Beyond the Mirror

The line was silent and Glykon waited a few more seconds for that to remain true before she toggled the receiver a couple times and to dial a number.
Nothing happened.
Again, she tried to clear the line and dial.
Nothing.
She had made an assumption that the line being cut was Valentine’s, not her own. Now, she knew better. Now, her goal had to be to convince her children to be ready to leave, and quickly, but without a panic.
“Kids!” she hollered through the cottage home. “We’re going to surprise visit Merilli at Loer’s!” she announced cheerfully, turning away from the phone and heading further inside to find her children with a bright smile on her face.
It was little Juniper who lit up immediately. “Merry Lily?” When her mother nodded the affirmative, she sprang to life. Her white hair already started to fall from the careful braid her brother had plaited it into this morning. It always seemed to go when she had any kind of excitement.
Glykon held up a finger to forestall the child from bounding off. Her eldest daughters currently in residence started to rise up from their seats at the kitchen table, but held in mid-motion, waiting for the decree to come down.
“We’re going to be gone for a couple of months,” their mother explained, “so make sure you don’t leave anything behind that you would be upset to be without.” That finger wagged in warning to each child in turn. “I won’t come back for anything.” She waved her hand toward the stairwell to the upper level where each of the children’s bedrooms were located. “Go now. Quickly!”
“Finally?”
“You’re going to listen?”
The twins exchanged looks and Vespertina murmured something to her counterpart in a cant of their own devising that even Glykon, for the multitude of languages she studied and communicated in, could not speak herself. However, she could comprehend enough of it via tone and body language to know that she was faced with a delicate moment. A look of trepidation would solidify their own concern and mistrust of this deception she was weaving. If she could buoy their spirits instead…
“Go on,” Glykon entreated in a soft voice to match her girls’, a gentle hand on the shoulder of dark chocolate-haired Sóley and a small smile. “She’s going to be thrilled to see you both.” Turning conspiratorial, offering a tiny smirk only for her two bonded daughters, she nudged the moon-pale Vespertina. “If you show her what you learned in school, she’ll be tickled.”
As her academia-minded children began to ascend the stairs, the pink tiefling straightened up again, bidding them, “Oh! And don’t fill three bags with text books. We have perfectly good spellbooks in Lux.”
Sóley rolled her eyes. Her sister’s shoulders rose and fell quickly just once, betraying the single bubble of laughter she wasn’t able to fend off.
Aster, hands on Juniper’s shoulders, had been holding a concerned look on his mother since she came into the room to announce her plan. Glykon sighed when she caught it and suddenly feared glancing around to look for his other sister. The six-year-old was still practically bouncing with her excitement, like one of the young bunnies that inhabited their yard every season. It made her much easier to focus on.
It also made her harder to focus on.
Severine had been so hard to look at in the early days, the reminders of where she came from — who she came from — had been heartbreaking. Since Lovis’ disappearance nearly six months ago now, Juniper had begun to stir up similar feelings. Her cloud-white hair, the pallor of her skin, the contour of her face… She looked so much like him. It was her eyes, pink like her own, that only made it worse. Glykon had joked to her husband that they ruined the otherwise perfect representation of him in that little face. Lovis, however, had surprised her with his response, showing a gentleness she had not expected in light of her self-deprecating humor. He insisted that those eyes were merely a reminder of how this perfect child — perfect as all her older siblings were as well — was the ultimate testament of the love they had for one another.
It made her feel like there was a fist inside her chest, gripping her heart and squeezing it slowly. Just until it became uncomfortable, then —
h o l d i n g .
“What about…?” Aster tilted his head toward the hall to indicate the phone in the front room.
Glykon’s smile brightened, stepping forward so she could wrap her arms around her teenaged son, a studious boy — so young, yet so ancient sometimes — and wondered how much longer it would be before his head would no longer rest against her collar and he would stand taller than her instead, like his father. She wondered if Juniper — her arms wrapped around her mother’s waist, because it was clearly hugs time — would follow suit.
“I talked to my friend. He’s going to bring Severine to meet us there,” Glykon told her son.
Being of the heritage she was, lying came to the Princess Zar’ath as easily as breathing. Still, she tried her best not to lie to her children, to her husband or lovers, unless it was the kind sort of lie — like the kind that resulted in a surprise party, or good news that wasn’t hers to share. Ever since that phone rang, Glykon had begun lying to her children.
