The Demon Queen Wants To Live.

"The Unending," Ash repeated. She looked at the boy, then at me. "That explains some things," she said slowly. "It explains the way your fight played out. And what that Essence tasted like."

I almost smiled. It was good to have a retainer with a sharp mind. One who needed no excessive explanation for the simplest of things.

"What's- what's going on?" Lena's voice came from behind the sheet. It was thin. "Can you do anything or…." The girl had not heard us, but perhaps she had felt something of it all the same.

Ash and I looked at each other. Ash nodded. I sighed. "Nothing has happened. The boy's wound is…different from what I expected." I said.

The figure behind the sheet shifted. "Then-"

"It means it will simply take much longer." I cut her off.

Lena did said nothing to this. I saw the shadow behind the sheet shift again, drawing its knees closer. I turned to Ash again, pitching my voice low.

"The Cradle cannot heal something that isn't broken," I murmured. "My Requiem is only feeding this thing. Perhaps it might not, if I were stronger. But right now, neither of my powers can do anything." I paused. I saw the realization in Ash's eyes before I said it. "There is a third."

Ash's eyes widened. "Do you think Turn can work?"

"Yes." I said.

"But-" Ash paused. She looked at my hands, and I knew she was thinking what I was thinking. I could use my new power one try in three. I could use it in an empty forest, where neither quantity nor success nor failure mattered.

Now I would need the barest thread of Turn. A thread sent inside the inside of a boy's mind, where a single lapse in concentration could make Bloom overpower Ruin, which would do nothing. Or it could make Ruin overpower Bloom. With my concentration elsewhere, I would not be able to control the black flame before it damaged the boy's mind. Ilyasviel's power had preserved him, however cruelly. Mine would end.

"There's no time to train this time, is there?" Ash finally asked.

I shook my head. This Exarch was coming soon. Might come at any hour, if the Archon was to be believed. The Archon had said our time at the Academy was short. I suspected that extended to the whole of Koralis. If we left now, there was a chance we would not return, and the boy who would not wake would stay as he was. If something was to be done, it had to be done now.

I saw the same realization play across my retainer's face. Ash reached out with both hands. She held mine, right at the wrists. "You can do this," she said.

I looked at her, and found her blue eyes staring back at me with a Hero's resolve. "Did I say otherwise?" I asked.

"No. But I figured you needed someone else to say it." Ash said. I said nothing. I thought only that perhaps Ash knew me too well. She let go of my wrists.

Sol let out a small chirp from Ash's brow. Those golden eyes held me steady. I did not need to check the bond to know what that chirp meant. "You are impatient, Solara," I whispered.

I stepped back and held my arms out in front of me, palm up. A thread of white poured from my left, a thread of black poured from my right. They met in the space between my palms. The black ate the white. The white ate the black. Nothing remained. I tried again. I forced the balance, pressed one stream thinner and the other wider, and the air shuddered once and showed me no third thing.

I tried again. And this time was a success. The Becoming caught. A thread of every color at once spiraling inward on itself, the air around it lightly warping and unwarping. The Ember Core went silent. I held the thread of Turn for three breaths and moved it towards the boy. The thread unwound. The grinding returned. Ruin overpowered Bloom, and I caught it only a second later. I withdrew both powers.

Ash said nothing. Sol was very quiet. I tried again. Then again. Then again still. My successes were still one in three, but that was not good enough. I would not use a weapon that could slip from my grasp right before the strike. And so I practiced.

And in my many failures I started to understand the nature of my failures. I had thought these failures strange. The precise measurements required for Turn were difficult, but they were possible. I had once split the sky with fifty different spells, all aimed at the ready. To concentrate equal quantities of two finicky powers should not have been this difficult. Often I got the quantities almost precisely right, and even so, Turn would only take once in three tries.

I had not noticed it in the forest, with the sun blaring down upon me. I noticed it now, in a room that was very quiet, and in the light of a sun that had begun its descent. There was something other than precision I was lacking. Something to do with the nature of the Becoming itself.

