again. You have a lot of faith in Galicaea, and that comes through your connection to the moon, to the world, to the universe. You trust and believe in her ideas, and would continue to do so even without the church.” 

Here, he pauses, biting his lip and looking her up and down. His ears lower a little bit, as if already waiting for her to get mad. But he goes on. 

“Religion and faith are the big categories of belief, and sometimes they overlap, and sometimes they don’t. You have faith in Galicaea, and you participate in the religion, the community. That’s faith and religion. I have faith in Kirizayak, but I don’t engage with any religious communities for her. That’s faith without religion. And then there are people who go to religious celebrations and participate in the communities for the sake of having a community, without really holding it as a deep truth of the universe. That’s religion without faith. 

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with faith. I think faith is a good thing. I think that people should believe in something very deeply. That doesn’t have to be a god. It can be anything. You can have faith in something as mundane as believing that people matter. That’s pretty common, but it’s still a faith. 

“When faith becomes religion, though, that’s where it gets…” He sighs. “Sticky. Because once you organize a faith in such a way that the will of the collective speaks for everyone in it, and focuses on spreading more than actual belief, then it’s not strictly faith, right? Then it’s a weapon. A tool of control.”

A surge of outrage flares in Tracker’s stomach, and she opens her mouth, but Riz looks up as if tasting the tongue-lashing brewing in the air, and skewers her with a look. “You wanted the truth. This is my truth. This is what I think. You don’t have to agree with it, but you said you wanted this. I’m giving it to you. You don’t get to decide to opt out when it no longer aligns with what you expected me to say, or what is comfortable for you to hear.”

“I’m not trying to opt out,” she says. “But it’s… what you're describing isn’t my church.”

He waves a hand through the air. “This dead goddess would disagree.”

Her stomach twists, a towel trying to wring all the guilt out of itself. The Church of Galicaea did that. Erased a goddess for the sake of growth, for the sake of power. And that wasn’t Tracker’s church, but…

He sighs. “Look, I know you’ve also gotten shit from the Church of Sol. I’m not going to preach to you about how it feels to be hated by the followers of a religion. You know. And both of us also know that those groups aren’t monoliths, evidenced by you and Kristen. But the Church of Sol and the Church of Helio refusing to denounce the Harvestmen, preaching hatred in the name of salvation… I’m sure that faith is good for some people, and there are churches somewhere that can make that a positive. 

“But in the same way that the Church of Sol and the Church of Helio refuse to either support or deny factions like that, and that makes it really a kind of support in and of itself, your religion fundamentally has to do with the elven Church of Galicaea. They come together. It’s the same goddess. 

“You can’t remove that history. Maybe you can cover it up, but that’s not the same thing. There’s no way to undo atrocities like that. And that’s a heavy burden to bear, but if you want to participate in a system that benefitted from something awful, the way I see it, you have some degree of responsibility to not forget that. You have to understand it. You have to be able to look it in the eye to make sure you never let it happen again.”

Light, murky and slanted, pours in through the windows, brushing over the bridge of his upturned nose, throwing deep shadows across his brows and the dip of his throat. It’s like being underwater, seeing a creature built to live here. 

Riz was made to walk the line between light and shadow, between day and night, built to be both and neither all at once. 

Tracker was built for the moon, built for the darkness. She’s forgotten how to look at things in the cold, hard daylight. There’s no room to hide underneath the microscope of Riz’s attention. 

The thing about Riz, she thinks, is that he was never going to be able to ignore things. The thing about Riz is that the harder he tries to not think about something, the longer and more furiously all the subconscious parts of his brain think about it. He has been thinking about this, about all of this, for as long as he’s been able to understand it. Riz, trying to unravel the ancient and impossible mysteries of the universe, not by thinking about the universe, but by thinking about the people in it.

Tracker flexes her fingers at him, and smiles ruefully. “How have you figured out so much about the gods just by looking at other people?” she asks.

Riz stares at her for a long second in the underwater light, murky green and dusky gold and the dark, dark shades of his hair, the shadows in his wrinkled dress shirt. Finally, he just shrugs. “As above, so below.”

Her stomach is still twisting, a bed of snakes writing around inside of her. Her wolf, which perpetually sits just under her skin, waiting to be one, itches at her, fangs and claws and fur begging to be released, begging to be whole, to be holy. It feels wrong, that anything could have taken her faith and made it an executioner's axe for a goddess, for a way of life, for a whole nation. It sets her teeth on edge. 

“I keep thinking that I should be able to think my way around it,” she confesses. “I keep thinking that I should be able to come up with some reason that their goddess isn’t my goddess, so I shouldn’t be this worried about it. But it just makes me feel like I’m gonna be sick.”

“Good.”

Tracker gapes at him. “What?”

“Good,” he repeats, his eyes serious. “That means you’re exactly who I thought you were. A kind person whose faith is truly and deeply based in love and care for everyone.” And at her startled expression, he says, “It would be way more concerning if you learned that your church has basically committed a cultural genocide, and you didn’t care at all. That would be way worse. If it makes you feel bad, that’s a good thing.”

She closes her mouth. “...Yeah, I guess,” she says. She can’t ever imagine not being appalled by something like the Sylvairan Heresy. “So, what do I do about the elven church?”

Riz shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” she cries. “You just had a whole big speech for me about religion and faith, and now when I ask you what to do, you don’t know?”

He holds up his hands. “Look, I’m not making your decisions for you. I’m just giving you some honest opinions. It’s evidence for your clue board.”

“You know I don’t have a clue board.”

“That can be fixed. I have extra boards in my briefcase.” 

“In case of conspiracy theory emergencies?” she says dryly. 

“Of course!” he says. “I mean, imagine if someone needed to organize their thoughts and they needed a board and I didn’t have one. That would be awful!” He sounds deeply offended at this hypothetical Riz who didn’t have a board. His brow is furrowed and his tail is lashing, and it’s such a funny and cute expression that Tracker can’t help but laugh in spite of herself. 

As she does, she feels some of the tension release along her shoulders. She realizes that, uncomfortable as it made her, she does feel like she got something out of this conversation, a perspective that Kristen couldn’t have given her. A brutal sort of truth that she needed to figure out how she felt about it. 

Maybe she doesn’t have to have a plan right away for how she handles this. But she does know that he’s right. There’s no sweeping it under the rug. There’s no erasing it. There’s no going on as if she never learned what she did. 

One of the greatest forms of love, Tracker thinks, is to look at a broken part of something you love and decide to fix it. She feels the wolf itch under her skin, begging to snarl, to stalk, to grow. Galicaea is, after all, about cycles. About change. About embracing all parts of nature. Maybe Tracker can make a difference somehow. She just needs to think about it. She’s got time. 

She looks at her friend, perched in one of the van seats. She takes a deep breath and a leaf out of Kristen’s book, dives into the unknown, scared but open, waiting to change. “Hey,” she says. “So, I know you all did some research about Galicaea, and a lot of other elven gods.” 

“Yeah. Why?” 

“Can I maybe take a look at the Heavenstigation papers?”

Riz’s eyes flash. “Say no more,” he says, and lurches over to his briefcase. He sticks a hand in and swirls it around, coming back with a truly comical amount of papers. He hands over the stack. “Just wait,” he says. “That’s the first part.”

Her brows shoot up. “How many parts are there?” 

“Seven,” he says, sticking his hand back in the briefcase. “We are a very thorough investigative team.”

Tracker laughs, partially in affection and partially in despair as she considers how many papers she’s about to have. She looks down at the stack in her hands. The top paper is a handwritten table of contents for the stack, scribbled out in Riz’s chicken scratch. She flips through the next few pages. They’re not that old, but they’re already well-worn, articles printed with library ink, annotated with highlighter and gel pens, doodles in the margins and coffee stains warping words in big splatters across the middle of pages. 

In the corner of one of the pages, Kristen has underlined a line about love in the face of adversity, and scribbled next to it, this is what it’s supposed to be. In the corner of another, Riz’s handwriting says, Kristen, check out this section, think you’ll like it. don’t forget your common assignment for tuesday. 

She will admit, she had thought the Heavenstigation was a little ridiculous. It had felt like a dramatization of something that might have been better for Kristen if it were more normal. Now, she rethinks that. She looks at the papers, really looks at them for the first time, the result of dozens upon dozens of hours of earnest investigation and theological consideration, and sees them for what they are: an eager and ongoing connection with the idea of faith itself. 

Out of curiosity, quiet but possessing, she casts Detect Good and Evil. 

There are the obvious things. Her own power, like the light of the full moon. The Hallow spell, Kristen’s magic now like the thick embrace of a cool night full of stars. Riz, with his magic like flowing water, fresh and clean and cool. Zaphriel, in the van, his magic like the breeze over a warm beach. 

But then, just as she suspected, the papers in her hands, the ones Riz keeps pulling more of from his briefcase as he chatters about the organization of the stacks, are full of a faint holy energy. And not just the lingering brushes of Kristen and Riz interacting with the physical objects. No, these papers have their own divinity, ever so slight. These are the foci of earnest interaction with faith. They are, in a way, a form of prayer. 

Tracker laughs under her breath, shakes her head in fondness and awe and deep respect. The people in her life are so strange, and so wonderful. She can no longer imagine what it would be like to not know them. So Riz keeps pulling papers out, and Tracker keeps taking them. 

Finally, when he’s given her all the relevant papers, and told her about all the other stacks he has if she ever wants to look at more, she just says, “Thanks, Riz.”

He grins at her, fanged and delighted. “Any time.”

She taps the papers with her fingers, looks down at them, still feeling the lingering touch of all the magical sources here, all the divine power. She looks at the papers, records of gods, even ones, (especially ones) that Riz and Kristen don’t worship. That they’ve recorded just to record them. That history was kind enough to preserve. 

Tracker thinks about gods and followers and how history swallows them both up. She thinks about how they swallow each other. She thinks about the moon swallowing humans and wolves swallowing the moon. 

“Do you think that the unnamed goddess was forgotten by history because she erased herself, or do you think she was erased because her followers had already forgotten who she was?”

For a moment, they’re both silent. Finally, Riz says, “I think it’s probably both.”

Tracker sighs, holding the papers, all of Riz and Kristen’s endless questions. “It always is, isn’t it?” 

She tucks her newly requisitioned papers into the side of her seat in the van, and both of them climb out. They cross the yard in the scattered pools of misty light, and reenter Holly Hill to catch the final strains of what is clearly a heated argument. 

Fig is shouting, “-was NOT the one who came up with the idea to put all the shoes on the roof!”

Adaine shouts back, “Fig, no one else has Mage Hand besides Riz and I, and I know he didn’t do it!”

“Guys,” cajoles Kristen’s voice. “It’s really no one’s fault I almost fell off the roof. That’s all me. I’ve got a dancing heart and seventeen left feet.”

“ What?” Riz says, and darts away into the house. 

Tracker shakes her head. “I leave for five fucking minutes.” This group is a mess, she thinks. She loves them. At least that much, she has faith in. 

