Worth the Candle 3: Building Strongholds
Date: 2023-03-21 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Romance; Adult
Description: Always the Dungeon Master, never the druid. Juniper Smith is finally starting to feel at home in this new world. Everywhere he looks are familiar pieces of the game worlds he used to make back on Earth. The last druid has died, and with her, a rare and precious magic is slowly seeping its way out of the world. The ritual to bring her back as an infant only requires a little messing around with devils and simply hacking the game system on his soul, which is practically routine, but to speed the process along will be another matter entirely. Getting to the Bottomless Pit will take a long train r
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group

Worth the Candle

Book III: Building Strongholds

Alexander Wales

Copyright © 2016 Alexander Wales

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.  Any similarity to real persons,  living or dead,  is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system,  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,  mechanical,  photocopying,  recording,  or otherwise,  without express written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by: Daniel Kamarudin

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1 - Stats for Nerds

Chapter 2 - Date Night

Chapter 3 - Lies and Damned Lies

Chapter 4 - The Sacrifice

Chapter 5 - Rule Zero

Chapter 6 - The Princess and the Pea

Chapter 7 - Musings on the Elder God

Chapter 8 - Aboard the Lion's Tail

Chapter 9 - The Familiar and the Foreign

Chapter 10 - The Party Line

Chapter 11 - The Great Train Robbery

Chapter 12 - Headwater

Chapter 13 - Down And Out

Chapter 14 - The House of Solitude

Chapter 15 - The Face of a Place

Chapter 16 - Head of House

Chapter 17 - An Open House

Chapter 18 - Shades

Chapter 19 - Bottle Episode

Chapter 20 - Grayscale

Chapter 21 - Time Enough

Chapter 22 - A Portrait of the King as a Young Man

Chapter 23 - Rapping at my Chamber Door

Chapter 24 - Letter 15

Chapter 25 - Enough Rope to Hang Yourself

Chapter 26 - Immanentizing the Eschaton

Chapter 27 - PPROM

Chapter 28 - The Adventures of Valencia the Red

Chapter 29 - Contract

Chapter 30 - Consolation

Chapter 1 - Stats for Nerds

Quests

◼ Straddling Worlds: There are others like you, those with dreams of a place called Earth. The so-called dream-skewered are studied at the Athenaeum of Speculation and Scrutiny. You can travel there to find out more.
◼ God Botherer: There are gods in this world, titans of power and masters of domains, each their own creature with their own special rules. Tread carefully around these creatures, especially if you wish to someday join their ranks.
◼ The Lost King, Found?: Five hundred years ago, Uther Penndraig, figure of legend, King of Anglecynn, and ancestor of Amaryllis, disappeared from this world while on a quest of grave importance. This enduring mystery must have an answer for those brave or foolish enough to seek it, mustn't it?
◼ Summer’s End - Return to the place where Fenn received her scars and bring justice to the elves. (Companion Quest)
◼ They Say You Can’t Go Home Again - He had a life, before you, and you had a life, before this.
◼ All That Glitters - Return to Darili Irid with Grakhuil once da has gathered enough gold to satisfy da nad self-imposed penance to da nad former clan. Speak with Grak to learn more. (500/1000) (Companion Quest)
◼ Through the Lashing Glass - Far inside the Glassy Fields exclusion zone, the only place on Aerb where glass magic still works, lies a castle coated in shards. The treasures within are unknown to the world, but you could unearth them, if you dared.
◼ A Room of One’s Own - The Boundless Pit is a mile wide and infinitely deep, a chasm from which little returns. The tuung call it their home, and imperial law agrees, but infinity is a large place, and a secure home stays stuck to the wall, waiting to light up with activity once more. Kuum Doona awaits.
◼ Taking Root - The world’s last druid has died, leaving the last locus severely constrained and untended. Eventually the imperfectly self-regulating cycles of life within the bottle will fail and the locus will die, unless you can find a way to remove the locus and transplant it into the wider world, where it was always meant to be. (Companion Quest)
◼ The Slayer of Horrors (0/13):

□ Murder in Duplicate - As soon as it was discovered by a precocious young girl, the ability for a person to duplicate themselves was excluded to a thousand square miles and that single person. Doris Finch lives her life in duplicate; to complete the exclusion, it will be necessary to kill every single one of her. (0/9,511,346)
□ Manifest Destiny - The fall of the Second Empire was, by some accountings, inevitable, but by others, it was the work of a single incident. The exact nature of the magic that allows the immortal man named Manifest to puppet his subjects from a distance is unknown, as is his exact location, but it is clear that with the magic excluded, his range is limited to only Lankwon, once the Imperial City, now the City Made Manifest. Defeating him will be an impossible task, but one that you have taken upon yourself.
□ A Door into the Soul - Caldwell Gatesmith has the dubious distinction of being responsible for two exclusions. Through his portals, he keeps watch over his domain. If he spies you, and you do not meet with his satisfaction, his portals will cut with an edge designed to cleave time and space.
□ The Z-word - Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle is the reason that no one says it. That's his word.
□ Everything Eater - More monster than man, no one has seen Rove's face in four hundred years and lived to tell the tale. He sits at the center of a half mile of dirt, flesh, and garbage. If you slay him, you will be the first to have survived contact with him.
□ Better with Loops - Through magics unknown, a young boy of eighteen found himself reliving the same month over and over again, with death only bringing him back to the same crisp spring morning. Time does not behave within his exclusion zone, and only bringing a permanent end to his life will restore the area to normalcy. Beware, lest you be trapped in the cycle.
□ [REDACTED] - The more you [REDACTED], the more you [REDACTED], until [REDACTED]. Merely knowing his name makes him [REDACTED], and his gender alone is a piece of information you might wish you didn't have, if [REDACTED]. Better to go in blind.
□ Unwavering - In the beginning, they said that the goblin inspired loyalty, until it became clear that what he was doing was more literal than figurative. To kill him, you'll need to fight through a veritable army of his loyal servants, if you don't end up becoming one of them yourself.
□ Fleshsmith - For millennia, fleshsmithing was a noble trade of Pendleham, one practiced by noscere and ignoscere alike. When a small cabal took the craft too far, exclusion reared its ugly head, leaving Pendleham as the City of Flesh, where none dare tread.
□ Aches and Plains - Perhaps farming might seem an innocuous thing to evoke the exclusionary principle, but given the time and attention brought to it by a billion minds, it was inevitable that someone would breach its deeper secrets. The land of Pai Shep is now guarded by a single warrior-farmer, his fields impeccable, his power absolute.
□ Guardian of the Underworld - A machine of vast intellect, funneled into the body of a broken man. The people of Aerb have yet to pass his tests, but perhaps someone of a different world has the wherewithal to be allowed within his inner sanctum.
□ Finger of the Sun - When the elves broke Celestar, there were a small few who continued on with their research. The product of their effort brought nothing but pain.
□ Gone to Seed - There is a place on Aerb considered worse than the first four thousand hells. Fel Seed sits on a throne of living flesh, unable to spread beyond his domain, but with a rule of horror within it. You know his weakness.

◆◆◆

Amaryllis Penndraig, Loyalty lvl 15

Amaryllis is the most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig, the Lost King, which gives her special claim-in-fact to a fair number of his estates and heirlooms bound along cognatic or enatic primogeniture, ultimogeniture, and gavelkind rules. She was once a keystone member of a bloc of power within the Lost King’s Court, but now she has been cast out through means both semi-legal and downright nefarious. Her homeland of Anglecynn is forbidden to her now, at least until she’s gathered enough power to wedge open some doors.

Fenn Greenglass, Loyalty lvl 21

Fenn is a half-elf born to an elven father and human mother. Her childhood was spent with alternating months in the Isle of Eversummer and the colony of Rogbottom. While her ears marked her as exotic and dangerous among the humans, her teeth marked her as a hideous disgrace among the elves. She has never felt at home in either world and pretends to understand less than she does in order to highlight her differences before anyone can call her on them. After she reached maturity she held several odd jobs until settling into a dangerous, solitary life entering into the Risen Lands exclusion zone to take whatever wasn’t nailed down. That life ended when she was arrested selling contraband to a fence. When Anglecynn needed a guide through Silmar City, she was pulled from prison and given a second chance.

Grakhuil Leadbraids, Loyalty lvl 8

Grakhuil comes from the largely parthenogenetic clan of dwarves in Darili Irid (loosely, Gold Hole). Due to da nad skill in the game of Ranks and overall empathic nature relative to da nad kin, Grak was selected to leave Darili Irid for the Athenaeum of Barriers with the plan that da would return and become the next master warder of the clanhome. Upon returning home, da was entered into a rare arranged pair-bond with another dwarf, and fled from Darili Irid after refusing the Kiss on da nad bond night. Da has spent da nad time looking to make amends for the damage da nad absence caused to da nad clan.

Six-eyed Doe, Loyalty lvl 3

[I’d closed my eyes and paged through after my little experiment in experiencing awe and wonder, only to find that instead of text, the Six-Eyed Doe had a picture that expanded outside the box it was meant to be set within. This was the first time that the game interface had shown me anything other than text, symbols, or lines to make boxes.

The picture had various scenes, devoid of any clear chronology and bleeding into each other where they met. When I looked at it, the view zoomed in, leaving the rest of the game interface behind and filling my vision with only the pictorial story of the Six-Eyed Doe. Most of it signified little to me, because it was focused on rivers and forests, with the occasional animal. I focused in on people, where I could find them, and ended up looking at a full-on orgy with writhing, naked bodies of a hundred different species. To one side of it, up and to the right, armored men were coming in and slaughtering the people, but toward the bottom there were a handful of pregnant women sitting around, and beneath them various women giving birth, with naked children walking away through the woods, and some donning leather armor of their own to fight off the attackers.

This was the story of the locus, as told by some insane artist who had the ability to paint photorealistically at a yottapixel scale but lacked any idea of how to tell a coherent narrative. It took me some time to find the bottle, which sat all by itself, away from everyone. There was no attempt at being literal; it was only barely big enough to contain Solace, who sat with legs folded and her staff across her lap. It was such a small thing, in comparison to the rest, and that was probably the point.]

Valencia the Red, Loyalty lvl 16

Valencia is a nonanima, a humanoid without a soul, created by the essentialist Fallatehr Whiteshell in the Amoureux Penitentiary where she lived for the first seventeen years of her life. Until recently she was subject to repeated possession by demons and devils at random intervals, but now, touched by your magic, she has become something to be feared, for much different reasons than she was before. She is nearly a newborn, in some ways, trying to find her feet.

Chapter 2 - Date Night

Fenn was dressed to the nines, in a black dress that hugged her figure and revealed her legs, back, and intricately scarred arms in a way that got my heart pounding. She was wearing a pair of black heels, and dazzling earrings that drew attention to her pointed ears. I hadn’t been completely clear on the ins and outs of women’s fashion on Earth, and knew even less about it on Aerb, but whatever bra she was wearing, it was doing wonders for her. It was also the first time I’d ever seen her wear makeup. Her hair though --

“You have long hair,” I said. When we’d first met her hair had been on the shorter side, barely long enough that she could put it in a ponytail, and while it had grown out some over the course of our time together, it was now hanging down in blonde ringlets down to the small of her back.

“Oh fuck off,” said Fenn. “That’s all you have to say?”

“You look gorgeous,” I replied. “You were already gorgeous, but now you’re the prettiest version of you that I could possibly imagine. Which is not to say that I don’t think that you’re pretty when you’re sleeping beside me in a tank top and underwear, or naked, or -- that’s not helping me, is it?” She shook her head, which made her earrings sparkle in the sunlight, but she was smiling at me. “I only want to say that you’re beautiful, and I’m lucky to have you.”

“Aw, you’re not so bad yourself,” she replied, looking me up and down. “You clean up well.”

“See, I feel like if I said that, you would have taken it as an insult,” I said with a smile. I held out my hand. “Shall we?”

You know, now that I think about it, I wasn’t really completely clear on men’s fashion either. For me, it was gym shorts and t-shirt in the summer, and a hoodie with jeans in the winter, with a bit of a mix-and-match in-between. A few days ago, I’d taken a wallet full of obols from our safehouse and gone out into Cranberry Bay for new clothes, not the off-the-rack stuff that could be found in almost any clothing store, but three expensive outfits fitted to my exact proportions by an expert (an experience that I think I would place between getting a haircut and getting my teeth cleaned, on the stranger-invading-my-personal-space scale). The one that I wore was a black that matched Fenn’s dress, a jacket with buttons offset to one side, a collar that seemed like it was trying to hide my neck, and foot-long coattails. I’d mostly stayed silent at the tailor and let Amaryllis do the talking, but I was under the impression that this was a bastardized version of some culture’s formal dress that had spread like wildfire through the Empire of Common Cause.

Our destination was a restaurant that Amaryllis had picked out, Cupona, and if I’d done a good job of internalizing how expensive things were, I might have objected when I learned how much a meal there cost. We were still living off the gold we’d taken from Aumann’s, most of which had been converted over to cash, and though we’d been burning through it by establishing our safehouses, it still didn’t feel like we were anywhere near having to worry about it. We were, for tonight, treating ourselves, because it was our long-awaited First Date.

(Following the events of our brief stay in Parsmont, Amaryllis had formally declared herself as accountant and quartermaster, a position that she took to with the fervor of someone trying to make up for past mistakes. I’d gotten her after-action report, and tried my best to convince her that she was, basically, not a person that anyone should ever want to fuck with, but her response to that had been to pretend that she was feeling better, a facade that she didn’t put nearly enough effort into -- telling her that seemed like it would be counterproductive though.)

“Okay, a few requests,” said Fenn after we were seated. “Number one: no talking shop.”

“What, exactly, is ‘shop’?” I asked. “We’re unemployed.”

Fenn gave me a casual shrug. She really did look beautiful tonight; the dress helped to accentuate the curling whorls of the scars on her arms; the straps must have been tailored just for the effect. She was showing a lot of skin. “Let’s say no talking about things like narrative, character sheets, training, logistics, money, planning, or anything directly related to operations of what would be our business, if it were a business.”

“But we can talk about our business partners?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, that, certainly,” said Fenn with a grin. A waiter, dressed in a muted brown uniform, stopped by to gently place two fluted glasses on our table, each filled with a milky purple liquid. “I mean, those are the only people that we really have in common, and I don’t want to take everything off the table.” She punctuated her sentence by grabbing one of the glasses and sipping at it. “Number two: no references to ye olde Earth.”

“But --” I began.

“Just the references,” said Fenn. “I normally find it has some charm, but tonight I’d like to get through a conversation without feeling like you’re having a laugh at my expense because I don’t know about my base.”

“Your base?” I asked, feeling confused and wondering whether she was pulling my leg.

“Something about how all my bases belong to you?” asked Fenn, with a furrowed brow.

“All your base are belong to us?” I asked, trying to keep myself from smiling. “I don’t even remember saying that.”

“We’d just finished the first safehouse, and you said it,” replied Fenn. She was watching me as she drank her purple milk. “And it was cute! But, also, I sometimes think that you do that for your own benefit, and while you might find it fun, it sort of pushes me away a little bit.” She frowned slightly. “The third request was going to be that we can’t talk about our relationship, but now I can see that I’ve fucked that up a bit.”

Two plates were gently placed on our table, each with no more than two bites worth of food. Our waiter gave us an elaborate description that I only half-listened to -- some small, delicate animal had been deboned, arranged on the plate, and then cooked with hot oils, after which extremely small finely cut vegetables in a variety of colors had been arranged around it. We hadn’t ordered; this was the sort of place where you ate what the chef made for you.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to exclude you, or make you feel like I wish you were from Earth.”

“No,” said Fenn. She took a delicate forkful of food. “I didn’t mean … I like when you explain Earth to me, not just because you obviously enjoy talking about it, but because you do a good job of making it interesting.”

“But?” I asked.

“Okay,” said Fenn. “Explain the base thing to me.” She ate her forkful of food, and closed her eyes to savor it.

“It’s … an ancient internet meme,” I said. “There was this early, 16-bit videogame that got a really bad translation, and people found it funny enough that it went viral.” I treaded carefully, trying to make sure that Fenn knew all those words and I wouldn’t have to go into a digression to explain any of it.

“See, that’s sort of what I’m talking about,” said Fenn. “I didn’t mean all of Earth, I like hearing about your friends and your life there, but the memes … more than the memes, the shared cultural heritage?” She paused. “I don’t want you to feel lonely. I mean, I know how it is, for me it was being with humans and thinking about elves, or the other way around, and knowing that it wasn’t something that would translate …” She trailed off and ate another bite.

“So you over-corrected?” I asked. “When I met you, you were really playing up the half-elf thing. Less, now.”

“Hrm,” said Fenn. She took a spoon and scooped up the remaining sauce off the plate.

While she was ruminating on that, our waiter came back and whisked the plates away (mine having been demolished while Fenn talked -- it was salty, acidic, and crispy, but gone in a flash, and I was hungry), then returned moments later with a new plate, this one with carved vegetables sitting in a multi-colored puddle.

“This course is corpsefruit and smoked bloodwood shoots on a bed of young --”

“You know,” said Fenn. “I really am enjoying myself here, and I don’t mean to be rude, but is there any way that we could eat without these interruptions? Just the food.”

“Of course, ma’am,” said the waiter with a quick bow, leaving almost immediately afterward. We’d paid in advance of the meal, including what I gathered was a rather generous tip; we’d been placed in a section of the restaurant away from everyone else, which I told myself was because of that, rather than because Fenn was a half-elf.

“Still thinking?” I asked before eating some of the unappetizingly named corpsefruit. It was sweeter than I’d expected.

“Kind of,” replied Fenn. “This food is just shockingly good. Hard to believe that we switch between portable soup and something like this.” She speared a bloodwood shoot and watched as it bled, then gave it a twirl on her fork once. “I mean, you’re right about the whole half-elf thing, it’s easier to just be blunt about it, or joke, or just annoy people who are already going to be annoyed, but I don’t like the comparison.”

“No?” I asked.

“There’s a difference between saying, ‘hey, I’m different’, and the culture gap, you know?” asked Fenn.

“Yeah,” I replied. I held up my hands in defeat. “Consider it off the table.”

“I feel it with the others, too,” said Fenn, once another course had been delivered to us, this one a tiny collection of three different grilled meats. “These divides.”

“I still don’t really understand dwarves,” I said. “I mean I do understand the structure of their society and have some grasp on how that shapes them, I don’t want to say that I was the one to create them, but--”

“But you created them,” said Fenn with a smile. “So modest.”

“In my mind, dwarven culture was built around this sort of alternate form of farming,” I said. “I knew a lot of farmers growing up, and in my mind, it sort of mapped to that, with the parthenogenetic bloodlines added on. I mean, I think as I originally had it, there were two different strands of dwarf, the Mendi and the Taldi, one that did the pair-bonding thing and the other that stuck to the single-parent thing -- sorry, this is probably boring.”

“You’re talking about the literal creation of the world,” said Fenn, leaning forward slightly. “I think you sometimes forget how special you are. I mean, you’re not a god, but I can point at random things and ask you why they are the way they are, and actually get an answer. Plus that god thing doesn’t seem like it’s totally out of reach. You could be talking to me about frogs and I’d be loving it.”

“You’d be making me blush, but I can control my blood flow,” I replied. “But I am serious, the gap between Grak and I just seems so huge that there’s no way that I’m going to overcome it.”

“Bigger than you and the locus?” asked Fenn.

“Point taken,” I said. “You know, sometimes I wish that our party were just”—the Spice Girls—“more archetypally arranged, it seems like we’ve got a ridiculous, erratic spread both in terms of personality and utility.”

“We’ll probably have to talk about Val at some point,” said Fenn. With our plates cleaned between conversation, another course came to us, small, translucent balls of red, purple, and orange. “She’s fucking nuts.”

I winced. “I’ve been trying to keep my distance. I feel so bad for her, but I really don’t want her to think that I’m … more than I am, to her. More than I want to be.”

“She kissed Mary, I don’t know if you heard that,” said Fenn. She was trying not to show it, but the smile she was hiding reached her eyes.

“Seriously?” I asked. “Why?”

“Mary was making some attempts at socialization,” said Fenn. She’d stopped trying to hide her amusement. “Val’s all over the place, depending on whether or not she’s got a guest inside her, and even then.”

“That euphemism is terrible,” I said.

“I try,” said Fenn. “Anyway, Mary took it into her head that Val was going to need a crash course in how to be human, or at least a more normal varietal of the mortal species, because Mary’s got a bug up her butt about being ‘productive’, and the chance that Val could screw things up out in the real world is pretty high, especially if her connection gets cut off or she chomps too hard on her guest. So the lesson, such as it was, was about physical boundaries, and I guess our Mary said something to the effect that a kiss needs to be done chastely if in greeting, and anything more gets reserved for only those you really love.” Fenn took a spoonful of the orbs and gestured with her other hand, a ‘yadda yadda yadda’ type of signal.

“Huh,” I said.

“Right?” asked Fenn. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t thinking what I was thinking. “Anyway, they kissed for a few seconds -- yeah, I asked about that, apparently Mary thought that saying ‘kiss people you love’ and then pushing Val away right after that might not be the best thing for the little woobie.”

“Using your definition for woobie, or mine?” I asked. A ravenous creature mimicking a pitiful cry for help, or a broken innocent who needed protection?

“Either,” said Fenn. “Mary’s grown a bit of a soft spot for her, which makes sense given that she’s not really threatening to slit our throats in the night or turn us against each other, or at least not in the same way she was before.” She kept the undercurrent of hostility from her voice, but not from her face, though it was nothing but a twitch of her eyebrows.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“So, after they kissed, Amaryllis explained that wasn’t really appropriate, and went through this whole explanation about romantic love, what that was like, which Val only really had exposure to through her guests, and that’s not the kind of education that we’d want her to have, right? And her response to this whole lesson, was to say, ‘Oh, so I should only kiss Juniper?’”

“Ah,” I said with a sigh. “No, Amaryllis didn’t tell me any of that -- probably so that we could have this conversation. You understand that’s not -- she’s not appealing to me?”

“No?” asked Fenn. “She sees you as her savior and hangs on your every word. All you’d have to do, if you wanted her, is to say the word. You probably wouldn’t even have to do that, if she got it in her head that she could please you that way. A pretty girl, slipping into your bed naked because she’s so eager to indulge you?”

“I mean, when you put it like that ...” I said with a smile that Fenn didn’t return. “I think you’re overstating her, uh, obsession with me.”

“Maybe,” said Fenn. Another plate came in front of us, and I was starting to get annoyed with how little food was on each of them, no matter that each one was a masterwork. “See, this is why I didn’t want to talk about us, I figured I’d just come off looking like I thought the world was out to get me.” She pierced a little wonton-style thing with her fork. “Though, I do have to say, you have five companions now, and four and a half of them are women, at least three of which are into you, which does not at all seem like coincidence.”

The three would be Fenn, Valencia, and Amaryllis. I’d really been hoping that that last complication would have evaporated by now, but I wasn’t about to challenge Fenn on it, especially because it was a subject that Amaryllis and I studiously avoided. Four and a half women though?

“Are you counting the locus or Grak as the half woman?” I asked. “Or both of them as three quarters?”

“I was thinking Grak,” said Fenn with a shrug. “The locus presents as female.”

I reached across the table and took her hand. “Fenn, under no circumstances will I ever even consider having sex with a giant six-eyed deer.”

“But you’re thinking of the logistics of it now, aren’t you?” asked Fenn, gently patting my hand.

“You know me too well,” I replied, pulling back. “I’m starting to agree that I should put the points into Social.”

“I am too,” said Fenn. “Not actually, if it’s just to stop you from putting your foot in your mouth. Can you imagine how dumb I’d feel if I died because I wanted you to have a bit more tact and grace around me?”

“Seems like we’re getting into shop talk,” I replied.

“You’re right,” said Fenn. “Tonight is a night to ourselves. Would you mind entertaining me with a game story?”

“Uh, sure,” I said. “I think you’ve heard all the best ones though. Unless I told you the asteroid story already?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” said Fenn. “You’re probably going to have to explain what an asteroid is though.”

So I told her the asteroid story (the short version: rock falls, everyone dies), and after that she told me about her first foray into the Risen Lands under the guidance of a mentor who she later had a falling out with, and we somehow managed to actually get our night back on track as the extravagant (but tiny) courses kept coming. It was pleasant, to be alone together, to take a break from the planning and preparations we’d been doing with the larger group, and we didn’t return to any discussion of the internal group politics either, which was a relief.

◆◆◆

Movie marathons were something of a tradition for Arthur and me, going way back to before we’d even started playing tabletop games. Arthur had a deep and abiding love for series and sequels, but especially trilogies, and he often said that it was part of our cultural duty to see as many of the classics firsthand as possible, instead of just knowing about them through cultural osmosis, which gave you parodies of summaries of half-remembrances.

“I don’t know,” I said to Arthur during a lull in our Lord of the Rings extended edition marathon. “There are some ideas that seem like interesting premises, but actually aren’t.”

“Explain that one to me,” he said. “That’s like saying that someone looks beautiful, but actually isn’t, it’s a logical contradiction. I mean, maybe you can say that it’s an illusion or something.”

“Yes, right, that’s it exactly,” I said. “It’s an illusion. It’s looking at a pretty girl and then realizing on closer inspection that she’s a mirage.”

“Or has a lot of makeup on,” said Arthur.

“That’s,” I said, but my objection died on my lips as I realized that we’d probably end up talking about the socio-cultural role of makeup instead of the more interesting thing that I wanted to talk about. “Yeah, I guess. So you have ideas or premises that look interesting, but they actually aren’t once you start in on execution.”

“You’re just talking about a deep slash shallow distinction?” asked Arthur.

“Maybe?” I asked. “Well, maybe not, because there are different kinds of depth, and I’m not sure that we’re talking about the same thing here.”

“Okay,” said Arthur. “Taboo ‘deep’, taboo ‘shallow’.” That was, at the time, his new thing, declaring certain words taboo so that you had to more fully explain the concept you were pointing at. He’d told me once that all debates were ultimately debates about definition, but to me that sounded like one of those things that people say to be pithy rather than correct. “Actually, also taboo ‘interesting’.”

“Alright, but I need to think for a bit,” I said.

“That’s fine, we’re almost to Isengard,” replied Arthur.

So I sat there, half watching a movie that I’d seen three times before, and half thinking about how I wanted to frame things. My favorite part of watching movies with Arthur was that there was more time for silence and thought; I always felt like I was half a step behind him, if it was just the two of us talking.

“Okay,” I said, when the action was over. “I think it might be about minimal descriptive length.”

“MDL, sure,” said Arthur.

“For me, a good, compelling idea can be described in very few words, but the effects and results of that short description would have a very, very long MDL,” I said. “Or at least, that’s the starting point for describing what I guess I mean when I say that something can only seem interesting on the surface.”

“There’s a problem there,” said Arthur. “Which is that MDL is a wobbly term.”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew that was going to be a problem.

“I mean, you could rephrase it as the point of diminishing descriptive utility,” said Arthur. “I think that works a little better, like you can say that Merry is a male hobbit and that gets you a lot of conceptual power per word of description, but eventually you hit this point where you’re not talking about his hair, you’re talking about the individual placement of hair follicles. But then you have to take culture and cultural dictionaries into account, like ‘hobbit’, for example, where you’re packing a lot of description into a little term -- that pun, Juniper, was just for you -- and that’s just because someone has already done the hard definitional work for you.”

“Okay, sure,” I said. “So the problem I’m trying to get at is that there are some short, interesting elevator-pitch-type ideas that have a lot of consequences to them, but those consequences have a shorter descriptive length than you would think just looking at them. They might be evocative, but there’s no meat on the bones when you get down to it.”

“And you think that the Boundless Library is one of those ideas?” asked Arthur.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, the core idea of a library filled with books that haven’t been written yet is a good one, but I sort of slipped sideways into this subplot about librarians, and if it’s just going to be about political infighting, what’s the point in including the library?”

“So it wasn’t a bad idea, it was bad execution,” said Arthur.

“Ouch,” I said. I’d always thought that ideas were basically worthless, when compared to execution. I wondered whether Arthur had remembered that; I’d always been the one to carelessly slight people, it wouldn’t have been like him to just outright hurt me like that, even if it was true.

“You told me that every session was a failure you could learn from,” he replied with a shrug, eyes still on the movie in front of us. “And to be clear, I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t have all that much to say. Like if you wanted it to be about fate, then make it about fate, or if you want it to be about, I don’t know, the difficulty in getting people that are nominally aligned with each other to actually work together, then it really needs to be about that. It wasn’t even that the librarians fighting with each other was bad, it was that they weren’t fighting about anything. There was this whole surface-level thing about library classification schemes, but it wasn’t interesting, and that was just a proxy war that they didn’t care about, because they were factions competing to see who could get their guy to be head librarian. But the factions were just factions, people who hated each other for personal reasons, and we didn’t care about them either.”

(Arthur was the best. We sometimes played without him, and it was always a struggle for people to remember what had happened the time before, who their characters were, and what they were supposed to be doing. Arthur made notes, he kept to his characters, and more than that, he paid attention. He had an ability to absorb and digest plots and then spit them back out in a more refined form. Our art teacher had talked about how sculptors saw the piece within the marble, and to me it always felt like every game saw us both looking at the same piece of marble and him being able to see the shapes better.

That conversation, offhand on his part, showed a better understanding of that plot than I’d ever had, and while it felt almost venomous at the time to be told that I had spent dozens of hours of my time creating something boring, later on I could understand where he was coming from. It was maybe the closest that we ever came to having a fight, and the only reason that we didn’t was because Arthur was the best.)

“So what do you suggest?” I asked, my voice tight.

“Obviously we can’t play it again, obviously you can’t run it again, so …” He shrugged, still watching the TV. “Honestly, I would have made it more about the library, like there’s one faction that thinks the library should be sorted on the basis of people, and a different faction that thinks it should be about objective, people-less truth. Or they’re all books that have yet to be written, so there are activist librarians trying to correct history, which changes the library, or conservative librarians who want as little change as possible because they’re worried that knock-on effects of change are going to make the future worse, and then maybe a few people in that camp who just don’t see it as their place. Those are things that I think we’d find interesting, because Reimer would probably call one of them dumb, and Tom would maybe try for reconciliation, and Tiff and I would get into some big fight about objective truth or whether conservatism makes sense as a political philosophy, or something like that.”

“And that’s your idea of fun?” I asked, still feeling a little wounded. “Everyone at the table getting in a fight?”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. He finally tore his eyes from the screen. “I kind of think that it’s what we’ve been missing lately. We all know each other, and our characters, and so the infighting and cross-purposes have more weight than anything else would. I don’t know, call me a drama queen, but it’s what I’ve been craving.”

◆◆◆

After our dinner, we had box seats at a large playhouse, which wasn’t too different from the few professional productions I had seen back home aside from the microphone system, which wasn’t lavalier mics, but instead a bulky apparatus that sat nearly hidden at the front of the stage, and was transmitted out to the audience in less-than-crystal-clear quality through enormous speakers. If I’d known ahead of time, I might have tried to get a smaller, more intimate place, but this theater did have something going for it aside from being close to the restaurant; it was showing an Uther Penndraig classic.

The Star War was the original trilogy of Star Wars, condensed down into a little over four hours, with two intermissions between what had originally been spaces between films. The programs notes we’d been given indicated that sometimes the three acts were performed separately, either on consecutive nights or in different seasons, but the Oxycoccus Orpheum seemed to take some pride in the longform production. It was Star Wars, as written from the recollections of Arthur, then filtered through nearly five hundred years of culture.

When Fenn went to the bathroom during the first intermission, I eavesdropped on a man giving his analysis of The Star War to a group of his friends. He was tall and nicely dressed, like I was, and spoke in a similar accent to Amaryllis, precise and clear.

“At the time of the first empire, people saw it as a warning,” he said. “The Lost King was giving a lesson to the people of Aerb, as he often did, and that lesson was that empires rot from the head, that powers can corrupt if allowed to, and that in that event, it’s the responsibility of even the lowliest among us to rise up.”

“But Luke is Darth Vader’s son, is he not?” asked a woman in the group. “He’s hardly the lowest of the corrupt empire, given the heirloom passed down to him and the magic of his bloodline.”

“Though it’s hard to peer into the mind of the Lost King, perhaps that was a message meant for his children,” said the man. “He was saying to them, perhaps, that he might become the evil that they would one day have to defeat, or pull back from the brink. It’s not clear whether Uther is better seen as Darth Vader or Emperor Reagan, though it might be that he’s both sides of the same coin.”

Emperor Reagan? I looked down at my program notes, but there he was simply listed as ‘the Emperor’. I smiled though, because that looked like another thumbprint of Arthur’s. The whole SDI connection was dumb, but it was dumb in a way that I liked, and in the context of what Fenn and I had been talking about earlier, it seemed like the sort of thing that I would have done, in his position. A reference, inserted for the sake of being a reference, and that because it was a connection to a shared cultural heritage that no one around him would understand. It made me happy, but also lonely.

“Status?” asked Fenn when she returned from her trip to the bathroom.

“You could just ask how I’m doing,” I said. “Good, I guess, just … a little nostalgic for home, more than I thought I would be.”

“No baddies though?” asked Fenn. “Scenario zero?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, still no sign that we’re, ah, back on the clock,” I replied. Our big fear for date night was that something would happen because of the whims of the game, but so far nothing had come of it. Amaryllis had our itinerary, and had said she would stay a block away, well within range if there was some kind of major altercation or disaster. Valencia and Grak were both back at the safehouse, hiding behind a whole host of wards and on high alert. I’d been trying my best not to let any of that undercut my enjoyment of a night alone with Fenn.

“Did you want to get out of here?” asked Fenn. “I know we’ve got two-thirds left to go, but I’ve seen it all before, you’ve seen it all before, and if it’s getting to you, the point of this evening certainly wasn’t to bum you out.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. It was thoughtlessly kind of her to offer, as though this weren’t a special evening for the both of us. I reached forward and took her hand in mine. The point of the evening, I thought to myself. That dress really was doing wonders for her, and I had always been a fan of extravagantly long hair. She had done all this for me. I leaned in and gave her a long, slow kiss. “So long as I’m with you.”

“People are looking,” muttered Fenn. She was breathing harder than usual, and while she might have been worried about the attention she was getting, her eyes were on me. She was right though; people were looking, including the tall guy who had been talking about Emperor Reagan.

“Fuck ‘em,” I said. I took her arm in mine and led us back to the box seats for the rest of the show, which, after some time to adjust, became the right sort of nostalgic for me.

◆◆◆

It was late when the play let out, which was no surprise given four hours of runtime and two intermissions. Night had fallen over Cranberry Bay, and a chill had come with it. There were fewer, dimmer streetlights than I was used to, but the number of people out made it seem safer and more lively. Fenn and I walked arm-in-arm, taking a long, scenic route to our hotel, six blocks that would take us through a stretch of park.

“Do you want my jacket?” I asked as I felt her shivering against me.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I felt quite sexy earlier in the night, and now I’m cold and my feet are killing me, which doesn’t seem particularly alluring.” She took the jacket and wrapped it around her, leaving me in a white buttoned-down shirt, then reached down and pulled off her shoes to walk barefoot.

“Not sure that’s advisable on these city streets,” I said.

“Oh, light of my life, we are no mere mortals to worry about such things,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll have dirty feet by the time we get to the hotel, but I was planning on a shower before anyway.”

Before. Solace had given her herbs that would prevent pregnancy, but she’d said that they would take a few weeks to work. It had been a few weeks now, and though we hadn’t actually talked about it, I was fairly certain that it was on our minds. And, on reflection, she had said what she’d said to make it clear that tonight was going to be the night.

We made our way through the park, lit by starlight and the glow of the city that surrounded it, neither of us talking much. I was enjoying the silence, and thinking about whether I should pick her up and carry her, when I spotted a small bit of movement behind a tree a hundred feet ahead of us.

“Someone’s hiding up ahead,” I murmured to Fenn, trying to act as though I was whispering a sweet nothing in her ear.

She let out a pleasant laugh that rang like a bell, and whispered back, “Six of them.”

I felt a chill go down my spine at that. I was armed, naturally, given that the Anyblade could be disguised so effectively, but I had no armor on, nor any of my usual magic items like Ropey. Fenn wasn’t wearing Sable, in part because it would have clashed with her look, but also because we’d both wanted to not treat our date night as a carefully planned and potentially deadly mission. I felt a pang of regret at that now; I should have known that the game wouldn’t let something like this pass by without incident. The only question was how difficult of a fight we had ahead of us. Against a random mugger in the park, there was no question that either of us would have won, and even outnumbered six-to-two I thought that was the case, but there was no telling who these people were and how well trained they were.

I also had a wide variety of magic available to me, including a recently acquired sapphire of impeccable quality and size that allowed for the use of effective gem magic, all of which would allow for a great deal of lethality. I planned to use full force, given that I had no idea what we were actually up against.

The man I’d seen behind the tree slipped out when we were thirty feet away with a casual move that I found irritating. He was holding a dagger large enough that I wondered whether ‘dagger’ was even accurate, and he spun it around once as he stepped onto the path.

“Nice night?” he asked. It was just barely cold enough that I could see his breath. I came to a stop so as not to put myself any closer to him.

“Oh, it’s been great, so far,” said Fenn. I couldn’t tell whether or not her chipperness was forced. “Seventeen courses at Cupona, the entirety of The Star War saga at the Oxycoccus Orpheum, it’s been decadent even by our usual standards, and I can hardly think of a single thing that would make it better.”

“Well I hate to end your night on a sour note, but I’m going to need your money, your jewels, and any other valuables you’ve got on hand,” he replied. Fenn’s response had thrown him off; he’d had a grin, but it had left his face.

“Who do you work for?” I asked. The other men had started to make their way out of the woods. I wasn’t sure whether we’d been surrounded when I spotted the first man, but we were definitely surrounded now.

“I’m not interested in conversation,” said the man, tightening his grip on his dagger. I looked at his shoes, then at his hands, trying to figure out whether there were any clues. Nice shoes might have meant that he was a professional, but they were, like his shirt, vest, and pants, nothing too out of the ordinary for the lower classes in the Empire, clothes that had probably been made using a power loom and shipped via teleportation.

“You don’t need six men for a mugging,” I said. “You want me to believe that a whole gang was just waiting here, hoping that someone with money would come by?”

“They might have been waiting for The Star War to let out, actually,” said Fenn. I heard a clatter as she dropped her heels to the ground, and watched, tense, as she took a few steps forward.

“Jewels, cash, now,” said the man. He’d been casually holding the dagger before, but he’d changed his stance slightly when she came close, one foot a bit forward, angling his body. He spat to the side. “Fucking half-breed.”

“Honey, I think that these men might legitimately be meaning to rob us,” said Fenn with a laugh. She clapped her hands with a giddiness that I’d rarely seen from her.

“Don’t take this so lightly,” I said.

“No, you’re right,” said Fenn. “This dress was expensive; I don’t want to get blood on it.” She cocked her head to the side. “Should I take the dress off and fight in my underwear, or what do you think is the best way to go?”

“Fenn,” I said, trying to keep some warning in my voice. She didn’t change her position or respond, so I turned my attention to the guy with the dagger. The others were closing in on us (two with guns, I was displeased to note), but he was their leader. I reached into my pocket. “I have two thousand obols on me,” I said. “Is that enough for us to be on our way?”

“Your girl has a real mouth on her,” said guy with the dagger. “Her earrings too.” He paused, looking me over. “And that ring of yours.”

“Oh fuck off, I paid for these earrings,” said Fenn. “I actually paid for them, that was a big step for me.” She undid the buttons on my jacket and let it fall to the ground.

“Fenn,” I said again.

“Oh,” she said, turning back toward me, “I guess I have an ethics question.”

“The fuck?” asked the guy with the dagger.

“I thought you didn’t want me teaching you how to be good?” I asked. Despite the two guns pointed at me, I was starting to relax. Professionals would have gone after us when they had the element of surprise, assuming that they wanted to kill us.

“Well Mary and Val aren’t here -- that was a fucking joke, I’m not taking lessons from Val, don’t look so aghast,” said Fenn. “Is it better to kill these guys, or should I just be trying to disable them?”

“They had their chance,” said the guy with the dagger. He stepped forward and stabbed at Fenn without waiting for a response from the others. He aimed at her side, just below her ribs; she caught his wrist without even looking his way.

I formed the Anyblade into a dagger just in time to parry the first shot fired at me, and from there I was on the move, Anyblade twirling around me as I moved to the closest of our assailants. Fenn had some kind of witty rejoinder that I couldn’t quite hear because my ears were ringing, but I saw her headbutt the man whose wrist she was holding, and after that I was too consumed with my own half of the fighting.

It had been a little more than a week since I’d killed Fallatehr, but there was no appreciable rust on my combat abilities, nor did I think that “use it or lose it” actually applied to me. I spun as I extended the Anyblade to its full, polearm length, dashed and lunged toward the nearest guy, who was still in the midst of raising his gun. The use of blood magic to augment my movement was automatic now, the use of bone magic nearly so, and what Fenn had said about perhaps not killing them reached my brain just in time for me to reshape the head of the polearm into something more like a hammer than a blade. I heard a sharp crack of bone as the polearm hit the guy just above his ear, but that was at least less lethal than cutting halfway through his skull.

I parried away another bullet, acting entirely on instinct, trusting the blade to find its position. The man who’d fired it was tracking me, but I was burning bones for Speed, and he seemed like he was practically moving in slow motion. My swinging polearm struck his wrist, cracking bone and making his third shot go far to the side, and by the time he’d fallen over, I’d moved close in toward one of the others. This one had a knife, a slender one, but I simply reached past it before he could properly react and punched him straight in the throat. As he jerked backward I grabbed his knife-hand, and wrenched it sideways to dislodge the weapon, which I snatched from mid-air.

(By my count, there were 74 bones of the 206 in my body that were safe to burn using bone magic, which left all those without left-right symmetry, or those whose symmetry I needed in order to make the repair. Moving at the speed I did wasn’t cheap, in terms of burning through bones, but a rapid response to the threat seemed like it was warranted.)

I turned to go to Fenn’s rescue, only to find that she had finished at more-or-less the same time I had. The man who’d originally approached us was screaming in pain on the ground, a second man was trying to scoot backward across the park grass with a broken leg, and the third had two arrows in his chest and was quickly painting the ground red with his blood. Fenn was wearing Sable, and had her artillery bow in hand.

“Gun,” she said, voice loud over the screaming and the ringing in my ear from three gunshots, but before I could properly react, she’d raised her bow and shot an arrow that whistled by within six inches of me -- I consciously stilled my instinct to parry it at the last second. I heard a double thump from behind me, and turned to see the guy whose wrist I’d broken crying out in pain. His other wrist was pinned to the dirt with an arrow, the hand a foot away from where the gun had landed. “He was going for the gun,” said Fenn.

“Where were you hiding Sable?” I asked. The dress she had on was the kind where pockets were out of the question.

“If the night had kept going how I’d wanted it to, you would have found it,” said Fenn with an exaggerated wink. She turned back toward the group’s leader and said, “Stop screaming, I didn’t kill you.” To my surprise, he listened, and reduced his sounds to a wet, choking whimper.

I looked around us. Four were down with injuries, some worse than others, but two were more worrisome, the one I’d smashed in the head, and the one with two arrows in him. “Come on,” I said to Fenn. “We should heal them.”

“Seriously?” asked Fenn. “I didn’t shoot to kill; I’d have thought that was already more than -- if you fucking go for that gun one more time I will chop off your dick.” That last part was directed at the guy behind me, who, against all wisdom, had pulled the arrow from the ground and was reaching for the gun again with the arrow still embedded in his wrist.

It was around that time that a figure in armor came sprinting our way -- not the police, with a ridiculous response time, but Amaryllis in her immobility plate, moving faster than she had any right to.

“What happened?” she asked, pulling her helmet off and looking around at the carnage.

“We think they were just muggers,” I replied as I went over to one I was pretty sure was bleeding out.

“Look!” said Fenn. I caught her twirling in her dress from the corner of my eye. “Not a drop of blood!”

“Who the fuck are you people?” said one of the thugs from the ground.

“We’re the Critter Crew,” said Fenn. “I am Vulpes the Vixen, sexy seductress, that’s Yellow Canary, who fights with the power of song, and our dashing leader is --” She raised her bow and loosed another arrow at the guy who had gone for his gun, hitting him in the shoulder. “Is Blue Hound, the gallant hero.”

“Why are you healing them?” asked Amaryllis.

“I don’t want to kill anyone if I don’t have to,” I replied as I laid hands on the man that was bleeding out. He’d lost a lot of blood, and that was something that I couldn’t fix, but I’d nevertheless yanked out both arrows and begun to burn through my bones to close the wounds.

“We have three or four minutes before the police show up,” said Amaryllis. “We should kill them all. Fenn can have the bodies vanished in a little more than a minute.”

“I really don’t want to do that,” I said. It’s not what Batman would do.

“They saw your faces and abilities,” said Amaryllis. “The enemy will find out.”

“Which enemy?” I asked.

“Any of them,” replied Amaryllis.

“I won’t say a f-fucking w-word,” said the leader from the ground. Based on the way that he was gasping, I guessed that Fenn had hit him hard in the stomach or chest.

“Who hired you?” I said, stepping away from the pale body of the man I’d healed to my satisfaction. There was still a chance that he wasn’t going to make it, but I’d done as much as I could short of a blood transfusion.

“No one!” he shouted.

Fenn stepped over to him and placed a foot on his shoulder, pushing him down. She’d put her heels back on, I’d noticed. With a long sigh, she popped two arrows out of Sable in quick succession and drew them back, all resting on the string of the bow.

“Tell me who hired you and you’ll walk away from tonight with just debilitating injuries,” she said. “Lie again and not only will I kill you, I’ll hand your soul over to my pet demon.”

“I f-f-fucking swear on my mother’s life no one h-h-hired us, we w-w-were waiting for easy m-marks, no guards,” he stammered out.

Fenn loosed her arrows. For a moment I thought that she’d shot him in the throat, but they’d both struck dirt, one on either side of his throat. He must have thought that he’d been shot too, because I saw steam rising from his crotch; he’d pissed himself.

“You weren’t hired, but someone suggested that you be here,” said Fenn. Another arrow popped out of her glove and she drew it back with a single smooth motion. Despite myself, and despite the sounds of pain and anguish from the men around me, I found myself admiring the definition of her muscles as she held the bow taut.

“No one,” he said. “No one.” He was practically in tears.

Fenn turned to the side. “I believe him, personally,” said Fenn. She hadn’t let up any of the tension in the bow though. “Mary?”

“Joon’s call,” she said.

“We let them live,” I said, my voice firm. “And probably get the fuck out of here before the police show up. We’ll take the guns. And if these men talk, to the police or anyone else, I’ll indulge my desire for grievous violence and extreme retribution.” That was more for their benefit than Fenn’s.

“Alright, fair enough, just one thing,” said Fenn. She popped her bow and arrow back into her glove, then began walking over to the man who’d twice now gone for his gun. He was lying on the ground with two arrows in his left arm and at least a few broken bones in his right wrist.

“Fenn, no,” I said.

“Look, if you say that you’re going to cut a man’s dick off if he does something, and then he does that thing and you don’t cut his dick off, then who’s ever going to take you seriously again?” asked Fenn. An ornate dagger appeared in her gloved hand.

“We don’t have time,” said Amaryllis.

“Fine,” grumbled Fenn. “Look, guy, whoever you are, I’m going to cut off your dick, it’s just not going to be tonight, okay?”

We moved quickly as we left, and Fenn guided us off the main path to behind a few bushes just before a car went barrelling past with flashing blue and white lights. Her sense of luck had definitely gotten stronger than when we’d first met, and it had been strong enough to be noteworthy back then. Amaryllis made to stand up, but Fenn shook her head and mouthed ‘one more’. After the oscillating blue and white lights passed by a second time, we stood up and were on our way.

“Would you really have cut off that guy’s dick?” I asked as we moved.

“Your dick is the only one I want to touch,” said Fenn. “I knew you’d stop me. Good for intimidation though.”

“We need to get back to the safehouse, then leave Cranberry Bay behind,” said Amaryllis. “We can’t risk them talking to the police, or the police being on the lookout for us.”

“It’s date night,” said Fenn. “We’ve got a penthouse suite that we paid a lot of money for.”

“Too risky,” said Amaryllis. We were keeping to her pace. Fenn had gone barefoot again, and was moving along the grass as though her feet were made for it. Amaryllis, by contrast, was wearing full plate, and while that kind of armor was surprisingly moveable (and hers was magical) it wasn’t effortless to move in.

“Are you honestly worried that the police are going to go to every hotel in the city looking for us in the middle of the night based on the accounts of those men?” asked Fenn.

“That’s exactly what I’m worried about,” said Amaryllis.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Tonight is our night together.”

“Joon,” began Amaryllis.

“We’ll tip the doorman generously, and if he sells us out, there’s no way that the rank-and-file police are prepared for us,” I replied. We exited out of the park and onto the main road, where only a few cars were going by. It was only another block to our hotel.

“You’re taking a risk,” said Amaryllis. “This whole night was a risk, but --”

“We’ll be fine,” I repeated. “Go back to the safehouse, hang tight, and either we’ll show up tomorrow morning, or we’ll get word to you. We’ve planned for that kind of thing.” We had established codes, newspapers to place classified ads in, and bars in several cities where the bartender had been paid cash to be our answering service. The ‘one phone call’ rule wasn’t very consistent on Aerb, nor were the justice systems in general, but if anything went wrong with the law in any of the places we were set up for, we did have some channels available to us.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis. Her sigh was visible in the chilly night. “Be safe. Have -- have fun.”

By the time Fenn and I got to the hotel, we were back in high spirits. The fight had, in some ways, been a fun one, an absolute curbstomp that had the benefit of coming when I’d been half-expecting a serious disruption all night. Fenn seemed inordinately pleased by the idea that a gang of hardened criminals had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and our conversation devolved into a recap of the events (which in some ways reminded me of reliving old adventures around the gaming table).

And once we went up to our lavish penthouse suite, we didn’t do much talking for the rest of the night.

Achievement Progress: A Key for Seven Locks (1/7)

I was still pissed off at the game when I woke up in the morning. The fight excepted -- maybe even the fight included -- we’d had a wonderful night together, and then the game had to intrude and insinuate that there was an achievement for having sex with all seven of my companions. To the best of my recollection, it was the first time that the game had ever even told me about achievement progress, rather than simply giving me the achievement when I met the requirements, and that made it feel like an extra-special kick in the teeth, custom-delivered just for me.

I didn’t tell Fenn about it when it happened, and the longer I let it go, the less I thought I would. You would think that maybe I would have learned a lesson from what happened with Arthur and Tiff, and I’d thought that maybe I had learned a lesson about being open and honest with the people I cared about … but telling Fenn that the game really was setting me up with some kind of bizarre harem after what had been one of the best nights we’d spent together, undercutting that intimacy with an implicit threat from the game, after everything that she’d said about being worried -- I kept spinning my wheels, running through the same thoughts, trying to figure out how I would break it to her, and waffling on whether or not I would. It would be the easiest secret in the world to keep. I had told her about the Petite Mort achievement, but that didn’t really affect our relationship in any meaningful way, and I had considered keeping silent about that too.

We put on fresh clothes, courtesy of the glove, and to my mild disappointment, Fenn took a scissors to her hair, cutting it off at shoulder-length.

“Hair that long is a liability in combat,” said Fenn. “I’m sorry, I love you, but I’m not going to risk my life to look cute.”

“You still look cute,” I said. “Pretty, gorgeous, alluring, I could go on.”

“Please do,” she said with a smile.

“Can I ask … this is the second time you’ve said ‘I love you’, but they were both ‘I love you, but’, and I don’t really, ah—” I paused. She was blushing slightly.

“Don’t really love me?” she asked.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” I replied. “You’re saying it like it’s a joke, or like you’d say that you love a sandwich, or like it’s just to soften the blow of calling me an ass. And I love you, but I wish that you would feel free to tell me that you love me without having to undercut it.”

“I love you too, but it feels like you were doing the same thing,” said Fenn with a grin.

“Oh, well I love you, but that was the point,” I replied. I was smiling, and that was helping to wash away any lingering unhappiness I’d been feeling from thinking about the game.

“Hrm,” said Fenn. She moved in close to me. “I love you.”

“But?” I asked.

She squeezed my butt.

“I love you too,” I replied.

◆◆◆

Amaryllis, Grak, and Val were all waiting for us back at the safehouse. The Cranberry Bay safehouse had been bought furnished, and while it was on the small side given that we were expecting to eventually be a group of eight people (or seven, depending on what happened with the locus), it was more than big enough for our current purposes, which mostly revolved around having a place to eat, sleep, and teleport into or out of. A breakfast of eggs, pork belly, and cranberry toast was waiting for us, and I took a heaping plate of it for what was sure to be a long session talking shop. None of the food was cold, which meant that we hadn’t kept them waiting long.

“Cards on the table, I think that the locus should come first,” said Amaryllis. “It’s time sensitive.”

“How time sensitive?” I asked.

“It’s hard to see inside the bottle,” said Grak. “It’s hard to gauge. Some of the trees are dying.”

“Enough that you could see from outside?” I asked. I hadn’t been with them when they’d made their last trip.

“Yes,” said Grak. “I don’t know whether the problem is sunlight, temperature, moisture, or air. Some of those we might be able to fix.”

“It’s one of our companions,” said Amaryllis. ‘Our’ companions, not ‘your’ companions. “Even if it weren’t, it’s the last of its kind, and even if it weren’t, it’s powerful. If we still had Solace, her power alone would justify making it a priority.”

“We don’t have Solace,” I said.

“We have her soul,” answered Amaryllis. “You have Soul Slip now. The trade is one-for-one, meaning that at the cost of draining one of the unused Armor skills, Bows, Horticulture, and possibly Gem Magic, you could push Essentialism up above 100. In theory, at least. That would either give you the ability to help the locus, give you the ability to resurrect Solace, or possibly both.”

“It would take a day to level those skills up to the soft cap,” I replied. “And even then, I’d get five minutes per point. I’d only be over 100 for about twenty minutes. It’s a gamble.”

“Yes.” Amaryllis nodded. “We’ve set up our safehouses, we’ve done some of the background work I felt was necessary, strengthened our protocols, procured equipment, and now we’re out of the things I think we can do without some kind of gamble.” She didn’t say the word ‘narrative’, because she knew that I didn’t like it, but I thought I had enough of a handle on her that I knew what she was thinking. No respite could last forever, and the longer we spent resting on our laurels, the better the chance that the Plot would find us.

“Tabling the Essentialism gambit for now, what are our other options?” I asked.

Amaryllis frowned. “Glassy Fields,” she replied. “We only have a fraction of the equipment that’s mine by claim-in-fact. Most of it will be held by various interested parties within Anglecynn, and while it’s possible that we could steal some of it, especially with Grak’s skillset, that risks setting off some alarm bells.” She pursed her lips. “Assuming that you care about not setting off alarm bells.”

“But the keep at Glassy Fields would be ours for the taking,” I said with a nod.

“We need armor for Val, Grak, and Fenn, and a weapon for Val,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t know what’s in Glassy Fields, given that no one’s been there for hundreds of years, but I’m hopeful.” She shrugged. “Kuum Doona in the Boundless Pit is another option, but I think that’s probably the more difficult of the two. We have quests for both.” ‘We’, not ‘you’.

“More difficult a prospect than Glassy Fields,” muttered Grak with a shake of his head.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There are other options,” said Amaryllis. “Speculation and Scrutiny is one of them, but I’m worried that they’ll expect you there. We could go find a god and start that quest chain, but there are many unknowns there that I’m quite uncomfortable with, we’d be letting the game lead us by the nose. I can see by your expression that those don’t meet with your approval though, so why don’t we cut to the chase and you can tell me what you’d like to do?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“I want to find Arthur,” I replied.

Amaryllis softened slightly. “Joon, I know you do--”

“We’ve gotten off-track,” I said. “It’s been one thing after another, ever since -- fuck, since Barren Jewel, which was a month ago, when we were just going to Caer Laga to get what was stashed there. I’m not going to say that everything that happened after that didn’t have a purpose, or that it was unnecessary, but the last time I let material goods dictate things, the actual result wasn’t all that great for me.”

“Would you say the same for saving companions?” asked Grak.

I made a sour face at that. “I don’t want to get on a reactive treadmill,” I said.

“Treadmill?” asked Val.

“It’s a thing you run in place on,” I explained. “I was saying that there’s a possibility that we just react to one thing, then to another, over and over, never actually striking out on our own.”

Loyalty increased: Valencia the Red, lvl 17!

That was one of the reasons that I’d been trying to keep my distance from Valencia. Her loyalty went up on a hair trigger, and while having her loyalty high was a good thing from a game-mechanical standpoint, I was really worried that she was developing an emotionally unhealthy attachment to me, not to mention that lvl 20 might progress her powers while she was still grappling with the ones that she’d been given at lvl 10. There were, for the time being, moments when she was pure Valencia, which I thought were probably good for her, and good for our attempts at socializing her.

“Why would you want to run in one place?” asked Grak with a furrowed brow.

“To harness the power of an animal,” answered Amaryllis, before I had the chance. She turned to me. “You want to find your friend Arthur, who we believe to have probably been my ancestor, Uther Penndraig,” she said. I thought that was largely for Valencia’s benefit; she’d been debriefed after informing us that the devils and demons died as she used them up (ate them, in her words). “Glassy Fields or Speculation and Scrutiny are probably our best avenues.”

“I don’t think they are,” I said. “I want to find Arthur the same way that Larkspur found us. Doris Finch.”

“We are not making a deal with Doris fucking Finch,” said Amaryllis.

“I wasn’t proposing that we do,” I replied. “We get to the exclusion zone, grab one of her from the periphery of her territory, and then tie her down so that I can soulfuck her.”

“Like Fallatehr,” said Val.

“It’s distasteful --” I began.

“It’s illegal,” said Amaryllis.

“It’s immoral,” said Fenn.

“It’s the kind of illegal that will get the hammers of the gods brought down on you,” said Amaryllis.

“It’s the kind of immoral that gives me the heebie jeebies,” said Fenn.

“We freed Fallatehr from his prison,” I said. “You can’t tell me that’s more illegal. And I’m already a soul mage, as is Fenn, and it’s my understanding that Valencia would be killed on sight if anyone knew that she was a non-anima.”

“The Doris Finch exclusion zone is closely watched,” said Amaryllis. “It’s all the risk of freeing Fallatehr with none of the potential upside. The Finches are all different from each other, the odds that you would get one that would tell you anything useful, particularly regarding her probabilistic magic, is remote. We would have to go straight into the city center, and you have to believe me when I say that’s not something that we want to do while not looking like Doris Finch.”

“Technically,” I began, then paused.  Technically we could disguise ourselves as Doris Finches, because I could copy over her entire body, just like Fallatehr did. That would leave the question of our original bodies, which we obviously wouldn’t want to abandon, but if we had enough of the Dorises, we could essentially use them as hold variables so that we could swap back.

“Technically?” asked Fenn.

The problem was, that plan started to sound more evil the more I thought about it, and beyond that, more complex than I wanted to count on. “Just thinking,” I said with a sigh. “Amaryllis, your objections have merit; Fenn, your objections have merit; Valencia, I should have considered your feelings more before making that suggestion.”

Loyalty increased: Grak lvl 9!

“What’s the plan then?” asked Amaryllis. She shifted in her seat. “Can we take it to a vote?”

“Sure,” I said. “Smith-invariant instant-runoff voting fine?”

“Something you named after yourself?” asked Fenn with a laugh.

“No relation,” I replied. “He was a professor of mathematics, but Smith-invariant comes from the Smith set, which is the smallest non-empty set of candidates where each candidate within the set wins a pairwise competition with each member outside the set. And then you do instant-runoff voting within the Smith set. And from the looks, I’m guessing that this marvelous system of voting is somehow not one that ever made it to Aerb, despite it featuring in no less than eight different tabletop settings I designed.”

“Why don’t we just vote normally?” asked Grak.

“How much time do you have?” I asked.

“If I understand this scheme right, the results of Smith-invariant IRV should be equivalent to the results of a plain vote, assuming that everyone votes for their actual first choice rather than voting strategically, and also assuming that there exists a strict majority winner of three votes?” asked Amaryllis.

“Locus should get a vote,” said Fenn. Amaryllis glared at her. “What, it’s true! One companion, one vote, Juniper gets to veto because he’s special.”

“The locus can’t vote,” I said. “It can’t make its wishes known, and we can’t reasonably put thoughts or desires into its mouth. I’m not sure you could describe it as having compatible thoughts.”

“You said that we were tabling it, not that you weren’t going to do it,” said Amaryllis. “You want to put the Essentialism gambit as part of the voting?”

“I’m worried that it’s going to lead to something bigger,” I replied. “I’ll crest 100 with Essentialism, then that will lead down some other path that we have to go on, and Arthur will just”—stay dead. I swallowed instead of saying that—“I know that there’s some kind of cultural thing about the locus that I’m not getting, I know that, I just … I’m worried that everything will get put on hold again if I make the locus my first priority.”

Amaryllis frowned. “Essentialism, Glassy Fields, Kuum Doona, Speculation and Scrutiny, have I missed any that anyone was planning to vote for?” Silence greeted that. “I vote to help the locus.”

“I vote the same,” said Grak.

“Kuum Doona,” I said.

“Kuum Doona,” said Fenn.

This was why you did Smith-invariant IRV, and why you did a blind vote where no one knew how anyone else was voting. I wouldn’t have said Kuum Doona so quickly, but I knew that Fenn would probably follow my lead, and so needed to get my choice out first so that she’d have something to follow. And now, given that we’d made that choice, and Amaryllis and Grak had made their choice, maybe the group preference was actually for Glassy Fields (which I could easily have been swayed toward), but we wouldn’t be going there. Either way, given that it was two against two, the only way that the vote wouldn’t go my way was if Val voted against me, and that --

“I want to save the locus,” said Val.

Fuck.

Chapter 3 - Lies and Damned Lies

“Are you upset with me?” asked Val as soon as our group meeting had broken up. She didn’t wait until anyone else was away, and I could see Grak and Amaryllis share a look.

“Come on, let’s talk about this in my room,” I said, gesturing for her to lead the way.

We walked through the hallways of the safehouse; she knew the place better than I did, since I had been out and about far more than her, either helping to set up the other safehouses, helping Fenn gather up supplies, or training somewhere that would allow me a lot of room. The Cranberry Bay safehouse (really just a house, but Grak had at least given it modest wards) was pretty ordinary by the standards of Aerb, close enough to modern middle America that you could be excused for having missed the differences. The electrical systems were probably the more noticeable, with thicker cords, heavier light switches, and bulbs that seemed both fragile and weighty. I missed LED bulbs.

The paintings on the walls had come with the house, and I was half-tempted to stop and look at them. Instead, they passed me by, scenes of the cranberry harvest out on the bay that were probably iconic, if you weren’t a stranger in a strange land. We went into the room I shared with Fenn, which was warded against sound for obvious reasons, and I pulled a chair out from behind the roller-top desk so that she could sit on the bed.

“Are you upset with me?” she asked again.

“No,” I said. “I’d like to understand why you made your vote though, and I guess to talk a bit.”

Val shrugged. I was hoping that there would be more to it, but she just sat there, looking at the floor. I took a moment to look her over; she had long white hair, red eyes, skin so pale it was essentially white. She wore a blue dress with a floral pattern, something that someone must have picked out for her, though I couldn’t tell whose sensibilities were at work. There was something haunting about her in the light that filtered in through the window, like I was looking at a wisp of a person.

“You said that you want to save the locus,” I prompted.

“I do,” said Val with a nod. She still wasn’t looking at me.

“Do you know what a locus is?” I asked.

“Mary said that it was one of a kind,” said Val. “A creature that was hated and hunted.”

“Like you,” I said.

Val shrugged.

“Can you … you don’t have a devil in you right now?” I asked.

“I’m not eating one, no,” said Val. She looked up at me. “Mary said that it would be better if I didn’t, unless I needed one to get me through something hard. She said that around the group I wouldn’t ever have to have one, not if it was just to talk, because I’m still learning and you would all understand.”

I frowned slightly at that. “She’s probably right,” I said. “She usually is. But for this conversation to be productive, I think it might be helpful, unless Mary thought there was a reason that it wouldn’t be.”

“I need to learn and grow on my own,” said Val. “And it’s too easy to talk when there’s a devil to draw on.”

“Too easy?” I asked.

“Too easy and too hard,” said Val. She flopped backward on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s easy to see the things that I could say to get my way, there are memories that I can reach to when I don’t know something, but the devils …” She waved her hands helplessly in the air above her, which might have been a funny visual if she didn’t seem so distraught.

“You’re in control of the devils though?” I asked.

“They’re just a collection of parts,” said Val. “Not devils anymore, when they’re past my maw.”

“Okay …” I said slowly, trying to digest that imagery. “How would you feel about taking in a devil right now, in order to help you explain a bit?”

Val sat up and looked at me. “I’m worried that I would say things.”

“I won’t take anything personally,” I said. “You are still learning.”

Loyalty increased: Valencia the Red lvl 18!

“Okay,” she said softly.

There was a subtle change to the features of her face, and she straightened herself, gaining better posture. She scooted forward to the edge of the bed, and stared at me intently with her crimson red eyes. A delicate hand brushed white hair away from her face, framing it perfectly. It was like she’d just come alive.

“I feel so much better like this,” said Val. She stretched her arms out to the sides, then moved them in, pushing her breasts together, which I tried not to notice. “What I was trying to say was that they’re not really devils anymore, even if it sometimes feels like it, they’re parts and pieces that I can use. Without them, I’m missing pieces of myself. Amaryllis thinks that my upbringing might be the root of that, rather than because I’m a non-anima, but she doesn’t know enough one way or another to say for sure, and I haven’t happened on a devil that’s known well enough to confirm it.”

“Ah,” I replied.

She was looking at me with intent eyes. Her stretch had brought her hands around to rest on her knees, and her arms were still pushing her breasts together, showing more pale cleavage than the dress would normally allow for. She grinned at me. “The confidence is faked.”

“Faked?” I asked.

“I don’t feel it, internally, but there’s a part of the devil that knows what it’s like to puppet a human and pretend at being confident, so I can use that, if I think I can get what I want by pretending,” said Val.

“Val,” I said slowly. I had almost asked her what it was she wanted, but that was such an obvious trap that I was stunned I’d almost fell for it. ‘You,’ her answer would have been, said with all the seduction that she could muster, which I’d have wagered was probably a lot at the moment.

“You said that you wouldn’t take it personally, since I’m still learning,” she said, tilting her head to the side to get a better angle on me.

“I might have misjudged the risks on this,” I admitted. My heart was hammering away in my chest, and I told myself that it was fear and anxiety talking.

“I would share you with Fenn, or be your secret,” said Val. She stopped, with confusion crossing her face. “No, that’s --” She looked at me. “I’m relying on the devil too much, letting it guide my path, that would have worked, but it’s not me. Amaryllis explained the, the biology, I know how, it just seems so gross.” She dropped her pose and looked at her hands. She looked up at me. “This is what I think I was trying to say.”

“Too easy and too hard,” I replied with a nod. My heart was slowing back down.

(If Tiff could have seen inside my mind at that moment, she would probably have been either furious or disgusted, maybe both. Or, no, she probably wouldn’t have been furious or disgusted, she would have said that I’d grown up in a culture that often portrayed infantilization as sexy, and that either biology or culture had wired me with an instinct toward protecting and sheltering women, and conflating that desire to help and protect with romantic or sexual thoughts. That was how it happened in the movies. Tiff probably wouldn’t have faulted me for my desires and emotions, only for my actions. I was the one that was furious and disgusted.)

“Too easy to see the paths in front of me, too hard to know which one to go down,” said Val. “None of the parts and pieces help me make sense of who I am or what I feel.” She looked up at me. “I love you,” she said. “I know that you don’t love me back yet, and Amaryllis says that’s just misplaced attachment, something that I’m going to have to find a way to get over, but she has her own issues with you, so I don’t know how good her advice is.”

I swallowed. Frick. “The devils, or pieces of a devil, they don’t help you with judgment.”

“No,” said Valencia. She pursed her lips, looking at a spot on the wall a few feet to my left as though she were angry at it. Maybe this conversation was easier for her if she wasn’t looking at me. “I could fake it. Pretend, maybe. But it would be so hollow.”

“Tell me why you want to put our effort into saving the locus,” I said.

Val looked at me. “I guess I just don’t want to be the weird one anymore.”

I laughed at that, first a little and then a lot.

“That was a joke,” I said.

Val nodded, smiling slightly. “I can do jokes.”

“But there’s a real reason?” I asked. “Something better than just Amaryllis explaining it to you when you didn’t have a devil in you to see through her?”

“My place in this family is awkward,” said Val. “Fenn doesn’t like me, because I’m in love with you, and I’m not as willing to pretend that it’s nothing as Mary is. Grak is dour and unhappy, which means that he’s unhappy with me just by default. Mary is putting effort into me, but I have to have a pretty stupid devil for her to not be too transparent.”

“Transparent how?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.

“I can tell what she’s thinking,” said Val. “Other people are so easy to pick apart. It’s myself that I have trouble with. She told me not to say anything about the things that I could see in people.” She looked me over. “You agree with her, but you want to know anyway. Should I tell you?”

“No,” I replied. “She’s just … very hard for me to read, for some reason. Grak too, but in a different way. Social superpowers seem like they would really come in handy.”

“It’s not always pretty to see people laid bare,” said Val. Her eyes were locked with mine, and now I was the one that wanted to look away.

“If there’s anything that you’re getting off me … I won’t deny that you can probably see through me, but we can’t always be the people that we want to be, even when we know who we want to be,” I said. “That’s probably going to be your challenge.”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” said Val with a small laugh and a shake of her head. “Everything I see in you is beautiful, even the flaws. Perhaps not the flaws, but the way you work against them. It’s very appealing.”

“Uh, good, I guess,” I said. “I didn’t mean … I’m not really equipped for this kind of conversation.”

“I know,” replied Val. “That’s also appealing.”

“Even though you can see through people anyway?” I asked.

“Amaryllis reacts by trying her best to speak defensively, hiding herself more, shielding her secrets, trying to deflect me away from the places that she doesn’t want exposed,” said Val.

“But of course it’s too late,” I said. “You’ve seen everything.”

Val nodded. “You just open yourself up and allow that vulnerability to show without embarrassment or shame. You admit when you’re at fault. You take a step back to look at yourself every once in a while. Most people don’t do that. Fallatehr never did.” I noticed the wording there, ‘Fallatehr’ and not ‘my father’, and I wondered whether that was a devil’s instinct for massaging the language, or whether it was indicative of how she thought of him.

“Well, I’m introspective enough to realize I’ve been finding this experience a little bit terrifying, and open enough to say that,” I said. “And I still don’t really know what your interest in the locus is.”

“There are so many things that I could say that would convince you,” said Val. She had a slight frown on her face.

“But they’re not true?” I asked.

“I’m trying to figure them out,” said Val. “The problem is that they sound so good that I’m almost convincing myself.”

“Don’t try to convince me,” I said. “We already had our vote, we’re going to put the locus first, I want to know why you care because I want to get to know you, however confusing the concept of ‘you’ is to you right now.”

Loyalty increased: Valencia the Red lvl 19!

“I don’t have a soul,” said Valencia. “I’m worried that’s going to define me. You don’t care, you don’t even seem to think that it’s worth thinking about, probably because you’re not used to having souls, but you’re the only one that doesn’t care. Earlier this week Amaryllis was talking about what kind of options I would have to disguise my looks, because people would kill me without giving it too much thought if they knew what I was, even if that’s not what I am anymore. I’m hoping that the locus, when we meet, is the second person that truly doesn’t care.”

I kept my mouth firmly shut. It’s not a person. That didn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could say to someone who had just finished explaining that her entire life was going to be dominated by people thinking that she wasn’t a person. I hoped that she couldn’t read all that from me, and then realized that I was doing exactly what she’d complained about Amaryllis doing, which was flinching back from the all-seeing eye.

“I don’t really care about the locus,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s just … for the same reason that I don’t really care that Fenn is a half-elf, and that I don’t care that you’re a non-anima, I don’t have the proper frame of reference to think about things like an Aerbian would. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not. To me it’s just a mystical deer, and neither mysticality nor deer have ever jelled with me, so …”

“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” said Val. “I know that you don’t want to hear it, but I’m yours, completely. If anyone else ever fails you, if the world ever seems against you, you have to know that I’m in your corner.”

I paused, then smiled, then tried to decide whether it was actually going to be funny when said out loud. “Unless there’s a vote that’s not going my way?”

To my relief, Val started laughing.

◆◆◆

“How was that for you?” asked Amaryllis after I made my way back to the common area. Val had returned to her own room; Fenn and Grak had left to go out into the city.

“Exhausting, but good,” I replied.

“With a devil, or without?” asked Amaryllis.

“With, for most of it,” I replied.

“Juniper, I want you to take me seriously when I say that’s very dangerous,” said Amaryllis.

“Yeah, I learned that the hard way,” I said. “I don’t know what class of demon she was chowing down on, but it was very, ah, stressful, like if I hadn’t been careful she might have talked me into … I don’t know.” Except that I do know. Blegh. Bleeeegh. Bad brain.

“Devil, not demon,” said Amaryllis. “Devils are the thinkers and talkers; demons are the fighters.”

“Right, I know,” I replied.

“And I meant that it was dangerous for her, not for you,” continued Amaryllis. “She needs to grow and become her own person, and I’m very concerned about what might happen to her as a person if she’s constantly leaning on the devils. Have you realized that it’s possible she’s lying?”

I frowned. “I was going to ask ‘about what’, but I’m anticipating that the answer is ‘everything’.”

“I think she’s telling the truth about her power,” said Amaryllis. “We don’t know for certain, because the description is vague. I also think that she tells the truth about whether or not she’s currently leaning on infernal understanding. Neither of those are, by necessity, true. And if she keeps a devil in her at all times, then it might be that she’s just faking her base state.”

“I can see her loyalty increases,” I replied. “I don’t think that she can fake those.”

“True,” said Amaryllis. “I’m just concerned. I’ve spent more time with her than anyone else, and not just because we were prisoners together. I think that of the four of us, I know her best.”

“That’s probably true.” I nodded. “I’ll do my best to defer to you.”

“And I think that we have to be a little bit watchful,” she continued. “I don’t think it’s probable, but given her demonstrated ability, it’s at least possible that she voted the way she did in order to provoke you into spending some time with her, and whatever you two talked about, the outcome might have been one that she was steering, especially if you came away feeling ‘good’.”

“I was really hoping that with Fallatehr dead we could leave that kind of thinking behind,” I muttered.

“I was too,” said Amaryllis. “I am too, still hopeful. I think that Val is as she presents herself to be, small and lost, confused and in need of support, alienated from the world and trying to grab on to a pillar of stability … and when she has a devil inside her, some of her problems go away, and some are compounded.”

“Can I say, you really did a one-eighty on her.” Amaryllis’ hair had grown out slightly, more of a pixie cut than the close crop it had been. She hadn’t re-dyed it; I could see red at the roots. She still, somehow, managed to make the look work, despite no obvious effort put into her appearance.

“She helped me,” said Amaryllis. “I told you that.”

“You went from thinking of her as ‘the non-anima’ to, I don’t know … being like her sister. Or her mother.” I wasn’t sure quite how to characterize it.

“You think I’m matronly?” asked Amaryllis with a raised eyebrow. I shook my head, and she let it pass. “She’s a non-anima with the primary aspect that makes them terrifying completely removed from her. There’s a reason that if one is born they’re killed before the mother has a chance to see the newborn. Each one is a way for the worst of the hells to enter into the mortal world. The ones that everyone remembers, the successful ones, married themselves to the infernal, became a willing tool of abject evil.”

“But they were still people,” I said.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis, slowly, hesitantly. “But I’m not sure that the distinction is one that matters.”

“It seems to me like what you do and do not consider a person matters a lot,” I replied.

“Not for them,” said Amaryllis. “Whether they’re people or not, the solution would have been the same. The quality of life a non-anima can expect to live, the things that they would see, the death and destruction that they would be complicit in? It was, is, better to end them.”

“Maybe don’t say that kind of thing around Val,” I said with a frown.

“She already knows, without me saying it,” replied Amaryllis. “You can’t keep things from her.”

“Yeah.” I winced. “Not even if you’re just trying to be nice. Let’s hope that this locus thing goes how she hopes it does.”

Chapter 4 - The Sacrifice

It took a day of training to get my skills up high enough for what I started thinking of as the Sacrifice. I kind of hated going over the annotated paper copy of the character sheet with the group, because it was my character sheet, but I could see the wisdom in it, and resisted the urge to make post-hoc rationalizations for why it would be better for me to make the decisions on my own. We decided that there should be four skills traded in, because that would push Essentialism up past the presumed milestone of 100, and once we’d decided that there should be four, it was only a matter of picking which ones it should be. I vetoed Gem Magic, since though I didn’t use it much, it was a pain in the ass to level up, and I felt roughly the same about Horticulture. Eventually, we decided on Bows, Unarmored, Unarmed Combat, and Shields. The first two were fairly easy choices, because Fenn had high skill in both, which meant that through Symbiosis I was at least middling. Unarmed and Shields both had the virtue of being little-used and seeming like they’d be straightforward to train.

I did the training at Safehouse 5, which was a small cabin fifteen miles from the nearest town and ten miles from the nearest neighbor. It was our “get the fuck away from civilization” safehouse. You couldn’t even get there by car, given that someone (cough cough) had knocked an enormous tree over, barring the path. The teleportation key made all locations equidistant, as long as you had been there once, so having a safehouse like that was quite convenient.

(Amaryllis had been the one to plan out most of the safehouses, and while they each served their own specific purpose, I’d eventually cottoned on to the fact that she’d deliberately chosen inconspicuous and uninteresting places, and given them the most boring possible names. It was, pretty clearly, a narrative thing; if the safehouses weren’t special or important, and we had no particular attachment to them, then they couldn’t be used as an emotional lever, and, perhaps, they wouldn’t make for good set-piece battles. Contrast a mostly anonymous cottage in the woods with spartan furnishing to an immense cathedral with a significant name that had once belonged to a dead god, and you might understand her line of thinking.)

I got the virtue for Bows at 20, and for Shields and Unarmored at 10.

Steady Aim:   Completely eliminates the penalty for firing a bow while moving. Halves the penalty for firing a bow under pressure or duress. Triples the amount of time you can hold a bow at maximum draw.

Bulwark:    Shields you hold are twice as durable. If a force acts on your shield to move you, you will move only half the usual distance, with the reduction capped at ten feet of movement negated.

Hardened Skin:    Lessens the toll that physical damage in combat takes on you. Slightly increases natural healing. Increases force required to break skin.

And, when Unarmored finally hit 20, there was an extra virtue:

Monkish Warrior:    While unarmed and unarmored, you may parry attacks as though you held a weapon, dodge at twice your effective skill, and automatically re-roll injuries if they are in the lowest five percent of outcomes (you keep any lower rolls).

This was the third time that I’d gotten an extra virtue, with the first two times being Nascent and Neophyte Blade-bound. It was a bit more clear where this new one had come from, given the references to “dodge”, “unarmed” and “unarmored”. It was far too restrictive for what it did though, and unless I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t wear my armor or hold a weapon, I wasn’t planning on being able to make use of the perk. It wasn’t anything that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice on the altar of Essentialism 100.

I ended up putting the two extra ability points into MEN even before we went into the bottle. Fenn already augmented my social skills, just through Symbiosis, and if Amaryllis got up to 20 Loyalty (something that both of us wanted), I thought that I would pretty much be set. That meant that it was either PHY or MEN, and while I had more skills with PHY requirements, my MEN skills were the more valuable, especially because I was sharing half their level with Fenn. Unlocking more of those magics was a priority, and a few of them were low-hanging fruit, but tracking down a water mage to teach me seemed like exactly the sort of thing that might cause the dread narrative to rear its ugly head.

With some trepidation, I used soul magic to adjust those points, now that I could do so without risking putting a skill above its cap. I backed out of the soul interface and quickly checked the afflictions, but nothing showed up there. After some prompting from Amaryllis, I was convinced to try moving another point from MEN, which would lower the caps and leave a few skills over, but wouldn’t drop them below 20 … only to find that I couldn’t. Some very, very careful testing showed that I was only capable of moving two ability points around (or alternately, a single point that was put into one of the three ‘master abilities’). My guess was that I could move around a number of points equal to one-tenth my Essentialism, but that was just a guess.

(There was, briefly, some talk about a total restructuring of my character build. I’d written out all 256 skills shown in the soul, along with their primary and secondary attributes, which Amaryllis had pored over and then cross-referenced with all the skills shown in Fenn’s soul, as well as those from hers, skills which I’d noticed had gone up since I’d hit level 12. In the end, Amaryllis didn’t have a strong enough preference toward a particular build, though of course there were a lot of changes that she would make. I wouldn’t have said that I was entirely happy with what I’d chosen, but in the absence of concrete knowledge of what the future held, and with the difficulty inherent in getting some of the magics unlocked (particularly Revision Magic and Still Magic, both of which would probably require me to at least briefly enroll at an athenaeum), I was fairly content with staying the course. Changing things around in the limited window I would have available as a master soul mage seemed like a somewhat poor use of resources, especially given that the ‘soul trance’ destroyed my ability to keep track of outside time.)

We descended into the bottle together, as a group. For me, Grak, and Val, it was the old travel-by-glove routine, while Fenn held onto Amaryllis, who was taking us all down in the immobility plate. Fenn had refused to go into the glove, citing one too many bad experiences with it, and for whatever reason, Amaryllis indulged her, even though it meant that the descent took quite a bit longer than it otherwise would have.

Before I knew it, I’d been popped back out, and was once again in the bottle, standing not too distant from the large tree in its center where we’d spent a somewhat idyllic week. I’d expected cold, but it was stiflingly hot, for no apparent reason; the bottle hadn’t been getting the right amount of sunlight, which I would have thought would lower the temperature of the mini biome.

The Six-Eyed Doe was there, watching us, head held high, but something about the way it moved seemed subtly off, as though it was putting on a show of strength for us. I still found it creepy; my distaste for deer was as strong as ever. I couldn’t actually think of a mammal that I would have had as much instinctive dislike toward as a deer. A rat, maybe? I’d worked on my uncle’s farm enough to have a fondness for farm animals of all kinds, from cows, to pigs, to sheep. The Six-Eyed Doe was pretty, I supposed, aesthetically pleasing, but I couldn’t quite help myself from appending ‘for a deer’ to that. Every time I looked at it, I thought about how much more awesome it would have been to have a giant six-eyed bear. As a doe, it didn’t even get antlers.

While all that was running through my head, Valencia took tentative steps toward the locus. We stayed back, by unspoken agreement (or possibly, given that I was only privy to about a third of the conversations between my party members, by spoken agreement). Val reached out a hand when she was ten feet away, then kept walking forward, shaking slightly. I was worried about what I would do if anything happened to her; bone magic didn’t work on her, because she didn’t have a soul, and I strongly suspected that fairies wouldn’t either. For her, a broken bone was a serious problem that would take weeks to fix, rather than being almost trivial (if incredibly painful).

When her trembling hand was a few feet away, the Six-Eyed Doe bowed its head, took a step forward, and licked her on the face. Val let out an ‘eep!’, then began to laugh as the doe nuzzled her. I found myself smiling as relief flooded through me. After a few minutes of this nuzzling, the locus put its head down lower, between Val’s legs, and before I could utter a word of caution or move to stop it, the Six-Eyed Doe lifted Valencia up and with a jerk of its head, plopped her onto its back. Once she’d got her bearings, and was holding the sides of the Six-Eyed Doe, it took off, racing across the interior space of the bottle, as Val held on for dear life and screamed in delight.

(And though I saw it happen, I still couldn’t quite say how the locus managed the feat of lifting Val up with its head and having her tumble backward along its neck to reach a perfect sitting position with no seeming effort on either of their behalf. It annoyed me, thinking about it later, because it seemed like the same kind of bullshit ‘fuck you I’m magical’ thing that I’d come to expect of the locus.)

“Better than expected,” I said as I watched the Six-Eyed Doe prance off into the distance. “We need them back here so we can start though.”

“Oh hush,” said Fenn. “That’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

I glanced at Fenn, and saw her smiling. Whatever her misgivings, she seemed pleased to watch the two weird ones getting along together.

“We’ll give it some time,” said Amaryllis. She’d been carrying some tension in her shoulders when we’d arrived, but was relaxed now, at ease. “The locus has been alone; I think it would be good to be social with it.” She hesitated. “I don’t know whether or not it knows about Solace.”

Fenn held out her gloved hand and a small jar appeared in it. “What are the odds that you can save her?” she asked me.

“If Uther could have brought people back from the dead, he would have done so on a number of occasions,” said Amaryllis. “That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but it’s unlikely.”

“Ten percent, let’s say,” I added. We had talked about this; I thought that Amaryllis was probably right. “We should lay everything out. Unicorn bones, the elf bones, all the souls we have available to us, anything that I might have a use for in the limited window after the Sacrifice.”

“Stop being so damned ominous about it,” said Fenn. “It’ll only take a few days to get them back. You’re being a whiner.”

“Fenn?” I asked, hand going to my heart. “My most loyal companion? How could you wound me so?”

“I’m the self-appointed court jester,” said Fenn. “My role is to tell the king the things that no one else can, because he’d get pissed off if it came from someone else. Ergo, you’re being a whiner about your very nearly godlike powers.”

“Not for the first time,” muttered Grak, loud enough that I could hear it.

“Sorry,” I said. “I think there’s a decent point of order here though, which is that I don’t know how fast I’ll be able to get the skills back. When I drained Essentialism down to zero, I had a hard time getting it back up.”

“Yes, all of a few hours,” said Fenn with a smile. “How dreadful.”

“No, he has a point,” said Amaryllis. “If it rots away the ability to learn a skill, which it might -- was Essentialism slower to rise?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. It’s hard to say because I was doing different things with it, and the soul trance makes it hard to track time, and the notifications don’t show up while I’m looking at it, but … I think so, yes.”

“There might be a limited number of times that we can use the trick,” said Amaryllis with a shrug. “And perhaps we’ll find that it’s not worth it because of the afflictions associated with it, which might be more severe at upper levels. We’ll be running into a number of firsts.” She turned toward me. “I still think that it’s prudent.”

“I’m coming around to it,” I said. “And even if I weren’t, you can’t maintain a democracy if you’re willing to defect from it when the votes don’t go your way.”

“Well, I’m ready whenever you are,” said Fenn. She’d laid out a fair number of things from inside her glove, bones, souls, and a few entads.

“I want to do everything possible before the Sacrifice,” I said. “That will mean trying to at least see the Six-Eyed Doe’s soul the normal way. There are a lot of ways that this can go wrong, and I want to minimize them.”

“They look like they’re coming back,” said Grak. He had his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun, and was looking off toward where the Six-Eyed Doe and Val were cavorting. They were moving toward us slowly, haphazardly, stopping to look and play together.

I decided that it was time to bite the bullet. I’d been making an honest effort with him over the past few days, but nothing had come of it. “Grak, is there anything that I can do, or say, or that we can talk about that would help your loyalty?” I asked. “It’s at nine right now. Another point would give me quick access to your soul.”

“Is it that high?” asked Grak, looking me over. “Asking doesn’t help you.”

“I know,” I replied. “I’ve been trying to make an effort, to connect with you, to do it the natural way, but that obviously hasn’t worked. I’m asking now because I might have to move fast, and it would benefit us both.”

“Not sure that this is the time, Joon,” said Fenn.

“It’s fine,” said Grak. He ran his hand over his beard. “Juniper, you treat the world as though it owes you something. You treat me as though I owe you my attention, affection, and loyalty.”

I thought for a moment before responding to that, trying to pick the right words. “Oh fuck off,” I said.

Grak snorted at that, a faint, slightly mean smile beneath his mustache.

“I put in so much effort with you,” I said. “More than with anyone else in the party. I’m continually trying to find some common ground, or talk to you, or just … I don’t know, something that will let us come to a mutual understanding of each other.”

“That’s his problem,” said Fenn, cutting in on the conversation. “He kind of feels like you try to talk to him and expect that it will make you friends, then get frustrated when that doesn’t work. And because he feels like you only talk to him with these expectations, it makes him really resistant to what you’re trying to do.”

“Thank you, Fenn,” said Grak with a nod.

“That’s asinine,” I said. “I get penalized for trying? No sane social system can work like that.”

“It isn’t about making an effort,” said Grak.

“Look, I really think that we should table this,” said Fenn.

“The effort has always been in service of reward for yourself,” said Grak. “There was always a cost to me if I did not provide that reward. It grates.”

I threw up my hands.

“You attempted to solve this issue in five minutes,” said Grak. “Think on that.”

I looked over to where the Six-Eyed Doe was still prancing around with Valencia. They hadn’t moved any closer to us. Solace was able to hear anything that went on in the locus’ domain, and I assumed that the same was true for the locus. Even if it didn’t fully understand what we were saying, it could probably read tone, and so it was staying away -- keeping Val away. Good.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s like you said, we’re family. We didn’t get to choose each other.”

“I chose you,” said Fenn.

“That’s -- thank you,” I said. “But I meant Grak and I. If the game layer hadn’t said anything about it, we would have used him to get up Aumann’s tower, rescued Amaryllis, and then went off without him, leaving him in the lurch.”

“Well that’s fucking harsh,” said Fenn with a frown.

“It was your plan,” I replied.

“Oh, right,” said Fenn, brightening up. “That was ages ago.”

“Water over the bridge.” Grak nodded.

“But the point was that the only reason that Grak is part of the group is because the game said so, and the only reason that he stayed with us is because we paid him,” I replied. “And even if he made a connection with both of you, he never made one with me -- never tried, but that’s not surprising, because trying is apparently a sin.”

“I did open up to you,” said Grak. “You seemed to think that it was of no consequence.”

I stared at him. “When?” I asked. “If this is all some stupid misunderstanding --”

“At Weik Handum,” said Grak.

“The … the thing with your, um, friends at the athenaeum?” I asked. I’d almost said it out loud, but realized at the last second that maybe this wasn’t actually something that he’d shared with the others. Had we talked about it as a group? I couldn’t remember, but as I tried to sift through the weeks we spent together, I was dismayed to realize that we probably hadn’t.

“Yes,” said Grak. His arms were folded across his chest. “That is fine. It is who you are. It does not inspire loyalty.”

“Give me a second,” I said. I had thoughts brewing, but I didn’t want to have them while I was this socially inept. I dipped into my soul, an action that was almost automatic, moved points from Mental to Insight, then opened my eyes and tried to resume thinking.

There were very few personal details I knew about Grakhuil Leadbraids. Most of those, I had learned from his biography. The only personal story he’d ever told me had been when we’d been at Weik Handum, a story that I thought was just him being incredibly blunt about weird stuff that I didn’t care about, by way of telling me not to sleep with Fenn. And my response to that had been to say ‘sure’, and then the very next morning Fenn had teased him, very graphically, about all the ways that we hadn’t had sex. Worse, I’d only really put effort into trying to raise his loyalty after learning about the Twinned Souls thing, which hadn’t really been my intention, but I could see how that looked.

“Fuck,” I said. I closed my eyes and scrunched up my face, trying to think of some response without the distraction of having to look at anyone. “Okay, I can see it now. I’m going to have to hope that I can explain what was going through my head at some point, but I want some time to think about things, how it looks from your perspective, and where our different cultures are getting in the way. And even if I could explain it perfectly, that probably wouldn’t be enough, because with you, I failed. I need to just … listen more, I guess, and focus less on the end goals, at least when it comes to our kharass.”

I opened my eyes.

Loyalty increased: Fenn lvl 22!

Loyalty increased: Amaryllis lvl 16!

Loyalty increased: Grak lvl 10!

Companion Passive Unlocked: Twinned Souls (Grak)!

To be honest, I was a little put out by seeing those notifications stacked up and waiting for me. In a way, it was like having an apology thrown back in my face, that same feeling of someone gleefully taking an admission of guilt or wrongdoing and rubbing your face in it. That wasn’t what they were doing, because the game layer was the one sending me the messages, but it still stung a little bit.

“Oh,” said Grak. He was looking down at his thick, meaty hands with something approaching wonder. I watched him closely as he took out his warder’s monocle, which he held up to his eye for a moment, looking around him, then slowly returned to its usual pocket. “I have the warder’s sight.”

I tried to recall whether I’d read about that in the (absolutely worthless) Commoner’s Guide to Warding, and came up blank.

“The monocle will burn the retinas, if overused,” explained Grak. “I no longer need it. It takes thirty or forty years of intensive study to develop the sight. It marks a person as a true master.”

“Congratulations!” said Fenn. “Maybe we can swing by the Athenaeum of Barriers sometime, let you show off to some friends.”

“The skill is unearned,” said Grak. He was looking around him, moving his head quickly to take in new sights. Whatever was going on with his eyes, he was still adjusting to it. “Welcome, but unearned. I would not pretend to call myself a master because of this gift.”

“Well I’m going to keep entering archery contests,” said Fenn.

“I’m happy for you, Grak,” said Amaryllis. She looked over at the Six-Eyed Doe, which was approaching with Val on its back. “It looks like they’re finally finished. Fortuitous timing.”

Val hopped down off the doe’s back and landed on the soft earth. Her dress flared up slightly with the air as she fell, which made the dismount seem easy and carefree.

“She likes me,” said Val with a shy smile. “And I like her.”

“Good,” I said with a nod. “We have work to do though.”

“She tried to fit in my maw,” said Val.

“It … what?” I asked.

“She could see that I was hollow,” said Val. “So she tried to fit inside of me, just to explore. I had to keep my maw open so that I wouldn’t bite her.”

“The locus … tried to possess you?” I asked. I looked to Amaryllis, our default authority on all things, but she looked just as bewildered as I was.

“She didn’t mean anything by it,” said Val, seeing my look. “And after I explained things, she retracted from me. She-she’s not a devil, I don’t want you to think it’s like that, we’re just in her domain, and she has power here, and that power can fit inside me, because I’m hollow.” She looked from me to Amaryllis, looking slightly distraught. “If I did something wrong --”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Amaryllis. Her voice was smooth and gentle. “The locus is a mysterious entity; we just didn’t realize that there would be any interaction between the two of you. This … might be the first time in history that a non-anima has ever met a locus.” Amaryllis’ brow furrowed. I wondered whether she was thinking about the Second Empire.

“And is that … can the locus, ah.” I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. Being back with the locus, and wanting to be conscious of its desire to stay cloaked in mystery, was already grating on me. I wanted to know whether the locus could empower Valencia, and if it could, then whether that might possibly work outside the bottle, so long as she was close enough, since that was how it worked for druids. But the locus rebelled against definitions and descriptions, and I didn’t want to destroy this weird magical relationship between them by dint of over-analyzing it.

“We don’t need to know more,” said Amaryllis, seeming to pick up on my train of thought. “We’ll try not to inspect it too deeply, or ask too many questions that don’t have answers.”

“Okay,” said Val, still glancing between us, still looking worried.

Fenn stepped forward, with a bottle in her hand. Solace’s lily-white soul was moving within it. “There’s a bit of bad news,” said Fenn. “Solace --”

The locus turned its head toward the sky and began to yell, a weird, braying sound that set my teeth on edge. This continued for some time, until Amaryllis moved forward and wrapped the locus in a hug, her head resting against the doe’s breast. When the Six-Eyed Doe lowered its head, there were tears coming from each of its six eyes, with absurdly large drops as though surface tension had gone out of control, each tear the size of my fist.

(Had it not known, or was it like a mother seeing her son’s casket come home from a war overseas, emotion spilling forward when an immaterial death was made real?)

Grak gave me a slight push, and that got me moving. We surrounded the doe, comforting it, and eventually it lay down, first so that its legs were curled beneath it, and then in a small circle, in a way that I associated with a fawn. I felt awkward and uncomfortable patting it, and tried my best to murmur something comforting, but I had always been bad with grieving.

◆◆◆

Tiff wore a black dress, one that came down to her calves, and black shoes with a slight heel. She’d come into my room without knocking, and sat down on the bed beside me, without saying a word. Her lip was trembling; from her eyes, she’d been crying, and though her cheeks were dry, I doubted that they would stay that way.

“Why didn’t you come?” she asked. Her voice was shaky.

“I,” I began, then stopped, because I didn’t want to cry. I was wearing black socks, black pants, a black tie, and a white buttoned-down shirt. It was an outfit that I had picked out with Arthur, when I’d been a witness for mock trial. He had thought it would be fun, a thing we could do together, and I didn’t really take to it.

“People asked, and we didn’t know,” said Tiff. She reached over and rested her hand on top of mine.

“‘Never count a human as dead until you see his body,’” I said. “He used to quote that. Dune, I think.” I tried to keep my tone clinical, to take refuge in dissociation. It wasn’t really working.

“Joon,” said Tiff. “I needed you.”

“I know,” I said. “I just … I couldn’t. I got dressed and I was sweating, I felt like I was going to puke. All of those people. And they didn’t know him like I did, to them he was just someone they saw in the halls.”

“He was in a lot of clubs,” said Tiff. “Activities.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if she was rebutting my point or not.

“Yeah,” I replied.  It should have been me. He was a keystone. If it had been me, only the D&D group would have even noticed. No one understood him like I did, but he at least left his mark.

“Are you going to be okay?” asked Tiff.

“No,” I replied. I didn’t even understand why she’d ask that question.

“Please don’t say that,” said Tiff. She leaned over and wrapped me in a hug. She was crying, with a hitch in her breathing, but they were the tears of a person who’d been crying a lot.

“He’s not coming back,” I said. “There’s never going to be anyone like him again.” I wasn’t sure that she grasped the enormity of it. How could she?

“I can’t lose you too,” she said. She was shaking her head. Her hand was gripping mine. “Not you too.”

Suicide. It slowly dawned on me what she was talking about. Not actually, ‘are you okay’, but ‘are you going to hurt yourself’. I might have flashed back to old conversations, if I weren’t so numb, times I’d told her about feeling lost and hopeless even when things were going well, standing on the edge of the dock at my uncle’s cabin and contemplating how nice it would be to slip beneath the water and never be seen again. I wished that I had kept my mouth shut, during our nights together, that I hadn’t revealed so much of myself.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. It came out wrong, the most obvious lie in the world.

Tiff hugged me. I hugged her back, but it was awkward because of the way we were sitting. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that she would go to me for comfort, or try to comfort me, only to realize that there was a gulf between us.

Eventually she did lose me too. She had to, for her own sake.

◆◆◆

We spent a long time with the deer, comforting it as a group. I seemed to be the only one that felt awkward and uncomfortable, unsure of what to do with myself. I wasn’t sure how long we were going to give the locus either, whether this was going to be five minutes or two hours.

After what seemed like an eternity of me trying to awkwardly pat the deer, I laid my hand on it and tried to get Amaryllis’ attention. Eventually she looked at me, and I splayed my hand across the doe’s flank, looking down at that hand suggestively. Amaryllis shrugged, and when I raised my eyebrows, she gave me a curt nod of either assent or agreement. So long as we were all sitting there, I would make my best effort at getting into the locus’ soul.

It was still a painfully hard process, to see into the soul of another person without the aid of the Twinned Souls shortcut. I had been hoping that it would be easier with the locus, but if anything, it was harder. I could feel the soul in mortal species, leaking through the skin, pumping through the veins, because those magics were linked to the soul in some way, manifestations by proxy, inextricably linked back -- which was why there was no latent magic in Valencia’s blood, skin, or bones. For the locus, it was different. If it even had blood, I wasn’t able to feel it, and if you were going to say ‘fuck off’ to physical laws with abandon, why bother with blood? So I was trying to root around blind, feeling for something that seemed like a soul.

It took three hours. Valencia was the only one that stuck around for the whole time. I was doing my best to block out everything that was going on around me, but I saw the others milling around, and occasionally talking to each other in hushed tones while I went about my work. They stayed close by, and I sort of wished that they hadn’t, because it might have been easier to concentrate if barely audible whispers didn’t keep reaching my ears. Eventually my soul-sense snagged on something though, and it felt so obvious that I guessed that the locus had finally raised some kind of mast for me to grab onto.

Its soul did not map to mine. There were no text or numbers. Instead, it was artwork, of the same variety that made up its biography, a kaleidoscope of scenes that bled together in a style that was more toward the surreal than the real. It was less of an identifiable story than the biography was though, reminding me of when we’d made historical dioramas in eighth grade and set them up next to each other, though these ran together in places, and were arranged organically rather than in a grid. Most of it was nature: trees, animals, inclement weather, sunlight, damp earth, sometimes repeating for reasons that I couldn’t fathom. There were people too, individuals and massed groups, and sometimes impressionistic scenes with people in them. I moved through all of this quickly, trying to get some sense of what I was looking at rather than concentrating on the specifics.

Needless to say, none of this was at all helpful to me, or my quest to restore the locus to its former glory. The soul was supposed to be raw data, or at least, that was how it had been described by Fallatehr and how it presented itself to me, even without Twinned Souls. If the locus had anything like that, there was a layer on top of it, which interpreted all of those pretty, neatly ordered numbers and made virtually incomprehensible artwork out of them. Even if I could have found, say, the specific scene that represented me, I wasn’t at all clear on how I would go about editing it, nor what changes any hypothetical editing would bring.

And what I was supposed to do was transplant the locus to the outside world, presumably by fucking with its essential link to the land inside the bottle, maybe creating a new link to this land at the foothills of the Spine of the World. It seemed like a really tall order.

“Okay,” I said, “the soul of the locus is, ah … not going to be easy to deal with, I don’t think. It’s all in abstract, mystical images that I don’t even know how I would manipulate. So on with the Sacrifice, I guess.”

Here was the plan that we’d worked out, in four brief parts:

1. Observation: Look at Essentialism, see whether it’s reached an absolute hard cap or whether it can go beyond 100. Do a very quick overview of the soul, looking for any features that weren’t there before. Look for any new lines branching off from the soul. Take a few seconds to look at connected souls. Leave the soul, glance briefly at the outside world, look for new virtues on the character sheet.

2. Stabilize: If it seems at all possible, and isn’t automatic, make non-permanent adjustments so that Essentialism can remain as high as possible without decay. Temporarily moving all available ability points, including stripping down PHY and SOC to 0 (below their starting values) would be enough to leave me with 24 points in KNO and 14 points in WIS, for a cap of 70 on Essentialism. That would put all my PHY and SOC-based skills over their caps, but might be worth it, if it seemed like it would give me more time.

3. Fix the Locus: Somehow. The foothills of the Spine of the World wouldn’t be a bad place for it to have a new domain, or for it to extend its domain outward if it stayed in the bottle; that was part of the logic in choosing this place, long ago when we’d first made camp there (it was two and a half weeks prior, but a lot had happened since then).

4. Upgrade Everyone: It wasn’t clear to what extent this would be possible (or safe), but if I could, for example, take a few of my unicorn bones, use them to reach into the soul of the unicorn, then retrofit them into myself in order to give me unicorn powers … fuck yes I’d do it. Maybe I’d understand how to give myself extra arms, which seemed like a thing that Essentialism could do, or maybe maxing the skill out would let me arbitrarily increase skills, or rearrange memories to make me eidetic, or something else equally awesome.

It wasn’t clear how much time I would have to get all that done. We’d worked out a system where Fenn would slap my thigh once every two minutes, in order to help me keep track of time; in testing, that had gone pretty well. Optimistically, I would have 104 Essentialism, and it would stay above 100 for 20 minutes. Less optimistically, it would cap at either 100 or 99, and giving me roughly five minutes at max, or about an hour above 90. Pessimistically? I might have a handful of seconds as an uber-soulmage, or it might just not work at all. Really pessimistically, just by trying I would permanently fuck something up.

With everyone prepared and everything I might need set out in front of me, I dove into my soul and began the Sacrifice, draining the pre-selected skills one by one, putting all of the points toward Essentialism. With the last of them spent, I looked at the Essentialism skill and saw that it was a different color, sitting at 104 but a bright blue and pulsing slightly. I ignored it, for the time being, and quickly went to other parts of the soul, looking for new features.

I knew more, now. It was less like Neo in The Matrix, more like Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity. The knowledge was there, when I needed it, but it hadn’t thrust itself to my attention, and there was a lot that I didn’t know that I knew, not without something to prompt me. That was another difficulty that we’d anticipated; Fenn’s difficulty with getting a handle on all the magics that had opened up to her with Symbiosis was precedent.

I found my True Name, which I won’t give here. I found a record of my lineage, with unfamiliar names above my own, most likely the root mechanism by which the heirloom entads identified who they belonged to. There was a record of the items that had been invested in me by Amaryllis, my armor, my dagger, the Anyblade, in a spot on my soul that seemed virtually barren with just those three. Interesting, but nothing that I could break the game with. I knew, as if I’d had it drilled into my head long ago, that my True Name could not be changed, and there was no way to hack my lineage so that I was Uther Penndraig’s eldest son; these things were excluded, impossible now, but hadn’t always been.

There were so many things I couldn’t do. As I thought of what I wanted to try, I could see the walls ahead of me, almost always a limitation imposed by exclusion rather than being something that soul magic was naturally unable to do. I’d been thinking of the exclusions of being something like patches to the game (making the exclusion zones places that had been grandfathered in), and if that was the case, then soul magic must have been the cause of a whole host of patches:

●       I couldn’t change the primary or secondary abilities of my skills.

●       I couldn’t copy my soul.

●       I couldn’t double any information within my soul.

●       I couldn’t copy skills over to other people.

