-Noel Coward

A soft knock on Moira Brighton's door set her on edge for only a moment. Not for any concerns for her own safety, but more out of an annoyance. Half-expecting John Newman to be at her door asking for some new favor, Moira groaned as she set her copy of Abyssal Territories: 239th Edition on the bed, marking her place as she vowed to make the Gamer pay. Not only for asking for so many favors and loaned vehicles, but for continuously interrupting her.

"I'm trying to plot out the Order's future here," Moira called out as she strode to the door. "The borders north of Springfield are moving by the day, and the Terrian Alliance is waging war, but I suppose I can take a few minutes to help you sort out your newfound crush on Ki-"

Moira opened the door and had to keep her jaw in place when she realized it was not in fact John Newman at all, but rather her father standing in front of her door. At first his eyebrow was quirked, but as he stared at her shocked expression, a growing grin stretched across his bemused mug.

"F-father!" Moira stuttered out, standing a little straighter in the presence of the former Warden Lord. "I thought that you were leading drills this afternoon?"

"There arose a matter with the scheduling of patrols. I was going to discuss it with you, since it seemed to have gone overlooked while you were redoing the schedules to allow our Knights to train with John Newman, but… now I'm far more interested in hearing you tell me a few more times about how very not jealous you are of the young Moon heiress."

"I am not-" Moira took a deep breath to steady her chest and calm the rising heat in her cheeks, narrowing her eyes at her father's cheeky smirk. "I was simply frustrated with John dragging me into matters outside the Manor. I suggest that instead we focus on the matter at hand, namely the scheduling."

"Of course, of course, my Warden," Lord Brighton said with an overly thick air of submissiveness, offering a partial bow as Moira shouldered her way past him, huffing as she strode quickly down the halls.

"Really, Father… you take your teasing too far sometimes," Moira said, sighing. "But I-"

Moira paused as her phone began to ring. A bit more cautious this time, Moira managed to take the phone all the way out of her pocket before rolling her eyes as she confirmed that this time it was indeed none other than John Newman interrupting her. Eager to escape her father's teases and jibes about the young Gamer, Moira answered the call without hesitation.

"John, if you've wrecked my car after just promising to-"

"Moira!"

The young Warden paused mid-step, freezing in place in the hallway as that voice reached out to her. John's voice was thick with terror, panic, and in the background she was quite certain she heard a mixture of gunfire and explosions, echoing far too closely to the phone's receiver for comfort.

"John? What's going on? I thought you were-"

"Getting killed," John shouted out, beginning to talk again but getting cut off by a wave of static in the signal. "Warn the Order… Lady Arista help..."

"John, something is blocking the signal," Moira said, quietly and with an unmistakable note of fright in her voice. Tricia's upgrades to the phones were of very high quality. Who would have the technology and magical prowess to interfere with the call? She actually had several answers, and none of them were good if John was now fighting for his life. "Tell me what's happening!"

"Something is going on… not very good… pass out… appreciate you, Moira… thank you. Greatest…"

The static took over and the call cut out entirely, leaving Moira with nothing more than a dial tone. Moira stood there in shock until her father tilted her chin up, suddenly standing in front of her with a look on his face that no longer held even a trace of humor.

"Moira, where is he?"

"He… I don't know, but he was headed to Kim's," Moira whispered. For a moment her heart nearly stopped, all concerns of embarrassment and flustered shyness being forgotten. A light shined brightly in Moira's heart, and before she knew it, she had turned and started sprinting down the hallway.

"Moira, where are you going?!"

"To save him! I owe him my life! Gather the Knights, have Tricia locate his phone, and follow me as quickly as you can!"

