The playing field was already a mess by the time Evalyn landed. Melted steel cooling into strings, steel bars jutting from concrete, crumbling like biscuits.

  With the dome suddenly gone, the torrential rain finally hit. Weighty, and carrying a presence all of its own, it unloaded onto her shoulders.

  A radiant set of blue antlers shone through the thick veil of water, gathering debris to mount a temporary defence. Evalyn leapt from a warehouse rooftop and joined the Queen behind the barricade.

  “Don’t overexert yourself, your majesty.”

  “I don’t believe I am,” she said. “The three are all right, but I worry most about the Vesmosian.”

  Evalyn turned; Iris was getting to her feet with Crestana’s help, and Alis was once again standing, although blood was seeping through his left sleeve.

  “I had hoped we could resolve this with minor damage,” Amestris muttered. “Stand back. Be ready to take the one with the staff.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The rest came with little fanfare, as was the Queen’s style. The ground beneath them split in two; at first just the concrete but the fracture quickly deepened. Past foundation, past soil, past rock. Next came buildings—both standing and reduced to rubble—all built under the watchful eye of her majesty, and therefore hers to use as she pleased.

  Blades of metal, wires twisting like tendrils, shards of glass and chunks of concrete flung at the two fugitives like a machine gun. The onslaught only continued, the Queen waiting for something: a moment.

  “Ready yourself.”

  Evalyn exerted her magic, priming herself like an elastic band.

  “To the left.”

  The earth cracked, and the two sides arched upward into a peak. Evalyn rocketed left, finding, as promised, the man she knew as Peter Nair struggling to find his footing on the fresh incline.

  Evalyn wasted no time; pointed tendrils stretched from the sharpened plates of her armour, fully intent on making a skewer out of her target.

  The head of the staff flashed an incomplete mixture of two colours. The vines spawned again, cocooning him before Evalyn could reach. She advanced anyway, confident she could punch through.

  A green flash, and the seams in the bark glowed. Evalyn’s tendrils dug into their target, but didn’t go far beyond the first layer and garnered little more than a small cloud of splinters.

  A trick in every gem. Combining two together was a no brainer.

  She opted for volume. More tendrils, more points of attack. Mounting pressure would force something out of the ball.

  The Queen retreated, her damage dealt and her helping hand played. She left the cards reshuffled, the land to their left now a great wall of concrete.

  The rain almost rendered Crestana invisible, but she was definitely in the real world. Iris could feel her freezing arms wrapped around her chest. Alis was close to her right, sleeve dyed blood red, dousing the rain a vivid shade of scarlet. If it weren’t for his injury, Iris wondered if she’d even spot him at all.

  She turned her attention forward, in line with her footsteps, searching through the tempest for a sign of life, a flash of gold. But all she found was a figure; an injured, drenched, mortal figure.

  His face was scarred: once gashes running down his cheek, interrupting the messy stubble across his face. Iris could guess how they came to be, or what fuelled the loathsome glint in his eyes.

  “Let’s stop!”

  “Crestana!” Iris hissed. She braced for an attack.

  “It’s enough! What else do you want?”

  It was a line from a fairytale. Something only Crestana could gather the courage to say when her own life was at stake.

  “We have nothing to give you! They did what they had to!”

  “Crestana…stop…”

  She was well intentioned, but just as wrong.

  The person, the memory of what must’ve once been a person, had every right. No. Rights assumed the world worked on order. Life—its chaos of convenience, of the easy way out of a hard solution—wasn’t blind, nor did it hold a set of scales.

  Cheated. Destroyed. Iris could only fathom life from the other side of the coin. The cheater. The destroyer.

  She had to do what she had to do, yes, but nothing changed how his eyes saw the world; a world where she was the monster, the villain. Words that described her as fair as the word ‘daughter’ did. As accurately as ‘friend’. As truthfully as ‘ally’ or ‘citizen’ or ‘child’.

  “They left me with nothing.”

  Words that described Evalyn as faithfully as ‘mother’, as ‘wife’, or as ‘daughter’, Elliot as honestly as ‘father’, ‘husband’, and ‘son’.

  “All I have are memories.”

  All described her, few of her own choosing. Definitions thrust on her simply by trying to surviving.

  “All I have left are memories.”

  Her sheer presence, her mere actions besides the air she breathed, hurt something, angered someone. Evalyn wasn’t heartless, but in the end, she knew it was impossible to draw a line. What was acceptable, what was moral, at some point was lost in semantics, in opinions, in meaningless dribble that helped nobody but those who could afford to draw the line where their feet wouldn’t cross it.

