Josef had never seen snow. Just imagining it—gracefully slow, floating rain—was already enough to enchant him. The thought of a momentary chill as it hit his open palm sent shivers down his spine. Colder than anything he had ever felt before.

  But when he watched the warm, autumnal gold fall over the city, and envelop him with a magic that seemed enough to wash away the blood from his hands, he knew that snow could never compete.

  The same gold that had had destroyed his world and sent the course of his life spiralling. It wasn’t the gold itself as much as it was the promise it held; the promise the constellation offered him as it dove back over the horizon, was what tantalised him.

  Come get me. I am here.

  It had all been a bad dream, everything since that day. He could finally pick up where he left off if he just ran for his life in that direction.

  The constricting four walls of his hotel room were no longer shelter; they were roadblocks. The man responsible for their refuge was no longer an invaluable ally, but a stranger whose convenience was only debatable.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Nair whispered, seated on the bed, his hands resting on the head of his cane. “It’s a provocation.”

  “I don’t care,” Josef blurted, making for the door.

  Nair stopped him with his cane. The barrier was a weak one: nothing stopped Josef from simply barging through. But even in his moment of defiance, Nair had a way of neutralising it all, overriding his free will with whatever command he pleased.

  It was the same when he abandoned Moira.

  “You will care,” Nair commanded.

  Josef couldn’t tear his eyes away from the cane’s gems, somehow gleaming in the pitch-black room.

  The last of the gold fell from the sky, and the Wishing Whale set over the horizon, the last wisps of its light fading.

  He couldn’t find the courage to look into Nair’s eyes, but the gemstones would be enough.

  “How many years until our next chance to kill them?”

  “I don’t know, but when have we killed a Wizard or Witch in a fair fight?”

  “How many more years until we get a chance to do that?”

  Nair lowered his cane, but Josef found himself still arrested mere inches from the door. The old man re-assumed his rest as he gazed out of the window, far into the future.

  “This is a game of patience.”

  “But Vesmos isn’t patient.”

  “The plan is working.”

  “The plan won’t ever work unless the Wishbearer is dead.”

  Josef knew it. Nair had said it himself; the crown jewel of Geverde’s Aether Infused was no one but the Wishbearer themself. The crown would still shine as long as it stayed in place, and currently it held firmly. Undeterred by their previous efforts, the jewel kept shining, goading them even.

  And the Emperor knew as well as Josef did that Nair’s masterstroke, along with all its funding and master’s reputation, lay in the dislodgement of said crown jewel.

  “How many years would Vesmos wait?” Josef asked. “They might be more patient than me, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Little by little, he bent Nair’s spell to his own will.

  “Unless that is wiped off the face of the earth, you might as well be doing nothing. It’s all the same to Vesmos.”

  It wasn’t as grand a moment as he hoped. Words built off a foundation of frustration were simply flying out of his mouth, hoping they would land.

  “Just twiddling your thumbs while you take a holiday around the world, hoarding their cash and their agents.”

  A desperate cry, like a child longing for the playground, a dog for the beach.

  “I’m here! I’m your best damn chance, and if we’re never getting out of this city…I’d rather take them down with me.”

  The end was in sight. The nightmare was coming to a close.

  “Let’s mark this victory on your gravestone.”

  It was her they were looking for. All the reputation, the fear and the priority fell onto her shoulders. She was the bait that fought back, but it was important she played both roles effectively.

  Anything was on the table: that was the inadequate conclusion that Alis’s description had netted her. Anything was on the table, but that whirlwind of possibility still hinged on a human being, one that was susceptible to nausea magic and thought in bullets and simple barricades.

  She’d sent Iris away, Crestana and Alis following close behind to leave her to stand her ground. The bait she would be.

  Revenge was a powerful motivator, one that Evalyn could sympathise with and therefore fear more than anything grand or materialistic.

