The best of plans can go astray in any number of ways. It's not like we can always see what's coming a lot of the time, after all, right? Even Seer's have their limits sometimes it seems... Events unfold including but not limited to: John doing 'guy stuff' with a Golem, Fena breathlessly rambling (again), And Hannah gets more then she bargained for multiple times over!

 

“Um... Fena?”
All I got in response was another pitiful moan of obvious pain and torment.

“Fena you-”
I had to practically bite my tongue to stop myself from saying the ‘un’ before continuing.
“-alive in there?”

The next pitiful moan took a slightly upturned note of insistence which could either have been a sound of agreement or a sign that she needs that coffee faster than Lurch can realistically make it sadly.

“Fena... when did you... uh, ya know, become a... um...?”
The bundle of bedspread on the table in front of me shifted slightly, then it rustled before finally it split open at the top like a cocoon to allow the, looking worse than death ironically, vampire Fena to stick her head out and stare at me in confusion.
“What I mean is, when did you become a... a vampire exactly? I know it’s been a few months since I last saw you and John said the un-dead have been pretty active around here since but...”

Her eyebrows slowly crept up her surprisingly normal, if rather pale for most of humanity, looking face until they practically merged with the black mass of tangles that make up her currently messy hair in general.

Eventually, after the silent stare-off between us had reached the point of almost painful awkwardness that had even me considering the option of looking away, just to finish it at last, her eyes left mine and cut over to John as a confused yet slightly amused smirk spread across her thin lips in a way which would honestly have been kinda cute if a fang hadn’t taken that opportunity to make itself known again, ruining the look entirely.

“She seriously doesn’t know?”
Apparently that question wasn’t for me judging by where she was looking and the non-committal grunt she got in return from John.
“Like, really doesn’t know? Not even a clue?”

I turned slightly to try and see the other half of the conversation I’m being excluded from and just managed to catch John’s shoulders lowering out of a slightly bemused shrug before I had to snap my head back around as Fena let off an uncharacteristic burst of loud laughter, only to cut herself short moments later as her hands poked out of her cocoon to hold her head in obvious pain from the sound itself instead.

“I take it I’m missing something?”

John snorted behind me which is honestly never a good sign in general, let alone at times like this.
Slowly Fena lowered her hands down and brought her head back up to look at me again, this time with eyes that betrayed just the slightest hints of fear for some Powers-known reason.

“I’ve always been a vampire Al. Ever since we first met, did you seriously not know? I mean... I kinda thought it was obvious and you just never brought it up to be polite really...”
My eye twitched heavily as those words hit home rather harder than I could have expected, even if I HAD anticipated them before hand, which I didn’t of course.
“The tight-lipped smile you always used to tease me about because it was ‘cute’, the fact I never leave the shop and always stay pretty far away from the windows even on over-cast days, the rings I use to cast elemental spells because my magic has no element anymore what with my being... you know?... I mean, didn’t you ever wonder why I’m always so cold, even when the heating is on and I’m bundled up in multiple layers?”
...Wow...

That... that was definitely not something I saw coming?
She’s right; I mean, the clues were all there and more!

The way she’d always lick her lips nervously if I came into the shop injured, bleeding, before shooting off upstairs to get Edith’s help.
The way she never seemed to get out of breath, even when Edith had us both doing jumping-jacks for a solid hour as punishment for ‘interrupting her stories’.
The amount of times I attempted to ask her out when I was still ‘Al’, under the guise of going for something to eat, just as friends of course...

Oh Powers, FOOD!
How could I have been so stupid?!
Food! She never once ate, not in all the time I’ve known her have I ever seen her EAT something!
Drinking, sure, but even then it’s usually water or wi...ne...

“The reason you used to beat me every time I stayed overnight watching movies in the storage room instead of doing stock-checking was because I was the only one actually DRINKING wine, wasn’t it?”
For a long moment my serious, if only slightly annoyed, glare was met by her lightly apologetic gaze in return before finally she cracked and had to look away from me as she burst into relieved sounding laughter for some reason.

