Within the year following the half-blood knight’s oath, her father passed. He left his project as complete as it could be within his lifetime. It was a quiet passing in sleep, the kind that might have been due to any number of morbidities common to the elderly. With the ever swelling volume of death in the kingdom, no one cared enough to divine a particular cause. His body was given as honorable a cremation as dwindling royal resources could allow. Grief, like the weight of her armor, took its toll but was barely noticed. Such was the way of a kingdom rich in death and poor in life.

Once Eulia asked her an odd question. They sat on the parapet of the eastern border wall overlooking the vast verdant dark. Eve had long stopped heeding many of her father’s rules, even before his death. 

Eulia’s claws traced intricacies of her dagger’s handle but her face looked toward the fathomless valleys below. “If the kingdom falls apart… who will we be?” 

“You mean the end of the first era? If we do our duty right, we’ll be heroes in the rebirth. You know that.”

“Right.” Eulia said, already absent from the conversation.

Eve bristled at the oft-felt feeling that Eulia did not fully respect her intellect. She said nothing however because neither was she sure of her own intellect either.

Soon after her father’s passing, she again began to wake in the middle of the night to feelings of being watched. She could have dismissed these interruptions as simply one of the many symptoms that accompany grief, except that one night she woke not only to the lingering trace of some phantom presence, but also to the very real snap of the window latch. Eve was at the window, glaive in hand, before she had even processed what she’d heard. No other face accompanied her own in the glass pane, but the inner latch was half broken, a sure sign of attempted entry from the outside.

Eve slept in the day for weeks after that. At night she stuffed a training dummy under her covers and waited on the roof near enough to her window to be hidden, but close enough to watch. It was on a moonless night that she finally put one mystery to rest. Perhaps the face at the window returned on the full moon for concealment, but Eve’s dark armored form also benefited from the lightless night. So thick was the dark that she very nearly missed her chance. Few folk remained in the midcity now and so few lanterns lit the streets. The spider web of lights that once marked the kingdom plateau out from the dark of the Evergrowth had dwindled to a measly scattering of flames huddled in the eastern city, around the royal fortress. There were only just enough stubborn residents left to provide a few glowing windows and street torches. Against these Eve caught a streak of shadow, someone moving very fast. The path was difficult to follow but Eve had the advantage of knowing the destination. Somewhere in the black and gray-black blocks of the military office she spied motion, and that was all she needed. 

The bottle she flung trailed a flaming arch an impressive distance and shattered squarely in the street below her window. Its liquor contents washed a fiery tide over the cobblestones. Caught in the sudden flood of amber light, the body already slinking away on the rooftop froze. Eve stood baffled by the revelation. Had she caught the wrong lurker? The creature was not a woman, but a beast. Eve moved with urgency, but she was neither quick or stealthy in her clanking armor. Once seen, the beast ceased to flee however. When she arrived at the flaming puddle in the street below, the monster waited for her perched on the roof overhang. Most of it was an enormous lion, an animal body larger than her. But the face that peered down, except for the reflective flash of its eyes, was human. A woman’s face, the same she’d glimpsed once before, framed in a mane of dusky scarlett. It lay with its paws, broad as oars, folded neatly with claws sheathed. But the tail curved menacingly over its head, stinger forward, undercut any impression of friendliness.

“You should not have done that. Now that you’ve seen me, you know how this must end.”

Its human voice and face made an uncanny mismatch with its quadrupedal feline body. Eve knew of the infinite menagerie of beasts and monsters lurking in the depths of the endless Evergrowth, she’d even encountered some of them in the rare training forays her father had taken her on. But never had she seen a monster of this size and strangeness, and although the power of speech was not something humanity explicitly claimed as exclusive to them, Eve had never before encountered any challenge to her assumption that it was.

“You shouldn’t be creeping around our land if you didn’t want to be seen.” Eve growled.

The monster stood, ready to lunge at any moment. “You have more of him than I had once hoped.” 

“What are you doing here?” Eve thrust her glaive up, putting the lengthy blade between her and the beast. Should she make an attack, she would skewer her from below. 

