Usually and unfortunately, when Octavia's ears rang and her head spun, it was a byproduct of the hazy violet agony that sought to ruin her life. This time, it was every complication at once, multiplied by one thousand. For a moment, she outright couldn't hear, the ringing in her ears settling in alongside dizziness. Her eyes watered, besieged by true smoke and dust still lingering before her. Bits of something solid, miniscule and peppered across her body as they were, draped her from head to toe. Everything ached, the impact with the hard marble below leaving her bruised muscles pounding painfully.

She wasn't sure if she'd hit her head. Still, whatever blinding flash had followed in a split instant was enough to give her double vision for a while longer. It was only as her thoughts began to solidify and time freed her senses from their standstill that she noticed the emptiness in her hand, squeezing for nothing.

Stradivaria was there, still wedged firmly between her arm and her body. Viola was not, her soft fingers having fled in the time it took to blink.

"Viola?" Octavia cried, sputtering as trespassing dust struggled to sneak into her mouth.

"I'm…here!" she heard, a soft call from a place unseen. Octavia cursed her limited visibility, struggling to raise one flailing hand.

"Where are you?" she tried desperately, the ringing in her ears gradually settling.

The voice that answered her wasn't Viola's. It wasn't a voice at all, really. Instead, she caught an agonizing scream that dug deep into her stomach, endless and piercing. It surged with enough raw anguish that Octavia wished her ears would ring again.

"Octavia?" she heard Viola call to her at last.

They definitely weren't Viola's cries--particularly not at that level of horror and ferocity. "I'm here," Octavia reiterated in turn. "What happened?"

The dust, at last, was settling, and her watery eyes were free to rationalize. The lights that previously blinded her had largely dimmed above, still shining artificially down upon her with a muted glow. Every movement of her extremities touched upon something jagged and uneven. She ran her shaking fingers along the once-cool marble below, now notably hot to the touch all around. It didn't quite burn, although the shift in temperature was jarring enough to make her twitch.

When she struggled her way into a sitting position, one of her forearms stung. On further inspection, her dress had been slashed, a patch of blue shredded just above a sizable abrasion. It wept, bleeding in the slightest. Octavia winced. The torturous screaming was ceaseless, and she still couldn't pinpoint it. It stung her ears far worse.

"Is everyone okay?" came Madrigal's voice, horrified.

"What was that?" Octavia called to her. She doubted she'd get a valid answer.

"Oh my God."

With the three short, curt words she'd caught from Josiah, his safety verified in some capacity, Octavia was both relieved and unnerved to hear the disbelief in his voice. "Josiah?"

She earned nothing more from him. All she found was ever more screaming, unbearable in the way it was beginning to make her heart race. Distantly, she heard rustling and movement in place of words.

"Josiah, what's wrong?" Octavia asked again, panic poisoning her veins.

"Don't come over here," he shot back instantly.

That wasn't a deterrent. Frankly, it sparked more of a morbid curiosity than anything. She fought to peel herself off the newly-uneven flooring faster, coughing with the effort of dispelling haunting dust.

"What is it?" Viola asked hurriedly in her stead.

Madrigal's strangled whimper was nearly inaudible over the relentless screams, now mixed with ragged breaths of great distress. Octavia's heart dropped into her stomach. It was her fault for disobeying the singular demand Josiah had given her.

"Oh my God!" Viola cried, much the same.

"I said stay back!" Josiah snapped.

Already, he was hard at work, his hands moving quickly as the supplies he'd just refreshed were put to good use. Octavia had always wondered if tourniquets were painful, for how plain, thin rope would dig so tightly into bare skin. She supposed Harper's clothing helped with that, somewhat. It hadn't spared him in any capacity otherwise.

Where Octavia had gotten off with minor injuries, largely in the form of bloodied scrapes and throbbing bruises, Harper had put her tiny suffering to shame. If the marble flooring had been sharp and uneven beneath her, at most, then it was outright shattered adjacent to him. Fractured shards of what was once swirling stone were scattered haphazardly around the boy. It was fitting, then, that his radius to such a blow had brought brutality in equal measure, punishing him with torture that made Octavia's stomach churn just to witness.

Truthfully, it could've been far worse, and Harper was lucky his right leg hadn't been blasted clean off his body. It still didn't make the wound he was left with any more tolerable, a deep, bloodied crevice that plunged well into his calf and wrapped neatly around to his shin. It wasn't even bloodied so much as it was exposed, giving way to unsettlingly-thick pockets of skin, muscle and possibly bone that Octavia was well aware she wasn't meant to be seeing. As could be expected, they wept fervently, leaking in earnest through the well-annihilated brown trousers that had once clung to his legs instead.

