Being surrounded by those that meant to protect me made fleeing from danger a rather slow process.

Which, in my admittedly limited experience, seemed counterproductive.

Alexei led the way, walking just fast enough to stay in front of Anna and I, but not fast enough to create any distance. Arthur followed behind, the sound of his heavy footsteps a constant reminder that he was there. Sam padded along on either side of us, the big blue cat weaving nimbly through our legs to guard against open alleyways and crossing streets.

Anna and I clung to one another in the middle of them all. She was the only reason I had not tripped and fallen any of the half a dozen times my feet had gotten tangled underneath me. She was the only reason I had begun to move at all after the attack.

The lightning had thrown up a great plume of snowy powder into the air, and a thick fog had come creeping into all the gaps between the buildings of Hymneth. It was still terribly cold, but the way that it was cold had changed. It no longer cut against my face or pierced the thinnest seams of my clothes. It clung to every part of me and weighed me down like a cloak of freezing water.

There were other groups ahead of us that were running towards the Lun bridge at the far end of town. The biggest, which looked like it held almost every underwitch that had been in The Boiler, was shielded by a house sized bubble that gleamed pastel blue in the dim moonlight that managed to sneak through the clouds above.

We had nearly drawn even with the place the lightning had struck when Arthur called out to Alexei.

"Could that not have just been lightning, guard?" The tall man said from behind us.

"Impossible." Alexei answered simply.

Anna let out a short, angry, sigh. "How is that impossible? We are outside."

"No. You are in The Mother in Blue's domain." Alexei corrected her.

"What does that even mean? I'm getting very tired of you knowing things and not telling us." Anna demanded, her short temper for my guard evidently growing even shorter.

Sam's deep voice rumbled up from where he prowled through our legs. "Your anger is not misplaced, mortal, but it is ill timed. There is danger. My Lady is exposed. That is all that matters."

Three of the blue circle guards, the same kind that stood on the bridge to Lun, came running out from between two buildings on our left and made their way towards settling plum in the distance.

"Answer me, guard. Making her flee like this could be entirely unnecessary." Arthur called out again.

Alexei answered, but his usual flat tone had taken on a hard edge. "It is impossible because my mother's power is what holds these mountains in eternal winter. There are very few souls with the power to pierce through that."

"The storm during the new moon ball?" I asked through my chattering teeth.

"The same." Alexei agreed.

Arthur lengthened his strides and took up at Anna and I's side. The hardness had returned to his face, and it felt like the constantly smiling man had been replaced with someone I did not know.

"What does this have to do with her? There are half a hundred girls running towards the school, what makes you think she is in danger specifically." The tall man demanded as he grabbed Alexei by his shoulder.

The metallic sound of Alexei's sword being drawn made my eyes flinch shut, and when they reopened, the two men had stopped dead in the street.

"She is my ward, and if you wish to live long enough to become her knight like you wish, I suggest you do not interfere with my duty." Alexei said calmly.

There was no anger or frustration in his voice, but the blade of his white handled sword was resting just a hair away from Arthur's throat.

"How do you-" Arthur started, confusion softening his face to something that resembled my friend.

Alexei cut him off. "I have forgotten more than you will ever know, squire. If you feel for her the way-"

Anna cut Alexei off like he had done to Arthur. Only, she did it with a ball of snow instead of her words.

The white powder burst against my guard's shoulder and clung to his sleeve as it tumbled back down to the frozen ground.

"And what was that meant to accomplish?" Alexei asked as he turned his one white eye to Anna.

"Nothing. I just don't like seeing a sword pressed against my little brother's throat, creep." Anna snapped as she scooped another mound into her gloved hands and packed it down.

I don't know what the cause was, but something changed in Alexei's eye at Anna's words.

She threw her second ball of snow, but it did not strike its target. Faster than I could track, Alexei swung his blade and halved what Anna had thrown.

"That is enough of this. We have to-"

Arthur cut Alexei off with three sharp whistles as he looked up to the sky.

