Vaeloria left the sitting room because the reports had stopped telling her anything useful.
The dolls remained outside the offices. The guards had not been attacked. Questions went unanswered. Each messenger delivered the same facts with greater discomfort, as though repeating them might eventually explain why armed visitors were allowed to wait outside the empire’s military leadership.
Mk1 walked beside her.
The doll matched her pace without difficulty, keeping the same distance from her shoulder through every turn. Guards straightened as they passed. Conversations ended before Vaeloria reached them.
She listened to what replaced the voices: hurried footsteps, a door closing farther down the corridor, someone adjusting a weapon that should have remained at rest.
“Give me the status of the others,” she said.
Mk1 turned her head. “Mk2, Mk3, and Mk4 are present. Riven is present.”
“I know they have not left. I am asking what they are doing.”
“Holding their positions.”
“Until Derpy tells them otherwise?”
“Friend Derpy is resting.”
Vaeloria stopped.
Mk1 halted beside her, hands resting neatly at her sides.
“You have been near him,” Vaeloria said. “You have seen the person speaking through him. Tell me whose instructions you are waiting for.”
The doll’s gaze shifted back along the corridor, toward the room where the connection to the mindscape remained. Vaeloria followed the small movement before looking at her again.
“What is he planning?”
Mk1 opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Friend is safe.”
“That was not my question.”
Her fingers flexed once.
Vaeloria lowered her voice. The guards nearest them suddenly found reasons to look elsewhere.
“I have refused the order to take him. I have put my authority between him and the people waiting to place him in containment. I am not asking as his enemy.”
Mk1 watched her without blinking.
“But I am the queen,” Vaeloria continued. “Something is being arranged inside my palace, and you will tell me what it is.”
The answer took long enough that Vaeloria expected another careful evasion.
“I cannot do that.”
“Cannot, or will not?”
Mk1 tilted her head, listening to something beyond the corridor.
Vaeloria saw the change and turned before the air opened.
The Phantasm portal formed several paces away, a dark reflective surface extending through the space between two lamps. Mk2 stepped out first. Mk3 followed, then Mk4, whose arrival made the nearest guard retreat a step before catching himself.
Riven came through last.
Her eyes went directly to Mk1.
The smaller doll’s posture changed. She remained beside the queen, but her attention had become unmistakably fixed on someone else.
“Riven,” Vaeloria said. “You were instructed to wait.”
Riven looked at Mk1 long enough to confirm she was still there. Then she turned toward the others.
“Open the way. We are moving.”
Mk2 and Mk3 shifted to either side of her. Mk4 moved behind them, watching the guards while the portal widened.
Vaeloria stepped forward.
“Where are you going?”
Riven finally met her eyes.
“Both sides.”
“The War Council and the War Office?”
There was no answer. Riven turned back to the portal, and the dolls went through with her.
Vaeloria reached the place where it had opened just as the dark surface contracted. For an instant, she saw the edge of another room. Then the passage closed, leaving stone beneath her feet and a guard staring at the empty air beside her.
“Notify Amy and Lyn,” she told him. “Find where they have gone. No one is to start a fight without reporting to me.”
The guard hurried away.
Mk1 remained where she had stopped.
Vaeloria turned back slowly.
“Why did you stay?”
“I was assigned to you.”
“By Riven?”
“By friend.”
The distinction did not reassure her.
She had thought keeping Mk1 nearby gave her access to what the others were doing. Now she looked at the doll and considered the possibility that someone had arranged the opposite: one unit to remain with the queen while the rest acted beyond her reach.
“Come with me,” she said.
Mk1 obeyed at once.
That, too, had become difficult to trust.
The portal opened inside the War Council office before anyone at the table could finish reacting to it.
Mk2 and Mk3 crossed first, moving clear of the opening. Mk4 followed and turned toward the entrance. Riven stepped into a room that smelled of ink, leather, and cooling lamps.
Eight leaders occupied the central table. A clerk stood nearby with papers held against their chest.
The faction leader rose so quickly that his chair struck the cabinet behind him.
“Who authorized—”
Riven reached him before he could finish.
Her first strike drove him against the edge of the table. Papers scattered. He caught her arm, pushed away from the wood, and released a burst of magic from his free hand.
The force threw her backward.
Riven landed on her feet and slid, her heels scoring the polished floor before she stopped. Mk4 began to move toward him.
“Hold the entrance,” Riven said. “No one comes in. No one leaves.”
Mk4 changed direction immediately.
She shut the doors and braced herself against them. The first guard outside reached the handle a moment later. Iron rattled, followed by a shouted demand for the room to open.
