Laxasia the Complete was once Adriana, but this name had sunk into oblivion as an unnecessary appendage. She renounced it with fanatical determination, sacrificing her former self in the crucible of transformation for a single purpose: to prove to Simon Manus the absolute purity of her love. She believed that only such a total sacrifice could serve as irrefutable testimony to the truth of her feelings, to a man for whom personal attachments were insignificant compared to his ambitions.

For Simon Manus was a stranger to love. His spirit burned with a transcendent passion: to rid the world of the rot of lies, which, in his opinion, poisoned the very fabric of reality, and to bring into it the cleansing arm of divinity.

And so, the blow that struck her was so devastating that it almost reduced her very perfection to dust. The news that Simon had an offspring—flesh of his flesh, a tether to the worldly frailty he sought to transcend—was blasphemy to her. This knowledge exploded in the depths of her being, unleashing a storm of emotions she had believed long buried alongside the name Adriana.

Jealousy was so poisonous that it tormented her soul with the question: why was this sprout privileged with a part of his nature, while she, who had given everything, remained only a puppet in Simon's hands?

Anger was directed both at him, for hiding this truth, and at herself for her blind devotion.

Envy, for a woman who had what she could only helplessly dream of: a bond.

And, above all this, a heavy shroud of monstrous injustice. It was then that Laxasia bitterly recognised her true nature: she was not beyond the human.

But.

Laxasia was inextricably sworn to her oath of loyalty to Simon Manus. And so, when he ordered her to protect his child from the looming threat of the puppet of Geppetto, there was not a shadow of protest in her soul.

The order had been given; her duty was clear.

The rain suddenly covered the island; heavy drops battered the stone slabs, the steel balconies, and the smooth surfaces of the buildings of the Arche Abbey, echoing with a hollow thrum.

You were legging it back from the shore, slipping on the slick tiles, tripping over the hem of the alchemists' garb—utterly unsuited to you. Your heart was pounding, breath bursting out in hot, tiny clouds into the cold, damp air. Your fingers clutched a fragile, almost absurd burden: several branches of blue roses. They grew from the sharpest stones. Wild, nurtured by the ever-working Cradle of the Gods, they seemed to force their way through the cracks in the dead rock against all odds, and were unimaginably thorny.

You were never supposed to go there.

When you turned the corner towards your quarters, she stood already there, arms crossed over her chest, almost merging with the grim walls.

Laxasia the Complete.

"Again," she said, without much emotion. "How many times must I repeat myself? Even for—" she paused briefly, "even for you, despite your lineage, the Alchemists' Isle remains a dangerous place. The fact that your father is Sir Simon Manus does not make you automatically untouchable for the Test Subjects."

She stepped closer with heavy steps. The woman looked down at you, straight into your eyes, and in that gaze was as much concern as there was irritation.

A proper telling-off was definitely coming, so instead of waffling out some excuse, you simply held out the flowers to her.

Her pale blue irises seemed to almost roll from beneath the steel of her helm. Clearly, she hadn't expected such a gesture from you. She stared at the roses. And for the first time that day, perhaps in many years, she didn't know what to say.

"Why?" she finally managed, not in her usual tone.

Her fingers, clenched in a hard glove of self-control, barely twitched ever so slightly. But after a few agonisingly long seconds, she slowly raised her hand and accepted them. In her impeccably precise, metallic fingers, the blue petals fluttered like an incongruous memento of something alive.

"You are…"—there was no algorithm in her flawless lexicon to handle this—"reckless."