1. Rachel (Our Hare MC!)
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[Twenty-Six Hours Remaining.]
The polished white stairwell wound into the earth like a throat swallowing.
Rachel descended first, tennis shoes finding each step without sound, ears angled in opposite directions—tracking the fading storm above and mapping what waited below.
Nia pressed close to her thigh, hammer clutched against her chest like a teddy bear. Counting the hours, Rachel concluded she’d be able to return to her adult form.
Yet, this not-so-little side quest hadn’t been the brute force type she was used to that demanded her support.
It had been an eventful day.
Then again, almost every day since The Oscillation had felt like weeks… Some had practically been that, with all the time-warping zones.
Snow trailed her.
Behind them, Regina moved with the measured grace of a woman relearning how to occupy space she’d surrendered. Her broken mirror floated at her hip, bleeding dark light in rhythm with each footfall. She hadn’t spoken much since reconciling with Snow.
It was a tad awkward, to be honest.
Rachel’s mouth became a line as her gaze drifted to the side, fully viewing the destabilized and displaced Fable leader.
First, the Montana Crystal wave.
Then meeting Butter—divinity wrapped in personality and pressure.
Her instinctive distrust of organizations and of being used or managed…
And now this?
Rachel almost felt some real sympathy for her.
Snow’s gentle eyes moved to her, a sad smile coming on as she whispered, “Am I deserving of that look?”
Rachel rubbed the back of her neck, catching Regina’s silent attention behind her step-daughter.
“And what look would that be?” she asked with a light laugh.
The dark-haired beauty’s lips fell ever-so-slightly, vision moving to the damaged walls, showing signs of Scarlet’s battle.
“Those eyes that could cut like a dagger…and an attitude that nothing really matters. Like I’m a pretty little rose, with some thorns to make you bleed… Used to being on her own, fighting through the grief… Maybe I’m projecting,” she ended with a laugh, fingers moving to her elbow. “Truth is, I’m more uncertain than I’ve ever been.”
Nia tensed up a little, but Rachel responded with a weak chuckle. Turning back toward the winding stairs, she couldn’t help reflecting on those descriptive words attached to another woman she knew.
“You make me sound like a certain vampiric succubus… I’m not so romantic as to link myself to something so emotional. I’m not Aurora. It says a lot about you, though. I can see why you admire Butter so much… She’s confidence incarnate.”
Pivoting again to distract her, Rachel asked, “How are you faring without the strings? Not that I’m taking shots, Regina.”
“No offense taken,” the queen quietly returned at their tail.
Yet, Rachel could feel her intense focus on her step-daughter for the answer.
When no answer came, Rachel shifted in their slow descent, catching the Fable’s movements:
Not walking so much as remembering how. Her fingertips grazed the wall—not for balance but contact, like a blind woman reading a room through touch. The threads that had held her were gone, but her body still seemed to move in increments, pausing at invisible boundaries that no longer existed.
She wasn’t controlled for long… I suppose that when your autonomy is so fully taken away, it has a harsher effect than we might think.
Rachel filed it and kept descending.
An opening soon after revealed the front entrance, where Alice’s aftermath marked the zone. From what she’d witnessed, the fable typically could repair itself, but these wounds healed slowly. She could imagine they function the same for Scarlet’s attacks. Hairline fractures spidered from each serif, the stone remembering violence it couldn’t quite heal yet.
It was paradoxical. Going into the dungeon from a different location to end up back here, but it was apparently a part of a complex maze ordering. Even sound didn’t find her ears through the open doorway, but if they went through, the whole chain would snap, and they’d have to go through the maze again.
Rachel’s tail swished once, catching Snow’s gulp and Regina’s tight mouth upon seeing the state of their castle. Rachel had to wonder if the carved ‘A’ on the marble doors of the throne room was still there for all to see.
Letting the scene leave her mind, Rachel pressed on. Yet, she paused on the second step as the queen stopped to look at the place where Alice had slaughtered every loyal subject she had.
Rachel sighed. “Alice wasn’t exactly subtle… It could be worse. Ali Baba would attest to that,” she said with a strained smile. “Then again, maybe I shouldn’t jinx you before all this ends.”
“…I will take your assurances to heart. Though, truly, to believe such carnage could be caused by a simple misunderstanding of intent. A masterpiece, made of my mistakes… I shall keep it as is, as a reminder.”
