When Ira turned thirteen, Father Pine began letting him take the subway on his own. Provided he follow all the standard safety rules, of course. No talking to strangers, no unnecessary sightseeing, stand five feet from the tracks, and always carry an Ossein dagger. The sort of guidance all protective parents gave their brand new teens. And Ira had obeyed like his Father had been watching for the first few months. Until summer began to end, rolling forward into the frosty beginnings of September. 

Maybe it had been pure boredom. Maybe it had been the stuffy air inside the cement tunnels under the city. Maybe it had been their laughter. Ira could no longer recall what inspired his tiny act of rebellion--but he could remember how the children sounded. How they had pushed and shoved, their little violences sweetened by an understanding of playfulness between them. Well, maybe it was that. Ira had only paused for a moment, turning to stare with his wide eyes at the fight breaking out on the middle platform only to find that it wasn't a fight at all--and that he could remember had confused him most of all. 

His feet stuck to the sticky cement walkway, his body frozen. The endless crowd continued around him, flowing onto the east-bound evening train ahead of him. And Ira stayed behind. The train doors squealed as they slid shut. The train peeled off down the track, leaving a rush of sour tasting air behind. 

The children--no, not really. They looked older than Ira. Maybe by three or four years, he wasn't sure. They stayed behind, too. Huddled into a circle, chattering about something Ira couldn't exactly hear. There were four of them. Three boys shoving and barking at one another, and a girl who was red-cheeked and giggling. As mesmerized as Ira was--although he didn't know why. 

Ira backed away from the train platform. He found an unoccupied bench and sat down, pretending to be waiting for the next train. He leaned forward, his palms on his knees, and shut his eyes to listen to the sound of their voices echoing through the gray tunnel. 

He didn't know exactly how long he waited. Long enough to miss one more train, and long enough to hear the hearty whine of metal as the third began to approach. It was then that the oldest of the three boys, or at least the tallest, ran towards the edge of the platform. 

Ira's spine had stiffened, his heart thudded, he nearly shouted out at the boy to stop--that it wasn't safe so close to the tracks--but the boy stopped on his own. He turned to his friends and lifted his left hand, displaying his red can of soda. He shook it up, shaking as hard as they were laughing, and threw it onto the steel tracks. 

The train rolled into the station, crushing the soda can like a rhino to a beetle. And they roared in delight. But Ira didn't know what was so funny about that. Nor did he know why he stayed to watch the train pull away, revealing the squashed tin corpse of the soda. In the end, Ira missed five trains. He stayed until the teenagers had long since left. Sitting beside the tracks, breathing in the slight scent of oil and spilled soda. 

Ira felt like that now. Like he was a little tin container that had been crushed by a speeding train, leaving him flat and emptied across the nails and bolts beneath the tracks. The world came back slowly. Buried beneath the pain screaming in every cell of his being. Under his skin which burned and itched, there was cool ground and warm grass. Above his eyes, which hesitated to see the world through the foggy white clouds stamped into his vision, there was inky-black nothingness. Ira turned over onto his side, groaning in displeasure as all his joints popped and bones creaked. From the ghostly memory of sugary and stale air, he could smell salt and smoke. 

"Good morning, sleeping beauty." 

Ira winced, lifting his trembling palms to cover his ears. Her voice was sharper than Ossein against his skull, digging into the soft squishy material of his brain. He laid on his hips for a moment, breathing in deep gasps of surprisingly crisp sea air. 

"How are you feeling?" 

"Popped." Ira managed between his clenched teeth. 

"Understandable." Mayvalt agreed in her poker-tip voice. "Heimrians aren't meant to travel through the Trammel." 

Those last few words stuck out more than the rest: through the Trammel. 

He had done it. He really did it. Ira had stepped past the limits of his human body. And that, he realized, was far more terrifying than he had given it credit for being back in New York. He collected his flattened palms beneath his back, slowly pushing himself up to rest on his folded legs. The effort left him winded, gasping in harsher salt-rimmed chunks of air. 

"Take your time." Mayvalt offered. A pleasantry that only stung. They didn't have time--not enough to waste. 