“You just found out I’m a frigging VAMPIRE and THAT’S what your worried about?! That I cheated on our silly drinking games with blood instead of wine?”
Reluctantly even I could see the funny side of it now that she’s said it.

Slowly my lips twitched a few times and eventually split into their own amused grin as a laugh escaped my chest moments later making my shoulders slump in slightly tired relief of my own.

It’s been a long day, cut me some slack here!
...Consider the slack cut!...

“You’ve always been a pretty terrible Goth, if anything, considering my past experiences with vampires in general, you’ll make a pretty great one easily... Vlad was a complete poser too...”
John snorted behind us but he wasn’t important in all of this.
I could feel my own smile get ever so slightly wider as Fena’s laughter doubled in force, if not volume, and she rolled deeper into her blanket-cocoon to snigger almost convulsively to herself inside.

So... Fena’s a vampire?
...Eh, I’ve seen weirder...
It’s a surprise naturally but also kinda not at the same time?

Either way I’m pretty sure I’m already over the initial shock to it all by now and I’m solidly on my way towards ‘acceptance’, with maybe a few stops off here-and-there to tease my friend and see where we both stand with each other again before I have to ruin the good vibe we’ve got going on by bringing up Edith at least.

“Remember when you walked in carrying those enchanted mirrors and ‘some random cat’ hissed at you?... I seriously thought you were angry at me and did it on purpose at the time but now it’s pretty obvious that you’re just an idiot Alistor Cooper!”
Her head popped up again and she pulled a frankly adorable face at me before carrying on in a tone that was probably about as deep as her usual soprano voice can manage as she carried on while shooting me a light-hearted glare that plainly said that she was impersonating me, the old me that is.
“Oh, what happened to your face Fena? Sunburn! It looks really bad, do you want me to take you to a hospital?”

Her voice shifted back into her usual tone again but the mockery was almost palpable as she went on to explain.

“Thank the Powers Edith was there, when you came in a burst of sunlight reflected off the mirrors and practically burnt my eye out! If Edith hadn’t ‘suddenly’ noticed some Bad-Juju on you and knocked you out while trying to fix it I’m pretty sure my survival instincts would have kicked in and I’d have attacked you as the nearest blood-donor to me at the time!”

...Seriously?!...
How many other moments have I misread or misunderstood because of this big secret between us?

“Then there was the time you decided that I should help you carving protection runes into the back of all those crosses you ‘borrowed’ from the Vatican, do you KNOW how many chickens I had to drain to recover from all the blisters I got when you dumped that lot in my arms all of a sudden?!”

...Oh Powers, this could take a while...

======

“So, how old ARE you exactly?”
Fena paused momentarily before shooting me a now much more relaxed smile.

We spent over half an hour reminiscing about the past of all things; mostly about the things we’d both completely gotten wrong due to being equally obvious to each other’s oblivious-ness.
Finally after a few uncertain stabs at conversation proceeding the nostalgia we managed to settle into a comfortable ‘normal’ for us, where we talked about what we’ve been up to lately while steering pretty clear of the elephant in fluffy slippers that seemed to stomp around every time Edith’s name came up at all.

I spent most of that time telling Fena all about my latest projects and getting a much better reception, let alone general comprehension from her, then I ever did with Sarah... mostly because Fena could actually understand half of the words I was saying of course.

Meanwhile Fena rather embarrassedly told me about the ‘blood-n-drugs’ binge she went on after ‘the event’ as people are apparently now calling it in magical circles.

Between Edith not returning home, the Male Sibs ‘disappearing’ on the same day and then her misguided belief that I too had died, along with everyone else after John’s rather botched attempt at explaining what he knew of things to her, the day after I fled into my workshop while looking for some help in finding me again, she fell into a bout of depression.

That lead her to doing what she apparently ‘always used to do’ when depressed... pay drug addicts to donate blood to her privately and get high off of their tainted blood for a few hours at a time... a story which was almost worryingly parallel to my own, although where I had Arista’s secret stash to fall back on she had to rely on Lurch for getting hers once she became too dependent to go out and get it for herself.

