Nyxelle had been running for what felt like hours.
Her lungs burned with the specific intensity of someone who has pushed past the point where the body stops being cooperative and started operating on something more stubborn than endurance.
The thick cloth bound around her ears muffled everything the creak of the hull, the distant voices of crew members, the ambient hum of the ship at night but the vibrations still reached her through her skull, a constant low pressure that made it hard to think clearly.
She had covered every corridor in her assigned section. Every door, every junction, every space large enough to hold a person. Nothing.
She stopped on the main deck to breathe.
Someone hit her from behind at speed.
"Hey!" She spun around, annoyance snapping into her voice. "Watch where you're going!"
She looked down.
A child stood before her. A boy young, perhaps eight or nine who had not moved after the collision and showed no sign of intending to. He stood completely still except for his hands, which were clapping. Slowly. Rhythmically. His eyes were a burned, hellish red, and his face carried a wide smile that reached those eyes but contained nothing behind them the smile of someone whose expression had been taken over by something that didn't know how faces were supposed to work.
He kept clapping. He kept smiling. He said nothing.
The cold traveled down Nyxelle's spine before her mind had finished processing what she was seeing. Something was wrong with this child in a way that went beyond illness or injury something had been done to him, or was being done to him, right now, in real time.
Then the melody found her.
It came through the padding as though the padding wasn't there not loud, not even particularly clear, just present, threading through the cloth and the bone and arriving somewhere inside her head that she couldn't locate or defend.
The effect was immediate and total. Her emotions stopped being hers. Happiness and grief and exhaustion and excitement arrived simultaneously from no source, filling every available space, and underneath all of them her facial muscles began, without her instruction, to move toward that same vacant smile.
Her mind threw her backward.
"Don't let the song catch your ears."
Arlienne had said it in the suite, leaning forward slightly, her expression grave in the way it got when she had finished being clever about something and wanted you to understand the part that wasn't clever at all.
"I have a theory that today's concert is directly related to the people who have gone missing during the ship's last four sails."
Seraphyne had her finger resting beneath her chin, her expression shifting through several things without settling. "How are you certain these things are related?"
"Before I decided to board this ship, I tracked the rumors." Arlienne's voice had dropped into the register she used when she was laying out something she had been building toward for a while. "Half the passengers from previous trips vanished. Stranger still, their relatives and friends who were traveling with them never showed concern they simply accepted the disappearances. Under questioning, none of them had clear memories of how their loved ones went missing.
But they all reported one thing in common: the last thing they remembered before their companions were gone was hearing a beautiful song."
She had leaned in then, the storyteller's instinct surfacing beneath the strategist's.
"The crew claimed the passengers hadn't gone missing they had 'departed midway' due to emergencies."
Nyxelle had felt the pieces begin to connect and had said so. "You said this happened four times. That's a lot of people to depart midway. Why is this ship still sailing? Why aren't the crew in prison if they're involved in mass disappearances?"
"Because every Great Noble House is at war," Arlienne had replied, without hesitation. "Shutting down a major vessel in a crisis collapses public transport. The ground is far more dangerous than the sea right now. The victims weren't high-ranking nobles. There's no evidence. And most authorities are too busy managing their own part of the war to care about missing commoners."
Nyxelle had felt the disgust move through her at the clean, systematic way Arlienne laid it out not because Arlienne was wrong, but because the logic was real and the world it described was real and neither of those things made it any less nauseating.
"How did you know all this?" Seraphyne had asked. "We know the Captain is involved in Emerion's disappearance, but could he really pull off a scheme this massive? And are you saying they somehow erase the memories of the surviving passengers?"
"A soldier working for the Dawnveil family lost his children on a recent trip," Arlienne had said. "His friends sympathized with him. But the man acted completely normal afterward careless, even. He wasn't a psychopath; he had loved those children. But after returning from this ship, something in him had changed. He never tried to find them. I dug deeper and found the problem wasn't the man."
She had paused.
"This ship wasn't always what it is. Before the rumors started, it didn't even run on a Leviacore it was a slow, traditional vessel with cheap tickets, the kind nobody important bothered with. It's only recently they shifted to Leviacore operation, which is the only way to attract nobles and wealthy merchants. The previous version of this ship had no value to anyone with money."
Nyxelle had seen it the moment Arlienne finished the sentence. "Without a Leviacore, nobles won't travel it's too slow. Which means the crew used the profit from the missing people to upgrade to a Leviacore-operated ship. So the crew didn't want Emerion or Anathema getting in the way of their operation."
"They benefited by..." Seraphyne had stopped. Her face had changed completely not the sharp focus of someone processing information, but something more visceral. "By selling organs."