A silence followed, Nia and Snow tentatively staring at the woman.
Then, quieter, the Wicked Queen whispered, “…Thank you.”
Rachel didn’t need to say anything.
She tilted her head, and they descended further; the damage changed character as they walked.
The middle floors carried Adelaide’s fingerprints—subtler, more insidious. Walls that sat a fraction too far apart. A corridor that curved where it shouldn’t, adding distance the eye couldn’t measure, but the legs felt.
Rachel’s left ear twitched at the spatial inconsistencies, feeling Old Man Coyote’s force contending with the magician. [Seventh Sense] mapping the distortion even without her Seed’s full power. The power diverged eventually, Regina silently directing them around the oddities.
Illusion matrices were embedded in the architecture itself.
Regina’s mirror pulsed just before the queen took them down a divergent path, and her knuckles whitened around the scepter she’d reclaimed.
“I hear it. Faint, but he seems to be having a good time.” Rachel mused.
“Major,” Nia whispered, tugging her shorts. “The air tastes weird down here. Like…burnt sugar and iron. Is that Wakalapi or Adelaide? Wakalapi is fighting her, right?”
Rachel’s smirk lifted as they continued, getting a bit of a shiver. The chill of combat made her blood ache to join, but it wasn’t her fight—misfortune led her down this maddening game of weaving past needless conflict.
“C’mon, Nia. You know this taste,” she prompted, shooting her a look that made the girl pout. “It’s underneath those layers. Frank’s been busy.”
Nia’s face paled. “Eldritch Force… Is he trying to awaken Black Hat?”
Rachel stuffed four fingers into her pocket, maintaining her casual tone. “A similar being, not Black Hat himself. That was Ali Baba’s corruption. Listen closely, you can hear Frank explaining things to Scarlet.”
“You say that like it’s normal,” Snow muttered.
“For us?” Rachel yawned, stretching out her free hand and shoulder. “Yeah. This is Tuesday.”
“It is not a Tuesday, Major! Maybe…a Wednesday.”
Rachel’s lips twitched. “What is your measuring method, Little Bun?”
The next stairwell brought the shift that made her teeth flash.
Blood.
Not pooled—eroded.
Scarlet’s signs carved into the stone in trails where her blood had lashed against something. The cuts, the spike holes, and savagery showed she had not held back—based on the conversations, she’d been against Frenkenstine’s monsters.
“Scarlet did good,” Nia mumbled through their soul-link, hammer tightening in her grip. “But I can still hear them. How could they survive Scarlet and laugh?”
Rachel gave her outfit a lifted eyebrow. Do you really have to ask that? It’s Scarlet. Her not holding back is not her going all out… She’s Scarlet, not Seed Scarlet.
“True… That would be terrifying,” Nia shivered, no doubt thinking back to their confrontation with Scarlet’s Seed persona in Elizabeth’s masquerade. “We were skinned alive, even with the Black Moon.”
Rachel shook her head.
Black Moon? We had over ten thousand moons powering us, thanks to Cerridwen, and we got bodied—well, literally cut in half. Scarlet’s a monster… She’d skin someone alive and wear it like a costume, if she became what her mother wanted her to become.
“Yikes!” Nia pressed closer, trembling a little. “Stop scaring me!”
Just facts, little bun. Her restraint is self-limiting. That’s a blessing and a curse.
Rachel followed the brutal battle through the passageway, Snow and Regina growing more hesitant as the damage escalated.
First array: brute force. She hit it head-on. Shattered in two strikes.
Second array: she learned. Targeted the resonance frequency. Smarter.
Third array onward—she adapted in real time, finding a pattern in the monster family's defenses through her blood flower corruption and other attributes.
Parallel to the blood erosion ran a different set of marks. Four parallel gouges in the stone—deep, precise, mechanical. Victor’s claws were Rachel’s guess.
Beside them, thermal scarring from Augustus’s internal mechanisms her ears tracked, and a single impact crater where someone had been thrown into a wall hard enough to reshape it.
No small feat in this hyper-resilient castle.
This feels more like both sides fought to contain, not to kill. Every mark says the same thing: slow them down, don’t kill.
Her right ear shifted, angling downward.
There.
Frank’s voice strengthened. Layered beneath the stone and whatever dimensional folding reshaped the maze.
Scarlet’s clipped frustration.
Butter’s musical warmth.
