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Catherine Foundling stood over two corpses in an alley, panting, heart racing almost uncontrollably. The bodies wore the uniforms of city guards; she wore the gray skirt and pleasantly blue cotton blouse of the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls and a liberal application of blood spatter.
She ignored the trembling girl pressing herself against the alley wall for now. The intended victim of the guards wasn’t exactly exuding danger, and if Cat had learned one thing fighting in the pit it was to never take your eyes off the main threat.
No, the main source of threat here was inarguably the almost ludicrously lethal-looking man currently idly examining his fingernails. He didn't look like anybody Cat had ever seen before, and she had a sinking feeling that there was no way what she was seeing could be natural anywhere. He wore a sober tunic with long sleeves and buttons so dark it was practically as if they’d been formed out of shadows. At his hip he bore a slender sheathless blade that somehow exuded an absolutely impossible sense of sharpness, like somebody had somehow taken the very idea of sharpness itself and hammered it into a weapon. He had pale skin and a clean-shaven face, with thin red lips pressed into a scowl that seemed like a permanent feature. A black silken blindfold covered in spidery silver writing in no language Cat could read or recognize covered one of his eyes, and his hair fit the concept of raven-haired better than anybody Cat had ever seen or imagined. But none of these things, not even the sword, were the real reason why he seemed so lethal.
The real reason why was the way he casually emanated the silent assurance of somebody absolutely accustomed to ending lives. Not quite what you’d call a reassuring presence to find yourself in a darkened alley with.
Still, he had… probably, Cat thought grudgingly… saved her life. She’d been doing well enough fighting the guards, right up until she wasn’t and she was getting the life strangled out of her on the ground instead. If this stranger hadn’t shown up out of nowhere and hauled the man choking her to death off her, she’d never have had the opening to grab the knife off the guard’s belt and cut his throat with it. Then the other one had howled and come at her and before she knew it she found herself stabbing him- she wasn’t actually sure how many times.
Which. Well. Killing somebody had turned out to be not much like what she’d thought it- anyway. She didn’t have to think about that right now. Maybe not ever! It seemed unlikely she could avoid the thoughts forever, but you couldn’t really know until you tried, could you.
“If you’re quite finished letting your mind wander?” the man drawled languidly. Cat had a hot retort halfway to coming unbidden out of her mouth when he flicked his eye from his nails to her, and his eye met hers for the first time. And instead she found herself peering into the absolute, depthless darkness of a night that had never known stars, and never would. She found herself drifting away from her own body, mind slipping inexorably into a void that engulfed her consciousness completely. She began to panic, so naturally it was as if there was never any other possibility, thoughts scrabbling frantically like a rat clawing at the box that had trapped it.
...No. This was just another fear to be faced, and what was that but another term for a challenge? She’d never caved to a challenge yet, and she would be damned to the Hells before she’d let this be the one that broke her. She had too far still to go to break now. She snapped back into her body with a sharp jolt. She found the taste of blood in her mouth and realized she’d bitten her own tongue without knowing it.
Anger surged in her, hot and righteous. Who did this spooky motherfucker think he was? His eldritch bullshittery wouldn’t impress her, not if she had anything to say about it. She held his gaze deliberately as she spat a mouthful of blood onto the alley dirt, and forced nonchalance into her voice. “I might be young, but I’m still too old to be scared of the dark. Try harder, or keep your child’s games to yourself.”
She winced internally as her mind processed what her mouth had just produced. Ah, suicide by taunt - not the fate I’d wanted, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t one of the most plausible, she thought almost wistfully.
But instead of becoming angry, the stranger just smiled widely. Too widely. Showing too many flawless white teeth, too small and too close together and just a little bit too pointed to be mistaken for human. “Ah,” he practically purred, “my instincts did not lead me astray. You are the story I was looking for.”
Catherine had to restrain herself from taking a half-step back on instinct, before she remembered she was through with being afraid of this bastard and squared her stance instead. Fuck it, it’s too late to try to swallow my words, and pretending to be someone I’m not has never been my strength anyway, she resolved. “Oh? I’d say I’m a girl, actually, not a story. Judging from your skin tone they must keep you indoors pretty much all the time, so maybe you’ve just not seen one of those before?”
The stranger shrugged carelessly. “A girl is a story is a key. Or a lockpick.” He eyed Cat up and down skeptically. “Or perhaps just a crowbar. Regardless, it’s all one and the same, or at least it might be. But finding that out is exactly the point, isn’t it?”
