"Aspirant."

"…Legislacerator." I wipe the blood at the corner of my mouth and cast my gaze up up up, up at they whom has become my pursuer. Their figure is familiar yet not, the triangular rods of their horns now molted into deadly points, eyes glossed over into featureless auqa; they are everything I should have feared yet was not cautious enough to prevent.

Shaking, I push the body of an assassin off me and rise to face my ruination. The corpse lands among its fellows with a soft splap.

As I rise, I realize I'm taller than them. Of course, of course I am, but knowing and seeing are different things, and witnessing the most illustvicious of the Empress's lawkeepers shrink in front of me sits wrongly in my vision. Still. It won't take much. The assassins' victory is a painfully present work in progress; the tip of a spear has broken off in my ribcage, penetrating shallowly in that there is still a decent chunk of jagged metal big enough to put a fist around. Poison flows through my veins, the malignant coating capable of killing seadwellers within minutes, carefully crafted to swell lungs and paralyze muscles. For Royalty? Without reaching a medicalizer, I have hours. All someone needs to do is slow me down.

"It appears you have done well for yourself," I comment. True, if relative.

"me, unfortunately, cannot say the same for you." They look at me, maddeningly, intoxicatingly impassive, just as they have always been. "Your struggle against Her has always been ill-fated, Aspirant."

The wind blows on this alien planet I can't bother to remember the name of.

"I did warn you."

They did. They don't sound happy to be right. For the ages that have passed between us, I have never seen them happy at all—if there was ever someone who could understand the troll before me, it is not me. I grunt. I have no more words to give. If there is a chance, we are going to fight, and it won't stop until there is another body lying on the dry dirt of a place too far from home.

Knowing my luck, it will be more than one.

I wrap my fingers around the spear and pull, and it lands on the ground with a clatter. The ringing is a herald, and it only takes long enough for the sound to disperse before I realize how monumentally bad of a decision that was. I fall down on one knee, pressing a hand against the gaping wound in my side.

Lynx looks down at me with what could only be described as pity.

I realize this is how I die. Not even the dignity of a final fight between I and my enemy turned friend turned…whatever they think of me now. Whatever made them choose to take my assignment. Whatever gravitational force keeps holding the two of us together.

"I really have made a mess of it," I note absently.

"If anyone could have done it, it was you." If I didn't know any better, it would almost sound like they are trying to comfort me.

I wonder if they'll strike I down. If they would risk getting close enough for me to return the favor.

"Maybe. But I did not." I look down at the slick on my hand. Under a red and dying sun, it almost looks like melted bubblegum. "I suppose I needed you after all."

I laugh. It's not funny.

The wind howls louder, and there is a soft second, where both of us are breathing in tandem, where I swear I can hear it as though they were right up against me.

"I know," they say, as clandestine as ever, "that is why I have come to join you."

This, somehow, is the part of the dance where I slip up.

"Join?" Join in death? Somehow, in all their melodramatics they never seemed the sort. "Gotten that tired of her have you? It didn't take long. Did you not pick your side eight sweeps ago?"

"Yes." Their eyebrows crinkle ever so slightly, and I am struck by the unprecedented emotion on their face. "And I have regretted it every day since.

I look at them like they're crazy. I think they are.

There is something I don't understand here, my mind trying to parse what is always layers and mousetraps of intricacies with this one, stuttering all over one another as I glance up in riveted shock. Yet, they reach down and offer me a frond up. Despite the hesitation, the sheer disbelief still coursing (and spilling out of) my veins, when they haul me to my feet I feel like the action is complete. Like I have finally stepped out a cycle and can begin anew.

"Lynx…" I start.

"Hush Zarya," they say with the most dismissive of waves. "Always so much talking. Come along, it's time we got you to a doctor."

"I still don't…"

They turn from me, and for a moment I swear I see shame in the downcast of their eyes. They move, practically dragging me along as the poison makes it to my veins, and for sure I think I've died in this moment. And, in the muddied logic of my brain as my fingers find their way through Lynx's, I am perfectly fine with that.