Area Six, May, a.t.b. 2015

Scrappy. That was how the matron of the orphanage had described her.

There were other things Dorothea had been called by that woman over the course of her childhood, of course: difficult to manage, distrustful of authority, aggressive… Everything that Dorothea was as a child more or less guaranteed that no one would ever have wanted to adopt her—and with all of the uncertainty surrounding her origins, the deck had already been stacked against her by a considerable margin. Indeed, no one knew where she had come from, only that she had been surrendered to that orphanage as an infant, with a few speculating that she had come from a noble house that had fallen into disfavour, a family that hadn't seen the writing on the wall, the portents predicting the ascendancy of the former prince-turned-emperor, Charles zi Britannia, early enough for them to have secured their position among his supporters and allies; a few more supposed that she simply must have been the child of a now-dead mercenary, given the fact that the Emblem of Blood had drawn in glory-hounding bravos by the bucketful—and that, at least, had given to them an explanation of why the emerald-eyed girl had insisted upon being so very surly and unpleasant.

Regardless of the reason for her behaviour, it had won her no friends amongst the other children in Lady Anne's Home for Girls (so named in honour of the former duchess of Lesser Virginia who'd been responsible for the orphanage's existence and financing), and it had seemed all but guaranteed after a while that Dorothea was bound to be enlisted in the Imperial Army upon her sixteenth birthday. And she supposed that she'd managed, in a way, both to fall into that fate and avoid it simultaneously.

The day she turned ten, a beautiful, sharp-featured woman with skin as dark as hers, dressed all in finery that spoke to a highborn status, called upon the orphanage, with her body servant in tow, and asked to see the children. Dorothea hadn't expected much—the staff of the orphanage by this point did their best to try and scrub the rest of the children of the stain of being associated with her foul temper, which resulted in her being rendered more or less invisible by design—but the woman's gaze had zeroed in upon her, and she commanded that Dorothea be brought to her.

That was the day that led Dorothea to her first meeting with her stepmother, her father's wife—Lady Emilia of the House of Ernst, who had risen to become the dukes of Lesser Virginia following the fall of the House of Lee, and the eradication of their bloodline.

Dorothea was a bastard—her father had dallied with an Austrian woman of birth as common as that of all those who'd come from Europia less than three generations past—but Duchess Emilia was, for all intents and purposes, effectively barren, rendered such by a parade of miscarriages and stillbirths, and so it had been her decision to seek out one of her philandering husband's (potentially) many illegitimate children and adopt them as her own. That had led her to Dorothea, and though she could not recall precisely how she had conducted herself that day (which was perhaps strange considering it was such a pivotal moment of her life), her stepmother had seen something in her that resulted in her being moved out of the orphanage on the very next day, and being taken at last to her new home—Arlington, the seat of the dukes of Lesser Virginia.

Having been a child at the time, and one who liked to read at that (though she had spent a great deal of time and effort in disguising that), Dorothea had had certain expectations when it came to a stepmother. The tales of children often characterised such women as wicked and embittered, sadistic and vindictive; and while the woman who had adopted her into her home was certainly shades of these things, being as she was a survivor of the games of power that characterised the later days of the Emblem of Blood more so than the open savagery of the earlier portion of the era, when the noble houses had influence and retinues aplenty to spend backing their chosen claimants, when it came to Dorothea, she was as good as her word, treating her as her own trueborn daughter and not a legitimised bastard, for all that Dorothea was so often told that she had her birth mother's eyes and hair.

Duchess Emilia, her stepmother, was strict and perhaps a bit distant, in spite of her best efforts; a harsh taskmistress and an exacting teacher, certainly, but she was also fair, and she never hesitated to praise Dorothea's efforts whenever she made them in good faith. That this woman had expectations that she never once relented in, believing always in Dorothea's ability to fulfil them if she but put forth the effort, lit in the blooming adolescent a fire of sorts, motivating her to live up to those expectations to the best of her ability.

It was rare to see her father, Duke Friederich, in any capacity—the activities that had led to her birth arrested him still, enchanted and haunted in equal measure as he was by the lingering spectre of the legacy of his forefathers before him—but in six short years, Dorothea Ernst had firmly lost any desire she might have had ever to come to know the woman who had birthed her; she and Duchess Emilia had become as close as blood, if not closer, and the fanciful notions of her middle adolescence were defined at least in part by lamentation regarding the fact that she had not truly been born as her mother's daughter, for all that the woman in question considered it inconsequential. Her mother had little patience for nonsense, after all, for all that that fact made her and her husband, Dorothea's father, a very strange pairing indeed. And yet, nonetheless, Dorothea felt as though she had something to prove, that she must repay her adoption by way of acquitting herself as a worthwhile heiress to her family name, leading her in short order to matriculation at Imperial Colchester, and a subsequent commission.

Almost a decade had come and gone since those days; while surely, her academic performance and the rather meteoric rise through the ranks of commissioned officers that followed made her a candidate for a spot on Lord Waldstein's reformed Order of the Round Table, it had been her performance in the field under the watchful eye of Marianne 'the Flash,' the Knight of Two, that had gained her the right to wear the cape. Indeed, it could well and truly be said that Dorothea, as well as every other current member of the Rounds, owed a great deal to the Left Hand of the Emperor: she was a mentor and a teacher, a colleague and peer, a ruthless woman wholly devoted to her duty, who had in truth been every bit as instrumental as the Knight of One, though perhaps less overtly so, in making the Knights of the Round into the institution it was today.

Meeting the woman's prodigal daughter, her eldest child who had caused her no end of grief, was an interesting experience, to say the least. Oh, she'd had her preconceptions—Lady Marianne had spoken of the girl rather often, and rarely all that well, decrying her as a wilful and haughty girl, ungrateful, entitled, defiant—but the young woman had been spoken of kindly by Heir Weinberg, and not even Heiress Alstreim had anything less than complimentary to say about the princess's abilities, at the very least, and so she had endeavoured at least to keep an open mind. After all, were there not those who would complain about how she behaved as a child? Was it not the way of children to grow up and mend their faults?

The reality of Princess Justine was an enigma. She was somehow everything that Empress Marianne had been as a Knight of the Round, and yet there was nothing recognisable of the woman herself in the way that those qualities manifested themselves in her. She shared an easy rapport with those under her command and had at the very least undeniably done very well to still be alive after spending this long behind the rebel lines without anything in the way of support until recently, and she moved with an ethereal and lethal grace that made it only too believable that she could have left Lord Bradley in such a state. There was not a mote of awkwardness or hesitation to how she moved with that strange sword at her side—it hung from off of her hip with all the ease of an old friend, well-wielded; the strategic insights she had shared with them that day in the pavilion had proven so accurate as to verge on prophecy, the plan she had devised was bold but not at all foolhardy, and she had taken command with such seamlessness that Dorothea's scepticism at her ability, as a freshly-minted battlefield captain with little in the way of resources, to accomplish what she claimed to have managed had begun to fade before they'd even left the command pavilion.

Even her most incredible claim, that her five thousand had won out against a force over forty times their number, and at rough technological parity to boot, seemed to grow less and less unbelievable the more of her own investigation into the matter Dorothea did, questioning their prisoners of war and witnessing the terror and the shell-shock that had immediately begun to set in upon even mentioning the battle in question. Even the rebel leader, brazen 'Santa Anna', seemed to feel his blood run cold at the mention of the princess, and of his engagements against her.

It was shocking, to say the least—both that Dorothea had managed to misjudge the young woman so completely, and also that such a resourceful young woman as the princess could even exist in the first place, to have accomplished so much with so very little.

Perhaps it was unsurprising, however, that her examinees, having attended school with the girl for a full two years, would have a somewhat…differing view of Princess Justine and her accomplishments.

"So, 'I'm here, too,' huh?" teased Weinberg, needling his pink-haired friend over an open comms channel between their three Knightmares.

"In my defence, she's, like, really hot!" Alstreim protested, minding the fact that Dorothea could, in fact, hear them not one bit as she responded.

"And here I thought you thought she was scary," the blond continued to antagonise.

"'Scarousal' is a thing, Gino," the rosette sighed in long-suffering exasperation. "Look it up."

Intellectually, Dorothea knew that this was a good sign: Lord Waldstein put a large emphasis upon a bond of fraternity between the members of their order, as past iterations had, in his estimation, been entirely too fractious to have the slightest chance of maintaining their loyalty to the Crown, where it belonged. Thus the fact that the two were already childhood friends, that between them ran such an effortless dynamic, was a point in their favour, that they would not succumb to infighting that might compromise their loyalties. It was why, aside from Lord Bradley, the current iteration of the Order of the Round Table did their best to steer clear of individuals who were themselves possessed of an overtly antisocial persuasion, no matter their martial prowess—and not to mention, one such individual was already more than enough.

It was, however, a rather visceral discomfort for Dorothea, to have to listen in as two of those who were almost certain to find a seat among the Rounds discussed the sexual attractiveness of a girl whose mother Dorothea had respected and admired. It stirred within her a sensation that was common to many a quarter-lifer, for whom the magnitude of the passage of time, and the evaporation of their position among 'the youth', was a phenomenon novel enough to be worthy of remark. And so she did—albeit under her breath, and with what she felt might well have been a healthy dose of self-admitted dramatism.

"Gods, I'm getting old…" she sighed to herself, closing her eyes and shaking her head ruefully. She then said into the comm unit, for the sake of having something to do that didn't involve being reminded of the fact that she would no longer be able to count herself amongst the youngest members of her order in a few weeks' time, "I'll scout ahead a-ways and report back."

"Go ahead, Lady Ernst," the Weinberg heir replied easily, his mood far lighter than what the Knight of Four was used to dealing with. "We'll keep the column moving steady until you get back."

Nodding to herself, Dorothea gripped her control yokes more firmly, and guided her Gloucester out of the first ranks of the vanguard, easing it up towards top speed as the path down which the army was now travelling, leading more or less directly towards the Rio de Janeiro Settlement, running alongside one of the many railways criss-crossing the province as it did, widened and twisted with the bends in the landscape. It wouldn't be long, now, before they came upon the city, and though Weinberg and Alstreim had professed to having absolute faith in Princess Justine's irregulars' ability to take control of the settlement themselves, it seemed most sensible for Dorothea to go ahead and verify, for all that she was beginning to believe that the kids who were soon to be her colleagues might have had a point.

She rounded a hollow, circled a hill, weaving deftly through tree and brush and shrub, and at long last, her customised Gloucester came within striking distance of the settlement itself, cresting another hill to get a clear reading for her factsphere sensor to tell her exactly what she was looking at. The cover popped open, a few muted beeps signalled the sensor's activation, and then the readings popped up on the Knight of Four's onboard computer.

The bay, it seemed, was a ruin; near to an entire fleet of vessels, both military and recreational, now floated derelict in the water, or laid themselves to rest in its deepest, darkest reaches. What defences the city had boasted, or at least those that her factsphere could pick out without significant interference, were all of them well and truly dismantled—and, as if in a gesture of open welcome, one of the main gates into the walls that encircled the sprawling grey expanse of the ghettos hung precipitously ajar, with the gate itself a shredded ruin and little more.

"Dame Dorothea, what are you seeing?" Weinberg prompted over the comms.

"If I had to guess? Your classmate's handiwork," Dorothea replied wryly. "I think it's pretty safe to say that she's been through here…though how she sank so many ships is beyond me, since not even we got to count on naval support…"

"That's Justine for ya," Weinberg laughed. "We're right on your tail, so hold tight."

"Roger that," Dorothea replied, leaning back into the seat of her cockpit as she awaited the arrival of the column she had just recently left behind.

As a Knight of the Round, and a veteran soldier, she was no stranger to waiting; the period in which she was left to occupy herself by twiddling her thumbs was mercifully short nonetheless, and before even a half hour had passed, the Knightmares of the vanguard passed her position down below, and Weinberg and Alstreim joined her up on the ridge of the hill from which she looked out upon the settlement.

"Wow, you weren't kidding," Alstreim remarked with something akin to wonder.

"Hmph. I'm not exactly in the habit of joking around, Heiress Alstreim," Dorothea replied, smirking where her examinee couldn't see.

"N-no, of course not, Lady Ernst—I just meant…!" Alstreim sputtered, stumbling over her words.

"Not sober, at the very least," she finished drily.

Weinberg chuckled. "What, is that some kind of tradition for the Knights of the Round? Buy the new members a drink?"

"When did I ever say that I'd be buying?" Dorothea shot back, shaking her head with a low chuckle. Hopefully, her teasing little jape had succeeded in putting them at ease; their performance in battle was, to her mind, more than satisfactory to qualify them for initiation—that performance being overshadowed by their royal classmate's exploits notwithstanding. Kids though the pair of highborn scions might have been, the two of them were still just what Bismarck had hoped for—not to mention there was no real way for her to make her misgivings known without seeming the highest order of hypocrite.

"You're shaking us down, then, aren't you?" Alstreim rejoined flatly.

"Not in the slightest," Dorothea shrugged. "Anyways, unless either of you have some burning and urgent desire to pitch camp and rest while we're right in front of the proverbial finish line, I think we ought to think about getting a move on. That sound reasonable?"

"I'll just be happy to be within the limits of a city," sighed Alstreim. "I'd quite honestly kill for the chance to take a proper bath…"

"Hah!" Dorothea barked out a laugh. "Well, if nothing else, I can guarantee you, that's not a feeling that ever stops sneaking up on you, no matter how many times you go venturing out into the field."

"Great…" the rosette groaned.

"Well, I, for one, will be glad to put this all behind us…" Weinberg said with a sigh of his own.

"As well you should be," said the Knight of Four. "After all, we've got a joint initiation ceremony to plan—assuming the two of you want to be initiated together, of course."

"…I mean, it's not like we haven't done everything else together," said Weinberg, his shrug almost audible to her. "Everything important, at any rate…"

"You keep my chastity's name out of your whore mouth, Gino Hieronymus Weinberg," Alstreim shot back so quickly that it was almost impressive.

"Ah—hey!" Weinberg objected, his tone playfully wounded.

"Alright, break it up, you two," Dorothea, choosing to be the responsible adult for once, interjected. "We have a princess to go link up with, don't we?"

"Yes, Lady Ernst," the pair said in exasperated unison.

Dorothea chuckled to herself. They were good kids.

She took point, naturally, and led them down the hill, to link themselves back up with the bulk of the slowly-proceeding column of APCs, Knightmare Frames, G-1 units, and lorries of all stripes, with a few of the vehicles having been emptied out to keep the prisoners of war under lock and key, leaving those who would ordinarily have occupied them to march alongside—that, in addition to the system of rotating people in and out of the remaining APCs to keep them in top shape, in case they were set upon by any number of threats that might be lingering in the provincial countryside, caused the column's progress to have slowed, even by military standards, to barely short of a crawl. Once they were back together, they began to move up the way towards the front gate that had been so clearly rent asunder—but as they drew closer, Dorothea got the nagging sensation that there was something amiss.

