Mora had long since settled into a comfortable routine at the quarry. The workers, with a few exceptions, had gotten used to her presence, and now treated her as part of the team, rather than a visiting dignitary. They even invited her to join them for drinks in the evenings, although they had banned her from joining in drinking contests after she tore through three bottles of vodka in a single evening and ended up being heartily sick in the flowerbed outside the foreman’s quarters. She had worried that that incident would make them think less of her, but if anything it had truly solidified her place as a member of the team. Now, with all her new friends and plenty of useful work to do, the quarry was starting to feel like a home away from home. It was almost a shame it was just a temporary assignment. But somehow, things just didn’t feel quite right today. Oh, the day had started well enough. She had woken up next to Goro, a very polite young man who shared her love for baking, and who had spent the night with her in her quarters. After making and enjoying a very pleasant breakfast together, the two of them had gone down to the pit to get to work. But that was when everything started feeling out of place. The orders that had come in during the night were just downright unusual, and because of them, almost everyone was hard at work down in the pit of the quarry. The only worker up on the ridge was Kyla, a middle-aged woman who always kept herself to herself and rarely spoke to anyone. She was well-known among the quarry workers for never touching a single drop of alcohol or joining them in any games of chance. For some reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on, the idea of Kyla working alone up on the ridge while everyone else was working the pit just didn’t sit right with Mora. But she had her own work to do, excavating quatrite slabs from the bed of the quarry right next to the wall, so she didn’t really have a lot of time to think about it. Albert, Willow and Miriam had met up in Albert’s office for a joint budget meeting. The recent spate of accidents and setbacks suffered by the big research project had put a strain on its coffers despite the ample investments and contributions coming in from all over the twin republics, and the three magi had gathered to discuss possible solutions to the issue. The meeting had gone on for far longer than any of them had anticipated, though, and so they had sent for lunch to be brought to them in the office. But that had been over half an hour ago, and it shouldn’t really take that long to prepare a simple cold lunch. Willow, who dealt notoriously poorly with hunger, was hanging draped over his chair and complaining loudly. Miriam, for her part, was mostly trying to cheer Willow up. Albert tried his best to simply keep working on the budgeting issue, but he couldn’t keep himself from glancing up at the door every so often and frowning. Something about this delay didn’t sit right with him. Kio was out on another freight run, although it was a much smaller one this time. There were just two other couriers following in the wake of his dappled mare this time. His saddlebags were heavy with more of that ‘radio’ stuff. Supposedly components to upgrade the gear the soldiers already had. Kio didn’t really care, though. As long as he was doing his part, he was happy. Especially if it meant spending more time on Sunflower, the pegasus he’d been given for these freight hauls. Sunflower had turned out to be a lovely girl with a good, even temper, a great deal of trust in her rider and a love for high speed flight not usually found in her breed. But there was something about this one run that didn’t seem quite right. It was unusual to send out such a small group on a freight run, especially one led by a wind mage as powerful as Kio. And while he supposed it would be helpful for the people at the mobile garrisons to have better communications equipment, the ‘radio’ stuff they were already using seemed to be working just fine, so it wasn’t exactly an emergency or anything. And besides, he’d never even met the two couriers that were flying in his wake. They seemed nice enough, and their credentials were in order, but Kio had never seen them around the pegasus roosts before. Sunflower whinnied beneath him, seeming to sense his agitation, so Kio leaned forwards and gave her a pat on the neck to reassure her. But he couldn’t quite seem to reassure himself. Jarak was out playing with the boys and girls from the Starhome orphanage. They were all good friends of his, and he tried to find time to play with them as often as he could. They had spent the morning in one of the local parks, and after an early lunch they had started heading for their ‘secret base’ in an abandoned lot where there weren’t any grown-ups around to complain about them being to noisy or breaking things. But just as they were about to head off, Jarak cocked his head to the side with a small frown. After a few seconds he nodded to himself and turned to the children. “Sorry, friends. I’m afraid we have to call it here for today.” “Aaaaw…” One of the boys said. “Why can’t we go to the secret base?” “I’m really sorry, but I have some very important work to do. But I’ll come back to play with you again soon, I promise.” It took a bit more convincing to get the kids to agree to head back to the orphanage, but he managed