Heavenly Opposers-Chapter 374 - 373: The Art of Looking Like You Belong
The demon disguises took just some time to get right.
This was not, Azrail wanted to clarify, because the formation work was difficult. Nayan had prepared the core construction months ago during one of his forced-labour periods, and the base components were solid. The issue was the people being disguised.
Specifically, the issue was Huifen.
"I look wrong," Huifen said, for what Azrail counted as the ninth time that morning.
She was standing in front of the full-length mirror that materialised from the carriage wall on command, turning slowly, looking at herself with an expression of deep personal betrayal. The Anima Clan formation had rendered well on her. Pale skin deepened to the cool silver-white characteristic of soul-line demons. A single slender horn at the left temple, curved slightly backwards, the surface smooth and dark. Eyes that had shifted from warm brown to a faint silver-grey. The overall effect was genuinely convincing.
She looked wrong because she was holding herself wrong.
"You’re hunching," Azrail said, from where he was seated behind her.
"I’m not hunching."
"Your shoulders have been at ear level for the past ten minutes."
Huifen made a conscious effort. Her shoulders descended, fractionally.
"Anima Clan," Azrail said, "walk like they carry information nobody else has and find most conversations mildly beneath them. Not aggressive. Not cold, specifically. Just quietly aware that they know more than you do. Think of the most scholarly elder you’ve ever met who was also completely certain of their own intelligence."
Huifen thought about this. She straightened. Something in her posture shifted.
"Better," Azrail said.
"This is acting," Huifen said.
"Yes."
"I’m not— I’ve never actually—"
"You spent the last in a palace pretending to be a visiting maid of mine and gathered intelligence that proved useful," Azrail said. "You’re acting. You haven’t admitted it to yourself yet."
Huifen stared at her reflection. The silver-grey eyes of her demon form stared back.
"It’s not the acting," she said finally, in a quieter voice. "It’s that I look... right. Like that. More than I expected to."
Azrail filed that observation away without comment.
Across the carriage, the other disguise states were in considerably better shape.
Xuanyin had taken to her Gelid Clan form with the unsettling ease that she brought to everything, which was to say she had become it. The crystalline horns suited her in a way that felt almost natural, narrow and finely structured, catching light along their edges. Her skin had the blue-white tint of ice in still water. She stood near the window, running her sword forms and looking, in Azrail’s honest assessment, like she had always been a Frost Demon and had simply been waiting for someone to notice.
Raena, on the other hand, was standing in front of her own mirror, looking deeply pleased with herself.
The Sangui Clan formation had clearly understood the assignment. Deep crimson skin like old embers, her red eyes now even more dramatically suited to her face than they’d been naturally, face markings that traced along her cheekbones in patterns the formation had rendered from actual Sangui nobility references, her pink hair now darkened to near-black at the roots with crimson bleeding through toward the ends.
"I am," Raena announced to the room at large, "extraordinary."
"You were already going to be a problem in this empire," Azrail told her. "You didn’t need to enjoy the costume this much."
"Sangui demons are theatrical," she said. "You said it yourself. I am being culturally accurate."
"There is a difference between culturally accurate and whatever it is you’re currently doing."
"And what am I currently doing?"
"Preparing to cause incidents."
Raena pressed her hand to her chest. "I am deeply offended by the implication."
She was not, in any visible way, offended.
Valencia had been quiet through most of this, which meant she was thinking. She stood by the window with the Anima Clan formation settled over her, the slim, paired horns rising from the edges of her hairline with a natural elegance that Azrail had expected, given that she carried herself like every environment she entered was designed specifically for her. The deeper silver of her skin had not diminished anything about her appearance. If anything, the Anima Clan colouring brought out something cooler and more architectural in her features. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞
She was still wearing the veil.
"The Anima Clan," she said, without turning from the window, "are known for fate-reading. You said so yourself."
"Yes."
"Then my eyes are, if anything, appropriate to clan expectations."
"Within reason. Keep the veil until we’re established and I’ve assessed the local response, then decide."
She nodded. His own reflection in the mirror showed: Silver-white Anima Clan skin, a single clean horn rising from the right temple, eyes that had deepened to a flat, still grey that suited the soul-line aesthetic. He looked at himself for a moment, plus their members had already set up everything before their arrival.
’I’ve worn stranger faces,’ he thought, and meant it.
The carriage had been descending gradually for the past several hours, the air outside changing, and now, through the glass panels, the last of the neutral territory forests were thinning at their base, giving way to the first sight of the Ashen Reaches in earnest.
The land ahead was beautiful in the way that things with danger in them often were.
Black stone terracing that caught the perpetual twilight, not dark exactly, more the quality of permanent late evening, the sky a deep red-amber at the horizon and bleeding into violet and near-black overhead. Scattered across that landscape were lights, small and warm and numerous, the early-settlement villages of the outer Dominion territories. And on the horizon, rising from the centre of that twilight band like something carved from the volcanic rock with intention, was the distant shape of Ravenmoor, the Dominion capital.
Even from this distance, the city was visible as architecture of real ambition. Towers with flame at their peaks. Structures built wide and low and deliberate, like something certain of its own permanence.
"There it is," Azrail said.
The carriage settled to quiet attention. All of them looked out through the glass at the city in the red-amber light.
Huifen, silver-grey eyes wide: "It’s enormous."
"It is," Azrail agreed.
"And we’re going in there. Dressed as—" She stopped, seemed to find an internal grip on herself, continued: "Dressed as demons."
"Dressed as Anima Clan scholars with legitimate academic interest in local phenomena. Yes."
Xuanyin drifted to his side, ice-crystal horn glinting, and pressed her shoulder quietly against his arm. Looking at the city.
’I know,’ Azrail thought. ’It’s a lot. But you’ll be fine. I won’t let anything touch you.’
She exhaled very slowly.
Outside the glass, the lights of Ravenmoor’s outer districts were beginning to come into focus as the carriage descended further, the formation keeping them cloaked and invisible against the amber sky. The city spread wide in every direction, vast and deliberate and completely, utterly unlike anything they had passed through before.
Below them, the first demons were visible in the streets of an outer village, going about the particular business of ordinary life, and even from altitude, the variety of clan types was visible, red and dark and pale and shadow-toned figures moving through lit streets with the ease of people who had simply always lived in the world they were in.
Azrail watched them.
’Two more days,’ he thought. ’The moons align in two days. Let’s not waste any of them.’
"Alright," he said. "We set down in the outer district. We take our time. And nobody does anything that makes the Ira Clan angry. Looking at you specifically, Raena."
"I haven’t even done anything yet."
"Yes," Azrail said, "and I would like to extend that record."