  A mere threat on her livelihood had her marching the path of war. Grafting her own fury a hundred-fold onto the enemy, and they no longer needed to be a Wizard to worry her.

  And of all the skeletons in her closet, the one she shared with Iris was the one that decided to crawl back from the dead.

  No hard feelings. No good or evil. Meeting your enemy’s hedonistic desire with your own. Those weren’t things Iris understood, or rather believed in. In her eyes, perhaps she was still the oppressor on the wrong side of history.

  As long as she didn’t let perceived justice take its course and surrender herself, Evalyn could deal with the aftermath. Although ‘could’ wouldn’t mean it would be any less painful.

  Evalyn looked to the sky, the first moments of war descending upon the abandoned district. The hallowed twilight moments manifested in a high drone, one that hung over the sky like a soprano choir.

  Eventually, speckles of gold distinguished themselves from the stars, their movement fast and uniform as though flying in formation.

  Wings. Avian wings too big for any bird.

  Gold as they were, to her eye, their shape was unmistakable. Rapacian fighters. Geverdian design. The opening blow to what had eventually crushed the old F.S.A..

  To rain hellfire on Excala the same way it did on them. Evalyn couldn’t remember fighting such a pure expression of vengeance.

  If only the world abided by poetry.

  The fighters, almost an identical fleet to the one Elliot commanded that day, descended into the industrial district. Their opening volley followed soon after, and it draped the land beneath in streaks of carpet-fire.

  Evalyn examined the maelstrom of imitation bullets—the muzzle flashes, the lightning, the gunfire, the thunder—as her armour closed in around her body.

  The bullets hit, pinging off her own golden plates like hail from the roof of a car. The rest fell in ribbons around her, drawing lines of sawdust and debris as the bullets chew up and spat out entire warehouse’s worth of steel.

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  The world around her crumbled, yet nobody was dying, least of all her. An attack so indiscriminate was just their opening play, a gauntlet thrown down in response.

  The role of the bait. Evalyn hadn’t played her part well enough.

  She called upon her bow again; the ends extruding from her left palm, the shaft of the arrow from her right. Lastly, she strung her bow and raised it to the sky, and as though commanding an entire company of archers, a hundred bows and arrows behind her followed suit.

  Drawing on the same enemy again. The déjà vu wasn’t lost on her. She wished it had been.

  Evalyn fired first, and the rest followed soon after. The first arrow was always the most accurate, tearing a fighter’s wing from its chassis. The other hundred flew straight, catching anything in their path.

  Gold struck gold, both the latter and the former crumbling into shards that streaked across the sky. But as Alis warned, a fleet of fighters remained after the dust settled.

  Evalyn hoped they had been watching closely. It was the best she could do, short of hoisting a flag above her head. But conveniently, they answered in the affirmative, and next stole a page from her own book.

  A ring of gold began encircling her, at first hiding in the district’s many seams and alleys but eventually rising above their rooftops with no signs of stopping until it blotched out the stars.

  Through the ever-shrinking gap, Evalyn watched thunder clouds gather, spawning as wisps from thin air. Through the fading hole in the dome’s apex, rain began falling. Tempestuous rain, enough to smother the gold’s light and obscure it from the city.

  The Queen’s contribution. Evalyn prayed it wasn’t the last. She could picture her majesty leaving the fight to them in a fit of whimsy as much as she could picture her leading the charge herself.

  The storm outside beat against the barrier, and with it, the domain inside the golden walls was severed visually and sonically from the outside world. Unless the Wizard’s magic worked like Iris’s, conducting an attack from outside would be borderline impossible, as it would be for Evalyn.

  She crossed her fingers, hoping that assumption would narrow down the search area. But that wasn’t Evalyn’s job. Being the bait still was.

  Raising her heels and filling the space in between with matter, she made to reposition. Fast and agile, she fired off more arrows, feigning desperate attempts to break the barrier. The arrows punctured it, but the wounds closed as fast as she could make them.