Shredded as they were, the laceration was outright gaping, battered by flakes of the same sharp marble that had managed to crawl inside somewhere along the way. The scattered gashes adjacent to the wound that echoed the same, shallow by comparison and yet still oozing in their own right, only compounded his agony. "Gruesome" was hardly a word that did the sight justice. It was downright sickening. His screams were an understatement.

With her eyes wide with horror and her throat burning from nausea, Octavia couldn't help herself. "Harper!" she screamed on her own.

"You have to move your hands," she heard Josiah murmur.

Curled into a ball as he was, his red-stained fingers grasping desperately at what of the wound they could cover, his breathing was rapid. Against the floor, Harper shook his head with just as much desperation, his cap brushing against the speckles of marble that scratched his face. He gritted his teeth, somewhere between sobbing and whimpering.

"I have to be able to see it," Josiah continued softly, laying his hands upon Harper's trembling wrists. "If you don't move, I'm gonna have to hold you down. Don't make me do that."

Were it Octavia, she probably would've required the latter. Harper never failed to amaze her, in that aspect, his fingers retreating in the slowest. The accompaniment of steadier breathing, still racked with sounds of uncontrollable pain, wasn't enough to ease her own suffering. She would've dropped to her knees at his side, holding onto him for dear life, had Viola not beaten her to it.

The Maestra clasped one of his bloodied hands in both of her own, her eyes flooding with as much terror as Octavia's. "Harper," she said simply, frantically.

His eyes met hers, teary and leaking much the same as his injury. "It hurts," Harper sobbed. "A lot."

Viola raised her eyes to Josiah instead, still just as panicked. "What the hell happened?"

He'd chosen to attend to the smaller lacerations first, dabbing at them one by one with wet gauze that left Harper flinching. "I have no idea. Something exploded, I think. From under us."

"How?" Viola asked.

Josiah shook his head, already delving back into his bag once more. "I don't know. It barely even damaged the friggin' walls. I'm just as confused as you are, I promise."

His words were more than true, and Octavia hadn't even realized until they'd left his mouth. It was as he'd said, more or less--the damage to the white, barren embrace of the hall was limited, mostly confined to the tattered marble below. The blackened patches of paint that peeled from the walls were the only true indicators of damage, the architecture otherwise structurally sound. Well-intact as it was, the mysterious explosion had hardly made a dent. The concept of a disgusting little blast gifted personally to her alone was disorienting.

"Did a pipe burst or something?" Viola tried.

"There's no way a pipe bursting did that," Josiah countered.

"Don't…move," she could hear Harper strain through those same gritted teeth, his breathing still exceedingly labored as his shoulders rose and fell quickly.

Viola squeezed his hand. "Take it easy," she pleaded. "Don't talk."

Slowly, with notable effort, he shook his head once more as tears splashed against his bangs. "Might…be more…of them."

Viola recoiled. "What?"

Octavia's stomach hurt. "More…explosions? Or…whatever that was?"

"You think it was intentional?" Viola asked, wincing along with Harper's jolts of pain.

Even still, he found the strength to nod, grunting in distress as Josiah attended to his smaller injuries. "I…It wouldn't be…out of the question."

"Why the hell would someone try to blow up the building?" Josiah asked, somewhat louder than necessary. "If it's Drey's people, what's the point in damaging his own place?"

"But what else could it be?" Viola argued. "He has a point!"

The idea of an intentional assault, even in passing, was enough to lead Octavia's fingers into place along Stradivaria's frets. "I-I…we should go. This was a bad idea."

"Don't!" Harper interrupted sharply, his voice pointed enough to startle Octavia. "We're…already here. We've made it…this far. Please don't stop...just because of--"

He never finished. His words were replaced once more by the same bloodcurdling screams of agony as Josiah adjusted his lower leg. Even Josiah wasn't immune to Harper's pain given sound, his face strained. "Sorry. I have to."

No amount of Viola endlessly gripping Harper's hand was alleviating his torture, her own eyes watering instead. "Just hang in there, okay? It's…gonna get better."

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To Octavia's immense surprise, he nodded slowly, hollow eyes leaking in earnest out of reflex. "I'll…be okay," he breathed, his voice wobbling.

