RP:Double Double Toil and Trouble

Part of the Larketian Fault Lines Arc

Summary: The witch Valrae curses Queen Josleen to hallucinate nightmares, and in the process possibly hurt herself. Initially Josleen believes she is seeing things, but quickly suspects she is being hexed, and for good reason given the political climate in Larket. She sends for King Macon and Headmaster Percival at the Academy of Magic. Around the same time, Valrae loses control of her own spell and the hex turns on her threefold and she suffers nightmares worse than that which plagues Josleen.

The headmaster can trace the hex to the source, but to do so Josleen must continue suffering under the curse. The trio cross Larket, enter the Eternal Forest, and in the enchanted woods Percival's trace of the magic gets crossed with false signals. They find a recently-homeless (not Valrae) in a lean-to in the forest. Believing her to be guilty of the hex, the Rage Knight bursts through her door. Valrae, who is nearby in the forest and still suffering from her own hex, witnesses the Royals barging in on the wrong witch. The wrongfully-accused witch is arrested and yet Josleen's hex does not break. The terrified Queen runs from her nightmares and trips and tumbles in the forest, suffering superficial wounds, but also begins cramping in her abdomen and bleeding between her thighs.

Back at the fort infirmary (and with the hex dispel), the King and Queen receive good news: the queen is with child. And the miracle child is safe, the bleeding was just a scare. The Royal Couple is overjoyed and celebrate the news. In private, Macon contemplates the boldness of the witch's attack and decides he must send the opposition a strong message. He decides the with will be publicly executed, without trial.

A Cave in the Eternal Forest, and Fort Freedom

She'd fasted for two days. She'd bathed in the Vibrance river on the night of no moon and filled the hours before sun rise with gathering and cleansing her tools. Now, as golden rays of sun slanted through the trees and bird song began to stir the air Valrae gathered her power. The witch pulled energy from the dirt under her bare feet, from the tips of her fingers that brushed the earthy wall of her small cave. The magic she was prepaired to do was secretive, dark, and very old. It required privacy and seclusion. A circle of salt surrounded her. Astrophyllite, Diopside, and Onyx crystals formed a pentagram inside, the woman standing tall and cloaked in it's center. At her feet lay a black mirror of rainbow obsidian, a mortar and pestle, a red candle, a bundle of belladonna and a wickedly sharp athame. Her eyes, dark and dangerous as a forest shadow, opened suddenly as she spoke an ancient word. Emerald flames arched around her, called from the air by will and word, and formed a circle beyond the white line of salt. The witch lowered herself before the mirror, robes of red pooling around her but never reaching beyond the center of her star, to sit on her knees. In the mortar the woman ground her chosen ingredients. A spider's eye, the tail of a serpent, the wing of a beetle and the leg of a toad. She chanted as she worked, filling her cave with dark power, until it was reduced to a boiling black tar. The witch plucked the stick of belladonna up, brought it to her lips and blew to ignite it in errie green flame. She let it burn for a moment before fanning it out. The sweet, deadly herb filled her circle in thick swirling grey clouds without leaving it. She lit her candle, called more dark power up with a word and pulled a bundle of hair from a pocket in her sleeve. It wasn't of the gold and honey curls that rest atop her own head, no. Valrae had paid a pretty reasonable penny to a less than clever ladies maid of the queen for this powerful treasure. The hair she held now was that of Josleen, Queen of Larket. Passing it through the flames she whispers,

"A sacrifice of blood is made, A price of self to be paid, With anger and malice I do call, Nightmares to wake, Sanity to fall, The queen atop her high throne, Stumbles down now to shatter bone, Darkness of my will to grow, As above, so below."

The circle of fire and the single flame of her candle burst into new life as power saturated the air thickly. Valrae dropped the unburned hair into the bubbling tar mixture, snatched up the athame and scored her palm with it. Her blood flowed in a scarlet ribbon into the mortar. Now, as the words were spoken and the ritual observed, Josleen's own hair would act as compass and anchor for the witch's dark spell. It would find the other woman, wherever she might be, and surround her. Through out the morning it would coil around her mind with the deadly art of a snake. Hardly noticeable at first. Was that movement in the corner of her eye? Whispers in the empty air? The sound of a wasp behind her head? It might gradually worsen as the spell's coil tightens. The flowers on a nearby table might crawl with spiders, a pen might writhe into a deadly snake. Beetles might pour out of a servants mouth. Valrae could watch all of this through her black mirror. The rules of this spell were this: None of the images can harm the victim, that would be for them to do to themselves. It can only last as long as the caster's own will. The jinxed might spy the caster's own image in the hallucinations. (Hence why Valrae is hooded though she is working under ground.) And if the victim manages to unbind themselves from the spell of their own will, the curse will be reflected back to the caster three fold.

