She inhaled like it was the first time she'd ever done so, raggedly, air pouring into her lungs, and then coughed part of it out, shivering. The warmth and shape of someone's hand pressed against her face - she fearfully shied away from it, or would have if her head could travel any farther than a few hairs' width. But the hand didn't leave, just gently holding her. Probably not attached to that woman, then.

  She - Ravenna, right, that was her name - blinked slowly, trying to clear away the confusion. She had been dreaming... but for how long? How much of the past few days had been- wait, was it days? How much time had passed since- since...

  Her head hurt so much. Her body hurt, too. What of it she could feel, above her waist.

  "It's okay," she heard a familiar voice say. "Just... take it slowly. You've been through a lot, I can tell."

  Ravenna's gaze slowly tilted sideways, the view changing from the stone brick ceiling to Fern's face. Fern? That wasn't right. "Why," she began, and coughed a little more, painfully. The pain was starting to ebb, though. Things were getting a little bit better; the darkness swirling inside her was almost back to where it should be, nice and strong and comfortable. She would heal, given enough time. Probably. It was hard to be sure of anything at the moment. "Why," she began again, and stopped, and tried to recapture the errant thought. "... Why are you here?"

  The noble with the mean voice and... Ember! That was her name. Ember and the noble were talking, but the words didn't really register. She just looked up at Fern, whose face had suddenly grown sad for some reason. "Why wouldn't I be here?" she asked, softly.

  "Because-" Ravenna hesitated, the thoughts trying to join together. Everything was still so fragmented. "Because you were already here, and- and you left. You said-" Her eyes started to fill with tears. She remembered how much the words had hurt. She didn't want to remember them, or say them aloud. "You- you took off the earrings and- and you left... so why-"

  "I'm here, Ravenna," Fern replied, her gentle voice cutting through the noise, the confusion, the static. "Right now. Let me show you." She csped hands with the dark mage and lifted up, up to her ear. "Do you feel it? It's right here. I promise I never took it off. I would never throw away a precious gift like that."

  The tears kept coming as she felt the gentle, crystalline scraping across the back of her hand. It was there. She was there. But- it was all so confusing, she couldn't work it out. All she could do was- "I'm sorry, Fern," Ravenna whispered, barely seeing anything. "It's all my fault..."

  The fallen hero's hand tightened around hers for just a moment, before guiding her arm back down to a resting position. "I-" She hesitated. "... Let's get some of these potions in you, first. Then we can talk. Okay? Healing comes first. We can think about the rest of it ter."

  She blinked away the tears as much as she could, and by the time she could - mostly - see again, Fern had uncorked one of the bottles and brought it to her lips, carefully tilting her head up to help her drink. It wasn't the first time she'd had a healing potion, but it had been... a long, long time since she'd been so badly off that she needed one. She couldn't even remember when, just vague memories of being pressed up against a brick wall in the shadows, bleeding from arrows still piercing her, forcing down a potion just to give herself some space...

  This potion tasted better, she thought, and a little smile crept onto her lips after she finished it. Maybe it was the company.

  "You shouldn't take her lightly," Fern was saying to Ember, when her mind tuned back in.

  "Mm? Who?"

  "Oh, the-" She looked back, and hesitated. "The woman who was... with you. Angelisse Peacebuild."

  "Oh." Ravenna frowned a little. "Peacebuild..."

  Fern sighed quietly. "Yeah. Ember's making fun of her name."

  "I don't think she's a very nice person," she murmured.

  The fallen hero's lip quirked. "Which one?"

  Ravenna smiled just a tiny bit. "Ember's just spiky on the surface, really." The color had started to come back to her too-pale body, the bruises already fading just a little. "It's the other one who..." She paused. "Has deeper problems. Or maybe the problem is there's... nothing in her, deeper than the surface."

  Fern sighed, once again. "Her title is all that holds her together," she murmured, "like cracked pottery. One tap and she'll fall to pieces."

  The dark mage brightened a little. "Oh! Yeah, like that! That's really good!"

  "... Those were your words, Ravenna."

  The clockwork in her mind ground away for a moment. "Ah." Another moment. "Well... I'm gd you... liked them enough to remember them, I suppose."

  This time when Fern sighed, it was much heavier, somehow. It also came with an echo from Ember. "You really are irredeemable garbage," she was saying.

  "Easy for you to say to someone you have at a complete disadvantage," Angelisse returned, through gritted teeth.

  Fern just uncorked a second potion bottle and helped Ravenna drink it again while they listened to the exchange.

  "And whose fault is that?" Ember shot back coolly. "You've walked into your own corner, and I can't think of any reason you should deserve pity. I suppose you didn't expect this 'stupid little monster', as you're so fond of calling her, to have anyone who cared about her enough to stage a rescue all the way down into your little foxhole. Who would come save you if the situation was reversed?"

