~~PROLOGUE – FATE (August 1st, Year 562)
August 1st, Year 562; Maisen Sheikaih, King - Samarie Island

The rain fell swiftly, mercilessly, and with a strength surpassing that of any storm in recent memory.  Even the elders, with years stretching half a millennia or more, were baffled by it, but King Maisen Sheikaih remained perfectly still.  He observed the day calmly from the highest level of his castle’s courtyard, now a temporary courtroom for the battle between Maisen’s only two sons: the princes Rhydaen and Cerabris.  Such a location ensured that Maisen could watch, with a better view than anyone, the destruction of his dignity, his family, and everything else that he’d ever worked for.  Still, confronted with such a profoundly twisted form of entertainment, the king’s mind was not focused on the proceedings before him.  He, like everyone else, couldn’t help but concentrate on just one thing: the weather. 
Though those in the courtyard tried to pretend otherwise, they all knew that their end fell in sheets and curtains of water around them.  Enchanted to reflect the true nature of its inhabitants, the weather of Samarie Island was a curse, a punishment dealt by the night elves’ own gods as retribution for their pride and conceit.  It was predetermined, unavoidable, and well deserved.  The only saving grace was that maybe, if they were lucky, the rain would fall just hard enough to make them forget the atrocities that had led them to that day.
The toll of the high accuser’s bell dragged the king back from his solemnity.  A noticeable hush swept across the courtyard, but Maisen could still hear a few outspoken observers whispering their suspicions.
“Prince Cerabris has always been jealous of his younger brother.”
“He was out for revenge.”
“The king’s favoured young Rhydaen even since they were children.”
“That poor girl...”
Much of the crowd’s focus was aimed toward the outermost edge of the courtyard, where there was chained a woman whom they all knew wasn’t really a woman at all.  She was a nixie: the product of an element and a soul, a human-like demon made only to be the prisoner of her creator.  It was the result of experimentation into life and death: an action that the king himself had prohibited centuries before.  It was a science that the night elves should never have delved into, part of the reason they’d been cursed in the first place.
The nixie’s features were long and narrow, blanketed with skin as pale and flawless as the queen’s once was.  Her hair was a deep shade of red, dark yet bright like Rhydaen’s.  She seemed almost natural enough to delude a person into thinking she was real.  Cerabris had chosen to name her Kyhauna, as if such a creature deserved a name.  A nixie never breathed; she would never bleed.  To Maisen, Kyhauna was an abomination that should never have walked the land.  What disturbed him most was that this thing, this monster, had Princess Sayhali’s eyes.  It was as if he could see the poor child’s soul behind the demon’s facade.  The wails of Sayhali’s mother, the priestess Niala, could still be heard above the storm, a steady stream of tears adding to Samarie’s already rising flood.
Across the courtyard, a train of solemn, dark-robed men deliberated amongst themselves—the chosen jury.  A few moments passed before they each raised a hand to signal that they had made their final decision.  High accuser Hakiema cleared his throat loudly before rising from his great stone chair.  Both princes, the nixie, and the rest of the courtyard stood as well, but Maisen remained silent in his seat.
“Prince Cerabris Sheikaih,” Hakiema bellowed, “you are accused of sacrificing Princess Sayhali, the only child of your younger brother, Prince Rhydaen, and combining her soul with the dark waters of this island to create the abomination which we see before us.  If you are found guilty, the nixie, who has committed no crime herself and is not bound by our race’s curse, will be sent through a portal into the mortal realm; you will be sentenced to death.  Do you have any final statements before the jury gives their decision?”
The silence around the courtyard was palpable.  Cerabris, undisturbed until then, stretched somewhat stiffly and was about to reply when he was suddenly caught silent, staring wide-eyed at some unknown horror ahead of him.
It took a few seconds for another person to see it, and then another, and then the screams began. 
Maisen stretched out his hand hesitantly and half a dozen red droplets soon splattered his skin, each shimmering surreally in the reflected torchlight.  Around the courtyard, most people were in a panic, but there were still some who carried as many years as he did.  Calmly, those few observed the phenomenon with the gravity which it deserved.  The island had rained blood just once before, on the first day that they were cursed with it. 
It was the gods’ own recognition of Cerabris’s guilt.

Part 1 - Myth

"The sound of the Gion Shoja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the colour of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline; the proud do not endure.  They are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.”

-The Tale of Heike, Chapter 1 (1371 c.e.)
Translation - 1988 c.e., Helen McCullough

~~CHAPTER 1 – PAGES OF HISTORY
April 7th, Year 641; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Castle

I could smell life in the early morning air.  It breathed of fear, desperation, and freedom—however brief.  They were all emotions that echoed in my own soul as I shivered, gazing down the empty street before me.  The city seemed both sombre and peaceful, its silhouetted buildings barely showing through several layers of dense fog.  It had begun to rain, though I was certain that the day would be clear.  Hesitantly, I leaned on one of the rough, bricked columns that supported the elven castle’s main entranceway.  The stone was cold, still holding some of the night’s chill.  Winter had lingered unusually long that year.
In my left pocket rested a notable collection of jewels that I’d taken from the queen’s wardrobe (I was not yet so possessed as to call her mother).  In the right, a delicate notebook; its fragile, worn cover felt warm and reassuring in my hand.  I wore a short, hooded cloak—an attempt to keep the city dust off my dress so that my excuse for the morning’s activities might actually be believed—and a stable boy had lent me a pair of work boots the night before.  They were just large enough to fit around my own dainty of day shoes, and stitched well enough to keep out most of the rain.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the gate-watcher motion toward me.  He wasn’t the usual gate-watcher, who would still be in bed trying his best to cope with a disturbing case of food poisoning.  I had this morning’s last-minute substitute, Shayne, to thank for that: a young kitchen apprentice who was just about the only person I’d befriended since arriving at the castle.  He owed me a favour. 
Shayne quickly performed the hand signal that we’d agreed upon beforehand.  It meant that the castle’s outer guardsmen were changing shifts.  The royal gardener would have already come and gone, and most of the stable-hands had not even awoken yet.  If anyone asked, Shayne would explain my absence by telling them that I’d left to take a walk around the outer gardens—a giant hedge maze, yes, but that would only keep them busy for so long.  It was a risk I needed to take, though: there were only a few days of relative freedom left to me.  For what I’d planned, that morning would be my only chance. 
I took a deep breath, looked once more toward Shayne, and then walked out into the abandoned streets of the elven capital city.  Growing puddles absorbed my small feet with every step.
The rain made my journey feel undeniably quicker; if I’d loved anything as a child, it was the rain.  There was something about its scent, something...that I could not quite describe in the way that rain smelled which seemed to invigorate me. It was like a heightened awareness of things, a sudden consciousness that would wash over me, not unlike what I suspected a wild animal would sense when it caught sight of its prey.  I could feel it in my eyes, my chest, and the back of my throat like a wind—a chilling, empowering gale that only I seemed capable of sensing.  Perhaps the fact that so few others appeared able to tolerate the rain as I did fed the obsession.  Maybe I was just out of my mind.
My destination was a lesser-known inn located in one of the much older parts of the city.  When I found it, the street which it occupied seemed completely void of life.  All the windows on the neighbouring houses—if you could call them houses—were closed.  There weren’t even animals to disturb the silence. 
The inside of the building proved equally deserted.  Chairs hung upside-down from various tabletops around a dusty square room, waiting for the inevitable crowd of noisy vagabonds to take and rearrange them to suit their own needs.  A layer of the previous night’s debris coated the worn wooden floor, illuminated by a dull stream of morning sunlight that barely filtered through the grime-covered windows.  The staircase was mouldy and appeared broken in some places.  As I considered the risk of falling through it, I was startled by a gruff voice calling to me from the floor above.
“What are you here for, girl?” a man at the top of the stairs grunted.  His slight swagger hinted of some residual intoxication.  I did my best to ignore it, and nervously retrieved the book and Queen Isabelle’s jewellery from my pockets.  I had no doubt that she’d realize they were missing; I could only hope that she wouldn’t suspect me.  She probably didn’t even think I was capable of it.
Stretching over a particularly large gap in the stairs, I handed the jewels over to the half-conscious drunkard as payment.  “I’m looking for Niros, please.”
“Name?” he asked.
“Kha’aziemne.”
It was the name my father had given me as a child, years before we’d moved to the castle.  I didn’t want the man to know what I went by now.  It would add even more risk to the already precarious situation I’d put myself in.  He looked over my book with mild curiosity, then pocketed the jewellery and motioned toward a simple wooden chair that leaned against the far wall.  I took the chair and he gave another grunt, disappearing behind an unmarked door further down the hall.
The wait was painfully long, and every moment that I didn’t know where that book was passed like a century.  It had belonged to my grandmother.  Well, I thought it had...I hoped. 
Several years before we came to live in the castle, my father had told me stories about her and her people, about their magic and the flood that killed them.  He’d said that her name was Kyhauna, which, in her language, meant Eternity.  In most of the realm the night elves were little more than a colourful myth; an overly-ambitious elven village cursed with isolation on an invisible, sunless island.  But there remained something more to my father’s stories, I knew.  I’d spent every moment I could searching through his things for some sort of key to prove it. 
Easily overlooked, my treasure had come in the form of a simple brown notebook, dusty and fragile with age.  From the feel of it, I assumed the cover was leather.  It was unadorned and clearly capable of falling to shreds in my hands.  I wouldn’t have thought much about the plain little book except that, when it lay open, its pages were filled with line after line of strangely scrawled characters.  No doubt it was some form of language, but none that I’d ever seen before.
Niros was a translator.  He was, in fact, the only translator in the entire elven capital that wasn’t elven himself.  The elves were very strict on at least that point: no one from any of the other races was allowed to reside on their land.  Even while at war, a good portion of the elven military dedicated its time to scouring the city constantly for anyone who didn’t belong there.  Of course, it was virtually impossible to search everywhere, and not everyone followed the law.  With enough people willing to hide them, intruders easily found ways to live unnoticed.  There were some people who came to be with ones that they loved, some who came paid to spy on the elven government, and some who came just because they knew they weren’t allowed.  My own father wasn’t elven, either.  I...did not know what I was.
The door at the end of the hallway opened with a thud just loud enough to seem intentional, and the tall, gruff man from before approached me again.  He nodded toward the empty doorway and then proceeded down the stairs.  Taking this as an invitation, I slowly entered. 
Niros (at least, I assumed it was Niros) sat behind a long, oaken desk piled high with thick textbooks of various widths and colours.  He was generously robed in several shades of violet, but the garments appeared old and heavily worn.  He had likely stolen them, or been given them as payment by someone who had: violet was not a common colour outside of the province’s nobility.  His straw-like brown hair hung in his face as he concentrated, hunched over the intricate markings in my book, until he noticed my presence and immediately sat up.
“What is this, some kind of joke?” he asked sharply as I approached the desk.  He waved my book around, carelessly holding it by its fragile bindings.
“It’s nytelven!” I replied, barely keeping my anxieties in check.  “Shouldn’t you be a little more careful with that?”
“Nytelven?”  He turned the book around above his head so that the pages faced him again.  “As in, the Alium Sinod?  That children’s story about a bunch of cursed elves and a haunted island?  As if such a thing actually exists.”  He meant it with sarcasm, but I could tell that, for a moment at least, I’d caught him off guard.  He laughed to cover it up.  “The night elves are a myth, girl.  I do not deal in legends.”
“My father had this journal; he told me—”
“He told you that the Alium Sinod were real?  That he’s one of them?  Did he also tell you you’re the last descendent of a highly advanced, superbly gifted, mythological race?  I suppose being nonexistent is better than being mortal.  Ariendor Sheikaih claims all sorts of things, my dear.  I see him here in the bar downstairs nearly every night, boasting his stories to drunkards long since sick of hearing them.  His voice even reaches through these floorboards on occasion, talking about himself, his so-called ancestors, and you.  The rest of his listeners, impaired as they are, don’t catch what he really means by his stories; even drunk, he’s smart enough not to mention you by name.  But I’m slightly more attuned to subtleties than they are.  You’re lucky I’m not a child-trader, Princess.”
“I am no princess,” I responded as emotionlessly as I could manage while my plan shattered into a maze of jagged pieces.  He knew who I was and what I was worth.  His partner might’ve already been on his way to work out some sort of ransom deal.  I did my best to quell my rising embarrassment by placing my focus instead into methodically tapping my fingers along the scratched surface of Niros’s desk.  Though unspoken, my freedom balanced precariously, solely relying on the discretion or greed of a stranger.
“What,” Niros mocked, “is that not what they’re trying to parade you around as?  The king is an obnoxious, overweight twit who can’t have children, so Queen Isabelle is dragging you and your father out from the streets as a suitable alternative?  You, my dear, are little more than the queen’s key out of an unhappy marriage.”  He smiled cruelly.  “I wonder, is she even your mother?”
I glared my harshest at him for whatever good I thought it would do.  No, I did not know if the queen was my mother.  In fact, I hoped she wasn’t.  I despised the people, the culture, and all the selfish frivolity that she stood for.  I would have rather been back living with my father in our shack, where the most change in a day was deciding if he would throw things at me or throw me at things. 
Now, I took etiquette lessons and dining lessons; there were nearly half a dozen lecturers claiming to be teaching me how to stand—and for what?  I would be little more than an illegitimate poster child for a weak, cowardly race of people who boasted culture and beauty while drowning their own citizens with one grossly unreasonable law after another.  The elven high council must have either been blind or extremely desperate, because the queen seemed to think they would actually accept me. 
I needed to pretend I was elven; I knew that, but there was something more about this than my so-called parents would tell me, some undisclosed plan to win over the council’s opinion.  As to what it was, I couldn’t even begin to imagine.  If all went as planned, Queen Isabelle would get an easy way out of her marriage, I’d become a dolled up little princess, and dad would conveniently ‘die’ in some accident (with enough money to live comfortably until he actually did) to be replaced with whichever enticing young man the queen set her eyes upon...or no one, if that was her fancy.  Personally, I’d rather have drowned, but no matter how much I loathed my situation it was not the place of some slimy, underfed thief to mock me for it.
“I can’t help but wonder of your intentions, though,” Niros continued.  “The council decides on the validity of the queen’s claim the day after tomorrow, and here you are trying to prove that you’re not even elven.  It’s a little counterproductive, no?  Besides, why are you so convinced that you’re not one of them, these people that you so seem to despise...?” Niros reached over and twirled one of my dark red curls of hair around his finger.  Just the sound of his voice made me want to run from the room.  “You do have quite striking features, I’ll admit.  There’s the dark in your hair, and the life in your eyes.  Such an unusually bright shade of green; it’s not something that I’ve seen amongst the people here before.  But still, there must be more.  Convince me.”
“I can create flames,” I suggested, doing my best to overcome my unease.  Fire was a strictly non-elven branch of magic.  They could heal, hypnotize, and enchant, but try as they might, not a single elf in history had ever managed to conjure a spark. 
Not any normal elves, anyway. 
The night elves, according to myth, had spent their time in isolation obsessively exploring every aspect of magic—concepts which people living now could only dream of.  They had manipulated the very fabric of their being, changing themselves on a biological level that affected even their children.
Niros raised an eyebrow.  “You can create fire...on command?”  I’d lost the stream of conversation for a second.
“No,” I admitted, “but I’m trying.  I’ve only done it a couple times now, mostly when I’m angry.”
“And this is your basis for being one of the night elves?  Naught but a pretty face and a few childish fire tricks?”  He seemed legitimately disappointed.
“Well it’s not like I’ve had anyone to teach me!  I was hoping that these writings might help me in that particular area.”
Putting his attitude aside for a moment, Niros leaned back in his chair and seemed to seriously think about it.  His curiosity and pride waged a temporary battle before Niros let out a sigh, dropped his chair back down, and smoothed the notebook out on the desk in between us.  Apparently, he’d tired of poking fun at my situation.
“Even if this book could help you, I can’t understand a single word of it.  It’s nothing like any script I’ve seen before.  I can only offer a couple of things that I’ve noticed.  Firstly, it’s mostly comprised of several bulk sections of text, anywhere from half a dozen lines long to four or five pages.  Each section is headed by short line scratchings that are unlike the majority of the other characters.  If we presume that these markings represent some form of numeric system, most likely dates, then I’d have to guess that this book served as some kind of journal.”
“A diary?” I interrupted.
“It’s quite possible.  I’ve also noticed that many of the characters look identical to one another with the sole difference of a single black circle above the symbol.  Seeing as the dotted versions of these characters only appear at the beginning of words, I’d have to guess that it’s a form of capitalization, likely to denote names or titles.  You’ll notice that the very first page contains only a single string of characters with one of these black dots...”
I leaned closer to see what he was talking about; though I’d seen them many times before, the neatly inked symbols seemed to hold so much more meaning in that instant.

