Sitting on Your Thumbs

Tariche was tinkering with a cross-sectioned specimen, laying on his belly atop them. On his own, the Doctor would never have been able to get ahold of a study like a Dravir. A single pinky flick from those towering lizard guys would shatter his ribcage. Fun for sure but highly unproductive.

That was what his new buddies at work were for. Helping Tariche do no harm while being able to conduct his research.

A stained single page document slipped over the incision he was digging through.  

“If it isn’t a love letter, I’m not interested.” The Doctor, speaking with the end of his scalpel pinched between his teeth. He nudged the tarnished document to the side with his elbow, pulling out until he was only wrist deep inside his hobby.

“You haven’t been working,” Aco grabbed Tariche, hauling him off of the body and let his instruments clatter on the floor. She didn’t put him down, keeping the Doctor at arm’s length lest he slip away. “And don’t call this mess work!”

“Aw Aco, I’ve been toiling over this slab for hours carving the frostbite off of all of you. Look at that!” He tilted his head towards the buckets shoved into the corner. “The rat infestation takes better care of those than the garbage chute.”

“Ugh.” Aco tossed Tariche into his chair, retrieving the piece of paper as she did.

“Oh, I see. You want me to do your work,” Tariche wafted the air away from his wrinkled nose. “I can smell your work from all the way across the base. How desperate are you?”

In all honesty, the smell coming from the interrogation room was a lot better than the sickly sweet rot festering in Tariche’s rooms. A few of the other members had actually mistook the acrid smoke for unseasoned steak left on the stove too long.

Seeing what was actually going on had spoiled more than one appetite, all for the better of course. It helped Aco weed out the yellow-bellies.

“Remember last week?” Aco pinned the paper to Tariche’s chest. “We hadn’t seen you for days.”

“Fourteen to be exact. The two of you off on an all carnage-paid vacation, leaving poor me alone with bad company.” The Doctor glanced at the occupied beds, checking if the dead cared enough to object. As per usual, Tariche was not so lucky.

“Felt like fourteen minutes to us,” Aco rolled her eyes. “Before Solan and I even got back, you had bandages out, stiches ready—“She gripped the Doctor’s shoulder and leaned heavily on him. “—and the antidote.”

“You sent me a letter.” The Doctor shrugged his trapped shoulder, placing his spectacles on his nose to looks smart reading the crinkly document.

“It was from Oliver about replenishing the medical supplies and just the supplies,” Aco wasn’t deterred by Tariche’s feigned nonchalance. He always tried to appear snooty and smart to get trouble off his back when being himself would have done the job perfectly. He really made no sense to her, from a personal standpoint all the way to the meta-physical.

“Just from that, you knew he had poisoned Solan before the effects kicked in,” She scanned the messy room, cluttered with very specific tools in particular places on the floor and beds. “We didn’t just have the antidote on hand, sitting out with a needle already filled. You had to make the antidote from scratch.”

Pursing his lips, Tariche squinted at the smudged lettering. He remembered how Oliver had reacted angrier than Solan or Aco had when the Doctor had blindly stabbed Solan with the needle.

Too bad for Oliver.

“I read someone’s writing, I know what they know,” The Doctor said, shrouding his ability under what was true for everyone. “I meet them face to face, I get to know more. That’s how this works,” He looked up at Aco, tapping a spot right beneath his eye, stars sparkling bright. “I’ll give you the hard facts but I couldn’t tell you why Oliver wanted Solan dead.”

‘What,’ ‘Where,’ and ‘When’. Sometimes ‘How.’ ‘Why’ wasn’t possible.

Still, immediately being able to tell What and When was already too much. Barbed disgust curled in Aco’s chest. She wondered if the Doctor was intruding on her head too.

“Why?” Tariche blinked slowly at Aco, reminding her that he had the same confused face on when she got into an explosive argument with Solan for letting himself be open to harm.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Aco tilted her head back and made a beleaguered sigh.

He wasn’t a real mind reader and as long as Tariche couldn’t tell the twins’ feelings on the matter, they were still strong.

“Solan got into a fight with Oliver when we first joined the Rose. It’s been years and he’d been nursing that grudge the entire time.”

“Ah, being petty,” Tariche nodded, taking his attention back to the paper. “The number one trait of an ideal Rose Petal.”  

Not exactly being able to disagree, Aco ran her fingers through her hair. There was a day left to get results to please the Commander.

At this point, she was distressed enough to bribe a magical creature into helping them.

“Alright, I’ll get to it.” Tariche said, flipping the document over.

Immediately suspicious over the Doctor’s charity, Aco was about to turn her interrogation techniques to the Doctor but he started sniffing the document.

“Is this his?” Tariche asked, running his nose over the corners. “Did he pee on it?”

Aco gaped at him, quickly putting a meter between them.

“I don’t know, did he?” She crossed her arms in front of her face. Blood was the one good thing to come leaking out of a body. Tears and snot were the downside of the full package.

“He might as well have. I can’t read him with this trash,” Tariche crumpled the page and shoved it into his front pocket. “Well? Deliver me to the patient.”

“Absolutely not.” Aco placed herself between Tariche and the door.

“Why? You can do a lot worse than I can,” The Doctor slunk up to Aco and leaned his arm on her shoulder, having to go on his toes to do so. Aco could barely believe him. “Alls I need is a good look at his face, whatever may be left of it.”

