Thanqol

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

The umbrella slices down into the earth like a spear, and a moment later the feet of Zhaojun touch down upon it with perfect balance. From her position of unassailable height she looks down at Machi with the deadly contentment of the Highest Up Cat, tail swishing, blue eyes blue fire blue lipstick.

She kicked down at the side of her umbrella and with a phomph! it sprang open, making Machi step back from the unexpected motion. Her legs arc and spin beneath her elaborate robes, bringing her around into a meditative lotus posture, balanced flawlessly atop the umbrella.

"Once, there was a volcano!" Zhaojun said. "And upon her slopes lesser creatures built their towns. The volcano was torn, for she longed to show the creatures clinging to her side her full strength and beauty, but every time she did they trembled and quaked and fled. So the volcano, in despondency, learned to temper her wroth, learned to lower her standards, learned to show mercy to those few flickers of courage and boldness she saw. If the choice was between half a rivalry and abandonment she learned to live with disappointment. And her head became so bent by always looking out for those below her that she slumped and slid and faded back into the plain."

From a fold in her robe she produced a wooden box, tied in blue string. She laid it across her lap, unraveled it with one pull, and opened it to reveal three compartments. One held a pair of firewands and enough gleaming dust to make even the incautious shrink back a little; one held a sheaf of papers; one held a small packed lunch of rice dumplings, lotus root and sliced peaches. Chopsticks flashed out from a billowing sleeve, and the stone mask was pushed up just enough for food to slip in beneath.

"And so it is with you, little sister," said Zhaojun. "Too broken hearted, too spurned, too lovesick to burn the world. You know that they do not fear the N'yari below any longer? The Flower Knight Kalaya, who rests but a short ride from here, is concerned with demons and dragons. She is the destined hero of this land, chosen by Heaven, and yet cats and the girls who are them do not even enter her mind. I am shocked that you would be regulated to such a sideline, but then, that is why I am here."

With a blur the chopsticks are replaced with long, emerald-sapphire feathers, a quill from a sacred bird. The papers are arranged. "If you would care to answer some questions about your local deities and their failure to support your civilization in raiding the lowlands it would assist enormously in my investigation."

[I Ship It: 3]

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Robena slows and stops. She feels the whisper of something ethereal passing by, and in its passage it leaves questions like winter ghosts. The answers touch points of deep hope and despair, a whole range of possibilities - but there is one thing that is confirmed by Constance's lack of response.

She is not forgiven in the face of inevitable death. If Constance had thought to take pity on a girl about to meet her death by giving her one last happy memory to carry to the reaper she could have faced Pellinore's axe without fear. Now she knew that she was not forgiven, or far more terrifyingly, perhaps her death was not inevitable. The questions coiled around her, snakes of hope and despair, and she could not tell which whispers were more terrible. Should she embrace a dark fatalism or a frantic clinging? Her heart could not settle between the feelings and so she drifted for a moment upon the twin torments.

Enough! She had crossed all of Rome's ancient lands and not found time or space enough to think through as basic a concept as virtue, and she'd freeze to ice before she solved the faerie riddle of this castle. Whatever was to come, it would not come as any result of her wit. So she swallowed hard and tried to pack away her clamoring mind and its temptations, and returned to stand before Constance. In silence this time, and stillness.

Sunshards

Chen!

+I think it's grasping,+ said Jessic in answer to your question. +Some princesses get stuck on their stories for the same reason that some people grasp for objects. This is something they love too much to let go of, that they are afraid to let evolve, afraid to let it go a different way. They want to be isolated authors explaining what's in their heads and not members of a community who let the world change them in ways they don't expect. They're afraid they won't get to tell it, they're afraid to trust their personas to other people's hands, especially to new people. You should ask Keron what she thinks about that kind of,+ she made finger quotes with her talons +"fake-ass domination".+

+It's hard, though, to fight for what you love, to put in all the work and energy and not have that respected. Anyone in a creative area wants to be heard, be loved. If you want to disarm a Princess you need to give them that love - and then beat them. If you don't love your opponent, at least a little bit, it's not a duel, it's just a fight. And fights are ugly.+

Rose!

