Chapter Text
Thirty-one days since Babel fell, which Tracy believed was about twenty-eight days longer than it should have taken to figure out its new name. People needed to name things. It was, she thought, a fundamental flaw in the human operating system. You couldn’t just have a catastrophic, reality-rending event without having to call it something. The Fall. The Coda. The Unweaving. Something. She’d heard a soldier refer to it as “The Big Oops,” which, despite herself, she’d found more honest than most.
The Tower of God was a pile of rubble that no one knew how to move, Babel was a smoldering crater of linguistic ambition, and the King of Babel… that self-proclaimed bastard of deity… was (presumably) a fine red mist somewhere in hell. Good riddance. The thought came with satisfaction.
And yet, here she was. Still a tactician. For an army that might or might not be called the Eclipse.
The name was Morningstar’s, of course. Everything was Morningstar’s, which was the problem. He had given them a purpose that started the rebellion against Babel and now, it felt more like a really large, really well-armed book club or something. Morningstar hadn’t been seen for official orders in seventeen days. Tracy knew because she’d been counting out of the petty, bureaucratic accounting that her mind lingers to stay sane.
In his absence, there were orders. She’d found them on her desk three days after the Tower fell, written in neat calligraphic hand on a scrap of what looked like a page torn from a ledger. In my absence, authority is vested in the Returned and the Encroached, jointly.
Jointly. To share authority with a freed slave.
Tracy sat on the edge of her cot, the canvas of her tent doing little to muffle the sounds of an army idling. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, then started to recall herself as a noble. Or had been. The daughter of House Avestra, her family’s lineage of a kingdom that no longer existed in any meaningful sense. Her father had collected rare maps, her mother had believed that political disputes could be settled with a perfectly-brewed cup of tea. Now they are dead, thanks to that bastard King.
Now she took orders from a man who had burned the old world down, and shared command with a man that the old world had enslaved.
She stood up, ducking out of the tent. The air smelled of woodsmoke, unwashed bodies, and the sweet decay of a fallen empire. Across the makeshift fire pit, Joker was seated on a crate, meticulously cleaning a blade. He didn’t bother to look up to acknowledge Tracy's presence.
The distaste between them sat on the crates and watched the fire with them. It wasn’t personal and that was the most exhausting part. He looked at her and saw a noble who had likely never known hunger as a constant companion, who had learned strategy from books and tutors rather than from the lash and the rebellions of the enslaved. She looked at him and saw a man who had been given power by the very force that had destroyed her world.
They were Morningstar’s left and right hands, two people who would have been mortal enemies three months ago, now forced into a partnership so uneasy it made the ground under the army’s feet feel stable by comparison. He couldn’t protest his position any more than she could. You don’t say no to the man who crumbled the world’s greatest power.
Tracy cleared her throat. “The courier came.”
Joker’s hand stilled on the whetstone. He didn’t ask which courier, as there is only one who came to their tent.
“The Avestran Plains,” she said, the words feeling like foreign objects in her mouth. Her kingdom. Her former kingdom. “The provisional council is refusing to acknowledge the new… order.”
He finally looked at her through his half mask. His eyes were the color of dried blood. “They’re ‘stubborn.’”
“That’s the word they used,” she added, her own voice dry as dust.
“And what are we to do about their stubbornness?” Joker asked, sheathing the blade with a soft click.
Tracy felt the weight of the paper in her pocket. She thought of her mother’s tea set, the delicate porcelain cups painted with scenes of the Avestran countryside that were now shards in a looted estate. She thought of the King of Babel’s soldiers, their faces blank as they dragged her father out the door, her mother’s voice cracking as she called out for her to stay hidden. The King of Babel was gone. But his kingdom, his system of conquest, of subjugation… had been Morningstar’s enemy too, and he had proven himself to be very good at learning from his enemies.
“Convince them,” Tracy answered. She looked out at the army, who were now looking at her and the man beside her for direction. She has to lead them to her homeland. To make it kneel, publicly, and apologize for its existence.