All of them.
“So, hurry up,” she urged the boy, smoothing a hand carefully over his hair wheat-colored hair and minding the well-woven lateral braid that fastened at the back of his head with a thin cord of leather she wasn’t so sure didn’t come from a pair of Lovis’ shoes.
Vespertina had asked for his pillow, claiming she’d forgotten hers in her haste to return home.
Sóley wanted one of the small knives he’d left behind — for gathering ingredients, of course.
Juniper had traded the blanket on her bed for one of his cloaks. Beneath it, she would ‘sneak’ in to sleep at the end of her parents’ bed some nights, waiting to see if Lovis would sneak in, too.
Tempest had sneered and taken a sword from her father’s collection, because he clearly didn’t need it.
Every one of them needed something of their father’s to feel connected to him still, with him so far away, after so long without word.
Glykon slept in his unlaundered tunics… until they began to smell more like her than him.
With a deep breath to bring her away from the nebulous nostalgic and back to the now, she nodded Aster toward the stairs, while gently prying Juniper’s arms away from her waist. “You too. Go on.” He was quite a bit more serene than his sister, and though he always watched out for her, Glykon still felt compelled to remind her youngest, “No skipping on the stairs!”
When she turned away, she found herself alone in the kitchen and relaxed with an exhale. Her body seemed to sag in on itself, as though she may as well have been a marionette hung up to rest, strings no longer pulled taut.
Slowly, dread crept up her spine with the delicate touch of spider legs, making her want to brush it off or shudder. She was more resolute than that and kept her composure, but listened — really listened — to why she felt that feeling. The phone call alone wasn’t enough to trigger this level of anxiety.
It was the Wilds. The songs of birds no longer reached her ears, and when the wind blew outside, it was more than just the strings of shiny shells, rocks, and scraps of copper of the wind chime hanging from the porch that added to that strange music. She started toward the front door.
“Place is surrounded.”
Tempest’s voice was flat, sudden enough for Glykon to turn around and press her hand over her chest as though it would keep her (still aching) heart in place. Before she could form the words to begin to express her confusion, her daughter continued.
“While you were busy putting on the we’re definitely not about to feed you a really foul-tasting medicine routine,” Tempest answered her mother’s look of affronted shock with a glance that asked really? in return, and without skipping a beat, “I tore into an invisibility scroll and did some reconnaissance.”
Tch! went Tempest’s tongue off the roof of her mouth. “Honestly, Mother. It’s like you’ve forgotten how to fight a war.”
Glykon’s hand lifted from her chest and settled at her hip instead. “I am not fighting a war, I am protecting my children.” There was that look again. Closing her eyes and focusing on letting out her breath slowly as a way to keep her patience and her calm, she was forced to concede. “Fine. Do your sisters know?” The ceiling received a glance, the location of the bedrooms occupied by the twins approximated.
“What?” Tempest’s face screwed up in an instant. “No. They’re useless.” She shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, she could describe to you what it would look like down to the most minute detail if she did it, but I don’t think Ley’s ever actually cast a single spell in her life,” Tempest assessed. “And Tinie’s solution will be to tell you to open a portal to the moon, and don’t worry Mom,” she adopted a voice much higher than the sound of her actual sister’s voice, likely indicative of how much she believed her head to be in the clouds, “I’ll lead them through! and then poof!, our little astronomer is off tromping about the cosmos like an idiot.”
Glykon stood a little taller, head tilted to one side as she took in her middle child’s mien. “That’s a very unkind way of viewing your sisters. They—”
“—wouldn’t be seeing the big picture,” Tempest finished for her mother, voice still calm and even, even as her mother’s pink eyes sought the gaps in the curtains for signs of what her daughter’s already warned her of. “They wouldn’t be protecting the family, they would be protecting you.” Tempest’s mouth curled up when those eyes snapped back on her again, self-satisfied. “I know you believe that’s not a sound strategy.” Self-satisfied, but pained in knowing what the consequence is to being correct here.
Glykon stood somber for a moment before nodding her head. “Go up there. Get them and whatever bags they have together and bring them back into the kitchen.” With a sigh, she pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Don’t let on that something’s up. Just get them to hustle.”
“Hustle where, Mom? How do you expect to get all of us out of here?” Tempest’s brow furrowed, unwilling to outright question the wisdom of her mother in gathering with her siblings in a single, not terribly defensible location.