Cat blinked, and replied. “Well, I hope all that cryptic nonsense was good for you, stranger, because I certainly didn’t get anything out of it.”
The stranger clapped his hands together. “Oh, but I have failed to introduce myself, haven’t I? How practically crass of me.” He chuckled lightly to himself before continuing. “You may address me as the Prince of Nightfall, of the Winter Court of Arcadia. And you are Catherine Foundling, of the Laure Home for Tragically Orphaned Girls.”
Cat found herself unable to control her expression as it was revealed that, first, this was a fucking fae prince, and she’d known that he was some flavor of inhuman and dangerous already, but how was a FUCKING FAE PRINCE even fair? Her luck didn’t just rain, and it was well past the point of pouring, on to the point where it was currently dawdling around the level of knocking her down and spitting venomous acid on her face while laughing. Which just brought her right to second, the fucking fae prince knew her godsdamned name somehow, and she’d read enough stories to have a good idea of some of the ways that could go horrifically bad. She was pretty sure the Winter Court were usually the extra bastardy ones in the stories too, so that was just the perfect icing on this layer cake of violence, tragedy, and misfortune that her life seemed to have become.
Evidently taking note of her manifest consternation, the… Prince of FUCKING Nightfall flicked his gaze down to the left side of her chest before meeting her gaze again and raising an eyebrow mockingly. Cat swore internally. Right. The orphanage just had to sew patches with their bloody names and the name of their house on them onto the uniforms, didn’t they?
He hummed slightly to himself before saying “I’ll be seeing you again shortly, Catherine Foundling of Laure. But for now, you’d best be a good girl and wipe that blood off your face before you hurry on home.” He leaned forward slightly. “There are monsters coming.”
Well, she didn’t like the wording he used but she didn’t have to be asked to leave twice, not from here. The cryptic warning about monsters wasn’t cheering either, especially not coming from this man. Or should it be from this fae? Whichever. She looked behind her for the girl from before so she could make sure she got moving too, and found the alley empty except for the corpses. Wait. This alley dead-ended, for the girl to have gotten out without Cat noticing… how long had she actually been floating in that bloody void before snapping out of it, exactly? She snapped her head back around to say something to the Prince about that - she wasn’t sure what, but it would probably be nothing wise to say - but found the mouth of the alley completely deserted now as well.
Cat swore, aloud this time, before hastily wiping her face on one of the non-bloody parts of a guard’s tabard - at least, she thought it was one of the non-bloody parts, it wasn’t exactly well-lit here - and hurrying away through the darkened streets, hoping and not quite praying to make it inside the Laure House without being spotted.
A couple of minutes after the orphan girl left, an unusual pair of people walked up to the alley mouth. One was an enormous Taghreb woman, impossibly standing somewhere north of eight feet tall and bearing a hammer that would be absurdly oversized for anyone else slung over her back. The other was a notably short pale-skinned man in dark plate armor, with eyes of an eerie pale green. The sheer disparity between their heights might have been amusing, if you didn’t know who they were. If you didn’t know what they were capable of, and all the things they’d already done. They surveyed the scene of violence left within for a handful of moments before the woman grunted and spoke. “Well, whatever exactly it was that happened here, looks like we got here just a bit too late to catch the end of it.”
The man shook his head slightly. “On the contrary, I don’t think we missed the end at all. Unless I miss my guess, I’m afraid what we missed was a beginning.”
The woman rested one of her immense hands on his shoulder comfortingly, before she said, “It’s good to know that you’ll still have all your cryptic bullshit to take joy in, once all your friends have left you in exasperation.” The pale man’s lips twitched. “Anyway,” she continued, “they can’t have been gone more than a few minutes. The scent’s more than fresh enough for me to have no trouble tracking them down, if you want.”
He inclined his head, considering it for a moment, before shaking his head again. “No, this is someone else’s story now. I’ll not have us step foot in it until we know something about what we’d be stepping into. Besides, we have an appointment to kill a governor. It would be rude to keep him waiting.”
The tall woman chuckled. “Yes, it would be a shame to… leave him hanging.”
The man in the dark plate refrained from rolling his eyes so thoroughly that his reaction was even more obvious than if he’d just rolled them. “And to think,” he said, “they call me a monster.” The huge Taghreb woman cuffed him on the shoulder with surprising gentleness in response.
