Lenora looked at Lewd, gauntlets glowing slow and steady at her sides.
"Take notes, Lewd." Her voice was even. Not unkind. Just honest in the way that cuts cleanest. "If you can't protect yourself, how are you going to protect the one you love? How do you expect to be anyone's rival for someone's heart when all you're bringing is looks?" She tilted her head slightly. "You talk a big game. But that's all it's been so far."
Lewd's teeth pressed together.
Lewd. Phantasm's voice moved through her mind — smooth, unhurried, already three steps ahead. Don't lose your cool. That's what she wants. Fall back. Let me think.
A beat.
Celica is boosting her — more than I expected. Pushing through that head-on isn't going to work. The book's warmth shifted, reshaping into something more deliberate. My power doesn't have to be weapons. It can be anything you imagine. Fall back for now. Let me set you up properly.
Lewd didn't argue.
She turned and ran — clean, fast, disappearing into the treeline in the opposite direction without looking back.
Lenora moved to follow.
And stopped.
Mia and Sphinx stood in her path.
They hadn't lunged. Hadn't postured. They were simply there — side by side in their jester forms, blocking the way with the particular stillness of things that have already decided the outcome and are in no hurry to begin. The firelight caught the runes on Mia's mask, the red-glowing cracks across Sphinx's. Purple flames drifted upward from Mia's shoulders without sound.
Then their shadows moved.
Not with them — independent, a half-second behind, rippling like something beneath the surface had shifted. It lasted only a moment before the shadows settled back into place.
Lenora's eyes dropped to the ground. Then back up.
She said nothing.
Behind their masks, the two of them were already talking.
Are we really doing this? Mia's thought pressed against Sphinx's mind, uncertain in a way she rarely was. Without master. This is the first person he's met — someone who actually matters to him. I'm not comfortable with it. Even if she's asking us to go all out.
Sphinx's golden eyes tracked Lenora with quiet focus. We never get the chance to test ourselves when master is around. Think of it as training. Pacing ourselves. A pause. Besides — that rabbit is emitting something. Something dangerous. You feel it too. Another pause, more deliberate. What were master's orders, Miss Mia?
Mia was quiet for a moment.
Then she stretched — dropping low to the ground, shifting her weight left, then right, then reaching both paws up toward the sky in one long, unhurried motion. The purple flames around her rose and fell with it.
She looked at Sphinx.
Don't get in my way.
Sphinx's grin widened beneath the mask.
Same to you.
Mia broke left.
Sphinx broke right.
Both of them hit full speed before Lenora had taken a single step.
Lenora laughed.
Not the polite kind. Not the kind that covers nerves or buys time. The real thing — bright and genuine, pulled out of her by something she hadn't felt in longer than she wanted to admit.
There it is.
She jumped backwards, hands moving fast, magic circles blooming in the air around her — three, four, building in sequence, the kind of setup that needed another two seconds to—
Mia didn't give her two seconds.
She was already there. The speed of the jester form was different from anything Mia had shown before — no wind-up, no telegraph, just sudden presence where there hadn't been presence a moment ago. The purple flames around her shoulders weren't drifting anymore. They were pulled flat by velocity.
Lenora's circles shattered unfinished as Mia appeared above her — high, the apex of something that had launched before Lenora had tracked the takeoff — and came down.
The axe kick connected with the sound of something final.
The ground didn't crack. It gave way entirely — earth splitting outward in a ring, a crater opening beneath Lenora's feet with the force of the impact, deep and wide and sudden. Dust billowed up in a wall.
The sky through it was briefly visible.
And in that sky — one golden eye.
Lenora had half a second to see it before Sphinx hit.
He came down fast. Too fast. Lightning preceded him like an announcement, electricity arcing outward from his descent and finding the edges of the crater before he did. The ground shook. The crater doubled — walls blasting outward, the ring of displaced earth expanding as the electricity discharged through it in every direction.
Then silence.
Lenora looked up from the bottom of it.
Above the crater, a magic circle had formed — wide, luminous, hovering steady over the destruction they'd just made. Mia and Sphinx stood on it side by side. Paws crossed. Looking down.
Composed.
Patient.
Like that had been the opening move.
From the edge of the magic circle, Sphinx's eyes cut sideways.
