Worth the Candle 2: Trust and Consequences
Date: 2021-12-31 23:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: Always the Dungeon Master, never the jail keeper. Juniper Smith is trapped in a prison that seems to be of his own design. Everywhere he looks are bits and pieces of the game worlds he used to make back on Earth. Now, he finds himself on the run from the law and helping out criminals, looking for magical solutions to centuries-old magical spirits trapped in bottles. Can he trust an elf that's been locked away since the bad old days of the Second Empire? Danger lurks around every corner, and trust is hard to come by, even within the party that grows more like family with every passing day.
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group

Worth the Candle

Book II: Trust and Consequences

Alexander Wales

Copyright © 2016 Alexander Wales

All rights reserved

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 - In Search of a Quest

Chapter 2 - Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats

Chapter 3 - Keep Magic Weird

Chapter 4 - The Market of Blood and Bone

Chapter 5 - At Arm's Length

Chapter 6 - Doe or Doe Not, There is no Try

Chapter 7 - Math.random()

Chapter 8 - Copse and Robbers

Chapter 9 - Blood in the Water

Chapter 10 - Culmination

Chapter 11 - A Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Chapter 12 - Looper

Chapter 13 - Bond Girl

Chapter 14 - Vacation Vocations

Chapter 15 - Place Your Figs

Chapter 16 - Panopticon

Chapter 17 - All the Myriad Ways

Chapter 18 - Aggressive Negotiations

Chapter 19 - Animus

Chapter 20 - Drift

Chapter 21 - The Chemical History of a Candle

Chapter 22 - In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet, Again

Chapter 23 - A Kindred Soul

Chapter 24 - The Long Night

Chapter 25 - A Helping Hand

Chapter 26 - Seeing Red

Chapter 27 - In Mutual Congress

Chapter 28 - Moral Agency

Chapter 29 - The Soul of Discretion

Chapter 30 - Tripartite Talks

Chapter 31 - Amaryllis

Chapter 32 - The Mouth of a Long River

Afterword

Chapter 1 - In Search of a Quest

I didn’t manage to fall asleep until Fenn snaked a lazy hand under the covers and laid it across my chest. I don’t know if she did that by instinct, accident, elf luck, or because she’d woken up enough to see me staring at the ceiling and thinking, but either way, it was a comfort.

When I woke up in the morning her side of the bed was empty, and my clothes and weapons were laid out for me, with my armor off to one side. The smell of breakfast came in through the open bedroom door, and I dressed in a hurry, electing to leave the armor off. I was feeling much better than I had felt the night before, with a clearer head.

Fenn was cooking pancakes and bacon, and had already made a mess of the kitchen. When I came over to the dining table, which was in the same large room, Amaryllis slid me a cup of coffee in a thick mug, with a small, dark-yellow square floating in it that I assumed must be butter. She raised an eyebrow my way, and on the assumption that she was asking if we were still okay, I gave her a nod.

“So, now that we’re all here, we shall eat pancakes and discuss the future,” said Fenn. She set a large plate down on the table, stacked with pancakes, and then another large plate, stacked with bacon. Grak immediately took the top third of the pancake stack and moved it to his plate, then began eating it with his hands. “Enjoy the bounty of the freezer and pantry of Weik Handum, long may it provide.”

“My end goal is to find and rescue the Lost King, wherever he might be,” I said. “I assume that’s going to be difficult, because I have to imagine that a lot of other people with better resources have already tried, but I knew him, so that at least gives me something of an edge.”

“Joon comes out with a strong pitch!” said Fenn. “Can our princess deliver a better counter-offer?”

“The Lost King is most likely dead,” said Amaryllis. “It’s been five hundred years. At best, he’s in one of the hells; at worst, both his soul and body have long since been destroyed. Even if we assume a best-case scenario, the original plan we made when I was still sick was that we should endeavor to complete as many of Juniper’s quests as possible in order to make him more powerful. That’s instrumental toward finding and retrieving the Lost King.”

She folded her arms, and I noticed she was wearing a different shirt from the night before, this one with “Boning by the Bay” written on it. I was partially successful in suppressing a giggle.

“Neither of those are plans,” said Grak, wiping the back of his mouth with his hand. “What is the list of quests?”

I closed my eyes and looked at my character sheet, then read them off one by one.

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?
◼ Boneitis - The problem goes deeper than the bones, further than the heart, and straight into the very essence of your mortal existence. Find someone to alter your soul, or alter it yourself; either way, this is a project to approach with caution.
◼ 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.

(I left that last one off, because it was creepy and I didn’t want to do it.)

“Okay, well I think we all know which of those I would prefer,” said Fenn as she plucked a piece of bacon off the plate. “It feels good to be the best, most important companion.”

“Amaryllis is more important,” said Grak.

“Grak, did we not bond with one another watching over these two hoomans?” asked Fenn. “Did we not fill several jars with unicorn blood, working in perfect harmony, did we not butcher the beast together, did I not cackle maniacally as I watched you try to chase down the naked jaybird?” She asked this last one with a finger pointed Amaryllis’ way and a grin on her face. “Alright, I can see where the cackling might not have been that endearing, from your perspective.”

“Amaryllis controls investiture of the entads,” said Grak. “She is also the most traveled, giving us the widest range with the key.” He took another bite of pancake, munching it with his wide teeth. “She is also the second-least annoying, after me.”

Fenn narrowed her eyes. “Betrayer.”

“We should do them in order of how easy they are,” I said, “We’ll have to factor in the difficulty we might have in moving. I think at a certain point it’s going to make sense for us to just use the normal systems of travel that everyone else uses, just in the interests of keeping a low profile.”

“Straddling Worlds, then,” said Amaryllis. “But Boneitis is more important in terms of keeping you healthy.”

“It’s really not that bad,” I said. “I think boosting my END curbed it. The worst I felt was during training, and — I should write out an updated character sheet and a list of discovered rules again, but it looks like I’m going to be capped on what I can do when we’re just sitting around making up training exercises.”

“How are new quests formed?” asked Grak.

“I’m not too clear on that,” I said. “Sometimes I’ll get one when someone tells me something, or when they ask me to do something, and there are some quests that come in parts, meaning that I get the next one as soon as the first part is done.” I took a breath. “So if anyone has anything they think is a quest, you can try to offer it now and expand our options.”

“I need one thousand pounds of gold for my penance,” said Grak.

“Ugh,” said Fenn. “First of all, we already know that, second, that’s not how you deliver a quest.” She cleared her throat and then started in on her best dwarf impression. “Juniper Smith, I have grievously wronged my clan and must return to them with a sizeable fortune of gold as my penance. I will not be greeted warmly upon my return. Your presence by my side upon my return to Drilly Ird would be the warmest possible closure to this chapter of my life.”

Quest Accepted: 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)

“That … actually worked,” I said. “I think maybe the difference is that I was invited? It switched from being something that he was going to do on his own to something we’re going to do together?”

“I did not invite you,” said Grakhuil. “This matter is personal.” That much was clear from the quest text, and the words ‘self-imposed’ brought both clarity and questions to what it was he really wanted, beyond gold.

“Well it’s going to take another five hundred pounds of gold,” said Fenn. “And I will fight anyone who wants to use group loot to that end.”

“I have no argument with our arrangement,” said Grak, folding his arms across his chest.

“And you still have no quest to return me to power?” asked Amaryllis. “Do you think it would work if I asked you to be my knight?”

I let out a breath. “I think it might interfere with the Lost King quest, if I’m being honest,” I said. I watched her ice-blue eyes, hoping that I could catch any traitor thoughts there. “The entire political structure of Anglecynn for the last five hundred years has been built on the fact that the Princes and Princesses are only ruling in his stead; if he comes back, there’s going to be at best a massive reform.”

The idea of dragging Arthur out of whatever hole he was hiding in and bringing him back from the dead, only to have him continue the rule of Anglecynn, caused some dissonance in me. What was my end-game here, after he was back? I didn’t think there was an Earth for me to return to, and certainly I didn’t want to be slapped back into a simulation of the Kansas I had left. I didn’t imagine that Arthur would want that either, but after a lifetime on Aerb, maybe he would have disagreed. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the game wouldn’t end then; it seemed to me like that was the ultimate quest.

“I will accede that’s a possibility,” said Amaryllis. She folded her arms across her chest, mirroring Grak, though her expression was more mild than his permanent resting frown.

“They don’t have to be personal quests, right?” asked Fenn. “They can be anything?”

“Based on the evidence, they just need to be something that I can accomplish.” I rubbed my neck. “So far as I can tell, they don’t even need to be particularly reasonable for a person to do.”

“And if you’re right about the nature of this world, then you’re directly responsible for everything from the undead to the unicorns, right?” asked Fenn. “So some would say that you have a moral obligation to clean up all the messes you made.” I didn’t like where she was going with this, and my imaginings were just that, fictions made real (or at least more real) by the Dungeon Master of Aerb.

“You’re saying that I should fix everything in the world?” I asked.

“No, nothing like that,” said Fenn. She pointed a finger at Amaryllis without looking at her. “Encyclopedia girl, tell me how many —”

“I will suffer through being called Mary, and I will suffer through what I don’t doubt are an endless series of horrible clothes you picked up for me, but I am a princess of Anglecynn and the most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig and I will NOT respond to ‘encyclopedia girl’,” said Amaryllis.

“That’s where you draw the line?” asked Fenn with surprise. “Someone is in a bad mood this morning. Very well, Princess Amaryllis Penndraig of the Kingdom of Anglecynn, tenth of her name, Slayer of Gold Mages, Drinker of Unicorns, The Immobile Woman, I humbly ask you to tell me how many major or minor exclusion zones might be ended by a rag-tag group of heroes.”

“None,” said Amaryllis.

“Bullshit,” said Fenn.

“If these things could be done by a single person, or even a small group, they would have been,” said Amaryllis. “Do you think the international community is so negligent that they would let Fel Seed sit on his throne in the City of a Thousand Brides if there were any option to do otherwise? It’s flatly impossible to kill him, by any means, not even in theory.”

Quest Accepted: 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.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Were you deliberately tempting fate?” asked Fenn.

Amaryllis shrugged, and I saw a slight smile that disappeared almost at once. “It can be done then?”

“The game seems to think so,” I said. “It also thinks I know his weakness, which, uh, might be a problem, because I really don’t. Let’s not do that one.”

“Well I’m not suicidal,” said Fenn. “Unlike the three of you, I have a vested interest in living. If we can give Juniper’s brain a hundred quests, we don’t have to actually do anything with them, but sometimes the game drops hints that might be useful.”

I agreed with her logic, but I really didn’t want to have the Fel Seed quest sitting there in my head to look at, because if the game put that quest there, then it meant that there was at least a chance it wasn’t impossible, and even if I wasn’t responsible for him, I did have a moral obligation to end him if I was the only one that could do it. He probably wasn’t real, the simulated people he was torturing probably didn’t have actual computing power dedicated to them, they didn’t have real lives … and yet, you could do conditional probability, the odds that those people were real multiplied by their pain and suffering, and surely the numbers would dictate that I should at least give it consideration.

“Thirteen,” said Amaryllis. “You won’t be able to do anything about the ones like Blue Fields or the Datura Desert, but there are thirteen enpersoned exclusion zones which you might be able to defeat, if you rise to the heights that Uther Penndraig obtained.”

Quest Accepted: The Slayer of Horrors (0/13)

“Okay,” I said. “Well I’ve got a meta-quest for that, but I’m actually not suicidal” —anymore—
“thank you, and I was thinking that we could do something that’s easy for once in our lives. Are there people we can meet, places we can go, things we can do that don’t necessarily involve combat, or at least where combat is with people who aren’t trying to kill me.”

“I believe there are two ancestral caches left which Aumann would not have been able to break past, even if he knew about them,” said Amaryllis. “One is within an exclusion zone, the other one might as well be. The castle in Glassy Fields is both warded and encased in razor-sharp shards of glass, with the vidrics sure to attack us on approach. It dates to just after Uther Penndraig’s disappearance, which should make it of special interest to you. It was never considered worth the probable costs to retrieve whatever might be there. There’s a reason that no one loots the Glassy Fields.”

Quest Accepted: 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.

I gave her a thumbs up at that, and she nodded.

“The other is three miles down the Boundless Pit, abandoned since the tuung claimed it, but warded against them,” said Amaryllis. “I believe it should contain a suit of armor with a short-range investiture, assuming that the wards around it haven’t been broken past and that the tuung haven’t made an effort to detach it from the pit walls, which they might have. The place was built by an architect under forge frenzy, and contains its own defenses that make it a formidable conquest; since Weik Handum isn’t secure, and cannot be made so, I would suggest that Kuum Doona be made our new base of operations, if we can get to it, though only a fool would choose to defy the tuung lightly.”

Quest Accepted: 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.

“Okay, got that one too, but I’m not sure that we really need to end every single quest suggestion with a dire warning about how foolhardy or deadly it would be,” I said.

“Though woe betide any who might attempt it, we could look into getting me some kind of awesome magical hat,” said Fenn as she grinned at me.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “I don’t actually think any of that expanded our options, not unless anyone wants to go into yet another exclusion zone.”

“The Boundless Pit isn’t an exclusion zone,” said Amaryllis with a slight frown. “The term has a very specific meaning, even if you disagree with the imperial designations.”