—

It goes like this: they pass through the Shrine of Thorns to get to the portal, still burning, burning, burning in the middle of the briars. Riz steps over the threshold of the chapel, and feels all the hairs on the back of his neck raise. His tail rises, and his ears flick out. It feels… not malicious, but heavy. The world is heavy in here, the air thick like the clouds before a lightning strike. 

Riz stands in the chapel, edging deeper toward the thorns and the dais swallowed up into the darkness. He looks up at the mural of the woman on the wall, her vast hair, the broomstick and the cottage and the spellbook and the fucking cat, slinking over her shoulders. Witch goddess. 

He looks up at the mural and feels the power in this place, the magic that is still buried in the earth, rooted in the foundations, drifting in the air. He looks, and he knows the truth. This goddess is forgotten, erased. But she is far, far from dead. 

“You feel it, right?” Kristen murmurs, standing just behind him. 

He thinks of Tracker, unable to pass through the chapel, a cleric repelled by holy ground. It let him through, though. 

The vines that drape over the mural half obscure the goddess’s face, leaving one carved eye staring at him. Kalina sets Riz’s teeth on edge. This place, though-

“Yeah. I feel it.”

This place just makes him very aware, and very, very sad. 

He takes one last look at the goddess of mystery and doubt, abandoned by the congregation who followed doubt straight into mistrust. 

He turns and walks over to where the others are debating the marching order through the portal. He climbs up Fig’s back without preamble or warning. She doesn’t even flinch as he unzips her backpack and tucks himself in. 

“I’m coming with you,” he tells her. 

“Cool,” Fig says, and reaches awkwardly over her shoulder to pat his head. “I like having a backpack buddy.”

Riz curls up against her barely-folded clothes, the edges of folders full of sheet music digging into his sides. He can feel trepidation rising in his chest, little carbonated bubbles of stress fizzing inside of him. Just breathe. Just breathe. 

Maybe it’s a bad plan for him, specifically, to be leading the charge into literal, actual Hell. But he’ll be damned before he lets Fig walk in first, alone. He would follow her anywhere. He would follow any of them anywhere. 

Fig walks through the portal, settles halfway through and beckons the others through. Gilear trails through, already sweating profusely and looking deeply uncomfortable. Riz makes a mental note to throw out any yogurt he tries to sneak in, because it will surely go bad in the heat. 

Then Fabian and Adaine try to come through on the Hangman, and everything falls apart. The briars slash at the people, throwing them back into the chapel, and send Fig, Riz, Gilear, and the Hangman tumbling in the other direction. 

With a roar of flame, the portal vanishes. The Hangman screeches, tires skidding as he spins in circles. Fig stands up, and Riz, from her backpack, pokes out to see a blasted surface of flame and twisted, jagged rock extending beyond the horizon. 

For a moment, they all just stand there as the Hangman yelps for Fabian and spins around where the portal is no longer. 

“Well,” says Fig. “Fuck.”

Chapter Text

It goes like this: the Bottomless Pit falls into endless, hungry darkness, and for the first time, Fig truly understands the meaning of insatiable. The Pit is a mouth with no stomach, something that will eat and eat and eat and never be satisfied, an eternal swallowing of torment and pain with nothing to show for it. Everything that makes life good and worth living is absent here, just rivers and oceans of agony that can never be washed away. 

She looks at all the pain, all the screaming, the torrent of bodies pouring from the gaping wound of the flaming sky, and all she can think is that her dad was right to leave here. Way better to be a bloodrush coach. 

These people were bad people, supposedly. Murderers, liars, thieves. She beholds it all, all the suffering in the name of some cosmic justice, and she wonders if all of these people really deserved it. She wonders if this actually makes the universe any better. 

Riz is sticking close to her, trailing along in her footsteps like a shadow, sharp eyes cataloging everything here, all the nooks and crannies of the spiral road in the side of the pit, all the doorways blasted into the rock. He’s clearly on edge, ears flattened back against his skull and tail lashing.

In the landscape of blood and lava and coal-black dirt, he sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s even more obvious than Gilear. His green skin looks too vibrant, too alive for this place, and his glowing golden eyes are even brighter than normal in the shifting red light. His skin is already starting to be covered in a faint rash, less pronounced than when she casts something on him or next to him, but present enough to be noticeable. 

This is no place, Fig thinks, for a guardian angel. And yet here he is, following her into the depths of hell without question. 

They’re just beginning to cross the deeper threshold into the true descent of the Pit, when Vraz the Mean appears in a blast of fire, face incensed and eyes flaring with rage. “Oh, are we all having a good time?” she bellows spitefully. 

Riz, behind Fig, leaps into the air and hisses, sharp and vicious. 

Vraz’s face contorts. “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” she roars, lurching toward Riz with a velocity and an intensity that has Fig shoving sideways between the two of them, hackles raising. 

Riz hisses again. 

“You’re gonna fuck with me?” she snarls. “Give me another hiss. You little fucking angel brat. You’re a little bitch. I’m not scared of you. What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” 

Fig shoves Riz’s shoulder. “Go on, hiss! Hiss at her!” 

At her urging, he leans out, opens his mouth to bare all of his fangs, wickedly curved and glinting in the light. He hisses, a piercing noise with an undertone of a snarl, something so deep and animalistic that it sets Fig’s teeth on edge. This is a noise he has never made for them. 

“You wanna see a hiss?” Vraz snarls, and grabs her mouth, ripping it open at the hinges to bare blunted teeth and wag her tongue at them, a fleshy, horrifying distortion of a face that shouldn’t move like that. 

Fig puffs up. “His hiss was scarier!” She gestures to him grandly, and says, “Meet Riz, my paralegal.” 

Vraz’s face knits back together, and she looks disgusted. “Oh, fuck, wow, congratulations, I’m so happy.” She steps closer, leering into Fig’s face with breath that smells of smoke and rotting flesh. 

“Listen here, you little brat,” she snarls, stabbing a finger into Fig’s chest. “I don’t give a shit that we had to call you down here as some kind of special witness. That doesn’t make you hot shit. You roll up here? Fine. But keep your little angel bitch pet on a short leash. And if you try anything? I’ll be the first to rip all his skin off his fucking body.”

And Fig-

Well, since her horns grew in, Fig has run warmer than average. Her resting temperature is somewhere around 102 degrees these days, which gave her mother a heart attack the first time she ran a fever. But after using magic, or when she’s especially emotional, she gets hotter, her blood going more infernal than mortal. 

The rage roars in Fig’s chest, boils over through her veins, and she feels her temperature rise. She swings her bass off its strap around her neck, and without hesitation, smashes it straight into Vraz’s face. 

The devil rears back with a shriek, more out of indignation than pain, Fig thinks, but it’s still darkly satisfying. “Oh, that’s how you wanna play this?” she shouts, blood boiling. “You wanna be mean? Fuck you! You’re a two-bit devil who can barely handle putting together a tribunal! This is the Bottomless Pit, the domain of Gorthalax the Insatiable, my dad. I have more claim to this place than you, and I say Riz is welcome here! You’re just bitter and sour that you don’t have any friends! You’re a loser.”

“Yeah!” Riz shouts, tail cutting through the air. “I’m Riz the Ball, and we’re just gonna roll with this! We’re here! We’re here for your trial thing! And under Article 457-J, any friend of the presiding fiend of the domain is welcome. So suck on that!” 

He punctuates with another hiss, and Fig shoves Vraz out of the way so that they can all pass to go to the tribunal room. As they trail down, Fig leans over and whispers, “Is that a real thing?”

“Yeah,” Riz whispers back. “I talked about it with Gorthalax once. You know, he says any time we’re in Hell we’re welcome to drop by, and he figured I might get some shit for it, so he told me about Article 457-J. I’m technically on a visiting list somewhere.”

“Oh,” she says, and pride and joy swells up inside of her. She forgets, sometimes, that her dad and Riz talk sometimes when he’s over seeing Sklonda. Someday, she thinks delightedly, she and Riz are probably going to be siblings. She sometimes forgets about her master plan to get all of the others to be her siblings in some capacity, but it’s honestly going pretty great for her. That’s so cool. Fig loves that her family keeps getting weirder and bigger. 

They make it into the tribunal, Vraz following them through, steaming with hatred. 

They go through the tribunal, and when they ask her who put Gorthalax in the gem, Fig says, “Kalina used a proxy.” Not the whole truth, but not a lie either. Riz gives her a thumbs up behind Vraz, and Fig feels the support of her friends buoy her up.

They leave the tribunal room and Wretchrot, (who Fig tries and fails to not feel just a little weird about creating) leads them through the various levels of the Bottomless Pit. As Wretchrot leads them into one of the libraries, Fig leans over toward Riz, her braid swinging over her shoulder, and whispers, “Hey. Do you think the floors really go down forever? Is it really bottomless?”

Riz’s tail flicks. “I mean, the Nine Hells are all one plane,” he says. “Theoretically, if you go far enough down, you should just eventually hit another circle of Hell. It shouldn’t really be bottomless.” He pauses. “So, you know, with our luck it definitely is.”

Fig barks a laugh that gets lost in the cacophony of screams from the torrent of falling souls next to them. “So, do you think the Pit could lead to the other circles of Hell?”

Riz ponders that for a moment, and finally shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe. But there’s no real reason to, and we probably shouldn’t go any further from our friends than we already are.”

Fig thinks about her friends back in Arborly, thinks about Ayda back in Leviathan. Her stomach twists, writhes like eels. “Yeah, that’s a good point.” 

“Plus,” he says, one ear flicking, “I’m on pretty thin ice here even with the express blessing of Gorthalax, and this is his domain. I don’t think any of the other circles of Hell would like me very much.” 

“Oh, no!” shrieks Wretchrot over Fig’s shoulder, making them both jump and Riz hiss. “Your friend has celestial blood, and quite a bit of power at that. He is welcome here, in the domain of Gorthalax the Insatiable, as a friend of his daughter, but the devils of the other layers of Hell would delight in eating him like a midday snack!” He drifts uncomfortable close to Fig’s ear, tiny wings beating laboriously, and whispers, “Do you think his blood would also make something fun to play with, Mistress?”

Riz, whose hearing is definitely good enough to pick up the imp’s stage whisper, flattens his ears back against his head and says, “Let’s not find out.”

She thinks back to the absolute disgust on Vraz’s face as she looked at Riz, and feels her hackles raise. “Yeah, no other layers of Hell for us.” She pushes Wretchrot away. “And definitely no weird little celestial blood monsters.”

“I would be a carrier of blood-born illness!” the imp shrieks, cackles, and resumes guiding them toward the library. 

Once inside, Fig browses looking for some kind of relationship advice book. She strolls through the dark, polished shelves, breathing in the smell of musty scrolls, brushing past the tomes that look to have been bound with true skin, not even leather. 

She manages to find one book, bright red and bejeweled, that has a lot of detailed minutiae about stealing human souls for succubi and incubi. She flips, increasingly frantic and increasingly disturbed, through more and more graphic illustrations of sex positions, feeling herself begin to boil over, until she snaps the book shut with a decisive thump, face flushed and hands shaky. She shoves the book not even back in its correct shelving, but back behind the row of books against the back of the shelf so that it is completely hidden from view and will never be found or consulted ever again. 

