They Took Her

The low thrum of the group’s conversation was dominated by Astra’s laughter, a bright and constant satellite in Red’s orbit. She burst with delight at every word he spoke, regardless of its triviality. Their small procession had moved through the woods in a companionable quiet until he had begun a story about some antic of Ami’s. Walking a little distance from the others, Argent kept his eyes trained on the path ahead, his features arranged into a carefully neutral mask.

“You don’t believe she’ll be bothered by this?” Argent’s question, spoken softly and intentionally ambiguous, hung in the air between them.

Red remained unfazed. “I’m not causing any harm,” he retorted with a dismissive shrug. A cynical sneer played on his lips as his gaze swept over the others. “Everyone is driven by their own private motivations.”

Argent gave no response, withdrawing into a pensive silence. There was a casual indifference to Red that set him on edge, a disquiet that was only intensified by the unnatural stillness that had fallen over the forest. Not a single leaf stirred, not one bird sang. It was as if the woods themselves were holding a collective breath.

Further behind, Jiro and Hana walked with their hands entwined, communicating in a silent language of touch. His thumb traced lazy, abstract patterns on the back of her hand. Periodically, she would peer up at him from beneath her lashes with a softened expression, and he would answer by tightening his hold—a small, possessive gesture intended for her eyes only.

As their de facto leader, Cera was painfully aware of the precariousness of her command. Her hold on this company was tenuous at best. Each member was a maelstrom of individual motives and beliefs, too fundamentally different to ever coalesce into a unified force. It felt as though the only person she could truly depend on was Perla. Yet, even that certainty was undermined by a cold, sharp blade of doubt. Perla was, after all, Cy’s sister. In a world as fractured as theirs, where did one’s allegiance truly reside?

There was no time to dwell on that tangled knot of fear. She led them toward the restaurant, a familiar landmark in their uncertain world. As they filed into the dining room, Cera felt the first icy fingers of panic grip her; the room was completely empty. While the others were momentarily captivated by Astra’s theatrical retelling of one of Red’s jokes, Cera slipped into the kitchen, meaning to quietly apprise Perla of her brother’s presence.

She was met by a scene of chaotic, culinary devastation. Her breath caught in her throat. Saku was slumped over a small table, his chin resting on his fist, his face a canvas of dried blood and raw anguish. A vicious, purple bruise was already blossoming along his jawline, and his lip was split and swollen. The kitchen was in shambles. Pots and pans were scattered across the floor like the casualties of a forgotten battle, their contents splattered against the walls in a disordered, abstract mural of sauces. The air was thick with the cloying, nauseating stench of spoiled prawns. There was no sign of Perla, or of the cook, Willem.

“What happened here?” In the suffocating silence, Cera’s voice was a thin, brittle thing.

Saku barely raised his head, his gaze fixed on some unseen point on the filthy floor. When he finally spoke, his voice was a dry, rasping whisper. “They came.” He swallowed, the sound labored and painful. “This morning. They came, and they took Perla. I tried. Gods, I tried to stop them. But they… they were too strong. They knocked me unconscious. I just… I only just woke up.”

A roar of white noise filled Cera’s ears as the floor seemed to tilt beneath her. Her knees buckled, and she slid down the wall to the cool, tiled floor. “What?” she breathed, the sheer weight of his words stealing the air from her lungs.

Saku buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking with a silent, agonizing grief. “They took her,” he swore, his voice choked with emotion.

Cera watched him, the immensity of her own despair a crushing weight on her chest. “But how,” she exhaled, struggling to her feet by using the counter for leverage. A single, chilling thought began to crystallize in her mind. I defeated them. I located their nests and I annihilated them. How did they manage to regroup so quickly? How could they have bypassed our sentries, penetrating the very heart of our sanctuary? How could I have been so utterly blind?

A new, more terrible thought surfaced. “Where is Willem?” she demanded, a fresh urgency sharpening her tone.

The question seemed to cut through the haze of Saku’s sorrow. “What?”

“The cook!” she hissed, praying her voice wouldn’t be heard in the dining room. “Willem! Why didn’t he sound the alarm?”

A strange, horrifying clarity began to dawn on Saku’s battered face. His lips twisted into a grotesque, mirthless smile. “Willem?” he whispered. “He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“He was acting strangely last night. Agitated. Perla and I, we questioned him about it. He was more on edge than he usually is. We didn’t know what to think. But he’s fled. Gone to find his son. The boy went missing, and rumor has it he fell in with Krysta’s followers.”

Saku’s smile was sour and broken. “Willem’s loyalty was never to this place. All that mattered to him was that his son was his son, no matter whose banner he fought under.” He cracked his knuckles, the sound sharp and furious in the wrecked kitchen.

The revelation was a physical blow. Cera’s jaw clenched. Betrayal and abduction. The two pillars of her command, her mentor and her lieutenant, had been taken from her.

“Why her?” she asked, the question directed more to herself than to Saku. “What could they possibly want with Perla?”

Saku finally looked up, his eyes meeting hers. “Look, I know my own limitations. I can’t get her back on my own. I would die in the attempt, but there isn’t enough time.”

