“What are you doing?” Lydia had to know as she stood at the edge of the grave. She didn’t know what the worst about the scene was. Maybe it was the entirety of it? No, the devil definitely lay in the details here. Was it her father quickly hiding the pendant and staring at his daughter not with guilt but with fear? The hole? The decayed corpse in the broken casket that had nothing to do anymore with the mother she had loved?

The answer was that it was all equally horrifying. It tore at her, the anger, the hate, a whirlwind of negative emotion tossed around inside her, leaving only murderous confusion. “What are you doing?!” she repeated.

“I am… Lydia I just needed this thing, and…you know the past months have been hard, and…” he stumbled something together as Lydia created an Illusion Barrier around them. Gulping, he hit the back of the literal hole he had dug himself into.

“I have been providing money and help to you, you are safe, sober, why would you do this?” she whispered these words. He had become so stable in the recent years. The answer she was met with was silence.

Of course, she couldn’t have known what had happened. How the help he had been receiving had in reality come from a sleeper agent of the Blood of the Proletariat who exploited the man’s weakness by replacing his drugs with ideology in an attempt to create leverage towards Lydia. How, in the sessions, Ivan had revealed the existence of the key pendant, a secret his daughter had kept for years. At least he had insisted that nobody else desecrated his wife’s grave, although that was a questionable last ditch of honour.

“Uhm, I just… I have my reasons,” Ivan avoided the questions which he wasn’t allowed to answer. Unless… “I have found some friends who have the best of everyone in mind! Come with me, and…!” He stopped abruptly as a piece of metal flew up to his throat.

Lydia’s fists trembled as she tried to bring herself to just do it. Lying to herself was a thing she had sworn to stop doing just a few days after having been saved by Frederik. “You have been a disappointment every day since Mother got sick,” she whispered; “You lost your job, you wasted our savings, you drank away the money I scrapped together for us, and now that our life turned out for the better, you rob her grave and sully her last wish… I should just kill you.”

The coward in the ditch didn’t dare to speak up to any of the accusations hurled his way, just looking at the sharp piece of metal on his throat. Just a few centimetres between him and a fate he justly deserved.

But she couldn’t do it.

The piece of metal retreated. “You died today,” she decided with closed eyes. Knowing perfectly well that this decision was going to influence her life for the worse one day, she made that announcement. “You took your own life while overcome with sorrow. You will never set a foot anywhere close to the empire ever again, or I will kill you myself. Do you understand?”

The answer was silence and the disappearance of the man when she opened her eyes again. He didn’t even have the courage to say goodbye, had just left the barrier when Lydia had given him a gap. This open grave now held two people in her mind.

‘You know what it was that he took with him, right?’ Cath asked.

‘Yes…’ Lydia was perfectly aware. The key to the Tomb of Teuton, a place where the Knights of Teuton, under whose protection she soon would be placed, had sealed their most important artefacts. She had no idea why her mother had stolen the key, although the most likely answer was foolish spite. ‘…let us end the family Goch today, Cath. Fuse with me.’

‘…I accept,’ the elemental said, and they began the preparations. It wasn’t all that hard in practicality, as things which had been perfected hundreds of years ago seldomly looked to be to people that stood on that old knowledge. In essence, it was a modified summoning circle that was faulty by design to prevent the elementals summoning to happen anywhere else but inside the person’s body. By using the already in-place contract, the magic essence of the elemental would then seep right into the summoner’s soul and permeate her whole being, effectively replacing both of them.

It was a cowardly thing to do in this situation, to just end herself in favour of a person she hoped to be stronger. In a way, she saw her father in this action. However, she promised herself to become someone who could do what was necessary for her new family. A family that wasn’t something as paltry as a blood connection but a bond of obligations, debts and rights. A family that she could work for with all she had, the size of a nation.

‘Farewell, Cath,’ Lydia said.

‘This is not a goodbye, Princess of Steel,’ the metal elemental berated her; ‘This is our rebirth.’

The summoning circle activated as both sides fulfilled their tasks, and Lydia felt something break inside her.

It hurt. Her grandfather had promised it would have been pleasant, but it hurt. Her whole body felt hot and then was suddenly thrown into icy waters. Her eyes, lidless, absorbed the painful clearness of blue shade as her skin crawled with needles. Once she had become numb, she was thrown into fire, and everything was scorching hot. From the tips to the roots, the fire seemed to take hold of her. The process repeated, once, ten, hundred, maybe a thousand times, and each time it hurt a little less as her new consciousness was hammered into shape and assumed a new state of being.

Eventually, she came back to her senses, reborn. Her hair had assumed a slightly red, copper like tinge, and her eyes, a normal brown before, had become an open gate to her emotions. She saw these changes in a flat piece of polished metal she created from her blade.

She felt different yet the same. Her memories were still there, together with all the ones of Cath. There was a definitive change to how she used her powers; it was easier to the point where it was almost as natural as breathing now.

The pain of what had just transpired was still fresh, but it didn’t touch her as deeply. It was like she had suddenly gained the personality of an experienced business woman, together with the ability to put a distance between herself and things that didn’t benefit her. At the same time, she still felt the pain, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

She was like a forged but unsharpened blade. It would take much longer for her to understand her new self. One thing, however, she was certain of: she no longer was Lydia Goch. Her name was Lydia Augusta the Fourth of House Hohenzollern. Her father had killed himself, and her mother lay before her.

She averted her eyes from the corpse and jumped over to the gravestone that was laying in the dirt. Resting her hand on it for a few minutes, she whispered to the cold stone all the great things that had happened to her which she originally wanted to tell her.

“…Maybe there is heaven for us after all of this,” she genuinely hoped; “Then I can shout at you for having your faults and you can berate me like you always did when I didn’t behave properly… I wonder if you would be proud of me?”

The grave was silent even when she left.