Chapter Twenty-Two: The World

It was just a nickname, an awful one at that, but regardless, it had stuck.

Ratsbane.

Cleo thought it was horrid, and had said as much to the girl's father, who had given her the terrible alias. He, of course, was no help at all, and thought it was hilarious and clever and therefore it remained in use. It was even worse when the little girl started responding to it more quickly than her real name, which was Rebecca.

Rebecca Aloysia Finrandi, aged three, who just happened to have let her parents know early in life just what sort of bloodline she was heir to, by torch-electrocuting a field rodent when it had mortally frightened her on the back porch one quiet summer twilight. She'd been toddling around on the back porch, a picture of babyfaced perfection with a head of glossy black ringlets and her mother's bright, sky-blue eyes, wading around the shaded, ivy laden terrace in bare feet with her copper watering can. Cleo remembered, she'd just put down the baby when she heard the earsplitting scream from out the open double doorway. She'd barely spun around, her heart surging in her chest, when the dark figure of her husband was already flying past the doorway and skidding out to the terrace to mollify his wailing daughter.

Decklan, only a handful of months old at the time, had just finally allowed himself to be rocked to sleep and woke with an upsetting little jerk; already whimpering from the crib and squirming ominously. Cleo remembered scooping the tiny boy up before running out to the patio, where Rebecca's little sobs were muffled in her father's shoulder; the sun was about to set, gold light glistening in long nets across the stone pavers, where the remains of an enormous field rat lay in smoldering ruin, and Orphen couched beside it, looking down at the black smear with a mixed expression of arrogance and surprise while Rebecca sniveled herself dizzy as she was apt to do.

"What's going on out here?" she'd breathlessly rushed through the open double doors with her squirming son held against her bare shoulder, her heart beating cold in her throat, and Orphen had turned towards her after a minute, his eyes still cast downward at the smoking black lump that had once been a small, furry animal with a long tail.

Following his gaze, Cleo started at the sight, Decklan whimpered fussily, and she patted his tiny backside. She dropped her voice below the level of Rebecca's bawling. "What the hell is that?"

With a curious smirk, he finally looked up at her. "I think…it was a rat," he said, then dipped his face into the cloud of black curls floating around his daughter's head and whispered to her for confirmation, "Becky, was it a big rat?"

She didn't lift her head, only nodded emphatically and gave a breathless sob to punctuate it. She could be terribly dramatic. Orphen had mentioned in passing she must have gotten that from her mother.

"I can see that!" she intoned dangerously, "I mean what happened to it?! Did you do this?"

He shook his head slowly, lifting his free hand that wasn't soothing the sniveling girl, and casually pointed up at his daughter.

"No!" Cleo breathed, torn between excitement and horror. "Not already!"

He was rubbing the girl's little back with an eyebrow raised at his blonde wife, asking her to save her comments until he actually had the freedom to reply. "Come on," he said cloyingly to Rebecca, "There's no reason to keep crying is there? It's gone, see? Becky, baby, how'd you get rid of it?"

It hadn't taken long to figure out that Rebecca already had discovered she could use magic. Not that she'd known what it was; just that she could. Orphen had taken her out back to find another random, overgrown beach rat, and come back into the house ten minutes later, using his miraculous prowess with the girl to talk her into taking a bath while he set about donning his cloak to go have a quick word with her favorite Uncle Majic at the Tower.

After putting Decklan down for the second time and settling her daughter in a foamy tub, she'd blocked him in the foyer with tears in her eyes. "Not already!" she repeated in a low rasp, low enough that Rebecca couldn't hear her in the bath where she was splashing happily with her rubber ponies and collection of seashells. "Orphen, no; she's only three!"

"She's too young, relax, they wouldn't even take her anyway."

"They took you!"

