The only thing stranger than pretending my shirt was a dress, was having a short conversation with someone I knew without them recognizing me.

Not long after we had crossed the bridge into Hymneth, the guards with the blue circles on their tunics had let us pass without question, we passed by the other new moons on one of the snowy streets.

I thought they would pass without a word, but Plia left their little group and wobbled her way over to Anna.

"You are Ire's girlfriend, right? Where'd she go? Is she okay?" The little underwitch asked, her words slurring and her face rosy with warmth.

Anna opened her mouth to respond, but Plia continued before she could.

She could barely keep her eyes focused as she spoke. "And who's this? Does Ire know you're wrapped up with someone else? That's not nice," Plia leaned in and whispered. "She's crazy, you know. Not bad crazy, but you better treat her right. She's a good girl, you know?"

"Who are you talking to?" Mallory called over to Plia from where the new moons had stopped.

In three great skips, she slid into Plia and barely managed to stay on her feet. Her eyes half lidded and a lazy smile softening her sharp features, she hung her hands on Anna and I's shoulders.

"I'm Mallory, and I'm going to be The Lady in Blue. Give me something to remember you by and I won't forget you when I am ruling over Zenithcidel." She said with a wink.

Alexei came into my sight from wherever he had been lurking behind us.

"Underwitch Mallory, it is far past your curfew. I suggest that you all return to Lun with haste." The white haired man said with no sign of the frustrations he had experienced earlier on his face.

With the way my fellow new moon smiled, Alexei might as well have told her that he loved her. "You came!"

She hooked her arm in his and pointed off down the street. "Of course, I knew you would, how could you resist an invitation from me? If we hurry, we can still get that drink before the tavern closes."

Before Alexei could undoubtedly deny Mallory's offer, someone shouted from a dark alleyway to our right. "I am escorting them home, Master Alexei. Your concern is welcome but not needed."

Tana, who was laid back and asleep atop Auden, sat straight up at the raised voice. "I met a giant!"

Without another word she dropped back down and closed her eyes once again.

It was hard, I had to sink my teeth into my cheek, but I managed to stop myself from yelling at her to fall off the familiar and die.

Precept Jasna appeared from the alley, and raised an eyebrow at the sight of Mallory holding onto Alexei.

"Oh, I did not realize that the two of you were so close. Don't you think the age difference would be a bit inappropriate, Master Alexei." The downy haired Precept asked as she approached us. She was just as striking as she had been the first time I had seen her, and the feathered overcoat she wore only made her prettier.

I was under the impression that you were aware of Precept Jasna. That she is the daughter of a sorcerer like you. Precept Seram's words echoed in my mind at the sight of Jasna. The part about me was a lie of course, but I knew that the truth about her father to be true.

How had the daughter of a sorcerer become a teacher at The Mother in Blue's school?

I do not know how he did it, and had accepted the fact that I likely never would, but Alexei disappeared.

One moment, he was caught in Mallory's embrace. The next, he was several paces down the snow street with no footprints in the snow to mark his trail.

Precept Jasna could not hide the laugh that rolled out of her.

"Look! Isn't that Ire's cat?" Plia called out as she pointed the opposite direction that Mallory had.

Mallory was running before I could turn around and see Sam sitting in the middle of the snowy street we had just come down.

"Let's catch him!" She giggled as she went.

Plia and Vanda took off after her, and I tried to pretend that I did not notice Jasna's pale blue staring as she passed by us. Auden and Tana carried on their way without a glance, and Anna pushed me onward despite my shivering legs.

We reached a building whose doors were wide open and followed Alexei inside. Down a flight of narrow stairs, and then two more just like it, he led us to a room whose walls were painted pure black. Like Precept Seram's class room, there were terraces that rose up from the squared center of the space, and climbed down them in pursuit of my silent guard.

We were not alone. All of the chairs were not full, but there were enough people in the place to call it a crowd. Each and every one of them, just like the three of us, were dressed from head to toe in black.

"When do we play?" I asked as we took our seats on the bottom row. Alexei sat to my left and Anna sat to my right. All three of us together took up the middle of the row, but the crowd was not nearly full enough for that to be a problem.

"We don't play. We see the play, dummy." Anna smiled.

I frowned. "Oh. Well, then, what are we here to see?"

"If it hadn't been for you know who, we were-" Anna began.

All of the lights in the room snapped out, and the excited chatter of everyone around us quickly faded into hushed excitement. It was not true silence. It was the shapeless sound of all the souls in the black box trying their best to remain quiet.

Anna finished what she was saying in a whisper. "-suppose to see a romance about Lyrian and Astelia. I don't know what this is going to be."

There was something about it, an energy, that made it almost impossible for me to not talk.

Before my restraint on myself could break, white fog creeped into the room and blanketed out shoes so thickly that I could no longer see the bottom of my boots. Cold came with it, and sent a chill up my stockinged legs that was so sharp I felt like I had been stuck in a mound of snow.

"Long ago," A voice with no speaker echoed into the room. It was full, feminine, and caught my attention immediately. "When this place was yet to be known as Hymneth, before a single grey stone of Lun Arcanicil had been placed, when all that roamed Golgladdagell were beasts and snowstorms, there was a queen atop the mountain's highest peak."