A low sound built in his throat — not at Lenora. At Mia.
No magic, he sent. No breath attacks.
Mia's tail moved behind her, slow and conflicted.
I know. She was quiet for a moment, watching the crater below. I feel like it would be unfair anyway. Master cares about this one. The flames at her shoulders dimmed slightly — something almost reluctant in them. I want to let loose so badly right now. But—
She stopped.
Sphinx. Her voice in his mind shifted — the playfulness gone, something older and more instinctive taking its place. I think we should finish this. Now. Before things take a turn for the worse.
Below them, something moved.
Lenora was getting up.
Slowly. Not struggling — just taking her time about it, the way someone does when they're deciding something rather than recovering from something. One hand pressed to the crater floor. Then the other. Blood traced a thin line down the side of her head, catching the firelight, and she didn't reach up to wipe it.
Her ears were changing colour.
Brown bleeding out at the tips, something deeper and redder creeping in from the roots — slow, like a tide coming in, like a door opening that had been closed for a very long time.
She started laughing.
Not the laugh from before. That one had been warm — the sound of someone genuinely delighted, lit up by a challenge they'd been waiting for. This was different. This laugh had no warmth in it at all. It came up from somewhere lower, something that had been sitting underneath the composed instructor and the soft maid outfit and the careful restraint for longer than anyone in this camp had been alive.
It didn't stop.
Sphinx looked at Mia.
Mia looked back.
Neither of them moved.
The gravity shifted first.
No warning. No build-up. The air around Lenora simply decided it had a different opinion about direction, and everything near her — loose dirt, scattered ash from the fire, Mia and Sphinx both — got pulled downward with sudden, total authority. The magic circle they'd been standing on buckled under the pressure and dissolved.
The gauntlets on Lenora's hands flickered.
Then vanished.
Two blades took their place — red, both of them, the colour of something that shouldn't be that colour. She turned them over once, like reacquainting herself with old friends.
"Damn." A low exhale, almost to herself. "It's been a while since I could use this form." She touched the side of her head where the blood had dried. "Must've needed the knock."
I think I'm going to call this form— Celica's voice moved through her mind, quiet and deliberate, the tone of someone cataloguing something important. —Blood Lust.
Lenora's ears had gone fully red now. Her hair followed — the brown bleeding out strand by strand, crimson taking its place from root to tip, slow and absolute. Her eyes were already there.
She moved.
Mia didn't have time to reset. Lenora crossed the distance between them in a single motion, hand snapping forward, fingers closing around the mask — and pulling. The runic mask cracked down the middle with a sound like something ancient breaking. She didn't stop moving. The same motion that broke it carried Mia sideways, released, sent her into the treeline at a speed that left a sound behind her.
The tree didn't bend.
It shattered.
The echo of it rolled through the swamp and came back wrong.
A low, soft hum started in Lenora's throat — barely audible, the kind of sound that raises the hairs on the back of your neck before you can identify why. She turned her head toward where Sphinx had been standing.
Empty.
He'd faded into the shadows without a sound. Smart.
"Here kitty kitty kitty." Her voice was light. Easy. "Don't worry. I just want to see you."
She started walking.
Not fast. That was the wrong part. She had red blades and a crater behind her and she was walking — unhurried, swaying slightly, like someone moving through a party they were very much enjoying. Her head tilted one way then the other, taking in the treeline.
"Leeeeeewd." She drew the name out, head turning slowly. "Where are you?"
In the trees, Lewd didn't move.
She'd been watching since Lenora got up. She was watching now — pressed into the dark between two trunks, Phantasm's grimoire held tight against her chest, barely breathing.
"You want to be my rival for Derpy's heart." Lenora's voice drifted up easily, like she was making conversation. "How are you going to fight for his love if you won't even come out of the trees?"
Something moved in Lewd's chest that wasn't courage.
A crack opened in the back of her mind — involuntary, the kind of memory that arrives without asking permission.
Whisperfen.
The cat girls' voices first. The specific quality of that cruelty — not loud, not dramatic, just relentless. The ground going out from under her. The cold of the sewer water. The particular humiliation of being down there with nothing but a stick, looking up at the hole she'd fallen through.
Nobody came.
Her heartbeat jumped.
Lewd.
