Iris and Crestana travelled across the rooftops with Iris's purple beast between their legs, taking advantage of the lack of witnesses. The Steel Whale loomed large over the edge of the city, the cry of its engines still a prominent drone several districts away. Its bow deprived several city blocks of sunlight, but the metaphorical shadow it cast over the city extended much farther. Like the barrage balloons of a crisis passed, it hung above Excala's collective consciousness like a storm cloud.

Crestana still in her arms, they dropped into an alleyway, where Iris stripped off her armour and checked her watch. Record time; she just hoped it was enough.

They crossed the empty street, bee-lining for the library's dilapidated façade.

"There's no magic."

"What?"

Iris paused inches from the crumbling front door. Crestana had stumbled to a halt a few paces behind, bewildered.

"There's no magic. Usually I sense traces, but there's nothing. It's…just an old building…."

Iris tried the doorknob anyway, but it had rusted from the inside. The crumbling cylinders and pins bit into each other as she cranked the mechanism back and forth, only making it worse.

Iris dissipated her hair and formed a battering ram, the idea of witnesses escaping her in the moment of panic. She blew through the lock, leaving a cloud of rust flakes and sawdust in its wake. Her body moved with the door's momentum, and she stumbled forward onto the rotting floorboards.

Rays of harsh sunlight trickled through the open ceiling, falling onto blankets of moss quietly climbing the bare brick walls. Stripped of its furnishing, its plaster, even its floors.

It was just an old building.

"Girls?"

The voice came from a counter, made freestanding by the ruinous passage of time. A small, scaly being curled into itself.

"Tony…the library…" Iris said, her voice trailing off before she could properly ask the question.

Tony simply shook his head. "Not 'ere anymore."

"Where's Al?" Crestana asked, catching up to Iris one cautious step at a time.

The Spacehopper looked downcast, glassy eyes watching a scene already passed. "Gone. Special Operations took 'im away right before ya got here."

"Already?"

"For the best," Tony said, unable to sound like he meant it. "He's the country's only hope."

Suspended dust swayed in the sunlight. Frozen in time, as much a memory as Iris's favourite place. The muted rainbow of bookshelf corridors, the smell of polished pine…

"When things go back to normal…will the library come back?"

Tony didn't budge. Neither a nod nor a shake.

If it returned, it wouldn't be the same.

Another piece of her life obliterated.

Another part of her home, gone.

"Again?" she stammered. "Again?"

With the second outburst, her hair stood on its end. Tears welled in her eyes even though she would rather die than cry in that moment.

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"Iris?" Crestana asked sheepishly, tugging on Iris's jacket sleeve, but Iris was numb to everything in that moment besides the sensation of her hair dismantling.

"Again and again."

The memories of the library were already fleeting, the smell of polished oak and pine surrendering to history.

More hair disappeared, forming terrible, jagged spikes moulded by emotion.

Rage. Rage festering on sadness. The same kind that had once brought Tetrica to madness.

Crestana weighed heavy on Iris's side, but her mind was of a singular purpose, to pursue the fleeting memories before they faded forever.

The circular river that tickled her ears, the grass that brushed against her ankles as she climbed her way to the top of the gentle hill to rest her head on the creaking, driftwood workshop.

At least that was a memory she could hang onto. It felt so real, through the haze of her anger.

"Stop it!"

Whatever fuel the sorrow and rage burnt on, those words seemed to choke her flames of it. Nothing; Crestana's particular variety that left her gasping for air she didn't really need.

She fell backwards, and a great weight fell on her chest as she did. Coughing and sputtering, she grasped at the weight, recognising the cut of the clothes and the shape of the hair.

Crestana appeared through the blurry mess that was her vision, shutters bent upwards in concern, or was that confusion?

It didn't seem to matter. Either way, she was upset.

"Stop it," she said with less energy but no less commanding. "Get yourself together."

She wished the blur of her vision was a side-effect of her tantrum, but they were tears, ones she'd tried so hard to keep hidden.

"But the library—"

"Things change."

"Why?"

"Because they do!"

"I don't want them to!"

"That isn't your choice to make! It never is!"

Crestana's voice box crackled as her trembling Aether tested the limits of translation.

"It wasn't when my mother died. It wasn't when I got these powers. The one thing I decided for myself was to help you, and I can't even do that!"

Rage. Rage fuelled by sorrow. As Crestana's grip on Iris's collar grew tighter, their surroundings warped; jagged, terrible. The grass twisted into thick, jagged twine, and the peaceful river burst its banks, sloshing in great tidal waves.

Aether Influx. Iris felt herself growing sick; the borders of Crestana's body grew foggy, and undefined.

"But do you think I acted a fool? No! No, I didn't!"

Iris grasped Crestana's hands, the ones pinning her to the ground by her collar.

"Crestana—"

"Stop."

Her voice was suddenly shaky, hardly louder than a mouse's scamper.

She bent over, and her head fell onto Iris's chest.

"You hold it in," Crestana said. "You hold it in because anger won't get you anywhere."

She repeated it over and over as though it were a mantra lulling her to sleep. The stream trickled peacefully around them, and the grass sang a chorus through the wind.

The Spacehopper watched on from the workbench, his domain back to how it once was.

"Your future partners are in for a damn handful," Tony grunted. "But sincerity's sincerity, even if it's out of whack."

Crestana rolled off Iris and onto her back, nestling in the bed of grass, a forearm over her mask as though it were a lazy attempt at hiding.

"I take it you don't plan on skedaddling out t' country while you've the chance, Iris?"

"No," she said once she'd finally regained her breath, head still processing the image of Crestana's fury, let alone her words. "I told Mum and Dad. This is my home."

"Be careful with words like that," Tony snorted. "'S how the wartime pamphlets get ya."

"But it's the truth," Iris replied.

"Geverde's people'd see ya shot for just existing, 'n that's when the old hag was still around to protect you."

"But Al—"

"King Alphonse will rise in wartime. He won't have old age t' soften 'im either. If I was you, I wouldn't stick round t' take that chance."

Al disappeared beyond the counter's edge, small, padded footsteps pattering away.

"Same goes for you, Crestana. Al won't make you an exception forever."

"I don't want to be an exception," Crestana protested, her voice still fickle.

"But you've got an option Iris doesn't have."

Tony seemed to sigh, as a puff of smoke sputtered across the counter edge and disappeared in the artificial sunlight.

"Sorry, girls," he said. "It's sad, isn't it? When there's no bookshelves around."

The land beyond the ring river was blank—neither black, nor white, nor any other colour or texture. Just a haze. A foggy memory.

"We all die on one hill," Tony said. "Geverde is Al's, and who knows how many bodies he's gonna pile on it 'fore he croaks it."

The haze slowly receded, and inch by inch, green grass took its place. Unending, infinite green grass.

"Think carefully about which hill you choose. You only get to do it once."

Iris sat up, looking out on the empty plains as the wind softly jostled her hair.

"Is this your hill?" she asked.

"I don't know," Tony replied.

Crestana's hand found hers, resting in the pillowy, blanketing grass. She didn't move otherwise, and Iris was of the same mind. Iris enjoyed Tony's hill, and if she weren't to die on it, she wanted to at least enjoy it one more time.

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