“The way only I can,” Glykon assured her child. “Now go.”
Tempest hesitated only a moment, but gave a short nod and hurried off up the stairs. Once she did, her mother strode quickly to their dining room and began sliding the table back until it was pushed against the wall and barring the back door. The chairs were pulled to the walls as well, making space in the center of the room.
Taking in a deep, measured breath, Glykon closed her eyes and imagined the place she wanted to see. Slowly, she opened her arms in front of her. The change in air pressure and ambient sound told her she’d succeeded, bringing her to open her eyes again and stare at her brother’s house.
The back of it. Rather than step through the portal, she tugged aside the collar of her dress. Among the beautiful vines, thorns, buds and blooms adorning her skin was a sleeping fox in a crown of flowers, its tail curled around Glykon’s throat. With a lazy stretch, Revebjelle stood from the sorceress’ skin, remaining draped just for a moment as though she were a stole, before hopping down silently to the floor just in front of Glykon’s feet.
The familiar slipped through the portal and ran around the front of Orion Zar’ath’s house. The yips of the creature, followed by more humanoid sounds in return, told her she’d at least found someone home. It wasn’t long before the little fox bounded back into view with her eldest brother in tow, wearing that face that she knew he’d be wearing to be summoned by his sister’s familiar. The portal wasn’t a shock to him.
But he didn’t love it.
“Severine’s been found,” Glykon stated plainly. The two never needed to waste time on greetings. Some situations simply didn’t have the space for it. “But someone’s coming for the kids, and they’re already here. I was going to travel the usual way, meet you and hand them off, but obviously that’s not possible. If I try to leave here, they will be taken.”
Revebjelle circled Orion’s legs anxiously, holding in a whine. She didn’t need to make noise for him to see how dire the situation was. “So, where are they?” The faint scowl on his face told Glykon what she needed to know.
“Upstairs. But I’m not sending them to you — I wouldn’t lead them to your door. I’m offering you the shortcut.” Stretching out her arm, the familiar backed up a few steps, then made a bounding leap. The movement on the parts of both of them was fluid. Glykon bowed to adjust her height in accordance to what the fox could reach, and the little creature landed back where she belonged, instantly melding into the markings of her mistress’ skin again, without any otherwise physical collision. It was an impressive sight.
Not impressive enough to throw Orion. “The shortcut.” He cast a glance back toward his own home, to someone just out of Glykon’s line of sight that made her nearly say something stupid like tell her I say hello, before turning his look of concern back on his sister. “Then open the portal to where you need to be, and go with them.”
“I can’t.” There was a loud thump! from overhead and the edges of the portal crackled as Glykon looked up. An indistinct shout from Tempest put the mother at ease. If something had been happening, the shout would have been far louder, and whatever language the sailor chose to swear in would have been delivered with perfect elocution. By the time she looked back to her brother, he had already made up his mind.
“You got it?” he asked of the portal.
Glykon nodded her head. Holding a portal to her brother’s location always seemed to come easily. It was a place mapped out in her heart.
Orion stepped through and Glykon embraced him the moment he did, the portal shrinking until it closed behind him. She allowed herself to shake with fear in his arms just the once. He knew better than anyone what that emotion felt like on her. “Thank you,” she whispered. He responded with a briefly tighter hold, then a pat on her back. She withdrew and nodded once. “I’m sending you all to Lux Brumalis. They believe they’re visiting Merilli, so they’re packing accordingly right now.”
“You told them to pack?” Orion asked, incredulous. A situation this dire, and his baby sister told her children to pack for a mountain vacation.
“If I hadn’t, they’d be arming themselves right now,” Glykon insisted, but her jaw trembled. The truth was that she didn’t know what she should have told her children to do. “The house is surrounded, Ri. I don’t know who’s out there, but they’re after me, and whatever they want…”
Orion knew firsthand just how strong Glykon could be — and was. He knew she could defy the will of an emperor — the very gods — given the mind. A Dalvath princess by blood and by birth, she could be ruthless if she felt the situation warranted it. The Zar’aths could eat their own, and as much as she tried to distance herself from that, it was just as true in her case as it was in their sister’s.
The lengths Glykon Creed would go through to keep her family safe were practically legend. She had sacrificed the lives of her own people. She had committed a heinous (and quite private) act of treason that could have cost her everything. To threaten those she held most dear was to take one’s life in their own hands.