  To live was to take up space, to take space from someone else.

  “You have Moira.”

  Alis’s voice: a shaky, injured guiding star through the rain. The few words he said arrested them, the figure shrouded in rain most of all.

  “She’s waiting for you.”

  The rain hid his face. They could only wait for his words or the flash of gold; whichever came first.

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  “I have the chance to take everything away from them.”

  The moral line before Iris’s feet shifted forward. Deeper into violence, deeper into anger, deeper into power. Forward. So far forward that it would be the wall that protected her life from him.

  “Then take it,” Iris muttered.

  Crestana’s grip tightened around her torso, but they were weak willed, not truly intent on holding her back.

  “Then take it!” Iris shouted, bellowing against the rain. “Try, and see what happens!”

  Iris caught the first flash of golden light, and she met it with her own. Crestana let go; Alis readied his weapons.

  Then the rain stopped.

  No rubble. No shadows. No sound.

  Just desert. Golden sand. The sun beaming down on them, on the small, rocky outcrop they shared with dozens of H.O.A.

  Evalyn gave up, trading the spears for a nutcracker: two solid walls pressed against either side, the pure might of altered physics behind each one. She brought her hands together, feeling the ball’s resistance between her palms.

  Then, another flash, another colour of the rainbow. Red this time, and it was stubborn. The light crawled from underneath the vines and latched onto her gold like a parasite.

  It spread through crevices between the maple leaves, singling out their leaves and prying them off the main body one by one. Its mass dwindled, and with it, its power.

  Evalyn released her hold before the rot could spread too far. Magic that deconstructed magic; it was commonplace in Geverdian fire and rescue, although the streets of Excala would riot if they ever used such a potent variety.

  Nair emerged from his shell now that he’d made his point. It was in him to block anything too conventional, and to chew through anything that got past. Put him in her Mind Palace, and he might tear a hole through it.

  Things would drag on unless she upped the ante. The Queen’s concealment would help, but she was still right next to Excala on an otherwise peaceful night.

  Her trump card would wait. Exhaust all other options first.

  “Act four.”

  The vines returned, sprouting from her feet and making a beeline for Nair. Keep his attention divided, his focus busy.

  The staff probed the attack, crushing the vines under condensed air, but Evalyn’s assault was relentless. They made passes at him as his defence grew more frantic, but he only started moving once she started firing arrows.

  Kill shots, aiming straight for centre mass. Those persuaded him to jink. Another airburst propelled him off the ground, but what carried him afterwards was pure momentum, no control besides another burst.

  Evalyn aimed her arrow, leading her shot and firing. His body itself glowed green, turning grazing hits into nothing but ricochets, but she was beginning to see his flight path clearly.

  Square hit. She knew instinctively it wasn’t enough to pierce, but knock him out of the air it did.

  Evalyn pounced on the opportunity, ensnaring him with her own vines and separating him from his weapon. She crushed his cane’s head into splinters, the jewels into fine dust.

  The jig was up. Evalyn relaxed. The rain had smothered her, although her armour had kept the worst off her shoulders. The world beyond her immediate surroundings was a blur.

  Just occasional sparks of light. A streetlamp, a company sign.

  A red glow, drawing Aether.

  “No way.”

  With perhaps a hundred-fold the vigour of before, the red magic ate away at her own, rot racing through her vines and back towards her.

  She panicked, severing the roots from her soles and leaping backward as the magic infected the last of the wood, fiending for more.

  She strained her eyes through the rain, looking for the culprit, for an explanation. He used a staff; he wasn’t a Wizard.

  Nair stood on the far reaches of her vision, his suit now well torn from her earlier attack.

  A gemstone glowed red from behind the holes in his dress shirt, grafted onto his skin under a thin, translucent layer of scar tissue.

  “You sick bastard,” she muttered, checking her handgun was still where she left it.

  The back and forth started again, with what to Evalyn felt like a renewed fervour. Vines, arrows, knives and guillotines all shattered against him one way or another as his own offenses mounted. The bursts of air weren’t life threatening by themselves, but with each hit, her brain rattled in her skull, the interrupted concentration enough for him to close another few metres of distance.

  Something possessed the man. The green shimmer about his body made it impossible for her to pull out her gun. Getting overexcited and pulling the trigger prematurely meant one less card up her sleeve. It wouldn’t be the killshot she needed unless he was mortal once again.

  But the chance wasn’t coming.

  “Screw it,” she muttered. “Act Five.”

