Chapter Text
Roxy Lalonde lay in the soft summer grass outside the city, hands cradling her head, and stared up at the floating city of Skaia. The city’s shadow was currently blotting out the sun above her, thereby providing shade and enabling her comfort on an otherwise hot afternoon. As she gazed at the vague shapes that constituted the bottom of the floating metropolis, she wondered where exactly, among the many skyscrapers and parks and palaces of Skaia, was the home of the Empress?
Of course, Roxy had never been to Skaia, because she was a Void Aspect, and Void was a Low Aspect, so she was Earthstuck. So she speculated about the location of the Empress, one eye closed and tongue caught between her teeth as she held up a thumb to cover different areas of Skaia up in her view.
She liked to pretend the Empress’s palace was right there in the middle of the city; that would make some kind of sense, right? If Roxy were some fancy Life Aspect who ruled the world or whatever, she would build her palace in the dead center of the floating metropolis. It was very symbolic.
Then again, perhaps the center of Skaia was where the High Priestess’s temple was.
She sighed. She’d find out one day, mark her words. She was determined to get to Skaia, and soon.
“I’m coming for you, Betty,” she said, lifting her other hand up, holding an imaginary rifle. She even squinted as if looking down a long sniper’s scope, “aiming” right at the heart of Skaia, then she pantomimed pulling the trigger. As she imitated a rifle’s recoil with her hands and arms, she simultaneously mimicked the loud, echoing crack of a gunshot. “Your ass is grass, bitch.”
“Diiiiirk,” Roxy groaned, sitting behind her best friend as he fiddled with his latest wooden model. It was too early in the process for Roxy to tell what he was making. “Come on, are you even listening?”
“I’m trying to focus, Rox,” he said distractedly. Roxy rolled her eyes, kicking her feet back and forth from her seat on the bench like a child.
“Focus on me for a minute,” she said.
Dirk sighed, carefully twisting a dowel into place, then looked up at her. “What?”
“I was asking,” she started pointedly, “if that Hope guy had been around again. The cute one, you know… what’s his name, with the muscles and funky accent.”
“Jake,” Dirk supplied.
“Yes! Jake. Has he been down from Skaia again?”
Dirk shook his head. “No. Which is something you'd know if you paid attention to your official duties more often.” Roxy made a face, rolling her eyes. Dirk just shrugged and continued, “But, I did get this today.” He handed Roxy a green and gold envelope, then turned his attention back to his project while she read.
Dear Prince Strider,Please expect my presence on the seventh of July. My shuttle ought arrive at seven of the clock in the morning. By order of Her Imperial Majesty, please arrange transport for me from the shuttle station to the Seat of Spirit, where we shall discuss matters vital to the ongoing establishment of order in your city.
I look forward to my visit,
Sincerely yours,
Page of Hope Jake English
Skaian Ambassador to Earth
Messenger of Her Imperial Majesty, Sylph Betty Crocker
“The seventh is tomorrow!” Roxy said indignantly as she stuffed the short missive back into its envelope.
“I know,” Dirk sighed.
“Nice of them to give you warning,” she grumbled as she tossed the envelope onto Dirk’s desk.
“At least they did give me warning this time,” he replied, sitting up straight again and returning the pliers he had been using while Roxy read to their proper place in his toolbox. “Remember the second time English visited?”
“What a disaster,” Roxy agreed, remembering how nobody had bothered to tell Dirk—or anyone, for that matter—that the Empress was sending her personal messenger. English himself was rather kind about the whole affair, but the fallout once news traveled back to Skaia that Betty’s own ambassador had been made to wait for hours before being acknowledged by the Seat…. Poor Dirk had been forced to work very hard to regain the Empress’s favor after that.
That was about a year ago now, and since then, English had been to visit four more times.
“Lucky for you English has a thing for your hot bod,” Roxy continued, grinning.
Dirk rolled his eyes, then stood. “Come on, I have to go finish up some reports. Gonna be a late night since I have to fucking rearrange my whole schedule tomorrow for that halfwit. Do your job for once and help me out so I can get some sleep.”
