Chapter Twenty: Round One part II
The world does not always stop for transformation.
Sometimes you have to carry it with you —
into the fairgrounds and the food stalls
and the ordinary hours between crises
learning what you've become
while the rest of the day continues.
── I. AFTER THE MATCH ─
I. The Colosseum — Afterward
The walk from the arena floor to the competitors' exit took exactly as long as it always did, and was nothing like it had ever been before.
Ruby was aware of the crowd's attention in a way she had not been before the awakening — not just the sound of it, which was the same wave of noise she had always moved through, but the specific texture of it: the sub-vocal quality of surprise in the nearest rows, the shift in people's posture as she passed, the particular silence that had moved through a section of the stands when her wings had unfurled for the final strike sequence.
Her wings. The thought arrived with the persistent quality of something she had not yet accommodated into her understanding of herself. She had felt them emerge, during the match, with the naturalness of something that had always been there and was now simply visible — the gray-and-crimson sweep of them responding to her movement with an ease that suggested they understood her intentions before she fully formed them.
Her small horns were the stranger adjustment. Not painful, not uncomfortable, just present at her temples with an awareness she hadn't had before — the way you became aware of a new piece of jewelry, except this was not something she could take off.
Yang fell into step beside her, her own golden scales catching the afternoon light in a way that had attracted a continuous stream of second glances since they'd entered the competitor's corridor.
"Dragon Princesses of Beacon Academy," Yang said, with the specific quality she brought to things she found both absurd and genuinely true. "I feel like that should be on a banner somewhere."
"It feels," Ruby said, testing the words as she said them, "like I've been walking around all semester with something folded up that just unfolded."
"That's exactly what it feels like," Yang agreed. A pause. "Also the heat thing is still weird. I keep startling myself."
"At least you don't have feathers," Ruby said."
"Fair point."
From the dragon family section, still visible from the competitor corridor's high windows, the assembled parents and cousins were in various states of observation. Ruby could feel the specific quality of her father's attention — the particular variant of Taiyang Xiao Long's worry that she had been able to identify since childhood, now audible to her as a specific register in the crowd's noise that her new senses could distinguish.
She looked up. He was watching, his expression carrying the specific combination of pride and the particular bewilderment of a man who was still performing the calculation of what his daughters had become.
Ruby waved, with the rose petals that now moved with any intentional motion she made. He waved back, with the expression of someone accepting, gracefully, that his calculations were not yet complete.
"You'll get used to it," Koga said, appearing beside her as they moved toward the exit. He said it with the certainty of someone who had not experienced it personally and was choosing to be confident on her behalf, which she found more endearing than she probably should have.
Ruby opened one wing slightly and looked at the feathers — the storm-gray shifting to deep crimson at the tips. She closed it again.
"The feathers or the scales?"
"Both. The scales settle into body awareness fairly quickly — they register the same way skin registers pressure. The feathers take longer because they're sensitive in a direction most people don't have sensory input from."
Ruby opened one wing slightly and looked at the feathers — the storm-gray shifting to deep crimson at the tips. She closed it again. "I bumped a table."
"I know," Koga said. "The vendor was more impressed than inconvenienced."
Behind them, Yang's post-victory energy was doing its characteristic thing. Max walked beside her at a pace that was approximately the right height for the wingspan they were navigating alongside, which was useful for both of them in different ways.
Weiss caught up with her scroll pressed to her ear and an expression that had moved, over the course of the call, from careful neutrality through controlled irritation to something quieter. She ended the call before reaching the group.
"My father," she said, to the air and to whoever was listening. The tone communicated that further questions were welcome but not required.
"Worse or better than the last one?" Blake asked.
"Different," Weiss said. "Less shouting. More finality." She pocketed the scroll.
"Fairgrounds?"
"Fairgrounds," Ruby confirmed, and the group moved on.
II. The Vytal Festival Fairgrounds — Late Afternoon
Among the students from multiple academies moving between stalls and navigating the competitive social register of a multi-kingdom tournament, the proportion occupied with intelligence work was probably not apparent to any individual observer. Collectively, from the right vantage points, it was legible.
Team CFVY had three members in different sections of the fairgrounds with the aligned, systematic attention of people who were not tourists. Teams SSSN operated with slightly less discipline — Sun's natural sociability made the persona easier to maintain but harder to sustain at the required level of attention. He kept wanting to actually talk to people.