Adoncia’s distrust.
Frank's measured calm.
A fourth voice—younger, enthusiastic—Victor.
Victor’s mother and father.
They’ve been talking for a while. At this point, Rachel was sure Frank’s plan was exactly where her misfortune threads were guiding her. Each new piece of information only confirmed it. And, without a doubt, he knew she was listening.
That saved a lot of time.
Scarlet wasn’t totally buying it.
Butter was…well, Butter.
Snow’s blue eyes tracked the blood erosion on the walls, and something shifted behind them.
“Who fought here?” she whispered, running her hand down a massive gash where Scarlet’s scythe had eaten away its surface. “Are these dimensional cuts? Spatial cuts?”
Rachel slowed but didn’t stop.
“Scarlet,” the step-mother stated. “One Adelaide feared more than Rachel. Her blood touched the walls, and I felt it through the castle. Through me.” Her fingers curled. “She was scared. But she didn’t stop.”
Nia’s ears folded. Rachel held the silence, letting it breathe.
“Scarlet’s tenacious, even if scared,” Rachel said simply. “We’re getting closer to—”
The castle lurched, forcing her to snap her jaws shut to not bite her tongue.
Not an earthquake—a dimensional stutter, reality hiccupping like a scratched record skipping a groove. The walls bent inward for a fraction of a second, then snapped back with a resonance that rattled Rachel’s teeth and sent Nia tumbling into her leg.
Regina’s mirror ignited, drawing their gaze.
Crimson light burst from its fractured surface, unbidden, the broken glass reflecting something that wasn’t in front of them. The queen raised it instinctively, and the image locked into focus.
Adelaide’s circular chamber.
Rachel’s ears snapped forward, a smirk brightening her lips.
“Wakalapi seems to be having a good time.” Her tail swayed to the rhythm, picking up the beat in her heart, anticipating her turn. Something massive was coming… Hidden, dozens of colossal bundles of misfortune were pulled in by Butter’s gravitational presence. “I’m a little jealous.”
The magician stood at the center of a spinning constellation of mirrors, cards, and chains—her hat orbiting her head in tight, aggressive loops. Rings blazed on every finger, each one pulling power from a different source. Her coat billowed in winds that only existed for her, theatrical and precise, every element of her presentation screaming control.
But her jaw was tight. And her hands moved too fast.
She’s burning through reserves, Rachel hummed to herself, seeing Snow and Regina’s narrowed eyes.
Wakalapi occupied the opposite side of the chamber with the stillness of a man who’d decided the universe could wait until he finished his smoke.
Sacred tobacco curled from his pipe in ribbons that weren’t smoke—they were language. Symbols wrote themselves in the air, what seemed to be a vocal tradition, each one a ward, a truth, a peeling of skin from the surface of illusion.
Where they touched Adelaide’s mirror-walls, the reflections stuttered and showed what was actually behind them: stone, runes, and the bones of her deception.
Old Man Coyote’s presence draped around him like a second shadow, and Rachel could feel the spirit’s amusement even through the mirror.
Her memory briefly tugged her back to the present as the pair escalated their illusory duel: the potion Alice had given her.
The number of misfortune’s threads around that slim throat is about as tight as it was for Dionysus…just not as certain. The feeling, though? Something worse than death is circling her. They were a lot stronger before… Something’s given her slack.
Thoughts, Nike?
Adelaide’s mirrors spun faster, catching the smoke-glyphs and reflecting them back—but wrong, twisted, so they looped into themselves and pointed the Native American back toward the same corridor he’d just mapped. Every time his sacred smoke revealed an exit, she stitched the illusion closed with another mirror. Every time she tried to expand the chamber to push him out, his wards held the boundaries firm.
The Goddess of Victory within her hummed, still sounding troubled, despite how long it had been since Nungal’s private conference with the deities.
“It is an even match. Victory is on a razor’s edge, though Adelaide will likely have the chance to escape before anything solidifies into a true win. Oh, and your buns are becoming restless. The pups are stirring, as well.”
Good to know. Rachel returned with a grin at her recovering partner. It seems we’re getting close to everything snapping into place.
“Your little shaman tricks,” Adelaide called, voice carrying its usual sweetness with an edge underneath that Rachel had never heard from her, “are being exceptionally tedious. Don’t you have better things to do, such as rescuing your precious goddess? I have appointments to keep.”