"I was four," he corrected calmly, glancing past her and into the hallway a moment to check if their daughter hadn't vacated the tub randomly, as she had been known to do, sneaking up on him in the office or patio naked and ornamented with white blobs of soap bubbles as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

"You think you're awfully cute, don't you?" she hissed, planting her hands on her hips and giving him the fierce stare of a mother tiger, and he laughed at her, catching her around the waist and backing her casually against the foyer wall.

"I didn't have parents. I was an exception. And you know I have no intention of that, besides."

"Watch your hands there, buddy."

He flashed her an innocent smile, raising an eyebrow in just that little way he did. "See? You're not that worried."

"The hell. Orphen, what if she hurts herself?"

"She might. But she won't do it twice. Didn't you ever fall out of a tree or anything as a kid or did your Mom keep you under a bell jar?"

She glared. "I think I remember leaving home against her demands and following around some mean prick that nearly got me killed a few times."

"Oh yeah, that guy," he quipped acidly. "Wonder what ever happened to him?"

"I hear he ended up pussywhipped by some blonde."

His hands tightened on her, trapping her against the wall with his body. "Ouch. That was nasty."

"Weren't you headed for the Tower?"

"Yes, but not to sign her over to them for chrissake, give me a little credit. Don't you think I ought to find out what's usually done at this point? You know I don't have any idea, but seeing as she's already got electrical down without either of us knowing, it won't be long before Rat's Bane in there is burning down the—"

"Don't call her that!"

"Oh come on, you don't think that's funny?" He'd grappled with her a little, even as she put extra effort into looking somber, trying to stand her ground as he went for her neck, his words lost in the long curtain of her hair and his hands resuming their indecent wandering. "Not even a little? Ratsbane? The adorable doom of all rodents?"

She was as easily and hopelessly charmed by him as ever, he knew that. Likewise, he had Rebecca wrapped around his little finger as thoroughly as her mother had been for what felt like forever. He knew she'd smiled, her anxiety relaxing even as she'd tried to turn her face way to hide it. And that's all it had taken.

From then on, it had stuck. That terrible nickname.

Drama of that medium-low caliber was somewhat typical in the Finrandi household. Things hadn't always been so idyllic. For years, before their eventual marriage, their relationship had been an undeniable firestorm at every phase of it for all their years living at the Tower during the war. From their lengthy, slow beginning to Orphen's phase of intense possessiveness when he'd threatened to kill her rather good-looking fencing instructor and just about anyone else who looked at her twice, their vicious-as-ever quarrelling, hard long days, sometimes weeks of not speaking to each other, and their eventual passionate, emotional reunions. Hartia constantly insisted that she deserved better; and if she knew Shrimp Man, his joking insinuations that he would make a much better choice weren't altogether entirely in humor, but she'd never mentioned it to Orphen. Despite that he'd gradually learned to be more secure in her loyalty to him, joking or no, she couldn't be sure what he would do to his longtime friend for such a suggestion.

They'd had their first earth shattering break-up about six months after her abduction by the Church, in the thick of the first summer of the war. While arguing about it with Hartia, she'd insisted desperately it was the end of their mercurial love affair, and to prove it, she'd kissed him. Kissed Hartia. God knew what Orphen would say, would do, if he ever knew that. It was only once, and she'd been goaded on by his insistence that she would never be anything but a slave to her heart's addiction to his temperamental, socially handicapped friend. No matter the reason, impulsive and ridiculous as it had been, she'd really done it to prove that lie to herself.

Unfortunately, it hadn't been quite as exciting as she'd thought: after growing so used to kissing Orphen, who was still able to suck the breath from her with just the right brush of his lips, kissing Hartia was like kissing the brother she didn't have. They'd laughed it off awkwardly, and Cleo, fighting an impolite urge to spit, had forlornly admitted to a slew of things she hadn't wanted to put into words, the least being that he was right. That no matter how terribly they fought, she'd belonged to the bastard utterly since long before they were actually together. That they didn't always get along, but when they did, it was so beautiful. That being apart from him was complete hell; but unavoidable, and probably for the best. And that no matter all of that, this was the end of it.

