Drip.

Control leads to power.

Drop.

Power without control is chaos.

Drip.

Control must always come first.

Drip.

I am in control.

Something wet fell across Astrid Salvera's brow and slid down the bridge of her nose.

With her eyes closed, Astrid had the absolutely horrid thought that someone was urinating on her face.

Her eyes flung open. Fat drops of rain splattered against her eyelashes and clumped them into blurry shapes. Strange. It never rained in Halorium, the capital mountain of her realm. Snow, sure. Ice, definitely. But rain—She swiped at her damp face and jolted onto her hands and feet to gather her bearings.

Portal, she remembered. Third task! The quill.

The grass beneath her was a vibrant green like the flesh of a lime, a bright color she had never seen amongst the white and frost of Halorium. And it was slippery. Her left palm, which she realized belatedly was crusted in deep blood, sank wrist-deep into the brown sludge that lay in wait underneath the grass.

"Ergh!"

She lost her balance and fell, landing chin-first into the soggy soil.

At least, she hoped it was only mud.

Spluttering bits of grass and dirt from her mouth, Astrid sat back on her heels, head spinning. Most likely from being flung through a portal. She wasn't quite sure she believed Thaddeus Currel's theory about portal sickness and being unconscious any longer. Her stomach rolled in defiance as she sucked down a breath.

What a complete wanker.

The air felt different here. Heavier. With Halorium situated at such a high altitude, the air had felt light, the oxygen thin and somehow easier to inhale. This air felt thick as if the weight of the seven realms pressed down onto the numerous trees, drooping their branches. It felt sticky and green. Astrid scoffed. If the color green were something tangible, she was sure it would feel just like this. Sticky, thick, weighty. Greenery surrounded her, its vibrancy flashing across her pupils, earth's threads shouting at her from all directions. She found herself squinting to block some of it out.

Truth be told, she had never felt so trapped.

All thanks to the bloody green earth, which had never been her favorite of the seven elements to manipulate. Her mud-covered face only justified her opinions on such matters. Belsynen, the land of the Fae, appeared to be a claustrophobic realm, indeed.

Perhaps that explained why their warriors were always so moody.

Looping vines criss-crossed over her head, interconnecting a broad canopy of trees and leaves so thick with moss and branches it was impossible to see the sky through it. For all Astrid knew, it could have been the rise of morning, the descent into evening, or the deepest of nights. Not to mention the trees themselves were ones that Astrid had never even seen. They appeared so different from the thin needled pines of Halorium; these were much taller, their trunks wider, leaves larger than her head in all the possible shades of reds, greens, yellows, and oranges. Some even littered the ground, and when Astrid raised to her feet, she realized the fallen leaves made the earth soft and springy.

Sebastian would probably know all the scientific names of these trees—Bash!

Astrid spun on her toes, eyes wild for him, but they fetched instead upon a knotty trunk of a tree wider than she was tall. It stood just south from where she had laid, a little ways downhill. Its bark was glowing, shimmering, and partly translucent.

The portal.

A woman's outline shone before it, her skin shining almost golden.

"Serah."

The Scribe's name stuck in Astrid's desert-throat, but she wrenched towards the Scribe regardless. Serah held up an immediate hand.

No, the Scribe's gesture said, Wait.

Astrid halted with a foot poised on an exposed root that had seemingly sprung from the ground of its own accord. Bloody wet forest.  When she righted herself, Serah inclined a wrinkled head towards the space at her bare feet. A crumpled form stirred amongst the bed of leaves, limbs twisted in his cloak. Sebastian d'Aximos groaned, the space between his dark eyebrows twitching as he attempted to pull himself into consciousness. Behind him, the lights of the portal started to fade into the mossy brown of the tree's bark.

Serah met Astrid's stare with thin lips. Astrid pursed her own in return. "You are not returning to Halorium, are you?"

The blasted, stubborn Scribe shook her head. Dammit.

Astrid took a step closer. She knew what she was meant to do next. Knew what her mother, Queen Davina, had instructed of her: "Do not let the Scribe stay outside of Rainier's borders."

Serah, the elderly woman who had tutored Astrid with gentility and patience despite the fact that Astrid's mother had mutilated her, imprisoned her, and murdered everything that the Scribes had ever stood for.

"Return her using any means necessary, Astrid. Be who I made you to be."

Two steps forward. Only mere seconds, Astrid estimated, to do it before the portal's glimmer dimmed entirely. Her heart hammered painfully against her sternum. She glanced down at Sebastian whose eyes still fluttered behind closed lids. Carissénas. Promised One.

Salveretta is a farce.

