The mists shuddered in the wake of her arrival.

She returned garnished in the dripping black shadow of her servant cloaked over her shoulders, but the instant Lord Dhracia set foot in the misty cavern, Senka had leaped away and returned to the shelter of dark corners. The Lord merely shrugged her absence off like a coat. She carved a path righteously toward the cascade, ignoring what peering eyes might behold her. Blood remained on her hand, her fingers where she had handled the remains of Jupiter, on her cheek, oozing in a soiled mess from her breast and thigh. It was no smear against perfection--merely an embellishment, these streaks, these promises of black.

At the edge of the lagoon, Lord Dhracia fumed. She'd gotten what she came here for, and now she was back to claim dues from those who had let her nest degrade so badly. Those dues were far higher now that she realized to what extent, exactly, things had degraded.

Her mere presence burned, summoning the attention of the bird and the little lion.

Nemean had not gone far; she had retreated to the cool vents and hid, staying within the chilled reaches of Pisces. But as Lord Dhracia returned, she slowly descended back toward the lagoon--and so too did Tenzin, gracefully gliding down from his own perch to land near the lagoon.

If She had returned, then it was to collect from him a payment. As before, he bowed to Her arrival and then simply waited: for death, for pain, for eternal suffering? He didn't know yet.

Nemean hovered nearby, waiting tentatively, unable to ready herself to flee. If Lord Dhracia wanted them here, then here is where they would be.

They came to her like flies to pollen on the lip of a pitcher plant. Lord Dhracia was otherwise unmoved, poised at the edge of the lagoon, those eyes observing from beneath pensive lashes. Despite the carnage so boldly exclaimed on her hands, the snarl of bare flesh on her wounded surface, she remained as stark as ever. No expression passed while she watched the two Masters reveal themselves. Nor would it in the few seconds that followed.

“Tenzin,” she commanded icily, and raised her fingers to beckon him. He would find it irresistible, her chaos blaring and magnetized to his, painstakingly organized. Her fingers were arched--her hand waiting until the phoenix came within reach. And with her other hand, she held one of the many prizes she had reaped from Polaris: the arrow, one of those still intact, with the heart throbbing and dribbling and its fletching sparking with electricity. “It would appear that at least one of your Masters has defected. An unpleasant surprise, I'm sure you can imagine, but I've saved you the trouble of removing her,” Lord Dhracia said briskly, voice fed by a heated undercurrent.

She held the arrow to the phoenix, demonstrating the next object of her concern. The static-sparking feather.

“This concerns me,” Lord Dhracia added cuttingly. There was no promised worry; only foreboding displeasure. “Do tell me, where is our friend, Tamulus?”

And was the situation down here far worse than they let on? It was already bad enough; but how many Masters have become wasted in their stagnancy? How many killed at the hands of each other? And why was she not immediately informed of what she might have been stepping into?

Her anger boiled on, unseen, but palpable in the air.

His name crushed him, a force from deep within his own magical well that squeezed and scratched. Tenzin drew closer as she Demanded him to. He was silent as She spoke, listening, his eyes wavering on the arrow; he could not ignore the marring of Her features, but he also would dare not mention it. Whose blood had it been? He shifted on his splayed feet as She spoke more, his heart kicking at the sight of the sparking feather. Tamulus... Tenzin had not seen him since the rebellion.

His beak parted to speak, daring to cut the air with his inferior, sullied voice. "Tamulus escaped," he answered honestly. He could not lie to Her. "There was an uprising—hm, some five thousand years ago. Unfortunately some of us died, and we could not reach out. There was a surge of magic recently—presumably you may have seen it already, the new Spire. We have only been awake for only five years now, and it was my understanding that Astraea did reach out to you after that, with the researcher, Bartos."

The deep ice of his eyes hardened on the arrow. "Jupiter had also escaped with Tamulus, but returned to research the new Spire. She wanted to destroy it." But she had been destroyed, it seemed. He bid her farewell in his thoughts.

Their moment of confluence was imminent--her fingers outstretched for the cold, downy tufts of blue under his chin, his hesitation, which she could feel through magic alone--connected in the way that all things plagued with His magic were. She felt him, silky vanes on her fingertips, and for a moment the Lord was trapped in the fork of a divergent path. But even if these discrepancies were becoming more common, she knew which path she was always, eternally inclined to select. It had to be anger.

She listened, unmoving, as Tenzin delivered the prognosis that she had already known. With each word her eyes hardened further, and with each name her brain ticked again. She recalled the conversation with Astraea. She recalled the cat, too. Lord Dhracia found him clever, but in the end he was of no use to her. Whether that was a good thing was his to decide.

After he spoke of Jupiter's intentions to destroy the spire, she ensnared the down beneath his chin and seduced him closer, violently and indomitably. “Destroy it?” At least that aspect of Jupiter's recreation here had lingered. At least she'd held onto the right hatred. “I find it hard to believe she'd favor the old one over the new.” Some of them were always destined to rebel. It was a seed sewn among them long ago, and it would reliably grow over and over again, in every Coil, in every iteration. It was unfortunate that Jupiter was too fucking stupid to realize the necessity of the things Lord Dhracia orchestrated from the shadows, but not unfortunate enough for Lord Dhracia to grieve it. Or even care.

“I didn't ask you to tell me something I already knew,” Lord Dhracia continued, tilting her head as she peered down her nose at the phoenix, who, despite the advantage of his glorious size, still would be made to seem so small before her. “And I shouldn't have to advise you on what I expected to be told.”

Tamulus should have returned.

Tamulus should have never fucked off in the first place.

Now she had to play firefighter and pull him out of the burning building he was hiding in on the surface.

