Somewhere in the halls that lay at the end of the singing stairs, The Mother in Blue led us to a door that I had first thought to be the entrance to a small closet. A narrow staircase was hidden behind it, and as Alexei shut the door behind Anna and I, it became impossible to see.

I tripped immediately, and if it had not been for whatever part of Nami's back my face slammed into, I would have likely needed her to heal me again.

"Can you make a werelight for us, Autumn? And you can drop your glamor now. There will be no one beyond this point that doesn't know how you really are." Nami said as she helped me to my feet.

It shocked me how good it felt to hear that.

I had grown very tired of being someone else. Even if it was because I was going to face The Mothers, being allowed to be myself was a pleasure that I would not take for granted.

"Isn't it against the rules for her to use her aura outside of a classroom?" Anna asked aloud, one of her hands holding onto the back of my dress gently.

"Not when she is with me. I am the headmistress of Lun, no matter how easy that is for me to forget. What I say goes." Nami said as we started moving again.

I let my mask of Ire go and did as I was told.

"You should've warned me first," Anna coughed and spat. "It got in my mouth!"

The sound of her struggling to spit out the dust that I had thoughtlessly sent raining onto her was drowned out by Nami's sudden laughter.

Without any more thought than it had taken for me to choke my beloved, I let a werelight of my bright blue rise up out of my palm and paint the dark staircase azure. I looked back over my shoulder and wiped what remained of my glamor off of Anna's face. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."

Nami looked back at me and smiled. "Such a pretty shade. I'm glad to know that your time here has not been wasted. If I remember correctly, you could not do that before the semester began."

"Your memory is correct, Headmistress." Alexei said from behind us.

The sound of his expressionless voice was enough alone to ruin the good feelings that Mother Nami's complement had given me.

"Why are you even here? Is The Mother in Blue not strong enough to guard me on her own?" I asked with just a little too much anger in my voice.

Nami kept climbing the stairs, but she snuck another glance back at me. "Is there some trouble between you two?"

"Yes, Headmistress. She has made it very clear that she no longer wishes to be my ward." Alexei answered for me.

"Autumn? Is that true?" Nami asked.

"Yes," I answered immediately, but then my confidence failed. "No. I don't know."

Nami stopped when we reached a door that was identical to the one we had already gone through. "Has something happened?"

"I am curious about that as well." Alexei said simply.

Anna tightened her grip on the back of my dress so quickly that it almost pulled me off of my feet. She knew how much the white haired man's abandonment had hurt me. Even if she had been terrified at the thought of piercing her ear, I knew that she would not hide her feelings towards my guard if she felt like they needed to be expressed.

"Do you believe it is time for the two of you to part ways?" Nami asked.

I looked back down at Alexei.

"No. My purpose here remains unchanged." My guard answered, his one white eye staring at me so intensely that I was forced to look down at my feet.

"What is your purpose here, creep? You don't help her, you hardly even talk to her, and when you should have been guarding her, you left." Anna snapped as she spun around in the narrow stairwell and nearly knocked me down.

That wasn't true. He had helped me earlier that day. If he hadn't, and I had ruined Tana like I had been about to do, I had no idea where I would be.

"You can't treat her that way. Even If she didn't ask for you to be here, you are, and that means something to her," Anna continued, anger rising in her voice and filling the stairwell with its echoes. "You spend your whole life locked away in a room and see how quickly you get attached to someone. See how much it hurts you when they up and leave."

I placed my hand on her shoulder gently. "Hey, I'm okay. You don't have to-"

"No! I do have to. I'm tired of him lingering around and doing nothing. He's like a ghost. We're being haunted by a ghost and he thinks he is performing some stupid duty." She shook her head and continued.

"Lady Anna," Nami said, her voice heavy but not unkind. "There is much you do not understand about Master-"

Alexei held his palm up towards the rest of us. "Thank you, Headmistress, but I do not need to be taken up for. She is right."

"Is she?" Nami said.

"I am?" Anna asked in obvious disbelief.

"Yes, but perhaps now is not the time to discuss it. It will do her no kindness to make The Mothers wait any longer." My white haired guard said with a slight nod.

Even the smallest expressions from him seemed to carry far more weight than they should have with me. Anna must have felt the same because his words were enough for her to turn away from him without argument.