She abandons that whole aisle and walks back through toward the front of the room, where the desk is. “Whoah,” she says as she reenters the front, and nearly trips over the tidal wave of books and scrolls that have been pulled off of the shelves and arranged in piles around the desk. 

“Mistress!” Wretchrot cries delightedly, swooping over. “Your friend is destroying the library in his quest for answers. I think he would make an excellent addition to the staff of the Bottomless Pit!” 

Fig frowns. “Baby. I am not employing my friend in Hell. He is here to be my litigator and nothing else.”

“Yeah,” says a voice behind her, making her leap into the air and whip around. “The commute is way too long.”

“Nine Hells, Riz, you scared me.”

Her friend looks up at her and blinks. “I wasn’t even being stealthy that time. You were totally lost in your thoughts. Here, can you take some of these?” He gestures with his chin toward the stack of books in his shaking arms. 

Fig scoops up the top four, swearing at the weight, the thick, blood-stained books scratching at her jacket. She wonders how Riz was lifting them. “What are all these?” 

“Books on the legal codes of the Bottomless Pit, and the Nine Hells in general,” he says, walking back toward the desk, where all the books and scrolls emanate out from like a bomb radius. 

“The Nine Hells actually have official legal codes?” she asks, surprised. She knows she got a subpoena, and that’s why they’re here, but abandoning your whole domain feels like something that would get attention even without legal codes. She had kind of assumed there wasn’t much order to the hellish legal system. 

He plops down in the center and starts flipping through one of the books, already starting to cross-reference it with three other books he has open. His eyes flick back and forth between the pages, squinting perhaps more aggressively than the light in the room would warrant. He seems stressed, but he always seems stressed. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I know it seems weird, but there’s actually kind of an issue with over- legislation in the Nine Hells. There’s so many laws that contradict each other so much that you can get away with tons of shit if you apply the right combination of loopholes, because so many of the laws sort of invalidate massive sections of the other laws. So you can get away with a ton of stuff, as long as you can figure out what laws actually affect and null all the other ones.”

Fig pokes one of the piles of books with her toe, a pile that Riz has labeled with a sticky note, Books that will steal your soul, very cursed, FIG AND GILEAR, DO NOT TOUCH. “That’s really weird, but kind of useful for us, I guess,” she says. “How do you know all this stuff?”

He pauses, and looks up from his books, his face a little guilty. “Oh, I…” He coughs a little. “I talked about it a lot with Gorthalax. You know, when he’s over in the mornings, before Mom is up.” He shrugs. “He has interesting stuff to say, and he’s been alive so long, he knows so much. Even though you’d think he’d be better at not getting trapped in gems by now. …Sorry.”

“No, you’re right, it’s a bad habit,” Fig says. “We’re gonna work on it. I’m gonna make him practice how to not get trapped in rubies.” She has no idea how effective that will be, but damn if she won’t try.

She sits down next to Riz in all of the chaos, leaning over his shoulder to look at the papers. “Is there anything I can help with?” 

“No, I’ve got it.” His brow is furrowed so deeply as to appear painful from the weight of his squinting at the paper. 

Fig sighs. She pulls on his shoulder, and he turns to look at her questioningly. “Dude, you’re gonna give yourself gray hairs by eighteen.”

“Gorgug already has gray hairs,” he points out. 

“Yeah. Because a ghost reached into his chest and grabbed his literal heart with its hands. Just because he rocks it doesn’t mean it was supposed to happen.” She squeezes his shoulder. “I’m here to help you. It’s actually way better for me to be helping you than to just be sitting here feeling useless.” She looks down at her other hand. “I mean, I already kinda feel like I haven’t been helping as much as I should have on this quest.”

He straightens. “Hey, no, you’ve been super helpful. You shouldn’t feel like that.”

She sniffs, and shakes her head aggressively, like a dog trying to shake off water. She squares her shoulders, and says, “Well, whatever. That’s beside the point. You’re doing something important, and I want to help you because I care about you. So is there anything I can do to help?” She makes eye contact with him and makes her face as earnest as possible. “Please? This is the only time I’ve ever wanted homework. You better take advantage of it.”

He snorts, and an iota of stress melts off his shoulders. “You read Infernal, right?”

Fig beams. “You bet your angel butt I do.” 

He laughs, and pushes a couple books over at her. “If you can read these and give me the condensed version, that would be actually super helpful.” He rubs at his temples a little bit. “Trying to translate is giving me a headache.”

“Gotcha,” she says, and takes some of the books. “Sparknotes summaries of legal codes, coming right up.”

They stay there for about an hour, scouring through tomes, Fig translating and Riz noting down the most interesting or helpful stuff. Fig doesn’t really get most of it, but Riz seems to soak it all up like a sponge, ears flicking and tail swishing and eyes glowing faintly as he scribbles down notes. 

She doesn’t know if he is understanding more of the legal jargon because his mom is doing coursework over the same things right now, or perhaps because he’s apparently had lots of conversations with her dad, but several times, she goes to sum up a legal code, and he beats her to the punch, muttering an even more concise description under his breath and jotting it down before she can even finish. It makes Fig’s skin feel too tight and too loose all at once. 

Obviously, it’s very helpful that Riz knows what he’s doing, but at the same time-

At the same time, a part of her can’t help but wonder why Riz knows more about this than she does. Shouldn’t she know this? Shouldn’t this be her job? 

When they go to take a break, wrap up all the scrolls and shove the books back, Riz shoving a couple into his briefcase to take with him, Fig looks at her friend and asks, “Riz, do you… do you think it’s weird that I don’t know this stuff and you do?”

He pauses, one hand in his briefcase as he shoves books in. “Um. Not really? My interests are really weird, Fig. I don’t think knowing about the legal codes of Hell is a normal tiefling thing. Or a normal anyone thing, really.” 

She shifts, biting at her lower lip. “So, you don’t… you don’t think I’m, like, a bad daughter or anything for not knowing all this stuff? I mean, this was so much of my dad’s life, and I know basically nothing about it. All I know about his job is his job as a bloodrush coach!”

Riz closes his briefcase and scrambles up on a table to look her directly in the eye. “I think that’s okay. I mean, that’s what is important to him right now. I’m sure if you asked him about this stuff, he would tell you, but he’s paying attention to your life as-is, and you’re paying attention to his life as-is. I think that’s pretty normal. And I think that if anyone but you tried to imply that you’re a bad daughter, he would probably have some opinions about that.”

Fig nods, trying to pull his words into her heart and make sure they stay there. She’s not a bad daughter. She’s not. 

“So, it’s okay that I don’t know stuff about how this place works?” 

“Of course,” he says, and shoots her finger guns. “Besides, you’ll always have your personal litigator.” His grin is crooked and toothy, and she loves him with enough fire to put Hell itself to shame. 

She smiles back at him. “I better. It would be a lot of work to find another one.”

He nods seriously. “Devil lawyers are probably few and far between.”

She laughs at her friend, who is so serious and so unintentionally hilarious and so full of light. She thinks about all the ways where she might have ended up in some other world, without him and her other friends, and can’t help but think that all the bad shit about being in their party is worth it, just for this. Just for them. 

Wretchrot leads them out to see her dad’s treasures in other rooms. There’s a hall full of insane armor, glowing with malevolent energy, fire flickering off the metal. She and Riz debate briefly over grabbing some of it for Gilear, but they ultimately dismiss the idea. 

Eventually, the little imp leads them to true rooms, with silk beds and stylized masks mounted on the walls. Riz takes a lap, sharp eyes casing the room, and Fig walks with him, trusting his sense of hyper-vigilance. The rest of the group sort of trails after Fig, so they end up doing a strange follow-the-leader through the rooms, the slight sway of Riz’s tail and his swiveling attention leading the way. 

He pokes his head into a gallery, and begins to walk through, the rest of them following. She notices him eying the mirror with deep suspicion, and looks sideways to see-

Fig stops dead. Wretchrot, newly christened Baby, appears in the mirror as only a floating drop of blood, shifting like water in zero gravity. The Hangman’s motorcycle shell is gone, leaving a coal-black, hairless, hyena-esque dog with fiery eyes and lava cracking along its spine. And standing behind Riz, following him with silent footsteps, yellow eyes fixed, hawklike, on her friend, is a black tabaxi woman. 

Fig feels all the hairs on the back of her neck rise, feels fire begin to bubble up in her throat, in her fists that she clenches. She’s never seen Kalina before, but there’s no mistaking this woman. She’s dressed in armor suitable for a rogue, all dark clothing and leather bracers. And the way she’s looking at Riz-

Fig grins, all teeth and no humor, baring her fangs just like she learned. “Hey, bitch,” she says, her voice loud enough to echo off the walls, a bard drawing attention to herself to get it off her rogue. 

Kalina, in the mirror (absent from the hallway, not there, never there, just a disease buried in her friend’s nervous system), turns her head, and makes direct eye contact with Fig. She smiles back, predator all the way, a look she’s seen in Riz, in Sklonda, the look of someone born with her fangs. There was no awkward period of growth and bitten lips like Fig and Gorgug. No, these people were born with knives for mouths and they know how to use it. 

Fig stares at Kalina, memorizes every inch of her face, an artist committing a subject to memory for later replication. Once Fig knows a face, she can wear it. 

Kalina looks away from Fig, back to Riz, who has gone so still he may as well be dead, and waves cheerfully. Friendly. As if this is casual. As if she has a right to Riz. 

A pit opens up in Fig’s stomach, something as bottomless and unsatisfying as this place full of horror. It yawns to swallow up her insides, cold seeping in around the edges of her righteous rage. 

It’s her first time seeing it for herself, but Kristen, she sees now, was right. Kalina has a favorite, a cat with a preferred chewtoy. (Fig has never so deeply hated one of her friends being right.) 

The mirror, though it shows images, does not convey sound. 

So Riz turns to look at something in his field of vision, open air full of a projection only he can see, and Fig tries, deeply unsuccessfully, to read the Shadow Cat’s lips in the mirror. It doesn’t work so well sideways, with her fully facing Riz. 

Fig debates the merits of swinging her bass through thin air, just to try and piss Kalina off enough so that she focuses on Fig again. 

Riz exchanges a tense, “Thanks,” in response to a conversation she can’t hear, and then she sees Kalina walk away in the mirror, her tail swinging behind her, unbothered. She looks at her friend to see his face pale but determined. 

“Honestly?” Fig says to him, trying to break the tension, “She’s not as hot as I thought she’d be.”

And Riz, tense to the point of complete fracture, barks a laugh sharp enough to cut diamond. She counts it as a win, because what else is there to do? “Are you good?” she asks. 

Riz shakes his head, and says, “Yeah, yeah, absolutely,” completely unconvincingly. 

She eyes him for a moment, suspicious, but unsure of how to press him for details. Then she stops. 

“Hey,” she says, and reaches over to push on his shoulder. “Hey, hey, hey. Should we dump out all our money and see if we can use the mirror to find, you know.” She breaks off and makes a general hand-waving gesture to indicate magic and the spellbook. 

