Tackson was on their tenth radio channel of the day, and it was barely past mid-morning. The sun, unimpeded by autumnal clouds for the first time in centuries, beat down on the back of their neck.

They wrenched the curtains shut, denying even the faintest sliver to fall onto their desk. Panic was drawing out their ire for the moment, for something as innate as the sun. Its simple needling was enough to drive them mad, and the words from the radio, as solemn as they were, were only spurring Tackson on.

Spiralling deeper into confusion, until the very walls of their office of winding marble pillars and seamless wooden planks felt alien, wrong.

Geverde wasn't Geverde anymore. Nothing was certain, the future most of all.

Phone calls and damage control they'd been dealing with, the frantic intercommunications between different security branches began feeling like nothing but an escape from reality, from utter despair.

They may have wished for change—radical change at that—but to rebuild a nation like Geverde from the ground up was absurd. Insanity.

It had to be. Tackson knew they followed new-age thinkers, the words of those who could map a prosperous future. Nowhere in their rhetoric did they suggest regicide. Nowhere. At least Tackson thought.

At least, they interpreted it that way.

They slammed a fist down onto the radio, dislodging its internals with a sickening crunch before storming out of the room.

The office outside was in a quiet frenzy; a perfume of panic and astonishment hung about the air as desk worker after desk worker, officer after officer pushed past him as though they had some place to be and the law they swore to protect still existed. It clung to the smooth sandstone walls like a miasma, one that Tackson saw no escape from. Their heading was out of pure desperation; they were looking for words of comfort as much as answers.

Answers from the one person they regarded higher than anybody else, of unwavering vision and a mind to set it into motion. The one that had once upon a time opened up Tackson's eyes to a new worldview. The right worldview.

They pushed an enormous set of double doors open, their heavy hinges groaning in the face of Tackson's furious march forward. As the doors swung open, what hit them was something they never would have expected.

Clarity.

Relief.

As though the suffocating air about them had, in the blink of an eye, evaporated.

Tackson could think clearer, the trembling in their hands slowly subsided. The director's office, without even cracking a single window, was pure, as though nothing had changed since the day before.

The director sat behind his bureau, silhouetted by the sunlight streaming in from the open windows. He seemed to relish it—the uncharacteristic harshness of it all, perhaps because that was the truth. The weather was finally unimpeded, untampered by mortal design.

With the very sun itself at his back, he was little more than a silhouette, yet when his shoulders were shaping rays of light around them, he almost looked godlike.

"Sir," Tackson muttered through Aether, the sudden change in atmosphere sapping them of the panic that had spurred them to the director's office in the first place. "Sir, the uh…the news."

"I've heard," the director said, but that was all he said. As befitting a godlike figure, the director simply watched Tackson, neither anticipating nor dismissing his next words.

"What do we do now?"

At first, no words came. It had nothing to do with hesitation, or a lack of the right words. Like the room, Tackson could only sense clarity from the Spirit sat before him. Absolute confidence, no qualms or even anxieties about the future.

"We have a chance to rebuild the nation with the future in mind."

A lesser being in the same position may have let their emotions overwhelm them, good or bad, their words infected with a gravitas that betrayed their flawed personality.

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But the director was benevolent; that's what Tackson sensed from his assuredness. Quiet optimism born from genuine concern. Those words alone, said in a refuge of clarity, where the weather was true and the Spirit before them was wholly unafraid of that glaring, irritating reality, were enough for them.

The outside world was ablaze, but here was the answer. Tackson could feel that it was the only explanation.

Even a child could trace the connection between the director and the Queen's death, realise they were staring into the hollowed eyes of a Spirit whose actions would long outlive his name. But now, Tackson was convinced there had been a purpose.

"Yes, sir," Tackson said, finding the comfort he craved in that answer.

Provenance listened to the last cries of a bygone era, a nation in grief, a city in chaos, all half the world away. Somewhere beyond the horizon outside his window, behind the setting sun, the turning of a page in history was sending forth shockwaves.

The crown prince was fast asleep, unperturbed by the setting sun on his eyelids. His mother stroked his head, running thin fingers through budding black hair while she wore a dire expression, the words from the radio on her mind.

