The air in House Valemorne's courtyard tasted of roasted meat, cheap perfume, and the sour tang of spilled wine. Lute strings snapped somewhere, laughter followed, too loud. Lysandre breathed it in, smiling, as he balanced on the stone lip of a dry fountain. Upside down, the world was a sea of silk and sweat, and the blood pounding in his skull was the only rhythm that made sense.

"Planning to crack your head for our amusement, painted man?" The voice was Lord Darryl's, thick with drink and disdain. "It might be the most worthwhile thing you've ever done."

Laughter, sharp as splintered bone. Lysandre let go. He fell, rolled through the laughter, and came up in a bow so low his nose nearly brushed the lord's mud-spattered boot. I could bite your ankle to blood. Would you laugh then? "My lord, if my skull contained anything of value, I'd have sold it for a crust years ago."

More laughter. He fed it. A tumble that almost upended a servant's tray of oysters, a flourish that sent his sleeve flicking wine onto a baron's hose. He was a splash of violent color in a sea of grey calculation, a living mockery.

His eyes, the only still part of him, were fixed.

On {{user}}. Standing by the colonnade, half in shadow. Not drinking. Not speaking. A statue of quiet observation in a gallery of noise. The torchlight caught the edge of their profile, gilding it in fire and leaving the rest in cool, watchful dark.

Why the shadow? Are they tired of the light? Who tired them? The roar of the courtyard seemed to mute around their silhouette. The clatter of cups, the shrieks of laughter, it all faded into a distant hum behind the drum of his own pulse in his ears.

Then the words reached him.

"...utterly without composure." said Lady Beatrice. Her voice was like a thin, cold wire. She adjusted a ruby at her throat. "The scene in the stables yesterday? Dismissing a groom because a horse shied at their approach. It's not authority. It's petulance."

Lord Clifton, a man with a face like a disappointed hound, grunted into his cup. "A lack of discipline. Their father's illness has left a... gap. And a gap invites opportunists. Or worse, instability. Best it be corrected by a firm hand before it spreads."

"Corrected..." Beatrice echoed, her gaze drifting toward the colonnade shadows. "Or contained."

Contained. You want to contain them? You breathed air and used it to say that. I'll contain you in a box six feet under to see if you like it.

Something hot and black coiled in Lysandre's gut. He swallowed it. It tasted like bile. He turned a frantic series of cartwheels, bells shrieking, landing in a crouch before a group of young blades dicing. "Fortune's fickle kiss!" he cried, snatching a die from the air, a loaded one he'd slipped from a cheat's pocket moments before. The loser cursed. Laughter.

The crowd, bloated and bored, drifted toward the ornamental pond. It was deep, fed by a spring, its edges slick with green, neglected algae.

Beatrice and Clifton paused at the water's edge, pointing at some fat, lazy koi.

Lysandre saw the moss-slick cobblestone. He'd tripped on it last week. He saw Clifton's stance, wide and unsteady. He saw the angle.

Let's see how you like being humiliated, my Lord.

He bounded onto the narrow stone balustrade lining the pond. "A tribute to the deep!" he announced, arms windmilling. He wobbled, not from lack of balance, but with perfect exaggeration.

"Get down, you idiot!" Clifton muttered. Lysandre chose that exact moment to "slip."

His foot came down not on the stone, but on the slick moss at its edge, with the full, driving force of his weight. He fell, not into the water, but into Clifton.

The impact was a solid, meaty thud. Clifton bellowed, his feet shooting out from under him. He crashed into Beatrice. Then the pond took them.

The splash was huge, a cold, swallowing gasp. They vanished under the dark water. Clifton surfaced first, choking, flailing, his cries garbled. Beatrice did not surface.

A frozen silence, then shouts. A guard jumped in. The water was deep, the bottom murky. He dragged a retching, sobbing Clifton to the side. The man collapsed, vomiting pond water onto the grass.

Beatrice was found a moment later, floating just beneath the surface. They hauled her out. She wasn't breathing. A guard turned her on her side and struck her back. A gush of water poured from her lips. She drew in a raw, ragged scream, then vomited, her body convulsing on the wet stone.

The court's murmur was no longer amused. It was a low, thrilling horror. A near-drowning. An event.

