RE: Monarch

I had precious little time to think on that, staring down at Shear’s body, as my vision began to swim. My stomach flipped, and suddenly all I wanted to do was sit down. My breath came in tight little shallow pulls that never filled my lungs.

My heartbeat was irregular.

Poison.

I flailed around in the pool to look for the dagger. When I found it, it was obvious that the water had washed away the scent of whatever substance coated it, preventing me from identifying it. With renewed panic, I staggered over to my bag and dumped it open. I didn’t have much in terms of medical supplies, and certainly not a wide suite of anything to stop poison. However I did have basic first aid supplies, including a stick to make a tourniquet.

I yanked my belt off and wrapped it around my shoulder, then hesitated.

Never put a tourniquet on a snake bite. Lillian’s voice. It isolates the venom to one area and makes it much more destructive than if it’s allowed to spread throughout the body. You might lose the use of that limb altogether.

That was true of snakes, yes. But this was poison from an assassin, engineered to kill. I looked down at my missing fingers. It was spreading up my left arm, closest to my heart.

No choice. I had to try and stop the flow. As quickly as possible, I tightened my belt around my arm and screamed. A dull fog of pain began to move in, scrambling my thoughts.

I mentally calculated the distance to Casikas’s apothecary. It was too far. With the way I felt now, I’d never make it in time. The more flourished section of the caves where Casikas and I gathered ingredients from was a quarter mile from here, maybe less. If Guemon was correct, I could find Garrote Cap there fairly easily.

Of course, that in and of itself was a risk. Because if they’d used the same poison on me as they had on Guemon, more garrote cap would simply kill me faster.

It was impossible to know for sure. I simply didn’t know as much about the symptoms of poisons as I did about general palliatives and medicines. It was a risk I had to take. I’d accepted the inevitability of dying, expected it, honestly, but I’d be damned if I let anyone decide it for me. I needed to know why Persephone had tried to kill me. Dying now would scuttle that knowledge, or force me to retrace my steps exactly to obtain it.

On my way out of the cave, I passed a body. An infernal wearing Ralakos’s blue. I remembered what he’d said about having me followed. Apparently, there was truth to that.

It took nearly an hour of searching to find the garrote caps, and in the end, I wasn’t truly sure I’d found them. The smelled right and looked right, but my vision was blurred and I was so disoriented that they could have just as easily been simple toadstools. I grabbed a handful and shoved them into my mouth, the flat and earthy taste unpleasant. Then I laid back and waited, releasing the belt on my arm. My arm, which had swollen significantly and began to throb, vibrated with pins and needles as the feeling slowly returned.

I laid on my back and waited for death. Or life. Whichever came first. My heart began to pump at a normal rhythm, and the nausea in my gut quelled. I found myself breathing a sigh of relief. The poison used on me and the poison used on Guemon was different after all. I took note of the Garrote caps. About half of them had been harvested, but there was still a great number here, more than enough to raise a small fortune. But gold was the least of my worries.

I trekked my way back to the surface caves, where I found Shear dead. He’d turned on his stomach and tried to crawl away, only making it a few feet.

It would be less embarrassing to say that my manner of checking for signs of life—kicking him repeatedly in the face—was only intended to do just that, but the truth was I had a lot of anger with nowhere to put it.

I was tired of being ambushed, and cut open, and having pieces of me sliced off.

Briefly, I considered fishing around in the pool for my missing fingers but discarded the notion. That would take too long, and there was a chance Shear had backup that might look into his disappearance if he took too long to check in.

I took the long way out of the surface caves towards the enclave, just in case any other would-be assassins were lying in wait.

I arrived at Ralakos’s estate, my anger still not fully expended by the exhaustion I felt. I gave him the shortest, most straightforward explanation of what had happened to me. One of Persephone’s men had attacked me at the pools. I killed him, but barely.

It’s amazing what missing fingers does for a person’s credibility. Ralakos barely stopped long enough to ask me how I knew Shear was one of Persephone’s men. A healer worked on my hand while I told my tale, a modified version of what had happened in the previous reset, me scouring the vice districts for an unrelated investigation and coming upon the names of Persephone and several in her employee.

Ralakos sent out several groups of men. One to retrieve Kilvius, a handful to get Shear’s body (and my lost fingers, he insisted), as well as a much larger contingent to accost Persephone herself under the guise of an invitation to Ralakos’s estate. Erdos stood guard over me uncomfortably, his eyes continuously flicking to the door as Ralakos made preparations.

“Something wrong, Captain?” I asked him.

“I should be with my men,” he groused.

I felt a mild pang of sympathy for him. Despite knowing Persephone for a much shorter time than anyone else here, I still wouldn’t have wanted to send men under my command into her spiderweb of a district.

