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She'd been sent on some errand or another. Astrophyllite didn't much remember the details anymore besides that she was supposed to go find Kerberos and he had their full instructions. It was probably better than he did - Natron had apparently realized that his lieutenant wouldn't keep more than one step in mind very well. But, with her instructions in mind, she was going to do her very, very best!

Finding Kerberos would be easy, she thought. She liked him. He was really pretty, with flowers that sprouted from, like, everywhere? And pretty, drape-y robes, and he felt like darkness and familiarity and perfume and sweet, sweet sorrow and he radiated it like one of those space heaters that they put on restaurant patios during winter. She could feel him from like, miles away. Well, no, maybe that was an exaggeration. But she could feel him and she was closing in.

There was an order signature with him, rusty like a Mars page, and faint--

No, thought Astrophyllite, pausing and shaking her head. She didn't feel it anymore. Maybe she'd just been imagining it.

"Kerberos," Astrophyllite called as she approached, sweetly sing-song. He was just around the end of the block. "Kerberos, we've got a project!"

The lieutenant rounded the corner, crossing into an alley. It took her an odd moment to process what lay before her. There was the Mars page, dead at Kerberos's feet, blood pooling from beneath his red tunic. Kerberos's hands were bright with the stuff, and he was writing with it, on the concrete-block wall...

AVAL

He was halfway through an O, she thought, her fingers going slack around her ouija board. It clattered to her feet. "K-Kerberos," stammered Astrophyllite. "What- what are you doing?!"

A message. Astrophyllite frowned. She knew that she wasn't smart, so maybe Kerberos's meaning would have been clearer to someone else, but to her it was completely opaque. Who would he be sending a message to? To - to the knights? There was a dead page at his feet, after all. The boy's glamour was bleeding off of him as his body cooled, his tunic and jerkin and sandals dissolving to reveal the hooded sweatshirt and bright jeans beneath. He was just a kid, she thought sourly, no older than herself or Colchis or...

She wrung her hands together. "You killed him," Astrophyllite said softly. The full magnitude of his statement was sinking in now, and her voice trembled a bit as she continued. "Have you been killing pages for two months?" Some of her friends were knights, thought Astrophyllite pitifully, even though she wasn't supposed to have them. Maybe Kerberos had killed some of her friends.

"Avalon's Wonder killed her," she said quietly, taking a step back. The smell of blood was strong in the air, like the rusty dust that Mars spilled into her brain, but not. When she'd taken a life, it had been clean. She'd reached into a bad man's chest and plucked his starseed out and seen the light in his eyes fade. He hadn't bled. He'd gone quietly. Kerberos looked like a murderer, and she bet he hadn't even collected the page's starseed so it could do some good.

What a waste, she thought, with growing, uncertain horror.

"Avalon's dead because her Wonder didn't understand what she was doing and it was scared and it tried to protect itself," said Astrophyllite. "Who are you sending a message to? There's no one... it's no one's fault."

Least of all the dead boy's.

Astrophyllite gritted her teeth instinctively against Kerberos's raised voice, expecting some sort of physical violence to follow. She took an awkward step backward, but he turned back towards the wall, and made no move to come after her. The lieutenant breathed a shaky sigh of relief as he finished the sign. Avalon. Her heart sang that name to the cosmos sometimes, full of loneliness and sorrow and the aching of existing without the person she'd first honestly wanted to impress, the first person who'd thought that she could.

"No it's not," she said quietly, balling her hands into tight little fists and raising them anxiously towards her chin. "It's just different. There are plenty of them who want to find a compromise, to protect the Earth as much as we do-" Gehenna and Colchis and Hvergelmir and Mintaka weren't poison, they were nice! They were her friends!

"Her wonder was scared," she repeated. "It didn't know what she was doing and it tried to protect itself. Anything would do that, Order or Chaos. I- I bet that boy fought back when you killed him." How much blood was there in a human body? she wondered, looking back to the corpse. There was so much of it on the ground - surely he would have to stop bleeding soon. How long would it take for someone to find him? For someone to find Kerberos's message? And would whoever found it... understand it?

Astrophyllite certainly hadn't, without elaboration. In fact, she still wasn't sure she understood it. And Kerberos... he sounded so angry. So much unlike himself. Was it because he was more powerful now, because with power came madness, like Bischofite had had?

"Avalon wanted us to bring them to our side," she said quietly, fearing reproach. "She wouldn't want us to kill them. We should be taking them to Zinkenite or- or Laurelite. We should be making them perfect." That was what they did in Russia. Melanite had told her so.

Cruel. Monstrous. The words hit Astrophyllite like ice water. Like a burning brand. She'd been close to tears before, but now she felt them welling hot and shameful beneath her eyes. "But we- we- we-" she stammered, and trailed off. We're the good guys, she'd meant to ask - but she suspected she wouldn't like whatever answer Kerberos had in mind. The signs were there, weren't they? She just really, really didn't want to see them.

But if Chaos meant stealing days off people's lives, if Chaos had made Kerberos do this, if Chaos had turned Bischofite into... into a monster, a literal one, not just the broken, cruel man he'd been when she met him--

"It's magic," she said, leaning down carefully to reach for her board. His question came as a strange relief, a chance to focus on anything other than them moral quandary she'd been tossed into. "Wonders are magic. Planets are magic. That's where Order takes their magic from. We trade ours, so that Chaos will make us perfect, but then... the wonders still have magic. There's water in a well whether or not you put a bucket in it."

She fretted with the edge of her board, worrying one of the rounded corners. "They're alive. They're like babies. They don't understand things. They need to be protected. They can get scared," she reasoned. It didn't sound quite right, but then Astrophyllite had done her best to talk to a lot of people and it seemed like most of them spoke in metaphors, anyway, so maybe that was how she was supposed to do it, too.

The lieutenant took a careful step towards Kerberos, still scared of some sort of retaliation. She looked at the wall. "I don't know what they did to your sister," she said, "But if that's what this is about, maybe you should write her name on the wall, and not Avalon's."

What could she do? Really, what could she do? Kerberos was older, more secure in his power and surer in his intentions. Astrophyllite would have thought, before tonight, that he would never hurt her - but right now, she saw the look in his eyes. There was hurt there, but there was also malice.

She took a step back, the board trembling in her grasp. "We all still have magic," she said quietly. She'd discussed as much with Natron weeks ago, when she returned from Boston. "It comes from Chaos. Order's comes from places." Order's is more potent. Knights had spells, she thought. Kerberos was dark and angry in her mind's eye, a maelstrom of floral debris and sweet-scented regret and bitter sorrow, and this was the only magic she knew. If she were a knight, if she were a wonder and not just a stone, maybe she'd have something more useful.

I still don't know what you're trying to say, she thought. "Never mind," she said. "I can tell that you don't care and you don't want me here."

They'd had an errand, but now she didn't think she wanted to be around Kerberos long enough to complete it. Astrophyllite turned, retreating back the way she'd come, and when she was far enough away that she didn't think he'd be able to sense her any longer, she tucked herself up beside some shipping palettes an had a good, long cry.

"General Natron," she said, fumbling for her communication crystal. She tugged the sleeve of her coat across her face, hastily drying her eyes and wiping her nose. "I couldn't - I don't think we can finish what you asked for tonight."