Her left hand flexed, clenched, and flexed again, the space above her elbow free from the cuff. Her blood ran freely here. She turned to Serah again.

"What of Zev?"

Serah bowed her head, placing two somber fingers to her heart and drawing a line over it. Sacrifice, it said, because Davina would surely punish Zev for Serah's defiance. Would torture the aged Scribe worse than maiming his tongue. Astrid stopped her advance when her toes could just brush Sebastian's unconscious ribs. She cocked her head, scanning the rebel woman from over the body of her Carissénas.

"You were Pavel Kyiva's Scribe," she accused in the voice of her mother, Davina's claims coming out as her own truths, "You are responsible for the curse upon my family."

She had always known Serah carried a quiet bravery, a soft dignity that had kept her alive all these years, but when Serah met her challenge without so much as an ounce of remorse or pity, Astrid found herself respecting the woman for it. It was all rather irritating.

Astrid frowned. "Pity," she admitted to no one in particular before she leapt across Sebastian's prone form and slammed into Serah.

The two of them fell into the leaves, Astrid twisting them both away from the portal as it blinked out of existence, dormant once more. With one arm wrapped around the frail woman, Astrid blindly reached for Sebastian's cloak with her other hand and yanked it. Sebastian rolled out from it, his left ankle catching in one of its folds. Astrid pulled it from him harder. If anything, maybe a twisted ankle would help wake him up. She grabbed a fistful of the cloak—the sleeve, she thought—and stuffed it into Serah's mouth. The Scribe's dark eyes dilated to pinpricks but she only blinked at Astrid as she sat back on Serah's legs to keep her in place.

"Why do you trust me?"

When the Scribe only blinked again, Astrid growled before placing a hand over Serah's heart. "Just be still and quiet," she demanded, "the last thing we need are the fae warriors of Avylon showing up because they hear you scream."

Without the confinements of the arulonite in her cuff, Serah's Spirit-threads came to her easily. Perhaps it also had to do with being outside of Rainier in a realm where the elements flowed more freely, unrestrained by her mother's arulonite grasp. Regardless, Astrid was thankful for it as she grabbed onto Serah's Spirit and directed the gleaming thread towards the Scribe's gagged mouth.

Exhilaration rushed to Astrid's head, dizzying her, as the thread twisted and healed. A muffled, pained moan absorbed into Sebastian's cloak, and Astrid held onto Serah, directing the element's work. She felt alive, trembling like a pent-up solar flare, the neurons of her mind sparking and laughing—a shriek disrupted her silent euphoria.

It came from her. "—the Hel?!"

Someone had shoved Astrid in the shoulder, hard, and she fell from Serah, tripping over the woman's legs before she morphed the fall into a sideways somersault. She flipped head over toes and came up on one knee, fists up around her face, twisting to confront her attacker who she immediately felt like pummeling upon spotting his flushed, rain-splattered face.

Fae warrior, her arse.

"Dammit, Sebastian!"

The black curls of his hair stuck damply to his bronze forehead and pale cheeks. He glared at her as if challenging her to say anything about the absurd, boyish look of it.

But when he spoke, it was a hard tone that sounded anything but boyish. "What are you doing?"

Astrid rose to her feet, brushing off the debris from her clothes. Then, she deigned to meet his cold demeanor with one of her own, arms crossed, her own, pale hair now falling about her face as well, all thanks to him and his nonsensical blitz attack. She gestured a dismissive hand out towards the Scribe.

"Why don't you ask her, Seabass?"

Serah stumbled to her thin knees and removed Sebastian's cloak from her mouth. She held it in her arms like it was something precious, lips stained with blood, cheeks gaunt. But her gaze held strong when she looked from Sebastian to Astrid.

"You care for him." The Scribe's words grated against her throat. She took a moment to breathe between each syllable. "That's why I have faith in you."

Well, Astrid wasn't entirely convinced she accepted nor cared for the sound of that excuse.

Even still, Astrid's arms unraveled from her chest where they dangled at her sides rather uselessly until Sebastian said, "You healed her?"

Her hands snapped to her hips. "I am not entirely a monster, Bash."

"That's not what I meant—"

He sighed, ran a hand through his messy hair, and then grew distracted by the green, wet landscape of the fae's leaf-stridden realm. It was rather messy, so Astrid could hardly blame him when his lips tugged into a frown. She was sure his knees shuddered as the tip of his right boot stuck underneath a loose root. He grunted in surprise and flicked his wrist towards the offender as if to flip off Goddess Elayn herself. Astrid smelled the thread first, the scent of soil somehow overwhelming her nostrils despite the moist garden smell of this gods-forsaken realm, before she understood that Sebastian hadn't actually gestured rudely to the earth. No, he had used Earth's element to force the root back into the ground. So effortlessly. Without any apparent thought of it.

