When Hakuryuu had still been young enough not to know to hide the defiance in his eyes, Kouen had caught him doing a great number of ill-advised things. He had scolded him for each and every one of them, as older siblings are supposed to do, and over time it had strained their relationship a great deal more than he would have liked. He would never replace the brothers Hakuryuu had lost, this was something he had had to accept, but he could try to do as they would have done.

With maturity came civility, and Kouen had been relieved to say for some time now that he and Hakuryuu were on amicable terms. But they were not close. The tiny princeling who had dissolved into fits of giggles every time Kouen scooped him up in his fur cloak when he returned from the battlefield had disappeared long ago. They had never had the chance to rebuild what they could have been- comrades, friends, brothers -and Kouen had always considered it a regret of his.

Hakuryuu continued to do ill-advised things long after he was old enough to mask his expressions and hide his intentions behind flowery words. Kouen gave up trying to stop him, because at some point it became obvious that Hakuryuu no longer needed a protector. Maybe he never had at all.

Among the ill-advised things Hakuryuu had done, Kouen considered his befriending a Seelie prince to be somewhere near the top of the list. He didn't know where they had met, or how, or how long their friendship had lasted. They were close, sending letters and small gifts with enough frequency that Kouen recognized the messenger birds they rotated between. On more than one occasion, Hakuryuu snuck from the palace to go gallivanting with his Seelie companion, careful never to let him close enough that the Queen might catch wind of him.

The Seelie prince looked more or less exactly how Kouen had expected. He was the epitome of what the Seelie court embodied, all soft yellows and summer warmth. Flaxen hair hung over his shoulder in a wavy tail, and his skin was sunbaked. Sharply pointed ears were gilded in golden hoops, feathers hanging from his lobes, and his eyes the color of molten gold. He had the allure of a sweltering day about him, and warmth exuded from his body as if he were a fragment of the sun itself.

He rose from where he had perched himself when Kouen dismounted, standing to his full height and rolling his shoulders back. Kouen took only a few steps forward before halting, allowing the fae to size him up without further encroaching on his space.

Kouen embodied the UnSeelie court as much as the prince before him embodied Seelie. His dark clothes accentuated the cool paleness of his skin, and his crimson hair was a nearly violent splash of color on an otherwise monochrome palette. The air around him spoke of chilled breaths and the stillness of nighttime, each step calculated, every movement intentional.

The two stood there a long while, eyeing each other carefully, hands on the hilts of their swords.

"…Of all the people I expected to come looking for Hakuryuu," the golden prince said into the silence. "You were not among them."

"Is it that difficult to think I may worry for my own flesh and blood?"

"You've never been close. The way Hakuryuu always put it, you didn't see eye to eye."

"In retrospect, I've begun to realize this may have been because I was still looking at where he had been, and not where he had grown to be."

The prince considered him thoughtfully. It was refreshing to see someone take his words to heart the first time he said them rather than having to reiterate himself to be believed. UnSeelie were suspicious creatures by nature, always careful of deception, where Seelie seemed much more willing to trust first and avenge themselves later.

"Alibaba," the prince introduced finally, inclining his head. "Prince under King Sinbad of the Seelie Court."

Kouen cocked a brow, though he inclined his head in return.

"I hadn't expected Sinbad to allow his name to be dragged into this. Rebellions are not likely to reflect well on your Queen."

"Did I mention my Queen?"

There was a mischievous glitter in the prince's eye, the kind Kouen associated with a faerie about to play a very malicious prank.

"I suppose you did not." he acquiesced carefully.

The amusement did not leave the prince's eyes and Kouen was forced to combat the instinct to be immediately wary. They were here with the same goal, it would not due to be on edge around each other constantly. Alibaba cocked his head a fraction to the side, and Kouen took this to be an invitation to speak first.

"Was the Seelie court involved in the Prince's disappearance?" he asked, his words laced with magic that curled itself into the air.