it in the end. Once his little friends were out of sight, he huffed in annoyance and started walking down an alleyway, careful not to make any sign that he knew that three men were following him. Kaia was trying her best to seem like she was just here at the lab to observe the work being done and ask questions of the gathered researchers, but she couldn’t quite conceal how unnerved she was feeling. After all, she was essentially here as a spy. Or was it called spying when you were trying to prevent sabotage? It was kind of more like counter-spying. Maybe that was what counterintelligence meant… Well, no matter what it was called, Kaia didn’t much like it. But she had promised Awa she’d catch whoever was messing up the cage project, and she didn’t intend to break that promise. Awa was busy doing her project leader thing like always, but Kaia could tell the girl was almost as on-edge as she was. But she knew Awa couldn’t really take any attention away from her work to go looking for saboteurs. Kaia would have to handle that on her own. And so she had been looking around, asking questions, doing everything she could to make it seem like just her usual curiosity. And she had been focusing the magical senses she only recently figured out she even had as finely as she could manage for hours on end, which was starting to give her a bit of a headache. The lab was full of all kinds of strange magical energy, not to mention the ‘blank spaces’ caused by the huge quatrite slabs. But even taking all that into account, there was something magical going on that didn’t seem quite right… Kyla Vale had been working towards this moment for so long, it almost felt unreal that it was actually happening. It had taken her weeks to figure out what work orders she needed to forge to make sure she was all alone on the ridge above the quarry pit with the magus stationed right below her, and actually forging those orders and swapping out the actual work orders before the foreman had a chance to see them had been absolutely nerve-wracking. But at long last, the time had come. But it wasn’t all planning and skulduggery. The actual task was an undertaking in and of itself. Even with the equipment available on site, pushing a fifty-ton slab of quatrite right to the edge of the ridge without alerting anyone down below had taken her all morning, and she only had minutes left to enact her plan before the workers got their lunch break. There was no way the slab of rock would remain unnoticed all throughout lunch, so it really was now or never. Kyla wiped the sweat from her brow and tried to calm her laboured breathing. She grabbed her pendant in both hands and muttered a quick prayer to the Goddesses under her breath. It was almost time. Twilight was coming for them all. Steeling her resolve, Kyla activated the rock-mover, doing her best to keep it as silent as possible as it pushed the massive slab over the edge of the cliff. “Come on, come on, come on… Mix in already… Oh Goddesses, I don’t have time for this…” Mira Stone kept stirring the powder into the pitcher of lemon water, watching as the rainbow-coloured flecks slowly dissolved away in the liquid. But it was taking way too long. It was her own fault, really. When she’d timed this to see how long it took, she’d always used tap water. Cool, certainly, but not iced like this lemon water. She hadn’t realized the colder temperature would make it take so much longer! If only she could have stirred the powder in before the ice was added, but that was impossible, of course. Too many people in the kitchens. Anyone could have spotted her. It was only away from prying eyes, in an empty side corridor, that she finally had her chance. By the time the powder had finally dissolved completely, there was almost no ice left in the pitcher. It had all melted from being stirred through the water so much. But Mira had no time to go get more ice. She simply had to hope no-one would notice. She took a few seconds to make sure that her hair wasn’t too disarrayed and her maid uniform wasn’t too ruffled. This was it. This was her only chance. She couldn’t afford to mess up now. She grabbed her pendant and tried to calm the frenzied beating of her heart. “There’s no going back now. Mom. Dad. I’m sorry. I won’t be coming home. But I’ll meet you again beyond the twilight.” Hiding the pendant beneath her clothes, Mira hurried off to Albert’s office and knocked on the door. Kel Warder looked over to the man flying next to him. They were much too far apart to talk, especially covertly, but honestly, there wasn’t much to be said at this point. They were here for a reason, and the time had come. Failure was not an option. Whether they got out of this alive was immaterial. All that mattered was completing the mission. The man across from him raised his amulet, the polished bronze gleaming in the sun, and Kel nodded in response. This was it. Digging through his saddlebags, Kel pulled out his disassembled crossbow piece by piece, careful not to drop anything as he assembled the weapon. He had practiced putting this thing together on horseback many times, but doing it in the air was another thing entirely. Fortunately, the magus was providing a very smooth and even wind, and there was little turbulence. Once the crossbow had taken shape, Kel pulled back the string and reached down to the concealed quiver of bolts strapped