"Don't be absurd," said the Countess, spinning you about - and with a click chaining you to the wall. "We both know you'll never remember a word I say if I'm not spanking you as I say them. And besides, if even as well trained a handmaiden as Thian can make mistakes, someone like you has a lot of training ahead. From what I hear, you even dropped some of the Princess' possessions on the ground while assisting Cyanis? A handmaiden must be graceful, Rose..."

...

It is some time later, and a thought is weighing on your mind.

Obviously you're waiting for Princess Chen to rescue you. She's beautiful and warm and has a smile that's just - so! She's your girlfriend, she said so, and not once has the Countess ever contradicted that. Every one of her statements has always been in reference to your mistress, without ever suggesting that she is your mistress. She is simply training and taming you because it is correct for her to do so, and so that when you are with your mistress you'll be ready.

But Countess Keron is so good at it, though! She knows exactly what you want and what you're ready for and how to make you feel safe even with her hand around your throat. She's as confident as fire. But still she's been keeping you at a distance because you're not hers. Yet. She's also keeping you at a distance from Jessic, and not once have you been asked to wait on the Princess.

You must be getting very confused and very torn, Rose. It would have been easier if Chen had just saved you right away, but now you're wondering what she'd look like tied at the base of the throne alongside Cyanis. Tell us a little about the struggle in your head.

Yue!

The crowd is cheering. They have seen many things but they have never seen this.

Fighting like this is riding a wave. It's about falling in love. It's about not letting your adoration for your opponent drown out your own voice and style. Tianic is trying to tell a story about distance, reach and stability - a figure like an unapproachable castle, long blade rotating in advance of whichever direction you try to reach her. If she can tell the story her way she will shine all the more beautifully, fending the wolf off and keeping it at bay with a blade that spins in concert with impeccable footwork. If she tells her story it will end with her untouchable, a worthy custodian of the blade she carries.

But that's the difference between her and a more experienced warrior, a better warrior. Her story doesn't have a place for you in it other than 'defeated'. She is doing her best with the skills she has, she is doing her best to make you admire her, but when she admires you it is despite herself and the persona she is trying to wear. Her smiles, while genuine, are slips. She's still trying too hard to copy someone else's style. She's fighting with her mind more than her heart right now and, if you could figure out just where to push her, wouldn't this be so much better?

You'll need to Entice her to get her to see what she's really capable of - but the how for that won't be hard. Your joy is infectious and she's already willing to fall. The risk here is that her hidden potential may be more than you're currently ready for.

Breathless Dead

Redana and Dolce!

As Redana reaches for the axe, Dionysus reaches for the Neamean. Its creation! Its daughter! For all the fertility of the gods it can always be forgotten that they can claim children through adoption just as surely. This, then, is the Nemean! Redana, daughter of madness, reaching back in time for the moment when she would be born! The Laughing God has ever been silent but as it reaches out to draw forth the final extinction of the human species from this game that all the other gods have been playing the silhouettes of Poseidon, Hades, Apollo and Zeus are but horrified shadows on the wall, waiting for the echo of coming laughter.

No god can undo what another god has done! This is the law! And none of them saw the truth of this moment, none of them had the eyes to perceive this future that had been making its way back to this past! All it needed was a Redana-shaped hole to fill and...

In that moment the grip of Dionysus slips. The Nemean cannot enter.

For there is already a Redana here.

Not the one broken in mind and heart - there is another Redana. Redana as she might be if she were made of marble, crowned with olive and with radiant hair. Redana as a queen, a leader, a commander, an empress. Redana stable and kind with the serene light of Apollo resting upon her head.

