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Clorinde is four years old and afraid of the dark.

Master tells her there is nothing to fear, and that she will never be a Marechaussee Hunter if something as harmless as nightfall is enough to scare the wits out of her. She takes Clorinde out into the forest, every evening, and makes her find her way back home by a palmful of stars in the sky. It takes hours: Clorinde is small, smaller than the other children her age who she sometimes sees playing down by the creek while she trains, and always-sore from the bruises of learning to fall. But she makes it, night after night, stumbling up the steps to Master’s little stone house and a hot meal waiting on the table. 

When she is five, she is allowed to bring the Geovishap, who she has named ‘Geovishap.’ Geovishap is not very good at navigating, but it can always sniff out the best wild mushrooms, and its warm, solid presence at Clorinde’s shoulder makes her feel just that much braver. Together they kill their very first phantasm, and Geovishap lets her take all the credit. Because it can’t speak, of course, to tell Master otherwise, but Clorinde thinks maybe it would have backed her up anyway, just because they’re friends.

When she is six, Master brings her a wooden crate overflowing with books and teaches her how to read.

The first book she reads all by herself is a fairytale. In it, a brave Lochknight rescues a princess from an evil witch’s tower all covered in thorns, and they ride off into the sunset on the back of a dragon.

Clorinde could be a knight, she thinks. She has a sword, which she’s already killed monsters with, and Master has a big black cape that maybe she could borrow. She has a brave steed — well, she has Geovishap, who sometimes lets her sit on its back if she stays really still. She stands in front of the mirror, and tries to imagine herself with armour and a shield, scaling the walls of some impenetrable tower to save the beautiful maiden inside.

She likes the fairytales a lot, but her absolute favourite stories come from the Book of Focalors. 

Not many people worship their Archon, not like the gods of other lands. She doesn’t need it; the courtroom is her cathedral, everyone always says, and the verdicts of the Iudex and the Oratrice her prayer. The Book is more a set of basic laws than anything else, but it gives the laws a backstory, full of drama and emotion in precise, eloquent words. Between those pages, their Archon becomes a divine guide watching over all of Fontaine — like Master, like a parent. 

Clorinde memorises the Oath of the Hunter. She learns all the mushrooms in the forest — hallucinogenic, edible, fatal. She holds a sword until her palms feel empty without it. But in her own time, she learns about justice. 

When her arms ache from training, she counts out the beats of a prayer in her head. When she’s shivering and bleeding her way through the forest, she whispers it out loud, and swears she can feel a sourceless warmth filling her with newfound strength.

And when she goes to sleep at night, the dark doesn’t seem so scary when she’s curled up in bed, safe and warm under Lady Furina’s divine, eternal gaze.

And then she is nine years old, and re-thinking everything she thought she knew about sunshine.

She likes nighttime better now, usually. It covers her tracks, makes it easier to hide from her prey and to pass unnoticed through the hunting grounds. There’s no reason to be afraid of monsters when she can fight a mitachurl off with one hand tied behind her back; the rope burns are still there on her wrist, healed over the course of a week to a faint shiny pink. 

But now she is at a picnic, and her eyes hurt from it all, and there’s a girl made of pure sunlight shouting orders into the army of children. Her dress is dark blue and ripped at the hem, and a scratch sits sharp and red on her chin as if it has only just stopped bleeding. She waves at Clorinde from her perch — a makeshift structure of latticework chairs and cool-boxes, terribly precarious, already buckling beneath the girl’s kidskin boots. 

Clorinde does not wave back. She shrinks back, her heart hammering in her chest. She isn’t scared — she isn’t scared of much anymore — but the whirlpool of voices and limbs unsettles her. If she stepped forward, she is sure she would drown.

“Oh, there he is,” Master says. Her scarred hand falls heavy on Clorinde’s shoulder, a warm and familiar anchor, and she steers them both across the lawn to an outcropping of wooden crates and those same latticework chairs. A man stands over a barbecue, turning meat over the flame with a pair of long-handled tongs.

“Callas,” Master says, when they’re right in front of him. “Thank you for inviting us. This is my student, Clorinde.”

Clorinde peeks out from behind Master’s legs. The man is tall and sturdy, and he holds himself with the easy power of an accomplished fighter. Has Master brought her here to learn from him? 

He smiles down at her. “Hello, Clorinde. I’m Callas Caspar, the head of the Spina di Rosula. Would you like a sausage?”

Clorinde nods, and he passes her one wrapped in soft white bread. It tastes like rosemary.

As she eats, the adults talk about Poisson, a place Clorinde has heard of but never seen. There have been troubles with overfishing, Mr. Callas says, and a bridge’s rope snapping beneath the strain of footsteps. Master asks about unfamiliar names. The world feels very big, all of a sudden — so many people Clorinde has never met, so many places she has never gone to. 

She wishes Master had let her bring Geovishap, but it doesn’t get along well with people who aren’t Clorinde. She had left it in the garden with instructions to behave; it must be happy there, in the sun, digging through the flowerbeds or chewing on the iron legs of Master’s garden chairs. 

She drifts away, unmoored in this sea of people-who-know-each-other, until she reaches the frilled shade of a beech tree. The grass is cool beneath her knees, and it feels instantly quieter in the shadows, as if the foliage is shielding her from the noise as well as the light. 

A few moments later, loud, tramping footsteps spring up to her left. Not Master, who moves through the forest without so much as a dead leaf crackling beneath her weight. Clorinde looks up warily.

It’s the girl from before, in the blue dress, holding a sandwich in one hand and a bowl of fruit in the other. Up close she’s even shinier; hair like spun gold, eyes huge and blue and sparkly like the sea. Clorinde feels very small and very shabby in comparison.

The girl smiles. “Hey there!” She says brightly. “I’m Navia. My papa organised this picnic, but I helped —- I made the fruit salad! You’re Madame Petronilla’s… apprentice, right?" She wrinkles her nose like the term is funny, but the smile remains. She’s missing a tooth — right-hand side, upper canine, a direct mirror to the one Clorinde last lost. 

Clorinde nods. “I’m Clorinde,” she says lamely. “Um… I like to read.”

The girl flops down next to her, legs stuck straight out in front of her on the grass. Her kidskin boots are stained with green. “Me too!” She says. “What’s your favourite book?”

“The…” Clorinde glances over her shoulder. Master is on the other side of the picnic now, engaged in spirited conversation with an old woman Clorinde vaguely recognises from their trips to Petrichor. She notices that, and she notices too the strategic positioning of it all, keeping Master all but hidden from the two off-duty Phantom melusines sharing a punnet of strawberries on the grass. 

She’s far enough away that she won’t be able to hear anything, though, so Clorinde turns back to the pretty sunshine girl and says “The Book of Focalors.”

The girl — Navia, Navia — frowns. “I’ve never read that,” she says. “Apparently it’s required reading in the big schools, but my tutors always say not to worry about it. Is it good?”

“I think so. There’s one part where she makes bread.”

Navia looks dubious. “I can make bread,” she says. “Melus taught me how.” Clorinde doesn’t know what a Melus is — is it like a Melusine? — but she nods anyway. “Isn’t an archon supposed to make big miracles? Like…” She thinks very hard for a moment, chewing thoughtfully on her sandwich. Her gaze lights on the horizon, Mont Esus ringed with a halo of clouds. “Like creating a mountain!”

“Lady Furina could make mountains if she wanted to,” Clorinde says stoutly. “She made bread out of fish. A baguette long enough to feed everyone in Fontaine.”

Navia’s eyes widen. The cloudless sky turns grey in comparison. “Okay,” she agrees. “That is pretty cool. What else does she do?”

And Clorinde takes the proffered bowl of fruit, and bites into a slice of pear, sharply sweet, and she tells Navia stories until the sun sets. 

For exactly five weeks between their birthdays, Navia is eleven and Clorinde is nine. 

Clorinde has not celebrated her nine birthdays with much fanfare. Since she turned six, Master has brought her a new book each year, and allowed her to stay up an extra half-hour reading it at night. She had thought grand celebrations only happened in stories and for Lady Furina’s own birthday month. Lady Furina is four hundred and seventy; she has been four hundred and seventy for as long as Clorinde has been alive. 

But Navia had asked, with great enthusiasm, what sort of party she would be having for such a milestone. Clorinde hadn’t had the heart to tell her that the date she calls her birthday is nothing more than guesswork, based on her size and development when Master had taken her in. So she had said she wasn’t sure, that she didn’t think much about birthdays, and Navia had gasped and said she couldn’t ignore turning ten. And that, as Clorinde’s elder by two entire birthdays, she was old and wise enough to plan a party herself. 

Clorinde hadn’t argued. The thought of spending a day like that with Navia — something celebratory, something soft — had made her ribcage feel warm, like a little ring of candles wrapped around her heart. 