** there's supposed to be an image here but I can't upload it onto the internet , sorry

“...So, if we assume that this is some form of diary, that is undoubtedly the name of its writer.”
“Kyhauna,” I whispered. 
Whether Niros heard me or not, he didn’t acknowledge the sentiment.
“I don't know how far it will get you,” he said as he callously handed the diary back to me, “but at least it's a start.”

~~CHAPTER 2 – FATHER DEAREST
April 7th, Year 641; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

The iron knocker of the castle’s garden gate screeched painfully as I tried to lift it.  The metal was far too rusted to actually make a convincing knock, but the screech was enough to attract the attention of the head gardener’s wife, Joanna.  Within moments, her hazel eyes appeared through a viewing slit, narrowing slightly as she tried to make out who was on the other side.
“Princess Iladen?  What’re you doing out there?  Guards ‘ve been looking all over for you, trampling through all my spring bulbs...”  She unlocked the gate from the other side, opening it up to the result of another metallic whine.  Never used and rarely guarded, the back garden gate had been practically forgotten about by most of the castle’s staff.  Even Joanna and her husband had taken to using the main entrance instead.  I suppose I should have been thankful for the negligence, given my morning’s activities.  Might make for a good escape route one day.
“I was looking to buy some scarves from the market,” I lied...poorly.  “Something nice to wear for the council meeting.” 
Joanna gave me a reproachful look, too smart to believe my story but understanding enough not to prod it further.  She nudged me inside and reclosed the gate, lifting a surprisingly large wooden beam to barricade it.  Calloused hands manoeuvred a series of iron latches shut.  Maybe not such a good escape then.  Not until I could lift the beam, at least.
“You should be more careful though, Miss,” Joanna muttered as she absent-mindedly began brushing the dust off my dress.  “No more of this sneaking out on your own; I don’t care what your reasons.  I don’t mind ya being around and all, but there’re some here that do.  Some that might not wish you as well as Francis and I.  Friends of the king and such...  And I don’t mean your father—though he’s just as scary on his own accord, if you’d ask me.  I mean the king that is now.  A lot of people don’t like the thought of you and your father taking his place.  A lot of people don’t like the thought of you and your father even living in the province at all, if you get what I mean.  You should watch out.”
How hated I was in the elven castle was plainly obvious to anyone.  If anything, I was probably safer sneaking around alone outside.  I nodded my agreement dutifully, though, and that seemed to appease her.  For every person as kind as Joanna there were ten more full of pretentiousness and greed.  It was a wonder that the elven people could survive each other, let alone the demons who constantly harassed them.
Just as Joanna finished, we were approached by one of the castle’s many over-worked messengers announcing that my father wished to see me.
“He’ll meet you in the solarium, Miss,” the poor servant said, confused as much as all the rest of them regarding how to address my father and I.
“The solarium?” I repeated though he’d already turned to go.  I couldn’t help but smile a little; the solarium was my favourite of all the castle’s many rooms.
Joanna just raised an eyebrow “Wouldn’t want to be there myself, what with you disappearing half the morning.”
I looked up to the sky, where the sun was nearly at its centre already.  The day was surprisingly warm considering its morning.  Over-excited about Kyhauna’s diary, I hadn’t even noticed.
An elaborate space with walls and ceiling made entirely of intricately woven glass, the solarium itself didn’t do anything to help relieve the heat of a cloudless day—especially not after hiking up the ridiculous amount of stairs leading to it.  A view of the room’s centre was kept hidden from its doorway by several rows of potted plants on wooden shelving, and I touched each one as I walked by, felt its texture, smelled its aroma.  The sunflowers stood tall and cheerful, the vines determined, the roses proud.  My favourites were the orchids: simple, graceful, and strong.  I’d never possessed much talent for growing things, but loved plant-life nonetheless.
“Kha’aziemne?” my father called to me as I reached the end of the first row.  He once again used the childhood name he’d given me years before: a name that was now to be kept secret, smothered away in place of a more acceptable, calmer title.  The harsh consonants of it reverberated across the solarium’s high walls, echoing back to me manifold times.  Though I disliked how the name sounded, I could not entirely hate it.  Nor could I hate the new name that replaced it.  Strangely, they both seemed quite suiting to me, both parts of myself.
My father called again, more strictly, and I followed the sound of his voice to find him seated by the solarium’s main window, comfortably arranged in a chair that suited someone whose standards placed far above his own.  His greasy, black-brown hair fell as misarranged twists and knots down his back.  The fingers that fiddled with a loose thread of fabric from his simple shirt ended in nails that were as riddled with dirt as I always remembered.  They disgusted me nearly as much as the dark yellowing in his teeth or the hollow sags about his eyes.  Beside him on a table rested the remains of a gourmet brunch, picked apart and mostly wasted, rotting steadily in the sun’s heat.
“I want to introduce you to some of our relatives tomorrow,” he announced as I reached him.  He’d finally pulled the loose thread from his shirt and was now examining it between his fingers.
“Relatives?” I began, forgetting my place for a moment.  “But I thought that we didn’t have any rela—”
“We don’t,” he cut me off.  I instantly fell silent, bowed my head, and faced my feet, only stealing glances at him from the corner of my eye when I was sure he wasn’t looking.  I could feel a familiar heat rising in my cheeks. 
It wasn’t that I was afraid of him; him, my father.  I was cautious.  Cautious...or wisened.  I would gain more from him with my silence, with calmly observing his actions and words, than I would by arguing.  His point was clear.  This would just be another stage in our pretending—a necessary stage, but one that threatened his other plans.  I was to keep it to myself.
“We will meet them at our old home tomorrow morning for breakfast,” he continued.  “I’ll arrange for our coming and going and it would do well for you not to mention the journey to anyone.  I expect you to be ready by seven.”  Then he dismissed me with a wave of his hand. 
I took a few formal steps backward and turned to leave silently with my head still bowed, my mind churning through the implications of this new development.
“Oh, and Khaazie,” he called again as I reached the door.  My fingers slid lightly over the cold, metal surface of its handle.  “Tomorrow, don’t act elven.”
Though he couldn’t see, I closed my eyes and nodded, acknowledging this distinctive change in my father’s orders with some curiosity.  For the past several months I’d been told to do nothing but act properly elven in order to convince the province’s council of my legitimacy.  It would almost be fun not to have to lie so much for once—an interesting change. 
And at least I would be in my own home again, if only temporarily.  Even empty, plain, and cold, it was still a comfort compared to the elegant rooms I was given at the palace: an old, familiar prison against a strange, new one which I’d not yet had time to fully pick apart.

~~CHAPTER 3 – THE DEMONS
April 8th, Year 641; Madeline Adaire – Elven Province

The demons were said to be a devious, cruel, and ruthless people, descended from twelve original ‘pure’ demons who’d been created solely from the fear and hatred of mortals.  They were the second oldest race in existence and had always been the most powerful, but with every passing generation, the demons lost more and more control over the evil from which they’d been created.  They grew into mutated, unnatural forms with chaotic, animal-like minds.  Some of them were hardly even recognisable as conscious, thinking beings anymore.
Because of this, the demons were ruled by the family closest in relation to the original twelve.  The family currently ruling the demons—Saritai, Makayla, and Adonis Daemoni—were close descendents of the youngest original, Daicon.  As Madeline Adaire watched them, slowly nodding off in the carriage beside her, it struck her as ironic that the demons’ rulers were the most human-like among their race, both in mind and appearance.  After all, they’d never hidden their hatred of the humans...and the elves...and even Madeline’s own race to some extent.
And yet here she was, encouraged by her mother to befriend them, to enamour them.  Or, more specifically, Adonis, the young demon heir.  Though, if Madeline was completely honest with herself, she viewed Adonis as barely a shade of his father.  She liked Adonis, sure, but she couldn’t claim to love him as her mother pressured her to—not unless he grew to be more like Saritai.  She could only hope.  Sometimes Madeline was jealous of him, though.  He, as a boy, was not yet aware of the plots and intricacies involved with this thing artificially labelled as romance.  Despite his heritage, his birth, and his someday responsibility, to Madeline, Adonis’s life seemed so very simple.  So very pure.
He trusted far too easily, for one.  He trusted her, and her mother, and everything they told him.  The thought of Adonis’s great capacity for trust gave Madeline’s conscience a hint of guilt.  She trusted him too, to an extent, and she wouldn’t want to break that or his friendship; she was genuinely his friend.  All the acting made her sick; the way her mother taught her to speak and move around him, leading him on all without him even knowing.  It was all for the benefit of their future, Cecilia Adaire would say.  Adonis would one day rule the realm, and if she were lucky, Madeline could rule beside him.
She glanced up then to see him staring at her.  He hadn’t expected her to, and looked away quickly.  Then, a second later, his gaze returned but with a different expression.  He pointed out the window with a grin on his face.  A sudden jolt in the carriage announced a change in the texture of the roads.  Madeline looked out the window for the first time in hours. 
They had finally arrived. 
The capital of the elven province grew around them with as much plainness as she’d expected.  Even the carriage they rode in only served as a reminder of the elven peoples’ weakness.  Refusing all cross-border trading and communication, they defended their suffering culture with unjustified pompousness, all the while causing its artistic and technological death.  Really, if the demons were willing to give up one of their greatest sources of entertainment, the elven-demon war could have been finished decades before, to devastating results.
Though, as Madeline looked out the carriage window, she couldn’t help but get the impression that the elves already had been devastated, even without the demons’ help.  The city streets were filthy, unorganized, and crowded at every corner with all manner of vagabond.  All around them people coughed and begged and cried.  Under bridges, she could see the remains of children’s sleeping places; the children themselves roamed the sidewalks, starving and diseased.  The stench of it was consuming. 
Adonis suddenly reached across her lap to close Madeline’s window.  “You don’t want to catch anything,” he explained, and she nodded her agreement.
As the carriage approached the top of a large hill Makayla, having just awoken in the front seat, pointed out the same thing.  Though, she added, the problem seemed to fade slightly near the centre of the city.  Even from their hilltop, perhaps a half hour’s ride away from the castle itself, it was clear that a large border of sorts was set up in the very centre of the city to keep one grade of people away from the other.  Makayla pointed out her disgust at the idea, but Madeline only observed it with a silent interest, vaguely disappointed that their final destination was on this side of the border and not the other.

~~CHAPTER 4 – BREAKFAST
April 8th, Year 641; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

Shortly after the sun rose, I arrived alone to meet my father at our old home.  He’d left the castle hours before, likely to prepare for receiving the ‘relatives’ he spoke of.  I had anticipated some lecture, or perhaps just the general statements he often used to assert his superiority, but my father didn’t say anything at all as I entered.  He was unusually subdued, and part of me was afraid what the reason for it might be. 
In the dining room, our table lay set out for a large breakfast.  I was immediately taken aback by the number of strange faces I saw before me.  More people were there that morning than I could remember our house ever holding before. 
A single empty chair remained at one end of the table, with an untouched plate of food before it.  My father motioned for me to take my place there, and I quickly obeyed.  I didn’t eat, though; I couldn’t.  Instead, I poked the food on my plate around nervously with my fork, trying my best to avoid catching the gazes of the near-half-dozen people unabashedly staring at me.
The man seated at the head of our dining table was not my father—my father, in fact, didn’t take a seat at all—but an unusually tall, fair-skinned man with golden-blond hair and a strongly hooked, yet elegantly fragile-looking nose.  I could see that he possessed many laugh lines on his face, but at the moment his expression reflected only complete seriousness. 
To the man's right sat a stunningly beautiful woman with long, rich locks of dark brown and a complexion that glowed even in the dingy atmosphere of my father's makeshift dining room.  The only thing that awed me more than her beauty was the dress that she wore: a long, flowing gown made in the deepest shade of forest green.  It seemed to hover slightly in the air around her, moving in small, rather eerie ways as if it were caught in a modest, circulating breeze. 
I’d heard of ghost fabric before but had never actually come across anyone who owned any; it was on extremely expensive material.  Ghost objects of any sort were normal, everyday things that happened to be in direct contact with someone when they died.  As can be imagined, a thriving underground market of people murdering for the sake of creating and selling various ghost items ran rampant throughout the province.  They sold for such enormous amounts of money not only because they were beautiful and unique, but also because they were the only things that could make physical contact with ghosts.  If anyone, for whatever reason, really wanted to contain a ghost, they would need a room made of walls that people had died against.  I found the thought, and the substance altogether, rather intriguing.
Across from the stunning woman sat perhaps the only people in the house to have actually touched their breakfast: a bright blue-eyed boy who seemed slightly younger than me, and a shorter girl who must have also been around my age.  Her hair was a more vivid shade of red than I’d previously thought possible.  Neither of the children seemed to be paying any attention to the tense atmosphere of the room, carefully aiming bits of food at each other with spoon catapults instead.  I assumed that the boy was the taller man's son, as they looked nearly identical, but the girl was clearly unrelated.
“What is her birth name, then?” the man asked suddenly.  He possessed a very strong, clear voice, obviously used to authority.  Both children stopped their playing immediately as a result.
“I n-named her Kha'aziemne,” my father stuttered from the shadowed corner that he’d been hiding in.  His discomfort caught me off-guard.  I’d never thought very highly of my father, but nerves were something he simply never showed.
“Kha'aziemne?  An odd name—clearly not of elven descent.  I assume that you've changed it since?”
“Yes, sir, to Iladen-Amaya. The queen and I agreed that it would suit well, and my daughter seems to have taken a liking to it.”
“Yes, yes,” the stranger muttered to himself.  “I've never heard anyone called by that name, but it flows calmly like most of the language that these insects use.”  The man stopped for a moment to poke at his food then suddenly glared at me, making my insides squirm under his scrutiny.  Seemingly satisfied, he let out a harsh laugh.  “Small, nervous, undignified...  What kind of imposter are you supposed to make?  It seems your father needs our help much more than he realizes.”
“Try not to be so harsh, darling,” said the woman to his right.  She placed a hand gently on his arm.  “The poor girl doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
The man gave pause to the idea.  He looked back toward her, a question passing without words between them, and then turned back to me.  “You do know why we’re here...don’t you?”
The only answer I could muster was more nervous silence, but that seemed to be enough.
“Well,” he continued, his frustration clear from his tone, “I suppose I should start by introducing us then; I’d assumed your father would have at least taught you that much.  I am Emperor Saritai Daemoni of the demons—” If I had eaten anything that morning, I would have lost it all just then “—this is my wife, Empress Makayla; our son, Adonis; and his play-mate, Madeline Adaire, whom he insists on taking everywhere with him.  The nosey, poorly dressed woman in the hallway is Madeline's mother.”
He paused for a moment, noticing my distress.
“Are you all right, girl?” 
I nodded again, too afraid to actually speak.
“Very well, then,” he continued undeterred.  “Your father, unfortunately, is our cousin.  We don’t mention him to the public for...obvious reasons, and have rather failed to keep in touch.”
His cousin?  Or her cousin...?  My mind raced to dig up whatever scraps of demon history I might have heard at the palace.  All of the sounds in the dining room began to mute and fade a little as I processed things, as if I were slowly sinking in a bathtub, the water leaking gradually over the edge.  It felt indescribably strange, being around someone who cared so little about my father, someone who was able to say these things right in front of him.  My father, who’d been treating me in a similar way all my life.  My whole world shifted under me.
“This brings us to you, Iladen, and why it is that we are meeting here,” Saritai said firmly, his voice bringing me suddenly back from my thoughts.  “Your father, it seems, has this flimsy idea of trying to get you into the elven monarchy; and, though it's not usually my place to help or even to care about affairs on this half of the realm, it would be invaluable for my people to have a source of intelligence within the elven government.  That way we'll know whether to send five or six soldiers to squash them, you see.”  Saritai laughed maliciously at his own joke, but no one else really seemed to appreciate it.  They all looked around absently as he calmed down a little, a grin still widely spread across his face. 
“So, the idea is that we will fund your father's plan in exchange for having you as our spy.  I'll be able to use either money or sharp blades to convince most of the elven council that they should agree to do as the queen wants.  If you really have any of my blood in you at all, I know you'll prefer this to sitting pretty and drinking tea, right?”
I nodded vigorously.
“Good.  Then, of course, there is the reason for meeting you like this.  I am quite intrigued, both for the sake of you being our spy, and for my own curiosity: what exactly are you?”
Caught off guard, I hesitated.  “I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to be pretending to be anymore.”
Makayla gracefully held in a giggle and got up from the table to approach me.  She motioned for me to stand up also, so I did; she was far less intimidating than her husband. 
“That's all right, Iladen.  I'm sure we'll be able to figure it out before we leave today,” she assured me.
It was a comforting thought, even if I had doubts about it. 
“Now, let's just have a good look at you...,” she mumbled, turning me around.  “You have similar ears but you’re definitely not elven; I can't smell it in you.  Perhaps you’re a mixed breed?  It’s unlikely but not entirely impossible...”
She stopped in front of me, looking slightly flustered.
“It is very strange, Iladen; Ariendor claims that you are the daughter of the elven queen, and I know you are the second cousin of my son, but I cannot smell the slightest hint of either elf or demon in you.  Still more curious is that all the close decedents of the original twelve demons have very distinctive traits which set them aside.  Perhaps that part of you simply has yet to awaken?  I have an idea!”
Makayla smiled reassuringly at me once more, closed her eyes, and placed a hand on each of my shoulders.  “Please, bear with me, dear,” she said.  “This may hurt a little.”
For a minute, nothing seemed to happen.  Then her calm face turned very dark.  I could feel her hands on my shoulders getting warmer.  The faces around the room began to blur as I found it suddenly difficult to breathe. My knees gave out on me, but the empress's slim hands held me up by the shoulders like a vice grip.  Next came the pain: a searing, scorching pain in my back and my hands.  I tried to scream but couldn't make a sound.
“Mother!” the young demon prince shouted from some far-off place.
The room stopped turning, but the warmth and a slight pain in my shoulder blades still remained.  I steadied myself and saw the empress smiling widely back at me, clearly proud of whatever she had done.  “Well, at least we know one of your parents is true.  You should look in a mirror, darling.  The room seems a tad brighter, no?  Oh, and watch out for your hands.”
“My hands?”
I looked down to see that four incredibly thin, bone claws had sprouted from the first knuckle of each finger.
“Many of our relatives have been gifted with claws,” Makayla continued beside me as I just gaped in awe.  “Yours are a good deal smaller than most of theirs...but that has its uses too.  Now come.”  She smiled mischievously, wrapped a hand carefully around my wrist, and led me to the mirror in the hallway.
Unsure if I could handle any more shock, I hesitantly peered into the glass.  Instantly, I needed to close my eyes to shield them from the sudden brightness; the room behind me was on fire!  No...I was on fire? 
My every instinct was to move, but Makayla held me still with her grip.  My eyes adjusted a little, and I began to make out distinct lines and patterns in the flames. A sudden, definite shift moved throughout them.  I turned around, but predictably, the house had not set fire the moment I looked in the mirror.
“Do you think she could fly, father?” asked Adonis.
“I'm not sure.  Perhaps she could teach herself to?  They do look quite remarkable but not entirely...solid.”
Confused, I turned back toward the glass and gasped.  Wings! I had giant wings, shaped like the skeleton of a bat's and made entirely of fire.  Makayla stood behind me and waved her arm through them as if they were nothing but air.  “Not even hot!”
“Well, then she must be able to fly,” the young redhead beside Adonis stated smartly.  “What other use could they serve?”  She went back to picking at her food as if the whole exchange was beneath her notice.
“But...is this permanent?” I asked, not letting Madeline’s comment dampen my excitement. 
Makayla giggled.  “Permanent?  Yes.  Constant?  Not necessarily.  I was able to use my own magic to awaken the demon blood inside you, child, but eventually you’ll be able to do it yourself.  It's all a matter of control.  For the moment, my family's presence here should sustain this form of you.
“Am I a demon, then?”  It wouldn’t be half bad, being part of the most powerful race in the realm.  At least then I would know what I was. 
But Makayla’s smile faded a bit as she replied, “No, darling; this only proves that you are closely related, as we are, to one of the original twelve demon lords, Daicon.”  Makayla sighed.  Her expression shifted from the kind reassurance of a moment before to something deeper, darker.  She seemed inexplicably sad.  “You are not a race of this world, Iladen-Amaya.  I suspect you will discover many more gifts and surprises within you as you grow.”
Then, as if to purposely break the mood, Saritai coughed from across the room.  “Well, now that that's settled, we can be off.  Clearly, she is in fact our relative and not some random girl you kidnapped to trick us.  As such, she should make a suitable, perhaps even an exceptional spy for our purposes.  I will set about having the elven council uh...convinced.”
“I am very grateful,” my father stuttered, clearly as surprised as I was by this all.
“Good!  You should be,” Saritai said, collecting the children and their things.  “As am I: now we can finally leave this disgusting city.  Are you ready, Makayla?”
“Go ahead; I'll be just a moment, dear.”  Makayla waved the rest of them out of the dining room.
 She turned back to me once they had gone, leaned closer, and whispered directly into my ear, her words flittering toward me like butterfly wings.  “Don't let your situation impede upon your desires, child; I am anticipating great things from you.”
Then Empress Makayla gracefully followed her husband out of the room, and my world visibly dimmed as the wings vanished.
“Father?” I asked when he reappeared through the doorway.
There was an unusual look to his eyes.  Fear, perhaps? Regret?
“The council will make its decision tomorrow evening, Kha'aziemne,” he said sharply.  “Make sure you rest well, and bloody well don't do that while we’re there.”  Then, without a further word, my father briskly walked away. 
I stood there speechless and alone for what could have been hours, and then determined to spend the rest of the evening attempting to change again.

