Great Dojo

[Kotomine_Rin]

Vega

If he was smiling for a second, it didn't last. He'd been ignoring that boy until now for... obvious reasons. Just how could someone live with himself, with a face like that? Even Vega couldn't hide that for a moment, he looked hurt.

"At least I have one."

So hurt in fact, that he only registered part of what Sethrol said. No, for a moment, he spaced out... until a pang of pain caused him to touch his temple, slightly. Was it the throbbing pain of that punch of Sethrol's? The duel he had not too long ago with the boy? Or something else?

No, no way. Is he... no. He was strong enough to take those blows, I thought he... This isn't...

This is... this is ignoble. Murder. He was no threat to me. How could I kill him? I just wanted to scare the boy a little, crush his fighting spirit. So why...

Why do I feel... like this?

Vega was an assassin by trade. Taking lives, snuffing beasts, punishing those who deserved it... all of that was common to him. But he had never done it before. Not until today.

He had never killed a human.

"And oh please, why would I buy any of that? You're just aching to vent your frustrations, do I look that gullible?" He sighed... for a moment grimacing in pain.

Just being here today all felt like a bad dream. Maybe he'd wake up in the arms of his mother, and this whole nightmare would end. But it wouldn't. It wouldn't, and it all made him feel overjoyed. That alone was its own special kind of hell. That's when his eyes turned to shock, and he realized he was grabbing onto Sethrol. He'd look shocked for a second at how far he had gone... but it was already too late.

"It won't bring him back. Even if you hate, curse, and beat me half to death, it won't bring back those you care about. But it'll feel good. I suppose that's its own reward. Besides, I've still got plenty of frustration to let out. So what's a flesh wound or two, compared to your head under my heel?"

[yinsukin]

Sethrol

"Now now, I think your proving my student's point."

Sethrol sat down, just in front of Jonathan's corpse.  A simple deep breath and the aura of the passionate man was gone.  Indeed, something was silenced inside of the old man, that energy gone with the wind.  "Besides what if I am?  If you can survive this training, then it won't be long before there isn't much to teach you anyway.  So here are my terms.  If I win, you kiss the feet of his corpse and apologize for killing him.  Now if you win, I will teach you everything I know and be your personal resource for training whenever you so desire, even over my other students.  Does that sound like a deal?" 

[Kotomine_Rin]

Vega

"Fine. I'll make you eat those words, old man. Don't look down on me." He let go of the old man and glared at him, but this time, the fire he was barely suppressing was burning like a kindling.

[YOLF]

Orcus
Late Morning, after the clash at Albion

He is surrounded by writhing and bruised bodies, and useless sticks litter the span of the training floor. He is a boulder reaching to the sky, the tip of an iceberg that entombs the strife of a lost world, and they are pebbles thrown aside, tiny boats rendered unto flotsam and waste. They are beneath address, miniscule and meaningless, and to wait for a disaster to notice the things it swallows is merely wishful thinking. But he is seeing them.

He had come after the tournament in the demon's paradise, and greeted them with a question. What is the reason for your strength? Today he asks, what is the purpose of your weakness? And it goes unanswered.

They cannot answer, and their muscles fail to prove that the premises are false, unable to hold on to their weapons. They feel a mind as sharp as the scalpels of the demiurge, press down and peel aside their fear and their monochrome dreams, to expose the colors beneath. They call him Chaos Bringer, the title he used for show. It is only half true. Chaos must be sowed to seize order, as the ultimate alloy of war is the only tool by which peace can be forced. All hearts beat of their own order, fragile and whispy; to make it solid, to know what shape it is in truth, they must first know disorder, and carve themselves out of it. And how can this noble cause be anything but love?

They're eating out of his hands soon enough. He's a good sport about it.

[Magery]

Orcus
Late Morning, after the clash at Albion

He is surrounded by writhing and bruised bodies, and useless sticks litter the span of the training floor. He is a boulder reaching to the sky, the tip of an iceberg that entombs the strife of a lost world, and they are pebbles thrown aside, tiny boats rendered unto flotsam and waste. They are beneath address, miniscule and meaningless, and to wait for a disaster to notice the things it swallows is merely wishful thinking. But he is seeing them.

