Bailey Thistle was getting intimately familiar with the Inn bed’s sheets, in that special way only a person who refused to get out of bed could.

Okay, she didn’t refuse entirely. But unless she had a damn good reason (changing into less smelly clothing, the occasional meal away from bed), she stayed put. This let her really explore the intricacies of the mattress; every lump, every spot where the stuffing was uneven, she found it all.

She’d laid on the bed in pretty much every way she could think to. Bailey tried laying on her back, on each side, on her stomach (the tits rendered this one untenable), and so and so forth.

This exploration of the bed was a good distraction from all the many many problems that would otherwise crowd her mind.

In the fallout of the party from hell, Bailey had gotten very very angry, and then suddenly all that anger burned out. There was no drive to do anything. It was, honestly, really frightening. Where normally a flame of fury driving her forward would be, there was just an abyss.

It was at least a cozy abyss.

“Come lay down, friend,” it said, “rest a while. Or forever.”

So she hadn’t gotten out of bed in days. Henry and Hannah were out trying to get jobs, Lillian was out preparing her scathing report on the Order, and Bailey laid in bed and tried very hard not to think.

It was on the fourth day after the party of doom that someone knocked on the door and ruined the perfectly good depressive fugue she was in.

“Hey,” said Alice’s voice, “three little birdies told me you haven’t moved your ass in days.”

“I’ve moved plenty. It’s just been restricted to a small area.”

“Okay, that’s just really fucking sad. Can I come in?”

Bailey shrugged, and the sheets over her torso shrugged with her.

“Yeah, sure.”

Alice stepped in, with her hair in the world’s loosest bun, and dark bags under her eyes. Or rather, larger dark bags under her eyes than usual. She looked to be made of some nasty type of wax, and she moved like sleep deprivation’s assistant librarian.

“You don’t look so good,” Bailey said.

“Oh yeah? You don’t look like a million coin yourself there, missy. When’s the last time you left this room?”

“When’s the last time you slept?”

At that, Alice cringed.

“I’ve -- napped. Power napped. Cat naps.”

“Falling asleep for a few seconds,” Bailey said, “does not count as a cat nap.”

Alice opened her mouth, but Bailey cut in, “Nor is it a ‘power nap’. That’s nothing. There’s no word for that because that’s a sign you’re tearing your body asunder by staying up for days at a time.”

The only noise Alice made was a sort of explosion sound with her lips.

“I came to check on you and get your ass out of bed, and you’re getting on my case?”

Both sisters laughed. It started as a pithy thing, the dying croak of joy from two thoroughly depressed nowhere girls, but the laugh grew into a strong and healthy laugh at how fucking sad the whole thing was. Bailey, the girl who wouldn’t get out of bed, and Alice, the girl who hadn’t slept in four days, both crooning a sad song of mirth to an audience of empty seats and crickets.

“Come on, Alice. Sit. If we’re going to be sad sacks you might as well get comfortable.”

“Now there’s an idea.” Alice sat on the bed, close enough to put a hand over Bailey’s arm.

A moment passed, then ten, then thirty-five, then fifty. They were pretty long moments, too. So they were quiet for a good long while.

“So that party took a bad turn,” Alice said.

“Oh, did it? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah! As a matter of fact, it did. It got really weird. A certain person I shan’t name made everything real weird.”

Bailey sat up, but only long enough so she could lay her head on Alice’s arm. Her big sister wrapped her in a hug that could envelop the whole world and still have some space left.

“What is it with us Thistle girls and being so fucked up?” Bailey asked.

“Pfft. It’s part of our charm, I think.”

A fly buzzed around the room, and Alice looked around for it.

“Don’t bother. I’ve tried to kill that thing so many times and it just buzzes off.”

It was true. The one pastime Bailey had taken to was trying to kill that fucking insect, and she had failed every single time. It was a quick little bastard…

“Damn. I guess that’s one point for flies, huh?” Alice said.

“More like ten points, but yes.”

Bailey exhaled.

“I haven’t eaten all day,” she said. “I want breakfast.”

“It’s one in the afternoon.”

“It’s breakfast when I say it is, nerd.”

Alice grinned, “Now you’ve come around to my way of thinking! Come on, I know just the place.”

 

***

 

‘Just the place’ happened to be the same one where Bailey and Henry had discussed getting help with Alice, a whole lifetime ago.

Lillian, Henry, and Hannah were all there, already sitting down.

