The days that had passed between the last class of my first week of Restoration and the first of my second week had all gone far too quickly.

"And you are sure? If you need to not go, we can turn around right now and go back to bed." She asked and offered me the same thing that she had been every few minutes since we had woken up that morning.

"I am sure," I kept a smile on my face and answered her the same way that I had every time she asked. "I am better now because of you. And I'm wearing my sandals, so my feet won't hurt today."

It was true, but I swept my foot out in front of me just so she could see.

It had been an attempt to make her laugh, but the corners of her mouth did not so much as hint at a smile.

She cut her eyes over to where Alexei stood at the base of the singing stairs. Leaning closer and lowering her voice, she sighed. "I wish I knew what I made you better from, but have a good day. You know where I'll be if you need me."

She kissed me on the cheek and I watched her walk all the way down to the library and step through its doors before I so much as thought about moving.

I had not been easy to care for the last two days because the pain that I felt could not be healed with aura or treated with medicine.

Seeing the warden and Tana had hurt me in a way that I did not know I could hurt.

I took up beside Alexei and started up the singing stairs, feeling much heavier going up them than I ever had before.

I did feel better than the last time I had gone down them, but that was not a very hard thing to accomplish. The tears that had been flooding out of my eyes had made me nearly blind and if I had not had my white haired guard to hold onto, I don't know if I would have made it back down to my quarters.

"You consider me your friend, yes?" Alexei asked as we approached the first floor landing.

I looked over at him and tried to hide my surprise at his attempt to start a conversation with me. "Yes."

"Then tell me why you are lying to Lady Anna about the cause of your pain?" He asked, not looking at me so intensely that I knew it was intentional.

I had not seen him since he had found me in the new moon's quarters and helped me to my room. It could not have been more than a minute or two after I had been left alone that he had appeared, so even if I had not run into the warden, my plan had failed once again.

"Why don't you talk to anyone about the cause of yours?" I snapped back at him, his question making the dulled pain in my heart sharpen.

He said nothing for a long moment, and did not speak again until the first floor of Lun was far behind us.

When he did, he said the one thing that I was the least prepared to hear. "Thank you."

"For what?" I asked as I stopped dead and Caerulus's lullaby came to a sudden end.

"For reminding me why I should have stayed silent." He said without stopping.

My heavy heart burned bright with sudden anger.

I grabbed him by his wrist and tried my best to snatch him back down the stairs.

Either he was too strong or I was far too weak, but all I managed to do was pull myself down onto my knees.

"You can't do that," I yelled up at him. "You chose to be here, no one is making you be my guard. Nami told me that."

One of the reasons I had agreed to stay at Lun was because Nami had said that I brought life out of Alexei.

That life came to light as his white eye was washed with the blue of his aura.

"You speak of things that you do not-" He started and stopped.

A group of unfamiliar moons came walking down the stairs like a bouquet of blue flowers. They were all bunched tightly together in their cloaks and were staring forward with the same intentional intensity that Alexei had been wearing not very long before.

Only the sound of their footsteps on the stairs disturbed the silence that filled the air.

Alexei sighed, the blue left his eye, and all the tension left his body as what I then knew to be half moons passed.

A tangled mess of giggles and whispers rose up from them as the silence that their arrival had created disappeared completely.

"Where did he-No, The Mother in Blue-That's her-no way-I swear, Ferrin said so-She beat-I should ask him to-"

They were grouped together so tightly that I could put a face to any of the voices until a brown haired girl with a strong jawline turned around and shouted up at Alexei. "Who are you?"

Every other moon in their group turned to look as well.

Alexei, for some reason that I did not understand, looked to me for help.

I should have listened to Anna. I should have stayed in bed. But I didn't, and everyone around me was going to have to deal with that choice.

"You don't know?" I asked aloud as I turned my glare from my guard to the brown haired underwitch.

"No? That's why I asked?" She said after a confused glance back at her sisters.