The hands of the analog clock on Tariche’s desk ticked loudly in the silence of Aco’s consideration. She and Solan had twenty hours left.

“Fine.” She shoved Tariche off of her shoulder and headed for the hall, the Doctor bouncing after her in excitement. Those remaining twenty hours were going to feel like twenty years stuck with Sparkles.

“Stooping so low, Aco. What’s so special about the prisoner?”

Unfamiliar with this individual base, Aco followed the wisps of smoke rather than the directions in her pocket.

“You know everything, Doctor. Take a minute and figure it out for once.”

Tariche had to have known which prisoner of the Thorn was worthy of custom-made magic-inhibiting shackles, and a prison made of steel and stone. He was once one of King Alteon’s trusted knights with a background drenched in magic, around since the days when the Crown belonged to a different family. Jaania was close to the King now but she wasn’t privy to every whisper and whimper between the royal family.

Sir Kenway may have been half-elf but he was as close to family as a loyal servant of the Throne could get. Tarnishing his rapport and framing him as a deserter under the Rose’s nose had taken a tremendous amount of effort on the Thorn’s part.

They needed to be a step ahead, if not at the very least in step with Jaania in case Akanthus slips up and the Thorn gets found out. Any dirty secret Sir Kenway knows could be used as blackmail against Jaania or to ruin her relationship with the Crown.  

“How come you’re both in such a rush? The Knight’s not going to die the moment the Commander returns. The Commander isn’t that good,” Tariche caught up to Aco, smiling at a pair of Thornhunters hugging the wall to avoid making eye contact with them. “Didn’t he take on Sir Kenway in glorious combat, smashing those timeless good looks five feet into the dirt?” According to the rumors. “He should have the honor of playing with his prey.”

“Commander Theano entrusted me and Solan with interrogating him!” Aco snapped, stopping at the door to the Knight’s holding cell. “We have to make him talk.”

Anything less than remarkable would garner that cold, distant stare, demarking boredom towards a nothing that didn’t deserve even critique.

Fear fluttered in Aco’s heart and she tugged on her collar like it was strangling her.

All of the enthusiasm bubbling at Tariche’s seams drained and his expression went blank, mirroring the face in Aco’s nightmare. It just about made Aco jump out of her skin.

“Hmm,” The Doctor turned to face the door. Above all else, he preferred his pain to others. More so for little monsters with grape flavored eyes. “I won’t waste time asking why.”

Aco was about to whack him over the head and into the interrogation room but a scream scrambled her thoughts. The smoke leaking out of the door grew blacker as the room shook.

She and Tariche ducked into the room to find Solan beside himself in anger, pumping a lethal amount of voltage through the chains trapping their prisoner to his upright slab. The yelling had come from Solan, infuriated by the lack of any reaction whatsoever to an amount of pain that made ice dragons squeal.

At some point, Sir Kenway had been incredibly handsome. His long silver hair and the charm of his sophisticated elfish features would have been jarring to see atop the seven foot body of a juggernaut. The half-elf was made of muscle, scar tissue, and steeled determination.

Despite having more burns than skin, none of that had changed.

There was no magical ability hidden in Sir Kenway’s green eyes but they bore into Tariche’s, as if he saw through to his bones.

“Solan!” Tariche shouted at the one other person he talked to in the Rose, meeting the Knight’s gaze head on as he read. “You’re not going to say hi? Shut that thing off and come chat with your best friend.”

“You need to cool it, Solan. I wanna tap in.” Aco shot at her brother, giving him a different reason to stop. “Doctor’s here to make sure he won’t pop halfway in.”

Muttering a slew of curses, Solan flipped the lever back to zero.

The whirr of the machine slowed as it powered down and the steadfast knight was as still as he was when it was cooking his innards. Merely raising a brow, Kenway spoke.

“The longer I remain trapped here, the more I realize that Theano only has enough wit to indoctrinate children to his cause.”

That almost got Solan to slam the lever back to max but seeing Tariche’s eyes brighten, stars twinkling in the dark, made him back off.

I am a prisoner of the Thorn.

The Thorn is an extremist faction of the Rose that Jaania does not know of.

They want information about the royal family that Jaania could never know.

There is no way to leave this place alive.

Yes, yes, the Doctor had read this on every other visitor, be they victim or fellow Thorn, that came in. Tariche was merely following this line of boring logic to find the juicier details. The letter from Oliver took hours on a hunch to get through but face to face with an objective in mind? It won’t be long now.

“Are we good for hot water yet? I smell like expired liquid smoke.” Solan passed his twin a handheld switch. The knowledge that Aco had received some sort of button registered in the Knight’s mind and Tariche made note of that.

There are routes in and out of Swordhaven that a select few know of.

Princess Victoria leaves through them frequently without King Alteon knowing.

The Princess is not fond of the Rose.

“Don’t feel too bad. I heard about the freak from old Silloh. You know how he used to be a knight serving the King?” Aco chattered loudly to bring the attention on her instead of Tariche. “The rest of them had to work until they had one foot stuck in the Styx to become knights while this guy got a title thanks to his magic side. You can’t run a message from the coast to the Capital without some kind of cheat.”

“Sure didn’t help him when he fought the Commander,” Solan sneered at the shoddily stitched up gash across the prisoner’s belly. The strings were barely holding his guts in. “Keep him comfy and I’ll try to save a few drops for you.”