“You bitch,” Bailey said to Alice, “you set me up.”

At this, Alice rolled her eyes, and took on a deadpan tone.

“Oh no, I’m so vile and awful, I brought my sad sack little sister to her girlfriends and boyfriend who are all worried sick about her so they can have a nice meal together. Truly, the betrayal of the century.”

“Be nice,” Henry said.

“Please,” Lillian put in.

“Or else.” Hannah smacked a fist against her open hand.

Alice inhaled, and nodded.

“Sorry.”

Bailey took a seat next to Lillian, but then came to a horrible realization; there were only four seats. There was no space for Alice!

“Hey, there’s nowhere for Alice to sit.”

“Yeah, because I’m not. My work here is done: you’re out of bed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to--”

Alice fell asleep standing up, for just a second.

“Go to bed,” Bailey said.

“I’ll think about it. Later, nerds. Treat my sister right or I’ll turn you into toads.”

And with that, Alice went out the door. Bailey made a rude gesture in the general direction of the door, in hopes that her sister would get the message through her incredible psychic powers that seemed to come with the ‘big sister’ kit.

When her point was made, she turned to face her duplicitous backstabbing partners. She was out of bed, and it was their fault! That was a crime that demanded recompense.

“That was a dirty trick, getting Alice to get me out of bed.”

“Someone had to do it,” Hannah said.

Fair was fair. There was a point where exploring the topography of a mattress became an unhealthy hobby to keep. Bailey, much to her chagrin, thought that maybe she’d passed that point already. Though the only way to be sure was to go back to bed and see if--

“Bailey, dear, you should eat something,” Lillian said.

Fine. Bailey would have a bite to eat, then she’d go back to bed.

“If it would make you happy,” she said.

“I would be delighted if you ate,” Lillian replied.

If it would make Lillian happy, then damn it, she’d do it. She’d do just about anything to see that shark-toothed smile. Hell, Bailey would even get out of bed and stay out of bed if it so pleased Lillian Stone.

It occurred to Bailey that she was extremely gay.

“So, how have you slept?” Hannah asked.

“I mean, I’ve been resting for four days. How do you think?”

“You toss and turn in bed,” Hannah shot back, “and frequently wake up in cold sweats.”

Bailey’s eyes leveled into flat discs. She had, in fact, zero recollection of this. Sure, she had her fair share of nightmares, but that was fine. Most of her dreams were nightmares, statistically speaking, if she tracked them over the course of her lifetime. Thus, a nightmare or three every night for five nights straight was to be expected.

“Hannah,” Henry said, and gave her a Look.

“Alright, I’ll ease up. Look.. I’m just... worried, alright, Bailey?”

At that, Bailey shrugged.

“Nothing to worry about, but I appreciate the thought.”

All three of her partners made faces; Henry’s was the most obvious. His mouth tended to quirk in odd directions when he was trying to keep his mouth shut, and it was doing so then. Lillian’s was more subtle, but Bailey’s Lillian-ology knowledge was getting better, and told her teeth slammed shut meant ‘oh boy, that’s a whole lot to hear’. And then there was Hannah, whose blank expression quivered.

“Anyways, what’s on the menu?” Bailey said.

Breakfast was nice. It was Bailey’s favorite meal… It was a meal of portent. A good breakfast foretold a good day, and the day’s breakfast was very good indeed.

She finished the whole thing with a bittersweet cup of tea; somewhere between Alice’s unbearable sweet tooth and Bailey’s Other Sister’s inexplicable love of the harshly bitter. It was an herbal concoction, that tea, with some honey.

“So.” Henry cleared his throat, and reached for Bailey’s hand. She took it, and he squeezed.

Bailey waited, while Henry looked to their other two partners. Each of them nodded back.

“The reason for the, ah, subterfuge,” he said, “is that we wanted to offer you a choice.”

“Picking my poison?”

“No, no. See…”

He shut his eyes.

“The last few days have not been good to us. We were so ready for a good party--”

“And it was quite good. Until the end,” Lillian put in.

“Yes. Exactly. But it went bad,” he sighed, “and now. Four days later, we’re all scrambling a little. But the three of us were thinking, we could spend a day with you. No job hunt, no paperwork… just a day for us four.”

Bailey raised an eyebrow.

“Where’s the choice? That’s an obvious yes from me.”

“The choice is whether we spend the day at the inn, stay in and cuddle and do nothing. Or…”

Henry smiled.

