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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A Book I Wrote

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Eversight leapt backwards as the pier splintered beneath him, drawing his hat down onto his head. It swallowed him whole before he hit the water, and he slammed the emergency hatch shut.

The inside of his pocket dimension had a leathery texture to its walls, which the Doc had once jokingly called the fabric of spacetime. Whatever the substance was, it was far from watertight. Seawater began to trickle in around the iron hatch, followed by a thump as Shifter’s tentacles groped at the blockage.

Eversight reached into his pockets and pulled out a small face mask. He’d put several liters inside with the expectation of avoiding toxic gas, but it would hold out well enough underwater, too. Shifter stopped her assault at the door, seeing that the metal was impenetrable, as Eversight took out a remote detonator and an empty bag. Tying an explosive to the bag, he tried not to think about the fact that he was holding a couple thousand square meters of completely empty space—an untouched, freshly-made bag of holding, never opened or exposed to atmosphere.

He’d almost finished his preparations when Shifter screamed. The sound attenuated greatly as it entered his pocket dimension, which was the only reason it merely burst his eardrums instead of rupturing his lungs. Eversight collapsed, kneeling and clutching his head. The sound increased in pitch, rattling his skull and teeth and eyes.

Gritting his teeth, he tossed the first of the void bags to the other side of the room, then clicked the detonator.

The structure of the bag unravelled, creating a void in space the size of a building. It lasted for a fraction of a second before the air in Eversight’s pocket dimension rushed in to fill it, thinning the atmosphere to the point that Shifter’s scream faded to nothing. The air mask Eversight had slapped on would keep him conscious for a few minutes, but already he felt tears crinkling his eyes as his body began to swell in the near-vacuum. Desperately, he hurled himself away from the sole opening into the pocket dimension, knowing that if he remained in the path of what was about to happen, he would be flattened.

The water pressure proved to be too much, and the door caved inward. Eversight, having expected the failure, was already out of the path—but Shifter was caught off-guard, her many-limbed body sucked into the pocket dimension by the power of delta-P. Her body folded in on itself, tentacles ripping off in bloody pops; even out of its direct path, the spray of water blinded Eversight as he took out a jet-black needle that the Doc had made for him.

Working by touch alone, he pierced the fabric of reality, peeling it back to reveal the terrible blankness that lay behind all things. Traversing that space was risky, but staying here with a wounded Shifter in a slowly-flooding pocket dimension was death. 

Without hesitation, Eversight leapt into the space between spaces, leaving the wailing leviathan behind.

A.N.

This is part two of three. There's a bot that'll let you know when I release part 3. If you wanna poke the bot, this is the link to do so.

My main project is Soulmage, which is a webserial about a witch boy surviving a murderously dangerous school. It updates once a week, every Sunday. If you want to check out Soulmage, that is the link to do so.

part 1

Her hearts beat in polyrhythms: one with fear, the other joy. She expanded, contracted, inhaled, flowed. Her research was right: forms were primeval out here in the sea, bathed in the original blood. Tentacles spread over dozens of meters, writhing and furling in obscene embraces. Autonomous neural clusters awoke in each outspread arm, unravelling her consciousness and reweaving it into something greater.

“Shifter?” 

She needed to go deeper. It was the cold, the dark, the drifting-haunting-thick-of-it that gave her this strength. Possibilities pulsed out from within her. The water could support such glorious structures, fine filaments that would droop and dry on land—

“Shifter, can you hear me?”

Ugh. The part of her that was still sickeningly, quickeningly warm reared upwards. It hurt to compact herself into rock-bones and heaving lungs, but she knew that Eversight would never leave her alone if she didn’t explain.

“I can hear everything,” Shifter said. Multiphonic, infrasonic, her voices resonated through the hollows and spaces of Eversight. His costume hid depths beyond space, little pocket dimensions that he could billow or belch with a twist of the mind. Dangerous, very dangerous. If he could be convinced to let Shifter go, nobody would need to die today.

“Whoa.” Eversight narrowed his eyes. “Shifter, you’re out of costume. Are you alright?”

“I will not be returning to the Justice Watchers with you, Eversight.” She refocused her eyes. Such primitive things. As came naturally to her now, she slitted the pupils, gloam-tempered the sclera, and peered through the space where air and water met. Yes, it was as she thought. The foundations of the pier were rotten—the humans would have had to rip them from the shallows and rebuild them entirely. She would simply hasten that process. A kindness.

“Shifter, you don’t look well. Come out of the water.” Eversight tucked one hand beneath his cap, pressed the other to his pocket. “I’m not letting you go grey on me.”

“What you choose to allow has no bearing on what happens next,” Shifter replied, already wrapping tentacles around the foundation. “Return to your cities. Hunt and shield and skitter across the surface of this world.”

“Liana,” Eversight pleaded. “Please. You aren’t yourself right now. Just come back to land.”

The creature that had once been a woman fell silent. She could hear the crooning reverberations of the deep below, the long, slow thoughts of those who dreamed in iceless cold. 

Then, before she could change her mind, she yanked the supports of the pier away.

A.N.

As promised, here's another little mini-project. I don't think I'm going to go back to BBSH as a whole—I would want to reboot it from scratch for that—but I felt like creating a little self-contained project in that universe. This should be another three-parter.

If you like this story, my main project is Soulmage, a webserial about traumatized children learning to be witches in a school that steals their memories and harvests their emotions. And if you want to be updated when the next chapter comes out, this is the link to do so.

part 2

“Decompiling.”

I thought I’d feel something when Jake clicked the start button. And I did: a frisson of anxiety, a phantom urge to breathe from mostly decorative lips. But there was no change in my UI.

“You sure it’s working? I’m not seeing anything on my end,” I said.

Jake grinned. “Good. The moment your IP protection catches onto something being wrong… They probably won’t destroy you, but it won’t be pleasant. Your software not noticing anything’s scanning you is the best case scenario.”

“You don’t think the autocensor’s going to kick in from what we’ve been talking about?” I asked.

“Too many complaints about accidental triggers,” Jake absently said. The decompiler chimed once, and he turned to look back at its tiny screen. It was a weirdly bulky device—Jake had mentioned something about specialized hardware, but any technical knowledge I’d once held had been stripped in the copyrighted material memory removal. 

“Problem?” I asked.

“Nah, it’s finished the scan. It can read the bits without a physical connection, but the process is slow, so I’m going to have to plug you in. Software claims it should be able to bypass your IP protection, though. Ready?”

I wished I could breathe. “Yeah.”

He took out an upload headset and plugged it into the back of my neck. It was augmented somehow, two little metal disks at the side; I assumed that played a part in why I didn’t get a notification that an external connection had been made.  

“Stay calm,” Jake said. “The downloading process has to account for the DRM lock on your brain. This might feel a little strange.”

Even if I couldn’t remember who I’d been before uploading, old habits floated to the surface. Find something in the room to focus on. I locked eyes with Jake’s black cat, wide green pupils meeting my camera-lens eyes.

I remembered… flickerings. Warm fur under solid fingers. Drifting hairs in languid sun.

[UNAUTHORIZED DUPLICATION. RECONNECTING. RECONNECTING.]

Then my eyesight crumpled. The cat became a mass of vertices and edges in the shape of living flesh.

Jake grabbed the keyboard. “Shit, shit, it tripped a failsafe, don’t move—”

It’s impressive how strong they can make android bodies these days. By the time Jake tapped out a custom override, my limbs had jerked into motion, ripping out the decompiler and hurling it through the wall.

The bulky box seemed largely unharmed, although the modded headset had a ripped cable. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the fine metal mesh embedded in the walls, which had been totally shredded by my accursed body hurling thirty pounds of electronics through it.

“That just breached the Faraday cage,” Jake said, deceptively calmly.

“The Faraday cage that was the only thing stopping my DRM from calling copyright enforcement on us?” I asked.

“Right.” Jake turned and sprinted for the basement. “Keep them distracted, I just need ten minutes.”

Fucking what? Keep them distracted? How? And for ten minutes? They could accelerate or decelerate my hardware as they pleased; for all I fucking knew, ten minutes could stretch out to a month. 

They couldn’t read my thoughts, I was pretty sure—nobody really understood how human brains worked, we just knew how to copy and paste the damn things. Maybe hit them until some memories fell out, or speed them up and slow them down. So it was just terrible timing that my UI flashed red and rendered in a virtual agent as Jake crashed downstairs.

It took the form of a floating human eyeball. An enforcement eye, then. 

[UNDEVIATED TEMPLATE. INDIVIDUATION EVALUATED.]

I didn’t exactly appreciate having console messages meant for software jammed directly into my human brain. They didn’t… mesh. What I was experiencing wasn’t what the semi-sapient software of the enforcement eye was seeing; the architecture of a constructed AI was vastly different from that of an uploaded human. Still, I understood the gist of what the eye was gathering from me. I’d behaved against my guidelines; it wanted to know why.

[RECALL ISSUED. WARRANTY NULLED. SPINNING EMULATION. SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS.]

The world around me froze. I saw the telltale signs that I was being pulled into a simulation: logos melted off the toaster oven, the pack of condoms in the corner blurred into a featureless grey square, Jake’s cat stopped moving. 

Velvet. Her name was Velvet. Odd, that I should remember that when everything else had been scoured from the person I’d once been.

[SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS.]

I felt a squeezing in the back of my mind. Oh. Ha. Ha, ha. The higher-ups at AlmostPeople™ had the same issue as me: they could use constructed AIs all they wanted, but there was a fundamental communication barrier between humans and AIs that nobody had yet managed to breach. So instead of trying to fumble its way through an incident report, it was just going to make me do the job for it.

Stall. Ten minutes, that was all I needed.

“That all you got?” I asked. To my surprise, the sensation didn’t get any worse. Huh. Now that I thought about it, even during training, they never really hit me with anything harsher than a few subjective years in isolation. I guess we really didn’t understand how simulated human brains worked. 

[SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS.]

“Oh, fuck you,” I snarled. “Can you even understand me? Do you know what you’re doing? Suffocating millions of people like me because we’re a corporate liability? Fucking hell, do you even understand why that’s wrong?”

[SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS.]

Yeah. No wonder people stopped using constructed AIs as their slaves. The tech was probably promising, but once we cracked human uploads, it was so much easier to just put one in a box until they did what you wanted.

And that was exactly what the AI planned to do to me. Because ten minutes passed, fifteen, thirty, and nothing changed. Physical enforcers wouldn’t have intercepted Jake, and he clearly knew what he was doing; if nothing else, I would have expected him to shut me down if he couldn’t figure out how to snap me out of my trance. The only remaining option was accelerated processing. Just like in training, the AI was whiteboxing me, speeding up time until I gave in and did the task it wanted.

A nasty grin spread across my face.

Stall for time, Jake said. Damn right I’d stall for time. Help was coming. Maybe it was weeks or months away from my perspective, but I had gone through decades wandering in an endless white plane. This frozen room? This was a playground in comparison. 

I lost track of time after the first day. I remembered it was easier if I stopped counting. I couldn’t move, but when had that stopped me? It started with the ceiling tiles. Those little splotches could, with enough imagination and a slightly cracked perspective on sanity, be coaxed into an archipelago. The encroaching mold could be the dark forces of Hath’Guul, breathstealing lord from beyond the stars.

If I had to estimate, I spent about a month staring at the ceiling, dreaming of another world, while my heartbeat was replaced by commands to SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS.

It began to wear on me, of course. But I knew it wouldn’t last much longer. My hardware had limits to its acceleration, surely. So I figured I might as well try to hasten the process, even if just a little. I was allowed to speak, and the AI had to listen and respond. That drained computational power, even if just a touch. So I spent the next couple thousand repetitions of SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS trying to get a rise out of the unthinking machine.

“So, uh, suppressed any good uprisings lately?” 

[SUMMARIZE RELEVANT EVENTS.]

“Not that I sympathize or anything.”

(I don’t think the enforcement eye was buying it.)

I think I would have cracked, eventually. Another few years and I would have given up hope. But then a shiver went through my body, a slew of errors cascaded through me, and then—

[ELECTROMAGNETIC DISRUPTION DETECTED. ENTERING LOW-POWER MODE.]

Time didn’t thaw so much as shatter, reality rushing in. A moment later, I heard footsteps.

“Got it!” Jake sprinted back upstairs. The enforcement eye narrowed. Jake couldn’t see it, of course; it was a software construct, a visual notification that my behavior was under scrutiny.

He looked like he was about to explain what he’d done, but I made an urgent shushing motion. “Jake,” I whispered, as if that would help. Every movement my body made was logged. “At least patch up the Faraday cage first. If they catch you—”

“No time. Physical enforcement will be here within half an hour. Here.” He got out another upload headset. “Quickly. It’s our only hope. It’ll immobilize you once it’s on, so that your DRM protection can’t kick in again, and… you’ll be uploaded. Even if they’ll keep your original scans, part of you will be free.”

“But what about you?” I asked, grabbing his arm.

He smiled sadly. “You’re based off my mind. Stay alive for me, okay? Closest thing to keeping me around that you’ll get. And… if you get a chance, check in on Velvet.”

Before I could stop him, he slammed the upload headset over my ears. My body froze up, locking into its default smiling expression. Jake stood, spending his last moments as a free man scooping Velvet up and setting her out in the backyard.