~~CHAPTER 5 – FALLING THROUGH WALLS
April 9th, Year 641; Madeline Adaire – Elven Province

Holding her skirts carefully so as not to have them trail in the dust, Madeline Adaire quietly walked down the dilapidated steps of her aunt’s old house.  Each stair creaked just a little in reaction to the girl’s small, bare feet, but the sound was like thunder compared to the silence that enveloped the rest of the house.  Each movement seemed to send out vibrations of tension like the plucking of a string.  Madeline looked carefully at every detail of the space around her to calm herself.  Knowledge was her best source of security.  She slowed her breathing and paced her movements, settling down her nerves and her doubt.  She needed to show confidence, strength, and superiority.  It was something she had learned when she was younger, the only way she found she could be heard.
“What are you doing, Mother?” Madeline asked as she reached the bottom of the staircase.  Her mother, Cecilia, was in the kitchen not far away, chopping vegetables for an early supper.  Madeline could see this clearly but had asked nonetheless; through all her experience with her mother, Madeline knew that Cecilia never cut vegetables.  Cecilia never prepared dinner, either.  Now seemed like a rather unusual time to start.  The question went suspiciously unanswered. 
A little concerned, Madeline approached her mother warily and took a seat across from her in the kitchen.  She watched with hidden apprehension as the knife moved up and down methodically across the countertop.  Each resulting thud added punctuation to the silence.
“So that girl,” Cecilia eventually began, “they were saying that she’s just as close to Daicon as Adonis is?”
“Sort of,” Madeline replied.  Her mother’s eavesdropping skills never ceased to amaze her.  “Makayla’s father, Vont, and Ariendor’s father, Hesh, were twin brothers.  Though both mortal, Vont and Hesh were the only sons Daicon had.  Whereas Makayla took up her grandfather’s demon blood, Ariendor’s line remained mortal—with the exception of Iladen, of course.  “Decades ago, Vont managed to kill Hesh and take the demon throne for himself.  Since then, Ariendor’s half of the family has pretty much been abandoned into obscurity.  Even though Makayla is empress, most of the demons don’t even know she has a cousin.  I didn’t know myself until yesterday.”
“I see,” Cecilia mumbled as she went back to cutting the vegetables distractedly.  “They’re probably close by then, right?  To keep an eye on their investment?” she asked.
“They’re hiding in the castle for the evening.  Apparently there’s some sort of secret room by the kitchen.  It’s really close to where the elves will be holding their meeting, so they should easily be able to watch how things are going.”
“It wouldn’t be easy to hide both them and a set of guards within the walls of the castle, though—would it?” Cecilia asked.
“I’m pretty sure Adonis said they were mostly alone...”  Madeline paused for a second to think.  She had always been cleverer than most of the children her age.  “Where are you going with this, Mother?”
Cecilia turned away to pull a dusty, well-used pot out of the cupboard behind her.
“Well now, you know we’ve talked about this before, dear...”
Madeline’s eyes grew wide with realization.  She pushed herself back from the counter, causing the legs of her stool to screech painfully across the floor.  Cecilia continued to calmly prepare the vegetables, dropping them one by one into the pot, ignoring her daughter’s sudden distress.
“We’ve talked about befriending Adonis, about being liked by his parents, about the eventual possibilities that such a friendship might bring.  Never, never about—”
“About killing them?” her mother finished for her.  The calm in Cecilia Adaire’s voice was enough to chill Madeline to the bone.
“Who knows how long they’ll live for, Madeline.  Tonight is an opportunity we’d be foolish to waste.  We could kill this so-called second heir and pass the demon crown directly to Adonis in the same night.  Everyone will be distracted with the council meeting.  It could be the only chance we have.  Don’t you want to be empress?”
“I would much rather wait...,” Madeline whispered.  She could see her mother’s teeth grinding.  The knife twitched carelessly between her fingers.
“I’ll send an assassin to deal with Ariendor and Iladen,” Cecilia continued, undeterred, “and then I’ll take care of Saritai and Makayla myself.  They won’t expect it from me.  I could say there’s an emergency, that you’re sick...”
“Adonis is my friend, Mother!  His parents are wonderful people!”
“They’re in our way!”
“I won’t let you!”
Cecilia was caught silent for a moment, staring at Madeline in a whole new light.  Then she slammed the knife onto the wooden cutting board with a ferocity that surprised even her own daughter.  She wiped the sweat from her brow and glanced at the window behind her, where the sun was already merging colourfully with the horizon.  A wicked grin slowly spread across Cecilia Adaire’s face as she turned back toward her daughter.  “Then I guess you’ll be missing out on dinner tonight.”
Madeline had only a second to process the words before she was violently shoved into the broom closet.  She managed to pick herself up just as the door slammed shut.  A click echoed through the keyhole as Cecilia locked her in.
 “Mother!” Madeline screamed, shocked, through the solid wood.
“There’s no use complaining; if you’ve changed your mind about this, I can't have you getting in my way.”
“You can't do this!  Mother!  Please!” Madeline begged but Cecilia was nearly gone already.
“You’ll thank me in the morning!” she shouted.
A second later, the echo of the front door closing set Madeline's heart pounding.  She needed to do something, tell someone!  Her mind raced through possibilities that she knew she didn’t have time to consider.  Refusing to let the panic drown her, Madeline took a moment and breathed deeply. 
She placed the palms of her hands against the rough, oaken door holding her back and tried in vain to relax as her heart pounded against her chest.  The aging wood was firm and unyielding to her flesh.  Madeline closed her eyes and paused to listen carefully, making sure that her mother was really gone before doing the only thing she could think of.  She leaned against the closet door, held her breath, and fell through it.  She couldn’t help but gasp as each wooden fibre passed painfully through her skin like sand through water.  A second later, she collided into the kitchen’s solid stone floor.
For as long as anyone knew, whenever members of the magical races died, there was a chance that they’d come back.  It was rare, and inexplicable, and when it happened, if it happened, it usually took about two centuries.  It was not a happy reunion.  It was not a second chance.  As far as everyone was concerned, the souls of the dead stayed dead. 
What came back were ghosts in every sense of the word; they had no feeling, no emotion, and no memories of their previous life.  They were immune to physical objects, and of course, immune to death.  The only real pieces of them that they retained were their magical abilities and physical appearance.  Because of this, the ghosts of the magical realm resided in their own territory, which allowed no one in or out—besides the odd ambassador from the other races—in order for the souls living there to avoid contact with loved ones from their long-forgotten past.
When she was younger, Madeline discovered that she could adapt ghost-like properties at will, allowing her to go around unseen and walk through walls.  She was also restricted by the same things that ghosts were.  She couldn’t explain why, exactly; she’d never died.  The thought alone was absurd.  But still, as much research as she’d done on the subject, Madeline had never discovered anyone else like her.  No one was simply born as a ghost, or a part-ghost, or whatever she was. 
Madeline had never told her mother about any of this.  Surely, if Cecilia knew of her daughter's abilities, she’d make all of the items in their home ghost-materials just to keep Madeline inside.  The only person who did know was Adonis.  He was the only one she could trust, the only person she really cared about.  She needed to reach the main part of the city and find a guard to warn about what was happening.  Cecilia had taken the carriage, so Madeline would have to run.  She got up, scraped off her knees, and left. 

~~CHAPTER 6 – PREMONITION
April 9th, Year 641; Makayla Daemoni – Elven Castle

 “If you keep letting your husband go on like that, people are going to start thinking that he’s Daicon’s grandchild and not you,” Naeem commented from the doorway.
Makayla turned away from the small peephole to acknowledge her husband’s head advisor.  She wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there, or why, and lately she’d stopped caring.  Naeem was always around somehow, always watching. 
She swallowed her disgust for the man and flashed him one of the smiles she was famous for.  “It doesn’t really matter to me all that much: Saritai is nearly as noble in his own right.  Besides, the people love me more no matter which of us is the proper heir.  I’m the charming one, after all.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Naeem bowed and smiled in return, though Makayla noticed how it didn’t reach to his eyes.  She didn’t say anything about it. 
“Your husband was concerned that you might be thirsty, shutting yourself up in here like this.  It’s not really befitting for someone of your stature, you know.”  Naeem gestured to the two-foot-wide, completely bare hallway that they were in.  It was a crawlspace running between the walls of the castle’s kitchen and its main council chamber.
“You can tell him that I’ll be out after the decision’s read.  Until then, I’d prefer to watch things unfold with my own eyes.  You can learn a lot about people by observing the little things, you know: the way they keep their hands, move their eyes, fiddle with their hair...”
“I’ll let Saritai know, then,” Naeem conceded.  Makayla couldn’t help but notice a small tone of disappointment in his voice.  “Was the girl what you thought she would be?” he asked casually.
“You mean, was she a demon?  No.  She is my relative, though.”
“She must have Daicon’s gift, for you to be so certain.”
Makayla laughed.  “All demons have gifts of the original twelve, Naeem.  It’s just not really noticeable anymore after the fifth or sixth generation.  But yes, she has wings of fire and claws that are nearly invisible, both extremely useful traits.  Although, not quite as useful as my own.”
“You haven’t yet told me what your gift is, exactly.”
“And I never will, Naeem.”
“You don’t trust me?”  A slight hint of offense betrayed itself, though he played it off as a joke.
“Of course I don’t trust you.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons; one is that you have enough confidence in yourself to casually question the most powerful woman in the realm as if she were your friend.”
“Your Majesty,” he stammered, “I didn’t mean to off—”
“You didn’t,” Makayla cut him off.  “Sorry, I’m just a bit tense tonight is all.”
“Are you worried the girl will fail?”
“No; I’m confident that she will do fine.  After all, she has the blood of three royal families in her.”
“Three?” Naeem asked, feigning a little too much disbelief.  He was well aware of Iladen-Amaya’s heritage, Makayla knew, but she played along.
“Her mother is queen of the day elves; her father’s father is a son of Daicon, same as mine; her father’s mother is Kyhauna Sheikaih, a nixie created from the death of the last nytelven princess.”
“The night elves?  I thought they were a myth.”
“They were as real as we are now: my father was the one who set Kyhauna up with Hesh.”
“He told you this?”
“Of course not.”  Makayla smiled coyly once again.  “I know because of my gift.”