These children are around the age the Princess was when she started disappearing.

The twins are dedicated to the Commander.

Tariche began to frown, hearing Aco and Solan continue to banter as the latter stepped out of the room.

The boy pushed the generator to its limits.

He did not notice me stretching.

“You try so hard to please a man who wouldn’t be satisfied if Lore was offered to him on a platter,” Sir Kenway spoke, startling Tariche. The twins were pointedly ignoring him now but the half-elf continued to speak. “You tried to the point that you helped me.”

“Aco?” Tariche touched her shoulder.

“What, you finished?” Aco asked, annoyed.

“The King and his knights are sworn to protect the innocent. Even those outside of our borders. I am sorry we let you slip through the cracks.” Sir Kenway rolled his shoulders.

The realization hit Tariche before his eyes could read the Knight.

“Lock the doors!” He yelled at Solan.

“I will make up for it by freeing you from Theano’s clutches,” The Knight announced. “Starting now.”

The children’s eyes grew at the Knight’s impressive show of strength. He stretched his arms, warping the metal of his bindings until they snapped. Solan watched the pieces rain on his sister and the Doctor. His hand hovered on the switch outside the room.  

Sir Kenway all but walked out of his ankle restraints.

In a frantic attempt to make the Knight talk, Solan had fried him to the point that his restrains had begun to melt. It wasn’t by much but it was just enough for the giant to free himself.

There was no way Aco and Tariche would be able to make it out of the room in time, let alone escape the monster’s grasp.

They were all too shocked to flee. That instinct shamefully didn’t register until Sir Kenway had grabbed Aco’s arms, hurling her into the back of the room. Solan was about to ignore Tariche’s shouts but Aco landed with her feet against the wall. She leaped on to the slab, brandishing her weapon.

“Close the door!” She shouted and Solan was shaking his head well before the command had flown from her mouth. “Please!” Don’t let me be the reason for us both being dead.

Without thinking, Tariche let Aco’s plea push him into the Knight’s way, watching as she jumped at the back of the man’s head.

Squeezing his eyes shut in anguish, Solan activated the locks and five feet of slammed shut. The door had moved like a guillotine, separating the twins and the Doctor.

If this had at all ruined what Sir Kenway was planning, he wasn’t particularly upset about it. He plucked Aco out of the air mid-jump by the neck, slowly bringing his gaze back to the Doctor as Aco snarled and kicked.

“Do you want me to take a time-out in the corner?” Tariche smiled nervously. Under incredibly similar circumstances, the Doctor would have been fine with the situation. Titillated even, if it not for the fact that Aco was trapped and the only things he had to restrain the pair were—

Sir Kenway knelt to be level with Tariche, watching the Doctor’s shoulders bunch anxiously.

“Apologies but I can’t let you run free.” The Knight softened their voice like he thought it would soothe Tariche into complacency.

Even if he had a plan unfolding in the back of his mind, Tariche couldn’t understand the kindness this Knight was offering to his captors. It was unneeded and frankly, quite patronizing.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it family-man. You must be worried sick,” Tariche crossed his arms behind his head. “Play your cards right and you might get to see all four of your families.”

A beat passed where the Knight stared at Tariche, blankly perplexed.

“I get it,” Tariche explained himself. “Sorry we had to ruin that set-up you had going. A wife and daughter at home, with three Princesses to hanging to your arms at work. Not that I’m ragging on your wife or anything but humans get wrinkly so fast.”

Tariche doubted Sir Kenway had eyes that could turn red but boy, he was close to pulling a miracle.

Still in his clutches, Aco stopped kicking around as the veins in the Knight’s neck began to bulge.

“As long as the wife and boss don’t know, there’s nothing wrong with having a roll with the young ones. Geez, I hope you at least waited until they were–”

The Knight punched Tariche so hard, he blinded an eye and bounced his head against the wall.  

---

“Don’t worry, Solan,” Silloh, the best suck-up the Thorn had to offer, tried to console Solan as the other Thornhunters gathered outside the interrogation room in strict formation. This may have been the first time a hostage situation has happened but they weren’t milling around unprepared. The moment the two pronged plan was laid out, they dispersed to their stations.

“I have to say that this might be overkill,” He patted the equipment Solan had rolled in front of the door. He pressed a button and the mechanism stretched its cord taught in a near instant. The gears made an especially loud and ugly noise when dug his thumb into the switch; a sound that his sister would know, and by extension, Tariche would too. “Knife-ears has nowhere to go.”

“You touch me and the rest of your arm is going the same way your frostbitten toes did,” Solan snapped, seeing Silloh’s hand retract from the corner of his eye.

What would Silloh or any of the cannon fodder know about overkill? He doubted Silloh, who ditched his ‘hard-earned’ knighthood the moment he found an outlet for his spite, cared about anything as much as he and Aco did for each other. It had been less than an hour of them apart and if killing everyone in the hall meant being reunited, he’d hunt down the bugs snacking on the leftovers.

“Stand back!” A Thornhunter nearby spotted something slip out from under the steel door.

Solan sped to the door, grabbing for what turned out to be half of a familiar stained page. Large letters written in smudged blood spelled the High Commander’s name.

Fury and fear were a terrible combination that turned an action like tearing up a letter into Solan mimicking a wolf ripping apart a small animal, snarls and all.

