The moon hung full and bright over the lower districts.

  Magnolia lay curled beneath the quilted blanket Yi had given her, the one with the faded floral pattern. Her hair spilled pale across the pillow. She looked younger like this. Slack-faced, breathing slow. All that careful guardedness she carried during waking hours had gone somewhere else for the night, and what remained was just a girl, eighteen and exhausted, taking up barely half the bed.

  TAP. TAP. TAP.

  Her eyes opened.

  There, pressed against the glass, was a face.

  A round plush face.

  Button eyes catching the light. Brown snout pressed flat against the window. Tiny hooves raised, one clutching a rock.

  TAP. TAP. TAP.

  Magnolia threw off her blanket and crossed the room, unlatching the window before the wretched thing could crack the glass. Cool air spilled in, and a small shape tumbled past her onto the bed with a soft fwump.

  "Finally!" Piggy's voice was a high-pitched whisper. "Do you know how long I've been out there? My hooves are freezing."

  "How," Magnolia hissed, keeping her voice low, "did you find out where I live?"

  "Easy. I followed you from the sky. You never even looked up." The pig's button eyes glittered. "I'm very good at stalking."

  This is a nightmare. I'm still dreaming.

  "Also," Piggy added, her voice taking on a sly lilt, "isn't this a little naughty?"

  "...What?"

  "You know. Young girl like you. Sleeping in your boyfriend's house. Scandalous."

  Heat flooded Magnolia's cheeks. "He's not my boyfriend. We're not—it's not like that!"

  "Mmhmm. Sure." Piggy's tone was deeply unconvinced.

  Magnolia sank onto the edge of the bed. There was no winning this.

  "So," Piggy said, rolling onto her stomach. "What do you like to do for fun?"

  "I like to read. And I've been learning to cook."

  The change in Piggy was instantaneous. "You can cook?!"

  "I'm getting better at it."

  "That's amazing! I can't cook at all! One time I tried to make toast and I caught on fire!"

  "You're... flammable?"

  "Extremely! It was a whole thing! Very traumatic!"

  Magnolia found herself, against all reason, almost smiling.

  They talked for what felt like hours. By the time gray light began to seep through the window, Magnolia's capacity for conversation had been thoroughly exhausted.

  "I should go," Piggy said finally, floating up from the bed. "I'll be back tomorrow! We have so much more to talk about!"

  "We're not friends."

  "Best friends forever!"

  And then the pig was gone.

  Magnolia stared at the ceiling for a long moment. She could still see the small indent in her blanket where the pig had sprawled.

  She's coming back tomorrow.

  The thought filled her with a bone-deep dread.

  Magnolia pulled the blanket over her head and willed herself to sleep.

  * * *

  The days that followed blurred together in a way Magnolia had never experienced before.

  Not the dull blur of the Satellite, where one shift bled into the next and time lost all meaning. This was different. This was warmth.

  Mornings began the same way: Yi would leave for work and Magnolia would slip out the door with Skippy at her heels. She'd climb the trail to the clearing, now littered with the rubble of her practice, and she'd train until her muscles screamed and her mana reserves ran dry.

  She was getting stronger. She could feel it.

  And then she would return to the house, and Yi would come home smelling like sweat, and they would cook together.

  She was getting better at that, too.

  Her rice no longer turned to mush. Her vegetables maintained structural integrity. One evening, she made a soup that Yi actually asked for seconds of, and the memory of his surprised smile stayed with her for days.

  They fell into a rhythm. Comfortable. Easy. The kind of rhythm Magnolia hadn't known existed outside of picture books.

  Yi would tease her about her cooking. She would pretend to be offended. Skippy would beg for scraps, and Yi would sneak him pieces of meat when he thought she wasn't looking. They would talk about nothing important: the weather, the neighbors, the increasingly aggressive bird that had taken up residence in the tree outside. And somehow those conversations felt more precious than any she'd had before.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Sometimes, in the quiet moments, Magnolia would catch herself watching him.

  The way his dark hair fell across his forehead. The crinkle at the corners of his eyes when he laughed. The gentle way he moved through the world, as though everything deserved kindness, even the spiders he carefully relocated outside instead of killing.

  He's a good person, she thought. A genuinely good person.

  She wasn't sure she'd ever met one before.

  But there were other moments, too.

  Moments when something would shift behind his eyes, and the warmth would drain away, and he would become someone else entirely.

  It happened on the ninth day.

  Yi came home late, later than usual. When he stepped through the door, Magnolia knew immediately that something was wrong. His jaw was clenched. His eyes were cold. His hands, she noticed, were shaking.

  "Those bastards," he said, and his voice was quiet in a way that frightened her. "They think they can talk to me like that? Look at me like I'm nothing?"

  He crossed to the counter and gripped it with both hands, knuckles going white.

  "I've worked harder than any of them. Given more. And still they look at me like I don't belong. Like I should be grateful for scraps."

  He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.

  Magnolia's hand stopped on the kettle.

  She knew what anger looked like. She'd grown up with it, learned to read it the way some children learned to read weather. But the thing on Yi's face wasn't anything she had a name for. It was older than anger. Heavier. The kind of feeling a person spends years folding up and putting away in some deep place, and here it was now, unfolding, and she understood with sudden cold certainty that whoever had caused this was going to wish they hadn't.

  When he lifted his head and turned to look at her, she saw something in those dark eyes that made her blood slow.