Team RWBY was thinking about noodles.
They had almost reached the stall when Emerald Sustrai appeared from the adjacent vendor row and produced the warm, open smile of someone who was very good at producing them.
Ruby's storm-enhanced perception had been developing for two weeks, and in the first three seconds of this interaction it registered: the contained precision of Emerald's body language, which had the quality of performed naturalness; the direction of her eye movement, which covered Ruby and moved immediately to Yang with an attention that was assessing rather than friendly; the micro-tension in her expression that existed beneath the smile and was independent of it.
"Team RWBY! I caught your match on the monitors — your coordination in the second phase was impressive."
Ruby registered all of this. She was not yet certain what to do with the information, so she said: "Thank you. The terrain rotation in the third phase was a challenge."
"I noticed," Emerald said, and the noticing had layers. "I'm Emerald Sustrai, Haven Academy. I'll be competing in the doubles rounds with Mercury Black."
"Blake's faunus senses had been providing a running account of Emerald since she'd appeared — a scent profile carrying the chemical signature of sustained alertness, the specific kind that manifested in intelligence work rather than combat preparation. She filed it.
"We've heard the name," Yang said pleasantly. Her fires were not doing anything specific, but they were present."
The conversation that followed was short and genial and almost entirely operational on Emerald's side — she was extracting the doubles pairing, the tactical priorities, the inter-team dynamics — while Team RWBY provided the information that could be given without harm and withheld the rest, and neither party acknowledged this dynamic directly.
When Emerald departed toward the vendor stalls, Velvet's closed-channel observation was brief: she's done, she has what she came for.
Ruby watched Emerald's retreating back and found, in the register her storm senses were increasingly making available, that something about the interaction had felt like watching a performance of ease from someone who was not entirely at ease. The gap between the surface and what was underneath it had been visible at the conversation's edge — a brief, involuntary quality when the word friendship had been deployed that carried a texture it would not have carried if the concept were simply tactical.
Coco's response was shorter: don't follow. Let her think it was clean."
She filed it, the way she was learning to file things.
III. The Noodle Stall — Evening
The card reader's declined-transaction sound was the specific flat beep of something very certain about itself.
The shopkeeper's expression was the expression of someone who dealt with declined cards regularly and had developed a professional gentleness about it.
"I'm sorry, miss. Would you like to try another payment method?"
Yang did the arithmetic in approximately two seconds — the monitoring of available resources, the gap between what was needed and what was present — and arrived at the answer she recognized as deliberate.
Weiss looked at the reader with the expression of someone whose world has performed an action her understanding of the world does not contain space for. Her primary account. The one that had never, in her life, not been funded.
"Weiss."
Team JNPR's arrival — Pyrrha's warmth, Nora's immediate enthusiasm about the visible transformations — provided the cover for the brief, private calculation of what this meant. It meant that Jacques Schnee had identified the specific lever still available to him and had applied it. It meant that the independence Weiss had been building since September had just acquired a practical constraint it had not had before. And it meant he had done it now, at the Festival, which was a statement about timing.
"My father called this afternoon," Weiss said. She was still looking at the card reader. "The call that ended differently than the previous ones."
"Please," Pyrrha said, stepping forward with the ease of someone for whom this decision required no deliberation, "Allow me to cover everyone's meals. Celebrating victories together is what teams are supposed to do."
She handled payment and the question was resolved before Weiss found another angle of objection.
"Pyrrha, I can't —"
"You're not asking," Pyrrha said, with the specific gentle firmness that was characteristic of her. "I am offering. Those are different."
The meal assembled itself around them — both teams, the dragon family contingent who had been maintaining surveillance and had ended up in the vicinity, the comfortable warmth of a shared table after a significant day.
"He'll try something else," she said finally, to Blake, who was sitting beside her in the way Blake sat beside people when she'd decided they needed company and was providing it without making a feature of it.
"This is not the end of what he'll try."
"Yes," Blake said.
"I need to be prepared for that."
"I'm also," Weiss said, "completely certain that he will not succeed. Which is new for me, as a position. I want to name that."
"Yes," Blake said again.
Blake looked at her with the direct, quiet attention that was her version of warmth.
"Noted."