Navia makes a cake from fresh, crisp autumn apples, drizzled in clotted cream; she stuffs a baguette with salted ham and sharp yellow cheese. A picnic on the lip of the hill before the ground opens up into Poisson. They play the tabletop game that is Clorinde’s birthday gift, and Navia weaves daisies into a crown as her character sneaks through the corridors of a deserted mansion. When she’s finished she places it ceremoniously onto Clorinde’s head. A perfect fit.

Mr. Callas comes up to check on them every few hours, a show of parental concern that makes something in Clorinde’s chest twist painfully. She knows her master loves her — thinks she does, anyway — but there is not much room for gentleness in a Marechaussee Hunter’s training. 

But the shards of envy melt away as the day wears on, and she feels like she’s melting, relaxing into the warmth and the softness of her party. When they have tired of battling dragons, Navia climbs back into the depths of Poisson to beg board games from the adults of the village. They tie six times across four different games and fall asleep beneath the sun, holding hands like otters drifting downstream. 

When it gets dark, she realises that Master must have forgotten to pick her up. Mr. Callas offers to take her home in a wagon, but Clorinde opts to walk instead. She wants to scope out the darkened forest, and see if the tangle of blackberry bushes a little way off the road has ripened enough for picking. Master likes blackberries — perhaps, after Clorinde’s evening training is done, they will go out into the garden and eat them from the bowl, lit up by lanterns and fireflies, tossing the underripe fruit for Geovishap to catch until it is purring and its little face is stained purple. 

She cuts left, off the road and over the Autumnequi foothills, following rabbit-trails, content. She will go back to Navia’s house next week, and Melus, who is not a Melusine but a man, will teach them both to make scones. She will bring Master the blackberries, which she has folded the hem of her shirt around like a basket, and they will both be happy.

At the edge of the forest she pauses. She ought to be able to see the light of her house by now — the lantern at the door, the yellow-green of the Pneumousia generator pumping power to the lamps inside. The curtains ought to be closed to keep out the faint autumn chill. Something prickles against her skin, the hunter’s instinct, waiting still and silent for any sign of life.

Geovishap scrambles across the garden to greet her, and she lets them both into the house. Dark inside, quiet. She tries to hang her coat up on the coatrack and finds it completely empty of coats. 

Clorinde stares at the polished brass peg where Master’s black cloak lives. Of course she’d have taken it with her if she went out, but her long woollen winter coat is gone too. And the jacket she wore yesterday, knives sewn into the soft blue lining. And her hat. 

Cold pools in Clorinde’s limbs. She starts down the corridor, keeping her footsteps grave-quiet. 

In the kitchen, their breakfast dishes still sit drying on the rack. There is fruit in the fruit bowl. There is no Master.

She untucks the hem of her shirt and lets the blackberries tumble onto the dining table. She is too high up, and she lets them fall too roughly; one bursts, dripping blood across the polished wood. 

The living-room is also empty, and Clorinde stops, her heart crawling into her throat, because so is the bookcase. Her own meagre stash of books sits placidly on the bottom shelf, just as she left them, but Master’s things — adventure stories and travel guides, encyclopaedias of the plants and monsters that grow in Fontaine’s forest, the battered copy of Raising Resilient Children that Clorinde had used for target practice as a toddler — everything is gone. 

It is a test. It has to be a test. 

In Master’s bedroom she finds a bed stripped of its sheets, the blanket and pillow folded neatly against the headboard. In her own, she finds a little oblong box on the dresser: a necklace with a pendant, a little silver sword glinting against the satin lining. There isn’t a note, but Master doesn’t believe in cards. She doesn’t like having her name visible, where someone who isn’t Clorinde could see it. 

For a moment she fumbles with the clasp — her fingernails are too short to hook beneath the catch, and by the time she succeeds the pad of her finger is pink and numb from the pressure. The pendant slides to the trough of its chain, a faint cold weight against her chest. 

She doesn’t sleep well that night. Geovishap creeps into her bedroom, abandoning its usual nest in the kitchen to curl at the foot of her bed; it has grown recently, and there is not much room left for Clorinde. She rests her bare feet on its rough, rocky shoulder and squeezes her eyes shut, circling through the Salve Regina in her head. A Marechaussee Hunter must be able to fight through exhaustion, but she must not let it come to that if she can help it. When she dreams, she dreams of Master’s retreating back.

For three days, she stays at home. She leaves only to hunt — if Master returns, she does not want to miss her. She doesn’t know how to cook for one, but Geovishap happily gobbles up the excess portions once they have cooled beyond repair. 

On the evening of the third day, she takes her pillow and her blanket and carries them into Master’s bedroom. 

The closet is hanging open slightly — its hinges are old and need oiling, something Master always says she will get around to but never does. Clorinde often wakes in the night to the squeak of it opening, the one spot of noise in an otherwise silent hunting routine. 

She finds a bottle of oil by the sink and brings it back to the bedroom. It’s a little difficult, dribbling oil onto metal components so far above her head, but with the help of Master’s dressing-table chair she is able to brace herself between the wardrobe and the wall, and tilt the bottle downwards into the metal rings. 

Perhaps if Master comes back, and she sees that Clorinde fixed the hinge, she will be so pleased that she stays for good. 

Satisfied, she climbs down to test her handiwork. Closing the wardrobe is smooth and silent, but there’s a small squeak of resistance as she opens it outwards. Clorinde frowns and wiggles the handle, trying to figure out where she went wrong. Missed a spot? Something internal, too deep and broken for a dribble of oil to find or fix?

Nothing. She opens it again: the same stutter, drag, like a rasping breath of air before it swings the rest of the way in a single cheerful wingbeat. Inside, a splash of light against something tucked into the far-back corner.  

Door forgotten, she leans into the wardrobe. She once read a story that began like this, and some soft, childish part of her wonders if she’s about to fall forward into another world. She doesn’t want to do that; she likes Fontaine. And Lady Furina might not be able to see her anymore, if she were to go somewhere else. 

But she doesn’t fall — there isn’t a secret world in this wardrobe, just a piece of fabric on a hanger. 

A cloak, melding with the shadows at the back. Clorinde must have missed it last night in the darkness. 

She pulls it from its hanger and takes it into her hands, the fabric cool and heavy, too thick to snag on her callouses. Master never wore anything like this — her only cape is flat crow-black, a distinguishing, eternal player in the Maison Gardiennage’s wanted posters. This is blue. A dark powdery hydrangea-blue, printed and tasseled with strong gold thread. Against the lining sits the clear imprint of the Marechaussee Hunter’s insignia.

Which means… this cape is for someone else. Some other hunter, trained from the very first years of her life, a mantle passed down through snatched, borrowed generations. 

Clorinde knots her fingers into the cape and pulls it to her chest. She goes to her knees. She shivers in the weight of an empty home. 

Lady Furina, she thinks with all her might. Lady Furina, what do I do now?

Clorinde turns eleven, and Navia turns twelve. They race each other through a minor growth spurt, Mr. Callas scratching their heights side-by-side on a piece of wood every time Clorinde visits. She is in the lead, and she intends to keep it that way, even though her ankles are too cold in her too-short trousers. She learns to sew. 

She turns thirteen, and Navia turns fourteen. She spends a summer taking her sword to the garden, cutting back the tangle of grass and bushes into something resembling order. By the time autumn comes, her palms are bleeding like she’s a child again, but the wilds are tamed and she is able to plant rainbow roses in the spaces left behind.

She saves up, coin by coin, to buy a pearl rosary from a grandmother’s market stall. 

She turns fifteen, and Navia turns sixteen, and they sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the lip of a boat, and Clorinde looks at Navia’s laughing face turned up to the sun and thinks she would do anything, anything at all, to keep her safe and happy. 

When Clorinde is seventeen and Navia is eighteen, they pack a bag full of weapons and clothes, and go camping in Erinnyes Forest. 

Over the summers, they have made a game of hunting and scavenging, pretending they live off the land in a world far from the Court. Clorinde is… getting better at interacting with people who are not Navia, but there is a sweet comfort in the routine, the distance, as if they’re the only two people in all the world. 

She likes not having to share Navia’s attention. She thinks maybe that makes her a bad person.

Navia is the better fisherwoman and a lead-foot hunter, so she cuts sticks into spears while Clorinde drifts to the edges of the forest, following a carpet of broken ferns until she reaches a narrow ravine. She is expecting a deer, which could feed the two of them for the whole trip; instead, she comes face-to-face with a vishap.

She has seen them before, once or twice, glittering in the distance like cut jewels. She has never wished for a closer look; they cause little harm, and therefore fall outside a Marechaussee Hunter’s purview. When she had pictured them, she had imagined them as bluer versions of Geovishap — round-eyed, wide-bodied, the curious innocence of a boulder about to fall.