“Okay,” I said. “And given that we can’t stay here without having to constantly worry about whether someone is going to show up and find us, I think that’s probably a reasonable near-term goal. I must be close to leveling though, and in my ideal world, I would do that without combat on the line, especially given that I still need my bones healed. To me, that means our next step is either finding someone who can do soul magic, or going on either the Straddling Worlds quest or the God Botherer quest. Because God Botherer doesn’t seem like it’s going to end at simply meeting a god, that means that we’re down to either going to the Athenaeum of Speculation and Scrutiny, or we’re going to try to find someone who can take a peep at my soul.”

“Unless Mary has a supremely trusted soul mage on call, I vote for the athenaeum,” said Fenn.

“Me too,” said Grak. “I would not trust a skilled soul manipulator.”

“Noted,” I said.

“We still have to worry about Larkspur,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t believe that he would dip into the kingdom’s supply of elf luck again, but that’s a possibility that we need to be prepared for. More to the point, he has power both within Anglecynn and the Empire of Common Cause which he could use to make our lives difficult, even if we aren’t moving against him. From there, he would likely try to kill me, or capture the rest of you in an effort to kill me. So long as Anglecynn’s FSD is after us, we’ll have to keep moving around like rats, afraid of the light. It’s ammunition to use against him, if”—she hesitated— “if I ever have a future in Anglecynn.”

“You’re saying we kill him,” said Fenn. “Figure out a way to lure him somewhere, then slice his stupid head off.”

Quest Accepted: Slice His Stupid Head Off - You still have to worry about the Foreign Security Director of Anglecynn, Larkspur Prentiss. He’ll have you running like rats, afraid of the light, so long as he lives. Figure out a way to lure him somewhere, then do as the quest title says.

I stared at that message, then blinked it away.

“Something happen?” asked Fenn.

“No,” I said. Just the quest text quoting the two of you. Are these being written on the fly or are the talking points being inserted into the conversation by the Dungeon Master? Really hoping that it’s the former. “I got a quest to kill him.”

“The detection wards I placed just pinged,” said Grak, who sat up from his chair. “They’re a half mile out, we should leave before anyone arrives.”

I frowned at that, but moved into action. We had a plan for this, and I wasn’t about to deviate from it. I ran up the stairs to my room while the others went to theirs, snatched up my armor and my messenger bag, which had all my worldly possessions that weren’t in the glove, and then ran back down into the basement, to the one room in Weik Handum where teleportation wasn’t blocked. Grak had put up his own wards there, to ensure that no one could come in through that back door, and when I arrived he was moving his wand, bringing the ward down.

“Wish we could see who it was,” said Fenn as she came into the room, with Amaryllis close behind her. “But not so much that I’m willing to risk getting a bullet in the brain.”

“Where are we going?” asked Amaryllis, who shut and barred the door behind her. She looked incongruous in her t-shirt and shorts, a serious expression on her beautiful face and an excited energy that I knew was only a few moments away from turning deadly if she needed it to.

“Speculation and Scrutiny is the consensus,” I said. “If we’re rats, then I can live with that in the short-term.”

“I’ve never been there,” said Amaryllis as she held out the key. “We can’t use the touchstone.” She closed her eyes, and I could see rapid movement beneath her eyelids. “I can put us a hundred miles away, on some train tracks, it should be in the middle of nowhere with, at most, some farmers around. There, or back to my room in Cranberry Bay?” (The room was paid through for the rest of the week, with strict instructions not to disturb, just for this sort of eventuality, but there was a chance that a sufficiently widely cast net could have tracked us there and set up an ambush, or at least given an alert.)

“Train tracks are fine by me,” said Fenn. “I’ll prepare my expert-level train-dodging skills.”

“Do it,” I said.

And a few seconds later, with a brief moment of blinding pain, we were standing on train tracks that sat on a raised embankment between two large, ordered rows of flowers. There was no rushing train to greet us; instead there was a short woman with a cloak of leaves and a long staff, her skin green and hair a light brown, the race crantek if memory served. She was in the flower fields, staring at us with no surprise on her face.

Fenn’s bow was in her gloved hand in an instant and she had an arrow out a fraction of a second after moving the bow from one hand to the other, all in a series of smooth motions. I placed my hand in front of the arrow as soon as I saw what was happening.

“I’m pretty sure that’s our next companion,” I said.

The short green woman gave us a small smile and a friendly wave.

Chapter 2 - Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats

The one thing we hadn’t gotten around to discussing was the issue of companions. Uther had seven of his Knights of the Square Table, and extrapolating from that, I was bound to have at least a few more. Both Amaryllis and Fenn I had stumbled across, while Grak had been someone we’d met after setting out some bait. I had an inkling that it might be worth it to find as many companions as possible, but then realized that logistics weren’t on our side, given the teleportation key only took five people at a time.

(We hadn’t tested Fenn’s glove-past-the-limit theory yet, because it seemed too risky to me. Things that were in the glove stayed in the glove across teleportations, but I had this nightmare scenario of putting someone in the glove and trying to exceed the limit, only for the game to punish us by disconnecting the extradimensional bubble. Would the game kill a companion for that? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t willing to test it, and there were lesser fates we might suffer, like having to go on a long quest to retrieve them from wherever rogue extradimensional bubbles spit out their contents.)

I could at least make some guesses about what a new companion would look like, and what their role would be, given what I had seen so far and what I assumed about either the shape of the game, or how the Dungeon Master thought. Companion #4 would be different from companions #1-3, with as little repetition as possible, which meant that he or she (probably he, given that we were gender-imbalanced (depending on how you counted Grak)) wouldn’t be a dwarf, wouldn’t be a half-elf, and probably wouldn’t be a full elf or a human, though I was less sure on those two. Humans were the majority race here, and a full elf might provide some (totally unwanted) tension with Fenn, but in terms of traditional D&D party makeup, it would be better to go with something else.

Companion #4 probably wouldn’t be a warder, because Grak had that covered, and probably wouldn’t be an archer, because that was Fenn’s job. Amaryllis’ role in the group, seen through the classical D&D party lens, was as the face, the person who did all the talking and politicking, but I didn’t think she really fit in with that role. Instead, she had mostly been the plot-driver, information-giver, and source of wealth, but those weren’t actual party roles. Regardless, my guess was that Companion #4 would have some magic that I didn’t currently (and possibly couldn’t ever) possess.

Lastly, there was the question of magic items. Amaryllis had nothing but the void tunneler when I met her, Fenn had her artillery bow, and Grak had both his warder’s implements and a magical axe. There was something of a trendline there, and it conformed to roughly how actual D&D parties worked; you couldn’t just have new characters come in underequipped, otherwise they would be too weak and demand too much of the new loot, so they had to have something worthwhile on them to keep them in line with the party. If they’re in line with the rest of the party despite having nothing, then they get too powerful once they start getting equipment, which is a different problem.

So when we stumbled into a mysterious green-skinned crantek woman with a fancy cloak who seemed to be expecting us, my companion sense immediately began tingling.

Fenn kept her arrow nocked, but eased up on the draw.

“Hi friend!” she called to the green woman.

“Greetings,” replied the green woman with a small bow. Like Fenn, she was projecting her voice to be heard across the field of flowers. “You might want to step off those train tracks. I don’t think a train is coming, but it makes me nervous.”

The flower fields she stood in were being farmed, for what reason I could only guess at, though my mind immediately leapt to the Dutch tulip futures craze of the 1600s (more likely they were for dyes). Beyond them was forest, and beyond that were tall, dark-purple mountains shot through with layers of white strata. There was no one else around, and whoever tended to these flower fields, they didn’t have so much as a shed in the area. It was a strangely idyllic place for a meeting.

Amaryllis stepped down the embankment, putting us closer to the woman, and I followed after, with Fenn close behind me. “Did your eyes say companion, or was that a guess on your part?” Amaryllis asked, slightly under her breath.

“She shows purple, the same as the three of you,” said Grak. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about his magic glasses, which he’d taken out from his furs and put on. “I think purple means friend. The people of Cranberry Bay ranged between blue and yellow.” He took off the glasses and raised his monocle to the green woman, who was waiting patiently with a slight smile on her lips. “Staff is magic, cloak is magic, woman is magic,” he said.

“Really?” asked Fenn. “The cloak is magic? Thank the gods we have you around.” This was sarcasm on her part; the cloak was made of a variety of different leaves, which were green at the top and shifted in color until it reached her calves, where it was red. There were no obvious threads, seams, or other indications as to what might be holding it together. All in all, it was probably the most obviously magical item I’d seen in Aerb thus far.

“Dial it back a bit,” I said. I tried to keep my voice low. “Grak, thank you for checking.”

“Sorry,” said Fenn. She turned to Grak. “That thing you said about me being annoying really got to me, you know?” She raised her voice and called to the green woman, “Hey lady, are you particularly annoying?”

“Not really,” the woman called back.

“Drat,” muttered Fenn.

“Juniper?” asked Amaryllis. “Is she confirmed as a companion?”

“No,” I replied. “I agree it’s suspicious. She was waiting for us, clearly. Even if she is a companion, part of our kharass, there needs to be a plausible reason for her to be here. More dipping into elf luck?” The woman was still waiting patiently for us, resting some of her weight on the staff, which had a bird’s skull at the top, embedded in the knurled wood.

“I don’t know,” replied Amaryllis. She was still standing there in her t-shirt and shorts, and when she cast an eye toward Fenn I imagined she was wishing she had armor on. “Maybe we should stop being rude and go introduce ourselves.”

The crantek had been a race that I over-designed and then only used for a single story arc, and I was pretty sure that my 7 KNO was the only reason that I was able to recall anything much about them, because I hadn’t been studious in reading through The Book of Blood. They were short and green-skinned, with their natural habitat being the boundary zone between forests and fields. Their skin allowed for photosynthesis, but it wasn’t enough to keep them up and running, so they were ruminants as well, eating hard-to-digest plants or grass and then chewing their cud.

The go-to mode of behavior for crantek was to go into the forests, gather a bunch of green things to eat, and then find a sunny place to sit and chew cud. I had all these plans for what crantek society was like, how they handled their winters, what they did on rainy days when the sun didn’t shine, their beliefs about their place within the food cycle, and none of it ever really came up. The most that I ever got to show them off was with a crantek elder who had a habit of regurgitating and chewing on cud when he was thinking.

The green of this crantek’s skin was a light, pleasant color, and she was cute, with slightly childish features, like I always thought of hobbits being. This bothered me a bit, because the crantek weren’t supposed to be attractive to humans, at least not as I’d drawn them up. Why would they be? Different species (races, in D&D parlance) shouldn’t actually be attractive to each other, not unless they could cross-breed, and that had been something that I’d had a bug up my butt about when I was drawing up the crantek.

This woman didn’t conform to my fifteen-year-old self’s designs in a few ways. She had ears, not concave pits on the side of her head, and her teeth were more-or-less human, at least from what I had seen when she was talking, which made no sense for a ruminant animal. (And yes, I could already think of all the excuses and justifications that I, and presumably The Book of Blood, would use in order to have cute-to-humans crantek, but it still bothered me, because that wasn’t how I had made them.)

“Oorang Solace,” she said with a bow, once we were close enough that we didn’t have to raise our voices. “You may call me Solace.”

“You saw us come in,” said Amaryllis. She had hidden the teleportation key away the moment we’d landed, and wasn’t holding it anymore. “You were waiting for us.”

“Yes.” Solace nodded. “I’ve spent the last year looking for the four of you.”

I glanced at the others. So far as I knew, this time last year I hadn’t yet existed, and my body had been in some kind of institution or prison. Fenn was also in prison, or possibly not yet arrested for looting an exclusion zone, and Amaryllis was still busy being a princess, and Grak was … doing something, but not something all that important in the scheme of things.

“And who do you think we are?” I asked.

“Ah,” said Solace with a smile. “That, I do not know. The spell I cast was not to find you specifically, but someone who was both willing and someday capable of helping me to save my druidic grove.”

“You’re a druid?” I asked. I hadn’t thought that Aerb had druids.

“You’re not a druid,” said Amaryllis. “The last of the loci were exterminated during the Second Empire. They couldn’t move, which meant they couldn’t hide, and they didn’t have the firepower to fight back. There haven’t been any druids for three hundred years.”

I saw Solace glance down at Amaryllis’ shirt (‘Boning by the Bay’) and frown. “I understand that’s what’s taught at the athenaeums these days. Would you care to see some proof?”

From her cloak she pulled out a large, five-gallon bottle with thick glass walls, which she set on the ground in front of her. It didn’t escape my notice that there was no possible way that she could have hidden the bottle in that cloak, which at least gave a hint to what its magic was. The bottle itself was magic as well, that much was clear from looking at it, because inside was a miniature forest with a clearing in the center, which sat on top of a half-foot of dirt. I might have thought that it was a diorama, if not for the details.

Amaryllis stared down at the bottle, and Grak pulled out his monocle to look at it. There was an entire scene in there, laid out before our eyes, an entire ecosystem in miniature, captured.

“Nice bottle,” said Fenn.

“Are you carrying around a locus?” asked Amaryllis with wide eyes. “Is that even possible? Has it been surviving within that bottle for the last three hundred years?”

I held up a hand. “Clearly, you actually are a druid,” I said. “What spell was it that brought you to this specific place and time, placing you at just the right point to see us arrive when we didn’t even know we were going to be here until minutes ago?” That seemed like the most important point to me, because I wanted to first make sure that Larkspur couldn’t use the same method to find us, and second I wanted to see whether we could find Arthur with it.