I held my finger up to my lips and crept down the stairs as I spoke. "Shhh, I'm going to tell you a secret. All those gatekeepers that have had their tongues cut out? The thunder and lightning and storms? What happened at the theater with Sorceress Gell? All of you know about those things, right?"

The brown haired underwitch nodded along with everyone behind her.

They had all been giggling before, but my words had upset them, I could see it in their eyes.

"Bad things keep happening here, but they are going to get worse," Looming over her on the step above where she was standing, I lowered my voice and looked around as if I was worried about being overheard. "Because he is here. The Blue Death, The Walking Storm, The Stealer of Underwitches."

All the stories my mother had ever told me came flooding back into my mind. But it was not mischievous faeries, terrible dragons, kind queens, curious foxes, or sleeping giants that I thought of, it was the way she told me about them.

Just like Idensyn Aubrey would, I let the fear that I was trying to make them feel spread across my face as I turned back and pointed at Alexei.

"And he is right there!" I shouted and cowered away from my white haired guard.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The half moons did not break into terrified screams at the end of my words like I wanted them to.

When Alexei vanished from the steps above me and reappeared behind me in the ghostly light of the singing stairs faster than I could blink, they felt the fear that I had failed to give them.

The underwitch the brown hair yelped in surprise and fell back onto the blue bouquet of her sisters.

Before I could enjoy the rest of the panic that I had helped cause, what felt like the jaws of the familiar Bru wrapped around my waist and tightened.

Then, too much happened at once for my mind to keep track of.

Wind. Cold air. The underwitches vanished. Blue light blinded me. My feet left the ground. The brown haired moon gasped suddenly. I was snatched roughly away from her.

Every faint shade of blue that colored the singing stairs all washed together.

Like I had fallen from somewhere high, a pit formed in my stomach and I thought I would be sick.

I was flying.

I was flying like when the split had dropped me in the sky above Vowkeeper's anguish.

No.

There were footsteps that were little more than blue splashed blurs underneath me.

I was being carried.

The very moment that I realized that, everything came to a sudden stop and I felt like my flesh would fly off my bones from the halting force.

Alexei lowered me off of his shoulder and leaned me against the wall that stood opposite of Precept Cherith's classroom.

I closed my eyes and sank to the floor in fear of my stomach emptying itself without my permission.

"Why would you say such things?" He demanded as he knelt down and focused his one white eye onto me.

I tried to speak, but I had to cover my mouth with my hand to keep everything else that was trying to come out with my words in.

I gagged, swallowed, shivered, and opened one eye at him.

"How do you do that?" I croaked, not knowing if I was going to cry or try to hit him.

"I cannot tell you," He said with an expression on his face that I had never seen before. "What is there to gain from scaring those moons or calling me such a terrible thing? Why would you say the things that you did?"

In the small ways he had emotions, I had seen anger, sadness, and what was good humor at best.

I had never seen him look disappointed.

"Because you lied to me!" I shouted and threw my left hand out in front of myself.

I chose not to cry.

It would not have been a big one because the firework I was forming had not had very much to grow, but before it could ever pass through my channel, Alexei stopped it dead.

His thumb pressed painfully in the center of my palm and his blue glowing out from underneath it, I could not have manifested my aura if my life had depended on it.

"When?" He demanded, the disappointment in me that I had seen hardening into his mask of stone.

"On the bridge in Hymneth! You said Azeralphane wasn't real, and that was a lie!" I kept shouting.

I knew well enough that I was not why I was so upset that morning, but he had chosen to be my guard. It was his fault that he was there to receive my ire.

Alexei grimaced. "It was not. Azeralphane is just a name, but even if you thought that I did, does that give you the right to behave like a contemptuous child?"

"Yes! If you can walk around like a ghost, then I get to-" I started.

Tana appeared in Precept Cherith's doorway with Auden close behind her.

"Leave us, Underwitch Tana." Alexei said simply, his voice sharp and heavy with power.

I met her watery blue eyes.