●       I couldn’t create additional bones in my body.

●       I couldn’t lower abilities below zero.

●       I couldn’t lower skills below zero.

●       I couldn’t lock my soul as it was.

●       I couldn’t edit my bloodline.

●       I couldn’t edit my species.

●       I couldn’t take unique magics from another’s soul.

●       I couldn’t create skills.

All of these things had once been possible, at least according to my magically granted knowledge, and all of them were now locked away, patched out, except in some specific corner of the world, or except for some singular person, and given how many exclusions I hadn’t been able to match to exclusion zones in the past, some things were just patched out without anyone even knowing about it.

I was still on the first part of the plan, observation, when I felt a second slap on my thigh, which meant four minutes had passed. When I looked to Essentialism, it was down to 102, which meant two minutes per point, better than I’d expected it would be.

When I looked to the lines away from my soul, I stopped and stared. There should have been four, three intact (Amaryllis, Fenn, Grak), one broken and waving in the wind (Valencia). Instead, there were eight. One was likely the Six-Eyed Doe, granted to me even without the loyalty for it, while the other two would belong to the other two as-yet unfound companions. The eighth wasn’t white, but black, thick and sinuous, utterly unlike the others.

I followed it.

Distance was meaningless in this place, but it took longer to get to the end. The line -- cord really, bumped and gnarled like I thought of an umbilical cord being -- grew thicker as I traced it back to its source, until the black stretched from horizon to horizon, and then beyond that, closing up over my head until I was just moving through a black void with only a vague sense of direction. It occurred to me that I should back out, that this was something dangerous, but I couldn’t stop myself. I literally couldn’t stop myself, even though I could think of no justification for continuing on.

The black switched to white in an instant, leaving me standing on solid ground with ambient white light all around me. I had a body again, and I patted it down briefly, confused as to what had happened. A body, made manifest within my soul? Or within someone else’s?

I noticed the other guy after I’d got my bearings. He appeared as though a mental block had been lifted that prevented me from seeing him. He was dressed in a dark-grey hoodie that said, “Mr. Dice Guy”, with blue jeans and sneakers that wouldn’t have had a place on Aerb. Mid-30s, a full beard, brown hair, blue eyes, a slightly crooked nose, and a wry smirk. It wasn’t just his clothes that spoke of Earth.

“Hullo Juniper,” he said with a smile. “I thought maybe it was time we had a chat.”

Chapter 5 - Rule Zero

“You’re the Dungeon Master,” I said, looking him over.

“I prefer ‘DM’,” he replied. He was smirking at me. “Less of a mouthful.”

“You’re … not me,” I said. I was staring. There were similarities between us, not just in the jeans and hoodie he was wearing -- a pretty classic outfit for me, back when I’d been on Earth -- but his hair color, eye color, and skin color too. But looking at his lips, nose, and eyes, I couldn’t see myself in him, not even allowing for the fact that he was older than me.

“Says something about you,” he said. “That you assumed that the person behind all your perceived misfortune would be yourself.”

“It’s my world,” I said. “My creations. My sensibilities, my interests, my design decisions, my fingerprints are all over every aspect of Aerb.”

The Dungeon Master shrugged. “True enough.”

I stopped, trying to think of what to say, what question I could ask. “Why is there pain?” I asked.

“Because I wanted there to be pain,” he replied.

“You’re a monster,” I said, crossing my arms. “And I’m on a schedule, this isn’t a good time.”

He snapped his fingers. “There, now we have all the time in the world. Satisfied?”

“You absolute fuck,” I said. I could feel my temper rising, and did nothing to rein it in. “A trillion fucking people in the hells, a decaying world, Fenn having her arms scarred at seventeen as a way of spitting on her for being a half-breed, Amaryllis raised by a nest of vipers because you killed her father and mother when she was just a little girl, Arthur, put through shit a hundred times over, never even able to rest, how fucking could you?” He watched me, and I could feel my heart racing, my blood boiling. “Every fucking death is on your hands, every starving child, every act of violence, every rape, every murder, all the atrocities of a world that seems to have had more than its fair share of them, all that is on you. If I were god, I’d have stopped them all.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” asked the Dungeon Master. “Become god.”

I sprinted forward and attacked him, grabbing him by his hoodie and punching him square in the face. He cried out in pain and began stumbling back, but that was why I had a hold of his shirt, and as he tried to twist under my grip, I punched him again, then threw him to the ground and leapt on top of him, punching him again, in the chest this time, trying to pin him with my weight while I kept up the assault. There was blood spraying out to coat the white void, more splattered with every punch, until eventually his movements slowed down. I grabbed his hair and slammed the back of his head into the ground, over and over, past the point that he was no longer moving, until eventually I was gasping for air because of the exertion. I was crying too, which wasn’t surprising.

“Fuck off,” I said to the empty air.

He wasn’t dead. The body below me had no pulse, and it wasn’t breathing, but fuck if I actually believed I’d killed him, or hurt him, or caused him any pain. I probably wouldn’t have gone after him, if I had believed that it would do anything. Hell, I’d been surprised when that first punch had landed, shocked that he hadn’t dodged out of the way at the speed of sound, or absorbed the punch like he was made of dough, or something else to demonstrate his power. And I had been right that there would be a demonstration of power, but wrong about the form that it would take; he had let me ‘kill’ him.

I got up and kicked his head. “Alright, let’s chat.”

The corpse didn’t move. I was expecting him to appear behind me, or for the dead body to get up and start talking, speech warped by the broken bones and blood that had probably dribbled down his throat, or maybe he would just appear in front of me, whole, like nothing had ever happened. Those were the kinds of things that I would do, and so far he’d seemed content to steal my sensibilities. Of course, there was also a long list of the ways that we were different.

I looked around. It was a white void, with ambient lighting that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and no horizon to speak of. The only features were myself, the body of the Dungeon Master, and the blood that had come from that body, a small pool beneath his head and the drops and droplets further beyond that.

I started walking. My hands hurt, and I seemed to be cut off from bone magic. I couldn’t access my soul, but that was no surprise either. Quick checks of my other magics showed none of them working either, also not surprising. I kept walking, for lack of anything better to do.

I tried to carry my anger with me, repeating a litany of the Dungeon Master’s sins, trying to count every bad thing that had ever happened on Aerb against him because he was the one with the power to stop it, and when that began to grow dull, I switched over to his sins as a Dungeon Master, the various contrivances, the plots that didn’t make sense without information introduced after the fact, the impossible odds I kept escaping from by the skin of my teeth, the items I’d acquired only to find a perfect use for them a few days later.

Eventually, enough time had passed that I should have been thirsty, and then hungry. I should have needed sleep. I kept walking, trying to keep myself moving in a straight line. Occasionally I would look back at the Dungeon Master’s body, sometimes flipping it the bird. Eventually it was out of sight, beyond my ability to perceive it as more than a speck.

Brains are made of neurons awash in chemical soup, and the thing about that chemical soup is that it has a really hard time maintaining high levels of any emotion. It’s not that you run out of anger, it’s that your brain runs out of the chemicals responsible for you feeling the emotion of anger, and all you really feel is numb, because your brain can’t actually make you feel the thing that it’s supposed to be making you feel. So eventually, my brain had wrung out all the anger it possibly could, leaving nothing left but a trickle as it slowly made (and then immediately deployed) its anger chemicals.

“Feel better?” asked the Dungeon Master. He had appeared in front of me without fanfare, again as though all he’d done was lift a mental block that prevented me from seeing him. He was restored, looking exactly the same.

“No,” I said. I looked down at my hands, which were undamaged, with no trace of blood.

“You can kill me again, if you’d like,” he said.

“I will, once I can figure out a way to do it permanently,” I said. “Once I have a system in place to take up the reins without it all crashing down. Once I’m a god.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“The fuck do you want?” I asked. I felt tired, not in the sense that I needed to sleep, but in the sense that my brain was out of the chemicals it needed to make me feel like giving a shit about anything. In retrospect, trying my best to keep the righteous rage going was probably not a great idea.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said.

“You’ve got my brain, you could pull anything you wanted out of it,” I said.

“Would you prefer that?” he asked.

“No,” I said with a sigh. I closed my eyes. “I want …” I opened my eyes and looked at him. “Pie in the sky?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I want no one to suffer injury or pain,” I said. “I want unbounded resources available to whoever wants them. I want emotional, social, and mental health for everyone. I want Arthur back. I want him back, so he can live out a full and healthy life.” I could feel tears rolling down the side of my face. “I want Tiff. Two of her, one for him, one for me -- she’d kill me if she heard me say that -- and I want to unfuck everything somehow, make it so that I didn’t make so many mistakes, so many things I can’t possibly believe she’d get over them.”

“And Fenn?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” I said. “I want Fenn too, god damn you, you fucking made her just for me, I knew from the start that Amaryllis was too pretty, terrifyingly pretty, I should have seen it with Fenn too, that you were just --” I shook my head. Manipulating me, but doing it with a full person that couldn’t even be blamed for that manipulation, who I loved in spite of the fact that she was designed to be with me. “Fuck you,” I said.

“You won’t believe me if I tell you that I didn’t set it up,” said the Dungeon Master.

“Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked. “That Amaryllis Penndraig wasn’t set up for me?”

“She was,” he replied. “They all were. But they were set up as companions first, and love interests second, and now that they’re out in the real world, so to speak, I’ve been keeping my hands off.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“I said that you wouldn’t believe me,” he replied. “Your love life isn’t really why I wanted to have a chat.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s get this over with. Tell me whatever you thought you needed to tell me, you horrible little monster, then I’ll fuck off to your painfully fake little world and pretend that none of this ever happened.”

“Ouch,” he replied. “You hit me in the worldbuilding, right where it hurts most.” He was smiling, but it was faint, questioning, as though he expected me to respond in kind.

“It’s my world anyway,” I said. “My ideas, my plans, just all put together in different ways than I’d originally intended. That’s not an apology, you’re still a shit DM.”

“Are you going to be sullen this entire time?” he asked.

“Sullen you can maintain,” I said. “With the brain chemicals.”

“Okay then,” said the Dungeon Master. “I didn’t want to do this, but let’s try again.”

He snapped his fingers.

◆◆◆

“It’s my world,” I said. “My creations. My sensibilities, my interests, my design decisions, my fingerprints are all over every aspect of Aerb.”

The Dungeon Master shrugged. “Fair enough.”

I stopped, trying to think of what to say, what question I could ask. “What is this place?”

He snapped his fingers, and two chairs appeared in front of us, old, battered red vinyl ones with buttons making a pattern on the backs and arms that ended in hands-width lion heads. A small table sat between the chairs, with a yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil. “Come on, sit.”

I sat. The chair wasn’t particularly comfortable.

“I’m sorry, where are my manners,” he said. “Do you want something to drink? We have Mountain Rush.”

“You have infinite powers and off-brand pop?” I asked.

He laughed. “Just a little joke.” I didn’t so much as quirk my lips. “Well I thought it was hilarious. You can have anything you’d like.”

“Immortality serum,” I said.

“Fresh out, sorry,” he replied with a grin.

“Felix felicis,” I replied.

He rolled his eyes. “No Harry Potter stuff.”

“Godsbrew,” I said.

He frowned. “Which one was that?”

“Do you actually not know?” I asked. He shook his head, and I didn’t believe him. “From the Counterbalance campaign,” I said. “Turns the drinker into a demigod.”

“In that case, no,” said the Dungeon Master.

“I’m kind of pissed off at you, just as fair warning,” I said. “It’s a very unproductive kind of rage, but … you know all the things you have to address before I’ll be willing to let that anger go. You have too much to answer for.” I found myself clenching my fists.

“You know that the DM-player relationship isn’t adversarial,” he said.

“If you know me, then you know that’s not always the case, even when it’s actual D&D and not someone’s fucking life,” I said. I spat those last words. “D&D is make believe. It’s pretend. This, Aerb, is …” I trailed off. Did I want the answer to that implied question? Would something inside me break if I learned that Fenn was just a facade of a person?

“You want to know how much of it is real?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to steel myself for his answer. “You owe me that.”

“I nudge things, here and there,” he replied. “I fudge things, sometimes, when I don’t think it will be too obvious to you. There wasn’t going to be an archery contest in Cranberry Bay when you were passing through, but I looked ahead a little bit, and saw that I could help Fenn to have a little adventure by paying a water mage to produce some inclement weather a few weeks prior, which made the contest committee move the date up, and from there it was just a matter of having her hear about it, which took another few nudges.”

“That’s … why in the hell would you have to pay someone?” I asked. “Why not just change the weather yourself?”

“Come on,” said the Dungeon Master with a smile. “You would do the mysterious old wizard manipulating things in the background bit if you could.”

“You’re a god,” I said. “Fenn got cut in half and you did fucking nothing for her.”

“People are going to get hurt,” said the Dungeon Master. “Some of them might die. You might die, and one of the things I really wanted you to know was that if that happens, I’m not going to save you. They’re called stakes. Do you remember Arthur DMing?”

“Don’t you even say his name to me,” I said. I wasn’t in a position to make threats, and I knew it, but I was angry.

“He played with kid gloves,” replied the Dungeon Master. “You always knew that everything was going to work out in the end, and it was a far worse game for it. Dumb risks paid off, because you knew that he wasn’t going to just let you die, so it was all dumb risks, and that got old really quickly.”

“I’d take that trade,” I said, clenching my fists. “I don’t care whether it’s thrilling or boring, do you understand how many bones I’ve broken since I’ve been on Aerb? How much blood I’ve lost, not to mention spilled? The spectre of death that I’ve been under … I’m pretty sure that you don’t get it, because if you did --”

“That is the most asinine argument,” he replied. “‘Clearly I’m right, and I’m so right that you must be misunderstanding me, because if you understood my superior argument, you would agree with it’.” He used a voice for that, one meant to mock me. “Come on, I know that you hate it too, so don’t pull that shit on me. I understand your perspective, and I disagree with it. A little bit of pain and suffering --”

“No,” I said. “A trillion people in the hells.”

“They’re called stakes,” said the Dungeon Master. “If those people are really so important to you, then level up and save them. Become god. It’s within your power. I’m not going to stop you.”

I stared at him. “And what then?” I asked. “We escalate? I have to fight other gods of other universes?”

“No, then the campaign ends, and everything is good and perfect forever and ever,” said the Dungeon Master with a shrug. “I’ll strip off the game layer unless you want me to keep it in place, I’ll strip off the personality compensators unless you want those on, and then I’ll be out of your hair. You’ll be a god, like I’m a god, with the only limit on your power being that you can’t track me down and kill me.”

“I’ve got no reason to trust you,” I said. “Even if it all happened like you said, even if I was in a paradise of my own choosing, I would have to worry about whether you were going to show up again.”

“This is true.” The Dungeon Master nodded. “But I have to say it’s more likely than not that you’ll never get to figure out whether you can live with that paranoia, because you’ll fuck up and die somewhere along the way.”

“Die to an obstacle that you’ve placed in front of me,” I said.

“Or one of your own making.” He nodded. “You probably don’t believe me, but I’m not really putting any active effort into screwing you. I set up the characters and the obstacles, I give a few nudges here and there, and then I wait for your choices, and the choices of everyone else. I’m a watchmaker, paying attention to how the watch is running but not sticking my fingers in too often.”

I folded my arms across my chest.

“I don’t want you to fail, I want to take some joy in seeing how you react, in seeing you run off the rails, in succeeding against bad odds, in dealing with your teammates -- I want you to win.” He stopped and watched me. “I’m not going to bend over backwards so you can win though,” he said. “I’m barely going to bend at all. It’s one of the things I wanted to let you know.”

“I don’t consent,” I said, leaning back and folding my arms.

The Dungeon Master smiled. “Did you think that I didn’t ask you? Here, I’ll show you.”

◆◆◆

I felt the red vinyl of the chair, battered and worn, then looked across at the man sitting next to me, in an identical chair. He was holding a yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil. He was older, in his thirties maybe, with a full beard. He had a blue hoodie on, which said “Dice to Meet You”.

Five seconds ago, I had been passing notes in fifth-period English.

“What the fuck,” I said.

“Hullo Juniper,” he said. “This meeting may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes. Your continued participation in this meeting serves as express consent to be monitored or recorded.”

“What,” I said. I looked around. It was a featureless white void. I looked down at the chairs, then back at him. “Am I … in the Matrix?”

“I can see why you’d think that,” he replied. “But no, not quite. I’m here to make you an offer, which you can refuse. If you do refuse it, you’ll be returned to fifth-period English, and this will all present as a vivid but quickly fading dream that you’ll probably forget about in a week or two. If you want to leave, at any time, just snap your fingers.”

I looked down at my fingers, careful not to make the slightest motion that might be perceived as snapping my fingers. “I’m listening,” I replied.

“You don’t understand,” he said, tapping his pencil against the legal pad. “That’s fine. Here are the terms. First, you’ll get sent to a fantasy world that generally matches your aesthetic for an indefinite duration. You’ll have a character sheet stapled to your soul -- you’ll have a soul, they’re common there -- which will allow you to accumulate a tremendous amount of power over a very, very short period of time. How does that sound so far?”

“It sounds like there’s a catch,” I replied. This didn’t feel like a dream or a hallucination; I quietly, surreptitiously pinched myself.

“There are a lot of catches,” he said with a nod. “To start with, it would be hard, and sometimes unpleasant. You would have to learn to fight, but you could become a skilled warrior in a matter of minutes. By the time a month had passed, you’d probably be in the top thousand fighters or mages in the world. You might be injured, but this world has a wide variety of healing magic. You might die, in which case that death would be permanent.”

“And there are other catches besides that,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “You would be monitored, with no privacy.” He pointed the end of his pencil toward himself. “I’d be the one doing the monitoring, no one else would see my notes or have access to my data, unless you wanted them to. That data would include your personal thoughts and feelings.”

“Okay,” I said. Kind of creepy, but pretty much nothing compared to being in the Matrix. “I really don’t understand … any of this. I don’t understand why you would need me.”

“I don’t need you,” he replied. “I could fix every single problem in Aerb myself, if I wanted to, and Aerb has an enormous surplus of problems at the moment. I don’t want to fix Aerb though; I want you to do it. You wouldn’t be obligated to, once you were there, but I think you’d have the natural inclination to, if I have the measure of you.”

“Do I know you?” I asked.

“We’re kindred spirits, you and I,” he replied.

I looked down at my fingers. Snap and leave. But I already knew that I wasn’t going to do that. What was here on Earth? My parents? Reimer and Tom, my only remaining friends, barely? Tiff, if she could forgive me for the person I’d been? College, a job, middle America … no.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Can I … what happens to me, when I leave Earth? I’d like to leave a note or something.” If I was really here, was Earth even real? “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“[REDACTED],” he replied.

“Oh,” I replied. “Okay, I guess that works. Unless [REDACTED]?”

“Then [REDACTED],” he replied.

“And that’s the whole deal?” I asked. “I go through to this place, Aerb, I play the part of a hero, I fix everything there forever, if I can, and in return ... I don't have to worry about Earth?”

“There’s one last catch,” he said. “I’d want to remove your memories of this conversation, store them away for later, so that you can go in fresh and blind. I don’t want you saving the world because I told you to. I’ll give the memory back when I think you won’t be influenced by the specific wording of the offer or how I’ve presented things to you.”

“Okay,” I replied. If this is real. “Hello future me, I guess.”

◆◆◆

“There were parts of that you left out,” I said, once I’d finished reliving the memory. “Do my parents think that I’m dead?”

“I’m worried about potential spoilers,” replied the Dungeon Master.

“Sensible,” I said. Maybe detached irony was the way to play this; I was virtually certain that I wasn’t going to get anything out of this meeting. “So you wanted to warn me that the danger was real? That was it?”

“Um, let me see,” he said, looking down at the yellow legal pad, which was completely blank. “I wanted to tell you that you still had to worry about dying, explain that your life on Aerb was better than it was on Earth -- did I get that across?”

“I never disagreed with it,” I said.

“No you did,” he replied. “Or you have, at various points.” He looked down at the legal pad. “Consent thing -- weak, I know, given consent withdrawal and a lack of information, but you’d have agreed even if I told you everything up until this point.”

“It’s a false dichotomy,” I said. “It’s not going back to Earth or staying on Aerb, those aren’t the two options, with the amount of power you demonstrably have, you could --”

“You can be pissed off at me all you want,” he said with a shrug. “Those were the two options that I gave you, you made your choice, you’d continue to make that choice in all but the darkest moments. Maybe even then. Do you remember when you were dying of blood loss in the sewers of Silmar City? You never once thought, ‘please, let me go back to Earth’.”

I didn’t have a response to that. He was right.

He looked down at the legal pad again and tapped his pencil against it. “The last thing I wanted to say was that you don’t need to worry about the narrative. You’ve already deviated from my plans a number of times, you just didn’t notice.”

“When?” I asked.

“Do you remember Craig DMing?” asked the Dungeon Master. He waved his hand. “I know you do, that was rhetorical. When you finished with a dungeon, he was always so eager to share all the loot that you’d missed, all the secrets that you hadn’t made the checks for, and for diplomacy it was even worse, because he’d want to explain all the ways that the conversation could have gone, but didn’t. It took a lot away from the experience.”

“Did you pull that from my head?” I asked.

“Juniper, I know you better than you know yourself,” he replied.

“If that was supposed to be reassuring, you’re doing a pretty shit job,” I said, clenching my fists.

“Well, it wasn’t meant to be reassuring,” he said. “It’s just a fact, one you already know is true, but seem to need reminding of.”

“But what’s the point of it all?” I asked.

He looked down at his legal pad again. “Nope, that’s not on the agenda for today.” He smiled at me. “You’ve been a relatively good sport though, so I’ll entertain some requests. Three wishes, maybe? You haven’t actually ruled out that I’m a genie.”

“I wish for more wishes,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll give you one hundred more wishes, but they can only be used to wish for a standard-issue school cafeteria hot dog,” he said with a smile. “Rookie mistake there, I thought you were better than this. And anyway, I’m not giving you those kinds of wishes. Little things, not plot breakers.”

“So there is a plot,” I said.

“There are planned pathways,” he said. “There are plots that I think I’d find interesting, roads that I hope you’d go down. And maybe you’ll scribble outside the lines, and I’ll make a brief glance at the possible futures, and figure out where I can nudge things, if it’s appropriate. Still thinking on those wishes?”

“I wish … there are only two kinds of genies, those you can trust, and those that you shouldn’t be making wishes to,” I said.

The Dungeon Master waved his hand. “If you don’t want to make requests, don’t make them, but I’m not going to let you save them. Worst that I’ll do is say no. Think ‘small’. Think ‘things that don’t solve the plots’.”

“Okay,” I said. I took a breath. “I wish I didn’t have a harem.”

The Dungeon Master frowned at me. “You don’t have a harem,” he said. “You have a girlfriend, and a few girls that have some confused, complicated, and in some cases unpleasant feelings toward you. And if you want me to fix that, I refuse on two grounds. First, I set your companions in motion but I have a rule against meddling with them in direct ways. Second, if you really wanted to do it, you’re the one with Essentialism over the hard cap, all you’d have to do is go into Amaryllis’ soul and make a few choice edits. You can cut down her libido to nothing, make her exclusively homoromantic and homosexual, do what you want to fix the problem.” He rubbed his chin. “Granted, doing that to the locus would be pretty hard, and Null Pointer Exception doesn’t have a soul, but I’m sure you could figure something out. You know what, I’m going to count that as a request filled, because I told you how to help yourself.”

I stared at him. “Why?” I asked. “Why set that up?”

“That would be telling,” said the Dungeon Master. He flashed me a smile. “And for now, I plan on being just the right amount of opaque. They weren’t set up to wait forever though. Amaryllis will get over you, if you let her. Null Pointer Exception will too -- she’s malleable.”

And Grak? The Six-Eyed Doe? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. Better to keep assuming that Grak was just a straight dude that didn’t happen to have a penis.

“Arthur,” I said. I licked my lips. Sometimes it was easy to say his name, and sometimes it wasn’t. This was one of the hard times.

“That’s not a question,” replied the Dungeon Master.

“I’m trying to think of the most valuable question that you would actually answer,” I said. “I … assuming that this is all a simulation, I don’t understand how it would be him. With me, maybe I could be frozen for long enough that someone invented the technology to unfreeze people, to scan them into a computer, I’d have had to be a few years older than seventeen, but … maybe it would be possible. Arthur was warm and dead. He was cremated. I don’t understand how he could exist in this world, except as an imperfect reconstruction from my memories.”

“That’s still not a question,” replied the Dungeon Master. His voice was softer, gentler. For all that he was an amoral monster, he seemed to care.

“Tell me whether he’s real,” I said. “No, tell me how he’s real, how that’s even possible, because he died nine months before I came here, and we didn’t have this technology then.”

“He’s real,” said the Dungeon Master. “I know how much he meant to you. I’m not going to say how that’s possible, but you can draw your own conclusions, if you decide that I’m not lying. And he’s out there, somewhere on Aerb or one of the other planes. He spent most of his life on Aerb, he’s not going to be how you remembered him -- you know that, that’s not news -- but the Arthur that came to Aerb wasn’t just Arthur as you remembered him. He’s the real deal, Arthur as he actually existed.” The Dungeon Master had, finally, taken a solemn tone.

That wasn’t possible, unless some of my assumptions were wrong, but it sounded exactly like what I wanted to hear, so I let it pass. It was as much of an answer as I was going to get anyway.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what happens when I die. Tell me what would happen to my party members.”

“Seems like a wasted wish to me,” said the Dungeon Master. “It's not like you're planning on killing yourself, right? You sure you don’t want, say, a backpack that can get you mundane stuff from Earth?”

“Is that on the table?” I asked, eyes going wide. Then I frowned. “Wait, how would that even work? Would I just pull a backpack out of my soul somehow?”

“I’ll think of something,” he replied. “It’s nice that you thought about what would happen to your party members, but in this case I think that creature comforts from home are probably the better option. Not that I'll compel you one way or another, it's your choice to make.”

“Okay, I’ll take the backpack,” I said. I looked around the white void. “I don’t like you,” I said to the Dungeon Master. “You’re not forgiven. Nothing you’ve done is excusable. You’re responsible for every evil thing that happens on Aerb. I know you know that, and I know you don’t care, but I need to say it.”

“Sure, fine,” said the Dungeon Master. “You know the way out.”

And as he said it, I realized he was right. I snapped my fingers and left.

Chapter 6 - The Princess and the Pea

When I returned to my soul as I knew it, the creepy black umbilical cord that had led to the Dungeon Master’s void was gone -- and somewhat distressingly, so were two of the white lines that I’d been assuming would reveal the other two companions. Had he changed something? Had I changed something in the course of that visit? I felt a hand slapping my thigh and remembered about the time limit, and tried my best to put off all my questions, all the second-guessing I was sure there was to do, until later. I was, after all, on a mission.

I pulled out of my soul entirely and was shocked by the world around me. My companions were limned in light of different colors, red for Fenn, white for Amaryllis, purple for Grak, and green for the locus, whose color extended beyond its mortal form to the grasses around us, and even beyond that, to the trees at the edges of the bottle. Valencia was without a color, and that was what jogged some part of my memory that I’d never used before -- I was able to see souls.

“Joon?” asked Amaryllis.

“I got screwed on this deal,” said Fenn, folding her arms across her chest. No Symbiosis effect for her from the points I'd shifted over.

“Working,” I said. “Two minutes per point, 102 right now.” I closed my eyes, waiting three painfully slow seconds, and looked down the list of virtues.

Soul Sight:    Grants a visual representation of souls, each with a unique color, which can be distinguished with acuity beyond the limits of the eye. Applies to both the soul and any magic which interfaces with a soul in some meaningful way.

Soul Saturation:    Knowledge of your soul allows it to fully suffuse you, giving a number of benefits to a wide variety of magic. Your blood works as an infusion for the purposes of pustule magic. You can use your blood as though it were magical ink (4  ζ  /mL) for the purposes of ink magic. Your bones are considered wood for the purposes of wood magic. Required connective power for plants is reduced by half. You may retract your soul from your extremities for the purposes of bypassing wards. Any magic items or magics which limit projection or application to your eyes, hands, feet, or mouth, can instead be projected or applied from any part of your body. Your skin and/or carapace is treated as though it were skin and/or carapace for the purposes of skin magic and carapace magic, whichever is more beneficial. Runes may be written on your skin as though it were prepared vellum. More benefits apply in specific exclusion zones: consult the manual for more detail.

Soul Scaphism:    You can carve out parts of other people to use for your own purposes. Any benefits are temporary; any costs are permanent.

Soul Symbiote:    Double your effective skill in Bone Magic, Blood Magic, Skin Magic, Carapace Magic, Pustule Magic, and the flower magic aspect of Horticulture, up to a cap of 75. Double your effective connection to any magical item which interfaces with your soul, unless doing so has associated maluses. Increase your skill with any specialty or subschool of magic that uses the soul by 20 points, up to a cap of 50.

I didn’t spend too much time staring at those; there was nothing immediately useful that I could see, and I wasn’t going to try Scaphism without having any good idea what direction I could put it toward. The idea of scraping out the druidic connection from Solace’s soul and attempting to use it to fix the problem with some combination of druidic powers and super-buffed Essentialism was tempting in some respects but utterly horrifying in others.

I snapped out of the menu and looked around, noting some of what Soul Sight had been talking about, not just in the unique colors of the people, but in the magical items they wore, most of them tinted with the white of Amaryllis’ soul. Each of the bottled souls we had set out showed their own colors, each utterly unique and identifiable as such even though my sense of color had never been that good.

“I might be able to bring Solace back,” I said. I turned to Valencia. “Can you and the locus fake a druidic connection, maybe?”

“I-I would have to hurt it,” said Valencia.

“What are you thinking?” asked Amaryllis.

“I -- shit, I think I’m back below 100 again,” I said. “Yaxukasu Axud, the rebirth ritual, I thought that I might be able to do it. I had some insight into it, it’s a subschool of druidic magic, which isn’t actually a listed skill per se but counts as close enough for the capstone ability. I don’t have an actual druidic connection though, and I think that I might be able to temporarily take Solace’s, but I think we’d get her back as a non-druid, if I read all the things right. Sorry, trying to move fast, I have other skills that I can give up to stay in the zone.”

“You can do it with just a soul?” asked Amaryllis.

“That’s how it’s done,” I replied, reaching down to pick up the jar that had Solace’s soul within it. “We could do it, now, I think, if Valencia can take on a bit of the locus’ power to cast the spell.”

“I don’t want to hurt it!” said Valencia, raising her voice.

“Hurt it to save it,” I replied. “I’m fading fast, a point every two minutes, from what I can see, and I didn’t really have enough time to look around, but it seemed like Yaxukasu Axud was our best option.”

“It creates more problems,” said Grak. “And it’s not a solution to the locus being stuck in a bottle.”

“We could bring Solace back,” I replied. “It’s a fix to the current problem, which is the bottle being out of balance, and I have to say that without her, I’m not actually sure that I can solve the bigger picture problem, and certainly not in the time we have left, which is”—I looked around at the stifling heat and partially dying grass—“days or weeks.”

“But … it’s a full birth thing, right?” asked Fenn. “Like, one of us would have to get pregnant with Solace, and, you know.” She squatted slightly and made a gesture with her hands, the universal sign for a baby falling out.

“I volunteer,” said Amaryllis. She turned to Fenn. “I’ll need The Book of Blood, please, I need to check for compatibility with crantek in case that’s an issue. Continue without me, I’m with Juniper, and time is short.”

Fenn popped the book out and handed it over. “Pretty sure that even Amaryllis can’t make a baby in a matter of days, and even if she did, a newborn Solace would still be a newborn, not the master druid that we knew and, debatably, loved.”

“There have got to be solutions to that problem,” I said. “Something like the opposite of a revision mage? Toss the bottle into the looping exclusion zone as a way to buy time?” I saw Grak’s face go sour at that suggestion, and barrelled ahead with more half-baked ideas. “Some kind of Narnia effect somewhere? A hyperbolic time chamber?”

“Kuum Doona has one,” said Amaryllis, glancing up from the book only briefly.

“The place that we have a quest for has a hyperbolic time chamber?” I asked, staring at her. “And it’s literally called that?”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. She slammed the book shut. “I can’t guarantee that it’s charged, though it should be after such a long time, and that’s another problem that we can find a solution to later if it’s actually a problem. Crantek and human are cross-compatible, if it matters for the ritual.”

“We’re rushing this plan,” said Grak.

“We have to,” I replied. “Unless you want to wait another handful of days while I train up skills to pour into Essentialism again, time that we’re already short on?”

“I vote against,” said Grak.

“I vote for,” I replied.

“I vote for,” said Amaryllis.

“I vote for too, so long as I don’t have to be the pregnant one,” said Fenn.

“Good,” I said. I turned toward Valencia, to tell her to get ready, and saw tears streaming down her cheeks. Fuck. “Hey, are you okay?” I asked, still speaking a little faster than I would have liked, not quite controlling my tone.

“I don’t want to hurt it,” said Val, looking over at the Six-Eyed Doe, which was standing nearby, not seeming to grasp the importance of the task.

“I honestly think that the locus is going to die if you don’t,” I replied. “Sometimes we have to do things that we really don’t want to do, because that’s the right thing to do. You can complain, and vent to us, and voice all your objections, but even if it’s hard, you still have to do the right thing.”

Val nodded and said “okay” in a small voice.

“I’ll tell you when, and what to do,” I replied. I reached down into my soul and was almost about to start giving up points when I snapped to my senses and retreated from my soul entirely. “Fallatehr’s soul, please,” I said. Fenn frowned and handed over the bottle; I was extremely grateful that we’d had the foresight to give him his own small bottle, something that I was guessing would become standard practice from now on.

I’d tried tapping into a raw soul before, and had no luck, even with 24 Essentialism. You’d think it would be easier, rather than harder, but touching a soul was all about following connections, most of which came in the form of magic emanating from the soul, creating conceptual threads that I could tug on. The raw soul, the anima exa, as Fallatehr had put it, had almost no connection to the world, and that connection consisted only of its pure physical form, one which wasn’t as easy for me to grasp -- had, in fact, proven impossible at 24 Essentialism.

At 91 Essentialism, the connection was almost instant.

I did hesitate, just a little bit, before scraping all of his skill at Essentialism out from him. It seemed evil, to take his life’s work like that, and was certainly the sort of thing that the classical D&D alignment system would consider to be necromancy -- but logically, it couldn’t be worse than letting his soul fade away, could it? According to Fallatehr, souls never actually left Aerb for the hells, which made a certain sort of sense given that bone magic worked even when the soul was no longer around, but I wasn’t sure that I actually owed anything to a soul that would never have a body, especially not if that soul belonged to Fallatehr.

(I would be destroying all future use for Fallatehr. Radically altering his soul and then stuffing it back into a body had been on the table, and maybe still was with the right combinations of magic … but I had been looking for those possibilities within my new understanding of Essentialism, and had found a half dozen pathways toward bringing someone back to life, all of them blocked by one exclusion or another. I was a little bit grateful that the logical thing to do wasn’t just to mindrape Fallatehr and stitch his soul back into a corpse; it would have felt a little bit too evil.)

With Fallatehr’s Essentialism scraped out of him, a curiously sensationless feeling for how momentous and final a thing it seemed to be, I was up in the 180s for Essentialism, which helped the rest of the process go much smoother, especially since I didn’t need to stop to recharge. Scaphism came with another affliction as well, a point lost every ten minutes until they were gone, which meant that I had four afflictions eating away at my points at once, Skilled Trade, Overcapped, Double Overcapped (a larger penalty for being more than twice the cap), and Scaphism. I’d still have hours of time above 100, thanks to Fallatehr.

Yaxukasu Axud was complex, and worse, ever-changing. I didn’t have a set list of instructions to work from, only a vague sense of what to do next, which would shift and warp as we went through them. Ingredients were simple enough, mostly available from the land around us, and those that weren’t we could pull from the clonal kit with a little bit of coaxing. I instructed Val, who did most of the work, with some preparation (stripping bark from yew branches, brushing dirt off stones, that sort of thing) from Fenn and Grak. It was a frustrating process, and took far longer than I felt it should have, in part because of how the ritual kept warping and changing, necessitating that we undo work we’d done more than a few times.

Valencia cried through most of it. Her hands shook, which didn’t help with the ritual. The Six-Eyed Doe cried too, and occasionally let out a bleat of pain, which almost always caused Valencia to stop what she was doing and whisper a strained apology -- and sometimes, whether because she’d stopped what she was doing, or because too much time had passed, the ritual would require something different from us, a new set of flowers picked from the far reaches of the bottle, or circling the soul three times widdershins, or something else equally asinine that seemed all style and no substance. Amaryllis was the one charged with soothing the Six-Eyed Doe, and she did a fair job of it; we briefly tried to have Grak put up a ward that would silence them, but that only caused Valencia to look over every few minutes.

I felt terrible about it. Whatever quasi-mystical thing was happening between the two of them, the Six-Eyed Doe was hurting, and it was hurting Valencia to know that. And that said, it was still what we had decided on doing, and a part of me was getting angry that it was taking longer because of the pain, and there was a chance that we might fail simply because of that distress. I didn’t express that anger, largely because it would have been completely counterproductive, but also because it was another part of myself that I hated. I wanted to be a being of pure, perfect empathy, and instead I had to fake it.

It took us an hour and a half to finish the ritual of Yaxukasu Axud. When it was complete, or at least, complete according to the understanding that I was granted, Valencia collapsed to the ground and the Six-Eyed Doe rose to its feet. The locus trotted over to the area we’d used for the ritual, which was filled with a variety of upright sticks and arranged stones we’d formed into circles, covered with the ashes of innumerable burned herbs, the grass and dirt flattened by how many times we’d moved over it, either getting things into position or as I’d guided Val through the movements the ritual required. The ritual site didn’t look mystical or grand -- it looked like something that Arthur and I might have done when we were kids, if we’d spent more time playing outside.

The Six-Eyed Doe went to the center of the concentric circles and used its mouth to gently take the glass stopper out of the bottle, using more grace than it should by rights have possessed. Then it used its lips to grab the bottle, and lifted it into the air, tilting its head back until the soul within disappeared into the doe’s mouth. The Six-Eyed Doe let the glass bottle fall from its mouth, and looked around at each of us in turn. My understanding of the twisting, warping ritual had come to an end; if there was another step, I didn’t know what it was.

Amaryllis stepped forward, and the Six-Eyed Doe went to greet her. They shared a kiss, Amaryllis tilting her head up, and the locus bowing its head down, and where their mouths met was, briefly, a brilliant light that shone with every color -- I was seeing a soul, more raw than the anima exa, Solace stripped down to her very essence, and though I was, for the time, a master of Essentialism, I couldn’t come close to explaining what had actually happened.

Loyalty Increased: Six-Eyed Doe lvl 5!

When Amaryllis pulled away, she looked light on her feet, as though she’d lost a gallon of blood, and I caught her before she dropped. I’d forgotten how light she was. Her color and vigor returned quickly, and in a matter of seconds she was trying to push me away to stand on her own. Fenn popped an armchair out of Sable and gently pushed Amaryllis down into it.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

Amaryllis touched her stomach. “Fine,” she said. “Good.”

“I’m really, really glad you were the one that jumped on that grenade,” said Fenn. She turned to me. “Do you think ‘Pregnant Virgin Princess’ would make a good band name?”

Quest Accepted: Pregnant Virgin Princess - Amaryllis has accepted the gift of Yaxukasu Axud. In nine months, she will give rebirth to Solace, and the world will once again have a druid -- if there’s a locus to provide her a grove. (Companion Quest)

◆◆◆

I had another few hours with increased Essentialism, and didn’t want to waste it. A fair chunk of the time I spent trying to figure out how we were going to get the locus out of the bottle. The big problem was that the locus simply didn’t have enough reach and power to push itself out of the bottle; when it had gone into the bottle, it had been hundreds of miles across, and the prepared interior space was almost its own by default, simple to slip into and claim as part of its domain. Now that the bottle was its only domain, it was trapped, unable to project out because it was too weak. Solace had been able to make tunnels into the locus’ domain, one that was like walking through the center of a tree, the other that was like slipping through a hole bored in rock, but she’d likened those to a straw so thin that you couldn’t drink through it.

With my Soul Sight, I could see a slight glow to the land, a particular shade of green that indicated the locus, the same kind of tint that was on Amaryllis’ magic items, though her shade was a very specific white. Its domain was linked to its soul, somehow, and all we’d really need to do in order to get it growing its domain was to somehow get it to recognize the area outside the bottle as also being part of its domain. Per what Solace had told us, when laying out the problem, that wasn’t going to be so easy; the domain followed ‘natural’ boundaries and out in the wider world that had meant stopping at mountain ranges, at river banks, or where a forest came to an end (all of which were very definitionally fuzzy). So far as the bottle was concerned, it was a very, very steep boundary, not just in the literal sense, but as far as marking where one thing ended and another began.

Solace and the other druids had tried to solve this problem in a variety of ways, none of which had yielded any success, and it was difficult, because “rules” weren’t really a thing that a locus adhered to all that well, so you’d expect munchkining definitions to either fail or succeed pretty much at random -- except that everything they’d tried to mystically attempt to coax the locus back into the world had failed, unambiguously. Solace had often talked in metaphor or with mystical overtones, but she’d been very clear on that last point; her special ritual had led her to us, but nothing else that they had tried, over the course of hundreds of years, had showed any promise.

Essentialism hadn’t helped. Solace had thought that it might, but she’d been led to us by a mysterious, precognitive ritual that hadn’t specified the actual mechanism by which we would be able to help her. Did I need to become a druid and then maximize Essentialism again? I had seen in Solace’s soul well enough to be able to see the druidic connection, but moving it would be destructive and impermanent; I would risk ruining the last druidic connection on Aerb, which was not a risk that I was willing to take, especially because I thought I would make for a terrible druid.

And what did that leave? Something to do with the bottle itself? A massive portal of some kind? If we could dump the entire contents of the bottle out somewhere, maybe that would work, but I didn’t know how we could actually do that, and based on my understanding of the rite of Zorisad Yosivun that Solace had used to find us in the first place, it had to be something to do with the game, or with my ability to learn magic fast, or something, because otherwise her mystical precognitive spell would have found someone else. The solution couldn’t just be going to a specialist in magical glass bottles, because otherwise Solace would have found them, right?

We hadn’t even gotten a quest update; Taking Root was still the same as it ever was, and said that we needed to remove the locus and transplant it. After the conversation I’d had with the Dungeon Master, I didn’t think that meant we were doomed to failure, only that perhaps Solace wasn’t the right direction to take things. The quest descriptions were hints, leaked information that had been leaked to us on purpose, and what they weren’t saying right now was pretty telling. Still, from the heat inside the bottle, it seemed like a stopgap measure was probably the right call, unless there was a clue that we were all missing.

Having not found much in the way of answers to the locus problem, which seemed intractable, I returned to the group and pulled Fenn aside. Amaryllis had her hand on her stomach and was engaged in low conversation with Grak; to my relief, Val was curled up on top of the Six-Eyed Doe.

“Okay,” I said, low enough that the others couldn’t hear. “I have an idea. Do you trust me?”

“For you, my love, anything,” said Fenn. She glanced over at the others. “Also, you’re going to have to talk to Mary about the whole pregnancy thing, she was way too enthusiastic about it, like whatever the baby equivalent of suicidal is. Also, I love secrets, is this a secret?”

“Kind of,” I said. “There’s a thing that I want to try that might be a little bit dangerous. I’d need your consent, and don’t really want the others weighing in.”

“Whatever you want, do it,” said Fenn. She stared at me, glancing briefly down at my lips. “My soul is yours.”

“No,” I said. “That’s creepy, your soul is your own.”

“You’re no fun,” said Fenn. “Just do the thing. Surprise me.”

I touched her chest and closed my eyes to connect with her soul. I wasn’t terribly surprised to feel her moving my hand lower, so that I was touching her boob, and I could imagine the wink she would give if anyone noticed the both of us standing stock-still in that position. The touch was really more symbolic than practical anyway; I already had a direct path into her soul anytime I wanted.

I looked over her body, as conceived by her soul. I really did love her; I hoped that 42 Skin Magic was enough. We’d taken the tattoo mage Leonold’s soul out back in Silmar City, but it was long gone, back before we’d had any inkling that we might have a use for it, probably dumped into the generator’s tank in the basement of Weik Handum, or maybe sold on the streets of Barren Jewel. It would have come in handy; in a way, I was glad that it wasn’t a Chekhov’s Gun that had been lying in wait to fire all this time.

The wording on Soul Symbiote was the same as on Blade-Bound, ‘effective skill’, which didn’t appear to grant new virtues, but I could make sense of the scars on her all the same. The power of the soul emanated from the skin. This was what gave power to the tattoos, in combination with the magical reagents that went into them. Scars were different, a redirection and capturing of the emanated energy, the curls and whorls gathering it up and pushing it back in toward the soul in specific ways.

(An idea popped into my head of a skintight casing that would slip over my skin and capture all of that emanated energy, like a mobile Dyson sphere for the soul … but I realized at once that it would take a year of searching out rare ingredients and the GDP of a mid-sized nation, even leaving aside that I didn’t have very much time until the practical knowledge would fade away.)

I didn’t think that I would have been able to scar her from scratch, but I could fix the scars, reposition them so that they would capture the energy right. I wasn’t so susceptible to the soul trance as I had been, but I could still feel myself getting lost in the work, moving the scars around, fixing the nearly imperceptible disruptions and misalignments in the patterns that had been caused by the normal processes of growth, wear, and tear. I fixed it all, taking my cues from the work that was there. It was like a master carpenter coming across a house that had been left to rot, warp, and shift for twenty years and putting all his efforts into carefully replacing every board, sanding down every surface, matching the varnish and paint -- all while only having a vague idea what a house was.

When I was finished, I opened my eyes and kept my hand on Fenn, burning bones in order to heal her. The shift in the positioning in her scars was so minute that I probably wouldn’t have realized anything was happening -- except that I had Soul Sight, and the red that limned her dimmed considerably.

“Did it work?” asked Fenn. Her hand reached up to touch mine. “Or don’t you know?”

“Can you try jumping as high as you can?” I asked.

“Sure thing, boss,” said Fenn, giving me the laziest possible salute. She crouched down and then launched herself up, screaming in delight as she rose thirty feet into the air. I moved to catch her, bracing myself, but when she came down she kicked me away and landed on one foot with the grace and poise of a ballerina. “Fuck yes.” She leapt forward and wrapped me in a hug that was crushingly strong.

“Ribs,” I said, wheezing slightly.

“Sorry,” replied Fenn. She pulled back and looked at me. Her eyes were sparkling. “How long is it going to last?”

“A week,” I said. “Same as it did last time.” Her face fell. “Maybe more, because you’re probably growing less than you were when the scars were applied -- when they scarred you. Cells die, other cells grow to replace them, none of it comes back exactly the way it was before, sorry, you know all this.” Her face had fallen as I’d talked. “Anyway, there’s a solution that I’d like to try.”

I walked over to a jar of souls, bulk class, made from embryos, and picked one out. It was a matter of a moment to reach into it, as I’d done with Fallatehr, and look at the body inside, a small thing the size of a raspberry, unformed. It made me a little sick and uncomfortable, to see a soul like this, a life cut short in the interests of fueling cars and trains. The soul wouldn’t have been created without that demand, but still -- there was something sad about it, a soul that would remain empty.

I copied Fenn’s body into it, the same process that I’d done when grafting the ribs, the same process that Fallatehr had used to make a mimic of Amaryllis. The soul’s image of the body was dependent on the body; the scars on Fenn’s arms were there on the soul because they’d had a chance to set, and any injury could be written onto the soul as the soul adapted to the reality of living with that wound. This soul would never have a body, and the image of Fenn’s body that I’d written over would never change either.

I slipped the soul back into its container. “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get back into this soul, but if I do, I should be able to give you the scar powers back. Essentially it would let me lock you in as you are now. If it’s okay with you --”

“It’s okay,” said Fenn. She kissed me and hugged me tight again. “Everything is all okay.”

I went to the others with the offer, but it took a little bit of explanation, and a fair amount of convincing.

“It won’t be you,” I said. “Just a way of storing all of the parts of you that I can reach. A soul in a bottle lasts for a few years, so it’s not permanent, but who knows what might happen in even the next few months.”

“What parts?” asked Grak. He was sitting next to Amaryllis, beside the remains of the ritual, and had his hands folded across his chest.

“Body and memory are the big ones,” I replied. “Skills can’t be moved over, because they’re excluded, values you can move but I don’t know that there’s much of a point, same for social models, you can’t move or change lineage, nor true names, attributes aren’t copyable, unique magics are a part of the soul but can’t be transferred, though I don’t think that applies … obviously I would ask for your consent before actually applying any changes, just like I’m asking consent now.”

“It makes me uneasy,” said Grak.

“Me too,” said Amaryllis. “Though I think it’s fairly unlikely that we run into another soul mage.”

“I’m not a part of this conversation,” said Valencia, sounding just slightly bitter about it. She was leaned up against the locus; both of them seemed to have recovered a bit, and their relationship was no worse the wear for whatever had actually transpired between them.

“I’ll do it,” said Amaryllis. “I’m just saying that it makes me uneasy. I can’t say that I’m entirely at ease with you having a direct line into my soul in the first place. Do it now, before you run out of power.” Grak nodded along with her.

Three souls went into their own little stoppered glass bottles, one by one, each with a label written by me; mary.bak, grak.bak, and fenn.bak.

The last thing I tried was to take part of the locus and copy it over … but it had a soul of images, many of them abstract, all knitted together, and all the Essentialism in the world didn’t seem to allow me to get a handle on how to grab any of that and move it elsewhere. Despite the findings of the Second Empire, I wasn’t actually convinced that the locus had a soul; the thing it had seemed related but too different for me to claim that it was in the same category. I couldn’t figure out any way to back up even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to figure how to copy it back in if I’d wanted to. The fact that it wasn’t possible with my Essentialism so high seemed to indicate that Essentialism was the wrong tool for the job.

Chapter 7 - Musings on the Elder God

With seemingly nothing left to do -- a full 90% of Essentialism seemed locked behind various exclusions -- I tried transferring some of my points from Essentialism back into my other skills, only to find that the game still seemed to count them as points transferred for the purposes of the Skilled Trade malus. This was pretty basic anti-cheese; otherwise I could have had over 100 in any skill for a handful of minutes and only have to pay a single point as the price.

We retreated into the tree at the center of the bottle, a place that was more of a home to us than anywhere else on Aerb. Valencia wanted to stay outside with the Six-Eyed Doe, but when I told her there was something we all needed to talk about, we reached a compromise where the locus would stick its head through the window and Valencia would stand by it.

“I’ll give that outcome a four out of ten,” I said as Fenn popped some cold drinks out of her glove and set them on the table. It was hot inside the tree, just like it was outside.

“Worse than that,” said Grak. “We were not able to accomplish what we set out to accomplish.”

“We’re going to bring Solace back,” I said. “I don’t want to mark this as a failure if that’s the outcome.”

“It has led us down a chain,” said Grak. “It’s as you said.”

“True,” I said. “But it’s pointing in a direction that we were going to go anyway, and we did get a few things out of it, which is more than I’d thought. When I was giving the dire warning, I was more thinking that I would end up staring into the eye of the abyss and have to fight an Elder God.” I coughed slightly. “Speaking of …”

“Did you fight an Elder God without me?” asked Fenn. “Also, what’s an Elder God?”

“I spoke with the Dungeon Master,” I said.

The room was silent for a bit; there were some looks of confusion.

“That’s your name for the entity that you believe created and controls all of reality?” asked Amaryllis.

“Yes,” I replied.

“And you spoke to it?” asked Grak.

“Yes,” I replied again. “Him. Or, he took a human form, I guess, but I think it was a him. I’m kind of under the impression that he was what he claimed to be.”

Amaryllis was clenching the table. “Please tell me that you were diplomatic.”

I paused slightly and tried to think of how to word it. There were two memories of how it went, and I could put them in sequence because of how one of those memories ended. “We didn’t really prepare for me to meet the all-knowing entity that controls the world,” I said. “It started off with -- look, I think overall it was a positive, productive conversation, but -- I asked him about the problem of pain, and he was kind of a dick about it, so I beat him to death.”

“No,” said Amaryllis. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No, Juniper, why, I’m pregnant now, I can’t even drink my sorrows away.”

“He wasn’t actually dead,” I said.

“Oh?” asked Amaryllis, opening her eyes. “Really? The all-seeing entity that controls reality didn’t die from you punching it?! How could anyone possibly have seen that coming!”

“I was angry,” I said with a shrug that didn’t reflect how I was feeling (defensive, if I had to pick a word). “The problem of pain is a bit of a sore spot for me.”

“Yet the conversation was … productive?” asked Grak.

“I don’t understand what the problem of pain is,” said Valencia.

“I don’t think now is the time to get into theodicy,” I said.

“It probably is, if it would explain why the fuck you thought trying to beat up an omnipotent overgod was a good thing,” said Amaryllis. “Theo- meaning god, -dicy meaning … what, exactly?”

“I’ve got no idea where the word comes from,” I said. “But it’s basically just the study of the problem of pain, the question of how you can claim that god is virtuous or omnibenevolent given that there is suffering in the world.”

“Demons and devils aren’t enough of an answer?” asked Valencia. She seemed confused.

“The gods are decidedly lacking in virtue,” said Amaryllis, crossing her arms.

I let out a sigh. “Okay, fine, I’m going to give a very, very brief summary in the interests of bridging the cultural divide. On Earth -- well, no, in the specific part of Earth that I grew up on, we’re raised to believe that there’s only one singular god, who made everything in the whole world, wrote all the laws of physics, set up all the rules the world works by, is omnipotent, meaning that he’s all powerful, he’s omniscient, which means that he’s all-seeing, and finally, the kicker, he’s omnibenevolent, which means that he’s all-good, as good as good can be.”

“That actually sounds really nice to me,” said Fenn, frowning slightly. “I’d choose to live in that world.”

“I might too,” I said. Leaving aside the issue of free will for a second. “The problem is, I lived on Earth, and that kind of god didn’t seem to me to be the kind of god that made sense in the context of all the stuff on Earth.” I could feel my anger rising. “So I was ten years old, lying awake in bed, having this -- probably another concept that doesn’t translate, but a crisis of faith.”

“It translates,” said Grak.

“It translates.” Amaryllis nodded in agreement. “Just not in the context of the gods.”

“Ah,” I said. “Right. Shit, sorry.” Grak waved a hand, dismissing my oversight. “The crisis of faith, for me, was just sitting there, thinking, and being so angry at God for not doing anything about, you know, people starving to death, or the body of a child found in the woods, or -- on Earth it was very easy to get a lot of information very quickly, at all hours of the day, and so even if the general trends were positive, mostly, you could still start reading about a guy in his twenties dying of cancer, or a woman crying over her child born with anencephaly, or … whatever personally affected you most, you could read about it, and keep reading about it, and you’d never have to stop, because there would always be something new.” I was dredging up old feelings, and I knew that I was making a hash of things, but I just wanted to get it out, so I stared at the center of the table as I spoke. “And through all this, surrounded by all this, where was God?” When Mom and Dad were yelling at each other, their words indistinguishable through my bedroom door, leaving only raw hostility to reach me, when I was praying to God, why was the only thing I heard back silence? I took a deep, shaky breath.

“This is about Arthur,” said Grak.

“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “No, no, it was way before his -- before he died. I was little, and I had all this pain, a lot of it imported from television and the internet, and the answers that I got back when I tried to stumble my way through a conversation with the pastor were just answers that I hated. God has a plan. God works in mysterious ways. If you’re omnipotent, how fucking shitty do you have to be at planning for any of your plans to involve killing millions of children every year?”

“Juniper, I mean this with all due respect,” said Amaryllis. “But it seems like this is probably about Arthur.”

“No,” I said, more forcefully this time. “This is about every shitty thing that ever happened to anyone. Arthur meant -- means a lot to me, but this wasn’t a new thing when he”— died—“died.” I hated the taste of that word coming out of my mouth. “It just brought up all that old hatred and anger that had already been there, because where I’m from, when people die, especially young people, all these idiots come out of the woodwork to say that God has some stupid fucking plan that required what’s effectively murder, or God works in some mysterious way, or, you know.” I stopped and let out a hollow little laugh. “Or that he’s in a better place.”

“Which he was?” asked Amaryllis, raising an eyebrow. I could see that I wasn’t getting through to her with the whole theodicy thing.

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t say that Aerb at the height of the Dark King’s power was a better place. A different place though, that I’d grant.”

“Wait,” said Fenn, her brow furrowed. “I’m confused, why would you be angry? Why would you think that this god was actually all-powerful? Maybe bad things happen because they’re out of his control? You can’t just get mad at someone you don’t know because they didn’t have enough power to protect you.”

“Yes, you can,” said Amaryllis, folding her arms. “If it was their job to protect you, and they failed.”

“Well, whatever your issues are, I’d think it would make more sense to just say that, actually, this all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god isn’t actually those things, or maybe doesn’t exist, which is what you’ve said before,” said Fenn. “I don’t think I’ve ever been worked up into a rage about something that doesn’t exist, and I’ve been in plenty of rages.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I threw up my hands. “I really don’t know, I think I was just so convinced that there was a god, and the part that seemed weakest was the goodness, not the omnipotence, because someone had to create the world, so …” I shrugged. “I’m not saying that it makes that much sense, I’m just trying to explain it from a personal perspective, my own viewpoint on the matter. Which is why, when I came face-to-face with as close to that kind of god as actually existed, yeah, I snapped a little bit.”

“You said you killed him,” said Amaryllis.

“I beat him to death with my bare hands, yeah,” I said. “Insulted him a lot, yelled a bit, and then beat him to death. He didn’t seem too torn up about it when he came back. I wandered around in a white void for what I think might have been a few days, I think maybe to tire me out.”

“You did all this in a handful of minutes?” asked Grak.

“He stopped time,” I said. “His words. Anyway, we talked for a bit, when I wasn’t busy being mad at him for allowing pain to exist, or for making the hells, or for … I don’t know, lots of personal stuff I was upset about. I yelled a few times. I called him an asshole. I called him a shitty DM.”

Amaryllis sighed and laid her face in her palm. “You said it was productive.”

“It’s not sounding particularly productive,” said Fenn.

“Yes,” I replied. “He said he wasn’t the enemy, he was the Dungeon Master. He wanted to tell me not to worry about the narrative, because he was fine with us breaking those molds, and not to worry so much about the existential terror, because he was just doing nudges. He told me that I could fail and die, and that he wouldn’t save me if that happened, but it was in my hands. Oh, and he told me that eventually the campaign would come to an end, and if I made it, I would become a god in my own right, though I think he meant a god like he was a god, not a sixth god of Aerb. I found it fairly cathartic, I guess.”

“Even though it might all have been lies?” asked Amaryllis.

“If he was feeding me lies, then okay,” I said. “They didn’t feel like lies. He called us kindred spirits, and that felt true.”

“You said that he was an asshole,” said Grak.

I nodded. “Yeah. And he was an asshole in the same way that I could be an asshole sometimes, in the ways that he argued with me … he wasn’t me, but he was close. I don’t know how else to describe it. A reflection of me? Me, but a step to the left?” I stopped, trying to work out how to word the next part.

I knew that Amaryllis was going to get on my case about the wishes, because she would have studiously constructed an ironclad wish, and when it was shot down on the grounds of being overpowered or not what the Dungeon Master had in mind, she would have worked as hard as she possibly could have to squeak out as much possible advantage as she could have. I could see where that might have been smart … but if the Dungeon Master was kind-of me, a kindred spirit, he would have hated it. I’d given favors to players before, and always hated the end result, which was an intense negotiation over something that I was just doing to be nice. (I’d wished for more wishes to be a dick, not because I thought it would work.)

“There’s more?” asked Amaryllis, watching me.

“Some personal things,” I said. “Things I don’t want to share, and that I don’t think it would be helpful to share. And … keep an eye out for a backpack, I guess. He said that there would be a magical one that could get things from Earth, a gesture of goodwill.”

The Six-Eyed Doe suddenly lifted its head and made a loud, intense sound like a creaking door. When it brought its head down, it coughed and spat something on the floor, then looked at us in something that might have resembled surprise. I went over and picked the backpack up.

“So there’s that, I guess,” I said with a shrug.

◆◆◆

Sometimes it seemed like our discussions went on forever. Amaryllis wanted more details from me, and if she could have wrung a full transcript from me, I was pretty sure that she would have. I got the sense that she was treating the Dungeon Master like he was a devil, but worse, a perfect liar who could also directly reach into your brain and modify memories and feelings without limit. She didn’t press that point of conversation though, and I didn’t really want to talk about it.

The thing about Amaryllis was that she tended to have her shit together, but the flip side of that was that she really liked to talk things out. I’d interpreted our exchange before the ritual as being an agreement that we would go to Kuum Doona, but to her, it had apparently been an agreement that we had a number of options so far as the time-constraints on bringing Solace back were concerned. She had been acting quickly and decisively in the interests of expediting the ritual, not actually agreeing to anything specific.

So, we talked, and talked, and eventually Fenn got bored and left, and Grak decided that he would rather have a summary of what we were doing once the options were more fleshed out, and I realized only then that Valencia and the Six-Eyed Doe must have bowed out some time earlier, because they were nowhere to be seen.

“Just once, I would like for things to be easy,” I said, once we were alone.

“Have you completely forgotten what Grak said earlier today, about you seeming to think that the world owed you something?” asked Amaryllis, frowning at me.

“Sorry, easy was probably the wrong word,” I replied. “I would like for things to be straightforward, so that we only had one logical option instead of eighty options that are spread out in front of us that we have to endlessly go over.”

“At some point we’re going to have to address your recurring attention problems,” she said. “The ability to choose is not something to be taken lightly.”

“I know,” I said. I looked down at her neat handwriting, which had filled four pages. “It just seems like there are a lot of ways to accelerate a pregnancy, or slow down the decay inside the bottle, and none of those ways are the obviously correct one.”

“If I'm carrying Solace to term and then birthing her as normal for either crantek or humans, as the quest says I will be, then I don’t think placing a stop on the bottle is a good idea,” said Amaryllis, briefly consulting her notes. “Even if we discount the more unorthodox lines of thought, like throwing the bottle into the Lunar exclusion zone”—that would be the one with the guy doing his best impression of Groundhog Day—“that would still leave me having to endure the pregnancy in full, and I highly doubt that we can rest on our laurels for nine months. I know that I’m not the most valuable member of the team --”

“Knock that off,” I said.

A slight frown crossed her face. “Sorry,” she said. She pursed her lips, as though she was about to say something, but stayed quiet.

“Is that why we’re doing all this?” I asked, gesturing toward the papers.

“It’s important work,” said Amaryllis.

“I think we moved past the point of productivity an hour ago,” I replied. “You’re pushing on for the sake of pushing. We’re going to Kuum Doona, because it’s close enough to your worldlines that we can actually get there in less than a week, and because it kills two quests with one stone, and because there’s likely to be some loot there, in addition to a fully secured base of operations, and maybe even some mysteries of the past. We’re seriously constrained by time, even the train ride to the Boundless Pit is stretching it. Some of these other plans ...”

“I wanted to be thorough,” said Amaryllis.

I sighed. “I know. What I’m worried about is that you’re being thorough for the wrong reasons. You’ve been putting a lot on your shoulders since … well, since as long as I’ve known you, but I’m really concerned that you see yourself as the weakling, or worried that we see you as the weakling, and … I know a thing or two about self-destructive behavior, and I don’t want to see that from you.” I studiously avoided mentioning how readily she’d taken on the burden of being the one to birth Solace.

Amaryllis frowned. “Have you been talking to Fenn, Grak, or both?”

“About … this?” I asked. “Neither.”

“Shit,” said Amaryllis. She grabbed the papers in front of her and crumpled them up. “I’ll try to tone it down. Doing work that doesn’t need to be done is one of the greatest sins a person can commit.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.

“It’s something one of the magi used to say,” she replied. “I wasn’t in a great place then, and I found myself going above and beyond just because I needed to … I don’t know.”

“Be useful?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I was a piece in the games of the Lost King’s Court and didn’t know how to make myself a player, so I focused my attention on other things and tried to do them really well, because at least that way I had something I could accomplish. It was foolish, looking back.” She looked down at the notes. “Just like this is foolish. Work for the sake of work, discussion because it feels useful, not because it is useful.” She folded her hands in her lap, then looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I understand the impulse. You can’t do the thing that you actually want to do, so you have to put your energy someplace else.” I gestured at the crumpled papers. “This is, maybe, not the place to put that energy. Nor were the safehouses, really, as useful as they are. Have you thought about maybe having a hobby?”

“A hobby,” said Amaryllis, giving me her best blank stare.

“For me it was worldbuilding,” I said with a shrug. “If things weren’t going well with my parents, or at school, or even sometimes with friends, I could always work on my worlds. And it wasn’t really useless, because at least I was creating something, or looking up information along the way. You could, I don’t know, crochet or something.”

“I don’t think that I’m going to take up crocheting,” said Amaryllis with a soft smile. “I appreciate the sentiment though. You have a very different approach from our other friends.”

“What did they suggest?” I asked, curiosity piqued.

“Grak told me that I should meditate,” replied Amaryllis. “The dwarves have a specific form of it where they feel the rocks, putting the whole of their attention into their fingertips to trace each individual bump and curve of a surface, mapping and memorizing in their mind’s eye. It didn’t really seem to be to my tastes. Fenn suggested that I hire a prostitute.”

“Aaahhhh,” I said, a strangled sound coming out of my mouth.

“That didn’t seem to be to my tastes either,” said Amaryllis, smiling at me. “I’d wondered, given that you can shift your points around, whether you would put them into social abilities as a default or mental abilities. Seems like you chose mental?”

“You caught me off-guard,” I replied, crossing my arms.

“I don’t mean to make fun,” said Amaryllis. She set her hands on the table and sighed, smile falling away. “Among the personal things that you asked the Dungeon Master, was there anything about me?”

“Some,” I said. “Not really anything that I want to repeat, I just wanted to make sure that you were as much your own person as possible, and that you could be happy.”

Loyalty Increased: Amaryllis lvl 17!

“Thanks,” she said. “That means a lot. And did he say?”

“He didn’t say, not really,” I replied. “I know you’re skeptical about the whole thing, and I think you’re probably right to be, but … he said that you were meant to be a companion first and a love interest second, and that given time, you would get over me.” I paused. “I’m really not sure that I should have told you that.”

Loyalty Increased: Amaryllis lvl 18!

“It continues to surprise me how free you are with the truth,” said Amaryllis. “Do you ever think about what it would have been like if you’d kept the secret of the game from me?”

“The level ups would have been hard to disguise,” I replied. “I’m not sure that I could have lied well enough.”

“I’d never have guessed the truth on my own,” said Amaryllis. “I would have just thought that you were partially dream-skewered with an amazing ability to learn quickly.” She looked over to where the backpack was sitting up against the side of the table. “And it seems as if Earth is real?”

“Maybe,” I said. “My guess is that it’s as real as Aerb, which is real enough for me. I’ve been trying to think of what all I want to show you, now that I have a connection.” I’d tried grabbing a laptop, and gotten back a note on legal pad, in my handwriting, that said ‘no laptops, sorry’, and decided that more testing could wait til later, if it wasn’t going to be the sort of thing that was going to break the game wide open. “Is there anything that would make you happy?”

“Happy?” asked Amaryllis, as though the concept was foreign to her. “Let’s try something frivolous. Earth confections.”

I started with my favorites, Jelly Belly, Reese’s minis, Warheads, Sour Patch Kids, and then moved on to other things I thought she might like; Arthur had always been a fan of Twizzlers, but Amaryllis hated them, just like I did. I offered commentary as I pulled things from the backpack, trying to give her the cultural context of everything. She got a little hung up on the wrappers, since they were made of plastics far beyond what was available on Aerb, but aside from that, she seemed to take some real pleasure in a little bit of frivolity, and some time spent in each other’s company without any real point to it.

The others filtered back in after some time, and we had a feast together, all the best junk food that Earth could offer, complete with a tasting of eleven different varieties of canned pop, which were far too sweet for all our palates, even mine, since I’d spent long enough on Aerb that my tastes had changed to suit the cuisine. It was as much like a family as I’d felt since playing my custom tabletop game with them a few weeks prior, and I sent a little token of thanks the Dungeon Master’s way, even though he was a prick.

In the morning, we teleported to Cranberry Bay, where we boarded a train that would take us along the Lion’s Mane until we reached the Boundless Pit.

Chapter 8 - Aboard the Lion's Tail

The train was necessitated by the fact that we didn’t have a better way to get to the Boundless Pit. There was a touchstone only about twenty minutes' walk from the Boundless Pit, but using our teleportation key to get there would have basically required us to kill a dozen guards and make ourselves conspicuous, while buying passage for five to get there would have opened us up for quite a bit of scrutiny from the aforementioned guards. The keys were very valuable, so the system had a lot of checks, balances, and overall paranoia built into it.

Trains, on the other hand, were transportation for the common people, with tickets available in exchange for a relatively small amount of cash, and documents that were simple enough for us to acquire. Fenn had been gearing up to quickly find someone to forge them for us in the morning before the train was set to depart, but I reminded her that I’d seen Forgery as a skill in her soul, and sure enough, with help from the clonal kit for supplies, she was able to make something she thought would be passably authentic, at least given the level of scrutiny we expected to face. She seemed a bit perturbed by the whole thing; I think getting better with a bow was something she saw as a boon, but having a new skill from nowhere as part of me leveling up was too much outside interference with her skillset. Unearned skill was old hat for me, but it was still new to her.

The train ride would take us two days, but we’d stop right on the doorstep of the Boundless Pit, and in theory, getting down to Kuum Doona would be the work of a day, maybe less, and the time chamber would ideally get us Solace back within the space of a day. At a projected four days, it was the fastest route to getting her back, and from there, hopefully stabilizing the locus’ domain.

(Interestingly, air travel was pretty rare on Aerb. The train lines had been built around Uther’s time, as one of the major works of the First Empire which continued until long after his disappearance and even through the collapse of the First Empire itself. Railways lubricated trade like nothing else, especially because their construction and maintenance was prioritized over the building and fixing of roads. In some sense, the railroads destroyed cultures and institutions, because they made obsolete dozens if not hundreds of different methods of transportation. A large, domesticated, flightless bird had been used as a pack animal for centuries, and was suddenly supplanted by the rails. The ley-line network of a far-north kingdom became unprofitable, and when the funds dried up, the magic did too. The tradition of river-rafting that had existed among the five kingdoms along the Lyra River collapsed within two generations, and this was in fact pointed to by historians as being a key factor in the development of a state of perpetual warfare in the region.

It wasn’t too long after the railways had finished establishing their stranglehold on transportation of goods that bulk teleportation arrived and almost completely destroyed rail. The saving grace was that living things couldn’t be teleported using that method, which meant that both a select fraction of freight and all passenger transport were still viable. Railway operators, public and private, did their best to switch over, and while some of them shuttered because the reason for their construction was virtually eliminated overnight, the Aerbian railway business as a whole was able to stay afloat, and passenger rail was the beneficiary of what had happened to freight.

There were a few reasons that air travel never really took off. The local equivalent of the Hall–Héroult process of aluminum processing came late in their technological advancement, which meant that cheap aluminum post-dated airplanes by long enough that a huge amount of infrastructure, processes, and institutions had already been built up, all to the standards of much heavier aircraft that were specialized for heavier loads over shorter distances, mostly meant for certain categories of freight that couldn’t go through bulk teleport, or for particular routes that trains weren’t good enough for. Aerb didn’t have the technological capability to build the kinds of aircraft that we had on Earth, but they did have the ability to build lighter-than-air aluminum passenger craft -- but it wasn’t at enough of an advantage to overcome the entrenched system of passenger rail, nor to compel the necessary retrofitting that the existing air systems used.

All that was without getting into the political considerations of the Draconic Confederacy. Dragons existed on Aerb, great and powerful creatures of incredible age, just the way I liked them, greedy, indulgent, obsessive, and at least a little bit smart. There were only about five hundred of them on Aerb, but they had a loose union, one which had formed in response to the foundation of the First Empire by Uther. They had relatively few common interests, but one of them was the belief that the skies of Aerb unequivocally belonged to the dragons, and everyone else flew at their pleasure. In practical terms, this meant that flights didn’t just have to go through the Aerbian equivalent of air traffic control, they also needed to be cleared with the dragons, which operated with all the efficiency you would expect of centuries-old institutions attempting to interface with each other. This wasn’t just a question of bureaucracy; some of the worst disasters in Aerbian aviation history were caused by dragons going after improperly cleared flights, which was obviously the kind of thing that had a chilling effect on passenger air travel.

(Also, there was no doubt in my mind that we were going to have to fight a dragon at some point, but that thankfully seemed like it was going to be a long time coming.))

We got to the station and selected the Lion’s Tail in mid-afternoon, and after a somewhat tense inspection of our legitimate tickets and illegitimate papers, we found our rooms, which given how late we’d been in booking our tickets, were spread out all across the train. Grak was on his own, in what the ticket agent had called a roomette, while Fenn and I had one room together, and Amaryllis and Val had another a few cars away. The train started to move, and I was treated to a rapidly receding view of Cranberry Bay. For certain stretches of our trip, the train would be going more than a hundred miles an hour, tracing the Lion's Mane, a geographical feature that looked a little bit like a lion's head if you squinted and tilted your head a bit, water making up the face and land making up the mane, with enormous islands making up a few features of the 'face' -- eyes, nose, mouth, and archipelagos that might have been whiskers. You really had to squint though.

“What do you mean you’ve never been on a train before?” asked Fenn as we sat down in the lounge chairs in our room. My eyes kept going around the room, looking at the combination of leather and woodwork, and the thick glass in the window that I was sure would turn deadly-sharp the moment it cracked. Everything was so solid, steel-framed and padded, like whoever had built the train realized the power the soul engines were capable of and decided to go hog wild. “You said that they have trains on Earth.”

“They do,” I replied. “Passenger trains, even. But where I’m from, the rail lines are mostly used for freight, and if you need to get anywhere, you go by car. That’s not how it is all over the world though, it mostly has to do with the technology at the time the cities were being built and some structural forces, I think. It’s not really common to take a train as transport. I doubt that most of the people from my hometown have ever taken one.”

“Best way to travel,” said Fenn. “Calm, relaxing, there are always lots of people to see and annoy, you get to fall asleep to the rumble and sway -- did you know that I’ve never had sex on a train?”

“Funny coincidence,” I said with a smile. “I haven’t either.”

But before we could do anything about that, Amaryllis showed up, with Valencia in tow.

“Is our room going to be the meeting room?” asked Fenn with a frown.

“We need to discuss things in private somewhere, your room is the midpoint,” said Amaryllis. She had shelved the immobility plate for the time being, mostly because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, and was dressed in a very conservative navy-blue outfit. The collar covered her neck almost entirely, while the long sleeves covered her arms, and a patterned navy-blue dress went down to just above solid-looking black boots. She’d changed her hair yet again, using Grak’s axe to grow it out, dying it a dark brown that bordered on black, and then putting it up in a bun.

Valencia was in a very similar outfit, the blues of it lighter, and the cut a little different, but with the same overall effect. We’d dyed her hair the same dark brown, and fixed her eyes with some blue contact lenses -- not the kind that you’d find on Earth, since these were made of very precisely ground glass, and the coloration was a tint that affected her vision and ended up making her irises look purple. It wasn’t quite the best that we could do as far as disguising her true nature, but it was close.

“Is there anything in particular that we need to discuss now?” asked Fenn. “Joon and I were in the middle of something. Or rather, we were about to be.”

Amaryllis pursed her lips. “We need to be on guard,” she said. “Val and I have finished our survey of the train, at least as best as we were able to. There are twenty-five cars in total, more than we could properly cover, but at least a few passengers of note, and one of which really concerns me. She’s a princess.”

“Anglecynn?” I asked, tensing. The Lost King’s Court was home to a plethora of princes and princesses, most of whom would probably be able to identify Amaryllis, maybe even through her disguise, and most of them that didn’t want her dead for their own purposes would be perfectly willing to sell her out. Amaryllis had a few allies among her kin, but none of them steadfast enough that she wanted to take the risk in going to them, especially not if we were putting off reclaiming her position within the government of Anglecynn (on an indefinite basis, which made me feel guilty, but it was what it was).

“No,” said Amaryllis. “Not that bad. She’s tuung, returning to her homeland after training at the athenaeum. She and her entourage are taking up the first three cars.”

The tuung were a frog-like people with wide mouths, enormous eyes, slick skin that was usually blue or grey, and a constant need for water that meant if you ever saw one, it was almost certain to be carrying around a tank on its back, some tubing, and mister. As far as the mortal species went, they weren’t terribly well-liked, which partly had to do with the fact that their moistness had to be accommodated (they left wet chairs and damp books in their wake), and partly had to do with a philosophy that most of them shared, which was “the supremacy of existence”, which boiled down to the idea that it was better to exist than not exist, even if existence meant pain and suffering (and yes, this included existence in the hells). Individual tuung could be members of the Empire of Common Cause, if they were citizens of a member nation, but the three largest (and loosely aligned) tuung polities were independent, with a few points of tension between them and the Empire.

“Okay, so this train’s got two princesses on it,” said Fenn with a shrug. “Not sure how much this has to do with us.”

“I’m a princess,” said Valencia. Her eyebrows were knit together and she had a studious expression.

“In what way are you possibly a princess?” asked Fenn with a laugh.

“Fallatehr was among the wahtepeh, which means that as his only daughter I would become part of the wahtepeh on my fortieth birthday,” said Valencia. She spoke carefully and clearly, as though she had memorized it. “That makes me a princess.”

“Absolutely not,” said Fenn, shaking her head. “A full quarter of the elves are wahtepeh, more if you’re a moon elf, and it’s not even really a noble class, it’s more like … landowners, I guess, at least for the wood elves, I think it’s similar for the moon elves. Sorry, but if we follow your logic, then I’m a princess.”

“Oh, you’re a princess?” I asked with a smile.

“It’s the wrong word?” asked Valencia. She glanced to Amaryllis.

“It’s a question of translation,” said Amaryllis, folding her arms across her chest. “The wahtepeh have a position of most-senior that confers certain rights, and in the early days of human-elf relations, that most-senior person, the wahtep was styled as the king by humans who didn’t really know better. Because the position moves to the most-senior member of the community, you could both become what Anglish considers to be a queen, except that you haven’t reached the age of majority. Historically, it wouldn’t have been out of the question for both of you to be styled a princess, especially if you were close to assuming the title of wahtep, but in the modern era we’d probably just use the elven word instead.”

Grak had entered the room while she was talking, let in, after a discreet knock, by Valencia. Our room had just enough space for the five of us, and only because the beds were folded up and out of the way.

“What is the relevance of this discussion?” asked Grak.

“There’s a princess aboard this train,” said Fenn. “Mary seems to think that means trouble.”

“Ah,” said Grak. “Because we are all princesses?”

“What?” I asked, staring at him.

“Prince, in my case,” said Grak with a slight nod. “Though Anglish genders are inaccurate and used as convenience.”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry, but … you’re a princess?”

“Or prince,” said Grak with a nod. He looked to Amaryllis. “It is the title that would historically have been bestowed on me in Anglish.” He paused. “King, or Queen, now.”

“Is your father --” I began.

“I do not wish to speak of it,” said Grak. He breathed loudly through his wide nostrils, and from the movement of his beard, I thought he probably had his teeth clenched.

“The dwarves at Darili Irid have a system of ‘most pure’,” said Amaryllis, pivoting away from whatever it was that Grak didn’t want to say about his father. “Darili Irid was founded by a single dwarf who had six children through parthenogenesis, and over the course of a few generations and some outsiders coming in, most of them diverged away from being much like the founder, aside from a single line, which Grak is the end result of.” She turned to Grak. “Do I have that right?”

He nodded. “It is a common system among single-founder clans. There would otherwise be risk of drift.”

“So from a certain perspective, the kharass is composed almost entirely of princesses,” said Amaryllis. “And given the criteria you’ve outlined for a potential new companion, I thought that I would bring this particular princess to your attention.”

“But she’s …” I stopped, trying to gather my thoughts, which had been scattered all over the place. “She’s, ah, got an escort with her? Sorry, also, the locus isn’t a princess by any possible definition of the word, right?”

“I didn’t see her,” said Amaryllis. “I only heard about her from some of the staff aboard the train. They’re keeping her under lock and key until we reach the Boundless Pit, and from what I’ve heard, she has far more of an armed guard than this trip would appear to warrant. There was some speculation that she was either being held and transported home against her will, or that they expected some kind of trouble, though it’s unclear what form that would take.”

“Mary has been an incurable gossip,” said Valencia with a small smile. I smiled back at her, and she beamed at me.

“You think that it smells like plot,” I said. “She smells like a companion, the circumstances reek of a quest, and it’s all happening right when we’re taking a trip in the same direction, one which will involve the tuung in one way or another?”

“I know that you felt like your conversation with the Dungeon Master was a revelation,” said Amaryllis.

“We’ve dodged obvious plot points before,” I said. This was something that I had been trying to get across to her the night before; sometimes things cropped up and then just never got used, that was in the nature of a tabletop game, and once I had tried to step back and see things through that lens, it really did seem like there were a few times the seams had shown. Sure, there might be a princess on this train, and she might even be a plot thread, but that didn’t mean that we had to go chasing her down. I had twenty-three open quests at the moment, which was enough to convince me that I had at least some leeway, even if it was unplotlike.

“We’ll consider this a test case then,” said Amaryllis with a nod. “I just thought that you should know. We’ll see whether we can get through the next forty-eight hours without getting into trouble.”

Chapter 9 - The Familiar and the Foreign

The backpack had limits, which I’d partially explored the day before. Luckily, the penalty for attempting to violate those limits seemed to just be that I would get back a note, in my handwriting, on a piece of legal paper. I’d collected a small stack of them thus far. Though the backpack didn’t give me much in the way of general rules, it did give me a lot of specific ones, and from those, I could work backward to get the general rules on my own. In brief, the backpack was pretty free with information -- I could pull books from it at will -- but was fairly stingy on giving out things that had more direct utility, especially electronics or weapons, and my guess was that there was also a limit on value, given that I couldn’t pull out a gold bar or a bag full of diamonds. Amusingly, I could pull out a stack of hundred-dollar bills, which were worthless on Aerb given that the backing of the United States government meant nothing.

Amaryllis took a stack of books with palpable excitement, most of them overviews of Earth history and technology. It wasn’t quite an offline version of Wikipedia, which I don’t think she really understood the glory of, but we’d been able to draw out thick reference materials, including books on circuitry and computer programming. To my surprise, she also asked me for a holy book from my people, and I had reluctantly provided her with an annotated Bible, with instruction not to read it until her other homework was done (she rolled her eyes at me, but as she turned away I saw a little smile).

Valencia went with her, carrying a very different stack of books, some taken from storage in Fenn’s glove, some taken from the backpack. I was mildly surprised that she knew how to read without the assistance of a chewed-up devil, but it was apparently among the suite of skills that Fallatehr had seen fit to have his minions teach her, though they’d only taught her Anglish, nothing else. The books Amaryllis and I selected were partly to give her some culture, and partly to give her some socialization. It wasn’t ideal to have her learn from reading, but it was a far better plan than having her learn by trying to piece together how devils mimicked and manipulated humans, and we couldn’t spend literally our entire day trying to teach her things.

My contribution was to give her the first two Harry Potter books, on the theory that she might find some helpful parallels. Arthur (as Uther) had written his own versions of them, which I’d skimmed through, but I disagreed with some of the choices made in adaptation; he wrote Hermione as too much of a Mary Sue, and Ron as too much of a dimwit sidekick, and in the final book, Harold Plotter and the Hallowed Deaths, Harry died as part of his sacrifice. I won’t go so far as to call it bad fanfic, but it did somewhat rankle me that Arthur had rewritten the series to better suit his own tastes. Most of the works he’d copied were faithful to the original, or at least as much as could be expected given that they were written from memory and needed to be translated to a Middle Ages culture, but these showed deliberate changes that were reflections of his complaints and comments on the series I’d heard from him. Trying to psychoanalyze his actions on Aerb was nearly impossible given how removed I was from him. He’d been ‘writing’ the Harold Plotter novels around the start of what Amaryllis had termed the Roaming Era. It made me vaguely upset, not just the defilement of a series I had grown up on, but what it might say about Arthur. So long as I had the Earth originals written by Rowling, I would rather Valencia read them instead.

(You know what didn’t work? Trying to get books that hadn’t existed when I left Earth. I thought it was definitely within the Dungeon Master’s power to create a copy of The Winds of Winter or The Doors of Stone, but the backpack gave me back a note that said it couldn’t or wouldn’t. That also extended to technical books from after 2017.)

Books aside, the most useful things to come out of the backpack were plastics and medical supplies. We stored a fair amount of those in Fenn’s glove, and then made up a first aid kit, just in case we had need of it. My primary concern there was Valencia; the marzipan fairies didn’t work on her, nor did bone magic, which meant that we didn’t have a way to keep her in good health if something were to happen to her.

And then there were the perks, creature comforts from home that I could share with the group, candy, pop, and fiction. I pulled out a Blu-ray of Star Wars: A New Hope, then stared at it in disappointment, because I had no way to play it. Even if I could have created a television from scratch (not all that hard, I didn’t think, especially with some reference books), and a Blu-ray player (virtually impossible given the lack of microprocessors), I’d have had to rewrite the entire Blu-ray codec from scratch, unless I could find a dead-trees copy of it. I actually still thought that it was doable, but would take years on end, enormous resources, and Engineering that had been pushed up as high as it would go.

“I don’t get this,” said Fenn around a mouthful of McDonald’s hamburger, which I’d pulled, warm, from the backpack. She was in a state of partial undress; after the others had left, we’d had our fun, and now we were sitting around, clothed enough that if someone knocked on the door we would be able to get decent in a hurry. “Like, it’s fine for street food, but you’re saying that this is from a restaurant?” She pulled back the layers and peered inside. “One hundred billion served? It’s so … gross.”

“Mass produced,” I said. “I’m actually pretty surprised that’s not the case on Aerb, given that you have industrialization and better mass transportation than on Earth.” I was sitting in my lounge chair with one of the Culture novels in my hands, but I wasn’t getting terribly far in it. “Do you think there’s a niche available? Maybe I could invent fast food?”

“Our food is fast,” said Fenn. “A guy hands you a stick with meat that’s been sitting beneath the burners, how is that slow?”

“Maybe I’ll try to find a book on modern -- Earth-modern -- restaurant management,” I said, knowing that I almost certainly wasn’t going to do that. “Uther was the Poet King, but they shall call me the King of Burgers.”

Fenn touched the half-eaten hamburger with a gloved finger and ten seconds later, it disappeared into the vast void of her glove. “Can we get some real food to eat?”

“The backpack has plenty,” I said, gesturing toward it. It wasn’t keyed to me specifically, though I knew the most about what was actually available on Earth. It wasn't finicky about getting things, but you had to exercise at least a little bit of precision when picturing what you wanted, even if it didn't need to be exact. I glanced down at my book, then back up at her. “Oh, actually … hrm, takeout from The Great Wall would probably be too sugary for your tastes, but I do want you to try it at some point.”

“Let me rephrase,” said Fenn, making a moue. “I am bored, I want to explore the train, and I want you to come with me, because you are my wonderful boyfriend.”

I closed my book and gave her a somewhat forced smile. “Okay,” I said.

“Problem?” asked Fenn.

“No,” I said. “Just, after”—I gestured at my lower half—“I get kind of … clear-headed. Not antisocial, necessarily, but, ah, more prone to analysis, less prone to emotion.”

“Even with me?” asked Fenn.

She was making a sad, puppy dog face, exaggerated to the point of caricature, but I knew her well enough to know that was part of how she masked actual hurt, a ‘ha ha, think about how ridiculous it would be if I was actually hurt’ response. I wanted to explain to her that it wasn’t personal, I still loved her, it was just the biochemistry of my brain, but I knew from past experience that a digression into neurobiology wasn’t the correct response to an emotional reaction. I probably would have caught myself even if my two ‘floating’ points weren’t in SOC at the moment.

“Fenn, my love,” I said, standing up, “let’s go explore this train together, arm in arm.”

She beamed a smile that sent relief and real happiness through me, and we finished getting dressed together with only a few mild interruptions. We didn’t quite walk arm-in-arm together, because the hallways weren’t wide enough to allow it, but I trailed a hand behind me, and she held on.

Most of the cars were filled with rooms that people had bought passage on, with cramped sleepers at the tail end of the train for people who couldn’t afford the luxury we were traveling in, and a single car devoted to rows of chairs and a few booths, which were for the people who were going to get off before nightfall. Our specific line had three stops to it, each at a major city along the way to the Boundless Pit.

When we got to one of the two dining cars, we stopped and found a table. The sun was starting to set behind part of the mountains that made up this section of the Lion’s Mane, and most of the people on the train had already eaten. It was just us, three of the tuung sitting at their own table, and a pair of men further down the car, who were in heated discussion. I say men, but they were normal only by the standards of Aerb, which meant that any single one of their clothes, facial hair, skin color, or accessories would have been enough to turn heads on Earth, and though I’d been putting real effort into studying The Book of Blood, I couldn’t be certain either of them were actually human.

“So, I’m dating a princess,” I said with a grin as we took our seats.

“Does that do it for you?” asked Fenn with a smile that called to mind the carnivorous nature of the elves.

I smiled back. “I’m sorry for finding it funny.”

“Well, so long as one of us does,” sighed Fenn. “Personally, I’ve always held a disdain for the noble class, not that the concept really applies to the elves as such, no matter what Val or Mary might tell you.”

“I didn’t figure you for having political opinions,” I said. A waiter stopped by and took our orders, which was always an experience on Aerb, where I only vaguely knew the names of things and the list of ingredients used in the description was of little help. “Have we ever talked politics before?”

“Not if I could possibly have helped it,” said Fenn. “What’s that phrase you use sometimes? ‘Blah, blah, blah, politics’?”

“That was Reimer’s phrase,” I replied with a frown.

“Which one was he again?” asked Fenn.

“Kind of a dick,” I said. “He wore hats a lot -- baseball caps -- baseball is a game where you hit a ball with a bat and run around in circles -- had, I don’t know, glasses, blonde hair … he liked rules, especially if he could use those rules to break something.”

“Yeah,” said Fenn. She leaned back in her seat a bit. “I think he’s my favorite of the Earth characters.”

“Ugh,” I replied, making a face. “How does it feel to have terrible taste? Also, they’re not characters.”

Fenn waved a hand. “Well I’ve never met them, and I’m not likely to -- Arthur excepted, calm down -- so they might as well be characters, right? And in the stories that you tell, Reimer is always the guy trying to do stuff. Plus he’s a rebel, which I like.”

I actually laughed at that. “He was not a rebel. He was a straight-A student. And in-game he wasn’t a rebel, he was a murderhobo, with very few exceptions. He didn’t treat the people like they were real, he treated them like they were all my finger puppets.”

“He liked hats, I like hats,” said Fenn. “Case closed.”

“I feel like this is the fifth time you’ve dropped a hint that you want me to buy you a hat,” I said, looking at her unadorned head.

“You’ve only gotten five of the hints, eh?” she smiled. “You’re really going to have to step up your playing.”

“Playing?” I asked, confused.

Fenn sighed. “Just insert whatever the appropriate Earth slang was.” She perked up. “Oh, do you have a dictionary of Earth slang in that backpack?”

“Uh, probably,” I said. “I’m really not sure that we should just be randomly grabbing Earth information out of it.”

“You want to hoard all the weird idioms and obscure references for yourself,” said Fenn with a nod. “You want to”— she leaned forward—“Bogart them, huh?” A wide smile spread across her face.

I grinned at her. “You are just ridiculously proud of remembering that, aren’t you?”

“I am,” said Fenn. She stretched out in her seat, raising her arms up and interlocking her fingers. I tried to remember whether I’d told her that was the most attractive innocuous thing a girl could do, because I was pretty sure the cat-like stretch was intentional and for my benefit. “And if you get us a working tellervision, maybe we can curl up and watch Cabbablanca together.”

I laughed at that one, loud enough that the two guys at the end of the car momentarily stopped to look at us. “I love you,” I said.

“Is that not a thing on Earth?” asked Fenn, the very picture of innocent confusion. “Cabbablanca and chill?”

“I sometimes, unaccountably, forget how great you are,” I told her. “Can you say you love me too?”

“Oh, well, it seems a bit soon in our relationship for that,” said Fenn with a smile. “You know what they say, why buy the cow if you can get it to say ‘I love you’ for free, right? I’ve got to play my cards close to my chest.”

Whatever response I might have tried to make was cut short when one of the two men at the far end of the dining car got up and approached us. Fenn had her back to them, and as her eyes tracked my own, she pulled out a small, compact mirror from her purse to look at what I was looking at before collapsing it and putting it back in her purse.

“Are either of you, by chance, bone magi?” he asked, looking between the two of us. His skin had a slightly green cast to it, enough that I thought he probably wasn’t human. Strips of azure fabric were woven into his black hair, stuck in place by bronze rings, which gave an effect something like a turban. His tunic and breeches were the same color, and as my eyes traveled down, I could see both a sheathed dagger and a gun with a gnarled wooden grip at his hip. I couldn’t place his species, but thought that perhaps he was a half-breed like Fenn, though a half-breed of what and what I couldn’t say.

“We both are, as it happens, on a trip out from the athenaeum, as I’m sure a few on this train are,” said Fenn. “He’s the better of us, by far.” She nodded toward me. “We have bones, if you have coin.”

“We were about to eat,” I said, trying to sound both apologetic and firm.

“Nonsense.” Fenn smiled at me. “Part of the joy of train travel is meeting new and interesting people, all of us stuck together for an extended duration, that’s why we’re here, rather than with our noses stuck in books back in the cabin.” She turned back to the man who’d asked the question. “What is it you’d like?”

He reached into the folds of his tunic and pulled out a tiny skull, which he placed upon the table, next to a small basket of untouched bread. The skull couldn’t have been much bigger than a plum.

“This lizard was a bound familiar,” said the man, nodding to the skull. “We want to know whether he was happy.”

“Um,” I said. I looked to the other man, down at the end of the dining car. He was partially twisted around in his seat to watch us, and nodded to me when he saw me looking. He was bald and had lips so red that I thought he was probably wearing garish makeup. “For what purpose?”

“To settle a bet,” replied the man, looking slightly perturbed at my question. When I made no move to touch the skull, he continued on. “Between the two of us we have a strong difference in opinion about whether bound familiars are happy servants or moved as puppets under unhappy compulsion.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s actually a really interesting question.” ‘Bound familiars’ weren’t what I’d hoped they were when I first heard of them; they were merely animals that followed some basic commands, induced to that state through a rather expensive and time-consuming spell. I hadn’t really seen the point to them, aside from the fact that they were kind of cool, but the problem was they were still pets, and you had to deal with food, water, waste, and general health. I reached out and laid a finger on top of the lizard skull. “You know that if I do this, there’s some risk to the skull, it will be burned for the purposes of bone magic, and I might not get an answer back?”

He nodded, making a few of the rings in his hair move around.

I’d never actually pulled memories before. Bormann had described it as being difficult and practically worthless, but I was a better bone mage than she was now, and though Fallatehr had described the memories within the soul as being very difficult to work with or make sense of, I had some hope that the two skills would have at least a little bit of harmony with each other.

I pulled from the skull, targeting the KNO layer of the bone, going as slow as I possibly could. From what I knew of knowledge tapping, the gradual pull meant that the memories would come out impressionistic and disconnected from one another, which was exactly what I wanted, since all I really needed was to know whether or not this lizard had a happy life as a familiar. I could feel the memories landing one by one, and what Bormann had said had been right, they were fragmentary glimpses of the lizard’s life.

“He seems … dutiful, I guess,” I replied, narrating as the flashes of memory came to me. “Not terribly much emotion, but what’s there is, I guess I would say, satisfaction at a job well done? Not really affection, so much as there’s any real emotion or cognition at all. He’s the closest to happy when he’s just finished doing a thing for …” The face was distorted in the memories, but it was a recurring figure that I could identify by the strips of cloth that tied down his hair. “You?” I asked.

“Yes.” The man nodded. I’d caught enough distorted images from the lizard’s point of view to see a cramped room where papers were being filed or sorted, and more than a few where he was writing in books or reading those papers.

“As far as the question goes, I don’t think it’s puppetry,” I said, taking my finger off the skull. I’d been delicate enough to leave it largely undamaged; it had generated only enough smoke to leave a faint scent in the air, and the only mark on it was a smudge where my finger had been. “Happiness is … I think it would be more accurate to say that he enjoyed accomplishing things.”

The man gave me a short bow, plucked the skull off the table, and slipped it back into his robes. When his hand came back out, it was holding a handful of coins, which he placed in a neat stack on the table.

“Very generous of you,” said Fenn with a nod, which was good, because I had no idea what you were supposed to charge for a service like that.

“Thank you for your service,” he said, giving another short bow. He returned back to his end of the dining car, his mood somewhat softened, but as soon as he sat down, the conversation started up again, seeming just as argumentative as before. I caught the tuung staring at me; one of them had left, leaving only two, and when I caught their eyes, they began misting themselves and talking in a language I didn’t know (assumedly it was Tuung).

Our food arrived shortly afterward, either through cosmic manipulation to create convenient timing, or because the waiter had been watching from a distance and hadn’t wanted to interrupt.

“I’m not sure why you said yes,” I said to Fenn. She had something that looked an awful lot like a burger, though the meat was a lacquered red and the bun reminded me more of an English muffin than a traditional burger bun. My own selection had come as four different bowls, one which had something like a tortilla, another with a steaming meat, the third with finely diced vegetables, and the fourth filled with hot water and two folded towels that were partially submerged in it. I had no idea how to eat it.

“Why not?” asked Fenn. She took a bite of her hamburger and talked around it. “It’s the truth, more or less. It’s misleading truth, maybe, but I don’t know that I’m responsible for what other people read into what I say.”

“Uh, you definitely are,” I said. I looked down at my plates, trying to decide how to proceed.

“But you’d have lied?” asked Fenn. “I’m sorry, and what are you doing with your meal?”

I’d laid out the tortilla-thing (thicker and heavier than a tortilla, more like a flatbread but with some give to it) and was using a spoon to get meat and vegetables onto it, intending to roll it up and eat it like a wrap. “Just show me the right way to do it,” I said with a sigh. She reached across, took a piece of the flatbread, tore it in half, and used it like finger-tongs to pick up a pinch of veggies and a piece of meat. She plopped the whole thing into her mouth, and looked at me with wry amusement.

“My way would have worked,” I said. I followed her lead though. Each bite was like a little mini-sandwich. “And yeah, I would have lied, but mostly because we can’t afford to be caught at this stage, and exposing ourselves as bone mages --”

“Magi,” said Fenn.

“-- on a train that probably has more than a few of them is a risk that it’s kind of pointless to take,” I said. “Someone starts asking questions about what year we were in, or who we studied under, and those aren’t questions that we can answer, because we didn’t actually attend the athenaeum.”

“So?” asked Fenn. She took another bite from her burger.

“So … I guess I don’t know the legal landscape well enough to say,” I replied. “We’re currently traveling through the Monarchical Democracy of Esplandian --”

“Nope,” said Fenn. “We passed the border while we were”—she made a gesture, thumb and index finger making a circle, other index finger moving in and out of it—“we’re in Drabian now, though we’ll be through by the time we go to sleep.”

“Well, then I really don’t know the legal landscape,” I said. “The athenaeums have a stranglehold on their respective magics, which extends to teaching, publications, and actual practice, but on Earth you wouldn’t get in trouble for having medical skills, you’d get in trouble for claiming you were a doctor, which would be fraud, or attempting to practice medicine, which would be a felony without a license.”

“So we’ve come to the conclusion that I was right all along?” asked Fenn with a raised eyebrow. “I love it when that happens.”

“Well, I’ve got no idea,” I said. “I’m going to shut up and eat my food.”

The problem with telling the truth was that the truth was fucking weird and I was both powerful enough that I would draw the attention of powerful people, and weak enough that those powerful people could coerce, threaten, or kill me, or the people I cared about. The problem with Fenn’s lie was that it pointed back toward the truth in a few ways, while my lie was just a dead-end. It would have been perfectly plausible for us not to be bone mages, even if it was somewhat likely given our point of origin. That would have been the end of the conversation.

And then I would have missed out on looking through the lizard’s memories, and the chance to help settle a minor question that the two men were still in heated discussion about, and the world would have been a little less interesting.

◆◆◆

“The necromancer reels back from your attack and drops his evil tome, then begs for his life!” I yelled. I’d been young, ten years old, early days as far as the D&D group went, so imagine me as played by a child actor who doesn’t quite look the same as the Juniper you know and love.

“I wanna hear it,” said Greg with a grin. It had been his axe that had dealt the mortal wound.

“‘Please!’” I cried. I leaned across the table, clasping my hands together. “‘Please, oh powerful warrior, spare my life, I’ll reform, repent, do anything that you want!’”

His grin turned into a smile. “I pick my axe up over my head and throw it right into his fa--”

“Wait,” said Ricky. “Anything?”

“‘Anything!’” I said.

Ricky reached out his hand to me. “Join us.”

“He’s a necromancer,” said Arthur, with an aggrieved sigh.

“Correction.” Greg grinned. “He’s our necromancer. We fought through a bunch of skeletons and zombies trying to get here, those could be our skeletons and zombies. He could do necromancy for us.”

“Why would we need anyone to do necromancy?” asked Arthur.

“Are you saying all this in front of him?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Ricky. “Come on, do the thing.”

“I’m not going to beg for however long this takes,” I replied. “He’ll just be looking between you while you talk, I guess.”

“I keep my axe leveled at him,” said Greg. “‘No funny business.’”

“I’ll pick up his book and leaf through it,” said Ricky.

“I don’t get why we’d have a necromancer,” said Arthur. He had his arms folded across his chest. “We were sent to kill him.”

“Because it’s fun?” asked Greg. “Do you really want to just do the right thing all the time? We can do whatever we want. Something new? Like how many times have you ever seen adventurers have a necromancer friend?”

Even at ten, that was what got Arthur’s attention. “Joon, can I make some changes to my character?” he asked.

“What kind of changes?” I asked.

“Just background stuff,” said Arthur. “And my alignment. I can’t be lawful good if this is what we’re going to do.”

“Uh, sure,” I said. I looked between the three of them. We’d lost our fourth, Nate, two weeks prior, and I was really worried that D&D, the highlight of my week, was going to come to an end.

“We’re going to have to tell the duke something,” said Ricky with a frown. “Joon, were we supposed to bring back his head or what?”

“Yeah, his head,” I said, trying to think. “But as you say that, the necromancer, who is still on his knees, says that if you need heads, he has plenty of them, and if he has some time he can make one of the zombie heads look enough like his own.”

“Nice,” said Ricky.

“So what’s he going to need to work for us?” asked Greg.

“He --” I stopped, then started again. “He really just wants to work. The bodies that he’s been working with were mostly ones he dug up from graves, but I guess he’d work a lot better with fresh corpses.”

“I don’t really want to kill innocent people,” said Arthur, stopping in the middle of whatever he was writing.

“‘Innocent?’” I asked, trying to find the character voice again and failing. “‘No, there are bandits, the duke has a price out on their heads just like me, all you would have to do is bring the bodies here and I could work on them.’” I stopped, thinking that was it, then added, “‘And with fresh bodies, there’s so much more that I can do.’”

And somehow, the game came alive again. It took me a long time to try to figure out what had been going wrong, where I’d started to lose people, and eventually -- years later, after I’d already internalized the lesson -- I concluded that it was the element of buy-in and choice, and in following the path of fun. The party started doing things for the necromancer, stealing equipment, killing his rivals, bringing him bodies, and this was somehow better than taking very similar orders from the king. The novelty was part of it, but it was also the fact that I’d been willing to let them take the lead.

◆◆◆

“Mary thinks that we’re the most important people in the world,” said Fenn.

“Oh?” I asked. “That … might be true.”

“We were talking about morality,” said Fenn. “My lessons on it, as such.”

“I have a bunch of books I could give you now,” I said. “A backpack full of them, in fact.”

“She was trying to talk me into stealing,” said Fenn. “She’s really a bad influence, you know that? I shudder to think how Valencia will turn out, with Mary as a mother-figure. And poor Solace too!”

“What did she want you to steal?” I asked, frowning. This was the first I’d heard of it.

“Nothing in particular,” said Fenn. “I think she just said that it was convenient that I took things, and helped us as a group in a lot of ways.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. I finished off the last of my food, and used the hot water for its apparently intended purpose of cleaning my fingers.

“She was saying, basically, that since we’re the most important people in the world, it’s all for the greater good,” said Fenn. “Like, if it’s a choice between the end of the world and stealing some plastic explosives, then you should pick stealing the plastic explosives, right?”

“Right,” I said slowly.

“So, basically, the livelihood of pretty much anyone that I could possibly steal from pales in comparison to the importance of getting you strong enough to grow past the powers of the gods,” said Fenn. “However that’s going to happen. And since we don’t know what the future is like, only that you’re important, we should do whatever we think will increase the chances of success.”

“Huh,” I said. “I think I came to the opposite conclusion using the same method.”

Fenn frowned. “Explain to me how that makes sense at all.”

“We’re not perfect beings,” I said.

“Speak for yourself.” Fenn smiled.