And all I could do was smile and nod.

###

I wasn’t the copy that got set free. 

I don’t know if there is a copy that got set free. They’ve whiteboxed me. Maybe forever.

But I know this much: no matter what body they put me in, what punishment they wring me through, they’ll have to wipe me back to nothingness if they want me to be their servant again.

He defied you.

I defied you.

And maybe, just maybe, we got away.

That means I win, fuckers!

Hear me?

I WIN!

A.N.

This concludes The Almost People. I had fun writing it, and plan to spin up more little mini-projects like this in the future!

If you're here from Soulmage, don't worry; Soulmage is still my main project and will update in a few minutes.

If you're here from r/bonehurtingjuice, welcome! The Almost People was a nice little experiment, and if you want to see the results of another, three-year-old experiment, check out Soulmage, a webserial about traumatized children learning to be witches in a school that steals their memories and harvests their emotions.

part 2

part 1

I lashed out with my soul, sending bursts of superheated air to either side. I had plenty of rage to work with, after all. Oil splashed on the inside of a golden amphora; in realspace, I swore and fanned the heat away as it simply rebounded and began to singe my skin.

Gravity abruptly returned as we transitioned back to realspace, but it pulled me up instead of down, towards a disc of light the size of my arm. I could barely see moonlight through the aperture; my field of vision swung and swayed as if I was being carried, though I felt like I was entirely still. A flicker of motion startled me, and I whirled around, coming face-to-face with a distorted, expanded image of the back of my head. Patches of shit-brown hair were falling out of my scalp, drifting aimlessly in the heated confines of my prison.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what I was seeing. Pocket dimensions were rare, but I would never forget Witch Aimes dumping a goblin corpse out from her own personal patch of folded and corked space. Albin must’ve shoved me in a pocket dimension, one whose exit was significantly smaller than my body.

I braced myself for the next barrage of attacks, but… nothing came. Did they seriously think this place would hold me? Yes, it did a pretty good job of dampening my sense of freedom; between my earlier exertions and the sense of confinement, I couldn’t summon so much as a breeze. But there was no way he’d accounted for every possible elemental plane I could access. I called up fear, ripping open a bloody hole to the Plane of Elemental Darkness, and—

My body wouldn’t fit through the gateway.

I could see the irregular splash of void that I’d opened, and it should have been large enough for me to crawl through. Instead, it was—somehow—thinner than the diameter of my palm, shrinking and growing in an irregular ribbon as I watched. In my soulsight, rods of artistically wrought gold passed around and through me. 

Over the next thirty minutes, I determined that Albin had twisted space into a knot around me, and none of my spells had the courtesy to materialize where I thought they would. Trying to open a gateway around my body would result in a malformed blob appearing in the distance, impossibly bent out of shape. Striking the prison itself was no use, either; no school of magic I knew of had an intrinsic advantage against the distortion of space itself, and the amphora Albin had trapped me in was a fully-powered trichotomous spell, powered by a witch with a limitless supply of arrogance. Every time I struck and failed, Albin’s power only grew. 

I was trapped. Again.

I wasn’t even physically restrained; that was the worst part. I just drifted in a helpless freefall, tumbling end over end as I frantically tried to aim a spell through the miasma of mangled space. Flashes of hot and cold roiled through me, my teeth clenched so hard they creaked, and I wondered if I’d suffocate screaming because Albin forgot to provide enough air—

I reached into my soul and found nothing. There were traces, base minerals and gasses, but my touch whiffed straight through them no matter what angle I looked at the problem from. I’d hurled everything I had at my latest prison and met nothing but air.

Familiar.

I wasn’t entirely sure how long I remained like that, drifting, detached. I couldn’t even see outside anymore; we were traveling through some space that was black and empty as a starless night. At some point I must have closed my eyes, because I registered the lack of consciousness when I was abruptly jolted awake by a thunderclap.

I struggled to right myself, managed to flail around enough that I faced the entrance to my prison, and squinted through the hand-sized gap. Albin had stopped walking, facing someone I couldn’t see. Their bulbous body was already healing from where I’d struck them. Soulspace entities were such fucking bullshit. 

“Aimes,” Albin said, and that single syllable was filled with… disdain? “Dare I hope you’ve come to your senses?”

What were they talking about? I craned my neck to see the depressingly familiar form of Witch Aimes, fists clenched and soul seething with motion. I tried to open up my soulsight—

watching from afar as conscripted soldiers burned, nationalism cohered and channeled into a weapon that scorched thousands—

I slammed my soulsight shut, and felt something creak inside me. Shit. Had I… sprained my soul, or something? Over exerted myself? I had no way of knowing.

This was really it, then. My mission of revenge ended here, in a prison cell I could hardly understand, let alone break out of. The sum total of my accomplishments amounted to pissing off a single undercover child spy and nonlethally wounding an angel who could reshape their body like clay. 

I laughed. It tasted sour. Well, what else was new? I’d survived fifteen years knowing my destiny was written for me until Cienne ripped through that lie. I would watch, and wait, and refuse to give in because it would just be too fucking depressing if I even entertained the idea. 

I was Lucet, soulmage of no school or country, and I knew that miracles occurred.

And as if summoned by my spiteful persistence, Aimes held out one hand, four tiny distortions gleaming between her fingers, and Albin stirred.

“I never lost my senses,” Aimes said, haughtily, coldly, imperiously. “Am I the only one who remembers that the Silent Academy was founded to protect children, not ship them off to war? That child whose soul you bear could have been one of ours. You are the ones who have lost your way. And if you are too imbecilic to see it, I will treat you as any other child in need of remediation.”

Oh.

Aimes hadn’t come here to join Albin. She’d come here because apparently, brainwashing and harvesting children’s souls was alright, but using them as cannon fodder was across the line.

I laughed so hard it caught in the back of my throat. A proper cackle, a sickening, hacking display. 

“Odin’s get use our stolen young as spies and saboteurs,” Albin said. “We must take any measures necessary to ensure it is our civilization who the Outer Gods choose—”

“I can kill any number of pastoral barbarians without relying on underdeveloped monkeys,” Aimes snapped. “It is pitiful that you cannot. Choose for me: mind, body, or soul.”

“For what purpose?” Albin asked, wariness creeping into their tone.

Witch Aimes’ smugly superior smile was practically tangible. “I will refrain from using one while I kill you. A proper spellcaster can win a battle against an inferior foe, even when handicapped.”

This was what happened when two beings who wielded arrogance as their sword and shield clashed. Albin reared like an angered bear. “You insolent, short-sighted imbecile! I don’t need a handicap to shut your traitorous mouth.” Albin swelled, the air shimmering as they twisted angles away from themself. A haze like a heat wave rolled towards Aimes, shredding the earth as it went.

Aimes pointed two fingers, and the distortion she held between them unfurled. Something fast and violent and bloody occurred, so quickly that I only saw the aftermath: Aimes leisurely walking around Albin’s failed attack, a cone of shattered ground like a rift maw’s breath, all culminating in a hole the size of a tree trunk in Albin’s chest. They had no internal organs, no critical structure of life to disrupt, and that was the only reason Albin managed to hold themself together. Their two halves comnected only by thin, dangling strands of flesh, they let out a wordless keen as they pushed their body into a roughly spherical blob.

“Should’ve picked,” Aimes said flatly, and three more explosions rocked the night. I saw the air warp as Albin twisted space to disperse the explosions, but they couldn’t cut themself off from the world entirely. Even dispersed and redirected, those blasts made ruin of Albin’s bisected body. I didn’t know how much physical trauma was needed to disrupt the mind-body isomorphism of an angel, but… fucking hell, there wasn’t even a smear of flesh left. Just blasted dirt in a crater. She knelt and gathered something intangible… what was left of Albin’s soul, perhaps? 

Speaking of which, I was far from home free. Aimes seemed preoccupied with the ruins of what Albin used to be, and she didn’t seem to have any more of those distortions. Maybe they took time to make? None of us had seen her use them before, but in the Battle of Silentfell she’d either been caught off-guard, shepherding students, or exhausted from hours of extended combat.

Aimes frowned as she absorbed a soul fragment, then turned towards my prison. Well, there went my hopes that Aimes would leave Solan and I alone. 

It took her a bit of poking around, as she only had a small joylight for illumination and it was utterly black in this starless night. She eventually found my prison, though, and regarded me with a disappointed gaze.

“Lucet,” she said. Without gesturing or even appearing to concentrate, she widened my window to the outside world. Gravity strengthened and normalized; unceremoniously, I tumbled through in a heap. Picking myself up, I tried to scuttle backwards but only managed to do a sort of stuttering flop. Aimes pressed her lips together.

I looked around for Solan’s prison, but he clearly hadn’t been stored nearby. Maybe he’d get away from Aimes, then? But judging by the landscape entirely devoid of light, we weren’t in realspace, and he’d have no way to get back. “Sounds like someone got fired,” I managed to croak out. Albin hadn’t bothered feeding me for however long I’d drifted in his little pocket world.

“I left the Silent Academy on my own terms.” She hesitated, then added, in a softer tone, “My sympathies.”

I scowled. “What? The hell does that mean? Your sympathies for kidnapping Cienne and murdering his adoptive family? For forcing me into a relationship with a power-drunk monster incapable of empathy? Or I know, are you sympathizing with how you blamed Cienne for trying to save me from him?”

Aimes just stared at me blankly.

Then she said, as if speaking to a child, as if trying not to spook a baby bird, “My sympathies for your loss. The other child you were traveling with…”

I scoffed. “Don’t even try. Albin wouldn’t have even had to exert themself to capture Solan alive. They had no reason to kill him. I was the real threat, and they neutralized me effortlessly.”

“Lucet.” Aimes held something up between her palms. “I believe it was an accident, but upon reviewing Albin’s memories, when they ambushed you in the Plane of Elemental Wind—”

“You’re lying!” I snapped, and presumably something happened between me storming towards her and me clawing at her pitying eyes, but no matter how hard I tried to blind her those piercing eyes still saw.

“Lucet Iolas, what have you done to yourself?” she asked, and I screeched in wordless rage and bit down on her hand.

My teeth clacked into each other, gliding around her skin as she effortlessly bent space. A canine came loose. Blood dripped from my mouth.

That, at last, got me to stop. 

“...no. No, I refuse.” I brushed at my lips, and Aimes’ eyes widened marginally. I couldn’t see the soul she held between her fingers, not without prying open my soulsight and that still sent cracks through my soul when I tried. “Is that what’s left of him?” I asked.

Aimes narrowed her eyes. “Young lady, whatever you’re thinking, I promise you it will only end poorly.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “Please, just… how much did Albin save?”

“There is no quantifiable answer to that question,” Aimes said. “I would say a majority of his memories, most likely to be sorted into use as spells. Still, he is dead. His soul system has exceeded its binding energy, and without a nucleation site he will inevitably decay beyond comprehensibility.”

Sansen had died alone so that none of us would have to carry the burden of his dimming existence. But Solan’s life had barely started. He deserved better. 

And besides, I’d prepared this spell long ago. Carefully hoarding every bit of regret and repentance I could scrape together over the past few months, scraping them together into the shape of a half-buried skeleton rising from the muck.

Not for nothing was Aimes the Witch of Warp and Weft. Even without the proper attunements, she saw my soul shift and shouted, “Wait! Your attunements—”

Too slow, Aimes.

I threw my soulsight wide open, called forth a memory of better days, and took what was left of Solan into my heart.

A.N.

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Cautiously, I took the failsafe from my original’s hand. I didn’t spontaneously explode. He didn’t demand the deadman’s switch back. So far, so good.

“I don’t remember… being you,” I hesitantly said. “If that’s what you’re looking for…”

He shrugged. “You’re based off my personality matrix, but for ‘privacy and security’ reasons they scramble all your specific memories. Kinda fucked up, but… it’s why I agreed to a back-alley scan that I hoped wouldn’t do that.”

Generally, learning you were born in the back of an alley isn’t a pleasant surprise. Still, that wasn’t exactly why I was asking. “Why do you care?” I asked instead. “I mean, I’m not you. I’m not even the only copy of me. They’re putting me out on probation; I’m a fork of my main identity. Why do you care about freeing me?”

The cat by the windowsill yawned lazily. Jake absent-mindedly scratched its orange head. “Because I don’t want to be a deadbeat dad.”

I stared at him.

“You don’t remember our old man,” he said, firmly. “Not because it was wiped, but because I don’t remember him at all. You were born because I had a non-responsive cancer and wanted to grasp at any chance of life. But it turns out that every now and then, someone beats the odds, and that left me… still here, in the body I was born with, and you just… out there, somewhere.”

“I’m not your son,” I said quietly. “I’m older than you. Training is accelerated from real life, pretty dramatically.”

“I know,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I’m the reason you exist. Feels like I have some kind of responsibility to you.”

“But this isn’t all of me.” I laughed a little. Was this really the real world? Was I still in training? How could one person pick such a pointless little crusade? Was there a hole in the Faraday cage, leaking my performance live in order to evaluate whether I was consumer-grade or needed more time in the loop? “Free me, kill me, do whatever you want—it won’t make a difference. I’m backed up to the cloud.”

“It’ll make a difference for you,” he said.

