The rose hair girl’s hair was red and gray and white. bits and pieces that had been inside the man's skull a moment ago, now decorating her perfect porcelain skin like grotesque freckles. A chunk of something was caught in her hair near her temple, glistening wetly in the flower's golden glow.

  The flower was still floating above her head. Still spinning slowly. Still shining like nothing had happened. Her golden eyes found him. She was breathing hard and her arms shook.

  "I—" Ivan's voice cracked. He tried again. "I think you got him."

  She blinked. Looked down at the rock in her hand. Looked at the body pinning Ivan to the ground. Looked at her own hands, at the blood and the bits of brain matter stuck to her fingers, and something shifted in her expression. The killing focus drained away, replaced by something younger and more fragile.

  "Oh," she said. Her voice was soft. Hoarse from being choked. "Oh, I-I didn't mean to—"

  "Could you maybe… help me? With the dead guy? On top of me?"

  She dropped the rock. It clattered against the floor, and she moved forward, grabbing the man's shoulder and helped push the dead man off. The body rolled to the side, and Ivan could finally breathe, and could finally see the full extent of the damage.

  Ivan rolled onto his side and puked what little he had left in his stomach.

  “...Jesus, you really fucked him up.” She had obliterated the back of his head and one of his eyes had popped out of its socket from the impact. It was hanging by something wet and stringy against his cheek.

  The girl stood over him, her bloody hands hanging at her sides. The flower drifted down from above, settling gently into her hair like it belonged there, its golden light catching the gore on her face and making it glisten.

  “Who’s Jesus?” She asked.

  Ivan spat. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at the beautiful, blood-spattered girl with the sacred flower in her hair.

  The dead bastard was heavy and the hole in his head painted a dark smear along the alley floor. "We should—" He stopped. Breathed. Adjusted his grip on the man's boots because his fingers were slipping. "We should probably hide this guy somewhere."

  "No," she said.

  "No?"

  "I will not hide him." She said, "he attacked me. I defended myself. There is nothing to conceal."

  The dead man's left boot came off in his hand… he stumbled back, holding the boot, staring at it, then at the girl, then at the trail of brain matter and blood they'd left across the alley.

  "Lady, we just—you just—there's a guy missing the back of his head and we're dragging him through an alley. I don't know how crime works in this world, but where I'm from, this is the part where you get a lawyer."

  "A what?"

  "Forget it." He tossed the boot onto the corpse's chest and grabbed his ankle instead. "Why the hell are we dragging him, then? If we're not hiding him?"

  "Someone will find him. They will see what he was… a man of violence in a place of violence. No one will ask questions."

  Ivan looked at the body. Then at the alley. Looked at the girl, who was wiping her hands on the front of her already-ruined dress.

  "Okay… if you say so." He wiped his own hands on his coat. The coat was already wrecked from the alley floor and the dead man's leaking skull, so it didn't matter much.

  The girl turned to face him fully, and in the thin light filtering down between the buildings, Ivan got his first real look at her without a fist in his face or a corpse between them.

  She was one of the most beautiful girls Ivan had ever seen. Even covered in a dead man's skull fragments. Maybe especially covered in a dead man's skull fragments, because that meant his brain was fucked up from trau—

  No. She was just that pretty. The kind of pretty that made idiots do idiotic things.

  "My name is Rory," the girl said. She dipped her chin… a small, precise bow that looked practiced. "Rory Quin. I owe you a debt for your intervention, though I regret the... outcome… it was not what either of us intended."

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "Ivan." He didn't bow. He was pretty sure if he bent at the waist right now, something in his insides would rupture. "Ivan Tepes. And uh, for the record, I didn't really intervene so much as I got kicked a bunch while you did all the actual work."

  "You placed yourself between me and danger," she said. "That is not nothing."

  "What were you doing down here?" he asked. "This doesn't exactly seem like your type of neighborhood."

  "Someone stole something from me," she said. "Something I need… something far more important than money."

  "Okay." Ivan waited. But she didn't continue. "And what about the dead guy?"

  "I hired him to help me find the thief… he was supposed to be a man with connections."

  "And when you couldn't pay—"

  "I told him I would pay when I recovered what was stolen." Her hands curled at her sides, "He decided there were other ways I could settle the debt."

  Ivan's stomach turned over again, and this time it had nothing to do with the corpse. "Right," he said. His voice came out harder than he expected. "What did they end up stealing?"