Roxy waited while Dirk pulled on his crimson robe with its crowned heart sigil in golden embroidery, the mark of his official station as the Seat of Spirit, which was a fancy way to say “governor of the unlucky Earthstuck sots and wretches.” He had inherited the Seat entirely because of his Class/Aspect combination. Heart was the highest caste among the Low Aspects, and Prince was the second highest of all the Classes. Only a Seer of Heart would outrank Dirk among the Earthstuck, and no Seer of Heart had been born in several generations.
Dirk slipped on his gold and crimson shoes, then glanced regretfully around his workshop. Roxy knew the look—Dirk would have preferred a life of tinkering to one of ruling. Heavy the crown, etc., etc.
“Aw, cheer up, Di-Stri!” she said, slinging an arm around his shoulder as best she could despite their height difference. “It’s not like being a Blood or Mind would’ve freed you up to do this all the time.”
“We could have been born Noble,” Dirk pointed out as they stepped into the hallway and he shut the door to his workshop. “Then we could have done anything we wanted.”
Roxy rolled her eyes. “Yeah but we’d also be Noble, which by default means we’d be pretentious assholes.” She paused, then patted his shoulder. “Never mind, that wouldn’t be a change for you. You’re right: dream big, Dirk.”
One very good thing about Dirk being the Seat was that when he had told everyone that Roxy, a lowly Rogue of Void, would be his Shadow, it was final. Despite the covetous glances and resentment that it fostered among others who were passed up for the position, Roxy was grateful for her job. Rogue of Void was a fairly uncommon Class/Aspect combo, but rarity didn’t make it valuable. If anything, Rogues of Void were among the most mistrusted of all Lows. Void was a slippery Aspect, and Rogue was not only the second-to-lowest of all Classes, it was also inherently about deception and stealth. Essentially, people saw Roxy’s Class/Aspect assignment as “slippery, lying shrew.”
But when the Prince of Heart put his foot down, only orders from Skaia could change his decision, and the Skaian government’s approach to Earth matters was, and Roxy was quoting official doctrine here, “as long as you don’t fuck it up, we don’t care.”
The bad part about being Dirk’s Shadow was that Roxy found herself yawning and grumpy outside the shuttle station at 6:50 the following morning in her most uncomfortable formal attire. She was head of the envoy sent by Dirk to receive Page English, so she had to be dressed in her official robes—navy with her Void Aspect clasp on the lightweight summer cloak, and a chain of office around her neck with Dirk’s crowned heart sigil at the center. The authority granted to her by the chain of office superseded her low Class/Aspect, signaling that any orders she gave were essentially orders from the Seat himself.
“Rogue Lalonde,” began one of the others in her party, a Blood Aspect (maybe… Heir, Roxy thought?) who had been working for the Seat of Spirit since before Dirk had occupied the role. Roxy already felt bored just looking at the dusty old woman. What was her name, Corinne? Bureaucrats, ugh. “Perhaps His Excellency would be better received if we were to move the delegation indoors.”
Roxy made sure to mutter some choice words just within earshot as she pushed off from the wall she was leaning against to go inside. Carina and the rest of her entourage strategically didn’t hear the Shadow’s grumbling.
Inside was dim and boring and not nearly as nice as the morning-sunny garden they had been standing in. Like most Void Aspects, Roxy preferred the expansive outdoors—the more open the space, the better. Being inside buildings could feel so… stifling.
They didn’t have to wait long for the ambassador’s shuttle to arrive. Roxy was inspecting her midnight blue summer cloak—a showy garment worn almost entirely behind her rather than over her shoulders, meant solely to make her look impressive—when she heard a deep, booming voice call her name.
“Roxy, dear gal!”
Roxy grinned, flinging the cloak back into place as she turned to greet English. As Nobles went, English wasn’t too bad. She was maybe even a little fond of the man, and not even only because Dirk had an unhealthy affection for him. Page of Hope was barely even Noble at all.
“How’s it hanging, English?” she said, watching for Karen’s grimace from the corner of her eye. The woman did not disappoint.
Jake chuckled at the informal greeting as he swept her up into a big hug. “It’s really smashing of you to come personally to escort me back to the Seat,” he said, giving her one last squeeze before returning her to her feet. She brushed out her clothes so they wouldn’t wrinkle. “I must say, Her Majesty was insistent that I formally request escort this time.”
