Astria Trevanei’s body hurt all over. She had been standing in the reception line at the High Sorceress’s annual Ascension Day gala for the last six hours, bowing and smiling and exchanging insincere pleasantries with a seemingly endless parade of nobles, relatives of nobles, and other assorted hangers-on, and she was tired and sore from all that genuflecting.

She hated having to appear at these sorts of Court functions. Hated the forced smiles, hated the endless formalities – Gods, but the High Sorceress did prattle on this year, so much so that Astria had to stifle more than one yawn during the invocation. She hated having one of her most reliable fledglings stand behind her to whisper the forgotten names of important personages into her ear as they approached and planted kisses on her proffered hand. And those ceremonial kisses – those were the worst. It was bad enough already to have a series of half-witted highborns slobbering over her delicately-manicured nails, but every year the Grand Magistrate, who had been casting indecent stares in her direction ever since she had been twelve – twelve, by the Gods, twelve! – would linger there with his lips pressed against her hand for just a few seconds longer than could possibly be appropriate.

One year, Astria actually felt his tongue slither across her knuckles, and it had taken every ounce of control she possessed to resist a strongly-felt impulse to grab hold of him by that slimy tongue with one hand while setting his hair on fire with the other. Imagining it still made her smile.

But she had maintained control, kept her composure, and beamed a perfect smile at the Magistrate instead as she said: “So lovely to see you again!” And she had kept right on smiling until after he moved down the reception line and out of sight.

Astria understood control. It was one of her strengths.

So she put up with the ceremonial duties incumbent upon her as the High Sorceress’s envoy at Court, and she waited until the last of the important guests had departed before she excused herself and slunk back towards her chambers to nurse her aching muscles and wounded pride.

Her back hurt from all the standing and bowing. Her ribs hurt where her girdled corset dug into them beneath her fitted ceremonial robe. Most of all, her feet were killing her. Wearing the azure stilettos had been a mistake – six hours was too long to be on her feet in those shoes, no matter how well they matched the color of her robe.

She briefly considered summoning her favorite fledgling to give her a foot massage, but decided against it. She needed time to decompress. She wanted to be alone.

Still, as she hobbled into the antechamber of her lushly-appointed suite within the Court’s residential wing, she could not fight the growing realization that she was too alone. Her lady’s maid was nowhere to be seen, and the two bodyguards whom she had recently installed outside her door were also conspicuous in their absence.

She stood there, quiet and still, and listened for any clue as to what was going on, but she heard nothing. There was no sign of any disturbance in the room itself. Her fine furniture was in its usual places, and she saw no unusual scuffmarks on either the velvet-upholstered settee or the hand-woven carpet.

“Lelina?” She called out for her maid, but got no answer.

“Sir Agren? Sir Morr?” Nothing from her bodyguards, either.

Focusing her mind, she waved one hand in a wide arc and cast a detection spell which rippled out through the air around her, sweeping across the room and into each nook and cranny. But the spell passed over everything without so much as a flicker, and she could sense no other presence in the room. Which made sense, because her quarters were thoroughly trapped against intruders, and she was confident in the strength of her protections.

Still, where were her servants?

She thought about returning to the gala and coming back with some fledglings in tow. There would be safety in numbers, but she would have to invent an explanation for allowing them into her personal chambers, some story which both concealed her true concern and did not augur a breach of the social order. She couldn’t think of a satisfactory lie, and so she put the thought aside.

Instead, she kicked off her stiletto heels and tip-toed over to the black marble door to her inner chamber. The door had no lock or knob. In their place, it had a small, polished brass plate with the House Trevanei sigil etched into it – an open eye with a single flame at its center, wreathed by a ring of starbursts.

Astria traced a thin, delicate finger along the pattern of stars. With a gentle hiss, the door slid open before her.

She took a full breath, and stepped into her chamber.

The room was shrouded in darkness, but Astria could see the familiar outlines of her canopy bed, dressing screen, and divan in the shadows before her, all in their accustomed places. Again, she heard no sound, detected no hostile presence. She started to walk across the room in the direction of her wardrobe when–

“Hello, Astria.”

Astria whirled to her left and her hand shot out, casting a bolt of fire in the direction that the voice had come from. In its reflected red light she saw a small figure seated upon a plush armchair in the darkest corner of the room. For a split-second her firebolt tracked towards the figure, before the spell slammed into a magical barrier and vanished with a crackle of noise and a flash of white light.

“It’s nice to see you, too,” the intruder said.

Astria saw the seated figure raise a hand, and suddenly the glowstones in the wall sconces around her room flared to life, filling the chamber with a warm orange light.