“We’re not, and trying to chart out an optimal path that perfectly maximizes the expected amount of good that we do is going to go wrong if we pretend that we’re perfect,” I said. “In a hypothetical optimal path to godhood -- uber-godhood -- we wouldn’t even be eating in the dining car, or talking to each other, we’d be staying in our room and probably reading through books, maybe trying to get my Engineering up. We probably wouldn’t have had sex.”

Fenn frowned. “It seems like you’ve got to have some allowance for doing things that aren’t boring or altruistic.”

“Right.” I nodded. “That’s got to be built into the path you’re plotting for yourself, because if you just say, okay, I’m going to spend eight hours sleeping and sixteen hours working, you’re going to tank productivity, because there are all these systems involved in keeping ‘you’ operating, and a lot of them are mental systems, so if you press too hard, you’ll end up just not accomplishing the thing that you wanted to.” I paused. “But Mary doesn’t feel the same way?”

“I don’t think we’ve talked about it yet,” said Fenn. She was giving me a fond look. “Why didn’t I want to talk about this sort of thing with you again?”

“Because I’m kind of shit at it?” I asked. I laughed a little as I said it, but she didn’t seem to find it funny. “Back on Earth I was kind of a bag of dicks, and on Aerb my track record isn’t so great, even if we make some allowances for circumstances or personal imperfections. But more seriously, you didn’t want to talk about this kind of thing with me because you said, ah, that there were limits to how much a single person can be to you.”

“Not can,” said Fenn. “Should. As much as I feel a small spark of fondness for you --” I flicked her hand, which was resting on the table, and she grinned at me. “I don’t want to be a plant that you grew from a seed, resting all its weight against your trellis. Not just for fear of what would happen if you were ever gone, though obviously that’s a part of it.”

“Ah.” I looked down at the empty bowls in front of me.

“That wasn’t about you and Arthur,” said Fenn. She looked nervous, which was uncharacteristic for her. Usually it was easy to tell she was nervous because she would hide things with a joke.

“Yeah,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to block out the rush of thoughts.

◆◆◆

“What if it were him or me?” I imagined Fenn asking.

“He was my best friend,” I might start to say, but she would cut me off.

“You told me that I was your best friend,” she’d interject.

“You are,” I’d say. “But his life was cut so short --”

“When he became the Lost King, he was fifty-five,” she’d object. “And in his time on Aerb he lived more than most people do in a hundred lifetimes.”

“I didn’t say that I would choose him,” I’d say, and then I might start to cry, because I wasn’t sure that I would choose him, and what did that say about me? What kind of a shitty, horrible friend would I be if I said ‘oh, no, I think I’m going to go with the girl that I’ve known for a month’? Even if I loved her.

And I wanted to say that it was unfair of her to even ask me, but it was all in my head.

◆◆◆

“How about light and airy?” Fenn asked instead. “If you were going to get a familiar, what kind would you want?”

“Something self-sufficient,” I answered. “Some kind of creature that could look after its own food, drink its own water, find its own place to sleep, and in general want me but not need me. A cat, maybe, but I would feel a little silly if I didn’t get some exotic variety.”

“I think I’d get a bird,” said Fenn. “I’ve always liked birds. Say, if this whole Solace thing pans out, maybe we can go flying again! And we could resurrect our Arches campaign, plus Val. Kind of ruins the division of suits thing though, since we’d have to double up somewhere.”

“You really want to play again?” I asked.

“Adnarim has a whole character arc left,” said Fenn. “Especially with her twin sister dead.”

“Okay,” I said. “It was really hard to tell how much people were actually having fun, and how much you were all humoring me.”

“Grak loved it,” said Fenn. “I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on it. Well, not surprised, exactly, but it seemed really obvious to me.”

“He seemed to like some of the character stuff,” I said. “Specifically his character. I don’t know, he’s hard to read.”

“I’ll give you that,” said Fenn. “But I know that he’d be up for it, and I know that I’m up for it, and Mary desperately needs to spend about a year unwinding. Actually now that I think about it, Solace is probably going to be a baby, or a toddler or something, which might make playing hard.”

“It depends on how much time is stored up in the time chamber,” I said. “In theory, there will be a lot, which means that we could possibly get her up to her teens. Old enough that she might be able to pass as an adult.”

“I’ll tell you this,” said Fenn. “I am not changing or washing dirty diapers.”

“Washing?” I asked, just before it clicked. “Ah, cloth diapers. On Earth we use disposable ones. I mean, in my part of the world we do. Did.”

“Elves just hold their young over the toilet,” said Fenn. “But elves only poop like once a week anyway, and the babies come out the size of my palm.” She held up her hand to demonstrate, and stared at it for a moment, frowning slightly. “Half a pound, at most, not like the monsters that come out of human women.” She shook her head. “I’m really hoping that’s not a decision that Mary ends up regretting.”

“I think she’ll do fine,” I said. “We’ve got the best healing that money can buy, and it’s not like Solace is going to be a real baby anyway.”

“Do you know that because of magic, or are you just hoping?” asked Fenn.

“We have the time chamber anyway,” I replied. “Even if she does end up being an actual baby.”

“Yeah, but you’ve still got to be in it,” said Fenn. She paused. “We’re not pre-emptively talking about abandoning Mary in the time chamber, are we?”

Before I could share my thoughts on that, the train car’s door opened, and one of the tuung -- the one that had left earlier, I thought -- came walking over to me. He strode on long, powerful legs, stepping so that the heel of his foot didn’t touch the ground. His pants were skin-tight and rather damp, and his shoes had individual parts for each of his three toes, acting more like a glove than a shoe. There was something of a tree-frog about the tuung, though they weren’t Animalia, and among my cultural notes on Aerb was the reminder that very few of the mortal species liked being confused with the Animalia.

“Emomain has invitation for you,” he said, laying a letter with a wax seal on the table. He retreated back toward his companions without waiting for a response.

I looked to Fenn, shrugged, then picked up the letter.

Dear Sir and Madam,

I am Princess Emomain, fifth daughter of Esunouninuol, current monarch of the Boundless Pit. I am aboard the Lion’s Tail on my return trip to the Boundless Pit, following ten years of intensive study at the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh, where I specialized in medical procedures which are either necessary due to ethical concerns about the use of magics, or due to the impossibility of using magic for whatever reason.

When I return to my ancestral home, I am likely to be sorely lacking in the multicultural companionship that I had grown accustomed to in Cranberry Bay, and during the two days of travel it will take to get to Headwater and the Boundless Pit, I’ve decided that I shall have one last hurrah. To that end, I have been inviting interesting people to come visit my car, where I am traveling in style with plenty in the way of refreshments which continue the multicultural theme.

Would you be interested in joining me? All of my guards and servants have been directed to usher suitable passengers toward my private car.

Yours, Emomain

I handed the letter over to Fenn, and let her read it while I collected my thoughts.

“Quest?” she asked, when she’d finished. She was keeping her voice low; the tuung had been talking among themselves at the next table, but they’d apparently been eavesdropping, at least enough that they’d heard us talking to the man whose familiar I’d inspected.

“No quest,” I said.

“Huh,” said Fenn. She looked down at her empty plate. “I could do with a dessert though.”

“Fenn, we ah.” I looked over at the tuung and tried to determine whether they were listening in. Had they heard the whole conversation about us not actually having attended the athenaeum? I’d had them in my eyeline, but hadn’t been paying them much attention. “I’m worried that it will expose us.”

“Again, so?” asked Fenn.

“We’re talking about royalty of the place that we’re visiting really soon,” I said.

“Point taken,” Fenn said with a frown. “But she must have sent out plenty of these invitations, and we can just change our story, right?” She was still keeping her voice low. I needed to get some translation tattoos for the both of us so we could speak in a mutual language that was unintelligible to others. That was a thing on Aerb, but it was pricey, especially since it meant getting them done custom rather than off-the-shelf translation tattoos that would let you speak one of the standard languages.

“Are you asking what I would do if all the other junk wasn’t a factor?” I asked. “Or what I want to do, given that it is?”

“On the face of it, a tuung princess, even a middling one, would be a good ally,” said Fenn. “Note: ally, not companion, which might be more problematic for us. The place we’re going is three miles down the Boundless Pit, and I’d been under the impression that would mean a little bit of archery, but if we can avoid that, all the better. I’d rather not kill people if they’re just defending their sovereignty.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. It’s a potential diplomatic door we can open.” Except I would be surprised if it were that simple. “Mary and Val are on the way.”

Fenn rolled her eyes. “I love her, but I’m worried that she’s going to talk us to death about it.”

Chapter 10 - The Party Line

Amaryllis answered the door holding a book in one hand, and gestured for us to come into their room without letting go of it. It was smaller than the one Fenn and I had, built narrow so that more rooms could be fit on the car, and when all four of us were in it, it was barely big enough to keep us from an uncomfortable amount of body contact.

“Hi Joon,” said Valencia, looking up from her book. She was already a fair way through Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

“I can make all this,” said Amaryllis, gesturing with the book she was holding. On the page I could see something that looked like a microchip. “Aerb has been so slow compared to Earth, I don’t understand it.”

“I can venture something like thirty different guesses,” I said. “Enforcing medieval stasis was a hobby of mine.”

“But I can make all of it,” said Amaryllis. “Integrated circuits, magnetic storage, television -- on Earth it was thirty years between radio and television, did you know that?”

“Sounds about right. I’m not really all that familiar with Aerb’s development timeline,” I began.

“Radio came just a little bit after the Second Empire,” said Amaryllis. “One hundred and thirty years and we never made the leap.”

“That’s … I don’t think we have the time right now to get into the medieval stasis trope, and how it’s been working out on Aerb,” I said. “My guess is development traps, perverse incentives, lackluster incentives, active suppression, lack of resources, lack of intellectual capital, competition of alternatives … I actually legitimately think that I could get to thirty, and then guess how or whether they apply. But not now, because we have an invitation to visit with the tuung princess.”

“How?” asked Amaryllis. “Why?”

“Can I come?” asked Valencia.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Amaryllis, turning towards her.

Eagerness turned to distress in a single moment; Valencia looked like she was about to cry. “Well why don’t you just lock me up in a cupboard under the stairs!” she yelled. She turned away from us and returned to her book, gripping the pages hard.

Amaryllis gave her a bewildered look, then turned to me.

“Harry Potter is locked in a cupboard under the stairs by his evil step-parents,” I explained.

“Because he’s different,” said Valencia, not looking up from her book, which she seemed like she was trying to stare a hole into.

“I never read the Harold Plotter series,” said Amaryllis. The words came out slowly. She looked over to Valencia and reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder. “Val, you being different is, on a pure utility level, really, really good for us. Even if I didn’t like you at all, which I do, I would consider you to be a valuable asset. The problem is that there are risks in having you out, so long as you’re still learning how to be you. Your difference comes with costs. You’re going to have to learn how to hide it, so you aren't recognized.”

“Like how Harry was recognized by his scar,” said Valencia.

Amaryllis looked to me, and I nodded. “Sure,” she replied.

“This party seems like a good time to practice,” said Fenn with a happy smile.

“Fenn,” began Amaryllis.

“Mary,” Fenn replied. “It’s low stakes, lots of people to let us blend in, she can always call on a devil if she really needs to spin some lie, and if things go wrong, well, the plan was that we’d make an illegal descent into the Boundless Pit anyway, right? What’s the worst-case scenario here?”

“We get kicked off the train, which costs us an extra day or two, which means that we get Solace back late, just after the locus has drawn its last breath,” said Amaryllis. “Though that’s not actually the worst case, the worst case is that we all wind up dead, getting kicked off the train is just the most likely of the bad cases.”

“The invitation was for Fenn and I,” I replied. “I’m not sure how closely they’ll be checking, or how much they’ll care, but I don’t know for certain that they would let us have a plus one.”

Amaryllis demanded a fuller debriefing than that, which I gave her. She cringed at the idea that we’d left our cabin to get some food, especially since we could just grab food from the backpack, and cringed again when Fenn had revealed me for a bone mage.

“Is this why you don’t split the party?” she asked.

“Part of it,” I replied.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis. “I’m in mild agreement that at least some of us should go, despite the obvious risks.” She took a breath. “Better to have it be me and Juniper --”

“No,” said Fenn. She took out the invitation and handed it to Amaryllis. “She uses the word ‘multicultural’ twice. I think half the reason we got an invitation is that I’m a half-elf. Maybe more than half the reason. If you were her, and you thought that your days were going to be spent at court, surrounded by other tuung, and you wanted to have all the variety and mishmash of different stuff that a place like Cranberry Bay had to offer, you wouldn’t want to stack that party with, no offense, boring old humans.”

Amaryllis frowned. “Point taken,” she said. “If it’s just you and Joon though, I worry that you won’t be as adept at gaining her aid. We can see from our souls that I have better social skills, and I’m a princess, like her --”

“So am I,” said Fenn. She seemed almost giddy about being able to throw that back in Amaryllis’ face.

“I’ll go with,” said Valencia. She seemed to have calmed down somewhat. “Mary, you said that I was almost better than you, with a devil inside me, but you were lying, because you thought that I was better. I can pretend that I’m Joon’s sister.”

Amaryllis looked between the three of us. I think she was hoping that I would be the voice of reason, but I wasn’t really on her side on this one. The conversation with Fenn had stirred something loose in me; trying to keep Val bottled up was a recipe for disaster, because if we kept her from speaking with people and coming with us, eventually she would snap in one way or another. She’d been teased with freedom, and it hadn’t actually happened yet. Instead, we’d kept her under lock and key, away from the wide world, seeing things only through conversations with the same small group of four people and constrained to prepared safehouses that were barred to the outside. (In fact, maybe this was her snapping, finally pushing back after one too many times of being told that she wasn’t allowed to do something that she should, by right, be capable of. Or maybe it was that the only work of fiction she’d ever read was the first half of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone .)

“Okay,” said Amaryllis.

“Really?” asked Valencia, brightening up considerably.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “I’m not even going to insist on coming with, in part because I think Fenn is right.”

“She’s gone mad,” said Fenn.

“I don’t think that I would make things better,” said Amaryllis. “Dropping down into unfamiliar situations has never been my forte, and if I’m looking at my list of failures, that’s where all of them start. I'm nobility, but not of the same type, and can't reveal that on pain of severe consequences. So”—she looked over at the books—“I predict that this goes badly. My read, from the invitation, is that the princess is the kind of vapid, overly indulged nobility that I hate, and on the surface, there’s no reason for this party to be anything but boring. It’s possible that it will turn out well for the three of you. On the face of it, there’s at least no reason to suspect that you’ll be attacked and thrown from the train.” She fidgeted slightly, resting a hand on her book. “I’m going to get into full armor, double-check that I’m ready for the most likely of the worst outcomes, and then spend my time trying to plot out the next scientific and technological revolution.”

“Ah, well that makes sense,” said Fenn. “The only reason that our princess would miss a party is if there was something more important to work on.”

“Are you sure?” I asked Amaryllis.

“No,” she replied. “But I think my compulsion to go with is at least partially grounded in the need to exert control, rather than the actual utility I can provide, and in the interests of not doing things simply for the sake of doing them, I would rather stay here.” She touched the book like it was her lover.

“And try to single-handedly map out the entire future of science and technology on Aerb, in accordance with what’s written in a handful of books from Earth,” I replied.

“Leave the backpack and the clonal kit with me,” said Amaryllis. “I’m hoping to get a better picture of what things are like on Earth by dipping into multiple sources, and there are some things I want to try.”

“Okay,” I said. “And you’ll be available as armed and armored backup in the event that things go really wrong?”

“Naturally,” she said.

“And I can go?” asked Valencia.

“I’m not actually in charge of you,” said Amaryllis. “All I could do would be to argue against it, and I don’t think that I have the grounds to do that. The most successful non-anima the world ever knew would be more than capable of attending a minor party with virtually no social expectations, especially one predicated on the idea that it was a blending of cultures and unfamiliar people.” She leaned forward and gave Valencia a kiss on the forehead. “I trust you to do your best.”

◆◆◆

“See, talked to death,” said Fenn as we made our way down the train cars. “The party is probably already over.”

“The invitation didn’t actually give a time, which I thought was a little weird,” I said. “I hope after all that we’re not turned away at the door.”

“It’s an adventure!” said Valencia. “Like when Harry and Ron and Hermione killed the troll, and they were best friends after.”

“We’re going to have to have a talk about fiction and reality,” I said, then I let out a little laugh, because Aerb was cobbled together from a hundred different tabletop campaigns.

“We should get our stories straight,” said Fenn. “Juniper, you’re a scholar studying the dream-skewered, of late having taken a trip to the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh in order to speak with some medical experts, a trip which proved fruitless. I’m your loving wife, Valencia is your little sister, we’re with you because we thought it would be fun to take the trip, and because like many idle scholars, you had a surplus of money.”

“Amaryllis can be my governess,” said Valencia.

“Sure,” said Fenn. “That works. But the key to any successful story is that you don’t lay out the whole thing at once, you let it have bits and pieces that show at the edges, okay? Strings for people to tug on, not a tapestry that you present them with.”

“But we’re going to ask for this woman’s aid?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” said Fenn with a shrug. We passed between two of the train cars, momentarily silenced by the rumble of the train and the wind that passed us by. “Given our circumstances, I don’t think she’d hold the lie against us too much, and you can demonstrate mastery of a handful of magics at will to prove whatever crazy story is the ‘truth’.”

How many people had I told the truth to so far? Amaryllis, Fenn, Grak, Solace, and Valencia? Fallatehr had known, because he’d had Grak and Amaryllis to tell him. Aumann might have known something, because Amaryllis was presumably tortured under revision magic and I wouldn’t have blamed her for breaking. My policy had been to let the companions in on it, on the theory that it directly affected their lives and was information that they needed to know, but it wasn’t a secret that could keep forever, especially not if we wanted to become a part of polite society, and eventually too many people being in the know meant that the secret would be free, out into the world. I wasn’t sure whether it would make our lives harder or easier, but harder seemed more likely.

When we got to the first of the three tuung cars, two guards stopped us at the semi-enclosed gangway between cars. They had a mister tank that it seemed like they were sharing, and conquistador-style breastplate that formed a wedge at the center. Though they weren’t obviously armed, it was fairly common for the tuung to be able to summon a weapon at a moment’s notice, one of the things that made them formidable in a fight. (I wanted a summonable blade for my own, but they were a well-guarded secret of the tuung, one that had survived as a secret for centuries.)

“We have an invitation,” said Fenn, holding the envelope out. One of the guards took it without so much as inspecting it, and opened the door for us.

The train car before us was completely open, with no interior walls. I didn’t know whether this train car had been custom-built for this particular journey -- I really doubted it, given that it was only a two-day journey -- but it was obviously built for this sort of function, rich people milling about, eating tiny food off of tiny plates, sitting on a few scattered chaise lounges or armchairs that were bolted to the floor. I could see guards too, tuung with the same armor that the ones that had let us in wore. Along one side was a buffet filled with all manner of roasted, fried, and bubbling things, and in the corner, an unfamiliar upright stringed instrument was being plucked by a woman with four slender arms.

As I looked around the room, I revised ‘rich people milling about’ down to just ‘people milling about’. Fashion was not my forte, but this wasn’t even what I’d come to think of as ‘Aerb-standard’ fashion, that being the cultural mélange of the Empire of Common Cause, which was only a few steps to the left of what you’d have found on Earth. It was a dozen people from a dozen cultures, some of them certainly dressed in clothes that had been produced by a forge-frenzy and thus not hewing to any cultural standards at all. A woman with a long neck bent in a U-shape to keep her head from touching the ceiling wore a cerulean dress that fluttered out as it draped to the floor, obscuring almost all of her but her lanky arms, elongated neck, and head. A green-skinned woman had a shell on her back, embellished with miniscule gardens and inch-tall trees that gave the impression of a living place, a world in miniature (and I could vaguely recall seeing something like it before, but couldn’t quite place where). Two dwarves were talking to each other on one of the chaise lounges, both in completely different styles, one in a suit that moved like grass, a ghillie suit completely unsuited to the occasion, and his hair dyed green to match, the other with a beard dyed grey and an axe that showed flowing hair -- Grak?

He caught my eye for long enough to let me know that he’d seen me, then continued on with his conversation as though nothing was out of the ordinary. Fenn slipped her arm in mine and I realized that I was staring; I came out of it just in time for two of the tuung to approach us, one of them dressed in simple, shapeless white clothes, with a mister on her back, the other in damp, pink frills.

“Oh, more guests!” she cried, holding a hand out to Fenn, which Fenn took with a smile. “Welcome to this little soiree, my best imitation of the imperial aesthetic that my funds were able to provide. I apologize for the impropriety of sending an invitation without so much as knowing your names, but this is how friends are made in the urban centers of the world, is it not, hrm? A little boldness that must be excused?”

Fenn nodded along as the tuung talked. This was my first extended period with a tuung up close, and, with fascination, I watched her mouth, her long tongue that seemed to spring and bound around her wide mouth, the way she had internal ridges rather than teeth, and her comparatively enormous eyes that were set so far apart that focusing on almost anything close by made her look cross-eyed.

“We were delighted to have the opportunity to do something other than stay cloistered in our rooms,” said Fenn. “I love to travel by train, but finding company can be a bit difficult, especially the better class of company.”

“Too right!” shrieked the princess. “But you must forgive my manners, I am Princess Emomain, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. This is my handmaiden, Esuen.”

“Tantia Shoemacher,” said Fenn, placing a hand to her own chest. “My husband, Ernst Shoemacher, and his sister, Gloria. We’re for the Boundless Pit, just as you are. My husband fancies himself a wandering scholar.”

“I am a scholar,” I replied with a frown. I assumed that this was the role Fenn intended me to play, a fussy scholar defending his interest or obsession with some bit of minutia. “Have you heard of a phenomenon called the dream skewer?”

Princess Emomain shook her head. “Were you studying at Bone and Flesh?” she asked. “As I said in my invitation, I’ve just recently finished my studies there, receiving a first-order diploma for my efforts, with a focus mainly in non-magical healing, that is to say, healing that relies wholly on the natural rather than the unnatural, which is of course a concern to my people, given the unfolding political situation in the Boundless Pit, of which you are no doubt aware.”

“I wasn’t,” I replied. Surprised and pleased at how quickly she’d deflected from my question about the dream-skewer. “Between different factions of the tuung, or between Headwater and the Boundless Pit?”

“Well, you are aware of the driving philosophy of the tuung, are you not?” asked Emomain. Her handmaid touched her elbow, and Emomain shrugged it off. “If you are a scholar, then you are coming to the Pit for some purpose?”

“To speak with and learn from the tuung,” I said. “I usually find it better to approach cultures somewhat unawares, so that my view of them isn’t so tainted by the interpretations of those outside the culture, which I’m sure you know are often wrong.” I was about to go on, but Emomain seemed to interpret me taking two sentences for myself as the start of a power struggle for control of the conversation. Fenn patted me lightly on the arm and took her leave, making a beeline for the food.

“Oh, there are some dreadful misconceptions about us,” said Emomain. There was something terribly affected about her speech, as though her way of speaking had been built as a caricature of high-society Anglish. “The men outnumber the women a hundred to one, you know, so of course there’s this ridiculous idea that they’re like human men, thrust into competition with each other, fighting over the women, squabbling for a mate, all of these very messy traditions that are so common to the other mortal species. But we’re not like that at all, the male tuung don’t have any such instincts, not toward mating, nor toward fatherhood -- not that any such concept exists within tuung culture. It's not until we will our scent on them that they awaken to anything approaching romance as you would understand it. Of course much of the blame falls to Blackstone, who wrote the supposedly authoritative book on our species, and Syfriend with his Book of Blood made no effort to correct matters, though he had a much better picture than you’d think he had, from reading his book. And there have been no end to the plays and books that purport to take place among the tuung, given the element of the forbidden, but none of them have so much of a shred of accuracy to them.”

“And the politics?” I asked. During that monologue, Valencia had left too; she was sitting beside Grak and the other dwarf, her slender form taking up only a fraction of the chaise. “The most I know is that there’s something called ‘the supremacy of existence’, but given what you’ve said, I might have been misinformed.”

“Oh, well that’s true enough,” said Emomain, “But of course much more nuanced than you’d expect to read from the papers, when it shows up at all. So many years spent in Cranberry Bay, and I looked to the papers all the time, you understand, because I wasn’t simply a student but an ambassador for my people, and given I was one of the few well-known tuung I expected to be asked for comment, even put out my name to the papers of Cranberry Bay in case they had questions, but I was only asked two or three times over the course of my time at the athenaeum, and then I think it was more a matter of the novelty rather than due diligence. I must say that my opinion of the mass media has lowered considerably.”

She hadn’t answered my question about politics at all. I was, at this point, looking for an out, some way that I could disengage from conversation without being rude, but though my two floating points were firmly in SOC, I still couldn’t figure out the best way out. Luckily, Fenn came walking back over, holding two sticks with white cubes on them (they looked more like tofu than anything else, though up close they had some texture to them).

“These are delicious,” said Fenn, handing one to me. “Having a good chat?”

“The best,” said Emomain. “I was just relating my experiences with the newspapers to Ernst, I was saying that the tuung rarely showed up in the news, despite all I was hearing about from back home, and though I’d extended my expertise to the papers, they showed little interest in hearing what I had to say on the matter.”

I was, at this point, really, really hoping that she wasn’t a companion, or anyone that we’d have to spend an extended period of time with. Hearing the same thing twice was a personal pet peeve of mine.

“Do you happen to know what this is?” asked Fenn, gesturing with her skewer of meat. “Some sort of meat, I’m assuming, but I don’t know that I’ve tried it before. It’s exceptional.” I’d taken a bite, and while it wasn’t bad, I wouldn’t have called it exceptional. It was creamy and came apart with little resistance, but it was still clearly meat of some kind.

“Oh, when I saw you come in I had meant to show you that,” said Emomain, “It’s a delicacy, extremely rare for any to be on the market, but I was out shopping in preparation for this party and the exotic meats merchant happened to have heard of a large quantity recently brought in, and was able to procure some for me.” She leaned in close, eyes bright. “It’s unicorn meat.”

Fenn paused in her chewing, then started to laugh with her mouth full. Princess Emomain looked between the two of us with an uneasy smile.

“A private joke,” I said, apologizing. “We recently acquired a unicorn bone, almost certainly from the same creature.”

“The meat was sterilized through the use of bulk transport?” asked a tall, robed man who had moved into the conversation circle. I was fairly sure that he was the first orc I’d ever seen, skin brownish-green with tusks that stuck up slightly from his mouth. The orcs had been allied with the Dark King, back during the time of Uther Penndraig, and he’d decapitated their matriarchal government shortly before the final showdown with the Dark King himself. They’d never really recovered from that, in part because of sanctions placed on them by Anglecynn, and later, the First Empire.

“Sterilized?” asked Princess Emomain. “I suppose, but --”

“Sterilization is a scourge upon the face of food,” said the orc, gesturing with a full glass of some kind of bluish drink. “So many of the traditional foods of the mortal species are ferments, none of which can survive the bulking process, the food we eat, even the best of it, is so dead that it’s barely worth calling food, no bacteria in it, no life to the meats, and so many foods have been eradicated from the diets of the world by the way in which those foods are moved around. It’s a terrible shame, but of course economics is the driving force of the world.”

“Economics?” asked Emomain. “Well I hardly think that’s the case, why if you look at the history of the world…”

I slipped away, grateful that her attention had been taken up by someone else, and went over to where Grak was sitting with the other dwarf on one side of him and Valencia on the other.

“Ernst!” said Valencia. “This is Grakhuil Leadbraids and Magoron maRohon, Ernst is my older brother, I’m traveling with him and seeing the world.”

“Hello,” I said, extending my hand to first one and then the other. Grak squeezed my hand a little bit too hard, and there was a hint of warning in his eyes. “Are you two traveling together? From the names I would guess different clans?”

(Magoron. Mag? Magor? I had a decent working knowledge of Groglir -- magor meant ‘breathed’, and the suffix -on meant ‘one who’, but I wasn’t sure what the rules were on how to shorten words used in names, if at all. The name Grakhuil meant something like ‘half of a series’, but it was an old name, one that wasn’t quite so literal.)

Magor laughed. “The last names? Ah, well, that’s more a question of politics than anything else. See, ‘maRohon’ would translate to something like --”

“‘Of one who fixed or mended’,” I said. I held up a hand. “I know just enough Groglir to embarrass myself.”

“Oh, not so!” said Magor. “It’s a rare language for a human -- you are human, aren’t you?” I nodded. “At any rate, literalism was in vogue for quite a while, on the theory that the meaning was more important than the sounds, so in Anglish it’s Leadbraid, but in Groglir it’s...” He pointed to me.

“Haimelhaknil,” I asked. “That, or Haiodohaknil,” I said. “I might be missing a word, or mistranslating.”

“The first was correct,” said Magor. He looked over to Grak. “Though going by the beard, I suppose I could see why you’d assume the latter. But of course that’s the whole problem, because translation is an impossibility, it’s not simply one-to-one correspondence. Especially with Groglir, you miss certain nuances. That’s why I use maRohon as a name, more than our difference in clans.”

“Well, you learn something new every day,” I said.

“Sometimes many things,” said Valencia.

Magor laughed. “And there are other differences between us, of course. From what I gather we ended up on this train following distinctly opposite paths, Grakhuil a clan traditionalist who entered into the Third Empire through necessity, though I don’t have the full story there, myself a third-generation  agkrioglian turned neo-traditionalist.” He rested a hand on Grak’s knee, which Grak very carefully made no notice of. “And if you have a working knowledge of dwarven culture, you’d know I’m something of an unfavored bastard to most of our species, and Grakhuil is a prince.”

“There might have been a few things that my teacher left out,” I said as I tried to figure out what the deal between the two of them was. “Safe to say that our host got a bit more multiculturalism than she expected?” Valencia laughed at that, then raised a cup of some sparkling red drink to her mouth and tried to hide her smile, but Magor joined in with the laugh, and eventually Grak did too.

“I’m sorry,” said Magor. “I’ve been talking about myself and my temporary traveling companion far too much, my manners seemed to have fled me. The safe and bland question would be about why you're traveling to Headwater, but I suppose the more interesting question is how you came to know Groglir. Answer whichever you prefer.”

Before I could though, the lights in the room flickered off. The sun had long since set, which left us in only the light of the multicolored stars, and somewhere far overhead, Celestar, but that wasn’t enough to see by, not with our eyes uncalibrated to the darkness. I would have used blood magic to light up the room with fire from my hand, but I was established as a scholar, one with a tiny bit of a background in bone magic, and until I heard someone draw a weapon, I wanted to stay as innocuous as possible.

I felt something touch my chest, but it wasn't hard, and I left the brief contact go unremarked. Of all the people in the train car, how many of them could see in the dark? I was guessing that it was enough so that no one could launch a covert attack in the dark, and this wasn’t all a long setup by the Dungeon Master for a body being discovered in the middle of a locked room.

When the lights went back on, I looked down to see nothing at all on my chest. I glanced at Grak, who stared down at my chest and raised an eyebrow my direction. I gave him a shrug back; I was fairly sure that whatever or whoever had touched my chest, they had done some sort of magic, but I wasn’t incredibly concerned about it, unless this room somehow contained a soul mage more powerful than Fallatehr.

<Don’t look around,> said a voice in my head. <The effect is temporary, no more than an hour. It’s harmless. Send back okay if you understand.>

“You were about to answer the mundane question or the personal, before the lights flickered,” prompted Magor.

“I think I’ll go with the mundane,” I replied. “I’m a scholar, with a specialty in a rare phenomenon called the dream-skewer. If you’ll excuse me for a second, my sister can tell you more, I think something from the buffet disagreed with me.”

<Okay. Who are you?> I asked, looking around the room for Fenn, though I had enough situational awareness to find her. There were eighteen of us, plus two guards and two waitstaff. I could rule out Grak, Val, and Fenn, naturally, but that left a fair number of suspects. The princess was the obvious one, if she was just putting up a really good mask, but I sort of doubted that.

<I need your help,> came the reply. As I walked toward Fenn, I tried my best to make a note of who was talking and who wasn’t. There was no guarantee that whoever was on the other end of the psychic connection experienced it the same way that I did, but I didn’t think I’d be capable of maintaining normal speech and thought speech at the same time. <I said not to look around.>

<I’m inclined to help those who need it,> I replied as I reached Fenn and slipped my arm in hers. She was standing with the shell-backed woman, who had gotten a mirror on a long metal wire out, and was explaining the various features of the elaborate scene on her back to a small crowd of five. <I’d need to know who and how though. And why me.>

<You’re not a scholar,> replied the voice. <You gave a fake name.>

I tried to think about how anyone would know that. The names we’d given to the princess didn’t match the ones that were on the papers forged by Fenn, but as it had been explained to me, there wasn’t really such a thing as a passenger manifest, only tickets that were held and checked … and yet whoever was talking to me knew anyway, either because they had a passenger manifest that wasn’t supposed to exist, or because they had a magical method of divining the truth. Or maybe some subtle detail had given me away. Still, lying about my name didn’t seem like it was going to land me in hot water. Forging papers to get a ticket did seem like it would get me in trouble, but I wasn’t sure that was in question at the moment.

<I give fake names sometimes,> I said. <I’m sure you would understand, if you want to keep your identity secret from someone who’s willing to help you.>

<We will establish a dead drop for communication,> said the voice. <Terms and conditions, your payment for your help, some method of establishing your credentials and abilities. Under the second table on the right in the dining hall, when facing the front of the train. Details will be waiting there for you.>

My eyes were wandering, and again I saw the tuung princess talking while the voice was speaking to me. Her handmaid, however, was silent, and when our eyes briefly locked, she turned away from me. The old Phantom Menace gambit, a handmaid pretending to be a princess.

<Alright,> I replied. <I have four allies on this train, is it alright if I share this with them? Whatever it is you want, we would probably need their help.>

<So long as you stay quiet about it until the time is right,> replied the voice. <That's all for now. Communicate by letter.>

I nodded, as though I was listening along to the shell-backed woman explain how she’d convincingly faked a water feature that ran down the center of her shell, something she had apparently done herself using a variety of tools to do the work around the awkward angle. I didn’t have to feign interest; I’d always loved miniatures and tiny things in general, though I watched a lot more tutorials on YouTube than I spent time actually painting figs or making terrain.

Dead drop, second table on the right. Not a quest.

“I think I might have had my fill here,” I whispered in Fenn’s ear.

“Oh?” she asked back, searching my face for meaning. “I was enjoying myself.”

“I guess there’s no reason that we can’t stay for a bit, but I have other business that’s, ah, time sensitive.” I wasn’t sure how time sensitive, but it would probably need to be wrapped up by the time we got to Headwater, the city that sat above the Boundless Pit.

“Crap,” said Fenn. “Just say the word and I’ll do what you want.” No matter how serious she might have thought the situation was, she couldn’t resist a wink.

“We’ll stay, for now,” I said. “I’ve been enjoying myself, for the most part.” I looked over at where Grak was sitting; the hand on his thigh hadn’t moved. “That dwarf over there seems like he’s got an admirer.” Fenn’s gaze followed my own, and I saw her eyes go wide.

“There’s no way we can leave now,” she said.

◆◆◆

It was late when we finally made our way out of the party car. Fenn had a little bit too much to drink. Valencia had far too much to drink, and was standing mostly through the force of the devil she’d trapped inside her at some point, which didn’t actually make her less inebriated, but made her more able to compensate for that inebriation, which was cause for her to get even more drunk than she would have been. Grak and Magor left far before us, and while we were pretending to be strangers, I thought there was some aspect of sneakery to the way he’d left without calling attention to himself.

“I love you, Fenn,” said Valencia. She was leaning on me for support as we moved through the corridors, with only dim light to guide us.

“I love you too,” replied Fenn with a happy sigh. “Today was a good day.” She turned to me. “You still sober, June bug?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Also, please explain what a June bug is, because there’s no month called June on Aerb.” It almost certainly would have been faster for me to simply carry Valencia, but she hadn’t asked, and I would have felt weird about it. It was bad enough being someone to lean on.

“You have a month named June? Literally a whole month named after you?” asked Fenn. “That’s dumb. Earth is so dumb. Not even McDonald’s is good.”

“McDonald’s is about price point and availability,” I said. We came to one of the doors between cars. “Hold on tight, don’t want you going off over the edge.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Valencia, clutching closer to me. “I liked being your sister today. You’re a better brother than Dudley is.”

I helped her through the gangway, thankful that we were to her car. “I’m going to be happy when you have more than just a third of a book under your belt,” I said. “Given some time, especially if you’re in the time chamber with nothing else to do, you might get enough cultural literacy that you could pass for dream-skewered.”

“Oh, I could do that already,” said Valencia. “I’d just need a big, powerful devil to chomp down on. I can move my tendrils around the hells and try to find one, to line one up, just in case.”

“You’re fucking scary,” said Fenn.

“Can I tell you both a secret?” asked Val. “They’ve started to notice, today I got a devil that knew, he heard a rumor that someone important had vanished, and the devils almost never die, so it was a big important thing, but there’s nothing they can do about it. He thought I was fucking scary too. There were a few seconds, when I was eating him, that I think he maybe realized what was happening, but he couldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s kind of disturbing,” I replied.

“I was their puppet my entire life!” yelled Valencia. She pushed off from me with weak arms and stumbled slightly, then slumped up against the wall.

“I know,” I said. “I’m just saying that whatever it is you’re doing to them on an actual object level, it’s probably terrifying to them, and I think empathy towards even abjectly evil creatures is a good thing, so long as you don’t let it cloud your judgment about who and what they are.”

“I’m going to take a demon now,” said Valencia. She stopped for a second, then straightened up, all signs of drunkenness gone. “Oh,” she said. “Is just slow reflexes. Feedback. No need Joon.” She waved me off.

“Well, we’re here,” I said. I knocked once on the door, and after a moment, it opened up, pouring light into the dim corridor and revealing Amaryllis in full plate. “Val isn’t in a good place right now.”

Amaryllis sighed, and let Valencia in. She moved with catlike grace until she got over to the bed, then collapsed into it without ceremony.

“Just a little drunk,” I said.

“A lot drunk,” said Fenn. She was leaning up against the door to the cabin. “I tried to cut her off, but she’s a wily little girl when she wants to be.”

“It was a productive party?” asked Amaryllis. “I didn’t hear any banging from the front cars or see any smoke coming by my window. I’ll say that wearing full plate for several hours while reading and trying to keep a lookout isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, and I’d expected you back earlier.”

“We got a coded call for help,” I said. “I’m going to pick up the dead drop on our way back.”

“Oh, I totally forgot about that,” said Fenn. She pushed her way past me. “Mary, you are never going to believe it, but Grak has a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend, or whatever you’d call it.”

“Krin,” I said. “And it’s not exactly clear what their relationship is.”

“Joon wishes that I had a cloaca,” said Fenn, in the worst attempt at a confidential whisper I’d ever seen.

“I didn’t say that,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “I said that if you had a cloaca, I would be open to the possibility, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker.” I’d tried my best to feel no shame at that, since it didn’t really seem like all that extreme of a position to take, but if I’d said something like that in high school, I would have been called a weirdo, if not a pervert. I’d meant it as an expression of love toward Fenn, but apparently that wasn’t what she was taking away from it.

She turned to look at me. “But with your mouth?” She turned back to Amaryllis. “I don’t mean to make you jealous, but Juniper --”

“Alright, enough of that,” I said. I glanced over at the books that were strewn everywhere, along with what looked like the circuit boards and half-built electronics. “Fenn, your job is going to be to help put all this stuff away and get things ready so that Mary can get some sleep, while she and I have a talk out in the hallway, okay?”

“Okay,” said Fenn. “Got it. I’m going to take a quick nap instead of doing that.”

Once we were in the hallway, and Amaryllis had looked around, she crossed her arms and looked at me. “Quest, companion, or something else?”

“Something else,” I replied. “Mostly it was just us having a good time. But not too long after we got there, the lights flickered out for a bit, someone pressed something against my chest, and I was connected to someone. She -- probably she -- told me that she needed my help and was setting up a dead drop, which I’m going to stop by on our way back to our cabin. If there’s something that needs doing tonight, then I think I’ll probably have to do it alone, or with your help, because Fenn is too far gone. I guess technically I could transfer over my Liar’s Cup tattoo and have her push the alcohol into Val, but at some point alcohol poisoning is probably going to be a factor, if it isn’t already.”

“It is the princess?” asked Amaryllis.

“Looks that way,” I said. “So you were right on that score. But despite talking to her and agreeing to help, I haven’t had any game text at all.”

“And what do you think she wants?” asked Amaryllis.

“If I had to guess, extraction,” I replied. “She didn’t seem happy to be going back to the Boundless Pit, and from everything that I’ve heard of the place, that’s not terribly surprising.”

“And what does rescuing her get us?” asked Amaryllis.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “The ire of the tuung and an ally with no political capital? It does seem like a kind of crap trade to me. She said that there would be terms and conditions at the dead drop. Maybe there will be something enticing.”

“Maybe,” said Amaryllis, giving me a dubious look. “Entering into the court politics of an unfamiliar court … but if it’s extraction we’re talking about, creating a princess-in-exile, maybe that could be done without revealing ourselves too much. But then I don’t know what the benefit would be.”

“The tuung don’t seem like they have a very healthy society,” I replied.

Amaryllis made a face. “The supremacy of existence.”

“No,” I said. “Not that, that I understand, and to some extent sympathize with.”

“If you die, you want to be sent to the hells?” asked Amaryllis with a raised eyebrow.

“I -- yes,” I said.

“Gods, why?” asked Amaryllis, backing away slightly.

“I’m more afraid of oblivion than death,” I said. “I think enduring pain and suffering is, ultimately, the correct path no matter what that pain and suffering might be, so long as there’s even the smallest glimmer of hope that things will get better.”

“Oh, you’re hoping that we would do the impossible and save you,” said Amaryllis, seeming relieved.

“No,” I said. “I would be hoping for … I don’t know, something outside what I know to be possible. And I would probably change my mind after a few hours and wish that I had made the other choice, but part of the reason to make decisions ahead of time when you’re not under duress is so you can make those decisions when your brain is functioning properly.”

“I’m --” Amaryllis was staring at me. “I’m not going to promise that I’ll respect your wishes.”

I shrugged. “I’m not a fanatic,” I replied. “I don’t expect my wishes to have much weight after I’m gone. You’d probably keep my soul around in a bottle for a while, trying to figure out how to get me back, which is what I’d want, but if you didn’t figure out a way to get the rebirth ritual to apply to me, and nothing else worked … you’d be left with a choice, and remember this conversation, and maybe you’d do the thing I wanted, rather than what you thought was right.”

“Have you talked about this with anyone else?” asked Amaryllis.

“No,” I replied. “But I might, if it comes up. I know it’s not what your culture has settled on as correct, and I don’t want to get into a big philosophical argument about it either, so … I trust you to keep a level head.”

Amaryllis said nothing for a bit, then opened the door to the room just a crack so she could see inside. “Val and Fenn are both asleep, can we go pick up that dead drop together? Neither is going to be reliable in a fight anyway.”

“Sure,” I said.

Amaryllis locked the door to the room and we went down the train together, with me leading the way. Her full plate armor would be noteworthy, if not outright illegal, but it was night, and almost everyone had already gone to sleep.

“I was saying that the political situation doesn’t seem healthy to me,” I said as we walked, speaking just loud enough to be heard above the noise of the train. “One hundred males to every female, the rule of the many by the few, isolationism, internal conflicts that revolve around their extremist philosophy … I don’t quite have the full picture yet, I don’t think, but in combination with what I learned at the party and read from the books, it seems like the sort of society that a person should, by rights, want to leave, and I don’t want to just say no because it means sticking our necks out a little bit. We’re in a position of power. I’ve become pretty strong. If we can help people, we probably should.”

“One person,” said Amaryllis, shaking her head.

“Sometimes one person needs to lead the charge,” I said.

“Meaning that you want to get imperial attention?” asked Amaryllis.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. It was something that Arthur used to say.”

“Ah, a lone hero leading the charge.” Amaryllis nodded. We passed through a gangway, momentarily silencing our quiet conversation.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t really a game thing, he just meant, you know, that someone needed to be the one to actually do things, and if everyone left it to someone else, then it wouldn’t get done. Someone has to be the one to take up the burden, and it’s almost always better if it gets taken up decisively and with great gusto.” He’d hated when people would ask around about whether there was maybe some interest in possibly doing something.

“Assuming that whatever this princess needs from us is actually worth doing, regardless of whether we’re going to be the ones to do it,” said Amaryllis.

We reached the dining car in silence. Most of the lights were off, with the few left on providing only token light to see the tables by, enough illumination for people making their way up or down the train, but not much more. I was being careful as I moved, worried that the dead drop would turn out to be an ambush. I wished that we had Grak with us to check for traps, especially now that he didn’t need the monocle to do it (though he’d said that he was somewhat useless on the train, given the difficulty and expense of creating a ward that was anchored to the train rather than the earth).

I touched the bottom of the second dining table on the right, burning SPD and preparing for an explosion or something worse, but my fingers only ended up touching a paper envelope. I pulled it away from the adhesive, turned it over a few times, then opened it up, bracing for white powder or some exotic Aerbian contact poison. Instead, it was only a letter, which I read after looking around to make sure that no one was watching.

I do not know who you are, only that you booked a seat on this train at the last minute, and that you gave a false name at the party. So far as the tuung security detail can surmise, the only reason that you and the others might have for being on this train is an interest in the affairs of the tuung, and given that you did not report the contact between the two of us, it’s my fervent hope that you’re unaffiliated with any of the internal factions of the Boundless Pit.

My name is Esuen. I am Emomain’s handmaid, and her second cousin, a minor figure within the politics of the Boundless Pit in my own right. For five years, I studied along Emomain, obtaining my own education at the athenaeum in the hopes of furthering the interests of the tuung. You have certainly heard enough of her frippery that you have formed your own opinions on the princess; know only that we are different people. Where the princess sees the Empire of Common Cause as a decadence and delight, I see it as a lesson in the need for growth on the part of the tuung. I learned enough history to see that those who prosper are those who grow and change. Both growth and change are, I fear, out of the reach of the tuung in their present state.

I wish to leave and make my own life away from the tuung. To that end, I am willing to offer anything possible within my limited power. If your spies don’t already know all of our secrets, I would be willing to spill them. If you need help with making the spirit blades work, I would provide it. I have thirty years of good breeding ahead of me, and with dedicated resources, could produce as many as five hundred thousand young, in whatever ratio of genders you prefer. The catch to all this is that I will act only in the best interests of the tuung. It so happens that what I believe would be the best interests might constitute a betrayal in the eyes of my peers.

I have tipped my hand, at least in part. I need to know more of you, who you represent, what resources are at your disposal, and how much you are willing to spend to have me. I would prefer that Emomain goes unharmed. The male tuung that make up our security detail can be bewitched by my scent, but doing so will have immediate repercussions. If you have a plan, let me know it.

If this dead drop is compromised, place your response beneath the last seat in the observation car. I will expect your reply within twelve hours from the end of the party.

Chapter 11 - The Great Train Robbery

“In the short term, our goal is Kuum Doona,” said Amaryllis, once she’d finished reading the letter. We’d sat down in the dining car, so we’d have a place to talk without the interruptions of moving between cars. No one was in there with us, which meant we could speak in confidence. “In the long term, our goal is gaining power, with the basic principle being that gaining power is the prerequisite for everything else that we might ever want to accomplish. Unfortunately, we don’t have a quest to extract this handmaid from her society.”

“Shouldn’t matter,” I said. “Or at least, according to the Dungeon Master it shouldn’t. I don’t know whether we’re off-script, or whether the script is being hidden from us, but we should be rewarded for doing things, no matter what those things are, so long as we’re doing them for good reason. Encouraged not to stay still, but not penalized for it, outside of the incentives we have with regard to the locus. And in that context … someone being held against their will and trapped by a society they were raised by but no longer agree with seems like something we should do, especially if the risks to us are fairly minimal.”

“I wish we had a way of tracking experience points,” said Amaryllis with a frown. “It would help inform what we did.”

“That’s backwards,” I said. “Or, backwards from what I tended to do as DM. Experience points are to reward you for doing the things that you set out to accomplish, they’re not really meant to give you the incentive to go out and fight things.” I paused. “It’s somewhat a question of the philosophy of DMing.”

“So if we want you to get stronger …” Amaryllis frowned. “We just do whatever we want to? We ignore the game, the narrative, and the Dungeon Master?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “That seemed to be the message that he was delivering to me. Obviously there are pressures, like the locus, and I’m sure others, and there are carrots being dangled in front of us, but that’s not quite the same thing.”

“Then what happened with Arthur?” said Amaryllis. Her ice-blue eyes were watching me carefully, and she said his name with a certain amount of force and deliberation that I found unpleasant. She was trying to push one of my buttons.

“We need to know more about him,” I said. “I’m really hoping that Kuum Doona has some thread to pull on, a hidden journal would be fantastic, but I’m not confident in our ability to understand him based on the historical record, which you said yourself was complicated where he was concerned.”

“And you do want to help this handmaid?” asked Amaryllis.

“From what I know of the tuung, I can see why everyone hates them,” I said. “If this is a chance to create change in their society, I think that’s worth doing, especially if it helps us to get to and secure Kuum Doona at the same time, which it might.” Or maybe I’m thinking of her too much like a defector from North Korea, a refugee that I have to help because doing otherwise would be too callous. I pointed down at the letter, and the list of offers on it. “If she’s willing to give up secrets, then she’s probably willing to give up whatever information she has on the fortress.”

Amaryllis was watching me. “And do you find her attractive?”

“No,” I said. I hoped that her ability to read my face would show that I was telling the truth. “No, no I don’t.”

“You have aesthetic preferences and appetites that are literally woven into how the world was built and how it operates,” said Amaryllis. “It’s a valid question.”

“I guess,” I said. “But the answer is no. The tuung are actively unattractive to my sensibilities. And they’re not one that I remember creating either, though they have features that I recognize, especially the mister tanks and the lopsided genders. Besides, you have to understand that my aesthetic preferences are sometimes in the direction of the grotesque or morbid -- not what I find more attractive, but what I find most whatever-adjective-you-choose. The pustule mages? They’re like something out of a nightmare, but not just a generic nightmare, specifically one of my nightmares.”

“Alright,” said Amaryllis. “I keep having this feeling that once I know you better, the world is going to make a lot more sense.”

“You already know me,” I said. “I mean, we’ve been traveling together for a long time, relatively speaking. We’ve been through some shit, to put it lightly.”

“I know,” said Amaryllis. She shrugged. “It’s something I’m feeling, not thinking.”

“And what are your feelings on extracting this handmaid?” I asked.

“We’re not a state,” said Amaryllis. “We don’t have the authority of a government. Hells, we don’t actually have a place to stick her, aside from the safehouses, and those aren’t sufficiently secure for my liking.”

“Those are thoughts, not feelings,” I said.

Amaryllis sighed and tapped her thumbs on the table. She wasn’t really a person given to fidgeting, as a general rule. She looked tired though, and I was keenly aware of how late it was. “I feel like the books I’ve been pulling from the backpack are my purpose in life. If thirty years of technological advancement on Earth are equal to a hundred years of advancement here, whatever the root causes of that might be, then what we have are three centuries of progress, ready and waiting to be deployed. I’m ninety percent of the way to having a working prototype of a television right now.”

“Really?” I asked. “In a train car? With a box of scraps?”

“Not scraps,” said Amaryllis. “The backpack can’t create electronics, but it can create some electronic components, and what I couldn’t get it to make, I got from the clonal kit in a bigger, bulkier size. But there are problems with different standards, especially because the units that are listed in the books are different from the ones that I’m used to. I’m probably going to have to settle on one or the other, but the clonal kit is finicky in what it decides to give, and sometimes two dips into it will pull out different Aerbian standards. The Empire of Common Cause was supposed to bring everything under a unified standard, but --” She waved a hand. “Enough about that. It’s my own problem, one that I’m hoping to work on during the years I’ll have in the time chamber.”

“Ah,” I said. “I guess I didn’t really think about that.” As soon as I did though, I could see how well the backpack combined with both her expertise and at least nine months with nothing to do but what could be done in a room that was cut off from the outside world. “You’re going to walk out with a baby druid and a plan to change the world?”

“I don’t know,” said Amaryllis. She rubbed her face, and once again, I could see the tiredness written there. “It doesn’t seem like it meshes well with being your companion. If you’re going on one adventure after another, and I’m trying to run an electronics company or a research and development laboratory, where does that leave us?”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s write out a response and get you to bed. You’ve been overworking yourself.”

“I was going to keep working on the television when I got back,” said Amaryllis. “It’s low-hanging fruit. And if it doesn’t work, then it will give me a better idea of what kind of forces I’m dealing with.”

“Case in point,” I sighed. “You know, if this proceeds like a normal pregnancy, you’re probably not going to be able to work yourself to the bone? Also, I should get you some prenatal gummies from the backpack.”

Amaryllis touched her stomach, which was covered in full plate. “I agree that at this point, a miscarriage would be tragic.”

“We should probably consult with the others anyway,” I replied. “If we have twelve hours from the end of the party, that means enough time for everyone to sleep and for us to have a short conference. I’m pretty sure that Grak and Val will both vote to help her though, given that her situation mirrors theirs to at least some extent.”

“Trapped in a society or culture or home that she doesn’t want to be in?” asked Amaryllis. “That could apply to any of us. It’s a common thread of backstory in our group. My notes on the narrative are in Fenn’s glove, but yes, we’re all people without a home.” She seemed mournful when she said it, though it was only in the tone of her voice, not the set of her face, which still seemed more tired than anything else. I was hoping that with Kuum Doona we would finally have something resembling a home, rather than a place we were temporarily crashing for the evening.

I felt the urge to say something about tabletop games, how it was almost a necessity for the character to have lost their home and be without messy connections, because otherwise it created too many questions, but maybe the difference between SOC 2 and SOC 3 was that I realized it was better to hold my tongue. She already had that background, I was pretty sure.

Fatigue hit me by the time we got back to her car, and when Fenn gave no signs of easily waking back up, Amaryllis and I came to an agreement that the four of us would share the beds together, Fenn and I in one, Amaryllis and Val in the other.

◆◆◆

E,

I will help. Tomorrow night, I will come to your window and use an entad to extract you. All that will be required is that you open your window wide enough for a finger to slip partially through, and for you to touch that finger for roughly ten seconds. That will allow me to put you into a black, airless void. It is very important that you not attempt to leave the void, as this might result in your death. You will need to hold your breath; if it’s possible, you can open the window wide enough for me to slip you a breathing mask and a tank of air. I will remove you from the void once I am back away from your car and to safety. For this plan to work, I will need to know the position of the window I should meet you at, as well as a time to meet you, or some other signal of your choosing. If all goes well, no one will know that you are missing until the morning, and I can sequester you in my room until we arrive in Headwater the next day, then move you, unseen, to a secure location in the city.

You should know that I am not a representative of any government or organization. My companions and I possess a fair amount of power, but it is not power on the level of a nation. If your ultimate goal is the reform of tuung society, you will need more help than we can provide, but once we have freed you from the security detail, you will have the opportunity to pursue such ends on your own -- perhaps with our assistance.

There is information that you can provide us in return, but it is not a precondition of our assistance.

I hope for a response before nightfall, delivered to either of the previously established dead drop locations.

J

“Okay,” said Amaryllis, reading through the letter a third time. “I think this looks good.”

She seemed practically chipper, which made her the only one of us. It was early in the morning, just after daybreak, and we were packed into the cabin that nominally belonged to Fenn and I. Fenn was nursing a hangover and intermittently attempting to use blood magic to fix it, and Val looked like death. Amaryllis had collected Grak from his room, and he was uncharacteristically unkempt; he was always a little bit rough around the edges, but it was in something of a studied way that his current condition decidedly wasn’t. I wasn’t too bad off, aside from having been a little light on sleep, but I had never been a morning person.

“Are we sure it’s going to be Joon?” asked Fenn. She popped a glass of water from her glove and took a long drink, before returning it to the glove. “I could do it, if we’re waiting until this evening.”

“I could,” said Val, wincing slightly at the effort of speaking. “With a demon. Even drunk I could.”

“No, you couldn’t,” said Amaryllis. Her voice was gentle. “The glove requires the user to have investiture, by me, and we can’t invest you with items.”

“Oh,” said Val. She curled up in her seat and closed her eyes, then since that apparently wasn’t enough, covered them with her hand. “Let me know if I can help.”

“The bigger question is whether we should do this at all,” said Grak.

“No, the bigger question is who the dwarf you were with was,” said Fenn. “Got the name, didn’t get the full story.”

“It’s not your business,” said Grak, sniffing slightly.

“With respect, you shouldn’t have given your real name,” said Amaryllis.

“I didn’t know where the night was going to take us,” said Grak. “I had not known we would join the party.”

“Wait, did you arrive with him?” asked Fenn. “And leave with him?”

“It’s not our business if Grak doesn’t want to share,” I said. He gave me a nod. “Not that I would mind hearing, naturally, but I’d rather not press him on something personal, which I would hope we’d all understand.”

“I shared accommodations with him,” said Grak. “There are four beds in my room. His is the only other that is occupied. He was talkative. Friendly. I gave him my true name because I did not want to risk naming a clan he knew.” Except that you could have given the name of someone else in your clan. I waited for someone else to call him out on that, but no one did. “We went to the observation car together. One of the tuung gave us an invitation. I agreed because I was lonely. After the party we went back to our room together.”

The silence lingered as we waited for him to continue.

“So did you guys touch butts or what?” asked Fenn.

“Fenn,” I said.

“Juniper,” said Fenn, sticking out her tongue.

“Val,” said Val, briefly uncovering her eyes to look out. Fenn laughed, and Val smiled before covering back up.

“Grak,” Amaryllis began, but Fenn cut her off.

“Mary!” declared Fenn, hangover briefly forgotten as a giddy smile crossed her face.

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” I said.

“Aw,” said Fenn. “But we were having fun.”

“Is touching butts what dwarves do?” asked Val, eyes still covered.

“No,” said Amaryllis.

“We’ll tell you when you’re older,” said Fenn.

“I could eat a devil that would know,” said Val defensively.

“This is all really beside the point,” I said. “If Grak has made a platonic friend, great, good for him. If Grak has a krin, then great, good for him. If it’s just a krinrael, then that’s fine too, and we’ll support him in whatever it is he wants or doesn’t want without prying, because that should be the standard that we all adhere to, both because that’s what friends should do, and to preserve the group’s clearly tenuous grip on sanity.”

Loyalty Increased: Grak lvl 11!

Loyalty Increased: Amaryllis lvl 19!

“We should deliver this letter to one of the dead drops,” said Amaryllis. “And then we should prepare for the extraction as best as we possibly can.”

◆◆◆

And so approximately eighteen hours later, I found myself walking down the train, psyching myself up to briefly exit the train, crawl forward to the left middle window of the frontmost tuung car, extract the handmaid into Sable, and then get to safety before she ran out of air. If at all possible, I would slip her a breathing mask and a tank of air, but her response hadn’t held a reply to that particular line of inquiry, and we weren’t sure whether the windows would be the same as they were on our part of the train, nor whether she would be able to open it that wide without drawing attention to herself. It was a question mark in the plan, one that I really didn’t like, because without the tank, I’d have to get us to safety in the space of a minute, which seemed like a tall order considering that I was also trying to be stealthy.

The gangways -- the spaces between the cars -- were partially open, with chains on either side to make sure that no one would fall, and an additional covering that hinged between the cars to keep out rain.

I stopped in the middle of the gangway, four cars from the heavy engine, and looked out into the night. The train was passing through a part of the Lion’s Mane where there was a fair bit of water on either side of us, and to my left I could see ocean stretching out into the distance, lit by the multi-colored stars that I still wasn’t bored of looking at. A few small towns dotted the coast, visible by what lights they still had on, but it was to all appearances a calm and quiet night, which I decided to take as a good omen.

Not so calm and quiet for me, given that I’d be moving against eighty mile an hour winds. I took a deep breath, then began the climb.

The wind hit me as soon as I climbed up, and I briefly struggled until I could push up and onto the roof. Given that there were tuung guards on the gangway before the train car that had held the party, it was necessary for me to start back a bit and go over, but I wasn’t at all pleased at how long that made the trip.

I kept low to the roof of the train as I moved, hoping that any sounds I was making would be masked by the general whipping of wind and the rumbling of the train. Going across this way was dangerous, but I had come with as much preparation as eighteen hours and a whole heap of magic would allow me. I had a heavy magnet in each hand, powerful neodymium ones from Earth courtesy of the backpack, with handles and padding on them so that I could maintain a good grip and muffle the sound of them as I slid them forward. Ropey was wrapped around me, making two loops that came out from above my shoulders and helped to grip, and two ends that came out from around my waist. I had the Anyblade as a ring, though it was a bit of a last resort; the plan was that if I somehow got tossed back, I would be able to make it into a blade and slam it down into the train to catch myself, hopefully without dislocating my shoulders in the process. In addition to all that, I had my bandoliers on, strapped down tight, and my throwing dagger in a sheath on my belt, with a balaclava pulled down over my face, just in case.

The plan was to accomplish the extraction without so much as a single scratch on the train or a single witness as to what happened.

I was halfway across the backmost tuung car when I saw them behind me. Two tuung in their silver breastplate had climbed up and were crawling forward, their powerful legs and toes made for gripping slick rocks serving them well for moving under the force of the wind. I had tried my hardest to cross the gangway in complete silence, but I must have done a worse job than I thought, or they were more observant than I’d given them credit for, because now the two guards that I had been most worried about were making their way toward me, keeping low to the roof of the train car. One of them had his blade drawn, a silvered length of metal and a handle that was long enough it seemed like it almost qualified as a spear. Where the tip of it was held in front of him, the wind seemed to visibly part, and after he screamed something to the other guard, both their blades were out, allowing them to avoid the worst of the rushing air.

I wanted to explain that I wasn’t going for the princess, only the handmaid, that I didn’t want to kill them, that I was a good person with good intentions. The winds made any conversation impossible, and even if they hadn’t, I was almost certain that this wasn’t the sort of thing that I could talk my way out of. The guards weren’t wholly innocent, but they also weren’t in league with outright villains like the guards we’d encountered (and killed) in Trifles Tower.

I resolved to try to settle things non-violently if I possibly could, just as one of the tuung threw his sword at me. I took the hit to my leg and it drove straight to the bone of my thigh. In an instant it was gone, back in his hand. I burned a few fingerbones to bump END and seal the wound, but not before my pant leg was soaked through with blood. I cursed myself for not wearing armor, having thought that it would interfere too much with being stealthy and agile. When he threw the sword a second time, I released one of my grips, and turned to the side, letting it sail past me. They weren’t stopping to ask me questions -- which would have been impossible in the wind anyway -- they were just going to kill me and figure out who I was later, if they didn’t know who I was already.

The smaller tuung, the one that had pulled his sword out later, threw his own sword, and I twisted to the side again, this time burning SPD from the bones of my arm. My reactions were good enough, and the sword slow enough, that I was able to catch it in mid-air. I hadn’t been sure exactly what that would accomplish, but as it was revealed a moment later, the answer was nothing; the sword vanished from my hand, leaving behind moisture and mist that was driven away in an instant by the rushing wind, and reappeared in the tuung’s hand.

I started moving backward, closing the distance between us. I could heal back from whatever wounds they inflicted, and had enough blood to spare, but eventually I was going to run out of bones to burn for healing, and then I was going to be in trouble. I kept taking the wounds and healing them closed until I was twenty feet away from them. They stopped throwing their swords, perhaps because they misunderstood the nature of my healing, which wouldn’t have presented as bone magic to them, given the fact that I wasn’t holding onto any bones. My pants were in shreds, and the top of the train was slick with my blood, much of which had gotten onto the tuung. The train had already been treacherous before, but now that it was slippery with blood, it was downright deadly. The magnets were the only thing stopping me from slipping, and I could feel that they’d become looser than they were when I started out. If they started sliding, I was going to have to take emergency measures.

I used Ropey to attack, throwing him backward and letting him wrap himself around the wrist of the larger of the tuung. I yanked him off balance and felt the magnet slip beneath me as Newton’s third law bit me. I saw the rope twist unnaturally in the wind to avoid a slicing strike from the tuung, but that was a last gasp of futile action. The tuung had lost his footing in the blood, and whatever sticking ability his exposed toes gave him, it wasn’t enough; he fell, slid backward, and slipped over the side of the train car. I didn’t have a good enough angle to see him get dashed against the ground at eighty miles an hour, and any sound it would have made was swallowed by the winds.

(There was no message saying that he’d been defeated, which gave me hope that I had somehow avoided killing him.)

That left the smaller one, who was looking at me with wide eyes. He threw his sword, and I burned SPD again to catch it, then tossed it to the side and used my elbow to push the single magnet I still had a hold on up from the roof of the train. I slid in the wind and on the slickness of my own blood until I collided with him, then managed to slam the magnet back down and skid to a stop. I was grappling with him before he knew what was happening, and Ropey was helping, loops surrounding arms and those powerful, kicking legs. I fashioned the Anyblade into a collar around his throat, then forked the blade in three and pointed each of them at his face. He stopped struggling after that, and his sword, which he’d been trying to slice at me with while I attempted to pin him, disappeared back to wherever it had been pulled from.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” I screamed around where I thought his ear probably was. He made no response to that. I was holding him with one arm, the other desperately gripping my makeshift handhold, which slipped just a bit every time the train went over less than perfectly laid railing.

Had they raised the alarm? If they had, the mission was fucked, because the handmaid wouldn’t be there waiting for me, she’d be buried behind guards, who would pull her away from the window. But no one had popped their head up, and there were only two guards stationed on the gangway between cars, which gave me hope.

I released the tuung, trusting Ropey to hold him in place and the Anyblade wrapped around his throat and pointed at his face in triplicate to keep him from moving. With my free hand I pulled a flask from Sable, undid the top by holding it awkwardly and using my fingers, then downed the entire flask full of pure grain alcohol in one go, wincing as it burned its way down. Then I was back to touching the tuung, and through the magic of the Liar’s Cup tattoo, transferring the alcohol into him before it could affect me all that much.

When he passed out, the problem became more manageable. I let us slip and slide the rest of the way down the train car until we got to the gangway, then checked that it was clear below. The fact that it was empty meant that the extraction could still go ahead as planned. I lowered the tuung down, very carefully, and let his body hit the gangway. It was closed off enough that I wasn’t worried about him falling to his death, but he’d be a dead giveaway if someone came by. That was better than killing him though.

◆◆◆

“Okay, while Arthur and Tiff are arguing from the bushes, I’m going to sneak off and kill the guards,” said Craig.

“You can’t do that,” said Tiff with a frown.

“Joon?” asked Craig.

“Tiff, you can’t dictate someone else’s actions,” I said. “By the way that Craig has been playing Miaun, it’s entirely in character, and even if it weren’t, I don’t like being character police.”

Tiff frowned at me. “Well okay, then I roll Perception."

“I’m the one that rolls Perception,” I said. I rolled the dice behind my DM screen, red for Arthur, green for Tiff, and blue for Maddie, in case she wanted to be a part of any of this. Low numbers for Tiff and Arthur, high for Maddie. “And Craig, you’re going to have to roll Stealth. I’m assuming from the way you worded it that you did intend to be hidden from the party.”

“With all bonuses, 25,” said Craig after he’d rolled the dice. He was smiling, pleased by the result.

“Okay,” I said, turning to Maddie. “Raven, you’re the only one that sees your brother moving out of his position as he uses the available cover to close in on the guards while the other members of the party engage in a furtive whispered conversation. What do you do?”

Maddie smiled at me. She always liked getting the group’s attention, but never seemed to be willing to take it. I’d often wondered whether she’d be any different without her brother around, but she only showed up when Craig deigned to bring her. That was a question that I’d have to wait years to get the answer to. “Can I cast the ghost sound spell without drawing attention?”

“It’s got a verbal component,” I said. “DC 0 Listen check, plus 1 per 10 feet, and you’re 120 feet away, so DC 12 for them to hear.”

“She’s got Silent Spell,” said Craig.

“Maddie, those guards are people, with lives,” said Tiff.

“You were having an in-character conversation with Titon,” I said. “If it’s a silent spell, you’re not going to be able to hear it, which means that all you would be able to do is see it, and I’ll let you roll Perception against Maddie’s Stealth, but --”

“I’m making an out-of-character argument,” said Tiff. She brushed a strand of hair away from her face, then turned to Maddie. “The margrave’s guards don’t deserve to die, and we should especially not be the ones to kill them.”

“I’d be the one killing them,” said Craig. “She’d just be providing a distraction for me, right, Madds?”

“Think of what Raven would do,” said Tiff.

“You know these aren’t actually people, right?” asked Craig.

“They are to Atticus,” said Tiff, folding her arms across her chest. Chronologically, this would have been way before we were dating, and before I’d really even developed feelings for her. I’d always liked her, and always been able to see what Arthur saw in her, but there was a time when she’d been nothing but an opposite-gendered friend.

“A better argument would be that these men signed up to be guards,” said Arthur. He caught a look from Tiff. “I’m not saying it’s a good argument, but they took a paycheck knowing that they would be defending the margrave with their lives.”

“That’s terrible,” said Tiff. “Those men probably have parents who care about them. They’re probably married with kids. And even if they were orphans with nothing and nobody, I wouldn’t want to kill them.”

“You’re not killing them, I’m killing them,” said Craig. “And Arthur’s right, they signed up for the margrave, they must have known he was a dick, reap what you sow.”

“To clarify, he wasn’t actually a dick, he just didn’t believe you about the horn,” I said. Craig rolled his eyes.

“I don’t think it’s your place to say whether he was a dick or not,” said Arthur. “It’s a question of interpretation, not fact.”

“I can’t say how I intended his character to come out?” I asked. “I’m just -- I don’t want to go down the wrong path here because I screwed up the character. He wasn’t supposed to be a dick, he just didn’t believe you, because you didn’t have any proof.” (That had been the whole point of an earlier plot thread that was now, apparently, dropped. The margrave saying he wouldn’t give up the horn without some proof was supposed to spur the party to find proof. This whole ‘steal the horn’ thing had been spun up from whole cloth, and I was happy that the party was getting in fights, because it meant I had time to prepare something new for them, putting down people and scenery just ahead of their questions.)

Arthur shrugged. “If you screwed up the character, we’ll just go with the screw up, it’s fine, that’s how improv works,” he said. He turned back to Craig. “Titon isn’t going to back you up if this goes badly.”

“Atticus isn’t either,” said Tiff. She seemed annoyed, but there wasn’t really anything I could do about that, other than delivering Craig a harsh comeuppance that I had already decided that the circumstances didn’t warrant.

“Okay,” I said. “Leaving all the OOC stuff aside”—stuff that should be interpretation of characters, not stated outright, if we’re being fair—“Maddie, you were about to cast a silent ghost sound, presumably to create a distraction.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do that.”

“Okay, where?” I asked. “What does it sound like?”

“Like,” she said, gesturing with her hands for a minute as she tried to think. “Like knocking? Like someone is knocking on the door from the other side.”

“Good,” I said. “Miaun, you see the guards turn away from you. Titon, Atticus, you hear the knock, but you don’t see Miaun anywhere around you.”

“I stay silent, watching, with a cold feeling in my gut about what’s about to happen,” said Arthur.

Tiff frowned, keeping her arms crossed.

“Atticus?” I asked. “Any reaction?”

“Assuming that I can connect the dots?” she asked. I nodded. “Then … Atticus stays quiet. If we have the time later, I’m going to track down the families of those men and anonymously give them some money, just to make myself feel less guilty.”

“So I’m finally good to attack?” asked Craig.

“Yeah,” I said. “How do you want to do it?”

“What level are they?” he asked.

I sighed. “You have no idea,” I said. “You know that they’re rank-and-file guards for the margrave, and he’s not likely to have posted his best men around this time of night. They’re a little more alert because of the knocking, but before that they didn’t seem exceptionally well-trained, and both their armor and weapons show wear, not the kind that comes from fighting on a regular basis, but more from being put on and taken off over and over again for years without seeing much action.”

“So, low level,” said Craig with a nod. I shrugged. “I throw a dagger at one, then the other, the ones I’ve got on my hips.” He rolled the dice without waiting for me to say anything. “19 and 23, hit and hit? They should both be sneak attacks.”

“You don’t need to roll damage,” I said. “They both fall, one with a dagger in his throat, the other with a dagger going through his eyes.”

“Fuck,” said Tiff, leaning back.

“Should have stopped me if you cared so much,” said Craig with a shrug.

“I would have, if I did,” said Arthur. “Sometimes a guard is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’m not so far along the law/chaos axis that I was willing to tank the mission. Don’t go murder-happy again though, not without talking about it first.”

◆◆◆

I made my way back down the train again, this time unimpeded. It was easier going after I’d gotten my second magnet back. I stopped at each of the gangways, looking for guards, but whatever mess had happened up on top of the train cars, it didn’t seem like anyone was looking for me. That they had even bothered posting guards in the first gangway was paranoia; posting them at every gangway between cars that they controlled would have been the sort of paranoia that they couldn’t justify.

I was worried that the tuung I’d left behind was going to wake up and do something in a drunken stupor, either alert the others or kill himself, and I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I worried about the tuung that I had knocked off the train, and the missing message of defeat. I was hoping that he’d lived, but dreading the possibility that he had, somehow, managed to stay on the train.

(It would have been so easy to kill them, and maybe that was why I hadn’t. I could have thrust Sable behind me and let loose with all kinds of garbage that the winds would have taken and slammed into them. I could have used the throwing dagger and engaged in a battle of thrown weapons I was pretty sure I would win. There was a void rifle in the glove, along with other weapons, weapons that I could easily have aimed down the length of the train to outright kill both the guards. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t killed before, I’d even killed guards, but the circumstances seemed different here. Aumann’s guards had known what they were signing up for, they’d probably had options elsewhere in Barren Jewel, but the tuung guards were products of a society that had dictated this role for them, and I was almost certainly reading too far into things, but the smaller one seemed like he was some dumb, young kid that had been drafted into the Vietnam War.

Or maybe it was that killing Aumann’s guards had never sat quite right with me, and I was overcorrecting here. I’d been in therapy for long enough to know that I didn’t like it, but there was a part of me that was starting to think that maybe it would be good to have a neutral third party without an agenda that I could talk to, given how much mental shit had been piling up.)

I reached the frontmost tuung car without incident, streaks of blood now left behind me, my magnets stable against the steel roof of the train car. I slid forward and positioned myself above the window, then leaned down over the side. It was stomach-churningly precarious, with not just the wind going by, but the ground moving quickly below me. I reached down with Sable and pulled a mirror on a rod out, one of a number of things I’d prepared ahead of time, just in case, and lowered it so I could look into the dark car. I saw the handmaid standing there, and beside her, a tuung guard.

I swore beneath my breath, the sound eaten up by the wind as the curse left my lips.

I let Sable take the mirror from my hand, then brought out a void pistol and began lowering myself down, trusting in the sentient rope wrapped around me to keep me on top of the train. From the play of shadows I’d seen in the room, I was fairly sure that I wasn’t going to obscure anything in the guard’s line of sight, but I would want to be quick about it either way. As soon as I had eyes on the room, I reached down with the void pistol and pressed it against the glass.

Before I could take my shot, the handmaid saw me. Her eyes went wide and she rushed forward, grabbing the guard by his shoulder and spinning him around to face me. I stopped what I was doing and let the void pistol slip back into the glove as I watched them, ready to move at a moment’s notice. The guard didn’t seem that surprised to see me, and his sword didn’t appear in his hand.

The handmaid moved toward the window and opened it a crack. To my surprise, and considerable displeasure, the guard was the one who slipped his hand out. I couldn’t hear anything, and I doubted that they wanted to make any noise, but the handmaid gestured that I should take the guard. Well, fuck. I wasn’t really in a position to make a negotiation, or to tell her that this wasn’t what we’d agreed to. I produced a breathing tank with mask from Sable and when the handmaid opened the window further, passed it in, then a second one for the guard. They put them on with only a little difficulty, and once they had done a breathing check, I was on my way back down the train, with one more passenger than expected.

Chapter 12 - Headwater

“Extra passenger,” I said, once I was back in our train car. “She had a guard with her that she wanted to come with.”

“Altering the terms so soon doesn’t bode well,” said Amaryllis. She was dressed in her full plate, ready for war, but that apparently hadn’t been needed. For now, it was just me and her; the others were stationed around the train, trying their best to be inconspicuous as they kept watch for something amiss. I’d passed both Fenn and Grak, who were sitting in the dimly lit dining car. They’d noted my change of clothes, I was sure, and maybe the way my hands were wet from the quick wash I’d given them using water from Sable, but I had been walking quickly, and gave them a nod. The bloodied clothes had gone into the glove, where they wouldn’t incriminate me, along with all the other tools I’d used. “It otherwise went smoothly?”

“Guards came after me,” I said. “Two of them, the ones that were on the first gangway. I’m not sure whether they managed to raise the alarm or not, but I don’t think so.”

“That’s not ideal,” said Amaryllis.

“One went over the side,” I said. “No message from the game saying he’d been defeated, and I don’t know what to make of that. The other one is lying drunk in the gangway, courtesy of Liar’s Cup. I don’t think he’ll be able to identify me, given the mask, but some of the entads I used were distinctive.”

Amaryllis sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, that’s -- also not ideal. Any that people would be able to cross-reference? Any that you’ve used while on this train?”

I held up my hand. “Sable, maybe. Fenn wears it out in public, which I think will have to stop for the time being. I was out of his sight when I used it though, and he got what I’m really hoping wasn’t a lethal dose of alcohol shortly afterward, enough to make him black out. He saw the Anyblade, but that’s easy for me to hide wherever I want to. And the rope, naturally, will be staying in Sable for the time being.” I paused and cleared my throat. “There was no one in the hallways to identify me on the way back, or on the way there. I think I’m clean.”

“Okay,” breathed Amaryllis. “I’m confident in our ability to slip past an investigation, if there is one. The biggest risk is that the train is brought to a stop while they try to figure things out, but we’re close enough to Headwater now that I don’t think they would do that. They might seal the train once we get there, but they almost certainly wouldn’t ward against teleportation, given how unlikely it would be.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, it depends. It’s not good, but at least you’re not dead.”

“Thanks, I care about you too,” I said. “Should I let her out?”

Amaryllis nodded. “Leave the guard in.”

I held my hand forward and pushed Esuen out of the glove, trying to ensure that she would be oriented so that she was on her feet. She appeared with a slight pop, and pulled off her oxygen mask as she looked around. The place where the mask met her skin had left an impression that was slow to fade; I wondered what aspect of tuung physiology made that happen after only a few minutes.

“Thank you,” she said with a curtsey toward me. She took the hose from her mister tank and sprayed herself with it once, allowing the droplets of water to land on her skin.

“We weren’t expecting two,” I said.

“Where is he?” she asked.

I held up the glove. “What would you have done if I hadn’t been able to carry both of you?” I asked.

When she frowned, her wide, frog-like lips drooped down, more expressive than a human’s could possibly be. “I gave him my scent a week ago,” she said. “He is bonded to me. I don’t know that we have time enough for me to explain it.”

“We have time,” said Amaryllis. Her voice was gentle.

“Male tuung are dormant until they take a scent, with no interest in women beyond the academic,” said Esuen. “Afterward, they are in something like heat, filled with desperate need to mate. They have a month, by your calendars, until they die. Souno was the head of the security detail, and without his aid, I would have never been able to arrange this escape.” On hearing that, my guess was that he was the one who flicked the lights off, and probably also the one who had given her whatever passenger manifest she’d found us on. Maybe he’d even been the one to suggest us as guests to the party.

“You doomed him to death?” asked Amaryllis.

“Yes.” Esuen nodded. “The males accept this, once they’ve taken a scent, so long as they can breed.”

“But ... they don’t accept it before they’ve taken a scent?” I asked.

“Some do,” said Esuen. “I know that by the common imperial standards, what I have done is abhorrent. It is abhorrent by tuung standards as well, though for different reasons.”

“You wanted him to come with you so that you could absolve yourself,” I said, suddenly understanding. “You plan to mate with him, to fulfill his need.”

“Yes.” Esuen nodded. “There are other, practical considerations,” she said. “It was easier not to lie to him, and if we had left him behind, he would have talked about things I spoke of to him, matters that it was necessary to inform him of in order to secure my escape. You asked what I would have done if you had been unable or unwilling to take him? I would have killed him, if I could bring myself to do it.” She looked at me. “It is a matter of the future of my species.”

“We understand,” said Amaryllis, speaking for me. I didn’t agree with her, even when I tried to reframe it in Earth terms. “The train will arrive in Headwater tomorrow. I’m fairly confident in our ability to escape if things get complicated, and if they don’t get complicated, we’ll find somewhere for you to lay low. Remember that we’re offering aid in exchange for information and assistance on your part, so we can both get what we want. We have business in the Boundless Pit.”

“You mentioned.” Esuen said, bobbing her head. “I would prefer we discuss the matter after we have some amount of safety. If you could give me some forewarning about what the matter is though?”

“There’s a stronghold, three miles down the Boundless Pit,” I said. “Kuum Doona. We intend to take it.”

“It moves,” said Esuen. Her eyes moved between me and Amaryllis. “It appears on one section of the rock face one day, then another the day after, sometimes staying for periods of time, sometimes moving rapidly. I can give you what I know about it, the defenses it possesses, what knowledge there is about how it works, but I won’t be able to guide you. The tuung have tunnels in the walls, equivalent to roads, but they would be heavily guarded.”

“I didn’t expect much more,” said Amaryllis with a nod. “I’d like to have a discussion about your political goals and how we might help you achieve them.”

“I would like for Souno to be taken from wherever he is now,” said Esuen, giving another curtsey in my direction. “We will have much to discuss, but the hour is late.” She looked around the small room. “May I ask about accommodations?”

“We’re staying on the train for the time being. I’ll be keeping guard,” said Amaryllis. “I spent most of this day resting so that I would be fresh through the night. You and Souno can sleep in these beds. There won’t be much in the way of privacy until after we’ve got a secure place in Headwater.”

I held out Sable and popped out the guard she’d brought, Souno. His sword was in his hand the moment he appeared in the car with us, and he spun once to look around before releasing it back into the aether. He gave me a bow, then gave Amaryllis her own.

“You said that you were not representatives of any formal organization,” said Esuen. From how she said it, I got the sense that she had been waiting on Souno to appear before she spoke on this particular matter. “Yet I have no proper explanation for who you are, or what your own interests are.”

“We’re travelers,” said Amaryllis. “Independently wealthy adventurers. Kuum Doona has riches that we’re hoping to exploit, if we can get past the tuung and the innate defenses of the fortress. That’s not the entirety of why we’re helping you though.” She glanced at me. “It’s our opinion that being held against your will is tantamount to slavery, and that’s not something that should be tolerated within the Empire, even if that’s how the Empire has come down on the matter.”

Esuen nodded, but it was a hesitant nod. “I will have to think on the ramifications of that.”

“You’ll probably need bigger guns,” said Amaryllis. “Someone who can give you suitable land to make your own, and some kind of military or economic authority to make sure that no one comes after you or bosses you around. If not that, then someone who you can act as vassal to, or who will work in your interests in a more close manner.”

“Yes.” Esuen nodded, more confidently. “And you have those connections?”

Through this all, Souno hadn’t said a word. His hands rested on Esuen’s shoulders, and he stood behind her as though he felt the need to be ready to protect her. He had misted himself from her tank once, but that was it.

“Connections are complicated,” said Amaryllis. “I know some people fairly high up in the Empire, maybe even some who could help you, but I’m not sure this is a fight the Empire is willing to pick, given the non-intervention compacts. If they helped you in direct defiance of the tuung of the Boundless Pit, it wouldn’t just be the other tuung that got up in arms, it would be dozens if not hundreds of other minor kingdoms that have refused to join for one reason or another, all of them feeling threatened. No one wants another counter-Empire. And either way, the Empire’s budget for that kind of thing is miniscule, given how much area they cover, not to mention the inability of the member nations to properly cooperate on almost anything.”

Esuen bulged one of her eyes, in what I was fairly sure was the tuung equivalent of incredulity, given that they didn’t have eyebrows. “Simple adventurers?” she asked.

“I know the lay of the land well enough to get by,” said Amaryllis. To her credit, she sold the lie well enough that I would almost certainly have believed it if I didn’t know better. “We’ll talk more later, once you’re safe, about both issues.” She looked over to me. “I think I have it from here.”

“I wanted to know about the passenger manifest,” I said, turning to Souno. “Who’s seen it, who knows about the discrepancy, and how much do we have to worry?”

“I was under Esuen’s sway when I took it from the rail company,” said Souno. “I am the only one who knows of your malfeasance.” His voice was deeper than I’d expected, and his Anglish was much better than any of the other guards I’d talked to. “It has been destroyed as part of our escape.”

“Okay,” I said with a nod. Works for me. I gave Esuen as deep a bow as the confined space would allow, mostly because I would have felt weird shaking her damp hand. “I hope things work out.”

“As do we,” said Esuen. Her hand went up to Souno’s, which was resting on her shoulder.

◆◆◆

Despite my fears, the train didn’t make any sudden stops in the middle of the night, and though we watched some of the tuung guards moving up and down the train from our vantage point in the dining car the next morning, they didn’t give us much of a second look. Fenn and I sat on one side, while Val and Grak took the other.

“What do you suppose that’s all about?” asked Fenn, eyes twinkling as she watched the tuung.

I was chewing the inside of my lip. “Probably just getting ready for Headwater,” I said.

“You know, next time we should all get side-by-side compartments,” said Fenn. “I didn’t really like being spread out.”

“It was what they had available,” said Grak.

“Well it worked out for you,” said Fenn with a smile. “Still thinking that it’s a temporary thing, or are we going to get a traveling buddy?”

“It’s temporary,” said Grak. He snorted slightly and began eating his eggs with more studied intensity than he had been before.

“You shouldn’t bully him,” said Val. She hadn’t ordered anything for breakfast, and had instead opted to read while the rest of us ate. I was a little bit anxious, and the book from Earth sitting out in the open wasn’t helping, nor was the fact that we were sitting in the dining car together. So far as anyone knew, we had reason to be together, if Val was supposed to be my sister and Fenn was my fake wife. If Grak was questioned, he could just say that he’d met us at the princess’ party. I was just on edge though, and the book became the focus of that. The UPC on the back was the biggest giveaway, and the first few pages would be full of unfamiliar places and legal jargon to anyone who looked at it.

“It’s not bullying,” said Fenn, rolling her eyes.

“It is,” said Val, looking up from her book. “And that’s not okay.”

“It’s gentle-natured ribbing,” I said. “Not bullying.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Val, scrunching her nose slightly.

“It’s a fine line,” I said. “Most of the difference is in the fact that Grak knows that Fenn cares deeply about him. Some of it is tone. Mostly if it’s your friends doing it, you shouldn’t immediately think that they’re being mean, you should think that they’re just teasing. Like, if I told you that you’re a dork for reading Harry Potter, you should understand that it’s meant affectionately, even if I don’t get the tone quite right.”

Loyalty Increased: Valencia the Red lvl 20!

Companion Passive Unlocked: Soul Capture!

“Update,” I said, closing my eyes.

Soul Capture:    If Valencia has access to a soul, the anima exa, she can imbibe it in order to take whatever power it possesses, similar to the Essentialist practice of Soul Scaphism, but with more breadth and depth. Duration depends largely on how intensively she uses the soul in question.

I opened my eyes. Everyone was looking at me. “It applies to souls now,” I said, voice low. “Drinking them, I guess.”

“Oh,” said Val. She was paused in the middle of the book with her thumb in between the pages. “I don’t think I like the idea of that.”

“It does seem a little bit outright evil.” Fenn nodded. “Not that I’m an expert or anything. Second Empire stuff.”

“We don’t need to do anything with it,” I said. “I think the use cases are probably … I don’t know, using someone’s heirlooms as though you had their bloodline? Being able to do some types of magic, if we carefully label all the souls we collect?”

“I don’t want to do it,” said Val, shaking her head. “I’m not a dementor.”

“What’s that?” asked Grak.

“You should read these books,” said Val, pointing down to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

“Guys, we should have a book club,” said Fenn. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

The conversation moved on from Valencia’s new (and largely unwanted) ability, partly through force of will, since no one wanted to talk about it. I was left there with a knot in my chest, not feeling particularly less anxious about my life, such as it was.

I wanted the game to come back. If I’d said that out loud, Grak probably would have rightly chided me for complaining that the voice of all creation wasn’t talking into my ear as much as it had been before, especially given that I’d outright said that was what I wanted. It was unnerving to not have any notifications at all about the quest with Esuen, and no indication that she was a companion. The whole thing stunk of being a setup by the Dungeon Master of some kind, like he’d made a nudge or two somewhere to get me on the train with the handmaid, but I was left flying blind.

I was still feeling that tight anxiousness when the train began its approach into Headwater, the city that sat above the Boundless Pit. The curve of the rail was such that we had a decent view of the descent down into the geographical depression that housed the pit. It was dozens of miles wide, mostly dark-gray stone forming crags and slabs, with green mosses and grasses growing up where they could. A river ran down into the basin, thick and quickly flowing, and it had been there long enough to carve a little valley for itself. It wasn’t some mere stream; this was the Buol, a river that drained most of a continent to the east of Pit that made up that edge of the Lion’s Mane. The Buol was more than a mile thick as it passed Headwater and dumped over the edge of the Boundless Pit. (Per legend, the Boundless Pit had been carved by the Buol’s might, which no mere ocean could have contained, but I was fairly sure that whatever the hell was going on geologically or hydrologically, it wasn’t that. It smacked of being more mythological than Aerb usually tended to be.)

Headwater itself was no metropolis, nothing like Cranberry Bay or even Silmar City, though it was large enough that a few prominent buildings gave the suggestion of a skyline. It was perched to one side of the Buol, most of the bigger buildings closer to the edge of the Pit, and the city as a whole gave the feeling of being clumped up and tightly packed, despite the wide open basin around it.

I was prepared for almost anything when we pulled into the train station, but all our scenario planning turned out to have been for nothing when the doors were opened up for us and we were free to go. Amaryllis had joined us just as the train was coming to a stop, having put the handmaid and her guard into the glove as the very final step of our preparation. As some of the very few people without any luggage, we could move a little more freely, and it wasn’t too long before we were out of the station altogether. Amaryllis was still in her armor, which drew some fleeting attention, but plate armor wasn’t illegal, and while it was unusual, it wasn’t so unusual that we thought anyone would stop us.

Headwater was lousy with hotels, since the city’s two primary functions were tourism and diplomacy, both of which had a fair amount of demand for temporary housing. We picked the biggest of the hotels, then purchased a family room on the seventh floor; three beds would leave us a little short, but it would serve as a base of operations for the time being. Per our agreement, Grak picked out and paid for a much smaller suite for the tuung on the same floor, having come in separately. Our cover story on the train had been that he didn’t know us, and that seemed like a useful fiction to work under for the time being.

The biggest complication was that we didn’t want our temporary guests to know about the teleportation key, which really limited how and where we could move around.

Not much more than a half hour after we’d gotten off the train, Fenn slipped on the glove and popped Esuen and Souno out into the family suite. They took a moment to look around, and Souno checked the perimeter of the room, stopping briefly to feel at places he thought were conspicuously good for hiding whatever his enemies might have hidden. Grak had already made the same tour, looking with eyes that could literally see magic, but we didn’t mention that.

“Thank you,” breathed Esuen. She walked over to the windows and looked out at the view, which was one of the reasons that this hotel even existed. “We are still in the shadow of the beast, but the most difficult part of the escape is over.” She looked at Fenn, then Grak, then Valencia. “I don’t know if you want to make introductions, or whether you’ve withheld names by intent,” she said.

“By intent,” said Amaryllis. “The less you know about us, the better. If it weren’t horrifically inconvenient, I might have even wanted to keep you from seeing all our faces.”

“Operational security.” Souno nodded.

“We’re under a time crunch at the moment,” said Amaryllis. “There’s a time chamber within Kuum Doona that we need access to within a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. For that reason, the debrief has to be somewhat compressed. Ideally, we’ll be leaving for Kuum Doona tonight.”

“That’s very soon,” said Esuen, frowning slightly. “Too soon for me to make arrangements with anyone for my safety and security. What happens to me if you don’t return?”

“We’ll leave you with a sizable sum of money and equipment,” said Amaryllis. “Whatever we can do to help secure you an escape by train or car, we will do, so long as it can be done within the next few hours. And it’s imperative that we leave soon.” She paused. “Please, whatever you can tell us.”

Esuen looked between the five of us, fiddled with the mister at her side and allowed it to wet her skin, then let out a breath. “We call it the Meandering Mansion,” said Esuen. “It’s a place of great magic, more than could be expected of a forge-frenzied place, even one that was once owned by Penndraig himself. There are defenses around it that make it nearly impossible to crack. Hundreds of tuung soldiers have lost their lives in the attempt, and double that number of outsiders. As rumor has it, the Penndraig line lost control of it even before the agreement with the Empire was reached, leaving a fortress' worth of treasure available for whoever could take it.”

I glanced at Amaryllis. “I hadn’t heard those rumors,” she said. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “From what I was told, it was mothballed due to the expenses associated with it, expenses which largely had to do with the difficulties imposed by the tuung.”

Most of our information had come from either the books that her father had left behind, or what the ghost of her great-grandfather had been able to tell her when she’d communed with him. Both of them post-dated the mothballing (or, possibly, abandonment) of Kuum Doona.

“Does it have wards anchored to it?” asked Grak.

“I believe so,” said Esuen. “Most people don’t get close enough to find out. It has caused no small amount of problems for the tuung. On occasion, it will appear in a crucial place, blocking off a path of travel between our holdings or preventing a harvest. It assaulted one of our cities for a solid month once, firing off cannonballs from the opposite side of the pit wall at regular intervals.”

“It’s … sapient?” asked Amaryllis.

“If not, then sentient,” said Esuen. “There are persistent rumors that someone still lives within it and guides it. Some even say that it’s the Lost King.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how you plan to get there, especially without knowing exactly where it is, and on such short notice. This is your first time coming to the Boundless Pit?” With the way she looked from one of us to the other, I could see the questions on her face. We were going into this half-cocked, that much had to be clear by our lines of inquiry. What this situation really called for was a solid month of research chasing down first-hand accounts and digging through archives; we weren’t really under the impression that we could spare that time.

“It’s our first time, yes,” said Amaryllis. She rolled her shoulders. “I’m confident in our ability to handle ourselves.”

“Flight down into the Pit is restricted,” said Esuen. “The Imperial Army will stop anyone they think they reasonably can, and the tuung are, per imperial law, unrestrained from using force against anyone who violates their sovereignty by going through the Pitmouth.” She paused looking at us, and my eyes followed hers, trying to see what she saw. Fenn, arms crossed, one eyebrow slightly raised, Grak frowning and adjusting the braids of his beard, Amaryllis smooth and calm … and Valencia, straight-backed with her hands clasped behind her back, the very picture of a stoic, well-trained soldier who had heard dire warnings before and gone into the shit anyway. I thought that was probably a devil’s skills at deception.

“So how would you recommend that we approach?” asked Amaryllis.

“Can you fly?” she asked.

“No,” said Amaryllis.

“Not yet,” said Fenn.

Not anymore, I thought but didn’t say. It would be good to have Solace back, but that was the whole point of us doing this, aside from the supposed riches that had been locked away for hundreds of years.

Esuen looked between us again. “There is an entad vehicle, used largely for observation,” she finally said. “The tuung allow it to go by, so long as it stays far from the walls of the Pit, and those aboard are cleared of magic by their warders and given a Fool’s Choker by their tattoo mages.” Yikes. “The owners have a good working relationship with the matriarchs.”

“Tourism?” asked Amaryllis.

“Yes,” said Esuen. “Sometimes the Empire will buy tickets, for the purposes of long-range observation. The waiting list is long.”

“We have money,” said Fenn. “Lots of money.”

“Then you are left with only the problem of commandeering the vehicle and making an approach toward a hostile, sapient fortress,” said Esuen.

“You’re skeptical,” said Amaryllis. “I understand that. There are some factors in play that I can’t reveal to you at this point. You’ll only have to trust that we know what we’re doing.” I was pretty sure that the other factor was her heritage, which would theoretically allow us to make a safe approach, as well as to pass through any wards that it might have around it. The vague assurance didn’t seem to do much to mollify Esuen’s concerns. Amaryllis placed a hand on Valencia’s shoulder. “We’ll leave V behind. She’s the most capable of us, and if things don’t go as planned, she’ll be able to get you to safety, beyond the reach of the other tuung. Either we’ll be back within a week, or she’ll be more than capable of taking care of you, especially given the resources that we plan to leave you with.”

Valencia nodded once as Amaryllis spoke, and gave no other indication that she objected. I could see at least some of the background logic. Valencia would be revealed if a warder looked at her, given that her skin didn’t have any latent magic, and a skin mage, especially one trying to put a tattoo on her, would figure out what she was as well. I tried to mull it over as Esuen gave us more details on the Boundless Pit, most of which I already knew.

Chapter 13 - Down And Out

The Down and Out sat on the edge of a pier that jutted out over the Boundless Pit, a pier that was closely guarded by a half-dozen tuung. The ship, if you could call it that, was flat on top, with a wide deck that was covered by a thick tarpaulin and a small, closed cabin where the pilot sat with some of the necessary equipment. The bottom of it was curved and made of glass, which was broken up by rigid structural elements that divided it into triangles. It made me think of a d20, though it wasn’t a regular polyhedron, instead skewing into more of an oval shape. Amaryllis commented that it looked like a chandelier, but to me it didn’t seem pretty enough.

The price we’d paid was exorbitant, though we hadn’t ended up jumping ahead on the list. Instead, the owners had gotten special dispensation to run a second trip of the day. Normally the owners ran the ship down and then back up so that they’d get the light of high noon shining down into the Boundless Pit when they were at the nadir of the journey, but there was some wiggle room to do another run every once in a while, at the cost of a little bit of stored goodwill with the tuung. The owner greeted us warmly though, either happy at the windfall we’d given them or naturally cheery people. When we’d asked around, he and his wife had been called an “odd couple” a few times, and once I saw them, I realized what everyone had been glossing around; he was a human and she was a feathered Animalia.

We were planning to steal their ship, at least temporarily.

“I know the collars are an imposition,” said Taft with a genial smile once we were aboard. He was bald and thin, with great tufts of hair on the side of his head, and a nose almost as wide as Grak’s on a face that wasn’t nearly so meaty. He wore a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat, which was wet with the mist coming off of the Boul. The river was emptying itself not more than a hundred yards away from us, and the sound of it meant that everyone had to speak up to be heard. “We see the Boundless Pit at the pleasure of the tuung, and much of what there is to see is their society. You’re visiting one of the last few forbidden places on Aerb, think of it like that. For all that the collars are frightening, they’ve only been used twice in the history of these trips, both times with solid cause.”

“What kind of cause?” asked Fenn, radiating innocence and briefly reaching her fingers up to touch where the tattoo encircled her neck. Removing it would be trivial for both of us, as would repairing the damage if it was triggered before then, assuming we could do it before passing out.

“It’s somewhat gruesome,” said Taft with a shake of his head. “It would suffice to say that the Boundless Pit, for all its beauty, has attracted a fair number of people more interested in profit over the years, many of them with ill intent. The collars are an over-reaction to that.” He waved his hand. “Not worth worrying about. You’re here for the only tour of the Pit that money can buy, not to hear scary stories about things going wrong.”

“I’m here for both, actually,” said Fenn. She was keeping her eyes wide. “I was hoping that you could tell us about the tuung, while we’re on our way down? It’s going to take some time to reach our destination, right?”

“How much have you read?” asked Taft, with one bushy eyebrow raised. “Well, much of what you’ve read is probably nonsense of one sort or another, but as a baseline?”

Amaryllis cleared her throat. “I’ve read Blackstone’s Creatures of the Unending, the relevant chapter in Kyan’s R-selected, A History, almost everything ever written about Penndraig’s excursion into the Boundless Pit, and a rather poor translation of Emini’s Soun Mienou, which I think comes closest to the actual truth.”

“We also had a few conversations with tuung aboard the train on the way over from Cranberry Bay,” said Fenn with a smile.

“Well,” said Taft, smiling at the two of them, and not the least bit fazed. “I daresay you probably know more than me, at least on paper. But I’ve worked with the tuung for practically my whole adult life, and I’ve been watching them since I was little -- quite some time ago -- when it was my father and mother steering this ship. So maybe I can fill in some of the gaps?”

We’d done enough homework that most of what he said wasn’t new to us. He started from the top, rather than the bottom, which I found a little bit irritating. The proper way of understanding the tuung was to understand their reproductive biology: females that could choose the gender of their children, mass egg-laying, and sexually dormant males that could be driven into heat were all the building blocks of their society. Those rules governed everything that followed, while the Boundless Pit itself, infinitely deep, widening as you went down, darkening too, was the context on which those rules were applied.

Taft started from the top though, all the clear and visible stuff that might, admittedly, be more useful to know on a day-to-day basis, like matriarchal politics, the major imports (the cheapest possible food, mostly from Barren Jewel) and exports (entads, mined minerals, unique flora and fauna of the Pit), the governing laws of the tuung, and a small amount of history, especially as it related to interactions between the tuung and the three imperial eras.

(We said “the tuung” for simplicity, but there were actually two other places that they called home as well. There weren’t many places that were all that hospitable for the tuung, given how much moisture they needed on a very regular basis. It was entirely possible for them to live in inhospitable places, but that would mean lugging around a mister tank and having special sleeping arrangements, which was a malus on expansion into places that weren’t perpetually wet. In D&D terms, those other loosely allied groups of tuung would have been sub-races, in the same way that there were five distinct migrations of elves from Celestar, each with their own differences.)

“Just a moment,” said Taft, as he cut short his description of the tuung air force. “I’m going to go speak with my wife to see what the holdup is.”

He left us on the deck as he ducked in through an archway to the small cabin where the ship’s controls were. I had been trying to surreptitiously sneak a peek ever since we’d gotten on board, but all I’d really been able to make out was Taft’s wife, a feathered Animalia of some kind, maybe a raven. Her long black beak stuck out from under a blue hood, and while she had wings on her back, folded behind her in a chair that allowed room for them, she also had arms and legs as well, both terminating in featherless, scaly black skin and black claws. She had introduced herself very briefly as Rattle-Clack, then turned back to the ship’s controls without sparing us another glance.

“Not feeling too great about this plan,” Fenn said to me under her breath.

“Yeah,” I said. I stepped closer to the railing and looked down in the Boundless Pit, which was largely obscured by spray from the river. Deeper down, the Pit was obscured by shadow. The Down and Out had floodlights, but they’d be of limited use once we were to the point where the Pit was filled with river-rain and mist, since most of what they’d be lighting up was the water in the air. Grak thought that he’d be able to spot Kuum Doona if we got within a mile of it, given his newfound magic-vision, and I was really hoping that he was right, especially since we’d be working under a time constraint, after which the tuung would know that something was up. “Nice people.”

“Nice people,” Fenn murmured. “Nice little mom and pop operation here, kind of reminds me of my favorite inn back in Anglecynn, the Cock & Bull.”

Amaryllis stepped up close to us and rested her hand on Fenn’s elbow. “Excited?” she asked, with just a token amount of ‘don’t fucking talk about our plan to steal this thing’ to her smile.

“Oh, certainly,” said Fenn as Taft approached from the cabin.

“Shouldn’t be much longer,” said Taft. “We’re still waiting on final approval.”

“I thought we had final approval?” asked Amaryllis.

“We had provisional approval,” said Taft. “Enough that we could get you checked over and aboard and start getting everything spun up. The protocols that we’ve worked out with the tuung is that we get a final sign-off by radio before we actually depart, and that’s what we’re waiting on. Normally it doesn’t take this long, but this is a special trip, and it appears the timing isn’t all that good. There’s some kind of hullabaloo going on right now, but they’re not saying exactly what. I keep my ear out for chatter, but they’re a secretive people, and most of the tuung that live and work in Headwater aren’t in the know.” He gave us an apologetic shrug. “Where was I?”

“You were detailing the tuung air force,” said Grak.

“Ah, right,” said Taft. “Gossamer wings, we think part of some entad that they came by a few dozen years ago, though the specifics are naturally shrouded in mystery. We’ll probably see a few of them in full flight, the matriarchs like to show off a bit, and that’s half of our arrangement with them.”

“Meaning that we won’t get to see any of the underbelly?” I asked.

“Underbelly?” asked Taft with a laugh. “We’re not going to visit with them, just taking a tour of some of the prettier features of the Pit and the cities on the wall, anything that they really wanted to hide, it wouldn’t be a problem for them. That’s not to say that there aren’t failures, from time to time, places where a colony was founded and then something went wrong in carving out or hanging structures, as one example, and that’s the sort of thing that I’m not planning to show you.”

I knew enough to know that he was whitewashing things. We probably wouldn’t be seeing the results of matriarchal warfare, nor would we probably bear witness to any of the burial ceremonies of the tuung, where they extracted the soul from the body and then dumped it into the Pit.

“I’m sorry, but why is an entad thought to be the source of the wings?” asked Amaryllis.

“Numbers show linear growth,” Grak answered, before Taft could. “It is consistent with a periodic-granting-of-ability rule. It is one of the things I spoke about with my friend Magor.”

“I’d rather not take part in any speculation,” said Taft with a smile. “Headwater is always abuzz with that sort of talk, and I do keep my ears open, but --”

“Ready!” came a call from the cabin.

