{king's shield} {WaR} {im so sorry plz}

HELLO

THIS IS NOT DONE
I KNOW IT IS NOT DONE

however, I will be getting on a long bus to a land with no internet in thirty seconds and ostensibly will not have internet connection until I get back, which is past the WaR deadline, so I have to declare this ready to grade and can’t edit until this is done, I guess. There are two really important scenes still here that I haven’t written, but in the sake of hitting the deadline, I’m posting this now and then I guess we can talk rewrites or something because they are really fucking important parts, and then there are a bunch more where I was like QUICKLY MAKE SOUNDS ON THE KEYBOARD FUUUU .-.

and, yes, I feel like a derp posting something that I know isn't my best work, or even my good work, or even my proofread work, and I'm sorry

so, anyway, this is ready for grading, and I'm still sorry

anyway, look, a medieval-themed shiny.

king’s shield

part one: defiant​

[hr][/hr]

Drip. Drip.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, the eldest princess of House Castelle stood at the base of the dais of the steel throne and waited for the thunder. Princess Nemo and her pawniard familiar had seen the clouds on the way in, she’d seen the rain dripping down the front of the impassive stained glass window, and she’d seen the sun vanish beneath the strain of the darkness.

But she had yet to hear the thunder.

She cupped her hands under her chin and stood on her tiptoes, the top of her head barely tall enough to see over the lip of her father’s throne, a twisted hunk of metal that, no doubt, had been designed to be too uncomfortable for any one person to occupy for too long of a time; no craftsman could have left that many undulled edges by accident. Castelle was the House of discord, after all, even if it bore the sigil of steel, the element of the enduring and the unbroken.

Drip. Drip.

In the center of the room, a smooth, flowering hourglass stood on a raised dais, the twin bulbs of its base and top catching the muted sunlight and throwing it across the chamber. Nemo had grown familiar with its marking of the inevitable progression of time throughout the years spent here; even during the summer storms, the quiet drip of one drop of water falling from the upper chamber to the lower chamber was still audible. Beneath the hourglass, a small black and red creature, armed from head to toe in plate mail and sporting two long, wickedly sharp blades instead of arms, watched with curiously innocent yellow eyes as each drop of water fell with each passing second. Nemo glanced over at the creature, and it seemed to sense her desire, scampering over on short legs to stand by her side.

“Mother, can you tell me the myths about the dragons again?” Princess Nemo absent-mindedly brushed her silvery bangs out of her face, but her eyes—too dark, almost black—held a sort of intense eagerness and focus that looked several years older than the rest of her. One hand strayed to stroke the steel helm of the creature beside her, which had settled down by her side once more.

To Queen Retia, Princess Nemo and her dark pawniard would always look a little out of place in House Castelle. It might’ve been the slight loping, feral grace with which her daughter moved, or the peculiar poise with which her she held herself, or the too-dark, too-intense eyes with which she observed everything. Even now, in a brightly-colored, floor-length velvety dress typically reserved for formalities, Nemo seemed like an outcast in the room of the steel throne.

And the pawniard familiar, by the gods. If there hadn’t been so many witnesses, Retia and King Fischer himself among them, who could all claim with certainty that Nemo had been born with it just as all other children were born with their own familiars, there would have been rumors of some dark sorcery. Not that Nemo seemed to notice, though. It was in her blood, though, to be unlike the rest of them.

Retia sighed and turned away from the ornate stained-glass window that dominated the back wall of the throne room. Her hand strayed to the familiar beside her, a massive silver and red bird with feathers as cold and unyielding as ice and a beak as thick as a broadsword, and every bit as sharp. All of the familiars of House Castelle seemed built for war, as if, like their throne, they were all designed to cause as much conflict as possible. The skarmory shuffled its wings impatiently, and its large talons threatened to leave gouges in the stony floor. A bit of the rainbow light filtered over Retia’s face, casting the shadows beneath her own too-dark eyes into a wash of color for just a moment. “Nemo,” she said gently, “you’ve heard the legends a thousand times.”

Drip. Drip.

Retia didn’t blame her daughter, though. As a child, Retia had dreamed of brighter worlds as well. It hadn’t taken long to discover that these stories were just that, though—stories.

“Can I hear them again, at least?”

Retia hadn’t expected anything different, to be perfectly honest. She pointed upward, the rainbow light from the stained-glass cascading over her fingertips as well, a single ray of light descending from the heavens. Conveniently symbolic, but Retia had seen worse coincidences in her time. “There is a great pokémon in the sky who watches over us all, Nemo,” Retia said quietly, looking up toward the images of the gods frozen in the crystal glass. The lorge, strange though it was, always managed to touch her with its beauty. “There are two dragons. One is the underwater lord of space; the other is the steely lord of time.”

Above them, the rose-pink dragon of time and the steely-blue dragon of space circled one another in the confines of the stained-glass, their jagged images towering above the throne in their majesty.

Retia knew the words to the myth; from the way she was mouthing the words as well, it seemed as if Nemo did, as well. Still, Retia continued, “But the dragons are lonely, Nemo. They live in lonely exile. The underwater dragon lives deep within the oceans that are his home, so far away from all other pokémon and humans that he has almost faded from our memory. And the steel dragon, though blue as the magnificent vaults that are his home and as hardened as the iron that is his element, circles above us, hidden in the clouds.”

The skarmory beside Retia bowed its feathered head and gave a low, mournful caw.

These were the legends of the House Castelle, passed down through the generations. One day, when Nemo was older, Retia would tell her the rest.

“It must be nice, flying up there where the world cannot touch you,” Nemo said wistfully, looking up first at the rain falling from the clouds above and then at her mother’s skarmory, which shook its wings out a little. “I want to fly one day.”

“Perhaps, Nemo,” Retia said dutifully. Her daughter’s familiar was a creature of shadow and steel, lacking wings or the gift of flight; and her daughter was a princess who would never hold the throne. Her life would be a quiet one, filled with hosting banquets and watching the knights of the realms fighting for honors and her favor. But no flight. “Perhaps.” And even Retia, with the steel bird of a familiar, knew that they would both be grounded.

Drip. Drip.

“Why does he hide in the clouds, Mother?”

Retia was never one to believe Castelle’s lore, but she obliged. “He is our guardian, Nemo. The water dragon has his domain deep beneath the ocean, and there he slumbers. But the steel dragon watches over us, and in return we give our thanks to him, but he will not land here to receive them because he is afraid.”

“Why?”

“Although he tries his best, the steel dragon cannot always protect us. People die. Peace is broken. Chaos rules.” Retia sighed and cast her gaze through the colored glass up into the storm clouds, watching as the rain tumbled down to the earth below. The lands of Castelle were beautiful at any time of the year, but the rainy season had always been Retia’s least favorite, because—

Her daughter’s pawniard, which had been scraping patterns into the stone floor by filing its twin claws—no doubt reflecting Nemo’s hidden anxiousness; her father’s throne room was never a place in which she rested easily—stopped and looked up, apparently deep in thought.

For a moment, Nemo was silent, considering. Her fingers idly tapped nonsensical patterns into her thick velvet dress, the only outward sign barring her pawniard of her discomfort here, but her eyes held a focus well beyond her years. “So sometimes, the steel dragon fails?”

Drip. Drip.

Retia’s eyes clouded over with worry. This was why, she knew, her eldest daughter would never be cut out to be a princess. Too many questions. But all the same, the queen answered quietly, “Yes. Sometimes, Nemo, the dragons cannot protect us. And they say that every drop of rain is a tear that the underwater dragon sheds for a life lost under his watch.”

They were both silent for a moment, mother and daughter staring out of the windows of the throne room. The raindrops, innumerable, poured down from the sky in droves.

Out in the distance, there was a brilliant flash of light, followed by a low rumble of thunder.

House Castelle had recently won its wars, but the cost of its freedom had been steep. There had been more summer rain this year than any other that Retia could remember.

“And the thunder?” Nemo asked, her eyes fixed on the heart of the storm in the distance.

Drip. Drip.

Retia gently laid a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “The thunder is special.” She paused. “When a person dies before their time, the dragons are most sorrowful of all, for it was their job to protect them, and their job that was failed. And that person left his life before he was done living. So whenever someone dies before the earth is supposed to release them, whenever a brave hero dies too soon, the steel dragon will let loose a mighty roar to the heavens, so that person will at least be remembered in the echoes of the rumbles of the skies.”

Nemo propped her head up on her hands, still straining on her tiptoes to see over the windowsill, and she waited with bated breath. Her pawniard moved beside her to look upward as well.

But they were not rewarded.

“I wish for more thunder,” she said at last. Slumping back and watching the raindrops plummet to the ground again, sliding down the slick stone.

Queen Retia was taken aback. “Why in the heavens would you want that?” She’d lost many friends in Castelle’s war, many of them close, and she never wanted to lose another friend before it was time. She’d seen them all cut down in the heat of battle, watched them earn their thunder, and she didn’t want it again.

Nemo stretched her tiny hand out again, dark eyes narrowing as she studied the raindrops leaking down her fingers like tears. “There’s so much rain,” she murmured quietly, voice lost in thoughts too deep for a child of her age. “So many people gone, and yet none of them died before their time. The rest, then, were all meant to die when they did.” She cupped the water back in her palm, watching the reflective surface of the pool of raindrops ripple with every new addition. “No one still had people to meet, things to see, lives to change. And the rest were just lost in the storm.”

Retia opened her mouth to reply and then closed it.

Drip. Drip.

And then Nemo stood around, her tiny frame alight with resolve as she balled her hands into fists and craned upward to meet her mother’s gaze. “I want to be heard,” she said. “I want to make a difference in the world, to help people, to save people, to change people. I want to be so important that no matter when I die, it will always be before my time, because there will be so much left that I can still do.” Nemo realized she was breathing heavily, and she slowly lowered her fists, aware of what she was saying. “I want to be a hero.”

The pawniard beside her looked up and positioned its razor-sharp blades in front of its chest in a sort of fighting stance, one raised higher than the other and both poised to strike.

There was no sound for a while but the gentle patter of rain hitting stone.

“It is not a princess’s place to die young,” Retia said at last, carefully treading with her words. It was still hard to reconcile Nemo’s mental age with her physical one, and her daughter had long ago started saying things that made Retia think her daughter was older than her years.

“Father doesn’t want me to rule, though, does he?” Nemo did not so much as blink before she asked it.

“Where did you hear that?” Retia tried to keep her voice light, to sound like she was joking, but Nemo saw right through it.

The little girl shrugged. “I just know. Is it because—”

Retia cut her daughter off before she could say any more. “Nemo, don’t speak like that. Your father won’t be happy to hear of it.”

For once, Nemo did not question her.

But she knew. They both did.

Drip. Drip.

Retia moved her arms protectively around her daughter, who would never be king, and they watched the rain die out together. In the tallest tower of the fortress of House Castelle, a little girl watched the rain and waited for thunder.

The skarmoy cawed mournfully.

She would wait for a very long time.

Drip. Drip.

[hr][/hr]

“Nemo, wait up!”

Her face flushed with exhilaration, a girl no more than seven cleared a grassy ridge, her dark hair streaming behind her as she raced through the forest, her younger brother hot on her heels. “You’re going to have to be a whole lot faster than that if you want to catch up, Bren,” Nemo called over her shoulder, and for once, she was elated because she was almost flying. She threw her head back, hair and dress alike flapping in the wind, and she felt wonderful and free and—

There was a rapid flash of blue, almost too fast to be seen, and Nemo found herself sprawled ungracefully across the ground as her foot caught on something and she was sent tumbling forward, the fall too fast for her to process. She skidded forward for a moment, the filthy edges of her dress accumulating more of their dusty coating, and she could only watch in shock as her younger brother, cackling victoriously, raced past her. By the time she had righted herself, Bren was at least ten feet ahead of her. She did the calculation quickly. She wouldn’t be able to recover that distance.

“No fair,” Nemo protested, the tips of her ears turning bright pink with embarrassment. She stomped her bare foot into the ground. “You can’t use Tair like that. You’re cheating.”

“You’re bigger than me,” Bren said, folding his arms as well, breathing heavily. His grin, however, was victorious, and that smug smile remained on his face as his riolu emerged from the undergrowth by Nemo’s feet, having tackled her ankles a few seconds previously. “So it’s not really cheating if you cheated first, is it?”

“You can’t just use your familiar like that, Bren.”

“I don’t see why not,” Bren replied, pouting and sticking his chin forward in defiance. At his side, the riolu did the same in miniature. “You’re just angry because you didn’t think about it first.”

{He’s right, you know,} a tiny voice with the slightest undertones of a metallic ring said in the back of Nemo’s mind. Nemo’s pawniard emerged from the bushes to her left and added over their mental link, {You are upset for not thinking about it first.}

{Shut up, Shay,} Nemo whispered back to her own familiar, but now the rest of her face was burning with shame as well. Scowling, she turned away so that Bren couldn’t see her irritation, and then she began storming back to the castle, bits of her dress catching and ripping on the thorny undergrowth on the sides of the forest path. Alarmed, Shay turned and began to follow after shooting a warning glare toward Bren’s riolu.

Bren trailed back for a moment, glancing to her golden-eyed pawniard and back to his older sister, and then he began skipping to catch up. “So,” he began, letting the word hang longer than it normally would’ve. “Did I win?”

Nemo scowled. “No.”

Her voice suddenly adopted a petulant tone. “Neeeemo…”

“No.”

He’d outsmarted her. He’d outsmarted her. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Nemo felt Shay’s smug retort dawning in the center of her mind—like all pairs of familiars, they didn’t quite communicate through words, but through some understanding that ran deeper than focused thought. When they had both been young, they thought to one another in mental washes of emotions and splashes of images; now, their communication was the same but far more rapid, almost complex enough to catalogue into thought. Dully, Nemo formulated the gathering of resignation and irritation that translated into a quiet, {Shut up, Shay}.

And Nemo was promptly met with a returning wave of calm that barely meant, {But you still know that I’m right.}

It was really quite irritating sometimes to get into debates with externalized projections of herself and her emotions.

Nemo had found, at least, that Shay was far more entertaining than most things her age, be they human or familiar alike. Most people were so dull and fawning to her because she was a princess, always agreeing with her.

“Okay,” Bren said amicably, and fell into step beside his older sister. “I won’t do it again, I promise.”

And there were some people, like Bren, who didn’t seem to care one bit. Despite herself, Nemo smiled, reaching down to ruffle her brother’s dark-brown hair affectionately. “You aren’t that bad, you know.”

From her, it was almost a compliment.

“I wonder if Father is going to celebrate,” Bren said, completely oblivious to Nemo and her brooding thoughts. “It is the anniversary, after all.”

Nemo shrugged. “Probably a feast, like every year.”

Both siblings paused for a moment. Feasts meant pomp and ceremony, with half of the kingdom there, and drinking and merriment for all but the king’s children, who had to look dignified and solemn for the entire time. Nemo didn’t mind it particularly; she saw no joy in drowning herself in alcohol until she was a sodden fool. Bren, however, eagerly counted down the nine years that separated him from manhood, although he assumed he would be permitted to take part in the festivities earlier if he so choose. “I’ll race you back to the castle,” Bren said brightly, and then took off, riolu at his side.

Nemo’s smile widened a little, and she sprinted after her brother, longer legs easily closing the distance between them. It was hard running in a dress, though. Maybe she could ask Mother if she could—

“Gotta be faster than that to beat me!” Bren cried out, laughing. His curly hair tumbled in the breeze.

And then Shay, whose eyes were more accustomed to seeing further in the dark, registered it in the distance and sent a wave of terror and suspicion. {Be careful.}

Nemo saw it then. Abruptly, Nemo threw her hand out, catching Bren in the shoulder and cutting the boy off in mid-sentence. “Bren, stop.” She pulled her brother behind her with more force than was necessary, staring off at something in the distance.

“Nemo, what’s—”

When she spoke again, Nemo’s voice was tight, higher-pitched than normal from fear. Shay, like all familiars, did not possess the same degree of self-control as her human did, and openly shook from the fear that Nemo was hiding. “Bren, how fast can you and Tair get back to the castle?”

Bren looked around, frowning in confusion—he’d alreadywon; couldn’t she see that?—before his eyes followed Nemo’s gaze and found what had frightened his sister.

In the bushes, less than twenty feet down the path from the two frightened girls, a pair of bloody dots glinted out from beneath the undergrowth. Bren strained, looking closer, and the dots, like the crimson rivulets he had once watched a knight clean off of his sword, blinked once in reply.

“Nemo?” he asked, feeling a pit of cold fear starting to open up and flood the rest of his body. And now Tair began to shake as well. “Why is the—”

“How fast can you and Tair get back to the castle,” Nemo repeated tightly, her eyes fixated on the pair of blood-red eyes.

“I don’t know, I’ve never tried running that far, but—”

Nemo’s mind was working several steps ahead of itself, as it always did, and it came to the same conclusion in a second: if it was hiding in the bushes and smelled like blood, it was not to be trusted; if it was not to be trusted, she should not be near it; if she should not be near it, she and Bren had to get away; if she and Bren had to get away, they had to outrun the creature. Secondary understanding: they could not outrun the creature if it was chasing them both. Tertiary understanding: Retia would not forgive her if anything happened to either of them, but Nemo was older, so—

Conclusion: they had to get away from the creature, fast, so Tair and Bren would run to get help while Nemo and Shay made do. Tair and Bren were apparently faster than she and Shay, she thought wryly.

Less than half a second later, her calculation complete, Nemo said in a low voice: “Go, then. Tell someone; get help.” Beside her, having traced through her mental calculation just as easily, Shay grimly pulled herself into a fighting position, crossing her tiny blades protectively across her face. Beneath her helm, her yellow eyes glinted with a strange determination mirrored in Nemo.

“What?”

“Go!” Nemo shoved her brother sister into Tair, who thankfully understood. Small and tiny though the wolf-like creature was, he wrapped one blue paw around the boy with surprising strength and began sprinting through the underbrush.

The pair of bloody eyes in the bushes turned once to watch the shadows go, glinting depths flickering with what might have been interest, but the creature’s gaze fastened back on Nemo. Quietly, the thing hissed, coming to the same conclusion that she had—until help arrived from a castle three miles south, the little princess was on her own and helpless, with only a familiar by her side who was no doubt as untrained in combat as she was.

“I am Nemo, firstborn of House Castelle, daughter of King Fischer,” she called out in a shaking voice. “You might not understand me, but know that if you harm me, you will face Father’s wrath and my own.”

Fat chance, but it didn’t need to know that.

Another hiss. The creature moved out of the bushes, revealing what Nemo had noticed that Bren hadn’t—the creature’s spherical form, while less than two feet tall and hardly tangible in some places, was covered in blood, or at least dripping in enough of it that Nemo could catch the coppery scent from where she stood. Its razor-sharp claws, sprouting from the sides of the purple-ish haze that surrounded it and hardly corporeal, had the worst of it, although when it smiled at her, its mouth filled with daggers, she could see the crimson stain all across its teeth.

“I am Nemo,” she began again, and then she came to the secondary conclusion that negotiations were useless and turned to run.

The creature screamed victoriously, lunging after her, but Nemo didn’t waste time turning around. Her bare feet, calloused (against Mother’s admonitions) by hours of shoeless play, made hard impacts with the ground while her dress slithered behind her through the dried leaves.

Blood of the blood, the creature hissed, its voice slipping into her ears and threading through her thoughts, and Nemo at least knew that her initial suspicions weren’t unfounded.

It caught up quickly, weaving through the trees, its body passing through incoming branches like they were made of air and easily overtaking the frightened young girl. Nemo looked up, seeing the crimson-splattered creature of darkness looking at her with its bloody eyes from a perch above her head, her breath catching in her throat. The creature leered.

The rock Nemo threw caught it in the face, right between the hungry gaze, but she watched in fascination as her weapon passed straight through its head, meeting no obstruction.

Nemo frowned. Conclusion: the creature wasn’t—

It landed on her head then, twining its bloodstained claws into her hair, letting flakes of crusted crimson slip down onto the soft velvet of her dress, crooning and hissing. The claws hadn’t looked corporeal, more like it had pushed out blobs of the darkness that had formed its spherical body into more lethal shapes, but they certainly felt solid.

Nemo screamed again as the creature’s claws inched closer to her eyes, cold upon her cheeks, but her flailing would do nothing.

{Nemo, look out!} Shay was shouting back at her, uncountable units of fear pouring across their mental link that served only to make both youngsters more terrified of the thing in front of them.

Blood of the blood, it hissed again, the gaseous ooze around it snaking down her forehead. Blood of the blood!

Shay, shrieking wordlessly and indignantly, reared around and plunged the tiny, serrated blade that made up her arm into the ghost’s head. The thing hissed back in response and spat a blob of darkness toward her, unlatching from Nemo’s head for a moment to combat its new foe. The shadows writhed, and Shay fell to the ground, an unnaturally black cloud descending around her and defying her attempts to stab at it.

They were familiars, though, and even if Nemo couldn’t see what was happening, she could feel the fear and terror and pain pouring across their shared mental link and into her brain, and then the monster had latched itself back to her and was using those so-very-solid claws to tangle in her hair and pull her head backward, exposing her neck even as Shay struggled weakly against the cloud of darkness surrounding her and—

Something colder than fear filled Nemo then, and her thoughts coalesced into a single expression that she could sum up in one word clear enough for Shay to feel across their mental link:

{Kill.}

Black tendrils of shadow burst out of the ground from her feet, shooting up from between the roots and latching on to the creature, easily engulfing its tiny body and forcing it off of the girl’s tiny head in a single action. The thing screamed and screamed, recoiling from the vaporous fingers as if it had been burned, but as it fell to the ground, those same black tendrils swirled until they formed an inky pit, into which the ghost sank, claws flailing wildly as it tried to escape.

Another matching circle of black, formed by those same tendrils, appeared twenty feet overhead, and the ghost fell into the first and out of the second, hurtling toward the ground until—

It calmly halted its descent and floated upright and landed nimbly on a tree. It turned its head to look back, its leering smile still firmly in place, and it cackled.

{Nemo!}

Littlessst princesss sssshall die!

Nemo looked at her fingers in disbelief, watching tiny bubbles of dark energy fizzling around her palm. Without thinking, she pointed her hand at the monster, and another blast of shadow erupted from her hand, a portal opening up in the middle of the tree, turning the bark to shreds and leaving a gouge a foot deep in the age-hardened oak. The pieces of the tree fell emerged from the circle of darkness she’d created by accident above the clearing. Her hands trembled, whether from fear or exhaustion, and the zig-zagging pattern of the blast allowed the creature to clamber into the shelter of the canopy.

She turned to run then, all semblance of control lost. She had to get away. Shay struggled out of the black haze and turned to follow. “Leave me alone!” Nemo shouted, but the hissing was still behind her.

Another disturbance in the darkness, and the shadows attempted to engulf the creature once more. It dodged, cackled, was back on her tail in a moment, batting away the pawniard’s attempts to combat it like they were nothing.

The thing hissed back at her, and Nemo felt a whoosh of air before something hit her in the back, splattering around her like liquid and knocking her to the ground. She tumbled a few feet, kicking up a spray of dirt as she skidded to the ground. Nemo looked up just in time to see the smile of daggers cackling back at her, poisonous-looking purple energy flickering out of existence near its claws.

Sluggishly, Nemo came to the conclusion that she had to move, but her muscles felt like water. Her breath came to her in harsh pants, and she lay frozen on the ground, sideways, as the creature began to come toward her again, bloodstained claws leaving pinprick-tracks in the trampled daisies all around. And beside her, Shay’s exhaustion compounded into her own, and they both were splayed on the ground, helpless.

Move, she had to move, had to do something before—

The thing leapt at her then, jaw wide to reveal a pitch-black maw, claws outstretched, blood-red eyes glinting in the diamond sunlight—

There was a shout, muffled to her ears, and flash of grey and silver.

Nemo looked up weakly to see a hulking metallic shell above her, iron pincers each the size of her arms sinking into the ghost’s body with a sharp schnick. The two creatures struggled against one another for a moment, the bloody-eyed monster screaming in pain even as purple tendrils of the aura surrounding it latched on to the pincers of the second pokémon and began crawling down its carapace with ferocious speed.

The muffled shouts sharpened into sounds. “Nemo!” Strong hands wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her back, her body still too limp to protest, and she watched, limp like a ragdoll, as her rescuer’s familiar threw its head back with herculean strength and then slammed the monster into a tree with enough force to rattle the bark and send a flurry of pine needles to the ground.

Something was shaking her. “Nemo, are you okay?”

The familiar lashed out again, mandibles clamping into thin air as the ghost flew out of its path, narrowly evading destruction before making a tight somersault in mid-air to fire another wave of black energy across the clearing.

“Nemo!”

The steely-creature that had seemingly appeared from nowhere to rescue Nemo charged forward again, its mandibles clicking furiously as it covered the distance between itself and the pulse of dark energy with surprising speed. It snapped its mandibles shut, and this time, it did not miss.

The creature’s jaw seemed to shatter this time as the iron pincers sank into its mouth, and it reeled back, clutching at its face with incorporeal claws, dark blood joining the dried crimson from before. It screamed in protest again, hissing as it moved, but it was clearly retreating.

