Lavender blinked hard. “I’m… still here,” she repeated aloud, like she needed the sound to make it true. Under the water, there was nothing to watch her anymore. No hunger, or fascination. Just calm, cool liquid. The absence should have felt like relief. Instead, it felt like a room after someone has left. Quiet in a way that makes you notice your own heartbeat too clearly.
Brute’s tail flicked once. “Okay, great. We killed the nightmare. Can we go back to the part where we eat food and pretend we’re normal?”
She let out a sound that might’ve been a laugh if her body hadn’t been trembling. “Sure, I’ll just…” taking a step her knees threatened betrayal almost instantly. Zemmal moved without hesitation. The ground shifted, the stone beneath her feet steadied as if it had decided to be kind. Lavender’s balance returned, barely.
Enough, Zemmal told her gently. You widened too far. You are fraying.
Lavender’s jaw tightened. “I’m fine.” Brute sneezed pointedly. She glared at him with the remaining portion of her dignity. “Stop that.”
“I can’t,” he said blandly. “I’m allergic to your lies.”
She opened her mouth to fire back and felt the world begin to fold. Not the landscape, or the sky. The space between moments. The basin’s light dimmed as if someone had cupped a hand over the sun. The air grew too still. Lavender’s scars warmed.
Reibella stepped out of nowhere onto the lakeshore as if she’d taken a casual stroll through reality and found and interesting place to pause. Dark fabric drifted around her feet. Her hair moved like smoke in slow current. Her expression was arranged into something pleasant, like she’d arrived at a dinner party slightly early and was pretending not to notice.
Lavender’s stomach dropped anyway.
Reibella’s gaze flicked over Lavender’s posture, her hands, the hollowed look behind her eyes. Her smile softened. “No screaming,” she observed, sounding genuinely impressed. “You’re becoming so mature.”
Lavender’s voice came out hoarse. “I almost fainted.”
“That counts as screaming in your body’s language!” Reibella said cheerfully.
Brute, who had been staring at the lake as if daring it to misbehave again, turned his head toward Reibella and narrowed his eyes. “You could’ve show up before she did the thread-severing thing.”
Reibella blinked. “And deprive her of character development? Never. Besides, I was. In my way.”
Zemmal inclined his head. Mother.
Reibella waved him off without looking. “Don’t start. I’m in a relatively fragile mood, and I’ll bite someone.”
Lavender dragged a breath into her sore lungs. The air tasted like cold stone and the sorrow of endings. “Why did we have to do that?” Reibella’s eyes slid back to the lake. For a moment, her face went oddly still. Less human, and more aligned with something incomprehensible to Lavender. Then the expression loosened again like a mask settling into place.
“Because that siren was not just a predator,” Reibella said quietly. “It was an anchor.”
Lavender frowned. “An anchor to what?”
Reibella’s smile returned, thin and bright. “To a seam. A weakness in the world’s weaves. A place where reality is already tired.”
Brute muttered, “Love that for us.”
Reibella continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Authority has been looking for stable points to syphon from. Not the loud ones like your forest tantrums, Lavender. The deep ones. Ancient ones. Things that have survived the world being rearranged because they were already part of the rearrangement.”
Lavender’s scars pulsed once in agreement like her body had opinions now. “And the siren…” she started.
“…was sitting on top of one of those points.” Reibella finished. “Singing into it. Feeding into it. Keeping it pliable.”
Zemmal’s eyes sharpened. They were going to use it.
Reibella nodded once. “Yes.”
Lavender felt a cold movement under her skin. “For what?”
Reibella’s gaze finally pinned her. One green, one purple. Familiar and wrong all at once. “For Phase Four,” she said softly. “For the part where they stop pretending control is local.” Brute’s posture stiffened “You said they’re already running it.”
“They are,” Reibella agreed. “In pieces, and prototypes. In polite little facilities where people in uniforms call suffering a procedure. But they need anchors to scale. They need the world to hold still long enough for them to nail it into place. Authority doesn’t just want control of the RCs, but civilization.”
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Lavender felt herself grow tense. “So now they know we’re here.”
Reibella’s smile sharpened at the edges. “They already knew you existed. Now they know you’re inconvenient.”
Brute observed, “We really have a talent for that.”
Reibella stepped closer. “We are not staying here,” she said, tone still light but threaded with something that could not be negotiated. “You are exhausted and vibrating with tension. And I am not in the mood to watch you collapse dramatically into a puddle.”
Lavender’s pride tried to rise. Her legs refused to support it. Reibella made a small motion with her hand, almost dismissive. Like brushing lint off a sleeve, and the world dissolved. The basin vanished. There was no sensation of movement, no rushing air, no vertigo. Just a moment when Lavender’s stomach forgot where it belonged in her body and then rushed to remember. They were standing on black stone again.
Castle air, cool, clean, heavy with rain filled Lavender’s lungs. She swayed. Brute pressed into her side immediately, anchoring her with the blunt insistence of a creature who knew what bodies needed whether she liked it or not. Zemmal was already turning, scanning, instinctively placing himself between Lavender and everything else that could be a threat. Even inside Death’s home.
Reibella watched them with something like fondness. And hunger. Lavender hated that she could see both clearly now. “Welcome back,” Reibella said brightly as if she had not brought them to where they stood. “Try not to bleed on the floor. It’s very hard to get mortality out of obsidian.”
Lavender rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “You just… moved us.”