On a slightly amusing note, the local Police department are now convinced that some ‘Freaky Frankenstein lookin’ Mo-Fo’ is in Klamath Falls going on a one-man vigilante spree against the local drugs trade while taking large samples of his unconscious victims’ blood as ‘some kind of sick trophy’.

At least that’s what the officer who had called around one evening to give, poor, defenceless and only partly sober Fena a warning about it said... along with giving her his personal contact details on a card she waved around almost proudly during her explanation.

While amusing, that all did lead us back to that one big point we’d been dancing around for the last hour, namely the reason for her depression and binge, ‘the event’ at Wizard Island.

Naturally I scrabbled for the first safe topic I could to avoid it all yet again and somehow settled on asking about her age of all things.

...Stupid brain...
Yeah, stupid brain!

“It’s not polite to ask a Lady her age Al-”
She shot me a cheeky wink and leaned in a little more as she’s been doing every so often when she finds something even funnier than usual lately.
“-but just between us girls Hannah-”

...Oh, that’s what she found so amusing?...
She’s still not quite used to the concept of me being both female and using my ‘new’ name sadly.
I can’t exactly blame her, but at least she’s trying, even if she does act like the whole concept is a big joke or game where I’m hiding behind a false identity like some sort of spy or something.

“-I’ll be Four-hundred and Twenty-Six next spring.”
My mouth dropped open in shock and she practically fell off her chair laughing at the apparently rather stupid look on my face as I tried to process what she’d just said.

It’s not so much the age itself, although it is at the extreme of what I’d often considered the ‘maximum possible age’ a mage could live to naturally in one body if they were really lucky, but more the idea that Fena of all people could be that old in general.

“I’m the oldest of the Sibs after all; admittedly it’s been centuries since Edith, Romi or Remi have treated me like the ‘big’ sister annoyingly but then, when you get to that age the long way round, without eternal youth or a fear of daylight at your side, I guess an age difference of a few years doesn’t really mean much anymore?”

She grimaced slightly but eventually shrugged to both me and herself at whatever thought had crossed her mind in that brief moment.

“Vampires see time in a completely different way than humans after a while, most go insane because when you’re effectively full-on immortal, life has little-to-no meaning in general. We found a way around that for me by taking the old saying of ‘living in the moment’ to a pretty big extreme but it’s still kinda an issue.”

Short attention span at times, impulsive actions, almost childish amusement at little events and a constant need to avoid feeling ‘bored’... yep, I can definitely see what she means by her ‘living in the moment’ now that she mentions it.

Honestly at one point I was pretty convinced she just had the Goth equivalent of some hyperactivity disorder, with this new information it definitely makes at least some level of sense though.
If she’s too busy focusing on the ‘now’, she isn’t busy focusing on the ‘forever’... which would also explain her quick slip into depression when overnight she lost Edith, the male Sibs and me all in one go too, I guess?

...I still think she has ADHD though...
Definitely Vampire-Goth ADHD!

======

“Fena... it’s been fun and all but I think it’s time we talked about... Edith...”
Just rip the band aid off!

Come on Hannah, time to be a big boy... girl... whatever, and just do it so you can-
“Oh! Saying that, she left you a letter upstairs, two seconds I’ll go grab it for you.”

Before I could respond, the now rather overwhelmingly perky form of my usually rather quiet friend took off with inhuman speed for the doorway leading back upstairs without a second glance, leaving me sitting on my chair staring after her in surprised confusion.
...Edith left us a letter?...

The evil little Yoda was a seer after all.
I guess she might have... might have known what was coming, maybe?

Why have I got a bad feeling about this all of a sudden?
...Hidden Seer powers activated!...

My right-hand shot up to smack myself over the head on some kind of instinct that I don’t fully remember ever gaining which is more than a little worrying, almost as worrying as the anticipatory grab my left made to stop it before it could make contact too.

After a few seconds staring at them both in shock they both seemed to almost ‘realise’ that I was watching them because they went limp suddenly, my right ironically crashing palm-first on top of my head as it fell down despite the left’s best efforts to stop it.

