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1.
For as hapless as they seem, Calloway’s little group hurts like a bitch.
You slide under the werewolf’s snarling fangs, sneer as the halfling’s sword gashes this wrist. Try not to curse your lord. He must be trying to teach you some kind of lesson, not extracting you when the mission is clearly untenable.
Fucking—sue you. Even you couldn’t have predicted how strange and stubborn Calloway’s tagalongs would be. Their blood is in the dust and the air is stale with spent magic, and they’re still ringed around the Calloway thief like an angry, hemorrhaging bunch of cockroaches. They have given you exactly zero self-preservation to work with.
Though you can work with other things.
“You know, you could still join me,” you call out to Laudna. “If you like.”
“No!” Laudna scoffs. The force of it dislocates a rib—you wish you could take it as a souvenir. Maybe next time.
“Alright,” says the prickly one. His hammer sparks. “Yeah, we’re done with this.”
You feel the disgruntled pull of the Sorrowlord a moment before the hammer impacts (you suppose you will have to thank him, eventually, for saving one of your favorite faces); and in the shard of frozen time, you memorize them. Laudna’s uncertainty. Her nosy sorcerer’s scowl.
How sweet. You’ll have to visit again.
2.
“The offer’s still open, you know.”
You dodge the Eldritch Blast with a laugh.
You’d considered wearing another face, seeing if you could play with her again. You’d have tried something different. A little less bubbly, a little more hurt. Inviting her to take care of you.
But that would have defeated the purpose, which is to see that delicious look of betrayal again. An act of self-care, really. Dealing with the Sorrowlord’s predictable displeasure, your suspended payment, and the truly nasty deals you’ve brokered for armor repairs has left you hungry for some scrap of pleasure.
Plus, if the Sorrowlord does decide to screw over your contract, you’ll have made it harder for the next hire.
Laudna stretches up to her full height. You hear vertebrae snap like twigs. “What are you doing here?” she growls, backed by the whisper of a thousand dead leaves.
“Asking you to join me.” You shrug. “We won’t even have to kill Calloway until my lord takes the hold off my payment. Promise. What do you say?”
Laudna stares at you. You feel her mind reach out and scream WAKE UP! into the stillness of her friends’ dreams, and you taste the rage, sour and stinging. When you reform in the glade, you lick the last of it off your new grinning lips.
This is an excellent idea.
3.
This is a terrible idea, of course. Which is what makes it so fun.
The lightning bolt knocks you on your back, sprawled gracelessly in dirt and pine needles. The nosy sorcerer steps forward and puts one booted foot on your chest.
“Leave,” she Commands.
You choke on smoke and laughter. Laudna said she was strong. But this is all she has, a boot and a paltry handful of paltry spells. They will evaporate and she will wither, and your offer will still be new.
“As you wish,” you say. “Tell Laudna I’m still waiting.”
4.
“Shame,” you say. “Are you and Laudna on the rocks again? I could—”
A mind whip: a storm of screaming voices, a raw-throated silence.
You have to admire her pettiness.
5.
“We could really be—”
Lightning bolt.
6.
“—something special—”
Boulders, slammed together tight as her clenched jaw.
7.
“Do you honestly want to deny her—”
Shoved over a cliffside.
8.
“—a friend after you’re gone?”
The sorcerer snarls, a pretty little piece of rage, and a storm chokes out the sky. You feel the lightning dancing in your armor for days after.
9.
“She’ll be so lonel—oh.”
Your body, already half-liquid and sliding away from lightning bolts, congeals once again when you register Laudna sitting in front of you. Your lips turn up.
(You’d been attempting to see Laudna, but you hadn’t expected to feel so satisfied when you succeeded. Or so very slightly discontent. You’d gone to the trouble of reshaping your body, after all, and the sorcerer isn’t there trying to destroy it. A move with no opposite; an unbalanced game.)
“Are you finally ready to take me up on the offer?” you ask. “We could have so many adventures, you and I. I know you like those.”
Laudna pokes the fire. Unlike the sorcerer, no anger or disdain twists her pretty mouth. She cannot disdain what she knows she can belong to. What she will belong to, one day.