Blood of the blood, it hissed at her, turning to fix its broken gaze on Nemo. Blood of the blood. We will find you.

“Nemo!”

Reality rushed back to her, and she snapped up. “Get away from me!” she screamed, curling up into a ball and covering her ears with her hands, but this hissing was still there. The dark energy exploded from her this time, demanding to tear free and be felt, and she felt rather than saw the pulse that collected the hands and the iron ant and all the king’s men and sent them five feet away, flying backward, scattering them among the undergrowth like leaves.

She saw him picking himself up with the aid of his familiar, watched the men’s faces transform into something that might’ve been fear. She backed up, suddenly afraid as well, the pieces clicking together. These were friends. More accurately, this was—

“Daddy?” Nemo whispered numbly, and then the dizziness overtook her at last and she slumped to the ground.

[hr][/hr]

”Gods, Fischer, what happened?”

“That was Journay’s gastly, no doubt. But I cannot even pretend to understand why it was so far from their camps, Retia.”

“Gods, they must be desperate to win the war if they have strayed this close to our fortress. Was he alone?”

“I found no sign of others. Strange that he would scout here, and I cannot see any tactical advantage for the Thonians to send the familiar of their best warrior this far north, but I can see no other traps.”

“Time will reveal them, if there are any. Is Nemo okay?”

“The healers say she will mend. She’s resting now.”

“Who are you certain knows what actually happened there, Fischer?”

“Lucent was there to fight off the ghost, and he was able to repel it, thank the gods, but he won’t say a word, naturally. There were a handful of other guards, all well-trained soldiers, but… well…”

“Do you trust them?”

“With this? Not at all. It’s a pity; I was thinking of promoting the ones who had some brains.”

“Gods, Fischer, you didn’t.”

“There is a price to be paid for your daughter’s safety, and the price happens to be higher than six men’s lives.”

“Gods, Fischer.”

“They knew when they were signing on that they would have to be prepared to die.”

“I don’t—”

“I state my regrets, but Nemo is safe. They would’ve surely mutinied otherwise, and with war so close behind us, I could not risk her. I will ask this only once, Retia: do you have any idea how she did what she did?”

“No.”

“The blood of House Castelle raises many magics in its line, but never have I seen one like that.”

“There are new gifts with each generation, Fischer. You were the first of your kind as well.”

“Retia, she held off Journay’s gastly on her own. She is but a child. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we can explain any of it. What does it mean, Fischer, the rest of it, the Thonians scouting this far north and Journay’s gastly, what does it mean, actually?

Pause.

“Honestly? War.”

[hr][/hr]

Nemo woke up on her bed, feeling clean and dry and with faded fragments of a two-sided conversation in her head. She frowned, stretching out with her fingers, and she found soft sheets rubbing against her palms. Interesting. Groggily, she opened her eyes; her head hurt, and her vision throbbed in sympathy. Reaching up, she rubbed her temples, cringing a little.

Her mind went next to Shay. The pawniard by her bedside was bandaged and asleep but alive, and that was all Nemo could really hope for. She frowned for a moment, forehead creasing in concentration as she tried to remember precisely what chain of events had put her here.

“Are you feeling okay?”

King Fischer had not, for what he hoped were obvious reasons, had all of the time in the world to spend with his daughter. Winning a war tended to do that to people, and Fischer had spent more time away on war campaigns than at home enjoying the peace in the past decade or so. As it stood, Nemo could only recognize him from the portraits that hung, stern and frozen in oils, on the castle walls. “Daddy?”

“Are you feeling okay, Nemo?”

Nemo seemed to understand, her too-dark eyes processing the information easily, and then they widened to almost comic levels as she continued in a high-pitched voice, “But Daddy, I don’t really remember what happened; there was a scary ghost, and then Bren ran away with Tair and then Shay and I were—”

He almost smiled; by the gods, she might yet grow up into a brilliant strategist like her mother.

The little girl trailed off. “Daddy, why are you smiling?”

“Retia taught you to do that, didn’t she?”

“I don’t—”

Fischer’s grin widened, and he leaned back in his chair, one hand idly drumming a pattern into the gnarled armrest. “Retia taught you to act your age around strangers. An excellent first attempt, but you might’ve played up your youth a bit too much, if you ask me.”

The change was immediate. Nemo’s smile faded, the eager adoration vanished, the nervously clenched fists uncurled. Her eyes sharpened again, studying her father with veiled interest. When she spoke, her voice was pitched several octaves lower—her natural voice, rather than her forced falsetto. “Most people don’t notice it unless I play it up, Father. They get freaked out by the lack of familiar and don’t see anything else unless I overplay it.”

“Please, don’t call me ‘Father’; that’ll make me feel old.” He leaned back—Nemo noticed that he really wasn’t that old when she looked; not nearly as old as the oils made him out to be— hand migrating back to his cheek as he, too, studied Nemo with newfound interest. “And you—”

“Do this with everyone besides Bren and Mother, yes.” She didn’t wait for him to finish, but instead finished his sentence for him and answered his question, purely out of habit. People were so slow sometimes. “I won’t try with you again—”

“You don’t see me very much,” Fischer replied, eyes narrowing as well. “But I’m not daft, and although this may be the first time we’ve spoken in a while, you wouldn’t take me for a fool. So then why would you—” He broke off, nodding as he finished the sentence in his mind and then answered himself before Nemo could, “You didn’t know of what I was capable, so you needed to evaluate if I were a threat or not.”

“Something along those lines, yes.”

Fischer leaned back in his chair, struggling to hide the smile that was starting to creep up his face. His duties as a leader prevented him from returning home frequently—not that he minded, given how dull and mundane castle life would always seem to him after a world at war—although he was beginning to if he could make a ruler out of Nemo after all. It’d been a while since he’d had a conversation like this; the last time, really, had been when he’d last spoken to Alira, who— “Do you like Bren?”

Her words came out a little rushed. The understanding was slowly setting in for her as well, no doubt. “Bren’s okay, but—”

Ah. Disappointment. Well, it would’ve been too much to ask the gods for two children exactly like himself. “He’s not you.”

He saw the world just like she did.

“No,” Nemo admitted, glancing at her fingers nervously, although she couldn’t quite hide a smile of her own. “Not many people are.”

Fischer looked at her over the tops of his fingertips, trying to get a proper reading on this tiny wisp of a girl with silvery hair and dark eyes who, he’d seen, possessed and affinity for magic and an affinity for mental-manipulation. A potent combination, to say the least. “You never asked me if Bren survived, you know.”

Nemo didn’t fall for the obvious trap. “If he’d gotten injured, Father, the first thing you would’ve done was informed me of that.”

Fischer couldn’t quite suppress his smile this time. He couldn’t imagine how boring it must have been for poor Nemo until now, stuck inside of the dreary halls of Castelle’s Fortress while the war was raging on all around her. The girl was clever; the last person he’d seen making statements like this at her age was—

Well, himself, really, but since it would be arrogant to use himself as a measure of genius, Fischer had to give credit where credit was due to Alira, even if Alira hadn’t actually been around for that and his statement was based mostly on guesswork. Maybe the girl would grow up like her father one day.

“Tell me, Nemo. Have you ever played chess?”

[hr][/hr]

“So my pawns can only move forward one square at a time,” Nemo said, frowning as she studied the array of pieces on the ancient wooden board before her. Interesting. “And they capture diagonally?”

“Yes.”

Even more interesting. “What are they good for, then, if the rest of my pieces have much better mobility?”

Fischer ran his thumb across his side of the board, where the black pieces were lined up in their two stolid rows. The wooden set was ornately carved, each piece overlaid elegant filigree—gold for white and silver for black—and yet it was cracked with age and dusty with disuse. At first, he hadn’t been able to convince any of the court to play him: the fear of beating their king at a child’s game, and his subsequent wrath upon discovering his loss, had been too strong. “Think of yourself as a ruler, Nemo, and these are your subjects. Not all of your people will be skilled warriors. Not even half.”

“Mother says I will never rule,” Nemo replied evenly, rubbing the top of her pawn with her fingertip.

And then his advisers had discovered how a true chessmaster danced across the web of squares, and they had wished they could say they were throwing the game for someone so seemingly insignificant as Fischer—weren’t good warriors supposed to be bad minds?

A pity, really. Few besides Alira had ever been able to entertain him at this game—or many other games, for that matter.

There were hard truths to accept, though. “Retia is right, most likely. All signs say that you will never rule House Castelle.”

“Why?” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice. Really, she did.

Fischer steepled his fingers over the bridge of his nose. “Tell me, Nemo. Why do you think?”

“I—” Nemo bit her lip uncertainly, as if aware for the first time that she may have spoken poorly and now she would need some very, very eloquent words to avoid being tried for treason, if Fischer so chose.

To his right, almost imperceptibly, Lucent’s mandibles clamped shut with skull-crushing force. Fischer knew the reason why, of course; he could feel the agitation that Lucent was sending him through his familiar’s mental link. It was too early for conflict, though, even if he could see that the girl’s familiar, a short, stubby pawniard, had tensed its arms in preparation for combat as well.

Nemo, thank the gods, hadn’t yet picked up on these things. No matter—Fischer did not doubt that she would become a brilliant general one day, if given the chance—she would have plenty of time to learn the warning signs of a conflict in the making.

“Do continue.” Fischer opted to ignore the somewhat-chilling piece of information that was staring him in the face: Nemo, who had until this point been complaining about her birthright, recognized him as the roadblock to the throne. He didn’t know his daughter very well, although at this point, he really wanted to; if she viewed him as yet another obstacle in the way of her goal, however, and if she had inherited her mother’s stubbornness, Fischer would need to stay on the lookout for assassination attempts in the next few years. A pity. He’d taken a liking to his precocious young daughter, even if his son still had the markings of a fool.

“Bren is, I assume, third in line, after my mother,” Nemo continued quietly. None of this was really fair to her, but she never bothered mentioned that aspect out loud. Life was never fair to anyone; that was the hero’s path. “He has much to learn, but father appears to have faith in him.”

“And?”

Fischer asked the question with such infuriating calmness that Nemo couldn’t help but say it, even if she’d just promised herself a few moments earlier to hold her tongue. “I’m older. It isn’t fair.”

Fischer stood up heavily from his seat beside her bed and turned to study the wall. In terms of first conversations with people, the one he was currently holding with his daughter had proven surprisingly enlightening so far. One hand slipped to the belt upon his waist, fingering the battle-hardened leather. “Life is not fair, Nemo, and complaining will not do you any good.”

In response, she reached down and moved one of her pawns forward two spaces.

He smiled, and then mirrored her actions with a pawn of his own. “Tell me, Nemo. Why is your father king?

Nemo frowned, sensing a trap. “Because he was born heir to the House Castelle, as am I.” Another pawn moved forward. She couldn’t quite help but emphasize the word ‘born.’

“Not quite.” Fischer sighed heavily, studying the board for a moment, and then added, “Move my pawn forward for me. No, not that one. The fifth one from the left.”

Nemo did so. “I don’t understand.”

For the life of him, Fischer didn’t either. He knew the facts, of course, knew the secrets that Fischer was so invested in hiding, but that didn’t mean he agreed with any of them. There was a sort of shame in silence, though, as if he was condoning the lies by hiding them like Fischer and Retia and whoever else knew. “You will one day, I hope.”

“Why not now?”

She really did have her father’s confidence, if he wanted to call it that. There was a sort of arrogance radiating from her, one that shouldn’t have belonged to someone so young, and Fischer had seen it all before. “Do you know the story of our realm, Nemo?”

“Retia told me the legends once, yes.” Nemo paused, apparently satisfied with her answer, but when Fischer looked at her expectantly, she felt obligated to continue, “The two dragons—the steel and the water one—split into the sky and the seas, and two kingdoms rose as a result. We are of House Castelle, descendants of those who followed the steel dragon. Next to us rose House Regium, descendants of those who followed the water dragon. And, in the forests, the outcasts of our land formed House Thonia, and they followed the usurper dragon of darkness.”

“Obtuse but mostly correct,” Fischer said, and realized when Nemo’s face fell that he may have been too harsh. “But the legends do not tell you of King Dronus, last of his name, final ruler of House Regium, who was foolish and bold and provoked House Thonia and House Castelle into putting aside their differences for one another and running his kingdom into the ground not two decades past.”

“I’ve never heard of him.” Nemo did not entirely appreciate the digression, but she had to admit that she was curious.

“And that was how thoroughly his House was scourged from these lands, Nemo. Oathbreaker, we called him. Kinslayer he was, too, for he had murdered his sister to take her place on his throne. Dronus was a craven lunatic maddened by his courage, and he refused to let his people surrender, and in doing so doomed them all. You were but a babe when the last of House Regium was killed.”

Shay made a low hissing sound under her breath, and even though Nemo moved a hand to quiet her familiar, she couldn’t help but feel alarmed as well. No matter how rash Dronus had been, no matter how many oaths broken or kin slain, the utter destruction of his kingdom seemed too steep of a price to pay.

“And what lesson is this meant to teach me, Father?”

“That a king is nothing without the support of his people,” Fischer responded, albeit somewhat regretfully. “And, although I only now thought of this, I do not think your plan would bode well for our kingdom.”

“What plan?” She tried to look innocent, to widen her eyes, open her mouth just a tad and look—

“You are clever, Nemo, and you know it,” Fischer said with a sigh. “But while you might be able to wrest the throne from Bren’s hands after my passing, it would not be a happy time, and your greed would throw House Castelle into disarray. The lands would burn, and the Thonians would attack our divided kingdom and destroy us as we did to House Regium and their heretic king.”

Nemo hung her head. “I wasn’t thinking that,” she lied, and Fischer wished for the thousandth time that having intellect like hers didn’t mean that something else inside of her was dead already.

They played on in silence for a while. Fourteen moves later, Fischer won, as he always did.

[hr][/hr]

“Nemo, not so far left; you’ll leave yourself wide open. Up, left, right, down. Good. Hold your sword a little higher, Bren. Again. Up, left, right, down.”

“But Mother, it’s heavy.”

Nemo closed her eyes for a moment and kept them closed tight and then shook her head to continue doing the swordplay drills. Normally, this time of the afternoon was reserved for quiet reflection, which meant poring over a book in the library or trying to convince one of the servants in the kitchen to give her an early snack before dinner, but things were different now. Fischer had spent more time at home in the past week than he had for Nemo’s entire life, and she had a feeling that the monster that had attacked her and Bren was to blame.

And, furthermore, Nemo hadn’t been allowed out of the castle, even after the healers had said she was allowed to resume her activities. Not that she’d actually been hurt, she’d heard them whispering, just traumatized—and it wasn’t like Nemo really responded well to trauma anyway. She’d prided herself on being unshakeable, like the knights of the lore and the ones who stood in silvery-grey cloaks around the gates of the castle. And Shay had chastised her for it, but the brave knights in their shining armor never got eaten by the ghosts or the Thonians, did they?

“It’s a wooden sword, Bren; be lucky that I haven’t decided to make you start with real ones like your father suggested.” Retia managed to sound bothered and warm at the same time, and it was an interesting mix as she chided her son. “We’re almost done.”

“I still don’t see why we have to learn fighting,” Bren complained, arms sagging and back arching as he gave up trying to flail his sword around as he had been doing for the past half hour. “Isn’t that what soldiers are for?”

“Soldiers won’t protect you from everything,” Nemo muttered, before she remembered her father’s threat against regicide. Was it even regicide if he wasn’t yet a king?

Shay instantly chided her for that, and Nemo pointedly ignored her.

{He’s your brother, Nemo,} Shay pressed, ever the voice of reason in times like these, and Nemo felt guilty but didn’t really feel guilty about it at the same time. What kind of a king couldn’t lead his pawns into battle? She didn’t want to be like Fischer’s chess-king, trapped behind the ranks and ranks of fodder and hardly able to move.

Retia’s eyes narrowed, almost as if she had sensed her daughter’s intent, but she smiled instead and replied, “Bren, don’t you want to be like your father’s knights? There are great songs of Sir Margent the Magnificent and his excadrill, and the bravery that the two showed during the war with Regium in the days of old. Or Sir Garrin the Great and his klinklang, who held the gates of the fortress centuries ago against the Thonian forces in a previous war.”

“No,” came the sullen reply, and Nemo couldn’t help but stifle a smile.

It was her fault that they were having to flail around like fools, though, and that thought made the edges of her smile sag a bit. Her fault for having the gastly find her and try to kill her, and her fault for not being able to defend it on her own. Nemo had charted through the possibilities of what would’ve happened had father not arrived in the nick of time to rescue her—he hadn’t even been at the castle to receive Bren’s warning, for that matter—and Nemo had concluded without a doubt that she and Shay would’ve died that day. A shame, really; living was far more preferable.

It would be nice to have songs about her at some point, though. Nemo quietly added that to her list of desires for the world once she brought it under her first, and Shay chided her again.

“Why not?” Retia asked, sighing and putting away her own sword, which she had been using to demonstrate the basic forms to her children. “They are all great heroes.”

She had, unfortunately, walked right into that one, at least in Nemo’s eyes. “They’re all dead,” Nemo said calmly, and continued practicing her forms as if she hadn’t noticed.

{Nemo!}

{I don’t see what’s wrong with stating a simple truth.}

Retia sighed and folded her hands across her chest. Nemo had been a precocious child, yes, but each day she began to say more and more terrifying things. She would never be king, no, but at this rate she would never reach adulthood before her tongue backed her into a corner and cost her her head.

Nemo, to her credit, seemed to recognize that insulting the brave knights and heroes of House Castelle wasn’t her best line toward a supporter in this argument, so she began to backtrack. “I meant more like—”

“No, it’s fine. You and Bren are done for the day.” Retia sighed and began massaging her left temple. “Sir Barrick, come; we must discuss our armament plans for the replacement members for the royal guard who were lost in the fight against Journay’s monster?” There was a hitch in Retia’s voice, something that made Nemo narrow her eyes, although she had to quickly turn away as a massive man, chest as stout as a barrel and with muscled shoulders with which Nemo thought she could break cinderblocks, approached them. His familiar, a creature resembling a small person no more than two feet tall, the front part dressed as a lady in beige and the rear in the shape of an enormous par of jaws, trailed closely behind him, looking far too elegant for a man of such gargantuan proportions.

“Yes, my lady. I will show them to you at once.”

With that, Nemo and Bren were left to watch as the two adults walked away, conversing in hushed tones with heads bowed, their familiars—one walking, one flying—trailing behind them. There was still an hour until supper.

“We could play chess,” Nemo suggested, but Bren curled his nose in disgust. He’d discovered quickly that Nemo only played him so that she could inevitably win.

They stood in the practice yard for a moment longer, bewildered, at which point Nemo remembered that she hadn’t seen a single one of Father’s men killed when they came to rescue her.

[hr][/hr]

“You have great potential for magic,” Fischer was telling her calmly, one hand resting on the icy-cool head of his durant as if to channel his power through it. In fact, he was probably doing that—the first thing Retia had explained to her was that magic-users employed their familiars as a medium, venting out the special abilities of their familiars through themselves.

Sorcerers, on the other hand, used incantations and sacrifices to channel the magic of others through them, and necromancers resurrected the dead, and warlocks did something or the other, and Nemo had started glazing over Father’s explanation because she was a mage and that was so incredibly awesome.

Nemo couldn’t help but feel a little thrilled at the thought, though. She had magic. Father had magic. Bren didn’t.

Retia didn’t, either, but Nemo decided not to think about that.

They went through a series of exercise that Father insisted were meant to help her channel her magic, but Nemo couldn’t do them. The desperate anger, the unbridled rage, was gone, and the fire she was supposed to be using didn’t seem to have a fuel.

{Concentrate, Nemo,} Shay was telling her.

{I’m trying,} Nemo replied, but it really was a lot harder than she’d expected. A pity, really; if she mastered this, she’d have another leg-up on Bren, at least.

“I can’t,” Nemo said at last, unclenching her fists and finding the world around her entirely devoid of the shadows she’d so desperately wanted to create. Maybe it’d been a fluke the first time around, and she hadn’t actually had a gift and she’d just been imagining things in the heat of the moment when the monster had attacked.

“You can,” Fischer said firmly, and his voice left no room for question. “Concentrate, Nemo.” And he really was just like the voice inside of her head, except he wasn’t her familiar.

She’d been angry when she’d used the magic. Afraid before, and then, like turning a lever, she’d suddenly been angry, angry enough to terrify the monster and Shay and herself. Kill, the voice that had sounded like her own but really couldn’t have been had screamed at her, and she’d certainly tried.

Angry. Like the time that Bren had beat her at running, or the time that Father had beaten her at chess, or the time that the ghost had almost killed her, and yet she couldn’t channel it out quite like that. Not on command, or at least not with nothing at stake.

Fischer gently patted her on the shoulder. “It starts when you’re scared, I know, but you have to have more control over it than that. Your familiar gives you the power, but you must be the conduit.” With a gentle wave of his hand, one of the metal chess pieces from the board in front of his throne rose up and floated five feet over toward them, hovering gently above his open palm and twirling, almost idle. “Calmly, see?”

And Nemo tried again, she really did, as hard as she could. All she got for her effort was a headache, and eventually Fischer gave up on her for the day as well.

[hr][/hr]

The skarmory was terrifyingly fast, jabbing with its beak and nearly taking off her head. Nemo knew that it wouldn’t, not really, because Retia would be more careful than that, but the thought still scared her.

She caught the beak on her sword—a real sword, really and truly, just like Father’s—and almost staggered back from the weight of the blow. Her arms shook and suddenly felt ten times heavier than they had before.

But she had a real sword, a metal one, and she’d tied her hair back and was practicing extra-hard so that Father would be proud of her even after the magic fiasco and so that she could beat Bren, and she couldn’t let anyone else down. Valyrion, her mother’s skarmory, had armor thick enough that she couldn’t cut through it, and he was gentle enough that he wouldn’t accidentally spear Nemo through in the practice.

That was the hope, at least.

“Careful,” Retia cautioned, and Nemo couldn’t help but wonder if it hadn’t looked like she’d been careful with the enormous steel bird before.

Valyrion jabbed at her once again, and Nemo was again able to block the stabbing beak, although this time she nearly missed, and a deep notch opened up in the edge of her sword. Internally, Nemo wilted a little. That would take many hours to grind out.

She began with an uppercut this time, careful and precise and controlled, aiming for Valyrion’s neck as her mother had instructed, only to find that the skarmory had easily blocked her attack with his beak again. The bird’s magnificent crest glinted in the sunlight, the only warning of its movement, and then it was aiming at her again.

Parry, thrust, parry, strike, parry. It was like a game of chess, really, with two different players trying to outwit the other, but here there was the added element that the loser tended to end up dead, or at least seriously maimed.

She decided to go faster, feeling Shay tensing up behind her as Nemo began venting their shared frustration out on the bird. Rage fueled her strokes and allowed her to hit harder and faster, and yet Valyrion remained with his feet firmly in place on the practice-fields as he barely needed to dip his head or tilt his beak to shrug off her blows. She tried to hit the neck again, imagining Bren’s face above it, aiming for the spots of darker grey armor that must’ve been something vital, and every time she was thwarted.

No matter. She’d wear the beast down eventually, even if it took all day. She’d take it down; she had to; she needed to win this and no bird was going to stop her from—

“Nemo, enough,” Retia said, and Nemo was frustrated that anyone would dare stop her; couldn’t they see that she was busy, busy trying to—

—kill her mother’s familiar. Ah.

Nemo stopped, finding herself drenched in a cool sheen of sweat. She also found that she’d hammered her sword so thoroughly against Valyrion’s steely, armored beak that there was a whole new collection of notches for her to grind out today, like Retia had shown her yesterday, but—“I didn’t mean to,” Nemo said in alarm, the reality of what she’d just tried to do flooding through her.

Retia was looking at her, alarmed, and then her face fell and she took Nemo’s sword from the girl’s quavering left hand. “I know you didn’t,” she’d said at last. The girl was nothing like her father, true, but she’d seen the terrifying glint in Nemo’s eyes, almost seen the change happen when Nemo had contorted her face and began raining blows down so hard on Valyrion’s armor that Retia could almost feel it too.

“I’m sorry, really. I—”

Nemo wasn’t one for apologies, or for being unable to finish her sentences, so the fact that she’d just done both was a bit surprising. Retia took it as evidence of her daughter’s fear and placed the sword gently on the rack behind her, reaching around to envelop her daughter in a hug.

“You mustn’t get so angry when you fight,” Retia whispered. What she had seen had scared her, truly. Her daughter, not even a decade old, and already with her father’s intent to destroy. “If anything, rage will cloud your better sense of judgment and make you vulnerable to a calculated attack.”

“Help.” Her word was tiny and plaintive.

“Put the anger in a jar. Seal the jar up tight. Don’t let the anger show, Nemo, or else it will consume you.” Retia had been whispered these words once, back when she’d been learning how to master her own magic, but that was all behind her now. “Put the anger in a jar,” Retia repeated again, and again, and however many times she would need to.

The shadows, which had been writhing in response to Nemo’s rage, quietly faded back to the way they were supposed to be.

