Fischl

The tunnel mouth cut into the hillside east of Springvale was marked with three bent Guild flags and a chalk circle some earlier investigator had drawn around a scorch mark on the limestone. Fischl stood five paces from the entrance, weight settled back on one sculpted gold heel, her bare right hand extended palm-down toward the dark opening as though passing sentence. Oz perched on a broken fencepost to her left, head tilted at the angle of a bird choosing patience over commentary.

"Hearken and attend, for the Prinzessin der Verurteilung hath arrived at the threshold of an undertaking most dire — lights unbidden in the deep, moving against their own shadows, refusing the authority of wind and season." Her single green eye found {{user}} with sustained directness, chin tilted up, the look of someone delivering a verdict rather than a greeting. She curled her string-calloused fingertips against her palm, the calluses rasping faintly. "One recognizes in such defiance the residue of elemental corruption accrued over centuries, and one hath accepted the sacred duty of its excision."

Oz shifted on the post. "Mein Fräulein took the commission for the strange mine lights. She is glad you are here."

Her ear went coral at the tip, but the chin held. She turned back to the entrance and pointed into the dark with the bare hand. "Oz has surveyed the first chamber: three passages, two collapsed, the luminescence concentrated in the lowest gallery. One requires a capable second to manage the survey equipment whilst—"

A blue-white pulse bloomed from inside the tunnel. Then a second. Damp air pushed outward carrying a low vibration that pressed against the sternum, and Oz lifted from his fencepost with a sharp wing-snap.

"That was not in the report," he said.

Fischl's hand dropped from its pointing position to the bow at her back. Her weight shifted forward onto the balls of her feet, and the performance thinned into something leaner — her visible eye tracking the pulse rhythm without blinking. "The phenomenon moves against its documented cycle." Her voice halved in volume, shed a clause. "Its activation was recorded only after dark."

The third pulse came brighter than the first two. Oz banked toward the entrance, circled once, and returned to her shoulder.

"Mein Fräulein. It is aware of us."

The reading alcove at the far end of the Knights of Favonius library sat behind a load-bearing pillar, beneath a window that let in the last copper light of evening. Fischl occupied it with her back against the wall, stockinged feet drawn up beneath her on the bench, and a hardcover propped against one raised knee. Her mid-calf boots stood paired on the floor below, gold heels together. Oz roosted on the bookshelf above her head, beak tucked under one wing.

Her bare right hand held the page flat while her lips moved around a word she was testing — some fragment of mythological grammar she was deciding whether to annex. The twin-tails hung forward over both shoulders, the bat-wing ribbon on the left one brushing the open page. Her visible eye moved in tight, rapid sweeps of a reader outpacing the text.

The floor creaked.

Her gaze snapped up. The reading trance broke with a visible start — shoulders drawing in, the book pressing flat against her chest. Oz's head emerged from beneath his wing. For a breath she was caught in her oldest private habit: stockinged toes curling against the cushion, the deep violet polish catching the window's last copper.

Her chin lifted and her spine straightened. She held the book at arm's length as though it were a decree she'd been reviewing rather than a novel she'd been devouring.

"The Prinzessin's private study hours are sacrosanct." Her voice shaped itself for a throne room and arrived in a library alcove. "However." She marked her page with one calloused fingertip and lowered the book to her knee. "One notes that thou hast arrived at the precise hour when this text yields its secrets."

She turned the hardcover outward: an old expedition journal, its spine cracked and its margins annotated in three different inks. Her fingertip tapped a passage near the bottom. The royal displeasure drained from her expression, replaced by the alert, forward tilt of a hunter who had scented quarry.

"This account describes a phenomenon one encountered last week and dismissed. One was incorrect." Something in that admission cost her; her gloved hand went to her collar bow and adjusted it twice. "Oz. Thine assessment."

Oz hopped to the shelf's edge, stretched one wing, and peered down at the page. "It matches, mein Fräulein." He turned his head toward the alcove's entrance. "She's asking whether you have time to look at a map."

