Alira’s hand froze on the doorknob. It was Raine on the other side; she knew that. She could sniff out his scent through the thickness of the wood, which was honestly a bit of a weird thing to note, but even without that, it could be no one else but Raine.

  The reason she stopped wasn’t him. She could hear it. The heavy, dusty book cover snapped open. In a few seconds, the pages would turn. They were here yet again. She expected that after the show just now.

  Alira placed her hand on the metal knob with a heavy sigh and twisted it open. “Come in,” she said, turning away without seeing his face.

  She knew exactly what to say to him. She had thought about what to tell him since she saw what she did in the sewer. She replayed the event in her mind every second, rehearsing the words to describe it to Raine.

  “What happened?” Raine asked, marking the start of a talk that would make or break her. “You said you saw them leaving her behind. But you couldn’t find her body?”

  Alira shifted her gaze away toward anywhere but Raine. She decided on the carpet where his shadow stretched as she sat on the edge of her bed. He remained standing, his shadow falling over her figure.

  “I lied about that. I’m sorry,” Alira whispered. “I would say I thought I read about them leaving, or I assumed they did, but that would be a lie. All I read was that they cut her arm off.”

  Raine’s breath hitched. Then he exhaled, as if trying to puff out the suppressed smoke from a fire inside his throat.

  “But I really thought they would,” Alira continued. Each word she spat out felt like rusty nails. “I thought they were just going to make an example out of her. I thought they would at least leave her corpse behind, but they didn’t. I was wrong. They have something far worse in store for her.”

  Raine’s shadow moved as he squatted in front of Alira, looking up to meet her eyes. “Tell me.”

  “They cut her hands off, and they…likely did the same thing to her legs.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you heard about Rebirthing?” Alira answered him with a question.

  Raine frowned when Alira began to look away. His stern eyes forced her still. “No.”

  “The method one becomes a Fellsworn depends on the Outer they’re swearing their soul to,” Alira said, recalling the content of the novel. “For Mother, you become Hers by Rebirth. First, your limbs will be cut off. Then, you need to be put into what they call a womb while clinging to your last breath—you have to be alive throughout it. Days later, you will be spit out of that hell. Reborn, birthed by Mother with new sets of limbs and a reformed mind.”

  When Raine didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, Alira continued.

  “We need to find her before that,” she said. “After all, it’s my fault this happened.”

  “It’s not your fault—”

  “It is. And it’s your fault, too, you know.” Alira looked straight into the golden swirls in Raine’s eyes. “You let her come close. Even when you know your life is trailed with the blood of those closest to you.”

  Raine’s face tensed up, his jaw clenching.

  “Don’t get angry. You know it’s true. You and me. We’re the same. My hands are soaked in blood, too. So, the blame is ours for letting her tag along with us.”

  Raine tried to turn his head away, but Alira caught his jaw. With her other hand, she pressed him down by the shoulder with her weight, forcing him onto his knees, to prevent him from running. It was her turn to force eye contact as she tilted his head up to face her.

  “Listen to me, Raine. Listen well. You don’t feel it as I do, but we’re both betting against time. I didn’t tell the professors about what they did to her,” she said, and quickly continued before Raine could get a word in, “They wouldn’t search for someone who would soon be turned into a Fellsworn as hard as they would for the kidnapped daughter of a count.”

  Raine closed his mouth, losing his words.

  “I will let you know that the stake is not just our life,” Alira pressed on. She wasn’t done. “Tell me, what did you find there in the cultist den?”

  Raine’s jaw was hard and tense in Alira’s hand, but he didn’t move away. “Bodies. Empty bodies.”

  “Don’t tell me that’s all you see from that. Raine,” she called him out. “They’re more than just emptied bodies and skin suits. They are everything that has been working against you and this world behind the scenes. The Mother cult is preparing for something worse than you hate to acknowledge. Your story is not about revenge, Raine. That’s...as much as I can tell you for now.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “What about you?” he demanded.

  “Me? I’ve got about three months or so.” Alira shrugged. “Your father, the duke, placed a Complete Bind on me. You saw how I instantly ‘healed’ back in Vesper Reign? That’s his curse on me, and it’s going to doom me soon.”

  She sighed. “...You need to become stronger, Raine. For both of us. Trust me—you’re carrying more than just our fates on your shoulders. As your Role says, you hold Staywes’s blood in your veins and Staywes’s fate within your palms.”

  Raine rubbed at his jawline, a scorn sewn deep into his features. “You want me to break the bind? Three months isn’t as long as you wish. What happens if I can’t do it on time?”

  Alira laughed with her whole body, the hollow sound echoing through the spacious room until it filled it to the brim, choking the air out of its occupants. Slowly, her laughter faded to leave behind an empty stillness. She met his pretty, confusion-clouded eyes and smile.