“It was a spell of Zorisad Yosivun, the Deep Searching,” said Solace with a small bow at the foreign words. “It takes a year to cast, and at the end, that which was sought is found. If it cannot be found, the spell will cost the caster her life. I sought those who would be willing and someday capable of helping me. As the spell is concluded, and I am not dead, and the four of you are the only ones around for miles, I can only presume that you will be the ones to help me.”

I frowned at that. “How does the spell judge willing and ‘someday’ capable?” I asked. “How does it … how is it supposed to know?” What’s stopping us from fucking off to go do something else? I knew the D&D answer, which is that things could always go off the rails at any moment, and the DM was just making as good a guess as possible about what the future would hold, but I really hoped that her answer would be illuminating.

“Zorisad Yosivun works differently depending on what you ask for,” said Solace, again with a small bow as she said the spell’s name. “For people, it searches within hearts and minds and takes its measure of you. It brought me inexorably to this time and place.”

“That was a very non-technical answer,” I said.

“The druids were non-technical,” said Amaryllis. She had been crouched down next to the bottle and now stood up to look Solace over. “They were powerful when near their locus, one of the most powerful of the mages of the Lost King’s day, but even before the Second Empire began its campaign against them, they were beginning to lag behind the other schools of magic.”

Solace nodded. “The revolutions of the First Empire were not compatible with druidic modes of practice.” She reached toward one of the rows of flowers with a slender hand and with a come-hither gesture, one of the blue flowers began to grow, extending its stalk in defiance of the principles of both botany and physics, until it rested just under her nose. She gave it a sniff and murmured in satisfaction, then gestured at the flower again, which sent it back to where it had been. “The Deep Search was only for those willing and possibly capable, it gave no promises about the future. There are things I can offer you, both my aid as a druid and as a flower mage of some small power, as well as the magics the grove has steadily accumulated over the centuries.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll do it.”

“Juniper,” Amaryllis said with a tight voice. “You cannot unilaterally decide these things.”

“We’re a democracy, dammit!” said Fenn. “But I vote yes, and you gave Joon the tiebreaker, so consider that another win for democracy.”

Amaryllis sighed.

“You’ll have to tell us what, specifically, you think we can do,” I said to Solace as I watched Grak tapping at the bottle with his monocle up to his eye. “Or I guess if you just used magic to find us, then you need to tell us what your problem is, in detail, so we can figure out what tools we have to solve it, or might acquire in the future.”

“We placed the locus in this bottle three hundred years ago,” said Solace. “The environment inside is self-regulating, and the natural home of the locus, though limited in land area by what the bottle can hold. I am the last of the druids tending to it, and without me, I believe that the land inside will die, and the final locus with it. What the Deep Searching has indicated is that you are willing and might someday be capable of finding a permanent solution to the problem.”

Quest Accepted: 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)

“There are significant wards inside this bottle,” said Grak. He reached for the top of the bottle, and pressed a thick finger against the neck. Solace made no move to stop him. The bottle tipped up on edge, but the earth and trees inside it stayed in place, not sliding or moving even as Grak pushed the bottle up to a fifteen-degree angle. He let it back down, slowly and gently. “Wards are static,” he said. “The wards are anchored to the internal extradimensional space, not to reality.”

“Is that a problem?” I asked.

“No,” said Grak. “It indicates a vastly powerful collective of linked warders.”

“This isn’t the first time Zorisad Yosivun has been used by this druidic grove,” said Solace with a small bow at the words.

“You understand that this isn’t a thing that we can do right this moment?” I asked. Solace nodded. “I don’t mean for lack of will, but because we don’t have the first clue how such a thing could actually be done.” The fact that I now had a quest indicated that it was probably possible, and the fact that it was a companion quest meant that she was a companion, which implied a certain level of trust (though I hadn’t forgotten that Grak’s loyalty had started in the negatives).

“I didn’t ask for those who were willing and capable at the moment,” said Solace with a light shrug.

“Is there a reason for that?” I asked.

“As I said, this isn’t the first time that Zorisad Yosivun has been used by this druidic grove,” said Solace. Her voice was gentle, but I could read the subtext. If the spell couldn’t find what it was looking for, it would cost the caster her life. How many times had this druidic circle cast the spell, with more and more pessimistic wordings, until it had come to this? I couldn’t tell whether that reading was correct or not, but for all her calm I didn’t think that Solace would be standing before us if she had many better options.

“Would you like to meet it?” she asked us, gesturing toward the bottle.

“The locus? In there?” asked Amaryllis, casting her eyes toward the bottle, where the tiny trees were moving gently under the force of a breeze that must have been entirely internal. Her eyes were bright and full of curiosity. “Yes.”

“Seems like a trap,” said Fenn. She still had her bow out and arrow at the ready.

“Helping her is a companion quest,” I said. I watched Solace’s face as I said that. I wasn’t sure how she would take the whole ‘you’re eternally linked to me’ thing, and wanted to hold off on having that particular conversation. She also seemed to have no idea who we were, and if she had been prepared for our arrival, it wouldn’t have been too hard for her to kill us outright.

“Still seems like a trap,” said Fenn. “Grak and I will stay outside. Grak, start putting up as many wards as you can.”

“I will put up the ones most likely to prevent an ambush,” he said with a frown.

Solace stood in front of the bottle and placed her finger just inside the rim. Her body twisted and warped as it was sucked into the bottle in a flash, distilled down to a tiny thing that was pretty much impossible to see.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis. Any sense of wonder that might have been present on her face had vanished, and she strode forward to the bottle. “We should be able to talk freely for a moment. I agree with Fenn that it seems like a trap, but we very much appear to have made the acquaintance of a practitioner of a magic long thought dead, which would be an incredible boon, and that makes me immediately suspicious.” She looked me in the eyes, hers glacial blue and probing. “You said that she was a companion?”

I closed my eyes and started talking even as I waited for the screens to come up. “I was given a quest for the restoration of the grove,” I said. “It was labeled a companion quest, but looking at the companion screen —” I stopped for a moment, because the companion screen was not as I had left it.

Amaryllis was still at a 9 for Loyalty, Grak had moved up to a 3, and Fenn was at 16. The first point of order was that loyalty could, in fact, exceed 10. The second was that Fenn had somehow gained a whopping six points since the last time I checked. The messages the game gave me weren’t recorded anywhere, and didn’t stick around for long even if I didn’t blink them away, which meant that it was possible I’d gained those points while asleep and never noticed it … or something had happened when I was high on unicorn blood.

“— it doesn’t show her as a companion, not yet, which means that I can’t see what her loyalty is, and we know that those can start in the negatives.” I hoped that my pause didn’t entirely give me away. Fenn and I clearly needed to have a pointed conversation, ideally in private.

Grak sniffed at that, sucking air into his wide nostrils. “I assume that was me,” he said. “Fenn planned to betray me. It would have been foolish not to plot against you.”

“Water over the bridge,” said Fenn with a wave of her hand.

“I think it’s a risk worth taking,” said Amaryllis. “The Second Empire moved against the druids. The Empire of Common Cause might be able to work with them. There are minor exclusion zones that a locus would be able to revive almost entirely. If we can get them reproducing …” She trailed off and looked at me. “You think that this is a result of your power?”

“Um,” I said. I thought that this was Dungeon Master shenanigans to introduce a new player at the start of a new session, but that would be related to my place in the context of this world as a simulation, rather than any displayed or provable powers on my part. “It’s hard to say.” It’s hard to say whether there were potential companions floating around in the world who we had a high chance of bumping into, or whether there were a small, set pool that showed up on schedule, or whether something even weirder was going on.

“Very well,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll go in, the others will keep guard.” She walked forward and without another word, placed her finger into the bottle. The same magic happened again, twisting and twirling her physical form around for a brief second before she was sucked inside.

“Okay,” said Fenn. “We should be able to talk freely now.” She looked to me with a too-serious expression that was a mimic of the one Amaryllis had worn. She broke after a second of that. “Well I personally didn’t have anything, but if one of you two did?” She glanced at Grak. “Remember, vow of silence, don’t mention unicorn blood.”

Grak rolled his eyes, but said nothing.

I stepped forward to the bottle, psyched myself up, and put my finger just inside the rim. There was no physical sensation of my body being distorted to fit through (and shrunk down?) as I entered the bottle, it was the world around me that seemed to be changing, save for the bottle itself, whose mouth was only growing wider. And then I was falling, with walls of glass on either side of me, until they opened up where the neck of the bottle ended. Below me was the woodland I had seen from outside, spread out right up to the glass, with a small creek running from one end to the other, and a clearing that I was dropping down toward.

I hadn’t actually given much thought to the prospect of what I was going to do to arrest my fall. My assumption was that either the magic bottle had some special feature that would allow me to land safely, that Solace would save me, that the locus would save me, that there were wards that would prevent injury, or maybe that I’d simply heal back from the injuries that the equivalent to a mile-long fall would give me. But it wasn’t until after I had fallen a few hundred feet that the raw terror of the rushing wind set in and I started trying to figure out how I was going to deal with this in the worst-case scenario. I had left my messenger bag, with Ropey inside it, on the ground back near the flower fields. I had more bones that I could suck dry for END to heal me, assuming that I could stay conscious when I hit the ground, and I could probably take the Anyblade off my finger and shape it into something that would provide drag to slow me, and that would —

I sprouted wings. They ripped through my t-shirt, making me thankful that Fenn had taken my armor, and I was startled to realize that I could control them with a thought. They were huge, with each one stretching out at least nine feet, and even then I could tell that they would only be enough for me to soar, not actually fly with. With an excited thought I reached out to the wings, trying to feel the bones in them like I could within my own flesh and blood, but I was disappointed to find nothing there. More than that, my blood wasn’t pumping through these wings either, whatever magic had made them.

Still, I could glide, and the pure silence of it, with no sound but the rushing of wind, called back a memory of biking in the nighttime. Gliding on these enormous wings put piloting a helicopter to shame, in part because it was so effortless to use them. I didn’t need to think about any aspect of flight; it was as intuitive as if I’d had those wings since the day I was born. That probably meant some level of mental hackery, but I wasn’t about to let that ruin my fun.

When I spotted a flash of long, red hair, I angled down. Amaryllis was looking up at me, and as I circled her, losing altitude with every rotation, I could see that her t-shirt had holes ripped in the back as well. Solace was nowhere to be seen, but beside the creek that ran through the field there was a singular tree, standing tall and alone. A small plume of smoke was rising up from a dead branch that extended slightly past the tree’s canopy.

I landed next to Amaryllis by bringing myself to a dead stop and then dropping the final twenty feet, killing my momentum with a final flourish of the wings. I could feel a strain on my ribs that hurt far more than I had expected it to, but when I came back up from my landing I had managed not to actually break any of my weakened bones. The wings were retracting into my back in a hurry.

“Okay, now that we’re alone together, we can finally speak freely,” I said.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “Assume that the winds here will carry your every word to her ears.”

“Sorry, that was a joke,” I said. One that probably didn’t work without the context of Fenn’s joke, when I thought about it.

“Ah,” said Amaryllis. “Okay, I get it.” She didn’t laugh or smile. “Was there anything you needed to say, that you didn’t say last night? Something you couldn’t mention in front of Fenn or Grak?”

“No,” I replied. “Or … there was one thing. You took an amulet with a glowing blue gem from the Caer Laga vault. Fenn and I never did discover what it did, and it was keyed to you personally, so, I’m not saying that I think it was something that you were hiding from us” —though it totally was—
“but it was one of the things that I kept meaning to ask you about once you got better.”

“It’s a copy of my great-grandfather,” said Amaryllis. “Wearing it allows the facsimile to converse with me. I’m fairly certain that I could push my own essence into it, which would clear him out and make the copy one in my own image, but I’m understandably reticent to do that.”

“Huh,” I said. “That seems like it could have been useful to know about. Really useful. Four heads are better than three.”

“He’s currently useless,” said Amaryllis. “I’ll spend more time with him later, but he wants me to engage in testing with him to ensure that I’m the sort of person who needs his help.” She looked toward the tall tree that had smoke puffing out of its makeshift branch-chimney. From the ground, I could see that there were a number of natural holes and hollows, and the interior of it was lit. “I’m trying my best to be forthright with you, but we have other concerns at the moment.”

“Right,” I said. “I mean at first I was just trying to make a joke, but, you’re right. Let’s go.”

As we walked toward the tree/house, I contemplated the bottle. Gravity still felt the same, which it probably shouldn’t have, and the light outside the bottle still seemed as bright as it had when we were out there. My eyes were smaller now, so less light should be hitting them, right? The obvious answer was that magic was compensating for that, but the how seemed like it might be important, if only because it might reveal some of the underlying mechanisms of the simulation I was pretty sure I was in.

(From the outside the bottle was eleven inches across, and from the inside I could simply look at the walls, get a very close approximation from Range Finder, and then use some simple trigonometry to correct for the fact that I was looking up at the walls, since trees were in the way at ground level. My quick calculations, which I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do without WolframAlpha before reaching 7 CUN, suggested the interior of the bottle had a diameter of ~1.2 miles, meaning that we were at something like 1:7000 scale. The trees were not tiny at all; they were behemoths.)

Solace was waiting for us by a wide hole in the tree, not something carved, but what seemed to be entirely (impossibly) natural given the grain of the wood. The windows of the tree-home were similar, and if you had never met a person nor seen a home, you might have thought that it was just the tree’s quirks that had made it into this.

“You’re actually a druid,” said Amaryllis. “This land, this square mile of territory, is really inhabited by a locus, which you carry around in your magical cloak. You can travel without your power diminishing, because you’re never more than a single press of a finger from your locus.”