Astrid quirked a brow at him, but he only stared at his fingers for a second longer before they began to shake. He held them to his stomach and released a heavy breath. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is confusing, and I..." He looked over at Astrid. "I'm not sure I like portals all that much."

That smallest of grins infiltrated her face. "That makes two of us."

Their camaraderie spoiled too soon when Serah's garbled, abused voice rasped between them. "Earth called to you."

They turned to the Scribe whose eyes were wide and bright in pleased wonder. "You answered its call instinctually," she continued, "You have grown, Carissénas."

Sebastian lowered his gaze back to his fisted hands. "Please do not call me that."

It was no longer only skepticism that drove his words: sorrow? Guilt? Grief? It made Astrid want to reach for him like she had in Lambert's office only hours ago. Though it felt like another world entirely. Instead, she merely smirked and said, "I shall not hesitate to take the credit for him." She grabbed Serah under her armpits and hoisted her light weight back onto its feet. "It was I who taught him of the elements, after all."

Sebastian offered her a thin nod of gratitude, but Serah still watched him with the awe of someone who watched a treasured memory come to life.

Which, in a way, Astrid wondered if that was exactly what it was for Serah right now. She saw her Author: Pavel Kyiva. A thought that was validated when the Scribe said in a soft, reverent way, "You are so like your father."

Sebastian froze as precisely as Halorium's longest, and most gangly icicle. "Pavel." His lips hardly moved. "You were his Scribe."

Astrid startled at that confession and whipped towards him. "How did you know that?"

Bash watched her in turn. "How did you?" His dark brows bunched in a harried bush between his eyes. It was the angriest bush she had ever seen. "I heard you, you know, while I was unconscious. You knew of Pavel even before I showed you his Monverta. How?"

"Davina." It had been Serah who answered. "She imprisoned me because of it. Has been searching for Pavel's rumored child for years."

"Why?" Sebastian's jaw ticked rapidly. "What does the queen want with me?"

Astrid wished she could shut her eyes and ears so she wouldn't have to watch what the truth would do to the bridge she and Sebastian had built these past months. She did not wish to see that bridge be torn and burned before her very eyes, to see the look on his face in the wake of all the soot and smoke. Not yet.

But here it was.

Astrid felt Serah's eyes on her, as if the Scribe were giving her an opportunity to speak first, but Astrid was certain any of her words would be the first embers to burn him, and she couldn't do that. Coward, she heard her mother insult her. Coward.

Better to be a coward than the one who broke him.

So, with a disappointed sigh, Serah delivered the first drop of fuel: "Davina requires your power. She needs you to release her husband, Niklaus Verilibros." Serah allowed that to settle for a moment, which hadn't been too bad, Astrid supposed, all things considered because Sebastian had already known that bit. It was what would follow that would finally shock him into complete and utter hatred that Astrid doubted he could ever see past.

"But you must not," Serah continued, "for it will be your soul for his."

And there it was.

"But we will have the Black Quill," Astrid rushed to appeal. "It voids the soul-transfer—"

"You are not just invoking voixili to free your father, Astrid Salvera," Serah scolded, "you are attempting to break an Eyelesene curse. A curse of Gaia." The Scribe's withered hands shook from the passion of her words. "Sebastian will not be the same afterwards. It will end the Kyiva line and reinstate your own. Your mother knows this even if you claim otherwise."

Astrid swallowed, her tongue too large for her mouth. It took all of her steel to raise her gaze from Sebastian's stomach, to his chest, to his collarbone, and up, up, up. The long, tense muscles of Sebastian's neck strained as if it physically pained him to look at her.

"You never told me," he said.

"I told you it could not be me."

"That is hardly the same, and you know it!"

Forgive me. I am so sorry.

Please.

At least, those were the words Astrid desperately wished to say, but how could she? Was she even truly sorry for the secrets she had kept? Still kept. Because, in the end, Sebastian had learned the truth of who he was. Hadn't that mattered the most to him? Meanwhile, Astrid remained lost amongst the murky darkness without a shred of light cast upon herself, her family, the truth of her capabilities. It was hardly fair. So, she bit her tongue, the sharp tang of blood focusing her nerve, bringing forth her Iced Guard's mask. She swung past Sebastian's hurt brought on by her own betrayal to demand:

"I think it is time you tell me everything you saw in Pavel's memory, Fisherboy." 

_ _ _

We hope you enjoyed this start to their journey towards the Black Quill. Whatever else will they find in the realms outside of Rainier? Tune in next time! Thanks for reading!