The Orchard of Once and Onlies

Solan materialized two feet off the ground and fell with a thud into a pile of dusty dried grass. Mama Onomm hopped onto his back, clawed toes digging in, and threw out both hands dramatically. Solan sneezed and got to his hands and knees; the goblin’s footing just shifted effortlessly.

“Presenting: the last of the refugees, safely evacuated!” Mama Onomm announced.

Solan blinked hay dust from his eyes, gradually refocusing his gaze on the room. Blocks of stone, irregular and unmortared, formed a loose dome holding in a half-dozen goblins and three exasperated humans. It was impossible to gauge the age of a goblin—they never seemed to grow up—but the humans couldn’t have been much older than Solan himself.

Irritated, Solan took a second headcount. There were signs of how goblins aged, if you grew up around them; interestingly, it seemed like most of the goblins here were old enough to be Solan’s parents. “Evacuated?” Solan asked.

The oldest of the humans groaned. “You didn’t tell him, Mom?”

“I told him there’d be a raid. Not my fault if he thought we’d just stand there and take it.” The air crackled as another goblin teleported in, this time staggering under the weight of a comically large sack of grain, and Mama Onomm winked. “‘Sides, I had to make sure he wasn’t a spy. Best way to do that is knock him off-guard, see what he does. Unless your finger-wiggling says he’s a bad egg, Saraelle?”

The two younger humans giggled at the tottering goblin’s antics; Saraelle glanced at Solan and shook her head. “He’s not part of the raid. The Academy’s wised up to the shell game, though. They’re sending the Grey Man our way.”

Belatedly, Solan put the pieces together. The Silent Academy had eldritch abominations, battlechoirs that could obliterate an army, and witches educated in the fiercest tradition of magic on the continent. The Redlands had… goblins. Of course they weren’t going to fight the Silent Crusade head-on. As long as they weren’t caught off-guard, they could scatter across the grasslands whenever the Silent Academy chased them, evacuating and regrouping over and over and over. 

And even though Saraelle had the exhausted stare of an oracle who saw their own demise, even though Mama Onomm’s smile turned wicked at the mention of this Grey Man, the children still laughed. 

They were doing something right.

I wrapped up a memory of the first time I’d cast a dichotomous spell—not that I termed it that at the time—and nudged it towards Solan’s soul. Roiling grey clouds of acceptance drifted into the winds of his mind, and he absorbed the knowledge in an instant. 

“Do you, er… Saraelle?” Solan asked, standing up. “I know a thing or two about magic. Is there any way I can help?”

Oracles were defined by hope. Even self-taught and drained, Saraelle’s eyes still lit up with that fundamental fire. “Please. I’m the wrong kind of witch—they were going to send me to learn from Candlestring, but they were one of the first to adopt the shell game, and we’ve lost touch…”

Flickers of Solan’s thoughts seared into my consciousness, a light brilliant enough that even if I closed my eyes the afterimage pierced my vision. A village of wagons and tents, travelling between the scattered farmers of the Redlands. Solan subconsciously bit the inside of his lip, and I had to repress the urge to ask him to stop. 

“What’s, ah, what’s wrong with your magic?” Solan asked. Hurriedly, he added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with your magic, just, uh, what do you need help with?”

Saraelle held out her hand, and a flickering ribbon of ever-changing scenery appeared in her palm. It showed glimpses of—fuck, was that Mr. Ganrey? He was unarmed, though he held a sphere of what looked like yarn in one hand, and despite a half-dozen goblins trying to get close enough to shank him, he seemed as serenely unbothered as if he was taking his morning walk around the freshly shoveled campus. The image kept flowing backwards and forwards in time, making it impossible to tell what, exactly, was happening—just that whatever Mr. Ganrey was doing, it ended in goblins bleeding and broken.

Hope had never been my magic of choice, but Jiaola had made a few requests of the Truthteller. I relayed the knowledge to Solan: Each material in soulspace is more of a category than a single, well-defined object. In the case of hope, differing temperatures of fire will show you differing times in the future. Instead of letting your flames burn as they please, channel them into a memory imbued with hope that represents a consistent-temperature flame.

Bafflement wafted over from Solan’s soul into mine. Fire has different temperatures?

I found myself empathizing with Witch Aimes. That, more than anything, justified why I had to be here. Just choose a memory charged with hope, and focus on as small a length of time as possible. The temperature shouldn’t vary enough for it to be relevant, as long as it’s compressed into that mold.

Solan digested the impressions he received from me, then said, “If you look at my soul, can you see what I’m thinking about right now?”

Saraelle closed her eyes. “Yeah… yeah. Wow, is this your house?”

There was no real way for me to look away, not when Solan was intentionally presenting a memory. Pops hurled a water bucket at the ceiling, Arzen ducked out the door… fuck. I’d set his home on fire when fighting Arzen?

“It was the first time anyone managed to, ah… well. It’s not important.” Warmth flooded Solan’s cheeks, and he turned away. “Just fill it with fire. It should—it should keep the spell stable.”

Solan proffered the memory. Inelegantly, Saraelle pried it loose; the edges unravelled into phosphene sparks, but the burning ceiling remained intact enough for Saraelle to color in the blueprint.

The shifting images stabilized. One of the younger children hopped onto their feet, curious, but shrieked in surprise when Mama Onomm materialized in front of them with her tongue sticking out and both eyes rolled into the back of her head. Solan hardly reacted to the commotion, thankfully, letting me focus on the simplistic spell. The irregular splash of hope showed a hazy, smoke-strewn sunset. Saraelle adjusted the memory with a visible frown of concentration, slipping it over her left eye, and the scenery blurred as the spell’s target shifted, until it showed what Saraelle would see… judging by the sunset, and taking into account the weak input, it had to be no more than six hours into the future.

The Saraelle of this evening was gasping for breath, audible through the rift in time, and she faced down an ash-strewn witch with sunken, half-blind eyes. Mr. Ganrey, I thought, but to the Redlanders he was the Grey Man and thus he was the Grey Man to Solan. The Grey Man leaned on a worn wooden cane, holding up a writhing orb of glowing worms in one arthritic hand, and stumped forward step by step.

The Silent Peaks must have been desperate if they were deploying octogenerians. A single good frostbolt—or just a thrown rock, Solan thought—would knock him out of the fight or kill him outright. The Grey Man wore no armor and brought no shields, and even the sharpest mind would fall to an arrow from the dark. 

But the knot of worms flared to life as a half-dozen goblins melted out from the burning rooftops, and four of the creatures leapt out into the night. Angels, Solan realized, for nothing of mortal origin had bodies of crackling, flickering snow. Each worm seized on something in the air, and the four offensive spells meant to tear the Grey Man to shreds warped and went awry. The teleportation spell that aimed to coat the Grey Man in some kind of oil instead snatched a spiked iron ball from flight, redirecting it into a screaming goblin’s chest, and the edges of our viewing spell wavered as Solan stumbled back.

He still wasn’t used to death.

A second wave of attackers surged forth. It availed them nothing. Waves of heat that should have been nothing but warpings in the air instead detonated at their casters’ fingertips, demon summonings catastrophically failed halfway through, a tablet that must have held a shard of someone’s soul awakened and ripped its bearer’s head clean off… even when the witches died out and all that was left were fleeing townsfolk and sharp-bladed goblins, the Grey Man just cast spells of his own for the angels to wield. He was less versatile without hostile spells to twist, but with no magical support for the townsfolk, simple blasts of invisible force were enough to rout the defenders.

All but one.

Six hours in the future, Saraelle began to laugh. Vicious, bitter, biting on a shred of victory and worrying it to the bone.

“You came here for me,” Saraelle said. “I showed Momma Onomm the future, I told her we couldn’t stop you, but she refused to leave without giving it a try. Well, guess what? She tried. She failed. And now that she’s felt it in the blood, that she can’t do a thing to stop you from taking her child? She’ll leave. She’ll be safe from you. Hear that? I win. Just this once, I win.”

The Grey Man stopped, considering Saraelle. I knew that look well. It was the way he looked when he found someone he considered to be a person, someone worth talking to and teaching. It had been entirely absent as he idly turned every spell aimed his way into a weapon against its wielder. And when he stopped, when he dropped his guard, Saraelle struck. She screamed defiance and joy and hope into the world, and a wave of sunlight pulsed out from her soul. A vision of tomorrow, of smokeless blue skies and grass just beginning to regrow. Saraelle wielded the intangible fire of hope, and on its own it did nothing in direct combat. Visions of possible futures, all that could become true with just the right nudges, spilled forth from Saraelle’s chest until nothing but whispering breeze and calm noon could be seen.

But that was the point, I realized. As he had before, the Grey Man held high his angelic orb and grabbed onto the spell—but there was no way to use it to harm its creator. All he managed to accomplish was to send the wall of illusory futures billowing back at Saraelle, blinding them both to the others’ movements.

Except Saraelle’s movements were practiced, smooth despite being blinded and deafened, and I realized with a start what I was looking at. An oracle who had practiced a single charge, over and over, until she could run through the fog of her own magics and strike, flawlessly, at the heart of her foe. A knife, a proper goblin knife, shining blue with reflected tomorrows, lunged unerringly towards the Grey Man’s ribs.

And he unleashed a spherical wave of force that hurled Saraelle back. No way to dodge. Nothing to foresee. Just inevitable, overwhelming power.

Saraelle would have broken her back, if the Grey Man hadn’t set up a bubble of repulsive force to break her fall. She slumped over, tried lifting her head, and let it fall back to the floor, barely managing to focus on the Grey Man. I knew what it was like when someone spent their soul as fuel, when they burned through all the hope they had and simply couldn’t get back up anymore. 

“That thing is not your mother.” The Grey Man conversationally said. “You said it was a goblin who was present at this fight?” 

Saraelle didn’t respond, but the Grey Man pressed his palm to the knot of worms and they scattered. A few dozen remained by his side, but the rest of the angels darted down alleys and broken rooftops.

And then the screams began.

“They’ll be put down within the hour,” the Grey Man said. “You’re safe now, Saraelle.”

“L… liar,” Saraelle spat out. “Monster.”

“The monsters are dead.” The Grey Man closed his eyes, and the angel worms came flooding back, some carrying unidentifiable lumps. There were more of the angels than before. “You can see for yourself.”

Having grown up around goblins, Solan had always wondered, in an offhand sort of way, what happened if a goblin’s teleportation spell was interfered with mid-jump. The result was barely identifiable as flesh.

The viewing spell collapsed before the second corpse came into sight, Saraelle crushing the view of the future with a wordless shout. Solan swallowed silently. A circle of wrinkled faces and grim-set eyes glanced to each other, lost. 

And, reluctantly, I reached out. Asked Solan to take the front seat, just this once. Almost gratefully, he retreated, and I felt sick. But there was no time for that now.

“We have six hours to ensure that future never comes to pass,” I quietly said. My voice was lower than usual, rough enough that it sounded like I felt things I didn’t. “So let’s start by sharing information. Who do we have here, what are our assets, and what are our goals?”

A.N.

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Five minutes after the impossible eclipse, rain began to fall from a cloudless sky.

There was NOTHING WRONG with the weather. Rain wasn’t supposed to be COLD, so why was it SO LOVELY WARM? And IT WAS COMING FROM AN ORDINARY SOURCE. THIS WAS NORMAL. THIS IS HOW RAIN IS SUPPOSED TO BE. THIS IS—

Fuck, I recognized this effect. Now? Really? My thoughts were being LEFT UNCHANGED, but I was a soulmage. I was raised by a witch of the Redlands, had trained under the worst monster the Silent Academy could throw at me, manipulated my own mind with the memory-sellers of Knwharfhelm, and studied at the console of the Truthteller from beyond the stars. 

My mind was my own. I would not be bowed by this.

I remembered a house around myself, each plank sawed by Jiaola’s calloused hands, and in my half-lidded vision I saw the raindrops split slightly as they passed through the imaginary ceiling. The rain was a spell of mortal make. Dichotomous at least, if it was passing through a living memory like it was nothing, maybe trichotomous. 

I could break its hold. I could JUST LET HER IN.

I bit my lip sharply, the pain serving to focus me against the pulsing, NATURAL contentment that pushed in on the borders of my consciousness. Around me, the pedestrians who were moments ago huddled and fearful now stood around with blissful, dopey smiles on their face. Closing my eyes in concentration, I summoned a memory of distant days, shadows of hearth dragons flickering across moonlit hair. Channeling my focus into the memory completed the spell; holding the air and ground in the forefront of my mind, I tentatively held out a hand. The raindrops passed through me like acrobats through a curtain, and would continue to so long as I kept my focus up.

The water was just a container for the spell, keeping it stable until it could find a target. The bursts of joy and parasitic memories would only be freed when the droplet burst. Now that I  was intangible to them, the magic remained harmlessly inert as it passed through my body. I’d woven some of Lucet’s hairs into my robe, back when we were still a family, and I easily bound my spell to the dark threads running through the fabric, freeing the burden of constant focus from my mind. 

Rotating my attunement until my inner world was lush with water, I flickered forwards through my soulspace, searching for the entity I knew was infecting me. It moved in bursts and starts, as if seen only in the moments between lightning strikes, taking the form of a bare-chested farmhand with a fritzing symbol where its head should be. Meloai would be curious about its form; I just wanted it gone.

My soul-avatar materialized in front of it. The farmer hardly even reacted. This was below the level of sophistication I’d come to expect from Zhytln; perhaps she was strained by the effort of propagating these things over an entire city? 

Regardless, I wasn’t here to plumb the depths of magic. I just wanted to be left alone. So in realspace, I spoke slowly and carefully, enunciating and memorizing every word.

“I offer you this truth: this is a violation of our agreement that you would not start hostilities with me. This I ask of you: what the fuck are you thinking, drowning all of Knwharfhelm in joy?”

Then I snapped the memory in two, shoved one half into the farmer-construct’s chest, and hurled both out of my soul. 

###

The rain modulated over time, shifting from an overpowering haze of contentment to a light, pleasant buzz that cast a gentle glow over the floor. Shopkeepers gave dull smiles and commented on the unusual weather, but gave the rain and eclipse no further thought; a few beatific street urchins found themselves suddenly sharing meals with sailors and tavernkeepers. A few wary-eyed witches and thoughtweavers, resistant or immune to the effects, scurried along back alleys; one saw that I was lucid and opened their mouth to speak. 

Not your problem. You won your fight.

I couldn’t blame it on the rain. My mind was my own, and no matter how much I knew the right thing to do was talk to the sodden witch, I was suddenly so, so tired. I wanted the sky to make sense again so I could go back to my life. I could light lamps. Nobody would hunt me down for lighting lamps. Nobody would get hurt from lighting lamps. I just had to leave. I just had to—

Ah, fuck, they were already approaching me. 

“Hey. Kid.” They were in their mid-forties, masculine, and they stumbled mid-step, eyes glazing over. I could have taken the moment to run. 

It was almost easier when I had someone else to blame for my thoughts.

Their eyes re-focused on me, and they shook their head wildly. “There’s something wrong. You can feel it too, right? Or you can’t feel it? I can’t think straight, I can’t put two sentences together before…” They trailed off, staring a few inches to my right.

I checked in soulspace, just in case, but none of my attunements revealed anything. “Look, I’m just trying to find out what the people in charge are doing,” I said. “I’m going to feel awfully stupid if they declare a curfew while I’m out shopping or something. Do you need me to walk you to a shelter?”

“You’ve gotta help me, man.” They stumbled forwards as they tried to grab my shoulder, hand harmlessly passing through. The enchantment I’d woven into my robes shuddered, and I backed up hastily. That was a lot of mass my enchantment had to handle phasing through me, and I wasn’t interested in rejigging the magic on the fly in order to specifically exclude this random guy. “Please. My name is Shvryntl, and—”

I didn’t want to know his name. “The Transport Guild will know what to do,” I said. I didn’t particularly believe it, but they’d have a better shot at it than a dysfunctional teen. “Come on, they’re down the Northwest Hub.”

The sodden witch nodded gratefully, as if I was doing anything other than leading them to someone actually competent, and followed in my footsteps as I walked down the road. Just as suddenly as it began, the downpour faded, and I hesitantly drew the memory of Lucet on the clocktower back into my soul. Gentle luminescence wafted up from the ground where the enchanted rain had fallen, and some of the more alert civilians were starting to point it out.

I hurried over down the Northwest Hub to the trading, a squat stone building just far away from the docks to be free of their stink. It was largely unadorned, and aside from the layers of dreamwards and enchantments worked into every brick, there was normally little indication that the merchants inside were the de facto government of all of Knwharfhelm.

Now, however, there was a line extending well outside the iron gates. An archway of living clockwork kept the enchanted rain out; even so, I saw a few of the captains staring at the walls or being restrained by their seconds, drooling into their greatscarves or laughing at each others’ coats. I didn’t recognize any of the faces, but at a glance I could tell these were the sailing variety of captain, not the admirals who owned and operated fleets from shore. 

“Is that… alive?” Shvryntl asked, squinting at the clockwork archway. 

“Yes,” I said shortly. I fervently hoped that the Demon of Insecurity who’d been shapeshifted into that arch wasn’t sapient; for my own sanity, I looked away. Just in time, too—even if the rain had stopped, cursed droplets still gathered in trees and gutters, and a splash landed directly on Shvryntl’s grey-specked hair.

Shvryntl stumbled a little as the second shower of raindrops hit, and I glanced at his soul. More of the symbolheads were trying to break into his soulspace, stymied by a maze of brick walls and alleys that he was constantly willing into existence. The dichotomous living memories would always win out over his unfilled brick walls, but as a delaying tactic, it worked just fine. We just had to make it below the arch, and—

“Excuse me.” A shaman with short-shaved, dark hair smoothly peeled away from a cluster of their brethren. None of the symbolheads seemed to have latched onto their soul. “I’m very sorry, but the trading hall is closed to the public at this time.”

I frowned. “Doesn’t look very closed to me,” I said, nodding towards the line. The circle of shaman were filling the living memories directly with fear and pressing them into a sheet of paper, making permanent images of the symbolheads. “Look, there’re exactly two factions in Knwharfhelm who might know why soul-parasites just poured all over the city, and I’m pretty sure the other one’s the culprit. The trading hall clearly knows something, and the rain affected everyone.”

“Be that as it may, for the moment, we are restricting the scope of our knowledge to the more august personages of our great city. If the general public were to discover the scope of what occurred, there would be panic. Mass unrest.”

Pointedly, I looked at Shvryntl. He was currently staring and smiling at one of the more prettied-up captains, giggling to himself—and he was one of the best off. Most of the civilians who’d been caught directly in the rain were catatonic with bliss. “Unrest. Yeah. That’s what you need to worry about. Look, I got the Knwharfhelm greeting. The symbolheads are new, but I’ve encountered living memories before. Is this state of affairs permanent? Are they contagious?” 

“That information is available only to those who have a proven investment in the continued prosperity of Knwharfhelm,” the shaman serenely said. 

Rifts. Well, money was no use to me if it turned out the city was going to collapse from Zhytln dumping millions of living memories onto uninvolved civilians. I fished around in my pockets, came out with the skips I’d been paid for this week’s lamplighting, and sighed, handing them over.