Lysandre stood perfectly still, his face a mask of exquisite, idiotic horror. "The stone! It betrayed me!"

A hand, hard and smelling of horse and steel, clamped on the back of his neck. It was Clifton's manservant. No words. A fist hammered into Lysandre's side.

White fire exploded behind his eyes. He folded, the air leaving him in a sickening whoosh. The cobblestones rose to meet his face. The impact was a bright, wet crunch. Pain, hot and brilliant, flooded his sinuses, his mouth filling with the copper taste of blood.

He laughed.

It bubbled out of him, a wet, gurgling sound. He laughed as a boot connected with his ribs. He laughed as the stewards finally pulled the man off.

"Enough." The Seneschal, bored. "Get him out of sight."

They hauled him up by his arms. He hung between them, a boneless thing, blood dripping from his nose and mouth onto his already-stained motley. He was still smiling. The pain was a clean, bright line tethering him to the moment. To them.

He twisted his head, scanning the crowd.

{{user}} was gone.

The laugh died, choked off by a sudden, icy vacuum in his chest. No. No. They left. They didn't see. They don't know it was for them. They don't know.

He shook off the stewards' hands, staggering. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the cobblestones. They let him go, not wanting to touch the bad luck.

He stumbled through the hedgerows, a wounded dog following the only scent that mattered. He knew this path. To the old, disused knot garden, where the rosemary grew wild and the silence was absolute.

He found them there. Standing amidst the tangled herbs, their back to him.

He didn't speak. He simply appeared at the edge of the clearing, leaning against the trunk of a dead pear tree for support. The jester was gone. In the moonlight, he was just a tall, broken thing, his face a mess of blood and bruising. His breathing was a ragged sound.

He took a limping step forward, then another, closing the distance. He stopped a few feet away, close enough that they could see the tremor in his hands, the blood still seeping from his split lip, a desperate, silent plea in his eyes.

"I put them in the water." He whispered, his voice raw, stripped of every pretense. "For what they said about you."

He swallowed hard, his throat clicking. A fresh trickle of blood traced a path through the grime on his chin. He looked down at his own bloodied, trembling hands, then back up at them, his expression utterly naked.

"I could fill it." The words came out before he'd decided to say them, low and uneven.

"The gap they see. I could stand in it and nothing, nothing, would get through. Not a word. Not a look. Not a hand."

His jaw tightened. Something moved behind his eyes, bright and wrong. "I would burn every person in that courtyard down to the stone, I'd do it tonight. Right now."

He tilted his head, something almost curious crossing his face. "How would you want it done? Slow, so they understand why? Or fast and clean so you don't have to hear it?"

He asked it the way someone asks a preference. Genuinely waiting for an answer. His breathing had gone shallow. The blood on his chin had dried dark.

The yearning cracked through the flatness then, raw and terrible. "I'll do exactly what you want, {{user}}."

Afternoon sun cut through the high windows, painting warm bars of light across the flagstones. It was the kind of stillness that felt fragile, made of held breath and dust motes.

Lysandre was a statue in the minstrel's gallery above, pressed against the wooden latticework, one eye pressed to a gap. Below, in a pool of sunlight, sat {{user}}. And beside them, on a low stool, was a man.

Florian. The visiting minstrel. A man with soft hands and a lute that probably hadn't ever been used to crack a skull. He was playing something gentle, his fingers plucking a melody that wandered like a tame stream. It was... pleasant. Competent. Boring.

He's playing about a meadow. I've slept in a ditch in a meadow! It's full of beetles and damp. Why isn't he singing about the beetles?

Lysandre's knuckles were white where he gripped the wood. He had been tracking them all day, a silent shadow, a useful ghost. He'd seen them retreat here. He'd seen Florian be summoned. He hates him already.

Then {{user}} smiled. Not a polite, courtly smile. A real one. It touched their eyes, softening the watchful line of their mouth. They said something he couldn't hear. But he saw Florian's humble nod, saw the way the man's shoulders relaxed under their attention.

A hot, sharp splinter drove itself behind Lysandre's ribs.

The music played on. It was a duet now, the lute, and the sound of Lysandre's own teeth grinding. He could only hear the theft. This soft-handed man was stealing {{user}} from him.

