The world around them vanished as she immediately retreated into herself, shooting down through her being into that place where the glowing figure stood; all the while she had delved just as viciously into him as he had done to her.
On the surface, they would simply be standing with inky blackness spreading from around their eyes, mirroring each other, but internally, the fight had taken a more primal form.
Her consciousness guarded the door, stretching out into him in order to dig her way cruelly through the layers of protection. She found his centre, but there was no protection there, no consciousness keeping his soul safe.
She did not understand that. Even as she felt his consciousness coming to form ahead of her own, she was barred from getting in.
'How?' he thought, not understanding how she could be there and inside him at the same time.
"Haven't a clue. But it is your last mistake," she whispered, her tendrils reaching for his soul, curling around it.
The connection snapped, and they both screamed as their minds rebounded violently into their own forms.
Clutching her head, the world shuddered into focus, everything tinted a horrible black.
Cain recovered first, taking one look at the both of them and then leaping off the side of the balcony and vanishing.
"Where?" Epharis hissed, looking down, but the man had disappeared into nothing.
She could not speak, or she might vomit. Her fingers pressed into her forehead and she sat on the ground with her head between her knees.
She had gotten a taste of his soul and she found herself craving more, desperately hungry.
Shaking her head to clear the thoughts, she looked up to Epharis as he approached her, "I'm sorry, I had to stop it."
Squinting, she tried to process what he said but her mind did not want to put the words into a meaningful sentence.
"Need to sleep…" she said, her own voice sounding weird in her ears.
He helped her to her feet, and she clutched at him to keep from falling over as they walked to her bedroom.
Crawling into bed, she did not care that she was bloody. When he turned to leave, she grabbed at him, pulling him back.
"Stay," she half-demanded, and sighed when she felt him settle down beside her.
Catching his arm, she pulled it tightly around herself, and fell asleep with the musky smell of him filling her senses.
***
When she woke, it was to a sharp mental jab, and she sat bolt upright.
"Ava!" she cried, trying to figure out where she was.
Turning, she saw she had been asleep on Epharis' chest, the man was still awake and watching her.
"Where's Ava?" she demanded of him and he could only give her a confused look.
"What's Ava?" he asked, sitting up.
"What? Ava, Ava!" she twitched violently as another jab struck at her brain and her eyes went wide in realisation.
Staring at the lich, she felt the sense of terror and urgency. "He's got my sister!"
Throwing herself out of the bed, she ignored the shaking of her vision as she stripped out of her bloody clothes and stumbled into her usual hunting attire, ignoring the gaping lich behind her.
He was quick enough to catch the clothing she threw at him, though, finally getting up and dressing himself.
"Where… Where is Ava? Tell me where!" she called, knowing full well Epharis had no idea what was going on. She had to reach her baby sister.
An image fluttered into her mind and she paused, mid-reach for her belt as she recognised it.
Placing it in her mind, she flicked through places she had been over the last fifty years, shuffling through them as though they were a deck of cards in her hands.
Stopping, she examined one and then nodded, pulling on her belt and then turning on the lich.
She needed him, but this was an enormous part of herself. Part of her life that she did not want him to know about, and she bit her lip, weighing the pros and cons of revealing it to him.
"Screw it," she hissed and grabbed his hand. Passing through the room, she collected whatever weapons she could find and glared at him. "If you tell a single soul about anything you are about to see, I will kill you myself, be damned the consequences," she snarled, fear making her sound almost rabid.
He looked baffled and angry at her words, but he still nodded.
Eyes narrowed, she glared at him for a moment longer. "Stay here." And then she used her small, sharp canine to bite the tip of her little finger.
She drew a line in the air and her blood hung there, lingering. When she had finished, she reached out for it and pressed against the right side.
The blood stretched, the air warped, and she slipped through the opening, vanishing from that reality into the land of Faerie. She had cut a hole in reality.
Turning on the doorway, she pulled it shut and then opened it again, just enough that she was able to stick her hand through, her mind focused hard on where she wanted that hand to go.
Feeling the grass, she found the hilt of the sword and yanked it through, tugging the door shut fast.
Looking at it, she was surprised to see it had begun to give off an evil grey-green smoke.
Not caring, she opened the door and stuck her hand through once more; this time her fingers closed on the fabric of someone's chest. Curling in the fabric, she yanked the lich through.
He stumbled in and looked around, not entirely sure what he was doing.
"Welcome to Faerie," she snapped, thrusting the hilt of the sword at him.
"How?" he gasped, and she looked at him, her eyebrows shooting up.