He had come after the tournament in the demon's paradise, and greeted them with a question. What is the reason for your strength? Today he asks, what is the purpose of your weakness? And it goes unanswered.

They cannot answer, and their muscles fail to prove that the premises are false, unable to hold on to their weapons. They feel a mind as sharp as the scalpels of the demiurge, press down and peel aside their fear and their monochrome dreams, to expose the colors beneath. They call him Chaos Bringer, the title he used for show. It is only half true. Chaos must be sowed to seize order, as the ultimate alloy of war is the only tool by which peace can be forced. All hearts beat of their own order, fragile and whispy; to make it solid, to know what shape it is in truth, they must first know disorder, and carve themselves out of it. And how can this noble cause be anything but love?

They're eating out of his hands soon enough. He's a good sport about it.

a girl

it was probably midday. it may have been afternoon. hard to argue that it was evening.

There are stories that begin like this:

A great and powerful tyrant visits a place of swords. Their temerity—to think of wielding a blade without his permission!—amuses him, so he seeks to remind them of their place. He challenges them, one by one, one by two, one by three, one by four, one by all. It does not matter, for he is a great and powerful tyrant. They cannot crush him in the moment of his strength. And so his blade introduces them to the floor and his glory introduces them to fear. It is a kind lesson, as far as tyrants go—and therein lies the trap, for hopelessness learned by kindness is the most terrible of all.

But of course for every tyrant there must be a hero.

In a story like this, they are a peasant, unlearned and unfamiliar with the blade but an old friend of hope. Or perhaps they are a passing stranger, the only one who will not recognise the tyrant by the shape of his name. Sometimes they are a child, for truth is known to come from the mouth of babes and swordlaw is the oldest truth of all. Usually they are there by accident; often they do not watch their step or their mouth or their curiosity and so pique the tyrant's.

In the end it is always a challenge. Sometimes it ends in ignomious defeat. Others in impossible victory. This is never what matters. What matters is that the peasant stranger's child picks up a sword for the first time and they think oh. So this is what love is.

The rest—well, that hasn't been written yet.

Orcus, of course, is not a great and powerful tyrant. He is the tyrant's congenial vizier, easy with a smile and wise with advice and always, always here to help. So when he comes down to a place of swords, he does not meet the hero. It is not his place.

No: he meets the witch.

There's a switch in her hands. Not even a wooden blade, for she is but a friendly maiden unfamiliar with the law of swords, just a simple wooden stick good for rapping recalcitrant apprentices around the knuckles. It taps the ground in a jolly rhythm as she walks across the floor—well-polished bamboo covered in sweat and the memory of bruises—loud enough that you can't hear how you can't hear the sound of her steps. She winds delicately around the exhausted students, favouring each one with a gentle smile that eases what little disgruntled defeat Orcus has not already soothed from their souls.

There's something idyllic about the way she moves—her skirts flutter around her ankles like rosepetals in the wind and her hair is a careful stream falling across her shoulders and back like a river of ink. It's as if someone decided to sing a fairytale to life and set it across the stage just to remind the tyrant and the vizier what genre they're in. One of her ears, thick and furry as a well-loved dog, twitches toward a corner of the room where one student is regaling his friend with a highly exaggerated story about how he came this close to actually parrying Orcus' first blow, and she giggles softly just as she stops directly in front of the man himself.

"They love you, you know," she says conversationally. Her switch bounces out an idle beat as she stands there, her fingers drumming on the handle not out of impatience but out of the sheer joy of the song. Between bounces, she points to some of the students at random: a dark-haired, dark-skinned elf, a yellow-eyed naiad, a shy little foxgirl with a pretty black tattoo on her cheek. "Just one short spar and you're already their hero."

She's partway through another friendly smile when it twists into a short, unhappy frown.

"Ah, forgive me, that was rude. I've forgotten to introduce myself." She bows, her back perfectly angled to avoid offence and obsequiousness both, and looks up (and up) to meet Orcus' sharp red eyes. "I bear the name Kakura Yuzu, and I would appreciate it if you would honour me with the chance to become my hero too."