But this is not Geovishap. It is a dragon, or something close to it, sword-sharp at every edge. A passage from the Book of Focalors: thou shalt not bring harm to Vishaps, for they are children of Fontaine, and Chosen by the Waters from whence human life sprang. There is intelligence in its reptilian face, a human-like wariness, a strange sort of understanding. It blinks glittering purple eyes at her and then lumbers away, leaving Clorinde feeling faintly unsettled. 

“Papa told me the Duellist’s Trial is scheduled for October,” Navia tells her back at camp. Her fish, as well as the two rabbits Clorinde had eventually caught in the forest, had made a surprisingly delicious stew, and now she is peeling a bulle fruit plucked from a nearby tree. She splits the soft fruit down the middle and offers Clorinde half; their fingertips brush, and when Clorinde pulls her hand back her skin stings as if she has pressed it to broken glass.

“Yes,” she says simply. Mr. Callas had told her as well.

“Do you think you’ll apply?”

Clorinde takes a bite of her bulle fruit, wincing a little at the sourness before it fades into a pleasant tang. Navia always chooses underripe fruit. “I’m not sure,” she says slowly. “I would probably succeed, if I did apply, but…”

But that isn’t what I was raised for. I am the Marechaussee Hunter; I am the last Marechaussee hunter. It isn’t a decision she has come to consciously, but she tries to imagine raising a child like Master raised her, and feels as if spiders made of ice are crawling along her spine.

But what if you weren’t? Comes the reply, as it has every day since Mr. Callas pressed the Cabinet D’avocats leaflet into her hand. What if you were a Champion Duellist? A servant of the law, working beneath the Hydro Archon to bring true justice to Fontaine?

But what if Master comes back? Wouldn’t she be disappointed, to see you throw away such a vast legacy for something as small as a dream?

“…I don’t know,” she finishes. There is a shred of bulle fruit stuck in her teeth. She wishes Navia wasn’t looking at her, or that they were small again, so she wouldn’t think twice about making terrible faces to try and pick it out. 

Navia’s shoulder bumps against hers, a friendly little nudge that sends an entire opera surging through Clorinde’s blood. “You should,” she says. “If you don’t like it, you can always quit, right?”

Clorinde raises an eyebrow. “Really? You are advocating for quitting something?”

“Well, I don’t want you to be stuck doing something you don’t like. I just think this would be a good fit for you, that’s all.” She grins, the shining conspiratorial grin that always makes Clorinde feel like she’s staring into the sun. Sometimes, Navia is so beautiful to look at that it hurts. “Imagine it! You as a champion duellist, me as the head of the Spina — well, when Papa decides to retire, at any rate. And you never know, maybe we could end up changing the world together!”

Clorinde has never wanted to be famous. She has never liked the thought of so many eyes on her, or the tabloids picking her apart like a vein. But changing the world. Doing it alongside Navia. Upholding her Archon’s ideal of justice and keeping Fontaine safe. That is something else entirely, and she feels embers of possibility kindle and warm in her bones. 

“Alright,” she decides. “I will apply.” She looks over at Navia, expecting celebration, expecting the sweet smugness that always comes when she gives in to her friend’s whims. Instead, Navia is looking back with a strange hunger: dark in her eyes, high on her cheeks, soft against the corners of her mouth. It is not an expression Clorinde has ever seen on her face before. It cannot be what she thinks it is.

“Navia,” she says, unsure what she is going to say next. But it doesn’t matter, because she has not finished drawing breath before the world becomes blue and gold and sharp with citrus, and then Navia is kissing her.

Pain — their teeth clicking together, another sting of sourness from the bulle fruit juice on Navia’s lips. Heat. Lips on her lips, skin on her skin. Shock draws her muscles tense, and Navia’s mouth is gone in an instant, but her forehead remains pressed against Clorinde’s. 

“Is this okay?” She murmurs. Clorinde can taste her breath, which lives in her lungs, which keeps Navia bright and alive and with her. Nothing has ever been not-alright; this is a world in which shadows do not exist.

“Yes,” she manages. “Yes. Navia.” A prayer. She would think it blasphemy against any god but her own, but she has read the books and seen the plays, the tragedies, the romantic epics beloved by Fontaine’s Archon. 

This is worship just like any other. Navia is a blessing from Lady Furina herself.

Navia’s face splits into a grin, and if Clorinde thought she had been smug before, it is nothing to the set of her features now. Completely happy, completely satisfied, a cat who has drunk its way through the entirety of a dairy. As if that one word from Clorinde had given her everything she has ever wanted. 

Clorinde puts a hand to her flushed cheek, feeling the softness there, the heat. One shallow dimple against her palm. The other drops down to Navia’s waist, bracing them together in a perfect mirror of how Navia is holding her. 

“I’ve been trying to rustle up the courage for that for a while,” Navia says, nudging their noses together again. It is a rare confession of vulnerability: she spends most of her time at arms, forcing her way through the world with blunt optimism, determined to shape her little corners of Fontaine into something clean and whole. She doesn’t like to wallow in the uncertainties, or the grey areas. She doesn’t like to be afraid. “I wasn’t sure if it was something you wanted.”

And Clorinde — whose job it is to protect her, to quell the shadows and the doubt, finds she cannot speak at all. So she leans in, and kisses Navia again. 

She, of course, passes the Duellist’s trial.

Fontaine is not a pious society, but there are a number of small, contained churches to Focalors scattered about the countryside. Clorinde had attended her first service at age twelve in a tiny hut at the foot of Mount Automnequi, where five people had sat upon rusted garden chairs and prayed to their Archon for a break in the rain. 

If that church had been a little spark in the fabric of Clorinde’s faith, then the Opera Epiclese is a bonfire roaring its prayers to the open sky. Lady Furina’s most ardent followers congregate in the lobby, clutching newspapers and playbills as their hymn-books, giving everything they have to the spectacle of the court and stage. And their Archon soaks up the spotlight, growing bigger and brighter with every shouted word of praise. Clorinde does not shout, but she feels it rattle through her, as world-breaking as a kiss, and she thinks of the audience as the waves of an ocean buying Lady Furina towards the sun. 

And then Clorinde is twenty, and Clorinde is undefeated, and Clorinde is face-to-face with her Archon for the first time in her life.

It does not feel like a spotlight, or the glittering rush of gold that she has heard others boast of. It feels only like peace. Like a home she has found nowhere except the arch of Navia’s collarbone and the curve of her hip, and the sightless fit of her rapier’s hilt against her palm. The tea is sweet, and the parlour is flooded in blue sun.

Lady Furina stabs through a strawberry with the delicate blade of a dessert fork; its blood drips onto the porcelain plate below. At her shoulder, Monsieur Neuvillette stands marble-silent with a hand on his silver-plated cane. Navia likes to come up with theories about their relationship — Clorinde usually refrains from such discussion, unwilling to engage in such tawdry speculation about the person she prays to, but she always listens to Navia’s voice, and she recalls the theories now as the tea party marches on in silence. Familiar, son, Oceanid, friend. A lover who slept his way to immortality, or a spouse whose lifespan is the irrevocable proof of their bond.

He seems a far better bodyguard than any of the humans Lady Furina has employed over the years. Clorinde feels very small, suddenly, an intruder in this eternal partnership. 

“Do you like the tea?” Lady Furina asks her, and Clorinde almost drops her cup.

“Yes,” she says.

Lady Furina laughs a pitchy, circular laugh. “Another one of those, then, are you? I suppose I should have expected that — I seem to be utterly surrounded by strong and silent types these days. Not that some of them are all that silent,” she adds, shooting a look over her shoulder at the beautiful living gargoyle at her side. Monsieur Neuvillette blinks, and frowns, and says nothing. “Not if you’re a glass of water. Tell me, Clorinde — what makes you believe you are fit to be my bodyguard?” 

Clorinde takes another sip of tea: dark earl grey, the sort Navia refuses to drink on the grounds that it tastes like soap. How do you know what soap tastes like? Clorinde had asked her once, and Navia had ducked her head and mumbled something about honey and lavender into the bare skin above Clorinde’s knee.

“I was trained well,” she says frankly. “Far better than my colleagues at the Cabinet d’Avocats, and in a significantly shorter amount of time.”

“And why was your training terminated?”

“Unforeseen circumstances,” Clorinde replies. “But I learned to fend for myself. As a champion duellist, I have never lost a battle, and I believe the few opponents who have forfeited have done so on account of my reputation. Amongst my peers, I also remain undefeated in the four ‘King of the Hill’ tournaments that have been held since my entry into the Duellists’ ranks, including one that came about during my examination.” She does not say the tournament had come about because of her own aptitude — speaking of herself like this is odd enough as it is. “And… on a personal note, Lady Furina, I do not believe there to be many contenders as devoted to your teachings as I.”

