Josephine limped into the smoking realm like a candle dragged through wind — flame ragged, gait unsteady, every step leaving a tiny trail of soot on the cracked stone. The air tasted of iron and old grief; embers whispered across the ground and the trees — if they could be called trees — were skeletal fingers that scraped the bruised sky. Smoke clung to her hair and the hem of the yellow dress she'd stolen from happier mornings. Her breaths came shallow and quick; each inhalation scraped her throat raw.
She fell.
The world folded beneath her and something hot and metallic surged in her mouth. She coughed blood, a thin, crimson line that stained her fingers. Elandra's great wing shadowed her, and before her knees could find the earth a firm grip, the dragon's warm, leathery arm scooped her up. Elandra carried her as if she weighed nothing at all.
"Who are you?" a voice, colder than the smoke itself, asked from the darkness.
An Umbral Seraph stepped forward, tall and impossible. Its form shifted between shadow and bone; wings like tattered banners unfurled into the space and scraped the edges of reality. Its face was a blur of intents, its eyes two coals of reproach.
Josephine waved at him weakly, the motion more stubborn than graceful. She tasted iron on her tongue and hunger beneath the hurt. Her hand trembled as she hung the bag on Elandra's flank; the leather strap scraped, rasping through the silence.
"I see you managed to pass the others," the Umbral Seraph intoned, voice as smooth as old knives. "But child—child, you cannot pass me. Many have tried their luck… but they unfortunately passed on." He gestured with one charred finger; skeletons littered the ground — the remains of those who failed — and the air hummed with their last, frozen screams.
"Tf!" Theron's curse cut through the realm like a thrown dagger. It was small, sharp, and full of worry.
"WHAT is the challenge now?" Queen Olydia's voice asked, tight with motherly dread that braided with royal composure.
The Umbral Seraph's smile — if it could be called such — widened. "You see, child," he said, voice slipping into the soft honey of a lie, "you will have to kill me while fighting your traumas… your pains. Are you ready, child?"
Josephine nodded. The nod was tiny and brave and almost… defiant. She looped her bag over Elandra one-handed and bit into the second half of the apple she'd kept. The apple tasted like heat and memory; she chewed with the careful hunger of someone who'd learned to ration comfort.
The Umbral Seraph's eyes flicked to the fruit. "Finish it," he said.
She did.
Inside her mind, small, insistent thoughts crawled out like mice. I need food, nana. If I get out, I hope there will be a lot of food. She tasted bread and cinnamon at the thought — memories of the bakery, of a woman with tired hands and warm eyes. Xavi and Kara, somehow, heard those scraps of private longing. Xavi's jaw tightened; his voice carried, a command that cut through the realm and into servants far away.
"Make the biggest meals. Clean the room. Put all the food — now!" King Xavi ordered, and maids in a castle miles away moved like clockwork toward a promise they didn't yet understand.
"JOJO!!!" Adris's tiny shout bubbled from somewhere behind; his palms clapped, small fists of faith.
"Begin!" the Umbral Seraph said, and the realm waited for the inevitable.
Josephine took from her bag the knife Tess had pressed into her hand — not ornate, but true. The metal bit cold against her palm. As the Umbral Seraph launched himself, all grandeur and nightfall, she ran. She ran not like a queen but like a child who had once run for bread. She moved with brittle grace: a backflip that scattered ash, a kick that met hollow ribs, the blade finding tendons she couldn't name.
"How dare you!" the Umbral Seraph screamed when the knife found his neck. His voice cracked the trees, and his shadowed form lurched. He tried to snatch her; his reach was the length of unhappiness. But Josephine had learned to be fast in alleys, fast in hearts, fast in survival. She saw, suddenly and violently, the cinema of her childhood.
She watched herself as a smaller girl on a cold street before Nana opened the bakery that day when Nana was sick. She saw the tiny hands knocking on closed doors, asking for coins. She remembered the weight of judgement when the townsfolk turned away. She tasted the bitter medicine money bought, and the shame that sat like a stone in her chest. Her mind flickered: Ceillie at the corner, calling for her; Sophina's slow, patient eyes straining with worry; names thrown like stones. The traumas came at her in a flock — loss, hunger, cruelty, abandonment — each one a wingbeat that could have overshadowed her.
"Oh no…" Ceillie's whisper echoed, as if present in that smoke-choked place.
People called her names and she held her head and screamed silently when the sounds crashed into her. "Oh shit!" Piere blurted, feeling the rawness of memory like a physical thing.
She felt rage like fuel then. Rage is a dangerous heat; it cooks, it purifies, it burns away what is weak. In the memory, family dinners sat like untouched islands: laughter she had not been offered; warmth that had not reached her hands. Tears forced their way out, blind and bitter, and she clasped Ceillie's hand as if they were tethered to life.
"Jojo…" Tess said, voice a thread of fear and adoration. The Umbral Seraph's voice became a chorus that tried to name, to hurt, to shatter.
"You will be a big destruction! YOU WILL WIPE EVERYTHING OUT! YOU ARE A DISASTER — THE QUEEN OF DEATH!" His laugh was a blade. "YOU ARE QUEEN JOSEPHINE! EVERYONE YOU LOVE WILL LEAVE YOU! YOUR HUSBAND, YOUR FAMILY — THEY WILL ALL LEAVE YOU!!!"