But her greatest strength was also his sister’s greatest weakness. With Lovis already missing, it seemed to Orion as though history may be repeating itself. What could she be forced to do in order to see his safe return? Or Severine’s?
She had thought this through, then. To separate herself from her children would be terrible for all involved, but could also be exactly what would be necessary to keep everyone involved safe.
“Lux Brumalis, then,” he confirmed. She replied with a nod.
“You just need to get them there. Go home again when you feel the time is right. Loer and Lyall will see you home.” The first feet hit the stairs and Glykon pressed a kiss to her brother’s brow. “I love you. Thank you,” she said again in a hush. This would suffice as their goodbye now.
Vespertina was the first on the landing with her full pack, warm coat already draped over her shoulders to save the space. She passed the hallway and into the dining room, pausing briefly when she saw the state of the space, and noted her uncle’s presence. “I thought you weren’t in residence this time of year.” Confusion cleared quickly, a smile spreading across her face, “I should’ve known. Mother won’t listen to any of us, but I bet you set her straight about going to the mountains, didn’t you? Ah, this will be nice! Up there, the stars are nearly close enough to touch! You’ll have to see them with me.”
Orion smiled faintly and accepted the brief hug from his niece, glancing to his sister over the top of her head. Glykon only shook her head in response.
Soon, they were joined by Sóley (who was slightly more suspicious than her sister), Juniper, and Aster. The youngest proceeded to immediately attempt to climb onto her uncle’s shoulders in her excitement, leaving the teenage boy to mill back toward the stairwell, where he caught the last of the Creed children as she started to cross the hall.
“Tempest?” Aster asked in a low voice, “Why’s Uncle Orion here?” He was more astute than most gave him credit for, and he knew that if anyone could assess a threat, it would be his closest older sister.
The young woman bristled internally. Lying to Aster was one of her least favorite activities. “Didn’t know he was coming,” she admitted rather than to try. “But we should just get ready to move out, okay?”
Having noticed her son’s departure, Glykon was having a low conversation with her brother at the same moment. “Make sure to handle the twins. Tempest will have the others.” Juniper was lifted from her perch and deposited on the ground again. “There will be plenty of time for climbing when you get to Merilli’s,” she assured the youngest in a voice that carried now.
The family was finally assembled in the dining room.
“Okay!” Glykon called the group to order with a clap of her hands and a chipperness to her voice. “We’re going to—”
There was a knock at the front door.
“—completely ignore that,” she assured her children, who started exchanging looks. Tempest, however, kept her eyes square on Glykon, her head cocked faintly from her position leaned up against the entry to the hall to hear what noise traveled from the other parts of the house as much as outside. A quick shake of her head told her mother that they were still alone for the moment.
“What’s going on?” Sóley asked anxiously.
“We’re going to Lux Brumalis,” Glykon restated, the cheer having faded by several degrees.
“Yeah?”
“Why?” Vespertina picked up from where her sister left off.
“I told you—”
The knock at the door was a pounding this time. “Glykon Zar’ath! Come out and surrender yourself immediately!”
The twins gasped sharply, exchanging wide eyed looks. Juniper looked up at the face of every adult present in turn, clutching at the edge of Aster’s tunic, who was busy sharing a look of disappointment with Tempest.
The tension held for the space of three solid seconds before Glykon made a decision. “Alright,” she declared, “We’re going through the portal.”
The moment she began to move, the children started to gather behind her to watch and wait for the portal to open. Tempest pulled open a cupboard to retrieve a box. She shook it to assess the balance and quantity of its contents, then cracked it open and with a heave threw the contents on the floor in front of her mother. It was a spread of herbs and leaves commonly used in a tea acquired in Endora. It had been terribly expensive.
The scent of it was heady, and while it no longer consciously did so, its aroma still reminded her of the first time she’d seen the homeland of the oracles. It was the place where her life had changed forever. In all the ways it had done so, Glykon had enough years to reflect and decide it had all been for the better. This scent meant that enormous change was coming, but that it would work out to a net benefit.
The portal opened easily.
Glykon opened her eyes and stared out at one of the courtyards of the Dawn’s mountain sanctuary. She didn’t have to call the order to march. Vespertina started to move, but hesitated when Sóley didn’t immediately move to join her. Orion planted his hands on both their shoulders and nudged them toward the portal, scooping up one of their packs as they went.