“Well,” Joker stands up tall. “Let’s go convince them.”
He started walking toward the command tent, not waiting to see if she followed. Tracy watched him for a moment. A noble and a slave… she finds it ironic, imagining the poets write about the great joke where the universe pairs her with the opposite to teach her something about the nature of humanity or whatever.
The thing was, she couldn't complain either. What would she say? It's unfair that I have to work with the nobody? She could already hear how it sounded, see the look on Joker's face if she were stupid enough to say it aloud.
She let out a deep sigh, then walked to the command tent, sat through the briefing, and gave the orders for the march. When the army moved at dawn, she rode at the head with Joker on her left, the two of them leading an army toward the land she had once called home.
The travel took four days.
Four days of hard riding, supply lines and scout reports, and Tracy pretending she didn't recognize the landmarks. That river bend where she'd learned to swim, crossroads where merchants had set up every harvest festival, the orchard where she'd stolen apples as a child, laughing with her siblings, all too young to understand that the orchard would one day belong to a mad king.
By the time they crested the final hill, the sun was setting, painting the Avestran Plains in shades of amber and gold. The capital spread out below them, and the walls had been rebuilt since the King of Babel's occupation. New gates, new towers, the architecture trying desperately to look like it had never been breached. Tracy knew better. She knew the scratches on the cobblestones where her father's boots had dragged. She knew the house on Meridian Street where she'd hidden, listening to her mother scream.
The provisional council had been informed of their arrival. A delegation waited at the gates; old men in borrowed finery with their expressions tried to be dignified but were just terrified. Tracy recognized some of them. Minor lords who had survived the occupation by being unimportant enough to not be worth killing them along with the merchants who had profited from Babel's rule.
She dismounted. So did Joker. The delegation's eyes darted between them, unsure which one to address. The confusion is almost funny.
"Lady Tracy," the eldest of them said, stepping forward carefully. "We received your uh… the orders. We simply wished to discuss the terms, to find a mutually agreeable—"
"There are no terms," Joker interrupted. "There is an order, and compliance is expected."
The old man's mouth opened. Closed. His eyes found Tracy's, looking for the noblewoman he expected to understand, to negotiate, to remember that they were her people, her kingdom, that surely she wouldn't let this nobody dictate—
Tracy looked away.
She looked at the walls, at the gates, at the cobblestones that still held the ghost of her father's last steps. She was not a coward, she told herself. She was a tactician. And the tactically correct decision is to let Joker handle the messy business of breaking people's pride so that she could focus on the larger strategy. That was what she told herself. That was what she kept telling herself, even as the delegation was led away, even as the army began to move through the gates, even as she heard the first cries from the square where the penance would take place.
The penance lasted three days.
It was Joker's idea. He explained it to Tracy before they arrived like he was discussing the weather rather than the systematic humiliation of an entire kingdom. The faithful need to believe, he'd said. They need to see the old world kneel. Not just the lords. Everyone. The merchants who sold grain at Babel's prices. The priests who blessed the conquerors. The mothers who named their children after the King. They all participated. They all benefited. They all kneel, or none of it means anything.
Tracy had listened and nodded. She had told herself that this was strategy, that the consolidation of power required demonstrations, that Morningstar had chosen Joker for this because the man understood something about breaking people that she could never comprehend.
She watched the first day from the balcony of the commandeered guild hall, with a goblet of wine in her hand because who would listen to this while sober? Below, in the main square, the lords of Avestra got their finery stripped and knelt on the cobblestones. One by one, they crawled to the center of the square and recited the crimes of their house, their voice cracking as they listed the names of those who had died under Babel, the compromises they had made, the collaborations they had pretended for survival.
Tracy recognized Lord Harrow. He had been at her father's funeral, or what passed for a funeral when there was no body. He had wept. She had thought, at the time, that he wept for her father. Now she watched him weep on the cobblestones, watched him press his forehead to the ground and beg for a forgiveness that did not come, and she wondered if he had wept for himself even then.