“You don’t think she’ll come quietly?” I asked.

“Depends on if she did it or not.” Erdos’s mouth set grimly.

“If who did what now?” Kilvius approached us, easy-going grin on his face.

“Kilvius.” Erdos nodded in respect.

“Good to see you as always, Erdos.” Kilvius bowed deeply. The fact that they were familiar with each other was news to me. Kilvius’s smile lessened when he spoke to me, the discomfort of our last conversation clouding things.

“How do you know each other?” I asked.

“Erdos here is a regular at Koss night.” Kilvius extended an arm towards the other infernal. “Often the only violet in attendance. Without his donations, I’m sure the whole thing would have fallen apart by now.”

The way Erdos’s lips turned downward spoke to the likelihood these donations were not exactly voluntary. “You’re all a bunch of filthy red cheaters.”

Kilvius didn’t bristle at all. Instead, he extended an arm, and the two men embraced with only minor reluctance on Erdos’s part. Kilvius’s face dipped into a frown as he noticed my bandaged hand and chest.

“What happened to you?” He asked, closing the distance between us instantly, any awkwardness between us quickly and easily cast aside.

“I’m fine now.”

“Your fingers…” Kilvius’s voice was mournful. I felt badly for how I’d treated him earlier, but now wasn’t the time for apologies.

“It’s fine. I have eight more and it’s not my sword hand,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “There’s something else we need to talk about.” I noticed Erdos on the periphery. “Can you leave us for a moment?” I asked him.

Erdos grumbled, but let me know he’d be right outside the door and excused himself. Once he’d left, I turned to Kilvius.

“Persephone tried to kill me.”

Kilvius froze.

I continued. “I know you have some sort of history with her, though I don’t know the details.”

“How could you possibly—“ Kilvius started, then trailed off. “Ah. The visions.”

“Correct. The reason I called for just you, is I have a feeling that discussing that history with Nethtari here would be more than a little uncomfortable for both of you.”

He gave me a flat look. “Very accurate, for a feeling.”

I shrugged.

Kilvius sighed and launched into the story.

He was born an orphan. Crime in the Enclave forty years ago was much worse as the council was largely corrupt, so it was only natural for infernals like him—which I inferred to mean poor with little magic to speak of—to fall in with the wrong crowd. Still, Kilvius took to it more quickly than most. He was a natural born thief and burglar, talented at getting into and out of houses and stores in the wealthier sections of the enclave beyond the crevasse.

The orphans of the enclave had a simple rule, one that was rarely broken. They never stole from each other. This uneasy truce allowed them to cluster together in various hideouts and rooftops—using safety in numbers to mitigate the many horrible things that could happen to an orphan within the bounds of a city as large as the enclave.

There was an exception to this rule, Kilvius noted, his lips thin. Persephone. Her demonic traits were notable even then, though not as pronounced as they once were. She was relentlessly targeted by the other orphans. Over and over, her possessions were stolen from her. Kilvius felt bad for her, but what could he have possibly done?

Still, the fact remained that Persephone was forced to work harder than the other children. Exponentially so. He once watched her steal into a house he’d been casing and clear it out in minutes. Her skills as a thief eclipsed his easily.

As Kilvius grew older, into his early teens, he began to protect Persephone from the other children. His view of right and wrong were warped of course, due to his upbringing, but the way she was targeted bothered him. His efforts isolated him from the other children, and before he knew it, the two of them were a mated pair. Persephone was his first love, and as such, had a talent for fogging his judgement. She used him as both a partner in crime and an enforcer, constantly pushing the boundaries to lay the foundations of what would one day become her empire.

Then his luck ran out. He was caught in the middle of a robbery he had argued against, the theft of a powerful counselor’s magical artifacts, and was looking at an execution.

Then he met Nethtari. She was a new solicitor then, though she worked much in the same capacity she worked now. As a civil servant for those who could not afford one. Nethtari brought him out of the darkness in more ways than one. He had learned to see violets as nothing more than walking meal-tickets, but Nethtari was different from the start.

Persephone never once came to visit him.

There were many attempts to bribe Nethtari, but none of them succeeded. He noted, grimly, that he very much doubted she’d be working the same job to this day if she’d just gone along with what the council had wanted.

Instead of being executed, he was imprisoned for a year. Even Nethtari seemed surprised by the result.

She kept up with him. Eventually, her feelings for him turned into more. They married.

Kilvius saw Persephone about a year after that, randomly, in the market. Though wearing a veil and fine silks, he would have recognized her gait anywhere.

And in her arms was a small, sleeping child.

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