Wakalapi puffed. Smoke wrote a glyph that roughly translated to patience.
“Hmm. Did you say something? I couldn’t hear you past the whining.”
Adelaide’s left eye twitched.
“She’s not losing. But she’s not winning,” Regina noted, steadying herself from the dimensional twists, constriction, and dispersal shifts the pair caused. “And for someone like her, that’s worse. Every minute she spends here is a minute she’s not with Butter, not finishing her ritual, not ascending.”
Snow nodded slowly. “Wakalapi doesn’t need to beat her. He just needs to be annoying enough to hold her in place. It’s a dangerous game.”
“Not our fight,” Rachel dismissed, turning from the mirror.
Though when she caught Regina’s expression, she had to reevaluate the queen’s opinions—it was brief, volcanic, and swiftly controlled.
Oooh. Interesting.
“What?! What?!” Nia privately piped in, skipping after her as she once again took the lead. “Are we fighting soon?”
Maybe.
Rachel didn’t elaborate, keeping the queen just in her sight. She was staring at the image of Adelaide in her castle, the woman who had saved her from Snow’s exile… Only to use her devastated and desperate position to use and abandon her.
She had to wonder if the queen had figured out what Rachel had through listening to Frank and Butter’s chats.
The mirror’s light faded as they descended the final stairwell. Rachel’s ears tracked the voices below with increasing clarity.
Scarlet’s pacing. Her blood agitated.
Butter hasn’t moved from her confined place, chains rattling from time to time.
Adoncia was doing everything she could to make her high queen more comfortable.
The monster family was trying to engage Scarlet intellectually—smart monsters.
Frank just kept working at his workstation.
Yet, it was an odd, mechanical ticking that continued to tug at her ears.
Gears.
Endless gears, paradoxically ticking against each other into infinity at any frequency.
At one point, it was singular.
Then she doubted her own ears—it was plural again.
Then there were two—thousands—endless—three.
A clock?
Every time he looks at it, his heart fluctuates…
The laboratory door was already open when they left the hall.
Rachel stepped through and let the room speak first—naturally, Butter stole all the spotlight.
Shining like a blazing star, funneled into a lonely diamond topaz.
Scarlet stood at the center of the space, blood coiled in defensive spirals around her torso—not attacking, not retreating, just ready. Her crimson eyes locked onto Rachel instantly, and the relief that washed through them was immediately strangled by the confusion of seeing who followed her in.
“Rachel! Are we—” Her gaze ricocheted between Regina, Snow, and back. “Is the Wicked Queen really on our side?”
“Reformed Wicked Queen,” Rachel corrected lightly. “Ish.”
“Ish?!”
“What do you want me to say?” she chuckled back, cracking her neck and waving at the Frankenstein family as she spun in a slow circle to take in every angle. “She’s got a head full of demons. Sweet like candy. Riddled with love.”
“Huh? Really, Rachel?”
Rachel couldn’t help but laugh at the looks she got—Butter, and even Snow, practically breathless and wheezing.
“A pretty face and a heathen. The dark with her’s a different feeling. Kind of like you,” Rachel chuckled with a smile, though it quickly became forced as she glanced at Snow. “Okay, maybe Aurora did rub off on me a little too much. No, but joke aside, yeah, she’s on our side.”
Scarlet put her fingers to her temples and pressed them out, mind stuttering. “What the—Aurora? I am so lost! Please, she is not here. Right? I just—I can’t. Not her!”
Rachel couldn’t blame her—Aurora wasn’t truly Aurora, but an ambiguous figure that not even she had been able to pin down. Even now, she wasn’t sure if she was a friend or foe.
One of the few people she hadn’t explicitly won against.
She didn’t know what winning against Aurora even meant.
It was a real problem.
“No. No, just…forget it,” Rachel waved off, trying not to get pulled into that smirking succubus’ spiral memory temptation route. “She’s just like a bad song.”
“Rachel! Rachel!” Butter chimed, drawing all eyes as Frank continued to work on his floating mirror, ignoring them. “Oh, you look terrible. I mean that affectionately. You have such wonderful bags under your eyes.”
“Thanks, Butter. You look chained.”
“I know! Don’t I look ravishing? It’s been an experience.”
Adoncia stood at Butter’s flank, club low but ready, oni features set in the kind of protective fury that said she’d been vibrating at this frequency for hours.