He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a raw, desperate plea. “I know what she was teaching you. Her strategies. Her tactics. You are in command of this army.” His eyes were filled with a profound, soul-deep anguish. “All I can ask of you is… please, bring her home.”

His unspoken love for Perla was a tangible thing, a shimmering force in the ruined space that separated them. Cera gave a single, sharp nod. The stakes of this conflict had just become intensely personal.

“They didn’t harm her, did they?”

Saku shook his head, shame wrapping around him like a thick cloak. “She would give back anything they dealt her tenfold. They only captured her because of me. She went with them of her own free will because they threatened to kill me.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Cera said, though her mind was already a whirlwind of calculations and plans. A flicker of hope cut through her despair. “Perla can destroy those thugs from the inside.”

A thin, unsteady smile touched Saku’s lips at the image.

“So, is the restaurant closed?” The strangely practical question surfaced from the chaos in her mind, a desperate attempt to cling to some semblance of normalcy. She was ravenous.

Saku pushed himself to his feet, wiping a smear of blood from his lip with the back of his hand. “It’s probably for the best that Willem is gone. He’s not the only one who can cook. We only kept him in the kitchen because, of the three of us, he was too ill-tempered to serve customers.”

“Good to know,” Cera said grimly. After so much time living on the razor’s edge, gallows humor felt almost like a second language. For the sake of her own sanity, peace would have to be postponed.

She returned to the dining room without a word and took her seat. Cy, however, had known something was amiss the moment he had stepped into the empty restaurant. The tense, pale mask of Cera’s face as she re-emerged from the kitchen only served to confirm his suspicions.

“Cera?” he hissed as she sat down, the sound sharp enough for the entire table to hear.

She turned, and the arctic fury in her eyes was so potent it almost made him recoil. But his concern for his sister was stronger than his caution. “Cera,” he pressed again, hissing her name.

A poisonous temptation bloomed in Cera—to wrap her hands around the purple-haired boy’s throat and squeeze the life from him. She ruthlessly crushed the impulse, forcing herself to remember her position. She was their leader.

Wisely, Cy did not hiss a third time. He broke his chopsticks with a clean snap and began to meticulously convey peanuts to his mouth.

“Where’s your sister, anyway?” Jiro’s question, punctuated by the loud sound of his chewing, dropped into the strained silence like a heavy stone.

The tension was a physical entity, a palpable desire for violence that pulsed in the air. Across the table, Red and Argent shifted uneasily in their seats.

Just then, Saku emerged from the kitchen. His lip seemed less swollen, but his movements were still leaden with exhaustion. He took their orders without making eye contact with anyone. Cera could read his thoughts as if they were her own; he was blaming them. All these skilled fighters, and they had failed to protect Perla.

The sense of futility was suffocating. In their training, she had allowed herself to feel a sense of power, but now… Her hand trembled so violently that her teacup tipped over, its contents spilling across the table in a dark stain.

Argent glanced down at the spreading pool of tea. “An omen,” he murmured, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.

“What?” Cera snapped.

“Nothing.”

When the food was served, Cera finally shattered the oppressive silence. “We’re leaving today.”

Cy immediately identified the flaw in her plan. “We haven’t gathered enough provisions. And where is Perla?”

“They have her,” Cera said, her composure finally fracturing. “She’s been taken.”

The casual clatter of utensils stopped. The air, suddenly frigid, crackled with tension. Cy’s gaze locked onto hers, his face a collection of sharp angles in the dim light. Every trace of humor had vanished from the faces around the table.

“We move out tonight,” Cy said, his voice low and hard as iron, cutting through the stunned silence. He stood, his chair scraping loudly against the floorboards. “I’ll go back and prepare the supplies.”

Cera watched him leave, a flicker of respect mingling with her anguish.

The rest of the meal was consumed in a tense quiet until Astra, no longer able to tolerate the silence, made a sharp remark that grated on Ignis. “Can’t you be silent, woman?” he hissed.

Cera silenced him with a single, glacial glare. The tension around the table was thick enough to choke on.

Red finally spoke, his attempt to inject a note of normalcy jarring and unwelcome. “Cy mentioned you two were fooling around,” he said, gesturing crudely in the direction of Hana and Jiro.

Jiro scoffed, a defiant spark in his eye. “What is it to you? It’s not as if you’re seeing much action these days, are you?” He shot a crude, dismissive look at Astra.

A jet of white-hot flame erupted from Cera’s palm, shooting across the table at Jiro. He merely raised a hand, and an inch from his face, the fire was extinguished, annihilated as if it had never existed. A collective gasp rippled through the group.

“Keep talking, and you won’t have a mouth left to speak with,” Cera warned, her voice imbued with a terrifying authority she had only ever witnessed in Perla.

“Is that a fact?” Jiro challenged, but the bravado in his tone was hollow. He did not press the matter further.

Even Jiro was prudent enough not to provoke this new Cera. A cautious distance was already forming around her, a stark delineation of her newfound authority.

As the group prepared to leave after their meal, Argent broke away from Red and approached her.

“Are you all right?” he asked softly.

“Obviously,” she replied, her voice flat and brittle. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Worry clouded Argent’s eyes. He ran a hand through his hair. “No reason,” he said. “It’s just… a stressful situation.”

“You could say that again.”