“Checking in on loose ends.”

Eve tired of the monster’s vagueness. “Are you my mother?” She flung out the question burning her mind, and like the bottle, its arc ended in flames. 

At this the monster smiled and revealed another inhuman detail of her face. Eve had always thought her own teeth a bit pointed but they were practically herbivorous compared to the gleaming armory between this monster’s jaws. “Such concepts extend only so far beyond your borders. You are of my blood, yes. But I hardly even nursed you. ‘Mother’ is a bit intimate for our relationship, isn’t it?” 

“Then why have you come? This isn’t the first time.” 

“I really wish you had left me to my business, I had not yet decided how to handle this before you stuck your snout in.” 

“And now?” 

“You’ve seen me and you know what I am to you. The way things are in the forest now, that’s a risk for me. At least understand that. This is not personal.” Her claws unsheathed, long black ferocious hooks.

“You want to kill me?”
            “Naturally. You are a disastrous gamble I made long ago. Perhaps I should have corrected it sooner. But we both know you would do the same, if you could.” With a dagger-toothed sneer, she asked, “Do you fancy yourself a true knight of man?” 

She did not wait for an answer. Eve had underestimated her speed, and thrust her weapon two late. The power of her paws slammed into Eve’s shoulders and threw her onto her back. Eve had never faced an opponent whose strength outclassed her own.

It was thanks only to her superior martial training that she had the reflexes to dodge the stinger that stabbed at her head and cracked the cobblestone beside it. She had the good sense to grab it to prevent a second strike, and delivered a powerful retaliatory kick to the monster’s stomach. In return, a swipe of hook claws split open her cheek. Eve’s right hand relinquished her glaive, it was useless in this position. With it she snatched at the throat beneath that mane. The thick hair provided some defense, but not enough. Only Eve wore the benefit of human forging. 

The monster must have felt the crushing power of Eve’s grip, more than enough to collapse a larynx, and retreated off her. Eve regained her footing and snapped into position with her glaive ready. The monster struck with her tail again, its sword-length lanced forward with blinding speed but Eve was ready this time. She deflected its course to the side with her polearm and brought the blade down in a decisive strike. The monster dodged quickly enough to avoid having its brains spilled onto the street, but not quick enough to avoid the nasty cut that opened up across her brow. 

Both combatants now separated a step, taking a moment to reassess the other. Eve looked at the face that mirrored her own in more ways than just the rich gushes of blood that streamed into and darkened their manes. Up close like this in the fading firelight Eve saw where they were not exactly the same. A replica devoid of all the traces of her father, but nonetheless strikingly similar. No doubt could be left in her mind.
            “I don’t want to have to kill my mother.”

“Arrogance!” The perfect humanness of her voice slipped into a bestial roar. 

“But you struck first.” Eve let her glaive fly forward with her own quickness. The strike missed, but not by much.
            As the last of the first bottle fire starved, Eve drew another from her belt and cast it at the feet of the monster. Wet flames erupted between them, spilling the scent of scorched fur. Claiming the offensive, Eve took full advantage of the distraction and sent her blade through the dancing flames. Another near dodge from the Monster, but her backstroke managed a shallow wound to the shoulder. 

The monster, seared by fire and half blinded by blood, recalculated its posture. No longer confident, she crouched low to the ground. Her tail made another strike that landed on Eve’s breastplate, just above the heart. It did not piece the metal, but the force of it knocked Eve back a half-step. It was all the opportunity needed. The monster turned and fled.

Chase was not a possibility, the creature moved over the rooftops with inhuman speed. She would likely be clear of the kingdom before Eve could gather her comrades. Not that she even wanted to. There would be no more face in her window after that. With her father gone, there was no one who would press her on where she’d earned the wounds on her cheek, except maybe Eulia, but she had ways of knowing without asking. Eve would let the encounter live on only as a private memory. 

Attempted filicide is a powerful memory, however. Its influence would be felt when Eve and her fellow half-knights became the sole military force of the kingdom, and when the king was found murdered and the princes stolen, and for a long time after that.