“If I do,” she says, “will you stop this? Leave my—leave Imogen and our friends alone?”
It’s tempting. But— “Aw, Laudna. Come on. I want you to choose it.”
It will be sweeter when she does. Even if it’s after her friends have all died; you’ll leave their bones withered in the dirt of the mortal plane, and guide her gently into a world eternal, evershifting. It will be like returning a stray river to the sea.
“No,” says Laudna (now). “I won’t. I’ll never, do you understand? If that’s all you want, you can leave—stay in the Feywild, or wherever you came from.”
You meet her gaze, shift your face to show her your true eyes. They’re as dark as hers. The color of a starless sky, a half to Laudna’s pure, deep shadow, rich and lifeless. Beautiful.
“If that’s what you really want.”
“Yes. That is—that’s what I want.”
Her jaw dislocates as she swallows, and you want to curl your fingers around it, as though taking the whole of a rotten pomegranate in your hand. One swift yank and she’d come all the way open.
10.
The sorcerer is back. You grin. After yet another negotiation with the Sorrowlord (respectfully, milord, I will not lower my rates; graciously, milord, you cannot give this to fucking Nyvelnim), you could use a good fight.
A dizzying lash at your mind; a blast of darkness at her chest. You both skid, stagger, ready—her hand stretches, a smile as grim and feral as yours parting—
“Stop! ”
The Command finds no purchase; you laugh and dart closer so that your lips almost brush hers. Her eyes go wide and sweet with panic.
“Afraid of a little competition?” you say. “Not that it’s a competition, really. She will join me.” You snap this body’s teeth a millimeter from her throat.
She lays a hand on your chest, and it sizzles.
11.
“Your boss sure has some tactics,” the wolf murmurs. “Sending the same person to infiltrate. I’m just saying, you coulda given me a cut. I mean, I respect contractors.”
You roll your eyes. “Where’s Laudna?”
“Hmm.” His chisel bites into his hunk of wood, carves deep. The moonlight glints off his fangs. Sharp as silver from a new vein. “Leave a message?”
You huff and melt into shadow. Not tonight.
12.
The strange little robot is on watch this time. Just beyond are the flaming pyres of Jrusar, choked around with mortals and their brief sensations; but the light falls short of their camp. Spread above them is wild sky, as dark as a bruise.
It’s a perfect night to watch Laudna shiver, or see the sorcerer’s eyes flash white with envy.
But they’re not here. No stretched and screaming shadow, no sorcerer mustering the last dregs of her power to spite you.
Once more, there is no one to hear your offer.
A feeling you cannot name lodges like a stone in your throat, and you twist yourself into three different bodies before it fades.
13.
Laudna’s dumbfounded look is so complete that the only thing to do is to kiss it.
You don’t, of course—consent is important. One must agree to kissing as one agrees to your contracts: of their own free will, knowing that there will be delicious and irreparable consequences. Instead, you lean forward and flick her kneecap, grinning with orcish teeth.
“Wanna get out of here?”
Laudna’s leg flails out, more out of a snapped-nerve reflex than an attempt to kick you (though you’re sure she wouldn’t have minded either way.) She squawks and shoves you away. Or tries to, at least; her stick-thin arms crack in the attempt.
You feel sorry enough for her you go anyway. Those aren’t the kind of games you play with Laudna—somehow, over these visits, they’ve been reserved for the sorcerer.
Which—is possibly a concerning thought. Or a whim, passing as quickly as the orc’s skin off your shoulders.
A whim, surely.
14.
“I wondered if you’d gotten tired of me.”
The sorcerer sets her jaw; you think you detect the barest hint of an eye roll in the dark. “‘M always tired of you. Can’t you just leave us alone?”
You spread your hands under the wide-open sky, the smattering of silent stars. “Now, that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?”
That’s definitely an eye roll. “Let’s get on with it, Dusk.”
“Yu, actually,” you say, surprising yourself. Then you shrug, languid and unbothered: it would be nice to fight with one less pretense. Just to see how it feels.
It feels like a scoff and a foot sliding back in the dirt; like lightning bright as starshine; like laughing as the wind goes out of this frail chest. “Don’t suppose you’re gonna stay away this time, Yu?” the sorcerer says, asking mostly out of stubbornness, and you roll your eyes right back at her.