“Isn’t that fine?” Silloh called out, safely from afar with a buffer of several Thorn members in between. “We aren’t inconveniencing the Commander. He’s coming here anyways so I say, give our prisoner a time! The Commander will sort this out.”

Flicking his wrist, Solan threw a knife straight at Silloh’s forehead. It stabbed through his helmet and nicked the idiot’s skin barely more than a paper cut would and he still cried.

“Commander Theano will hear none of this!” Solan was in front of Silloh in an instant, dragging the grown man down to his level. “We will handle this ourselves and the Commander will only know our success!”

“B-but—“

“The Thorn is a weapon. No weapon bows,” Solan hissed. “And imagine if Commander Theano does find out about an escaped prisoner, trusted by the Crown, who knows our faces. He’ll burn this place to the ground and bury its ashes.”  

“With Aco and our medic inside?” Silloh’s eyes widened.

“Without hesitation,” Solan threw Silloh aside. “And I’ll make sure all of you burn with us.”

Silloh’s Adam’s apple bobbed, nearly falling into his stomach while a shutter shook the Thornhunters within earshot. It took nothing short of courageousness to approach Solan, starving for blood, with the message their base had recently received.

“Solan? We got word from the Commander,” The shuddering tiny voice of a man about twice Solan’s height got his attention.

“He’s early.”

An intense hush fell over the corridor of Thornhunters, devouring their nerves.

Turning to his sleeved ace, Solan ran his hand over the barbs. The blade had teeth like many of the weapons Solan favored.

“Fine, we won’t have a day.” Leaning against the launcher, Solan crossed his arms and dug bruises into his arm.

---

The message Sir Kenway had passed to the outside returned with a reply on the reverse side.

“Fourteen hours.” The Knight read aloud, sitting with his back against the door. Exactly where they needed him to be.

Good, Solan was smart to the unwritten message Tariche had sent with the one Sir Kenway had forced him to write. He couldn’t imagine the half-elf being squeamish about tracing the letters with his sizzling fingers. Probably wanted Tariche’s wobbly handwriting to get a threat across.

Now, where did that leave them?

The interrogation room didn’t just have a slab for the prisoners to sing on. One side of the room was occupied by a table and two chairs for spectators. Tariche had sat himself there and with the quiet analog clock that Sir Kenway had been forced to watch count the final days of his life down. He hadn’t stopped Tariche from moving there, happy to have him and the clock as far away as possible.

What was Tariche going to do with his arms chained behind his back anyways?

That left him with Aco, who was sitting on the floor at the opposite side. ‘Fourteen’ hours was going to be a long time silent. Aco could stare at the floor for that long, biting on her tongue like she did at her dear old papa’s galas.

As long as no one provoked her, that is.

“What brought you to the Thorn?” The Knight lifted his chin instead of sleeping like Tariche had hoped.

Thankfully, Aco left his words abandoned in the air. She wriggled in her chains, feeling for her pockets.

“Are you looking for this?” Sir Kenway opened his palm, revealing the handheld switch Solan had passed to her on their way in. He must have taken it while he was chaining her up. “There was another base like this not far from Amityvale’s Doomwood. Before I could take my findings to the King, an earthquake swallowed any proof of its existence. I suppose that was another Thorn and this was the cause.” He held the switch up.

Aco said nothing, continuing to glower as the sound of her grinding teeth filled the gloomy room.    

“Silloh wore his hands down to the bone to become a Knight and discarded his hard work on a whim,” The Knight continued to speak over Aco’s scorn. “He wouldn’t stay knowing his life was in constant danger. Only the most dedicated to the cause would,” He paused, watching Aco sweat and struggle with her stoic façade. “Only the two of you would.“

This time, Sir Kenway wrote the message himself. He slipped the remaining bits of the yellowed page, the one Tariche had planted on the floor, under the door to inform the rest of the Thornmembers about the failsafe Theano left the twins in charge of.

If only he would stop at that.

“Why—“He began to press Aco again.  

She and Solan had trained themselves meticulously to react in the same way no matter what stepped into their way. Joy came in the form of starting fires and rough spars. Fury took the same costume. Fear was all loud shouting accompanied by anything that could shatter. Tied up like she was, Aco showed her intense distress in bared teeth and stricken wide eyes.

“Do it! Press the button and put all of us out of our misery!” Tariche begged, slamming his head against the table, cracking his spectacles. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, pouring over his chin, and pooling on the table. “You’ve been rambling for five whole hours! I can’t take it anymore!”

Sir Kenway and Aco glanced over at him, disconcerted by the sudden violent outburst. The knight creased his brow, squinting at the clock by Tariche’s head. The vessels in one of his eyes had blown, coloring his sclera a spectacular red. Yet, he could still see that five hours had indeed elapsed.

‘Five hours have passed.’

‘My perception of time has been altered.’

Tariche might have misread his intentions earlier but these facts were very true to the Knight. The seconds were passing and the Doctor kept counting.

Immediately, Tariche’s good mood soured when the Knight turned back to Aco. She was clenching her teeth so hard that they were about to crack.

“The way you’ve been blubbering, I don’t think you can see this through,” Tariche sputtered, desperate to make a bad call. “Theano’s not coming to get us. We’re gonna be locked in forever unless you make the right choice. Make Theano’s life just that little bit harder and kill us.”