It wasn't anything clichéd, like the birds going silent, or there being no birds—on the contrary, after a few minutes, she began to worry that the beasts of the air would never shut up! There were heaps of them, soaring high above the ground—albatross and gulls, of course, but also more than a few of those big carrion ravens the provincial nobles had accidentally set loose into the wild, according to that ornithology book she had borrowed off of Michele for the sake of having some light reading. But more than just that—because of course they were here, the city obviously bore the scars of battle—there was a feeling in the air, something she lacked the vocabulary to properly describe and thus couldn't quite put a finger on.

And then they passed as one unit beneath the gateway.

Dorothea's jaw dropped, her eyes shot wide, and her heart plummeted into her stomach.

She'd been prepared for squalor, prepared for iniquity—this was still a Britannian province, even in a state of rebellion, so the local Numbers being corralled in filth was something she was just prepared to see as a matter of course. She didn't spare any thought or feelings for it, she didn't hate Numbers the way that a fair few of her countrymen among the peerage did—much like the commoner she had thought herself to be for the first decade of her life, especially since she had believed herself to be a commoner who lived in the Homeland, when it came to Numbers, she just…didn't really think about them all that much. They were no more significant a part of the status quo, in her mind, than railways or aeroplanes.

She'd been prepared for signs of battle, for bodies laid out, riddled with bullets, yet to be taken in or burned where they were. It certainly wouldn't have been ideal, of course, but these were simply the sorts of things that happened in war. People died en masse, on fields or on streets or in alleys, and their bodies were left for carrion while the warhost that had emerged victorious took care of them when they could. She was, to an extent, desensitised to such things, and she'd been inured to it all at least since Indochina, where she'd earned the cloak she now wore so regularly.

The sight that she now beheld was neither of those two things, not even in the most remote sense, or indeed in even the most lurid of terms that one could have used to describe either case.

This was…

"…Merciless Hells…"

There was a path that had been cleared, from the gates at one end of the city to the distant palace on the other, deep in the settlement proper, that the Knight of Four could only speculate to once have been the government bureau. It was a road, a highway through the slums and the ghettos, and even through all of the lavish, decorated architectural noise that had made up the bulk of the settlement, built as it had been during a bygone era of both society and artifice. But this road was marked off not by any sort of barricade, nor by a column of soldiers; instead, on either side of the road, at regular intervals, tall wooden posts had been stuck fast into the ground, and atop these wooden posts, all of which ended in points that seemed wickedly sharp from where Dorothea was staring, were people.

Men and women, young and old alike, each attired in such surpassingly resplendent finery that they could only have been of high birth, adorned the tops of these spikes, like decorative eagles that were placed atop legionary standards during the days of classical antiquity; there seemed to have been no consideration at all for age or for sex, as children barely old enough to read were just as often sandwiched between those who seemed to have been women in the prime of their lives and those who were men grown firmly into their twilight years as they were grouped together. Blood and offal, gore and excrement streaked down the sides of the spikes, and in each and every case, their faces were fixed into death-masque expressions of unimaginable agony and unthinkable horror.

They were dead, all of them; and though she looked, and looked quite hard, Dorothea could not see a single one that she was not certain to have died screaming. It was obvious only that none of them had died quickly, and nor had they died particularly recently. More than a few displayed gleaming bones as carrion pecked away at their exposed abdomens and ribs, and more besides had been seen as ample nesting grounds, set into the chest cavities of some, and the open mouths of others—sometimes, even, both at once. Some of the birds, it seemed, now pecked at the flesh solely to open up new spaces to set their nests, and the sparse black clouds of flies had attracted other birds, like cuckoos and terns, and more exotic manakins and quetzals—there was even a starling or two, unless her eyes deceived her—to peck away at the insects almost as quickly as they could spawn.

And it was this morbid scene that played itself out, over and over again, without anything in the way of meaningful variation, from the gate-house all the way up to the entrance of the government bureau itself.

In this, at least, Dorothea had to agree with Alstreim, verbatim. Merciless Hells, indeed.

"…Did…" Weinberg began, finding his voice at last, however strangled it might have sounded. Not that Dorothea could blame him. "Did Justine do all of this…?"

Dorothea was about to answer, at least as a pleasantry—but then a flash of immaculate white caught her eye, and it was enough for her to change tack immediately. "I suppose we're about to find out…"

The white shape she had spied approached, its specifics growing more and more discernible as the distance between them closed, and as it did, Dorothea felt helpless to do aught else but gawk. Its approach was fast, faster than she'd ever seen anything with that shape move—far and away faster than Dorothea had ever personally seen anything on the ground move, for that matter. And the closer it grew, the less she could deny it, even if only to herself, impossible though the truth might have seemed:

It was a Knightmare Frame.

It was a bit taller than her Gloucester, and far more slender, streamlined and elegant. Its immaculate white armoured plating was trimmed heavily in gold, its lines sleek and smooth and dramatic, leaving it to seem far less like a piece of military hardware than it did a work of art. Its almost theatrical shoulders and the sweeping angles to which the helmet structure that covered the delicate circuitry of the head conformed gave it a distinctive profile that Dorothea would even go so far as to call operatic, and from either side of its futuristic-looking cockpit block, there hung a golden-hilted sword in a beautiful white scabbard.

But, perhaps most strikingly of all, as it drew up towards them, revealing the nearly featureless gold faceplate beneath the helmet, there was what looked to be an angled visor, within which were not two eyes, as was the case with the faceplates of every model since the outmoding of the Glasgow, but a single black band, across which there tracked a sinister, baleful, demonic-looking green mono-eye.

The accompanying crimson Sutherland that moved like a Gloucester (which Dorothea had noticed was a commonality in the case of the custom Knightmares piloted by the higher echelons of the 588th, to the extent that they even possessed such a level of organisation), was far less remarkable, comparatively; yet it had brought its EM jousting lance with it all the same, and the devicer inside handled the machine with a level of deftness that Dorothea knew would be troublesome if she had to go against it one-on-one.

She engaged her Gloucester's speaker systems, then, and said, in a voice that she had no idea how she kept sounding firm, "Identify yourselves!"

"Kururugi Suzaku, ace pilot of the 588th Irregulars," said the devicer of the strange, futuristic white Knightmare over her own unit's speakers. "Y'all've sure taken your sweet time gettin' here. What, y'all got stuck in traffic?"

The girl's levity in the face of…of the savagery that surrounded them was somehow far and away more sickening than the sight of the mass impalement itself had been. Dorothea struggled, and struggled mightily at that, to maintain her composure as she spoke. "This is Dame Dorothea Ernst, Knight of Four. I demand an explanation for this barbarity."

"Ah, I see, I see," Kururugi hummed. "Y'see, the Boss warned me I might need to crack the whip, as she put it. Tell me, Dame Ernest, are ya really about to go about and start buckin' the right and proper chain o' command? See, an' here I thought all ya fancy-schmancy 'Knight o' the Round' pricks were supposed to be all about that 'discipline' shit—ever since ol' Bisy-body started runnin' the show, at least…"

"Suzaku…!" Weinberg called out, his tone pleading over his Gloucester's speakers.

"Not right now, Twinkletoes," Kururugi snapped. Her strange Knightmare drew closer to Dorothea, and the open challenge, the urging to take matters into her own hands and face the consequences, was clear as day. "See, lady, the thing here is? I don't give a damn. I couldn't give less of a shit if I tried about how up in arms y'all were fixin' to be over the execution of traitors to the Empire. So here's how this is gonna go, alright? You're gonna fall in line right the fuck now, y'see, or y'ain't gonna get a chance to fall on your fancy fuckin' sword, 'cause I'm gonna be takin' it off of your hip and feedin' it to ya. Ya got me?"

The same part of her that baulked at Princess Justine's claims of primacy rose again now, surging up with a vengeance—and on some level, she was glad of the fact that neither of her two examinees were in an emotional state to ask her to stand down, because she didn't know if she would have listened. "Are you threatening a Knight of the Round, Kururugi?"

"Y'know, ya keep sayin' what that pretty blue cape is supposed to signal like it's supposed to mean somethin'. Didn't exactly keep Lucy-Goosey's eye in his head when I cut it out, now did it?" Kururugi said in a faux-conversational tone. "And besides, it ain't a threat so much as it is that ya got yourself a choice to make. And of course, with every choice comes consequences. Ya got shit to say, you can be my guest and say it to the Boss's face. Until then? Your soul might belong to the Emperor, your heart might belong to Bisy-body, but your ass, Lady Ernst? Your ass belongs to me. Understood? Or do I gotta say it a li'l slower for ya, so that you can finally start pickin' up what I'm puttin' down?"

"Suzaku," the devicer in the crimson Knightmare chastised.

"Yeah, fine, whatever," Kururugi sighed, her white Knightmare backing away and allowing the red to slide forward. "Floor's yours, Homura-chan."

Finally, someone sensible, Dorothea thought ruefully, for she was quite keenly aware of the very much non-zero probability that such a proclamation, even within the confines of her own head, would prove itself ironic in very short order indeed.

"Our greetings to you. The majority of your army will have to stay outside of the city limits for now, until the cessation of hostilities is confirmed," said the other devicer. "Heir Weinberg, Heiress Alstreim, you two will come along, as well as Lady Ernst, provided she minds the law, and her position within it. You will be permitted two soldiers to every prisoner of war as an escort, and we will then guide you into the throne room, where Her Highness will accept the surrender of the rebel leader known as 'Santa Anna.' Then, and only then, will the rest of your suppression force be allowed within the city limits."

"And…what about all the bodies…?" Alstreim asked softly, flatly, vacantly. "Marika… What about all these people?"

"As they were not the citizens of a sovereign power, but instead subjects of Britannia who were also complicit in an act of insurrection against the Crown, Her Royal Highness Princess Justine, as the duly-appointed representative of His Imperial Majesty's justice, passed judgement on those you see lining the pathway," the crimson Knightmare's devicer, Marika Soresi, if Dorothea's memory served, replied simply. "What you now see before you was none other than Her Highness's verdict."

Before Dorothea or Alstreim could say anything further, Weinberg interceded. "We accept the terms you have presented."

"Very good, then," said the Britannian noblewoman. "The traitors in your custody will, of course, be made to walk."

"What." That flatly-delivered question, so rendered through a potent mixture of pure shock and not an inconsiderable amount of outrage, slipped from out of the Knight of Four's mouth before she could find within herself the presence of mind to remain silent.

"Her Highness is merciful; it is her command that the accused be allowed to pay their final respects to the guilty," Soresi explained, her affect every bit as even and unruffled as ever. "And it would not be just were they not allowed to behold the magnitude of the evidence against them ahead of their final judgement, to behold their accusers."

So, that's how she's playing it. Fuck. Now she knew why Kururugi had been so willing to insult her to her face—technically speaking, and through no manipulation of Imperial law in letter, Princess Justine's actions here were entirely above-board, and legally protected, to boot. She had no grounds upon which she might seriously object, and any action she took against the princess would therefore be extrajudicial, not to mention a serious blow against the credibility of the Crown, that its (nominally, at least) loyal servant could be attacked or slain by one of His Majesty's own enforcers for what, on paper at least, was nothing more illicit or criminal than obedience to the letter of the directives she was given.

Thus did it fall to Dorothea to do the responsible thing: she swallowed her conscience, and did what needed to be done.

"Weinberg. Alstreim," she began, in a tone that would brook absolutely zero argument whatsoever. "Select two infantrymen to guard each prisoner, and then get them out of those vehicles. They're marching. Disobedience…will result in immediate disqualification and summary ejection from even the probationary ranks of the Order of the Round Table, on account of obstruction of Imperial justice."

"I—!" Weinberg exclaimed, before his voice strangled itself into speechlessness.

"I'll arrange it," Alstreim replied, her voice every bit as vacant and shocked into an eerie calm as it had been since they'd passed through the gate.

The crimson Knightmare retreated a bit. "I'm glad that we could come to an understanding."

The urge to flip both of the kids before her off rose up in the back of Dorothea's throat, but she kept it down, and maintained her composure.

Though they had won the war, here they were beaten, and she knew it.

The darkness that occluded the interior of the prisoner transport, a miserable, stuffy, stagnant gloom, exploded into brilliant, blinding light, and Santa Anna blinked twice against the piercing rays as they came into an environment that his eyes had grown accustomed to and sliced it to pieces. He beheld once again the absolute state of him—his finery reduced to little more than rags, soaked with his own sweat and the grime of the flight in the aftermath of that disastrous engagement his surviving men and allies had taken to calling the Battle of the Two Rivers, his facial hair having grown to an unseemly degree, the hair atop his head now unkempt and lank and greasy, hanging heavy in front of his dirt-smeared face. He was a mess—and perhaps it was fitting, that having lost his reputation, what remained of him should be reduced to such a bestial state, where perhaps the only good thing that could be said about his condition, or of that of his fellow captive nobles, whose current circumstances were broadly reflective of his own, was that none of them went hungry or thirsty. The rations they were given were far from the fare they were used to, certainly, but it was filling, so that while their tongues might go wanting, and their morale suffered accordingly, their bodies were every bit as well-nourished as they were at the time of captivity, broadly speaking.

There were infantrymen in a column to either side of the threshold of the vehicle, Santa Anna noted when he turned his gaze towards the light, considering the soldiers' uniform closed helmets, and how they masked the faces of those who wore them, concealed expressions and status right down to whatever scraps of common humanity these lowborn might have possessed. He had always thought that such things were empowering at their core, that the rabble could look so pitilessly upon they who were their betters, as if it was in truth theirs that was the right of judgement; but there was nothing for it, he supposed. He and his fellows, at the end of the day, were the defeated, the vanquished; their lives were forfeit, and they would have to be extraordinarily lucky, or their adjudicator merciful to the point of innocence themselves, to manage to walk out of this situation with their families' lands and titles intact.

Expecting clemency from out of a chosen representative of His Majesty, Santa Anna mocked himself for being foolish enough even to consider with any degree of gravity. After all, if the adjudicator was given to such ahistorical, un-Britannian leniency, then His Majesty surely would not have chosen them in the first place. Perhaps I truly have taken leave of my senses…

Regardless, the directive of the silent commonborn sentinels was clear as day, and Santa Anna, who was the rebellion's leader in life, and would strive to be in death, if only for the sake of honour, was the first to pull himself upright out of his utilitarian seat, and make his way on unsteady legs towards the daylight of the world beyond these mobile metal confines. He heard his fellows following his lead, men who, for once, did not see fit to expend the energy or effort to argue, to be at each other's throats, to blame one another for the part that each of them played in their current state of downfall—and perhaps there was a certain level of tragic irony in that, the fact that only now that they were ruined, only now that they were men who were about to die, did they find enough common ground to stand in solidarity with one another, and not conflict.

Like livestock, they were paraded out of the bowels of the APC and into the paved streets of what, at a guess, must have been the capital of Area Six, the Rio de Janeiro Settlement—though, from the quality of the 'road' beneath his feet, simple asphalt that had been laid down at the lowest possible price and with the smallest possible degree of effort (not that they still hadn't complained about their tithes and taxes being used to the advantage of the Sixes, however obliquely), they weren't actually inside the settlement proper, a duality that left only the ghettos as a possibility. First Santa Anna, and then his fellows behind them, all two dozen who still lived. As traitors to the Crown, and not prisoners taken from a sovereign power, they hadn't even been granted the dignity of cells aboard a land-cruiser, and now they were being offloaded from what paltry accommodations they had been given and into the ghettos—for Santa Anna, the knowledge of how far all of them had fallen was a silence that rang deafeningly in his ears.

