Alarion’s eyes cracked open with immediate regret.
Sunlight, far too bright—and far too cheerful for his liking—stabbed him through a gap in unfamiliar curtains. His head felt twice its usual size, each beat of his heart a hammer strike against his temples. He hadn’t felt this bad since… when? His fight with Or’Valde? At least this was more localized.
He groaned and tried to sit up, but that, too, proved to be a mistake. The room spun lazily, his stomach twisting in protest. He froze, willing reality to stay where it belonged.
Just how much had he had to drink?
He wasn’t in his room. The walls were deep emerald, not the pastel blue of the Governor’s palace or the familiar gray of his Ilvan-Trai quarters. The bed, far more comfortable than any he’d had in years, dipped oddly on one side. Almost as if...
That was when he noticed the warmth beside him.
Alarion looked to his right with the timidity of a condemned man. He knew what he would find, and he could already sense the peanut gallery winding up their newest jibes.
A woman lay next to him, her dark hair spilled across a silk pillow, one bare shoulder visible above the sheets. She was beautiful, unfamiliar, and still very much asleep. She was also several years his senior, perhaps twenty-five to his nineteen years—if not more.
His heart began to race at the sight of her, worsening his agony. It was hard to think clearly, which made his next mistake both predictable and avoidable.
“Kotone,” he murmured, without thinking.
“Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!”
“Shut up!” Alarion mouthed harshly to his buzzing, insect-like familiar. The woman beside him stirred but did not wake. A small blessing on a chaotic morning.
“Anti-toxin,” he told Kotone, as quietly as he could. She buzzed in place a few seconds longer than usual, her oddly slanted eyes judging him. She vanished with a pop of air and reappeared an instant later, dropping a thin vial of green liquid onto his lap.
“Thank you,” he told her silently.
“Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!”
“Mmph…?” the woman beside him murmured, rolling onto her side as Alarion cursed his hand-me-down familiar. Why couldn’t he just have a normal storage power?
Alarion drew a deep breath through his nose, then downed the potion. He struggled to abide the alchemical substances at the best of times, and ill as he felt, it came worryingly close to coming back up as fast as it went down.
Thankfully, anti-toxins were fast-acting.
[Anti-Toxin – Minor] has taken effect. Your condition [Poisoned – Moderate] has been reduced to [Poisoned – Slight]
Moderate? Alarion gawked at the alert as his nausea ebbed. Had someone tried to poison him last night? Because even Kali’s Rank II liquor should not have—
“Mmm… good morning, Martyr,” the brunette whispered.
Annette. Her name was Annette. They’d met the night before, during the Governor’s Equinox Ball. She’d said he looked lost and wondered if he needed a guide. Memories of that introduction and more sharpened into full clarity as the pain diminished. Quite vivid memories, in fact.
“Please don’t call me that,” Alarion replied.
“Oh? You didn’t seem to mind so much last night,” she giggled as her young lover’s tan skin took on a crimson hue in the half-lit room. “Was it the way I said it that you prefer—”
“N-No!” he winced at the volume of his reply, then looked away quickly as he realized his eyes were drifting where they ought not. “No, I just… Alarion. Please.”
“Of course, Alarion.” Her slim hand curled around his wrist, her index finger stroking him in a way he found shockingly reassuring. “Did regret come along with the morrow?”
Alarion shifted to the edge of the bed, then glanced back over his shoulder to see her smiling up at him. If she was offended by the idea, she was good at hiding it—even when he shook his head in denial. “No, I just… I worry I am taking advantage—”
Annette’s laughter was music to his ears.
“Oh, you sweet boy,” she tittered, rising enough to drape her arms around his neck, pert breasts pushing against his bare back. “By what means do you think you could take advantage of me even if you tried?”
Alarion shot the woman an indignant glare as she settled her chin on his shoulder.
“You would not be the first woman to feel like she had to reward the Martyr,” Alarion said, his voice dripping with distaste at the memories of romance gone wrong. “Or the first beauty put in my way by another’s hand.”
“Ah, you think I’m beautiful? So you were just playing hard to get after all,” she murmured, idly playing a sharp nail across his chest, causing him to shiver. “You were testing me, but I must have passed.”