It’s tempting to stop it, she's the authority after all. She could have stopped it. That was the thought that followed her through the first day, at the cold dinner she did not eat, on the unfamiliar bed in the lord's house that was now hers. She could have stopped it. She did not.
The second day was worse.
The second day, it was not just the lords. Merchants, the guild masters, the landowners are now involved. The captain of the city guard had served under three regimes and would serve under a fourth if no one stopped him, the woman who had run the orphanage and had sold children to Babel's officers for favors. They knelt. They recited. They begged.
And in the evening, when the square had emptied and the penitents had been herded to whatever fate awaited them, Tracy heard the first scream.
It came from a house two streets over. A noble house, one of the few that had survived the occupation intact. The scream was followed by a crash, and then a laugh, and then a sound that Tracy recognized that she would later despise herself for.
She stood up. She walked to the window. In the street below, Eclipse soldiers moved between the houses unhurried, their faces hidden in the twilight. From another house, further away, came a woman's voice raised in protest, then cut short. A child began to cry. The cry became a wail, and the wail went on and on.
Tracy's hand was on the door before she realized she had moved. She stood there, her palm flat against the wood, and she did not open it.
She was not a coward. She understood that morale is at rock bottom, that soldiers needed their source of entertainment. But she did not ordered this, not sanctioned it, not even known—
The wail cut off.
Tracy's hand fell from the door. She stepped back. She sat down on the edge of the bed, she put her hands in her lap and she stared at the wall. She is untouchable. That is the word that came to her, the word that settled into her chest alongside the stone she had never swallowed. She is untouchable. She is the authority. She could walk out there and tell them to stop and they would stop, because she is Lady Tracy, because she shared command with Joker, because Morningstar himself had put her name up there.
She did not walk out.
She sat on the edge of the bed and she listened to the noises of the night, the distant shouts, the occasional scream, the low murmur of voices that did not want to be overheard, yet she thought about her mother's tea set. She thought about the shards. She thought about how she had never picked them up, had walked away because she had been too afraid to touch them, because touching them would have made it real.
She is not a coward. She is doing what she had to do. She is the authority, and the authority had to remain above the chaos, had to keep perspective, had to—
The noises stopped.
The third day began the same as the second.
Tracy stood on the balcony, with the same goblet of wine in her hand but the liquid inside having gone from red to a murky brown as the day stretched on.
The penance continued. The square is packed now, the cobblestones invisible beneath the press of bodies and the sun set. She did not move from the balcony. The penance continued by torchlight, the flames casting long shadows that danced across the square. The air is cold now, the autumn chill settling into her bones. The goblet was cold in her hand. Her fingers were numb. She did not notice.
Above, the stars came out. One by one at first, then the sky emptying itself of darkness to make room for light. The moon rose hanging over the square. Tracy watched it for a moment, watched the way it turned the torchlight pale and made the kneeling figures below look like statues in a garden she had once visited as a child.
Her eyes drifted back to the square.
And then she saw someone.
A figure stood at the back of the crowd, where the torchlight faded into shadow. Taller than those around her, or maybe standing straighter, refusing to kneel in a sea of penitents. The dress is pale blue, long and ruffled, like she came from a ballroom. The bodice caught the torchlight and golden borders tracing the shape of her. The figure seemed to glow, though that is impossible. The light shines behind her and should’ve been in shadow.
Oddly enough, no one else seemed to notice someone sticking out like a sore thumb.
Tracy leaned forward, her hand tightening on the balcony railing. The crowd moved around the figure, parted and reformed, but no one looked as if the figure was not there at all.
Her hair was dark blonde, though in the moonlight it was hard to tell where the blonde ended and the shadow began. It fell in waves past her shoulders, unbound, moving in a wind that Tracy could not feel. And in her hands, a silver-bound book with the cover of a blue moon. Embedded, or painted, or growing out of the silver itself.