"We can't sit around." Ira scolded. He stiffened his legs, forcing them to push up against the ground. His knees trembled, clattering as fiercely as maracas. It wasn't much support. Which, Ira would guess, is how he ended back up on the lawn, his hands splayed across the dirt, stinging from the impact of collapsing. Mayvalt lurched forward--until Ira halted her with a halfhearted glare. "I'm fine! I'm good. . . I'm just, well, I think I'm gonna do some. . . surveillance?"

"From. . . the ground?" Mayvalt asked slowly. 

"It offers me a unique vantage point." Ira shrugged. "Good for recon." 

"Sure, kid." She surrendered, lifting her leather-clad shoulders in a weak shrug. "Then tell me what you see." 

Ira straightened his spine, puffing up his chest to keep his ribs from compressing in on his cotton ball heart. He blinked past the blindness coating the surface of his blues eyes and inhaled his first few sips of the new world he'd woken up into. Something he had so far denied doing. The terrain had been submerged into a thick darkness, a sort of haze that Ira found difficult to process. 

He craned his head back, raising his eyes to where the sky should have been. And it was. Sort of. There was a flat expanse of dark night scenery, speckled by white stars and center pieced by a half-phased silver moon. But the space between all those pinpoints was vaguely orange-ish. As if stained by a distant fire. It made the night feel much closer, the lid to Ira's cage. So he looked down, to where the world wasn't pinning him. The silver moon cast the dirt in a warm glow, enough to see the jagged peaks and rolling hills that coated the remainder of what Ira's eyes could see. Ira had been dropped onto one of those cliffs, sitting high above the rest of the world. He and Mayvalt rested on the grassy peak, with rock behind them and cliffs ahead of them.

"Why are we," he croaked, "in. . . Virginia?" 

Mayvalt was silent for a moment before cackling, doubling over to rest her flat palms on her knees. "Did the portal scramble your head, brat? No! This isn't a road trip to see grandma. You're in Avernus." 

"This is Hell? Really?" Ira mumbled. His ears thudded from the sudden rush in head. "Why is it so picturesque?" 

"Okay, ground rules." Mayvalt chirped, clapping her palms together in a stiff cutting motion. "Let's just assume that everything you think you know about Avernus and Avernians is wrong. Your little cult made up their minds about this place centuries ago--but it doesn't make it fact." 

Ira swallowed the insult driven at his sect and cleared his throat with a rough hum. He had to admit that there was a lot the Progeny didn't know. Secrets, some known and many more unknown to Ira himself. "Fine. Then, no brimstone?" 

"Oh, no." Mayvalt said, shaking her head. "There's tons of brimstone. If you go too far." 

"The pit." Ira guessed. 

"The pit." Mayvalt agreed darkly. "But we don't have to worry. The First Prince placed a Trammel over it. It'll keep all the bad things down there." 

"What about the Third Prince?" Ira asked. "And Melchior? Will they be able to cross the Trammel to come out?" 

Mayvalt's cow-soft eyes rolled over to him. She quirked up her lips into a smirk and blew a breath through her nose. "What? Worried about him after your little tryst with the Prince?"

Ira's cheeks flooded with purple before he could even process the meaning of her teasing. "What? I didn't!" He choked, his hands flying to his lips as if they'd been marked in ruby red lipstick. 

Mayvalt snapped her head back with rough barkish laughter. "It's written all over your face." 

"No!" Ira sputtered. "It's not!" 

"Oh, dear little brat." She sighed, puffing air from her nose. "Don't lie to me--I can see your horns." 

Ira quirked his eyebrows up into arches over his sea-blue eyes. "Is that some He-Goat expression?"

Mayvalt rolled her eyes and placed her palms on her hips. "No, I mean literally. I can see your horns. The Prince must have placed a blessing on you to help hide you in Avernus." 

Ira's fingers shot up to the soft waves of his ruffled yellow hair. He scraped his nails across his scalp but there was only lavender-scented skin and flaxen curls. "What?" 

Mayvalt swooped down, catching his wrists with her viselike grip. "Don't mess with them. You won't be able to touch them or feel them--they're not real. But sticking your hands right through the illusion like that is a real good way to get us caught." 

Ira nodded weakly, prompting Mayvalt to drop his hands. "Angels, okay." 

