Fine so I'm self-promoting

Day 2, Part 0

Rigel opened her eyes to dawn, the white walls of her room throwing back rose highlights. The window flashed as she sat up. That was odd, she'd closed the curtain last night, hadn't she? Maybe she'd been too tired.

Anyway, she was the exact opposite of tired now. She'd slept better than any other time she could remember, and she wanted today to really begin. The Palace was waiting, after all. She put her jewelry back on, laced up her sneakers, and headed for the dining room, where Kauri, rainswept, and Oro already were. They were eyeing the empty table and talking.

"The question is, where is he?" rainswept asked.

"Where's who?" Rigel asked. "Mr. Breakfast?"

"Ha, no," rainswept said. "Good one, btw. We're waiting for the Prince."

"He doesn't seem to be anywhere," Oro explained. Honestly, less than a day ago I was thinking of him as Oreobin, cringe. ...Though I still don't know his real name, come to think of it, but yeah, we're ignoring that for the moment.

"- Wait, you've looked for him?" she added out loud as the meaning of Oro's words sank in. "How long have you guys been awake?"

"Since about an hour ago," Kauri said perkily. "We're early risers. And also, this palace, man. There's something about it. Oro here isn't exactly an early riser, or so he says, I mean do we trust him? probably not, but yeah."

"The Prince is sticking to you," Rigel said severely.

"If only, Rigel. If he were, we wouldn't be wondering where he was; he'd be right here with me."

"It would be some glue that would make anyone able to stick with Kauri," rainswept said gloomily. "Anyway, so we've been up for an hour, and we went over all the palace that we saw yesterday. It looks like the Prince showed us all the palace there is. And our host has abandoned us, and we're starving."

Dragonfly opened the door and walked in, then looked crestfallen as she noticed the empty table. "No breakfast?"

The explanations were gone through again. Or, at least, they had been halfway gone through when the missing host came in, looking even better than usual. Kauri broke off in the middle of "Seriously, I wish he'd show up -" I've always been very good at timing, as I'm sure you'll agree.

"Yo, guests," I said. "Hope I haven't kept you waiting." I looked behind them, and they all turned back to the table. Rigel's eyebrows rose. There, sitting politely on the table, was the long-desired breakfast.

"Cute boys, right?" Dragonfly said, just softly enough for Rigel to hear. "Even breakfast wants to be around them."

The others joined us a moment later, and we had breakfast together, bantering and looking out over a tangle of hedges and roses in one of the palace gardens. When everyone had finished, I leaned back, looking down the table. Come to think of it, where was Finior? "We're going to Sairelin," I announced. "You know, the city nearby."

"On the unicorns?" Dragonfly proposed hopefully.

"On the dragon?!?" Hawkstar exclaimed, also hopefully.

Kauri and Oro looked at each other and sighed.

"On the unicorns, on the dragon, and, for those who prefer other things, other things. Everything should be waiting outside. Ready?"

"More than," Rigel volunteered, hoping that she could ride the Pegasus she'd befriended yesterday.

We went outside, where Finior was surveying two motorcycles with distaste. "H, what are these doing here?" he asked. "Am I right that no one's riding them?"

"Kauri and Oro are," I told him. "They don't both fit on the dragon."

"But your -"

"I know, obviously. But it's all right."

Finior gave me The Look. "All right with -"

"No, all right with me. We'll talk about it later, all right?" I shook my head at him, and he subsided. I turned back to my guests. "Choose your steeds," I invited. "The Pegasi and alicorns are staying on the ground for the most part, because you practically need seat belts to stay on when they're in the air, and I don't want anything happening. The motorcycles aren't crash-prone - they pretty much drive themselves, so you should be fine."

"Though motorcycles are, in general, best avoided," Finior amended sternly.

I didn't disagree with him, because of course he was right. In more ways than one, actually. And I couldn't resist one glance back at the Palace as we chose our conveyance (and, in the case of the mythical creatures, our conveyance also chose us), even though I knew that no one would be watching.

No one ever was.

So why did I have that feeling?

And the next moment we had hit the road, the morning air lingering somewhere between warm and cool and blowing in our faces like a whirlpool. Rigel let out a shriek of happiness as her Pegasus took off from the ground in a lazy swirl of wings, evidently disagreeing with me about the seat belt thing. Oh well, no one was going to die.