Astria blinked for a second as her eyes adjusted. Still holding her hand out in the air, poised to strike, her mouth fell open as she saw the scarred face of the woman sitting in her chair.

“I thought you were dead,” Astria said.

“It turns out that I’m very difficult to kill,” the scarred woman said. “I hope that doesn’t disappoint you too much. And, for goodness’s sake, put your hand down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Astria paused for a moment, but eventually did as her sister asked. She allowed her arm to drop back down to her side, and walked over to sit on the corner of her bed.

So, Beryl was not dead.

Astria had suspected as much – her sister’s body had not been among the corpses pulled from the smoldering ruins of the tavern in the Nameless District. And, if Beryl had escaped, then it was not surprising that she had dropped off the map afterward, given the chaos she had set in motion. Beryl’s shop had been abandoned when Astria had quietly sent her agents around to inspect it, and no one had seen or heard from her sister since. As such, it had been convenient to have Beryl declared dead – doing so had diverted some attention away from Astria for a while, and had given her a ready-made scapegoat while she played for time and planned her next moves.

But, whatever might have happened to her sister, Astria had not expected to see Beryl. Certainly not anytime soon, certainly not like this – unannounced, in her personal chambers.

She had not planned for this.

And then there was Beryl herself, who seemed, well, different. Physically, the changes were marked. Her skin, always so pale, was now tan, as though she had been exposed to a great deal of sun. And the clothes she wore were strange, foreign – all white linen, with odd styling and a loose cut.

Most surprising of all, Beryl had combed back her hair so that it framed her face without concealing the scar around her burned eye.

But there was something else that was different about Beryl as well, something which Astria couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it was just the fact that she was here at all. Astria had a hard time believing that her sister had sought her out in this manner, had invaded her territory – that she had taken such a risk. It was not like her. Beryl was dangerous, certainly, and even impetuous, but bold, or assertive? No. More repressed than bold. More servile than assertive.

And yet the woman Astria saw sitting in her chair did not look servile.

What was Beryl’s play? She needed to figure that out, and fast. Astria knew her sister could be very dangerous to her.

“How did you get in here?” Astria asked.

“How did I get in?” A look of amusement crept across Beryl’s face. “Astria, I designed half of your wards and traps. I enchanted the lock on your door. Please give me a little credit for being able to bypass my own work. As for the rest of your spells, well, as you yourself said, I’ve always had a knack for this sort of magic.” Beryl ran a hand up and down the chair’s velvet-upholstered arms. “I have to say, you have a lot of very nice things in here. This is a very comfortable chair.”

“And my servants? Where are they?”

“Those giant men, and your maid? Once I introduced myself, they didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me, so I suggested that they take the night off, and they obliged. The looks I got – what have you been telling these people about me?”

Astria grimaced. How was it so hard to find reliable help?

“I don’t ever speak about you,” she said. “You have developed quite the reputation – one purely of your own making, I might add. If it becomes known that you are alive, you should know that you will be hunted down. All of House Dentevi will be after you, not to mention the city watch. You’re a criminal, a killer.”

Beryl looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and when she looked back down, Astria thought she could detect a hint of sadness in her sister’s face.

“How many people died in the fire?” Beryl asked.

“Eleven,” Astria said. “Now that we’re not including you.”

“How many of them were Dentevi men?”

“How should I know? I wasn’t the one who nearly sparked a war between two of the Grand Houses while burning down half a block in the process.”

“Please, Astria, don’t patronize me. You have feelers everywhere – around the Court, in the city watch, probably even at the mortuary. You’ll have found out what happened.”

Astria sighed. It was true – almost as soon as the embers had gone out, Astria’s network of informants had been hard at work, trying to assess what damage had been done and how it might rebound back on her. Knowledge was a weapon, and Astria made a point of being well-armed.

“Four dead Dentevis,” Astria said. “Two knights, one sorcerer, and one I’m not sure about yet.”

“And the other seven? Who were they?”

Astria shrugged. “Nobodies.”

Beryl was quiet for a moment. “I wish it hadn’t happened like that,” she said. “I never intended to hurt anyone. It wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Then what is it that you do want?”

“I want us to talk.”

Astria laughed. “And what if I don’t want to talk to you?” she said.

“I just want to have a conversation, Astria. Please don’t turn this into a fight.”

“Or what? You’ll tattle on me to the High Sorceress? You’ll kill me?”

Beryl sighed. “No. I’ll leave, and you won’t hear what I have to say.”

“Wonderful. Fantastic. Let’s skip straight to that part.”