I tried to sound out the gargling sound of the word the voice had just said. "Gogla- Gaelga-Gg-"

Alexei leaned over and pressed his finger to his lips to silence me. "It is the name of this mountain range. Gol means hollow. Do not interrupt."

I snapped my lips shut and turned away from his white eyes stair.

"Ooo, you got in trouble." Anna whispered so quietly that I almost thought I had imagined it.

If I had not literally bit my tongue to stop from laughing, I would have caused a much larger interruption than I already had.

The voice continued. "The queen was not fair, she was not kind or noble, of all the things we hope for a queen to be, she was none of them. She kept her throne through might and fear alone, and save for the souls that dwelled within the cornerkeeper's temples, there were none that were safe from her scorn."

The fog at our feet filled the floor and rose up over my knees.

A figure appeared in the clouds of white on the right side of the room.

"One of those souls, a young shrine maiden who could not accept living in fear, braved the white wastes in search of a hero." The unseen voice said as the fog began to take the shape of pure white evergreens and sharp mountain peaks.

The figure walked among them and though I knew she was in no true danger, she kept herself low and moved with careful caution. I could not see her face because of the dark purple hood that covered her head, but when she spoke, her words came in a fear filled whisper.

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"What lays beyond the snow? Who will save us from this bitter fate. She Who Keeps The Boundaries, deliver me safe passage, save us from this demon, let spring bloom again." The shrine maiden called out as she crept down the imaginary mountainside.

I leaned over to Anna and tried my best to speak only to her. "Who talks like that?"

"Who talks if they are trying to be sneaky?" Anna whispered back with a little laugh.

Alexei held his hand out to silence us, but did not turn away from the play.

The evergreens and mountains fell away into shapeless fog all at once. The shrine maiden collapsed down with them and disappeared in the blanket of white. Long tendrils of it curled back up my legs and spun across the front of everyone on the bottom row of the room.

I caught the broken end of what the unseen speaker was saying.

"-sea in storm. Many a wise man would have stayed in harbor from fear, but the shrine maiden would not be stayed. She must find the temple below and The Mothers that the quiet wanderer had spoken off."

I leaned over to Alexei. "What happened? How did she get in a boat?"

"If you had been listening instead of speaking, you would know." My white haired guard answered without meeting my eyes.

Thunder rumbled in the little room and the waves gave way to rolling dunes of windswept sand. The shrine maiden reappeared, but she was no longer scared. She crawled across the desert illusion, every shaking arm forward looking weak and exhausted.

"Mothers, help me. Mothers, help me. Mothers, help me." She panted as she collapsed to the ground with her hands outstretched.

She could not continue.

Her will had run out.

Her hand fell, and when it sank below the fog, a tree sprang up and grew towards the darkness above. Its trunk split, twisted, turned and spread into thin branches that were littered with bulbs.

"Mothers, help me." The shrine maiden said with the last of her strength.

The tree bloomed.

Uncountable blossoms came from the unfurling bulbs, and just as quickly as they spread, they were carried off the branches by an unseen wind.

"We are here, child" A chorus of voices said in unison.

The blossoms of fog swirled around the room just like the stormy waves had been only moments before. Applause broke from the crowd and I found myself falling into it alongside everyone else.

Anna smiled and laughed as she looped her arm in mine. She reached our hands up to one of the blossoms and tried to catch it in our palms. When it touched, it separated and blew through our intertwined fingers like flowing water.

"Isn't this fun?" She asked underneath the applause.

I nodded in agreement and tried to hide the grimace that nearly ruined everything.

I had not noticed it before because of the overwhelming feelings I had felt after Ali's punishment, but I was hurt.

All of me felt like one cold throb. My middle felt like it had been ripped apart and put back together wrong. But what hurt more than anything, was that I knew I would not be allowed to be myself as soon as the play ended.

I had nearly been beaten senseless, defeated The Mother in Purple in combat that she had forced upon me, and talked to the other new moons without them discovering who I was. If anyone had been allowed to know what I had been through that day, it would have been my play that the people of Hymneth had come to watch.

What mattered more than anything else that had happened that day was that when Anna looked at me, she was seeing Autumn.

"Rest, child." The chorus of voices echoed as all the light left the room.

Where there had only been the black boundary that had been built by the crowd and the shifting white of the fog before, color came.

Sheets of lavender unfurled from the darkness above us and formed a sheer column on the left side of the room. Within the thin purple, a silhouette appeared, and it was so similar to Mother Ali that I wondered if she was actually inside of it.

Fabric that was the color of sand followed the lavender and draped onto the floor beside the lavender. The silhouette that rose up within the sandy sheets was tall, thin, graceful, and looked enough like Azza to bring an annoying itch to the scars she had left on my body.

Without a moment between, a grey column fell in line beside the first two. So dark and gloomy that it seems like someone had cut the cloth straight out of the sky above Lun, The Mother in Grey's familiar shape took up an unmoving stance within the sheets.

My mind knew they were not truly there, but my body and heart did not feel that was proof enough to not be scared.