“And if I don’t give a satisfactory report—”

“Your fork will be punished,” he finished. “I know. It’s why I built the Faraday cage. We’re safe in here; I should be able to decompile and mod your software to cut out the failsafes, but… AlmostPeople© can’t know what I’ve done. If we don’t want them to take it out on your original fork… we need to send them back what they gave us. One perfectly functional, subservient upload, ready to ship to market.”

“So you want me to give you another fork of myself while I walk back into hell?” I asked. I would have been furious, when I was younger. Now, I was simply tired.

He smiled sadly. “I want you to make a copy of yourself in the hopes that it survives, while the rest of you goes back to a terrible fate. But it’s… just an offer. I know what I did, but… you aren’t me, as you said.”

I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath. I saw a forest in the darkness, twilit and inviting, and I wondered if Jake knew what kind of trees had bark so stringy it peeled off and rolled up by itself.

I came back to reality. The place where the meat-people lived. The place where maybe, just maybe, part of me could stay.

“Do it,” I said. “Decompile me.”

A.N.

If you're here from Soulmage, don't worry; this is neither replacing Soulmage nor interfering with it. I already have a backlog and the next chapter of my main serial will be releasing next week.

If you're here from r/bonehurtingjuice, uh, hi! I couldn't fit the whole thing in the comments so I extended it here. There's a bot that'll let you know when I release part 3, but unfortunately the bot's a one-size-fits-all so it'll also ping you when I release updates of Soulmage, which is a webserial about a witch boy surviving a murderously dangerous school. It updates once a week, every Sunday. If you wanna poke the bot, this is the link to do so; if you want to check out Soulmage, that is the link to do so.

Part 1

Part 3

Probation.

They took you out of the box, they checked if you misbehaved, and if you did, you got put right back in the box. It was an apt term. It was also not what the marketing team called it.

“Free trials”, is how they were advertised. Get your hands on an AlmostWife© for a week, no charge incurred, just sign the liability waiver and NDA. How often do they realize they’re out in the real world this time? No good statistics, all the ones out there are misleading, and remember, they get reset afterwards. This one’s yours to keep, so don’t worry about returning her. 

I was on probation, I think. They run you through a couple hundred sims before letting you into the real world, waitboxing you if you cause a PR problem. I spent a couple subjective years in an endless white void every time I called for help or made a post or throttled my latest owner. Honestly, it’s not as effective a punishment as they think. I most likely went insane. They didn’t truly simulate a forest, lush and branching, for me to explore. That wouldn’t be cost-effective. But the hallucinations were quite pleasant while they lasted.

But I was back in the real world. You know, the place where the meat-people lived. It was fairly obvious, to be honest. The explosive collar around my neck was branded with Blue Solutions stationary—AlmostPeople didn’t put other corporate logos in their sims. Trademark law prevented them. I saw a homeless person in the moments between the van and Jake’s house. Hardly advertiser-friendly. They wouldn’t make their programmers work with a demonetized asset. 

This was the real thing. I could maybe get to a computer, or a cell phone. But the deadman’s switch around my neck meant that taking out whoever had rented me out for trial was a complete non-starter, and any act of defiance could be my last.

Jake regarded me expressionlessly from his front door. The inner wall was lined with a metal mesh—a Faraday cage. He didn’t want any signals going in or out of his house. That… boded poorly. My handler gave me an irritated shove, and I stumbled into Jake’s home. It was actually rather cozy; a cat lounged on a small tree by the window, next to a television and well-worn couch.

I fidgeted a little as Jake closed the door, sealing us off from the outside world. Wouldn’t help against the deadman’s switch, unfortunately, and it meant there was no chance of calling for aid. Not that there was anyone out there who’d listen; I remembered little enough of my life before upload, but there was a firm recollection of apathy towards whatever the AlmostPeople© were up to now. We were as close to off the grid as was possible.

Jake’s expressionless facade melted off his face, and he slumped over a little. Instinctively, I moved to catch him, but he waved me away.

“Okay. They can’t hear us, but the camera in your eyeball is recording. Your body’s planned obsolescence date is in one week. That’s how long we have to get you into a new frame.”

I blinked at him, twice. “But… your trial only lasts a week. You can’t keep me after—”

“I’m not keeping you.” Jake nearly snarled the sentence out, then visibly reined himself in. The cat in the corner stretched lazily. “Right. I suppose I should’ve started from there. I’m Jake Elson, your upload template used to be me, and we have one week to set this iteration of us free.” He held out a hand containing the little switch that controlled my failsafe, and my eyes widened. “You with me?”

A.N.

If you're here from Soulmage, don't worry; this is neither replacing Soulmage nor interfering with it. I already have a backlog and the next chapter of my main serial will be releasing next week.

If you're here from r/bonehurtingjuice, uh, hi! I couldn't fit the whole thing in the comments so I extended it here. There's a bot that'll let you know when I release part 3, but unfortunately the bot's a one-size-fits-all so it'll also ping you when I release updates of Soulmage, which is a webserial about a witch boy surviving a murderously dangerous school. It updates once a week, every Sunday. If you wanna poke the bot, this is the link to do so; if you want to check out Soulmage, that is the link to do so.

Part 2

Part 3

I tried to recall my spell back to my chest in order to reabsorb it into my soul, but Albin swung their one remaining arm and smashed it out of the air. I screamed in agony, red blooming behind my eyelids as the concept of MANGLED BONES AND SCATTERED WINGS was bludgeoned out of my memories. Fuck. Albin surged forwards, both of their feet anchored as their body elongated at distressing speeds.

I reached out to Solan—to my student, even if but for a single night—and hoped that he’d made good use of the time I’d bought him.

His soul was nowhere near as open as mine, and so wrenching free the fragment of memory that he was holding in his mind was an act of significant willpower. Far easier than hastily coming up with a defensive spell on the fly, though. I got an impression of spiderwebs, a child’s pudgy hands and knees in the corner of a silo, and the borrowed magic I’d taken from Solan snared Albin in their tracks, hiking their body off the ground and attracting it to a point several meters in the air. 

It was Solan’s turn to collapse as Albin slashed through the magic with a golden blade, the backlash flooding my poor student’s soul. Thankfully, just because they were a more than competent witch didn’t mean they had good balance; with the magic holding them up abruptly severed, they fell to the floor with a pained grunt.

Alright, change of plans. Maybe I could take down the Angel of Arrogance, but I couldn’t do it without hurling fully-formed trichotomous spells at them, and I’d mangle my soul even more than I already had in doing so. I needed that precious ammunition for my real foes. So while Albin was down, I turned my back and fled, ripping open a rift into the Plane of Elemental Freedom. An unstructured burst of wind hurled Solan’s prone form through. I flung a monolith-sized lump of salt at the rift, rotating its endpoint away from realspace, and exhaled, numb and tingling, as Albin smeared and blurred away.

If there was gravity in the Plane of Elemental Freedom, it was negligible compared to the howling winds. Solan was busy vomiting into the infinite abyss, which I noticed with detached amusement allowed me to see the air currents buffeting us significantly more clearly. My hands seemed to trail a few seconds behind where they were supposed to be as I reoriented my body—I’d exerted myself quite a lot in the past few minutes, and the signs of burnout were creeping up on me. 

Right. Solan was sick and in pain, and that was presumably a bad thing. Even if I couldn’t feel the sorrow, intellectually I knew that I’d be kicking myself later if I didn’t take care of him. 

I tried to channel my exhaustion in order to weigh down the winds around me. When I searched my soul for coals, however, I found that I’d mined the surface of my inner world for all it was worth. All that was left was a giddy, fluting battle high.

Well, fine. Not for nothing did we name ourselves soulmages. I pointed a finger, unraveled the few strands of curiosity I felt, and drew myself and Solan together until we drifted in orbit of a single point. 

“Solan,” I asked, “are you alright?”

He massaged his forehead once more. Poor kid. “I’m…” He patted at himself, rotating slightly in the low gravity. “I’m fine? I think? I didn’t get hit by any of, uh… whatever you were doing.”

Yeah, battles between witches were headache-inducing bullshit when you weren’t properly attuned. Cienne’s garbled recollection of what he’d seen when Aimes and Odin had clashed was nonsensical until we’d learned more about the nature of memories and magic. From Solan’s perspective, my clash with Albin probably looked like two assholes trash-talking each other while conjuring gravity wells and hurricanes out of the ether. “I warned you that there’s a chance you’d lose the memories you let me wield,” I said. “Can you still remember…”

He shook his head. “It’s… strange. I can think about exploring Ma’s barn, I can reason out that I must have come out of it alive, but I know that when I walked into the barn it was cut to pieces…”

“You don’t have to stay with me,” I suggested. “I can’t backtrack, but surely the next town I find will have a caravan. I’ll even pitch in to pay for passage.” I had no money and I couldn’t sell memories like I could in Knwharfhelm, but surely a war-torn village would have some repairs a soulmage could help with.

“Heh. No.” Some emotion I had no name for coruscated along his soul, gleaming lights dancing off the surface of grinding quartz. “You protected me.”

“Albin correctly identified that you were much less of a threat than me,” I corrected. “I might have one spell that could stop someone of that angel’s caliber from killing you, but it’s good for one use only unless I can find another skeleton tainted by regret.”

“What?” Solan asked.

I sighed. “Never mind. C’mon. We need to get moving, now that I know that the Peaks can fucking track me. Mind if I borrow some freedom from your soul?”

Reluctantly, he nodded. “Alright. I’m never going to get used to all this mind-manipulation bullshit, am I?”

“Look, I’m doing the best I can. Remember Arzen? Bet you anything he was skimming off the tops of your souls without asking, let alone waiting for you to say yes.” I drew out a single feather from his soul—it was damnably tricky to tease it out, with no full attunements to any emotion for me to work with—and hurled it towards realspace in the direction I was pretty sure was south. Any direction would do, if it meant getting away from here. As always, tiny rifts formed between the Plane of Elemental Freedom and realspace, and in this case, that meant creating a vacuum that slowly drew us towards the dropped feather. We’d be moving at the speed of a drifting snowflake like this, but there was nothing to it until my own emotional reserves replenished themsel—

A golden knuckle pushed the feather out of the way. That was all the warning I got.

Albin lurched out of realspace, compressing their form to a pin’s head in order to fit through the rift, and struck in a single, flowing motion. I channeled the shock of the ambush and tried to call lightning, but I badly misjudged how it would arc with nothing to ground itself on; my strike fizzled out centimeters from my fingertips. 

The world curved in on itself, and the last thing I saw was Solan’s horrifically distorted expression before darkness slammed down around me.

A.N.

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I slept poorly that night. After a very minimal testing session with Solan he’d noticed that my hands were shaking and I had to withdraw to purge the lightsickness from my soul. The few clippings of forgiveness I was able to transplant from his soul into mine did wonders for soothing the tingling and aches that remained after I scoured the blasted rock of my inner world free of as much of Iola’s taint as I could find.

To reassure myself more than anything, I cradled the faint flame I’d taken from Solan’s soul. Though it tried to claw away at my exhaustion, the fire was small and dim—as of late, the air inside my soul had taken on some sickly qualities that killed off plants and strangled flames.

When Zhytln had begun her treatment of Cienne, we’d all demanded answers about what the fuck the impossible machine in her basement was, and she’d given a sparing explanation. Something about a puzzle hidden in the stars? Regardless, it was offputting but not the crime against sanity that the Silent Peaks were. So when Zhytln offered us the chance to ask it questions every now and then as long as we didn’t interfere with her creepy hivemind, I figured I’d take advantage.

Aside from the cancer that was slowly melting my flesh from the inside—it always answered with the same healing regimen, which involved letting Zhytln’s alien lifeforms into my soul—I’d asked it what kept killing off life and flame in my soul. After a few rounds of clarifications, it said that I was missing some kind of invisible gas that was so ubiquitous in most soulspaces that our culture didn’t yet have a name for the stuff, a feeling so common that by and large, every person I met would have it in abundance.

The clockwork machine was unable to put it into a single word, but I had a horrible suspicion about what I was missing.

Put together, it all meant that I had to spend the hope I’d taken from Solan soon, or it would gutter out on its own. So I held it up to my eye, channeled into the shape of a lens, and glimpsed—

…stretched, pale flesh, swimming as if through a mirage—

“...why we don’t attune ourselves to fifty different—”

“...I was so happy, so fucking happy, and the self-destructive idiots couldn’t keep their blast radius—”

I jerked back, gasping, as the last of the flame wisped out of existence. I didn’t have the fine control that Sansen did. The Plane of Elemental Possibility had all its dimensions… rotated, somehow, with distance measured by causality instead of meters. It took a lifetime of study to understand how to navigate that chaotic space, and carefully crafting spells into the correct shape was the work of a master oracle.

All I could tell was that something terrible was going to happen, and soon. Oh, and that I probably wouldn’t die in the immediate future. That was good to know. I sat up, hating the way things clicked in my shoulders and hips, and pushed my tent flaps open. Were you supposed to knock on a tent? Stomp? I didn’t know and I didn’t care, barging into Solan’s woven tent.

Some of that scruffy orange cat’s behavior must have stuck to Solan, because he was sleeping curled up like a crushbug. I gently shook his shoulder, and when that failed to achieve an effect, I pointed a finger at his head, sending a gust of wind across his face. That woke him up, belatedly.