He blinked a few further times, squinting against the stabbing pain of the grossly incandescent rays of sunlight suddenly bearing down upon his eyelids like half a hundred bodkin-arrows, and his vision swam with tears that welled up in his eyes, though thankfully, none of them fell. He blinked them away as quickly as he dared, his capacity for sight returning to him slowly as his eyes adjusted; and when his clarity of sight returned to him at last, his ears filling with the cries of perhaps a dozen different species of bird, the silence giving way to uproarious cacophony as his equilibrium returned to him, he looked around, and beheld…!

They had known going into this grand endeavour of theirs, of course, that should their efforts result in failure, their lives would be forfeit, and more likely than not, their families would be rendered nearly or wholly destitute, stripped of their titles and lands and estates, their wealth seized and given to another loyal newcomer or ascendant gentry, and their names living on only in the most ignominious of fashions. If it was the case that His Imperial Majesty himself decided to intercede against them—should they have proven to be so grossly unfortunate—then it was not impossible that their entire families would have been put to the sword, the traitors' bloodlines brought to an end befitting the ignobility of their crime.

But even when this had come to pass in the past, such as it did in the case of the House of Lee or the House of Trevelyan, and an entire lineage was wiped clean of the earth, there was an unbroken precedent that a certain level of…civility would be exercised, guaranteed by the status they once held; while the head of the offending family would be subject to any number of gruesome, ugly deaths, from simple hanging or beheading to drawing and quartering or the blood eagle, those who were merely members would have a poison draught administered to them, that they might die with some measure of dignity—or, failing that, they would be killed in their homes, in their beds, and their bodies disposed of with a measure of discretion.

From the choked curses and the helpless dry-heaving of those men who had come with him into the jaws of this doomed fate, Santa Anna knew that they were bearing witness as he did to the horror that now surrounded them. But Santa Anna could not mutter even to curse, and neither was there any of the surge of sickness that so arrested his fellows, welling up from the depths of their souls and forcing their bodies into a rejection, in the most explicit of terms, of what they were looking at.

He recognised each of these people, either from personal acquaintance or any of the several hundred balls and parties and social gatherings that he had been obligated to attend as a local nobleman. As he stood where he was, completely and utterly transfixed, he looked up to behold de la Mancha's wife, who was next to de Montero's younger daughter, a girl who couldn't have been a day over ten years old, and also next to Delgado's young son, a boy barely old enough to read (who was de Montero's daughter's cousin by marriage), with her corpse fixed to the top of a wooden spike that had entered, it seemed, at the small of her back, and erupted out from her pierced collarbone, just above her full breasts, her neck gone slack, her head rolled back in an open-mouthed scream of agony and fear. A family of black carrion-birds now laboured to build their nest where once her child, de la Mancha's only son, might once have suckled, and another pecked at the white of her sightless eyes, clouded and glassy-dull in agonised repose. De Montero's daughter had been smaller; the spike that had been placed at the small of her back came out of her mouth, and Delgado's son, who was yet smaller still, had his jutting from out of one of his eye-sockets, leaving the carrion-birds and the maggots, the young of the flies that zipped around in thick clouds to be fed upon by yet more birds, only a single eye intact to feast upon.

The sight was mirrored: here was the dowager-countess of Brasilia, who was forced now in death to watch over two other women's grandchildren, and the husband of her son's closest male friend. It was odd, he thought, how much the evident lack of consideration for family ties or friendships in the placement of all of these people who had taken refuge in the settlement upon those wooden spikes, the randomness of the arrangement, amplified the horror he, and his fellows who had known these people in life by face and name both, had to grapple with while looking upon it. It was a randomness that was not reflected in the placing of the spikes themselves, each as painstakingly uniform as possible, and placed at what looked to be intervals that were unerring in their consistency of distance and regularity of occurrence.

He was numb to it all as the infantry put the barrels of their guns to his back, and forced him and his fellows both into a procession, around one side of their transport and up the path—to Santa Anna, the fact that a road had been carved to lead directly from their position to the government bureau at the far end of it, with their families impaled at those same intervals all the way up the path, defining the road, had ceased to hold a visceral feeling of horror in his chest, and in his numbed state, he found it within himself to be at the least respectful of the attention to detail, as well as the scale of the undertaking. He barely reacted when the crimson Knightmare that had taken him out at the Battle of Two Rivers came up to them on one side, with a strange white Knightmare, the likes of which he'd never seen before in his life, flanking them on the other; when the Gloucesters of the three Knights of the Round who had finally captured them, the Knight of Four and two prospective members of the order whose aptitudes were being assessed (judging by their positions of command, their white, black, and gold uniforms, and the noticeable lack the unknowns displayed of the Order of the Round Table's signature cloaks) brought up the rear, boxing them all in as they were herded up the road that had been so graciously laid out for their use, he had not the energy to waste upon expressions of shock or surprise.

That their families had been…That their lines had been ended suggested very strongly that this was a sign of His Majesty the Emperor's presence, an indication of his judgement—but Charles zi Britannia was a creature of habit, and a man who respected their precedents and traditions besides, in act if not in word; it would have been so grossly irregular for him to do this so publicly, to put their families on display and then force them to walk under the open sun and the leering death-gazes of their friends, lovers, spouses, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and children, to witness first-hand what their defiance had cost them, that it simply could not have been his word that ordered this. But who? Who would have done this, who would have left their judgement to linger beneath the shadow of such savagery, such barbarity? What infernal sadism was this, the sword hanging above all of their heads, waiting and eager for the descent?

The birds sang and cried, and more than one soldier joined his fellows in being sick upon the ground and then later being left to dry heave. The question buzzed uselessly in Santa Anna's mind like a wasp as he put one foot before the other, his boots pitted and tattered, barely useful for more than keeping the assorted filth of the road from his feet, and though his heart broke to see his Lucia likewise defiled by a sharpened length of wood, stuck fast in the ground, the truth was that, as soon as he'd seen what had befallen those his fellows loved and valued, he had known in his heart that she, too, would be there. Her belly was gravid and bloated, like an overripe fruit, and he realised with a shock that in all the months since he had seen her last, she had begun to show, and had been put upon that spike enormously, obviously pregnant. The fact that he had been about to be a father to another child was a horse's kick directly to his heart, and he could not bear to look and see his own child, a girl of only seven years, his Anamaria, upon another spike further down, for all that he knew she must be there. Still, the knowledge that impalement was neither a painless nor swift method of execution eroded his spirit, and the echoes of what she must have sounded like as she died, what both of them must have sounded like, as over the course of hours if not the better part of a day they slowly, inexorably sank further and ever-further down on the pikes as the sharp wooden sticks slowly pierced their flesh, their organs, their bodies, to exit the other side, haunted him as he proceeded past them.

It was a monstrous thing, he decided, to force him to bear witness to this—indeed, to force this upon any of them, let alone all of them at once. In fact, not even the infamous Vampire of Britannia himself, he would have wagered, would have set this into motion, forced them to watch their beloved dead, trapped for the rest of time in these stations of total debasement and absolute indignity, with no more quarter granted to those who were with child than to those who were elderly than to those who were able-bodied than to those who were themselves children… It was beyond comprehension. What manner of creature would have done this—what monster, what foul demon, what perverse mimicry of man?

The cool, climate-controlled air inside of the palatial building that had once been the government bureau was not the breath of civilisation and solace that it had once been, not so very long ago—it passed over Santa Anna as a stone in the river-bed, unerring, uncaring, indifferent. The devicers of both of the escorting Knightmares were now at their side as they had been on the way up, and he noticed them in a way that he had not noticed the five of them dismounting, their escort and the three Knights of the Round whose actions had at last captured them, for they were both, to his surprise, young women, no older than sixteen, in black uniforms; the young woman with the auburn hair, of whom he could glimpse no more than her back, held in her hand a diamond-bladed spear as tall as herself, and her companion, whose thick waves of chestnut were bound back into a high, wild tail, carried a pair of curved swords from the Orient at her left hip, wearing the scabbard of one atop the scabbard of the other. All around them, in the once-familiar halls of the building, a great number of silent infantrymen clad in black armour that seemed sleeker, more advanced, and of better make than that of any of the Britannian regulars who had accompanied them up the path, stood guard, with each and every one of them armed and primed for any sudden burst of combat. The familiarity that the sight of that black armour was as unwelcome as it was unrecognised—Santa Anna found that he could not for the life of him think of where he might have seen its ilk in the past; he knew only that he had.

Through the guarded corridors they went, and while the Knights of the Round who were present and the four dozen regulars seemed to grow progressively more unnerved by their surroundings, the two young women, while silent, walked with an unbothered ease, as though all was well, and exactly as it should be. A straight path through the complex seemed to be the route they walked, and Santa Anna could not help but to take note of how the black-armoured infantrymen's heels clicked together just that little bit more, standing a hair or two taller than they had been, as if these two girls held some measure of authority that not even the Knights of the Round, neither the Knight of Four or her examinees, were capable of commanding.

As one, the two girls threw the double-doors into the audience chamber wide open, failing to do so much as to break stride as they crossed the threshold, their knee-high black boots clomp-clomping on the marble floors with each step up to the far end of the chamber—where, upon the dais, past two full rows of the black-armoured soldiers, each row two ranks deep, and at the end of a rich, heavy violet carpet, trimmed in cloth-of-gold, was the very throne that Santa Anna had once commissioned, to be ready ahead of time for his glorious, victorious return to the capital, and the coronation that would shortly follow.

It was a great, grandiose thing, a golden chair modelled after the throne of King Charles II, who had presided over the Spanish Empire at its height, when the Invincible Armada had ruled the seas, albeit with a few flourishes; its back was decorated, as that great monarch's had been, with effigies of leaves and roses and thorns, its cushions were a lavish, plush crimson velvet, and resting at the foot of each leg was the paw of a lion—but more than this, it was fashioned in grand scale, with a pair of roaring leonine faces adorning arms that were figured to evoke the imagery of a scorpion's chitin, and from the back of the chair extended a pair of chiropteran wings that were meant to seem to encompass all who stood within the chamber.

It was the iconography of the manticore, the legendary beast he and his fellows had chosen in order to represent their nascent dream of empire.

But that empire was now a stillbirth; and yet, the throne did not sit empty.

As they were marched over the threshold behind the two young women, both of whom strode right up to the edge of the dais before moving smoothly to kneel before the occupied throne, Santa Anna felt as if he was noticing only the most minute and specific of details of the one who reclined upon the throne that had been meant for him. He noticed how the fine black lace brushed against the knuckles that stood out in relief even through the medium of black gloves; how one hand was perched upon the cap of the hilt of another odd curved sword of the Orient, like it was a sceptre and not a weapon to be wielded, held off the side of one of the arms as if kept as an afterthought, a mere symbol of office, and nothing more; the potent mixture of ease without effort and unnatural grace that radiated from every angle and curve of that posture upon the throne, that regal languor; the way the elbow rested upon the opposite arm of the throne, the limb lifting up to end in a gloved hand, curled into a loose half-fist, supporting an idle, immaculate jaw upon its covered knuckles and slender wrist…

The large carrion-raven that chose to perch itself upon the lion-head of the throne's arm, near to the woman's knee, almost seeming to glare at the newcomers, its eyes flashing scarlet…

"Rise, my friends," the young woman who could have been none other than Justine vi Britannia, the Fourth Princess of the Realm, bade the two girls who were genuflecting before her. "Rejoice in a duty duly discharged; you have done well, as per usual."

As one, both girls rose to their feet, bowed low—the auburn-haired girl, he noted, held that spear of hers still, kept upright even as she bowed a full ninety degrees, together with her swordswoman companion, her thick chestnut tail trailing over her shoulder almost to the floor—and split apart to move to positions on either side of the audience chamber-turned-throne room.

The action left Santa Anna with no choice but to regard the young woman, a girl of no more than sixteen years herself, who was the architect of his astonishing ruin at the Battle of the Two Rivers, and all the lean months before it—the young woman who would now serve under His Majesty's authority as his judge, his jury, and his executioner.

For all that she was a little less than half his age, she was beauty and terror made flesh, sitting there with her long legs crossed, clad in breeches and high, heeled boots, both black, with a single ankle bobbing lazily as she regarded him. There was not a sliver of porcelain flesh to be seen beneath her silver-collared throat and the neckline of her black blouse, and her full, plum-painted lips were curled into an arrogant, superior, and malevolent smile, hauteur and malice met and married, seamlessly melded into one unified whole; her dark-shadowed eyes were hard as gemstones, amethysts that glittered cold and all-consuming as the new moon beneath the shade of her thick lashes and black-stained eyelids, even as one sat obscured by a veil of wavy raven hair, which hung to her chin—her features stark and sculpted, as if he was beholding neither stone nor flesh, but an effigy of living ice, carved by a master's careful hand. He was riveted, not by her youth, but by the power she commanded, and would have even had she not her black-armoured killers surrounding her—at least a hundred, or perhaps even as many as two hundred grim, silent figures, all eager, obedient hounds, like a pack of wolves, patiently awaiting their mistress's command.

He had asked himself, he recalled, what manner of monster could have commanded the display that he and his fellows had been forced to witness on their march up to this castle on the hill, a palace by the sea turned a perverse, exhibitionistic abattoir. The answer lay before him now, in how the long shadows that the sunlight cast through the large windows seemed to lean and gather and yearn for her, how her gaze radiated like rime and frost upon the dawning of a winter morning, how she perched even now upon the throne that he had commissioned, neither thief nor usurper but undisputed mistress of all she surveyed, wicked like a dark sorceress from the tales he might have told his children had they lived, or been born in the first place.

Yes, he thought to himself, as his skin began to crawl from how those eyes regarded him, without so much as a flicker of acknowledgement for his agency, or for the force he had brought to bear to kill her; he had no doubt that the offence she had done him, the ruin she had made of him and his house, the depraved savagery she had committed against his young son and his pregnant wife, and countless children and loved ones besides, meant less than nothing to her. If she lost even a moment of sleep over any of it, if even a bare sliver of what she had done, what she had wrought, ever came to haunt her, he would be shocked to his very core, and that was the truth of it. This was not a human woman before him, not a creature of the natural world who was in any way capable of the joys and woes of mere, base mortals such as he or his fractious, quarrelsome compatriots, who dealt in their deceits and sins, their virtues and ambitions. She was not even a beast, nor even a mere monster.

She was a demon. A fiend in a young woman's shape.

A single strong, dark brow, elegant and dramatic, arched. "It is often customary to kneel when one is awaiting judgement, Santa Anna."

He blinked, uncomprehending, his mind moving as if mired in molasses.

BANG!

