unraveled

flos

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           They walked into a dimly lit room, with a sole table and chair, and a door on the opposite side.

          Luna stood squarely in the center of it, with her arms crossed and her gaze set tightly on Acelius. His grin immediately dimmed, flopping like a dying fish, until it finally flipped into a frown. "Why are you here?"

        "Why are you here? How do you know of me?" she offered, instead.

        "I heard you knew you of flos."

        "And who told you that?" asked, Luna.

         Nia waved her hand in dismissal. "Irrelevant."

         Luna opened her mouth to talk, when Acelius asked again, "Why are you here?" His voice was taut, as if one wrong breath and the words would topple over.

          Nia didn't know how to feel about knowing exactly what had caused the sudden caution laced in each syllable he spoke.

          She looked up to see Acelius, staring back at Luna, his eyes fierce and confident through his glasses, but here standing by his side she could also see the panic and worry behind the lenses.

         "It's not what you think. I left that house a month after you left," said Luna, her features slowly melting from stone to sympathy. "I tried stopping him, you know." She pulled up her sleeve to show a nasty scar that ran through the fair flesh of her forearm, elbow to the tip of her middle finger.

            Acelius didn't react.

           Nia knew somewhere inside she should feel sympathy or some sort of humanity, but all she could think was about the dart and how much time she had left.

           Luna seemed to understand that it would take more to actually settle Acelius, so to Nia's utter annoyance, Luna talked more about things that weren't darts. "Your brother... he became the Golden Heir. But perhaps you knew that."

           "Perhaps he always was," Acelius muttered, low enough for perhaps only Nia and ants crawling nearby to hear. He turned his head to her and gave a small smile, "It's funny because I was the one with the golden hair."

            Shaking his head, he shifted his gaze to Luna. "So you ran and what? Started a business to poison people? You could have maidened for families here, Stealers only know how many nobles would love to keep you-"

          "-as a servant," she interrupted, finishing his sentence. "That wasn't my life, Acelius."

          Something unwelcome flared in Nia, hearing her say his name.

          "That was a fix. A solution that lasted while the problem did. You can't possibly think we like to waiter you around. It's a force of the economy, a divide between idol dreaming between better days, and working with what you were given."

          Before Acelius could open his mouth to answer, Nia interjected, eager to bring rooks that they'd come for into play. "I know you're not flos. But I also know you know who flos is. Tell us and we'll be on our merry way."

          Luna raised a brow in question. Grinding her teeth, Nia pulled out the dart and placed it in her open palm where she rolled it until satisfaction and then handed it back.

         Thankfully, Luna didn't bother denying it, instead she asked, "And what do I get in return?"

        "What might you need?"