Though, obviously, it hadn't been the end of anything. It was later the same night that Orphen had knocked on her door in the dormitory wing of the Tower, demanding she speak with him. She'd opened the door briefly, despite the hour, only to find him propped irritably on her door frame, inebriated and hostile, and it had only taken a brief exchange before she'd slammed the door in his face and collapsed forward against it, clenching her teeth, fighting tears as always.

After a long minute of ringing, tear-slicked silence where she could still feel his presence leaning on the other side of the door, she heard his voice through the moisture swollen wood.

"Goddamnit Cleo. Why do you do this to me?"

"Why do I do this? To you?!" she'd hissed back. "That's a good one. If you weren't such a self-obsessed prick and gave a fuck about anyone but yourself, I wouldn't have to answer that question. I should be asking you. Why do you do this to me?"

"I do give a fuck!"

"Yeah right. You've sure proven that. You don't believe a word I say. You don't trust me. And you don't care how it makes me feel when you accuse me of awful things just because you're—!"

"I care…I'm…sorry."

She didn't like how he'd choked that out. "No you're not."

He was silent a long time in response. For a moment, she thought he'd walked away before she heard his voice again. "Cleo…I don't want this." A long pause. Then, "Please…"

And she'd jerked open the door, quickly enough that he half-fell through it and had to catch himself on the doorsill, and she had to smile despite herself as he glared at her, unfocused as he was.

"Do you insist on fucking doing that?" he spat. He could slip from sweet to malevolent so quickly, it still sent her reeling. Often he couldn't even tell her she was beautiful without getting defensive afterward.

"Yes. I do. I insist. You'd think you'd have learned not to lean on the door like that."

She'd slammed the door once he was inside, launching into his arms and wrapping herself around him before he could even retort. Hartia was right. She was completely enslaved, and though he'd seemed a little shocked at first, he hadn't held out very long against her aggressive seduction as she led him in and pushed him onto his back on her bed, straddling his hips and undoing the buttons down his shirt, her teeth closing gently on his earlobe while she told him to just shut up. His mouth had tasted of gin, his skin fever hot under her hands, and the way he'd been so particularly responsive to her touch had spoken volumes of just how much he'd really missed her; just a slight needful twist of the spine into her as she kissed him, though she was sure the alcohol was to blame, or thank, for his openly telling her so, and that he really was sorry. That he loved her. And as they lay entangled that night, dewy with sweat and blissfully reunited, listening to the low rumble of the summer thunder underlying their quiet, breathless voices, she couldn't have asked for anything more from life.

Sadly, this sequence of anger, regret, and reunion had continued far too long, with just a little more urgency each time it repeated. Between pride and obstinacy and insecurity, there was no end to the innumerable ways in which they managed to wound each other and set that cycle spinning out of control. Their predictable repeating circuit had only truly slowed and died out, out of necessity, once they'd become aware Rebecca would be coming along to join their emotional circus.

Of course, it wasn't for another year after that humid summer night that she'd found out about the would-be surprise pregnancy, though clearly it had been bound to happen eventually, with Cleo returning less and less to Totokanta to continue her visits with the doctor for her mother's once-demanded inoculations against fertility. She'd never mentioned the shots to Orphen, though she knew he'd obviously wondered how it was possible they had dodged that particular bullet for as long as they had. It wasn't something they talked about. All it had taken was an accidental lapse in her treatments during another explosive break up and passionate reconciliation between them, and it had happened. She clearly recalled waking the morning afterward feeling peculiar; even curled up in his arms late that night, listening to him quietly sleep beside her, she'd felt something was somehow different. Something vague and incomprehensible like a shift in the direction of the wind or an increase in humidity.

But telling him about it, once she was extremely, unquestionably certain of her condition, had not been an easy nor stressless task, and she'd put it off as long as was possible until she found herself confronted with the shattering news of Orphen's being sent back out to lead an assault on the Church-occupied Valley of Eugenia. Even up to the moment of saying goodbye to him, she hadn't said a word; and only the soul-destroying prospect of his not coming back and never knowing at all had forced her tongue out of its silence.