  The rain faded from a dull murmur slowly into complete silence. Trees passed rumours from one branch to another, whistling eagerly to see what came next. Gravel under her feet shifted. The warmth wrapped itself around her drenched clothes.

  The dishevelled sight of him was in plain view, and even the most flattering light couldn’t save him.

  Everything about the rumoured, poised demeanour; what remained of his clothes was the picture of desperation. Desperation spelt out in five large gemstones carved into his skin.

  But as desperate as he was, he was driving her into as much of a corner. All his magic—all that she had seen so far—was purpose built to deal with magic. Magic from a Spirit, or from a Witch or Wizard.

  How Vesmosian. It almost made her grin.

  The vines now came from every direction, crawling their way out of the forest floor. Whittle down his stamina, take control of his Aether intake, choke him from his supply before putting a hole in his chest.

  At least, that was the plan.

  With no shadows to hide in, Crestana was a sitting duck. Letting her ride on her back was a brief respite, but it wouldn’t last. The three weren’t in fighting shape, least of all Alis.

  His toolbox wasn’t of much use in a Mind Palace, least of all one that kept its owner away from the fight. Constantly on the back foot, defending from barrage against barrage, retreating to another position given an opportunity.

  His face was looking pale. The wound on his arm kept bleeding into the sand. He was growing tired, his openings ever wider.

  Iris held the brunt of the attack off. She was the target, and it wasn’t her first time, either.

  Cleaving through a swathe of Higher Order only brought the next batch to the surface. Again and again, five crushed, five more would emerge from the edge of her vision.

  “Your Majesty.”

  “I could certainly turn it into a scrapyard, but by your efforts, I don’t believe that would be much help.”

  Iris blocked a magazine’s worth of cannon fire as she spoke. “Can’t you get us out of here?”

  “A Mind Palace is the domain of the Aether Infused.”

  “So it’s on me then?” she seethed, gritting her teeth.

  Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Death from above soon followed, steel caskets crash landing on the rock, detonating and taking from it and the H.O.A. around it entire chunks.

  A bloodbath, one that Iris was to die somewhere in the middle of. It didn’t quite matter where or how.

  “Help me out here.”

  Open.

  The voice echoed in her head, morphing into a piercing squeal that could break glass. Crestana covered her ears, a string of garble spewing from her voice box.

  The final door’s lock rattled. The seams between the pieces grew wider, but it didn’t come apart.

  Open!

  More garble. More chatter. Its faded lustre fa?ade crumbled; the brass underneath split apart.

  But still, as it stood in shambles, it kept the last door closed. Robbed of even its last defence, the hallway was still stubborn.

  “Iris.”

  She heard her name through the garble. Crestana calling out to her, right next to her ear, and she could barely find her voice in the chaos.

  “What is it?” Iris asked, crushing another set of Higher Order as her Beast’s beam took out a row.

  “Make it quick,” she said. “I’ll…never be able to look at Moira again if I know he suffered.”

  A final mercy. A quick death to the man who promised her a painful one. It felt unfair, as though one final mercy would make it any easier on anybody’s conscience. It was an attempt at a fair world, one where the line was so warped it now ran between quick death and slow.

  A distinction Evalyn made with the gun tied to her shoulder, the rifle slung across her chest.

  Deeper into hatred, deeper into desperation, deeper until she stooped to his level, fought on his terms. But the world wasn’t so poetic; revenge wasn’t satisfying, nor was anger blinding, nor was victory sweet.

  The world was. Give and take. Transactions. Currency. The more space one took, the more they needed—the more they wanted to survive the more they took. The only constant. Whatever came after was unnecessary, simply indulgence that flavoured an otherwise bitter, tasteless existence.

  Because otherwise it was all just due process.

  Iris opened the last door, and there was nothing there.

  Nothing. The conclusion that her past life had come to.

  Pure nothing.

  Eventually decorated by entropy, by chance, by coincidence and by happenstance.

  But behind the fa?ade, behind the meanings thrust upon it by the minds of those who couldn’t comprehend nothing, was exactly that.

  Nothing.

  No order. No particular chaos either. A nothing that words couldn’t explain, but was necessary to survive in.

  And unfortunately, nothing had limited space.

  Due process. Kill or be killed. Nothing personal. Nothing spectacular. That was what drove the Spirit of destruction to madness.

  “You’re soft after all,” Iris whispered, the doorknob crumbling between her fingertips. The barrel of Marie’s handgun rubbed into her skin. She grabbed its handle and, for the first time in her life, fully appreciated what it meant.