Lady Furina spends approximately one hundred years chewing her mouthful of scone. When the hourglass runs dry and time begins to turn in on itself, she swallows, and raises an eyebrow.

“Well,” she says, red lips rising into a real smile. “Perhaps we were wrong about the silent part.” She pushes aside her plate and leans forward. “This is a demanding job, Clorinde. What would your family think of you being away so often?”

Clorinde thinks of Navia, her shining eyes and stubborn chin, her endless patience and fearless strength. She thinks of Navia at her door a week after Master left — already so terribly aware of what it would mean — with a loaf of bread and her freckled arms locked around Clorinde’s shoulders as they shivered in the emptiness of that house. She thinks of Mr. Callas and the Saurian-patterned sheets that had been waiting for her when she next returned to Poisson. But what she says is, “I don’t have a family.”

Lady Furina watches her for a moment, as if weighing up an invisible set of scales. Then she spreads her arms in a sweeping gesture, silver cake fork glinting in her hand like a sword. 

“Then let Fontaine be your family,” she says. 

And with that, she earns Clorinde’s life and soul and blade, forever and always, until the stars all fall out of the sky.

Lady Furina is, often, not like Clorinde had imagined her.

She had pictured a distant, far-off figure, a fierce but benevolent god. She had pictured the ocean. And Lady Furina is like that sometimes, tempestuous and mercurial, shuttered off behind herself in a way seemingly unique to the divine. 

But at the same time, there are moments when she seems painfully, astonishingly human. She delights in tawdry office gossip, which she bribes out of Sedene with a parade of snacks that cost more than Clorinde’s monthly rent. She picks fights with seagulls and hides snacks in her pockets. She seems to have made it her life’s mission to antagonise Monsieur Neuvillette, but sometimes, when he turns to leave, Clorinde catches the quiet kicked-puppy expression stamped across her face, as if he is walking away with her entire beating heart clasped between his gloved fingers. She loves to sit in the sun while indoors, but refuses to set foot outside unless firmly shielded by a hat or ornate satin parasol. 

Clorinde knows that life in the Court of Fontaine is not easy for most, but under Lady Furina’s influence, it becomes easy for her. She settles into a comfortable sort of routine: duelling when she is called for, following Lady Furina through her days.  She becomes friends — of a sort — with the Fortress of Meropide’s new warden, drinking tea in his office and testing their strength through arm wrestling. Monsieur Neuvillette joins them sometimes, and Clorinde learns he is far less intimidating than he appears; there is a newness to him, despite his age, that reminds her a little of Geovishap. 

Navia begins taking responsibility for the Spina Di Rosula’s Fleuve Cendre operations, spreading her belongings across the apartment and wearing a nest into Clorinde’s new bed and laughing herself sick when Clorinde, in the throes of passion, accidentally uses her new vision to short out the lights. To have her so close, all the time, is another novelty that feels as if it should not be allowed; as if she ought to be put on trial or sent to the duellist’s ring to defend it. 

She wakes up at night sometimes,  the remnants of a strange and poor adjustment away from her old nocturnal rhythm. Sometimes she goes hunting. Sometimes she gives in to the luxury of softness and stays in bed, watching the way Navia’s lashes flutter with the movement of her eyes behind closed lids and listening to Geovishap’s quiet snores as they both dream. 

But almost inevitably, she will glance from the window onto the streets below and watch a small blue shape wandering through the city, lit only by the streetlamps and completely alone, as if the Hydro Archon is inspecting the world to make sure it is all still there. 

In the end: she ends up in the ring anyway. And though she is not the one on trial, though her opponent is not quite a match for her own skill, it is the first duel she cannot ever truly win. 

Clorinde is covered in Callas Caspar’s blood.

She thinks she might have caught him, eased him to the ground as he died in her arms. She thinks she may have closed his eyes. She doesn’t quite remember; her head is full of static wind and the vicious beating of wings, wings, wings. There is blood on her gloves.

She pulls them off and throws them into the ocean.

Navia had screamed. This beach will look like a crime scene, come morning — nobody will ever guess that the real crime had taken place hours before. She had killed Callas before nightfall, she is certain, but it seems as if light is crawling into the sky. Perhaps somebody will find her and arrest her. It’s alright, she imagines telling them. He was dead before I touched him. I only did what I was told. 

She blinks, because her eyes are getting dry. Navia had screamed.

Hours before: acceptance. Stepping into the ring, Mr. Callas’s weathered hand in hers. He isn’t wearing gloves, and Clorinde can see the scar across his palm, the memory of a hunting trip they went on when Navia was eleven and she was ten. He had carried them both, one on each shoulder, and Clorinde had laughed and clung to his collar and forgot for a moment that Master was gone. She meets his eyes, and knows the world has already ended. All she can do now is bury the corpse.

On the beach, Clorinde watches the sun rise.

Breath strikes up somewhere to her right, and the gentle crunch-crunch-crunch of footsteps. She considers moving her head, but her body is made of powder clay, and it is far too heavy to follow her commands. A small warm hand cups the back of her head.

The visitor does not say anything. She only drapes her divine presence across the rocks and waits.

Clorinde turns her face into her Archon’s lap, and lets the gentle rhythm of Lady Furina’s fingers in her hair carry her out with the tide. 

The time after blurs into shadowed oblivion. Clorinde works: lawbreakers do not rest just because the sky has fallen in. Lady Furina doubles her shifts, dragging her from the stage to the wilderness and back again before she has time to breathe. It is good. Clorinde does not want to rest, or think, or return to her empty home. 

She takes two absences in three months. On the first, she travels to Poisson with her old shortsword, and presses it into Navia’s palms. She leaves before Navia can say a word — to reject it, to reject her. To ask what had happened in that arena. Navia’s face is blank and blind with grief, and Clorinde sees her nose, her eyes, all the pieces of her father that live on inside her. 

Look after her, he had said. A walking corpse’s last words as he left his body and spilled into the arena’s cobbled floor. 

On the second, a week later, she ties a loose circle of rope around Geovishap’s neck and leads it onto a boat.

The boat’s captain is not particularly enamoured with the idea of transporting a large, stony reptile across the ocean. Geovishap has grown, and now it stands taller than Clorinde, too big and full of energy to fit comfortably in a city apartment. It takes Monsieur Neuvillette’s personal influence and a painful sum of mora for the captain to acquiesce, but she does, and passes Clorinde a ragged parcel-paper ticket, round trip, all the way to Liyue. 

It is the first time she has left Fontaine since her Master vanished. She recalls, vaguely, travelling to Port Ormos as a small child, playing hide-and-seek with tuberous little creatures the adults all swore were stories and hiding her one smuggled book beneath her shirt at checkpoints. She recalls a witch in Mondstadt and a fleet of turtles dipping beneath the green waters of Chenyu Vale.

They dock in Yilong Wharf, and spend the night in a little port-side guesthouse before setting off at first light. Geovishap trots along beside her on the path, curious, perhaps a little unsettled. 

It relaxes when they pass through Huaguang Stone Forest into Minlin, scurrying to and fro, investigating every stone and scrap of grass with a fastidious urgency that reminds Clorinde of the Marechaussee Phantom Melusines. She wonders how much it remembers from the land of its birth — it had been a hatchling when Master brought it home, barely out of its egg-tooth, half Clorinde’s size and full of fighting spirit. It must have missed Liyue the way she misses Fontaine now. The presence of it. The soul of its Archon resonant underfoot. Since Clorinde first began praying to Lady Furina, she has never felt so far from her gaze.

When they reach the place her map labels Cujue Slope, she stops. This is the place Master had got Geovishap from, all those years ago: she had never mentioned how she came by it, but over the last few months Clorinde has not been able to stop wondering. Was it taken from a family who loved it? Are there Geoivishap parents and Geovishap siblings, all wondering where their beloved child had gone? 

She hopes so. She hopes they will be delighted to see it again.  

When the sun goes down, she finds a good cave and builds a fire. Roasted quail for her, an apparently delicious chunk of Cor Lapis for Geovishap. When it is finished, it licks the rock-dust from its jaws and curls up further down the cave, purring as its hide comes into contact with the stone floor. 

It looks so happy here. She has a sharp, sudden vision of her master, the last time they saw one another, and the way she had turned back as she made her way out of Poisson. Clorinde has spent twelve years wondering why she left, but now, she wonders if she is beginning to understand. A Geovishap needs rocks, and places to run free at all hours of the day. It needs to be home, where it was stolen from. It needs to choose its own life. 

She pats the rigid spurs of rock along its spine, whispering to a new-dead god for her pet’s protection. Then she snuffs the fire, so that the smoke will not draw any attention, and makes her way in a careful hunter’s-tread towards the mouth of the cave. 

