Sofie ran down the street in a near panic, her and Pari’s packs bouncing awkwardly against her back with every step. She’d lost sight of the squirrelly child over a block ago, and now she had no idea where to look. This street looked the same as all the rest: a row of nondescript buildings on both sides, with several alley openings periodically present along the way. Just a few people were still out in the glow of the crystal street lamp, most of them busy on their way somewhere. Four people ahead of her on the right were in the middle of disassembling some sort of stall.

Pausing her chase for a moment, Sofie strained her ears, trying her best to hear some sort of sign to help her re-locate her adopted sister. Instead, all she could hear was her own panting, the sound of items being placed in a cart, and clicks... lots of metallic clicks. Sofie wasn’t entirely sure what the sounds were, but they were coming from every direction and getting louder.

The people loading the stall into the cart noticed the clicks just a moment later. An uneasy feeling sprouted inside Sofie as she observed them quickly go from tiredly doing a mundane task to a state of utter terror within seconds. Almost as one, they dropped everything they were holding and ran as fast as they could, leaving the half-disassembled cart behind.

That was when the first robot came careening around the corner, all the way down at the end of the street. A second one followed right behind. With trepidation, Sofie turned around to find two more barreling down at her from the opposite direction, just scant meters away from running her over. With a reaction speed that the old Sofie would never have managed, she let go of the packs slung over her shoulder and flung herself to the side. The move came not a moment too soon, as the massive metal machine, moving at a speed comparable to an automobile, sped through the space she’d just occupied.

Scrambling back towards her discarded supplies—which, thankfully, hadn’t been crushed by any large robot legs just now—she hefted them back up over her shoulders and peered about. More robots were converging on a building down the road, several even moving across the roofs of the stone buildings as they made a beeline towards their destination. Sofie shuddered as she watched the damage they inflicted on the stone. To think that she’d almost taken one of them head on...

But what if Pari was taking them head on? The thought sent her mind spiraling down an anxiety vortex. What if Pari was in that building down the way? What if she was currently under siege, or hurt, or even bleeding out or-

“Friend?!” a familiar child’s voice called out from somewhere nearby. “Friend, wait!”

“Pari!? Pari, where are you?!” Sofie called out as her worry transmogrified into a combination of relief and irritation. A surprised “ah!” rewarded her. Sofie’s aggravation rose. What was she doing in there?! There were giant robots rampaging through the area and she was gallivanting around in some alley on her own in a city she didn’t know? It looked like Sofie would have to give the child a stern talking to. “Pari, you get out here this instant!”

Walking over to the alley nearest where Pari seemed to be hiding, Sofie waited with her hands on her hips for the youngster to appear. “Pari! Don’t make me come in th-” A small, cloaked figure emerged from the darkness. Sofie marched towards her companion, filled with motherly disapproval. “Pari, you can’t just go running around like-”

The scolding died in Sofie’s throat as she got her first good look at the child’s tear-filled eyes and quivering lips. Alarms immediately began to blare inside her head as she realized that the dreaded, worst-case scenario was upon her: her beloved angel was about to cry.

“Sweetie, come here!” she quickly said while scooping the child into a comforting hug. “Tell Sofie-sis what’s wrong.”

“F-frien... person ran away,” Pari sniffed, her voice trembling with pent-up emotion. “Pari saved person like Sofie-sis but p-person r-r-ran a-aw-w-w”

Oh no. Sofie could tell that if she let the beastgirl get even one more word out it would be too late to stop the tears, so she interrupted with the first thing she could think of. “Did you ask them to be friends?” she asked hurriedly.

“U-uh huh,” Pari sobbed.

“And, umm...”

Crap. Sofie had hoped that maybe Pari had gotten a tad too excited and perhaps forgotten to actually communicate some desire for friendship. Now she didn’t have anywhere else to go! She wracked her mind for something to say, something that would stave off disaster for even another minute.

“...did they... uh...”

She couldn’t do it! Her mind was drawing a complete blank! Well, almost a complete blank: she’d come up with a single response, but it was so stupid that she didn’t dare say it! Yet what other option was there? She was out of time! She had to say something! Sofie cursed her own ineptitude and said the stupidest idea to ever cross her mind.

“...did they say no?”

“N-no? Person didn’t...” replied a confused Pari.