"HRAH—! GAH—!" His leg erupted in a burst of white-hot agony that consumed his every sense at once, and almost immediately did his knees buckle beneath him, driving him to the carpet with his hands to arrest his fall. His vision cleared, though it wavered still, and he stared at the sight beneath him as the pure violet it was dyed became muddled, first indigo, then magenta…

He looked up in time to see—there! Up upon the second level! Another young woman, short-haired, wearing the same black uniform the prior two girls, the devicers, had worn, with an elongated black shape cradled in her arms, glass glinting, barrel smoking…

"Now then! Are any of the rest of you mongrels in need of similar encouragement, hm?" the demon asked with a calm insouciance that cracked through the chamber's air like a scourge and chilled his blood, even as it flowed out of him in thick rivulets. It drew his attention back to her, and when he made to stand, perhaps in a futile act of defiance, or perhaps simply through force of habit, the man who styled himself an emperor in the making found, to his mounting horror, that beneath his quadriceps and hamstrings, there was nothing left—not even his knee.

His fellows, as it turned out, didn't need any further prompting—they who were to be his vassals in a dream victorious gave their obeisance in unison, or very nearly, two dozen men scrambling to fall to their knees, lest an eagle-eyed sharpshooter young enough to be any of their daughters (granddaughters, even, for a few of them) see fit to lame them knelt. They obeyed more eagerly than they had even the most banal and uncomplicated directives he had ever seen fit to give them, and that was only partly the product of the fear that Santa Anna's abrupt crippling had set to flaring within them.

The rest of it, he knew, was awe—terrible, horrific awe.

Now, and only now, did the Fourth Princess see fit to rise from her throne, a gaudy, tawdry thing in her presence, wholly beneath the station she seemed to command. She uncrossed her legs, planting both of her boots firmly upon the floor, heels and all, and rose in a single sinuous motion, inhumanly graceful. One firm clack, heel and then toe, upon the marble floor, rang out louder, it seemed, than the recent gunshot had even managed, the tail of her long black coat seeming like a furled pair of wings as the scalloped hem now brushed against her lower calves and ankles, the preternatural reality of which the representation upon the throne was but a crude effigy.

The silence that followed was absolute, save for the sounds of her footfalls, each of them ringing out upon the flooring, duller than the first, but surely no less momentous for it, and the fluttering of feathers, as the raven flew off of the arm of the throne to alight upon her layered pauldron. Not even his own heart had the audacity to hammer in the space where it might interrupt her, this creature out of myth and far-flung legend, this harbinger of misery and ruin—it was like he was submerged underwater, and hers was the only sound there to reach him, in that space where breath was deadly and every last bit of air was as coveted as it was dwindling. He watched the scabbard as it swung from her hand to her hip, where it fastened with ease; and then he saw only her boots, her coat, and the gunmetal sheath.

"Now, now," the princess chided, and suddenly her black-gloved hand seized his jaw, and forced his gaze upwards with a grip like iron to meet her own, pitiless and cruel as it was. "Even a mongrel must know to look its own death in the face, wouldn't you agree?"

Even the raven, who was newly perched upon the princess's shoulder, glowered down at him.

In any other circumstance, the effect that phenomenon would have had, of pet and mistress forming complementary expressions, would have been comical and endearing in equal measure.

As it stood, it was, as was the case with seemingly everything about Justine vi Britannia, myth made flesh.

"But, then again," she considered as her hand left his jaw, and she rose back to her full height with a stretch of her knees. "If you knew your place as well as you ought, Santa Anna, I suppose you wouldn't be in this mess right now at all, would you?"

"You… You fiend," he found the strength to say, and not even he knew whether it was revulsion or reverence that guided his tongue here. "You've taken…everything from me…"

"Not everything," she prevaricated, and the blade's-edge smirk she spoke with made the mockery as clear as well-water. "Just the vast majority of it. And even then, not just from you. How is dearest Lucia, by the way? I know some men take to being cuckolded far better than others, of course, buuut I'd wager yours is a bit of a special case."

"Will you kill us, too?" he asked, doing his best to brush past how her words twisted the fresh knife that she had buried into his heart, right up to the hilt.

"Oh, my dear boy," she spoke with venomous comfort. "You knew that your lives were forfeit from the first, didn't you?"

"Th-then…" he stammered out, the loss of blood beginning to weaken him. "W-why…? Why make us… Why force us to witness…?"

"…The ruin I made of your families?" the princess finished for him, her tone contemptuous. "How I have taken everything that any of you mongrels have ever loved and reduced it to so much ash, with which I have now painted your faces?"

He gulped, and nodded.

Any false mirth vanished from her countenance like snow in spring. "In no particular order: Coxim. Jatai. Cáceres. Pirapora. Ascensión."

An emotion so long in coming that it now felt foreign suffused him—incredulity.

Was she…?

Could she have…?

Did she really put an end to dozens of highborn lineages…for the sake of the Sixes?!

"You really…?" he asked rhetorically, his outrage rising like bile. "For their sake—?!"

"Well…" the princess shrugged, flippant as could be. "That, and your silly little temper tantrum did ruin my wedding night. Still haven't gotten to go on my damned honeymoon…"

He gaped up at her, aghast.

She smirked at him once again, as if he was somehow beneath her hatred. "Now, does that answer your question, mongrel? Or must I repeat myself?"

The Numbers were lower than beasts. Every true Britannian noble knew that much, he thought to himself. Wholly unlike the commoners, who were occasionally useful for bowing and scraping, as servants and as playthings, Numbers had no use, no utility, no redeeming quality that might make them the equals of simple beasts of burden, or even livestock. They barely even qualified as refuse, for that would imply that they were ever of use to anyone—teeming, writhing, constantly breeding… They were vermin, worse than even insects, fit only to be cleared away and exterminated for the glory of the Empire, that more deserving underlings might till the fields and work, kept content so as to prevent rebellion, but nothing more than that, and create a world free of pests and lower creatures…

And for their sake—for the sake of the vermin, the refuse, the subhuman chattel of the Empire,this so-called princess of the realm, this half-French whore, had just snuffed out every noble bloodline in Area Six like it was nothing, and then had the audacity to put it on display…!

"Very well, then," the misbegotten half-breed said, her tone light, as if her crime, her abomination, wasn't a hundred thousand times worse than their rebellion—! "Boys? Have at it. But make sure that you leave the heads identifiable, and please, take care that you don't touch this one—I have special plans for him… Oh, and do try to spare the ammunition, if you could. It's expensive."

A pained cry rang out from behind him, and Santa Anna whipped his head around to see as some of the black-armoured infantry stepped forth from their rows, brandishing the butts of their rifles, and beat his compatriots with them, the blows falling over and over and over, brutalising them everywhere except on their faces. Chests, shoulders, legs—and more and more swept in from the flanks to join in. It didn't take all that long for blood to start flying, spurts of it splattering against their previously immaculate black helmets, and the cries and yelps of his fellow noblemen subsided into whimpers and then wet, sickly gurgles—or at least, whenever the sound wasn't the nauseating crack and snap and crunch of bones breaking, their bodies giving way under the merciless brutality of the grimly silent, black-armoured infantry.

A horrible thought occurred to him, then, in light of all that he'd just learned, and he turned his head back towards the demon with a speed that very nearly gave him whiplash. "Are they…?!"

The Fourth Princess knew, it seemed, precisely what he was asking. "If I gave them an order to take off their gauntlets and their vambraces, to bare the skin of their arms to you, I daresay you'd see them quite clearly, Santa Anna: six identifying numbers, tattooed into their skin in blue ink. It's a bit of poetic justice, I should think…"

"And what do you mean to do to me, then?" Santa Anna spat, repulsed as he was by the upending of the natural order of things to which he'd just borne witness.

"Oh, that's a simple question to answer," the Commoner Princess replied, mocking him yet again. "I seem to recall you accusing me of taking everything from you. That much, I won't do, of course; but I will be taking everything of value from you—which, unfortunately for you, doesn't include your life. Not in the strictest sense of it, at any rate…"

"I have nothing else you can take from me, filthy half-breed!" he hissed in defiance. That he and his family would be sentenced to death for the sake of subhuman creatures unworthy of the air they breathed… It was an indignity that he would not countenance, and certainly would not suffer quietly.

"Oho! The mongrel has found his bite at long last! How very amusing," the fiend remarked, even as she laughed at him, and the beating behind him had long since ceased to sound like anything more human than a pack of butchers pulverising meat. "But, sadly, you're quite incorrect. You see, even after all that you have lost, Santa Anna, you yet retain your memories of having had these things in the first place. And so, I shall take from you every last scrap of joy, every recollection of happiness. I will take from you the names of your wife and son, of your mother and father, of everyone who ever meant anything to you, and when at last you are reduced to the truth of yourself—a hollow shell, the most wretched of all creatures ever to have gallivanted about in the skin of a man—only then shall I present your gibbering remains to His Majesty, so that once I have killed you in every way that matters, he can take care of whatever's left."

Her words, of course, meant nothing to him—he knew not of what she spoke—but then, out through the press of the black-armoured guards closer to the throne, who did not allow themselves to partake in the savagery that was now winding down behind him, came another girl of no more than sixteen years clad in a black uniform, with long, bound hair the colour of moss, and a white coat overtop it all, as well as a mousey commoner girl, with inky black hair and spectacles, the latter of whom carried what looked to be, to Santa Anna's admittedly untrained eye, a surgeon's bag.

"A lobotomy?" he scoffed, undaunted—largely on account of his still-seething outrage, admittedly.

The Commoner Princess's cruel, blade-sharp smile drew just that little bit sharper at his disparaging remark."Oh, nothing so imprecise, I assure you."

The black-haired commoner opened the bag, pulling out a single cylindrical container of a substance that looked like dried blood, together with a syringe and an intravenous injector—and, at the sight of those implements, a terrible realisation began to click into place in Santa Anna's mind. "…Oh, no…"

At once, the demon seized his head by the hair, and jerked his head to the side, exposing his neck. A look in the direction of the moss-haired noblewoman—or at least a noble bastard, though she carried herself like she was accustomed to status—revealed that, just as Princess Justine had done, she was smiling at him, and bitterly. "Five hundred CCs, if you would be so kind, Miss Einstein. And while this might be improper of me to say, as someone with more medical training than probably half of all currently active field medics: Santa Anna, was it? Well, Santa Anna, I can truly say that it will be my pleasure to administer this dose…"

And of course, he knew precisely what the drug was—more than once, they'd considered it as a way to purge the Sixes finally, once and for all—and the broad strokes of what it could do. Refrain, a drug that sent the user back into an illusory era in which all of their fondest memories coincided, extremely addictive and with a list of side effects that was longer than the table they'd sat at as they discussed the benefits of its introduction to the Six population, and not by an insignificant margin. At a high enough dose, or even over an extended period of use, it essentially trapped the subject inside that memory-world, and that entrapment was potentially indefinite. Beyond that point—beyond that point, the drug was no longer the sort of thing they could have feasibly marketed to the Six population through go-betweens, like individual robber barons or criminal syndicates, not without the vermin cottoning to the fact that the drug was a tool of extermination and genocide, which had the capacity to create…problems.

Guillotine-shaped problems.

He struggled against the hand in his hair, saving his breath to try and wriggle free, still bound to his hands and knees, even as one of them pulsed the sharp, white-hot pain of loss through the very core of his being—even if he might be naive enough to look to the Knights of the Round, who were, when last he'd seen, positioned as far back in the chamber as they could get while still technically being within it, even if he screamed, there were no legal grounds upon which they could save him, not when it was the Holy Britannian Emperor's appointed adjudicator who was doing this to him, and there was no one else here who seemed even remotely willing to help him, or even anyone else who didn't take some measure of glee in how he squirmed and struggled and suffered in an attempt to keep his mind, to keep his memories, to keep his consciousness…

The green-haired girl approached at last, brandishing the injector menacingly. His efforts redoubled; the drug had to be injected directly into his bloodstream, so as long as he could make them unable to get a clean shot at any of the veins in his neck, then…

The carrion-raven on the Commoner Princess's shoulder fluttered off of the pauldron, and landed on his shoulder, sinking its talons into his skin—talons that were far sharper than they ought to have been—in the process. And, impossibly, it vocalised a litany of commands: "Stay still! Stay still! Stay still!"

"Come now, mongrel," the princess snarled, and her lips pulled back to reveal sharp teeth and fangs to bite and tear and rend and shred and…

"GYAAH—!" Something sharp-pointy-claw-sharp-rend-tear cut into his clavicle, piercing flesh and muscle in equal measure, biting into his bones…!

"Be a good boy, and take your medicine…"

The injector pricked into his neck, squarely where his carotid artery should be.

The flood of liquid joy and surging dread flowed, uninterrupted, into his bloodstream—he looked up from his tormentors, past the Commoner Princess, and there upon the abandoned, vainglorious throne, was his wife…and his son…and his daughter, his little girl, perched upon her mother's knee. And they were smiling, and they were happy, and they loved him dearly, welcoming him home from a long, troublesome journey, and it was so very beautiful—they were so very beautiful, his beloved family—that he could not help but weep…

Antonio.

Anamaria.

"Lucia…"

And with his beloved wife's name upon his lips, Santa Anna—Sergio Siguenza—ceased to think…

Night had fallen upon what was in the running for the busiest day of Gino's life—and the one that had upended the most of his world at once, without a doubt. The suppression forces he and Anya had led on the way down into Area Six had been allowed inside the city by now, though a good portion of them, upon seeing the…street…had elected to stay outside instead, camping out and bedding down in the G-1s beyond the limits of the walled-in ghettos, regardless of how dark the night was—there were, after all, no civilians left within the Rio de Janeiro Settlement, though none of them had been…and besides that, it was the night of the new moon, and so not even the moonlight could be relied upon to brighten the darkness. He couldn't help but notice, of course, that the ones who had chosen to stay outside the city limits were almost to a man all members of the suppression force's officer corps who had come from highborn families—but he had not had the time to think about what that might mean, that the rank and file sought quarters inside the ghost city and the officers had not, not in the face of the absolute clusterfuck that their day had become after the judgement of Santa Anna and the rebellious highborn. Even now, he wrestled with the guilt of leaving Anya behind to deal with the massive mountain of bureaucracy and administrative busywork she now had to take care of, but as she'd told him, he was less than useless with that sort of thing, and so she'd shooed him out, ostensibly because she couldn't trust him not to fuck anything important up if he stayed.

His thoughts were a tangled web, a snarl in the fabric of his mind. He tried to reconcile the girl he'd first properly met, in the lists of Ad Victoriam, after her daring manoeuvre completely wrecked the Prytwen he'd been piloting, with the sort of person who could do what he'd seen today, who'd executed these men's families in as gruesome and public a way as she could have, forced them to watch, and then ordered them to be beaten to death for the sake of preserving ammunition. He tried to reconcile them, and he failed: even in the face of Anya's many warnings over how scary she apparently was, and of the reputation she had gained in school as an ice queen, he found that he couldn't stop thinking of them as two entirely separate women. He knew he wasn't the best at keeping track of the ebb and flow that defined Imperial politics, knew that if he hadn't been good enough at fighting to catch Lord Waldstein's eye from fairly early on, he would likely have been an atrocious heir to the House of Weinberg, but he felt, justified or not, as though he would have picked up on this, the seeming dual nature of Princess Justine, enough so that at least now, it would make a retroactive sort of sense.