against his thigh. Nocking a bolt, Kel took aim on the young man flying in front of them, his companion doing the same beside him. Lowen Auwi was not pleased with how things were going. The plan had been to take the mad magus’s orphan friends hostage once they had gotten to the abandoned lot they liked to play at, well out of earshot of the more populated areas of the capital. But for whatever reason, the boy had sent the children home early. But all was not lost. The boy had stepped into an alleyway, and was rapidly heading away from the open streets. He turned to his two companions and nodded his head, gesturing towards the alley the magus had stepped into. The two men nodded in response, each placing a fist over their chest, above where their amulets were concealed. Lowen returned the gesture, and the three of them slipped into the alleyway, drawing their knives as soon as they were out of sight of the main street. They might not have the advantage they were hoping for, but they still outnumbered their target three to one. As long as they maintained the element of surprise, victory would be theirs. Ilian Sen could barely conceal her excitement. This was the day she had been waiting for. This was the day they would finally wipe the world clean of this foul heresy. Their plans were finally coming to fruition. No more sneaking about, no more hiding in the shadows, no more simple sabotage. Today the cage heresy would be ended once and for all, along with all the magi who supported it. It was all she could do to contain her glee and act natural as she carried on her usual charade as a lab assistant. But contain it she did. It wouldn’t do to give the game away early, after all. She knew full well that out of everything that was happening today, her part in the proceedings was the most important of all. Today, this heretical research and all the sinners working on it would be reduced to nothing, all in the name of the great Goddesses. All her studies, all her planning, it all led to this one, glorious moment. Soon, her final act of sabotage would finally bear fruit. It was a thing of beauty, a work of art. A single, perfectly orchestrated chain detonation that would reduce this entire laboratory to rubble. All these heretics would burn in the glare of the sun for all eternity, while her eternal reward awaited her beyond the twilight. Making sure no-one was watching her, Ilian placed a hand over her chest, feeling the pendant concealed beneath her clothes. “Great goddesses, the moment is almost upon us. In your names, I cleanse this place of sin. On this day, I shall come to stand before you as a champion of your twilight.” Most mages aren’t just unable to sense quatrite, they’re essentially incapable of sensing any magic whatsoever around sufficient amounts of quatrite. In a place like this, essentially a huge pit completely surrounded by massive quatrite walls, the average elemental mage would completely lose all sense of the magic in their surroundings. But to Mora, it was different. She could sense the earth magic radiating from her own body as it extended across the pit. She could have navigated this quarry blind just by sensing where her magic got absorbed by the quatrite. The instant the quatrite block above her cleared the edge of the ridge and began to fall, Mora felt as if a large hole in the magic of the world was hurtling towards her. Acting more on instinct than anything, she locked her bracers into guard position, and the quatrite beneath her feet actually started to glow red hot as the immensely powerful earth magic overloaded its ability to absorb it and forced it to crawl up over her skin as a protective barrier. The quatrite shell spreading across her body was so hot it almost burned, but thankfully it wasn’t heated to a glow like the stone beneath her feet. Just as the falling block was about to strike her, the magical shell of stone finished forming, and the earth magic coursing through it hardened it to the point of nigh indestructibility. The workers of the quarry barely had time to react. In what seemed like an instant, a massive block of quatrite had tumbled from the ridge above and slammed into the magus. The crack of stone on stone was deafening, and to the workers’ amazement the falling slab of stone split cleanly through the middle, Mora’s stone-clad form not budging an inch as the slab hit her. The two massive halves of the block, each of them far larger than the magus herself, tumbled off her form and slammed to the ground beside her. Her heart running a mile a minute, Mora pulled her bracers away from each other and leapt off the burning ground. Or at least she tried to, but she only managed a sluggish tumble away from the glowing hot rock. As she kicked off her thick leather work boots, she slowly came to realize that the quatrite skin she had summoned wasn’t retracting at all. If anything, the sparkling white stone seemed to have fused with her skin, giving her a look like a statue carved from some kind of sparkling marble or quartz. Turning her head, Mora looked up towards the ridge and saw Kyla turning to flee. Unable to think of anything else, she poured as much magic as she could muster into a small piece of quatrite, hoping to overcome the stone’s natural capacity to absorb magic enough that she could fling it at the fleeing figure and knock her down. But much to her surprise, the