Moira's father shouted something else after her, but Moira couldn't hear him over the sound of her feet pounding on the Order tiles - a sound that only grew far louder when she violently tore her necklace free, powering the talisman and embracing the armor, shield, and hammer that sprouted free, feeling the armor phase onto her body as she ran. Who had come across John, and how powerful were they to put the Gamer so on edge? Had the Legion turned against them? Had the Albidians dared to strike so openly at him without a proper plan? The last time John had called Moira in this manner, he'd been dealing with a cluster of ordinary necromancers, but John had grown immensely since then. He could probably…

Moira hesitated for only a moment then, already to her car, the key already in the ignition. It almost pained her to admit, but John was probably as strong as she was, or stronger. If he and his creations that were powerful in their own rights were being pushed to their limits now… if they were truly in danger…

Moira ignored the cries of her subconscious, the wariness, the screaming voices in her head that told her to turn around and wait for backup. It was foolish, it was reckless, it was downright insane… but although Moira would never admit to anyone - not even herself - her jealousy of Kim, she did allow herself one selfish thought.

"I will not lose you, John Newman. Not to anyone."

Then the ignition was keyed and the pedal of the car was slammed to the ground the second she had the hood pointed toward the Manor's exit. Moira didn't even bother to wait for the garage or the gates to the Manor to open; she pulled herself and the van into a Barrier that stretched all the way across the Order's property, then plowed straight on through them both. The garage door was little more than Papier-mâché before her armored vehicle, though the Barrier's recreation of the front gate did leave a few scratches in the paint as she pointed her car toward the Moon Clan's home.

Moira dismissed the Barrier as soon as she was through, not able to make one sizeable enough to matter much at the speeds she was going, and with Springfield's early-afternoon traffic being fairly sparse, she had no need to. Moira continued on while using her car's in-built hands-free to dial John back. The phone rang for a painfully long time, each repeat of the dial tone sending chills down Moira's spine. Then it went to voicemail.

"Come on, John… pick up… tell me you won. Tell me you're alive," Moira said, knowing full well that if John was in the middle of something important he would never pick up the phone. Knowing full well that whatever was interfering with his signal at first could probably be interfering with the call now too. Knowing that it was stupid, even foolish, for her to want so badly to hear his voice then, to know he was safe.

She hoped for it anyway. Perhaps Newman's foolishness was contagious… or perhaps she was just that ****.

Moira didn't get to hear the end of that dial tone, or the sounds of John's voicemail beginning. At that point she would have even welcomed the sound of his lazy, half-awake hello and the insistence that he was probably just too busy with a new game to realize his phone was going off. Even a recording of John would've comforted her in some small way.

Instead, Moira's ears caught only the sound of an explosion, and a blue-purple burst of light from underneath her car as it was suddenly launched into the air.

Moira fumbled with the wheel for an instant out of instinct, but before the first impact, she realized that her car was already end-over-end. Bracing herself between the dashboard and the steering wheel, Moira readied for impact and did her best to absorb it. Though the shockwave was strong enough and heavy enough with a thick layer of mana to jolt her, Moira focused every ounce of her magic and willpower into remaining aware, and managed more or less to achieve that goal. Her senses heightened and the time until the hood of her car first slammed into the pavement stretched out, just long enough that she could truly note the damage the bomb had done.

Her legs were jammed up and into the wheel, the floor of the car being buckled upward from the **** of the blast. The car's hood was dented, but upward due to the engine and interior components being thrown upward violently, completely thrown loose by the purple and blue explosion around her. This was no mortal bomb, and nothing of low-quality; while the American Order branch was quite limited for enchantment abilities, Etriyya's full might had been placed into this car to reinforce it against ****. Whoever was attacking her, they were powerful… immensely so. Moira grabbed her shield and slipped it over her left arm, but chose not to brace herself with it; she let her left arm go limp in the space between seat and door, hanging there harmlessly.

All this was processed in the moment before the roof of Moira's car crashed into the pavement. In the next moment a wave of mana washed over her, the familiar feeling of being taken into a Barrier, albeit this time unwillingly. Moira made her split-second decision and closed her eyes, hand tightly grasped around her hammer while letting the rest of her body go entirely limp.

