Elsa sat up from her chair and blinked the sleep out of her eyes a minute before refocusing her vision on Nathan. He smiled back at her and said "What can I do for you?" in as cheery a voice as he could, and wincing at how obviously fake it sounded. Elsa seemed to appreciate the effort though, and returned his smile before pushing herself up, her hand knocking her book to the floor.

She looked to the book, and her face fell immediately. She gave a tired sigh and went to pick the book off the floor. Nathan bent down and took the boom for her, handing it over with a polite smile. She took the book and looked at it with a sad expression before looking back to Nathan. "I need your help." She said solemnly. Nathan nodded and sat down next to her, and she opened the book, flipping idly through the pages. "This book says that commanding troops is like a game of chess. "

Nathan nodded. He had heard that comparison before. Elsa shook her head and said "But… I don't want it to be. Those are people, fighting and dying, not just pieces on a board!" she gave a shaky sigh and closed the book again "I don't think I can do it. I can't just tell people to go fight and die." Nathan nodded again, then said "You were pretty calm and collected when Gothel attacked. It's just like that, except not against a force of magical gas people."

Elsa shook her head again and exclaimed "It's nothing like that! That was needed, Gothel was insane and she had to be stopped. The King of the Southern Isles is just plain stupid, and I don't want anybody to die because of it." Her voice seemed to fade as she realized what she was saying. She was suggesting the exact thing Nathan had been hoping she would accept all along. He spoke, taking her hand and saying "Let me go, and not a single citizen of Arendelle dies. I can stop this war before it even starts!"

Even as the words left his mouth he remembered what the Outsider had said to him. He couldn't stop the war, but he could change its outcome. Elsa gave another sad sigh and said "It just seems…. wrong, underhanded, to just send you over and have you wreak havoc on their internal affairs. Am I any better of a person if I just let that happen?" Nathan shrugged and said "If you let me go, you'll save hundreds of lives, on both sides of the conflict. And, if everything goes well, no one would even know who had done it. As long as I'm careful I can make everything can work out."

Silence passed between the two for a few moments before Elsa said "I just wish I knew what to do." in such a pained voice that Nathan didn't know what he could say to make her feel better. Instead of saying anything, he spread his arms wide and offered a hug to the depressed woman. She gladly accepted, throwing herself around him almost hard enough to knock him to the ground. He was able to stay on his feet, and the two stayed embraced like this for several seconds.

After the few seconds had passed, Elsa's grip on Nathan loosened and she said "Oh, I suppose it's about time I got up and did something useful, isn't it?" Nathan let go and stood again, guiding her by a hand up as well.

Nathan watched her as she started to walk off to do her royal duties that he had no ability to tolerate. Something inside of him wanted to follow, to help her in any way he could, but his mind told him that he would just get in the way. Now all he could really do was to wait for Elsa to give him the signal that the Southern Isles had gone too far, and then he would attack. He might not have the strength of an army, but he'd be damned if an army had the same effect he did. And his effect could shake an army apart, if he just waited for the right moment to leap from the shadows.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts. It would do no use to build his ego up before undertaking a mission. When he had been a freelance killer that was something he had avoided like the plague. Nothing good would come of an overestimation of his abilities.

Instead he turned his thoughts to something more useful than that. He thought about how he could find and track down those in charge of whatever forces would be attacking Arendelle. The one in charge of the whole war would be easy enough, being the king, but Nathan wanted more specific targets, Generals, commanders, the people who would organize the battles themselves. Those would be the ones seeking to directly hurt Arendelle, and they would be the ones to taste Nathan's steel first. If attacks persisted, than he could move up the chain of command, and if the king was stubborn enough to continue his foolish war, than it would be his head on a pike next. After that there would likely be little left of the Southern Isles left to do war with. While the concept was distasteful to him, he couldn't help but feel a little hope that things would progress that far. There was something oddly therapeutic about imagining that fat king being stone-dead on the ground.

He shook his head again. His mind was difficult to rein in today. If he wanted to find leaders individually, he would need someone better than him at finding people. Lee was good at that. But she wasn't very good at the other skills that would be required if she were to accompany him. She needed to be stealthier, and probably be better in a stand up fight than she was. If he wanted to take her, than he would have to speed her training up than the slow pace it was taking now.

The door to the library shut, snapping Nathan back to reality. He took a few steps across the room before realizing that he didn't know where he was going. His stomach gave a growl for attention, and Nathan shrugged to himself. It was as good a goal as any right now. He set off towards the hall where he knew there would be food.

The walk through the halls was as uneventful as ever, a few servants nodding silently to him as they passed. Nathan returned their gestures with his own. After he made his way to the hall he spied Anna on the other side of the room, pushing the large door open and slinking into the room like she was hoping not to be seen. This caught his interest, and immediately he moved to intercept her. She kept looking around her, her eyes darting around nervously, like she was afraid of someone seeing her. In spite of this, she was making no apparent effort to avoid being seen by average servants who passed by her with puzzled looks on their faces. Nathan got the distinct feeling that the one she was avoiding was him. This only made him more curious as to why she was trying to sneak around.