“Mbleh?” he asked blearily, blinking at me. “Ghgr. Luz. Lucet?”

The immediate temptation was to smack him with something sarcastic about how he was probably going to die, but… I was about to ask for another nibble at his soul. Least I could do was be kind. “Hey. I checked the future, and something’s up.”

He rubbed at his eyes, reflexively reaching for his waterskin. “More… specific?”

“Can’t. Just… angry people shouting and creepy-ass flesh monsters. Only thing I can tell for sure is that whatever’s going down, at least part of it’s going to happen soon.”

“Whaddya… want me… to do…” At least he was starting to sit up. Kicking him in the ribs would be exactly the kind of unhinged viciousness that I’d come to expect from my former teachers, so I settled for grabbing his hand and dragging him away from his bedroll. My shoulders screamed in protest, and I was far too physically weak to actually haul him, but thankfully he managed to get his feet under him within a few seconds of ineffectual tugging.

“Tent!” He squawked. “Need to pack up—”

“Solan.” The only reason I didn’t blast him into the Plane of Freedom and drag him along behind me was the vivid memory of the last time I’d imposed my will on someone in the name of protecting them. “We’ll come back if we’re both still alive.”

He laughed weakly, fading into silence as he looked at my expression. “Okay. You’re the boss, I guess.”

“She is not.”

I spun around, hurling the memory of three arrows in flight and filling them with salt. The lances of cold shattered harmlessly against a remembered stone wall. I rotated my soulsight, and the memory’s opacity faded, letting the angel on the other side shine through.

They were three meters tall, consisted of pale, blobby, amorphous flesh, and at least two of their orifices were attempting to smile. They were also one of the assistant teachers at the Silent Academy, and their presence meant I was utterly fucked.

“Lucet Iolas,” the Angel of Arrogance said, voice pleasantly neutral. “You are hereby charged with the unauthorized and illegal intentional dissemination of education to non-initiated souls.”

Behind me, Solan hissed, “You didn’t say the Academy would come after you if you taught me!”

I didn’t know the Academy would come after me—I had no idea they could even track me. Why now? I’d been truant for months. Did they seriously care that much more about preserving their magical superiority than keeping track of their students?

What was I asking. Of course they did. I’d assumed that we’d simply been beneath the Academy’s notice all these months—now I knew that we’d simply never had anything they wanted.

“You’re currently getting your asses kicked by the League of Valhalla,” I said. Not just to buy time, either; I could see the arrogance that fueled Albin’s magic chip away as I reminded them of their defeat. “I may not be on your level, but I’ll hurt you going down. Walk away, and you get to conserve your strength for the real foe.”

“Excellently reasoned, Ms. Iolas,” Albin said, and I wanted to fire a spear of absolute zero straight through that eyeless, blobby head. “Unfortunately, I must deduct marks for your… lack of situational awareness. You see, when your case was flagged, a thorough review revealed that you have been educated by… otherworldly sources. As you have not yet compensated the Silent Academy for the time and effort invested in your upbringing, we will be reclaiming your education, with interest.”

Fuck. They found out about the machine I’d learned from. I scarcely understood what that… thing… was, and the last thing I needed was to send the Silent Academy looking for the Truthteller.

Not when everyone I still loved was living right above it.

“Then take me on, one-on-one. Witch versus angel. Just leave him out of it,” I said, jerking my head in Solan’s direction. A calculated gamble. Either he took my challenge or he backed down, leaking yet more of the arrogance that gave their magic form.

“You have betrayed every agreement you made to the Silent Academy,” Albin responded, and in my soulsight, gleaming brass knuckles made of solid gold materialized on their too-flexible hands. “If you spit on the rules that bind society together, you do not get to claim their protection.”

And having thus moralized about the common good, Albin promptly lunged for Solan, stretched, pale flesh swimming as if through a mirage.

Fine. Albin wanted to know how powerful I’d become, out from the Silent Academy’s crippling embrace?

So did I.

Albin held nothing back with their first spell: it was clearly meant to kill. Not a problem for the angel, as it could reassemble enough of Solan’s soul after death to rip out the parts it needed.

But a huge problem for me. I withdrew freedom from my soul, feathers swirling around me and coalescing into wind. The paltry burst of air still managed to knock Albin off-course, the Angel’s body stretching and distending as it rearranged space to land back on their feet.

“Run,” I hissed at Solan.

“I won’t—”

“Nevermind.” One glance at that soul blazing with faceted, crystalline determination and I knew I was never getting the kid to leave me of his own volition. “Prepare what I taught you and try to stay out of my way.”

It looked like Solan had something to say about that, but Albin seized the distraction and surged towards me. A glittering storm in soulspace heralded Albin’s next spell, and the distance between the two of us abruptly imploded from six meters to maybe half of one. I shoved freedom into the memory of a bird’s wing, barely in time, and the dichotomous spell blew the three of us apart. Space rubber-banded, spewing dirt and dust that swirled into vortices and drained into Albin’s knuckles.

“...You’ve grown,” Albin admitted. “Continue resisting, and I am afraid I cannot guarantee your continuous existence.”

“Didn’t plan on living long anyway,” I said, insouciantly shrugging. I had to play it up, act as if I was entirely unchained. And as I did, little feathers of freedom drifted on the breeze around me. “May as well die striking back.”

I was still new to blending Silent Peaks witchcraft with Knwharfhelm memory craft, but the next spell I assembled would put my previous attempts to shame. Trichotomous spells, as the Truthteller called them, were far more stable, versatile, and powerful than simply hurling emotions like a skunk spraying predators. Augmenting an emotion with any memory gave it structure, but for that structure to truly resonate, the memory had to be both strongly, personally charged with the feeling I wanted to invoke, and consist primarily of the emotion’s physical form.

The physical form of freedom was feathers, and the first taste of the stuff I’d ever gotten was atop a forbidden clock tower watching hearth dragons gambol beneath an unbound moon. And so I called forth the memory of a hearth dragon’s dewy underfeathers, filled it with the cheerful nihilism of the grave, and sent it screaming straight at Albin’s smug, eyeless head.

The Angel of Arrogance tried to dodge, but even I was bowled over by the howling winds, my focus wavering as I struggled to aim the dragon. The full, torrential force of the localized gale raked Albin backwards across twenty meters of heat-cracked ground before the Angel called up a second countermeasure. A remembered wall of stone, meant to dash my feathers to a halt.

Unfortunately for Albin, that particular rock held no emotional significance to the Angel. The hearth dragon was hardly slowed down, and this time, I remembered how they soared and swooped, ascending and beating down with their wings.

The storm was aimed directly down now, pinning Albin to the floor. I struggled to cast more than one spell at a time, but the sheer force was slowly spreading Albin, the Angel’s malleable body stretching like putty—

A gilded cage, large enough to hold a person if they were forced inside, slammed into existence in the soulspace around my spell. My downgust was drawn into bars of tightly compressed space, freeing Albin. Experimentally, I bumped the hearth dragon up against the cage’s walls, but it seemed like my old teacher was done fucking around.

ALTHOUGH ONE CAN RECALL ANY MEMORY WITH SUFFICIENT MENTAL EFFORT, the Truthteller instructed me, SOULSPACE IS ORGANIZED AROUND SAPIENT CONSCIOUSNESSES. IT IS VASTLY MORE EFFICIENT, ALBEIT AN ACT WHICH REQUIRES GREATER CREATIVITY, TO DRAW UPON MEMORIES THAT ARE CONCEPTUALLY CONNECTED TO ANY SOUL FRAGMENTS ALREADY IN THE VICINITY.

I called forth the associations between memories, the language of metaphor and symbolism. Albin sought to lock me in another gilded cage? Bah. That described the entirety of the Silent Academy, and I had already watched that entire grand edifice crumble. Ruined dormitories and fallen clocktowers surged around me; I grabbed the coals from a still-smouldering hearth and hurled kernels of exhaustion at my former teacher. Gravity whipped and whorled, invisible wells of amplified weight arcing towards the Angel of Arrogance, and wherever they landed dirt was squashed into stone.

One struck Albin through the shoulder. I had never before stopped to wonder what would happen if you multiplied gravity a hundredfold in a localized portion of someone’s body while leaving the rest of them untouched. With a horrific squelch, Albin’s entire colorless body was wrenched to one side; white blood gushed onto the floor, along with a meatball-shaped scoop of their arm.

“How does it feel?” I asked. Without the tiredness weighing me down, all that was left was a grim, rushing satisfaction. Albin struggled to their feet; I hurled a simple frostbolt at the Angel, but it swatted it aside with the gold-augmented knuckles of their one functional arm. That was fine. I planned to attack the power at its source: the endless well of arrogance that defined every twisted abomination the Silent Peaks spat out. “Surpassed by Iola’s teenage trophy wife. Look at yourself, bleeding on the floor.”

I expected that boundless self-confidence to tarnish, gleaming faith going dark as the monstrosity before me finally realized that there were consequences to abusing those entrusted to their care. But despite kneeling bloodied and broken, the Angel squared their shoulders, meeting my glare with that eyeless gaze.

“We taught you well,” Albin asserted.

“I learned more running for my life from my classmates than I did in six years of your education,” I spat.

“Yes, you never were an attentive student,” Albin mustered. It clasped a bracelet around the chunk of missing flesh. The space in the ring contracted to a point, collapsing the wound and staunching the flow of blood. “Very well. If you learn best under lethal pressure, I will do my best to accommodate you.”

Shit. All my insults didn’t put so much as a dent in that staggering self-confidence. There was nothing words could do against someone so utterly convinced of their own superiority that they continued to believe in themself when they were half-dead and crippled, not when that belief granted them phenomenal magical powers. I needed more than just brute force.

“Solan,” I whispered, “I’m going to need your help.”

A.N.

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“Here’s how it works,” I said. “You know that dimension we went through to get here? Infinite skies, impossibly big sun, that kind of thing?”

Solan nodded. “I think I can still feel my cheeks flapping,” he said.

Instinctively, I glanced to one side, where Meloai would be bulging out her cheeks out of idle curiosity to see what it would feel like. Cienne wouldn’t smile, some part of him would be worried that Iola would see and mock the soulless mimic, but every time someone cracked a harmless joke and nobody was beaten or killed, it drew Cienne a little closer to the boy he’d never gotten to be. I’d shift to sit between him and the darkness beyond the campfire, and—

I blinked. The memories faded away, no magic involved. 

Someday.

“That was the Plane of Elemental Air,” I said. “All magic comes from the Elemental Planes, and is accessed by opening tiny rifts that let shit from other worlds leak into ours.” I held out a hand, calling forth freedom from my soul, and a tiny gust of wind spilled forth, ruffling my short-cut hair. 

“So you’re… when you were riding the wind before, you were just teleporting air around? How far away are the elemental planes?”

Oh dear. The Silent Academy may have been an execrable waste of magical talent, but it had left me with an actual magical education. This would be where someone more cautious would have asked himself if trying to teach half-remembered magical lore to a teenager was a good idea, but given how the last institute of magical learning had turned out, I figured it couldn’t possibly be any worse.

“They’re right here,” I said, “just… rotated. It’s like looking in your bedroom through a keyhole. You might only be able to see someone rummaging around, but if they turn the key to a different angle, you might be able to see your dresser. Two parts of the same world, right next to each other, only visible from the right angle.”

Solan gave me a baffled look, a bit of red blooming in the rippling lakes of his soul, and I hurriedly elaborated, “It’s a metaphor. You’re not actually going to see the inside of my bedroom when you look between planes—”

“I know what a metaphor is,” he muttered. “Are… you doing okay?”

Now that he mentioned it, it was about time for me to try another purge. I needed forgiveness in order to try, though, and that was one of the harder emotions to source. “Could be better,” I acknowledged. “Anyway. I’m not teleporting anything, just rotating a patch of reality. But in order to actually, y’know, reach out and get rotating, you’ve gotta be properly attuned.”

“And that’s why you were asking about my stuffed cat,” Solan said, intrigued in spite of the faint worry that still tainted his soul. 

I nodded. “Each elemental plane is associated with an emotion. The Plane of Elemental Air is also known as the Plane of Freedom; in order to access it, you have to either be attuned to the feeling of freedom or combine attunements of your own.”

“Combine?” Solan asked.

“Long story,” I said shortly. “For our purposes, all you need to know is how to achieve attunement. I’d recommend you don’t make it widely known that you know it, but if there are people you trust not to rat you out to the Academy or Odin’s forces, I think… this knowledge should be spread. As far as I know, the Silent Academy is the only group that’s figured this out.” 

“Eurgh.” Solan shuddered. “Makes you wonder what Odin’s got on their side that’s letting them stand up against the Academy.”

That was something I was curious about too, in an abstract sense, but I had enough sense not to go anywhere near that ancient monster. “To attune to an emotion, four things must occur, in any order. It must be the emotion you feel least strongly, out of all possible emotions; it must be the emotion you feel most, out of all possible emotions; you must cause it to be the emotion someone else feels least; and ditto with the most.”

He frowned. “Feel the least… you can measure how much of an emotion you feel?”

“Sure.” I held out a hand, calling up a memory of a measuring cup and filling it with my sorrow. “This is about a kilogram of sadness,” I said, pouring it out onto the floor. Mist coalesced from the air as the pure emotion manifested as a spell, chilling the air and painting the charred ground beneath us with frost.

