Her hand was warm. Her grip was iron. The pact was made in the silent understanding that they were about to do something gloriously, terminally stupid.
Iris let go, the fierce light in her eyes softening into something more familiar: her own unique brand of chaotic delight. "You know," she said, tilting her head, her vibrant red hair catching the last of the hilltop sun. "You're really, really lucky you have me."
Kaito just waited. He was learning her rhythms. The grand pronouncement was coming.
She spread her arms, as if presenting herself. "I told the King I'd be your messenger. Fetch you, guide you, that sort of thing. Boring!" She made a face. "But that was just the cover story for the court. The real reason I'm here… the special thing for the special thing… is because the King knows I'm the only one who might be able to keep up with whatever you turned out to be." Her smile turned razor-sharp. "And because he knows I'm the only one crazy enough to follow you into the places you'd need to go."
She leaned in, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, though they were alone on the empty hill. "I'm not just a messenger, Kaito. I'm the wild card. The contingency plan. The 'if-this-goes-completely-off-the-map' button. And you," she poked his chest again, right over the Dryad's flower, "have officially gone so far off the map we'd need a new universe to find it."
She stepped back, her posture shifting from playful to something poised and ancient. The wind stilled around her, as if holding its breath. "You asked about my secret. What a Half-Divine gets that's just for them." She held up one finger. A single, perfect point of sunset light—a condensed droplet of her orange-red and deep purple eye colors—appeared at its tip. It didn't glow; it absorbed the light around it, creating a tiny, profound darkness at its heart.
"This is The Lock," Iris said, her voice no longer a whisper, but resonant, layered with power. "Not a spell. Not magic as you know it. It's a law. My law."
She flicked the droplet of light. It sailed a few feet and hung in the air. Then, with a soft click that Kaito felt in his bones more than heard, reality around the droplet… set.
The blade of grass directly beneath it froze. Not in ice. It just stopped. Every natural sway, every molecular vibration ceased. A tiny, six-legged insect that had been crawling on the stem became a perfect, immobile emerald statue. The air around it no longer moved. Dust motes hung like fixed stars.
It was a perfect, absolute stasis.
"It works on anything," Iris explained, her eyes fixed on her creation. "Living, non-living, magical, physical. It finds the target's… essence. The core truth of its motion, its existence in time. And it tells that truth to stop."
Kaito stared, a cold understanding dawning. It wasn't paralysis. It was a localized end of time, of change. A divine edict of cessation.
"For how long?" he breathed.
Iris shrugged, the power in her fading, the droplet winking out. The grass resumed its sway. The insect scurried away, unaware it had been a timeless monument. "Until I undo it. Or until something with a stronger law breaks it. So far," she smirked, "nothing has."
The implications were staggering. She could lock a door, forever. She could lock a heart, stopping its beat. She could lock a spell in mid-casting, a blade in mid-swing, a concept in mid-thought.
"But," she held up a second finger, the playful glint returning, "that's not all! That's just the One. Every Lock needs a Key, right?"
The same focused intensity returned. This time, she pointed at a small, weathered stone half-buried in the turf. She didn't summon light. She made a small, twisting motion with her finger, as if turning an invisible tumbler.
Click.
The stone didn't freeze. It changed.
One moment it was grey, rough, ancient. The next, it was smooth, polished, and a deep, vibrant blue. Then it was porous, crumbly, and rust-red. Then it was the grey stone again. The cycle flickered—stone, sand, crystal, dust, stone—faster and faster, a dizzying blur of the stone's potential states, past and future, as if someone was spinning the dial of its very identity.
"The Key doesn't unlock my Locks," Iris said, releasing the stone, which settled back into its original, weathered state with a faint sigh of settling earth. "It unlocks… potential. It finds the latent truths within something—what it was, what it could be, what it might become—and makes them all momentarily true at once. It creates a… a superposition of states. Confusion made manifest."
She grinned at Kaito's stunned expression. "Useful, right? I can Lock the Architect's big, scary dimensional bridge so it can't open. Or I can Key their perfect, stable machines into a chaotic mess of what they might have been if they'd been built wrong. Living things don't like it much. Too many truths at once breaks the mind."
Kaito looked from her, this vibrant, chaotic woman, to the now-ordinary stone. Her powers weren't about destruction or overwhelming force. They were about control and chaos. Imposing absolute order, or inducing perfect disorder. She was the fulcrum between stasis and entropy.
She was, he realized, the perfect counter to the Prometheus project. They sought to impose their order, their harvesting blueprint, onto his world. Iris could tell their order to stop. Or she could turn their perfect, logical machines into an incoherent scream of possibilities.
"You're coming to the Frost Continent," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Try and stop me," she laughed, the sound bright against the gathering twilight. "This is the most interesting thing to happen in my last fifty years. Besides, you've got the key they want." She nodded at the Leviathan Staff. "And I've got the Lock and Key that might just break their door. Seems like a fair fight."
A fair fight. Against a multi-dimensional mining operation.
For the first time since stepping out of the Blightscar, the crushing scale of it didn't feel like a weight. It felt like a target. He had a direction. He had a purpose. And he had, against all logic and reason, an ally whose power was as beautifully, terrifyingly paradoxical as his own.
"Then we go," Kaito said.
Iris's sunset eyes sparkled. "We go. But first, we need a better map than 'glacial core.' And for that…" she wiggled her eyebrows, "we need to poke a very specific, very grumpy bear."
Kaito didn't need to ask. The only person they knew who had been to the Frost Continent, who had fought a Titan there, and who had the strategic mind to guess where an alien base might be hidden…
Was currently back in Whitepeak, probably drinking his body weight in ale and boasting about it.
They were going back. Not to report. To recruit.
The wild card and the anomaly were going to drag the Argent Spear into a war against the sky.