Beryl rubbed her forehead above her good eye. “Why do you hate me so much?” she asked.

Astria stared blankly at her sister. She was surprised to realize that she was gripping her silk sheets with clenched fists. So she let the sheets go, placed her hands in her lap, and tried to keep her emotions under control, tried not to rise to the bait.

“Why do I hate you?” Astria said. “You ruined my life.”

“I ruined your life?” Beryl said. “You locked me in a room for ten years. You threw me out on the street. You unmade me.”

“You killed my mother,” Astria said, feeling her control start to slip, feeling the anger which she knew was building inside her start to smolder.

She watched as her sister stood up from the chair and took a few steps towards the bed. She fought against the urge to stand up herself and strike her.

“I killed our mother when I was eight years old,” Beryl said, “and even though I didn’t mean to do it, I’ve spent the rest of my life living with it, living with the knowledge that I killed the kindest, most caring person I’ve ever known, all because I was jealous of you. Because I wanted to be more like you, because I wanted everyone to look at me the way they looked at you.”

“And I suppose that makes it right?”

“No, it doesn’t. Nothing I can ever do, or say, or feel can make it right. It took me a long time to realize that, to stop trying to undo something that can’t be undone, to stop hating myself, to accept myself for who I am and what I am.” Beryl kept moving closer to the bed, until she was nearly within arm’s reach. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not asking you to love me. I’m just asking you to try to accept me for who I am and what I am.”

“A murderer?” Astria said. She fixed her two amber eyes onto her sister’s single green eye.

“Among other things, yes. But also your sister. A Trevanei.”

“Not anymore. Not since I had your name struck from our House. We may share blood, but we will never share a name.”

Astria was quiet for a second, then she covered her mouth with her hand as she suppressed the urge to laugh. This whole absurd encounter made sense to her now – she knew why Beryl had come. Her sister might look different, might seem different, might say all these different things, but Astria could see through her new façade, and she saw the same old game lurking underneath.

Beryl wanted what she had always wanted. She wanted her name back.

Well, she’ll never get it, Astria thought. Not while I’m alive.

“So that’s it, then?” Astria said. “You’re here to beg for your name back? Or to threaten me, maybe?”

“No.”

“No, what? You don’t want it back?”

“No, I’m not here to beg you or to threaten you. I’m here to tell you that, even if I can’t forgive what you did to me, I think I understand why you did it. I wish you would give me my name back, but I know I can’t make you. I know you have to want to do it.” Beryl closed her eye, then opened it. “You know, I used to lie awake nights, thinking about what I could do to you – what I would do to you – to get you to make me whole again. I thought about bribing you. I thought about extorting you. And, yes, I also thought about hurting you, and I hated myself for it. I spent twenty years feeling trapped by you, feeling like you had this terrible power over me, and wondering how I could be free of it.”

Beryl reached into her trouser pocket, and her hand came back out holding a small, red crystal. It was small enough to fit inside her palm, and it was the color of sunrise on a stormy day. Astria hadn’t laid eyes on it in over twenty years, but she knew what it was: a fire diamond. She had given it to Beryl, asked her to break the seals on it – a simple act which had triggered a chain of consequences that was anything but simple.

And here it was again, almost within her grasp.

Beryl looked down at the fire diamond in her hand, then held it out towards Astria. “At first I thought I would use this against you, somehow. I would come here, come to see you, and force you to give me what I wanted. I felt like, finally, the tables had turned, and I could be the one to have power over you. Instead, so many strange things happened. Your man Treddon put a sword through my heart, except he didn’t kill me, and he wasn’t your man after all. The Dentevis paid him off, and they were out to kill you, too. So I went to try to stop them, and I wound up hurting a lot of people who I never meant to hurt, and it could have just been more blood on my hands, another scar on my soul. Instead, it took me away from here, took me to places I never could have gone otherwise, where I met people who I would never have met otherwise, who helped me to learn things about myself that I might never have learned otherwise.”

Astria’s eyes had barely left the fire diamond since it had appeared in her sister’s hand. But, as Beryl spoke, and as the import of what she was saying began to register, Astria felt a cold shiver run down her spine, and she looked away from the mana stone and at her sister. Looked hard into her eye, searched for the truth, and tried to decide if she was really hearing what she thought she was hearing.

“You travelled away from here?”

“Yes.”

“How far away?”

“Very.”

“You’re saying that—“

“Yes.”

“—that you’re a planeswalker?”

“Yes.”

Astria fell silent for a moment. She ran a hand through her auburn hair, curling it around her fingers, pulling on it. This changed things, if it was true. But it couldn’t be true.