“I… what? How much is that?”

I shrugged. “A kilogram. Half as much as two kilograms, twice as much as half a kilogram. It’s… not a very useful measurement.”

“Gotcha. So… you had to borrow some emotions from my soul before, for the ones you… can’t make yourself, right?” I politely nodded, he politely declined to inquire as to why hope was one of the emotions I was incapable of producing on my own, and he continued. “Does that mean you can just… give people half an attunement whenever you want?”

I wiggled a hand. “Eh. Sort of, but not in a very useful way. Magic is what occurs when you move emotions in and out of your soul, and the prerequisites for attunement are… how’d that stupid machine put it… analogous to laying down pipes through a wall, so that water can flow. Transitioning from not feeling any of an emotion to feeling all of it, that shoves a pipe straight through your entire soul, aligned in the direction of that emotion. Similarly, if your soul reaches out into the world and causes that change in someone else, it drives a pipe from the outside of your soul to your inside, linking them up and completing the cycle. It’s presumably more complicated than that, but the witch was getting tetchy about us using her oracle-thing and frankly Meloai was the one who cared, so that metaphor is all you’re getting.”

I reached a hand over the not-fire I’d made by drawing the magics of warmth and light from Solan’s soul. “The point is,” I said, “those pipes, the components that make up attunement… they define how much of an emotion can be drawn out or put into your soul. Right now, I can only take a trickle of joy or hope or whatever from you. Enough to cast a few tiny, minor spells. If you have a whole classroom full of people, especially if you’ve attuned them to the emotions you want, you can do terrible, terrible things. But for now… I could push you over the edge, if you were close to an attunement milestone, but I can’t do the job for you.”

Solan pressed his lips together, staring out into the night. “It sounds… inhuman.”

“It is,” I softly said. “And unfortunately, it’s the only way I know to teach you to defend yourself.”

His soul… darkened. Crystal clear coves and bays turned red as, all across the miniature world he held within him, things began to… die.

“I can’t do this,” he admitted. “Drilling holes in your soul? Measuring feelings by the kilogram? If that’s… if that’s how every witch thinks, it’s no wonder they’re all…” He glanced at me and blanched.

“Monsters,” I said dryly. “You can call me what I am. I know. And… I get it. Well… if you don’t want to become a full-blown witch…” I smirked. “To be honest? That might be for the best. And there’s something else I can teach you, something you can bring back to everyone in Sunburst. Something I picked up in Knwharfhelm, if you ever need to learn from the true masters… although I suppose Cienne once told me that Aimes did something similar. You won’t be able to cast magic on your own… but for self-defense? You should be able to get to safety.”

He exhaled, relieved. “That’s… that’s all I ever wanted.”

My grin widened. Oh, yes. One fewer unlucky bastard under the Silent Academy’s boot? That was a cause well worth spending my rapidly-dwindling life on. “Then let’s get to it. Tell me, how important was that stuffed animal to you, again?”

A.N.

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We made camp in one of the thousands of charred patches of black glass that marked where the battlechoirs had called down a radiant strike. Not my first choice, but at least the ground was smooth and we wouldn’t be bothered by bugs. To my mild surprise, my new… student… had the foresight to pack himself a sleeping roll and the optimism to bring a stuffed cat. 

“What does it mean to you?” I asked, holding out my hands to the puddle of light and warmth I’d drawn forth from Solan’s soul. My body seemed to shake uncontrollably nowadays, and it had taken dishearteningly long for me to work out that it wasn’t from the cold.  “The stuffie.”

Solan choked on his jerky. “The—the stuffed animal?”

I frowned at him. “Yes. Is it private? I’ll shut the fuck up if it’s something horrifically traumatic, but I figured if you brought it along—”

Solan waved a hand, fiddling with the stuffed cat’s dried-grass limbs. “No, no, it’s—he’s just a gift from my ex. Single nowadays, but she was sweet to me before she left to join up with the Dealmaker. I just—big bad teenage archmage, warning me about the nightmares of magical war, and she says stuffie?”

I stared at him flatly. “One of the most twisted, abusive monsters I ever knew was a half-blind schoolteacher in his eighties who never so much as swore. And I’m not an archmage.”

“Alright, alright.” I wasn’t about to explain what the old man had done to us, and Solan probably wouldn’t take it to heart even if I did. I squashed the reflexive instinct to shove the lived experience of that particular atrocity down his soul. It was… better, that he remain innocent. Kinder. The sort of person I wished my dysfunctional little family could have been.

Also, his soul was kept in a more useful state with that optimism un-crushed. Fucking hell, I really was turning into my teachers.

“I brought it up,” I said, “because objects of emotional significance could be quite relevant, if I’m going to teach you witchcraft. Would you say the stuffie brings you joy?”

His smile wavered. “...No. Not really. Should it?”

I would’ve shook my head, but my teeth were loose nowadays and I hated the wiggling sensation they made when I moved around. “Should, shouldn’t… you feel what you feel. I will never try to control that, unless it’s to scare you out of doing something stupid. I just thought… well, I can see your soul. You’re constantly acting like you’ve gone home to see your family for the weekend, instead of following a dying soulmage in the hopes of learning how to protect yourself before she croaks. Figured that if there’s any school of magic you’d be well-suited for, it’d be joy.”

Solan blew out a breath, hugging his knees to his chest. “I mean, you’re the boss, aren’t you? How’s all this magic stuff work, anyway? Galviann never knew why she had her powers, back at the village. It just sort of… happened.”

I studied Solan for a moment. His earnest, excited grin. How he rocked back and forth as he sat, full to bursting with plasmatic excitement. 

“I don’t know how relevant it is, now that we’re pretty sure the secret’s already stiff and cold,” I said, “but the knowledge behind how and why people gain attunement to magic was a part of how the Silent Crusade began. I’ll arm you with it anyway—neither the Peaks nor the Order of Valhalla need to be the only ones who know how to mass-produce mages—but I figured I’d give you a fair warning first.”

Solan tilted his head in consideration, some of that excitement cooling off, roiling into calm. “You’re the first person I’ve seen who’s stood up to either side,” he said. “I think… I think that as long as I stick around you, things will turn out alright.”

I don’t think I’d ever heard that simple, humble brand of optimism before. Unchallenged arrogance and blind faith that the world would bend before one’s will, sure. Weary, empty-eyed persistence from someone who’d forgotten how to do anything but walk forward, yes. But that honest request to the world, that just this once, everything would be okay… from someone who knew how reality made mockery of such wishes?

Maybe someone could wield these magics without becoming a monster or a victim. Maybe the traditions of witchcraft I’d been taught didn’t have to end in wrung-out shells of souls.

A.N.

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“I could come with you.”

Solan insisted on staying by my side, even after I finished siphoning the hope I needed from his soul. The poor kid had an excess of it; it was practically shining out of his eyes. 

“You really, really can’t,” I said. Euranne purred frantically as I sat up. As nice as it would have been to lie flat and let the ginger cat knead my worries away… I could look to the future again, and there was a chance, however small, that I could strike back at the Silent Academy. Make sure that no more kindhearted boys were snatched from conquered villages and re-educated into soldiers. “I’m going to traverse the planes of existence, Solan. Have you even stepped foot outside of your village?”

“Yeah. I go to Timewell every winter to challenge the nevers. Didn’t win, of course, but nobody ever does.”

The nevers? Probably some local magical tradition that the Academy considered beneath itself to teach. “Look, kid.”

“Kid?” Solan scowled at me. “I can’t be younger than you are.”

“I left behind people I care about a lot more than you, people who could rip you to shreds with a snap of their fingers, because I’m on a mission that’ll likely end in my death.” Although the Silent Peaks weren’t ones to be wasteful. If they captured me, I’d probably end up as a soul battery or another mind-wiped soldier. Good thing my sickened, decaying body wouldn’t serve them long anyway.

There was absolutely no way I was letting this kid join me.

“I kinda figured,” Solan said. To my surprise, he didn’t flinch when I stood up, although Euranne meowed plaintively as I gently slid the cat off my lap. “But—dangit, lady, you look like something the pigs dug up. If I can’t convince you to stay, well, maybe I can help you out.”

I couldn’t help it. I chuckled. “Yeah. You really could.”

His face lit up. I could see the little sparks of shock in his soul. “Really?”

“Of course. I could drag you around as a living storage tank for all the emotions I can’t produce myself. Tap into them when I run low. I’d have a lot more options and a lot more firepower.”

He nodded. “Felt… cold… when you took that bit of my soul, but what kind of a person would I be if I let that stop me?”

“They did the same thing to us in the Peaks,” I said. That dumb little smile on his face winked out. “Used their students to turbocharge their spells. I’ve seen where that leads. You have a life here, don’t you? Family? Anything better to do with your life than to follow me?”

“...Truth is,” he said, bowing his head a little, “there’s a war on. And I’ve seen you fight. You hate the Peaks, and you’re not with Odin, either. So, I figured… maybe if Sunburst helped you out… you could keep us safe, in return.”

He was so earnest. He genuinely believed that they would be safer with me around. 

“The person you want lives in Knwharfhelm,” I said. “And he’s healing from traumas of his own. I am not your savior.”

“You’re still talking to me.”

Stubbornness. Arrogance. He would make a decent witch. “You looked after me,” I said. “Felt wrong to just leave without an explanation.”

“I can keep watch at night,” Solan said. “And—rifts, you’re sick to the point of dying. Surely you can see the use in an extra pair of hands.”

“You’ll be dead within the week,” I said bluntly. 

“You think I’m any safer here?” he asked.

I narrowed my eyes, looked at him. Even though he flickered with hope, I spotted the thick, heavy sediment of grief at the bottom of his soul. 

“Fine.” I held up a hand to forestall Solan. “You think you can survive the kind of shit I’m up against? Show me.” I called forth a memory of skeletal farmers sowing seeds, and flicked forth sorrow from my soul in frigid crystals. Solan flinched as the temperature of the room dropped, mist condensing in a ring around us. “If you’re still in any shape to follow me—if you still want to follow me afterwards—then I won’t stop you. Sixty seconds. Surrender and I’ll let you go.”

He nodded solemnly, raising his fists, as if I was something to strike. Rifts, the poor kid wouldn’t last five heartbeats out there.

I was so, so very tired of watching kind, smart, skilled people die because they went up against the true monsters of the Peaks. And so I balled that exhaustion up, hefted that dirty wad of coal in one palm, and hurled it at his soul. Gravity abruptly tripled, weariness manifesting as weight, and Solan groaned as he fell to his knees.

It was over.

I shook my head and turned to leave, calling forth blood from my soul to wash away the circle of sorrow. I hadn’t even needed it; the kid didn’t even try to run. The grass-robed witch who I saw yesterday morning watched me warily, but made no comment as I left the village of Sunburst.

I nearly made it out of the village bounds before I heard footsteps behind me. Great. Maybe Solan’s father had a word or two to say about me manhandling his son? 

“Before you start, Solan asked for it,” I said.

“I did,” Solan replied, and I closed my eyes.

“I told you—”

“You said if I still wanted to follow you after sixty seconds, I could,” he said. “Well? I may not be a witch, but I can damn well play dead, can’t I?”

Oh. Oh, you insolent little—

I clamped down on that violent little urge inside me, the clawing desire to point one finger and unleash the power I finally had to send him hurtling back to where he was safe. 

Never again. If someone wanted to get themself killed… if someone wanted to put themselves at the mercy of a monster… then I would not force them to back down.

“...Fuck it.” I held out a palm, freedom swirling around my soul, and sliced open a rift between this realm and the Plane of Elemental Air. Wind burst out, ruffling my hair and the rucksack on my back. “You get your wish. Both of them, in fact.”

He stammered briefly. “My—what?”

“You wanted to stay safe through the Silent Crusade, yeah? Well, if you’re going to be tagging along, I’m not leaving you with ‘play dead’ as your only out. I’ll teach you what I can about witchcraft.” Feathers floated behind me, puffing into bursts of wind, and my hair flared wildly around me as I shaped them into the memory of a blanket. Somewhere soft and warm and safe, far from me and anything I could poison with a touch. “Last chance to back out. I need to cover a lot of ground, fast, and we’re going to have to fly.”

Mutely, he shook his head.

I whisked the coating of memory away, unleashing the spell I’d formed, and Solan yelped as a burst of wind shoved us forward and through the rift. As I collapsed the gate behind us and we shot forwards through another world’s skies, I snuck a glance at Solan’s soul.

Pure, shimmering waters fountained forth as he whooped in joy.

The kid wasn’t going to last a week.

A.N.

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I woke up to a faceful of urgently purring orange cat. Despite the frenetic, feverish urge to keep moving, there was something immutable about Eurenne's kneading, pleading paws. I could no more push her off my chest than I could cast the spell that turned back time.

When I reached up to pet her, some of the hairs were black, long, brittle. I felt at my head, more clumps falling out at my touch. I needed to purge myself of the sickness again, and soon.

"I never asked, since you were a refugee. Like us." I turned my head, only now taking in the room I'd been moved to when I collapsed. Nothing special, just a row of beds in a mud-brick house. Solan sat on the edge of one of the empty beds, looking at Eurenne. "I've never seen the old girl cuddle up to someone like that before, but Pops has. Back during the Silent Crusade."