The Nemean rages forth anyway. It animates the shell of this lesser Redana, the alternate Redana, and flies at the Apollonian Redana with that spectral axe of entropy. With open palm, Redana the greater turns it away. Step, step, step - the light of calm and serenity boils against the madness of machine chaos. A thunderous blow carves the center map table diagonally; with light fingers the scattered papers are snatched from the air. With dark howling the air thickens into sludgeish poison, erupting in waves of venom wherever the Nemean darts. With perfect breathing even toxic air is cycled through each chakra in turn. With the shimmering crash of broken lights the Nemean makes its case for superiority. It was here first! With a gentle touch, Apollo's Redana cups the Nemean's jaw in her fingers and gives her a chaste and pure kiss on the forehead.

And with unhesitating violence, Artemis erupts from her forehead and drives her knife into Dionysus' mask.

It cracks. The machine god staggers back, eternal silence filed with horror as its fingers cover the fracture in its mask. The Nemean cannot struggle against the gentle embrace that pulls her closer for in this moment she is as weak as a kitten. Dionysus tries to pour dark energy, mad inspiration, despairing energy, into its child but every drop drains away. No god can undo what another god has done. And far-sighted Artemis had Mynx poison Redana years ago for just such an occasion. An arrow fired by a child has finally hit its mark.

For a long time this poison has lain dormant, but now it pours out from where it hid in her bones, relaxing each muscle and sapping away the strength of divinity. The furnace of Redana's heart and the silver shield of her bloodstream nanites already strive to purge it from their systems. But it will take time, and in that time the Nemean is slipping away. It is too weak to claim to be the true Redana in the face of this saintly apparition before her. And so it fades, withdrawing alongside its creator-parent, leaving only the shell of the broken girl behind, gently held in Apollonian Redana's arms.

(And though it is Mynx behind those eyes, there is yet a price to pay for defying a god. Redana, pure and transcendent, she shall remain until a Redana arises who is stronger than she and the Nemean both.)

Alexa!

It's like teleportation.

One moment you're stepping behind the curtain and the next you're sitting in a small recovery room, blinking away the fog. There is absolutely no intervening time or sense of motion. Whatever anesthetic or... whatever the priest gave you during the operation must have been really good.

The room is simple; a bed, a table, a shrine, a bathroom. The only thing that marks it out is the large silver tray resting beside your bed, filled with five biscuits. Salty, one reads. Bitter, says another, followed by sweet, sour, and spicy. A glass of water and a small basin is besides the biscuits with a note suggesting you rinse your mouth between each new flavour to cleanse your palette.

Vasilia!

"Surviving is a remarkable drive, and remarkably uncommon as a motivational force," said Iskarot. "The former Emperor Molech whose decapitated head now steers our ship was not motivated by survival, else he would never have declared war on Ares. Nor were the Cerons who overcame him - they are a war species whose genetics place their pack instinct above their individual survival, a trait that is instrumental in their battlefield triumphs. Many amongst the Priesthood have to work hard at prioritizing individual survival. They are locked in a silent struggle to convince themselves that their lives have meaning beyond their function, even years removed from it. That their travels have meaning in the eyes of an absent god. That there is some value in them living long enough to experience new wonders. Survival is an assertion of self worth, at a time when treacherous minds and unbalanced biology might deny it."

He tapped the side of the coleslaw container. "That is why I bought this. As a... celebration? Acknowledgement. Mark of respect. That you decided to prioritize your own survival rather than end us all and wreck this ship on the altar of stubborn hubris and refusal to be made irrelevant. You could have defied Zeus, and you did not. Given the stormclouds that have been brewing that may well have saved us all. So. Thank you."

XIII!

To move through the city of the Azura at such speed is to navigate through a dream. This is nothing like Tellus, nothing like the Imperial Palace, nothing like Baradissar. There is so much here and you're moving through it at speeds that render it more emotion than place.

