The meal got cold.
Lenora hadn't touched it beyond the first poke. The baked carrot sat in front of her — her favourite, somehow, Slurry had known — and she moved it around the plate without purpose and stared at the table and didn't say anything.
Hours had passed since Revy left.
He always had a book. The thought moved in circles and she couldn't stop it. Since the first day. He had it. But the only time I ever saw him use it was when he was recording data — writing things down. It was always the bracelets. It was always Celica. She pressed the carrot to one side of the plate. And now I know why. She was piggybacking. The power was always his.
She moved the carrot back.
I cost him a fight. Celica went through that painting because I couldn't hold onto her. He trusted me with her and I let her slip and she found the opening and she took it and now somewhere on the other side of that painting he's dealing with the fallout of it.
Her ears drooped.
What is wrong with me.
Images kept returning. Him and her, fighting together. The way the power had moved between them — not like a student and a teacher, like two things that had figured out how to work in the same direction. Her ears flushed warm and she looked at the carrot and decided the carrot was the most interesting thing in the room.
From across the space, Crysha watched her.
She had been watching for a while. She knew Lenora's expressions the way you know the expressions of someone you've tracked across fifty years of distance — and she had seen many of them. Frustration. Determination. The particular blankness that came before a fight. The soft look that came after one.
She had never seen this one.
In all the years of suitors presented and dismissed — politely, impatiently, once memorably through a wall — Lenora had never once looked like this. Like something had gotten underneath the surface and taken up residence without asking.
Crysha crossed the room.
"Young hare." She kept her voice even. "What troubles you." She paused. "You should be relieved. The abomination's calamity book has returned to its original owner. That's where it belongs. You're lighter without it."
Lenora picked up her carrot. Set it down. Stood. Picked up her plate.
And moved to a completely different table.
Crysha stood where she was.
"You can't walk away from this forever," she said, to Lenora's back. "We will have to talk about it eventually."
Lenora sat at the new table and poked at her carrot.
Below her, her shadow rippled — slow, deliberate, going unnoticed.
Something in it was watching.
Ten minutes passed.
Derrpy sat down across from her.
She didn't say anything immediately. Just sat there with both hands on the table and a grin that suggested she had things to say and was simply deciding the order.
Lenora poked her carrot.
Derrpy's grin widened.
Lenora poked the carrot again.
Finally — "Can I help you, dear."
"I'm actually jealous," Derrpy said, with no preamble, "that you got to meet him."
Lenora looked up.
"...I'm sorry?"
"Him." Derrpy gestured at the painting on the wall behind the desk — the dragon, the wolf, the thing between them. "Your Derpy. I'm jealous that you got to meet him and I didn't." She picked up a fork and began spinning it between her fingers. "When we started moving a few days ago — before we got here — we met his father."
Lenora went still.
"A massive black wolf," Derrpy continued, as though this were perfectly ordinary information to be delivering over dinner. "Red mane. Really nice, actually — though everyone seems to think he's some kind of monster." She paused. "He was absolutely terrified of our grand elder. Who has been alive since the very beginning. Since before the gods were named." Another pause. "That part was funny."
"You met Derpy's father," Lenora said.
"I didn't get to talk to him," Derrpy clarified, pointing the fork at her. "Revy and I were hunting. At home. In the forest. And then one of our pack screamed." She set the fork down. "They don't usually scream. Our little ones are tough. But this one screamed dragon wolf god and that's — that's not a thing that happens. So we went to look." She tilted her head. "Two young wolves and the big black wolf. That's what we found."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Derrpy looked at her with the expression of someone who found the question genuinely confusing.
"Because you asked my sister a question and she didn't answer it." She shrugged one shoulder. "And also because you seem to like the wolf god." Her eyes moved sideways to where Lewd sat across the room. "Same as the mouse girl."
Lenora said nothing.
"We went home and told our elder," Derrpy continued. "He said — in the morning, show me where he was. The ones that smell like they were claimed." She rested her chin in her hand. "So in the morning, we went back to where the black wolf had been standing. And we heard singing."
