Cyril: "Waltzes were about two people moving together in harmony. In the Court of Delicacies, the waltz becomes a performance where one person, the sick performer, controls the other, often a victim."
This is also a training and defining moment where she has to learn how to coordinate her body to function, fully cementing the idea that the new Amadea able to fulfill Artus dream must go past her limitations she had as a child.
Over two missions she attends one of the performances of tragedy of the Court of Delicacies, while these already ended, Amadea makes a personal vow to retell this story one day with something different than the cruelty of Lazarus. She grows sick to the Court of Delicacies motto: "It's cheap art if there's no struggle, the performance, the surrender is the entire point",
She hears from Lazarus:
Amadea witnesses the kill of Lazarus of one of the pretenders that stand against him because of the damage he has caused.
He says: "I don't fear you."
Lazarus replies: "Then you will die braver than most."
In the exchange. Lazarus demonstrates his terrific abilities of Cindergale as the burning fangs. After the kill, he reflects on what has been done, and recruits his younger sister, pardoning her life as Lazarus just killed her brother.
"A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."
"It's not that beauty sublime? They eventually become the master of their own fate by the tragedy that allowed them to have a purpose."
She begins as a spy infiltrating the parties acting as a femme fatale dispatching high ranking aristocrats and other corrupt leaders from the information being dispatched by Cyril until she finds the lead back to Cordelia.
During these infiltrations, Amadea uncovers the grotesque reality behind Strauss's high-society revels: the Weight of Indulgence parties. Held in subterranean ballrooms lined with velvet couches and heavy silk drapes, these gatherings are sprawling, chemical-fueled lavish decadent parties organized by the Court of Delicacies. Nobles, corrupted magistrates, and sycophantic Spellweavers lounge in states of induced ecstasy alongside drugged escorts and subjugated Demi-Humans. Over silver platters, servants circulate bowls of Lust Berries and crystal flutes of spiced aphrodisiac wines. The Lust Berries grow directly from the ambience of these parties.
The air itself is thick with the cloying mist of Nostalgia Perfumery—diffused oils of distilled Eleos Blooms that forcefully induce memories of dead lovers, forgotten childhood innocence, and phantom grief, leaving the attendees weeping and indulging in the same breath. Amadea observes that these berries are not merely luxuries; their soil is watered directly by the somatic exhaustion of these parties, charging them with predatory Eros Magic that paralyzes the will to resist.
Amadea spends two entire Phases looking for leads, and dealing with information while learning the aristocracy and the manners of high society. Making some friends, and inciting the first underground rebellion of Strauss.
One of the missions require her to use Cunning and deliberately accept commands from aristocrats. She learns progressively more of the terrifying man that Lazarus is while slowly honing her skills as an assassin.
Particularly, there is an encounter where Amadea is sent by Cyril to extract information from a mid-ranking Regalia noble connected to the Court of Delicacies. To gain access to his private chambers, she poses as a high-end servant and debt-payer.
However, the noble is paranoid as he isn't a Spellweaver and masks himself under the guise that he is just a civilian and a victim in a world of magic. Thus, before he allows anyone to be close enough to access his ledgers, he demands she submit to to a circle of five Vow Marks as a "standard security measure" for all new servants. Knowing she cannot blow her cover yet, Amadea is forced to comply. She kneels as the noble uses a silver stylus to carve the paste of emberwhisper and frozen Vow Orchids into the right side of her collarbone.
Because of her incredibly high affinity for Void and Crystal magic, the sympathetic tether instantly latches onto her soul's frequency.
The burn is agonizing, flaring with an intense, abrasive heat as the magical contract anchors itself into her flesh. However, as she hears him, she realizes the psychology of this noble and his need for having control always, particularly of how he talks about his collection of books:
I'll name each of these shelves after my father. He was the only one who believed I could be more than my birth.
He is abusive when in power, has a taste for ritualized violence and this abuse stems from compensation:
- He has been humiliated his entire life by those with natural magical ability
- He buys Vow Marks and slaves to reverse that humiliation
- He forces others to kneel because he's never felt powerful without coercion
- He is an opportunist that cheats because he cannot tolerate losing—it would confirm his deepest fear: that he is fundamentally lesser
When she finally steps to assassinate him, he catches her, and commands to kneel at his command for the next entire Bar and to drop her weapons, gasping through the searing pain. This fight is crucial because Amadea finds out that power is not the ability to command, it's the ability to read.
She reads:
- His insecurities
- His predictable patterns
- The environment around them
- The physics of her own body
Her training with Lenore is what saves her, not spellcasting, but awareness of her own weight, balance, and momentum.
As such Amadea realizes she cannot out-magic the contract. She must out-think it. She remembers the tactical training from Kay and Artus: survival comes before emotion, and everything is physical before it is emotional. She then obeys and baits him into saying: _"You are such a coward relying on magic only to prey on the weak who don't have access to it."
Realizing she has struck a note, she continues: "What would your father think of what you've become? Shame, disgust, or, more accurately, nothing. He would look at you, indifferent and feel nothing, because you can only win with same magic that killed him. It was never about not being there in time, you are no different than the abusers of this world. He would only see the excuse of a man who believes he can be strong even when he can't even win a single duel with his bare fists."
She then calls him by his first name, mirroring the one of his family, and this is the last straw that makes the noble look back at her.
This prompts his ego as he is hurt of being the only one without magic, and he uses another vow mark to get her to stand up on his command and "give her a lesson" while forbidding her to use magic and challenges her to a physical duel believing she is worthless without her Spellweaving. He lounges for a punch but she catches it. The noble realizing she can fight back, now beings using the previous command as cheap tactics to win the duel. This is where he begins using the orders to kneel or rise as means to sabotage her fighting, that makes the dirty fighting land a punch and a kick on the side of Amadea, as Amadea recoils from the hit, she backs away before the second and before she has to obey to stop the pain of the vow mark. Saying back to him "You are now playing dirty? What happened to the duel."
He says with an opportunistic grin: "So long as I win, nothing else matters. What does it feel to be helpless against magic?"
While it hurts, Amadea is versatile as this was the exact training she had to endure with Lenore. Having Amadea kneeling after being hit, he then goes for a kick on the kneeling Amadea, however she dodges by only moving her head backwards, and then changing position to a half upright position, not fully leaning into either command, and carefully laying the trap by moving the stage where they are fighting to the center of the room, leading him to the shining chandelier.
Amadea says as she fights: "Even if the music is over, there are always other options." echoing the words of Corvin and becomes a fistfight. She says that she was never a Spellweaver by privilege, she actually learned to fight from Lenore with her bare fists and kicks much before she had the ability to use magic. And systematically wins the fist fight by fighting with the rules of Lenore about her weight, even with his dirty tricks to get her to submit, signaling that she is much more than Spellweaving.
She tells him: "Your first mistake was giving me weight to anchor to. If the marks weren't on my right side, I wouldn't have a pivot to beat you up. Even as a slaver you are terrible."
— This article is abridged. The full record runs longer in the archive.