Riz’s eyes widen. “Oh, hey, good plan.” 

They dig through their things, Fig unearthing a few stray gold coins from her pockets and her bass case, Riz pulling out pouches and pouches of money from the Briefcase of Holding. They dump a veritable pile of golden coins out in front of the mirror, an obscene display of wealth, and kick through it with their shoes in an attempt to unearth any coins that look suspiciously like a dead goddess's spellbook. 

After a couple minutes and the disturbing image of Baby rolling in the coins like a pig in a mud pit, Riz says, “I don’t think it’s in here.”

Fig huffs, plants her hands on her hips, and regards the pile of currency with deep distrust and even deeper disappointment. “Damn. I was really hoping that one would work.”

He shrugs. “Worth a shot.” One ear flicks, and he eyes the mirror with an expression that usually means he’s about to do something very smart. Riz digs in his pocket and pulls out a well-worn photo, holding it up to the glass. 

—

Riz would like the record to state that he is starting to really, really hate these fucking mirrors. First with Baron, and then with this mirror, some kind of illusion detector. The photos that only some people can see and the hallucinations that only some people have, sugar-spun lies from tongues that aren’t even real. 

He doesn’t want to play this game anymore. He wants to see both sides. He wants to see what is real and what is not. The line between reality and fiction, truth and fear, possibility and fantasy, is growing thinner and more precarious every day. And he’s done with it. Done wondering, done waiting. 

Riz holds the photograph of his mother and their family’s ghost up the mirror, and sees only his mom and an armful of empty air. 

He feels spiders skitter up and down his spine, feels ice pool behind his eyes and on his tongue and in the hollow ringing of his ears. Not real. Not real, not real, not real, and yet also, real enough to fuck absolutely everything up. 

His mom smiles in the photo, young and yet unburdened and full of a life that in his darkest moments, Riz wonders if he maybe stole from her. There is no evidence of anything physical touching her arm. 

He looks back at Fig, and Messages her. She’s in our minds. 

Shit, she Messages back. This is so fucked.

You’re telling me.

She looks from the mirror to the photo to Riz, some complicated knot of emotion flickering through her face, strands of feelings he can’t quite untangle. She looks at him, fiery eyes dark with- concern? Guilt, maybe?- and says, “Hey.” She shifts on her feet, flexing her fingers, and Riz catches a whiff of cinnamon and campfire smoke in the air. “I just wanted to ask you… are you okay that we hold up this picture of your mom all the time?” 

He pauses. “Oh,” he says, startled and, after a moment, touched. It’s such a wonderfully Fig thing to be worried about, in the middle of a quest. Riz has always been willing to sacrifice just about anything at the altar of getting clues, so much so that sometimes his friends seem to take it a little bit for granted that he’s on top of stuff. Which, to be fair, he usually is. But Fig stopping to check in with him about it, to make sure it’s okay-

“It seems like a really messed up thing to have to do, literally every single day,” she says, picking at one of her nails and the polish still stubbornly hanging on from tour. “To have to show a picture of your mom like crime scene evidence.”

He stops, tries to untangle the complicated mess of emotion in his chest regarding the picture. His mom, looking so young and happy before he happened. His mom, standing arm-in-arm with a hallucinated plague. There’s a complicated legacy here, wrapped up in want and desires and universes that might have happened and didn’t happen colliding with the one that did. Ghosts of demons and ghosts of people that grew into different people. He looks at his mom, young and less burdened, fewer stress lines but the same smile. 

“That’s really nice,” he says, clutching the photo and looking up at Fig and her worried, guilty face. “No, it’s okay. My mom’s really important to me, and I like seeing all the different parts of her. It’s cool to see pieces of her past.” 

Fig lets out a relieved breath, her shoulders losing some tension. “Okay,” she says. “Just had to check in.”

And Riz hears, as if from the depths of his mind, Kalina’s voice say, “Do you want to know more about your parents’ pasts?” 

Riz’s ears flatten back against his head, his tail stiffening and raising. He feels sweat begin to break out on his forehead and between his shoulder blades, itching, even though this is far from the hottest section of the Bottomless Pit. A part of him wonders, viciously and petulantly, if Kalina has any hobbies besides torturing teenagers. The rest of him just aches. His stomach twists, cold and clammy, a cavernous opening beginning to yawn inside of him. 

“This is classic devil shenanigans,” he whispers under his breath in Goblin, as if speaking it aloud will stop him from making bad decisions. 

Kalina’s laugh echoes from nowhere. “Sure. But what’s a deal with the Devil if it gets you what you want?” she says, voice sticky sweet. “Come on, Riz. Don’t you want to know?” 

He tries to regulate his breathing, tries to act normal past the way his throat is closing up and his lungs are in a vice and he can feel himself going icy-cold even in the first circle of Hell. His shoulders itch. His tattoos itch. His magic roils under his skin, a deep-ocean storm in a bottle waiting to shatter. 

And doesn’t it always, always come back to this? Back to the board, back to Kristen asking about his plane and Fig asking about his dad and his mom begging him to talk to clerics and the water, always the water, always the parts of himself that he can’t make small enough to fit on any clue board. Doesn’t it always come back to this: does Riz want to know?

He breathes, thin and shaky, wonders if Kalina can feel the vice too. “I mean,” he whispers, “yeah.” 

Fig frowns. “Who are you talking to?” 

He opens his mouth, and-

“Tell Fig, Gilear, or the motorcycle, and the deal’s off. It’s not a lie. I really knew him, and I can really tell you about him.” 

“...If you really knew him…” 

“They’re onto you,” she says, short and businesslike. “Don’t talk to me for another twenty minutes. Shake ‘em.” And her voice vanishes. 

Fig is still looking at him with renewed concern. Gilear is looking slightly baffled behind her. 

Riz swallows as if choking down thorns, and does not speak about the voice. Instead, he says, “I’m gonna go grab a bunch of stuff and put it in front of the mirror, see if anything seems off.” 

And he… probably will do that, since it seems like a good idea, and if he does, then it’s not a total lie, right? And besides, if he has to wait around for twenty minutes doing nothing but waiting for the Shadow Cat to show up, he thinks he might go crazy. 

“Very well,” Gilear says, scratching at his shirt. “I shall set up on the sofa and see what’s happening in the kitchen here. I don’t know that they will have what I need for frittatas but we can always try.”

“Yeah,” Fig says encouragingly. 

Riz tries not to wince, and resolves not to eat anything. He would only end up barfing frittatas everywhere. 

“And you said you’re not useful,” she says, bumping him cheerfully. 

Gilear gives an utterly humorless and self-deprecating bark of laughter. “Right.”

The Hangman’s engine revs, and he says, “I shall assist in this endeavor as well. I will guard this dwelling place, Mistress Faeth, against any incursions from demons or devils.” 

“While we’re down here you can call me Fig the Infaethable,” she says with such pride, a pleased, toothy grin on her face, that Riz actually cracks a smile through his miasma of worry. 

“Ah, a title!” bellows the Hangman. 

Baby chimes in, “Mistress, let me show you to all of the amenities of this villa within the Bottomless Pit.”

“Sure,” Fig says, and begins to walk after Gilear, the Hangman, and Baby. She pauses in the massive, gilded entryway, and turns to give him a concerned look. “Are you sure you’re gonna be okay in here? I could hang out. Or you could come help with frittatas.” 

Riz’s stomach twists at the worried yet hopeful look on her face. “Nah,” he says. “I think I’d better leave the frittatas to the former lunch lad. I’ll be okay.”

Fig gives him a long, evaluative look. Finally, she says, “Okay, but you know where I am if you need me.”

He nods, and the knot in his stomach twists tighter, grows heavier with guilt. “Yeah. Thanks, Fig.” 

She nods and vanishes around the corner, leaving Riz alone with the mirror and his briefcase and the sick swooping of anticipation in his guts. He whittles away fifteen minutes or so actually doing what he said he would, dragging in objects from the rooms around him and showing the mirror all the things in his briefcase in an increasing spiral of paranoia. What if one of his books or pens or maps is secretly something else? Something bad? Something cursed? Unlikely, but better safe than sorry, he figures. 

He finds nothing, of course. It doesn’t actually make him feel any better. It makes him feel kind of shitty, actually. He tells himself it’s the ambience of Hell making his breath come short and ragged. 

At around the fifteen minute mark, he gives up on displaying objects and investigates the mirror. In a cracked section around the base of the frame, he manages to use his claws to peel out a sliver of mirror, long and jagged, that, when he holds it up to the photo, displays the same quality as the larger mirror. Not anything huge, but enough to catch a glimpse of if something is not as it appears. 

He grips the mirror nearly tight enough to draw blood from his palm with the shattered edge, squares his shoulders, and, before he can do something sensible like change his mind or call Fig, walks out onto the crude balcony. 

Kalina is already there, leaned back against the wall, surveying the endless roar of falling souls with passing amusement on her feline face, tail flicking around her ankles. She turns to look at him, smiling with only the corner of her mouth. “Mr. Gukgak, pleasure to have you out here.”

He stares her in the eyes, wonders if she can see, through his eyes, the projection of herself that she’s placed in his mind. “What is it that you wanted to tell me about my dad?” he says, his voice low and hard. 

She arches an eyebrow. “To business. Right this way.” She turns, and begins to walk down the ledge. 

Riz stares. “Where are you going?”

She stops and turns to look at him. “You know, usually, kiddo, when someone tries to lead you somewhere, the polite thing to do is walk and talk, and I know your mom raised you with manners.”

“When the someone leading me somewhere is a magical STI hallucination, I reserve the right to know where I’m going, first,” he says. “I’m not moving until you tell me what you know.”

Kalina full-body sighs, and fully turns to face him, but doesn’t walk back up. “You’re usually a pretty smart kid, Riz, so I know you know better than that. This is not how negotiations work. You gotta give me a little to work with, here, bud.”

Riz takes two full steps back into the doorway, never breaking eye contact. “What do you know about my dad?”

She eyes him, yellow gaze cutting through the hazy darkness that cloaks the area beyond the torch light above the gates. The Shadow Cat, in her element. “The better question, kid, is what do you want to know about your dad. I worked with Pok for a lot of years, and in the end, the only thing about him that I couldn’t figure out was how to get him to leave well enough alone.”

“You got him killed.”

“I did,” she says easily. “Good thing death isn’t the end here in the Great Wheel.” She gestures around them. “I mean, look at all this. Look at you. I got Pok killed and still he shows up to grace the Prime Material with more of his kind: blindingly loyal workaholics driving themselves into an early grave. You people really do make the world go around, you know.” 

He feels rage flare in his chest, and something sicker, some bleached-white flash of recognition. Nothing sharper than the truth. 

“You knew him, and you got him killed,” he accuses. “If this guy you’re talking about is even my actual father, and you’re not making stuff up. Why would I trust you?”

“Believe me, kid, this guy’s your father,” she says. She takes another few steps up the ledge back toward Riz, coming further into the light under the doorway. “And why should you trust me? You probably shouldn’t. But I’m telling you that you can. I’ve never lied to you. I’ve never sold you anything that wasn’t actually on the shelf. I mean, you notice stuff for a living. Surely you’ve noticed that my story hasn’t changed.”