  “Then I guess I shall suffer a fate worse than death.”

  +++

  It was quiet again. Raine left, and so did they. The sound of page turning had stopped at some point as well. Maria had dropped her off to bring her lunch and check on her before quickly leaving again to attend her night class. Her head was finally as quiet as she wanted it to be.

  Alira had been permitted to take sick leave for three days.

  She sat at her study desk with a few heavy coin pouches put aside. Strong coppery scent dominated her sense of smell, mixing in a way it shouldn’t with the sweet taste of apple pie still lingering on her tongue.

  Before her were a square sheet of paper and a short stack of ten coins.

  The duke provided her with a yearly allowance of eight hundred Lia. That was about sixty-six Lia a month. One Lia could be broken down into twenty snivilins, and one snivilin was made of five foens. She had asked for this month’s allowance to be delivered in bronze-colored foens coins.

  That was roughly about six thousand and seven hundred coins in total.

  Staring at the coin stack and the open pouches, Alira mumbled for her judgment.

  [This Alchemist of Staywes asks for Judgement.]

  ※

  Character Name [Alira Ravon]

  Will Favorability [Upper Gold]

  Alchemist Ranking [9]

  Alchemic Casts

  Position Exchange (8)

  Movement Bind (9)

  Physical State Exchange (13)

  On-Surface Substance Exchange (5)

  ※

  “At rank nine, ten precast is my limit,” Alira mumbled to herself. She could feel the mental strain and the feeling of tightness around her body from precasting ten coins with Position Exchange.

  Alira picked up the fountain pen again, dipping it in ink. The paper was blank, the ink from previous fading away after it had been applied, but the cast outlines where the pen had pressed down remained. She trailed after them with ease and took out the eleventh coin when she was done.

  She pressed the coin and the paper between her palms and cast. Just as the cast established, the connection she had with the one on the first coin snapped.

  “Ten is my current limit.”

  Alira placed the coin on the desk next to the first stack. She dipped her pen again and began to draw the cast again.

  “Six thousand, six hundred, and fifty-five coins left.”

  By the time Alira had finished arranging all the coins into neat little towers on the desk, it was already dusk. Crumbled balls of paper sat on the floor around her, discarded after she made a tear in them from the repeated drawings of the same lines—the surface of the alchemic cast had to be one even plane.

  She turned to see Maria fast asleep in her bed, lightly snoring. The girl had insisted she would stay up as late as Alira would, but clearly her body didn’t agree. Unlike Alira with her messed-up sleeping habits, the people here were early risers who tended to call it a day when the night was still young.

  She whispered her judgment to confirm that she was now a rank ten alchemist. It was easier to rank up early on, and her rank would have gone up higher if she hadn’t hit ten, the upper limit of an Apprentice.

  Unlike how mages could rank up without a complete restriction, alchemists had to face trials once they hit certain ranks, such as ten, thirty, and fifty, in order to continue the path of alchemy as Lesser, Elite, and finally Grand Alchemist.

  Before she or Raine could rank up any further, they both needed to pass their first Trial of the Will. Trials could be taken together, and Alira took advantage of the mood to convince Raine to take his with her.

  Still, all her efforts weren’t wasted even if she didn’t rank up. Alira grabbed the coin closest to her. She held it within the heat of her palm and closed her eyes. She conjured up a mental image of the Position Exchange cast, and just like that, small streams of light escaped from the gaps between her fingers for just a second.

  She could know cast without needing to draw, and the limit of precast had gone by three, five if she strained herself.

  Alira needed to become stronger to keep up and maybe even pressure Raine as a fellow alchemist. She needed strength to stand beside the protagonist. Ever since then, she had been thinking about what would have happened if it had been her who stayed back instead of Lillian. If, for whatever reason, she couldn’t use Hollowed Mirror, she likely wouldn’t be able to make it out of it. Not without suffering the same fate as Lillian.

  Unlike Lillian, she bore a Complete Bind. Every cut they made would be transferred before she even shed a drop of blood. The cultist would have kept trying, and it would be a losing battle with her body as the battlefield.

  “Immortality...”

  Her thoughts went to Jain. The girl took pleasure in asking her random, silly questions, and the dilemma of immortality had naturally come up before. All she could think of was that being an immortal would suck if you were trapped in a burning room with no escape. She was, in some way, at least half-immortal now, so she needed to know how to escape if she ever found herself in a fiery hell.

  Alira’s gaze turned to the window. Monday was a day that belonged to itself, free from the rulings of any Divinities. Today was a moonless night.

  It was dark outside. Tonight, even the stars were in hiding.