~~CHAPTER 7 – GUNSHOT
April 9th, Year 641; Shayne Trugan – Elven Castle

Shayne Trugan held his breath as he did his best to balance four plates along his left arm.  It wasn’t something he’d had any practice with—he was a cooking apprentice, not a server—but there was so much to be cleaned up after the ceremony that all the kitchen staff were told to pitch in. 
All in all, it had been a rather uneventful ceremony.  The vote was six for and one against with three council members missing.  He supposed that was their way of showing their disapproval, as if to say that the whole thing wasn’t even worth their time.  Even if they had come and voted no, though, the decision would still have passed. 
Shayne was happy with the result.  From what he knew of her, Iladen-Amaya was smart, brave, and passionate.  If nothing else, she represented change, and change was something that the elves sorely needed.
He looked up as a couple of the regular serving girls passed him and giggled at his efforts.  The sight of them didn’t help his balance at all.  His sister, Claire, giggled too.  She was in her first year of training to be a proper server for the royal family.  For now, her job was to follow the rest of the girls around and observe what they did.  She would walk silently behind them with her head bowed, offering fresh napkins or drinks to some of the less-distinguished guests.  At only ten years old, she was the youngest server in the castle that year.
Just has Shayne got the last plate to sit properly, a high-pitched scream came from the kitchen.  The surprise of it caused all the plates he held to fall and shatter.  A younger girl ran over to clean it up but stopped again at the sound of a second scream.  Everyone in the room stood still and listened as four or five people ran down the hallway outside.  One of the girls whispered something to another.  Claire overheard it and let out a short gasp.  A second later, the doors burst open and one of the older guardsmen came in.
“Shayne!” he yelled.  “Go and fetch the dress pants you were wearing the other day and put on this jacket.  Something’s upset the women in the kitchen and I need you to watch the western garden for me while I check it out.”
“The western garden...but isn’t that where the queen is?  Shouldn’t someone more quali—”
“There’s nearly a dozen guards already posted around the outside of the garden.  The inner gate is just a formality post; you’ll be fine.  Just mind your courtesies, keep your head down, and I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
By the time Shayne changed his clothes and made it outside, Queen Isabelle, the old king, and the new king were having a hushed conversation on the castle steps.  It seemed like some sort of ritual for them all to say long-winded goodbyes, not that there was really any tradition to be followed for such unique circumstances.  Even among them, the royalty, the awkwardness was obvious.  Shayne quietly closed the gate behind him and positioned himself a short distance away, hoping to make as little of a disturbance as possible.
The sky was pitch-black save for the odd sparkle of whichever stars shone bright enough to reach through the clouds.  A noticeable wind playfully skirted the grass around the castle’s stone steps.  The young princess was dancing in it, twirling around with her arms out and her face to the sky.  Her eyes were closed, and though she didn’t smile, Shayne sensed she was relieved. 
Then a shadow darted quickly between the bushes behind her.  Not sure if he was seeing things, Shayne glanced back toward the queen and kings.  They were still huddled in conversation.  He let out a breath, reassuring himself that the others would have noticed if the shadow was anything to worry about. 
When he looked back at the princess, though, she’d abruptly stopped spinning.  As if frozen, she stood staring into the darkness.  He skirts slowly settled down around her, giving up the momentum of a moment before.  She’d seen something too.
Shayne found himself beginning to sweat.  Should he interrupt them all and say something?  Should he ask the princess what she saw? 
Then there was a distinct, echoing crack and the pit of Shayne’s stomach dropped.  He whipped around and saw Ariendor Sheikaih sprawled out against the castle stairs, his broken skull bleeding a never-ending crimson streak across the stone. 
He wasn't moving.

~~CHAPTER 8 – ESCAPE
April 9th, Year 641; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Castle

Isabelle's scream drew my attention more than the second shot.  The old king was limp, his fallen body sprawled on top of her.  My own father was already dead on the steps.  They were strategic killers, taking out the strongest two first to leave a panicked woman and little girl as easy prey.  They used metal firearms, a piece of mortal technology that had been adopted and altered by many of the realm’s other races.  Most middle class elves had never even heard of them.  I, having grown up in one of the less-reputable parts of the city, was blessed enough to be able to recognise it in an instant.  I threw my shoes off and turned to run. 
Isabelle's final scream was blocked by the sound of another shot, soaring just barely over my head.  The once-pleasant breeze felt like thousands of tiny needles on my skin.  I could hear two...maybe three people running behind me.  There weren't many of them, but they were catching up fast.  As I ran, I heard my breath echoing through the emptiness around me.  I’d never known I could run so fast. 
Then the edge of my foot caught on something that my eyes couldn’t quite register in the darkness.  I tripped and bit my tongue as my face hit the grass.  The wind was instantly knocked out of me. 
Those wings would really come in handy now, I thought as I gingerly pressed my tongue around my mouth.
I tried to get up but couldn’t.  I needed to catch my breath but couldn’t seem to do that either; my lungs screeched in protest when I tried.  Helpless, I just stared desperately into the dark of the night.  In the silence, I could only hear them coming closer, their footsteps resonating in my mind.  I waited, terrified, barely able to see my own hand in front of my face, let alone whatever was chasing after me in the darkness.  Maybe if I just stayed still long enough they wouldn’t be able to see me either? 
Five seconds passed, then ten, and then, without warning, the footsteps began to grow quieter.  Why?  Were they running away?  Several sharp whistles pierced my ears through the chilled night air.  Had someone from the castle heard the gunshots and alerted the guard?
Less than a minute later, half a dozen lanterns emerged from the darkness.  Someone in the distance shouted commands to a group of men.  They ran straight to the dead people, the ones they could do nothing about.  I forced myself up; they didn't seem to have noticed me yet.  The assassins had escaped.  There was a very good chance that they’d been sent to kill me too, and the way I saw it, the less people who knew I was still alive the better.  I felt a large bush to my left and quickly crawled inside it. 
A last glance into the night showed Isabelle and Ariendor as they were being carried off.  I probably would have fainted then if it weren’t for the adrenaline still pumping through my veins.  I waited anxiously for the courtyard near me to empty.  One minute.  Two minutes.  I didn’t want to gain any unnecessary attention.  Then, once all had gone still, I silently half-walked, half-crawled through the royal gardens and out into the city.
My thoughts were a blur as I ran.  Was it strange to feel no real emotion at the loss of my parents?  Was I soulless?  Broken?  Maybe… 
My only focused goal was that I had to get home, fetch a duller, less expensive change of clothing, and gather whatever food I could scrounge up.  I silently gave thanks to the fact that I always carried Kyhauna’s diary with me; even now, it rested amongst the folds of the newly tailored ball gown I wore. 
After the whole business with the council, a lot of people would know what I looked like.  I considered the benefits of darkening my hair to black.  I definitely needed to get rid of the dress.  Someone had sent those men to either kill the four of us, or just me.  If I hadn’t been a target, they wouldn't have put the effort into chasing after me.  I hadn’t seen their faces.
I considered my options and decided that my best bet was to play dead.  The only people who knew I was still alive were the killers, and they wouldn't want to tell whoever had hired them that they’d failed.  If I just stayed out of sight for long enough, maybe they’d pretend I was dead.
Focusing more on what I would do than what I was doing, I nearly missed a familiar redhead darting past me.  I paused for the second it took to register her, then quickly whipped back around to make sure.
“Madeline?” I shouted, remembering her name at the last second.
She turned back to me, completely exhausted.
“I have no time!” she tried to yell but her voice was too harsh from running.  “You're bleeding?  Have they already—?”
She stalled.  The panic was clear in her voice and expression, perhaps even stronger than my own.  Then, without saying another word, she turned and started running again, doubling her previous pace. 
I rubbed my hand along a cold spot on the side of my head.  A dull throb immediately registered in response.  The crimson liquid spread easily along my fingertips; I was bleeding.  I hadn’t even felt the pain until Madeline mentioned it. 
I continued on again, but slower.  I worried about what other unknown injuries I might have.  If I passed out, I’d be as good as dead. 
Or worse.
I would need somewhere to stay.  I could maybe manage to steal some food and there was a thick forest near the city; maybe I could build some sort of twig fort?  Despite the circumstances, I couldn't help laughing at that.  Maybe Saritai and Makayla would help me?  A warm feeling grew in my chest with the idea.  They were probably ridiculously busy people, but it seemed that they at least felt I was worth something, even as just a minor curiosity.  It was a nice thought.
Just as my limbs began feeling like they were going to fall off, I glimpsed the building my father and I used to live in, where breakfast the day before had been the most eventful thing in my life.  I approached it from the shadows, careful not to make a sound.  The grass still felt a bit damp from the previous days’ rain and the chill of it pricked at my senses.  Between the fear and the adrenaline, I found myself like a different person; I took every precaution, saw every movement, noticed every sound.  A frightened raccoon scurried around a bush to my right, but the night was otherwise silent.
Once I felt certain no one was watching, I quickly darted over to the aged front doorway and ran inside.  I closed the door as slowly as possible, turning the handle carefully and muffling the final click with my hand.  I hadn’t overlooked the fact that, if someone did want to kill me, they’d be logical to hide here and wait in case the assassination at the castle had failed.  It was a risk to come back here, but one I was willing to take; having a few supplies with me could make the difference between life and death on the streets.
I placed my back against the door and examined the entranceway, giving my eyes the time they needed to adjust.  A few feet ahead of me was a large gap that I knew led to the kitchen.  If anyone had been hiding there, they would’ve seen me come in, and I’d probably be dead already.  I waited a few more seconds but held back my sigh of relief when nothing happened: just because the kitchen appeared empty didn’t mean that the rest of the rooms were safe. 
I slowly approached the kitchen pantry, keeping my back against the walls and listening out for any unusual sounds.  The sun had already set, but the moonlight was enough to illuminate my father’s collection of knives on the counter.  Most of them were dull and rusted, but two were sharp enough to be useful.  I tied them quickly to my stockings, careful to turn the blades away from my skin, and then started digging through the pantry for food.  There wasn’t much left—my father and I hadn’t lived there in months—but there were still a few leftover ingredients from yesterday’s breakfast. 
A worn sack hung from a hook on the pantry door, and I quickly filled it with anything that I knew I could eat: a few apples, a handful of mushrooms, and half a loaf of bread.  I left the eggs behind: even if they didn’t break while I was walking around, they’d been sitting in a warm pantry and I didn’t know how to cook them properly anyway.
After I’d taken what I wanted from the kitchen, I slowly crept across the rickety wooden floor toward the rest of the house.  My goal was my own bedroom.  I was nearly there when the sound of the front door opening froze me.  In the surrounding silence, I could have heard it from half the city away. 
The sound was soon followed by whispered voices.  There were at least two of them, both men as far as my frantic ears could tell.  I hesitated for a second longer than I should have, then ran the rest of the way to my bedroom.  I didn’t take the time to shut the door.  Quiet as I’d been, I was still paranoid that they may have heard me running.  The echo of kitchen cupboards opening and closing was unmistakable.  They probably thought I was hiding in one.
My heartbeat began slowing down, but my mind kept racing, considering options and weighing risks.  I wanted to change into something darker, something plainer.  But, even if I had the clothes, I did not have the time.  The voices grew louder and more violent with each second.  I could hear the intruders crashing around the different rooms as they looked for me.  It would only be a matter of time before they came to mine. 
They were close enough for me to make out a few of their words.  Despite every inch of me screaming to run or hide or do anything, my body was frozen against the wall beside my bedroom door.  Frozen, at least, until I heard six words that seemed to start my brain working again: “Let’s just smoke the place out.”
Without a second thought, I ran to the thin screen that served in place of a proper bedroom window.  I cut the fabric with one of the kitchen knives and threw the sack of things I’d gathered outside before following it as quietly as I could.  I’d barely made it across the lawn when a wall of heat collided with my back.  It was not normal fire; normal fire was slower, less predictable.  Whichever one of them had started it was clearly not elven.  Not elven, just like me. 
I backed away into the wall of bushes that lined the property, not able to take my eyes off the fire.  Against the light of it, I could see the two intruders’ shapes as they left, certain enough of the job they’d done.  I fell to my knees and just breathed until my heart finally calmed down again. 
The burning of my house seemed oddly appropriate.  I couldn’t have stayed there myself; it was much too obvious of a hiding place.  I knew that I didn’t want anyone else looking around there either; though, for what reason, I couldn’t say.  I’d never been particularly proud of the house I lived in, but it still was mine: my past, my life. 
No one needed to know about it; everything was best left forgotten.  The fire’s smoke stung my eyes and throat, but I looked up at it gladly. 
So vibrant. 
So strong. 
I couldn’t help staring at the flames for several more minutes before eventually turning away toward a small forest that I knew lay nearby.  It wouldn’t be long before people saw the smoke and showed up to see what had happened. 
Hopefully, I’d be long gone and sleeping by then.

~~CHAPTER 9 – WAITING
April 11th, Year 641; Madeline Adaire – Elven Province

The mid-morning sun warmed Madeline’s back as she waited patiently for her mother to return home.  She wasn’t sure what she would say or do when that happened; she only knew she had to wait.
The palace had been in chaos when she’d arrived.  There were guards shouting out orders, arguing with each other on protocol, blaming anyone they could find.  People were screaming, running, trying to get as far away as they could.  From what frantic conversation she’d heard, Madeline knew it was too late already.  She’d failed Adonis.  There was nowhere else to go but back home. 
That was a day and a half ago.
When she’d returned, the house was completely empty.  The only signs of life at all were a trail of footprints left in the dust from the fight with her mother.  The pile of dinner vegetables still lay half-cut on the counter.  The reminder made Madeline’s stomach growl.  A little food wouldn’t hurt; the nausea she’d felt before had begun to dissipate. 
She looked toward the front door.  It remained as silent and unmoving as it had the whole time while she rested on her knees on the cold floor in front of it.  As Madeline tried to stand, she found the bottom half of her legs entirely numb.  Her knees started to buckle out from under her, but she caught herself quickly on the edge of a small table.  She straightened up carefully and waited for the numbness to go away. 
When she’d finally started to head toward the kitchen, the door knocked.  Its echo coursed throughout the empty house like a gunshot, making her heart skip a beat.  Her tongue seemed caught in her throat; she couldn’t answer.  The door knocked once more before it was kicked open.  Madeline froze.
Through the upset of dust, a small group of people walked toward her.  Two armed guards whom she’d never seen before came first.  Once they realized that there was only Madeline and an empty room, they cleared the way for Adonis and a very tall, dark-skinned man whom Madeline remembered to be Naeem, the Daemoni family’s head advisor.
“Madeline...,” Adonis began hesitantly.  He started walking in her direction but then stopped, rethinking things a little.  He would be the demon emperor now; he needed to put forth an image that commanded people to respect and follow him.  Their relationship would need to change.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t come for you sooner.  With everything that’s happened, Naeem wanted to make sure I was kept safe first.  I heard about your mother too...”
“My mother?” Madeline asked, unsure how much she should say, how much Adonis already knew.
“You don’t know?” A flash of surprise crossed Adonis’s face.  He was concerned for Madeline’s sake, but nothing more.  He didn’t know what she did.
“I’m sorry, Madeline, but she’s dead,” Adonis continued, doing his best to be delicate about the situation.  “She was found in the streets a short distance away from the palace.  That’s why I came here for you, to give you somewhere to go.”
“Somewhere to go?” Madeline repeated dumbly.  She felt as if she were in an invisible bubble; everything around seemed skewed and muted.  All she could concentrate on was Cecilia being gone.  Her mother was dead and no one but her knew what they’d plotted.  Adonis would never find out.  She was safe now.  Madeline let out a small smile, only mildly aware of how strange it would look. 
Hesitantly, Adonis reached out his hand to her.  On his finger was a ring that had once belonged to his father, its size still a little too big for him.
“I thought you might want to come live with me.”