Team JNPR's match announcement came through the fairgrounds speakers as the meal was winding down. The departure had the energy of people returning to purpose — Nora's bounce audible, Ren's steadying hand on her shoulder, Jaune's bearing already shifting from relaxed toward ready.
"Show them Beacon teamwork," Ruby said, with the uncomplicated sincerity that was her most powerful register.
Jaune turned back briefly.
"Always."
Then they were gone, and the fairgrounds continued its business, and the evening moved toward the darker hour that was coming.
IV. Beacon Academy — The East Gardens — Night
She had chosen the east gardens because they faced away from the main campus lighting, which gave the moon more room and made a person standing in them visible mainly to themselves and to anyone looking specifically.
Yukikaze had been there for twenty minutes. The lightning at her fingers had moved through several patterns in that time — the slow spiral indicating processing, the faster arc that arrived when something had an answer, and currently a slow single-direction discharge that did not have a name in her taxonomy of electrical behaviors because she had not encountered this particular interior state before.
You matter to me personally.
She had said it. In daylight, in the training facility, to Mercury Black who was technically an operative of a hostile organization and was practically someone whose presence in her electrical field produced effects she had not yet found the framework for.
She was not certain what to do with having said a thing from that place to that person. She was also not certain what to do with the fact that he had responded by looking at her as though she were a door he had not known was there.
The footsteps on the garden path did not surprise her. She had been tracking them for forty seconds — the mechanical quality of prosthetic legs on stone, the distinctive weight distribution. She had been expecting them, or something very close to them, which was why she was still here rather than returning to the dormitory.
The words had come from below the level that words usually came from — below calculation and social management and even the instincts she'd spent years developing. The place that was simply what was true.
I saw you from the main building," Mercury said, from the path's entrance.
"I know," Yukikaze said. "I left the window in my sightline."
A pause.
"Every time I close my eyes lately," Mercury said, stopping near the garden's center fountain, "I keep thinking about the things you've said. About choices and belonging. About what a person is supposed to be when no one has asked them what they want to be."
"I know the feeling," Yukikaze said. She turned to face him. The moon was doing specific things to his silver hair and to the frost-colored prosthetics that had replaced the legs his father had taken from him, and she was keeping a careful accounting of the details, which was itself a category of behavior she did not typically exhibit.
"That's either very calculated or very genuine," he said, approaching with the unhurried quality he had when he was not executing a specific mission objective. "I'm having trouble distinguishing between the two lately."
They stood with the fountain between them, the water doing what fountains did at night.
"That's not something I told you to think about," Yukikaze said.
"No," Mercury agreed. "It arrived on its own. Which is part of what I'm trying to understand."
"What kind of things?" Yukikaze asked. "When you close your eyes."
Mercury looked at the fountain. He was being careful with the answer in the way he was careful with things that were true and might be irreversible once said.
"Fragments," he said. "Not clear images — the feeling of images. Being somewhere with stone floors and enough light to see by, and moving through something difficult alongside someone who made it less difficult by being there."
A pause.
"Laughter. The specific kind that happens when something is genuinely funny rather than when laughter is the appropriate social response."
Yukikaze's lightning stilled.
"Mercury," she said carefully. "Those aren't random images. They're pieces of something that was taken from you. Something real that someone decided should be inaccessible."
"A girl with crimson scales," Mercury continued, and the words had the quality of something arriving rather than being retrieved. "I can't see her face clearly. But I know she could outrun me, and that I made her prove it three times, and that she did."
The silence that followed had a quality she was not immediately certain how to categorize.Mercury was quiet. His expression had the quality she had learned to recognize across their various interactions: genuine thought, not performed thought. Processing information against a model of the world that was being revised.
He looked at her. "That's not possible. I've always —"
"You've always believed what you were told about yourself," Yukikaze said. She said it without accusation — it was too important for accusation. "Which is different from having always been what you were told."
"If that's true," he said slowly, "then everything I believe about who I am —"
"Is incomplete," Yukikaze said. "Not false. The person you are right now is real. But you're not only that person. The one who knew the girl with crimson scales — that person is also you."
He sat down on the fountain's edge. She came and sat beside him, not at the careful distance she might have maintained before, but close enough that her electrical field moved around both of them.
"What does your heart tell you," she said carefully, "about the mission Cinder has assigned you? Not your training. Not the operational parameters. What does the part of you that produces those fragments at night tell you?"
