There was silence.
Then: "Come now, warriors. You must prepare. She is almost upon you," Muiress declared. Tarin turned to glance at her and noticed that even she looked more than just disheartened as the last spark from the Portal was extinguished.
"Tarin, I must go. Iliss must not know of my kingdom playing any part in all of this, or she will come after us as well. I ask this not out of a desire for self-preservation, but out of a love for my people, and for Serena. I have things I must teach her, and I have a role to play in this war yet."
With this last, Queen Muiress leaned in and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. He was still so distracted by everything that had just occurred that he did not notice her hands moving around to his back until he heard the metallic sound of his cross swords sliding back into their sheaths. He had forgotten he had left them lying at his princess' feet.
"My gift to you," Muiress whispered to him in a conspiratorial tone. In a moment of bright spirits, she winked at him. Then the lake behind her made a noise that sounded an awful lot like a sigh, and she walked towards it without hesitation.
"This is not the last you will see of me, Warrior of the Moon."
Tarin looked away before the waters rose up to welcome her back into her kingdom. He could not bear the thought of losing another queen, even if he knew they were not all necessarily gone for good. Knew, not hoped, because he would not allow a sliver of doubt into his mind that Serena would indeed return, the moment it was safe for her to do so.
The shore of Lake Muiress was a whole lot quieter than it had been just minutes ago, but that only allowed for Tarin to detect the sounds of the approaching Infernal company. Striding toward the edge of the forest where he assumed they would make their appearance, he drew his swords and twirled them around experimentally. They did not look or feel any different, and yet Muiress had called them a gift. Frowning, he tightened his grip on their handles and gestured for Vice and Birches to stand on either side of him, Dallin and the other twin behind their respective fighting partners.
"It is almost noon," Vex declared, her sing-song voice cutting through the tension in the atmosphere in an almost unnatural fashion.
"It feels like dusk," Birches responded gruffly. He wiped the back of his arm across his eyes briefly, clearly trying to pass the movement off as an itch. He grabbed his bow off of his back and notched an arrow, aiming it into the shadows of the forest.
"Dusk has fallen," Tarin said matter-of-factly. He could not afford to display emotion now. He had to set an example to his remaining Wolves. He had to survive this. He had to ensure that dusk rose again.
In the wake of his statement, their view of Lymeryth was consumed by darkness. A shade came down over the trees. The spaces between the trunks were filled up with blackness. And that blackness was moving - the darkness was coming for them. He had been here before.
He lifted his swords, and as if in response, Iliss strode from the trees. If she was surprised to see him prepared to fight her rather than falling to his knees due to being tied down in a blood oath, she did not show it - in fact, she was smiling. Her eyes scanned the area briefly as the rest of the Infernals poured out of the forest, and he suspected that she was searching for the princess.
"She's dead, you traitor," he spat through his teeth, forcing his voice to crack on the word 'dead.' It was not hard to put on this act; after all, he had just lost her again, and had no idea when he would be able to see her again. The last time she had gone into the human world, he had been forced to live without her for eleven years.
Though she had seemed supremely unconcerned before, this declaration caused Iliss' eyes to snap back to his face in a hurry. "What do you mean, she's dead?" she demanded. Just hearing her voice caused a tremor to run through Tarin's body. He wanted to run his swords through her body. He wanted to see her suffer. He wanted to see her bleed for what she had done.
"I mean, she had managed to break free of your curse early this morning in the castle with me, but your little sidekick came in and created a confrontation that riled her up," Tarin explained, keeping his voice icy and dangerously low as he executed Muiress' plan. "Her magic let loose, and the castle started coming down around us. I did all I could to prevent her from being hit, but I couldn't stop her magic from flaring out. It killed her from the inside."
Though part of his story was false, even just imagining it caused him enough pain and fury to channel his magic down the lengths of his swords. They lit up with a bright energy, and, seeing his opportunity as Iliss stood in shock at his words, he stormed forward, intent on ending her.
He heard his Wolves engage in fights of their own behind him, and he simply dodged all of the Infernals who ran for him, too focused on his path to bother wasting his time on them. They did not matter.
Iliss snapped out of her daze and just smiled wider as he approached. He swung his swords in a move that would have split her in half if she had not suddenly evaporated, leaving nothing but a few specks of sparkling silver dust in her wake. She reappeared behind more of her Infernals, who stormed toward Tarin so abruptly that he was sure she had given them an order he had failed to hear. He lifted his swords once more, only to drop them in shock when the Infernals parted around him, veering off to either side in order to get to the twins who lingered nearby, who both accepted the unbalanced fighting ratio with their usual fervor.
"You think that by killing me, all of this chaos will end," Iliss stated abruptly, as if reading his thoughts. "That all of these Infernals, as you call them, are inconsequential pawns serving under their queen."