"And don't say that, either." Mayvalt scolded. "Try sap. Or Princes." 

Ira curled his lips into a sour pout, turning his head towards the cramped sky. "I'm good--I'll just keep it PG." 

Mayvalt scoffed, shaking her pink head. "Heimrians are so stubborn about such stupid stuff. Well, alright. Feeling better? It's about time to start moving." 

Ira's eyes swiveled up to her. "Moving where?" 

"To Heneth, obviously." She snorted. "Sap, that portal really did scramble you all up. What year is it? Do you know who the President is?" 

Ira glared at her with the last few scraps of his vitriol before rolling his feet under himself. As unsteadily as a fawn, he began to rise to his legs. "I mean where is Heneth? How far?"

Mayvalt turned, pressing her flattened palm to the space above her eyebrows. "There," she snapped out with her arm, pointing to a spot beyond the jagged cliffs. To a distance Ira couldn't follow. She turned to him, catching his squinted up gaze and winced apologetically. "Sorry, I forgot you've got weak Heimrian eyes. It's not that far. . . uh, to me." 

"Wow," Ira remarked dryly. "Thanks." 

"We can make it before the sun rises." Mayvalt continued. "I'm sure all the other Faun are already there, enjoying Satyrian drink and Faunish music. Heneth--well, you thought New York knew nightlife." 

It took her mentioning it to remind Ira that there had, in fact, been others to go ahead of him. "Oh! The He-Goats--the gate!" He spun around on his wobbly legs, searching every corner of him and Mayvalt's ledge. There was no glowing white pool, no matter where Ira searched. 

"Fauns, kid. Fauns." Mayvalt corrected with a groan. "And yeah, those are all gone. The Faun would have gone immediately to Heneth. Avernus is alright, but well, it's better for Fauns to stay in Heneth where they've got safety in numbers. The gate dissolved right after you popped out of it." 

Ira's stomach might have twisted up into a knot at the realization there was no way back to New York--it might have but Ira was almost completely sure that his internal organs had been scooped out at some point, replaced with carved lumps of butter in vaguely organ-ish shapes. There was a sound in his skull, a soft whooshing. His own heartbeat, he realized. So at least his margarine heart could keep him alive. 

"Okay." He breathed. "Let's go." 

Mayvalt must have been grinning, he could hear it in her words. "Okay. Let's."

Before Ira could get in a word, maybe to discuss their incredibly limited options, Mayvalt walked towards the edge of their platform. She turned to Ira with a smirk that filled his gut with mud and ice. "Keep up, Heimrian." 

"What are you-" 

She leapt, disappearing over the side in an instant. Ira rushed towards the cliff, staggering to a halt at the rocky ledge. He bent over, placing his hands on his knees to balance himself. Mayvalt had landed about seven feet down, just beyond what Ira wanted to jump himself. She dusted her palms off on her pants and shrugged in a mockingly casual display. Ira rolled his eyes, ignoring the rush of relief at seeing the He-Goat alive and unharmed. 

"We don't have all night!" She shouted, cupping her hand to her lips to cast her voice upwards. 

Ira groaned, rolling his eyes. "Fine. I'm coming. . . just." His eyes darted each way across the mountain, but despite his great efforts he failed to locate any sort of lift or magical elevator that would float him to the bottom. With a string of curses, Ira lowered himself onto all-fours. Like a toddler anxiously lowering themselves into a pool, he laid flat on his stomach and swung his legs over the cliff's face. His toes scraped the wall, flailing momentarily before catching. Slowly, Ira tested his weight. The muscles in his arms whimpered, his fingers stung from his tightened grasp in the grass he had woken up in. 

Things didn't often go as Ira wished they would. His life was a series of cruel and ironic jokes. So, he half expected to fall. He waited for the moment the stones beneath him peeled away from the mountain to send him down, and down, and down. By some impossible miracle--it didn't come. His weight stayed where he put it, half on the wall and half on the ground above. 

Ira released one strangled breath and let go. His legs tensed, taking up the hold his arms had been previously securing. He scrambled down the ledge, fingers digging into holds anywhere he could find them. He didn't really know if he was climbing down, or just maintaining the speed of his plummet. He only knew it when his toes touched solid ground. He sagged, sighing in relief. 