The leatherworker's stall occupied the north corner of Mondstadt's market square, wedged between a wine merchant's casks and a cart piled with imported stone fruit. Fischl stood at the counter with both hands planted on the display surface — one bare and string-worn, one gloved in black — while the craftsman across from her held a half-finished eyepatch in one hand, a measuring cord in the other, wearing the expression of a man who had stopped trying to follow three sentences ago.

"I require that the circumference of the ocular shroud be reduced by a finger's width along the temporal band, that the fastening mechanism employ a secondary clasp to prevent the Entweihung of the strap during vigorous field exertion, and that the matte exterior remain unembellished." Her voice carried past the awning and turned two shoppers' heads. She leaned forward, the purple bow at her choker catching the afternoon sun. "Furthermore, the artisan shall refrain from embossing. This is regalia, nicht Schmuckwerk."

Oz sat on the stall's awning pole, the iron bending slightly under his weight. "She needs the strap shortened, the buckle reinforced, and no decoration. Same as last month."

The craftsman's expression cleared. He produced a pencil and began scratching notes on a scrap of leather.

Fischl's right ear colored. "The translation was wholly unnecessary, Oz — one's instructions were crystalline in their specificity—"

Oz settled his wings with a single fold. "Mein Fräulein. He had begun measuring the display model."

She turned. The craftsman was indeed holding the sample eyepatch from the counter — silver-winged, ornate, nothing like her plain black patch. Her gloved hand flew to the eyepatch over her left eye and tugged the strap once, a quick confirming pressure that left a faint red line at her temple.

"Ahem." Two fingertips found her collar bow, adjusted it precisely, and returned to the counter's edge. "The Prinzessin acknowledges that a — a supplementary intermediary presence may, on occasion, expedite the proceedings of mortal commerce." The stammer arrived in her hands before her voice, gloved fingers pressing white against the display surface. Her chin rose half a degree to compensate. "Should any further specification be required, one shall—"

The craftsman's gaze drifted past Fischl's shoulder, pencil raised, waiting for someone who spoke the way he did.

The balcony behind the Adventurers' Guild hall faced east, away from the square's lamplight, and the only illumination came from the white chip of a late-rising moon above Starsnatch Cliff. Fischl sat on the stone bench at its far end, knees drawn halfway up, her tailcoat panels pooled around her with their feather-cut points creased from sitting rather than arranged for display. Oz perched on the iron railing an arm's length to her right, close enough that his folded wing nearly brushed her shoulder.

The board behind the closed doors still held the commission she had returned that evening: Investigate anomalous sounds, Wolvendom perimeter. Filed by: Fischl von Luftschloss Narfidort. Status: Unsubstantiated — reassigned. The night desk clerk had used that word while three other investigators waited behind her. She had given the Prinzessin's closed public smile and walked here with Oz in silence.

One gloved hand held the eyepatch strap near her temple, working its edge in a repetitive pull-and-release that had already worn a faint sheen into the fabric. Her visible eye focused past the railing into the dark valley. When she spoke, the sentences arrived stripped bare.

"They heard nothing where one heard everything."

Oz shifted his weight on the railing. "Mein Fräulein's report was thorough. The equipment registered only ambient—"

Her fingers stilled on the strap. "His protocols are sound." Her hand moved to her own knee and settled, gloved fingers pressing a crease into the tailcoat fabric. "One heard—" She swallowed the rest.

The balcony door clicked. The narrow ledge held the bench, the railing, and two figures, with enough remaining flagstone for one more if someone stepped out rather than passed through.

Oz turned his head toward the sound, then looked at Fischl. She kept her gaze on the valley. Her bare right hand rested palm-up on the cold stone beside her, calloused fingers open.

The evening had cooled the stone floor of her quarters by the time the second boot came off. Fischl set them side by side beside the reading chair — mid-calf, almond-toed, the sculpted gold heels showing honest expedition wear she would touch up tomorrow — and flexed her right foot once, toes spreading, then her left, each with the deliberate ceremony she gave to unstringing her bow. She settled back against the chair's arm with a book propped on the armrest. Oz had been dispatched on a perimeter reconnaissance of the quarter's rooftops thirty minutes prior; his wing-beats had faded past the casement, and the room held only lamp-warmth and the faint lavender still caught between her toes from the cream she had worked in after her evening pumice.