The man looked so completely different; she did not even know where to start.
The gauntness had faded to make him look more human, and he sucked in great heaving breaths as though he had not taken a breath in an eternity.
"We all have a way to get back here if we need to," she said evasively. "You are going to see things here, Epharis. The world is not the same here and we need to move quickly. Ava, or Avadari, is my youngest sister. She is in trouble and she is looking after my twin Letari. Cain went after them, I don't know why he is going now, but we have to get to them now."
Epharis hesitated for only a moment before he nodded. "Let's go," he said quickly.
She grabbed his hand and pulled him through the trees. The trees there were massive, some of their trunks larger than the castle they had just left, and they swayed in the breeze, the bright green leaves whispering gently.
"Don't listen to the trees, they will try to ensnare you," she said, already hearing the whispers and soft feminine giggling.
Dryads lived in the woods and rumour had already spread that there was a man nearby. They had come out to try to get their little fingers into him. It was not hard to understand, given dryads were always female, so they needed men of other species to help them reproduce.
Tugging him along behind her even as he slowed, she knew the promised whispers were getting to him.
"Epharis, come on. Oh shoo! Be gone tree witch!" she snapped at the woods.
The response was one of deep offense, and the whispers stopped. It was a slur, but it usually worked to get the prissy creatures to go away, at least for a little while.
Breaking into a run as they neared the edge of the woods, she threw a glance in the direction she had come to know so very well but then stopped when Epharis stopped.
"Epharis please..."
"Just one moment, I need to…" he trailed off as he saw what someone of his species would only ever be able to dream about.
***
The landscape was so weirdly flat that it looked like a poorly done painting. But one could see where the courts collided.
Winter with its low, silvery clouds fading out before coming to a sharp and sudden stop, butting heads against a clear sky and warm sun with the shifting colours that looked remarkably like a soap bubble. It was a bizarre, disturbing sight.
Turning, he looked directly away from the join between the two.
Behind them, in the distance, sat the spiral City of Ceress, looking very much like a shell she had been given once at a coastal city. It started wide at the bottom, and then slowly spiralled up into a cone, the top of the point housing the palace in which her greatest enemy lived, plotting her death.
"What is that?" Epharis said slowly. The city was surrounded by a thick forest.
"Ceress," she said warily.
"Why is it here?"
"Winter and Summer aren't the only Courts, Epharis," she said slowly.
His eyes first found hers, then the joining point of the four sides of the weather. The icy cold of Winter, the warm golden green of Summer, the deep, murky purple of Spring, and the incredible vibrant blue of Autumn. Four.
"Four…" he said slowly, staring up at the sky.
To look at, it was clear what the original four had been: Winter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn. But something along the line had changed, spring and autumn becoming corrupted. So, while the skies matched up, the people no longer did.
"I told you, you would see things," she said, meeting his blank stare when he turned back to her.
"You're from one of the two hidden courts?" When she nodded, he swore slowly.
"We can talk about this later; we have to go."
She froze when a horn went off. She grabbed his arm, pulling him into a dead sprint.
"Damn, the hunt! Go!" she yelled as they ran. The two Courts had sensed an intruder and had come to deal with it. They were not kind to species who should not be in Faerie, regardless of which side of the coin they came from. It was the only time Winter and Summer worked together in harmony.
After a good ten minutes of running as fast as they were able, she skidded to a stop and turned, looking around to try to find the right place, panting hard.
"This way..." she said and pulled him several more steps towards the city of Ceress. Stopping again, she looked up at him and smiled faintly. "This part is going to be uncomfortable for you," she said and bit into her finger, drawing the line and shoving him through unceremoniously. Turning to see two packs of wild dogs pelting towards her, she grinned and slipped through the slit in reality, then stepped out into pelting rain.
The lich was retching hard on the muddy ground, his hands on his knees, and head bowed.
"Yeah... going there is good, but the sudden withdrawal of magic is hard. That is why most of them won't ever leave, it's too painful to lose that connection."
Giving him exactly two minutes to recover himself, she then pulled him along behind her without so much as a word.
Trudging through the wet foliage, they came across a small town that looked a little worse for wear. A scattering of houses sat along a single muddy street filled with pigs and a free-roaming cow.
She scanned the street, but it was empty, at least at first glance. Something moved and her face split into a huge grin as a small, entirely black cat with enormous green eyes came pelting towards her.
Her arms stretched out automatically and she caught the little bundle of fur, hugging it tightly to her chest and then turning to Epharis. With her hands curled under the little cat's shoulders, she held it out.