Astria didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to believe that her sister – Beryl, of all people – had that kind of power, a kind of power which Astria didn’t have, never would.

But Astria knew Beryl, knew her face and her voice and her manner, knew how to tell when she was lying.

Beryl was not lying.

“Then why did you come back?” Astria said, the tone of her voice subtly changed – less imperious, more cautious. It was a tone she was used to hearing, just not from herself.

“Because I realized that I’ve spent my life running from a lie: fearing you, hating you, hating the power you held over me, wanting to be free from your control.” Beryl looked straight into her sister’s eyes. “Astria, I was never under your control. You never had any power over me. You had the power to hurt me, sure, and you did. But that’s where it ended. I always thought you held the key to my future, that you had to make me whole before my future could begin. Now?” She shrugged. “I’ve come to terms with who I am. I’m already whole. And you can’t hurt me anymore.”

Astria didn’t understand. “You’re still nameless,” she said.

“Yes. But I don’t need a name to be who I am.”

“Then why do you care? Why do you keep bothering me about it?”

“Because it was my mother’s name. Because I want to be part of her again. That’s easy for you,” Beryl said. “You’ll always be part of her. You see her every time you look in the mirror. Me, I only see her in my dreams. And my dreams are not good dreams.” She pointed to her blind eye and the violent scars around it. “This is what I see when I look in the mirror.”

“You’re not trying to cover it up anymore,” Astria said.

“I’m not ashamed of it anymore. I used to hate it, because it was a reminder of what I did. Now, it serves a different purpose. It reminds me to focus on awareness and acceptance. It reminds me that I don’t have to run from who I am or how I feel.”

“So now you’re some paragon of forbearance, is that what you’re telling me?”

“We’re sitting here talking, aren’t we?”

Astria looked at her sister, tried to figure her out, but couldn’t. “You really think you’ve changed, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes. Walking the planes does funny things to you.”

“And now, what, you’re going to change me, too? I’m some sort of reclamation project for you?”

“No. I just wanted you to know how I feel, and now you do. And I wanted to know how you felt, and now I think I know that, too. Where we go from here? I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“And that?” Astria said, nodding towards the fire diamond. “What do you intend to do with it?”

Beryl held the small, red crystal up, so that it danced with reflected light.

“When you brought it to me, did you know that our mother was the one who sealed it?”

“Yes.”

“So you lied to me?”

“Yes,” Astria said.

“Why?”

“I didn’t trust you.”

Beryl sighed, shook her head. “I can just barely remember seeing her with this, back when we were very young. Do you remember that?”

Astria nodded.

“Was it hers?” Beryl asked.

Astria nodded again. “But she sealed away it for some reason, and, after that, no one seems to have realized what it was. It was just one more curiosity to collect dust in a display case in the High Sorceress’s quarters.”

“Until you stole it.”

“I didn’t steal it. It came into my possession.”

“Well, that’s cryptic. You’ll have to forgive me if I get the sense that you still don’t trust me.”

“I’m not much of a believer in trust,” Astria said. “I find life is much safer that way.”

Beryl shook her head. Then she held the fire diamond out to Astria, and motioned for her to take it.

“Here,” she said. “This doesn’t really belong to me, and I don’t need it anymore. It doesn’t belong to you, either, but I get the sense that you need it more than I do.”

Astria started to reach out to take the crystal, but hesitated with her hand halfway there, wondering what unspoken price her sister expected in return.

As though she could read Astria’s thoughts, Beryl said: “There’s no catch. Think of it as a goodwill gesture – provided, that is, you think having this thing is worth dealing with the trouble that seems to follow it around.”

Astria held her hand out, and Beryl dropped the fire diamond into it. Astria closed her fingers around the little crystal – it was warm to the touch, and she could feel the mana waiting inside it, ready to do her bidding.

She slipped the gem into the scrip she wore around her waist.

“Thank you,” she said.

Beryl smiled a small smile. “I can’t remember the last time you said that to me,” she said.

Astria couldn’t either. Maybe things really were changing, changing in ways she wasn’t sure she understood.

“So, how much danger are you in?” Beryl asked.

Astria sighed. She thought about lying, but wasn’t sure what could be gained by it.

“More than I expected,” she said. “The High Sorceress won’t be around much longer, whether she knows it or not, and I intend to be the next to ascend. Other Houses have different notions. I knew I was stepping on some toes, making some enemies, and I was prepared to deal with that. I’m smarter than the people I can see lined up against me. More powerful, too,” she said, thinking about the fire diamond which now rested inside her scrip. “But it turns out that there are other players in the shadows. Players from far away who I can’t see clearly. House Dentevi may be the tip of the spear, but someone else is guiding their hands. I have to be careful at the moment. Very careful.”

