Greenvale’s river port ran loud in every hour.

Dockhands shouted across cargo that never stayed still, merchants argued prices that never settled, gulls screamed at everything on principle. Iskaris’s veil had eaten the sea epochs ago, and the trade that should have sailed outward now rode the rivers inland.

A hooded figure moved through the middle of it without drawing a single eye.

Pink hair tucked under the cowl. Floral tattoos climbing the skin at her wrist where her sleeve ended. She cut around a crate of lacquered pottery, past a stall of fresh-cut river eel, past two navy officers who did not so much as glance at her.

The last warehouse fell behind her. The last pier followed. She kept walking until the port’s roar had thinned into river-sound and the bank beneath her feet was all smooth stone and low reed.

She did not slow.

She stepped off the bank into the current.

The water swallowed her to the waist, then the chest, then the collar.

She spoke one word against its pull.

"[Verdant Kin]."

The river answered.

Pink petals bloomed along her shoulders in a slow-opening crown that spread outward through the water, thickening the current around her with flowering green.

A pair of small gill-kin with translucent lotus-heads and flaring red stamens drifted in from the deeper channel, settled against either side of her throat, and threaded their stems through her collarbone with the steady rhythm of lungs. At her wrists and heels, long kelp-like leaves unfurled into fins and caught the pull of the river.

Orianna let her breath out.

The water entered her throat as air.

She kicked.

The fins caught the motion and turned it into speed.

...

Upriver, underwater.

Past the stretches where big ships could not go, past the tributaries where smaller boats turned off, past the narrow channels no boat reached at all. The water changed color as she went, green to green-gold to the deep emerald of places where humans did not go. Flowering reeds brushed her shoulders. A field of luminescent river-lilies closed behind her in the wake of her passing.

She cut a line through the current toward a bend she already knew.

The inner curve of the bend sank into a pool the rivermen would have called drowned. At its bottom, under a shelf of roots and silt that had been there long enough to look geological, a seam of pale light flickered once and was gone.

Orianna drove downward through it.

The shelf opened because it had been shaped to, and she found herself in a dry chamber.

It should not have been dry. A hundred feet of river water sat on top of it, and the stone walls were clean of every drop. Crystal-lamps hung from the ceiling on silver chains and threw steady warm light across tables whose edges had worn smooth from a thousand years of use.

Books, scrolls, and alembics covered every surface. A dozen jars of liquid no apothecary on the continent sold openly sat catalogued in a handwriting she recognized from syndicate records a millennium old.

At the far end of the chamber, bent over a brass instrument on a workbench, was the Mediator, the syndicate leader of the Vesper Consortium.

Long grey beard down his chest. Back stooped from a millennium of work exactly like this. His hand had paused over a small flask of pale-blue liquid when the wards screamed whatever silent alarm they screamed into the part of his brain that listened for them.

He moved faster than a man his age should have been able to.

His hand left the flask, crossed to his belt, and settled on an artifact that shook the air the moment his fingers closed on it. The wall-etched runes he had been standing in front of flared to life in one synchronized wave.

Every line of the chamber lit violet and gold and blood-orange. The air between him and the intruder thickened into pressure Orianna could feel against her skin. Whatever spell the runes had been charging was half-ready before the old man had finished turning around.

"An intruder?!"

His free hand came up and shaped a small and very precise spell in the air between them.

Orianna reached up with both hands and pulled her hood back.

Pink hair spilled out in a loose fall to her shoulders.

The Mediator’s fingers stopped shaping.

"...Flower Queen."

He knew her. The half-formed spell between his fingers held where it was.

"How?!"

Orianna tilted her head the smallest fraction.

"With all due respect, that’s none of your concern."

"It very much is!"

A shrug answered him.

The old man’s grey eyes searched her face, found no trick to explain what he was looking at, and went cold.

"What do you want?"

Orianna looked at the agitated man, one moment away from firing at her, and nonchalantly said, "Don’t worry, I’m not here to attack you. A few years ago I was looking for your hideout and found this location. It was just harmless preparations in case the next vote for the Obsidian Circle’s open seat didn’t land on my name once one of you oldheads dropped dead."

In the Vesper Consortium, decisions were made by the Obsidian Circle Members, the leaders of the Consortium’s various departments. Black Fang, for example, was the leader of the drug department, while others took care of the army, finances, logistics, and more.

When one member died, the remaining members would hold a vote among the most promising Veil Walkers, the second highest rank, and elect one to the now open position.

Orianna was a Veil Walker, and one of the strongest and most competent ones, evidenced by her more or less already running her own department as Black Fang basically refused to do any work her station demanded, spending most of her time reading books in her poison baths.

The Mediator’s fingers spasmed once.

"...you WHAT?!"

"Preparations. Hypothetical."

"You would have killed your leader if the vote didn’t land on you?"

"Obviously. I wanted a seat. If I hadn’t gotten it, I was prepared to take it a different way." Orianna lifted one shoulder in a slow shrug. "The plan was that I would ask Black Fang to step out of her poison bath for a few hours, the two of us would pay you a visit, and the next morning the syndicate would have a new master."

The old man’s beard shook.

"You DARE speak it so plainly?!"

"Yes, but as I said, you don’t need to worry. That part of my life has moved on. You can vote for whoever you want, I no longer care. I’m here for something else."

He stared at her.

His spell had collapsed between his fingers some seconds ago.

He began grumbling under his breath, the tone of an elderly man who heavily disapproved of the younger generation. "I always thought you were the only sensible woman among the drug department’s circle of lunatics, but I suppose not..."

"Did you say something?" Orianna asked, leaning closer.

"...So what do you want? Say it already."

"Devil. The Primordial Villain."

The grey-bearded man’s hand, which had been drifting back toward the pale-blue flask on his workbench, paused short.

He turned to his instruments instead, making a show of resuming his work.

"Yeah, the bastard who has been waging wars abroad while his syndicate is burning. Very loyal."

Orianna was having none of that, her nonchalant voice hardening.