“Mommy?” Juniper asked with wide eyes, now filled with fright and uncertainty.
“It’s okay.” Mother and brother insisted at once, to the startlement of the first. Aster let his hands rest on his sister’s shoulders and guided her to stand before the portal. “Just like we practiced, little bunny. Show Merilli how well you can hop.”
Juniper took in a deep breath, holding it inside puffed-out cheeks. From there, she brought her hands up, folding them down in front of her and pausing for a brief moment as she seemed to take time to embody the essence of a rabbit. Twitching her nose, she hop -
hop -
hop -
hopped
through the portal.
Aster, however, did not follow behind. He instead turned and faced toward his remaining sister and his mother, starting to draw patterns through the air with his hands. An invisible wind ruffled the edges of his tunic as he whispered spells under his breath.
“Tempest,” Glykon warned, an edge to her voice. She couldn’t hold the portal forever, and the more insistent the shouting became, the more difficult it was to maintain.
Tempest let out a growl from the back of her throat. “I’m on it,” she promised. Pushing off from the door frame, she hurried forward, looping an arm through the straps of her pack quickly before simply colliding with her younger brother to try and bounce him right off and through the portal.
The boy, however, was warded, and refused to be moved.
“Aster!” Tempest shouted at her brother, bouncing off him instead. She threw her bag through the portal where it was received by Orion. Vespertina took up Juniper while Sóley shouted an alarm, calling for Lyall and his Black Guard.
The boy shook his head resolutely. “I won’t let anyone take Mom!” he swore, tears glistening in his eyes. He refused to shed them, refused to let that fear keep him from doing what he’d need to do.
He was fifteen.
“You’re a liability!” Tempest declared, feeling like a jerk the moment the words left her lips. “We’re not going to let anyone take Mom, but you have to go and get help. You have to go find Loer!”
“We don’t have time for this!” Glykon’s voice was edged with desperation. “Aster, you have to go through.”
“No! I won’t!”
Every one of them standing there had the same heart, and knew it. Tempest swore under her breath, tearing a small scrap of parchment from her belt and reading the writing scrawled there. Aster’s eyes grew heavy and he slowly started to slide to the floor. “I’ve got him!” she declared as she dashed forward again to catch the boy in her arms.
“Good!” Glykon praised her daughter, offering a small smile. “I know that was hard. I know that it hurt and will continue to hurt in the coming days,” she further noted as Tempest stroked her brother’s hair apologetically. “It will be the right choice, and you’ll come to understand it eventually.”
Tempest’s mouth curled with a wry smile. She didn’t need her mom’s assurance to understand that putting her teenage brother under a sleep spell, rather than let him face a sizable mercenary detachment, was the the wisest course of action. But Mom was the one who struggled with notions of hurt feelings.
“Now go bring him through,” Glykon instructed, finally lifting a hand out in front of her. After all her practice, she found she hadn’t needed the gesture in order to establish a portal. With the power being etched into every inch of her skin, it had seemed as easy as opening her heart and thinking of where she wanted to be. Unfamiliar or hostile places warranted different gestures from her, however. Now… Now, she just felt she needed the focus that came from imagining her power could flow through her and accumulate in the palm of her hand. Tempest understood it as a sign that things were getting difficult and dangerous. “I’ll be right behind you,” Glykon assured.
With a soft grunt for her effort, Tempest pushed to her feet with her brother held in her arms. “Be right back, then.” She joked with an ease she didn’t feel. “Going to go trade my kid brother for a sword, like I’ve been threatening to do for years.”
“See that you do!” Glykon spurred her on, watching the last of her children slip through the portal. Just like that, she nearly closed it up behind them, but at the last moment, the fox shifted from her pace around her neck and nudged at her jaw. “And you, old friend?”
Glykon had come by Revebjelle quite accidentally. She’d been shifting and swaying her way through the markets as usual, when she came upon a seller that she had always been excited to see, whenever they came to port. She’d received pretty birds before, but on that particular outing, there had been something new.
A fox.
There had not been an ounce of regret for using her rank to snatch up the little thing from a would-be buyer ahead of her, for Glykon had never seen such a beautiful, small, soft and fuzzy thing before, and what was the point in being a princess if she couldn’t have exactly what she wanted?
As a kit, she was such a small creature. The color of her coat was like amber, tail tipped white, black on the tips of her ears and making her paws look as though they were clad in little boots.