Victor sat on a workbench nearby, legs swinging, the hole in his torso mostly healed but still showing clockwork beneath skin.
The lab spread out around them in organized contradiction—Eldritch artifacts beside crystalline extraction devices beside handwritten notes in neat cursive.
Butter held up her steel bonds with a grin, sitting at the center of it all, golden hair catching the light of a dozen impossible instruments. Her aquamarine eyes beamed at Rachel with the kind of warmth that made the room feel smaller in the best way.
Someone else wanted her attention, though.
“Miss Rachel!” the boy waved, making Scarlet growl at all the interruptions upon joining her slow examination of the room. “Franky said you’d come through the east corridor. He was off by four minutes! Your misfortune is crazy.”
“No need to rub it in,” the handsome blond muttered, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. He was scrutinizing a specific Eldritch-feeling design on the surface that put the chill through Rachel. “Nice of you to join us, Queen Regina, Snow, Rachel… Take a seat.”
Augustus inclined his head toward them from the far wall, one arm still resetting with small mechanical clicks. His wife stood beside him, composed despite the claw marks across her shoulder that were mending in real time.
Frank stood at his primary workstation, glasses catching the light, clipboard in one hand. His other hand held a pocket watch. The ticking filled the silence in Rachel’s ears—wrong in a way even the Black Moon hadn’t been.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Rachel’s [Seventh Sense] mapped the room before she’d taken her second breath. Piecing together Frank’s cryptic and not-so-cryptic conversation on the way here, she was getting a better picture of what he was planning.
The extraction device isn’t just pulling power. It’s cataloguing. Building a template of Butter’s Life Force architecture—her soul’s blueprint.
“But,” Nike interjected with the room centering on Rachel, “given his own statements about Butter, that would require a level of understanding not even the Creation Deities would possess. His implication places her closer to Nungal’s level as a potential High Goddess.”
Rachel plopped down onto a stool, swiveling around to look at the excited blond. Nia was listening intently, now trying to reassure Scarlet and update her, though the vamp girl knew most of it through watching them through the gear mirror.
That makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s stronger than that, with the effect her existence itself has on misfortune. What do you make of the devices around the room?
“The crystalline matrices along the walls aren’t weapons,” Nike returned. “So far as I can tell, they’re a delivery system. Resonance chambers, designed to broadcast a specific divine frequency across dimensional boundaries…at a level far beyond anything reasonable within the third dimension. Also… I sense the smallest fragment of Cerridwen within the framework.”
Rachel’s ears popped up at that, making sure her eyes didn’t directly lock onto the spot.
Now that grabs my attention. Anything else?
“The playing card on the desk—Eldritch, yes, but not corrupted. It’s a key. Dimensional lock, is my guess. Specific. Targeted. There is a web of Negative, Positive, Divine, Eldritch, Infernal, and…other aspects I cannot begin to classify, possibly forces beyond the 7th Wall.”
She internally whistled, gaze fixating on the unbothered man, everyone still waiting with bated breath for her to speak.
And the watch… Misfortune’s threads… I can’t even sense anything around it, as if misfortune itself gets lost in its ticks.
Nike’s short hum and sigh told her what she needed to know before she voiced it.
“I couldn’t tell you more. It is one of those things I’d classify as above the 7th Wall.”
Interesting…
“Scarlet,” Rachel said calmly, pulling the girl’s attention from Nia’s nervous chaos. “Your thoughts? I’ve heard a lot over the past hour, but nothing before that.”
The vampiric girl’s blood settled a fraction—not quite relaxing.
“Frank says he’s on our side,” she mumbled, fang poking out and crossing her arms.
“His monsters—eh, family,” she corrected, glancing their way, “fought me through—well, a lot, to slow me down. They’re tough. Butter is chained but apparently having the time of her life,” she shot an incredulous look at the divine queen.
“Guilty as charged! Adoncia, sneak me another one of those sweets over there.”
“High Queen…” the oni groaned with a look that said, no.
Scarlet powered on.
“Apparently, Adelaide took Butter’s hair and made a deal with my—mmm.” She bit hard on her lip before releasing a long puff of air. “And made a deal with Adelle,” the name came out like a pulled tooth.
Rachel nodded. It was the first time she hadn’t called her mother.
“She did it through a mirror portal. Frank gave Adelaide a protective charm. On purpose, he says,” she grumbled, glancing his way. “He also released Alice into the castle. On purpose.”