[YOLF]

Orcus

He raises his eyebrows at her, and his hood doesn't hide the cautious wonder. He vanished it before sparring, so they could look upon his face and know his will unclouded. But polish a blade well enough, and it might show your own face, and only you control what picture it forms. Put a mirror in front of a mirror, though, and what do they show?

"An unusual course," Orcus says, twirling the blunt practice sword. The primal peers down at her, lips curling. "People do not traditionally seek heroes. Heroes come to answer their need. You can call me Orcus, Yuzu."

The young ones - and the old, but young in potential - raise their heads in their direction, one by one, glimmering with curiosity.

(Orcus counts them.)

[Magery]

Orcus

He raises his eyebrows at her, and his hood doesn't hide the cautious wonder. He vanished it before sparring, so they could look upon his face and know his will unclouded. But polish a blade well enough, and it might show your own face, and only you control what picture it forms. Put a mirror in front of a mirror, though, and what do they show?

"An unusual course," Orcus says, twirling the blunt practice sword. The primal peers down at her, lips curling. "People do not traditionally seek heroes. Heroes come to answer their need. You can call me Orcus, Yuzu."

The young ones - and the old, but young in potential - raise their heads in their direction, one by one, glimmering with curiosity.

(Orcus counts them.)

Kakura Yuzu

"Well, that's just silly," she says, pouting up at Orcus with ingénue innocence (and isn't that interesting, doesn't that say something, when a girl stands before chaos looking so perfectly poised for plundering, like Red Riding Hood before the Wolf). Her long white sleeves rustle pleasantly as she tosses a couple of jaunty waves at a student here and there; a giant of a man with thighs thicker than her waist and a ruddy-cheeked dwarf whose beard is spun through with a king's ransom in jewellery. They wave back, a little hesitantly at first as if they had to be startled into familiarity, but it's clear they recognise her in the end: perhaps they'd just needed to be reminded by the shape of her smile. "Any villain worth their salt knows that the hero is coming—that it's best to seek them out and establish the rules of the game before somebody has an unfortunate accident—and is not villainy the second-oldest tradition in the world?"

(The oldest, of course, is something far too uncouth for such a youthful flower to discuss in the company of a stranger).

Then she blushes in embarrassment, her cheeks flushed red like poppies—ah, so that's the sweet scent drifting faintly from her hair, how familiar.

"N-Not that I'm saying I'm a villain, it was just an example, oh, how frightful!" She hides her face in her palms, slender fingers arrayed across her skin like the legs of a porcelain spider—no, just like a shy girl who's made a fool of herself, a spider is much too sinister to describe this Kakura Yuzu. "Please forgive me, Mr. Orcus. I'm being quite silly. I wanted to come here and see what all the fuss was about, but I happened to catch a glimpse of your sword and it was so impressive I had to ask if I could feel it for myself!"

A pause.

One of the students—the foxgirl with the tattoo—giggles behind her hand.

Kakura Yuzu turns from a girl wearing a blush to a blush wearing a girl as she stutters and stumbles over her words, hands flailing almost hypnotically as she nearly whacks Orcus on the nose with her wooden switch. "No I didn't mean it like that please stop laughing!"

Naturally, this only makes their audience laugh even harder until even the high, flat wooden roof above is trembling with the sound of their joy.

(How terribly embarrassing).

[YOLF]

Orcus

The smell of poppies... seems strangely an old home (not one's own), and freshly made bread. It is evocative, but not intimate. Can one feel nostalgia for the things one has never taken the time to appreciate, long for remembered images of sweet times that never happened, and ache as though it was their own past on display in a beautiful case? Kakura Yuzu seems to think so.

Orcus likes poppies, possibly. He did not come back for poppies. An unnameable eon fighting through innumerable spawns of chaos with no true company but yourself places some things in perspective.

"Clever and funny," Orcus says, smiling in good nature and content bemusement. "If not a villain, it seems I have the pleasure of meeting a rare and lovable flower. And no villain would stumble at such a decisive time, of course. There's no need to apologize."