Nyxelle had looked at her mother. "Where did that come from? I didn't think they'd profit that way."
"In my field, organ transplants are in extremely high demand," Seraphyne had said, her voice beginning to lose its steadiness. *"Because of the war, Miravale's hospitals are overflowing with injured soldiers. We often need to replace organs damaged beyond healing. They cost a fortune nobles buy them, and sometimes healers buy them for their patients." *She had stopped. Started again. "Recently... I have been able to get high-quality organs at a very cheap price."
She had reached for the bag beside her.
The sound that followed was not something Nyxelle wanted to remember.
Seraphyne had retched until there was nothing left, her whole body working against itself, tears blurring her vision. When she lifted her head her expression was not the expression of a person who had been upset it was the expression of someone who had discovered that something they had dedicated their life to had been built on something they would have died to prevent.
"I became a medic because I thought it was a non-violent way to help. I thought I was giving people a new life." Her voice had cracked. "I didn't know. I didn't know I was using the organs of innocent people."
The sobbing that followed was the kind that comes from somewhere too deep for composure to reach.
Nyxelle had put her hands on her mother's shoulders and held on. "Don't blame yourself, Mother. You did what was right. You didn't know."
"Nyxelle is right, Aunt," Arlienne had said, and for once the calculation had entirely left her voice. "It's not your fault. But you can avenge those innocent lives today and save more people." A pause, and then the steel returned not cold, but deliberate. "Sometimes violence is the only way to defend. Cover your ears. Don't let the song reach your mind."
Seraphyne had lifted her head. What had replaced the grief in her expression was not grief's opposite. It was something colder and more specific and considerably more dangerous.
"None of you," she had said quietly, "will go back alive."
The murderous intent in those four words had surprised both of them. Arlienne had looked at her aunt for a moment with something that might have been reassessment, then raised her fist.
"That's the spirit. Now let's save my brother. No." She had corrected herself, and the correction had felt genuine. "Let's save the ship."
"If we still hear the song," Nyxelle had asked, "what do we do?"
"Honestly, I don't know," Arlienne had admitted. It was one of the few times in the conversation she had said those words. "But ignore it as long as you can. Think of something else. And the moment you feel its influence pinch your tongue or your skin. Pain interrupts the signal."
"Distracting the senses from enjoying the song," Seraphyne had said, her eyes steady again.
"Exactly." Arlienne had summoned her trident. "Let's go."
The memory released her back into the present and the smile was still fighting her face for control.
Nyxelle's mind was a tidal wave every emotion at once, none of them hers, all of them pressing toward that same fixed vacant expression that the child in front of her was wearing. She could feel herself losing ground by degrees.
I don't want to die here, she thought, and the thought was clear and specific and entirely her own, which meant it was still her in there. Not here. Not like this. I have things to do. Poisons to experiment with. Healings to learn. I have not finished yet.
The smile reached her cheekbones.
"Damn it," she managed, forcing her jaw to move against it.
She bit her tongue.
The pain arrived like a door slamming open sharp, immediate, traveling through her entire body in a single wave that hit every nerve simultaneously. She went to her knees. Her hands came up around her face and she held them there, riding it out, the agony displacing everything the song had been building.
The smile collapsed.
The emotions receded.
She scrambled upright, turned to the child, and slapped him across the cheek with everything she had.
The Control Room was a furnace.
Black smoke poured from the jagged hole where the door had been, the fire eating outward along the corridor walls in no particular hurry, the kind of fire that has found good material and intends to use all of it. Arlienne stood at the threshold and watched it and thought.
Behind her, Rui's voice continued its rhythm.
"Ryuuken--Ryuuken, wake up--, Ryuuken--"
"Will you be quiet for a moment?" Arlienne said, keeping her voice controlled. "I am trying to think here. The shouting won't help him. He needs healing. He has lost too much blood."
Silence.
She heard Rui stop. She didn't turn around.
A few seconds passed.
"Can you heal him?" Rui's voice came out differently than it had before the composure stripped from it, leaving something rawer underneath. "Please."
The word sat there. She could hear what it cost him.
"What makes you think I know healing magic?" Arlienne said. She turned and looked down at him. Her eyes were steady and cold and she kept them that way. "And even if I did why would I help you?"
Rui looked at her.
The hope that had been in his face closed over slowly, like a wound deciding not to heal. He pressed his hands against his skull and stared at the floor and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He had known better than to ask a Dawnveil for anything. He had known better and he had asked anyway because Ryuuken was bleeding out on the floor and he had run out of other options.
