It had been three years since she joined the Temple of Bellicus.

With her innate talent and her high domain affinity, she had outstripped the others with ease. Her beauty had no equal among the noble females of her age. Proposals came to her from noble house after noble house, and she declined them all — she had always looked down on the males her own age, found them soft and immature, and made a sport of insulting and taunting them.

And then, as fate would have it, she fell in love with a male commoner. One who had tended the severe wounds she took fighting the beasts of the Cruentus Mind, the innermost region of the rainforest.

Their love grew slowly, in secret meetings.

Until her family found out, and pressed her to cut ties with the commoner — a royal duke had asked for her hand.

She refused on the instant. And when, after much confrontation, they could not move her, they stripped her of her noble title and her status, and cast her out of the house.

She married the commoner, and began a new life, and was happy.

But her happiness was a candle-flame in the winds of fate.

One night, a group of drunken nobles came to her house — the same ones she had taunted and humiliated in her Bellicus days. Before she could react, they overpowered the two of them and bound them to the floor. And there, that night, they raped her, and made her husband watch, and then they killed him in front of her, and left her in the ruin of it, battered and alive.

Something changed in her after that night. She felt it — a thing inside her, straining to break free.

When her wounds had healed, she went and found each of those nobles, one by one, and she and tortured them so brutally that each committed suicide .

Many veteran guards had fainted seeing the dead body of those nobles .

Hunted for a long time by the houses of the dead, she was given refuge at last by the Order of Mercy. She joined them, and killed at their word, and with each kill she felt the thing inside her draw closer to breaking loose.

Until one day it broke.

Inhibition. That was the thing that had been caged in her. She broke out of the cocoon of it, and took the name Madam Butterfly, and embraced from that day the self she had become.

But still, in sleep, the nightmares came. That night. Those rough hands. The blood on the floor. And her husband’s bloodied face, shouting —

*Help. Please, somebody, help —*

" Someone — someone, please, help me — "

Saana’s scream tore Madam Butterfly out of the memory.

Her eyes came open and went red with a vehement fury, and she saw Kervyn — saw what he was doing to Saana on the bedroll.

" Kaiser — leave me — please, Kaiser — " Saana had broken into tears, unable to fight him off.

" Never. I am not done with you. " Kervyn leered down at her, drunk past reason, pinning her wrists to either side of her head with his gloved arms. " And still roleplaying, even now. You saucy little minx. "

Saana spat in his face.

The rage took him again, and he struck her hard, and blood came from her mouth and her nose.

" Filthy bitch. How dare you. I will make tonight a thing you never forget. My name will haunt you the rest of your life. You will remember how Ke— "

He never finished the name.

A forked dagger crossed the hall at tremendous speed and drove into his open mouth.

It sheared the tongue into three ragged ribbons of meat as it entered, and split the inner cheeks wide from the inside, so that his face burst open along both sides and threw up twin fountains of blood where the flesh gave way. The blade drove on — through the soft dangle of the uvula, down into the windpipe, tearing everything in its path — until the two wavy points punched out through the back of his neck below the skull, forcing open two wide dents in the flesh and standing there wet and red in the firelight.

Kervyn’s ruined head sat impaled on the length of it, blood sheeting from the torn cheeks and the wrecked mouth, pouring down his chin and his bare chest and pooling black on the bedroll beneath him.

The scene was horrific and gory.

Saana looked at the half-sliced ruin of what had been Kervyn’s face, and screamed, and fainted.

Kervyn did not fall.

His slit pupils dilated and hazed as the blood clouded the whites of his eyes. His chest pulled tight, no air moving through the wrecked pipe of his throat, and consciousness began to slide away from him. He forced himself to hold on — reached, in his mind, to pull the dagger free and swallow a healing pill — and found he could not move a muscle. His whole body was paralyzed.

Someone was coming toward him. Through the red haze over his eyes he could make out only a shape, drawing near.

Madam Butterfly knelt at the bedroll, bringing herself down to his level, and her voice came full of disdain.

" Kaiser. You filthy rapist. I thought I would take no joy in killing you. I was wrong. I was right to take your bounty. I will feel clean, ending scum like you. "

She reached for the hilt of the dagger standing out of his mouth.

Kervyn’s ears still worked. He had heard every word.

*Stop — stop — my name is Kervyn. Kervyn, of House Stanthall. I am not Kaiser. Kaiser is this girl’s —*

And then it struck him like lightning — this "Kaiser," from the awakening ceremony in the Council Building, and the whole of the night at the Lustrum, and everything since, all of it falling into place at once.

His mind went blank at the size of it. How thoroughly he had been played. How neatly he had been served up as the scapegoat on a platter.

He laughed, somewhere inside, and sighed with it.

*Well. At least I do not die ignorant.*