Shana left the scullery to fetch water by the nearby stream in the crack of dawn. The cold air was a herald for winter, only a week or so away. Shana always hated winter. Her toes and fingers always went numb and her teeth would chatter so much, not to mention the cold air that would leave her lungs and throat burning like fire.

Her body had always been naturally weak since she was born, something that not even her system-enhanced Endurance could deal with properly. To hear the elders say it, the system could only enhance what you already had, and two times a grain of sand was still only two grains of sand.

She heard the faint chattering of men downstream. Just a stone’s throw away, a procession of guards came to fill their jugs of water, mercifully ignoring her while also remaining in earshot.

“—Altaluvia sits nestled between the River Mervis and the Arzveim mountain range. Our city runs uphill all the way to the king’s castle, and we’ve got outer walls the height of ten men. That’s not even talking about all the other cities and towns between us and that blasted desert. And you still think we’d get invaded?”

“You don’t get it,” another said urgently. “I heard tell from my cousin, I did! ‘E says the troop movements are all over the place. The officers aren’t telling them shite, but they can tell something’s wrong.”

“Ye think it’s a Royal Treasure?” one of them asked.

“Impossible,” the first man who spoke dismissed out of hand. “You really think there’s a bloody Royal Treasure out there with the power to transport a whole army? You don’t think they’d have already taken over the whole world with something like that?”

“What if it’s just starting now?” the rumormonger said. “Maybe this is the beginning of the end?”

The sceptic just scoffed. “Alright then, soil your britches with ghost stories all you want. No skin off my back, but if you ever wake me up in the barracks, screaming your head off after a nightmare, I’ll raise your Endurance myself.”

The others laughed at that.

Shana quickly left before they could notice her in the ensuing silence. Thankfully, none of them called her back. The others called it a weak presence, but she found that to be an advantage. To most people, she was invisible.

She entered the scullery and left her bucket on the counter, where the kitchen staff would soon get to it.

In the break room, a whole group of servants surrounded someone sitting on a chair. Shana shifted her position and caught a glimpse of the one sitting, Karina the yellow-eyed servant who had been… punished by the house healer.

“Take it easy today,” the head maid Manalia said. Like the twins Safina and Moria, she was standing straight and gave the poor girl the space she needed. “Don’t aggravate your wounds and you’ll be back to good health in no time at all.”

“Thank you,” Karina spoke not in her usual pitch, but a pitch higher, affecting a warm and meek personality. “I will try my best, ma’am.”

The door to the scullery opened up with a loud bang. “Hello?” A familiar voice called out. “I’m looking for someone named Shana.”

Everyone in the break room turned to her, and suddenly, she was perfectly visible. Reza entered the room like she owned it and turned towards where everyone was looking. “Shana, you are late.”

She winced, recalling that she’d already woken up a little too late, and had even stopped to listen to some soldiers prattling on about the war front.

“My apologies, ma’am,” she said as she walked to her. “Please forgive me.”

“Please don’t make me look for you again,” she said. “I have work to do, you know that. The lord is processing prisoners as we speak and I cannot keep him waiting.”

She nodded rapidly as the woman handed her her son. “I promise I’ll do my best going forward.”

Reza turned towards where the servants stood, all of them suddenly frozen. They were always very awkward around her, not knowing whether to treat her like another Reizenbrahm, a simple guest of honor, or an enemy of the country. It didn’t help that she had brutalized one of them in a fit of anger. “You,” she said, pointing at Karina.

Karina started to shiver. “Y-yes, ma’am?”

“I had completely forgotten about you. How long has it been, three weeks? A month, actually.” She walked towards Karina, and all those servants and friends who had surrounded her just a moment prior, parted before her like a skittish crowd of animals. Reza clicked her tongue, and then almost chuckled. She whispered something under her breath, and then spoke louder. “You are lucky I came down here. Though a fortuitous increase in Endurance may have saved you, that infection is nowhere near defeated.”

She pulled something from her pocket, a glass ball of some kind, and waved it over Karina, who flinched, tears rolling down her face.

Suddenly, her eyes widened, and she clutched her stomach in shock. When she looked up again, Reza had already turned to leave. Quickly, Shana followed her out, no longer able to bear the gazes of her colleagues, and also secretly relishing in their cowering ways.

She was past that now, no longer in the bottom rung of the house.

000

Losinda looked out the glass windows of her friend Kadira’s mansion, overlooking a most expansive courtyard where dozens of armored soldiers faced off against each other with blunted polearms, doing war games. Some even rode great, hulking beasts, and were practicing quick turns through an obstacle course.

