Lenora took a slow breath. Let it out.
"How long," she asked, "have I been away?"
Crysha folded her arms.
"A hundred years, dear." Her voice was the same temperature as the air around her. "Not long, honestly."
The frost beneath her feet had started to recede — barely. A slow, reluctant thaw.
"I've been tracking you for fifty of those years." Crysha didn't move. Didn't shift her weight. She spoke the way someone speaks when they have already decided the outcome of a conversation. "I watched you close off after the Grim War. Watched you lose your footing." A pause. "I saw you kill your special ops squad."
Lenora's jaw tightened.
"I saw you use the form you call Blood Lust."
Still. Quiet.
"I saw Gareth."
That one landed differently.
Lenora didn't look up. Her fingers curled at her sides — not into fists, just inward, like something trying to make itself smaller. The name sat in the air between them and neither of them moved to take it back.
Crysha let the silence hold for exactly as long as it needed to.
"And I know you've used that form four times since," she continued, "to bring down seven kingdoms."
"Stop—"
"The winds have a name for you."
Don't.
"They call you the Red Hare Executioner."
Lenora's ears bent. Dropped. That slow, involuntary fold that happened when something reached past the armor and found the part underneath that still felt things.
Someone had seen it. Someone had been watching the whole time and said nothing and seen all of it.
"You saw that." It wasn't a question.
"I did," Crysha said. "Which is why I'm here." Her gaze softened — not warm, but something adjacent to it. "I want to bring you back, Lenora."
Then her eyes moved.
Past Lenora. Past the camp. To the two sleeping figures curled near the fire — and the creatures nestled beside them.
Mia felt it before Crysha said anything. So did Sphinx. The shift in attention. The weight of being studied.
"You may be traveling," Crysha said slowly, "with an anomaly." A beat. "Or an abomination."
The word landed.
Mia's tail went rigid. Sphinx lifted his head.
Then — a sound. Low. Layered. Not quite a growl and not quite a hiss but something that lived in the space between the two, coming from both of them at once.
"Pets," Crysha continued, as if she hadn't heard it, "should not be able to do what yours did."
Mia stood. Sphinx stood.
They looked at Crysha for one long, steady moment.
Then they turned, walked back to Lewd's side, and lay down — one on each side of her — and did not look at Crysha again.
"Depending," Crysha said, "on how you respond — I may have to drag you back myself."
Her hair changed.
Not all at once. A slow bleed of color from root to tip, midnight blue bleeding through like ink dropped in water. She didn't reach for it. Didn't announce it. She let Lenora see it and left the rest unsaid.
She has the same blood. And she's had a hundred years longer with it.
"I'm not going back." Lenora's voice was flat. Decided. "I need to get stronger. Strong enough to face him."
Crysha's expression didn't shift.
"Face who, exactly." Not a question. A sorting mechanism. "Gareth. John. Or the monster you've decided to travel with."
Something ignited.
"The monster," Lenora said sharply, "has a name—"
"He has a name—"
Both of them spoke at once. Lenora and Lewd — Lewd who had apparently been awake long enough to hear all of it — voices overlapping in a single unified cut.
A beat of silence followed it.
Crysha looked between them. Something moved behind her eyes — brief, unreadable — before the cool settled back in.
The air dropped another degree.
"I don't care," she said, "what the monster's name is." Her voice didn't rise. It never rose. "I care about you. I care about the fact that you are not in control of yourself. And you know it."
Lenora said nothing.
Because she did.
Crysha's gaze moved then — unhurried, deliberate — and landed on Lewd.
"Shouldn't you be at the rat kingdom?"
Lewd's eye twitched.
"I grew up in Whisperfen." Each word came out careful. Precise. Like she was placing them down before something snapped. "I know of no such place." A breath. "And I'm a mouse."
"Mouse. Rat." Crysha tilted her head slightly. "The distinction doesn't change the kingdom. It's a joint realm — ruled by the mouse god and the rat god together." Her tone was the same as it had been for everything else. Informational. Unhurried. "You might consider visiting. You could stand to connect with your roots."
Lewd blinked.
The anger didn't disappear. But something else moved underneath it — quieter, uncertain. She glanced down at her hands for half a second.
"Would I..." She stopped. Started again. "Would I get stronger if I went there?"