As she passes through the Wharf again, numb and cold and alone, she buys half a dozen egg tarts from a young woman in a green dress. She smiles slyly at Clorinde, a hollow mirror of how Navia used to look when she wanted something. Clorinde drops too many coins into her palm, unlined, and flees to the boat. 

Lady Furina loves the tarts. She eats four in one sitting, and waves a fifth beneath Monsieur Neuvillette’s nose until he gives in and takes a delicate, reluctant bite. He chews slowly, casting pleading glances at Clorinde, until their Archon takes mercy on him and finishes it off herself. 

When Clorinde returns to her empty apartment, she discovers the sixth tart has beaten her home. It sits patiently on a paper napkin, eyeless, not judging. At the corner of the napkin is a note that seems more flourish than word: she sends a finger of elemental power into the electrical workings of the building to flick on a lamp so that she can read it. 

You ought to enjoy the fruits of your own labour every once in a while. Welcome home, Clorinde.

She eats it cupped in the palm of her hand, the Indemnitium streetlamp outside her window washing the kitchen underwater-blue as if the great flood has come for them all. She thinks of her master, and of Callas and Navia, and of Geovishap bouldering happily across the plains. She has lost everything — now she closes her eyes and fills herself again: duty, justice, faith. La communion. Lady Furina’s sacrifice, to guide her forward, and remake the emptiness in her unified image. 

After Marcel’s saltwater remains have been swept from the Fountain of Lucine, Clorinde assists the gardes in escorting Mr. Tartaglia to prison. After that, she has tea with Wriothesley in his office, swatting away the fleas on his couch as he and Sigewinne fill her in on their newfound plan. After that, she climbs blinking back into the sun to find Navia waiting by the Fortress’ entrance. 

The rain has stopped, and the world glints with sunshine like a mora coin. Navia smiles a hesitant little smile, one dimple, fingers light on the handle of her parasol. “Hey, there.”

“Hello.” Clorinde looks about. Melus and Silver are nowhere to be seen, a rarity since the months before Mr. Callas died. She supposes they all know why, now. “Is… something the matter?”

As soon as she says it she wants to kick herself. Of course something is the matter. Clorinde is shaken from the events of today — she cannot imagine how Navia, a would-be victim twice over and still bleeding from the betrayal, must be feeling. 

But Navia shakes her head, visibly gathering the dregs of her old armour around her like a patched shawl. “No,” she says, and then, “Well. Yes. I don’t… this has been hard for me.”

“Of course.” Mr. Marcel, who had carved them wooden toys and always let Navia pick the flowers from his window box. Mr. Marcel, whom Callas had trusted with his life.

Navia looks down, spins her parasol in place. “This, and… and Papa, and everything that’s happened. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it, if I’m being honest. And I just… wanted to talk to you.”

Clorinde swallows. She had wished for those words, alone on the beach, and before, pressing her master’s sword into Navia’s hands — gentle hands; hands that Clorinde has seen hurl an axe through a monster’s skull and seconds later cradle a crying child to her shoulder. Palms calloused from leather pommels and the rope that holds Poisson together, chipped pink nail polish on the thumb. To hear them now feels saccharine, slippery, too indulgent for the day they have both had. She puts her hand on the hilt of her sword and breathes.

“What would you like to talk about?”

Navia looks up again. Blue steel. A single strand of hair is stuck to her collarbone, though Clorinde cannot tell if it is held down by sweat or rain. “Why didn’t you tell me that Papa intended to die?”

“…He was your father.”

“And you were my best friend.”

“I thought it would be easier for you to blame a living person, whom you could forgive if you chose, than somebody you could not speak to again.” The empty house. The Saurian sheets. “The memory of your father deserved to remain untarnished, and I… I felt a loyalty to him.”

Navia, mercifully, does not raise the subject of the sword. She toes at the ferrule of her parasol, where runoff rain has pooled into a little puddle on the cobblestones. Clorinde thinks of the garde, dissolving into seawater before their very eyes, and feels a blunt wave of nausea in the back of her throat.

“I feel so foolish,” Navia says. “Like a child, walking around with my eyes closed, not noticing that the village is on fire.”

“You aren’t a fool,” Clorinde says desperately. “Nor are you a child.” Not anymore. But she had been, in a way Clorinde never was. Navia had always seemed so strong, so competent, so wise — but she had always been protected from the cruelty of the world, and the emptiness of it. She had never needed Clorinde as much as Clorinde needed her. “Your father kept it from you deliberately, to spare you from that pain. I kept it from you. The blame lies with me.”

“It’s not your job to protect me from the truth. You don’t get to just decide what’s best for me. I never wanted to blame you, Clorinde. I just wanted my friend back.”

Clorinde had been much more than a friend, but she senses Navia isn’t ready to broach that topic yet. A relief — she doesn’t think she is ready either. Perhaps they never will be. It is enough that they are here, together, speaking of the things that matter for the first time in years. 

“I know,” she says, the words burred and sticky in her throat. “I shouldn’t have taken that choice from you. I’m sorry.”

Navia’s pretty mouth tips at the corner. “Me too,” she say. “For not seeing. And for not knowing what it was like for you before.”

There are things Clorinde could say to that, but she doesn’t want to argue again. Navia has always carried too much, held it too tight in her stubborn hands. All Clorinde wants is to lift that weight to give her a chance to breathe.”What will you do now?” She asks.

Navia kicks her parasol up from the ground, hooking the damp lace over her shoulder. Beneath its frills, the sleek machinery is almost invisible. A bystander would never know what a lethal weapon it can be. 

“Back to Poisson, I suppose. The water levels are still rising, and the magician twins had the right idea with those bags, but we can’t all leave. The Spina Di Rosula will try to shelter the vulnerable and reinforce what we can.” She looks over her shoulder, eyeing the Opera House with tired skepticism, but her voice turns soft and pleading. “Are the Palais Mermonia even trying?” 

Lady Furina’s bodyguard shifts have doubled. She scuffles around behind her locked door from sunset to sunrise, and she and Monsieur Neuvillette have hardly spoken in months. It isn’t lack of effort that has kept them in this snare. This strange prophecy, and the Primordial Sea, cannot be untangled so simply. 

Clorinde has faith Lady Furina. But she is afraid for her. She stands to weather a far worse fate than her people, if they cannot prevent what is to come. 

“They are trying,” she tells Navia. “We all are.”

Navia nods, though troubled shadows still sit at the edges of her eyes and mouth. “Alright.” She makes to leave, unfurling her parasol again to shield her from the sun, but pauses at the edge of the pathway. “Come out for lunch with me,” she says. “I’ll stay in the Fleuve Cendre tonight, so I’ll have plenty of time tomorrow before my boat leaves. We could go to Hotel Debord, if you wanted…?”

The yes spills from Clorinde before she has fully processed the question. 

After their first kiss, she had scrimped and saved to buy a collection of secondhand romance novels from the market in Poisson. She had had no parents to learn from, and her master never dated, and so Clorinde was left with no idea how a romantic relationship was supposed to work. She did not end up following the novels’ advice — she had eventually given them to Aeval — but she remembers now a common thread, which she had written down on a scrap of paper that Geovishap had promptly eaten. Do not seem too eager. Colloquially: play it cool. Withhold yourself, lest your partner see your desperation. 

Whoever wrote those stories had clearly never met Navia. Whoever thought feigning a lack of interest could ever work had never been in love with the sun. 

Navia beams, clearing the last whispers of cloud from the sky. “Tomorrow, then,” she says.

And Clorinde says, “Tomorrow.” 

They eat. They dine in a private room at the Hotel Debord, the sky outside flashing between clear and overcast like the flick of a lampswitch. The stained glass window throws its colours back against Navia’s cheeks, the silk of her hair. 

They order fricassee de poult and foi gras, sweet white wine and bread with cheese, bavarois with strawberries for dessert. Clorinde tells Navia about Callas’ last words to her; Navia tells the floor about Marcel. Navia asks after Geovishap, and Clorinde gives her the abridged version: it was too large to live with me. It is happier now, back home with its kin and its god. 

The next week, she receives a parcel in the mail. Inside it is a photograph. The two of them at thirteen and fourteen — Clorinde was taller that year, growing pains shooting through her arms whenever she swung a sword. Navia had cut her hair short and hated it. In the picture they stand at the jetty in Poisson, feet bare against the slippery water-doused wood,  Geovishap’s stony little head protruding from the water as they call it back to shore. Clorinde remembers that it did not listen: they had had to dive after it to get it out of the fishing-nets, and afterwards they had collapsed, soaking wet and breathless with laughter, into a skin-and-scales pile on dry ground again.

She frames it, and places it on her bedside table beside a photograph of Lady Furina. 