She went quiet for a moment. Something in her expression shifted — something remembering.
Then she sang it.
Soft. Not performing. Just repeating what she'd heard.
"Vemi, sweet with iron spine, Soft like sugar, strong like wine. You don't need teeth to be the brave, You don't need blood to be the blade. Vambasta, grow — get sharp, get loud, Make your strength into a crown. Save my rematch, make it clean — I want to see what you become when you're free."
She stopped. Scratched the side of her head.
"I think there were more lines. But I can't remember them." A small chuckle. "Sorry."
Lewd appeared at Lenora's elbow, Phantasm tucked against her side.
"Hey." She looked at Lenora carefully. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." Lenora set the carrot down. "Just — thrown off after what happened with the bracelets. Watching them go through the painting like that. It was a lot." She looked at the room around them. "This whole place is a lot."
Lewd looked at her for a moment longer than necessary. Then she sat down and didn't push it.
Slurry appeared from the kitchen.
He moved quietly for someone his size — setting things down on each table without announcement or ceremony. Meat for Mia. Fish for Sphinx. A generous wedge of cheese for Lewd that she looked at with visible appreciation. Two plates of baked carrots — one in front of Crysha in the corner, one in front of Lenora. He pulled out a chair, sat down, and put his feet on the table.
"When we got here," he said, apparently to no one in particular, "we shrank." He looked at the ceiling. "This place adjusts. Whatever's inside it gets scaled down to something human-sized. We can't shift into our true forms unless we actually need to — or unless we're really hungry." A pause. "Whichever comes first."
In the corner, Crysha's expression shifted.
The transformations. She filed it quietly. Not a threat display. They were hungry. She turned her cup slowly in her hands. And they're contained to these forms unless pushed. Useful to know.
She set the cup down.
"I need to ask you something," she said.
The reaction was immediate.
Both of them — Derrpy and Slurry — turned to look at her with the synchronized energy of creatures who had been raised to do exactly one thing when this specific type of situation arose.
"We don't answer to you," Derrpy said.
"Unworthy false god," Slurry added.
Lewd put down her cheese.
"Could you answer her question." She looked at them both, patient, deliberate. "She's part of our party. You're treating Lenora and me with respect — which we appreciate — but she was there when we were fighting each other. She stepped in. That counts for something." A pause. "Please answer her question. For us."
Derrpy and Slurry looked at each other.
Then they both stood, walked to the far end of the dining room, and began whispering.
Slurry: "I don't know."
Derrpy: "I don't know either."
Slurry: "The chosen are making a request. I don't know if we can do that when it's a non-believer — but she's a chosen's companion... Revy's the one who handles this. We sell stuff. We don't make decisions."
Derrpy: "What if we answer three questions? Maybe two? That seems fair?"
Slurry: "...Three and two?"
Derrpy: "Three and two."
Slurry: "That doesn't mean anything."
Derrpy: "It means something to me."
This continued for twenty minutes.
Then they walked back and stood in front of the party with the posture of people who had resolved something through great effort.
"We will answer your question," Derrpy announced. "But only that. And then it stops." She looked at Crysha. "Start your question. False god."
The irritation bubble that formed on Crysha's forehead was visible to everyone in the room.
"You sheep," she said, very quietly, "are about to be chopped."
Derrpy and Slurry growled. The room darkened at the edges. The weapons on the walls shifted.
Lenora stood up.
"Okay." She moved between them, arms slightly out, speaking to everyone and no one. "Let's take a breath. Everyone sits down. We talk in the morning when we've all slept and no one is—" she gestured at the room, "—this."
Crysha looked at the two sheep.
The two sheep looked at Crysha.
"That's fine," Crysha said. "I can't argue with that."
"Good night," Lewd said promptly, and was already heading for the stairs.
The room settled.
Lenora sat back down at her table alone. The carrot was cold. She ate two bites of it and stared at the table for a while.
