From her place atop the lower of the two towers in Mirra, Agnessa gazed up at the crumbling peak of the taller one before her. It rose dark and looming, its cracked top a crown of days long past. Even the tower beneath her was ancient beyond accurate historical reckoning, and its better was older still. Before the city sprawled below; before the cornerstone was set for the keep beneath her feet, the broken tower stood.

  Who or what did the tower house in those forgotten days? Even Agnessa couldn’t tell. What historic energy she felt there had been impossible to decipher. She realized now that it meshed with a present power. Combined, the synergistic energy distorted both patterns, obscuring both from passive observation. Or detection. It was no wonder she hadn't suspected foul play earlier in Mirra.

  She sighed just as historic energy rose like a draft and washed over her like a breeze. It had been drawn by the intent of her curiosity, but it lingered in ways most historic frequencies don’t. It further struck her curiosity, now in other ways; why was the energy so reactive? She thought maybe, if she had enough time, she could work out how to separate it, piece by piece, from the newer energies. Maybe it wouldn't take so long.

  The flow of energy grew in intensity and settled easily on her thoughts. A wistfulness sparked within her like a fleeting glimpse at a dear memory previously forgotten. It wasn't a memory of hers, and yet she felt completely captivated by it.

  Bits and pieces came together. Strong energy stirred strongest from an era when people like her populated Gorals. A wave of insight; Goralian rule over all others who were at best slaves, war dogs used as toys for sport.

  The feeling lingered for only a moment longer before fading like a veil pulled from over the present.

  In her daze, she had flitted up to the taller tower. She found herself on its ledge. How all-encompassing those feelings must have been to distract her; she hadn't even realized what she'd done in basking in them. She had landed gracefully on a dusty slant of a slab so monstrous its fall could flatten a hill. It rocked and teetered beneath her.

  Something sparked behind her in the clouds as she climbed the slab, and she peered over her shoulder to look at it. It wasn't a ship. It wasn't a soldier. It wasn't a newcomer of great power out to struggle with her on behalf of the wizard king. It was the Red Star.

  How could something so far away ping her in this way, to trigger her guard as something more alarming even than present perils?

  She didn't know, but it had, and she didn't fight the urge to stop and stare at it.

  It had peeked through the clouds. Now it hung there, shining.

  It was so strange to her, this matter of the star. It felt oddly confrontational to stare at it. But even she didn't know just what it was.

  She suspected her brother, Clement, knew. What little she knew about it she had gathered through watching him.

  She had seen it in his mind. Most often, those times she caught him obsessing about it were times they shared in the womb. As he suckled his thumb and dreamed of the star, she watched. And as she dreamed, and he snuck for himself moments to think alone, she pried.

  She could still remember, clear as the present, those moments. She didn't know why. So much of her childhood was simply wiped from her memory. But she had retained those moments, and so many other from their time together in the womb.

  He had been in mental space most times. Through her mind's eye, it had seemed as though he browsed an endless library, though she knew better; the library she saw was something more symbolic than actual, representative of something abstract he perceived clearly that she could not. The eternal annals of consciousness, maybe. Whatever it was, he was there, poring over anything and everything he could find related to the star.

  Why?

  Like so many things to do with her twin brother, she didn't know. He was an enigma.

  She tore her gaze from the star and climbed up the slab. As she made her way across it, it began to change. Its cracks merged as the slab rose whole and became flush again with the rest of the flat ground atop the tower. Rounded edges about the circumference of the tower rose into a shoulder-high wall, harsh and angular. Green patches that blotched the stone faded away with other imperfections, leaving behind not gray stone, but a white stone of a type she was not familiar. It glowed in its own light like the color of the white moon and was translucent like thin clouds. It became sunny out, the sky became blue, no ships presently hung over the skyline, and there was no skyline over which to hang. There was only this one tower, like a finger of God, that touched the sky.

  She didn't struggle against the overwhelming sense of awe the seamless transformation sent coursing through her being like adrenaline. She let it affect her and move through. "The game of magic begins,” she said softly to herself.