That had been what he'd truly been feeling for most of the day—the horror of the…display had, of course, been a shock to his system, as had the surrender and summary execution that followed, but once all of that had cleared from his mind, and he'd been able to think straight again, or at least straight enough that Lady Ernst no longer saw fit to hover over them like a ruffled mother hen, all that remained was confusion, and it was sending his thoughts round and round in circles, like a dog chasing its own tail. It was because of this that he'd accepted so quickly that Anya had been right to dismiss him—air or answers, he didn't know which of them he needed more right then…

The former government bureau was as good a place as any for him to wander about, seeking to find some measure of clarity for his own thoughts and feelings, and so there he was, loitering in lavish corridors and empty halls as he ambled to and fro, exploring without really taking in anything he encountered, in the vain hope that the skein of his mind might miraculously find itself unspooled and lain clear. It was a strange experience—even at court, the mere sight of his uniform, even without the cloak that would mark him as a bona fide Knight of the Round, almost invariably garnered him a measure of deference from both regulars and Royal Guardsmen alike, both of whom would at least acknowledge his presence with a nod. It was not so here, in this palace at the heart of Justine's temporary domain, where Gino could feel neither deference nor recognition of any kind—only the glowering suspicion of these silent, still sentinels, armed with rifles they had used to beat the rebel nobles to death with, and clad in fine, unfamiliar black combat armour from head to foot, without a single flash of exposed skin. He could not help but feel even more alien beneath the weight of their idly distrustful gazes, and before too long, he found himself rushing past them whenever he came across them, always in groups of at least two, stationed at nearly every intersection of corridors, and a fair few of the longer stretches between those junctures.

Gino didn't know where he was in the bureau, exactly—he was aware only of the fact that wherever it was that he'd ended up, his presence was entirely accidental—but eventually, he stumbled upon a humble hall, comparatively speaking, that was cast in pitch darkness, in marked contrast to the rest of the well-lit corridors of the remainder of the government bureau. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom of it all, but once they did, he spotted at the far end of the hall what seemed to be…a balcony that looked out to the sea, apparently? It wasn't vacant, whatever it was, he could clearly see, and the security presence was much lighter than elsewhere out here, with a difficult-to-spot pair of black-armoured infantrymen standing at the ajar threshold of the balcony, as if even their presence in this place was little more than a formality. It was a curious enough sight for Gino—and his hands were idle enough—that, instead of continuing to wander, he went towards the balcony, where an amorphous figure looked out into the lightless sea, inky-dark as it was beneath the blackened moon.

As he got closer, however, Gino gradually realised that it wasn't one figure who stood there, looking off of the balustrade and into the bay, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond, but two figures, intertwined, with the larger wrapped tightly about the form of the smaller. A step or two closer allowed his adjusting eyes to recognise the entwined pair of figures as women, one of whom seemed to be very nearly as tall as he was—perhaps a little less than ten centimetres short, he estimated—and he knew of only one woman, really, who both fit that bill and might conceivably be here, guarded by Justine's sepulchral soldiers.

Apparently, he'd just stumbled onto the married couple mid-canoodle.

He realised, after a moment of shocked hesitation, however, that…aside from their proximity, with how his cousin's frame seemed to envelop her royal wife's, they didn't seem to be doing much of anything. They just stood there, out upon the balcony, their bodies entwined and at rest—save, perhaps, for a gentle rocking, to and fro, at the behest of some silent rhythm, some song that only the two of them could hear. It didn't even seem as though they were talking, or anything—just staring out into the ocean gloom, together, submerged in a silence that was not awkward, but rather…companionable, almost, if not for the fact that it was also obviously and quite overtly amorous.

Gino didn't know what possessed him to walk past the guards at the entrance to the balcony, nor did he recognise the source of whatever thought had convinced him to do anything more than walk away to let the two newlyweds enjoy their moment of quiet, his confusion left as a matter for the morrow. Yet, he did not hesitate to brush past the black-armoured guards stationed at the threshold and out onto the (surprisingly quite large) balcony, while the sound of his footfalls obviously alerted his cousin, who visibly tensed at his approach, her body coiling ever more tightly about her wife's.

Well, in for a penny… he sighed, still not entirely certain why he'd chosen now, of all times, to try to get his grievances addressed. "Justine. Could we, like…talk?"

There was a silent pause, followed by a rush of furious whispering, an inaudible conversation which seemed to resolve itself with Carmilla disentangling herself from her wife, stepping away, and striding back into the hall beyond, brushing past him firmly enough to make him stumble just a bit as she made her way out of the darkness. Then, Justine sighed heavily—he could just glimpse the outline of her shoulders as they rose and fell, even through the medium of what looked to be a black dressing gown—and turned away from the sea beyond to face him. "What is it you wish to address, Gino? I certainly hope, for your sake, that it is a dire enough matter to justify irritating my wife…"

Okay, so she's a little peeved, too, Gino registered with an internal nod. And you know what? That's fair. But…even still, I can't shake this feeling, like I really have to know…

"So, uh… How's about them birds?" Nice one, Gino, real smooth, ten out of ten…

"…Birds," Justine repeated, her diction slowed with incredulity. "You interrupted my time with my wife, who hasn't seen me in four months—almost certainly incurring her ire in the process, might I add—to talk to me about…birds?"

In for a penny, Gino sighed to himself for the second time tonight—and with his luck, it was almost certain not to be the last. He shrugged, affecting nonchalance (and he found himself newly grateful for the darkness, given that he was quite certain that he was doing so incredibly poorly), and elaborated. "Yeah, the birds. Specifically, the ones that are now making nests in the chests of dead children."

He couldn't see it as clearly as he could in the light, but his night vision continued to grow more and more refined the longer he spent out here, the scant illumination from the brilliant tapestry of stars above, now freshly unhindered by light pollution, enabling his eyes to do more with less, and so he caught her dark eyebrow cocking quizzically, the corner of her lips pulling up into a rallying smirk, one that was about as sharp as a razor. "Oho? And prithee, am I now meant to be the Keeper of Carrion, that it might be within my power that I could dictate to them where, precisely, they must choose to hatch and raise their young?"

…Aaaand now she's getting defensive. Great going, Gino, he scolded himself. Then came another internal sigh—he was beginning to sigh inside his own head more than he ever did outside of it at this rate, he noticed—and the begrudging admission to himself. Oh, well… Progress is progress, I guess… "This isn't really about the birds, Justine. I think you know that."

"What, really? No~!" she rejoined sarcastically, biting as ever, her hand flying up to that ruby and silver collar that she'd been wearing around the base of her neck, every day, without fail, since before their first meeting. "I—! You don't say! Next you're going to tell me that you're really here because you take issue with the sentences levied against enemies of the Empire."

"They were children, Justine!" he cried, incredulous and taken off-guard by what she'd just said.

"Yes, they were children. And in the eyes of many others in other places around the world, so, too, are we," she emphasised, very pointedly. "I don't know if you've quite managed to grasp this yet, Gino, but we are highborn—all of us are, from you and I, to my friends, to Anya, to every last child, born or unborn, who are now mounted upon those pikes. You cannot thinkas a commoner thinks, and expect to survive, let alone prevail—the game is different for us, the rules as distinct as they are incontrovertible. The game was different for them, too, and their traitor mothers, and their traitor fathers, all the way down to the gestating root of their lineage. All that separates them from us, Gino, at least in a material sense, is that they lost."

"So, what? That completely absolves you of guilt? You're just…hunky-dory with this, now?" asked Gino, rhetorical and increasingly bitter. The image in his mind, of the girl he had called a friend out in the lists, was now shattering right in front of his eyes, "Is this a new hobby of yours, then? Just…putting seven and eight-year-olds on pikes? Impaling pregnant women and then going and making an adultery joke about it, right in front of their husbands?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Justine scoffed as she turned away from him and returned to the rough-hewn marble balustrade that gave her a view of the dark, inky sea.

"How is that ridiculous?" he demanded, folding his arms across his chest and raising his chin. Now, at least, his emotions were unspooling and making themselves plain—confusion, old reliable that it was, but also sorrow and betrayal. "How is it any more ridiculous than what you did to them?!"

"Whatever ruin I inflicted, they brought upon themselves," Justine spat, her voice thick with disdain as she did so.

"They were innocent!" he protested, needing her, his friend, the girl he had always defended, even to the closest of his childhood companions, to understand this, almost more than he needed every lungful of the air he breathed.

"There were no innocents!" she cried as she whirled around, violet eyes blazing, almost luminous in the dark with the force of whatever sentiment lay behind her vehemence. "Not anymore. Any one of them could have stood up and said no, we won't behave like animals anymore…!"

Gino recoiled, as if stricken—never before, in all the time that they'd known each other, had he ever seen Justine so much as raise her voice, and certainly not in anger. To say that he was now thoroughly lost, taken completely off-guard by the turn this conversation had taken, would have been to say something that was in the running for 'Understatement of the Year.' He lowered the hands he'd unconsciously lifted in the universal gesture of surrender back to his sides before he found his voice again, and asked, "…Justine, what on Earth are you talking about?"

"You weren't there, Gino," she spat, her tone all flame and furor and venom. "You didn't see… You didn't see what I saw—what we saw. So do not dare to think that I shall allow you to stand there, swaddled in all your blessed ignorance, and tell me that they were innocent—any of them, in any way. Every last one of them was either complicit, or would become such in time…"

Gino still didn't know what his schoolyard friend was talking about, and now he found that he was only more confused. "Justine, that doesn't tell me—"

"The towns, Gino," she cut him off. "The damned towns. Sundown, extermination, whatever!"

"Wait, wait, wait," he interrupted her in turn, shaking his head and waving his hands to beg her for a pause. "What the Hell is a…sundown town?"

Justine grew very still at that question, almost unnaturally so, and her expression morphed into one of mild horror. "Oh dear gods, you don't know… You…actually don't know…"

Never before had he so badly wanted to tear the hair out of his scalp in frustration. This was telling him nothing. "I don't know what, Justine?! What don't I know that's so bad?!"

"Do you know what happens to Numbers in the Areas, Gino?" Justine asked instead of answering. "Have you truly neverso much as considered asking the question? Of just about anyone, I'd wager?"

"I mean, I've heard a lot of bad stuff, sure, but that's all propaganda," Gino replied, still mystified.

"Propaganda, Gino? Really?!" Justine exclaimed, incredulous. "And I suppose all that thumping of the podium that His Majesty does is all just vague gesticulation and hot air, then? And the fact that all of the nations native to the Homeland have vanished into thin air is just, what, a historical coincidence?"

"Justine, could you just…?!" he cried, frustration strangling his words in his throat. "Enough of the riddles! Just say it plainly!"

"Genocide, Gino," Justine said at last, and his mind summarily ground to a halt at the sound of the word. "Displacement. Extermination. Ethnic cleansing. Terms that are, apparently, very much meaningless to you."

"Wait, so you're saying that the Peninsular Rebellion tried to commit genocide against the Sixes?" Gino asked, shaking his head as his brain rebooted.

"They accelerated it greatly, at the very least," Justine said with a mirthless laugh that rang out like shards of broken glass, crashing to the floor. "This rebellion has been in the works since before we went to school, Gino—emptying the ghettos and stuffing all the Sixes into their extermination towns to be worked and starved and violated to death was the very first thing they did as a coalition, before they murdered the viceroy and declared themselves independent. But, crucially, the extermination towns existed before they did that, Gino, and while I can't say that it takes the same formin every Area as it did in this one, it does in a fair few of them, and the rest? The rest have their own methods of accomplishing the same goal."

"That… That can't be true," he replied, shaking his head. "Aya—Area Eleven is…!"

"The exception that proves the rule, I'm afraid," Justine told him, even as she turned away from him and back towards the black bay again. "And make no mistake—if it had been allowed to be subjected to the tender mercies of any viceroy other than Milly, Area Eleven would have turned out every bit as much of an atrocity as the other, older areas already are. The Area Eleven you know was only made possible due to the extraordinary efforts of Milly, her grandfather, and those sworn to them, and now it is rapidly becoming the wealthiest province in the Empire. That the Honorary Britannian system that she put into place is anything more than a woefully transparent ploy to have disposable cannon fodder on hand whensoever the provincial government needs an especially unsavoury task handled is in and of itself grossly ahistorical, and bucks the established conventions of provincial rule in this nation so thoroughly that an argument could be made that it isn't even culturally part of the same empire. That Area Eleven is as it is today does not exonerate the rest of the provinces—it incriminates them."

"Even if that is true," Gino began again, shaking his head and circling back to the true thrust of what he'd initially wanted to say to her. "That's not a problem you can fix by impaling people, Justine…"

"Oh, can't I?" Justine snapped rhetorically, freshly incensed, and still gazing out into the black water beyond the balcony, her bare hands (which he'd never seen before, and still couldn't see with anything that could be considered 'clarity', even by the loosest possible definition of the term) scraping furrows into the stone of the balustrade—somehow, he guessed. "It was Empress Theodora nox Britannia who once wrote, 'devoid of value are the threats made without ample evidence that by the selfsame hand was violence of the same or greater degree wrought—be sure to make examples of those foes that one cannot control, that those that one may shall be cowed in turn.' What I have done in impaling the families of the rebel leaders was not an act of needless cruelty, and nor was it some form of directionless flailing, the lashing-out of a powerful person given slight. This is realpolitik, Gino. The war here in Area Six was won with our armies upon the field—and by making an example out of its insurgent belligerents, by taking all that they have ever loved and valued and putting it on display in grotesque pantomime for all the world to see, we win the peace that follows. That is the foundation of ruling, Gino, can't you see?"

This was a side of his friend that Gino did not recognise. He shook his head sadly—and he was sad, genuinely, but this wasn't something that he could be party to. "All I see is a field of carnage, and a pile of noblemen beaten to a pulp, Justine. I'm… I'm sorry."

She barked out a laugh, a twisted, mirthless thing. "You don't understand. Of course you don't. You knew not even the true face of the bloody-handed empire you've sworn yourself to until today—how could you? You did not stand where we stood, wither as they withered. You're just a boy, after all. Just a boy, who desires beyond all else to live his life as a commoner, who has remained blissfully ignorant to the layered dangers and depravities of the world into which he was born…"

Every forlorn word out of her lips carved a fresh pound of flesh out of his chest. Is this what it's like, I wonder, to lose a friend…? "Justine—!"

"That will be all, Lord Weinberg," interrupted the princess, the woman he once counted as a friend. "I don't believe that we have anything more to discuss. Good evening, cousin."

The impulse to defy her, to do anything he could not to leave what camaraderie they had shared here to wither upon the vine, seized him at once; and yet, she had dismissed him, in her capacity as a princess of the realm as well as His Majesty's adjudicator, so he could not heed that urge, no matter how he might have wished to. Something Justine—Her Highness had said in the throne room earlier that very day, or perhaps the previous, returned to him in a flash, and its taste was bitter upon his tongue. At the very least, it can't be said that I don't know my place…

"…Good evening, your highness," he said at last; he bowed, then, albeit stiffly, and with that final courtesy, he left her there, leaning against the balustrade, looking out into the darkness and the sea in the shadow, with whatever bond they might have once had, that casual ease that allowed them to transcend the disparity in station between them, now very firmly severed.