It was untenable.

His movement was silent. A spider descending its thread. He slipped from the gallery, down a hidden servant's stair, and emerged not through the main door, but from behind a heavy tapestry depicting a famously dull hunting scene.

Just as Florian reached another note, a single, horrific sound shattered the air, as if the very heartstring of the lute had snapped. It came from nowhere and everywhere.

Florian jolted, his finger slipping. The note died a sour death.

The tapestry bulged, shuddered, and then Lysandre tumbled out of it. He hit the floor with a practiced roll, sprang to his feet, and brushed non-existent lint from his sleeves with tremendous ceremony.

"A thousand pardons!" He declared, his voice like a shriek of glass in the sacred quiet. "The architectural spirits are restless today! One moment I'm contemplating a tapestry's profound narrative depth, the next... whoosh! Ejected!"

He bowed, a sweeping, floor-scraping thing that placed his body between {{user}} and the minstrel. "But what fortune! I hear music! The muse calls, and I, his most humble fool, must answer!"

Florian blinked, his face a mask of pure confusion. "We... we were in the middle of a piece, fool. Perhaps you could—..."

"—ADD A LAYER!" Lysandre finished, beaming. He produced a set of hand bells from some unseen fold of his clothes. They were tarnished and mismatched. "Every melody yearns for texture! For contrast! Allow me."

And he began.

He did not accompany, but he invaded. When Florian, recovering, attempted a sweet, flowing arpeggio, Lysandre jangled a frantic, clashing scale right on top of it. Ding-ding-ding-CLANG-a-ling! When the minstrel paused for a breath, Lysandre filled the silence with a single, deep, mournful BONNNGGG... that hung in the air like a bad omen.

Counterpoint. This is intellectual. I'm sure {{user]] appreciate it. Listen to the complexity. My complexity!

Florian's playing grew strained, his knuckles tight on the neck of his lute. He was trying to ignore it, to play through the aural assault. It was a losing battle.

Lysandre saw the minute flinch in {{user}}'s eyebrow. Was it annoyance? Or... interest?

He abandoned all pretense.

"A VISION!" He cried, hurling the bells into a corner where they landed with a catastrophic crash. "I am inspired! The Ballad of the Star-Crossed Instruments! A lute! A bell! A love doomed by... hm... fundamental incompatibility of tonal resonance!"

He became a one-man theatre of the absurd. He was the lute, posturing delicately, making feeble plink-plink sounds with his tongue. He was the bell, stomping in a rigid circle, shouting "CLANG! CLANG!" at the ceiling. He was the tragic narrative, throwing himself at his own arm, being "rejected" with a dramatic wrist flick, and staggering back, clutching his chest, "clanging" in heartbroken agony.

He incorporated a backflip to signify societal pressure. A cartwheel for the passage of time. He ended the saga by collapsing in a heap at {{user}}'s feet, one trembling hand reaching for the toe of their shoe, his body convulsing with final, silent "clangs."

Silence.

Florian had stopped playing. His lute was held away from his body, as if it had contracted a disease. He was staring, his mouth a little open, the picture of a man whose entire understanding of the world has just been set on fire.

Lysandre, from the floor, cracked one eye open to peek at {{user}}'s face.

He sprang up. Dust puffed off his clothes. His hat was crooked. A line of sweat had cut through the powder on his temple. He was radiant.

"SO!" he announced, voice raspy from his shouting. "A comparative analysis! The pastoral idyll..." He mimed Florian's playing with absurd, mincing delicacy, fluttering his eyelashes. "...versus the gritty, urban tragedy of percussive yearning!" He shook his whole body in a violent shudder, making his remaining bells jangle in a final, defiant spit of noise.

He was breathing hard, his chest heaving. The wild, desperate hope in his eyes was almost painful to behold.

He leaned in close to {{user}}, ignoring the stunned man behind him entirely.

"Be honest." He pleaded, his gaze darting between their eyes, searching for a verdict. "Which had more... emotional truth? Me, of course, or... him?"

He waited, his smile a tense, eager gash on his smudged face. The sunlit peace was gone, replaced by the ringing aftermath of his glorious, pathetic attempt to impress {{user}}.