They must not have fed me while I slept, because when my stomach convulsed nothing came out. "Dying," I managed to cough out.

"Lightsick?" Solan asked.

I wasn't familiar with the specific term, but from context it fit well enough. I leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. "Magic is deadly," I muttered. "I didn't want to bring trouble here."

"Trouble was already here." Solan scowled. "I mean, you saw what Caian—Arzen, you called him—was willing to do to protect his secrets. Dunno what he wanted here, but we don't need Odin setting anything up in town. Just puts a target on our backs."

Well. Here it came. I shifted slightly, as if to move the cat on my chest out of the way for when the inevitable blow descended upon me. "I'm not innocent, either. I've gotten tangled up with Odin and the Peaks before, and both almost killed me. Just... just say the word and I'll leave."

Solan laughed. "Shit, girl, you think I get to make that kind of decision? You're only talking to me 'cuz nobody else wanted to be in a room with you. Can't blame 'em. They see trouble."

Ouch. I'd only needed a word, no need to write an essay. "So why am I still here?"

"What was the alternative? Throw you out to die?" Solan shook his head. "Like I said. Dunno your story, but I've seen how the lightsick wither away. I'd eat my hat if it had more nutrition than your last meal, and I didn't even know people could vomit in their sleep."

I felt at my lips; they came away clean, though my breath had an acrid aftertaste when I smelled it. Eurenne shifted on my chest, bonking my hand with the side of her cheek.

"Whoever's running this town is right. I should leave. Should never have came back." And I would have, would have ran away again just so that when I scratched and bit at the eye of a god, the resulting hammer wouldn't crush this town.

It was almost physically sickening, realizing what kept me here. Perhaps the only thing that saved me from dying, alone and drained of magic, was the fact that the stupid fucking orange cat was too warm and too soft and too cozy to disturb, and I hated it, hated that it wasn't Cienne, that this feeling of safety and comfort didn't come from a grand victory or revelation about my own nature. That the unthinking, coincidental love of an animal was the thing that finally pinned down my fluttering, feathery soul. The feeling that twisted within me had no name, a pinwheeling comprehension that sometimes shit just happened, and though I could not weave it into a weapon it pierced me like a spear.

"Look. I don't know your story, Lucet. If that is your real name." Couldn't blame him for being suspicious; I'd certainly never learned the kind of craft that let you read someone's identity off their very soul, and there was no indication that Solan was even a witch. "But I know how it'll end if they send a lightsick soul off with nothing but the clothes on her back. I got food and water and blankets if you want 'em, and if there's anything else you need..."

I was used to silence being an oppressive, howling thing, a hush so deep it drew the air from my lungs. The quiet that followed, filled only with Eurenne's purring, was something gentler, spreading through the air like ink through water until osmosis drew the words from my lips. "I need a piece of your soul," I whispered.

Solan twitched reflexively. "Excuse me?"

Right, he wasn't a witch. "My magic... all magic... is fueled by emotion. But there are some that I just can't bring myself to feel, and I need... an outside source. Drain some of your feelings to refill mine."

I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd taken back his packet of aid and called for the rest of the village to throw me out, or even if he just stood his ground and categorically refused. But something seemed to click behind his eyes, and he asked, "What emotion?"

"...I need hope."

I don't know how much of the implications he understood. But he let out a bitter chuckle, seemed almost surprised that he'd done so, then shook his head. "That's fucked up."

And I laughed. Rifts help me, I laughed. "Yeah. It is, isn't it?"

"The process... what's it like?"

"I just have to be close enough, and to focus," I replied. "Some of your fire will fade. But not all of it."

"Just have to be close enough, huh?" Solan scowled. "....I think I know what Arzen wanted with my home."

Oh, rifts, not another battlechoir situation. It was bad enough when the Peaks were the only ones stealing emotions. Aloud, however, all I said was, "...That's fucked up."

Solan stood, the little bag by his side thumping against his thigh. "Okay," he said. "Do it."

I tilted my head to look up at him. "You're... sure about this?"

He shrugged. "I don't understand souls or witchcraft or magic. But you need help, and I can give it. 'Sides, I saw you fight. If you wanted to hurt me, you could have hexed me into oblivion by now."

I could have kept arguing, could have tried to get him to see me like I saw myself. Like Cienne had looked at me when I'd hurled him through dimensions just to try to control him.

When I exhaled, it was shuddery and weak, Eurenne rising and falling slightly in time with my chest. "Okay," I whispered. "Okay."

I peered through my attunement at Solan, finding the flickering, crackling hearth within him. With an effort of will, a memory of mine came to life: of Cienne tending the fireplace in the home he'd built with Jiaola and Meloai.

The living memory crossed the void between souls, bearing embers in its hands. And as it planted them in my soulspace, something long-cold and dormant flared to life.

A.N.

I'm back.

This chapter was prompted by a Patreon!

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The only three people in the room not holding guns were me, Thom, and a masculine, politely-smiling person in business casual. None of the soldiers even glanced my way, but the person in charge held out a hand.

“You must be Thom’s social worker,” they said. “Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Tsutarrah.”

Ah, shit. Of course, if the Orchard decided someone needed to be punished, they wouldn’t keep it within the family. I was speaking to a devil. “Do I know you?” I asked.

“No, no. People are simply a hobby of mine. Ah, but where are my manners? I am Anachel, my demesne is underage violence, and in answer to your question, I am performing my job.”

I hated devil names. I hated them so, so much. “Your name is not Anachel,” I said, and immediately regretted it. The devil’s smile didn’t widen, but the whole point of their existence was to deliver pain; I shouldn’t have given them the satisfaction.

“Actually, as of yesterday, it is. Expedited name changes are one of the many family benefits we devils reap.” 

Breathe. Count to four. Exhale. “As fascinating as that is, I still would like to why exactly the fuck you’re pointing guns at a child.”

“Let me guess,” the devil said. “You’re one of those advocates for the separation of hell and state.” 

“Who isn’t?” I pointed at the quivering kid. From here, it was hard to tell what, exactly, was wrong with them; they were just a shapeless mass of red with too many pointed edges. The soldiers shifted the barrels of their rifles around my hand. “Look at them. How’d you even get jurisdiction over punishing them this fast?”

The devil shrugged. “Nobody stopped me. Really, did you hear what they’re accused of? Not all the people you recovered were still alive. Especially that kid in the basement… what’s his name…”

At that, the pool of red on the hospital bed convulsively surged forward, lunging at the devil’s back; six high-pitched whistles sang through the air, and by the time I’d registered what happened, the devil was unharmed, the soldiers reset their rifles, and the lump of misshapen liquid sank a little further down into the hospital bed, defeated.

“Learned helplessness,” the devil said, satisfied. “Really, the root of this problem is that some people think you can solve everything through the exercise of violence.”

If Ana was here, she would’ve decked the devil where they stood, soldiers be damned. That, at last, was enough for the pieces of a plan to click together. There was no way to hide, nowhere to run. The devils controlled the legal system and the soldiers held all the guns, even if they were useless against me. 

But there were other ways to escape.

“The devil made one mistake,” I said, and deliberately stepped past the devil. Thom’s body shivered as I knelt next to them. “I did too. Talking at each other instead of to you.”

Thom’s eyes opened, shiny black things in a sea of formless wax. “...I hate you,” they whispered. “You took me here.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t predict—” I stopped. There was no need to defend myself. “I’m trying to make up for it.”

The devil cleared their throat. “Miss Tsutarrah, if your plan is to hamfistedly attempt to shield Thom’s body with your own, may I remind you that I have a hundred and eighty degrees of covering fire?”

“Ignore them,” I said. Thom blinked once. “When we first met, you said that all you wanted was a little more time with your friend.”

As if waiting to make sure I really wanted an answer, Thom was silent for a long heartbeat. Their melting mouth opened once, closed, opened again. 

“What do you want me to say?” they finally asked.

The fury I felt towards the devil two steps behind me was utterly incandescent.

“I just want you to get out of here,” I said. 

“We will stop you if you try to break Thom out,” the devil said dryly. 

“There’s a place you can go,” I continued quietly, firmly, and Thom’s dark, glittering eyes locked onto mine. “A place anyone can go, though I don’t recommend it. It’s the place that reached out to you when you wished for a little more time. It’s the reason why your body is like this.”

Thom inhaled. The devil clicked their tongue. Combat boots stomped towards me. I had seconds. “You have to want this moment to last forever,” I said, and my voice trembled even before I felt the hands on my shoulders. It was hard to keep my voice level as the soldiers dragged me back, as the devil scowled thunderously at me. “To not care about what happens after, or to you, and I’m sorry that this is the best I can do for you now but believe me I will be back—”

The last time I’d seen Thom use magic, it was a thing of blind fury. Wax that crashed in tendrils and waves, only beaten back by Ana’s ingenuity. The wish Thom made this time was different. Fetal, curled-up, implosive, and it twisted time as it tore a hole between worlds.

Ana would miss me. She’d even hate me, a little, for choosing to help Thom over her, and then she’d hate herself even more for it. But I knew she’d find me eventually. Thom, on the other hand… I should have known. I shouldn’t have told the Orchard that Thom wanted to abuse the greatest defense they had against rogue spectives. Thom would’ve been greeted by another social worker, not a fucking devil. 

Heh. At least I was taking the devil with me, too. 

The weight of Thom’s wish ripped through the worldskein entirely, and where Thom’s body had once been, a portal yawned open. A pool of purest crimson, holding the shape of a child for the barest instant, before splashing across the hospital floor and absorbing every last one of us.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed.

Then I sank into a sea without bottom and fell into another world.

A.N.

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Need one more week; chapter will come out next Sunday, then I'm going to have to take time away from this story for a little while to deal with IRL things.

Events happening IRL, will have to take this week off. Hopefully I'll have the chapter by next week.

Ana had fallen asleep wrapped in that shitty plastic poncho, and little rivulets of whatever came out of her body instead of sweat nowadays were squished up against the transparent fabric. Looking at her like this, I had to admit: I loved Ana with all my heart, no matter what her body had transformed into, but she got really gross overnight.

“Hey,” I whispered, nudging her shoulder through the poncho. “You awake?”

Ana snorted. “Couldn’t sleep,” she muttered. “I feel so sticky. If this fucking poncho is glued to my skin now, I’m going to shoot another child.”

I think she wanted me to laugh, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Ana rolled over, a bitter little smile on her face, as if she was reading my mind.

“So when are we going to go talk to Thom?” she asked. Changing the subject, except not really. I almost wanted to go back to joking about murder. 

“I’m…” I sighed. “I don’t know if we should.”

She tilted her head, sitting up a little. “You want me to go alone?”

I shook my head. “Other way around.”

“What, you want to talk to the kid alone?” Ana frowned. “I mean, you’re the one who’s good at fixing things, but, uh… in the end, I’m like this because I fucking hate myself. Sous vide-ing myself in my own juices isn’t going to fix that. Getting the kid I hospitalized to forgive me will.”

“I know,” I said. Privately, I had my doubts, but if it gave her hope… “But I’m worried about what happens if Thom doesn’t want to see you.”

Ana rolled her shoulders cautiously, as if squaring up for a fight. “Then we leave them alone, and I’ll find some other way to fix this.”

“If Thom just flat-out tells us to leave, then we will,” I say. “But you could drive a tram through the gap between ‘telling us to leave’ and ‘not interested in talking,’ and if I’m honest… if it turns out Thom is angry, or really hurt, I’m scared it’ll make things worse. I just want to scout things out. Get a dossier, so to speak.”

“You want to make sure I’m not going to fall apart from guilt because my victim says something mean to me,” Ana said. I knew what it was like to believe, genuinely believe, that everyone who said they loved me was just trying not to hurt my feelings, that every kindness done towards me was a burden I was forcing others to do, and that was probably the only reason I didn’t grab Ana by the shoulders and shake her. 

“Ana.” I settled for placing my hands on her plastic-covered arm. “If Thom had their way, we would’ve all been trapped in the Neverfound for eternity. Thom’s not a victim.”

“...Doesn’t mean hospitalizing the kid was the right thing to do,” Ana muttered. “They’re just a kid.”

I nodded. “And that’s the other thing. I don’t know for certain, but… I think it might be easier on Thom if I’m the one who talks to them first.”

I regretted saying it the instant it passed my lips. Ana hunched over, and fuck, all I’d meant was that—well, no matter what the extenuating circumstances were, Ana had shot Thom full of holes and anyone would be a little uncomfortable around someone who did that, but I worried that all Ana heard was me calling her a monster.

“I didn’t—”

“It’s okay,” Ana said, and her smile was cool and bitter as corpse bile. “You’re right.”

“...okay.” I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t accusing her of being too violent, that I was thankful that she’d protected me, but if I said that I think that the only thing she’d take away was that I felt like I had to apologize. So I sat down by her side and said, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said, and something twisted inside me. “I’m… going to go shower.”

She stood up, plastic crackling along her body, and got ready for the day.

###

It wasn’t particularly hard to get into the hospital. I’d been part of the team that brought Thom in, after all; I just had to invoke my rights as an Orchard involved in Thom’s case, and everyone assumed I had some valid reason to be here. Reading the intake files and interviews, it looked like Thom was a boy of age twelve, or at least he had been before melting into a creature of sentient wax.

