At the sound of Beryl’s arrival on the scene, all six members of the Dentevi delegation spun around to face her. The swordsmen unsheathed their various blades, and Beryl could sense the sorcerers gathering in their mana.

“Who are you, and why are you here?” the matriarch demanded.

“Who I am isn’t really important,” Beryl said. “The why part, that’s the important part. I’m here to tell you that, whatever it is you’re planning, it stops right here, right now.” Beryl pointed at the iron chest on the ground at the angel’s feet. “For starters, that means making sure that those slave collars you just bought don’t wind up in the wrong hands.”

The matriarch gave a little signal to the female sorceress. An orb of white light appeared in the sorceress’s hands, then drifted upwards to hover above the street, where it cast an unnatural, pale glow across the features of all present. As Beryl’s face became visible, she saw recognition flash across the matriarch’s face, which then contorted in anger.

“You,” the matriarch said, practically spitting the word. “Astria Trevanei offered me her personal assurances that you were dead.”

“If it makes you feel any better, she thought that I was dead. But that’s hardly relevant to the matter at hand.” Beryl focused on clearing her mind of extraneous thoughts, on acknowledging the anger which she could feel bubbling up inside her and creeping into the tone of her voice. “I don’t particularly like making threats, and I’m frankly not very good at them, so I will just explain the present situation to you in the simplest possible terms,” she said, addressing her comments directly to the matriarch, since she knew that the others would take their cues from her. “I will not allow you to leave here with the contents of that chest, which leaves you with a straightforward choice: you can write this deal off as a bad idea and walk away now, or you can try to keep your awful little collars, in which case you won’t be walking away at all. It’s all up to you, but I know which choice I would make.”

Beryl could feel the fire starting to build within her, could feel the mana that she was gathering almost without intending to. She knew without looking that the tips of her fingers had started to glow.

The matriarch practically vibrated with anger. “How dare you presume to address me in such a manner? You are nameless, unworthy of my acknowledgement, and you have already slain four of my House. And yet you dare to make threats on my life?” The matriarch pointed a shaking finger at Beryl. “Your life is the one which is forfeit. Any less would bring shame and dishonor on our name.”

“Living with shame is a terrible fate, and I know from whence I speak,” Beryl said. As she spoke, she began to smell the dry, slightly-burnt smell of heat in the air around her. “But dying in shame is worse. You said it yourself: I’ve already killed four of you. I don’t want to add six more, but I will if you don’t give me a choice. This doesn’t have to end like that. You can still turn around and leave.”

The silver-haired matriarch seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then she spun around to face the angel, who had stood passively by throughout the confrontation.

“And you, are you going to just stand there?” the matriarch demanded, her hands balled into fists. “This murderer is attempting to steal from us that which we’ve rightly bought and paid for. Aren’t you going to do something about it?”

The angel’s face was a pale blank. “Your business with Mister Vane has been concluded,” she repeated. “My master is not a party to these events, and has no obligation to you or anyone else present.” And, with that, she took an additional step backwards, and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

The infuriated matriarch turned back to Beryl again, who was now visibly glowing, her whole body like a white-hot filament.

“Kill her,” the matriarch said.

“Fine,” Beryl said back, as the two knights with drawn longswords broke into a run towards her, and the two Dentevi sorcerers each raised their arms in her direction.

An explosive boom cracked around her as a wave of flames and heat rolled off of Beryl and out towards the charging swordsmen. It was on them before they could even react. Their cloaks burst into flames, as did their eyebrows and hair. One of the men dropped his red-hot sword with a kind of choked, rasping scream, and reached up to cover his burning eyes with his hands, only to scream even louder as his flesh blistered and burned beneath his fingertips. The other swordsman’s mouth had been open when the flames struck him. Fire and boiling air had raced down his throat, burning away his vocal cords and rendering him mute as he tumbled to the ground, so that the only sounds coming from him were the sizzling and popping of his bare flesh where it came into contact with the searing-hot plates of his armor.

Beryl watched the knights burn and die through a kind thin, red haze which had colored her vision. She could feel the air vibrating around her, could feel her own blood vibrating in time with it, could feel that same blood pounding behind her eardrums, surging through her one working eye. She felt as though she were in a state of heightened consciousness that was nearly overwhelming in its intensity, such that time seemed to dilate and slow, and she was aware of every single sensation that coursed through her body, of every single instinct that flared through her mind. It was a kind of strange, serene sense of being present within herself which she only ever experienced when the fire took over. But, at the same time, she felt almost disconnected from her own actions. It was as though her body moved of its own accord, and she knew what she needed to do only after she had done it. Like she didn’t have to think, but instead merely to feel, and to react.

Beryl looked away from the knights and towards the sorcerer on her left. There was a bolt of lightning leaping from his hands and arcing towards her, and she was fascinated by how slowly it seemed to move. She made no effort to evade it; instead, she stepped directly into the bolt’s path. She swept her left arm out in front of her in a wide arc, raising a circle of protection which glimmered in the air before her like a gossamer shell. The bolt struck her protective spell and vanished into the aether with a crackle of static and a flash of intense white light. Beryl brought her other hand up and pointed it in the startled sorcerer’s direction. A jet of banefire erupted from her fingertips and raced towards the opposing mage, passing through her own protective barrier and the one which he struggled feebly to raise as though neither were present. The sorcerer hardly had time to cry out before fire met flesh and his body was reduced to glowing embers and blackened bones.