The noise in her head became a hurricane. Names and accusations, futures prodded like wounds. She could have crumpled. She could have let the Seraph fold her into a small, silent shape.
Instead, she breathed in. The air was harsh. King Xavi's thought reached her — not an order, this time, but a single, three-word command: Kill him. It was not cruelty; it was recognition of the danger.
Her fingers tightened on Tess's knife. The seraph folded into front of her, wings bright as accusation. Josephine smirked — the sort of expression she'd learned from scraping herself together out of broken things. She grabbed the seraph's wings like ropes and drove the blade into the hollow where an eye might have been. Black and purple blood — not human blood, something of night and rue — spattered across her face.
"AHHHHHH!!" the Umbral Seraph's agony rose like a chorus of snapped strings. She did not stop. She stabbed and stabbed, not in rage but cemented with purpose — each puncture a promise to the child that had knocked on doors for medicine, to the woman who had washed others' sorrow, to the friend who had held out a hand. Finally, with a practiced twist full of both terror and precision, she wrenched his head free. It spun, a dull crown of shadow, then tumbled from her fingers.
She kicked the body until it lay still. Purple-black blood seeped down her forearms and streaked the yellow of her dress. Her boots were heavy with it. She walked to the weapons — because a warrior takes no chances — and slid a whip into her bag, the leather whispering like a serpent. Her fingers closed around the Nightmare Sovereign; as she held it, her eyes flashed black for a heartbeat. She slid that in as well, everything needed to survive the rest of a life she might yet refuse to lose.
Elandra roared holy fury; Aradia — who had been carrying Josephine earlier — caught the dragon's sound and raced toward the exit of the dark forest, carrying Josephine as if she were the most fragile, most essential thing in the world.
"She's out!" Hendrick's shout was immediate and monstrous with relief.
Xavi's eyes glowed with something dark as well — a readiness that made the air shiver. He moved with a speed that had nothing to do with the world's clock; his movement tore a line through the realm. Xoni gasped — "Woah!" — and the scene around the exit blurred into a portrait of exhaustion and rescue.
She stumbled when they reached the clearing, but Xavi was there. He caught her as she nearly fell again, his hands steady and warm and absurdly tender after everything she had been through. Elandra gave a final, thunderous roar that seemed to push the last hanging smoke away.
"Welcome, Ms. Josephine," Xavi said, his tone equal parts relief, command, and something quieter that made the words a salve.
She smiled once, a fragile curve, and then passed out.
They carried her back to the castle — a procession of worry and relief. Someone dropped her bag by the water trough and Xavi set it aside, whispering, "Take it from here, Ms. Ceillie." Sophina and Ceillie moved like rituals; they bathed her, warm water running over the black-stained skin, cleansing the purple sheen of unnatural blood from her arms. The wounds were raw; the bandages soaked where they needed to be soaked. Kara carried the bag inside and began inscribing symbols with a hand that trembled more than she let show.
"Elandra!" Kara cried, throwing her arms around the dragon who had perched in the courtyard. Elandra responded with a careful lick that left the girl smeared with soot and dragon-warm affection.
"We're done bathing her," Ceillie announced. "Put her in my room."
Xavi's face shifted at that — a softening that belonged to family. "Your room?" Queen Olydia asked, surprised that Xavi would allow anyone into the sovereign's private chambers.
"Yes," Xavi said, mild, carrying Adris in his arms. "Is there a problem?"
Olydia opened her mouth, then closed it. There was something she could not name in the king's pale eyes that made her bow to the logic of his decision.
They carried Josephine into his room. Ceillie and Sophina laid her gently across the bed; Xavi set Adris on the blanket beside her and spread his oxblood cloak over them both with the careful ceremony of a guardian. He sat by the bedside, eyes hollow with a sleepless guard, watching the slow rise and fall of two chests — baby and woman — who had been through a tiny apocalypse together.
"Jojo, love…" Ceillie murmured, fingers stroking the ruined hair that still smelled faintly of smoke. Xavi watched, and in his gaze there was both the weight of a ruler and the tenderness of a man who had loved through war and loss and somehow learned to make room for other people's pain.
While the household tended to warmth, Kara went to the weapons. She gathered each blade, each relic: The Nightmare Sovereign (now bagged), the whip, the old iron dagger from Tess, and others that hummed with history. She arranged them in a ring, the air around her tight with incantation. Ancient runes burned at her fingertips; she spoke words older than the castle's stones. The weapons answered with low, hungry murmurs, and Kara's chant laced each with protection and purpose. The circle closed around them like a promise.
Outside, the moon watched. Inside, a dragon slept folded like a sleeping ship, and in the king's room, Josephine breathed and dreamt. The realm beyond the castle still held its dark roads and cruel curiosities, but for a single night there was a small, fierce island of warmth: a bed, a blanket, a child's breath, and a woman who had carved a path through shadow and blood and returned.
Kara's chant ended in a soft exhale. The weapons pulsed, steady and obedient. The castle settled, and for the first time in many nights, Xavi's shoulders relaxed, just a little.