Derpy. She pressed one finger against the wood grain. Please be all right.
Then she got up and went to bed.
The room Derrpy and Slurry had given her was small and soft and warmer than the road had been for weeks. Lenora stood in the middle of it and unhooked the maid dress for what felt like the hundredth time — the hem now gone entirely below one knee, the apron a lost cause, the single surviving ruffle hanging by a thread.
She folded it anyway. Set it on the chair.
Then she opened her bag and pulled out what she'd been wearing to sleep since Vemi and Vambasta's inn — an oversized night shirt and a pair of shorts that weren't hers. She'd taken them from Derpy's bag without asking, the morning after the fight, when she'd had nothing dry to change into. She hadn't given them back.
She pulled them on and sat on the edge of the bed.
The fabric was soft in a way that didn't belong to this world. Different from everything she'd worn before — lighter, stranger, comfortable in a way that made her feel slightly off-balance.
Last time I slept in something this comfortable was when—
Her face went warm.
She looked at the ceiling.
Her shadow moved.
Not the slow ripple of Mia and Sphinx passing through. Something different — lighter, uncertain, like something that wasn't sure of its welcome pressing upward from the dark.
Then Harpy Derpy came through.
He floated more than stood — wings catching some light that didn't exist in the room, the harpy form looser than the dragon wolf shape, less anchored, like something half-remembered. He looked like Derpy and didn't look like Derpy and both things were true at the same time.
Lenora was on her feet before she'd decided to stand.
"You can relax," he said. His voice was quiet. A little tired. "It's me. Only a small part of me is here — my main body is unconscious so I can pass through shadows. I wasn't sure whose shadow I was coming out of." He glanced at his own hands. "I wanted to check on you. And on Lewd."
"How." She was still staring. "How are you — how is this—"
"The harpy form is just skin that molted." He leaned against the wall. "At the musical dragon incident. It's... complicated. It caused a lot of pain. But it means I can move through shadows like this when I'm out." He looked at her. "I'm all right. Mostly."
"I lost your bracelets." The words came out before she could arrange them into anything more useful. "Celica went through that painting and I couldn't stop her and she found you and I cost you that fight. You trusted me with her and I—"
His wings shot upward.
Not aggressive — startled. Like she'd said something that needed to be physically pushed back against.
"Lenora." He came away from the wall. "It's all right. Things happen outside our control. Part of me knew it was going to happen — that doesn't make it your fault." The wings lowered. "I just need you and Lewd and Mia and Sphinx to be safe. That's the only thing I'm checking on right now."
She closed the distance and wrapped her arms around him before she'd decided to do that either.
He was different. She could feel it even through the contact — something underneath the familiar shape that had shifted, or been added, or was still becoming. Her brown ears drooped against his shoulder.
"What happened," she said quietly, "in the dungeon of the White Tiger Kingdom."
"Well," he started, "as you know, I'm changing — my mind is before—"
The shape in her arms came apart.
Not painfully. Not dramatically. It simply — unraveled. The harpy form dissolved into the air and what was left standing in front of her was a hare.
Almost the same size as her. Longer ears — much longer — drooping past her waist rather than standing upright, the tips curling slightly downward. Long rainbow hair falling everywhere, white and silver at the root and shifting into every pastel colour along its length, iridescent in the low light. Pink round glasses. A wide grin that was currently trying very hard not to be a laugh and losing.
"Oh man." The hare pressed both fluffy paw-print cuffed hands over her mouth. The small black and white bunny plushie hanging from her hip swayed. "I cannot keep this up." A laugh broke through. "I didn't know you were so gullible — you haven't changed at all—"
"You—" Lenora took one step back. "You were—"
"Hey, cousin." The hare gave a small wave with one enormous paw. "It's been a while."
Lenora's hair moved.
It started at the roots — the brown shifting, warming, edging toward something darker and more dangerous as something old and deep in her bloodline woke up and said you've earned this one.
