Nagaina-Ryuuoh

Day Three: It's been three days...quite probably three of the worst days ever, in the history of the world, and I speak with a reliable degree of specialist knowledge and certainty in that regard. I'm sorry. I'm babbling. I also haven't slept more than a few minutes in those three days so I'm afraid I -- Let me start over again. It's been three days. Yuu and I are at Hunedoara Castle in Hungary, with approximately one hundred and fifty refugees, most of them women and children. Our position is not entirely encircled due to the nature of the castle's fortifications, though we estimate the numbers of -- of -- adversaries outside the gates at

The Old Man was something of a fixture: he appeared in town at the end of every summer, after the worst of the holidayers crowding up the shops and the boardwalks and the beaches had long since gone back to London, manifesting himself between one day and the next, a tall, skinny scarecrow of a man with a wild haystack of iron gray-and-steel silver hair, a rather notable eye-patch, a cane that he only rarely remembered to use, and a long, black coat that caught the slightest breeze and billowed magic and whispers and stories out behind him as well as any wizard's cloak. He dwelt in a trim little white-washed cottage overlooking the sea, its sh

It began between them, as things usually did, with an argument. Afterwards, Allen was never quite sure what that argument was about, how it had started, or why -- which was, in fact, also fairly typical of the majority of his interactions with Kanda Yuu on any given day, time of year, or phase of the moon. In fact, he was developing a theory concerning the precise gradients in Kanda's generally disagreeable temperament, the phases of the moon, the relative dew-point temperature on the particular day of observation, and an insanely complex advanced mathematical theorem that Komui had showed him that made predicting what species of foul temper

The Bookman and his apprentice left Home in the small hours of the morning on June 21st, when dawn was a hint of pale crimson on the eastern horizon and all but a bare handful of the motherhouse’s residents were still abed. Rinali encountered them on their way out, as she pushed a cart loaded with coffee cups and platters of fresh pastry for the morning shift coming on duty in the Science Department at dawn; Ravi grinned at her, snitched a fruit-stuffed tart, and, she realized somewhat later, left something as well: an artfully folded note, sealed in green wax that had been painstakingly inscribed by hand with a sewing needle rather than

He knew, abstractly, that he would have to do it again. It was not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when,’ and slowly escalating necessity. He was no longer a young man, and while neither his body nor his mind had yet failed him, he also no longer possessed the luxury of time in which to wait for the perfect candidate to present himself, either from within the clan or from without. Or herself, he supposed. The Bookman, after all, was not always a man, and a girl stood as great a chance of possessing the combination of proper temperament, intellect, and education as her brothers, particularly now. There was, in fact, a girl among the

She wasn't entirely certain, even then, what she had been expecting. She had known, intellectually and for quite a long time, since she had been adopted as a de facto assistant by the Science Division, that Nihon was the lair of their enemy. She had known, but had never permitted herself to think too deeply on what that fact meant, and she suspected that no one else had, either. They were huddled together under the dubious shelter of an overgrown stone arch, the few standing remnants of a bridge long since destroyed by design or neglect. The small fire they'd lit seemed to cast more darkness than light, the shadows outside the flickering cir