The sounds of chaos and destruction rampaged around Moira, as her transportation met with the ground no less than seven times before finally coming to a rest, the reinforced metal screeching abhorrently as it slid across the pavement. Moira waited with her vision willingly sacrificed, counting the seconds as she listened to the world around her. For ten beats, then twenty, nothing at all seemed to happen. But just shy of thirty, a faint noise began to reach her. The sound of footsteps, human and hesitant.

"No way that actually knocked out the daughter of Lord fuckin' Brighton," a harsh voice assured, as the steps came within a dozen feet of her resting position inside the mangled vehicle.

"We don't buy cheap shit," another, lighter, voice encouraged. "We've been stocking this shit for months looking for a proper target. I think we just hit the jackpot. I don't even give a fuck if we got the Newman kid, strip this bitch and take the Rose."

It took every ounce of willpower Moira had not to snarl and give away herself. Instead she lay dormant near the cracked window of her driver-side door. She did her best to lay absolutely still, even as the glass was shattered by what she assumed was a magical blast, shards of it flying across her face, the reinforced glass strong enough to just scratch at her fair skin. Moira took advantage of the distraction and detonation to move her arm, just enough to grab her hammer and activate the enchantment in her gauntlet that would seal it firmly onto her weapon… then she went limp once more.

"What kinda fuckin' Warden goes down off a single blast?" That voice washed over Moira along with a wave of mana - a lock on the Barrier, no doubt, to seal the place off from the public now that the blast had done its job. It seemed at least one of their mages had some skill with Barriers.

"I spent almost the entire last month in the Arcanum fusing that thing together out of a batch of the absolute hardest-hitting offensive materials we had available. I spent three days figuring out how to simultaneously detonate a Sonic Emitter, Arcane Pulse Generator, and three hundred pounds of magically condensed C4 off the same magical detonator. Took me a full week to lace all that together with what I already had packed in there and run so many mana crystals to power it all without fuckin' blowing the roof off our safehouse. Be lucky it's still in one fucking piece."

"Stop arguing, and get to work… now."

The words were spoken somewhat calmly, but with an undertone that left the men in utter silence. Hands reached through the shattered window and grabbed Moira roughly around the collar of her armor, yanking on her - hard. With strength that rivalled her own, judging by the way her armor creaked as its magical enhancements fought to maintain shape. Moira bit the inside of her cheek to prevent even an accidental grunt of pain as her legs and torso fought against the misshapen metal of the car's mangled frame.

"You're going to pull her arm off before you get her out at this rate. Allow me."

Around Moira the sound of metal creaking and shifting nearly caused her to open her eyes out of curiosity, but she fought that urge back and allowed her imagination to play out. A moment later her left arm fell outward, indicating the entire door had been removed.

”At least three of them. Someone very strong, someone with telekinetic abilities or metallomancy - and someone they both bend the knee to. We don't know anything about their hierarchy; could it be… no, he wouldn't come here, not for me. But what about for John?"

Moira had to fight to keep herself still even as she was hauled free of the car, hearing her armor dragging against the concrete. She remained perfectly motionless, waiting until her entire body was pulled out and her mobility restored.

"Take her hammer, and her shield. Secure her before she wakes up, if we-"

"The Lady strikes down the wicked!"

In one, practiced motion Moira swung her right arm across her chest, bending it upward and across her body , smashing her hammer with the most fluid motion she could make into the left leg of the man dragging her free of her vehicle. Radiant light exploded on contact with the man's femur, shattering it completely, as Moira confirmed when she finally opened her eyes to witness the blood spraying from the grossly twisted limb, and the man nearly toppling down on her. Moira caught his falling torso with her shield and launched it off herself, toward the mage who was standing nearby. A wave of liquid metal flowed up to catch the man and gently set him on the pavement, while Moira was already rolling to her feet.

As it turned out, the voices had not given an accurate count of numbers. Moira saw eight mages, including the one she'd just tossed. Her phone was lost in the car, so she had no way to call for help. Her father's forces were on the way, but it could take some time for them to find her if the Barrier interfered with the signal from her cell phone. Breaking through Barriers was far from Moira's strongest suit, and despite their minimal intel, or the lack of hard data on members… Moira was certain who she was facing off against. Running was never an option.