Sofie had never believed more in the existence of a god than just now. She’d weathered many a storm since arriving in Scyria. She’d been stabbed, hunted, and nearly killed multiple times. She’d been starved and abused and chained to dungeon walls the continent over. But nothing had ever hurt Sofie like listening to her sister’s anguished cries on that fateful day when they’d first met. She’d rather be stabbed a hundred times than see that weeping face ever again. And so, Sofie did what she had to do. She put on her most sisterly smile and lied through her fucking teeth.

“That means that they’re your friend then! If they didn’t want to be your friend, they would have told you no, wouldn’t they?”

Pari looked up at her with hope in her eye so sweet and pure that Sofie nearly contracted diabetes. “R-really? P-Pari has a friend?”

“Of course! I’m sure they just had to, uh, go somewhere... or something. I’m sure that your new friend will come back and see you later, alright? That’s what friends do, after all.”

“Pari has a friend!”

The look of joy that suddenly appeared on the child’s face was enough to melt even the most crotchety being’s heart, but Sofie couldn’t help but feel a deepening dread. She’d just dug herself a hole so deep she couldn’t even see the sky. Now, when the truth came out, not only would Pari be devastated, she’d also lose trust in her!

Sofie sighed. What was done was done. At least now, maybe she’d be able to think of some way out of the mess she’d just created. She handed Pari her sack and took her hand, leading her back towards the station. “So tell me about this fr-”

Sofie never finished her sentence, as suddenly the robots down the street filled the air with the sounds of gunshots and screams.

*     *     *

”How exactly have you stayed alive for so long when you can’t even follow simple directions?” a quite irate Jerithim asked when the pair returned to their meeting place. “I believe all you needed to do was stay put, but apparently that was too much for you to handle?”

“Sorry,” Sofie mumbled glumly.

“Did something happen?” he inquired, noticing her sullen demeanor. “Do you know what those sounds were?”

“...I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, whatever,” Jerithim said, pivoting topics. “I found a place, so let’s go. I don’t like how quiet it’s gotten around here.”

The “place” turned out to be a small seemingly-abandoned shack tucked away from the main roads. It would do for the moment, she agreed—not too big, out of the way, and empty. Pari curled up by her side and fell asleep almost immediately, while Jerithim slept how he always slept: lightly, with his weapons in his hands. Sofie, however, remained wide awake, lost in her thoughts.

There had been people in that building back there, “had” being the operative word. Sofie didn’t know who those people were, or what they might have done, but she knew that nobody deserved what had happened to them. She could still see the look on the one woman’s face as she’d charged out of the building, only to be turned into swiss cheese before she’d even taken three steps. It hadn’t been a fight, it hadn’t even been a massacre. It had been an execution.

She’d seen things like this before. Not in real life, but in textbooks and documentaries. This sort of thing happened in third world countries, the ones run by despots who ruled by fear, intimidation, and violence.

Was Otharia a country like that? Was Lord Ferros, the Earthling, the man like her, the person who she’d placed more hope than she rightfully should... was he a monster? This fear, and the uncertainty that it created, had been growing in her ever since her arrival in this nation. But witnessing this atrocity had turned it from a nagging worry to something she couldn’t ignore no matter how much she wanted to. The problem was, what was she going to do about it?

She didn’t know. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t find a solution. She didn’t have an army, or powers, or fighting skills, or really anything else that might help fix this. All she had were her presence and her words. She didn’t even know what she would say if she met the man living in that domineering metal monstrosity standing in the center of the city.

With a sigh of resignation, Sofie laid down beside Pari and gave her a soft hug, eliciting an unconscious purr from the adorable tyke. Since she didn’t know what to do, Sofie decided to just go with her heart and do whatever felt right at the time. Whatever that would be, she’d find out tomorrow.

*     *     *

After so many months without a proper toilet, having one readily available whenever she needed it made Sofie feel like a deaf person hearing music for the first time. As she slumped back against the toilet and did her dirty business, she pondered the existence of these public installations. It seemed that her Earth cohort didn’t like the way everything smelled so much that he’d put them seemingly everywhere. Not that Sofie minded. Wroetin’s many faults aside, she couldn’t deny that it smelled orders of magnitude better than pretty much any other city she’d visited since her arrival on Scyria.

