When we open the door to our home, Lady Lillit Sheid strides through in the fullness of her power.

Gone is the softness and the teasing intimacy of when I last laid eyes on her in the audience chamber; gone are the revealing clothes and the flirtatious hunger in her bearing and eyes. It’s all replaced by command, while at the same time she’s still entirely herself. It hits me like a blast of cold water, stiffening every joint of my body and not quite making me take a step backwards, but I do sway despite myself.

“Magelord. Architect. Adventurer.” She nods to each of the three of us in turn as we find ourselves almost milling awkwardly around, not sure how to proceed. After a moment, she nods down towards Vonne, too. “Champion.”

Down towards Vonne takes me aback, and I glance behind me and to my right. It’s two small steps to standing beside where she’s kneeling, head bowed and body shaking, tails insufficiently distinct as to be countable twisting around each other in a frenzy. “Up,” I murmur quietly to her, hand under her armpit. “Up, up, bowing or whatever is one thing but we don’t kneel.”

I have to more or less haul her up, feeling a weird dragging weight as though she’s heavier than she was but no more massive. I maintain eye contact with Lady Sheid the whole time, doing that eyes-on-eyes stare that people seem to find so discomfiting. She doesn’t, or at least doesn’t indicate it if she does, which is expected.

“How…” Vonne’s voice is a whispered gasp. “How can you just…”

“Where I come from, we don’t kneel.” I keep my voice to the same calm, quiet murmur, even as the anger starts to build. Lady Sheid waits as though time isn’t passing, imperturbable. “Not to our caretakers, not to those who hold authority over us, not to the uncountable stars nor the nothingness of the void. Not in their homes, and certainly not in our own, and this is your home too.”

There’s a moment where I’m worried she’s going to argue with me about it, and where I’m worried that I’ll let the anger show if she does. I get that this isn’t about fault and even if it were it’s obviously not Vonne’s fault that Lily came in here wielding her authority like a hammer, but being angry at Lady Sheid isn’t much better than being angry at one of my companions.

One of my companions. It crystallizes in me in that moment, somehow, and at the same time Vonne’s back straightens like a weight is coming off of her.

“Lady Sheid,” I finally say, and nod back at her with a nod that’s just the tiniest bit deeper than her own, or as best as I can manage. “We were given word to expect you.”

“There is a debt,” she says calmly. Her voice isn’t loud, but it rings the room like a bell, tolling out a prophecy of the future encoded into its peals. “We will have an exchange of our stories and a meal; and we will part with no debts between us, and not as enemies.”

“Find yourself then a guest in our home. Lady, Architect, and prisoner too; welcome.” Zidanya smiles at her, and we all start moving more or less together towards the great common space. “Be your fortunes as they are, move they as they may either low or high, let us be in weal and not in woe.”

“Bread and salt.” We’re by the table, and I reach out to the platter. I dip the bread into the salt and break it in two, then break each of those pieces again. I toss the piece underhand at Lily, not that I don’t think she’d be able to catch it if I pitched it as hard as I could, and just as gently toss pieces to my three companions. “Means you’re a guest in my home. Properly it should be a different bread, with egg for more protein, but we work with what we have.”

“Salt and bread. Not a tradition I am unfamiliar with.” Lily’s personality peeks out from under Lady Sheid’s for a moment as she gives a ghost of a smirk, and she eats with every indication of pleasure.

While everyone chews their mouthful of bread, I take the opportunity to look at her with a more critical eye. She’s dressed totally differently from what Zidanya thought she’d be wearing, trading the swirling silks that suggest magic and beguilement and the flirtatious air for tight-fitted cotton pants and a wraparound jacket with sleeves that go just past her elbows. Her gloves end before the first knuckle and leave only a few centimeters of skin between them and her sleeves, and her boots look like a high-fashion variant on heavy work boots. Her body underneath it all is neither muscular nor curvy, existing in a sort of abstract, unremarkable perfection. Sheathed in close-fitting dark blues and deep purples, her skin is a dark reddish-brown, untouched by cosmetics and with its severity neither marred nor softened by even the slightest of imperfections.

Just about everything is different from what we’d expected, but she still used the exact words that Zidanya said she would, so this isn’t a disaster. Yet. And while this sort of… power play is a very different way to get the scene set…

She will speak of a debt, but not from where, or when, or to whom.

“Gavonne, daughter of Vix. They call you the Sed Spark, is it not so?”

“Lady.” Vonne startles at the words, then nods in a short, excited jerk. “It’s an honor. I mean, it’s an honorific, and an honor. I—”

“Is it your desire to remain in Magelord James’s service?” Lily’s voice is cool, almost aloof, and something twists in her expression as she locks eyes with the sed by my side. “Will you take the field in his defense, should he stand and one of his company fall?”

“I… is that a command, Lady?”

“What a good question,” I say with my best attempt at matching her tone, and every eye snaps to me like I’d just done something astonishingly dumb or rude. It doesn’t so much as slow me down. “Lady Sheid, do you command my companions?”

Lily’s eyes break from Vonne to lock with mine. Well, they try to; I’m studying the asymmetric single piece of fabric lining the edge of her jacket’s outer fold, somewhat fascinated by the way it accordions out in tiny folds folded back onto themselves. Something about this amuses her, because she twitches the fold straight, laughing softly.

