“Ta-da!” Clarisse twirled in her casual clothes, expecting to be showered in compliments from Nikolas. A white blouse and pleated grey skirt decorated her figure, along with dark tights, a pink scarf, a colorful array of hairpins and a small purse slung from her shoulder. The only remnants from her adventuring outfit were her knee-high boots. “How do I look?”

  “It’s… alright. I’m glad you’re wearing the boots, and it’s surprising how you packed all this,” The faux fox replied, peeking into her open backpack to check how much space her changeover had freed up.

  “Hey– don’t look in there!” Clarisse lunged forward to zip the bag shut, being that it housed just about everything she owned at the moment. “And just alright? What’s wrong with it? Is it the skirt?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it, why would you think I meant that?” Nikolas narrowed his eyes, blind to her desire for praise. “You look just as good as you normally would. Of course, there’s the lack of protection if you had to fight in it. Are you wearing the chainmail, at least?”

  Clarisse rolled her eyes at the hollow’s overprotectiveness. “I’m not going to get attacked in the middle of the city, Nik. And if that does happen, I can handle myself. I’ll have Berry and Kaylin with me too!”

  “Right, you’re good then. I’ll trust that I’ve trained you well enough to survive… whatever Mystogann’s streets have to offer.” He seemed unsure of himself, but shrugged it off in the face of her infectious optimism.

  “We should go together later and get you something new to wear,” Clarisse thought aloud, before remembering that Berry was waiting for her downstairs, and made haste. “Do you have any plans for today?”

  “I might head out later – I’m not sure yet, so take the keys with you,” Nikolas held the door and ushered his favorite fragile human out.

  “Thanks, I’ll bring you a souvenir!” Clarisse beamed, turning to acknowledge someone standing out in the hallway before heading off to have the evening to her own antics.

  “You don’t have to–” Nikolas called out, but it didn’t seem like she paid it any mind. He watched her disappear around the corner, before his ears twitched at the sounds of another pair of feet against the floorboards. Approaching from a few doors away was Valeri, an unwelcome sight for the homunculus.

  “Hey, fancy some company? I could step in for a word.” The blonde oddity of a knight almost invited himself in before the hollow stepped out and swiftly shut the door.

  “I’d rather step out,” Nikolas replied, keen to keep inquisitive people out of their room, and apparently far away by the speed at which he started walking away from it. “How about the terrace?”

  “Seems alright,” Valeri shrugged, taking long strides to catch up. “Since the gals were having a night out, it occurred that we could do the same.”

  Nikolas noted that there hadn’t been any room for him to object or even be notified, and gave him a side-eye. “Could’ve let me know ahead of time.”

  “Aye, the other pointy-ears only thought of it after we got back.” Valeri shrugged, unbothered by Nik’s scarcely social attitude. In fact, he seemed rather amicable in response to it, taking it as a challenge to work around. “I’ll meet you up top with Noir, mkay? Don’t go missing on us!”

  Leaving the musical knight with a nod to take a detour, Nikolas swiftly scaled the stairwell. Time was immaterial to the hollow, and every moment after reaching the top was spent on analyzing the layout of the surrounding streets and buildings.

  When Noir and Valeri made it to the top, they each carried a tool with them; a golden-black walking cane and the same crudely constructed guitar from the previous night. Nik’s mind went back to the soulsword sheathed to his waist, and consciously pulled his cloak to hide its existence.

  “Pleasure to have your company once more, Mr. Nikolas,” Noir greeted him with a courtesy, followed by a nod from Valeri. The veterans took to either side of him, eyes fixed curiously on the nebulous kitsune between them. Their attempt to give him the stage perpetuated the silence until Valeri spoke up after an awkward cough.

  “So, what brings an Anierian all this way?” The shabby knight asked to clear the air. “I could make a pretty little scribble connecting all the places a kurestral scouting could happen between here and those glaciers.”

  Nikolas let an audible exhale go, his mind meandering towards a well-practiced lie. “I suppose I needed a change of pace, somewhere to start over. I’m not exactly welcome among my kind anymore, on account of the tails I’ve lost.”

  “Tails,” Noir noted with a knowledgeable cadence. “I have found it quite rare to hear of excommunicated kitsune, even more to see them in person. You are gifted to survive the journey off that continent.”