Even before she’d begun to bond with the fox magically, Glykon knew she was intelligent. The choice was laughably obvious in hindsight, after a disastrous and short-lived pairing with a mouse, that Revebjelle should be her familiar.
She’d been there the first time they’d encountered a portal, serving as her eyes and ears into the world beyond. So often since then, Revebjelle had continued to serve as Glykon’s eyes and ears.
“Go on, then.”
She could again.
The vixen jumped from Glykon’s shoulder and landed on the other side of the portal in Lux Brumalis, bounding toward the children and passing Tempest as she hurried back toward the portal.
She could see the look in her pink eyes.
“No!” Tempest cried. “Mom, no!”
She knew what it meant.
“I’m sorry, my darling.”
Glykon wouldn’t be stepping through behind her.
Tempest, her father’s sword held in one hand, shouted with an emotion she couldn’t define, letting it embody the need she felt, to carry her cry to the Divines and beg for the speed necessary to get through that portal before Glykon could finish the flourish of her wrist and curl of her fingers into her palm. And she was sure that she’d run then, faster than she ever had before. It would be close, but she could make it. She could make it.
She could make it.
She
could

make

it.

She thought she could almost feel her mother’s fingertips against her own as she reached out to her, the desperation spurring her forward with that last bit of energy.
But the way back was closed.
The portal shut just as Tempest was poised to smash through it, leaving her only with an after image of the long look of sorrow and regret in Glykon’s eyes when reality bricked up the blockade between them.
Tempest collided with a wall at full speed and staggered back, sword scraping across the stone ground beneath her feet. Her family watched in horror, not a one of them sure what to say or do then. The grieving godchild knew only one thing: she threw back her head and she screamed with a ferocity, an intensity, and a mournfulness that could only be exhibited by her mother’s demonic bloodline. It echoed through the mountaintops and lingered long after her throat had gone raw.
Glykon’s arm dropped to her side and she stared into her empty kitchen, where her family had been standing. Waiting. Trusting her to get them all to safety. Again, she had lied to her family.
Gauntleted fists pounded again on the door and this time she turned and announced she was on her way.
The mercenary had stepped back to the ranks with his fellows by the time she arrived at the door. Glykon peered out curiously. “What’s all this about?”
She immediately felt herself cut off from her portals. There would be no leaving here through that method, or by hoping tree to tree, as she had intended. Again, she asked, “What is this?” Voice lowered in pitch, she still avoided sounding openly hostile.
The only answer was the advance of a young man with broad shoulders, a set of shackles out. A man several yards from her, protected by the ranks, spoke: “Glykon Creed, please come with us.” While she kept her nose out of politics, Glykon still made it her business to know who was feuding with whom, who struck up an alliance through marriage, and the like. These men did not wear colors she recognized, but there was something familiar about the speaker.
“On whose authority?” Pink eyes darted about the clearing for anyone who might take responsibility for this incident, but found nothing and nobody brave enough to speak to her.
The young man reached for her arm.
“I am Princess Glykon Zar’ath, and I command you to tell me who is demanding I be detained, and on what charge!” She had half a mind to warn them, but they hadn’t deigned to answer a one of her questions, so why remind them to reconsider attacking a fae in her own realm?
Glykon stomped her foot, and called nature to her aid. She pushed back against the man meaning to apprehend her, the very earth rising up and striking at him in warning.
Tattoo. She realized the speaker was familiar for their tattoo. She’d seen it on those in the laboratories of The Eye all those years ago. What did that mean now? So many had started new lives. Did it mean anything about whose service they fell into?
There was no time to dwell on it. A mage among the ranks threw a spell at her, and with her arm held as it was, she could only dodge it in part. Still, it would take far worse to lay her out.
The mage cast another spell, and this time, Glykon froze. Out from the woods? — No, the mirror — came the most horrifying sight.
The blind beast.
Glykon shrieked her terror, but rather than try to protect herself, she wrapped her arms around her stomach and meant to curl small as the beast descended. As she crumpled, she felt the world slow. The mage looked on in shock. What was happening before him had not been meant to happen. She registered this — that they had meant to retrieve her, and that she was meant to be alive — the moment her heart stopped.
Glykon Creed felt herself slip away, then...
Nothing.

---

Featured Characters: Glykon Creed, Luther Valentine, Tempest Creed, Orion Zar'ath, Creed.