Chapter 13

Their departure took another week. She asked no details, but she saw the glint in the Knight's eyes as they left the palace – their backs were straight, tense, and their movements were snappy. Fresh off their ships they'd easily shared smiles, they'd played with each other, played pranks and gone in and out of the city as if it was an amusement park. It had been a tough awakening, to see themselves as vulnerable as they'd been, taken by surprise by the ingenuity of those who had more wits than manpower.

War changed everyone, but their gifts made Elysians react differently: tragedy was uncommon, the shadow of death something that they lorded over their enemies rather than something that hung over their necks. In Phobos' eyes, in Aristides' eyes Ophelia had seen the ghosts of every brother they'd seen slain, and every man they'd had to kill. It simply hadn't been as visible in the elite Elysian units.

The game had changed. She wondered if word would spread of what the Phrygians had invented, what the Arqans had mastered. If the men who had survived would bring their weariness back into the Empire, engendering a new kind of brutality.

She didn't ask any questions, and didn't dare look out to the plaza after that day, but she knew that a massacre was being carried out in Arqa at that very moment. There wasn't any subtleties about what Aegyr and Crescentio wanted to convey to the other Free Cities, to the world: one should better be thorough, because if a single Elysian was left there would be hell to pay. She had attempted to protest, but Aegyr's passive, empty stare and his absolute silence said that she would be given no say in the matter.

Aegyr had told her he would escort her back to Elysium, along with Orion and six other Elysian diplomats, including Baron Doria. She asked again to see Hyperion, but was only allowed to see him from afar, from her balcony, as he was taken back to his villa to remain under house arrest. The weeks he'd spent inside his cell had left him looking pale, his hair longer than ever, yet this only made him seem more ethereal, unreal.

Aegyr and Orion both stood next to her, making sure she wasn't about to do anything crazy. "Are you not going to cry?" the latter said, "How cold of you."

Ophelia watched on as Hyperion stepped into the carriage they'd prepared for him. She turned her head to the left, to smile at Orion, "why should I cry? I'll see him again."

Aegyr scoffed, drawing a laugh out of the praetorian. "Some would find that boldness delusional, your highness," the latter said.

She shrugged off their disdain; she would make it happen. That 'aurelian miracle' she'd pulled off had filled her with confidence. For the first time in weeks, she somehow felt that she was back in control of her own destiny. It was like an affirmation that what was at her disposal could move mountains and make the impossible seem possible, despite the trappings of the society around her.

Hours later, it was their own turn to leave. Rather than a carriage, and as if to make a statement, the nine-person delegation would travel to the port on horseback. To almost make a parade out of it was meant to be a slap in the Arqan's faces: they were being told that they could do nothing, that now their city was Elysian playground.

Crescentio and his Knights all gathered to see them off. Her actions on the day of the bombing had transformed her in their eyes: they'd never doubted her origins, but now that she'd demonstrated in front of her eyes what she was capable of, all to save a few dozen lives, she'd become legendary. They all knew they'd borne witness to a moment that would become myth in history, and as she followed Aegyr dressed in her sparkling blue robes, they all acknowledged it by saluting her.

It wasn't like the military gestures she was used to: perhaps more spontaneous, and certainly more reckless, each of them held a hand up, cupping in their palms a small flame of Dorian fire. An avenue of blue, and the golden glow of her earring which like a star traversed down the night sky.

Aegyr rode in front, and behind him Orion would follow with Ophelia; the other six Elysians would tail them in columns of two. It was a strange combination of pomp and ceremony with pure, unabashed improvisation, the likes of which come from genuine intention and not just artifice. As they passed through the gates she'd fixed herself, she took one last look at the palace she'd become so intimate with in the last few months, and knew she'd never see it again.

Outside, the populace stared darkly at them, making no attempt at hiding their ill-will. Ophelia stared straight ahead, not wanting to see their faces. It felt strange to be at the receiving end of so much malice, and it certainly affected her; she knew that there was nothing she could do, even if she tried. Momentarily, she was trapped in Elysium's embrace, and as such the fate and the actions of the empire would reflect on her.

"See?" Orion whispered as they neared the port. "I told you. If you cull them at the right time, the vermin will not bother you."