I wondered if the arguing would have been any less if everyone had let the others finish what they were saying.

A pale blue glow came spilling over a roof to our right, and a moment later, Opa cam swooping down from the sky and dove beak first into Arthur's back.

"Alright, what did you see, little guy?" Arthur asked towards his chest, speaking to the spirit that lived inside his body.

Alexei sheathed his sword as we waited and unwound the thin leather cord that kept his hair tied back. It fell past his shoulders in a long white sheet, but just as quickly as he let it loose, he was winding the cord back around it.

It felt so strange to see him doing something so normal after witnessing him moving faster than I could see. I had just watched the spirit of a little boy fly inside my friend in the shape of an owl, and that felt less strange than seeing Alexei fix his hair.

"But that doesn't make any sense." Arthur said aloud, speaking to none of us.

Anna walked over to her brother and pulled me along with her as she went.

I was surrounded by a squire from the armory enclave with a spirit inside him, a familiar that could summon lightning and shed his skin like a coat, and the sorcerer son of The Mother in Blue, but nothing made me feel as safe as being in Anna's arms did.

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"Neither does talking to yourself. What did he see?" She demanded as she put herself between the tall man and my guard.

"A blue skinned man and a lady made of frost are fighting where the lightning hit. A bunch of other guys are there, but they are just standing around," Arthur said through a sigh. "I don't know, that's what Opa said."

Alexei's fingers tightened on the handle of his sword.

"That sounds like that Azeralphane demon you say doesn't exist." Anna said to him.

My guard's hand tightened further and I could hear the rope that wrapped what he held groan from the pressure.

"Something draws near" Sam rumbled up from where he stood at my feet.

Just when I thought the handle would snap between the white haired man's fingers, he released it and winked out of sight.

The very next instance, he appeared at the end of the street closest to our right.

Frost, like living crystal, spread over the walls of the wooden building on either side of him in intricate shapes and patterns. It crawled over the snowy ground and froze over the top of Alexei's boots in an icy wave.

My guard did not attempt to escape it.

He bent himself at his knees and braced.

A body struck him square in the chest not a moment later.

The Mother in Blue was not the only dancer in her family.

Katarina's son turned through the impact and broke free of his frosty shackles. He spun back across the frozen ground without ever losing his balance, and held the body that had been thrown into him all the way.

Snow, fog, and frost all swirled together into a white wall of chaos as Alexei slid to a stop just before his back could hit the big windows of the building behind him.

Whatever force that had brought everything rushing towards billowed past him and shattered the window glass like an unseen hammer.

Anna had pulled us down to the ground. Sam had pressed himself against our front, and Arthur had covered us with his massive arms.

If it hadn't been for them, there would have been two bodies flying through the air.

"I should have listened to you, cat. I'm sorry!" Anna cried as we were pelted with whipped up snow.

Alexei stood tall despite it all.

The body he had caught was not just a body, it was a person. He lowered her to the ground, and I realized that it was a person I knew. As she ran her hands over her gown and straightened her hair, I saw that she was someone I knew dressed as someone I had been.

Underwitch Maletta, the strongest of Lun's moons, shouted at Alexei in the same Katarina costume she had been wearing during the play several days before.

"He-I-She-He took her, Master Alexei." Maletta finally managed to say as she started back towards the alley she had been thrown out of.

"Took who? Who did the taking?" Alexei demanded as he winked out of sight and appeared in front of her faster than I could blink.

"Sorceress Gell, she is the one who writes the plays we put on. He just held his hand out to her and she disappeared. Mothers help her, I have to go back. Nami is gone, I am the only one who can save her." Maletta explained, her expression shifting wildly from fear to sadness and finally anger.

All of the frost that spread across the buildings around us and the stony street beneath us began to recede. The sharp trickling sound brought visions of an army of crystalline spiders sprinting over cold glass. The spiders were not real of course, but if they had been, they all would have been crawling towards Maletta.

"No," Alexei said as he placed his hands on her shoulders. "You cannot. Escort my ward and her companions to Lun. I will see to this."