"No." Alibaba answered without hesitation, his reply braiding itself around Kouen's. The magic formed a brief bond between them, a compulsion to reply, and their natural honesty took care of the rest. "Are you a spy sent by the UnSeelie Queen?"

"No, I am not. Have you been with the Prince this whole time?"

"Not all of it, but enough. How much do you know about what's happened?"

"Only enough to suspect I will be returning home with a corpse."

Alibaba smiled, which would have been enough to mesmerize a more foolish man.

"If it were anyone else we were speaking of," he said. "I wouldn't disagree. But Hakuryuu has a nasty habit of surviving things he shouldn't; I think we both know that."

"You do not think him dead, then?"

"I think it would be a bad idea to make assumptions without gathering all the facts. Walk with me?"

Kouen gestured for the Seelie fae to lead the way, falling into step beside him. It was difficult to gauge the actual distance they walked, for Sidhe was not a singular plane of existence as the mortal realm was. It twisted and undulated itself, its rivers and valleys listened to the yearnings of the heart and paths could tell when one knew their destinations. However far they went, it wasn't long before they came upon a scene of destruction.

Even in ruins, Kouen could recognize a semi-permanent campsite when he saw one. He had been to battle enough times to recognize the layout of the place, from where the sleeping tents would have been to where the food was made and the guard outposts. It was little more than cinders and broken fragments of wood and foliage now, but he could imagine it when it hadn't been. At least fifty people could have lived there somewhat comfortably, with room for others to come and go.

"Our camp was attacked," Alibaba said unnecessarily. "UnSeelie forces were on us before we knew what was happening. We didn't have time to do much other than evacuate a few people and fight for our lives."

"Hakuryuu was there?"

"A lot more of our comrades would have died if he hadn't been."

Alibaba led them around the perimeter of the desolated camp, tracing Hakuryuu's footsteps from his memories of the battle. The charred remains of a polearm lay in splinters on the ground. Kouen told himself it could belong to any of the rebels. He knew better.

"…Last I saw, he was running off that way." Alibaba said, pointing away from the camp towards a frost tipped mountain. It didn't look like it belonged beside the lush swamp they were bordering now, but that wasn't uncommon for Sidhe topography. "He'd gotten the attention of at least a few of the enemy and led them off. He never came back."

Kouen noted all this in stony silence, the image of his cousin darting from battle, pursued by the enemy playing out in his mind. That was just like Hakuryuu. For all his biting words and austere personality, he had never been the kind of man to let his comrades die in front of him. Even if it meant putting himself in harm's way, he always at least tried to lessen the number of casualties.

As if reading his mind, Alibaba smiled ruefully, his brow knitted into a pained frown.

"I was gonna yell at him," he mused aloud. "Tell him he was an idiot for running off on his own like that."

"He wouldn't have listened to you."

"Nah, don't expect he would have."

The longer he gazed at the mountain, the more a prickling sense of unease settled into Kouen's bones. Something drew him towards it, not in the way ancient magic intent on bewitching him might, but like instinct was pointing wildly in that direction.

"What is it," he asked, though he suspected he knew the answer. "That makes you think he is alive up there?"

"Call it a gut feeling."

"And do you often obey your gut?"

"I'd be dead twenty times over by now if I didn't, Lord Kouen."

The UnSeelie Lord nodded sharply, and without further contemplation the two fae whistled for their mounts, and set off towards the mountain.

The silence as they rode was neither companionable nor tense, just a blanket between them that kept them both quiet. Kouen did his best not to allow his mind to wander or his heart to feel any semblance of hope. Their journey up this mountain could result just as he expected, with a frozen corpse he would have to carry home, or amount to nothing at all.

It was only easy to keep his expectations so low because he forced himself to. Because he could remember the last time he hoped for anyone in his family, and the utter devastation when that hope had been crushed. He wondered what Hakuyuu and Hakuren would have said to him now, as he led his mount carefully through the twisted path of the mountain, perhaps to find their brother's body.