At the end of the water channel is something that walks the line between lake and inland sea. Roads channel through short buildings, barely two floors high, made of brick and with their alleys filled with graffiti. Along a series of spires you can feel gravity change and warp as you draw close to those strange structures the Azura ships were using as turning points - you alter your sprint and lean into the same curves the ships made and you're almost flying. There is something like a street grid here but it's misaligned, all of the grid lines at different angles that result in entire buildings balancing themselves like inverted pyramids on tiny flecks of land in the middle of horrendously complicated intersections. Streets lined with trees lead up to networks of skyscrapers in the distance. Bridges and bridges across that lake-ocean, some thin and some wide, but you know better than to try any of the ones guarded by those silent Azura sentinels - even if you could win you're running so fast it'd take you longer to rebuild your stride if you stopped to fight. The violet sun is setting against the waves as you race, traveling along the network of piers that surrounds a harbour, heavy with strange boats and glowing blue lights beneath the surface. The Azura are an aquatic species, aren't they? Plenty of them swim here, bodies flashing through the water with a speed and grace that you wouldn't imagine their bulky bodies capable of on land. Your feet move in a blur with that cluster of distant skyscrapers ever in your vision, the fixed core of the world you can always navigate by.

It's like a dream. You've never ever covered as much distance as you have on this day. You've run for longer periods of time, certainly - when training for the Olympics you would run for days at a time, but there you were chained to the closed circles of the Imperial palace. Running without destination, running without arriving, running without making progress towards anything except exhaustion, running against nothing except time. Now you're running to a destination, now you're running in pursuit of a starship, the strength and beauty of your limbs matched in contest against solar fire.

You find the right bridge and you're running across it, from the twilight city towards an ancient university and cathedral mall, step by step closer to the shadow of that endless tower. You see glimpses of lives, shops, warriors, vehicles, ruins, statues, elevators, swimming pools, suburbs, tropics, dams, mountain observatories, escalators, toys, signs, tangles, doors that lead to other places, shortcuts that are spectacular secrets, tidal locked gates and trees wet from rain. You run and counting time and pace is impossible in a world too grand and too small to be chained by time.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

She could wield enormous power here with a simple act of secrecy. Simply by being an ambassador from Heaven and failing to speak her desire she could paralyze this entire court. None could act against her if they did not know her agenda. If they knew she had duties relating to mortal administration they could offer their services dearly, whereas if they knew she was here to investigate and censure then they could throw rivals and scapegoats at her feet. They seek the shape of her so that they might know how to push her, and how far.

In what direction is always a mug's game to guess. Wind spirits will help or hinder as it suits them, but they would find little satisfaction by blowing about thing she found meaningless. What they crave is relevance and entertainment, and that means that they need to know what they are assisting or thwarting. This of course is dangerous territory as Iupeter's domain brushes against Venus', but more relevant than the dance of the maidens in this moment is that Zhaojun is weary. She is a cat, after all, and a damn sight better a cat than these miserable leopards who allow themselves to be ridden like mules.

So with feline imperiousness she climbs atop the offered leopard without a word and immediately rests her head against Jenny's back, whispers her destination and falls into an easy daydream almost immediately. And she does not fear that these sky-spirits will lead her astray because the desire to find out what business a creature such as her has atop a mountain such as this will overbalance any competing trick that they might think of on short notice.

And so she nuzzles into Jenny's back and begins to purr.

Sunshards

Chen!

+I kind of think you can't have dreams without studying the dreams of other people,+ thought Jessic in the cold light of one early morning, breathing in the steam of her hot chocolate. +In a way, I don't think you can even be a proper person without it. Civilization is dreams layered on top of dreams going back thousands of years, and it's an inheritance and a treasure. This is a world with demons and machines and dragons,+ she ruffled her wings, +but all of them become human when they decide to lay claim to that inheritance of human stories. The more steeped in that tradition they become the better they are able to contribute to it, and when they do they're enriching humanity as a whole. That's what I think a Princess is, Chen... it's about being an artist, and part of being an artist is studying art.+

Rose!

The Countess snaps her fingers, and immediately her handmaidens are by her side. She turns away from Rose to single handmaiden Thian out.