And now, Astria thought, her sister had stepped into the game, too. Her sister who had pierced the veil, and who was now in a position to help her – provided that she could be managed and controlled.

That would be a challenge, the prospect of which filled Astria with equal parts excitement and fear.

“I need your help,” Astria finally said.

“I thought you might. For the record, are you ordering me, or asking me?”

Astria was quiet for a moment. “Asking,” she said.

Beryl nodded. “What do you need?”

Astria hesitated. As she herself had said, it was not in her nature to trust. Enlisting Beryl’s help was a leap of faith, a gamble. Astria didn’t like gambles. She liked games where she knew the outcome in advance, games where she had already shaped the result.

She liked predictability. Beryl was not predictable.

But there was an opportunity here, if she could figure out how to take it.

“I need you to find out about someone for me, someone not from here,” Astria said. “Find out whatever you can.”

“Who?”

Astria stood up from the bed and walked across the room to her dressing area. Atop the dressing table was a wooden puzzle box, carved in the shape of a star and covered all over with swirling, painted lines in blue and gold. Astria put her fingers on the box and a seam appeared across its middle. She lifted off the box’s top and extracted a small, folded piece of paper from inside.

She closed the box, then she walked over to her sister and handed her the slip of paper.

Beryl unfolded the note and read the name written on it. Her face was a blank.

“I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

“Ask around off-plane. You’ll find out something,” Astria said.

“I’ll do what I can.”

Beryl looked back down at the name for a second. Then the slip of paper on which it was written burst into flames. Beryl watched the paper blacken and curl before dropping it onto the floor and grinding it to ashes under the heel of one of her hobnail boots.

Astria fought to suppress a grimace; the rug in her chamber was almost brand new.

Then Beryl took a small step to close the distance between herself and her sister. She reached out and put her hand on Astria’s shoulder.

In spite of herself, Astria flinched. As she did, she felt a flash of anger towards herself over that momentary lapse of control, that unintentional dropping of her guise. She had shown more than she had meant to show. She stepped back abruptly, and returned to sit on the edge of the bed. When she looked back at Beryl, she saw a look of sadness on her sister’s face.

“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” Beryl said.

After a moment, Astria nodded.

Beryl sighed. “You know, I met a woman while I was away, a friend who told me something very important. She told me that fear is the most powerful force in the eternities, and that more evil is done out of fear than any other motive. That’s why I think I understand you now, Astria. Because I know you’ve been afraid of me for a long time.”

“I have good reason to be afraid of you,” Astria said. “You’re dangerous. I know that, better than anyone else. Better than you know it yourself.”

“Not anymore,” Beryl said.

“We’ll see.”

Beryl shrugged. “I guess we will,” she said. “Anyway, we’ve just managed to have a full conversation without either of us threatening to kill the other. That seems like progress of a sort.”

Astria allowed herself a small smile. “I did try to kill you before we started talking,” she said.

“That doesn’t count. You didn’t know it was me. Besides, it would take a lot more than that to kill me.”

“I hardly gave you my best shot.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

Beryl walked over again, and this time Astria forced herself to sit still as her sister put a hand on her shoulder.

“Please think about what I told you,” Beryl said, “and I’ll see what I can find out for you.”

She started to walk away, then turned back to face Astria one more time.

“Astria?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

“I’m always careful. How will I know what you find out?”

Beryl smiled. “I know where to find you,” she said. “I’ll just let myself in. Don’t change the locks.”

Astria watched as Beryl walked to her chamber door, traced her finger across the House Trevanei sigil, and disappeared.

Then Astria reached into her scrip and took out the fire diamond, turning it over in her hand, studying it under the light. She felt the mana inside it, and thought about how it might change the balance of power in the game she was playing.

With that in mind, Astria Trevanei started to work on a new plan.

* * *

Aloise Hartley leaned over her workbench, hardly daring to breathe as she carefully smoothed-out the creases in the ancient constellation chart she had unearthed on her latest expedition. She was using a fine-haired brush to clean away some dirt which had been ground into the chart’s folds, and she had just started to reveal the writing underneath when she heard the sound of a door open and close downstairs.

That was odd, she thought. Lys had gone out, and Aloise hadn’t expected her back for some time yet.

Aloise put the delicate chart aside and stood up. She stepped out of her loft workshop and looked down from the upstairs landing into the parlor below. As she did, she was startled to see a woman looking back up at her.