Phantasm's voice cut through it — sharp, present, pulling her back to the swamp and the firelight and the red-haired woman walking toward her.
She's below you. Stay in the canopy. Move.
Lewd moved.
She opened Phantasm — the book responded instantly, pages fanning wide — and wings came. Dark, wide, the same silhouette as Phantasm's own, spreading from her back and catching the air before she'd fully committed to the jump.
She pushed off the branch and rose.
"Oh." Lenora looked up. Something that might have been appreciation crossed her face. "There you are."
She giggled — and the sound was wrong in the same way the hum had been wrong, something playful riding on top of something with no playfulness in it at all.
"Come on, Lewd. Don't make me chase you." She crossed one blade behind her shoulder. "I just want to talk."
The slash came in a single clean motion.
Red light traced the arc — two lines crossing, an X blooming open in the air and expanding outward and up, chasing Lewd through the canopy with the particular patience of something that had already calculated the angle.
It found the left wing.
The wing sheared. Not gone — just compromised, the structure failing mid-beat, and then Lewd was falling with one wing working and one wing not and the ground was coming up fast.
Lenora was already there.
She caught up before the landing, stopped in front of Lewd as she scrambled back across the dirt, and lowered one red blade until the tip was level with her.
"Lenora." Lewd's voice came out small. Her hands were up. "Stop."
Something hit Lenora in the back.
Hard. Fast. No warning.
The scream that came out of her wasn't pain exactly — more like the sound of something that had not expected that and had strong opinions about it. The force of it knocked her forward and sent Lewd and Sphinx both tumbling face-first into the dirt, tangled in the recoil.
Lenora straightened.
Turned.
Sphinx was already back on his feet, mask cracked across one side, the red glow behind the fractures burning brighter than before. Mia had emerged from the treeline. One side of her face was unmasked now — the broken half gone, the other half still carved and glowing — and she was watching Lenora with both eyes open.
"You two." Lenora's voice had dropped — quieter now, which was worse. "Don't know when to quit."
She moved toward Sphinx.
Her hand reached out.
The moment her fingers made contact — the shadows moved.
Not a ripple this time. Something deliberate. Something that had been waiting for exactly this.
The whisper arrived like a temperature drop.
You touch or hurt any more of my pets—
Lenora's hand froze.
—I will make you regret it.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't angry. It was the kind of voice that doesn't need to be either of those things because it has already decided. And it was coming from inside the shadow beneath Sphinx's feet — not from any direction, not from anywhere she could turn and address.
She turned and slashed anyway.
Both blades. Behind her, where the voice had seemed to be. Air. Nothing. Just the sound of the blades and the swamp and her own breathing, which had gotten rougher without her noticing.
She stood there for a moment.
Then she turned the hilt of one blade around in her grip.
And hit herself in the side of the head with it.
Hard.
"What are you doing." Not a question. Directed inward — at something specific, at something that had been steering. She hit herself again, panting, and a stripe of brown appeared at her temple — cutting through the red, spreading slowly. "You took advantage of me." Her voice cracked slightly at the edges. "You extended it. You used me to go after Phantasm."
The red in her hair retreated another inch.
"Go to sleep, Celica."
The blades dimmed.
The red pulled back from her ears in slow increments, brown returning root by root, and Lenora stood in the middle of the destroyed campsite — the crater behind her, the shattered tree to her left, two pets watching her from a careful distance — and breathed.
The book screamed.
Not Celica's voice — something beneath it, older and rawer, the sound of something that had been overextended and was being pulled back by force. It tore through the camp and then cut off completely, and in the silence that followed the dragon authority cuffs snapped back into place around Lenora's wrists — sudden and cold, the yellow flaring once before settling.
Lenora was on her hands and knees before she'd registered going down.
She was sweating. Panting. The kind of breathing that comes from fighting something internal — not a wound, not exertion, but the particular exhaustion of wrestling control back from something that didn't want to give it.
Across from her, Lewd had backed up.
Not far. Just enough. Her hands were at her sides and her ears were flat and she was watching Lenora the way you watch something you thought you understood and now aren't sure about.
Lenora looked up at her.
"Lewd." Her voice came out rough. "I'm sorry."
A pause. She pressed one hand to the ground to steady herself.