“We could spend it out here. In the city. Get dinner, swing by Roxy’s, have a nice walk around town.”

Bailey felt a strange pool of warmth in her cheeks. There was something confounding about the idea of being wanted the way her partners did, wanted for a full day together, wanted just to walk.

“Uh -- wow. Um.”

“Oh, she’s blushing. It’s that easy?”

“Shut up, Han,” Bailey said, through her hands.

Hannah leaned back in her seat and jabbed her fork Bailey-wards.

“And here I thought you were all miss confident seductress. Where’s the girl who told me to ‘shut up and kiss her’?” Hannah said.

Okay, that demanded an answer from Bailey. She breathed in, and removed her hands from her face.

“Oh, so it’s the confident seductress you want. Wait till tonight and I may just oblige that,” Bailey said.

Maybe it was the tone of voice Bailey took on. Maybe it was the cocked eyebrow, or the thin smile. Whatever the case, Hannah, ever the hypocrite, was blushing up a storm, redder than the skies at sunset.

“Oh, she’s blushing. It’s that easy?” Bailey intoned, with a slight mocking lilt.

“You shut your mouth,” Hannah said, “or I’ll shut it for you.”

“Promise?”

Lillian covered her face with her hand, and did her very best not to laugh. It was an A for effort, but not for execution.

“Goodness help me, I’m dating a bunch of horndogs,” Henry sighed.

“You’ve no room to criticize,” Lillian said.

The teasing went on for a good while, exchanged between the four of them, as natural as gravity. After they had another round of tea, they paid their bill and went on their way.

 

***

 

As winter mornings went, it wasn’t so cold.

Okay, it was cold. But it wasn’t that cold. There were different kinds of cold, see.

There was the empty, dry cold, the kind that chilled a person to the bony firmament of their skull. This was the cold that was lonely and painful and sharp.

Or there was the wet, slushy cold. When it was that sort of cold, people fell ill, struck by eternal sniffles. This cold was gross and slimy, the kind that stuck to a person’s clothes and soaked through their skin.

But that day, it was neither of those. It was a pleasant chill. In their wool sweaters and jackets (and Henry’s big cloak), they glided through the air that seemed to say, good morning, glad you’re up and about again.

“So,” Henry said, “you never made that choice we offered.”

“Well, I’m already out. We may as well walk around for a bit. Then I’ll go back to the room.”

“Wonderful!”

The walk took them through the Vines. The place was swallowed up by the Whorling Vines, which instead of dying in the winter merely shriveled and turned grey.

Thankfully, the vines stopped growing in the cold. This left time to reclaim swallowed buildings and repair some of the damages. There was no killing the vines outright, not anymore, but they could be cut back, dug up, and slowed down.

Efforts to do so were in full swing; the four of them passed by work crews in winter clothes and thick gardening gloves snipping, chopping, hacking, and burning away at the plants. Bailey found the burning to be a bit worrying, but she kept that to herself.

She just made sure to be as far away from the burning bits of plant matter as possible. There was always a chance a spark could catch some old wood and…

No. She would not entertain the thought. Bailey squeezed Henry and Lillian’s hands tightly and held her breath until they passed the work crews with fire by.

Somehow, their wander led them to Vines of Nine, the Seamstex shop that Henry had gotten his comfortable cloak from.

“We should poke our heads in,” Bailey said.

“A. I don’t think the four of us will fit in there, it’s so small, and B. Look at the sign on the door,” Hannah replied.

Indeed, there was a sign on the door. It read ‘Closed -- working on commissions for the big party. --R’.

“Big party?” Bailey asked.

Lillian gestured at another piece of paper on the door; it was a poster, more than anything.

“Order of the Platinum anniversary party and fundraiser gala… open to the public,” Bailey read. “Formalwear required.”

Interesting.

Very very interesting.

“We’ve got a destination in mind, Bails. You good to walk more?” Henry said.

“Yeah.” Bailey’s gaze didn’t leave the poster. Something evil and spiteful was germinating inside her, like a whorling vine in a burnt-out hearth.

 

***

 

The destination, as it turned out, was the Church’s ill-fated botanical garden.

Bailey knew it to be a failed vanity project; a sign of the Holy and Sublime’s dominion over the domains of nature, flesh, and fruiting bodies. Unsurprisingly, this backfired spectacularly. It helped, when building a garden, to have a botanist on staff. The Church learned this wisdom the extremely hard way.