She turned around to glare at him. "Don't be so cold-hearted."

"I'm a realist!"

From the palace, the black Elysian ships had seemed like tiny mice, scattered around the waters of the Arqan port. Up close they revealed themselves more imposing, their sleek lines giving them a certain futuristic look. They looked like they were out of place for that time, for that world, and it occurred to her that perhaps their design accounted for their strangeness. That perhaps they were meant to be a dreary sight for someone on shore, a line of uncanny ships from another dimension.

There were no gangplanks for them; they weren't needed. True to what Hyperion had once told her, Elysians looked for any opportunity to exhibit their uniqueness, and just like the silent parade to the port, it would also serve as a reminder to the native population. Aether carried them from the dock into the black deck, blue robes billowing in the wind.

The Elysians that were in the port looked on, their eyes searching for her. She made no gesture towards them: she owed them nothing. Instead, she stood to the side of the ship that looked onto the great hills of Arqa, and searched the place where Hyperion's villa stood. The only people she wanted to say goodbye to were there, sequestered away from her eyes. As they began to move, she took out the golden arm band that hung from her waist, and held on to it for comfort.

It was an uneventful, boring first day. They took turns 'driving' the ship, using their powers to push the vessel forward. Unlike what she'd done with Hyperion's ship before, there were no sails and therefore no wind needed to be called forth: the ship simply sailed on by itself, as the waves parted ways for it.

"Huh, I never thought about just carrying the ship," Ophelia confessed as she sat with Orion and Aegyr. The former had brought a few games with him to teach her; the first one was something very similar to the game battleship she'd played in her youth. After a few rounds, and due to her familiarity with its rules, she'd begun to take the lead. A disgruntled Orion had proposed to take a break, and this had prompted a conversation about who would be on the rotation for driving the ship next.

"When I came to Arqa it felt only natural to take advantage of the sails and simply make the wind blow," Ophelia explained further, and then added. "It certainly makes it easier that it's not a single person carrying it all the way through."

"What a lucky Chaldean," Orion mused, "that he didn't have to waste his gold in sailors."

"Oh," Ophelia went to correct him. "When we set sail, he knew nothing about what I could do. There was an incident during our journey that forced me to reveal it to him. But he thought I was some Elysian runaway. And I'm not quite used to these long journeys; three days of work to avoid another six days of sailing was a good trade."

"I don't think I've ever heard of anyone manipulating the weather in such a way," Aegyr mused. "Did it require you to focus your thought on it?"

"The entire time, yes. It was very tiring, and after we spotted land, I fell ill from exhaustion," Ophelia recounted.

Both men were pensive; it was clear that the discussion was one that probably was almost academic to them. She was, after all, stretching the limits of what they knew.

"It must be that, unlike an Elysian baby that is born with their aether and gradually learns how to harvest it, your body wasn't quite ready to deal with the demands you put on it," Orion said. "But, aether is much like a muscle. It requires some training for it to bloom to its fullest potential, but its limits are predestined from birth. For a Byzantine, perhaps this limit does not exist, and it's simply as much as what the body can take at any given time."

"Did your emperor not do such things? Or was he never ill?"

Her innocent question sparked a strange ardour in Aegyr, who seemed almost insulted by the implication that the Elysian emperor could do something as mundane and human as fall ill. He relayed some of the accomplishments that had become the fodder of many tales and stories that they were told as children. From his mouth Ophelia saw emerge the true nature of how its citizens regarded their emperor: more than simply a figure head, he was a god and a hero who, like Herakles, had gone through multiple trials to show his virtues to the world.

He'd called a storm to drive off invading ships, cleared the water of Aurelia of its poison after enemy troops had laced it with arsenic, protected an entire castle from five hundred men by himself. He'd healed the sick, built and rebuilt fallen cities, saved crops destined to fail. His hand had slowly built and strengthened the burgeoning empire; his benevolence and charity seeming almost a caricature to Ophelia. It was like reading a story, not the real deeds of a man made of flesh and blood, who loved and hated, conquered and made terrible mistakes. Aegyr was a fanatic, it was clear, and this was probably true of most of the Elysian nobility. As the Baron had said, they all traced their roots to that larger-than-life figure, and the grander he seemed the more his halo extended towards them.