quatrite didn’t seem to absorb her magic at all, leaping up at her command as readily as any stone. Of course, with the sheer amount of magic she had poured into the thing, this resulted in it taking off so fast it made a noise like thunder, and before Mora could even react the stone had struck Kyla in the head. Given the speed the stone was moving at, this rather predictably resulted in Kyla’s head entirely ceasing to be a head. As everything finally started to settle down, Mora just sort of sank to the ground with a huff. She regarded her shimmering skin with a sort of detached bemusement, then turned to look at the spot where she had stood. She saw the air shimmering with heat over the cooling patch of stone. She saw the massive block of quatrite, cracked right through the middle where it had struck her. She saw her boots lying off to the side, the soles gently smouldering away. She felt heavy and stiff, and her movements seemed slow and ponderous. And her hair seemed to have turned completely solid, every strand as stiff and as immovable as stone. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to get the stone skin covering her body to recede at all. While she was trying to process that, she gradually began to realize that the quatrite didn’t feel like a hole in her magical senses any more. Somehow, she could sense it like any other stone, and it reacted to her magic as freely and as readily as simple granite. She just sort of stared up into the sky as the workers shouted and bustled around her, trying to make some kind of sense of what had just occurred. “Well…” She said at last. “My goodness.” “Finally.” Albert huffed as the maid entered with their lunch. “What took you so long, girl?” “My apologies, Lord Magus. There was a delay in the kitchens.” “For this long? Oh, whatever. Just bring it in, girl.” Albert bundled up all the papers covering the desk, and the maid started setting the cleared space, portioning out the food on their plates and pouring them each a glass of lemon water. But when she was done and turned to leave, Miriam called out to her. “Hold on for a moment, dear.” The maid turned around to face them once more, and Albert noticed there was cold sweat running down her face. “Is there something wrong, Lady Magus?” “I just felt that before we eat, it would be nice of you to tell us why you’re trying to poison us all.” The colour drained from the young maid’s face. “I… I don’t know what you mea…” “Mage’s bane, unless I’m much mistaken. Nasty little poison. Forces the magic straight out of you so fast it kills you stone dead. Scentless, odourless, almost invisible if you dissolve it in a liquid. But if you look carefully, you can just make out a slight rainbow sheen on the surface.” “Wh… Why do you…?” “Why do I know so much about mage’s bane? Because I take it every day, a tiny pinch with every meal.” “What? But that…” “Will kill me? Maybe, but not for a good while yet. I’m not the most powerful magus, girl. I’ll never measure up to legends like Princess Amber. But if my weakness makes me unable to protect the one I love… I’d rather die. The mage’s bane keeps me sharp. Keeps my magic burning hot. It gives me that little extra bit of power I need to keep my love safe. A few years off my life is nothing compared to that.” As the girl stared in shock at Miriam, Albert steepled his fingers and leaned forward. “Now, girl, let’s have a chat about why you were trying to poison us, shall we?” The girl seemed on the verge of panicking for a moment, but then a strange sort of calm settled on her face. “I failed you. I’m sorry.” With that, she bit down hard, and Albert heard something crunch. Before he could really react, the girl slumped to the floor and started to spasm and shake. A strange, purple froth began to spill from her mouth, and in a matter of seconds she was dead. Albert looked at the body with equal parts shock and frustration. “A suicide pill? Stars above! Who would… Miriam, search the body! Willow, alert the guards. No-one is to enter or leave this castle until I say so. We need to get to the bottom of this!” Aiming a crossbow while in flight is a tricky business at the best of times, and the extreme wind Kio was summoning to aid the pegasi in their flight certainly didn’t help matters. That was why, even at such short range, the first bolt sailed harmlessly past Kio’s ear, while the second thudded into this shoulder. The pain and shock was almost enough to make him tumble right out of the saddle, but his military training just about allowed him to keep his reactions in check. Turning to look over his uninjured shoulder, Kio saw that the men behind him both had crossbows drawn, and were frantically trying to reload them for another attempt. There was nowhere to take cover. There was no time to draw a weapon. All Kio could do was summon his magic and slam the most powerful winds he could muster straight into the chests of his attackers. Fortunately, it turned out to be enough, and the powerful wind wrenched both riders from the saddles and sent them hurtling to the ground far below. Unfortunately, the sudden change in the winds was too much for the pegasi behind him to adapt to, and with panicked whinnies they stalled out and began to fall. “Like hell!” Running on pure adrenaline, Kio pulled on the quick-release strap for his saddlebags, freeing them from the saddle and sending the heavy load