"I have to go," Roxanne said, gathering the reins and mounting in one fluid motion.
"Wait."
Cassius caught her arm before she could pull away. He produced a long narrow box and held it up to her.
"Take this." He opened it. Inside lay two sword daggers, their blades dark and strange, carrying the particular weight of something forged from more than metal. "I made these from the hearts of the soldiers we killed here. These blades will cut through any protection. Any spell. Any magic shield." His eyes met hers. "You will need them when the time comes for the Codex."
Roxanne looked at the daggers for a moment then took the box and secured it.
"Thank you," she said. "I cannot waste any more time."
She rode off without looking back, the sound of hooves fading quickly into the dark.
Cassius stood where she had left him and watched until there was nothing left to watch.
The silence of the ruined fortress settled back around him.
"I cannot help but feel hollow when you are not near," he said to the empty air, his voice quieter than it ever was when she could hear it. "I do not know what that makes me. I do not know what I am becoming."
He stood there a moment longer.
Then he turned back into the dark alone.
inn was warm and low lit, carrying the familiar smell of ale and woodsmoke that had not changed in all the time Cassius had been away from it.
The innkeeper looked up from behind the counter and stopped.
Then a slow grin spread across his face.
"Well. Long time no see, Cassius."
"Longer than I would have liked," Cassius said, pulling out a chair and settling into it with the ease of someone returning to something they know well. "I was under arrest for a while. Recently managed to escape ."
The innkeeper leaned on the counter, unbothered by this information in the way that only people who have known someone a very long time can be unbothered.
"So then. The usual arrangement or would you prefer to go in yourself tonight?"
Cassius leaned back in his chair and considered this for a moment.
"I will go in myself," he said. The corner of his mouth shifted almost imperceptibly."I guess my looks can pull a lot of them," Cassius said.
"Follow me," the innkeeper said.
He led Cassius through a side door and pushed it open.
The room beyond was alive. Music poured through it like something breathing, low and rhythmic and impossible to ignore. Bodies moved across the floor in various states of abandon, human and demon, witch and wolf and beastmen, all of them caught somewhere between discovery and surrender. Candles burned in deep colours along every wall and the air itself carried a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature.
At the door a woman appeared.
She was striking and barely dressed, moving with the confidence of someone who had never once doubted the effect she had on a room. She extended a glass toward Cassius with a slow smile.
"Welcome," she said, stepping aside to let him in before closing the door behind them both. "What you are holding is a cocktail. Infused with sedatives and spiced with something that comes directly from the Goddess of Lust herself." She gestured at the room around them. "Everyone here is on a journey of discovery. Human, demon, witch, wolf, beastmen. All of them finding what they did not know they were looking for."
Cassius looked at the glass.
Then he drank it in one motion.
The effect was immediate. A dizziness that did not disorient but sharpen, every sense rising to the surface at once, his body humming with an awareness that felt boundless. The music was louder. The room was brighter. Everything was very, very alive.
He straightened and looked out across the hall.
Every eye in the room had already found him.
He stood differently from every other man there and the room knew it without being told. His eyes, his hair, the quiet and dangerous aura with which he expelled . He had not moved from the doorway and he was already the most compelling thing in the room.The first to approach him was a beastman girl, small and unhurried in the way she moved, white hair falling loose around her face, soft bunny ears catching the candlelight, a small tail flicking gently behind her. She looked up at him with wide eyes and placed her head against his chest without invitation, as though she had already decided he was safe.
"I am a bunny beastman," she said, her voice soft and sweet. "I am very submissive and I promise I am even sweeter."
Before he could respond another presence pressed against his other side. This one was different, confident and deliberate, her eyes holding his without apology.
"I am Cassia," she said. "A wolf, like you. I saw you from across the room and I could not find a single reason to stay there."
Cassius looked between them both.
He settled them on either side of him and the night moved the way nights in places like this tend to move, warm and unhurried, his lips finding one then the other, the cocktail doing exactly what it had promised.
Then someone passed.
He almost missed her.
She was moving through the crowd with her head down, nothing remarkable about her pace or her direction, but something about the line of her jaw, the shape of her profile, the way she carried herself stopped his hand mid reach.
He caught her arm before she had passed entirely.
She turned.
Similar features. Not identical. But close enough that something in his chest moved before his mind could stop it.
She looked at him with calm curious eyes.
"I am just a human," she said simply. "Would you like to bed with someone my kind."
Cassius looked at her for a long moment.
He did not answer immediately.