Orion, bless the strange praetorian, was slightly more measured in his appreciation of the man he served: "how the emperor came into his strength is lost to the myth. That is true," he observed. "But some who study the history of the empire have remarked that his miracles became grander, as the situation called for it. Perhaps he, too, had to discover slowly what he was capable of."

Orion felt that was as much as they needed to discuss about the emperor's strength. It was clear that Aegyr's storytelling had bored him, and he was looking for something more interesting to discuss.

"But, I'm curious my lady – you are not used to long journeys, you said. Why is that?"

"I'm also not used to sea journeys," Ophelia clarified. "In my time, it's more common to travel by air, using machines that are able to cross the sky like birds. I don't know about distances in this world, but a journey that might take a person say, five days, you could do in three hours."

That shocked the both of them, whose eyes went wide. "That's… incredible," Aegyr said.

"It is," Ophelia had never stopped to think about it twice, always taking it for granted. Her life in that world had slowly unravelled a strange idea in her head, that perhaps the fantasy land was the one she'd left behind, with all its faults, and not the one she'd been transported to. "We would do these… uh, holidays with my dad. People would often take a rest from work for a few days and journey into another city, another country, for fun. And we would go to this place that had very beautiful beaches, and where the weather was warmer than in London. If one were to make the journey the old way, one would have to ride from the city to the coast, which would take, let's say, one day. Then one would have to sail for hours to reach the continent's shore, and then ride south for days on end to reach the southernmost coast of the continent. And then, sail again to reach the islands. It would be perhaps, two weeks of non-stop travelling. But for us, it was only four, five hours journey."

"There must be no kingdoms then, no empires," Aegyr breathed, in awe. "How could they exist when there's no barriers between people, when distance is such a strange concept?"

"We're only human," Ophelia awkwardly smiled. "The distance might not be a problem, but it still exists in our minds."

"Information must travel fast as well," Orion offered his own conjecture. "Messengers only require a few hours to go from one end of the continent to the other."

"We don't use human messengers, or physical letters…" Ophelia sighed, trying to figure out how she was going to tackle the most complex aspect of life on Earth in her time. "There are networks of… wires connecting every city and every town on earth, and through these wires information travels so quickly that one can have a conversation with a person who lives on the other side of the world as if they were in the same room. Like we're doing now. We know about things happening elsewhere at the same time they're happening."

"Your excellency, I surely hope you will make haste to call the scholars as soon as we arrive," Orion said excitedly. There was a distant look in his eyes, the sort that gave one the idea he was simply going through all the possible consequences of such a discovery making it to the empire. "We ought to have them work with lady Ophelia. This would change history, forever."

For once, it seemed like the two men were in sync. "It would, indeed. Nothing would remain unknown."

Ophelia had something to say to that.

"The more information there is, the more difficult it becomes to tell what's important from what's not. And it will not stop people from lying. It's still difficult to tell truth from fiction."

Orion smirked.

"All the wonders in the world will not change human nature."

Aegyr disagreed, "a single look into the history of Lygeum reveals that there are noticeable differences in the nature of those who receive the blessings of civilization and those who don't. When his majesty the emperor brought from Byzantium his wisdom he found a world that could be shaped by it, and when he used his blood to raise Elysium, he showed that such shaping could create a race that stands tall above the rest. Perhaps there is no remedy to all of human vices, but it is an undeniable truth that the Elysians are in this respect more virtuous than anyone else."

Ophelia chose not to say anything at that point. In the solace of her own mind she told herself Aegyr's outlook was disturbing, although not surprising. Ironically, his words were marks themselves of the excess of vanity that led some lost souls to regard those who were not their own as either above or below themselves. It was a tale as old as the ages, a primal instinct to show one's tribe as different from everything else to affirm its own identity and place in the world.

Orion felt like it was time to indulge his playful side. "So under your own logic, you would agree that lady Ophelia here should be the most virtuous of us all?"

"Yes," Aegyr replied matter-of-factly, with such speed that it made one wonder if he'd heard the question at all. "Second to his majesty."

"Interesting. One would think you thought of her as a naughty child that needed to be taught a lesson."