“Skilled, are they not?” Kadira analyzed the field with those piercing blue eyes. “My husband kept only the best around for the defense of our capital. Level twenty-three infantrymen, and level twenty-five cavalry on metamorphosed war-worgs.” The wolfbear-like animals were half-again as big as their mundane counterparts, with sharper claws, teeth, a more muscular frame and a sheen of glossy, black fur. They were the works of a level forty Domesticator in the employ of the crown.

“I wonder why they never gave Janina a war-worg,” she mused idly. “Though I suppose they don’t take to the desert heat very well, not with their black coats.”

“I imagine it’s exactly what you are thinking,” Kadira smiled honestly. “We are both women, so it behooves us to band together when an injustice has been perpetrated. I cannot imagine the trials and tribulations you may currently be suffering, but know that I am with you.”

Losinda clenched her fists. “Why didn’t you tell me about Janina’s challenges?”

“No one told me,” she said. “All I heard was that she was passed up for a promotion because the generals thought her more useful as the leader of a limited squadron,” she moved closer to her. “But between you and I, my old friend, there has never been a woman to breach the barrier between captain and major. It was only recently ascertained that this fact is rooted in discrimination, as no special class warrior of level thirty has ever been prevented a promotion to major either. Though I suppose you may already have known that.”

Losinda had always attributed her lack of promotion to the fact that the Reizenbrahms were generous donors to the war effort, and always endeavoured to keep their daughter safe while she was fighting by making above-board deals with the commanders to keep her safe.

Now that she thought of it, that was common practice for most of the nobility, and yet someone as qualified as Janina should have received the promotion they were due. Yet, she wasn’t.

Perhaps she had been too… mired in her own disappointment in her daughter, to choose to walk such a perilous and atypical path that afforded her very little in terms of advantages, that Losinda had not even allowed herself to see the extent of the discrimination Janina had faced.

“Do you have many stories of Janina?” Losinda asked. “Any war stories that the general may have relayed to you?”

“The battle of the Crag Oasis comes to mind,” she said. “Though I’m sure you may have heard of it.”

She hadn’t, and if she didn’t know any better, then she could have sworn that her old friend was needling her for it, but Losinda knew she wouldn’t do that. Else she wouldn’t have been so transparent about it. “Tell me about it.”

“I won’t get into the boring details,” she said. “But it was a battle that should have ended in a retreat. See, we needed to hold a rest stop that could water our troops and animals. The supply lines were disturbed by guerilla mercenaries of the Krastag tribes, and our generals needed faster movements so they could clear the area for the wall’s construction. One brigadier general had the half-baked idea of taking the Crag Oasis, but proved too inept to handle himself. He ordered a general retreat while wasting his troops, a silkpants who bought himself into his rank no doubt. Then came Janina. She didn’t commandeer the troops so much as she dove headfirst into the slaughter, cutting a swathe through the enemy. She rallied the troops all on her own, and they mutinied against the commander’s orders to retreat. Thankfully, instead of digging his heels down, the commander took advantage of the surge in morale and, by some miracle, captured the oasis. It was said that Janina defeated all their greatest champions in an unfair duel where they grouped up against her.”

Losinda regretted hearing about that. A large part of her was proud, make no mistake, but the part of her that was a mother quailed at the gory details. “She never was one to listen to others if she believed them to be wrong.”

“We could all aspire to be more like her,” Kadira giggled. She turned away from the window and gestured ahead of the hallway. “Well, let me not keep you much longer. You wished to see my husband, isn’t that correct?”

Losinda had spent the last few weeks talking to as many officers as she could, progressively climbing up the ranks for answers on where Janina was, or how responsible they were for her disappearance.

Her Charm was in the high twenties, but what people usually didn’t suspect her of was high mental attributes to go with them. She could read people like open books, manipulate the truth out from their mouths, especially men too distracted by a beautiful face to mind their words.

Thus far, she had found nothing pointing her towards a culprit or reason for her disappearance. Certainly, it would be simple to just conclude that Janina had given up on her country after her lover died, but that wouldn’t explain why she would pull away from her family. She was still proud of her name, and still loved her father. He was always the closest to her in the family, and he would know how to comfort her now that she needed him the most.

It just didn’t add up that she would disappear. It just…

She followed Kadira, walking through the opulent hallways decorated with marble pillars, masterfully done busts of General Armin’s forefathers, and paintings depicting idyllic pastoral landscapes.

There was also the spoils of war, Golden City art such as quilts with intricate patterns of many clashing colors and traditional masks that imitated animals of all kinds.

Kadira let her inside a study where, behind a desk, a brutishly large elderly man with bifocals pored over sheaves of papers, spread around his desktop haphazardly. “Honey,” Kadira began. “Losinda is here to see you.”