A woman with one clear, green eye, and another that was clouded and blind, ringed by red scars. A woman wearing the white linen blouse which Aloise had given her on a cold, rainy night on a lonely, far-off plane.

A blouse which, Aloise noticed with a start, was now streaked with what looked like blood.

“Oh my goodness, what are you doing here? Are you alright?” Aloise asked.

Beryl shook her head, and there was a slight tremor in her voice as she said:

“What can you tell me about a man called Fisco Vane?”

First off, I was happy to bring Astria back here. As I mentioned a long time ago (or, more accurately, a couple months ago, which somehow feels like a very long time), I actually find Astria to be a bit of a puzzle, and so it was fun to try to climb inside her head for a change to see what she would make of her sister's abrupt return.

Astria actually turned out to be a little savvier than I think I was expecting. I started to write under the assumption that Beryl would win her over into a fuller, less ambiguous state of detente, but Astria turned out to be a little too slippery for things to work out that cleanly. She is not a nice person by any stretch of the imagination (or at least, if she is, we certainly haven't seen it yet), but I've been surprised to find a kind of sympathetic pathos in her. Her life is not really one of her own choosing - she lives in a world of cloak-and-dagger by virtue of the accident of her birth, and while she has a natural talent for not only surviving but thriving in that kind of world, it also traps her in a way, and it frames the way she sees reality. Her motives are clear and sensible given the life she finds herself in, but, were she given the chance to start over from a totally clean slate, I'm not sure if this is the life she would choose. It very well might be - after all, she is driven, ambitious, and confident, and to portray her as a total prisoner of fate is to do her a disservice. But there's also a slim chance that this might not be what she wants, and that makes her interesting to me. She and Beryl are both victims of circumstance (albeit in very different forms), and they have both been damaged by it, although they have responded in divegent ways.

As the title implies, Beryl clearly sees Astria as in need of some form of reclamation, and thinks it can be done. Astria, naturally, doesn't share this view. Beryl may be right about her sister. But she might not be. There is a real danger here.

(Just to be clear, I don't mean to imply that Beryl is motivated purely by altruism. She obviously has her own personal interests as well.)

Getting back to the larger picture, I see this story as essentially the conclusion of Beryl's introductory chapter. I feel like I have a grip on who she is and what her motivations are, and she now has a reason to venture out into the wider multiverse. Her conflict with Astria has essentially driven her actions to this point, and I still think that is a critical piece of her larger story, but the problem with that conflict was that it was too localized and too personal to really give Beryl the kind of invitation to move around in the wider world that I wanted her to have. Now that she has something else on her plate, I look forward to see what she does next.

Along those lines, I want to extend another "thank you" to Ruwin, for allowing me to draw again (albeit very, very briefly) on his wonderful characters. They are more fit-for-purpose (and just plain better, when you get right down to it) than anything I had rattling around inside my noggin, so the fact that these two threads of the M:EM have the chance to interact in some small way is a testament both to the achievements of the project and the talent of the people who work on it.

There's some really fun language going on in here. On the one hand, I do feel like it's being a little too clever, but that doesn't mean it isn't working.

I think the paragraph grouping is a little weak. Just too much separation going on in similar thoughts.

mmm I think "decompress" might not fit in with the rest of the narrative language. It just jumps out really bad. Likewise, "sigil" doesn't really feel like it fits with what you describe. Signet or Seal would be better than sigil, since sigil sort of implies more abstraction.

... Gooootta say that Beryl is being a little supervillain here. The sitting in the dark room waiting thing is just not a good fit for her. The waiting isn't that big a deal, but it's the voice in the darkness that pushes it over the edge. You can retain the surprise just by having her tucked away in a lit room. I do get that you want the stand off and action to jump off the confrontation, but it really puts Beryl in a negative light that I think detracts from a lot of it. Too much like what Astria would be seen doing.

As the scene goes on, I realize that there's something very wrong with the scene's dynamic. Having both of them seated makes them equal, but having Beryl sitting from the start causes some problems. Honestly, I think given the way the scene is playing out, Beryl needs to be on her feet. It matches the personality differences between the two as well, but you need Beryl in the more active position. Having Astria seated suits her for two reasons. One it lets her make the proclamation that she's unconcerned, but it also makes her the passive participant, which is the weaker of the two.

Beryl could use a little more activity. We get a lot out of Astria, but Beryl's expressions and tone aren't really touched upon.

The world at large here is still a bit less MagicTM than it needs to be. I don't fault that much, but it certainly has a different... texture (maybe?) than the right flavor of what makes Magic. I think if you just made a few simple mentions of mana being used in Astria's spells or something it'd help bring it back in line (like when Astria deals with the lock for example. Prime time to do that.)