That took him a few contemplative minutes to answer. When he did, he looked straight into Ophelia's eyes. "When his majesty the emperor arrived to this world, there was no order. He showed us the way. Lady Ophelia unfortunately saw this world first from the eyes of barbarians; it's through no fault of her own that she was made to stray from the right path, but I felt it was necessary to make sure this was corrected."

"I wonder what would happen if after all this, I still walked a different path from what you thought was the right one," Ophelia replied, her eyes hard and sharp.

"That's impossible," Aegyr smiled at her, and she saw a hint of arrogance in his gesture. It seemed that Orion was in agreement, as he nodded pensively. A tense moment passed between the two men and her, before the praetorian asked for another match of battleship.

Their argument was buried under her good will; as much as she hated that insistence in her conversion to their convictions, she wasn't about to spend and entire week at sea fighting over it. The next day, she tried to distract herself while she walked on the deck by telling Orion about the incident on the way to Arqa, wondering if the dangers of the Amber line were lurking nearby.

"We're further east," Orion replied. "And as far as I know from the sailors that travel through this part of the Atlantean Sea, there are no reports of such things. But that is interesting; I had always regarded them as mere rumours."

"That's what Hyperion said as well. But even if they were rumours, he showed enough respect for his sailors that he always hired more men than it was necessary, as he would always lose someone during these trips."

"And what did this monster look like?"

Ophelia opened her mouth to try and describe it, but the words initially escaped her. She remembered the worm-like creatures and shuddered at their parasitic zeal. "They had invaded the body of one of the sailors. He was found dead on deck, and when someone went to throw him to the sea, the creatures inside of him made the corpse move, act like it was alive. They were looking for their next host."

"It reminded me of horror uh, movies. They are sort of like plays; and we had many where the story would revolve around the dead being re-animated and walking around as if they were alive, of parasites causing horrible mutations in men… They were my favourites, because I found the concept so scary. And to see it for myself in real life… it was terrifying."

"You went to see plays that would scare you?" Orion asked with a laugh. "I've certainly enjoyed a fair share of tragedy plays myself, but I've never known one that would necessarily scare me."

"It's a strange concept," Ophelia admitted. "But I suppose that it gives on a certain thrill, to face our fears. It must also come from a morbid fascination with the things that will harm us. When you witness a terrible accident take place, you can't take your eyes away from it. Perhaps it's the same instinct."

Orion was intrigued.

"Curiosity," he said. "I would love to see such things. Perhaps you shall have to write a play yourself. I'm sure you could create a convincing enough monster."

"Create?"

Orion shot her a mischievous look, and took her hand, leading her to the back of the ship. On the floor, a hatch led to the hull, which was used only to keep their food and water supplies. They climbed inside, and walked amongst the baskets, barrels, amphoras, and jars that had been secured against the keel.

Ophelia asked for clarification but the praetorian simply smiled, telling her to be patient. He dug into one of the large baskets that were near the hatch, and pulled the carcass of a rabbit, which had been dried and smoked for preservation. He winked at her, and laid the game on the floor. The storage was dusty and cramped, and there was barely space to walk; the only light came from the open hatchet, which was barely illuminating that side of the hull. Ophelia had to squint to make out the outline of the thing.

"I shall teach you a new trick," Orion said, and then the rabbit trembled. The stumps of its legs moved, and its stretched, leathery body began to twist and turn as it stood. "Imagine that you had tied fine wool threads to its ends, and you were pulling from them. It will move as if it was alive."

Ophelia crouched down, looking critically at its twitchy, jagged movements. "It might be good for surprising someone, but I think it needs some more work…" She poked the skin, and thought about the kinds of sights that would horrify her.

Where her hands touched, dark, wet, mouldy growths would bloom. Skin and muscle recycled themselves through the spots, adopting new forms. The body propped itself on five, then seven, then twelve appendages, all with the look of having been freshly skinned and left to rot in a humid greenhouse for hours. The new additions were reddish, with powdery white spots and crusts, as if they were the product of disease. At her request it started moving, and the appendages started acting almost like arms that would stretch out to find a place to hold on to before actually setting on the ground.

She made it move towards Orion, who jumped back. "I don't know if your play will be very popular, lady Ophelia, but it will certainly succeed at scaring the audience. What is that?"