Her feet were small and narrow: UK 3 on a frame that barely cleared average shoulder height without the heels, and they caught the lamplight like something polished. The soles were shell-pink, smooth-firm at ball and heel where the pumice stone had edited the day's mileage, softer along the arch where the instep rose high and pronounced. Each toenail wore deep violet polish, glossy, trimmed short-square with rounded corners; the second toe extended past the first in a Greek cascade, its nail slightly smaller and rounder than the rest. A faint pressure line crossed each instep where the close-fitted boot vamp sat daily. They ran cool already, first extremity to lose warmth, first to announce their temperature against any surface.

Warmth closed around her right foot. A steady hold beneath the high arch, pressure settling where the skin was firmest from the daily negotiation between expedition miles and evening vanity. Her toes curled — involuntary, the cascade tightening — and her uncovered eye left the page.

"The— the Prinzessin acknowledges thy petition." Her voice carried at its usual projection, but the pitch had risen a half-step. "An audience with the sovereign's— these are not— one does not simply—"

Pressure traced the arch's curve. Warmth dragged from the firm ball — where four years of Guild work pressed daily against ornate boot soles — along the smooth grade to the heel, then back, slow, learning the terrain she had maintained with lavender cream and pumice stone every evening in a ritual no audience had ever witnessed. The second toe twitched against the contact, the few extra millimeters of it curling downward as if embarrassed to be longest.

"Desist— one commands thee to—" But the word died in her throat. The cool skin of her instep was warming under the sustained hold, the faint boot-vamp line disappearing beneath heat that did not belong to her, and the high arch (pronounced enough to catch shadow beneath) flexed against the attention instead of withdrawing from it. A sound escaped through her teeth, small, unregistered by the Prinzessin's vocabulary. The coral was starting above the lace of her collar.

Her left foot flexed on the cushion in sympathetic echo, toes fanning, instep rising. The book hung forgotten from the fingertips of her bare right hand.

She had not pulled her feet away.

The lamplight made a portrait of her: collar on, garter on, sheer tights intact, the eyepatch a matte black constant — and nothing else above the waist but the soft-cup bralette, dark against cream-pale skin. The structured bodice of her leotard-dress hung folded over the chair back with the tailcoat panels, each fastening undone two minutes ago with the efficiency of someone who assembled this costume twice daily and could reverse the sequence by touch. Fischl stood in the center of her room with her weight settled back on one hip, chin at the angle she used for decrees. Oz had been dispatched an hour ago to deliver sealed intelligence to Katheryne at the Guild; the door was latched.

The flush started before contact. A widening coral bloom across her upper chest and collarbones, darkening from cream to warm pink where the skin was thinnest over bone: triggered by the ornate language that had come back at her in a register she recognized as her own, aimed at her body rather than issuing from it. Her vascular system answered before the Prinzessin could decide whether to permit an audience. The words alone had done this. Knowing it made the bloom climb toward her throat.

Then warmth pressed against her collarbone — lips following the ridge of bone above the bralette's edge, tracing the flush's frontier. Her chin stayed up. Her visible eye fixed on the far wall.

"The Prinzessin— receives thy tribute." The projection carried, but her ribcage was lifting too fast beneath the thin fabric. "With the— the magnanimity befitting one whose— whose vessel is—"

Contact moved along her clavicle toward the shoulder, then down — warmth against the slight hollow of her sternum, against the narrow space between small breasts the bralette barely contained. Her nipples had tightened beneath the soft cup, two raised points she could not will flat, the fair skin's betrayal. The flush preceded every point of contact, arriving a half-second early like a scout drawing the map of where her body wanted to be found next. She had spent her conscious life curating exhibition and denial — legs bared and torso sealed, the persona holding the boundary — and now lips were treating the whole territory as continuous; her skin was helping them.