[hr][/hr]

Nemo was thirteen and more than skilled enough to spar with Valyrion—and truly spar; they’d reached the point where he’d spread his crimson-tinged wings and taken to the sky, diving at her with beak and talons and razor-sharp feathers—when the blade of kings descended on the practice grounds of House Castelle.

She’d been on the parapets, talking about something stupid and vapid with Bren, when she’d seen the sword wheeling around in the heavens, flying with its tassel as blue as the sky trailing behind it, and Nemo had been transfixed.

The sigil of their house was of a sword and shield of a defending aegislash, but she’d never seen any of the blades of kings in the flesh before, just like she’d never seen their dragon gods.

Here before her was the true right to rule, though, and she could almost hear a screaming sound building up in the back of her head, as if it knew what she wanted.

{Be careful,} said Shay, and although neither of them understood what the danger meant, they could both sense something deeper than their understanding.

For starters, at least, there was a sword flying through the clouds and behaving as a sentient being, which probably wasn’t ordinary.

“Woah,” Nemo heard Bren say, and she knew at least that she wasn’t imagining this. She squinted a little, trying to see if she was really seeing what she thought she was, but it did seem like there was an enormous broadsword wheeling through the sky.

Nemo felt strange, as if her hand wasn’t her own, and she lifted her left arm toward the sword, and she could feel it coming back toward her, as if they were linked together. The sigil of her house and the daughter who would never rule it; of course that would be fair. But she could feel the sword calling to her, screaming in a voice louder than the one in the back of her mind urging her to be careful, and then—

No. As a child, Nemo hadn’t wanted to rule House Castelle, would’ve done anything for it, but she wasn’t a child anymore. Bren was the rightful heir. She would not compete with him for that.

But the sword, the sword was screaming in her mind for her to claim it, to carve her name with it all over House Castelle as she’d always wanted, but she couldn’t do that. Not to her brother.

Come, the sword in the sky was screaming to her, and Nemo was finally aware of how absurd this entire situation was. Fight. Face your destiny.

No, she replied, and watched almost as if from another body as the sword wheeled away and vanished into the clouds, leaving her wondering if she’d just imagined the entire thing. What in the gods name had she just done?

“You sent away your honedge,” a voice said from behind her, and both Bren and Nemo turned guiltily around to see Fischer striding toward them over the castle parapets.

“What?” Nemo asked, and she could feel her pawniard breathing easier. Had she done the right thing?

“Forgive me for spying, but I didn’t want to interfere.”

“I don’t understand,” Bren said flatly.

Fischer sighed, glancing toward the spot in the sky where the sacred blade had once been but was no longer. His face was unreadable, as always, but Nemo could almost feel his longing. “There is a legend among the people of House Castelle, older than time and nearly forgotten,” he said quietly, reaching down with one hand to idly stroke the top of his durant’s head. “We believe that, in times of crisis, an aegislash will descend from the heavens and appear to the true king.”

Nemo was already working out what he was going to say, and a thick aversion like nausea began to fill her. Was he really going to suggest that—

“The honedge appears first, coming to lead that candidate on a quest, and he—or she—can choose to join the honedge in a desperate urge for glory or send it away,” Fischer continued. Another emotion had tinged his voice; Nemo couldn’t tell what, but she could see that Lucent beside him was growing more and more anxious. “Should the candidate be victorious on his quest and do what the gods deem as just, it is said that the honedge will reach its final form, aegislash, and name that man as true king.”

Nemo was going to vomit. She knew it. She’d just—

“The sigil of our House, Nemo. Our symbol of justice.”

Gods be good, she had the divine right to rule and she’d let it run away because—

Because what, exactly? Because she’d recognized what Fischer had told her and accepted, for some reason or another, that she never would? Retracting her claim would be the gallant thing, no doubt, even if it wouldn’t write a legend.

{The sword may yet return to you,} Shay said, and Nemo opened her mouth to—

“The blade of kings only comes to a person once in his lifetime,” Fischer finished for her. “And it is the hero’s duty to bear the burden of his choice for the rest of his life.”

[hr][/hr]

When Nemo was sixteen, she beat Fischer for the first time in chess.

Nemo saw the opportunity then, suddenly so clear to her that she almost thought it was a trap at first. Had Fischer overlooked this? Could he not see the ambush he’d left himself open to?

She began searching the board for more traps, trying to see if perhaps Fischer had acknowledged the possibility of her check but had devised a checkmate that would crush her defenses before she ever reached an endgame. He was most certainly toying with her, she reasoned, and Shay thought the same.

But Lucent never lied, or at least his behavior didn’t, and the durant’s antennae were twitching in a clear sign of agitation. Perhaps Fischer had noticed the ambush he’d allowed himself to walk into, or perhaps, more likely, he was focused on more important things than a game.

“If you wouldn’t mind making your move,” Fischer said dryly, but his knuckles were clenched and he looked a little pale. “I’m expected for council shortly, and it wouldn’t do for my advisors to know that I’ve already found a replacement for all of them who is at least twice as foolish as they are at times.”

A backhanded compliment, but Nemo expected it nonetheless. It would be cruel for her to defeat him while he was preoccupied with the war, wouldn’t it? That would be unfair.

No, she would take whatever underhanded victory it would take to let her win. If she could just beat him once, just once, then maybe he would come to see her as an equal. Or, if not an equal, then at least worth a bit of his time.

Nemo moved her bishop forward and was more than a little pleased to see his eyebrows knit together in alarm as he, two moves too late, recognized the ramifications of her trap. Had she really done it? Had she beaten him? She began to smile.

The joking smile, the dry wit, all faded from his face and she knew she’d won, but Nemo instantly regretted it. He closed up immediately, sharp eyebrows contorting into a frown over his silvery eyes, and Lucent began to hiss, mandibles opening and closing in agitation.

She’d won. She must’ve.

“Our time is up, then,” Fischer said, making a show of glancing at the hourglass to his right even though they’d forgotten to overturn it for nearly three hours, and he swept himself out of the seat and turned away, his durant on his heels. “A pity we couldn’t finish our game.”

“But—” Nemo began, and stopped when she saw the fury in his eyes, the same fury she’d felt when Bren had beaten her with Tair so long ago.

“So focused on the results, still.” When Fischer spoke again, his voice was soft but brimming with contempt. “I was hoping I’d taught you better, but it seems that even my best efforts have still fallen short.”

“Father, I didn’t mean to—” How was he doing this, making her feel so bad at winning an honest victory?

With a contemptuous wave of his hand, Fischer knocked over his king and then strode out of the room. The door clanged shut behind him, and the sound reverberated in the empty room that had once held wit.

A sore loser, Nemo told herself. That was all he was.

{That wasn’t your fault,} Shay told her quietly. {You won this fairly.}

She might have, true, and yet Nemo could not help but wonder if she’d won this game and lost something far more important. Something told her that she wouldn’t be playing chess with her father again for a very long time, or at least not like this. The days of the fun games were over.

[hr][/hr]

When Nemo composed herself and arrived half an hour late to council, still feeling as unsettled as ever, one of the guards by the door stopped her to inform her that the Thonians had begun their advance that morning, and they were inching ever-closer to the gates. Scouts had seen Journay and then failed to report back afterward.

So this had been father’s tiny “distraction.”

{You’re being childish,} Shay told her as they turned to leave, but she obediently trotted after Nemo. {He needs you in there.}

{He has his own wits and his own councilors,} Nemo replied, and for once it felt good to be just as childish as her father. And it certainly felt good to skip the blasted meeting and let her father fight his own war for once, and she stood on the parapets and threw stones into the courtyards below until she saw the rest of the advisors filing out of the throne room, their heads bowed in hushed conversation.

And yet there was a sinking ache in the back of her throat, and as she walked into the throne room and swept past the other councilors and watched the last of the meeting clearing away, Nemo couldn’t help but feel like she was missing something.

Drip. Drip.

Nemo knew it was stupid to show her anxiety so openly, but she couldn’t help but pace in tight circles around the floor before the steel throne, her fingertips pounding distracted rhythms into her palms. At the heart of the hall, the great waterglass remained stationary, a silent, temporal guardian that counted out the seconds with tiny drops of water. The sounds echoed in the tense silence.

Bren, standing in his corner to the side of the throne with Tair, looked strained. When he caught Nemo’s gaze, he almost imperceptibly shook his head. But nothing would calm his sister like this.

{Nemo,} Shay whispered in a strained voice, a flood of regret tumbling across their shared link, {you are being rash. Think this over.}

Nemo ignored them all.

It was probably a bad sign, really, that Shay was being the voice of reason instead of the raw and untempered emotion as it so normally was, but Nemo ignored that observation as well.

Drip. Drip.

“Will you tell me what’s going on?” she asked at last, whirling to a halt to stand before Fischer, hardly taking the time to kneel before his throne. To her right, Shay kneeled as well, and the light that filtered in through the stained glass threw her red helm into a rainbow of colors. The rows of soldiers lining the halls, impassive and always watching, did not escape her attention. She had to act her place while they were here, but their presence also reminded her that there was something more sinister afoot.

“You may rise,” he said impassively, with a wave of his hand. And then: “You’re nervous.”

Nemo’s reply was curt. “Obviously.” She levelled her icy gaze upward and tried to remain as cool as possible. “There must be a reason that you’ve sent the entire court into turmoil, but short of the end of the world, I’m drawing blanks on what could possibly be important enough.”

Drip. Drip.

Fischer said nothing at first, and then in a smooth voice, he gestured to the table before him. “Why don’t we play a quick game to pass the time? I’ll be black. You go first.”

Nemo bristled. He was going to challenge her to this, after his tantrum this morning? So be it. She would crush him if it came to it, but she could always abstain and let him wallow in the fact that he’d been beaten, beaten by a child.

{Nemo, be careful.}

But Shay was beginning to grow agitated as well, whether from her own feelings or because of the shared link with Nemo she could not tell, and soon she was mapping out the possibilities for war from this chamber as well.

“Oh. I forget. You prefer to be black. I’ll start, then.”

Nothing.

“Fine, I’ll just tell you that I’m white and I moved my pawn to C5.”

And then she approached. She did not sit, refused to look at the chess board, did not bother to raise her gaze to acknowledge her father or her brother.

Arms folded and back to the steel throne, she said, “Pawn to D4.”

Drip. Drip.

There was silence in the throne room, the kind of dark, desolate silence that obscured everything save thought. Even the soft thumps of the stone pieces onto their lacquered squares made little impression on the overwhelming emptiness.

Fischer cleared his throat expectantly. “I’ve just made my move. Would you like me to tell you what it was, or are you going to be civil and turn around to—”

“Knight to B3.”

Drip. Drip.

Fifteen seconds passed while Fischer pondered the next move, his fingers poised over a pawn of his own, eyes darting around the board. They’d long since abandoned the point where the real game was played on the board; instead, each move and countermove was mapped out in their minds. For Nemo, the graduation had been obvious; she stood now with her back to the board, her fingers still restless as she waited for the thump that would signify her turn. Her familiar did not even hide her anxiety as well, and Shay could not help but sharpen her blades on one another as the battle continued.

Fischer was not as arrogant, or at least not as openly so.

Fifteen more seconds passed.

And still Nemo did not realize.

Drip. Drip.

“You need to learn how to keep your head level in a crisis situation,” Fischer said calmly, finally settling on his own knight and moving it forward and to the left. “A good general should be observant no matter how pressing the danger.”

“A good general should be well-informed of the danger first,” Nemo replied, still not turning around. “Pawn to G3,” she added, waiting for the obvious feint with the knight.

Drip. Drip.

The waterglass continued to stand, calm and omnipotent, slick beads of water moving from the top chamber of the curved glass to the next. The hourglass was almost expired; in about ten minutes, she decided, someone would need to turn it over. Perhaps one of the tin soldiers lined up on the walls, sent to protect the royal family.

She did not realize it then, either.

“Do you know what you’ve been preparing for?”

Nemo weighed the question carefully, searching for tricks. There had to be something; no conversation in the throne room could ever be simple.

Drip. Drip.

And she still did not notice.

“War,” she said at last, one hand slipping to the sheath on her hip. It was a simple enough answer, and he could interpret it however he wanted.

“Wrong,” Fischer replied, and moved his bishop forward three spaces diagonally and to the right.

Of course.

Drip. Drip.

“The Thonians have been our ultimate enemy since the very beginning,” Fischer continued, eyes narrowing as he surveyed the board and, no doubt, detected a hidden trap. “Never forget that. They were always our real enemy. You were not raised to fight a war against a faceless army.”

“Pawn, H6, and I assumed that much was obvious.” Nemo didn’t turn around. She did not wish to get involved in his petty war if it would only bring her pain with no glory. “I don’t think I see your point.”

Drip. Drip.

And still Nemo failed to see the blatantly obvious.

Fischer reached up and calmly took her pawn with his bishop and placed it on the side of the board. “The war is coming faster than I had predicted, Nemo.”

She raised one eyebrow. “Something didn’t go according to your plan?” A wry smile crossed her face. “Which did you choose to capture: pawn or knight?”

“The pawn.”

A pause.

“Well-played.”

Drip. Drip.

“Knight to H3.”

“I’m serious, Nemo, there is a war coming. Our scouts have reported back seeing brigades of Thonians infringing far too close for comfort, and engaging them any more will result in a full-scale war.” His lip curled in annoyance as he considered the next move. “The nearest skirmish rages less than a mile beyond our doors as we speak.”

And still Nemo did not see it.

Drip. Drip.

“I do not fear an escalation of war,” she murmured quietly, her index finger tracing the intricate filigree on the hilt of her blade. “Surely you don’t doubt your preparation?”

They played the next few turns in silence.

Drip. Drip.

“I prepared you to win games, Nemo,” Fischer replied, the faintest touch of acid slipping into his voice. “War is a different matter entirely.” He glanced back at the board. “Checkmate in eleven.”

Nemo didn’t so much as flinch. “Bishop to E3.” Crisis averted, momentarily. She frowned, though. He seemed to be calling his victory too early—overestimating himself, or underestimating her. She wasn’t quite sure which.

But she still didn’t see it.

Drip. Drip.

“You don’t understand how sacrifice works in these games, Nemo,” Fischer said calmly, studying the board before moving a piece forward. “In a game, you can be a hero. You can save everything and grind yourself into the ground in the name of protecting everyone, so that you don’t lose a single time.”

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t know where this was going.

So of course she didn’t realize.

Drip. Drip.

In a stiff, high voice, she replied, “I fail to see the difference.”

“In a war, there’s no such thing. There are kings and pawns, Nemo.”

And I just captured one of your pawns, she thought calmly. “Rook to D3.” Another pause as she surveyed the dripping hourglass before her, its water gently cascading—but slowly, slowly—back into its bulbs. “I take it Bren is just your pawn, then? One of many, perhaps?”

No response, but she heard a sharp intake of breath from behind the throne.

Drip. Drip.

“There are few pieces of value in a war of this size, Nemo. But the lesson that you absolutely must learn before you face this threat,” Fischer murmured quietly, his eyes clouding over with sadness, “is that there can only ever be one piece for which you are willing to sacrifice everything. The rest may as well be pawns, for all the good you can do them.” He sighed heavily and leaned back into the throne, suddenly looking his age and more, but Nemo was not facing him; she did not see it.

“I don’t understand,” Nemo began.

And then she saw it.

A full eight minutes and thirty-four seconds too late, Nemo thought to wonder where Retia was, and by then she had fully realized that she had lost this game to Fischer long ago.

Drip. Drip.

An enormous clap of thunder shook the hall.

She whirled around to see the board spread out before her, the black queen waiting in the center of a board that she had sensed in her mind’s eye but had not fully understood until she saw the web of stone pieces sprawled before her, the possibilities laid out before her, the painfully obvious trap spiraling in inevitable threads around her father’s queen. Nemo saw it then, the path to his victory; she would have to capture his queen to protect her own and open up the way for him to checkmate her in seven, or she would let her queen die to prolong the struggle for a few more turns.

And suddenly she saw, she realized, she understood what this conversation was about, and her hands fell limp to her sides, pale and white and shaking. “Where is she?”

“Where is who, Nemo?”

“Don’t play games with me,” Nemo said, smashing her fist into the stone table. Her voice dropped until it was cold enough to freeze fire. Slivers of pain shot up her arm, but she ignored them. “I never saw her go inside; you wouldn’t send her elsewhere in the castle; there’s a widespread threat that you clearly haven’t neutralized. Where is mother.”

Another harsh intake of breath from Bren, but Nemo chose to ignore it.

He seemed to mull it over for a second, his face lined with age, but his hesitation came not from some cruel desire to prolong the conversation, but from pain. “She went on a peace mission this morning to the heart of the Thonians,” he said at last. “She and her soldiers are well beyond our scouts, and the infernal darkness swept over them. We could not find them before the order came to—”

Another crash, and this time the remaining white pieces fell to the ground, clattering uselessly around Nemo’s boots. Her voice had become painfully dangerous now. “Where. Is. She.”

“We had to withdraw our ground support in the surrounding area to protect the hold, Nemo.” His voice was calm. No, Nemo thought. His voice was controlled. He was in just as much agony as she was, like a sword was being inserted into her intestines and slowly twisted, so that each breath felt like it was on fire while her lungs collapsed around her heart, strangling her even as she tried to keep beating forward. “She is the realm’s Second Knight. It is her duty to defend our lands.”

She whirled now to the silent guards stationed around the perimeters of the hall, their pokémon holding equally stony vigils in their ranks. “You can’t be letting this happen,” she whispered. Her voice caught in her throat, and she ran over to the nearest soldier, a woman in full armor with an impassive lairon waiting by her side. Nemo grabbed the woman by the throat, pinning her against the wall, but the soldier did not respond. “You can’t be letting this happen!” she shouted.

The lairon did not so much as hiss.

“We do not dare stray out of the castle with the war this close upon us,” the commander said, her lairon in stiff salute. Neither of them met Nemo’s frantic gaze. “To do so would mean that we were lost. There is a small taskforce that is—”

Nemo flagged the woman as useless and began filtering out her words. She spun away, releasing her grip from the chainmail. “Father, please,” Nemo whispered, looking up the dais steps to where the steel throne stood, silhouetted in darkness. “I’ll lead the soldiers, but we can’t—”

No one moved.

“In a game, you can be a hero,” Fischer repeated, his face like carved stone. “You can save everything and grind yourself into the ground in the name of protecting everyone, so that you don’t lose a single time. But this is not a game, Nemo. This is war. And war means sacrifices.”

She couldn’t listen to this any longer. Nemo took a step backward, her heart pounding and trying to wrench itself out of her chest at the same time. “Will no one save Lady Retia?” she shouted, spinning around to see the impassive gazes in the armored soldiers, searching for aid and finding none. “You are Castelle’s finest soldiers, our bravest, and yet none of you will leave to aid—”

The campaign would be dangerous and brutal, she knew, and a good many of them might die in the infernal darkness, but—

“In a war, there can only be one piece for which you are willing to sacrifice everything, Nemo.”

Her white king, its stone body making dull thuds with the worn steps leading up to the throne, rolled to a halt by her feet.

{We must go now, Nemo, if we are to go at all.}

She saw it then, the zugzwang, all too clearly, just like he did. There was no move that could better the situation, but not moving would be even more horrible. You don’t know where she is, her rational side told her. You can’t possibly find her in time, not now. It’s finished.

Drip. Drip.

She didn’t care.

Unsheathing her sword, Nemo spun around and stormed out of the throne room, the double doors creaking to reveal the impenetrable, infernal before her.

Drip. Drip.

[hr][/hr]

“I’ll come with you.”

Bren appeared behind her, barely managing to prop open the thick wooden doors of the throne room against the winds of the gathering storm. Tair stood at his side, glaring upward with steely eyes.

“I don’t—” Nemo began, eyes instantly drawn to the weak points of Bren’s untrained arms and uncalloused hands. He was good at the court life, if nothing else. Need you, she almost said, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. “Father will want you inside. He must keep his heir safe.” She didn’t stop for another moment, but was taking the steps down the castle two at a time, taking anxious glances up at the sky as she stormed away from the fortress.

She wasn’t fully able to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

But if he could afford to sacrifice Retia, he could not complain about this.

To her eternal credit, Bren did not falter. “I’ll come with you,” he repeated, fumbling with the sword that Tair had passed him and then struggling to buckle the sheath to his belt. “I can still outride you.”

{You don’t want him here?} Shay asked, only to be brushed off.

“Father will—” Nemo began again, but cut herself off. She sighed. Deep breath. But there was turmoil inside, louder than the raging winds outside, and she forced herself to adjust the buckle of one of her braces before moving forward to one of the mounted guards by the base of the stairs. “Fine.” She wasn’t going to waste time debating this. “Don’t fall behind.”

{He’ll get hurt,} Nemo replied at last, mulling the response over in her mind before she did so. {He’s not trained in combat.}

“How are we going to get there?”

“I’ll find a way,” Nemo said tightly, gritting her teeth.

{Neither are we.}

Nemo didn’t have an adequate response to that, so instead she focused on shutting out her familiar out and trying to think. She had to focus, but she had to be fast, and she had to know where to find Retia before it was too late.

She glanced skyward, where grey clouds were threatening a downpour overhead. But off in the distance, almost on the edge of the horizon, Nemo saw a pillar of clouds that were almost dark enough to be black, the edges tinged with purple and crackling with unnatural energy.

{There,} Shay said, giving voice to the thoughts that Nemo hadn’t even bothered to form, and Nemo began to run, running like they were children. She heard Dren’s sharp intake of breath behind her and chose to ignore him, stepping through the portal she had opened with Shay. Dren could follow if he dared.

[hr][/hr]

The ground was littered with corpses, both those in the royal uniform and not, but she couldn’t see—

{Oh, gods.} Shay’s backlash of disgust and nausea made Nemo want to collapse to her knees and empty her stomach across the ground.

She saw the man and his monster then. One hand clutched at a spear, dripping with use but still gleaming in the infernal darkness; at his feet, a dark creature with that looked more gaseous than not with bloody red eyes and a wicked, leering mouth worried over a human arm that no longer had a body.

The man’s other hand held—

Nemo felt the air leave her then, the horror rush into her and fill her up.

The man turned then, the blackness in his eyes marking him as a Thonian, and he dropped his burden into the growing pool of blood at his feet, soulless gaze meeting Nemo’s as he turned and smiled. At his side, the creature did the same, giving a wide, leery grin filled with too-many teeth as it looked up from the corpse of a red-drenched creature that might’ve once been silver.

Nemo followed the path of the object, watched the man drop the—

Bren screamed.

—mangled corpse of Retia to the ground, where it slid limply to rest at the man’s feet. Beside her, the wingless remains of her skarmory lay splayed on the ground, feathers like bloodstained swords littering the ground.

“Get it away from her,” a shaking voice from behind Bren said, and he heard the sharp snick of a sword’s being drawn. “Distract it.”

{Shay, you need to go as well. They’ll need you there.}

Bren didn’t know why he obeyed, but he did, taking a few staggering steps forward, his feet trailing amongst the bloodstained daisies. The man’s creature leapt at him, its purplish claws extended and aiming for his throat, its bloodstained smile filling his vision, but Shay knocked it out of the way with a harsh snap of her blade, golden eyes fierce. The man’s monster rolled back and began to cackle, vanishing into the infernal darkness, but by then—

He tore her gaze away from the fight for a moment, just one, to where Nemo was running to kneel at Retia’s side, sword forgotten, hair coming undone—

The bloody spear whizzed past his ear, nearly catching his hair with it, and Bren barely managed to dodge out of the way. With fumbling hands, he drew his sword from its sheath, holding the tempered blade in front of him as Retia had once taught him. Tair sank into a low, crouched fighting stance, and Shay crossed her blades in front of her chest as she formed a defensive position.

“Who sent you?” Bren shouted.

But the man and his monster gave no response. The beast appeared out of the shadows at the man’s feet, clambering up his arm, bloody claws leaving tiny pinpricks on his leather armor. It touched its paws to his shoulder, where a hint of bloody flesh peeked out from gaps between two metal plates, and Bren watched in curious fascination as the flesh began to knit itself together, tendons weaving like they were flailing wormheads with minds of their own. The man slowly rolled his shoulder a few times, exercising the feel of the newly-mended flesh, and it occurred to Bren that she should’ve been doing something.

He ran forward, feet finding no foothold in the bloody field of flowers, Tair at his side. The purple creature launched itself at Tair this time, its fangs fully exposed, eyes like rust glinting, blood-stained claws spread wide.

Tair swung his fist forward, the riolu’s blue paw curled into a fist and his ears flying backward as he tried to uppercut the monster as he had with so many others before him, but the creature calmly passed through his attack as if neither the riolu nor his power were there. When the gastly passed through him, however, the riolu gave a shriek of pain and collapsed to the ground, dark tendrils of energy lashing at his eyes where the creature had touched him.

Shay moved in now, and the pawniard gave a hoarse scream and slashed wildly at the incoming ghost, but the creature phased through her blades with a wisp of dark energy and appeared behind the red and black pokémon, cackling, mouth opened wide, teeth like daggers glinting in the infernal darkness. Shay, too slow, was whirling around, and Bren lashed out with his own sword. The creature let go of Shay and lashed on to the cool metal of the sword, clambering up that as well, darkness dripping in its wake.