It hadn't been the most ideal setting for such news. Clinging to him in the grand hall, still dressed in her snug white fencing suit and surrounded by the bustle of hundreds of friends and couples and families saying their farewells, she'd whispered fiercely that no matter what, he had to come back. He just had to, that's all.

Smoothing her hair with an anxious laugh, he'd assured her he hadn't been planning on not coming back. To not worry. And she'd started to tremble embarrassingly, repeating herself inanely that he had to come back; that they knew who he was by now and would be targeting him. And that it wasn't just for her that she asked this time.

He hadn't taken that bait exactly. Instead he'd asked if she was cold; why was she shaking like that? For being so clever, sometimes he was just so slow with these sorts of things. "What's that mean?" he'd said finally, as though he'd had to go back over what she'd said in her mind. "Who else?"

She'd pulled back, shaking furiously like a woman freezing to death despite that it was a sticky, overcast July morning and forcing her eyes up to his gravely, begging him to catch on so she didn't have to say it. Even though with the wary look he was giving her, she suspected he'd just wanted to hear it to solidify his sudden suspicions.

"The…baby…" That's all she'd gotten out. She didn't know what she expected from him at that point, but was all the same terrified. After all, he'd basically made a career out of being unpredictable.

After a few tense, tear-jerking moments of his expressionless stare, his arms tightened around her and his head dropped down next to hers in a kind of winded embrace, his nature of being rather subdued with displays of affection in public all at once abandoned.

"Oh god…" he'd breathed, plainly shaken. He hadn't even cursed. She was sort of surprised. But she couldn't stop shaking. It was a minute before he squeezed her. "Calm down."

"Hu-how can I calm down? You think I waited this long to tell you because I wanted to be dramatic?"

"How long have you known?" his voice sounded weak, but that was to be expected.

"Three weeks."

"Jesus," he exhaled.

Though he kept her held tightly against him, he wasn't looking at her either. She wanted to say she hadn't let this happen intentionally. That she was more terrified than he could possibly be. But instead she went for a more simple approach, "Are you angry?"

"Angry? N…no…not angry…it's only…" he let out a quick breath, clearly struggling to translate his thoughts into words. "I'd just started to think that…we…couldn't…"

Whether that thought had been a good or bad one, she was unable or unwilling to discern. With her cheek against his shoulder, looking out over the vast hall, she could recognize a few of Orphen's students on the stairway. One girl had her boyfriend's teal bandana tied around her wrist, as was the trend started (presumably) by Cleo's trailing red sash, still tightly fastened in place even after so long. Strangely, it hadn't taken long for this to catch on once it had been noted by the student body that Finrandi's girl wore his old Tower headband as some type of promise ring. These days, you saw girls all over with different colored head sashes fastened around their wrists; flags of some sort of commitment. Which was funny, since Orphen had never intended it that way the day he'd tied it on her. She remembered watching them while Orphen finally spoke up, his words so soft they immediately demanded her attention.

"Okay," he'd said, a cautious note entering his voice of which she was instantly wary. "Just…for once, don't be contrary for the sake of being difficult."

"I have never, not even once, been contrary just for the sake of—"

"Listen to me. I expect you're going to do the right thing and marry me and not fight with me about it."

He'd said it in such a toneless rush it was hard to determine if he was really serious, and instead of processing the altogether staggering statement, her mouth went into overdrive. "Aren't I supposed to be the one talking about doing the right thing?"

"But you're the rebellious one. Just ask your mother."

"I'm the—?!" She'd tried to push off of him, but he held her in place as she struggled for the moment she had it in her. "You're just saying that to annoy me, aren't you?"

"Are you going to marry me or not?"

"Well, you're a romantic bastard, I'll give you that," she'd cracked sourly. "Did you actually want me to answer?"

He'd exhaled hard, his arms locked around her, the lines of his body taut with obvious anxiety and she wished she hadn't had to drop this on him before he'd left, just to reassure her conscience.