That put a crease in Regina’s nose, though her cold eyes didn’t quite reach action yet.
Frank didn’t twitch at the reveal.
She turned to Rachel with the expression of someone who’d been asked to solve an equation where half the variables were on fire.
“I just—it’s so complicated!”
Rachel held out a fist for the frustrated girl to bump, saying, “Okay, let me see if I can fill in the blanks with what I know… He says he’s fixing the Fable Seeds.”
That immediately snatched Snow and the queen’s sharp eyes.
“He says every Seed has a corrupted core—a Black Mote. Interesting name, by the way,” she chuckled. “I like it. That it will release Crimson Toilet entities when any Fable collapses.”
That got Nia and Butter to giggle, and even the Frank family snickered.
“He says he needs Butter’s Life Force to build something that’ll purify them and create real souls for Fablekin. Ambitious. I’m not sure about the downsides. But it’s a solid goal,” she noted, thumbs-upping the man.
She paused, Scarlet’s fangs pressing into her lower lip again as Rachel continued.
“He also admits he’s the one who set all of this in motion. You want to know how I trust someone who built the maze, put us in it, and then offers to show us the exit?”
“Yeah… That’s about it. I guess.”
Rachel put a hand on her shoulder and got up to walk past her, past the defensive perimeter of blood, past Adoncia’s bristling aura, and sat down cross-legged in front of Frank’s workstation. Every eye was on her.
Nia made a sound like a deflating balloon, but Rachel ignored her, looking up at Frank.
The pocket watch ticked between them.
“You released Alice to destabilize the castle and force Regina into a vulnerable state. You gave Adelaide the charm so she’d survive long enough against Wakalapi to complete her connection to Adelle and, through her…to the World Tree, because Adelle is smart like that.”
Scarlet’s eyes widened. Butter clapped. Everyone else looked lost, beside the silent, mythical scientist.
“My mother—Fiona, Anthony, and the others are at the World Tree… What is she planning now?”
Rachel held up a hand, seeing the traumatized girl start to shake at the mention of her.
“I can only tell where misfortune’s threads are pulling together… We’re bound to whatever misfortune is surrounding Fiona and our group. It didn’t become clear until I met Alice. And who started that chain, hmm? That’s not a coincidence…”
“It is a collection of coincidences,” he muttered in response, glancing at his clock again before moving to another device, “aligned together until it is not.”
Rachel’s focus fixated on the open hand-held pocket watch, noticing no face or numbers, only gears turning at random into infinity, many in opposite or divergent directions.
“…Makes sense. You extracted Butter’s Life Force template because you need the architecture of genuine, sustainable existence, as you said. And you’ve been checking that watch because you’re not measuring time—you’re measuring convergences of overlapping realities beyond what that statement can even be implied… Until, as you practically said, every coincidental variable is locked into place.”
She looked into his bright blue eyes, dispassionately working. “Am I close? I don’t expect to be right on the money. But you need Adelaide to make her move… She’s the actor. You’re attaching everything to her causal chain. It’s brilliant, really. You need her to build the bridge you can’t…or won’t build yourself.”
Her vision narrowed, and now the uncomfortable question came to mind that obviously had to be answered. “You’re not a villain… You aren’t a friend. And only one person checks those boxes for me… Are you the fake Aurora?”
Scarlet became stiff as a board, blood coiling into an offensive grid around the stilled scientist. Butter leaned forward, practically bouncing in her seat as if being without popcorn for this was a crime.
The tension increased.
Breathing ceased.
And then, Frank’s straight face cracked slightly with a polite smile—just a hair, just enough to show something tired and real underneath.
“That’s a rather generous assessment. And quite the disturbing accusation. It would be far easier for me if that were the case…”
He paused his limited tinkering under Scarlet’s death cage and looked at her with a tilt of his head. “I am not. Does that disappoint you?”
No one moved.
Rachel held his gaze…then sighed, not hearing or sensing any skips in his heart.
Though the only real way to tell if he was telling the truth would be to have Maria here.
“I can’t prove or disprove otherwise… I have to take your word for it. It’s okay, Scarlet.”
A low growl rumbled through Scarlet’s throat as the crystallized blood liquified and returned to her. “It’s like we’re back in Elizabeth’s masquerade all over again! What about Twilight! Are you working with her? Huh?!”