Before I knew what I was doing, I threw myself into my feet and tried to rip my hand away from my guard.

I could not be around her, not then. I had tried to scare the half moons. I had yelled at Alexei.

With the way I felt then, I did not know what I would do to Tana.

Despite what I would have thought previously, it brought me no joy to see the honey haired underwitch flinch away from me in fear.

I only escaped because he let me, but every step I took towards the little hall with the snowy painting of the medery was a teary blur.

Through the first door and then into the last door on the left, I collapsed to the stony floor next to the tall table in the center of the room and cried.

I cried until my tears ran out.

Then, I sobbed until my throat was raw and my body was sore.

With nothing left to come out of me, I sat in silence with my knees pulled to my chest.

I don't know how long I was in the little room, but sometime after I had gone quiet, I heard something coming from the black box.

At first it was just the sound of splashing water, like the trickling drip from a still running sink.

Then, there was something that almost sounded like words.

"Gup. Gup, gup."

I wiped my face on the end of my cloak and looked up at the table

"Gup."

I crawled up to my feet and peered into the black box.

"Are you trying to talk to me?" I asked through a sniffle as I held my hand above the darkness.

The sound of the thing swimming quickly at the surface of the water gave me an answer. I did not know what type of answer it was, but it felt too close to my question to be anything but that.

Maybe it was because I hadn't stayed in bed or maybe it was because I still felt sick to my stomach, I didn't know, but when I let my hand slip into the concealed water and the thing brushed against my fingers, I felt like it was trying to comfort me.

I opened my hand and it swam into my grasp.

It was still slimy feeling, but I did not hate it as much as I had the day before.

No part of me was any closer to knowing what it needed than I had been any time before, but I needed something from it.

"She didn't touch you, but there was a girl in here the other day. Her name is Anna. She spent the last two days taking care of me because something she doesn't know about made me sad." I began as my aura built beneath my palm.

Once I started I couldn't stop. "I didn't mean to not tell her about Tana, but so much has happened now that I don't know how to. Hey Anna, this underwitch has bullied me every single time I have ever talked to her. Hey Anna, she also tried to convince the girls that are supposed to be my sisters that I was crazy. Hey Anna, she attacked me and pulled my dress up because she almost figured out that everything about me is a lie."

"Gup." The thing made its almost word again as I took a deep breath.

"Hey Anna, I hate this girl more than I hate The Mothers, and you know what they have out me through." I continued.

I let the smallest amount of aura I could leak through my palm and I felt the thing take it from me willingly.

"Hey Anna, the worst thing about it all is that I wish I was her. She doesn't have to worry about being snatched out of her bed or buried alive. She doesn't have to spend weeks waiting for the bruises on her stomach to go away. She doesn't have to spend everyday not being who she is," The thing wriggled in my hand as I ranted, but it did not try to escape. "If one of the precepts asked her to be their apprentice, she could just say yes. If the warden asked her to be the warden, she could accept without worrying about it. It's not fair!"

The moment that I raised my voice, the thing slipped through my fingers and swam away from my touch.

Before I could find it in the box or do anything else, the door to my little room swung open.

"Precept Cherith?" I asked, fearing that she had heard everything that I had just said.

It was not my teacher that I found standing in the doorway.

It was my familiar.

"What are you doing here?" I asked as I took a step towards him.

Without a word, he turned around and padded back into the hall before looking back at me.

I followed him for no other reason than feeling like I should.

He pushed his face against the door and shut it behind me.

Then, he leapt from the floor to a hole in the wall that stood where the painting of the medery had once been.

"The inner-" I started to say, but he thumped his paw against my calf and silenced me.

I glanced back at the door to Cherith's hall, knowing that my white haired guard was standing just outside of it.

I had tried escaping him with too many Ires and making an Ire that was not me, but both had failed.

My big blue cat of a familiar had given me a third option, and I needed very little convincing with the mood I was in.

I followed Sam into the inner halls and closed the painting behind me, leaving no Ire left for Alexei to catch.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.