Mayvalt clapped her palms together cheerfully. "Great! One down, a hundred more ledges!" 

Ira blew out an exasperated curse from his trembling lips and grit his teeth together. "I don't like you, Chital." 

"I didn't build the mountain." She laughed in return. 

"Whatever," he dismissed. "Go on, make it look easy." 

"My pleasure." She bowed. 

| 𓃦 |

Ira wasn't good at bouldering. He had had this same realization once before. When he had slipped down a steep hill and been chased back up it by an approaching Beast. Only now, there was a lack of fear based motivation and a tightness in his muscles that he couldn't shake free. He would have liked to creep down the mountain at the speed of molasses, but the Vestige strapped to his back forced his hand, dragging him down the rocks quicker than he could grapple for support. Mayvalt didn't seem keen to share in his struggle. She bounded ahead, leaping down ledges as easily as Ira could rush up a flight of stairs on all-fours. And somehow, as she bounced from cliff to cliff, she still found the energy to speak. 

". . . at the time, ascots were in fashion. So, the dark ages. But we found a place in Abingdon that had-" 

Ira's fingers slipped. His heart leapt into his throat, where it stayed until after he'd regained his balance with the toes of his shimmering leather shoes. He gasped in a shaky breath, pressing his forehead to rest against the cool rock wall. 

"-boss didn't like it though, said it tasted like cardboard. He could taste at the time, so it wasn't that." Mayvalt continued. "Maybe it's cause he used to catch his own fish. With his mo-"

Ira dropped, landing with a graceless stumble onto the ledge beneath him. He grasped the edge of the next cliff, squeezing his fingers against the stone to keep from toppling over the edge. Ira braced his limbs against the level, sucking in gasps of salt-laced oxygen. 

"-at do you think?" 

"Huh?" Ira managed to sputter. 

There was a slight pause in her returned reply. Once it did come it sounded suddenly closer. Emanating from the space directly below him. "I asked what you think?"

Ira peered over the cliff, staring down at the fuzzy antlers just a few feet from his eyes. "Are you," he panted, "climbing back up?" 

"Didn't seem like you could hear me from all the way down there." She shrugged. 

"Oh," Ira huffed sarcastically. "Thanks." 

"Yeah, no problem." Mayvalt agreed. She placed her palms on her hips and tilted her head. "So? Thoughts?"

Ira slid his legs over the ledge and slowly lowered himself down, landing on the balls of his feet. He brushed his palms down the front of his black pants to clear them of dust. "About?" 

"Boss." 

Ira shuddered. "I have nothing to say about him." 

Mayvalt shrugged, turning on her heels. She leapt to the next drop, landing on the tips of her toes. Ira rolled his eyes and lowered onto his stomach to climb down the edge of the rock face--again. 

"Are you acting all stuffy like that cause of-" 

"Nope!" Ira interrupted. "Not cause of that, and I have nothing to say." 

His toes touched the grassy ledge. His muscles released forcing him to stagger onto his feet. He turned to face Mayvalt before she inevitably surged ahead again. 

"Boss kisses a lot of people, y'know." 

Ira might have turned purple, but beneath the silver moon and the shade of the mountain it was hard to tell. "I didn't ask. Nor do I care." 

"Okay, well I'm just saying it's nothing to feel weird about. He's Silver-Tongued." Mayvalt said, repeating that same word. The one the Third Prince had used. 

"Silver-Tongued." Ira repeated, lifting his eyebrow. "Yeah, so everyone keeps saying. What is that?"

"It means boss keeps his magic in his body." Mayvalt explained. "Didn't you notice how he used his blood to open the gate? His spit is the same. It's full of power." 

Ira pressed his palm to his lips, choking back the gag rising into his throat. "Oh, angels. Please don't say spit. I don't want to think about his spit in my mouth." 

Mayvalt laughed. "Your mouth? Boss doesn't kiss anyone on their-" Ira winced and Mayvalt froze, turning as stoney as the mountain they had been dismounting. "Oh. . . oh!" 

"No! Oh nothing!" Ira snapped. He lowered onto his stomach and pushed himself over the next level of the mountain. He propelled himself quickly down to escape from the conversation happening above. Which was useless. A whoosh past his ear and thump below him was all it took to tell Mayvalt had beat him. 