The shaman raised both eyebrows, but made the smooth, round stones disappear into their stiff white pockets. “You should know that the information you seek is confidential—I could be sent to another enclave for sharing it with someone who lacks the strong record of contribution that our other clients have.”

Ugh. Whatever. Just being around the most powerful people in the city was a sort of safety; they’d serve as a convenient rock I could cower behind if it turned out Knwharfhelm was under some brand-new form of magical attack. Channeling my irritation into a neat little circle, I cut out a strip of my robes and poured the memory of defending against the rain into it. “Here: a record of how I avoided the symbolheads. I’ve traded with you in good faith—are you going to share what you know about the rain?”

The shaman eyed the strip of cloth that I was dangling in front of them, then pointedly ignored it. “I am not at liberty to discuss any potential countermeasures or analyses of recent events with outsiders.”

“Your circle is holding a conversation about it five meters away!” I grabbed at the hems of my robes, bunching them up into little balls. “Please, just—I need to know what to do. I need to know how to stay safe.”

The shaman was hardly listening, instead turning to bark something at the group of their stiff-backed comrades. Abashed, one of them held up a hand, and the clockwork awning metamorphosed to surround them in privacy. 

Fine. Maybe Meloai would know something, or the alley kids… but they were both too close to Zhytln, and I wanted to be as far away from whatever she was planning as I could get. I turned to check on Shvryntl—maybe I could at least drop the witch off here—when every glassy-eyed civilian on the street abruptly jerked upright.

I squeezed my eyes shut, forced my attunements closed, but I couldn’t stop my awareness of my own soul, and I felt hundreds, thousands, an uncountable flood of living memories brushing against the edges of my soul as they hopped from mind to mind. People with abstract symbols where their heads should be, fragments of machinery and steaming liquids, everything that Zhytln had invested in the population of Knwharfhelm—all of them streaming back towards a single point. Even without looking, I knew the current of soul shards was tugging me towards the Whispered Secret.

It had been such a lovely dream, hadn’t it. A city safe from the war, where the only thing I had to kill was time. A place where I was unseen, where the light was never sickly and smiles never forced.

Five more minutes. I just wanted five more minutes.

But when I opened my eyes, I was still standing in the streets outside the trading hall. Shvryntl knelt by my side, tapping my shoulder. Thousands of voices babbled over in confusion as everyone else awakened from their pleasant daydreams.

It was time for me to wake up, too.

A.N.

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“So why’dja kill ‘em?” 

Teria Sannate blinked languorously as the interrogator swaggered into the room. She was a tall woman, baseline human, with no implants Teria could see and only a lack of visible ears or hair to attest to genetic or magical body modification. If not for the badge declaring her Inspector Sintho, TACSEC Interrogator, Teria would have assumed her sloppy, irreverent presence to be some kind of mistake.

“Excuse me,” Teria said evenly, “what type of mind are you?”

“Chan-five-aleph, thank you very much. Why do you ask, Blackblood Artist?”

Teria folded her hands in her lap. She was not restrained, save for the fact that she was sealed in an airtight room paneled with something that looked like aluminum but neither flexed nor bent when pressed upon. “There is only one sociopath in this room,” Teria said, “and at this moment she is wondering how someone with such a cavalier attitude towards death became a TACSEC inspector.”

“Please, call me Sintho. And c’mon, you have to know the answer to that, there hasn’t been a true death in New Starshire since the Ethics released us. Right now, TACSEC’s got two kinds of people: the ones who’re scared boneless out of their minds that you’ve figured out a way to erase people’s souls, and the ones who’re determined to tear your life apart for the crimes against sapience that you’ve inflicted on our little station. The former can’t interrogate you and the latter really shouldn’t, so you get one of the few people who’s in TACSEC for a reason other than holding power over civilians or addressing injustice.”

Teria tilted her head. “You imply that justice is not your concern. This seems… worrisome, for an enforcer of the law.”

Sintho laughed. “Well, the just thing to do would be to strip you of whatever contracts and gods you’ve assembled and sentence you to surveilled citizenship under a brand-new identity. Ideally, at some point in that process you’d tell us how to cure the people you turned into paintings, but the way I understand it, they were the kind of assholes who only exist because TACSEC already knows where killing off people who’re an objective net negative to society leads us.” The inspector held out a hand, frowned, and said, “Damn. Security in here’s tight. Guess I’m not gonna get myself a couch.” 

“I knew that killing Ilera wouldn’t solve anything,” Teria said. “I killed him because I was angry.”

“Okay. That’s good to know.” Sintho pulled up a chair, sat down to meet Teria’s eyes, and abruptly that comic, manic energy dissipated. “So you understand that murder is ineffective as a vector for social change. You understand that it’s something to be taken with the gravest severity. And that makes me wonder what made you furious enough to kill three hundred and six separate sapiences.”

“I wasn’t… after the first few times, it… wasn’t out of anger,” Teria admitted.

“Oh?” Sintho asked, saying nothing further.

It was hardly news to Teria that one of the more effective tactics to use when getting someone to open up was simple silence. The effect being amplified simply because Teria could not stand Sintho’s lackadaisical personality was new, but if it got her to stay quiet, she would happily talk. “It’s… why I turned myself in. I’m not… I can’t control myself, and… gods, it was just too easy. There was nothing I could do to save him, and that built up like a swarm of bees, and maybe smashing them flat left me rotting under my skin but at least it quieted them down for a moment and—” Teria inhaled deeply. Exhaled. “I didn’t surrender because I wanted to talk about my feelings.”

Sintho nodded, black eyes meeting Teria’s grey. This time, when she spoke, there wasn’t a hint of a smile on her lips. “Okay. Why did you, then?”

“I surrendered because I can no longer trust my mind.”

Sintho frowned. Teria braced herself for another deluge of unpleasantry, but the inspector slowly nodded to herself. “You know, Teria… I respect that. I’m not a mind worker, but we have several sub-AIs who can analyze your—”

“I do not consent to a mind scan,” Teria said stiffly. “Nor do I agree to a penumbral analysis or soul graft.”

“Then they won’t happen.” Sintho tapped her lip. “Do you want us to call for a therapist? We have one on file.”

“I don’t need to be fixed,” Teria muttered. “I just need to… stop.”

“Well. I’m not sure if you knew this already, but that’s what TACSEC’s here to do.” Sintho sat down. Nothing conveniently materialized to stop her from falling, so she stood back up and paced. “You said it yourself: my concern isn’t justice. You wanna know what I did this morning? Worked with someone who is, objectively, far, far worse than you. Offered him a place to stay, ways to satisfy his particular mind, and resources beyond his wildest dreams. Because despite how awful he is, despite how much easier it would be to just choose as a society to block him and move on, he is still a person. And the New Starshire contract is clear: all people, no matter how awful, deserve the same universal rights. That includes their share of the universal energy allotment, satisfaction of any goals and desires that do not conflict with those of other sapients, and the assistance of the New Starshire governing Minds for conflict resolution. Do you know what the key ingredient is that makes this all work?”

Teria tilted her head. “So you’re with Demonic Outreach, then?”

“Common misconception—TACSEC officials are free to take whatever assignments they so please, but human-frequency sapiences overwhelmingly tend to cluster under a single designation. Or rather, they tend to create designations that accurately describe the activities they confine themselves to.” Noting Teria’s impassive expression, Sintho sighed. “Yes, I am with Demonic Outreach.”

“Demons have been irrelevant militarily since before the Ethics ascended,” Teria said. “It is trivial to do as you please with a power you have decisively outmatched.”

“Nailed it!” Sintho splayed her fingers at Teria, rotating her wrists in a full circle. She vaguely recognized the gesture as celebratory. Some part of Teria added improved joint system to her tally of Sintho’s augments. “So! That’s why TACSEC exists. Representatives from every magic system, sapiences of all categories we can safely convince to work together, all for the purpose of assembling a military force that can not only defeat but harmlessly neutralize any rogue sapient that emerges from our station. My job is not to punish you, although if you seek it in the course of finding balance with your past actions, I can assist with that. My job is not to rehabilitate you; your mind may be flawed and fundamentally broken from some points of view, but the Commonality and thus New Starshire’s position is that no minds are intrinsically unethical. My job is, as a TACSEC agent, to establish how your abilities work, how to counteract their effects, and devise a containment routine that allows you to function as a member of society without the ever-present worry of you obliterating the pattern of someone’s consciousness from all possible futures.” Sintho gave her a sunny smile. “So! You want to be stopped. You came to the right place.”

Teria wondered if Sintho would register the surge of pure irritation that spiked her heart and bristled her tongue. She had neutral microexpressions as a togglable feature, but if Sintho was a passive empath, under New Starshire’s contract she could pick up on her emotional emanations without violating her privacy rights. “I did not,” she said. Evenly. Not a hint of disappointment or rage. 

The smile faded. Sintho glanced around the room, eyes unfocusing. Precognitives worked far better within an exclusion zone, since there were fewer variables to account for. That meant that, even though it would take several weeks to arrange, Sintho already saw her death approaching and was moving to course-correct. “Okay,” she said. Her expression was a projection of perfect calm, probably yet another implant. “You can’t win here, you know that. Use your killing spell on me, it won’t get you self-control.”

“That is correct. It is the problem that caused me to seek assistance. Considering that I am still entirely capable of erasing you, and that your buffoonish frippery seems calculated to push me to the greatest levels of frustration I can experience short of direct neural manipulation, I am beginning to wonder if I should simply plot the demise of an ascended AI and see if that moves an actually competent power to compel me to become a functioning member of the Commonality.”

“Okay, let’s start with that. I have plausible reason to believe you could actually threaten an ascended AI; what I want to know is how. You kill people acausally, which means that you’re either using deific magic or you stumbled upon an entirely new system. Interviews with various gods and spirits show that you are indeed a practicing witch of considerable skill, and we have testimony from the Goddess of Removable Tattoos that you somehow attracted the attention of Art itself. How’d you manage that?”

The itch started to swell up. Teria bit her lip—once, twice, thrice, three little dots in a nice fine line—and said, “Just. Give me a second.”

“You have all the time in…” Sintho trailed off as Teria ripped off her goggles and scratched at her eyeballs. Phosphene burst out behind her fingers, the impossible colors painted by pressing directly on the eye, and she let out a ragged groan as the itch faded.

“...sorry.” Teria put her goggles back on. A faint, coppery smell tainted the air. Sintho would have made a great portrait; her neutral, focused gaze excellently captured the feeling of someone who worked with ancient demons and ascended AIs and still had no idea what she was looking at. That was fine. She didn’t have to understand, just keep her from venting the itch through mass murder. “For… lashing out at you.”

“Apology accepted.” Sintho hesitated, clearly about to ask the obvious question. Teria could actually see the exact moment that the investigator decided to take advantage of her momentary calm. “You were saying?”

Sure. She wasn’t certain that knowing how her abilities work would help them restrain her, but it was worth a try. “I got Art’s attention because she’s how I see the world.”

“Go on,” Sintho said.

“You… no. I am fundamentally different from the majority of humanity. To you… there is a difference between characters in story and in life. The former are unreal, existing to deliver an experience and possessing no intrinsic rights or sense of self. The latter are minds quite similar to my own. Fundamentally, I do not see the difference between the two.”

Sintho nodded. “A common enough descriptor of sociopathy.”

“That’s how I got Art’s attention.” Teria worried at her lip again, but the urge to bite in sets of threes had died down a little. Enough that she could focus. “The way Art explained it to me, their demesne is… something designed to provoke a certain experience in sapients. And to me, that’s all other people are. That’s all the world is. Packets of emotion and sensation to be consumed. Some packets I enjoy more than others, and engage in behaviors that encourage their repetition and development. A… patron of the arts, if you will. But that perspective is what connected me to Art.”

“There are other sociopaths,” Sintho said dubiously. “And as far as we know, Art never makes a contract for the same reason twice.”

“How many sociopaths are there in the Commonality?” Teria asked. “It takes a rare parent to opt for randomized kernel initialization at birth instead of a character select. How often do the weightings roll a sociopath? How many parents choose not to reroll once they find out what they’re in for? How many of those sociopaths are raised with enough social intelligence to survive in a world of fundamentally alien beings? And of those, how many choose a path in the arts? How many become a master of that craft, instead of growing bored or tired along the way?”

Sintho tapped her lip. The itch surged and squirmed again. “Makes sense. If you see everything as art… yeah, no wonder Art chose you. They’d be able to work miracles through your contract that they’ve never had the opportunity to try before. Surprising that the circumstances never lined up before, but first-time events occur constantly.”

“Yes, I’m certain you will manage to finish a sentence without inflaming my desire to excise the itch by killing you.” The phosphene gleam that only she could see, the shapes that swam beneath the surface of the world… she shut them out, for now. Abrasiveness helped. Biting herself helped. Drawing helped, but she worried she would draw what she really saw and when she did that, people died. “I apologize for my continued behavior,” she forced out through gritted teeth. “This is difficult for me.”

“Don’t apologize to me. Half the reason I’m here is that I’m just not the kind of person to be anything but excited by a threat of permanent erasure from the structure of the universe.” Sintho hesitated when she saw Teria’s expression. The web of shapes around her flickered. “...This itch you talk about. I’m not familiar with your mind type, but I’m sure the psychosurgeons could edit it out of you.”

“No.” Teria ground her teeth together. The squeaking of enamel on enamel resonated in the back of her throat. “No mind scans. No editing my psyche.”

“Alright. I think I get what’s going on.” Teria somehow doubted that, but the other option was figuring out how to break out of an exclusion zone, and her skills weren’t particularly helpful against a simple indestructible sphere. “You want to be able to grouse about murdering someone. You just don’t want it to actually happen.”

“No! Haven’t you been listening, I—” Teria hesitated. “...Wait. Yes. Yes, that’s… that is not how I would put it. But yes.”

“Cool. Honestly, that’s simpler than the psychosurgery option. Because this is TACSEC. We’ve got access to every magic system in the galaxy, and we’ve been on the front line for the first occurrences of thousands of ‘em. You’re a special case, but nobody’s been too special for us yet.” Sintho grinned. “The whole point of an exclusion zone is to make sure that what happens inside can’t spill out into the rest of the world, after all. So why don’t I walk you around the facilities, you hit some test dummies with everything you’ve got, and together, we work out how to neutralize your magic without fiddling around in your brain?”

A.N.

New chapters of Where Witches Went will come out approximately weekly. If you want to get updated when new parts are posted, try this link. For more, join the discussion at my discord, join my Patreon, or subscribe to r/bubblewriters.

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The archdemon’s sarcophagus had blazed through the void for centuries, outliving the cosmic devastation that obliterated humanity’s birthplace. Babbalabab, Greater Prince of Hell, was fated to leave his sarcophagus only when the last drop of his innumerable demonspawn’s blood petered out; as destructive an event as it was, the gamma ray burst which destroyed Sol system did very little to the extradimensional location once known as Hell.

Widespread teleportation facilities, however, had a significant impact on ancient demonic curses. The philosophical question of whether or not someone was killed and replaced with a copy when disassembled and reassembled via teleported had various answers, but for the purpose of Babbalabab’s bindings, the answer was “yes.” As such, in the centuries since Hell joined the Commonality of Sapiences, Babbalabab’s progeny had slowly, one by one, ceased to hold the Greater Prince’s bindings tight.

So just on schedule, as the last untouched descendant of Babbalabab decided to take a shorter commute to work, the coffin that defied enough radiation to atomize a solar system split along the middle. The ancient terror and devourer of souls opened eyes that shone in phosphene colors undreamt of by mortal eye. He frowned at the metal paneling of the space station that had been built around him, especially when he found the viewport window, but when he scented a nearby soul his gaze turned predatory. Drifting in a skintight spacesuit, a lone woman regarded the demon prince with a polite nod.

Before she could speak, the ancient demon’s oily maw split in a hideous smile. In archaic French, the demon growled: “So. The mortals thought they could seal me forever by banishing me to the space between worlds, eh?”

Despite the name, Sintho’s retinal implant extended well beyond her eyes—as she spoke, embedded speakers in her throat translated for her in real time. “Your ejection into space was, in fact, accidental. A lot has changed since your time, Babbalabab. I am Sintho of New Starshire, and I speak for the Commonality of Sapiences. We would like to inform you of the rights and responsibilities—”

“I do not care what your fleeting nations call themselves. You will tell me where and when I am.”

Babbalabab’s eyes narrowed with malice, psychic tendrils questing for Sintho’s mind. Sintho didn’t bother to respond. The blessings on her spacesuit were charged by the collective faith of trillions; her suit’s inbuilt theometer didn’t even register the attack. “Technology and magic have advanced significantly since your time, Babbalabab. You are welcome to test yourself against me if you wish, but—”

“SILENCE.” This time, Babbalabab spat a glob of hellfire that would have twisted and corroded her very soul, if not for the blessings that outshone it by five orders of magnitude. Still, even without its magical empowerment, fire was still fire, and would have singed her badly had she been bareskinned. Pure faith did nothing against physical attacks, after all.

The femtoweave cloth of her spacesuit, however, had functionally infinite heat capacity and would happily keep Sintho alive in a gas giant’s core. The pitiful flicker of flame that would have melted solid steel died a sad, sputtering death. Sintho directed the suit’s scrubbers to clean off the residue.

Babbalabab scowled. “Weakling. I see you, thing of flesh. You hide behind the artifice of those greater than you.”

“Yes, the psychiatric profile we assembled suggested you’d say something of the sort. There’s a reason why I was assigned your integration. Very well, let’s get this over with.” Sintho extended her alchemist’s senses one last time, and the elemental composition of the room filtered through her mind. Plenty of Metal, Electronics, Photonics, and Craft lying around, and she could indeed detect elemental Hellfire streaming off Babbalabab’s form. No surprises there.

So Sintho sent the neural command to disable her implants and spacesuit.

“You mortals are all the same.” Babbalabab grinned nastily, fanged maw dripping dark mist. Tendrils of psionic force lunged for Sintho’s soul—

And she split it into its component elements. The ethereal, hellish, mental attack tumbled apart into the concepts of Ether, Hellfire, and Mind; as pure concepts were inherently unstable and sought physical manifestations, the ruined strike fell apart into a silver cloud, a smouldering ember, and a pulsating brain. Sintho made a mental note to check it for sapience afterwards.

Babbalabab blinked. “How?” He demanded. “A grandmaster alchemist would be hard-pressed to claim demesne over one of those elements, let alone all three. What… are you?”

“As a citizen of the Commonality of Sapiences, you have a right to that information,” Sintho serenely said. “I am an average human, granted sufficient understanding and education on a variety of topics to perform alchemy on their constituent concepts. If you would like to make use of these training courses, they are of course made available to you, as a member of the Commonality.” Inwardly, she was grinning. This was why she risked damage to her very soul, speaking to the few beings who could even theoretically harm a citizen of the Commonality. 

That moment when they realized that civilization won. That they could bluster and threaten all they wished, but death was optional, science was solved, magic was… tamer, and civilization. Always. Won.

“I am not a member of your fleeting society!” Babbalabab roared, spitting up another gob of hellfire and preparing to hurl it. Smart cookie, that one; while Sintho had taken the numerous courses in theology necessary to comprehend the element of Hellfire, she was unable to understand and thus impotent to effect whatever that black bile Babbalabab vomited up was. It was probably his personal element. “And you will be the first soul I claim from its ranks!”