plummeting to the ground below. He urged his now-unencumbered steed into a sharp dive, marshalling a powerful wind to help him gain the speed he needed to overtake the panicking pegasi beneath him. Making a quick circle turn to fly towards them from behind, Kio whistled a sharp command. Fortunately, the pegasi were well trained, and despite their panic at losing lift, the plummeting creatures responded perfectly to the command, extending and angling their wings in anticipation of the coming wind. Kio blew past them like a bolt of lightning, the enormous winds trailing in his wake picking up the winged beasts like leaves on the wind. As they picked up speed, the trio of pegasi started to regain lift, but their trajectory was still more of a dive than a flight. Giving frantic whistled commands the entire time, Kio directed both the winds and the pegasi with a speed and precision born entirely of instinct, training and pure adrenaline. In the end, he only just managed to level out their trajectory moment before they hit the forest below them, and Kio actually heard the snapping sounds of Sunflower’s hooves just skimming through the very tip of the leafy canopy. Gradually shifting the wind to shed some speed and regain a bit of altitude, Kio began to look around for a good landing site. Preferably somewhere inhabited. The bolt in his shoulder wasn’t exactly a lethal shot, but it had still penetrated some way into his flesh, and he really needed to get it looked at before long. Besides, he was losing some amount of blood. And trying to direct three pegasi in flight while dizzy from blood loss seemed like a remarkably poor idea. Jarak tried to look oblivious as the three men snuck up behind him. They were honestly not that bad at it. He certainly couldn’t hear them, and he hadn’t really seen them in the crowds earlier. But he didn’t need to. He could feel their body heat. The moment he realized they were following him, he had sent all his little friends home. After all, it wouldn’t do to put his friends in harm’s way. It wasn’t long before one of the men sneaking up on him lashed out with a knife. But what actually hit him was a scattering of ash and a few droplets of molten metal that burned little charred holes in his clothes, but didn’t harm him in the slightest. Turning around, he saw a man in front of him staring at the charred stump where his hand had once been. The two men beside him rushed in to attack, but Jarak simply raised a hand and allowed the fire flowing through his body to reduce their hands and weapons to ashes and slag, just like he had with the first attacker. One of the men dropped to the floor and began to shake, seemingly going into some kind of shock, but the other man simply shaped his remaining hand into a fist and attacked. Jarak responded with a vicious kick to the throat, and watched in satisfaction as he dropped to the ground, clutching at his windpipe. With the two flunkies dealt with, Jarak rounded on the man who was clearly their leader. “You know, I don’t really mind people attacking me. I’d still kill you for it, obviously, but I wouldn’t mind. But you were going after me on a day when you knew I was going to be playing with my friends from the orphanage. You were going to hurt them, weren’t you? You were going to hurt them to get to me.” The man looked at him mutely for a few seconds before seeming to reach a decision, and moved to bite down hard on the left side of his mouth. But Jarak’s hand shot out like a striking viper, grabbing the man’s jaw and wrenching it until he was rewarded by a sickening crack. As the man’s jaw fell open limply, Jarak grabbed him around the throat with both hands and started to squeeze. “Thought you could get one over on the mad magus, didn’t you? Use my madness against me? I know what they all say. I’m Jarak the mad boy, who collects friends like little marbles. They say I’m Amber-blooded, but in a different way. Because they don’t understand. None of them understand.” The man tried to kick at him, but a brilliant white flame erupted around his leg, dissolving it into a cloud of superheated ashes before it had a chance to connect. “I’m not Amber-blooded any differently than anyone else. Just more. No-one has ever been as Amber-blooded as me. Not even Princess Amber herself. If they just realized that, they would understand the power I have.” The man gurgled intelligibly. He didn’t have the strength left to stand. But it didn’t matter. Jarak was lifting him up into the air by the neck, and he dangled helplessly with his one remaining leg swinging weakly through the air. “There are fifteen million people in this city. And I can feel every single one of them. I can sense their inner fire every second of every day. When a new one is born, I can feel their warmth emerging from their mother. When one dies, I can feel their heat gradually cooling and vanishing from the world. That’s always a very sad thing, because maybe that person could have been my friend, if I’d just met them before they died. Maybe one day, no-one will have to die anymore, and everyone will be my friend.” He frowned. “Well, almost everyone. Garbage like you will never be my friend. Anyone who tries to hurt my friends isn’t my friend. Not now, not ever. And that makes you useless to me.” The man’s eyes rolled back into his head, and with a final gurgle he stopped struggling completely. With