The doors to the Throne Room had not yet opened, and Aurora was already certain she was going to embarrass herself.
She stood slightly behind Julian's left shoulder — not deliberately, she had simply drifted there — and tried to compose her thoughts into something resembling professional dignity. The attempt was not going well. The corridor was silent and entirely too long, lined with silver wall sconces that casted narrow paths of light across the stone floor, and there was nothing to look at except the doors at the end and Julian's back, and she had already memorized both.
Duke Partridge, who had not stopped talking the entire walk to the Throne Room, stood on the other side of Julian. Aurora wasn't all too sure whether he knew how to stop talking or not.
The assignment is routine; she had to keep reminding herself. Protection detail. She had done harder things than this. She was—
The pressure hit her before she finished the thought.
It was not pain. It wasn't even that uncomfortable. It was more like walking into a room where something enormous lived — a weight in the air that held no element she could easily classify on the Resonance Wheel. It pressed against her Heartbeat the way deep water presses against the ears: Persistent to a fault.
Raw, was the only word her mind could produce. This was raw mana.
She had read about Mana Shards in the Compendium. She had even theorized about them in her own works — the fragments of a frequency that predated the Resonance Wheel, the primordial resonance that had never learned to organize itself around a soul. She had written about what it might feel like to stand near one, academically, theoretically, with the careful hedging of a scholar who had not actually done the thing she was describing.
She was approximately correct, which did not comfort her in the slightest, because the source of this pressure was behind a door she was about to walk through.
It was a person, most likely. Which was worse, somehow, than a Shard. A Shard did not look at you at least.
"Open them." Julian commanded the guards as if he were the King himself. His ego may be that of a King's; however, he most certainly was not one.
The guards opened the grand doors and stepped aside without a word. Julian walked through as if the doors had opened specifically for him, which, Aurora reflected, was probably how he experienced most doors. Duke Partridge followed with the authority of a man who had walked into this room many times before and expected to many times after.
The Throne Room was silver and gold in a way that made Aurora feel like she was approximately the size of an ant in a garden. Chandeliers ran the length of the ceiling, glittering gold, their light falling in pools across the reflectively polished floor. The walls bore tapestries she did not look at because she was too busy taking note of the lack of guards stationed inside.
Off the record, then. Whatever this was, the King didn't want anyone outside the room knowing about it. That was either reassuring or deeply alarming. Aurora had not yet decided.
Behind the Throne, carved into the wall, pale in stone, was a statue of Saint Aurora — Patron Saint of Confidence and Humility.
Ironic, wasn't it? These traits were pretty much the exact opposite of hers. Looks like Aurora could look forward to never being a Saint when she kicked the bucket.
Atop the Throne sat King Aldous Cayne, Third of His Name, and the pressure in the air that she had felt in the corridor was, if anything, more present in here, which meant it was emanating from the figure standing beside the Throne. She peeked from behind Julian's coat. A young woman in white, similar in age to Aurora, even if she wore it differently. The same years arranged into a far more composed looking individual than the clinically anxious Aurora could ever be.
Princess Alara Cayne. First Princess of Astoria. The picture she had been given back at the cabin had been accurate and also insufficient.
Julian descended to one knee at the base of the steps. Aurora, half a second behind him, followed. She had almost managed to do it gracefully.
The Duke, she noted, did not kneel. He inclined his head — a deep, respectful nod that somehow managed to convey both deference and independence. The King's expression shifted very slightly at the sight of him. Not warmth, exactly. Something more comfortable than warmth, something Aurora couldn't quite place her finger on.
"You may stand," the King said.
His voice was the voice of a man who had been listened to for twenty-three years and had stopped needing to demand for respect. Clearly, this made his well-practiced, because Aurora was well and truly terrified now. Julian stood. Aurora stood.
"Not you."
Julian stepped aside. Aurora collapsed back to her knee. She had read, in three separate court related texts, that prostrating oneself before a monarch was considered the appropriate gesture of absolute deference. She had thought about this abstractly. Experiencing it and the unrelenting atmospheric weight of whatever was bleeding out of the Princess was a different matter entirely.
She bit her cheek. Almost enough to draw blood.
The King observed her for a long moment. She had the particular sensation of being assessed by someone who had assessed a great many peoples.
"Lord Albright has told me much about you already," he said. "The Arcana Witch." So, we're just letting anybody off the street know her secret now? Aurora silently cursed Julian out. She had been trying to make sure she could count on her hands the amount of people who knew, but now it seemed as if she would have to start counting on her feet at this rate too.
"We cannot simply have an Order member follow my daughter opening," the King continued. "That would require explanations I am not prepared to offer." He settled back slightly, the cushion of the Throne making a soft noise. "You will enroll at Isaria Academy. A late enrollment — a student from outside the capital, connected through an old friendship between your late father and Duke Partridge of Aurelio."
Eh... a student?