He holds out his hand, and instead of a vulgar, forgettable practice sword, a devilish blade coalesces from a bleak trail of mist. The warrior wets his lips. "Is this the sword you would like to hold?"

The handle fits perfectly between Yuzu's fingers, and the weight settles, like a perfectly balanced lump of steel. The whole weapon is black and polished, but she cannot see her face on it. It is clouded on the inside, like the other face of a thin glass separating a warm hearth from the wind of Winter. The gloom roves and rolls like a living thing, damascus patterns slithering. It is every metal that ever was, and none of them. It should not exist.

[Magery]

Orcus

The smell of poppies... seems strangely an old home (not one's own), and freshly made bread. It is evocative, but not intimate. Can one feel nostalgia for the things one has never taken the time to appreciate, long for remembered images of sweet times that never happened, and ache as though it was their own past on display in a beautiful case? Karura Yuzu seems to think so.

Orcus likes poppies, possibly. He did not come back for poppies. An unnameable eon fighting through innumerable spawns chaos with no true company but yourself places some things in perspective.

"Clever and funny," Orcus says, smiling in good nature and content bemusement. "If not a villain, it seems I have the pleasure of meeting a rare and lovable flower. And no villain would stumble at such a decisive time, of course. There's no need to apologize."

He holds out his hand, and instead of a vulgar, forgettable practice sword, a devilish blade coalesces from a bleak trail of mist. The warrior wets his lips. "Is this the sword you would like to hold?"

The handle fits perfectly between Yuzu's fingers, and the weight settles, like a perfectly balanced lump of steel. The whole weapon is black and polished, but she cannot see her face on it. It is clouded on the inside, like the other face of a thin glass separating a warm hearth from the wind of Winter. The gloom roves and rolls like a living thing, damascus patterns slithering. It is every metal that ever was, and none of them. It should not exist.

Kakura Yuzu

Her eyes sparkle like sapphires cast in sunlight, and for a moment she actually bounces in place, the lovely silver mandala hanging on a cord around her neck swaying with the rhythm of her joy. If you look closely, you might notice that the shadow it casts never actually seems to move—a dark, bruiselike thing flat above her sternum—but no doubt that's just a trick of the light, or maybe an awkward girl's best attempt at a practical joke. Either way, it's much less important than the way she peers with childlike curiosity at Orcus' blade, head turning this way and that way like a sparrow darting between piles of seed as she studies the... well, let's call it steel just to make things easier.

(She's not much less reserved than their audience, either, who seem to split between expressions of amazement, gasps of amazement, and in the dwarf's case an eyes-rolling-back fall into unconscious amazement).

"It's so pretty!" From somewhere, she pulls out a blank paper tag and starts scribbling notes in what is either a complex code or a foreign language, stroke after stroke forming things that are not quite pictograms but not quite letters either. How she is doing this with one hand while also holding the sword with the other is not important—don't worry about it! "This is the least real thing I've seen in years—oh, how truly wonderful!"
 
For a little while there is no other sound other than the floorboards creaking beneath her as she vibrates with excitement, flitting around the sword (which is now hanging suspended in the air like an awkward question) and covering tag after tag with that same lovely, flowing script. Occasionally her eyes flick to Orcus as if to reassure herself he's still humouring her, her mouth too busy to ask (too busy to smile!) as she chatters on and on about her latest fascination: the sevenfold curves of the hilt, the twelve different blades, the samsara script decorating the "steel", and all the other things that it does not have and are not true.

Eventually, she stops, shaking out her left hand as if chasing away writing cramps, and looks up at Orcus the same way a grandmother might when asking a grandson for help disentangling these horribly overcomplicated newfangled computers.

"Mr. Orcus, you have a truly wonderful lie here," and note how she no longer calls it a sword, that's important, pay attention, "so could you please kill me with it? I really have to know what that feels like!"

[YOLF]

Orcus

He studies her as she studies it, rubbing his chin. Orcus scans every single character she writes, and how they come together, flow from one to the other in unreal metric and grammar. He pauses at the shine in her eyes, mouth thinning, and something unwinds. A spark of disbelief lights a flame of recognition.