Still, to create such a system must have been a tremendous undertaking. The restroom contained a working sink and toilet, meaning that there had to be water pipes hooked up to it. What’s more, the poop had to go somewhere, which meant sewers as well. Sofie doubted that Wroetin had fully working sewers before this, which meant that Lord Ferros had probably created those as well. Given the ease with which those giant worm robots dug through the earth, she could see how he was able to accomplish it. Actually, on second thought, that was likely the cause of the rumblings back up in Nont: sewer creation. It made sense that he’d want to apply his system to the entire country. After all, unlike the trains, it seemed that the Otharians actually were willing to use these installations.

Pulling the cord hanging from the ceiling, Sofie listened to the familiar sound of a toilet flushing—a sound she found strangely soothing—before letting out a surprised “eep!” as a hidden bidet kicked in and squirted her rear with surprising force. On second thought, she should have seen it coming, as there was no toilet paper or anything similar anywhere to be found.

Sofie pulled up her pants and turned on the faucet. Speaking of things missing, where was the soap? There was a little shelf sticking out of the wall that clearly was meant to hold some sort of soap, but the shelf was empty. Grumbling to herself, she exited the stall, refreshed and ready to go. Except... now her hands felt dirty and gross.

She knew it made no sense. She knew that her hands were pretty clean, relative to how dirty they’d been most of the last year, but something about being in an actual toilet stall had re-heightened her declined standards. And, she justified to herself, she wanted to appear as clean and respectable as possible when meeting this Lord Ferros. First impressions were important! So she insisted to the others that they go find another stall where she could wash her hands. It wasn’t until after the next three stalls were all also missing soap that she gave up.

*     *     *

“What is it?” Jerithim wondered as he stared at the crystalline panel embedded in the metal before them. The group stood next to a large gate in the side of the fortress’s outer wall. In front of them looked to be a door, though there were no knobs or handles to be found. All that they could see to work with was a smooth dark panel beside the maybe-door.

“Maybe it’s a magnetic lock?” Sofie mused. “Or a handprint scanner?”

“Handprints? What?” the elf replied.

“It scans the patterns on your hand to see who you are,” Sofie explained.

“You can tell who people are by their hands?” the spy wondered with concern.

“Yeah, it’s all about the little grooves and stuff. You just put your hand on here like this-” She placed her palm onto the panel with her fingers splayed out. “-and if you’re in the system then you get to-”

Brrzt.

A negative buzzing tone sounded from somewhere behind the panel, causing her to jump in surprise. “Wow, it actually is a handprint scanner. So... crud, that means we can’t get in this way, can we.”

Brrzt! “Hehehe.”

“All the gates are completely shut,” the elf remarked. “There are no guards, and I have not seen a single being enter or leave this place all day. It seems that this friend of yours does not wish to be bothered.”

BRRZT! “Hehehehe.”

“Well, too bad for him,” Sofie stated flatly. She hadn’t come all this way to let some damn walls stop her, no matter how technologically impressive they might be. But what other ways inside were there? The walls were quite high, but with Jerithim’s grappling-hook-y device they’d potentially be able to scale them. Yet Sofie was sure that nobody who was smart enough to make all the technological marvels she’d seen so far would design a security system that could be circumvented by just climbing over it.

As if to confirm her thoughts, Sofie spotted a glimpse of a robot making its way along the wall. Yeah, they’d probably be shot as soon as they got even two steps into the place that way. But if going in from the side and above were out, that only left...

BRRZTBRRZTBRRZT! “Hehehehehehehehe.”

“Pari! Stop doing tha...” an exasperated Sofie began just as a previously unseen panel opened up above the scanner. A robotic arm with a long, thin pipe on the end emerged, the pipe looking to Sofie suspiciously like the barrel of a gun. The arm turned and twisted so that the end of the pipe pointed down at them. “Run!”

The three of them hightailed it away from the wall as fast as they could, ducking into an alley and out of sight of the wall as soon as possible. Seemingly satisfied, the arm folded back into its compartment and the panel closed.

“Well, seems ringing the doorbell over and over until he answers the door is a bad idea,” Sofie observed. As she stared out at the city, away from the fortress, her eyes fell on the public restrooms installed along the main road that led out of the city. They’d been erected at set intervals, almost like kilometer markers along a straight stretch of road, all the way from the edge of the city to the fortress. And if the toilets led to the fortress in a straight line, then maybe...

Another one of Sofie’s patented ‘terrible’ ideas began to form in her mind. “Hey Pari,” she inquired, “do you still have that acid that Arlette and I wouldn’t let you experiment with?”