Nami waved us through the door at the top of the stairs and we came out into a dimly lit hall that was lined with paintings.

"Let me guess, there are secret tunnels behind every one of these, right?" Anna said as she took up beside me and wove her fingers together with mine.

"No, but I don't blame you for thinking that. These are actually mine." Nami answered as she slowed in front of one that hung opposite the door.

It was a beach. It did not look all that different than the one I had been sitting on when I had met a certain black masked beast. White sand, dark blue water, a cloudless sky, and nothing else.

As simple as it was, Nami looked at it for a long time before she started walking again.

"Is that one your favorite?" I asked aloud as we left it behind us.

"To be honest, I have never really cared for paintings," Nami said and shook her head. "I had all of these hung for someone else's sake. You could have it if you want?"

I gave my best impersonation of Precept Seram and smiled politely as my hand went up to my new jewelry. "You have given me enough already."

Anna elbowed me gently in the side and narrowed her eyes at me.

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I understood why she had hurt me immediately. "But there is something I want to talk to you about, you said we would when we were in Precept Jasna's quarters."

"Right," Nami said and smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. "I won't make excuses for myself, but I will apologize for not speaking with you sooner. Let us meet with the others and then we will speak, yes?"

I nodded in agreement as she led us through yet another door and the sounds of a conversion found their way to my ears. Just like when Alexei had led me through the inner halls, I could hear the muffled voices of the Mothers echoing out from an open door.

"-should trust her, Azza. Anything else would be beyond shameful. Remember what they have given you, remember what they have given everyone. If it was something she could tell us, she would. You must know that."

Grey. I thought to myself as I recognized The Mother in Grey's flat tone immediately.

"And you, Gwyn? Should I willingly accept these obvious untruths and pretend that they are not there? What would Lei think if she was still here?"

A small amount of fear came with the recognition of the second voice. Azza.

Whatever had left The Mother in Brown so low the last time I had seen her had evidently passed because she sounded just as harsh and demanding as she had on the first day I had met her.

"I don't know. I'm not her, but Grey is usually right about everything. Why would she not be now?"

Gwyn.

"So that is why you left your forest in war to come all the way here? Grey told you what she saw. What makes this-"

Azza's voice went quiet as Nami let out a gentle whistle that filled the cold air of the hall.

I hoped that the three I had heard speaking were not the only ones in the room.

My mother was the first that I hoped for. She had been there for the first super secret training that being a twinsoul forced me to have, but with Anna, my classes, all the mess with Tana, and everything else that had happened at Lun, it was easy to forget just how much I missed her.

Seeing Rhiannon would likely make me want to go back to Erosette more than I already did, but it would be worth it. Would she notice what shade of red my nails had been painted with? Would all of them? What would it mean for me if one of The Mothers knew that I had taken a liking to another?

Glim wouldn't care. Or, she would, and she would hide some small yellow working in my clothes to remind me of her. I wasn't sure what was more likely, but I knew that The Mother in Yellow was the one soul in The Circle that I wanted Anna to meet.

"I had begun to wonder if you had decided to leave us here to rot." Azza said to Nami as soon as we came through the door. She looked like she had been given the same amount of warning about my training as I had.

Every part of the soft fabric that covered her slender body was sheer and patterned with little glittery stars . Her short black hair was pinned up behind her head with golden clips, but what truly gave away what she was wearing were the slippers she wore on her feet.

No. It couldn't be. I thought to myself.

Anna must have thought the same thing and decided to share it with everyone else. "Are you wearing pajamas?"

"Am I not allowed the comfort of sleep, mortal? Or would you have me keep my eyes open until your short life ends? I believe I could wait that long." Azza asked, her golden eyes full of all the terrible things that I knew she was capable of.

Nami put herself between The Mother in Brown and Anna and I.

"No. I told you that we are not doing that anymore. While you are in my school or speaking to one of my moons, you will treat them with respect." Nami said. Her tone was not harsh and her words did not come off as a threat, but the strength that filled her voice could not be ignored.

Azza stared back at her for a long moment, and no one else in the room so much as took a breath.

With a long inhale and an even longer sigh, Azza let the tension between them slip away as she reached out and put her hand on Nami's shoulder. "Yes, you are right. Change is difficult for me, I hope that you are able to forgive me."