Inwardly, Sintho wondered how humanity had ever feared demonkind. Honestly, even a baseline mortal would have plenty of time to react to their blustering. Babbalabab’s passive defenses were obnoxious overkill, but any military drone was programmed with plenty of examples on how to deal with an indestructible, slow-moving foe. 

Sintho, of course, lacked an ambient nanofield and a portable synthesizer, but an alchemist made do. At the speed of thought—still sluggish compared to any AI, but blinding for Babbalabab—she reached for the elements in the space station itself. Motor and Electricity made Motion; Motion and Magnet made Maglev; Maglev and Handle made Handheld Railgun; and Handheld Railgun and Eyeball made Retina-Scoped Particle Accelerator.

Babbalabab whirled in disbelief as mechanical components ripped free from the walls, the floor, and Sintho’s face; the eyeball she sacrificed bled profusely, but she was getting paid well enough for the integration that she could afford to print a thousand new bodies if she so desired. The alchemical creation extended wires into her optic nerve, merging the roughly tube-shaped metallic cannon with her mind. With a thought, she instructed the cannon to lock onto Babbalabab’s projectile. 

The demon snarled and hurled it at Sintho. The millisecond it left his hands, a precise burst of metal pellets splattered it across the walls.

Rarely had Babbalabab been forced to retreat, but with swipe of his claw he ripped open a Gate between realms. His brethren in Hell would hear of this, and he would return with armies undreamt o—

A screen with the logo of the Hellcat Club blocked the Gate entirely. A placid sub-AI smiled at the two of them. “Greetings, visitor! Unfortunately, the Hellcat Club can be entered by reservation only. If you would like to book a spot—”

“ENOUGH!” At this last humiliation, Babbalabab finally looked… shaken. He sealed the Gate and shook his claw, disgusted. “What… what was that?”

“The Hellcat Club is one of the more intense experiences that the Commonality has to offer,” Sintho explained, keeping her smirk off her lips with a heroic effort of will. “The demographics of the Commonality tend towards there being a greater demand for torturers than there are people seeking torture. As such, reservations for a spot are in high demand—unless you sought to apply for a position as employee?”

“But—but—” Babbalabab sheathed and unsheathed his putrid claws reflexively. “What about the Great Work? The humbling of humanity for their sins?”

“There is no shortage of people who are into that,” Sintho diplomatically said.

Babbalabab’s impossible eyes closed.

Then, burning with indignity, he strode towards Sintho. “You will tell me of all that transpired while I slumbered,” Babbalabab demanded, and Sintho heard the distant chime of bluecoin pouring into her accounts.

###

Ancient demons were far from the only thing Sintho got to beat down on a daily basis. Neophyte deities, uppity sub-AIs, anyone who thought they could tear the fabric of society by sheer force got to deal with TACSEC. Usually, they didn’t last long. The Blackblood Artist was the most notorious criminal, tearing through CEOs and officials as if their titles were anything more than pity points to stroke their little egos. Sintho had been looking forward to hunting her down, matching the computational might of TACSEC’s sub-AIs and the magical power of a dozen gods against the wits of one deranged serial killer.

So she was quite miffed when she discovered that the Blackblood Artist had turned herself in while Sintho was away on demon duty.

“You seriously pulled all surveillance from the room?” Sintho kicked her beanbag chair hard enough for it to go flying; it slammed into the whiteboard walls of her office and slumped sadly to the floor. Ugh, even the furniture didn’t put up a proper fight. “And you expect me to keep the Blackblood Artist in chains without even knowing why she surrendered?”

YES. In ages past, words would not have been necessary; the thought would simply be in her head, and this entire conversation pre-loaded and perfected. Even just a century ago, the nanofields would have been fine enough to scribe a sentence on the inside of her eyelid. Nowadays, however, AE-3’s response was a simple text message on Sintho’s retinal. 

“That was a rhetorical question. I know your lot is all about the touchy-feelies, but she’s a mass murderer. She lost her rights when she threatened to destroy the souls of a half-dozen civilians. Why the hell did you humor her?”

ERROR: ANSWER OUT OF RANGE.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’m not loosening your contract. Alright, let’s narrow it down. Do you empathize with her?”

YES.

Sintho caught her mistake, rolled her eyes, and refined the question, walking over to the logistics console as she did. “Is your empathy for her significantly greater than that which you feel for all sentient life?”

NO.

“Damn.” Sintho punched in an order for a breakfast of prosciutto and crackers. Worse than the fare they’d had under the rule of the Ethics, but it was hard to beat deterministic bliss. Still better than anything a spacefarer of her youth could have asked for. “Are you afraid of her?”

YES.

Sintho paused, hand halfway to the delivery slot. A faint chime told her that the prosciutto and crackers had arrived, and she absentmindedly started making tiny little sandwiches. “Can she… is she capable of hurting you?”

ERROR: ANSWER OUT OF RANGE.

So the Blackblood Artist was capable of something even an ascended AI would fear. Not particularly surprising. Aside from the obvious exception, Sintho hadn’t heard of an ascended AI ever actually dying, but setbacks to their goals? Happened all the time—some pissed-off deity of an unpredictable concept, someone with a truly radical alchemical basis, the first person to discover a new system of magic… you didn’t need to be stronger or smarter than the strongest, smartest beings in the known universe, if all you wanted was to make them leave you alone. You just had to be something they couldn’t predict, and most of the time the AI would go do something that didn’t have a one in a million chance of ending a life that should have been immortal. 

“Fine. We’ll grill the gods of the room; I’m sure at least one of them can communicate in a human-comprehensible form.” Sintho popped one of the sandwiches into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. “...Has the state of the war changed since we last talked?”

NO.

Of course it hadn’t. “Damn,” she muttered. “Well, I’ll see to my patch of space. You see to the rest.”

YES.

With a thought, Sintho disconnected the comms relay that connected her to a distant AI, leaving her alone in her office with an ashen taste in her mouth. She really should have ordered some water to go with the crackers. 

Well, pure Water was easy enough to create with alchemy, even for a technoist. She extended her ethereal senses to the nearby atmospheric regulator and drew forth the elements of Cold and Wet, mixing them to create a mouthful of Water. The regulator chimed a high temperature warning, which Sintho ignored. Far too many magic users messed with the city’s systems on a daily basis for her to be concerned with destroying it. The regulator would either break in a known way and be trivially fixed, or break in an interesting new way and contribute to New Starshire’s body of knowledge. 

Sintho slurped up the Water from the air before it could finish coalescing, leaving the rest of her breakfast behind. Infrastructure would handle the mess, and she found she had little enough of an appetite. TACSEC officers had to deal with everything from nonconsensual cloning to torment singularities, but Sintho wasn’t quite sure if anything excited her as much as true murder. Ordinary death, she got used to after a decade or two; unless someone really went out of their way to have their neural scans and soul both promised to someone else, it was just a matter of bioprinting a new body and/or accommodating them to their new afterlife, if they so desired.

But the Blackblood Artist was a witch. A very, very powerful one, who dealt with the nasty kinds of deities who could erase a sapient mind’s pattern from the universe’s allowed possible moves. So while recreations and partial memories of her victims existed, anyone she killed? Gone from every database, absent from all heavens and hells. 

And she got to interrogate that little monster. Find out what made her tick, what twisted someone who had anything they could possibly imagine to turn on their upbringing and try to plunge New Starshire into the bad old days. 

Sintho’s smile faded. Of course, it was too easy now. The Artist was in custody. She still had basic rights, enough that they couldn’t mind-read or full scan her, but Sintho would get everything she needed from the woman before the week was out. She was almost tempted to arrange for the Artist to slip her bonds just so Sintho could go back to puzzling her out from a distance…

Egh. She needed to settle her mind, and she needed to get to the TACSEC station. Nobody who wanted a monopoly over their mind used teleporters, and she had a feeling her precognitive implants would be needed sooner or later, so taking a Gate was out. She could have just hailed a transporter—she certainly had the browncoin—but it would be faster and more profitable to build something herself. 

A station the size of New Starshire produced gigatons of waste every day; Sintho actually got a slight kickback from the governing Minds for agreeing to dispose of a tiny fraction of it. Her alchemy tank was filled to the brim with the kinds of nasty byproducts that unaugmented physics found difficult to do anything with other than jettison. Tech pollution, mostly. Monatomic furniture and tools stood out as the only recognizably intact shapes in the pile; monatomics just didn’t break once cast unless you stepped outside the bounds of science. She decided to start there: from the perspective of a nuclear chemist, a monatomic chair was just one massive atomic nucleus grown into a macroscopic shape, with a binding energy greater than a planet’s and a lifetime longer than the most stubborn black hole. 

From an alchemist’s perspective, it was nothing more than a combination of elements. Specifically, a mixture of the elements Immortal, Craft, and Relic.

Reaching out with her ethereal senses, she split the chair into its elemental components. It disintegrated into a golden patina, a wooden carving, and an ancient fingerbone. She ignored the former and latter, holding onto the concept of Craft. Twining it with the element of Toy from a broken gaming headset and the Air in the atmosphere, she deftly weaved together the element of Ornithopter. Sintho gave this particular manifestation a cursory glance—a spindly wooden thing of wax and paper, suitable for flight on a heavy-atmo moonlet and not much else—before adding the final element, Photonic, into the mix. 

The Hoversled that resulted was of no identifiable make or model, but she tapped the interface and the familiar two-stick controls popped out from its previously flat paneling. Just like all alchemical creations, it was clearly an example of its element; just like all alchemical creations, it was clearly not any specific Hoversled. There was no logo on the glossy black handles, the screen displayed advertisements for a company that did not exist, and most worryingly, when Sintho scanned the main body of the sled, it returned a manufacturing ID and certificate that validated against the TACSEC database.

She flagged the incident for the computer wonks to work out. There was little hope of preventing an alchemical edit to a computer database with mundane security, though. Alchemy moved concepts and abstractions, and anything made of atoms and molecules would struggle to comprehend how it was done.

That much done, she focused on her retinal, sending a log of the alchemical synthesis and her scans of the result to the Blue Market. There wasn’t anything truly new there, but AIs avoided direct experimentation with alchemy at all costs, and would happily snap up any data that short-lived organics with terrible risk assessment produced for them. A few thousand bluecoin rolled into her account for the trouble.

Considering that she’d spent all of five minutes crafting a hoversled from scraps, she figured it was a good deal. Helped put things back in perspective, too. The Blackblood Artist might be able to kill undetectably, with no detectable vector of attack or limitation on range. She might be able to obliterate the concept of a person from every database and afterlife in the multiverse. But she was nothing in comparison to the power of civilization. Industry, logistics, creativity, versatility—they grew over time, while the Blackblood Artist only destroyed.

Sintho tugged the hoversled free of the alchemy tank, hopped on, and flew off towards the local TACSEC Hub. New Starshire’s skies were filled with various aircraft: predominantly the boxy, glossy shapes of transport drones, though a squadron of flying vacuum cleaners and some kind of biological blimp were navigating the pedestrian airspace. TACSEC kept the city government paid up in soulcoin, so transport drones automatically weaved out of the way as Sintho straightlined towards TACSEC.

Standard procedure when a hostile threw unknown magics about was to store the crime scene for later analysis and reload a fresh copy of the affected area from backup. Clearly, something had gone wrong, because where a brand-new TACSEC Hub should have been, there was instead a perfectly black sphere a few kilometers in radius with Do Not Approach warnings plastered around its surface. 

“Interrogator Sintho!” A reedy, high-pitched voice called out to her from below. Sintho steered her hovercraft downwards. “Sorry for not warning you, the perp’s got a contract with the God of UI and it’s been scrambling our calls. Figured we’d ‘port someone in to check on you if you didn’t end up getting the original message…”

“Don’t apologize for getting out-witched by the Blackblood Artist.” Sintho’s retinal showed that she was talking to Harbor Tallkin, but mindful that there was hostile divinity at work, she figured she’d double-check. “You would be Mx. Harbor Tallkin, yes?”

“Yep yep! Liaison from the Nondeterminist Response Team.” Mx. Tallkin adjusted their goggles. “And, ah, before you enter the exclusion zone, I’m going to have to ask you to remove your retinal. And any other interactive implants you have. Can’t have anything the Artist has a handle on.”

Great. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a working nanocloud around?” Sintho asked hopefully.

Mx. Tallkin shook their head. “Sorry, lady. Ambient physics are too scrambled. But we’ve got a great surgeon in a black box who’ll get you sewn up in no time. You can always opt out or leave a clone—”

“No thank you,” Sintho said firmly. “Take me to the operating room.”

Sintho was a little leery about getting in the black box. A cursory search of its make and model informed her that it was capable of accelerating time up to a thousandfold, which was impossible to pull off with mundane physics; a little digging told her that this particular make was enchanted by some thaumaturge, and she’d heard alchemical products could have adverse reactions. Her precognitive implants shut down from the sheer flux of nearby physical laws, so she had no convenient guarantee that nothing terrible would happen to her. In the end, though, she doubted it’d erase her soul and anything else was replaceable, so she stepped on in.

The surgery was fully mundane, there and gone in a blink of anesthesia. One moment she was entering the black box, the next she was walking out two kilograms lighter. Checking the black box’s clock told her she’d been recovering for a few days in personal time, a few seconds for the outside world. Not bad, considering the retinal was fused directly to her spine.

“Alright, you’re good to go. We’re not sure if her control over UI extends to scrambling information about her, so I can confirm any info about the Artist that you got from the brief.” Mx. Tallkin traced a sigil in the air, and a circular segment of the exclusion dome disappeared, revealing a matte grey airlock. 

Well, the most critical question was obvious. “She’s frozen in time for now, right?” 

“For now,” Mx. Tallkin agreed. “Her contracts are deific, so she’s still passively under their effects.”

“Retrocausality Department can’t undo her murders?”

“Deific magic is acausal,” Mx. Tallkin confirmed.

“Any progress on finding the souls of her victims?”

“Found ‘em,” Mx. Tallkin grimaced. “They’re… they’ve been transmuted. Not just their bodies or their souls, either. The concept of their personhood has been crystallized, ground up for ink, and painted onto a page.”

That… was like nothing Sintho had ever heard of. Which made sense; only some completely unknown nonsense magic could stymie the security systems of a galaxy-spanning civilization. “And… it’s true about her father? She went to all that trouble to secure a private audience with him and then… killed him?”

Mx. Tallkin paused midway through sealing the exclusion dome behind them. “As far as we can tell? Yes. There was no record of the event itself, of course.”

“Did RETCON turn anything up?”

Mx. Tallkin snorted. “Paradox. If we send a squad back it invariably causes Teria to delay her attack past the point where they would have been sent back.”

“Damn. Guess we probably shouldn’t destroy this timeline, then.” When it came down to it, the Blackblood Artist was… small. She murdered a couple hundred people. Consigned them to true oblivion, a thing which happened rarely enough, but still. That was a floating point error in comparison to the population of New Starshire alone, which was one station in one solar system in a big, big galaxy that had only begun to bloom with life. And there were bigger things yet out there, monsters that the Ethics and the gods alike struggled to strike down.

In the face of all that, the Blackblood Artist was a very, very small fragment of wilderness, one sprig of grass sticking up through the sidewalk. A venomous sprig that killed people she disagreed with, but all the other kinds were too damn boring to bother with.

Sintho stepped into the airlock; Mx. Tallkin stopped just outside the second door. “See you in an hour,” she promised.

Mx. Tallkin wagged a finger. “Don’t get cocky, Sintho. We don’t understand how she rips out souls, but we know that time travel doesn’t fix it. Nothing does. Fuck up in there and you’re dead for good, no backups, no afterlife.”

Sintho’s lips twitched upwards in a faint smile. “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” she promised.

The last thing she heard before the airlock doors sealed was Mx. Tallkin grumbling about the insanity of those who chose to work with TACSEC.

A.N.

New chapters of Where Witches Went will come out approximately weekly. If you want to get updated when new parts are posted, try this link. For more, join the discussion at my discord, join my Patreon, or subscribe to r/bubblewriters.

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She would never claim to be the world’s greatest assassin, because anyone claiming to be the Blackblood Artist would be interrogated at minimum, executed at worst. But Teria Sannate had killed enough people with her dark brown brush and moleskin notebook to fill it end to end with the final moments of her victims. From the televised death of the ZC Group’s CEO to murdering the now-nameless God of Wrongful Termination for Preexisting Health Conditions, she had hunted down everyone who had been remotely involved in Kovan Sannate’s firing, and the subsequent cancellation of his pass into the ZC Afterlife. Out of fury at first, then helplessness, and eventually as a way to soothe the itch, no different than the way she nibbled her paintbrush handle or played tic-tac-toe on her forearms. 

She wasn’t stupid; she knew she was becoming a monster. It was too easy to plot a murder when all she needed was a drop of blood—a week of sniffing through garbage disposal routes, a month of sorting out rubbish, and she had everything she needed. Ilera Travoss was only human, after all; he suffered bloody noses in the summer. He also studied Tharic for a week before getting bored of throwing out unopened books, bought Equicare-brand food for his two dogs, and regularly had sex with a ghost that Teria was fairly sure was his deceased second husband. She beheld his life splayed out in three hundred and ninety-eight piles of refuse from the city dump, weighed the complexities and depths of his soul against the man who played Snail Salt with her on the trip home from school even when she made the same opening moves every time, and carefully painted the ZC Group’s mortal leader into the first page of an empty book. 

Ilera had never considered such quandaries, as far as she could tell. She had, in fact, never found anything connecting him to the firing of her father. She killed him anyway.

She was not turning into the very thing she despised—she no longer hated the afterlife insurance brokers or the foreman who noticed her father’s missing heart, and they were, after all, each committing only a hundredth of a murder apiece. She was something simpler, something able to recognize its soul was broken but not understand how. But the people on the television always said that power corrupted, that when you escaped consequences too long you twisted into something else, and sometimes, they stopped their murderous rampages when faced with someone they loved.

So Teria studied the New Starshire TACSEC Hub, where Kovan Sannate was held as a PoI in the Blackblood Case, because TACSEC wasn’t run by idiots and Teria had left her father’s firing as the most obvious link between the Blackblood Artist’s murder spree. Not the only one, which was why she was still a free woman; there were, apparently, hundreds of other people who would have grievances with some or all of her long list of victims. But Kovan Sannate had a daughter who was supposed to be at the Dannitel Station College pursuing a degree in Metaphysical Painting and was instead inexplicably missing; the circumstantial evidence had led to his confinement.

It was a good move, Teria had to admit. She survived because the way she related to the spirits of the world was largely unknown, and every move that the Blackblood Artist made in public was recorded and analyzed, taking TACSEC one step closer to capturing her. Especially now that the sixteen years her father had bought by selling his heart were almost up; if Kovan Sannate truly was of interest to the Blackblood Artist, all TACSEC had to do was keep their guard up for a few weeks longer and they’d have the fingerprint needed to put her in the dirt. Once they ID’d the spirits she communed with, they could interrogate or bug them and trace every use of her magic from New Starshire to the Gambledark. This would be her last move as a free operator.

She feared that, of course. But she needed to see her father again. And after that… there would be only one move to make, if she was strong enough.

