Yuki!
The terror of a bygone age in front of you takes her starglasses off for a moment. Behind them is light like sludge, like tears, like bile rising in a throat. Light that has curdled. Light that is capable of animating the bodies of the dead when laced with the flora that it is more closely attuned to.
O daughter of Yukisworld, the First Fallen made an elaborate system of magic because he was a fucking nerd. (Just ask Tsane.) He refracted his light into a dizzying series of essences, each one ripe with possibility, with secrets to discover, with unexpected edge cases and combo spells that not even he could have imagined. But each of us? We are peers to the magic of this world, and ours is alien to what our lost brother made down here. Even mine. One day, you might have the chance to really see that. But here's the magic of the Rot Star, the Poison Star, Spite themselves.
And for a moment, she looks lost.
"Why...?" It's a sigh out of floral psuedo-lungs. "I... there was... in the beginning there was... my knights..."
Then she focuses her attention back on you, and her rictus grin returns. "The why doesn't matter, squire," she hisses, and there's another voice underlying hers again. A wet, awful voice. She flicks out the arms of her starglasses and slides them back up her nose with her middle finger. "First comes the Wildwood. An empire of leaves and bones. Then, in the end, the mushrooms; and after them, nothing." She purrs that word like it's a pickup line (and that was her, not the wet voice rejoicing in leaves and bones).
She casually tosses a table your way, and your axe only barely cuts through it. Casual. She's relaxed about this, for all that getting nicked made her angry. She's not taking this seriously as a challenge, a duel, a battle against an equal. That's how you could do it (you realize, ducking another chair). She wants knights. She wants someone she could love to hate. She wants-
A roar echoes throughout the Chrysanthemum. Aria's head jerks up, and an awful laugh bubbles out of her. "So you're here, too. I'm allowed this. I'm allowed this!"
She turns and starts running. And once she's out of the cafe, that's when the wood starts growing out of her.
(You're still not satisfied? Well, her problem is that she's a corpse puppeted by starlight, with a personality so big that it still serves as the container of that light. You'd need to drain it out of her, then put your head together with Heron- or someone who's pored over her library- to fill it up with something else to sustain her, and even then you'd still have Bad Queen Aria to deal with, now free to pursue her goals to topple Thellamie free of a master. Or you could put her to rest.)
Cutie!
Ignore the dragon transformation behind your foe. (It's incredible, really. The speed of the growth, the way the branches curve like real ribs, the scary woman dangling from vines in the place where a real dragon would have a heart.) Her eyes are gold, her breath is sweet like apples, the way she sways is like the branches of a willow tree in the wind.
"Yes! Let's leave! Nobody needs to be hurt, just come with me!"
She reaches out, and somehow you manage not to take her hand. You rebuff her, in fact. (Politely, I'm sure. There's a good Cutie!) It doesn't matter whether it's just a step back or a defiant flourish of your Heartblade; it's enough that you, in this moment, reject her. Because she's dangerous and fake and you've got a Princess of Crevas fighting right behind you to protect you from people like her.
"Well." She sighs and draws her Heartblade, and it is thin and black and some sort of sap runs down the groove in the blade; the carpet hisses where a fat, sticky gobbet falls to the ground. "There is really no need to be difficult, is there?"
She lunges for your legs. You do not want to be pierced by that Heartblade, Cutie. It is very, very good at causing pain. The sap will spread in your veins and it will burn like ant bites and cramping muscles and you're not good enough to be here and you are never going to college. If she is the carrot (and I think we can all agree that carrots are vastly overrated as a root vegetable), that sword is the stick whittled down to a vicious needle.
Get stuck by that awful thing and you might just curl up into a whimpering ball for her to carry away.
Handmaidens!
It is an unfortunate truth that there is just enough glorious, showy empty air in the center of the Chrysanthemum, above and around that showstopping tree, for two dragons to have a battle- provided, of course, that they are quite willing to smash each other into either side of the spiraling helix staircases that run all the way up the sides of the tower. Or, for that matter, through the walls and into the cold winds outside.
But Aria (you know her, Yana, of course you know her, in your heart there is still a connection to this body, and you can feel the awful light that fills her up, and the weight of the bog that she wants to turn the world into, the petulant plan here at the end of all her clever plans of carefully orchestrated decay and collapse, long centuries past, but the light was never the source of the hate, that's all past life cringe married to the trauma of being killed) isn't much of a dragon, is she? A parody in glistening wood and flowering vines and white bones. But she's enough of a dragon to twist in the air and then flare her wings out, beating powerfully up towards her other self.
And here's the thing, darling Handmaidens: dragons are the bones of the world. The First Fallen convinced the slumbering coils of the dragons to be instead of roiling in not-existing. Which means that there's no room for two dragons here. Not in the too, too solid world. One needs to win.
Aria slams into the Dark Dragon like a kiss with fangs. Only room in a hive for one queen! Only room in Thellamie for one dream! And this sure isn't fair, two against one, given that the Rot Star's riding her veins, its light bursting against Yana's shadows, saying: you are small, and you are less than you were, and you will never have this glory again.
Heron would know what to do. But Heron's not here to figure out the option that a Paragon would choose.
Eclair!
You're as drunk as any kitty maid has ever been, here or anywhere else among the stars. But it's all sloshing about in your head. Your feet are certain and sure on the stairs, and that demands all the peerless focus of one of the members of the Order. You pass through the evacuation of the Chrysanthemum untouched, even as the pretty ladies and boys who work for smiles show off their training to make sure that no guest is getting left behind.
Your feet lead you, and they lead you-
Here.
Why are you here, a few steps to the left on this landing? Because, here, it leads into the backstage of a theater stage, to all the props, the costumes, the masks, because this is a Lunarian comedy that they're doing here, which isn't to say it's a comedy written by Lunarians but rather a comedy about Lunarians, and part of that is the exaggerated costumes, the over-elaborate dresses, the masks, the masks, each one hung up with care on the wall.
There's one missing.
She was here.
Eclair Espoir, do you dare take the space where there used to be a mask and put it over your own face?
Maybe this is the drink talking. But this is one of my temples. The magic trick makes new magic tricks, and this is one of them. You can catch a glimpse, here, if you act with holy irrationality. If you look out on the empty audience as Timtam would. If, for a moment, you are wearing the absence of her mask.
Either way, your armor settles comfortably onto your shoulders as you look at this empty space. Catches you up in a hug. It missed you, too. (I can say this here. Doesn't it make you almost believe it's better than being true?)
Yuki!
All the way back to you, sweetie. I'm not going to leave you dangling in the wind! Because Suli is the one dangling in the wind.
It's hard to get one of the Nagi to lose their, for a lack of a better word, footing. But Cousin It over there cheats with their magical hammer. A trapdoor with a slide leading right out into open air is just mean. You get to see Cousin It kick her right down into it, even as two dragons rage in the center of the tower.
And if I know anything about you, Yuki Edogawa, it's that you're not going to let your Sulochana fall. Not when you're watching her claw at empty air.