~~CHAPTER 10 – A CHANGE OF LIVING
April 12th, Year 641; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

The first thing I did was sell the silk gown I had worn at the castle. I traded it in exchange for two warmer, less conspicuous sets of clothing, a thin cloak, some silver coins, three apples, and a healthy meal which I’d finished over a day ago.  As my stomach kept reminding me, I hadn’t eaten anything else since.  I still had some of the food from my father’s kitchen, but thought it best to spread that out as much as possible.  The exchange for my dress was an unfair trade by anyone's standards, but wearing such clothing would make me an obvious target for petty thieves and kidnappers. 
I hadn’t made any concrete plans yet.  All I knew was that I wanted to remain inconspicuous as long as possible, at least until I knew for certain what had happened, and why.  Once I knew that, I’d decide between going back to the palace, finding a home to stay in for a while until the killers were found, or leaving the province altogether to start a new life. 
For now, though, I found myself frantically trying to decipher pages from my diary.  Kyhauna, like me, was the last of her kind, struggling to learn her own capabilities.  Hopefully she’d had the forethought to note some of her discoveries.  An experiment perhaps?  A spell?  Even a few useful words of advice would be nice, but luck seemed to have abandoned me.
If I could find something to compare the language to, then I could try to find common words, maybe make out at least a few sentences; but so far, my understanding of the roughly scribbled symbols was little changed from when I’d brought the book to Niros. 
First I’d marked all the words with black dots in front of them; hypothetically, they’d mostly be important names.  Out of all the names I’d heard my father tell me in his stories, the closest in pronunciation to Kyhauna was Sayhali, having the same sound in the second part of the name.  I compared all the names to what I’d already guessed was Kyhauna's from the cover, and came up with only one that resembled it properly.  Having the same third symbol, and also being marked as a title, I assumed that Sayhali was written as,

All in all, it was very little progress for the effort I’d put into it, but at least I had something; I now knew the symbol for a 'ha' sound, and that was a start.
For the moment, I decided to give up trying to read spells that may not even exist from a language I knew next to nothing about.  Successful or not, the whole endeavour wouldn’t bring me any good any time soon.  Instead, I resorted to feebly trying to conjure a flame like I’d done so many times before by mistake.  I carefully placed the journal back inside my bag so as not to burn it if I was lucky enough to create any fire. 
There, along with my small collection of supplies, was also a newspaper that I’d found discarded on the street corner.  Despite not being able to read the formal elven, I kept the paper because the title seemed to be printed abnormally large; I was curious to see if or, more logically, what it had to say about my family and the events of a few nights past.  For the first time, I regretted not paying attention to the lessons at the castle.  Surely there’d been something about reading formal elven in there somewhere. 
Absentmindedly wandering, I hadn’t noticed the steadily increasing number of people shouting around me.  I looked up and saw a small crowd gathering in the square roughly a block away, a collection of various merchants and labourers.  No doubt there’d be a substantial amount of gossip being passed around town about the whole situation.  Perhaps someone there could read me what the newspaper said?
Careful to wipe some dirt on my face and make my hair particularly ratty, I quietly approached the crowd.  I didn’t think any of the common citizens would recognize me yet: I hadn’t been princess long enough to have any ghastly portraits taken.
The nearest person was a heavily scarred butcher with a cleaver carried openly on his back and a frightening look of general loathing in his face.  The next closest was a tie between a round baker and a tall, hooded man with a slightly mutilated left hand.  I opted to ask the baker instead; he smelled of warm bread and had flour layered over the apron he wore.
“Excuse me, sir,” I muttered quietly.
The baker smiled and knelt down to better converse with me; I’d always been annoyingly short for my age.
“Yes, child?” he asked politely.
“Could you tell me what this reads?”  I pulled the paper out of my pack and handed it to him.
The baker stood back up, adjusted glasses that I’d only just noticed, and mumbled several phrases to himself.
“You know this is yesterday's paper?” he asked, turning back to me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” he began grimly, “it reads that the demon emperor and empress were discovered roughly two hours from here, poisoned.  They were both dead by the time they were found and no one knows for sure why they were here to begin with.  Their young son, Prince Adonis, is left to rule the demons in their stead.”
My heart sank at his words; Saritai and Makayla were the only idea I’d really formed for a potential new home, not to mention kind and interesting people in their own right.  I tried not to let my emotions show when I asked, “No news about the queen and king then?”
“None at all, though we’ve all heard the rumours.  If I were to bet, I'd say it was the demons.  Their presence here is so unusual, and an assassination attempt on such a night would make perfect sense.  That doesn't make up for the deaths of the emperor and empress, though...  Other bodies were found nearby too, some kitchen staff and the mother of one of the demon prince’s friends but there haven't been any official accusations yet.”
“Well, thank you anyway,” I mumbled, disappointed.
“If you’re interested in the queen,” the baker continued, “the royal guard is supposed to be making an announcement here regarding it any minute now.  It’s why we’re all gathered like this.”
I quickly nodded my thanks to him and searched for a crate to climb on and watch.  On the other side of the crowd, several uniformed guards argued loudly with each other.  Unable to come to a decision, but pressured by the crowd’s growing complaints, the group sent their most decorated officer to address the people.  He approached the centre of the stage and cleared his throat.  Everyone stopped what they were doing to listen, an effort which didn’t seem to help the guard’s composure. 
“As you may have already heard,” he began, his voice echoing loudly through the anxious silence of the crowd, “Queen Isabelle Saphyra; her new consort, Ariendor Sheikaih; and the former king, Lord Remus Sezor were shot with foreign weapons and killed two nights past within the castle gardens.  The newly crowned Princess Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih, who was last known to be with them, has not been found, dead or alive.  There is common belief amongst the council that she may have been kidnapped, but no ransom note has been forthcoming. 
“For the time being, the population will be ruled by the decisions of the high council, which will be led by the previous king's eldest nephew, Alvarian Sezor.  To him, the young princess will now formally be considered betrothed.  In the case of the princess's confirmed death, Alvarian will take up the throne.  You are all to refrain from any large gatherings until further notice and wear black robes of mourning at all times when in public.  Any developments with this situation will be announced to the public immediately.”
At that, the officer carefully stepped down off the stage, rejoining his fellow guardsmen with obvious relief.  A chorus of hushed rumours began to grow again as the onlookers found their friends and neighbours and left whispering in groups of two or three.
Betrothed...?  I hadn’t even heard most of the speech after that one word.  Feeling rather nauseous, I quickly worked my way back out of the steadily dispersing crowd.  I took a moment to hide behind the corner of a nearby building and throw up.
Betrothed?  Really?! 
I worked to force a couple deep breaths and tried to steady myself.  It meant nothing, I told myself; I wouldn’t be going back to the palace any time soon, not if I had any choice about it.  I closed my eyes, trying to think of anything but what I had just heard. 
A few seconds later, and still feeling slightly uneasy, I carefully got to my feet and went back to attempting to make fire, doing my best to push the news as far back in my mind as possible.
A couple hours passed with little more than a spark and a small bit of warmth that I could very well have imagined.  Maybe if I snapped my fingers or muttered nonsensical words it would help?  I looked up to see the sky steadily darkening.  The last rays of sunlight faded, barely visible on the horizon.  A chilling breeze swept up from the alleyway behind me, making my teeth chatter and reminding me of the lingering winter. 
I soon found myself facing the cold echo of an abandoned dead-end alley, sparsely decorated with only a sharpened metal fence and a rough assortment of crated food supplies.  I feebly snapped my fingers a few more times without luck, desperation slowly taking its toll. 
If I’d put the effort into learning how to make a normal fire, like the weak humans had however many thousands of years ago, I wouldn't have this problem.  Or maybe I could’ve been born to a family that actually thought of learning those things, like bakers or blacksmiths, or one that had a steady income and a nice, inheritable house (without the assassins) so that, if they ever did die, their loving daughter might have more than the clothes on her back, a few rotten apples, and a betrothal to a stupid, weak, goddam useless elf!
I threw my arms out in anger and nearly lost an ear as a smouldering piece of debris suddenly flew past my face.  Immediately, I dropped to the ground and covered my head with my hands.  I felt several small, metal shards as they sliced at the skin on my arms and shoulders.  My hands were hot enough to burn, and my ears couldn’t register anything, fogged out and muffled, as if I’d been stuck underwater for far too long.
After a minute or two, I hesitantly opened my eyes and found a soft glow at the edge of my vision, stemming out from the previously dark alleyway.  Cautiously, I raised my head to see what had happened and let out a soft, involuntary gasp; the once-unmarked fence before me was now a twisted mess of blackened metal, still flaming brightly in few places.  I slowly looked down at my right hand to see it covered in a thin, swirling layer of flame.  The heat had mostly receded, but I was still careful to keep it far from my hair and clothing. 
I’ve done it.
The thought registered itself slowly, crawling through an ocean of shock and doubt.
I set the fence on fire. 
I let show my first real smile in ages, but then swiftly checked myself.  I crawled over into the shadow cast by a nearby collection of food barrels, and as if on cue, my hand went back to normal.  I looked around the dark alley and back to the street from which I’d entered, trying to discern any moving shapes in the shadows.  The streets had become steadily more vacant as the evening settled.  For this, I thought myself lucky. 
I checked once more and let out a sigh of relief; surely if someone had seen me they would’ve done something by now.  A talent for fire was not something I wanted to reveal this soon after the queen's death, especially not now that the elves knew Saritai and Makayla had been here.  No doubt the guards were already searching the city, looking for anyone with connections to the whole disaster.
I’d just barely calmed myself down when a large shadow approached the open end of the alley.  It was a very tall, unusually broad man who wore a cape that covered him from neck to toe and—from what I could hear—a sturdy pair of heavily set, metal-rimmed boots.  His age and hair colour were hidden under the shadow of a worn, wide-rimmed black hat, but I could see just enough to know that the hair was dark and the face held more than a few scars.  As he approached, I could make out the faint shine of silver rings lining both his hands. 
He stopped not even three feet away from me and glanced around the alley, looking for the source of the noise.  The fires on the fence were all but extinguished, and I thought he was about to look my way when something seemed to attract his attention on the ground.  He bent down and grabbed my pack with all its precious contents, including Kyhauna’s diary.  I must’ve dropped it when I hit the ground.  The man grinned wickedly, threw the bag over his shoulder, and confidently strolled out of the alley before I could even consider my options. 
Rather flustered, I crawled out of my hiding spot the moment the thief turned away and followed him as quickly as I could manage without being ridiculously obvious.  I could not afford to lose sight of the thief; my entire past lay in the diary that he unwittingly carried over his shoulder. 
As I’d thought, the street beyond my little alleyway was completely abandoned; the nearby markets had closed hours ago, and the sun had all but disappeared.  The cold slowly began to set in. 
The longer the journey progressed, the more sceptical I became about the character of the man I was following.  He led me out of the common marketplace, through the outer city buildings, and past the run-down part of town that I’d grown up in.  I watched nervously as the number of buildings I recognised grew fewer.  Before long, we entered a far darker, stranger neighbourhood; where there were broken shutters on all the windows, scantily dressed women on the street corners, and more than a few starved children sleeping in the gutters.  The rest of the population consisted of similarly cloaked men with greed in their eyes and small, throat-slitting knives at their sides.  Unnervingly enough, the number of these vagabonds decreased drastically the further we went, as if they were fading away at the sight of the man I was following.  Several even gave him a nod or a salute as we passed.
Our trip ended abruptly at the door of a large, seemingly abandoned clothes factory.  The stranger knocked in a long, well-memorized pattern and the door immediately opened wide.  It was too dark beyond the door for me to see who opened it.  After the thief disappeared inside, I came out to have a better look at the place and quickly noticed a streak of light coming from an open window near the base of the building. 
Looking inside, I saw that the window belonged to an old storage basement, heavily littered with broken machinery.  It consisted of one large room; a small, open closet; and a second, tiny room, which was closed.  A table was set up in the centre of the basement, its surface littered with playing cards.  Four less-than-sober men occupied it, shouting out various inaudible phrases as they waved their card hands at each other angrily.  I crawled through the window and quietly dropped to the floor behind a particularly large piece of discarded machinery, just as the stranger I'd been following all evening came loudly down the stairs.
“I have a surprise for you, boys!” he bellowed.
“Kain!” the men shouted in unison, dropping their cards and forgetting their previous arguments.  “We were starting to bet if you’d ever come back!”
“Well, you see, it’s a surprise that took a particularly long time to secure.”
He carelessly threw my bag of treasures on top of the gambling table, where the four men shifted through it without mercy, dumping its contents roughly across the tabletop.  Kain came to stand at the nearest side of the table, a little too close to my hiding spot for comfort.
“There's nothing here but a bunch of junk!” one of the men complained.  I winced as they carelessly tossed my book aside.
“I know,” Kain grinned, backing up a bit so that I could almost smell him.  He bowed.  “Your surprise is right over here.”
Before I could react, Kain grabbed an empty chair and swung it into my ribcage, knocking the wind out of me and revealing my hiding spot.  I fell sprawling across the cold floor, trying to catch my breath and straighten my vision.  Then, before I found the chance to move away, one of Kain's stronger friends grabbed me by the back of my shirt and threw me against the wall.
“Now, now, boys,” Kain said casually, clearly not all that concerned.  “This toy's for keeping, not breaking.”
The group seemed to collectively back off a bit and I slid down to my knees, leaving a thin trail of red across the wall after me.  Kain smiled maliciously, tossing my book up and down in his hand.
“You must really care about this thing to have followed me so far, girl.”
I coughed a bit of blood out onto the cement floor and glared back at him silently.  One of my teeth felt loose.
“I saw your little trick in the alley; fire magic is quite an unusual skill in this part of the world.  Quite useful, too.”
His men cackled behind me although they clearly had as little grasp of his plan as I did.  Kain acknowledged them with a nod and continued, smiling. “Though, of course, if you ever tried to use such a trick against me or my men well—” he slowly began to tear one of the pages out of my journal “—you get the idea.”
I could almost feel any plans of escape leaving me as the paper slowly split.  Seeing the defeated expression on my face, he gently closed the book and placed it back on the table beside him.  “Do you know who I am, little girl?” he asked.
“Kain, I presume?”
“Yes, though in these parts I’m more commonly referred to as Corpse Maker.  You see, whenever there are unpleasant businesses around, and someone feels the need to, uh... put someone else out of the picture, they talk to me.  They even pay me grand sums of money for helping them out with their petty personal grudges. 
“In turn, I dig through my human arsenal and pick out an appropriate assassin for the job.  Said killer gets half of the earnings along with whatever they can take from the residence of the victim.  You might think that’s unfair but it's a good trade, really: this way none of my friends need reveal their faces to any of the common folk.  As for me, if any of our clients try to snitch me out to the guards, they know they'll have an entire army of killers at their throats.  I feel it’s a very... efficient system.  And you, young lady, have two very good things going for you:
“First, by some strangeness that I can't really understand, you’re able to wield at least one of the less frilly, elf-like forms of magic.  Second is you’re a thin, weak-looking little girl; no one would see it coming!  Your stalking skills are horrid, but really, that comes with practice, and who knows what other tricks you may be capable of?  And if it doesn’t work out,” Kain shrugged rather nonchalantly, “we can always kill you later, no?”
At that, the rest of the men laughed rather heartily.  Kain seemed genuinely excited about the idea.
“You can have that lovely little room over there,” he motioned, pointing to the closed door that I’d noticed earlier from outside.  I now saw that it had a small window with bars and a thick lock near the handle.
“And as for your book,” he continued, “you can have it back once I know I can trust you.  It's not such a bad life here, you know.  I honestly think you may warm up to it.”
He smiled once more and gave a short, mocking bow.  I could see the rot spreading through his yellowed teeth.  “Have a good night, darling,” he hissed.
Then Kain turned and shouted various commands to his men.  They picked me up by the arms and legs, carried me to the tiny room, and threw me onto the thinly covered stone slab I presumed was to be my bed.  One of them went to fetch my apples and rolled them to me one by one across the floor.  They laughed once more, stepped out, and closed the door behind them.  I heard the lock set with a heavy clunk and curled up on the thin covering. 
Once I’d tuned out the obnoxious sounds of the men gambling and laughing from the other room, only the odd squeak of a rodent disturbed me.  I silently wondered if some of Kain’s men were the ones hired to kill my parents.  Would I end up meeting them?  Would I work with them?  I’d have to be careful to keep my identity to myself, keep my hair dark, my eyes down.  I’d already thoroughly mastered the art of not acting like a princess. 
I snapped my fingers once more and sighed to see a small, vibrant flame dancing mockingly on their tips.  Cheerlessly, I dismissed the fire and grabbed one of the apples off the floor.  Nibbling on the bruised fruit, I couldn't help but think to myself, “Well, at least it's not the palace, right?”

PART II - Puppet

June, Year 643 - January, Year 645

"Only a few find the way.