You cannot force the form you want.

The words came to me, and I could not have said why. But I remembered where they were from. In the Forging, I had forced shapes onto a dozen lumps of chalkiron, and turned them all to dust. That class had nothing to do with what I attempted now. Or did it?

I took a deep breath, and then I stopped demanding anything of my powers at all. I channeled threads of Ruin and Bloom, and I let them find each other. The quantities were wrong. There was more Bloom than Ruin, and the two powers did not meet at the exact space between my palms. Black and white swirled together.

And then I saw the third thing. It flickered once, and it caught. And the two threads of black and white became a single thread of every color at once. I held the power. I let it go.

I took a breath and tried again. The power caught again. I tried ten times, and now the third thing showed itself one try in two. It was not perfect, but it was better. And all it had taken was a change in mindset, no more.

"Hero," I whispered, still looking down at my palms. "This new world of ours is truly strange."

She took some time to speak again. "Is that a bad thing?" she asked.

"No."

There was a small chirp. I turned to the boy, and saw Sol sitting on the boy's stomach. She was staring at the boy with a focus I had rarely seen from her. She let out the tiniest chirp, then looked back at me. Then she looked back at the boy. "How demanding, Solara," I murmured, reaching out to brush her head. She let out a small chirp.

"Lys, are you ready?" Ash still kept her voice low.

I took a deep breath. I still had not nearly mastered this power but it would have to be enough.

I channeled threads of Ruin and Bloom from each hand. They met, and the third thing took. A thread of every color at once, warping and unwarping the air around it. The Ember Core was silent. I sent the power inside the boy. Inside the inside. Inside the white.

The white stirred. It reached for my power the way it had reached for the Requiem. I braced for the draw, ready to withdraw my power in an instant if I was wrong about this.

Nothing happened. The white reached and its reaching closed on nothing. It was kin to beginnings and had a hunger only for endings, and the thing I threaded through it now was neither. The white stirred again, and I could almost feel its confusion through the thread. Then it stopped, and did not try again.

Then I was back above the plain, white to the horizon and past it. The sun nailed at its fixed height over a world that had neither wind nor sound. The figure was still walking, and his back cast no shadows.

I wondered briefly how long a moment lasted in a place like this. Whether four years had passed for him. Whether four thousand had. There had been powers like that in the old world. Illusions one could live a lifetime inside, only to come out and find that only moments had passed. I hoped that was not the case here. Death was a kinder mercy.

I willed the boy to wake. Nothing happened. The white did not stir, nothing on that endless horizon changed. I focused again, pouring more of myself into the wanting. I almost lost control of Turn again. I withdrew a fraction of my mental attention and considered.

I had known this power's laws for a single day, and the laws were strange. The Requiem ceased whatever I pointed it at. Cradle filled any hollow I found. This Becoming demanded continuity and possibility. It demanded a thing be turned into something it could have been, and might, in the smallest measure, want to be. And so I understood the problem immediately.

To wake is to end a sleep. And this is a world that consumed endings. Someone else might have given up, but I understood the bars of these prisons well. The height of Concept Magic was to argue with the world itself, and convince it that it was wrong. This was no different.

So I turned the power onto the endless plain itself. The Unending was a plain without a horizon. A plain where no road went anywhere, because there was nowhere to go. But a plain was already almost a road. It wanted only somewhere to arrive.

I laid my power across the whole of that featureless plain. And I willed it to change from a place where everything stayed stagnant, into a place that could change. I reached with that concept, and the white trembled. Just faintly.

And through the trembling came the boy's impressions. It was the first time a thing had wanted to change so strongly that I felt its impressions through Turn. Two impressions came, each as strong as the other.

I felt him want to wake. I felt his desire to wake and see the sister whose posture he had so painstakingly corrected. His desire to stand before her not at the height he told her he stood at, but at the height he did. His desire to see his father and apologize. For what, I did not know. I knew only that the desire was sincere.

And beneath it, exactly as deep, exactly as strong, I felt him want to lie down on the white ground and never rise again.