Crysha looked at her for a long moment.
"You might," she said. "That depends entirely on you."
Lewd looked at Lenora.
"Would you come with me?" she asked. "To that place."
Lenora was quiet for a moment. Then something in her expression settled — not soft exactly, but decided.
"Lewd." She met her eyes. "Even if we're fighting over the same person — we're still friends."
Lewd blinked. Opened her mouth. Closed it again.
Crysha rolled her eyes so thoroughly it was almost a full head movement.
"Lenora," she said, in the tone of someone who had been patient for a very long time and was approaching the end of it, "you have your own matters to attend to."
Her white hare foot had started tapping. Fast. Rhythmic. The kind of tapping that wasn't nervous — that was waiting.
Lewd and Lenora exchanged a look. Then they both turned to Crysha at the same time.
"Could you," Lenora started.
"Take us both," Lewd finished.
Crysha stopped tapping.
"Unfortunately," she said, "I am not taking anyone anywhere until you tell me what happened." Her eyes moved to Lenora and stayed there. "And beyond that — I'm not certain both of you could make the journey." A pause. "The kingdom has a barrier."
Lewd frowned. Something moved behind her eyes — working through it.
"...Because we're rabbits and hares," she said slowly. "We can't cross a barrier built for mice only."
"Correct."
Silence.
Then — movement.
Mia and Sphinx looked at each other. A long look, the kind that didn't need words between them. Sphinx turned and dragged one claw through the dirt — slow, deliberate, carving a line. Then another. Mia leaned forward and exhaled — a thin, careful stream of heat that scorched the earth between the letters, darkening them.
Words. Cut into the ground.
What if we broke the barrier.
Nobody spoke.
Lenora stared at it. Lewd stared at it. Crysha — for the first time since she'd arrived — stared at something like she hadn't expected it.
"You—" Lewd's voice came out too high. She corrected. "You can understand us?"
Sphinx dragged his claw through the dirt again. Mia followed with her breath.
We cannot speak to you directly.
But we can write.
When we want our opinion heard.
The three of them stood there in the cooling air, looking down at the words burned and scratched into the ground, and none of them had anything to say to that.
The next words came slower. Mia exhaled in red — deep, serious crimson that scorched the letters clean into the earth.
Just because we are pets does not mean we cannot understand you.
A pause. Then green — sharp, almost irritated at the edges.
It is simply a pain to do this. And we are somewhat above it.
Lewd stared. Lenora stared. Crysha said nothing.
Sphinx dragged his claw through a fresh patch of dirt and Mia followed with blue — cool, precise.
We are highly sophisticated pets. We have been with our master for quite some time. We know how he feels. We know what he wants. Most of the time.
Another look toward Lewd. Then red again. Serious. Deliberate.
Our orders were to protect you, Lewd.
You can use us to fight. You be the support.
Our master trusts you.
The blush hit Lewd before she could stop it — a full sweep of color across her face. She blinked once. Then twice.
Then she turned and gave Lenora the most insufferably smug look she had managed in the entire journey.
Lenora filed it away and said nothing.
Mia shifted. Red again — but different this time, layered with something more precise.
Do not get the wrong idea.
He knows you do not like war. He knows you do not like fighting. That is exactly why he wants us to be your sword specifically.
Lenora glanced sideways at Lewd with a smile that said: your move.
Lewd's smug expression dimmed approximately three degrees.
Sphinx turned then — not toward Lewd or Lenora, but toward Crysha. Deliberate. Measured. He scraped a clean line in the dirt and waited for Mia to follow.
Blue. Formal.
Miss Ice Empress.
We understand you may see us as pets belonging to someone you consider an abomination. But you must understand — we did not entirely choose to come here.
A pause. Then red.
Celica brought us. We had walked away. Then she bound herself to our master — and when she did, we followed. She ran a shop, in the other world. Before all of this.
The fire that shaped the next words burned lower. Quieter.
Where our master came from — people saw him as a monster. No matter how kind he was. No matter how gentle. They looked down on him regardless.
Always.
Nobody spoke.
Sphinx lowered his head and smoothed the dirt flat with one slow pass of his paw. A clean surface. A pause that felt like a breath before something heavier.
Then he began again. Mia's flame followed — low, careful, like she was choosing each letter.