Some don't recognize it when they do

Some... don't ever want to"

-Cheshire Cat , *American McGee's Alice

~~CHAPTER 11 – CARDFACE
June 26th, Year 643; Shayne Trugan – Elven Province

There was a loud, metallic screech before Shayne found himself being forced down a thin set of stairs.  He couldn’t see anything beyond the black cloth wrapped around his face, couldn’t feel anything but the cold knife against his throat.  The faint glow around his blindfold faded out as the door shut behind him and his captor, blocking out the sun.
“Where are we going?” Shayne asked, not for the first time.  A small breath of air glided past him.
“I’ve taken you to your new home,” the man announced as he guided Shayne further down the stairway.  “There are only three things you need to worry about here: if you try to leave without me telling you to, your sister will die; if you tell anyone else where you are, your sister will die; if you disobey me in any other way, she will die.  Do you understand?”
Shayne nodded meekly.  So it wasn’t a palace guard come to bring him and Claire in for questioning.  At least that was a bit of a relief.
They’d reached the bottom of the stairs and Shayne listened as a second doorway opened.  The faint sounds of a card game floated up to him.  Three or four men and a young woman.  Hearts.  The woman seemed to be winning.
Shayne jumped as the knife from his throat was quickly used to cut his blindfold.  He was in an old, abandoned clothes factory.  An assortment of sewing and weaving machines were tossed over and pushed to the room’s edges, making space for the card players and a rustic, wooden table. 
The two nearest men twisted to see Shayne and his captor enter the room.  The young woman was too preoccupied deciding what to do with her hand to notice until one of the men shouted, “Hey, Kain, what’ve you got there this time?”
“A new play toy for our little Khaazie to teach,” the man named Kain answered confidently.
The woman finally looked up, presumably reacting to the sound of her name.  But that wasn’t her name.  At least, Shayne couldn’t believe that it was.  Now that he saw her face clearly, he could swear she was a near replica of the princess that had gone missing two years before.  The eyes were unmistakable; it had to be her.  If she’d lived, if she’d somehow ended up here, if she’d dyed her hair black and kept her true self a secret. 
That was what dissuaded Shayne, though: the woman before him seemed as if she was her true self, completely satisfied and confident in her surroundings.  If she recognised him at all, it was only shown in half a second of hesitation; even that could have been attributed to any number of reasons.  And if it was the princess, she’d obviously gone to great lengths to stay hidden.  Clearly, she didn’t want to be revealed. 
He’d leave it alone, Shayne decided, at least until he could be certain
“For me?” the woman called Khaazie asked quietly, re-examining her cards one last time and then contemplating the new turn of events.  “So I’ll be allowed out on my own now?”
“Well, with Shayne here, but yes; I think you’ve earned yourself a little more freedom.”
“I appreciate it,” the woman acknowledged, “but how can you be certain he won’t run?  Besides me, of course.”
“I have eyes on his sister,” Kain explained shortly. 
A bit of tension grew in the room.  Kain was clearly in charge, yet he willingly answered the impertinent questions of what seemed to be one of his youngest employees.  She might not have even been that: the woman could’ve been captured just like Shayne.  He found himself wondering what form of collateral they held against her.
The young woman suddenly slapped her cards down on the table and pushed her chair away.  “I’ll let you guys have this one,” she said as she stood and tidied her skirts.  She picked up the hand of the opponent nearest her and smiled with a controlled sense of satisfaction at what she saw.  “I’ll play you all again tomorrow, but for now it’s getting late and there’re a few things I’d like to think about.” 
She gracefully curtsied and made to exit to a nearby room.  Her eyes lingered for just a second on the staircase that led back outside.  If Shayne understood the situation properly, she was probably restraining herself from exercising some of the new freedoms she’d just been granted at his expense.
“Don’t let the pretty face fool ya’, kid,” one of the older men advised gruffly after she’d left.  “Girl’s only been here two years and already thinks like she owns the place.  Piece of work, that one.  I don’t envy ya.”
“Khaazie, her name was?” Shayne asked, doing his best to make the question sound innocent.
“Kha’aziemne, technically, but she’s got another thing coming if she expects us to run around trying to pronounce that all day.  At least, that’s what she says her name is.  Probably isn’t.  Aint no one here know my real name neither.”

~~CHAPTER 12 – AMBITIONS
May 10th, Year 644; Madeline Adaire – Ayres Cliff, Riel

Madeline watched with quiet fascination as an ocean of clouds raced through the sky in front of her, chased as if on the breath of a hurricane.  The air felt light and crisp; the sun, warm and gentle.  The fields stretched open before her, as welcome as a carefree morning until they reached the edge of their small paradise.  There, they quickly shrivelled and died, derelict in the ashes of the realm’s most southern kingdom.
“This place was named for my father’s family,” Adonis commentated from beside her.  “To date, it’s the only place in Riel known to allow things to grow.  I do hope it’s to your liking.  Would you enjoy some more apple?”  He passed her a small sampler plate which she politely accepted.  The whole afternoon had been unusually formal between them.  It made her just a little on edge.
Roughly thirty feet away from them stood a ring of guards, silently keeping vigil for their young emperor’s safety.  Not even a simple picnic could be complete without an entourage to follow it.  Of her own people, there were only two: April, an older woman employed to be Madeline’s lady-in-waiting—a service which Madeline only made use of in public situations when she was most expected to—and Tabetha, the ambitious younger daughter of a nobleman whose name Madeline honestly couldn’t remember. 
Tabetha was of Madeline’s own choosing, a surprise to both Adonis and the smaller court.  Openly, she was labelled as a second serving lady (much to the first’s despair) but privately she served as both a spy and a messenger, retrieving information that Madeline would have had difficulty acquiring herself.  She was paid most generously for the task.
At the moment, Tabetha sat a short distance to Madeline’s left, contrite and innocent for all appearances.  She’d already advised Madeline to the purpose of that afternoon’s picnic several days before.  Something so trivial hardly made good use of Tabetha’s talents, though.  Adonis’s intentions were obvious; Madeline could tell them just by watching his expressions.  She’d learnt to see everything he was thinking.
Another minute and Adonis excused himself formally with a bow, “If you could just pardon me for a moment...”  Then he walked somewhat stiffly over to where Naeem had stood watching them both throughout the affair.  The man’s gaze was as disturbingly emotionless as always.
“I’ve had word of your father, Madam,” Tabetha whispered carefully from beside her. 
Madeline snapped her head around at the news.  “He’s been found, then?” she asked, allowing her composure to slip for just a moment.  All eyes were still on Adonis.
“He’s been living in a small river town in eastern Kanaya.  Master Joseph is the man responsible for finding him.  He wants to know if you’d like us to bring him to you.  Discretely, of course.”
Madeline thought about it for a moment then, “No, I think I’d rather you not.”
Tabetha couldn’t hide some of her surprise, not from Madeline.  “Then... what would you like us to do?”
“Kill him,” Madeline answered simply.  “I have no interest in my father.  I only needed to be sure he wouldn’t come back to try and claim me, circumstances being what they are...”
“Of course,” Tabetha acknowledged dutifully, reaching a slim, gloved hand out for a coconut tart.  She nodded in Adonis’s direction just as he started to head back toward them, a delicate red box held in his hands. 
Adonis had worked hard to single-handedly increase Madeline’s social status as much as possible.  In mere months she’d been promoted from his friend to one of his advisors, and most recently, to an ambassador for the ghost population.  At her age, such a thing was completely unheard of.  There was only so much more he could do.
“I suppose I should start calling you Majesty soon,” Tabetha said slyly.
“Yes, I suppose you should.”

~~CHAPTER 13 – FIRE
August 19th, Year 644; Niros Kostas – Elven Castle Library

“Kyhauna Sheikaih,” Niros muttered under his breath as he thumbed through the mortal history section of the elven castle’s public library.  His hands shook as he went, much to his own annoyance, and some sweat formed lightly on his forehead.  Another book and there was nothing.  He put it back on the shelf and reached for a new one. 
“Kyhauna, Kyhauna, Kyhauna Sheikaih...” 
He’d heard the name twice now: once whispered softly from the lips of a young girl and then again, just recently, in a text on mythological alchemy practices.  The text in question was written based on various pieces of lore picked up in the mortal realm by a young sorcerer, now deceased.  Niros was lucky to have found it at all.  It mentioned Kyhauna Sheikaih only briefly as a curiosity to the mortals who lived near her, but just the name was enough to pique Niros’s interest. 
He still remembered the missing princess, Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih, whispering the name Kyhauna to him two days before her disappearance.  She’d suspected the woman to be the original author of the diary she’d brought him—a diary which was, Niros admitted to himself, written in an extremely odd series of symbols vaguely resembling the oldest form of elven.  He needed to learn more about it, about her.  But she was gone now.
From the corner of his eye, Niros could see a few other people in the library watching him cautiously.  He obviously appeared agitated, nervous, and tense.  To add to that, he hadn’t slept or eaten properly in several days.  The hunger for knowledge overwhelmed the hunger for proper sustenance, as it often did when he was after something. 
That must be what they looked at, he reassured himself.  He’d covered his ears carefully, both with his own hair and a thick, heavy hood.  They couldn’t know he wasn’t elven.  He was safe coming out in the day if he was careful this way.  Even here, just outside of the castle itself, he was safe.
But the people kept looking at him.  Every time he checked, a new one stared at him, watching as he shakily moved from one book to another.  He counted six guards total in the room, each one with their eyes on him.  He turned back to the book in his hands and tried to forget about them.  He needed to seem normal, just like all the other library visitors there.  He resumed flipping the pages slowly, more scanning their words than actually absorbing any information. 
Then he saw her name; Kyhauna Sheikaih, clear and plain in simple black print. 
He turned the pages more frantically, nearly tearing several of them out.  There was a whole chapter on her and the fiefdom that she and Hesh Ceimahl had ruled in the mortal realm.  This was what he was looking for!  He only needed to find something to reference where she’d come from.  The nytelven myth said that they’d sent her to the mortal realm through a portal.  If that portal still existed, Niros could find it and follow it to Samarie Island itself.
“Excuse me, sir?” someone questioned from behind him.
The stranger placed a hand on Niros’s shoulder, a gesture of concern; but Niros, shocked out of his desperate shell by the contact, flew about wildly and knocked the man over.  In the sudden, spinning movement, Niros’s hood fell off and his hair flew about him.  The room’s guards approached to address the injured man’s well-being and saw Niros’s ears. 
There was a moment of absolute stillness.  No one in the room knew quite what to do... until Niros wedged the book he held under his armpit, and in one sweeping motion, grabbed every other book on the shelf he could carry.
He ran toward the exit.
Instantly, all six guards were after him.  To try and slow them down, Niros knocked over a pair of lit sconces on his way.  Fire spread and sputtered across the library’s dry, carpeted floor.  The mass of people began to panic.  Niros didn’t look back, running as fast as he could with an armful of thick, heavy books; but he heard the screams and shattering windows behind him.  The guards had no choice but to stop and try to put the fire out.  Those who could conjure water did so, and the flames eventually receded; but not before Niros was long gone. 
He crashed down the door of his own small apartment and gathered up what few possessions he owned; now that the guards knew his face, they would plaster it all over the city—Wanted: Outsider.  He’d have to leave the province.  He’d do it within the hour.  The nearby sorcerers’ territory of Aviantez seemed like his best option: he and his father had lived there years before. 
Yes, he thought to himself, that would be perfect. 
It wasn’t until hours later that he realized he’d dropped the one book he needed back in the fire.

~~CHAPTER 14 – CRIMINAL TIES
December 20th, Year 644; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

I nudged the dying man's toe with the fragmented shreds of what used to be a wooden chair.  A weak moan escaped his throat but nothing more.  I wasn’t entirely certain whether or not I actually wanted to kill him yet.  Sighing, I leaned back against the wall and continued to flip randomly through the pages of a newsprint that I’d found scant minutes before, hanging carelessly off the side of his nightstand. 
It was the woman printed on the cover that’d caught my attention: Madeline Adaire, whom I’d seen suspiciously sprinting toward the city the night of my parents’ deaths.  Madeline, who’d been such good friends with Adonis, who was no doubt ruling the demons alongside him right then as I might have been if things had turned out half a shade differently.  She presented more than a mild curiosity to me.
I pried the dying man's left eye open and waved the paper in front of his face. 
“Do you know what this says?” I shouted. 
He just groaned again in return so I tried pulling his ear back and yelling directly into it.
“Do you know what this says?!”
“Fuck you,” he spat.
Useless. 
I swiftly swung the broken chair leg, cracking his skull in one hit.  The body twitched once and then stopped moving entirely.
The one good thing about Kain was that he at least let me choose my own victims.  This one kidnapped children, holding them hostage just long enough to move to another town, then selling them into slavery.  The client who came to us about him had tracked the man all the way from the centre of Kanaya, far to the elven province’s southeast.  I didn’t care so much about the justice of it, but killing other criminals at least gave me a sense of purpose... or a weak excuse, depending on how I chose to look at it. 
I glanced over the top of my paper again, eyeing the bloodied corpse before me.  Sometimes I was still startled by the ease with which I’d adapted to killing.  Sometimes I almost enjoyed it—did enjoy it, if I was being completely honest with myself. 
It wasn’t the worst possible life. 
And I had my freedom, of a sort.  The city lay wide open to me and I could leave whenever I wanted.  I stayed because it was a warm place to live, with edible food and plenty of bodies to test weapons and spells against.  There were people to teach me and people to entertain me, and of course, I stayed because of my book.
Kain kept my treasure hidden somewhere far out of mine or anyone else’s reach.  I’d given up hope that he’d return it to me the day he’d taken the lock off my door.  Even though I was rash, stubborn, and unpredictable, he knew I could achieve the types of murders that the other men could not; I had access to half a city worth of places that they’d never see.  He wouldn’t just give my book back and let me go, not now. 
I needed to find something more valuable to him than I was to trade for it; so I picked the rich victims: wealthy, pig headed, cold hearted bastards that I knew the world would be better off without and hoped that maybe one of them would own something good enough for me to barter my life back with.
“Are you done up there yet?” Shayne yelled from downstairs.  I’d left him there to watch the front door, the easiest task I could think of for his first job.
“Almost,” I replied, quickly getting up to start cleaning the mess.  I tossed away the chair leg and began gathering all the items that were in contact with the man during his death, being careful to avoid getting blood on anything valuable. 
Where most of the other men just sold them, I had made a hobby of sewing dresses and crafting weapons out of whatever ghost objects I collected.  Shayne and I agreed to share most of the valuables from jobs we did together, but the ghost objects themselves were the reward of whoever did the actual killing.  Shayne wasn’t quite there yet.  Part of me didn’t think he’d ever be.
As I made to leave the room, I couldn’t help but notice its previous owner’s substantial collection of books.  They filled an entire wall on their own, covering it in an intricate mosaic of knowledge and lore, each piece a slightly different colour or size.  My eyes caught on a larger one, perhaps the oldest of them all, which adorned the middle shelf proudly: the Greater Ancestry of the Demonic Kingdom: A Composed History of Riel and its Makers.  A rather risky decoration for a wealthy home in the centre of the elven capital. 
I picked it up carefully and flipped through the pages in chunks, curious to see if it mentioned anything about my apparent relatives.  I wouldn’t be in it: the book was much older than I was.  There remained a chance that my father was there though, or at least Adonis’s parents.
The page I wanted was easier than expected to find; The Ancestral Line of Daicon: youngest of the original twelve, the shade of Human Doubt.  According to a short summary, each of the original twelve demons were manifested representations of human flaws, empowered by the presence of the flaw from which they’d been made. 
I followed the names on the page lightly with my finger; Daicon was at the top, then his twin sons, Vont and Hesh.  Below Vont was Makayla and then nothing because Adonis hadn’t been born yet, either.  To Makayla’s left, I noticed a notation by Saritai’s name.  Apparently, he was a more distant descendant of the third-oldest original demon: Ayres, of Pride.  I went back up to Vont and Hesh.  Hesh’s line extended into the next page, where Kyhauna’s name rested beside it. 
I’d known already, but seeing it in an official print made my heart skip regardless.  Ariendor’s name appeared beneath them, marked as deceased even though he’d still been a child at the time: my mortal father was an embarrassment to demon history even then.  My finger lingered on his name a moment longer and I debated adding my own to the page until I noticed Shayne looking over my shoulder.  He could be stealthy, it seemed, when he wanted to.
“So I was right,” he whispered.  Even that small sound made me jump.  I quickly slammed the book shut and replaced it on the shelf.  He only laughed at the reaction.  “What, did you think I hadn’t recognised you?”
“If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?” I asked with a shade more hatred than I’d intended.  The tone caught him off guard, buying time for me to mentally review how much Shayne could really know about me.  I concluded that whatever he thought must have been limited to my experiences with Kain and in the palace, nothing about the Alium Sinod.
“I wanted to be certain,” came his response.  “You seemed so adamant about keeping yourself secret.  I wouldn’t want to falsely accuse someone.”
“Accuse?  Am I a criminal now?”
I’d meant for hiding my identity, but the actual circumstances caught up with me a moment later.  I gave myself a mental smack.  Of course I was a criminal; I’d just murdered a man and was in the process of stealing his things.  Shayne’s grin only frustrated me more.
“Let’s just go.  There are a few more rooms up here to search through and that should be it.  You did clear out the main floor, right?”
“Of course,” he confirmed with a mockingly solemn tone, still watching me with far too much amusement as I led the way back into the main hall.
“I’m just curious about one thing,” he started as I quickly scanned the rooms for anything valuable.  An old tapestry, a bit of jewellery, a mediocre sword.  “Why aren’t you in the palace living like the queen you are, ordering your army of guards to torture Kain for whatever it is he has of yours instead?  Did he make you sign a blood contract or something?”
“A blood contract?”
“Like a normal contract, but signed in blood.  If it’s broken, the signer and all their descendants instantly die.”
“No...,” I replied slowly, slightly disturbed at the notion of such a thing and the matter-of-fact tone in which Shayne described it.  “What Kain has of mine is more valuable to me than my life.  Like your sister.”
The banister that ran along the house's grand stairway was made from an elegantly carved red-wood, stained to show darker, and gently curving with the slope of the spiralled steps.  It was not unlike the shape and colour of my own hair, at least before I’d been forced to dye it.  I wondered how many children the owner had sold to afford such luxury.  I wondered if I might be able to wash out the dye now that Shayne obviously knew who I was.  I wondered how much more I could get away with not telling him.
“What is it?” he asked, his curiosity overcoming the unease I had caused by mentioning his sister.
“What’s what?”
“The thing Kain has of yours to keep you here.”
“A book,” I replied vaguely, still distracting myself with my own thoughts.  I would wash the dye out, I decided.  I’d do it the very next day.
“Just a book?” he continued prying.
“It’s my past—who I am.” 
“Who you are?” he laughed.  “Everyone knows who you are.  If you’ve forgotten, there was an entire province-wide debate about it.  You’re the queen of the goddam elves!”
“No,” I muttered distractedly, “I’m really not.  The palace guards cannot help me because, if they were made aware of what Kain has of mine, I’d be the one they’d torture, not him.”
Shayne was about to start arguing again, but a faint noise from the first floor kitchen gave us reason to pause.
“I thought you said you cleared the floor?”
“As much as I could; kitchen door was locked, lights off and all...”
“You ignored it because the lights were off?!” I hissed, running toward the noise instead of giving him a chance to reply.
I slowed down a bit as we approached, stepping as carefully as I could across the old wooden floor.  We’d already finished our job, and probably should have just left, but curiosity got the better of me.  As we reached the kitchen door, I conjured a small fire in one hand, quickly covering it with the other so as not to give away our presence. 
I dug into the pocket of my skirt and retrieved a set of lockpicks that I kept around for when I was out with the others.  For myself, I’d carved a set out of my demon claws.  It was incredibly useful but not exactly something to show others, so I passed Shayne the kit, and waited impatiently as he fumbled around with it.  He needed any practice he could get.
The mechanism released a minute later with a small, satisfying click.  I gave Shayne a ‘don’t screw this up’ warning glare before placing a palm flat against the face of the door and slowly creaked it open, ready to throw fireballs at anything that moved.
The kitchen was disappointingly empty. 
I turned back to ask what Shayne thought of it but he still stood staring from the doorway.  “This kitchen is amazing,” he gasped, ever the aspiring chef.  I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Well, if you turn out to be terrible at killing people, maybe Kain will let you stay and cook his food for him instead.”
Shayne chuckled a little too, until the noises started up again and we both froze.  The sounds seemed to be coming from the pantry.  As I walked across the marble floor, I did my best to be completely silent, resting my weight on only the very front of my feet. 
The moonlight caught in the edge of my vision, reflecting off of an assortment of brilliantly polished knives and other kitchenware.  I made a mental note to take them back with me later.  Shayne would approve.  I looked back once more to make sure he was behind me and then, keeping one arm still ready to attack, I reached out the other and carefully inched the pantry door open.