The disappointment he could envision on their faces only spurned him forward, his eyes burning with cold fire.

Alibaba led the way, following the trail pocked with broken twigs and dislodged piles of dirt. As they went higher, snow began to feather the ground, and Kouen took the lead in tracking where Hakuryuu and his assailants may have gone. The Seelie fae hadn't dressed for the cold, and so his body compensated by exuding more heat. Kouen had him hang back because of it, just in case it was enough to melt the fallen snow and ruin the already faded trail they followed.

The trail led them up, until the paths narrowed enough they had to leave their mounts and continue on foot. Alibaba stayed at least five paces behind, making a great effort to draw his body heat inwards so as to disturb as little of the path as possible, should they need to return and start again. It would have concerned Kouen more, had the prickle in his bones not grown to needles jabbing into his nerves the farther down this trail he plunged.

They emerged out into something of a stone clearing, and here things became far more visible, even beneath the fresh snow. There had been a struggle of some kind, however brief. A myriad of footfalls had left impressions in the dirt, and the paths extending away from the clearing were in the same condition. No corpses or discarded weapons were visible, and if there had been blood the snow had covered it, but it didn't matter.

Kouen's eyes had fallen on something out of place, something that made his heart want to beat a war cry against his ribs. From beneath the snow, there was a sapling emerging, which on its own would not have been unique, were it not for the fact that nothing else seemed to grow on the mountain. It was too young to bear flower or fruit, but it had begun to grow gently sloping branches and crisp leaves that stood out against its sullen backdrop.

Alibaba had noticed it too, and drew in a breath.

"Is that—"

"Yes."

"Do you think it's—?"

"It is too small to be a body." Saying it aloud reassured Kouen as much as it did Alibaba. "But it is a piece of him, whatever it was."

A fae's body always returned to the earth from whence it had come. It sunk into the soil and transformed, became a new life that grew and flourished once again. Trees, bushes, brooks, ponds, even some lakes and mountains, had been born of the corpses of fallen fae. Their power in life became their existence in death, and the sapling growing there was unmistakable to Kouen. It was a piece of Hakuryuu, though which piece, he could not say.

Alibaba twisted his head, tilting his nose to the air and breathing in. He frowned, stepping further into the clearing and sniffing the air. Kouen approached the sapling with dread pooling in his stomach; it was almost worse than finding a body.

"Do you smell that?" Alibaba asked suddenly, drawing his attention from the remains.

Kouen paused, then breathed in deeply. The cold hair settled into his senses, and then all at once he knew exactly what Alibaba was talking about.

"Iron."

The sting of it hung in the air, burning an acrid trail in the Sidhe atmosphere. The scent was no longer strong enough to provoke the urge to gag, but it made both fae wrinkle their noses and take a step closer together, merely by instinct.

"Why in the name of the sun is there iron this deep in Sidhe? Maybe on the outer borders where the ogres do their trading, but here?"

"Someone had to have brought it."

"Why, though?"

"I suspect, for Hakuryuu."

Kouen swept around in a circle, his calculating eyes taking in everything at once. An image was beginning to form in his mind of a fight that he had never witnessed.

"Hakuryuu is a more than able fighter. Even here, he would have felled at great number of his enemies before falling himself, if he fell at all. The numbers who were here, it speaks to someone well aware of what he's capable of."

"You think the raid wasn't about us at all, it was meant to draw out Hakuryuu."

"With all due respect, Alibaba, you and your rebellion are barely a murmur in the UnSeelie court. This much attention would not be paid to you under normal circumstances."

"If that's the case," Alibaba said. "Then why aren't there any bodies? They went to all the trouble of luring him up here, presumably to use some sort of iron weapon on him, and yet-?"

He gestured to the sapling.