  The proverbial flag above her head. She was hoisting it high now.

  Jets again. They wanted to keep things as long a range as possible. Trading jabs to measure distance, only now the jabs were landing with more accuracy. Evalyn’s armour negated the damage. The fight was making no progress yet.

  She leapt from the edge of another warehouse, catching in her peripheral vision a growing sea of purple gas carpeting the streets. Keeping her opponents distracted would become exponentially more demanding. The flag above her head had to become a firework, or better yet, a cannon.

  “Act four.”

  Vines and roots sprouted from her feet, their branches of maple leaves quickly building canopies of colour over the lifeless streets below her. Evalyn continued to exert herself, pushing the vines out further and faster than ever, rapidly covering block after block in every direction.

  As the range of her Mind Palace invaded the arena, the space available to the enemy dwindled, and that panic reflected in the skies above her.

  Strafing became bombing, and imitation fire broke out across the imitation wood. Still, Evalyn didn’t relent as the purple gas below her feet plumed ever upwards.

  Then, the gas caught.

  A flash of purple erupted in the distance. The fire faltered, the bombs ceased, and the entire dome seemed to quiver.

  “Nice one, Iris,” she muttered.

  Sensing through her gas alone made for a muddy picture, and by the time she could flash the matter around a hint of movement, the culprit was already long gone. With every unsuccessful attempt, she considered burning the entire area, but held off as best she could.

  Both at Crestana’s, and surprisingly Alis’s request, she had promised to at least try to take either alive. Iris wasn’t complaining; it was a compelling request, only one that better suited the Wishing Whale itself.

  She knew better than anyone the motive of her enemy’s revenge. She knew what lengths she herself would go to for it. She knew that her chances of winning nosedived the moment she tried to act with any amount of mercy.

  Her Beast ducked underneath another rusting steel walkway that almost grazed the three riding its back. They flew low to the ground as to avoid early detection, only adding to their nauseating perception of speed.

  Hopefully, Evalyn was simultaneously closing in. The vines were receding, focusing their growth further down the dome.

  The gas was pluming thicker, rising halfway up the building walls, but still she could feel wisps of fleeing movement, nearing the edge of the dome.

  Iris gave up on harassing them, diverting all her attention to simply tracking them down. Turn after nauseating turn, she took corners at full speed while she distinguished and tightened the grip around the two assailants, wrapping hardened branches around their entire bodies.

  Confident she had narrowed down two bodies, Iris solidified her gas around them. Prey snagged, she reared her Beast’s head above the rooftops and checked her catch.

  Gold dust. Nothing more than gold dust slipping between the seams of her tendrils.

  “Watch out!” Iris cried as the movements of her eyes grew hysterical, whipping from one nook to another cranny. She had overplayed her hand, with insufficient gas to cover her blind spots.

  “Your Majesty—”

  “Your Eight o’clock.”

  The force struck before she could react. A sudden burst winded her from behind, knocking her off her mount. Instead of gold dust left in its wake, an intense gust of wind rushed past her ears instead. A burst of air; a familiar Vesmosian favourite.

  “Split up!” Iris shouted as she dug the fingers of her gauntlet into a nearby warehouse wall. Alis was on the ground beneath her, gathering purple matter to his side; Crestana was already long gone.

  “Where’s Crestana?”

  “Shadows.”

  “Good. Amestris?”

  “I still sense magic from the same direction.”

  With hindsight, Iris found the open set of roll up doors the blast had come from. She restarted her attack twofold, deploying demolition rams to make rubble of the wall around the opening while restocking the area with gas.

  One solid impact and the wall was cracking under her power, but before she could sustain the assault and deliver a second, her enemy’s response came. Two golden H.O.A.s rounded the corners of the besieged warehouse, rifles already raised.

  Iris moved to defend herself and Alis, erecting barricades in time to catch the cannon rounds, the bolts on their rifles furiously cycling with each press of the trigger.