Perhaps she imagined herself in the Queen's position. So high in the clouds, yet her neck nor that of her son's was safe. As for Provenance, he'd worried too much about his own neck, and now carried little sympathy for the Empress. Perhaps it wasn't sinking in, hearing the end of what, or rather who, once felt rather eternal.

"Congratulations," Fanreth muttered. "You did the impossible."

"Nonsense," he scoffed. "I never left this room."

He stood up and softened the radio until it was nary a mutter humming side-by-side with Arna's breathing.

"Geverdians decided. That makes it all mean something."

Fanreth didn't seem to care much about the distinction. Instead, her eyes drifted away from him and towards the setting sun.

"You've almost done your duty then," she said. "You're free, provided my husband is in the right mood."

Provenance let out a wry chuckle. The Empress knew her husband too well.

"I don't mean to challenge him if he wants me to stay," he admitted. It wasn't a matter of fear or respect, but that he had grown too reliant on the emperor's backing. Their current reality would've been nothing more than a daydream without it.

"Then do you still want to leave?" Fanreth asked. Her hand paused, resting on her sleeping son's scalp.

Provenance bit his bottom lip, wanting nothing more than to ignore the tremble in her voice as she muttered it, a simple sentence that he couldn't help but think was missing one more word.

Trapped in a lofty tower, while the one who held the key to her door ran a country down the path of war as she…she was just another stroke in his painting. An integral one, but one placed down many years ago, and there'd since been more pressing colours to add, canvas to fill, shapes to imagine.

And the one person whose face didn't hide behind a mask, or humour behind careful words and etiquette, had just so happened to lend her an ear.

No, it was nothing more than pity. He felt nothing more than pity, nothing more than he ever had the first time he'd met her, enamoured less with the man that was her husband than with the fate it represented for her.

"I have a witch to find," he said. "This," he said, wagging a finger at the radio, "will draw her out."

Fanreth nodded, hiding whatever disappointment Provenance suspected she harboured. Arna cooed, and she restarted the movement of her hand.

Provenance watched the two for a moment as the sunlight slipped across their bodies and into the shadow of the skyscrapers, unable to tear his eyes from the fleeting beauty in the tragedy.

The phone rang as it always did. Arna, used to it, stirred but kept sleeping, now with a look of deep concentration. Provenance moved to answer it before the device could get another shrill ring in, and picked up the receiver, pressing it to his ear.

"Are you listening to the radio?" Antea said, sounding utterly ecstatic.

"Yes, my friend. You ought to celebrate."

"When will we hear from the emperor?"

"Straight to business, are we?" Provenance grumbled, leaning against the wall as he continued to watch the light recede up Fanreth's flowing dress. "His court's demands will come by the evening through the regular channels. Discretion above all else; if a suggestion feels too heavy-handed, alter or strike it."

"Awfully timid for the Emperor," Antea said.

"These are the instructions of his court. If it were up to him, I'm sure we'd have been at war a long time ago."

Antea grunted, the usual sign he had little else to say. But Provenance caught him, wondering if in the face of his greatest triumph, there was a single cordial morsel in his body.

"Will you finally tell me why you wanted to do this?" Provenance asked. "No harm can come of it—what's done is already done, after all."

A long silence followed, the Spirit's thought process interfering with the Aether line as soft, oscillating crackles.

"Geverde changed after the Aether and Diesel war," Antea started. "The afterglow lasted too long; it fed the Queen's ego until we were stealing arms deals from Vesmos's plate."

The subtle, sincere undertone of fear in Antea's voice, for a brief moment, almost made him sound human.

"We can't win a war against Vesmos. The Queen was going to destroy us all."

The answer caught him off guard, but the surprise wore off quickly. What little he knew of Antea, Provenance understood he calculated his moves, however outlandish. Loyalty was a curse if it'd send the country one loved to its doom.

"Then you did your country a service," Provenance said, little conviction behind his own words.

"Do you hold an audience with the emperor soon?"

"It isn't planned…but I'm due for an appointment soon."

A knock came at the door, right on cue.

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