The white marble of the balustrade was cool beneath her fingers, though the furrows she had clawed into them in her ire ran deep and rough, scarring the stone, potentially forevermore. But then, perhaps that was just as well—it was hardly the most gruesome scar that this rebellion, and the part that she and her warhost had played in putting it down, would leave upon this land once they departed, stronger than they'd arrived. That thought, perhaps unsurprisingly, did little to return to her the peace that Milly's departure from her side had stolen from her, and in its absence, Gino's privileged ignorance buzzed around her head like a cloud of fruit-flies, unwelcome and bothersome in equal measure. She didn't feel much of anything, at least not about the end of whatever quasi-friendship they had shared—she'd lost her mother the moment that she had been born, and a sister not long after she had begun to find herself out of the ashes of her own ruin, and in the face of those, someone she liked well enough from her academy days such as Gino barely registered. But that he could be so innocent amazed her, and not at all in a good way.

She'd spoken truthfully. He hadn't been there, of course, though that applied to more than she'd let him know, or was ever likely to: Santa Anna's outburst in the throne room the day before (it was a good bit past midnight, her internal clock informed her) had not been unexpected, not by any measure. It had taken the 588th three full days to gather and shape the wood, and then plant into the ground all of the six hundred sixty-six wooden spikes they'd needed, and in that time, she'd taken it upon herself to go down to the cells, both to check up on the guards personally and take a surreptitious head count, and to speak to the families of the men she was fighting against. She'd had a faint degree of regret that what she had decided to do with them was necessary at the time, and had thought to provide words of comfort—but the very moment they'd learned that it was on account of their death camps more than anything that Justine had chosen to put them in particular to the sword, it was as if a switch had flipped. Fear, dread, and terror had turned to outrage in a flash, and suddenly even that last ember of remorse was snuffed out: it became clear that they detested the Sixes more keenly than they feared for their own lives, in that moment, and that they would labour for a day and a night in the wild to build another extermination town just so that even one more Six could die in it. It was a level of hatred that she knew would find purchase in their children, as their parents' hatred had found its purchase in them, as well, and it had scoured her clean of whatever final, lingering scrap of sympathy for one's fellow man had attached itself to them.

Upon the dawn of the fourth day, she'd taken their children from them—for they were yet guilty of no crime, only of absorbing the seed of atrocity—and she had made certain to force them all to watch, to bear witness to their children's pain and torment as they died.

They'd remembered their fear after that. They'd suffered and perished with it in their eyes.

Gino had spoken of deserving and innocents, and she'd seen the corpse-mounds, hollow men, and feral children all over again, apparitions that would linger within her, unable to be forgotten like all the rest, for as long as she lived. She did not know if what she had wrought here over the past few weeks, the street of impaled bodies, killed as they were in the ascending order of guilt, had balanced the scales—however could one hope to judge the weight of a genocide and its victims, she'd wondered—but she knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that nothing she had done, no work of suffering her hands could have wrought, could have tilted the scales in the opposite direction.

And thus had Gino's words amounted to precisely what she'd spoken of, that night around the fire:

The bleating of an ignorant, privileged sheep.

Privately, Justine rather hoped he was wise enough to treasure his ignorance: among the ranks of the Knights of the Round, it would not last for very long at all. There was a tragedy to that, perhaps—but then, what was this era in which they lived, if not a procession of atrocities and tragedies, all to usher in the very end of civilisation itself?

It would be a drop in the proverbial bucket—now that she had said what she did, had taken to his innocence with a hammer and made the first crack, Gino would be able to escape knowledge of the bloody legacy of Britannia no longer. And perhaps he would have the wherewithal to curse her for it—but she was certain that he would be better off, all the same.

At court, after all, the only place for the ignorant and the innocent was on the menu.

Another part of her mind made itself known, a new chamber rotating into the barrel, and she sighed. She turned from the sea, a sight made even more beautiful, strangely enough, with the absence of the moon, left only to reflect the glittering stars, and approached the two soldiers who guarded her—a pair from the original group that Suzaku and she had rescued from Pirapora before destroying it, having been out for long enough that they were beginning to shed identifying each other by the numbers tattooed onto their arms and create new names for themselves. In the bastard tongue that had become their ever-evolving lingua franca, she said, "Stand outside and guard the door, if you would. I'd like to be alone for a moment."

Neither objected; instead, they nodded, and moved to do as she had commanded of them.

Only once they had left the room, and the door closed behind them, did she sigh anew, and stare out into the darkness of the hall. "I had expected that you'd have left with Milly. Am I to take it that you, too, have aught to discuss with me?"

Silence swallowed her question, but she was not fooled. Her instincts nudged ather, and she lashed her hand up and snatched the cold metal out of the air, catching the shuriken at the distance of the bridge of her nose away from her eye.

At last: "How long has it been since you last felt fear?"

Justine cocked her head, perplexed. "Beg pardon?"

"Your heart rate is almost unchanged, your breathing remains steady, and your pupils haven't dilated any further than they already were," Sayoko's voice explained from out of the darkness. "Without so much as a momentary flicker of fear, you caught the shuriken I threw at you. And so I ask, when was the last time that you felt fear, your highness?"

She seriously considered the question, and what the answer might be, for a long, pregnant moment, determined as she was to give it the contemplation that it was due, and then spoke truthfully. "I couldn't say—I don't believe I ever have, not truly. Anxiety, insecurity, misery, aversion, yes—but fear itself? Not so much."

Sayoko sighed, and the almost inaudible sound of her feet hitting the floor—something that Justine knew for a fact to have been done for her benefit, since otherwise the sound of the evening waves in the bay would have made masking her footfalls child's play for a shinobi of Shinozaki Sayoko's calibre—heralded her approach. "That is what I was afraid you'd say…"

"…Is it really so terrible?" Justine found herself asking, before she could think better of it and try to filter herself more effectively. "To live without fear, I mean?"

"Courage and bravery are not the absence of fear, but the conquest of it," Sayoko admonished.

"Never have I claimed to possess either quality," Justine replied in tacit agreement, lifting a single shoulder into a resigned shrug. "It is of no real consequence to me either way, truly."

"No?" asked Sayoko, as she drew ever closer, her footfalls deliberately heavier than they had to be. She wanted Justine to be aware of how close she was getting, to be able to gauge her approach, though to what end, Justine did not know. "Men understand things like courage and bravery. They admire them, even; they proclaim them as virtues. But fear's complete absence is alien to them, and they know not what they're witnessing. You've experienced that yourself just now, haven't you?"

Justine could feel her hackles raising—she didn't understand the point that Sayoko was making, but she knew that the woman almost certainly disapproved of her, that Justine's display in the bath, of which she was still ashamed these weeks after the fact, had irreparably damaged the shinobi who was Milly's surrogate mother's perception of her, and so she felt it prudent to be on her guard, just in case. "The dispute between Gino and myself just now had nothing to do with fear, or of how my lack of it is perceived."

"It had nothing to do with it, truly? Then I suppose I simply must have imagined your use of fear as a weapon—that is what a deterrent constitutes definitionally, is it not?" Sayoko countered easily, as her silhouette became more and more apparent in the gloom. Then she stopped, and sighed. "Your highness, ever since the night of the full moon, you have been wound tight as a bow-string in full draw, and in that time, each word that I have spoken, not only in your direction, but your very presence, has caused you to tense as if in anticipation of a strike. I have seen its likeness in the young mistress's face before. Now, I would know why."

Offence shot through Justine's body like a jolt of lightning, chased swiftly by sorrow. "How truly must you detest me, that you would think to deceive me so openly. I know for a fact that for as much of a tyrant the late Lady Cassiopeia may have been, she never once herself laid so much as an unwelcome hand upon Milly, and nor did she allow it of any of the servants. She believed corporal punishment to be beneath her, and her station."

"Very well," Sayoko huffed in exasperation. "I suppose we can work with this…"

"And now you believe I must be led by the nose to your conclusion, unable to handle you stating your meaning openly…" Justine sighed herself—she felt a renewed sense of sympathy for the humble live wire, aware that she was more than likely being unreasonable, but nonetheless unable to keep the poison from rising in her gorge. If she did not spit it out right now, she knew, somehow, that it would drown her. "How little you must think of my intelligence, I suppose. The senseless, pretty-faced princess, so spoiled and so temperamental she , she must be managed, don't you know? Directed, handled with care, as if she was made of decorative glass and spun sugar…"

"My apologies—I handled that indelicately," Sayoko said, her tone almost tentative.

"Don't be. I'd rather you be honest than delicate," Justine sighed, hanging her head as she pushed the breath out of her. "You're right, you know. Every step along this path, I have had to be managed. I have seen the people I love, my friends, watch their words and mind their actions whenever I find myself in their presence. Even now, I knew what I was saying was…irrational, and frivolous, even as I said it, and yet I could not stop, I could not master the impulse to speak. You have my contrition for that, as little as that must mean. I can know for certain only on account of this brand that has been burned into my eye that my friends have never once considered doing what Gino has just done, that they remain somehow true and loyal, and remain by my side by choice and not obligation—and even still, that knowledge mystifies me."

"…All of that aside, we seem to have drifted rather far afield of the point," the shinobi seemed to concede. "Facial expressions. How proficient are you at reading those?"

Justine chuckled, and did her best to remember herself. She was almost certainly further entrenching in Sayoko's mind the negative perceptions that had been formed of her that night, but she had never much cared for deception except in instances of clear and unambiguous necessity anyways, and so she tried to push those thoughts from her mind. All of what she'd just done was wholly inappropriate, and unbecoming of her besides, so she took a fraction of a moment and did her very best to take each element that had given rise to her unseemly outburst, and force them back into their proper box. At last, she said, "I can tell a truth from a lie, and a feint from a genuine attack, if that's what you mean."

"Then tell me," Sayoko said, seeming to grow increasingly impatient with her. "What, exactly, was the expression upon the young Lord Weinberg's face as he spoke to you just now?"

"Shall I name them in order?" she asked, perhaps three-quarters of the way deathly serious. She'd seen enough facial expressions over the years, observed and deconstructed them, that her inability to forget allowed her to form patterns for herself to identify expressions and the emotions they corresponded to with a degree of accuracy she'd never seen the need to statistically analyse, but which she'd nonetheless ballpark in the vicinity of ninety-six to ninety-eight percent. The difficult part, of course, and the part where simple people-watching and rigorous observation and analysis would always fail her, was connecting a specific expression and the feeling that was attached to it to a root cause—that was, to say, she could discern with a level of ease some would find and have historically found to be deeply unsettling that a person was angry, but she'd still be left with glorified guesswork regarding what, exactly, that person might be angry about, or why that specific subject, even if she managed to suss it out, might draw their ire. But then, that wasn't the question her disapproving pseudo-mother-in-law had asked of her, so she felt confident enough to affect flippancy as she enumerated, "Let's see…there was discomfort, followed by recrimination, and then there was resignation mixed with resolution, a fair bit of desperation, befuddlement, horror… Sorrow, betrayal, no small amount of shock…et cetera, et cetera. He tends to wear his heart very firmly upon his sleeve, does Lord Weinberg."

"If you are truly that adept at determining his emotions from the lay of his face," Sayoko began, her tone soft, her speech slow, "then why did you respond in anger? You know him not to be as intelligent as you are. It seems a bit…petty."

"Well, I didn't want to disparage him," she sighed, carding a hand through her hair. "I don't believe it to be particularly conceited or arrogant of me to claim that it's quite rare that I have occasion to speak to anyone whose expanse of knowledge acquired and retained could be said to compare favourably to my own. But that is no excuse for unwarranted condescension on my part—it would have been rude to presume his ignorance. And so at first, I believed that he was simply being obtuse, or uncritical. I had no idea that he was trulyso ignorant. By the time he let that slip, the bridge between us was already burnt, for all intents and purposes. I suppose I thought it might be kinder to grant him the courtesy of a clean break. He's heard enough by now to ensure that he would be dragged into this mess regardless of what he chose to do with what I told him. It was the least I could do, then, to staunch the bleeding—but by then, it became clear that there was nothing more for us to discuss. He might still curse me for it—he will, if he has any sense—but it was not my wish to repay his goodwill by opening this pit beneath his feet."

"…Lord Jeremiah told me that you said that loyalty is a two-way street," Sayoko said quietly. "And yet I see only that you give it freely, but restrict how much of it may find its way back to you. You bear up under their burdens and yet are resentful that your friends would think to try to carry yours."

"Of course I am," Justine scoffed without rancour, levelling her gaze directly towards Sayoko in the shadows. "What is the point of me as a leader, I ask you, if not to aid them in shouldering their burdens? And if it is truly so beyond me to shoulder my own in addition, then do I truly have the right to lead them?"

"The martyr's thorny path is not one to be admired, your highness," Sayoko chided her, seeming almost saddened as she did so. How…strange.

"Yes, well, that's rather the point, now isn't it?" she rejoined. "I do not do this for admiration—that the history books of times yet to come might record me as anything more than the most vile of villains isn't a dream worth having, child's fancy that it is… No, I do this so that those who come after me might find such fortune as to live in a world that has no need for women like me to exist."

Silence followed—a very terse silence—and Justine understood, after a moment, the error she'd just made. She clarified: "Not that I mean to die, or to sacrifice myself recklessly or without need. My life is not my own to spend, and it hasn't been ever since Milly claimed it for herself…"

"…Clearly, this conversation demands more than the time we have to unravel," sighed Sayoko, and she finally closed the distance even further, to something that would be properly conversational beneath the glare of the electric lights if they'd been on. "The more pertinent fact of this situation is that you've created a significant advantage for yourself that could easily backfire if not handled deftly; I had intended to advise you on how best to utilise it, and perhaps dispel this silly notion you've decided upon, that the discomfort I displayed at what I inadvertently unearthed during the…bathing incident was because I thought less of you, in the process. But you have proven to be an…elaborate enigma, to say the least, your highness; so, for the time being, I would have us speak of more practical concerns…"

The cylinder clicked out and clicked in, another thought process claiming primacy, another chamber aligning with the barrel. Justine greeted the shift with relief, and she didn't bother to disguise it. She herself had no problem admitting that she was still quite perplexed as to the nuances of the conversation that they'd been having, how it had wandered and meandered and digressed from avenue to avenue without much at all in the way of rhyme or reason, and she was taken aback, not only by how it could be possible that the older woman could have been discomfited by aught else about that night, given how unflappable she had proven to be on numerous past occasions, but by how her disapproval of Justine as a suitable bride for Milly, whom she seemed to regard as her daughter in fact if not in blood or in name, was something she considered to be so outlandish a possibility that she could refer to it in such a dismissive fashion. She shoved another part of her mind, which insisted that that had, in fact, been a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw, given the circumstances, away from her, into a box and secreted it away from her current cognition, to be addressed at a later date, if at all (though she would be quite shocked if this subject truly didn't come up again); she chose instead to focus on the feeling of having solid ground beneath her feet once again.

Clumsy though she might have proven with regard to the muddled, tangled, seemingly cyclical subjects that Sayoko had deemed of sufficient import to spend all that time addressing initially, as far as Justine herself was concerned, the joint concepts of pragmatism and practicality were as good as her mother tongue.