"You," said the Countess to Thian, "have failed me. I instructed you to train this girl properly, and here she is calling me a liar. Here she is contradicting me. Here she is, so uncertain in herself that she is rating the words of a fox above mine."

She gestured again, imperious. Her will was clear - and in moments, Rose was unchained from the wall and Thian was bound and gagged in her place, blushing and squirming as it was always a handmaiden's right to do.

"It seems as though I have to take care of this personally," said Countess Keron with a sigh. She held out her right hand and without speaking her handmaidens knew to place her armoured metal gauntlet upon it, pulling the straps tight. The Countess flexed her fingers experimentally - and then grabbed Rose by the throat and lifted her off the floor and pushed her firmly against the wall. Little crackles of electricity ran through that gauntlet, causing sharp little jolts of static force to play across Rose's skin and through her hair.

"Listen to me," she said. "You are a bad girl when your mistress says so. You are a good girl when your mistress says so. You only have one job and it is to serve your mistress. If you are such a scatterbrained little mess that any passing fox can usurp your mistress' authority then she hasn't made herself clear. Your mistress commands your obedience not because she is strong, for she knows that you could overcome her in battle if you so chose. She does not command your obedience with code phrases or mind control or threats, those simply paper over weaknesses. Your mistress commands your obedience because she is correct. She knows your place and she knows hers. You serve because it is the right thing to do, for you and for her. And the definition of being a bad girl is someone who acts incorrectly, such as by serving unworthy mistresses. Am I clear?"

Yue!

It turns out that there's one thing harder than training to fight as a wolf: training to fight against a wolf. When a big canine sprints across the battlefield right in a devastatingly straight line and your instincts are torn between 'what a cute doggo!' and 'run for it!!', knowing what to do with a blade is less important than having experience with dogs. And you learn something from that as well, Yue - decisiveness is more important than opposable thumbs.

You bowl her over before she works through her lizard brain instincts, and before you know what's happening a bell has been rung and there's a round of applause from the stands and someone on the side unfurls a banner underneath your name with a score of 1 - the first round to you. Are there rounds? Hyra didn't say - maybe she didn't know the Sky Castle rules, maybe she didn't think it was important. But it seems the right thing in the circumstances to let Tianic get to her feet sporting a massive blush and brushing sand out of her battle dress. When she sets herself again it's with a fierce determination, the sting of humiliation cutting through the fog of her nerves. T-that was a fluke, you can almost hear her telling herself. Get it together!

This time when she sets her stance she's filled with a maiden's determination. This time will be a real fight. She has someone she can't let down too.

[Roll to Fight!]

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

The topic of the conversation between the Coherent shifts after a while, bringing a slightly cooler tone to a hot blooded celebration. The question has been raised about the first time they altered their bodies - what they wanted, what they thought they wanted, what they thought was okay to say that they wanted. Some of them are very quiet through this topic, but others are wise and distanced enough - or even simply drunk enough - to swap some stories.

Envy comes up - feeling drawn towards a task or social role designed for a specialized servitor clade. If you had been spliced as farmer and they had been spliced a pilot then there wasn't a path to the sky - at least, not one which didn't involve the genetic equivalent of cobbling together a rickety biplane in your garage from theoretical principles. Sometimes it was envy's cousin, hero worship - finding someone so inspirational that you wanted to follow in their path, even if it lead somewhere you were told you couldn't follow. Some of them expressed a deep itchiness, an uncomfort in their own skin that they didn't know how to express, and so they shed that skin regularly like a snake. Some of them had a dream of their completed self and have been diligently working towards that perfection step by step in a linear fashion. Some are curious, figuring they won't know what their ideal self is like until they try every possible configuration of shapes. Some of them had a simple problem, and they fixed it, and they were done.