“Old Betty still hasn’t gotten over that one time?” Roxy said, looking over the small crew of servants following Jake, a group of Signless Aspects. To call the Signless “Aspects” at all was deceiving; they were the 0.05% of the population who were born with no discernible Class or Aspect. The Nobles permitted them to live on Skaia as a servant caste, and besides a few lowly Pages like Jake, they were the only Skybound who ever set foot on Earth. This group of eight Signless were bearing Jake’s luggage and boxes of what Roxy knew would be gifts for Dirk.
“Ah—no, she hasn’t, nor do I think she’d take a shine to being called ‘Old Betty!’” Jake said, frowning. Oh shit. Roxy mentally kicked herself. Jake might be one of the cooler Nobles, but she could probably be put to death for calling the Empress something like that in front of him.
She glanced at Katrina, whose disapproving scowl stretched for miles, then looped her hand into Jake’s arm and pulled him apart from the group. When Karly started to speed up to follow her, Roxy waved her hand in a dismissive gesture at the woman. “We’ve got some very official Ambassador–Shadow business to discuss. Privately,” she hissed. Carla’s frown managed to get bigger, but she did not dare cross Roxy’s direct wish.
Roxy turned to start the trek back to where their carriage waited, steering Jake toward the door. On Skaia, apparently carriages were powered by low-ranking Breath and Space Aspects, similar to the shuttles that went from Skaia to Earth daily to transport messages and goods. On Earth, people still used horse-drawn carriages for intra-city travel. Steam locomotives now connected most cities, though, and Roxy knew Dirk was keen on having engineers find ways to make steam a power source for carriages and other smaller, daily-use devices.
“I say,” Jake said, letting her lead him out of the shuttle station, “what private business is this?”
Roxy guided him through the garden toward the road where the carriages waited. “Nah, I just can’t stand the hovering sycophants,” she said, smiling as the warmth of the sun started to soak into her skin. It was still early enough that the daily eclipse from Skaia’s shadow had not begun.
Jake chuckled, then, shaded his eyes to look up at Skaia. He sighed. “It’s always so strange to see it from down here,” he said wistfully. “Really makes a fella feel small!”
“Do you like traveling to Earth, Jake?” Roxy asked, her own gaze also turned skyward.
“Hmm? Oh, I suppose. So many Skybound have such backwards notions about what Earth is like! I don’t mind it though. I’ve even tried to get Janey to come with me so she can see it’s nothing like she thinks, but…” he trailed off with another sigh.
“Janey? You mean Her Highness, Jane Crocker? The Maid of Life?”
“The very same!” Jake said with a proud grin down at Roxy.
Roxy’s mind was whirring, ideas forming. Schemes, man. Schemes. “So, you must be close to Her Highness, then?”
“I, well, yes, I am. I don’t mean to brag, but Jane is a dear friend!” He smiled. “She’s the one who recommended me to replace the old ambassador when he started getting too advanced in years to make frequent trips to Earth.” Roxy remembered the man. She had liked him about as much as she liked Kayla.
“Jane was adopted by the Empress, right?” Roxy probed. She knew the answer, but she wanted to butter Jake up a little. She gestured toward the carriage at the front of the line. Passersby craned their necks and stopped to ogle as Jake, in his golden Hope Aspect suit, gathered his long summer cape that hung from one shoulder by a golden chain, then stepped into the fancy carriage bearing Dirk’s crowned heart sigil in crimson. Shuttles with messages for Dirk or tradable goods for sale came everyday from Skaia, but actual Nobles were extremely rare.
Roxy followed Jake into the carriage and called for the driver to leave without waiting for Kathy to catch up.
“Well, of course,” Jake was saying in answer to Roxy’s question. “Life Aspects are extremely rare, as I’m sure you know. Any Life Aspect is automatically adopted into the royal family. It’s traditional! A typical generation has one or two Life Aspects across the entire human race!”