Maletta did not listen to the white haired man.

Her eyes rolled back into her head as the frost, her frost, coalesced around her feet and climbed up her legs.

For once, I knew what was happening.

I had seen something like it many times before.

Maletta was becoming herself, her true self.

"Too long I have waited, Master Alexei. When Mother Katarina passed me over in favor of Nami, I spent decades wondering what she had found in me that was lacking." She called out, her voice carrying through the foggy air with power behind it.

Maletta was a second crescent. She was the only one within Lun that I had seen. Alexei had once told me that the purpose of being a moon was breaking yourself. I had learned recently that the purpose of being a moon was to become The Lady in a blue.

So many things began to make sense to me in that moment.

Maletta continued. "There is no end to the times that I have asked myself how I could be more like her, how could I come close to her perfection. I've come to believe that my willingness to wait was my flaw. If your mother were here now, what would she do?"

The frost spread over her hips and laid up her middle in a dizzying mail of shapes and patterns. It reached her chest, and Alexei withdrew his hands from her shoulders.

"You are not her, Maletta." Alexei said.

I had never seen him look quite so sad before.

"No, but I am Echowalker, and without her, I would have been nothing." Maletta said in little more than a whisper as the frost froze over her mouth and covered her head.

Anna pulled me tighter to her, Sam pressed harder against us, and Arthur covered us further as the blinding light of the underwitch's power cast away all of the heavy fog.

When it dimmed and I could see again, Maletta was gone and Echowalker had taken her place.

The broken reflections of the underwitch shone through her armor of ice, but it was never more than a glimpse. Like a statue carved from blue tinted stone, she had been encased in a perfect sculpture of The Mother in Blue. Every frozen hair, the delicate features of her mask, and the grace she moved with when she took her first frost spreading step, it was all in the visage of Katarina.

"Who took the sorceress, Maletta." Alexei demanded, unable to look at the transformed underwitch while he still stood in her way.

Echowalker raised her frozen hand and turned Alexei's eyes towards her with a single finger. "You must know by now. The Blue Death, The Walking Storm, The Misfit King, the demon who killed your little brother, the demon who has taken our Mother."

Alexei showed his teeth as fury filled his one white eye.

"It is Azeralphane, and I will make him pay for what he has done." Echowalker said as she released my guard.

She stepped past him, and every step after, she sunk into the frost at her feet like she was walking into water. Before she reached the buildings on our right, she had submerged herself completely and was gone.

None of us spoke.

All I could do was watch my guard as he glanced from me, towards where the lightning had struck, and then up to the sky.

"Damn it all!" He spat as his own power came to light in his palm.

At first, I thought he was making a werelight, but then the ball of aura unfurled into the shape of a little bird. He brought it to his lips and whispered something that I could not hear before throwing it up into the night sky above.

He watched it go, and when its glow could no longer be seen, he turned on his heels without so much as a glance at me and disappeared.

The sound of the upturned snow shifting and resettling filled the silence between all of us, and none of us spoke until a terrified looking man appeared in the broken window on our left.

"Your guard has left his post, My Lady." Sam broke the stunned silence with his low pitched growl.

Still holding us in his arms, Arthur spoke next. "He's not a very good guard if he just up and abandons you like that."

"Arthur. Shut up. So many things just happened that you don't understand. You have to learn when to be quiet." Anna snapped at her brother.

"I'll keep that in mind, Ma." The tall man groaned at his sister.

"Silence! Someone approaches." Sam growled again.

All of us whipped our head around in every direction to see who was coming towards us, but none of us thought to look up.

A woman descended from above us on wings of sky blue power. Her bare feet met the frozen ground and her working turned to dust with a final beat. She shook the snow out of her downy black hair and straightened the long blue feather that was tied at the top of it.

"Precept Jasna?" I asked aloud.

"Hello, Underwitch Ire. A little birdy told me that you had been left out in the cold. Why don't we go inside where it is warm?"

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