“Tariche, what’s wrong with you!” Aco shouted, about to throw herself at the Doctor to do it for him.

“Save yourself from the pointy eared kids and let Alteon take care of his surprise grandchildren,” Tariche panted, watching the Knight’s breathing hasten. His jaw locked tight but his chest heaved like his a bull drowning in blood. “Die a hero in your heart, not a four-timer hiding in the royal court.”

Quicker than a blink, the knight marched over to the Doctor with a length of chain and slung it around his neck. Gripping both ends of the links, he yanked it taut. The makeshift bruised Tariche’s skin, forcing his eyes to bulge out of his skull, tears still streaming over his crooked smile.  

Ah, the delightful burning white-hot pain of taking it too far.

“Wait!” Aco stopped him, having gotten up to her knees. Sir Kenway looked over but kept the chain tight, confused and somewhat revolted by how Aco seemed to be in more anguish than the Doctor was.

Lip chewed raw, Aco finally gave up and relented.

“If you have to know why, then sit down.”

The Knight didn’t take time to deliberate. He allowed the chain to slip off of Tariche’s shoulders, avoiding the shower of spittle from the Doctor’s hacking and coughing.

“Aco—“ Tariche struggled to stop himself from dry heaving. “—What are you—“

“My brother and I aren’t from Greenguard.” Aco began her story the moment Sir Kenway was sat down in the middle of the room right in front of the door, distancing himself from Tariche while giving Aco room to speak.

“All of you think this patch of grass is the center of Lore, where all the bad mages wear black and wallow in cemetery puddles. You don’t see outside your borders. Those same mages are holding ruling seats in country councils. My father was one of them.”  

Her words dripped with bitterness and Tariche hated this. He hated how Aco could barely keep herself from spitting and how Sir Kenway calmly listened, fully aware that Aco did not want to share. Facts were hard and cold, with physical pain lingering only until wounds mend. Aco and Solan’s were the kind that would go on forever, with fangs sunk deep into their necks until the day they snap.

Too much of a good thing was always poison.

“The kids here are lucky. Their parents only wanted boys. My father kept splitting heirs with different wives trying to make one of them spit out a baby bursting at the seams with magic. Out of his entire harem, numbering in the double digits, my mother was the best. She even covered both bases. A boy and a girl, brand new and already drained.”

“My father, in his infinite mercy, allowed my mother to comfort him and give us time for our latent magical abilities to bloom. We grew up empty with one of the few things that made us happy, being able to look at each other and see ourselves, infuriated daddy dearest. If we were inflated with magic like you are, father would have loved us. I bet he’d tote us around like dogs. Instead, our worthless selves had the audacity to look so much like him and he couldn’t handle anything so close to him being failures.”

Solan’s eye had been taken by accident when he tried to disfigure Aco when using them in a shooting range hadn’t been enough. That much, Tariche knew. Not why and how it could have easily been different.

“It reached a tipping point and the rest of the story, you could probably make up on your own. We tried to hide, it didn’t work, so we went on the run. Father didn’t bother chasing us, thinking that we’d be eaten alive without magic to protect us. Now? Magic’s going to be why all of you are going to be sent to death’s realm piece by piece.” Finally, Aco managed a sneer.  “Why would you care though? If you grew up there instead of me, I’m sure you would have been a Prince.”

Sir Kenway didn’t argue. Why would he when that was the truth? Instead, with an ugly glassy sheen over his green eyes, he said “You won’t find what you think you lack from the Thorn, least of all their leader. There are many in Lore who will help you. If you inform Jaania of the Thorn’s existence, then—“

“You’re not answering my question.” Aco cut in, having none of the cookie cutter pleas she could get from next week’s prisoner. “Then let me help, you selfish prick.”

The Knight bit down, surprised by the insinuation as Tariche clawed at his thighs, glancing at the muted clock.

“You don’t care unless we or anyone like us are in your face with the problem. You’re assuming that as long as it’s not happening at home, it doesn’t exist,” Aco’s glare sharpened. “Commander Theano is the real hero here. More than Jaania, the King, anyone. He doesn’t have to know us to help us.”

At that, Tariche had to let a tired sigh escape his nose. A thief could steal from a murderer, leaving them to starve on the streets, and accidentally avenge the victims. But in the end, they were looking out for themselves. Meanwhile, the twins were actually working for Theano. The least he could do was remember which one was which.

“Theano is using you. He can’t be your fath—“

Oh no.

Tariche was illiterate when it came to the mood of a room but there was no way he was going to let this idiot go there.

“Why are you telling him all of this?” Tariche asked, genuinely curious. “I’m your Doctor and you leave me in the middle of conversations.”

On the brink of boiling over, Aco retorted “You never strangled a friend to make me talk!”

Tariche sat straight up in his chair. His black and blue eye even widened at the meaning behind Aco’s outburst.

“A friend?” Tariche gasped, the stars in his eyes sparkling brightly.

“Oh god damn it.” Aco cringed, head sinking deep into her shoulders.

The Doctor had managed to fully capture Sir Kenway’s attention, except it wasn’t what he said that got the rise out of his captor. Getting so excited over Aco’s accident made the star in the Tariche’s eyes actually emit light.

“A-ah…” Aco stammered, trying to salvage the disaster. “Has it already been fourteen hours?”

