A convention to celebrate the future.

To work towards peace and prosperity.

To put old grievances behind and forge new connections.

Yet the buildings taller than Rayak's most outlandish estimates, dangling chandeliers like stretches of the galaxy, casting well-dressed and smartly groomed shadows onto the lustrous red brick were just too old. It paid its dues to conventions, to norms, to the power of aristocracy, to egos only satiated by the blood of thousands.

Expansionist. Imperialist. Everything to make the guests of the convention feel comfortable.

Rayak stuck to the edges of the convention building, where her already obscured form was further doused in shadow outside the chandeliers' reach. A form once useful for hunting, until modern society had called on her people to turn from subsistence to employment. Spies, contract killers, even the beginnings of a decentralised police force.

Her new assignment fit the bill in a sense. Although it did for the other side, too. Others lurking, same as her. Her contact had made assurances that no details of the plan had changed since she abandoned her post at Bankson Private Security.

She knew where they were, what their routes were. An early reunion would be the death of her ambitions, faint as they already seemed.

She focused forward, on the route decided beforehand, but the flashes of familiar forms distracted her. Spirits native to what was once Rhodsiva, with no indication of their allegiance as either Treyatasian or Neflemi, but it was perhaps that lack of distinction that bothered her most.

The briefcase swung back and forth in her maw as she watched them, wondering if she might see them die like she had her own.

Beyond the main banquet hall, where preliminary small-talk flowed like decadent wine, were the function rooms. From there, access halls and doors would lead to kitchens, storage holds and loading zones; a pair of doors on either side of the stage stood in the partition.

One of her people was by the entrance. Her singular focus on the one point allowed her to perceive him, but he had to attend the entire hall, including all the Aether signatures that came with it.

Rayak paused and lay close to the floor, thinning her profile as she waited.

The faint blip of an ending radio transmission. The guard moved on, likely ordered to rotate posts. A stroke of luck, bespoke tailored for her by her main beneficiary. Rayak continued unabated.

The hallways were thin, but again, she stuck to the walls and kept a low profile as servers whizzed by her, travelling to and from the hall with glasses, sometimes empty, sometimes full.

The polite commotion was a rapidly fading memory; the anticipation that came with seeing those responsible for her suffering washed away, and she replaced it with steely determination.

Minutes went by until the foot traffic in the surrounding halls diminished too. 'Staff Only' littered almost every surface, and soon, those signs evolved into 'Prohibited Area'. More guards, each rotated or turned away by a sudden distraction, parted the defensive line down the middle like slicing butter. Rayak travelled down that middle, riding close to the wake.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Her path terminated at a barrier. Flanked by armed guards was a pulsing wall of Aether manifest that, to her sixth sense as a Spirit, may as well have been a solid wall. It wasn't something her guardian angel could easily account for—it was a matter for her own hands.

Rayak set the briefcase down behind a corner and stalked the first guard. Both being Beaks made maintaining her stealth harder, but the Aether pull of the barrier was enough to overshadow her own.

She stood on her hind legs and opened her maw, locking it shut around the Guard's neck, tearing it open as Aether began leaking immediately.

The luxury of time did not exist for the second kill; she turned around to make it, but the guard already lay on the floor, throat slit open, much neater than her own kill.

Standing over the body was another Beak, dressed in a three-piece suit. His mask was almost too ordinary, with no luxury features whatsoever.

"Indigo," the Beak said in a low, almost robotic voice. It was their code word—between her and her contact if they were ever to meet.

The radio on the dying guard crackled to life as control made a request for a situation report. The Beak pocketed his knife, took off his own mask and swapped it with that of the dying Beak.

"Viges Crattac three-four, all clear, maintaining post."

The radio transmission ended, and the Beak dropped the deceased's mask to the floor. Once refitting his own, he spoke through the Aether.

"Do you have the package?"

"Yes," Rayak said, returning to the briefcase and picking it up. When she turned around, her contact had finished rummaging through the guards' belongings and had extracted something of a small tablet, the lines running down it akin to an inscribed magic pattern. Pressing it against the barrier, the wall of magic began collapsing.

"One minute," he said, gesturing for the briefcase, which she handed over.

The storage room was in shadow, the sliver of the open door casting light on a broad, ring-like object that spanned the height of the room and almost half its width. Copper, with pipes and wires weaving in and out of its frame.

"What is this?" Rayak asked. "This isn't a meeting room."

"It's a portal into Her Majesty's Forest, scheduled for use during the opening ceremony."

"Why are we here? You said we'd plant the bomb in a meeting room."

Her contact opened the briefcase and worked the machine inside. "What do you think?"

Rayak didn't like her own answer. Panic set in.

"This wasn't the deal."

Her contact barely acknowledged her as they shut the briefcase closed.

"I know," he said before moving to a control panel screwed into the circular portal.

"I'm not doing what you say."

Her contact pressed the patterned tablet against the copper until, under a faint blue glow, the tablet disappeared. Sparks of blue raced along its circumference, already blackened from past use, and encroached ever inwards to complete the circle.

"This device destroys Aether, and it is large enough to kill every Spirit in this building, including your...former colleagues at Bankson."

He strolled over to the edge of the portal as the forest behind it continued to gain further clarity. He placed it down by the rift, and stepped back, offering the floor to Rayak.

"Thirty seconds," he said. "For you to decide if the lives of your people are worth revenge."

"You're bluffing! That'—"

"Thirty. Seconds."

Banging against the door. Shouts for surrender.

And she had done everything right. Everything. Every step of the way.

The blank mask regarded her with all the empathy offered to a variable in a science experiment. Nothing behind the eyes, even for a Beak.

The portal finished forming, and the pounding outside reached an interminable crescendo. They would all die in a matter of moments anyway.

All in thirty seconds.

Hesitation. Regret. What she had kept at bay by simply always moving forward now infected her judgement; clouding the value of victory, or what she believed victory was. She would have the same blood on her hands as those she hated.

Better a stranger than one's own. That's what it came down to.

Rayak approached the portal and picked up the briefcase, throwing it into the Queen's forest, watching it disappear behind shrubbery tinted blue.

How many wars she had just avoided, how many she had just started — none of that went through her mind in the moment. Only a blunt, sudden pain in her side, and losing balance as she fell through the portal.

Landing on gravel, she instinctively rose to her feet but took another second to process what had happened. In that second, the portal failed, shattering into pieces like a glass mirror.

"No...no no no no—"

The briefcase. The briefcase! Somewhere in the shrubs. Somewhere Nearby—

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