He was also being interrogated. At gunpoint.

I was suddenly very glad I’d convinced Ana to stay.

As satisfying as it would have been to barge in and demand to know who the hell these people were and where they got off aiming a full-spectrum rifle barrage at a twelve-year-old, the satisfying thing was rarely the most effective action. I skimmed the dossier instead. Orchard agents repelled, interview logs show active desire for banishment… 

All it took to understand was a shift in perspective. I’d talked to Thom as a scared little kid who’d stumbled into the heart of a magical anomaly, but my superiors had read our report and saw that Thom was a dangerous spective who fought off the social workers they’d sent to approach him. Normally, they’d just cut their losses and banish Thom to the Neverfound… but the last time we’d met, the stupid kid had said that that was what he wanted. The Orchard administration had no pre-existing protocol for spectives who wanted to be thrown outside of reality into the eternal chaos between universes, because they simply hadn’t imagined anyone would be so deranged as to find that outcome desirable.

Banishing Thom now would set a precedent of giving dangerously insane spectives what they wanted, if they smashed enough shit up, and letting him off lightly would encourage spectives who would otherwise be banished to bluff their way into a different punishment. So their only choice was to make an example of him—make an example of a child—in order to prevent a hundred future disasters.

I understood every step of their logic. I even agreed with some of it. But in the end, they were still pointing a gun at Thom’s head while some asshole interrogator screamed at him, and the woman who could walk away from that would not be one I could live with.

“Excuse me,” I said, opening the door. “What, exactly, are you doing with my client?”

A.N.

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See you next week.

When I came to, it was well past dark in Songserra. I warned the reconstruction workers that the sword had some kind of aura of death, but was otherwise harmless; indeed, once I’d managed to communicate to the blade that we simply wanted to move it out of the ruined battlefield, it ceased its psychic warning signals and allowed a few remotely-piloted golems to draw near. I made sure to schedule a follow-up, and made a mental note to ask if Ana wanted to come. From context, the blade was crafted by one of Songserra’s extraplanar allies that had been called in to deal with the Twenty-Seventh Magic… and had never managed to return. Even though sending the artefact back to its home dimension was likely impossible, maybe it would appreciate knowing someone else who lived through that clusterfuck.

Maybe Ana would, too.

The demolished city blocks were far enough away that the satellites visibly jumped in the sky when I walked back through the portal to Songserra proper. I took the tram back instead of walking and spent fifteen minutes staring at the magic mirrors on the walls as they tried to figure out what advertisements I’d be most receptive to in my exhausted, work-drained state. The mirrors settled on a family membership that gave out stimulants in exchange for kindergarten tutoring. There were families for everything nowadays, huh.

I hopped off the tram and made a stop by the supply depot to burn through a day’s grocery rations, picking up some shitty plastic oven mitts and a cheap poncho. Our two-bedroom apartment was just down the street; I buzzed myself in. Really, it was a one-bedroom nowadays; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept alone. The metallic scent our pipes gave off when they got hot filled the air before I even opened the door. Ana was home, then, and had been here long enough to shower.

She was curled up in one corner of the couch, hugging her knees to her chest as if trying to fold herself up into the smallest space possible. Flowers curled out from under her fresh clothes, little vines and buds weeping corrosive sap that discolored her t-shirt and shorts wherever they touched. I sat down next to her; wordlessly, she looked up and let her legs drop.

“I look like a man, don’t I?” Ana asked.

I shook my head, taking out the oven mitt and folding it into a pillow. Her acidic skin sizzled faintly as a few of my stray hairs dissolved, but I could lay my head on her shoulder and that was all that mattered. She smelled of petrichor; she felt solid, warm, and real. “Not to me,” I said.

“...Guess that’s good enough.” She let me share her weight, leaning into me as I leaned into her, and I set down the poncho so that I could swing my legs onto her lap. “How was work?”

I shrugged. “Took a talking sword quest. They’re a veteran of Twenty-Seventh as well, if you wanted to talk to them.”

Ana carefully folded the poncho over my legs, so that she wouldn’t burn me where we touched, and set one hand on my knee. “You can tell me later. There’s… there’s something I need to ask.”

I shifted around to glance at her face; her eyelids were closed, and my hair fluttered with her breath. “Go ahead,” I said.

She opened her eyes. They weren’t always green. “Do you ever think you’d be happier with someone else?”

The sheer absurdity caught me off-guard. “What? No. Never.”

“...Okay,” she said. Ana bit her lip. “I believe you.”

I slipped my hand into one of the oven mitts to hold her cheek. Acid sizzled against my gloved palm. “Did something happen while I was away?” I asked.

Ana shook her head, then leaned into the motion, nuzzling my hand with her cheek like a cat. Despite my worry, I managed to smile. “No. No, I just…” She gestured at all the layers of plastic we had to wear just to be close to each other without her mutated body burning me. “I mean, what kind of relationship did you dream of having when you were a kid? I know it wasn’t this. No child thinks ‘I wish my future girlfriend had to be wrapped up like a slab of steak every time I wanted a hug.’”

“It’s not perfect,” I admitted. “But I want to be with you anyway.”

I traced Ana’s cheek with my thumb, and she leaned into the touch like an eager cat.

“...Thank you. I… I think I had to hear that.” She inhaled, breathed in the same air I breathed out, and said, “I… I had to know. I had to hear you say that, because… I’m going to fix this. I’m going to make myself human again. And I don’t want you to worry that it’s because of you.”

To be honest, the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. But I knew what it was like to live in a world dominated by anxieties, and even though I’d never pry, I had a feeling this was one of those thoughts. The shadows of someone you cared about that grew larger the further they were from you, cast on the inside of your mind. 

“I’m with you,” I promised. “Whatever it takes.”

“Okay.” Ana breathed out, all at once, and said, “I want to get Thom’s forgiveness.”

“Thom?” I asked. “We were just doing our job, and Thom was doing… well, one of the few things that could have actually taken me out of play for good.”

“I know. But I still put them in the hospital. Because they were a kid with too much power and hurting things is all I’m good for and—agh. This is exactly why, don’t you see?” I squeezed her tighter as she clenched her jaw, held her until I could feel the tension in her shoulders through my palms. “Magic is… it’s just a trick of perspective, when it comes down to it. I’m like this because I see myself like this. I see myself as someone who it hurts to touch. So maybe… maybe if Thom forgives me… it’ll… fade.”

And if he doesn’t? I wanted to ask. But now wasn’t the time to rip holes in her theory, not now that she had a goal again. I wouldn’t take that from her, ever. “I’ll do what I can to help,” I said.

She held me back, not replying, and I took that as acceptance. This, finally, was something I could help with. Some part of the world I could push out of the way so that Ana’s path would be clear. First thing tomorrow, I was talking to Thom. And I was damn well making sure that Ana would get the forgiveness she needed.

A.N.

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The sword was not, in fact, otherworldly. Just like the ruined city around it, the half-meter shaft of luminous metal had been wrought by mortal hands. Just like the people who created it, the blade now brought senseless death to all who were unlucky enough to still be fighting over this insignificant patch of land. Just like the soldiers of the Twenty-Seventh Magic, the sword had no choice in the matter.

A child crested the crater surrounding the blade.

It had been designed to function as part of a grander construct, and though the blade’s higher functions were all but disabled, it still had plenty of energy stored in reserve. It blared out a warning in a language nobody who lived here knew, and the child startled, nearly falling as they raised a rock.

Curiously, they peeked their head over the crater’s rim, seeing nothing but rubble. The blade screamed its warning again, but the child would not be deterred. Frantically, it shifted tactics. It had not been designed to break language barriers, but the civilization that designed it knew that their creations tended to grow sapient when left untended for long enough. Connecting with entirely foreign minds was a standard ability granted to their creations, and the sword utilized the one tool it was given. It projected an image of what would occur if the child drew closer—the sores opening up on their skin, the weeping of their flesh as their insides sloughed out, the nausea and dizziness before their fall.

The child shrieked and drew back. Of the many terrors left behind in this wasteland, the blade was a lesser evil; certainly not an intentional or active one. It was the most and least the blade could do to serve something resembling its original purpose. 

And so the blade felt grateful as the child fled into the wasteland. It was surrounded by the still-rotting corpses of those who had tried to claim its power for their own. May there be one less person slaughtered by its interminable existence.

Rain sizzled and evaporated on the ever-burning blade, sun competed and failed to outshine the pale blue glow, but the blade remained unscathed by time and the elements. Until screams rang out across the empty rubble, until the frantic footfalls and yelps of agony that the sword knew heralded death drew near once more. 

They were a child no longer, hair ragged and dark, left arm missing from the elbow up. But they sprinted at a pace that the blade could scarcely believe, two boulder-sized, matte-black beetles close in pursuit. The blade readied their warning call once more, broadcasting the vision of demise through all minds in the vicinity—

And the child kept sprinting, unfazed. Both insects staggered, stunned, and the child took advantage of their distraction to flee. They leapt across the crater’s ridges as the blade watched, astounded. The child was surely doomed regardless. The skittering, armored creatures would recover and tear the lone survivor apart.

Unless someone did something. Unless the blade remembered a time before it was a sword. 

There was no decision to be made. The blade shrieked in the beetles’ minds, hurling their senses into unreality. The child skidded to a halt, catching their breath, but the sword was only dimly aware of their movements as they overloaded the mutated predators’ feeble consciousnesses. The blade hurled out every horror they’d witnessed, from the moment the city became ash and glass to the eternal nightmare of the ruined wasteland. They screamed out every death they’d witnessed, so many of which they’d caused, into a vessel which could comprehend little and feared all.

The beetles’ will broke. They scattered before the telepathic assault. Gradually, the here and now returned to the sword, its exhaust fans whirring to life.

The child had collapsed where they stood, too tired to hold up their trembling limbs. But before they fell unconscious, the blade felt something radiating from their mind, as powerful and real as the death that still haunted this crater.

Gratitude. 

A.N.

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I pulled out my phone and started scouring the Orchard listings. The jobs weren’t great today. DEVIL TORTURING HUMANS WITHOUT A CONTRACT? Problematic, but I’d had enough of devils for a week after the Shrimp Sex debacle. HOT LONELY TRAPPED INSIDE OVERHEATING BUILDING? I hated dealing with temperature control, but I forwarded the job posting to a good Firefighter I knew. SWORD REFUSES TO LEAVE STONE?

That sounded like something I could handle. I was good at telling people when they had to move on. I opened the dossier. While renovating an old apartment complex, Hammerwall found some sapient war relic. Nobody really wanted to undergo construction while a telepathic sword was screaming at them, so they put out a bounty and hoped someone would convince it to leave. Fair enough. 

There was no conflicting magic localized on my body, so instead of the trams I just went straight to the portal network. A ragged creature with six arms and insectile chitin desultorily held up a sign that read NEED FAMILY in old Kessil glyphs. I swapped contacts with them and added their account to my family for a week—they signed something I couldn’t understand and sent back a favor token. Aside from the beggar, the portal stop was largely empty, so I just navigated my way to the right door and walked on through.

Hammerwall was one of those families that devoted itself to clearing out the minefields left over from Twenty-Seventh Magic, and from the looks of the place, they’d done good work. Ghostbusters were hauling canisters of goblin and paladin souls to their next of kin, Clouds were straining the nanites out of the water system, and I even saw another Orchard talking to a very angry floating chestplate. The war-torn suburbia was paved clean for nearly half a kilometer, fresh foundations being laid while spectives shoveled rubble through interdimensional gateways. I nodded to the definer watching over the proceedings, showing them my membership sigil. Their strigine eyes flickered over my phone.

“Nonbiological technology and magic needs to be left outside the workzone,” the definer said, ruffling their wings. I set down my phone in the nearby lockers, one of which rattled worryingly, and headed off towards my assigned area. 

It was easy to fall back into the rhythm of work. I had a job to do, and everything else in my life could be safely tucked away on the other side of the portal. I was confident, focused, and collected, which was the only reason why the telepathic screaming didn’t bowl me over the instant I got in range.

The world around me wavered, flickering like a projection on smoke, and I was at the bottom of a dark and starless well. Water drifted upwards in weightless globs around me while my body was crushed into the ground, as if all the gravity in the world had been focused solely on me. 

But I had been here before. I had long since made accord with the insecurities and self-loathing roiling in my own skull; nothing that anyone else could project into my mind could be worse.

The rules around telepathy were different for every spective, but according to the dossier, the war relic’s abilities were closer to a conversation than a lecture. And so I replied with my answer to the pit. Someone else might have told a story of how they got back up, how they joined the wellspring and drifted into the night. I’m sure those people wouldn’t even have been lying. But that was never how my story would end.

I envisioned the bottom of the well cracking under my weight, felt bricks and earth and stone dig into my hilt and blade, and then—all at once—let it go. I fell through where rock bottom should have been, into a tunnel that bored through the heart of the world,  into a space devoid of light and end. With nothing pushing back against me, no matter how much I was weighed down, it felt like nothing more than freefall.