“It’s called a lapel,” she says.

I blink a few times. “Oh! I’d seen that word written down, but I didn’t know what it referred to. Is a lapel, like, necessarily folded back and forth like that? Is it always a part of the jacket itself, or can it be a frill or an accessory?”

There’s a pause that I can only really describe as trenchant, or wondering if it should be trenchant. Right around when I’m starting to wonder if I’d said something horribly wrong, eyes flickering around to see the blankness on the faces around me and the understated wild glee in Amber’s body language, there’s a sound like rocks gargling themselves and then Lily is laughing and the moment shatters.

“Adam, you are impossible.” Just about every trace of the power she’d been radiating is gone like it was never there, along with the cool aloofness. There’s nothing about her that isn’t mortal, mundane, a woman sitting in a comfortable chair with her head cradled in her hands, laughing. “If I could make another of you, it might break the world.”

“The Spirit tried for thirty years without much luck, on over a thousand iterations.” My voice is dry; see? I, too, can do humor is a mood I had plenty of practice with. “So maybe that’s for the best.”

“I should like to think that I could handle two of you, my lord.” Amber’s voice is low and husky, mostly for comic effect but not entirely, and whatever was left of the previous tension shatters as everyone bursts into snickering, Amber included.

“Well.” Lily recovers first, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Gavonne, girl, my question stands. Both of them.”

“Your Ladyship honors this—” Vonne closes her mouth with a snap at Lily’s raised eyebrow, then sighs. “Yes,” she says simply.

“No.” Five pairs of eyes snap over to me. “Vonne won’t be taking the field with us,” I clarify. “Also, I’m not going to insult anyone here by getting in the way of their, like, statements of identity, but I like the term companions a lot better than in the service of.”

“Your companions have staked out a sacrifice for the crowd,” Lily says severely. “Ze is out of zir league and will be the keystone to your defense. Do you expect Khalal to survive that?”

“No.” My voice sounds flat, even to myself. “You’re right that Khalal will be the lynchpin of our next fight. If ze wanted all the way in I’d have something to say about tricks we could pull and cards I could play to have zir survive it, but as is, I fully expect to go into the grand finals showmatch as four.”

“I can fight! You don’t need to—”

“Vonne.” Her mouth snaps closed with alacrity, though I’m not quite sure why. My tone is level and calm, and I’m being careful not to communicate any anger in my body language. “Two things. Actually, three. First off, you can’t have it both ways; either you’re in my service and I get to tell you that you’re not coming to the fight and you get to say as you will it or whatever, or you’re a companion of mine and then you’re a person, not a resource. Second, believe me, I’m well aware of the logic behind your proposal, that you can safeguard the three of us who can’t come back from death quite as casually; but I absolutely will not expend you, nor have you come to physical or psychological harm, when your aid won’t be needed. This isn’t about me bowing to my fears or your mother’s desires.”

Her tail twitches at that last, the rest of her stock still. “And the third, Adam?”

“Amongst ourselves, we can bicker and fight.” Lily twitches an eyebrow and smirks faintly, and I do my best to ignore it, focusing on the normally-bubbly fox-girl in front of me. “In front of anyone else, we’re a team; we don’t argue with each other or undermine each other.”

“Oh.” I see her take that in like it’s nothing more or less than novel input going into a set of algorithms, and she frowns. “Didn’t Amber…”

“Contribute humor to the situation, maintaining the tone that Adam had set?” Amber lays a hand on Vonne’s shoulder, smiling a little. “Yes. But that was an act of support.”

Vonne lets out a deep, purring sigh, her shoulders collapsing. “I’m gonna have to learn a whole new thing.” She pauses, and suddenly perks up. “Actually, I’m good at that! Okay. I can still help you drill, though, right? Because I wanna show Sara how much better she’s helped me get!”

“Ominous.” Sara’s single, dry word shatters any remaining tension, and eventually the laughter clears to snickering and then companionable silence around the table.

“So.” Lily’s body language visibly, not-so-slowly shifts, almost as though she’s physically gathering herself together.

“So.” My back straightens, and the word comes out in my most neutral voice.

“Magelord James. Companions thereof.” Lady Sheid’s voice has resonance, presence, and command; it sends pleasant shivers down my spine, and they redouble when she smiles. “I hope you are prepared for the exchange we spoke of.”

“Lady Sheid.” I incline my head fractionally, not bothering to look around. If any of my companions isn’t ready, they have however long it takes for their turn to come around to get ready. Five stories, per tradition, told one after another in chronological order. “We are.”

“How much do you know of the fall of the Firstborn, and the Quiet Time?”

I incline my head towards Vonne. “Yon Champion told me of the rebellion of the Sed and the conjuration of the Shieldstorm.”

“Not, then, of the rise of the Gods, or the Goddess?” Lady Sheid studies Vonne, then nods. “I shall endeavor to provide what context my story will require, then; for first, the Firstborn fell, and then began history as mortals count it.

“It was the time known as the Breathing, when the first townships rose on the mountains to dance with the storms, and the first peoples of the plains began to rebuild in the lands left fallow by the war; in those days, those who would become the Druids and Rangers of lost Arcadia had not yet struck out for the islands, and the Temple called upon every child in their eighth year of life.

“And in those times, in a place that would in time become consumed by this Temple, there was a pond.”