She lets you get back up before she wipes the blood from her nose and comes for another round. You grin.
There are worse things to do in the dark.
15.
The Sorrowlord Zathuda, Bearer of the Lightless Flame, is a brainless idiot.
He gave the contract to Nyvelnim.
You wrench yourself into a dragonborn baker—larger than your tastes, but with deft hands—and march up to Calloway’s table. They’re stage-whispering about professors and leylines and the ancient secrets of the red moon, all over a platter of bacon. Gods, zero self-preservation. You can’t believe you’re about to save them.
You sigh. Then, brightly: “Special?”
Laudna’s eyes flash. So do the sorcerer’s.
It’s sloppy, but—fuck it. He gave it to Nyvelnim.
You lean over the table and bare your teeth, so close that the prickly one starts reaching for their hammer, fist splintering the handle of their tankard. You spare a moment to be glad Laudna got attached to the sorcerer instead of him. At least the sorcerer has a touch of subtlety.
“Relax, I’m not here to fight.” Your lip curls, considering: “Maybe later. I’m here to deliver a warning.”
“Out of the kindness of your heart,” the sorcerer mutters, and you wink at her. She knows you so well.
“Someone’s hunting you,” the dragonborn’s vocal cords sing-song. “Don’t die to him, please. It would make my contract very difficult, and I don’t want to deal with the paperwork.”
Laudna’s eyes flicker ichor-black (beautiful), and the sorcerer reaches under the table to take her hand.
“Friend of yours?” the wolf says.
“Not particularly.” You shrug. “I would call it competition, but that’s giving him too much credit.”
“So it’s business, then,” the sorcerer says wryly. There’s a flush to her cheeks, blooming with the pink of mortaldom; it’s made her fascinatingly direct. Although, you suppose she’s always been that way, only with more lightning and death.
“Isn’t it always?” you say, though that doesn’t feel quite true. But then again, lying rests so easy on your tongues, and at least one truth is very simple: Laudna and her sorcerer crackle with so much death and promise, sweet to the taste. Gods be damned if you’ll let Nyvelnim take all that for himself.
16.
You don’t visit them for a while. You’re busy. You’ve got jobs. Laudna and the sorcerer are...an occasional treat, like the sweet gum you chew between marks, rolling it pink and sticky between your canines and spitting it out when it’s used up.
You could spit them out, if you wanted.
But that would be admitting defeat, wouldn’t it?
17.
You meet the sorcerer on the deck of a skyship next, looking vaguely nauseous but overall not dead. It pleases you—not that Nyvelnim stood a chance, of course, but possession’s always been in your job description. And when the sorcerer raises her eyes to yours, electric as the brimstone thrumming beneath your feet—well, you’ve spilled enough of her blood that that sight belongs to you now.
“Thank you for the warning,” she allows through gritted teeth. “Found him tryin’ to ambush us a few days after.”
“Do I get a reward?” you grin, and the sorcerer shakes her pretty head.
“You’re impossible.”
“You didn’t say no,” you point out, hopping up onto the railing of the ship. The sorcerer eyes you with that look that means she’s considering whether to retort wittily or shove you to your death. You sort of hope it’s the latter; you want to see if she’s gotten stronger, if she’s gotten meaner, if she’ll be able to touch you.
You stack the deck: “Aw, did Laudna tell you to say thank you? Such a faithful guard dog.”
Usually that name is enough to make her explode, her own sense of possession erupting from inside her skin. But now the sorcerer just smirks, thin and bright as one of her scars, and says, “And what does that make you, Yu?”
She laughs and exposes her throat enough that you can’t help sending a dagger toward it.
18.
“Run away with me?”
“Yu!” Laudna manages to jump even while attached by her fingernails to the wall. Hot. “What are you doing here?”
“Maiming, killing, stealing souls,” you grin and waggle your eyebrows, “seducing?”
Laudna flushes like a too-ripe pear. Then, quickly, she rams her lips into these lips (terrible lips for kissing, an inexcusable oversight), more like she’s trying to pierce you than kiss you. Hey, maybe she’s got an idea there.