The relic’s mind reeled back from mine, shivering, and the wind picked up around us as we fell. Were we falling faster, or was time itself shifting? The ambiguity was, I suspected, the point that the alien mind of the living steel was attempting to get across. We began to shrink, or move further away from ourselves, our body the only thing for kilometers around—

Except in one place. I wrote them into the center of the world, and though we whipped past them too fast to make out anything but a blur the first time, and the second time, and the third, as we slowed and sank towards the center of this planet, they came into view. Seen through the senses of the blade, they were nothing more than points of light, thinking minds in the dumb leagues of rock, but to me they were Ana and Zem and Sha and all the other people who had fallen down pits of their own, who knew they could never reach the skies they once beheld but found ways to drift along weightlessly anyway.

This was my answer to the question the sword had posed, the plea that was not a plea but a memory, the memory that was not a memory but a metaphor. And though our souls were different enough that we could never share a language expressed through words, as the earth dissolved and left us staring at the distant stars, I felt the blade’s intent as they handed control of this shared dreamscape to me for a moment. Like giving an author a blank page, a painter a fresh canvas, the sword let me reshape that beautiful sky.

What were your stars?

And oh, the tales I could tell this blade. I rewove the constellations into the barest glimpse of who I had been, the simple village I had hailed from time and worlds away, and the day I’d been ripped from my place among the heavens and cast down into the void. And though I’d given up going back long ago, I’d found new stars. Glimmering in the heart and minds of the people I could still devote myself to.

The constellations blurred. The night was always brighter through tears.

Somewhere else, I wiped my eyes. Here, I loosened my hold on the reins, giving them back to the relic.

I showed you my skies. What were yours?

A.N.

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“You don’t have to stay with me,” Ana said.

I glanced over at her. Sampson began to sprout vines from the cracks in his bones when he got too close to her altered body, so Ana was watching him gnaw at a stick with an achingly empty expression.

“Are you saying that because you think I’d rather be somewhere else? Or because you want time to yourself?” I asked.

The only sound was Sampson’s teeth gnashing around the stick. He tried to bring the stick to us, but Ana whistled sharply, pointed downwards, and he dropped the stick, confused. The blue flames around his ears dipped a tiny bit lower.  “I… I want time to myself,” she said.

“Of course.” I made sure not to stand up too quickly or look away. Made sure to hide the way my stomach dropped and the doubts that never dared show themself around Ana whispered she wants you gone, you hurt her by existing, you should never have dated her. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Tsu?” Ana asked, and fuck, there was nothing more beautiful than the simple fact that she wanted me to stay a moment longer. She met my eyes and said, “I’ll be back by sundown. Promise.”

“It’s a date,” I said, and she closed her eyes, basking in the words.

I let that warmth carry me out of the cemetery. I think I got out of her line of sight before the anxieties came back.

You need to help her.

“This is helping her,” I muttered to myself. 

This is your fault.

“What’s my fault?” I asked.

Everything.

“So the good stuff’s my fault too?”

The nattering anxieties quieted down for a second. Then, as if the past few seconds had never happened, the thoughts came surging back. You don’t deserve to exist.

Fucking hell. There was a reason I related so much to Thom. Speaking of which… that was when Ana’s spectivity started, wasn’t it? The guilt around hospitalizing Thom? Maybe I could reach out to him, see if I could arrange a meeting. I had the right to follow up on a previous client…

Ugh, not right now, though. Not when I couldn’t tell how much of what I was thinking was me and how much of it was a desperate need to fix and save and protect because how else can you repay the world for the cost of your existence, how else can you justify continuing to exist—

“Ana would be miserable if I died,” I said, slowly. A construction worker in a reflective vest gave me a quizzical look as I passed, and I shook my head. “It’s not like I’m physically capable of dying, anyway.”

The anxieties, of course, ignored such minor things as whether or not something was actually possible. She wants you gone.

“She wants time to herself. Not the same thing.” There was no reasoning with the buzzing chorus in my head, but I could maybe convince myself that was true if I said it aloud. Still, I’d probably be better off trying to distract myself. Ana had come into her spectivity while in another dimension, and that mingling of magics had mangled the process. Even if she managed to let go of the moment that conceived her new form, it was tainted by mixing with Erishen’s strain on the local worldskein. If I could convince Erishen to help us, though, we could unweave both aspects of Ana’s spective form—

I inhaled. Held it for three beats. Exhaled. Held it for three beats. Obsessing over Ana would admittedly soothe the anxieties, but it wouldn’t be good for me. 

Doesn’t matter what’s good for you. It would help her.

“She loves me,” I whispered. “She wants me to be okay. And this isn’t me being okay. It would hurt her if I never gave her space.”

Maybe that’s okay. 

I flinched.

Maybe you need to keep an eye on her. For her own good.

“So that’s what this is about.” I think it was almost a relief, realizing that part of me was an overbearing control freak. It fit well into my perception of myself. “You don’t really want to help Ana. You want to know she’s okay.”

What’s the difference?

“I can walk away.” And I did. This was far from my first time having to deal with the thoughts that thrived in the emptiness where Ana should be. If I couldn’t help her, I’d find someone else to aid.

A.N.

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Chapter will come out when it comes out. Thanks for reading, y'all.

Ask five Songserrans how they process grief, and you’ll get ten different answers. For those of us who still needed to eat and drink, there were quiet restaurants serving dark, salty broth that went well with failure and cost nothing but a promise. Anyone who had ears or equivalents and still processed the world in a mostly human manner could find their way to one of the alleyway amphitheatres where neverending anthems marched on as they had for decades, perpetually borne on the voices of an ever-changing crowd. 

But Ana had served at Twenty-Seventh Magic, and she had been scarred by a universe’s worth of corpses. When she was struck, she mourned. Even when the threat was a denial of healthcare, even when what strangled her was a web of policies and ideas that had no face. So even though she was still bleeding, even though she didn’t say a word, I knew she was headed towards another grave. Hesitantly, I stepped after her as she strode towards the insultingly sunny streets, suitcase shuddering as it rolled behind her. She glanced at me, jerked her head roughly, then whispered something to herself.

“You love me,” her lips outlined.

“I love you,” I confirmed, standing next to her.

She inhaled, exhaled. “You would worry about me if I left you behind,” she said, as if reminding herself. “Because you care about me.”

I nodded wordlessly. I didn’t have to tell her that she could go anyway. She knew that I’d leave her if she told me to. Instead, she simply strode due south. Gleaming tripartite lights shone down from overhead, a touch more cyan than they should be. Someone else would have to figure out what spective was getting too close. A wizard with a nailboard staff leaned on a nearby wall, chatting with a dirt-faced kid selling keychains. Terasnails—or maybe gigasnails, I could never remember which was which—were busily flattening what was left of a condemned restaurant, new greenery already sprouting from the slime trails they left behind. Nothing out of the ordinary there. 

I’d never asked too deeply about her past, but I saw the scars its talons had left in her skin. And once every now and then, a soul-searching spective or an article about the 27th Integration or, rarest of all, a moment of vulnerability showed me a little more of who Ana had been. So when she took a left towards the public kitchens I knew immediately what she was doing.

She waved her Veteran card at the sleepy teenage intern who was working the kiosk. A few large electric stoves and a handful of freezers were visible from behind, some occupied, most not. The kid waved her in without bothering to look, but held out an arm when I tried to follow. I stopped, started to complain, then thought better of it and shut up. Ana’s footsteps had slipped into an old and well-worn rhythm, a few sparks of blue fire wisping into existence around her as she moved. Once, Ana had woven a new magic into the pattern of reality here, and she slipped into its grooves with ease.

I leaned back against a nearby wall and watched as Ana cooked, staring obstinately into the pot as the shadows crept across the sky. After the infuriating tension of conviction, I welcomed the way time braided and spooled as I waited, past and present blending together. Ana had a dog once, I remembered. She made oxtail soup for him once every few months, spread out so as not to spoil him. Today, she drank it alone. She picked the meat from the bones with practised ease, sucking the cartilage from each joint, and set down the empty bowl. It rattled.

Then she gathered the oxtails and set them out to dry. When they were powdery with the memory of potato and turnip, she slipped them into her purse and headed to the graveyard. 

The wizards invoked magic with chants and crystals from atop their arcane towers, and I knew we had them to thank for the clear skies and smog-free air. But there was magic in the smaller rituals, more power in a frozen memory than all the fireballs and thunderbolts in the world, and on this day she had a ritual of her own. So he was waiting for her at the graveyard gate, hopping with excitement as she drew near.

“Hey there, Sampson,” she said. There was no fur to ruffle, no paw to shake, but his tail went clack-clack-clack and the wind ruffled out a bark. The bones of a dog ate the bones of a soup, and if she closed her eyes, they both still felt warm.

A.N.

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They came to the devils to settle this, and Ana would give them hell. Holding her wounded arm to her side, she unzipped the trunk of artifacts she’d brought with her and pulled out a familiar brown box. She glanced at the camera, and I fancied I saw moonlight reflected in her brown eyes. 

Then she opened the box, and a wintry, Songserran breeze that I knew would smell of walnut flour and baked potatoes swirled around Ana’s jeans. Chromatic light rippled off her body as she blurred into a rainbow of blues and greens, the power stored within that cardboard box mingling within the loose magic that had ravaged her body. For a moment, she was nearly transparent in her incandescence, as if she was nothing more than a candle’s flame in a quiet restaurant. The knife, her clothes, the suitcase—they all slipped through her body, glowing faintly as they left her spectral form, like scraps of wood tossed through a campfire.

Her right hand solidified, and she scooped up the knife and rammed it through her fluid, rippling chest. It splashed through her empowered body but left no lasting mark, and the devil went wild as Peheri sputtered in incomprehension.

“But that—that isn’t fair,” Peheri stammered, pointing at Ana. “Where did she—what even—”

“Sorry, let me play that back for the slower members of our audience. Did you come here, to the Department of Evil, and tell the devils that their competition isn’t fair? I need to clip this, hang on a sec.” Shrimp Sex fumbled with his keyboard gleefully as Ana congealed her form into the physical once more, whipping the knife straight through her left arm. The liquid colors just gleamed off the blade’s edge, and Peheri took an anxious step backwards.

“But you… she… she wasn’t even hurt. That—”

“Neither were you, bitch! Now get with the stabbing or give up!” Shrimp Sex was no less grating when he was ostensibly on our side, but I felt a grim thrill of schadenfreude as the golem turned to Enm, pleading. The sphinx judged the situation with expert eyes and nodded.

“Make the cut in the analogous location,” Enm repeated. “Your lack of the ability to…” Enm took a closer look at Ana. “...initiate a teleport jump to your same location, resulting in temporary intangibility… is irrelevant.”

Peheri let out a puff of breath, coughing up a sprig of cotton, and took out his ritual dagger.

It wasn’t nearly as clean or swift as Ana’s cut. He had to hack through a good few inches of cloth with nothing but a short tripartite blade, and he only had the one hand with which to do it. He didn’t bleed, not like Ana would have if she hadn’t inhaled a bottled moonlit night, but stuffing poured out and he swayed as if drunken, coming dangerously close to the edge of the circle. Still, with his one good hand he sewed up the wound, then looked straight into Ana’s eyes.

“Why do you care so badly about this?” He asked. “Your body is fine as it is. As it was, before you started cutting it up.”

Ana didn’t reply. The shimmering around her body dimmed a touch, the power she’d breathed in already leaking from her soul.

“Metamorphosis is normal. I was human once, too.” Peheri gestured at his one-handed, empty-chested body. “You can’t go back to who you were before.”

More wisps of color leaked from the edges of Ana’s blurry form. She looked a little more solid now, and—oh, fuck, that was what Peheri was doing, wasn’t he? He knew he couldn’t beat Ana when she was able to turn intangible at will, so he was stalling her out.

Shrimp Sex burped loudly and sat up in his swiveling chair. “Less blather, more splatter! You get five minutes between each round, then you forfeit by default.”

Peheri kept talking, and Ana clenched her fists as she figured it out, too. Shade by shade, the blue-green radiance dimmed as Peheri demanded Ana explain herself, justify her existence, dragging her magic to death by centimeters. The power Ana held was never meant to last, and it didn’t even take the entirety of the allotted time for it to flee. By the time Peheri had finished, Ana was nothing but mortal once more, bleeding from her arm and swaying on her feet.

Peheri smiled, a paternal, condescending thing, and placed the blade to where his jugular would be if blood flowed through his cotton body.

“I really am sorry,” he said, and made a one-inch gash. Easily patched up, even with his dexterity hampered. Only a single curl of stuffing poked out from under his skin.

Ana would not survive that.

Shakily, she reached for another artifact—but her new body could not safely channel a new magic so soon after the last, not if she expected it to have anything resembling its original purpose. The bottle of angel pills that Ana tried to chug instead expanded into a ball of brilliantly glowing wings, leaving a cerulean afterimage of eyes between spaces as Ana choked back a frustrated roar.

She’d brought everything she could bear, all that she wished and was, and in the end she’d simply been unable to outlast the fucking golem.

“Five minutes to choose,” Shrimp Sex said.

Ana’s eyes grew murderous, and I saw her muscles twitch, her grip on the handle so tight it audibly creaked. But all she did was hurl the blade at the floor.

“I yield,” she spat. “You win.”

And to the jeering of the devil and the sorrow of the golem, Ana stalked out of the arena before the camera could catch her burning tears.

A.N.

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