There's a financial dynamic to this. The Magi of the Order are the experts at the augmentation and body modification that the Coherent desire, and so they hire the Coherent as soldiers and labourers in exchange. The conversation naturally flows onto grousing about pay, conditions, risk, and the damned magi. Everyone agrees that they should have gotten danger pay when the Yakanov went down, and that the priests were probably holding out on them with their 'all of our equipment is back on the cursed space station' excuse. But while they're grumbling, this is the good natured grumbling of workers who are basically content. This is more mythologizing than anything, the foundation laid to lead into tall tales of how everyone totally saw a Coherent warrior with an eyepatch blast through a horde of bonsai zombies with two lightning pistols granted by Zeus herself.

Vasilia!

"You are small and irrelevant and from the smell of things you have somehow managed to burn rice," said Iskarot. "I do not understand. The process is straightforwards. Boil water. Add rice. Add broccoli. Season with monosodium glutamate. And yet you are able to achieve such a spectacular failure and not be genetically driven to ritualistically flay the fur from your back as penance for your crimes against biomatter. That blithe acceptance of mediocrity is truly remarkable."

A pause, as a spoonful of coleslaw vanishes into the depths of that blackened robe. Is he clewing? Is he dumping it directly into a vat of acid? Impossible to say.

"I must clarify that although this sounds like criticism, it is not. I know far fewer beings able to accept mediocrity than beings driven to achieve transcendent perfection."

XIII!

Philosophers sometimes make the case that the universe is one and all places are bound to the same natural laws. Travelers from the Order of Hermes sometimes quip that Zeus' laws are constant no matter where you go in the galaxy. The Endless Azure Skies stand in defiance of such simple-minded universalism, and it demonstrates this truth above all with flight.

Flight in the realms of Tellus is a thing of fire and force. Muscles and engines burn away gravity for as long as they have fuel to sustain them and they pay for their defiance with sweat and smoke. To fly as the Imperials fly is to exercise power. Sometimes Imperial flight might even be graceful, but what is grace but power controlled? But to call the flight of the Azura graceful would be like calling the orbits of planets graceful - you could perhaps imagine how the concept might apply to such a spectacle, but the scale and concepts are so wildly different from any traditional understanding of grace that an entirely different vocabulary will need to be developed to understand it.

The Azura ships you watch don't move like birds or jets or anything else you might imagine. They are spheres, gleaming and reflective, rolling through the skies like marbles across ever-tilting glass. Many of them drag other spheres in their wake, orbiting them around them like moons around a comet. Sometimes they can turn on a dime, two hundred and seventy degrees of rotation in a split second at speeds that would make even a gene-reinforced combat pilot swoon. Sometimes they seem caught in some invisible lull, pulling themselves through a turn at the sluggish speed of a tea trolley snarled in that horrible tangled rug Nero kept in the Red Room. There's a logic there, a pattern, but it's no more visible to your true eye than the thermals that a bird might use. Even the Auspex is sluggish and curious here. It has been a long time since it has observed these ships and its memory stirs slowly. Eventually you can feel yourself leaning into the curves, developing a strange sort of instinct and expectation for the patterns they're taking even if you can't articulate the why of it. It has to do with their height... or perhaps their relation to other ships, or those strange flying buildings. The closer they are to each other the more control they have.

You watch them fly for many hours. Long enough that when the dark dagger-shape of the Anemoi cuts through the surreal symphony of Azura spheres, burning and raging on its way to a docking tower, it feels as alien as you do.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

"Ah, now my heart truly does weep for thou, Constance," said Robena in an overwrought tongue learned in the courts of Frankish kings, "for now at last I realize that to become a priestess thou were forced to forswear thy martial pride! It is no longer thine to wield a weapon upon the field of battle as thou did in yesteryear, now thou art at the mercy of any unchivalrous knave who dares to cast against you. Very well, then! Remain here - I go to fetch thou a champion to stand in thy place."

Robena turned her back. One free shot, should Constance desire it - that was all honour demanded.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

The air is cold. The castle is empty. The fountains are freezing. Snowflakes drift down from above.