"That it's wrong," he said. "That people will be hurt who haven't done anything to deserve it." The words came out flat, with the flatness of something stated rather than admitted — something that had been true for some time and had simply not been said. "I keep making tactical assessments of what Cinder's plans will cost and the cost is always people, and I've been filing that observation under 'operationally irrelevant' because that's what I've been trained to call it."
"And if it's not irrelevant?"
"Then I've been contributing to something I shouldn't have been contributing to," Mercury said, with the flatness of a completed accounting. "Which is a more uncomfortable conclusion than the operational irrelevance version."
Yukikaze looked at him in the moonlight. The lightning at her fingers moved in the slow, natural pattern of someone who has stopped monitoring it.
Mercury was quiet with this for a long moment. Then: "What does it mean if I choose differently? From everything I've understood myself to be?"
"Mercury," she said, "the person who has those fragments — the one who knew that girl — that person is still present. I can tell. My family can tell. You came to find me tonight, not on a mission, not at anyone's direction. That's not conditioning. That's you."
"I want to stop what she's planning," Mercury said. "For Beacon. For the people here who don't know what's coming." A pause. "And I want to find out who I was. Before."
Then those are real wants," Yukikaze said. "And real wants can be acted on."
Something happened to Mercury's expression. Slowly, with the quality of a physical process — a thing loosening that had been held for years.
A girl with crimson scales who could outrun him. Three times proved. Laughter in stone corridors. The first syllable of a name, present and almost graspable.
Mist," he said, very quietly.
He did not know that it had been said out loud. He felt it more than heard it — a sound made by his own voice that he had not consciously composed.
Yukikaze's hand remained over his. "Yes," she said, in the same quiet register.
"She's been looking for you," Yukikaze said, "since the year you disappeared."
V. The East Gardens — Skye's Arrival
Skye stepped into the garden's central clearing with her storm abilities at the surface — not displayed, not deployed, but present in the way of something that had been authorized to stop managing itself. The atmosphere around her had the crisp quality of air before lightning. Leaves moved in directions unconnected to the ambient wind.
She had been tracking the evening's movements through the family's network and through the older awareness her training had given her of certain energies. She had felt Yukikaze's field change approximately twenty minutes ago, and had understood what the change meant, and had then done the thing she had been preparing to do since before the semester began.
She arrived in the way weather arrived: present before it was visible, with a quality in the air that preceded and prepared for the physical fact of it.
Cinder Fall's silhouette was visible at the garden's far entrance.
"Cousin," Skye said, as Cinder came fully into the clearing. The word carried specific weight — not warmth, not hostility, but the precise acknowledgment of a relationship that was real and complicated and relevant to what happened next.
Cinder stopped. The Fall Maiden power she carried expressed itself in the quality of the air around her — not the atmosphere of a storm, which was organized and purposeful, but the atmosphere of combustion, which consumed. She looked at Skye with the expression of someone who had been tracking multiple operations and had arrived at one requiring personal attention.
"I wondered when your family would produce someone with the patience to prepare rather than simply react," Cinder said. There was something in it that was not entirely strategic — a genuine note, the frequency of someone encountering an opponent they find interesting."
"You've been preparing," Skye said. "So have I."
The preparation had not been dramatic. That was the essential thing about it, and the thing that Cinder's approach had not accounted for: months of understanding exactly what the Fall Maiden's power was and how it functioned, not to overpower it, but because understanding a power's mechanisms was what made it possible to deny it the conditions it required. The Fall Maiden's autumn force needed specific atmospheric conditions to express at full capacity. Skye had spent months learning which conditions those were and how to alter them precisely, at the cost of significant effort, in exchange for making Cinder's power operate at a cost it had not been designed to sustain.
"You're not afraid," Cinder said. The observation carried the quality of genuine intelligence-gathering."
"I'm appropriately concerned," Skye said. "Fear and appropriate concern aren't the same thing. You've built your approach on the assumption that they are. That's useful intelligence."
"Your agents are compromised," Skye said. Plainly, because the plain version was the one that mattered. "Whatever you came here to maintain, it is already changed. The question you're dealing with tonight is not whether to maintain it but what to do next."
"What I do next is not your concern."
"What you do next in this garden, to the people in this garden," Skye said, "is the thing I am specifically making my concern."
Neither of them moved.