He had lost Leon nine years ago and done nothing. Had been too weak, had passed out while his friend disappeared into whatever the night had taken him into. Nine years of training every hour of it pointed at never being that helpless again and here he was, on his knees on a burning ship, watching his other friend bleed.
The same distance. The same floor. The same hands that couldn't do anything useful.
Nine years ago, the snow was coming down heavier than usual.
The valley had always been cold, but this was different the kind of cold that came when the season had stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was. Even the places that usually stayed clear were being covered now, the white creeping inward from the edges.
Rui lay in his bed and stared at the window.
Outside, a few survivors were burying the dead in the snow. The bodies they were burying were not whole. Some were missing hands. Some were missing legs. Some had been taken apart in ways that Rui could see from his window and had been trying not to see for a week, his eyes finding them anyway every time he looked outside, the way eyes always find the thing you're trying not to look at.
He hadn't looked for his parents. He couldn't. He knew they had been there that night and he knew what the woman had left behind when she walked away, and he couldn't make himself go and find out which pieces belonged to them. He told himself it was because he didn't want to know.
He knew it was because he was afraid that if he found out he would stop functioning entirely and he wasn't sure he was functioning now.
He hadn't checked on Mui either. He felt the shame of that separately from everything else its own specific weight, sitting on his chest.
The knock at his door surprised him.
He thought it was a neighbor. He got up slowly, the way everything happened slowly now, and crossed the room and opened the door.
Ryuuken stood on the other side.
His face was grave. His eyes were something else entirely a fire that had no business being lit in a valley full of graves.
The punch arrived before Rui finished registering who he was looking at. His head snapped back. He staggered two steps. He stood there with his hand against his face and felt nothing in particular, which was accurate.
"What are you thinking, hiding in your house like a coward?" Ryuuken said, stepping inside without being invited.
"I was thinking like a coward because that's what I am," Rui said. The words came out flat, without self-pity, just factual.
Ryuuken stood in the middle of his room and looked at him. The fire in his eyes didn't go out.
"I don't know why you think that. Iriz never failed a mission in his life and he lost to her. I felt that woman wasn't even using full power. If he didn't stand a chance, we were insects. Iriz and the dead ones are the past. We are the present because we are alive." He paused. "Now stop being an idiot. Let's train to get stronger."
Rui looked at him.
"Is Leon the past as well?" he asked.
The fire in Ryuuken's eyes flickered. He didn't answer immediately. The silence stretched long enough that Rui understood it was a real question that had found a real gap.
"I don't know what happened to him," Ryuuken said finally. "But let's hope for the best. Leon would want us to move forward. Aurelith spared our lives because she thought less of us we can use that. And one day I know we can defeat her."
"I wish that were true." Rui's voice shook slightly. "We don't know what she can do. We don't know her power scale. We don't know her limits. We're giving ourselves false hope."
Ryuuken looked at him.
"So what's wrong with false hope?"
Rui stared at him.
"If false hope helps you stay alive," Ryuuken said, "then what's wrong with it? Defeating someone like Aurelith feels impossible from here. But we have to take a step forward to see how impossible it actually is instead of sitting in this room like a bum."
He punched Rui on the head again. This time Rui made a sound.
"You dumb ass," Rui said. "I'm a fool for even considering it. But I suppose training beats being eaten alive by my own thoughts."
He got up. He dusted off his clothes. He walked to the door.
"Don't forget your savior," Ryuuken said behind him, and laughed. "False hope."
Rui laughed too a small sound, half surprise, half something that needed to be let out.
"If we get stronger," Rui said, stepping outside, "we can give this valley hope again."
He extended his hand into the falling snow. The cold settled into his palm, clean and simple.
"We can protect Mui too," Ryuuken said, stepping out beside him. "He's going to do something horrible to himself if he doesn't get support. We should have checked on him."
"Don't blame yourself for that," Rui said. "You couldn't have helped him if you weren't in your own best form." He paused, looking at the sky. "We're going to be the light of hope for the people here. Even if they laugh at us for it."
"Greatest knights House Corvus has ever seen," Ryuuken said, and raised his fist.
Rui laughed again covering his mouth, the way he did when something surprised him into it.
"Sounds like a promise," he said.
The snow kept falling. Both of them stood in it, fueled by the only thing available to them the determination to be worth something, and the false hope that it would be enough.
Back in the burning corridor, Rui lifted his head from his hands.
He looked at Ryuuken on the floor.
He looked at Arlienne's back, still turned to him, still watching the fire.
He said nothing. He moved to Ryuuken and pressed his hands against the wound and applied what pressure he could, which was not enough, and kept it there anyway, because it was what he had.
The fire continued to eat the walls.
Somewhere above them, the concert played on.