A/N: If you haven't read this fic recently, be advised that, while it was a bit under 150K words the last time it was updated, in November of 2014, it's now a bit under 550K words. It was never dead, I just started to suck a bit less as a writer and decided that this fic needed serious revision. That revision is now complete, so here's the next update. The update following this will be in a few days.

If you haven't reread this fic since mid-November 2017, and you haven't been following the rewriting process on Spacebattles, I highly recommend that you read it over again.

Another Voice: Waiting To Go

Kirche Augusta Frederica von Zerbst lay sprawled out in the bed of the cart that the Tristainians had left behind, scowling at nothing in particular, as she waited for Tabitha to return. She'd equipped herself for fighting, not sitting around all afternoon, and hadn't brought so much as single text to study. She'd already expended her vis, practicing Flame Wraith, and she couldn't train her familiar because she'd left Flame safely behind at the lodge!

And thinking up the retorts that she should have hurled at the Zero's familiar wasn't nearly as satisfying as it would be if he were right there to wither at her barbed wit.

Still, despite her present boredom, she didn't regret traveling south to Gallia with Tabitha. Her tiny friend had been elevated as a Chevalier even before attending the Tristain Academy of Magic. Surely there were adventures to be had in her company!

And so it had proven. Although Kirche had been paying attention, and if she'd read the other girl's subdued reaction correctly, being tasked to kill a feral water spirit had frightened her.

Then they'd fought the spirit of Lake Lagdorian, and received ample proof that Tabitha was right to fear their foe. Simply staying alive, that first day, had been no mean feat: The spirit was canny, cautious, and had all the water of its lake to draw on. And they were going to have to come back every day until it made a mistake and one of them managed to fry it or freeze it, respectively.

But once they'd worked out the rhythm of surviving its wrath, each day's battle was exhilarating, a perilous galliard that promised death at every turn, and they were going to be the ones who prevailed! It was the most excitement Kirche had ever had, right up until the most disappointing resolution imaginable.

Who could possibly have predicted that the skinny little rose-headed runt would suddenly show up, and somehow manage to invoke an ancient legend to negotiate a truce with a spirit gone feral!?

Or, for that matter, manage to subdue her – her, Kirche, the pinnacle of von Zerbst verve and vitality such as had not been seen since her great-grandfather's day! – before she could even react. She couldn't even remember her Shield collapsing before she'd been rendered unconscious! And then the Zero had offered truce and healing! As if the ancient rivalry between their families was as petty and beneath notice as a childhood grudge!

She hadn't bothered to conceal her glee nor her scorn when the pathetic little bitch fled from classes a month before the summer break. The Zero had been in the company of those learning Line and Triangle spells while she struggled with cantrips: Of course she'd taken whatever face-saving excuse had offered itself to segregate herself from such humiliating comparisons. By Kālikā, she'd not cast even one single spell in that hasty journey to Albion!

Although her familiar had somehow talked down a pirate frigate from taking them all prisoner. Which wasn't worth considering on it's own – the captain had turned out to be the doomed Prince Wales, and they'd have all been freed soon enough – but now the Spirit of Lagdorian had invoked some ancient alliance straight out of forgotten myth.

The problem was, it was absolutely absurd to think that Brimir had sent one of his archangels to be the Zero's familiar. After all, Kirche didn't particularly believe in Brimir or his angels.

Why should she? She was a child of two peoples. On the one hand, there was her legacy as a Zerbst. On the other, there was her legacy as a princess of Aryavarta. Halkagenian myths might claim to chronicle events six or seven thousand years past, but that made them provincial bumpkins in comparison to Aryan legends, which spoke of events taking place over a hundred thousand years ago.

Of course, her parents had trained her to be equally cynical about the accuracy of both sets of legend. After all, if the gods were so potent then, where were they now? And how could diverse pantheons share a world when each insisted that it was responsible for creating the world in its present form?

Most damning, in Kirche's eyes? Why were the holy powers of the priests always something that either magic could duplicate, or that functioned invisibly and undetectably?

Hers was a comfortable agnosticism, well-suited to one who intended to brook no divine interference as she carved out her own blazing niche in the legends of generations to come. And it had stood unshaken since she developed it, until this morning. When an ancient spirit had insisted on treating Halkagenia's Archangel of War as something, not only real, but also present. In the person of the familiar of the Zero, no less!

The mighty warriors of Aryan legend were often compared to tigers. She'd visited Dvarta, the new Imperial City, and as a princess of Aryavarta had been granted entrance to the Imperial Menagerie. Thus she'd seen tigers. Seen them hunt, even, in the vast preserve that had been established for the pleasure of the Imperial Throne.