“I’m still not going to—join,” she says awkwardly. “I’ve already sort of got a bitch sucking on my soul. And there’s Imogen, of course.”
You blink, feeling strangely as though this body is malfunctioning, stomach twisting in shapes you don’t control.
“But you did help us, in your own way, and I’m fairly sure you’re not actually going to kill Fearne, so. Thank you.”
Laudna looks at you, and her eyes are so damn sincere you evaporate on the spot, frantically seeking a ribcage to stick a knife into.
19.
“I heard you ki-issed,” Calloway sing-songs.
You dissolve before the “Absolutely not” is fully out of this mouth. Maybe you will kill her, actually.
20.
The prickly one raises his hammer in salute, next you land in their camp. “Am I gonna have to hit you with this?”
You raise a bushy eyebrow. “Probably, but you won’t be able to.”
They snort as if to say, fair point. “They’re over there. Please don’t kill them, we’re all very tired. And we’re probably gonna need them to blow some stuff up.”
No promises, jumps snake-like to the tip of your tongue, but the prickly one is already turning away. It irritates you somewhere deep below the flesh: that he knew where you were going. That he left his back open, and you didn’t run a sword through it.
You are becoming a known quantity—predictable.
You stalk off toward the sorcerer’s bedroll, hoping to work off the steam.
21.
Over the next few weeks, the sorcerer grows exhausted. She’s always been exhausted—it’s her look—but it wears even deeper, carves jagged grooves in her face and darkens her eyes. Her lightning bolts don’t lose their heat, their sting, but the desperation that bleeds through them is perhaps the first you’ve tasted that isn’t sweet. Isn’t anything but sweat and unshed tears.
You’d be excited to feel something new—newer than scales, newer than skin—if it didn’t ache like a bitch.
“Is this because Laudna kissed me?” you ask her one night. “Are you jealous? Don’t worry, I can kiss you too.”
The dance stutters; the sorcerer misses a step. And you’re on her like flame to a dry grass, this shoulder nestling into her sternum, this hand restraining her wrist, your dagger sliding up and tucking itself under her jaw, where the creeping riverbeds of Ruidus still pulse.
You feel her breath hitch, but outwardly, she just smiles. “You sure think a lot of yourself.”
“Laudna did.”
“Laudna can make her own choices,” she says. She’s still smiling as though something is funny.
“We both know what you’re hoping she’ll choose.”
Now the sorcerer’s eyes flash. “I know she’ll choose me. As much as she can. But, Yu—”
You press the dagger closer; blood pearls on the edge, and your name trails off into a choked huff of breath. “Yu—” the sorcerer says, more irritated than scared.
You just growl. You want to fight, you want to dance, you want to kiss Laudna and feel the sorcerer fry you for it. You don’t want the shape of your name in the sorcerer’s mouth, where it feels like a true shape: where she’s the one pinning you down, her knowledge of you a dagger to your throat.
The sorcerer’s eyes soften, as if she understands even without her telepathy. That’s almost worse. She lifts her unrestrained hand to touch your cheek, and for a moment you think she might smudge away the skin, expose the starlight underneath. It makes you—this body, this fucking body—tremble.
“Alright,” she says. She opens her mouth, and for a dizzying moment, in another universe’s thread, you know she’s about to tell you to—
“Get off me.”
The Command sears through you. For once, you let it take you—or maybe you’re too weak to resist it now. It’s good. Like a storm, tearing everything asunder. It leaves no choice, no feeling, no name but the sorcerer singing in your blood: Imogen. Imogen.
You fight until she drops you. And then Imogen lets you go.
22.
You go back to avoiding them.
You want to spit them out.
That lie doesn’t rest so easy on your tongue; you try another, and another, and another, but you always return dissatisfied.
23.
Rumors fly on the wind: Calloway’s group is going after the Key.
You think about the exhaustion carved into Imogen’s face. You think about Laudna and her soft eyes. You think, zero self-preservation.
24.
Sometimes you dream of Laudna’s eventual surrender. It’s sort of like the way you dream about your targets dying, faces stretched in grosteque patterns of pain and terror, but also not like that at all.