Valrae's black mirror offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of the Royal Couple. The King and Queen sit at one corner of a long table enjoying a multi-course, mouth-watering breakfast. Josleen dons a silk, hand-painted robe imported from Vhys whose color perfectly complements her radiant skin and hair. She looks like an animated doll--money will do that. Macon wears casual comfort clothes, which may be a first for Valrae who has likely only seen him before in armor, even at his own wedding. The couple chats happily when suddenly the egg's yolk on Josleen's plate seems to wriggle as if something writhes beneath the thin, milky membrane. Josleen clutches her stomach and gags daintily into her mouth. Macon arches a brow and looks at Josleen with a little concern, and a lot more hope. A sly grin slowly spreads across his lips. Could it be? Morning sickness? Is she...? Josleen smiles disarmingly at Macon, a little sadly, too--no, she doesn't think she is. The eggs look fine now and she regains her composure. Macon still looks hopeful as he excuses himself from the table, pecking his wife on the lips goodbye, squeezing her hand over her shoulder as he goes. Josleen lifts a newspaper from the table and flips to the opinion columns first. As she reads an article about the danger witches could pose, and how a reasonable and rational society should react (spoiler: King Macon's doing a B+ job according to this columnist, not enough policing), she suddenly feels as if she's being watched. A shadow moves across her periphery. She glances over her shoulder. Nothing.

A servant enters the room to clear the table, and a plumper-by-the-day Gigi follows the servant after a successful round of begging sausages off the kitchen staff. He trots over to his mother and drops his head in her lap. Without lifting her eyes from the page, she drops a hand onto the dog's head then suddenly jerks it back up and gasps! She felt warm blood and matted fur, but Gigi's head is fine! The poodle's tail wags slowly, confused. She smiles and scratches him behind his ears, thanks the servant, then rises to start the day. Enroute to the Royal Bedroom she passes a nursery that Macon had built as a surprise for her birthday. She visits it daily, obsessively, always fantasizing about the day she'll be a mother, and just as often despairing that that day will never come. She walks over to the crib and stares into the bed. Her half-elf terility is a worse curse than any faux beetles and spring-loaded snake gags that Valrae could devise. Macon's false hope at the breakfast table has stirred that lifelong grief. Her shoulders sag and she drops her head, eyes closing as she tries her best not to succumb to despair and ultimately failing. She weeps. Gigi whines at her feet, licking anything his tongue reaches, mostly her leg. Suddenly she feels something sticky, warm, and wet between her legs, she looks down and sees blood, blinks, and just as quickly its gone.

The initial shock wears off and she quickly begins to suspect she's been hexed. Few people would reach that conclusion this quickly, but you don't have a meteoric rise like Josleen without leaving a wake of enemies, some of them witches. She's been hexed before--not in this exact same way, but she's been hexed. In fact, her past experiences with witches have in part fueled her willingness to look the other way when witches suffer small indignities. She was made to suffer indignities by witches, as have friends close to her (Valrae knows of one). Even more importantly, Larket is having a moment with witches, and her paranoia of witches is at an all time high, and with good reason. The monarchy has made enemies in the witch community. However, this initial suspicion that dark magic is afoul is not yet strong enough for her to alert Royal Mages and the King. She tests her theory. She walks to the bedroom (massive, two walls of floor to ceiling windows with views, gaudy and expensive), ignoring a buzzing above her head, and looks straight into her vanity's mirror. She's read in fables, and had confirmed by the Witchcraft Research Department at the Academy, that mirrors play an important role in witchcraft. She stares into the mirror, but sees nothing. She draws the massive curtains over the windows and lights a small candle on her vanity and peers into the dimmed mirror. Is that? She squints at what appears to be a hooded figure.. maybe? Or is it a shadow?