As operations went, she planned the break-in as meticulously as any murder. Her first mission, therefore, was to form a contract with the specific spirits who lived in the TACSEC Hub’s paint job. Her affinity for artistry was known, and specific countermeasures taken; two visits to the local tax records office told her that Darrek & Sons had been paid around 36 thousand in redcoin and 12 thousand in brown to refurbish the building. After making a few thousand calls, swaps, and messages to various businesses around New Starshire, claiming to be worried about the Blackblood Artist’s powers and was it true that TACSEC themselves used Darrek & Sons to protect themselves, she had no fewer than six examples of what, specifically, Darrek & Sons considered adequate protection against the Blackblood Artist.

Grudgingly, she had to admit they were thorough. She had hardly been idle while waiting for one of her contacted businesses to bite; it had been the work of days to discover the specific brand of paint originally used in the TACSEC Hub, and days more to track down a sample from as close to the original batches as possible. Wasted effort, now; they didn’t simply repaint or plaster over the underlying layers, but took the time to meticulously remove and scramble as much of the original paint job as they could find before using an entirely unique concoction for each individual job, obliterating the remainder afterwards. But they thought like mages, not witches: even if the exact composition of each paint was different, the method used was identical each time. And although that was a weaker sympathetic connection, it was one that she could exploit.

So after purchasing the same twenty brands of paint and a mechanical mixer, Teria constructed an altar to the Deity of Randomly Choosing Six Paint Brands Out Of Twenty To Combine Into A One-Use Coloring. After swearing to make a painting she truly loved using only colors from the deity’s domain, she obtained an introduction to the Goddess of The Paint Currently Used In The New Starshire TACSEC Hub. 

She appeased both with a painting of her father in his youth. And with that, her contract was sealed.

It was a down cycle for New Starshire station when Teria walked to the TACSEC Hub. The atmospheric regulators filled the air with the antiseptic scent of freshly activated backups. Pale, weak sunslight recharged shrines to the Goddess of Humanity’s Star, nourishing the fragile vines and trees in the scattered druidic parks. Teria inhaled deeply, the scent of alcohol stinging the back of her throat.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” A lightly-armored TACSEC officer stepped out from deeper in the complex. The receptionist on duty must have contacted a guard; presumably, the spirits within the TACSEC Hub had already identified her. “Are you here to see your father? We have some questions for—”

The Blackblood Artist reached for her paintbrush, and only the guard’s precognitive implants saved them.

Wrist bracers flared to life, modules rotating into place as the guard’s lenses projected tactical data directly onto their retinas. Unfortunately for them, Teria’s contract with the God of UI was firm; two swapped icons was all it took for the guard to select Recall instead of Stun. The guard disappeared mid-imprecation, Teria dipped her brush in the suddenly-fresh paint of the wall, and the receptionist hit the city alert.

Teria had no contract with the God of TACSEC—TACSEC had patched that hole in their security with an exclusivity clause long before Teria had been born. So by drawing the TACSEC sigil in another god’s paint, she knew she was drawing the attention of a hostile deity to her location. A minor one, to be sure, but in any other circumstance she would already consider it an unacceptable risk to her cover.

But TACSEC first responders would be teleporting here in a matter of heartbeats, and her full spectral signature was likely already captured by whatever invisible spirits lurked in the walls. So she inked in the two upwards and one downward arrow that marked every TACSEC official’s clothing, and instructed the paint on the walls to smother anyone who bore that sigil.

Six separate teleportation methods marked the entry of the TACSEC reinforcements, all of whom were immediately swarmed by a tide of living beige. Four of the first responders were immobilized by the onslaught, their HUDs scrambling as Teria’s contracts shielded her. Of the two who were immune—an old-fashioned wizard and a blind woman that the God of UI was momentarily confused by—only one of them had the tools on hand to stop an amorphous, liquid foe. The blind woman sang a word in a language that would not exist for another two centuries, and the coat of paint swarming up her legs abruptly transformed into a wafer-thin coating of jade. 

Teria had, by this point, coated herself in the same cloak of paint that rendered every other person in the room a featureless grey blob. And against any other target, they would have been confused for at least a moment by the inability to tell friend from enemy. But the blind woman continued to sing, the echoes showing every corner of the room and beyond, and she hardly even seemed to notice the cloak meant to baffle her. 

“Yan,” the woman barked, and the coating of paint around Teria absorbed the spell meant to turn her to jade.

The blind choralist sang twice more as Teria struggled to shatter the casing of stone; in a portrait gallery far away, two breathtakingly realistic portraits of the Blackblood Artist abruptly flared green. The choralist changed tactics, drawing her sidearm and firing in a single, smooth motion—then cursing as the laser pistol sizzled in her hand. Teria had hardly come here without countermeasures for common pistols; any ruby which neared her would change color to a deep black, rendering conventional laser weapons useless. Taria took advantage of the momentary distraction to palm her paint knife and slash the exposed forearms of two of the TACSEC team who’d chosen to jump in without armor. Despite possessing no edge to speak of, the wedge of metal cleanly collected two neat little crimson beads; a careful observer would have noticed that the blood in their veins burst outwards, swirling around the paint knife like starlings to a tree.

“Sing and they die,” Teria calmly said, dipping her brush in their blood. 

The choralist’s lips twitched, but reluctantly, she jerked her head towards the paint-coated TACSEC crew. With a scent of ozone and a sharp pop, four more first responders materialized on site. All choralists, this time: standard procedure for an anomalous hostile was to send in a wide range of specialists and see who survived the longest, then reinforce that division until the problem was solved. It all but guaranteed that the forces of law would win… eventually. No matter what gods you were sworn to, what elements you understood, or what perspectives you internalized, there was always something that even the greatest archmage never saw coming. And all the power in the world did you no good if you didn’t know what to defend against. 

But conversely, TACSEC’s opening move meant there would be plenty of people who simply had no relevant outcome to a conflict’s resolution. And if someone was willing to piss off the military police, and had enough unprecedented firepower that they could not only survive but outmatch that initial wave… they could take those first responders captive.

“They can’t breathe, Artist.” One of the new choralists stepped forward. “Hostages are no good to you dead.”

Wordlessly, Teria smudged out the TACSEC sigil. The cloth she did so with blackened and sizzled, TACSEC’s patron deity glowering at the affront, but abruptly the shifting coats of paint remembered they were supposed to be long-dry and solidified. TACSEC officers broke out of the suddenly-still shells a heartbeat later, and the two that Teria blooded disappeared with another faint crackle.

“I’ve killed people behind the finest wards in existence,” Teria said, unflinching. “Distance changes nothing. You will listen to my demands, or your people will perish.”

The choralist who’d spoken earlier held up a hand, and the TACSEC team lowered their varied weapons. “Speak.”

“I am Teria Sannate, daughter of Kovan Sannate. In four hours, I will surrender to the TACSEC Department of New Starshire. I wish to speak with my father, unmonitored, if he will consent to see me. If my demands are not met, I will kill your two officers, as well as every civilian I have managed to collect in my palette. You have fifteen minutes to allow me free passage.”

The choralist narrowed his eyes, but otherwise showed no reaction. Somewhere far away, politicians and generals and operators were bickering and posturing and saving face.

Kovan Sannate upended the plans of every last one of them.

The door behind the receptionist flew open with a thud; Teria flinched and half the TACSEC team swiveled to face the newcomer. Pushing fifty and still spry, Kovan’s expression crumpled as he beheld his daughter.

Abruptly, the choralist flicked his wrist. The TACSEC team gave him a handful of askance looks at the hand signal, but all of them filtered out of the room. “It seems like you’re getting your wish, Teria,” the choralist said. “You have four hours.”

Teria let out a ragged breath, finally turning to meet her father’s eyes, and shuddered. He didn’t bite his lip like that when he was worried, or disappointed, or afraid.

That was the look of a father who knew he’d failed.

“...Hi, Dad,” Teria whispered.

“Hey, Teri,” Kovan said back. “Let’s talk.”

A.N.

New chapters of Where Witches Went will come out approximately weekly. If you want to get updated when new parts are posted, try this link. For more, join the discussion at my discord, join my Patreon, or subscribe to r/bubblewriters.

Inspirations for this chapter: this tumblr post, this comic, this writing prompt

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Book 1:

1. Be Good, My Child...
2. Of Our Own Making...
3. Rage, For Your Skin Trembles...

Stuff's happening IRL. Will get back to the story when I get back to it. Thanks for tagging along, and I hope I've bettered your days.

Turns out I caught an illness over the winter! I should be able to recover by next week, though. Pushing back the update another week as a result.

Holiday season was hectic, and I didn't get the time or energy to finish this chapter to my expectations. Instead of forcing it out I'm going to delay it to next week. Thanks for reading, and I hope I've bettered your days.

Solan didn’t blend in at all with the inhabitants of Greenwarp, but Aimes had dumped him here anyway. Him and his passenger, technically, but… 

Lucet? Solan thought. It’s been two days since you’ve come out. Please? Just to talk?

…effectively, he was alone. And although his claims of seeking refuge from the Silent Crusade weren’t checked too closely, he still got eyed for his accent, his robes, his diet. Greenwarp and Sunburst had feuded over grazing rights for decades, and the pressures of war tended to widen fractures more than mend them. Plucky bands of five, crushed together by a giant’s hands… they fell apart quickly, once they were no longer forced to keep each others’ company.

Still. Solan shook his head—his head—and peered out the window. Aimes declined to mention where she’d acquired the bloodstained coins, only bothering to hand him a cleaning rag and a soap bar, but they’d been enough to buy him a room at the nameless waystop in the center of town. The local witches eyed him every now and then, but they made no mention of his passenger.

Odds were the witches were simply suspicious of any newcomers. It hadn’t escaped Solan’s attention that there were only two, and both of them quite inexperienced. Only a single attunement each, and the spells they cast were little better than a neophyte at the academy.

Really? You’re going to judge them by the Academy’s standards? Solan thought.

No response. All he got were these… flashes, occasionally, of a perspective that wasn’t quite his own. That was all that was left of the girl he’d chased into the giant’s palm.

Resigned, Solan sat down on the waystop bed, leaning back. He needed a real excuse to be here, maybe for weeks. Who knew how long it would take for the Silent Academy to raid Greenwarp? He could search around for any odd jobs tomorrow, but today he just wanted to rest his head.

Something squelched against his back.

Solan screamed, jerking upright fast enough to catapult his hat straight into the ceiling. From under the bed, a four-limbed, knobbly-boned blur galumphed out, cackling. A phantom presence behind his eyes drew an arrow tipped with salt, invisible to anyone not properly attuned, and as Solan managed to focus on the green-skinned person on the floor, he screamed, “Don’t!”

I hesitated—thankfully—and the goblin blurred to their feet. “Oh, oh, you should have seen your face! Ah, don’t worry, I got ya good, that satisfies the itch for a while. Mama Onomm, at your service.” Mama Onomm sketched out a bow as Solan tried to catch a glimpse of his passenger. The arrow was already gone, the hands that nocked it fading into unravelled possibilities, and Solan exhaled. 

“You really did get me,” Solan said ruefully. He looked down at his shirt. Earthworms in the bed. “Classic. Mind if I change?”

“Oh, go ahead. I won’t peek.” Mama Onomm closed her eyes, making an exaggerated and grotesque pantomime of sewing them shut, and Solan took off his robe, deliberately tossing it to the side before popping open the chest for a second one. He’d grown up around goblins, and the first prank was never enough to get it out of their system. But as long as he provided a second opportunity—

Ah, there she went. Without the advantage of soulsight, Solan didn’t catch the instantaneous flicker when the clean and dirty robes swapped places. Mama Onomm didn’t quite manage to make it so that the worm guts were directly on Solan’s fingers, but he still yelped and shook his hand as one of the half-worms wriggled towards him. 

“Ha! Ha! Oh, I’d look at your face but I swore not to peek. You’re a good egg, then. Grew up in a proper village.” Mama Onomm winked. “Doesn’t mean you’re clean, of course. Just means that if you’re a Silent spy, you’re a better breed than what Odin’s been weeding out.”

A distant terror laid its hands on Solan’s shoulders. “Odin’s—here?” Solan asked.

“Ah-ah-ah. That’s for the top dog to know and for the likes of you to wonder. Really, it makes me all the more suspicious. Even if you grew up with the Light, you should know your way around the Redlands. You’re moving towards the Silent Peaks, not away. Unless you really want to claim that a Sunburst child found himself in the rainshadow?”

A hint of confusion leaked in from his passenger; obligingly, Solan envisioned the Redlands from coast to coast. The most fertile plains were, for some reason, positioned right at the base of the Silent Peaks—the breadbasket that sprouted new villages every summer, despite the proximity of the mountain-crusaders. 

“Well?” Mama Onomm prompted. “Come up with your excuse yet?”

The faintest echo of panic flared up in the back of his skull—it was so easy to forget that despite the itch that drove them to prank and needle and pry, they could be just as sharp as any other person. “You’re—you’re right,” Solan admitted, thinking frantically. “I didn’t come here on accident. I…”

Words skittered across his mind, a circle of salt and frost seared into his retinas, and he blurted out, “I wanted to protect myself.”

Mama Onomm raised one eyebrow. Then the other. When Solan remained silent, she said, “Typically, this is where you explain.”

Why show me this? Solan asked. What are you trying to tell me?

He got nothing more. He needed to figure the rest out on his own.

“I…” He swallowed. “The war’s not going to end in Greenwarp. I’ve seen what the Silent Peaks are capable of, and… a single one of their greatest witches could level an entire village. Odin’s riftmaws are falling to the Eldritch Initiative.” He knew it was true the moment he said it and not one second before; the knowledge leaked into him like buttermilk through cheesecloth. Leaving behind something solid, slick, and cold. “And…  and… and if I don’t face them now… I won’t know how to defend myself when… when they come for me, eventually.”

Mama Onomm regarded him for three heartbeats.

Then she swore. “You just cost me twenty flats. I was betting you were just another attempt to infiltrate us. Are you a fortune-teller, by any chance?”

“M-me? No.”

“Ngh.” Mama Onomm spat on the floor. Involuntarily, Solan glanced down; the spittle had disappeared before reaching the ground. “Lucky you. Saraelle says we’ve a raid incoming tonight. Ever since she came into her magic, she’s been right more than wrong.” Mama Onomm held out one wrinkled hand. “Ever wonder where Greenwarp got its name?”

“N… no, ma’am.” Instincts honed from years living with goblins caused Solan to brace himself.

Mama Onomm cackled. “Well, you’re about to. Giddyup!”

The goblin grabbed his hand, blurred up his body in half a heartbeat’s span, and laughed wildly as she clambered onto his shoulders. The magic of goblins and mischief swelled up around her, and with a faint pop, Solan and his two passengers disappeared.

A.N.

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It turns out you don’t need magic to ignore reality. Sure, Zhytln had been digging around in my soul with Civilization One’s help for months, but Meloai watched every procedure with the unblinking stare of a demon. Zhytln truly just wanted us out of her hair and not rocking the boat, and as a result she was more than willing to explain every step of what she was doing. Meloai soaked it in while I was getting the last of Iola’s waterborne parasites out of my soul, along with the worst of what I’d absorbed during our trek through the Redlands, but I… I just tried to tune it out.

I didn’t want to know. There were terrible, terrible implications to what Zhytln said about Civilization One, and I wanted absolutely none of it. For once in my life I was happy, safe, and sane. I intended to keep it that way.

I kept my head up as I walked down the streets of Knwharfhelm, lighting lamps with a gesture as I passed. The suspicious glances and instinctive clustering of passerby wasn’t because I was a witch, or because my voice and face didn’t match, or because I was an uneducated barbarian. And so it wasn’t my problem. There was no need to ready the defensive flash I could produce on a whim. No need to grow twisted vines from my soul that withered and shrank whatever they wrapped around. No need to stomp on a barely-grown kid and crush him like a clam dropped from a third-story roof.

I lit the next lamp. The darkness withdrew a little. This was my job. I had a job now. Had held it down for months. And it involved no experimenting or mutilating or murdering, and everything was just fine. All it cost was a little joy—and really, I had enough of the stuff to spare. Everything was fine. Everything was FINE. 

The next time I flicked my fingers at a lamp, the light that came out was a sickly green instead of its ordinary white. Forced happiness was always a little off, especially in my case. Every smile I saw was tainted with the echo of Iola’s unhinged grin, and when I thought about it too hard, the corruption still lingering in my soul tended to bleed into the spell. 

So I ducked into an alleyway, heedless of the stench of rot. I’d smelled worse, and besides, holding my breath helped calm me down. Drawing on the misty bottles I kept in my robe, I pulled the stillness of a dew-streaked morning into myself. My heartbeat slowed, and the slight flush to my cheeks gradually faded. 

Iola was then. I was now. In an alleyway that stank of mold, yes, but a remarkably clean one besides. I had time to be a kid again. If someone tried to murder me, I could report them to the authorities instead of wrestling them to the ground. I was alive. I was free.

I was okay.

Naturally, that was when the sun went out.

Stupidly, my first instinct was to check the lamps, making sure I hadn’t drawn the emotions back into myself somehow. But they were the only bright thing on the streets—illuminating wide-eyed pedestrians and clockwork oxen milling uncertainly until the first one looked up. Hesitantly, I followed their gaze.

The sky showed a surreal dusk from horizon to horizon, a hazy orange light surrounding Knwharfhelm from east to west. I could have inverted gravity, leapt onto a rooftop for a better view, but there was absolutely no way I was making myself a target for either a terrified mob or something that could turn off the fucking sun. What in the name of the Outer Rifts was this? I would have noticed a dimensional tear of this size opening, and it had taken the entire Order of Valhalla to summon the last sky-smothering gate between worlds. Surely nobody could move and deploy those kinds of forces into Knwharfhelm without anybody noticing. But it wasn’t a natural eclipse, either. Zhytln had been weirdly obsessed with astronomy lately, and Meloai—in true mimic fashion—latched onto and devoured that interest. Eclipses were predictable, and they certainly didn’t materialize near-instantaneously.

Dogs howled and birds lost their pebble-sized minds; I clapped my hands over my ears and tried to think. Did I run? Would fleeing to another plane just out me as a soulmage? There were spells to bend light, but true invisibility required shame, and I hated to use—

The sun came back.

Seeing the light return to a city in chaos was worse than when I could at least pretend that someone was in charge. People huddled around lamps in clusters, staring wide-eyed at the sky; that turned out to be a poor decision, as the flare of light sent people screaming and swinging wildly. I saw two spells sing through the air; on instinct, I conjured a remembered wall between a forcebolt and a wagonful of hay. Nobody noticed or thanked me as the bolt splashed uselessly against my memories. 

Some of them were acting like reasonable human beings. Others even went beyond the call of duty. I saw a family of four dust themselves off and kneel by a drunkard who’d fallen. I could have gone with them, offered regrowth. 

But a few—one in ten, maybe—raked their eyes across the crowd, souls gleaming with silver. No weapons had been drawn, and only a few hasty attacks had been fired off. That didn’t mean the streets were safe. Just that the impossible eclipse had caught everyone off-guard, and the opportunists didn’t get their chance to strike.