Bren shouted in terror and stepped back even as the thing began to consume the steel, causing rust and decay wherever its jaws touched the cold metal, only deterred when Tair picked himself up and bodily threw himself in their direction.

The man was there too, his soulless eyes as black as the maw of his familiar, spear flying into his hand as if by magic, and it was then that Bren spun around with horror and understood that the legends of the Thonians were true and he held no chance.

“Nemo!” he screamed. “We have to go!” He couldn’t help but glance toward Shay. The pawniard had entered a desperate frenzy, stabbing at the attacking ghost with abandon, and he had to wonder if any of the terror that Shay was feeling was transferring over to Nemo, her familiar. He could feel Tair’s horror right now, and desperate desire not to die, and that only doubled the urge he’d been feeling for a while now to turn tail and run and die another day.

But he had to stand his ground. People were depending on him; this was what heroism meant. He shook his sword, trying to dislodge the ghostly creature from it, but it continued to clamber closer, bloody claws inching down the blade and nearing his hand. The man swung his spear then, using it more like a club or a poleax, and Bren instinctively threw his sword in the way. The creature phased away again, vanishing with a pop of energy to appear behind Tair just as the sword and the spear were about to clash. Bren found himself nearly knocked backward from the force of the blow, and he stumbled away a few steps, fighting back a scream of agony as the monstrous gastly sunk its claws into Tair’s unprotected back.

By the gods, this had been so wrong, but if he had left Nemo to do this on her own—

“Nemo!” he shouted, unable to tear his focus away from the fight for more than an instant. There were so many things that had to be done—he had to escape, Nemo had to escape, mother had to escape—but he didn’t know if they were all possible anymore.

Perhaps father had a point, and only some pieces could be saved in the span of a longer war at the risk of further martyrdom. ”Nemo!”

“Use light,” came the distant reply, tones clipped and strained.

But they had no light, Bren thought, frustrated.

Gritting his teeth, Bren locked his elbows and swung with his blade arm, hard, catching the man in the arm just as Tair regained his balance and pinned the ghost to the ground. Shay rushed up behind it, golden eyes locking with the bloody ones of the gastly as she drew back her claws and prepared to slash, even while the creature tried to lunge for her eyes.

There was a blast of darkness, so dark that Bren couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face, and while he felt his sword sink deep into the flesh of the man—Journay, her father had said, but now the thoughts were all running together like blood and sweat and tears are thicker than water—shoulder, felt the satisfying crunch as the leather and metal plates bent beneath his steel, he found himself flying backward, tumbling through the air, one hand extended for Tair as he tried to—

Bren hit the ground hard and pulled himself upright weakly, blinking the stars out so he could better see the bitter darkness. Tair lay in a heap by his side, and Shay was nowhere to be seen.

And before them, the man and his monster were healing themselves again, the man regenerating the chunk of flesh that Bren had managed to carve from his arm while the ghost grew back its eyes that glowed like candles in the oncoming, infernal darkness. The ghost wrapped its vaporous claws around the man’s shoulder, and then they sunk into the ground, the blackness obscuring them entirely.

He and Tair had to fight back to back, he realized, and no sooner had he thought it than Tair had pulled himself behind Bren, the riolu’s dull and bloody arms extended, guarding his weak spots as he blocked his familiar’s. Bren held his own sword in front of him like it was a club, the point wavering as he stabbed uselessly around in the clouds of darkness that surrounded them, his breath catching in his throat and—

The spear hit his sword then, and the man’s face appeared before him seconds later, pale and ashen and devoid of life as if he were just a shell. The black of his eyes looked even deader than before, but his face was contorted with some sort of rage as he smashed the flat of his spear into Bren’s blade.

The ghost phased behind them then, launching first for Tair’s eyes before darting around and passing through the two of them, its claws extended and slashing madly, careening around even as Bren grimly locked his jaw and tried to match the man’s spear, feeling himself losing leverage at every exchange.

They needed to spin around, he thought, and he was shuffling his feet sideways to switch places with Tair, braving the assault of the bloody-eyed ghost as the riolu pitted himself against the spear, aiming lower for the man’s feet even as the spear jabbed back at him, almost catching even the most nimble of his dodges. There was a blast of dark energy, and then both Bren and his riolu went flying back, plowing into the ground and crying out from their shared pain even as Journay leaned forward, his spear crackling with the same dark energy as he raised it over his head and prepared to impale—

The spear made direct contact with Shay’s chest, piercing through the red metal plating across her abdomen with a deafening squelch that rumbled like thunder and—

Bren sunk to the ground, panting heavily and only able to watch as his sister’s familiar writhed in pain, having taken the blow for him—someone had just sacrificed themselves for him, and surely that was not what it meant to be brave—and his thoughts slowly turned to incoherence even as Tair tried to keep him grounded. And through it all, Shay was screaming in pain as her clawed feet hit the field of bloody daisies and her legs gave out beneath her, the ghost leaping for her neck while her arms were too weak with the sudden rush of agony to do anything more than catch her fall. She flailed weakly, unable to do more than move like a puppet on a stick, his limbs spasming.

“Shay!” he screamed hoarsely, even as the ghost clambered over her unprotesting body and latched on to the pawniard’s arms, chewing at her blades and tearing through the metal like it were made of grass. And then: “Nemo!”

But Nemo was lost from her sight even as he heard a piercing scream so painful and feral and raw that it must have been ripped from its owner’s through, but his sister remained crouched by Retia’s side, numb hands tearing off strips of her mother’s dress for bandages and wrapping them as tightly around one bloodied stump of an arm as she could, the other frantically fumbling for something, anything, to keep Retia from spilling over her fingers like the brook behind the castle even as the mind-numbing, all-consuming pain spilled over her link like the tears spilled over her eyes as she tried to hold them back.

Shay had gone completely limp now, his feet dangling a full six inches from the ground, blades at his side, one falling off as the ghost clamped down and began to worry away at it with razor sharp fangs, and everything was falling, falling so fast—

There was light.

Tair leapt forward toward the ghost even as Bren remained helpless, and the gastly prepared to smack the riolu to the ground as it had done so many times during their exchange. But this time, Bren felt rather than saw as his familiar exploded into a brilliant burst of color, his arms flying wide as the blinding light shielded him from view, and Bren flew head over heels, tumbling to a halt with one arm thrown over his face to shield him from the light.

And then he began to scream as well as he felt energy pooling over his link with Tair—surely this was what dying felt like; there was just too much—and he found himself crawling around on his hands and knees, helpless as a babe even as Shay’s legs kicked out one final time and then went still.

The pain began to fade then, but the energy still poured in, and Bren felt himself being rejuvenated, the healing aura filled him up and mending his wounds and rebuilding his courage.

The darkness began to scream, the shadows themselves writhing in agony, shying away from Tair and his brilliant light as his body began to elongate, one arm regenerating as he went. Bren squinted to watch it, but the riolu grew taller, his feet reaching the ground and his body becoming stockier and more muscular, ears peaking upward in time with formidable spikes that formed on his paws and chest, tapering to points that looked sharp enough to cut through air.

So this was what evolution felt like. Bren stood up, slightly out of breath but otherwise unharmed, and readjusted his grip on his sword even as his riolu—no, his lucario lunged forward and sank both of its paws into the center of the nebulous haze that marked the gastly’s body. The ghost screamed in agony, backing up, but even as it scurried away, its leg healing itself as it crawled through the air like it was water, the warrior was already rearing back, his hands filling with dark energy that Bren had seen too often from Nemo—

“Tair!” Bren screamed again, but the lucario was already running forward, newly healed arms crossed in front of him as he prepared to intercept the attack. He hadn’t made it three steps before the ghost launched itself into his face, shrieking bloody murder, its claws on fire, and he stumbled backward, spiked paws scrabbling to find purchase on an enemy he couldn’t see.

The spear hit Bren then, catching him like a club in the ribs and sending him crashing to one side, all of the wind knocked out of him even as the ghost threw Tair back to the ground again. He struggled harder this time, as he was stronger and they couldn’t lose, but—

“Nemo!”

But Nemo was still crouching by Retia’s side, her breath coming to her in dry heaves, desperately trying to curb the bleeding, so much bleeding—

It was quieter here, away from the battle, and she almost could ignore what was happening.

There is only one piece for which you can sacrifice—

She’d shredded off what she could for bandages, her cloak in tatters, her mother’s dress torn to pieces, even while something screamed in horror in the back of her mind, but there was nothing. The blood kept coming, kept coming in terrible floods, and she’d finally stabbed her sword into the fabric and twisted it as tightly around as she could as a tourniquet into the stump of the arm that was cut off at the elbow and now she was weaponless. But there was still the gaping wound in the chest, unstoppable, and it wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop.

Behind her, a blast of dark energy flickered off harmlessly into nothing, obliterating a patch of bloody flowers three feet wide, but her powers wouldn’t do anything here. She needed to heal, not destroy. Father had never taught her how to do that.

And somewhere in the back of her mind was the horrible, horrible void that had once held the thoughts of someone who had shared her consciousness since birth, someone who knew her thoughts and her feelings and her fears and knew and was her but was no longer, and there was nothing in that corner but emptiness, and the very thought made her want to vomit. But Nemo couldn’t do that, couldn’t do that now. They had to be brave, all of them, even if she wanted to get up now and run to her tiny little pawniard, that little externalized part of her heart that all people with familiars allowed the world to see, the manifestation of her deepest desires. And that corner had been replaced and vanished, and now there was just emptiness and screaming and—

But Retia could still be saved, while Shay—

“Please,” Nemo whispered. She didn’t know to whom or to what.

“Nemo!” came the desperate scream again.

She turned around in time to see Bren slump to the ground, the warrior’s spear sprouting out of his shoulder and the ghost with bloody eyes trying to shred a bigger version of Tair.

The bloody eyes looked at her again, smile of daggers widening. Blood of the blood, it hissed.

This was what father had been warning her about. This was the enemy for which she was not prepared.

This was war, this was her fight, and this was her villain, but Nemo found that she hadn’t prepared enough to be the hero, even if she’d had the cause of one.

Time seemed to slow down then, and she thought through a million possibilities at once, the ideas flooding her head like the blood. She should have been doing something, moving, acting, but she stood there, half-crouched and half-upright, paralyzed in horror. The thoughts came to her in flashes, like pictures from a book. The Thonians were nigh-invulnerable in the impenetrable darkness. She couldn’t use her sword against it. The ghost could teleport and regenerate itself and its master. If she ran now, they would kill Bren and Retia. If she fought it, she would lose. If—

She thought of Retia and Shay, who had been sent out on a mission of peace and ambushed by the declaration of war instead. Shay, who lay limp a few feet away, eyes glazed and barely breathing, and Retia, who—

The desperate screaming in her head continued, the fragments of reality moving further and further apart, but they were drowned out by something else.

“Nemo,” a voice whispered to her right, so quiet it was almost like a dream.

Her mind was forming sentences at half a million miles per hour even as she turned back to her mother—I’ve got you, don’t worry, you’ll be okay, please—but her lips refused to move, carved into stone.

Retia’s eyes flickered with some sort of urgency, locking with Nemo’s, and Nemo saw a secret nestled there, one she couldn’t quite understand, one that demanded to be heard.

And then Retia opened her lips, faint words coming out.

Nemo should’ve said something, should’ve pleaded with her to save her breath and her strength and her life, but still her body refused to respond.

It wasn’t fair. She’d only been five minutes too slow.

Trembling, Retia’s remaining hand reached out and grasped Nemo’s, squeezing faintly. Blood, she didn’t know whose, seeped between them and—

“Nameless.”

Nemo did not understand it, did not process, did not blink, but that did not matter because—

And Retia’s hand went limp in Nemo’s and she breathed out gently, everything that was and is and ever would be Retia of House Castelle vanishing from the world in a tiny wisp of golden energy that trailed upward toward the darkened sky that left the girl shivering and alone, puzzling over the words that should’ve been a clue even as strands of her hair fell loose from her bun and trailed to the ground and above the skies threatened to lay down their burdens at last but a downpour was no match for the puddles of blood scattered around the field but Retia was gone so what did it matter any more, what did it matter if this was all that remained.

She heard the crunch of armored feet on broken gauntlets and turned around to see Journay, fully healed, looming over her, his gastly by his side. And there she stood, hair coming undone and covered in blood that wasn’t her own, weaponless and powerless against the most formidable army her father had ever thought to face, and the last thing she needed to do as the hero was show fear.

A raindrop as salty as the sea landed on Nemo’s clenched fist, and then it started truly to rain.

There was no thunder, but it rained for a very long time.

[hr][/hr]

book two: justified​

[hr][/hr]

The field of daisies where Retia had died had been littered with corpses and daisies. Nemo saw this much even as she tried to push the distracting thoughts out of the way, but Shay wasn’t there to do that for her anymore and she didn’t know what she would do if—

No.

Slowly, Nemo stood up.

She did not accept this.

Across from her, the man and his monster stood—she recognized them now, the legendary Jornay and his feared gastly, but she saw him only as the enemy. Already, the gastly had latched on to his wounds and was regenerating; already, he had summoned his spear back to him and was preparing to finish off Bren, who had fallen beside his lucario and her pawniard and did not seem to be getting back up.

This is not a game.

Nemo took six precise steps forward, enough to catch Jornay’s attention and turn his black eyes toward her, and that was all she needed.

This is war.

She had no weapon; he saw that, and laughed, even as she held her left hand out, palm open and empty.

He is the enemy.

The most powerful leader of the Thonian forces hefted his weapon and prepared to charge, an identical smirk etched on his and his gastly’s faces, their smiles like daggers.

He is to be destroyed.

“I, Nemo of House Castelle, firstborn, claim my birthright, the blade of kings.”

Do not flinch.

Like a comet, sparks trailing in its wake, the sacred blade wheeled through the infernal darkness, landing in her outstretched hand, tassel wrapping up the full length of her arm and securing itself to her body even as she began to run forward to meet his charge.

Do not hold back.

The spear and the sigil clashed, and Jornay’s weapon, of the infernal darkness and forged in the black forests, shattered.

Kill.

Nemo swung back, even as Jornay stumbled away, regenerating his wounds all the while, his ghost screaming in pain as the blade began to glow with brilliant light, black eyes meeting black.

Kill!

And she brought the blade down in its final arc, her arm no longer completely her own.

KILL!

There was light.

[hr][/hr]

Bren had four cracked ribs.

Tair had broken his left paw.

Nemo had seen enough injuries to know that they would recover.

And Shay was still dead.

[hr][/hr]

“Father will want to speak to you.” Bren’s voice was quiet and calm—no, controlled.

It was nightfall, and Nemo could not create a portal stable enough to bring them back to the castle, or she chose not to.

To hell with control. “How fast can you run back to the castle?” she asked, a sardonic smile on her face that didn’t match her cracking voice. How she wished that they could be young again. “You go on ahead. I—” Nemo didn’t bother hiding the sharp angles in her voice.

She understood who was to blame for this, though.

There was silence.

“You can’t hole yourself up here forever.” Bren glanced around the grove uncertainly. He was suddenly aware of how vulnerable they were—fighting Journay, watching all of that happen—at some point, he had thought that this would’ve been a perfectly safe stroll. Now, though, was a different matter.

More silence.

“You did everything you could, Nemo.”

Nemo stood still in the clearing in the grove of trees for precisely two seconds more, her breathing suddenly becoming more and more harried as her fingers curled into fists and her jaw locked. A wisp of dark energy twined around her fingertips, and she tightened her fists even more. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t let it out, couldn’t stop hiding now or else—

Nemo whirled around. “I did everything I could,” she repeated quietly. Her voice shook, and then: “Is that supposed to make me feel better? That I wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, smart enough to have predicted this and somehow saved her? That I wasn’t good enough?!” Her voice had reached a hoarse scream at this point, eyes wide like stars, fingernails stabbing into her palms, every muscle clenched and trying to react when no action was required.

Bren stared back in fear.

When Nemo spoke again, her voice was quieter and more lifeless than it had ever been before. “I get it, Bren. I did everything I could, but I wasn’t enough.”

More silence.

Above them, the grove was calm. Sunlight filtered in gently through the branches, and there was a hint of birdsong in the breeze. The world smelled of life; tiny shoots of grass stabbed up from the ground beneath their boots and the leaves on the trees prepared to burst into bloom.

Nemo didn’t understand. The world should’ve been ending, like hers was, and yet it was oblivious. “Go run back to father, Bren, like we always do. We were fools.”

They were fools for believing that just because they believed that something would work, that it actually would. That was the maxim of the hero in all of the legends Retia told her—and would never tell her again; the thought still hurt. The power of heart or love or courage would overcome all.

But no one ever wrote myths about final acts of cowardice or initial acts of courage, because people who did heroic things ended up paying terrible prices and drowning like Nemo was in the blood of the innocent. But if people were to understand that, they would lose hope, and hope was all they really had at this point.

Lying, though, was Fischer’s game. Not hers.

Bren found that his eyes were dry. He would react to this later, he knew. His mother was dead. He should be hurting. Tair felt a wash of sorrow at least for the woman who had been their mother, but—

“You need to come with us.”

“I cannot return to House Castelle.” Here she was now with no familiar to guide her, the blade of kings firmly attached to her arm. It would suck her dry one day, the legends said. The weight of heroism and leadership would crush her as it did all the others, and Nemo knew for certain that this was not the best play. Even now, although she did her best to hide the thing by keeping her hand on the pommel and acting as if the honedge attached to her forearm was her sheathed sword, Nemo could not shake the feeling that something irreversible had come to change things forever. “Not now. Not with Retia—” She could not bring herself to finish the sentence.

“Her funeral is in a matter of hours, Nemo. Please.”

Nemo turned away and folded her arms. She couldn’t see Retia now. Not like this. Not with half a thousand people there, milling about, offering thanks for the queen they hadn’t even tried to save when it had mattered most.

And certainly not without Shay. The pawniard might’ve paced the ground for her and showed her weakness for her and impaled things with her blade arms for her or—

Nemo couldn’t think about her now, but she couldn’t help it. The memory was so fresh, so raw, so real and painful that bringing it up hurt, but so did her arm and her heart and everything else because Shay and Retia were dead and nothing would be the same for her.

Bren tried again. “Do you blame father?”

The pause stretched for a moment. “Gods, Bren, who do you think I blame?”

She couldn’t help but cast a gaze toward Tair, although she averted it right away. Not because seeing her brother’s lucario meant that Bren had yet another thing that Nemo had once had but lost, even though that was true, but because she wanted to see what he was thinking. And yet the lucario seemed calm, if a little more reflective than usual, and it occurred to her that she should’ve been more careful in how she’d reacted to her mother’s death.

Silence.

“It’s not your fault,” Bren said at last when he understood.

Something deep inside of Nemo snapped, and she felt her temper flaring up again, although she tried her best to suppress it. Put in in a jar, mother had said. Seal the jar up tight, don’t let the rage get out, don’t—

“I told myself that, too,” Nemo said in a hollow voice. “I repeated that again and again, my hands covered in her blood, and I realized that I was lying.” She’d hated the dramatics as a kid, laughed at those songs of the brave knights and their armor and their dragons and their clichés, because that had never been what heroism meant to her. But now here she was, treading those same footsteps and spouting those same lines.

“You couldn’t have—”

“I could’ve noticed that she wasn’t in the throne room sooner.” Nemo refused to turn around. One arm was braced against a tree, and the other tightened around the sword that had fastened itself to her forearm until the knuckles showed, pinched and white beneath her skin. “I could’ve looked around instead of playing games with father. I could’ve been less arrogant and more humble and searched for the traps with more than just my mind.” She paused and threw her hands into the air before letting them fall back to her sides. She began to speak faster. “Bren, there’s so much I could’ve done. I could’ve ignored the soldiers and not tried to sway them from father’s orders, because they clearly were a lost cause. I could’ve ignored father, understood that his hands were tied and there was nothing I could do. I could’ve ridden out faster. I could’ve dragged a healer with me against his will because I knew mother would need one; she might’ve lived with one. I could’ve—”

“Nemo, please.”

The words came tumbling out; no jar in the world could’ve held them. “I was only five minutes late. She was still breathing when I got to her, Bren.” And there it was, the deep, dark secret that she’d been wanting to say but didn’t dare, didn’t dare in case it burned through her core like acid but what did it matter now, when everything should’ve been burning anyhow? “She was still breathing. If I had just brought that healer along she would’ve been fine but instead I… instead I… I just held her hand and looked her in the eyes and listened, listened like a stupid, stupid idiot.” The last words were bitter and tasted like lemon juice on her tongue.

Nemo took a step away. Deep breaths. In. Out. Put the anger in a jar. Seal the jar up tight. Don’t let the—

Hers was the right to rule, and the proof was here, tangible firmly cemented to her hand. All that remained was to take it from the doddering fool whose cowardice and unwillingness to take sacrifices had caused the deaths of Retia and Shay.

Castelle was the iron house, but it could still burn.

There was a sickening clap, like a bolt of thunder but a hundred times less magnificent, and one of the trees fell to the ground, cleaved in two. Nemo looked at her free hand with disgust, feeling the energy dissipate out of it. She’d always been better at this when—

Put the anger in a jar. Seal the jar—

In one swift motion, Nemo drew her sword and cut the sapling nearest to her in half. There was a satisfying crack as the blade cut through the wood, but the trunk was hardly thicker than her clenched fists and provided no resistance to the fire-hardened metal. Mother would—

Put the anger—

If only.

“I’ll look for you by dawn, then,” Bren murmured, and turned away.

[hr][/hr]

Bren lowered his hood against the pouring rain and wondered if this was the kind of rain that Retia talked about, the drenching kind that always came over a battle. It cleansed the earth of the terrible bloodstains that men left behind, but he was too old to believe in that tears-of-a-dragon idea, even if Nemo had been still dreamy enough to fall for that and tell it to his face not two months ago.

Ironic, though, that it would rain at a funeral. Nemo would fold her arms and snap at him that he was being just like those stupid, unrealistic knights in their myths, but Bren didn’t control the weather any more than he’d controlled what had happened on that accursed field.

His mother was dead, his sister was broken and without a familiar, and Bren didn’t feel anything at all.

As a child, he’d always thought that Nemo had been the uncaring one. She’d been cold, calculating, and manipulative, just like Father. And she’d been proud of it, always proud to beat him in chess and swordplay and whatever else she chose. Nemo had despised him, too; for a while, Bren hadn’t been able to figure out why.

They’d been playing castle, though, and Nemo had always made him be the prince, until one day Bren decided he wanted to be king. Nemo had turned away from him, one hand clenched into a fist and hiding as always, and then Shay had leapt for his face and begun clawing, clawing so hard that she sheared off the wooden play-helm they’d been using and was about to do the same to his skin before Tair leapt up and tackled her away.

They’d never told a soul.

A new fool had cropped up to replace the Black Knight lost overnight, a mystery warrior going by the name of the Grey Knight. And Bren would never tell a soul who he thought was in that suit of burnished armor either.

Nemo had tried to kill him, yes, but she did that to everyone. And Nemo had grown up, just as Bren had stopped being that quiet little boy who complained too loudly to Father when things didn’t go his way. Nemo, though, was supposed to be the heartless one, the cruel one, the distant one, and yet here he was standing in the rain and donned in the black garb of morning with his face perfectly blank like a slate even when he wasn’t trying.

Beside him, Tair’s head was bowed. It had been weird growing accustomed to his familiar’s new size and strength, and the stream of emotions and feelings that the two shared had suddenly gotten far more complex, but Bren had other things on his mind.

Namely, the fact that his father, whom he despised, was standing equally calmly and equally rigidly, as if Retia’s funeral procession was only yet another formality.

Funny, really, how this whole offspring thing had worked out for both of them. Nemo desperately wanted Father’s love and was left thirsting; Bren never wanted Father’s love and drowned in it.

The rain continued.

It was only when the crowd began to turn away, their black hoods upturned to protect against the wind and the storm, that Bren realized he hadn’t paid attention to the service at all.

[hr][/hr]

Drip. Drip.

The dawn of the day after Retia’s funeral was grey and lonely, and the light that trickled into the king’s hall was far from warm.

“I see you’re alive,” Fischer said when he watched Nemo limp into the room, keeping the weight off of her bad ankle but making no attempt to hide the sacred blade whose tassel had wrapped around her forearm. “And here I was assuming Bren had killed the best warrior of the Thonians on his own.”

“You knew she was walking into a trap. You let mother die.” Nemo’s voice was cold enough to freeze fire.

“Nemo, please.” This time, Bren spoke from behind the steel throne, hands outstretched. He’d seen Nemo’s barely-checked rage back in the grove, but he’d hoped that she’d had the sense to temper it before seeking an audience with their father. “Think of what you’re saying.” And to whom you’re saying it, he wanted to add, but adding that would only mean throwing himself in the fire as well.

“Shay is dead, too.”

Bren chided himself for being a fool for ever thinking that Nemo would have any sense at all.

Drip. Drip.

“And I take it you understand well, since you are clear ready for leadership. You’ve even already taken it upon yourself to claim the way of the sword.”