Through the smoke, in light tinged emerald from her fire, Valrae watched the images that rippled on the surface of her black mirror like reflection on water. Without pulling her dark eyes away from the mirror she wrapped the wound she'd opened in her palm. King Macon's casual image is jarring one. The idea Valrae has come to associate him with is one clad in steel and power. It was disconcerting to see a more mundane and human side, the kind that took breakfast, a royal breakfast that was filled with more food than some of her people might see in a week, with his wife. But Valrae's own humanity was left untouched and unmoved at the sight. Instead, it stirred only thoughts of vengeance in a heart that was growing cold and dark. Josleen's was not so off-putting, donned in silks and glowing with the beauty privilege could provide. The witch watched as the curse slowly rooted in the Queen's mind. It spurned quiet looks between the powerful husband and wife that Valrae couldn't make sense of until breakfast had passed and the king's image faded from her mirror. Until Josleen was standing in the nursery.

The dark power Valrae called was pulsing around her now, drawing out the worst parts of the witch's own heart until shadows of rage and anger eclipsed the compassion there. Whatever regret and understanding was stirred from seeing the other woman suffer in a nursery empty of life was smothered by darkness. She didn't even blink at the illusion of blood though the parts of her heart that were being choked with black would have bled with sympathy. Even as the hungry power cornered off the part of her mind that was screaming the witch leaned closer, her flames rising high enough to burn the earthen ceiling of the cave. As the curse had rooted in Josleen's mind, the power had spread through Valrae's own and corrupted it. Though she'd been meticulous and prudent in her planning, Valrae had lacked experience with the overwhelmingly and intoxicating effects of aggressive, black magic. She'd been overly ambitious in her spell, had called forth power far greater than necessary for a simple hex. The power she'd attempted to harness was now controlling her. Locked in her own mind, she watched as if she were a serpent in still waters. There was an obvious shift in the Queen as she moved from the nursery. A swear slipped passed her frowning lips when the other woman stood in front of her mirror. A bolt of fear went through Valrae's stomach as she jerked back, away from her own mirror. Time seemed to slow after that, while she watched as Josleen drew the curtains and lit her candle. The witch jerked away again, moving her bandaged hand to pull her hood down lower. As she did she tipped the mortar. The boiling black substance hissed across the exposed skin of her wrist and the face of her mirror. A wail of agony and fear burned her throat as the spell slipped completely beyond her control and the fire spread.

When Valrae loses control of the spell, the room suddenly darkens to Josleen, and Josleen alone for the hex afflicts her mind, not her environment. Every shadow stretches ominously towards her, and move of their own wicked volition like wraiths. Without warning the perfume bottle on Josleen's vanity tranforms a serpent that lunges and snaps at the Queen's throat. She bats the hallucination away and runs towards the service bell hanging on the wall to ring it frantically. The bell erupts into a swarm of beetles and Josleen forfeits ringing for help in favor of shouting for it. She runs into the hallway, past the nursery, into Augusta's, (Macon's mother) room and shouts at Augusta's handmaiden to send for Headmaster Percival at the Academy, and to tell the King that the Queen needs him--urgently! The stunned handmaiden hesitates, looking to Augusta for permission, but Josleen snaps, "Go! Now!" Augusta scoffs, but Josleen hears a cackle of an eerie, inhuman pitch. "Really, Josleen, you look hysterical. What, did you find a rat in your room? As I have been saying all along, the maids here don't know how to clean properly." As Augusta speaks Josleen sees a weasel wriggle slowly up her mother-in-law's throat, then claw and chew its way out of the side of her mouth, right through the wrinkled, gaunt cheek. Instead of screaming, Josleen gasps into her palm and backpedals out of the room. "Josleen?" Augusta calls with a hint of concern and a little bloodthirsty glee that Josleen is not hallucinating. (Deep Augusta thoughts: Could her daughter-in-law have finally cracked, and thus here, at last, is her chance to ship Josleen off to an asylum and push a more suitable wife on Macon?) "Don't!" Josleen gasps as she darts off back to her bedroom to wait for Macon and Percival. Presumably Macon arrives first, as he travels a much shorter distance. When Macon arrives he'll find Josleen sitting on the very edge of her chaise, bent over her knees, face buried in her palms to shut out all the hallucinations. Having been cursed like this once before (by the undead creature Revan), Josleen is able to weather the nightmare with some wit about her, though that may not be apparent from the outside. Gigi sits at her feet, looking with concern up at his mother/owner/companion/everything (who is, let's face it, the best--deep Gigi thoughts). Augusta leans on the door frame, arms crossed sternly over her chest, watching Josleen suffer through what appears to be a mental break. When Macon enters, Augusta speaks first, "Oh, Mackie, I don't quite know what to do with her. She ran into my room, screaming at the help quite rudely, ordering them to find you and that mage, the one from the academy, Per--Par...? That one. I tried asking what's wrong, but she won't speak to me. Heavens, I don't even know if she can hear me."