“Yes,” said Solace with a faint smile. “Do you love it for the sake of the power I wield, or for the majesty of a forgotten magic?”

Amaryllis hesitated. “Both,” she said. “Druids are, or have become”—she stopped—“you know. You can travel freely, you must know what the word ‘druid’ means to the people of Aerb.”

“A thing lost,” said Solace with a nod. “A symbol of the death and desecration of the Second Empire, a memento of all that has ever been lost and cannot be recovered. Yes, I know.”

“Then why,” began Amaryllis, before stopping again. “The Empire of Common Cause would welcome a locus, especially a moveable one, with open arms. Almost any nation within the empire would throw money and personnel toward rehabilitating this grove.”

“To come under the control of another is not the way of the druids,” said Solace. “I have one master, and that is my locus.”

“And you would see it die rather than administered by a kingdom?” asked Amaryllis.

“You misunderstand the nature of a locus,” said Solace. “To be administered by a kingdom might be enough to kill it, even if the land it had was large, healthy, and mostly untouched by the mortal species. My locus has been confined to this bottle with a single square mile for near-on three hundred years.”

“And besides that, it’s the kind of thing you would use the Deep Searching for anyway,” I said.

Solace looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “This locus has too little land to induct new druids into the grove,” she said. “It took three deaths to Zorisad Yosivun before we stopped trying to find a kingdom to be our salvation.” And each of those deaths with a year invested in the question. Each one gave you information, if only in the negative, suggesting that what you’d asked for was, despite what you might assume, impossible.

It was bothering me that there was still no message about her being a companion. How it had worked in the past was that a loyalty message would pop up after enough time, and after the second level of loyalty, I would be able to see a biography. None of that was exactly pinned down, and there were more complicated theories, but I really thought that I should have gotten one by now.

“So where is the locus?” I asked.

“Behind you,” replied Solace with a smile.

When I turned around, I saw a doe, six feet tall at the shoulder, with skin so pale brown that it was nearly white, and six eyes that were all staring right at me. It moved closer, twitching an ear, then bent its head low to the ground to eat from the grass there, not taking its eyes off me.

Loyalty Increased: Six-Eyed Doe lvl 0!

Chapter 3 - Keep Magic Weird

I stared at the six-eyed doe as Amaryllis approached it. It was massive, for a deer, though showed no signs of giving a crap about the square-cube law. I mean, I also didn’t give a crap about the square-cube law, but it was one of those things that you needed to think about when designing creatures, because someone like Craig or Reimer would start questioning how a fly as large as a house was able to generate lift, and “it’s magic” only worked as an explanation a limited number of times before people started thinking that you didn’t know what you were talking about.

I stayed back. I wasn’t actually clear on why Amaryllis was going toward the thing. There were definitely cultural assumptions and pieces of history that I was almost completely ignorant on, given that “magics that were previously considered dead” weren’t high up on my reading/research list (though when I phrased it like that, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world was to go after specifically those kinds of magic, because that was plot-bait incarnate). I couldn’t tell whether Amaryllis’ obvious affection and wonder for the locus was being faked for some reason, or stemmed from the place of the druids in the cultural canon of Aerb. Had she been faking those emotions outside the bottle, then dropped them as soon as Solace was gone, or had she been actually feeling those emotions, then suppressed them when it was inconvenient to be having them? I had been traveling with Amaryllis for quite some time, and didn’t actually understand her very well.

I wouldn’t say that I hated deer, but a lot of my time with deer had been spent looking at them down the barrel of a rifle, and I considered venison to basically be the only reason that it was worth suffering their existence. Hunting aside, almost all my interactions with deer had been negative, either because they were eating things from the garden or they were narrowly avoiding an accident because they were too dumb to be sensible about roads.

(And was the Dungeon Master trying to say something, by having this creature be a deer, rather than something else? If half the stuff in Aerb was built to my specifications, from things I had dreamed up or reflections of my life, then why a fucking deer of all things? Was this just on the level of “hey you used to hunt deer”, a stupid surface-level reference, or was it actual commentary of some kind? There was a point to asking questions like this, which is that eventually I might be able to figure the Dungeon Master out, but I was pretty far from solving that puzzle.)

“Do they all look like that?” I asked Solace.

“Yes,” said Solace. “Because that is the only one there is.” She gave me a smile as I opened my mouth to try smoothing things over. “It’s okay,” she said. “And no, they didn’t all look like that, back when there were hundreds.”

I almost said that seemed like a lot, before remembering that Aerb was ten times as large as Earth, and having tens of them on Earth would have placed them on the far side of the critically endangered species list. Even at their peak, they had been really rare.

“I don’t know much about druids. Or loci,” I said.

“That’s okay.” Solace nodded. “Not many do, these days. Being absent for three hundred years will do that. Druids were never ones for knowledge anyhow.”

“Huh,” I said. “And, is there a reason for that?”

Solace shrugged. “Knowledge is detrimental to the art,” she said. “I gave you wings so that you wouldn’t die from the fall, but that might have been impossible for me if I’d had any concrete ideas about how wings actually work. It used to be a somewhat common occurrence for druids, to go off in pursuit of better understanding only to lose their intuitive connection.”

“So, like a piano player who can only play when they’re not thinking about what their fingers are actually doing,” I said.

“What’s a piano?” asked Solace with a raised eyebrow. Amaryllis had come back to join us, her time nuzzling the deer apparently complete. I assumed that she’d been listening in on our conversation.

“Uh, it’s a musical instrument that you play like this,” I said, holding my hands out as though I was about to type something. “You press black and white keys which raise hammers that hit against strings, which then make sound?” (SOC, dump stat, etc.)

“He means a clavichord,” said Amaryllis with a smile. She turned to me. “The tangents are actually blades, not hammers.”

“Right,” I said. “But druids must have some limits, right? I was just wondering what those limits were.”

“Would either of you wish to become a druid someday?” asked Solace. “It might be possible, once this task is complete and the locus can induct new members.”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “I think I would like that.” And there I knew she was lying, because the thought of Amaryllis making a commitment to a forest, or the spirit of a forest, or whatever, sent up a bunch of error messages. (To be clear, these were non-literal error messages. I was at a point in my life where I needed to start making that distinction.)

“Then I will choose to demur on that question, Juniper,” said Solace.

I tensed for a moment before some remote part of my brain told me that Amaryllis had already said my name in front of her. “I’m sorry, we never did make our introductions,” I said. “I’m Juniper, this is Mary.” There was a little twist of Amaryllis’ lips at the fact that I hadn’t used her real name, only enough that I knew she got it.

“And who are you, at a deeper level?” asked Solace, still with her kindly smile. “I, again, know almost nothing of you. Three races among the four of you, magic items to spare, and a warder of some skill? There are not terribly many conventional arrangements of people who would suit even that bare bones description. If the four of you really do have a teleportation key, then … well, I don’t know what that would make you.”

“Joon?” asked Amaryllis. I could read the implied question in her voice. Can we trust her?

“It’s complicated,” I said.

I turned to look at the locus. The Six-Eyed Doe, as the game termed it, that was my actual companion, not Solace. And if I were a game master who had a player with the ability to literally see the loyalty levels of everyone on the team, you had better believe I would give them someone their power didn’t work on. The question was whether that meant Solace was meant to betray us, or whether it was a red herring, or whether I was trying to read far too deep into what little of the Dungeon Master’s machinations I could actually, visibly see.

I had made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to treat people like that, that I wasn’t going to throw anyone under the bus because I doubted that they were real. I had read those kinds of stories, and they almost never worked out right for the protagonist, but it wasn’t just that, it was the idea that if I discounted things as ‘not real’ then I would have to discount my entire life, because I couldn’t trust any of that either, not even the vividly real ones.

So on her merits, could we trust Solace? No, absolutely not. If I had known that she wasn’t a companion, then I probably wouldn’t have gone into the bottle to begin with. She was a companion’s — servant? secretary? hand? — something like those, but that was introducing trust chains into the mix, and I didn’t particularly trust or understand the Six-Eyed Doe as yet either. Solace seemed nice enough, but I wasn’t about to live my life on Aerb on the basis of how nice people seemed when I first met them. That wasn’t to say that I was going to reject the quest, or even reject having her as a traveling companion, but trust had to be earned, if the game wasn’t going to just cough up that information.

“Complicated?” asked Solace. She gave me a small grin. “I’ve been the only druid left on Aerb for the last thirty years. I survived the extermination efforts of the Second Empire. I understand a thing or two about complicated. I won’t ask you to break any silence you feel you need to keep, and Mary, I will confirm that you’re right; I can hear anything that’s said within the domain of the locus.”

“Wait, are you saying that you’re at least three hundred years old?” I asked. “How is that possible? Did you know the Lost King?”

“This body is forty years old,” said Solace. “Young, by crantek standards. When I grow too old I perform the rite of Yaxukasu Axud, which allows me to be birthed again. I have lived for four hundred and eight years, across a number of bodies. The Lost King was before my time, sadly.”

I sighed. “Well, that at least explains how you can be here if the locus couldn’t induct anyone into the grove.” That also meant that she was a source of valuable knowledge, but perhaps not the kind of knowledge that was of immediate use, especially if they were anti-knowledge. “Is healing within the realm of what a druid can do?”

“Of course,” said Solace. “It was what we were most known for. Outside the bottle I am considerably weaker, but inside I can heal almost any injury and cure almost any disease, so long as it’s not too far progressed. Before the Second Empire, people used to bring their sick into the woods in hopes of finding a druid they could plead their case to.”

I frowned at that. “Okay, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to just set up a station where people could come and get a hearing?” I asked. “Why should they have to wander into the woods? I mean why would the druids want totally ignorant outsiders coming in and bumbling their way around?”

“You were right that you don’t understand druids,” said Solace. She gestured to the locus. “It’s order that rankles. Systemization and understanding are anathema to a locus. This world in a bottle has just enough that’s wild and free to sustain the locus, and even then it bucks at me when I go about my work of keeping this place functional.” She ran her hand through her hair. “Do you know your history?”

“I think I can safely say that I don’t,” I replied.

“What you’re suggesting?” asked Solace. “That was how the Second Empire started. They saw the loci and the druid’s groves as resources to be exploited, the domains as places to be penned in and contained. That is fundamentally not how a locus behaves. To study it is to weaken it. To enumerate a druid’s powers is to cause them to fail. That was always what the loci and their druids butted up against, the desire of the mortal species to know and the nature of the locus, which is not to be known.”

If a druid couldn’t use their powers if they understood them, then the first thing I thought about doing was going up a level and trying to figure out what ‘understanding’ meant in that context, and to test what various things would trigger this anti-understanding mechanism. Obviously going up a level was, to some extent, allowed, right? Otherwise Solace wouldn’t be able to tell us that actually understanding druidic magic would kill it, and she knew enough to know that she would lose power if she actually understood the mechanics in anything other than an intuitive sense. And yet, I was pretty sure that I was edging around something that would be forbidden, or at least that I would be told was forbidden.

“That’s always been my biggest gripe with D&D,” said Arthur. “The magic almost never feels magical, and that’s because it’s bound by rules. Joon solves a lot of that by just giving us weird stuff —”

“It’s the ‘Keep Magic Weird’ initiative,” I said.

“Is that a reference?” asked Tom.

“‘Keep Portland Weird’, right?” asked Tiff.

“Yeah,” I said. I gestured to Arthur to continue. We had seven people for the session, including Craig’s kid sister Maddie, which made it a bit of a madhouse, especially when Arthur was trying to talk seriously about something.

“The problem is that there are rules, and once you know those rules, you can’t be surprised by them,” said Arthur. “It’s a map that has all the lines drawn in, with nowhere left to explore. Wizards are supposed to be magical, but they just boil down to a list of a few hundred spells to choose from. You get the buzz of magic from those spells when you first read them, but after that, it falls flat.”

“You can’t fix that though,” said Reimer. “Not unless you want to go full freeform roleplay without any rules, and that always sucks.”

“That was basically what we did for Actual Cannibal ████ ███████, and it worked great,” said Tiff.

“████ ███████?” asked Maddie. She was three years younger than us, not really a kid, but that was how I had always thought of her: Craig’s kid sister.

“No talking when it’s not your turn,” said Craig. She pouted at that. “Whose turn was it?”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my turn tracker, which was a mess of dry erase marker. I had horrible handwriting. “Tom, you’re up.” (And, as usual, the conversation continued on while I tried to deal with combat and Tom’s questions. I listened in, splitting my attention, unable to contribute without bringing an already-slow session grinding to a halt.)

“You could totally do a purely DM-mediated magic system,” said Arthur. “The player says what they want to do, the DM places a difficulty on it, and then the player rolls some dice. I thought of that in two seconds, I’m sure there are better ways.”

“But the DM is just arbitrarily assigning difficulty?” asked Reimer. “And the player just has to take a guess at how hard it is to actually cast a spell or do whatever unstructured thing it is you want to do? I mean, you’re going to have to introduce rules at some point, even if they’re just meta-level rules like Wish or Miracle, and it’s the rules you dislike.”

“If you had a good DM, I think you could do it implicitly,” said Tiff. “You could do like a social contract type thing, develop an understanding, and then build from there. You’d basically be praying to your god, but the god would be the DM, and maybe he would have his own rules, but you’d never know them, and you’d be discouraged from knowing them.”

“Wanna homebrew it?” asked Reimer with a grin. “If you pitched it, I think Joon would go for it, and then I can cheese the shit out of it.”

“I heard that!” I called out to them. “Tiff, don’t you dare go over to the dark side, stay over in the light with Arthur.”