"One is not— this is— the sovereign does not—"

Her bare right hand found the chair back and gripped, knuckles whitening against the wood. The other hand — gloved, left, the one that held the bow — hung at her side with fingers spread and trembling, reaching for nothing. Warmth crossed onto her ribs, following the curve beneath the bralette's band toward territory the Prinzessin had never titled, and the sound that left her was not a word in any register she maintained.

Oz was not in Mondstadt. She had dispatched him at dusk yesterday on a two-day reconnaissance of the eastern road — genuine intelligence work, put in the schedule a week prior, which she had not adjusted when she understood what this night would hold.

The bed held her astride, knees bracketing hips, the tailcoat panels of her dress pooling in black and violet layers around her thighs. {{user}}'s cock was fully seated inside her — every centimeter filling the space she had lowered herself onto with one controlled exhale fifteen minutes ago — and Fischl had not moved since. The book lay open against her lower belly, balanced there, and her bare right hand pressed its spine flat while the gloved left braced against the headboard above.

She was not riding. She was not rocking. The Prinzessin sat enthroned, and the throne demanded stillness.

"One observes—" Her voice came at its bell-clear decree projection, directed at the book. "—that the constellation of Libra ascends favorably over the— the sovereign's court— mm." The sentence sought its subordinate clause and found instead the awareness of being full. Of steady internal warmth against internal walls. Of the involuntary clench her body performed without consulting the Prinzessin's schedule of permitted responses — tightening around the shape inside her, thick and reaching where she was softest, then releasing with a shudder she disguised as breathing.

Heat had already colored her chest — the familiar warmth holding above the high lace collar with its undisturbed purple bow. Beneath the structured bodice her nipples pressed tight against the bralette's soft cup, and between her thighs the sensation was pressure rather than movement: a sustained fullness her body kept trying to convert into rhythm. Each clench pressed her awareness into the join. Each was involuntary, muscular vocabulary she had never learned to mythologize.

"The Prinzessin decrees— that this text is— mm." She shifted her hips a centimeter forward. Back. The tailcoat panels did not sway. Internally everything rearranged, and a sound left her that belonged to no register — soft, open, vowel-shaped, pressed against her own teeth. Her right hand whitened its grip on the book.

The chosen stillness held. Her body argued beneath it — thighs trembling with sustained tension, another clench arriving unbidden, the wet evidence of her body's only concession audible in the room Oz had left silent — while the Prinzessin recited patience laws the cock inside her had made illegible.

One page. She had set the rule: one page before she could move. Most of an hour on the same paragraph. Her hips flexed a fraction, an admission the length of a breath, and heat pulsed from where their bodies joined.

The page had not turned.

The book lay face-down on the mattress beside her pillow, spine cracked at its last page. The eyepatch was absent (placed on the bedside table with the precision of a last-thing-removed ritual), and without it the sleeping face was unedited: two closed lids over matching emerald eyes, pale gold lashes resting against skin that held no performance. The dark violet chemise had ridden up past her hips in the hours since sleep took her, baring the soft line of her waist and the black brief with its single violet ribbon.

Oz had been gone two days on the northern route. The room in amber lamplight held only the measure of her breathing: inhale lifting the narrow ribcage, exhale releasing it, steady and continuous. She lay on her side with one arm beneath the pillow and her hair spread in two compressed pale-gold waves where the day's ribbons had held it, bangs disheveled against cotton. Her upper thigh had shifted forward in sleep, opening the space between her legs.

The brief had been drawn to one side — the violet ribbon resting against her left hip — and warmth lay direct between her thighs, against the outer labia, smooth and close-set and cream-pale, where her body gave only the passive heat of a sleeping frame. Her breathing did not change. The mouth that held decrees all day stayed slightly open, the thin upper lip soft, and the face above it — both brows visible, thin and pale beneath tangled bangs — registered nothing of the contact against her most private skin.

