The city had grown quieter on the walk back. The lanterns still burned in their long warm lines above the streets, but the music had thinned to something distant, and the distant thing was fading further with every turn we took. There were no children now. The people who remained walked unsteadily and with their heads down.
"Do you know where we are going, Hero?" I asked.
"Yep." Ash walked beside me, her hand in mine. "I know the way."
I had been following her lead since we left the stream. I had followed it in the Academy, to reach our classes. I had not questioned it then. I questioned it now, because I was curious. "And just how do you know the way," I said, "when we have only come this way once?"
"Hmm?" She turned to me. "I was memorizing all the turns we took since we left the Academy. So I can just reverse all of them and end up back there." She shrugged. "Besides. I bet we'll see it once we get close enough anyway."
I considered this. I had thought it was some secret skill the Hero had been keeping from me, the same way she usually slept before I did. I had considered something as simple as this, but I had dismissed it. Her trick could not be so simple. And yet, perhaps it was. "That," I said, "is a very useful skill."
"They all used to say the same thing." Ash's voice had gone quiet. "You need at least someone in a party who knows directions. The rest of them were hopeless. I got tired of always getting lost inside dungeons."
I said nothing to that. We walked. Sol slept between my horns. The lanterns passed overhead. The sound of our footsteps on the cobblestones was the loudest thing in the street. "Since we're on the subject," Ash said, after a time. "I'm curious how you can walk and not drop her." She looked up at my horns. "Since she's asleep, I mean."
"It is no great skill." I kept my stride even, as I had been keeping it. "One has only to keep their back straight and their steps measured. And I have had centuries to perfect the doing of it."
"I thought," Ash said, "that was just who you were."
"It is who I am now." I looked ahead at the emptying street. "A Queen who stumbles is not a Queen who inspires confidence."
Ash was quiet as we turned a corner. When she spoke again, her voice was careful. "If you ever do want to stumble a little," she said, "I won't mind. You can lean against me. If you ever feel like it. I'm pretty sturdy, you know."
Objections came almost before Ash had finished her own offer. "I will remember that, Ash," I said instead.
We walked on. The music behind us thinned further, and then it was gone entirely, and I did not notice the exact moment it went, not for a turn and several steps. That was the first wrong thing. And the street was empty. The crowds had thinned, but here there were no crowds at all. Not a single soul.
"Ash," I said.
"I know."
She took a step away from me, and we both surveyed the empty street. And then I felt it, a gaze that settled over me. I had felt one like it once already, at the festival, in the thick of the crowd, and when I had turned there had been nothing to find and Ash had felt nothing at all. Sol stirred against my scalp. Her feathers flattened.
"Oh? So you did notice. A little faster than I had guessed you would." The voice came from above us, and it was soft, and smooth, and very silky. "Perhaps the two of you are not complete fools after all."
Ash and I looked up. She sat on the edge of a rooftop, her legs dangling into the empty air. A red-skinned figure, her horns catching the lantern light and pointing straight up at the dark sky. I knew who she was before she had said a single word more.
Ilyasviel rose. She stepped off the edge of the roof, and she fell. She landed on the stone without a sound and without an impact. I had not felt the Essence that should have softened such a fall.
Ash stepped in front of me. Sol woke fully and loosed a mighty chirp, her four wings flaring wide above my horns.
"So," Ilyasviel said. Her gaze swept the length of me once, and then twice. "You are the one who calls herself Lysanthia."
I looked at her arm. In the Arena she had been too far for me to see the shape of her Sovereign Crest. I saw it now. A white Crest, and it was a hydra. I counted its heads, though some part of me already knew what the counting would find. Twelve. There were twelve heads. Something stirred in my chest. I crushed it. Now was not the time.
"I am," I said. "And you are Ilyasviel. Some name you the strongest in this Academy. Here I had thought the strongest would walk openly and proudly. Not slink across rooftops to watch from a distance."
Her expression scarcely changed. There was the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth, there and gone. "I had not believed it," she said. She began to walk toward us. "I admit, I was curious. A half-demon who would openly call herself that name. Who would take up the name of the great mother, and wear it in the light."