"Relax." Mimi's voice shifted from laughing to careful in the span of a word. "Lenora. You're being monitored." One long ear twitched toward the shadows in the corner of the room. "You wouldn't use your god technique in here."
Lenora's jaw clenched.
Her hair sat at the edge of changing for a long, precise moment.
Then it settled back to brown.
Mimi reached up and patted her on the head.
"Who's a good girl."
The silence that followed had edges.
"Mimi." Lenora's voice was completely level in the way that meant the opposite of calm. "Why are you here."
Mimi dropped her hand and straightened her hoodie. Her expression had shifted into something that was still smiling but underneath it was paying attention.
"I'm heading to the White Tiger Kingdom," she said. "There's a trial. The gods decided — whoever can beat the monster in the dungeon of the White Tiger Kingdom gets to recruit him. Whether he wants it or not." She tilted her head. "But here's the thing." She grinned. "The wendigo sheep got there first. They've already made their claim."
She fell to the floor.
Not dramatically — genuinely, collapsing sideways in what appeared to be genuine laughter, one long ear flopping over her face, the bunny plushie bouncing against her hip.
"Those beasts—" She wheezed. "Those absolute trash beasts beat us—"
Lenora crossed her arms.
Mimi pulled herself upright. Wiped her eye. Composed herself with the effort of someone who found composure deeply funny.
"One year," she said.
Her voice had changed. Still warm. Still her. But the layer underneath it had settled into something real.
"One year, Lenora." She looked at her — directly, without the grin for just a moment. "And then I'm coming for you."
Before Lenora could respond, Mimi's form blurred.
The rainbow hair. The drooping ears. The paw-print cuffs and the grinning plushie and the long ridiculous ears and all of it—
Gone.
Lenora stood in the middle of the room.
She looked at the space where Mimi had been standing.
She copied him. The thought arrived quietly and sat in her chest with a lot of weight. She copied Harpy Derpy — perfectly — and I had no idea. She knew what he looked like. She knew what he sounded like. She knew exactly what I'd want to hear.
How long has she been watching.
Something moved in her throat. She swallowed it. It came back. She swallowed it again.
It came back a third time and she stopped fighting it.
She flopped face-first onto the bed, buried her face in the pillow, and cried — not elegantly, not quietly, not in the measured way she'd been carrying everything else — just cried, with the full weight of the road and Celica and the empty book and the painting and the songs and the fact that someone who knew things about Derpy that she didn't had just stood in her room and laughed.
She was asleep before the tears stopped.
Her eyes were still swollen when she came downstairs.
She'd done what she could — cold water, deep breath, the particular expression she'd learned at twenty-two that could pass for fine in most lighting. She got dressed. She came down.
Lewd was at the table. Crysha was in the corner. And Mimi was sitting on the counter with her long ears draped over her shoulders like a scarf, helping herself to something from a bowl, rainbow hair spilling everywhere, completely unbothered.
"Lenora," Lewd said carefully, "are you—"
Lenora's hair moved.
It was fast. Faster than it had been in the clearing with Crysha, faster than anything that had come before it — the brown going red before she'd taken her second step, two crimson blades already forming as she crossed the room and Mimi came off the counter in a single backwards leap that cleared the desk entirely.
The table between them took the slash.
The wood split clean.
Lenora stood over it, one blade still extended, chest moving, hair fully crimson, eyes fixed on Mimi with the look of someone who had arrived somewhere they were not willing to step back from.
Mimi looked at the table. Then at the blade. Then at Lenora.
"Seems like you're heading back," she said lightly. "Can't keep your cool, can't stay on the road."
Lenora leveled the blade at her.
"I don't care," she said. "If I have to go back—"
The blade didn't waver.
"—I'm taking your head. Bitch."
Mimi tilted her head.
The amusement on her face was genuine — not mocking, just genuinely delighted by the blade pointed at her throat and the crimson hair and the intent behind both.
"Ohhh." She let out a slow breath, grinning wide. "You think you can actually do that."