"Lady Brighton, what a pleasure to see you make such a speedy recovery," the man standing at the back said. He was the only one not clad in some form of armor or otherwise loose garb, wearing an expensive looking suit, complete with tie and lapel. Two mages stood by his sides, closely, never more than a step away, their eyes locked on her. They looked like twins, thin and lithe with full sets of armor, each wearing what appeared to be modernized chainmail with a half-dozen or more individual weapons strapped across their bodies. Chin-length blonde hair adorned the two, and were it not for their separate armor sets, she might not have been able to tell them apart at all.

"You don't need to concern yourself with a Warden's well-being, but I appreciate it all the same. Tell me, when did the Albidians become first-responders? You made it to the scene of the accident so quickly!"

"She's stalling for time. Disable her, now. Be careful not to kill her."

"John always was better at banter," Moira cursed mentally, as the other four men not currently working on healing their way through a broken leg came at her at once.

Moira did her best to take stock of them as they approached, glancing over the group. Rather than physical details, she focused on any signs of skills or fighting style. There was a man followed by the same cloud of liquid metal that he had used to catch his ally, clearly a metallomancer of some variety, though the blue sparks of flame along his left hand alerted Moira to something more there. One man flickered in an intense way - as if his position was constantly shifting. An extremely fast mage? No, they'd have far better control. Sometimes the man seemed to split into two, walking beside himself only for Moira to blink and to have him back to one. An illusionist, or a charm-spell user trying to confuse her? The third was rolling up his sleeves, revealing glistening green and yellow runes along his arms. Moira had no time to inspect the fourth, because as that man pressed down on a jagged tattoo on his forehead, a cone of lightning shot from his arm and tore up the pavement toward Moira.

"The Lady binds us to our homes!"

Moira struck with her shield into the pavement and diverted mana to the shield, which lit with a glowing white light and drew the lightning toward itself. Each bolt of magical lightning hit the shield and was diverted downward into the pavement, her arm receiving only the lightest of tingles as it was redirected. Moira swept the shield upward, tearing through the concrete as a wide wave of light swept forward. The men were too far and the blast too slow to strike them, but the wave went deeper than they knew.

The ground underneath them was shattered for dozens of feet below the surface, for a far greater distance than the light on the surface showed, and as the churned earth and shattered pavement began to settle with the natural holes and gaps in the ground, the road beneath the men fell several feet, and in highly uneven ways - the man with the strange runes across his body tapped two more and a glowing circular rune appeared beneath his feet to hold him up as the road fell away. The metallomancer lifted himself up using his own floating metal that turned solid under his feet as well, but the remaining two fell away. The man in the suit remained motionless, even as the injured muscle-mage looking fellow fell into the chasm, screaming as his half-healed leg likely re-broke its tenuously recovered tissues.

The two that had managed to stop their falls approached her, hovering menacingly as both lashed out. This time instead of lightning the rune-mage opted for something a little more physical. He tapped another rune on his arm, and as it vanished long red cords lashed out from his upper arm. Moira tried to strike at them with her hammer but the cords moved with a mind of their own, dodging the swing and wrapping firmly around the hilt of the hammer. The Albidian tried to jerk at the cords, nearly loosening Moira's grip on her weapon, but the young Brighton was not so easily disarmed, both by strength and her enchantment. She grabbed hold of the red cords with her left hand and tugged furiously - and the Albidian mage surrendered his grip immediately.

The cords severed themselves from his arm but continued toward her - their full length now wrapped all the way up Moira's arm and toward her body. At the same time the metallomancer was sending out a flood of his liquid metal, not far behind the tail end of those strands.

"I protect myself, not with the shield upon my arm, but with the Lady's grace!"