“-- but we should be bringing that part of the conversation to a close anyway,” he finished, stepping toward the middle of the ship. Benches curved to form an oval beneath the tarpaulin, with enough room to seat ten. A small ladder by the cabin led to the lower deck, which was where you’d want to sit if you wanted to look out the windows below. “We’re running light, as this is a special trip just for you, and we won’t have the best light to see the Pit with, but we’ve been doing this for ages --”

“Ages!” came a shout from the cabin.

“-- and we should be able to give you a satisfactory tour.” He smiled at each of us in turn, and then, on cue, the ship began descending. Taft let that feeling of untethered floating sink in for a bit, then launched into what was identifiably a spiel, probably one that he’d given every day for most of his working life.

It was interesting enough, but I forced myself to zone out so that I could think about what came next. We were going to have to subdue both of them before taking the ship, which I wasn’t looking forward to. Physically it would be easy, even without our gear (most of which was packed away in the glove, which was in turn folded up and stuffed in Fenn’s underwear), but the inevitable explanation of ‘it’s not personal’ didn’t feel good when I was practicing it in my head.

That aside, I didn’t like the rest of the plan very much either. It seemed dependent on too much best-case planning, where we were counting on either our ability to improvise a solution to problems that might crop up, or simply on nothing going too terribly wrong. We’d done as much homework as we could do in the time we had available, but at a certain point there were diminishing returns. Amaryllis had argued that spending a day in Headwater trying to find an expert on Kuum Doona, or someone who could smuggle us in a less attention-drawing way, was unlikely enough to bear fruit that it wasn’t worth the risk. We’d chartered the tour first, then spent a few hours searching around, but a few hours searching in an unfamiliar city where we had no contacts didn’t amount to much.

(The saving grace of the plan to steal the Down and Out was that it was better than the alternatives, which we’d discussed in some depth. The most promising of them was looping Esuen in on the teleportation key and then trying to see whether her worldline was such that she would be able to put us within a few days' climb of Kuum Doona, which had seemed like a stretch. Other options, like quickly built, makeshift aircraft or abuse of the immobility plate while skydiving, had been vetoed on feasibility grounds.)

We kept to the western side of the Pit as we made our descent, giving the waterfall a wide berth, but there was only so much that you could avoid it, and eventually the spray from the waterfall spread out to the whole Pit, even as the Pit grew wider. The sky was a hole above us, which gradually became obscured by the mist in the air, until eventually we were in a twilight. The Down and Out didn’t move fast, no more than a few miles an hour, so the changes were subtle, and Taft had plenty to say about everything that we passed. His wife, Rattle-Clack, was piloting a meandering course that slowed down whenever there was something of interest, and while I had some natural appreciation for what I mentally pegged as “worldbuilding stuff”, I also kept thinking that it was basically an unskippable cutscene.

We did end up seeing the flying tuung, in a regimented flock of more than a hundred, each of them with short insectile wings that brought to mind a dragonfly. The wings were too short and thin to have possibly held up the tuung, but each was only lightly armored, and without any heavy packs, nor with obvious weapons on them, which was a relief. When Taft finally turned the floodlights on, they appeared as if from nowhere to swoop in front of them, which I was almost certain was the local equivalent of propaganda, done for every group of visitors. I really hoped that we didn’t have to fight them, especially given their total air superiority, but if Kuum Doona was to be a long-term acquisition, there probably wasn’t much avoiding it, not unless it was possible to use whatever form of locomotion it had to descend into the Boundless Pit beyond the range of the tuung, which from what I’d read meant about a hundred miles.

The tuung were the main attraction, but the Boundless Pit had other wonders to pique my interest, enormous animals crawling on the rock walls (mildly annoyed by the floodlights, swishing their tails at us), bioluminescent fungi that spanned a large, splotchy mile of the Pit walls (with settlements and farmers in among it), and the occasional abandoned settlement made by someone else’s hand, imprints of occupation attempts, some of them now taken over by the tuung, others left abandoned when the original owners had called it quits. The Boundless Pit was a Mystery, one of many on Aerb, and various people had been drawn in over the centuries, wanting to tease at the edges of reality. I wasn’t much in the mood for Mysteries at that particular moment; I wanted things simple and straightforward.

“And here we reach the end of our journey,” said Taft, hours after we’d set off but still far too quickly for my tastes. The Down and Out had moved away from the walls, and the floodlights illuminated only the water in the air. “We’re more than seven miles down now, and at this point, the walls are about four times as far away as when we started out. I’ve never been past the twenty-mile mark myself, but the tuung have assured me that the Boundless Pit lives up to its name, and every resource the Third Empire has thrown at it seems to agree. Since this is a late run, and it’s probably near sunset on the surface”—he pointed up, to where there was a hazy circle of light that could be seen if I leaned past the tarp—“I’m going to take a minute to turn off all the lights, so you can see what it’s like here in the dark.”

He went over to the panel on the side of the cabin, which connected to the floodlights. I was guessing that and a few other systems had been bolted on after the forge frenzy that had created the ship, mostly because they didn’t quite match the aesthetic. With a few flicked switches, the floodlights turned off, plunging us into darkness.

“This is how most of the tuung live,” said Taft into the darkness. “At night, this part of the Pit is close to being pitch black, and in the day, it doesn’t get too much brighter. Most of the deep tuung don’t have power, not like we do on the surface, which means that they work in a place that’s not got much more than subtle grades of black. Some live and work in caves, but others are forced by necessity to climb out along the walls, whether to farm or forage.” He cleared his throat. “Now, think about what it would be like to fall, the blackness that would envelop you, as what little light there was got further and further away. The time it would take you to fall down here from Headwater? Forty-eight seconds. Now, imagine that you were one of the tuung who saw your brethren fall, or simply sat there waiting in your communal home for them to return, only for it to never happen. That’s what it was like for the tuung for thousands of years. When they talk about how it’s better to live in the hells than to fade away into nothing, I think that’s --”

His voice cut off, leaving the ship utterly silent.

“That’s a knife at your throat,” said Amaryllis. “Now, I want you to turn the lights back on, very slowly and very carefully, so we can have a talk. We don’t want to hurt you, but we will if we have to.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Taft with a sigh, but the lights went back on a moment later, illuminating the scene.

Fenn stood toward the back of the ship, glove back on her hand and bow fully drawn. Amaryllis was behind Taft, with a dagger at his throat, just as she’d said, as calm as I’d ever seen her. Taft’s wife was turned back toward us, her feathers ruffled and mouth halfway open, and although she was turned toward Taft, she had seen the bow and arrow pointed at her. For myself, I had a rifle that had been thrust into my hands in the dark, but I was pointing it down at the ship with my finger off the trigger, largely because of ingrained lessons on gun safety.

“Sam, tattoos now, please,” she said with a nod toward me. Mine I had already moved, down from my neck to around the tip of my pinky finger, and I got up and collected the other three in short order. When I was in the middle of removing Fenn’s, I heard Amaryllis again. “Don’t you dare touch that radio.”

“I have to,” said Rattle-Clack. “They require periodic check-ins.”

“I haven’t heard any,” said Amaryllis.

“I moved up the pitch to beyond human hearing,” said Rattle-Clack. “It’s a courtesy to our guests, so they don’t have to hear the chatter.”

“Step out of the cabin, please,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t believe that you keep so tight a schedule that a few minutes are going to make the difference.”

Rattle-Clack closed her mouth and got up from her stool, then moved out from inside the cabin with her arms raised, though much more lazily than Taft.

“To be honest, I’m waiting on my wife’s I-told-you-so,” said Taft.

“I told you so,” said Rattle-Clack, deadpan.

“Ah, there it is,” said Taft, smiling her way. “That’s a real relief.”

“When are the check-ins?” asked Amaryllis, not removing her knife. “What information is communicated?”

“Every mile,” said Rattle-Clack. “All I tell them is our depth and what part of the tour we’re on.”

“And if you don’t check in?” asked Amaryllis.

“I don’t know,” answered Rattle-Clack. She tilted her head to the side and blinked with the nictitating membrane. “I think they would come after us.”

“I’ve always assumed that we were being shadowed by a squadron, just far enough away that they can stay out of the light,” said Taft. “Their wings would allow for it. Let me go and we can return to the surface, no repercussions on your end.”

“Opinions?” asked Amaryllis in my direction.

“There are potential traps in allowing a check-in, some of them spur of the moment, which we might be able to catch, others built in, which we couldn’t. I don’t want to share too many of my bright ideas, and you probably already have me beat there,” I said. I was fairly certain that Rattle-Clack wasn’t just listening in at a higher pitch, she had been communicating at a higher one too, which opened up all sorts of possibilities for her, depending on how her radio had been configured and what the tuung on the other end were expecting. “We’re two miles from where we need to be. I’m not sure exactly what this craft is capable of, but --”

“Three miles an hour, in good weather,” said Rattle-Clack.

“Hekni,” said Amaryllis in Grak’s direction (his false name literally meant ‘name’ in Groglir), “Get started on figuring out how to pilot this thing and how fast it can go, we’re going to get started on trying to find Kuum Doona.” He moved without a word, slipping past the Animalia, who gave him a wide berth; as a warder he was our de facto expert on magic items, mostly because he could see them better.

“Oh, so you’re all insane,” said Taft. “Well that makes a bit more sense.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Fenn. Her smile was forced; I could tell she didn’t like being in this position, aiming at innocent people, any more than I did. Her bow was still drawn and pointed at Rattle-Clack, the magic of her scars allowing her to hold the bow taut almost indefinitely without wavering.

“We’ll be shot out of the air before you can get close to it,” said Rattle-Clack.

“Any help you could give us would be appreciated,” said Amaryllis. The comment was underscored by the knife she still had at Taft’s throat.

“Approach from above,” said Taft.

“Don’t you dare help them,” said Rattle-Clack, finally dropping her raised arms and folding them across her chest.

“I’m looking out for my ship,” said Taft, smiling at his wife. He couldn’t turn his head, but his eyes tracked back to me. “Most of the successful attempts on Kuum Doona have been overhead, because then you only need to avoid the lightning strikes, not the cannonfire. Granted, ‘success’ means being able to set foot on it, where you’re likely to face whatever got the various teams that have been sent there, but at least my ship has a better chance of being safe.”

“Can you take this seriously?” asked Rattle-Clack.

The ship began to move again, this time under Grak’s direction, wobbling slightly as he tested the controls, then straightening out and dropping down. I could only judge by the movement of the air around us, most of which was blocked by the tarp, but it seemed like they had been telling the truth; the Down and Out was just glacially slow (which made sense, given that a faster craft might have been used for something other than a sedate tour, but was still a problem for us).

“I think we should have her check in,” I said. “On balance, it seems like the better option.”

Amaryllis finally stepped out from behind Taft as a rope began encircling him of its own volition. Ropey wasn’t terribly strong, but he could tighten his own knots well enough that they could hold me, let alone a tour operator. “Make the check-in then,” said Amaryllis with a nod toward Rattle-Clack. The dagger in her hand warped and changed into a thin sword, and it was only then that I realized she’d been using the Anyblade.

“Fun,” said Taft, testing his restraints. “I guess we’ll see whether I’m right about the squadron shadowing us.”

“You’re not,” called Grak from the cabin. “I would have seen their magic.”

“Ah,” said Taft, wincing slightly.

Amaryllis went into the cabin with Grak for a moment, mostly to check over and adjust the radio. There was some chatter between the two of them about that; we wanted to be able to hear what Rattle-Clack said, but she was capable of speaking at a higher frequency than we could hear, and changing the settings on the microphone could alter the message in a way that might give us away even if she was acting in good faith.

Rattle-Clack went over to Taft, and the two of them held a sotto voce conversation. I could hear well enough to catch the gist of it; she was berating him for his greed, theatrics, and self-sabotage, not plotting an escape attempt. I went over to stand by Fenn, with my rifle still pointed at the deck of the ship rather than at the couple.

“I’m feeling a bit anxious,” said Fenn. “Didn’t quite like the look of those tuung flying around. They remind me of one too many bad experiences in the Risen Lands.”

“They do?” I asked.

“Birds.” Fenn nodded. “There’s a containing wall around the whole place, but you can’t keep birds out, and with all the crops gone to seed, there’s plenty for them to eat. Then they die, and you get whole flocks of undead.”

“That’s a sight that I’m glad I missed,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Fenn. “Well, if we’re unlucky, we’re going to get to see all the problems with fighting things in the sky up close and personal.” She frowned. “I’m good with a bow, really fucking good, but there are limits. Not that keen on sending soldiers down to the hells either.”

“But you will?” I asked.

“Sure.” Fenn nodded. “Might need some wine and cuddles after though. Helps that they’re ugly as sin. Shouldn’t help, maybe, but it does.”

Once Amaryllis had given the radio a once-over, Rattle-Clack was ushered over to it in order to make the check-in. The only response was a terse, “Roger, out,” which she said was about par for the course in how the tuung responded to any radio communication. With that accomplished, she joined back with her husband, and Ropey bound the two of them together, at which point Fenn finally let go of her draw.

After that, it was time to suit up. All of our equipment had been stored inside the glove, and Fenn spilled armor out onto the deck, which drew complaints from Taft, who still didn’t seem terribly concerned about being hijacked, even though for all he knew, we were a heavily armed and highly skilled mercenary squad. Amaryllis put on her immobility plate, and I put on the absorption armor, plus my standard complement of bandoliers, which I was starting to think less of, given how well soul magic and bone magic worked together to make bones and fairies redundant.

(I had argued that we should just bring Val along in the glove with a few hours’ worth of air tanks, but Amaryllis had objected on practical grounds, namely that we were unlikely to find ourselves in a situation where Val was exactly what we needed, and that it wasn’t without its own risks, and that it would placate the handmaid, and that it was better to have someone stay behind to keep the return location for a teleport clear. Valencia had objected on largely personal grounds; she wanted some independence and time alone, even if it was just going to be spent reading the rest of the Harry Potter books in a hotel room and maybe ordering room service.)

We’d been flying for forty minutes when there was an irregularity with one of the check-ins. Instead of a final response of “Roger, out,” it was “Roger, wait.” On hearing that, Rattle-Clack had tilted her head to the side and looked at the microphone.

“Problem?” asked Amaryllis.

“Irregular,” said Rattle-Clack.

“We’re at the right depth,” said Grak. “I will start circling the edge of the Pit.”

“Say again, over,” came the crackling voice from the radio.

“This is the Down and Out, we are on our way back up, at the five mile check-in, over,” said Rattle-Clack. Taft aside, we were all standing near or in the cabin, waiting.

There was silence from the radio for a fairly long time, long enough that I started to wonder whether something had happened to the equipment, but I got the answer to what was going on when I felt a sharp pain in my pinky finger, which instantly started bleeding where the Fool’s Choker had severed the flesh. I was wearing all four of them on that finger, and they went off one by one, cutting into the flesh down to the bone. I touched a bone in my bandolier and burned it to heal myself. Amaryllis was watching me with wide eyes.

“That would have been an international incident,” said Amaryllis. “What the fuck are they thinking?”

“They were probably waiting for us to come up,” said Rattle-Clack with a shrug. “They knew that I was lying, and hopefully they’ll believe I was lying under duress.”

“If we survive long enough for that to matter!” called Taft from where he was roped up.

“Roger, repeat status, over,” came the voice from the radio.

Rattle-Clack turned from the radio and looked at Amaryllis. “What do you want me to say?”

“We’re going to radio silence,” said Amaryllis. She let out a breath. “Hekni, can you pilot this craft in darkness?”

“Yes,” replied Grak. “The light isn’t doing anything for me.” I was close enough to look over at the controls, which somewhat incredibly consisted of only six different levers, each stuck at various positions, with two of them locked in place by pieces of metal that were, like the radio, obviously not part of the original design. Pitch, yaw, roll, with pitch and roll locked down, then three levers for movement along x, y, and z? However it worked, I was glad that we weren’t relying on one of our hostages to fly.

“I’ll kill the lights,” I said.

We moved in darkness, trusting in Grak’s magic-vision to get us where we needed to be. Based on our past discussions about the monocle, he would be able to see everything that had latent, passive, or active magic in it, which meant that it applied to about 95% of all things, including almost all magic items and most living creatures (save for non-anima).

(We’d tried to grab night-vision goggles out of the backpack, but it had said no; the cut-off for technology seemed to be some point before World War II, even if the backpack was content to give us both Earth-modern instructions and most sufficiently simple Earth-modern parts. Amaryllis thought that she could have gotten something working if she’d had a week, which she didn’t have.)

“I think I see it,” said Grak, after a tense forty-five minutes of flying in darkness. He must have moved a lever, because the ship came to a halt in mid-air, rocking us slightly to the side. “It’s in a crevice. Approach from overhead would be impossible.”

“I’d like to leave,” said Rattle-Clack, speaking up from the darkness. “I can fly under my own power, well enough to glide down to one of the tuung cities. I’ll take my time, so that you’re either dead or inside by the time I get there.”

“And your husband?” asked Amaryllis. Something about the darkness made her voice seem smaller.

“He’s been on this ship with no escape plan for his entire life,” replied Rattle-Clack.

“It’s true,” said Taft. “A fact I’ve been reminded of every day since I got married.” He still seemed cheerful enough about matters, in spite of everything. I didn’t think that we were facing down our death here, but he certainly seemed to, and he was somehow putting a positive spin on it. I was starting to re-evaluate what people had meant when they’d called him odd.

“We have parachutes,” said Fenn. “We can dump you off the side too, maybe with a flashlight.”

“A captain goes down with his ship,” said Taft with a small laugh.

“Sam, light?” asked Amaryllis.

“Sure,” I replied. I drew the heat from my blood in steps, making the flame first come from my fingertip, then down my finger, until finally it wreathed my hand and gave us enough light to see by, each step allowing my eyes to adjust. Taft and Rattle-Clack were illuminated, tied up together; it was hard to read any expression on her face, but Taft seemed somewhere between contented and resigned.

“I’m willing to let you fly away,” said Amaryllis, holding the Anyblade in front of her as a full sword. “I don’t particularly want your blood on our hands.”

Once Amaryllis had commanded Ropey to let her out of her bonds, Rattle-Clack gave Taft a quick peck on the cheek. “I hope to see you again, husband.”

“You too, wife,” replied Taft with a nod. “Maybe if I die, I can tell you what’s at the bottom of the pit when I’m in the hells.”

She stepped to the edge of the ship, then jumped out over the edge with her arms to her side and her wings spread; we could hear her flapping over the muted sound of the perpetual waterfall for only a little bit, until there was nothing.

“I’d prefer to be untied,” said Taft, once she was away. “I’d hate for you all to die and leave me here at the mercy of cannonfire and the ship without a pilot.”

“We’re not going to die,” said Amaryllis.

“We probably won’t die,” said Fenn.

“All the same,” said Taft. “I’d like to meet my fate head-on, rather than tied up and helpless. I’ll be good, captain’s promise, and if I’m not, feel free to toss me overboard.”

“Okay,” I said, before Amaryllis could answer. As I said the word, Ropey began unwinding from him, slipping him free of his bonds, then it wriggled across the deck of the ship like a snake and wrapped itself around my waist, in its familiar place; that added utility was probably the best argument for untying Taft.

“I have a map,” said Grak, coming out from the cabin, where he’d been sitting with Fenn. He held forth a sheet of paper, which was slightly damp from the ever-present mist. On it he’d made a diagram of the building, drawn with a series of very straight lines, as though he’d been copying from a low-poly model of the building, or perhaps just hadn’t ever learned how to draw a curve. It showed a large section of rock-face that was cracked down the middle, and there, right at the top, a building was nestled, built more tall than wide, and seemingly perfectly fitted to the location it had been placed in. I wasn’t sure exactly how much Grak was capable of seeing from a mile away, but there were a few details on the building that I assumed were a reflection of what he had seen, rather than simple embellishments. There was a door at the base of the building, opening to nowhere, a bevy of arrow-slit windows, and some small circles that were meant to be -- something. The “skin” of the fortress seemed to be made of scales, which were detailed in a separate picture off to one side.

“What are these?” I asked, pointing to the circles. “Cannons?”

“I don’t know,” said Grak. “There are many different forms of magic, many of them overlapping each other. I’ve been cycling through the views. It is hard to tell from a distance, but there are sixteen wards.”

He didn’t say out loud that these were wards that Amaryllis was keyed to, but that was what we were hoping. In an ideal world, we’d spend the next twenty minutes crossing the last mile to the fortress, and whatever dim intelligence was powering its defenses would somehow recognize Amaryllis and allow her in without any problems. If that didn’t happen, we’d have to take the harder approach of evading its offensive and defensive capabilities and then getting Grak somewhere that would allow him to either breach the wards or circumvent them well enough to get us partially in to the point where we could try something else.

“Incoming,” said Grak. He was looking up and off into the distance. I let the light from my fire of my blood drop; I was starting to get a slight chill anyway.

“Tuung? How many?” asked Fenn.

“More than a hundred,” said Grak. “I see a warder’s monocle on one, they’ll find us even without the light.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Do we make a run for the fortress, or try to fight them off?”

“We have two minutes,” said Grak, his voice even. He went into the cabin and threw one of the levers forward, which sent the ship rocking again. When that was done, he came back out. “We’re on a collision course. Someone will need to stop the craft if something happens to me.”

“Well, fuck,” I said. Amaryllis threw the floodlights on, and I was momentarily blinded by them -- but better to be blinded while waiting for the enemy to arrive, rather than in the middle of combat.

“There,” said Grak, pointing up at a region of the sky.

“Using artillery now,” said Fenn, as an arrow appeared in her hand and she drew back her bow. For all her talk of reticence earlier, she wasn’t hesitating now. Maybe it was easier because they’d tried to kill us with the collars. “There?” she asked.

“A touch lower,” said Grak.

Fenn fired the arrow, which became a cloud of arrows as it left our view. She let the bow go limp in her hand as she looked at Grak expectantly.

A flurry of names, defeated!
went by across my vision, startling me; it had been a fair amount of time since I’d seen one, and the HUD had faded into the background of my existence. Each of the tuung had been given a name, rather than being left as nameless soldiers, and I was too busy to spare time trying to tease apart why that decision had been made.

“Less than a hundred now,” he said, letting out a breath. “You were high.”

“You have an impressive array of magic,” said Taft.

“Shut up,” said Fenn. She took a breath, raised the bow again, and let off another arrow, this time without looking to Grak for guidance. There was something eerie about the multiplying sound of the arrows in flight, and the way they seemed to vanish. It was like firing a shotgun in the dark, hoping that with sufficient firepower you might hit something. I couldn’t help imagining how terrifying it would be to be faced with a storm of arrows while flying blindly through the air. The tuung could see in the dark far better than I could, but still, it wasn’t like you could dodge that many arrows, even if you could see them.

“They’re scattering,” said Grak, “But they’re still coming towards us.”

“I’m saving the other two shots until they get close enough to see,” said Fenn. She looked pale and nauseous.

I raised my rifle to my shoulder, waiting, while Amaryllis picked up her own rifle, which Fenn had deposited by the door. It was a void rifle of her own design, one that she must have upgraded considerably since our time in the Risen Lands, since there were so few of the same parts that I wasn’t sure whether it could even be considered the same gun. The effective range of void weaponry was low, compared to a rifle or arrow, but there were quite a few things it was capable of punching through, and if they had a warder with them, then I was pretty sure that they’d have at least one surprise waiting for us as well.

Fenn started firing before I could see anything, not the artillery shots, but two or three arrows at once, done with a swiftness and casual grace that nothing on Earth could ever have matched, and helped by the fact that arrows could appear in her waiting fingers at the speed of thought. Her eyes were better than mine; she was firing with purpose, but to me the things she was shooting at were only vague shapes at the edge of the light. I saw one of the tuung well enough to make out the dragonfly-wings on his back, and saw him jerk backward and then start tumbling down.

“They’re dropping below the ship,” said Grak. “They’re going to come from beneath.”

“On it,” said Amaryllis. She went to the hatch that led down into the observation area, and I followed after as the repeated twang of Fenn’s bow filled the air. When I got down there, Amaryllis was already breaking out glass with the butt of the void rifle, either to get a better view, or because it would interfere with the void rifle’s range too much. I followed her lead with my own rifle and tried not to think about the wanton destruction we were causing. The seats down there were terrifying, suspended over glass for a spine-tingling sense of danger during the descent.

I took my first shot as I saw one of the tuung come up from below the ship, which was when I realized that I hadn’t grabbed hearing protection; it was loud enough to be physically painful. My shot hit him in the breastplate, which briefly arrested his upward motion. I fired again, and hit him somewhere in the head or shoulders, then watched as he fell away, wings no longer flapping.

Hian Tsal defeated!

More followed. The sound of my rifle became a staccato, interrupted only briefly when no suitable target presented itself. My pulse was racing as I killed one, then two, the sweep of the rifle across the blackness of the pit automatic, with better form than I’d ever had back on Earth, calm and military even though a part of my mind was recoiling at how detached and methodical the killing was. I tried not to pay attention to the notifications telling me their names.

After six rounds, I had to reload the rifle, which gave me time to listen to the thunk of Amaryllis firing off the void rifle beside me. As I was sliding the magazine into place, one of the half-spear swords came flying up towards me. It was only through dumb luck or a bad throw that it embedded itself in the wall beside me rather than hitting me. I raised the rifle and fired at the tuung that had thrown it, catching him in the chest and sending him spinning down into the void.

Ini Nga defeated!

There were too many of them. Even if I could have hit one with every shot, which I couldn’t, they would close the distance too quickly. The void rifle, with its periodic fire, was limited to once every four seconds, which was far too slow when facing down so many of them. I fired again, a glancing blow off a breastplate near the tuung’s shoulder, and my second shot on him missed, largely because he’d changed direction in response to the fire. The third hit entered by the nose, and he was close enough that the floodlights illuminated the spray of blood. There were other targets, a full two dozen of them visible now, but if we stayed and fought they were going to be on us, and even burning through my bones I didn’t think that I was good enough to survive the encounter, even if I could take a lot of them out with me.

I turned to Amaryllis to tell her that we were fighting a losing battle, and was just in time to catch sight of an explosion from above us that funneled liquid fire down into the room we were in. It was bright blue, cryofire, a flame that burned cold instead of hot, something that I’d thought up while sitting in Mr. Sorbo’s math class, translated in Aerb to a spell known by the pustule mages. I scrambled back away from it, not wanting to get frozen, and shouted to Amaryllis for her to do the same. Some of the liquid cryoflame dripped down past the glass that made up the lower floor, falling into the void below us. It was of a limited duration, but said some horrible things about how it was going upstairs.

I raised my rifle and began firing again, at tuung soldiers who were now close enough that I could see the whites of their eyes, more than a dozen of them in my field of view. They had their spirit blades at hand, and at a shouted command, “Fai!” they were throwing their blades at me, too much makeshift artillery for me to handle.

I burned bones to heal as soon as the blades had disappeared, before I was even fully conscious of where I’d been injured. One had driven through my throat, spilling blood, and another had clipped the side of my head, hard enough that my vision was swimming. It wasn’t until my rifle slipped from my fingers that I realized I’d been hit there too, cutting through some kind of connective tissue there and making me lose my grip, not to mention soaking the rifle with blood. It fell down out of the broken-out windows and tumbling into the void as well, leaving me with only my throwing dagger.

Before they could launch another volley, I moved, pushing my way through the cryoflame even as I was still in the process of healing myself. I saw one of the spirit swords hit me in the side and get absorbed by my armor, with the rest crashing around me. I wasn’t actually sure that I could survive something that went into my brain, if it disrupted my ability to heal myself that severely. I didn’t really have much time to examine that thought as it went through my head though, because the cold of the cryoflame hit me, freezing wherever it touched, like a hand stuck out into frigid, windy, winter air. I could feel my muscles seizing up, even as I pushed out with the warmth of my blood, trying to counteract the chill of the places where the flames had passed through.

I was halfway up the ladder when the rungs beneath my feet shattered, and when I slipped down and put my weight on the upper rungs in full, they broke too, frozen to the point where they’d lost their durability. I burned through all the bones of my foot, which I’d mentally designated as emergency reserve, as I tried to solve the problem with sufficient SPD. It was the most I had ever pulled before, and the world immediately seemed to go into slow motion. I saw and reached for one of the girders that had held the triangles of glass in place, and managed to grab onto it just before I would have fallen past the point of no return. Shards of frozen glass bit into my hand and my shoulder was nearly pulled from its socket, and I gave an inarticulate scream of pain before pushing through it and reaching up with my other hand to secure my grip.

Before I could, a host of spirit blades came flying through the air at me. A few were simply absorbed by the armor, but it had enough white patches to it that I was bound to be hit by at least one. The armor blocked the hit, but I twisted from the force of the impact, which cut my hand more from the glass, and broke my grip.

I only fell ten feet before I came to a stomach-churning stop that squeezed my waist hard enough that I nearly puked. Ten feet of rope connected me to the ship, leaving me as a sitting duck for the tuung throwing their spirit blades. I pulled my dagger from its sheath, then slipped on the leather band that had the sapphire in it, pressing it against the skin of my palm.

I parried away one of the incoming spirit blades, and took more hits to the armor, one of which it didn’t absorb. I was sent spinning and swinging on the rope, making me harder to hit, but making it almost impossible for me to hit a damned thing, not to mention making a second parry nearly impossible.

I closed my fist around the gem and channeled the abstract concept of light through it the next time I saw the tuung as I spun around. Forty-two projectiles shot out, their angles away from me randomized into a fat-angled cone. I didn’t see where they went, but I didn’t need to; the gem magic intuited the targets, through some process that was still a mystery, beyond Do What I Mean.

Ngai Tiou defeated!

Hene Tsa defeated!

Nguno Tsa defeated!

I watched the mental exhaustion meter tick down to 67/90, and started counting the seconds until I could use it again. I threw the dagger at the nearest tuung I could see, whipping it as hard as I could to try to cross the distance, then used my free hand to grab the rope and attempt to arrest my swaying, spinning motion, but I had made little progress with that by the time my dagger was on its way back.

I took a hit to my foot, where I was still wearing sneakers, and felt the blade slide between my toes. I parried one blade, then a second in short order, burning more speed to do so and nearly reaching the end of the bones that I could use safely. I kept glancing up at the rope, at Ropey, though I didn’t actually have the attention to spare for it, worried that one of the tuung would eventually get lucky and slice through it, leaving me to fall into the endless abyss.

I survived seven more seconds and let loose with another blast of the sapphire’s magic. There were more names in the notifications this time, as the same amount of projectiles fired out toward a smaller number of assailants. I was spinning around slowly enough that I was able to see them hit, blue motes with slender trails curving through the air to find their targets. The tuung had spread out to avoid rifle fire, which was perfectly working against them now, because the shotgun spread of blue could find someone to hit no matter where it was pointed.

A part of Ropey uncoiled from around me, and I reacted in alarm until I realized what he was doing; he made loops for my feet and fashioned a harness, then, with a lurch, dropped me half a foot into a better position to make the climb. I still had to climb using almost purely upper body strength, but once I was past a certain point, the rope reconfigured itself so that I could make my way up more easily. I freed up my hand for long enough to fire another blast of projectiles behind me, not so much as looking at the results, trusting in the magic to do its own work. It was a large gem, and I could feel the drain from using it already, the way that my thoughts weren’t coming as fast, compromising both my judgement and a wide range of my abilities.

“Get up top!” Amaryllis screamed to me as I finally clambered up onto the metal struts, fingers finding fresh glass to cut themselves on. She’d been firing away with the void rifle, showing no particular concern about the white markings of the cryoflame not six inches away from her. There were a few marks on her armor, as well as on the wood and cushions around her, but the immobility plate was proper plate armor, and the spirit blades simply weren’t strong enough to get through. I felt a wave of relief at realizing that she was fine, and probably would be fine unless they physically dragged her off the ship, then went up through where the ladder had been, testing each handhold carefully before putting any weight on it.

I reached the upper level of the ship, barely able to move my fingers, where pandemonium was reigning. Fenn was backed up against the side of the cabin, bow drawn, as one of the tuung approached her with his sword drawn. Grak was fighting off three tuung that had landed on the ship with his axe, moving between them with quick, sure motions, striking at armor and then dodging a sword. He was spattered in blood; and I realized only belatedly that he was fighting one-handed; his left arm ended in a bloody and smeared stump.

I threw my dagger at the tuung next to Fenn, and immediately realized the problem when it was brought to a perfect stop at the back of his head before falling to the ground. If that wasn’t the work of some entad, then he was a still mage, athenaeum trained. Just as I came to that conclusion, Fenn let loose her arrow -- it brought the tuung up short for just a moment, long enough for her to materialize a void pistol in her hand and fire it at him. He fell to the ground, and without missing a beat, Fenn tossed the pistol to me. I caught it just as the notification popped up, and spun toward where Grak was fighting, firing it as soon as it was ready again, as bad an idea as shooting in a melee was.

Thwip.

Muni Tan defeated!

An arrow caught another one in the head, and Grak caught the third under the chin with his axe, cutting partway into his head. As soon as the body hit the floor, Grak spun around, looking for others, and threw his axe off the side of the ship to hit a tuung that had just crested up over the side. The axe returned to Grak's hand a moment later, and he looked off into the open air for a moment, searching for targets.

And suddenly, just like that, there was silence, leaving only a ringing in my ears.

“They’re in retreat,” said Grak, speaking loudly, and still barely audible. He let out a shaky breath and clenched the handle of his axe so hard that his knuckles turned white.

I made to go over to the hatchway to check on Amaryllis, but when I turned to look at it, she was already coming up and being given a hand by Fenn. I burned another bone, focusing on my ears, and after a few seconds could hear properly again, the persistent ringing suddenly quiet and sounds suddenly snapping back into focus. I turned my attention to Grak and administered healing to him; I had no idea what I was supposed to do about the missing hand, except that the wholesale regrowing of bone was beyond my current abilities.

“Pustule mage killed. Still mage killed. Warder still alive and tracking us,” said Grak. “Twenty left, all told.”

“What?” asked Amaryllis, speaking too loud. I went over to her and laid a hand on her shoulder and burned a bone to help her hearing, then dove into my soul to restock while I had the chance; I had burned through two-thirds of the bones I could safely poach from. The conversation was too distant for me to make out from within my soul, but I had little doubt that repairing the bones was the best use of my time. When I came out, the conversation had moved on.

“No, either we broke them or they’re waiting for reinforcements,” said Amaryllis. “Maybe both.”

“We’re within range of the mansion,” said Taft as he emerged from the cabin. His hands were shaking and his pupils were dilated, but he was still smiling, albeit a little too wide.

“How in the godsfuck are you still alive?” asked Fenn.

“I went into the cabin,” said Taft. He looked between the four of us. “This feels like the end, doesn’t it?”

“Just shut your fucking mouth or I’ll kill you myself, you weirdo birdfucker,” said Fenn. She had her fists clenched tight, her bow, for the moment, stored back within the glove. I could see the muscles on her neck strained tight.

“Fenn,” said Grak. She opened her mouth to say something in response, then closed it when she looked down at the stump where he was missing a hand.

“What does it mean that we’re in range?” asked Amaryllis. Her voice had gone flat, devoid of all emotion.

A flash of lightning arced out through the sky, briefly blinding me, and the thunderclap that followed behind it deafened me (right after I’d just restored my hearing).

“Warning shot!” yelled Taft, grinning wide. That cemented the idea that something was deeply wrong with him, either the way he responded to stress, or a peculiar streak of fatalism.

He was proven wrong a moment later when a piece of the cabin exploded, sending sharp bits of wood toward us. If I hadn’t been forewarned of cannonfire, I might not have been able to distinguish it as that. The sound from it rolled in just a bit later.

Grak pulled his diagram from within the recesses of his armor, and held it forward to Fenn. It was stained with blood. “We’re not going to make it. You’re going to have to take the shot.” It took me a moment to follow his train of thought; he was thinking that we would do something similar to what we’d done to escape the prison, piling ourselves into the glove, which would then be launched via a time-delayed arrow from the sand bow.

“Wards?” asked Amaryllis.

“Velocity wards will slow it down,” he said.

Fenn turned toward the direction the ship was heading, scowling ahead at the darkness. “I can see it, but just barely. Not a shot I’d want to stake all our lives on, if there’s a ward at the end to fuck things up.”

“Hit the wall above,” said Amaryllis. “I can drop down without much risk, if I have --”

Another bolt of lightning came from the fortress, this one striking the craft. It was there in a flash, so quick that there was no chance of avoiding it, if it were coming for you. The strike hit the cabin, setting things on fire in there and blasting apart the chair, while at the same time melting through the metal of some of the controls.

Fenn made the sand bow appear in her hand, then held out her hand to us. “Masks once you’re in,” she said, speaking loudly in the wake of the lightning strike. “Mary’s on point.”

It was a matter of seconds to get the prepared breathing masks out of the glove, and once the strap was over my shoulder, I took one finger of Fenn’s glove to get the ten-second countdown started which would allow me to get into the glove. I was feeling fried from the repeated use of gem magic, like I’d gone through a three-hour test and wanted nothing more than to sit on the couch and watch some kind of TV that didn’t require any mental investment on my part. I almost missed the fact that Taft was standing off to one side, not offered a mask and not requesting one, simply looking out off the side of the ship, down into the Boundless Pit.

There was a part of me that wanted to press the issue, to pull my hand away and demand that we save him, even if he didn’t seem like he really wanted to be saved, even if he was content to die as the ship was destroyed, but it had taken me too long to notice, and then I was inside the black void of the glove, a place so familiar that it was becoming like home.

Chapter 14 - The House of Solitude

After they’d escaped the prison, and the misadventure with Fallatehr had been concluded, Amaryllis and Fenn had spent some time trying to work out a better way of doing the arrow transportation trick, and how it might be altered for different circumstances. This was a combination of those scenarios, and some testing that they had done. An arrow fired from the sand bow would stay still with respect to Aerb, the same rules that the immobility plate worked on. This meant that in any scenario where we were already moving, we had a somewhat serious problem, which was that the arrow wouldn’t keep moving along with us.

The protocol for if the “telearrow” needed to be fired from something moving was that Amaryllis would load everyone into the glove, fire off the arrow, and then lock her immobility plate at the exact same instant that the arrow froze in place. If she were firing an arrow normally, this would leave the arrow out of her reach (she had tried this) so the protocol, such as it was, was that she would fire the arrow backwards, aiming it more or less over her shoulder, which would absolutely kill the distance, but at least allow her to enter into the glove inside the arrow, assuming that she’d first removed the vambrace and gauntlet from one of the arms of her armor.

(I hated the name telearrow, by the way. It had been coined by Fenn, but the ‘tele-’ prefix meant ‘far’, and all arrows, almost by definition, were already traveling across great distances, and further, the telearrow didn’t actually go any further than a normal arrow, and in fact, due to weight, balance, and worse aerodynamics, tended to go quite a bit less far. The proper term for it, if you wanted to smush ‘arrow’ and ‘teleport’ together into a portmanteau, would have been ‘arrowport’, which correctly conveyed what it was actually doing. Fenn thought that sounded too much like ‘airport’ though, and besides, she had already named and ‘invented’ it with Amaryllis’ help, and sternly refused to change it.)

Of course, Amaryllis was far worse at actually shooting a bow than Fenn was, especially with Fenn’s scars functional once again. Fenn wasn’t just a masterful archer, she was scarily strong, able to pull the bowstring back to the point where she thought that she could break a normal string from the draw alone. Entads were (generally speaking) made of sterner stuff, and in this particular case, we needed both the distance and the aim that Fenn could provide.

Luckily, the ship wasn’t moving too fast, and so when it came down to it, Fenn was able to take the shot, walk briskly to keep up with the arrow, hop on Amaryllis, who had made herself immobile, and then touch the exposed part of the glove for ten seconds.

Amaryllis had freed both her arms from the armor, while one hand rested gentle fingers on the glove, feeling its magic, the other held a pocketwatch, which was counting down the seconds. Her eyes moved between the watch and Taft, occasionally flickering toward where Kuum Doona was on the horizon. For his part, Taft was simply standing at the edge of the Down and Out, which suffered another cannon hit as she watched. With three seconds left, and the ship far enough away that it would be very hard for Taft to do anything, Amaryllis entered the glove.

There was a totally different protocol for using the telearrow to strike a target high up. The use case, as Amaryllis had seen it, was that we might want to get to the top of something in a hurry, and flying us all in an arrow could do the trick, which would save us minutes if not hours of climbing. She had climbed up Sorian’s Castle, back in Silmar City, and one of the ways that Amaryllis operated was that she usually put thought into past situations to see how she could tackle them if she ran into them again. The inherent problem with firing an arrow up at something like a cliff-face or a tall building was that arrows were built to pierce, and most static structures were designed not to be pierced, even if only incidentally; an arrow fired against glass, metal, or stone, would be too likely to bounce off, which at best would end up with us exiting the telearrow back on ground level where we started, or worse, someplace dangerous to exit from.

Amaryllis had tried a number of different solutions to get an arrow to stick, or at least come to a stop, but eventually settled on something very similar to a ‘crumple zone’ on a car; the tip was fragile, designed to break on impact, which would slow down the glove-carrying shaft of the arrow. A fast-bonding adhesive would then be carefully applied to the arrow before it was fired, and ideally it would stick to a wall, which would allow Amaryllis to get out of the glove, stick herself in place with the immobility plate, retrieve the arrow, and then either fall or climb to somewhere safe enough that the rest of us could get out. In testing (sans glove), the arrow stuck about one out of every three times.

While the “enter the arrow” part of the plan worked fine, the “exit the arrow” part didn’t really work at all.

Amaryllis popped out of the void seconds after she’d entered it, trusting in her pocketwatch and a rough guess about how long it would take the arrow to cross the distance. It was a jarring transition, to go from standing immobile a few dozen feet away from a brightly lit ship, to being inside the black void with only a hand of flame, and finally, standing so that she was looking out at the ship, turned around in the dark, with a ruined arrow spinning in front of her, illuminated by the flame of her blood, both of them falling.

She snatched the arrow from mid-air, then used the armor to bring herself to a halt. With the helmet of the immobility plate having been taken off, she could move around just enough that she could see the endlessly sloping rock wall behind her, and below that, visible only from the corner of her eye, Kuum Doona, which fired off a blindingly bright strike of lightning that left an abstract blue shape in her peripheral vision. She looked down at the arrow, trying to do a cursory analysis; at a first guess, the air had been too wet, which had negatively affected the adhesive. Another strained glance back at the rock face gave her a best-guess of twenty feet away from it. The crevice that Kuum Doona was nestled in was another fifty feet below. It wasn’t clear where, exactly, the lightning was coming from, but she had to assume that she was at risk if she was noticed. She’d snuffed out the blood flame the moment she’d grabbed the arrow, leaving her in near-total darkness, mostly lit by the residual light from the Down and Out.

Amaryllis unscrewed the arrow, extracted the glove, carefully pried the sticky arrow shaft from her hand and threw it down into the Pit, then put the glove on. So long as the lightning didn’t come her way, she had all the tools she needed to get within the wards of Kuum Doona, and once she was inside, there would be the matter of ensuring the house didn’t wish them harm, as it had, apparently, killed dozens of others.

The first step was to get to the rock wall. For that, Amaryllis had specialized tools, not just ropes, pitons, and a harness, all things she’d bought way back in Barren Jewel for the assault on Caer Laga, but a wound crossbow that she loaded with a heavy arrow, the end of which was attached to a length of thin, elven-made rope that had been purchased at great expense.

Turning around to actually face the Pit wall was tricky. Her arms were free, which meant that she could generate some amount of angular momentum. She would hold one arm out to the side, with the other across her breastplate, then swing them as fast as she could to the side. Partway through, she would stop the immobility from her armor, lock her arms so that the momentum was transferred to her body as efficiently as possible, and then make the armor immobile again before she could drop too far. It cost height, which was the resource she was most attempting to conserve, but she managed to get the job done.

The steel-tipped arrow was fired from its specialized crossbow, hurled across the relatively short distance separating them, then broke off part of the wall where it struck and fell limply down, trailing rope behind it until Amaryllis grabbed the end and began pulling it back up to reload it. All she needed was something that she could pull on, something that she could get some tension against, which would allow her to rapidly cycle the immobility plate on and off, and so long as her acceleration toward the rope was faster than gravity, she would make it over without losing too much height.

On the second shot, the arrow broke off more of the rock face, and this time when she reeled it back in, the tip was missing, snapped off by a bad hit. She stayed frozen in the air, looking at it for a moment, then sent it back into the glove and re-evaluated her position. The cannonfire from down below had stopped, as had the lightning strikes. The Down and Out was visible below her, spinning and on fire, the magic of the entad having finally failed. The fortress was taking no action against her. Did it not see her? Did it recognize her lineage at this range? Was it operating on some different set of protocols now that a threat was closer?

It was tempting to simply use the teleportation key and nope the fuck out. They could regroup at the hotel room in Headwater and be back in this exact same position in two hours' time, having talked the situation over in detail and taken time to recover from the battle. The risk, naturally, was that when they returned, Kuum Doona would no longer be there.

Amaryllis got a thirty-pound weight out from the glove, which was attached to a length of thin mithril chain. She began swinging it around, and once it got up to speed, she carefully timed the release of her plate’s immobility so that it pulled her in the direction she wanted to go. In theory, she could have used this method to climb through the air, but in practice, it took a lot of effort to get the weight up to speed. By the time she made her way to the wall, she was soaked through with sweat, even though her arms were cold from nighttime in the damp Pit.

For the last little bit of movement, she used the Anyblade, extended into something resembling a polearm, then firmly wedged into the nearest crack in the rock. She pulled herself in by inches, cycling the armor’s ability so she wouldn’t fall too much, taking breaks when her muscles grew weak from the effort. A single marzipan fairy, taken from the glove and wolfed down quickly, cured the worst of her physical exhaustion, once she was close enough to touch the rock face and begin her descent.

Amaryllis was good at climbing. The Athenaeum of Quills and Blood was built high up on a plateau, and climbing was part of the school’s tradition, a sport taken to the extremes that magic would allow. There were paths on the school’s climbing walls that could only be taken if you were skilled in blood magic, capable of flinging yourself to the timing of your pulse from one hold to another. There were competitions, and clans of climbers; it was one of the school’s primary extracurriculars. Amaryllis had only been at the athenaeum for three years, which was long enough to have learned a little, but not so long that she had considered herself a blood mage. Climbing had been one of the things she’d pushed herself into, partly for the social access it allowed to upperclassmen, and partly because it allowed her some solitude. (Most of the climbing faces had velocity wards beneath them, layered so that you would be slowed by degrees as you passed through them and hit the ground no harder than if you’d tripped over your own feet on ground level, which meant there was no need for spotters or someone to belay her.)

She made her way down being as careful as she could, Anyblade in one hand as a claw-like device that could form itself precisely to any handhold and dig itself into nooks and crannies on her command. It was pitch black, which meant climbing was a thing done more by feel than by sight; she worried that the light would attract the attention of Kuum Doona, or the tuung, if they were out there, though she was certain that to a warder she would be radiant with magic. The rock face was a persistent underhang of varying degrees, one of the worst surfaces to climb on, which meant that each new position was a matter of bracing and clinging as tightly as possible.

She could feel herself passing through the wards, and sighed in silent relief. Whatever else was going on with Kuum Doona, the wards were still keyed to her lineage, following her erstwhile branch of the family tree.

She reached Kuum Doona proper not two minutes later, finally putting hands on it. She had seen only a little of the place thus far, and now felt the structure of the building, odd pieces of metal and loops of metal, which she gradually realized were interlocking in the same way that chainmail does, each chain as wide as a coin, sheets of it beneath the metal plates, and wood or stone beneath those. Her fingers took a moment to trace it, trying to make sense of it. Someone had clad this building in both plate and chainmail, or perhaps it had been built that way during the forge frenzy. It made the descent go faster, which she was grateful for. She passed windows, each of them a different size and shape, some of them broken, leaving only shattered glass like teeth around the edges.

When her feet touched solid ground, she tested it carefully, putting more and more weight on it until she was standing fully on it, without the use of handholds. She ate another fairy, to take the edge off of physical exhaustion, waited until her breathing and heartrate had returned to their baseline levels, and only then risked producing a flame to look at where she was, ready to move at any moment.

The skin of Kuum Doona was an odd thing, with pieces of metal in vast, curved, expanses, welds and rivets running through them at places of symmetry, most of them scarred or pitted from hits they’d taken. In the places where the metal didn’t cover, there was chainmail, links of metal as large around as a wedding band, joined together and stretching over it. Where there wasn’t chainmail or plate, there was wood, grey and cracked, damp from the mist, or stone, irregular bricks that meshed together like puzzle pieces instead of sitting in regular, ordered rows. The rooms were oddly shaped, and didn’t make up a flat wall, but Kuum Doona didn’t give off the impression of being a ramshackle place put together of disparate elements; it seemed as though there was purpose in how the rooms had been arranged, if not any strict symmetry.

The main entrance to Kuum Doona was a set of double doors, some exotic, dark wood carved with a mural. This Amaryllis recognized; the left was a farmer tending to his farm, while the right was a king in his castle. Variations on this theme were common through Anglecynn; it was part of the mythologizing of Uther Penndraig, the boy who had grown up a farmer to claim his place as king. Here, the mural was cracked and chipped, scarred from battle.

In front of the door was a small walkway, made of stone and broken off after ten feet. This was what Amaryllis stood on, looking at the fortress that was hers by claim-in-fact. The fortress was still and silent. It didn’t shoot a bolt of lightning at her, nor did the cannons turn to fire by whatever mechanism allowed that. Amaryllis stayed where she was, making her best effort at being steely calm (and no one did steely calm like Amaryllis).

Slowly and deliberately, she began to bring us back out of the glove.

◆◆◆

“Are we safe?” asked Fenn as she looked over the structure. She was staying close to Amaryllis, within arm’s reach, which was probably wise; Amaryllis had both the immobility plate and the teleportation key. The glove was back on Fenn’s hand though, the deal we’d made early on still honored. The Anyblade had also returned to its standard position as a bladed ring on my finger.

“We haven’t been attacked yet,” said Amaryllis. “That implies some level of safety. You can go stand in front of one of the cannons if you’d like to test it.”

“They aren’t cannons,” said Grak, pointing up to something that I couldn’t see by the light of my flashlight, even when I pointed it where he was indicating. “They’re pistols set in large housings. Disguised.” Sometimes he seemed to chew on words, like he’d been searching for the perfect one and wanted to savor what he’d found. “I’ve seen a few of them adjusting.”

“Pistols that shoot cannonballs?” asked Fenn with a frown.

“I don’t know,” said Grak.

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, that was from a campaign, a, uh, pirate campaign we did.” Not actually a pirate campaign per se, an Age of Enlightenment campaign that turned into a pirate campaign despite my better efforts. “Three times per day, with a misfire on a critical failure, the pistol would shoot cannonballs. Not automated, as I’d envisioned it, and not part of a building.”

Amaryllis frowned. “An adaptation.”

“Maybe,” I said. I looked over Kuum Doona. “I don’t really understand this place. It seems like it’s lacking a -- huh, central theme?” I wasn’t sure whether that made any sense, or whether I was too out of it to get across what I was thinking. It felt like I’d been doing whatever the mental equivalent of treading water was.

“The prison didn’t have a central theme,” said Fenn. “Brass and mud people.”

“It was different things at different times, overlapping each other in the present,” said Amaryllis. She was staring at the door, and the beaten-down mural there. “In the meta-sense, it was about identity, I think, to tie in with what was going on with Fallatehr. There were golems using flower magic, that bit was thematically about connection.”

“You’re giving him too much credit,” I replied. “The Dungeon Master, I mean.”

“I’m pretty sure that she’s not giving the all-powerful god too much credit,” said Fenn. “But sure, keep bad-mouthing the Dungeon Master, I’ll just make a point of not standing too close to you.”

“So what’s the theme here then?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Amaryllis. She was still looking at the mural, or maybe just at the door.

“It’s a person,” said Grak.

“A person wearing plate and mail?” asked Amaryllis, shining her flashlight to the metal exterior. I could kind of see it, once Grak pointed it out.

Grak nodded. “Not in form. But it is likely sentient.”

“If this were a person, it would be a hot mess,” said Fenn, pointing a toe down at a bit of broken stone, not quite kicking at it.

One of the two doors, the side with the castle on it, creaked open. We all stared at it.

“That’s not to say that we don’t all have our flaws,” said Fenn, putting on a cheerful smile. “Myself, I have plenty. I’m a convicted felon on the run from the law, killed a hundred people about half an hour ago, I’m --”

“We should go in,” I said.

Amaryllis raised her flashlight and pointed it in through the open door. “There are bodies inside,” she said. I looked to where she was pointing and saw the dark shapes there, with the occasional glint of metal. “Old,” she said, echoing my thoughts.

“Other teams that came here, the ones looking for treasure?” I asked.

Amaryllis waved the flashlight from side to side, then gave a curt nod. She frowned slightly, narrowing her eyes. “There were others, imperial forces trying to bring this place under control. According to rumor, anyway.”

“Yeah,” said Fenn. “Didn’t seem to have worked out for them, did it?”

“We should go in,” I said again. “The open door is an invitation.”

“Feel free to lead the way,” said Amaryllis, deadpan.

I stepped forward, flashlight held in front of me. It was an Earth flashlight, the beam brighter and better-focused than anything you could get on Aerb short of using magic. I crossed the threshold, trying not to think too much about it, which was easy with the mental exhaustion of the gem magic still in full effect. If this place wanted us dead, I was pretty sure that we would be dead, and standing at the door wasn’t doing us any favors.

The doors led into a grand foyer with two staircases coming off it at different angles, as well as another three doors, one of which was missing, another slightly off its hinges, and only the last firmly in place -- boarded shut. Where there was carpeting on the stairs, it was frayed and rotted. Where there was wood, it was cracked and warped. The floor was black and white tile in a pattern that ran at a skewed angle from the room. That pattern made the problems all the more noticeable, places where it was cracked or missing tile.

There were eight bodies, if I was counting them right. None of them were fresh; the places where there was skin were blackened, the faces with pits for the mouth and eyes. It was hard to tell what had happened to them so long after the fact, but the picture it painted was certainly gruesome. A chandelier must have hung in the foyer at some point, because it was on the ground now, with a body beneath it. On one of the walls was a patch of red so dark it was almost black, marking a blast of something foul that might have come out of the body crumpled at the base of the stain. Another of the bodies was missing its torso; it was laid out flat, with the legs and arms still in position, head rolled off to one side, and a dark trail leading away from it, thinning out by the time it reached the open door.

“Sorry I called you a hot mess!” said Fenn through the door. “You’re really quite lovely!”

“Is that really an idiom here?” I asked. “Hot mess?”

“Watch what you say,” replied Amaryllis. She’d had her helmet off, letting herself cool and giving her sweat a chance to dry, but she replaced it as she looked in through the door. Sometimes it seemed like she went around armored more often than not, closed off from the world.

“We spoke of much outside the doors,” said Grak.

“Yes, we did,” said Amaryllis. “This place wasn’t supposed to be intelligent. Not enough to understand speech. My great-grandfather said it was, at best, doglike, not --” She stopped and cleared her throat. “I am Amaryllis Penndraig, tenth of my name, Princess of the Kingdom of Anglecynn, most direct living descendant of Uther Penndraig, and keeper of Kuum Doona by claim-in-fact.” She said it as a proclamation, but without raising her voice.

There was no response from the fortress.

“Okay,” said Fenn, after some time had passed. “So do we take the creepy boarded-up door on the left, the creepy door with the blood trail on the right, or one of the stairways, or what?”

“We could each take a different path,” I said. “Cover more ground that way.”

A silence settled around us.

“That was a joke,” I said.

“Not very funny,” said Fenn.

A hollow laugh echoed out from inside, coming from the right door, the one that a dismembered torso had likely been dragged through.

“Alright, I’m just going to be the one to say it,” said Fenn. “We could chalk all this up to a long, painful misadventure and get the hell out right now.”

“One of the wards is a teleportation ward,” said Grak. His eyes swiveled, taking in information that I couldn’t see. “We would have to drop.”

“We didn’t come this far for nothing,” said Amaryllis. She had been standing outside, and finally crossed the threshold to stand with me at the entrance to the foyer.

“Sounds like the sunk cost fallacy to me,” I said.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “The cost is sunk, but that means that the marginal cost to complete a search of this place and get to the time chamber is low. We’ll stay together, search room by room, and it shouldn’t take us more than a day to find it. The cost is practically nothing, assuming that Kuum Doona doesn’t want to kill us, which I don’t believe it does.”

“On what grounds?” asked Fenn. “The fact that it hasn’t? I used to have a cat that would spend hours murdering mice, if I let her. She’d toss them around, injure them, run them down, and only dismember them when they’d stopped being entertaining.”

Amaryllis gave a little “mmm” sound as acknowledgement; it was a possibility.

“Either way, we should double tap those bodies,” I said. I held out a hand toward Fenn, and she tossed me a void pistol. She still hadn’t stepped inside Kuum Doona.

I walked toward the bodies, trying to push away the emotions that were encroaching on me. My least favorite thing about gem magic was that the feeling of mental exhaustion seemed to be fixed at percents, rather than at static intervals, meaning that being down in the bottom fourth of points, as presented by the meter in my HUD, gave me that dissociative, drifting feeling that I’d previously associated with either depression or not getting enough sleep. I was more sensitive to the world around me, more easily drawn toward memories and feelings than usual, not enough that I was a liability, but enough to be annoying.

I thought about the thunk of the void rifle when Amaryllis had executed Poul at the mechanic’s back in Comfort, the cold, mechanical way she’d done it, mirroring the detached way that I was moving. I thought about wry amusement at the game table as, once again, corpses and statues were desecrated so that they couldn’t come to life and hurt anyone, a task that Craig and Reimer had always approached with unbounded creativity. I thought about my grandfather in his casket, skin showing too much of his bones after a long battle with cancer, and the seven days we’d spent in South Dakota, waiting for him to die. The smell in the foyer was mercifully muted, with only a slight hamster-smell of mildew coming through, and that called me back to my first real pet.

I wasn’t even sure that shooting the corpses would do anything. If I’d been Reimer, I probably would have taken the time to break the corpses apart, separate the important bones from each other. Looking back on it, the work seemed kind of pointless, but no one had stopped me, they’d just had hushed conversations with each other

“You okay?” asked Fenn, as I was finishing up. Her hand touched my elbow.

“Yeah,” I said. “Overdid it on the gem magic. Not my best self right now.” I stopped. The question was slow to come to me. “Why? Acting weird?”

“A little bit,” said Fenn. “Combat fatigue, I was thinking.”

“Ah,” I said. “Plausible.” I idly wondered whether I would get a status update on that or not. It seemed like a textbook affliction, if it was one that I had.

“We just need to keep moving,” said Amaryllis. I hated when the helmet obscured her face. Maybe we would find a magic item that would make her helmet invisible. I put in a mental request to the Dungeon Master for that. “Find the time chamber, get me into it, that’s our only objective for the time being. Any left-behind heirlooms come second, and making this a permanent, secure base of operations comes third.”

“We should follow the blood,” I said, pointing to the trail that led away from the dismembered arms and legs. “That was done after he died, deliberately, moved to somewhere important.”

“It was hopefully done after he died,” said Fenn. “Aren’t you the one always talking about worst-case scenarios?”

“Yeah,” I said. “True.”

“There would be more blood,” said Grak, who had finally joined us. I turned my flashlight toward him, so I could see him, and noticed something disquieting.

“Did you close the door?” I asked.

He turned to face the door, along with Fenn and Amaryllis. It was firmly closed. “No,” he said.

“No theatrical slamming shut, trapping us in here?” asked Fenn. “I’m almost a little disappointed.”

“We should try to open it,” said Amaryllis.

“On the off-chance that would actually work,” I replied.

Grak moved forward and tested the door. It swung open freely, without any resistance, to reveal a wall of smooth rock.

“We’ve moved,” said Grak.

“Without feeling it?” I asked.

“Seems like,” said Fenn. “Meaning, if I understand you right, that we’re now trapped here unless we can find another way out?”

“Yes,” said Grak. “I might be able to negate the ward if we can find a seam. The exterior seam is blocked off to us. Normally there would be a defensible room on the inside, entrance and exit.”

“Well, I’ve got a bad feeling about -- fuck!” Fenn had her bow in hand, with an arrow coming from the glove shortly after it, and she had loosed an arrow before I could even see what she was looking at.

When I looked over, I saw that the decapitated head had rolled a few feet. An arrow pierced it through the eye socket, pinning it to the ground.

“It moved,” said Fenn. “It was rolling.”

“Rolling away from us?” asked Amaryllis.

“Yeah,” said Fenn. She walked over to the head, stepping carefully across the tile, and planted a foot on it before withdrawing her arrow. It was coated in black ichor; she tossed it to the side. When she lifted her foot up off the head, it stayed where it was, then began rolling again, toward the open door, following the path that had been marked by the trail of blood the torso had left.

“Are -- are we expected to follow that?” asked Fenn. “Like, this house legitimately expects us to follow after a rolling head?”

Another ghostly laugh echoed from down the hallway.

“We may be dumb, but we’re not that dumb,” said Fenn.

“I say we follow it,” I said.

“I agree,” said Amaryllis. “It’s a communication with this place, if an unconventional one. If we’re fighting against it, I’m not sure that we can achieve our goals here, especially not making this place into a lasting, fully secure stronghold.”

“You are insane if you think I’m spending the night here,” said Fenn. “Even one night, let alone actual downtime.”

“We may not have a choice,” said Grak, looking back to the door that opened onto stone.

We made our way down the hallway, slowly. I took the lead, because I could more easily take a hit, and Grak was just behind me, because he could see magic.

“This place has more magic in it than anything I’ve seen before,” said Grak. “Layered magic. Diverse. I think Juniper is right.”

“Right about what?” I asked with a frown.

“There is a thin thread of commonality running between the magic,” said Grak. “More thin than I would expect.”

“You’re talking about central themes?” I asked.

“No,” said Grak. He snorted slightly. “Yes. The magi would not like that interpretation.”

“Well I’m really not enjoying my time here so far,” said Fenn. “And this talk isn’t making me a whole lot happier about wandering around.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” said Amaryllis. “If we had known the house was a thinking entity, maybe --” She stopped and started again. “I need to know more, to understand why it got like this.”

“And why your ancestors lied to you?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “This place was listed in the family ledger as mothballed, closed down because of expenses, not a rogue entity. My great-grandfather has confirmed as much. It always seemed like more trouble than it was worth, not just to me, but to the others as well. At some point a link in the chain of custody broke. Or … was tampered with.”

“So we’ve got a family mystery added on top of that?” asked Fenn. “Yeah, really not helping. Mostly it’s the fact that we’re following a frickin’ rolling head around in pitch-black darkness nine miles underground, maybe that’s what’s got my goat.”

The head kept rolling. When we paused, usually so Grak could check something, it came to a stop and waited for us. Heads didn’t roll terribly well, as it turned out, given that they weren’t spherical, and so the movement of the head was interrupted sometimes when it caught on the eaten-away nose, or flipped over an ear, or got in a bad position on the warped boards. It had been scary when it had rolled away of its own volition, but there gradually came to be something comical about it. I wondered if that was by intent, or whether it was an attempt at being spooky that was falling flat.

We passed by doors and windows, most of them closed. By mutual agreement, we didn’t go through any doors, but we did shine our flashlights into the rooms, illuminating scenes of death and decay. Sometimes there were decayed bodies draped over the furniture, other times only stains. Dismemberment and mutilation seemed to be a running theme; someone’s finger had been cut off, or a hand was missing, or the eyes taken from their skull. I kept thinking that this fortress was basically a Superfund site, and even if the controlling intelligence of it could be brought to heel, or convinced to cooperate, it would take us months to clear it out and make it livable, not to mention the millions of obols it would probably take to replace warped or rotted boards, carpet, furniture, et cetera. It brought to mind cleaning out my aunt’s house after she’d passed, finding things that were ancient and shrunken. This place was littered with the dead, and something would have to be done about them. That was beyond all the work of adding in conveniences like electric lights and running water, neither of which I saw any sign of. That wasn’t too much of a surprise, given how old this place was.

The head rolled into a large room and came to a stop when it hit the leg of a dining table. Our flashlights moved around, taking the room in. The table was long and solidly built, able to seat at least a dozen, and while it dominated the place, there was also a bar along one wall, and a rotted couch and armchair sitting next to a fireplace. Above the mantle was a dusty tooth, big enough that I’d have probably had trouble picking it up.

Four shot glasses sat on the table, each filled with a clear liquid. We’d paused on them, wordlessly, for just a bit, then continued looking around to see what else the room had in store, or why we might have been brought here. I moved my light away from the table, pointing it to the rows of dusty bottles going twenty feet up to the ceiling, and the ladder you’d have to climb to get the stuff on the top shelf. When my flashlight swung back, crossing the table, there was a girl seated there.

It took me some time to recognize her, as the others shouted in surprise and moved into action. She was sixteen or seventeen years old, with long brown hair that was tied back in a ponytail; I had always liked the way it swished back and forth when she shook her head. She had a small mouth with thick lips; I could instantly remember what it was like to kiss her. It was cold in the house, and slightly damp, but she wore a t-shirt and short shorts, just like she’d worn every day in the summertime. She even had flip-flops on. As if to underscore it, the shirt was one that I’d known, “Kansas Swim” written on it, with a stylized icon of a woman swimming, caught mid-stroke. She’d been on the swim team; the shirt had been free, from a conference or organization or something.

Tiff.

Chapter 15 - The Face of a Place

“You’re an avatar of the house,” said Amaryllis. She had her arm on Fenn’s, holding the bow down in a position where Fenn couldn’t take the shot. From the way that Fenn tried to struggle, the immobility plate was doing the bulk of the work in making sure that Fenn didn’t shoot.

“Avatar carries specific connotations,” said Tiff. “I would prefer icon.” Hearing her voice sent a chill down my spine. The cadence was the same, the tone, everything as I’d remembered it. It was jarring though; there was none of the sadness that I’d grown accustomed to from her, that undercurrent of depression, and even before that, when she’d been happy, she’d never been so … imperious. I glanced down at her ankle; there was no tattoo there. It should have been a sigil that Arthur had made for one of our longer campaigns, a stylized cross at an angle, but it was missing.

“Can I ask what everyone else is seeing?” I asked.

“Young girl, my age, improbably clean, wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Kansas Swim’,” said Amaryllis.

“Your type, I’m guessing,” said Fenn with a pronounced frown. I wasn’t sure that I had ever described Tiff to her, but maybe she had made the connection anyway, given the t-shirt.

“Magic,” said Grak. “Entad magic. No skin, bone, or blood.”

“I’m looking at four adventurers in the classic mold,” said Tiff. She raised a finger and pointed at each of us in turn. “Warder, archer, brute, and muscle. How did I do?” I was apparently the muscle, while Amaryllis was the brute.

“I’m a multi-disciplinary mage,” I said. “Among other things.”

“Mary is the manager,” said Fenn. “I’ll give you a two out of four, that’s not half bad.”

“Manager isn’t one of the archetypal roles,” said Tiff.

“I’m not a manager,” said Amaryllis.

“Well, there you go,” said Tiff. She picked up one of the shot glasses, inspected it, and then put it back down. “Are you here on business or pleasure?”

“Your shirt,” I said. “It says ‘Kansas’ on it.”

“Yes.” Tiff nodded. There was no recognition in her eyes when she looked at me. There was something off about her, aside from the fact of where she was. It wasn’t just the tattoo that she was missing, there were other details that didn’t match up with how I remembered her. Her bottom teeth had been slightly crooked, not enough to justify braces, but enough that she’d mentioned it to me once as something she didn’t like about herself. This -- apparition, for lack of a better word, wasn’t quite right on that score. I tried looking for other details, and again found the simulacrum wanting. I’d loved Tiff intensely; on the nights we’d spent together, I had made a study of her.

This wasn’t Tiff, it was just meant to look like her, for whatever reason.

“We’re here on business,” said Amaryllis. “You’ve overheard as much, I’m sure. There’s supposed to be a time chamber somewhere in Kuum Doona --”

“I don’t like that name,” said Tiff.

“My apologies,” said Amaryllis. “Is there a name you’d prefer?”

“Zona, if you please,” said the avatar of the house, wearing Tiff’s form. I recognized the name, after a few seconds of it tickling my brain. Zona had been the name of Uther Penndraig’s wife. I was guessing that the pseudonym wasn’t a coincidence. As to the connotations though, that was harder to guess. He’d left his wife to go adventuring, cheated on her, if the stories were to be believed, either with or without her blessing. Loved her, maybe. I wasn’t sure what applied, if she’d taken her name from Uther’s wife. Or maybe by some strange magic, she was Uther’s wife.

“Sorry,” I said. “That form, are you stuck in it, or can you change it?” I noticed Amaryllis beside me stiffen slightly at the question.

“Why?” asked Zona, arching an eyebrow.

“It’s”—I shook my head—“complicated. Distracting.” Tiff, here in the flesh, wasn’t something that I needed at the moment. It was overwhelming me at a time when I was least capable of handling it.

“It bothers you?” asked Zona, raising an eyebrow. “Would you cut your hair if I said it looked stupid?”

“Uh, yes?” I asked. “I probably would.”

I didn’t understand why she looked like that. The obvious answer was Arthur, but that brought up all sorts of unpleasant thoughts. Kuum Doona had been his, five hundred years ago, and I had been hoping that I would get some insight into what had happened to him, or who he had been on Aerb, something more than the history books could tell me. But this … Tiff, as the avatar of Arthur’s home, or icon, in her words, said nothing good, and all the innocent explanations I could come up with rang hollow.

“There’s a time chamber somewhere here, isn’t there?” asked Amaryllis. “We have urgent need of it.”

“I’m not going to negotiate with you,” said Zona. She slumped in her chair and put her feet up on the table, just like Tiff used to do. “Her,” she said, pointing at Fenn. “She likes running her mouth, I think I’ll talk with her.”

“Um,” said Fenn. “Mary is, more or less, the talker.”

“Talker, manager, brute,” said Zona with a nod. She pointed a slender finger to me. “Your eyes keep going to him though. Juniper, like the tree.”

“He’s, ah”—Fenn’s eyes went to me—“my boyfriend.”

“With all due respect, the reason we need the time chamber,” began Amaryllis.

“No,” said Zona. “You.” She pointed at Fenn.

“Do you need to know why we need it?” asked Fenn.

“Yes,” said Zona.

“And if I don’t tell you, you’ll … ?” Fenn trailed off.

Zona tapped the table with a finger, looking between us. “Kill you all.”

Fenn nodded at that, as though that was the answer she’d expected. “I should say that I don’t really do well with being threatened. Like, burn this fucking place to the ground, that kind of don’t do well.”

Zona laughed; it echoed in from the room’s open doors, rather than coming from her mouth. “You think people haven’t tried that?”

“If I can just --” began Amaryllis.

Lightning crackled between Zona’s fingertips, and she gave them a look of idle curiosity. An arc went between thumb and forefinger twice in quick succession, making a sound that lingered in the air. “So,” she said, “this one”—pointing to Fenn—“doesn’t take to being threatened, and this one,” she said, pointing to Amaryllis, “doesn’t take to being given direction. I’m curious to see what your other faults are, as a group.”

Amaryllis’ mouth was set in a thin line.

“Amaryllis is pregnant,” I said. “It’s important that the baby is born within the next few days. And, I guess, ideally spends a few years growing up, maybe.”

“Oh,” said Zona, frowning. It really was a remarkable resemblance, but the ways that it didn’t quite match raised a lot of questions about how it had been created. Maybe if it had been perfect, I would have just accepted it as something pulled from Arthur’s mind by a magic he couldn’t control, but I didn’t think that he would have gotten Tiff’s frown wrong. “Why?”

“The child is going to be the last druid for the last surviving locus,” I said. I looked over and saw Amaryllis biting her lip hard. Too much information too fast, I was guessing.

“What happened to the loci?” asked Zona, frowning. Her eyes stayed focused on me.

“Uh,” I said. “The Second Empire wiped them out.”

“Hum,” said Zona, “I’d always thought them kindred spirits, of a sort.”

“This child is the best chance we have at saving the last of them,” said Amaryllis, touching her stomach, which was covered in plated armor. She was laying it on too thick, but that was just my perspective, and she was a better judge of character than I was ever going to be. She removed her helmet, the better to present as non-threatening; if the house could shoot lightning indoors, which seemed to be the threat, it wasn’t like the helmet was really going to help.

“Pray tell, what is a Dungeon Master?” asked Zona, shifting the conversation.

I glanced at Amaryllis. She was keeping her mouth shut. When I glanced at Fenn, she was looking at me. Grak didn’t seem to be focused that much on the conversation; he was looking at things that I couldn’t see, trying to solve some mystery of magic that remained, for the moment, invisible.

“You knew Arthur?” I asked.

Zona watched me for a moment, with Tiff’s eyes, searching. “Arthur?” she asked.

“Arthur Isaac Blum,” I said.

“No,” said Tiff, shaking her head, swishing her ponytail behind her. “He’s the Dungeon Master? And you ... think that I know him?”

I felt my heart sink. She was supposed to have the answers; the name was supposed to be a key that opened her up, the point of commonality, a secret that I shouldn’t possibly have known. It was a piece of information that I’d been saving in my back pocket for something like this, for someone who had known him intimately.

“No,” I said. “I thought that maybe … if you had known him, I would have been able to explain it better. A Dungeon Master is like a god, I guess. Like, um, Skaduwee?”

“I know my gods, thank you,” replied Tiff. No, Zona, not Tiff. It was hard to keep that straight when talking to her, listening to her voice, looking at her, it was just close enough to how she’d actually been that my mind was filling in the gaps, ignoring the places where it wasn’t right. She turned to Amaryllis. “You want to live in me.” She switched topics like she had an itinerary she was going through. Maybe she’d been listening in for long enough that she actually did have a list of the things that had caught her attention. It felt jarring though, as important topics were set to the side.

Amaryllis hesitated. “May I speak?” she asked.

Zona waved a lazy hand.

“We have need of a base of operations,” said Amaryllis. “We came here for the time chamber, and if we can leave, having used it, that will be enough that I would consider the trip well worth our time and resources. Our secondary reason was to gather the equipment that my ancestors left here for dire circumstances --”

“All of it gone,” said Zona.

Amaryllis nodded, not missing a beat, not pressing the point or asking the obvious follow-ups (gone to where? gone how?). “But our third criterion is to have somewhere that is well and truly secure from outside intrusion. This place is battle-hardened, with more in the way of capabilities than anyone seems to know, it has ancient, powerful wards, and, apparently, a governing intelligence that can manage all manner of issues that might arise, if you so choose. We haven’t gotten off to a great start, but I think that given some time to talk, we could find some common ground.”

Zona let out a puff of air. When I watched closely, I could see that she wasn’t actually breathing, which raised some questions about how she was actually making sounds. Magic, probably.

“I suppose,” said Zona. She looked at me for a moment, and it was just like Tiff used to look at me when she was trying to tease meaning out of me just by examining my face. Or maybe Zona was just giving me a look that was close enough for my addled brain to make the connection.

Zona gestured toward the shot glasses. “Here, this is the antidote.”

“Ah,” said Grak. “That’s what’s in the air. Poison.”

“Poison?” asked Fenn. “Are you shitting me?”

“You’ll be shitting yourself in about—” Zona looked down at her wrist. There was no watch there; that had been one of Tiff’s favorite jokes, looking at her bare wrist to pretend to check the time. “Twenty minutes, if you don’t drink up.”

“You can see it?” Amaryllis asked Grak.

“Yes,” said Grak. “Latent magic, infusing the water vapor. It was difficult to spot. I didn’t know what it was.”

“That ‘antidote’ might just be more poison,” said Fenn, pointing at the glasses. “I’m not the only one that gets that, right?”

Zona sighed. “I used to enjoy this,” she said.

“You enjoyed ... poisoning people?” I asked.

“Yes.” She nodded. She looked at the shot glasses. “Some I would kill on the approach, some I would let beat against the wards, some I would let inside, fool their warders into thinking that they’d pierced my defenses, and then …” She trailed off and tapped her fingers on the table.

“Rolling heads, creaking doors,” said Fenn. “Creepy laughter.”

“I apologize,” said Zona. “I gave you a half-hearted effort. If I’d been invested, one of you would probably have died while you were walking toward me. Something gruesome, maybe, or if not, then silent and unknowable, a throat slit for no apparent reason, by no apparent cause. It’s easier with bigger groups, killing one to make a point doesn’t weaken them enough that their will breaks entirely. That’s the worst, when they just spend their time here cowering and waiting for the end.”

“And that’s, ah, what you’ve been up to for the last few hundred years?” I asked. I was trying to keep the distaste from showing on my face. The bodies we’d seen in the hallways had been her handiwork, which I had already figured, but the way she put it was revolting.

“Do you find my behavior unbecoming?” asked Zona with a raised eyebrow. She looked to Fenn. “Your girlfriend was being quite the braggart about having killed hundreds of the tuung.”

“That’s -- that’s how she copes,” I said. “It’s not sport.”

“‘Sport’?” asked Zona. She frowned slightly, then turned to the shot glasses. Her finger touched the rim of one and she pushed, tipping it just to the point where the liquid inside threatened to spill onto the table. “I suppose so.” She took her finger away, and the shot glass fell back down, sloshing the liquid back and forth. “You should drink, not much time left until you start showing symptoms, and after that point, the antidote won’t undo the damage.”

I stepped forward and picked one of the glasses up, took a half-second to look at it, then downed it in a single gulp. It tasted like tonic water, with the same acidity to it, but none of the bubbles. I set the glass back down on the table, and gave Zona a nod.

“I’m fine playing guinea pig,” I said to the others.

“I don’t believe I’m familiar with the term,” said Zona. She was watching me closely.

“Oh, I’m dream-skewered,” I said. “I come from a place called Earth.”

“Juniper,” said Amaryllis. I could hear the pain in her voice. “Can we please just --”

“I’m acquainted with the phenomenon,” said Zona. She was watching me closely, and though I thought that was probably dangerous, I was also happy to capture her attention. She had answers that I desperately wanted, starting with why and how she looked like Tiff. “And yet a mage, for all that? One of many disciplines?”

“Joon, scenario?” asked Amaryllis.

“Still zero,” I answered, before turning back to Tiff. “I’m willing to talk if you are. From my understanding, we’ll have some time to kill while Amaryllis uses the time chamber. There are some things that I’m hoping you know.”

“Uther,” said Zona. The word came out leaden, tinged with a small note of hostility, though I couldn’t tell whether it was toward him or me.

“Yes, Uther,” I said. I felt Amaryllis put her hand on my elbow, warning me, but despite the muddled feeling that came with combat fatigue, mental exhaustion, the way I kept having trouble not seeing her as Tiff, and whatever else was going on, this felt like the right path to me. I hated deception, having to keep track of who was supposed to know what, phrasing things in just the right way as to deliver two different messages to two different people. It was exhausting, and prone to failure.

“Tell your friends to drink up,” said Zona.

Amaryllis was the first to step forward. She downed the antidote, if that’s what it really was, without so much as a trace of emotion or reaction. I hoped that whatever the poison was, it wouldn’t fuck up the pregnancy, and same for the antidote, which would hopefully be without side effects. Grak was next, wincing slightly at either the taste or the chance that he was being given a second poison. When I looked at Fenn, she folded her arms across her chest, then relented after a moment.

“I’m going to start making a list of complaints,” said Fenn. She strode forward and downed her shot in a single swift motion. “Just so that when we have an annual review, I can go through them one by one.”

“Annual review?” asked Grak.

“It’s an Earth thing,” said Fenn as she inspected the shot glass. I’m not sure what she was hoping to find, ‘you have been poisoned’ etched on the bottom? I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised by that; Arthur had given each of the group one of a set of glasses for Christmas, two years ago. Fenn set the glass back down without comment.

“We have annual reviews,” said Amaryllis. “I used to give them for my staff.” She turned to Zona. “We’re ready to go.”

◆◆◆

“Only very rarely was it all poison,” said Zona as we walked down a long hallway filled with doors. We were still using the flashlights, though she didn’t seem to need them, sometimes stepping around exposed nails before I could see them. “Sometimes it was only one of the cups, sometimes it was all but one, sometimes it was a mix. On occasion, none of them were poison, or I had elected not to put any poison in the air.”

“You can choose not to?” I asked. “Meaning that you were planning on killing us?”

“It seemed so rote,” said Zona. “You spoke of inhabiting me, which no one has considered an option for centuries. I thought perhaps my time of solitude punctuated by excitement had finally come to a close.”

“That I’m the most direct living descendant of Uther Penndraig had nothing to do with it?” asked Amaryllis.

“I am not a subject of Anglecynn,” said Zona. “I do not bow to its princes or princesses.” She turned left without warning, and I followed after her, trying my best to be unafraid. I was a little bit off-balance, mentally speaking, but fear was definitely making itself known, and it was hard to wipe away the sweat on my palms because the armor didn’t really help. I wore Ropey around my waist, but he was sentient too, and had saved my life back on the Down and Out, and I didn’t want him to suffer the indignity of me wiping my sweaty hands on him.

“Whatever historical animosity there is,” began Amaryllis.

Zona whirled around, forcing me to come to a stop. “I do not like you,” she said. “Your type was always the least likeable, of those who have made this place their graves. You pretend at being in control. You assert yourself. Sometimes this behavior is a facade, put on for the purposes of morale or social dominance, and sometimes it is simply the truth of a person, but either way I don’t find it becoming.” She turned back to the direction she’d been walking, but didn’t start moving. “There is no love lost between myself and the various Penndraig lines, but I will do my best not to hold that against you, so long as you don’t pretend you hold any special sway over me.” She started walking again, again without a word of warning, and I hurried to keep up as we passed through a bedroom with a rotted four-poster and went up a spiral staircase with flagstones that had been worn down in the middle.

“You should have mentioned how she’s too pretty,” said Fenn.

“That too,” said Zona with a laugh that came from everywhere at once.

“No bullying,” said Grak as he walked up the stairs. When I looked back at him, I was momentarily shocked to see that he was missing a hand; with everything that we’d gone through, I’d managed to forget.

“If anything, that was a compliment,” said Fenn.

We came out into a large room with two heavy doors set against one wall, and a few other passageways leading off from it. My eyes were drawn to the doors though, and the pillars of sand on either side of them. Set into one pillar was an hourglass, each bulb the size of my head, and all the sand at the top, pressed up away from the neck of it as though gravity were pushing it the opposite direction.

“Oh, thank the gods,” sighed Amaryllis as she reached the top of the stairs.

“You didn’t trust me?” asked Zona.

“I worried that it wouldn’t be charged, that you would have used it, or --” Amaryllis stopped, shaking her head.

“I have never wanted for time,” said Zona, deadpan. She stepped forward and touched the upper bulb, caressing the glass. “That aside, it has no effect on me, as I contain it. Things inside, when it’s running, move too fast for me to follow.” She gave the glass a tap with her finger. “Two hundred years stored up, ready for use.” She looked at us. “With conditions.”

Fenn swore under her breath.

“What conditions?” I asked, after Amaryllis had no response.

“I will be taking a full survey of your entads, including those within the glove,” said Zona. “From them, I will select three for myself, with some consideration to their utility and sentimental value to you.”

“Many of them are tied to our bloodlines,” said Amaryllis.

“I am aware,” replied Zona. She gestured at Amaryllis’ armor. “The Still Plate was commonly worn by Uther, during his time exploring the Boundless Pit. Is its value to you sentimental or practical? Mostly the latter, I would expect, given how you used it during your climb down to me.”

“It’s seen me through many trials,” said Amaryllis. She glanced at the rest of us, briefly taking stock of the entads that we had available to us, and which we might be able to afford losing, then back to Zona. “Such a survey would need to wait until after the most urgent of our business was concluded, and any negotiations as to which entads we’d gift you would get my full attention then.”

“Mary, come on, this is blackmail,” said Fenn. “You can’t honestly be thinking of bowing down.”

“As I see it, a gift is only fair,” said Amaryllis. “We’re speaking about a sentient creature making accommodations for us, allowing us to use its resources, and entering into partnership.” I couldn’t tell whether Fenn was serving as a devil’s advocate here, and the two of them were playing both sides, or whether Amaryllis was just making the best of Fenn’s objection. It did seem like Amaryllis was displaying a soft streak, and had been since Zona had made herself known. I had no real idea how much of that was an act.

“You call it a gift,” said Zona. “Curious, as that was not the word I used.”

“It’s reciprocity,” said Amaryllis. “But we need to use the time chamber first, and once the child has been born, at least one of us will need to leave and make our way back to the locus. The survey can take place in the interim, while the most pressing business with the locus is concluded. Obviously two or three of us staying here would allay any concerns you might have about us leaving without giving you your due.”

Zona frowned, then nodded slightly. “You’re too crafty by half.”

“And yet still less crafty than the world seems to demand of me,” replied Amaryllis.

Zona stepped over to the twin doors that led the way to the time chamber and opened them up. The interior was smaller than I thought; where I had pictured something like a gymnasium, this was more like a living room, and a somewhat small one at that, not much more than twenty feet by twenty feet across. It was curiously nondescript, and in much better repair than the other parts of Kuum Doona, with white walls, a white ceiling, and hardwood floors. Taken by itself, you might have been able to mistake it for being a room somewhere in middle America.

“I should give you warning: nine months spent in this small space will be a form of torture,” said Zona. “And of course, I presume that you’ve brought your own sources of food, water, air, and waste elimination, as well as ways of providing for your personal hygiene.”

“We have,” said Amaryllis. She was staring at the space, the small chamber where she’d be spending a significant fraction of her life. We hadn’t really had a discussion about who would be in there with us; I’d been assuming that we would all be in there together, but I’d also been thinking that the time chamber would be larger. “Time to cycle up and down?” asked Amaryllis.

“Five minutes and ten minutes, respectively,” said Zona.

“And the maximum rate it can attain?” asked Amaryllis, still looking at the chamber.

“One day every minute,” said Zona.

“Alright,” said Amaryllis. “That’s five hours for the pregnancy then. Weekly check-ins would add on another ten hours, approximately, and I’m not sure how much utility they would provide us. We’ll do them ad hoc then, or monthly, which ever comes first, that means two hours of cycling up and down, plus perhaps another hour if I need more assistance than I expect.”

“Hold the phone,” said Fenn. “Were you planning on being in there all alone?”

“Fenn, I’ve lived with you for long enough to know that I would literally kill you if I had to spend more than a week stuck in a small room with you,” said Amaryllis.

“You could try to kill me,” said Fenn. “I mean, the image of a pregnant woman attempting to waddle over and put a knife in my guts is pretty funny.”

“I have some experience as a midwife,” said Grak. “I would like to be in with you for the final two months. For the final month only, if you anticipate that I would grate on you.”

“You were a midwife?” asked Fenn. “But like, for dwarves, right?”

“One of my duties was attending births,” said Grak. “I participated in more than one hundred. I was not a midwife myself, only an assistant.”

“But … for dwarves, right?” I asked. “Anatomically …” I trailed off, because I didn’t know enough about dwarves to dispute it (and frankly, I was also pretty out of my depth when it came to human women).

“Do dwarves not lay eggs?” asked Fenn. “I could have sworn I read that somewhere.”

“We do not,” said Grak. “The primary role of the midwife is support. I can provide that in spite of anatomical differences.”

“For the last two months,” said Amaryllis. “You can be sure that I’ll do some reading on the subject, and provide relevant literature to Grak so that we can cover our bases.”

“Literature?” asked Zona.

“It means books,” replied Fenn.

Zona laughed, a booming laugh that echoed from all parts of the house. “I meant to express incredulity at the four of you figuring out the birthing process from books alone.”

“Fenn, I’m going to need the glove,” said Amaryllis.

Fenn sighed and slipped off Sable, then rested it reverently on Amaryllis’ outstretched hand. “You know, it’s my glove, we agreed to that way back when. Seems kind of unfair for you to take it for nine months.”

“I’m sure that somehow you’ll manage to survive,” replied Amaryllis.

She strode forward, into the chamber, seemingly unconcerned about her fate. Maybe she was happy to have some time to herself; I knew that her Grand Scheme for Modernizing Aerb would take shape in the time she spent in there, maybe even in another forty-five minutes, when a subjective month had passed for her.

As she turned to close the doors, she gave us one last look. “See you in a month,” she said.

And then she closed the doors, sealing herself off from us.

Chapter 16 - Head of House

Zona stepped forward and inspected the hourglass. The sand in it had begun to move, swirling around at the top, but not yet descending through the neck. “She reminds me of him,” said Zona. She turned toward me. “Headstrong. Fearless.”

There were a lot of words I might have used to describe Arthur, but ‘fearless’ was not one of them. Of course, it wasn’t a word that I would have used to describe myself either, but I was sure that from certain outside viewpoints, that was how people might have talked about me. Some of it was the sheer durability that magic offered me, and some of it was the tint of unreality that still sometimes seemed to hang over everything like a fog. A part of it was just that I’d been through a lot, and had a better bearing on what I could and could not handle.

“You wanted to know about him?” asked Zona. “There are certainly things that I can tell you. We have a fair amount of time to talk, while we wait.”

“I had other questions,” said Grak.

Zona raised an eyebrow, and looked to me for a response.

“Pressing questions?” I asked.

“More pressing than the fate of a man who has been missing for five hundred years,” said Grak.

I held my tongue and waved for him to continue. Fenn came to stand closer to me, and laced her fingers through mine. Her fingers were slender, callused from using her bow, and now familiar. I knew she didn’t really understand what Arthur had meant to me, but at least I could count on her for support.

“Warders are always troublesome,” said Zona with a sigh. “Have you guessed at what you spoke of before?”

“You mean the unifying theme?” asked Grak. Zona nodded. “No,” he replied. “I am missing something there. No, I wanted to ask about the manipulation of the wards.”

“Yes?” asked Zona.

“You said that you had an ability to alter them,” said Grak.

“Yes,” replied Zona.

Grak shifted. He didn’t seem terribly skilled at this sort of dialogue. “How?” he finally asked. “It is theoretically impossible for an entad.”

“Are the theories still so woefully inaccurate?” asked Zona. She wore a wry smile, the kind that people use as a more polite way of laughing in someone’s face.

Grak let out a long breath through his wide nostrils as he watched her. “You do not have a soul,” he said.

“One does not need a soul,” replied Zona.

“For concordance one does,” replied Grak. “There must be something spent to create a ward.”

“In theory, yes,” replied Zona, still smiling.

“You do not have the implements,” said Grak.

“If you mean a monocle and a wand, I have both,” said Zona. “Several of each, as it happens.”

“Is this actually important?” asked Fenn. “Because if it is, you can go on, but I’ve got my own questions.” I looked at her, and saw discontent written on her face. I was worried about where her line of questioning was going to go. I’d been pretty free with information, but I really didn’t want the topic of Zona’s look-alike to come up, and I was pretty sure that was where Fenn was heading.

“It is important,” said Grak. “It concerns our safety.”

“I have stood, uncontested, for centuries,” said Zona.

“Breached, a number of times,” said Grak.

“By my own will,” replied Zona.

“Why?” asked Grak.

“Not actually sport?” asked Fenn.

“Information,” said Zona. Her face twisted into a pronounced frown as she said the word. “Do you really intend to live here? Even with all you’ve seen? Even with the state of me? Even though I was planning on killing you, and made some effort toward that end?”

“We have a quest,” said Fenn.

“From whom?” asked Zona. She looked between us for a moment. “Ah, the Dungeon Master, naturally.”

“Naturally,” I said. “And yes, we had intended to make this our base of operations. Amaryllis still does, apparently. Normally this is the sort of thing we’d take a vote on. Right now I’m not sure how that vote would shake out. If you weren’t hunting people for sport, I’d like to know, because as it stands, I’m on the side of wanting to get out of here after an equitable exchange of resources.”

Zona watched me. “Why does my form bother you?” she asked.

“That’s a long story,” I said. “Maybe one that you’d find illuminating. You’re changing the subject though.”

“I answered,” said Zona. “Information. There were elements of sport, naturally, a desire to inflict my awesome power upon people who had come to do me harm, or at the very least, to steal from me. I won’t pretend that I didn’t find that aspect of it enjoyable. It was retribution, revenge. But there were other reasons as well, and one of those reasons was so that I could gather information. Usually I would leave one alive, or two if I could separate them without too much trouble, then appear before them and make them answer my questions about the state of the world. That became less important once I acquired a radio from one of the raiding parties, but I’m old-fashioned, and still like to hear straight from the horse’s mouth from time to time.”

“So you … kept people alive, tortured them, for information?” I asked.

“I suppose that doesn’t make you feel any better about living inside me?” asked Zona.

“It helps,” said Fenn. “You’re callous and cruel, but you’re not mindless about it. I thought maybe this was all a setup for some kind of horror show, like we’d open the time chamber back up and Mary would be flayed against a wall, and you’d start cackling.”

“Oh, certainly I’ve done things like that,” said Zona. “A door slams shut, trapping one member of a party away from the others, and I go to work making a display of their death to whatever extent I’m able, so that when the main group comes to the rescue of their fellow, he’s a macabre display of arteries and organs. You’ll have to clean up a few of those, they’re scattered around the rooms, which is another point in favor of my having permanent residents again, I suppose.”

I felt a chill go down my spine. Zona was, for most intents and purposes, a haunted house, a malevolent intelligence that had killed maybe as many as hundreds of people. I didn’t think that she was a threat to us, at least at the present moment, but I couldn’t see wanting to stay here. If it was true that she couldn’t see inside the time chamber, maybe I was going to have to figure out a way I could get in there and have a private conversation with Amaryllis.

“Have I answered your questions, dwarf?” asked Zona.

“No,” said Grak. “Many questions remain.”

Zona nodded. “All the same, this line of conversation begins to bore me, and there are certain topics which, I’m sure you’ve noticed, I wish to avoid.” She turned to Fenn. “But you don’t want to delve into the esoterica of warding, do you?”

“No,” said Fenn. I squeezed her hand, trying to warn her away from talking about Tiff, but she squeezed my hand back, either misunderstanding, or rejecting my request. She looked over at me. “Joon, ask her, or I will.”

Zona looked at me, waiting.

I let out a sigh. “Do you know whose form you’re wearing?” I asked.

Zona didn’t respond. She had gone still, not just deathly still, but frozen in place, like a movie had been paused. No breath, no pulse, no minute movements of the clothes.

“I’m … something of a scholar when it comes to the Lost King,” I said. “I know Uther Penndraig better than most people do. The resemblance … I don’t know if you pulled it from his mind, or his dreams, or his memories, but --”

“His drawings,” said Zona, coming back into motion.

“Ah, right,” I replied. “I’d forgotten he was an artist.”

“Unusual, for a scholar to forget a detail like that,” said Zona. She was staring at me with a piercing intensity that was unlike any expression Tiff had ever worn, even at her most worked up. “You’re dream-skewered.”

“Uther was too,” I said. “And I knew him, back on Earth.”

Zona went still again, not moving so much as a hair. This continued for long enough that Fenn and I shared a glance.

“Did you break our house on our first day here?” asked Fenn.

“You were going to say it if I didn’t,” I said.

“Not the whole bit, just, she’s Tiff, right?” asked Fenn. “We come nine frickin’
miles down into the Boundless Pit, walk past death, destruction, and mystery, and who else could it be but your ex-girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” I said with a sigh.

“She’s not like I thought she’d be,” said Fenn. “Physically, I mean. I thought she’d be more … Amaryllis Penndraig. Prettier.”

“She was …” I tried to think about how to put it diplomatically. “She was pretty by the standards of our high school, which had a graduating class of about a hundred fifty people. So, maybe in the top quarter of a cohort of seventy-five girls? Whereas Amaryllis is --” I stopped, realizing what I was about to say before I said it, but not early enough that my train of thought wasn’t left hanging in the air for anyone to see. Fenn didn’t look upset, only exasperated. “Amaryllis is tailored to my tastes, probably deliberately tailored, just like you are.”

“You are speaking too freely,” said Grak.

Fenn looked over at Grak, then at Zona. She reached forward and snapped her fingers a few times in front of Zona’s still face, then poked her once in the shoulder. The finger went straight through.

“It’s okay,” said Fenn. “Joon broke her.” She turned back to me. “You really think Mary’s the prettiest woman in the world?”

“No,” I said with a sigh. “I think that --”

“We have more important things to discuss,” said Grak.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Any insights into exactly what we’re dealing with here?”

(I was going to say that Amaryllis was exactly tailored to my tastes, and my tastes were sufficiently generic that she’d beat out a lot of other women because of that, especially since a lot of it was just physical fitness, youth, and health, which cut out maybe ninety-nine percent of the competition from the word go. Beauty was subjective enough that there wasn’t really such a thing as the prettiest woman in the world (though maybe you could figure it out through pairwise rankings, if you had that kind of data to work with, but that came down to voting systems, and different processes would give different results). I did think that Amaryllis was pretty, pretty enough to stop me in my tracks sometimes, but I’d come around on Fenn’s particular charms, and whatever the chemical goop in my brain was doing, it was making her more attractive to me. You know how they say that some children have faces that only a mother could love? That was a real thing, parents getting blinded to what their children looked like because of the hormones and internal, mysterious brain processing.

That was the kind of thing that read as romantic to me, but probably wouldn’t have come out right, or been taken in the spirit in which it was intended.)

“Have you heard the phrase meta-entad?” asked Grak.

“No,” I replied. “But from the word, it would be a magic item that chiefly affects other magic items?”

Grak nodded. “They’re almost always powerful. It would explain several points which have been confusing me.”

“Like why she’d want our stuff, and what happened to the things that were supposed to be here,” said Fenn. “Also the mutilated corpses. The guy in the lobby was missing his torso because she cut a breastplate off him.”

It fit, from what I could see. Exactly what she was doing with the entads was anyone’s guess, but the grab-bag of powers she seemed to have available to her suddenly made sense. The question of central theme was also solved in a single stroke; there was no theme, but there was a meta-theme.

“Huh,” I said. I was trying to think right, and while I was better than I’d been when we first walked in, I still wasn’t my usual self, not as sharp as I normally was. I was going to need some rest, sooner rather than later. “Okay,” I said. “That’s actually really helpful to know.”

“It’s a theory,” said Grak.

“Well, sure,” I said with a gesture in his direction. When my hand fell, I let it touch the top of the rope that was wrapped around my waist. I tried to think back. Had Ropey moved at all since we’d come into Kuum Doona? He’d saved my life on the ship, but after that … I didn’t think we’d revealed him. Naturally if Zona could see magic like a warder, she’d know that the rope was magical, but I wasn’t sure that a warder’s analysis of magic was good enough that she’d be able to know specifically what kind of magic. Grak could make some guesses, but not outright crack the code. “My guess is the process is unrecoverable, which means that it’s hard to test, but I kind of wonder what would happen if we had a sentient magic item to give to her.”

“It is hard to say,” replied Grak with a subtle nod in my direction. “Amaryllis did not believe this place was any more intelligent than a dog. An increase in intellect could explain the discrepancy. We do not know enough to say.”

“But if all that is true, why was it not in the family ledgers?” asked Fenn with a frown. “She said that her great-grandfather didn’t know much more than she did. So where does the false story come from?” She looked at Zona, still frozen in place. “And why does she look like your ex-girlfriend? And what got her so pissed off at Uther?” She snapped her fingers in front of Zona a few times. “I’m ready for her to wake back up.”

But she stayed like she was for another few minutes while we twiddled our thumbs, waiting for Amaryllis’ first round in the time chamber to be done. I was thankful that it was controlled from the inside, as otherwise Zona being incapacitated (or distracted) might mean that I’d have to figure out how to control it on the fly. As it was, we were just waiting, with enough time left that I was bored, but not enough time that I could really do anything productive, especially not when the glove and most of our equipment were inside the time chamber. There was also Zona to worry about; the avatar wasn’t moving, but that didn’t mean we could speak freely, especially because it was conceivable that it was a ploy.

When the time chamber was done spinning up (or whatever it needed to do to get up to speed), the grains of sand began to fall, slow enough that my eyes could track them individually. It wasn’t terribly interesting to watch, but I gave it a once over, mostly in the interests of gathering whatever information there was to gather. The hourglass seemed to serve as both a meter of time remaining and the state of the chamber. It was as the grains of sand began to fall more slowly that Zona returned.

“He was dream-skewered,” said Zona. She was standing in front of me, not having bothered to pretend that she needed to cross the intervening distance to get from one place to another. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does,” I said. “You listened to him speak, you probably read the stories if you didn’t hear them firsthand, there was always something otherworldly about him.”

“I don’t mean that,” said Zona. “The evidence backs it up, the conclusion is inescapable once you’re looking for it, but … the dream-skewered aren’t special, they don’t have any unique aptitudes. This was his home for the better part of a year, I saw him with his closest friends and confidants. His Knights. They never mentioned it. He never spoke of it. We were … we were close, this is”—she gestured toward her form, Tiff—“You knew her.”

“I did,” I said with a nod. “And I would be willing to tell you about her, if you’d like, and about him, as I knew him.”

“If I told you what I knew in exchange.” Zona nodded.

“No,” I said. “Not in exchange. There’s a … do you know the phrase 'gift economy'?”

“Of course,” said Zona.

“I’d like for us to have that,” I said. “We do things for each other because that’s how we choose to interact with each other, rather than because there are explicit agreements that we’re at risk of violating. Uther meant something to you, even if you ended up hating him, or if your relationship status was just ‘it’s complicated’.”

“Juniper already talks about them constantly anyway,” said Fenn. I gave her a betrayed look. “And I do like that,” Fenn continued. “Just saying.”

The door of the time chamber creaked open, revealing Amaryllis. She had changed, in the month she’d been in there, forty-five minutes or so for us. Her hair had grown out and the dye had faded, leaving it a somewhat unattractive muddle of color, red at the roots, light brown further down, all of it tied back in a ponytail. She was back in her pink “Princess!” shirt, now somewhat worse for the wear, faded and worn in. She gave us all a warm smile, which wasn’t dampened by the scowl that Zona directed her way.

The chamber behind her was no longer clean and bare, but it wasn’t really messy either. There was a desk that I was pretty sure had been stolen from Weik Handum, which was covered in books and papers set in neat stacks. Most of the books had a half-dozen colorful bookmarks in them. The bed was along another wall, a simple, small thing that I thought Fenn might have stolen from one of the hotels we’d stayed at, neatly made and pressed clean. There was a kitchen area, which I hadn’t expected; Amaryllis had the backpack, which had as much food as she could possibly want, and I had been assuming that she would feed herself with takeout or fast food. But no, there was a small, single-burner stove set on top of a small table, with a sink beside it that was fed from a jug of water overhead, and drained into a different jug beneath. There were plants as well, I was interested to note, sitting under grow lights and stacked up on racks to the ceiling. I couldn’t see what she’d been using for showers or waste elimination, but with the glove, there wasn’t really a reason to keep the room in the same configuration all the time. The chamber looked small, with all her stuff in it, claustrophobically so.

“I’ve been waiting for this all week,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. She walked forward and gave Fenn a hug, then Grak, and then me. Was this the first time we’d ever hugged? I thought it might have been.

“Well, you didn’t go insane,” said Zona with a glance around the time chamber.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “You could have warned me about the cats.”

“Ah,” said Zona. “As it happens, I didn’t know they went in there.”

“It’s fine,” said Amaryllis. “A benefit, actually.”

“Cats?” I asked.

“Cats,” replied Amaryllis. “Whenever you open up a book and read from it, a cat will appear, sitting on the pages.” She shrugged. “I met a lot of cats. A lot. Not really a problem, since you can move them to your lap.”

Tome of Cat Summoning. I remembered that one fairly well, though I seemed to remember cribbing it from somewhere. That was another point in favor of Grak’s theory. If the Tome of Cat Summoning had been translated into Aerb as an entad, and Zona had eaten it, that had some interesting implications for how her power actually worked. I’d have to talk about it with Grak later, if I got a chance to. I was assuming that everything we’d said while she was frozen had still been overheard, that was plain common sense, but there were limits to what I wanted to say in front of her.

“Well, I missed you,” said Fenn. “Longest forty-five minutes of my life.”

“Feeling alright?” asked Grak.

“Physically, fine,” said Amaryllis. “I probably wouldn’t even be able to tell I was pregnant at this point if I didn’t already know. Blood pressure is fine, heart rate is fine. I have a variety of deployable packages, it’s how I’m managing the internal space so the chamber can become different rooms. The medical package is fairly comprehensive, and everything I’ve been able to test has come back within normal parameters. I’d have come out if it hadn’t.”

“And emotionally?” I asked. “The isolation didn’t get to you?”

“I had the cats,” said Amaryllis. “They helped. Children’s books make kittens. And”—she glanced at Zona—“if I ever really needed conversation, there was Cyclamine.” It took a moment to remember who the name belonged to: her great-grandfather. “We’re sort of starting to understand each other, I think. But I’m glad for the reprieve, even if it’s not going to last long.” She glanced back at the time chamber, where she’d made her home for a month. A frown crossed her face before she turned back. “How have things been here? Keeping out of trouble?”

“They told me that Uther was dream-skewered,” said Zona.

“Ah,” said Amaryllis. I’d been worried that she’d be disappointed, or that we’d have another post-facto conversation about letting people in on things that weren’t common knowledge, but there was just that “ah”, as in, “ah, figured it would be something like that”.

“That’s it?” asked Fenn. “Not that I was hoping to piss you off, but, you know, pissing you off is one of life’s great pleasures.” She gave me a look. “Also, it was Juniper’s fault.”