Macon is half casually dressed still and half in armor. His legs and feet are covered in the tarnished silver plate of The Rage Armor, while his upper body is clothed the same way it was this morning at breakfast. This betrays that he was either getting ready for his daily training, or was some way through it already. The armor slows him down slightly while he races through the fort and castle to the royal chambers with the Rage Axe slung on his back. He dodges some staffers nimbly, and knocks others aside. When he reaches the room he continues past Augusta while raising a brow at her testimony, and pushes Gigi aside so that he can drop to one knee in front of the seated half-elf, putting himself at roughly eye level with her. He places one hand over one of hers to move it away from her face so that he can examine her, “Wha’ is goin’ on?”

Percival is summoned in his office at the academy around the same time Macon arrives at Josleen’s side. He isn’t given very much information and appears to take his time getting ready to leave. (Putting on his ‘going out’ headmaster’s robes that hang near the entrance to his office.) Once he sets foot out of the academy however, he is the pinnacle of haste. He probably only takes one step to move from the entrance of the Academy of Magics to the entrance to Fort Freedom, as a howling gale lifts him up from the ground and pushes him forward the moment he lifts his foot. Once inside he jogs along with a guard as he is escorted to where he is needed. No matter what scene he walks in on, Percival is straight to the point and quick to diagnose the problem. As per usual the magical prodigy can’t hide his enthusiasm while he describes the type of magic he is starring in the face to those who can’t see it near as well, “She is under a… spell.” He chooses his phrasing carefully there, avoiding words like ‘hex’ or ‘curse’ that are earning specific connotations here in the Hard City lately. “It is being cast remotely…” His stare drifts off, away from Josleen towards the southwest corner of the room. “Stopping it at the source is preferred but…” He does his best to explain to these people so... uh… inexperienced with magic, that he can only trace the magic so far from the source or the target. Josleen will have to accompany him as the magic being cast on her appears as more of a compass needle pointing in the direction of the source rather than a solid thread between the two...

Valrae's own ring of emerald fire, once meant to be protective, had closed in around her. It was only a hair's breath away from the hem of her crimson cloak now. The witch still knelt on the floor of dirt, clutching her hand in anguish and watching with wild, dark eyes as the bubbling black mixture destroyed her precious mirror. Her only connection to Josleen was lost and so she was left unaware of the danger that Percival poised. The cloying smoke of belladonna was thick enough to choke her now. Sweat was beading on her forehead from the suddenly trechorus flames. The dark magic she'd unleashed was it's own force now, as destructive as a hurricane but filled with malice. It was giddy to turn it's dark will on Valrae and sadly, Josleen. Suddenly, the witch could feel squirming beneath her shins. Without regard to the flames, she shrieked and stood. The earth beneath her was still, but from the darkness behind her came sounds. The rake of wickedly sharp claws on stone and through soft damp earth. Panic clawed at Valrae's chest. Leaving her tools, forgetting her smaller fear of the fire, the witch ran through the flames. With her hands over her face and the cloak covering the rest of her she managed to make it through without being terribly burned, but she had to discard the deeply red cloak again as the helm had caught. With the circle of salt and fire now broken, the flames died down and burned orange. The candle had been toppled and snuffed out in her escape. As more horrible sounds came from the darkness Valrae continued to flee. She tore out of the cave and through the forest, skirts and golden hair trailing behind her, with small cries of terror at each new horror. The trees bled. The river was swollen with the bloated bodies of her friends. Beetles and spiders dropped down to bite and claw and writhe in her hair. Things with no name and unholy forms reached out to her, pulling at her skirts and hair and sleeves. The illusions were indistinguishable from reality. Valrae was lost in the forest and trapped in her own curse. If Percival or Macon found her now, she would be as helpless and defenseless as a distempered animal caught in a trap.