  Magic was not her forte. In fact, she only rarely felt compelled to use it, and she only ever did so very poorly. Raw energy manipulation had always come so much easier to her, and she was fine with that; as magic's superior, the abilities it afforded her satisfied her needs.

  Another breeze swept over her. Where nothing had been all around her, space was filled – with carpet, tables, weapon racks, and other more curious things. A great throne of polished wood sat beneath the stars and, before it, at the edge of where the crack had been, stood an enormous spyglass of rich, shiny brass on an equally shiny brass mount. The glass at the outer end bulged in ways that assured her no physical science was behind the mechanics of its design. The material object, like the library Clement had used those years ago, was a symbolic representation of a physical concept only implanted within the physical to meet the standards of rules its creators likely scoffed at as bordering on arbitrary. Its function, then, surely must have yielded results suitable to such an advanced group.

  Agnessa felt compelled to look inside. She did so, and what she saw left her second-guessing magic's worth. She saw, southwest, clear as day, a great city where nothing stands today, gleaming green and blue, and surrounding a great tower she'd never seen yet immediately recognized all the same.

  “The tower of Gitra. So, these are the ancient days,” she said softly, stepping back from the eyepiece of the looking glass. So far away was that tower from here, beyond a curvature that would see it shrouded if spied from here, no matter by any means. And yet, by some magic or wizardry, the great battle that ended the Gitra commenced before her, and she saw it perfectly, and in perfect detail.

  Who had watched from here, all those years ago? Whoever he was, she could feel that a cold laughter had spilled from him. He was a great man in stature, and greater in girth. A powerful man of seemingly endless years, brutal, ruthless, and unstoppable in his days, by Goralian standards. And yet still, he was somehow leagues beneath her brother in terms of raw energetic capacity.

  She shivered, and though she would have liked to assume it was due to the chill air, she knew it was not. Her brother terrified her, perhaps even more than the star.

  She had to pull herself together. The magical distraction had played its part well. Whoever had cast this spell had caught her in it like a fly, and as she wiggled within it, she found that she couldn't get out, but rather that she was sucked more within it.

  Whoever had painted history here chose this era to display for a reason, to draw her in. It had worked marvelously. To look as the Goralians had upon the Gitra on their dying day had been something she'd longed to do since the day she'd discovered they had ever met their end. Who or what could have dwindled such magnificent beings during what must have been such an epic final stand? It was imperative that she knew. Now that she did, she could move along, and she imagined the creator of this facade would expect her to.

  Hissing and hushed voices stole her attention parallel to the quenching of her curiosity. Another wind blew over, and this one lit the way to a drop of covered steps. They were draped in red, all the way down into the tower as a long and spiraled descent of growing warmth and the sooty-sweet smell of smoldering embers. Torches lined the walls in brass fixtures. Beneath them were bouquets of dried flowers sprinkled in fresh spices. Portholes in the wall were rimmed in iron. Mere gaps in the walls today were windows encased in thick glass. Portraits hung, and skins, and the heads of great extinct beasts. This was a different world, one of order, power, strength whereas today was weak, cracked and decayed. She was starting to see the connection, the point of the display beyond its draw; the order shown, the power, was what Armeddes meant to reinstate and claim as his own; the suffering of the Gitra then was the sacrifice of suffering in Mirra he had already shown he was willing to make.

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  “You clearly perceive the intent,” came a cold and distant voice; it broke the fa?ade at once. “Though you fail to perceive who it is behind the display. For I am not your emperor. I am merely his servant.”

  Agnessa, who had been at the end of the winding way, hesitated before stepping fully into what was now a cold dark expanse.