I hoped...

---

We arrived at Sairelin in one piece, or, more like, thirteen pieces - the eleven guests, and Finior and me. It was the sort of city that you wanted to spend your summer in, Rigel thought, as the Pegasus glided to the ground. Picturesque, tiny, no cars, just narrow streets open to the sky and lined with sparkling white buildings and others of solid stone and stucco. People were passing back and forth, not too many, not too few, and it felt like a place with thousands of hidden places and secrets that no one was supposed to know but that you might find if you just headed in the right direction.

"Leave the conveyances, unless they want to follow us," I told them. None did follow us, though a motorcycle seemed very inclined to for a moment, and we headed properly into the city on its marble walkways. The city of the Palace.

We wandered at random for about a quarter of an hour, and then, as we walked out into an enormous plaza with a marble sculpture in the center that the perimiter of buildings reflected all the sunlight onto, I left the others for a moment. Rigel barely noticed; she just wanted to drink in this moment that was like the moment in a fantasy novel when everything was still all right, when nothing had crashed yet.

"Hey, kids," a voice said, and Rigel turned to see a middle-aged man coming towards them from across the square. He paused to greet Finior, and then focused on them. "I'm one of the Sairelin locals. You're the Prince's guests, amiright?"

Finior was busy with something else, so Hawkstar answered. "Yeah, he invited us to the Palace."

The man looked at them more closely. "But you're not actually living there?"

"Actually, we are," Crescent told him.

He raised his eyebrows. "Living there? Then you must have actually seen the Sairelin king?"

The Sairelin king? Rigel looked around the square, a chill moving through her, though she couldn't have explained why. There wasn't any Sairelin king in the Palace. But then again, no wonder the Prince was just, well, a prince. But how could someone else be living in the Palace, someone they hadn't met? "Who is he, exactly?" she asked carefully.

"So you haven't seen him either...? No one does, except maybe the Prince and Lord Finior, and rumour has it he never leaves the Palace. Not in our lifetimes, anyway. He's the Prince's father, and he's been ruling for something like fifty years. Everyone wants to know who he is, but good luck on that one." He lifted a hand to them. "I'd better be going. But tell me if you ever do see him. Enjoy the Palace."

I had heard the last few words, and I turned back a moment too late, my ready-made explanation dying as I saw the looks on their faces. He'd said too much, so so much for that. "Yeah, he exists," I admitted. "He'd rather keep to himself, so, I mean, just don't like go looking for him. But I wanted to introduce you to someone who does want to meet you."

Rigel noticed for the first time a young woman - the one I'd been talking to - coming up behind me. She was smiling, and she had straight brown hair and decided, sparkling brown eyes and features that fit together perfectly. She was gorgeous, in my opinion, and I might add that we looked very cute together. "My girlfriend, Irile," I explained.

Rigel stared at us; she hadn't really thought that there would be a couple involved with the Palace. It felt, somehow, like something she should have known about already. Dragonfly looked as if she thought we were the cutest couple on earth, and Crescent was obviously as surprised as Rigel.

"It's so great to meet you," Irile said with a little wave. "I'm spending the rest of the day with you at the Palace, so we can spend time together. It's amazing that Perid invited you."

"Perid??" Rigel asked.

"My name," I explained.

Talk about a surprising morning, Rigel thought.

I'll be the watcher of the eternal flame

Day 2, Part 1

Night had dropped over the Palace. Oro was standing in one of the halls, wondering about what secrets might be hidden away somewhere here. A king, a girlfriend... who cared. They'd just been eating pizza in the dining room, laughter the soundtrack of the evening, while the Palace chipped in with pertinent song lyrics. It was amazingly good at finding the right ones. For example, when the Prince remarked on how long it had been since Irile had visited, who asked the Palace to say companionably, "Tell her that I missed our little talks"? Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men. Was it trying to get Oro to like it? (If so, it was managing it...)

The Prince had said as they disbanded after dinner that they should meet in the Brazier Courtyard in half an hour. This was very nice; the only glitch was that Oro didn't know where the Brazier Courtyard was. "Where do I go?" he asked the Palace, but it was evidently napping and didn't want to be disturbed and therefore did as it would be done by, and didn't say anything. Which didn't help.