Nothing ever came of that homebrew plan, which I was thankful for, because I liked the rules. Arthur was right that magic seems a little bit less magical once you stuck everything to a cork board, but it wasn’t less magical for me, because everything I thought up I could make a reality, and that process of making these ethereal ideas into something concrete was one of the things I loved most about tabletop.

I was certain that I was never going to be a druid, and that I would never want to be a druid, and that even if I did want to be a druid, I would probably be powerless within the week because I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from investigating what limits the power had. But there was a bigger problem than that.

“Can I hurt the locus by thinking the wrong thoughts?” I asked. Like, say thinking about the fact that as size increases, volume increases faster than surface area, and the doe just looked like a normal doe without the structural changes necessary to have legs that supported it, and it had six eyes that would require an almost totally different skull from what an actual deer had, and six eyes didn’t really seem like they would help much given the configuration on the head, except maybe for added parallax, and oh god am I killing this deer just by thinking these things?

“No,” said Solace. “You’re trying to pin down what can and cannot be pinned down?”

“I’m just, maybe not suited to this place,” I said. “Or, this variety of magic. I’m a guy who pins things down, by my nature, and if you tell me that it’s mystical, which you seem to be doing, I start to think about all the properties of that mysticality.”

“You would make a bad druid,” said Solace with a laugh. “But no, the things you should be most worried about are telling me how or why something I have done, or am about to do, cannot possibly work, or openly questioning how it did work given some piece of knowledge available to you. As for the locus, it matters more what is done within its domain, and how you see it. It is a thing that values friendships without structure, rather than written or oral agreements. It would never, for example, induct either of you as druids in exchange for your service to it; your service must be given without any preconceptions of trade. If your service is so given, then the locus might take to you, or it might not.”

I looked to Amaryllis, wondering whether she knew that. She seemed like she would make a bad druid too, at least to my eyes, but maybe she was better at the whole gift economy, spiritual guidance, it’s-just-a-show-I-should-really-just-relax thing than I suspected.

“Okay,” I said, “But the upshot is that you’re offering us aid? With no strings attached?”

“Hrm,” said Solace. “I wouldn’t go that far. I will say that my intention is to help you, and it is my hope that it is your intention to help me. I will give you both the material aid and personal effort I believe you require in the pursuit of your goals.”

“But,” I said. “Should you believe that you’re not getting closer to —”

“We’ve accepted already, Juniper,” said Amaryllis. “Or rather, if I understand Solace right, we have already declared our intentions and she has declared hers. I don’t know that there’s more to say on the matter.”

“Mary is in charge of diplomacy,” I said to Solace with a small smile.

“And that’s something that the four of you do together?” asked Solace. “Diplomacy? If I’ll be traveling with you, will it be to places where diplomacy takes place? I have to say that you seem exceedingly well-armed for diplomats.”

“We’re on our way to the Athenaeum of Speculation and Scrutiny, to learn more about the dream-skewered,” said Amaryllis. “Any assistance in shortening our journey would be much appreciated.”

“And there’s another thing,” I said. “I’ve been having a medical issue with my ribs and my left hand that I’d like your help in fixing .” If you can.

(I was trying my best not to tell the druid what she could or could not do, and why it was probably impossible. This wasn’t a test, per se, though I was expecting that it would give me data either way, and that wasn’t my fault, was it? I was also hoping that there wasn’t a placebo requirement; would druidic magic work less well if I thought it wasn’t going to work? Was I allowed to ask whether there was a placebo effect?)

“Remove your shirt,” said Solace.

I did as she said, with only a little bit of hesitation. The spell that had given us wings had ripped two holes in the back anyway. I noticed a slight change in Amaryllis' expression as she looked at me, a shifting under the mask of good humor she was currently wearing. I was sure that I looked different from the last time she’d seen me. I was quite a bit more muscular now, having gone from 5 PHY to 7 PHY. I didn’t have any dysmorphia from it, none at all, which in itself was odd, because I would have thought there would be little moments throughout the day when I would look down and be shocked by the changes my body had gone through. The game layer, or the simulation, or whatever, had been kind enough to monkey with my perception of self (which, yes, was disconcerting, but I figured was better than feeling like I had been trapped in the wrong body).

Solace placed a hand on my bare chest. She had a pleasant smile, most of the time, despite being four hundred years old and having apparently suffered through the fantasy equivalent of the Nazis, along with the deaths of everyone close to her and a life of hiding. That smile began to fade as a look of confusion came over her green face.

“You’re perfectly healthy,” she said, not removing her hand from my chest. She frowned. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, that would have been … yesterday morning.” I hadn’t touched the pancakes, bacon, or buttered coffee in the morning. I had woken up from bed to eat something and then gotten sidetracked with Amaryllis. And before that, I’d been high out of my mind on unicorn blood, then passed out, which meant that it wasn’t a great day for remembering to eat.

“Well, that explains the malnourishment. But I don’t fully understand this,” said Solace. She moved her hand, touching me, first pressing her fingers firmly against my side, then going for my arm. She grabbed my left arm, in her hand and peered down at it. “Your body thinks that it’s healthy, but it’s wrong. This is —” She stopped and pulled her hand away, then looked at Amaryllis. “What happened to him, exactly? Does he know?”

Amaryllis looked bewildered at that, and I hoped it was authentic. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but I’m a bone mage. I used the magic of those fifty-one bones in a time of need and whatever it is you’re seeing, that’s the result.”

“Oh,” said Solace. She calmed down somewhat. “I knew that it was your soul, I just thought … I hadn’t considered that you had done it to yourself. I assumed that she was a bone mage, and they can touch the soul ...” She stopped and looked at me. “The things the Second Empire did with the soul are one of the reasons that they aren’t looked upon fondly anymore, if you’re really so ignorant of history as you claim.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but what’s wrong with you isn’t something that I can fix.”

“Okay,” I said, “I need to put a history book on my shopping list or something.” I paused. “I should warn you that fixing this problem of mine is on our list of things to do, and it’s very possible that meddling with the soul is going to be how that gets done.”

Solace blanched, her light-green skin going a shade lighter, making her look sickly. “I was afraid of that,” she murmured. “But yes, that does make sense.”

“It makes sense in terms of the Deep Searching and why you were brought here,” said Amaryllis. “You think salvation might take dealing with the soul of the locus.”

“Does a locus have a soul?” I asked. “Or, sorry, is that one of those things that I’m not supposed to ask?”

“They do have souls,” said Solace. Her face was set in a frown. “The Second Empire was fastidious in its attempts to understand the world. Never let a death go to waste, they said.” She glanced over to the six-eyed doe, which was still standing close by. “I’d prefer that we speak of this elsewhere.”

I looked up at the top of the bottle. “Is there a better way out, or are we going to grow wings again?”

“I’ll admit that was mostly for effect,” said Solace. “I didn’t have the measure of you as well as I do now. I wanted to show you this place, and its majesty, which is just a scrap of what the locus once had, and will have again.”

(I found it odd and somewhat off-putting that everyone just called “it” “the locus”. Were names too much of a constraint? The game called it Six-Eyed Doe, and that was what I was going to go with, at least within the privacy of my own head. It also seemed dumb to call a doe an “it” instead of a “she”, considering that it was already gendered, but whatever.)

Solace stepped over to the tree-house, which I took as an opportunity to glance inside as I followed. It was more ordered than I had expected, given what Solace had said about the nature of druids, but the order was organic, with little out-of-the-way cubbies, stacks of fruits and furs, and nary a straight line in sight. Solace went up next to the door and took her staff in hand, then tapped twice on the wood. It split along the grain, revealing a long tunnel through the wood that extended, fourth-dimensionally, straight through the entire width of the tree.

“Down the rabbit hole then,” I said with a breath.

When Solace started walking down the dark tunnel, I followed after, with Amaryllis right behind me. As soon as she was past the entrance, it sealed shut behind me, leaving me with a claustrophobic feeling and a sudden spike of panic. I was about to light my fingers on fire when I saw a swarm of yellow-green dots appear in front of me, which at first reminded me of the fireflies I’d tried to catch with Arthur when I was little, before I realized that they actually were fireflies. As more of them appeared, I could see by their light that they were coming out from Solace’s long, leafy cloak. They kept on coming, flying up and around us, some of them landing on the roof of the tunnel, until there was enough light to see by.

(I was fairly sure that this was also meant to impress us with a blatant display of magic, just like the winged glide down into the bottle, and I have to say that it was working on me.)

We went what felt like a hundred yards before a shaft of light opened in front of us, which eventually resolved itself into an ordered row of flowers once my eyes adjusted to the light. Solace stepped out into it as the fireflies swarmed to her and made their way back under the leaves of her cloak. When I stepped out of the tree after her, I looked back to see the long tunnel seem to emerge from a tree that couldn’t possibly contain it. When I looked at the field, I saw Fenn and Grak standing there over the bottle. Fenn had spotted us, and was giving us a wave.

“Can you go ahead to the others?” asked Amaryllis. As soon as she stepped out of the tree, it folded itself back up, looking no different from all the others. “We’ll be along in a moment, but there are a few things I’d like to discuss in confidence.”

“Certainly,” said Solace. The crantek gave us a short bow and strode back to her bottle without a look back.

“So,” said Amaryllis. “It’s complicated?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “The locus is the companion, not Solace herself. Grak’s glasses show her as purple, which I have to take as a good sign, but I would be more confident that we could trust her if she weren’t a minion.”

“She has power,” said Amaryllis. “Her needs are straightforward, and she’s not making many demands. Actually, her goals for the moment are directly aligned with our own; she wants you to be stronger. If it’s alright with you, I’ll probably reveal my true identity to her when we make camp for the night.”

I startled at that, because the idea that Amaryllis was asking me was a little bit odd. “Sure,” I said. I hesitated. “How much of that was true?” I asked. “About you wanting to be a druid? Any of it?”

“The things I want and the things I can have are very different,” said Amaryllis. She reached back to feel the holes in her shirt. “I would like to have a new shirt that doesn’t make me look like an ass, but I doubt that Fenn will be able to resist the urge to show off to our new travelling companion.” She sighed. “I would like to be a druid, to wander the woods in solitude, to have that simple, uncomplicated—”—she looked at Solace—“that’s not right, looking at her, I didn’t mean to diminish her sacrifice and struggles. Druids in the fairy tales are different. Maybe that was a safe dream because it was unattainable.” She looked to me, staring at me with those pretty blue eyes, perfect lips slightly parted. “Are you worried that I’ll let thoughts like that get in my way?”

“No,” I said. “The opposite.”

“Oh,” said Amaryllis. She turned back toward the others. “Come on, I don’t want them to think that we were conspiring.”

“We were conspiring against you!” Fenn said to us as soon as we rejoined the others. “Grak started it. Do you know what he said as soon as you left? He said, ‘Now we finally have a chance to speak freely’! His first joke!”

“I understand jokes,” said Grak. “It was not my first one.” He looked at Fenn with a frown. “I regretted it immediately.”

“Solace was just telling us what a wonderful time you all had in the bottle,” said Fenn. “We’re all still friends, right? Everything is copacetic?”

“Right,” I said. “We are, uh, not at full disclosure though, regarding the two major things we’re keeping under our hats.” I paused and realized that I could potentially have been talking about a few different things. “One regarding me, one regarding Mary.”

“Trust takes time, I understand that,” said Solace. “Mary, you were asking if I could assist in travel? How would the four of you feel about being birds? We could be at the athenaeum before nightfall.” Solace scooped the forest-in-a-bottle up and put it in her cloak, a process that seemed to be governed by a flourish of sleight-of-hand more than magic.

“That sounds lovely,” said Amaryllis. She turned to Fenn. “Fenn, my shirt was ripped, and I would like a new one, please.”

Fenn broke out into a grin, which she tried and failed to suppress so she could make a serious face. “Hrm,” she said, wiggling her gloved fingers. “No, no, no — hah, that’s the one, perfect for our circumstances.” A folded pink shirt appeared in her hand, which she tossed to Amaryllis.

I watched closely as Amaryllis unfolded the t-shirt to get a look at it. It was a single word with an exclamation point, in bubbly, curled writing, with sequins and glitter on it. ‘Princess!’, the shirt declared.

Amaryllis stared at it with a blank face for a few seconds before bursting out laughing.

Chapter 4 - The Market of Blood and Bone

Solace went around to us one by one, tapping her bird-skull wooden staff upon our heads. The tap produced dense mist, which fell down like a sheet to cover the body, and when it cleared, there was a bird standing there instead. I watched that happen to Grak and then Amaryllis, as Solace moved around the circle. Their bird forms looked almost identical, with her being a bit more sprightly and him a bit thicker. The color of the feathers was a dark black, with white on the belly and the lower half of the head.

“What kind of bird is that, if you know, or if that question isn’t indelicate to your, um, profession?” I asked, as Fenn was tapped on the head and shrouded in mist (or possibly, odorless smoke, if it had physical substance at all).

Solace gave a little laugh. “We’re not so fragile that we can’t withstand a little scrutiny,” she said. “They’re swallows.”

Yeah, thought so. African or European? “With an airspeed velocity of roughly twenty-five miles an hour?” It was a random fact stored away in my brain from long-ago discussions around the D&D table.

“I don’t really know,” said Solace with a raised eyebrow. “We don’t put much emphasis on measurements, and that aside, how fast or slow an animal goes — even one of the mortal species in animal form — is not something that can be reduced down to a simple number. People do it, but it’s pointless and, anyway, doesn’t ever truly match what we see in the world, where there are a million things that might affect a swallow’s flight.”

