{-Alfonse-}
It almost felt like a relief to be going home, even if he dreaded the work and some of the people he'd be going back to. He'd never say it, but after a while Kiraat's company started to get uncomfortable; looking at Sharena, he knew she felt something similar.
They were lucky enough that the days spent traveling were nice—they were starting their third day and they were close enough to the castle that they could've walked and been there by evening, and thankfully sooner with the horses.
"Kiraat may not have had anything useful to say about Loki, but… Lekra told me something a while ago," Sharena said quietly, the first one to start a conversation since yesterday. "I didn't really think about it much until now, and they're kind of bugging me to talk about it…" She gave a sideways glance to something the other two didn't see.
"Lekra was something of Loki's creation. I'm ready to listen to anything that might help at this point." Alfonse only knew as much as he did because she'd been open enough to talk about it frequently; when he'd gone to her room while she was sick, he occasionally overheard her and Henriette having a conversation relating to the matter. Maybe she'd felt the same way he did when she learned that their mother knew of the nightmares that he'd felt when he told her about Veronica—the general sense of knowing that they didn't need to keep secrets anymore.
Sharena nodded slowly. "It was a bit after I talked to you when I'd tried to remember… They said that 'all things fall according to the gods,' without me having to explain too much of the context, and called them 'the ones history forgot.' Loki, Thórr, and Alfaðör." She paused at the last name, long enough for someone else to have said it, before saying it herself.
So they were getting on the bad side of gods. Alfonse payed less attention to the fact he'd interacted with one of them (and realizing that could probably explain Thórr's almost-inhuman height) and more to the idea that, whatever prize they supposedly possessed, was something worth troubling gods over. All it really did was make him more concerned than he already was.
…
Henriette was the first to greet them when they arrived. She waited until they were all dismounted before giving a hug to both of her children, and a welcoming nod to Veronica.
"All things considered, I'm assuming it went well?" she prompted as they gathered up their things and left the horses in charge of a servant. "You have perfect timing. Fauna and Iztali came over earlier today and they made some cookies; they were setting them out when I passed them, in fact."
"You sound nervous," Alfonse observed. He nodded for Sharena and Veronica to put their things in their rooms, handing the former his own to have a more extensive conversation with their mother. "Did something happen while we were gone?"
She sighed. "Not exactly… but we did receive something that you two might find familiar. Do you know how well Sharena's doing? I'm afraid it might make her sick… I can't say I've been doing much better…"
Only one thing came to mind when he heard that, remembering what Kiraat had said about getting a "weird piece of rock" and sending it somewhere safer. He'd been talking about the nightmare's heart—and he'd sent it to Henriette.
The nightmare's heart, as the name implied, controlled the nightmares. Alfonse had, personally, not looked at it extensively it since Anna had put it away after they acquired it in the world of nightmares. Sharena had been bothered by it for the whole duration it was at the Order's castle, since it held voices of all the nightmares' victims; if it truly was that, then it would explain why Henriette felt uncomfortable around it, even if she didn't experience quite the same thing as Sharena had. They'd lost track of it, however, when Natheniel took it—according to Lekra, he'd given it to Loki, and that was the last they ever heard of it. Thórr was an accomplice of Loki's, so it would make sense that she'd have a piece.
Now the next question showed: why would they give them a piece of something so important? Sharena had told him about what Anna said she and Lekra could do if they'd used it right—using Anna's exact words (at least, saying it was), she summed it up as "…we could control their harmful nature but give them enough room to do other things. That way the two of you can work towards a goal that benefits the entire team—something that might help us figure the rest of this out."
His suspicion was proved correct when Sharena came back down and Henriette showed it to them.
"That's definitely it…" Sharena mumbled, wincing. "Lekra's getting worked up about it, at least… and the voices are there…" She closed her eyes and leaned back on the chair, saying much quieter, "Please stop…"
"It concerns me how much the two of you effect each other," Henriette remarked with a frown. She gently folded a cloth back over the little glowing stone, and pulled it back off of the table to her lap. "If there's any more of this out there… I'm afraid of what's going to happen to you, so strongly connected to one of them. I assumed it would cause a reaction but I didn't really think it would be that bad. Why don't you go to your room and rest? I'm sure Fauna wouldn't mind to take you, if you're really not feeling well."
Sharena nodded slowly, got up, and left.
Alfonse sighed. "I'm going to have to tell Anna about this." He honestly didn't want to. Their last conversation hadn't gone well, and he was willing to admit he'd purposely avoided her since then. Nothing good would've come out of it.
"What she's done so far hasn't really been the best course of action, but… you know I'm not a fan of people keeping secrets. Especially not in a time like this. We all need to be able to be honest with each other."
"It's hard to be honest when you know someone's going to yell at you for it. I might be the boss of her here, but the moment I'm at the Order's castle, she's my superior again and she's going to keep pointing that out. After a while she never saw us as royalty anyway; guess that counts choosing to ignore the fact that I'm not just the prince anymore."
"I wish I knew what I could say." Henriette stood up, giving another glance at the cloth covering the nightmare's heart in her hands. "You should try to get some rest, too, before everyone else notices you're back. I can't quite promise you'll be going to bed at a reasonable hour when they do."
"Before you go, would it be alright if I came to you later? There's a few things I'd like to ask you about, but they don't need to be addressed right now." He got up as well, ready to make sure Veronica was somewhere the council wouldn't find her and start on the list of things he had to get done.
She smiled, though it was a worried one. "Of course. You can come to be whenever you need to. I'm going to go back sure Sharena doesn't need anything and then I'm probably going to the garden. It's a lovely afternoon."
Then they both went their separate ways. When Alfonse saw Iztali, he'd tried to keep the younger from bothering Sharena; the two of them had grown close in the time they'd known each other, if not just because of her natural way with kids. He'd lost track of him eventually, though, and hoped he wouldn't cause too much trouble.
Alfonse found Veronica in the room she'd stayed in before. She seemed distant but did keep a short conversation with him when he'd went over what she should do if she wanted him. He still made a promise to check on her frequently, of course, but it didn't hurt to have a back-up plan.
With everything else out of the way, he'd gathered up the council to figure out just how much work he had to do. It was everything he figured he'd need to do plus some, from a mix of possible Loki sightings to complaints to things obviously just thrown in there to try to annoy him.
((A/N: If only Alfonse acknowledged the part where Anna only started treating them like friends when they needed her to be. She didn't even consider them close to her until after Zacharias's disappearance, when she'd tried her best to keep the three of them together.))