In your dream, Laudna takes your hand (your hand, for whatever that means). She smiles with every single one of her teeth. “You were right,” she says.
Behind her, rising up like the shadow of an oncoming storm, or a massive, hulking dog, is Imogen. She glares at you as she follows—because she is following—and you realize she’s following both of you, the thrum of her violent and devoted in your blood. In the dream.
In the dream, you couldn’t be happier. You kiss Laudna’s hand like a gentleman, then bite so that your teeth notch in between her knuckles, drawing ichor. Laudna hisses. Imogen crackles.
“I told you so,” you say—the best part of the whole thing. “Let’s scram.”
25.
Three days before the solstice, you find Imogen kneeling in the middle of the forest, ribs heaving with panic. “Aw—shit,” she pants immediately (she must have found you in the gap). Her hands scrabble in the dirt. Her eyes are wide and hazy, like a sheep’s under the cleaver. “F-figures.”
“I can leave you alone,” you say.
“And not—and not—fight?”
“It’s no fun if you can’t put up a good one.”
Imogen wheezes a laugh, shuts her eyes. Tears bead on her eyelashes, reminding you of the way her blood beaded on your knife, reminding you of how easy it would be to cut through her. Like butter. Like paper.
Imogen flicks a witch bolt your way, because she’s delightfully petty like that.
“It’s so—we’re so stupid,” she says, not even frowning when you dodge. “This plan—”
“Wouldn’t trust whoever came up with that, yeah.” Your body posts itself up against a tree, lazy and unmoving. You’re not here to fight, but you don’t—there are worse things than you in the woods, after all.
(You don’t want to leave her alone.)
(You would have left before, part of you whispers. A different you. When did you become so different?)
Imogen looks up at you. And even though you and Laudna share something fundamentally beyond her, even though she’s just a mortal having a panic attack in the dirt, it’s a lot like looking into a mirror. Maybe it always has been, and you’ve never stopped reshaping yourself to look.
“You gotta take care of her,” Imogen whispers roughly. “If I—just. In case. Take her to the Feywild. Show her the flowers.”
It punches you in the gut, this victory. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? You wanted this.
You slide off the tree, leave the skin there.
With your own starlit mouth, you say, “I promise.”
26.
Two days before the solstice, you form in Laudna’s tent, stealing some of her shadows for your disguise. It doesn’t matter; she knows it’s you. She doesn’t even flinch anymore.
It doesn’t feel like a loss, though, especially when she sets a finger on your lips and jerks her head toward Imogen. “She’s sleeping.”
“What better time to elope?”
Laudna ignores you, one hand still on your lips while the other cards through Imogen’s hair. You wonder what it would be like to have Imogen’s hair—thick, purple, wild like the woods—and Laudna’s hands—cool, slender, gentle as a crafting knife. Nice, you think. It would be nice to have them both.
“She hasn’t been sleeping well lately.”
“Well, you’ve come up with a truly idiotic plan.”
Laudna tilts her head, grins her equally tilted grin. “Are you saying you’re worried about us?”
“You’re going to get yourself killed before we seal the deal.” You shift uncomfortably—what an odd sensation. Laudna’s expression flickers. She removes her finger from your lips.
“If you took my offer,” you say, hushed, “it would keep you safe. I wouldn’t take the contract for Calloway if it came down the pipe.”
“Hmm,” Laudna says. Beneath her, Imogen lets out a little snuffle of a breath. “And Imogen?”
You shrug, uneasy. Imogen made me promise, you could say. And Laudna would fold, because Imogen had asked it of her, because she loved Imogen. You wouldn’t have understood why before, but—you suppose you and Laudna share this too, now.
The thought of using that lever feels like daggers on your tongue. Instead, you say, “Can’t control what she does.”
“I won’t go without her. You know that.”
“Had to ask, though.” The uneasiness is still crawling inside you, like worms, like another body waiting for you to turn yourself inside out and cover yourself with it. “You shouldn’t fuck with the moon.”
“But I should fuck you?”
The words are sharp, bitter, honest. Like the bit of poisoned meat in a trap. Your heart leaps, and you want her to clamp shut around it, to dig in and let you see a little more of this thing, ghastly and beautiful, that you’ve finally coaxed out of her. “Oh, Laudna,” you purr, “the invitation’s always open.”