"Of course I think that," he hissed, running at her once more. He grunted in increasing frustration as she simply poofed out of existence again. He had no idea how advanced her magic might be; she had never displayed it much during her time at the castle, but clearly, there was a lot about herself she had kept hidden. It was highly possible that she was secretly a master magician: she was Agros' daughter, after all, though her mother Grytza's abilities remained a mystery to them all. If she was a formidable sorceress as well, the Realm could be in even deeper trouble than he had expected.
She appeared behind him, and he spun, whipping his swords around with him without much technique, just in the hopes that she would be slower than him this time. He was wrong. She poofed away and sighed upon landing just a few feet farther back, out of range of his blades.
"You are wrong, Tarin," she stated, and it was only then, in that moment of hesitation, that Tarin realized they had entered the forest. He could hardly hear the sounds of the battle from the shore any longer.
"Are you trying to tell me that this company you just led here isn't under your command?" Tarin asked half-mockingly. He still held his swords at the ready, but was beginning to accept that this was probably going to end up being a magical duel. He was confident in his magical abilities, but knew that this could potentially be a tougher fight than he typically engaged in, depending on the extent of Iliss' unknown powers.
"Of course not," Iliss snorted. She still showed no signs of wanting to fight him. Normally, Tarin would take that as a sign of defeat in his opponents; somehow, however, he got the feeling that his fight with Iliss was far from over.
"I'm in charge of this company," she continued. "I'm just not the one in charge of the armies. If you really want to end this war, you will have to go for the more important players on the board." Here, she smiled again, though this one did not reach her eyes; it was bitter, and when she finished, he understood why. She had never been a fan of following another's orders.
"You called me the queen. But if that's true, then there is a king above me on the board."
"Who?" Tarin demanded. "Pevana?" He was so close, so close to the answer. Once he had it, he could kill Iliss, and then go on to kill this mysterious leader as well. The Infernals themselves had never posed much of a threat besides through sheer force of numbers; without enacting the clever strategies their leaders had spoonfed them, they would be easy to pick off.
Iliss surprised him by raising her hands in a gesture like surrender. "I will answer you if you drop your swords," she purred. Her tone made it clear that she did not expect him to follow through. However, the truth of the matter was that he did not need his swords to win a fight; he had other weapons, he had his magic, and he had his own limbs. Seeing as they had not been doing him much good anyway, he let them fall to the forest floor.
Iliss stared at them for a long, silent moment, as if entranced by the X they had happened to form upon their landing. Then she looked up, and her eyes were unclouded, her expression serious and clear. He was not sure why it was that he sensed darkness closing in around him. Perhaps it was caused by the heaviness of his young queen's crown he had in his pocket, or maybe the suns were somehow falling already after all. He suspected briefly that Iliss was using her magic on him, but upon sending out magical feelers of his own, he realized that she was not emitting a single particle of the stuff.
Their eyes met briefly, but Tarin was distracted by the swift movement she made to throw her silver hair over one shoulder: the slight turn of her head to the right, and the subsequent sharp snap to the left to whip the hair across her back. It was so familiar, the sight nudging at the walls of his memory - and now that he was up so close and truly studying it, so was her hair. He felt his eyes widen at the similarities, and his gaze flickered across Iliss' form frantically, but no - he could see her in Iliss everywhere. He could see--
"Celestine Wulf," Iliss finally answered. "Your mother, Tarin."
The screams that suddenly rose above the tree's canopy from the shore seemed more appropriate now than ever. "You're lying," he said automatically. He had not so much as heard of his mother since he was an adolescent, let alone from. She could have been dead, and he would not have even known. He would not have cared. In fact, some internal part of him had always believed that she was gone. Maybe it had just been easier to live that way.
Iliss just shook her head slowly. He was using his magic to try to catch her deceit, but that had never been a foolproof technique anyway. He would not believe it, could not. He believed he had escaped his mother for good when he came to Azure to become a warrior. To think that she had come back into his life under these circumstances... to think that she was behind everything that had caused Serena so much pain...
To think that his mother had shattered his chance at a happy life again, was unbearable.
His princess had once described to him what she remembered about the feeling of giving her magic up to Eris. She had been drowning. The current had been sucking her under, and she was surrounded by open waters with nothing for her to grab hold of. He had a similar feeling now, though he did not have the liberty of believing it to be a vision. This was real, and he was sinking, sinking into an oblivion that could result in only one of two ways. Whatever Iliss said now had the power to change everything. Nevertheless, she spoke into the open air as if her statement were perfectly light and harmless rather than a string of words which would doom his possibility for redemption:
"I would never lie to my big brother."