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re a good rogue. You know how to keep up a story. That doesn’t prove anything.”

She shakes her head. “You Askandis and your proof.”

“My name is Gukgak. ”

She steps even closer, eyes flashing, catlike, long after they’ve passed under the lamplight. “Yes, it is. But you want the other half, right? You want to know. You need all the information. I get that. Good instincts. Information is the power that greases the wheels of the world, from the highest plane to the lowest,” she says, gesturing around at the Pit. “I want to give you that information.” 

His brain whirls. “...Why? What’s in it for you?”

“Does there always have to be something in it for me?”

Riz gives her a look, and she laughs. 

“Wow. Suspicious. If I had any actual currency, I would take bets on what age you first develop a stress ulcer, kid. I’d make bank if you got them before twenty.

“There’s nothing in this for me, bud. Consider this one a gift out of the kindness of my own heart.” 

“Yeah, ‘cause you’ve just got loads of that just laying around.”

Her eyes flash, and she moves fully into the doorway, so that they’re on the same slope of ground, and she’s looking down at him slightly. “Riz,” she says. “Sweetheart. Look, Kristen, Tracker, the others… These are people that I have fondness for, but I just met them. 

“You’re special. You were born with me. I’ve known you your entire life. I’m like your godmother. And the fact that you are so cold to me, it feels hurtful. I’m telling you this as a favor. A token of good faith. 

“Because, here’s the thing, Riz. Maybe you get into the forest. Maybe I don’t kill all of you right away. Maybe you make it all the way to catch up with the Abernants, stop them, put an end to this ritual. Maybe you only lose a couple of your closest friends. Maybe you get back to Aguefort, and you get to hand this crown back to that crazy old coot, for him to lose it again.

“I get that you and your little adventuring party tend to operate under the sunk-cost fallacy, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Just because you started doesn’t mean you have to finish. 

“And if you don’t finish, if you all turn around and let this happen, when someone comes back, you’ll have a very powerful friend in a lot of very high places. I’m sure you’ve put together by now just how many people I’ve got my fingers in. Just how many more the Nightmare King can get into. 

“Your dad got it. Your mom got it. It’s good to have powerful friends, sweetheart. And we can make that happen. And as a fun extra consolation prize for being a good sport, and someone I happen to like a fair bit, I’ll throw in dear old dad to sweeten the pot. I get what I want, you get what you want, we all come away with friends down the line. Everybody wins.”

Riz’s throat lurches, gagging on something that isn’t there. Sour bile coats his tongue, and his stomach twists. Sweat breaks out, cold and clammy on his palms. 

There’s a glint in her eyes, knowing. It’s the look of a person who knows they’re right. It’s the look of a person about to cross the finish line. The look of a person who knows exactly why the buttons they push are going to work. 

Because she’s right, isn’t she? About him and all the things he does? Information is power, and Kalina has so, so much of it. Connections are strength. The world is built on them. 

Riz could take this deal, and it probably wouldn’t even hurt him. He would keep his friends, know where he’s from, have access to more connections than he would know what to do with. All it would cost is the entire world. 

(Can you really not understand why someone would do something that benefits them? ) 

What am I doing? he thinks furiously. 

“So, what?” he demands. “You tell me a few things about someone who may or may not be my dad, and I roll over like a pet doing a trick? That’s where this goes? Seriously?”

Kalina stops. For the first time, he catches the barest hint of something like surprise on her face before it vanishes back into the impassive friendliness. “Riz. Buddy. This is a good deal.”

“For you, maybe!” he shouts. The sound is swallowed up by the chaos of the pit, but he feels the questions inside of him go hard and sharp, melt together and transform from dead weight to razor-edged blades. “What if I don’t care about some asshole who up and vanished before I was even born? What if I don’t need that? I have parents already! I have a family already!”

For her to take all his insecurities, all of his aimless wondering, all of his late-night doubts and curdle them into fear, into strings to yank him around like a puppet? No. It’s more than practical. It’s cruel. And Riz is done playing. He’s done waiting for answers given by a woman using them for leverage. 

“Kid,” Kalina says slowly, holding up her hands as if approaching a spooked animal. “Riz. This is a win for both of us. You stop wondering, your friends all make it out. You want to know where you’re from? You can meet him. He’s here. Don’t you want that?”

He laughs, shrill and hysterical and unforgiving, lips curled back over his fangs in a snarl. “My dad, a celestial, is here, in the Bottomless Pit.”

She shrugs. “It’s not that unusual. Gorthalax is a fallen angel.”

“So my dad fell?”

“No, kid. And he’s not in the Pit, but he is here in Hell. The Iron City of Dis.” She steps to the side, gestures down. “I can show you.”

Riz stares, dumbfounded. For a long moment, he says nothing. And then- “You think I’m stupid. You think I’m going to follow you to the Iron City of Dis to find a celestial? Fuck you.” 

The panic is rising, overflowing like a bottle of soda full of Mentos, like water boiling over the edges of a pot. He can feel himself shaking, can feel the cavern opening up deep inside of him, the crack splitting through his center. He’s cold. He’s in Hell and he’s cold. 

“Kid,” Kalina says, eyes flashing. “Take a breath.”

“You’re a creep!” he shouts. “You’re a creep walking around in people’s spines and being weird about their fears and making them see things! I’m done listening to you! You’re so full of crap!”

“I’m not lying to you,” she says. 

But he’s past the point of listening. She’s the familiar of the Nightmare King. She deals in fears, deals in the terror of the questions that go unanswered. 

But Riz isn’t scared of questions. He’s a rogue and an investigator. He deals in questions too. He clenches his fists, clammy with sweat, and his tattoos do not itch, but rather burn in his skin. He doesn’t need his dad to be aasimar. Doesn’t need his dad to know his magic, or decide how to use it, or even to have a whole family. Riz’s life does not lack. He doesn’t need to burn anything to chase a ghost story. 

“I’m fine not knowing!” he shouts, and it comes out angry and raw and true. His markings and tattoos flare with light, casting the shadowed doorway into sunset, golden-purple tones that don’t touch Kalina. “I don’t need your deals or your information or your promises or your sympathy. We’re getting that crown back, and we’re getting an A plus, and I’m going to shoot you in your stupid face!”

And finally, finally, he feels something settle deep inside of him, a foundation finally going level, shifting sands solidifying into ground sturdy enough to stand on. He might never know about his dad. But that’s okay. The doubt is an old, familiar friend, one he is finally making peace with. He can take what magic he wants and what friends he wants and what family he wants, and he’ll be fine. 

“I’m fine not knowing,” he says again, and his voice cracks, but he knows with the same faith that he trusts his friends that it’s true. He steps back from the doorway, away from Kalina. 

As he does, Kalina’s eyes widen, nearly imperceptibly, and her eyes flash, an eerie flicker of light not unlike what Riz knows his own do. A passing of power behind her gaze, and an edge of unease that he’s never seen from her before. 

For a moment, they just stare at one another from opposite sides of the doorway, two pairs of slitted eyes regarding one another. Then Riz peels back his lips and hisses, a low, vicious noise of warning, a threat that cannot be taken back. 

Kalina watches him for a long moment. Her face is nearly impossible to read, tail perfectly still behind her body. One ear twitches, and she tilts her head at him. “You know,” she says, “I really didn’t think you’d be this stubborn. Guess you got a little more of Sklonda than Pok in you after all.” She shrugs, casual. “Ah, well. You’ve got it all figured out then, I guess. You don’t care about your dad? That’s fine. But do me a favor, bud. You’ve still got time here. Think about what you really want.” 

And with a swirl of shadow, she disappears, leaving Riz panting and curled up, ready for attack in the hallway. 

For a moment, he stands there, teeth bared and ears flicked up at attention, waiting for her to come back. Eventually, once it’s clear she won’t be, he lets his posture relax a little bit. His breathing is still coming sharp and short, edges chopped off unevenly. He looks down at his claws, at his markings that are still burning with golden light. His hands are shaking. 

His blood feels like it’s running behind schedule, his heart waiting for it to catch up. Something has settled in him, a stability falling into his bones that has never been there before. Peace with the unknown, with the fact that his answers may never come. But he can still feel all of the icy fear, the cloying guilt, the sticky-sweet anger pulling down through his gut. The peace comes, but the emotions linger, the chasm opening in his gut to spill out forever and ever and ever. Bottomless. 

He tries to pull it all together. It pours through his fingers, water through a sieve. There is nothing to make it smaller. 

Finally, Riz just stands up, and turns, numb, to walk back into the halls and rooms of the Bottomless Pit. He does the only thing he can think of. He goes to find Fig.

—

It goes like this: Kristen stands in the chapel of a forgotten goddess (forgotten but not dead. She can feel that this goddess is not dead, that she will be there if only Kristen reaches for her) and draws the face of the deity of doubt and mystery. 

She looks at her spirit guardians and thinks of Riz’s stalwart determination to protect. She thinks about his love of mystery and of questions that lead into answers that lead back into more questions. She thinks about her friend and all the ways that those two things can go together without being completely cynical and devoid of hope. 

Riz’s hope is not blind naivety. It is a fangs-bared, claw-marked approach to growth. The world will be better because he will make it so. There is no reason, but that doesn’t mean nothing matters. That means everything matters. Riz loves things with razor edges and vicious determination, and as she stands here with the face of a goddess of questions in her hand, Kristen realizes that idea means more to her than any amount of nihilistic declaration that there is no reason for anything at all. 

“I want to have kids one day,” she tells her spirit guardians, looking at their wide eyes and cortados and realizing they’re nothing like what she wants to become. “I want to be a good friend. You know? It’s just that, in the little minutiae of real human life, I think I need more answers than just, everything’s wrong, everything’s broken, let me drink a cortado alone in this coffee shop.” 

And as she turns back to her drawing, she watches them unravel, vanishing into motes of light. And she feels her shoulders relax. She thinks about Kirizayak, about faith and power in endings that are beginnings too. How nothing makes sense, but everything ends and begins just the same. There is truth to doubt and to questioning, but without some sense of hope or belief behind it, it’s just scary and heavy. 

Kristen draws the face of a goddess, and thinks that probably that was never going to last anyway. Those ideas were built on concepts of lack of purpose, but Kristen doesn’t need purpose. She’s a cleric. All she needs is faith. And even if nothing makes any sense, there’s a lot more faith to be had in hope than despair. 

She leaves the chapel with a drawing of a goddess, and a spark of something bright and new and full nestled up alongside her heart. 

—

It goes like this: as soon as he walks in the room, Fig can tell something is wrong. His posture is too stiff, his face wiped blank, not with intention but with emotional exhaustion. 

She shoots up off the couch and over to him, hands shooting out to hover over his shoulders. “Riz?” she says, trying to keep her voice level. “Riz, are you okay?”

It takes a few too many seconds for him to look up at her, and his eyes are blank in a way that terrifies her. “No,” he says, and his voice is hoarse as if he’s been screaming. “No. Fig, I- I did something real dumb.”