Tracy could not look away. She could not breathe. The figure is not moving, not participating, not kneeling. Instead she is simply there, watching the penance with a stillness that was not patience nor judgment.
And then the figure looked up.
Their eyes met across the square. Tracy felt it like a hand around her throat. The figure's eyes were blue. A shining blue, the blue that had never been touched by darkness.
And her mouth let out a smile.
The smile widened.
It should not have been possible. Tracy is too far away to see a smile, too far to see anything more than the shape of a face in the torchlight. But she saw it.
Tracy's hand went to her chest. Her heart is pounding. The goblet slipped from her fingers, fell, hit the balcony floor with a clatter of metal on stone that she did not hear. The figure below is still looking at her, still smiling.
Behind her, a door opened. Then closed. Slow footsteps crossed the room. She is still watching the figure below, watching the smile, watching the blue eyes that held her in place.
The footsteps stopped. Someone is behind her. Someone is close enough to breathe on her neck, to reach out and touch her, and Tracy did not move, did not turn, did not—
The scream that snapped Tracy out of it came from behind her, and her body moved before her mind caught up from the pain.
She turned.
The woman is young. That is Tracy's first thought that made it through the white wall of agony that bloomed in her side. Young, with dark hair plastered to her face with sweat, her eyes wide and wild. Her hand wrapped around the hilt of a dagger that was buried to the crossguard in Tracy's lower abdomen, just below the ribs, angled upward.
Their faces were close enough to share breath.
"You," the woman hissed, and her voice cracked on the word, "should have stopped them."
She twisted the blade.
Tracy hissed. Her hands came up for the woman's shoulders and shoved. The woman stumbled back, her grip tearing free of the dagger, and the blade came with her.
Tracy's vision whited out, then returned in a rush of color and noise and the wet heat spreading down her side. She could feel it soaking through her tunic, warm against her skin. Her legs buckled. She caught herself on the balcony railing, the cold marble biting into her palms, and forced herself to stay upright.
The woman had recovered. She was already moving, the dagger dripping in her hand, her expressions looked desperate and hatred and almost like grief. She is not a trained assassin. Tracy could see it, the way she held the blade too tight and her feet were planted too wide. She was a daughter. A sister. Someone who had watched the penance from the crowd and had chosen the only weapon she could reach.
She lunged again.
Tracy moved on instinct. She dropped, her legs folding beneath her, and the woman's dagger cut air where Tracy's throat had been.
The momentum carried the woman past her, off-balance, her arm extended too far, her body twisted. Tracy's hand shot out. She grabbed the woman's wrist where holding the dagger, and she pulled.
They went down together.
The impact jarred Tracy's teeth together. Her side screamed. She could feel blood pooling beneath her, warm and slick on the cold stone of the balcony. The woman was on top of her now, stronger than she looked, her weight pressing down on Tracy's chest, her free hand scrabbling for Tracy's throat. The dagger was still in her other hand, and Tracy could see the woman's face inches from her own, could see the tears cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks.
"Monster," the woman gasped, her hand closing around Tracy's throat, her fingers squeezing down the windpipe, "You should have—"
Tracy did not let her finish.
She brought her knee up, hard, into the woman's stomach. The grip on her throat loosened. The woman's breath left her in a whoosh, her face crumpling and her body folding forward. Tracy used the moment to twist, to shove, to get her weight on top. The dagger clattered against the stone as the woman's hand went out to catch herself.
The bloody dagger lay three feet away. Tracy lunged for it. Her fingers brushed the hilt, and then the world turned white. The wound in her side spasmed, and her arm went limp.
The woman is faster.
She had recovered while Tracy's hand hovered uselessly over the dagger. Tracy saw the scramble of knees on stone, the flash of the woman's hand closing around the hilt. She was already rising, and Tracy was still on her knees, still gasping, still trying to force her arm to move when the dagger came up.