I quickly shot a glance around the room to make sure no-one saw that little momentary bout of insanity, finding that thankfully John and Lurch are still off somewhere doing ‘guy stuff’ as John put it, so he could leave me and Fena to our ‘chatting’ apparently.

Slowly my eyes settled on my hands again which had seemingly decided that cupping gently together in my lap was some way of showing ‘innocence’ of any such wrong-doing I may think they might have done.

...We’re unofficially-officially going crazy, I swear...
Stupid defective brain!

======

“Found it, sorry about the blood stain on the corner, I kinda dropped half a sheep on it at some point I think, but the rest is fine I promise!”
I really didn’t have the heart to even glare at her for that one at this point.

The fact that she was offering me a pretty convincing look of apology helped and I’m pretty sure she’d be blushing if her rarely displayed dimples showing is any indication at least, considering she can’t actually... ya know... ‘blush’, being un-dead and all.

Another stupid thing I missed about her that I’ve only just realised is that no matter how embarrassed she gets, in all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her properly blush before... for now rather obvious reasons no-doubt.

Rather than voice that rather stupid new realisation I settled for offering her a gentle smile and taking the envelope from her with almost reverent care, before flipping it over to find it sealed shut by an honest-to-Powers wax ‘seal’ straight out of history with a family crest on it and everything.

“Edith said you’d want to be alone for reading it, don’t worry, I’m going to go clean up my room for a while... although how on earth I’m going to get some of those blood stains out I have NO idea-”
She didn’t really say anything more to me from that point on as she turned away to head back upstairs, although I could distinctly hear her still muttering to herself thoughtfully under her breath as she went anyway.

With a few more steps the door leading upstairs shut loudly behind her and I was left alone in the quiet main room of the Sibs shop holding the letter carefully away from my body just in case it might explode in the time it takes for me to get up the guts to open the damn thing, let alone read it!

...This is Edith we’re talking about, so good call on that one I think...
Exactly!

======

‘Useless Girl,

By now you know that my ‘accent’ is fake for the most part, so I’ll skip the preamble.
I’ve written and re-written this letter a thousand times in the last few years, always thinking up new ways to explain what needs to be said... but in my final hours before I come to join you in battle, I find myself writing it all once more.

We both know you don’t have much of an attention span so I’ll jump to the important points.
Number One:
Don’t be an idiot and blame yourself for my death!

I’ve got blocks in place to stop myself from seeing events past my current incarnations life-time, a security measure to ensure I don’t create another mistake like Arista once more, but I’ve known how I would die for a very long time now.

All I can say is that I died proud and happy to have been your tutor as well as your friend.

Edith...

My last view before the ice consumes me entirely will be of you collapsing backwards as Arista’s core-shard is thrown out into the void at long last, for that you have my deepest thanks and above all else my undying loyalty, do not blame yourself or do something stupidly ‘you’—like throwing yourself into a depression filled drugs binge like Fena is sure to do unless you follow point Number Two properly!

Uh, oops?...

That brings me onto point Number Two:
Survive the fight, as I know you will, survive and come back to Klamath Falls for Fena.

A long dead incarnation of Arista by the name of ‘The Countess Beth’ turned her into a vampire many long years ago and she cannot be left alone as she is.

It took some borderline necromancy for me to keep myself and the twins alive for all these years without reincarnation. I’m basically being held together by my magic these days and the twins are even worse off, their cores having fallen completely to a point where they are only sustained by my magic alone, which as you can imagine is more than slightly limiting on life in general.

This all means that the moment I die the twins will, too, leaving Fena all alone in the world but for you. Take care of her Useless Girl!

She is my sister and I love her as such, but the vampirism has taken its toll on her as with all undead, warping her mind and working in similar ways to the methods that Arista has used upon you in the past, to shape her thinking towards darker intents.

Her core is dead and, as such, her personality is no longer safe within the natural reincarnation cycle.
When Fena dies the version of her that you know, the version which I have watched grow from a slightly airheaded little nobles daughter into a passionate and caring human being, will cease to exist.