The tiniest sound of Madrigal's own soft breathing at her side, ragged as it was in turn, drew Octavia's eyes for a moment. Deathly quiet as she'd been, she'd hardly made so much as a single motion. Instead, the Maestra was frozen still in place beside her as she drank in Harper's agony with wide-eyed dread. She, too, was no stranger to the panic that came with their situation, if the look on her face was any indication.

Octavia watched the way, regardless, that her own trembling fingers inched towards the strings of Lyra's Repose, cradled delicately in her arms even now. With her terrified gaze locked on Harper alone, her breath quickened, tears pricking at the edges of her eyes. When the very tip of her index finger had just begun to brush against one copper string, Harper's wandering, half-lidded gaze beat Octavia to the revelation by seconds.

"No!" he screamed, tearing his hand away from Viola's. It was with another scream, instead born once more of relentless hurt, that he threw both of his stained palms down firmly over his open wound. Again did he grit his teeth, struggling in vain to stifle the cries of pain that erupted involuntarily. This time, the fierce glare with which he pinned Madrigal spoke to something different, even in the midst of his suffering.

Madrigal's lip quivered, her fingers still over the harp. "But Harper!"

Harper shook his head, narrowing his eyes. "Don't you dare!"

The bitter tears that teased the corners of Madrigal's own eyes escaped, slipping down her cheeks. "Harper, please!"

"I won't let you!" he growled.

"But I want to!" she sobbed. "It's my decision!"

"I won't let you do that to yourself!" Harper snapped with surprising clarity, his breath still impaired as he winced with every movement.

Madrigal shook her head. "It won't take that much away, I know it!"

"Your life is precious!" he cried. "All of it! It doesn't matter how much! I won't let you do this!"

Harper's frantic, sharp eyes shot to Octavia's instead, full of determination she didn't expect in the depths of his suffering. "Octavia, don't let her! You have to make sure she doesn't do it!"

"It'll heal," Josiah offered to the sobbing Maestra, far softer by comparison. "It's…fixable. He'll be fine with enough time. It's not gonna feel good, but he'll get better. This won't kill him. You don't have to hurt yourself like that."

"But it's my lifespan," Madrigal whimpered, her sorrow splashing against the golds of Lyra's Repose. "I should get to pick what to do with it!"

Harper opted for a gentler tone instead, grunting with hurt as Josiah pushed his hands away once more. "Please, I'll be okay! This is…nothing. I've been through way worse than this. There's…so many wonderful things you should do with your life instead. A little pain is worth us spending more of that life together, okay?"

Madrigal sniffled. "I don't want you to hurt at all. I can help."

He struggled to smile, a futile effort compromised viciously by his agony. Still, the sentiment was there. "Octavia…needs you right now, more than…I do. She needs you and Viola. Please, keep going. For…me, okay?"

Viola shook her head, still on her knees at his side. "I don't feel right about leaving you alone here."

"I have…Josiah," Harper breathed.

"Josiah isn't a Maestro."

The boy in question pursed his lips, drawing a glassy, maroon bottle from his canvas bag. He sighed. "She's not wrong. You…might want to hold her hand again. This isn't gonna feel too good. Sorry in advance."

Harper obliged, squeezing Viola's hand once more. The Maestra didn't resist, offering the same with both hands in turn. When Josiah tipped the bottle carefully above the horrific gash that blighted the majority of Harper's lower leg, his torturous screams were back the instant its liquid splashed into the crevice. They were possibly even worse, accompanied by the need for Josiah to physically hold his thigh in place as he struggled to escape the intolerable burning.

The Maestro clapped one hand over his own mouth desperately, a half-hearted effort to stifle his own uncontrollable cries. Given the way he was still meeting Madrigal's eyes, Octavia figured the action was at least somewhat related. It didn't keep her from sobbing again.

"Madrigal, I need you," Octavia tried, doing what she could to steal the girl's attention. "I…need you, okay?"

The Maestra's shoulders shook, and she still couldn't tear her eyes from Harper's suffering. "I-I…"

"I need…someone at my side," Octavia spoke slowly, willing her own voice to remain as steady as possible. "I need someone to stay with me. I trust you. I need you. Please, Madrigal."

Madrigal nodded with another sniffle, her gaze still confiscated. "O-Okay. Okay."