“Surely not actually a million,” I said, before stopping. “I really would make a bad druid, because now I’m trying to think about all the various factors that could influence swallow flight.” I was also thinking about relative levels of error and confidence intervals, but that was probably not something that the druid wanted to hear about.

Solace nodded happily, then tapped me on the head without another word. Mist poured down in front of my eyes, and when it cleared, I was a swallow, with no obvious transition between the two states, not even in terms of proprioception. Had my arms become wings? I lifted them, and it was as natural as if I’d been born into them, not like I had thrust my hands down into a bird suit and was controlling the wings from a distance. I ran forward a little bit on clawed feet, then flapped up into the air.

It took us two hours to get to within striking distance of the athenaeum as we followed the railroad tracks. It was visible almost from the first moment I took off though, as a beige smudge on the top of a singular purple mountain, one which sat a bit off from the rest of the range, at the end of a peninsula. Beyond that was ocean, wide and vast. That rock formation was something I didn’t think you’d ever see in nature, almost aggressively so. As we got closer I saw a city nestled at the mountain base among the trees there, and just barely, the thin line of lights that shone from the cable car lines.

We landed together in a copse of trees beside the main road into Boastre Vino, which ran parallel to the train tracks. There were barely any farms around the place, nor any visible industry, just woodland; it made me wonder at how much of Aerb was simply unspoilt. Twenty billion people across two billion square miles meant that at its peak (which it was now well below) Aerb only had the population density of Earth in the 1930s. Modern-day Aerb had a fourth of that, and I wasn’t sure how much of that decline was recent, but it seemed like enough that maybe nature would have started the reclamation process.

Solace changed back first, then tapped each of us with her staff, returning us to our natural forms one by one.

“We should be a few minutes' walk from the city,” said Amaryllis, once she had a mouth instead of a beak. “Juniper, you still want to do this the legitimate way?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m dream-skewered, so I have a reason to go to the athenaeum, which means that they should let me in and hopefully answer my questions, right? That seems faster and safer than trying to be duplicitous. I won’t be institutionalized or murdered or something?”

Amaryllis shook her head. “From everything I’ve read, the dream-skewered aren’t really confined, because this is the place that’s most like home for them, with an Earthian diet and others that believe they’re from the same place. There’s not a life for them, outside the athenaeum walls. That freedom also gives the researchers a better rapport with their subjects. You should be safe. We’ll ask around before we do it though.”

I let out a breath, trying to drain myself of nervous energy. “And do you think that you’ll all be allowed up with me?”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. She looked down at her shirt and smiled at ‘Princess!’ staring up at her. “Clearly I already have the perfect disguise. We’ll spend the rest of today in the city, gathering information, making sure that it’s safe and trying to figure out a cover story, if we need one. I wouldn’t want you going up there alone.”

“You think they’ll let us up armed and armored?” asked Fenn. “Especially the one they think is brain-damaged?”

“We’ll see,” said Amaryllis. “I would suggest armed but not armored. Half of our weapons can be hidden away in one form or another. They might check us, but I doubt it, and in the worst-case scenario, we’ll have to put some of it away in a secure vault.”

“A very secure vault,” said Grak with a nod.

“We have Sable to store things in,” said Fenn.

“I don’t want to pin everything on that glove,” said Amaryllis. “It’s a single point of failure.”

“I won’t leave my cloak, for obvious reasons,” said Solace.

“Which in the worst case means we might be splitting the party,” I said with a grimace. “Which didn’t work out well for me last time.”

“And what happened last time?” asked Solace.

“I’ll tell you about it over dinner tonight,” said Amaryllis. “We should do some reconnaissance and make camp at a hotel anyway. Besides, we skipped lunch today.” I grimaced at that reminder; I still wasn’t hungry, though I was feeling a little light-headed.

We strode forward, until we came to the familiar walls that every city so far, save for Cranberry Bay, had up around their borders. Here they were a bit taller and more finely made, tailored as though meant to impress anyone on the approach, even if they were facing the woods. The main entrance was some distance away, just barely visible, but I had seen it from the air and it looked like there was a checkpoint that we really didn’t want to go through, not if it meant trying to explain ourselves. Grak got out his monocle and looked the wall over for a bit before letting us know that it was unwarded.

Solace stepped up to the wall. “Over or through?” she asked.

“How —” I began. Amaryllis gave me a brief shake of the head. “We should see what’s on the other side first,” I said. “Once we’ve slipped in we should be able to achieve relative anonymity, it’s the breach that carries risks.” It might have been better to do it as swallows, but the inability to communicate with each other was a complicating factor.

Solace nodded and pursed her lips for a whistle, then held out her staff horizontally. A few seconds later, a variety of birds landed on the staff, and she tweeted at each of them in turn, causing them to fly off. It didn’t take long for them to return, though I waited impatiently all the same. Solace listened to each of the birds in turn, smiling gently at them, and when they had given their report, they flew off, one by one.

“Directly through this wall is an access alley with an entrance out onto the city streets,” said Solace. “There is no one there at the moment, though that may change.”

“The birds said all that?” I asked.

“Oh, I have no idea what they said,” replied Solace. She laughed at my expression. “It’s been some time since I’ve traveled with other druids, and even longer since I’ve shared the company of those outside the grove. I’ve missed it.”

“Keep your questions to yourself,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t want to sound mean, Joon, or like I’m trying to tell you what to do, but this druid is an asset, and second-guessing every little piece of magic you see goes directly against our interests. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I get it, it’s just”—I bit my lip—“it will take some adjusting to, that’s all.”

Solace stepped toward the wall, licked a finger, and ran it down in a straight line from the top of her reach down to the packed earth. The solid stone grumbled slightly and then parted way for her, and she stepped forward without seeming to think about this at all. I followed after, with my Anyblade gripped in my hand as a dagger. I had Ropey in the bag slung on my side, freshly killed fairies in my bandolier, and bones at the ready in a second bandolier in case I needed them.

It was fortunate that there was no one in the alley, and that we made it into the city proper without anyone the wiser, but there was a part of me that kept thinking about how close I was to leveling and how likely it was that a proper fight would get me there. I wasn’t about to antagonize the city guard just to get that fight, but I still itched for it, just a little bit, if it would push me over the edge and into the next level.

We did draw a few stares as we moved through the streets, which I thought was mostly due to Solace’s cloak, or perhaps the five of us moving together. I was glad that we weren’t wearing armor, because almost no one else was either, and those that were definitely drew the attention of everyone they passed.

“You know, I could put your cloak in my glove,” said Fenn. “That would probably save us some eyeballs.”

“Probably,” said Solace. “But no thank you.”

After stopping to ask for directions twice, we came to a tall hotel, where Fenn rented three rooms for us, handing over what looked like a thick stack of cash to the woman at the front desk.

“Alright,” she said as she returned to us. “Our business trip has begun in earnest. I have two of the rooms for two nights, which I think should be all the time we need here, and one of the rooms for three solid weeks, so we can have a secure place if we need to. Mary, you and Solace have some things to discuss tonight, so you’re together, Grak, you snore, so you’re on your own, and Joon and I have twin beds together.”

“Fine by me,” said Amaryllis, without so much as batting an eye. Studious indifference to Fenn and I sharing a room, or actual indifference? I had no idea, and it irked me that I didn’t know. Maybe I wanted her to have at least some reaction. “In the meantime, we should split up.” She stopped and looked around our small group huddled together in the hotel lobby. “Sorry, we’re still a democracy.”

“Sure are,” said Fenn. “I have some things to sell and things to buy, and I’ll be the one to keep an eye on Juniper, because gods forbid he gets discovered as a mental incompetent in these parts. At least, that’s my vote.”

“What could you possibly have to buy and sell?” asked Amaryllis.

“I was hoping to find a buyer for unicorn meat,” said Fenn. “We spent a fair bit of time butchering that thing. I’ll hold back a bottle of blood for us, but we’ve got a few from when we drained the thing, and they don’t go bad fast enough to be worthless.” She looked to Solace. “We killed a unicorn, it was no big deal.”

Solace nodded, which I gathered was not the reaction Fenn had hoped for. “So you have an alicorn?”

“I guess we can sell that too, if we have you,” said Fenn. She smiled at Grak. “Looks like you’ll get your wish there.” Right, because he gets a third of the loot.

“I would appreciate it,” said Grak. “I’ll go under the mountain and speak with the dwarves there. There’s a sizeable city beneath the mountain, Lalon Dohore. It’s been some time since I’ve been with my kind and I can ask them about affairs at the athenaeum.”

“I would prefer to walk the city, if we are going to wait,” said Solace. “I believe I can be worth more on my own, without questions.” Asked of her, or by her?

“Then I’ll try to figure out admittance procedures for the dream-skewered,” said Amaryllis. “Fenn, once you’ve sold the unicorn parts, can you do that too? We don’t know quite what we’re here for, not in the long-term, and it might be something that wouldn’t be disclosed along official channels.”

“Beat the information out of some scholars, got it,” said Fenn.

“And if Larkspur has a way to track us?” I asked. “If we split up and then he finds us, somehow?”

“Then we have a very serious problem,” said Amaryllis. “Unless you think you can beat him, run away. Not to here. Instead, find someone you can pay to run a note to the hotel. Sound good?”

We split up then, and I said a small prayer to the Dungeon Master, hoping that we would reunite without incident.

Fenn and I walked together, making our way through the typical Aerbian jumble of streets that refused to meet at the same angle twice. This place was smaller than Cranberry Bay by a fairly large margin, but it still had more than enough in the way of sights and sounds. Fenn stopped at a stall, which was selling what looked to my eyes like a tentacle with all the suckers removed, placed on a stick, and then roasted with some kind of dark sauce. She got four of them, and handed me three.

“Eat,” she said. “You’re going to be weak if you don’t eat, and if you’re weak, I might die, so I don’t care how much you don’t want food, eat to save my life.”

I ate. The taste wasn’t bad, but I was pretty sure that nothing would have excited my taste buds. “I’m glad we have some time alone,” I said. “There was something that I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Eat,” Fenn repeated. She watched as I took another bite. “And what was it my little hooman had on his mind?”

“I need to know what I said to you when I was out of it,” I said.

“Hmmm,” said Fenn. “Grak and I swore a very serious vow of silence on the subject, and he’s made a joke, thus redeeming himself in my eyes, so I’ve decided not to betray him after all.” She paused. “Maybe that will be our thing, me deciding not to betray him after all, over and over again? We’re up to several times already, and I’ve only known him a week.”

“Fenn, I’m serious,” I said. I tried to eat quickly, so I wouldn’t have to think about it sliding down my throat. Was the loss of appetite getting worse? I’d increased END, but I’d also increased muscle mass, which meant that I would theoretically need more calories, and I was starting to worry that long-term damage was inevitable. “Your Loyalty went from 10 to 16.”

“Oh?” asked Fenn. “I thought it might have gone up.”

“And … why would you have thought that?” I asked.

“Well, I’m more loyal to you now,” said Fenn with a beaming smile. She leaned in close for a whisper, with bright, playful eyes. “It’s because of the things you said.”

“That’s not fair,” I replied. “Really not fair. You were worried about your loyalty, about being a puppet. This is something that we should talk about.”

“I’m less worried now,” said Fenn with a shrug. “Because of the things you said.”

“Okay, but”—I frowned—“I still think it’s not fair, because it’s like our relationship progressed without me even being aware of my half of it, and given how much time and effort it took to get you up to 10—”

“Effort?” asked Fenn. “Well, you sure know how to make a half-elf feel special. I didn’t know that my friendship was so arduous.” But she was smiling as she said it, and I would have smiled too, but it felt like I had been thrown off a boat and didn’t know the way to shore.

“Fenn, you have to at least give me part of it,” I said. I felt my chest constricting. “I’m really worried that, I don’t know, that I eroded away a part of this person that I really care about. It’s not funny to me.”

Fenn watched me for a moment. “That is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to me. Well, aside from some of the things that you said to me when you were high on unicorn blood.”

“So that was it?” I asked. “I said some nice things?”

“And some not-all-that-nice things,” said Fenn. “Oh, those I can tell you, I don’t think Grak would mind so much.” I waited and ate at the last of my tentacle sticks. “You told me that you didn’t like my ears.”

I winced. “I think I can explain that,” I said. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t find them aesthetically pleasing on you, it’s that, ah, more that I find them neutral now, maybe? I did like them when we first met. I mean, mostly because, I don’t know, they were distinctive. They have a nice curve. I mostly don’t notice them anymore, but when I do it’s just, they’re there … you know?”

“And if you had the choice between me having normal human ears and me having elf ears, you would first ask me what I wanted to have, and then you would pick that, or if I really, truly, had no preference whatsoever, then you would maybe be slightly more comfortable with me having human ears, not because you dislike the elf ears, but because you don’t like them, which is a very important and meaningful distinction, but you actually aren’t all that into ears anyway so it’s not worth talking about.” Fenn smiled at me. “Was that your train of thought, more or less?”

“I already said all that?” I asked with a grimace.

“That’s the short version,” said Fenn with a nod.

“I’m sorry, it’s not something that I would ever bring up if I weren’t, again, not in my right mind,” I said. And yet her loyalty jumped six points anyway.

“You say six points difference?” asked Fenn. “I think that was worth a point, maybe two.”

“Huh?” I asked. “That was worth positive points?”

“Well, I would explain it to you, but I don’t want to bring the mood down,” said Fenn.

“I know this is all fun and games to you,” I said. “But I actually am worried that part of your personality got overwritten on accident.”