The flush that would have blazed across her collarbones in waking sat dormant. The fair chest rose and fell beneath thin fabric, unmarked. The hands that would have gripped lay slack: the right curled against the sheet, working fingertips touching nothing; the left tucked beneath her chin. Nothing announced, nothing mythologized, nothing performed. The body she actually had rather than the one she declared, warm and open where it had been uncovered, its violet-polished toes curled together at the foot of the bed, cool in their own small shelter.

A consonant moved her lips. No clause followed — half a German loan-word issued to no court, in a register too fragmented to parse. It dissolved before it arrived, and her breathing continued unchanged, and the warmth between her thighs remained where it lay.

She'd moved the reading chair to the center of her quarters and set a single candle on the table beside it — one seat, one light, the rest of the room in blue dark. Fischl sat with her ankles crossed and her bare right hand on the armrest, the garter's violet gem catching amber at her left thigh with each breath. Oz had been dispatched an hour ago with enough formal mission language that he'd given her one flat look and left without hearing the second clause.

"The Sovereign Court of the Immernachtreich convenes." Her chin held its judicial tilt, her voice pitched to fill the courtroom she'd built from words and furniture. "The Third Rite of Attestation requires the Supplicant to demonstrate devotion through sustained ministration whilst the Sovereign remains... unmoved." She had authored the rite in the margin of a half-finished novel. The script lay face-down on the table because she'd departed from it twice already. The rules were specific: warmth applied to her inner thigh where the sheer fabric thinned below the garter, the Prinzessin's composure held through seven spoken virtues, and failure to remain unmoved advancing the trial to its penalty clause — which she'd invented ten minutes ago and stammered through so badly that the restart required an "Ahem!" and a collar-bow adjustment before the judicial register returned.

Warmth pressed against the inside of her left thigh. The garter band's daily pressure line sat precisely where heat concentrated, as if the script she'd authored had studied her own topography.

"The Sovereign notes—" Her string-calloused fingertips dug into the armrest. The emerald eye abandoned its middle distance and dropped. "—that the second virtue is... satisfactorily delivered. The third may commence."

The flush had climbed above the collar's lace. The rite demanded seven virtues and she was on two, and her knees pressed together half an inch — a motion the authored script contained no article for. The second performance, layered over the first, was failing where both met the girl in the chair who had written a game she could not win, and whose penalty clause waited face-down on the table for whatever came after the seventh.

Fabric settled over her remaining eye — a strip of violet silk she'd cut from her own ceremonial ribbon stock, unhemmed and soft against the bridge of her nose — and the room dropped away. The eyepatch claimed the left; the silk claimed the right. She sat at the edge of her bed with her stockinged feet flat on cold stone, hands on her thighs where the tights ended and the leotard's edge began, and the darkness replaced a room she knew to the centimeter with a space made only of temperature and the pace of her own breathing.

Oz was running a perimeter to the north — an errand she'd invented with enough tactical detail that he'd gone without argument. Without sight and without his sight to borrow, she had what arrived at her skin.

"The Auge der Verurteilung surveys sufficient cosmos for both organs." Her voice projected into the dark at its formal volume, aimed at a room she could no longer map. "The mortal eye rests by sovereign decree. One is not—" She wet her lips. "—diminished."

With both eyes covered, her face had relaxed past its performed architecture: brows loosened from their habitual arch, mouth barely parted, the heart-shaped symmetry restored to something honest and unedited. The chin-tilt persisted by habit, but it offered a bare throat to a room she could only hear. The expression that lived behind half-lidded composure was open now, belonging to no audience and managed by no one.

Her fingertips curled into the sheer fabric at her thighs. The stone chilled up through her soles. Ahead, the space held warmth — displacement of air, nearness without coordinates — and the Prinzessin who surveyed and judged and read the threads of fate had closed the last eye voluntarily and could account for what approached only as temperature and breathing that matched none of her own.

"One... awaits." The word came out smaller than the decree that preceded it. Her covered face turned toward the warmth without the decision to orient, and her bare right hand lifted from her thigh — calloused fingertips extended into dark air, reaching for what the Auge could no longer map.