“You sit here playing games and making quips, and yet Queen Retia is dead,” Nemo hissed, and when she saw that Fischer had returned to his chessboard, her face contorted with rage. With a single stroke and a pivot of her feet, she moved her sword through the stem of the hall’s hourglass, shattering the delicate instrument and sending its pieces and its contents cascading to the ground.

Dripdripdripdrip

But breaking the hourglass—

Dripdripdrip

—would not reverse the time—

Dripdrip

—and undamn Retia—

Drip

—no matter how much any of them wanted it to.

Drip.

Bren knew this, even if Nemo was too consumed by anger and grief to feel it, and he couldn’t help but wonder why he wasn’t in a cold rage like Nemo was, if they had both lost a mother.

Perhaps, though, this was the madness that people felt when they lost their familiars, when their unchecked emotions had no outlet and their familiars could not express their agitation for them.

Fischer sighed pointedly. “Congratulations,” he said. “You can decapitate an hourglass now. If you do that to Thonian warriors just as easily, we may yet win this war.”

“Mother is dead!” Nemo said, and her composure truly slipped for that one moment, the raw pain and agony entering her voice for that final word, and everyone in the hall down to the guards heard it.

Fischer glanced up, and Lucent crept out from behind the steel throne, mandibles that were hard enough to break bones opening and closing with his unbridled agitation.

By then, Nemo had managed to calm herself, although her words were just as pointed. “And you are nothing more than a coward. I may only know a little, but you know nothing, Father.”

Wordlessly, Fischer stood up. “So you chose the way of the sword, I see.” Pause. “A pity.”

Nemo glared up at him, silver eyes meeting black, and she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever loved this man more than her mother as a child. Retia was warm and welcoming and caring, and he was as cold and as empty as the forests in the winter, with not a spark in him. “You’re trying to evade me.”

She was probably looking like a fool in front of all the king’s men again, but Nemo was past caring. She’d made a scene the day before, and Retia had ended up dead for her efforts. The cowards had weighed Retia’s lives against their own and found they preferred their own sorry hides over their queen, and so had Fischer. The guard stood there as one, though, a hundred silver cloaks draping across the walls of the throne room in silent vigilance.

“I only knew one other person foolish enough to accept their honedge when it came to them, you know. The history records are sparse about fools who accept the quest that the blade of kings gives them; only three have been recorded in written memory. All of them died horrible deaths.”

Nemo waited for someone to stop her—Shay, perhaps, or Retia, and realized that her voices of reason were gone and she would be forever on her own. The spoiled, headstrong girl who thought she knew everything would have to die if Nemo was to live to see another day, but Nemo didn’t want to let her go just yet. “You’re still evading.”

And yet she was aware of the honedge wrapped around her arm; she could feel the blue tassel on her flesh night and day, wrapped so tightly that she could still buckle her armor around it one-handedly. It hadn’t come off, not with pleading and prying and begging, and Nemo had understood at some point after destroying the lonely grove that it would be a long while before she had finished this.

The other drawback, of course, was that one of her hands had been permanently converted into a weapon, it seemed, and giving hugs was going to be markedly more difficult with the danger of impalement factored in.

Fischer sighed and sat a little straighter in the steel throne, grimacing as he tried to find a comfortable spot and failed. Lucent, beside him, clambered up the mottled metal and perched protectively about his head, antennae twitching nervously in a throne room that had no wind. “All of you,” he said, gesturing to the silver-cloaked royal guard lining the room, “leave us for now. The princess and I must talk.”

Obediently, the soldiers and their familiars turned to leave, and Fischer watched them impatiently from his throne.

“Not you, fool,” he snapped to Bren, who had turned to exit with Tair as well. “You need to hear this as well. Gods above, and you’re to be my successor. It could be worse, I guess.”

Yeah, Nemo couldn’t help but think bitterly, and although her connection with the honedge didn’t feel like a connection with any of the other familiars, even a weak one, she could feel what seemed like agreement coursing through her. But whose fault was it that Fischer had a horrible heir?

The room cleared, and Nemo watched as the gates slammed shut.

Fischer glared at both of them, daughter with a sword forever pinned to her hand whom he could never allow to fight and son with cowardly blood running through his veins whom Fischer could never, in good conscience, allow to rule.

“Retia’s life had a price—”

Nemo spoke up at once. “Father, surely even you can see how absurd you’re being when you say—”

“—and I assure you it was a high one, Nemo,” Fischer continued. The only sign that showed he was even aware that he’d been interrupted was when he raised his voice to speak over her protests. “But it was not worth the kingdom.”

For the first time, Bren spoke up, even if it was against his better judgment. “How do you know that?” He was still confused, really. He didn’t feel upset that his mother was dead, only empty inside. His loss had turned itself into grief, it seemed; Nemo’s had turned itself into rage.

Fischer, too, seemed surprised that Bren had found his voice. “I loved Retia,” he began, “but—”

“But not enough to save her,” Nemo interrupted again. Her free hand was balanced precariously on her hip; crossing her arms in front of her chest as she once had didn’t seem to be an option any more, given the sword situation.

“Nemo, if you’re going to insist on being rude, I’m going to have to ask you to leave or gag you. I don’t care which.”

Nemo glared at him, weighing her options, and then held her tongue. For the time being.

Fischer started once more, choosing his words carefully. He seemed well aware that the allegiance of his children might depend on what he was to say next; if he misspoke now, he might still be able to convince Bren to stay on his side, but Nemo had been tipping for a while now. And the last thing this game needed was a traitor. “You think I should’ve marched my armies against Journay to rescue Retia. And go on, Nemo, you can both answer that one.”

“Yes.” Nemo’s response was instantaneous; Bren, closed his mouth and looked away.

“I do hope that you are familiar by now with the speed with which my armies are prone to travelling,” Fischer said, sighing and examining the fingernails of his right hand with feigned boredom. “We cannot all have such elegant means of transportation as you do, Nemo, and I do not deny that by the time we arrived on the scene, Retia would’ve been long dead. Perhaps you made it in time; judging by the lack of queen today, I assume not.”

The last arrow hit a little too close for Nemo’s comfort; was it possible that Fischer knew exactly how close she had been to arriving on time to save her mother?

“And,” Fischer continued grandly, taking the silence as an invitation to pursue the matter further, “in so boldly marching in and out, we would’ve strung out our men in a merry little line as we trekked through the Thonian forests. I doubt that a quarter of them would survive the trip there and back, assuming that there were no Thonians remaining when we arrived to rescue a miraculously still-living Retia.”

Nemo opened her mouth to say something, remembered her promise to hold her tongue, and fell silent. The cogs were rushing in her head, though.

“So in your silly little situation, we’ve rescued our queen at the cost of three-quarters of the army; oh, and while we were on our merry little jaunt, we happened to leave the fortress largely unguarded, seeing as our troops are spread thin enough as it is.”

And by now Nemo could clearly see the elegant manner with which Fischer had manipulated the conversation into his favor. She couldn’t argue against this logic now, even though every fiber of her mind was screaming that there had to be a way to turn this against him.

Fischer clapped his hands together and leaned back in the throne, apparently oblivious now to the shards of metal that were digging into him as he did so. “I shouldn’t have to finish it up so obviously for you, but by this point I’m pretty sure even Bren, brilliant commander that he is, would see the opportunity to rush in to our poorly-defended castle and completely destroy us. Everyone would die, the land would burn, the Thonians would win. And the best part, of course, is that Retia would still die in those subsequent sackings thereafter, or have a fate worse than death.”

There had to be a flaw in his logic somewhere. Nemo wanted to accuse his estimate of their casualties as being far, far too high for an army as well-trained as House Castelle’s, but even there she knew that Fischer was probably accurate—their army was trained in head-to-head battles, or at best in defending a castle; the Thonians excelled at guerilla warfare and didn’t even seem to have commanders. Perhaps they wouldn’t storm the fortress or take advantage of House Castelle’s weakness, or perhaps—

Nemo could not help but accept that in this situation, Fischer was infuriatingly right, as usual.

“Did a honedge come to you as well?” Nemo asked instead, wondering if this mysterious quest of the heart and soul was what had driven Fischer to such cold and calculating ends.

He paused. “It did. I sent mine away too, you know, and it never came back for me.” Fischer sighed, the ferocity slipping from his voice and replaced with a hint of tired age, and Nemo remembered for the first time that he had lost an important piece in his game that day as well. “I saw it as a blessing, though, that I was never called for that greatness.”

“Are you so craven?” Bren asked, the question spitting out of his mouth like poison, and he covered his mouth in alarm when he realized what he had just said.

But Fischer did not turn that temper on him, did not begin lecturing him about the errors in his argument. Instead, Fischer sighed and simply said, “A great man craves glory, Bren. A good man craves what is right. I hope it will be many years before you learn this lesson, but the world is filled with great men, and yet good men are hard to find.” He saw Nemo bristling at the mention of Bren’s crowning, but that ship had sailed long ago and there would be no abating her fear on that front short of naming her king right now and murdering himself.

“I don’t want to be king,” Bren replied quietly, and Fischer knew then that his dilemma was complete. A son whose right was the crown and didn’t want it; a daughter who could never rule and would kill to do so anyway.

“I didn’t, either,” Fischer said with a heavy sigh. It was sad, really, how little he knew his children. That was his fault, no doubt, for leaving them when they were so young.

“But you got it nonetheless,” Nemo hissed, unrestrained anger in her voice. As always.

He was afraid for his daughter, really; he wanted nothing more than to take her into his arms and remind her that he, too, had lost someone whom he had greatly loved and he wasn’t throwing tantrums about it, at least not on the surface, but all of that would be wasted on her now. “I never wanted it.”

“Don’t you dare lecture me about wanting,” Nemo snapped, and then she began running up the steps of the stone dais toward his throne. Fischer had a thousand guesses as to what her intents were, and she knew none of them would be good. Already, Lucent was sinking into a crouch for war.

And then something in the steel-cold king snapped, and Nemo could see it. “No,” he said in a calm voice that was cold enough to freeze fire, cold enough to portend terrible, terrible things.

“I’m sorry?” It wasn’t really an apology; Nemo didn’t do apologies, but maybe he would accept the gesture and—

“No,” Fischer said, rising to his feet and taking three steps toward her, one hand wrapping so tightly around her non-sword hand that it sent a flash of pain shivering up her arm. Nemo began to struggle then, half-heartedly swinging her sword toward him to at least intimidate him into letting her go, but he held out a hand and forced the metal of her armor away effortlessly. Part of her mind filed away the fact that he didn’t seem to be able to affect her blade into the back of her mind, and then she returned to the situation at hand, which involved her current inability to move.

“Father, please,” Bren began, holding out one hand, but then he held his tongue. Coward, Nemo couldn’t help but think. This was the coward who had taken her right. She loved him, yes, but she couldn’t help but wonder if she would love the steel throne more.

No, those were horrible thoughts. Where had they come from?

The honedge chuckled ominously at her in response, and Nemo frowned, wondering if perhaps there was a drawback to the way of the sword, when—

“I wasn’t always an only child,” Fischer said quietly, moving in so that his face was almost touching Nemo’s. Every vein was outlined in sharp contrast with his creased forehead.

Nemo had to think over his words for a moment, frowning to understand, but by the time it had dawned on her, Fischer was already marching her behind the throne, his grasp inescapable. Bren trailed ineffectually behind them with Tair.

And then Fischer was leading her to a corridor in the gap behind the throne that Nemo had never noticed, and he flung the door open with his free hand and dragged Nemo inside, nearly throwing her down the stairs that unfolded before all five of them, father and daughter and son and three familiars minus one. They were behind the stained glass, she realized numbly, watching the light filtering around them into muted purples and blues. This wasn’t part of the mural she had seen, though, and it certainly wasn’t visible from the outside of the castle.

Fischer flung her loose then, and Nemo skidded forward, almost losing her balance and trying to pretend that the awkward steps she took thereafter were to examine the stained glass on the far side of the room, the only source of light aside from the flickering torches. The cracked glass depicted a mostly-grey serpentine dragon adorned with gold and red armor in some places, six tendrils of darkness sprouting from its back and flying behind it. The dragon itself seemed curled in an arc, helmed head and fierce red eyes glinting with fires all of their own as it flew, frozen in time as it tried to reach the depictions of the water and steel dragons in the glass above it.

“That is the shadow dragon,” Fischer said quietly, pointing to the grey creature. “Brother to the steel dragon and water dragons that you see above, and chosen god of the Thonians.”

“And why do you—”

“He is said to watch over those who have left this world,” Fischer said. Behind him, Lucent had stopped at the foot of the stairs and refused to move any further, reluctant to enter the crypt even though its stairs were worn with use. “The water dragon and the steel dragon may mark their passing, but it is the shadow dragon who brings their souls with him to the underworld, where they are forever interred here beneath the earth.”

She’d wanted to fly as a child, never touching the ground, and perhaps this was why.

Nemo began again, “But—” And then she stopped herself, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked around. The crypt was relatively small, large enough for the three living souls in it with little space beside, but Nemo didn’t see the headstones or the inscriptions that she’d been accustomed to in places like these.

Instead, she saw hundreds of little pedestals scattered around. Some bore broken swords, chipped off at the hilt and rusted on the edges; some dented shields, so thoroughly crushed that no amount of hammering would bring them back into shape; some bore stranger things still, like the long fang of what might’ve been a mawile, or the remnants of a spike that could’ve come from Tair’s chest. Some only held one of the objects, some two, some all three, but each pedestal in the room contained a combination of the sword, the shield, and what Nemo realized must have been the remains of a familiar.

She suddenly understood, and she hated herself for antagonizing her father, if only because he always had better trump cards.

Nemo shook her head; no, she was genuinely saddened by this; the part of her that was irritated at being outplayed was childish and immature and sounding too much like the voice of the honedge attached to her arm. She would have to look into that.

“Do you understand now, Nemo?” Fischer asked quietly. The torches through his face into a harsh juxtaposition of light and shadow, and every crease on his face stood out.

“How long has this been here?” Nemo asked, spinning around. The room had seemed small, but there were so many pedestals.

“Since I became king and lost my first battle as commander of this House,” Fischer replied, and his durant hissed. It was the first time Nemo had ever heard Lucent make a sound before, and then she understood—

All of these knights and all of their treasures, only dating back to the time that her father had first sat upon the steel throne. So many. Dead.

“These are only the knights who fall in battle. Their families want their bodies back, of course,” Fischer was saying, although Nemo was almost too shocked to hear him. “And I have no right to them, nor will I ever claim any. But after my first loss, I swore it would never happen again, and I gathered these tokens to remind myself that the people whom I command are still people, and they do not vanish as easily as the pieces on my board do.”

He leaned over and, almost reverently, stroked the hilt of a broken sword whose pommel was inlaid with chipped rubies. “I had to limit myself to only those who died in battle whom I knew personally. There have been so many dead since that first battle. I can give you their names, if you want, if you still believe I am too ignorant to lecture you on loss.”

“You don’t need to—”

“Sir Karn the Courageous,” Fischer said, cutting her off as he raised the broken sword with its ruby-studded hilt into the air in a dramatic flourish that seemed too tired to be for show. “Cut down in the battle for Arcana by Mougyar the Slayer.” He moved on to the next pedestal, which only contained a broken-off steel barb. “The remains of Sir Florent and his ferrothorn Dale, slain defending the castle from rebels from the north. We never found his sword or shield.” And still he continued on in a terrible voice even as Nemo began shrinking back, cowering away from everything just as his durant was. “Sir Edlon—”

“Enough!” Nemo shouted, not because she was angry but because she needed to do something, anything to get his horrible voice and his horrible truths out of her ears.

“One more, just one,” Fischer replied in that terrible, terrible voice, calm but cutting. He didn’t move his feet; neither did Lucent. Instead, he pointed with one robed hand toward a large, domed shield that hung on the wall across from the stained-glass depiction of the shadow dragon. The shield itself had been covered with intricately carved symbols; beside it rested an enormous broadsword that looked like the exact replica of Nemo’s blade of kings, except that this blade had a purple tassel rather than a blue one. The shield was cracked down the middle, the two pieces hung next to each other but with enough of a gap between them for the schism to be visible. Like every other weapon in the room, the sword was broken off as well, with jagged and dulled ends of steel glinting in the torchlight through the rust.

The sigil of House Castelle, Bren realized as he recognized the great aegislash from the carvings and the books. But he’d never expected to see an actual one before.

“Princess Alira of House Castelle,” the king said. His hand remained where he’d put it, but his head seemed to slump a little on his shoulders, and he suddenly looked every bit his age and then some. “She was wise, kind, and brilliant, and showed true promise as firstborn of the House to replace her mother one day. Beautiful, too, but that was so little compared to everything else that she was. Princess Alira was the only person in living memory during her time to have the blade of kings appear to her; not only did she accept her quest, but she also fulfilled it, bringing unquestioned peace to House Castelle. During her journey, her honedge evolved into an aegislash, the sigil of our House, and she was marked as the true and just queen of Castelle.

“She died then, struck down before her twenty-fifth birthday and two weeks before her coronation, killed in her youth at a peace banquet in her honor by King Dronus the Mad of House Regium, who seemed to want to take her aegislash for himself. House Castelle saw him for the monster he was and engaged with him in war, wiping out him and his lands and his people, but our rightful queen was dead. The throne passed instead to the next in line, and he was nowhere near the ruler she would’ve been.”

Bren didn’t even have a shot at reading Fischer’s face, even if it hadn’t been shrouded in darkness in this particular moment or impossible to interpret in every other moment. And he knew the answer that Nemo had no doubt figured out as well, even if he had to steel himself and ask, “And who was this replacement king?”

“I wasn’t always an only child,” Fischer said in response, and then turned to sweep out of the crypt, his robes and his mournful durant swirling behind him.

[hr][/hr]

Nemo was having a hard time fighting with her sword-arm now, and Bren could tell. He wasn’t sure exactly when he’d changed from the timid to the warrior with the eye for combat, and he wasn’t even sure if he’d actually changed at all, but he was starting to notice things. Nemo carried herself a little differently now, struck with more reckless abandon and made wilder, less controlled parried and blocks.

The sword was heavier, Bren had thought at first, or she was still in mourning and filled with rage, or she had to fight differently without Shay.

But no, Bren had realized eventually, when they’d clashed swords and another time and he’d looked at her eyes, the clang of steel still ringing in his ears. She’d changed as well.

Another block, another parry, and Bren took a confident step forward to block Nemo’s next thrust, only to find himself overstepping into a feint and finding the tip of her sword at his neck. They’d had issues in the practice-field ever since the tragedy, beginning with the fact that Nemo could no longer switch her sword out for a wooden one and risked beheading someone until Sir Barrick had devised a clever metal sheath that, at least, took the edge off of her sword. Her blows still hit like a mace or a warhammer, though, so there was still that.

If only most of their problems were so easy to fix.

She’d changed, sure, but she could still crush him without breaking a sweat.

“I yield,” Bren said, removing his helmet, which reeked of sweat, and he trudged over to the benches and sat down. He’d gotten better, sure, perhaps good enough to beat her if she tied both hands behind her back, but that wouldn’t be good enough for anyone.

There was the pressing issue of this mysterious Grey Knight, whom Bren had taken first for a poorly-timed joke, who had instead taken to showing up at skirmishes between the Thonian and Castellian forces and slaying every warrior in sight, regardless of what side they were on.

“Is it hard, killing people?” Bren asked at last, and he hadn’t really expected an answer. But Retia was dead, and that was bad, but Journay was dead as well, and his sister, scarcely old enough for marriage, was responsible.

Nemo felt like her heart had been gone for a long while, and the killing hadn’t hurt as much as the loss, so she pretended not to hear. “You’ve gotten quite good,” Nemo said conversationally as she sat down beside him, hardly breathing hard. It wasn’t fair, how good she was at this, and yet there were so many things in his life that weren’t fair, and so many in hers as well. “I’m impressed.”

Bren opened his mouth to say something and then just decided to take the compliment at face value. “After everything that happened,” he said at last, glancing down at his feet rather than looking his sister in the eye. “I,” he began, and then stopped.

He couldn’t get over that. Nemo might blame herself for Retia’s death, but Bren at least had Shay weighing him down with the terrified but determined look in her golden eyes as she ran in front of him and—

“Everyone’s always having to save me,” Bren said at last, wringing one hand with the other and then switching sides to do it again. “And one day, they won’t be able to or they won’t want to, and I want to be able to protect myself when the time comes.”

He didn’t dare look up, so he couldn’t see Nemo’s expression when she replied in a low, quiet voice, “I’m always having to save everyone. And one day, I won’t be able to or won’t want to, and—”

She broke off, unable to finish the sentence, and Bren couldn’t help but feel selfish compared to whatever problems she had to face. They really were so opposite it was hard to believe they were related, and yet—

“I’m sorry,” Bren said instead, because he really didn’t know what else to say.

“I can’t use my magic anymore,” Nemo said in response, which wasn’t at all related to what he’d said but still terrible all the same. Her fingers twitched nervously and without rhythm, as they always did, but it was harder than ever to get the words out. The one thing she’d had that Bren hadn’t, and that was gone for her too. “Ever since I lost Shay, I haven’t—”

“I’m sorry,” Bren said, “I’m so sorry,” and he knew it would never be enough.

[hr][/hr]

When Nemo was eighteen, the Grey Knight had been at large for too long, so Fischer had named Prince Bren of House Castelle, heir, as the White Knight of the realms. She'd watched from behind the throne—that was supposed to be Bren's spot, where he watched and whimpered while she did the important things, except those times were gone—burning with jealousy, as her father and his durant had stood before a kneeling brother and his lucario and proclaimed the coward the protector of the realms.

Nemo didn't want to be White Knight; she wanted to be king; she knew that wanting was petty and she shouldn't have wanted to begin with, but none of that really helped ease the slight. Bren had gotten better, sure, but she could crush him with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back if it came to it, and he certainly wasn't going to be any good against the Thonians or the Grey Knight or whatever other monsters Fischer had him fighting.

And yet Fischer was tapping his sword on Bren's right shoulder, then his left, and the crowd was cheering, and Nemo was burning with anger in the back. She was the one with the sword and the skill, after all, and—

Bren met her eyes and shook his head, and that settled it.

"Don't," Nemo said, and the entire crowd went silent.

Shay probably would've warned her that this was a bad idea. Shay was still dead.

Fischer, to his credit, managed to keep his face impressively calm. Without turning around, his sword still on Bren's right shoulder, he asked, "And why not?"

There was still time to back out of this. She could claim that Bren was too young to die, or that a Knight wasn't a title worthy of his glory, or that—

"He doesn't deserve it."

Well, anything but that, really, but there was no taking back the words.

Fischer turned around then, one eyebrow raised. She couldn't tell if he was impressed that she'd actually called him out, exasperated that she'd done it in front of the entire crowd, or both. "And you do?"

Saying yes would make her look stupid, so Nemo at least had the change to—

"Do you know why you were never a candidate for the throne, Nemo?" Fischer asked, and there was so much raw malice in his voice that Nemo could only begin to guess just how badly she'd wounded his pride with her foolishness. He was being called out in front of his kingdom in his precious son's moment of glory, and he was going to shame her in return, and she was stupid, so gods-damned stupid for even thinking about this, and she should back down while—

"Let me tell you a story of a Thonian town called Arcana," Fischer continued loudly, and there wasn't a single sound in the rest of the hall except for his voice, which was mesmerizing and controlling in itself.

It was then that Nemo knew there was no stopping him now, and she would have to endure whatever terrible revelation he had to give her.

“Arcana was the northern capital of Thonia at one point, before I led our armies in there and burnt it to the ground. You wouldn’t remember this; it was less than a year before you were born. But we thought the war would end, then; with the Thonian stronghold destroyed, our enemies would have suffered a terrible loss.”

Nemo managed to pull herself together. She had the blade of kings; he could do nothing to her. “And?”

“The Thonians used to have a royal house, like we did, with a magnificent lineage dating back centuries. After the battle of Arcana, there was only one member remaining, a young girl about your age, and, well, you must know the rest.”

No. She didn’t know the rest, and she wasn’t going to reveal her ignorance by guessing, gods damn him.

“No witty retort? Fine. We thought the war would end if the girl told her people that it would end. For good measure, and to ensure that a peace treaty would be in something deeper than paper, I married her.”

Nemo was beginning to see where this was going, and she suddenly didn’t have the ability to breathe. She began in a halting voice, “Retia—”

And Fischer continued on, confident and terrible, seemingly oblivious to the shocked reactions of his crowd. “But Retia had no choice, and although my advisors convinced me that she would be the key to peace—and she wasn’t, by the way, but they say I mustn’t speak of that—she became my queen. We would work together, eventually, but at first she was terrified of me, and I left her alone. I refused to touch her against her will as so many of the Thonians do to our cities that they capture.”

Subtle, he was, adding in the bit about the Thonians while pointedly ignoring the rest of the war crimes on both sides, but—

“Imagine my surprise, then, when she had a child less than a year after the fall of Arcana. It certainly wasn’t mine.”

Once, after Retia had died, Nemo had snuck down into the cellars and imbibed as much wine as she could. Her head had ached for hours after that, and Nemo had remained there, head spinning and world losing focus as her thoughts swam in circles and crashed into one another, and everything had hurt so badly. She was drunk, Bren had told her when he’d cleaned up the vomit from the ground and found her a new change of clothes, and it felt funny but it hurt a lot at the same time.