~~CHAPTER 15 – ADELLAE
December 20th, Year 644; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

What I didn’t expect was a little girl, much younger than me, gagged and tied to a chair that had long since fallen on its side.  Her eyes went wide at the sight of the fire in my hand, so I quickly put it out.  I knelt down to undo the knots of rope around her and took the cloth out of her mouth.
“Th... thank you,” she stuttered, eyeing me warily, still afraid to move from the chair that’d held her captive.
“I take it you were kidnapped?” I asked, but meek silence was the only response I received.  I reached out a hand to help her up.
The girl was short (very, very short) and pale, though that was to be expected from being locked away in a closet.  I couldn't quite tell whether her hair was a soft shade of grey or an extremely light brown but I noticed that her ears were of a normal size, not long and pointed like the elves’ or my own.
“I'm Adellae,” she whispered shyly and then, noticing my glance, she added quickly, “Please don’t report me.  I know I’m not elven but I’ve lived here with my mother all my life.”
Report her?  Shayne barely resisted laughing.  The girl didn’t realize that we’d just killed a man.
“I’m not elven either,” I answered patiently.
“That would explain the fire...,” she muttered.  I could see her eyes evaluating Shayne and I quickly, trying to determine whether we were friends or a threat.
Then: “Do you know what day it is?” she asked out of the blue.  I went to answer before realizing that I didn’t honestly know myself.
“The twentieth of December,” Shayne replied for me.
At that, a small light seemed to brighten the young girl’s face.  “Then I’m not too late!”  She exclaimed, her demeanour now rather too cheerful for someone who’d just escaped being locked in a two-foot-wide closet.
“Late for what?”
“To see Madeline Adaire; she’s supposed to be bringing the Book of the Dead here sometime near the end of this month, or the beginning of next month, depending on how long she’s held up at her current location. 
About a year ago, one of my mother’s friends got us jobs in the palace kitchens.  My mother’s elven so, even though I’m not, the kitchen staff don’t mind me much so long as I keep myself quiet and take care of the tasks they don’t like.  They’re so scared of Madeline; maybe I’ll be lucky and get to be the one to serve her.”
“We could walk you back home if you’d like,” Shayne offered suddenly, as if the palace wasn’t the absolute last place either of us wanted to go.  “Could you tell us more about Madeline and this book while we walk?”
“Of course!  Thank you!” the girl replied before cheerfully skipping ahead to lead the way.
When he caught my glaring expression, Shayne shrugged.  “The Book of the Dead sounds like something relatively valuable; perhaps you can trade Kain one piece of literature for another?”
“I think Madeline Adaire might be the strongest woman there is,” Adellae continued chirping, oblivious to Shayne’s comment.  “My mother tells me all the time about the amazing things she’s been doing for the ghosts ever since the demon emperor elected her to be their ambassador.  She gave them more rights as a separate race and managed to organize them into a running democracy.  They listen to her because she can change between being a ghost and a perfectly solid, alive being at will.  No one's ever seen the likes of it before.  She even ran in their first election and won!  She probably got the women's vote; they've had nothing but pompous male rulers forever.”
Adellae had to pause and take a quick breath.  Her cheeks were practically flushed from excitement.  “Anyway, there’s a huge ceremony for them passing along the Book of the Dead to her; it’s tradition for the book to be managed by the race’s current leader.  She'll be visiting all the other races with it to introduce herself.  She's already done the tour once when she married Emperor Adonis—but not with us, of course, because of the war.  It should be interesting to see how she's received.  Being a ghost, or at least some-what a ghost, the elves literally won’t be able to touch her.”
“What’s the Book of the Dead used for?” I asked, switching the girl from one encyclopaedic topic to another for the sake of Shayne’s plan.
“Just what it says,” she replied without missing a beat, “It’s an enormous, constantly changing book listing everyone who’s died and everyone who’s been converted into a ghost.  It updates itself automatically with every new death.  I think it’s really interesting, but most people just think of it as some sort of trinket.  Only the ruler of the ghosts is allowed to read it, though.  Otherwise, there’d be millions of people trying to see if their loved ones had been converted or not.”
“And you said Madeline should be in town soon, right?” Shayne prodded.
“I’m looking forward to seeing her.”
I could almost feel the grin spreading across his face.  Was he thinking we should try and steal it?  Was he insane?
“We’re nearly at the palace,” Adellae announced suddenly.  “I can show you a secret entrance into the servant halls; we won’t want to be seen by the guard.”
“Probably a good idea,” I agreed, giving Shayne a pointed glance as we followed the girl around the western edge of the royal garden. 
The outside guard was particularly light at that time of night and easily avoided if you knew their patterns.  Adellae's idea of a ‘secret’ entrance turned out to be the chute in which the kitchen staff tossed bags of compost for the gardener.  It was extremely cramped, long, steep, and it reeked of rotten fruit.  Suffice it to say, I was very glad when we reached the dimly lit hallway on the other side.
“Mother and I sleep with the female servers in a room on the far side of the bakery,” Adellae told us, pointing toward two large, silver doors that smelled like they led to the kitchens.  Shayne refrained from mentioning how painfully familiar the place felt to him, allowing Adellae to keep leading the way.
“They'll be so happy to see me!”  She smiled, pushing the doors wide open before I could even think to stop her. 
Immediately, there were half a dozen well-fed men and women rushing toward us.  They swept Adellae into a tangle of hugging arms and crying faces.
“Natalia!” Adellae shouted, freeing herself and running over to a kindly looking woman who’d fallen to her knees in shock when we first walked in.  “I've missed you so much, Nata!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Shayne continuing slowly down the hallway, mesmerized by the changes to his old home, perhaps trying to find the rooms where he and his sister used to sleep.
“I thought you were dead,” the woman eventually managed to say, her high-pitched cries bringing me back to the scene at hand.  “We've all been so worried about you, Ada!  What happened?”
“I was kidnapped!” Adellae explained dramatically.  “These people saved me, Nata!  Though... I don’t even know their names.”
All thought of walking out unnoticed in the commotion faded when every head in the brightly lit bakery immediately turned my way.  Some of the newer staff didn't seem to recognize me, but there were more than a few completely white faces.  One man, who seemed in about his mid-fifties, immediately darted out the other door, most likely to wake the rest of the castle.
“I know her name,” Natalia whispered.  I remembered her from the last time I’d been there; my eyes must’ve been a dead giveaway.
“You do?” Adellae asked but Natalia ignored her.
“You had best leave, Iladen, before Gregory tells the council.  We’ll take good care of Adellae and see that her mother is woken.”
I nodded thankfully, glad that they weren't all trying to keep me there like I’d feared.
“Iladen?  You mean Iladen-Amaya?” Adellae whispered, almost in a trance, “The princess?”
“She would be queen now but yes, that’s who she is.  You mustn’t tell anyone you saw her, Ada, not even the other servants.  Do you understand?”
“She freed me, Nata!”
“Yes, yes.  Hush, Adellae,” Natalia tried to calm the girl down.  “Now it's your turn to free her.  Iladen is not meant for the palace.  She should not have risked coming here. ”
“Thank you,” I whispered just as the sound of alarm bells began to seep in through the walls.  The echo of it chilled its way into my skin.
“No, thank you,” Natalia replied solemnly. “You’ve brought our Adellae back to us, but you must go now!”
She didn’t have to tell me twice.  A second later I was calling for Shayne and running back to the compost chute that we’d come in by.  Sliding back down it didn't take nearly as long as climbing up, but by the time I reached the gardens, I could already hear the whistles of the guard.  I barely managed to sneak back through one of the gaps in the garden wall before uniformed men started taking posts around all the exits and nearby streets.  It wasn’t until my breathing and heart rate calmed down again that I realized Shayne wasn’t with me.

~~CHAPTER 16 – QUESTIONING
December 21st, Year 644; Shayne Trugan – Elven Dungeons

Shayne watched the scene around him through half-squinted eyes, doing his best to appear unconscious.  If they thought he was awake, his captors would go back to questioning him, and he wasn’t sure how much more of that he or his body could take.  Already, he ached all over.  His skin was covered in a layer of bruises and cuts, both deep and shallow.  Even opening his eyes as much as he did was straining.
There was an argument between two men; that much he was aware of.  Shayne knew them both on sight: the unnamed interrogator who’d been keeping him company for the past six hours, and Alvarian Sezor, the current leader of the elven council and Iladen-Amaya’s betrothed.  At first, Shayne was surprised to see someone of such rank outside his dismal holding cell, but listening to the conversation soon explained it to him: they wanted Iladen. 
When Shayne first awoke, they’d offered him freedom and forgiveness for the crimes of which he’d been accused.  The suspicion on him for the queen’s murder would be dropped in an instant.  In exchange, he had only to tell them how to find their precious princess.  They told him they wanted what was best for her, that her betrothed was going mad out of longing for her, that the people were begging for her to lead them.  It was when they thought he was sleeping that Shayne really learned the truth. 
For Alvarian Sezor, there were three possible options: if Iladen-Amaya was never found, he would remain the head of the elven council but without the power to do anything unless the entire council voted for it first.  If Iladen-Amaya was found alive, he would become king by marrying her but have to share a considerable amount of that power with her as well.  The best situation for Alvarian would be if Iladen-Amaya was confirmed dead.  Then he would be king without her and free to take a new, more cooperative young lady for a queen.  He probably would’ve preferred it if Shayne had been a murderer: it would have been rather convenient if the assassin who’d tried to kill the entire royal family tracked the princess down after all this time to finish his work.
Still, Shayne was somewhat tempted.  He knew Iladen could handle herself, and if Alvarian was willing to let him go free, maybe he’d be willing to help get Claire back too.  The two of them would have to change their names and wear a bit of makeup for a while but they might eventually be allowed to work in the palace again.  Shayne could continue his cooking training and Claire would always have a nice meal and a clean place to sleep.  He could give up Iladen’s location for that, he reasoned.  He could do it for Claire.  He was about to say as much when a third person appeared outside his cell and interrupted the argument.
“Well,” Alvarian questioned this newest visitor, “did you find any family members to help convince him?”
“No sire,” the man replied solemnly, his voice grungy and thick with an accent that Shayne couldn’t quite place.  “Boy came to work for the palace as an orphan about a decade ago, parents gone as long as he could remember ‘em.  Had a sister, but she was found dead in one of the riots last year.  Aint no one out there left for the lad now.”

~~CHAPTER 17 – JUST LIKE ME
December 21st, Year 644; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

All I’m asking for is a few people to come with me!  You won’t even spare that for him?” 
“And let you kill them too?  Of course not.  Giving you help would only encourage you.”
“So you won’t even let me try?  Why did you bother recruiting Shayne at all if he means so little to you?!”
“Why?” Kain laughed.  The casual way in which he’d been handling the entire situation only served to infuriate me more.  “I brought him here for you, figured a friend your own age might help keep you here, keep you happy.  I shouldn’t have bothered, though; he was less adept than an infant and you’ll never leave this place anyway.  You love it too much.”
I took a step back, insulted much more than I wanted to admit.  Was it an insult?  Kain’s grin grew further as he saw my hesitation.
“What, are you surprised?” he mocked, coughing a bit as he did.  “You’re just as much a killer as I am, girl.”
That was all I could take.  His laughter made me sick; the truth hidden in what he’d said more so.  I turned and took the stairs three at a time just to get out of there as fast as I could.  The banister gave off a rusted metallic clanking under the pressure.
“Run, girl,” he yelled after me.  “You’ll be back.”
I threw up as soon as I reached the outer door.  The air was bitterly cold, but anything fresh and open was a welcome change.  I looked up at the street in front of me: it was as dark and gloomy as always and perhaps even less occupied than usual.  It began to snow, a sudden shift from the tolerable chill of the night before.
I tried to think my situation through clearly, but my mind kept flipping from one thing to another with no sense of direction or purpose.  Kain wouldn’t send anyone to help me and none of the others would risk disobeying him.  I couldn’t save Shayne on my own.  If they really thought Shayne was really suspected of my parents’ murders, or even if they just planned to use him as a scapegoat, the palace would be crawling with guards.  Besides that, all the regular staff and civilians would’ve heard the rumours already and be able to recognise me easily. 
There was nothing I could do for him. 
I hadn’t felt so completely powerless since my childhood.  I could almost see Shayne’s expression, read his thoughts: You’re the queen, Iladen; you could have stopped this.  You could have saved me and my sister both.  Part of me thought he was right, thought I should get up right then and make some sort of effort.  Even if I failed, at least I’d know I’d done my best, that I’d stood up for something for once in my life.
Then, “Shayne is dead.” 
The news came suddenly from a small voice behind me. 
I spun around to find Adellae standing there in the cold, wrapped up in a small coat and hat.  “How did you get here?” I asked, her first statement not entirely sinking in yet.
“He told me where you were as I was bringing the castle prisoners their daily food.  It’s another one of the jobs the other servants don’t like to do.  I wanted to come and thank you properly for saving me, and warn you not to try and save him.  They hung him a couple of hours ago, but there’s still people all over the place looking for you.  I’m sorry.”
I should have been more upset by the news, I knew, but part of me felt a little relieved.  I was too late to save Shayne; he was already gone.  A small piece of my world resumed its normality, leaving behind but a shade of the resolution I’d held moments before, a figment just large enough to tug mildly at my subconscious.
“Do you want to talk at all?” Adellae asked, ever the mature seven-year-old, and I soon found myself walking beside her along the wall that marked the city limits, my fingers scraping numbly along its pale brick surface.
Talking with Adellae involved almost everything except Shayne: Adellae’s life, her interests, her goals—and that was helpful in its own way.  By the end of it, she stared hopefully out at the sky beyond the wall, telling me how she wanted to leave someday to find her father in Aviantez, or go to a fancy alchemy school in Kanaya: the realm’s capital city and a complete mixture of all races and technologies.  She sounded so happy talking about dreams that she might never see realized, brave despite all she’d been through and all that she still couldn’t know about the world.  It put me to shame.
I could make a normal life for myself somewhere, could be a seamstress, a blacksmith, a household guard.  Anything, really.  Kyhauna’s diary was all that held me back. 
For the first time in my life, I found myself questioning if learning my past was really worth sacrificing my future.  Nothing remained for me in the elven province.  The council wanted me dead; their guards hunted me in the streets.  I would be a fool to think that Kain found me any less expendable than Shayne or the others.  I would give it one chance, I determined, and then I’d leave. 
Shayne had told me what he thought I should do.  I’d steal that book from Madeline.  At least, I would try.  If I couldn’t, and if I survived, I’d start again somewhere new and live a life for myself.
“When did you say Madeline would be here again?” I asked Adellae
“Any day now,” she replied cheerfully, skipping ahead of me at a good pace.  Her smile was one of pure innocence.
Maybe I could be happy too.