*     *     *

Sofie stared at the ronutepo corpse and tried not to barf. The toad-like creature, with its misshapen face and mouth and its pockmarked skin, was disgusting enough to look at while alive, but now that it was dead it not only looked gross but smelled putrid as well. If the gasses leaking from its open maw were anything to go by, the thing subsisted entirely on a diet of rotten eggs and spoiled milk.

The Stragmans had arrived shortly after they’d managed to somehow kill the giant beast, and were now standing around the body, chatting with Arlette, Jaquet, and Basilli. They didn’t seem too interested in talking to Sofie and Pari, so that left the two of them with nothing to do until the group was ready to reconvene outside the caves. At least, that’s what Sofie had thought until she noticed the little troublemaker peering into the beast’s gaping mouth with a disconcerting level of interest.

“Pari, what are-”

Seemingly without fear of the sharp teeth or deadly acid, the girl hopped inside the ronutepo’s maw and began rolling around in the slimy, sticky mucus found inside, giggling all the while.

“Pari!” Sofie shrieked as the sight nearly gave her a heart attack. “What are you doing? Get out of there!”

“Pari is getting ingredients!” the little catgirl chirped, as if fooling around inside the mouth of an oversized animal that spat acid was the most normal thing in the world. Now entirely covered in the slime, Pari pulled out a knife from beneath her ratty cloak. The sharp implement looked to be made not of metal but of bone, or perhaps a large tooth or claw. Regardless of its source, the implement proved incredibly sharp, as the small child began stabbing and slicing away at a section of the creature’s mouth with relative ease.

“Calm down, she won’t be hurt as long as she’s covered with mucus,” a nearby Stragman man said to the fretting Sofie. “That’s how it keeps the acid from eating away at it from the inside.”

Looking around, Sofie realized that multiple people had witnessed the child enter the beast’s maw but nobody else seemed too concerned about it.

“Hmm, she really knows her stuff,” the Stragman commented as Pari continued to slice away at the flesh. “She’s digging right where their acid sac is found. Normally only a master carver dares to take out one of those. I wonder who taught her that.”

“Do your people use the acid for things?” Sofie wondered.

“Not usually. It’s nearly impossible to store, or so I’ve been told. Eats away at almost any container you try to put it in and dries up quickly.”

Pari put her knife away and dug her hands into the meat before pulling out a giant gland almost a third of her size. Carefully avoiding the teeth, she waddled out of the mouth and over to her sack. Placing the organ down for a moment, she rooted in her sack and pulled out a large ball of soft wax. Sofie knew that sphere—it was the source of all the wax Pari used to make her candles and store her ingredients. Like everything else, the child claimed she’d gotten the wax from “grandfather”, and Sofie wasn’t sure what Pari was going to do when the wax supply ran out.

Humming a happy tune, the beastkin pulled off a generous portion of the wax ball and reshaped it into something halfway between a bowl and a cup. Then with practiced efficiency, she poked a hole in one side of the acid sac and began to pour a thick, viscous liquid into the wax container. Once the organ was empty, she closed the opening at the top and sealed the wax shut with a small flame.

Sofie didn’t feel too confident about Pari lugging about a ball of wax with deadly acid inside it everywhere she went, but the ease with which the girl harvested the “ingredient” and stored it, along with the Stragman’s comments, gave Sofie the impression that Pari knew what she was doing so she said nothing. She could always bring it up with Arlette and if they thought it was too dangerous they could confiscate it later. Besides, was it really any different than whatever else the child had in there? This was a kid who made explosives for fun, after all.

Her task complete, Pari stood triumphantly back up and turned to Sofie with a proud smile on her face. Putting her arms out, she closed in for a loving embrace, only to stop in confusion as Sofie instinctively avoided the slime-covered tyke.

“Pari, go clean yourself off first, okay?” Sofie said, taking a step back.

Puzzled, Pari reached out again, pausing to watch as Sofie contorted herself out of the way.

“Pari, stop,” Sofie insisted. An ominous dread grew inside her as she watched the child realize what was going on. Pari’s adorable face split into a wide, mischievous grin.

“Pari, no.”

“Heh.”

“Pari, I’m warning you...” Sofie chided as she took another step back.

“Heheheh.” Pari stepped closer.

“Don’t you dare-”

“Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe-”

“NO! PARI! STAY AWAY!” Sofie cried, but she could see in the scamp’s eyes that it was too late for reason at this point. So instead she turned and ran, a giggling, mucus-covered child hot on her heels.