The place, in the present, was a great corpse hewn of stone and masonry. It was dominated by a burnt-out greenhouse, though the house wasn’t very green by then. Whorling vines emanated out from it, pulling the place apart with grey-green tendrils of fleshy plants.

“Of all the places to walk, you chose here?” Bailey said.

It was a picked-over carcass of a place, but she had to admit its deathly beauty.

But was it a corpse, or a canvas? The buildings could be shored up, the glass replaced, and the vines uprooted. It would be no small feat, but a failed little vanity project could become the bones of something else. But what was that ‘something else?’

The greenhouse was a mass of rotted wood, with a rounded and domed roof that stood above a cracked stone base. Any and all glass was in ancient pieces… all that expensive material, shaped by skilled hands, in pieces.

The vines were thickest in the greenhouse… The crown root was probably buried somewhere around there. They were beautiful, at times, even as they choked out the ground and killed all other plants in their vicinity.

“Now there’s the Bailey smile I know,” Henry said.

“I’m smiling? Since when?”

“Since we got here,” Lillian put in.

Well, shit. She was smiling.

“I must seem like the weirdest fucking person on the planet,” Bailey said.

“For smiling at a bunch of ruined buildings and dying plants? Yeah, a little. But I like it better when you’re smiling weirdly than laying around,” Hannah replied.

Bailey laughed.

“You’re all a bunch of flatterers, that’s what you are.”

“And don’t you just love it?” Lillian asked.

“Rude.”

Their walk took them out front of the greenhouse, out to a foul-smelling rectangle of a pool. It stretched out before them, with milk-grey water and bits of ice floating in it.

Bailey took it upon herself to throw rocks at it. She would, if pressed, insist she was skipping stones, but she never worked out the technique. So, instead, she just threw rocks at the water, and watched the ripples expand out. There was something satisfying about watching a stone hit the surface and explode out into dozens of circles, radiating out like pale moonlight.

“My parents got married by a lake,” she said, “that’s all I know about their wedding, really. They didn’t talk much about… before. Before everything went to shit.”

She picked up another stone, and threw it overhand. If water had a brain, that pool would have a concussion from the impact.

“They said there was a church by the lake… but it was a ruined one. Fitting. The best thing a Church building can do is crumble.”

There was anger in her words, but it wasn’t the hot flash of anger that drove her to revenge. It was a much older, much more exhausted anger. It was the anger of knowing the Way Things Are had lasted for generations, for hundreds of stupid years, and could damn well do so until the sun burnt itself out with celestial cataracts.

She could see the sun, reflected in the pool. Bailey took up another rock and hucked it straight at the solar reflection’s central eye.

It stared at her, that reflection. It bid her a mocking hello. With its dull glow, the sun glowered down through the mirror of pale water and burned its peculiar flames, and Bailey hated that. There had been enough burning, enough flames, and enough of that mocking gaze. Would she let the celestial bodies above her brand her a freak, an outcast, the spawn of villainy?

She could show them just how freakish she could be. If the Order, kidnappers and murderers all, were Heroes… She could be their Monster. Their Villain.

Her thoughts turned to revenge; at first, a dull sort of thing, but the blade of vengeance grew sharper as each thought honed it.

She had an idea.

A wonderful, horrible idea.

“How would you all feel about going to a party?”

Bailey smiled, and dropped one last stone into the pool. When it made impact, it scattered the sun’s vile reflection, leaving the pond in its beautiful murky state.

It was a bloody thought in her mind; but for the Order, her thoughts were bloody, or nothing worth.

***

 

Someone waiting for her.

Wreckage.

Those were the main things in Bailey’s dream.

She walked a long path that winded up a great mountain, and everywhere she went, there were signs of carnage. Dead bodies piled here and there; some armored, most not. Many were posed in defensive postures, holding a long-broken defensive line.

Bailey walked up the trail, past the smashed barricades and stamped-over defensive mounds. The acrid taste of smoke burned at her tongue, and as she walked past corpses with holes in their necks, she saw pillars of smoke built high into the midday sky.

It was a bright, sunny day. A horrible sort of day to die on.

She came upon a burned husk of a town, on a plateauing part of the mountain.

Burnt-out revenants of houses cooked and a public square sat piled with bodies. Some of them wore armor, patchworks of reinforced cloth and scavenged mail and plate. Most wore no such protection, and what clothes they wore were scorched and torn.