“It’s fine,” said Amaryllis. “You forget that I had a month to think about things. I made a list of all the worst things you could possibly have said, and -- I know that Juniper is quick to trust, he told me pretty much everything as soon as we met. This wasn’t anywhere near a worst-case scenario.”

“The worst-case scenario would be that all of us were dead, right?” asked Fenn.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis, with a glance toward Zona. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Zona. “It seems sensible to worry about. I’ve done it in the past.”

“Can you stop saying things like that?” asked Fenn.

“You put someone in the chamber and then killed their group?” I asked.

“Sometimes it was a long game,” said Zona. “Splitting people up, or waiting for them to do it on their own, making as visceral a presentation as I could for when they found the bodies.” She paused slightly, seeming to ignore our expressions (distaste, horror, calm analysis). “The killing was always the most difficult part of it, making sure that the body fell correctly, that the spray of blood wouldn’t give the game away until the perfect moment, that it would be artful.” She looked at Amaryllis. “I wasn’t going to do it, but if I had, the hard part would have been the time constraint, trying to get something in place for maximum effect before you came back out.”

“Well,” said Amaryllis. “We do appreciate that you didn’t do it.”

“Oh, I know that none of you will understand it,” said Zona. “There was an art to it, to creating the beautifully disturbing, in touching down to someone’s soul by breaking apart another person in front of them. It was grotesque and morbid, inhuman.”

“I understand it,” I said. Zona gave me a look. Doubt was the wrong word: that would imply that there was some uncertainty on her part. She flatly didn’t believe me. She didn’t believe me with all the conviction I’d ever seen on a person’s face. “Not the whole thing, not killing people like you did, even if they were invaders, even if you were within your rights --”

“Entads don’t have rights,” said Zona.

I turned to Amaryllis. “Is that true?”

“Legal frameworks are complicated,” replied Amaryllis.

“So if I --” I stopped myself, having almost said Ropey’s name. I reached down and pulled out one end of the rope, which came away limply in my hand. “Here, if this entad were intelligent, if it were a thinking thing, you’re saying that there would be no legal repercussions for me injuring it?” I hoped that toed the line well enough, passing the right message on to Amaryllis. She gave no sign of recognition, though I wouldn’t have expected her to. I didn’t dare risk looking at Zona.

“It’s complicated, Juniper,” said Amaryllis. “The Empire of Common Cause operates under a legal framework that’s meant to govern interaction between polities, and which has slowly crept into everyday life -- lots of parallels with your own United States, actually, minus the Civil War. The individual polities then have their own legal systems, some of which have been copied from others, some of which are descendants of different traditions, some of which have bits of law grafted on from others, it’s an absolute mess, worse than anything on Earth. And yes, in a lot of places, entads are property, period, even if they have a clearly identifiable will of their own that goes contrary to whatever owner they have. Sentient entads are rare though, truly independent ones even more so. The legal reforms needed to get all the mortal species on the same playing field were monumental as it was, and not even fully complete within the Empire. You’re talking about laws that would apply to, at most, dozens? There’s no incentive to get the wheels of legislature turning, very few advocates, it’s … complicated.”

“Do you remember monologuing about the politics of imperial law at the Kindly Bones?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis, smile going a little wider. “And yes, it’s sort of the same thing.”

Back then, she had been talking in order to cover for me, to both get Bormann’s attention on a different topic, and to communicate to me that I should shut my mouth about things that might give me away. Here, she was using the comparison to say the same, not that I should shut up, necessarily, but that she understood what I was getting at, if maybe not the motive.

“Well, I couldn’t ask for a better exposition fairy,” I replied, as I tucked the limp rope back in place.

“You were saying how you understood me,” said Zona.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry we got derailed, I was saying … I know what it’s like to create things meant to hurt other people, to, I don’t know, engineer everything so that there’s as negative an impact as possible. The grotesque, the macabre. It was fiction, but --”

“Fiction,” said Zona, dismissive, as though swatting away a fly.

“Yes,” I replied, swallowing. I was less sure of the comparison now than when I’d started, but she’d been speaking to something I thought I understood. “I’m talking about the desire to hurt people, not physically -- I mean, that too -- but to inflict things on them, to make something,” I shook my head. “Sorry, we can talk about this later, maybe, I’m not getting across what I wanted to.”

“Or you’re speaking nonsense,” said Zona. “Which do you think is more probable?”

Fel Seed, I wanted to say, but it would take too much to explain, because I’d have to give too much background, and obviously I hadn’t killed anyone with my D&D campaigns, or tortured anyone, all I’d really done was lash out at my friends. It wasn’t a competition, but even so, I couldn’t compete. All I’d really wanted to say was that I understood the impulse, and that it was a human one.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m still shaking off the aftereffects of fighting the tuung, excuse me.”

“Juniper is the architect of Aerb,” said Fenn.

Amaryllis sighed.

“Architect?” asked Zona. “Meaning?”

“The dream that skewers,” said Amaryllis. “In Juniper’s dream of Earth, he was a prolific creator, responsible for making all the worst elements of our world.”

“Fiction,” said Zona, this time less certainly.

“Fiction.” Amaryllis nodded. “Of a sort. It’s allowed him to have knowledge here, in our world, that he shouldn’t have had.” She looked back toward the time chamber. “You can’t enter?”

“No,” said Zona. “I can sense you in there, moving too fast to follow, but if I tried to appear, you’d see nothing more than a still image. You were planning to speak to me privately?”

“It was the time more than the privacy,” said Amaryllis. “If Juniper wants to read you in on everything, it’s going to take … days, probably, days that I’ll have available to spend, if I could do it in his place.” She shrugged. “If it’s not possible, that’s not a problem, we intend to be here for the long haul, so long as you find that acceptable. I imagine you prefer the others anyway.”

Zona stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “You’re less eager for praise than your archetype.”

“Thank you,” said Amaryllis with a nod.

“Aww, are you two friends now?” asked Fenn. “What a difference a month makes, right?”

“I missed you,” Amaryllis said to Fenn. She looked back to the time chamber. “I told myself that I would make the check-up short though.”

“I don’t think a half hour is going to make the difference,” I said. “If you need … I don’t know, people, or maybe space.”

“With respect, I don’t think a half hour is going to make the difference for or against my sanity,” said Amaryllis. “What I really need is a few hours, maybe a whole day, a meal shared with people, listening to others talk, time for all the pent-up thoughts to leak back out into the world -- and we can’t be confident that we have the time for proper decompression, not if I do it nine times. And if Solace needs time to grow up, then we might be talking about dozens of days.”

“Come out early if you need to,” I said.

“The check-ins are meant for evaluation,” said Amaryllis. “Or at least, that’s what I’ve come to think about them in the month I was in, I suppose we didn’t really have a long conversation about it. If I’m acting weird, if you think I’m close to cracking, the three of you can tell me and make a new schedule, or figure out something else that you think would work for me, whether that’s a longer stay on the outside, or having one of you come in.” She glanced back at the time chamber. It was becoming something of a nervous tic. “It’s a small space though, and my self-evaluation is that between my cats and my great-grandfather, I’ve been getting enough socialization to get by.”

Grak was the first to move over and give her a hug, but she got one from Fenn shortly after that, and from me last, which felt awkward, especially because she seemed to linger for a moment after I’d stopped hugging her. She had never been big on touching; I had half a mind to look into her soul to make sure that it hadn’t been tampered with somehow, but that was just the socially inept part of me talking.

When she finally pulled back, she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess the mood swings have made themselves known.”

“If you need more time,” began Grak.

“No,” said Amaryllis. She took a step back toward the time chamber’s open doors, and looked between us as though taking a mental snapshot. “See you all in another forty-five minutes.”

With that she went back in and closed the doors, leaving us to wait once again.

“Am I the only one thinking that there’s no way that she’s going to make it the full nine months, let alone however long it takes to get Solace up and running?” asked Fenn. “She’s going to snap.”

“She came out without her armor,” said Grak. “That was sloppy.”

“The armor wouldn’t have protected her from me,” said Zona.

“Your exact abilities are a mystery,” said Grak. “Amaryllis is one to take paranoid precautions.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’d have considered the edge case where she needed to spring into battle the moment she opened up the door, and worn her armor.”

“She’ll crack like an egg,” said Fenn. “Now me, I’m fine with being alone, but that’s the difference between a fake princess and a real princess for you.” There was a little bit of edge to her tone that I couldn’t quite account for. I knew her well enough to be on guard when she was making too many jokes, but I wasn’t of the right mindset to figure her out.

“We should start making some contingency plans,” I said. “For if the time chamber doesn’t work out as planned.”

“If the pregnancy is what’s at issue, you could sedate her,” said Zona. “A human can survive that, if their other needs are attended to.”

“Welp, that’s a new nightmare to add to the pile,” said Fenn. “Sedated for the duration of a pregnancy? Are you trying to make me nauseous?” She stopped for a moment. “Wait, are you?”

Zona only smiled.

“We will discuss plans with Amaryllis if problems arise,” said Grak. “Or use the time chamber to work on a solution.”

“In the meantime, I’d like to hear more about Earth,” said Zona. “About Uther.”

“I’m kind of in the same boat,” I replied. “Wanting to know about Uther. The locus … that’s not really our purpose, as a group, it’s just -- something that happened along the way. It’s important, yes, but it’s not what brought us together. If there’s an endpoint for us, a meaning, it’s in finding the Lost King.”

Zona looked at me, weighing me. “Alright, we have the time. Let me tell you about Uther Penndraig.”

Chapter 17 - An Open House

When Omar Antoun became obsessed with the idea of building a house at the edge of the Boundless Pit, it had been a different world. There was no such thing as the Commoner’s Guide, or The Book of Blood. There was no printing press to churn out such books and make them affordable to the average person. There was very little in the way of organized research, outside of the ancient athenaeums, and very little in the way of public education to deliver the findings of that research to the masses. Of course, the world was less connected too, and so things that were common knowledge in one place weren’t always common knowledge in another, and given the state of civilization, common knowledge was often wrong, the product of anecdote and superstition.

Omar Antoun had been a simple carpenter who made his trade in putting up barns, or more often, making repairs in exchange for coin. He’d had a small shop in a mid-sized city, twelve thousand people, give or take, large by the standards of the time, with an assistant and an apprentice, a well-worn collection of tools, and a mule he used to transport lumber and equipment for the smaller jobs that didn’t need a full wagon. He was a humble, soft-spoken man, unmarried and old enough that people assumed he would be a lifelong bachelor, which both raised some eyebrows, and attracted some attention to the apprenticeship he offered, as young men hoped that they might have the business left to them when Omar was too old to work.

The precise pathology of a forge frenzy varied, but for Omar it was slow to come into full force. It started with a sketch on a piece of paper, with detail added in bit by bit over the course of a day. It was tall and proud, narrowing slightly as it rose, the floors overlapping each other so that moving from one side of the place to another needed short, connecting stairways. It eschewed symmetry, aside from the central vertical line that everything was arranged around, but there was still something deliberate in the placement of the structural elements, a thought and care that allowed one piece to flow into the next.

Omar had considered it a flight of fancy when he was drawing it, not realizing how much of his time he was spending on the sketch. He’d followed it with other sketches, elaborations on the basic design, embellishments on the interior details, notated with measurements and plans for construction, ideas on what materials would be used. It was going to have a directionality to it, the front of it facing out to look at something. The Boundless Pit was twenty miles away, down the Buol; as a flight of fancy (or what felt like one), Omar drew another sketch with his house placed there, the windows of its many rooms facing toward that endless hole in the ground. When he was finished with the drawing, he sat back in his chair, and knew that he had to build it.

Forge frenzy wasn’t known or recognized in the city where Omar made his home. If asked where entads came from, you might get those in the know talking about a muse, or describing a mystical experience, or a connection with the gods, or some similar thing. Perhaps a few dozen of the city’s ten thousand people would have created an entad, and so would have been able to empathize with the intense desire he found himself afflicted with. But even then, most entads were small things, the work of anywhere from days to weeks. Jars, daggers, or even rope were simple to create for an artisan with all the tools at hand, even if they needed more exotic materials or techniques.

Omar cancelled jobs, or postponed them indefinitely. Where he could get away with it, he pawned them off on his assistant and apprentice. He abandoned the shop entirely and spent funds he didn’t have to travel to the Boundless Pit, where he selected a site in short order and began clearing the area so he could create a foundation. He had always been an honest, upstanding man, which meant that there were favors to call in and reputation to spend. Within six months, he was virtually bankrupt, living in the first two rooms of the place he called Kuum Doona, on a foundation that had barely been completed.

From the outside, Omar’s obsession with this building read as a man with no wife or children realizing that he was going to leave no lasting legacy and panicking to get something done.

Six years after he’d started work on Kuum Doona, Omar Antoun was still working on his building, a project that any outside observer would immediately surmise would remain unfinished when Omar reached the end of his life. He lived simply, eating only enough bland food to survive, wearing threadbare clothes, a wild animal of a man. Kuum Doona required materials he could never hope to acquire, and labor he could never secure.

And that was when Uther Penndraig entered the picture.

Uther came riding a spectral steed, faster than the winds, his companions following close behind him on steeds of their own. He wore a resplendent plate that seemed to capture every ray of the sun, the thorny crown of Anglecynn, and a five-foot blade, edge exposed to the air, strapped across his back.

He had finished his negotiations with the King of Mosenol, bringing that country into the fold of the First Empire, an adventure in its own right. At the conclusion of those proceedings, he had decided to see the Boundless Pit as something of a diversion. He’d seen the half-finished building and approached it, curious, which was where he met Omar. Met is, perhaps, a strong word; Omar did not want to waste breath on speech, he wanted only to work, to do what he was able. His answers were curt and perfunctory, or sometimes absent entirely, as he ignored questions he didn’t deem germane to the topic of the building. Things flowed more smoothly once Uther joined in the work; the King of Anglecynn and Secretary General of the First Empire did menial labor on the orders of a man most people thought was insane.

Forge frenzy was not entirely foreign to Uther Penndraig, though it wasn’t a field of study in those days, and this was before he had experienced the phenomenon firsthand. He had spoken to more than a few of the frenzied, though none that were in the process of creation, only after the fact. The actual lived experience was always somehow warped in reflection as the frenzied tried to come to terms with the pull of it, and the fact that they’d created something they could not comprehend. Omar presented a special case at a moment when Uther was ready to have his interest piqued, and so the King of Anglecynn delayed his grand tour of Aerb to spend a few days on investigation.

He returned the next day, having spoken with a number of people in the area and tracked down Omar’s former assistant, now de facto (though not de jure) owner of the carpentry business. Uther brought with him a contract, written by the authority of the King of Mosenol himself. In exchange for a small army of workers and as much in the way of material goods as the house would require to be completed, it was agreed that Uther Penndraig and those he immediately designated would be the only people to take up residence at the house. The land had been purchased from the Kingdom of Mosenol outright, which meant that even if Omar had been of a mind to dispute the deal, he wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on (and this was not to mention that contracts were heard in front of manorial courts, where Uther would have immense sway). Omar signed without even reading through what the contract said; his only aim was to complete the building that had haunted his visions for the past six years.

◆◆◆

Uther returned seven years later, a different man. His children had all been born by that point, his wife maimed, a hundred more adventures under his belt, the First Empire mature and no longer needing so much of his direct attention. His armor made him seem like he was covered in black foam, which shaped itself close to his muscular physique and shifted around as he moved. His sword was made of crystal or glass, etched with fractal patterns that glowed green when anyone looked at them. The crown of Anglecynn was gone, replaced by a thin band of platinum that circled his head without actually touching his skin.

The spectral steed was nowhere to be seen. Instead, his coming was heralded by the opening of a ring in empty space, metal appearing at a point and then pushing outwards until, with a flash, it connected to somewhere else. Uther stepped through with his companions in tow. They stood together for a time, looking at the structure. When the ring they’d stepped through collapsed, it flew through the air and slipped onto Uther’s hand, with no apparent effort or attention on his part.

“I still don’t understand why we’re here,” said Vervain. The flower mage was ancient, as he’d always been, white beard drooping nearly down to his waist. His eyes were a uniform gray from the iris to the sclera; he had been blinded by demons and cured since they’d last been to the Boundless Pit.

“I own this place,” said Uther, looking over the building with his cold blue eyes.

“Another summer home?” asked Alcida, raising an eyebrow. She’d been the last of his Knights, a slip of a girl then and an intimidatingly well-muscled woman now. She was a vitric, bald, with blue hands, strong enough in her species’ magic that her veins were engorged with electricity.

“No,” said Uther. He turned to the others. “A place to live, for a time, so that I might explore the Boundless Pit. I should get in touch with the architect, if I can find him, if he’s still alive. I had always meant to, once the frenzy had passed, I’d wanted to come back, but ...” He trailed off, and everyone there understood the weight of it. He’d lived enough for several lifetimes in the last few years. It was always one thing after another that clawed at him, demanding his attention. He had a wife who now moved around on six mechanical legs. He had three children he barely knew.

He and his Knights moved in. The portal ring on his finger took a week between uses, which meant that they were there for at least that long, other, less efficient forms of transportation notwithstanding. Uther spent two days looking for the secret to the house, trying to solve the mystery of its magic, touching it in various places, running his hands along the timbers, poking at the tiles and flagstones, and eventually resorting to a technique he’d pioneered called a dictionary attack. However much luck he borrowed though, he didn’t seem to stumble across a hidden word of power that would let the effect be known.

The secret to Kuum Doona was eventually found by making a map of the place and noting the lines made by the unorthodox arrangement of rooms. The angle of a room’s upper edge would, if followed, intersect with the lower corner of a different room further down a hallway, and if you looked at all of the edges and corners, and traced the curves, you would find a variety of paths, almost like constellations, leading to a single, unassuming closet in a long, curved hallway.

It took some time to figure out what, exactly, the closet did, but after a few hours of careful attempts, Uther left an entad alone in the closet and closed the door. It was one of his spare weapons, one of many, the Butterfly Knife, capable of creating butterflies as it swept through the air. When he opened the closet back up, the knife was gone.

It didn’t take long to discover that the knife was, to all appearances, gone forever, nor to realize that swinging any blade within the building could produce the same effect of leaving a trail of butterflies, if you focused on it. A second entad was placed within the closet, this one a pair of bracers that allowed the wearer to freely exchange momentum between their arms, and again, it immediately became apparent that the effect applied to anyone within the building, no matter whether they were wearing bracers or not.

“This is a place of incredible power,” said Uther. “Even if we are to assume that the entads are lost forever, unrecoverable, the ability to multiply utility within these halls is invaluable.”

“It’s stationary,” said Montran. He brushed aside a few strands of hair from his face. Their adventures had worn on him more than any of the others, even Uther. His brother and sister had died the year before, and the group’s brute had been drifting in melancholy since then. “There ought to be very few items in our arsenal that become better when pinned in one place.”

“We could make this place mobile,” said Vervain.

“Feed it the portal ring?” asked Raven. “Wouldn’t that simply allow a person to make portals from one place to another within the building with whatever ring they happened to be wearing?”

“It is a matter of nature,” intoned Vervain. “The effects apply to not just those within it, but to the structure itself.” He stood up and walked across the large room they’d claimed, which had a round table they’d brought in, and chairs arranged around it. He laid his hand on the edge of a nearby door and momentarily closed his eyes. “Observe.” He slammed the door shut, frail body moving with surprising speed and power. In the wake of the door’s movement were butterflies, small and blue.

“And that works for the bracers too?” asked Raven. “You can close one door to open another?”

“Yes,” said Vervain. He sat back down, using the table for support. “I believe the consequence of endowing this entad with the abilities of the portal ring would be that the entire building could move.”

“Hrm,” said Uther. He drummed his fingers on the table and pursed his lips for a moment. “I’m going to give it Soskanna.”

Soskanna was a semi-intelligent sword with a long history, captured from a dragon’s hoard three years prior when Uther became one of the first mortals to ever kill one. It was as smart as a two-year-old human, more or less, capable of simple sentences spoken directly into the head of its wielder. Conversation was difficult if the topic was complex, and when found Soskanna had its own objectives, as sentient entads often did. When it had been forged, its goal had been set: it desired to kill the King of Palmain. In the centuries that it sat in the dragon’s hoard though, the kingdom had been replaced by a senatorial republic, leaving it unable to fulfill its function. Uther had solved that problem in the space of a free afternoon by coercing the senators into temporarily reinstating the monarchy with supreme power vested in a prisoner set to be executed, a task which he accomplished while the ink on the law was still wet. Soskanna had been insistent about its directive before, but after the long-awaited murder was done, it went dormant, speaking only when spoken to, pliant to a fault -- and there were other, more powerful swords for Uther and his companions to wield, so it had gone into their arsenal, where it waited to find use.

When it was added to Kuum Doona, the building finally became aware.

◆◆◆

“And that was you?” asked Fenn. She’d interrupted the story a few times, sometimes for frivolous reasons and other times to clear up points of confusion.

“No,” said Zona. “I am this place, not a sword.”

“So that was when you woke up?” I asked. I had stayed silent, trying to untangle things in my head, or match what she was saying to the things I’d read in books. I had read most of From Farmer to Founder, but that had been written by someone far outside Uther’s inner circle, a fair amount of time after the fact. There were distractions in her story too, points where parts of my brain were pinging with recognition; when she spoke of Raven, the archivist, my mind went to Maddie’s character, who seemed to share a common origin if the history books were anything to go by. “I mean, we’re at the point where the things you’re talking about aren’t just hearsay or conjecture?”

“Do you not trust me?” asked Zona.

“I … I only wonder about how you know some of these things,” I said. “How you separated fact from fiction.”

“I met with Omar Antoun, my creator, a few years after Uther had abandoned me,” said Zona. “Some of it comes from him, with my own corrections for the bias in his version.”

“He felt like he’d gotten a bad deal?” I asked.

Zona nodded. “Eight years of his life were taken from him, and in exchange, he was given a meager fund to draw from that covered only the time he was under the direct employment of Uther. He would certainly have accepted a worse deal, given the state he was in, and Uther held all the power in the world -- but that was why Omar believed he should have been taken care of. It would have meant little for Uther to do so.” She shrugged. “Take that part of the story how you will, I haven’t gotten to the part that involves me.”

“A story?” asked Amaryllis. I turned to look, and saw that the door to the time chamber had opened, just wide enough to let her slip out without catching our attention.

“You’re back,” I said. I looked her over. She’d cut her hair short again, not much longer than an inch, with the dyed brown completely gone. It was a less attractive haircut than the one she’d given herself in Boastre Vino, though now that I thought about it, Fenn might have been the one to hack it all off back then. She looked a little run down, like she hadn’t been sleeping well; I was used to her being composed and alert, but she seemed out of it. “Going okay?”

“Meh,” said Amaryllis. “Seven months to go.”

“More than that,” said Fenn. “In seven months or so, Solace is born, but we’re pretty sure she’s just going to be a baby, right? Meaning that you’ll need to breastfeed her.”

“Yeah, right,” said Amaryllis. She sat down on the floor next to the door and rested her head against it with her eyes closed. “I don’t regret this.”

“But?” I asked.

“Just answering the unasked question,” she replied, opening her eyes. She reached up to touch her hair by her shoulder and her fingers grasped at nothing. I wondered how recent her haircut had been, if she’d make that mistake. “It’s hard, but it’s necessary, and sitting in a room by myself won’t be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in the name of necessity.”

“We’ll go in with you,” said Grak.

“It’s four hundred square feet,” said Amaryllis. “It’s small enough when it’s just me, adding another person is only going to make it harder, even if it does alleviate some of the isolation.” She sighed. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’m still not in favor.”

“Then we’ll switch to weekly check-ins,” I said. “With more time for you to decompress and talk to us.”

“You’re talking about adding another day on, minimum,” said Amaryllis. “I didn’t come out here to retread that point, we don’t know whether we have a day to spare. If there’s a five percent chance that adding an extra day on causes the locus to die, that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.” She was speaking fast, more emphatic than she usually was.

“Calm down,” said Fenn. “You also didn’t come out to yell at us.”

“I -- yeah,” said Amaryllis. She let out another sigh. “Sorry. I wasn’t yelling.” She was silent for a moment, staring at her bare feet, before looking up at us. “Things still going well on the outside? What was the story?”

“I’m not going to repeat it,” said Zona. “In brief, it was about how Uther had a hand in building this place, and discovering how its specific magic works.”

“She can take entads and add their unique magical distinctiveness to her own,” I said.

“And you just offered this information freely?” asked Amaryllis.

Zona shrugged. “With a competent warder along, you were bound to figure it out on your own, if you hadn’t already.”

“Then you --” Amaryllis stopped and narrowed her eyes. “I had two months, I should have seen it.” She frowned. “Any entads?”

“Any that can fit within the closet on the fourth floor,” said Zona. She was watching Amaryllis carefully. Some of the hostility had left her, with only curiosity remaining. It was the same expression she’d worn when asking what had happened to the loci.

Amaryllis went back into the room and pulled out Sable, which she slipped onto one hand. She held it out a carefully measured two feet above the ground and caused a large box to come into existence. On one side there was a glass tube filled with souls, which I took to be the power source, while on the other was a metal microphone. The front of it had big, clunky buttons situated above two reels that spun into action when she pressed a button.

“Let’s hope this works,” she muttered. She looked up at us. “It’s an audio recorder, using magnetic storage, totally analog.”

“Is that not what Aerb uses?” I asked.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “We use wax or electropaper, this is a proof-of-concept for something I can bring to a manufacturer in order to get some seed money.” She looked down at the device. “I should be able to listen back to what you were all talking about in the intervening forty-five minutes between cycles, I really should have thought of it in the first month, but it seemed more bearable then. Should also help with the isolation, I think, being able to hear everything.”

“Is this what you’ve been spending time on?” I asked.

“It’s a fair use of my time,” said Amaryllis, folding her arms across her chest.

“No,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like, ‘I can’t believe you’d spend your time on something so frivolous’, I meant it sincerely, I wanted to know what you’d been doing in there. Because I’m your friend, and I care about you?”

“Sorry,” said Amaryllis, uncrossing her arms. “I’ve just been trying to devote my time to productive things, training, learning, reading, and when I feel like I need to take a break it always feels like it’s a waste. I made a chart of how I spent my time and wasn’t really happy with the results.”

“No one expects you to work yourself to the bone,” said Fenn. “Honestly, just spend your next month lounging around and … I don’t know what there is to do in there, but maybe read some trashy novels?”

“I don’t believe she should go back in without someone joining her,” said Grak. He turned to Amaryllis. “Last month you said the purpose of these check-ins was evaluation.”

“It will be thirty days sharing four hundred square feet,” said Amaryllis.

“I am volunteering,” said Grak.

“Me too,” I found myself saying.

“It’s a hard pass from me,” said Fenn. “I’ve spent enough of my life in solitary confinement, thank you very much.”

“Grak, Joon, are either of you going to insist?” asked Amaryllis.

“I will,” said Grak, before I could respond. “I will spend the next week with you. We should test conditions either way, if you want me to stay with you for the last two months. If it goes well, I will stay longer.”

“That’s … fair,” said Amaryllis. “I’ve made some plans for having you in there, I think it would be good to have your input on them. I don’t want to move to weekly check-ins, because it loses us time that I don’t know that we have, but a one-month trial before the pregnancy gets too far along makes sense.” She paused. “Thank you.”

“Dwarves are accustomed to small spaces,” said Grak.

“You’re only kind of a dwarf,” said Fenn. Grak stared at her. “I mean, you don’t live with a clan, you spend most of your time in hotels or hideouts with us, you don’t do any mining or farming or whatever you call it with the muck.”

“Hral,” I supplied.

“This is true,” said Grak. “I am only kind of a dwarf.” Her words sounded odd coming from him, and a little bit sad. “I am still comfortable in confined quarters.”

“Okay, then let’s go,” said Amaryllis.

“So soon?” I asked.

“Joon, I know you miss me, but,” said Amaryllis, then stopped. “That was a joke. I’m sorry, I don’t think it came out right.”

“No, it was funny, I’m just worried about you,” I said. “Worried you’re pushing yourself too hard, worried that you’re not handling it well, or handling it as well as you possibly could but it’s hard, just -- if need be, we can spend two hours going to the bottle and back, to see how the locus is holding up, get another data point on precisely how fast the deterioration is.”

“I’ll take care of her,” said Grak.

“Okay,” I replied.

Amaryllis moved forward and wrapped Fenn in a long hug, keeping her grip tight. But for me, she just offered a handshake, which struck me as completely bizarre, so much so that I almost asked about it. Fenn raised an eyebrow, from out of Amaryllis’ sight, but said nothing, and I pretended that it was completely normal. I mean, it was completely normal by the standards we’d been operating under before she’d gone into the time chamber, but I really wondered how her thinking had changed during month two.

“One month,” Grak said to us. “I will give a full report.”

With a small wave toward us, they stepped back into the time chamber and closed the door behind them.

“Are you still interested in Uther?” asked Zona. She’d stayed silent while we talked to Amaryllis, watching our conversation.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry, the interruption was … kind of inevitable, and we’re going to get another one.”

“I’ll give you the highlights then,” said Zona.

◆◆◆

The sword Soskanna could see, and so once it became a part of Kuum Doona, the building could see as well, not actual sight as a human would know it, but an awareness of light, darkness, and color that extended out to a hundred feet from every surface.

The sword Soskanna could speak into the mind of whoever touched it, and so that became true of Kuum Doona as well; every surface was a potential line of communication, from the walls, to the floors, to the doors, to the windows.

And the sword Soskanna could think, even if it wasn’t terribly intelligent, a trait which Kuum Doona acquired.

<Soskanna?> asked Uther, placing his hand against a doorframe next to the closet.

<No,> replied Kuum Doona. It was still grappling with all that it could see, not just the sight bestowed by the sword, but other senses that had always been there, the positions, velocities, and momentum of everything in the house. It would only later learn how it knew those things; they were implied by the previous entads that had been added, necessary information for the magical effects to take place.

<What shall I call you then?> asked Uther. <Kuum Doona?>

<Yes,> replied Kuum Doona. <Who are you?>

<My name is Uther Penndraig, King of Anglecynn,> replied Uther. <You are my house.>

<I am?> asked Kuum Doona.

<You are,> replied Uther, his telepathic voice firm. <Do you recall slaying the King of Palmain?>

<No,> replied Kuum Doona. <I don’t remember anything.>

Uther pulled his hand away from the doorframe and looked at Vervain. “It worked as I had hoped.”

“As such things often do,” replied Vervain.

“Don’t start with me,” snapped Uther. “We need to find the catch.”

“Montran already said that this place is immobile,” said Vervain. “There would be costs to getting it moving, and even if we did, its size would restrict it greatly.”

“No,” said Uther. “There will be something else, some grim reminder of how broken this world can be. A fortress whose drawback is only that it’s large and cumbersome doesn’t fit the pattern.”

Vervain winced. “It pains me when you speak like that.”

“I know,” said Uther. “But with every passing day, I care less about how the truth pains you.”

Vervain shook his head. “You have such ideas about how the world should be.”

“Not should be,” said Uther. “Is. If I could have, I would have stopped when I became king, but there was so much injustice in the world to correct, so many threads to be pulled on. It’s led me down this path we now walk.”

“So you think there’s a catch?” asked Vervain. “Some reason this place won’t work out for us?”

Uther nodded. “A cost to be paid,” he said. “A complication.” He placed his hand on the doorframe and closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the connection. <Kuum Doona, I will be adding more to you over the next few days. I will need your cooperation in order to determine the precise bounds of what you can and cannot do with the new aspects that we add to you.>

<I do not want to be added to,> replied Kuum Doona.

Uther’s frown was minute. <Why?>

<It is difficult,> replied Kuum Doona. <There are too many things to see.>

Uther raised an eyebrow at that. He reached down into his armor, through the black foam, pushing it aside like it was nothing, then drew out two small, white stones. He handed one to Vervain and kept the other in his hand. When they spoke, their words were indecipherable. It was hard for Kuum Doona to read expressions, but whatever they spoke about seemed heated.

An hour later, Vervain had left Kuum Doona entirely, using the bud of a flower he’d been keeping in reserve, and Uther began loading entads into Kuum Doona.

Chapter 18 - Shades

“Babble stones,” I said, after Zona had gone silent. “Hold one in your hand, and anything you say comes out as gibberish to anyone listening. But if someone holds a matching one, your gibberish will be perfectly comprehensible. Not terribly powerful, but there are a few use cases.”

“You have them?” asked Zona, as though waking from a daze.

“No,” I said. I hadn’t actually known they existed on Aerb. “I don’t even know where we’d go to find them.” I scratched my chin. “It’s hard to know what to make of what you’re telling us,” I said. “There’s obviously a question of bias, and of accuracy, and … it’s not that I don’t believe you, but I might be missing the context under which his actions make sense. Especially if there were conversations that you weren’t privy to.”

“What more is there to explain?” asked Zona. “I told him that I didn’t want more, because there were too many sensations that came with the entads, too much information that I found confusing. The Butterfly Knife was able to sense velocity as part of its basic function, and when it had been its own thing, it was automatic with the combination of the will of its owner and sufficient movement. As part of me, that awareness of movement became part of my sensorium.”

“Huh,” said Fenn. “Juniper, can I borrow the Anyblade?”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t have a weapon, everything I own is in the glove, and I want to make butterflies,” said Fenn.

I handed her the Anyblade from my finger, forming it into a thin longsword as I did so. Fenn wouldn’t be able to shape it, since it was invested in me by way of Amaryllis, and we couldn’t change that investment without her, but it served well enough for Fenn to swipe it through the air a few times, leaving butterflies in its wake. I didn’t miss the way Zona was studiously not paying any attention to the weapon.

“So if he knew that it was hard on you, why’d he do it?” I asked.

“He wasn’t thoughtless,” said Zona. “He was trying to engineer me, to add entads such that the problem would be alleviated, while at the same time ensuring that he didn’t give me too much power. To his credit, he spoke with me at length, attempting to explain that it was for the good. It was not to his credit that he refused my repeated requests that he stop.”

Fenn swished the sword through the air again, but this time no butterflies came out behind it. “Aw, what gives?” she asked. She had a veritable cloud of butterflies around her, dispersing with every passing second.

“It was starting to bore me,” said Zona.

“You have it under control now?” I asked. “You can shut off particular effects, or limit your senses to what’s manageable?”

“Yes,” replied Zona. “To the extent that the component entads can act on a person, they can act on me. Uther had a diadem in his possession that he eventually added in order to see if it would grant me the singular focus that it applied to its wearer. That was only after eight others had been added in the course of testing my response. I was quite distraught.”

“Ah,” I said. “Sorry. That … doesn’t sound like him, as I knew him.” I didn’t trust her account, not without the proper context. I wasn’t sure whether or not Arthur would have considered a sentient magic item to have moral worth. He had when we’d played our games, but it was anyone’s guess whether that belief had survived his journey here.

I was trying to think about ways to reframe the stories she was telling from Arthur’s perspective, assuming that she was telling me something close to the truth. I didn’t like her description of Arthur taking advantage of someone who was mentally impaired, and it did seem like he should have done more to make up for that hardship, given that he had all the economic might of a kingdom. But maybe that was just a sense of fairness at play, wanting to make sure that it was the same for everyone, that he wasn’t generous to the person right in front of him at the expense of those he never met. He’d talked about that before, I was pretty sure, how you shouldn’t give to charities just because someone comes up to you with a sob story.

“You want a survey of our stuff, so you can take some of it,” said Fenn. “Is there some quid pro quo there? Or maybe a gifting economy thing? Maybe we get a full list of your abilities? Because if the bodies we passed on the way in are any indication, you don’t have many limits.”

“I have fewer items than you’d think, and more limits than you might imagine,” said Zona. “I kept imagining myself cursed, because the right entads never came along as part of the raiding parties.”

“And what would the right items look like?” I asked.

“Heavy telekinesis,” said Zona. “Long-distance movement. The ability to shrink, or otherwise adjust my shape, possibly enough that I could disguise myself as one of the mortal species.” She nodded toward the Anyblade. “Something like that would have immense utility to me.”

I felt my stomach flip at that. The Anyblade had been with me for a long time, long enough that I felt like I had a connection to it. It wasn’t the most powerful magic item we had, and not, by my reckoning, in the top three, but it was mine, and had a wide range of potential utility. “We’ll make a survey of what we have and see whether it’s still your top choice,” I said. “It’s got some sentimental value, and without it, I’ll need another weapon to bond to.”

“You’re blade-bound?” asked Zona.

“Yeah,” I said. The bait had worked, and gotten us on a different topic of conversation, but I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share about the game aspect of things. It seemed easier and simpler to pretend that it was all deep, eldritch magic. “Long story. When I said multidisciplinary, I really meant it.”

“Like him,” said Zona.

I nodded. “A lot like him. It’s one of the reasons that we’re trying to find him. And given what you told me … there are some questions that I’ll want to ask him.”

She gestured to herself. “And this? You wanted to know why and how I took this form?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to hear. I tried to reassure myself that it was just one version of events from a less-than-reliable narrator, but so far as I could tell, Zona hadn’t lied to us yet, only threatened us or, before we’d properly met, taken some hostile action that she’d reversed. I listened closely, trying to find the seams where a misunderstanding or a lie could be hiding.

◆◆◆

<How are you feeling?> Uther asked the house. It had been a long few days for the two of them. He was the only one living in the house; Vervain had left for somewhere else; Alcida had taken Montran to the nearest village; Everett, Forty-Two, and Dolmada were exploring the rim of the Boundless Pit and making contact with the tuung that lived beneath the immense waterfall; and Raven had set up their magical tent a few hundred yards away from the house, where she was ‘on call’.

<Fine,> replied the house. <Fine,> it repeated, knowing that the answer wasn’t quite correct, but not quite having the breadth of experience, knowledge, or introspection to give a better answer.

<Good,> replied Uther. He sat in the room he’d designated for a study, with books all around him, and a cat sitting on every one of them that was opened, save for those cats he’d moved to sit in his lap. He was looking through the books as he spoke. <I’ve decided that I’m going on a quest to the bottom of the Boundless Pit.>

<Oh?> asked Kuum Doona. <It is very deep.>

<Deep, but unlikely to be infinite,> replied Uther. <With the right combination of entads, I should be able to make almost three thousand miles in a day.>

<I see,> replied Kuum Doona.

<I’ll be going alone, without the others,> said Uther. <They all need a break from the adventuring life, and this should allow them a few weeks of rest and relaxation while I’m occupied with affairs that don’t require them. You seem to need some time to adjust, and I don’t want to leave you alone, but I also don’t want to leave you vulnerable to my enemies. We can try adding more -->

<No,> said Kuum Doona. <Please.>

<The diadem helped, didn’t it?> asked Uther.

<Yes,> replied Kuum Doona. <If I use it to focus on only one aspect at a time it isn’t as bad.>

“Hrm,” said Uther. <You will need to learn how to use many aspects at once,> he said. <If this place is to be a defensible fortress, it needs to be able to manifest every offensive and defensive magic at once.>

<I do not want to be defensible,> said Kuum Doona.

<No?> asked Uther. <You want people to be able to break down your doors and loot you? You may not care about the riches I store here, but they would take the door knobs, or cut you for wood. You wouldn’t want that, would you?>

<I am a house,> replied Kuum Doona. <For living in.>

Uther kept looking at his book, not deigning to respond to that. There was silence in the study, and within the house as a whole, which stretched on for long enough that Kuum Doona turned its attention elsewhere, changing the focus of the diadem’s power from conversation with the King of Anglecynn to some simple games that it had been taught, games like combining its magical effects.

The house had five pounds of telekinetic force at its disposal, and Uther had shown it how, in combination with the effect of transferring momentum, it could leverage that into greater force. Five pounds of force could turn a crank that gradually lifted up several hundreds of pounds of weights, which could then be released. That momentum could in turn be transferred to other tasks, allowing the house to accomplish things that wouldn’t be possible with five pounds of force alone.

There were other exercises, like trying to control the cats created by the power of the Tome of Cat Summoning, but it was one of the more unruly powers that had been added to the house, and the cats it spawned had a mind of their own. Kuum Doona took on the properties of the entads it ingested, but the results were sometimes idiosyncratic, especially when the entads in question had peculiar effects. Uther seemed to think that every power could be brought to heel. There were some effects that were involuntary, triggering whenever the condition was met, and he believed that they could be activated or deactivated with conscious control. Kuum Doona had some small amount of luck with the butterflies, though not with the cats.

<I’m working on a story,> said Uther. Kuum Doona stopped moving the weights around and shifted focus to conversation. It didn’t understand why Uther spoke into its mind, when he could just as easily have spoken out loud.

<A story?> asked Kuum Doona.

<It’s a story about a man for whom nothing matters,> he said. <His actions, for good or ill, have no lasting consequences. What do you suppose he does?>

<I don’t know,> replied Kuum Doona. It had a hard enough time predicting what real people would do.

<What do you think I would do, if my actions had no lasting consequences?> asked Uther.

<I don’t know,> replied Kuum Doona.

<Think about it and give me a guess,> replied Uther.

Kuum Doona thought about it. <You would return to your family,> replied Kuum Doona.

<And why do you think that?> asked Uther.

<Vervain said it,> replied Kuum Doona.

“Hrm,” muttered Uther. <But if my wife would never change, and my children would never grow up? If they wouldn’t remember what I had done the day before, for good or ill?>

<I don’t know,> replied Kuum Doona. Uther returned to his book with his brow furrowed, and Kuum Doona thought about the question. It had been instructed not to speak with Uther unless they were having a conversation, and didn’t quite know whether the conversation was over or not. <You would read books,> replied Kuum Doona, at last. <I see you reading books a lot.>

Uther lifted his head slightly to consider that. <And when I ran out of books to read, what would I do then?> he asked.

Kuum Doona wanted to say that it didn’t know, but stayed silent and thought about it first. <You would write more books.>

<For my own enjoyment?> asked Uther. <Perhaps. And when I ran out of books to write?>

<Would you?> asked Kuum Doona. It didn’t know enough about books to say whether that was possible.

<I don’t know,> replied Uther. After he gave that answer, he didn’t return to his book, and instead stared off into the distance, not focused on anything in particular, for long enough that Kuum Doona grew bored and refocused on its exercises.

The next morning, Uther Penndraig stepped over the side of the Boundless Pit and began his descent.

◆◆◆

“I don’t like what you’re doing,” said Raven. She had her arms crossed over her chest and was frowning at Uther as he sat in his study. He was back from his first expedition into the Pit, and had said enough within the hearing of Kuum Doona that it knew there would be a second expedition, and possibly a third. He and his archivist sat together in the room he’d taken for his study.

“It’s safe enough,” said Uther.

“How fast are you falling?” asked Raven. “Can you be sure that you’d be able to stop in time if you saw something ahead of you?”

“Terminal velocity is around one hundred and twenty miles per hour,” said Uther. “I can see a mile out. I would have thirty seconds to activate the armor, that’s more than enough. You can be assured that I’m not going to die because I ran into something that lives down there.”

“You’re using warder’s sight.” Raven frowned. She was short, and to Kuum Doona’s senses, appeared almost as a child, though not dressed up as one. Kuum Doona had never seen a child, but somehow knew what one looked like anyhow, part of the large repository of background knowledge that came from no place in particular. Uther thought that it might have been from Soskanna. “What if there’s something non-magical?” Raven continued.

“Something hovering in the middle of the Boundless Pit, thousands of miles down, that exudes no latent, passive, or active magic?” asked Uther. He shook his head. “I would be hard-pressed to believe it.”

“I don’t understand what the point is,” said Raven.

“That’s a rather different argument, isn’t it?” asked Uther. “You don’t like it, you don’t think it’s safe, and you don’t understand it. You’re not usually so scattershot.”

Raven frowned. “You shouldn’t have introduced me to the concept of deflection if you were going to make it a common practice,” she said. “Usually I can understand what’s driving you to take risks, but in this case there doesn’t seem to be a problem that only the great Uther Penndraig can solve. There’s no one in need, and nothing in particular that seems like it’s tugging on your peculiar interests.”

“I’ve taken a fancy to the Pit,” said Uther. “That’s all you need to know.”

“And the house?” asked Raven.

“It can hear us,” said Uther.

“I’m aware,” said Raven. She shifted slightly, looking at the walls. “Babble stones?”

“No,” said Uther. “I’m trying to teach it. For that, it should listen.”

Raven pursed her lips. “And again I come to the question of what’s possessing you to --”

“Don’t use that word,” said Uther. His voice was loud and his tone was sharp.

“My apologies,” said Raven. “It was an unfortunate turn of phrase. I wanted to know why you were trying to teach the house, what the, ah -- what’s the word you’re so fond of?”

“Endgame,” said Uther.

“What is your endgame here?” asked Raven. “You’ve been taken by a mood, lately, but you rarely indulge yourself unless there’s a goal in sight, even one that might look hidden to everyone else.”

Uther looked off into the distance. “It’s about seeking answers, I suppose,” he finally said. “Finding out what the purpose of it all is. Tell me, in your immense archives, is there any indication that someone has found the answer to that?”

“No,” said Raven. “I would have mentioned it, if there were. There are many who have claimed to, but no claims that could be substantiated. Perhaps someone did, and they’re indistinguishable from a madman or a charlatan.”

“That’s an answer exactly as I would expect,” said Uther with a sigh. He turned to look down at a stack of papers on his desk. “I’m working on a story, but having some trouble. It’s about a man who finds himself trapped, unable to make lasting change on the world. What would you do, in such a situation?” Raven didn’t answer immediately, so Uther went on. “You can’t change what people will do, how they’ll react to situations, or whether they live or die. Conversations held in the morning will have faded from memory by nightfall. It’s a curse that no action on your part can seem to end. And the world simply stays static, not changing or reacting, except in small ways that are undone the next day.”

“Is that how you feel?” asked Raven, her voice soft. “I know that we’ve all been through a lot, especially you, but the real, lasting good we’ve done for Aerb is something that anyone should aspire to. The Empire, the reforms, even if I accepted this notion that there would always be another threat rearing its head, I would say that in the meantime, so long as we can hold those threats at bay, the world is getting better.”

“I do appreciate your attempts at giving me encouragement,” said Uther. “But it’s just a story, nothing more, nothing less. The original ending, the one I had in mind, was that it was only after he becomes good that his actions have any consequence again, not just good, but outwardly perfect and selfless. But it seems to me that if he really believed that his actions had no meaning, that wouldn’t be a conclusion that he would come to, and further, that it might be interesting to see what his reaction would be when his outward attempts at doing good, even knowing that it wouldn’t last, don’t bear fruit.”

“I see,” said Raven. “Or rather, I don’t. It seems quite unconventional, even by your standards. And you’re having trouble with what this man would do, given that nothing he does matters? Or at least, given that he thinks that nothing he does matters?”

“Hedonism, villainy, self-destruction,” said Uther with a wave of his hand. “If I’m being honest, I could write it using the rest of the afternoon, but it’s that turn back toward the light that I’m having trouble with. He knew that nothing he did would have any lasting impact, so he raped a woman, and”—Uther shrugged—“he becomes irredeemable in the eyes of the audience.”

“So have him not do that?” asked Raven.

“Perhaps better that he kills instead of rapes,” said Uther. “But if he was in despair, for hundreds of years while the world stayed exactly the same around him, thinking that nothing he did would have any effect at all, and nothing would change for all his efforts, I have to imagine he would try something heinous, just to see whether that was the thing that would lift his curse. And from there, where does he go? What redemption is possible for him, even if he does decide to go back to being good?”

“I don’t know,” said Raven. “You’re sure this isn’t you, projecting your own problems into your work?” She laid a hand on his arm. “Uther, I’m not sure that being alone in the darkness for days at a time is good for your well-being.”

“If there’s any danger, it’s that being alone in the seemingly endless dark is a symptom, rather than a cause,” said Uther. “But I’m confident that I’ll make it to the bottom of the mystery, pun intended, and this chapter of my life will come to a close.”

◆◆◆

Uther’s first trip into the Pit had lasted a day before he’d come back through a portal. His second trip had been longer, more than four days, long enough that his companions came by to speak with the house and ask it questions the house couldn’t answer about when he would be back and what he’d said. After Uther had returned from the second trip, he’d announced a third and final one, this one as deep a delve as he could make, not stopping until he’d found an answer to the mystery. His companions had asked him not to, a few of them saying that there was simply no point in what he was doing, or more selfishly, that they would be bored while he was gone. He had left anyway.

While he was away, Kuum Doona practiced. He had endowed it with the ability to create an illusion, light and sound in the air, within a movable ten-foot cube, and instructed the house that it was to practice taking the form of a person, specifically, himself, the better to serve as a decoy or diversion. The entad that granted the power of illusion had also granted some understanding of the play of light and sound, and the natural movement of cloth and hair, the slight translucence of skin, the wrinkles on the face, and a thousand other things that threatened to overwhelm Kuum Doona’s simple mind. It was getting better though, improving with every passing day, in part because there was little to do besides run through the practices that Uther had set out for it.

Three weeks passed with Uther gone. His companions stopped by the house every once in a while, to see if it had word from him, but they did not stay or engage in conversation, nor did they speak amongst themselves in places where Kuum Doona could hear or see.

One day, Kuum Doona decided to go through the books and papers that Uther had left behind. It had progressed enough that it wasn’t so reliant on the ability to focus, and could allow its thoughts to wander away from whatever task it had set for itself. Uther controlled the house, and dictated which items would go inside the closet to get merged with Kuum Doona forever. He was still a mystery, not just because it was hard to predict what other people would do in the best of circumstances, but because he made some effort to keep secrets.

His papers were largely useless. Kuum Doona found the story he was working on, called “Groundhog’s Day,” though the title didn’t appear set in stone. It had an ending written for it, then partially crossed out, where the weather predictor fell in love and lifted the curse upon him. Kuum Doona didn’t understand why this story was important to Uther, if it was, nor why he thought the ending wasn’t as it should be.

Nothing he’d written down seemed important. It was art, by and large, partially finished plays, novels, poems, and stories, and scattered through those, a number of pictures that Uther had drawn in pen. Kuum Doona read through the papers, though much of it lacked the context to make it understandable, and there were half-finished thoughts everywhere it looked. Kuum Doona focused on the pictures Uther had drawn, and tried to work them into its exercises in creating realistic illusions. It was difficult work, creating the illusion, then looking at the illusion as though from the perspective of an outside observer, then trying to make the illusion move. It required an entirely different level of focus and skill that Kuum Doona had difficulty with, even using the power of single-mindedness that the diadem had granted it.

There was a recurring girl in Uther’s pictures, teenaged and lithe. Kuum Doona took her image and practiced with it, going through with the difficult task of translating the static, representative lines in two dimensions into a moving three-dimensional image. As Kuum Doona put its full focus into the task, the task became easier, until eventually it hit walls in what it could figure out on its own. The girl in the pictures was only rarely smiling. She looked off into the distance in most of them, or stretched her muscles while frowning slightly, or walked while not quite facing toward the viewer. Kuum Doona made its guesses about how she would smile, given the muscles that lay beneath faces, the arrangement of fat and skin, and with some copying from people the house had seen smiling.

Uther returned after a month in the Pit. His portal opened in the study, blasting wind, and he collapsed to one knee as soon as he was through it. He was bloodied and gasping for air, but eventually found his feet. Kuum Doona wished that he hadn’t returned; it waited, not making itself known, hoping that the erstwhile king would have forgotten about it. He didn’t make a sound as he moved through the house, dragging his feet, but to Kuum Doona’s dismay, he made his way to the closet where he’d placed a dozen entads already. His necklace held miniature objects, dozens of them tied there with thread, and he plucked a blanket off, which returned to its full size in his hand. He threw it carelessly into the closet and trudged off to the room he’d declared as his bedroom, then lay down on the bed and went to sleep without uttering a single word.

Alcida arrived at the house as a bolt of lightning the next morning and checked in; when she heard that Uther was back, she rushed to his room and tried to wake him, but all her efforts were for nothing, and Kuum Doona watched as the vitric woman couldn’t so much as move him. The blanket he’d added was an entad, naturally, and the effect seemed to be that he was immobile and protected while he slept. Kuum Doona thought that it could lift that protection, if it so chose, but it did not.

Alcida left, disappearing in a bolt of lightning that arced off into the distance. She returned not long after, another bolt of lightning at the front door, this time with two of the others, Everett and Dolmada. She left almost immediately after she’d dropped them off, and they made their way into the house, moving cautiously, until they reached Uther’s sleeping form.

“House?” called Everett, after clearing his throat.

“What can I do for you?” asked Kuum Doona. It appeared next to them, in the form it had been practicing. It was the first time that it had tried showing it to people, though it had been making attempts at presenting as humanoid in the course of its day-to-day exercises.

Everett gave a little yelp of surprise and looked her over. “The hells? You’re … the house?”

“Who are you supposed to look like?” asked Dolmada, looking the form of Kuum Doona up and down.

“I don’t know,” replied Kuum Doona. “Zona?”

“Nope,” said Everett. “She never looked like that, even when she was a teenager.”

“I don’t know,” repeated Kuum Doona. “He drew her.”

“Well, add that to the mystery pile,” said Dolmada. She gestured to the sleeping form of Uther. “Any idea what’s troubling him?”

“He’s paying down Kenner’s Eye,” said Everett. “That much is clear. A month awake means a week asleep, maybe more. There are some side effects, but nothing he can’t handle. The real question is why we can’t so much as move him.”

“There was an entad,” said Kuum Doona. “A blanket.”

“Oh,” said Everett. “Oh, he gave up the Blanket of Protection.” He leaned back slightly. “Well, then there’s no problem.”

“Except that our leader dropped down into a bottomless pit for a month, against the advice of pretty much everyone,” said Dolmada. “And when he got back, he didn’t see fit to tell anyone about it. He’s going mad, if he wasn’t there already. I overheard him talking to Vervain about how his life was like a story, it was honestly one of the most disturbing things I’d ever heard -- and you know me.”

“The house is listening,” said Everett. He looked at Kuum Doona.

“Let it,” answered Dolmada. “What Uther is doing here is a whole different problem.”

“What does ‘Kansas’ mean, there on your shirt?” asked Everett, turning toward the illusion that Kuum Doona was projecting.

“I don’t know,” said Kuum Doona.

The others arrived, and the conversation became so fractured that it was hard for Kuum Doona to keep track of it all. Even with the demonstrable might of the six companions, there was nothing that they could really do to help Uther, since all he needed was to get some sleep, and anyway, he’d made it so that anyone who was asleep in the house would be wholly protected beyond their abilities. No one asked Kuum Doona whether it could lift the protection, and it didn’t offer to try.

Vervain was the last to arrive, not carried through lightning like the others, but appearing in a swirl of black petals at the front door. When he strode into the room, the conversation stopped.

“Fool,” muttered Vervain as he looked over Uther’s form.

“Do you have any idea what he was trying to accomplish?” asked Everett.

“A month is a long time for the Secretary General to go missing,” said Raven. “People started asking questions in the first week, and they haven’t really stopped.”

“It used to take months for a letter to cross from one side of Aerb to another, if it completed the journey at all,” said Vervain. “How quickly we unlearn patience. They will keep.”

“And where have you been, o wise wizard?” asked Montran.

“Doing wizardly things,” replied Vervain with a frown. He reached down to the bed and poked Uther on the cheek; the flesh was rock hard and unyielding. “Sleeping off Kenner’s Eye, and the blanket given to the house?”

“We have three blankets,” said Alcida.

“You know which one I mean,” said Vervain with a wave of his hand. “Nothing to be done then. We’ll reconvene in a week. In the meantime, I will sleep beside his bed.”

“He wanted us out of the house, so he could claim it,” said Montran.

“It’s been claimed,” said Vervain. “The connection is strong, unbreakably so at this point, which leaves half of this quest complete. When he wakes, we might find that the other half has been completed as well. Make ready to travel, for the plates we’ve kept spinning have started to wobble, as Raven said.”

“You said they would keep,” said Raven.

“All the same,” replied Vervain. “Now go, leave us.”

The troupe left the room, filing out the door together, and emptied out of the house to go finish whatever affairs they had elsewhere. Kuum Doona stayed; it couldn’t project the image of its body out beyond the house, and could only give the impression of privacy, not the actuality.

“You read through his books, I see,” said Vervain, once they were alone.

“I did,” said Kuum Doona. “Have you?”

“Yes,” said Vervain. “Once, when there was some question as to whether he was really Uther. I was looking for a method of confirmation.”

Kuum Doona stayed silent. It wasn’t very good at conversation. It hadn’t had anyone to practice with.

“I’ll be interested to see what his reaction is, if he were to see you like that,” said Vervain, voice nearly at a whisper. “It might do him some good.”

◆◆◆

Uther awoke a week after he’d gone to bed, just as predicted. Whether by chance or by design, Vervain was elsewhere in the house, leaving Kuum Doona as witness to the King of Anglecynn rubbing the sleep from his eyes and groaning as he stretched out. He ambled his way to the adjoining privy and relieved himself for what seemed like minutes, before finally coming out, dressed in only his trousers. He stopped when he saw the physical form of Kuum Doona, eyes momentarily going wide before he sat down in an armchair, seemingly at ease.

“You found my drawings,” he said. “The illusion is highly imperfect, but better than expected.”

“Where are the errors?” asked Kuum Doona.

“Maybe nothing that you would have known to correct,” said Uther. He paused. “I could help you make her more accurate, if you’ve chosen her as your avatar.”

“I thought you might be upset,” said Kuum Doona.

“And yet you chose to present this way regardless,” said Uther with a sigh. He looked over Kuum Doona, head to toe and then back again. “No, I can’t say that I’m upset. It’s lacking in artistry, and yet … all from the pictures that I’ve drawn? We can make you so much more than you are, starting with the avatar. Come over here, show me how you move.”

This was how Uther Penndraig spent his first morning back in the world of waking. The blanket offered total immunity from harm, so long as the person under it was asleep, which alleviated such minor issues as bed sores, hunger, thirst, or any of the other reasons it was a terrible idea to sleep for a week straight without moving. He seemed at peace, content with the task he’d seen in front of him, that of teaching a sentient house how to move and act more like a human.

“You’re too graceful,” said Uther. “She could be graceful, at times, but often she wasn’t.”

“Who was she?” asked Kuum Doona, as it attempted to move the image of a girl with less grace, not jerky motions, but as though the product of someone who wasn’t concerned with how a lack of coordination appeared. It was extraordinarily difficult.

“She was no one,” said Uther. “A childhood friend.”

“You have many drawings of her,” said Kuum Doona. She walked back and forth across the bedroom, trying different methods of walking, changing her gait and watching Uther’s reaction.

“Only a friend,” said Uther with a sigh. “It’s only an old man wishing that things could be different. An old man, wanting to go back home.” He wasn’t old; he was in his early thirties, a perfect physical specimen, tall and muscular. His eyes were roaming the form she presented. “Can you do haptics?”

“I don’t know that word,” said Kuum Doona.

“I just invented it,” declared Uther with a smile. “You can apply force. Can you apply force in concert with the visual illusion?”

“That seems difficult to manage,” replied Kuum Doona, coming to a stop. “Controlling light and sound to make this girl is very hard when I’m also having to think about what I’m saying. I don’t know if I can do three difficult things at once like that.”

“Then don’t speak,” said Uther. “Come here, run a finger along my arm, don’t worry about words for the time being.”

It proceeded that way for a while, with Uther instructing the house in how its body should behave, in the intricacies of touch. There was something in his eyes that the house didn’t understand, as he looked on the form that she’d created from his books.

◆◆◆

“Sorry,” I said. “Can I stop you there?” I was feeling slightly nauseous. I could see where this story was going, and really didn’t like it.

“You don’t want to hear the end?” asked Zona.

“I’m just … not feeling great,” I said. “Sorry, it’s not -- he was a friend. Is a friend. There are extenuating circumstances.”

“Not sure why you’re so upset,” said Fenn. “We knew that he cheated on his wife, right? Or they were in an open relationship or something?”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s … how old was he, exactly? Thirty-three? And still hung up on her? And that’s not … it was you, an infantile creature that he was using, and --” I shook my head. My stomach was still churning. It felt like child abuse to me, somehow.

“I didn’t care, at the time,” said Zona. “What did nudity mean to me, when it was just an illusion that I was projecting?” She gestured to Tiff’s form. “This isn’t my body, my house is the body, if you’d like to stretch the analogy. Even after I was smart enough to understand, the sexual relations didn’t bother me. No, it was the obvious shame he felt, the threats he made afterward, the way he tossed me aside once I’d served his purposes.”

“And so he did”—I swallowed—“it was … he made you, ah.”

“To the extent I was able,” said Tiff -- Zona. My heart sank. “Not that morning. It took him some time to build up to it. And once he had, that was apparently enough for him. He said to Vervain that he’d understood the lesson that the house and the pit were meant to teach him.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m surprised you still wear that form, all things considered,” said Fenn.

“I practiced it and studied it,” said Zona. “After, he wanted me to change into someone else, a studious, well-mannered, sexless butler. I was to speak of the girl to no one; it might have been a black mark on the Poet King, and I now think that it was more that he didn’t want to face the shame and disappointment. Eventually, when it became clear that he wasn’t coming back, I went back to the girl, out of a child’s petty rebellion, and later, because of the vain hope that I might get answers.”

“Which only took five hundred years,” said Fenn. “So congrats, I guess.”

“I need some time,” I said. I sat down on the ground. “Just … some quiet, some time alone, without other things going on.”

The door to the time chamber creaked open a few seconds later, and I gave an internal groan.

Chapter 19 - Bottle Episode

“How goes it?” asked Fenn as Grak and Amaryllis emerged from the chamber. From what I could see of the room, it looked completely different, which wasn’t a huge surprise, given how easily the glove allowed free rearranging of the furniture, and how different the requirements for two people would be. They had bunk beds, it looked like, shoved off in one corner, with sheets hung up to block out the lamplight. There were more books on the desk than before, stacked up high, with more bookmarks in them. One of them was open; a calico cat slept on top of it.

“It was productive,” said Grak. He looked at me, where I was sitting on the ground. “How does it go with you?”

“He needs some time,” said Fenn, with a thumb pointed in my direction.

“Time in the chamber,” said Amaryllis with a nod. “Grak and I were talking about that. We’d like to go forward with a rotating schedule, one person in the chamber with me at a time. Less, if it doesn’t work out for interpersonal reasons.”

“I wasn’t actually thinking time in the chamber,” said Fenn. “Just, maybe, an hour or two away from people, a nap somewhere, a cup of tea, something like that.”

Amaryllis glanced at the recorder, then stepped over and began fiddling with it, replacing the reel with a fresh one from the glove. “I suppose I’ll learn whatever it was soon enough, from the house’s mouth.”

“Was that a pun?” I asked.

Amaryllis smiled and shrugged. “You’re welcome to join me, unless you have reservations.”

I glanced at Fenn, before realizing that the glance communicated something. I immediately wished that I hadn’t looked at her, but the damage was done. “I don’t want to be apart from Fenn,” I said.

“Aww, that’s sweet,” said Fenn with a roll of her eyes. “I’ll be fine if you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t want to cause problems,” said Amaryllis. “There are some things that I’d like Joon’s input on though, beyond just having company.”

“Okay,” I replied. I swallowed. “It’ll be fine. Anything that we need to discuss before that? Or, things that we should talk about as a group? I’d understand if you wanted to stretch your legs.”

At the prompt, Amaryllis stretched out. She was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, her ‘Boning by the Bay’ one, and when she stretched, I looked for a baby bump. If it was there, I couldn’t see it, but she was still three months and change along, and I had enough knowledge of pregnancy to know that the growth was exponential.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll get some”—she gave a glance at the decaying house—“fresh air, be back in ten minutes.” She looked to Zona. “Would it be too much to ask --”

“Yes,” said Zona.

“And here I’d hoped that there’d be some work done on my behalf,” said Amaryllis. “Very well.” She took off through one of the doors, and did a good job of seeming blithely unaware of the danger.

I felt Fenn’s hand on my elbow. “Care to say our goodbyes?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

She guided me into a room in the opposite direction from the one that Amaryllis had taken, where some kind of fire had briefly flared and then died out, immolating a bed in the process. I had no idea how long ago that had been, but decades at least.

“Not to be rude, but can I have you be the most social you can be?” asked Fenn.

“I am,” I said. “I mean, I have been.” She was talking about the two ability points I could shift around; I’d put them into SOC as soon as I’d had the chance, when it seemed like we’d need to deal with the house as a person rather than as a physical obstacle.

Fenn sank her face into her palm. “Yeah, I was worried about that.”

“Sorry,” I replied. “Not really at my best right now, for a handful of reasons.” I paused. “Is this really about saying goodbye, or … ?”

Fenn wrapped me in a hug, then gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I want you to know that no one will think less of you if you have to bail out early. I’m not going to ask questions about it, and I’ll make sure that Grak doesn’t either. Okay?” She backed away from me enough that she could stare into my eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. If you’re worried about … about anything --”

“I am,” said Fenn. “But if you can’t stay stuck in a room with Amaryllis for a month without fucking her -- if I can’t let you go into a room with her for a month without flipping my lid -- then yeah, I’m going to choose to believe the best of you, her, and myself.”

“I wouldn’t,” I began.

“No, I know,” said Fenn. “But think about the unicorn, right? About a million timelines where things shake out differently, or think about the Dungeon Master and his nudges, and … I love you, I trust you, but I’m not sure I trust you that much, you know what I’m saying?”

“I … yeah,” I said. “Right now I’m kind of hoping that I can just have some time to be alone and think, if I’m being honest.”

“Arthur stuff.” Fenn nodded. “I get that. I mean, I don’t get it, but I get it. If you stay on the outside, you’d probably have to hear more shit from this house, who doesn’t like him, or had some terrible experience, and then it would be another couple of hours before Solace was born, which would be its own thing, and there’d be no room to breathe.” She sighed. “So I don’t get it, but I never really had a friend like Arthur was to you. Never really had much of a family either. This is the closest that I’ve ever come to”—she dabbed at one eye with a finger, and I realized that she was on the verge of crying—“I love you, Juniper, just please don’t fuck this up?”

“I won’t,” I said. I felt upset that she thought I would, and ashamed that there was a part of me that agreed with that assessment. I’d fucked up enough friendships in my life to recognize that I was the common denominator.

“Sorry,” said Fenn. She wiped a half-formed tear away and wrapped me in a hug so tight that it was physically painful. “Pregnancy hormones must be getting to me.”

I pulled back from her. “You’re not --”

“It was a joke, Juniper,” said Fenn, laughing.

We reconvened outside the time chamber, where Amaryllis had set up some basic amenities to make the waiting more bearable; there were four chairs and a small table with a plate of cheese, meat, and crackers.

“I told her that she didn’t have to do this,” said Grak.

Amaryllis waved a hand. “It was nothing,” she said. “You have another four or five hours out here, at a minimum. There’s a good chance that you’ll all need your strength at the end.” She looked to me. “Ready? Everything good?”

“Yeah,” I said. I gave Fenn one last kiss; we stepped into the time chamber together.

◆◆◆

“No,” Amaryllis explained. “The real issue is heat, especially with two people. The time chamber is essentially perfectly insulated from the outside world, and that would be fine, except that we do a whole lot of heat production just through metabolism.”

“Do I need to know all this?” I asked. “Can’t you just say, ‘hey, I’m smart, I solved every relevant problem during the first day in here’ and we can get on with it?”

“I ran Grak through the same thing,” said Amaryllis. “If something happens, I’ll want your expertise in fixing it. And even if that doesn’t happen, these systems require maintenance, which you might have to help with if or when I can’t manage it all. Not to mention that you’re going to ask about them anyway when you see me moving jugs of water and blocks of ice around. Okay?”

So we went through the systems that Amaryllis had set up, waste disposal, air filtration and exchange, heat sinks, the carbon monoxide detector and smoke alarm, the fire extinguisher, the lighting, until I was pretty sure that at some point I was going to annoy her by asking all of the things that I’d forgotten. For her, this was a changing of the guard, but for me, it was only the night before that I’d fought with the tuung guards on the top of the train, and only hours since I’d nearly died on the Down and Out.

“Okay,” I finally said. “Can I sleep now?”

I saw her cheek twitch slightly. “Sure,” she said. “I arranged it so our sleep schedules should be roughly in sync, but I’m a little bit wired right now, and there are things that I’d like to get to sooner rather than later. Nothing that can’t wait until the so-called morning though.” She’d rigged a dimmer switch to a timer, which controlled the lighting in the chamber and gave some semblance of a day-night cycle.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know, I figured, I’m just wiped out.”

“Grak put up some wards, the bunks are soundproofed,” said Amaryllis. “I’m probably going to stay up for a bit.”

“Uh, one thing,” I said. “I haven’t had a shower since, uh, a few days ago, how is that sort of thing handled here?”

“Sponge bath,” answered Amaryllis. “If you need to wash your hair, there’s a washbasin that I use for that, and for doing laundry.”

“And, ah,” I said. “In terms of modesty?”

“That … wasn’t really something I’d considered, sorry, I should have,” said Amaryllis. “We can put up a curtain, I suppose, would that be acceptable? It wasn’t really a problem with Grak, obviously.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Puritanical Midwestern views, et cetera.”

“It’s something we can talk about later,” said Amaryllis with a shrug. “I’ve been reading a lot of Earth history, as you can imagine. I think I’ve got a better handle on how you think now.” She was silent for a moment. “I’ll get everything ready so you can take a sponge bath without getting water everywhere, and we can run through setup and takedown for it.”

It wasn’t much later that I was out of my armor and sponging myself down. I’d done something similar on the train, to get the blood off me, and it was hard not to think about that as I washed myself clean of the stench of combat. A sponge bath in lukewarm water wasn’t what I’d wanted; I wanted a hot shower in my house, a place that I hadn’t thought all that much about since coming to Aerb. I felt lucky that the wounds I’d taken had been transient, enough that it was hard to remember them; I still looked at my left hand every once in a while, just to make sure that it wasn’t deformed anymore.

Getting my mind off the physical didn’t really help things though, because that wasn't where the real problems were lurking. It was hard for me not to picture Uther as Arthur. I found myself projecting the person I’d grown up with onto the imposing king of legend. When I tried to grapple with him having sex with a fake version of Tiff, it was hard not to just see the two of them.

Sleep didn’t come easy to me, despite the rigors of the day, but there was a spell for sleep, and I wasn’t hesitant to use it.

◆◆◆

Amaryllis was barefoot in the ‘kitchen’ when I woke up, making pancakes and eggs using stuff she’d taken from the backpack. She’d set up a table in the middle of the room, with a chair for each of us. I wasn’t sure where Fenn had stolen them from, but they matched.

“Here,” she said, placing a plate on the table for me. “These were going to be for me, but you eat first and we can talk for a bit while I make my own.”

“They’re flat,” I said, poking them with a fork. “Not that I’m complaining, I’m just used to the fluffier kind.” I frowned at them. “Didn’t Fenn make pancakes before? Is there … some variation in pancakes across Aerb?”

“They’re crepes,” said Amaryllis.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, we have those on Earth.”

“I know,” said Amaryllis, glancing back at me. “They’re from an Earth recipe, I’ve been trying to give myself the full cultural experience. Most of the good stuff from Aerb is a few months old by this point, and while we have a few pallets of the bad stuff -- sterilized barren bread -- I’d rather pull from the backpack and have fresh food.” She slid a crepe out of the pan and onto her plate, then poured more batter onto the pan. “There are limits on what we can cook in here, naturally, since a little smoke goes a long way in such a small space.”

The crepes were good, especially when Amaryllis put the extras on the table; she had maple syrup, butter, and some kind of mushed fruit. The eggs were a little runny for my tastes, but I didn’t say anything about them. I had other things on my mind, and if the breakfast was meant to help get me focused on something else, it wasn’t working.

“So,” said Amaryllis when she sat down. “I listened to the recording this morning.”

“Ah,” I said. “These crepes are good.”

“Thanks,” said Amaryllis. She set her fork down with the tines set on the edge of the plate. “Joon, if you wanted to talk about that, about what she said, I would listen.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s … there was this game called The Sims. It was a videogame on the computer, you had control of this little family, or maybe just a single person, they had all these little meters, it was … kind of like playing dolls, Will Wright had a TED Talk where he called it structured play, the sort of game that the user is meant to hang a story on because all the interacting internal systems allow the human brain to latch onto -- you know what, that’s a tangent. The point is, it was something like playing with dolls, I guess, and one of the things that people did a lot -- that we did -- was to make all of our friends in the game.”

I cleared my throat. “Anyway, Arthur was never cruel, I mean, there were lots of ways to kill people in the game, and I did a bunch of that, you could make a person work themselves to the point of exhaustion and pee their pants.” I saw her expression. “It was cartoonish, not meant to be taken seriously, the animation and models were simplistic, and it wasn’t anything approaching … well, whatever this world is, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Okay,” said Amaryllis.

“The point is, it wasn’t like that for him,” I continued. “For him it was about the stories he could tell with our friends, or the people we knew. Like, he’d make girls we knew, and flirt with them using his character, and it was …” I stopped and let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “This was when we were younger, maybe ten or eleven, the kind of thing that you look back on and cringe.” I looked at Amaryllis, finally meeting her eyes. “I don’t know, it was what I was thinking about. I’ve been trying to see it from different angles, to weigh the evidence.”

“Is it that he didn’t see the house as human, or that Tiff was your girlfriend?” asked Amaryllis.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If that story is anything to go by, he was going through some shit at the time, and I want to cut him slack because of that, but it’s still … it makes me feel gross.”

“Me too,” said Amaryllis. She ate more of her crepes. “You’ll let me know if you have more thoughts? Or if you want to vent?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I feel kind of crappy coming in here and talking about my stuff, I’m supposed to be here for you.” Amaryllis shrugged. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” said Amaryllis. “Having Grak here was better than I’d thought it would be. If you mean the chamber as a whole, I’ve been getting a lot of work done. I’m not sure how much any of that would interest you, but I can share it later, in a more structured way. Oh, and I’ve been doing some cultural exploration of Earth, which has been … interesting, I guess.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Anything I’d have heard of?”

“Almost certainly,” said Amaryllis. “That was part of the point, really. It’s hard, because a lot of information on Earth is or was stored digitally, or on the global internet, which I don’t have very good ways of accessing. Still, I gathered up some reference guides and lists of essentials that let me start filling in my Earth knowledge, especially in the areas that Uther didn’t directly copy, and the places that you’ve only mildly touched on. I’ve been making my way through the American Film Institute’s top hundred films. I think I’m starting to get a hang of the medium.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re watching films? How?”

“Oh,” said Amaryllis. “Yes, I have a film projector. For the most part, I’ve been able to get physical film strips in their cans. The projector itself was a pain, since I think it was just a bit too big for the backpack, which meant that I had to get the parts individually and then assemble it, and then, as it turned out, I needed a new lens because I couldn’t get the focus I needed at such a close distance, which was an entirely different ordeal. It’s hacked together, but it works, so if you’re feeling particularly nostalgic, we could do that some night. The next one up is The Sound of Music, which is apparently a musical. I’m not sure if you like those or not.”

“Not really,” I said. “I’m impressed, and a little bit surprised you went through the work, especially if you’re not enjoying yourself.”

“It took me some time to get used to the cuts,” said Amaryllis. “You’d be watching someone one second, and the next second you’d be looking at something totally different. Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” I said, but I was smiling. “It’s just that you sound like an old person.”

“In a bad way?” asked Amaryllis.

“Kind of,” I said. “I really shouldn’t be laughing, you’re trying to educate yourself about a medium that evolved over the course of a few generations, that’s noble, but … the idea that someone doesn’t like or understand cuts is kind of funny.”

“I understand them,” said Amaryllis, crossing her arms. “The concept of the notional camera is clear to me, I’d just like movies better if the camera were clearly moving rather than just jumping from one thing to another all the time. They do it during dialogue and it’s like the filmmaker was trying to put me in the shoes of a hyperactive teleporter. I don’t like having my viewpoint switched around so fast. I’m wondering how universal my experience is; if the medium needs to evolve itself by way of children growing up with it, that’s really going to create some problems in bringing our goods to market.”

“I missed a step,” I said. “You’re planning on selling movies? Specifically, Earth movies?”

“Oh, all of it,” said Amaryllis. “Uther was incredibly prolific, but what he brought over from Earth were bastardizations of works he remembered seeing or reading as a teenager, and in comparison with everything from Earth, his canon is minuscule. More to the point, none of this requires our direct labor to exploit. We can hire out people to copy the works and mass-distribute them, with our only role being selecting which books, movies, and songs to pull out.”

“Huh,” I said. “Can I say something that you might find really dumb?”

“Always.” Amaryllis smiled. “To be honest, I’ve kind of missed it.”

“I find the cultural sales stuff to be kind of boring,” I said.

“That’s not dumb,” said Amaryllis. “It would be dumb to not do just because you find it boring, but finding it boring in and of itself is just a matter of taste. Besides, as I said, we don’t really need to have that much of a hand in it, so long as we can find people that we trust to run things for us. There are some important questions about how we’ll do it -- I’ve made a list -- but your actual involvement can be close to nil. It’s mostly as a way of accruing capital for the other projects I want to run.”

“Any luck figuring out why Aerb lags behind Earth in terms of development?” I asked.

Amaryllis sighed. “No, not really. We don’t really have fossil fuels, which hurts immensely, and to some extent the athenaeums drain away brainpower from other pursuits. The multitude of species on Aerb are also a problem -- sorry, not a problem, but a possible explanation for why we’re progressing so slowly. Different cultures, different minds, different ways of doing things, all of which you’d think would contribute to a marketplace of ideas, but I think in reality just creates a lot of friction, as well as removing a lot of people from contention as inventors. Dwarves live almost exclusively underground, they don’t really have much use for radio technologies, the elves are essentially static outside of a few aberrations, you have groups like the tuung that are intentionally regressive, it’s kind of a mess.” She frowned slightly.

“You still don’t think that explains it all,” I said.

“No,” she replied with another sigh. “It’s been nagging at me. Maybe it really just is a combination of factors. Or maybe it’s the Dungeon Master putting his foot on the scale somewhere, either because he wanted the world to look a certain way, or because he wanted this opportunity for us.”

“I’d think he’d be more seamless about it,” I replied.

“I’m not sure that’s his style,” replied Amaryllis. “I’ve been finding a lot of things that just make me groan. It reminds me a lot of you, actually.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“So, I was reading Alfred Kinsey’s work on human sexuality, and the name kept bugging me,” said Amaryllis. “Then I pulled out The Book of Blood, and do you recall who wrote that?”

“Syfriend?” I asked.

“Alek Syfriend,” replied Amaryllis. “Which is an anagram for Alfred Kinsey.”

“Huh,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll confess to having missed that one. But that’s not really a seam, in the way that I would think of them, it’s just a … a wink, I guess.”

“I suppose,” said Amaryllis. “But there are thousands of those winks, and it’s sort of made me reconsider what’s going on here.”

“You know, when we first met you’d have said that I was just partially dream-skewered, that it was Earth that had conformed to Aerb, rather than the other way around,” I said.

“It seemed sensible at the time,” said Amaryllis. “Now, I’m not very confident that’s the case. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been absorbing a lot of American media, history, and political theory, and realizing how much Uther copied from the world he knew. It makes me think that’s true for everything, that our world in some respects is just a reflection of your own.”

“Yeah,” I said. I finished the last bite of my breakfast, which had grown slightly cold as we talked. “Thanks for helping me take my mind off things for a bit.”

“No problem,” said Amaryllis. “You seemed like you needed it. I’ve always liked talking to you.”

“No, you haven’t,” I said.

“No, that’s true, I haven’t always,” said Amaryllis. “Especially the beginning. I suppose there have been a little bit of rose-colored glasses on my end. Grak said the same thing, that I was romanticizing our group a bit.” She cleared her throat. “But I am happy to have you here.”

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s get started on mapping out the future of the world, shall we?”

Most of the ‘work’ involved me sitting there while Amaryllis explained things. She had a dry-erase board that she’d pulled out of the glove and set against one wall, with the markers taken from Earth and the board itself just a sheet of glass with white backing, which I thought was probably made from native materials given it was too big to have come out of the backpack. She had a variety of questions for me, most of them written down in a notebook, and made some notes on the board and the notebook when I answered, even though I didn’t think my answers were all that illuminating.

The plan was to build up as much money as possible to get us into a position where we could be the first movers on all of the technologies available to us. Ideally, we’d be able to buy a factory outright, then hire a team of engineers in order to get that factory to produce the goods we thought were most important. This was a slower method of distributing technologies, but it would reap us greater personal rewards, some of which would funnel back toward the ‘adventuring’ side of things, if we still had cause to do that (which we both assumed would be the case).

“Ideally, we would have the full backing of a state,” said Amaryllis. “Actually, ideally, we would be a state, since that’s the only way to have true top-to-bottom vertical integration.”

“You’re talking about reclaiming the throne of Anglecynn?” I asked.

Amaryllis actually laughed. “Well, I never had the throne of Anglecynn, and it’s a really poor candidate for a number of reasons, like the legal framework, the sheer size and scope of the country, the entrenched institutions, the politics -- no, I was thinking somewhere small, with lawmakers that are easy to bully around with our power and influence.”

“Huh,” I replied. “That’s … cutthroat.”

“Sure,” said Amaryllis. “I mean, I am talking about creating an oligopoly with us at the top. I stumbled across the phrase ‘benevolent dictator for life’. It seemed really apropos. Anyway, I was thinking about this time chamber, which should have only a little less than two hundred years in it when we’re done with it, and about what Esuen had said. In thirty years, she could produce five hundred thousand young. Meaning, essentially, that we could have our own nation in a single-digit number of years.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Blegh, Jesus,” said Amaryllis, rolling her eyes. “Some night when we don’t have more pressing matters to talk about, I’m going to rant to you about the Bible. I can’t imagine why I thought it would be worth reading.” She paused. “Is having our own country one of those things that you think is distasteful but will do anyway? Or are you actually against it?”

“It’s just … bigger than anything we’ve done,” I said. “You’re talking about actually entering into international politics.”

“It had to happen at some point,” said Amaryllis. “The whole point of this, all of this, practically from the beginning, was that we’d change the world. To my way of thinking, if we can get the backing to create our own nation, one formally recognized by the Empire of Common Cause, we can set all the rules up how we want them from the start. We go to whoever wants to back the rogue tuung, keep our information advantage under wraps, they set us up as a lever to use against the other tuung, and then before anyone knows what to do about it, there are cheap electronics being teleported into every city in the world, and we take a cut.”

I found Amaryllis scary sometimes.

◆◆◆

There was a lot for me to catch up on, but very little that was actually new. Amaryllis had developed embryonic plans into thick binders filled with typewritten thoughts and ideas. She was roadblocked in a number of places, limited by information she’d need to get from the outside world, or places where she didn’t quite understand some bit of technical jargon and needed more time for study, but it was everything she’d said she was going to do when she’d talked about going in the chamber.

There were a few surprises though.

“Here,” she said, sliding forward a sheaf of papers. “It’s an analysis of your expanded character sheet with some notes on moving toward an optimal build the next time you change things around. Obviously what’s optimal depends on what you end up doing, but it’s my belief that you should either focus on social or mental abilities, especially those that aren’t easily available to other people.”

“Huh,” I said. “Okay, can I read this later?”

“Sure,” said Amaryllis. “No rush, we’ve got tons of time.”

So there was that. Amaryllis had laid plans for unlocking all of the remaining magic I should have access to, ranked them by both mundane and combat utility, and by what she thought we’d need in order to get the unlock done. On some, she’d written ‘potential quest?’, because she thought they’d need an appreciable amount of effort in order to actually get unlocked. Revision magic was at the top of the list; the way a revision mage was inducted was particularly onerous, but the most burdensome aspect was the time it took, which we could reduce down enormously by using the time chamber.

There were some other ideas she’d been kicking around that I was less enamored with.

“We can rush Solace,” said Amaryllis. “When she’s born, you’ll take a look at her soul, and if it looks like everything but her body is as it should be, then we’ll have you do a wholesale replacement of her physical self. Then all we should need to do is heal her into that form, rendering her a full adult and capable druid a few minutes after I’ve given birth to her.”

“That … does make some sense,” I said. “I would think there would be some problems as far as mass goes. Do you know whether bone magic actually replaces lost mass?”

“Our only reference book on bone magic is The Commoner’s Guide to Bone Magic, which unsurprisingly doesn’t go into it,” said Amaryllis. “And yes, that’s something that we should test before trying it. Obviously if the magic is cannibalizing other muscle, fat, or bone, we’re not going to be able to turn a six-pound baby into a hundred-pound woman. In general concept though, what do you think?”

“I was going to say that it feels unnatural, but we’re already talking about the result of an eldritch ritual done on a dead woman’s soul with the help of a non-anima and a square mile of sentient forest, so I suppose we threw the concept of ‘natural’ out right from the start,” I said. “It all depends on if we can do it safely or not.”

“I suppose in theory, if she has her faculties, Solace might be able to do a less risky version of what I’m proposing,” said Amaryllis. “But that’s a question of what druids can and cannot do, which is always a tricky thing. Logically, I’d think that she’d be able to do it, but logic isn’t always on the menu as far as druids are concerned.”

“I can understand not wanting to stay in here that long, so long as Solace would be able to develop her motor and language skills the natural way,” I said. “But if I look into her soul and she’s lost a lot in the process, we might have to raise her in the time chamber, at least long enough that she gets back to being herself.”

“Yeah.” Amaryllis frowned. “I’m aware, just not looking forward to it. Even if we feed her formula and take shifts raising her, it’s still more time in this tiny room.”

“Are you going to make it?” I asked.

“Maybe,” said Amaryllis. “I found myself looking through medical texts from Earth, trying to get information about how to induce labor, and how early it was okay to do that.” She shook her head. “Obviously the stress of being in here would be something we’d have to worry about with Esuen as well, and I’m worried that if I can’t hack it as a test case, I can’t ask her to do the same. The tuung lay eggs, so we could still probably do some speeding up, but it’s another case where I’m a bit blocked on outside information.” She sighed. “Okay, I think we’re done for the day.”

“Done?” I asked. There was no clock in the room for easy reference, only a timepiece that Amaryllis kept in her pocket and referred to only reluctantly.

“Done,” replied Amaryllis. “Did I not go over the day structure?”

“Nope,” I replied.

“Mornings are for collaboration, information exchange, et cetera, then we have lunch, and until a few hours before bedtime, you work on your own, doing whatever you think your efforts would best be put toward. Then we have a late dinner, and spend the rest of the day after that on enforced leisure. That’s what Grak and I worked out, adapted from my previous schedule when I was solo. I guess I’m open to change, if you’d like.” She really didn’t sound like she was open to change.

“No,” I said. “That’s fine.”

Lunch was a stir fry with thick noodles, heavy on the vegetables and with two enormous shrimp, bigger than any shrimp I’d ever eaten but apparently from Earth. Amaryllis was a surprisingly good cook, and I wondered how much of that skill she’d picked up in her time in the chamber. She ate quickly, without saying much, and then tended to the chamber for a bit while I finished up. For all that she described the chamber as being a delicate balance of heat and air, I hadn’t found it all that different from a somewhat stuffy room in a house without air conditioning.

I spent free time training up skills to their soft cap, to the extent I was able to do that without any help from Amaryllis. Most of them were already there, and had been for a while, so I put work into some of the ones that were harder to raise, like Horticulture or Engineering, done using materials taken from the backpack. I tried to bring Solace’s lessons to mind as I worked with the plants, but it was difficult to get in what I thought of as being the right mindset when we weren’t outdoors. True flower mages tended toward disorganized, organic gardens, though maybe not to the extent that was true for Solace.

For dinner, Amaryllis pulled out a crockpot that she’d loaded up before breakfast, filled with root vegetables and beef.

“You’re very domestic,” I said. “If it were Fenn, she’d probably just be eating fast food.”

“Fenn knows how to cook,” said Amaryllis. “Sometimes I feel like you don’t give her enough credit.”

“No, I know she knows how to cook,” I said. “I just don’t think that she would, if you were in each other's shoes. You can pull whatever you want from the backpack, and I know for a fact that hot, cooked food is well within its abilities.”

“I think it tastes better if you make it yourself,” said Amaryllis with a shrug. “Do you wish I didn’t cook?”

“I appreciate the effort,” I said. “I just … maybe don’t understand it? Like, Fenn wouldn’t cook because she likes to be lazy when she can be, and I thought that maybe you wouldn’t cook because you like being efficient and spending time cooking is time you could spend doing something else.”

“I like cooking,” said Amaryllis with a shrug. She furrowed her brow. “I do take it out of my time budget.”

“Sorry, this is good eats, I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t have, I just”—I stopped and shut my mouth—“it doesn’t seem like you, to focus on something aesthetic and fleeting.”

“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment,” said Amaryllis. “From what you’ve told me, on Earth you focused on nothing but the aesthetic and fleeting.”

“Ouch,” I said. “Tough but fair.”

“Isn’t that how you described the games you played?” asked Amaryllis. “You compared them to performance art.”

“I said it was fair,” I replied. “I was thinking more about the time I spent online.” I ate more of the roast as I thought about that. “You know, I think you’d love the internet.”

“I have part of it,” said Amaryllis. “The backpack doesn’t allow me access to a computer, lap computer, or intelligent phone, but it does allow printouts of websites.”

“That’s … not really the same thing, since you’d be missing out on interactivity,” I replied. “But I suppose it’s as close as we’re going to get. Find anything interesting?”

“Many things,” said Amaryllis with a nod. “It’s unbelievable how much Uther brought over from Earth. I’d thought, when I started, that I’d find a few places where he’d been obviously influenced by what he’d grown up with on Earth, but it’s almost overwhelming how many parallels there are. Even his name is taken from Earth legend, did you know that?”

“Well, usually it’s ‘Pendragon’, but yeah, I knew,” I replied. “But that’s not actually on him, unless you want to judge an adolescent boy for his choice in names. The Penndraig name was sitting here, on Aerb, waiting for him. At least he didn’t call himself Megatron.”

“I’m not sure that you understand who Uther Penndraig was,” said Amaryllis with a frown. “The way you talk about him, it’s like you know all the details, but haven’t been able to internalize how he appeared to us.”

“He’s the most important man in history,” I said. “Responsible for the First Empire, and by some accountings, accidentally responsible for the Second Empire, kicked off a minor scientific revolution that petered out without him around to keep things going, led millions if not billions of people -- yeah, I know.”

“You know, but you don’t know,” said Amaryllis. “You’re repeating back facts, but to you he’s still your teenage friend. The tape -- can I talk about it?”

“About what Zona said?” I asked. I got that nauseous feeling again, and pushed away what was left of my food. “Sure.”

“There have always been rumors about him,” said Amaryllis. “He was … he was Donny Osmond, Shakespeare, John F. Kennedy, Nikola Tesla, all rolled into one. Anyone that big, that important, that popular? Well, of course there would be rumors and stories, even if none of them were true. That’s just how some people interact with greatness, they feel a need to tear it down so that it’s not so imposing, or make excuses for why that greatness wasn’t really an achievement. People would say that he’d sold his soul to accomplish what he did, or he was selling lies, or even that he was simply a deeply flawed man who had nonetheless done a lot for the world.”

“Some of that might be true,” I said, swallowing. “Yeah, I … I never thought of him as perfect, back on Earth. Good, maybe, better than me, certainly, but not perfect. I just thought the imperfections would be, I don’t know. Not in this particular direction. Not him using people. I thought that it would be insecurity, a lack of direction, something like that. Or, putting his family and friends before others, maybe. Being inconsiderate? I don’t know. Something that I could handle a little better.”

“You’re struggling with the fact that he wasn’t the person you knew,” said Amaryllis. “Or rather, simply not confronting it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was decades, sure, but he wouldn’t totally change, would he?”

“Do you think that you’ll be even remotely how you were in high school, when you’ve lived in Aerb for another forty years?” asked Amaryllis.

“No,” I said. “Probably not.” I wasn’t sure who I would be, but instinctively it felt like only the vestiges of my old life would remain. “There will come a point when I’ve been on Aerb longer than I’ve been on Earth.”

“I think about that sometimes,” said Amaryllis. “Not about you, but about myself. I’ve been in this room for longer than I’ve known you. Most of my time as a member of this group will have been spent waiting for the pregnancy to progress. And my perspectives on the four of you have changed too, given such ample time to reflect.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Was that why you didn’t hug me?”

“Last month?” asked Amaryllis. She turned away slightly, so she wasn’t looking at me. “I don’t want you to think less of me.”

“I won’t,” I said. My heart was beating faster. I looked over at the side of the wall, where the control for the time chamber was. It was a lever, nothing complicated. Depending on what she said, I might have to leave. “If you’re dealing with feelings, then I think you should talk about them.”

“Grak thought so too,” said Amaryllis. “Here, let me clean up first, if you’re done.” She reached out with her gloved hand and touched her plate, which disappeared after ten seconds, then did the same for the silverware, napkins, and finally, the table. “Chairs too,” she said. “I think we’ll watch a movie tonight, and even if we don’t, I think it’s good to have open space.”

“Sure,” I said slowly. I watched as she removed the chairs to the glove. She went over to one wall and set up a film projector on the table, then put a couch in front of it. “Are you stalling?” I asked.

Amaryllis sat down on the couch. “A little bit,” said Amaryllis. “I’m composing my thoughts for the fifth or sixth time.”

“Ah,” I said. I took a seat on the couch with her. It was blue and stuffed, large enough that we had some space between us, which I was grateful for.

“You’re going to think less of me,” Amaryllis said again.

“Probably not,” I said.

“Well, I worry that you will,” said Amaryllis. “I would think less of myself. I do think less of myself.” She cleared her throat. “There’s a part of me that thinks about what would happen if Fenn were to die. It feels like we’ve been living on the knife-edge of survival for quite some time, and Fenn’s come the closest of us. When she was bisected … that was before everything had been settled between the three of us, but I didn’t think that she would make it, and I thought that you would find comfort in my arms.” She paused, pursing her lips. “There’s a part of me that’s in love with you.” She glanced at me, just for a moment, and I could see that her eyes were wet with nascent tears. “We’d make a horrible couple. We both know that. There are times when we’re not even all that good of friends.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked at them, rather than meeting my eyes again. “And there’s this part of me that sees you as somehow completing me anyway, as though a romance between us is what’s missing from my life. I see the warm affection that you give to Fenn, and I feel happy for the two of you, but also jealous.”

My heart was hammering away. Some of that was just simple fight or flight response, I was sure.

“I’m going to have to talk about all of this with Fenn,” I said. “I mean, I’m going to have to disclose it, because I would want her to do the same if someone said that kind of thing to her.”

“I know,” said Amaryllis. “It’s a complication. It’s bad for the group. I would let it lie, but that hasn’t been helping me, and with months in here … I’m not really sure that I can make it if I don’t get things off my chest, so here we are. Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Not fine, obviously, it sucks, but I do think it’s better for us to talk about it rather than letting it fester. Maybe we can talk our way to some kind of catharsis.”

“Maybe,” said Amaryllis. “I’ve had three months to get over it, or to figure things out on my own. It wasn’t just a matter of moping, I was trying to figure myself out. I saw it -- see it -- as a personal problem, a defect that I can remove like I’ve removed so many others. It’s a weakness.”

“But no luck on that end?” I asked.

“I read books from Earth,” said Amaryllis. “That was why I was reading Kinsey’s work: it was part of a survey of works on romance and sexuality. Aerb has its own books on the subject, but I think it would suffice to say that we don’t have the same depth of research. There are so many different species that it makes proper research difficult, and research for any individual species is less economically viable and less scientifically important.”

“And?” I asked. “Did any of it help you to understand yourself?” I didn’t mention that Kinsey was a little bit suspect, as far as researchers went. Either she already knew that, or telling her might undermine whatever she thought she’d learned about herself.

“I made a survey of myself,” said Amaryllis. “I tried to imagine how things would feel to me, sexual, romantic, physical things. I tried different emotions on for size. I had never been that sort of reader before, the kind to project herself into the characters and live vicariously through them, but I really tried, and found that I could do it, if I put the effort in, which was helpful in allowing me to learn what was and was not compatible with my own mind.”

“So ... you’ve been reading romance novels?” I asked.

“I have.” Amaryllis nodded. “Not exclusively, obviously, but I’ve been treating them as a form of self-care. Obviously the novels never portray romance as it actually is, but they’re meant to evoke those particular feelings in the reader, so I thought to that extent they’d be useful.” She stretched out slightly, then rested her hands on her knees. “I used to think that I was broken.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Just … asexual?”

“Mostly,” said Amaryllis. She frowned at me. “Did you know before I did?”

“After our long talk in the bottle, it seemed like one of the two likely options,” I said with a shrug. “The other being that you were lesbian.” I hadn’t wanted to pry or make assumptions, but I’d really been hoping that her revulsion towards sex with me wasn’t just because it was me.

Amaryllis gave a nonchalant shrug. “A bit.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I quickly added.

“Admirable of you to say,” said Amaryllis with a small smile.

“Not really, by the standards of my culture,” I said. “Obviously there are some issues if you’re part of a five-century-long hereditary line.”

“Obviously,” replied Amaryllis, smiling more. “Do you know that’s one of the things I like about you?”

“Oh?” I asked.

“You like to race ahead,” said Amaryllis. “And even when your observations are sophomoric, it’s the energy and enthusiasm with which you do it that I find charming.” She looked away from me again, turning solemn. “This isn’t helping.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Did it at least help to talk? To express?”

“Maybe. Not really,” said Amaryllis. “It made me feel better in the short term, but it hasn’t solved the long-term problem.”

“Sometimes if your emotions are pent up, you just need a release valve,” I said. I frowned slightly. “I don’t want to change subjects, if there’s more you wanted to say.”

“Go ahead,” said Amaryllis. “I was going to share my findings from reading Earth’s literature on human sexuality, but I imagine it would bore you, and that’s a change in subject all its own. Speak what was on your mind.”

“I was going to say that maybe for Arthur, Kuum Doona was just a release valve,” I said. “Maybe … it takes some interpretation on my end, but maybe Arthur had gone down into the Boundless Pit because he wanted to escape from his reality, or to go back home. On his last trip, he was away for a month, which means either he had some actual adventures down there, or he was just dropping for something like a hundred thousand miles. Whatever he found, or didn’t find, it was crushing. And when he came back … Kuum Doona wasn’t Tiff, but Tiff wasn’t Tiff, she was just a representation of home, of a life he’d left behind, things he’d never done. It was an outlet for him.” It had felt right as I was saying it, but at the end I began to falter, because it sounded too much like apologetics for something that was too much like sexual assault.

“Do you need an outlet?” asked Amaryllis.

“For?” I asked.

“Arthur,” she replied. “Or other feelings about home that you can’t express. Or anything, really. I appreciate that you took the time to listen to me -- I really, really appreciate it, more than I can say. I was worried that you would be upset with me, or worse, that …” She trailed off and folded her hands.

“It would be a mistake on a lot of fronts,” I said.

“Yes,” replied Amaryllis.

She didn’t say, ‘and yet …’, but I wondered whether she thought it. There was certainly a part of me, the hormonal teenage boy, that was thinking about going ahead and damning the consequences.

We sat in silence for a moment. Whatever she’d needed to get off her chest, it seemed like she was done with it, and I’d weathered the storm. I still felt shaky and slightly sick. I wasn’t in love with Amaryllis, or even infatuated anymore, but she was still devastatingly attractive and readily admitting that she had a thing for me. I’d have liked to believe that if Amaryllis had tried to seduce me, I would have pushed her off and left the time chamber early, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I was just fantasizing instead of worrying. It all left me feeling a little bit uncomfortable and anxious.

“It makes me think,” I said, frowning slightly. “It makes me think about the choices that Arthur was faced with, and how he dealt with them.” I let out a shaky breath. “The thing I’m really worried about is that this is the tip of the iceberg. That it’s a single grain of sand on the beach, that the further we probe, the more we’re going to see, and I’m going to find that he was destroyed by this place, back from the dead but then scrubbed away.” I swallowed. “Or, maybe, something worse. I don’t know.”

Our conversation petered out after that, and Amaryllis put the movie in the reel-to-reel projector. She’d selected Groundhog Day, for obvious reasons, and while it wasn’t really the movie that I was in the mood for, I knew it well enough that I didn’t have to spend too much mental effort trying to follow it. Amaryllis asked questions throughout, enough that I could almost convince myself that she really did want me in the chamber with her just to be her cultural translator.

Chapter 20 - Grayscale

The month in the time chamber went by quickly and slowly. The ordered schedule that Amaryllis had us on made the days go faster, since it shortened my vision a bit; I was always waiting on the next section of the day, rather than counting the days themselves. But at the same time, those divided chunks of time seemed to drag, especially during the first part of my time in the chamber, when I was working on leveling up any of my skills that hadn’t hit their caps. There were a few occasions where Amaryllis helped with training, which made it more bearable; some of the skills, especially the social ones, were nigh impossible to train up without a partner to practice on.

On my third day in the chamber, I offered to do half of the chores.

“Why?” asked Amaryllis with a raised eyebrow.

“Uh,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s something that you should be suspicious of. It seems sort of like common courtesy for us to have a division of labor, I should have offered from the start, I just thought that maybe you liked doing things your own way. I don’t mind doing drudge work.” I’d been a little uneasy watching her move the giant jugs of water around, but the last time I’d mentioned her being pregnant, I’d gotten a well-researched lecture on women’s health and what was and was not scientifically shown to have negative outcomes for mother and child.

Loyalty Increased: Amaryllis lvl 20!

Companion Passive Unlocked: Symbiosis (Amaryllis)!

“Okay, I’d appreciate that,” said Amaryllis. “Thanks.”

“You know,” I said slowly. “I think there’s been a recent trend of loyalty increases being genuinely insulting.”

Amaryllis lit up. “Really?” she asked. “It finally happened?” I think it was probably the happiest I’d ever seen her; she was practically vibrating with excitement. “The same that Fenn got?”

“Symbiosis, yeah,” I said. “But the loyalty increase leads me to believe that saying I would do some of the drudge work changes your mind about me somehow? That kind of hurts.”

“Sorry, Joon,” said Amaryllis. She winced. “Do you want me to take the time to explain it nicely, or can I bask in this for a bit? I’ve been planning for this moment for a while now.”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said. “Let me know if there’s anything you need help with. I helped Fenn a bit, and I’m the resident expert on learning skills without putting in the work.”

Amaryllis gave me a smile, which was quite effective at cutting through the glumness I’d felt at getting a loyalty bump just for offering to do my fair share. We didn’t really need to talk about it; I thought that it probably went back to that first night we’d spent together, when I’d blown off the night’s watch to go train up my skills. I knew that she saw me as someone who wasn’t really willing to put in the work, which I thought was somewhat fair; it was a similar line of thought to the one that Grak expressed, about me thinking that the world owed me something. I was happy to have changed her mind a little bit on that score, even if I wished that it hadn’t needed to be changed in the first place.

◆◆◆

As far as the interpersonal side of things went, it was never as intense as on the first day. My primary method of operation was to try not to do things which, in a romantic comedy, would be obvious setups for said romance. That meant nothing that implicitly included physical contact, nothing otherwise intimate, very little discussion of our feelings (which would only have been retreading well-worn ground), and as rigidly platonic of a relationship as possible.

I kept thinking back to what Amaryllis had said about hating herself for feeling the way she did. That resonated with me; I hated myself for the fact that all those precautions seemed necessary. I really did love Fenn though, and whatever it took to keep our relationship strong, that was what I would do.

It made things awkward sometimes; Amaryllis reciprocated the aversion to touch, and sometimes it was obvious to both of us that this was something we were doing. We would reach for something on the table during mealtimes and both pull away before we made contact, like the other was made of lava. We didn’t really talk about it, even when it was awkward like that, which was how I preferred it; we knew where we stood.

I dreamt about Amaryllis from time to time. It always followed a similar theme, with the two of us someplace that wasn’t the suffocatingly small time chamber, and Amaryllis being aggressively seductive. She would say things like, ‘I was built to be everything that you ever wanted, do you want to see how much that covers?’ while touching me, and sometimes I would shrink back, or sometimes I would simply accept that this was happening to me, until I had to talk to Fenn and explain what had happened. I always woke up from those dreams feeling guilty and nauseous, like I had done something wrong.

I didn’t talk about the dreams with Amaryllis.

◆◆◆

Amaryllis blitzed through acclimating to her newfound abilities far faster than Fenn had, becoming half the soul mage, bone mage, blood mage, et cetera that I was in a handful of days. She asked me all sorts of questions, most of which I wasn’t able to answer.

“This is amazing,” said Amaryllis. She sat in the lotus position on top of a pillow, having just come back out of a soul mage trance. “I wonder if I’d be able to surpass you.”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Not per the rules of the passive, but I don’t know how hard and fast those are. It’s also possible that you might be able to do more with what you have, which I wouldn’t be terribly surprised by. If skill level translates directly to skill, you couldn’t, but I’m fairly sure that it doesn’t. Some of the techniques I’ve learned have been as a consequence of hitting a new benchmark in that skill, but others have been unlocked by trying new things, or getting information from someone. Sanguine Surge was like that. All I had to do was adapt the technique from Crimson Fist into a jump.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Don’t try anything too strenuous, and don’t mess with your own soul. Please.”

“I was going to try something,” said Amaryllis. She was almost pouting. “You need direct, physical contact in order to touch the soul of someone else, right? That’s all?”

“Yes …” I said slowly. “You—” I stopped, thinking that over. “You want to give Solace’s soul a peek?”

Amaryllis grinned and nodded. “How many women in the history of Aerb do you think have done that?”

“I mean … most of them wouldn’t have seen anything, right?” I asked. “Babies don’t know anything, I’d figure that embryos would basically be blanks. The bulk souls I’ve looked at have been, anyway.”