“You were… convincing,” he admitted.
“Did it occur to you that I might be taking advantage of you?”
It very much had, actually.
“You wouldn’t be the first hoping for marriage. Or a child.” The words were bitter, but her gentle touch and the smile on her lips made a frown impossible. “The latter tend to turn to mist the moment I mention precautions.”
“Well, I am barren as the Old City—or so my Status tells me—so I had little to lose and nothing to gain by humoring you.” She laughed a little at his rapidly forming pout as she added, “Apart from a pleasant evening. Besides, high Aptitude or not, I do not think my husband would approve of raising a bastard chi—”
“Your husband?”
Annette must have had some sort of acting skill, because she kept her face utterly impassive for nearly two seconds before dissolving into laughter.
“That isn’t—“
“Funny? Oh yes. Yes, it is. Your face alone!” she cackled, holding him tighter and pressing her lips to his neck to soothe frayed nerves. “Mothers above, I thought it might be the drink, but you’re just this easy to torment all the time, aren’t you?”
“Are you done?” Alarion inquired, his smile-scowl utterly ineffective at cowing her mirth.
“I don’t have to be,” Annette replied, her voice taking on a sultry tone. “But it might be too late? The sun is high, and you have things to do this morning, do you not?”
“At dawn,” he groaned. Bergman was going to have his hide for oversleeping. Again.
“More the pity,” she sighed into his ear, kissing his neck one more time before releasing him. “Try and remember that not everyone had an ulterior motive.”
“Hmm?” he asked, already sliding out of the bed to collect the discarded bits of his dress uniform.
“I wanted you,” Annete told him as she leaned back against the headboard, covering herself with the sheet. “Just you. Not the Martyr. I didn’t even recognize your name for nearly an hour, though I worry what that says about my memory. You are handsome, charming, and easy to toy with.”
“I’m glad to be of service.”
“I find most men are,” she smirked. “Sometimes fun can just be fun. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“So, I was a fun distraction, then?”
Annette met his eyes briefly, then looked away—biting her bottom lip. “Yes. Though… I wouldn’t object to another diversion this evening. If I haven’t lost your interest?”
Alarion sighed, “We’re departing this afternoon.”
“Always the problem with soldiers,” she mused. “Next time, then. Your belt is in the corner.”
“How did it…?” Alarion flushed a deep red as the memory came back to him and quickly bustled about to make himself presentable. A nearby mirror helped, but only until he saw the way she was looking at him.
The hungry look in her eye was a stark reminder of how he’d ended up here in the first place.
“How do I look?”
“Like you need a shower and fresh clothes. But good enough to get back to the palace without raising any eyebrows.”
Alarion laughed, stifling the smile behind an open palm as he nodded. “And you called me charming?”
“I grade on a curve,” she shrugged, then slid out of the bed, tiptoeing across the bedroom until she stood before him. Even after years spent growing and filling out, he was still shorter than average—short enough that she had to tip his chin up for their eyes to meet. “But I really do like you.”
But I really do like you.
The familiar words echoed in his mind as his expression soured. He turned away, trying to conceal it, and saw hurt and confusion on Annette’s lips.
“I am sorry—”
“It is alright,” she said, dipping in to kiss him softly on the brow. “Till next time.”
Annette guided him to the doorway with a gentle hand at the small of his back, keeping a careful distance to the side to avoid the gaze of any passersby as Alarion stepped out into the hall.
Like the suite, the hotel hallway screamed Vitrian wealth. Its cream-colored walls were adorned with gilt-framed paintings of pastoral scenes and abstract geometries. He couldn’t tell if they were good or bad, and the fact that he pondered the question at all gave way to a bark of nervous laughter. He walked a few steps down the hall—far enough to not be seen from Annette’s peephole—then slumped back against the wall, eyes closed, his heart beating so fast he thought he might faint.
“Another one, really?”
“Sweet mothers—” Alarion yelped in surprise, a fist already cocked at his side before his brain caught up with his ears.
Nessa stood before him with a hand on her hip and a scowl on her face.