"Already arranged," The Duke said from beside her, with the ease of a man who had no worry in the world. "The paperwork is in order. As far as anyone is concerned, I've been meaning to do this for years — honoring an old debt to a good man." He glanced down at Aurora with that boyish smile, the one that's barely left his face since she had met him in the library. "I'll need you to not make me look bad."
She was fairly certain that was his version of reassurance. Despite him never having met her father, she appreciated his compliment of him.
"You will keep your name," the King said. "You will not keep much else."
Aurora bit her cheek, her knee was starting to hurt from kneeling too much. However, she was too afraid of being executed to stand up, so she tried processed the information given to her instead. A cover as a student. That was manageable. Uncomfortable but manageable. The Academy meant people. People meant conversation and conversation meant she wanted to crawl into a small room and die alone.
The Academy also meant... she couldn't publish her magnum opus. If she still went through with it, more and more attention would be placed upon her until she eventually explodes.
"Because you willingly accepted this assignment," the King said. Yeah, she was most certainly "willing" to do this job, right Julian? The King continued, "I assume you have no objections."
N-No, Your Majesty." Her voice came out as steady as it could. "None."
The King's gaze moved to the Duke. Their eyes met with a comfortable silence that showed years of friendship.
"Cassian," the King said.
"She'll do well," the Duke said simply, as if he were stating a fact that he had already seen the outcome of. "You have my word on it."
The King accepted this with a small nod and stood. He turned to his daughter and pressed a kiss to her forehead with a warmth that contrasted the formality of the room.
"She is all yours now, my honey bun."
Alara's eyebrow twitched at the nickname. Not in front of the guests, Father was written all over her face. She waited until he had gone before stepping down from the dais. The pressure in the air moved with her until it and her were close enough for Aurora to feel visibly uncomfortable.
The two men standing on either side of Aurora exchanged a look — the look of two men who knew this was not their part — and one of them took a step back. Julian stayed as still as furniture, a very decorative and snooty piece of furniture that believed it belonged front and center more than likely. Or at least that was Aurora's thought on it.
"Aurora," The Princess said. Not the Arcana Witch, she never mentioned the title everyone knew. "Please stand."
Aurora stood. She was not significantly taller than the Princess. She had been briefly hopeful that she might be. She was not.
Alara looked at her with piercing eyes that did not feel like assessment so much as simple attention — the way someone looks at a cute cat. Her eyes were the same as the picture. However, the picture had not captured what it felt like to be looked at with them.
For some reason, despite the discomfort she felt, Aurora had no desire to back away from the close proximity. Her body wouldn't let her. What kind of spell did the Princess place on her?
"You can feel it," Alara said. More of a fact than a question.
Aurora looked down, as if she were just convicted of a crime she didn't mean to commit. "Y-Yes."
"Most people can't." She said it without any particular feeling, the way one reports on the weather. "Senior Bureau practitioners, sometimes. Very few Order members. You felt it before the doors opened. I know you did."
She noticed that. Aurora churned this over in her head as she kept her eyes downcast. The Princess was far too observant for Aurora's liking.
"The corridor," she confirmed. "It's quite significant."
"It's getting worse." Still the same tone as if reporting on the weather. Alara placed her hand over her heart subconsciously with a calm that was not distance to the matter but something more akin to acceptance. "It has been for two years."
The Resonant Heartbeat was the mechanism by which the soul maintained its presence in the world — Aurora had written over four thousand words on exactly this point. What she was standing in front of was a soul doing that with a broken mechanism. Raw Magical Life Essence with no frequency to shape it. A Mana Shard that breathed and thought and had apparently decided, at some point, that equanimity was more useful than despair.
"I want to propose something," Alara said. "And I want you to hear me out before you react."
"That phrasing," Aurora dared to peak at the Princess, "suggests I am going to react."
"You are," Alara agreed pleasantly, a warm smile appearing on her face. "A Resonant Pact."
Aurora took a step back and raised her arms slightly in defense. She thought about every possible way she could escape the Palace without becoming some fugitive. She found none.
A Resonant Pact. Criminal prosecution under Association Charter. Tier One Forbidden Art. Progressive Heartbeat dissolution, loss of selfhood across years, severance consequences that the Compendium described in language that was, for a dry institutional document, remarkably evocative of suffering —
"I know what they are," Alara said. Apparently, Aurora had been speaking out loud, much to her dismay. The Princess looked at her with the patience of someone who had already wrestled with this argument and had come to terms with the outcome. "I know what they do. I know the texts." A brief pause, enough to take a breath. "I have had rather a lot of time to read."
"The Compendium describes it as —"
"I know what the Compendium describes." Her tone wasn't sharp, just certain of the facts that she knew already. "The Compendium describes a pact between two Heartbeats. Two frequencies synchronizing and blurring toward each other over time until neither is distinct." She tilted her head slightly, the same warm smile on her face. "I don't have a frequency."
She doesn't have a frequency. The implication should've been impossible considering Aurora was speaking to a person and not a Mana Shard but here we are. A standard pact created erosion because two identities pushed against each other. If one party had no frequency to impose against another Heartbeat, then the standard mechanism of dissolution did not apply. Aurora's Heartbeat would not be meeting an equal, it would be providing a pillar. A shape for something that had none.