  “Like you, I prefer the warmth and light of a healthy fire,” an old man standing there in the middle of the room said. She thought she vaguely recognized him, and he went on as the light returned with the warmth within the facade. He stood before her in the middle of a vast expanse nearly the width on all sides of the round stone tower, on a great shaggy carpet of white and black fur patterned in zigzags, on wood floors both shiny and polished, and under a great round chandelier of wood and antlers. He wore a round black cap on his curly white head. His eyes were a cold, severe blue beneath bushy white brows. His beard matched his hair, and it hung just below a collar of blue velvet, like the jacket he wore. It was a jacket only members of The Five wore. And as she searched her memory, she was sure she found him there in places as Pallin, First of the Five, beneath only the Vicar within the order of the Church and the eyes of El Shaddai. What was he doing here? With Armeddes of Galsia, enemy of Barufus the Humble, therefore enemy of the Church?

  Pallin asked his own question. “What brings the Lady of agony here to the cold, dead peaks of ruinous Gorals? Looking for trouble, I suppose. And why? Aren’t yours the concerns of one beyond such trifles? I thought you had left to seek out The Sword. Have you abandoned your holy task? Or is it that The Sword has found its way here? So, Armeddes guessed it correctly, then. It is on the move.”

  Agnessa didn’t say anything. Though they were framed in questions, these words were more of prying probes in search of tells in the smallest ticks or wayward thoughts. He could not be further from the truth concerning her intentions, and that was a deliberate device on his part. Still, even that posed a question she would be wise to take seriously in wonder: should she be in search of The Sword if it seemed even remotely possible Armeddes was too?

  “I would never have expected the sister of Mercy to stand silently when questioned. Like your brother, you're an unyielding statue in the face of questioning. Though only in that, I'm afraid, are you much like him. In that and your mutual vanity.”

  “Vanity,” Agnessa scoffed.

  “Look at you. Your beauty radiates as naturally as a newly sunlit morning beneath clear skies. And yet you dress in gold and glimmering stones to impress by other means.”

  “Does my brother dress this way?” Agnessa asked, genuinely curious; she hadn’t seen him in nearly a decade.

  “He doesn’t have to dress in such a manner to show he’s vane. He wears it on his face. He’s stained in it. It’s a permanent thing. A sort of unwieldy magic even he’ll never quite control.”

  “Magic,” Agnessa said, her eyes, for a moment, scanning the room.

  “Magic,” Pallin said, almost an admission. A wand, shoulder-height and itself vane in appearance, materialized from the ground up in his hand. “White wood of the Ether Tree,” he said, tapping in succession with each right finger the staff he clutched in left knuckles. “Tipped with the Eye of the Lord.”

  “It was you who stole it, then,” Agnessa said, eyeing the golden gem at the crest of the staff. She remembered when the relic went missing. Clement admitted he’d known who’d done it, though he never said who. He’d only say it had no connection with The Sword, thus being of little concern.

  “To call what I did stealing is a stretch whose measure few would understand.” He stood tall, and let it be known to Agnessa that he did not need the staff to stand.

  He threw down his coat, and in that moment his staff became a sword of white wood with gray grain, emblazoned in a golden light that flickered like flames. The sword was long, as long as the staff had been tall. And whereas the kite-cut gem had been as tall as a hand and as wide around as a fist, it was shrunken and embedded in the center of the hilt. It shown in a dazzling light of its own like the sun.

  Agnessa smiled, though her eyebrow twitched. Wizards are not as easily destroyed as giant bugs. It can be accurately assumed that they come prepared in the way of protections. And most protections, if imbued about the body properly, reflect at least some ill intent back on the original source.

  Still, she smiled all the same as a spike of flaming light, gold, like the radiant energy about the wizard’s sword, came alive in her hand.

  “I will ask you, Milady, to leave only once.”

  “I will not go,” she said, assuming a defensive stance.

  “Very well,” he replied, shutting his eyes. He was uplifted then, encased in a white light like a visible wind that encircled his body.

  That, Agnessa noted, was the protection she had suspected. In its radiant form, it would reflect her energies.

  Agnessa lit green in her own protective light as the tower faded from existence. They hung suspended in a pale orange sky. The atmosphere was heavy here, and when a ground of blue grass rose up to meet their feet, both nearly collapsed under the sudden strain of heavy gravity.