She goes to Poisson, and helps Navia hammer sheets of metal to walls, reinforcing the weakest parts of the town. She spends the night there, in the bedroom that used to belong to Callas — new blankets on the bed, old furniture gathering dust in the corners — and says nothing when Navia creeps in around midnight, only opens her arms and pulls her close on the mattress. She goes to the Fortress of Meropide, learning the mechanisms of the doorways that protect the sea from a single underground vault, Wriothesley pacing like a caged animal as he waits for his engineers to finish their work.

Her days away from the Palais Mermonia become something of a relief; Lady Furina and Monsieur Neuvillette’s arguing has worsened beneath the pressure, and they can hardly be in the same room without going at each other’s throats. Clorinde does not understand her Archon’s inaction — the water levels are rising past their markers every day, and anyone who knows her can see that she is deeply troubled. No, more than that; she is frightened.

She tries to speak to her about it once, after Wriothesley’s sluice gate breaks. Whatever Monsieur Neuvillette had done to hold the Primordial Sea back had worked, but they have all seen the water now. They can no longer pretend that it does not exist. But Furina has been strung-tight and rabbity for a month, and she squirms from Clorinde’s gentle questioning like an eel from a fisherman’s net. A laugh, an innuendo, a flirtation, an excuse.

So when they gather in the ruins of Poisson — Navia breaking, Neuvillette torn, the twins blank and cold as Snezhnayan ice — she sits down at the table with a pocket full of silver and listens.

And then there is a trap. And then there is a trial. And when Clorinde is twenty-six, the world turns to rubble beneath her feet.

She mops seawater from the floor of the Opera House.

She goes home to Navia, gravestones on both their shoulders, and brushes that sunshine hair back from her beautiful face. She goes to visit Wriothesley, whose moment of aerodynamic triumph has been somewhat soured by the most expensive traffic fine in Fontaine’s history, and the fact that the Maison Gardiennage does not accept payment in the form of credit coupons. She goes to work, and watches Monsieur Neuvillette drag himself through Court as if his limbs have been turned to stone, a statue carved from his own grief. Whatever happened, in that one eternal minute before the sea level rose, seems to have broken him almost completely.

At night, she whispers her prayers and holy vows, but they do not bring the comfort they used to now she knows they have only ever fallen on deaf ears. At night, she dreams.

She dreams of red human blood on the flat of her blade, and a life dissolving into a watered-down sea. She dreams of Silver, age fourteen, shyly asking if there was room for one more in a childish game of hide and seek. She sees Melus, and Mr. Callas, and her master, all standing around the crumbled ruin of a shipwreck. 

The dreams never last very long. Clorinde is not the only one in her bed, and Navia’s nightmares require far more comfort than her own muddled guilt. Navia’s life has been destroyed four times over, and she does not even have the luxury of blame. 

The streets stay empty. Clorinde tries to become a statue herself: an anchorpoint, immoveable, holding up a little corner of the crumbling world. 

A storm sweeps through Fontaine at the end of the month.

The sky mottles itself with bruises, thick knots of brown and grey and green blustering themselves low across the land. The rain, rarely gone for more than a few hours since the great flood, is perfectly absent, as if the heavens themselves have run out of tears. Clorinde’s skin rumbles with the spread-thin sizzle of lightning netted beyond the clouds.

When the sun sets, and the horizon is still clear of rain-swelling, she goes to church. 

Not the Opera House: after all that has happened, she would not mind if she never set food behind those grand glass doors again. Instead she tracks her way to that first church, the airy little hut tucked close against the foot of Mont Automnequi.  It it just as she remembered, right down to the stained-glass windows: the scales of justice at the door, scenes from the Book of Focalors stretched in stained glass along the sides of the building. One of the windows is smashed, now, a jagged hole right through Furina’s face. Its remnants crunch beneath the soles of her boots as she steps inside. 

By the alter, a vase of dried-out flowers sits next to a small statue of Lady Furina. Not a copy of the Statues of the Seven, but an alloyed metal rendition of a scene from the Book of Focalors — a sword and scale in her hands, a blindfold across her eyes, the cogs of the Oratrice in neat little rows beneath her feet. When she was younger Clorinde thought the diversity in statues to be an odd choice, compared to Mondstadt’s singular representation of Barbatos and Inazuma’s cloaked and mighty Shogun; as she grew older, she began to suspect Lady Furina had simply become bored with one pose, one outfit, one prop. Now, she wonders which if any had been the real Furina, mixed up between lie after lie, hidden in plain sight. 

She touches her fingers to the base of the statue, brassy with fingerprints, its inscription almost erased under the touch of its worshippers. A sick sort of horror grips her at the realisation that nobody will replace it, carve those letters into their rightful place; nobody will band together to fix this broken window. If something were to happen to Furina, it would only be a matter of time before her memory dropped away from the fabric of Fontaine altogether.

She turns away, breathing slowly and deliberately to weigh back the foreign sting in her throat. Her eyes adjust to the new layer of darkness.

The room is not empty. Monsieur Neuvillette sits at the back in a shadowed pew, head bowed, hands folded before him over the grip of his cane. He does not look up as Clorinde makes her way towards him, though the odd antler-like strands at the back of his head seem to twitch in her direction. 

“I didn’t know you came here,” she says. 

His eyes blink slowly open. “I do not, usually.” His voice sounds strange, slow and rusty, like a shipwreck carried along by the currents. “As Focalors’ high priest, I am aware of the locations of such churches, but I have never visited this one before today. It seemed… fitting.”

They are so close to the cemetery. Bodies dissolve everywhere, not just in the water; they fall apart in the ground. “She would approve of the symbolism.”

Neuvillette inclines his head, and gestures for Clorinde to take a seat in the pew beside him. The cheap wood snags at her tights — she does not think it has been sanded since she left to live in the Court. They sit in silence, breathing into the empty space: the last two worshippers at the alter of Focalors. 

She does not like to wallow in despair, but she knows her life has not been an easy one. But through the difficulties —  losing her master, losing Navia, losing Callas and the parents she cannot remember and Geovishap’s sad rumble as she told it to stay — she has always been certain that she is not alone. That no matter how empty she felt, the struggle came with a purpose. That no matter what happened, it was her duty and her honour to follow her Archon’s teachings. Without that faith she is adrift.

“It was not entirely a lie,” Neuvillette says suddenly. The words echo back at them in muted waves from the arched ceiling. “The story is hers alone to tell, and I do not believe she is ready to share it, but I would not wish you to believe her guilty of deception for her own gain.”

Cryptic. Clorinde likes puzzles, but she cannot summon care for this one. She is too exhausted, too hollow in a place that cannot be filled. “Many people see it that way. She will not be able to return to Poisson for a very long time.”

Neuvillette nods. Clorinde says, into the grave-still air: “It was our fault.”

Another nod. A sigh, the tired rasp of snowfall. “Yes.”

Navia had argued that point: she had claimed it was her responsibility, her anger, her bowl with a teaspoon of seawater eating into the fragile skin of Furina’s hand. She had wanted to make Clorinde feel better. But it was their duty, hers and Neuvillette’s, to ensure Furina’s safety no matter the cost. To protect her. To care for her. Navia’s words were kind, but this is something she cannot understand.

In the end, the thing she had needed protection from most was them.

“Have you spoken to her?”

Neuvillette looks at her. Moonlight catches against his hair, his pointed ears; his eyes glow a little in the darkness. Furina’s are the same — Clorinde has spent a number of night-shifts patrolling the Palais, watching the reflective glint of blue as her Archon availed herself of the kitchen’s impressive snack collection. 

She feels the loss low in her stomach, a hole where the corner of her world should be.

“Twice,” Neuvillette says softly. “Since she deigned to leave the Palais. I sent her some things she left behind in her haste to leave. And meals, although I do not think she has eaten them. I am… worried about her.”

We should have worried about her earlier, Clorinde thinks, a fat boulder of blame lodging itself between her ribs. Humans, or whatever it is that Monsieur Neuvillette is, should never have presumed to know better than a god. 

Even if she isn’t one. Even if it has all, from the very foundations of Clorinde’s existence, been a lie. 

Control: the foundation of both bladework and prayer. She breathes in a circle six times until the boulder loosens. To the west, at the end of her elemental reach, a ribbon of lightning strikes down into the sea — a homecoming. 

“I do not think she would welcome a visit from me so soon,” Neuvillette continues. “But I believe she would like to see you. You have always been very important to her.”

She tries to imagine it, seeing Lady Furina’s real face and knowing that it belongs to a human. All she can picture is that fixed, distant smile at end of a sword, that blind panic over the lip of the defendant’s box. Clorinde’s faith was not borne out of fear, but she thinks Judgement Day will be very bad for her. 

But Furina, the person distinct from her godhood, who demanded Clorinde carry her over puddles and could not abide the boredom of solitude for more than ten minutes without breaking, is on her own. Clorinde knows what it is to be abandoned; she will not let that happen to Furina. 

“Alright,” she says. “I will go.”