The corpse of an orange-scaled dragon, riddled with ballista bolts, was laid out on the crushed ruins of a public house. The dragon had a weather vane stuck in its neck, a lance of metal with a metal piercing through soft underscales.

A river of hot red blood ran down the drainage ditches dug into the town’s dirt streets; it pooled near the entrance to the place. Bailey stared at the lake of blood and wondered just how many people were mixed into that hideous cocktail.

She went to the poor dead dragon that was draped over the tavern, and stroked their face. It was inadequate as an expression of grief; but she did not know this dragon… did she?

 No. She didn’t. The thought made her head hurt and her ears buzz.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Then she picked up a stray weapon from the remains of the battle, a halberd of some kind, and dragged the thing all the way to the pooling blood. It took some effort, but she managed to jam it in the ground, blade side piercing a hole in the sky.

Then she tore off a piece of her dress, and wrapped it around the pole to make a flag of it. It wasn’t much of a headstone, but it would do. 

It made for a hell of a black flag, waving over a red lake of grief and terror.

Past the town was a great fort; or, perhaps, it used to be great. The stone ramparts  had been knocked over, like a tower of sticks toppled by a rampaging child. Only one defensive feature remained: a great tower that stood vigil over the carnage.

Bailey felt a sense of terror fill her, as a sinking boat took on water, or as a child drowned in a rushing river, but she had to continue. It was a magnetic pull she felt. There was someone waiting for her,

She pulled herself over a fallen defensive wall, up and over the stone brick. The scorch marks on the stone betrayed a war-caster, one of those pyromancer types they hired to break up riots and scare people back into their homes.

Or to burn their homes down. That was also a thing they might do.

The central tower of the fort was big; big enough for the dead town’s whole population to hide in. The door was barred, which Bailey somehow anticipated. She gave it another try, but the great wood door didn’t budge.

That was, until it fell over with a great ‘thud’. It had only held on to the frame out of stubbornness and spite. But spite could only defy tyrant physics for so long, sadly.

Alright.

Bailey caught her breath and moved inside.

The room beyond it was cavernous, a true grand foyer. But the grandness was undercut by the wood defensive structures and boards on all the windows. Thankfully, there were no dead bodies in the room. Unfortunately, there were no living ones, either.

She could almost feel them, the people that should have been there. The last line of defense against an enemy lesser than they feared, but greater than they knew. People who had never picked up a weapon held blades tight, old soldiers who had sworn pacifism stood ready to shed blood once more. They all had stood, in shivering formations, waiting for the end to either swallow them whole or pass them by.

Anything to keep the revolution going for just a few more minutes. They could rebuild, right? They could recover from this attack. This was just a setback.

Bailey felt this so hard it could have been one of her own memories… but what came next was fuzzy, and then after the fuzz, there was a hard cutoff. It was clear, then it was fuzzy, then there was nothing.

Cool.

She went up the curved staircase, careful to not step on the metal spikes deployed every few steps. This was a last ditch effort of a defense if she had ever seen one.

Past the stairs was a hallway, which led to… the administrative heart of the fight. How did she know that? She remembered an office. It was always a mess, filled with all manner of knick knacks…

She found herself opening a door… and beyond it was the very office she recalled.

It was the office to crown all offices. The desk was a cluttered pile of letters and books first and a desk second.

The walls were adorned with art; some paintings, but mostly graphite etchings. In every piece, there were four people gathered. In one, the four of them were dressed in dark finery, posing over a huge couch. In another, they were each completely naked, tangled in each other’s embraces.

Behind the desk was a chair; in the chair sat a woman. Her hair was a deep curling crimson, her eyes were a deep black, and her dress was the color of the deep sea; black and green, to the point of absorbing light.

When Bailey looked at the woman’s face, she saw a strange distorted mirror of her own… the nose was wrong, the lips were a bit off, and the hair part was different… but it was close. Scarily close.

“Have a seat,” the woman said, “this is going to take a while.”

“What is?”

She smiled, but there was no joy in it.

“I’m going to tell you how I failed… and how you might yet succeed.”

“Do I know you?” she asked, even though Bailey knew she knew this woman from someplace. Oh, when was it? Where was it?

The woman smiled. There was evil in that smile, there was mischief, there was revenge. It was a smile that Bailey had worn plenty of times. This strange distorted mirror of her smiled, and though she could not place who this was, she knew this woman.

“Guess who,” she said.