Reibella’s brows lifted. “Yes. Through reality from one spot to another.”
“That’s…”
“…unnerving,” Reibella supplied, pleased. “Correct.”
Brute muttered, “You’re impossible.” This made Reibella’s smile widen even more. “Thank you!” Lavender forced herself upright. She was still shaking, but she was standing. That counted as a small victory. “What now,” she asked, voice rough.
Reibella’s expression shifted. Became sharper. “Now,” she said, “we talk about Maelin Black.” The name landed like a weight. Lavender had heard it enough times now. Authority whispered in barrens gossip. In the fear behind conversations that cut off too quickly, in the rigid way soldiers spoke when they thought they were alone. Black. Director Black. The one who didn’t have to raise her voice because nobody was dumb enough to not take her seriously.
Zemmal flicked his tail back and forth in a controlled rhythmic pattern. She is the axis.
Brute’s ears went back. “I was hoping we could talk about literally anything else.”
Reibella’s gaze slid to him. “No.”
Brute sighed like someone who had been sentenced to a lecture. “Fine.”
Lavender folded her arms tightly over her ribs. It wasn’t warmth she was seeking to keep in. It was herself. “You said you’d start telling me things,” she said. “Not skimming the surface and letting me drown in inference.”
Reibella blinked, then looked faintly offended. “I have been extremely generous with information.”
“You’ve been extremely generous with vibes,” Lavender shot back. Brute made a sound that might’ve been a laugh. Reibella’s attention snapped to him. “Don’t start.” He sneezed, unrepentant.
Lavender held Reibella’s stare. “So, who is General Black in all this? Why do you name her?” For a moment, Reibella didn’t answer. Then, she walked toward the long table in the center of the hall. The cracked teapot mended with gold sat there like an insult and an offering at once. Reibella touched the pot gently, almost absent mindedly.
“Black,” she said at last, “is a human who took the world’s terror and decided the solution was to become the thing everyone feared.”
Lavender’s brow furrowed. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is,” Reibella said with light annoyance. “It’s just not a satisfying one. Humans always want tidy origins. They want a single trauma they can point to and say ‘aha, that’s where you went wrong’.” She glanced at Lavender. “It makes them feel safer.”
Lavender’s stomach tightened. “And the real origin?”
Reibella’s smile thinned. “The real origin is that she is intelligent enough to see the tapestry and arrogant enough to think she can reweave it without consequence.” Zemmal’s voice pressed in, heavy. She hears the thread?
Reibella nodded once, eyes on the teapot. “Yes.”
Lavender’s scars warmed faintly. Reibella continued, voice soft yet full of edges. “Authority likes to pretend it is a system. Doctrine. Necessary structure born from chaos. It’s also a cult. And every cult has a prophet. Brute’s voice came flat. “Black.”
Reibella looked toward him. “In a way, you could say that. This is not a religion. That would require humility of some sort.” She lifted one hand, and the air above the table shimmered. A map formed. Not just geography, but layers of resonance. Lines that weren’t rivers or roads but pressure points in the world’s weave.
Lavender’s stomach dropped as she recognized the shape of RC3, rigid, square, its edges precise against a landscape that never wanted to be controlled. Red points pulsed within it like infections. “They call it Phase Four,” Reibella said. “You’ve heard them whisper it, you’ve felt the edges of it.” Lavender’s mind flashed back: the way the forest had listened when Authority equipment entered it. The way sensors stuttered and died. How the world itself seemed irritated. Reibella’s finger drifted over RC3. “Phase one was identification, classification, labels behind the ears.” She made a face. “Humans love labels. It lets them pretend they understand what they’re afraid of.”
Her finger continued to move outward, tracing the past into focus in front of them. “Phase two was containment. Implants, camps, conditioning. Making magic users into tools instead of people. Phase three was expansion; testing weapons on dragons, probing seams, and finding thresholds. You met the consequences of Phase Three on your way to me.”
Lavender’s jaw clenched. “And Phase Four?”
Reibella’s finger hovered over a pulsing knot in the map. “Phase Four is scaling. It is the moment they stop using magic users as soldiers or experiments and start using them as infrastructure. They are building a weapon, and this time it will not be a bomb. Before you bother to ask me, yes, it is much worse than the Nuclear Winter.”
Brute’s voice came low. “You said they want to pull the thread out.”
Reibella shook her head slowly. “They are doing more than that. They are building a loom.” She gestured and the map shifted. A new image formed: a cavernous chamber rendered in cold light. Metal scaffolding, large concentric rings. A spine of machinery that looked like someone had tried to build a nest out of gnarled bark and leather. At the center, a hollow space like an open wound.
Lavender’s scars flared with head, and she hissed through her teeth. Zemmal’s voice was tight. They are forcing resonance. Reibella’s expression was almost apologetic. “Yes. Magic users. Hundreds at first, then thousands. Linked as nodes to the greater machine.” Lavender felt the burn of bile begin to rise in her throat. She did all she could to stamp the feeling back down and gather herself. “If that’s how they want to play this,” Lavender managed to spit out in her disgust, “then it’s time we met them at the front lines of this fight. Tell me more. Tell me everything.”
Thank you for reading my story. I spent a long time working on it and am glad I get to share it with others. Not your speed though? Check out another cool author below to give a try!
Sci-fi ? Telepathy ? Psychics
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- Straight & queer romances. (No harem.)