  “You could call it that… have you been to Aniera?” Nikolas asked, his eyes narrowing slightly at the elf’s casual attitude when recalling lesser-known customs.

  “I was of a blessed ilk to travel through the land of flowers in an age where peace was as abundant as grains of sand in the deserts of Sutherland,” Noir waxed poetic with a warm grin. “I was but a child then, but my father saw to it that I learned about the world before I was to venture on my own path. He was a true man of religion, and so we found hospitality with the foxes of the shrines. Pray tell, do you hail from such an ancestry?”

  “N-no,” Nikolas replied bluntly, somewhat put off by Noir’s penchant for prose. If anything, the name suggested the opposite of the smiling beacon of harmony that stood before him. “Sometimes I wish that were the case, but I belong to the warrior clans far in the north.”

  “Crafty fellows, I’ve heard,” Valeri interrupted, to which Noir leaned in over Nik’s shoulder for the apparently imminent anecdote. “I ran into some in the snow-capped mountains of Rish’ul once, while my chapter and I were on the run with a necromancer’s army hot on our heels. They’d been separated from their company as well, so we decided on a temporary truce. Nasty blight, that blasted demon was.”

  “Hear that? These good folk would take oh so kindly to learn of the devil in their midst.”

  “Can you not? We’re already surrounded by one of Thened’s elves and a holy chapter knight.”

  “Oh, but I must. Who else better to guard your paranoia than I?”

  “Good, I thought the nagging at the back of my mind was someone breaking in, not your nonsense.”

  “What?”

  “What…? That isn’t you I’m feeling? There’s this nauseating pain…”

  “No, that’s not bloody me! Get a hold of yourself!”

  “. . .”

  “Knowing the lay of the land, they ended up jerry-rigging a lingering sonic blast by having two of us combine our magics and trap them in a cracked gemstone. One good toss towards a glacier, and it cascaded down on the undead once we lured them underneath. The necromancer was easy pickings from there, hah!”

  “The craftiness runs in our blood,” Nikolas returned an uneasy smile, yet only blank blinks made it past his mask to them, who had yet to cultivate Clarisse’s aptitude for reading his eyes. The pain in his head grew with time, but he was determined not to show any signs of being affected.

  “I’m glad to hear that!” Valeri smirked, holding up his prized makeshift guitar. “Always been one to appreciate someone who can think out of the box.”

  “How did you come up with this?” Nikolas repositioned himself to stand in front of Valeri, casting a cursory glance at Noir as he did, spotting the elf staring back at him with a deathly focused gaze and that same grin as before.

  “It’s him. Wretched Thened-spawn…”

  “Calm, calm. Can’t let him know we’re being affected, especially if it’s holy magic.”

  “Your patience infuriates me.”

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  “And your lack of it might get us exposed. Now hush!”

  “We were on the frontlines in the trenches,” Valeri rambled on with another anecdote, choosing to appear oblivious to what Noir was doing even if he knew. “It was a terrible deadlock… neither side could make any progress despite holding positions close to each other. As our numbers waned, the skirmishes slowed down, and fighting became a distant memory in the monotony of patrols and… waiting. For days and weeks, we would just wait for an opening to show itself, and it kept building up until one day we heard the sound of a trumpet from the other side.”

  Under the pressure of psychic holy magic, all Nikolas could do was listen and nod along, keeping his lips tightly sealed and his throat tensed to contain the rising bouts of vomit that were building within him.

  Valeri’s expression overturned as he recalled what followed. “At first, we thought it was a trick to ease our guard, but the trumpet continued to play from the other camp. By the third day, we were jealous. All we could yearn for was the sound of music, and in my desperation, I stole a spool of wire from our meagre supplies and fashioned this ol’ thing with everything I owned,” He waved his hand over the guitar, strumming a few notes for effect. “The company leader was furious, but everything fell silent when I began playing it in the trenches that day… We could each hear the other’s tune faintly from within cover, and eventually we both stepped out of our trenches to convene in no man’s land. ‘Twas a night of performance unlike any we had had in years…”

  “Did that really lead to peace?” Nikolas asked, his curiosity piqued by the absurdity of such a truce.