*     *     *

Sofie had never been in a sewer before, and she had to admit it wasn’t entirely what she’d expected. She’d seen depictions in movies and television shows, of course, which had led her to expect a certain level of grossness which the Wroetin sewers did not reach. The tunnels were actually... well, they were still gross, just not that gross. A large stream of refuse-laden water slowly flowed down the center of the large tunnels that made up the arteries of the system, the foul liquid imbuing the sewers with the putrid stench that Sofie had expected. Luckily, there were thin but relatively dry paths on either side where they could travel without stepping in the water itself.

The newness of the system surely played a huge factor in making the sewer experience more palatable for her. There just hadn’t been enough time for the tunnels to become inhospitably disgusting yet. Also, unlike the places she’d seen on television, every single surface here seemed to be coated with the same shiny, gray metal that made up all the other technology Lord Ferros made. Sofie wondered where all the metal came from. There sure seemed to be a lot of it to go around.

“Twenty-two...” Sofie counted aloud. After entering the sewers through a grate outside the city, the trio had found their way to the large tunnel that ran beneath one of the city’s main roads, the roads that went all the way from the wall to the fortress. From there, she’d begun to count the small openings in the top of the tunnel as they went. As she’d expected, a certain distinct set of openings could be found at the top of the tunnel, each placed at the same interval as the toilets up above. She’d already counted the number of stalls on this street, coming up with a total of...

“Twenty-three!” Sofie declared triumphantly. “We have arrived! Look, the pattern of openings stops here. That means we’ve reached the fortress. And the tunnel still goes straight, see? I told you this would work.”

Jerithim simply let out a resigned sigh. “We still don’t know that it will work.”

“Sure we do. The hardest parts were the candle and this. The rest will be easy.”

“Are you sure your... candle thing can eat away at so much metal?”

“You saw how little was needed to work through the grate at the entrance, didn’t you?” Sofie reminded him. “There was a lot more where that came from, and we’re about to use it all. Unless there’s ten solid meters of metal right above us, we should get through... I think. It’s not like we’ve ever tried this before. So no, I’m not sure. But we’re going to find out!”

She smiled as the elf sighed again and rolled his eyes.

A little further down the tunnel, they came upon some new features sticking out from the ceiling every so often: hexagonal protrusions the width of her head, each with an iris-shaped hatch in the center. Sofie scoffed at the sight. This man was so paranoid that he even had gates for his poop chutes.

“This is probably the best spot, right in the middle,” Sofie stated, stopping beneath one of them. “Pari, place the candle here please.”

“Okay!” Pari chirped as she set down her sack and pulled out the largest candle Sofie had ever seen her make. The long, thin cylinder stood nearly forty centimeters tall with a diameter of perhaps eight centimeters. Pari had used almost all of her remaining wax stash to create this thing, which made Sofie feel quite guilty. They would have to find a replacement soon. Sofie didn’t want to think of what would happen if Pari couldn’t relieve her boredom through experiments anymore. She’d probably burn down a whole city or something.

The two of them backed away a good fifteen meters, making sure to take the direction of the airflow into account and moving upwind. Pari lit the wick before turning and running back to join them. For a moment nothing happened, but just as Sofie began to wonder if the candle was a dud, the candle began to spew forth acid like a spray can spraying paint straight up towards the ceiling. The ronutepo acid began to eat away at the metal as Sofie had hoped, quickly opening a hole that grew with startling speed. Together, the three of them watched as the hole widened and widened while the candle sprayed acid upwards harder and harder, all as a dark metallic liquid rained down onto the walkway below. Perhaps a minute and a half later, the show came to an anticlimactic end as the candle sputtered out and went silent once more.

After giving it another few minutes, Sofie carefully approached the area. An acrid smell powerful enough to overwhelm the sewers’ ambient aroma filled her nostrils, making her cough as she covered her nose and mouth with some extra fabric. The area around the candle was covered in pockmarks from the stray drops of ronutepo acid that had fallen to the ground, as well as puddles of dark metallic residue—an apparent byproduct of the reaction—that were slowly draining into the stream in the center of the tunnel. After dipping a small piece of cloth into the closest puddle and seeing no reaction, Sofie decided it was harmless enough. She stepped forward, kicked the remains of the candle into the water, and looked up. A victorious grin grew on her face as she gazed through the hole and saw a ceiling on the other end... one that had partially melted away as well. The tunnel was more than a meter wide, more than enough for her and Pari to squeeze through.