  With a grunt, the wizard lunged forward, performing a stab of perfect form. His right hand, he outstretched, arm straight, the tip of his blade angled perfectly at her heart, his other arm behind his back.

  Agnessa dodged, but did not parry, the attack. Instead, she flew up into the air and landed behind the wizard, who stood straight before turning and adjusting his stance to face her.

  Again, he lunged, and again, she dodged. But this time, when he missed and she rose, he swiped at her feet.

  The tip of the blade nipped at her ankle with a scratch that scattered blood. It spattered on the grass and sizzled there until gone in a pungent plume of smoke. This was how hot the air was there where they were, on the distant surface of the small green moon.

  Agnessa had never bled from a wound before. She couldn’t help but grimace, eyes wide, as she looked down and saw yellow fat exposed within the blood of the fading wound.

  Pallin didn’t smile. In fact, his face remained as cold and severe as it had been all along, his steely eyes finding her ankle only for a moment before returning to her own bright eyes.

  “One word,” he said, “and I drop the spell and let you fly. One. Word.”

  Agnessa, whose ankle had already healed without scarring, blinked once slowly before shaking her head and letting out the smallest of sighs. She regained what looked like composure in the knowing that Clement hadn't been lying; they were, he and she, fully Goralian rather than some sort of Gitran hybrid despite the seeming impossibility. Regardless of the comfort the painful experience brought in revelation, her nerves tortured her still, as she had been cut.

  “Say it. Any one word. Say please. Or stop. Or no.”

  “Fuck,” she said, “you.”

  Pallin’s mustache twitched, and he adjusted his posture so that he stood ready in a more aggressive stance. “Say no more,” he said. “We end it, then.”

  Agnessa felt it was her turn to make the first move. She knew just what she’d do. Clement had done it to her several times before. These agonizing demonstrations had been his means to teach her an invaluable skill. He had taken her space and shut her in it, removed it from physical space and laid it out again in a space he stretched into existence with his intent. From her perspective, she did everything she could to hold her cells together in what was an omnidirectional pull.

  She placed Pallin under that same test now. His protective spells dropped, and he screamed in pain and a struggle to keep himself together.

  Despite his struggle, and her effort, he did maintain himself.

  Agnessa had never been set on killing him. In both sympathy and a newfound admiration, she let him go.

  They appeared back in the tower, in that same grand room, only in the cold and windy dark of night in the present time.

  He fell to his knees there and coughed a single glob of blood before wiping his mouth, standing slowly, and locking eyes with the young goddess of death. His was an expression of unfeigned panic, and he maintained it in fear she might do something even more horrendous to him should he look away.

  “Vanity is not all we share in common,” Agnessa said, for she knew even Pallin feared her brother. Everyone had. “I may be small within the shadow of my brother. But compared to rats like you, I am great!”

  Pallin tried to speak, but he could not. He gripped at his throat and shook his head, his sword appearing at his feet with a clatter, and then rising up as a staff that met his hand.

  "Heed my warning and spread it throughout your lot! I am Agnessa Iadora, and you have gained my attention!

  He faded in a puff of smoke there, and Agnessa ran through it to the open door beyond.

  She flew down the steps and found the tail end of what she sought as a trail of pale, yellow light that stretched up into the sky toward the white ship.

  Armeddes had made that trail. He had observed their fight and fled rather than joined.

  She refused to accept that he was gone and launched herself after him in the trail.

  The ship was still there, greater than she’d ever imagined, and growing ever larger as she neared it.

  It shot down a great dagger of sunlight from within its core that left a flooding gash in the city below.

  Suddenly, it was gone; it had vanished in a flash. What an enormous energy, to leave a hole in the air behind it, of nothing, of outer space within inner space, vacant until she filled it, and then the sky. Even the hole in the ground was second to such energy.

  But neither held her attention like what currently drew it. The Red Star. It had, for the first time, looked down at her and noticed she was there. But why? Why now, after all this time?

  She looked directly beneath her and saw the blonde boy falling limp.