The great mother. No one had ever called me that. In my age there had been no such thing to call me, for the Class had not permitted the concept at all. It seemed a thousand years was long enough for a myth to grow in strange directions.
"Even I would not dare take that name." She stopped a few paces off. She looked at my forearms, at the black running down the right and the white running down the left. "Then I saw your marks. You somehow have two Sovereigns. And you were hiding them. No doubt with help from Valtheris himself." Ilyasviel folded her arms across her chest. The gesture was familiar. "So the luck has gone to your head. And now you believe you can call yourself that." Her own head tilted. She looked from me to Ash then back at me. "Are you going to keep hiding behind your woman?"
I knew a challenge when I saw one. "Ash," I said. "Step aside."
Ash looked back at me. "But-"
"Ash." My voice was firmer. She looked into my eyes and, slowly, she nodded. She held out her hands, and I lifted Sol from my horns and she twisted in my grip, and through the bond came a spike of protest so sharp it needed no words at all. Ash looked at me and took Sol in both hands. Sol's chirping turned furious, and Ash's eyes did not leave mine.
"Be careful," Ash murmured, and stepped aside. That left the two of us facing one another across, a half dozen feet apart.
"So why have you come here?" I asked. "You have come a long way down from your roof. State your purpose."
"My purpose." Ilyasviel tilted her head. The white Crest caught the light. "I came here to take away your name, and the pride that lets you walk around freely with it."
We were of the same height, or near enough that it made no difference. Her eyes were red, brighter than the red of her skin. I folded my hands and looked into them. "It is my name," I said. "And I will not part with it."
"Then let us see if you can stand under the weight of it."
Essence flooded the square.
It came down over everything at once, a great mass of it, and my knees buckled. I went to one. Behind me I heard Ash gasp, and I turned enough to see her on both knees with Sol pressed flat against her golden head.
The Archon had bent me with the power of a Sovereign mark. This was no mark. It was only the weight of Essence, pressing down like a hand splayed flat across the whole of my body. It felt like being inside of a Resonance Chamber harsher than the one I had been given to prepare for the duel.
And with the weight came a taste. It was the taste of a thing that had been, and would always be. A thing that could be cut, and slashed, and burned, and would only return from the burning stronger than before.
"You cannot even bear my weight," Ilyasviel said. She had not moved. "And yet you would carry a name that once carried the world." She tilted her head, slowly, the other way. "They say all of us half-demons have something wrong with us. That rare is the one who knows her place. Even so. I have never heard of one fool enough to walk about wearing the great mother's name. Perhaps the demonbloods will say nothing. I will."
The Ember Core hummed, and then it burned. I forced Essence into my limbs. Something inside me tore, muscle or worse, I did not know. The white line of the Cradle began to pulse without my asking. I rose. I staggered forward one step, and I did not go down again.
Ilyasviel's eyes widened only a fraction, and only for a breath. Then the sneer returned.
"You speak of the weight of that name," I said. "You do not know how great that weight truly was, girl."
"So you are that far gone." Ilyasviel whispered, and the whisper carried the length of the empty street. The weight lifted from me all at once, as swiftly as it had come. Behind me Ash drew several deep breaths and pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. "Very well, then," Ilyasviel said.
Her mark blazed. She extended her right hand toward me, and the hand swelled, and grew and then split, and the flesh of it turned to white scale. Three great hydra heads rose from where her arm had been. Each was the size of a wolf. The three heads turned their faces toward me.
"Lys-" Ash said.
"Do not, Ash." Her knuckles had gone white around nothing. Her left hand had risen halfway, and she was forcing it back down. Through the bond came a single flare of fury, and I felt Ash's hand close gently around Sol.
Then the heads came. I darted back as the first smashed into the stone where I had stood, cracking it. The second lunged for the space I had dodged to, and I loosed the Requiem, and black fire poured from my right hand and swallowed it whole. The head twitched, and ceased, and was nothing. Then the third took me from the blind side and drove me into a wall, and I felt my ribs give.
I pushed myself off the stone. And as I watched, the head I had unmade hissed and drew itself back together from the stump, whole once more. I went very still.