Astria's immediate dismissal feels wrong for her character. The “Wonderful. Fantastic. Let’s skip straight to that part.” just doesn't seem right coming from her. Part of that is tied to the language employed though. The last bit doesn't match her linguistic signature that you've been putting together.

The... mention of Astria knowing what a planeswalker is is kind of a wrinkle. We've never been given any idea of how well known they might be in this setting and given Beryl's ignorance, it doesn't feel right, even if Astria had more experience, or it to be so simple a mention. If it were me, I would shift things around, have Beryl say what she is and have Astria think it a legend then begin to understand the truth of it. The simple acceptance of their existence has waaaaaaaaaaaay too many complications in its implications. Even among those that suspect there is a multiverse, it's too much of an academic theory that they can't prove. Just changing the lines around would settle that better. Planeswalkers and the multiverse just shouldn't normally be something to be blase about.

Beryl really does need more expression. She just comes across as too calm and unemotional throughout.

While I'm glad to see Aloise back, we might end up running into a problem using her. Quite simply, I don't know if she'll know who Fisco Vane is. She doesn't feel like she'd run in the same circles and she's DEFINITELY not met too many of their kind.
Aside from that, I will admit that I worry a bit at her usage, only because I'm currently using her in a story I'm writing right now. However, I think that might be advantageous because it might mean we can cross over some streams and tie everything together in one way or another. Still, none of these are my characters so I don't feel like I can really weigh in with any authority to that.

@Aloise and Fisco: Stars and Smoke is a story where Fisco and Aloise meet, though it's mostly a character study and just highlights how they interact. Keep in mind that the story is very early in Aloise's career as a planeswalker (she's probably very young - barely twenty-three - and roughly the same age when she meets Beryl. The Hermit's Burden takes place about a year later.)

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that Fisco supplies her with an immediate method of contacting him - his signature coin. If Beryl received information indicating this, it is very likely that she would contact Aloise, whom she has decided is trustworthy. (See: A Bet on Kindness )

And OL, being the polite, sincere librarian that he is, asked my permission first even though he didn't have to because he's such a sweetums.

@Beryl and Astria: Though I do agree that Beryl may need more of a presence, I absolutely adored Astria in this piece. She's very atypical for the role - I expected her to be all machination and no emotion, but instead, she's just as emotionally motivated as you would expect any woman to be. Her dislike of Beryl is visceral and tangible, and for good reason. Since the story is told from Astria's point of view, it would be likely that she seems more animated. I hesitate to think of her as playing a passive role in this exchange, however.

If anything, Beryl is the passive one, despite initiating the scene, as Astria continually aggrieves, accuses, and then eventually, accepts. Beryl's trying to prove a point by staying calm and being diplomatic. Astria's just angry that her sister has made her life difficult.

@Aloise's further involvement and crossing the streams: Yes! I want this very much, and keep in mind that Aloise's timeline is flexible, and she is well traveled enough, to accommodate several consecutive stories, even if they have nothing to do with one another. I want her to meet different shades of characters - I want her to meet Ellia's and Kirsh's and pyromancers and beast mages. She thrives in a setting where she is learning something new about herself or others, and she is motivated by altruism.

I'm molding her to serve a purpose, of course. She's important to Fisco's arc, but she's also a whole lot more than that. While I'll be tying down some large swaths of her time, she is, at her heart, an explorer. She won't stay in one place for long. Feel free to take her out and show her something wonderful.

My fate is always to be 20 percent off the correct amount of cleverness, either in one direction or the other.



My personal preference is usually for more, shorter grafs. When things are working right, the graf breaks come where I imagine tone or attitude shifts occurring inside a character's head, even if they combine to represent a larger train of thought.

That being said, things certainly aren't always working right, so I'll take another look for places where the story is getting a wee bit fragmented.



Agreed that I like "seal" better in the second instance. I'll need to think a little on the first. One of the things I think I understand about Astria is her ability to not act in the moment (when she's on-form, anyway), to store up these little provocations and insults and impulses beneath a cool exterior, and only release them when it's safe to do so. I see her as a kind of human pressure cooker that builds up steam and has to let it back out; and "decompress" felt okay, but there may be another word that's more fit for purpose.

(Also, I wonder what it might take to cause Astria to finally boil over. Beryl seems to know roughly which buttons to push, but we've never seen Astria's lid blow off. If it ever does...)



This is somewhat on purpose, and I'll try to explain my thinking.

