I half-stumbled into the grand parlor where Szylla waited.
Her parasol leaned casually against her chair, her hands folded in her lap with patient poise, though one of her many slender tendrils absently curled and uncurled against the floor like it was testing my mood. Her monocle flashed as it caught the light, etching tiny glyphs in the air when she turned toward me.
I didn't bother with decorum. I stormed forward, my breath raw in my throat. "You have to stop him."
Szylla tilted her head, birdlike and coldly elegant. "Stop whom, dear? I entertain rather a broad gallery of rogues and reprobates."
"Vaida." I choked on the name. "He's— he's driving Aria to do something suicidal. Feeding her these ideas about hunting the monsters that ended Earth, telling her she has some destiny tied to killing them. He wants her to become something terrible, and he's using what's left of her grief to do it."
Szylla's expression didn't change, but the shadows around her throne seemed to gather more tightly, pooling like thick oil. "Is that so unusual? Zeldritzon is a realm built on the hungry ambitions of survivors. Some claw upward, some claw inward. Vaida merely illuminates paths others would prefer left in darkness."
I clenched my hands so tightly my claws dug crescents into my palms. "This isn't illumination… it's… it's manipulation. I thought you kept Vaida as an adviser or steward, but this—! He's toying with her life, with her pain, just to see what she becomes. You have power over him. You have to call him off."
Szylla's monocle dimmed, the runes within it going quiet as her own eyes met mine directly. A rare, direct look that held no amusement, only a profound, tired gravity. "Oh, little Chimera. I don't have power over him in the way you dream. Vaida is not my servant. He is my apprentice—my heir in waiting."
The words slammed into me with all the force of a hammerblow. My ears rang. "Your… what?"
"My successor," she said plainly. "Chosen from among countless horrors, centuries of searching, because his mind and instinct for evolutions—biological, philosophical, cosmological—nearly surpass even my own at his age. One day, perhaps sooner than I would like, this dominion and all its vaults of Ascension will pass to him. The tapestry of life here will be his to unravel and retie as he deems fit."
My mouth opened, but nothing came out at first. Then finally, hoarse, "So you're telling me the fox who just convinced my sister to throw herself against gods is going to inherit all this?"
Szylla's mouth curved into something that might have been a sympathetic smile, if not for how weary and hollow it seemed. "It was never simply inheritance. It is an outcome. Vaida is what this place needed to shape next. As you were an outcome, once. As Aria is becoming."
"I won't let him use her as one of his twisted experiments," I spat, my throat catching. "I won't stand by while he poisons her with this obsession just to see what happens."
"You may not have to stand by," Szylla said softly, almost kindly. "But you may find you cannot stop it either. Aria's will was never so fragile as you believed. She would have found purpose in ruin with or without Vaida'a whispers. He simply gave her clarity. That is… part of why I chose him."
My vision blurred. I didn't know if it was tears or fury or some soul-deep exhaustion that reached up to drown me. "Then you're just going to let it happen. Let him push her off the cliff, because it's more interesting to watch her fall than to help her back up."
Szylla did not rise from her seat, but one of her many tendrils stretched out, brushing almost maternally along my cheek. It felt cool, nearly pleasant, the same way ivy feels when it grows over gravestones. "Little KiAera. This is Zeldritzon. Here, we do not coddle fledglings from the truth of predators. We give them the means to become something more. Or the freedom to perish chasing it. And sometimes, that is the same gift."
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
I jerked back. My mark under my skin seared like frostbite. "You're all monsters. I don't know why I thought there was anything remotely human in any of you."
Szylla's smile turned sad, if only for a moment. "Because you still carry enough of your old heart to look for it, even in the dark. Hold to that, if you must. It is rarer here than any crown."
I didn't answer. I simply turned and walked away while her whisper followed me like a cold tide.
"Tell Aria when next you see her that I envy her clarity of purpose. And tell Vaida… that I expect him to pay the price of all these stories he spins. Even rule-makers are not exempt from consequence."