She’d changed over the last year and a half, though not in a way he would have expected. While he’d grown older, the Thoughtborn girl was now younger than when he’d created her. With the appearance of a girl of no more than fourteen, she was now shorter than her ‘father’—a change that had given her a bit of a height complex.
Sadly, that was not all that had changed.
Gone were the crisp, practical dark leathers she’d once ‘worn’, replaced by a never-ending carousel of fashion that defied everything from taste to physics. Today it was a body-hugging golden dress beneath a long white coat. Too short for his liking, the dress didn’t merely look like gold—it was gold—an ever-shifting mass of liquid metal that shimmered with each movement.
There were wreathlike patterns engraved onto the metal fabric, snaking along the garment as though they were alive. A similar set of golden wreaths circled around one thigh and her right wrist, with a third acting as a crown atop the loose mop of her white hair.
White, not black.
That had been the very first change she’d begged of Alarion, and looking back, he realized how manipulative it had been. He’d turned her down time and time again, wanting nothing to do with the seditionist leader kept deep in the dungeons of Ilvan-Trai, but when she came crying to him, telling him she just wanted her hair to match her father’s? That had been enough to break him.
Nessa had come from him in a way most children never did, so she knew exactly what buttons to push. After a few weeks of lessons with Centre he’d learned enough to safely mold Nessa’s underlying thoughtform and how to give her the ability and permission to manipulate it on her own. Once the floodgates opened, she had changed a good deal more. Dusky skin to match his own, a near infinite wardrobe, and a much thinner and more diminutive frame to match her self-perceived age.
The only things she’d kept untouched were her face and her Vitrian eyes. They belonged to Sierra, yes, but they were just as much a part of Nessa.
“So, this makes four?” Nessa asked, scowling up at him.
“Three,” Alarion muttered as he pushed past her, heading for the stairs. “Yvette and I didn’t—”
“No. No. No,” Nessa repeated loudly, drowning out whatever else he was going to say, even as she followed him.
“Could you keep it down?” he glared.
Nessa’s looks weren’t the only thing that had changed with Centre’s tutelage. Together, they had progressed deeply into the Materialization step of Thoughtborn development, enabling her to have a much broader impact on the world around her. While she still struggled to make herself visible as anything more than an indistinct shape—in large part out of the shared fear of someone recognizing her for the doppelganger she was—Nessa had much better luck with the other senses. She could now lift unattended objects of her own accord and was able to touch most people who were aware of her presence.
But it was sound where she truly excelled.
“Could you not tell me that? Ever? Would that be possible?” the young Thoughtborn insisted with a performative shudder. “Mothers help you, I am not even two years old, and even I know better.”
“You asked,” he reminded her as they descended the stairs. “It could be worse.”
This time, Nessa’s shudder was less of an act. Though they’d made great strides in control over their sympathetic link since her creation, emotional bleed-through was still a possibility if they were close enough.
There was a reason she tended to go wandering whenever Alarion spent time with Kali.
“One day I am going to find a nice, handsome Vitrian boy and make you rue the day—”
“Why are you here?” Alarion asked, interrupting the idle threat she’d made on more than one occasion.
“Hmm?”
“You were waiting for me,” he reminded her. “If it were just to make snide remarks, I assume you’d have waited at the palace.”
“Oh. Right!” Nessa had enough humility to blush at just how sidetracked she’d gotten. “Ivor was in a tizzy that you weren’t back yet and asked me to find you.”
Alarion scowled. “I’m not that late.”
The sun overhead, as they emerged from a side exit, begged to differ. But even so, it wasn’t like Bergman to get upset over something so small.
“It isn’t that,” Nessa said, echoing his thoughts. “Apparently, the new Vitrian officer is on her way.”
“They’re always on their way,” Alarion reminded her.
That fact was part and parcel of his arrangement with Governor Williams. By law, all Auxilia forces were required to be commanded by a Vitrian officer, and the 238th was no exception. They’d had plenty—Thirty-one, to be precise. Each was the child of some wealthy or influential house, assigned to the 238th with only a few days remaining in their Induction—days that inevitably expired while on route to their new posting, thereby requiring the selection of a never-ending cycle of new officers.
So why was Bergman so up—
“Yeah. But this one is arriving today.”