Wrath was the searing organ inside her chest that pinched her lips. It was another trickle of oil oozing from the gouges in her flesh. She did not have the patience for this. Lord Dhracia swallowed it down with the nuance of fresh composure, because she was always composed, even when her nerves were electric, Lord Dhracia was not an easy thing to crack, and she gave the bird a controlled smile instead.

“But perhaps,” she said finally, “I've been working you too hard. Such details lose traction on a slippery mind.”

Classically svelte and unaffected, her voice lifted to stroke the side of the phoenix's majestic crown; but if he were to listen close enough, which she knew he would, he would find her nails vying for his scalp.

“I think you're overdue for a break, hm?”

She gripped the arrow tighter. She could feel Tamulus' recalcitrant static desperately biting at her fingers. It coursed through her heart, through her abdomen, her arms and legs, daring to congeal on the tip of her tongue; this anger she harbored for him. For being so careless. For making this harder than it had to be. This anger for her Masters who did not do what they were told to do. Anger for everyone who thought they could break away from her schemes as if the roles they played lost their value somewhere along the way. Five million years could not forgive a single moment of selfish disregard.

Gritting her teeth was not enough to keep it at bay. It broke loose on the eve of her memories of that night--the birth of the Ninth Coil--that he would become so neglectful.

Something snapped.

The singularity of Lord Dhracia became a flare of zealous fury, because they should know, they should all know, but they couldn't, but they should; if only they knew what she was trying to accomplish here in the basement of her House of Chaos. She erupted, sinking the arrowhead into the jugular of the bird that she gripped in her fingers. She squeezed with one hand and stabbed and wrenched back and stabbed again, succumbing to her carnivorous rage that, in a split second, would proffer just a whisper of Lord Dhracia's raw interior to any unfortunate enough to see it. They would see how that interior was so glossy and red and only red, and bleeding and enraged and impatient and furious; they all thought they could just exist while she toiled day after day after day after day after day--

But in the End, she wasn't doing any of this for them, anyway.

Lord Dhracia unleashed her blows with relentless vigor until she felt the phoenix slumping in her grip. Until sharp scarlet gurgled out of the brand new wounds she opened up in his throat, until the colour stained his beautiful blues and specked out of his beak and pooled on the rock ledge at her feet. Then she dropped him. Then she dropped the arrow. And without looking anywhere else, she stepped over the carcass, still moving just barely, wheezing through his maimed windpipe. She kept him alive. She wanted him to feel this.

Her hands rifled through his plush overcoat of feathers. She found his longest, softest, shiniest adornments, and gripped them at their shafts, and pulled them out of his flesh. She wrenched handfuls of feathers out. Not just the beautiful ones; the ones close to the body, the ones that protected him, the ones that gave him his texture. She didn't care. Lord Dhracia ripped out clouds of down with an exorbitant intensity that was designed solely to make him suffer, to know the effects of her wrath, to know that she would do this to him again and again for every time he and his ilk disappointed her. And when she ran out of feathers to grip, she dropped onto her knees and searched for the nearest sharp thing, a rock, and used that to bash him next, forming pits of vivid gore that opposed his peaceful cerulean. Blood whipped against her face and arms. Holographic silver shone green. Shone red.

She would not be disobeyed again.

When finally she was done, and Tenzin was visceral debris that may or may not still be alive--she didn't care--she stood again. Breathless from her carnage, she wiped the blood away on the back of her arm, stared with pleasure that at long last set in at the sight. Then she dragged her gaze stoic toward the little lion.

“The nicest feathers, if you will. Have your Overseer keep them for me.”

But something in her voice was different. It grated. Shadow fingers around her own throat, husky, hungry.

“I'll be back for them later.”

Lord Dhracia stepped away.

“And Tenzin,” she peered at the ruins of the phoenix, “do not mistake this as the consequence of your complacency. That is still to come.” Lord Dhracia smiled. Lord Dhracia snarled. Lord Dhracia would shove thorny roses down his throat until he choked and died.

The darkness was quick to return to her feet, and she was quick to go with it.

This longer this took, the worse she was going to make this. Tamulus better hope it didn't take long.

exit Lord Dhracia

His breath came in heaving gasps. Soot marred his white purity, the stench of singed fur an uneasy backdrop for the focus of his rolling eyes, his panting mouth. His clattering steps had become unsteady, limbs rubbery with running so far, so long.

He had seen what she had done to Raheerah and now-?

Now she had come for Tenzin.

Tenzin; who had granted Amazon her life back. Tenzin, who had healed, and helped, and softly murmured, and never asked anything in return. The beat of his heart was painful in his chest: a fast and heavy thump against his ribs that made him feel sick. He was pushing too hard. If his magic had held, he would have sent his double to watch the events. But it had lashed back at him, by fate or by poor luck, and left him on his knees in Orion and so he was here, running, running, running...

He arrived too late--far too late.

What could he have done, even so-?

But all there was was the stench of blood, and there it was, as he staggered in close: splattered over the lip of the lagoon, pooled and sprayed in a gory mess, littered with tufts of pale blue feathers.

He stumbled into the shallow waters beside the pool, looking here and there with dawning horror in his eyes.

Is he--dead? he wondered.

The concept of the chrysalis floating like glittering ice in the water did not at once occur to him, and the exhausted stag spun this way and that. His mind was racing.

He had to go back, and check on those who had been attacked. They might need help--but what could he do? The only one he had ever known to possess the ability to heal was gone, now. Pride was standing in water tinged with his blood.

The white stag lowered himself to his knees among the feathers and the blood, gasping, and dropped his antlers to the ground--weeping for Tenzin; weeping for them all.