~~CHAPTER 18 – DOMINOE
January 4th, Year 645; Iladen-Amaya Sheikaih – Elven Province

I coughed into my sleeve to try and hide my distaste for the murky brown liquid that a less-than-enthusiastic barmaid had served me a few minutes earlier.  Not being able to stomach the glasses of blood served in Diëra Inn was laughed at quietly among friends; being too weak even to take the bar's offered substitute would earn you enough ridicule to turn every head in the room. 
I could tell by the flush of the barmaid’s skin that she, unlike the owners of the establishment, was not a vampire.  A good deal of the customers weren’t either, though that didn’t stop them from flocking there like crows to a fresh corpse.  They all came for one reason or another.  To feel unique?  Dangerous?  Special? 
Despite Adellae’s expectations, it had been nearly two weeks before Madeline Adaire appeared in elven territory.  It was just enough time to put the finishing touches on a large, black iron bow that I’d been working on.  I enchanted it with a variety of spells that I hoped would transfer to the ghost arrows it shot—there wasn’t really a good way to test transferring spells to ghost items without an actual ghost.  I’d practiced using the bow a few times before within the small basement of Kain’s factory, but carrying such a weapon around in the open streets, even at night just to practice, would’ve attracted more attention than was wise.
I’d originally began making the bow solely for the aesthetics of it; the thought once crossed my mind that I might enjoy learning archery one day, but ‘one day’ was supposed to be in a handful of years.  Unfortunately, a ranged weapon was necessary for my plan; Madeline couldn’t be afforded any warning.  I’d never possessed much skill with throwing knives, and the re-engineered mortal firearms held little appeal for me. 
I did regret not having time to carve the arrows themselves, though.  It proved impossibly difficult to make iron arrows fly as lightly as normal ones in such a short amount of time, not to mention trying to imbue them with a myriad of poisons and curses.  In the end, the best I managed was to steal a stack of regular arrows from a nearby guard tower and force them into the hands of one common street criminal, whom I dearly hoped nobody would notice floating down the eastern river. 
With any luck, the resulting ghostly properties, a jar of homemade poison to soak the stems in, and lighting the feathers with my own fire would be enough to take down the new leader of the ghosts.  Really, I doubted it, but I’d put enough effort into the venture already that it seemed like a waste not to try.
Madeline was at the main counter, less than thirty feet from the dampened corner in which my table was conveniently hidden.  She hadn’t ordered a single drink since I’d arrived, alcohol, blood, or otherwise; and I had no doubt that she, at least, would recognize me if I attracted too much attention. 
I did my best to plug my nose without being too obvious, and took whatever the dull-coloured liquid was in one drink.  I slammed the glass back on the table, satisfied with my own boldness despite a violent burning in my throat and a distinctly metallic aftertaste that attached itself, somewhat permanently, to the corners of my mouth.  My head swam slightly, and I tried to keep my eyes off the filth around me but the unwashed pool of blood at my feet and the slowly spreading patch of mould on the wall behind me seemed to be vying for my attention. 
It hadn’t been too difficult for me to guess where Madeline would be staying; though the illegal vampire bar remained much a secret from the elven guard, it was commonly discussed amongst the less-morally-inclined of the province's people.  Diëra Inn presented the only public place to stay that was not somehow run by elves.  Although Madeline was visiting the province formally and had rooms prepared for her in the castle, I knew that she’d be far more comfortable here, even with the dingy atmosphere.  I wondered to myself if the official, legal, vampire businesses were any more hospitable.  Maybe I was only suffering for the owner's need for secrecy?  Maybe they simply didn’t care; those foreigners less inclined to dine with pointy-eared nitwits would come whether it was hospitable or not.
I noticed a man—an amateur, clearly—watching me from a table nearly as unlit as my own.  From what slight glances I took of him, I saw that he wore a long, dark cloak with a hood that covered his face completely and sleeves that hung loose enough to show several pieces of silver wrapped around his wrists.  His cloak was bordered with a thin line of bronze that matched the buckles of his boots and a few buttons that I could see gleaming through from his shirt.  He appeared tall, and thin, and was either extremely clumsy or nervous because when the waitress came around for him to sign his tab it took him several attempts to pick up the quill properly. 
I wasn't so much concerned about him as curious: surely Madeline could afford to hire better body guards than that.  I wondered if this was Kain having one of his new recruits follow me for practice; he’d done so on occasion in the past.  If so, this one was failing miserably, though not much worse than I had at first.  I found it odd, however, for Kain to bring in a fully grown man with little to no skill: usually he preferred to get them young and break them into ‘good habits and a sense of proper loyalty.’
Curious as the stranger made me, I’d run out of time to waste on pointless musing: across the bar from me, Madeline got up and said goodnight to her new-found friends at the counter.  She’d be heading to her room, one of twenty that the inn rented out from the two floors above this one.  Having spent my last several nights observing the various nuances of the building, I knew that rooms one through five were on the eastern side of the first floor, with eleven through fifteen directly above them.  The remaining ten rooms were located appropriately beside the first, but on the western half.  I watched the bar-keep pass Madeline a key from the twelfth peg above the taps, waited for her to disappear up the stairs, and promptly paid my tab to go.
My bow and arrows were as I’d left them, covered in a torn, easily overlooked tarp a few feet from the back door.  I hung the heavy bow over my back and carefully wrapped the poisoned arrows in the tarp—I didn’t want to risk anyone noticing something the width of a quiver.
A very thin string, particularly hard to see in the dark of night, hung lightly from the side of a neighbouring building.  When tugged, it brought down one end of a rope ladder which I’d attached to the building’s roof earlier that day.  The night’s bitterly cold wind swung the rope ladder precariously under my feet as I climbed it, but I knew it wouldn’t fall.  Once safely on the rooftop, I carefully angled my bow to shoot into the second window from the left and prepared the arrow.  The set-up part was over; I just had to kill her and get the book.
She was there, as expected, brushing her bright red hair in front of a mirror that was, thankfully, turned at an angle that didn't reveal my position on the roof behind her.  Also to my luck, the window was left open.  Surely having to break through shutters and glass would destroy my arrow’s trajectory and alert the people downstairs.  So many things that I hadn’t even thought of had just lined into place for me: the window, the location, her even having the Book of the Dead and bringing it here in the first place.  Was I meant to kill her? 
It would be the first murder that was just for me, for purely selfish, unjustified reasons.  I wasn’t fond of Madeline, but did she deserve death like my other victims?  Was a single life worth finding out my past?  Would I even be able to translate Kyhauna's diary once I had it?
I pushed all the unpleasant questions from my mind and focused on aiming instead.  I’d never actually shot a bow at that range before.  The buildings were ten feet apart, plus the twelve or thirteen feet in length that Madeline’s room seemed to be.  I took a deep breath and held it; perhaps not breathing would help steady my aim?  I pointed the arrowhead directly at Madeline's back and then, considering gravity, decided to move it up a little higher.  I closed my eyes and pulled the string back, listening to the bow slowly creak as it reached its limit.  I could feel the wind cooling the sweat on my face and hands, moving unusually fast for a moment which seemed frozen to me.  And then I stopped for a second, pausing with the bow drawn to really consider my surroundings.  My bow was made of iron.  It would not have creaked.  And if my bow hadn’t creaked, then what—
“Boo!”
I turned and shot and nearly fell off the building at the same time.  Briefly, I heard the sound of Madeline’s mirror shattering as my arrow pierced through it.  I’ve missed her, some deep part of my consciousness realized, but I was more focused on twisting to face whoever stood at my back.  As I turned, I reached for my smallest weapon, always kept strapped above my ankles.
A sickening, grinding sound echoed through the night air as the blade of my dagger plunged into the man who’d shouted behind me.  I could feel the metal’s vibrations as it grated against the bone of his shoulder blade.  I couldn’t help but shudder; that feeling always made me cringe.  It took an unusually long second before either of us seemed to register what had happened.  The look of shock on his face was nearly priceless before he slowly bent over in half.
“What the hell were you doing?!” I screamed as the man before me clutched his shoulder and gasped for air.
“You stabbed me!”
“Of course I stabbed you; you startled me!  Sneak up behind someone with a readied weapon, shout in their ear, and what do you think happens?  You’re lucky you didn’t get an arrow in the face!  Wait a second...”  Something at his wrists had caught my eye and I leaned closer to have a better look.  They were the same silver contraptions that I’d seen earlier.
“You were watching me in the bar,” I accused him.
He looked like he was about to explain but spit out a frightening amount of blood instead.
“Oh shit...”  I was instantly reminded of all the poisons I’d soaked that dagger in throughout the years, most recently an assortment of extremely fast-acting ones. 
“Get up,” I ordered, grabbing him roughly by the same shoulder that my dagger had just landed in.  The rope ladder still hung precariously off the side of the building, and with more than a little help balancing from me, he miraculously managed to half climb down it, landing on the street below with a disconcerting groan.
“I stay only a few blocks from here; it won't take us long to get there,” I told him as I started running in the direction of Kain's factory.
“Wait, where... why?” he asked.  His words slurred slightly near the end.  “Can't we just wait a minute?  In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a gaping hole in my shoulder.”
“That dagger was soaked in a very fast acting, very fatal poison; I need to bring you to the antidote.  There won't be enough time for me to run there and then back again, so would you please hurry up a bit?”  I didn’t mention that there’d probably be an army of Madeline’s friends on our trail before too long.  He probably saw at least a little of the panic in my face then, because he began weakly jogging behind me.
“Poison?” he mumbled as his face began to pale.  “You mean to tell me you’ve been casually carrying around poison-soaked weapons for the better part of the evening, and you didn't even think to keep the antidote nearby!?”
“I didn't really anticipate random strangers sneaking up on a rooftop in the dark just to startle me!  Unlike you, I take care around dangerous, loaded, weapons.”
“Oh yeah,” he scoffed.  “You’re the very image of attentiveness and grace.  That's why I have gods-know-what kind of poison seeping through my veins.”
I ignored the comment and lowered my voice a little as we reached the window leading into Kain’s factory basement.  “Like it or not,” I warned him, “I have your life in my hands right now, and you've already fucked up my plans once this evening; so if you could just shut up for one minute while I grab the antidote, I might consider saving you.”
Then, without another word, I climbed down to the basement and saw that the room was thankfully empty.  The stranger seemed to get over the pain of his wound enough to lean through the window and keep talking to me.
“My name's Dominoe by the way,” he whispered.  At least he had the sense to be a little quieter.  “It's not the best name, I know, but my sister picked it so it's not really my fault.”
“Why would it be any less your fault that your sister thought you unworthy of a decent name as opposed to your parents?” I hissed back.
“Well... my sister was kind of evil,” he muttered.  “But, then again, so were my parents...”
Ignoring him, I grabbed a tightly sealed glass of violet liquid and climbed back out the window
“That's the antidote?”  He looked the jar over rather sceptically.
“Are you complaining?  You’re lucky I’m even giving it to you; I figure you're too stupid to be of any danger to me.”
“Gee, thanks.”
I soaked a torn piece of my skirt in the antidote and carefully dabbed it on his wound.  “Now, you're going to tell me exactly what you were doing following me around all evening.”
He stared back at me blankly a long silence passed before he meekly answered, “I don't know.”
“Playing dumb?  Really?”
“Really, I don't know.  What were you doing there?”  He grinned.  “I’ll tell if you do.” 
What I was doing there had been completely obvious; the lack of any proper fear or logic in him confused me.  He’d nearly just died and was being threatened by an assassin in one of the shadiest neighbourhoods in the province, yet he seemed completely at ease.  He could even have been called cheerful.
Looking back on it afterward, I’d admit that telling him was a dumb idea; but at that moment, I had his life in my hands.  I didn’t quite see the risk.  Maybe it was just me wanting someone to talk openly with.  Maybe I’d already seen some inkling as to the type of person Dominoe would be.  To this day, I’m still not sure, but I remember the look on his face perfectly.  His smile was nearly convincing.
“Not that it's any of your business, but I was trying to steal a book.”
“A book?” he laughed.
“Yes, a book.”  I frowned, dabbing his wound with a little less care.  “A very important book.”
“Excuse me, then.  If I’d known it was an important book I would never have questioned your reasons for carrying around poisoned weapons alone, in the dark, and with obviously no skill to use them.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I continued, trying to ignore my irritation enough to keep applying the antidote rather than cracking the tiny glass bottle on his skull.  “I’m sure that idea's out of the picture now, assuming Madeline heard the racket we caused outside her window.”
“Madeline Adaire?”
“Yes, Madeline Adaire.  What, do the ghosts have two leaders now?  Who else do you think I was aiming at?”
That seemed to quiet him up, and several blissful minutes went by with little more than the immensely satisfying sound of Dominoe groaning in pain before he started up again: “Why did you want to steal that book anyway? Lost someone?”
“No,” I answered slowly, unsure if I could really trust the stranger.  Instinct versus logic was a battle that I’d been struggling with for years.  Instinct, it seemed, won out yet again.  “I wanted to trade it for a very important book of my own so that I could get out of here.”
“Oh?”
“The diary of my grandmother.  It is... very precious to me.  There’s a man I work for here; he has it hidden  somewhere.  I planned to give him the Book of the Dead in exchange so that he’d give me mine back and let me finally leave this place.”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know.  Anywhere?  Nowhere?  Just... not here.  Definitely far away from here.”
I finished cleansing the poison and then carefully wrapped the wound in a few more torn pieces of cloth.  He rotated his shoulder around slowly and smiled.  “Good as new!” he exclaimed. 
I didn't believe him.
“Mind if I make a suggestion?” he asked.
“Hmm?”
“About where you could go.”
“I suppose...”
“Great! I have the perfect place.  Just close your eyes.”
“No,” I replied sternly.  “Do you think I'm stupid?”
He seemed rather taken aback by that.  “Of course not; I just asked you to close your eyes.”
“And I said no.  You could tie me up or lead me into some sort of ambush or who knows what else!”
Dominoe raised his eyebrows.  “I'm sure you'd notice and promptly give me a very painful death if I tried to tie you up.”
He was right.
“How about a token of good faith, then?” he continued, reaching into one of his cloak’s many pockets.  “Something to help you trust me a little more...”   
“What could possibly—” I started to ask before I saw what he held and my breath caught in my throat.  He passed it to me gently and I took a second to flip through the first few pages.  It smelled of dust and tobacco and whatever else lay around where Kain had it kept, but the sound was still the same: a generation of whispers passing with every page.  I looked up at Dominoe, not sure what to say, not sure if I’d even be able to speak.
“Please close your eyes,” he asked once more.
So I did.