Seeing her soften felt like watching Plia refuse a meal or Mallory not flirt with every beating heart that she encountered. I had seen it before, when she had been Goldluster, but seeing her be that way in her pajamas was so different from what I expected from her that I really did not know how to feel.

"It is not me that you should be apologizing to." Nami said as she turned her ocean eyes back to Anna.

Azza looked at her as well and sighed once again as she shook her head. "No. I can't. I am only capable of so much in one day."

"The Mother in Brown has finally found her limits. I can't believe that I was here to see it," Mother Ali said as she stood up from where she had been sitting next to Mother Grey near the fireplace and stretched her arms high above her head. "How are you, kid? Did you heal up alright?"

"You look like a princess." The words slipped out of my mouth before I could really think about what I was saying.

It was true, she did look like a princess from one of my mother's stories, but knowing how reactionary she was left me in fear at what that truth would make her do.

The smoke from the burner that hung from her lips forcing one of her eyes closed, she flashed me a toothy smile. "I'm more like the dragon that steals the princess, but thank you. Take it in, none of you will ever see me dressed this way again."

I did as I was told.

Not even a month before, she had been drunk, violent, and wearing far less than she was then. I could still feel small twinges of pain on my middle if I thought about it enough, but that Ali seemed like something from a nightmare compared to the one standing before me. She was in a gown of deep purple. Her lavender curls were adorned by a silver circlet that kept them from falling down to her eyes. Other than the burner that still hung from her lips, none of her was like she had been before.

"You could have changed." Said a voice from a speaker I could not see.

A long table stood against the wall to my right, and as I looked at it, a hand appeared from underneath the blue cloth that draped down from it.

"You wanted us to see you like this." Gwyn said as she crawled out from underneath the table.

The Mother in Green did not look well. She was so dirty that only the pale skin of her face could be seen and even that was not clean, just less dirty than the rest of her. The tight black garment she wore was little more than a collection of loose shreds that had somehow managed to stay together, and every hand forward she crawled looked like it would be the last before she collapsed.

"Does that mean you could have bathed or did you want us to see you like this?" Nami said as she went and helped the filthy Mother off the floor.

Grey stood up from the fireplace and waved me towards a chair that sat in front of the window at the back of the room. "If everyone is ready, we should begin. None of us have any time to waste."

"Is my mother not coming?" I asked Nami, a heavy feeling of disappointment making me feel like my steps were twice as difficult to take as they should have been.

"No. This was not a planned meeting." Azza answered for her.

No mother, no Rhiannon, no Glim, not even Twila Plaas. I thought to myself, realizing that nothing I had hoped to be in the room was there.

The window behind the chair gave a perfect view of the courtyard and the front gates of Lun. I turned my back to it and sat down as Mother Grey came and sat on the floor in front of me. Refusing to meet my eyes with the cold grey of her own, she took my hand into hers and the calluses on them nearly made me shudder.

"This will be just like before, Underwitch Autumn. You will reach for your soul and we will all follow along with you. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mother." I answered. There was no other choice for me to make, I knew that like I knew escaping Alexei was almost an impossibility.

Everything gathered around me then, and I tried to settle my mind enough that I could reach for my soul.

"Wait. I'm the only one that doesn't get to watch." I said once everyone in the room, including Anna and Alexei, had their hands on The Mother in Grey's back.

"That is a powerful position to be in, Autumn Aubrey," Nami said with a smile. "You have five of The Nine Mothers here just for you. There are very few souls in chaos that hold such influence."

My hand found its way to the little silver moon hanging from my right ear. "I am powerful?"

"Normally, no. But in this instance, yes." Azza answered for Nami once again.

Nami shook her head. "Do you really not see how almost everything you say comes across as an insult?"

"What? It is the truth. I thought you would praise me for giving her that." Azza said and scowled.

Mother Ali took a long drag from her burner and chuckled at the arguing Mothers.

"Have you always been this tall?" Gwyn asked as she rubbed at her face with her dirt covered forearm.

Anna was silent, but she kept her eyes on mine as she gave me a reassuring smile.

Alexei said nothing.

"Silence. What she has been asked to do is not easy," Grey said as she gave my hands a small squeeze. "Whenever you are ready, Underwitch Autumn."

I had become too nervous to wait, so as soon as she said my name, I pushed my mind into myself and showed all of them my soul.

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