"That wasn't me." She stopped. Tried again. "It was me. But from a long time ago. I thought I'd buried it." She exhaled slowly. "Normally I can control it. But this book is something else."
She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to.
Her arms gave out.
She caught herself on one elbow — blood loss catching up with her all at once, the way it waits until the adrenaline stops before it presents the bill. The ground felt steadier than she did.
I won't lose next time.
Celica's voice arrived without invitation, quiet and certain and completely unrepentant.
You have a form that may rival gods, Lenora. Why seal it away?
Lenora didn't answer her.
She stared at the dirt and breathed and did not answer her.
"Lenora." Lewd's voice was careful now — not afraid exactly, but careful the way you are with something that just showed you it had edges. "If we're going to be travelling together..." She hesitated. "Maybe we should switch Calamity books."
She reached for Phantasm.
The book didn't move.
Neither did Celica's Embers.
They stayed exactly where they were — settled, certain, immovable — in the way of things that had been placed deliberately and had no intention of being repositioned. Derpy had sent them here. That was the beginning and end of it.
Lewd pulled her hand back.
She stood there for a moment, looking at Lenora on the ground, and then she sat down beside her. Not gracefully. Just dropped — close enough that their shoulders were almost touching — and said nothing, because there wasn't anything that fit.
Her eyes closed.
Then they didn't open again.
Lenora watched her for a moment. Mia and Sphinx had gone still at the edges of the camp — watching, waiting, their jester forms dimming slowly back toward something quieter.
I'll sleep, Lenora decided. Just for a moment.
But before her eyes closed — the shadows moved.
Not a ripple. Not the small thing from before.
An image rose from the shadow pooled beneath Mia and Sphinx — the shape of someone familiar, assembling itself from darkness into something almost solid — and then everything went black.
Mia and Sphinx were still panting when they felt it.
Hands. Two sets. Pressing down on their shoulders from behind — gentle, deliberate, the kind of contact that knows exactly how much weight to use.
They turned at the same time.
Two figures stood behind them.
The first looked like their master. Not an impression — exactly like him, down to the way he held himself, the particular quality of his presence that they had known since the beginning. It felt like him too, the way the shadow always felt when it rippled — something familiar coming through from somewhere underneath.
The second was different.
He had wings. Broad and layered, spreading from his back in three distinct bands of colour — red at the top, deep and warm, bleeding into pink through the middle, then dropping to purple at the bottom where the feathers caught the faint light of the camp. His hair carried the same pattern, the same three colours moving through it from root to tip. He stood slightly apart, watching the two of them with an expression that was patient and a little sad and something else that didn't have a clean name.
The first one — the one that felt like master — spoke.
"Each of you carries a small piece of me." His voice was quiet. Certain. "We were going to come through if things got worse."
Mia's head tilted.
Sphinx's followed.
The winged one stepped forward.
"Call me Harpy Derpy." He said it simply, like it was just a fact being filed. "I'm the part that was used to make you both. The part that got sealed away when you were." He looked at Mia. Then at Sphinx. "You've been carrying me since the beginning."
Neither of the pets moved.
Harpy Derpy stepped back.
And folded — slowly, the wings drawing in, the colours dimming — and sank into the shadow beneath Mia's feet until he was gone.
The other one looked at Sphinx for a long moment.
Then he fell backward into the shadow beneath Sphinx, and the shadow closed over him, and the camp was quiet again.
Mia and Sphinx looked at each other.
Then they lay down.
And slept.
The White Tiger Kingdom.
Derpy was asleep.
Tears were already falling when his eyes opened — he hadn't been crying in his dream, or if he had, he couldn't remember it. The feeling had arrived before the waking did. A specific kind of pain, not his own, coming through a connection he couldn't have named or explained but had always been able to feel.
His pets.
He knew it the way you know your own heartbeat. They were hurt. Both of them. Something had happened — something real, something that had pushed them further than they usually went — and he had felt it from across every distance that separated them.
His mouth opened.
The sound that came out wasn't a word.
It was the kind of sound that doesn't have a shape — just pressure and grief and the particular helplessness of caring about something you can't reach. It cracked the silence of the room and kept going until it didn't, and then he fell back against the bed, and his eyes closed, and the tears kept falling quietly even after everything else had stopped.