We’ve spent centuries trying to find a solution to help her, to make it so that she can have a normal reincarnation again, but from all accounts it is just not possible.
All I ask is that you keep her safe, keep her happy and keep her alive until I can once more return to watch over her again, can you do that for me Useless Girl?

Of course...

The third point I must raise is of the future.
I cannot tell you what is to come from now on, that is the purview of my next incarnation after all, but I can make some guesses from my lofty position as your ‘stupid/wise old yoda-wannabe’.

Uh oh!...

Yes, I have heard your grumbling on more than one occasion and I take it in the vein it was offered, with little more than an amused smirk at your childish choice of wording in general as my only comment upon it.

Well, that’s something at least—Sorry, Edith...

You do not know how far the battle-lines are drawn on both sides of this conflict useless girl and you are not yet ready to face it all even if you did, I’ll leave the history lesson for those who are more knowledgeable than I on the topic you will no-doubt meet in the future.

I can assume that when news of my death reaches certain areas within our political system you will be contacted by a familiar but unwelcome face. Please do not dismiss him out of hand as I know you will wish to. He holds information you will need and maybe even offers some form of closure for you at the same time.

...Cryptic much?...

I’ve spent a long time thinking on my final moments over the years since I first saw them with my gift and I’ve come to one rather startling realisation.
You have more than two cores within you!

Um—you’re a bit late to the party on that bit of info, Edith, I’m sorry to say.

To be precise, I believe you have three!
One which Arista will ‘give’ back to your sister in the next hour or so, one ice core of unknown origins which houses Arista’s core personality, and a final one which allows you to survive the removal of Arista’s ice core in my final seconds.

It wasn’t hard from there to work out that this third core would be your much fabled ‘Locus Point’ and something which I’d initially forgotten may be a problem due to its almost total uselessness as anything but an annoyance for all of us up to this point.

This brings me onto my final point and the end of this missive to you, my often exasperating student.

======

"Oh I’M the exasperating one, am I Edith?!"
Can you say ‘Bad JuJu’ at all you little-
...Calm breaths...

Slowly I lowered the letter down into my lap and let off a heavy huff of air to calm myself down a little bit, my right hand came up automatically to wipe away a few tears I hadn’t consciously even realised I’d been letting fall as I read Edith’s very... ‘Edith’... final letter to me at long last.

Only she could be so infuriating that even in a letter from beyond the grave she manages to piss me off!

“Powers damn it Edith, you just had to get to me one more time, didn’t you?”
Despite my possibly harsh sounding words, a bitter little smile formed on my lips even before they’d truly finished leaving them.
“...Powers damn you Edith, you evil little troll...”

Without another word I turned back to her note, a sense of almost ‘zen-like’ calm falling over me for having something to turn my attention onto once more if nothing else.

======

The ‘diversion’ I placed upon your magic when it became obvious that Arista had pushed her core into a controlling position, after you let that stupid toff friend of yours make you a little more ‘girl’ and a little less ‘useless’, was not some great mysterious power you made it out to be in the weeks following my placement of it.

In fact, it’s not even a ‘diversion’ in a traditional sense but more a reduction to the complexity of your internal magic’s self-regulation as a whole.

Uh—what?...

I shall use small words so you can follow me through this properly.

...Smug much?...
Don’t read my mind from the dead Edith; It’s creepy!

You’re magic is comprised of Arista, Mother and Yourself.
You house three very different cores in ability, content and associated personalities but each holding one overriding connection amongst themselves.

At your very centers, at the very apex spark which spawned your cores in the first place, you each hold the same unimaginable power which few mages would believe existed if not for the very real results of that powers existence.

Mother’s magic was once the purest source of this power, she was even able to manipulate it to some degrees in healing which is actually what gave me the original idea behind your so called ‘diversion’.

Arista received only part of this power, barely one-percent by what I can see while studying your lines as you cast, and it only ever manifested in the most basic form that she became so widely known for within the magical community.

Then we come to you...