Ophelia sat back, feeling slightly light headed, and smiled at the praetorian. "Something familiar mixed with something disgusting. Why don't you try it?"

"I fear my sense of creativity is not quite up to part with Byzantium. I will disappoint."

Ophelia pouted. "Do you think you could make it move, at least?"

The other man sensed that she was up to something and arched an eyebrow at her. "What are you planning?"

"Well, maybe we could try and see how effective it would be for scaring audiences. Aegyr would be a fantastic test subject."

Something akin to five stages of grief seemed to go through Orion's face with remarkable speed. Surprise that she'd suggested it, denial that it would be wise to do it, bargaining as he considered how funny it would be, amusement at the end result and finally, the acceptance. "Goodness, I must be a bad influence," he said as he looked at her 'creature' and made it move in the same manner she'd done before.

They decided to carry out their prank the next morning, when Aegyr would be sitting at the bow, concentrated in driving the ship forward. It was an unusually foggy, overcast day, which stood as a perfect gloomy background for the horror they were about to unleash. It wasn't a prank without risk: Aegyr could lose control over his aether, causing the ship to keel over. Because of that, Ophelia would sit behind him to control the situation if anything were to happen.

Orion stood at the stern and without any of the ship's passengers noticing, slowly opened the hatch to let their creature out. Its appendages looked more like arms in the morning light, and its body more diseased as the greenish hue of the growths stood out in contrast to the reddish brown of the flesh. It moved slickly, with the grace and speed of a tarantula in search of its prey.

A man that had been talking to Baron Doria was the first to notice its presence. He reacted as one would expect, throwing himself backwards and screaming. "What is that?!" the Baron himself followed with. The other Elysians reacted as the creature went from side to side of the ship, trying to get closer to them, clearly trying to make use of their aether to drive it back. Ophelia, trying not to laugh or even let a smile through, worked to counteract any of their attempts, seeing as they began to fall into true panic.

"Your highness!" someone shouted, "it's coming towards you!"

She faked a surprised scream, and ducked as the creature jumped towards her. It missed, but wasn't deterred: its next target was Aegyr, who had its back to it. The creature quickly attached itself to him, each of its twelve appendages embracing him, before it began to wriggle so that its body crawled towards his chest.

Aegyr, who had been deep in thought, reacted only then to the mayhem that had been unleashed: he looked down, and without even flinching, sent the creature flying backwards, ripping apart the appendages that had been holding on to him. As he turned around to look wildly around him, the only sign of his agitation was his trembling hands and his dilated pupils: it was small, but it was enough for the trained eye of the pranksters, who started laughing uncontrollably.

"Praetorium primum!" he roared, and Orion went flying forwards, falling heavily on the deck in front of the irate archduke. Next, he turned to look towards Ophelia, who readied herself for a similar strike. "You two irresponsible-"

An explosion blared out, cutting him off. Both Orion and Ophelia sobered up quickly, and like the rest of the passengers, looked for signs of its origin. Seconds later, something hit the water next to the ship, and the force of it rocked the vessel so hard it took the desperate hand of all its occupants to revert it back into place.

Ophelia was as lost as some of the Elysian diplomats as to what was happening, but Orion and Aegyr knew immediately what they'd just witnessed. "Enemy fire!" came the shout from the latter, which sprung everyone into action.

Despite their ranks in the hierarchy, all Elysian noblemen were expected to serve as Knights for a certain amount of time. It was after their service that they were allowed to pursue other careers; those that clearly had no talent for it ended it early, sometimes being gently reassigned as diplomats or other bureaucratic works. That was why when Aegyr issued the next commands, they all reacted quickly, following with ease the motions that years of practice had etched into their memory.

The next cannon balls were not meant to miss, but were repelled by the action of the Elysians, who were now expecting them. As Aegyr cleared the fog in the distance, they spotted the visage of two war ships that were quickly approaching them. "Scout ships," Orion said, noting their smaller size. They did not have much firepower, just enough to defend themselves should they come across pirate fleets. Although they carried no identifying flags, their access to gunpowder in such style of ships made their affiliation evident.