"Yes, I want you to goddamn answer."

She sighed, long and slow. "Okay."

"Okay." He paused, content for a second with their tentative understanding, then he added, "You realize this means you'll have to quit walking out on me."

"You realize this means you're going to have to stop being such a prick," she countered.

He hadn't replied to that, and they'd merely spent the next several minutes holding onto each other for dear life; silently terrified until Orphen's lieutenant commander, a familiar tall redhead with a pale spray of freckles and the same embarrassed look he usually was forced to greet them with. "I'm sorry, sir…I'm always interrupting you two…"

"Tompkins…is it time already?"

The kid nodded sternly, gave an unnecessary salute and headed for the front doorways, where another familiar redhead was waiting for him in olive green robes. Hartia had been teaching the first and second year children then, and was helping with the war effort voluntarily, as most of the Tower staff was wont to do. The militia, as Orphen had predicted a year before, had shrunk considerably in size at the time; though those that remained had become more adept at battle through a lot of study, training and experimentation in the Tower Courtyard with their unorthodox Master hurling spells for them to reflect, block or dodge while they were trying to hit him just once.

Orphen gave her a last squeeze then caught her face to kiss her gently. When he drew away, with her shaking beginning to resume and her all too familiar expression, he kept his hand cupping her face and tilted his forehead against hers while she closed her eyes against gathering tears. "Don't cry," he instructed, as he always did when they sent him away.

And as she always did, she collected herself as much as she was capable, and nodded. "I'm trying."

Despite everything, she remembered how empty she'd felt as he'd leaned in to kiss her goodbye. "You don't have to do this," she'd whispered to him.

"There you go, being difficult again."

"I'm not being difficult. I just…if it's not what you want, you don't have to do it just because…because that's what you think you're supposed to do."

"Stupid," he'd whispered back, "Since when have I ever done anything just because I'm supposed to?"

And he'd kissed her once more, hanging onto her a moment longer than it felt like he normally would have, then headed for the front of the hall, where he'd stood beside Hartia a moment, running his left hand back through his dark hair; a nervous gesture of his that was easier to read than his own words a lot of the time. She watched for him to visibly steel himself as he was so flawlessly, though probably not effortlessly, able to do. It was just one of the reasons why Orphen had been a very difficult person to get close to, not only because of those walls he could call up around him in the blink of an eye, but because beyond those walls there were vicious thorns. Once he'd risen his unmistakable, authoritative voice with beginning instructions for the militia to translocate as a unit to a point just outside Eugenia, where a faction of the Imperial operatives were already waiting, she started back up the stairs, his words projecting not only all around her but flooding though her, echoing inside her skull.

The problem had been that he hadn't come back quite as smoothly as he'd promised. The clash that had raged in Eugenia the following days had been a veritable bloodbath, and for days the only soldiers who had returned from the battle had come back in pine boxes in the back of horse drawn hearses, and buried promptly in the Tower cemetery without any viewings whatsoever. There was talk that the entire militia had been destroyed, that the forces of Kimurak had backed them against a shallow valley and taken them down in an unrelenting spray of lead. There were frightened rumors fluttering around the student body that Finrandi was dead, that the war was lost, that the Church would be coming back to the Tower to finish what it had started, despite all the barriers. And Cleo had lain in bed at night, knees drawn up to her chest with her arms clutched tight around his pillow, assuring herself it was just a terrible lie. It was just such a night that she'd been lying awake that a knock came at the door, and when she'd answered, it was Majic with a relieved, quiet smile, telling her the militia had returned, and that Orphen was among them, alive and relatively unscathed. As he'd come home to her that night, she could feel tangible relief in his embrace; in the way they'd made love. She could feel how terrible the battle had been in just the way he kissed her; the lingering fear that he may not have come home according to the plan, as he'd so nonchalantly promised her.