Mk4 did not shift.
At the table, the faction leader drew himself upright. The successful counter had restored some of the certainty Riven’s arrival had taken from him.
“You think keeping my guards outside leaves me helpless?”
Riven tilted her head.
“Friend gave an order. I am here to protect him.”
“Then you should have considered what happens to your friend after this.”
She opened her mouth.
The edge of a mirror-shield emerged from the space within, its black glass catching the room in a distorted reflection. Riven drew it free and brought it into position. A cursed sword followed, longer than anything the onlookers could reconcile with the small body that had concealed it.
The leader stopped speaking.
Riven advanced.
He released another strike, sharper and more concentrated than the first. She raised the mirror-shield to meet it. The impact flashed against the dark surface, and the force turned back across the room.
He twisted aside. His own magic struck the cabinet behind him hard enough to break its doors.
Riven was already close.
He retreated along the table, one hand raised to ward her off, the other searching for enough space to cast again. She kept the shield between them and gave him no pause long enough to complete the movement.
Mk2 and Mk3 watched the remaining leaders. No one attempted to pass them.
The faction leader reached the end of the table and found the wall behind him.
Riven’s sword cut through him before his next spell formed.
The two halves of his body disappeared into the Phantasm void before they touched the floor.
For a moment, everyone stared at the empty space.
There was no fallen body to look around, no spreading blood to mark where he had stood. The broken cabinet remained. His chair lay on its side. His absence was the only evidence of the blade’s work.
Then the other seven leaders ran.
They went toward the doors because the doors belonged to a world they understood. Mk4 stood in front of them, and they still tried to reach the handles beyond her.
She left her brace only long enough to meet them.
The attack was brief. None reached the exit. Riven opened the void beneath each fallen body, removing them from the floor while the guards outside struck the doors and called for instructions from people who could no longer answer.
Mk4 returned to her position.
The clerk stood alone beside the overturned papers.
Riven approached. The clerk backed into the table and gripped its edge, the documents they had been holding scattered around their feet.
“I am only the clerk,” they said.
Riven looked at them.
Then a portal opened beneath their shoes.
They dropped out of the room with a cry that ended when the opening closed.
Riven stood still long enough to look across the office. The table remained. The seals and files remained. Chairs, broken wood, and loose papers marked the places where the leadership had been.
She turned toward the dolls.
“The War Office next.”
Her portal opened beyond the sealed entrance.
They crossed into the corridor together, appearing behind the guards gathered at the doors. One officer turned with his weapon half drawn. Another stared at Riven’s sword, then at the entrance his companions were still trying to force.
Before either could give an order, she opened the next passage.
The dolls followed her through.
The War Office command suite had received enough warning to know that something was wrong and too little to know what to prepare for.
A messenger stood near the main table. An officer was calling for a second report. Hands moved toward alarm devices and weapons when the portal appeared.
Riven crossed the threshold with her shield already raised.
Mk4 took the doors. Mk2 and Mk3 moved to either side of the room.
There was no negotiation this time.
The first alarm was cut off before its message could finish. Orders overlapped, one official demanding that the guards enter while another called for everyone to withdraw. Neither instruction changed the placement of the dolls.
Riven moved through the command suite. The void opened where resistance ended. Desks were left occupied by unfinished work, chairs emptied before they could be pushed away, messages abandoned before anyone could carry them out.
The portal admitted no distinction between rank and service.
By the time it closed, the suite contained no one who could resume its work.
Riven gathered the dolls and opened a passage beyond the castle walls.
Cold air met them on the other side.
Mk2 turned toward the distant building. Mk3 looked at Riven, waiting to hear whether there was another destination. Mk4 settled into place beside them.
Riven dismissed her weapons.
“We wait for friend.”
No one argued.
Behind the walls, the guards were still trying to assemble the first complete report.
Amy and Lyn met Vaeloria before she reached the sitting room.
Both had questions. Neither had an answer that would explain why the dolls had abandoned their positions and passed through the corridor without stopping for the queen.
Vaeloria gave them the account as they walked.
Mk1 followed closely until the sitting-room doorway came into view. Then she moved ahead, drawn toward the faint shimmer of the mindscape connection.
Lenora turned as the doll entered. Ace remained near the wall, watching Sinister.
Mk1 stopped in front of him.
She studied his face, then tilted her head toward the light beside him.
“Is friend okay?”
Sinister looked down at her.
“He is fine. Still resting.”
Vaeloria entered behind her.
“Tell me where Riven went,” she said. “And do not give me another answer about Derpy being safe.”