"From how you have spoken in the past, I take it you have no issue with the manner in which I have chosen to exercise my authority here, then," Justine began as a preamble.

"I do not—not on the face of it, at least," Sayoko confirmed, and from the shape of her silhouette, it was clear to Justine that she had folded her arms across her chest as she spoke. "The point that I was getting at when I spoke of fear, and of how your lack of experience with it might prove problematic, is that the fact that you do not know fear as others do means that you would lack also the proper understanding of the dynamics of how it manifests in others, and in how it informs their actions. I mentioned Lord Weinberg not to harangue you, your highness, but to illustrate how, even with how you deciphered his facial expressions, you managed to miss to what extent his actions in seeking you out were driven by fear, whether Lord Weinberg himself realises it or not."

"You mean to imply that Gino is afraid of me, then," Justine asked, though her tone did not carry the interrogative lilt with it. "That my capacity for violence has frightened him."

"In the most oversimplified of terms, perhaps—an emotion like fear is rarely so clear-cut," she said, the shinobi gesturing with one hand as she spoke, even in the pitch darkness. "What frightened him was not your capacity for violence, but that he might have misread you, and the kind of woman you are. He did not, of course, and I won't entertain an argument on that front, not now and perhaps even not ever, but I suspect that he didn't fully grasp your…intricacies, let's call them."

"And how does this relate to impaling the families of the leaders of the rebellion?" Justine asked, as she kept an ear to her tone to ensure that only the genuine curiosity with which she asked the question could be heard in her voice. She drew a connection to prompt her. "You mentioned my use of fear as a weapon?"

"Yes, I did," Sayoko acknowledged. "And I will say again: I am shinobi. It would be a hypocrisy of the highest order to condemn you for it. My concern, your highness,is that, divested as you are of your own sense of fear, you are as a blacksmith who knows not her own strength, who cannot feel the weight of the hammer in her hand as she brings it down upon the blade. Tell me, how may one expect such an apprentice to bring her blows upon the unfinished blade with the consistency the craft requires? If she may not accurately sense how much force will soon be brought to bear upon the point of contact, how can she know that it is as much as the last blow, or that it will be as much as the blows that follow?"

"And so your concern is that my inability to experience fear has left me clumsy with handling it as a tool of my own, is that it?" Justine asked, feeling as if she at last understood at least the broad strokes of the point Sayoko meant to make. "That is…not at all unfounded, I must admit; and I must confess also that that wasn't a difficulty that I had foreseen…"

"Of course you didn't," Sayoko replied conciliatorily. "Your highness, even the greatest of leaders possess blind spots. The experiential knowledge of the nature of fear just happens to be yours. It's a daunting one, I will grant you—more so than most, even—but not at all insurmountable."

"I'll thank you to notice that while I agreed that I resented needing to prevail upon the aid of others, I didn't say that I refused to do so, nor that I was ungrateful for the aid they offered," Justine sighed, rolling her shoulders with the motion of it. "I am quite aware of the fact that I have limitations and must look to my friends to handle what I cannot. It doesn't mean that I have to like it…"

"Well, I can tell you that if you don't capitalise upon the statement that you made out there, then you have left the door open for your opponents among the nobility to define it for you," Sayoko assessed. "That would mean that those highborn whose perceived invulnerability, save before the Holy Britannian Emperor himself, you have exposed for a lie will be hard at work attempting to paint you as a mad dog, who must be put down with all haste lest you burn all the world in your furor. The fear will be such that your sister will need to distance herself from you in public, the parents of your friends will band together to attempt to pull them from out of your perceived sphere of influence, that the young mistress's endeavours will grind to a halt and others will take the opportunity to step up their attempts to sabotage her efforts…"

"In other words, if I don't control the narrative, I'll be outmanoeuvred," Justine realised grimly.

"At least for some time yet, yes," Sayoko affirmed, just as severely.

"Gods below…" Justine swore bitterly. She may not have possessed Juliette's talent for intrigue and courtly plotting, but neither was she Cornelia—she understood well enough the rules of that which Juliette and Friede both called 'the Game of Shadows', enough to understand the enormity of the stakes of failure. For all her lecturing to Gino about winning the peace, she'd nearly managed to blunder blindly into the very same folly that had proved the ruin of so many young, ambitious generals over the millennia, of which there was perhaps no more famous an example than that of Hannibal Barca himself. In this, at least, she'd hoped to break the mould—and I still might, she realised in a flash. After all, Hannibal's doom wasn't sealed until he closed his ears to Maharbal's counsel after his victory at Cannae. Perhaps it was hubris and pride that caused him not to hear of it, to wish that his ultimate victory might be all his own. Perhaps the true fault is not in not knowing how to use a victory that you have gained after all, but rather in not knowing how to listen when the advice of others counsels you how you may…

Hubris and pride were Hannibal's unmaking. And Hells be thanked that I am possessed of neither.

With this sudden epiphany bringing calm as swiftly as the agitation which had endeavoured to seize her, Justine asked of Sayoko, "What is it, then, that you recommend that I do here?"

"Well, first of all, I'd advise you to go and get ready to meet your admirer," said Sayoko, her tone now seeming…teasing, strangely enough? Justine…wasn't entirely sure how to handle that, coming from a woman whom, until recently, she'd thought disdained her and didn't think of her as good enough for Milly.

"I'm afraid I…don't exactly catch your meaning," she said, as she decided not to waste energy in an attempt to scrape the guarded element out of her tone.

"I got a report relayed to me from the Hyūga Clan, Zero Cell, a little while ago," Sayoko elaborated. "Apparently, Diethard Ried of Hi-TV fame has abandoned his posting among Princess Cornelia's First Euro Task Force in Madrid, and boarded an aircraft in what was described in the report as an 'awful hurry,' his production crew in tow. The shinobi who was at the scene, for all that she was rather far afield of her home outpost, was nonetheless able to slip a tracking beacon onto the landing gear of the aircraft in question, and its destination has been narrowed down to here."

"But Madrid is half a day away from here even by air," Justine observed, perplexed though she was. What is it that might have him coming here, if not…? "Wait. How much footage did that journalist who got embedded into the suppression force get?"

"Enough to send the good Mr. Ried onto a commandeered aircraft, more than likely snubbing the future Chief General of the Imperial Army in the process, in a fashion that was described by another of our agents as 'like a man possessed,'" Sayoko shrugged, almost as if she found the situation humorous… "It's a good thing that the solution to our little problem is about to drop right into your lap, isn't it?"

"And I take it you're just waiting for a go-ahead from me, to go and light the settlement up like the Royal Fireworks Festival's being hosted here, in the interest of guiding Mr. Ried's shuttle safely towards its destination?" Justine asked, though it was admittedly quite a bit more conjecture than question.

"By your leave," Sayoko replied with an almost jaunty nod.

"…I suppose I can't very well try to express gratitude for having such competent subordinates, and then complain when they take the initiative without sounding a bit disingenuous, can I?" Justine sighed, her lips quirking upwards into a fondly exasperated smile she didn't bother to try to hide.

"That would be a bit of a strange thing for you to do, yes," the shinobi agreed without so much as a hint of shame or remorse. "Tends to send mixed messages, and all that…"

Diethard Ried had been ten years old when he'd decided that he wanted to make history.

He hadn't been the most vigorous of children back then. He'd been scrawny and thin, a late bloomer and an easy target for the other children, back in his hometown. Carl Coreander's Cabinet of Curiosities, an antique bookstore snuck away two or three doors down from the town square, was where he spent most of his time, the only place that wasn't the house he shared with his widowed father where he could find some measure of reprieve from the predations of the other children his age, who were, at the time, probably twice his height and weight, or so it had seemed back then. The old man who ran the shop, Carl Coreander, was a consummate curmudgeon, and in the early days of them knowing each other, he'd consistently attempted to grouch the young Ried boy out of his shop, deriding every fault about the boy that he thought he could find, from his diligence to his education; but Diethard had come prepared after the first few attempts to hide out, and challenged the shopkeeper with the sort of things he read in some of his mother's old books, kept on a high shelf in the house, and that had shut the old man up.

Over the next few occasions, that silence had warmed to a begrudging respect, which had eventually culminated into an admission that the old man was glad for the company. And then the old man had filled the boy's mind with letters—not just characters from Chaucer or verse from Marlowe and Shakespeare, but the words of Herodotus and Livy, and then of Malory and Taliesin the Bard, even the historians of the Han Dynasty, who had recorded the deeds of the first emperor of China, thousands of years ago. Of course, he'd eventually learned that the old man had given him accounts that mythologised the past just as much as they had recounted it, considering the embellishments a harmless necessity to keep a young boy's attention, and to occupy his imagination in so doing.

While the children his age were playacting as regulars in the field, Diethard's fascination had been arrested with the grandeur of Xerxes the Great's five million men, a warhost so incredibly and impossibly massive that when they stopped to drink, it was said that they drank rivers dry. He had become enamoured with such tales from the earliest onset of his exposure to them, and he devoured them at a pace that shocked even Mr. Coreander himself. In the histories of the Chinese dynasties he had read, it wasn't unusual in the slightest for armies of millions to clash and slaughter each other, headed by powerful tyrants squabbling and feuding over a perceived slight—and even when he eventually learned that many of these accounts of times past were most likely extremely embellished, he'd come to love them for the embellishment and the fantasy as well as the truth that might lay hidden, buried beneath layers of dense minutiae.

Those children who had played at soldiering eventually signed up, either to a lord's retinue or to the Imperial Army itself, and he knew personally that less than a handful of them still lived, while the rest had had to be buried on some foreign field, likely in a mass grave. Diethard, on the other hand, had left his town behind, and gone to study journalism while working a dead-end job in the Imperial Archives. Only once in all the time since then had he returned to the place he spent his childhood—not for his father's funeral, but for the old man who had indulged and befriended him. Only once he'd gotten there for the funeral, for he'd loved the old man more than he had his own father, had he been told that he was the sole beneficiary to Mr. Coreander's will—the old man had truly had had no one else in the world—and even to this very day, every last one of the books Mr. Coreander hadn't promised or sold before his death now lined the shelves of Diethard's own home, and made it into the boxes safe and sound every time he moved.

When he'd entered the halls of King's College on merit scholarship to study history and journalism, he'd been enamoured with a history composed of individual moments—flash points, the sorts of events that people wrote anecdotes and tall tales about, asked each other 'where were you when…', or even saw fit to record on canvas, an almost completely anonymous artist's most famous, and grisly, work. Even through a half-decade of rigorous study, he'd still thought of Agrippina's final vengeance, of the moment when the Empress of the Night, a famous and influential courtesan and rumoured bastard of the line of von Britannia, the Imperial Family, had ascended the steps to claim the vacant Chimeric Throne, naming herself Theodora nox Britannia, the Twenty-Second Holy Britannian Empress, and then setting into motion the foundation of the institution of the Imperial Consortium, so that the throne of Britannia might never again risk going on without claimants, and of half a hundred different moments whose ripple effects throughout history had brought into being the fundamental social axioms of what he knew as 'modern day.' The prospect of being there for his own moment, to capture and immortalise a grand event, to be the Herodotus of the modern day, to be there, to witness such a conjunction of factors with his own eyes, to experience it as the first ripples began to expand to echo across all the time to come… That was what had driven him towards journalism, in the end, and away from adding to the echoing of thousands of voices on a subject a thousand years buried.

The reality of journalism once he entered the field was rather…less romantic than he had hoped for it to be, filled with dull mundanities and the aggrandising of the egos of insecure, insignificant blue-bloods whose historical impact would lose out to a stone skipped across a pond. If he was honest with himself, he had allowed himself to become jaded and disenchanted, and it was only in his very darkest moments, when he took his own life into his hands and wondered if it was worthwhile to continue, if he would ever get to achieve the dream that had kept him going through even the worst patches of his childhood, that had saved him from falling to pieces as the pall-bearers lowered the only true friend he'd ever had into the ground for the final time, that made him more than just a dead man walking, more than just an opium-induced illusion of an addled mind, a fond shadow on a filthy wall that could have been anything at all. He'd nearly let that dream slip from his fingers, putting on masks when he could and reducing himself to ruin when he couldn't, and the energy fled his body, leaving him scraped-out and raw—and above all else, exhausted.

And yet, for as close as Diethard Ried always came to forgetting that dream, to removing himself from this mortal coil alongside it, it remained, as always it had been, his fondest dream, his raison d'être.

Which was why he couldn't stomach someone else achieving it first!

Really, he thought to himself, what would a philistine like Clarisse Moulinier know about 'dreams' or 'ambitions'? What is she other than a two-bit presenter who treats this like a job?! Where is her passion, her commitment?! This is a vocation, a calling! It's a godsdamned way of life! So how dare she be there, fulfilling my dream, while I'm stuck halfway around the world watching primped-up blue-bloods taking potshots at each other…!

Most galling of all was the fact that a moment had come. He'd nearly been sick with envy as he saw the road of impaled corpses on the television screen, overcome with resentment when his colleague reacted with horror and disgust instead of the amazement and wonder that sight deserved—nay, demanded—out of any who might think to record its existence. And even once they were on the shuttle, he'd nearly throttled his assistant when he had made the (in retrospect, probably quite reasonable) suggestion that Diethard get some rest while a hack like Moulinier got to film the final moments of the Peninsular Rebellion!

But regardless of whomever had stolen his thunder—temporarily so, if he had anything to say about it—every moment that they spent in the air, and everything that Diethard had witnessed while in transit to Area Six, had him more and more certain: certain that he'd made the right decision to abandon his post, especially now that the war in Spain was more or less over anyways, that he'd been correct to flip the coin, and take a chance, what felt like the gamble of the ages, on whether he'd found his Hel-Queen Agrippina, his Empress Theodora, in Justine vi Britannia.

They'd known they were coming. How, Diethard neither knew nor cared; he was far more interested in being grateful for the extra lights to shepherd his shuttle in, so that he wouldn't need to stop into another adjacent city—so that he wouldn't be forced to wait for even a moment longer than he needed to in order to have that first meeting with the young princess, only just a woman grown, who had so thoroughly captured his fascination, whose performance made him feel like a giddy child, nose in a book and reading about the grisly spectacle of the March of the Dead Men for the first time all over again.

Because of these lights, he'd been able to have his shuttle land without incident, and when they'd disembarked, his crew and himself, the landing zone had been hemmed in by soldiers in strange black suits of full-body combat armour, unlike the dull grey mass-production body armour of Britannian regulars, which focused all of its protection on what lay above the waist instead of beneath it; and standing at the head of that armed and grimly silent escort was a statuesque, dark-skinned Britannian woman—around one hundred eighty centimetres tall, Diethard would have guessed, give or take no more than two in either direction—with long silver hair that was pinned up in a bun, dressed in a more-or-less nondescript black uniform. The sharp beauty of her features spoke to some level of highborn lineage even if her unique hair colour hadn't already, and as if to confirm it, the woman favoured him with a cordial smile as soon as they came into each other's view, her fine brows betraying not a hint of any sort of tension whatsoever, and said, "Welcome to the newly-pacified Area Six, Mr. Ried. I'm Dame Villetta Nu, vassal and retainer to Her Royal Highness Princess Justine vi Britannia."