The sword looks different from how he pulled it out. It doesn't matter. His eyes have narrowed into slits in the time it took for her to finish, when she poses her request.

Orcus contemplates Yuzu's face perhaps like one contemplates a senile grandmother, and then he cracks, laughing like a child from the pit of his belly. His olympian shoulders shake ungracefully as he tosses his head back through the delighted sound. Everyone else holds breathlessly in astonishment. As he winds down at last, some seconds or maybe minutes later, still holding his stomach while a grin splits his face, he raises a finger to a milimeter from her lips and speaks.

"On one condition. You must tell me everything about it."

He takes up Chaosbringer, and it is only an instant. It is raised, glinting at the lie in front of him, and then it is no longer there. A black streak darts past the small crowd, and a brutal crunch skewers the neck of the butterfly-tattooed foxgirl.

There's no sound in the aftermath, and no blood spraying from the wound, only ink and vapor. "How is it?" Orcus asks, lowering his throwing arm.

[Magery]

Orcus

He studies her as she studies it, rubbing his chin. Orcus scans every single character she writes, and how they come together, flow from one to the other in unreal metric and grammar. He pauses at the shine in her eyes, mouth thinning, and something unwinds. A spark of disbelief lights a flame of recognition.

The sword looks different from how he pulled it out. It doesn't matter. His eyes have narrowed into slits in the time it took for her to finish, when she poses her request.

Orcus contemplates Yuzu's face perhaps like one contemplates a senile grandmother, and then he cracks, laughing like a child from the pit of his belly. His olympian shoulders shake ungracefully as he tosses his head back through the delighted sound. Everyone else holds breathlessly in astonishment. As he winds down at last, some seconds or maybe minutes later, still holding his stomach while a grin splits his face, he raises a finger to a milimeter from her lips and speaks.

"On one condition. You must tell me everything about it."

He takes up Chaosbringer, and it is only an instant. It is raised, glinting at the lie in front of him, and then it is no longer there. A black streak darts past the small crowd, and a brutal crunch skewers the neck of the butterfly-tattooed foxgirl.

There's no sound in the aftermath, and no blood spraying from the wound, only ink and vapor. "How is it?" Orcus asks, lowering his throwing arm.

...Kakura Yuzu?

"Wonderful," says the dwarf lying supine on the floor, pressing her hands together as if offering prayers to a shrine. "Simply irresistable. Like lightning down your spine and fire blazing in your marrow. Oh, you've killed so many people, Mr. Orcus!"

She gets up and there's no shift, no blur, no cackling kaleidoscope, she's just—she's just always been Kakura Yuzu, or at least always had the shape of the thing that Orcus sees when he looks at Kakura Yuzu. The foxgirl is still twitching around the sword, tattoo weeping tears of ink and bare feet scrabbling against the wall she's pinned against; the witch is humming some sort of song as she dances with the dark-skinned giant, the two of them twirling around in hilarious contrast given one of his hands swallows the whole of her waist. Nobody else seems to have noticed there's anything amiss—some are even applauding Orcus' throw, as if he didn't just try to murder something beautiful.

"I really must know something, though." There are two swords sheathed on her hip, now, the tips of their glittering golden hilts painstakingly carved into the shapes of smiling foxes. But her hands are nowhere near them—they are clasped politely before her belly, the very picture of a patient petitioner. The perfect paint across her fingernails—a black so dark it swallows your eyes when you look too close—stands in stark contrast to the startlingly innocent white of her skin. The same jewellry the dwarf was never wearing is set across her hair until she sparkles beneath the warm light of the dojo's torches. "Why?"

She cocks her head to the side, quizzical as a baby bird upon spotting a delicious worm. Her ears perk up, curling proudly until they seem to be aping a devil's horns rather than a fox's ears.

"Why?" she repeats. "What dreadful purpose moves you, Mr. Orcus, that you bear such a marvellous thing?"

[YOLF]

Orcus

The primal's eyes flirt with the madness that has revealed itself around him. His smile is no longer wide and loud, but cutting and appraising. Orcus does not bother to ask when her little play began. To some experiences, and some beings, there is no meaningful difference between reality and dream.