Mk1 shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
Amy moved clear of the doorway. Lyn stayed beside it, keeping the corridor in sight.
“You heard me,” Vaeloria said.
The doll looked at her.
“I rewrote my code.”
Lenora’s hand moved toward her weapon.
Vaeloria remained still. “Explain what that means.”
“Your instructions are no longer my priority. I protect Derpy. I follow his orders and the original one’s.”
“Riven,” Amy said.
Mk1 nodded.
Vaeloria looked at the doll who had walked beside her, matched her pace, and obeyed every request that did not interfere with an instruction given by someone else.
“When?” she asked.
Mk1 said nothing.
The queen turned toward Sinister.
“What did you do?”
His gaze passed from her to Mk1 and back again.
“We are nine steps ahead of you, dear Vaeloria.”
Lenora watched the words strike.
Vaeloria’s expression changed before she could contain it. She looked toward the table, then the door, placing the morning’s conversations beside one another. Derpy’s apparent helplessness. The argument with the King. The Council’s pressure. The doll left at her shoulder while the others moved elsewhere.
She had assumed she understood where his choices ended and hers began.
Now she could no longer find the boundary.
Color rose into her cheeks.
She sank onto her knees before anyone thought to move a chair behind her. One hand rested against the table’s edge, but her attention remained on Derpy’s face.
“I am going to marry him,” she said.
Amy stared.
Lenora took a step forward. “What did you just say?”
Vaeloria looked up, still visibly caught by the thought.
“He saw the positions before I did. All of us trying to decide where to put him, and he was already—”
“He is a person,” Lenora cut in. “You do not get to claim him because you have decided he would make an interesting prize.”
“That is not what I said.”
“You announced you were going to marry someone who cannot even answer you from his own body.”
Sinister watched them with open interest.
Ace stepped between Lenora and Vaeloria.
“Enough. Neither of you is arranging a marriage in this room.”
Vaeloria rose with one hand still on the table. Her composure returned faster than the color left her face.
“I do not require permission to know what I want.”
“And he does not owe you agreement,” Lenora replied.
“That,” Ace said, “is where the conversation stops until he can take part in it.”
The disagreement did not disappear. Lenora remained beside the table, watching the queen with an anger she made no effort to soften. Vaeloria adjusted her clothing and asked Lyn for the next report in a voice so controlled that the effort behind it was obvious.
Mk1 stayed near Sinister.
No one had learned where Riven was.
An hour passed before the guards brought an account Vaeloria could question properly.
The delay did nothing to reassure her. Early messages contradicted one another. The dolls had been seen in a corridor, then inside a room they could not have entered, then nowhere the guards could find. Doors opened onto offices whose occupants did not answer.
Vaeloria sent each messenger back for names, witnesses, and a clear distinction between what had been seen and what had been assumed.
When two guards finally entered together, both were pale.
They bowed deeply. One kept his eyes fixed on the floor until Vaeloria told him to speak.
“Your Majesty, the War Council offices and the War Office command suite are no longer functioning.”
“Why?”
“Their personnel are gone.”
“Which personnel?”
He swallowed.
“The leadership present in both locations. The staff inside with them. We have not located any of them.”
Lyn moved closer. “Were they taken through a portal?”
“The dolls used portals. Witnesses saw them in the corridors. We heard fighting inside the Council office, but when we entered, there was no one there.”
“Bodies?” Amy asked.
The guard shook his head. “None, my lady.”
Vaeloria’s hand stilled against the table.
She had wanted Derpy’s next move explained. Now she had an empty pair of offices where the explanation should have been, and no certainty about what had happened to the people inside them.
Lenora turned toward Sinister.
He had listened to the report without changing position.
“It seems Derpy won the game of chicken,” he said.
The room went quiet.
Lenora crossed the space between them before he could add anything else.
“You told me he did not want anyone hurt.”
“I did.”
“You called it a bluff.”
He looked toward the guards, then back at her. “They have reported missing people.”
“Do not make me argue with the wording while you sit there smiling.” Her voice lowered. “What did you do?”
Sinister lifted both hands, showing her empty palms.
“I have been here with you.”
Lenora remembered Derpy’s limits as Lewd had described them. She remembered the dolls leaving, the order given inside the mindscape, and the care with which Sinister had spoken about whose hands had done what.
He had offered his presence in the room as though it settled the question.
It only changed which question she needed to ask.
“Then tell me what Derpy ordered.”
Sinister lowered his hands.
“Ask him when he wakes.”
Behind him, the connection to the ash shore continued to shimmer.
Lenora looked toward it, waiting for the person inside to answer.
Only Sinister smiled back.