“Huh, that’s some dangerous stuff,” the elf remarked as he joined her. “You just had that lying around this whole time?”

“Honestly, the only reason I didn’t make her get rid of it was I forgot she had it in the first place,” Sofie admitted as he handed her a rope. Quickly she began tying her supplies to her back so she’d have both hands free to climb. “Glad I didn’t, though.”

“Pretty lucky.”

“Yeah... sometimes it seems luck is all I have going for me.”

She stepped out of the way, letting the elf pull out his grappling hook device which had kept them all from dying on their way down from the walls of Crirada several weeks back. Now he’d refitted it with a payload of thicker rope which could be used for climbing. Aiming it up through the hole, he launched it up the tunnel and over the edge. The grapple on the edge latched onto something out of their view.

“Seems good enough,” he remarked, giving the rope a series of hard tugs. “You two go first, I’ll take up the rear.”

Pulling herself up on the rope, Sofie slowly climbed her way up the tunnel. As she did, she couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that there was no way that Earth Sofie would have been able to climb a rope on her own power, and that was not even considering the extra weight tied to her back. In fact, it was entirely possible that early Scyrian Sofie wouldn’t have been able to do what she was doing now. But here she was, stronger and more capable than before. It felt good to know that she’d grown stronger since arriving here.

Several minutes later, Sofie huffed and puffed as her head finally peeked over the edge. Looking about to make sure the coast was clear, she saw a room that reminded her of the toilet stalls out in the city, only much nicer. There was the toilet, the sink, what looked like a metallic mirror, and even what seemed to be a shower stall. Luckily, the door to the room was shut. “We’re in,” she remarked to her companions below. “Now we just have to find Lord Ferros and-”

“Oh, no need for that,” interrupted a cold voice behind her as, without warning, the door slid into the wall. “I’m right here.”

Still hanging from the rope with only her head sticking through into the restroom, Sofie froze at the sudden appearance of a man in a large metal suit of armor standing in the hallway on the other side of the door. Her face, flushed with exertion and excitement, paled as her eyes focused on the large minigun pointing right at her head. The gun barrels began to spin.

“AHHHH!! Don’t shoot us! Don’t shoot us!” Sofie screamed as she ducked her head back below the lip of the hole. Looking down to see if she could lower herself more, she was shocked to find that the bottom of the hole had closed up, trapping the three of them inside.

The man let out an amused laugh. “Yeah? And why shouldn’t I shoot assassins breaking into my home?”

“Because we’re not assassins! I’m from Earth too! Uh, McDonald's! Star Wars! Rihanna!”

A tense silence fell over them for a moment, before Sofie the loud bang of something heavy falling to the metal floor.

“Y-you’re...”

Peeking cautiously back over the edge, Sofie saw the man known as “Lord Ferros” standing where he stood before, the minigun previously in his hand now lying on the cold hard floor. Even with the armor on, Sofie could see that he was shaking. With a groan of exertion, she pulled herself up into the room and stood up.

“That’s right. My name’s Sofie. I’m from Belgium. You?”

“I...” the man said gasped out as his trembling increased. The mask covering his face fell away, revealing a Caucasian man in his mid-thirties with a round face and a long, narrow nose. The greasiness of his dirty-blond hair and the pronounced bags under his green eyes spoke volumes about what he’d been going through before she’d arrived, while the tears in his eyes and the shaking of his body said all that needed to be said about what he was going through right now. “Blake... my... name is Blake...”

“You’re not alone, Blake,” Sofie said softly. She could see how the realization was ripping through him, as feelings of isolation and loneliness built up over months and months burst out without warning. She’d been through the same experience herself, several months prior when she’d realized that the Mother of Nightmares was from Earth. The relief that had brought her had been so powerful and sudden that she’d felt like she was going to break apart from the inside.

This was the moment Sofie had been dreading the last few days, the one where “Lord Ferros” the icon, the ruler, the shadow that fell over all of Otharia would fade away and the human that he truly was would finally be revealed to her. The one where she’d have to make a choice. Strangely, the choice that had been the source of so much fretting now seemed obvious. The feelings and thoughts that had been warring in her mind were now suddenly silent in this moment of clarity. She knew exactly what needed to be done.

Beaming a warm, friendly smile, Sofie slowly walked up to the shaking man and socked him in the face.