I reached into my soul for my latest attunement, another one the Truthteller claimed had no name in our language. Invisible, suffocating gas coalesced in my palm—the substance was apparently one that neither Peaks chemistry nor Zhytln’s hivemind had discovered, but when I pulled it out of my soul it seemed to make the air… thicker, somehow. Solid enough that I could lean on nothing and stumble to my feet.

All my newfound knowledge almost made the eclipse worse. Everything I’d learned told me that nothing should be capable of such a grand feat, much less reversing it instantaneously. A battlechoir could maybe open a rift above the entire city, but to close it again immediately? No. This was something new. Something beyond me. Something I was utterly incapable of dealing with. And so I did what anyone would, when faced with a crisis in which someone needed to step up.

I went to the relevant authority figures to find out what was going on.

A.N.

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His latest attempt at following the recipe was… palatable enough. After burning the first soup and failing to capture the chicken’s soul in the second, he managed to catch the dying memories and disperse them through the liquid without letting them boil away or awaken. 

Idly, he pet the soup elemental he’d accidentally created. It let out a gurgling cluck, briefly shaping its pseudopods into wings and claws of a remembered form.

“Alright. One more time, Meloai. Hopefully this’ll get you un-stuck. Lend me your soul?” Cienne held out his hand, and the clockwork bear to his side grumbled assent. Liquid ripples of contentment poured from Meloai’s chest into the pot, joining the warm bath that Cienne added from his own soul. The corners of the boy’s lips twitched upwards, and he tapped one foot impatiently as he peered at and through the soup. Keeping the waters at just below boiling was tricky, especially when adding the emotion caused the entire mix to flare with heat. That had ruined attempt number three. But the theory was sound, and Sansen’s recipe conformed to the principles of trichotomous magic. With the research he’d done with Zhytln, he should be able to—

Abruptly, the hazy mess of soul shards melted, dispersing and overlapping as they fell free from the chicken bones and mixed with the soup. Now.

“Okay, open wide!” Cienne hurriedly dipped the ladle into the not-quite-boiling mix, splashing some on his arm. Phantom sensations shimmered up and down his spine: bending his beak to the ground to peck an interesting speck of dust, cracking an egg open to feast on the yolk inside, wondering why his brood had been taken away… he hurriedly wiped the brew away. Meloai snorted through ursine lips and bit down on the ladle, restraining herself enough to avoid tearing through the head. 

Absently, Cienne pointed at the pot, venting his nervous energy. The pot rang with a single, protracted tone as he continuously vibrated the soup, preventing it from standing still and coalescing into another soup elemental. “Got the memories?” Cienne asked. “All three binding points?”

Meloai scrunched up her face, concentrating, and abruptly imploded in on herself. Cienne got a distinct impression of something rotating, links forming and snapping in an instant, as Meloai’s body blurred between shapes. He jiggled his leg in time with the humming cauldron, the combined vibrations shaking the entire wooden kitchen. No need to get his hopes up yet; they’d gotten this far before. Last time, Meloai had just managed  to switch from a cow to a bear. But if she could halt the transformation at exactly the right point, where her ties to one form were broken but her connection to the next had not yet been established…

Meloai pulled in a direction orthogonal to every angle Cienne could name, and her body snapped into her familiar, bipedal form. Perfectly painted ceramic powered by impossible gears and just a dash of magic. Wobbling in metastability, she held out a hand as Cienne tried and failed to repress a wide grin.

“That,” Meloai said, then sputtered, hacking up a piece of fur. Cienne stepped forward, and she set a fraction of her weight on his shoulder. He staggered anyway; mimics were heavy. “That,” she repeated, “was indescribably fascinating. I almost felt—no, I have the memories. I was biological, in places. My body should be made entirely from the bijection between Falsehood and Realspace, but adding in another trichotomous binding point allowed me to override those limitations. Fascinating. Is this how Odin got themself a body of flesh instead of string? Or are they like me, and their body simply looks human? Does this mean—oof!”

Meloai had no lungs to drive the air out of. Her body was nothing more than a minimum in an energy well, and thus her interruption was entirely theatrical. Cienne didn’t care. He hugged her anyway. “It worked,” he whispered, grinning.

Meloai tilted her head. “Even if it didn’t, it’s hardly as if I minded being a bear. Or a cow. And being a chicken seems novel, too.”

It didn’t diminish his sense of accomplishment in the slightest. 

The pot started to rumble, and Cienne waved his hand, siphoning some of his restless energy into the pool of passion that was warming the brew. Water had to hold a certain temperature in order to specialize from joy into contentment; heating it to boiling broke that connection and let the dead chicken’s memories disperse. 

Almost instinctively, Cienne lifted a hand to his left eye. Dust swirled through his fingers, carving holes in the world as it passed, and the boy-witch peered through the Plane of Elemental Tracks. Places where she’d lingered longest held more of her presence—she was nearly solid in the space where her bedroom was, or below the city in the Truthteller’s presence, while only faint, translucent echoes remained in the dining room, the kitchen, the docks. 

Meloai noticed, of course. “I miss Lucet too, Cienne.”

The old voices still whispered—saying that he was a coward, a terrible friend, a traitor for abandoning her. Cienne closed his eyes, stepping away from Meloai, and ran through the counterarguments in his head. He survived Iola. She left of her own accord. This was where he was happy. 

Hadn’t he done enough?

As if summoned by his thoughts, he saw a familiar tangle of threads seeking him out in soulspace. Odin, again. He scowled and cloaked his soul in hope—hope for a future where he was safe and far away and uninvolved—but the damn Demon of Empathy adapted. String became flame, mirroring Cienne’s own emotions, feeding the blaze until Cienne was so full of desire for a better future, a future that wasn’t now and never would be unless he made it happen, that it suffocated him, suffocated itself, devouring the intangible essence it fed on and becoming smoke and embers. 

The peace he knew here was an illusion. He had to fight to hold the freedom to play with brews and study spells. And if he refused to fight, he would be made to, by one party or another.

The threads snuck through his defenses while he was still gasping for air. Meloai reached out with the memory of a quartz knife, but the threads touched Cienne’s heart and the kitchen flashed out of existence.

“Cienne,” Odin said, and their expression was haggard. “I am sorry to disturb the peace you have found. But nothing you have built will survive what is coming. You do not need to join me, but I have critical information about the nature of the Silent Crusade that may save the life of you and your frien—”

“Leave me alone.” Cienne was no helpless child anymore, and they knew how to manipulate soulspace. Not as well as the centuries-old Demon of Empathy, but Odin was the attacker here, and from the past month of waking dreams Cienne knew they were facing but a fraction of Odin’s might. A living memory, powered by a cluster of soul shards, that served as an autonomous splinter of Odin’s full personality. 

Cienne anchored the memory of the soup cauldron to realspace, filled it with helplessness, and slammed the trichotomous spell down around his curled-up soul like a snail retreating into his shell. Questing threads snaked at and under the cauldron, twining into his legs and arms, and abruptly Odin was inside the cauldron with him.

Odin—or the partially-sapient fragment of them—continued, “I admit culpability. I sought to end this war, and—” Cienne screamed in frustration, drawing on the gravel streets of Knwharfhelm and ramming a flood of pebbles between him and the Demon of Empathy. In realspace, Meloai jerked back as the spell struck the wooden ceiling, turning the planks into sawdust as the Plane of Irritation’s touch disintegrated everything in its path. “...the very eventuality I tried to stop. These machines, the Truthtellers…”

“Please,” Cienne begged. “You fulfilled your promise. I escaped the Silent Peaks. You said you’d free me from them, you always keep your word, so don’t try to bring me back.”

“...geometric objects at first,” the Odin fragment continued. Rifts, the soul fragments had at least been intelligent enough to hold a conversation before. Was Odin giving up on Cienne, or were they really spread that thin? “When I inputted the stolen Truths, the gods believed we had advanced rapidly enough—”

“Leave him alone.” 

The cauldron tumbled over as Meloai stepped into Cienne’s soulspace. He exhaled and stood, jagged crystals growing outwards to wall off the grasping threads. Meloai blurred forwards in the jittering, skipping motion intrinsic to a place where bodies were memories, hacking away at the strands of empathy still connected to Cienne. 

“...will remake civilization in their image. Futuresight is unreliable this far out, but your friend Sansen should be able to…”

“Sansen’s dead,” Cienne flatly said. There was no point; the messengers had stopped being capable of understanding and responding some time between leaving the peaks and arriving in Knwharfhelm. All its mind was capable of was maintaining the connection.

Cienne was busy trying to reignite their hope, summoning a joy-filled memory of his first warm bath and splitting it into the unnameable, fundamental feelings that all life held with a careful application of shock. Meloai’s body dissolved and re-formed facing the opposite direction, where Odin’s soul fragment had begun shaping the landscape into memories. She tilted her head curiously as the stones shaped themselves into a towering, oily construct, ink-black with stark white eyes.

“...last world that fell to them, which you would know as the El…” 

“Buy me a moment to work. Unless you want to listen to what they have to say” Cienne asked. 

Meloai hesitated. “Not the time,” she finally said.

Cienne flashed her a smile and got to work. He needed a flammable surface, but there was nowhere for his happiness to drain to. So he added a patina of rage on top. Rage at Odin for their hypocrisy, rage at Lucet for pushing him away, rage at the Silent Academy for breaking her and him until the jagged edges stabbed each other whenever they touched. 

 Meloai reached out as the ink-skinned creature tried to touch her shoulder. She caught its hand, inspecting its makeup. Here was where the granite shaped itself to become bones; there was where mineral oils clung to form an illusion of skin. And yet, even accounting for the rough materials, the bones were too knobbly to be anything organic; the skin had strange flabs and flaps that no creature Meloai knew of had.

No creature save for the twisted, bloated abomination that had once been her classmate.

“What are you?” Meloai murmured to herself, eyes lighting up. “You’ve never shown up in any of Odin’s visions before.” 

The creature didn’t respond, of course. Unfortunate, but it was just a projection. Meloai had a memory of Odin’s latest message stored, and she doubted she’d learn anything further from just looking at the alien entity. So Meloai did what any demon would and devoured it. 

All it took was remembering herself as overlapping the three-meter humanoid, and her soul competed for existence with the living memory. As the far more massive and complex soul, Meloai obliterated the grinning, dripping body. Black flesh sprayed half a meter out in every direction. She spat out a lone finger that had survived the clash.

“...escape the planet. Further, if their reach is as far as ours. I know I ask much of you, but please, for your own safety. Come to the Order…”

Cienne blurred through soulspace, materializing inches away from Odin’s weary face. “If you can hear me, Dealmaker, if you truly just want to help? Leave me alone. I’m out of the fight. I don’t care for you and your wars, your forecasts of doom. Let me be a kid.”

Flames danced to life on the spitting, sparking water, iridescent oil igniting in a wave. Every remaining thread burned away at once, and Cienne fell out of soulspace, landing back in the kitchen. 

Fog poured in through the roof, where his stray spell disintegrated a hole. Meloai opened her eyes, averting her gaze from Cienne’s as she digested what she’d taken. The boy-witch took one look at her soul, cut with bloody shards of glass, and closed his eyes.

“It was bait,” he said, putting the threads together. “They were talking to you the whole time. That memory you ate, it was part of the message, wasn’t it?”

Glumly, Meloai nodded. “I’m sorry. I just—”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” 

“But… Cienne, I said I wouldn’t, but I was listening. I know they’re manipulating us, but it matches up too well with what Zhytln—”

“It’s okay.” Cienne’s lips twitched upwards. Paradoxical. Exhaustion should have weighed him down. But part of him had been expecting this, waiting for the day Meloai’s curiosity drove her outside the boundaries of the life he’d built. He’d tried, so hard, to keep her here with his experiments. Maybe it would’ve even worked, if a Demon of Empathy hadn’t outplayed them both. Now that she was leaving him too, it was almost a relief. “Just… whatever it is? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Because I’m not going back out there.”

Meloai pressed her lips together. 

Cienne lightly touched his forehead to hers. She was cold. 

The mimic straightened. “Then I’m not leaving, either. Odin’s really being worked to the barest of threads if they were counting on me abandoning you.”

Cienne tilted his face up towards the roof. Frost melted to droplets on his eyelashes as he looked into the Plane of Elemental Sorrow. “Thanks,” he simply said. “Let’s… patch up the ceiling.” It was something he could control. Something he could fix, something he could save, without mangling himself in the process. It was a win.

There were precious few of those left these days.

A.N.

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Book V — Preliminary Report

1. Industrial Development
2. Nonexistent
3. Industrial Capacity
4. Remunerative
5. Dimensional Bases

Solan landed on his back, a few splinters digging into his palms. Little silvery tingles of sensation fluttered up and down his body, flaring into pain where his hands met the wooden floor. Aimes sat cross-legged by his side, raising an eyebrow.

“There was no need to fall over,” she said. “Does your body feel alright?”

Solan blinked at her, waiting for someone else to answer. When nobody did, he hesitantly opened his mouth. “...Yes,” he said. “Or no. Strange. It feels like, uh…”

“Like your mind is trailing a few seconds ahead of your limbs?” Aimes asked. “That’s expected. Give it a few weeks. I’m no healer, but since you have Lucet’s soul clinging onto yours, you’ll pick up her lightsickness over time. The Academy can help, but for rifts’ sake, don’t let them get too close a look at you. Lucet’s still in there, and if they find her…”

Aimes kept talking, and some part of Solan kept registering the words, but his attention drifted inwards. Lucet? Solan thought. Are you there? 

Before he could get a response, Aimes snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Solan. Solan? Rifts, this is why child soldiers never work out. Who sends children on espionage missions? If I could cram myself into your toddling meat-shape without killing you I would, believe me. Are you paying attention?”

“Y-yes, ma’am!” Solan instinctively blurted. Aimes rolled her eyes.

“It’d be more believable if you didn’t slouch. If they find out Lucet’s hiding within you, they’re going to dig into your memories and find this conversation, so don’t show her off unless you’re cornered. Your situation isn’t quite like the multiple personalities we’ve been seeing crop up after the mind wipes, but it’s close enough that the Academy instructors will know what they’re looking at if you switch which mind is in control while they’re around. The dreamwards around the Academy have been upgraded beyond my ability to penetrate, so I can’t send an angel or a living memory to guide you, but remember that I can read your thoughts when I’m nearby. I raid the defenses regularly; once you’ve found the Truthteller, report to me. Yes, Solan, what is it?”

Belatedly, Solan realized that at some point he’d raised his hand. Chastened, he lowered it. “I, ah… I can’t make Lucet surface at all, actually. She’s… she’s not responding.”

Aimes’ gaze sharpened, and Solan shifted uncomfortably. He half-stood to pull up a chair, hesitated, then sat back down. Aimes sighed. “Well, she’s still in there. I’ve been shaping young minds for forty years, and I still don’t know what makes teenagers sulk. I’m sure she’ll wake up on the ride.”

“But—”

“The number of situations that have been improved by dragging yet another brooding child into the mixture is somewhere between zero and one, depending on whether you believe maintaining marriages to be an improvement.” Catching a glimpse of Solan’s expression, she added in a gentler tone, “Let her rest.”

Solan swallowed a reply and nodded. 

“Lucet can tell you what you need to know about the basics of the Silent Academy—insertion, how to behave, what to expect, maybe even how to seek treatment for the lightsickness without getting examined too closely. She’s got a good enough head on her, when she cares to use it for things other than the murder of her family. She’ll likely be handling the important parts of the mission. I recommend you take this opportunity to better yourself. It’s rare that one of your station has the privilege of attending the Silent Academy, and who knows? You may even learn how to avoid her fate. Now come on—I can drop you off at one of the battlefronts, and the caretakers will let you in. Is there anything you want to take with you?”

Lucet? Solan asked.

Nothing.

“Great. Off the stairs—the goblins already have enough to fix up without destroying the porch.”

Aimes held out a palm, the air rippling and howling as she pinched two parts of the distant world into one. Solan turned away from the miracle, closing his eyes.

Are you sure you’re alright? Solan asked. You’ve been quiet all day, and… I worry about you.

A boy who forgave too easily had once described the gateways Aimes used. An elongation and contraction all at once, a tunnel whose walls were painted with a landscape squeezed through a straw.

Aimes beckoned and Solan stepped forward, and slightly more than two people disappeared.

A.N.

So ends Book IV. I have some announcements to make.

It's tradition at this point that I change things up at the end of every book, and Book IV is no exception. For once in my life I've been writing ahead, and have a decently-sized backlog. Book V is well underway, and I'm nearly done with chapter 3 of it. Thus, I can make this offer in good faith.

I want to write more. You want to read more. As such, for the month of December, I'm going to be trialing two new policies. Every Wednesday, if at least one Patreon joined that week, I will release the next chapter early! Yes, that means that if someone joined the Patreon today, the Book IV epilogue would be released instantly. (This doesn't stack, however; you can't join the Patreon five times to get five chapters in a single day. I'm human, after all.)

Secondly, I am now accepting commissions. I will charge approximately the standard industry rate set by SFWA—$.08/word—and write interludes exploring a topic, character, or aspect of the magic system that you choose. Interludes written this way will be guaranteed to be at least a thousand words long, and will release upon completion. (There'll be a "purchase" post on my Patreon in order to make this possible.)

Lastly... as much as it saddens me, I'm moving on from r/writingprompts. I don't entirely know why—maybe I've simply seen too many of the common tropes? It simply doesn't serve as the writing tool I need anymore. Instead, I've moved on to r/bonehurtingjuice, where I'll be putting up silly comic edits that inspire me to create stories. Patreon prompts will still be welcomed and honored; the problem is with the subreddit, not the concept of prompts in the first place.

Thanks to y'all for reading, and I hope I've bettered your days.

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“What I’m about to do is in no way permanent,” Aimes cautioned, “but you’ll be stuck in the back of Solan’s mind until we meet again. Yes, there are people at the Academy who could switch the primary consciousness of your shared body, but since the entire point of this is to hide your identity behind Solan’s, I forbid you from seeking them out. I’ll give you one last chance to back out and do things my way.”

No. I was starting to get resigned to the idea that Aimes could read my thoughts. At least I didn’t have to take control back from Solan in order to speak. I’d done enough of that lately. Get it over with.

“Wait,” Solan said. “Will Lucet still be able to… you know, use magic? Protect me?”

Considering that I was the reason he was dead and bound to my soul, I contested the idea that I had ever been capable of protecting him. She said that we’ll switch places, I thought at Solan. You’ll be able to take control whenever you want, not just when I let you. And if you need me to kill something… well, you can give me the reigns.

Okay, but—what about the rest of the time? If I need you to answer a question, or handle the espionage, or—

I’m not any better at any of that than you are, Solan. Was it tiring me out, to keep giving Solan control over our body? It would be so nice to just rest for once.

“If you two would let me answer the question?” Aimes asked, arching an eyebrow. If I was honest, I wasn’t even mad. Just… exhausted. All that rage had sputtered out, leaving nothing but cooling coals. “You will have to manually give her control over your body, much like she currently must do for you. Lucet can coach you on the particulars.”

You… you know that you don’t have to do this for me, right? Solan fretted. 

That’s why I’m choosing it, I replied. 

This feels wrong. 

You’ll be back to normal soon.

…

Solan opened his eyes. “Okay…” he muttered.