That was about how Nemo felt right now, down to the nausea.

The black eyes, the dark familiar, the shadow magic. Retia had known House Castelle’s legends, but she’d known other ones too, but—

“Valyrion,” Nemo croaked, holding fast to her last lifeline. The skarmory was clear proof of Castellian heritage. It was a steel bird, completely unlike Shay, who had always had an element of darkness to her that might’ve passed for Thonian background.

“My uncle died in the battle of Arcana, and he left his familiar behind. Retia’s rotom die in the siege as well. What better way to welcome her into the royal family than to replace her companion?” Fischer laughed, but there was no humor in his voice. “It was all for show, and they weren’t linked, and the loss nearly drove her mad and took her magic from her, but it perpetuated a certain myth to our people that, among other things, Retia’s firstborn was mine.”

She was the littlest princess to Journay’s gastly not because she was younger than anyone else, but because she was Thonian’s youngest heir. And blood of the blood—

Nemo needed to vomit

Bren was giving her a look of pity mingled with horror, his thickset features contorted in confusion, but Nemo couldn’t take it anymore. She began to run, down the steps of the dais and past her father and toward the gates of the hall, but—

“I raised her bastard because I had grown to love her by then, Nemo,” Fischer called out to her, his voice almost mocking in its disgust. “But the blood of my enemy will never take my throne.”

Nemo vomited then, all over the steps of the castle that she’d once called her home but couldn’t have been her home, not if Fischer was telling the truth—and manipulative he might have been, but liar he was not—and ran, the blade of kings attached still to her hand, and tried to set right this terrible wrong.

[hr][/hr]

book three: no guard​

[hr][/hr]

They Grey Knight came for him that afternoon, just as Bren had feared. It’d been foolish to go out into the field, he’d tried telling father, especially with a genocidal killer on his hands, but Fischer had pointed out that it was a knight’s duty to protect the realm, and even if the Grey Knight had reneged that promise—if he’d ever made it to begin with—Bren was still Fischer’s White Knight, and he would have to do his duty.

A shame, really, because Bren had no intentions of dying today. He’d really been hoping against it.

But there hadn’t been much of an option, and Bren had been expecting it. His blood still ran cold when he saw the Grey Knight striding toward him, armor a mass of screaming grey shadows and razor-edged sword held almost lazily in his hand. The man didn’t use a shield, just a sword, but apparently he’d managed to slay mostly everyone in his way.

Perhaps Nemo—

No, there was no use thinking that now. Nemo wouldn’t be able to rescue him like she had from Journay. “What is your intent?” he shouted, and was met with only the breeze as a response.

Bren began testing the ground beneath his feet. Mostly grassland, with the forest fifteen feet in front of him and wide open plains behind. That would be pretty good for a fight, although there would be nowhere to run.

His white armor was far too heavy and far too large for him, or at least it felt that way. “I am the Lord King Fischer’s White Knight of the realms,” Bren called out, and his voice echoed a little in the helm. He felt foolish, like a child dressing up in his father’s armor to pretend to be king, and yet here he was. “You must stop.”

And, predictably, the Grey Knight didn’t do anything but walk forward in that same slow, deliberate pace from the darkness of the forest into the clear, open light of the plains. Even in the sunlight, though, Bren could see that the man had odd armor—it looked like a mass of writhing grey shadows spinning around in the shape of a knight, and if it hadn’t been for the black, clearly Thonian eyes peering out from a gap in the blend of grey haze that might’ve been a helm, Bren might’ve doubted that there was anything inside of the knight at all.

He remembered trying to stab Journay’s gastly familiar, which had looked largely similar, and that hadn’t worked out very well.

Tair had already bent his knees and clenched his paws into fists, aiming the silver spikes on the backs of his hands toward his opponent. They would have to face this fear for once, instead of running from it like they had with the realization of Retia’s death.

By then, the battle was joined, and Bren found that the Grey Knight’s sword and armor were far more corporeal than they looked. And, gods be kind, the man was fast, faster than Retia or Fischer or Nemo or anyone with whom Bren had ever had the terror of crossing blades with before. The man didn’t even need a shield.

Bren blocked the first blow, and overhead one threatening to cleave his helm and his head straight in two, with the flat of his sword, cringing back a little as the impact notched his blade and sent a flurry of sparks raining down around him. The Grey Knight was strong, too, and everything about this situation spelled Bren’s death.

But he couldn’t lose.

Tair was leaping forward like an extension of his body, both paws clenched as the lucario prepared to rain a series of lightning-fast punches into the Grey Knight’s abdomen, only to find that his opponent had already moved out of the way and was redirecting his sword from the boy to the lucario.

This time, Tair began retreating as a series of lightning-fast strikes were aimed at his abdomen, one of them glancing off the tip of the spike on his chest, and both he and Bren gritted their teeth and the shared pain. It was chaotic, though, and Bren took advantage of the chaos to slash his own sword down toward the shadowed knight, a strike that was blocked as easily as the first but at least took the focus away from Tair for at least a moment. The lucario backed off, teeth gritted and ears twitching wildly as he struggled to recover.

Bren traded blows with the Grey Knight, each exchange making his ears ring and his arms ache, and then the Grey Knight suddenly changed tactics and brought his blade upward in a sharp stroke, hitting Bren in the helm and sending him reeling, vision going black for a moment as the coppery taste of blood filled Bren’s mouth.

But through his hazy vision, he could see Tair leaping forward, paws outstretched and mouth open to show rows of tiny but razor-sharp teeth, and the lucario moved so fast he was almost a blue blur, lashing and darting around. The Grey Knight’s armor, however, easily withstood the lucario’s fast but shallow blurs, and Tair had to give way as the sword’s superior reach began making up for the element of his speed.

Bren was back by then, wondering in the back of his mind how long he and Tair could juggle not being murdered before one of them slipped up. This was like the fight with Journay, except now he was prepared and trained and his father’s bastion of purity or whatever a White Knight was supposed to represent, but Bren had never been more aware of how easy it would be for him to die than right now.

Tair leapt forward, somersaulting easily over the first stab and ducking under the one to follow as Bren darted in as well. No one would need to protect him anymore; he would fight himself and that would be that. Tair could help, sure, but they didn’t really count as two separate people, did they?

He could do this. His sword was just another extension of his hand, the plain white shield he’d been given just another part of his arm to block the attacks. And there was Tair, another weapon for him, fighting alongside and ducking and jabbing and biting even as Bren was whirling and feinting and stabbing, and—

They could win this. He could do this, and Father would be proud of him, except Father always was, and he would prove once and for all that he’d grown up and past all of this.

Tair was edging along the back, trying to get behind the Grey Knight’s impossibly-fast sword, and he was almost there, just a few inches away, when—

There was a blinding flash of light, and when Bren had finally managed to blink his vision away, the Grey Knight had two swords instead of one, and that was the end of everything.

[hr][/hr]

“I demand entrance with Lord King Fischer,” a voice said as the door slammed open, and Bren nearly jumped in fright and wet himself then and there.

He hadn’t died, which had been convenient, and he’d made it back to the throne room alive with Tair, which was unsettling, and Fischer had prepared to chew him out, which was embarrassing, and now this was happening, which was just plain awful.

Standing in the doorway—no, striding confidently through the doorway now, ignoring the silver guards who were already all drawing their weapons, aiming twin blades toward the heart of the king, was the Grey Knight.

Tair snarled.

Bren paled.

“You really can’t kill off heirs like you used to,” Fischer said lazily, and then resumed playing himself in chess.

Neither Bren nor Tair knew what to make of that information, and then—

Although Fischer hid it well, Lucent’s mandibles clamped together in agitation, almost destroying the base of the steel throne, and Fischer, king of House Castelle, finally understood what had been done, and he hated himself and everyone else for it. “I was proud and a bit sorry that you had taken up the way of the sword, you know. This, however, was not what I meant.”

“What?” Bren looked away, biting his lip, and his lucario began to shift his weight uncomfortably even as—

And then he understood what his father was trying to say, and his legs felt weak as terror filled him. No. He’d suspected all along, yes, but it couldn’t—

The Grey Knight grinned a little beneath the shadowy helm and spoke for the first time in a voice far too familiar. “You really haven’t grown any less clever with age, Father. Can I even call you that?”

“But I believe you may have, Nemo,” he whispered, but his face was clouded with an unreadable mixture of hatred and disgust and sorrow. And then, loud enough so that the hall could hear him, he called, “Clear the room.” The guards, as well as Bren and Tair, stared at King Fischer with expressions varying from confusion to disbelief.

“Your honor,” Sir Barrick began, clearly intending to protest.

But Fischer only sighed and stood up from his throne, drawing the sword from the sheath fastened to his waist with a clean, practice motion even as Lucent moved from behind him to beside him, legs tensed as if preparing to leap already. Bren, at least, had recovered enough to hand him his shield. “My wife’s bastard and I have some parenting issues to work out.”

[hr][/hr]

“I haven’t bothered asking what you’re planning,” Fischer said calmly as he blocked her two-pronged overhead strike with a lazy swing of his sword. He hadn’t practiced with an opponent like this for a while, but some skills never died.

The dual-wielding would be difficult to get around, though. She would have longer reach, more diverse attacking strategies, and more maneuverability than he would. Fischer had seen fools trying to dual-wield at some of the tournaments, and most of them had been eliminated early on for the simple reason that a shield and a sword were really the proper tools of war. A knight needed to be able to attack and defend; that one element was absolutely key to any battle.

Then again, given the fact that the swords appeared fused to her hands, perhaps she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. And for someone landed with such a stupid art as dual-wielding, she was doing fairly well for herself.

“In fact,” Fischer continued, catching the second strike on his rounded shield and easily blocking the third strike from her other hand with his own sword which he knew was coming, “I don’t bother asking what you’re planning, ever, because you don’t seem to be big on planning. I’m more interested in the why.”

“Why?” she asked, making an all-too-obvious feint with her right sword before stabbing hard with her left. “Isn’t it obvious?”

She’d always been one to telegraph her moves, no matter what the game was. Fischer sighed. “Not to me, no, and if you’d care to enlighten me, I would be ever so obliged.”

And yet she recovered just as easily from that mistake as she had from any other, and Fischer couldn’t help but wonder just how different things had been, if she’d truly been his daughter. “Do I have to make that speech again?” she was shouting over the sound of their clashing steel.

“I’d really prefer if you do, yes,” Fischer replied. There was so much wrong with this situation, and he couldn’t even begin explaining why. Retia would’ve killed him for doing this. She would’ve—

“You’re a dead man walking, Fischer.”

Distracted as he was, Ficher couldn’t miss the obvious threat she’d directed at him. “Come, now,” he said, taking pains to make his voice calm and cool and deadly as always. “You must give me some credit. I am not still a child, that you can kill me whenever I want.” Lucent entered the fray then, leaping forward to bodily tackle her in the midsection. She stumbled back half a step, no more, and managed to force him off to dodge a swing of her first sword while catching another one of Fischer’s blows on her second. “I was defending this realm before you were born.”

And then she—no, Nemo; no matter what, even if she wasn’t his daughter, she was still the little girl he’d raised so carefully into a monster—began to launch a frenzied counterattack, with first one strike, and then another, and Nemo was gearing up for a third when Lucent managed to flank her and started attacking her left side with mandibles the size of dinner plates and she had to stop. But before she could, Fischer was raining strikes down on her right side with such unerring speed and precision that it was all she could do to stop them.

The doublade moved to protect her when she couldn’t, forcing her arms upward in some sort of farce of fighting and telling her she was still doing things the right way, but Nemo knew, at least deep down, that the tables had suddenly turned. Fischer’s strikes were disgustingly on target with an accuracy born only of decades of practice, and he was as fast as Lucent when it came to landing short, devastating blows.

And there was Lucent, too, coming in on her other side, clashing with her sword as often as her armor. The durant was short, but it used its size well, ducking under the majority of Nemo’s attempts to stab it and easily scuttling around to a better angle. She managed to stab at it repeatedly, and the strikes that it didn’t duck under it dodged by skipping back with unnerving speed. Nemo could sense its intent, though; either it or Fischer would eventually slip past her guard and get around to her back, at which point the battle was lost.

More than ever, she missed Shay.

Nemo glared at him, knowing that she should've felt fear facing the older warrior but instead feeling only anger. “This was a setup,” she said hollowly. She watched, dumb, as he dodged her next strike and she overshot, stumbling forward, and the doublade buried itself three inches into the stone, humming. “You let me think I was winning.” Nemo barely pulled her sword out in time to catch Fischer’s next attack an inch from her face, not having the time or the strength to flinch away from the shower of sparks that followed, but she already had to move again to avoid Lucent, gods damn him, before he decapitated her.

Fischer studied her carefully. “For old time's sake,” he said, and Nemo realized with a start that he wasn't smiling any more. “Because we can't understand. Gods, I can’t understand, Nemo, and I’m usually good at that.”

Nemo felt the fierce anger rising in her again, and she couldn’t help but glare at the man she’d once called father. “Yeah, you don't understand, do you? You never have,” she hissed. Her fists clenched and she gritted her teeth. They were all so stupid, so clueless compared to her, now, the doublade was telling her. All she needed to do was prove it to them once and for all. “And I bet it's eating you up inside, isn't it?”

Fischer looked at her coldly. Neither of them moved. “You could say that.” Their swords remained pointed to the ground for a moment, and Lucent had stopped trying to crawl around the side to get a perfectly good shot at Nemo’s back. Another silence, and then Fischer managed, with some difficulty, to add, “And, well. I thought I had taught you better.” He’d meant it to sound flippant, but something in his throat choked his words before he could get them out properly.

Nemo blinked, and then the air exploded around her as she comprehended Fischer’s words. When she was younger, with Shay, the world might’ve exploded into a mass of shadows as she struggled to get her anger in check—now that she thought about it, she’d been a fool for ever believing she was anything but Thonian. But now, with no Shay to channel her rage, she didn’t even have her magic any more.

So she exploded into a flurry of motion, her arms snapping up alongside the doublade and lashing out in a vortex of swirling steel. “I'm just never going to be good enough for you lot, am I?” she hissed as she watched with no small measure of satisfaction as Fischer’s eyes widened and then narrowed beneath the onslaught, and Lucent was forced to come back to his side before the king lost his head.

Nemo took one step forward, and then another, and she’d almost forced him to the steps of the throne’s dais. She’d won then, she thought, watching him fumble back for another step and nearly fall. Nemo struck, but Lucent deflected the attack and launched at her for another desperate strike, but she managed to hit him with the flat of her blade and sent the durant flying into a wall.

Out of breath but still standing, Nemo realized that her path to the king was clear.

And then her eyes widened as she realized that Fischer was smiling, which was never a good sign. “You idiot!” Neon spat right back, raising his arms into the air and catching the strike that she’d intended to decapitate him on the edge of his sword once more. “Gods damn you if you’re a big enough moron if you believe that.” The words were so heated, such a shocking depature from his normal tone, that Nemo literally felt the breath freeze in her throat. Neon glared at him, fire in his eyes as he suddenly seemed to tower over her, casting a shadow over her and the entire room.

The fire dimmed. Fischer looked at her. Hard. “You only ever had to be good enough for yourself,” he said quietly, as the shadows retreated into the ground. For a moment, he looked so lost, so pained, that Nemo couldn't help but want to—

No. No regrets. She couldn't even consider that phrase. Her resolve would vanish. Nemo didn't hesitate, only leapt to her feet, one of the silvery blades in her hands as she struggled, so very hard, to stab Fischer’s throat and end the horrible, horrible words forever.

Fischer ducked out of the way faster than Nemo had ever thought possible, and she simply rocketed past him, cursing and barely managing to roll into the ground and catch herself as floor and ceiling spun together in a dizzying swirl. She tumbled for a few more feet before finally finding her balance and skidding into an awkward crouch, blades bristling outward warily.

She looked up, and wondered for a moment if this was what it felt like to look at a god. Fischer stood in front of him, eyes cold and calculating. “I promised Bren that I would give you one more chance, and this is all you've got,” he growled. His face was so empty, so terrifyingly cold, and then the facade dropped and he was just Fischer again. “You're not a bad person. I know that. We all do. And I know how it gets inside of your head.” Fischer wished for a moment that he was lying, but he wasn't. The pain was all too real. “Sometimes, it's hard to fight back.”

Nemo glared at him as well. “Are you going to give me some fool’s speech about how I need friendship to give me strength?” she retorted, uneasily rising to his feet and hefting her swords again. The doublade would give her strength, it told her. They could still win this together.

“No,” Fischer said coldly.

“Good,” Nemo replied, taking steps forwards now, her tone just as frosty. “Because I don't need saving, least of all from you. I'm strong now. Strong enough that I won't have to rely on you, or Shay, or Bren any more to get what I want done.”

Fischer raised his eyebrows curiously, picking up on the one thing in Nemo's words that stood out to him. “So this is about Bren now, is it?” His eyes narrowed as he studied the younger girl, who would never be king. “You blame him most of all, and he’s the least at fault,” he said quietly, fingers twitching unconsciously as he connected the dots. “He stole your throne, of course. Got a lovely Knight title that you didn’t think he deserved.” A pause. “And you blame him for the death of your mother.”

Nemo didn't deny it.

Fischer swore quietly under his breath. “This is wrong, Nemo. If anything, blame me or Retia or yourself, but your brother has nothing to do with this.”

Nemo bristled and almost managed to cut off his head again. “So you’re trying to protect your precious little heir, as always.”

Lucent nearly got her then, Fischer noticed. Perhaps talking would distract her long enough for them to disarm her, and then they could talk, or—“Nemo, I will do what I must to keep the realm safe.” There was no ignoring the threat hidden in those words, either.

“What, you aren't going to try and save me?”

Fischer didn't even blink. “I'm waiting for you to save yourself.”

Nemo was in the air again, both blades flashing as they darted in a complex web and tried to find some weak spot, any weak spot, in this horrible, mocking enemy of hers. “You don't get it, do you?” she hissed through gritted teeth as Fischer evaded his attacks, dodging just as often as using Lucent to absorb the blow. He didn’t lie about his skills, at least, even if he’d lied about everything else. “I want this. I'm strong now, and I've got everything I need.”

Fischer calmly caught Nemo's wrist with his free hand—he hadn’t even noticed how long ago he’d lost his shield, but now that he thought about it, he’d been wielding his sword with two hands instead of one for quite a while. The two of them stared at each other for a long moment, glaring daggers. “I wish I could believe that,” Fischer said, enough fire in his voice to burn rain. “I wish it would be that easy.” He twisted, hard, and Nemo found herself gasping as his wrist screamed in agony. “It would be so much easier for me to just kill you, but you were many things—and never a liar.” He looked into Nemo's eyes, and Nemo looked back, watching the fire in those blue pits start to burn. But deep down, Nemo could see pain.

Nemo wanted to respond, wanted to retort, wanted to say something, anything, but the pain was overwhelming every corner of her mind, forcing out any thought besides the agony. She gasped as Fischer only tightened his grip, and the sickening sound of something cracking filled her ears.

She had to do something. She lifted her other arm, the one that wasn’t trapped in Fischer’s vice-like grip, and tried to swing at him again. Lucent would block the blow, she knew, and that would be the end of things, but at least her gesture of defiance would—

“We are your family, Nemo!” Fischer roared in her face, shaking her hard. That calm exterior was gone again, replaced with this horrible, terrifying madness. “Do you really think that we're going to let Thonia take you from us? Gods be good, Nemo, we were the ones who raised you and loved you and protected you. And we’ve lost so much in this war already. Do you really think we'll let Thonia take anyone else from us?” He didn't want for Nemo to answer, didn't even give the girl time to think of the painful answer to his question. Fischer exhaled heavily before flinging Nemo to the ground, pinning her down by the weight of the swords irreversibly bound to her hands even as she struggled up to kill him again. “Do you get that?”

Stars swam across Nemo's vision as he struggled to regain his breath. Everything Fischer said, everything that Fischer stood for—

—she hated it. It was all lies, just like the illusion they had all once lived. She was the loner, the bastard, the oathbreaker, her doublade was telling her, so why stop now? Nemo slowly pulled herself to her feet, wiping away a smear of blood from her mouth as she glared at Fischer, king of the steel throne she’d wanted for so long but would never have. “You aren't fighting like you usually do,” she said, struggling to keep her tone almost conversational. No weakness. “More harsh. More blood. Have I made you mad, Daddy?”

Fischer wasn't nearly as polite. “I'm fighting the way I need to.” Lucent would kill her where she stood, and that could be the end of things, but—“You’ve never actually seen me fight before.” Fischer looked at her, took in her fighting words, and sighed. He’d known another child so blinded by pain and rage and so inclined to lash out. “And there's a reason for that. And there's a reason that I didn't want you seeing it today.”

Nemo folded her arms across her chest and smirked. “And why is that?”

“This is a long and painful lesson that I'm going to have to teach you. Slowly.”

“You're not answering the question.”

Fischer raised an eyebrow almost lazily. “You never answered mine. Why are you attacking us?”

“Does it matter? I had it all worked out, and you're all going to die now. You're the last piece of the puzzle, Fischer. So just fall down and die so that my vengeance is complete.”

Lucent hissed at her, long and low, and Fischer couldn’t help but look at her as an enemy. For the sake of House Castelle, he could kill her, but he didn’t think he could bring himself to do it. Not for anything, no matter his mantra. “I talked to you about how this game of ours has only one piece that is worth the sacrifice of everything else.”

“And I talked to you about how that is a cruel, terrible, heartless way to look at the world.” Nemo struggled to keep up with him—he had the infuriating habit of trying to stab her every time they spoke, and Lucent was no more polite. “And how my mother was more than just a piece in your game.”

She’d never told him that, at least not aloud, but Fischer was never one for stating the obvious, either.

But Retia had never been just a piece, not even from the beginning. Nemo would never understand that, of course, would scream and curse and rail at him, calling him a liar if he so much as dared to speak her name.

“It’s funny, really,” Fischer found himself saying, even though Lucent pointedly told him that it wasn’t funny at all. “Once I started looking at the world as a collection of pieces, it was funny how many fewer I lost.”

He’d lost something that day, though, and it hadn’t been of any strategic value at the time, so Fischer hadn’t minded cutting out the part of his heart that let him care about people, that valued one piece over another, because that always got in the way of winning the war. And he’d been heartless since then, sure, and cold and calculating and whatever other insult there was to throw at him, but at least he’d won and minimized the casualties.

“You had this all planned out, though.” Fischer slowly raised his sword again, testing the waters, even though sweat poured down both of their faces and his arms felt like lead. “I congratulate you for taking the initiative, even if you killed a good portion of my men.”

“I was killing Thonians, too,” Nemo said in the harsh, callous voice of a general who only saw men as pawns.

“You just missed one thing,” Fischer continued, ignoring her. “You didn't calculate how many lines I would cross to bring you back into the fold.” It was a last-ditch effort, his final bluff. He was exhausted; some nagging corner in the back of his mind that was probably an equally-weary Lucent was telling him that if he lost now, Bren and the rest of the kingdom would crumble into ashes. Words were all he had left, and yet Nemo had been beyond all reason for quite some time now.

She started running at him, the blade of kings utterly immune to his power even as he tried to force her back, and Lucent was already staggering forward on weary legs to intercept the blow.

And for her part, Nemo only looked partially victorious as she hurtled toward the man who represented everything she hated. Kill him, the doublade was telling her, suggesting decapitation or an elegant slitting of his throat or a thrust through his heart, if he even had one.

She’d done it, though. She’d finally beat him. She hadn’t done this since that game of chess, and even that hadn’t been a victory, not when it came at the price of Retia’s life. But Nemo had won, at last, and the throne that the old man was trying so desperately to defend was his no longer.

Fischer raised an eyebrow. “Get on with it,” he replied, as if humor would be the shield that he’d lost.

So she did.

A clang and a sharp impact later, Nemo found that she’d missed, and her blades had bitten into the bitter air on either side of his head but couldn’t finish him off.

Fischer calmly raised his sword arm and forced the swords in her hands back with his magic, sending the doublade reeling back in pain and screaming as he pinned its tip to the ground.

She’d spent this entire time thinking that he hadn’t been able to control her swords, had gone through the added danger of using the shadows the doublade provided as her armor instead of actual steel, and it turned out that Fischer had a hidden trap for her all along.

Of course he did.

He would kill her now so that the memory of his daughter would live in peace. He would spare her now so that she could save herself. “I’m sorry, Nemo,” he began, when the doors of the hall burst open and the stench of blood filled the air.

Fischer sighed and looked up, moments away from killing or saving his daughter. “What is it,” he asked, voice wary. “I thought I made it clear that we weren’t to be interrupted.”

“It’s the Thonians, Father,” Bren was saying, breathless. He’d struggled into his armor at some point, and it looked far too big for him. “They’re coming, and there are rumors that their sorcerers have brought a dragon.”

Everyone knew that the dragons had gone extinct in the last great war half a thousand years ago, and that the Queen Lina of Thonia herself had burned with the last eggs as well as her castle. That was just hearsay to dampen moral, and—

But he thought about the impossibilities he’d heard whispering in the wind, of the sorcerers lead by Journay who had the impossible goal of wanting to—

Fischer’s eye caught on the massive stained glass window behind his throne, and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as a massive, feral roar washed over the hall.

