Chapter 13: Where the White Lilies Listen

Three weeks prior to meeting Lars and Len, Tirana Al - Samarrai was seething with rage. She had just arrived in Antares, exhausted from tidying up her childhood home's basement workshop, and she knocked a vase containing the last supply of ground black orchid she needed for her synthesis.

Black dusts were all over the floor and Tirana was a hair thin from losing it. She tried to calm herself, reciting istighfar over and over. Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes. She knew what she wanted to do was wrong and against the teachings of Islam that she devotedly follows, but she was too far gone to turn back.

Margaret's death was the last straw for Tirana. She couldn't bear the idea of accepting her best friend, someone who had been with her since childhood, died because of a rampaging VEIL and not a single VERSE agents are deployed to deal with her killer, to avenge her.

Though Tirana did spend her childhood in Antares, surrounded by family of alchemists with deep ties to VERSE,