I didn't look back. My heart was already running ahead. Out of these halls, out into the monstrous dark, toward wherever my sister had gone to chase her ghosts. I would find her. Even if it meant standing alone against Vaida, Szylla, and the wretched logic of this world, I would not let her lose herself again. I'd let them watch. Let them all see what I would become, how far I'd claw and burn and break the world, if it meant taking back what was mine.
I followed her scent like a hound, nose twitching, ears pivoting at every echo. It was embarrassing, how instinctual it felt, how monstrously easy I adored it as I made my way through the long, dark halls of Szylla's manor. They were so steeped in old parchment, sugary perfume, and ghostly mildew that it took careful sniffs to tease out Aria's distinct thread.
But it was there. Subtle as a wisp of cold smoke, smelling of lavender and sorrow and something brittle, like dried flowers after rain. My claws curled against the slick floors, following that delicate trail through twisting galleries and rooms lined with veiled portraits that seemed to watch me with eyeless disapproval.
Past a sitting parlor abandoned to frost and drifting ash. Past an antechamber where shadow-tentacles writhed half-seen beneath the floorboards. Down a corridor so silent I could hear the breath crackle in my own lungs.
Until at last, I stood before a door slightly ajar. A low draft tugged at the hem of my gown, still that dusk-colored blue Szylla had insisted on dressing me in, though now it felt like borrowed plumage for a creature I wasn't sure I wanted to be.
I pressed inside.
Aria's temporary bedroom was stark by comparison to the rest of Szylla's gilded mausoleum. The four-poster bed was made with crisp sheets the color of bone. A single oil lamp burned on the nightstand, its light nervous and small. On the far wall, a tall mirror stood draped in black gauze, as though to spare whoever looked too long the burden of seeing themselves.
I inhaled again, deep, letting her ghost linger across my tongue. She'd slept here. Restless, likely pacing. I could almost see her dark shape moving across the floor, shoulders stiff, eyes bright with that ceaseless, electric calculation.
My gut twisted painfully.
On the neatly made bed lay a single folded note, cream paper rough-edged as if torn from a thicker ledger. My hand trembled slightly as I picked it up.
The handwriting was unmistakable. Clean, deliberate, with a curious little curl at the end of her Y's, just like when she used to label her school binders, color-coding everything in meticulous gradients.
Kia,
It's not that I don't trust you. It's that I don't want you to follow me.
Wailfiend has agreed to come. She's annoying but useful, and she doesn't try to keep me small. I'm headed east—to the lands of the Wanderan. They're closer to human than anything else here, and there are old places among them. Clues. Power. I'm hunting my first target there.
Don't try to change my mind. I know you would. I love you for it. But this is bigger than us playing at sisters in someone else's nightmare. I have to see it through.
Stay alive, so when it's all done, we can argue about it over cheap tea the way we used to.
—Aria
The words blurred. My breath caught sharp and wrong in my chest, as though I'd swallowed a handful of frost. I sank down on the edge of the bed, note crushed gently between my hands.
Wailfiend. That gaudy, drifting banshee. Of course she'd latch on to this grim little crusade.
And the Wanderan… east of here, nestled in those labyrinthine territories said to be woven through with barely stable folds of the Veil. Aria was chasing something ancient there, her first target.
A throb of dread mowed through me, but so did a fragile, fractured pride. She was reckless. She was beautiful. She was hers—not mine to drag back, even if every fiber in me howled to do exactly that.
I exhaled slowly, letting the paper fall to my lap. Then I stood, rolling my shoulders to shake off the chill that had settled over me.
"All right, Aria." My ears flicked back, tail lashing once. "Go make your mess. But don't think for a moment I'm not coming after you the second you need it… whether you like it or not."
I tucked the note inside my bodice, close to my thrumming heart, and left her room without looking back. Because if I did, I might just crumble… and neither of us could afford that now.