Together, they walked on, following the path of a different story.
Tonight was the night, it seemed, for the hands of Fate to take Catherine Foundling’s hopes and dreams and wring their necks in front of her. First there was that whole… incident, in the alley. Much of which she was still not thinking about thanks, moving right along. Then, not only had she not made it back into the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls unnoticed, she had literally bumped into Matron Clarabella herself almost right away. Even better, either wiping her face in a hurry hadn’t worked that well or that patch of tabard hadn’t been quite as non-bloody as she’d thought, because apparently she’d still had a large smear of what was evidently quite identifiably blood on one cheek.
As a result, rather than starting at the normal lecturing level for coming in after curfew and then gradually ramping her way up in response to Catherine’s manifest disrespect for her authority - you know, like normal - she had instead started at around one hundred percent of her normal maximum level of choler and had only escalated from there.
She always thought Clarabella was such an incongruously girlish name for the sour old bat anyway, Cat mused once again, nodding in what she hoped was a plausibly thoughtful and repentant manner in response to whatever the matron was currently waving her finger in her face and shouting about. But judging from the way the matron’s teeth clenched and her volume escalated again in response, either she hadn’t quite sold it or she’d nodded at the wrong part. Again. Or it could be both, really.
Both of them paused and turned their heads when an audibly cleared throat cut in with perfect timing, interrupting Matron Clarabella’s current rant during one of her rare pauses to inhale. It was the fucking Prince of Nightfall, somehow. In the blood-spattered alley he’d looked unearthly and lethal, like something that had stepped out of a dream of violence. In the hallway of the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls, he just looked disconcertingly out of place.
Like if the Black Knight himself showed up just to grab a drink in the Rat’s Nest, Cat thought, barely suppressing a hysterical giggle as she breathed out the word “fuck.” Matron Clarabella cuffed her ear without turning her head back to look.
“Hello,” the Prince said smoothly, “I have come to purchase one of your orphans on behalf of the Winter Court of Arcadia.”
Matron Clarabella met his eye without flinching, and if she had found herself drifting into a lightless eldritch void upon doing so the way Cat had then the only sign she gave of it was that her lips pursed even further. “Absolutely none of that is how an orphanage works, so you can take your ridiculous routine back to whatever third-rate troupe of street performers spat you out,” the matron snapped flatly. Cat felt a newfound sense of respect bloom inside her even as she clutched her newly sore ear, as she realized that she didn’t know what they’d made Matron Clarabella out of, but she had to assume that somewhere an infuriated blacksmith was hunting for the thief who’d stolen their special materials.
The Prince of Nightfall continued as if she hadn’t spoken, however, saying, “Specifically, I want Catherine Foundling. And of course, I don’t come empty-handed.” And with that, he tossed a bag of significant heft at the matron’s feet, where it landed with a clink and a flash of gold from the open top of the bag.
“Done,” Matron Clarabella snapped out unhesitatingly, speaking almost before the bag even landed. Cat felt her newfound sense of respect not so much wither as die screaming in a firestorm of instant outrage.
“Oh, like FUCK am I going to-” she began before the Prince cut her off by drawing his absurdly sharp-looking sword and swinging it in a vertical line that appeared to cut a hole into reality itself, releasing a puff of snow from what seemed to be the other side.
“The deal is sealed, then,” the Prince said with a smile that flashed his unnerving teeth again. Even as Catherine tried to back away, he took a swift step forward and clapped an inhumanly strong hand on her shoulder. Her protest of “I am not fucking going to-” was cut off as he dragged her through the wound he’d cut through what was real, which flickered out of existence afterwards.
The matron squinted at the bag at her feet. “Goon thinks he can fool me with some fae gold that’ll turn to dead leaves at dawn,” she muttered to herself. She raised her voice without turning her head or looking up from the bag. “You! The one who thinks I don’t know she cracked her door open to sneak a peek at what was happening! Run to the Legion camp, and tell the mages that the Laure House for Tragically Orphaned Girls is selling an entire bag of genuine unexpired fae gold for study before dawn!”
A door was practically flung open as the girl inside - she’d known there had to be at least one, and cultivating the impression she had eyes in the back of her head was always helpful - practically fell over herself to comply. She certainly didn’t want to get sold to some terrifying fae noble for being insubordinate. Matron Clarabella smiled to herself - only on the inside of course, she couldn't look like she was going soft. Yes, this could be a good night for the orphanage after all.