“Ho hum,” said Fenn. “Fine, but it’s long, and I’ll wait until after we’ve sold the unicorn meat, because we are here.” She gestured to the large market building in front of us, where the smell of meat and blood was coming from. I could see pallets laid out with a variety of meats on ice and large fans blowing cool air around.

I found it somewhat difficult to care about the meat market. Half of the stuff there came in refrigerated, via containerized teleportation, where it was then sold off in a pseudo-auction system. The variety of colors was astonishing to me, with a great many meats having un-meatlike colors: rich browns, vibrant greens, and a variety of eel, laid out in strips, that was electric blue. Most of the meat that came into the city was in the form of simple, cheaply farmed animals, and that kind of thing wasn’t sold by auction, because it was brought in by the ton every day. The meat market was full of all of the weird animals from around Aerb that some mortal species or another considered a delicacy, which were worth the price of teleporting in. Hence our interest.

Fenn talked to a few sellers, who each seemed ready to brush her off until she held out her hand and made a giant refrigerator appear from thin air, filled with ice and unicorn parts (this was quite a surprise to me as well, as I had assumed that the meat had been sitting by itself in extradimensional storage, degrading until it was close to worthless). The unicorn meat was, as it turned out, a delicacy, one prized by the elves, a fact that Fenn seemed to have known well ahead of time.

“We still want the bones,” I said once she was about to agree to a transaction. “It might be possible to extract unicorn magic from them.”

“I want them too,” said a burly man with rocky growths on his face. “You want the bones, I can do the butchering for you, but labor comes out of your pocket, and the price is worse.”

A new round of negotiations began, and I mostly didn’t pay attention. We were going to get more than a hundred thousand obols out of this, which was far better than I had thought, and I worried that I was going to screw things up if I let some expression come over my face. The money was pretty worthless given our current situation, because we already had millions that we couldn’t really do that much with. The thought of just being able to buy whatever we wanted was a little bit astonishing.

“Alright,” said Fenn, shaking the hand of the fleshmonger. She turned to me. “Now we just have to wait for the butchery.”

“You were saying something about killing the mood,” I said.

“I was just a tiny bit hoping that you would have forgotten,” she said with a sigh. “When is that Larkspur going to show up anyway?”

“FENN,” I said. “My god, it’s like pulling teeth.”

Fenn winced. “Okay, okay. So.” She looked around for a bit. “So I was mostly solitary, following the official end of my childhood, but I did have, oh, let’s say five proper boyfriends in my time as a young woman, which extends to this very moment. Males, for whom I was more than a fling. Two were ‘any port in the storm’ types, who found my hybrid nature off-putting but not so much that they were willing to give me a pass, and those relationships both ended because whatever I was getting from them, it wasn’t worth the occasional abuse I got in return, or the way I was hidden from their friends and family, or … yeah.”

“Ah,” I said. I licked my lips and tried to think of something sympathetic to say, but nothing came to mind. “And the other three?”

“Elf lovers,” said Fenn with a shrug. She was looking at the ground, not at me. “All different about it. One was a collector, the kind of guy who wanted to experience a ‘woman of every flavor’, and I didn’t learn that about him until after he left town. I had liked him, and I’d been tricked by his pleasant words into thinking what we briefly had was something other than just a mark in a column. Another man was always stroking my ears, touching them until they were sensitive and painful, and … just pushing me toward this idea he had of me, rather than letting me be myself. He had this obsession with elves, or at least idealized elves, like my mother did, and it churned my stomach after a time. And the third — did you read The Book of Blood?”

“You told me not to,” I said.

“Well, that guy is the reason why,” said Fenn. “He seemed normal enough, at least by my standards, or the standards I had then, and it was going well, but when it came time for us to have sex, after I had undressed, he was there between my legs, staring, poking, and prodding. Like I was just this thing to him. I can’t even describe how revolting I felt. Maybe he thought he was … I don’t know.” She paused and took a breath. “I ended things with him then, but not before seeing his personal copy of the book sitting on the shelf, with a little bookmark sticking out of it.” She looked up at me. “I know you have a bunch of crazy ideas about what that book might say about half-elves. You explained your theories to me.”

“And … you found that endearing?” I asked.

Fenn gave me a small laugh, and I could see that her eyes were slightly watery. “A little bit? Maybe?” Her voice was slightly shaky. “You were very sweet about it.”

“Do you need a hug?” I asked. Fenn nodded and moved toward me, and I wrapped my arms around her. It wasn’t exactly what I would call romantic, there in the cold meat market with the smell of meat and blood in the air, and the hum of commerce, but it was still nice.

“I’m not crying,” she murmured into my shoulder.

“Either way is okay,” I said. “I’m sorry those guys were shitty to you.”

“Yeah,” said Fenn. She breathed out a little bit and gave me a small kiss on the shoulder. “It’s like pit fighting.”

“We don’t have pit fighting on Earth,” I said.

“Earth sounds so lame,” murmured Fenn. “Well, you see these pit fighters, and they’re beating the crap out of each other, and one of them loses, but they both go on to fight again later, right? And you can take losses as a pit fighter, that’s just fine, because you can heal up and fight again. But sometimes you’ll see a guy in the pit protecting his right side too much, even though he hasn’t taken a hit there yet, and the reason is usually that he got hit hard enough one time that he’s been worried about another hit like that ever since. Or maybe it wasn’t just the one time, but a bunch of losses in a row, all piled up, and he’s healed from them, but he’s got this thing in his mind where he thinks it’s this eventuality that it’s going to happen again, like no matter the fight he’s going to get this strong hit coming at him from the same place it’s come from before.” She pulled back from me, first to look in my eyes, then to go stand a bit further away. “Thank you for the hug.”

“Anytime,” I said with a smile.

So of course she moved back and wrapped her arms around me, and I wrapped my arms around her. “You are so shit at negotiation,” said Fenn. “It’s actually kind of sad.”

Chapter 5 - At Arm's Length

Things were a little bit awkward between us after that. I kept wanting her to crack a joke, but she was being very serious as she took payment for the meat, and as we carted the bones over to a cleaner. It was roughly eight thousand pounds of animal, which was spread across no less than four different large refrigerators.

“So you planned this out when you knew that we were going to be going after the unicorn?” I asked.

“I have my own life beyond our little group,” she said.

“Right, but we haven’t actually divided up the money, except for Grak’s share,” I said. “So I have at least a little interest in the schemes that you’re pursuing, if there’s an investment involved.”

Fenn raised an eyebrow. “How dare you accuse me of having actually paid for things,” she said.

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it. “I think you were perhaps the worst person that glove could possibly have gone to.”

“Or I’m the best, because I think ahead to what our needs would be,” said Fenn. “I don’t particularly like stealing, I’m more into looting, but if I see an opportunity, I’ll take it.”

“And Sable must give you a lot of opportunities,” I said.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said Fenn with a grin.

The meat market had a bone-cleaner, which turned out to be a translucent green jelly in a reinforced tank. An anthropomorphic raven took our coin and dipped the bones into the ooze, which bubbled slightly and stripped them clean of any lingering meat, fat, cartilage, or ligaments before the raven pulled them out with a pair of long-handled tongs. This was the sort of thing that I had always dreamed about seeing, not the intense displays of magical power, but someone using what was probably meant to have been a monster in a dungeon somewhere for a mundane task. One of the things that I liked about Aerb was that it was settled and lived in; the first thing that I would have thought of when I came across an ooze like that was domesticating it for use in the bone trade, and someone else had already had that thought, and done the domestication, and now it was just part of the fabric of the world.

After the bones were cleaned and safely stowed within the glove (with two of the smaller ones slotted into my bandolier), we went on our way again, off to find a buyer for the alicorn. The raw magic of the glove had drawn fewer stares than I had expected, though it had drawn a few. Magic wasn’t exactly common, but it wasn’t rare either, and even if magic was distributed along a power law, that meant that the average person still knew a few people who would qualify for the title of “mage”, and a few people who held at least one magical item. I imagined that the glove would be more extraordinary to someone who understood the whole of magic across Aerb better, as I was starting to, because it was really, ridiculously powerful. Maybe you wouldn’t understand that, if you hadn’t even read the Commoner’s Guide series.

“So, I hate to prod at things,” I said, “but I’m given to understand that the thing with the ears you reacted to because … because I don’t really see you as a half-elf and forget about the fact that you’re technically a different species half the time, right?”

“I guess,” said Fenn with a shrug. “It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Like I like that you’re inattentive.”

“Well, you also said that was probably worth only a point or two, not six, so I’m left wondering where the other four or five came from,” I said. That assumed that she was right at all, but there wasn’t really a point in second-guessing her own internal sense of loyalty, not if I didn’t actually have numbers to compare it against.

“I’ve already said too much,” replied Fenn. “I joke, but Grak and I really did decide that it was for the best that we keep our silence. He’d be awful disappointed in me.”

As we walked, her arm slipped into mine, and she wrapped her gloved fingers around my bicep. I tensed for a moment, thinking that she was going to send me into her glove for some reason, then remembered that it took an act of will on her part, and sometimes people used their hands for things unrelated to powerful magic. After that I tensed for a different reason, which was the closeness she was showing with me. I liked her, I really did, and it was clear she liked me back, but I’d fucked up every relationship I’d ever had, romantic or otherwise. What she’d said to me about pit fighters protecting against a blow they’d felt one too many times before rang far too true, enough that I’d first thought she was talking about me, not her.

“Well that’s why women in fiction are virgins so much of the time,” said Tiff. “It’s this purity obsession that Western culture has, where men want women to be basically untouched by anyone so that they can be the first, so that one man will just be the focus of her sexual energy for the rest of her life, and she'll be unable to compare him to anyone else.” She held up a hand in Reimer’s direction. “And yes, I know all the evo-psych reasons for that, doesn’t mean it’s not kind of screwed up.”

(Part of the subtext here, which only Tiff and I knew, was that we’d had sex for the first time a few weeks prior, which was the first time ever for either of us. I would guess that was why the topic, ostensibly about the unfaithful Duke of Lagrange and his plot to kill the party, had turned to the concept of virginity in popular culture.)

“Well, if my part in the conversation can just be assumed, then good, I don’t have to say it,” said Reimer with a smile. “But men and women have different evolutionary reproductive strategies and everything you see is part of that.”

“I don’t think that’s why women in fiction are usually virgins,” said Arthur, setting his can of pop down on the table, “Tiff’s thing, not Reimer’s. I think it’s the same reason that young protagonists are orphans.” He sat back in his chair just a bit without continuing.

“Oh,” said Craig, “that reminds me, I made bingo cards.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a sheaf of papers, each one printed with a five-by-five grid with words in each space. “You can all put an X in the square that says, ‘Arthur sets up obvious bait’.”

“This had better not be why you were late,” I said.

“This is amazing,” said Reimer, looking over the sheet and making a few marks. “Does that one count for ‘Joon complains that Craig was late’?”

“Obviously,” said Craig with a smile my way.

“‘Tiff says that she’s not a feminist’, do I really do that?” asked Tiff. “I mean, I don’t consider myself a feminist —”

“Count it,” said Craig.

“— I didn’t think that I said it that much,” finished Tiff with a kick under the table in Craig’s direction that hit me in the knee.

“The Duke of Lagrange looks at the four of you in incredulity as you consult these sheets of paper,” I said.

“‘Joon tries to get the game back on track’, this literally has everything,” said Reimer.

“Arthur, why are virgins like orphans?” asked Tiff. “I’m not okay with leaving that dangling.” She glanced at me. “Sorry, Joon.”

“I’m glad you asked!” said Arthur with a gleeful smile. “Well, the reason that you see so many orphans, besides setting up the various orphan plots, is that if you’re writing a book or screenplay you always have to deal with the parents question somehow, at least if your protagonist is a teenager or young adult. Parents are inconvenient to a lot of plots, because the audience is left with this question about why the parents aren’t important or being brought up, and conservation of detail means you can’t just say, ‘oh, well he didn’t like his parents, or they kind of sucked’, because then the audience starts to think that’s important. So, writers just do the easy thing and kill the parents off. That can either tie into the plot somehow, or just allow the character to start as a blank slate, without having to take up screen time. And in this analogy, prior relationships are like the parents.”

I looked around the table and tried to think about character backstories. No one but Arthur had defined parents, siblings, or prior love interests. There was some baggage, quests that stemmed from their backstories, falls from grace, things like that, and for Tiff and Reimer, explicit dead parents, but it was all stuff that could reasonably be expected to be resolved, if the game actually went on long enough.

“And you don’t think it has to do with a culture that places importance on purity, innocence, and naivete, at least in women?” asked Tiff with her arms crossed.

“That’s a bingo,” said Craig. “I think I made these too easy, version two will be better.”

“I think that’s part of it, certainly,” Arthur said to Tiff. “But I also think that if I were a screenwriter faced with making a 90-minute movie, and I had the choice between having a one-line, ‘I’ve never done this before’ or having this whole long thing where I explained what both parties were bringing into their new relationship, I know what I would choose. Virgins are narratively convenient.”

“Wait,” said Reimer to Craig. “Let me see your sheet, how’d you get bingo?”

“There and there,” said Craig. “Arthur and Tiff have a long disagreement on gender, sex, — see, I made them different things, just for you — race, or socioeconomics. And the other one was ‘session goes for 30 minutes without even tangentially engaging with gameplay’.”

“I tried,” I said.

“Yeah, I marked that,” said Craig with a grin.