Laudna holds your gaze. Then she sighs and leans back, and the shadows leave her eyes, and her fingers comb gently, gently through Imogen’s hair. “I honestly don’t believe—” (you want me, your mind supplies; you know the empty spaces better than if she had spoken the words) “--well. We’re probably going to die, you know.”
Such a waste, the you of a thousand bodies ago would have said, or, why do you insist on chaining yourself to them? Dying is for mortals. We’re something different. Come home. But somewhere along the way, you’ve shed those words. Molted them off like dead skin and feathers.
The sentiment underneath it, like many young things, is wet and squirmy and horrible and foolish: “But if you don’t?”
Laudna leans close, your lips almost touching. You can see her smiling, like the moon. You almost twist yourself into a copy of her, just to feel that smile on your mouth. “You’ll hunt us down, won’t you? And maybe we can talk about it. Instead of stabbing each other.”
“Is that a promise?”
27.
One day before the solstice.
You don’t visit them again—that would be clingy. You’re classier than that.
28.
One day before the solstice, still.
It’s not strange; the Feywild has always been loose with time. And if you’re hanging around the parts of it that stretch seconds out like sinew or twine or spearmint bubblegum—well, that’s your prerogative, isn’t it?
(The halfling catches you in the shadows of the cave, perceptive as he is. He pokes the fire as gravely as he’d once stabbed you in the back, and doesn’t wake anyone else up.
“They’re asleep right now,” he says. “But I don’t think they’d mind if you woke them.”
You don’t say anything.
“We’re getting into some trouble tomorrow. If I were you, I’d say what you need to say.”
He meets your eyes, even in the dark, and you understand him perfectly: his small mortal grief, his boring soldier’s duty. He doesn’t hold a grudge against you, and if you try to fight him, he’ll stick a sword in your back again. He wants, very earnestly, for you to have no regrets.
You slip away.)
29.
YU!
Your true name shreds through the skin you’re wearing like light, like teeth, like the hunger of a grieving god. Someone is calling you.
No, not someone.
Yu. I’m ready to join you if you—I have an offer.
Come get me. Now.
30.
You go get her, of course.
The ground is a crater of the dead. The twisted, smoking remains of the Malleus Key lie burning at the center, and ringed around it, like hundreds of sacrificial goats, are bodies. Rebels and Ruby Vanguard, soldier and civilian, flung on top of each other in an indistinct heap—all mortals in death.
You recognize some: General Ratanish, the boring one from Bassuras. The Legend of the Peaks, Otohan Thull, crumpled along with her backpack of tricks—now there’s a name for Calloway’s group to add to their list. Various and sundry assassins from the Sorrowlord’s court, sent out in displeasure to the chopping block.
You’re almost impressed, though part of you has always known: for as hapless as they seem, Calloway’s group hurts like a bitch.
They’re huddled together, the air around them buzzing with magic and adrenaline. The prickly one lifts his hammer when he senses you behind him, but lowers it as soon as he sees your face: Dusk, for old time’s sake.
“You’re late,” they say rawly.
Beside them, the halfling is still with grief. Calloway trembles. Laudna—
Laudna, the thing inside Laudna, a petrified tree of long, curling limbs and claws like a dog’s, her eyes like pools of sap and blood—Laudna snarls. Her mouth is full of rows and rows of animal teeth—rats and cows and fish and human—and you have never seen anything more beautiful. “Yu,” she says, guttural, “Yu.”
“You’re amazing,” you breathe.
Laudna’s words thin out to a wail, and you realize—oh.
She’s crouching over a body.
Imogen in death is not beautiful. Her face is smudged with dirt, and she is very small and very pale. She looks as though her purple hair, pooling around her along with her blood, might drown her. She took a beating going down; underneath all the gashes and scrapes, you can barely see the line your dagger pressed into her.
“Fuck,” you say. “What happened?”
Imogen in death is not special. She’s just like every other body strewn out among the ruins, mortal flesh and bone rent beyond repair.