"Hey," Hawkstar said, coming up next to him. "Going to the Courtyard?"

"I would be if I could," Oro said, knowing that this was probably too cryptic but too focused on his thoughts to go into detail.

"Why can't you?" asked Hawkstar, who was having none of it.

"Because I can't," Oro explained, coming out of his thoughts momentarily. "I mean, I don't know where it is."

"Come on, that's easy. Prince Perid said it was just beyond the dining room. I think we can find it."

"Whoa, the alliteration," Oro said, startled completely out of his reverie. "Do you think his father knew what he was doing when he named him?"

(Actually, he did. He knew that Perfect, Positive Prince Perid of the Palace was way too good a title for me to ever want to be King Perid and ruin it.)

"Probably," Hawkstar opined. "Btw, what about the lighting in this place?"

"There's electricity in our rooms," Oro said, not quite following.

"I noticed, yeah. But here here?"

Oro looked around and realized what she was getting at. The hall was full of twilight, without either firelight or electric light. Colors were muted - Hawkstar's cloak was a softer, grayer brown than it usually was - and the end of the hall could barely seen. What if this is the only time of day when we could find the King? It feels, suddenly, as if we could... "Let's go," he said quietly.

They turned towards the dining room, simultaneously skirting the table and the shadows in the corners of the rooms, and headed out the hall at the other end. Oro realized that he'd left Hawkstar behind; looking back, he saw her silhoutted against an arched doorway. "Over here," she called softly.

He went over to join her, and they stepped outside together. Soft, evening air met them, and an expanse of stars.

"Hawkstar, Oro?" I called from the other side of the courtyard. "Great, everyone else is already here."

It was a long courtyard that didn't even quite fit the definition of courtyard; there was a broad sweep of night sky visible above, and down here there was a matching sweep of grass, edged with glimmering white columns beyond which twilight swirled. At the far end, and on either side, delicate black iron tripods held bowls in which fire shone. So that's why it's called the Brazier Courtyard, a part of Oro realized, but most of him was just busy trying to take it all in. The moment. The feeling of a safe, enchanting escape after a long summer's day. The faces around him; everyone else was, as I'd said, there, sitting on the grass, Irile sitting with me and the CBers and AEs scattered through the rest of the courtyard.

"So, what are we doing exactly?" Hawkstar asked beside him, her voice quiet and attuned to the night.

"Stargazing," Rigel said happily. "Living. Whatever; does it matter?"

No, it didn't. rainswept beckoned to them, and Oro sat down. It was strangely all right to be here, with the stars wheeling overhead and the sky still faintly dusky and the grass chilly and soft under him.

The Palace had evidently woken up, or at least this part of the Palace, because a song started to play. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a cold, difficult tune, but here, after a long sunlit day, it was just strangely harmonious on the air, blending into the gently perfect feel that lingered here.

Hadn't Rigel once said something about eternal summer? Well, here we are, he thought, his gaze sliding upwards to the constellations. When it dropped again, it landed on his friends, the people here: Irile, her head resting on my shoulder; me; Dragonfly, her arms wrapped around her legs; Kauri, holding hands with Crescent.

The song stayed for a second more on the air, and faded away. Too soon. There was a quiet silence that spoke of peace, and summer, and constellations.

"Be back in a second," Kauri said, getting up.

"Sure," Oro responded, pulling a fold of his cloak over his knees and leaning back again. These stars didn't form the same shapes as the ones back home - he'd stargazed there, and he knew - but they were equally beautiful, and the starlight and the firelight mingled to give just the right feel to the courtyard. For these few moments, the past and the future didn't seem to come into it at all; it was enough to simply be, and live, and feel. It was easy to forget things.

Kauri should have been back by now...

```````

Alive: 10 (Crescent, Dragonfly, Ouroborus, Rigel, th3mysticw0lf's 4 charries, Hawkstar, Rainswept)

Gone: 1 (Kauri)

``````

Also sorry to Kauri :^|

Day 3, Part 0 [Midnight]

Crescent found herself going back towards the library without even meaning to. She'd given up, she realized. Had she ever really believed that she was going to find Kauri? Maybe not. A part of her had known that one of them had vanished, that they were a smaller band now.