Looking to the clock beside Tariche, Sir Kenway saw that Aco had somehow managed to take almost half a day to tell her story. He mulled over their exchange, wondering if he had fallen asleep partway through, letting the quiet settle back into the room.

Quiet?

He stared at the two hands of the clock. One to tell the hour, another to tell minutes, and none to help him count the seconds.

“You escaped the chains!” He got to his feet.

“Ok yeah,” Tariche turned his palm over, having wiggled an arm free. He twirled his scalpel in his hand, glad that he needed one this sharp to cut through dragon bone. “Honestly, this was such a stupid plan. How did Solan expect me to make you think fourteen hours passed in fourteen minutes? We haven’t seen each other in fourteen days but it felt like fourteen minutes to him? They gave that pee paper to me after all that time and then I give it back? Cool that Solan got what I was trying to say with that but I was going to understand that he did if he had, I dunno, just wrote down four hours? And a squiggle next to it? I don’t know. Gods, this is so dumb.” He gave up on trying to kill more time.

“Why?” The Knight demanded, straying towards Tariche instead of staying by the door.

Grimacing at his tiny nettle of a weapon, Tariche doubted he could drive Sir Kenway back into place.

“Because the Commander’s coming!” Aco yelled, hauling the Knight’s attention back to her. With a smug sneer, she said “He could take you out without the jump, monster. Just like the first time.”

Heart leaping in his chest, Tariche held his breath as Sir Kenway walked back to the middle of the room, blasting past it to grab Aco by the collar.

“Your Commander did not defeat me. There was no glorious duel to be won in the first place,” He dragged Aco to her feet, the sympathy slipping into the room’s drains. “I received word that the Thorn had my family captive in our own home, threatening to harm them if I didn’t turn myself over willingly. There is not one honorable bone Theano’s body or any of his underlings.”

Three booming, stiff knocks on the steel plated door echoed through the interrogation room. Hope lit in Aco’s face, smile deprived of any of her constant scorn and bloodlust.

“Was your story true?” His tone was cutting, suggesting that the Knight didn’t think that was the case. “Then if Theano is really outside, a hero like you says he is–” He began moving Aco to the door, meaning to use her as human-shield.  “—we will see if he will be willing to cut through you to get to me!”  

By the time Sir Kenway turned around, Tariche had already beaten him to the door.

“It’s an imposter!” The Doctor shouts, knees wobbling under the weight of the chains clinging to his magic ridden body. “Don’t listen to her! Theano would never come to help us!”

“No, he’s here! After all we’ve—He has to be here!” Aco shouted, heaving in a ragged breath.

“Don’t you still have the bomb switch?” Tariche panted, taking a burdened step towards the Knight and an increasingly frantic Aco. “The jig’s up, so come on! Press it!”

“That isn’t true!” Aco protested, writhing wildly in her chains to escape. Her eyes were closed tight, fighting for composure. “The Commander is here!”

“Not even if Aco had the cure to magic hiding in her mouth,” Tariche grimaced, frustrated over Sir Kenway looking between the two of them like an idiot instead of moving. “You want to know who told Theano about the dishrag you left at the bottom of the sink too long? Oh, I’m sorry. You still call that disease ridden thing your wife?”

He was so close! The Doctor could see the Knight’s hold loosening on Aco and his gaze sharpening on the real villain of his story.

“That’s right! Theano’s not here, but I am! I’m the one that killed you! I’m the reason why you’ll never see your wife and three side—“

Sir Kenway’s kneed Tariche in the stomach, crossing the room so fast that the Doctor had first thought the chains were finally getting to him. Bent almost completely in half over the Knight’s, every thought was thrown out of the Doctor’s head and just as the room began to refocus, Sir Kenway’s elbow plowed into his back, sending him smashing into the ground.

Though she was used to seeing far more brutal treatment, usually being the one doling it out, Aco couldn’t help but cringe. Aco kept her back glued to the wall, legs aching to run there, to make a stupid move despite knowing better.

Then, the wet coughs became ragged laughter. Tariche was going to make his tormentor regret not going for the throat.

“I’ve gotten hit harder than that, and those people liked me.“ Tariche, prone and broken, turned his head to smirk, opening the split in his lip wider. “Who are you imagining? Brittany or Victoria?”

The Knight stomped on the back of his head, crushing his disgusting mouth closed on the steel flooring. If anything, that just made Tariche’s giggling louder.

“Traitor!” Sir Kenway grabbed him by the neck, dangling him like a noose would. “Magic lives in your bones but you would throw your lot in with not only the Rose, but the Thorn?”

Tariche was struck dumb by the allegation.

“A skilled spy could have found where I had hidden my family. A spy posing as a Doctor would have found out about my wife’s illnesses,” He squeezed, watching Tariche struggle to keep his eyes from rolling back. “But my feelings for the Princesses were to be taken to my grave! Yet, you knew.”

Ceasing all movement, Tariche went cold.

Ah.

The only insults Tariche had made up to enrage the Knight had been true. And it had sold him out.  

“Ew.” Tariche wheezed, black spots invading his vision. He barely noticed the door flying open and his body being torn out of Sir Kenway’s grip.

Blood splattered on the Knight, stock still in shock.

Pinned to the slap Sir Kenway had once occupied, Tariche squinted at the huge harpoon stabbed through his utterly destroyed shoulder.