He looked up from his papers and gave her a glass smile. “Ah. Captain Reizenbrahm’s mother.”

Kadira left the room, and Losinda went to stand before his desk. Quickly, he gestured towards the chair opposite him and she took her seat. “I know what you want,” he began. “And the truth is, I can’t give it to you. What I will give is my sincerest apologies. I should have done more to have her talents be recognized, but instead, I let her languish in obscurity when she had gone above and beyond the call of duty time and time again. I expected more from my countrymen, especially in such a time of crisis, than to devolve into infighting and discrimination based on traits we cannot control.” He scoffed. “Black eyes. Women. Homosexuals. What does any of that matter when your very freedom is on the line?”

“I don’t want your platitudes,” Losinda barked. General Armin closed his eyes, letting the vitriol wash over him without resistance. “My daughter has disappeared, and instead of offering to help me, you give me your regret? What can I do with that, exactly? Will it bring her back? You and your ilk drove her off, and instead of taking responsibility, you would rather I go home with a mere apology and well wishes?”

He waited patiently for her to stop talking, and when she hadn’t done so for over ten breaths, he finally said his piece. “I wish I could. I really do. I know this is not what you want to hear, but…” he sighed, and leaned back a little so he could pull open a drawer. After rifling through it for only a few moments, he pulled out a piece of parchment folded in thirds, and handed it to her. She unfurled it and let her eyes scan through it.

They were promoting Janina to colonel, only a single rank below the least of the generals. She would be skipping through two whole ranks to get there.

At the bottom, signing the document was the general of the army.

“I planned to have her recognized for her valor,” the general said. “But unfortunately, I could not have the letter sent in time. Instead, I had it addressed to her commanding officer for him to give to her once she returned to active duty, which as I’m sure you may know, she never did.”

Losinda swallowed. “I would… like to have that letter, to give it to her personally once she returns to me.”

“Madam Reizenbrahm,” he began with a sigh. He paused for a moment, but shook his head. “No, nevermind. Here,” he gave her the letter. “Again, I do apologize. I wish there was more I could do.”

Losinda didn’t wait to be dismissed. She stood up and left immediately. Outside, admiring the artistic hallways, was Kadira. She dragged Losinda away from the door to the study, and turned a corner before she began to speak. “Losinda, dear. I fear I must come clean regarding something.”

“Janina?”

“No, worse,” she continued. “Your whole family. Listen. You need to leave. The situation has become dire and the truth is, Altaluvia stands a real chance of being sacked.”

“How?” Losinda asked, baffled by her words. “They haven’t even captured any of our major cities near the border as of yet. What is the cause for your urgency?”

“It baffles our generals, too,” Kadira said. “But we do not know. All we know is, recently, the Goldmen have adopted a tendency to appear where they are least expected, without any forewarning. We are finding more of them inland, sacking villages and small towns, with no explanation of how they got so far into our country. Wherever Janina is, I can assure you she is safer than here. Please leave, and I pray that you may find her in time.”

“And you?” Losinda asked. “Will you stay beside your husband and support him?”

She shook her head, frowning mournfully. “I will take the little ones with me to Filomena. As Daiclovius has recovered miraculously, I expect that he may want to stand behind and fight, but he will not protest if you wish to leave.”

“He would encourage it,” Losinda nodded. “Very well; I shall speak with my husband post haste, and make the necessary arrangements, but I will give it a month before I leave. I must still look for my daughter.”

Kadira’s lips pressed together. “I am leaving the day after tomorrow, my dear friend. I still feel like it is not too soon. This war gives me a bad feeling, like we are all on the brink of annihilation. I implore you, my old friend, give it only a week and no longer.”

Losinda didn’t have to be a Charm specialist to hear the raw terror in her voice. Something dire was afoot, and now she had to face the choice of risking her three other daughters for the sake of one, a choice no parent should ever have to face.

000

In that strange space inside the diamond orb I called Focus, I saw a soul spew out theorems and proofs, concepts and ideas both confirmed to function and not.

Over the weeks that it ruminated on Circle Magic, it had come up with ways to streamline the process of detaching attributes from dying sacrifices and attaching them to Janina, all the while Jogmomich inserted vivid dreams into her mind, dreams that would help her reflect on her past and grow as a person.

“Anything strong enough to overpower the system magic enforcing my Sentence?” I asked. The Focus, thankfully, seemed to nod in its own peculiar way, its soul bobbing in confirmation.

The ideas it presented were half-baked, but perhaps doable. I could see success finally on the horizon. It would take me a fair few tries and failures, but just the fact that the option was now finally opened to me was liberating all on its own.