But in that case, what had happened? Finior had promised that they were safe here. And Kauri had meant to come back; she was sure of that. She shivered as she looked around the cold, night-wrapped palace. If her partner wasn't anywhere here... then what? Are any of us safe?

She entered the library. It looked different when it was full of lurking shadows and shifting, undecided moonlight, and when Kauri wasn't here with her. But somehow the CBers and AEs had decided to make it their meeting place; maybe it felt as if they wouldn't be interupted here, as if they were at least partially safe.

As Crescent entered, the others turned towards her, then looked disappointed as they noticed that she was alone. She collapsed onto one of the benches, the fact that it was midnight finally getting to her. "Kauri's gone," she said bluntly, the words heavy on her tongue. "We've been looking for hours, kids." But it seemed so strange that it had only been a few hours since everything was fine. What had happened to that feeling of happiness in the Brazier Courtyard? Argh, there were just so many questions.

"Everyone else is here, right?" Dragonfly asked, pushing a hand through her rumpled hair.

"Seriously, you guys didn't even notice that I'd disappeared too," Rigel said from behind her. "What if whatever happened to Kauri had happened to me too? But okay, that's not the important thing. I found something... or I think I did."

The others looked at each other, and then turned to follow her. She led them out of the library, cut across the garden, and paused in front of another of those emblems on the garden's stone wall - the golden dragon eating a sun. She gave it a light push, and it gave way, swinging softly open to reveal a torchlit hallway. Dragonfly gave a soft gasp, and Crescent shot a look at Rigel. While everything was going all right, of course she'd trusted her fellow guests, but now...? On the other hand, what did she have to lose? A lot of things, Crescent, her mind reminded her. A whole, whole lot of things. You've already lost Kauri; do you want to risk everything?

Yes.

"Let's try," she said softly, putting a hand on the doorway to steady herself. One by one, the others nodded, and they stepped inside.

The door didn't swing shut, which was a relief; at least it wasn't some sort of trap. If they wanted to, they could always step outside again; nothing was stopping them. I hope. "Okay," rainswept said quietly. "So let's just, kind of, see what this is."

A few steps ahead, Crescent saw, was another door, this one closed with light fiercely outlining the edges. Hawkstar was going towards it, and Crescent followed. Voices were audible behind it, she realized, and one of them was mine. I'd left the courtyard after about a quarter of an hour to see Irile off, just before everyone started getting really concerned about Kauri.

"Just admit it already," I was saying. "It's not like I don't know. I get it, you think I've been in the dark about so many things all these years, but seriously? You can't always be the one on top."

"I'll never answer on those terms," another voice warned; an imperious, dry, deep voice that Crescent had never heard before. "If -"

"Terms?? Sorry, but that is so not English. I don't have any terms. It's you who's always stuck on terms, and rules, and all that cr -"

He interupted me this time; like father, like son, and all those very wise sayings. Except that like father not like son, but let's ignore that. "I've heard all this before; I don't want to hear it again, understood? Whatever I do is my business alone. Whatever you do; well, that's my business too."

"My guests are not your business, Dad. Not. Your. Business. You would've been happier if you'd never even bothered to find out they were here. How - never mind, the details don't matter, but don't you dare stop me in this too. You always, always, always have to be the one on top, the one who does everything, the king. What's your long-term plan anyway? What's the point in that kind of existence? This is one thing that you can't just wreck. I have a life too, if you want to remember that."

Silence. Impassiveness, in other words. He honestly couldn't even care less.

"Fine," I said after a moment. "But just one more thing. Kauri isn't - you didn't...?"

"Whoever it was is dead to the Palace," he said, understanding what I was getting at and not much else. "That's all you need to know."

Crescent couldn't help the sound that came out of her, but no one seemed to notice.

"...You -?!"

"Perid, I didn't kill anyone. Does that satisfy you? But, as I said before, Kauri is dead to the Palace. To the Palace, Kauri never existed. And that is the last I'll hear of it."

"You're not getting away with this one," I warned him, but after that there was nothing but silence.

```````

Alive: 10 (Crescent, Dragonfly, Ouroborus, Rigel, th3mysticw0lf's 4 charries, Hawkstar, rainswept)

Gone: 1 (Kauri)

``````