  She had seen that look before. In the Satellite. In the faces of men who had already decided someone needed to die.

  Then something shifted. The cold light in his eyes dimmed. His grip on the counter eased. He drew a long, shuddering breath.

  "Magnolia." His voice had gone soft. Horrified. "I... God, I'm sorry. You shouldn't have seen that."

  He pressed a hand over his eyes.

  "I frightened you. Of course I did."

  Magnolia couldn't move. Her heart was still slamming against her ribs.

  "Ever since I was young," he said quietly, "I've had this... anger. Whenever someone made me feel small. Something takes over. Everything goes red." He shook his head. "My family was poor. My sister and I were bullied. Often. Badly. That's probably where it started."

  Then, without warning: "Ashfall Eve."

  Magnolia blinked. "What?"

  "It's coming. In a few days." And now he was smiling, smaller and quieter than usual, but somehow more genuine. "I've been looking forward to it all year. And I've been looking forward to bringing you."

  He met her eyes. "I want to watch the fireworks with you, Magnolia. From the hill where my sister used to take me. Just the two of us."

  The memory of his earlier words surfaced. It's a date, then.

  "I'd like that," she said.

  * * *

  Piggy was having the match of her life.

  The Staircase Match had been brutal. Her rabbit sister Bun-Bun had body-slammed her. Her cat sister Mittens had driven her face-first into the floor. She had been thrown, stomped, flattened, and at one point literally tossed into a garbage bin.

  But Piggy was the champion. And champions did not stay down.

  The final stretch was a blur of desperate scrambling. Bun-Bun lunging for the top step. Mittens clawing at Piggy's legs. And Piggy, battered and exhausted, throwing herself forward in one last undignified belly-slide—

  Her hoof smacked the hallway carpet.

  "YES!" she screamed. "THE CHAMPION RETAINS!"

  Bun-Bun froze, paw hovering over the top step, then slowly withdrew it.

  "Curse you," she said, but there was grudging respect in her voice.

  Piggy hauled herself upright and raised one hoof in triumph.

  "I am unstoppable. Undefeated. Untouchable. I am—"

  Clap.

  Clap.

  Clap.

  The sound came from behind her.

  Piggy turned.

  A figure stood at the end of the upstairs hallway, leaning against the wall casually. The evening light from a nearby window cast him in silhouette, but Piggy would have recognized that posture anywhere.

  Tall and lean, dressed in a fitted coat of deep sapphire. Gold embroidery climbed the fabric in jagged, hungry patterns, yellows and ambers tapering to points like flames licking up a wall. His hair was bleached the color of straw, cropped short at the sides but left longer on top, a stark contrast against his dark eyes and the warm tan of his skin. His face was sharp-featured and fine-boned, beautiful in the way that poisonous flowers are beautiful, with a glint of perpetual amusement tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  "Congratulations," he said, still clapping with exaggerated slowness. "Another successful title defense. Truly, the annals of wrestling history will remember this day."

  "Poinciana!" Piggy's exhaustion vanished, replaced by a surge of excitement. "Did you see that? Did you see the Uranage? I threw her off the stairs! She rolled all the way down! It was incredible!"

  Poinciana pushed off from the wall and walked down the stairs, picked up the cardboard belt and presented it to the Pig.

  "I saw," he said, “I also saw you get put face-first into the floor.."

  "That's called selling, Poinciana. You have to make the match look competitive."

  "Mm." He draped the belt over her shoulders. "I must say, when you ordered us all off the first floor for an hour in the name of your art, I was expecting something a bit more spectacular."

  Piggy bristled. "More spectacular? Did you miss the Gore? The Uranage off the top landing? Bun-Bun did a diving attack!"

  "I was hoping for a ladder." Poinciana picked an invisible speck of dust from his sleeve. "A table spot, at least. Any Staircase Match worth its salt has someone going through a table."

  "We don't have tables! We're stuffed animals! Our furniture is cardboard!"

  "Tragic, isn't it." He shook his head slowly. "No tables. No ladders. No chairs. The sport has declined terribly."

  "You're insufferable," Piggy muttered, pulling the belt tight against her chest. "I'd like to return this friendship, please."

  "All sales final."

  From the foot of the stairs came Mittens's voice, reedy and aggrieved: "Is anyone planning to help us? I think something important has come detached."

  "Rub some dirt on it," Poinciana called down, not bothering to turn his head.

  "I despise every single one of you."

  Piggy snorted. This was familiar ground. This was home: the teasing, the theatrics, the comfortable meanness that never quite drew blood. She had known Poinciana for years now, and their friendship had always run on insults the way other friendships ran on kindness.

  Then she noticed his face.

  The smirk had gone. In its place was something she saw only rarely, an expression that made him look older somehow, and colder, as though someone had switched off a light behind his eyes. He was looking at her properly now, and she found she did not much care for it.

  "Piggy." Even his voice had changed. Lower. Flatter. "We need to talk."

  The warmth bled out of the hallway.

  She knew that voice. In all the time she'd known Poinciana, she had heard it perhaps twice.

  "About what?"

  He didn't answer immediately. His eyes had drifted to the window at the end of the corridor, to the darkening sky beyond, and his expression had grown distant.

  "The preparations are finished," he said at last.

  Piggy stared at him.

  "You don't mean—"

  "I do." He turned back to her, and smiled. "It's time to bring back the Black Wisteria."