Fontaine’s Archon is living in a one-bedroom box in the darkest part of the city.

Lady Furina’s eyes are red. Her right hand is red, too, a faint glove of faded scars, all knuckle and tremor as she pours tea into their cups. When a stray droplet of boiling water splashes against her wrist, she doesn’t so much as flinch.

Clorinde has brought her cake. She is beginning to think she may as well have brought a bomb. 

“My Lady,” she begins, after ten minutes of near-silence. Furina, picking at her food as if it is poisoned, winces and drops the fork. 

“You don’t need to call me that anymore, Clorinde,” she says. “I’m not… well. You know. If anything, I should be calling you—”

“No,” says Clorinde. Her ears cannot take it, Lady Clorinde in her Archon’s voice. Even knowing it could have been said makes her feel sick at the blasphemy. “No, don’t…”

They watch each other for a moment more. The cheap clock on the wall ticks away, a heartbeat out of time.

“You don’t have to be here, you know,” Furina says eventually. Her voice is horrifyingly small, all curled-in and bruised, and Clorinde feels as if her heart is dissolving into floodwater.

“Alright,” Clorinde says. The silence feels as if it could harden into granite. She sets her hands flat on the table, visible, away from the hilt of her sword where they cannot do any more harm. “Perhaps we do away with the titles between us, then. We could just be… friends.” Blasphemy, blasphemy. Focalors, forgive her.

But Furina had had friends. Not many, not as many as her citizens may have believed, but she had had Sedene, and a handful of artists and playwrights always flocking about their muse. She had had Neuvillette — a complicated relationship, but unified in a way that seemed to surpass all notions of blood or marriage. And she had had Clorinde.

Clorinde remembers a crimson beach and hands in her hair. She remembers being fourteen, carefully stacking mora coins in an old wooden bowl, ten months of saving for the pearl rosary that still lives in her pocket. 

“Friends,” Furina says. She says it softly, as if her tongue might break the word in two. “And you would… want that? With me? Even though I’m — even though I don’t—”

Clorinde blinks. “Of course I do,” she says. “I care about you very much.”

Furina’s face does something complicated, skidding from a distant caricatured pout into a menagerie of emotion and then back again — to blankness, stillness, as if she has been wiped completely clean. “I’m not your god, Clorinde.”

“I know,” Clorinde says, although the words stick in her throat. “I know. I am not asking you as a god, or as a ruler. I am asking as someone who cares about you.”

“Even if I don’t know who me is?”

This, at least, is some familiarity in all this strangeness. Furina likes to test people. She needs things proven to her, served up on a plate: Clorinde’s role here has not changed, even if she kneels in the cracked and ruined rubble of her faith.

“I will help you to find out.”

“…You sound like Neuvillette.”

“He misses you,” Clorinde tells her. “As have we all. He thinks you don’t want to see him.”

Furina sighs, suddenly looking every inch her five hundred years. “It’s… the situation between us is very complicated."

“I am no stranger to complicated situations, Lady Furina.”

“Madame Furina,” Furina mutters, “If you absolutely must. Neuvillette might think he wants to see me, but I’d just be a hindrance to his leadership. He’ll never spread his wings and truly take up the mantle of ruler if he thinks I might come back. And I… I’m so tired, Clorinde.” Her mouth pinches, folding downwards at the edges, and she closes her eyes. “I just want to sleep for a million years.”

Clorinde thinks back to the time after Callas’ death, walking around like a ghost — or, more accurately, as if everything else in the world had become ghosts, and she was the only living creature left. Something Furina had said, carefully offhand: the only cure for death is life. They had been looking at a dead seagull, splayed over the ground on the way to a trial. She had had it buried beside the Opera House, a white-flowered shrub just starting to bloom, and Clorinde had pictured it flying up to Navia’s parents and maybe, unlikely, her own, in an afterlife beyond Celestia. “I know.”

“You know,” Furina says primly, a shadow of her old fussy bravado creeping back into her voice, “The real me might end up being utterly intolerable.”

Perhaps it is a joke. Clorinde answers truthfully regardless. “I believe I have seen you at your worst, and at your best. Please believe me when I say there has not been a moment where I have felt anything but love and respect for you, regardless of divinity.”

Furina watches her for a moment, weighing something up on unseen scales, the way she had done that very first day in her parlour. Then she smiles, and it is wobbly, tremulous, but it seems almost genuine, and that, at least, is a start. 

They are quiet for a time then, eating. With Furina’s attention focussed entirely on the cake — has she eaten anything at all today? — Clorinde takes the opportunity to look around. 

The apartment is small, and simple, a world away from the echoing marble of the Palais Mermonia. It must have come furnished — there is no trace of Furina in the cheap pine bookshelf, the under-padded chairs. In the corner, columns of untouched moving boxes fail to hide a patchwork water stain printed onto the wall. When she takes their plates into the kitchen, she finds a bucket filled to the brim with smashed porcelain.

She feels the warning tremors of the feeling before the feeling itself. Quiet, floral shards, cold steel. She reaches for the meagre stretch of stone countertop to steady herself, half-remembering an earthquake twenty years ago. A young woman had gone missing beneath the rubble of her home — later, her name was discovered in Marcel’s logs, one of the very first victims of the serial disappearances case. In the Belleau region, a little pot Clorinde had made from river-clay fell from her windowsill and shattered on the ground. 

Someone had said: why didn’t Lady Furina warn us about this?

Petronilla, Callas, Navia, Melus, Silver, Marcel, Geovishap, Furina. Clorinde feels like static. She feels like wings. She feels like the water has closed over her head. 

Breath. The hesitant click of high heels on the tiled floor. The first stone skipping across condemned ground. 

“I suppose I owe you an apology too, don’t I?”

This time, Clorinde can move, though her body feels distant and sluggish, the past sloshing around her ankles. Furina’s face remains perfectly impassive, but guilt is set into every line of her body, human, hands folded behind her back in sheepish contrition: a pose she has adopted a hundred times, but always, before, as mockery. There is nothing mocking about her now. The tense line of her shoulders makes her look very small, and very fragile, and very afraid.

It clogs Clorinde’s throat, the sticky sourness of an old, old wound. She’s going to come back. This is just a test, and she’s going to come back.

“You don’t,” she says. “I — you have nothing to apologise for.”

Furina shakes her head. She has cut her hair since the trial, and the new shorn ends flap about her cheekbones like small wings. It looks good on her — within weeks, all the noble-ladies in the Court will surely be boasting a similar hairstyle — but the sight of it makes Clorinde almost want to cry. Furina had loved her long hair. “No, I do. I didn’t… I never set out to be worshipped, but that’s what the role of an Archon demands. You all had to believe me. You believed in me, and I let you down.”

Clorinde wants to tell her that isn’t true. That even if she doesn’t understand why Furina had lied to her — to everyone — it doesn’t matter, and nothing needs to change. She wants to protect her like she should have done before.

But she can’t bring herself to lie. 

The flood inside her grows teeth and limbs and stretches itself into human form. It tells her it is divinity and Clorinde believes it. She swallows, blinks the fog from her eyes. 

“What do I do?” She whispers.

And Furina is not an Archon, and she is no kind of god, but she takes Clorinde’s hand in both of hers like an absolution. Somewhere down the street: the hiss of steam, the bubble of water, the metronome clockwork of machinery ticking them forward through time. 

“You live,” Furina tells her. “We figure out how to live, together.”

Furina flat-out rejects the idea of a new apartment, but she does allow Clorinde to coax her into a little unpacking, perching herself on the rickety dining-table to issue her orders as Clorinde lifts and opens and dusts. 

The work clears Clorinde’s head, anchors her more firmly to the tenuous, shaking ground. Furina touches every trinket that appears from their cardboard depths as if for the first time, hesitate and wondering, as if the statuettes and jewels are holy treasures instead of things she had bought with her own two hands.

Eventually, they out of boxes, and the single flimsy bookshelf runs out of space. Furina lies unspooled across the table as if giving instructions has worn her out entirely, but the tilt of her head, the sharpness in her eyes, tell a different story: she seems more alive than she ever has in the short bracket of Clorinde’s life. So Clorinde does what she came to do. She invites Furina to a party. 

After, when Furina is fed, and watered, and tucked into bed happily drunk beside a bottle of painkillers (Sigewinne had pressed them into her palm before they left — “I don’t think alcohol has ever worked on her before,” she had said; Clorinde had replied that she was beginning to see that), Clorinde takes the last Aquabus of the night to the Belleau region. 

She finds Navia still at work, hammering fresh planks of wood into the rope-lines of a bridge, an ancient leather oilcoat draped over her shoulders that Clorinde knows used to belong to Melus. The dim grey-green light of the lantern beside her sends flickering waves across her face. 

Clorinde drops to her knees and pins down a board with her palm. “When did this break?”