Melancholy surroundings, Robena has found, do not inspire melancholy moods. Instead they salve them. There's something about seeing the world fading, the candles guttering, and the silence heavy that reassures her. It makes her own feelings smaller by the contrast, smaller and more natural. If she's grieving she's not alone, if she's dying so is the world, and if she prays for resurrection so does every seed sheltering under the ground. Her breath surrounds her in a cloud and memories of childhood fill her and she daydreams of midwinter feasts and heavy boots and lying feverish under blankets sweating out every drop of water she drinks as a priest sits by her bedside and whispers soft words to her as she fades.

Winter is about learning to stop expecting a miracle, and then getting one anyway.

And so it is that the moment that Constance reveals herself she is caught clean in the neck with a snowball Robena had cunningly hidden behind her back.

Sunshards

Chen!

Princess Jessic not only has that, but she has shows so specific and so inventive you're not sure you could have imagined them. She has a movie about a girl who meets the King of Cats and becomes a cat in turn for a while, and she has a series about a girl in a world of talking animals who learns to transform into a megajaguar, and she has another where a magical wolf discusses economic theory as they journey across a mysterious kingdom. Each one is like a dream you might have started with, but in the telling of the dream it becomes so elaborate and so specific that it unfolds into something real and grounded. Simply by explaining a dream in that length and in that detail it somehow becomes a story instead.

Days go by, as enchanting and exhilarating as the richest sleep.

Rose!

It is always a sign of danger when the Countess addresses you directly. Everyone else offers advice, comfort, guidance. Hers is the shadow of discipline, the iron hand that keeps you from making any incorrect choices. But even though she's dangerous she's safe too for that exact same reason. If you choose wrong she'll score you across the behind to let you know your mistake and then make the correct choice for you. You can't make her mad, you can't disappoint her, you can't do anything that'll make her hold a grudge. She's responsible for you.

So when she comes in to see you tied upside-down and hanging from the ceiling, it sends a thrill.

"So, Rose," she said, running a hand through her long black hair - a signal that had a handmaiden fall upon it with a brush a moment later. "I am just back from hearing a tale of your wickedness and perversity in seducing the heart of an innocent vixen and leading her astray. Really, from the sounds of things, you are probably the most wicked and malicious monster to have ever walked the earth, a duplicitous liar who has been undermining my authority since the very beginning. According to Cyanis you are a very bad girl indeed."

Her fingers come up beneath your chin and she tilts your head up to look her in the eyes.

"And so I'm going to ask you a question, Rose," said Countess Keron. "How should I punish Cyanis for lying to me?" she snaps her fingers. "Ungag her, and let her speak."

Yue!

Here you are, before a crowd.

It's not a big crowd. This is very much wednesday night local team volleyball numbers, where attendance is a couple dozen. Ex-handmaidens who settled out early, retirees, enthusiasts, school kids and people who stopped by to watch a couple of rounds on their way home from work. The Countess is there too, a nexus of colour and energy that anchors the entire arena - she takes this seriously, takes you seriously, even if you have not won the crowd yet.

There's another smell in the air, visible to your enhanced wolf nose. Excitement. This is someone in the audience's first time watching a duel. You can hear the skipped breath, the gasp, the amazed cry "It's a wolf! She's fighting a wolf! Look, a wolf!" There's awe in that little voice raised so loud. Not many wolves in the clouds. Just like that, you've bought a little bit of magic with you up here.

Hyra had cast another spell to correct your colour vision in this shape. Important because without it you might not have been able to appreciate the sunflower yellow and black checker pattern of your opponent's dress. You might have missed the flash of her bright green eyes or the olive tan to her skin. She carries a long two-handed sword like she's afraid of breaking it and your amazing nose tells you that she's nervous and excited too.

"Tonight's duel," came Keron's voice, loud and clear, "is between Yue of the Terraced Lake and Squire Tianic of the Sky Castle. Salute your opponent and engage with honour."