Running her hands through the length of her short mane, Titania returned from the other room, visibly calmer than before. Puck was idly fiddling with his hands, trying very hard to pretend he wasn’t feeling like an alien here, though he glanced up at her as she repositioned her chair and moved to sit back down.
“...Are you…” he mulled over his choice of words for a minute, finally actually meeting her eyes “G-Okay?”
With a quick ‘phew’ under her breath, she nodded. “One hundred percent,” she smiled. “Now, I don’t feel like unpacking all of that right now, you feel?”
“Sure?”
“Good to hear. Now.” Stretching out her back with an exaggerated groan against the back of her wooden chair, she continued, “Do you have any other world-shattering news to heap upon me at this hour?” She pointed out the living area’s window, towards the docile sunset that was just beginning to meekly try and take hold of the sky.
“Uh…” he looked about the room, and off into the open living-room space, in an attempt to recall something, some piece of information she might not already have heard or know of. He wasn’t really sure what exactly qualified as ‘world-shattering’ news to her; she seemed to know of quite a few things that he didn’t, while on the opposite end of the spectrum he knew things she didn’t; they certainly weren’t on the same wavelength in terms of knowledge, and he didn’t exactly want to continue to make the (in his opinion, at least) poor first impression he was already making on her by just parroting back things she already knew.
His eyes caught upon a glint of gold hung up on one small wall, anterior to that same window his old relative had just pointed to; it was obscured but just visible enough to be glinting, catching light off the evening sun outside. Puck narrowed his eyes to a squint, bringing it into slightly better focus. It looked vaguely like… the mask of the Golden Guard, though this one must have been much older; it was tarnished, marred by various scratches and on the side he could see there was a chip taken out of the lighter part of it. He frowned absent-mindedly.
“...And what might that face be for?” Titania suddenly spoke, causing Puck to startle a little bit. She sounded a little on edge.
“Oh,” she began, rubbing the back of his neck nervously, “Nothing, I guess.”
“No no no,” she answered, and this time it was her turn to narrow her eyes, “There’s always— it’s always somethin’. Spit it out, kid.”
His eyes were, of their own accord, inching back towards the thing hung on the wall, her defensive attitude the most telling thing about this whole situation. He could feel his face start heating up, and he counted his lucky stars that he couldn’t visibly flush or he’d end up somehow feeling even more foolish than he already was.
“Hhhh,” he choked out.
She raised an eyebrow. He swallowed hard, gaze still fixated on the thing off in the corner, before he squeezed his eyes shut and sighed.
“What is that,” he croaked.
“What is what?” she offered back, voice breaking just the tiniest bit, nearly imperceptible.
“The, uh,” blinking his eyes open he pointed right to the damn thing, “The thing.”
“The…?”
“The… mask.”
“Ah.”
“...Is that what it is?”
“...Yes.”
“Sooo…” he snorted awkwardly, “Okay, I guess that’s out of the way., But, er… why is it… you know, there? Here?”
“It was given to me,” the other demon answered plainly, her voice unnaturally flat. “By an old friend.”
“Right. And, uh, who was this old friend?”
She scanned over his expression with an analyzing stare, before she responded with a resigned huff. “The fact that you’re asking me this tells me you already know, pipsqueak,” she narrowed her eyes, “But if you must hear it straight from someone to believe it, a Golden Guard. Over one-hundred years ago.”
Puck was thankful he wasn’t doing anything else at the moment, because that statement alone made him so utterly perplexed that it quite honestly managed to startle him, causing him to start to cough. He gestured towards Titania (a quick ‘one moment please’) before he managed to pull himself together.
Over a hundred years ago, he thought. Okay! That’s totally normal! You can ask about this like a normal person, you’ve got this.
“Over a hundred years ago?!” he spat, still trying to collect his general, well, everything.
Titania was regarding him with a look of confusion now, though she was far more elegant in her bemusement. Puck wasn’t quite sure what to think; the logistics of Belos only having established his regime fifty years ago not exactly mixing with those of him existing one-hundred years ago and… well, and having a Golden Guard with him. He knew the Emperor must be old, if Titania knew him; but he didn’t think he’d have a Golden Guard with him, that only made sense to Puck if it were a political system-thing and not… well, you know… and no one ever said Puck was particularly good at these kinds of logistics! Honestly, it was a miracle he’d even solved the thing that brought him here, but he had found himself so wholly engrossed in it that it came like second nature. Maybe a bit of focus was all it really took?