Frank resumed his tinkering with slight amusement. “I am slightly acquainted with your former… Well, I wouldn’t call her your best friend, but you know the story well enough.”
“How—Rachel, who is this guy?! Only you know anything about that!”
Butter was practically bubbling. “So fun! The plot thickens!”
Rachel shook her head with a hiss, glancing at the former goddess. “…You’re working with Nungal? The Mists?”
Frank gave a slight shrug. “More with one than the other, though we are acquainted to some degree… Do you wish to know the truth that matters to the immediate situation?”
She stared into his smiling blue eyes.
“Let me finish what I’ve deduced outside of your identity…”
He gave her a rather cheeky bow, as if saying, ‘If you want the floor. I’ll just be working in the background.’
Rachel snorted and began.
“The Black Motes in every Fable Seed. Crimson Tide fragments that detonate when a Fable collapses. Revilla keeps the corruption active so the World Tree can serve as a medium for resurrection. Adelaide… I can’t be sure, but from what you said, she’s trying to ascend to godhood…”
Her eyes widened. “She’s actually building a doorway into Scarlet’s Red Sea for the Tide. I messed up her initial plans… This is her World Tree backup.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
“You extracted Butter’s Life Force template to create a counter,” Rachel continued, voice calm, analytical as she rose to pace, watching every micro-shift in his eyes. “Not a weapon—a replacement. A purification bloom that overwrites the corrupted core, seals the doorway, and generates genuine souls for Fablekin as a byproduct.”
The ticking grew louder. Not faster—tighter.
Snow and Regina looked speechless.
“And you need Adelaide to connect to the World Tree through Snow’s Fable,” she went on, fingers idly tapping the table as she paused. “Because that connection is the bridge your device requires. You can’t—or won’t,” she hedged, “build it yourself.
“You need someone greedy enough to construct it for you…and arrogant enough to think she’s the one in control. The same for Adelle… A textbook, indoctrinated narcissist—that we might be able to save,” she noted at Scarlet’s drooped shoulders. “The main thing I can’t decipher…is why this path, and who you are? Hmm… Well?”
Silence followed her bright chime and grin.
Victor stopped swinging his legs. Augustus’s mechanical clicks halted mid-reset. Butter’s bright smile softened—less playful now, more knowing.
Frank set down his clipboard, leaning against the table.
“You are as perceptive as I calculated.”
He removed his glasses, cleaned them with a cloth, and replaced them. A small ritual. A reset. Performance to honesty.
“Though ‘bomb’ is imprecise,” he added, giving the two people this most affected a glance. “Life Force, when channeled through purified Eldritch architecture, does not destroy. It replaces. The corrupted template is overwritten with sustainable being.
“The Motes do not detonate…they are inverted. What once devoured Intelligences and reduced them to blank states for the Tide’s evolution is instead metabolized by the system—consumed, repurposed, and used as the catalyst. The stored Intelligences within the Core become the scaffolding around which stable souls can form again.”
He opened the chest on his worktable, Rachel eating up the knowledge.
Shattered glass laced with blue Ichor rose into the air, assembling into a rotating schematic. A lattice of divine and Eldritch forces in delicate equilibrium—elegant, horrifying, every node a point where one wrong variable would collapse the entire design.
Adoncia’s grip tightened on her club.
Butter winced.
“However,” Frank continued quietly, “Ms. Park is correct about the bridge. My device requires a living connection between this Fable realm and the World Tree. Adelaide will provide that when she attempts to channel Adelle’s syringe through Snow’s Fable architecture. In that moment…she becomes a nexus.”
Scarlet’s blood froze mid-coil around her body. “She becomes a what?”
“A doorway,” Rachel translated, eyes never leaving Frank’s face. “Between this realm and the Tree. Between this dimension and whatever’s on the other side of it. And you’re going to use that doorway… That means Fiona and the others will already be involved on the other side.”
“To send the bloom through, yes. And I cannot tell you how everything will turn out. This is simply the easiest way for me to accomplish this goal. But also…”
He hesitated.
“The other reason,” Rachel finished softly. “You need that bridge to reach the World Tree yourself…or you want me to reach it.”
Rachel’s mind flashed back to her fight against Seed Scarlet, the multiple warnings she’d been given about visiting the World Tree since the day she became a Lunar Hare…
Where she could reach Cerridewen, imprisoned by the Crimson Tide.