"Why, mmm." It tastes rather tart, the inquiry itself, but his brows become lighter in fascination. "To find what is worth refining, to sort that which is to be used, from that which justifies its own survival. Battle is the best way to do these things. I enjoy them, and so did someone I miss very much. I hope to see him again."

He chuckles into the back of his hand. "You're well acquainted with matters of questioning, aren't you, Yuzu?"

[Magery]

Orcus

The primal's eyes flirt with the madness that has revealed itself around him. His smile is no longer wide and loud, but cutting and appraising. Orcus does not bother to ask when her little play began. To some experiences, and some beings, there is no meaningful difference between reality and dream.

"Why, mmm." It tastes rather tart, the inquiry itself, but his brows become lighter in fascination. "To find what is worth refining, to sort that which is to be used, from that which justifies its own survival. Battle is the best way to do these things. I enjoy them, and so did someone I miss very much. I hope to see him again."

He chuckles into the back of his hand. "You're well acquainted with matters of questioning, aren't you, Yuzu?"

Kakura Yuzu

She frowns.

It is devastatingly lovely, like roses scattered across a grave: her eyes narrow, her lips press together, her ears droop, and each piece of the performance is enough to make angels weep in sympathy. She seems—not disappointed, exactly, something closer to the feeling where you weren't expecting something to happen and it doesn't happen and even so you can't help feeling a little betrayed. One perfect step back lets her meet his gaze without needing to raise her chin any longer, her neck no longer exposed in salacious invitation. But then the expression passes like fog before the morning sun of her smile and it's like she never frowned at all.

"I am but a humble maiden who sometimes presumes to offer advice in matters above her station, my lord." There's something strange about her voice, if you take a moment to really listen. She's speaking a language that's well-cut, tonal, all snare-drum syllables and easy shifts in inflection, and each word flows from her mouth as easily as they must have from the branches of the first apple tree. From her, it is beauty, but it doesn't mean anything. Or perhaps it may to some, but it is not some universal language of truth. Just the childhood tongue of a wandering girl. And yet, somehow, you know what she is saying. You know what she means, how she's shifted into a more formal, courtly register all the way down to the pecularities of the grammar. Don't worry—it's not a cause for concern. One should expect that a simple shrine maiden who meanders the countryside to offer succour to the suffering is able to speak to them. That's just how the story goes. "If I may request your forebearance for a moment, however, you have not answered my question."

The witch and the dancing giant twirl past her in a flurry of robes and she absent-mindedly hums along to a few bars of their song before seeming to realise her rudeness and pressing her palms together in apology (when did she move them from her belly to hang loosely at her hips?). Behind her, the twitching foxgirl still impaled like the butterfly she wears on her cheek has pulled out a shamisen and is strumming it in time to the drip-drip-drip rhythm of her ink-dark blood on the dojo's floor. Some of the other students are nodding along; others are clapping their hands; a few have stood up and are marvelling at the smooth lines of Orcus' sword and the obscene way it's plunged so deeply into the pale flesh of her neck.

"To find what is worth refining is what you are," Yuzu says, now waggling a finger at him—and isn't this hilarious, isn't this wonderful, that this moon-mad child thinks to know the Lord of Chaos better than he knows himself. "You have answered me as a sword would, my lord: I cut, therefore I am. But why do you cut? What hands lay upon your blade? What breath exults your lungs? What purpose has your destination—what destination has your purpose? Surely a star of your prominence has greater reason to shine than the fact it is a star."

In the background, the twang of the shamisen ripples across the shuffles of hands and feet and robes and cloth.

[YOLF]

Orcus

He feels it as one feels the sun sink beneath the horizon in the dreary grasp of remorseless Autumn, even indoors. Tranquility slipping like a blade from a slick sheath, evidenced in the shift of Yuzu's tone, in the different form of address. But his expression is bright, the color of his face reflecting the flush of genial inspiration, as though he has seized a slippery piece of a rewarding but opaque puzzle.