a scoff, Jarak threw him onto the ground next to his collapsed compatriots. As he left the alley, Jarak raised his hand and allowed a bit more of his fire to come out than he usually did. In the alley, nothing remained but scorch marks, bits of slag and a dissipating mist of fine ashes. Many of the researchers and lab assistants had gathered to watch the latest entanglement experiment. It was a pretty important one, and everyone was eager to see if it would give any useful results. The fragment pieces were sealed away in a sturdy containment chamber, and were being bombarded by a carefully controlled flow of magical energy. Kaia was focusing her entire being on the chamber containing the volatile experiment. It was difficult to get a proper sense of it, what with all the quatrite in the area, but there was something that just didn’t feel quite right. It took her while to figure out the problem. She was able to sense two distinct water magic signatures within the chamber, but she should only be sensing one signature split across two objects. Someone had replaced the split fragments with two different whole ones. Kaia wasn’t an expert in the field, but she knew enough to figure out that four pairs of un-split fragments subjected to this kind of magical pressure were almost certainly going to dissolve into uncontrolled magical energy, and if that amount of energy was released in a lab full of the fragments… “EVERYBODY DOWN!” For once, Kaia was glad that the lab had suffered so many catastrophic failures. Because the moment she shouted, every single researcher in the room dove behind the massive quatrite barrier with a speed and efficiency born of habit and repetition. Kaia didn’t dive behind the barrier, though. If this detonation started a chain reaction, there was no barrier thick enough to save anyone from the resulting explosion. Pulling on every bit of magical energy she could muster, Kaia reached out to all the water in the area. Cooling tanks, water-magic experiments, water coolers, anything she could reach. As dozens of strands of water came flying through the air at breakneck speeds to gather around the experiment chamber, Kaia’s questing senses found a water main running beneath the floor. With a painful level of magical effort she forced the water through both the pipe and the floor, smashing the polished stone tiles to rubble and flooding the area around the experiment chamber with countless tons of water. Mere seconds after Kaia’s shout, the chamber started glowing so bright it was painful to look at, the ever-growing sphere of water refracting the light at odd angles. Moments later, a vibration powerful enough to shake the whole building shot through the floor, and Kaia struggled to maintain her protective sphere against the immense flood of kinetic and magical energy pushing against it. Gritting her teeth, she increased the pressure as much as she could, the water heating up at an alarming rate as it absorbed all the energy pouring into it from the detonating chamber. As the water started to boil into steam, Kaia felt the strain of controlling it redouble, and felt a trickle of blood running down both nostrils. Desperately searching for a safe way to dispose of the massive, roiling cloud of pressurized steam, Kaia’s eyes fell on a large safety vent inside the fume hood covering one of the experiment stations. The small part of her mind still capable of rational thought really hoped there wasn’t anyone standing near the exit of the vent system as she shoved enormous amounts of superheated steam through it. Finally, as she poured the last of the steam through the groaning vent, things finally calmed down. The scientists were picking themselves off the floor, which was gradually getting soaked with icy cold water from the burst water main. The rubble that remained of the containment chamber hissed and steamed as it cooled. Kaia just stood there and panted, her heart hammering in her chest and blood seeping from her mouth, nose and eyes. “NO! DEATH TO THE HERETICS!” Kaia didn’t think. She didn’t have the energy to think. As the woman ran at her with a knife, she simply reacted. Years of training took over where her conscious mind was no longer able to serve. She pulled her blade from its sheath, and in one fluid motion delivered a single perfect downward diagonal blow. With no conscious thought to get in the way, the sword was sharp with pure, unthinking instinct, and the blow cleaved the attacking woman from shoulder to hip. Time almost seemed to freeze for a moment, and then one half of the woman toppled forwards while the other fell back, her innards spilling out across the floor as the water was quickly coloured bright red by her blood. Kaia just stared at the bisected corpse, the image burning itself into her mind as she gradually started to understand just what she was seeing. What she had done. The harsh light of the laboratory gleamed off the surface of pieces of the body that were never meant to see the light of day, and she didn’t even notice as First River slipped from her trembling hands and clattered against the floor. “----! ----, --- --- --- -----?” Someone was shouting at her. Shaking her. The voice was familiar, but Kaia couldn’t identify it. Couldn’t tear her eyes away from the woman on the floor. The woman she had killed. “Kaia! Kaia, talk to me! Are you all right? Kaia!” Kaia threw up.