Josleen stirred from her defensive posture only when she heard her husband's heavy steps and the way his mother swallowed her words when she detected her son had no patience for her bickering, because there was a more pressing concern at hand, Josleen, as was usually the case. But Josleen feared to open her eyes, even to look at him, because she anticipated some grotesque lesion on his nose, or a blue-purple cast to his face as though he were asphyxiating before her eyes, but when he pulled her hands away from her face and she looked at him, she saw neither. What she saw instead was Kelovath wearing his shiny golden armor and a vengeful glare. She recoiled from him, then blinked, and when her eyes opened again she saw her husband's face and embraced him tightly. Without letting him go she whispered, "I think I'm being hexed. I'm seeing things. Nightmare things. It's getting worse." When Percival walked in and carefully avoided the word 'hex,' he was far too late. He confirmed the Queen's suspicions, and Augusta deflated a little. A spell is no madness, and too short-term a problem to treat with her desired cure for all ailments Josleen-related: marital separation. The headmaster said, "Sir, we should go before the spellcaster disrupts the spell." Josleen needed help with simple tasks like putting on boots (she yelped when she heard a rattlesnake in its depths), and slipping on a coat (which appeared made from the flayed skin of humans). She clinged tightly to Macon's hand as they left the fort, until his hand erupted in boils, then she released it until he took hold of her again. His insistence will see them through this, and her courage. She tried to remind herself that this is temporary, fake, she was safe. She felt vulnerable appearing like a lunatic in public, flinching despite her best efforts not to. A phalanx of guards shielded her from view, but some denizens caught glimpses of the spectacle of the twitching Queen. Only Percival could see echoes of her hallucinations (if Macon asked, Percival would tell him what he saw). Barely discernable threads trailed from each hallucination in a south and easterly direction, though in truth Percival had to make a lot of educated guesses. His trail led them to the forest, but there the magic got confused and erratic due to the magically-charged nature of the forest, and thus Perival was forced to make increasingly unsubstantiated guesses, though he told no one this. While witches have always had an affinity for the forest, their marginalization in the Hard City had further pushed them into the woods, both to practice their magic and, in increasingly frequent tragic cases, for shelter. The magical trace that had up until now led them towards Valrae diverts towards another source of witchy magic in the forest, a raven-haired woman recently forced into homelessness due to prejudices in the city. She built a lean-to in a shallow cave and she was practicing some dark magic at the moment as well, to curse the restaurant that had let her go for the simple fact that she was a witch. She was mid ritual when Percival points at her hovel and says, "In there."

Macon’s mother remains behind at Fort Freedom, of course, and once the royals and the headmaster are gone, she begins to make remarks to anyone whose ear she can get to, along the lines of, ‘Unbelieveable that I need to lock the door to my room in this castle... Mad women barging in all hours of the day.’ and ‘I’d be safer in that new home the rebels are trying to blow up.’ Ignoring completely the fact that has just been revealed of Josleen being hexed. Augusta continues while she retreats back to her room, making herself more and more agitated as evidenced by the increasing emergence of her Veratoakan accent that she normally masks so well.

In the forest, Percival leads the group dangerously close to Valrae’s location before the wires get crossed and they end up being pulled towards the hovel in the woods. The true hexer, should she be able to regain enough of her wits, will be able to hear and maybe even see the trio as they travel through and reach the home of the other witch. Percival’s weakness, if he has one, is his outright trust in his rare ability to visualize magic. At one point he needs only to turn his head to the left to catch sight of Valrae through the trees, but the threads of arcane energy he sees tell him to turn his head to the right, and he does not argue. When they reach the hovel, Macon is the one to breach the door, violently, with axe and boot, of course. The Headmaster of the Academy is very close behind, and can see the intense rage aura pouring out of the King as he catches this witch ‘red handed’. “Allow me, your highness.” Percival insists as he steps in to keep the Rage Knight from murdering this woman right here and now. Unnatural winds twirl about the room, blowing out ritual candles and whisking away magic circles while also lifting the young woman off of her feet and literally knocking the wind out of her. She is unable to make much of a sound while she is deprived of oxygen and is soon unconscious and laid back down on the floor by the powerful wind mage.