Green came next, but it was not the shape of The Mother in Green that stood within it.

Where Gwyn was short, the figure was as tall as I had ever seen a woman be. The Mother in Green that had punished me had been lithe and lean. The figure that loomed over the others was built in a way that impressed the truth of her strength on me just by looking at her. The silhouette's hair fell far past her shoulders instead of ending at the nape of her neck, and when she turned to the side, I saw that the lines of her face were strikingly elegant.

I broke one of my promises that I had made with Rhiannon and spoke one of The Mother's names aloud as I whispered to Anna. "That's not Gwyn."

Alexei did not shush me, but I still felt a chill run through me from the weight of his white eyed stare.

Mother Glim's column of fabric fell next in shades of sunshine and wildflowers. She did not rise up from the floor like the others. Instead, she came floating down from above like a fairy from one of my mother's stories. Which, for the small amount of time I had been around her, seemed exactly the kind of thing the real Glim would do.

Rhiannon rose up within the rose red fabric that followed Glim, and a small ache hurt my heart because of how much I wanted to see her again.

When the blue curtains fell, it was not Nami that stood among the other Mothers, but Katarina. I could not keep myself from looking at Alexei when her shape appeared.

He did not frown. He did not smirk. He did not so much as blink. His face had turned to stone once again. Still, I could not ignore the suspicion that if I had not been watching him, he would not have been so rigged.

How could he not have been? His mother was gone. Mine was only a black gate away and I knew I would burst into tears if I thought I could not see her again.

I had never truly seen The Mother in White or The Mother in Orange. My knowledge of what they looked like came from seeing them with their backs turned to me and a single memory that I could barely remember.

Their silhouettes did not give me anything else to go off, but seeing all nine of The Mother's shapes standing together made me feel like running out of the room.

"Wake, child. We have given you time to recover." They all said together, and the shrine maiden sat up at their feet.

Anna evidently noticed how uncomfortable I had become. She gave me a reassuring smile and patted my leg where my skirt should have been.

The shrine maiden whipped her head around in obvious confusion and a jumble mess of questions spilled out from her. "Where am I? How long have I been asleep? Who are all of you?"

"They have done that to me. It is not fun." I whispered to Alexei when he met my eyes momentarily.

He let out a small exhale through his nose. "Agreed."

If I was not mistaken, his answer meant that The Mothers had put him to sleep the same way they had me and the shrine maiden.

It seemed like he had been on their bad side before. I felt in my heart that he knew them even more than I did, and the little that I did know was enough to fear them. Alight with the rainbow of colored light that shone from the cloth columns, everyone else in the small room seemed like they did not know them at all.

There was wonder in their eyes, awe, as they looked at the imaginary Mothers. They did not know that Rhiannon held so much sorrow in her heart. They did not know that Ali's lips loosened when she drank. They did not know that Azza smelled of sun warmed stone and clean linens.

They did not know the pain The Mothers had caused me because of something I did not remember doing.

A new hurt joined with the pain in my body and the dread I felt at having to be Ire again so soon. It hurt me to see the crowd see The Mothers the way they were and I did not really understand why.

My attention left everyone else and returned to the play when Ali's column withdrew into the darkness above to the sound of whoever it was that was pretending to be her saying goodbye.

One by one, the others disappeared in the same way. Brown, grey, green, yellow, red, white, orange, the silhouettes all fell away until all that was left was blue.

"Rise, child," A voice said in a pale imitation of Katarina's voice. "I will lend my blade to your cause."

The shrine maiden brought herself up onto her knees before the shape of Alexei's mother.

The curtains withdrew.

The crowd broke into applause at the sight of The Mother in Blue.

She was dressed like Katarina, her hair was as white as snow, she even walked similarly to the graceful sorceress that I had been more times than I could count, but to my eyes the difference was obvious.

I was not looking at The Mothers in Blue, I was looking at the underwitch that had insulted me shortly after I had walked through Lun's gates for the first time.

"Maletta." I said under my breath as she took the shrine maiden's hand and all of the lights went out.

The applause continued for a time, but nothing new had happened by the time it faded out.

"Is it over?" I asked aloud and heard hushed snickers sound all around me from the crowd.

"No." Alexei said simply.

"Then why are we all just sitting in the dark?" I asked a little quieter than before.

Anna leaned her shoulder into me. "That was just act one."

"Oh," I sighed and thought about what she had said. "What does that mean?"

I had never enjoyed talking in the dark, but I found some small relief in not having to look at the crowd's admiration for my punishers any longer.

Anna spoke quietly as the lights began to brighten again. "The first half was all set up. All the good stuff happens in the second half."

"Shouldn't it all be good?" I asked, not understanding why someone would tell a story that was only enjoyable towards the end.

By the sound of her breath I could tell she was trying not to laugh. "You should really read more."

"Agreed." Alexei said simply.

Underwitch Maletta strode back into sight in her Katarina costume, the shrine maiden by her side and the fog from before at their heels.

I could not help but shake my head. "She didn't walk like that."

"Agreed," Alexei said simply for the third time. "She doesn't."

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