  Alis acted as her offensive half, wrapping both units in purple tendrils and heaving them off the ground. Through gritted teeth and a mighty groan, he flung them skywards, barreling towards the dome’s wall.

  But the few seconds they’d taken in their magical back and forth had been enough to distract them from their enemy’s next plan of attack.

  Vines, with iron-solid bark girth that put tree trunks to shame, rapidly extruded from the same roller doors as before, invading the battlefield with a feverish speed. Vesmos magic she had seen wand-users employ before, but never at such a magnitude.

  Iris made a pass to destroy it, first with solid rams, second with the hot breath of her Beast. Alis tried similar tactics, garnering him similar results. Charred and crushed as it was, the vines didn’t relent, leaving them—particularly Alis—open to the next golden attack.

  Tracing the vines to a progenitor was no longer viable; spread too far and too complex, she would be long overrun, assuming the Wizard she wanted even lay at its apex.

  The vines were insufferable, the gold dust gathering to form another unique threat too dangerous to stand idle in the face of. Iris’s ire was growing, a putrid mixture of survival instinct fuelling what was once tepid hostility. Her sympathy fast eroded as she came to terms with just how little the enemy had for her.

  She fed her Beast a portion of matter as it opened its maw like the teeth of a ratchet. The speck of purple material in its mouth grew hot and bright, outshining the vines’ green, the dust’s lustrous gold.

  “Shoot.”

  The burst of thunder cut across the warehouse roof, severing the steel from steel with heat alone. The surrounding air burned, expanding and rising, making way for a torrential gust of wind.

  As fast as it had begun, the beam’s breadth slowly dwindled. Iris let it die; the warehouse’s roof completely severed from its hinges.

  Concealment gone, there was one less layer for them to hide behind. Iris strained her eyes, peering through the aftermath for any hint of movement.

  “I sense nothing,” her majesty muttered.

  “Alis!”

  “Nothing!” he replied, having taken refuge behind a barrier of purple during Iris’s attack. “Not yet.”

  He emerged, weakening his barrier somewhat. But as though the commander of the gold dust could smell Alis’s momentary weakness, they struck.

  A rendition of an armoured personnel carrier burst from the rubble, ramming into Alis’s barrier bonnet first. In unison came another storm of vines, trapping Alis in its snares.

  The vines’ bark cracked, unnatural growth spurred on by magic. But in the midst of that unnerving sound, Iris heard somewhere the sound of bone breaking.

  “Alis!”

  The enemy was somewhere in the entanglement, but she wasn’t sure where. An attack strong enough to overcome the vines would take Alis with it.

  Diving in after him would be the only option, cutting her way through the vegetation until she dragged him out by the arm—

  The world suddenly stopped. Her body seized. Her armour began disintegrating in time with the vines, and she fell from her vantage point.

  Iris landed on the concrete feet first, knees folding under her body as momentum carried her weight into a roll. Even as she rolled on the ground, she gasped for air, yet felt as though she was still choking.

  She clawed at her throat, slowly through her animalistic state-of-mind realising what had happened. Crestana had levelled the playing field, but at a cost.

  Alis was picking himself off the ground, his off-hand bloodied but still intact. Crestana was nowhere, but that was for the best. Her attention then fell onto two figures, one struggling to recover as she was, the other unfazed, a sinister glow emanating from the head of their staff.

  Iris strained her muscles, her chest burning from the inside out. She tried to rise, but it wasn’t fast enough.

  The glow shimmered to a crescendo, clearing her vision enough to finally glimpse the enemy. Crestana had brought them out into the open and saved Alis in the process; but the power to capitalise on that chance, the time to do so swindled by the moment.

  “Be ready to fight again soon.”

  A flash of blue overpowered the glowing gems, intersecting with an explosion of warm orange gold from above.

  Might converged. Iris had seconds to breathe, but no more.