He worked his way around the room to get behind her, stopping and hiding every time he gaze fell on him. In this fashion he was able to get almost directly behind her without her noticing. He stood there for a moment, savoring the moment, before he tapped Anna on the shoulder and cleared his throat. She jumped and gave a shout, turning at the same time.

Her eyes fell on Nathan and she put a hand to the center of her chest, letting out a deep breath as she did so. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!" she said indignantly. Nathan shrugged and gave her a devilish smile. "You looked like you were trying to keep hidden, so I figured that I should say hi."

She shook her head exasperatedly and continued walking, every trace of trying to stay clandestine now gone. Nathan followed her. "Why were you trying to avoid me?" he asked curiously. As soon as the words left his mouth Anna's demeanor changed. She started to rub her hands together and gave Nathan a very strange look. He raised his eyebrows, not sure how to respond, but it was clear that he had hit a nerve of some kind.

"Well…" her voice tapered off and she averted her eyes. This only made Nathan more curious. "I… was kind of… I was testing a new power." She finished the sentence like she had just thought of the answer. Nathan raised an eyebrow again and said "Anna, if you're going to lie to me you'll have to do a much better job than that." After a short pause Anna retorted with "I'm not lying! I'm just not telling you everything, that's all." Nathan rolled his eyes. She was either an incredibly bad liar, or just being facetious at this point. He would've said both, but if he had to choose one he would say the latter. He asked "Alright, so what's the rest than?"

Anna thought for a moment before seeming to perk up and say excitedly "Did you know that I can do something that Elsa can't? I can't wait to tell her that I figured out how to do it, all by myself! I bet she'll be so proud!"

Nathan smirked at how childish the girl was acting. It was almost like she was a small child. She still hadn't answered his question. He said "You still didn't answer. What did you do that made you want to hide from me?" Anna gave him another nervous look before saying "Did you know that I can pick locks with my magic?" Nathan was about to say that she had still not answered his question when something occurred to him.

The door that Anna had entered through was one that was close to Nathan's room. If she had been doing something in his room, it would explain why she was so hesitant to answer. He always tried to lock his door when he left it, and if Anna had just figured out how to pick locks, it was reasonable to assume that she had exercised this ability. Things in his room were locked up for a reason.

He put a hand to the side of his head and said "Anna, doors are locked for reasons. If you took anything from my room I need you to give it back." She held her hands up defensively and said "I didn't take anything! I might have touched the rune in the chest, but it scared me pretty badly and I ran away." Nathan was about to ask what she meant, but quickly found that he didn't care too much. He said with a sigh "As long as you didn't take anything I really don't care too much. Just ask next time you want to go after something in my room."

Anna nodded. "After the shock that rune gave me, I think I'll be sure to leave your room alone." Nathan nodded, convinced that she would. He didn't know what a rune could've done to scare her too much, but he didn't doubt that it could. Runes tended to have strange effects on people. Whatever Anna had experienced had probably been something Nathan had never heard of happening before. From the few people that he had talked to about runes and their various effects, none had ever described quite the same phenomena.

Nathan grabbed a plate and piled a good amount of food on top of it before walking off and finding an empty table and sitting down to eat. Anna looked at him from one of the other tables and gestured to an empty seat next to her. Nathan shook his head and went about his eating. He was feeling unusually pensive now, and he wasn't entirely sure why. He knew it had to do with what Elsa had said to him, but he didn't know who it seemed to be resonating with him so much.

The more thought he gave the matter, the more it seemed like he was forgetting something vital. No matter how hard he racked his brain for some minor detail, he could not find it. After a few minutes of this he gave up on uncovering the mystery, the detail was doomed to haunt him forever. Instead, he thought about what sort of resistance he would meet when assassinating the military leaders of the Southern Isles. He had nearly no information on the place, placing him at a severe disadvantage.

Even with this deficit of knowledge Nathan was at least confident in his ability to take the leaders out. They might be dressed in military garb, but they would die, just like the rest of the people whom Nathan had set out to kill.

He leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the wooden table in front of him and the thoughts rushing through his head seemed to change from quick and intricate to slow and muddy. He shook his head a few times to try and clear the feeling away but enjoyed no success with his attempts. After a while he resigned himself to the possibility that perhaps he needed to take a break from critical thinking, no matter how much he disdained the thought. He got up from the table and walked towards the door that would take him to his room.

The doors closed behind him, and the walk through the halls was fast. Before long he found himself outside his room digging in a pocket for his key. He gave the doorknob an experimental twist to see if Anna had relocked it since breaking her way in, and was mildly surprised to find that it was indeed locked.