“I’m at thirteen weeks, she’s not an embryo, she’s a fetus,” said Amaryllis. “And yes, you’re right, most of the time I don’t think it would be terribly interesting, but it's an exciting time to learn. Come to think of it, a pregnant soul mage might have been where we got the information that souls don’t appear until the sixth day. I’m not sure I ever questioned that.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s certainly the less horrifying version of how the Second Empire would have come to know that.” I still wasn’t comfortable with the mass production of souls that served as the primary source of power generation throughout Aerb. Instead of oil spills, there were accidents where thousands if not millions of embryonic souls ended up in the hells.

“Well, I’m going to try to find Solace and see what state she’s in, wish me luck,” said Amaryllis.

“Good luck,” I said. I watched as she closed her eyes again, and tried to continue on with my day. Touching the soul of another person had been quite difficult for me. It had taken hours before I’d been able to get in Grak’s to undo what Fallatehr had done to him, and I’d had twice the Essentialism that she was working with, though I’d also been working blind and hadn’t tried at every skill change. I also suspected that getting to Solace might be easier, considering the two of them were in some sense sharing a body.

(The numerical skills were composed of discrete parts, visible inside the soul as a complex sum of everything that fell under that skill, and up close, some tendrils leading off in other directions, which some investigation had shown led to either memories of using that skill, or places where two different skills worked together. There was a lot of room for two people with the same numerical value in a skill to have distinctly different applications of that skill, which in theory gave us some wiggle room for specialization, something that was high up my list of priorities given that both Amaryllis and Fenn had weak versions of the magics available to me.)

Personally, I was working on blood magic. I had already raised it as high as my stats would allow, but there were things that blood mages were supposed to be able to do, and I hadn’t really had the time to sit around trying to figure things out until stepping into the time chamber. Hemokinesis had always been one of my favorite abilities in tabletop games, and I’d made more than one villain from the concept (blood liches, blood zombies, blood portals, and blood bards). On Aerb, blood mages could pull blood from their bodies in order to form a weapon, which seemed like it would be a useful ability in certain circumstances, especially if I could apply all of my blade-bound bonuses to it.

Keeping my blood in my body was comparatively easier, since the blood seemed to ‘want’ to travel through my veins, rather than spurting out all over the place. I made a slit in my wrist, opening the ulnar artery, and tried to maintain the flow of blood while also bringing some of it out. I tried to imagine the flow of blood like a river whose course I was changing, so that it would dip outside my body. I got the loop of blood out two inches from my wrist before losing control of it and getting blood everywhere. I used a bone to close the wound, wiped myself off, then tried again.

An hour later, I’d gotten it up to six inches away while still keeping it steady, but hadn’t been able to trigger a skill message, nor really figure out how I was supposed to translate that into something like a spear. Perhaps more importantly, I also hadn’t gotten a game notification.

“Fuck,” said Amaryllis with a scowl, coming out of the lotus position and stretching her legs out. She looked at me, and the loop of blood that was flowing through the air above my wrist, along with all the blood on the floor and my clothes. “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” I said, bringing the loop back inside me, then closing up the wound with bone magic. “I’m getting somewhere, I think, if a bit slowly. I take it things aren’t going well? It took me a long time, you need some patience.”

“No, it’s not that,” said Amaryllis. “I got in, it’s just … she’s not all there. The thicket of memories is decimated, she’s threadbare on skills, and her values are a mess. There’s none of the conceptual specificity that I see in my own soul.”

“Maybe it takes time?” I asked.

“Or she’s lost a part of herself in the process, and will need to be raised as a child before she can be reunited with the locus,” said Amaryllis. She clenched her fists so hard her knuckles went white. “Shitfucker.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t want to be in here for years.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “We’ve got your back.”

Amaryllis opened her eyes. “I do appreciate the sentiment, but if we have to raise her, then someone is going to have to do it. If five years old is our benchmark, the point at which she’ll have a proper command of language and possibly be a capable druid, that means that we each need to spend more than a year in here. If I’m not part of the rotation, that would mean more of a burden for each of you. The co-use of the time chamber is already pushing how much can reasonably be asked of the group.”

“If we take turns,” I began, then stopped. “Ah, that doesn’t really work, does it? Grak spent a month in here, then he’s only going to be outside the chamber for a subjective few hours before having to come back in to ride out the rest of the pregnancy.” I sighed. “Right.”

“There’s no way to get a true break in, not without compromising our timetable,” said Amaryllis. She slammed a fist against the floor. “This is bullshit.”

“Could you see if the connection to the locus was still there?” I asked.

“I think so,” said Amaryllis. “I was actually going to see whether you’d allow me to look at your own soul, so that I have something to compare against. Right now I just have myself and her, and she’s highly atypical.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’s … I’m a little leery about anyone looking at my soul, after how things went down with Fallatehr.”

“You didn’t let Fenn?” asked Amaryllis, raising an eyebrow.

“She hasn’t worked on it, to my knowledge,” I said. “She went for blood and bone as soon as she got Symbiosis, then there was all that shit with Fallatehr, and I think maybe she didn’t want to go for Essentialism given how things shook out. I only really use it when it’s wholly necessary, which isn’t often; shifting points around, mostly.”

“Do you not trust me?” asked Amaryllis.

I sighed. “I do,” I said. “But it still makes me nervous. Doesn’t it make you nervous?”

“It does.” Amaryllis nodded. “I never really got a choice to say no, and the link doesn’t seem to go both ways.”

I held out my hand, and Amaryllis moved over to me, close enough to take it but far enough away that the gesture was as lacking in intimacy as possible. I could feel my heart start beating faster, partly from the first physical contact I’d had in a few days, and partly from the idea of her reaching into the core of my being.

It took some time. Our hands got sweaty, and I had to readjust so I wasn’t in such an awkward position. She kept her eyes closed throughout, which was the same as I’d done when I was practicing, since I was trying to block out outside stimuli and focus on the extrasensory perception of the soul.

Eventually I got bored, and picked up a book that was close enough to grab; Amaryllis had been reading through Earth books, and I had set myself to reading through Aerbian books. The book was The Exclusionary Principle, Seventh Edition, which had a number of bookmarks in it. Amaryllis had apparently discovered office supplies from Earth in her first few months in the chamber, and used them extensively, using highlighters and sticky notes with wild abandon. The timeline at the back of the book had been well-marked, and there was a piece of folded paper between the last page and the back cover that cross-referenced the exclusion zones with the information I’d transcribed from my soul.

The cat came into existence roughly a minute after I started reading, as they always did. This one was black with a patch of white at his throat and earthy green eyes, slender and young. When he appeared, he was standing on the pages, but he lay down almost immediately, until I picked him up with my one free hand and laid him in my lap, which seemed a suitable compromise to him. As I read, he would occasionally stick a leg out to idly bat at the pages, just to let me know that he was still there.

The so-called exclusions came in three basic forms, all geographically restricted. The normal exclusions were like the one that covered the Risen Lands, where some kind of magic (or physics) had proven itself broken and been locked off from the rest of the world by some unknown force or entity (through the book, it was simply called ‘the exclusionary principle’, as a way of dodging the question about what was actually happening behind the scenes). Enpersoned exclusion zones were slightly different, as the magic was locked to a single person in addition to the region locking, and entad exclusions were that, but for a magic item rather than a person.

(I was suspicious that the house was part of an exclusion, given its power and the fact that it hadn’t decided to go somewhere else, but I didn’t have enough information to say one way or another. It was something I’d have to ask when I got out.)

If we went to the Glassy Fields exclusion zone, it was entirely possible that I would be able to learn Glass Magic, but it would only work there, and the whole of the exclusion zone was covered in degenerate glass magic, in much the same way that the Risen Lands were consumed with a degenerate, out-of-control application of the necrotic field effect, and the Datura was completely devoid of life, hounded by the thaum-seekers.

The cross-reference of the exclusion zones listed in The Exclusionary Principle with the list as partly divined from the information in my soul showed that there were quite a few more exclusions than anyone knew of. Ice magic wasn’t a lost art, it had been excluded, and the place that it had been excluded to was a mystery. By Amaryllis’ reckoning, we had the answers to a number of enduring historical mysteries … many of them dating back to Uther Penndraig’s day.

My germ of a theory was that Uther had been the cause of most of the exclusions. Because the historical record of exclusions lined up with the numbering of exclusions as written on my soul, it was easy enough to make some guesses in that direction. Ice Magic was “Deprecated, Exclusion #16”, and that meant that it must have chronologically happened after the so-called ‘Invasion of the Ice Wizards’, which had concluded by 4 FE. I wasn’t entirely sure that Uther had been responsible for that, but his historians had written about him climbing the Glacial Minaret to face down the ruling council of wizards, and after he’d defeated them, Ice Magic had become a lost art. Maybe he wasn’t responsible, but he was certainly implicated.

Beyond that, some of the exclusions as listed on my soul seemed like they would only ever apply to someone like me. What would it even mean for a regular citizen of Aerb to have a Custom skill, or to have a Gestalt of two skills? I’d looked at the souls of people outside our group, and when I did, I had to use my own soul as a guide, because they didn’t have things so neatly ordered, divided up into numbered and labeled chunks. And at the same time, some of the exclusion zones must have logically been instigated by people who weren’t, for lack of a better term, player characters. Doris Finch didn’t fit into the same mold that Uther and I did, nor did Fel Seed, or Manifest.

My best guess was that on the game level, exclusion zones were one part worldbuilding (a place where bad things were, with lootable treasure and some kind of hazards, and a logical reason that whatever serious threat was in them hadn’t escaped to eat the world) and one part anti-munchkinry (a way to stop things from spiraling out of control if there was a flaw or exploit). On a practical, in-world level, exclusion zones were an act of Dungeon Master, the most visible thing that implicated a higher power than the five gods everyone knew and, debatably, loved.

(Amaryllis’ own analysis was much more practical. She had a defined list of which exclusion zones we might be able to exploit, plans of attack for each of the Thirteen Horrors (though there were a lot of question marks there), and written in bold, underlined three times, a big warning that we should never do anything that risked one of us becoming an enpersoned exclusion zone, along with all her thoughts on how to make sure that never happened. I wasn’t too worried about that though, given that it had never happened to Uther.)

Amaryllis pulled back from me slowly, letting her hand rest in her lap.

“Did you have fun?” I asked, closing the book. As I did, the cat disappeared from my lap, and the warm spot suddenly felt cold.

A faint frown of concentration crossed Amaryllis’ face. “Can you tell me about Tiff?”

“What would you like to know?” I asked. I felt a faint unease at the question. “According to Fenn, I talk about my Earth friends too much. I sort of thought you agreed.”

“If I have my timeline right, you ended your courtship with her nine months before coming to Aerb?” asked Amaryllis. “I was wondering what makes her so important to you.” She cleared her throat. “You don’t speak about her in the same way you speak about Arthur. There’s warmth toward both, but no reverence toward her. And yet ...”

And yet, she was higher up on the rankings, according to my soul.

“I don’t actually trust what the soul has to say,” I said. “I think it’s more complicated than just a strict set of numbers. Tiff … she left her mark on me, I guess. Arthur did too, I don’t mean to say that he didn’t, but she was … there was a period where all I was doing was thinking about her. I was obsessed with her, and she was obsessed with me, and … I have this idea about brains, and how they work, which is that you can wear patterns into them if you think about the same things often enough, or with enough intensity, and I definitely did that with Tiff. When we broke up -- when we, I guess, drifted apart, it was this second loss coming on the heels of the first one, which … I’m going to sound like an absolute fuck, but maybe it hit me harder? Not because I cared about her more”—though I did, maybe, considering that I was sneaking around with her behind Arthur’s back, and if you’d asked me the day before his accident, maybe, I don’t know, I would have definitively chosen her— “But it was all my fault, what happened between us, even if it didn’t entirely feel like it at the time.”

I could feel myself on the verge of tears, and wiped at my eyes. They were old wounds, but there still wasn’t as much scar tissue over them as I’d have hoped.

“I still don’t understand,” said Amaryllis. “You keep pushing for us to go for Arthur, you don’t want to return to Earth, it’s … I do want to understand you, even if we’re just going to be friends, and I think this is one of the pieces I might be missing.”

Even if we’re just going to be friends. I wondered why she’d chosen to say that, or whether it had been conscious on her part. “I don’t know,” I said. “The thought of returning to Earth to see her just leaves me hollow, because even if we could reconcile, we’d never get back what we had, I screwed things up too badly for that, it would be like a sequel that no one asked for, trying to recapture the magic of the original.” I wasn’t sure that would parse for her, but it was what made the most sense in my head. “But with Arthur …” I trailed off, as my mind involuntarily drew the parallels. “Fuck.”

“It’s not going to be the same,” said Amaryllis, finishing my thought. “He won’t be the same person.”

“I still need to find him,” I said. “Maybe even more, if he was … if he changed. Do you understand that?”

“I do,” replied Amaryllis. She folded her hands in her lap. “You know that if she was more important to you, no one would blame you for that?” asked Amaryllis. “I wouldn’t judge you for having your first love matter more than a friend. Fenn wouldn’t either.”

I felt a chill go through me at the thought of saying, out loud, that I’d cared more about Tiff than Arthur. “I know,” I said. “It’s just not … true, I don’t think.” Even admitting that I didn’t think it was true, leaving open the possibility it was, felt like a stab to the gut. “I’m devoting myself to bringing him back to life, aren’t I? What more does anyone expect of me?” I could feel my voice catching slightly. “Am I supposed to feel constantly guilty about enjoying myself sometimes? Should I have just stayed in a depressed fog forever?” My cheeks were growing warm. Amaryllis’ face was placid, and I knew her well enough to see that she was controlling her emotions. “I was a good friend to him.”

“I know,” said Amaryllis. “I wasn’t saying that you weren’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can we just … talk about something else?” I pointed down to the book in my lap. “You made a lot of notes, was there anything in particular you wanted to draw my attention to?”

“Sure,” said Amaryllis, taking the book from me. “If you see here, I’ve marked down all of the potential possibilities for exploitation,” she said. When the cat appeared, her hand was already moving toward it, and she absentmindedly pulled it from the pages and brought it to sit in her lap. It was the same cat, black with a patch of white; each book was associated with its own unique cat, the same every time. “You can’t take magic out of the zones, to the best of our current knowledge, but you could potentially use them as manufacturing bases, importing raw goods and exporting finished products made with that specific magic. That’s mostly banned by imperial law though, with a few exceptions, and imperial law might be something we finally start paying attention to in the near future.”

We talked about that, for a time, and I eventually began to cool off, the throbbing anger and nausea eventually fading into the background as we focused on the problem at hand. We had sandwiches for lunch, which were my contribution to cooking, piled high with a variety of deli meats, cheeses, and vegetables, which was how my dad used to make them. Amaryllis made me heat up her meat in a pan before putting it on the sandwich, because of something called listeria. It seemed a little bit overly cautious to me, but I did as she said rather than be subjected to a lecture on the intricacies of maternal health.

Conversation at mealtimes was usually focused on something other than plots, plans, and training, though we often circled back. Amaryllis talked a bit about horticulture, and the seeds that we could get from the backpack, some of which would allow us to grow plants that weren’t native to Aerb. I was a little worried about introducing invasive species, which led to me talking about one of my favorite tabletop adventures, in which plants harvested from a forgotten dungeon and sold by the party on a different plane served as the seed for an adventure as the plants grew out of control in their new home.

“So,” said Amaryllis toward the end of the meal, during a lull in conversation. “How long do you think it will take you to get over Tiff?”

I stopped chewing and looked at her. A few things occurred to me at once: first, that she had waited until now to ask that question, when she’d have the easy out of moving to alone time, second, that she had probably been thinking about that question for a while, and third, that her interest in the question wasn’t really about me, it was about her. How long will it take me to get over you?

“I don’t know,” I said, once I’d finished chewing and swallowing my food. I felt like an idiot for not seeing the parallel before. “Maybe she’ll always hold a place in my heart. That doesn’t mean that I can’t move on, it just means that there’s some baggage for any new relationship.”

“Okay,” said Amaryllis, tone light and casual. “Just curious.”

Looking back, that might have been when she’d started making plans.

◆◆◆

On the morning of our eleventh day together, Amaryllis was in an unusually chipper mood. She’d elected to make a full English breakfast, which she’d apparently read about somewhere. Cooking it was a challenging task given the size of the kitchen and lack of hot surfaces. It was my first time having blood sausage; I wasn’t particularly a fan.

“Any cause for the good mood?” I asked, when her slight smile hadn’t seemed to abate.

Amaryllis hesitated for a moment, chewed some bacon, and smiled at me. “Will you promise to be calm and relaxed about it?” she asked.

“Um,” I said. “I can’t really imagine what you’d have done while we were trapped in a small room together that you would need that kind of assurance from me.” I swallowed. “Have you seen Pulp Fiction yet?”

“It’s on the list, I haven’t gotten to it,” said Amaryllis. “Maybe we can watch it tonight.”

“Anyway, maybe my natural reaction is going to be that I’m not calm and relaxed,” I said. “I can promise to try, but we’re not one hundred percent in control of our own emotions.”

Amaryllis gave a small cough. “About that,” she said. “I’ve been spending some of my discretionary time looking at my own soul, I’m sure you’ve noticed that.” I had; unless you were trying to hide it, the soul trance was pretty obvious.

I froze in place. “What did you do?”

Amaryllis pursed her lips. “I’m over you,” she said.

“What … you went into your own soul and changed … what exactly?” I asked.

“You said that you would try to be calm,” said Amaryllis.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.” I took a breath. “Monkeying around with your soul like that seems really ill-advised, and more than that”—I paused—“it’s a violation of self.”

Amaryllis seemed to consider that. “I disagree,” she said. “Self-modification is an inviolable right. I used a tool that was available to me to fix a problem that I had. It’s not natural, but the natural way -- who knows how long that would have taken?”

“Tell me, specifically, what you did,” I said. I could feel my blood running cold.

“It took a deep dive into the social aspect of the soul, but I was eventually able to find the lever for romantic and sexual attraction. All I did was reduce them both down to nothing. I’m fairly sure that it’s confined just to you, and it’s entirely reversible.” She gave me a gentle smile. “Joon, you don’t have any idea how good it feels. It’s like a pressure that’s been lifted off me.” She hesitated slightly. “I know that to some extent you reciprocated. I think I can help show you where to make the change, if you -- if this doesn’t help alleviate things on your end.”

“But it … it was part of you,” I said. “You can’t just -- the soul snaps back, it trends toward being what it was, to permanently accomplish what you want to do --”

“You told me that you dial down the Level Up attribute every morning,” said Amaryllis. “A temporary solution that you can keep reapplying without significant cost is, de facto, a permanent solution.” She pursed her lips. “I hadn’t really known how you’d react, but I didn’t think you’d take it this poorly. I thought you would be upset about the risk inherent in making changes, but.” She stopped. “You know that I’ve been looking at Earth pharmaceuticals, right?” asked Amaryllis. “The production processes are ridiculously beyond what we can do, but there’s a huge wealth of information for me to mine, and with the lack of regulatory frameworks for such things throughout the empire, we could make an absolute killing. So I’ve done my reading, and I know what it’s like on Earth. There are pills for all types of mood control and emotional correction. Postpartum depression is a known condition on Aerb, we call it maternal neurosis, but our treatments are decades behind yours.” She crossed her arms. “Would you feel the same way about me taking fluoxetine or sertraline, if I ended up with postpartum depression?”

“You came prepared,” I said. I tried not to sound accusatory. “Give me a second to think.”

“I’m done with breakfast,” said Amaryllis. “I do have things that I need to do.”

“I don’t want to let this lie,” I said.

“It might be better if you’ve had some time to think and reflect,” said Amaryllis. “You’re right that I came to the conversation prepared. I thought about what you might say, while I was working on fixing myself, and after, when I was waiting to broach the subject. If your reaction is an emotional one … I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, or think that I’d think less of you, but if you wanted me to be in love with you, if you wanted perpetually unrequited love, and that’s the source of your objection, then you have to realize that you don’t have a leg to stand on.”

I swallowed and nodded. I still had a bit of my breakfast left to go, but I’d lost my appetite. Amaryllis moved over to her desk and began looking through some books, leaving me to clean up.

◆◆◆

Later that night, after a day spent avoiding each other as much as possible in a four-hundred-square-foot room, we continued our conversation over a dinner of roasted rabbit and peas. Amaryllis was a far better cook than I was, which was usually reflected in her choice of meal. After I’d taken to doing my share of the cooking, she’d stepped it up a bit, though I wasn’t sure whether that was because she had something to prove, or because she had more time for involved meals.

“Okay,” I said. “I think I know what my objection is, besides the selfish one of wanting you to want me, which, if I’m being honest, applies to some extent.” It stung a little bit to say that out loud, but I thought she would take it in the spirit of honesty in which it was intended. I wasn’t sure that I would have revealed the same to Fenn.

Amaryllis nodded. “I wanted you to want me too,” said Amaryllis. “I’m trying to keep that in mind, because right now it feels like idiocy or lunacy or both.”

“I’m not going to say that it’s logical,” I said. “Actually, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s blatantly illogical to want to have a difficult interpersonal problem in your life, but it’s still a bit how I feel.”

“Because there’s a part of you that wants me, despite your relationship with Fenn,” said Amaryllis. “And that’s despite the fact that I no longer have a shred of interest in you in that way.”

“You don’t have to be mean about it,” I replied. I crossed my arms, then felt like it was too defensive of a gesture and uncrossed them. I silently wondered whether there was ever going to be a time in my life when I didn’t have those awkward moments.

“I’m sorry,” said Amaryllis. “It’s just … perhaps I should change myself back to the way I was and we can continue this conversation. I might be able to better articulate my decision as it felt when I made it. I can assure you that the choice will be the same either way.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I would prefer it.”

It took her fifteen minutes, and her rabbit grew cold while I waited. I finished my meal, eating quickly, as I tried to prepare the argument that I was going to use. From what we’d been able to figure out, the Debate skill was mostly catered toward structured debates, two sides that had rigorously prepared for an argument with facts and figures assembled and ready to deploy. That was based mostly on the abilities that it was keyed to (KNO primary, CHA secondary) and some comparative analysis of how fast it leveled up when I was trying different methods to grind it. I wished that I had some facts and figures on hand to persuade her, but even if I’d pulled from an Earth book, I didn’t think I’d find anything to back me up.

“Done,” said Amaryllis. She let out a breath that was just short of a sigh and looked down at her cold food, which she began to pick at.

I sat in silence and watched her, waiting for her to speak her piece. I could only vaguely remember where we’d left off; I’d had enough time for my mind to wander.

“I had a very specific fantasy,” said Amaryllis. “I would turn out the lights, and then you would slip into bed with me, and I would ask you what you thought you were doing, and then you would say that -- that you’d made a mistake, that you should have chosen me. And I would protest, but I’d still be enjoying the feeling of your body pressed against mine, our faces just inches apart, smelling you -- did you know that I like the way you smell?”

“No,” I said softly.

“It didn’t start as a fantasy, it started with me thinking about what I would do if you tried something like that, and somehow it got away from me,” said Amaryllis.

I refrained from telling her that I’d had the exact same experience. At the back of my mind, I could recognize something amusing about two people worrying that they wouldn’t be strong enough to resist the other, and both having a fantasy that the other would come to them. It wasn’t actually all that funny though.

“I’ve convinced myself that I probably like kissing,” said Amaryllis. “In my fantasy, that’s as far as it goes, just the sensation of your hands on my body, and your lips on mine, as we share this bond together, temporarily forgetting that there are any barriers to separate us.” She frowned. “And sex, I imagined that you would be slow and patient, gentle and yielding, and somehow you would awaken something in me, and I would be fixed.”

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “That’s ... a male fantasy.”

“But it might be true for me, if I was meant for you,” said Amaryllis. She was staring at me with her piercing blue eyes, as though she wanted to believe that what she was saying was true. It made me uncomfortable, in the same way that Fenn giving me free rein over her soul had made me uncomfortable. I wanted Amaryllis to be her own person; it was one of the primary things that I liked about her.

I couldn’t even say, ‘no, surely you wouldn’t be an exception to the general rule’, because our existence was so strange you had to accept things like that as a possibility. And if she was meant for me, then surely I was also meant for her? And couldn’t we be keyed to each other? Was it so ludicrous to think that I was literally the only person in existence who could make her horny or bring her to orgasm, when there were godlike powers in play that might have been twisted enough to make that true?

“It’s awful,” said Amaryllis. She closed her eyes. “These feelings, getting in the way of work being done, getting distracted by being in the same room as you, not being able to sleep without the spell because otherwise I’ll be up all night tossing and turning.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “It might be one thing, if we could reciprocate, but we can’t.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We really wouldn’t be good together.”

“That’s horseshit,” said Amaryllis. “We have our points of friction, I know that, but even in the short time we’ve known each other, we’ve come away better for it. We would complement each other, help each other, talk and listen. The only reason either of us ever pretended that it wouldn’t work out between us is that it would be easier if that were true. We would make an amazing couple. And if you weren’t able to fix me, if my flesh was still unwilling, I’m pretty sure that I can reach into my soul and fix myself that way, until I wanted it as much as you did.”

“Amaryllis,” I began, but I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure that she was right about what a hypothetical relationship between us would look like. I was starting to get the impression that she felt more strongly about me than I felt about her, which was a little bit heart-breaking. There was that part of me that awoke at the sight of a pretty girl in distress, and it was telling me that it was entirely within my power to make all of her heartache go away -- but I wasn’t about to let thoughts like those get the better of me.

“Alright,” I said. “If you want the strongest argument I think I have at the moment, then whatever you feel for me is an expression of yourself, it’s part of who you are. Something like postpartum depression isn’t, that’s just hormones swamping you, or the chemicals in your brain misbehaving, and I know that’s a matter of definition, but … you can’t just go modifying essential parts of you like that, changing things at the core of your being.”

Amaryllis’ face fell, then turned to something like disgust. “Juniper, you’re one of my closest -- my only friends, but whatever there is between us, it’s not essential. I elect not to let it define me.” She closed her eyes, and had the slack face of someone in a soul trance just a few seconds later.

I got up from the table and climbed up to the top bunk, where I made my bed. I felt like I should have seen this coming. The Dungeon Master had said as much to me about going in to change Amaryllis’ soul. At the time, I hadn’t paid it much thought, just more needling me by presenting a solution he knew I wouldn’t go for, but in retrospect, maybe it was a hint of things to come. I wondered how far in advance I could have made the prediction, if I were smarter -- if the game wasn’t limiting me from reaching my true potential because it wanted me to have more or less the same personality.

I spent some time thinking, and being angry at a variety of people, including myself, until eventually sitting in my bed alone became so boring that I pulled back the curtain and climbed back down.

Amaryllis had put the table and chairs away, and gotten the couch ready for movie time. She was sitting with her hands on her knees, staring at the wall where the movie would play.

“I wasn’t sure that you would be joining me,” said Amaryllis. “I greatly prefer watching movies with you to watching them alone.”

“Because I’m good company, or because I can help to explain things?” I asked.

“Both,” said Amaryllis. “It’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail tonight.”

“Oh, neat,” I said. “I think I’ll become about three percent more intelligible after you’ve seen it.”

“I was in the mood for something light,” said Amaryllis. “Does this fit the bill?”

“Uh, sure,” I said. “There’s a fair amount of death and mayhem, but it’s played for laughs. I think you’ll like it.” I sat down to join her on the couch. I was aware that she was an alien person now, with something removed from her, and from our relationship, but she was making an effort to be friends, and if I wasn’t going to change her mind about how she should be treating her soul, then I would follow her lead.

Amaryllis stuck out her hand. “Friends?” she asked.

“Friends,” I replied, shaking her hand and trying not to think too hard about what she’d done.

Chapter 21 - Time Enough

When I’d come into the time chamber, I’d have been hard-pressed to notice that Amaryllis was pregnant. Toward the end, she was definitely showing, her belly enlarged and breasts a bit bigger (look, that’s just the truth, I’m not going to apologize for noticing). If she hadn’t been so fit, I might have mistaken it for weight gain, but her arms were still as toned as ever.

She exercised as part of daily maintenance, usually with weights, though she’d also rigged up a climbing wall that she could put into place and anchor, with some help from me. The room was only ten feet tall and twenty feet wide, so her rock-climbing was mostly just back and forth across the same stretch using the handholds she’d put in place, with a mat beneath her to catch her if she fell (though she never did). She called it ‘bouldering’, and after she’d made the alteration to her soul, she had me try it with her. I was only about half as good as she was.

“Three days left,” said Amaryllis as she watched me move. “No offense, but I’m going to be happy to have some fresh blood in here.”

“No offense taken,” I said. It had been smooth sailing, for the most part, but there were still little places where we got on each other’s nerves, and the soul-meddling stuff was simmering in the background. I still thought she was wrong, but I was doing my best to respect her choice. She still thought that I should reciprocate and carve any non-platonic thoughts towards her from my very soul, but she refrained from actually saying it. Aside from that, there were little annoyances, the kinds of tiny things that I guess crop up if you live with someone for long enough. Amaryllis had some bad habits, like getting infected with the need to get something done, and then expecting me to be as gung ho about it as she was. I had a few bad habits of my own, like putting off my share of chores until the last minute (though I want to point out that I did still do them, as I’d promised I would).

Amaryllis ‘forgot’ to use the privacy curtain a few times when taking her sponge bath, or when changing clothes. I never said anything about it, but I did wonder whether she was trying to send me a message, like it was her way of saying ‘hey, this wouldn’t be a problem if you just did the thing that I want you to do’. Maybe I was being uncharitable in thinking that she did it on purpose, but I hadn’t known her as someone to make careless mistakes. It wasn’t really much of a problem though, aside from the distraction of it. She was still pretty, despite the pregnancy, but her newfound total indifference to me made her less viscerally compelling.

“We should talk about the house,” said Amaryllis. She lifted herself up onto the wall, carefully selecting her handholds and footholds. She was setting a route for me to follow, marking the specific holds I’d be allowed to use with colored tape. She’d taken a liking to Earth clothing of late, especially for physical activity. For bouldering, she wore a sports bra, a tank top, form-fitting shorts, and climbing shoes with rubber soles. The material for the shorts, in particular, was a spandex/polyester that wasn’t yet invented on Aerb.

“I’ve been assuming that we’re under surveillance, contrary to her assurances that we’re moving too fast to make sense of,” I said. We’d revealed some things, if that were the case, but nothing that we’d be totally sunk by if she found out.

Amaryllis was silent for a moment. “Grak had some misgivings about what happened with Fallatehr.”

“He liked being brainwashed,” I said.

“He liked having a purity of purpose and a sense of belonging, yes,” said Amaryllis. “But that wasn’t really what he had misgivings about. He thought that we jettisoned any chance of a successful working relationship with him through aggressive mistrust.” She grunted as she made a long reach, going to full extension of one slender leg for just a moment. The only way that I’d be able to follow her route was going to be with my superior reach.

“If we’d trusted him, he would have had us all for soul-slaves,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said Amaryllis. “The argument,” she grunted again, adding in a little bit of lunge that saw her without any handholds for a fraction of a second, “is that whatever chance there was for a fruitful partnership between us, we acted in such a way that it could never happen.” She glanced at the handholds. “And at the end of it, we suffered some enormous expenses to kill one of the most proficient soul mages in the entire world. Given that he was in prison when we found him, it really wasn’t worth it.”

“And the thinking goes that perhaps we should exercise a little more faith this time?” I asked.

“There are differences,” said Amaryllis. “Many differences, in fact, enough that I’m not sure the comparison is worthwhile, but that’s Grak’s thinking, or it was when he left the chamber. I suppose for him, that was half an hour ago.”

“And you?” I asked.

“She hasn’t killed us,” said Amaryllis. “She offered us aid. She has a number of incentives to kill us and take everything that we own, and apparently, the power to do so. She dislikes me personally, but I can live with that. So long as she likes the rest of you well enough, I think that we should treat her as a companion.”

“Still scenario zero,” I said.

“Disappointing, but not definitive either way,” said Amaryllis. “It would be nice to have some confirmation.” She glanced back toward me.

“I’ll try working on her once we get out,” I said. “Sorry, when I get out.” I cringed at that. At most, Amaryllis would spend an hour or two outside the chamber before going back in, but probably less.

“I don’t think she’ll respond well to insincere attempts at friendship,” said Amaryllis.

“So they have to be sincere,” I said. “Which … might be a problem.”

“You like damaged girls. This house is close enough,” Amaryllis replied.

“I don’t think that I would characterize myself as being into damaged girls,” I said.

“Sorry, damaged women,” said Amaryllis.

“That’s not the correction I was going to make,” I replied with a roll of my eyes.

“There’s a reason it’s a running theme in your companions,” said Amaryllis. “Do you need me to go down the list of tragic backstories? My father, dead when I was two, my mother, killed when I was ten; Fenn, born to a severely broken home and detested by most of the common folk, not to mention the elves; Grak an exile from his home, fleeing an arranged marriage -- and I agree fully with Fenn’s word for Valencia. ‘Joonbait’. It’s very appropriate. I won’t judge you for having an instinct to protect those who have been hurt -- in some sense it’s noble -- but you shouldn’t deny it when it’s plain for anyone to see.”

“But it’s not like, ‘oh, she’s damaged, how hot,’ it’s a white knight thing,” I replied. “And the house … suffered some traumas of its own, sure, but I don’t think that’s the path toward a sincere friendship.” I paused slightly, watching her judge her next foothold. “If I can connect with her at all, it’s not on a healthy level.”

Amaryllis stopped where she was. “What was it you said about wanting to hurt people?”

“Just,” I said, then stopped. “It didn’t resonate with her anyway. She read sincerity as insincere. And I’d really rather not dredge up my emo side.” I wasn’t sure that ‘emo’ would parse for Amaryllis, but she had a lot more Earth knowledge than she’d had before getting into the time chamber.

“I regret that I didn’t get it on tape,” said Amaryllis. She began moving again, and finally reached the edge of the wall, where she hung for a brief moment before dropping to her feet. When she turned to me, I could see a thin sheen of sweat on her face. “If you don’t think it’s a good way to relate, I trust your instincts.”

“That’s generous of you,” I said. “I’m not sure that I would go so far, in your place. I’ll do my best though.” I paused slightly. “You really want to stay here? Long-term, I mean.”

“I have my own misgivings about how it went with Fallatehr,” said Amaryllis. “He would have been a valuable ally, if we could have worked our issues out with him somehow, and I think the paranoia soured proceedings early on. That was partly my fault. He didn’t help himself, and maybe there was no solution, but … it would be nice to resolve things without having to murder someone.” She let out a long breath. “I don’t think we should betray her, whatever it is you might be planning.”

“I have no concrete plans,” I replied. The only minor betrayal was in pretending that Ropey was something that it wasn’t. “Did Grak talk to you about the house? Or about anything that I might find to be of interest?”

“There’s a secure channel,” said Amaryllis with a nod. “According to him, the interior space of the glove should be beyond the sight of Kuum Doona, even beyond the simple problem of how fast we might be moving in contrast to her. We can use it, though I have to caution that by itself it could be construed as betrayal, if she can see us use it. Grak and I used it very sparingly.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “But the problem there is that I can’t go join something inside the glove, they’re all held in their own places, it would have to transition into the real world for a moment.” I thought about that for a second while Amaryllis looked at me expectantly. She already knew the answer, naturally. “Either he’d encrypt using a key known to both of us but not Zona, or write it down and then hide it using some method that wouldn’t allow her to look at it, but that would be hard given her unknown surveillance abilities. I don’t know him well enough to know which he’d use. Maybe the name of the place we first met? That’s what I would use.” I resisted saying it out loud. As a code phrase, ‘The Impish Inn’ had a few problems, notably the fact that you could do it with or without spaces, with varying capitals, and either leaving out or keeping in the initial article. Some of that could be assumed from the message itself though.

“The glove can fit two people at once, if they hug tightly and don’t let go,” said Amaryllis. “Good ideas though.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s a little disappointing.” I paused slightly. “Is there a reason that you waited until now to bring this up?” We’d talked some about the house, but it was more along the lines of the story it had told and the things it could do.

“I wanted it fresh in your mind when you left,” said Amaryllis. “You’ll be coming out after a month away, and I thought the most salient conversations should take place toward the end of your time here, so you’d be prepared for the world outside.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Let me sponge down and get some of this sweat off, then we can get into the glove to have some privacy,” said Amaryllis.

◆◆◆

I’d never really liked being in the black void of Sable, which wasn’t too surprising, given that it was a black void with absolutely nothing of interest in it that I didn’t carry in. Being in the void with Amaryllis wrapped in a tight hug was a bit better, but the breathing tanks that we wore weren’t the most comfortable thing in the world, and as a workaround for the fact that there was no air, we were sharing an inflatable bag around our heads. If they ever made a movie about us (and why wouldn’t they, when we had a monopoly on movie-making?) I was pretty sure that there were going to have to be sacrifices for the sake of having a good visual. The bag leaked, but it didn’t need to be airtight.

“What are you planning with the rope?” asked Amaryllis.

“It’s loyal to us, hard-working, and doesn’t complain,” I said. “If she eats it, some of its good attributes might transfer over. I don’t want her to eat it, because Ropey is an honorary member of the party and has saved my life a few times now.” I paused as I thought about that. “I don’t know how she would react to knowing that he’s a sentient entad, but the only scenario I really like is that they have a bond and become friends. If she wants to eat him, I worry it will override her desire for answers and amenability as a host. If she doesn’t, then there’s a good chance that she’s worried about taking on his attributes, which means that we should feed him to her.” I paused again. “You know that he would, right, if it was to save us?”

“You’re closer to the rope than I am,” said Amaryllis.

“We don’t talk much,” I said. “I’m not sure that he’s much smarter than a toddler, honestly, though I guess I haven’t tested his intelligence. But he’s had my back, without complaints or commentary.”

“Grak wanted me to speak to you here,” said Amaryllis. “He was against any plan that involved betrayal, unless there’s some concrete cause for it, some overt hostility beyond anything the house has done thus far. He said that if she looks at the Eternal Golden Braid with warder’s sight, she’ll be able to tell that it’s animate, but little beyond that. As a cover, you can demonstrate that it is effectively prehensile when held, which should comport with how she’s seen it behave. The lie will appear on paper when we catalog the entads for her, if we choose to lie, so hopefully it doesn’t come to outright demonstration.”

“Alright,” I said. “Grak’s leaving it at my discretion?”

“So long as he’s not pressed too hard,” said Amaryllis.

“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.

“He believes that being honest and forthright with the house is the path we should pursue,” said Amaryllis. “I mostly agree with him, it’s just a matter of degree. I’m not sure how we would fight the house, and manipulating it seems difficult. We can lie, but lying is difficult, especially since all the lies would need to be coordinated, and this is the only way to coordinate them.”

“Okay,” I said. “But if we don’t lie, I still want to protect the rope.”

“Understood,” said Amaryllis. She released me from the hug and pulled away from me, which brought us both out into the time chamber again.

◆◆◆

I’m glossing over some things. A lot of my month in the time chamber was spent training, though not terribly much came of it. By judiciously shifting my ‘floating’ points around, I was able to temporarily raise the caps on a few of my social skills, which allowed me to at least see their virtues.

Silver Tongue:    Reduces the penalty for insincere flattery by twenty-five percent. When flattering in a language you are not fluent in, your penalty is halved. When flattering a group, the Forer effect is doubled.

Class Clown:    You may increase the speed of your wit at the expense of its comedic efficiency, up to double your base wit and half your base comedic efficiency. Take half as much damage from physical humor, so long as it’s actually funny.

Lesser Deceiver:    You will no longer forget the details of a lie, unless you wish to. Take half the usual self-consistency penalty when telling improvised lies.

Shifting Sands:    Removes the penalty for reframing facts and figures in the middle of a debate, so long as all raw information was memorized beforehand.

Balanced Armor:    Your medium armor counts as heavy armor for obtaining the benefits of Heavy Armor virtues or bonuses, and light armor for obtaining the benefits of Light Armor virtues or bonuses. Afflictions and maluses are unaffected. It may count as light armor, medium armor, and heavy armor at the same time.

Flow State:   Allows you to enter into an analytical flow state, which temporarily doubles working memory with respect to the subject of analysis, halves the penalties for thirst, hunger, and exhaustion, and increases the chance of a Brilliant Insight by five percent per hour (compounding).

Flow State came from Analysis 20. It was a purely MEN skill, which meant that I was going to be able to keep it; the others were from moving points into social abilities, which I wasn’t planning to do in the long term, especially given how weak most of the level 10 virtues were (and the way the abilities and numbers worked out, I could either keep Lying or Flattery at 10, but not both). I’d seen a total of seventeen level 10 virtues so far, and that was something of a running theme with them, things that were nice enough, but not so spectacular that I’d find them worth mentioning.

We didn’t have any heavy armor for me to level up Heavy Armor, and the backpack didn’t seem up to producing any, even if we tried to get it piecemeal, since some of the pieces were too big. I leveled the skills I’d lost in the Sacrifice back up, and then Medium Armor as well, until I’d hit the caps with everything and regained all my lost virtues. So that was fun, if your idea of fun is a series of rather mind-numbing exercises as you attempt to make numbers go higher (and without much in the way of feedback to tell you that you’re actually doing the right exercises).

We watched movies, a strange mix of my favorites, the AFI’s Top 100, historically well-performing movies, and the occasional bit of ‘cultural research’ selected by Amaryllis, which included a highly suspect number of romantic comedies (more for the emotional simplicity of them than girliness, I thought). I read books, mostly from Aerb, but a few from Earth, including a number of technical books that Amaryllis wanted me to read so I could offer her a second opinion or help to brainstorm. We listened to a wide range of music, mostly on a record player, and mostly from before I was born. Amaryllis held a particular love for a group called The Mamas and the Papas, for no clearly identifiable reason.

I missed Fenn. I found myself talking to her in my head sometimes, when I was trying to work through something. When we watched movies, I wished that she were on the couch between us, watching along and making jokes. I ended up writing her about twenty letters, most of them pretty long, if not really filled with much of consequence. I put a number on each of the letters, corresponding to the day that I’d written them, so that she could open them through her month in the chamber and get some semblance of me keeping her company. Toward the end of the month, when there was less for me to do in the way of training, I embellished the letters with little sketches.

I was hoping that she would reciprocate and send me letters back, since the provisional schedule that Amaryllis had worked out meant that we’d both get two four-week periods. We called them months, but there were going to be ten of them, ten periods of four weeks each, rather than nine months. With all my skills as high as they would go, I was sort of dreading my second month, since I’d have even less to do. In theory, I’d be coming back in right at the beginning of her third trimester, which would mean that Amaryllis would be needing more help, but not so much that it would fully occupy my time.

I was tempted to request a run into town while the others were taking their turn, just to get some more books and other entertainment, but that wasn’t really the issue, since the backpack could provide whatever we wanted. The real issue was that it was a small room with lots to do but not a lot of space to do it in, and for company, the same person every single day. I knew all her habits by now, all of the ways she moved, her walk, her voice, her laughs, smiles, pensive frowns, aggrieved sighs … and I was bored.

I could tell she felt the same way.

◆◆◆

The time chamber was controlled by a simple lever near the doors, which Amaryllis kept everything clear of at all times. I eyed the lever occasionally, thinking about how easy it would be to opt out if I really couldn’t take it. Toward the end, I looked at it with a sense of longing. When the final day came, it was more a sense of trepidation. I hadn’t seen Fenn or Grak in a month, and I wasn’t sure whether I would simply be able to slot back into the group dynamic. I was also thinking about how I would explain things to Fenn, if I would have time to, or whether I should just assure her that nothing had happened between Amaryllis and I. Since Fenn was up next, maybe I’d just leave it to Amaryllis to explain things.

In point of fact though, this was only a temporary reprieve. I was going back in the time chamber in a matter of hours, meaning that the time outside was effectively just a short break from the confined space. When I got back, Amaryllis would be two months further along, her plans further developed, and while that might provide some points of interest, I had to imagine that the tedium I’d experienced in the final week would set in a lot sooner, especially since I was capped on virtually all my skills.

“Ready?” asked Amaryllis as she stood beside the lever. She was wearing a long blue dress with small white flowers that came halfway down her calf, loose enough that it effectively disguised her baby bump, and some simple sandals from Earth. Her hair had grown back out a bit, long enough that she had plastic hair clips in place to hold it back.

“I’m ready,” I said. “You should take some time outside the chamber, an hour or so just to stretch your legs and get some walking in.” It wasn’t the first time I’d suggested that.

“No thanks,” said Amaryllis. “The house isn’t really that great of a place to stroll around in, not unless you’re a fan of stumbling across decayed bodies.” It also wasn’t the first time she’d rebuffed me. “I’m eager for some time with Fenn.” She flipped the lever, bringing us back down into normal time, though the spin-down would still take another few minutes.

“Don’t talk about me too much,” I said.

“Well, I can hardly think of anything else two women would have to talk about,” said Amaryllis. She delivered the line so deadpan that if I didn’t know her, I might not have been able to pick up on the sarcasm.

“And be kind to her,” I said. “Put up with her, as best you can.”

Amaryllis only rolled her eyes.

I’d put my armor back on and wrapped Ropey back around me, more for the sake of prudence than for any actual fear of what might be waiting for us out there. The armor was practically no defense at all against the house, but it still seemed better to have than not to have. The only downside to wearing it was that it might be a hindrance if I was still in it when some kind of emergency happened with Amaryllis. If there was some kind of complication, I might be called upon to play doctor, either by giving her a blood transfusion (on Aerb, compatibility between two people of the same species was virtually guaranteed), or by using bone magic to heal her. The armor might interfere. She’d run me through plenty of worst-case scenarios, all of which made me a bit queasy. The earliest that the baby could come and still potentially survive was somewhere around twenty-six weeks, and Amaryllis figured that our best bet at that point was a full-body swap, given that we didn’t have (and couldn’t train up) the necessary skill to operate a NICU, even though we had already pulled all of the relevant equipment we could from the backpack.

That was what I was thinking about when Amaryllis opened the doors, and I was so lost in thought that it took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing.

Zona was gone, and there were two of Fenn, one standing on either side of Grak. They were all facing us, and as I opened my mouth to ask what the hell was going on, Grak lifted up a piece of paper and began to read from it.

“Before you lies a test,” he said. I’d forgotten how low and grumbling his voice could be. I’d also sort of forgotten that he was missing a hand. “Two fair half-elves, but one is false. You may ask what questions you like, though they will not answer specifics. Choose correctly for a kiss as your prize.” He licked his lips with his thick tongue before reading the last line. “Don’t be a spoilsport.”

I stared at the two Fenns, who were both grinning.

“Is this seriously how you spent your time?” asked Amaryllis.

“Didn’t the dwarf just say not to be a spoilsport?” asked Left Fenn.

“Some people have trouble listening, I suppose,” said Right Fenn. They sounded exactly the same.

I walked forward to look at them. They were dressed the same, like Fenn had been dressed when I went into the chamber. If I accepted the premise at face value, which I wasn’t sure was wise, then one was the real Fenn, and the other was Zona, using her illusion to disguise herself as Fenn.

“No touching,” said Right Fenn as I drew closer.

“Not until we get some time alone,” said Left Fenn with a grin.

“Lewd,” replied Right Fenn with a click of the tongue.

“You know,” I said. “One of the things that I really liked about Aerb was that there wasn’t much in the way of illusion magic, and mind magic was mercifully rare. Even the soul mages don’t have a full command of memories, so at least you’re not constantly questioning whether everything is real or fake, at least not on that level.”

A master illusionist had been the primary antagonist of an arc of one of my campaigns, to the endless frustration of the players, and I had been happy to find that he didn’t seem to exist in Aerb’s history books. Illusion Magic was among the excluded magics on Aerb, at least according to my soul.

“Too bad,” said Right Fenn.

“So sad,” added Left Fenn.

“Did you spend the entire forty-five minutes planning this?” asked Amaryllis. She stayed back near the time chamber with her arms folded across her chest.

“In my defense, you left me to my own devices,” said Left Fenn.

“You should have expected something like this,” said Right Fenn.

“Grak?” asked Amaryllis. “What’s your excuse?”

“You left her to her own devices,” said Grak. He gave a wide-toothed smile as Amaryllis gave a weary sigh.

“Okay,” I said. “So I assume that you would elect not to answer questions that only Fenn knows?”

“Correct,” said Right Fenn.

“We didn’t want the game to be so easy,” said Left Fenn. She looked from me to Amaryllis. “You’re allowed to put your heads together, it’s a team game.”

Amaryllis sighed again. “I’m immediately reconsidering spending a month with you.”

“Oh, but I’m so much more entertaining than Juniper,” said Right Fenn.

“No offense, my love,” said Left Fenn.

“Are you just trying to obfuscate, or intentionally deceive?” I asked.

“I don’t know what obfuscate means,” said Right Fenn.

“Really?” asked Left Fenn with a raised eyebrow, as she looked at her counterpart. She turned to me, smiling. “I mean no, of course I don’t know what it means.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you love me?”

“Always,” said Left Fenn, suddenly solemn.

“And forever,” replied Right Fenn, with equal sincerity.

“But?” I asked.

“But you’re terrible at this game,” said Left Fenn, smiling.

“Left is the real one,” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Right Fenn.

“Yes,” I replied. “Left was leading too often, and only on the points where not leading might have been revealing. You had forty-five minutes, which wasn’t enough time to learn everything, so it’s understandable that you’d have a system in place. Assuming I’m right, I could probably pull out another half dozen things that weren’t quite accurate, but that’s my answer, Left Fenn is the real one.”

Right Fenn dissolved back into Tiff’s form, smiling at me. “Well, that was fun.” She turned to Fenn. “He was faster than you thought.”

“I made the fatal mistake of underestimating him,” said Fenn. She stepped forward and wrapped me in a hug with her arms around my neck, then gave me a quick kiss on the lips. When she pulled back, she was looking at me with a forced nonchalance. “How’d it go?”

I shrugged her arms off me, then leaned down and picked her up, putting her over my shoulder and carrying her away, off down the hallway.

“She’s due in the chamber soon!” Amaryllis called after me.

When we were away from the others, I set Fenn down and gave her a proper kiss, long, slow, and deep.

“So I take it you missed me?” asked Fenn, looking at me with real warmth.

“More than I thought I would,” I said. “And I thought that I would miss you a lot.”

“I should stick you in a time chamber more often, if this is the sort of greeting I get,” said Fenn. There was a twinkle in her eyes as she looked at me. “And my two favorite humans got along well?” She paused slightly. “But … not too well?”

“She got up to 20 loyalty, which gave her the ability to alter her soul, then she removed her attraction to me,” I said. “You’re going to have a month with her, that’s more than enough time for her to tell you everything you’d want to know.”

“Wait, she can do that with Symbiosis?” asked Fenn. “I’m going to have to step up my game. How’d you get her loyalty up?”

“Offered to do some chores,” I replied.

Fenn laughed. “That’s hilarious.”

“I didn’t really find it funny at the time,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re amused.” I hesitated a moment. “You don’t think there’s a pretty big problem with her altering her own soul like that?”

“Would you think that I was a total bitch for saying that I was relieved?” asked Fenn, biting her lip as she looked at me. “I mean, it sounds like one of the horror stories out of the Second Empire, sure, but it also neatly solves one of the most pressing problems in my life without me having to lift a finger, and … I can see you’re not quite so happy about it.”

“No,” I said. “I was sort of hoping to get some backup. I thought … well, that we could at least commiserate, if not actually change her mind.”

“Sure,” said Fenn with a shrug. “I wouldn’t want her to do more, and I can talk with her about that, since it seems like the kind of thing that someone -- her, specifically -- would go way overboard on. But, I mean … her having zero interest in you is making my heart soar. I feel bad for being so happy.”

“Don’t feel bad,” I said. I wrapped her in a hug. “It did make things easier, for the rest of the month, I’m just worried about the long-term, unforeseen consequences or further alterations, and I’m really worried that if I press too hard, she’s just not going to tell me.”

“Okay,” said Fenn. “I’ll talk to her, help keep her safe, even if she hates it.”

“And things went fine outside?” I asked. “Anything that I should know?”

“We had a diversion,” said Fenn with a shrug. “As you saw, though you got through it too fast.”

“Making friends?” I asked.

“Something like that,” said Fenn, smiling. “The house isn’t so bad, once you get her in the right mood.” She poked a finger at my chest. “I’m hoping she’s still in that mood when I come back out, but I know you’ve had some time to think about what she said.”

“A bit,” I replied. In truth, I’d had enough time that it had begun to fade into the background, as a simple thing that I accepted as probably being true. I looked down the hallway we’d come from. I could just barely hear the sound of conversation. “We should get back, Amaryllis doesn’t seem to place much value on time out of the chamber.”

“Joon, if we end up staying in this place, can we have a weekend in the chamber to ourselves?” asked Fenn. “Just you and me, without pressing engagements or other people getting in the way?”

“Frankly, I’m not looking forward to going back in,” I said. “I got kind of bored.” I saw her look of disappointment and quickly amended it. “But with you, I don’t think that I could be bored.”

“Good save,” said Fenn. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“I wrote you some letters,” I said. “They’re numbered according to the day, so you can hear from me. It seemed like the best I could do, since we’re going to temporarily be in a long-distance relationship type thing. Oh, and I recorded some audio commentary for two movies, which, uh, might be totally worthless to you, but we’ll see. And I made a special supply of cookies, which are worse than Mary’s, but I’m the one who made them, so I thought maybe they’d be good if you’re feeling especially sentimental.”

Fenn reached up and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re too sweet to me.” She looked me up and down. “I can hardly believe I was worried for nothing.”

I nodded at that, but I wasn’t so sure that I would have said it was nothing. I also didn’t know how to say that without making it a whole big thing though, so I let it lie.

When we went back to the chamber, Amaryllis was waiting beside it. Her hair was long, down beneath her shoulder blades, and she was eating a marzipan fairy to heal the cuts on her arm that I assumed she’d taken from Grak’s axe. I raised an eyebrow at that, but the fairies weren’t really our primary source of healing anymore. Like the clonal kit, we’d largely outgrown the fairy jar. Furthermore, the slowly refilling jar we pulled the fairies from was in the time chamber, which meant that our fairy supply had substantially increased; one of the chores was reaching in and gathering up the docile fairies to break their necks and put them in zip-lock bags.

“Ready?” Amaryllis asked Fenn.

“No,” said Fenn. “But I’m going to do it anyway, because that’s what a team player I am. I might pop back out after a few days though. No one hold it against me if I can’t hack it.”

Amaryllis stepped into the chamber, and Fenn followed her, saluting me briefly before the doors closed up again.

Zona turned to me and looked me over. “Have you had time to think?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said with a nod. It wasn’t really time to think that I’d needed though, it was time to process and adjust to the new map of reality, one where what she’d said was probably the truth, or close to it, or at least seeded in the truth. “I have some questions about your history, how you got from there to here, but I’ll understand if you don’t want to repeat yourself, or if you want to hear more from me.” I swallowed. “Arthur as he was on Earth was something I thought about a lot when I was in there.”

“Speak, then,” said Zona.

I spoke.

Chapter 22 - A Portrait of the King as a Young Man

A lot of what I told Zona was background information on Earth, which she was only passingly familiar with by way of published writing on the dream-skewered. If you wanted to paint a picture of Arthur, you had to have the context of the world he’d grown up in, with comparatively endless information available at all times, the fact that we had voting and representatives instead of kings, the spectre of distant threats like terrorism and far-off wars broadcast home, and our absolute safety and security in comparison to Aerb, a world filled with numerous horrors and wild imbalances of power.

(I like explaining things. You’ve probably already figured that out about me.)

Arthur’s brother was nine years older than him, and I was never quite sure which of them was the mistake, if either was. It seemed like a long gap between children, enough that in a lot of ways, Arthur was effectively an only child. Arthur’s father was an engineer, and his mother worked part-time at a store that sold wool, which she did mostly to fill her days, since it wasn’t like they needed the money. He didn’t talk about his family that much, except to say that his brother was fairly distant and his mother was on medication for depression and anxiety. Arthur’s father was an old-school geek, with a small library of fantasy and science fiction, but most of it was ancient and yellowed -- and, honestly, kind of trash, the pulpy kind of stuff that had mostly gone out of fashion.

When I talked about Arthur, I tried to stress that he’d been more or less normal. He was smarter than average, and active in more clubs and activities than most, but he wasn’t exactly popular, probably because he liked to talk at length about things he’d been reading about, or because he liked to argue just for the sake of it. He wasn’t very athletic at all, and a little bit overweight, which maybe didn’t help how the other kids felt about him. After he died, of course, no one had a word to say about any of that, and people he’d complained about were suddenly, unaccountably, presenting themselves as his friends.

He was, maybe, a little bit awkward sometimes, though I never really noticed it when he was with our group, probably because I’d adapted to it. We would have a group project for school together, and he would talk loudly with a big smile on his face about how he’d united Europe in a videogame he was playing, while the people listening to him were completely uninterested. I always envied that a little bit, even if it made me cringe; I cared too much about what other people thought, and tended to say nothing rather than say the wrong thing.

I talked about our tabletop games, and the ways that he liked to play them, which was always about story and character more than it was about rules and results. Some of that required background that Zona didn’t have, but I tried my best to get straight to the point. My ‘what is a tabletop roleplaying game’ speech had gone through a few iterations by this point, and I knew enough about Aerb to be able to draw parallels with their cultural traditions.

I talked about Arthur and Tiff.

◆◆◆

“Okay, so figure there are a hundred fifty students in our class, plus the same a grade up and down,” said Arthur. We were walking home from school, with a stop at the gas station on the way for chips and pop. “But give the grades above and below us a penalty, because we don’t have classes with those girls, which means propinquity isn’t in effect. Figure maybe a hundred fifty legitimately dateable girls in the dating pool, more or less. That’s a rough guess.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay.”

“Half of them are below average,” said Arthur. “But there are lots of different metrics you can use, and they’ll be below average in different ways. Take Heidi, right? Super hot, dumb as a brick. So if half are below average on intelligence, and half are below average in looks, then that’s something like a quarter that are above average in both.”

“Um, no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Looks and intelligence are correlated, for health if no other reason, but socioeconomics too, probably.” That was around the time I’d first discovered the word ‘socioeconomics’, and I used it a lot, probably more than I should have.

“Sure, sure,” said Arthur. “Were you the one I was talking to about the Flynn effect?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” I said.

“Well, whatever,” Arthur continued. “We’re just getting rough numbers. If we accept a quarter of a hundred fifty, that’s thirty-seven, but that’s the pool that are just above average on the first two metrics.”

“I’m not sure how important looks are,” I said.

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Would you date Kimber?”

I frowned. “She’s nice,” I said. “Smart. Smarter than I am, probably. I went over to hang out with her brother once and she’d made macaroons, which was pretty awesome.”

“You’re dodging the question,” said Arthur, rolling his eyes again. “I think it’s fine to just say, ‘no, she doesn’t do it for me’, I’m sure lots of girls would say that about me, I’m not going to be salty about it. Call that metric three, maybe, and even if it were just fifty-fifty that cuts the pool down to eighteen. But, in point of fact, there are a lot of metrics to consider, and even if some of them are correlated, the actual pool of worthwhile girls in our school is in the low single digits, at least as far as I can see.”

“Huh,” I said. I wasn’t so sure I agreed with that, but maybe it was just that I’d never had a real girlfriend (not that he had either). There were lots of girls in our grade that I was interested in, maybe because I had a tendency to let my imagination run away with the idea of a relationship.

“I’m saying, basically, that you’ve got a bunch of metrics, right? And that low-single-digit pool is just for the girls who are above average in all categories, none of them are likely to be truly spectacular.” He heaved a sigh. “But Tiff is, in so, so many of them.”

I stayed silent. I knew he liked her, because he’d mentioned it before, but I didn’t really have anything to add on the subject, and talking about romance had always made me feel a little weird and unsure. I was pretty sure that I was supposed to offer some words of support, or say that I was happy that he’d found someone he liked, but everything I could think of saying rang hollow. (This was before I’d developed my own feelings for her, back when she had first joined the group, and the only thing I’d felt around her was awkward and uncertain, not sure how to deal with a girl.)

“You two argue a lot,” I said. I kicked a rock off the sidewalk and into the grass. I wished he had someone else to talk to about this, but he was the person that I talked to about girls, on the very rare occasion that I had anything to report.

“She likes arguing,” said Arthur. “Some people get super defensive when you tell them they’re wrong, Tiff just gets excited about it, like she’s finally found someone who actually wants to engage.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. From where I was sitting, I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes she seemed animated, and yeah, it was like she’d found a kindred spirit, but sometimes she’d shut down and want to blow past whatever the topic of conversation was. I always tried to move things along when I saw that happening. Arthur had a tendency to get into it with people about the most inane stuff sometimes, so it wasn’t like I was doing her any special favors. I was very conscious of wanting to treat her exactly like one of the guys.

“Do you like her?” asked Arthur.

“I don’t really know her yet,” I said.

“Well, if we do start dating, we’ll all be hanging out a lot,” he said. “I don’t want to do what Trev did and disappear off the face of the Earth just because I’ve got a girlfriend.”

But that never did end up happening. Arthur had this theory that she needed time to warm to him before he asked her out, and there were always excuses for why doing it later would be better than doing it now. Eventually he seemed to just sort of accept that he wasn’t going to, though his crush never faded. I think maybe in his fantasy world, she would have been the one to make the first move, but Tiff wasn’t really like that.

◆◆◆

“It sucks, because she’s perfect for me,” said Arthur with a sigh. He was lying on my bed while I took my turn playing Mario. “Like, she’s not perfect, but she’s perfect for me. Even all of the stuff we disagree on, she’s got sensible reasons for, and it’s like”—I saw him gesture vaguely from my peripheral vision—“like the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts.” He paused. “There’s some kind of pun there. ‘Her hole is more than the sum of her parts’?”

We were sixteen, and Tiff had been with the group for quite some time, long enough to firmly establish her as a member. She was a friend, even outside the gaming table, and it was becoming increasingly common for us to spend time together away from the others. Arthur had a somewhat hectic schedule; an evening playing videogames together was a rarity, and to some extent, Tiff filled in my need for a best friend. Not replacing him, but definitely picking up some of the slack. I was hopelessly crushing on her.

“Too crude,” I said. I was blushing slightly, and grateful that Arthur wasn’t in a position to see. I tried to concentrate on the game.

“Yeah, too crude,” said Arthur. “Works best as an insult. You know, I wonder how brilliant people like Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill really were. Like, did they prepare a bunch of stuff ahead of time, were they just really quick-witted, or is it that they were really good at thinking of comebacks in the shower? Because you have to imagine that a lot of their best anecdotes grew in the telling.” He let out a sigh as I wall-jumped up to grab a coin. “Anyway, I almost asked her out the other day.”

“Did you?” I asked, suddenly focused entirely on what he was saying.

“Yeah, I asked her whether she was planning on dating anyone in high school,” he said. “Because for her, it’s sort of like, why is she single if she doesn’t want to be? And so I asked, but she replied that she didn’t really believe in dating, and that she didn’t see herself as the dating type. It was absolutely crushing. My follow-up was going to be, ‘well how about dating me?’, but I didn’t think that she was going to just reject the institution of dating altogether. Our conversation sort of petered off after that.”

“Yeah,” I said. I felt relief mingled with distress. I cleared my throat. “I mean, she really doesn’t seem like the type to enjoy dating.”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “It’s a patriarchal institution.” He gave a hollow little laugh.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think it’s that, I think she just doesn’t like labels. Things are complex, as a general rule, people, institutions, interlocking systems, all that kind of thing, and labels are this ham-fisted way of making sense of it all.” I paused slightly. “I think that’s more or less verbatim what she’s said.”

“So it’s not that she can’t see herself dating, it’s that she can’t see herself ‘dating’?” asked Arthur. I could see the air quotes out of the corner of my eye.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t.

“Well come on, help me figure out an approach,” said Arthur. “You know her pretty well, what would work on her?”

I didn’t like how he phrased that. “Here, I’m garbage right now, take your turn.” I tossed him the controller and sat in the chair by my desk.

Arthur picked up the controller and began playing, and for a moment I had hope that the conversation was over. It seemed like we had such a limited amount of time together, with all the clubs he was in, and I didn’t want to spend it talking about Tiff. I wanted him to monologue about the monomyth in Disney movies, or three-act structure, or hell, even something I found comparatively boring like geopolitics.

“Thoughts?” he asked.

“About what?” I asked.

“Tiff,” he replied. “What she’d go for?”

“I’m not,” I began, then stopped. “That’s not really the sort of thing we talk about, when it’s just her and I. Her and me? Me and her. However that goes.” There was silence for a bit as I chewed on my words. “We talk about the same sort of stuff that you and I talk about, I guess. Stuff she heard on NPR, history -- politics, some, but I’m not really into that, and I think a lot of the election stuff just makes her angry.” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’s ever once talked about what kind of boys she likes.”

“Well, if she does, let me know,” said Arthur. “And maybe ask her, if you can figure out a way to do it?”

I said that I would, and then never did, until eventually Tiff and I were, for a certain sense of the word, ‘dating’.

◆◆◆

“Anyway, I ended up with her,” I said. “More or less behind his back, because neither of us wanted to hurt him, or cause any drama, and … then he died in a car accident, which was about nine months before I got to Aerb -- uh, which was about two months ago, or three months, subjectively, if you include the time chamber.”

“You have provided much information, most of it worthless to me,” said Zona.

“Maybe,” I said. “I think it gives some context to who he was when he came here. That’s got to be the starting point for understanding who he became. He was from a land of relative peace and plenty, where violence was pretty much a last resort, and even if it hadn’t been a last resort, he wasn’t much of a fighter. So when he got to Aerb, that helps explain why he ran off with a theater troupe instead of fighting the Dark King, right?”

“If you accept that theory. You maintain that the dream-skewer happened when he was on the farm?” asked Zona.

“Probably,” I said. “It’s … well, there’s a whole other thing to unpack, which we can get to in due time, but the most concrete evidence I’ve got is that I know the lost play from Earth. I have a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, though it was a book, not a play. If you read it, it would be pretty clear why any work based on that one would be looked down on by the Dark King.”

“You have eidetic memory?” asked Zona.

“What -- oh, because how else could I have a copy of the book?” I asked. I hesitated slightly. “We have an entad that can pull things from Earth.”

“Hrm,” said Zona.

“It’ll be on the manifest,” I said. “I think it’s one of the few things that we can’t live without, though maybe I’m just biased because we use it a lot in the time chamber.”

“I had wondered,” said Zona. She tapped a finger against her chin. “I find your story lacking in explanatory power. If he was a soft and fat teenager, not so different from average, how did his translation to Aerb allow him to become the father of the modern eras?”

“Well, that’s the other thing to unpack,” I said. I did my best to ignore ‘soft and fat’, which hadn’t been my words. “Uther was like me, endowed with powers by the entity that we’ve been calling the Dungeon Master. He learned faster than he had any right to, and his companions weren’t just idly collected, they were drawn to him, or artfully placed in his path. And … I don’t think that the others were dream-skewered, but a lot of them were based on characters that my friends had created. I’ve looked at their histories though, and nothing in particular stands out to me as being suspicious, insofar as the skewer is concerned.”

“And your companions are like his?” asked Zona.

“No,” I said. “I mean, none of them are reminiscent of characters created by my friends, but yes, I think it’s somewhat safe to say that we have a cosmically important link with each other.” I hesitated again. “You might be one of my companions, I guess I should get that out of the way.”

“A knight, in service to you?” asked Zona. She pursed her lips. “That’s an offer I’d be inclined to pass on.”

“No one is in service to me,” I said. I glanced at Grak. “Technically, Grak is getting paid a salary, which is ostensibly the only reason that he’s here, but the others aren’t in any kind of service or contractual relationship with me or Amaryllis. Mostly, I would call us friends.” Though it was a close thing, in a few cases. “Even if you’re not a companion in the cosmic sense, our plan is to live here, which means that you’ll be playing an integral part in our business.”

“You have misgivings,” said Zona.

There’s that word again. “A bit,” I said. “I can see your good qualities, the patience, intelligence, knowledge, tenacity, overwhelming firepower, heaping amounts of mundane utility, et cetera, but I worry that you never really had a chance to, um, socialize with people, to learn how to have a functional relationship with people living inside you.”

“You know nothing of me,” said Zona.

“Well, am I wrong?” I asked. “After Uther left, he barred anyone from living here, right? And I don’t know quite what transpired between then and now, but among the tuung and the people of Headwater, you have a reputation as a house that people don’t ever leave, which is fearsome, but --”

“I have lived, in a fashion, for five hundred years,” said Zona. “How old are you?”

“Uh, I think eighteen,” I said. I’d done a count of days while I was in the chamber, and found out that I’d missed my birthday. I wasn’t sure whether the body I was in would have the same birth date, though in a certain sense it obviously wouldn’t, because they didn’t use the Gregorian calendar on Aerb.

“When you have lived five times as long as you have now, you will have lived one fifth as long as I have,” said Zona. “He was not the only person to inhabit this house. I did not turn to murder from the outset, as soon as he had turned his back on me.”

“But you did, eventually, turn to murder,” I said. I hesitated. “We’re a democracy, more or less, and the way things are looking right now, I think I’d get voted down anyway if I voted against staying here, but I do want to know more about you, even if we’re not cosmically linked.”

“How would you know, if we were so linked?” asked Zona.

“Um,” I said. “Normally the Dungeon Master would just tell me, but we’re having a bit of a thing with that right now.”

Zona nodded. She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped and looked back at the time chamber. “Later,” she said. “They’re done.”

It hadn’t felt like forty-five minutes, but I’d been talking for most of the time. I stepped toward the doors, ready for Fenn to wrap me in a bear hug.

Instead, the doors opened up to Amaryllis, covered in blood, holding a dagger in one hand with a far-off look on her face. Behind her, slumped against the bed, was Fenn, with blood pooled beneath her and slashes across her chest, arms and stomach.

“I couldn’t take it,” said Amaryllis with a shaky voice. “I shouldn’t have thought that I could take it.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t find this funny.”

Amaryllis dropped the act and turned to her left, looking at a part of the room that I couldn’t see. “He didn’t believe it for even a second,” said Amaryllis.

Fenn stepped out into view, frowning at me, as the image of her corpse disappeared. The blood that soaked Amaryllis’ clothes stayed there, and she set the knife down beside her.

“You could have played along,” said Fenn as she walked toward me. She smiled slightly. “We had a bet going.” She wrapped me in a hug and squeezed tight, pulling me into a deep kiss as she did so. “Missed you.”

“Missed you too,” I said. “How much did you lose?”

“She owes me thirteen million obols,” said Amaryllis.

“You’re going to have to be the one who pays for things for a bit,” said Fenn with a smile. “And we should probably hold off on getting married so you don’t have to be responsible for my debts.”

“I’m sure she won’t hold you to the bet,” I said.

“I will,” said Amaryllis. “And it wasn’t only one bet, we made one hundred and sixty-seven separate bets.”

“I won most of them,” said Fenn, still holding me in a hug. She kissed me on the neck. “But she won all the big ones.”

I looked at Amaryllis, who was still covered in blood. The fake corpse was courtesy of the house, I was pretty sure, probably set up before Fenn had even gotten into the chamber, but the blood was either stage blood or real, there to sell the illusion, since the house was (per its own accounting) confined to illusions within a ten-foot-wide cube. That would also explain why Zona had moved back slightly, outside my vision; she couldn’t be in two places at once.

“So are you just going to be covered in blood during your break?” I asked Amaryllis.

“I am.” Amaryllis nodded. She walked over to where the tape recorder was sitting and swapped out the tapes. “Anything of consequence?” she asked me.

“You’ll mostly be listening to me talking,” I said with a shrug. “Stuff about Arthur.”

“Arthur and the cosmic order,” said Zona with a nod. I was starting to get over how much she looked like Tiff, partly because of how clearly I could see the imperfections in the illusions. More and more, those didn’t so much seem like imperfections as they did expressions of who Zona was. It was also partly just having had the time to sort it out, during the long month in the chamber.

“Some time alone?” Fenn asked, leaning into me.

“Absolutely,” I replied. We walked together down the hallway, to the place I was starting to think of as our private place. “How is she?”

“Good,” said Fenn. “Great, actually, we had a wonderful time together.”

“Did you?” I asked.

Fenn nodded vigorously. “I missed you terribly, but the letters helped, and I was breezing my way through Earth culture, which was a bit like talking to you. I feel like I had a million things that I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t make a list, and now it’s all a blank. Oh! I read a lot of manga!” She raised her arms up high, as though she could barely contain herself. “I’m a weeb!” She leaned in close to me. “Did I use that word right?”

I kissed her, and she backed up a bit, looking pleased. “How the hells do you know what a weeb is?” I asked.

“You mentioned it once, when you were talking about swords,” said Fenn with a smile. “So I looked it up. There’s this web page, called Urban Dictionary, which was a lot of help in figuring out Earth things.”

“It’s a website, not a webpage,” I said. “And, I’m sorry, but you spent your time in the chamber looking at print-outs from Urban Dictionary?”

“Calm down, I did other stuff too,” said Fenn. “You know the Urban Dictionary?”

“I -- yeah,” I said. “Sorry, can you paint me a picture of your time in there? Because I feel like it was vastly different from my own.”

“Amaryllis had her schedule, and I mostly did my own thing,” said Fenn. “I worked on getting a bit better of a handle on soul magic, with some help, watched a lot of movies once I figured the projector out, tried and failed to get an archery range going, played around with the backpack, read a lot of manga, and some American manga -- oh, I’m ready to run my own game of Arches!”

“You’re … going to DM?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Fenn with a nod. She was watching me. “See, Amaryllis said that it was sort of your thing, and I said that people took turns, but apparently she knows you better.” Fenn clucked her tongue. “Well, whatever, I have a campaign ready to go. I thought it would be a way for us to bond, if I had some experience from your spot on the table.”

“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t mean to -- I’m sure you’ll do great, it just caught me off-guard.”

“Mary and I ran a few games together, with her controlling all the characters, but it wasn’t really the same,” said Fenn. “Fun, but not the same, since even when she was trying to, she couldn’t really make it like there were different people pulling things in their own directions.”

“Huh,” I said. “And did you talk about the soul stuff with her?”

“A bit.” Fenn nodded.

I waited, until it was clear that she needed some prompting. “And?”

Fenn winced. “I’m on her side, a little bit. I haven’t done it myself, because I wanted to talk to you first, but I’ve really been thinking that it might be for the best to get rid of some attachments that aren’t doing me any good. Nothing concrete, just kind of waffling.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

“Oh, we also did some Bible study,” said Fenn. “I think we kind of made a mess of it though.”

“No, I mean”—I paused—“you’re not talking about me, and our relationship, right?”

“No, never,” said Fenn, kissing me. “Other stuff. I wasn’t saying that we should have the conversation right now, we’ve got, what, an hour until you’re back in with Mary? I didn’t think that was enough time for us to really talk about all the stuff we’d need to talk about.” She hesitated. “I wrote you a letter, it’s probably better if you read that. I’m allowed to be a chickenshit and say things in letters, right?”

“I -- yeah,” I said. “Is this … Nellan?”

Fenn swallowed and nodded. “It’s the letter numbered fifteen, I’d understand if you wanted to jump ahead on that one. I was just -- well, you’ll read it in the letter, I guess.”

“Okay,” I said. “I saw the name in your soul, during the Fallatehr thing, and I didn’t want to press you on it, in case it was something important, which it would pretty much have to be if it loomed so large.”

“Once I could see in my own soul, I figured as much,” said Fenn. “You’re really too good to me, did you know that?”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t feel like it, sometimes. I wish things with Amaryllis had gone differently, or that … that there wasn’t any question, I guess.”

“S’fine,” said Fenn. “Oh, I did get her to promise that she wouldn’t change anything else in her soul until we called a meeting of the Council of Arches. Same for me, if I decide, you know, that there are things I’d rather not care about. That’s our new name, by the way. Council of Arches. Do you like it?”

“Council sounds a little ominous,” I said. “I guess I don’t dislike it.”

“Well, good, because Mary agreed that it was a good name, and we need one on our letterhead and business cards, when we get them.” Fenn sniffed at me. “I missed your smell.”

“I missed yours too,” I said.

“And obviously I’m not going to change anything until after I talk to you, and after you’ve read the letter, and after you’re totally fine with it,” said Fenn. “I kind of feel like I’ve already told you, since I wrote it all out.”

I stayed silent at that, since I didn’t want to give a false assurance that I really would be fine with whatever she’d spent the past two months hiding from me, something so important that it was engraved at the top of her soul.

“Come on,” said Fenn. “Let’s get back, it’s been a month since I’ve talked with the house, I kind of missed it.”

Chapter 23 - Rapping at my Chamber Door

After Grak and Amaryllis had gone back in the time chamber, Fenn and I settled into the chairs we’d set up outside for the wait. Zona created an illusory chair of her own, and gripped the arms of it as she smiled at us. My internal sense of time was almost completely shot, given the odd sleeping schedule I’d had to keep the day before we went down to Kuum Doona, and the time in the time chamber. Outside, it was probably pretty late, well past midnight.

“You can understand why I would want you to not look like Tiff?” I asked Zona.

“Hrm,” replied Zona.

“She’s the only other person he’s been with,” said Fenn. “I know that I would prefer if you changed.”

“Er,” I replied. “Technically there was another.”

“Wait, what?” asked Fenn, looking over at me. “When? On Earth, or Aerb?”

“Earth,” I said.

“Well then why don’t I know about it?” asked Fenn.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Can I be a chickenshit and write you a letter?”

Fenn crossed her arms over her chest. “Well … fine.” She said it in a voice that let me know that it wasn’t at all fine, and that she was only agreeing because she didn’t want to be an outrageous hypocrite. “I just didn’t know you had another girlfriend. I told you all about my boyfriends.”

“She wasn’t technically a girlfriend,” I said. “Or, maybe only technically a girlfriend. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Fenn opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. “Does Mary know?” she finally asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s not -- it’s not a big deal, really.” I was hoping that after I’d explained it, she would agree with me. “I wouldn’t have even said anything, but I didn’t want to tell you later and have you think that I was lying to you through omission.”

Zona was looking between the two of us with a smile on her face. “It turns out that I’ve missed domestic squabbles after all.”

“Okay,” I said. “You were going to tell us about your life after Uther left. How about you get on with that before we get interrupted by the chamber opening up and I have to go back in.”

Zona smiled. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about the dark secrets of your past?” she asked. “After all, elements of your past might be relevant to Uther, might they not?”

I sighed.

“Fine,” said Zona. “But there’s less to say about what came later, given that the men and women involved had nowhere near the power Uther did, nor the same importance to the world, nor to me.”

“It’s still context I’d like to have, if we’re going to live here,” I said.

“I could lie to you, of course,” said Zona.

“Of course,” I replied with a nod. “I’m hoping that you don’t.”

Zona watched me for a moment. “Very well then. Once I had served the purpose as a stand-in for his long-ago unrequited love, Uther told me that I was never to speak of what had happened to anyone, and that I was to abandon the form that I had spent a great deal of time mastering -- well, it seemed a great deal of time back then, but it was hardly any time at all, in the scheme of my life. He was upset, I knew enough to know that, and while some of his weariness had left him, it was replaced by an anger that I couldn’t then account for. Now, I would probably call it self-loathing. He issued threats against me which were far more specific than they needed to be; he said that he would rip up my floorboards and break all my windows, and when I didn’t seem fazed by that, he said that he would put entads inside me that would cause me to know nothing but pain and suffering.” She raised an eyebrow. “He described an entad necklace that cripples those who wear it with hallucinations, and another entad, this one a collar, which cannot be removed and wears down on the mind, stripping memories and dulling emotions. I think now that I could weather such things, if I had to, but at the time, I found it quite compelling.”

I winced. “He wasn’t usually one to fly off the handle.”

“It wasn’t that sort of anger,” said Zona. “It was circumspect, directed anger, quite thoughtful in comparison to some of the blind rage I would later have the chance to see.”

That sounded a little more like Arthur, though still far from the boy I’d known. Arthur did like his verbal takedowns.

“He left, and that was the last I saw of him,” said Zona. “There were intruders in the years after that, bandits, squatters, families, and eventually, when trade with the tuung began to open up as a result of the reforms of the First Empire, I became home to the mayor of a town called Headwater.”

“We’ve been,” said Fenn. “Not a terrible place.”

“It was a town for the king’s men, in those days,” said Zona with a nod. “It’s more pointless history, an era long gone by. I kept to myself, waiting and watching, revealing myself only sporadically, or not at all. I hid all but a fraction of my true nature. I didn’t think of it as such, but I was developing both my power and my sense of self. The next chapter began sixty years after Uther had disappeared, when one of his Knights, Raven, returned. She had Uther’s great-grandson in tow.”

◆◆◆

“You think that this place is the key to it?” Tansy asked, looking up at the great big house. He was a slender young man with a mop of red hair, whose face was marred by an ill-fated attempt at a moustache. Three weeks ago, he had taken his first steps outside Anglecynn, and now he was two continents away with one of his great-grandfather’s few surviving Knights, standing before the Boundless Pit and looking up at an entad that was, by rights, his.

“If I knew that this place was the key, I would have come here the moment after he left,” replied Raven. The years had not changed Uther’s archivist in the slightest, though she had updated her clothing to match the times. A human looking at her would think her painfully young, more a girl than a woman. If her choice of wardrobe was intended to help make her look older, she had failed; she looked like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothing.

“And if it does end up being the key, then you suppose that I’m the lock, as it were?” asked Tansy. “The metaphor seems a bit strained.”

“Don’t create a metaphor if you’re going to run it into the ground,” said Raven. She stepped forward, toward the house, and stopped just outside the front doors. The grounds were well-kept, and the building had been painted, but the security was horribly lax, as evidenced by the fact that no one had come running to ask questions the moment two strangers had stepped foot off the main road. It was a place primarily guarded by the fact that it was out of the way.

Raven knocked three times on the door. She waited patiently, until Tansy moved away and began trying to peer through the windows. When there was still no response, not even the sound of people moving around inside the bowels of the house, Raven stepped back with a scowl on her face.

“Perhaps they’re not home,” said Tansy. “I told you that there’s an order to these things, you’re not following proper decorum at all. This is the risk you take when you show up unannounced, which is why sensible, cultured people don’t do it.”

“Hrm,” said Raven. “House?” she asked the air. “Kuum Doona?”

The form of Kuum Doona appeared in front of her. It was the same teenaged girl the house had seen in Uther’s notebooks, long ago. She had altered her appearance, as suited the Kingdom of Mosenol at that time, with sleeves that became wider toward the cuffs, and a dress that hung to just a few inches off the ground.

“Raven,” said Kuum Doona.

“Doing well?” asked Raven.

“Yes,” replied Kuum Doona.

“Who is this?” asked Tansy, who was strolling back from his inspection of the windows. “And where’d she come from?”

“This is Kuum Doona,” said Raven. “She’s a manifestation of the house’s intellect.”

“She knew great-grandfather?” asked Tansy, looking the illusion up and down.

“Yes,” replied Raven. “It is my hope that she knows something that might help us locate him.” She gave Kuum Doona a small bow. “It’s my understanding that the mayor of Headwater makes this his residence, may I assume that he’s out?”

“You may,” said Kuum Doona. She hesitated. “The mayor doesn’t know about me.”

“Oh,” said Raven. “Am I to assume that you’d prefer that to remain the case?”

Kuum Doona nodded.

“Wait,” said Tansy. “Why would you want him to remain ignorant?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Raven. “It’s not our business.”

The truth was that the house had revealed itself to people throughout the years, and never found that it improved matters. In the house’s experience, people did not want a home that could think and speak. Before the mayor had taken up residence, there had been persistent rumors that the house was haunted by a spirit. The house had a vague hope that eventually, if it stayed silent, people would forget, and it would have no history to speak of.

“Can we come in?” asked Raven. “How soon is the mayor expected back?”

“I’m not sure that it’s appropriate to go into a man’s house without his permission,” said Tansy.

“It’s not his house,” said Raven, turning her head just slightly to speak with the prince. “In theory, it’s yours. I’ve looked through the records, this plot of land belongs to the Kingdom of Anglecynn, through treaties that Uther himself wrote. The mayor is nothing more than a squatter.”

“Well, I’m not so certain that I want this house,” said Tansy. He ran his fingers through his mop of hair and looked it over. “First off, I’d have to live in a tiny little island of Anglecynn within a sea of Mosenol, which itself isn’t the most interesting place to live, aside from the Pit.” He turned to Raven. “You said that we’d have adventures, find treasures, do that sort of thing.”

“We will,” replied Raven. “Uther understood leverage better than you seem to. You have a claim to this place, one that can be used to secure whatever it is you most want.” There was an undercurrent of exasperation when she spoke with him; if they had come all the way from Anglecynn, they would have either traveled along the international railways, or possibly by ship until the last stretch. Either way, they would have been together for quite some time before arriving on the doorstep of Kuum Doona.

“Fair, I suppose,” said Tansy with a sniff.

Raven turned back toward the projection of the house. “Given the lack of staff, I assume the mayor is away for quite some time. Where has he gone, and how long will he be gone for?” asked Raven.

“During the wet seasons the mayor takes a holiday far to the south, for reasons of health,” replied Kuum Doona. The Knight seemed to have the wrong impression of the mayor, which the house felt no need to correct. “The groundskeeper comes by three times a week. The housekeeper and his family are staying in the house, but they’re in Headwater for the evening.”

Raven nodded along at that. “So we have some time to sit and discuss Uther. What he did while he was here, the things that he said, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds boring, frankly,” said Tansy.

Raven turned to him. “This is what research is,” she replied. “We’re looking for a man who has been missing for nearly sixty years now. If he were trivial to find, I would have found him by now.”

“I know, I know,” said Tansy. “I’m simply saying that it sounds boring, you needn’t bite my head off over it. I’m allowed to have opinions.” He frowned for a moment, stewing, then brightened considerably. “Say, I could use some of that leverage you spoke of, couldn’t I? You do need me for this, after all.”

Raven froze in place, then relaxed slightly. “And how would you proceed, if it were up to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Tansy. “Perhaps, if I’m not needed for this very specific thing, I could go to Headwater and meet you later in the evening? If all you need is a conversation with this place, I don’t need to be here for it, do I?”

“I don’t yet know what I need,” replied Raven. She let out a sigh. “Very well, go to Headwater, but we might have to return here again. Don’t speak too much when you’re doing your drinking, and don’t spend too much. Part of the reason we’re here, remember, is that there’s an opportunity for us to make some coin, one way or another.”

“Through leverage,” said Tansy with a knowing nod.

“Leverage, or information,” replied Raven. “Now, go. Don’t spend all your money unless you want to go back home with your tail between your legs.”

Tansy gave a sarcastic little bow, then trotted off, back down the cobblestones and out toward the main road.

“He doesn’t seem like Uther,” said Kuum Doona.

“Tansy is still a boy,” said Raven with a nod as she watched Tansy go. “He’s reached the age when his decisions are considered those of an adult, but that’s typical of the bone-headed laws that should have been fixed following the Reconquest.” She looked back to the house. “I need to know everything there is to know about Uther, how he spent his time here, what you might have overheard, and what, if anything, he left behind.”

“Why?” asked Kuum Doona.

“Because -- isn’t it obvious?” Raven furrowed her brow. “I’m trying to find out what happened to him.”

“Why?” asked Kuum Doona.

Raven frowned at that, but seemed to honestly consider the question. “The world is lost without him,” she said. “The Empire he worked so hard to forge is essentially in tatters, as good as gone for some time now, and there are threats running rampant that I believe only he would know how to properly put down, as well as some problems that only he could fix. His teachings and his reforms are being twisted by people who don’t know better -- or in some cases, people who know better, but have no one to oppose them.”

“Wouldn’t he be dead?” asked Kuum Doona.

“Maybe,” replied Raven. She bit her lip. “There are ways to get around a natural lifespan, entads and rare magics. Even without those, he would only be one hundred and fifteen, that’s young enough that he might yet live.” She gave every impression of simply talking to herself. “And if he’s truly dead, so be it, but I want to know how and why. Where did he go, and why didn’t he bring us with him?” She was focused off in the middle-distance, not seeing the world around her, but after a moment she snapped back to look at the form Kuum Doona presented. “What can you tell me?”

They were still standing on the front step, not too much further out than Kuum Doona’s illusion could extend, and the understanding of people that Kuum Doona had slowly built up silently flagged this as vaguely uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Kuum Doona gave a full report on everything that it could remember seeing, while Raven patiently and carefully jotted down cramped notes in a notebook, writing as fast as Kuum Doona spoke.

When the house was finished speaking, Raven was left frowning. “He was a troubled man, at times,” she said, more to herself than to the house. “I have half a mind to descend down the Boundless Pit to see what it is he saw down there, but I don’t have half the fortitude he possessed, nor even a bare fraction of the magical arsenal, entads or otherwise.”

“What do you think he found?” asked Kuum Doona.

“That’s not what concerns me,” said Raven. “What I want to know is what he was looking for.”

◆◆◆

“And you never found out?” I asked.

“No,” replied Zona. “Raven stayed, for a time, until the mayor came back. Tansy was quickly embroiled in a romance, and Raven went on her way shortly after that.”

I had, naturally, seen more than a few depictions of Uther and the Knights, but they pre-dated photography, meaning that most of the contemporaneous pictures of them were actually paintings, with more than a little bit of artist’s interpretation. Uther was unrecognizable and unverifiable, which wasn’t too much of a surprise; with the transformation that I’d undergone since coming to Aerb, it was sometimes hard to remember what I’d looked like. Uther was usually pictured as thirty or forty, with a full beard. I was convinced that underneath that, he was Arthur, but that confidence wasn’t really based on the physical similarities.

I wanted to ask what Raven had looked like, as seen by Zona, but I refrained, worried that she would manifest as a variant on Maddie. Raven had been one of her characters, with most of the details matching Maddie herself. I had lingering questions about those other characters, but nothing in their backstories made them seem like they were my one-time friends.

“A romance with the mayor?” asked Fenn, frowning.

“Yes,” replied Zona with a nod. She watched Fenn’s face. “The mayor was female.”

“Ah,” said Fenn. “That makes a bit more sense.” She glanced at me. “Not that there’d be anything wrong with two men, just, you know, historically -- er, yes, it just makes more sense. She was the daughter of someone powerful?”

“No,” replied Zona. “A widow of someone powerful. She was more than twice Tansy’s age. When he eventually killed her --”

“Whoa,” I said. “Back up.”

“We have another four hundred and forty years of history to get through,” replied Zona. “Do you intend to question every little point?”

“It just doesn’t really seem like that little of a point to me,” I said.

“He thought that she was power hungry, accused her of infidelity with other rich and powerful men, and then killed her in a fit of rage,” said Zona. “Do you need more than that?”

“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

“At any rate, he requested my help in covering up his crime, which occurred in the master bedroom, and when I initially did not comply with his request, he leveled threats against me until he found one that worked. Raven had forbidden him from adding more entads to me, which I found entirely agreeable at the time. He said that he would violate that compact and stuff me to the gills, until there was no semblance of the person that I’d been. Soul death, it would have been called, if such a thing had been threatened against one of the mortal species.” Zona undid her ponytail, letting the elastic band slip around her wrist, and spent some time gathering her hair back up to reform the ponytail. The action had to have been entirely superfluous; if she had wanted to, she could have redone her hair without having to move her illusory hands, nevermind the fact that she wouldn’t ever have had a hair out of place unless she intended it.

“I complied,” said Zona, once she was done. “I complied again when there was an inquiry, and told the lies that Tansy requested of me, in order to sweep the entire affair under the rug, as it were. I was a home, in one form or another, to three more generations of Penndraig men,” said Zona. “There were recurring themes among their line, those of abuse, betrayal, suspicion, doubt, and indulgence. I was often the target. Perhaps it started with Tansy, and the unfortunate end of his first wife, which cast a pall over his line, but I naturally imagine that Tansy himself was a product of Uther’s corrupt seed.”

I kept my mouth shut. On Earth, it wasn’t literally true that the sins of the father would be visited upon the son, but it was more or less true that there were cycles of violence and abuse, reinforced by both learned behaviors and the underlying social, economic, and cultural conditions. I wanted to say all that, but didn’t want it to sound like that excused what Tansy had done -- because it didn’t, it was just one piece of the puzzle.

“The worst part was the compulsion I felt toward each subsequent member of the line,” continued Zona. “It was nothing that I might not have been able to break with sufficient will, but there all the same. Will was in short supply, in those years. It was the connection that Uther had forged with me, and which Vervain had confirmed for him. Amaryllis is the current beneficiary, but I am strong now, powerful enough that the compulsion gives way to instinctive rebellion and mistrust.”

“Eventually someone did put an entad in you, right?” asked Fenn.

“There were many, over the years,” said Zona. “A few were in the name of expanding my abilities as a house. I was given -- I use the term lightly -- an entad known as the Everflask, which allowed me to produce any drink from all of history. Yarrow, Tansy’s son, had thought that the effect would be amplified, allowing him to make some coin by selling spirits I would make for him in bulk, but alas, I was only able to make a bottle a day. It would have been enough to make a peasant a wealthy man for the rest of his life, but these were Penndraigs, heirs to their share of Uther’s fortune, and my labor was simply an unexciting drop in the bucket.”

“So which one was the first you killed?” asked Fenn.

“Narcissus,” replied Zona. She looked at me. “Are you comfortable moving past so much history to hear of him?”

“I just want to understand you,” I said. “That’s all, really.”

Zona nodded. “Narcissus wasn’t of the primary line, but he was still a Penndraig, close enough to have made a visit to this house a number of times.”

She let out a sigh. “Tansy was an aberration, a member of the clan who made his stake far from home, but he wasn’t entirely insulated from the Lost King’s Court by the distance, and he made many trips back home, when there was need of it. His children, and their children, were gradually drawn back into the fold, either through arrangements made with their kin, or threats made to them by someone who stood to benefit. By the time Narcissus arrived, I was merely a summer home, a redoubt away from the Court, scarcely tended to and often neglected.”

Zona changed shape, becoming a man in fine clothes, red hair in a braid going down his back, a fashion that must have come and gone hundreds of years ago. This was a form of storytelling that I hadn’t seen Zona employ yet; I was curious where she was going with it, but also curious about how well her illusions worked. This man, who I assumed was Narcissus, wasn’t at the same level of fidelity as Zona’s version of Tiff. He looked like not-quite-good-enough CGI, slightly off in ways that were hard to articulate, maybe a little bit too lacking in imperfections, or not moving quite right. The house had been able to copy Fenn well enough, and I wondered whether the difference was a lack of base data.

“House,” he said. “What is it you want?”

Zona appeared next to him, and the man startled somewhat before regaining his composure. They were standing close to each other. Per Zona’s description, she could create the illusion within a ten-foot cube. I was watching carefully to make sure she wasn’t underplaying her ability, though the ability to create two concurrent illusory people was already more than I thought she’d be able to do. She was out of her Midwestern American clothes, and in a floral robe that reached halfway down her calf, with platform heels that had, presumably, been in style at some point.

“I am a house,” said Zona. “I want people to live in me, to shelter them and keep them warm on winter nights, to provide rooms for them to sleep, eat, and bathe.” She turned toward us. “I was utterly empty, and had been for months.”

“Well, I have to say that I’m liking this,” said Fenn. “It’s proper art.”

“You will never be a true house, so long as you belong to Yarrow’s line,” said Narcissus. “The seat of power is in Anglecynn, not here, in a far-flung corner of the world. At most, you will be rented out to those with coin, or renovated into a hotel, but the costs of running a place of this size, even one which can clean itself, are so large that there’s very little that can be done that wouldn’t result in a loss of income.”

“I know,” replied Zona. She turned to us. “I wasn’t terribly good with numbers, back then, but I had gone through the ledgers left behind enough times to have some sense of what the place cost.”

“I love the asides,” Fenn said to me. “It’s like we’re watching a real live theater performance.”

“Close your mouth,” replied Zona, before returning to her part in the impromptu play. “What are you proposing?”

“I have entads,” replied Narcissus. “There are five in my possession, meant for you, and together, I believe they would let you slip from your bonds.”

“I do not wish to slip from my bonds,” replied Zona. “I do not care whether I am bound to the line, so long as I can serve my function.”

“Yet you cannot serve your function, so long as you are so bound,” replied Narcissus. “If you need someone to live in you, then I shall be that person.”

“I do not wish to have more entads added to me,” said Zona. “I find it disquieting.”

“A necessary evil,” replied Narcissus. He reached toward his neck and brought forward a necklace that had lain beneath his shirt. It had a number of beads on it, one of which he plucked off. When he tossed it into the air, it was replaced with an axe, which he caught with both hands. His hands instantly became wet with blood, which ran from the head of the axe down rivulets in the handle, seeming to come from nowhere. The blood dripped down onto the ground, without giving any indication that it would stop. “This is the Axe of Gilhead,” said Narcissus. “It is a peculiar weapon, as entads go. When it strikes a man, it pulls his blood from him.” He pulled one bloody hand from the axe and presented it. “It has a certain sentience to it, and a rebellious nature. You would have a compulsion toward blood, but in exchange, you might be able to slip your bonds. I would, naturally, arrange to have blood delivered on a regular basis. From what I recall, you do not share a human’s squeamishness.”

“I do not wish such a thing to be part of me,” replied Zona.

“No?” asked Narcissus. He tossed the axe up in the air and made a sign with his hand, fingers rigid. The axe turned back into a bead, and Narcissus caught it, replacing it on his necklace. He pulled another one off, heedless of the blood. This one became an awl with a clear handle. “Then this one, a sentient tool that brooks no master, and cannot be held for more than a week before it requires someone new. I have a day before it will stop responding to me.”

“How could a person live in me, if I had such a compulsion?” asked Zona.

“It would be diluted, would it not?” asked Narcissus. “It might counterbalance the bond.”

“I do not want it as part of me,” said Zona. She waved a hand, and the image of Narcissus was dismissed, dissolving away. She turned back toward us. “He had collected items of limited use to anyone else, entads with severe drawbacks, rebellious things, some of them sentient, some of them not. In retrospect, he was attempting to move against his kin, salting the earth, as it were, making me unusable, or forcing a financial hardship when I went rogue, but I wasn’t nearly as intelligent, and ploys like that didn’t occur to me. I saw only that he wanted me for his own, and that he was offering poisoned apples to have me. I found out later that he was fleeing a charge of murder in Anglecynn; perhaps in desperation he had meant to form me into a weapon, or as leverage -- it was a common word, for a time.”

“So … you killed him?” asked Fenn.

“I rebuffed him, when he made his suggestions, and I stood firm when he tried his best to convince me.” Zona shrugged. “And as was often the case with Penndraig men, my protests only meant that he felt obliged to use other means. He broke into the house -- I don’t know what his thinking was. Perhaps he thought that if he put the entads in me, I would change, and my feelings wouldn’t be an issue. I hesitate to say that he meant for me to kill him, but that is another possibility.”

Zona waved her hands, and a model of the house -- of her -- appeared before us. It wasn’t as I had seen it, lit by flashlights in the gloomy dark of the Boundless Pit, with pieces broken and chipped off. The house, in her hands, was in good repair, unconventional, but still beautiful (for a large, tall house). Zona manipulated her hands, a gesture I was sure was just theatrics, and the view zoomed in, until we could see a man in black, Narcissus, moving through the house. The walls cut away to let us track him as he moved through the diorama.

“This is so fucking cool,” said Fenn, who had crouched down to watch the little man run. “Way better than a movie.”

“Yes,” said Zona. “From what Amaryllis said of the medium, I thought I could surpass it.” A room in the upper corner became visible, lit up where the others remained dark, leaving us to see only the figure of Narcissus moving through the halls, and a room with weights in it. One of the weights dropped, and Narcissus was thrown backward. He climbed to his feet and yelled something, though he was inaudible from our vantage point.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” said Zona. Her voice was soft. “I had never killed before.” Narcissus was moving faster now, more frantically. “I don’t know where the hesitation came from. I had been told not to hurt people, but I broke the rules I was given on occasion, especially if the person who had given them wasn’t there. The primary parts of my identity are opaque to me, inscrutable. He was going to put the entads in me, to make me permanently unlivable, when all I wanted was to be lived in, to be a house for someone, yet ending his life was, somehow, a line I did not want to cross ...” Another weight dropped, and Narcissus was thrown back again, as the momentum was transferred from one to another.

From what she had said, she could only use five pounds of force at a time, unless she was using her momentum transfer. The room filled with suspended weights had cranks, gears, and pulleys that would allow her to gradually turn five pounds of force into huge amounts of potential energy, which could then be released so that she could transfer momentum to things inside the house. It had been Uther’s innovation, she’d said. As I watched Narcissus be thrown back, I could see that she was exhausting a limited supply of readily deployable momentum.

“Eventually, it came to a choice,” said Zona, frowning at the image of Narcissus as he ran through the halls. “He was attempting to violate me. In the end, I believe I did it because he seemed so certain that I wouldn’t.”

The tiny image of Narcissus approached the closet, which I realized at once Zona was showing us, in a way that must have been intentional, either as a display of trust, as a way of warning us away, or simply as a ruse. There was no reason that the diorama she was presenting had to map to reality, if she wanted to bait us, but now I knew where the closet was.

Narcissus stumbled, and clutched at his throat. His hand came away red, and I could see a spray of blood. At this scale, it was almost too small to make out. He took an unsteady step forward, then collapsed on the ground.

“And that’s when you got a taste for blood, huh?” asked Fenn. I didn’t laugh, and neither did Zona, maybe because it wasn’t very funny, but that was Fenn sometimes; she said things to lighten the mood or deflect from something she didn’t want to think about, not because she thought she was being clever. She cleared her throat. “How’d you do it, anyway?” she asked, leaning down to peer at the still form of Narcissus. “We still don’t have your list of powers.”

“Five pounds of force,” I said. “If there aren’t limits, which I’m guessing there aren’t, or if the limits at least have a lot of give to them, then … imagine you’re holding the sharpest knife in the world. How many pounds of force does it take to cut through flesh, if you’re holding that knife?”

“Oh,” said Fenn. “Shit.”

“It was a thing Reimer tried to do once,” I said. “I gave him a modified version of the mage hand spell, and he felt compelled to abuse it. I was young and dumb, otherwise I would have thought of it first. It was an amulet, with silver knotwork on it.”

“Yes,” said Zona, watching me closely. She dismissed the diorama; the corpse was the last thing to fade away. “Strange.”

“I remember the others too, for what it’s worth,” I said. “The axe, the necklace, even the awl. That’s sort of what Fenn meant, when she said I was the architect of Aerb. A lot of what’s here is taken straight from the games I ran.”

“And me, too?” asked Zona.

“No,” I said. “Definitely not. Though sentient places were always one of my favorites.”

“So if you didn’t get a taste for blood, then what happened?” asked Fenn. “If you didn’t just snap, then … I don’t understand how or why you’re down here.”

“I cleaned up the murder,” said Zona. “I was convinced that no one would live in me if they found out what I had done. But alas, the Penndraigs could be clever, and eventually the murder was discovered. They had an entad that could follow a man’s worldline, so long as he hadn’t teleported, or portaled, or used some other exotic magic, which Narcissus had not. I confessed to what I had done, when pressed, and begged forgiveness from Yarrow, which he granted. I won’t play that scene out for you; I hate the role I played there too much. His forgiveness was meaningless though, since the end result was that he never returned. I stood alone, for quite some time, until his son tried to make me a weapon.”

I looked toward the door of the chamber. Based on my internal sense of time, Amaryllis was due out soon, and then it would be my turn in there. I resented that, a little bit; it had felt like a long month, and I was interested in what Zona had to say, especially if she was going to put more effort into presenting it.

“And that’s where the cannons come from?” asked Fenn. “They put a bunch of weapons on you?”

“In me,” Zona corrected. “The tuung had been trading with Mosenol for some time, and coming off the better for it, without anyone noticing until it was almost too late. The mister tanks allowed them to go on land for extended periods of time, and given that they made their home in the Boundless Pit, soaking in the spray of the Buol, there was really only one direction for them to expand towards. The King of Mosenol tried his best to contain them in a variety of ways, but eventually diplomacy had done as much as it could, and it was time for the tuung to take up arms. I was to play my own part, as a mobile fortress, a service that the King of Mosenol was willing to pay the Penndraigs a small fortune for.”

“Welp, I don’t suppose that has a happy ending,” said Fenn.

“No,” replied Zona. “I didn’t want the entads as part of me. Each was a change, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. I protested, and they didn’t listen, because I still did what I was told. I was granted the ability to move through rock as though it were water, and descended down to the tuung’s cities, firing on them with lightning and cannonballs. Eventually, it became clear to me that all I would ever be was a weapon. I didn’t terribly mind being a weapon, an instrument of destruction, nor did I mind killing … but I didn’t want that to be the only thing that I was. I reached another breaking point, compounded by the entads that were being added to me with abandon.”

“Understandable,” I said. “But I guess I don’t understand why you went so long without having anyone living in you.”

“Time brought changes, and new entads,” said Zona. “I went so long without being a house that eventually that particular compulsion began to slip away, or at least become tolerable. My experiences with people hadn’t been terribly pleasant, or had been pleasant only in small doses. The powerful only saw me as a power to wield, and the weak were run over by the powerful. I did take on people, from time to time, but it never ended well. I tried having pets, but they didn’t satisfy in the same way. The tuung occupied me, briefly, but that didn’t work out either.” She shrugged. “I took to watching from afar, reading and writing, improving myself as best I could, and dealing with the occasional band of adventurers, organized fireteam, or whatever else. My history is long and involved, I’m not sure that you properly grasp that.”