It’s the truth. It’s the hardest lie you’ve ever thought, and it barely touches your tongue before you cast it aside, like spitting out a piece of garbage. None of them are Imogen. Not one.
“She sacrificed herself for us,” the halfling says. “I don’t understand a lot of it, but she overloaded the Key—”
“She did a stupid fucking thing,” the prickly one grunts, and Calloway touches their shoulder gently.
“Ashton...”
“I fucking—I know, Fearne—”
Laudna, the true Laudna, isn’t listening to a word they’re saying. You’re not sure if you are, either. You look at her, and she looks at you, and an eternity passes before she parts the poisoned bark of her lips: “I’ll join you.”
Her desperation fills you, feels like your own even when you’re not copying her body. It feels like Imogen’s, kneeling in the dirt and surrendering. It feels like everything a mortal would give for another. “Bring her back, and I’ll join you.”
You think about Laudna kissing you on a wall, and of Imogen flinging lightning bolts at you, and of the way Laudna had shrieked when you snuck up on her, her spine curving like a crescent moon; and of the way Imogen’s Command had felt in your bones, and how much you had wished for her to Command something different; and how much, really, you had wished and changed and shed and wanted, in a thousand different bodies, returning to three—
And Laudna. And Imogen. And Yu.
You take Laudna’s hand. “Done.”
(+1)
The Sorrowlord isn’t pleased, but when is he ever?
You explain that the contract wasn’t specific, timing-wise: Laudna will join you, eventually. You explain that it’s a victory, in the end, to have one of Bells Hells in your debt. You explain that you didn’t help them destroy the Malleus Key at all, and in fact your tie to Laudna will help you track their movements much more easily.
You want to explain that you’re lying through your fucking teeth and he can shove it, but you have a little more self-preservation than that.
You materialize outside of Imogen and Laudna’s room, shucking your disguise like clothes. (You think the actual clothes will go quickly, too.) They’re back in Jrusar now, with that mostly-blind old lady who can somehow still clock you in any body with her old lady powers. “That’s our Zhudanna,” Laudna had said, looking proud.
You’d pouted. Zhudanna was nice, but there wasn’t enough room to fight with Imogen, and Jrusar’s lights always blocked out the stars. Imogen had laughed, then, and slid her hand up your chest to deliver a Shocking Grasp. “We’ll be travelin’ soon enough,” she’d promised. “Just gotta get our bearings.”
You’d hold her to it.
When you press your ear to the door, you grin; they’ve already gotten started. You’ve memorized them by now, in forests, in fights, in bedrolls, in the morning when they try to crush you under the weight of them, at dusk when they break out the wine and tease you about your old name, anywhere and everywhere. Well, eventually.
But you especially have memorized this: Laudna, high and shameless, Imogen’s adorable, half-embarrassed moans. You’ve already got three choices of teasing remark to make by the time Imogen’s Mage Hand yanks the door open.
You grin. Imogen is glaring; as soon as you make it to the bed, she’ll drag you in and kiss it off of you. The scar on her chest shimmers with your starlight, where someone tried to take her and you poured yourself in. You like to admire it—your claim—all reverence and purring smugness. Especially when she’s desperate beneath you.
And she is desperate tonight. Laudna must have kept her waiting, poor thing: Laudna, wretched and blooming and beautiful as ever. She grinds against Imogen’s thigh, her many teeth devouring her. Her branches jut from her spine and fill the room with her.
You don’t wear another face around them—not unless they ask, anyway—but you still feel your body answering theirs, like it always has. The shape of desire rises low in your belly; you want them. You want to mold into them, and be remolded.
As if sensing you behind them (you’ve come a long way from the shrieking, though you still hope there will be plenty of that), Laudna stills. She unseals her lips for a moment—Imogen whines—and chuckles throatily. “I wondered if you’d visit.”
You grin. “Of course I would. You’re mine, after all.”
“Fuckin’ hell, you two.” Imogen’s head slams back into the pillow, her pretty face flushed with need and frustration. “Yu,” she says, like a command. Like a plea.
Laudna grins back before leaning down to answer Imogen, kissing her deeply. “Care to join us?” she offers.
And Sorrowlord fucking sue you—they’re yours. So you do.