Basically, this is a conversation-slash-confrontation which Beryl has been wanting to have with Astria, in one form or another, for twenty years. She's had more than two-thirds of her life to imagine how this would go, to try to rehearse what she wants to say, to try to plan what she wants to do, to try to picture how Astria will react. And, for most of her life, her vision for how this meeting plays out would probably have been very adversarial - violent, even. I can't remember it exactly, but there's a line from (I think) "A Bet On Kindness" where Beryl tells Aloise that she's worried about seeing Astria because (roughly) "I hate her too much to forgive her but I love her too much to want to hurt her, and if I see her now, I think I will hurt her."

For a long time, Beryl's great fear has been that, when she becomes emotional, she will wind up hurting the people around her, and that would have colored the way she imagined confronting her sister.

Beryl initiates this meeting now because she believes she has changed. She's more self-aware. She thinks she understands Astria better, and she thinks she understands herself better. She has bought into awareness and acceptance, and she thinks that even if Astria tries to provoke her, even if she feels her own emotions start to surge, she won't be overmastered by them.

But, while Beryl is genuinely more (for lack of a better term) Zen-like than before, this is a new thing for her, and I believe it is very effortful. She can surf her emotional waves, and she can focus on awareness and acceptance, but it takes work. She has to actively try to maintain that frame of mind. And that's why she's sitting there, in the dark - I imagine even with her eyes closed until Astria comes in the door. She's trying to focus, trying to center herself, trying to visualize a conversation with her sister that doesn't center around revenge, or turnabout, or score-settling, but instead seeks understanding. That's a big rewrite on the script she's had in her head for twenty years, and she needs real focus and effort to remember her new lines.

And this extends into the conversation. She doesn't emote as much as she otherwise might, or even move around as much as she otherwise might, because she's constantly working to stay in the moment and to be aware of her own feelings. (She does slip at times, like when Astria insults her by asking how she got in, and draws a visibly emotional reaction in the process.) And I think that one of the reasons she remains seated for as long as she does is because it's a learned remnant of the power dynamic between her and her sister. Beryl isn't used to being the one on top, or the one initiating action. She's used to Astria standing over her, and I think that her mental effort is sufficiently maxed-out on the talking portion of things that she's just defaulting to that mode of interaction.

Now, with all that being said, it doesn't mean I'm right to have written things this way, and I appreciate your suggestions. I'll need to let them turn over in my head for a while to see if anything shakes out.



Yeah, there's probably some low-hanging fruit here.



I actually had the same conversation with myself when I did my first revision, because - as you noted - that line doesn't quite sound like Astria. Her speech is less abrupt, and usually takes its time getting to her point. She's seldom this direct.

I wound up leaving it in purely on the grounds that I liked it.

My best justification for keeping it would be that it's a conversational gambit from Astria to see if she can land a quick, verbal knock-out punch and terminate a conversation she doesn't want to be having. When it doesn't work, she reverts back to form.

But it does stand out, for the reasons you mentioned.



I'll try reversing the parts and see how it looks to me. As I mentioned in response to Luna above, my expectation for both of them is that they do have a prior knowledge that there is a multiverse and that some people can planeswalk, but - as you said - it is a purely academic understanding. I wanted the brevity of this exchange and the speed with which Astria seems to absorb this news to indicate how focused she is on trying to find a way to turn the situation to her own advantage, but it may be too much too fast with too little fuss.

Do orcs blush? If they do, what color do they turn?



I think Beryl would even visit Aloise on spec if it came down to it, because she trusts Aloise and knows that Aloise has been around more than she has. Especially since things appear to have taken a nasty turn, I think Beryl's thinking would run to "any safe port in a storm."



Yeah. Your thinking largely mirrors mine, as noted above.

I was actually pretty nervous about writing a Beryl story from someone else's perspective, but it turned out to be a lot of fun to walk a mile in Astria's stiletto heels. (Painful, but fun.)

And, while Astria is a master manipulator on the larger scale, one of the interesting things I think I've realized about her is that she can be bad at reading individual people. See Treddon, who turns out to be playing both sides. See her bodyguards, who turn out not to be so reliable. See Beryl, who she has misread for years.

I think part of it is that her mind is always working so hard at figuring out how to get ahead of the person she's talking to that she doesn't pay enough attention to the small tells that the people around her are giving off - especially if she doesn't think of those people as important or clever - and this may well get her into real trouble some day. I think it's also another reason why she doesn't take as much note as she should of Beryl's tones and mannerisms, except when she's making a conscious effort to do so. And, frankly, she's not used to having to care about what Beryl's thinking or feeling, because she's used to calling the shots and not the other way around.