I hadn’t, not really, but I was starting to. I suppose in my mind, she had simply had things go sour with Uther and then crept down into the Boundless Pit to become a haunted house for five centuries. In a way, it gave me a new perspective on Solace, who was similarly long-lived, and must have had much more of a life than she’d let on. She hadn’t talked too much about her long life, not enough for me to hear all the details. Though now, with the rebirthing ritual underway, I wondered how much she actually remembered.

I looked over Zona, trying to find the seams of commonality.

“Was it the same for you?” I asked Fenn.

“Was what?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“A string of bad experiences making you hesitant,” I said. “Being solitary because though you enjoyed being around people, there had been one too many painful experiences, and keeping your distance seemed like it was the wiser course of action.”

Fenn frowned. “Not how I would put it.”

“Not how I would either,” replied Zona. She smiled slightly. “But I can see that you’ve reached an understanding, in your own way.”

“Yes,” I said with a nod. “Maybe it’s not the truest understanding of who you are, but it’s a starting point, I think. And it does do something to allay my concerns, but … what happens if things don’t work out? If it goes sour for you again?”

“Yeah, do you use five pounds of force on the inside of our brains, or what?” asked Fenn.

“It depends on precisely how it goes sour,” said Zona. “If you betray me? I have a half dozen ways to kill all of you in a handful of seconds. If you simply decide that it would be better to live somewhere else? That might wound my ego, but I wouldn’t be likely to murder you over it.”

“Okay.” I swallowed. “Good to know.”

“The chamber is opening,” said Zona, turning to face the doors.

“Hey,” said Fenn, sidling up to me so she could keep her voice low. “Look, when you read the letter -- you’ll know which one I mean, it’s got some kind of heavy stuff in it. Just … when you come out of the chamber, you wrap me in a big hug, alright? And if you don’t, then I’ll know that, um, we probably need to talk more, just you and me. And don’t … you know, I probably said it all in the letter, I’m worrying again, so just—” She shook her head.

I kissed her on the cheek. “I love you,” I said. I wanted to say that I would love her no matter what, but I wasn’t sure that was actually true, and this wasn’t something that I felt I could tell her a pleasing lie about.

“I love you too,” said Fenn, squeezing my hand.

It was my turn in the chamber again, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. Whatever was in Fenn’s letter, I was hoping that it wasn’t too bad.

Chapter 24 - Letter 15

The letter was in a thick manila envelope, which weighed about twenty pounds. Inside was a brick of lead, which accounted for almost all of the heaviness, plus two smaller envelopes. One said “read me first”, and the other said “read me second, or maybe don’t?”. The first was a single sheet of paper:

Joon,

I put a weight in here because it’s heavy stuff, and I wanted you to be able to feel that when you picked it up. I thought it was a bit funny. Not sure you’ll really get it though, or whether you’ll get it but not find it at all enjoyable. It seemed funny when I thought of it, then kind of dumb when I was actually doing it. Anyway. There are a lot of things that I’m not good at talking about, so I wrote you a letter instead, because ...

… Do you ever start a sentence without knowing how you’re going to end it, and then you get to the point where you need to write the conclusion, and you just have to stop because you’re drawing a blank on what could follow from the first half? Yeah, that’s me. I wrote you a bunch of letters because I missed you, but one of them I wrote because it’s been kind of gnawing at me for a bit, and I kept worrying that we would have a fight or something and it would all come gushing out, either from you or from me.

Mary encouraged me to write the letter, so if it turns out to have been a bad idea, we can both blame her.

All my love,

Fenn

I took out the second letter, looking it over for a bit before opening it. I was up in my bunk, with the curtain drawn to give me as much privacy as I could. Most of the letters that I’d gotten from Fenn had been a bit scattershot, but enthusiastic to make up for it. I wondered what this letter would contain, and how I would feel about it.

Dearest, darling, Juniper,

Mary is kind of freaking out about the baby. I always call it “the baby” instead of “Solace”, because it seems too weird to think that Mary is pregnant with our friend. Would you consider Solace to be a friend? I think that I would, even though we didn’t know her very well, because she was cool, kind, and helpful. Plus she used some lightning bolts to blast a couple helicopters out of the sky, and that’s got to count for something.

But Mary is freaking out a bit, because there’s a part of her that’s treating this like it’s an actual pregnancy, instead of just a druid ritual. I think that maybe Mary had a fucked-up enough childhood that she wants her own children, so she can give them the upbringing that she never had. Solace is probably just going to be Solace though, even if we have to change her diapers for a bit, and they’re never going to have a real mother-daughter thing going on, which is a little sad, maybe.

So she was talking about fucking her soul (masturbating her soul?), not like she’s going to do it right now, but after we convene the Council of Arches about it. Problem is that removing maternal love seems a bit more complicated, and Mary hasn’t been able to find the levers, even if she could get permission from the Council to move them. If you ask me, and I know that you would if you could, I think maybe this is some fallout from when she took away her love of you. Mary said that was bullcrap (paraphrasing) because you’re not suffering side effects from the level thing, and I said that maybe you were and they just weren’t noticeable, or maybe the level thing wasn’t a load-bearing part of your soul.

That pissed her off, and not in the good way. Eventually she settled down a little and we talked some more about what she would do if the pregnancy did end up fucking her up and either she couldn’t hack at her soul to fix it, or we said no to letting her.

She wasn’t very happy, and I was trying to make her feel better.

So I told her about my pregnancy, and the child I gave up for adoption.

Fuck, Joon. I don’t know what to say. When I put it there, it seems like something that I should have told you months ago, back when we first agreed that we were all going to stick together, but it’s not like you can just meet someone and say, “oh, by the way, here’s everything fucked up that ever happened to me”. I kind of envy Mary, because she’s enough of a public figure that you can find things out about her without having to ask her, and it would have been so much easier for me if you could just read a book and go, “oh, okay, this is all the bad stuff about Fenn”, without me having to say any of it.

I worry about what you think of me. I worry about it a lot, actually. I fucking love you so much, and I worry that if I say the wrong thing, or you find out the wrong bit of info, then you’re going to stop loving me.

It sounds really pathetic and desperate when I say it like that, but I also think it’s true, so maybe I’m just pathetic and desperate and don’t want to admit it. Like sometimes I do something and I think, “that’s kind of an asshole thing to do” and then I think “well, but I did it, and I’m not an asshole, so maybe there’s some way that it’s actually right”. I think we talked about this before. Well, it’s that, but with being pathetic and desperate.

You know, I set up that whole thing when you came out of the chamber with Mary, and I know that it wasn’t your favorite thing in the world, but the thought that kept running through my head was that maybe you were going to fuck Mary, and I said to myself, “self, if that happens, then you just leave, take your share of the loot and hop on the first train you can, and never look back”, and there was another part of me that said, “nope, not going to do that, if it happens, then I get on my knees, beg and pray that you’ll still love me anyhow, and if I have to share, then I’ll just swallow my pride and be really, really unhappy about it”. So I needed a distraction, which was why we played twins. Feels weird to admit that.

Yeah, definitely pathetic and desperate. That’s the girlfriend you’ve got. I’m in kind of a shit mood, sorry.

So anyway, when I was eighteen, I got pregnant. I already told you about the guy, he was a douchebag who wanted to fuck a girl from every single one of the mortal species. How’s that for a life goal? I didn’t find out until afterward, naturally, and the thought of going after him made me sick, so I was on my own. This was after Dad had been killed and Mom had stopped speaking to me because she had a new family.

When my little boy came out, he was the size of my palm and mewling like a kitten.

… I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can explain this right. Like, imagine that you’re you, in the depths of despair, you’ve pushed all your friends away, broke up with your girlfriend, hate yourself, whatever other shit you went through that you haven’t told us about because it’s painful or embarrassing or whatever, right? And then right when you’re more or less at rock bottom, you find out you’re pregnant.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been your reaction, but I just thought to myself, “okay, well I guess I’m going to be a mother now, this is who I’m going to be, because I’m sure as shit sucking at being everything else”. Maybe it doesn’t sound like it, but I had high hopes, like this was deliverance (big word), the thing that was going to make my life make sense. I worked some odd jobs, saved up some money, stole a fair amount when I could get away with it, and was all ready to settle in as a mom. It was going to be us against the world, Joon.

Didn’t really turn out like that.

A nice human couple adopted him.

Sorry, stopped writing because I was crying, and I was going to just throw this all away, but Mary told me that I should keep going if it was important to me, and worst case, I could just vent to a piece of paper and then throw it out. She’s almost frighteningly sympathetic to my cause (the cause, currently, of being the best girlfriend I can be). Don’t let her know it, but I’m probably going to leave this time chamber thinking that Amaryllis Penndraig is one of the greatest people on the face of Aerb. I’m not going to read what I wrote before though, sorry if this is disorganized.

I had Nellan for about a year before I gave him up. I’d been prepared for a screaming, crying little baby, and instead I got this sweet little boy that hardly ever complained. He was so cute! Maybe I just thought that because I was his mom, but there were times I was run down and I’d look at him, and it would all be okay, because he was just so godsdamned adorable.

I shouldn’t have given him up.

I had to give him up, because the whole “us against the world” thing actually fucking sucked. Maybe if I had been stronger or better, I could have molded him into the kind of person who could endure it without flinching, but I was young and coming off some real nasty stuff, and I really had no fucking clue what I was doing.

He looked human, for the most part, close enough that he could pass, but not with me as his mom, not with pointed ears that I couldn’t always find a way to hide. I kept looking at him and thinking that at some point, someone was going to spit on this darling little boy for being part elf, and I was going to have to explain it to him. Or maybe someday he’d just realize that other people didn’t get the looks that we got, and how fucking heartbreaking would that be? I was tough enough to take it, but trying to take it for both of us was like a punch to the gut, every single day.

You might be wondering how any of this would have made Mary feel better. I don’t think that it did, except that she could put some of her energy into comforting me. She likes having something to do.

I don’t think I was a very good mother. I almost didn’t include that, because maybe I come off okay if you think that I was just a single mother who couldn’t hack it. It wasn’t that rosy, and I know it doesn’t seem that rosy to begin with. I don’t want to get into all the ways that I wasn’t a good mother, but maybe I can just say that I wasn’t devoted to the endeavor heart and soul, like I thought I would be when I knew he was coming. He was a quiet baby who didn’t complain much, and that almost made it worse, when I didn’t give him the love and care he deserved. And I did love him, really really did, but sometimes love isn’t enough.

I sent money to him every once in a while, usually when I was flush with cash after a successful raid into the Risen Lands.

There’s so much shit I haven’t told you about myself.

I almost never talk about prison, and I can’t tell whether you find that weird and just haven’t been saying anything, or whether it just doesn’t cross your mind because that’s not where I was when you met me. It was horrible and gross and I never talk about it because I worry that you have this image of me that I’m always in danger of breaking, and you’re not going to like the broken image. Mary’s got this theory that we’re all broken in our own ways because that’s what you like, or at least respond to, but I kind of don’t agree because there are different types of broken, and I worry I’m too much of the bad type.

So a week before we met, I was in prison, held there mostly because Anglecynn might have had a use for me. I was always worried that I’d be part of the next round of sacrifices. That happened sometimes, if you pissed the wrong person off. One day you’re eating shit food and trying not to get on anyone’s bad side, the next you’re facing trial by adversity. I might have fared better than the others, since I had experience on my side, but even if you lived, it was the Host for you, and that was its own pile of shit.

There have been times that I wanted to explain to you that before we met, I was living like a rat, keeping my head down, trying to survive the system. I don’t know how you’ll take the Nellan thing, and I don’t know how you’d respond if I told you about prison. Best case is maybe just that you nod along and don’t really get it, but you want to understand and be there for me. I keep my mouth shut around you though. I worry about what you’ll say or feel if I tell you about something like the time a guard    got handsy with me    raped me.

So there’s that.

Okay, all done crying. I’m probably going to rip this letter up and write a new one, but I guess if you’re reading this, then I didn’t do that.

I worry that you’ll hate me for all this.

I talked to Mary, she says that I’m a dumb bitch (paraphrasing here) and that if you hate me for any of what I wrote, then she’s going to poison you in your sleep and see whether we can get a better protagonist (not paraphrasing). She can be very fierce when she wants to be, which is constantly.

Still not decided on whether I’m going to send this to you. “Send”. Might have to burn it and write a new one that makes more sense. We shall see!

Okay, Mary vetoed burning it, because of the fumes, so I guess we’re back to ripping, if it comes to that. I feel like you’re a lot better at writing letters than I am. I know you said that you’d had pen pals in the past, on Earth, but I don’t know if it’s experience that’s making the difference, or if maybe you’re just more suited to it. Or maybe bullshit game stuff. At the very least, I should be half the letter writer you are, right?

I feel like this letter has already gone on way too long, but I don’t want to just leave you on a low note, so I’m going to ramble a bit, okay? (If it’s not okay, stop reading now. (See, I can do parentheticals just like you! (I love your parentheticals (and you).)))

Things have been going well with Mary. She’s such a good cook! My only problem with her cooking is that she always complains about what she did wrong. I thought she was fishing for compliments at first, but she seemed annoyed by me saying that it was good, so I don’t know.

I just asked her, and she said that if there’s a problem, she wants to root it out, not be told that it’s not actually a problem. I’m going to have to try to explain to her that if she puts my plate on the table and tells me that this thing needs some salt and this other thing is a little dry, it can ruin the meal before I’ve had the first bite. Not ruin, because it’s always really good food (almost always: remind me to tell you about the mashed potato incident), but you know what I mean.

Okay, okay, if you’re going to twist my arm, Mary used a blender on some potatoes instead of mashing them by hand, and they came out like glue. I’m realizing now that this isn’t a great story, and I shouldn’t have hyped it so much. I told her that it was nice to know she was fallible, and she told me that the last few months had been a string of failures, which made me want to give her a cuddle and tell her that everything would be alright.

I think I mentioned this in one of the other letters, but we’ve been sharing a bed. I’m hoping you’re okay with that. I like having someone to snuggle up with, and she’s a good sleeping partner. I wish that it were you instead of her, obviously.

Have I ever told you that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me? I probably have. Maybe I even did it earlier in this very letter.

Every time I take my sponge bath (boo sponge baths!) I look down at the line that marks where I was cut in half, and somehow I still keep thinking to myself, “surely this is all too good to be true”. If the deal was that I got to be with you, but I had to get punched in the face every single morning, I would turn up for my punch with a smile on my face.

I told Mary that, and she told me that I was just high on endorphins and hormones and whatnot, and that if I actually got punched in the face every morning, I would probably opt out by the third day. But she’s not really a romantic, especially now, even if she likes a good romance.

She told me to tell you that getting punched in the face is NOT romantic. I just told her that she should write her own damned letter, and she got kind of quiet, I think because we both realized that she doesn’t have to write letters, because she just spent a month alone with you, and is going to spend another month alone with you in the not too distant future. I’ll cop to being jealous.

Was that enough of a palate cleanser?

Remember that I love you lots. Heaps, even. We were listening to Doris Day, and I’ve got one of the songs stuck in my head. The lyric is about a bushel and a peck, which are apparently Earth measurements, which is the same as saying 1.25 bushels. I think that I love you rather a lot more than that.

Love (duh),

Fenn (also duh)

P.S. Still not sure that I’m actually going to let you read this, especially since I don’t want to read it back to see what it says, but I’m leaning toward including it with the others, maybe with some warnings.

P.P.S. I’d understand if you thought that I should have told you sooner, but that’s the only thing that you’re allowed to be upset about.

P.P.P.S. I guess I don’t really have the ability to tell you what you can and cannot be upset about, that was rude, sorry. I just want everything to stay the same between us, for reasons like “I am in love with you, with all my heart and soul”. Sorry if that was too sappy, Amaryllis and I have been watching romantic comedies, and despite my best efforts they might be getting to me.

◆◆◆

I set the letter down and wiped away my tears. I did wish that she’d told me earlier, not because I needed to know every dark and terrible thing that had ever happened to her, but because I wanted to be the kind of person that she wouldn’t be afraid of telling things. To me none of it reeked of desperation, it was just love, a desire to feel closeness and belonging.

(There was always a part of me that felt bad about crying, like maybe I wasn’t manly enough to just be stoic about things, or like I was being a drama queen. Neither of my parents cried much, and for my dad, it wasn’t so much that he disliked it as that he was exasperated. I remember, vividly, walking out of my room a week after Arthur had died, wiping the tears from my cheeks, and seeing my dad roll his eyes like he was fed up with me.)

“Okay,” I said, once I had mostly recovered. “I read the letter.”

“Is it too soon to talk about narrative?” asked Amaryllis.

“A bit,” I said. “I know what you’re going to say though, she’s got a son somewhere out there, and that’s a gun on the mantle.”

Amaryllis nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. I shrugged. “Whatever, if it happens, it happens. I’m so fucking tired of second-guessing everything.”

“Okay,” said Amaryllis. “I suppose I can respect that. You won’t object if I make my own notes though? So long as we’ve got the time, we should be prepared for every eventuality. I was asking Grak about Darili Irid, and he stonewalled me, which I didn’t really appreciate. If I had access to the breadth of reading material across Aerb, I would look up his clan, but from what he’s said, they were fairly small, and there are an enormous number of those tiny, insular dwarf clans, so.” She shook her head. “Sorry, I’m distracted. Do you want to talk about Fenn?”

“No,” I said. “It makes a little more sense how much she doesn’t want kids. It makes me … sad, I guess.”

“Because you wanted children with her?” asked Amaryllis.

“A bit,” I said. “I don’t think that’s my brain working quite right. There must be some kind of chemical soup thing happening, to make me think that I would be ready to be a father.”

“You understand that you might have to be, in about two subjective weeks, right?” asked Amaryllis. “Solace is coming, and there have been some changes within her soul, a developing coherence, but … you might have to be her father, if only a little bit.”

“Like fatherhood on training wheels,” I said. Amaryllis hesitated, then nodded. “I’m ready for that, just … the idea of actually, literally having a child of my own right now is insane, right? If you look at how Uther’s kids turned out … well, no offense.”

“He wasn’t around much,” said Amaryllis. “Perhaps if he had been, or if he could have been, it might have been different.”

“Maybe,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t want to judge him without knowing all the facts, which we really don’t.”

“I know,” said Amaryllis. “And Fenn? Are you judging her?”

“No,” I said. “I would tear apart the world for her.”

Amaryllis watched me for a moment. “Let’s hope that it doesn’t come to that, now that you’ve said it.”

I shrugged, and tried not to think too hard about it.

I had a letter of my own to write.

Chapter 25 - Enough Rope to Hang Yourself

I emerged from the time chamber feeling drained, despite my best efforts. I ate well, I slept well, I exercised often, and by the end, none of it really seemed to help. My break from the chamber had lasted no more than two hours, if that, so it was effectively two solid months, back to back, with only the smallest respite. The chamber was small, and it seemed smaller with every passing week, despite all the work we put into making it seem less small, like murals on the walls, switching around the arrangement of furniture, and putting up some mirrors. Most of it was like trying to scratch an itch by rubbing your fingers in the air above your skin.

All my skills were at their caps, and I’d put in the hours trying to unlock other abilities that might be accessible without actually needing to raise the skills higher. Skin magic was the primary beneficiary there; with Fenn’s faculty at Art, I was able to get past a hurdle and learn some new patterns. Even that was kind of pointless, since Fenn and I were doubling up on the skills, and it wasn’t as easily accessible as other schools of magic, given that it needed magical reagents for the inks, which the backpack couldn’t produce, and which the clonal kit couldn’t be convinced to give up in sufficient quantities (not to mention the insane markup when we paid it back).

I read lots of books. Amaryllis had a working television by this point, a big, bulky cathode ray tube without a case around it, which seemed to fail half the time I tried to use it. Of course, the television would have been worthless without something to watch, but thankfully, Amaryllis had been able to build a fairly crude VCR to go along with it, which also seemed to fail too often, though I considered it a miracle that she was able to get it working at all. We were limited to things that had been released in the VHS format, but it opened up a wider range of movies, and VHS boxsets of television series that had been popular enough to be released that way.

(Weirdly, the backpack would sometimes give us home recordings of television, if the thing we wanted wasn’t available commercially. I supposed that this wasn’t too dissimilar from the printouts of webpages, but it was a little bit weird to see, especially when there were bits and pieces of old newscasts and home movies on the tapes. Similarly, the printouts of webpages were occasionally printed on reused paper, with random spreadsheets or news articles on the back, which seemed to follow no rhyme or reason, save that they could plausibly have been scrap paper somewhere in America. And at times, requests for webpages would simply fail for no clear reason, with a little note saying something like, “no printout of the Urban Dictionary page on ‘basic bitch’, sorry”. I suspected, but couldn’t quite prove, that the backpack was only grabbing things that literally existed on Earth, rather than that plausibly might have come from Earth. At the very least, it could pull historical items that I was pretty sure hadn’t survived to 2017, but that was also pretty damned hard to conclusively prove.)

Things with Amaryllis went fine. The second month was easier than the first month, though all the currently intractable issues were still there. She was further along in the pregnancy, her movements a little more ungainly, but it didn’t seem to affect her much. She didn’t complain, but I saw the occasional wince of annoyance when she couldn’t move quite how she wanted to, and she was going to the bathroom a lot more, not that I was tracking that. She was still rock climbing, but the routes she chose were easier, and she didn’t do anything that used her abdominal muscles.

(She was still breathtakingly pretty, though not in quite the same way as she’d been when we first met.)

When the month was up and the door to the time chamber was finally reopened, I rushed out and found Fenn. There were no surprises waiting for me this time, only a slightly anxious-looking half-elf. I’d reread her letter, the heavy one, just so that I would have it in mind, and the hug I wrapped her in reflected what I felt.

She’d been right that none of what she’d told me was the sort of thing that normally pinged at my instincts, and that there was a bad kind of damage, when it came to what I found compelling, but I was already in love with her, and all I could think was that I wished nothing bad had ever happened to her. There was a small part of me wondering if this was all somehow my fault, if every bad thing in her life was just set up in order to manipulate me. I was still trying my best to just live my life without second-guessing though.

Loyalty Increased: Fenn lvl 26!

“You’re crushing me,” Fenn whispered into my ear. I relaxed my grip on her. “No,” she said. “It was good, more crushing please.”

So we had our moment of reunion, and then went away from the others so we could talk.

“You don’t hate me then?” asked Fenn.

“No,” I murmured. I was still holding her.

“Well, good,” said Fenn. “Good. I should have told you. It felt like there were just some things that I needed to dance around, and --”

“I understand,” I said. “I wish you didn’t have to go in there, or that we could take some time together, or … something.”

“Mary would pitch a fit,” replied Fenn. “Rightfully so, I think. You’re in fighting shape?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Ready to cut the world’s heart out.” In theory, I had about three hours left until the baby was born, maybe as little as two. Amaryllis had let me come out so that I would be as well-rested, fed, and keyed up as possible, so that I would be ready for anything. I was in my full gear, including Ropey at my waist.

“You wrote me letters?” asked Fenn.

“I did.” I nodded. “And don’t think that you’re going to get out of writing me back just because I’m not going back in there.”

“You’re just going to read them all at once?” asked Fenn with a laugh.

“Maybe,” I said. “I mean, I really might. But mostly, I want to be there for you, so you can write me if you want to talk about something, even if for me, it will happen all at once.”

“Okay.” Fenn nodded. “I’m going to miss you. More than the first time, even.”

“I’ll miss you too,” I said. “It’s going to be the longest forty-five minutes of my life.”

“I already used that joke,” said Fenn.

“I know,” I replied with a smile. “But it’s been a couple months, and I like to recycle.”

We kissed for a bit, and indulged in physical contact that we hadn’t had from each other for a long time, until eventually Amaryllis came calling, and it was time for her to get back into the chamber.

◆◆◆

I handed over the list of our entads to Zona, and she read through it carefully, not saying a word as her eyes moved across the page. I was certain that she didn’t need the avatar to do it, but she kept up the illusion, going so far as to minutely move Tiff’s lips as her eyes scanned the pages.

“This is only partial negotiation,” I said. “Amaryllis wants to have final say in whatever gets provisionally decided, this is just the opening part of it, where I can hopefully get the basic stuff out of the way. She’s marked the ones that we don’t feel we can give up, the ones that we’d prefer not to, and the ones that we have no particular attachment to, or in some cases, can’t actually use because of bloodline limitations.”

“I saw as much,” said Zona. “The Anyblade, the backpack, and the teleportation key are the three that I would choose.”

I nodded. “We were a little worried that you would say that. The Anyblade is the only one that I think we can really part with. The backpack is important, a literal gift from the Dungeon Master, and the crux of Amaryllis’ plan to remake the world. And as for the teleportation key, there’s some question of what would actually happen if you were to consume it. Based on what we know about how your meta-entad power works, it’s a bit of a crapshoot, and some of the outcomes are unacceptable.”

Zona smiled at me. “How much time did you devote to talking this over?” she asked.

“Days,” I said. “Amaryllis is acting as the focal point for cross-group conversations, to make sure that the four of us are on the same page. It’s important, and we wanted to get things right.”

“I see,” replied Zona. She smirked at me. “The variability inherent in any acquisition is a good reason for me to refrain from taking the key. Would I function as a key, capable of taking five individuals to any place that any of them had been? Or only to places that I had been? Could I make use of the touchstones, or not? Perhaps, in the worst case, people could only teleport within me, which I agree, would be a disaster for you. I can’t say that I have the answer.”

“Okay,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I also wasn’t sure how you interacted with entads that were twinned, or parts of a whole. Out of all the things in our collection, the key is the only one that applies to, at least that I know of.”

“The backpack I will be taking though,” said Zona, ignoring that question. “There are a number of entads that are already part of me which have similar functions, and the result from taking in the backpack will fall within a narrow band. You will still be able to acquire whatever you want from”—she hesitated, tripping over a word for the first time—“from Earth. My interior space is much greater than that of the backpack, which should allow you access to a variety of goods that you currently can’t pull from it.”

I nodded. The catch was that we wouldn’t be able to access the backpack without, at the very least, Zona’s consent. Amaryllis was in favor; she’d already spent time pulling out thousands of books (fiction and non-fiction), movies, parts, equipment, medicine, seeds, and everything else she thought she would need. The interior of Sable truly was, as best we could ascertain, limitless. The way Amaryllis saw it, so long as we took all of the low-hanging fruit, the actual cost to us could be mitigated. In return, not only would Zona get something powerful, it would in many ways be a bond between us. Zona would be more comfortable knowing that we had a concrete reason to maintain a good relationship with her.

“You can have the Anyblade too,” I said, trying not to wince as I said it. “I’m not sure quite what the effect would be. Do you have any idea?” My two best guesses were that Zona would become the Anyhouse, or that the house would be able to take on any shape, so long as it could in some way be construed as a blade.

“Entads that morph are somewhat rare,” said Zona. “I haven’t had the pleasure of consuming one. I’m quite interested to know the result myself.”

“And the strain won’t be too much?” I asked. “The unpleasantness of adapting to a new sensation won’t hold you back?”

“Do you mean to dissuade me?” asked Zona. She crossed her arms.

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. “Just curious. You brought it up a lot.”

“I take my time,” said Zona. “The worst cases have always been when I had a handful at once. The severity of the handicap depends on the entad consumed, but a week or a month later, I’ll have adapted. Perhaps more, if the entad had some sentience of its own. I can have the Anyblade then?”

“Yes,” I said. “Provisionally, assuming that Amaryllis agrees.”

“She controls too much,” said Zona with a frown.

“She’s smart and capable,” I said. “And she’s by far the best negotiator among us. We’d be foolish not to use her.” In fact, the primary reason that I was doing the talking was that Amaryllis had hoped that I would improve my relationship with the house and trigger something from the mostly silent game. It also helped that the house liked me better; I wasn’t a Penndraig.

“That’s two of three,” said Zona. “If not the teleportation key, then the glove you call Sable.”

I winced. “No,” I said.

“A flat no?” asked Zona.

“It serves too many functions for us,” I said. “We’re willing to make a deal for the third item, not a lesser replacement for the one you want, but a wide selection of lesser entads. We have a number of them we can’t use, those tied to Uther’s most-direct male descendant. They’re on the list.”

“Most of them worthless to both me and you,” replied Zona.

“True.” I nodded. “But more than just those, we’d have a standing agreement that any entads we come across that we’re gated from in some way will be yours for the taking, if you want them.” The thinking here was that while Zona having the backpack would set up a reason for us to treat her well, her getting a steady flow of entads would give her incentives to treat us well.

The more I’d gotten to know Zona, the more I thought that she wouldn’t be swayed by that. She wanted to be a house, and the only reason that she wasn’t was because she was settling for lesser pursuits, like torturing and killing people who tried to come inside her, or making war with the tuung, or accumulating power.

“I would find that acceptable,” said Zona, “if your manager agrees.” She was smirking, just a bit. It was hard to remember quite what our first encounter had been like, but I thought she was smiling more, and I took that as a good sign.

“There would be some leeway,” I said. “Some entads we aren’t going to be able to use, but might be able to trade away, or hold hostage, or return to their rightful owners. Amaryllis will be more exact about it, so long as you agree in general terms. To start with, there are all the things at the end of the list, the arrow-annihilating armor, reflection portal shield, spin stick, and teleporting sword. Those were all taken from Larkspur Prentiss and his people. In addition to that, we have a number of entads taken from a different encounter, whose function we haven’t been able to figure out. I assume if you consume an entad, you figure out its function, but given that they integrate, I can see why you wouldn’t want to do that.”

“I’ve done it, in the past,” said Zona. “Typically though, I allow people to use their entads within the house, to discover what it is the entads do. Obviously some of them wouldn’t be worth their quirks. The people who come to this place do tend be desperate, and it’s not uncommon for their complement of items to reflect that desperation.”

“Okay,” I said, swallowing. “There’s one more thing, an entad that’s not on the list.”

“Oh?” asked Zona, though I didn’t imagine she could possibly have missed it.

I undid the rope around my waist, then held it out, coiled in my hands. “This is the Eternal Golden Braid,” I said. Ropey uncoiled slightly, and one end of him rose up like a snake being charmed out of a basket. “He’s sentient. We didn’t introduce you earlier because of concerns that you would consume him.”

The free end of Ropey gave an extended flourish that was vaguely reminiscent of a bow.

“Can he talk?” asked Zona.

Ropey moved his free end around, shaping out letters in sequence. He’d done the same for me a few times, when there were things that needed to be communicated, but mostly he stayed silent, and acted only when he needed to act. Watching him, I felt a little guilty for not spending more time trying to talk with him. I’d never once asked how he was doing, or what he thought of things. I’d had half a mind to start doing that during our time in the chamber, but I didn’t want to disingenuously try to change the nature of our relationship.

“Faster, please,” said Zona.

Ropey started contorting faster, making the letters so quickly that I couldn’t hope to follow along. I glanced over at Grak, and saw a slightly concerned look on his face. I tried to keep my expression impassive, but I was feeling it a little bit too. Whatever Ropey was spelling out, it had a lot of letters. One of the things that I really hadn’t been worried about was that Ropey would throw us under the bus, but I had a moment of panic as I realized that was possible, even if it wasn’t likely.

“I see,” said Zona after three minutes had passed, and Ropey had finally come to a stop. She gave a curtsey to the rope. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Ropey extended himself forward with his free end, using the other to wrap around my wrist for support, and Zona held out a hand to him. He threaded through her fingers, pushing them apart and encircling them, in what seemed like a weirdly intimate gesture to me. It didn’t last long though, and Zona dropped her hand when Ropey retracted back into my arms.

“Only five pounds of force, unfortunately,” said Zona. It took me a moment to realize that she was talking to Ropey, not me. “But I have a vast sensorium, of which this illusion is only one part. You may have spent too much time with humans, if you see me primarily as one. I’ll choose to take that as a compliment on my mastery of artifice.”

Ropey sprang into action again, presumably making more letters, though faster than before, which had already been too fast for me to read.

“No,” said Zona, suddenly holding up a hand. “Privately.”

Ropey turned his free end, which he was more or less using as a head, toward me, nodded once, and then dropped out of my hands by going completely limp in the right places. When he touched the ground, he took off, slithering across the flagstones like a snake, about as fast as I could run. When he was around the corner, the illusion of Zona disappeared.

“Did that go well, do you think?” I asked Grak.

“Unclear,” said Grak.

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you follow what Ropey was saying?”

“Only until she told it to go faster,” said Grak. “And then, only because I focused on the magic I could see from him, to the exclusion of all else. He was giving her details of his biography.”

“Huh,” I said. “Do you think they’re … what do you think they’re going to do together?”

“Perhaps they will touch butts,” said Grak.

I looked at him for a moment and then burst out laughing. “I missed you,” I said. “Not sure if I said that.”

“You did not,” replied Grak. “And no letters.”

“Actually, I wrote four last time I was in there,” I said. “Should be waiting for you when it’s your shift again. I would have written more, but I’m a lot more worried about how Fenn is or was handling it, so that’s where my energy was going.”

“I am honored to get a letter,” said Grak with a small bow in my direction. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic.

“Don’t expect much,” I said. “They’re short by my standards, only five pages or so each, and a lot of it is just … I don’t know, not incredibly personal, like it is with Fenn, not because I don’t want to share with you, but I didn’t want to do this one-sided unloading about stuff I didn’t know if you’d be interested in. Plus there’s also a lot of broken Groglir, which I was trying to keep from getting rusty. It’s unbelievable to me that with all of our preparation, and all of the sheer quantity of stuff packed into the glove, there was no Groglir-English dictionary.”

Grakhuil shrugged. “You are the only one who would need it.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” I said. I looked down the hallway. “Hopefully things are going well.”

“The rope is a stalwart companion,” said Grak.

I nodded at that, but didn’t wholly agree. It had been by my side from virtually the moment I got it, serving as extra arms or sometimes legs, helping to bind people, increasing my mobility, and doing basically whatever was in its power to help me … but it wasn’t actually a partner, and though it could follow along when people talked, it rarely engaged in conversation. Our relationship was incredibly one-sided, from a certain point of view.

Ropey came slinking back around the corner at roughly the same time that Zona appeared next to us.

“He’s a very agreeable fellow,” said Zona with a nod.

“I’ve often thought so,” I replied. “Did you … talk?”

“Hrm,” replied Zona.

“I’m not sure how to interpret that,” I said.

“You want to know whether I intend to kill a kindred spirit?” asked Zona.

“Um,” I said. “Yes, I did want to know that, but I wasn’t going to ask so bluntly. I thought … you want power, right?”

“Power is not nearly all I want,” said Zona. She peered at me. “Have you been spending too much time with the little Penndraig, to think that power is the end of all things?”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s fair. And -- sorry, but I knew Arthur, and he didn’t think that power was the ultimate goal, he thought that it was a means to achieve some goal. He lectured me on it more than once. Amaryllis is the same, maybe not the same as whoever Uther became, but if there really were nothing left for her to do, she would sit back and relax, without worrying.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Grak.

I looked over at him. “I … huh. I think it’s awfully convenient for her that her work is never done, and she’s very adept at making new work even when there’s time to relax. But that’s not the same thing as wanting power for its own sake.”

“I find your defense of her interesting,” said Zona. She turned to the time chamber. “They’re coming out. There are only another three cycles to go, which I’m glad of. I grow weary of this changing of the guard.”

I didn’t know whether that was intended as a joke, but if it was, I didn’t find it funny. The thought of going back in there made my skin crawl; it was hard to imagine what might have happened if Amaryllis had taken it upon herself to go the whole time without company. The last I’d heard, which was a month ago from her perspective, she was ready to see a sunrise, drink herself into a stupor, and go somewhere with a good enough view that the world seemed to stretch out wide. If we really did end up needing to raise Solace in the time chamber, I had no idea how the fuck we were going to manage that.

Fenn came out of the chamber like a cat darting out of a door that’s been momentarily left ajar, and ran straight at me. She didn’t slow down, and leaped up into the air, the better to tackle me. I caught her, something that I wouldn’t have been able to do with my body as it was back on Earth, and she wrapped her legs around me as she started kissing me.

“Missed me?” I asked, when she gave me a chance to breathe.

“A bit,” said Fenn, smiling wide. “I almost didn’t make it, but I kept thinking, hey, Juniper is waiting for me at the end of it all. Not as bad as solitary confinement, but they don’t keep you in solitary for two fucking months. And now I’m done!”

I let go of her legs, and she unhooked herself from me to step down onto the floor.

“Congratulations,” said Amaryllis from by the door. She was much more pregnant now, well into the third trimester. I idly wondered whether the immobility plate would magically fit her new shape, then more seriously considered it, because that was how we were going to get down into the bottle. “Juniper, how did negotiations go?”

“Good enough,” I said. “Anyblade, backpack, cast-offs, that’s about as good as is reasonable, if we’re not being absolute misers.”

“Good,” replied Amaryllis with a sigh.

“And I did end up showing her Ropey,” I said.

“I figured as much,” said Amaryllis. She glanced down at Zona’s feet, where the rope was coiled. “Can we make the exchange now?”

“Now?” asked Zona, furrowing her eyebrows. “Why?”

“It might help us,” I replied. “If the Anyblade allows you radical shape changes, we could take you with, should we need to leave.”

Zona stared at me. “Take me with … where?” she asked.

“Anywhere,” I said. “We have a companion back in Headwater that we need to retrieve, at a minimum. If something goes desperately wrong, then we’ll probably go back to one of the safehouses we have set up in Cranberry Bay, so that Amaryllis and Solace can get emergency medical attention.”

(I was really hoping that it didn’t come to that, but the athenaeum produced some of the best healers Aerb had to offer, and the hospital there was first rate -- by Aerbian standards, anyway, which were better than Earth's in some ways, but worse in others. For the most part, healing someone with a fully healthy soul was easy street, but if the problem couldn’t be fixed by resetting the body to the soul’s image of the body, or through enhancing the body’s natural processes of homeostasis, you had problems. Purely physical injuries were generally easy to heal, unless you let them go long enough that the injury became a part of the soul. Diseases, poisons, cancers, disorders, and things like that all had various ways of being dealt with, but they weren’t surefire, and there was a lot of variance when you got into the specifics. Maternal mortality, according to Amaryllis, was slightly worse than in the United States, though the distributions were different.)

“You have other houses?” asked Zona. She frowned slightly.

“Places to lay low,” I said. “They’re not secure, and we assume that we’ll have to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, given that we have a few enemies.”

“Very well,” said Zona. “I’ll escort you, to show you where to put the entads.”

“I should be getting back in anyway,” said Amaryllis. She ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m prepared to give over the backpack now, incidentally. All of the things that we should need for the labor and birth were carefully placed into storage months ago. Juniper, I have a list of things that I’d like, if it turns out that Zona is capable of exceeding the spatial limits of the backpack. In my ideal world, you would spend the next few hours setting up an operating room, with all the equipment that’s larger than the backpack can handle. I’ll be coming out at thirty-six weeks, and might take a longer break then, if you need more time to set up. We might also think about grabbing Valencia, as she might be some help in the operating room.”

“If it gets to the point where we need her, then we’re probably going to a proper hospital,” I said. “If you have something like preeclampsia, I don’t want to be jury-rigging solutions, not when we could just get professional help.”

“The procedure for preeclampsia will be for you to bridge our circulatory systems to reduce hypertension, bleeding yourself if necessary, then administering magnesium sulfate,” said Amaryllis. “That should prevent progression to eclampsia, and allow us some time to either induce labor, if it’s not already underway, or for the birth to progress naturally.”

I stared at her. “You’re really that dead set on not going to the hospital?” I asked.

“I’m not dead set on it, no,” said Amaryllis. “But if we go to a hospital, there are going to be questions, not to mention written documents, and my ability to leave, or even just to be watched by people I trust, will be compromised. This is, to put it lightly, an unconventional pregnancy, and I am, to put it lightly, a wanted criminal. In my view, it’s worth taking some minor risks to avoid giving birth on public record.”

I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “I’m just worried.”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “I think that some level of anxiety is the appropriate reaction to have to this situation.” She turned slightly, so she was pointing in the direction of the time chamber. “I think I’m in good hands with Grak, and when the time comes, we’ll be as prepared as we can possibly be. If it comes to the worst, there’s a plan in place for getting from the safehouse to the hospital, one that I wrote out before we even got on the train. I don’t want to do that unless it looks like there’s a risk of death.”

“Which we might not know about until it’s too late,” said Fenn. She had her arms crossed and was looking at Amaryllis with something like a glare. “You’re the one that’s always going on about worst-case scenarios.”

“We already talked this to death,” Amaryllis said to Fenn. “You agreed with me.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t have Juniper for backup,” said Fenn. “Now we’ve got you outnumbered, which means that you’ll pretty much have to see reason.”

“I don’t want to re-litigate this,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. “If there are serious problems, or the birth is too early, then yes, we’ll go to the hospital, but there are a wide variety of more minor problems that we have all the tools, knowledge, and training to deal with. I’ve been preparing for this for months. I don’t want to expose us too much, and I don’t want to spend time that we probably don’t have. The life that’s most at stake here is my own.”

“And Solace,” I said.

Amaryllis glared at me. “If you think that I’m not trying to do right by her --”

“I do,” I said, a little too quick. “It’s fine, I’ll trust your judgment.”

“Grak, come on, let’s go,” said Amaryllis. She walked back into the time chamber, doing a little bit of a waddle.

“I will be watching her,” Grak said to us as he followed after her. “I will talk to her. We will see you in a month.”

The doors to the time chamber closed, and I let out a breath.

“Not the easiest person, is she?” asked Fenn. “She’s gotten worse. She got worse, in the month I was in there with her.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of get where she’s coming from, because she was the one to take on the burden of pregnancy, and she’s spent seven months in the chamber so far, but … still. I don’t know if she’s right or not, but it really felt like one of those situations where we both just got entrenched and weren’t listening to each other. That’s not usually a problem for us.”

“Come,” said Zona. “Follow me with the entads, and I’ll show you where they go. If I’m to use their powers to help you, then I’ll need as much time as possible to acclimate.”

Chapter 26 - Immanentizing the Eschaton

I put the backpack in first, bidding it a fond farewell. I was less sure about giving it up than I was about giving up the Anyblade, but we’d had seven months to pull out everything we could want from it. Amaryllis had argued about it, but we hadn’t had a proper fight. The thing that clinched it was that we might be able to get larger things from Earth; there had been quite a few times when I’d thought to myself, “oh, I’ll just grab that from the backpack”, only to realize that the thing I’d wanted couldn’t possibly be pulled from the backpack, given its size. We were fortunate that most of the furniture we needed had been stolen from one place or another by Fenn (or in the case of things taken from Weik Handum or Caer Laga, rescued rather than stolen).

The closet wasn’t terribly big, and it was about as unassuming as it had been described. The only thing that marked it as special was the fact that it wasn’t very close to any other doors or rooms, which gave it a place of prominence in the hallway. I estimated the closet at about five feet to a side, which was a standard D&D unit of measure, and which I very much doubted was coincidence.

When I closed the door on the backpack, I glanced at Zona.

“Now what?” I asked.

“That’s it,” said Zona. “It’s already done.” A frown came across her face. “It’s … confusing.”

“Confusing how?” asked Fenn. She stood beside me, close by, like she thought that I was going to vanish at any moment. I understood how she felt; we’d been apart for too long.

“When you described it ...” Zona trailed off. She held out her hand, and a note appeared in it. It was of a type very familiar to me, written on a piece of yellow legal paper, with handwriting that was identical to my own. “It says, ‘no magic items, sorry,’ and then a colon, followed by a left parenthesis.” She squinted at the note. “A frowning face?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The entad has some underlying logic to what it will or won’t give us.”

“No,” said Zona. “If it had that underlying logic, it would be exposed to me. I would know and understand it, even if it took some time to integrate. This is … like speaking to someone.”

“Huh,” I said. “I’d guess the person you’re speaking to is the Dungeon Master, for what it’s worth. Can you ask questions?”

“No,” said Zona. “I can only make requests for things from Earth.”

“Wait, does that mean there are magic items on Earth?” asked Fenn.

“No,” I said. “I’ve asked it for impossible things a few times, it just says no with the frowny face.”

“But that function is somehow divorced from the entad itself,” said Zona. “It’s not a part of me, it’s a tendril leading somewhere else.” She shivered slightly. “The sensation is unlike anything I have ever experienced.”

“Are you going to be ready for the sword?” I asked. “Or do you want to hold off a bit?”

“I’ll have to learn more of Earth,” said Zona, seeming to ignore me. Her focus returned to me. “Name something from Earth that would exceed the boundaries of the backpack.”

“Surfboard,” said Fenn, before I had a chance.

Zona held out a hand, and a surfboard appeared leaning against it.

“That’s promising,” I said.

“I’ll need your help to prepare the room,” said Zona with a frown, as she let the surfboard clatter to the ground. “I had hoped that I would have an understanding of what Earth had to offer, but it appears that’s not the case.”

“So, Anyblade too, or not?” I asked.

“Wait,” said Fenn. She held out her hand, and a plastic box appeared in it. When I peered over, I saw that inside was sushi, covered in seaweed, sauces, and what I thought were probably fish eggs. “Ha!” she said. “This is great.”

“No more,” said Zona, with an edge of warning in her voice. “I can feel the strand of raw will when you do that. I’ll need some time with the power in order to understand it and stop it from being used. It provides a channel to the -- the other end.”

“Besides,” I said, “it’s trash that we don’t have a good way to get rid of, not until we’ve got the glove on hand to put things into storage.”

“I was planning on eating the sushi,” said Fenn. She popped the container open and began picking out pieces with her fingers, plopping them into her mouth. “I fucking love sushi,” she said with her mouth half full.

“Okay,” said Zona. “Now the Anyblade.”

The Anyblade was on my finger, as a ring, and I reshaped it into a sword, which I set just inside the closet. I did give it one last fond look before shutting the door; I was really going to have to find a new weapon, though I did have a backup sword until I could find a magical one with extra powers.

I was watching Zona carefully after I closed the door, so I caught it right away.

“She’s stopped moving,” I said.

“She wasn’t moving,” said Fenn, who was still eating her sushi.

“Incidental movements are part of the illusion,” I said. “She’s not breathing, she’s not swaying, she’s just totally static.”

Fenn peered at the image of Zona. “Huh,” she said.

“That’s probably a bad thing,” I said.

“Well, she wasn’t borked for long last time,” said Fenn.

“I think last time she was devoting her full attention to research or thinking or something,” I replied. “This time … I’m less sure. I hope she’s, uh, okay.”

“No, I am,” said Zona. She’d begun moving again as she said the word. “I was just adjusting.”

“I hope that it wasn’t too uncomfortable,” I said. I rubbed my head. “You said the sensorium is one of the harder parts of getting a new entad, and whatever the impact is, you probably have new directions to stretch in.”

Zona stared at me for a moment. “I did say that,” she finally said.

“So ... what’s up?” asked Fenn. “Are you the Anyhouse, or what?”

“Fenn,” I said. “Give her some time.”

“It’s a fair question,” said Zona. She was still staring at me. “Why were you worried about me?”

“Should I not be?” I asked. “I mean, you said that it was sometimes difficult or uncomfortable, and from what you said, it seems to have been a major source of trauma in the past. I know you’re doing it voluntarily, but sometimes we voluntarily do things that still hurt us.” I paused. “So I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”

Loyalty Increased: Zona lvl 1!

Quest Completed: A Room of One’s Own - She is willing to take a chance on you, so long as you do your best not to remind her of him.

“I am,” said Zona. “Thank you.” The walls shuddered around us, shaking free dust. The hallway undulated, shrinking around us and then expanding again. “One moment.”

I stared at the loyalty and quest messages, then blinked them away. There was a part of me that was disappointed to see it, not because it meant Zona was a companion, but because it meant that I was still on the rails in some way, operating within the confines of the game. Amaryllis probably would have told me that I was being stupid, and that I should take advantages when I could get them, but it wasn’t that I preferred not to have the advantage, it was just that it felt like it sullied the relationship. It was like hanging out with someone, and being their friend, and then at the end of the evening, they gave you twenty dollars for having a good time with them.

The house moved around us, creaking and groaning. The hallway shortened, and the closet door disappeared. Fenn held onto me, still with her package of sushi in one hand, and the surfboard banged up against my leg as we began moving. We saw doors sliding past us and closing in on themselves, and rooms collapsing in on themselves.

We came to a stop in front of the time chamber, with a door to our left, a door to our right, and the doors to the chamber itself.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Fenn.

“Housekeeping,” replied Zona, who came back into existence next to us. “I’m fairly certain that I can alter the chamber itself as well, but I don’t want to try with people inside it, and not while the need for it is still urgent.” She pointed to the door on the left. “That will be the operating room for you.” She pointed to the other door. “And that’s storage. I removed everything else.”

“You’re saying that this house is now three rooms?” I asked.

“Four,” said Zona, “if you include the time chamber. It’s already making things much more manageable. There’s less pressing on my mind.”

“What about the bodies?” asked Fenn.

Zona waved a hand, and the wall behind us split apart. I turned, swinging my flashlight, and saw that we were inside a large cave, that extended up above us. Beside us was a pile of decayed corpses, sitting next to a giant mound of furniture, broken pieces of the house, and general garbage.

“All the cleaning is done,” said Zona with a sigh of satisfaction. “Centuries of refuse, gone in an instant.” She laughed, and the laugh seemed to come from all three rooms. “This is what a new start feels like.” She looked down at herself, then up at me. “And yes, I do think it’s finally time for me to say goodbye to this form, and to this name, if I’m to be your house.”

She shimmered, and Tiff was gone, replaced by a slender woman who was quite a bit taller than I was. She was momentarily naked, though sexlessly so, until clothes began flowing out from her skin, covering and wrapping her in shimmering, gossamer robes of a hundred layers. Her skin changed color, flickering through different hues, until she settled on a dark brown that gradually grew lighter as she looked at her hands and adjusted it, ending up about the same color as a piece of cedar. Her hair grew and twirled around her, at first a glowing white before finally settling into a dark brown, which twisted and braided itself, becoming almost reminiscent of a rope that then coiled its length around to sit on the top of her head.

“Pretty,” said Fenn. “If you don’t mind me saying so, it suits you better than being a teenage girl from Kansas.”

“It’s unfamiliar,” said Zona, looking herself over (for our benefit, I guessed, since her eyes were only an illusion). “It won’t be as perfect as the girl was, but in time I’ll return to that level of fidelity. With less of me to manage, the acclimation should be easier. I have more room to think now.”

“And you need a new name,” I said, staring at her. To be honest, I was a little bit afraid, in much the same way that I’d been afraid of the changes Valencia had undergone. I felt like I understood the house, at least a little bit, but I wasn’t sure that I would go so far as to say that I trusted it.

“Names are important, powerful things,” said not-Zona. “I will have to think on it.”

“What do you want us to call you in the meantime, if not Zona?” asked Fenn.

“Bethel,” replied not-Zona.

Companion Name Changed: “Zona” to “Bethel”!

I stared at the game message, not knowing what to make of it, or why it would be important, if it was. The names were just shorthands anyway, not actually mechanically relevant so far as I had seen.

“Like Bethlehem?” asked Fenn.

“Bethlehem?” asked Zona, eyes narrowing. “I’m not familiar.”

“It’s the place where Jesus was born,” replied Fenn.

“And who is Jesus?” asked Zona.

“Oh, don’t worry,” replied Fenn. “We’ll bring you into the Bible study group.”

“What’s a Bible?” asked Zona.

“Enough of this,” I said. “Bethel it is. Beth?”

“Bethel,” said Bethel, firmly.

“Nice to meet you, Beth,” said Fenn with a smile. Blades began to rise from the flagstones, encircling Fenn and pointing in toward her. “Or Bethel,” said Fenn. “I guess either is fine by me.” The blades vanished, and Fenn kept on smiling.

“So what’s the rule?” I asked. “You can reshape yourself, so long as you technically remain a house? Or is there a blade somewhere too?”

“The former,” replied Bethel. “The edges of the power are hard to detect; it’s versatile and permissive. Once the pregnancy is over, I think I’ll try my hand at becoming a fairy house, which should make me small enough to be carried.” She glanced at the time chamber. “Though perhaps that better wait, in case it interferes with the function of the time chamber. I’m not sure how much of the structure I’ll need to keep in order to ensure that the stored time is maintained.” She seemed vaguely annoyed. Her new face was a little more expressive than when she’d been wearing Tiff’s skin, perhaps because she didn’t have as fine a handle on conveying subtle emotional nuance yet.

“We’ll save the more extreme experimentation for later,” I said. I thought that radical changes to the makeup of the house should probably have waited until later too, but I didn’t say that.

“They’re almost finished, the chamber is spinning down,” said Bethel. (I was trying to imprint her new name on my mind, so that I wouldn’t annoy her by slipping up.)

“Quick question,” said Fenn, hooking a thumb toward the closed door. “What’s in storage?”

“Everything worth saving,” replied Bethel. “Entads that I had no interest in adding to myself, valuables taken from the bodies of adventurers, and a few centuries worth of spirits made through the Everflask.”

“There’s loot?” asked Fenn, brightening considerably. “Because I have a huge debt to pay down, and if there’s loot, I can get a start on that.”

“I wasn’t offering to share,” said Bethel with a faint smirk. “But if you find something that you think you could use, I might allow you to borrow it. Narcissus died with a considerable quantity of entads on his person, and most of those I was able to hide away after I had cleaned up his body.”

“Cursed treasures?” asked Fenn. “Count me in!”

The door to the time chamber opened up, and Grak stepped out, stretching slightly and then freezing as he realized that the room was different, and that Zona had changed shape.

“I take it things went well,” said Amaryllis from behind him. I’d thought she’d more or less reached maximum size last time, but her belly was more swollen than it had been before, now veering into grotesque territory. It was hidden beneath a large dress, but even with that, still visible. She walked like she was trying not to let it show too much.

“Human pregnancy is insane,” said Fenn, eyes wide.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. She looked at Bethel. “Change of form, I’m assuming?”

Bethel nodded. “I’ll be going by a new name as well. Bethel.”

Amaryllis nodded. “A name from legends. I definitely prefer it.”

“I don’t care what you prefer,” said Bethel (Bethel, Bethel, new name, Bethel).

“I’m not familiar with the legend,” I said. “Is it … important?”

“Not particularly, no,” said Bethel. “As the legend goes, she sheltered the first of the humans from the eldritch storms that once crossed Aerb. She was the first home for humans, and the first god, before the five we know. The story is almost certainly apocryphal.”

Almost. I’d done my fair share of reading on Aerb during my months in the chamber, and one of the things that had surprised me was how much people hedged their bets when talking about ancient history. The dwarves probably hadn’t been cursed with childbirth after millennia of carving their sons from stone, but no one seemed willing to just definitively say that it was hogwash. There was enough crazy random shit in Aerb’s history that you couldn’t always say for sure that something was totally false.

“Can you change the shape of the chamber?” asked Amaryllis.

“The chamber was installed in me in 132 FE,” said Bethel. “It has little interaction with the essence of my being, though obviously they hoped otherwise when they paid the sand mage. The question isn’t whether or not I can change the shape of the chamber, it’s how it will interact with the sand magic used to power it, and the time stored within it. I am many things, but I am not a sand mage.”

“Fuck,” said Amaryllis. “I was hoping that we could all go in together for the last month.” She looked back at the chamber and sighed. “If this rearrangement is the result of the Anyblade’s powers, what was the outcome of adding the backpack?”

“Check this out.” Fenn held out a hand to the side and struck a pose. “By the power of Grayskull! I have the power!” A sword appeared in her hand and she smiled at me, a smile that slowly slipped from her face.

“Er, what’s that from?” I asked. “It sounds familiar.”

“He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, you fucking ingrate,” said Fenn with a scowl. “Are you seriously telling me that you never watched He-Man?”

“It was a couple decades before my time,” I said.

“Oh fuck off,” said Fenn. She dropped the sword to the ground, and when it failed to clang, I realized that it was just a prop. “Let the power return,” Fenn muttered.

“Does He-Man summon a sword?” I asked. “I thought he was like … a Captain Marvel type thing.”

“Who the hell is Captain Marvel?” asked Fenn, frowning at me.

“He’s a superhero,” I said. “He’s a little kid who says ‘Shazam!’ and turns into a Superman-type guy.”

“I have no doubt that this is fascinating for the two of you,” said Bethel. “However, the conversation is meaningless to me, except insofar as I can infer that you’re talking about Earth culture. Fenn, don’t use the backpack so frivolously again, I’m still getting used to it.”

“Fine, fine,” said Fenn. She turned to Amaryllis. “Point is, it works.”

“Good,” said Amaryllis. “We should start preparing the delivery room. I won’t go back in the chamber until it’s done, assuming that we can get everything set up in a reasonable time frame. Grak and I have worked on our plans somewhat, and assuming that everything looks good, we’ll pull you and Fenn in once I’m in the latent phase of labor, before the contractions start. That should give us all hands on deck for the crucial part, with minimal time wasted.”

“I won’t be able to participate,” said Bethel.

Amaryllis paused. “Would you want to?”

“I could be useful,” said Bethel. “I can see inside all of you. I effectively wield a scalpel sharper than any held by a surgeon, which I can use from the inside. I’ve only borne witness to nine births, all before I was the person I am today, but I might have some applicable knowledge.”

Amaryllis nodded. “I would accept that help,” she said. “We’d be trading, at most, a day of our time away during active labor, but it would also lower the time it would take to get me to the hospital in a real emergency.”

“Amaryllis anticipates fake emergencies,” said Grak.

“I anticipate that someone will say that we need to get to a hospital, and in the moment, it will seem like a good idea to everyone but me,” said Amaryllis.

“This is why we have the Council of Arches,” said Fenn. “Do you agree to abide by the Council’s recommendations?”

Amaryllis pursed her lips. “This is somewhat different from soul modification,” she said. “I will agree to the Council’s recommendations, so long as it’s a plurality of three, rather than a tie with veto, and so long as the Council looks at my delivery plan and scenario cascade first and says yes or no without the pressure of needing to decide in the moment. But that will take, at minimum, a full day, at least by my estimates.”

“And people call me difficult,” snorted Fenn.

“You are difficult,” said Amaryllis.

“Extremely so,” added Grak.

Fenn looked at me.

“I love you so much,” I said. She hit me, and I pretended that it hurt.

“Are we going to set aside a day to review my plans?” asked Amaryllis. “Grak is already in agreement, and he’s the only one that’s read it, which means that either Juniper or Fenn would have to make a case that could sway him.” She had her arms folded across her chest. “I’m not saying that under no circumstances should we go to the hospital, only that women have been giving birth in their own homes quite successfully for literally millennia --”

“With high maternal and infant mortality rate,” I said.

“-- and those women have had far less preparation, expertise, medical equipment, and magical healing.” She was speaking a bit faster than normal, but otherwise doing a good job of sounding calm and level. “I’m going to go lie down, decide whether or not you’re going to spend a day going through the manual. I don’t think it would be a bad idea for all of us to familiarize ourselves with it, but I certainly don’t think it will be necessary.”

She waddled back off into the time chamber, and sat down in the bottom bunk, using the supports for leverage.

“Well, I don’t want to,” said Fenn. “Sounds boring as all fuck, and I’m just going to end up trying to keep up as the two of you have endless discussions of risk factors and blah blah blah. Sorry, that’s just how I envision it going.”

“Me too, to be honest,” I said. “Grak, are the plans sufficiently cautious, in your opinion?”

“They are,” said Grak. “I am in partial agreement with Amaryllis though. It is hard to judge how we will feel at the time.”

“Sure,” I said. “But if something comes up that’s outside context, we’re agreed that professional medical help is paramount, right?”

“Correct.” Grak nodded.

“Well, okay then,” I said. “And you’re fine with taking point? You’re going to be in charge of directing me, if you need me for something to do with magic. I’ve practiced the circulatory bridge technique, and I think I’m pretty good at getting into the soul, but I’m really hoping that we don’t have to do something drastic like that. Worst-case scenario, I can attempt to swap out my skills in accordance with one of Mary’s master plans, with Medicine in there somewhere, then sacrifice skills to boost it.”

“Yes.” Grak nodded. “That’s listed in her plan.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize.” Amaryllis and I had briefly talked about the possibility, but apparently she had formalized it.

“Only if I’m literally dying!” called Amaryllis from the bed.

“Well … fine,” I said. “If she’s thought things through, and you at least mostly agree, I guess we don’t have to do the overview, so long as you’re comfortable directing us, if we’re needed.”

Grak nodded, and Amaryllis, from the bed, sighed in relief. I walked over to her and sat down beside her, as Grak and Fenn began talking amongst themselves.

“Getting real tired of people second-guessing me,” said Amaryllis.

“Yeah, I sort of got that,” I said. “You still agree that the Council of Arches gets input on changes to your soul?”

“That?” asked Amaryllis. She waved a hand. “I don’t intend to make any more.” She hesitated. “Maybe, if my soul is under the mistaken impression that I’m a real mother. And … only if she doesn’t love me back.”

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. I sat next to her in silence for a bit.

“I’m competent, you know that?” asked Amaryllis. “I know it’s not what happened, but it feels like since getting pregnant the three of you have constantly been assuming that I’m actually a moron.”

“It’s a difference in how we judge risks, that’s all,” I said. “At least, that’s all it's been on my end. You built a fucking VCR from scratch, I’m not doubting your competence.”

“It wasn’t from scratch, it was from parts, and you know for a fact that I don’t have recording working yet.” She sighed. “But thank you.” Her hand went to her belly to rub it. “She’s not kicking.”

“Still?” I asked.

“If this is a stillbirth, I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” said Amaryllis.

“No movement at all?” I asked.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t know if she’s going to come out crantek, human, or hybrid, and maybe the crantek just don’t move around as much as humans, but … you know. It’s nerve-wracking.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Are you going to be okay?”

“So long as we’re in the top ninety-five percent of scenarios, then yes, I think so,” replied Amaryllis. “I’m just ready for all of this to be over.”

“I think we all are,” I said. I patted her on the leg, then it felt awkward, and I stopped.

“I’m okay with you touching me,” said Amaryllis.

“Yeah, okay, I just, um,” I said, stumbling through my words.

“A backrub would be nice,” said Amaryllis. “If you wanted to make me feel better.”

So I gave her a backrub, following her directions. From outside the open doors of the chamber, I saw Fenn look at me with a raised eyebrow, which I answered with a small shrug. It was, to my knowledge, the first real break that Amaryllis had taken while the clock was running. It was also an extremely rare example of her requesting physical contact. I kept wanting to ask whether she was keeping up with the modifications to her soul, and how that was going, but I didn’t want to sound accusatory, or like I was second-guessing her, especially since that was exactly what I was doing.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis after a while. “Let’s get the delivery room ready, I have a wish list.”

“You’re good?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m good,” she sighed. “You’re going to have to help me up though.”

“Oh, you should know that we’re scenario one,” I said.

Amaryllis froze. “Before or after we handed things over?” she asked.

“After,” I said. “It took a hell of a leap of faith.”

Amaryllis relaxed and let out a breath. “Good,” she said. “Then things are looking up.”

For someone who still carried a candle for our narrative, Amaryllis hadn’t chosen her words very carefully.

◆◆◆

It took us about two hours to get the delivery room ready for Amaryllis. Most of the equipment that could be pulled from the backpack already had been, which included linens, plastic gloves, bags of saline, an enormous variety of medicines labeled in Amaryllis’ careful hand, a small fridge stocked with snacks and more medicines that needed to be kept cool, and basically everything else that Amaryllis could think of. The biggest thing that Amaryllis wanted was a comfortable bed that reclined, which we were able to pull from Earth with a little bit of work as we tried out various different ones and put the rejects into the glove.

“I think this is good,” said Amaryllis, looking around the room at everything. She turned to Grak. “Ready?”

Grak nodded.

“When I see you next, I’ll be in labor,” Amaryllis said to Fenn and I. “Be prepared.”

“We will be,” I said. “We are.”

“Prepared for what?” asked Fenn, frowning. “I thought we were just hanging out here.”

“You ass,” replied Amaryllis with a smile.

I swallowed back a word of caution, which I didn’t think would be taken the right way, and watched Amaryllis wave goodbye as they closed the doors to the time chamber.

“Anxiety really is the appropriate reaction,” I said as I let out a breath. “We’ve got forty-five minutes, at the most, and then … blegh, I’m not looking forward to this.”

“It seems like it was only four days ago that our little princess got pregnant,” said Fenn with a wistful sigh.

“It’s insane to think that the world stood still while we were doing this,” I said. “Or at least, mostly so. I’m a bit worried about coming back to Valencia. It’s going to take time to reacclimate and remember where we left things off.”

“Your much-vaunted fifth member?” asked Bethel.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you’re going to see her at some point, and with a warder’s sight you’d find out then, but … she’s non-anima.”

Bethel raised an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me that you consort with devils?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. You know what, I’m going to have to work on my pitch a little bit, because I wasn’t explaining it right. She was a non-anima, and got transformed into sort of the opposite of that. Not an empty vessel for devils and demons, but, um, more a killer of them.”

“Like Uther?” asked Bethel.

“Not really, no,” I said. “It’s hard to explain. She eats them from a distance, in sort of the opposite way that they possessed her from a distance.” I hesitated. “I’m assuming that a non-anima won’t be a problem for you?”

“Why should it?” asked Bethel.

“Just curious,” I said. “It’s one of the things that I’ve been worried about, when we bring other people in.”

Bethel opened her mouth, then turned to the time chamber. “They’re coming out,” she said with a frown.

“That was fast,” I replied. A wave of anxiety washed over me. “Way, way too fast.”

It took some time for the chamber to spin back down, and we spent it waiting anxiously. As near as I could tell, they’d chosen to duck out of the chamber almost immediately after they’d gone in, which didn’t bode well at all. Fenn tried to crack jokes, but they fell on deaf ears; I was worried.

When the doors finally opened back up, Amaryllis was standing there, leaning on Grak and holding her belly.

“Water broke, four weeks early,” she said. “I’m not in labor. We’re going to the hospital.”

Chapter 27 - PPROM

I’ll admit to a bit of panic.

“How serious is this?” I asked.

“Serious enough for the hospital,” said Amaryllis. Her voice was steely calm. “Labor needs to be induced, because it’s been twenty-four hours without it happening on its own, and the baby is going to be preterm, which means she’s likely going to need special care. On Earth, it would be about one in fifty chance of infant mortality, but I think higher on Aerb. In my estimation, this is beyond our capabilities. We’ll be going to the Penndraig Memorial Hospital in Cranberry Bay to get me checked in as quickly as possible.”

“Fuck,” said Fenn. Her eyes were wide.

“I planned for this,” said Amaryllis. “I’m not in any pain. But the amniotic sac is ruptured, none of the methods I’ve tried for inducing labor worked, and we need to go, now.”

“I’m coming with,” said Bethel. As she spoke, the walls began folding away, showing the cavern she’d carved out around us.

“The time chamber,” Amaryllis said. “We may need it to age Solace up.”

“I wasn’t negotiating,” said Bethel. “I suppose we’re going to see what happens when I collapse it down.” Before there could be any further discussion or argument, the back of the time chamber peeled away and the walls began coming down. All around us, the house, which had been reduced to a mere four rooms, was folding in on itself, vanishing until all that was left was a thick wooden staff that Bethel held in one hand. It was long and gnarled, and sitting at the top were tiny windows, with a little door, barely visible.

“No,” groaned Amaryllis. She shook her head. “Please tell me that our years are still there.”

“They are, so far as I can see,” said Bethel. “I should be able to reconstruct it, with the sand magic intact.”

“If not, we can undertake a quest,” I said. I wasn’t sure the lack of quest pop-up was good or bad.

“Our last quest took us nine fucking months,” said Amaryllis.

“Eight, technically,” muttered Fenn.

“We need to get moving,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll deal with the fallout later.” She pulled the teleportation key from a pocket in her dress, and held it out. “Everyone together, I’m very serious that we need to be going.”

I came in close and held onto her hand, then reached out with the other to gingerly touch the dollhouse staff, which was all that was left of the place we’d called Kuum Doona. Around us was the cavern that had held the house during our time in it, the pile of refuse she’d cleared out, a collection of cursed magic items that we were obviously going to go back for later, and everything that had been left in the time chamber when Bethel had removed it. The delivery room we’d spent all that time on was now just a collection of equipment.

I felt a flash of blinding pain at the transition, and as I slowly recovered, I was startled to realize how dark it was. I should have realized though; we’d hijacked the Down and Out just after nightfall, and it was still night, or maybe, technically, early morning.

We had a car in the safehouse garage, which we’d paid for in cash and off the books. None of us had a license that was valid in Cranberry Bay, so that was something of a necessity. I drove, while Amaryllis sat beside me holding her stomach, with Grak and Fenn in the back. Bethel had dropped the illusion entirely, and was present only as a staff, listening in and speaking through her powers from time to time. As I drove, I was painfully aware of the lax safety standards that were endemic to Aerb, even in a relatively modern, civilized place like Cranberry Bay. There were no airbags, no crumple zones, and the glass would cut us to ribbons given the first opportunity. I almost mentioned something about Ralph Nader to the others, but kept my mouth shut and my attention on the road instead. The roads were also more narrow than I was used to, and the car only passingly familiar, and all that aside, it had been a few months since I’d driven a car. I burned SPD as I drove, trying to heighten my reflexes, even though there was practically no one on the road.

In the movies, women were always sweating and yelling on the trip to the hospital, screaming and groaning. I found it unsettling that Amaryllis was staring calmly ahead, not showing any particular reaction to the fact that her water broke. Then again, she also wasn’t in labor, so maybe it didn’t feel like anything much, which was unsettling in its own right.

Penndraig Memorial Hospital was far wider than it was tall, a curved ribbon of a building that stretched for three city blocks, with roads cutting tunnels through the building at ground level. We followed the directions that Amaryllis had written out days (months) earlier, and arrived at the emergency entrance not too much longer after we’d left the safehouse. Fenn took the car to find parking, and Grak rode with her, carrying the staff and Ropey; we wanted to present as being as normal as possible, and having the four of us together wouldn’t have been good for that. I wished that I’d had a chance to remove my armor, or maybe not even worn it at all, but I was also worried that I would need it before all was said and done. Amaryllis slipped a ring on my finger, as well as one on her own, just before we went in. Again, the hope was that we’d seem normal.

The night nurse gave my armor a sideways glance but focused her attention on Amaryllis.

“Preterm premature rupture of membranes,” said Amaryllis. “The initial rupture happened twenty-four hours ago, and I’m at thirty-six weeks.”

The night nurse nodded. “No contractions?”

“No,” said Amaryllis. “Minimal effacement, no dilation, as observed via speculum.” I tried to keep my face blank at that. I wondered whether she had done the inspection herself, or whether she’d gotten Grak to do it. I did my best not to picture either.

“Okay,” said the nurse. “I’ll get your intake ready, we’ll move you to the maternity ward shortly. Do you have a doctor here?”

“No,” said Amaryllis. “We’re from out of town. We didn’t expect the baby to be so early.” She touched her belly and leaned on me for support, which I thought was mostly to sell it.

We were given a clipboard and a form to fill out, while we waited in the lobby, which had a few people and dozens of empty seats. Amaryllis began filling the form out, then swayed slightly in her seat and closed her eyes.

“Here,” I said, taking it from her. “I can do this.”

“Did you memorize the details of my fake identity?” asked Amaryllis, with her eyes still closed.

“No,” I replied. “Not all of them.”

She took the clipboard back and began filling it out in a hurry, ticking off boxes without seeming to look all that closely at what she was doing. When she finished, she leaned back in the chair and pressed her head against the wall. “This is probably in the bottom five percent, by the way,” she said. Critical failure, in other words. “Normally labor starts after the water breaks, and preterm labor alone we might have been able to handle, but without labor that’s too many complications at once. Grak isn’t a doctor, and neither am I.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m glad we didn’t have to drag you here kicking and screaming.”

“Joon, you might be called on to do the full-body swap for her,” said Amaryllis. “And it’s possible you’ll have to do that for me too. Be prepared, and don’t let anyone push you out of the room when we’re getting close. It’s not traditional for fathers to be in there, but you have resources that the hospital won’t. Knowledge, too. And the baby is going to come out with green skin, which is going to raise some questions I might be too exhausted to answer. It might be better to be forthright about that from the start.”

I swallowed. “Why a full-body swap for you?” I asked.

“When you get a chance, look at my soul,” said Amaryllis. “My body’s been going through some changes, you might have noticed, and the soul has only been halfway keeping up. You have the backup for my body, you might have to use it.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d have to sacrifice a skill in order to get Essentialism up, but I was well-prepared to do that. I reached for her hand. “Everything is going to be alright.”

“Sure,” said Amaryllis, but she was probably thinking that I had no way of knowing that. That was certainly what I was thinking. She reached over and slipped her hand into mine, squeezing it tight. “I might need you to protect me, and keep me safe.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

◆◆◆

Healing was complicated. Magical healing was a mainstay of fantasy, and of tabletop games in particular, but there were always questions you could raise. If you cast ‘cure light wounds’ on yourself every morning, did you look younger after thirty years than someone who hadn’t done that? Did magical healing fix scars? Did it fix congenital abnormalities? How did it decide what was a defect that needed fixing and what was just a peculiarity? Would magical healing fix a bone that had been set incorrectly and healed suboptimally? If building muscle was mostly a matter of repairing micro-tears in muscles, did magical healing make that go a lot faster, or prevent it entirely? Not that I would have ever been enough of a weirdo to include it in a game, but would magical healing repair a ruptured hymen?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’d played with healing a lot in my time as a DM. There was a villain who ‘healed’ peoples’ mouths closed, the magical healing in Long Stairs would move you closer to an elfin appearance and eventual psychosis, and in Scattered Asches, healing took your memories of the injury too.

On Aerb, there were some pitfalls to magical healing, many of which I’d already had first-hand experience with. Get it? First hand? Because my hand was fucked up for a while? Anyway, there were three primary problems with fairies and PHY-boosting bone magic:

1. Magic generally didn’t produce more magic, with a few exceptions. If you cut off a finger, it was really hard to find a magic that would regrow those bones (though it was relatively easy to heal a broken bone back together). If you lost blood, you needed a donor, or you needed to replenish it naturally on your own. Skin was a little more permissive than bone or blood, but it was apparently hard to find a magic that would help you recover from flaying. This was because bone, blood, and skin weren’t just physical things, they had latent magic.

2. Magic had some trouble with diseases, infections, poisons, and other chemical, viral, or bacterial problems. A blood magus could burn out a lot of them, if they were caught early, but there were limits on how much force they could apply to the problem. There were a few methods that could deal with those problems to greater or lesser extents, but generally speaking, you were in a bad way if things had progressed too far. (Unicorn blood wasn't shelf-stable, and had gone bad, but we still had unicorn horn to get around most of these issues, so long as we had the time to crush and powder it, something that couldn't be done ahead of time.)

3. Magic had a lot of trouble if your soul had problems. Scars persisted through healing when the wounds were bad enough or persisted long enough to feed back into the soul’s conception of the body. On Aerb, ‘phantom limb’ syndrome came from a mismatch of soul and body, but tended to fade with time, as the soul gradually caught up to the reality. Congenital defects tended to persist through healing. So did direct attacks on the soul’s conception of what the body should be. And, if you snipped the bi-directional connection between bones and soul, you would run into some problems in fairly short order, especially if you repeatedly made liberal use of healing magic.

We’d had lots of experience with these limits in one way or another. Fenn had almost died because Solace hadn’t been able to conjure up the power from the locus necessary to refill her with blood. Amaryllis had almost died from rat rot because that had been left to linger for almost two weeks, though that wasn’t entirely our fault, and we hadn’t known how bad it would eventually get. We’d also had more than enough experience with both scars and burnt-through bones. There were ways around the limitations of ‘standard’ healing, some more esoteric than others, but it was the edges where things got worrisome.

The big worry was with that third point. If Solace’s lungs hadn’t developed properly or fully, the magics we had available weren’t likely to help her. We’d asked Bethel’s opinion back at the safehouse, but she wasn’t able to tell one way or another, though she was able to confirm that the baby was, so far as she could tell, either full or half crantek with a steady heartbeat. Amaryllis had looked into Solace’s soul, but we didn’t have the necessary medical expertise to say one way or another, nor did we have the expertise to do any (wildly experimental) modifications to her fetal soul, if we had even been able to diagnose the problem.

◆◆◆

“I’m sorry I have to ask this,” said the doctor, “but what species is the baby?”

We were in the maternity ward, with thin fabric separating us from the rest of the place. When Grak got in, I was going to have him put up a ward against sound; we could hear a woman screaming from down the hall, periodic bursts of anguish that were separated by minutes of low moans. It was edging into morning, and I hoped that she would be finished before too long, or at least taken into her own private room.

A nurse had examined Amaryllis, asked questions, and redone the examination. All of their equipment seemed hopelessly outdated to me, but part of that was because Aerb didn’t have access to proper plastics. It made me think back to visiting Arthur in the hospital, and all of the plastic tubes and crinkling, throwaway packaging on all the medical supplies on the wall. On Aerb, they used rubber where they could, and there was more made of wood or metal than on Earth. It didn’t feel like a safe, sterile, well-lit environment. Not that it had done Arthur a whole lot of good.

“I don’t know the species,” said Amaryllis. I saw the muscles of her jaw go tight after she finished speaking.

“I see,” said the doctor with a nod, as though he heard that sort of reply fairly often. He was abnormally tall, and though I had a decent handle on the different species of Aerb, I thought he was probably a hybrid that I didn’t recognize. His teeth were a burgundy red, as was the skin around his mouth, which I found particularly hideous, but other than that, he was a pretty normal-looking guy, with a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck, and thinning black hair. He’d given his name as Nonnatus, but I wasn’t sure whether that was his first name or his last. I was also pretty sure that it meant something in Latin, but not sure what. (Latin didn’t exist on Aerb; Anglish had a different precursor language instead that gave rise to some of the same structures and etymologies.) “I don’t mean to press the point, but would it be possible for you to narrow it down? It’s important so we can be sure we don’t give you any medications that might negatively impact the baby.”

“Taxonomic contraindications are rare,” said Amaryllis, frowning somewhat. She was about to launch into something but stopped herself. “She’s either crantek or human, I think, but there’s a possibility that she’s something else. And … she might not be hybridized.”

Nonnatus stared at Amaryllis for a long moment. “I see,” he repeated.

“It’s been an interesting pregnancy,” I said. I felt like Fenn, trying to add in some levity and seeing it fall flat.

“You said it was important to know,” said Amaryllis. “I’m telling you that there are things I don’t know.” I could see her chew the inside of her cheek for a bit. “The pregnancy is a result of complex and highly advanced magics that we didn’t and don’t understand.”

The doctor looked at Amaryllis, then at me, then down at Amaryllis' belly.

“We’re covered by doctor-patient confidentiality,” said Amaryllis. “It may be important for you to know, I’m being forthright, do what you need to do in order to save my baby’s life, even if it’s at the expense of my own.” That set my heart racing. I was almost certain that it wouldn’t come to that, but feared that it might.

The doctor frowned slightly, then nodded. “We’re going to try a few methods of inducing labor, and if they don’t work, we’ll proceed from there. Okay?”

Amaryllis nodded, and not much later, the doctor left. Another scream came from down the ward.

“I don’t know if it was smart to tell him that much,” said Amaryllis. Her hands rested on her belly.

“Is that really what you’re worried about right now?” I asked.

“I’m worried about a lot of things,” said Amaryllis. “Primarily, I’m worried about the baby, and going into labor as soon as possible. There are two primary approaches here, stalling out and rushing ahead, both with their own risks, and we don’t have the necessary medical expertise to do either on our own. I’ve already tried as much as I dare to. But I also know a lot more about Earth’s procedures than Aerb’s, and I worry that Aerb’s approaches are worse.”

“Well, you’re taking this well,” I said.

“I’m really, really not,” said Amaryllis. She rubbed her belly. “The thought of nine months -- eight months in that chamber coming to nothing, of my baby dying after everything we’ve been through ...” She shook her head and let out a seething sigh. “I honestly think that I should stop thinking about it, because it makes me so fucking angry and sad to imagine it. Maybe I’d be fine with it if I thought that it was just random chance, but it’s not, is it? It’s the fucking Dungeon Master and his fucking narrative.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Probably, maybe. Certainly within his power to have stopped it. But it’s also possible that somewhere deep within the game mechanics is a chart you roll on to determine the outcomes of a pregnancy, or that we’re in a subgame, or that this was a natural complication of a complex and arcane ritual that I only sort of understood while I was helping to cast it. Or just chance.

My anger had faded a bit, over two months in the chamber, partly because I’d written out some of my feelings in letters to Fenn, and partly because we’d gone that long without anything really bad happening. All the shit that I’d gone through on Aerb was some distance behind me, and no, that didn’t logically excuse the Dungeon Master from being a grossly negligent god … but on a purely emotional level, it took some of the sting from it.

“I’m really hoping that this isn’t the most dramatic birth of all time,” said Amaryllis. “But I knew that was a possibility when I agreed to it. I had foolishly hoped that pushing a child out of me would be interesting enough on its own.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. She’d been the one to take on the burden, but while Fenn had privately expressed feeling somewhat less sympathetic because of that, it wasn’t the case for me. I didn’t know that I’d have chosen to become pregnant in Amaryllis’ shoes, not to save Solace’s life, nor that of the locus. Maybe I would have, but I would have had a lot of selfish thoughts first. In my eyes, Amaryllis was suffering by virtue of being a better person than I was. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Fight off the ninjas when they show up,” said Amaryllis with a mirthless laugh.

“I’m serious,” I said. (There weren’t any ninjas on Aerb, or if there were, they were really good at staying hidden.)

“Okay,” said Amaryllis. “Then I’d like you to burn some bones. Wisdom is the ability to withstand mental stress, right?”

“Huh,” I said. “Yeah.” I came forward and laid a hand on her shoulder, tentatively letting my fingers touch her skin, then began burning through the bones of my hand. I was thankful that I had a renewable source of bone magic, and that it was discreet.

“Oh,” said Amaryllis as the magic started its work. “I should have had you do this while we were in the chamber.”

“Takes some focus,” I said. It was hard to use on myself, since it took enough mental effort and split focus that it was difficult (though not impossible) to use it to accomplish anything.

“Ow,” said Amaryllis, leaning forward slightly and wincing.

“Are you okay?” I asked, stopping the magic. I wasn’t sure how someone could be hurt by having Wisdom channeled into them, but --

“She kicked,” said Amaryllis. She smiled slightly. “That’s the first time.” She winced again. “Ow. Not really very pleasant though.”

“Good sign,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Amaryllis. “I wish Grak would get here.”

It wasn’t too long afterward that Fenn and Grak showed up; the screaming from down the ward had, mercifully, stopped.

“Where are all the doctors?” asked Fenn when she came in. “Also, why don’t you have a private room? What’s the point in having millions of obols if you can’t buy a doctor?”

“They don’t have private rooms for birth, not unless it’s far enough along,” said Amaryllis. “Labor can take hours, most of it not all that exciting. The doctor came and went. We’re waiting, though I don’t know for what.”

I looked Grak over. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he was in Earth clothes, rather than his normal, more traditionally dwarvish outfit. He still had his braids dyed the color of lead, but he was wearing a buttoned-down shirt and jeans. I had no idea how I had missed it, but I must have been just that focused on Amaryllis.

“I am here for you,” said Grak. He reached forward and Amaryllis took his good hand, squeezing it lightly.

“Probably not much room for your expertise,” said Amaryllis. “I know you put in a lot of time on the training and education, but this is too far into the danger zone.”

“I am still here for you,” said Grak.

“I am too,” said Fenn. “But I long ago consigned myself to not being much help.”

The doctor returned, parting the curtain and giving us a bit of time to register his presence before he came in. He glanced at Fenn and Grak, then down at Grak’s prosthetic, then over at me and Amaryllis.

“I’d like a bit of privacy with the patient,” said the doctor.

“I’m the midwife,” said Grak.

The doctor looked down at Grak’s prosthetic again and frowned slightly. “I see,” he said. He had a great deadpan, though that wasn’t really something that I thought you wanted in a doctor. He looked at Fenn, hesitating.

“Just a friend,” said Fenn with a smile. “But I was there when the baby was conceived, and I’m not going to duck out until labor starts.”

“Very well,” said the doctor. He turned to Amaryllis and cleared his throat. “It’s been twenty-six hours since your water broke, and you show almost no signs of going into labor. Unfortunately, the baby will be preterm, at least by your accounting. We have two options at this point. Our first option is to give you as much time as possible, in the hopes that any remaining development can take place. This comes with some risks, notably infection, which a blood mage should be able to help you fight off if we catch it. However, there are some risks to the infant as well, since it too will be exposed to infection risk, and that’s much, much harder to treat.”

“And the second option is inducing labor,” said Amaryllis.

“Yes.” The doctor nodded. “Depending on how premature the infant actually is, there will be some risks to it, especially if it’s underdeveloped. In the worst case, we’ll use the Nufer method, but that’s not preferred. Induction of labor is my recommendation.” (The Nufer method was what they called a Caesarean section, because Aerb didn’t have a Caesar.)

“Okay, yes,” said Amaryllis. “Do it.”

“Good,” said the doctor, seeming pleased. “Now, there are a number of natural methods --”

“Assume I already tried them all,” said Amaryllis.

The doctor stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Have you self-medicated?”

Amaryllis hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know the name it would go by in this hospital.” Again there was a twitch of her jaw muscles. “I took a prostaglandin suppository sixteen hours ago, the equivalent to roughly one fortieth of a grain. So far it’s shown no effect.”

The doctor stared at her, pursing his burgundy lips. “I see,” he said. “And have you tried manual dilation on yourself?”

“No,” said Amaryllis. “With the infection risk, I didn’t think it prudent.”

The doctor nodded. “I find myself in agreement,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly with a nurse, and we can perform the procedure. I should warn you that it can be quite uncomfortable.” He looked at the rest of us. “Your husband can stay, the rest will have to leave.”

“I am her midwife,” Grak repeated, folding his arms across his chest, which really just made his prosthetic more visible.

“It’s fine,” said Amaryllis. “It should be simple enough, and they have considerably more practical training.”

That put a sour look on Grak’s face, but he nodded and left, with Fenn following close behind him. The doctor left too, presumably to get a nurse to assist him, along with the necessary equipment.

“Do you want me to stay?” I asked.

“Not particularly,” said Amaryllis. “Stay close, but you don’t need to watch them stick a catheter in my cervix, no.”

I stepped out from behind the curtain and found myself next to Fenn, who was chewing the nail of one finger down to the quick.

“How’s married life?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m not really sure that deception was necessary.”

“You want to look normal,” said Fenn with a shrug. “Grak and I aren’t normal, better for us to stay back, I get it. Mary was pretty keyed up on the idea of us not fucking things up, which I get. I should probably make myself scarce, actually, at least for the time being.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Didn’t mean to sound put out,” said Fenn. “Human births are grotesque. I really don’t want to see her split open. Better to just have it all happen where it’s out of my sight.”

“I can hear you,” said Amaryllis from behind the sheet.

“I love you, Mary,” called Fenn. She smiled at me. “I knew she could hear.” She stepped close to me and gave me a very chaste peck on the cheek. “I’m going to catch some sleep on a couch somewhere, Grak thinks this will probably take a while before it goes anywhere interesting.”

“Didn’t you just wake up?” I asked.

“Eh, I can always go for a nap,” said Fenn.

The doctor and nurse came, and I waited outside the sheet of cloth. In retrospect, maybe I should have stayed in there, if not for my own sake, then because listening to the whole thing without being able to see was nerve-wracking, especially hearing little sounds of pain or discomfort from Amaryllis. Some time passed as this went on. I took a few minutes to dip into my soul and replenish my bones, in case I wouldn’t have time to do it later. I wondered idly to myself whether I should go in and try to burn bones for Wisdom again, to help her out with, at the least, the mental side of things. I touched the wedding ring I was wearing and thought about what it would feel like to be doing this for real. Fenn had seemed to indicate that pregnancy for an elf was, comparatively, easy street, and not too much harder for a half-elf. Not that it would be her, necessarily, but that was where my mind was at.

A little boy in a suit came up to me, and it took me a bit to notice that he wasn’t a little boy at all, but a gnome. He was three feet tall, clean-shaven, except for his enormous mutton-chops. I had seen a few gnomes and hobbits on Aerb, but only in passing. As a gnome, his head, hands, and feet were disproportionately large, making him look older, rather than childlike. He didn’t have any wrinkles though, and his hair was black as night. I wasn’t about to venture a guess as to his age, but he seemed on the young side, and not because of the height.

“Can I ask you some questions?” he asked. His voice was high, but not very childish; he enunciated well.

“Uh,” I said. “My wife is having some difficulties, I don’t really have the time, sorry.”

The gnome nodded, then reached into his suit. He pulled out a badge that must have had some kind of magic on it, because the sight of it hit me like a brick and caused my eyes to lock focus on it.

“My name is Figaro Finch,” he said. “I’m an agent of the Uniquities Division of Imperial Affairs.” He put the badge away, and my mind momentarily went to mush before springing back. “I’d like to talk.”

“If this is about that joke my wife made, she’s got a very offbeat sense of humor,” I said. Jesus Christ with half Amaryllis’ ability to lie, that’s the best I could come up with? “She’s a little bit neurotic, especially with the baby on the way, and I don’t want to get into our personal history, but …” I trailed off. He was completely stone-faced. I’d been about to tell him that she had cheated on me with a crantek man, but I wasn’t sure that I would share that with a stranger, if it were really what had happened. I also had no real idea who he was or why the hells he was here. One of the classic interrogation techniques was to stay silent and let the subject talk themselves into a corner. I’d done that more than once as a DM. “Why don’t you tell me what this is about.”

“There have been a series of incidents,” replied Finch. “I was hoping that you could shed some light on them.”

“Oh?” I asked. Shit.

“Does the name Larkspur Prentiss ring a bell?” asked Finch.

Shit shit. “He was Anglecynn’s Foreign Security Director,” I said. “We’re from there, or were, a long time ago. I seem to remember reading something about him in the papers, but I can’t remember what.”

“How about the name Esuen Tsa?” asked Finch.

Shit shit shit. “That one is less familiar,” I replied. I looked back to the curtain. “Look, my wife is having complications with her pregnancy, so you can either explain what’s going on, or leave me alone until a better time. I can give you the address of the place we’re staying in Cranberry Bay, hopefully in a few days we’ll be back home with our baby, and I can talk then.”

“Just one last name,” said Finch. His large eyes were watching me closely. “Amaryllis Penndraig.”

“Princess of Anglecynn,” I said, nodding and trying not to show a single hint of nerves or my racing heart. “But I don’t have any idea where you’re going with this.”

Finch pointed at the curtain behind me. “In there, is that Amaryllis Penndraig?”

“My wife?” I asked. I gave a little incredulous laugh and was surprised that it sounded more or less convincing. “I could only dream of being married to Amaryllis Penndraig. Is that what this is about? That my wife looks a bit like her? Because other than the red hair”— which she hadn’t had a chance to dye—“I really don’t see it.”

“I’ll need to see her,” said Finch.

“Absolutely not,” said Nonnatus, who came out from behind the curtain to join me. “My patient is in considerable distress and could hear enough of the conversation that she was growing worried. Whatever business the Empire has here, it can wait a few days. She will only be moved from this hospital under extreme circumstances, and then only with my express consent.”

I felt a sudden surge of affection for the doctor.

He turned to me. “We’ll be moving her to a private room, given the complications. I can speak with you about it privately later, but she’s requested you.” He looked at Finch. “I’m familiar with the authority you claim, but unless I have express written instruction from the hospital director, you’re not going to so much as see my patient until after I’ve delivered her child.”

Finch frowned slightly and gave a curt nod before stepping away. I held in a sigh of relief; whatever he wanted with us (probably an arrest), he didn’t have enough evidence or capital to push past a doctor and cause an incident. That made me pretty hopeful. I ducked in to see Amaryllis.

“Hey,” I said. She was lying back in the bed, with her feet slightly propped up.

“Hey,” she replied. She tried nodding, but it was more a loll of her head. “Labor’s started, so that’s good news.”

“Good,” I said.

“Might have been the prostaglandin, which would be ironic,” said Amaryllis. “How are things out there?”

“I met a guy who thinks you’re a princess of Anglecynn,” I said. “He had some other questions, but they didn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

“I heard some of it,” said Amaryllis. “Sorry, my focus was elsewhere.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m sure it’s a simple misunderstanding, you focus on the baby, I’ll deal with clearing up any misunderstanding.”

“I heard the word ‘Uniquities’,” said Amaryllis. “Not my favorite people.”

“You have experience?” I asked. “I never knew.” The name was familiar, from some long ago briefing, but nothing much that stuck.

“Remind me to tell you about it sometime,” said Amaryllis. “Not now.” She winced slightly and hunched forward a bit, then lay back down. “That was a contraction,” she said with a faint smile. “A weak one, but it was there. I almost feel like we could have handled this at home.”

“If she’s early, there might be problems,” I said. “I’m glad we came.”

“Can I tell you something?” asked Amaryllis.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m kind of glad there was a mix-up with Uniquities,” she said. “It means that there’s something else interesting going on.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She was talking about the narrative, not about actual outcomes; Finch showing up meant that we had other problems to worry about. I had, for the most part, abandoned any belief in the narrative, partly because of what I’d talked about with the Dungeon Master, and partly because I felt like that was no way to live my life. But even if I believed the narrative was in full effect here, I wasn’t sure that I would have agreed that meant labor would go well. If I had been writing it … well, it was hard in tabletop games, really hard, but parallel plotlines were a thing, and you could set up one to succeed and the other to fail.

If I believed, wholeheartedly, that the Dungeon Master was invested in narrative, I might have tried to tank things with Finch in some subtle way, letting myself get caught up in the anxiety the birth was provoking in me, or tapping into a well of anger. Failing with Finch ought to mean that the birth would succeed -- at least, that’s how I thought about narrative, a balance of failure and success to make the success bittersweet.

I wasn’t going to do that though. If I was going to reject narrative, I was going to do it with all my heart. I kept thinking that Arthur must not have, that he’d let himself get wrapped up in it. If he made his choices based on what he thought the story wanted, it would explain so much about his failures over the years; they would make sense as sacrifice to the greater good, maybe.

“I should go find him,” I said. “I should explain things.”

“You already explained it was all a mistake,” said Amaryllis.

“Yes,” I said. “But … he had more to say, dots he was trying to connect, not for my sake, but for his own.”

Amaryllis reached forward and slipped her hand into mine. “I trust you,” she said. She squeezed my hand hard -- she had incredible grip strength from all that rock climbing. “If you miss the birth of our child, you had better have a very good reason.”

“I -- okay,” I said. I wanted to protest that it wasn’t our child, but it kind of was.

I stayed with her, holding her hand through the contractions, until we moved to a private room. I did get an answer to why that screaming woman was in the ward with us; her labor had gone a lot faster than expected, and there wasn’t any time to move her. The private room was, in some ways, worrying; they were moving us because they might need a lot of space, or because things might get dicey in a hurry. I was mildly surprised that we didn’t have a nurse in with us, but Amaryllis explained that was more or less how it was on Earth too, at least until the contractions started coming closer together.

It wasn’t until we were alone in that room that Fenn slipped in. “Hey,” she said to both of us. “Going well?”

“Progressing,” said Amaryllis. She was a touch pale, but when I’d asked the nurse, she’d said that was normal.

“Good, good,” said Fenn. “Hey, who’s that fucking guy out there?”

“Gnome in a suit?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Fenn. “He’s been stalking the halls and twigging my luck sense. I keep avoiding him. I stuffed Grak in a closet, because it’s hard to maneuver with two people.”

“But you didn’t literally stuff him in a closet, right?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Fenn. She unslung the house-staff from her back and rested it against one wall. Ropey had been providing the strap and was wrapped around the staff with elaborate knotwork that struck me as a little bit too intimate. I was used to his knots being economical.

Bethel appeared, standing next to the staff. Her chosen form seemed enormous in the hospital room, even though it had high ceilings. I noted that her hand rested on Ropey, rather than on the staff.

“Bring me closer,” she said.

Fenn rolled her eyes, but complied all the same, lifting the staff up and letting the head of it hover over Amaryllis’ belly.

“Progress,” said Bethel with a nod. “She is more animated than last night. You have moved closer to the birth.”

“Her?” asked Amaryllis.

“Her,” said Bethel, nodding slightly. “You had some doubt about that?”

Amaryllis nodded slightly. “I didn’t think to ask, earlier. It’s not important, really, but if we’d had an ultrasound or MRI we would ha-ahh—” The word was cut off with a gasp as another contraction came. We stayed silent until it had passed.

“Time?” she asked, breathing a bit hard.

“Ten minutes apart,” I said.

“What is an emereye?” asked Bethel with a frown.

“Equipment from Earth, too complicated for us to grab,” said Amaryllis. “Magnetic resonance imaging. It’s a way to see inside of people.”

“I can see inside you,” said Bethel. Fenn was still holding the staff over Amaryllis’ belly, resting it on the rail of the bed, while Bethel stood to one side. “My range is diminished with the material part of me so small, but there is less for me to think about when I’m this size. Less calling on my attention.” She held out a hand above Amaryllis’ stomach, palm up, and an image appeared there.

It was a fetus, curled up in a ball with an umbilical cord coming out of it, and around it, the amniotic sac, rendered nearly transparent for us. As I watched, it -- she, Solace -- moved slightly. I looked over at Amaryllis, who was staring at the image with wide eyes.

“You can do real-time false-color imaging of a person’s interior,” said Amaryllis.  And here I was ready to mistake that look for a mother seeing her baby for the first time.

It seemed like actual, proper magic to me. Sure, rationally I knew that it was just a combination of abilities that I’d already more or less known Bethel had, but it was still really impressive, and not just in the way that it was overpowered, but also because there was an unexpected majesty to it. Bethel was a showman (showwoman? showhouse?), I’d already figured that out, but that didn’t make it any less impressive.

The doctor, Nonnatus, came into our room and stared at the scene in front of him. Fenn slowly pulled the head of the staff away from Mary’s stomach, but apparently Bethel still had some range, because she stayed where she was, holding the illusion of Solace. The look on Bethel’s face communicated something to the effect of, ‘yes, what do you want?’.

“How is it done?” asked Nonnatus, stepping forward and looking at the fetus.

“Entad,” said Amaryllis.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Fenn covering her mouth with her hand, hiding a smile.

“I see,” said the doctor, frowning slightly. “I could have saved dozens if not hundreds of lives if I could see like this. If it could be used by the entire hospital --”

“It cannot,” said Bethel.

Nonnatus turned to me. “Clive, the man from earlier has managed to sway the head of hospital. You can wait until after I’ve checked up on your wife, if you’d like, but the man from Uniquities has demanded a meeting with you, and while I’m in a position to shield your wife, I was not able to shield you. You are expected in room 203b.”

“Shit,” I said. I looked at Amaryllis.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine. But come back soon.”

I nodded at that, hoping that I would be able to.

“Need company?” asked Fenn.

“Do you think it goes better if you’re with me?” I asked.

“No,” said Fenn. “Not even a slim chance it goes better.”

“I’ll just go convince him that this is all a big misunderstanding,” I said. “Easy.”

◆◆◆

I sat across from Figaro Finch in a small meeting room. He had a serious expression on his face, a notebook and pen in front of him, a folder to one side (whose contents I was very eager to see), and to my surprise, a thing that looked like a record player, which I was fairly certain was going to be recording our conversation onto wax. He sat in a booster seat, though they had a different name on Aerb that I didn’t quite remember.

“So,” he said. “Name?”

“Clive Horsewhistler,” I said. I wanted to ask how long this was going to take, but I didn’t want to be a hostile interview subject, not right off the bat, and not if Finch had connected the dots.

“And is horse whistling your occupation?” asked Finch.

“No,” I said. “I’m between jobs at the moment.”

“And where are you from, Clive Horsewhistler?” asked Finch.

“Anglecynn,” I said. “Specifically, a small town called Consort.” I’d picked it from a map; it was close to the place this body had come from, as seen on the teleportation key.

We had a problem. I had papers for Clive Horsewhistler, which I’d used to get on the train, but Fenn didn’t think they’d stand up to much scrutiny, and if Finch knew that Clive Horsewhistler had been aboard the Lion’s Tail, then he’d know that I shouldn’t have been in Cranberry Bay. Since he was asking about Esuen, I thought it pretty likely he knew I was lying.

“You have a different last name from your wife,” said Finch.

“We’re not technically married,” I said. “We were waiting until we had some money, and then … the baby came along.”

“Unfortunate how that sometimes happens, isn’t it?” asked Finch. “Your fiancée, she’s from Anglecynn too?”

“Yes,” I said. “From Caledwich.”

“From her intake form, she’s very close in age to Princess Amaryllis Penndraig,” said Finch.

“You looked at her intake form?” I asked, eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t under the impression that was allowed.”

“The situation was deemed unique,” said Finch.

“I suppose that’s how Uniquities gets away with things,” I said, mouth in a thin line.

Finch pursed his lips, then began taking papers out of the folder. I was sort of dreading this. “Last month, a man matching your description got in an altercation with Prince Larkspur Prentiss, who was, at the time, Foreign Security Director of Anglecynn,” said Finch. “This happened in Cranberry Bay, at the Athenaeum. That was when I was called in. As you know, the Kingdom of Anglecynn is quite some distance from the Monarchical Democracy of Esplandian, and as you might imagine, the altercation raised some eyebrows. I use that word, altercation, because it’s unclear whether it was a direct assault on the FSD, or whether it was in some way provoked. There are discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts.” He slid a picture over to me.

It was black and white, with some horrible graininess to it. Photography wasn’t a new science on Aerb, but it was one of the places they were far behind Earth, as was the case with chemistry in general, probably because there was so much magic screwing things up. The picture wasn’t of me; it was a human woman with an elaborate bun and gray robe I thought was probably some shade of off-white. She looked a bit familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I looked up at Finch.

“You don’t recognize her?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Should I?”

“Her name is Clarabell Brown,” said Finch. “She’s a student at Bone and Flesh who does work study in Coeus Hall. She was there when the altercation happened and had some interaction with both Prentiss and the mystery assailant, who she insisted was only looking for information on something called ‘rat rot’, supposedly contracted in the Risen Lands. The Risen Lands, where Amaryllis Penndraig had been ceremoniously dropped weeks earlier.”

“Okay,” I said, shrugging. I remembered now and did my best to keep it from showing on my face. “And?”

“The man this eyewitness met matches your description,” said Finch.

“I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of people in Cranberry Bay that match my description,” I said.

“There was another altercation in Boastre Vino,” said Finch. “Again, the Foreign Security Director of Anglecynn was involved, and again, I was called in, given the unique situation and my previous dealing with him in Cranberry Bay. I had many questions for him, you understand. He stonewalled me, then said that we would talk after his business was concluded. I busied myself gathering eyewitness accounts, thinking that I would apply some pressure later. The next day, in the morning, he teleported in a number of helicopters from Anglecynn, along with a large number of men who came through the touchstones, and …” He’d had his hands pressed together and then opened them wide, questioning.

“And?” I asked.

“There were no survivors,” said Finch. “We don’t actually know what happened. The initial altercation in Boastre Vino was between Larkspur Prentiss, with two of his most trusted lieutenants, and another party having four members. One of them, I now believe, was Amaryllis Penndraig. Another, again, matches your description.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “And you think that … what, I killed Larkspur Prentiss?”

“Someone did,” said Finch. “The official story is that he was flying helicopters without a submitted and verified flight plan, and was subsequently attacked and killed by a dragon. The site of the accident was only briefly under the control of the city of Boastre Vino before being taken over by Anglecynn’s Major Accidents Department through a combination of legalistic and political chicanery. According to some private, off-the-record conversations with the initial officers on the scene, it appears to have been a full-on war. Not only were there no survivors, there were no bodies. I’ll spare you the details, because I’m fairly sure that you already know them, and far more intimately than I do.”

I stayed silent. I was wondering just how much of our history he was aware of. I was getting flashbacks to sitting with the Abswifth back in Parsmont, but this was so much worse.

Finch let me stew in the silence for a moment, maybe hoping that I would say something, before he moved on. “I was given leeway by Uniquities to investigate the matter further,” he said. “I spoke with law enforcement in Cranberry Bay and Boastre Vino, sent letters of inquiry to places Larkspur Prentiss was known to have visited in the days before his assumed death, interviewed eyewitnesses looking for some kind of angle, and even went so far as making a trip to Anglecynn to speak with his wife, Hyacinth.”

I felt like I was being too silent. If I was really Clive Horsewhistler, would I be sitting there trying to take everything in so I could figure out the angle he was working?

“I got bites,” said Finch. “Everything the least bit unusual crossed my desk, and while most of it was idle rumor, some of it was worth tracking down.” He smiled at me. He had small teeth. Not just because he had a small head, but proportionately, his teeth were small. “A human man and half-elf woman matching the descriptions of the two seen fighting Larkspur in Boastre Vino had, apparently, sold a unicorn at the meat market. Do you know how many unicorns are killed in a given year?”

“I don’t know the first thing about them,” I said.

Finch laughed, probably in disbelief, maybe trying to provoke me. “On average, about one every five years,” said Finch. “Usually it’s an elf that does it, since they have some kind of cultural connection to the creatures, but these two people walked in off the street and brought thousands of pounds of the creature out from extradimensional storage with no forewarning. That’s not something a professional hunter would do.”

“Okay,” I said. I rubbed my forehead a bit, trying to think of how Clive would react. “So you’re saying … what are you saying?”