Through only luck and sheer coincidence, when danger was close enough to reach out and touch, Valrae had been frozen in fear. The dark visions before her eyes were so troubling she had been rendered immobile. Before her, clawing with tiny hands was the still born child she'd miscarried in Cenril's prison. Her sobs only escaped the moment Macon's axe and boot met loudly with the shack door. When her heart break finally released her, she ran perilously near the commotion. It was the presence of the mage's magic that had her turning her head toward the royal entourage. She watched helplessly as they cornered the wrong witch. Exhausted and caught in the grips of her own curse, Valrae stood and watched the scene for as long as she could stand be for she fled. Her throat and chest ached with the labour of her fevered, stumbling run through the woods. Her dress was torn, dirty and charred a little around the edges. Blood was welling from a mark under her eye where a branch, a claw in her crazied and hexed mind, had raked across her face. The witch would eventually exhaust herself and merely stumble and fall through the forest and underbrush, whimpering and weeping at the horrid sights of her own curse, until the sun sank low on the horizon. Eventually, she would trip close enough to the stone cottage of her home. The grove of hemlock trees were familiar but not able to be placed in her tired mind. She tripped over an exposed root, one that appeared to her as a writhing serpant, and was too exhausted to move. Luckily, an aging and stooped woman with dark weather-worn skin had been standing in the hip-high grass of the glade beyond. Her hair was the color of star's silk and tied in a no-nonsense bun at the nape of her neck. Her clothes were threadbare and monochromatic. She spoke little common and had met Valrae when she was still a penny potion peddler in Cenril. When Valrae was taken to jail the woman, Maude, had been steadfast and true in her motherly affection for the young witch. When Valrae hadn't returned as soon as she'd said, the older woman's instinct had her walking toward the grove. Maude's slowed pace quickened at the pitiful sounds coming from Valrae. With a knowing frown she herded the woman up and towards thier home.

Josleen stayed back as Macon burst through the door with the full fury that's made him infamous and terrifying. His rage has infected her too, and fanned her own furious flames so that she advanced on the hovel despite how ill-advised that was. She wanted to see that witch, slap her at the very least, but the Queen was not yet released from the hex and as she advanced she saw Kelovath again, believed Kelovath was behind the curse, an act of retribution for her betrayal and role in unraveling his evil plot against Larket. Unable to distinguish between reality and the hex, she believed this particular hallucination wasn't a hallucination at all, but real--after all, it could be, couldn't it? Kelovath was still out there, and in Josleen's imagination, nursing a grudge against her and Macon. She saw him take aim at her chest with a crossbow and she ran back into the forest to evade that phantom bolt. At the exact same time Valrae tripped over a root in front of her cottage, Josleen tripped on a root, caught her opposite foot in a pit, rolled her ankle, and tumbled some distance down the slope that leads to the Vibrance River's bank. Her shin banged sharply on a rock, palms scraped as she tried to catch herself, but ultimately a fallen tree trunk caught her in the middle, knocking the wind out of her. A sharp pain blossomed in her lower abdomen and by the time Macon and Percival have caught up with her she finds blood between her thighs, just like the hallucination in the nursery, only this time Macon can see it too. Percival quickly dispelled the hex and the darkness lifted from Josleen's sight. Everything restored to normal. She looked behind her to confirm that there was no Kelovath, then looked down at her thighs to confirm that there was no blood, but there was. "Macon..." Her voice trembled as she sought his hand. "Macon...what is happ-" She pressed her hand to her mouth before she could finish asking the question. Percival, without need for further commands, arranged to get the party back to the castle, with their prisoner, post haste.

Macon calls out to Josleen when he sees her turn and sprint away from whatever phantom the curse is projecting into her mind. It is probably for the best that The Fury Knight doesn’t know that it is an imaginary Fallen Paladin firing imaginary crossbow bolts at the queen, lest the Rage Aura he is exuding intensify further. He breaks into a clanking sprint after her, leaving Percival with the unconscious witch after growling out, “Why isn’t the hex broken?” towards the half-elf mage, and only catches up with Josleen after she has fallen. He takes her hand in his when she reaches out and hides the concern on his face from her when he sees the blood and it is not an effect of the curse. He doesn’t know what is happening, so he answers a question she didn’t ask instead, “You will be alrigh’.” It is maybe a failing of the Royal Guard that only the King, Queen, and Headmaster went out on this chase. Not that the Aeromancer is in anyway incapable of protecting the royal couple, it just isn’t his main duty in The Hard City. Fearing the consequences should something happen to the royals while outside of their care, a pair of Kingsguard has set out not long after the trio did from the fort and rather easily tracked them to this shack in the woods. After seeing the royals and the culprit off towards Fort Freedom, Percival remains behind to examine the hovel and the magic remaining within, as something seems not quite correct about all of this...