"He kissed you kissed you!" She declared as Ira landed. 

"What is this? A sleepover?" Ira grunted. He continued forward, swinging his legs over the next hold. Mayvalt chased him to the edge, peering down at him with her arms crossed over her heart. 

"Well? How was it? Did boss seem like, I don't know, into it?" 

Ira craned his neck up, placing his chin against the jagged stones to his throat. "Gross." He said. 

Mayvalt groaned, rolling her doe-wide eyes. "Not like that! I mean like. . . oh come on, kid. You know what I'm talking about. About how you're his So-" 

"I'm not his!" Ira shouted. "I'm not that person!"

Mayvalt flinched, snapping back from the cliff's jagged overhang. "I know-"

"You don't!" Ira roared. "You don't know anything about me! About the life I've endured." 

About the nightmares that had plagued his every sleeping moment. About the Cardinal, poised high in his court as he forced Ira to admit to thousands of sins he had committed in hundreds of lives. About the other knights, how they hated him. How they called him a dirty traitor. How Father Pine had been one of them until he had chosen Ira instead--how Father Pine had lied to him. How his role as the Soul had led him to Melchior. About how Melchior had died. Because of him. 

Ira's hands slipped first, followed by the shoes on the ends of his trembling legs. There was one single moment of weightlessness--until it was quickly interrupted by falling. And then landing. Ira crashed into the ground, hitting the dirt with enough force to pop something in his back and to force the air from his lungs. He whimpered, curling in on himself to stop the dizziness from attacking his skull. The Vestige dug painfully into his burning spine, freezing the bones there with its frosty touch. 

"Kid!" Mayvalt shouted. Her boots landed inches from his curled form, sending a painful jolt through the soil and into the base of his skull. Ira whimpered from it, rolling onto the sides of his legs to keep his head from being beaten by the ground and the vibrations rumbling in it. "Kid, are you-" 

"Don't." Ira panted from his trembling lips. 

She froze, her legs trapped in mid stride. "Don't? Don't what?" She whispered, her eyes darted left and right as if to detect the invisible trap she was edging closer to. 

Ira's face was red from the embarrassment curdling under his skin, and from the impact his cheek had made on something cold and compact. "Don't call me kid!" He snapped. Raising his voice, making his words into arrows that shot from the back of his throat, was the only way he knew of to release the pressure building up inside of him. Ventilating the steam before the entire container burst apart in a violent explosion. 

Mayvalt snorted, first in shock but then in amusement. Ira could tell the difference by the sound of her, how she pressed her fingers to her lips to contain the laughter threatening to spill over. At how childish he was. How pathetic he seemed.  

"Say my name." Ira challenged. 

Mayvalt's giggles froze, vanishing in an instant. She peered down at him with her wide brown doe eyes, her lips contorted into a pursed frown. "What? Why? Smack your head so hard you forgot, did'ya?" 

"Did you?" Ira retorted. He forced his vitriol into physical strength, channeling it down into his shaking legs. As unsteadily as he had been emerging from the gate, he stood. His shoes skidded across the dirt, widening his stance to keep him from flopping over like a cardboard cutout. "You seem confused about who I am." 

"I'm not!" Mayvalt protested. "Calm down, ki-" 

"I said stop!" 

She turned to stone--except the skin of her throat, where her pulse thudded as heavy as rain fall. Her eyes darted to his face, seemingly searching for something. Ira didn't know what. He didn't know if he had it--hidden behind his expression. He didn't know if she found it, but her eyes flickered down towards the Ossein on his belt. Mayvalt tightened her fingers around her bo and scoffed, kissing her lips to her teeth. "Fine. I won't call you that anymore, so are we good?" 

Ira's anger deflated as quickly as it had inflated. Or maybe it had only seemed to vanish and it really had been rapidly covered up by the overwhelming strength of his shock. Either way, his shoulder dropped in relief. "Uh. . . yeah, we're. . . good?" 

"Cool." Mayvalt muttered.

"Cool." Ira agreed awkwardly. He forced a cough up, breaking loose the knots strangling his vocal cords. ". . . yeah, cool."