We have not been to that world often. But we first appeared there — after our master sealed his powers.
We overheard them. The people with guns.
In the other world.
The words sat in the earth, dark and still, and the fire that made them had already gone out.
"That's a lot to take in." Lenora crossed her arms. "But Crysha — it might still be possible. For all of us to go."
Crysha's foot was still tapping.
"Before we discuss any of that," she said, "I want to hear your side. About the anomaly." A pause. "All of it."
So Lenora talked.
It came out in pieces at first — halting, then steadier. She told Crysha about the sky splitting open and something falling through it. About chasing him across the field and watching him try to run. About the contract — not out of sentiment, but practicality. He'd already made one with Vespera. She wanted to protect him. Train him. Make sure he didn't burn himself out before he understood what he was carrying.
She told her about Celica's powers. How Derpy had been learning to use them, slowly — finding the shape of them, learning the weight.
That's not quite right.
Celica's voice moved through her like cold water, quiet and precise.
Those were his powers. All of them. I was piggybacking off him.
Lenora paused mid-sentence.
"...I need to correct that," she said. "The power wasn't Celica's. It was always his. She was drawing from him."
Crysha's expression didn't change. But the tapping slowed slightly.
Lenora kept going.
She told her about Lewd — how they found her, how Derpy had taken to her immediately in that quiet, stubborn way he had with people who needed something and wouldn't ask for it. How his calamity book and Lewd's had met each other and what that had looked like. She paused there.
"Keep going," Crysha said.
Joker and King. The ambush in Whisperfen. How close they'd come to not making it out. Wolves' territory after that — the border, the tension, the way the air had changed when they crossed it.
And then Derpy.
Lenora's voice dropped without her meaning it to.
"He started changing," she said. "Dragon wings. Not... not in a controlled way. Like something was pulling him somewhere else. Like he wasn't entirely himself anymore."
She stopped.
Crysha waited.
"He challenged Vambasta," Lenora said quietly. "And Vemmi."
Something moved in Crysha's expression — brief, sharp, there and gone. The name had registered. She knew what those challenges meant.
The silence stretched.
Then Crysha exhaled slowly through her nose and pressed two fingers to her chin.
"This," she said, "is considerably more than I anticipated."
A long moment. The frost around her feet had gone still.
"If you don't mind," she said, "I'll be accompanying you for a while."
She didn't wait for a response.
The imperial bearing shifted first — something in the set of her shoulders, the line of her spine. Not lesser. Just different. Built for distance rather than ceremony. Her hair moved as the cloak came out of nothing — black as a winter sky and scattered with faint silver stitching, snowflake patterns running along the hem and inner lining like frost that had been there for years. Her hare ears pressed forward through the hood, alert. The long fall of her hair — blonde threading into pink, one thick braid running down her side and tied at the end with a black bow and a hanging blue crystal — settled over the cloak's edge. Moon and star charms caught the light at her belt. The sword crossed her back, familiar and unannounced. Her boots hit the ground with quiet finality, fur-trimmed, tipped with ice that didn't melt.
She looked, all at once, like someone who had been walking a very long time and had no intention of stopping.
Crysha the Wandering Hare turned toward the road.
"Well then," she said. "Let's not waste the morning."
Lenora watched.
That was all she could do, really. Watch the woman who had stood like a pillar of winter fold herself down into something that looked — against all logic and dignity — almost ordinary. Still tall. Still composed. But the weight of the divine had stepped back, and what remained was just a hare with very long braids and a sword she probably didn't need to reach for often.
Crysha was not taking her back.
She wasn't going to question it. She wasn't going to look at that too closely or say anything that might change her mind. She filed it somewhere quiet and left it there.
"Lewd." She turned. "Are you sure? About the kingdom. The mice, the rats, all of it."
Lewd considered this for exactly as long as it took her to glance at Mia and Sphinx, still flanking her on either side like they'd always meant to be there.
"I'm sure," she said. "Long as I've got you. And Derpy's pets." A beat. "I'll be fine."
Lenora looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded once, turned, and fell into step.
The party set off into the morning — four of them now, plus two creatures who were highly sophisticated and found the whole arrangement only mildly beneath them.
They didn't know yet what was waiting at the next stop.
They would find out soon enough.