It was only days later that they'd quietly eloped in Abanrama by the Sea, and her mother had gone into a conniption when she'd received her letter, only comforted with the knowledge that that good-for-nothing sorcerer had finally married her. She'd waited about a month before she'd written her again, with the other news about her being a grandmother, which had been received far more warmly and, shockingly, without any negative suspicions whatsoever.

The pregnancy itself went rather without incident, her only major complaint being that she'd had to give up her assistant instructor's position in fencing a few months in. After all of these years, her magical studies had not exactly taken off. She had an almost exclusive propensity for white spells, jobs involving matter that already existed in a solid form. She could lock and unlock doors, bring up simple barriers, repair objects. But when it came to combative spells, she fell utterly flat. Her specific energy just wasn't so inclined was what Orphen had told her one night, trying to ease her frustration to little avail. She'd protested that they wouldn't have even accepted her at the Tower if she hadn't been connected to him, and while he admitted it may have been true, that there was no way to know, and it didn't matter in any case. They were here now; and it was the safest place she could hope to be in her condition, with the bloody chaos only whipping itself into a frenzy beyond the fortress walls of the Tower of Kiba.

If anyone had asked him, which no one ever did, what had been the most petrifying day of the war, he would have told them it was the day his daughter was born. It had little to do with the Church itself, as they'd already been encroaching on Taflem for days before Cleo had gone into labor, though the doctor had explained the stress of the impending assault and intent of imposing attrition on the city had likely induced the event a few weeks before it was expected. It was early April, the ground still frosted outside and only beginning to thaw as the skeletons of Kimurak trebuchets rose foreign on the horizon of the bleak Taflem hillscape, and he'd plainly refused to go out to meet them head on in favor of waiting in the cold gray medical hallway, listening to Cleo screaming beyond the locked doors like she was dying and frightening him beyond belief.

He'd never told her about how they said his mother had died.

He never thought it was worth bringing up. No reason to frighten her. Instead, as he listened to Cleo's resounding shrieks of pain, that nightmare he'd kept in the back of his mind his entire life was coming alive behind a locked door they would not let him past. What Azalea had told him one day, or rather told Leticia in front of him, about how the sisters in the Orphanage at Laindast had said Krylancelo's mother had died in childbirth, bled to death right on the birthing table before they'd even cut the cord, it was something he wished she'd just kept to herself. He could have gone his whole life without knowing, would have even preferred to believe a lie or know nothing at all instead of being aware at a very young age that he'd basically killed his own mother. And how could he have ever turned out anything else but a murderer? He'd been born one. Cleo still didn't want to hear anything about it, and instead, as she cried out into the April morning, he was sure she was bound to fall victim to his curse in which everyone's blood ended up on his hands eventually.

And now that he was so incontestably and admittedly in love with her, it was only typical he would be the reason for her death. Hers and maybe even the baby's. The truth was, from the moment she'd broken the news to him, it was the first thing on his mind, aside from the fits of angst he'd endured over the reality that he'd never had a father and would have no idea in the least how to be one himself. Already he had a reputation of being a rather ruthless teacher, he couldn't imagine what sort of awful father he was liable to make, with his intensely limited patience and predisposition toward severity, impulsiveness and insensitivity.

He'd sat out in that sterile hallway as they'd demanded, his head dropped miserably into his hands, trying to clench his muscles against their involuntary quaking while Majic blathered on about one thing or another from the chair beside his, just to keep the tension broken. To keep his Master from snapping, even though the boy, then nearly eighteen, looked ready to cry himself.

When the cries had fallen silent, he'd felt his sanity starting to precariously buckle the way it hadn't for years; his memories irrevocably returning to the long days of Cleo's imprisonment by the Kimurak Church when the stirrings of his attachment to her had completely bowled him over in her absence. And while he'd been on the verge of losing his mind, choking on his own thrashing heart, waiting in the bone-crushing silence that followed the screams, the door at the end of the hallway had finally opened and a nurse had emerged, her smock deceptively clean of the sprayed scarlet blood he'd been imagining, and calmly called his name without any grim faced doctor to tell him the horrifying news he'd all but expected.