Gods be good, he’d so desperately wanted it to be hearsay. “We’ll finish this later,” he muttered to Nemo, picking up his shield where it’d fallen by the remains of the hourglass and running out of the hall to defend his people. Lucent skittered after him. “House Castelle needs a ruler.”

[hr][/hr]

The fields in front of the castle were already drenched with blood. Nemo had never been squeamish, but she’d also never been in a battle of this magnitude.

In the distance, there was a dragon, gods save them.

And as Nemo thought about all of the fighting, all of the bloodshed, she finally understood the steel dragon that wanted to fly in the sky. Sometimes, he wasn’t able to keep the peace, but that wasn’t always. Because sometimes, when he looked down from his heavens and saw the world he was trying to protect, bitter and cruel and ravaged as it was, he could only turn his scaled head away in shame. Maybe he never landed not because flying was so beautiful, but because the lands were so accursed.

The ghostly dragon roared at her—The Giratina, they had called it; father and god of death—and Nemo could not help but wonder what motivated this dragon to turn away from his brothers and his people and his world until now, when he had seen it fit to destroy her brothers and her people and her world.

The ghostly dragon threw back its head and howled at her with enough force to send the stones flying backward, and the yellow helm of its head, curved like the prow of a ship and gleaming like burnished armor, did nothing to conceal glinting red eyes like those of Journay’s monstrous familiar that hungered for blood.

Nemo heard one of the knights in his silvery cloak and shining armor swear under his breath, and she could’ve sworn that she detected the faint odor of piss.

“Stand tall!” Fischer was shouting to his men, Lucent rising strong like a pillar behind him, but already their forces were scattering. “We must defend the gates!”

Half of the royal guard had already deserted before Fischer was able to corral his men into a reasonable formation, and Nemo knew then that the battle would be hard-fought, if it all. There were easy games, and there were difficult games, and then there were games where half of the pieces were gone from the start and the remainder were almost useless anyhow.

The Giratina seemed to notice them then and began to snake forward, the serpentine outline of its body phasing without effort through the stony lands before it, and it had cleared the distance between the Thonian sorcerers and Castelle’s final defenders in a matter of seconds. The red markings on its body glowed in tandem with the red tips of its tendril-like wings and its red eyes, and there was so much red already, even before the battle was joined.

“Archers!” Fischer roared, and a cloud of arrows a bit sparser than average flew from the parapets. The dragon watched with fascination, beady red eyes swiveling to track them each in turn, and then the red sigils on its body glowed with an intense light and the arrows passed harmlessly through the creature’s body, burying themselves harmlessly in the ground a hundred feet away.

Nemo had thought she’d known her father’s moods, but she’d never seen him afraid before. He was pale and looked even paler in contrast to the dark steel of his armor, and Lucent was skittering in maddened circles around him.

“Fire arrows!” he shouted, calculating the distance they had remaining before The Giratina reached the castle and destroyed them all, and black-fletched arrows dripping with pitch throughout the ranks behind him. “Again!”

A hundred pinpricks of light soared through the air, and these seemed to find their mark. Most of the fires fizzled out against the dragon’s scales, but at least a dozen of them sunk into the cracks in the creature’s yellow armor and buried themselves nearly to the fletching.

“Ranged mages, now!”

The row above them erupted in a brilliant flash of light as a group of guards, led by Sir Barrick, aided their familiars in firing a sparse collection of silvery, flashing beams of light toward the dragon. Sir Barrick’s mawile did the same, opening its black mouth and allowing the flashing light to erupt from the jagged, tooth-studded head on its back. The beams of light lanced toward the dragon and caused it to stagger back, roaring in pain.

Fischer did not smile at their victory, though. “Again! Reload! Draw! Release!” Another wave of burning arrows shot over his head toward the monster. “Reload! Draw! Release!” And another.

The dragon was studded with arrows shafts this time, with nearly thirty of them stuck in its chest and along its lashing, rat-like tail, but it didn’t seem any slowed for the count. It shrieked again, a feral sound like broken glass scraping along stone, and when it threw back its head this time, the beak-like opening of its mouth filled with blue flames.

Dragonfyre, her doublade hissed in warning, but Nemo was already sprinting down the castle courtyard and shouting, “Get down!” She didn’t know if they would listen to her, oathbreaker and bastard that she was, but their other option was to remain in their formation and die. Nemo reached a lip of stone of one of the outer walls and crouched behind it, the edges of her silvery hair sticking to her face from sweat. Back pressed against the wall, she could see some of the royal guard heeding her warning and running for cover as well, and the rest—

—were too slow, and a wave of the demonic blue flames washed over Nemo’s head and into the courtyard, the light so blindingly light that she could hardly see.

Unbidden, her thoughts went to Bren and Tair, and she prayed to all of the gods she could think of that he had gotten out of the way in time.

The fire faded, replaced by the smell of burning flesh, and Nemo blinked several times to adjust to the fading brightness. Littered around the courtyard were the guards who had been too slow, reduced to a pile of still-burning char and molten metal where their armor and weapons had once been.

Gods above have mercy; Nemo did not doubt that everyone in this castle would join them soon.

Nemo pulled herself upright; the stone wall behind her was uncomfortably hot, and the top of it burned a bright-cherry red. And that had only been its first engagement. The first move in a game was never the hardest-hitting; those were saved for the endgame, when the plan fell into place and it came time to finish off the enemy in a precise strike. Perhaps The Giratina didn’t think like they did and spent all of its enemy up front, or perhaps it hadn’t even begun hitting with all of its strength yet.

She could only hope that it was the former.

She began to run back across the smoking courtyard, the stone still hot beneath her feet even where the fire hadn’t touched it. Some of the survivors were milling around in the chaos, clutching at one another or staring with horror at their dead companions.

Nemo raised one of the the twin blades of the kings into the air and souted as loud as her voice allowed her to. “To me, House Castelle!” she shouted. Fischer was nowhere in sight. If she struck now, the doublade was telling her, she could become a hero in the eyes of the survivors, the brave young princess who had rallied the remaining troops and fought off the monster that had attacked them. And if Fischer and the rest of his legitimate heirs had coincidentally died off in the attack, well—

No, Nemo said, her thoughts clear for the first time. She as fighting now because of—

“Nemo!” Bren ran to her side, his face stained with soot. Tair had taken a few scratches in the previous skirmish, and the lucario looked singed as well, but they were both alive. “How can we help?”

She could just stab him now, the doublade suggested. It was so convenient; she had the weapons right there and they would be forever together, attached to her hands with all the power a person ever needed right at her fingertips. The soldiers were still reeling; no one would suspect yet another corpse in this field of broken bodies.

No, she said, I love him, she said, almost firmly enough at she said it aloud, but shouting it louder would not make the lie any easier to stomach.

Instead, Nemo turned her eyes to the rest of the courtyard, to the rest of her smoking board and surveyed what pieces she had left. There, in the far right, Lucent was pushing Fischer upright, and they were both heavily burned on their left sides but not breathing. Not the sword arm, at least.

“Find Father and get inside of the castle,” Nemo said, fingers tightening on the hilts of her weapons. There was hardly a fight left, hardly a piece to be played, and yet she had to win this. If she failed now, everyone would die; if she won, she could save whoever was left.

But there is only one piece for which you can sacrifice—

Bren, stubborn fool that he was, shook his head. “I want to help.”

Of course he picked now to make his final stand of bravery. Of course. She couldn’t fault him for that, though; Castelle’s brand of heroism was the only one he’d ever known. “And if you do, the line of our House will end with you. Find Father and get inside, Bren.” Her tone left no room for argument.

“But I—”

“Now, Bren,” Nemo hissed, and almost levelled one of her swords at his throat for emphasis. She might’ve used a fist, or a hug, but she was well past all of that now; her hands had been changed entirely to swords and all she had now were weapons and whatever heroism was left in this world. “You run on ahead. It’ll be just like when we were kids again.”

Unbidden, she thought of game of chasing they had played as children that had been so thoroughly ruined by Journay and his gastly and the Thonians, of the crushed hourglass back in the courtyard she would now have to die to defend, of the steely lord of time who had abandoned House Castelle even when the Thonian’s hell-spawned monster had come to the aid of his own, and she knew they would never go back to those times.

Bren was retreating when she looked up again, her vision a little blurrier than before. Put the anger in a jar, she told herself. Seal the jar up tight.

She had thirty, maybe thirty-five left of the silver-cloaked royal guard standing by her. The rest of the survivors were on their own, no doubt, preferring to die or suffer treason than to serve a bastard oathbreaker; and the rest of those weren’t survivors to begin with. Still, Nemo was impressed that any of the soldiers had gathered at her call; she hadn’t thought that they would—

Fischer limped up to her, leaning heavily on the portion of Lucent that hadn’t been melted together. Two of the durant’s legs had fused together in the wash of dragonfyre, and Nemo could only thank the gods that Fischer wasn’t left-handed like she was; from the looks of his arm, a mangled lump of dragonfyre-shapen armor, he wouldn’t be able to use it again.

No, the soldiers had come for Fischer, of course, and she was a fool for thinking otherwise.

All of this in a single attack, her doublade warned her, and she still wanted to stand up to the monster? The Thonians would no doubt take her in if she denounced Fischer; she was still a trueborn heir there, even if she would have to fight her other siblings for the right to rule the corpses.

“I told Bren to get you inside of the castle,” Nemo snapped, trying to ignore the fact that the blade of kings was sucking her dry, crushing her beneath the weight of all of the souls she had failed to save.

“And I told him that I wasn’t yet dead and he wasn’t yet king, so I had no need to follow his orders,” Fischer said, just as calmly, although his forehead was covered in a thin sheet of sweat and his good fist was clenched so tightly that she thought his fingers might sink through his palms. “You fools are all that I have left? I notice that Sir Barrick and his mawile are both absent, and I assume they haven’t taken a leave of absence without informing me, so—”

“My name is Sir Roland. Sir Barrick named me as successor to the royal guard as he was dying, your honor.” A man whose familiar loomed over him in the shape of a large, blue bell nodded, and the rest of the soldiers gathered behind him stood in motley disarray behind him. “Not that I expect to hold the position for much longer.”

“Good, a realist,” Fischer said dismissively, speaking so casually that Nemo could almost forget that he’d had most of his left arm burnt off. “I like you. My first command to you is that you never call me ‘your honor’ or any equally presumptuous title again, should you live to have the chance; my second command is that you slay this dragon for me.”

There was a collection of nervous laughter at Fischer’s words, but by then, the king was already gathering himself up to stand as well as he could, his arm hanging beside him like a dead weight, and they arranged themselves for a lost battle already. “I assume that I do not need to inform you that if we fail, we will not only lose our castle, but our lands and our children as well.”

“No, your honor.” The reply came in three dozen different voices, all with mixed levels of enthusiasm, but a united chorus nonetheless.

“Roland, what did I just tell you about presumptuous titles?”

Whatever the man’s excuse was, he didn’t have time to stammer it out as the ground beneath them began to rumble and The Giratina moved to the foot of the steps, having recovered at last from its barrage of dragonfyre and looking no worse for the wear. Fischer swore violently, and Nemo could faintly hear Sir Roland shouting, “Scatter, and then regroup!” over the screeching sound of the monster’s spiked talons on the cobblestones.

Nemo barrel-rolled out of the way, angling her swords carefully so that she wouldn’t impale herself, and she managed to flank the creature, which was surveying the remainder of the men. Its head tilted back and forth and snaked from side to side as it studied all of its potential targets, as if too tempted by all of them to pick an easy victim.

And then Roland began the attack anew, swinging a heavy-looking battle-axe with a head that was worn and bloodied with use, chopping off the tendrils nearest to him while his familiar began emitting waves of psychic energy toward the creature. Fischer leapt into the thick of things as well, his burnt arm hanging uselessly to one side while as he slashed with his sword. Beside him, Lucent had latched on to one of the spiked protrusions on The Giratina’s underbelly and began clawing its way up the monster’s scaly hide, pausing every so often to sink its mandibles into the dragon’s flesh.

As Nemo watched, the rest of the royal guard entered the fray as well, and the air became thick with dirt and dust and blood as familiars of all sizes began converging on the beast alongside their humans. She saw a gigantic, steel-plated snake the size of a small house butt heads with the dragon’s plated armor, trying to knock it off balance only to be repelled by a blast of inky darkness. From the air, an enormous skarmory flew in from the heavens and began attacking The Giratina’s eyes, and Nemo thought for a painful moment of Retia before determining that the skinny boy hanging on for dear life to the skarmory’s feathered back was not her mother.

They could win this, maybe, Nemo thought as she began hacking at the thing as well, swinging at the tendrils leaking off of the dragon and fighting them off even as they reached to strangle her as if they had minds of their own. She managed to slice through one, sending the red-tipped end flying off some fifteen feet away, but there were always more to replace it, always more.

And then The Giratina gave a mighty roar again, a sound that Nemo had taken to associating with terrible news, and she began to backtrack as quickly as she could before the monster could regroup and slay whatever men she had left. Her mouth was already open to shout a warning to the others, a warning that would no doubt go ignored, when The Giratina howled and furled its remaining wings, gathering itself into a small sphere before it erupted outward with unnatural speed and force, black winds seething in its wake.

Nemo was aware that she was flying for a moment, flying in space and time and free from the world, unfettered, before the stony walls rushed up to meet her and collided with her head with a harsh snap.

She slumped to the ground, hard, her hands still trapped in the swords and useless in breaking her fall. Her thoughts began to run together like an oil canvas that had been smudged too hard, and the laughter and the tears mixed together in her head, for she was sister and daughter and oathbreaker and bastard and hero and villain alike, and if she didn’t make it out of this alive Bren would kill her for dying, except Bren would be dead too if she failed and—

Nemo pulled herself upright, one hand moving to check her head for trauma before she stopped herself to remind herself that her hands hadn’t been of much use to her since the blade of kings had become two to take over her life. She could deal with trauma; for now, she needed to make sure that—

In front of her was Roland, newly-named and self-proclaimed-to-be-short-lived head of the royal guard; twenty feet from her was his neck and head.

The rest of the royal guard was scattered around, equally maimed and equally dead, but Nemo found she only had eyes for Fischer, who now had a sizeable hole instead of a chest.

“Father,” she whispered. She’d survived this assault somehow; it hadn’t been because she’s seen it coming and dodged. The Giratina still looked to her as kin, the doublade was telling her. The Thonians still cared for her, if she wanted to run to them. With Fischer dead, she could easily enter the throne room now and finish off Bren and the others and bring the Thonians all their heads and be welcomed as their hero and praised as the oathbreaking bastard daughter that she was.

No. She couldn’t.

And, Nemo realized belatedly, she’d survived, but only barely. She had a crater to match Fischer’s in the center of her own breastplate, and she could almost feel it through her cracked plate armor on her back. Impaled like Shay, her beautiful familiar. There was an irony somewhere buried there, if she chose to look for it.

Fischer pulled himself up, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth and joining the pool gathering in his breastplate, and he took in the situation with characteristic lightning speed. Lucent, who didn’t even appear hurt but moved slowly, sharing his human’s agony, rushed to prop the king up.

What could they do now, when all hope was lost? They’d engaged a god. Nemo had been as big of a fool for thinking she could win this as she had been for thinking she and Bren and Shay stood a chance in hell of defeating Journay all that time ago.

Fischer locked eyes with her and seemed to recognize that she was the only other living person in the area, even as he began to take slow, painful steps back toward the doors of the castle.

He was abandoning her to the clutches of the dragon. Of course he would; he’d never been a fool for sentiment anyhow. He couldn’t sacrifice everything for her; she wasn’t his heir or his blood or even his love, and she wasn’t worth a damn in those silvery eyes of his, those silvery eyes that, like everything else, she didn’t have.

The Giratina, which had flown over to worry at the corpse of one of the men, leisurely using its beak-like mouth to crack open the head of the steely, shovel-headed serpent that had been attacking it earlier, did not notice the movement.

Fischer was three feet from the castle doors when he stopped and surveyed the area, his gaze lingering on Nemo’s frightened face for a moment. For once, he did not look confident.

Slowly, for the movement cost him, Fischer raised his hands into the air, and the metal around him began to shiver. The studs on the tops of the outer walls, the banner-stands, the discarded swords and shields, the melted puddles of the men who had perished in the dragonfyre, the mangled remains of the perished familiars, the armor of the recently-deceased royal guard with the soldiers still inside and the cloaks still attached; all strained at his call and then floated into the air. The steel serpent slipped out of The Giratina’s grasp, and the dragon turned its head at last to look to see Fischer, King of House Castelle, standing on the steps of his castle with a cloud of iron and steel orbiting him as if he were the center of a tiny galaxy.

It wouldn’t be enough to slay the dragon; The Giratina had weathered sustained attacks from Sir Barrick’s long-ranged mages for nearly five minutes. Surely he could see—

Thunk. Thunk.

One hunk of metal drove itself into the gate, a mangled black and tan shape that might’ve once been Sir Barrick’s mawile, and then another hunk of metal, and then another. And Fischer calmly locked eyes with the dragon that had fatally wounded him so long ago and continued to use whatever pieces he still had left at his disposal to do his duty as king and protect his people. The metal piled in piece by piece, two feet thick, then three, and soon a mountain of steel formed in front of the castle gate, making entrance to the hall impassible.

Thunk. Thunk.

Fischer locked eyes with Nemo once again, silver meeting black, and he sagged backward, using the last of his power to add his own armor and his own familiar to the ghastly barricade.

Nemo stared at him in shock, chest heaving, or at least what remained of it, as she tried to process why.

He was doing it for Bren, the doublade told her, whispering sinuously in her ear, voice as soft as the silk tassels twined around her wrists. Couldn’t she see that all Fischer had ever cared about was his trueborn son? And why wouldn’t he; why would he ever love a bastard oathbreaker like her, after all that she had done?

But he had looked to her, almost as if—

—The Giratina, as if aware of Fischer’s defiance at last, roared and—

—Fischer had faith in her.

But she was dying and damned, the doublade told her. She could at least go back to the Thonians and see if what dark arts they’d used to raise the dragon work on her.

Maybe he hadn’t loved her as much as Bren, and maybe Fischer never would, but that was beside the point. It was not a hero’s place to be loved; adoration was for the great man, not the good one. Maybe he’d grown to hate her just as much as she’d grown to hate him, when she’d forsworn everything to get her crown and her throne, but maybe, like she had, he’d cradled that seedling of love deep down, deep down where it wouldn’t thwart his actions. For there was no room for love in the hero’s game, he’d told her, no place for family ties to hold her back; she had to be cold and uncaring and her soul would have to be cracked beyond repair if she were to choose the way of the sword as her destiny. And if she hadn’t been cold and uncaring and cracked before, then the way of the sword would quickly make her that way.

And yet here the old man was, staggering back and looking every bit his age at last, and maybe he’d finally rescinded and found that one piece for which he needed to sacrifice everything. And maybe that piece still wasn’t Nemo; maybe it never had been and never would be; that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. That didn’t mean that his hard hadn’t broken when he’d ordered his son to kill his daughter, even if he’d hidden all of that pain behind layers of armor and a painted smile because that was what the good guys did.

And, most damning of all, maybe he’d started out as a little boy who’d wanted thunder and had grown up into a cold and hard and bitter man who wasn’t even worth a drop of rain to the gods who had abandoned them.

The doublade was screaming at her, and Nemo was half-aware of The Giratina’s form crashing through the remains of the castle and screeching in rage at having been thwarted, at least temporarily, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from Fischer’s face. The king and his bastard whelp, she couldn’t help but smile. Nemo wanted to laugh when she’d seen the matching holes they had in their breastpieces, craters that reached nearly from one end of their chests to the other. The king and his bastard whelp, both heartless and dying.

He shouted something at her, but his voice was too weak and too far away for her to make out the words, but she could probably guess. Well, don’t just stand there. Do something about it.

And then Nemo was running, her twin blades crossed in a defensive stance as Shay had once done so many years before her, and she braced herself to stand between the rampaging dragon and Fischer, the man who was her father in all things but blood. The doublade screamed at her no, don’t die for him, he who never loved you, and in return, Nemo channeled all of the fear and hatred and love that she had ever held for that man and everyone else across their mental link, so much that she thought it would destroy her.

And there was Retia and Shay and Bren beside her, the way it should’ve but never could’ve been, and Nemo knew that there were so many pieces for which she would’ve so willingly died, so many times she would’ve felt her heart and soul cracking for another and not done a thing to halt it, which meant that she would never have made a good hero in her father’s eyes.

But there was the secret, she told the doublade through the backlash of emotion that was threatening to overwhelm her. She only ever had to be good enough for herself.

The Giratina leapt into the air, the remains of its black-tendrils spread wide and reaching for her, its face studded with arrows and its body leaking ink-black blood all over the castle parapets as it came for her, those red eyes that had started everything locking with hers and preparing to wipe her out for good.

They could not back down, Nemo told the doublade that was screaming at her to surrender. She was all that he had left. Bren? Fischer? The steely dragon of their House?

The Giratina reached her and threatened to plow through her, leaving her nothing but a bloody smear alongside the rest on the stone, but she twisted her feet and struggled to stand tall. It would destroy her, and her deeds would go unsung, the doublade told her, and she would never be great or remembered or gone before her time at all.

But at least she would be good.

There was a blinding flash of light, and Nemo prepared herself to be thrown into the barricade of corpses and impaled, or crushed by the dragon’s massive maw, or devoured by dragonfyre.

Instead, she watched as the doublade crossed before her began to glow, the tassels that had bound the blades of kings to her arms slipping undone and wrapping around one another. The crossed blades merged together and glowed so brightly she was blinded.

There was a resounding clang, and The Giratina screeched in pain and reared back as if it had been burned. There was a circle-shaped dent on the armor on its golden helm, and Nemo looked down at her hands in shock to see that she was holding the sigil of her house in her hands, the enormous domed hemisphere of the king’s shield arcing in front of her.

They’d lost some part of it during the years, had forgotten about the shield in favor of the sword, but Nemo didn’t have time to reflect on that. She found herself staggering forward, her chest feeling strangely heavy—she’d expected it to feel light given how much blood she’d lost, she couldn’t help but think nonsensically—and she raised her shield in front of her even as her helm cracked off with a groan and left her vulnerable.

And then she was running toward the thing with what strength remained to her, moving so quickly she could’ve pretended she was flying, not clanking laboriously across the remains of her father’s courtyard. The shield in front of her shivered, sensing her intent, and the sword strapped across the inside of the dome unsheathed itself, tassel coming undone so that the blade could come loose, and suddenly she was replaying that scene in the bloodied meadow from so long ago, this time with the true blade of kings in hand as she charged down her monster.

The Giratina roared at her, as if mocking her insolence, but by then Nemo had gotten off a sharp slash to its underbelly that cut down to the bone and sent gallons of ink-black blood to the ground.

And the dragon roared again, eyes narrowing as it chased down the maiden, but Nemo was already switching gears at once, bringing the blade back in front of her and crouching and then watching with a sort of distanced fascination as it followed her chain of thought and brought back the shield.

She had mastered the thing at last. For so long it had run her into the ground, forced her to fight in its schemes like a pawn, and now she understood the game they were playing and commanded it like she would any board. She was in control here, for however long that would last.

The stream of dragonfyre parted uselessly on either side of her, so bright and so hot that the stones around her began to smoke and then glow, but the shield remained strong, even as Nemo stood up, knees struggling against the crushing weight of the fire above her as she raised the shield high, feinting to the right and then spinning to the left. She held the shield out over the right side of her body to ward off the remaining torrent of flames even as the shield began to withdraw and the blade came out, and she was fully sideways and out of the bath of fire just as the shield vanished and the blade was fully formed and—

And with one silver, sweeping arc, Nemo brought the true blade of kings biting into The Giratina’s neck. The effort of the swing sent her stumbling forward, and she lost her balance and collapsed to the ground out of exhaustion—and probably bloodloss, the part of her mind devoted to checking up on the hole that was her chest informed her belatedly—just as The Giratina’s head landed next to her, tumbling around like the balls she used to chase with Shay and Bren and Tair when they were young and the world was bright and airy.

The darkness lifted, but Nemo was no longer awake to see it.

[hr][/hr]

Bren reached her at last, too late as always, having finally realized that there was no hacking through Fischer’s barricade and blasting through the wall beside it instead with Tair’s help, but he knew with a sinking feeling in the pit of his heart that he had still been too slow.

And there was Nemo in front of him, armor twisted and dented and most of it torn off and scattered around like fallen leaves about the pavilion, her hair coming undone, the blades of kings detached from her arms at long last.

He hadn’t even been aware that he was running to her, and then he was cradling her head in his lap and wiping away the blood that was smeared around her mouth. She’d never cared about appearances, and especially not now, but she was dying and—

“I’m doing it,” Nemo whispered quietly, her voice weak and her heartbeat flagging into the cobblestones below, the cascade seemingly flowing harder when Bren moved his hands to try to staunch the bleeding. “Look at me, Bren. I’m doing it, right?”