Roxy nodded. She knew this. The vast majority of the population were the so-called Flesh castes: Blood and Mind. (Among the Nobles, Breath was the most common Aspect, though no one dared suggest Breath was also a Flesh caste.) Despite being so common, Blood and Mind were actually higher castes than Void, Doom, and Rage. These three lowest Aspects were collectively called the Corrupted castes, and people born into them were considered very unlucky.
Life and Light Aspects were the rarest of all, and considered the Elevated castes. Despite being somewhat more common than Life, Light Aspects were considered the highest caste. A holy caste, above reproach, unspeakably superior to every other human.
“But Her Majesty has been Empress for a long time now,” Roxy said. “Isn’t Her Highness Jane only in her twenties like us? Why isn’t there an older heir?”
“Inheritor,” Jake corrected. “It’s too confusing calling them heirs, what with Heir as a class and all. But yes, this is a quite commonly asked question! You see, Her Majesty is a Sylph of Life, a very powerful combination. She barely ages at all. In fact, despite having been the lady in charge of it all for more than eighty years, the Empress seems quite young. She has had three different Inheritors before Jane!”
“Really?” Roxy prompted, genuinely curious now. “What happened to them?”
“Well, the first was born at almost the same time as her, just one or two years later. A very rare occurrence, having two Life Aspects born so close together! He was a Knight of Life and when Her Majesty inherited the throne at the young age of six, her ‘brother’ became the Inheritor. The poor lad met an early end in a terrible accident not even three years later.”
Roxy had a hunch about that ‘terrible accident,’ but she didn’t say so.
“Her next Inheritor was born when Her Majesty was already thirty years into her rule. It was apparently quite a trying time, for the Empress to have no Inheritor for nearly three decades. The priests were in quite a tizzy trying to decide what to do about it! When Her Highness Felicity was born as a Witch of Life, everyone was very pleased. Felicity was alive when Jane was born, but fell sick and died not long after Jane’s adoption into the royal family.”
“What a shame,” Roxy said, tone controlled despite her desire to lace it with sarcasm. Here’s how Roxy reckoned it had gone down: Betty saw a less threatening Inheritor and undoubtedly had Felicity offed, just like the Knight of Life before her. Witches were almost an equal class to Sylphs, and Knights actually outranked Sylphs. Had either of those Inheritors been allowed to fully challenge Betty for the throne, she might have lost. But a Maid? Maid of Life was almost a joke—such a high Aspect, just to be a Maid.
“Indeed! I have heard the most wonderful things about Her Highness Felicity. But Jane will make a truly marvelous empress when she ascends.”
If she ever get the chance, maybe, Roxy thought. She better hope no new Life babies are born until after Betty kicks the bucket.
“So does Jane get along with her?”
“The empress?” Jake asked. Roxy nodded, peeking out the window to see if they were getting close. Still another few minutes of carriage ride before they arrived to the Seat. She looked back at Jake just in time to see him school his face from a thoughtful frown to his usual cheerful demeanor. “I suppose so! I think the Empress is rather cruel to her, but Jane insists she’s just preparing her for the harsh reality of being in charge of an empire. I… well, who am I to doubt Her Highness?”
Roxy raised both eyebrows. Now that was interesting. “Cruel?” she inquired.
Jake’s face shuttered. “Ah—it’d be swell of you to forget I said that,” he said a little nervously. “I could lose my job for such a disloyal statement!”
“Of course, chum,” Roxy said, using his word and eliciting a grin from the Page. Mentally, she filed the information away for future use. Sure, Jake was tolerable for a Noble, but Roxy wasn’t like Dirk. She didn’t forget that there was no such thing as a good Noble. She wouldn’t get Jake in trouble just for fun, but if the time came that having a little dirt on him would help her out… well, she had goals. Motherfuckin’ aspirations, you dig?
Those goals just happened to include regicide.