Orcus flicks his wrist, as casually as it is confident, and his blade wrenches itself free of the foxgirl's neck, drawing a spray of ink through the air. It lands fondly into his hand, fingers wrapping around the grip, and he looks down on the edge while running a careful finger over the stained (preposterous, blasphemous, how could this irrational substance be that which is stained and not the liquid that has spilled on it?) not-steel.

Who could be certain of the way the clouds would turn? Who could forsee every whim of the wind as surely as the mood of a sibling by the curl of their brow? A person would sooner suffer the most absurd of deaths in human imagination before lightning fell at her feet to the demand. She would sooner predict rightly the day, hour and instant of her death than know ahead of time which meetings in this vast universe were inevitable and which were merely luck. Much the same was the truth beneath Orcus. Unverifiable, unfathomable, and undistinguishable from coincidence. But a few beings always exist of the kind that can wait for the collapse of fate to unravel its secrets.

"You are not easily driven astray, nor smitten by challenges," he says, eyes lidded contemplatively, lips pursed tight between breaths. Then he looks at her, through her, into the hall of cracked mirrors within. "So I shall confide in you a secret. The reason is that I wish to see a friend again."

[Magery]

Orcus

He feels it as one feels the sun sink beneath the horizon in the dreary grasp of remorseless Autumn, even indoors. Tranquility slipping like a blade from a slick sheath, evidenced in the shift of Yuzu's tone, in the different form of address. But his expression is bright, the color of his face reflecting the flush of genial inspiration, as though he has seized a slippery piece of a rewarding but opaque puzzle.

Orcus flicks his wrist, as casually as it is confident, and his blade wrenches itself free of the foxgirl's neck, drawing a spray of ink through the air. It lands fondly into his hand, fingers wrapping around the grip, and he looks down on the edge while running a careful finger over the stained (preposterous, blasphemous, how could this irrational substance be that which is stained and not the liquid that has spilled on it?) not-steel.

Who could be certain of the way the clouds would turn? Who could forsee every whim of the wind as surely as the mood of a sibling by the curl of their brow? A person would sooner suffer the most absurd of deaths in human imagination before lightning fell at her feet to the demand. She would sooner predict rightly the day, hour and instant of her death than know ahead of time which meetings in this vast universe were inevitable and which were merely luck. Much the same was the truth beneath Orcus. Unverifiable, unfathomable, and undistinguishable from coincidence. But a few beings always exist of the kind that can wait for the collapse of fate to unravel its secrets.

"You are not easily driven astray, nor smitten by challenges," he says, eyes lidded contemplatively, lips pursed tight between breaths. Then he looks at her, through her, into the hall of cracked mirrors within. "So I shall confide in you a secret. The reason is that I wish to see a friend again."

"Oh, my lord, you shouldn't have."

Behold the very picture of a bashful maiden, hiding her face behind a glittering, gilt-and-pearl fan. Her eyes are downcast, shy as a shadow before the sun, her shoulders set demurely so that the whole of her body seems smaller than usual as if she's embarrassed simply to be seen. Behind her, even the dancers have stilled, the giant setting the witch gently on the floor so that they can press their palms together and bow to Orcus as if giving thanks to the gods themselves. The shamisen still warbles out, sharp as a lover's nails against the ear, but the foxgirl is presently being pampered by the crush of students, hands with three and seven and no fingers at all carefully stitching her head back onto her neck. A scene straight out of any faerie's mad revel, something Orcus has seen ten thousand times before.

(No wonder, then, that it's her words that linger far longer than this vision of bacchanalia, sitting somewhere in the hollow of the chest the way prophecy does.)

"I do truly love secrets," she continues. "You honour me."

She snaps the fan away, and then she was never holding a fan at all—how old the trick, now, how boringly mundane, how commonly seen. But she must know that too, you can see it in the cracks in the corners of her eyes, so why does she keep doing it?—instead settling her hands behind her back and smiling up at Orcus' imposing jawline, well-framed by the brilliant, blooming cornfields of his impressively long hair.

"Would you tell me about your friend, Mr. Orcus? To have touched the heart of one of your kaleidoscopic radiance—oh, please, I simply must know who they are!"

(She says are, not were, are, like it's not even a question. An assumption? A kindness? A reflection? A truth? You must know by now that it is all of these at once.)