[You have slain an Ascended human, Barax of Aldenmere]
Juno froze where he was. He waited for more. He hoped for more. He didn't pray for more, but he did right after.
[You have received a Memory…]
"HISSSSSS!"
Juno couldn't believe it. He was ecstatic. What fucking luck!
He had not only managed to kill a Master, but also receive a memory from him. He couldn't give a shit what type it was going to be, since it was an Ascended level!
Having the advantage of such a Memory was indescribable.
'Even Nephis and Sunny only got Awakened level Memories, and that was extraordinary enough! Oh shit. Give me an Armor type!'
[... received a Memory: Kings Execution.]
'... holy hell. That sounds like a Weapon type. Fuck. YES!'
Juno wanted to scream. He wanted to run around the room. He wanted to grab onto anyone, or anything, and tell them what he had just accomplished and what he had received.
That is — that is insane. That is actually insane. Most people would kill for a Memory from an Awakened and I just — from an Ascended — on my FIRST NIGHTMARE —'
A wheeze suddenly sounded from the other side of the bed.
Juno stopped.
He turned his head toward the sound, carefully, keeping his gaze low until he could assess. What he found when he looked was not what he expected.
Peara was still alive. Technically. The enchanted sleep held her together, but it would for much longer. It didn't take any time for Juno to realize what was wrong. A faint sound in her breathing that hadn't been there before, wet and uneven, and at the corner of her mouth, visible even in the near-darkness, a thin trickle of something dark.
Blood.
'Oh,' Juno thought. 'Right.'
On some level Juno knew what had truly happened, but seeing the sight in front of him he understood the whole picture.
Troilly had apparently been acting weird for multiple days.
Troilly had been the closest confidant and friend of Barax.
Troilly had reminded Barax and Peara to drink their medicine.
Troilly had insisted that Barax and Peara drank their medicine.
Barax was dead now.
Peara was dying.
Juno hadn't actually killed Barax by himself.
He just expedited Troilly's murder.
'Well, that would be giving me no credit. Hmm… I stole that guy's kill. Hehe, how treacherous.'
Before he could stop himself, not that he really wanted to, he slid over and came to be in front of the queen.
He had already stolen one kill from Trechoures Troilly, what is another one? He wouldn't know…
This time around, it took no time for his victim to die. She essentially died the moment Juno started to pour his venom into her.
Rearing back his body with a little grunt, he heard angelic words once again.
[You have slain an Awakened human, name unknown.]
[You have received a Memory…]
[...Received a Memory: Away From Home]
'Ha,' Juno thought, with deep satisfaction.
Two Memories. Two kills. The night had started with him falling off a chandelier and it was ending with two Memories and a completed — presumably completed — First Nightmare. The upgrade in circumstances was genuinely staggering.
He was already thinking about what the Memories might be, already running through the possibilities with the eager focus he applied to things he wanted, already —
The door handle moved.
Juno was under the bed before the sound had fully registered, moving on instinct, pressing himself flat against the cold floor in the narrow dark space beneath the bed frame. He stayed completely still and listened to the door open and soft footsteps enter the room.
A pause.
Then a long, slow exhale.
"...I am sorry, old friend."
Troilly's voice was different without the formality of the throne room around it. Quieter. Something in it that might have been genuine, in the way that things could be genuine even when they were also convenient.
The footsteps moved further into the room. Stopped near the bed. Juno could see the hem of a robe from his position on the floor — dark green, the same shade as the mask — and two feet in plain leather shoes, standing very still.
"You were getting soft," Troilly said, to the bodies. "Questioning things you had never questioned. Hesitating." A pause. "I could not afford for you to hesitate. Not now. Not when we are so close."
Another silence.
"Perhaps it was God," he said, more quietly. Almost to himself. "Perhaps listening to him all these years did something to you. Something it did not do to me."
He stood there a moment longer. Then his feet shifted toward the door.
'Now or never,' Juno thought.
He didn't think. He didn't deliberate. He knew, somehow, that the goal of this Nightmare was not the king or the queen. Nightmares were about beating Fate, and those two were Fated for death anyway.
The one Fated to live needed to be killed. If not for anything else, it was for that sweet, sweet title of 'Glorius'. Barax was too strange a name, anyway. He had to be related to that guy.
The only thing between Juno and Glorious was an old and weak man. An old and weak man that was, by the way, not expecting an attack.
He came out from under the bed fast and low, crossing the floor in the dark with a speed that still surprised him when he used it, and found Troilly's ankle before the old man had taken two steps toward the door.
He bit.
Hard. Deeper than before, more aggressive, the venom releasing with an immediacy that bypassed the measured quality of his previous strikes entirely. Troilly made a sound — sharp, startled, not quite a cry — and lurched sideways, one hand going to the wall for support.
"What —"
His leg buckled.
Not fully, not yet — he was Awakened, and Awakened didn't fold immediately, even old ones — but the venom was doing something, spreading up from the ankle with a heat Juno could feel through the connection of the bite, and Troilly's movements had already acquired the careful quality of someone managing a body that was becoming unreliable.
Juno didn't give him time to manage it.
He went up.
It was the snake instinct again, cleaner and more present than it had been before, something that rose up through the base of his awareness and simply took over the mechanical details — the way he moved up Troilly's leg was not something he planned, it was something he did, muscle over muscle, scales finding grip on fabric and skin with an ease that his human mind noted distantly and did not interfere with.
Troilly grabbed for him. Juno felt the hand close on empty air as he moved past it, up the back of the arm, across the shoulder, and then around.
The throat.
Something shifted in him at the contact — a sharpening, a narrowing, the world reducing itself to the specific problem of the neck beneath him and the pulse he could feel through his entire body and the increasingly frantic quality of Troilly's breathing. He coiled tighter. His human mind was still present, still watching, but it had moved to the back of the room and left something older and more direct in charge of the details.
He bit again. Same spot, different angle, the venom this time not measured at all — everything, as much as his body would give, the glands emptying themselves with a totality that left him feeling briefly hollow.
Troilly's hands came up. Weakly. They found him, closed on his coils, pulled with the diminishing strength of someone whose body was cataloguing too many problems at once — the venom at the ankle still spreading, the new bite at the throat, the constriction making the simple act of breathing into a negotiation.
Juno held.
He was aware, at some remove, that this was different from the King and Queen. That had been clinical. Distant. A strike and a withdrawal and a wait. This was immediate and physical and close in a way that made the other thing he had felt — that faint off-key note — louder and more present than he wanted it to be.
He held anyway.
Troilly's hands fell.
His breathing stopped being a negotiation and became something else, and then stopped being anything at all, and the old man in the green mask went still against the wall with Juno coiled around his throat in the dark of the royal chambers of Aldenmere.
A moment passed.
The world tilted, and Juno, wrapped around the dead man, started to fall.
After a soft thud, the tired and almost dead Juno slithered off the corpse and lay down next to it, listening to the Spell.
A moment passed, then the Spell resounded in the same loud voice as it had with Barax's death. This time, for a different reason.
[You have slain an Awakened human, Troilly of Aldenmere.]
[You have received a Memory…]
A dark grin spread across Juno's face. He didn't care to listen to what the spell had to say. He knew that he had done it.
'Three,' he thought. 'Three kills. Three Memories. If only mum could see how well I am doing for myself now…'
Finally, the spell whispered one last time.
[Wake up, Juno! Your nightmare is over.]
[Prepare for appraisal…]