I cannot be certain on this, having never actually seen this theoretical ‘third core’ of yours in action. However from what I have seen in the last few weeks of your ‘Golden domes’ and their power levels, I can surmise that you are truly on a completely different level from even Mother herself.

The power I speak of is, of course, the ability you share to create life itself, magical life, the ability to birth new magical children at all!

The same ability which earned your counterparts their often overblown joint title ‘The Mother of Magic’, the same sole domain of the two most unstable members of the magical world in general, until you came along at least...

With the removal of Arista’s core your miraculous ‘Golden domes’ will, I assume, disappear.

Due to the shifts required within your lines to accommodate the change in main magical element being converted and the limitations of the ‘reduction’ I put upon you, it will become useless the moment your system is cleansed of Arista’s ice in its entirety.

The trick I used was crude at best, using a sample of ‘your’ ice magic and using it to trigger a conversion which is technically as much of a step backwards as you managed to take when diverting from ice to water for some damned fool reason so many weeks ago, but with one fundamental difference.

The power within you is incredibly dense... just like you!

‘HEY!’
...That’s just mean!...

The power to create life from nothing which you all share is so amazingly dense that barely a drop is needed to establish its dominance within your system and despite being a technical ‘step backwards’ from the far more complex magic required for your body to naturally assume an elemental nature of any kind, that magic’s density provides an amazingly terrible exchange rate, something which you desperately need with how much magic you produce just by existing, Useless Girl.

On the final page of this letter I have provided a list of reference books and instructions on how you may gain a connection to that spark within you once more.

Mark my words, I know you will need and regain your precious ‘Golden domes’ in the times to come until I see you once more.
I say that as your mentor, as your friend and thanks to your general lack of ‘thinking’ or a ‘ sense of self-preservation’ that would have given me a heart-attack years ago if such a thing could actually kill me at this point.

This new method is much more in-depth when compared to the reduction I put in place before, but hopefully when you complete its training you will have a better understanding of yourself, your Locus Point and your magic as a whole, so that if the worst ever comes to pass and you die once more, you will still be able to access that spark within yourself despite the change in body that comes with reaching a requiem.

Edith, I don’t know what to say...
...Say nothing. Keep reading...

The last few years working with you have renewed my faith in the future which had honestly been almost completely eroded with the passage of time that has come from watching over Fena for so very long.

You are a truly exceptional person—useless—but exceptional, and I’m so very proud to have been a part of your life for so long, obviously crazy old fool that I am.

Take care of yourself Useless Girl.
Don’t mourn me, protect Fena and LIVE!

One day a much younger looking ‘crazy little Yoda’ will appear on your doorstep and I will be expecting to hear about all the madness I have missed that comes from just knowing you in the slightest apparently.

I’m sorry for my part in any suffering you have faced over the years.
A seer does as a seer is told to by fate herself, it is not our place to question, only guide those we must... but with you I can truly say that for the first time in an eternity I have grown attached to you and hope you have a long, happy life ahead of you in the coming years.

I must prepare, I have a set of new robes to enchant against blunt force, earth magic induced, trauma before ‘Mother’ calls us all together at Crater Lake.

May the Powers bless you, Useless Girl
Until we meet once more.

Esti-dif Ta
Sixth born of the Ta clan, Guardian of Delphi and honoured ‘Yoda’ to the magic emporium of Klamath Falls.

P.S - If Fena does somehow end up going off the rails before you get this letter and comes up with the stupid idea of mixing an orphanage with an opium den again, tell her that it didn’t work in London and it definitely wouldn’t work in Klamath Falls of all places, so just drop it you silly old fool!

======

That final point, which Edith just HAD to tack on at the end there, I suspect specifically because she knew how I’d react to it, left me laughing almost hysterically for a while, slumped heavily in my borrowed but still nice and squishy sofa chair.

Eventually, almost mechanically, my hands flipped over to the next page, finding what I can only assume were the promised instructions and reading recommendations that Edith left for me.
I couldn’t tell initially because my eye’s had mysteriously filled with water for some Powers-known reason?