The woman did not hesitate. She drove the blade forward with both hands, and Tracy felt it enter just below her sternum. Tracy's body was already falling backward, already trying to escape, and the blade—
The blade found its mark.
The pain was different this time. It was cold. The spreading cold started in her chest and reached outward, down her arms, up her throat, into her fingers and her toes and the spaces behind her eyes. Her heart stuttered. She felt the rhythm falter, felt the muscle try to push blood through a channel that was no longer whole.
Her mouth opened. No sound came out. Her lungs were filled with something warm and thick that tasted like copper.
"Oh, princess…" the woman breathed. Her voice is softer now as the anger drained out, replaced by wonder. "Why?"
Tracy's hand closed around the woman's wrist.
The woman's eyes widened. She tried to pull back and free herself from the grip of a woman who should already be dead, but Tracy's fingers were locked and pulled out.
The woman screamed, her feet too close to the edge and her weight too far forward. Tracy hauled herself upward with the woman with her, using the last of her strength to drag them both toward the railing.
The woman's free hand clawed at Tracy's face. Fingernails raked across her cheek. Tracy did not feel it. She could not feel anything now except the iron grip of her own fingers and the low stone balustrade pressing against her thighs.
Below, the square spread out like a tapestry of torchlight and shadow. The soldiers’ faces turned upward now, drawn by the scream. And there, pushing through the crowd, was Joker. She saw his face tipped toward the balcony, saw his mouth open in a shout she could not hear, saw him begin to run.
The woman saw him too. Her eyes darted down, then back to Tracy's face, and in that moment Tracy saw what the woman had been before the penance, before the occupation, before the world had broken her into something that could drive a dagger into a noble’s heart.
"Please," the woman whispered.
Tracy let go.
The scream went on. It went on as she fell past the third floor until the first, past the faces of the soldiers who were running to catch her, past the outstretched arms that would be too late. It went on until it stopped with a fleshy thud.
Tracy is already falling onto the cold stone of the balcony, her back hitting the floor, her head striking the marble with a crack that sent stars exploding across her vision. The dagger is still in her chest.
The blood was spreading faster now, soaking through her clothes, pooling on the stone beneath her. She could feel it leaving her, could feel the warmth draining out of her limbs, could feel the edges of her vision starting to blur.
She should call for help. She should scream, shout, do something other than lie here on the cold stone of the balcony. Her mouth opened. No sound came out. Her throat was raw, her lips cracked, her tongue like lead in her mouth.
Above her, the moon hung fat and white. The stars were still there, scattered across the sky like shards of light. She forced her head to tilt towards the square at the edge of her vision, the orange light casting shadows that danced and twisted and—
The figure is gone.
Tracy blinked. There was only the crowd and the penitents. There was only the blood pooling beneath her, the cold seeping into her bones, the darkness pressing in at the edges of her sight.
Footsteps. Heavy, running footsteps. The door to the balcony crashed open, and then Joker is there, his face appearing above hers, his eyes wide in a way she had never seen them. His mouth was moving. He is saying something, shouting something, but the words were distant, muffled, like sounds heard through water.
Joker's hands were pressing against her chest, against the wound, against the blood that was soaking through her clothes and pooling beneath her on the stone. His face was very close now, and she could see something in his expression that she had never seen before. Fear. Not for himself. For her.
She wanted to tell him something. She wanted to say that she understood now, that she understood what he had been trying to teach her, that the penance had been wrong and her silence had been wrong and she had known it all along and done nothing. She wanted to say that she was sorry. She wanted to say that she had seen the girl's face before she fell, had seen the girl she had been before the world made her into a weapon, and that she, Tracy, had been the one to make her fall.
She wanted to say so many things.
Her mouth opened. Blood bubbled on her lips. The stars were going out, one by one, and the cold is everywhere now, and the last thing she saw was Joker's face, his mouth forming her name over and over, his hands pressing down on her chest.
Then…