She feels her eyes go wide, but fights to keep her face open and her voice even. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, that’s- what happened?”

He takes a breath scarily like Adaine’s just before a panic attack. His ears are flat against his skull. “You know how I said I told you everything Kalina had been saying to me? Back in Leviathan?”

“...Yeah.”

A shiver runs through his shoulders under her hands. “I lied. I lied, Fig. She’s been trying to tell me stuff and I know it’s wrong and I know it’s bad and I shouldn’t have listened to her but she wouldn’t leave me alone about it and-”

“Riz! Riz, take a breath. Come on, with me.” She forces her chest to rise and fall with an exaggerated breath, taking one of his hands and flattening it against her ribcage. She wonders if she should Suggestion him into calming down, because she’s pretty sure that he’s about five seconds away from a full-blown panic attack. 

After a few moments, he catches on, always a quick study, and starts breathing with her. Once the noise is no longer as scary as it was, she says, “What has she been saying to you?”

He laughs, sharp and devoid of mirth, wrung-dry with exhaustion. “She’s been saying stuff about my dad,” he whispers, and Fig feels everything in her mind grind to a halt. 

And all of it comes pouring out. The taunts, the sneers, the promises. The tale of another person that Kalina used and discarded when he was no longer useful, no longer convenient. 

About halfway through, Fig fully picks Riz up under the armpits and carries him over to plop him on one of the couches and curl up next to him. He fully folds himself up into her side, head on her shoulder, fingers twitching in his lap. He tells her about the weird comments and the creepy looks and the insinuation that she somehow cares about Riz in particular. He tells her that Kalina claimed to be his godmother, and Fig has to use all of her self-restraint to not puke all over the couch. 

She thinks of Kalina’s look in the mirror, following Riz like a second shadow. Fig wishes, sudden and sharp and visceral, that Kalina had a body just so she could skin it. Riz hyperventilates next to her and her temperature rises to near scalding, but she holds his hand and he holds it back just as fiercely. 

He spills everything, the tale rotten and full of maggots and regrets and the tauntings of a plague, and for the first time, Fig fully and deeply understands the appeal of being a lord of Hell. The right to deliver pain for pain. Maybe it’s not right, and maybe it’s not just, but gods, wouldn’t it feel so good? 

Fig knows what it’s like to be searching for a father you never knew. To use that as a weapon? It’s beyond cruel. 

“Okay,” she says when he finishes, scrambling to distill the most important parts. “So, she tried to tell you that your dad was in Hell?”

“Yeah. On another layer. Dis.”

“And that’s just…”

“Down,” the Hangman rumbles, his engine much quieter than usual. He has no love for Riz, but apparently this is enough to inspire a little sympathy even in him. “The Iron City of Dis is the second circle of Hell. It is no place for a celestial.”

“Yeah,” Fig agrees. “Okay. So. She was clearly lying. And she was doing it to try to get us to give up?”

Riz nods miserably into her shoulder. 

She rubs his buck. “Okay. Okay. So, you didn’t listen to her. That’s great.”

“I mean,” he murmurs, “a lot of the stuff she’s saying lines up with what I do know, or what I think I know. His name was Pok. He was a goblin. He rose to Bytopia. And that was a name in relation to Kalina in some of the papers we got from Arianwen’s stuff. It’s… either she’s the best liar in the whole world, which is totally possible-”

“Or she’s telling the truth,” Fig says, her throat tightening. 

“It’s a lot of coincidences,” he says. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Fig… Fig doesn’t know what to think. Because Kalina has fabricated and manipulated the situation countless times with their group alone, not even accounting for everyone she’s ever interacted with. She very well could have spun an intricate lie just for the sake of fucking with Riz. But everything he’s described does seem to fit together too well to be totally false. If it’s a lie, it’s a very, very good lie. And it’s one that’s tearing her friend apart at the seams.

But even if she’s telling the truth, Riz hasn’t taken her up on her offer. None of them have gone along with her nonsense, at least not for long. 

“Do you want to know about your dad?” she asks. 

He takes a shaky breath, and is silent for a moment. Finally, he says, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m okay without it. I really, really am. My life is good. But I don’t know if I’d… If she’s lying, then I’ve gone along with all of this for nothing. And if she’s not, then my dad was partners with her. What kind of person would that make him? Just because he’s an angel doesn’t mean he’s good. But that’s still part of me.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Fig.”

She takes a moment, still rubbing at his back, trying to be a shield between him and the rest of the world, if only for a minute. She’s always been partial to the idea that Riz’s dad doesn’t know about him, mostly because she can’t imagine having a kid like Riz and not sticking around, unless you literally don’t know. But this is a lot to process, and she knows Riz’s opinions are different, and a fair bit more cynical. 

“Alright,” she says slowly. “So, I’m just gonna put this out there, and you don’t have to make a decision right now, but I’m just gonna say that we have a lot more information about this guy, or who this guy might be now. We’ve got a plane of existence. We’ve got a name. We’ve got possible identifying information. All of that is super helpful, and all of that is stuff that we could use to find him later, if you decide that’s something you want. 

“You’re so smart, and we’ve got super powerful clerics on our side. Ayda’s learning Plane Shift, and I bet Garthy would help you if you asked them about something like this. So I’m just saying that if you ever decide you want to know stuff about your dad, we can make that happen. We don’t have to do it through Kalina. There are way less risky ways to do that.”

Riz sighs, deflating against her. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“And you don’t have to choose right now! That’s something you can decide in a couple weeks or a couple months, or whenever. Maybe never! That’s also okay. It’s totally up to you. And I will be there to support you if and when you decide something.”

He snorts. “You’re gonna come to heaven with me?”

“Of course. You came with me to hell. And, I mean, Kristen snuck Aguefort in. Clearly they’ll let anybody in up there.”

He laughs, wet and shaky but true, and Fig cheers internally. “Yeah. You’re right. This isn’t… this isn’t a problem for right now. We need to make you the king of Hell and get an A this year.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m failing all my classes,” she says casually. “Did they give out report cards this semester?”

“Yes. Sandra Lynn got yours.”

“Yikes,” she says. “Remind me to never go looking for that.”

He laughs again, and Fig squeezes his shoulders tightly. “We love you. We’re here for you, stupid angel dad or no.”

“You’re a good friend,” he tells her, gripping her hand tightly. 

Fig blushes. “Hey, I’m just doing my best.” 

“Your best is awesome.”

“Mistress Faeth,” the Hangman rumbles, scooting a little bit closer. “If I may. It would not be wise to go to another circle of Hell without the permission of one of the ruling archdevils. But if we so wish, we may attempt to summon one here. I have been asked to send word to Captain Bill Seacaster, and word I have sent, but it is difficult to know if it has been received, since he is actively being pursued by all the armies of the Nine Hells.”

At this, Wretchrot swoops closer with a giggle. “M’lady,” he says, “seeing as you are the current beldam of the Bottomless Pit, perhaps you would light the beacon. This would allow at least Captain Seacaster to know where the missive was coming from. Perhaps light a little signal fire for the archdevil himself.”

Fig blinks. A beacon. Yeah. That would get Bill’s attention. And on the absolute off chance that there is a celestial in the second circle of Hell, maybe that would even get their attention. “Sure,” she says. “Lighting a beacon in Hell. What could go wrong?”

They follow Wretchrot, Fig and Riz still clinging to each other’s hands like kids trying not to get separated in the supermarket, back into a room with a knotted black spinning wheel. 

Fig holds out a finger over the needle of the wheel, and throws up a prayer to a celestial and an archdevil. Pok, she thinks, if you’re hearing this, you’ve missed out on a lot. Get it together. We could use a second guardian angel here. Bill, get here, please. And she pricks her finger. 

—

Riz watches as flame belches out of the depths of the Bottomless Pit, roaring up through the falling crowd of souls to split the sky like a jagged lance thrust into the sky. 

“The beacon is lit,” says the Hangman. “Let us hope that those potentates don’t, I don’t know, get mad at us.”

“They’re definitely gonna be mad at us,” he says. “They totally hate me.”

“I’ll just tell them I was lighting my cigarette,” Fig says. She is wielding a clove with one hand and gripping his hand with her other. Riz loves her, loves her with a depth as bottomless as this place. He looks at her, in front of the fiery beacon, cast in sharp reds and deep blacks, and thinks that anyone would be stupid to think she couldn’t do something just because she was mortal. Nine Hells, she already beat Gorthalax, didn’t she? She’s so strong, and so smart, and so brave, and-

Riz stops. 

She beat Gorthalax. The ruby. And something knocks loose in the back of his head, a memory pulled from breakfasts in his apartment as he grilled the older devil for information on coups. Gorthalax, flipping pancakes at the stove and explaining in his bass-pitched voice that, Most of the hierarchy of the Nine Hells is built on strength. If you’re strong enough to kill or defeat another devil, you kind of have a shot at any of their titles. 

Defeat. Defeat. What’s the wording behind that? Why is it different than kill? Why the distinction? 

Riz lets go of Fig’s hand and drops down, reaching into his briefcase to dig out some of the books from earlier. 

“What are you doing?” Fig asks. 

“I remembered something, I think,” he says. “It’s-” he pulls out a black-scaled book and flips it open, skimming through the pages until he reaches the section regarding coup law. 

And sure enough, there it is. To perform a coup, one must not kill the previous devil, but one must defeat them. It’s everything, it’s all the information he’s been collecting, all the late nights and all the useless information that is suddenly no longer useless. 

Riz stares down at the paper, and bursts into tears. 

“Whoah!” she cries, startled, and swoops down next to him. “Hey, what’s-”

“You already did it!” he sobs, holding up the book. “You already did it. A coup is just- you don’t have to kill, you just have to defeat Gorthalax. And you already did! With the-”

“Ohhhhh,” Fig says, her mouth dropping open. “Oh, with the gem.”

“You already did it,” he sobs, shoulders shaking with it. 

“I am the rightful king of Hell,” she whispers, eyes wide as saucers. 

“Collecting clues helps!” Riz weeps. “Solving mysteries helps!”

Gilear steps forward and leans down to place a hand on both their shoulders. “Okay,” he says, voice unusually steady and stubborn. “I’m going to step in as a parent now. We’re gonna all eat, and we’re gonna drink some water, and we’re all gonna lie down, okay?”

“We found a clause, Gilear,” he chokes out through his tears. 

The older man kneels down and pulls him into a side hug, rubbing at his back. “I know you did, Riz. I know you did.”

They all get up and retreat back into the villa for a few minutes. Gilear and Fig practically force Riz to drink some water. He stops crying after a minute and tries to wipe off his face, mostly unsuccessfully. It’s fine. If anyone says anything in the tribunal, he’ll shoot them. 

After about another hour, a bell rings somewhere off in the Pit, the noise echoing off the steep walls and filling all the hallways of the cavernous system. The tribunal. 

Fig looks over at Riz. “Shall we?” 

Riz takes a deep breath, collects all of his books, and brushes off his shirt. He nods at her. “Let’s go make you king of Hell.”