  “For one night, we had stopped the war.” Valeri nodded with a somber smile, but couldn’t raise his eyes to meet the fox’s “Just that one night, though. They received reinforcements at dawn, and we were overrun soon after. I was the only prisoner they took from my company.”

  “Such naive ideals of peace can only be realized in dreams and fantasies.”

  “Even if it was for one night… Perhaps common ground is the key.”

  “And what grounds do we share with these inferior beings?”

  “Perhaps more than you think.”

  “Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve gone shopping like this,” Clarisse recalled, walking with a pep in her step beside Berry and Kaylin, who were each dressed in a light-olive dress and a silvery-grey gown. “It feels good to do normal stuff again…”

  “Does Nikolas not take you out shopping?” Berry asked with a chuckle that laid out her disbelief for everyone to see. “I might be giving him too much credit for keeping his temper if that’s the case.”

  “W-we went out once!” Clarisse blurted out, always quick to the defense of an absent friend. “Twice, now that I think about it. The second time just didn’t pan out well… we couldn’t find anything we wanted at all.” Her thoughts drifted back to Mernilk, and the state in which they had left the half-lively, half-desolate city. A shiver ran up her spine as she compared it to Mystogann’s bright colors and spacious streets, a far more welcome sight than the drivel that hope had been deigned as in the forgotten parts of Mernilk. On top of that, the thought that their escapade through the eerie mists had been just around a week ago still left an unsettling feeling in her stomach, one which showed in her pale countenance.

  Berry paused alongside Clarisse, noticing her expression morph subtly from defensive to despairing over the course of multiple realizations. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind. Mind spilling the beans?” She nudged the redhead with her shoulder, breaking her from the stupor that had claimed her.

  “What? N-no, I’m fine!” Clarisse smiled, though it was both too sudden and too wide to be genuine. “It’s just been a very busy few weeks… Ha ha.”

  Kaylin, who had thus far relegated herself to holding Berry’s hand and humming a tune, decided to break the tension. “How about we check that one out first?” The construct remarked, pointing a silver digit at a bookstore across the street. “Can’t go wrong with a good book.”

  “I like that idea too,” Clarisse piped up, eager to gloss over the stagnating mask of happiness with a real one. She looped her arm around Berry’s, tugging both girls across the street with her to begin their shopping trip in earnest.

  An hour into browsing the shelves, Berry traversed the maze of bound pages with a copy of Deaf, yet not dead cradled in her arms. The autobiography of a musician from another world was something she had been wanting for quite some time now, and having claimed it close to her chest, she meandered the establishment in search of her companions.

  The first of them was rather simple to find, standing by the source of the store’s ambient tunes. Looking down at the magitech stereo, Kaylin did not seem amused in the slightest. The construct heard her partner approach, and simply gestured towards the ebony-encased cuboid that emanated calming, scintillating music with an expression so sour it might as well have been unfinished roadkill, creaking and croaking for a merciful end to its existence.

  “Why must the people of Ignisvell resort to such barbaric treatment of machinery?” Kaylin condemned the music-box and phonograph-like apparatus on top of it. “Look at it, perpetually stuck in the same loop… and it hasn’t been maintained nearly well enough either. There’s scratches on it…” She whispered, as if she didn’t want the machine to hear its scars being aired out.

  “It’s nothing like you, Lin,” Berry wrapped her arm around Kaylin’s waist to console her, and in doing so, eventually stole her attention away from the innocent stereo doing its job. “I think you’ll like this one.” She presented her selected title to the construct, who immediately leaned closer to inspect it.

  “Huh… Beethoven? I remember being awake when he was an up-and-coming talent. Wouldn’t shut up about how being able to appreciate music with more than our ears was important too, but I suppose he wasn’t wrong…” Kaylin pondered on a downright ancient memory, spacing out in the middle of the bookstore for a good dozen seconds before being brought back to the present by Berry’s voice.

  “I’m definitely buying this then– you never told me you might be in this!” Berry grinned in awe with glittering eyes at the newfound value her already anticipated purchase held.

  “I uhh… I wouldn’t count on me being an influence on the lad,” Kaylin chuckled at Berry’s excitement with a sliver of discomfort, but nothing that wouldn’t disappear with a simple shrug.