  The woman sneered. "I assure you my rescue wouldn't have been such a pitiful thing as this. Why, if I was taken-" She stopped cold. "If I was-"

  "That's about what I thought," Ember continued, quietly, after the silence grew for a while, along with the look of horrified comprehension on Angelisse's face. "You really don't have anything left beyond your name, do you? Nothing but a void inside that screams to be filled with vengeance, with violence, with anything it can feed on. But you don't fix that sort of thing by destroying, by taking from someone else. You have to create something to fill it. And you never learned to do that, did you? You never had to."

  "Don't talk like you know me," she hissed, but the fire had all but gone out of her.

  Ember just stared back at her. "By all means, go ahead and prove me wrong," she began after a moment, suddenly nonchant. "Tell me how very satisfied you are with your... work, here. How it soothes you. How proud your family would be of you. They would, yes? Surely these are praiseworthy accomplishments for a... Peacebuild." Can't believe I managed to say that name without cracking, she mused, with a tiny spark of satisfaction. "Well, Angelisse? How was it working for you?"

  This time, she offered no response at all.

  "How are you feeling?" Fern asked, to fill the now too-quiet cell.

  Ravenna squinted a little, then rexed her face. "A little better. Still can't feel my legs."

  "That doesn't sound good," Ember broke in, finally turning her attention away from the noble. "Let me take a look at her; I think you've probably done most of what you can on your end."

  Reluctantly, Fern nodded and stepped back as Ember squatted down next to the sb and started poking and prodding at the dark mage's body. For ck of anything better to do, she looked over at Angelisse, and saw in her expression a woman grappling with some very difficult realizations - and not finding any peace in the process. Falling to pieces, more like. But what would I even do in her situation? What sort of hope would I reach for, at the very bottom of it all?

  "Hey," she said after a few more moments of thought.

  Angelisse lifted her head. "What do you want, common girl? Come to kick me when I'm down?" The words hardly held any venom now, the edge in them dulled. She just sounded exhausted. Probably from all the fighting in her own head, Fern mused.

  "No, I just wondered what you would do if you were free."

  Bernie looked at her with an arch of one eyebrow, but the noble just scoffed quietly. "Free, you say? How utterly absurd. Nobles can never be free, common girl. Even if your man here removed his arm and let me go, and I walked out, past all the corpses you left on your way down-"

  "They're just unconscious, actually," Bernie murmured. "We didn't need to go that far."

  Angelisse blinked, the gears in her head adjusting to this new information. "Still. Even if I walked out unharmed, I'm still a Peacebuild. The one cut off from the family. No one wants anything to do with me; I burned my st connections just to make it down here. And if the aristocracy ever finds out what I did in this pce, to another noble, they would simply kill me. As an example." She grimaced, gring down at the sb. "No one wanted her around, but their stupid rules prevent them from getting their own hands dirty. I thought it wouldn't matter, if I could make it happen quietly. But this is just what I deserve for overreaching myself."

  Fern's jaw tightened. "Even so. If you could be free of all that, somehow; just as a theoretical exercise, perhaps. What would you do with yourself? What do you want to do?"

  She mulled over the idea for a long moment. "I just... don't think it really matters, if it's not possible," she sighed, eventually.

  The fallen hero's brow wrinkled. "Did you really have nothing in you at all? Was everything you did just for the sake of power and more power? Was there not even one single desire in your heart, even as a child, that wasn't stained by this disgusting game all the nobles py at?"

  Angelisse looked to the side, huffing out a breath. "Y-you're pretty rude, even for a common girl..." Even that didn't have any weight behind it.

  "It doesn't matter!" Fern shot back forcefully. "We're just people, Angelisse! Both of us! All of us! Underneath whatever titles and accomplishments and everything else, everyone bleeds the same way, bruises the same way!" Her fists clenched tightly. "You keep calling her a monster, but Ravenna is so much more kind and caring than any noble I've ever known. So much more human. If that's how you look at people, I would say I know where the real monsters are - but..." She took a breath and let it back out. "But even so. You're still a person. Under everything you've done, as much as it pains me. It's not in me to deny it."

  She blinked, bnkly. "... Gods, you actually believe that, don't you?"

  "She does," Ravenna confirmed from the sb, a little muffled and strained. Ember had turned her over onto her stomach, exposing a brutal wound near the base of her spine, and was already working on it with intense focus. "If there's one thing I know... fffhh, oww... it's how relentlessly... positive she is. Even in the face of death itself."

  "You shouldn't talk," Ember cautioned her, tersely. "It'll hurt worse."

  "Fine. Just sayin'." Even facing away, the dreamy little smile came through in her voice. "She's like the sunshine."

  Fern felt the blood rush to her cheeks and a soft little smile, irresistible, curl her lips. Despite everything else that had happened, that was happening now, the words pierced right through her. Into the most vulnerable part of her, filling her heart with warmth.

  Angelisse just looked at her and exhaled like her soul was coming out along with it, hanging there limply behind Bernie's arm, which had yet to move. "What's that feel like," she mumbled softly, "having someone say nice things about you, and actually meaning it?"

  Well then, Fern thought with a sudden inspirational spark, maybe there's a personal desire left in her after all.