—

It goes like this: Fig takes the pentagram on her forehead, and her blood turns to lava in her veins, power roaring through her, and she is burning, burning, burning, brighter and brighter forever. 

And Bill Seacaster stabs Vraz the Mean through her porcelain face. 

—

It goes like this: in the Iron City of Dis, an earpiece crackles to life with a flicker of light and a staticky voice. Pok wakes up to the voice of an operator saying, “Askandi. Askandi, come in.”

Chapter Text

It goes like this: Pok comes to with a hiss of breath and more aches than he can count, but suddenly that’s a secondary problem. The LPRTF is radio silent for all undercover missions unless you contact them first. In over two decades of working for them, Pok has never, ever gotten contacted first. Something is very, very wrong. 

The earpiece buzzes, sharp with energy, and the voice comes through again, urgent. “Askandi, come in.”

He doesn’t recognize this voice, so it must be a new operator. A new addition to the team in the months and months and months he’s been away. 

“This is Askandi,” he croaks, trying to level out his voice to match the urgency. 

“Thank the stars, agent, you gave us a scare there,” the voice says. 

“Why are you contacting me?” he hisses. “This may have blown my cover.”

“So blow it,” the voice commands. “We’re pulling you. Now. Wherever you are in Dis, get out.”

“What?” he asks, startled. “Why?” This is an important mission, one that took  months to plan and has taken months to get to a position this valuable. If he’s about to throw that all away, there better be a damn good reason.

“We’re picking up a rogue celestial signature in Avernus.”

Pok blinks. “What? Is there anyone assigned to Avernus right now?”

“No! That’s the problem! No one is supposed to be there, there are no active missions there right now. But we’re picking up a presence, and a strong one. There’s some kind of emergency signal. And the beacon of the Bottomless Pit is lit.”

Pok feels the surprise in his chest grind into a halt and curdle into panic, thick and sour. “Has anyone responded to it yet?”

A crackle of static. “Captain Bill Seacaster’s armada.”

His eyes go wide. “Fuck.” 

“Fuck,” agrees the operator. “We’re pulling you. Whatever this signal is, we can’t figure out how to contact it, but it’s sending out a distress signal. We can’t pin down the location with enough precision to get it back on our own without bringing Seacaster’s whole cavalry back with it, which I don’t have to explain would be bad in more ways than we can express.”

“I’m on retrieval,” Pok surmises. 

“Yes.”

“Copy that.” He grits his teeth, twists his wrists, rubbed raw from their bonds, and slashes at them with his watch. They fray, and he pulls, dragging himself free. He runs a hand over his face, and flicks off a spray of stale acid and lukewarm blood onto the floor. “I’m still in Dis,” he says. “Do you have a way lined up for me to get up to Avernus, or do I have to figure that out?”

“We’ve got your signal,” says the operator, brisk and business-like. Computer keys click in the background over the line. “And you’re in luck. Look to your side.”

“Which side?” 

“Either.”

Pok’s head snaps back and forth, scanning the room. Blood is spattered over the walls, dozens upon dozens of layers. It peels up in huge flakes, crusted into thin, brittle coverings with age. There are still puddles of acid sitting on the iron floors, the liquid shining dully in the fluorescent lighting. He creeps backward toward one of the corners, the one furthest from the light and the one-way mirror, the one with the deepest shadows. “Okay?” 

“We’re picking up energy of a Level Door there,” says the operator. “Look for a Seam.”

Pok’s eyes widen, and he scans the shadows with renewed focus. Level Doors are gateways that open and close between the layers of Hell. They shift randomly and rarely stay in one place for long. The Nine Hells are intricately intertwined, their magical signatures in the World Axis all so similar that sometimes, even without the assistance of devils, the fabric between the layers snags, and tears. Gaps open and close all the time. The entrances, Seams, are difficult to spot, but if you can find one-

Even after all these years, Pok isn’t quite used to having as much magic as he has now. In his life, he didn’t know so much as a cantrip. He’s an Assassin by trade, but being a risen soul in an Upper Plane for decades will do stuff to a person. 

He reaches out with a hand and passes it through the shadows, pulling at the shallow well of power that sits in his chest these days. It’s not quite a full Detect Magic spell, but it lets him feel the very edges of arcane effects. In this case, it’s more effective than trying to identify a Seam by vision alone. (He thinks, longingly, of the standard gear for agents that he left behind. He went deep this time, too sensitive a mission to justify anything flashier than the Arcadian Watch for truly tight binds.)

The magic of Dis is cold and hard, iron just like its name. He passes a hand through the space, feeling the resonance of Dis. And then, there. His hand passes along the edge of the wall, claws just barely brushing above the surface, and a flicker of heat races down his fingers. It yawns, hot and massive and hungry, an outlier in a place of harsh walls and impassivity. 

He digs his fingers into the wall, and they slide through and behind into a space that shouldn’t be there. The iron wall melts into a gaping maw of shadows and chittering, devilish noises from behind. A hall, space that warps like vision at the edges of your eyes, stretches out. At the very end, a faint, thirsty glow of flame. The Bottomless Pit.

Pok reaches up and touches the earpiece. “I’ve found the Level Gate. Going through now.” And before his heart can catch up with the fact that this is possibly the dumbest thing he’s done in a life and afterlife full of increasingly dumb decisions, he charges into the Level Door, letting the Seam vanish from sight behind him. 

Instantly, he’s swallowed by a darkness so complete that even his vision can barely cut through it. Voices shriek and chitter with laughter off in the edges of the liminal space, something that he recognizes, distantly, as bouncing off of his own brain. 

-all alone in here-

-fighting someone else’s battles again-

-couldn’t be bothered to-

-aren’t even finishing your mission-

-all that work down the drain-

And one that he doesn’t recognize, an alien thought, colder and sharper than all the rest, cutting through below his skin. -what are you even going to say to him? Will he even recognize you? 

He shrugs off all of the thoughts. Spaces like this aren’t made for anyone but devils. There’s no thought here that is safe or reliable. 

He comes through, slides out through the other edge of the Level Door, and swears under his breath, clinging to the rock wall for a moment as he blinks rapidly. The Bottomless Pit normally isn’t bright in the actual chasm section, but right now, the beacon is still roaring up through the Pit, a towering column of fire turning the air up to boiling temperatures and throwing the whole Pit into the light levels of full noon under a true sun. 

He has to take a few moments to blink away the dazzled sheen of his darkvision, and swears again as his vision adjusts and he looks around. The shadows are much sparser now than he likes. 

“Askandi, report,” crackles the earpiece. “Have you found the door?”

“Found it and went through,” he replies, one hand up to his ear. “I’m at the Pit now. Is the signal coming from deeper in the Pit or higher?”

“The surface,” the operator tells him. “And it’s rising rapidly.”

“With the armada?” he asks. 

“Looks that way.”

He swears. “Alright, standby. I’m going up.”

“Copy that. Good luck, Askandi.”

Pok doesn’t believe in luck. He starts sprinting up the road carved in the Pit, abandoning stealth for the moment in favor of pushing his body to its full speed. It takes him only a minute to get to the top of the road, where it begins to spill into fuller, wider rooms. 

He ducks into a doorway and scans through what looks like some kind of courtroom, the ceiling smashed open, the hellish rain of Avernus pouring through to smack ineffectively against the polished stone floors. He flattens himself against a wall inside the room as footsteps roar past outside, and he hears a voice shout, “Get the fucking teleport ballistics up and running! We need to get up there and skin those teenagers alive!”

Pok blinks. Teenagers? he mouths to himself, baffled. He doesn’t understand that, but it doesn’t sound good, so he slides around the doorframe to see an erinyes in harsh armor disappearing around a corner, leaving a literal trail of smoke behind her. Teleport ballistics, he muses. Now, that is convenient. 

He breaks into a jog, following after the devil deeper into the compounds of the Bottomless Pit, toward the ballistic rooms. 

—

In Arborly, Ayda throws her hands skyward and flame explodes around them all. 

They reappear on the upside-down deck of the ship built into Kalvaxus, and the first thing Fabian sees is his best friend standing at the edge, whooping and shooting his gun into the air. 

The second thing he sees is his father. 

Bill Seacaster is larger in death than he was in life, somehow. Four massive horns split out the sides of his head, a burning ember in his empty eye socket, smoldering coals for razor-sharp teeth. A massive, gnarled, hooked arm splits out of his back. He turns to look at Fabian, and his whole devilish face collapses into an affection that could drown Hell. “My darling boy!” Bill roars, and it echoes over the whole ship to wrap around Fabian like a hug. “Look out!” 

Fabian ducks as a sword goes swinging over his head. Behind him, Alistair Ash shouts, “I’m gonna kill you!”

He groans. “Alistair, I’m sorry!” he cries, whipping out his sheet and kicking Alistair in the chest so that he stumbles back enough for Fabian to get his sword in front of him. “I’ve come a long way!”

Ayda exchanges a flash of words with Fig and leaps off the deck, opening a portal that sends a flood of water pouring toward the surface, as Fabian leaps back, parrying Alistair’s swings. “You’re gonna die!” Alistair shouts. “You’re gonna work here on the ship with me! I’m gonna keep you pinned to the deck and I’m gonna get Chungledown Bim to come shit in your mouth!”

There’s a flare of rage, hot and sharp and fierce, that accompanies the fear. Fabian bares his teeth in a snarl. “Alright, fuck this,” he says, and dives fully into battle. 

—

Riz, next to the helm, ducks and covers his head as things explode on the deck, and Bill straightens and bellows, “Rebel armada! Follow your flagship to the center of Avernus, where we head for the Astral Realm! Let’s give ‘em a damn good fight along the way! To war, me hearties!”

And in the next second, there’s a blinding flash of light as Dimension Doors appear next to the helm. The three devils from the tribunal step appear on the deck. Kaistrona the Chained and Lorzug the Impaled turn to face Bill Seacaster, and Vraz turns toward Fig and Riz, demanding that Fig force Bill to return the stolen goods to the Bottomless Pit. 

Fig’s lip curls, and Riz can taste the sass coming even before she tells Vraz to eat her ass. 

Vraz snarls back, and dismisses all of Gorthalax’s warlock agreements with a flick of her wrist. 

Riz barely has enough time to register Johnny Spells and his tiefling greaser appears in a blast of flame before the erinyes turns to him, and growls, “Not in the Bottomless Pit anymore, angel pet. I promised you a skinning.” And she lunges. 

He leaps to the side, but not fast enough. She skewers him through the stomach with a sword longer than his whole body, and twists it in the soft flesh. Her free hand lashes out to try to claw at his face, and he twists his upper body out of the way, feeling more flesh tear around the sword through his torso. 

Next to him, Fig roars with fury, and swings her bass around, preparing to take a shot at the devil. 

There are more combatants flooding onto the ship with every moment. Fabian is engaged with Alistair. The greasers are charging. Riz watches a massive, silvery-blue arcane hand swoop down, scoop up Johnny Spells, and fling him over the side of the ship. There’s a flash of energy higher up on the deck as a teleportation missile lands. He needs to get her out of this combat immediately. Preferably to drop a thousand feet to the ground.