Most of the kingdoms that had a navy in the Atlantean Sea predominantly used catapults in large warships; those that were in the path of the trade routes to the east sometimes made use of cannons, as the cost of gunpowder made it feasible to equip their ships with such things. Only in the preceding years the knowledge of its production had seemed to finally break free from its hold by the eastern kingdoms, and had begun to move slowly westwards. Elysian influence had at different times slowed its adoption, but with the increasing tensions building during and after the Phrygian revolt, the Free Cities had finally gained access to it. This is why Orion looked towards Aegyr and told him they were facing Latilian or Philistian ships.

"They are foolish," Aegyr noted as the barrage of cannon fire continued. "How many rounds do you reckon they will fire?"

"It will certainly be enough to get closer to us. It is difficult to say what tactics they hope to pull this way, as they'll come within range for us to burn them with Dorian fire."

"What if," Ophelia suddenly chimed in, "they were doing a kamikaze attack?"

Aegyr and Orion both turned to look towards her for clarification. "A suicide attack, like the one that was done in Arqa. They're not aiming to survive; they're aiming to take us down with them."

"How would they do that?"

"Uh, I would imagine they'd stock explosive substances in their ships, waiting for one of our attacks to detonate it all. If they're close enough we'd be caught in the blast. And just like in Arqa, we wouldn't be expecting it…"

"Wars in Byzantium must be terrifying," noted Orion. "We should hope that they're not as astute as you are, my lady. But it is a fair point: Arqa was a lesson our enemies must have learnt from."

"I could try to jump into one of the ships, should they get close enough," Aegyr mused. "Or perhaps we could try to capsize them. With us three, we could easily achieve it, despite the distance."

Ophelia, in the wake of their little prank, felt a bit creative. She ran towards the starboard, where the enemy ships seemed to be getting closer and closer. Sneaking through the line of Elysian nobles batting away the cannon fire, she stood on the topside, ignoring Aegyr's shouts behind her. A strange wail was heard cracking through the air: it sounded strangely human, like an old woman imitating the sound of an old door slowly moving on rusty henges. The march of their opponents stopped, and the ships rocked on the tranquil surface of the sea, before large black spots began to form on their topsides.

Just like the rabbit's smoked body the day before, from the spots appendages began to grow. Wood replaced flesh, sprouting appendages that resembled bulbous, wide roots. They violently extended towards the sides of the ships, and as they were one next to the other, they found each other. Like lovers falling into bed they embraced, entangling into each other so firmly that it caused both ships to be lifted off the surface of the water ever-so-slightly, causing their cannons and loose deckware to slide into the water.

Laughing, Ophelia saluted them before taking control of the Elysian ship. Making an escape the likes of which could've been in a movie, or so she thought, she wanted to prevent the possibility of getting caught in a blast if her theory of them being kamikaze crews held true.

"I am ever so grateful I am lucky enough to witness this," Baron Doria said as the Elysian nobles gathered around her. "To make things change shape, I would've never known that to be possible."

She couldn't really focus on them as she kept her hold on the ship's trajectory, but she thought she saw some of them with tears in their eyes. "I imagine you will forgive me for the little prank we did earlier," she muttered.

"It was truly a horrifying sight, I shall not deny it," one of the other Elysians said. "But I do feel humbled that I was able to see such a feat."

Aegyr did not let his admiration get in the way of his duty; he spared Ophelia his sermon while she drove them, and instead decided to finish dressing down Orion for their prank. When he was done, he let the praetorian take charge of the sailing, and took her to the stern for her chastisement.

"If there's a next time, I should hope that you allow us the grace of taking some prisoners, lady Ophelia," he said, clearly displeased. "They can be quite useful."

"I don't know much about naval tactics in general," Ophelia defended herself. "But given how your enemies have carried their attacks as of recently, it's not out of the question that they would try something similar at sea. I don't think there's many safe ways to take prisoners in that situation."

"Given we have yet to hear a blast, I doubt that was their tactic. We've never heard of such thing before."

"And hopefully you will never hear of it in the future."

In the days that followed, Orion looked to gain back some of his favour with Aegyr, and began encouraging him to try Ophelia's technique of changing the shape of various objects. It was a combination of his playful manner and the prospect of learning something engendered by Ophelia's Byzantine wisdom that won the strict man over, and they both spent time experimenting with some of the broken ostraka that would normally be used for writing quick messages.