Instead, they'd woven him into the room smiling, and he'd entered the unexpectedly bright room to find his wife (it was still a weird word to use for her, in his mind) alive and well, cleaned up but unmistakably pale and exhausted but somehow glowing, cradling a tiny swaddled infant with a shock of black hair and a perfect rosebud of little pink lips, unbelievably tiny fingers latched onto her skewed hospital gown; all of which was so utterly amazing that he couldn't have even dreamed it up properly if he'd tried. When she'd looked up at him, he had a flash of absurd fear that she wouldn't know who he was, or that it was all a delusion brought on by madness.

Instead, she smiled shakily and told him to come meet his little girl. He remembered feeling dizzy and sitting down beside the bed in a metal chair, impotently asking if she was alright; but he couldn't quite recall what her response had been. He only knew he'd eventually ended up with that tiny bundle in his arms, warily staring down into the little face in a sort of ringing whiplash that followed the terror and complete awe of the whole morning, a little overwhelmed while they discussed what to name her; something which they had not come to any decisions about whatsoever in the months of her pregnancy.

They'd settled rather easily on Rebecca, the name of a heroine in a story Cleo had loved as a young girl. Orphen, for once, hadn't put up a fight. She'd carried her, given birth to her, after all, and the tiny girl was breathing and alive and had fingers and toes and everything she was supposed to; so the name didn't matter much so long as it wasn't anything that made him flinch. Luckily, she hadn't suggested anything of the sort. If she'd suggested Constance, just for example, he would have had to explain why he couldn't call his daughter that for the rest of his life. And at the time, he'd have just as soon avoided such topics.

Precocious, histrionic and lovely Rebecca Finrandi was less than a year old by the time the Church's aggressive efforts buckled under the weight of the growing Imperial onslaught. With its trained fighting force a dwindling and unrenewable resource, once their numbers had fallen to irreparable levels, and with their noble believers abandoning their faith in the Gods of the Giant's Continent as it was overshadowed by the deaths of their daughters and sons to accomplish increasingly impossible means, a fierce battle in the Fenril Wilderness had ended up as the final bout in the deteriorating war effort. The tide had turned permanently toward victory for the Federation, and those that remained of Kimurak's high-ranked were taken to St. Cantenosa, the island penal colony just off the Masmaturian coast, where they would await eventual trial. The Church itself was dissolved, and the city of Kimurak deeply occupied by the Imperialist army on a timeline of at least two decades. Throughout the conflict, the Ailmanka barrier had remained ever in tact, and despite having the ability, the fear of that ultimate unknown had kept the shards of the Worldstone so far kept in stronghold inside the Tower, to be returned to the University at Alenhaten once deemed entirely safe and appropriate.

Upon hearing the news of the Church's fall, Cleo had cried in open joy—the Federation had recognized Orphen into rather surprising notoriety, and the little Finrandi family had moved from their Tower apartment to a diminutive villa on the Elsinore seaside. It was small, all cream stucco and terracotta tile and covered in crawling holly, far to the east of Taflem on the rocky outskirts of Aoivanna province, away from the cramped hallways of the Tower and the frigid wind of Taflem. It was a place where Rebecca could run on the powdery white sand and watch the cobalt waves roll in from the front terrace; where Cleo could have her own kitchen (good God) and Orphen could find some semblance of freedom from a rather inconveniently growing fame; where he could turn his key in the lock and walk into a life he had built that had nothing to do with war or death or revenge. A place where the parts of his soul that were not irrevocably indentured to magic or murder could listen quietly to the slowly descending peace in his chaotic and sometimes still restless mind, settle in the arms of that firecracker blonde he still wanted to drown from time to time, and watch their tiny daughter grow into a running, tripping, mess-making, giggling little girl, who, considering her parentage, was certain to be complete terror. It was a luxury afforded by sacrifice and blood, and thanks to the Imperial Military's honors, at least Cleo's mother had nothing to complain about in her rather famous and unexpectedly well-off son-in-law; the great man who had had greatness forced down his throat.