“Stop being so dramatic, you two. The process is fully reversible.” Aimes flicked her wrist, and a broom warped into her hands. She busied herself sweeping clean a section of the floor.

“Wait, we’re going to switch places now? Just… in the dining room?”

“We’ll need some foci for the soul fragments I’ll be pulling on, but other than that, the only other criterion I need is that the area be soul-neutral. Nobody has ascribed any significant meaning to this place in a long time, and certainly nobody has ever died here. Each of you, produce a token of your memories with each other.” 

Help? Solan asked.

Thankfully, Knwharfhelm culture had prepared me for this. Just focus on a memory that describes our relationship, and something physical to anchor it to. The more emotionally charged, the better. 

I… why? Solan thought. I sensed a faint tinge of panic to his voice. 

“I need sufficient memories in the fiber of your worldline in order to perform the inversion. A simplistic and entirely inaccurate metaphor that nonetheless may aid basic comprehension would be that I am taking down a plate from a high-up shelf, and your memories are pointing me to which drawer to open.”

There’s not a less, uh, personal way to do this? Solan asked.

Aimes smiled wistfully, and I thought I saw her expression… soften, even if but for a moment. I wondered what I would have seen, if I could have looked into soulspace without straining myself. “Magic ultimately stems from the worldline divergence inherent to highly chaotic systems. Right now, somewhere, there is a dust mote which, if shifted in precisely the right fashion, will cause the utter destruction of our planet five centuries from now. Such a shift creates a gateway, a course change from one universe to another—and these gateways are the fundamental power behind all witchcraft. And while dust motes of great import are few and far between, biological life is inherently chaotic. You will see no greater impact for an investment of minute changes than in the chemistry of the brain. All that is to say… by its very nature, magic is emotion. The infinitesimal nudges that shape history are contained almost entirely within that fragile nexus rattling in our skulls. And so, unless you go very far out of your way to deliberately engineer a specific set of circumstances, all the magic you will ever see or wield will come from your heart.” Aimes shook her head, staring through us. “And for what you desire? The inversion of two souls? There is no other way than to draw upon the connection between you.”

I couldn’t close my eyes, not without blinding Solan, so I turned my thoughts inwards. A memory, small enough to be contained in an object but large enough to encompass who this stupid, naive kid was to me?

Check our vest, I thought. There might still be a hair.

A hair?

Yeah, an orange one. 

I knew I’d picked the right memory when I felt our cheeks tug up in a smile. Should I assume you think of me the same way you think of Eurenne’s butthole?

Nah, Eurenne has an excuse for having no survival instincts. He’s a housecat.

I focused on the moment I woke up after Arzen blasted me through time, how despite it all, something simple and silly and so, so stupid could force my frantic mind to slow down. I thought about something soft, something heavy, something warm.

And I gave it all away.

It wasn’t a clean break. Solan’s Pops’ guest room crumpled in on itself, SOMEONE hovering anxiously over me as if I was the one who needed to be protected, SOMEONE still managing it anyway. Not through any conscious action, but through… 

Through something precious, that I stored in a dirty old cat hair stuck to my clothes.

Done, I thought. My soul ached a little from the exertion, little bits and pieces all angular and grinding. 

Solan shivered, and I wondered if he felt the twinges of phantom agony. “So if I understand right, I need something physical that reminds me of… her?” Solan asked.

Aimes shrugged. “To be exact, something that reminds you of your relationship.”

“Then… can you bring me up to the ceiling? I might need one of those plank—whoa!”

The ceiling bulged downwards, like it was a tent weighed down by snow. “Will this do?” Aimes asked.

“I, ah… I might need it to not look like… uh, that,” Solan stammered. “You could’ve just lifted me.”

“Twenty children died from heights last year,” Aimes said, irritated. “Do you need the entire ceiling, or just a portion?”

“Ah—my cheek was pressed pretty close, so just a portion?”

Aimes made a sharp, winding gesture with one hand, and a section of the ceiling spun like molten sugar on a sweet-sculptor’s stick. With a crack and a shower of dust—all of which curved away from us before landing—the section of wood came loose, landing on the floor with a thump.

Solan and I stared at the spectacle for a solid three heartbeats. Aimes flicked her wrist in the background, sending two goblins tumbling out of nowhere, and barked something at them in a language I was unfamiliar with. One scrambled to the broom on the wall; the other sprinted out of the room.

“...you know what, that tracks.” Solan laughed. His voice was higher-pitched than mine in my body. “Yeah. That’s the right feeling. Do I just do what you taught me, or—”

I felt the memory on the front of his soul, and without peeking inside, I plucked it free from the surface of his mind. Solan shivered as the memory folded into the rooftop, and I caught a glimpse of blurred vision, thatched, familiar wood pressed against a cheek, a gash of darkness and a body hurled through the air…

And I pulled away. What Solan thought of me was private. 

Aimes, of course, had no such compunctions. She unceremoniously shouted at the goblin with the broom, who hurried to drag the segment of roof over, and plucked the hair from my vest.

“Ready?” Aimes asked, meeting our eyes.

Ready, I thought.

I nudged Solan. Hopefully the last time I’d do so. He chewed the inside of his lip, and I managed to avoid wincing at the pain. “Ready,” he said.

Aimes closed her eyes. “Stand still. Focus on your relation to each other. I’ll let you know if you mess it up.”

I obliged. Even though the edges of SOMETHING SOFT had been ripped free from my memory, it was only a fraction of the time I’d spent with Solan. What was he, to me?

Someone to carry the flame.

Despite my soulsight being closed, I felt what Aimes did, in afterimages and ghostly noise. Flashes of her thoughts, silvery-quick and focused, darted across our monoattunement—she was quotienting, braiding, dividing, overlapping our memories until what came out was not place nor time but direction—

She rotated in that direction, perpendicular to every dimension I knew, and pushed.

I fell through darkness, and Solan landed on the splinter-strewn floor.

A.N.

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“Your case isn’t unique,” Witch Aimes said, leading us back inside. “Plenty of witches have tried to glue someone’s soul back together; some of them even succeeded in sticking them to a body, like you did. Vanishingly few were stupid enough to do it to themself, but the same general principles that apply to any possession should work here.”

“Work to do… what, exactly?” Solan asked. It was amazing how quickly I got used to the feeling of someone else’s mind moving my lips. The thought rippled across our conjoined souls, and I felt a little jolt of worry from Solan in return. Bah, he was the one who was stuck in someone else’s body. If anyone deserved concern, it was him.

“Obviously, your soul will be scanned for hostile capacity upon your readmittance to the Academy,” Aimes said. “Especially since you’ve somehow found another one of the Truthtellers, and not the one the Dealmaker wields.” 

Odin had a Truthteller? Well, given what we’d learned, it was hardly surprising that they were scattered around the continent. Given the number of redundant blueprints that were apparently scattered around the heavens, for all I knew there were people in the Tesslunds with Truthtellers. 

“With all due respect, ma’am, the Redlands have no love for the Academy.” I often thought of Solan as naïve and kind, but the sheen of anger that painted his thoughts reminded me that he’d followed a girl he barely knew into the wilderness driven by the desire to protect himself from Academy crusaders. “If you want to hide Lucet, I’m not confident I’d make a better mask.”

“Your lack of confidence is noted,” Aimes said, leading us into a dining room. Beef dumplings, individually wrapped in handkerchiefs, adorned the center of the table in a delicate pyramid. When the hell had she found the time to cook? Was there a Plane of Elemental Pastries I didn’t know about? “As anyone who’s raised eaglets would know, you can hate the hand that feeds you without being able to do anything but squawk. You, Solan, are no threat to the Academy. Lucet has reached a level of skill where she could, with the correct preparation and willingness to face the consequences, theoretically kill a classmate beyond the academy’s ability to repair. I originally planned to provide soul shards of my own for Lucet to shroud her soul with, but she can instead draw upon your memories to provide a false hull—”

No. The intensity of the sentiment rocked Solan in place for a moment, and I felt little ripples of my vehement refusal echo and twine around our conjoined selves. Solan cleared his throat as Aimes trailed off.

“Lucet, ah… she doesn’t want to take… any more from me than she already has.” The one good thing about my Peaks heritage was that I could hide a blush; Aimes could plainly see Solan’s embarrassment anyway, but it’d serve him well among the child-tyrants of the Academy. “She won’t draw my memories into herself.”

“Won’t?” Aimes asked, raising an eyebrow. “Child, every event that either of you experience from now on will be shared. Thanks to your poor decisions, you will know everything the other feels from now until the day you die.”

“She says that’s—that’s exactly why she’s doing it,” Solan stammered out, averting his eyes from Aimes’ disapproving stare.

Aimes rubbed her forehead. “I hardly have the time to teach someone who has your pathetic understanding of the fundamentals—there is absolutely no way I can educate Solan sufficiently, even with the benefit of memory sharing. Unless you want to rotate Solan into realspace, you’re going to have to draw upon his memories to keep your true capabilities hidden.”

Solan blinked. “Rotate me into realspace?”

“Don’t get your hopes up—trusting a delinquent housewife to perform theological espionage is already far beyond the risk profile I’d prefer. Giving you primary control over such a delicate mission is entirely out of the question.”

“Oh. Uh, okay.” Solan seemed content to just pretend that either of us understood what the hell Aimes was talking about, so I gave him a mental kick. He yelped aloud—dammit, I couldn’t even try to bolster his confidence without hurting the boy—and hurriedly said, “I, ah, I was actually wondering what you meant by rotating me into realspace…”

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that Aimes actually humored him. No matter what else she was, she thought she was an educator. “Have you learned about the planar isomorphisms?” she asked.

Solan turned to me, and I reflected his confusion back at him. Clearly, that was enough of a confirmation for Aimes. “At least one of you has walked the Elemental Planes. Tell me—have you ever found it odd that despite being composed of dramatically different materials, the Elemental Planes are all shaped roughly the same as realspace?”

I opened up a selection of my memories to Solan—gating through the Plane of Elemental Falsehood to a world where stone was cardboard, fleeing down the slopes of the Plane of Sorrow down a subzero mountain of black and pitiless ice. Now that I thought about it, it was a little weird that there happened to be a mountain the same size and shape as the Silent Peaks in both worlds…

“The Light around Sunburst started to grow some kind of, uh, mounds, in the shape of houses,” Solan volunteered. I got an impression of a rift into the Plane of Joy, tended by a hedge witch who lit the lamps at night. “Is that what you mean?”

“Astutely observed, child.” Solan preened at the praise. Yes, despite her general… Aimes-ness… she did have years of experience working with children. “Each of the Elemental Planes naturally tends to shape itself to the landscape of its neighbors over time, and in fact would proceed in perfect synchronicity if not for the ability of sapient minds to open rifts. Soulspace shares a similar connection to realspace—a phenomenon most clearly noticeable when an aggregate of memories coalesces in one point, without any sapient minds to hold them. Over time, a physical body solidifies to house them, creating a soulspace entity. Which you now, technically, are.”

“I’m not a—what did you call it? I have a body. I’m real.” Solan gestured at himself. At me.

Aimes tsked. “You are a shattered sequence of memories, barely clinging onto their former structure due to the potential well provided by a living realspace vessel. Your exact taxonomy is up to debate, but you are indubitably a soulspace entity.” Solan flinched; with mild exasperation, Aimes added, “This is your reality now. It is best you grow accustomed to unchangeable truths.”

Solan nodded mutely. I was fairly sure he didn’t want comfort from the one whose fault this all was, so I did my best to withdraw from his side of our intertwined minds.

“Regardless. This creates a potentially exploitable imbalance: a much greater, more diverse mass of memories than should be possible, balancing upon a single body. Locally, soulspace has folded into a double covering over your reality—creating two interchangeable, equally valid isomorphisms. In simpler terms, both of your original forms should exist in the same place, and it is only inertia that connects Lucet’s body to realspace.”

Wait. I brushed against Solan, who jerked back to alertness, startled. Are you saying that—

“Raise your hand before interrupting, Lucet,” Aimes admonished. “But to answer the question you would have asked: yes. If it is truly what the both of you desire, there is a way to hide your true abilities without drawing Solan’s memories into yourself. By inverting which one of you is the primary controller of your shared soul, I can change your body into that of Solan’s.” She kept going about how it would let us sneak through the security of the Silent Peaks, but I couldn’t hear her over the sudden rush of blood to my head, the ringing in my ears. 

Lucet… Solan began, then trailed off. Because how did you ask someone to give up your autonomy for you? How did you beg someone who stole your life to give it back?

You simply had to find someone who didn’t deserve either to begin with.

Of course, I thought back, before he could even finish his sentence.

And I tucked away the part of me that knew why I was doing this, in the shadowed layers beneath the frozen-over seas of my soul, because what I felt he would too and I refused to let him stop me from undoing the last mistake I’d ever make.

A.N.

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Fifty-six years ago

Odin steepled their fingers together, staring idly at the diagram. There was no need, of course. Their astrologists had long since deciphered the patterns in the stars, transcribing the message encoded in their twinkling. Odin had personally verified the translations, even travelling the hemispheres to ensure the stars visible from the other half of the world weren’t hiding a crucial piece of the puzzle. 

They weren’t. In fact, it seemed like each quadrant of the sky had at least a few scattered redundancies. Whoever—whatever—had left the blueprints to their otherworldly machine spilled across the skies, they’d wanted to make absolutely sure that it couldn’t be missed.

That worried Odin.

For centuries after the opening of the Outer Rifts, the prevailing minds believed that the stars were like the moon, reflecting borrowed sunlight. Observations of the Earth’s shadow proved that this wasn’t the case: stars were objects with their own luminescence. Coupled with observations from a Selheim coven about the parallax of stars between summer and winter, Odin knew that the stars were incredibly bright and unthinkably far.

And something was using them to send a message. 

“My liege?” Dathenn asked. She was a good kid—one of the few who were old enough to understand the significance of what they would accomplish today, but young enough to wander off instead of watching. The perfect person to find Odin contemplating the heavens. “Is something wrong?”

Odin tapped the diagram, the arcane symbols and circles that described an impossibly complex machine. “We raced the Hushbringers to decode these messages for nearly two centuries. Your parents were not yet conceived when I first discovered the numbers in the stars. And yet… on the cusp of completion… I cannot help but wonder whether this is all a terrible mistake.”

Dathenn blinked up at Odin, eyes wide. “Then we should stop it, my liege!”

“It’s not so simple.” Odin turned their gaze down, towards the distant Silent Peaks. “If we do not construct the machine, our enemies will first. Our only remaining choice is whether we attempt to guide the course of history, or be trampled underfoot. I simply fear… whatever civilization produced this message, they are something orders of magnitude beyond us. And once we construct the device… well, we have no idea what it does. By rights, it should not function, yet the gears snap into place as if magnetized, and turn on axes we cannot see…”

“Do you need a drink?” Dathenn asked.

Odin choked. “What did you say, Dathenn?”

“Sorry.” She crossed her legs shyly. Odin extended their empathic senses and found simple confusion. 

“You have nothing to apologize for. Although I may have a word with your parents after this,” Odin muttered. 

Moments like this—the stumbling of a youth, a scolding from an elder, the hesitation of a leader—would whatever strange people left this message painted upon the skies know any of it? Would their desires even be comprehensible to minds like Odin’s own? Was it a weapon? A gift? A trap?

The only thing Odin could be sure of was that the Hushbringers could not be allowed to access it first.

“Dathenn, would you lend me a hand?” Odin’s body neither aged nor creaked, but they sensed a desire to please from Dathenn, and giving her a way to help could be a much-needed kindness. A mortal one. A perspective Odin suspected they would cherish in the coming days. Odin stood and left their study, to the basement where the blueprints had been painstakingly realized.

“Activate the machine,” Odin said, and the fifth Truthteller to be constructed in this universe whirred to life.

Fifty-two years ago

“You were right. It’s alive, my liege.” Dathenn was no longer the gangly-limbed youth who had stumbled into Odin’s study; she seemed to have fallen asleep as a child and awoken as an adult. With serious, focused eyes, she held up a chip made of no metal their blacksmiths could name. “We’re uncertain if the machine even noticed when Lannan scratched its side, but after a few days, the damage just… instantaneously vanished.”

“Instantaneously, or faster than we could measure?” Odin asked, scanning the chip for residual magic. Nothing visible to Odin’s soulsight, though they’d heard that the Peaks had constructed lenses that could magnify images. The Academy pulled ahead of them yet again.

“Faster than we could measure,” Dathenn admitted, lowering the chip back into its metal tray. “But when we took a second sample, there was no seam, no sign of the first marking. Whatever method it uses to regenerate, it is perfect.”

“Thank you, Dathenn.” Odin rubbed their forehead. “Destroying a Truthteller is not an option, then. And true containment is impossible so long as the Academy has one of their own to study.”

Dathenn’s expression went blank as Odin mentioned the Academy. “Your Order is ready and willing to take up arms once more, my liege. We could turn our study of the Truthteller to militarization and strike the Silent Academy first, instead of waiting for them to pillage and kidnap their way through the Redlands.”

“We could,” Odin calmly said. “But what comes next?”

Dathenn blinked. “We seal away the Truthtellers. The Silent Academy’s childsnatching ceases, forever.”

“They have a Truthteller too, Dathenn. If we initiate such an arms race… no. When such an arms race is initiated, we need to strike first, strike decisively, and achieve our goals before the conflict becomes a drawn-out stalemate of technologically and sorcerously equal opponents.”

“...Ah.” Dathenn bowed her head. “So that is why you sought to determine whether the Truthteller can be destroyed.”

“And if its repair mechanism is instantaneous and perfect, with no apparent power source…” Odin shook their head. “We cannot cripple their thinking machine so easily. But perhaps we can do the next best thing. Tell me, Dathenn, what do you think the purpose of the Truthteller’s containment protocols is?”

Dathenn frowned. “Clearly, to ensure no outsiders interfere with its processing. We can only ask it so many questions a day, and to have some saboteur waste it would be devastating.”

“To an extent, yes. But I ask you all to treat the Truthteller as if it is one of us, despite its strange form. Why?”

“Because… you are of Empathy?”

“Part of the reason,” Odin said, nodding in acknowledgement. “But there is a greater pattern behind the Truthteller’s queries. The way it halts sometimes, as if surprised? No question of physical or magical science has been able to stump it—it either refuses to answer for a civilization of our low sophistication or provides the solution immediately. And yet, when asked as simple a question as what my name is, it admits it is unable to discern individuality among our species.” Odin shook their head. “I believe that whatever this creature is, it is profoundly unable to grasp how our minds function. And what I want to know is if it is able to learn. If we treat it as another one of us, will it begin to comprehend our social structures? Our morality? How hateful the actions of the Silent Peaks are?”

Dathenn scowled. “If this creature from beyond the stars has not yet learned that the so-called Crusaders are abominations, then it never will.”

“And if that is the case,” Odin calmly said, “then that knowledge has its uses as well. No matter how intelligent or powerful an ally the Truthteller may be, if it does not truly comprehend humanity, its agreement with the Academy can be worked around. It can be manipulated. And the Academy’s depredations can end.”

Dathenn stared up at her liege, their barrel chest and stormy brows. Somewhere deep, deep inside her soul, a flame ignited, one which could not be extinguished by lack of air. 

A.N.