And in doing that —
"My mana would organize around yours," Alara said, following the thought with an uncanny calm that suggested she had done this calculation many times prior to this meeting. "It would use your frequency as a catalyst. A reference point for me." She paused, probably to add dramatic effect. "You would gain access to my reserve. Which is —"
"Substantial," Aurora said faintly, her lips pursing as she thought about all of the uses for such a deep mana pool.
"An ocean," Alara said, without any vanity. "It has nowhere to go and nothing to do. If you draw on it, it relieves the pressure that you've felt since you walked in here. It would give me some time to breathe." The calmness in her voice was ruined shortly after when she tapped her head with her hand and grinned, "Well, only hypothetically. We might both very well die instead."
Aurora looked at her like she was crazy. The Princess had both thought this through extensively and had come to terms with the fact she may die, Aurora had, in fact, not come to terms with this yet.
She groaned internally before thinking of her father and his catastrophic willingness to go to the edge of what the world permitted when he believed the reason was sufficient. His manuscript, which she had found among his papers prior to his death, the theoretical framework for naturalistic magic that the Church had called heresy and that she had read six times before she understood half of it, was a direct result of him taking risks to further his research on magic. She thought about what he'd do when faced with a princess who had no frequency and an ocean of mana that was slowing killing her.
She already knew what he would do. So did she.
She looked down at her feet for a brief moment before finding the courage to look the Princess in the eyes. "The blood requirement," she played with the hem of her dress and tried to speak steadily. "Mutual agreement... from both parties."
"Yup." Alara's expression had not changed from that cheeky grin of hers. Placing her hands behind her back, she turned her gaze to Julian.
"Mr. Julian, you wouldn't happen to have a knife, would you?"
Julian produced one from his coat pocket with comment. Why did he have that in the first place? To stab and kill Aurora if she messed up this meeting?
He drew blood from both of their palms with the efficient care of a man who had been asked to do unpleasant things all of the time. Why did pacts always have to involve blood. It was a stupid concept that was far too outdated for Aurora's liking. In the end, the goal was to transfer Magical Life Essence and the same could be done without drawing blood nowadays.
Julian took a step back, which was the right instinct as this next part wasn't for him.
From the corner of Aurora's eye, she could see the Duke watching with an expression far more subdued than Julian's neutral facial pattern. It was peculiar for one to have an expression less expressive than the Demon of the Order's, but alas, Aurora had found a man who could accomplish just that. He did not look away, nor did he say anything to stop the pact.
Alara held her hand out. Aurora looked at it for a moment — the thin line of red across the palm, the complete absence of performance in the gesture.
She held out her own.
Their palms pressed together. It was an immediate an uncomfortable feeling, like rubbing soap against the hand. At least the Princess seemed totally alright with this, which made Aurora question whether she had done this type of thing before.
"By our blood," Alara said, "we form this pact." Her voice was even. The voice of someone who had made a decision and was not afraid of it. "Bound by fate for as long as we both live."
Aurora repeated, albeit a bit less confident.
"Through our mana, we channel it as one, so that our Heartbeats may beat as one." Alara's grip tightened slightly. "I hereby accept this pact as valid."
"I hereby accept this pact as valid."
The effect was not theoretical. Aurora had half-expected something dramatic — light, sounds, a shift in the air, possibly an explosion. What she got instead was a shift within herself. As if a second instrument was introduced to a piece of music she had been playing alone.
And then the ocean arrived.
It was the only word for it. The mana reserve that opened to her was not a reservoir or pool, rather a depth with no visible bottom, pressure without a ceiling. It was a quantity that made her own considerable reserve feel like a cup under a waterfall.
The ambient pressure in the room eased a bit.
It was subtle. She would not have noticed the change if she had not noticed the presence to begin with. It did not disappear, only lightened, but that was better than nothing.
Alara exhaled. She did not appear to notice she had made it.
Their hands parted. Aurora looked down at her palm — clean. As if the pact never occurred.
"Congratulations are in order," Alara commented. Her voice sounding far less tired than it had been before. "We now share a bond stronger than any conventional relationship could display." She placed her hands over her heart and closed her eyes, briefly, before opening them again.
"Our Resonant Heartbeats. Our souls. They now beat as one."
Aurora looked at her — this composed, direct, physically unguarded girl who had spent the better portion of her life deciding whether something like this was worth the cost and had apparently decided that it was.
Their souls now beat as one. Aurora grimaced slightly. She had known this girl for approximately twenty minutes, and she was already the closest thing to family by technicality.
She bit her cheek.
"Do you... need me to call you Alara in private," she asked, the name sounding like poison on her tongue, "or may I work up to it."
The Princess looked at her for one moment and then gave the same warm smile Aurora was becoming accustomed to. It was the smile of a girl who had not expected to find anything funny today and had been wrong about that.
"You may work up to it," she said. "Take as long as you need."
Behind them, barely audible, the Duke exhaled — a sound much akin to relief.