Back at the fort infirmary Josleen is seen to immediately by ‘the best’ doctor Larket has to offer. Her injuries are tended to and examined while Macon paces in a waiting room, yet somehow his presence looms. He is eventually allowed back in and is greeted by a puzzled looking doctor who proceeds to explain that The Queen’s injuries are superficial, and are no cause for lingering concern. However, his examination has revealed something unusual. Josleen is pregnant. The Rage Knight’s slate eyes widen. -The pregnancy is fine!- The doctor very quickly clarifies to assuage any concerns before they can bloom in their minds after the bard’s fall. No adverse effects detected from her injuries. The prescription for the Queen is bed rest to recover. After giving that order, the doctor takes his cue to leave this medical miracle of a family to digest this news. ‘Muzo is a genius!’ Surely someone will think this thought eventually, but for now The Fury Knight is actually -smiling-, pressing his forehead to Josleen’s, and kissing his Queen, reminding her in between the elated affection, “I told you...”

Josleen could feel as they traveled back to the fort that her wounds were superficial, save for the one that ached in her womb. In the infirmary, the doctor looked quizzically at his beaker as the solution therein changed to the color purple. His confused expression seemed to Josleen to be confirmation enough that bad news was incoming. She quickly wiped at the tears that began to spill as the doctor ran a few more tests. Josleen wasn't watching him when the dried dandelion stem engorged and turned green, confirming his suspicion that a half elf is, somehow, bafflingly, pregnant. He called the King back in and Josleen couldn't bear to look at Macon for she felt she had failed him in the one duty most expected of a Queen. Then the doctor spoke in no uncertain terms and it was Josleen's turn to look confused, then joyful. She wiped away the tearful residue of her bleak assumption and pulled Macon in close, smiling and kissing him back. 'I told you,' he said. She laughed a little and nodded with her forehead still against his. "You did, my love, you did," she whipered. She kissed him again, slower this time, grateful for his confidence and unstoppable will that minces obstacles and subplants them with his desired reality. It's a wild, furious will that at times terrifies her, but only because she fails to realize that her own will is no more tame, her own ambition no more docile than his (indeed, she took her own risks to get here, both alongside him and behind his back). In this forceful, determined way they are perfectly suited. "Cancel everything and stay with me today." The witch, the hex, the looming threat of Kelovath, all else fades and drops away so that all she can think about is Macon and their baby.

Macon’s ridiculous winning streak (with some serious omissions) continues with the news that the queen is carrying his child, against all odds. With his forsaking of the God of Death, or vice versa depending on who you ask, he doesn’t even have to attribute this extended string of good fortune and success to some otherworldly force or divine intervention. As one might imagine, this is an incredible boon to his confidence, something that was already sky high as King of Larket, that t(he)y can accomplish whatever t(he)y attempt(s) to, and that his decisions are immaculate. “Of course” he will cancel everything today to be with her. Where one might have been able to debate whether it was Larket or Josleen that the King cared more for, now, over the course of just a few minutes, Larket might be burning and The Rage Knight would not bat an eye if the queen and his unborn child were safe. While they spend the day together and the doctors orders are treated hyperbolically by the king, treating Josleen like porcelain glass, he has time to think and worry about their immediate future. Surely they will be announcing this tremendous news sooner or later, and the Queen has just today been the target of an attack from a disgruntled witch. To prevent this from happening again and protect Josleen and her precious cargo, They cannot be lenient. There will be a few moments during the course of the day where the bard might be able to notice Macon in deep thought. If she were to question him, he would deny and not tell her of the decision he has already made up. The punishment for attacking the crown will be execution without trial, sending a strong message to any others that might consider such a thing.

As the king and queen returned to Larket, Valrae was being tucked away into her bed. Maude did her best to help the whimpering, curse-maddened witch become comfortable in her room and locked the door behind her. The old woman made herself a cup of tea, earl grey, and hunkered down in a chair outside of the bedroom door. While the royal couple received happy news, Valrae was visited by the bloodied image of Hannah above her bed with eyes cold and dark and accusing. It wouldn't be until the sun rose, long after Josleen would have been freed, and while Maude slept with her chin on her chest with the tea cup balanced precariously on her knee, that the curse finally loosed it's grip on Valrae's mind.