That that he'd ever call her Mother. Or even Tistiny, if he could help it. The bitch. Even approaching thirty, Orphen was nothing if not a bit of a grudge-holder. Immature and unenlightened as it might have been. Whatever.

More happily, Rebecca's first word, cup, had debuted not long after their arrival at the house in Elsinore Heights. Not long after had followed the first garbled versions of 'love you!' that she'd parroted after her mother's example, and for Cleo, it had been almost painful to see the way Orphen had cuddled the girl after first hearing it giggled merrily to him—too blankly overcome for a minute to speak at all. He'd spent far too much of his life with no one to tell him that, and far too long denying he'd ever be able to feel what had come to him so naturally, like that innate spark of magic he'd been born with, when he'd become a father. Even so, he was still spare with that phrase. He didn't throw it around. But all the more, when he drew his wife to him in the dark and whispered it reverently into her hair, it just made it that much easier to believe him.

It had been almost ten years since Cleo had run blindly from the Everlasting estate in Totokanta with her father's sword lividly clutched in both hands, ready to take the head of a rough edged young man she'd mistakenly accused of being a peeping tom, and who had within minutes set her heart in an uncontrollable flutter that had yet to vanish. The years between had been eventful, full of strife and exploit, the rebuilding of a Republic, and Majic's eventual betrothal to the demure, blush-haired Eris meanwhile gaining some infamy of his own. When the two had first been together and come to the seaside for a visit, they'd be so sugary sweet and full of reserved, flushed eyelash batting that Orphen would exchange an occasional disgusted glance with his wife while they weren't watching, making note to ask her later if they'd ever been that completely stomach-turning. As a reply, Cleo had laughed, pinched his arm hard and reminded him he'd never been that wiltingly sweet to her, not even once; but that others had likely exchanged faces at each other in response to their still-at-times questionable behavior nonetheless. Later that night in their dark bedroom, with their guests asleep across the house in the extra room, he'd shown her just how wiltingly sweet he could be, by holding her down and biting her while he made her gasp his name.

The one she called him, anyway. Just to remind her who it was she'd married.

With Ratsbane nearly five now and chattering and bubbling with her nerve-wracking, self-taught sorcery, it was of vital importance that she begin study soon, possibly in the coming months. Orphen would have none of the boarding school talk, wouldn't send her away for those long months at a time to be alone as he had been in that cold, austere place; even if it meant that their young son would not have the opportunity to spend more of his first years on the Aoivannan coast the way his sister had. Despite that it was so far from the Tower where Orphen still taught, and so far from her family and everyone else they knew, still, this quiet life in their sanctuary, their haven on the eastern outskirts of Kiesalhima, was a dream that would have to end one day. When that time came, they would return to Taflem with the children, in the snow and cold; in the mountains away from the crashing ocean and cattails, the morning rain and calling gulls and the white stretch of sand where the erstwhile Rebecca had sunk her first little footsteps into the damp beach, catching her chubby fingers around Cleo's with a gleeful, four-toothed grin at her victorious debut trek.

But that, all of that, was for the future. If there was one thing that had become clear over the years, it was that in this world, there was no chance. Only inevitability and fate, dressed up as random moments linking the each tick of the clock to the next; moments that run like beach sand through a baby's fingers. The children would grow up. Tides would shift. Ants would carry ten times their own weight. They would argue about ridiculous things. Revolutions would rise. The sun would move across the sky. The tossing ocean would wash their footsteps away, and they too would grow old.

Today just held mild uncertainty. How many more dawns would peek over the horizon at the house by the sea to find them, the magician and his fool, curled up together like a pair of cats?

Everything else was a question for tomorrow, whatever it would bring. Since it was, after all, their life, there could be god-knew-what around the corner on a daily basis; and when had anything in their life ever been predictable?

Right, well. Almost never.

END