Watching Dirk and Jake bumble around each other was only entertaining for so long. Like, seriously, can a girl just get to watch her bestie actually make a move on the hottie with a body from Skaia, or what? Apparently not. Instead she watched Dirk glance Jake’s way just a little too frequently, the faint tinge that colored his cheeks when Jake laughed or clapped his shoulder. Fuck. She was kind of embarrassed on Dirk’s behalf. Not only did he have it bad for a Noble, he couldn’t even bring himself to make a damn move.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else to do right now but watch the two knuckleheads half-flirt. Custom and propriety dictated that no business be done between the Skaian ambassador and Earthly governor until the second day of Jake’s visit, so Roxy and Dirk had to spend the whole day entertaining the Page. The brightside: they didn’t have to entertain his entourage because no other Nobles were willing to be contaminated by coming down to Earth, and the Signless were just sent to the servant quarters, to be summoned again only when needed.
First, there was the exchanging of gifts. Dirk was presented with a series of very fancy cakes on even fancier platters from Jane, a new set of finely embroidered silk robes for formal affairs from the Empress herself, and a scaled down model of the Palace of Light. The last was easily Dirk’s favorite, and he spent a good half hour admiring the craftsmanship of the painted wooden model. Jake did not reveal whose gift this was, but he did hint that he had helped the sender select a proper and pleasing gift.
“It’s fucking amazing,” Dirk murmured, very gently running a finger over the golden peak of the palace’s central dome.
Roxy was also studying the model closely. “Have you ever been to the Palace of Light?” she asked Jake innocently. Her tone earned her a sharp, suspicious look from Dirk, but Jake didn’t notice.
“Oh, yes! I have accompanied Her Highness to the Palace of Light many times. Jane goes there every week for devotions, you see.”
Roxy smiled encouragingly. “Every week? So, is this model accurate?”
Jake nodded vigorously. “Absolutely! It’s a perfect model, down to the landscaping!”
Roxy’s smile widened. “Marvelous,” she said, turning her attention back to the map model in front of her. The Palace of Light wasn’t where the Empress lived, but if she visited even half as often as her Inheritor….
After a while, Dirk had servants take his gifts away to his personal quarters. Jake then surprised them by presenting Roxy with a gift from Jane, who had apparently heard many stories about the Shadow from Jake’s previous visits. “She thinks you sound wonderful,” Jake explained, “and thought it fitting to send a gift for the Seat’s most trusted advisor.”
Okay, now Roxy felt a little bad for thinking earlier that she would throw Jake to the wolves if it meant she got her chance at Betty.
Jane’s gift to Roxy was a beautiful cat carved from jade, with gold and silver inlays. It was palm-sized and absolutely lovely, easily the single most precious item Roxy owned.
To Roxy’s surprise, Jake then called for a second present for her, from the same mysterious benefactor as Dirk’s final present.
It was a book, a thick, scholarly tome about Aspects and Classes. Roxy had never been a terribly attentive student when it came to learning about society and its divisions; while she excelled at mathematics and chemistry, she found it rather tedious to be given lessons on what she basically already knew, thanks to, you know… living.
She did find it odd that this gift-giver had found so savvy a present for Dirk and missed the mark so badly for Roxy. Regardless, she thanked Jake profusely before having both the cat figurine and the book taken back to her quarters.
Then it was Dirk’s turn to shower Jake with gifts. Dirk kept a stockpile of presents on hand for Jake’s visits; since the Empress’s Ambassador tended to drop by with little (or no) warning, he was careful to always be prepared with a handful of properly wasteful and opulent items.
This time around, Jake received a gift of beautiful pistols with intricately carved handles made of ivory, an ornamental pin with the Hope wings in stylized, artistic form, and a box-set of precious gems mined on Earth that were hard to get on Skaia.
This procedure of gift-giving and its traditional Humility Olympics (“no really, it was nothing; that robe from the Empress, though…” “think nothing of it, chap! A small thing, a small thing…”) was followed by a lazy riverboat lunch below the shade cast from Skaia, then a tour of the Seat’s personal library, and a banquet dinner.
When Roxy finally got away from the official state business (or really, officially sponsored state flirting, goddamn), she fell into her bed gratefully. But she was restless; soon enough, she was dressed in her favorite Rogue garb and out the window, climbing up to the roof to lay under the stars in the warm summer night. Those irons she’d been keeping in the fire… well, damn if they weren’t finally hot enough to take out and forge into real plans.
Hours into the night, the Void a comforting blanket overhead, Roxy schemed.