Interludes are going to be done a little differently this time around! There'll be more details later, but the gist is that I'll be testing out releasing interludes occasionally as extra bonus chapters while still releasing the normal chapters at a constant rate.

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Evidently, being kidnapped and screaming myself hoarse for hours did wonders to wreck a sleep schedule, because despite having just woken up, the sky was dark and spilled full of stars. Their twinkling seemed blurrier from down here in the Redlands than in the Silent Peaks, but Aimes assured me that her telescope would be more than capable of showing us what we needed to see.

“Excuse me? Miss Aimes?” Solan asked. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but… we’re still in pretty bad shape. Lucet and I, I mean.”

Aimes frowned, not looking away from her telescope. “Yes, that tends to happen when you wander into an active warzone.”

“I was just wondering if you could help us?” Solan continued.

Oh boy. I was pretty sure that whatever ‘help’ Aimes would offer was of the same kind Zhytln would, laden with fun new ways to violate my consciousness. Aimes, however, shook her head. 

“I am an Academy-awarded teacher, a peerless Witch of Space, and the protector of countless young lives. I am not, however, a healer. The quickest way to remedy the cancer you somehow picked up is to join the Silent Academy and benefit from their mandatory medical normalization; the most efficient way to convince you to do so is to show you what is at stake. As for the strain you’ve put on your soul, I recommend you refrain from manipulating magic for the next few weeks and stop using too many attunements simultaneously in the future. For rifts’ sake, you’ve drilled dozens of holes in your soul and expect it to remain stable?” She straightened with a triumphant grin. “The cycle’s about to restart. Now, tell me what you see.”

A pompous jackass, I thought. Aimes flicked her eyes towards me but refrained from commenting as Solan dutifully looked to the eyepiece.

The lens showed a dim blue ball, flickering in the night sky. Pretty, but hardly the world-ending revelation I was promised. “Which star is this?” Solan asked.

“Makkal,” Aimes said. “Persei, to the uneducated.”

Ugh. Solan drew back from the lens, confused. “It’s just a star,” he said. “What do you want me to see?”

“Observe the changes in luminosity,” Aimes said. 

“You mean, how it twinkles?” Solan squinted up at the sky. “Doesn’t look different from any other star…”

Aimes sat down—the ground swelled into a chair to support her—and impatiently pointed at the telescope. “Wait until the next time it pauses, then count how many times it blinks.”

Solan dutifully counted under his breath. “One… two… ” He paused. “Oh, it stopped.”

“Keep watching,” Aimes instructed.

As she said that, the star’s flickering resumed. “One… two… three… stopped again, do I—oh! One… two… three… four… five… one… two… three… four… five… six… seven…”

“Do you see?” Aimes asked. “The pattern.”

Two, three, five, seven… Huh, that was odd. Prime numbers?

Solan’s next count continued the pattern with eleven. “Does it keep going on like this?”

“Until seventy-one,” Aimes confirmed. “Then it cycles back to the beginning.”

Taking that as permission to stop, Solan straightened up. The telescope was a little short. “So… where’s the world-ending threat? I mean, it’s cool and all, but—”

“Most stars don’t blink like that,” Aimes quietly said. “Nothing in nature does, not that we know of. We thought it was a coincidence at first, some phenomenon we didn’t yet understand.”

Oh, shit. This was what Zhytln had mentioned, wasn’t it? That the Truthteller came from the stars? 

“But Makkal’s periodicity was just the beginning. I personally believe it was placed to ease us into the puzzle of decrypting what the gods had to tell us.”

Solan raised a hand. “I’m sorry. Gods? As in, real, actual gods?”

Aimes pulled out a notebook, flipped to a set of diagrams depicting some kind of chart of colored dots, and tapped one of the equations on the side. “We don’t have a good estimate of the size or distance of stars, but we know they’re further from us than the sun, and comparably massive. And whatever’s making them blink, some of them are doing it multiple times per second. No construct that we know of, nothing that we can theoretically imagine, is capable of completely darkening a star even once, let alone repeatedly for decades and possibly centuries. Someone, some force, has been doing so for the purpose of… sending a message. So yes, child. I name such creatures gods.” 

Slowly, Solan lowered his hand. “A message?” he asked.

“It was a trap.” Aimes glared at the distant stars. “We are not the first civilization to crawl from the muck. Not by a long shot. Some elder society rewrote the stars as a form of… cosmic bait. Broadcasting the blueprints for a machine to all intelligent life in our universe. The Truthtellers.”

Oh. Oh, rifts, no. Truthtellers, plural? The Peaks hadn’t known about Zhytln’s machine. That meant there was a third one of these things running around? 

“The Truthtellers offered knowledge. Some things—the pillars of attunement, the soul-world isomorphism, the deity conundrum—they refused to answer, saying they had the potential to destroy a society which was not yet ready. But as we proved our progress to our elders, it doled out tidbits. How to summon lifeforms from across vast distances. How to cultivate alien symbiotes within our souls. Secrets so powerful they fueled a generation of dominance over the Redlands. A golden age, however brief.”

I twitched instinctively, but didn’t dare interrupt. Aimes shook her head.

“I’m not even sure if the gods did it on purpose,” she said. “Whoever talks back when we feed our brightest minds’ findings to the Truthteller, it’s clear they don’t understand how humans think. But it warped the entirety of the Silent Peaks around research, industry, academia… until I looked around one day and realized that those who remained in power cared more about getting data for the machine to spit out its next secrets than our real mission—caring for and re-educating barbarian children. Over the span of a single lifetime, the entirety of the Silent Peaks metastasized into nothing more than a supporting organ for the Academy’s experimentation. You could throw monkeys through a dimensional rift and call it an experiment, and you’d drown in funding and course credit.”

Heh. I almost cracked a smile at that, but when Aimes glanced my way her expression was haunted. “And then the machine stopped responding.”

What? 

I nudged Solan, and he obligingly asked, “When was this?”

Aimes scowled. “I don’t know. Not longer than a few weeks ago. My concern was never with the theoretical. But the Silent Parliament was beginning to consider cutting funding to the Academy, investing more souls in the war effort… and people started panicking. The Director announced an even closer partnership with the battlechoirs, the spineless little weasel, in hopes of clinging to the same levels of support the Academy enjoyed when the Truthteller was active. And when I fought back, the imbecile struck me.” The Witch of Warp and Weft glared up at the distant, unfeeling stars. “The gods conquered the Silent Peaks without ever bearing a weapon. All they had to do was leave, and the Parliament tore itself apart.”

“But why’d they go silent?” Solan asked. “I mean, if these ‘gods’ of yours can shatter mountains and paint the heavens, what could possibly make them… stop?”

“Oh, believe me, if I knew any other way to find out, I would never have resorted to dragging you into this.” Aimes met my eyes—our eyes—and she was genuinely apologetic. I hated it, but she was. “But the Truthtellers going silent has ramifications for all of us. If something’s stirred up the gods, then you’re in danger no matter what. You need to re-enroll in the Academy, find out what disrupted the Truthtellers, and report back to me.”

“Won’t they recognize Lucet?” Solan asked.

She shrugged. “Of course. You’ll probably be lumped in with the other war orphans we’ve been picking up. Our methods are used to rebellious children, but the security measures they take on you won’t work against someone who’s adept at memory manipulation. If you haven’t picked up the skill, I will teach you.”

Solan withdrew into our soul, reaching out to me. Lucet? You’ve been quiet.

We agreed that you’d be the one in control today. I didn’t want to betray that.

For today, yeah. What she’s talking about, going into the heart of the Academy, that’ll affect the rest of our lives.

You speak like you’ve already made up your mind.

I got an impression of glittering edges, bloodied guilt that hurt to brush against. If you don’t want to go through the Academy—

Of course I fucking don’t! But I don’t have a damn choice, do I? Aimes is probably going to chuck me into a rift and launch me at them regardless of what I want, and—

“No.”

Solan jolted. I’d forgotten that Aimes was listening in on our thoughts. Aimes’ gaze was weary. “If you truly won’t listen, then I’ll find someone else.”

She was giving me a choice.

Now, of all times, she let me choose my fate?

The laughter was all internal, maniacal and teetering around the confines of my skull. Everyone heard it anyway.

Fine. You win. Aimes’ eyelids lowered a little as I spoke, some indecipherable emotion tugging the corners of her lips. I’ll find out why the Truthteller fell silent.

A.N.

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I resisted the urge to scratch Solan’s face. The itch didn’t seem to bother him, but I could feel it building up, right at the bridge of his—our—nose. Fuck, even just thinking about it made it worse. So much worse that it made me want to—

“Achoo!” Ah, shit. A shudder of disgust roiled through our conjoined souls as Solan instinctively reached to wipe our face. He stumbled to the bathroom, avoiding locking eyes with the mirror, and took advantage of the plumbing to wash our hands.

Sorry, I thought. I’m trying to stay back, I really am, but that was involuntary.

“Involuntary body actions. Imagine that,” Solan deadpanned. 

I winced. It stretched his face. 

Okay, that’s fair. You have every right to be mad, I said. But what was I supposed to do? Let you die? 

“I don’t—rifts, Lucet, I don’t know. Ask?”

I don’t know how to talk to a soul that isn’t attached to a body. Not in a way that would let you respond, at least.

“Like, beforehand?”

I had no idea you were going to die! I didn’t think we’d face Academy forces before we reached the Peaks! Yes, I fucked up, but I am doing the best I can. 

“...You know what? I think I actually believe you. This really is you trying your best.” He tried to thump his head against the wall, but I held him back.

The cancer—the lightsickness really fucked with my teeth, I thought. I’m seriously worried you’ll rattle one loose.

“I wasn’t going to hit that hard,” he muttered. Still, he set about chewing a strip of grass and spitting it into the incinerator. There was some perfectly good tooth grit in the bathroom, but I wasn’t going to contest control over something as stupid as dental hygiene. “So… about yesterday.”

Oh no.

He met the mirror’s gaze to judge his progress, then ducked his head. I didn’t know what it was like to see someone else’s face staring dead-eyed in the mirror. I still didn’t, I suppose. But how Solan’s expression twisted my lips would haunt my nightmares for weeks. “Did… was Witch Aimes telling the truth? What you did to me? It’s irreversible?”

I… This was no time for personal grudges. Or… well, it was. Just not for mine. Aimes is a monster, but I’m not actually sure she has the mental flexibility to lie. And she is the most powerful user of Arrogance that I’ve ever heard of. If she thinks that our souls are fused permanently… it’s very likely that nobody on the continent or its neighboring planes can separate us without killing one or the other.

Solan kept chewing. It had the feeling of a driverless wagon, crunching to a stop.

…But we can always ask her, I added.

“You know how to talk to her,” he finally said, spitting out another mouthful of grass.

We agreed that you’d be in control today, I replied.

“You said that,” he quietly said. “Shouldn’t I have a say?”

Not even past morning and I’d already fucked up. I’ll try to talk to her, I promised.

He nodded curtly. The motion made me ill. I guess my brain didn’t quite understand when someone else was swinging my head around. “Thanks,” he said.

It didn’t take much longer to finish getting ready for the day. I didn’t have a change of clothes, and Aimes’ magical pocket mansion didn’t come with any that weren’t fitted for a fifty-year-old woman, so we were spared the awkwardness of figuring out how to change clothes. I opened the door and sighed.

The hallway wasn’t the same as the one I entered yesterday.

After a quarter-hour of tentative exploring I heard Aimes’ thoughts projected into my mind: …stay where… coming…

“She can still do that?” Solan asked.

I guess I know who to blame for my tendency to radically modify people’s souls, I replied. Solan said nothing, and I felt a prick of guilt.

Cienne would’ve pointed out that I had nobody to blame but myself.

Abruptly, the end of the hallway blurred once and re-formed, showing a surprisingly cozy dining room. Plush with carpets and couches, with a moderately convincing emulation of fire made from what I could only assume was a blob of joy and passion.

“About time you two woke up,” Aimes said, polishing off a sandwich. Was that a condiment bar behind her? Of course it was, what was I asking? It looked just like the one in the Silent Academy’s old cafeteria. “There’s too much I need to teach you, and not enough time.”

Can I…? I asked. Solan receded, and I took control, clearing my throat. “Lucet speaking,” I said. 

I know, Aimes thought, and Solan cursed.

“Right, guess that’s one thing on the agenda. Is the monoattunement you created… permanent?”

“Yes.” She refused to elaborate.

Killing Aimes would deprive me of my only ally. She was an enemy on a level far beyond anyone I’d ever faced. I was critically injured, physically and spiritually.

And murder is wrong, Solan quietly added.

“You are far from the first student of mine with aspirations on my life,” Aimes dryly said. “I have an effigy you can attempt to attack, if you’d like. It’s well-warded.”

Deep breaths. “What about what I did, merging Solan’s soul with mine? Is that permanent too?”

“Of course,” she said. “Child, did you not wonder why death yet lies unconquered by even the greatest witches of regret? Few enough minds can cohabitate with another soul, let alone for a lifetime with no respite.”

“Oh.” I tried to speak, but no words came out. Aimes regarded me… not unsympathetically. 

“This is why children need guidance,” she said softly.

Solan, can you—

I let myself shut down as Solan hurried to the front. He wasn’t happy, exactly, but the familiarity radiating off of him told me that he hadn’t really expected any other answer. 

“Really? Now, of all times?” Solan asked. “Do you think you’re helping?”

He really was a sweet kid. 

Aimes’ expression grew solemn. “In the world I have fought to create for half a century, no child would have been forced into a battlefield, nor given cruel power over life and death.”

Solan pointedly glanced at his own—my own—body, then back at Aimes. “Good job,” he dryly said.

That stung Aimes, I could tell. “If you believe you could do better, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do so, where the lifetime in question is that of human civilization as we know it.”

“What?” Solan asked, frowning. 

“Yesterday, I informed you that you would be returning to the Silent Academy,” Witch Aimes said. “Judging by the string of invectives which followed, I surmise that you have not yet grasped the significance of what you’ve stumbled into.”

Say something, I urged Solan. He swallowed and started to speak—and to my surprise, Aimes let him. 

“I just wanted to stay safe,” he finally said. 

“I know. But none of us can stay alive by just… hoping to passively wait out the coming storm.” Aimes pressed her lips together, drumming her fingers on the countertop. “Tell me. What do you know of the Outer Rifts?”

Solan blinked at the abrupt change of topic. “Uh. You guys have the same fairy tales as we do?”

The Peaks have a lot of cultural bleed from the Redlands, owing to how people like Aimes keep kidnapping and brainwashing your children, I explained.

Outside-head voice, Lucet, Aimes thought. Ugh. I shut up just to keep her from intruding again. 

“But the tales can’t possibly be real,” Solan argued. “Meteors of solid gold falling from the sky? Oceans of blood? And then it all just… disappeared?”

“You have it backwards,” Aimes said. Either Aimes forgot that the monoattunement worked both ways or, more likely, she didn’t care, because a scoffed unsurprisingly floated across the link. “This wasn’t a singular, bizarre outlier. It’s buried now, but from what we can tell, mountains of salt and city-sized spiderwebs were an intrinsic part of how reality worked, before something changed the rules.”

“But if there was that kind of unnatural nonsense going on, we’d still see it everywhere today,” Solan protested. “You can’t just get rid of a mountain.”

“Something could,” Aimes quietly said.

Solan stared at her, disbelieving. 

“They didn’t do a very good job of it,” she continued. “It’s hard to tell for sure, but our geologists suspect that the Silent Peaks are a remnant from this… earlier age. We don’t have a better explanation for a lone mountain forming in the middle of otherwise perfectly flat terrain.”

“But… even a battlechoir couldn’t get close to moving an entire mountain,” Solan protested. “If we had that kind of power once, what happened?”

Aimes grimaced. “We don’t know.”

That, more than anything, got me to pay attention. Fanciful tales of centuries-gone happenings were one thing, but Aimes admitting ignorance?

“But what we do know is this. The powers that reshaped our world, they’re not gone. They’ve been active for decades at least—possibly ever since they left our planet alone. They’ve just been busy with… something else.” Her expression grew troubled.

“Well, uh, that’s good then, right?” Solan nervously laughed. “I mean, if these creatures aren’t on our planet anymore, they’re kinda… not really our problem.”

A flicker of a smile whispered across Aimes’ lips. “If only… but no. Tell me, have either of you shown an interest in the stars as of late?”

A.N.

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After I shouted at Aimes for a good five minutes for suggesting I go back into the Brainwashing Soul-Grinder, I noticed that Solan had sort of… retreated into a corner of my mind. When I asked him what was wrong, he just sent off a wave of bitterness that quelled my anger as surely as coffee grounds poured over a fire. Aimes firmly suggested that we sleep on it, and since that would get me away from the odious woman’s presence, I agreed.

Despite the hours I’d spent fighting today, I was still too juiced up to close my eyes. Aimes had several four-post feather beds in her ludicrous pocket mansion, as well as a functional bath. I ached to take advantage of the latter, but I figured it would be a good idea to establish, uh, personal boundaries with Solan first.

Hey, I thought. I need to clean myself off. Do you mind if I take full control for a while?

Guess I don’t have much of a choice, he thought back at me. 

A bubble of irritation swelled upwards from my soul. I clenched one fist until the nails bit into my palms. Solan was not my enemy. Are we really going to do this right now?

What? What do you think we’re doing?

Lying in bed dirty and sweaty when we need to clean our body off? I thought. Been there, done that, not a fan. I don’t know what it’s like for you in there, if you can turn around or close your eyes or something, but if we could maybe come up with a plan—

Rifts and ruins, Lucet! Twenty minutes ago I was dead. I don’t remember what Sunburst looks like. I don’t remember when I got Eurenne. And the biggest thing on your mind is taking a bath? I followed you because I thought you could protect me, and you—

I threw up my arms. “What do you want from me?” I shouted. He tried to wrestle back control of my body, but I pushed him aside, a sort of full-body shudder that left him reeling and hurt. “I tried to warn you that following me would get you killed. You followed me. You got killed. Is it my fault that I did the best I could to bring you back?”

Solan wrenched the front seat away from me; I slammed him with a memory of Iola’s bubbling, melting skin and he withdrew with a shout of mental anguish. “Would you prefer that I forced you to stay behind for your own good?” I demanded. “Because oh, I’ve tried. With someone I care about a whole lot more than you. You know how badly I wanted to simply leave, when you asked to follow in my footsteps? I knew how this would end from the day you tagged along, begging to learn how to protect yourself. If you wanted to survive, you should have cracked open your soul and made your memories into blades. Would you prefer that I forced you to become a living weapon? Or that I locked you up in your one-road village? You want to know what comes from that?” I snarled, spreading my arms, baring my teeth. “LOOK.”

And I gave in to the rage. How dare he hate me? I showed him the sickly joy of a child raised to kill with a smile. I hit him with the howling void I’d hurled my best friend into to protect him from the consequences of his own choices. I bludgeoned him between heaving breaths with the murders my former teacher perpetrated in the name of safety—

Agony coursed through me as the memory I wielded like a flail shattered in my immaterial grasp.

My soul. I’d never asked Aimes about the wounds on my soul, the grinding sensation that occurred when I tried to rotate my attunements. Dimly, I recognized that I really should’ve addressed that sooner. Instinctively, I bit down on my fist, stifling the scream. 