  “Where’s Clarisse gone?” Berry asked once she had managed to subdue her ecstasy at a chance to learn more about Kaylin from a text. “Need to find her so we can wrap this up…” she muttered, tugging her sentient flute along.

  The pair eventually found Clarisse knee-deep between the romance and fiction sections, surrounded by many stacks of novels on all sides. A few titles stuck out among the rest in the myriad that had caught her fancy, being the ones she had graced with being placed on the very top of each stack.

  Cruel Violet by Dreamer’s Riot

  Where You Promised by Hadrian Spatfyre

  Apothecary Diaries from Another World by Natsu Hyuuga

  The Bride and The Ashen Knight by BTS STORIES ?

  Clarisse had thus far not noticed the arrival of her audience, her attention thoroughly arrested by the book she was perusing the blurb of – A Survey of Sages by Jellee. A somber kitsune sat within the cover, a mere precursor to what the pages within held. For anyone with an understanding of what Nikolas and PH:OV were like, there was a clear pattern among the assemblage of romance she had accrued, all relating to them in their own, subtle ways. Fortunately for Clarisse, people like that were few and rarely alive.

  When she was finally alerted to Berry and Kaylin’s presence through a not-so-subtle cough from the construct, Clarisse almost jumped. “H-hey, how long have you two been there!?” she scrambled, maintaining scatterbrained eye contact while her panicking arms collected as many books from around to hide behind, and in doing so, knocked over one of the stacks.

  “Long enough to notice your dreamy collection~” Berry teased, helping pick up the fallen books while Kaylin arranged the books Clarisse hadn’t picked up back to their shelves. “C’mon, we got our selection. Let’s bill them and check out some dresses next!”

  “Right… Thanks.” Clarisse complied with flushed cheeks, carrying her assortment of guilty pleasures towards the front desk with barely concealed embarrassment.

  While the faded silhouette of the sun made its descent past across the archipelago’s veiled sky, the girls spent the rest of the evening shopping across the city for anything that caught their fancy. They sought out all sorts of establishments, window shopping wherever they found their means insufficient to purchase.

  Between these escapades, Clarisse found herself staring through the window of a particular store as they passed it by. She nudged Berry’s arm as a sign of interest, and soon the girls were collectively gazing at a long scarf wrapped around a mannequin’s neck, with one end flowing down to its torso. It possessed a rich, interwoven crimson hue, a picturesque copy of Clarisse’s own hair.

  “Bet it would match wonderfully on you,” Berry commented, returning the nudge from earlier.

  Kaylin leaned in from Clarisse’s other side, encouraging her in a likewise manner, “We could get it enchanted with fire resistance. There was a branch of Richardson’s a few blocks back the way we came.”

  “Ah, thanks. I wasn’t thinking of buying it for myself, though.” Clarisse smiled, reminded of the only visibly exposed skin Nikolas bore on himself. It always stood out to her, and like finally finding the final piece of a puzzle, the scarf seemed like the perfect addition to her lonely homunculus.

  When the redhead finally returned to their room, she found the door unlocked, albeit closed. After confirming that nothing had been tampered with in their absence, Clarisse changed into her pajamas and sank into her bed with a resigned, content sigh. With no idea when Nikolas would return, she rested for the first half hour since her arrival before lazily organizing the newly acquired articles into her bag.

  Once all but the red scarf had been sorted, she curled into the sheets and unraveled her diary, jotting her day into the paperbound confidant. There was a lot to write about, starting right from unlocking a new facet of her magic in the form of the explosive marks she manifested through Berry’s shield. She was debating whether or not to even grace Reggie and Duce with an entry when the room door swung open, followed by the light footsteps of a hollow.

  Clarisse peeked out from the bed, rushing to greet him with the paper bag that held the red scarf. “Nik! I brought something for you!” She exclaimed jubilantly, presenting the bag in front of herself.

  Nikolas closed the door behind with weary motions, turning around to greet Clarisse with a pair of lifeless, exhausted irises. There was a fleeting sliver of excitement in them as he laid his eyes on her. His perpetually composed demeanor only lasted a moment longer, barely long enough for him to assess that they were alone in the room. A pair of dull thuds followed, first dropping the homunculus to his knees and then to the floor in earnest.

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