He wasn't wrong, either. There were a great many ways things could have gone during this alleged fight, and no matter how many ways Kouen considered it the lack of corpses was obvious. If they hadn't used the iron immediately, then Hakuryuu could have taken out at least a handful of his assailants. If they had used it immediately, then Hakuryuu ought to be dead. No one used iron to simply capture someone.

Which left the only possible explanation; that Hakuryuu had escaped somehow. The problem was that Kouen couldn't fathom how his cousin had managed to do so. The pathways were all blocked, and the only way up was a sheer rock face that would have been too difficult to climb in the spur of the moment.

Alibaba, who had been trailing around the clearing looking for the same answers as Kouen, suddenly halted. He stood where he was for a moment, his eyes going glassy as he let his senses fall silent and the magic take control. The air grew warmer as he reached out, through the flow of magic around them, bouncing slowly on his toes.

"Lord Kouen," he said, his voice sounding distant. "Come here."

Kouen obliged, stopping in front of the prince.

"What do you feel? Here, just where I'm standing."

Curiosity had never been Kouen's vice, and so he simply mirrored the smaller fae before him, letting himself slip into the magic about them.

It was cold at first, the icy mountain welcoming him with crystalline whispers that shivered past his ear. All the magic here was similar, jagged and biting, without any vibrancy of life or warmth to it at all. A small patch to his left was different, the air around it a twisting network of warm blue that he knew was Hakuryuu.

Kouen pushed himself deeper into the flow, feeling his way towards where his body stood, skipping over the blinding heat of the Seelie fae and reaching into the space between them. At first, he thought he had somehow missed and ended up outside of the flow by mistake. He could feel nothing here, no magic at all, and then it dawned on him. The flow had not disappeared, but had instead been cut sharply down the middle, so that a blank fissure lay in the middle of everything.

Still not daring to hope, Kouen traced around the edges of it, feeling the faded words that made up the spell that had torn its way through Sidhe itself. Soft blue still lingered in every murmur.

"A gateway." Kouen exhaled, coming back to himself in a rush.

Alibaba had returned as well, blinking his eyes back into focus.

"He tore a hole, right here, but not to another part of Sidhe…"

A deafening pause fell between them, neither willing to say what came to mind. Alibaba pushed both hands into his golden hair, shoving it back from his forehead.

"Hel and everything below," he breathed. "He's in the mortal realm. That absolute lunatic."

"He must have felt he had no choice." Kouen said gravely, pointedly ignoring how his hand had found its way to the hilt of his sword and gripped tight enough it hurt.

"I know, I know! But that's—Sun, that's madness! How's he expecting to get back?! If he's injured, if iron's involved—"

"Either he is laying low, or he cannot return. What is wisest now is not to panic, and to proceed under the assumption that, however impossible it may seem, Hakuryuu is alive."

Alibaba carded his hands through his hair, gnawing the inside of his cheek as he thought.

"We have to get him. He would have sent some kind of word by now if he could, right? Something must have happened."

Kouen nodded brusquely, his mind already churning too many ideas at once to follow. If Hakuryuu was alive, then this changed things.

"Sending fae to the mortal realm en masse is a spell for disaster," he said. "And I cannot go myself, my lack of presence would be questioned too much by the Queen. Can you reach anyone who may be of use to us now, Alibaba?"

The prince continued to bite his cheek, toying with his bangs. His youthful face was pulled into a grim expression, somewhere between distaste and indecision.

"…Yeah." he said, finally. "I can reach out to King Sinbad and see if he's willing to send anyone after Hakuryuu. He's backing the rebellion, so I don't see why he wouldn't…"

"Good, then I suggest you make contact. Quickly."

Kouen turned on his heel, marching back the way they had come, his cloak billowing behind him with the swiftness he moved. Alibaba watched him go, making no motion to follow.

"Where are you going?" he called after the lord's retreating back.

Kouen turned his head just enough Alibaba could see the vicious curl of his mouth, showing off dangerous incisors in a violent rendition of a smile.

"I am going to inform my siblings that we've just joined a rebellion."