Navia sighs. “Last night. The old wood has been rotting for months, but nobody has had time to do anything about it. It should have held out longer — I guess the Primordial Seawater was harsh on wood, too.” Her voice wobbles at the end of the sentence. Clorinde knows better than to acknowledge it. You figure out how to live. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”

“I wanted to see you,” Clorinde replies. She folds her legs into a more comfortable position, watching the blue midnight mist wrap itself over Poisson. “It has been a very strange day.”

Navia looks up. A long curl has come free of its ribbon to hang over her cheek. “I’m glad you did,” she says softly. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Clorinde tells her, aching to tuck that curl away and to leave it there forever, to build a home right where it brushes against her collarbone. 

There is so much she wants to tell Navia. The gull, and what Callas had said to her in the ring, the vishap and the blackberries and Liyue. She wants to tell her she she isn’t afraid of the light anymore. 

But she is tired. And she is still. And she feels oddly weightless, as if she has been wearing very heavy armour for a very long time, and she has finally clambered free of it. So she takes Navia’s hand, and kisses her knuckles, red and grazed from the day’s hard work, and she says: 

“I brought you food. Let me help you finish here, and then we can eat.”

Clorinde does not return to Liyue until she is twenty-nine.

They had intended to go earlier; after that first Lantern Rite since Furina’s abdication, they spoke often of another trip. But Furina had wanted to go to Natlan, and then Navia had wanted to honeymoon in Inazuma, and by the time they can all schedule another week away, Clorinde is twenty-nine and Navia is thirty, and Furina is as old as the calendar on the wall.

Neuvillette is with them, this time. Clorinde appreciates that: Furina is her dearest friend, just as much as cornerstone of her life as Navia is, but her self-esteem is still not what it could be, and neither Clorinde nor Navia much want to abandon her for some time alone. Clorinde does not quite understand the relationship between them — after nine years, she suspects she never will — but she knows that as much as Furina adores her other friends, they are happiest when they are together.

My Saurian, she had called him in Natlan, and Clorinde had firmly squashed the seeds of a terrifying theory beginning to take root in her brain. My familiar, she had called him three weeks ago, begging Clorinde to invite him along. Come on! I’ll feel bad if you and Navia have to spend another holiday babysitting somebody old enough to be your great-great-grandmother. This way, you can take some time for yourselves without having to worry about leaving me alone!

On the second-last afternoon of their trip, they gather for lunch at a little restaurant overlooking the sea, shopping-bags clustered about their feet. Furina is inseparable from her prize, a silk bag of polyhedral dice carved from Liyue’s finest gemstones, which she had haggled down from a ruinously expensive price to merely exorbitant. She has proven herself a shark of a businesswoman, although Clorinde is not entirely sure she understands just how wealthy she is compared to the average Fontainian. In the market, she had also attempted to purchase an apple for four times its listed value. 

Below the seam of the horizon bob twin golden suns: the reflection of the true sun on the water, and a boat, painted clean red-and-yellow, spilling the distant strains of its orchestra across the bay. 

“That’s the Pearl Galley,” Navia says, when Clorinde asks. She has bought a guidebook this time, in preparation, and has spent the weeks leading up to this trip regaling Clorinde with a dozen fun facts every evening. “It’s supposed to be a sort of aristocrat’s club, with some of the best food and entertainment in Liyue, although my people in Fleuve Cendre advise there’s a lot happening under the surface that nobody should look at too closely.”

Neuvillette’s nose, predictably, wrinkles at the word aristocrat. Navia laughs and pats his hand, her ring glittering like harbour waves in the sunshine. “It’s actually not a bad idea,” she says lightly. “A nightclub on a boat… it seems atmospheric, and it’s clearly been a hit in Liyue. Maybe the Spina should start branching out!” Fontaine’s acting regent purses his lips, and the God of Justice raises an eyebrow, and she adds, “Only the parts within the law, of course.”

“Perhaps you could convince Wriothesley to let you rent his boat,” Clorinde jokes, as Furina ducks below her elbow to steal a mouthful of pork from her plate. “I don’t think he knows what to do with it now. It’s just sitting there, rusting.”

“There you have it, then!”

Across the water, the music changes: something high-pitched, layered with strings into a hungry symphony. Clorinde tracks the reflection of the water up the cliffs, remembering travelling with her master, hiking up a fog-soaked mountain to tour the Wangshan Hall and chasing fish down the creek at Stone Gate. Sitting barefoot on top of her bedroll in Petronilla’s friend’s spare room with a puzzle in her lap, peering out the window, waiting for her master to return with the promised pet. What will it be? Will it like me?

“There have actually been a few attempts at a venue like that before,” Furina is saying. She has finished Clorinde’s pork and started on the dumplings. “The Rusty Rudder, Fruits of the Sea, Archimbaud’s Floating Restaurant in Poisson…”

Navia sits up straight. “In Poisson! Why have I never heard about this?”

“Well, it sank.”

“Two hundred years ago,” Neuvillette clarifies. “I believe Madame Archimbaud’s official statement claimed the restaurant’s foundations were worn down by the weight of its success.”

Furina laughs. “Do you remember—” and she launches into a memory, a marching line of famous names Fontainians read about in the history books. 

They have slipped firmly into their strange, ancient little world, and so Clorinde takes the opportunity to lean over to Navia. Orange blossom, sun-warmed skin. A world much younger, new and delicate as curled spring leaves, but no less precious for it. “Come with me,” she whispers, and feels her breath brush against the shining curls behind Navia’s ear, the cool stone of her wedding ring beneath her fingers. 

They go hand-in hand, out of the city and into the plains, where the grass is brittle and browned by lack of rain. Clorinde marks the path in her mind — here is the tree with the broken branch; here is the creek slick with algae, turning the water green as liquid jade. Here is the mountain, mountain, mountain. 

Beyond the scattered ruins of the Guili Assembly there is the cave. Clorinde had chosen it with care — a safe, hidden place, close enough to the water for her Geovishap to drink, but far enough away that it would be unlikely to be spotted by passing wanderers. She had thought it would be happy there, but now, as she waits at the lip of the cave, she feels the cold fingers of dread curl around her neck. 

Perhaps she was not careful enough. Perhaps the place she chose was still too close to the road, and a sword-happy adventurer had stumbled across it. Perhaps there was not enough food and her pet starved to death, waiting for her to return. Perhaps — even after everything — perhaps this is another thing she has loved, and betrayed, and killed.

But then she hears it: the rumble of footsteps, growing louder and louder. Navia gasps, a realisation, and begins to laugh a second before a cannonball of solid rock ricochets from the tunnel and slams into Clorinde’s abdomen. 

She falls backwards onto the grass, winded, but her assailant doesn’t give her time to catch her breath. Instead it settles fully on top of her, and begins to lick the top of her head with a rough granite tongue.

She opens her eyes, and reaches up to scratch the new adult horns on her pet’s head.

“Hello,” she murmurs. 

Geovishap roars, a rounded quiet roar, the clack of a landslide behind its teeth. It thumps its nose intently into Clorinde’s shoulder. Navia falls to her knees beside them, and reaches out her own hand to pat along its rough, stony hide. “Hello,” she says. “Do you remember me? I’m Navia.”

Geovishap gives a delighted wriggle, its massive tail sending a shower of rocks down from the cave ceiling. And then, behind it: another clatter, another rain of pebbles from further in the cave. Four shapes emerging from the darkness.

One large. Three small, even smaller than Geovishap had been when Master had brought it home. All four-legged and the ragged brown of boulders.

Oh, Clorinde thinks. You fell in love too, did you?

The smallest hatchling cowers behind its other parent’s legs, but the other two barrel right up to them, wriggling and spinning their joy in dusty circles on the grass. Geovishap clambers off of Clorinde to nudge the little one forward into her lap, where it blinks hesitantly at her before licking its eyeball and curling into a tight ball across her legs. The other adult Geovishap sniffs at Navia’s hair, curious but oddly unfazed, as if somehow it had been expecting them. As if somehow, in the five years since they have seen each other, Geovishap had told its mate and its family about Clorinde.

She closes her eyes, feeling dizzied with the weight of it all. To be remembered. To be kept. Something slips off her shoulders, a last scrap of carried weight. 

“I won’t leave for so long,” she whispers against its stony nose, feeling strangely like a child again. “I promise. I won’t leave you for that long ever again.”

Geovishap clicks its teeth again, and breathes soft granite breath against her cheek. The two bigger hatchlings forego their spinning to wriggle closer to the action, knocking into each other and their sibling until their parents roar a clear, firm warning. Geovishap’s roar, Clorinde thinks, sounds an awful lot like Petronilla. 

And so she watches, and laughs, and leans her head against Navia’s shoulder where everything is sunlight and warmth, and in the back of her mind she thinks: from this day, as we pass the candle’s shadow-veil…