Then she changed.
The rainbow hair went first — the silver and pastel streaks swallowed whole by a wave of deep black and vivid, burning crimson that spread from root to tip in less than a second, trailing red fire as it settled. Her eyes shifted, violet bleeding through the irises, half-lidded and glowing and still smiling. The lavender hoodie dissolved into something darker — a black hooded crop jacket trimmed with white fur at the cuffs, gold crescent moons and X-marks running along every seam, the hood up and fitted with a crescent at the brow, her long ears draped back through it with pink bows at their bases. A decorative moon-chain belt circled her waist, midriff exposed above it. Below — red and pink striped thigh-highs, black lace-up boots hung with crescent charms, and at the very bottom, the fluffy white bunny feet that had always been there, unchanged, because some things don't need to change.
The bunny plushie at her hip came apart.
Two dark spheres rose from where it had been — bat-winged, grinning with too many teeth, orbiting her like they'd been waiting for this.
A crimson arrow formed in her hands. Not a bow. Just the arrow — a javelin of pure red light, pulled from the air like she'd stored it somewhere and was finally taking it out.
A dark circle opened beneath her feet, spreading across the floor in slow rotation.
Mimi rolled her neck.
"Bloodfire Hare," she said, almost fondly. "Let's see yours."
Both of them were ready.
Lenora, twin crimson blades, hair fully red, standing over the split table.
Mimi, arrow leveled, dark aura spreading, two orbiting companions moving in slow lazy arcs around her.
The room shrank.
Then something small and fast came through the kitchen doorway at full speed — Mia, in her jester bells and patchwork, planting herself directly in front of Lenora with her arms out and her chin up and the particular expression that meant she had decided this was her problem now.
From the other side, Sphinx stepped in front of Mimi with his paws folded and his jester-ribboned tail still and his eyes simply closed, as though the arrow pointed near his head was of no immediate concern.
The silence that followed lasted about four seconds.
"That," Crysha said, "is enough."
She walked into the space between them without hurrying, without flinching, without acknowledging the crimson aura or the dark circle or the two grinning dark things orbiting Mimi's shoulders.
"You are in a special place." Her voice was level. "You do not know what you would damage if you fight in here. And you do not want to find out." She looked at Mimi first. Then at Lenora. "Put your weapons away. Both of you. Now."
The dark companions circled once and went still.
Mimi lowered the arrow. Didn't dissolve it — just lowered it.
Lenora didn't move.
Crysha turned to face her directly.
"That's eight," she said.
Lenora's grip on the blade tightened.
"When we leave this place," Crysha continued, "we go back. We train. This conversation is not happening again."
"No."
"Lenora—"
"No." She pointed the blade — not at Mimi now, just forward, into the space between them. "She came out of my shadow. She wore his face. She said his voice. She said everything he would have said to me and I—" Her jaw worked. "She knew things she shouldn't know. And she used them. That's not something you walk away from. If going back is the consequence for that then fine. But I'm not going back without—"
The ice came from nowhere.
A single clean slash — not a strike, not a full technique — just enough. It caught her cheek. Cold bloomed against her skin and then crystallized, an ice flower forming along the line of her jaw, delicate and exact and completely deliberate.
Lenora went still.
Crysha looked at her.
"It is not up for debate."
"Lenora."
Lewd moved before anyone could stop her — stepping directly between Crysha and Lenora, not defensively, just placing herself there, in the space between the ice flower and whatever came next.
"If she goes back—" Lewd's voice was quiet. Steady. "Can I come with her?"
Crysha looked at her.
"We both can," Lewd said. "Get stronger together. That's — that's something we both need." She glanced back at Lenora. "And Lenora wouldn't do this. She wouldn't actually— not unless she was really hurt." She looked at Mimi when she said it. Not an accusation. Just a fact, placed in the room where everyone could see it.
The ice flower on Lenora's cheek caught the morning light.
She didn't lower the blade.
But she hadn't raised it either.