The runt's familiar didn't even begin to remind her of a tiger. No, if she were honest, he was starting to remind her of the bears native to the northern forests of Halkagenia. Who were lumbering oafs in comparison to the grace of a tiger, and who tended to stick to their own simple concerns. Which was all well and good, until those concerns impinged on your own. Because a courageous Aryan youth might take a spear and hunt a tiger turned man-eater, but Germanian commoners, no matter how brave, insisted on leaving bears to the nobility.

And her tutor in rhetoric had made it very clear that analogies quickly became worthless if pushed beyond the original comparison, but . . . anyone who'd seen a bear fish could confirm that they were capable of a certain direct skill and brutal grace. Even surprising speed, when roused to anger. And they considered bees an ignorable nuisance when seeking honey. In Germanian folklore, for that matter, the spirits of the winter storms – storms of snow and ice so terrible that humans could but seek shelter and fire and cower away until the worst was over – the spirits of such were always depicted as great, monstrous bears.

The Zero's familiar was even absurdly fat when he was first summoned, and a great deal of that had vanished while she wasn't paying attention. Just like how the bulk of a bear's winter fat was gone in spring and summer . . .

Kirche did not shiver. (And no one was around to say otherwise!) It still seemed absurd. But if there was something to Halkagenian myth, as she'd never seen evidence for with regard to Aryan myth, it only meant that she was correct to favor her Zerbst legacy over her Aryan heritage.

Her father, Sturmhart von Zerbst – Herzog Zerbst – had been the first Zerbst to possess Aryan blood, his mother being an Imperial Princess of impeccable lineage, albeit from a secondary wife. (The then-Heir, father to the current Emperor, was naturally of mixed blood. A concession to the sad reality that no dynasty could hope to rule in Halkagenia for long without magic of its own, but that reality was not spoken of in polite company.) Likewise, the Zerbsts didn't speak of the fact that the present Herzog had struggled all his life to live up to the image of power that was expected of the head of the family.

They were neighbors of the Vallières, after all.

Truth be told – except it hadn't, quite, and Kirche had been forced to work some of it out for herself from what her father hadn't admitted – that struggle had been no small part of his motivation to take up the life of an adventurer until his father died. With the right nobilia (the best a Zerbst could afford) and a nigh-suicidal level of derring-do, he'd been able to build and maintain the reputation of a proper a hot-blooded Zerbst scion, powerful enough to one day rule the Zerbst estates.

Sturmhart's only true failure was that it had been the Vallière scion who'd ultimately won the heart of the woman they'd both pursued, although he'd deemed the details thereof unsuitable for the ears of his daughters. Which still irked Kirche, because the books she'd found that were supposedly the accounting of her father's exploits were too fantastic to be believed.

Whatever had truly happened, when her father had inherited his title and decided to retire from adventuring, he hadn't brought home any of his many conquests. Instead he'd made a circuit of Germania, calling on dozens of eligible Aryan noblewomen, and had picked out one that was young, healthy, and had an impressive affinity for Fire. If rumor had it correct, he'd effectively purchased her, offering a 'gift' to her parents that was at least twice the value of her dowry. Kirche had been the first result of that union, and then . . .

She shook her head. No use dwelling on her sisters, who had all been trained to be proper Aryan ladies by their mother. As she had, for that matter, when she wasn't running off to beg lessons in magic from her father.

It had been like moving between different worlds, her mother's Aryan propriety contrasting with her father's wild vitality. And as satisfying as it could be to look down upon the Halkagenians like the uncivilized barbarians that they were, the blazing life of her magic was far more enthralling.

She'd made her choices for many reasons, and some of them she'd rather not depress herself by dwelling on, but ultimately, she'd made them because she was the Ardent. Fire was her life, for she was a true Zerbst.

Which meant that she would not stand for Vallière's contempt!

And . . . while she knew that the Zero's familiar was infatuated with his master, today it had seemed like the Zero was the more obsessed of the two. She hadn't even given Kirche a chance to approach him and demand what Lagdorian meant by addressing him as Gandálfr!

If the rose bitch had fallen in love . . . had the Vallières finally noticed that the mixed-breed Germanian nobles were proving to be far more fertile? With hardly any miscarriages, and far fewer of the difficulties suffered by noblewomen in the family way that could make having children such an expensive proposition? Issues that tended to be worse and worse the more powerful nobles were?

Perhaps it was a sign that Brimir only favored noble births if the child-to-be was worthy. Or perhaps he favored the growth of Imperial Germania, by blessing them with so many nobles – if not as individually powerful – in the rising generation. But if the Vallières had wondered if perhaps their line needed fresh blood, it made a certain amount of sense to risk only their youngest in the experiment. And to seek out a commoner of truly uncommon potential, even if he'd seemed so unassuming when he'd first arrived.