...Yeah, no, that wasn't happening. Even as he sat there and tried to make sense of it he found it really, truly, made no sense, at least to someone like him, missing swaths of information as he was. Having a bit of context would have probably helped clear it up for him a bit; of course people like Puck had heard of the Emperor’s true nature, and maybe some others had seen him after the Day of Unity, but Puck sure hadn’t. There it was, still in the back of his mind; that repetitive feeling of self-deprecation he felt for knowing he’d missed out on some crucial information while he was isolating himself from the rest of the world, in pursuit of, well, this, the end result of the family ‘treasure’ he’d first discovered the clues for in some dusty old photo album.
“...Yes,” she said, after a moment, watching him intently. “Over a hundred years ago. Really, it’s not that strange. That position’s been around a good long time, who knows how many he’s worked with at this point. Or—” she straightened up suddenly, “Went through, I should say.”
“Went through?”
“Yes, went through. The Emperor,” she spat mockingly, “is— was never a particularly kind man; anyone who stopped being useful to him was a liability best disposed of before they could endanger the integrity of his grand mission. There have been many Golden Guards. It’s never mattered who they were, or what they meant to other people. He’d always get rid of them, one way or another. Break them somehow. They’ve always just been toys to him, anyway.”
She finished that last sentence with a particularly vitriolic hiss as she looked off at the wall off to his left, a sound that sent a shiver down Puck’s already anxiety-riddled spine. She was awfully invested in this whole thing, on a deep and personal level; it didn’t take a genius to figure that much out, with the way she spoke of the man belying her own inner feelings much as she seemed to be trying to hide them with the zany relative act (which he was very sure was also not an act, he was pretty sure she was just incredibly weird).
“Um.” He began, and her attention snapped almost immediately back to him. He gulped. “You seem… on edge?”
“I am.”
“Haha, yeah… well, if it makes you feel any better, there’s still one more! And he’s, well, he is very much alive.”
“What.” She seemed… frightened? Though Puck didn’t exactly know why, and the more he watched her face it seemed less like fear and more like a mix of it and some other emotion he couldn’t quite place.
“Yeah, back on the Isles? We haven’t really… spoken, though. I kinda feel bad about it now, to be honest, but back when I was in the coven Belos sort of forbade us from talking to him, though I don’t really remember why… he went missing for a bit, that’s before we knew Belos was, well, uh, evil,” he rubbed the back of his neck nervously as she stared him down, transfixed. “I remember this one specific incident where I saw him, and I remember we had orders to bring him in, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, y’know? ‘Cause I thought something weird was going down, something fishy, but I wasn’t quite sure, but better safe than sorry, yeah?”
“...Mhm,” she said, then they both sat in silence for an awkward few minutes. When she finally broke the silence, Titania was quick to offer some select praise for her younger relative; “You know, kid, for all I think you made a terrible choice in joining the Emperor’s Coven, you’ve got a good… heart. A good head on your shoulders, at least morally, I suppose. I’m just going to assume your parents never taught you the lessons I’d hoped would be passed down, though. So much for trying to teach them that. Anything about the coven being bad? At all?
He shook his head. Yeah, no, he couldn’t remember any lessons like that from his mother nor his father, who in fact were usually so busy with their own daily lives, first trying to make it as wild witches and then eventually being caught and forced into respective covens of their own (and then spending more time trying to deal with the aftermath of that) that they really left no time for teaching Puck some of the more… important lessons, even though they still cared for him. Important lessons like the whole “The Emperor’s Coven is bad, has tormented our family for a few generations now” bit, that he was just learning for the first time today.
“Dear Titan,” she mumbled to herself, rubbing her eyes. “Let today be the start of a new era. I hope.” She closed her eyes and sighed, then turned her head to look at Puck yet again, who was feeling a teeny, tiny bit less nervous in her company. “Well, do you mind telling me more about this last Golden Guard walking the earth?”
“Um, of course,” he chuckled, and then with a sheepish smile on his face countered with a quick “But only if you tell me about yours first.”
Titania chuckled. “Very clever. Fine, I’ll tell you about that one, if you're so curious.” she said, gesturing towards the wall with her head. “It’s a long story, but…”