Viola rubbed her thumb tenderly against the back of Harper's hand, a weak gesture of comfort that still somehow offered something of merit. With her hand stroking his cheek as he winced his way through Josiah's ministrations, she managed to split her attention. "It's…like he said. This may not be the only one. There might be more explosives, if that's what that was."

"In the floor, right?" Octavia murmured, her eyes wandering up the length of the hallway. "Like, beneath it?"

For the distance they'd actually traveled, it was still a sizable distance more to even the second turn. Past it, she could still see no further. Whatever lay beyond was equally as intimidating--if not downright horrifying, given their newest predicament. Octavia still hadn't fully wrapped her head around the idea that it was intentional. She didn't dare begin to entertain the "how" that came with it.

"You're…gonna have to watch your step," Viola added.

Octavia's eyes scanned the marble before her. It was one more nauseating thought to add to the pile. "There's nothing that stands out. It's all just flat."

"So there's no way to tell if there's even something down there?" Josiah asked.

"As much as I'd like to imagine this was a freak accident, I have a feeling it wasn't," Viola continued. "I don't…feel good about the idea of assuming there's nothing."

Josiah narrowed his eyes. "How much of the building ended up like this, exactly? Are we reading too much into this, too?"

"You can…check," Harper murmured in between groans of pain, blinking slowly. "Hit…the floor…from here."

Octavia, too, blinked. "That could work, I think. I…do you think my light would set one off, if it was there?"

Madrigal shook her head. "I don't think I'd be able to."

"How hard does your light hit?" Josiah asked. "Physically."

She paused. "I-I mean…it depends what I'm hitting. I've…never tried to hit marble before. I don't know if I could actually pierce it."

"It's worth a shot, right?"

He had a point. "I can try, but I'm worried about the recoil if I actually do hit something. I don't know how far it'll…blow up."

Viola's eyes were on her partner, resting at Harper's side uselessly. "I think I can do something about that. If anything happens, I've got it. Can you…aim around me?"

"What do you mean?"

With shaky steps, Viola pushed herself to her feet, her lingering touch upon Harper's cheek a nod to reluctance. The crunched marble below her had not been kind to her skin, her delicate knees red and indented. She stumbled somewhat, wincing as she stretched. Silver Brevada settled into her hands, and she demonstrated her point regardless.

What followed its gentle song was the welcome, radiating chill of wondrous ice, scraping along the annihilated marble below as it steadily charted a path towards the ceiling. Rising high, Octavia watched on with surprise as Viola's soft trilling crafted a thickened wall of crystal, blessed with all the strength and gorgeous shading of a glacier.

In the empty, elongated hallway, every note echoed off the brilliant white that surrounded them. Even the flaking black that plagued the Maestros was graced in equal measure. Her frozen barrier didn't climb high enough to kiss the ceiling proper, instead stalling several feet from its apex. What that left Octavia with was a narrow, symmetrical gap, spanning the full length of the hallway from thrice her height. She tilted her head.

"What are you doing?" Octavia asked.

"Aim above me," Viola instructed. "You have good aim. Go through the gap and hit the floor. If anything happens, we should be fine."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded, the flute still level with her lips. "Yeah. Go for it."

Octavia wasn't a fan of this idea. Still, if it came down to trusting the durability of Viola's ice, then it was something she could put her faith in. That left her with Stradivaria in hand, still raised and ready upon her shoulder. She eyed the gap above her carefully, planning the single strike she'd get to attempt.

What light she'd be forced to piece together would be strong, quick, and piercing, should she hope to challenge marble itself. She'd been successful with material masonry before. Granted, it was weaker. Granted, she was in SIAR. Granted, in this particular Hell, she couldn't count on anything. She had to at least try.

Octavia drew back Stradivaria's bow across the strings. "Ready?"

Viola nodded. "Ready."

It was more so a question meant for the other three, given how her wandering eyes touched upon each. She was relieved to see them nod anyway. With their silent permission, Octavia found her beloved rays, sharp and valiant in all of their radiant glory. White-hot starlight pulsed against her skin, and it took effort to concentrate on one alone. She stole a deep breath as her fingertips burned, aching with the pressure of bottled, searing heat as she pumped every ounce of brilliance forward.

It would take effort to weigh down her strike in one shot alone. With the most delicate back-and-forth motions of the bow she could muster, rocking against the strings gently, she tensed whatever burning energy her anxious hands could tolerate. Her little ray was the tiniest of arrows, at this angle. Octavia lined up her shot, tilting her head back in the slightest as she fixated on the gap. Aiming wasn't the hard part.