Four years of walking. Perhaps longer in this place. An exhaustion that could never find a crack to escape through in this place. His feet had taken one step in front of the other. His back had never arched. Neither of those had been his choice. He was a prisoner in his own body, and he was tired of it.

The boy wanted an escape. He wanted the final escape. In any other place, perhaps one of the two might have overpowered the other. One might have ended. Not in this place.

I could force the choice. The way I had forced a rabbit into a different color. It would take an absurd amount of Essence, but I had it. I could pick one wanting and starve the other. Give him a false choice, for there was no other. For one breath I considered it. I did not do it.

I pulled the Becoming out of him and sat down hard on the edge of the bed. I stared down at the boy. Sol was on his stomach, looking up at me with those round golden eyes.

"Lys…what happened?" Ash was crouching next to me. "Are you okay?" To her credit, she kept her voice low.

"Nothing of consequence." I said. Perhaps I had let more show than I had intended.

"Lys."

I almost did not answer. What would a Hero think of what I considered? What would she think of me for considering it? I did not know, and the not knowing troubled me.

"He wants to wake," I finally whispered. "But he also wants the sleep that will not end."

Ash went very still. "You're sure?"

"I am."

She was quiet for a long time. She looked at the boy. She looked at her own hands. "Can you let him choose?" she finally asked. I looked at her. "We came from a world where others made our choices," Ash said slowly. "They were subtle sometimes. And sometimes they weren't. I know it's stupid but…but perhaps it is his choice to make, in the end."

I had been asked to slay people before. I had been asked to save them too. This third thing was to give a person a knife and give them the power to use it however they wished. I almost refused it out of principle. I had not come here for this.

And yet the boy's two wantings had both been true. Neither had been truer than the other. A Demon Queen forced the choices of her subjects. I, Lysanthia, was the last of them.

"Ash." My voice was barely above a breath. "If we do this, and he chooses death, then-" I glanced at the sheet and then at the door. We were inside the home of a man who ruled all of Koralis, who walked with dozens of Sigils at his command. A man who had been kind once and had changed all because of the boy now lying in this bed.

Our reasons would not matter. Nothing about our reasons would matter at all. And it was not just us. Whatever mercy my duel might have given the demonbloods would not stretch far if this boy died in this room with us in it.

Ash nodded slowly. "I know." She paused, and her right hand rose to her forearm, to the purple Line of the Veil. "I think I can do something that will last for a little while," she murmured. "Long enough that we could run. Or something."

How very unlike a Hero. She suggested we run, though I suspect we both knew we would not be able to run far. "Or something," I whispered. "Quite the plan." Ash smiled.

I was still not sure. Sol chirped. I looked down. She looked at me, then at the boy, then back at me.

"Do you want me to?" I asked. I had once again asked a bird for her opinion. This time, I wanted the answer. Sol chirped once. I checked the bond and found only determination.

"Very well," I muttered. "My retainers have strange demands."

I rose again and turned to the boy. In the end, it was neither Sol nor Ash that truly convinced me. Why should the strong waste themselves on the weak? A half-demon had posed the question to me as if it was not a question at all.

"So we can give them the chance to be strong," I murmured only to myself. I had given the demonbloods the chance to stand, and they had stood. I would give this boy the same.

I took a deep breath. I built the threads and I sent Turn inside the boy. I sent it inside the white, even as I surrounded it.

My Essence poured out of me and soon the thread became closer to a stream. My Essence drained, more of it than I had spent on anything since this Core's forging. I had emptied a resonance chamber's mana across two days of duelling a Hero and never came near the bottom of myself. I had thought there was no bottom. There was a bottom, and I felt it coming up to meet me. All against this small portion of what Ilyasviel had left inside the boy.

It was the difference between a Line and a Crest. An impossible task faced by a woman who carried impossibilities on both arms and a third beating in her chest.

I pushed harder. The white trembled. It bent. What had been a plain without a horizon became a plain with one. What had been a sun that cast no shadow loosened and on the white ground beneath the walking figure, a dark shape appeared at his feet. The first shadow that place had ever known.