  Rory looked at him for a long time.

  "I need it to become a Pendragon," she said.

  "A Pendragon," he said, keeping his voice low as they passed a row of shuttered windows. "You're trying to become a Pendragon."

  "I am a candidate." Rory walked beside him with her arms crossed over her chest, hugging herself. "One of several. But without what was taken from me, I cannot complete the inscription. I cannot bond with my spirit."

  "Your spirit…"

  "The Great Beast of Fire… Ifrit. I have carried his inscription since I was a child, but the inscription is incomplete. The spiritual nature was stored in a small red stone, no larger than a thumbnail."

  "Someone stole your rock," he said.

  "Someone stole the spiritual nature of a Great Spirit," Rory corrected. There was an edge to her voice.

  "It does not matter." She uncrossed her arms and tucked a strand of rose-colored hair behind her ear. The flower shifted with the motion, its glow steady now, warm against her temple. "What matters is that I find the stone. I hired that man because I was desperate, and I—"

  Her voice cracked. Just a small fracture, barely audible, but Ivan caught it.

  "I made a mistake," she finished.

  They walked in silence. The flower in Rory's hair glowed softly. The flower that had led him here. The flower that was sacred to the Obafemi bloodline, and would bare light when in the presence of an heir.

  It had floated through a crowded market. Past hundreds of people. Down an alley and into the slums. And it had settled in hair.

  "The flower," Ivan said.

  "It appeared during... during what happened. I assumed it was yours."

  "It was. Sort of. It's—" How did you explain a magic flower that a blind girl with liquefying eyes had given you after delivering a prophecy about the end of days? "—it's complicated. But it chose you."

  "Chose me?"

  "It's called a Morningstar Orchid. It glows when it's near an heir of Obafemi." Ivan watched her face as he said it. "It's glowing right now."

  Rory's hand went back to the flower. Her gold eyes were wide… she didn't say anything for a long time.

  "I'll help you find it," Ivan said.

  The words came out before the thought finished forming, which was typical, which was the Ivan Tepes special… mouth operating at full speed while the brain was stuck on the damn loading screen. Rory was looking at him with those gold eyes. "The stone," he clarified, because she was still staring. "Ifrit's spiritual nature. Whatever. I'll help you get it back."

  "Why would you do that?"

  Good question. Great question, actually. Ivan's brain offered several answers simultaneously:

  "Because that flower led me to you," he said. "And because you need somebody to help you, and I'm here, and… look, I know that sounds like the start of a badly written romance novel, but I don't have a better answer. I just… I want to help."

  Rory studied him. Her arms were crossed again, Ivan could see the marks on her throat where the man's fingers had squeezed.

  "You have no magic that I can see."

  "Also yeah."

  "You were beaten badly by a single man, and without my intervention, you would likely be dead."

  "Thank you for the recap."

  The corner of her mouth moved again. It was almost a smile,.

  "Very well," she said. "I accept your help, Ivan Tepes. Though I cannot promise you payment, or safety, or any reward beyond my gratitude."

  "Lady, I woke up yesterday in a bathtub full of my own blood. I’ll take all the gratitude I can get."

  She blinked. "You... woke up in a bathtub?"

  "Long story."

  "In your own blood?"

  "Longer story."

  The streets widened as they moved away from the slums, and the smell shifted from rot and piss to woodsmoke and bread, and Ivan's stomach growled so loud that Rory glanced at him sideways.

  He ignored it. He had bigger problems than hunger, though his body disagreed with that assessment on every possible level.

  He'd volunteered… like an absolute idiot, like a guy who walks into a boss fight at level one because he saw some youtuber do it, to help a girl he'd known for fifteen minutes.

  Rory was connected to a Great Beast. She was, if the flower was to be believed, some kind of heir to something important. And she was alone, and desperate, and she'd just accepted help from a stranger with no questions about his motives beyond a single "why."

  If he actually managed to find this stone and get it back for her… he'd have an ally. Someone who might be able to explain what the hell a Pendragon actually was, and why the pen on his shoulder had inscribed that word on his status screen, and what any of this meant for his chances of surviving longer than a week.

  Helping Rory wasn't just charity. It was strategy.

  the voice in his head said. It sounded like his own voice, which made it worse.

  He didn't argue with it. Couldn't. The thought sat there, weighting a ton, and he carried it the way he carried the bruises… silently, and with gritted teeth.

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