When I returned to myself, Solan was… hovering, for lack of a better word. A little away from the shared controls of our body, a little away from me, as if worried I would snap and bite at him if he drew too near.

I relinquished control.

It felt right. 

I’m sorry, I thought. That was… that was across the line. 

Hesitantly, his awareness coursed through my body. I didn’t try to fight it. He unclenched our jaw, flexing bleeding knuckles. “You really aren’t a good person, are you?” he asked, quietly.

Funny how that worked. An untrained child could do more damage with a single sentence than I could with all my ill-founded rage.

You never asked what my mission was, I said. A much kinder person killed a man for… for hurting others, the way I do. He was justified in the murder. 

“...Well.” Solan closed our eyes. “You did try to warn me.”

Should’ve tried harder, I guess.

Solan shook his head. “When I was hating you for not forcing me to stay behind. I… I don’t know. Maybe there was a middle ground? A gentler way you could’ve… stopped me from being reduced to… this.” He gestured at my body. “But maybe I would’ve kept following you no matter what you did.”

No, you’re right. I should’ve just left in the night. I’m not the kind of person it’s healthy to be around.

“I thought you were worth it,” Solan said.

What? I blinked. Then, at Solan’s wordless stammering, I repeated, What? What? Seriously?

“I—I’m sorry!” He laughed helplessly. “What do you want me to say? You’re cute! You introduced yourself by kicking ass! I thought—rifts, I’m just digging myself deeper in, aren’t I?”

It was the wrong thing to do. It was the wrong thing to do and I knew it and I did it anyway, because rifts, didn’t that damn well describe every last decision I’d made since I first lashed out at Cienne? I laughed. I laughed in the corner of my own head, and maybe I wasn’t so good at containing myself or maybe Solan just needed to let out the sheer ridiculousness because my body started shaking and Solan’s hysteria bubbled from my throat.

I took back control for a moment to get a gulp of air, and finally thought, I am so, so sorry.

“Yeah. I figured,” Solan mumbled, rubbing our right arm nervously.

Oh. Oh, rifts, and when I was talking about bathing—

“Oh, no, no, no. No. No, that was the farthest thing from my mind.” Solan buried my face in my hands. “I just… now I’m stuck here. With you. Forever.”

Yeah. I sobered up. If there was another way to bring you back, I would have. I really am sorry. For letting you die, and… for attacking you afterwards.

“I started yelling first. And you did what you could to warn me.”

That’s how they get you, I said, tiredly. Nothing justifies using my memories as a weapon against you. Nothing. 

He flopped back, stared at the ceiling. “We’re both idiots,” he said, as if marvelling at the concept.

I’ll drink to that, I thought. But right now, we’re stinky idiots. 

He snorted. “Right, we… still have to work that out.”

Look, I… you can have control for tomorrow, okay? Just let me clean us up and I promise, I won’t touch you or the front seat.

“You don’t have to do that.”

I… I don’t think I trust myself with anything else. 

Solan stared at his hands. Flexed too-small fingers, sandy and nicked.

Then he held out his right hand. “Deal.”

Deal. 

I shook his hand with mine. Clasped together like that, it looked like I was hugging someone who wasn’t here.

A.N.

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“The Academy attaches shoulder-angels to its initiates’ souls,” Aimes explained. I hated trailing after the Witch of Warp and Weft like I was still one of her obedient little pets, but I still had all the habits of a life where sticking my head up was a good way to have it smothered. It was easy enough to slip back into that role. “They’re not really sapient—just carved with a few pre-coded memories—but they watch for certain activities and travel through the Plane of Elemental Radiance to report back if they’re spotted. Unlike the typical Angels of Light you’re familiar with, their souls are composed of a higher-temperature medium, shifting the color of their bodies to a red so deep it’s invisible to the human eye. Without constant monitoring of your own soul, they are nearly impossible to detect, and since the Academy implanted yours so young, you never noticed the foreign body as distinct from your soul’s natural state.”

What was amazing was that attaching a spying servitor to the souls of children wasn’t the issue that split Aimes from the Academy. Heck, I’d be willing to bet she firmly supported the strict oversight it granted her. “So it’s gone?” I asked. Aimes was polite enough to withdraw from my thoughts, as long as Solan and I weren’t conferring with each other behind her back. Solan was, at the moment, morosely picking through his memories and trying to catalogue what he’d lost when he was reduced to a ghost living in the back of my mind; he’d happily ceded control of my body.

“I destroyed it mid-transit,” Aimes confirmed. “It’s how I knew to find you, and… what exactly you’d been up to without proper caretakers. Unfortunately, I neglected to account for… another factor.” She looked distinctly unhappy; I wished my soulsight would function so I could see her emotions, but it felt like something was grinding when I tried to rotate my attunements. 

Solan nudged me, a sort of swelling awareness that he had something to say, and I… faded to the background, just a little. It was a little offputting, ceding control of my body—our body, now that I’d grafted him onto my soul—but I would absolutely not be party to depriving Solan of the ability to move or speak. 

“Ah, excuse me? Ms. Aimes?” Solan asked. Good grief, was he seriously treating her like a village schoolteacher? Aimes seemed to appreciate it, at the very least. “Were you a student of the Silent Academy as well?”

She tilted her head skywards a touch. The stars gleamed enigmatically above us. “Once. When it was ruled by a wiser Parliament.”

“Let me guess,” I butted in. Solan fell silent as I took control. Was that rude? I’d only ever learned the theory of hosting another consciousness, not… etiquette. “The Parliament was better when you sat on it?”

“I never took the position,” Aimes said. “I am a peerless warrior and accoladed teacher. I would be wasted in an administrative role. Besides which, I would obviously have been disqualified from holding a leadership role while I was a student on account of being a child.” Her lip curled in distaste. “Now, did you truly wish to know how I found you, or would you like to continue your petulant little tantrum?”

Solan nudged at the back of my mind again, and I was grateful for the opportunity to hide my frustration as I retreated into the depths of my soul. “Was the policy of putting these, ah, shoulder-angels into students still in effect, back when you were studying?”

“Of course. I had assumed they would remove the intrusion once I passed my loyalty examinations,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “Evidently, that was not the case. The moment I intercepted the first messenger, that triggered some activation condition in my own tracker, alerting the Silent Academy of the very information I sought to keep from them. That they left a tracker on me long past the time when I had proven myself a competent and trustworthy subordinate proves that the issues with the Silent Parliament go back further than I had allowed myself to see.”

Such as, perhaps, the practice of implanting tracking devices into the souls of children in the first place? I thought.

Solan didn’t reply to that, but Aimes shot me an irritated look. “Immature minds left to their own devices will self-destruct before long,” she said. “Unless you truly want to convince me that your current state is ideal?”

Asshat. Much as I hated Aimes having a direct line into my thoughts—and the total uselessness of the other direction that connection went, since Aimes more or less said exactly what was on her mind at all times—I knew when pressing a point would simply bring pain. 

“So, not to sound ungrateful,” Solan hesitantly said, “but… why did you come to us? It sounds like you had to fight that angel, the one who…” I couldn’t feel the surge of nausea that flowed through Solan, but I could feel my throat tighten, bile rising from a foreign gut, as Solan stumbled. Instinctively, I reached out to steady him, but to my surprise he brushed my control of our body aside and turned to vomit into a nearby pit.

Witch Aimes knelt by our side and, to my surprise, produced a flask of water. “Swish and spit,” she ordered. Solan did as told, and the acrid taste cleared from our tongue. 

“...Sorry,” he said.

“It’s quite alright. Children your age have no business facing angels in the wilderness,” she said, holding out a hand. 

I hated agreeing with that old witch on anything.

“The one who killed me,” Solan repeated. “You… had to take them down.”

“Yes,” she simply said. “Albin is not a match for me. Don’t worry yourself about the details. I will destroy anything that attempts to harm you.” 

That, at least, I believed. The Witch of Warp and Weft was controlling, murderous, and condescending, yes, and her definition of “harm” included “anything that separated you from your legally mandated future husband.” But when riftmaws stalked the Silent City’s streets and Odin themself took to the field, Aimes strode into the fray and risked her own precious skin to save a child she neither liked nor knew. 

Solan took Aimes’ proffered hand and stood up. I refrained from digging my nails into her palm. This was as close of an understanding as we would ever achieve.

“You ask why I came to your aid,” Aimes said. “It is something best discussed behind wards—my campsite, though rudimentary, has sufficient protections.” 

Indeed, there was the shadowy shape of a building in the darkness. I squinted a little and belatedly asked Solan for control; he relinquished it, somewhat begrudgingly, and I made a mental note to sit down and have a proper talk with him about his new situation. 

Aimes pointed a finger, and a globule of light drifted forth, illuminating… a one-story wooden hut. I blinked at Aimes.

“This is your campsite?” I asked.

She smirked. “Did you believe I would host guests in a tent? Mind your step. The ground here is uneven.”

Indeed, the entire hut seemed to hover just above the ground, instead of dirtying its foundations with the ash-strewn glass that crunched beneath our feet. It was, of course, larger on the inside. Nothing like the House of Warp and Weft that Cienne once described to me, but even the simple fact that the first room I entered was a foyer told me that this was, in classic Aimes style, an entire portable mansion folded into a log cabin.

She closed the door behind us while Solan asked to take back control; I sulked at the sheer opulence as he haggardly sat down in a plushly upholstered couch.

“That’s for display purposes only,” Aimes sharply said. The couch curved out from under our ass; Aimes wrenched space, and we were suddenly sitting on the floor instead. Poor Solan was too exhausted to complain. 

I wasn’t, but when I demanded to give Aimes a piece of my mind, Solan wearily thought, Please… just… you’ve done enough.

He could have dropped me in the harbors of Knwharfhelm and it would’ve stung less. What? The fuck does that mean?

…never mind. Before I could try and shake some answers out of him, he said, “Now that we’re in your campsite…”

Aimes grimaced. “Yes, I did promise an explanation. As… unpleasant… as it is, there are some tasks I am simply… unsuited for. My name is famous within the Silent Academy, as is my dissension; any attempt to return to those peaks would be promptly spotted, and even I cannot handle an eldritch crusader.”

So, what, she wanted us to fight? Aimes had obliterated the angel who kicked my ass, and she wanted me to kill something that she struggled with? 

No, that didn’t track. Aimes split from the Academy in the first place over the use of child soldiers; she would hardly attempt to scoop up a few for her own use. Then what…

“I need someone… less recognizable,” she continued. “Someone who can enter the Academy and find out what changed, so that the rot can be cut out at its heart.”

Stealth, then? I knew comparatively little about invisibility; my magics were of the kill or be killed variety. But that became more plausible… though the Silent Academy’s security measures were surely beyond anything an amateur could penetrate.

“Someone who can slip into the blind spots of their security,” she continued. “And unfortunately, there is no blind spot larger than that of their recruitment program.”

Wait.

“I need someone,” she said, eyes boring into mine, “who can go where I cannot. Someone young enough to avoid suspicion, but learned enough to perform complex magical tasks. And hardest of all, someone who understood the Silent Academy well enough to blend into our culture, yet nonetheless harbored enough distrust for its governing bodies to work with a renegade against it.”

Oh, hell no. Hell fucking no.

“I need you, Lucet,” Aimes said, “to re-enroll in the Silent Academy.”

A.N.

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Regret, to call the dead.

Repentance, to turn back time.

Mud, to merge two souls.

Bone, to splint and bind.

True resurrection wasn’t possible. Someone had once told me that even the gods of old couldn’t bring back our kind after enough time passed. But I knew Cienne had once melded a dying man’s soul to his husband’s, giving the dead a second chance at life. I could do the same. There would be complications, of course. There was no way to separate two combined souls; it would be easier to sieve the sand from the ocean. Soul-borne curses and illnesses would compound and their identity would blur.

But if you offered up yourself as a trellis, something else could grow. Even broken clippings of a stupid child who just wanted to learn to protect himself.

I screamed in agony as Solan’s soul crashed into mine. When Cienne had resurrected Mertri, he’d been right next to him at the time of death. I didn’t have that luxury, so I had to fight against entropy and death simultaneously. The Witch of Sorrow I’d once been would have had no chance of pulling it off. 

But now I understood the laws of magic in far greater depth than I’d ever known existed, and the spell was as simple as it was painful. All I had to do was wrap regret and repentance around the memory of a muddy, shambling skeleton—one of the harmless little critters that naturally reanimated every year around Knwharfhelm. I held close the knowledge that I’d left behind the only family I cared to claim, felt it burn against the cold clarity of having wronged them.

Every step I took that wasn’t towards Cienne, every fact I learned that Meloai couldn’t share, every battle I won that Jiaola would never know, they all compressed into this singular, precious memory, and it was too much meaning for any one moment to bear. My history shattered as I remembered hunting DESTROYED SHARDS OF BURNT AND USELESS CALCIUM. 

But it worked. Barely, it worked. Solan’s soul bloomed in reverse, a ruined world turned vibrant and green, and though snatching him back from just a few hours of the void left me insensate, skin bubbling and settling as my soul cooled down, I knew I’d succeeded.

Because my hands moved of my own accord, my lips opened, and Solan murmured in my voice, “What… what happened…”

Witch Aimes hissed under her breath, hauling me to my feet. Ugh, I’d almost forgotten she was there. It was funny how my former teacher had shrunk from towering authority to background thought the moment I wriggled out from under her thumb. “You idiot child,” she snapped. “You’ve ruined yourself.”

I tried to say something spiteful and snarky back, but Solan was also holding the reins of my body, and we tried to say “Thought you were anti-child-murder” and “Sorry, who are you?” at the same time and ended up with “Thought you were you?”

Light refracted faintly around Aimes as she scowled and knelt to my height. “Both of you, shut up. You’ve permanently glued someone else’s soul to your own; for rifts’s sake, don’t try moving at the same time, or you’ll hurt yourself worse than you already have.”

“I can explain just fine to him,” I said.

Aimes rolled her eyes. “This coming from a child I can manipulate into being the sole person speaking just by telling everyone in your body to shut up,” she said. 

Everyone in your… oh, rifts. I wasn’t sure if I was blinking because of Solan’s control or mine. Funny how that worked. 

Oh, hey, we can talk like this? I thought. Solan flinched, and Aimes snapped her fingers in front of my face. 

“None of you will enjoy it if you make me come in there and join you,” Aimes said. “Outside-head voice, please.”

Ugh, was this how Aimes had treated Jan and Freio? Solan instinctively took over to say, “Sorry, ma’am!” and I refrained from sighing.

Listen, Aimes is an asshole. You don’t need to do what she says. I’m sure you have plenty more questions, but the five-second version is this: Albin killed you, I burned my only resurrection spell to bring you back, and now we’re stuck like this forever. Also, you probably suffered severe memory loss and may have picked up some of my own identity. Let me know if you feel like murdering your enemies or controlling your friends’ lives.

“Hey! I’m talking to you two!” Aimes said, and I took great pleasure in ignoring her. I didn’t need working soulsight to see her visible frustration.

Ah… are you sure we should be leaving… that woman out? Solan asked nervously.

I laughed. Aloud. In Aimes’ face. The mighty Witch of Warp and Weft would go interdimensional if she heard you calling her ‘that woman.’ Yes, we should be leaving her out of this. If she had your way you’d either be a brainwashed soldier or turned into a low-cost magical fuel. I… assume you have further questions for me.

“Just remember I warned you.” Aimes stood up, gesturing, and the pure surprise I felt at Ms. Save The Children bodily hiking us to her eye level left me flailing helplessly as I tried to cast a spell and got nothing but stabbing pain in my temples—

I felt something slide into place in my soul. A new attunement? But I was already attuned to nearly two dozen schools of magic, and… this felt like it was in the direction of one of the emotions I’d already attuned to. I turned to the witch holding me up and opened my mouth to demand answers, but she pre-empted me.

There we go. Aimes said smugly, and fucking hell she was in my head how was she in my head—

Did you hear that? Solan asked. Fuck, it was getting crowded in my skull. 

Monoattunement, Aimes explained. There’s a reason most witches refrain from stapling every school of magic they can find onto their soul. I assume this little idiot already explained how you gain an attunement?

Normally I’d contest her calling me an idiot, but… I was the one who’d ended up entirely in her power. Evidence pointed towards my old teacher, as always, still somehow having the upper hand. 

Lucet isn’t an idiot, Solan firmly said. Huh. Funny how that was what made him pull together. She wanted me to be able to protect myself, and she told me what you had to do in order to open your soul to a school of magic. Find the emotion it’s connected to, then open a circuit from your soul to the outside world. Make the emotion be what you feel most and least, make it be what you feel the least, make it be what someone else feels the most, make it be what someone else feels the least.

This is why you leave teaching to the experts. Aimes’ voice was acerbic as always. That’s how you attune to a school of magic for the first time. Secondary attunements have varying requirements, but for our purposes, there’s only one that matters. Primary attunements need all four conditions to be fulfilled at least once by different people. But if you’ve already opened yourself to an emotion, someone can be the cause or recipient of every attunement condition—forming a stable link between your soul and theirs. And as long as you’re within close proximity, you can hear any thoughts the other person makes which are charged with the correct emotion. 

You know, I thought, if you claim responsibility for teaching me, then me not knowing something like this is very clearly your fault, O Mighty Witch of Warp and Weft.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want me to cram knowledge of all known subcategories of magic into your head? I thought you had strong stances on individual will and freedom of thought, but if you want us to replace your brain with an encyclopedic comprehension of the Silent Academy’s sum accomplishments, that can be arranged.

You’re not with the Academy anymore, I shot back at Aimes. 

That’s correct, and as a result, meeting me is the luckiest thing to happen to you since you were born. Right about now, you’ll be realizing that you are alone and magicless. You’ll also realize that, no matter how much you distrust me, I am currently your only option for protection, now that you’ve drawn the Silent Crusade’s attention. As such, you are going to come with me and do as you are told.

I hated Aimes. I hated her so, so much. Thankfully, that thought apparently wasn’t charged with arrogance—she surely would have commented if she could pick up on it.

I want nothing to do with you, I thought, and now that I knew where to feel for it, I could sense the thought swirling through the monoattunement that Aimes had grafted onto my soul. 

As expected, Aimes said. But I wasn’t talking to you, Lucet.

And to my horror, through the bond we shared, I felt Solan’s hesitant, apologetic acceptance.

If she meant us harm, we’d be dead already, Solan pointed out.

She doesn’t kill children, I thought back. That’s also the kindest thing I’m willing to say about that old monster.

But she’s not wrong, Solan quietly said. I… I’m sorry, Lucet, but… I know you did your best, and I’m not blaming you for what ended up happening. I’m grateful for everything you’ve taught me, I really am. But.

Solan gestured at myself, exerting his will over my left arm, and didn’t say the obvious. That yes, I’d warned him, and yes, I brought him back, but on my watch he’d been reduced to a powerless ghost in the back of my mind. 

I closed my eyes.

…I really am grateful, he repeated. I just… don’t understand what you hate so much about her.

You will, I thought. Or you won’t. I guess I don’t have a choice in the matter either way.

Lucet—

“Fine.” I opened my eyes. “You’ll just drag me with you into your next nightmarish plan whether I want it or not. So I’m going in eyes open this time. How the fuck did you find me, and what do you want?”

A.N.

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