Mayvalt turned on her leather boots, crossing her arms and staring off into the far away orange-stained night sky. "Well, good news and bad news." She said. 

Ira tilted his head doggishly. "Start with the bad news?" 

"I planned to." Mayvalt agreed. "Bad news; you, Ira Rule, just fell from a mountain. Not any mountain, either. Mount Mojaere--er, sorry, I'll speak in New Yorker for you. So, you took a tumble from the Empire State Building. It's big news to Faun and an even bigger blight on the horizon, but the good news though is that you just fell from a mountain." 

Ira winced, pressing his fingertips into the bruised flesh of his shoulders. "You just said the same thing twice. Wait--how exactly is that good news?" 

Mayvalt smirked. "Take a look, Rule." 

He turned slowly, craning his aching neck back to take in the side view of Mount Mojaere. As Mayvalt had rightly described, it was big. More than big, in fact. It spiraled up, and up, and up, and up. Disappearing into the distantly glowing sky. The towers hadn't seemed so towering from inside the jagged peaks, hidden under overhangs, only looking at the path downwards. The face of the mountain side had been carved into convenient ridges, little shelves that Mayvalt had breezed down one hop at a time. And that Ira had, well, moved down as best he could. Until he hadn't. The last rung of the latter was a grassy level about nine to fifteen feet above what Ira could reasonably jump up to tap. Making for a plenty survivable, if not incredibly unpleasant, story later. A story which would never leave his--Or Mayvalt's if he had anything to say about it--lips. 

Wait! The realization clicked into place, buzzing the gears in his skull into overdrive. If that had been the last--then. Ira spun around on his aching legs. Spread out in front of him, planted at his eye level, were the wide trunks of curling and green trees. The forest encompassed the base of the mountain, blotting out large patches of the eerie sky. Ira's knees were suddenly jelly under him, weak with pure giddy relief. 

"Angels," he whispered, his eyes drifting shut. "We made it. I'm never--and I really, really, mean never going within ten miles of anything with any sort of incline ever again. It's steps, latters, and elevators for me from now on." 

Mayvalt snorted, rolling her cowish eyes. "We made it off Mount Mojaere in one piece but there's still a bit of walking between us and Heneth." 

Ira turned to her, lifting one blonde eyebrow over his sea-blue eye. "How. . . how much walking?" 

Mayvalt winced. 

Ira sighed, pressing his flattened palms to his forehead. "Okay, just don't tell me." 

Mayvalt nodded in solemn agreement before spinning on her heels, gouging the soft mud beneath her fe--or, hooves. As chipper as an early bird pecking the soft earth for the first worm, she trotted off into the forest. Ira sighed, straightening his spine with a series of pitifully loud pops. He limped along behind her, his hands resting over the wooden handles of his Ossein daggers. 

Ira had the sense he was dreaming, and considering the life he had lived, he did count himself an authority on the subject. And after so many days spent walking through the Catskills, he thought himself an expert on foliage, too. He had seen every possible combination of tree. Wide trees that tapered off at the top into thin twisted branches. Small trees that had been split by storms, or bent to grow in the little sunlight the other trees allowed them. He knew that there were over a hundred different species of pine, and he wondered if he had managed to walk underneath the needle canopy of all of them. Which is why Ira knew what he was seeing couldn't be real.

These trees were unlike anything Ira had ever encountered. They almost seemed entirely similar to pine, as stoic and nettled as the most promising Yuletide center piece, until Ira's gaze hovered for a moment too long. The trunks must have all been hollow and constructed by a stagehand. They wobbled in the breeze every so often, rippling like rubber. The shade they cast down across Ira's path didn't seem to come from a lack of moonlight, but from the trees themselves. They emitted a sense of unease.

Ira shuddered, drawing the attention of his travel companion. Mayvalt's eyes flinched away from him, returning to their wide and rapid surveillance of the dark wood. It unsettled him even more that whatever Ira felt, she shared.

"So," Ira coughed. His voice shattered the church-like quiet between them. He almost expected Mayvalt to shush him, pressing her finger to her lips like Mrs Redding--Ira's least favorite attendant of the New York Public Library--had always done. Instead, she turned her body to face him and tipped her head to favor him with her left ear. "Uh, the Fifth Prince. . . what's his deal? The Third Prince seemed pretty worried about it."