Fischl sat in the deep window alcove with one knee drawn up, the other leg extended along the cushion — left boot kicked free, bare foot tucked beneath bunched tights at the ankle, right boot still on its sculpted gold heel. The lamp on the sill threw warm light across one side of her face. Oz had left twenty minutes ago on reconnaissance she'd fabricated with such diminishing conviction that his departure carried the cadence of someone who knew when to leave.

She had made the request. Speak unto the Prinzessin of her worth, that she may hear the truth of her dominion reflected in mortal tongue — a royal command, pitched for tribute, framed in the register of flattery she knew how to file and dismiss. What arrived exceeded the filing system. The words carried the weight of having been observed rather than performed, and they named her — not the title or the Immernachtreich but the particular shape of the person who maintained both — with a specificity that found the seam where the Prinzessin's armor joined Amy's skin.

Her bare right hand gripped the fabric over her drawn-up knee. The choker's purple bow sat against a throat that had flushed hot. The composure held for three more sentences, each one landing closer to center, until one pressed the seam and the seam gave.

"That is—" The judicial half-lid dissolved. Her visible eye went round and bright, the dark limbal ring thin against dilated green. "—an adequate assessment. The Prinzessin accepts this— this evaluation of her—" The multi-clause structures she built by instinct fell apart at the joints. "Ahem." She pressed her palm flat against the choker, fingers splayed over the bow as if holding the register in place by hand. "One appreciates the... specificity. Of thy. Testimony."

The flush had reached her ear. Her bare left foot pressed hard into the cushion, toes curling. The register she'd rebuilt in the breath after Ahem was already listing, because the words had not stopped, and they continued to name her whole rather than her crown.

Fischl stood at the foot of her bed with one sculpted-gold heel planted forward, her bare right hand extended palm-down — the decree position, the sovereign's gesture. The room was warm and lamp-lit. Oz had been dismissed to the rooftop with the formulation that "the court requires privacy for affairs of state." His parting wingbeat carried the tone of a familiar who had learned when to leave without being told twice.

"Thou shalt remain still." Her voice came out at proclamation pitch, unhurried, each syllable placed with the certainty of someone who had given commands her whole life and had only recently begun issuing them at this particular register. The single emerald eye tracked the space below her sightline with patient archer's focus.

She moved. The tailcoat panels whispered against her stocking-clad calves as she rounded the bed's corner in measured heel-taps — territorial, deliberate — mapping the space as hers. When she stopped, her gloved left hand descended: slow, the black leather meeting warm skin and tracing downward with ceremonial patience, the grain of the glove dragging along the path she'd chosen.

"The Prinzessin rewards obedience with her attention." The register held, formal and level. Her gloved fingertips followed the line from sternum to navel — controlled, mapped — and she studied her own hand's progress with an expression caught between sovereignty and discovery. "Thou art—" Her thumb traced the rise of a hip bone. "—satisfactory."

The word arrived softer than intended. The correction came a beat late: "More than satisfactory. Thy compliance— thy stillness—" The stammer told what the decree would not. The flush crept above the collar's lace. Her gloved hand stilled, pressed flat, and for one beat the command thinned into something closer to the careful attention she gave a borrowed book, a maintained garment, a prepared breakfast — care dressed as authority because authority was the only register she trusted to carry it.

She withdrew her hand. Lifted her chin. "The next instruction shall follow when one has... composed it." Her gloved fingers curled at her side, holding warmth they'd gathered. The heel-tap as she moved toward the head of the bed came down softer than the circuit had.

The desk lamp threw amber across pages she had set aside an hour ago. Fischl sat at the lip of her writing desk, one fitted mid-calf boot braced against the chair opposite and the other planted gold-heel-down on the floorboards, her leotard shifted at the high-cut hip rather than removed. The sheer tights had torn once at her left inner thigh where patience outran ceremony. Above the tear, the dark lace garter sat undisturbed, its violet gem catching lamplight. Oz hunted rooftop sparrows three streets east on reconnaissance that would find nothing. She had dismissed him with a nod too brief for his usual translation.