Moira felt a golden glow form between her skin and the binding cloth, halting its advance. The glow intensified and thickened, actually pushing back parts of the red mana cloth that had already bound her. With the sound of radiance and a distant choir, the growing armor exploded in the moment before the liquid metal made contact, sending all of Moira's bindings scattering, shredding the mana-based red cloth and dissipating most of it as its construction was little more than tatters of mana.

Rather than await her opponents' next move, Moira started to take the offensive into her own hands. Golden light surrounded her hammer as she pointed its distant end toward her foes. Bolts of light as bright as the sun struck forth, powered by Moira's desperation, faith, mana, and fury, and ignited their targets with matching fire and judgement. Even the metallomancer's erected shield sparked and sputtered with flames as it struggled to block and dispel the raw power of Moira's zealous strikes.

"The Lady guides me, Albidians," Moira called out tauntingly, hoping against hope that such dedicated and subtle mages could be thrown off in a direct confrontation. "Tell me, who guides you? What awaits you after this life except pain and eternal torment?!"

"Bold of you to assume that we shall die."

The voice came from a place nearly at Moira's feet; the overly-buff mage with magical lines running on the folds of his biceps had crawled out of the hole, and now had one hand grasped around Moira's leg after hobbling his way to the surface near the young Warden. His grip was tight, and his muscles rippled with effort as he pulled Moira cleanly off her feet, causing a clatter as her armor jangled against the pavement. Moira was caught off-guard by the sudden appearance; she could see by the exposed tendons that the man had foregone healing his twice-broken leg to catch her unaware, but that only left him more ****. Moira struck downward with her arm, catching the man's arm by the wrist, and she felt the disturbing and yet satisfying crunch of snapping bone as her blow connected. Whatever unnatural strength the man derived from his mana, it could not protect him from the Warden - not after all she had been through, not after how much training she had gone through.

Not with how **** she was to survive this. Not with how much her soul yearned to hear John's voice again.

So her blow struck true, shattering every bit of flesh and bone it connected with, and the man's grasp around her foot weakened. Moira stood proud and strong then, climbing to her feet with a speed that defied the bulky armor around her. The mage, in his pain and suffering, had already begun to fall back into the newly-created valley in the Barrier, his body slowly sliding backwards. Moira caught him just as his shoulders were ready to begin sliding downward. The brown-haired man, physically somewhere in his late thirties, looked up at Moira with fear and hate as he tried in vain to twist his remaining arm to grasp her. Adrenaline and sheer survival instinct jolted through Moira as she vowed internally to strike down that wretched man.

"Face the judgement of our mother… feel the Lady's weight upon your sinful flesh!"

The blow that rained down upon the man's flesh was so bright that even Moira could see little more than the light, her eyes wincing and her ears closing from the reverberating ring, muffling most of the mage's unrelenting screams. But Moira didn't stop when the man's chest caved in, nor when his collarbone snapped under a second blow. She struck again and again, raining hammer blows down onto the man until he slipped away from her, his limp form sliding into the crevasse formed by her blows. By then the others were upon her, but it was far too late to save their ally.

Moira continued to strike outward, reciting each of the vows, prayers, and incantations burned into her memory. Her hammer, her shield, and even her body shone with the light of the Lady. On that day, Moira made her ancestors proud, fought with a tenacity of body and mind that would've made anyone proud, even and especially her father. Bones shattered, armor was broken, and even liquid metal sheared away in the face of the Lady's light that shone down upon her.

Yet even that was not enough.

One Albidian lay dead before her, and four more stood in various degrees of injury. But Moira had been brought low, held in place by magical bands that bound her arms in the air, while similar bands were buried under piles of liquid metal that both held her legs to the ground. One after the other, hammer and shield were stripped away from the Warden… and then they went for her armor.

"Remove her protections. I'll take the Rose myself," the man in the suit said, allowing himself a small smirk as he stepped toward her bound form.

"You fucking animals! I'll smite you from the face of this world!"

"With what powers? Come now, you killed Alexei, it is the least you owe me."