VI. The East Gardens — Emerald's Edge
Mercury was sitting on the fountain's edge with Yukikaze Ayakashi beside him, her hand over his, and his face had a quality Emerald had not seen in the years they had been working together. Not the mechanical competence, not the performed confidence, not the careful neutrality she had learned to read as his version of contentment.
What was not clear was her.
She had seen that expression on other people's faces. She had been specifically trained to catalog such expressions for operational utility, to identify the emotional states that made people vulnerable and exploitable. Standing at the garden's edge watching Mercury wear it, she understood — with the specific force of understanding things at the wrong time — why people found it significant.
"Mercury," she said, from the path's edge. The word came out smaller than she'd intended.
He looked at her. The expression did not entirely leave — it softened rather than disappeared, making room for something more complicated.
"Emerald," he said.
"The mission —" she started.
"I know," Mercury said. "I've been thinking about the mission."
"That's not what thinking about the mission looks like."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
Cinder's voice came from the clearing — Emerald's name with the specific intonation of a direct order. The order that followed was the one that had always been available, that Emerald had organized her entire understanding of their arrangement around never having to execute.
She did not move.
She felt it. She did not obey it.
"No," she said.
The word was small in the garden air. It was also, by any measure of what it had cost to produce, the largest thing she had said in years.
"Repeat that," Cinder said.
\"No," Emerald said again, and this time it came out slightly less small. "I won't hurt Mercury. I won't hurt students at Beacon who haven't done anything to deserve it." She stopped. Found the honest version of the rest. "I won't keep doing things that are wrong because you've given me a place to be."
Mercury stood from the fountain. He crossed the distance between them and stood beside her, which was a thing he did without calculation and which communicated more than any statement he could have made.
From the clearing, Skye's voice arrived: "Cinder. Your operation in this garden is over. What you do with that fact is the decision you're currently making."
The atmosphere between them had reached a quality that was measurable and unmistakable. The Fall Maiden power was fully expressed and working harder than usual because the atmospheric conditions around it had been precisely, systematically altered — not overcome, not suppressed, but made to operate at a cost that had been calculated in advance by someone who had spent months understanding what it required.
Cinder looked at the arrangement in front of her: Mercury, standing with Emerald, both of them on the wrong side of an operational outcome. Skye, between them and the exit, with her storm abilities doing the specific, unglamorous, effective thing her training had built them to do. And the awareness, arriving through her network, that the garden's perimeter was no longer simply observed.
Her Fall Maiden power surged. The air became briefly, genuinely dangerous — not metaphorically, simply the property of proximity to something very hot.
Then it receded.
Not because it had been stopped. Because Cinder Fall had survived as long as she had by being genuinely intelligent about when operational circumstances had changed beyond recovery. She looked at Skye with an expression that had moved past everything into something more considered.
"This changes your family's position," she said. "You understand that."
"Yes," Skye said.
"The forces that will move in response —"
"We've been preparing for them," Skye said, "since before I arrived at Beacon."
A beat in which Cinder assessed this claim against what she knew of the dragon families and arrived at the conclusion that the claim was likely accurate.
Then she left. Not with defeat in her bearing — Cinder Fall's bearing had no category for defeat — but with the specific quality of someone who has filed a new set of operational parameters and intends to work with them. She moved through the garden's far entrance and did not look back.
Skye let her storm abilities settle from their working level to their baseline — gradually, visibly, the air pressure normalizing, the electrical charge dissipating, the temperature returning to the ambient cool of a Beacon autumn night.
The garden returned to the quality of a garden.
She breathed.
Mercury was looking at the space where Cinder had been. His expression was doing several things simultaneously, which was appropriate.
Emerald was looking at her own hands.
VII. The East Gardens — The Aftermath
The garden filled with the steady arrival of people who had been at its perimeter and were choosing to be less so. Team MTGSY's members came first, moving with the unhurried quality of people who had been present for something and were present for its resolution. Honoo. Toshiro. Yukikaze, staying close to Mercury in a way that had become natural quickly.
Then, from the garden's eastern path, Mist.
She came without announcement, without the deliberate staging of an entrance, simply walking toward Mercury across the garden grass in the manner of someone who has been waiting for a specific thing and has just been informed that the thing has arrived. Her crimson scales caught the moonlight. Her gold eyes were carrying something that was not composure.
Mercury turned when he heard her. She stopped two meters from him. Holding herself back from a thing she wanted to do, because the right way to do it mattered more than the speed.