Outside, Solan stood at the controls of the harpoon launcher. All alone in the hall, his jaw fell open.

All of that baiting to get Sir Kenway in just the right spot, wasted over an entire miscalculated inch.

“For the love of—“Tariche put all of his pain into his scream. “Pull it out! Shoot him!”

Solan had been in the midst of doing so but hearing Tariche made his hand freeze over the switch.

“Hurry!” Tariche’s voice reached a screeching pitch, gripping the harpoon.

Sir Kenway was already on the move. He broke into a sprint and toppled over Aco, kneeling under his nose. Trying to get on his knees, the back of the harpoon slashed the side of his head as Solan cracked it back.

Still bound by the chains, Aco threw her knee at the Knight’s chin. Teeth bounced on the floor but she wasn’t done. Aiming for the same spot, Aco made him dodge into the launcher’s line of fire.

“Bullseye!” Solan pumped his fist, seeing the harpoon stuck in his target’s abdomen.

Except, there was no bleeding.

Aco stayed crouching, eyes widening as she began to realize that Sir Kenway had caught the harpoon with his bare hands.

Stepping on its cord, the Knight severed it with the deadly sharp harpoon.

So now, he was armed.

“Your fellow Thorns have abandoned you,” He noted, amazed that his warning about the explosives had managed to not just dissuade a few of them to leave, but all. “In the end, they were more loyal to themselves then they were in such a destructive cause. Don’t stop me–” he pointed the tip of the harpoon at Aco’s crouched form. “—and you’ll be able to join them.”

Sweeping the harpoon around at the change in the air, the Knight swung at Solan. His weapon clashed against Solan’s sword, metal shrieking against metal as the boy slid on his knees. He bent back, ducking under the harpoon to his sister’s side. A single slash from his sword, a deadlier form of the alloy from Tariche’s scalpel, shredded the chains.

“He took the trigger,” Aco pulled a dagger out of her boot. “The King won’t find out about us if we blow him sky-high!”

Sir Kenway was already in the hall, rounding a corner, but he heard Aco and sped up. If he could get to the woods, anywhere with cover, they would never find him.

Hope went from a flicker to a blaze, burning strong even when the twins caught up.

He spun, slamming the shaft of the spear into Solan’s side. His arm hooked on the bar, clamping down and swinging his weight under the harpoon to yank it to the side of the cramped hall. Aco was right behind him, sprinting and jumping at the Knight, knife poised to take out an eye.

Immediately, Sir Kenway heaved himself backwards, taking Solan with him. Aco fell short, throwing her knife instead. It cut the Knight’s ear, embedding itself into the door he had crashed into right next to his head.

The hall had been open the last time he checked, only now being cut off. There was no time to dwell on who did that, with Solan catching the Knight’s kick. It made the boy throw his sword, which Aco caught mid-arc, slashing down at Sir Kenway’s trapped leg.

Her blade struck the ground and Solan had been rammed against the wall, rattling his skull and loosening his hold. Quickly kicking Solan off, sending him rolling away, the Knight braced the stolen harpoon’s shaft against Aco’s unrelenting blows.

Every clash forced Aco to back up, more from her furious slashes colliding against an immovable pole. He was using her own strength to keep her at bay, steadily advancing on her.

Grunting with the effort, Aco tried to bat the harpoon away, digging a deep nick into the pole. Her blade was stuck and it took a single uppercut to her chin to throw her backwards.

In the chaos, Solan jumped off of Aco’s outstretched cupped hands, making a grab for the switch right as the duel reached a fork in the hall. The Knight bolted, feeling Solan’s fingers brush against the trigger. Taking the blunt end of the harpoon, he stabbed it down at Solan, denting the boy’s armor, and fled.

One bend after another, Sir Kenway ran into locked doors and cut-off bends with no obvious markers. He lost count after several identical dead-ends, always hearing the pounding footsteps of the twins not too far behind.

He almost came to a screeching halt when he passed the interrogation room, alarmed at how he managed to loop back to the exact spot with the amount of locked doors he ran into.

No, escape was getting farther and farther the longer he lingered. Sir Kenway forgot the matter and instead, began followed the trail of blood streaks leading out of the interrogation room.

True to his vermin nature, the traitorous Doctor refused to be rid of, crawling to safety as rats would in the flooding Swordhaven sewers.

Sir Kenway found him, slumped against a door unlike any of the wall sized gates that had blocked his way. His fingers were curled around its spoked handle, keeping the building locked like a vault.

It was a shame he couldn’t have dispatched the Doctor himself. At the very least, Sir Kenway could reveal the dealings of his fanatical sect to the crown.

“Is knife-ears gone yet? He always has to make everything so hard.”

The Knight heard a tired sigh from behind the door directly next to him.

“Why couldn’t he have turned left first?” The door slid open and the former Sir Silloh paled when he came face to face with his old superior.

Suddenly, the amount of locked doors in a fully occupied and operating base made sense. No one had abandoned the building. They had gone to lock the doors in a very specific way, likely scrambling when he took the wrong turn.

Because they were leading him.

“Hi there,” Tariche greeted the Knight, back on his feet with a beaming smile. Sure his shoulder was a gored mess but, free from the magic-inhibiting chains, his pretty face was clear of bruises if not smeared with a little bit of red. “Let me show you out.”