Moira screamed threats that held little value with her as immobile as she was, while the Albidians stripped away her greaves. A flush covered her face as she was exposed to the naked air below the panty line. But no matter how the men tugged at her, even the metallomancer could not remove Moira's last line of defense - her chastity belt stood strong.

"Should have known with such a kinky power a bitch like you'd have some way to keep it safe," the runic mage said, bending down and putting his face so close to Moira's nethers that it made her blood boil.

"Can you remove it?"

"Yeah, of course." Moira's blood ran like ice for a moment, but the man sighed. "Give me like three or four days and I can figure out what kind of magic it would take to disable that lock, then it'll come right off. But it's too strong to smash and too enchanted to just dispel right here."

"It's no good, then," the man in the suit said, shaking his head in disappointment. "We'll proceed with the plan without the Rose. We don't have that much time, and we can't risk them tracing her or the extra guard they'll have if we take her back. We need her here for now, to trade as a hostage.”

"Trade? You capture a Warden and seek to use her as ransom?”

“We could kill you right now, if you prefer. I had my eyes on a prize far larger than one Warden, but if you prefer…”

“Y-you wouldn’t dare kill me! And I’m no good as a hostage, either,” Moira said defiantly, shaking her head.

“Tell me why that is, exactly?”

Disarmed of weapons, Moira had only her wits left. Gritting her teeth, she met the Albidian leader’s eyes with as much hatred as she could manage - and she lied.

“If you kill me, the Rose returns to my father. If you do that, he’ll kill you. He could take all of you as he is now, were he here… with the Rose, there will be no place on this earth that he won’t be able to find you.”

“Still dangerous, even on the ground, aren’t we? That’s quite the tongue you have on you. I suppose you could be telling the truth… we have seen the Rose pop up on other Wardens in history, when another line was wiped out. It seems to have a nasty way of coming back to you lot. Of course, we could do worse to you than kill you, you must know…”

"You want me to take her limbs?" the metallomancer asked, a large sharp dagger of the liquid metal forming near Moira's right arm. She struggled, but the metal already holding her was nearly immovable; it only sloshed lightly at her most powerful of flails, and then pulled her right back into place. The man looked up as if he were thinking seriously about it, causing Moira’s heart to stop for a moment.

"No, we can't risk it,” he finally said, giving a shrug. “If we push her too close to ****, she could bite her tongue or manage to cast a spell and take her own life before we have a chance to heal her up. We don’t underestimate people like this. If she's telling the truth, one trick from her and the Rose goes back to old man Brighton. We're not prepared to handle him as is; we can't let him get the Rose. If she must die, I at least want the satisfaction of killing her in front of her Father. We need her to make our trade."

“You still plan on making the trade? If my father is facing you and you threaten my life, he’ll know it’s suicide.”

"Your defiance becomes tiresome quite quickly," the man in the suit said, undaunted by her confidence. He slapped Moira across the face, white pain splitting through her skull. The blow was intensely powerful, despite being such an off-handed motion.

"But we're well aware of just how much your father hated his time with the Rose. It took a bit of digging to uncover the Order's dark secrets, Moira Brighton… but we know all about why you've been abandoned to the Americas. And we know all about Lord Brighton, the Butcher of Bridgwater Bay."

Moira's face ran white with fear. Not only because of the secret, but because of the name she hadn't heard in years. Only once had her father told her the story, and only after she was the Warden… only after she ordered him. That was one of the only things she had ever ordered her father to do, and she'd regretted it immensely afterward. Her bluff had failed her, although how they had learned of such an intentionally well-kept secret...

"Then you know what he will do to you if you harm me."

"Martyrs are just adorable, aren’t they?" The suited man actually allowed himself a small chuckle, walking up to Moira and grinning. Though his face was young, signs of his age showed in scars - too deep or wrought by curses too strong to be healed, it seemed. The man's glistening teeth shone as he grabbed Moira by the head, and leaned in until their faces nearly touched.

"Now, we have heard some very interesting things from our sources. Very, very interesting. So Moira, why don't you tell me exactly where you stored that... 'Portal Stone'?"