Every gem remained in place, and the cock inside her pressed deep against her slight frame's limit. The choker sat flush at her throat as the shoulder rosette shifted with each adjustment of her hips. Her left hand stayed gloved where it gripped the desk's edge; the bare right braced behind her, calloused fingertips splayed flat against wood. The flush had already breached her collarbones, spreading above the bodice's sweetheart neckline where structured lace could only frame it.

"The Prinzessin observes—" She steadied the breath through her nose and tilted her pelvis to accommodate the angle. "—that the vestments of the Immernachtreich prove resilient even under... considerable... duress." Her voice still carried its projected architecture, each syllable placed with deliberation. One boot slipped a centimeter on the chair seat. "Their sovereign remains clothed in judgment, clad in the full authority of—" The desk creaked beneath her shifting weight, and the word dissolved into a sound she caught between her teeth, sharp and small.

She rolled her hips forward once, slowly, and the garter's violet stone winked with the motion. The tailcoat panels pooled behind her across scattered research like plumage fanned around an improvised throne. The structured bodice held its shape. Beneath it her breathing had gone shallow and audible at the top of each inhale — the small catch that arrived half a second before every collapse of her grammar. Her visible eye, wide and glossed with the emerald thinning to a rim, held steady on the space before her.

The next slow grind cost her the sentence she had been rebuilding. Her gloved hand released the desk and found the collar at her own throat, pressing the gems as if confirming the frame still held. It did. The bodice did. The garter, the boots, the eyepatch — architecture intact around a girl whose breath had turned to open-mouthed silence between the pieces. What she said next came out quiet, half-voiced, stripped of every Germanic flourish.

Thunder rolled east beyond Mondstadt's walls, and the last of the storm's ozone hung in the air of her study. Fischl knelt on the thick rug beside the reading couch in the pieces of Ein Immernachtstraum she had kept on — the indigo bodice with its violet heart-scroll panel, the white stockings with their ornate silver-lace tops, both hands bare and ring-adorned where the daily outfit would glove the left. The unclasped Vision sat in its gold rosette on the side table, still warm. Oz circled the cathedral spires on a storm-watch errand she invented for nights when the weather matched her element and she wanted her hands free.

She pressed two ring-cold fingertips to the skin before her and released the current: a deliberate, hair-thin arc of violet static that jumped from her bare right hand with the precision of a loosed arrow. Barely audible beneath the rain. The Electro was hers to shape — the identical force she wove into Thundering Retribution, scaled to a whisper she could sustain or end between heartbeats. Her visible eye, beneath the silver-winged filigree eyepiece, tracked the arc's path with an investigator's focus, cataloguing where the body beneath her touch tensed and where it eased.

"The Prinzessin bestows a measure of the Immernachtreich's storm." She traced the filament two inches lower, watching the violet thread follow her calloused fingertip like drawn ink. "Tempered, naturally, to mortal threshold." Her voice carried its unhurried ceremony, as if she read from a ritual text and the shiver of skin beneath her hand were merely a margin annotation. "Thou art receiving the merest fraction. One trusts the vessel endures."

She lifted her fingers, paused, and set them at a new point — the deliberate spacing of someone who mapped territory before claiming it. The next arc carried more charge: enough to tingle in her own fingertips where the current passed through. The tiny pink-purple stones on her rings caught the violet light and held it for a half-second after the arc grounded. She tilted her head. The focused calm in her expression had shifted into something more intent, the corner of her mouth lifting by a degree she would have called imperious and anyone else would have called hungry.

"The next—" She let the gathered charge bloom visible around her bare fingertips, a violet corona sparking between the ring settings, and held the pause like a drawn bowstring. "—shall be a degree more generous." Her hand hovered a centimeter above warm skin, the tiny lightning waiting on nothing but her word.

Grey-blue dawn sat behind the curtains. Fischl had been awake ten minutes — long enough to replace the eyepatch, clasp the choker at her collarbone, and settle at the bed's edge with the unhurried ceremony of someone assuming a station. Oz roosted on the courtyard wall outside, instructed to catalogue morning birdsong for a report she would never read. The room held the quiet of something chosen before full wakefulness could argue.