“It’s a trap… One you expect me to walk into.”
Frank’s appraising eyes met hers.
“Isn’t that your hobby?”
They stared at each other.
A second passed.
Five.
And a laugh rolled through Rachel’s belly, ears flattening to either side.
“Touché.”
Butter’s voice slipped into the stillness, warm and steady, chains clinking softly as she shifted.
“He’s not lying, Rachel. I’ve felt his soul against mine through the extraction. He allowed it subtly, actually. Limited perception, but true. It’s wounded. Old wounds. But the intent is genuine…even if the methods and reasons are unknown. What I do know is he is…” She searched for the word, aquamarine eyes flicking to Frank. “…lonely. Not immune from withheld intent or motives, but you get the point.”
Frank’s composure held.
“Perceptive as always, High Queen,” he bowed.
Rachel studied him for three seconds more, then turned to Scarlet.
“It’s worth the risk,” she said gently. “The Black Motes, the bridge, the bloom—it matches everything Cerridwen was leading me toward since supporting me. That doesn’t mean I fully trust it…but it’s worth investigating, especially with your mother involved.”
Scarlet’s crimson eyes widened. “That’s all—”
“Everything. Yes. I know. Not as thorough as I’d like.” Rachel’s voice softened. “Which means when Adelaide makes her move—and she will—the cascade hits all at once. Frank’s bloom. Adelaide’s connection. The World Tree. The Black Moon. And you… You also know everything we talked about with what the World Tree means for you.”
Scarlet gulped.
“The seals.”
“Mhm… You know how unpredictable this is.” Rachel didn’t look away. “When Adelaide opens that bridge, the pressure on your barriers spikes… I don’t know what happens next. But my misfortune sense tells me it’s both bad and good. Really helpful, right?”
The color drained from Scarlet’s face. “Right…”
Her blood trembled. Voice barely a whisper. “What if Seed Scarlet takes control? What if the seal breaks and she returns?”
Rachel held her gaze. Steady. Unwavering.
The kind that said I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.
“Then I’ll come get you, and Butter is still, well, Butter,” she said simply, gesturing at the head-bobbing former goddess. “We can only fight what we are willing to face. Same as always.”
Something cracked behind those bright blue eyes—not breaking.
Releasing.
A pressure valve easing just enough to let the fear breathe without drowning in it.
Scarlet swallowed. Then nodded.
That’s my girl.
Nia looked totally unsure, but that would vanish once Adult Nia came into the picture.
Rachel rose to her feet and faced Frank again.
“How long?”
He glanced at his watch.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The rhythm had changed. Not faster—denser. Each tick landing with more weight, more certainty, as if the mechanism was no longer tracking time but confirmations. Variables resolving. Threads aligning across dimensional boundaries.
“Adelaide is contained,” Frank said softly. “But she has contingencies. She will break free of the shaman’s loop. She is too resourceful not to.”
“When?”
A final tick rang heavier than the rest, resonating through the lab floor and up Rachel’s spine. Frank closed the watch.
“She took the serum. The Seed answers her. Premature, but you’ve already faced a weakened one before. This time, you won’t have to. About… Now. ”
The word hung in the air like the last note before a chorus crashes in.
Beneath them—far beneath, through stone, through folded dimensions, through the bones of a Fable realm already starting to die—Rachel felt it.
Roots.
Massive. Ancient. Alive.
The World Tree reaching through the space between realities toward a connection that hadn’t been made yet… but was coming. Fast. The resonance hummed through Butter’s chains, making them sing a single clear note that settled in Rachel’s chest like a second heartbeat.
Nia pressed against her leg. “Major… I hate you!”
Rachel’s ears flattened again, feeling the pulses and crawling whispers reaching up, resonating with her Black Bun.
You’ll do fine. I’ll buy you a new set of clothes and watch a movie with you.
“Promise!”
Promise.
“Pinky promise!” she demanded, holding out her pinky stubbornly. “You never watch movies with me!”
That’s because they’re kid shows and anime… Fine.
She linked pinks with the suddenly motivated bun.
Good. Now, give me the hammer… We’re about to see all these dominoes fall.
Her eyes hardened as she turned toward the shimmering mirror Frank fashioned, bowing to Regina. Then, he asked something he should have long before now.
“Your Majesty, if you would connect your mirror to this one… You will save your kingdom.”
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