Throwing his weight on the spoked handle, Tariche groaned with the effort to open the exit. A blast of cold air streamed inside, casting a layer of frost on the walls and floors. It was no wonder the Thorn members would rather stay inside and risk exploding. The blast was quick and painless compared to the agonizing freeze outside.

Injured as he was, Tariche could only manage a sliver of an opening. The force of both the twins hammering into the Knight’s back made up for him. Their combined power shoved the gigantic man stumbling a couple of steps on the snow, and over the sheer drop to the churning, freezing cold waters below.

Stabbing the harpoon into the cliff edge, the Knight hung there, knowing he wouldn’t make it up in time to get back inside.

“I’ve been scraping frostbite off of my patients all day,” Tariche leaned outside of the base, his white coat fluttering in the storm’s wind. His skin healed as fast as the cold was killing it. “Trust me, only ice elves can survive an extended walk in the nude out here. Slightly less extended when they have to swim. We checked.”

Solan and Aco joined him at the door, safely behind him, hoods pulled over their heads just in case.

“I’d say close your eyes and let the sleep take you but, I hate you. Please ride this train out for as long as your half-elf, half-whatever will allow.”

Already, the Knight’s fingers were losing all feeling, blistering black as the most extreme cold the territory of Dragesvard had to offer cracked them.

“You made some big mistakes, elf,” Aco gave him a mock salute. “You thought we were underestimating you; that we’d be dumb enough to think a harpoon was enough.”

“You thought we were a bunch of nut jobs, about to blow ourselves up over a nothing like you,” Solan snickered, full out cackling when Tariche showed off the trigger he stole back from the Knight on his way out. “But the worst of it, you felt sorry for us.”

“Big guy like you could have crushed our heads like eggs but no. You listened to our sob story and pulled your punches. You looked down on us,” Aco grit her teeth, letting her salute fall into a crude gesture. “Fuck you.”

Sir Kenway’s left wrist crumbled, leaving his arm to fly to his side. In what would be the last minute of his life, the Knight looked to Tariche, still wondering why. Easily, it could have been the Doctor stranded outside so why?

The Doctor couldn’t read minds but didn’t need a stressful power like that to see what Sir Kenway wanted.

“What have you done for me lately?” Tariche, face twisted in a frighteningly familiar way, answered the Knight’s question with another.

“Aco was right about you. Unless it’s right in front of your face, not trapped freezing on a cliff far away, you won’t help. Not even when it’s one of your own.”

New information registered in Tariche’s mind and what is was clearly showed in the Knight’s creased brow and frown. How he managed to pull an expression like that, caked in frost, was a testament to how much he must have wanted them to suffer.

“You poor children.”

Tariche’s lips parted and no words came out. From his reaction alone, the twins could tell that the Knight saw what he said to be fact.

They yanked Tariche inside, banging the door shut on what became silence.

A winner is an object hated for its height, beauty, strength. A mountain could be destroyed in a fit of rage because it didn’t bend its knees or press its lips to the dust. And it would have still won.  

There is no victory that warrants the pity that turns a mountain into a hill.

“Did you do that on purpose?” Aco asks, wrenching Tariche out of his daze by accident. She was tense, arms crossed tightly at the sight of the hole in the Doctor’s shoulder.

His face wasn’t a mess anymore and no one outside of the twins had seen the beating he got from Sir Kenway.

It was such a small gesture but Solan and Aco were standing around him, blocking his shoulder from view.

“Almost all of it,” Tariche sighed, taking off his tattered coat to drape it over his wound. “I blindsided in the middle by my own bluff of all things. I was the one who couldn’t get him to take that extra step to the left so don’t worry about this,” The blood was already seeping through his coat. “Give me a day to nap this off and you’ll have a bundle of that creep’s secrets under your bed.”

“Stay away from our room,” Solan tsked, resting his hands on his hips and bowing his head out of exhaustion. “Look, how do you want to get paid? I know you don’t do anything for free.”

“What are you talking about?” The Doctor asked, tilting his head in bemusement. With no trace of smugness to be found in those ethereal sparks, the twins knew he hadn’t stolen from them in the middle of the chaos. “I did want something for the trouble but I already got it, friend.”

Aco and Solan, understanding him perfectly, reacted like he had spoken in a completely different language. They bit down, inhaling sharply, eyes widening to the point that their pupils constricted.

“See you tomorrow.” Tariche walked off, saving the twins from awkwardly meandering around the subject.

But now, they were close enough to stop him. Maybe even beat the crap out of Tariche to staple that gross hole shut.

“Aw, did you really kill him without letting me get a last word in too? Come on.” Silloh interrupted them, having snuck out of his hiding place to tug on the exit’s spoked handle. Not strong enough to open it by himself, Silloh pretended to feel around it.

“If you hadn’t distracted Commander Theano, we would have eviscerated you starting an hour ago.” Solan said, curt.  

“Where did you lead him? We have a lot to report.” Aco added, fixing her posture next to her brother.

“About that,” Silloh’s mouth twisted, testing the other spokes to see if they were looser. “The Commander left a while ago. He took his research and asked for you two to send the briefing later.”

Turning their backs to the nobody, the twins stared down the empty hall.

The sound had abandoned the sterile fluorescent lighting and there was no stench to color the still air. No one around to ask.

Nothing.