And from the boy's own impressions, two shapes rose on the horizon that now existed. One was a lying-down, the rest he had wanted and been denied. The other was a courtyard, and a girl with her back going straight.

Wind moved across the plain for the first time in four years, and it was the first sound anything in that place had ever made.

The figure stopped. He stood for a long moment. So long that I thought he might stand forever. He took a single step forward. Then the connection thinned as the white dissolved. I was being pushed out with the cage's death.

The boy was walking, but I did not know what he was walking towards.

I came back to the room and my legs went out from under me. My hands were shaking. My vision swam at the edges. The Ember Core's grinding returned. I had known it would.

"Now we wait," I murmured.

Ash's shoulder pressed against mine. I did not lean into it. Or I leaned into it only slightly, which was different. Sol stayed on the boy's stomach, watching his face.

"Lys," Ash whispered. "I saw something, near the end." I looked at her. Ash met my gaze. "Later," she whispered. I nodded. Whatever the Hero had seen seemed like a thing that could wait.

The minutes passed. There was nothing to do but wait. The smell of herbs hung in the air. The light from the window dimmed and slowly went out entirely. A lantern hung by the window winked to light on its own. This room at least, was permitted to change. We watched, and we hoped.

And a thought came to me. Ren had told me that Ilyasviel hadn't killed the boy, and not for want of trying. Perhaps Ilyasviel had stood over a broken boy four years ago, wanting an ending, and found that her mark did not contain one. What that meant, I did not know.

After some time, Lena spoke again. "Is…are you done? H-hello? Are you still there?" Lena's voice came from behind the sheet.

It seemed from her side she could not even see our shadows. Neither of us answered. The shadow shifted, and stayed where it was.

The sound went away. The boy's breathing had been a small sound, only heard because the room was so quiet. Its absence was distinct. I felt Ash stiffen. I stiffened too.

My fists closed. So the boy chose death. I tried not to judge him, not after what he had endured in that place. I tried, and I was not certain I succeeded.

Then Sol chirped, loudly. She jumped to the boy's collarbone and chirped again. I checked the bond, and found only greeting. Perhaps the old sleep had to end before anything could begin. Perhaps Solara, who only began when her predecessor ended, understood this better than anyone else in all the world.

The boy gasped. His eyes flew open and found two enormous golden eyes an inch from his face.

"Where-" he croaked. "What?"

Sol let out a chirp so mighty it shook the walls and the floorboards. Then she pecked the boy in the chin.

"Elias?" The voice from behind the sheet cracked in half. "ELIAS-" There was movement, and then a scream. The shadow fell back as though struck. It was the vow, I knew.

"L-Len?" The boy's head turned away from Sol and toward the sound. His voice was a ruin.

I sighed. "You may come out, girl. I do not know the exact method, but I allow you-"

The sheet came off the rod entirely as Lena burst through. She hit the bed hard enough to knock the wind out of her brother and Sol clean off his chest. The bird landed on the bedside with an indignant chirp of considerable volume.

"Sorry about that, Sol," Ash whispered, scooping her up.

Lena Eckhart lay across her brother and sobbed. The boy was sobbing too, and they were sobbing together. I checked him with a thread of the Cradle, just to be sure. He did not seem to notice. I found none of the white in him now. I found only a boy who was tired, in the ordinary way. I withdrew my power.

Ash was grinning at me. I could feel it without needing to look. My own lips almost betrayed me too. Almost, before I stilled them.

The door behind us opened, and I did not need to look to know who was standing there.

"Elias-" The Marquis croaked. "Is that-"

Footsteps moved behind us, and to the bed. The boy who had just regained his breath from his sister's embrace lost it again as his father joined in. And then the three of them were weeping together.

They had not listened, in the end. I had told them I had only one condition. That I not be disturbed or observed. The sheet Lena had used had been a thin excuse, and the Marquis had burst in without my asking.

I would allow it, this once.