"So, my coming was expected," Diethard replied as calmly and charmingly as he could, keeping his television persona very tightly sutured to his face even as his body felt like it was coiling and twisting upon itself with the urge to vibrate with excitement.

"It was anticipated," she corrected, the distinction small, but important. But of course, Diethard had not survived for this long in his profession without learning how to pick up on the subtle connotation-reliant double-language that was always at play whenever the nobility chose their words with care—and they often did, at least amongst those of similar standing, for speaking so frankly and in explicit terms was often seen as a sign of disdain, that they did not warrant the consideration of a person of status. It was an exhausting game, if only because the gains it achieved could never be anything but marginal, at least ever since the end of the Emblem of Blood, but Diethard knew how to play it. The princess's deeds were not done with fame or fortune in mind, the hidden message said—and though it was perhaps not uncommon for that claim to be given out, the sincerity his well-honed 'bullshit detection' heard in Dame Villetta's tone very much was.

A retainer was the position of a satellite, to be the embodiment of their liege's interests, and privy to even their darkest secrets. If a retainer claimed a thing truthfully, then that thing would be true of the one to whom they were sworn, as well, and that fascinated Diethard.

There were many qualities one might expect from a member of the Imperial Family, and they ran a rather broad gamut as a rule. Humility, however, did not number amongst them; and in his shock, he almost missed what the Fourth Princess's retainer said next. "Her Highness awaits you in the third floor west wing parlour. I was bidden to escort you there. The soldiers of the 588th will, of course, be only too happy to see that your crew and their equipment are likewise well-settled, worry not."

The chance to have a semi-private meeting with the woman he had flown nearly halfway around the world for was too alluring for Diethard to deny himself the opportunity, even if it wouldn't have been in extraordinarily poor taste for him to do so (propriety was so often little more than a side-benefit to him, and not for the first time, he supposed that was the benefit of being born of common stock, that the ruling class expected so little of them that they could afford, in certain situations, to forgo propriety entirely); he nodded as swiftly as he dared, so as not to come across as so enthusiastic as to be unseemly, or worse, suspicious. "I would be honoured, my lady."

Dame Villetta nodded once, very placid and perfunctory, and turned on her heel, waving him forth. He followed her from the landing zone and into the complex that was once Area Six's government bureau, and might well be again, in time, and as he dogged her steps through carpeted corridors panelled in woods both bright and dark, and painted any number of vivid hues worthy of pastels or watercolours, through halls replete with lavish, overly-ornate decoration and marble floors, he began to wonder to himself:

What manner of princess would she prove to be?

There were, it could perhaps be said, as many varied ways to be a princess of the realm as there had historically been princesses of the realm, but generally speaking, Diethard had long since thought in private, that there were two broad categories within which these variations existed. The first of these was something that he'd termed the 'classical patrician', an archetype dating back to before the Humiliation—gentle, kind, and soft-spoken, delicate and beautiful, clever and intelligent but not loudly so, a flower in perhaps every sense of the term—and variations upon this theme that had made its way to the Empire's new Homeland from the abandonment of their old had prevailed, right up until the rise of Theodora. Her third-born son and eventual successor, Horatio rex Britannia (Twenty-Eighth Holy Britannian Emperor—the Year of Five Emperors was truly one for the history books), far from cowering in her shadow, had iterated upon his illustrious mother's institution of the Imperial Consortium and subsequent social reforms in his successful quest to cement into yew-law the seminal statute of gender equality, and in the years since, the second category had emerged:

The 'warrior-princess', he'd called it—as fierce and vicious as she was beautiful.

In that, he possessed the answer in the simplest and most widely-applicable of possible terms—that she fell into the archetype of the warrior-princess was obvious—but of course, his task as a journalist in a situation such as this one was, as he saw it, to take that vast and nebulous category and narrow it down, and to add intricate and perhaps even intimate detail to the portrait of the woman, of which he possessed only broad strokes at the moment.

The parlour to which Dame Villetta escorted him was revealed to be a large and homely space, quite a bit more comfortable than any old conference room might have been, with a crimson rug trimmed in gold covering the hard sanded-smooth oak of the floor, walls that had once been whitewashed but since subsided to a warmer ivory shade, and sofas and settees upholstered with leather that Diethard, as an educated guess, determined to have been sourced from cattle-hides. Said furniture was arranged in such a fashion that neither seat put the prospective occupants' backs to the door, which was strikingly uncommon in Britannian parlours, and the electric lights above the chamber hung as simple-looking lanterns from the ceiling, instead of adopting the pretence of attempting to replicate all the pageantry of grandiose chandeliers. And, as he was himself, he couldn't help but notice another set of doors at the opposite end of the chamber—a second entrance, he surmised.

Dame Villetta beckoned him into the space, and he went, taking up the settee on one side of the low oaken table between it and the armchair, where a tea service would be laid from the servants' hands for the sake of the occupants' refreshments.

But of course, there was unlikely to be tea here, not so late at night.

"Her Highness will be joining us shortly," Dame Villetta said as soon as she saw that he was settled. Then, she stepped back and leaned herself up against the wall, on the left side of the single armchair that now sat across the low table from him. That was…a perplexing choice—the left was a position that, to the best of Diethard's knowledge, was more or less reserved for a Knight of Honour, on account of some arcane bit of symbolism about left hands and off-hands and blind spots and shields (the nobility was quite fond of such layered meanings, to the point where whenever two blue-bloods traded barbs, there was much less in the way of overt insult, and so that space was filled in its entirety by increasingly esoteric processes of insult-through-implication and insult-through-allusion…), and so for Dame Villetta's claim of her post as the Fourth Princess's retainer and the spot she chose to stand to both be true, Princess Justine would have to be left-handed…

Sometimes he loathed the fact that he'd stuffed his head so full of the nonsense and pageantry those of high birth lived and died by instead of yet more histories, but he couldn't deny that knowing all of it did prove useful often enough in figuring out what was going on before his eyes that he couldn't manage to get away from the blatant utility of having done so.

Before he could get any further caught up in his own thoughts, the slight creaking of an improperly oiled door-hinge brought his attention snapping back to the present. Dame Villetta had closed the door that they'd entered through, and the creaking hadn't come from there, which could only have meant—

The clack rang out like a thunder-clap.

She was shorter than she'd seemed on screen, he noticed—not by much, of course, being as she was on the lower end of average in terms of height—but that was well, for it meant that her titanic stature as she delivered her judgement, and ordered the rebel nobles beaten to death with the butts of her soldiers' rifles, was the product of her gravitas alone. Indeed, even at such a height, even now, Diethard could not help but find her incredibly imposing, and her presence seemed to fill the room to the point where even he, a veteran of the silver screen who was renowned for his unflappable affect, met quite a bit of difficulty in his attempt not to feel as if it had swallowed him whole. Her beauty struck him across the face once his mind registered it, and he was taken aback by just how little justice Moulinier's camera and crew had done her. There was a magnetism to the sight of her—not erotic, not necessarily, but perhaps agapic—to the slope of her jaw, and how the ends of her raven locks brushed against it; to the seemingly-natural purse of her full, haughty lips, painted a deep, purple shape, very nearly black like the skin of a plum, and how they could express so much while concealing so much more; to the shape of her nose, artfully slender and straight, neither especially prominent nor particularly minute; to how her high, sculpted cheekbones complemented the sharp shape of her large, upturned eyes, which were accentuated further with thick lashes, the contours of eyeliner, and the dark, shrouding shadows of black eye-stain, making the unmasked intensity of her amethyst gaze that much more prominent; to the shocking, almost unnaturally perfect symmetry of her face, and to the commanding strength of her dark eyebrows, which was obvious no matter how much of the left side of her face her parted hair shrouded in a curtain of wavy, almost iridescent black, the colour of a raven's feathers.

It seemed almost crass of him, to drag his eyes down past the figured, ruby-studded silver collar at the base of her fluted throat, across the expanse of her slender frame that was nonetheless gifted, so that he might better take in, from a first-hand perspective and not the inexpert, anodyne angle of a passionless hack of a cameraman: the shimmering silk of her blouse, the sturdy boiled leather of her overbust corset, the fine, supple buckskin of her breeches, the masterfully-cobbled hide of her knee-high heeled boots, the undefinable strangeness that lingered about the material of her high-collared and armoured long coat, which fell to just below the curve of her shockingly toned and well-figured calves, and the complete blank he was drawing in the case of her form-fitting gloves. All of it was black, of course, but the contrast in textures gave it volume in a way that simply alternating shades would not have managed, and to say that she wore it all well was to deride her for how far short of the truth that statement might have fallen. She moved as if it was a second skin, with a lethal, almost preternatural grace, for all that the sound of her boots upon the hard floor would have caused the hall of a country chapelto echo like a cathedral, and when her gaze snapped to him, he got the distinct impression that she was wondering exactly what to make of him. It was as if she peered past the concealing layers of fabric and hair, of flesh and blood and bone, to gaze upon the truth of him; it was the sensation one might attach to feeling another tread upon their grave, and it was such a novel concept to him,that a mere look should affect him so, unsettle him so, that if anything, it enthralled him even further.

I will make you great, he might have thought, but for that it felt sacrilegious to even consider.

I will witness your greatness, he thought instead, and I will make sure that others know of it…

"Diethard Ried, I presume," she pronounced, the melodic and full-bodied mezzo-soprano register of her voice every bit as crisp and as clear as a winter morning, every nuance of her diction and elocution both flawless and dizzyingly immaculate. Her mind seemingly made up, the woman who could only have been Justine vi Britannia stepped ever-closer, dragging a single tapering, elegant finger upon the rim of the back of the armchair that had been reserved for her use.

"You presume correctly, your highness," Diethard replied with a respectful nod, shocking himself with the steadiness of his voice in the process.

"You have certainly come a long way," she remarked, her lips flashing into an indecipherable smirk. "It is, after all, a great distance between here and Madrid, even as the crow flies. I would know why."

The question, and the mildness of the tone with which it was uttered, dumbfounded him; was it not obvious why he might be here? Why he might travel all this way for the sake of a childhood dream he had no intention of forgetting, for the sake of his life's purpose, made flesh? But of course, the Fourth Princess did not know any of this, did not know who he was, or what drove him onwards, to face another day, even when all other earthly matters seemed so trivial and inconsequential. It was a shock, cold water to the face, and though he did not forget how what he had seen in Princess Justine affected him, it no longer had him quite so tightly spellbound, at the very least. He spared a moment to think: If this was how it felt to stand in the presence of Princess Agrippina, no wonder her men managed to buck the yoke of Death Itself to follow her into battle, one final time…

"Forgive me, your highness," he confessed instead. "I saw what became of the Peninsular Rebellion and its leaders on the television, and I felt…compelled to come here to see you, and to offer my aid. It's bad practice for royalty to leave the matter of their public relations in the hands of unknowns, particularly those who have already been…otherwise assigned…"

"The Peninsular Rebellion? Is that what they're calling it now? How very quaint," said the princess, as she at last rounded the armchair and deigned to sit upon it; that simple act seemed to alter the armchair into a throne, in essence if not in design. She sighed heavily, shaking her head—her youth was at once very much evident, but, strangely enough, it did not seem to diminish her even slightly. "Nevertheless, I can say that you are not mistaken. Yet, were you yourself not alternatively assigned?"

That was a point he was prepared for. Why leave Princess Cornelia's side for that of her younger, greener sister? The evidence, of course, would be as easy to obtain as it would be to gesture broadly to the road of impaled bodies she'd made, but his motives were far beyond such base sensationalism, and it would do him no favours for him to present her with proof that he might be amongst the worst scoundrels to have claimed their origins in his profession. No, he sensed that going with something more practical might serve him best here. "I've done a lot of good work for the company over the years I've worked for them—I don't believe it's conceited of me to claim as much—and so I've earned a degree of leeway regarding what I do and don't cover. I signed on with Princess Cornelia's army to witness and report upon the war, not to try to document the process of Britannian forces pulling back to Gibraltar ahead of peace negotiations. That is, to say, if I tell the people at the studio that I want to enter your service as a liaison to the media, I've made the right friends over the years to be able to do that. I have that pull."

Princess Justine went quiet for a few moments, her gemstone eyes flicking this way and that as she contemplated him in the yawning void of the silence. At last, she let out a mirthless chuckle, and leaned herself back in her armchair, crossing her legs in the process. "You have come to me at a most auspicious time, Mr. Ried, if you are truly seeking to enter my service. As it happens, I've found myself in a…delicate situation, shall we say, the proper resolution of which would require the services of a man with the skill set you seem to bring to the table."

He puzzled over that scrap of information for a bit—he'd been at this long enough that he thought that he knew what she was getting at. Just to confirm, he posited, "I take it there's some concern about how such a…bold move, such as the judgements you passed upon the rebel leaders' families, would get twisted back upon you in court? So you need a man like me to help you get ahead of it, control the narrative."

Princess Justine's single visible brow jolted halfway towards her hairline. "My, my, you are sharp… Yes, I'll need you to handle this for me, spin this to my advantage. I'm not fond of deception, but I am even less fond of allowing personal scruples like that to obstruct such actions should they become necessary. It's safe to say, I should think, that, in this case, it very much has."

"The truth is quite a variable thing in the halls of the Imperial Court, your highness," said Diethard. "Telling them a truth they do not wish to hear will only result in them twisting it into a lie anyways."

"Believe me, I'm well-aware," Princess Justine scoffed, though the sound was very far from hostile. "You may think of this as an assessment, if you must. Spin the fact and manner of the traitors' deaths to my advantage before we return to Pendragon, and if you have successfully done so by that time, whether you have accomplished it with my cooperation or not, then I will take you fully into my service."

Diethard's chest leapt halfway into his throat. She was giving him a chance to prove himself—to tell her that all his talent as a journalist and broadcaster was not solely on account of the efforts of others, with a bit of action, instead of empty words and vague promises. This was his big break—his dream was finally within reach! At long last, he stood upon the cusp of it. The imperative came upon him, then:

He would not fail. Not here.

"You may count on me, your highness," he said with a reverent half-bow that very nearly scraped up against the wooden surface of the low table—it was the best that he could do, given the fact that he was still seated. "Give me three days."

"You'll have your three days, aye—and more besides, with any luck, and if you are truly as you say you are, Mr. Ried," Princess Justine promised him, her tone firm. "Do whatever you must to ensure that you are successful, though I would quite strongly request that you endeavour to do so within reason."

"As you say, your highness," Diethard replied, shifting in his chair, eager to get to work—eager to vindicate his image, to prove himself, like he was a green boy of nineteen and not a man of nearly thirty. It was invigorating, this energy, and he found that he wanted more of it. But that all would come in time. "By your leave, then?"

"Indeed. We shall speak further on specifics and other such things come the morrow," said Princess Justine speculatively. Then, nodding once and sharply as though she'd just decided upon something, she leaned forth in her chair and looked at him once again. "And though it is, admittedly, only on a probationary basis at the moment…I bid you all the same: welcome aboard the great ship vi Britannia, Diethard Ried."