He unlocked it again and slipped inside. He looked around the somewhat barren room before grabbing a book off of the table next to the window and laying down to read. It was a rather quick transition from there that saw him wake up with a sudden jerk, flinging the book a few feet away and sending it skidding across the floor.

He turned to the window, and saw most of the sun's light was gone from the sky. With a small curse under his breath he got back to his feet and walked quickly to the door, pushing his way through and entering into the hallway. He was about to start down the hall when something occurred to him that stopped him dead in his tracks and look at the world around him.

Nothing seemed particularly out of place or unnatural, but in the dreams that the Outsider brought the signs were often subtle. In spite of his most vigilant searching, he found no sign that he had left his own world and entered into the Outsiders. He was indeed awake.

He started to walk down the hall, keeping his senses peeled for anything out of the ordinary. He wasn't sure where exactly he was going, but he had a feeling that something was wrong. He couldn't explain it, but the feeling that something was looming over him and the rest of the castle threateningly could not be dispelled.

The floorboards creaked under his weight every other step or two, but he paid little mind to the small noises as he tried to focus on what he was doing. If there was something lurking around in the castle he wanted to know about it before it knew about him. It wasn't long before Nathan felt his mind start to play tricks on him. Shadows seemed to dart from corner to corner, and he could swear that he heard whispers coming from every direction.

He knew these as his own imagination, but that didn't do anything to make them any less hair-raising. Nathan activated his shadow sense and immediately set about observing the area around him for any sort of hidden beings. He found none, and with this assurance his mind stopped manufacturing voices in the dark. He continued to walk the halls, figuring that he wouldn't be able to fall asleep after the rest that he had taken already.

Nathan walked his way through the halls slowly, taking in every detail as he went. He continued to do this for several minutes before deciding to take his search for Outsider-knew what upstairs. As he walked through the halls he passed numerous shadows moving slightly, the motions of sleeping servants or of the jittering and sputtering stump left of a candle that had been forgotten. He made a complete circuit of the second floor and, upon being satisfied with the results, made his way up to the final floor of the castle.

This floor being far smaller than the others made Nathan feel like a complete search was not necessary. Instead, he poured some of his power from the well inside of him into his shadow sense and made it expand, revealing the entire floor to him. A candle was burning brightly in Elsa's room, and Nathan was quick to take interest in what she was doing in there.

She sat on her bed, hunched over what Nathan assumed to be a pile of books and papers. He gave a small sigh as he started to walk towards her room. If it was late enough that the inside of the castle had gone to sleep, than it was too late for her to be up.

He knocked softly on the door and stepped back. The rustling of paper and sudden jerk of her shadow told him that his attempt to not startle her had failed. The door cracked open, and a beam of candlelight reflected off of one of Elsa's many crystalline constructs hanging from the ceiling assaulted Nathan's eyes, forcing him to hold up a hand between his eyes and the light to prevent himself from being blinded.

Elsa's voice said tiredly "Oh, sorry. Let me get that." After a half second pause the reflected beam was cut short, and Nathan was able to see once again. He saw Elsa looking at him from inside her room, a questioning look on her exhausted looking face. She rubbed an eye with the back of her hand briefly before blinking and asking "What are you doing up so late?"

Nathan raised an eyebrow and said "I could ask the same." He gestured into the room, inquiring if he could enter, and Elsa stepped aside, opening the door wider. He took a few steps in and directed his attention to the pile of things she had been looking at. The book she had been reading earlier was among the gathered documents and surrounded by similar looking texts, all piled on top and shoved to the side of a large map that depicted the entirety of Arendelle and the surrounding terrain. Several spots were marked on the map with large black dots, and labeled in fine black ink.

Elsa walked past him and pulled herself back into the position she had been in before he had intervened. Nathan walked over to the bed and took a light perch next to Elsa and inquired "What are you doing?"

With a heavy sigh, Elsa said "Making plans for when the Southern Isles attacks us." She pushed a few papers off of the corner of the map and pointed to the key, saying "The black dots are forts, the red ones are towns, and the black lines are roads." Nathan nodded. It was fairly clear that she was planning the defense of her country. He wondered if there was anything that he could do to help. From the slow and uneven pattern of her blinking and general body language he guessed that she wasn't in the best state of mind to handle a matter of such scale as that. He offered his help, and quickly found himself getting immersed in the process of establishing a strong defense. There was something interesting to him about planning with the ultimate goal of creating an impenetrable safe area. It felt like major role reversal to him.

It was about an hour later that Elsa slumped over against his shoulder, snoring softly. He grinned at the peaceful look on her face. Removing the pile of books and papers carefully, Nathan tucked her under the covers and started to exit the room. He was about to walk over the threshold of the door when something occurred to him. He walked back to the bed and pinched the candle out. The door closed softly, and Elsa was left in the peaceful darkness of her room, gathering much needed rest.


Author's thing:

The new chapter is now up. Celebrate the Friday.

Constructive criticism is appreciated.