Ophelia watched on, amused and curious as to what they would come up with. Orion had slightly more success in his first try, when he managed to grow the semblance of a face in the clay. The rest of his attempts were formless, blotchy messes. Aegyr, on the other hand, seemed to only manage to turn the flat pottery into perfect cubes. This Ophelia found incredibly funny, as it illustrated his personality extremely well.

On the fifth day, as the sun began to drop into the horizon, Ophelia felt that the merriment of the previous days evaporated as if it had never been. Dread possessed her violently when Baron Doria, who'd been chatting away to her, went silent and stood up. "Elysium," he whispered with a large smile on his face. Joyful whispers soon inundated the deck, and the men ran forward to behold the coastline that had moments ago been spit out by the horizon.

"It feels like it's been years since I last stepped foot on it," the Baron's emotions had overwhelmed his voice. Ophelia would've normally smiled at the sentiment, but she could only think of what awaited her once she set foot there.

It had all been a foolish dream, she thought, that endless wait in Arqa and the voyage through the Atlantean sea. She'd buried her fears away, always postponing coming up with a way out of her captivity. It had been easier to play along, to forget that Aegyr and Orion were not her friends, but her jailers… but now that she was staring right into the face of what she thought of as her doom, she felt frantic. Should she make a run for it the moment they got off the ship? Should she, perhaps, throw them off board as they neared the port and drive the vessel somewhere else?

Aegyr must've divined some of her thoughts; as the coastline grew larger and the port became more visible, he sat with her.

"Should you want to attempt anything," he said as he eyed her, perhaps with a little less curtness than he'd done in similar occasions. "Consider that it's now not just five or six of us you are to contain; you will have dozens, perhaps hundreds of eyes on your every move. And as the primum has correctly pointed out, you will be able to do as much as your body allows you to. I worry that in your eagerness to act, you will hurt yourself."

Ophelia narrowed her eyes, fear and dread turning into anger. "You are worried about me?" She almost laughed.

He fixed his eyes on her. Time and repetition had not completely erased the power of his gaze; it still carried for her a strange quality, an intensity that burnt like Dorian fire. It quenched some of her anger, and she waited with bathed breath for his response.

"I know now that I will not be able to easily convince you of my sincerity," he said with a lopsided smile, "but I do worry for you. And I should hope that even if you don't believe that, you will at least heed some of my advice."

Perhaps the thing Ophelia hated the most about him was that, despite his questionable actions, he really was sincere in his intentions. She did believe him. She felt her anger ebb away, despite her desperately trying to hold on to it. She looked down, before remembering that she still had his Lyre's Tears in her pouch. She took it out and offered it to him.

"I should give this back to you now, probably," she said. His eyes dropped to the earring before fixing back on her face. He tucked his long black hair behind his right ear, and looked to the side, making it clear he wanted her to put it on.

Ophelia was so taken by surprise at his gesture that she reacted almost automatically. It was only after her fingers had carefully left the Tears hanging from his ear that she thought to complain about that unexpected intimacy – and it was caused by the soft pine scent that reminded her of the time he had done the same for her.

A soft turquoise glow illuminated his neck, and as she stepped back she thought it made his gaze looked fiercer. He closed again the distance, leaning in to whisper in her ear: "the aristocracy in Aurelia, as awed as they might initially be, will be insatiable. Some may call it zeal, others greed, but they will look for every opportunity to possess you in some way or another. If you give them the chance, they will devour you."

"If you had no weaknesses, they would create some so they can use them to control you. If you look for freedom, you will not find it in their promises. That, I can assure you."

Ophelia turned her face slightly towards him. "Where do I find it?"

"In Sophia, next to his majesty the emperor… or by me."

It was spoken like a simple statement of fact, yet it hid worlds of meaning underneath. To Aegyr, her way out of Elysium was either through the emperor himself, or perhaps, if she was reading correctly between the line, through cooperation with the archduke himself.

"I… will remember your words," she said. He seemed satisfied with her response, and stood up to finish the preparations for their arrival at the empire.