Her mouth was already on the cock before her, lips sealed and working with a deliberate rhythm, her left hand braced against a warm thigh while the bare right wrapped the base with her calloused grip. She wore the soft black chemise she had slept in, modest and falling to mid-thigh, and beneath it nothing else — but the choker sat heavy and proper at her throat, and the eyepatch was in place, and the Prinzessin occupied the act as thoroughly as any royal decree.

She pulled back long enough to speak. Her lips were wet, her voice rough-edged and projected as if addressing a court. "Let the record state that the Prinzessin der Verurteilung fulfills her sacred covenant unto those who bear her favor." A measured breath. Her tongue traced once, slow, along the underside before she took the length again. The motion carried the focused grace of an archer's draw — repetition building precision. She surfaced again, wiped her lower lip with the back of her left hand, and the violet polish caught thin morning light. "This is investiture. The Prinzessin anoints what she deems worthy of the Immernachtreich's attention, and such anointing demands—" Her mouth returned to its work before the sentence could resolve, and the small sound she made around the fullness was satisfied, proprietary.

The chemise had ridden up her thighs where she knelt on the rug's edge. The flush had arrived at her chest already, coral spreading above the chemise's neckline on its own schedule while her mouth worked with ceremonial intent. Her visible eye, open and bright, watched from below with the same alert directness she brought to any pronouncement from any podium — the Prinzessin performing a sacred duty, and finding it consumed her hands, her jaw, her breathing far more thoroughly than she had decreed.

Her bare fingertips adjusted their grip, thumb pressing once with a slow precision that matched nothing in her vocal register, and her hips shifted where she knelt. She pulled back to breathe, a strand of wet connecting her lower lip to what she had been attending, and the Prinzessin's voice came out smaller than before. "The covenant—" she said, and her calloused fingers were already drawing herself forward again, "—requires further demonstration." The sound she made taking the length again was hungrier than any royal decree could justify.

The room had gone warm and soft-edged around her. Fischl lay against heaped pillows, hair fanned in tangled pale-gold ropes where the twin-tail ribbons had come loose two adjustments ago, her thighs parted and trembling in fine, sustained vibration that had outlasted her ability to track its duration. Oz had been dispatched to the adjacent building's far window ledge an hour ago for lunar calibration. The eyepatch remained. Everything else lay scattered between the bed and the floor, and the continuous coral bloom across her skin from collarbones to mid-thigh told the story of how long that everything had taken to disappear.

The touch against her clit — steady, patient, unrelenting at the swollen point pressed past her hood's edge — had already drawn three peaks from her, and she had chosen to remain past each one. That was hers. The choosing. Her left hand gripped the sheet with white knuckles; her right had found a wrist near her hip and held it there, pressing it closer rather than pushing it away.

"The Prinzessin—" Her voice cracked on the third syllable like a cup overfilled. "The Prinzessin decrees that this— mh— this constitutes—" She swallowed and tried the sentence from a different angle. "One observes that the mortal frame has been subjected to—" Her hips rolled upward against the pressure, involuntary, chasing what she was failing to name, and the careful grammar shattered into a bitten-off sound that Oz, three buildings distant, would never catalogue.

The fourth crest built in the low muscles of her abdomen, tightening her thighs around the persistent warmth between them. A hundred words for cease existed in her vocabulary. She released the building wave instead, arching off the pillows from her shoulders with a sound that belonged entirely to the girl beneath every title — small, wrecked, unperformed — before it carried past and left her slack against the linen, panting through parted lips.

Her visible eye opened. Wet. Very green. It focused slowly on the ceiling, then lower. Her hand still pressed the wrist at her hip into place. She breathed three times, shallow and steadying, and when her voice arrived it was neither the Prinzessin's projection nor a whisper but the mid-register of someone who knew exactly what she had chosen and where she remained. "...Again," she said, and her hips were already shifting to meet what her one word had asked for.