With a forceful sniff I brushed the water away, for safety’s sake, I’m a lightning mage now after all and lightning does NOT play well with water!

Slowly the note came into focus and I stared at it for a while, not really comprehending it because my mind was stuck more on the letter that came before it.

Finally after a period of time which could have been anything from a minute to an hour for all I know my introspection and lost musings were cut short by a clatter of noise to my right as a rather guilty looking, once more blood splattered and now dragging a suspiciously ‘animal parts’ shaped trash bag behind her, version of Fena came shuffling back into the room.

She actually jumped slightly in surprise when her tense gaze settled on my own curiously amused one, which I found even more amusing then the actual scene itself in all honesty.

“You finished with Edith’s letter?”
Her grip on the bag’s opening shifted slightly and a hoof of what I can only assume is some kind of sheep flopped silently out of the bag to hit the floor behind her, completely unnoticed by Fena as she stared at me with worry obvious on her now much more open and expressive face.

“...Yeah...”

After a long moment’s pause as if she expected me to say something more than that and one more shift of her grip which let what was possibly some form of rat’s tail fall out and join the sheep’s leg in its bid for freedom, she seemed to realise that I wasn’t offering much more on the topic at this point an-

“Anything interesting?”

-or maybe that was just my wishful thinking at work?

“Not much, just her usual stuff really, she called me ‘useless girl’ a lot, told me to keep an eye on you and offered some help on what I need to work on next in my training.”
She seemed to almost deflate at that response.

I know I could have told her the more serious details in the letter but something held me back from it, despite the disappointment obvious on her face from my rather flippant response instead.
The letter was for me, I know Edith pretty well at this point, if the letter was for me and she sealed it to make sure Fena couldn’t read it then it was for a reason.

Whether it was a good reason or just because she felt like it may be up for discussion but she definitely had A reason in mind and I’ll respect that if nothing else for now.

That being said, I’m not above sharing some of the less important or private parts with Fena if it will lift her mood at least.

“She did happen to demand that if you went into a drug-fuelled vampire binge that I should tell you your idea of mixing an orphanage and an opium den is just as stupid now as it was in London, so drop it before someone gets hurt?”

THAT did the trick at least!

While far from perfect and slightly strange to see, it really was a sight to behold as someone who couldn’t ‘blush’ did a pretty credible impression of doing just that, only without the red-tint to her cheeks that you would normally expect to be part of such an action.
My worries over her subdued mood were assuaged pretty easily from there as her head snapped up to glare at the ceiling above us.

Her delicate-looking pale fist came up quickly to wave dramatically skyward as she cried out something about ‘It was only one time!’ between sputtering fits of laughter that I happily joined her in without a thought, continuing on for a while afterwards as we made eye-contact again which only seemed to encourage us to laugh all the more for some reason.
...Good choice slipping that bit in Edith...

“I swear Al, it really was just this one time and I wasn’t being SERIOUS, you know, it was just an idea because at the time we-”

As Fena continued to awkwardly dig herself deeper into the hole of her own past actions, all I could do was settle back and grin at her happily.
I’m gonna miss you, you old witch, but don’t worry... I’m sure we’re gonna be fine in your absence for now...

“-and then Remy said ‘Well if you’re going to run both, why not save on space’ and so I said-”
The literally breathless rambling just went on and on but I didn’t mind.

For the first time since I saw her in her gore covered bedroom looking like some deranged feral beast, there was a spark back in her eyes that I’ve known and loved for years now.

So, I’m best friends with a vampire?
I’ve been tasked by my old mentor to help keep her sane until she can come back from the dead to take over again... and I’ve got a new magical ‘homework assignment’ to work on in my spare time.

That letter was unexpected but damned if it didn’t help me gain some sense of closure on my feelings for Edith and the guilt I let fester for so long during my isolation as well.

“-then the police showed up and tried to arrest me for prostitution, which I SO wasn’t doing! and-”

My relieved laughter joined Fena’s ever more desperate attempts to prove her innocence and the shop felt just a little bit lighter than it had barely an hour ago.
...We’ll be fine, I can tell. Thanks Edith...