But what the Vallières thought was theirs was truly there for the Zerbsts to claim, if there were any with the skill and daring.

It was true that Kirche had failed in her prior attempt on that front, but she hadn't been entirely sincere in her claims of desire for him, and he'd somehow picked up on that. Truth be told, to herself if no one else, she'd simply been offended that someone, anyone, was devoting himself to helping out her traditional rival when she, the glorious Ardent, couldn't seem to find a man who saw her as something other than a student or a pleasant tryst.

By Kālikā, even if he'd treated her as an enemy since then, an enemy was still a person. Which put him – she was going to need to learn his name, soon – leagues ahead of the boys in the Academy, who all too often treated her like a whore that they didn't need to pay, someone there to do whatever the noblewomen they courted wouldn't. Not that it wasn't enjoyable, often enough. But they had as little respect for her as she did for them.

Yes, it was clearly time to rekindle the rivalry between the glorious Zerbsts and the stodgy Vallières. And if she just so happened to win some sort of demigod out of ancient myth as her consort in the process, so much the better.

She might even be able to persuade Tabitha to help out. Her friend – her only friend – was reserved to an absurd degree, but she'd shown more liveliness when speaking to the Zero's familiar than Kirche had ever seen from the tiny azuretop, save their own conversations (and flights on Sylphid, since the Summoning Rite). If Tabitha liked having him around, then it would only make sense for her to be an ally in stealing him from the Zero. Especially since Kirche was more determined than ever to steal her as well, having now seen how Tabitha's people had no concern for her safety or well-being.

And if her friend was more lively around the Zero's familiar because she was finally beginning to take an interest in living, then Kirche would find endless entertainment in teasing her about her sudden infatuation. And, once she trained out whatever brutish or clumsy tendencies he undoubtedly had – he didn't seem that much older than the Academy students, after all! – perhaps she might even trust him enough to send him to act on that infatuation. Tabitha deserved someone who wouldn't brutalize her, after all. And from his stares in the bath at the Goddess Temple Inn, it was obvious who would command the bulk of his masculine attention, despite his infatuation with his pink bitch of a master. So she and Tabitha wouldn't have to fight over who had precedence, like so many of the Aryan tales of deadly intrigue between jealous wives and concubines.

But it was all just an idea. She'd always had plenty of those, and the trick was figuring out which were the sound ones.

Another reason to value Tabitha's friendship.

"So . . ." Kirche leaned over Tabitha's shoulder, as the two of them flew back towards the lodge that had been assigned to them for the duration of their quest."I couldn't help but notice that the Zero seemed almost obsessed with her familiar."

Her friend thought it over for a moment, then replied in Gallian. "It is not my place to make comments about the situation."

"No, no. Of course not!" Her own Gallian was slower and almost halting, but that was just a matter of practice. And since Tabitha was sensitive about her accent, and thus disliked conversing in any language but her native one, Kirche was always getting some practice. "But the Zerbsts and the Vallières have our . . . rivalry to honor. It is tradition."

The azuretop turned her head slightly to give a skeptical look to her friend. "Tired of students at last?"

Kirche grinned. "He might be diverting, for more than one night."

Tabitha gave her a much longer look. Then shrugged and turned back to watch where Sylphid was heading. "Entertaining," she commented.

"That's what I'm hoping!"

"No, you will be entertaining. It will be a farce, I am thinking."

Kirche narrowed her eyes and glared at the back of her friend. "You don't think I can, do you?"

Tabitha paused. "Very entertaining."

"Well! If I'm to entertain you, shall we discuss the," it took her a long moment to remember the word she wanted, "the strategies, this night?"

The azuretop looked back again with a faint smile and nodded. "But not another abduction. I think it would not go so well as your first try."

Well, of course not! Kirche wasn't expecting to be able to break the will of a legend, if that's what he truly was. No, this would require the gentler aspects of Fire . . .

Some of them, at any rate. Banked coals were hardly enticing, after all, and her title was the Ardent, not the Domestic.

They were almost to the lodge . . . and then, to planning! To victory! To the glory and triumph of Zerbst!

A/N: We don't get a lot of canon background for Kirche, so a lot of this is extrapolation on my part. And as far as I know her out-of-place phenotype was never canonically addressed. So a lot of this background for her was made up by me specifically for this fic.

If you have not read this fic recently, be advised that, while it was a bit under 150K words the last time it was updated, in November of 2014, it's now a bit under 550K words. It was never dead, I just started to suck a bit less as a writer and decided that this fic needed serious revision. That revision is now complete, so here's the next update. The update following this will be in a few days.

If you haven't reread this fic since mid-November 2017, and you haven't been following the rewriting process on Spacebattles, I highly recommend that you read it over again.