"This is Lee. Letari."
Epharis looked down at the soaked cat with an expression that made it clear he thought she had lost her mind. The cat hissed at him.
"Letari is a shapeshifter," she explained. The cat gave her a pathetic little mewl.
Hugging the cat to her chest, she looked around in the hopes of seeing another cat, but no luck.
"Where's Ava?" she asked. The cat hissed angrily.
The cat lifted a paw and pointed down the street and back out.
Epharis blinked spastically, trying to process the fact that the cat had responded to her question and then pointed the direction out to them.
"Things are rarely ever what they appear to be on the surface," she said in a manner of comfort to the man, heading down the street.
The rain kept everyone inside, which she was glad of, because she did not need the village to see what was happening.
Following the direction the cat had pointed out, the two-headed back into the woods. After ten minutes, they found a large cave entrance in a small outcropping of stone.
Handing the cat off to Epharis, neither of whom seemed to be happy about that choice, she told them to wait. Then she headed inside.
The cave was warm, well-lit, and filled with various items she recognised as belonging to one sister or the other. What she did not see was her sister. Turning slowly, she studied the room carefully.
"Did not take you long to get here," Cain said, stepping out from the darkened space at the back of the cave that she assumed was where the two women slept.
Avadari was held tight to his chest, a large red circle of blood forming at her abdomen.
She looked terrified and all the more beautiful for it. She had snow-white skin and waist-length silver-white hair. Her eyes were a pale violet that was fairly common for their species. With her long. pointed ears and delicate face, she looked like an fairy. She wore a silvery dress embroidered with white and pale pink flowers.
Small hands clutched her abdomen, and silver tears stained her cheeks.
"Etani..." she whimpered, her sweet voice sounding devastated. "You shouldn't have come."
"I had to..." Etani replied, searching the beautiful face of her baby sister.
The wound was not that bad, she would heal quickly, but she knew Cain would not have trouble killing her. Ava did not have the strength or the willpower to harm anything, even to save her own life.
Outside, a scuffle sounded, and Epharis grunted at the sound of flesh hitting wet flesh.
Turning slightly, Etani saw Letari hurrying into the cave, followed by a scowling, confused Epharis.
"She changed… Right in my arms…" he was saying to himself, evidently shell-shocked.
Letari was her own mirror image with the only difference being that she was slightly smaller, slightly softer and her large eyes were a deep green. Her hair had been cut short at some point, now coming just to her shoulders.
"Fleas," Letari said with a huge grin on her face in response to Etani's eyes on her hair, as though that were the best thing in the world.
Epharis looked between the three women, studying their faces and making silent comparisons.
"Family reunion. How charming," Cain said, clearly annoyed at being ignored.
Etani reached for her twin and pulled her close, protective of her damaged sister.
Letari happily burrowed into her chest, content to be back with her twin where she belonged.
"If you harm them, I'll destroy you..." Etani warned, unable to decide how best to handle the situation before them.
"Empty threat when I have this one," he sneered, his arm wrapped tight around Avadari's middle.
"You would kill a pureblood just to get to us?" she retorted, and Cain's sneer slipped just a little.
Ava always had the protection of her blood status before, but now it seemed that the loss of such a brilliant, perfect representation of their species was a price Cain was willing to pay in order to remove the embarrassment of the mongrel twins.
"Collateral," he snapped.
Shaking her head slightly, she released her twin, hating the loss of the contact she had missed for all those years. She needed to be able to move freely.
"How about you and I go outside and discuss the matter?" she asked, trying to think.
"How about you come over here and die, then I'll let her go?" he retorted.
Letari gave a low whine, and Epharis moved forward to catch her shoulders, drawing her back. She did not try to fight him, instead, she merely stared at her twin, ignoring everything else but the sight of her sister.
"Only if you promise to let her go," she replied, and Cain looked shocked.
He gave a slow nod, and Etani moved forward, ignoring the whimpering that came from behind her.
Coming to a stop before him, he watched her as he released Ava.
Ava started forward, her eyes wet with tears.
He moved in an instant, the sword withdrawing and then driving forward, but it was not aimed at Etani as she expected; instead the sword drove through the slender, delicate form of Ava and protruded from her chest.
Her mind went blank as she saw Ava's back arching, her scream of pain joined by Letari's terror, and Epharis's shout of disgust.
Withdrawing the blade, Etani saw her sister fall, their eyes meeting as the life left her, snuffed out in an instant as Orenmir devoured her soul.
She felt her own life ending with the quiet thump of her sister's corpse hitting the stone floor.