The corruption had pushed back against the Ending. It had tried to use the Requiem to reach me. This was not that. This head did not push back at all. It had been erased to nothing, and then it had come again.
This Ilyasviel was a hydra in more than the shape of her mark.
Could I use Turn? If I could not unmake a thing, I could make it something else. I discarded it in the space of a breath. Turn asked that Ruin and Bloom be matched exactly, and even in a quiet clearing with no one to trouble me I had managed it perhaps one time in three. And even then, it had conditions that the Requiem by itself did not. Ruin was the weapon my hands knew. And Ilyasviel stood exactly where she had begun.
I leapt. As I rose I loosed the Ruin down at her, and three heads rose to block it and ceased. They returned from the stumps before I had finished falling.
"You cannot dodge mid-jump." Her voice was almost bored. "I would hope someone calling herself Lysanthia would know that much at least."
Once, I had never needed to land at all. [Flight] had gone the way of the System, and I had not missed it until precisely that moment.
I took a breath and steadied myself in the air as the heads came for me. I loosed the Ruin again, but thin this time, a single whip of it. The thread went where I could not see, between the heads, along a line I had drawn in my mind rather than with my eyes. One of the heads struck me and knocked me from the sky. The hydra's head filled my vision. Its eyes were an endless white.
I fell back down with my legs mostly under me. I rolled and rose quickly, ignoring the protest from my ribs. Ready to dodge an attack that would surely come. None did.
I raised my head. Ilyasviel stood with one hand pressed to her face, and where the whip of Ruin had passed it had opened her right cheek clean to the bone. Blood ran down the side of her jaw. "How odd," she said. "I actually felt it."
There was no pain in the words. There was only a kind of wonder. It was the voice of one who has not been reached in a very long time. I had heard it once, from a general who wielded four greatswords at the same time.
The whip of Ruin had been meant to strike the woman's head more cleanly. Not just scar her face. If my calculation had been wrong, I had expected it to miss entirely, rather than do this. Ah. So that was it.
She was not standing where she had been. She had taken one single step to dodge, and so a blow that might have killed her had only scarred her.
Blood fell onto the cobblestones. Unlike with the hydra heads, this wound did not close. Then her nails found the edge of the wound. Ilyasviel grunted once, and tore the ruined flesh away from her face and cast it aside. Only then, in a single instant, was she whole again, the cheek smooth and red as though nothing had ever touched it.
I had already guessed from the heads themselves, but now I was sure. Her strange mark granted her the power of restoration. A strange restoration that was not like the Beginning, though perhaps it was its cousin.
"What manner of power is that?" I demanded.
"I should ask you the same." Her right hand was a hand again. She looked at me, and something in the look had changed. "You are not terrible," she said. "Better than any Line has a right to be. I can see now why that fool girl lost."
It was faint praise, meant to sound like anything else. I had given compliments like that often.
Ilyasviel turned, and took a few steps, and then she paused, and looked back over her shoulder. "But there is only one person in this world who deserves to carry the name Lysanthia." The whisper reached me across the whole of the silent street. "And it is not you."
I had heard my name said in reverence before. I had heard it said in fear in equal measure. Never like this.
Ilyasviel turned a corner, and she was gone. And as she went the sound of the world came flooding back in her wake. Ash rushed to my side. I reached up to my ribs with the Cradle, and the broken ones ground back into place. The pain made me wince. "Lys! Are you okay?" she said.
"I am well enough, Hero."
She helped me to stand anyway. I let her. And when I was standing, I leaned into her a fraction more than the standing asked for. Sol let out a chirp and rose from Ash's head. She swayed once in the air and she came down onto my crown. I looked up at her. Through the bond came her anger, hot, bright and oddly pointed at herself.
"You held yourself back," I told her. "You are clever, when you choose to be." She squawked at me. I smiled.
We both looked at the corner Ilyasviel had gone around, as if waiting for her to return. "It seems," I said, "that my name means a great many things to a great many people."
"I suppose so," Ash said. She reached for my hand. "Let's go back."
"Indeed." I took it, and we began to walk. "You know, Ash," I said, almost absently.
"Hmm?"
"Echidna’s eyes were black."