She threw caution to the wind and fired, putting her faith in whatever skill she'd been cultivating for weeks. With a sharp slash of the bow across vibrating copper beneath, her singular burst of light erupted forward. It charged on without hesitation, carving a perfect parabola that made her heart skip a beat.

Octavia simultaneously relished the developing quality of her steering and loathed the context under which it was being perfected. To her immense surprise, distance had done nothing to compromise the lasting composition of her beautiful ray. It was nearly enhanced, by comparison, accelerating ever faster as it crashed to the floor with far fiercer momentum than expected.

That was a good thing, as she'd learned that her light could crunch through even polished stone today. That was a bad thing, as it hardly took her light at all to send the corridor into explosive chaos again.

Octavia praised whatever god would listen that Viola, too, had developed as a Maestra splendidly. Her barrier held fast against the rampaging shockwave of the blast, a miracle in and of itself. The ear-shattering boom made Octavia jump, far louder than the one that had cursed them previously.

Opaque as Viola's ice was, segments were still vaguely translucent enough for her to peer through. Running towards the wall that spared her from bursting death surely left her appearing insane. She was far, far more concerned about the dual sets of marble-studded craters, parallel splatters of blackened paint shaming walls once crisp mere seconds ago. Her eyes widened in horror.

"There's more than one," Octavia said frantically. "There's…I don't know how many!"

Josiah swore. "I'm not even sure how safe I feel going back if we were to give up, at this point! We could've just gotten lucky coming in!"

"Are the walls reinforced or something?" Viola asked. "They're holding up perfectly fine. I'd expect something like this to cause a lot more damage."

Octavia narrowed her eyes. "It's SIAR. This was his dream. It makes sense he'd build it to last."

"Octavia," Viola began hesitantly, "what do we…do from here?"

The path of return was safe--ideally. Were they to retreat, they could still regroup. They could plan another approach. They'd still be in Solenford, and they'd agreed not to return to Coda anytime soon. Harper's injury, above all else, was extremely concerning. Octavia bit her lip. The idea of something awaiting them on the way out was petrifying. Maybe she was overthinking. Maybe she wasn't. Even devoid of a human touch, SIAR was still finding ways to crush her to pieces.

"Let's keep going."

Madrigal's words were sharp and resolute at the strangest time. It was enough to shake Octavia, watching on as the girl trailed her fingers down the length of Viola's glacier.

"You…want to keep going?" Octavia repeated quietly.

The Spirited Maestra spared her of words, nodding once instead.

"You're gonna go through that?" Josiah shouted. "A friggin' minefield?"

"You're going to get killed! At the very least, you're gonna get seriously hurt!" Viola cried in turn.

"I have an idea," Madrigal said.

"You realize you don't get any do-overs if that idea doesn't work, right?" Josiah snapped.

His harsh words didn't shake her, her soft eyes and softer voice offered to Octavia instead. "I have an idea, but Octavia has to trust me."

Octavia clenched Stradivaria tighter, her fingertips aching as the strings dug into her skin. "I-I…what do you mean?"

"I'll go with you."

"Madrigal?"

The Maestra smiled weakly. "Viola…should stay here, with Josiah and Harper. They need someone to keep them safe, so I'll go with you. I won't leave your side."

Viola could hardly cobble objections together. "Are you really sure about this? We can always try again another--"

"This is our chance," Madrigal countered. "It's empty, and it's quiet. Even if there's things like this that try to hurt us, there's no one chasing us this time. We're already here, and maybe we can find out all about what's been happening to everyone. We're so close. We can't give up now."

With her eyes on Octavia once more, her smile was genuine and bright. "Besides, in storybooks, when there's this much keeping someone away, there must be something wonderful on the other side, right?"

Octavia scoffed. Still, she couldn't suppress a soft smile of her own. "I don't think 'wonderful' is the word you're looking for, here."

"Let's…keep trying, and keep fighting," Madrigal said, her voice somewhat more firm. "I won't let you down, okay? I won't let…anyone down."

Her gaze wandered to Harper. Pained as his own smile was, faint and strained as Josiah wound bandage after bandage around his leg, it was a smile he fought to craft all the same.

"That's my girl," Harper breathed.

Madrigal beamed in earnest, hugging Lyra's Repose to her chest. Even muted, devoid of bubbles and laughs and endless love, Madrigal herself was contagious. It was warm. Octavia stole what she could.

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