I wasn’t blind nor deaf to the situation at hand. The Aellians were growing desperate, and the general anxiety in the air did not escape me.

I pulled my mind back from the Focus and reappeared in Reizenbrahm’s underground dungeon. Ever since the first fifty prisoners had arrived, Reizenbrahm had Janina moved to a solitary confinement cell, where she was out of sight from the other guards who now had to be brought in to watch over the recent influx.

I was here, ostensibly to take care of the wounded and translate for Reizenbrahm during his interrogations, none of which were going well at all for the sole reason that nobody was… sound of mind, to say the least.

The Goldmen looked like they were from the middle-east, and many of them shared my skintone, or were slightly darker or lighter. Their hair was either black or dark brown, and all of them had dark pupils in their eyes, as opposed to those artificial-looking faceted, solid-color iris and pupils of the gem-eyed Aellians.

All of them shared a dull, vacant look. They responded to certain things like eating food whenever it is presented to them, but otherwise huddled together and said nothing.

It reeked of… something supernatural. Either they were so fatalistic in their service to their land that they would ingest some sort of drug that would render them into simpletons, or their leaders did that to them, to prevent them from revealing any pertinent information precisely in a situation such as this. Either option was fantastical as it was, and begged so many questions, but none that I was willing to ponder.

This was not my war. In fact, this had so little to do with me that I genuinely didn’t care whether Altaluvia stood or fell. As far as I cared, the whole city could burn, and with it, the whole country. It had done nothing for me but tie me down, reject me at every turn, and tried to kill me on more than one occasion. I owed it nothing, least of all my effort in helping figure out how to win the war.

Instead, I walked to a relatively quiet part of the dungeon, without so many guards, and put my mind to work on the Circle Magic to break my Sentence.

On my sixth attempt, my concentration shattered as I heard something exceedingly strange and out of place, because it sounded familiar.

I turned to face one of the men inside the cells, a lucid, but bleary old man. “Come closer, dear.”

That wasn’t spoken in Aellian, or whatever language a desert-dwelling group of people from another world would likely be speaking, but Classical, Quranic Arabic. “Where are you from?” I asked him. “How did you get here?” I’d learned three different versions of Arabic in my childhood, and despite my lack of practice in the Classical variation, I found myself speaking with authority and fluency, probably due to my attributes.

“Dhul Arsha,” he whispered. “I am a conscript. They’re… scraping the bottom of the barrel for… mere droplets of moisture.”

“How are you here?” I asked. “Were you transported here?”

“That… witch,” he spat. “Cursed us. Took us here. Left us behind. Killed our minds, so we wouldn’t talk.”

I shook my head. “How long have you been on Allmother?”

“I am… fifty-three years old.”

Another source of Classical Arabic spoke from behind me. “Was it a Royal Treasure that took you here?” I turned to see Reizenbrahm, staring intently at the prisoner.

Was Classical Arabic the language of the Goldmen? How could that possibly be?

No. I couldn’t dwell on that right now. Wherever the answer was, it wasn’t here. What the present time needed was my full faculties, however.

“No… witchcraft,” he said. Unlike the Aellians, Classical Arabic did have a dedicated word for magic. “Witches… Golden Amaar, protect my soul!”

I felt a twisting of the magic around me, and felt more than saw or heard a metaphysical knife hurtling towards the hapless old man.

I could have knocked it away, but I hesitated because it was not my fight. My Sentence reminded me to be of help to Reizenbrahm and I engaged my powers. It was too late, however. My hesitation had cost the man his life as the witch that had transported him here silenced him before he could disclose anything of value.

Right next to me stood a misshapen person with eyes bigger than its own skull, blinking languidly at the scene of the old man, slumped over face-first on the ground with his butt in the air, his soul long gone. It turned to me, and its eyes widened even further in shock. In a flash, it disappeared.

Reizenbrahm turned to glare at me. “What did you do?”

“I failed to save his life,” I said. “Whatever that attack was, it killed him far too fast for me to have healed him in time.”

“And…” his eyes darted about as he thought. “Whatever it is he said, do you think you could maybe fight it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Was I confident that I could learn? Yes. I wasn’t required to say that, however. “I think it’s better we leave after we’ve tended to our affairs.”

“Of course you would say that,” he scoffed. “This is not your land.”

I rolled my eyes. “It won’t be yours for much longer, either.”

I took a quick step back before he could strangle me, and held my palm towards him, already having charged up a spell. Immediately, my Sentence acted up and I dropped my hand and the evocation before it could kill me. Thankfully, by then, Reizenbrahm was content to just huff and turn around to leave.

That damnable chain would come off me one way or another, and when it did, I wouldn’t even turn around to watch the city burn.