I had never seen anything that unsettled me more than seeing fear spread over a Mother's face.

The Lich projecting itself into the little third story bathroom of the boarding house or the horrors it had sent after me had not been half as disturbing.

The hate filled stare of Azza's that had been burnt into my mind like molten gold could not compare.

Seeing a sharp toothed familiar sink her knife like teeth into my leg while I was drowning was barely a memory at that moment.

Tana had bound me with her power and exposed the secret she knew about me to all the other new moons and our teacher. That very real threat seemed so silly in hindsight.

Nami was terrified, and she was a Mother. I knew first hand how powerful they were, and shuddered at the notion that there were things any of them actually feared.

With his one eye still glowing his perfect blue, Alexei stared down at her with a pained expression on his usually expressionless face. "How disappointing, Namiana. After all she has done for you and you lose faith in her this quickly?"

"Alexei, I-" Nami tried to speak, but my white haired guard did not allow her to.

"Where would you be if she had not given you a way off of that island? If she had not loved you and raised you like her very own daughter? You were her favorite, you know? After Jaka, when it was just the four of us, you were what held her together, and my heart breaks at the thought of her learning how easy it was for you to abandon her." He shouted, but his raised voice was not born of anger.

The white haired man was crying.

A single tear ran down from the corner of his eye and left a streak of his aura in its wake.

"Alexei." Nami said as she stood up from the unconscious Gell. She still looked as scared as I felt, but some of the strength had returned to her eyes.

"Is my judgment suddenly not good enough for you? Now that I am half a man, am I incapable of telling the difference between truth and falsehood? Do you not think I would know if she had passed? I am not just her son, Namiana. I am bound to her," Alexei cried, and the glow in his iris overtook the white as it filled his eye completely. "The mortal is right. I am a ghost, and once I rid this place of the false Azeralphane, I will haunt no one ever again."

The waves of her ocean blue that had been wrapped around sorceress Gell spun around Nami's feet like a whirlpool.

"Alexei. Listen to my voice. All of these strange things have upset you, and that has made it easy for your high to sweep you away," She said softly as the whirlpool began to spin tighter around her and my guards legs. "Let me help you come back to yourself. I believe you. I have not lost faith. I know that she is still alive."

Alexei started to change, and I had seen something like it enough time before to know that he was transforming.

He was becoming his true self right in front of my eyes.

His perfect blue tears turned to an impossible heavy stream and washed over his tight fitting shirt. Alight with his shade, the sleeves of his lengthened and billowed out as it turned into a flowing robe of pure power. Crying still, he brushed his hand over his face and painted his aura across his face like a mask.

"Alexei," Nami shouted as her working closed around the white haired man's feet. "You can't. You have to stay with us. It is your duty."

He stepped back from her and through her aura like it was nothing but heavy fog.

"The girl. She will show you the truth I speak. She has seen that my mother has no end," Alexei said, his voice becoming something between a harsh whisper and a breathless scream. The mask of aura that covered his features hardened into a flawless version of how his face would look if he were asleep, and the leather patch that covered his other eye came free. "I will haunt you no longer. I am a ghost, but I will haunt you no longer."

I had never thought about what lay behind my guards blind. I had just assumed that he was like Precept Zetta. There had been an injury that could not or had not been healed in time to save his eye. Even thinking that there was nothing there at all did not save me from the shock of seeing what was.

"Autumn! Restrain him! If he goes we will never get him back!" Nami shouted at me as her ocean of aura began to rise up like a wave beginning to crest.

I might as well have been asleep or dead for all the good I did. Like the impossible rain that had been falling against the glass in the room upstairs, I froze.

"Hey." Anna whispered harshly as she gave me a little shake, but it was not help.

All I could do was stare at the scarred mess that was my guard's uncovered eye.

Like a simple drawing of a shining star, pale white scars marked his brow and eye lid in four different directions.

"Look at me, Namiana. See that she still lives." Whatever Alexei was turning into demanded as he opened his ruined eye.

Only for a moment, I thought that the walls around us had come down because the temperature of the hall dropped so quickly that it felt like I had gone outside with nothing to keep cold from me. Stark white frost swept out from my guard and blanketed everything in a layer of what looked like paper thin crystal.

Nami's wave slowed and froze before it could catch Alexei and all I could do was stand there.

Between the tufts of Anna and I's chilled breath, Alexei continued to change. Everywhere his transformation had turned his clothes to billowing robes became patterned and lined with his mother's icy blue. From the high collar that had formed around his neck, the lines spread up his sleeping mask. When they reached the place that his blind had been only moments before, the color flowed into the star shaped scars and everything became clear to me.

The manor guards in Erosette had used swords that had been laced with Rhiannon's power.

Auraments. The name of such weapons appeared in my mind from some long forgotten memory, but I knew it to be true.

My guard had said he was half a man. He freely admitted that Anna was right about how she thought of him. He had called himself a ghost. Whatever bond, oath, or binding that Precept Jasna had warned Arthur about, Alexei had taken it.

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He had become Katarina's knight, and the crystalline eye that stared out front the center of his scars was his aurament.

"She still lives," He cried as he pushed his cloaked hand into the grey stones of the wall like it was the surface of a pond. "And I am a ghost, but she still lives!"

Whatever he had become, ghost or not, the wall could not stand against him. He walked back into it and it rippled over him like water.

He was going, and all I could do was watch.

Even The Mother in Blue was powerless to stop him.

We would never get him back.

Just before he vanished into the grey stones completely, a sound rose up from the far end of the hall.

At first, I thought it to be the rain that had turned the already eventful night into the frozen mess it had become.