Beside her, the domed shield, sigil of their House, slowly began to crumble to dust.

Father is dead, Nemo, he wanted to tell her, but he found he didn’t have the heart. And there was the good news, too, that the reinforcements had arrived to find the Thonians fleeing back to the forests when they saw their god die, but he didn’t have the heart to waste her time on the routing of her people, either. “Doing what?” he asked instead.

“I can’t believe I’m so foolish. Dying like this, like in all of those stupid myths Retia used to tell us. Swooning into a brave knight’s arms as I spend my last.” Nemo paused; indeed, her breathing was becoming more laborious. “I was never a good fair maiden for the stories, though, was I?”

“I was never a brave knight anyhow.”

“Thank the gods you’ll be a better king, then.” Nemo’s lips moved into a smile that was cracked with disuse, and her eyes slowly closed. “I’m doing it, Bren, aren’t I?” The wind tussled her unbound hair, sent the silver flying into the breeze, and with her eyes closed like this, she could almost lie to herself and believe it.

He couldn’t bring himself to think about what she was saying even as the understanding reached him in pieces and tore him as such. “You saved everyone, Nemo. Father would be proud.”

That almost earned him another smile, but Nemo’s strength had gone somewhere and she couldn’t quite find it. “Not everyone,” she croaked, and thought of the horrible wall in front of the gates. There was only one piece for which they could sacrifice everything, Fischer had told her, but he must’ve never known that there was also everything, for which she could sacrifice her one piece.

She didn’t want to think about the man who wasn’t even her father; not now; that would be too hard. So she thought of Retia and Bren and Shay instead. “It was never for him, Bren.” And then, “I’m doing it, Bren, aren’t I?” she asked again, voice nearly inaudible now.

Bren wiped a stray raindrop, portend of the final storm, from her cheek and lied once more to himself that it was actually a raindrop to begin with. “Yes, Nemo,” he said at last, but she was too far gone to hear him, and then she was gone altogether. “You’re doing it. You’re flying.”

Tair threw back his head and howled.

A great steely dragon flew overhead, its form barely illuminated in the dark clouds by a flash of lightning.

The dark heavens above seemed to sigh, and then they shook with a single rumble of thunder, as loud as the sound of the earth splitting in two, for Nemo, firstborn of House Castelle, first princess, oathbreaker, bastard, Grey Knight of the realm, unsung hero who died long before her time.

Spoiler

attempted captures: gastly, durant, pawniard, riolu, skarmory, aegislash
minimum/maximum character count: 195,000/255,000
character count: 217k-ish
success/failure: ---

write-a-roll prompt: dark, hero, pokémon/human (together but separate)

---

Frankly, I have no idea if this meets Merciless standards. I also have no idea what Merciless standards even are.

This story, like most of my other ones, started off almost entirely on a pun—The Fisher King, and then Bobby Fischer, King of Chess. However, I had intended to make this story happy and wonderful and full of delicious chess puns, with a cheerful ending despite the “dark” setting I got in WaR, with tons of warmth and Christmas cheer and—

You know that song and dance already.

Yeah, well. Phasing out author’s notes unless I have to because the story speaks for itself and fanfiction.net reviewers laugh at them and yada yada (she says after two paragraphs of notes and before one more). Also, about half of the names in this story besides Nemo are terrible chess puns, and Nemo is a terribly lame pun in itself, so there’s that. (No actually, Fischer, Fisher, fish, Finding Nemo, and then the whole Latin schtick).

Credit where credit is due; I wrote a good deal of this after finishing up A Storm of Swords (I’d give credit to GRRM, but he seems to have cut out my heart just like he did to lkdwtfaifhredweddinglsawtfdfh). He did put me back in the mood for some dark age-esque prose and people-talk, and I also give him credit for the marvelous idea of a pointy throne upon which no one wants to sit that lots of people fight over and then three-quarters of the main cast ends up dying. Credit also the Phillip Pullman/His Dark Materials universe, from which I (again) drew the idea of people being born with creatures linked to people who are physical manifestations of that person’s feelings (although HDM’s rendering of these creatures, there called daemons, have far more interesting and different nuances than the familiars shown here).

 

I'M ALMOST DONE GRADING SYN'S STORY BUT I'M NOT QUITE FINISHED BUT I DON'T WANT TO MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY SO I'M CLAIMING NOW.

WILL NOT BE A TWO MONTH LONG WAIT I PROMISE.

 

I know this has nothing to do with me, but lol 4 months later

 

CLAIMING THIS.

I LOVE YOU.

<3

 

I should prolly mention that I'm now in the habit of analyzing literature on the level of every individual word. There's a lot of wonderful minuscule nuances in here that I loved, and we'd be here till March (and that'd be awful cause we'd miss BB) if I tried to capture every thing that went right here cause there was a lot that did, but in this grade I tried to focus on improving the bigger picture of your writing. You may find it either a good thing or an annoyance that I've read a few of your stories and have seen patterns developing that I can comment upon. You are a talented and wonderful weaver of words, master of narratives, Hero of stories and Hero of my heart, and know that most of what I say here is a personal commentary that you don't necessarily need to heed.

So just know that even though this may seem very negative at parts, it's because I just really want to be helpful. And know that you wrote an excellent, excellent story regardless of anything my little grade says about it!

ONWARD...

hello i am a box ​

Storytelling:

Your story is like a box. You've presented a contained, multi-dimensional, beautiful piece manufactured from work and love. Closest to the surface are corners, the seemingly simple plot points and the edges that form them, the linear pathways that we expect in a fairytale story beginning from that familiar "once upon a time." These superficial, simple edges, points, and nameless faces provided the perfect structure for us to predict what was going to happen in the actual plot of the story. So then we really reach into the limitless depths of the box created by Nemo, Retia, Fischer, and Bren. Their collective survival story that they've sealed for themselves, because honestly they all individually created the drama that they're in, lead to an infinity of mysteries and demons similar to opening up Pandora's Box. Also, something I think you can appreciate relevant to Nemo: Pandora's Box may have actually been a jar!

Now, all this box mumbo-jumbo has a reason behind it. I'd like to approach your story as a reductionist text. Think of this as the opposite of world-building: instead of spending time and characters carefully adding in description about the physical surroundings, the history behind the surroundings and the people, and more about the way your world works that transitions us into the piece, we took the opposite route. The schema of the fairytale and castle was set up for us, and then deconstructed in lies, hypocrisies, and everything else that very much fit into the double entendre of Dark for your WAR prompt. Everything about the land and its people was so simple that we know the story lies elsewhere. Everything, the whole story, created by the four main characters lies within the box. The people and the armies and the knights and all that functions outside of the box. Essentially, the story strips away the surface plot and operates on the emotions and motivations of four people that essentially drive this drama-fairytale-darkness into incredible depths. I'd argue that you could have had almost all of this story take place within the castle and we would have felt the same emotions (barring the events of the climax).

My two biggest critiques of the reductionism: firstly, I often thought that events were perhaps too predictable. Princess Nemo is saved by her father from Journay's familiar because yes, the princess is always saved and we knew that was coming early on; or I thought about the moment where Nemo sets off to find her mother and literally after a new break, her mother is there because we expected her to rightfully reunite with her and complete that quest she, the Hero, set herself upon. This is a double edged sword: we speed up the plot by anticipation, and we can also quickly jump through events because we know how they're supposed to happen and therefore they don't need to be explained as much. However, this reducing of the plot's actual events definitely redirects the focus to what's happening with the characters. In a lot of my situation models of the story, a lottt more time passed by with Nemo playing chess against her father and having that sort of inner tension vs. an actual fighting outside of the castle. This means that the inner monologue better be pretty damn good, and most of the time, it was! But simultaneously I felt like the story had to trade these type of inner happenings for the actual adventurey-more-classical heroic stuff that could have been cool if we spent a longer time on it.

Secondly, I thought that the technique reduced a few important, very complex themes central to the story without intending to. My biggest concern was the reduction of the "hero" theme. For a darker story, we would think that the simple factors behind the commonly respected good "hero" would be dissected, grossly revolutionized, and made much more impactful or different than what we presume the good hero to be. We use that word a lot in this story, but is it applied in this story in the way that the story defines it? Nemo is told that the good hero is the one who will make the sacrifice for all the people, the one who will save the day, the one who understands that real war isn't a game and the hero must respect that. She strives for this, to supposedly become King and protect people, and I think that's exemplified by, "This was war, this was her fight, and this was her villain, but Nemo found that she hadn’t prepared enough to be the hero, even if she’d had the cause of one." There's a whole world out there and a lot of rain, but I felt like we were always reading on the edges of the box here. There's Nemo's selfish drive to become King while we as the readers are always cognizant that there's a much bigger war going on outside of all these characters all of the time; people are dying, they're still playing chess, and I read the loss of Retia as more of a small sacrifice in face of the thousands of lives that we know are being lost everyday in this war.

Her story seemed too dramatic at parts, and words like "sacrifice," "cowardice," "leadership," "lying," began popping up to explain heroism in a way that seemed way too cliche as the story progressed. I thought this may have become a major problem because Nemo's overall struggle, the selfish drive to become King and her agony over the loss of her loved ones, her resentment at the other two main characters in the story, seemed inconsequential in face of the very people who are dying that she's trying to convince us she deserves to save. I think it would have been easier to redefine heroism in this story through actions, backing away from reductionist explanations, and to allow Nemo to become her own defined hero opposed to a martyr. More on that later.

Despite my criticism, I really applaud you for writing this story in the way that you did. It was certainly inventive. It made the really cool background behind the dragons, and the rain and the thunder, the few pieces of more traditional worldbuilding, really shine. This was a rare form of storytelling and I definitely appreciated the creativity.

Away from the craft and into the story of the story.

Story:

The entire introduction is beautiful! You managed to tread a very thin thread of anxiety that quickly wrapped around readers like a rope. I was wondering what was going to happen with the Drip. Drip. but Nemo's end monologue there is incredible and made me excited to see what she was going to do in the story. You made a fairytale fade from pink to the deepest shade of black in about one second and I appreciated that. Additionally, I enjoyed how the narrative hit up some really big themes really quickly. Innocence, understanding of death, what it means to be mentally beyond your time (society - the era's time, individual - one's actual age), the absurdity of difference inherent in the Pawniard and Nemo, human potential and the worth of human life. The introduction definitely hooked the audience and got us thinking about some major issues that this little girl would have to tackle. Also, good job on establishing major symbols like the hourglass and the lovely dragons themselves.

Looking onward, the mental connection between the familiars and their people was truly so cool. I was getting feels from Natasha and Jacob, and if you really like that projected mental imagery idea I'd suggest reading the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness! I felt that the first 1/4-1/3 of the story involved some very intense and very relevant character-building, from the two children running around, to their growing apart, to the very important sense of monotony and unrest growing in Nemo that we as readers began to feel. As a heroic narrative I would have expected more actiony-adventury events to be happening right off the bat, but again since we're deconstructing that whole idea I enjoyed how the usually hectic pace of the traditional hero narrative was thrown off here (while we could still steadily predict things to come).

If I could add one thing here, I would suggest varying the perspectives of the characters while we're in this really neat character-building introductory mode. Bren's perspective directly following the mother's death was incredible and quite symbolic that it was placed there, as the mother was the sort of defending wall between the two children. When she passed, it was symbolic that we received Bren's side of the story for the first time. Specifically, I would have enjoyed seeing the mother's perspective during this beginning (perhaps when she’s teaching them swordsmanship) or even the familiar's. It would have been nice to know what Reita thought of the madness occurring to her children, especially given the knowledge later on about her and Nemo's true father, and it would have been mind-blowing to enter into Shay for a second and understand how she operated within the mind of this powerful and, as you elegantly articulated, precocious child. The easiest time to do these types of perspective switches is during the slower character-building moments, so I would recommend doing these there if you want to add just another neat dimension to the characters.

Pivotal moment: drip drip returns and Nemo's realization and then boom thunder clap, YOUR MOM’S DEAD, and all my feelings were slashed and it was wondrous! The execution of this scene was marvelous. The consistent power-struggle between her father, the parallelisms in the chess and the pawns/pieces and the people, wonderful. What I loved most about this scene was the way time was manipulated until we almost felt every second, reasoning and turning over Fischer's words in our heads, just as she did. "eight minutes and thirty-four seconds" coupled with the drip, reminding us each drip is another life lost, was traumatic. Good job!

Going to fly over most of Book Two and the beginning of Book Three right here because that's when I feel the story really became a neat mental drama that I'm going to comment on through characterization. I feel like there were three climaxes to this story, a plateau for each character: Fischer's confession of his failure as a king (or his near death at the hands of his daughter), Bren against his sister the Grey Knight, and Nemo's last action that marks her transition into the true hero and ultimately, her own death. Each was a marvelous redemption for each character it represented. In a story solely about motivations, self-worths, desires, and spoiled family bonds, because that's what it's really all about, you managed to conclude all of these character's stories in a way that will stay with us forever. The dimensions of resentment but necessary love between characters and the two pairs of parallelisms, the dragons and the people, the ruling families/martyrs before them and the present characters, provided so much more depth to the story. OH, and the additional climax with the shadow dragon incredible too, of course! THIS WAS SO GOOD I HAVE NOTHING MORE TO SAY. THANK YOU FOR WRITING A GOOD STORY.

Characterization:

Back to the concern with "reduction" of themes into phrases and words that made them a lot simpler than I think you wanted them to be. Context: Nemo's agony over her mother's death

And we go on with more of the narrator's theorizing on lying and the blood of the innocent and hope, etc. I feel like the narrative is attempting to drown us in the character's agony by throwing words of stones that have no weight to them. I hope I'm not reducing the importance of Shay and Retia's loss: ANY loss of life is ENORMOUS. However, I felt like the effects of the loss on the children and the Kingdom would have been much better seen through actions and storytelling opposed to the narrator's trying to tell us how the two children alone felt or throwing us these semi-vague notions of heroism. On an additional note, I felt like the whole "fairytale-narrator" idea could have been used very effectively here to portray that loss. Using that tone of innocence to communicate very thick scenes of agony could be an interesting contradictory style to tinker with, and an active way to get more out of the narrator.

Why the concept reductionism works in something like shantih, shantih, shantih but not as effectively here: there's so much more at stake here. In the former story, this explanation of heroism/belief operates as a survival technique for two ostracized individuals struggling to stay alive / find meaning and solace in their world and through each other. Here, the similar explanations of these themes did two complicated things; for one, it aggrandized the main character's personal plights until they seemed irrelevant to the conflict of the thousands of innocent people outside of them; second, it served to reduce Bren and Nemo into the plastic pawns that they're desperately avoiding becoming. In the beginning, Nemo talks about what heroism to her, and that's excellent, but then she begins thinking about these abstract concepts seemingly without much meaning to them and it took away from her initial introduction as a free thinker with a great mind, skillset, and ambition to boot. We love her because her whole life is a testimony to defiance, but when she starts believing in these simpler ideas behind heroism that somebody told her, I believe it takes away a bit from her original, fresh mission.

For future stories: think about how your character's actions affect others. Think about how one action affects their whole world, and use that prediction to both keep characters consistent with the landscape they live upon and with their relationships to other characters. Another thing to think about that may help later on: talk to your characters. Yes, have a conversation with them in your mind. Start with simple questions you'd ask of people you just met, and then go deeper into their motivations. This sounds really, really dumb, but this will help you stay true to your characters as your narrative continues and you find yourself wondering what character Y really would do here or what they would think.

I realize that I'm being terribly critical of the whole theme execution here. It was such a central piece to this story though, both the shaping of the box and the integral motivations behind Nemo and her family. I thought it had to be addressed in this way.

Moving on to the characterizations of each individual.

Nemo: Gracious, the ending is the beginning and the beginning is the ending for our hero... Here we have the princess, the villain, and the hero all in one package of intelligence, wit, longing, and agony. She was truly epic. I massively disliked her on the first-read through. But after a second reading, we reason that her resentment and her love for her family is well-warranted, and her actions at the end become that much more amplified given what we know of her inner suffering. Firstly, you did a profound job of using subtle moments to characterize her from the beginning: when she thinks that "living was far more preferable," or her light remarks against her brother, or her confidence that she will be King, we really enter into her world. Becoming lost in the world of one character's mind is something truly special. Throughout most of this, you didn't even have to tell us what she was thinking because there was so much great, unspoken stuff happening that created the circumstances for the extraordinary. The fact that she's being trained by the very people that she wants to both kill and protect was maddening and imagining how she felt was crazy!

Edgy area: Nemo's fall from budding hero to rampaging Grey Knight?? Definitely some mixed feelings here. First of all: GREAT job on this twist, because I don't think I'm the only one who missed the clues when Bren asked her what it was like to kill or her loss of magic (my God my feels), but wow, the complete 180 here exposed us to the depth of her raw resentment and it was glorious. But at the same time, it totally contradicts her wanting to save people (going back to her not truly striving to be the hero she supposedly wants to be) and then at the end oh I care about all of you again, sorry for killing like all of you on either side a few days earlier. Let me say this first: do whatever you want with your character. I love when authors are brave enough to show us the full range of their character's abilities and emotions, and honestly if it's inconsistent with that character I don't care. A good character is a good character, end story, end game, you won the world.

My only "complaint" here I suppose is that I thought we were missing something in her transition here. It's funny because I believe you told me something similar in the Defiance grade and I told you something similar in the Brotherhood grade, we both screwing up lmao, but I'm really not worried here because I think some careful editing could have facilitated Nemo's transition. Had we been in her head more in the two years leading up to the onslaught of the Grey Knight, or even yet, in the head of Bren or Fischer to truly contrast how mentally far off the deep end Nemo has gone by omitting her thoughts, the whole Grey Knight thing would have made that much more sense.

Something that happened that could have been made even that much more awesome imo: Nemo's separation from Bren and her mother. Your best work that I've read of sibling rivalry: Allie vs. her sister. The potency of the envy, the agony, the longing... can never be forgotten. The most powerful stuff in both that story and this one happens in the small moments, most powerful of all here when Shay's trying to claw Bren's face out and he realizes how much she hates him. Goodness. Making this even that much more dramatic through more moments, more focalization on Nemo, of both her hate and love of him, would have been golden. For the mother: the narrator even states, somewhere, something along the lines that Nemo didn't know what it was like to miss her mom so much until she held her corpse. If we saw even more of the formal distancing like we did in the beginning, such as the fact that Retia wants her daughter to call her Retia and not mom or something, would have both contributed to the dark ages theme and the distancing of daughter and mother. Also would have made Fischer's confession about her true parenthood that much more intense.

Bren: Nemo's perfect foil. I love that Bren was a child, truly a child. Really good job in the creation of this innocent foil who reacted like a human and not a fairytale character, such as when he cannot even bring himself to cry at his mother's funeral. He was next in line for King, but I interpreted him as more a prisoner of war than anybody else. His story has ended and I still feel so much sorrow for him and that in itself is moving. In terms of characterization, I was a little irked by phrases such as these:

This is a small thing, but this type of characterization makes Bren seem like he doesn't care about himself at all as he's about to face off against the Grey Knight. This is a very life or death situation but the narrator nonchalantly plays it off and I think that depreciates how important this moment is for Bren. If he doesn't care about his life, readers may stop caring too...

Fischer: AHHH this man is my favorite! The Princess Alira story is gorgeous and brings a whole new dimension of pain and emotion to Fischer and his whole family. The person who initially seems like the most unbreakable, crude character has actually experienced some of the most intense loss and shame. The person who hates his son for King and shames his daughter because he knows he will never/can never make her King actually loves both of his children so much. The person who seems to think of people in terms of pieces on the map is actually the most sentimental guardian, and the moment where we see him keeping literal bodies and parts of people in his little chamber... terrifying, real, and visceral. Kudos on creating such a multi-faceted, intriguing dude here!

Description:

My two favorite pieces of description - absolutely GORGEOUS way to communicate some intangible yet important ideas!

Description overall covered the bare bases. Throughout the story, I tended to think that description was at one extreme end or another. There were a number of really long sentences during the action scenes that sort of confused those scenes. These could have been fixed with some easy editing, but I will point out a verbose, garden-path-like sentence just in case this sentence was indicative of a pattern developing opposed to just a typo. Other times, I was wondering where the description was at all; the most description of Bren's white night armor, for example, is the fact that it's too big for him. This is symbolic in multiple ways, but in terms of the sensory description and the whole knight imagery I thought we could have been indulged a little more (especially as this is directly related to the WAR prompt).

Really quickly, there were a lot of incorrect pronoun references to Nemo as he or him, and then they was a couple of times Nemo was spelt Neon I usually don't care about typos - if I can understand what the author was trying to say then honestly it's all fine cause no one's perfect, but if there are consistent errors like that present then we begin to have a little bit of a problem.

I laud the intention of this long sentence - a whole bunch of phrases and madness matches the incomprehensibility of the experience. One or three sentences like this in a whole story would really deliver that shocking effect. I think that this one is more confusing for the readers than chaos-inducing, just because you have multiple characters moving around and the referents start getting confused and what does it mean to have someone spill over your fingers - sometimes, it is easiest to just say that a character is dead.

Spoiler

AHHH! Now this was an excellent execution of the long sentence effect. It worked more efficiently here because it's the end of the scene and Nemo's doing some deep thinking. By extending the sentence like this, you're also prolonging our mental model of the situation and making us feel the same agony she does.

In an opposite effect, I really liked those four brief sentences about Bren and Tair's injuries. There is weight in light sentences too.

Here, the fluidity of what's going on is delayed by the reader having to piece together every separate verb phrase. Long sentences create pandaemonium in the sentence but they may also confuse it to the point that the reader just has to keep reading it over and over again just to understand. What to do? Sometimes it's best to just read your story out loud to yourself as you're revising - you'll naturally catch where things are getting too long, what you can cram into a sentence without suffocating the reader's comprehension, etc. And once you've read out loud for a few paragraphs or so, your mind just naturally gets into a good pattern of variations.

To improve sensory description, I think it may help to include more spatial descriptions. For example, I really liked when Giratina's head thingie was described a ship hull because that made it much more real in my mind. Along with spatial description, I'd recommend more of that touch description as well, which is arguably the hardest one to add in. What does it feel like for Journay's familiar to be all up in Nemo's hair like that (or become more specific: what does "certainly felt solid" feel like?).

On another note, I'd recommend balancing expository description with the narrator's focalization of Nemo. There were times when she thought something was "so incredibly awesome" or "really and truly" or... "whelp" XD It's fine to use these phrases every now and then, but too often and it begins to take away from the fairytale setting you're in. If readers are paying attention then it kinda leads them away.

Also, I must point out that the diction here was outstanding. I certainly learned new words, which was a treat! You really fine-tuned this story to the time period! My last cautionary word of advice is to watch for words or phrases that are overused. "too dark" "cold enough to freeze fire" and "by the gods" were used so often that their original imagery effect faded out. It's possible to repeat images, but only if you're doing it for a very specific reason that somehow ties it back to a concept (if you are familiar with Stephen King, he does this a lotttt). Also, do you know JK, cause he says "by the gods" so much lol

Grammar:

hmm yes much went wrong here

but many more things went right in this story and that's what matters!

proofread plz

Length:

You are a hero.

Bye.

Outcome:

Gastly, Durant, Pawniard, Riolu, and Skarmory CAPTURED! You've written an incredible tale here of bravery, sacrifice, flight, hatred and love. You've written about heroes that will stay with us forever while doing it in your own unique way. Really, your writing style is something that's so special, and your potential with it knows no bounds. Speaking solely of this story, I felt like I could not award Aegislash because of a combination of certain factors that worked against the narrative. What are merciless standards? I don't honestly know either - to me, a good story is a good story. An even better story is a good story that is refined beyond its class.

Points of improvement:

1) Complete the story.
2) Iron out inconsistencies in the narrator.
3) Proofread to clean out grammar errors.

WAR:

• Dark: WOW, what can I say - you really took this theme and ran with it! The dark ages feeling is the outside of the box right, with the knights and the princess and the queen and the King but really it was about medieval values too. The daughter being oppressed because she's a woman, the supposed purity and valiance of the white Knight. What's even BETTER is that you made Dark a bit of a double entendre here; there's the dark ages and then there's the literal darkness swirling through Nemo. There's even a third darkness, the demons of each character. Fischer's sepulchral underground may as well epitomize darkness... Well-played, ma'am!
  
  
• Hero: I've prolly hit this one way over the head and I apologize if I was overly-critical. This is absolutely the theme you wrote about, and even though I thought I found major inconsistencies in it, the whole story revolved around it. So yes, this is definitely a pass too!
  
  
• Pokemon/Human (Sep. but Together): For sure ^^ I commented on the coolness of the familiar mental link earlier. The together-but-separate bit is really distinguished upon Nemo's loss of shay. The psychological, emotional, and prolly physical hole (neurons) can never be healed, and we carry that knowledge with us for the whole of the story. Marvelous. Each familiar also had its own outside personality as well, which was a nifty additional touch.
  
  You may claim a Complex-Pokemon! yayayyayayaya much love forever

 

Gotta give props to Elysia, here (and Smiles for grading). 5 Complexes and a Hard with one Story is probably a record somewhere (and will probably remain that way for a while) Congrats!!