He did not have the complete picture yet. The memories that had been returning were fragments, partial, the emotional residue of things rather than their clear sequential record. But enough had returned in the last forty minutes that when he saw her face — really saw it, without the conditioning filtering what his senses delivered — the name arrived at full volume.
"Mist," he said.
"Mercury," she said. "You said my name."
"I remembered running,\" he said. His voice was careful with it. \"You were faster. I made you prove it three times.\"
"Four,\" Mist said, and her voice carried the warmth of something that had been held a very long time without being allowed to express itself. \"You kept insisting the first one didn't count because of the turn at the second junction.\"
"You were right about the turn,\" Mercury said. \"I was faster on straight corridors and you knew it and let me argue about it anyway.\"
"Yes,\" Mist said.
He crossed the remaining two meters. She met him halfway.
The reunion was not the dramatic culmination of a story that had been building to a specific moment — it was the compressed, specific quality of two people who have found each other after a long time and are occupied with the fact of being in the same space rather than with the significance of what the space contains. Mist's hands gripped his shoulders the way you gripped something real to confirm it was real. His chin found the top of her head in the way bodies remembered things that conscious memory had been prevented from keeping.
Yukikaze was watching from the fountain's edge with her lightning at the slow, natural pattern. She looked like someone watching something she had hoped would happen and had been uncertain would, and finding that it had, and choosing to hold the feeling of that rather than process it into a category.
"You did the hardest part,\" Yukikaze said, not looking at Skye.
Skye stood beside her.
"You did the hardest part,\" Skye corrected. \"I kept Cinder from disrupting it. Those are different contributions.\"
"Yes,\" Skye agreed. \"Same outcome.\"
Emerald had positioned herself at the group's edge with the careful placement of someone uncertain whether she was inside it or outside it. Fox appeared at her elbow — Team CFVY's communications specialist, with the composed expression of someone who had identified a person in a liminal state and had decided to be present for them.
"You said no,\" he said.
"Yes,\" Emerald said.
"That was the hardest thing in the garden tonight.\" He said it with the flat accuracy of an assessment. \"Saying no to the person who gave you everything. Harder than any of the rest.\"
Emerald looked at the ground.
"What do I do now?\" she asked. It was not rhetorical. It was the question of someone who had never had to answer it from their own direction.
"Now,\" Fox said, \"you find out. With people who aren't going to tell you the answer in advance.\"
Velvet appeared at his other side with the quiet presence of someone who moved through spaces without demanding them. She didn't say anything, but she oriented toward Emerald in the way that constituted an offer without requiring acceptance.
The garden was quiet with the quality of something that has resolved, and with the undercurrent of the things that had not yet resolved, and with the patience of a night that had agreed to hold both.
Above Beacon's towers, the shattered moon was present in its usual place, fractured and faithful, its light reaching the garden in the pieces that were all it had to offer.
Mercury lifted his head from Mist's shoulder and looked at it.
"I have a lot to remember,\" he said.
"Yes,\" Mist said. She had not released his shoulders. \"We have time.\"
End of Chapter Twenty
✦ Ending Theme ✦
Akeboshi(Demon Slayer — Mugen Train Arc)
The ending sequence opens on the fairgrounds in golden afternoon light — Emerald's smile from the outside, composed and warm and entirely manufactured. Then the interior of that same smile, rendered as a brief flash of Emerald's actual expression in the moment before she produced it: the specific quality of someone performing a thing that used to feel natural and no longer quite does.
As the melody builds: the noodle stall, Weiss with her cup and Blake beside her. Then the garden — Yukikaze's hand over Mercury's at the fountain, the moonlight, the slow arrival of the name he had almost reached. Skye between Cinder and the fountain, the air doing the specific unglamorous work she prepared for. Emerald's single word, delivered to the garden's quiet: "no".
Final image: Mercury and Mist in the garden center, his chin at the top of her head, her hands on his shoulders. Behind them, the assembled family — Yukikaze at the fountain, Skye beside her, Fox and Velvet and Emerald at the garden's edge, not inside the circle but no longer outside it either. And above them all, through the trees and over the towers, the shattered moon with its fractured, patient light. Waiting, as it always waits, for what comes next.
Coming Next —Chapter Twenty-One: Round One, Part Three — The Dragon's Gambit