Mayvalt scoffed, shaking her head until her peach-toned curls unrolled out, flattening and retracting just as the spine of an accordion could. The golden ring she always wore around the base of her left antler glittered in the silver moonlight. "Nothing for you to concern yourself with, Heimrian."

Ira frowned. He turned his blue eyes down to trace the movement of his black leather shoes across the soft mud. Pausing to kick a glimmering orange pebble from his path. "How doesn't it concern me? I'm going there with you."

Mayvalt sighed. Exhaling one tensed breath. Her silver bo swung back and forth at her side. "It only concerns us Faun."

Ira's feet stuttered to a halt. He cleared his throat and broke into a quicker stride, closing the distance that had bridged between them. "Oh you mean like me, since I have these horns?"

Mayvalt's eyes shot upwards, to the space of illusioned air hanging over Ira's blonde curls. "Sap! I totally forgot."

"How could you-" Ira tossed his hands up into the air, groaning loudly. "Ang--dang it! Never mind that! So, tell me. What are we going up against here? Does it have something to do with the price the Third Prince mentioned?"

Mayvalt opened her mouth--and then snapped it shut. Ira had to sink his blunt white teeth into the pink muscle of his tongue to keep from pressing her further for an answer, figuring it would only drive her further from speaking. She lifted her free hand, the one not trapped in a death drip along the carved surface of her silver staff, and burrowed her fingers into her cherry blossom colored curls. "There was a reason we picked the Fifth Prince," she mumbled awkwardly.

"He's nicer?" Ira muttered under his breath hopelessly. "He has a soul-sale discount for services rendered?"

"The Fifth Prince is well known to Faun. Uh, but not like boss. Boss has spent a lot of decades in service to the Faun. He carved out a chunk of Heimr for us, covered us in blessings, gave us employment, kept us protected-"

"Why?" Ira interrupted. "Doesn't that all seem below a Prince?"

Mayvalt nodded, jerking her chin sharply down. "That's not my story to tell, but the Fifth Prince would agree. Two siblings equally as wrapped up in Fauns, but one is their protector and the other-"

Crack!

Mayvalt froze, forcing Ira to halt too with one palm flung back to press against the center of his chest. Her bo glimmered, tossing moonlight in a wide arc as she jabbed the point out before her. Ira's hands were moving, too. He pulled his Ossein daggers into his grip and spun around, placing his spine to Mayvalt's. He crouched down, balancing himself as best as he could with the ridiculously large black blade fastened to his back. He glanced back and forth across the dark rubber trees, squinting in an attempt to see between the eerie shade and wobbly trunks. He hoped Mayvalt was doing better than him.

"Do you see something?" He whispered, his voice strangled out from the thin space between his clenched teeth.

He could feel the wispy ends of her curled hair brush against the nape of his neck as she shook her head. "No--but I don't like it. Let's go. Heneth is close, I can smell the smoke."

Ira inhaled a lungful of the crisp salt-edged forest air. Beneath the layers of faux-pine, he could smell it, too. Campfire smoke, thick with charred fish skins. "Do you. . . smell anything else?"

"I'm not your bloodhound." She scoffed. "C'mon."

Mayvalt tucked her bo back beneath her arm and took off down the dark trail with a pace that made Father Pine's morning scramble to the subway seem like an evening stroll. Ira shoved his Ossein blades back into his belt, shrugging off his shoulders to shake the heaviness settling over them.

Right. He thought. It had to be his imagination, horrible memories brought to mind by the weight of Melchior's tooth in his palm. It wasn't real, buried just beneath the waves of cooking fire. It wasn't there, curdling between the dark trees. Ira turned his back, racing after Mayvalt, pretending he wasn't growing sick on the taste of rotten meat perfume. The same one that clung to the bubbled gray flesh of demonic Beasts. It couldn't be. Beasts belonged in the pit. The hole gouged into Hell's flesh, full of monsters and wolves. Ira's fingers curled at his sides. The pit had to be there--full of evils. He needed it to be.

Mel, he prayed to himself, please stay where I can find you.