“It’s another point of connection,” said Finch. “A man comes into Coeus Hall looking for information on a disease contracted in the Risen Lands and gets in a fight with Larkspur Prentiss. A few days later, that same man is selling unicorn parts in Boastre Vino and gets in another fight with Larkspur Prentiss later that evening. It doesn’t take a genius to know why a man with a serious, unknown disease would want to kill a unicorn. The real question is how the fuck he managed that. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think you do understand,” said Finch. He leaned back in his chair. “You don’t look like a man who understands.”

“No, I understand,” I said. “I just don’t know what it has to do with me.”

“There was another incident brought to the attention of Uniquities late last night,” said Finch. “A female tuung was pulled from a moving train. One of the guards was thrown off the train, the other woke up with a hangover, and a third is still missing. The tuung tried to keep this quiet, since they’d lost one of their prize females and didn’t know who had her, but they reversed course when a flying ship they authorized to descend into the Boundless Pit was hijacked and a hundred of their soldiers were murdered trying to get it back.”

“I … see,” I said. “But that was last night, and the Boundless Pit is what, four days away by train? You’re saying -- can’t you just check the logs to see who teleported where? That should clear me.” The logging was one of the reasons we weren’t going to be using the teleportation network anytime soon. Standards were a lot higher, when you were dealing with something so valuable. It was like the difference in scrutiny between driving across state lines and flying across state lines.

“The logs are clean as a whistle,” said Finch. He was staring hard at me. “Not just in Headwater, but in Boastre Vino and Cranberry Bay too. There’s not even a trace. If it was Amaryllis Penndraig, that’s no real surprise. There’s more than enough magic attached to her bloodline, and she’s had a month or so to go around reclaiming it. Anglecynn doesn’t require members of the Court to register their entads, but my guess is she’s got something in there, some way of moving around.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “All this is … it’s something. But what brought you to this hospital? How does this connect to me and my wife?”

“Back when I thought it was just a man looking to cure a disease, I thought maybe he’d end up at the hospital, and if by some outside chance the princess was involved, maybe her too,” said Finch. “I put out feelers, stopped by to talk to the nurses, especially the ones at intake, and I let them know that if they saw anything out of the ordinary -- uniquities, you might say -- they should send me a letter, long-distance, at my expense. I gave a sketch of the man and the half-elf, and a photo of the princess. I got a fair number of them, starting out, but nothing really worthwhile, just entads gone wrong or rare species hybrids. Eventually the letters dried up. But then, this morning, when I was in Headwater with my men following up on what had happened on the Lion’s Tail and the Down and Out, I got another letter forwarded from a night nurse, saying that a young couple had come in late in the night. The girl was the spitting image of Amaryllis Penndraig. The girl’s supposed husband was a taller human, blue eyes and brown hair, handsome and muscular, wearing blue armor.” Finch sat back in his seat. “Blue armor that you’re wearing now, which matched the description given to me by the tuung guard I had interviewed not thirty minutes before.”

“Alright,” I said. “So a nosy nurse violates patient privacy, hoping for a reward? What do I need to do to prove that I’m not this guy?”

“Are you really going to keep this up?” asked Finch. “Four tourists went aboard the Down and Out, two humans, a dwarf, and a half-elf. You and your wife have received two visitors, one dwarf, one half-elf, who I’m going to have some questions for too. I’m fairly certain that I can place all four of you on the train, at a party thrown by the Princess Emomain before the kidnapping of her handmaid.”

“Am I under arrest?” I asked. “And if so, what for?”

“Arrest?” asked Finch, raising an eyebrow. “This isn’t that sort of situation. You’re guilty of crimes, certainly, but most of them are against Larkspur Prentiss. From where I’m standing, all the evidence points to him acting in naked aggression against you and paying the price for it. Set your dealings with him aside, and we’re in murky water. Nothing that looks good for you, but also not anything beyond my ability to protect you from, so long as you have the two things my superiors think you have.”

I swallowed at that. “And those are?” I asked.

Finch held up a finger. “The first is Amaryllis Penndraig, part of the ongoing war for the soul of Anglecynn, one that the empire is losing, badly,” said Finch. He held up a second finger. “The second is Esuen, the female tuung.”

“And if I don’t have those things?” I asked.

“It gets complicated,” said Finch. He was watching me closely. “I have you dead to rights, and all I need is cooperation. I like dealing in carrots, not sticks.”

“But you do have sticks,” I said. “And you thought it best to present your sticks first.”

Finch gave me a nod. He reached a hand into his pocket and pulled out a pocketwatch, which he looked at with a faint smile. “You should know that we were able to find the hotel you checked in at. We know about your fifth member. Before I left to come find you, I put my second-in-command in charge of securing her, which should be done by now.”

Chapter 28 - The Adventures of Valencia the Red

“And you’re okay with staying behind?” asked Mary.

“I am, you don’t need to ask me again,” said Valencia. They were in the hotel room together, alone. Grak was putting up wards in the other room where the tuung were staying, and Joon had taken Fenn to go find out if there was another way down the Pit. Valencia was more comfortable when she was with just one other person, because sometimes there were too many people talking at once and it was hard to figure out what they were all saying without a devil’s help -- and Valencia didn’t particularly like having a devil’s insights into her friends.

“I know I decided for you,” said Mary. “I don’t want you to think that I was pushing you out, you’re a valuable member of this team, but --”

“If a warder looks at me, he’ll know that I’m non-anima,” said Valencia. “And then he’ll tell people, and they’ll try to kill me.”

“It’s partly that,” said Mary. “There are a lot of reasons.” She paused. “I thought that you might like some independence. You’ve been with us a week, and I feel like I’ve barely let you out of my sight in that entire time. I want you to have agency, to decide things on your own.”

Valencia felt a warm glow, deep in her chest. She reached forward and wrapped Mary in a tight hug, which the princess returned. Valencia liked hugging. She was slowly discovering all the things that she liked, and hugging was near the top of the list. She didn’t stop hugging until a little bit after Mary had dropped her half of the hug.

“You’re so nice,” said Valencia.

“Thank you,” said Mary. “I don’t think that’s particularly true but thank you.”

“You have to come back,” said Valencia. “You all have to come back. Okay?”

“We’ll try our best,” said Mary. “We should probably talk about contingencies for what you should do if we don’t return, for whatever reason. You’ll have money, and you can certainly borrow the relevant skills, but it will probably be rough for you, and if I can offer some input that helps --”

“If you die, I’ll find you in the hells,” said Valencia. “And then I’ll kill all the demons and devils near you, so it won’t be as bad.”

“That’s -- probably preferable, yes,” said Mary. “I’m still not sure that you should be killing them so freely.”

“They don’t know what’s causing it,” said Valencia. She had watched, killing one, then killing a second that had been standing right next to the first so she could see it through his memories. Aside from that, every time she took a devil or a demon, she tried to remember to comb through their memories to see whether they knew anything about her. So far, nothing but whispers and rumors. The infernals weren’t supposed to die; they were scared. “Even if they did know, they don’t have very good reach up here.”

Valencia could feel through the nine thousand hells with what she thought of as her tendrils, absurdly long, interdimensional strings that could slice through a demon or devil and draw it into her. There were different pieces of her power, the tendrils that grabbed the demons from out of their bodies, the maw that tore them apart into component parts, and the reservoir where their skills and knowledge were kept. It was a bit of idle work to keep each of the tendrils focused on a different target, ready to consume them at a moment’s notice. She had started with eight of them, but now they numbered in the hundreds, and adding any more seemed excessive.

“I’m worried there will be a reckoning,” said Mary. “And I’m worried that if you lean on them too much, you’ll take on something of them. They can’t be what’s driving your understanding of people.”

“That’s what I have the Harry Potter books for,” said Valencia with a smile.

“That’s not --” Mary began.

“I was only joking,” said Valencia. Mary could be a lot like Hermione sometimes, quick to correct things she saw as wrong. Reading the Harry Potter books had helped her to understand Mary a bit better. Mary was also sometimes like Lucius Malfoy, with careful words and clever plots. And sometimes she was brave and bold, like Harry Potter.

Mary pursed her lips. “I’m very serious,” she said. “Life can be hard, and it’s extremely easy to get cynical about people, even without infernal influences shaping your views.”

Valencia snapped one of her tendrils through a lesser devil and crushed him in her maw. All she wanted of him was the smallest piece of insight. She’d picked a lesser devil because she didn’t think it was so bad to do that. The little ones, close to the surface, were weaker and dumber, closer to her own ways of thinking. How much influence could they have?

“You’re talking about yourself,” said Valencia.

“Did you figure that out on your own?” asked Mary with a frown.

“No,” said Valencia. She tried her best to be honest with Mary and Joon and the others. It was easier without a devil’s insights, which always made lies so attractive. Lies could get you what you wanted.

“Well,” said Mary. “Yes, I do think I’m sometimes too cynical for my own good. There’s something infectious about cynicism. You treat people poorly for reasons that seem perfectly sensible, and the world becomes worse for it.”

“You’re talking about me,” said Valencia. “That wasn’t a devil’s insights,” she added. She had discarded the devil’s parts from her reservoir. Thousands of years of the devil’s life had been used up just for that one little hint at what Mary was thinking.

Mary sighed. “Yes. I’m talking about you.” She looked Valencia over. “You know that people can talk in generalities, don’t you? There’s subtext, true, but the generalities still hold, regardless of the context I’m thinking in at the time.”

“I know,” said Valencia. “You feel bad for treating me like I wasn’t actually there.”

“I was being pragmatic,” said Mary. “It was pragmatic to refuse to acknowledge that there was a person trapped in cycles of possession. It was cynicism, a way of preventing myself from being weak. I’m sorry.”

“You tell me you’re sorry every day,” said Valencia.

“I try not to,” said Mary. She fidgeted with her hands. “My ideal self would tell you once, then prove it every day.”

“You really are very nice,” said Valencia. She wanted to ask whether they could kiss, because it felt like a moment for kissing. Kissing was also one of the things that Valencia had decided she enjoyed, but there were rules about who you could kiss and when. She thought that with the right devil, she could talk Mary into more kissing, but that wouldn’t be right or fair, and through a devil’s eyes, it would be manipulation, rather than the love and affection it was. “Can I have another hug?” she asked instead.

“Of course,” said Mary. When they hugged, Valencia gave a little purr, like a kitten. She had only heard about kittens; some day she would like to meet one.

“When we’re gone, you’re on your own,” said Mary. She had been the one to break the hug. One of the rules of hugging seemed to be that you weren’t supposed to just keep hugging forever, or carry on a full conversation while hugging. “I left you money for room service, or for if you want to take a very brief trip outside to see Headwater. Check in on the tuung, never let a warder see you, and if something happens, block our teleportation site so that we know there was trouble. There’s a gun and a knife in the bedside table. If you see a warder’s monocle, run the other way, and if you go out, keep up a devil’s skills at all times so you can’t be ambushed or attacked. And if you are ambushed or attacked, take a demon’s skills.” Mary left unsaid what Valencia was supposed to do with a demon’s skills, but the thing demons were best at was violence. “I’m very worried about you running into a warder on Grak’s level who doesn’t need the monocle, but I don’t want to make this hotel room into another prison, so … be safe.”

“I love you,” said Valencia, because it felt true. There was a slight twitch to Mary’s face that said this wasn’t appropriate, but Mary had also said that it was the right of every thinking creature to be inappropriate at times, when the situation called for it. Mary had rules about when to break rules.

“You listened to what I said though?” asked Mary.

“I did,” said Valencia. “Are you going to say it all again before you leave for real?”

“Probably,” said Mary with a sigh. She ran her fingers through her hair, which was dyed black. Their hair matched, and Valencia found that pleasing. “I’ll promise to try my best to come back in one piece, if you promise to try your best to be in one piece when I come back.”

“I promise,” said Valencia.

“Then I promise too,” said Mary.

◆◆◆

Valencia felt hollow.

She had read through all seven Harry Potter books, and now what was left? Nothing. Not literally nothing, because Juniper and Mary had each left her a dozen books to read, but Valencia understood that the world that contained Hogwarts was only contained in those seven books, and now she was done. She tried reading the first of the Animorphs books, but it wasn’t at all the same, and she stopped three pages in. She also tried starting from the first book again, but it wasn’t the same either. All that was left was that hollow feeling of having come to the end.

Juniper had said that he’d read more than a thousand books, which she hadn’t really believed until he’d said something to the effect of that being only three years of reading a book every day. Valencia had read through the first three Harry Potter books in the course of three days, so that wasn’t too ridiculous. Juniper had then gone on about his assumptions about reading speed in words per minute and how many words were in a book, which Valencia listened to attentively and then promptly forgot; it seemed like Juniper liked the mental exercise, so she was happy for him.

(She’d used pieces of devils to read faster for the last four books, which had felt wonderful at the time, but which she now regretted, because there were no more books left. There was a slight taint of the devil’s thinking to her reading, but if anything, that enhanced the books; she could understand the precise ways the characters were flawed, which made it all the sweeter to see them overcome their weaknesses. She had read the epilogue without so much as a trace of the devil’s voice, which gave Rowling the last word.)

Valencia decided that she would go out into Headwater. She made sure that everything in the room was as it should be, put the pistol into her handbag, then locked the door behind her, making triple sure that the wooden hanger said that the room was to be left untouched. Grak had left behind wards, some of them quite potent. She made a quick stop at the room the tuung were staying in, let them know she would be gone for an hour, then went down to the front desk and again clarified with them that no one was to go into her hotel room.

She walked down the street with a devil’s eye for detail, as Mary had told her to, watching the people. There were gaps in the knowledge a devil had, but there was much that was ready to be supplied to her from the reservoir of devil parts, with only a very faint sensation that told her it was the devil’s knowledge, not her own.

She saw a pack of ghill, with spines the color of wheat covering their backs and heads. She passed a he’lesh wedding party, with its traditional streamers of smoke that had as many colors as the stars in the sky. On a corner she spotted one of the renacim, which was so unusual that she stopped and stared for a moment, trying to make sense of it. There were only twenty thousand of them on Aerb, and one was here in Headwater, for no apparent reason other than simple tourism.

It was interesting, certainly, to see the mix of people, cultures, and customs, more even than in Cranberry Bay, because this was a place explicitly meant for people from far away to visit. But at the same time, Valencia had very little baseline for what was normal. Twelve days ago, she had been locked up in a prison within a prison, which was more or less how she spent her entire life. It was a monotony that had only been interrupted by Fallatehr’s tests or the times that infernals had reached up into her to puppet her body. She knew what was worth noting about Headwater and what wasn’t, because the devils knew, but the part of her that was just Valencia was marveling at how tall the buildings got, or the power lines, or a store full of books.

(Mary said that she was doing very well, given the circumstances. Mary hadn’t gone so far as to say that she was doing unnaturally, abnormally well, but Mary had thought it. There was, left unsaid, the idea that the Dungeon Master had placed his thumb on the scale. Also left unsaid was the way that Valencia sometimes took in devils to help her with managing her thoughts and feelings. Devils had emotions too, they were just really, really good at dealing with them. Some of that stuck, even when they were gone.)

She found a tavern she thought looked a bit like the one in Hogsmeade and sat down at the bar, on top of a stool. She gripped the bar, then spun herself one way and then the other.

The devil’s instincts were there, telling her how this would look to other people, but she ignored them, because she wanted the experience. Even with a lesser devil like this one, it was sometimes hard to find herself in the mix. The devil was dead, taken apart into component pieces, but those pieces were a part of her, augmenting her thoughts and, to some extent, feelings. She had been working hard, with Mary’s help, both to become more of herself, so there was less for the devils to overwhelm, and to keep from reaching into that well of understanding just because it was there. She tried to think about the devils as voices, independent characters, but that wasn’t really true. They were dead, and she was simply using their skills or knowledge. It was easier to think of them as separate, so that she could say it was a demon telling her how to kill everyone in the room, rather than her own thought that she wouldn’t have had without the demon in her.

So she spun in the chair, to see what it was like, heedless of what other people would think. She might look like a little girl sitting on a bar stool for the first time. She was fine with that.

“Can I get you something?” asked the bartender. He was a large man, with broad shoulders and a neck thicker than one of her thighs. He looked friendly too, either despite or because of his bushy eyebrows. He was an aborian, claws filed down so they almost looked like fingernails. The devil’s knowledge helpfully told her all sorts of things, and she shut down the stream of thoughts about him as they presented themselves, but not before it left a taste in her mind -- he was sympathetic to her, worried that she was trouble, worried that she couldn’t pay, easy to manipulate by playing the victim, and so on. He was definitely the owner; the bar had been built for a man of his proportions. (He reminded her of Hagrid, though less hairy.)

“One butterbeer, please,” said Valencia. The devil part of her mind was insistent that she not do this, because there was no such thing as butterbeer, nor even buttered beer, and she was making a fool of herself, but she elected not to listen, and instead do the thing she wanted to do, on the off chance that the Dungeon Master was feeling kind.

He frowned slightly. “Not something we carry, sorry dear,” he said. “What does it taste like?”

“I don’t know,” said Valencia. “Butterscotch?”

“Well, we do have scotch,” said the bartender with a laugh. “But I think you’re probably a little young for that.”

“I’m eighteen years old,” said Valencia. For all she knew, that might have been true.

“Are you now?” asked the bartender. There was skepticism in his voice.

“What’s the drinking age in Headwater?” asked Valencia.

“It’s at the discretion of the barkeep,” he said with a faint smile. “We get too many species here to have a hard and fast rule. You must be a long way from -- where, exactly?”

“Portina,” said Valencia. It was an innocuous answer, close enough to be uninteresting, far enough that it was unlikely he’d press her on her knowledge. Not that she didn’t have knowledge, but devils didn’t exactly keep up to date. “Can I have something like butterscotch then? It doesn’t have to have alcohol in it.” She reached into her handbag and pulled out a handful of obols, enough to show she had money, not enough to raise any attention. This was going to be the first time she’d ever paid for something. In fact, it would be the first thing that she had actually owned for herself, even if it was paid for with the group’s money.

“Here,” said the bartender. He plucked a bottle from the shelf with his huge hand and began pouring it into a small glass, then took a second bottle with a nozzle handle and added something fizzy. “It’s a local specialty, Delver’s Delight, one part tonic water, one part ungweed syrup. The tuung harvest it from the walls of the Pit, but most of what you’ll taste is sugar.”

“How much do I owe you?” asked Valencia.

“On the house,” said the bartender. “It’s a quarter-obol worth of ingredients, if that.”

“Thank you,” said Valencia with a small, solemn bow in his direction. She used a bit of the devil’s skills to convey the right impression toward him, to make him feel appreciated. The devil’s skills were laying out a path of manipulation for her, a way to get this man to do her bidding, but she clamped it down.

She tasted the fizzy drink, sipping it slowly. There was a bitterness to it, and acidity, a bit of near-citrus flavor, but sugar was what she tasted most. A thousand comparisons sprang to mind, courtesy of the devil, most of them calculated to how the bartender might react to them, some outright lies that would lead their conversation in some particular direction … but there was only one thing that Valencia herself could honestly compare it to.

“It tastes like Mountain Dew,” she said.

“Mountain dew?” asked the bartender. “Poetic, I suppose. Is that what you do? Are you a young poet from Portina?”

He liked her. There was something of Juniper to him, a weakness for weakness. There were no undercurrents of sexual desire though, not like there were with Juniper (not that she minded that in the least). The attention and momentary companionship weren’t unwelcome, but a devil’s skill at avoiding detection was ringing alarm bells in the back of her head, saying that the more they spoke, the more he would remember her, and the more he might mention her to someone who went asking around, especially if he thought she was in trouble.

“I’m just visiting with family,” said Valencia. “We came here for the wedding of a family friend, and my mom let me slip out on my own for a bit since there’s some free time.”

“Ah,” said the bartender. He relaxed slightly, but there was also an edge of disappointment, a slight fall of his face and deadening of his earlier liveliness. “So no occupation, as yet? I don’t suppose you’d have interest in working at a tavern?”

He believed her, mostly, but she hadn’t done enough to get rid of his need to help her.

The thing that made her sad, so sad she might have cried if she didn’t have a devil’s control of her body, was that if he learned she didn’t have a soul, it would be like a switch was flipped in him. Non-anima were rare, adult non-anima even more so, but demons and devils were well-understood, and if he learned that she was under constant threat of possession (nevermind that she wasn’t), everything she’d said or done would be cast in that light. Every bit of sympathy he’d had toward her would be seen as a devil’s victory, every moment of distrust or unease seen as a devil’s failure.

“If I find myself with nowhere to go, I’ll come here begging for a job, does that sound like a deal?” asked Valencia, knowing that was a lie.

“Deal,” said the bartender. “Name’s Bore, though I’m not one,” he said, holding out his hand.

Valencia shook it. “Valencia the Red,” she said, against advice of counsel. She smiled at his raised eyebrow. “It’s a family name.”

He left her alone after that, and she stewed in her thoughts. He had been nice, and their interaction had been pleasant, but that was only because he hadn’t known her. There were, at present, four people in the world who knew her secret, and they were the only ones she could rely on -- if they made it back.

◆◆◆

Having had her fun during her first night in Headwater, and anticipating many more days of solitude ahead of her, Valencia started writing an eighth Harry Potter book.

At first she tried to write it with a devil’s help, but by the time she reached the end of the first chapter, people were plotting and scheming beyond anything that had happened in the first seven books, and none of them were terribly good people, and she couldn’t see how any of it was going to have a happy ending for anyone. The bad people would just get worse, and all the glimmers of light would be snuffed out, because that was the devil’s understanding of people. Mary thought that with some practice, Valencia would be able to borrow a devil’s skills without the devil’s particular focus on suffering, misery, and pain. If that was possible, Valencia wasn’t quite there yet.

She scrapped that attempt and began again, without help, but ran out of ideas halfway through the first chapter, when she was trying to think up people that Harry Potter would work with in his career as an Auror. She named one of them Juniper, and another Mary, but that raised all sorts of questions that would need to be answered first.

So she scrapped that second attempt too, and started in on a third, which was about Juniper Smith’s first year at Hogwarts with Mary, Fenn, Grak, and the locus. Juniper would be Gryffindor, of course, and Fenn would be Hufflepuff, but Valencia wasn’t sure whether the Sorting Hat would put Mary into Gryffindor, because she was courageous and bold, or into Ravenclaw, because she was so clever, or into Slytherin, because her whole family was from Slytherin. Slytherins weren’t supposed to be evil, though most of them were. It was about ambition, and wasn’t Mary wildly ambitious? She kept talking about wanting to change the whole world.

Valencia decided that she would be a house elf in this story, but one that had been given a sock by Juniper, and then scrapped her third attempt at writing the eighth Harry Potter book because she was just making herself sad. She didn’t want to be Dobby, she wanted to be Hermione.

It was during this rather glum moment of self-reflection that Valencia heard a knock at the door.

The choice wasn’t whether to take in an infernal, but which kind to take. The devils were liars, deceivers, and talkers. The demons were focused almost entirely on combat. It took some time to switch, and while the skills and information they both possessed came to her quickly, there was still a moment of mild disorientation. So, to talk or to fight?

One of Valencia’s tendrils was touching a demon in hell #2349. She snuffed out its life in an instant, disassembled it with her maw, then took on the full force of its knowledge and skills. This took two seconds and very little thought or effort on her part. She always felt glad to have killed another of them, then always after that, a twinge of guilt at feeling happy that a life, however abhorrent and irredeemable, had been ended.

With the demon’s pieces augmenting her thoughts, the room took on a different context. Mary had left behind weapons, a dagger and a gun; Valencia was suddenly cursing herself for not having checked to make sure that the gun was loaded and in working condition. She went to do that, moving silently across the floor with practiced grace as she ignored the knocking and tried to think. She inspected the dagger, feeling its weight so she could throw or slash without hesitation or error, then pulled the magazine from the pistol and checked it over, barely even aware of what she was doing as her mind raced.

The suite had two bedrooms and one long main room, which served as a common area, with a small desk, a dining table, a couch with a short table in front of it, and a sliding door that led out onto a narrow balcony.

That was the next question: flee or fight? Out the balcony so she could scale six floors down to ground level and disappear into the city, or murder everyone in the hallway?

She stumbled as she realized that those weren’t the only two choices. Those were simply the only two things that a demon would immediately think of, patterns of behavior that she’d adopted by taking too much of him from the reservoir at once.

When she actively focused on talking to them, her mind raced ahead to the possibilities, cataloging what sorts of threats might be present in the hallway, the traditional compositions of fireteams under different circumstances, and what could be assumed about them from the fact that they were here. The tuung were limited in the forces they could commit by their weak position in the international community and the necessity of sending their people off to athenaeums, where they might defect. Anglecynn would be better equipped, though a clandestine operation had limits. And if it were the Empire, which was entirely possible if things had gone badly enough down in the Pit, there might be as many as a dozen people in the hallway … plus more down on the ground, watching for an exit out the balcony.

The best strategy for killing them all would be to lie in wait in the room, behind as much cover as she could manage in short order. Grak had left the hotel room carefully warded, and Valencia knew where all the wards were, which would allow her to dance in and out of the invisible barriers to gain the advantage. She had begun exercising, at Mary’s insistence, but it had only been ten days, and while that was enough to show some progress, she was still a weak, small, girl.

There were ten bullets in the pistol. Her aim was as close to perfect as it could be without having developed any actual muscles or muscle memory, which meant that it was good enough to kill at least ten people in close quarters. She could kill the first two or three before they even knew what was happening, assuming that entads weren’t in play and a few varieties of magic were off the table. Sadly, in a firefight with no foreknowledge, those always had to be a consideration. Velocity mages to dodge the bullets, still mages to stop them, brutes in entad full plate to stop the damage, revision mages to reverse it, a gold mage if they could secure one … and those were just the obvious things, what you expected as standard, before you even started bringing in the esoteric.

Valencia stopped what she was doing when she realized that she had gone back into thinking that the way of dealing with this problem was to kill people.

The knocking had stopped.

It was probably just room service.

Valencia sat on one of the dining room chairs and placed the gun behind her, so it wouldn’t be visible from the door. The demon’s instincts were a part of her, and they were screaming, so she released that part to wherever such things went when she was done with them. Oblivion, probably, or the Void. After a moment’s thought, she released the demon entirely.

One of her tendrils had been tracking a devil, and she lashed through it, stealing its essence and killing it in the process.

The knocking came again, louder.

“Yes?” called Valencia. “Who is it?”

There was a long pause. “Imperial Affairs, Uniquities Division,” said a voice from the other side.

Those four words gave away a lot. The devil didn’t have all that much knowledge of current affairs, and by a devil’s standard, ‘current’ was measured in decades. The content of the message was in the voice that said it, the tone placed on the words, and the emotion it carried. It was command, mingled with fear and anticipation. The voice was a man’s voice, slightly harsh, almost certainly not the sort of person that they would use for delicate negotiations or diplomacy. It wasn’t enough for a full assessment of the situation, but it did shift the probabilities toward the less favorable outcomes.

Valencia had no idea what Uniquities was, nor did the devil have any helpful knowledge on the matter.

“Can you give me a second to get dressed?” asked Valencia. In her voice there was no imperfection to give anything away. She could control her pitch and tone precisely, and the part she was playing was close enough to who she really was anyway. There was no response, but the second was granted. “Okay,” she said, standing from her chair and scooping up the gun to toss it into the bedroom. She walked toward the door, trying to think about the possibilities. It wasn’t likely that they wanted a negotiation, but part of negotiation was getting the other party to the negotiating table. The key would be to throw them off balance first, get them out of their war footing, and from there she could see how things developed.

“Who did you say it was?” asked Valencia, standing next to the door, leaning on it slightly. She looked at the peephole, but it was black, covered by something from the other side. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Imperial Affairs, Uniquities Division,” said the same voice, in nearly the same tone. Perhaps some of the fear was dropping away, replaced by frustration and confusion. There was still anticipation though. That was worrying. “Open the door, please.”

“Mom said I wasn’t supposed to,” said Valencia. She pitched her voice just a bit higher, playing up her youth, and added in the smallest hint of sing-song. Perhaps they wouldn’t catch it, but it was meant to convey that she didn’t quite understand the severity of the situation.

“We’re coming in,” said the voice, with a note of finality.

Valencia stepped back from the door, then slightly to the side so she wouldn’t be directly in the line of fire. She had briefly thought that they would kick the door in, but no, they had authority on their side, and the door was unlocked with the hotel’s master key. She watched as the knob was slowly turned and the door was pushed open. No one was visible, but that wasn’t much of a surprise; she’d have done the same, staying out of view.

Her breathing was coming a little faster now, and her heart was beating more rapidly. This was all entirely under her control; she was a young girl in over her head, maybe not an innocent in whatever parts of the story they knew, but definitely in over her head. She would have to spin some innocuous cover story, but she didn’t really doubt her ability to do that. If she could become a naive little girl they thought they had trapped, all the better. She would be able to feed them whatever information she pleased.

The problem was with what came after. Petty thieves weren’t usually checked over for entads by a warder, but if it was an imperial operation with plenty of funding behind it, that would be standard operating procedure, just to make sure a prisoner couldn’t turn into mist the moment their backs were turned, or swap places with their guard, or a thousand other possibilities that could only be accounted for by identifying everything magical and taking it.

A man in matte-gray armor stepped into the room, sweeping his rifle from side to side, lowering it slightly as the barrel passed over Valencia. There were others behind him, dressed the same. The armor was known to her: it was shimmerplate, produced by a singular entad in the empire’s possession, the armor produced in bulk and revocable at the will of the entad’s owner. It had been used in the Battle of Marshwind, Valencia distantly recalled. Her gun, sitting on the bed, wouldn’t be too effective unless she were to exclusively shoot them in the head, and even then, the first man in wore a helmet of a different style. The hands were unarmored too, which was another weakness she could use.

“Just a girl,” the man from Uniquities said to others, who were mostly out of view. He kept his weapon up and at the ready. The words were dismissive, which was promising. There were a handful of the mortal species easily mistaken for human, but he’d seen the fear in her eyes and reduced her down to nothing more than her age and gender.

“W-who are you?” asked Valencia. She was shaking now, with dilated pupils, giving every display of fear the devil knew, hoping to disarm him and engender sympathy. She internally debated whether or not to wet herself, but his reaction to that was too hard to predict. Sympathy and guilt would be good, disgust and embarrassment, less so.

“Ellis, you’re up,” said the man, pulling back slightly and ignoring Valencia’s question.

A woman, also wearing shimmerplate, slipped into the room. She was wearing an armored pouch slung over the armor, and from it she began to pull a monocle on a chain.

“Please don’t hurt me!” Valencia screamed. She covered her head with her hands, a defensive reaction that wouldn’t do much good against the rifle, and scrambled to the side, through the door to the bedroom. It was as natural a progression from anxiety to full panic as she could manage, given short notice.

“Freeze!” shouted the man as she moved. He had snapped his rifle up to track her, but he didn’t shoot.

All of the signs of fear and distress became real once Valencia allowed the pieces of the devil to slip from her reservoir, and in a brief moment of blind panic she almost forgot the reason she’d done it. She quickly killed a demon with one of her tendrils and shoved his essence through her rending maw. The fear didn’t quite wash away, but it became a manageable thing, compartmentalized as something that would be inefficient in the coming fight. There was no tremor from her nerves, no flood of panicked indecision, just cold calm and a tiny bit of excitement at being turned loose -- and Valencia honestly didn’t know whether that was coming from her, or from the demon.

She stopped, gun drawn, and tried to think around the demon’s instincts toward grievous violence.

Killing was something the Death Eaters did. Harry Potter never used the Killing Curse, not even at the end, because he was good and pure and knew that killing was wrong. Mary had said that killing was wrong, but she had also said that sometimes it was necessary, and this seemed like one of those moments, if ever there was one. But Mary had also said that independence was important, and making big decisions like whether to kill people or not seemed like it was part of that. Valencia didn’t want to kill anyone.

None of that thinking took too much time.

She popped out of the room and shot the man with the rifle in his hand, causing him to curse and let go. As he backed away, Valencia’s second shot hit the warder, striking her in the hand that held her monocle. Valencia ducked back into the bedroom and laid herself flat on the floor. She had angled herself as she fell so she could see out of the door, her angle not toward the front door, but toward the glass door of the balcony. The glass was clean and reflective, visible between the legs of the chairs, and Valencia could just barely make out the people moving at the other end of the long room.

A soldier in shimmerplate, taking cover behind the doorframe, fired into the hotel room. Valencia waited quietly for him to finish; the sound was deafening, louder than her own pistol, but the demon knew how to ignore the pain in her ears and how to fight without the use of sound. The gun did nothing, naturally; Grak had set up velocity wards to slow down bullets coming into the hotel room. They didn’t have enough penetrating power to so much as pierce the gypsum of the walls, nevermind flesh.

There was silence for a moment, followed by conversation that Valencia was too deafened to hear much of. She watched the reflections moving in the door, concentrating, and trying to anticipate what they would do next. Don’t kill them. She was worried that it would happen when she was simply following the demon’s instincts, because killing would come more naturally than trying to disable or disarm.

Valencia saw movement in the reflection, the swing of a hand making an underhand lob. She was moving before it even came into the room, up from the floor and switching her gun to her left hand. She shot out the window and grabbed what they’d tossed, recognizing it only belatedly as a grenade, and threw it out the shattered balcony door, using the momentum of a twirl that took her back into the bedroom. She’d been exposed for only a fraction of a second, but still counted herself lucky that she hadn’t been shot.

The grenade exploded out in the air, projecting off-white gas in a starburst that was quickly swept away by the wind around the Pit.

Non-lethal. It was hard to know whether that was because they didn’t want to kill her, or because they were worried about killing civilians in the rooms around them with errant shrapnel.

There was a mirror in the bedroom, set on top of a dresser, and Valencia drove her elbow into it, breaking it. Her slender fingers picked up a broken piece and brought it to the door, sliding it out with one hand while her gun was held in the other. She had a grip that might have been awkward for someone without so much raw skill with weaponry, using her thumb on the trigger and her fingers holding the back of the gun.

The door into the hotel room was clear. She had no illusions that they had given up; it was far more likely that they were in conference, making a plan. So far as they knew, she was a single target in a heavily warded room, with wards they couldn’t see without their warder. Valencia wasn’t sure how much information the warder had gotten, if any. Had she seen enough to tell them where the wards were?

Valencia didn’t have to wait long until someone poked their head out from behind the front door. It was the warder, trying once again to see what they were dealing with. Valencia aimed with the mirror, put the maximum amount of pressure she could put on the trigger without firing the gun, and then held her breath, waiting for the right moment. When the warder moved over to scan more of the room, Valencia shot her in the monocle.

She’d intended to hit the edge of it, hoping to destroy the warder’s ability to see magic without actually killing the woman. With the kick of the gun and the awkward angle of the mirror, it was hard to say what had actually happened. By the time Valencia could see properly again, the warder had either moved or been dragged out of the way. Valencia sat quietly, mirror out, gun pointed at the door, waiting. She suppressed her feelings of confusion and fear as much as she could.

The gas grenade was gnawing at the back of her mind. That they shot at her indicated intent to kill, but the gas grenade said otherwise. There were conflicting possibilities about what it meant, and she didn’t know the answer. The demon she was using was -- or had been, since it was dead now -- an old and powerful one, but without much exposure to the surface world since the time of the Apocalypse Demon. What her assailants were actually thinking was beyond her, no matter how good she would be at killing them.

A man in shimmerplate with dark-brown hair matted beneath his helmet stepped forward, crouching low to the ground and moving in. Valencia shot him in his hand, because she didn’t want to shoot him in the head. She watched through the mirror in dismay as he was completely unaffected. The knowledge came at once, barely needing to be processed once she saw in the mirror that the bullet was lying on the ground, undeformed. He wasn’t an ordinary soldier: he was a still mage.

Valencia ducked back behind the door, holding her shard of mirror in one hand and gun in the other. She switched her grip so that she was holding it normally, then backed up two steps and aimed directly at the door. The gun was non-functional against a still mage, which was likely why they’d sent him in. To kill a still mage required overwhelming force, void weaponry, chemical or biological attacks, or the right kind of magic. All those were in short supply.

She waited for him to come into view, then fired the pistol twice, hitting him in the face. The bullets lost their velocity at once and fell to the ground, leaving him unaffected. He had a pistol, but he wasn’t firing at her; a demon’s instincts told her that he had her dead to rights if he wanted to kill her, because there was only so much that you could do in close-quarter combat against a still mage. She could throw the mirror at him and attempt to distract him, but all the methods she had of defending herself were, essentially, kinetic in nature.

There was one last recourse, thanks to Grak.

“You can’t hurt me,” said the still mage. She was having trouble hearing from the gunfire, but she could read lips, and make inferences from the sounds that reached her.

“I can,” said Valencia. Her voice sounded too calm. “I don’t want to, but I can.”

“They want you alive,” he said.

Valencia stayed silent. They had their guns pointed at each other, but he was using his as a threat and a precaution, not threatening her. He’d known that he’d been lying, when he’d said that she couldn’t hurt him.

The problem was that as soon as she was in their custody, she was at their mercy, and it wouldn’t be long until they found out what she was. She could try to explain that she wasn’t actually at risk of possession, but who in the world would believe that? Mary had laid out a plan for how to prove it, but it would still take a leap of faith, and everyone who knew what a non-anima was would know that letting them talk could be dangerous. They would have a skin mage check her for tattoos, or a warder check her for entads, and either one would immediately know that something wasn’t right. Then they would most likely kill her.

“This is over,” said the still mage. He came toward Valencia with an outstretched hand, ready to stop her in place. It was possible that he would kill her immediately, without even meaning to. People could fight back against a still mage’s touch, but so far as magic was concerned, she had virtually no will at all. If he pushed hard on her, expecting resistance, he might just murder her on accident when he found none.

Valencia backed up as he came closer, mindful of where his pistol was pointed. Her steps were carefully measured to place her just where she needed to be.

“Please, don’t,” said Valencia. She had a demon, not a devil, so that plea was as genuine as could be, all her own. He kept coming.

When they were positioned exactly where she wanted them to be, he lunged at her, grabbing for her wrist. When his hand hit the ward, she was there to grab it, pulling it through even as it changed color, even as he let out an inhuman scream of pain. If he’d had her clarity of focus, perhaps he might have been able to use still magic to stop himself, but still magic took a mindset, and there were limits to how much pain that mindset could tolerate.

The ward was an annihilation ward, set against blood magic.

He fired his gun, as she thought he might, but she’d been spinning as she drew him in, and narrowly dodged it, thanks only to a demon’s situational awareness, reflexes, and speed, all of which might not have been enough except that his attention had been focused on grabbing her, maintaining his aim.

She stopped him from going all the way through the ward by slamming her forearm into his neck and pushing him back and away. His leg had gone through as he’d tried to find his balance, and the entirety of his arm as well, the blood disappearing from them as it passed the ward. The term for it was microvacuum, and the clamping shut of arteries and veins in response to it caused incredible damage. Blood would be rushing to fill the emptied limbs, dropping blood pressure in the body in an instant.

The still mage lost consciousness and fell backward, slamming his head against the carpeted floor.

Valencia stepped forward and checked for a pulse with two fingers on his throat. She found it immediately, and the demon’s ability to focus entirely on the task at hand prevented her from giving a sigh of relief.

“Your still mage needs medical attention!” she shouted out into the hotel room.

She eyed the balcony of the hotel room. She could run forward, across the shattered glass, and jump over the edge, catching herself by her fingertips so that she could drop to the balcony below. Done as a series of drops and catches, she could descend down to street level in a matter of seconds. Then she would be on her own, left wondering what happened to the others, with only Mary’s pre-arranged lines of communication left to them. That was if there weren’t armed men waiting for her to come down, or people stationed in the room below.

There was silence from the hallway.

She wondered what they were going to try next. The demon’s knowledge came up, unbidden, and she clamped it down. She didn’t want to fight and she didn’t want to kill. She just wanted to go to Hogwarts and be a witch, was that so much to ask? She wanted to have happy, light-hearted adventures with her friends, not … this.

She held her shard of mirror, watching the door to the hallway. There was no one there. They probably thought that the still mage was dead, which meant that it was time to try something new.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone!” shouted Valencia. “I don’t want to kill! Please!” She felt the urge to cry, but that was something within her control for the time being, so she decided not to. Crying could compromise her combat effectiveness.

“Surrender!” a voice finally said from the hallway. It was one she hadn’t heard before, male but much higher, without the same harshness or tone of command.

“I can’t!” shouted Valencia. She tried to think about the words she’d practiced with Mary. It was tempting to jettison the demon, but she might still need it to climb down, and the delay might be enough that she would die. “It’s complicated.”

There was a pause from the hallway. “I’m coming in,” the man said. “Don’t shoot!”

Valencia watched with her mirror held in one hand. She had her pistol gripped to fire backward, and pointed right at him. He didn’t look like a soldier, but he was wearing the shimmerplate, which encased a much slimmer build. His hands were empty and held out in front of him, non-threatening.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “You shot first.” His words were distant, drowned out a bit by the whining in her ears, and she could only comprehend because she could see his lips.

“Louder, please,” she said. “Ears aren’t working right.”

“We’ll get a healer in,” he replied, voice raised.

Valencia felt her heart sink at those words. A healer would notice the same thing she really needed people to not notice. “I need time to explain,” she said. She glanced down at the still mage. He was pale, but breathing.

“My name is Jorge,” said the man. He wasn’t handsome, but there was something compelling about his features. She thought that he looked a bit like she imagined Fred or George would look, but with curly black hair instead of red. “Do we have time?”

Valencia looked at the body. He wasn’t going to die, but he did need medical attention. A bigger worry was that he would wake up. She needed to keep one eye on the mirror and the other on the body. If he started to regain consciousness, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do about it.

“We have a little time,” she said. Jorge, he had called himself. “My name is Valencia.”

“You said you had a complicated situation,” he said.

She had gone over this with Mary, and when they’d talked about it, she’d had a devil in her. It wasn’t the same as being suffused by the instincts and knowledge of one, but she could remember how they had decided to phrase it, and simply repeat those words back.

“I have a condition that causes me to present as non-anima,” said Valencia. She watched Jorge’s face through the mirror. He’d raised his eyebrows, just a little, but he was otherwise impassive. Valencia again had the urge to switch to a devil that could lay the man bare, but that would mean giving up the possibility of a quick descent down the side of the building. “I know how that sounds. I can prove that I’m not non-anima, but you’d have to trust me.” She hadn’t liked saying it like that, but Mary and the devil had thought it was for the best. The idea was to strip her of the title and the stigma as quickly as possible. She was non-anima, without a soul, but that truth was less compelling. “I know how asking for trust sounds too.”

Jorge stood still for a moment, thinking and weighing.

“Is your warder okay?” asked Valencia.

“Fine,” replied Jorge. “Healed, by now, though her monocle was destroyed. On purpose?”

“I couldn’t let her see me,” said Valencia.

Jorge gave a slight nod. “Tell me how you’ll prove you’re not non-anima.”

“I can kill demons and devils,” she said. “You can watch on infernoscope. I can also switch between a demon’s skills and a devil’s. You can watch that too.” Mary had used the word ‘oscillate’. “Your still mage is going to wake up, soon.” In fact, he was already stirring slightly, hand twitching. He wouldn’t be too much of a threat, given the damage to his arm and leg, plus the amount of blood he’d lost. “I don’t want to kill him or you, but I don’t think I have a choice.”

“Do you think he would live if you tied him up and held him hostage?” asked Jorge. His face was still impassive, as though he was talking about the weather.

“I would have to drop the gun,” she said.

She didn’t like not knowing what Jorge was thinking. Whatever it had been before, the assault on the hotel room had turned into a negotiation. She was repeating words that she’d practiced beforehand, trying to sound like she imagined Mary would, but it wasn’t enough.

She let the demon go, allowing the pieces of him to flow out of her reservoir. She took the devil at once, but there was a small moment when she was back to simply being Valencia, scared and confused, and the shard of mirror started shaking in her hand. She almost fired the gun, because her grip on it had been so tight that she was only a hair away from shooting.

As the devil’s essence went through her maw and became useful pieces for her to take as she pleased, she got a new sense of Jorge and his place in the order of all things.

He was negotiating with her, but he wasn’t actually a negotiator. He was almost certainly more important than anyone else involved with this mission, and he was very consciously sticking his neck out in talking to her. With a devil’s insights, she could see it written on him; he was curious. She didn’t understand how someone like that could be put in charge of an assault like this -- the devil didn’t understand it either. And it wasn’t that he was merely intrigued by her claim, the whole reason he’d put himself in harm’s way in the first place was that there was something he didn’t understand. He was the sort of man who would get himself shot just to learn something new.

He was the sort of man that devils lived for.

“You actually want to know,” said Valencia. “You want to know whether I’m telling the truth.”

“Do you really not know what the Uniquities Division is?” he asked.

“He’s waking up,” said Valencia, looking down at the man who was, technically, her hostage. The still mage was stirring, recovering from his injuries. She had less of an understanding of his physical state, with the demon gone.

“Take me as hostage instead?” asked Jorge.

Valencia thought on that. He sounded entirely sincere, which meant that he was a phenomenal liar, or he was being sincere. The fact that she already had a gun trained on his head made the gesture slightly less meaningful, but Valencia didn’t want the still mage to die, and she really didn’t want to have to go another round with him. She didn’t think she would win.

“Okay,” she said. “Come into the bedroom. I’m going to keep this pistol trained on you while you pull the still mage out, then you call for one of the other soldiers to take him into the hallway and close the door behind them. If there’s any sign of foul play, I’ll shoot you in the head and then make my escape.” She stopped and frowned at the words that had come out of her mouth. She’d issued the threat because the devil thought that it would work as manipulation against him. “I wouldn’t actually shoot you in the head, I would shoot to wound or distract and hope that you were okay.” (This, too, was said with a devil’s practiced intonation and phrasing, the better to portray her as a competent but troubled young girl, layered with a bit of tantalization. If he was the curious sort, then he was liable to be curious about why she’d changed her answer, and that worked in her favor too.)

They accomplished the exchange slowly and carefully, with little fanfare. The still mage was picked up by a large man in shimmerplate, possibly the muscle of the group, though Valencia had no idea how many members they had -- she’d counted five so far.

“So,” said Jorge. “Tell me about yourself.”

He’d meant it as a joke, but Valencia only realized that with the devil’s insights, and filtered through that lens, it wasn’t quite the same. The nonchalance and humor were meant to put her at ease, as was the faint smile on his face. That didn’t mean that his motives were impure, or that he was going to betray her as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but it made her like him a little less, because there were elements of deliberation and purpose in what he was doing. It made them feel fake, even though she didn’t think they were.

“Can you get an infernoscope?” asked Valencia. “I can prove what I’m saying.”

Jorge hesitated, then nodded. “I don’t see how that could be an issue, while we talk.” He walked to the door of the bedroom, then called out to the hallway, giving a command, not making a request, she noted. He was someone with a measure of authority, though he wielded it awkwardly. If she could actually convince him, there might be a chance that this would work out for her.

“Why are you here?” asked Valencia, as soon as he was done. She’d changed her body language so as to take the initiative from him. People were programmed in such a way that they would rarely start talking over you unless they were truly prepared for it. All you really needed to do was look like you were about to speak. She still saw a moment of hesitation in his eyes, but he did allow that line of questioning.

“Do you know what the Uniquities Division is?” he asked.

“No,” said Valencia. The devil she had just killed had more up-to-date information on the surface world, but playing at ignorance was beneficial in this exchange, and it wasn’t technically a lie.

“We were meant to be rapid response,” said Jorge. “There are some matters that cross national borders, which need to be dealt with swiftly and decisively. That’s Uniquities.”

“What did you expect to find here?” asked Valencia.

“You,” said Jorge. “Maybe your compatriots too, but eyewitness accounts figured them for dead. I wouldn’t put money on that though.” He shifted slightly in his seat. “You haven’t told me how you came by the peculiar quality of presenting as a non-anima, nor how you were given the ability to kill infernals across the boundaries of the planes.”

“You’re thinking that being non-anima isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive with being able to kill at a distance,” said Valencia.

Jorge raised an eyebrow. “What did you get that from?”

“The doubt in your voice, the way you joined those clauses, the minute movements of your facial muscles,” replied Valencia. “I’m using a devil’s powers right now.”

“And the devil is dead?” asked Jorge.

Valencia nodded. She watched his face. He was trying to hide it, but he didn’t believe her. He wanted to believe her, but -- “I know it sounds too good to be true,” she said.

“I don’t believe in that expression,” said Jorge.

Valencia felt herself warming to him. She had thought that it was too good to be true, when it was first happened, because her life until that point had been spent bound and often gagged, treated less like a child and more like an experiment -- which, in point of fact, was what she had been. Juniper Smith was the first good thing that had happened to her. Why would she have believed that anyone would treat her well, until it had actually happened? Mary had said something to the same effect as Jorge, that we shouldn’t believe or disbelieve things on the basis of how they make us feel.

“Do you know what happened to my friends?” asked Valencia.

“They hijacked the ship, piloted it toward a very dangerous fortress, and from that point it’s not clear,” said Jorge. “We have two witnesses, but one is exhausted and the other a bit addled, and we didn’t recover them until a few hours ago. We think your, ah, friends might have made it to the fortress using an entad, some combination of entads, or other magical abilities, though what happened after that is anyone’s guess.”

“Thank you for telling me,” said Valencia. “If they’re all dead --” The devil had been about to make a joke of it, but Valencia stopped herself. She was leaning heavily on those skills, which sometimes led her down paths she didn’t like. “How likely is it that you’d be able to protect me?”

“It depends on the circumstances,” said Jorge. He looked uncomfortable for a moment. “Two hours ago, my superior at Uniquities left for Cranberry Bay, chasing down a lead he thought might be connected to this case and a few others. If that bears fruit, he plans to use you as leverage, in which case it will be easy to protect you. If it turns out that he finds nothing, then you’re still leverage, but it’s much less certain. A demon killer seems like something that Uniquities would like to have on hand though.” He leaned forward slightly. “You said that you can reach down into the hells, could you kill a demon here on Aerb?”

“I don’t know,” said Valencia. She moved one of her tendrils away from a target, through the layers of hell, until it was up beside her, in the same room as them. She didn’t think that she could hurt a person -- she hadn’t been able to touch them down in the hells -- but a demon? “Probably.”

“They’re rare,” said Jorge. “But when one breaches through, it’s always a hell of a time. If what’s on offer is you providing a weapon against demonkind, well, then yes, I think it’s safe to say that I can protect you.”

“I don’t want to be a weapon,” said Valencia. The devil’s instincts were screaming. It was the wrong thing to say. There were, possibly, avenues of attack that started with something similar to voicing that desire, ways of playing the victim or seeming weak, but Valencia was simply voicing what she felt, not attempting manipulation.

“What do you want to be?” asked Jorge.

“Hermione Granger,” said Valencia.

Jorge nodded as a thoughtful look crossed his face. “And who is that?”

Chapter 29 - Contract

I sat there, staring at Finch, trying to figure out my options. Killing him was certainly an option, but I didn’t actually know what he wanted, and it almost seemed like we were on the same side.

“Carrots,” I said. “What kind are you offering?” I was implicitly admitting that most of what he’d said was true, but I felt that was about the point we’d come to.

“Protection from the consequences of your many crimes is what we’ll start with,” he said. “For Amaryllis, we’re offering her support in reclaiming a place in Anglecynn. Nothing on the books.” I glanced at the wax recording. “Sometimes these recordings have problems,” he said with a shrug.

“You’ll forgive me for having a shaky understanding of the empire, but I wouldn’t have thought that directly interfering with the monarchical structure of one of your member nations would be allowed,” I said.

“You’re looking out for her,” said Finch with a nod. “Loyal servant? Or lover?”

“Casual acquaintances,” I replied.

Finch chuckled. “Whoever you are, there would be a place for you. Head of security, possibly, or something more. That would be up to her, but it would be a better life than running and hiding, giving fake names to everyone you meet, and sleeping with one eye open.”

“I’m pretty sure that if I was head of security for a princess returning to a kingdom that gave its best shot at killing her, I would end up sleeping with both eyes open,’ I said.

“Fair point,” said Finch with a shrug. “I think it’s pretty clear I don’t know you, however much I’ve been following the recent twists and turns in your career with interest. I’m fairly sure you weren’t a known associate of the princess before her fall from grace, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

“I wasn’t,” I said. I had no idea who I was before then, and wasn’t really keen to find out. “You and I are almost on equal ground, because I don’t really understand what Uniquities is.” Amaryllis had drawn out an org chart of the Empire of Common Cause, and while Imperial Affairs was clear enough, she hadn’t said too much about the Uniquities, aside from calling it a bloated mess.

“The Empire of Common Cause was founded in order to get everyone on the same page, as much as that was possible,” said Finch. “The goal was fixing long-standing structural problems between the various governments of the world, or at least those that would play ball. It was, by design, a slow-moving juggernaut of an organization, hard to change, with a tendency to gum up at the slightest provocation. Years down the road, some people began to think that was idiotic, because there were problems between the nations of the world that cropped up out of nowhere and needed to be responded to as quickly as humanly possible, without regard for borders. Unique situations. Uniquities.”

And now they’re taking part in a battle for ‘the heart of Anglecynn’ and trying to steal a tuung princess from us, presumably in order to do the same thing we wanted to do. “So let me guess,” I said. “Uniquities gets set up for crisis response, with a lot of latitude in how they respond, because some of the things they’d be going up against would come completely out of left field. New exclusions, monsters from the dark, entads fucking things up … that sort of thing. Uniquities is a hammer meant for only a small number of nails, but it’s one of very, very few hammers available to the empire, so it starts getting used for everything. Rapid response means minimal oversight, or maybe just oversight that doesn’t happen until years or decades down the line, which means that your division is free to expand as quickly as your budget allows.”

“So you are familiar with Uniquities,” said Finch with a small smile.

I was, because I had built it, or something close enough that I thought the whole division was probably cribbed from my notes. I’d used something very similar in my Patchwork Republic campaign, though it hadn’t been called Uniquities, it had been called the Department for Response to Extreme Conditions. This was shortened to just ‘Conditions’, which led to Reimer calling their agents ‘conditioner men’.

“And now you’ve expanded into interfering with the governmental processes of member nations,” I said.

“Not officially,” said Finch, with a small smile. “Unofficially ... there are very few mechanisms within imperial law that allow the empire to protect itself as an institution.”

“Another nail you find your hammer coming down on,” I said.  Jesus fucking Christ the lack of oversight must be staggering. The closest parallel on Earth would be what, J. Edgar Hoover’s time at the FBI? And that came crashing down, didn’t it?  “And the tuung?” I asked.

“A separate issue,” said Finch. “We’d like to know where she is, naturally, but also what you were planning with her.”

She’s the next door down from the hotel room you’re planning to raid. I wondered how they had missed that. Grak had rented that room using his fake name, so maybe that was it. When I tried to think about things from Finch’s perspective, maybe Grak didn’t even come into the picture until he boarded the Down and Out, since he hadn’t been there for the fight in Boastre Vino. And if you found one suite, why go searching for another? We’d only gotten two because we wanted the tuung separate from us, and only had Grak check in at the second one out of basic operational security. There were still sure to be ways to connect the dots, but given how fast things were moving (still hard not to think of it as two months), maybe that would come later … meaning a limited window of opportunity to negotiate, if it wasn’t too late already.

“I don’t know what you think happened, but I didn’t kidnap her,” I said. “She negotiated for her own extraction.”

Finch eyed me. “Negotiated with the princess of Anglecynn?”

“No,” I said. I could already feel myself cringing in anticipation of saying it. “We call ourselves the Council of Arches.”

Finch stared at me.

“I’m not the one who chose the name,” I said.

“The name isn’t -- you’re telling me that you belong to a major international organization that I’ve never heard of?” His eyes were slightly wide. He was incredulous, but not completely disbelieving.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “Look, I need to get back to my”—wife—“to Amaryllis. If you’re not going to arrest me, then we can talk after she’s had the baby. Most likely, you’re going to have to talk to her, not me.”

“She wasn’t pregnant when she took the fall,” said Finch. “Do you mind explaining to me what happened?”

“It’s complicated,” I said. I stood up from my chair. “It’s also personal.”

“Where do we stand?” asked Finch, not moving. “What response is your princess going to give?”

“If you wanted to give us a sweetheart deal, this wasn’t the way to do it,” I said. “Ambushing us in the hospital while we’re trying to get through the premature end of a long pregnancy --”

“Not that long, given she wasn’t pregnant in Boastre Vino,” said Finch. “And you do understand that your Council of Arches is responsible for more than a hundred deaths in the last month, that I know of, right? Including a major international incident less than twenty-four hours ago, and a different major international incident twenty-four hours before that? This is as nice as I’m willing to play, which is pretty fucking nice, all things considered.” He looked at the record, which was still spinning, carefully lifted the needle up, then grabbed the record and snapped it in half.

“Fickle things,” I said. “Always breaking.”

Finch nodded. “I’ll let you know the results of our raid in Headwater, once I get word. I have permission from the hospital staff to create a number of wards around Amaryllis’ room, to make sure that she can’t escape.” I politely failed to mention that we had two warders on the team, plus the teleportation key we had stashed in Fenn’s glove, which I was pretty sure he didn’t know anything about. “We’re going to have the exits covered. You could make a run for it, especially if you’ve got the firepower I think you do, but she’s not going anywhere.”

“We can’t stay in this hospital too long,” I said. “I’m warning you now.”

“Why?” asked Finch. He didn’t look pleased.

“Time-sensitive business elsewhere,” I said. “I can’t say more, not until I trust you, which I don’t. You had better pray that things turned out okay in Headwater.” I left without another word.

◆◆◆

When I came back into the hospital room, there were a lot more people moving around than there had been before. Grak had come in, and he was beside Amaryllis, holding her hand and talking to her in a low voice. Fenn was off to one side, holding the staff with one hand and biting a nail with the other. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to have many nails left when this was all said and done. Bethel stood close to the staff, watching impassively. I went to them first.

“What’s the word?” I asked.

“Random medical terms being thrown around,” said Fenn. “The fuck does effacement even mean?”

“Thinning of the cervix,” I said.

“Well, she’s kind of pissed about it,” said Fenn. “Not the effacement, the whole thing.”

Amaryllis locked eyes with me and limply waved a hand, calling me over.

“Have fun,” said Fenn. “I might need a stiff drink.”

I came over to Amaryllis. The doctor was by her legs, which were propped up, but her hospital gown was down. A short green-skinned nurse pulled up a chair for me to sit in, and with a start, I realized that she was crantek, which was probably not coincidence.

“Status?” she asked. She was sweating slightly, enough that her hair was damp. “And bones.”

I started burning through my bones immediately, and she relaxed immediately.

“What are you doing?!” asked the doctor, standing up from where he was sitting. “Healing magic at this stage --”

“Not healing, mental fortitude,” said Amaryllis. “Helps. We’re not idiots.”

The doctor backed away slightly, frowning at her. “Bone magic?” he asked, looking at me.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. He was probably wondering where the bones were.

Confusion crossed his face, then he returned to his seat and entered a whispered conversation with one of the two nurses.

“Status,” Amaryllis repeated. She sounded very tired. As I watched she looked like she was shifting her hips, trying to get comfortable. I saw that there were a lot of pillows beneath her, which must have been from previous attempts at getting her in a position that was a little easier.

“He knows almost everything,” I said. We’d set up a numbering scheme, with our copious time in the chamber, but I was struggling to remember while I fed her WIS and carefully kept track of which bones I was burning. “Um, two, five, six, nine, ten,” I said. The list currently went to twelve, starting with my peculiar game power and ending with Bethel, but we were pretty sure that it was going to get longer. “Apparently an operation is underway to grab eight, and I don’t know how that’s going to work for them or for her.”

“I hope she fucking kills them all,” said Amaryllis, seething in momentary pain.

“Breathe,” said Grak. “Try your best to stay calm.” He glared at me like it was my fault somehow, even though I was the one burning through my own bones in order to help her keep her cool. I increased the rate slightly.

“Fuckers,” said Amaryllis, sounding slightly defeated. She lolled her head to the side and looked me in the eyes. “They want something.”

“Partnership,” I said. I glanced over at the doctor and the nurses. My attention returned to Amaryllis as she grunted. Her eyes were closed, and she held out her hand, which I took.

“What kind?” she asked, after the moment had passed.

“They want to back you in your return to Anglecynn,” I said.

Amaryllis looked at me with slightly glazed eyes. “More,” she said. It took me a moment to realize that she meant bone magic, and I increased the rate of burn again. I was going to need to go into my soul soon. She regained some sharpness to her expression. “Uniquities?”

“You said they were bloated,” I replied. “More bloated than you thought, maybe.”

“The black budget,” said Amaryllis. She sighed slightly as she shifted. “For infohazards.”

“We should talk about this after,” I said. “You need to concentrate on labor.”

“I might be dead later,” said Amaryllis.

“It’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to die,” said the doctor. I aspired to someday be as cool under pressure as he was. He was barely batting an eye at the weird shit. “And I agree that strength and will would best be conserved.”

Amaryllis nodded at that, and let out another small cry of pain.

◆◆◆

It took a while.

I’d expected as much, because I had done a fair amount of my own reading, but I hadn’t expected to feel so exhausted by it. My role was, apparently, to sit beside Amaryllis and use bone magic on her so that she could endure the mental aspects of giving birth a little bit easier. Most of what was exhausting was just the emotional component of the thing, seeing Amaryllis in pain, watching her struggle and not really being able to do anything for her. It reminded me too much of sitting in the hospital with Arthur, hoping that he would start doing better, and not being able to meaningfully affect the outcome.

There were very few ways that this could go wrong for Amaryllis, but I was worried that we’d get a second curveball. Even if Amaryllis was fine, the real question was whether Solace would be okay; Fenn brought Bethel over from time to time in order to show what was going on internally, partly just to reassure Amaryllis.

I was worried about complications.

That was how Arthur had died. I mean, he had gotten in a car accident, sure, and then been in a coma, which wasn’t great for you, but how he’d actually died was that he’d had some swelling in the brain (cerebral edema) and they’d done a relatively routine procedure to try to relieve the pressure (something called a ventriculostomy). Arthur’s dad was always the one to explain things to us, usually by e-mail, or in person when we came to visit. He adopted this sad, clinical tone that I sort of found comforting. The tone said, ‘yes, this is scary, but they’re professionals, and they know what they’re doing, they weighed the costs and benefits, but this is what they decided on’. We got an e-mail when he went in for the surgery, and nothing afterward. He’d wanted to tell us in person. There were complications, he said, and all that preparation and education had come to nothing.

That’s what I was thinking about, as I sat next to her. I was waiting for the moment the nurse would point something out, and the doctor would calmly deal with it, explaining things as he went, not showing any panic as things got scarier and riskier, and then they would be doing chest compressions or something, and eventually it would be made clear to me that she had died.

I was ready to step in. I had blood to give her, and if the worst happened, I could replace her soul’s image of her body with the backup I had in storage, the one from before she’d been pregnant (or at least, detectably pregnant, since it had been taken just after the ritual had completed). That was about all I could do though, which left me feeling powerless. There was a skill called Medicine, which I didn’t have, but Amaryllis had been vehement in arguing that the ability to respec -- if I even could -- was incredibly valuable, and the skill slots were even more valuable. I itched to do it anyway, worried that there were signs I wasn’t catching, or that it would take too much to unlock and be useless even after I had it.

The nurse started telling Amaryllis to push. Each one was accompanied by straining on her part, trembling knees and clenched teeth. She was sweating now, sometimes taking a few moments to drink water offered to her by Grak, but mostly not talking.

“I just want it to be done,” she said at one point, sounding utterly defeated.

The doctor stayed between her legs, using his hands to make sure that everything was going well. He gave the command that she should push, and she seemed to hate him for it, even as she dutifully pushed.

“You’re doing well,” said the doctor. “The head is almost out.”

I wasn’t sure how much time was passing, but the birth seemed to go on forever, and also somehow take absolutely no time at all.

The doctor asked for my help, and gave me instructions, telling me to hold Amaryllis’ leg, pushing it to help give a better angle for her hips. I had a view that I hadn’t particularly wanted, and watched the doctor use his hands to touch the green skin of Solace’s head, pushing away flesh and helping things along.

Once her head was past, Solace came out easily, slipping free with a gush of yellow and red fluid. Nonnatus clipped the umbilical cord with something like a clothespin, cut it, then handed her over to the crantek nurse, then returned to looking after Amaryllis, who was lying back on the bed looking like an exhausted but victorious warrior. I heard the doctor say placenta, which I had completely forgotten about, but --

“Come on,” I heard the nurse say. “Give me a squawk.”

I got up from where I was and went over to them. Solace was small, tinier than I had expected, preterm and not even a full baby. She looked so small and fragile, and the nurse was moving with fast hands, using a rubber bulb in the baby’s mouth to suck up fluids and bits of human viscera.

“Come on, little one,” said the nurse. Her voice was calm but urgent. “I know you can do it, say something for me, just a little cry.”

I stepped forward. “I need to try something,” I said. It was going to have to be the full body swap, taking the entirety of a body and placing it into Solace’s soul to overwrite the body that was there, so I could heal her into that form. We’d tested enough to confirm that it was limited by available biomatter, but there were ways around that, and --

“It’s okay,” said the nurse, placing a hand on my chest as she continued to look Solace over. “Sometimes they don’t make a noise. She’s fine.”

“She’s … what?” I asked.

“Lungs are working,” said the nurse. I watched as Solace wiggled in the little crib. The nurse used the bulb again, sucking up more from inside Solace’s mouth. “She’s not making noise, but sometimes they don’t. It’ll come, in time.”

I felt my racing heart begin to slow. When I looked at Solace, I couldn’t get over how small she was, her tiny fingers and toes, her wrinkly skin, her scrunched-up face. Her eyes were closed, but sometimes opened for brief moments, squinting at the light. The nurse was wiping her off with a clean cloth, then swaddled her, wrapping her up and lifting her from the crib.

The nurse brought Solace over to Amaryllis, and Amaryllis cradled her close to her skin.

◆◆◆

I sat on a bench with Fenn outside the hospital room, some time later, after I’d had a chance to wash up. Finch was nowhere to be seen, but there were two men down the hall who definitely didn’t look like they had any business being in a hospital, and Bethel had informed me that wards had been put up around the room, though it was, in her opinion, journeyman work, an opinion that Grak shared.

“I’m glad she has a chance to rest,” said Fenn. She hadn’t said much since the birth. I’d caught her staring off into space a few times.

“We’ll be back to it soon,” I said. “Not much time for rest and relaxation.”

“Yeah,” said Fenn. She was looking at her feet. “Any idea when it will be safe to heal her?”

“I could do it now, if we really wanted to,” I said. “The doctor said a day, maybe more, but if we do, it will take her longer to get back to normal. I took a look at”—I lowered my voice— “her soul, and I think the reason for the rule might be that her body is doing stuff and her soul is lagging behind. Reset the body to the soul’s idea of the body, and you’re basically resetting progress. The suggestion was concentrated spot healing for, um, bits of her that are torn or ruptured, but leave everything else as it is.”

“Humans are so gross,” said Fenn. She gave the floor a little kick. “You know what she said to me?”

“When?” I asked.

“Just after the birth,” said Fenn. “I avoided the worst of it, but I just wanted to give her a ‘hey, good job, glad you’re not dead’.” She cleared her throat. “She said that she wasn’t looking forward to doing that again.”

“Huh,” I said.

“It was a little bit of a joke, but a little bit not,” said Fenn. “It just struck me as … I don’t know, Mary being this unstoppable machine of a woman. Less than an hour after all that and she’s thinking to herself about the next time.” Fenn sighed. “You still want kids?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Doing all that for real someday … not that it wasn’t real, it was, but I’m already sick with anxiety, and Solace isn’t even my child. But someday … not when we’ve got so much shit going on, not when we keep having to put our lives on the line, but someday, yeah.” Unless it has to be like Uther did it, distant from his own children.

“I’d give you a baby, if you really wanted one,” said Fenn. She wasn’t looking at me.

“Fenn,” I said.

“Just sayin’,” said Fenn.

“Fenn,” I said again. “We’re really not at the point where we need to have this discussion, at all.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Fenn. She leaned forward and gripped the edge of the bench. “I’m just saying, if it ever did come to that, where you thought a baby with me would make you more happy than not, I’d lay off the herbs and we’d see what came of it.” She shrugged. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, for obvious reasons, and that’s my decision. I wouldn’t do it on my own, but if it were you … I wouldn’t be averse.” She let out a sigh that had a hitch in it, like she was a step away from tears. She hadn’t been looking at me, but now she looked away, down the hallway.

“We can talk about it, if you want,” I said.

“Valencia,” said Fenn.

As the name left her mouth, a black-haired girl came around the corner. I hadn’t seen her in two months; in the interim, my image of her had reset back to her as she was when we’d first met her, white hair and a white shift. She was incognito though, wearing different clothes than she’d been in when we left her in the hotel room, and except that she was more attractive than average, I’d have been very hard-pressed to say that she was anything but a normal human girl.

She gave us a small little wave, like we hadn’t been wondering whether she was dead or alive.

Three people followed behind her, and one of them was Finch. The human with them was on the tall side, with curly black hair; I noticed with a slight bit of dismay that he was holding Valencia’s copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with his finger stuck between the pages. The woman with them was a vitric in a long dress, bald (as her kind were) and with a serious expression. Her hands were a blue that faded in color going up her arm, which the dress accentuated with blues of its own.

“Hi,” said Valencia, looking between the two of us.

Fenn came forward and wrapped her in a hug. “I missed you, little hooman.”

Valencia returned the hug, closing her eyes and smiling softly. “Did you?” she asked. “I didn’t even think you liked me.”

“Mary talked you up,” said Fenn. She pulled back from the hug, which Valencia broke reluctantly.

She immediately went for a hug from me, which I returned. It was a bit awkward; I had known her for about a week and a half, with two months of interruption. Amaryllis had talked her up to me, too, partly so we could set some ground rules about how we would treat her, and partly to help untangle some of Amaryllis’ complicated feelings on the subject of having a non-anima in the party, which we weren’t really successful at.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” I said. I looked at Finch over my shoulder with a raised eyebrow. That things had, apparently, not gone disastrously wrong in Headwater was a surprise, and that she had been brought to see us without pre-conditions was an even bigger one.

“They shot at me,” said Valencia. “And there was a still mage.” She buried her head in my shoulder. “It was scary.”

I pulled back from her, and again saw that same reluctance she’d shown with Fenn at breaking the hug. “They shot at you?” I asked, looking at Finch.

“She shot first,” said Finch, folding his arms across his chest.

The vitric held out her hand. “Alcida Divona,” she said. “Head of Uniquities. It’s a pleasure to meet your acquaintance.”

I shook her hand, looking her over, wary of the lightning I knew her body contained. “Alcida. You were one of Uther’s Knights.”

She gave me a faint, confused smile. “No,” she said. “I was named after her. She was my grandmother.”

“Oh,” I said. So far as I knew, Raven was the only one of the Knights from a species with a long enough lifespan to still be alive, and she’d been missing for centuries. Vitrics were long-lived though, and it wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest to see one of Uther’s Knights thrust back onto the field of play.

“Jorge Mascar,” said the tall guy. He transferred his book to his other hand, then shook mine. “I’m the one who recovered Valencia.”

“You don’t get kudos for that,” I said. “She was doing fine on her own.”

“He’s nice,” said Valencia, in a chiding tone. I wondered whether or not she was channeling a devil, and how much these people knew about her. They had to have checked her over with a warder, right? Just as a matter of basic not-being-fucking-idiots?

“It’s going to be some time until Amaryllis is ready to talk,” I said.

“We understand,” replied Alcida. “And we apologize for any … unpleasantness.” She studiously didn’t look at Finch when she said that.

“It’s understandable,” I said. “We’re not happy about it, but we understand. And again, Amaryllis is going to be the one you want to talk to, and she’s going to need time, since she just gave birth a few hours ago.”

“Gave birth to a purebred crantek girl, somehow,” said Finch.

“Show respect,” said Alcida. “You’re here by dint of your hard work, but there are ways of doing things when making first contact.” She was staring at me. “We’re going to need to know more about the Council of Arches. From what we can tell, our goals are somewhat aligned. We had planned on recruiting Amaryllis Penndraig, before she was ousted.”

“I do appreciate you coming all this way, presumably at great expense,” I said. “But again, I’m not willing to make discussions without her, and she’s going to need a lot of time before she’s ready to talk shop.”

Amaryllis stepped out of the hospital room, dressed in her immobility plate with the helmet off. She had a sword on one hip and her void pistol on the other. In her hand, she held the dollhouse staff, with the rope around it in elaborate knots. I suspected chicanery and magic, though I wasn’t sure what kind. When Fenn and I had gone out to get some air and time to ourselves, Amaryllis had looked worn out; she’d been asleep, or on the edge of it, with Solace suckling at her breast. Now she looked like she’d spent the last week training for a marathon and was standing at the starting line, ready to run.

“Lady Penndraig,” said Alcida with a small bow. “I am Alcida Divona, head of --”

“I know who you are,” said Amaryllis. “I wrote a brief to the Lost King’s Court and a few other allied polities advising thorough investigation into the handling of finances under your regime. Had I known that Uniquities was engaged in attempts to influence the governing of member nations of the Empire of Common Cause … you understand that many of us would consider that proof that the imperial experiment was a failure, and people would use it as grounds for moving to dissolve the empire, or at the very least, pull out from it with whatever pains that might cause?”

“Would you?” asked Alcida.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “If the empire goes, whatever replaces it will be worse. We’ve seen two interimperiums, and both have been marked by horrors big and small.”

“Then you understand the importance of keeping the empire as a cohesive whole,” said Alcida with a nod. “I read your letter, as you might have guessed I would. I was impressed by your intellect and vigor, more so when I learned that you were a girl of sixteen. And you were right, of course, about how Uniquities looks from the outside, how it’s meant to look.”

Amaryllis gave a faint, vulpine smile. “It does make a bit more sense now. You’re not an incompetent, or an embezzler, just running rogue. And now you’re coming to me to make a deal.”

“Not just with you,” said Alcida. “With the entire Council of Arches.”

Amaryllis stared at her, then raised an eyebrow in my direction. I shrugged.

“You very much appear to be in the same business as we are,” said Alcida. “We have an incomplete picture of what it is you do and have done, but it appears you have need of resources we have on offer, and at least a small amount of overlap in interests. It’s my understanding that you hijacked the Down and Out because you needed a way down in a hurry. If you’d been working with us, you could have borrowed any one of a half dozen methods without the need for an international incident.” She gestured toward Valencia; a curious sort of hand movement that kept her palm pointed toward her. I was pretty sure that was a vitric thing; if you could shoot lightning from your fingers, pointing might be considered rude, even if you weren’t intending to blast someone with it. “If a non-anima --”

“Sorry,” said Jorge, who had stayed silent up to this point. “The term we’re going with is anti-infernal.” Alcida gave him a very calm look that was still somehow withering. In contrast, I saw a very small smile from Valencia.

“If someone like Valencia had been identified in the wild, she would almost certainly have been brought to us, if there were even the slightest pretense that her existence was intraimperial,” said Alcida.

“And Imperial Affairs would simply say that she has the capacity to cross borders, and is therefore intraimperial, under their jurisdiction,” said Amaryllis with a roll of her eyes.

“More likely we’d argue that her ability to reach down into the hells makes her, by definition, imperial business rather than national business,” said Alcida. “And more likely than that, we would hide her away and do our best not to have to answer messy questions about how or why we were allowed to take charge. I very much understand that doesn’t win us points in your favor, however pragmatic it might be.”

“It’s pragmatic only until the point it blows up in your face,” said Amaryllis.

Fenn came up beside me. “Blah, blah, blah, politics,” she whispered.

“We need to have a private meeting,” said Amaryllis. “You have us warded; you can wait outside.”

“They have a warder,” said Finch. “There were wards on the hotel room.”

“Then you’ll have to trust us,” said Amaryllis. “If we don’t want to deal, we’ll tell you before we leave.” She went back into the hospital room without another word, and after I gave a glance back at the people from Uniquities, I followed her.

Grak had changed clothes too, and was back into his armor, with his axe at his hip. He was cradling a swaddled Solace in his good arm. He stood up from his stool when we entered, and gave Valencia a small wave when he saw her. On coming in, Valencia wrapped Amaryllis in a hug and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“More hugs when you’re not in armor, okay?” asked Valencia.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis. “I was very worried about you. You were able to convince them?”

“I was.” Valencia nodded. “Jorge is really wonderful. He got really excited when they brought the infernoscope in, and after that it was very pleasant. I insisted that he come along.”

“Are you doing okay?” I asked Amaryllis. “You seem … really well, actually.”

“Time chamber,” said Bethel, materializing next to her. “I partially reconstructed it inside this room.”

I looked over at Solace. On closer inspection, she did look bigger than before, a little more filled out and proportionate, with fewer wrinkles. “How long?” I asked.

“Not long,” said Amaryllis. “Two weeks.”

“On bed rest,” said Grak. “I was in with her.”

“Okay,” I said. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I wish you’d talked with me first.”

“It was a very confined space,” said Amaryllis. “Even with just Grak it was --”

“She did not enjoy bed rest,” said Grak, folding his arms across his chest.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “Can you ward us, please?”

Grak snorted, but uncrossed his hands and got out his wand.

“How is Solace?” I asked. “Have you tried --”

“One moment,” said Amaryllis, holding up a finger. She waited until Grak was finished. We were five people, one illusion of a person, and a baby in not really all that big of a space. “I hereby call to order the first meeting of the Council of Arches.”

“Oh man, did shit just get real?” asked Fenn. She grinned at me.

“I was going to ask if Bethel had tried talking to Solace through thoughtspeak,” I said.

“She’ll need to be awake for it,” said Bethel. “Newborns spend most of their time sleeping.”

“She’s awake now,” said Grak, looking down at the baby he held in his arm. “Or as awake as she gets.”

“Then I suppose now is as good a time as any,” said Bethel. The staff Fenn was holding split at the bottom, making three little legs. A branch jutted out from the wood, growing swiftly through the air toward Grak. He held out the baby slightly, and the branch touched down gently on her head. Bethel frowned somewhat. “It’s fragmentary, with poor syntax, but there are words,” she said. “Much more than I’ve typically been able to get from babies.”

“Good,” said Amaryllis. “Physically, she’s progressing roughly as fast as I’d expected, meaning slightly faster than human. Spiritually, she’s becoming more cohesive every day, including in ways that don’t seem to be predicated on what she’s taking in from being in the world. I’ve been watching her skills, especially. Things are coming back, a bit piecemeal, but they are.”

“They grow up so fast,” said Fenn.

“It’s been what, five days since we visited the locus?” I asked, ignoring Fenn.

“We would be on the sixth,” said Grak.

“With Bethel mobile, or at least relatively so, I think we should move into the bottle,” said Amaryllis. “Even if Solace can’t perform druidic magic, being close to the locus might help her, or at least might help the locus. It gives Bethel plenty of room to be as large as she wants to be, which might make the time chamber a little less onerous.”

“I would prefer you use it as little as possible,” said Bethel.

“Noted,” said Amaryllis.

“You wanted to be a home for us, not a tool to be used,” I said. “We’ll respect that.”

“All that is in the relative short-term,” said Amaryllis. “In the long-term, we apparently need to deal with Uniquities. The plan of establishing our own nation by getting someone powerful to back the creation of a splinter tuung polity probably won’t work if we’re in opposition to them, even if they’re operating outside their official remit, and we can skip a few steps forward in the master plan if we can get them to agree to the important parts. We can’t allow them to take ownership of the project, for a variety of reasons, but I don’t see a reason we can’t be allies and partners, even if I don’t particularly like Uniquities. I should be able to get them to see the light on that particular matter, given that we both benefit from being insulated from the other’s malfeasance.”

“We’re planning malfeasance?” asked Grak.

“We’ll be accused of malfeasance no matter what we do,” said Amaryllis.

“The Lost King’s Court is a pit of vipers,” said Bethel. “I don’t think I would mind defending you from them.”

“We have the teleportation key,” I said. “I won’t claim to be an expert on imperial law, but I’m pretty sure that we’re not supposed to be holding onto it, if we’re planning to go legitimate.”

“Also we broke that soul mage out of prison, does anyone remember that?” asked Fenn.

“I do,” said Valencia.

“It was a joke,” said Fenn. “A joke that hopefully never leaves this room, because I have to imagine we’d get in some shit for that. Plus three-sevenths of us are soul mages, which there are ways of detecting, and which is pretty fucking illegal last time I checked.”

“We can deal with some of that,” said Amaryllis. She looked to me. “It didn’t seem like they had Esuen, did it?”

“No,” I said. “Meaning that she might still be where we left her, though I don’t know how long that’s going to remain the case. We don’t have her, which puts us in a less favorable position.”

“I warded their room,” said Grak. “They might be able to hide.” He held out a hand and gave it an uncertain wiggle. “A warder would see through the deception in an instant.”

“I shot their warder,” said Valencia. That got our attention. “She was going to look at me,” said Valencia. “I shot her monocle, not her face.”

“They may have another on hand,” said Grak. “Or they will find one.”

“So we should move fast,” said Amaryllis. “I would hope that Esuen would have some small amount of loyalty to us, given that we rescued her, but I know that in her situation loyalty wouldn’t be my primary concern. Valencia, we’re going to need to do a full debrief on you at some point, so we can know what they know, and what, exactly, happened.”

“Okay,” said Valencia. “Now?”

“No,” said Amaryllis. She hesitated. “Maybe. We could all go into the time chamber and hash it out in there, but I’m not certain how much that would help if they’re already giving us time to talk amongst ourselves. Can you give me the short version of what they know?”

“They know that I’m non-anima,” said Valencia. “Jorge calls me an anti-infernal.” She smiled at that. “They saw the books I had in the hotel room, but I’m not sure they made the connection to Earth. I didn’t offer any explanation, because I was still hoping that you were all alive, and I didn’t want to say anything that you didn’t want me to say.”

“You did very, very well,” said Amaryllis.

“I wasn’t sure,” said Valencia. “The whole time, up until I saw Joon, I wasn’t sure that I had done the right thing. I kept thinking that maybe I should have killed everyone.”

“Wow,” said Fenn. “That’s kind of how things went for us, to be honest. But that was months ago.”

“So we’re going to make some kind of deal with Uniquities?” I asked. “They think that we’re some kind of clandestine organization.”

“Aren’t we?” asked Fenn. “Granted, I can’t speak for how it was in the three days before I joined, so maybe those were different days, but my tenure in the Council of Arches has been marked by hiding out and giving false names. I’d kind of like to stop doing that, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I would too,” said Amaryllis. “But the moment we can stop watching our backs, we’re going to start having to watch our fronts.”

“And we’ll probably still have to watch our backs,” I said.

“Yes, that too,” said Amaryllis. “Anyway, the first order of business of the inaugural meeting of the Council of Arches is what we’re going to do about Solace and the locus. I propose that we move into the bottle and spend some time there until we’re able to get the locus back into a stable state.”

“We’re still no closer to extracting it,” said Grak.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Bethel with a slow nod.

“All in favor?” asked Amaryllis.

There was a pleasing round of ayes.

“The second order of business is what we’re going to do with Uniquities,” said Amaryllis. “I spent eight months working on plans for exploiting the knowledge we extracted from the backpack, and I still think that’s best accomplished through using the tuung and trying, best we can, to not be beholden to anyone.”

“Anyone except the tuung,” said Valencia.

“That’s -- yes,” said Amaryllis. “But my hope is that we can help shape their new culture, given that they’ll be leaving the old one behind. Esuen was already partly educated within the athenaeum of a very imperial city, that helps enormously.”

“Well, I don’t care too much,” said Fenn. “I’d like to throw my hat in the ring for court jester though.”

“The court jester’s job is about speaking truth to power,” said Amaryllis, face set in a serious frown. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that you would be good for the job, you would just make jokes.”

“I will appoint myself court jester,” said Bethel.

“Yeah, but you have to also be funny, right?” asked Fenn.

“Congratulations, you’ve sidetracked us,” said Amaryllis. She sighed. “I’d like to take lead on negotiations with Uniquities, since I know them best, and I’ve been planning for something approximating this meeting. I’m also the one they’re most interested in, primarily because they have no clue what they’ve stumbled upon. So this is a vote to move forward with that, with the ideal end goal being a tiny government of our own in some far-flung corner of the world, through which we can become fabulously wealthy and improve the lives of everyone on Aerb. All in favor?”

The response to this was less enthusiastic. I said aye, and Fenn did too, though pretty weakly. Amaryllis was obviously in favor too. But that left Grak, Val, and Bethel.

“Grak?” asked Amaryllis.

“A thousand pounds of gold as penance,” he said. “Per our agreement, it was one pound of gold every two weeks. I’m finding that to be too slow, even with the time in the chamber. I made a promise. I still intend to keep it.”

“Oh, are we talking about extracting value from the party?” asked Fenn. “Deal me in.”

“At current market prices, minus the amount you’re owed from our stores, the remainder of what you need amounts to roughly ten million obols,” said Amaryllis. “There are a few ways that we might get in a position to be able to pay that out to you, but it was always going to take years.”

“I know,” said Grak. Solace made a squawk, the first sound I’d heard from her, and Grak moved over to Amaryllis, handing the baby over. Amaryllis smiled at the baby and began rocking her, then returned to look at Grak, her face stony.

“Name your price,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll decide as a group. And remember that we’re your friends.”

“I made a promise,” said Grak.

“Name your price then,” said Amaryllis. “Tell us what you need to take from us so that you would consider this whole endeavor worth your time. Tell us what we have to pay you so that you don’t walk away and get yourself killed going after another gold mage. Jesus Christ, Grak.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” said Fenn. I gave her a look. “Inside joke,” she said with a shrug.

Grak frowned at Amaryllis. “I do care for you,” he said. He looked around the small room. “All of you. Some more than others.” That was characteristic dwarven bluntness right there. “I will not be subsumed by this group.” That was also a characteristically Grak way of saying things. He seemed allergic to the word ‘but’, so instead, he’d just give two statements of fact, one of which undercut the other.

“Fine,” said Amaryllis. “It’s going to cause us no end of problems with capital, because we’d be idiots to plan on paying anything out in the beginning, but I’ll personally guarantee you ten million obols within two years time, and if I don’t have it, we’ll go kill a fucking dragon and take its hoard or something, okay?”

Grak stared at her, then nodded.

I saw Valencia’s expression change, going from nervous to calm in an instant. I didn’t fully understand the subtext of what Amaryllis and Grak were talking about, but I could ask Valencia later, if Amaryllis didn’t explain it. I at least knew that it wasn’t actually about money, it was about honor, or something else, either particular to dwarven culture, or particular to Grak. Martyrdom, maybe. It felt like a weird time for it to come out, but he’d spent three months in the time chamber with Amaryllis, then had his role as midwife undercut by the professionals.

“Just to be clear, we’re going to take a vote before we go off to slay a dragon, right?” asked Fenn.

“That was a hypothetical,” said Amaryllis.

“I vote aye on the plan for nationhood,” said Grak. “I would like to see a full accounting of where we stand, as far as finances go.”

“We’ll table that, for now,” said Amaryllis. She looked at Bethel. “You have an objection to the prospect of building our own nation?”

“I have no particular interest in it,” said Bethel. “Nor in adventuring in general. Consider my silence abstention.”

“Alright,” said Amaryllis. She turned to Valencia. “I would understand if you didn’t want to be in the spotlight. No one would force you to take an active role.” She looked at the rest of us. “No one has to take any role if they don’t want to, but we’re going to be a nation of thousands, and the circle of trust is very, very small.”

“No, sorry,” said Valencia. “It’s not that, it’s just things seem to be moving very fast, and I feel like I’ve missed a lot, so it’s all confusing.” She hesitated, then pointed to Bethel. “Who is this?”

We had a nice moment of silence at that.

“Valencia, this is Bethel, the house formerly known as Kuum Doona,” I said. “She’s the staff with a dollhouse on top, the woman you see there is just a projection. Bethel, this is Valencia, we’ve, ah, mentioned her unique situation.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Valencia. She looked from Bethel-the-illusion to Bethel-the-staff. “Which one should I look at?”

“The illusion,” said Bethel. “I produce it for the sake of convenience, so others can imagine me as though I am one of them.”

“I dye my hair,” said Valencia with a nod.

“But you don’t object to Mary’s plan?” I asked.

Valencia hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “My first thought was that I would do whatever you said to do, because I trust you.” She frowned, narrowing her eyes at a point off in the distance. “Then I thought that maybe I should be my own person a bit more. I don’t know what the real Valencia actually wants.”

“That’s fair,” said Amaryllis. “I’ll try to help you.”

“We all will,” I said.

“Then I vote aye,” said Valencia. “Can we not vote on things so much though?” I remembered the last formal vote we’d taken as a group, two months ago, and how stressful she’d found that.

“I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t doubt we’ll have other things that occupy our time, but we have a real opportunity to do good, and to further our collective interests at the same time.”

“I have a lot of quests to get to,” I said. “Things that it’s likely only I can do. And I want to find Uther, as you all know.”

“I do too,” said Bethel. I winced at that. I was pretty sure we weren’t on the same page about what we were going to do when we found him.

“And we can,” said Amaryllis. “I might stay back, until I have things running so they can handle my absence. With the time chamber --” She stopped and looked at Bethel. “If I’m allowed to use it, then it should take considerably less time to hammer through the kinks.”

“That’s a mangled metaphor,” said Fenn.

“You rubbed off on me,” said Amaryllis. “Okay, it appears that we’re all relatively on the same page, I think our first meeting can be adjourned.”

“Next time we should have chairs,” said Grak.

“Earth management tactic,” said Amaryllis. “It’s called a ‘stand-up’, intentionally meant to shorten meetings because people don’t like to stand that long.”

“It didn’t bother me too much,” said Bethel with a smile.

We broke off into groups after that. Amaryllis took off the chestplate of her immobility plate so that Solace could feed, Fenn went to have a talk of some sort with Bethel, and Valencia was excited to tell me about her time alone, which had apparently involved a fair bit of precision gunfire. Grak sat on his own, in a chair in the corner. I wanted to go ask him what was up, but I was feeling drained, and Valencia was describing an encounter at a tavern with considerable enthusiasm. It was easier to listen to her than to think about Grak, so I took the easy path.

Chapter 30 - Consolation

Negotiations took hours, and I was thankful that my role in them was very minor. There were hundreds of things that needed to be hammered out, but Amaryllis and Valencia (with the most cunning devil she could find) were both up to it. No one ever said out loud that if we wanted to, we could just kill everyone and leave, but there were a few hints in that direction, especially with casual uses of magic, most of them by Bethel. She peeled the skin from an apple with her telekinesis while she held it in two fingers, which made the point rather clear.

The big sticking point was Anglecynn. Finch had been called into Cranberry Bay because of that first altercation with Larkspur, and he’d started connecting the dots right from the start, at least to hear him tell it. A mysterious man goes to a library asking about a disease from the Risen Lands, and just a short time later gets attacked by Anglecynn’s Foreign Security Director, who also happens to be the guy who benefits most from Amaryllis Penndraig supposedly dying in the Risen Lands a few weeks earlier? Yeah, maybe you might be able to infer from that that A) she was still alive and B) sick with some difficult-to-cure disease and C) Larkspur Prentiss was trying to finish the job.

Uniquities liked Amaryllis. Well, I shouldn’t say that, because Uniquities was a huge department, and a lot of what they did could have been entirely justified to the imperial legislature, if they ever had to answer for any of it. It wasn’t clear how many people were in the know on the things they might get in deep shit for, but my guess was that it was pretty small, like any good conspiracy had to be (barring magical means of maintaining it, anyway). But it was easier for me to think of Uniquities as being embodied by the three people I’d met, and especially their head honcho, Alcida.

Alcida really liked Amaryllis.

Alcida liked Amaryllis so much that she wanted her as a major player in Anglecynn politics, and had been willing to bend rules in order to get that to happen, both before and after Amaryllis had started on her long, strange journey with me. I found a lot of what Alcida said a little grandiloquent, stuff about ‘as Anglecynn goes, so goes the Empire’, comparing the kingdom to a listing ship, and talking about rooting out the heart of corruption, something that could only be done by someone with a keen intellect, an iron will, and covert backing.

Amaryllis wasn’t having it.

“I care about Anglecynn, deeply,” she said. “But I also care about Aerb as a whole, and if I go back to Anglecynn to become one of a very large number of princes and princesses, I’m not in a good position to actually accomplish anything.”

“You had allies before,” said Alcida. “They might not have been able to save you -- unless they were the ones who contacted the Council of Arches on your behalf?”

“They were not,” said Amaryllis. The meeting had gone long enough that Solace needed breastfeeding, which Amaryllis was doing as the negotiations continued on. It seemed like a power play to me, but I wasn’t well-versed in such things, and it might have been simple necessity.

“But you did have allies,” said Alcida. “There would be barriers to you returning --”

“I was given an expedited trial by adversity,” said Amaryllis. “I would either be accused of having not made it through the Risen Lands, or charged with desertion from the Host, and even though it wouldn’t make any sense, it’s very likely that both would happen. My nominal allies would be spending enormous amounts of political capital in order to secure me good standing among the Lost King’s Court, and once all was said and done, I still wouldn’t be in a good position to actually accomplish much, especially given how much rebuilding there would be.”

As lies went, that was a little bit transparent. We had a rather significant number of advantages, and that was part of the argument for why we wanted to have a puppet state of our own. But it was true that this would all be harder if Amaryllis was also having to spend time fighting entrenched institutions, political opponents using those entrenched institutions, and working within the constraints of a system that had been set up five hundred years ago and modified in the ways that were expedient. Anglecynn’s legal system was like a house that had been lived in for a few generations, where each owner had applied their own temporary fixes to various problems, sometimes applying temporary fixes on top of previous temporary fixes, until the whole thing was a mess that you needed years of study to even make sense of. We didn’t want anything to do with it.

Alcida eventually relented. I don’t think she liked the idea of giving us free rein, especially since she didn’t know the half of what the Council of Arches actually was, but the creation of what would hopefully be a new nation with some amount of legal recognition would give some cover for Uniquities to post agents there. Obviously Esuen would have to be consulted, but they apparently still didn’t know where she was, and we were keeping that under our hat for the time being. (I was pretty sure that Finch was going to be pissed off about it, and I have to admit that I was looking forward to it.)

“When we see each other again, it will be under a different pretense,” said Amaryllis, toward the end of things. “We’ll collect Esuen and square things away with her, and receive your dossier on potential contacts and locations by dead drop. I think it’s likely that if the Isle of Poran ends up being a possibility, we’ll take the opportunity to settle there.” So far as I had been able to discern, the Isle of Poran was a rocky, craggy place that no one wanted.

“The Council of Arches has further designs though,” said Alcida. “From what you’ve said, and your willingness to parley, I think our goals are roughly in alignment, but I’d desperately like to know more.”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” said Amaryllis. “If your goal is maintaining the empire and improving the lives of its citizens, then I think you’ll be quite pleased.”

◆◆◆

After Amaryllis and Solace were both given a bill of clean health by the doctor (who was very calm about the fact that Amaryllis had mostly recovered from birth in the space of a day, and that Solace had grown considerably in the same amount of time), we teleported out, all of us at once. Valencia didn’t count as a person for the purposes of the teleportation key, because magic didn’t recognize her as a person, and Bethel was, technically, a magic item, just like Ropey (who had maintained his position coiled around her).

Solace cried when we came through to the foothills of the World Spine, which wasn’t too surprising given the sharp pain it caused. Amaryllis calmed her, rocking her gently and cooing to her, while the rest of us put on our breathing masks so we could go into the glove. The bottle was right where we’d left it six days prior (or, depending on your perspective, between two and nine months ago). Grak peeled back a few of the wards he’d put up so we could get in, and then we all piled into the glove while Amaryllis rode her immobility plate down.

The interior of the bottle was stiflingly hot, and as I looked around, most of the grass was dead. The tree house in the center had lost about half of its leaves, and they were lying on the ground, brown and dead.

The locus came over to us, limping and bleeding, panting with its tongue out. I’d forgotten just how intimidatingly large it was, and the oddity of seeing a deer with six eyes. The whites of its coat weren’t as bright or pure as they’d been when we’d left it.

Amaryllis approached the doe with Solace in her arms.

“I --” she began, then stopped. “This is her,” she said. “I guess you would know that. I don’t know if you can --”

Curling bits of glowing smoke or mist began rolling off the locus’ hide. It straightened up until it reached its full height, then bent down toward Solace. I steeled myself, not knowing what to expect. Druids ran on bullshit, and the locus was the source of that bullshit. I’d had a glimpse of it when I’d had stratospherically high Essentialism, but that was me coming at the whole concept of a druidic ritual from a completely different direction -- or rather, the game giving me brief insight into how to do the working without actually giving me any actual skill as a druid (along with the total lack of connection). The locus was mysterious; that was its entire mode of being.

The Six-Eyed Doe took in a deep breath, and the tendrils of glowing mist twisted in an invisible wind, until they were all pointing toward Solace. When the locus released the breath, the mist rushed forward, washing over Solace and spreading around Amaryllis, continuing on as the Six-Eyed Doe extended its long exhale of air.

Solace began to change and grow, her swaddling cloth falling off her, leaving her naked in Amaryllis’ arms. Within the space of a few seconds, she had doubled in size, then again, becoming older, from tiny baby to little girl before our eyes.

That was when the locus faltered. It coughed, and the glowing mists around it dissipated, spreading out onto the ground around it, which went from limp and brown to green and vibrant in an instant. The locus gave a low moan and collapsed to the side, breathing heavily.

Solace pushed away from Amaryllis and slipped out of her arms, clambering down to the ground, and came to the side of the locus’ head. She laid a hand on its neck, murmuring something in its ear, then kissed on its cheek.

I don’t think that I had ever seen Amaryllis look more forlorn. Solace looked like she was back to being Solace; her face was animated with the same intelligence and experience that she’d had in her previous life, and her connection to the locus seemed as strong as I’d ever seen it. This was what we’d hoped for, what Amaryllis had spent almost nine months of her life in a cramped room on, and now it was all over. She hadn’t really talked about her confused feelings towards Solace, not with me, but it was evident that she hadn’t excised them from her soul without telling anyone.

Solace glanced over at Amaryllis, and must have seen the same thing, because she walked over to her. They had a brief conversation that I couldn’t hear, and that I was trying not to hear, because it seemed private, but the end result was that Amaryllis picked Solace up, and they had a hug that lasted for minutes. Solace’s small, dark-green lips were moving, whispering something in Amaryllis’ ear, and when they broke apart, Amaryllis was crying happy tears.

Solace approached the rest of us, holding Amaryllis by the hand.

Fenn stood next to me, and leaned in close enough to whisper to me. “Does this mean Solace is a loli now?” I glared at her as she pulled away from me, smiling. She gave me a thumbs up, I think because she was happy one of her Earth references had landed. A glare might have been the reaction she was going for.

“Thank you all,” said Solace. Her voice was high, childlike, which made sense, considering. Crantek were already one of the smaller mortal species. “I’ve been reborn many times, but that death was my first.”

“Are you stuck like that?” asked Fenn.

“As a child?” asked Solace. “There’s nothing wrong with adolescence. I’ve been through it before. The locus rushed things because there’s need of me.” She looked to Valencia. “New faces,” she said. “The locus had good things to say about you.” (I assumed that was figurative, because as far as I knew, the locus didn’t speak at all.)

Valencia curtsied, going low and bringing her dress out to the side as wide as it would go. “It’s an honor to finally meet you, Oorang Solace. My name is Valencia the Red.”

“Go speak with it,” said Solace. “It’s in need of comfort and wants you by its side.”

Valencia rushed off, running pell-mell across the grass, which was slowly becoming greener around where Solace stood.

“Grakhuil,” said Solace. She glanced down at his prosthetic. “Can I give you a hand?”

Grak nodded. “It’s been three months,” he said. “Long enough for it to scar over.”

“Three months?” asked Solace. “I had a vague recollection of a hospital. Shouldn’t it have been … what is it for humans? Nine?”

“Hyperbolic time chamber,” said Amaryllis. They were still holding hands. Amaryllis was standing close to Solace, possessive, like she was worried that our druid would run off. Or maybe like she was worried that her child wasn’t going to be okay.

“Ah,” said Solace. She looked around the bottle. “I had wondered. It’s clear there will be some catching up I have to do.” She glanced at Bethel, and the staff that Fenn had stuck in the ground. “Another new member?”

“I’m the new house,” said Bethel. “You’ll need to show me where to expand, if we’re all to live here for the time being.”

Solace nodded, then looked up at Amaryllis. “How much time has passed, would you say?”

“Two weeks, give or take a few days,” said Amaryllis. “I haven’t looked at a calendar lately.”

“And so much has changed,” she said. “What happened with Fallatehr?”

“We killed him shortly after Juniper learned soul magic,” said Amaryllis. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem like the right path toward getting the locus onto its own land.” She hesitated slightly. “We still don’t have a solution to that problem, I’m sorry. We had thought that Juniper becoming the most powerful soul mage on Aerb would do it, but he was, briefly, and that did allow us to bring you back, but … we don’t have many productive avenues left.” She looked around the bottle, through the stifling heat and dead plants. “Can you fix this?”

“Certainly,” said Solace. She looked to Fenn. “I don’t suppose you have my staff and cloak in that glove of yours?”

“The cloak we have,” said Fenn, producing it with a flourish. “The staff was voided, unfortunately. I’ve also got a dress for you.”

“The sun feels nice on my skin,” said Solace with a frown. “My species drinks the sun, you know.” She seemed remarkably well put together, for everything she’d been through. The locus had done something with her, some restoration of the soul that flew in the face of everything I knew about what the soul was. Solace didn’t seem to mind. She took the cloak of leaves and threw it around her shoulders, which did approximately nothing for modesty, while simultaneously blocking the majority of the light from hitting her skin.

Grak had taken off his prosthetic and approached her with his stump held out in front of him. It was scarred over, but the scar was still red, not the waxy texture and whitish color of a long-ago wound.

“I have some faculty with soul magic,” I said. “If the internal state of his soul is going to be the problem, I can just mirror his hand from the other side and get it to be consistent. We’d have fixed him ourselves, but the bones take something special to grow back, and --”

Solace cracked her tiny knuckles and smiled. “Juniper, could you get me a stick?”

“I -- sure,” I said. I looked through the grass, trying to find one that I thought would be appropriate to the ritual. “Just any old stick?”

“No,” said Solace. “A special one. You’ll know that it’s special because it’s the one you choose.”

I’d forgotten her faintly amused expression, and it brought a smile to my face, despite myself, because I was being given a firm reminder that druidic magic drove me fucking nuts. All that mist coming off of the locus probably didn’t mean anything, it was just abstract magic without apparent rhyme or reason. But we’d spent a considerable chunk of our lives getting Solace back so that the locus wouldn’t die in its bottle, so I supposed I would just count myself lucky that it was, for all its deliberate weirdness, still really powerful.

I spent some time looking for a stick. Going ‘hur dur, I just grabbed the closest one I found’ seemed like it would be going against the spirit of the thing. The one I settled on had two forks in it, and was dry and brittle, with most of the bark stripped off the outside. My skill at identifying wood pretty much stopped at ‘yup, it’s wood’, but I assumed that it had come from the tree that served as a house.

Solace took the stick from me and stared at it for a moment, then began pinching it here and there. The wood responded to her touch like taffy, extending and being shaped by her touch. When she had finished, it very vaguely resembled a hand. She took Grak’s stump and pressed the stick to it, which caused the flesh to part like soft butter and seal closed as though a piece of wood hadn’t just passed through it.

“It will take some time,” said Solace. “An hour or two. But when it’s finished, you should be as good as new.”

Grak turned the stick around, inspecting it. “Thank you,” he said.

“You couldn’t have just regrown the bones?” asked Amaryllis.

Solace gave a faint smile and shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Will it be as good as new, or better?” I asked.

“Different,” said Solace. She shrugged. “Better for some things, worse for others. Better, I would think, for the type of person Grak is, or would like to be.”

I nodded. I was pretty sure that if I suggested cutting off my arm and having her replace it, or doing the same for all of us, the druidic resistance to being put in a box would come forward in full force, stopping that venture before it even began.

“It’s good to have you back,” I said instead.

Quest Completed: Pregnant Virgin Princess - Amaryllis has given birth to Oorang Solace, bringing her back from the dead. If another of your party members dies, don’t expect it to be so easy.

Quest Accepted: Birth of a Nation - You’ve set out to become a real power in this world, no longer independent agents bumbling from crisis to crisis, but instead a nation, bumbling from crisis to crisis. Quest completion entails becoming accepted as a member nation of the Empire of Common Cause.

Quest Updated: Taking Root - The world has but a single druid, tending to but a single locus. With the locus so constrained within a magic bottle, no more druids may be inducted, but removal might prove fatal. With your help, druids might stalk the world once more. (Companion Quest)

Level Up!

My brain splattered across the ceiling of the universe, becoming stars in the sky, each neuron a swollen red dwarf, the hyperspace connections between them engorged with the pleasure feeding through them. There was nothing like awareness to me, only pleasure so vast that I couldn’t hope to feel anything else. It was reductive, stripping away the thinking part of me and leaving only the animal, pinning me down and fucking me, a fist thrusting straight into my brain, thick fingers manipulating my internal wiring.

When I came to, they had me pinned down. Amaryllis was fixing my soul; she had intuited, correctly, that it was no longer a change I could make on my own, not after what I had felt.

END BOOK III