Sensing movement to her right, Beryl stepped instinctively to the side and out of the way of the arcing greatsword which sliced through the space which she had occupied the moment before. As its blade flashed past her face, she could see the glowing runes which covered its surface, and her enchanter’s mind instinctively processed the spells placed upon the polished metal: wards against corrosion of the cutting edge, curses to cause the wounds it left to bleed, and protections against its use in the hands of another. While the sword’s hulking holder fought to change the direction of its momentum-laden swing, Beryl reached out to the blade’s enchantments with her mind, and channeled her own energy into them. The various runes suddenly flared with a nova-like flash of light, and the sword which bore them shattered into a hail of molten-red shrapnel. The giant Dentevi recoiled in surprise and pain as he was peppered with the remnants of his weapon. Little trickles of blood appeared all across his face and arms where the shrapnel had riddled them, and he stared almost mutely down at the mangled remnants of his hand into which the blade’s hilt had exploded. He was so preoccupied by the effects of the blast that he didn’t even seem to notice as Beryl rounded on him and struck him square in the chest with a fireblast which knocked him off of his feet and sent his lifeless body tumbling to the ground in a massive, smoking heap.

This left Beryl standing nearly face-to-face with the matriarch. Beryl was close enough to see the surprise and fear in the silver-haired woman’s eyes. She saw the woman’s lips move, though she hardly heard the words which emerged, and she saw the matriarch’s hand begin to rise up, saw the otherworldly tendrils of black energy which had started to coil around it. Beryl didn’t recognize the spell which the matriarch was trying to work, but she didn’t wait to find out any more about it. Instead, she pivoted quickly on the balls of her feet and ducked down low beneath the stream of dark energy which ripped through the air above her head. As she did, she conjured her own firebolt into being and shot it upward into the stunned matriarch’s face.

Beryl had to close her eye as a cloud of cinders filled the air around her, and the acrid smell of burning flesh filled her nostrils. That smell triggered a flood of memories which came rushing up from the depths of her subconscious, and she suddenly started in place, as though she were waking from a dream. The pounding in her ears started to subside, and time seemed to return to its normal speed. She sucked air into her lungs, suddenly desperate for breath, and as she opened her eye the red haze began to clear slowly from her vision.

Five corpses lay on the ground around her, in various states of charred rigidity, with trails of sickly black smoke rising up through the gaps in the dead men’s armor. The iron chest lay on the street in front of her, and behind it stood the pale angel, silent and stone-faced, her eyes on Beryl, her arms still crossed, her expression unreadable.

Beryl heard a kind of muffled sob come from just off to her right, and she turned to see the young Dentevi sorceress crouched down on the cobblestone street. She was curled into a nearly fetal ball, with her knees pulled up into her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around them.

Beryl searched her memory of the fight, which was already fading away with an alarming speed. She mainly recalled little isolated bits and pieces: a sound, a smell, a still image – a kind of patchwork recollection knitted together only by the threads of emotion. The overall effect was incomplete, but she could remember enough to realize that the young sorceress who lay before her on the ground had not cast a single spell during the exchange. Beryl realized that the woman must have taken cover as soon as the killing started. In the heat of the moment, Beryl had not even noticed her absence.

Fear, Beryl thought. Self-preservation. Normal, human reactions. Why did they seem so out of place?

Beryl walked over to where the young woman sat and knelt down next to her. She reached out and took the sorceress by the arm.

The young woman howled in pain as Beryl’s fingers wrapped around her wrist. The black fabric of her robe smoldered beneath Beryl’s searing grasp, and the woman’s sobbing grew loud and ragged.

“I’m sorry,” Beryl said. “I don’t mean to hurt you, and I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I need you to focus right now. I need you to look at me, and to listen to me, and I can’t let go of you unless you do. Are you listening?”

The sorceress turned her frightened, tear-filled brown eyes up to meet Beryl’s green one, and she nodded her head slightly. Beryl could see the terror written across the other woman’s face.

They were about the same age, Beryl thought. They might even have known each other as children.

Beryl adjusted her grip slightly, so that her fingertips didn’t keep burning the same places on the other woman’s skin. The sorceress winced and whimpered a little bit, but did not break eye contact.

“I need you to leave and to go back to your House. I need you to tell them what happened here. Tell them who I am. Tell them what I did. Tell them that I took your slave collars, and that I killed your people. And tell them that you fought me hard, that you did your best, and that I only left you alive so that you could give them a message, and the message is this: No more. This stops here. All the intrigue, all the killing. Whatever game your House is playing at, it stops here. Do you understand?”

The woman nodded, but Beryl shook her head.

“I need to hear you say it.”

“I understand,” the woman said, her voice small and ragged.

“Good. Because I mean it. No more reprisals, no more revenge. Honor be damned, it has to end here. And that specifically applies to House Trevanei. They’re not your enemy. But I will be, if anyone else gets hurt. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” the woman said.

“Good. Because, from this day forth, if a Dentevi so much as harms a Trevanei — and I mean Astria Trevanei in particular — I’m going to know about it, and you can count on me to overreact. Make sure they understand that,” Beryl said. “You have to make them understand, because if I have to do it, it’s going to end like this.” She gestured at the charred corpses nearby.

The frightened woman nodded her head again. “I understand,” she said.

“Good,” Beryl said. She let go of the sorceress’s wrist. “Now go. Get out of here.”

The young Dentevi sorceress scrambled to her feet and took off at a run.

Beryl closed her eye for a second, and tried to remember what Aloise had said. About how people were more than just the sum of their actions.

She opened her eye and looked around at the five dead bodies one more time, and she prayed that Aloise was right.