"What is that?" Anna whispered, both of us clinging to each other like our lives depended on it.

It couldn't be rain. There were no windows close enough to where we stood for the sound to reach us.

Precept Cherith turned her towards the singing stairs as the sound grew louder and louder.

I do not know if it was a working from any of the sorceresses in that hall or if the stress of it all had broken my mind, but everything seemed to slow.

Nami broke her working free of Alexei's frost and sent it washing out towards the masked man with drowning fury on her beautiful face.

What was left of my white haired guard vanished into the wall the moment before The Mother's wave could touch him.

A figure spun up from the top of the singing stairs and unfurled its wings before turning in our direction.

Grey dust, broken stone, and bursts of aura filled the air as a shockwave of force knocked Anna and I both to the ground. Instinct alone made me push her behind me and cover her with my body. She curled behind me and I felt the familiar cold of my azure whip come unfurling from my palm without the need to think about it.

Weight pressed against my shins, and I looked down through the dusty air to see my familiar standing in front of me.

"I am here, My Lady. Have no fear." Sam commanded in an impossibly low growl. The little arcs of lightning that coursed over his mottled blue fur whenever he felt the need to protect me jumped to the hem of my dress. They circled up my arm and down my chord before finding their way back to the big blue cat.

Just like I had seen Precept Zetta do before, all the dust and aura began to swirl into a stream that condensed into a small sphere in front of Nami's navel.

The portion of the wall that Alexei had sunk into was no more.

Locked around his icy robes and mask like a cage of bleached bone, two massive wings encased the white haired man completely.

Precept Jasna's split back cloak was draped over the ends of them and as she took Alexei's face into her hands, her wings flexed and lifted her up to match his height.

"Listen, blue boy. This is just like when we went to Erosette for Amoranora," Jasna said, her voice barely loud enough for me to hear. "I'm going to calm you down, you are going to sleep for a week, and then you will feel all better."

"Ghost," Alexei said in his strange, hollow, sounding voice. "Haunt you."

"In your dreams," Jasna laughed. She looked at him like he was not cloaked in his somber looking robes or wearing the sleeping mask. She looked at him like he was Alexei, just Alexei. "How about we take this off? I like you better without it."

Jasna brought her hand up and gently covered Alexei's aurament with her palm. As soon as the icy blue eye was blinded once again, all the frost that had filled the hall began to melt and fade away. "Go to sleep, blue boy."

Someone took my hand and I snapped my eyes away from my guard in sudden fear.

"Come, he is too strong for this to be done alone." Nami said as she helped me stand and pulled me towards the wings of bone that jutted out of Precept Jasna.

Alexei's voice was still not his own, but it had quieted some. "The rain. I have to stop the rain."

"It is already over. The school has been locked up, the guards in Hymneth have been warned, and all of the Precepts are standing watch. Everyone is safe, and she would not wish for you to go out in the damp. So let's go to sleep, alright? It is very late." Jasna said softly as her sky blue aura came to light against his face.

Nami placed her hands in the small space between Jasna's wings and sent trails of her ocean aura trickling up the precept's back, over her shoulders and down her arms as spoke. "Go to sleep, Alexei. All is well. You have shown me that."

"You deserve your rest, Master Alexei. We will care for you." Precept Cherith echoed the other sorceresses' words as she placed her hands on Nami's right and poured her aura into the collective working.

It was dark blue with just a hint of green and watching it run alongside the other shades was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

"Come, we cannot do this without you." Nami said as she glanced over at me.

A near infinite amount of things ran through my mind at her words, and I found myself unable to sort through them.

I would have stayed there, frozen and useless, if it had not been for Anna.

She put her hands on my back just like Nami had Jasna and pushed me forward. She took me by my arms and positioned my hands in the same place that Precept Cherith's were on the opposite side.

"Go to sleep, Master Alexei. I won't run away again until you wake up." I said honestly as I joined my aura with the charm and willed for my guard to rest.

Dark rooms, the slow warmth after a hot bath, cool sheets, and a yawn that grew into an irresistible stretch, I thought of it all.

My azure, Nami's ocean blue, the darkness of Cherith's blue green, and Jasna's brilliant sky all poured together into a charm that was so powerful that I could feel their will as well.

A sky filled with glimmering stars, the gentle rhythm of a stream flowing by outside a window, warm sand and the sound of waves, all of our thoughts wove together and Alexei's transformation began to fade.

The billowing hem and sleeves of his long robes turned to dust at their ends. As they fell away, the patterns of Katarina's power joined them and the cold that had taken the hall began to warm.

I felt so close to the other sorceresses, so together, but there was one soul in our chain of hands that had a power that was all her own.

Anna had no aura. She could not cast charms or create glamors. If someone needed a werelight, to be healed, or any other kind of working, my beloved would be no help.

But without her, neither would I.

She had pushed me forward, she had forced me to act as a sorceress should. I had power, I had stronger than I had ever been, but without her touch, I would not have had the strength to use it.

"Go to sleep, blue boy." Jasna said again, still holding his face with her hands.

The sleeping mask that covered almost all of Alexei's face splintered and cracked before streaming off of him all at once.

Tears still flowed from his one hood eye, but they were not blue like they had been before.

They were just tears.

And as Jasna wiped them away, the white haired man closed his eye, and fell back against what was left of the ruined wall he had sank into not very long before.

Jasna smiled and let out a slow sigh of relief.

We had done it together.

They had needed me, and with Anna's help, I had been a part of something good.

A burst of giddy laughter almost slipped out of my mouth but I bit my tongue. It had been so hard to get Alexei down, the last thing I wanted to do was wake him up again.

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