His face twists in a snarl, peeling back his lips to bare all his fangs. “You suck!” he shouts into Vraz’s face. “And you’re stupid, too!” He digs his claws, not into her flesh, but into the gaps in her armor, clinging on fiercely. 

He pulls on his magic, feels wings tear themselves out of his back, making several of the cinder zombies cringe back. Vraz herself jerks backward, eyes going wide as hives begin to burst out over her face. “Shouldn’t have come to the edge of the ship,” Riz tells her, and lunges backwards, flapping his wings to drag them both over the side of the ship. 

—

Pok rounds the corner into a ballistic missile room just as the screaming starts. He looks out of one of the arrow slits in the battlements to see- 

“What the fuck?” he says, startled. 

Just outside the Bottomless Pit, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are dumping from the sky in a torrent to drench the blasted surface of Avernus. Devils are screaming and shrieking with alarm, running about here and there and everywhere. Pok is no longer hiding, but in the utter chaos that has erupted in the battlements, no one is paying any mind to a filthy person who is definitely not supposed to be there. 

The water just keeps coming, pouring across the landscape faster than the devils can run. The ground here, scorched in the heat of the Nine Hells for millenia, is prime flash flood material. It could take flame, lava, meteors, godlike punishment from the sun itself. But a whole bunch of water? Forget it. 

He follows the torrent of water up, up, up, through the smoke-choked sky to find a massive nautical portal in the air, next to a ship of massive red wings and scales like embers. Pok’s whole body stiffens, ears flattening back against his head. 

Kalvaxus is miles larger here and now than he was when he ate Pok like a midday snack. It’s not often he really feels how small he is, but here? Now? Standing in the first circle of Hell and staring up at the body of the thing that killed him? He’s never felt smaller. 

But he doesn’t have time for this. He has a job to do. He darts deeper into the missile room, where devils are shouting off missile destinations, and other devils and damned souls are flooding into groups to get shot up. 

“Roc four, here-”

“-need five more souls for the missile for the silver dra-”

“-Green six, launching now-”

“-get in here, you idiots, or we’ll miss the flagship!” 

Pok’s ears flick up at the sound of a shrill, feminine voice. A teenager. He ducks under the tail of a spiny devil and around a swarm of imps to see a bunch of people collecting on a missile pad. A group of people wielding swords, scarecrow bags pulled over their head and sewn into the skin of their necks; a tall, quarterback-looking teenager with inflamed veins and riddled with sword lacerations; a girl in a scorched prom dress with shards of metal stabbed through her skull in a crude imitation of a crown; and a man in athletic wear, his muscular frame deteriorating around massive sprays of incinerated flesh, the scarring silver and golden. Celestial magic. 

The pentagram below them begins to glow, and a devil swings around a telescope, aiming the missile. “Alpha seven launching for flagship in five, four-” the devil begins to call out, and Pok breaks into a run. At “two,” he lunges onto the pentagram. 

The bloodrush-looking kid turns to look at him, and says, “Who are-” and then everything vanishes in a swirl of fire. 

Pok trips as they materialize on the deck of Seacaster’s ship. The boom of cannonfire shakes the wood under his feet, and the clanging of steel and roar of magic whips through the air. Barrels and weapons are scattered over the deck. Pok spots a pistol, and snags it off the ground. 

The boy also trips on the landing, but turns to face Pok. “Who the hell are you?” 

He looks at the group again, melee fighters and a young woman who is clearly a spellcaster. He raises the gun, and before she can even throw up a ward, he shoots the spellcaster in the chest. 

There’s a blast of gunfire, and she falls back with a scream, rotten blood pouring from her chest in goopy waves. The boy roars and swings his sword up to slash at Pok. He rolls out of the way as the boy swings down, falling in behind the scattered barrels to vanish from view. 

As soon as he’s out of sight, he whips his head around, scanning the battlefield. Kalvaxus’s back and spine have been cracked open like the husk of a melon to put in the deck of the ship, a hodgepodge of wooden planks and sheets of porous, volcanic rock sheared off to make level ground. There are crews of cinder zombies racing around on the deck, one team each on a side deck, using a complex system of rigging with barbed metal hooks embedded in Kalaxus’s flesh to pull his wings and steer the ship. As such, there is no mast, just ridged deck in all directions and cannons mounted on the edges. 

But the strangest thing by far is indeed the crowd of teenagers. There are easily half a dozen and then some sprinting around on the deck, screaming bloody murder and engaging in combat with a viciousness true to only teens. And they don’t appear to be damned souls. No, they’re just normal, living teenagers with weapons. 

He looks frantically for anyone he might recognize from the LPRTF, but there’s no one. The only living, non-devil adult he can even spot is a wood elf woman swooping past on a griffin. 

He watches an enormous arcane hand flash into existence, scoop up a tiefling off the deck, and fling him off the side with extreme spite. An erinyes charges across the deck, toward someone Pok hadn’t seen before behind the flash of a tiefling girl wielding a bass guitar. The erinyes stabs a young goblin boy straight through the stomach, and the tiefling whips around with murder in her eyes as the boy screams. Even from this distance, Pok watches in real time as the boy’s face twists from agony into vicious, singular hatred. He peels back his lips to bare his fangs, reaches for the erinyes’s armor, and-

The wings are bigger than he is, enormous, spectral stained glass figures spreading out from his shoulder blades as a map of markings and tattoos flare with gold across his skin, and a matching halo erupts behind his head. And with a roar that can’t be heard over the thunder of cannons and other gunfire, the aasimar boy (because he must be aasimar) throws himself backwards over the edge of the ship, dragging the devil with him. 

Even amidst all the chaos, the other teens take notice as he vanishes from the deck and sound the alarm by screaming in tandem, an overlapping of “Oh, FUCK you!” and “What is he DOING?!” and “IF ANY OF YOU SHITHEADS ON CANNON HIT RIZ, I’LL RIP OUT YOUR THROAT WITH MY TEETH!”

In those few seconds, Pok puts together a few things. One, this is the source of the distress signal. Aasimar. That would account for the LPRTF not being able to contact whoever it was. Not an agent, technically, but still connected to the plane. Two, the aasimar’s name is Riz. Three, the other teenagers are with Riz, and are probably his allies in this fight. All good information to have. 

With the devil gone from beside her, Pok watches the tiefling girl redirect her hit to blast two other tieflings straight off the ship with a burst of bardic magic that he feels reverberate in his teeth. Pok has spilled out closer to the center of the ship, which means he’s close enough to hear two of the teenagers, standing side-by-side, start to scream at one another over the noise. 

One, a redhead with a staff bigger than she is and a wild look in her eyes, whips around to the other and says, “We gotta get Riz! We’re gonna leave him behind!”

“Babe!” shouts the other, a human girl with a spill of dark curls, “Riz’ll be fine! He’s a badass, and he can fly.”

“I can grab him if he falls too far behind,” shouts another girl, a high elf with blond hair, one hand extended and glowing with silvery light. 

Pok watches the man from the front of the ship, with the celestial lacerations, charge forward at one of the girls and swing down with a silvered halberd. The other girl shouts with fury and prepares her staff to swing, but before she can, something crashes into the ship and the whole dragon veers sideways. Everyone smashes to the ground in a heap, and some of the crates and barrels slide around. He loses sight of everyone, and drags himself to his feet to see the fight resuming as the ship swings back into even flight. 

The ship shudders as the neck of the dragon twists, and a massive head swerves up above the deck, swallowing down a cannon. “Former minions!” shouts Kalvaxus, “Now is our chance! You must help me! I have been turned into a boat against my wishes!”

Pok’s heart stops beating in his chest, and without even thinking, he lines up a shot, and fires. Kalvaxus screams, his head rearing back and the whole ship shaking precariously as his bullet takes out the dragon’s eye. 

There’s an array of shouts from the people on deck, and several heads swing toward him. Some of the scarecrow people redirect, swerving away from the two human girls to charge Pok. He bares his teeth, tucks his pistol, and ducks under one of their arms as they swing down at him, only to be gored by one of the other ones in the leg.

He snarls, yanks himself free, and ducks back towards the girls. He feels himself enter an area of rippling, celestial magic, something cool and dark and moonlit. A Twilight Sanctuary. Clerics, then. 

Behind him, a bolt of lightning cracks through the air, coating his tongue with copper as the elven wizard launches her spell across the deck. 

There’s a deafening blast of gunfire and the bloodrush kid from the missile who crosses the deck to swing at one of the teenagers with a sword and- is that a sheet? -reels back with a yell as radiant light blasts through a fresh bullet wound on his shoulder. Pok throws a glance over his shoulder to see the aasimar, having caught up with the ship and taken a shot, bank hard into a cloud of smoke to vanish from sight after taking his shot. 

One of the cleric girls, the redhead, takes a few steps forward and turns to address the man with the celestial marks. As she turns, she spots Pok, and fully freezes. “Hey, what the fuck?!” she shouts. “Oh my gods. Oh my gods. Oh my GODS!” She faces the coach and says, “You deserve this! You deserve to be in Hell!” 

She slams her staff against the deck, and a tidal wave of light crashes out from her in all directions. It obliterates all of the scarecrow men, throws the bloodrush kid to the ground, and knocks back the coach. Pok flinches in anticipation, but the light passes through him harmlessly, leaving behind a feeling of scoured-raw flesh and fierce protection, as if the cleric herself can’t quite decide if he’s a friend or a foe. 

“Thanks for not hitting me!” he shouts to her, and her eyes go even wider. 

“RED ALERT, RED ALERT,” she screeches, loud enough to be heard across the deck even in the midst of the chaos. “Can anyone else see this guy, or is this some Kalina bullshit?!”

Pok freezes. “What?” How do they know anything about Kalina?

The other cleric whips around to look at him and her eyes go wide. “What the actual hell?” 

At the front of the deck, the tiefling girl smashes away a hit with her guitar, and turns to fully face her friend. She meets his eyes across the deck, burning with fire, and Pok jumps a little to see the flaming pentagram on her forehead. How is a tiefling teenager an archdevil? Who are these kids? 

The tiefling’s jaw drops. She stares at him, her expression caught halfway between disbelief and a rage so deep and vicious that every animal instinct inside of him screams to run. He’s met plenty of archdevils that are larger and thornier and more physically frightening than this, but he is uniquely cautious of an archdevil that comes with a mortal body and a righteousness to shame all the rest. “What is WRONG WITH YOU?!” she bellows, her voice echoing as if tripled, the deck shaking with raw bardic fury. “You couldn’t have picked ANY BETTER TIME TO SHOW UP?” 

Pok’s eyes go wide. “Do I know you?”

“He’s really there?!” shrieks the cleric holding up the Twilight Sanctuary. 

“You son of a bitch!” screams the archdevil. “Are you Pok Askandi?”

He freezes. “How did you know that?”

The redhead shouts, “Have you ever had sex with a woman named Sklonda Gukgak?”

All the other teenagers on deck snap around to stare at this point, and there’s a wave of cries across the deck. Pok feels like his whole body has turned to stone. It’s been years since he saw Sklonda. That was a one-night thing. How in the actual fuck do these random teenagers know that?