It was only after the session, when Tiff was driving us to her place, that Tiff picked the thread of conversation back up, this time with just me and her in the car.

“It kind of bugged me, what Arthur was saying,” she said. “About relationships being baggage.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “I think he was mostly talking about narratives, not real people. For people, the narrative starts when you’re born and ends when you die, and usually it’s not very compelling.”

“Disagree,” said Tiff. “For other people, the narrative starts when you meet them, and then you have infodumps with each other to get them up to speed on the plot thus far, which basically boils down to where they are in whatever plot threads they have going on. In that context, baggage is all the existing plot threads that everyone just has to acknowledge will never get solved, because there’s no way to solve them. So Arthur is looking at these past relationships as not being character-defining arcs that happened in the past, but unresolved threads instead.”

“I’m going to be honest, I don’t really have a dog in this fight,” I said. Maybe it was just who we were as people, or because I was a guy and she was a girl, but everything had changed for me the night we’d first kissed, not when we had sex. It wasn’t a non-event, at all, but the kiss had actually felt transformative.

“Yeah, I know,” said Tiff. She tapped her hands on the steering wheel. “Just venting. I kept thinking about you, and this thing between us, and how it feels like I’m more the person that I’ve always wanted to be now, you know? And I don’t want that diminished as mere baggage.”

I’m worried that I’m going to fuck things up with you. No, too direct, maybe too heavy. I’m worried that as soon as we start dating, or whatever the local equivalent of dating is, or whatever resembles courtship for two people who are inextricably bound to each other and together pretty much all the time is, whatever you’d call that, or whatever that would be, I’m worried about fucking it up basically as soon as that starts. And I’m worried that if I don’t make a move soon, then you’ll think that I’m never going to, and that would constitute fucking it up too.

“Did Grak actually agree to a pact of silence?” I asked, instead of saying any of that.

“Sure did.” Fenn smiled, squeezing my arm.

“And why would he have agreed to that?” I asked.

“Well, you’d have to ask him, but he wouldn’t tell you, because that’s covered by the pact about pacts we made,” said Fenn.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“It wasn’t my idea, I’ll have you know,” said Fenn. “He’s a warder, their job is to think about what kinds of threats a person might face, not just to put up wards where they’re told, though some of them do that too. So when he agreed that it was better to just not talk too much about all the things that you and Mary said, he also covered his bases and said that if we weren’t going to talk, then we shouldn’t talk about why we weren’t talking. Which, now that I think about it, is probably what this is.”

“No,” I said, “you’re talking about why you made a pact about a pact, that’s totally different. And you broke your silence before, so ...”

“Oh, but Mr. Smith, I feel ever so guilty about that,” replied Fenn with an innocent expression. Then her face changed from playful to serious and she squeezed my arm tight. “Deep breath.”

I took in a deep breath and then I was in the void of Sable once more, this time without a breathing apparatus to give me more time. The ones we had were too bulky to fit in my messenger bag, and I had thought that preparing for the specific scenario where I didn’t have enough time to have Fenn get one out of Sable was too fringe to justify me putting one in a backpack.

So I waited in darkness, holding my breath, wondering whether it was something she had seen, her elf luck pinging, or just a joke she was playing on me. Life-or-death jokes didn’t seem like her kind of thing though. I could get out at any time, but since I didn’t know what was going on in the outside, it was better to stay in for as long as possible.

I shaped the Anyblade into a longsword and grabbed Ropey out from the messenger bag, trying to make my movements as slow and economical as possible. Ropey curled around me, with one end trailing down each arm to provide either combat or climbing support. I touched my off-hand to one of the bones in my bandolier, again using languid movements, readying myself to drain SPD from it for the increased reaction time as soon as I was out. I used blood magic to give myself some light, mostly so my eyes wouldn’t adjust to the dark, and then I waited, still holding my breath and trying to fight down the panicked feeling of needing to take a breath.

I came out into an alley, burning the bone for speed as hard as I could and whipping back and forth to get my bearings while I took deep, gasping breaths that left me lightheaded. It was just Fenn, who had backed away from me. She was wearing a hat that covered her ears. There were people walking by on the street, but they gave us only the occasional interested glance before moving on, and not even that as soon as the Anyblade shrank down and back into a bladed ring.

“I saw a guy I assume was Larkspur,” Fenn explained. “My sense of luck pinged first, that’s why I put you in the glove, and I spotted him just after, quite far away. Tallish guy, red armor, sword, shield, cloak, short red hair, serious look just like our Mary, and three other people with him, similarly looking like they were about to start something.”

“They didn’t see you?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Fenn. “Unless they were clever enough not to show it, and had some reason not to try to snatch me. But no, they went into the building we were headed for, the Medicinal Magic store I was hoping to unload the alicorn at.”

“Okay, do you have a disguise for me?” I asked.

Fenn gave me a disappointed look. “You think I wouldn’t?” She held out Sable and produced a wide-brimmed hat with a black veil. “This is mourning garb for the altek,” she said. “Just pretend to be sad under there.”

I put the hat on, which made it difficult to see but would hopefully obscure my face. With a whisper I told Ropey to head back into the bag, because he was also distinctive. I stripped off both bandoliers and put them into the bag as well, then handed the bag to Fenn, who quickly disappeared it into her glove. That left the Anyblade ring as distinctive, and I quickly switched which hand it was on, changing its shape and color as I did so.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll follow the plan, hire someone to send a message to the hotel for the others, then move around and hide out while we wait to regroup.”

“Or,” said Fenn, “or, we know where they are, and if Larkspur ever saw me, it was in a black and white photo in a dossier, and you’re covered up, so I’m thinking that it wouldn’t be hard to sneak up on him close enough to at least eavesdrop. We know that they’ve got some way to track us, for certain now that I’ve seen them, but we don’t know exactly what that method is, and I would rather figure that out than spend the rest of our natural lives running.”

“Sounds dangerous,” I said. “Especially if we’re at only partial strength.”

“Well then I’m glad I didn’t go with my first suggestion, which was that I could snipe him, then hop into the glove and have you make a run for it,” said Fenn with a grin.

“Was there a big guy in full plate?” I asked. “Because he’s soul-linked, you’d kill him instead of Larkspur.”

“Still probably worth it,” said Fenn. “But this is a good opportunity for the eavesdrop plan, and maybe the only one we get, because we can’t guarantee when we’re going to see these guys again, or whether we’ll have cover from them.”

I hesitated. Killing Larkspur was one of my quests, and maybe this wasn’t on the docket, but it was an objective that seemed easy, and enough to get me within spitting distance of the level up, if I wasn’t already.

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll do it. No offensive action.” Though I was waffling on that, and wanted to add some qualifiers, like ‘unless we can kill Larkspur and then get away’. I halfway thought that was just my desire to level up talking though. (I shoved down some half-panicked thoughts about whether or not I was addicted to leveling up for later examination, but that was a worrying prospect if true.)

I checked her over to make sure that the hat was properly hiding her ears, then we moved out of the alley and toward the store, Medicinal Magic. There was no one stationed outside, which I took to be a good sign. We went as close as possible to the entrance, on the side of the door without a window, then started a casual conversation in quiet tones that neither of us was paying any attention to (Fenn was talking about a book she’d read and I was saying ‘uh huh’ at regular intervals).

“— short-term losses for long-term gains,” Larkspur was saying. “But given those long-term gains, and the long-term losses we might suffer if the target isn’t recovered, I do think it prudent to continue on this course for as long as feasible.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” came a female voice, one I didn’t recognize. “At this juncture, it’s no longer feasible. You’re taking time away from your duties as FSD and spending money as though it were a resource we weren’t constrained on. This is starting to look like the sunk cost fallacy in action.”

“She has the entad,” replied Larkspur.

“She might. It seems that way given the distances involved. And what good does the recovery of it do you?” asked the female voice, with a touch of exasperation. “It’s a political coup, but one that you can’t capitalize on, because it would raise too many questions about what happened to her, not to mention how you found her. We’ve spent too much political capital and reputation on this already, more than we wanted or agreed on at the outset.”

Larkspur gave a soft growl. “Eight days before the councils are back in session,” he said. “We have until then, at least.”

“You do,” the woman replied. “I’m going home. Good luck on your second time in the EZ.”

“I’ll need you there,” said Larkspur. “If Doris —”

“I know,” said the woman. “And that’s your burden to bear.”

Fenn pulled me along, back the way we came, just a few seconds before a woman swept out of the shop, dressed from collar to toe in a frilly red dress. The veil offered me some leeway in looking at her, and I could immediately see the family resemblance to both Amaryllis and Larkspur, both the red hair and pretty features, but also the seriousness of her expression. She wore a circlet on her head with several gemstones of different colors, all set in a line. She didn’t give a second glance at us, for which I was grateful.

As soon as she had gone off through the crowds, we stopped again to speak casually, me with my back to the store and her with her eyes peeled to it.

“I think that was enough,” Fenn said in a low voice. “We should take off.”

“No,” I replied. “We still don’t know how they found us. My guess is that they have precognition of some kind, but we need to know the details, whether it’s probability based or has some kind of limits that we can work around.”

“Fine by me,” said Fenn with a shrug. “They’re leaving.” She moved forward, at a casual, steady pace, and I followed after.

Larkspur was in his familiar red armor with black at the seams. Beside him were the two others I had seen at the library, the massive man in full plate who was meant to take the hits, and the horned woman with a staff (not, as yet, spinning and glowing). We kept our distance, far enough back that we couldn’t have heard what they were saying, if they had been talking. It didn’t look like they were though.

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

“I could shoot the meatshield in the head or chest,” said Fenn, leaning close to me. “My bow can puncture plate fairly easily. But then again, I’d assume that’s magic plate, and without knowing what kind of magic plate, it’s hard to say how wise shooting him would be.” She paused. “Probably not a great time for an artillery shot, given all the people around.”

I’d been thinking the same thing, and I was relieved to hear her say it. Her casual disregard for others when stealing had worried me a little bit. This was plausibly a time for the sand bow; all we’d have to do is wait for them to stop moving, she could line up a shot, and then we could hoof it while the arrow was still suspended in time.

“They went to that store because they thought we would be there,” I said. “We would have been there if your luck sense hadn’t twigged. So where are they going now? And why?” We’d only spent a few minutes, at most, getting to them; what information were they working on, that they would just leave the shop in relatively short order, rather than waiting in ambush for us to arrive?

We followed them for several blocks, with every intersection seeming to have been given a new angle at random, until we were into the true heart of the city, where there were buildings twenty or thirty stories tall towering over us. Larkspur stopped once or twice to consult something I couldn’t see, and those moments were always tense, because I worried that his goons would look around, or that he was using the magic item that was tracking us and would spin around to catch us. Those things didn’t happen though; that was the issue with paranoia, most of the time you were preparing for eventualities that never ended up occurring.

Larkspur was bleeding information with every step he took, so far as I was concerned. I didn’t have the full picture yet, but I had enough to start making some guesses. The conversation we’d overheard meant that the Larkspur problem was likely to solve itself, at least insofar as he was actively hunting for and attempting to kill us. There were still travel restrictions and warrants to look out for, but true border control seemed like a game that the cities and nations of Aerb had long since given up on, at least if magic was in play. He really was burning non-negligible resources to find us, and this current plan couldn’t last. We knew that his divination (or whatever) was highly imperfect, and my guess from the way he treated the medicine shop was that he had a lot of false positives.

“This is boring,” Fenn whispered to me after about twenty minutes. I shot her a look of disapproval. “What, it is, you can’t tell me that it’s not.”

“It’s important,” I said, though she was right, the tension had nearly evaporated, and now it was just drudgery. They weren’t leading us into a trap, they weren’t on the lookout for anyone following them, and if any of them had been trained to spot a tail, they sure weren’t showing any sign of it. Fenn, for her part, occasionally popped us down a side street for a quick costume change, which was easily accomplished given that she had apparently stolen an entire frickin’ clothing department. (She looked adorable in glasses.)

We did catch occasional snippets of conversation, though we were too far to make out much. The multi-syllable words were actually a little easier to catch, because I could infer missing sounds: “probabilistic”, “triangulation”, “candidates”, “duration”. It was frustrating not to be able to get a clear sense of what they were actually talking about. All I really wanted was for someone to say, “as you know” and then describe in exacting detail what they were actually doing, was that too much to ask? I did get a few glimpses of the thing he was consulting; it looked something like a pocket watch.

“Shit,” said Fenn, as Larkspur looked down for another consultation, something he was doing more frequently. “Luck is twinging, we should … oh fuck.”

I saw it too; our travels through the city on the trail of the Prince had brought us to a place with restaurants, and coming out of one of them was a red-headed girl in a pink ‘Princess!’ shirt, followed by a green-skinned woman with a cloak of leaves and a long staff. Amaryllis and Solace seemed to be in high spirits and were talking animatedly with heads bent together, and I could see that it was only going to be a matter of time before Larkspur or one of his people saw them.

There were too many people around for a fight, and we were under-strength given that neither Amaryllis nor I were wearing armor. There were two cars and a flatbed truck loaded with barrels making their way down the street, moving slowly because of the people that seemed heedless of jaywalking laws (if this place even had any). A full battle here would be a shitshow, especially if we were at it for long enough that the local equivalent of the police showed up.

“Give me the bag, take the shot,” I said to Fenn after only a few seconds of deliberation, hoping that we could end this quickly.

My messenger bag popped out of her glove and she tossed it over, then the bow appeared in her hand, and an arrow after that in short order. I slipped on my bandoliers while this was going on and Ropey slithered over my body to provide protection and support. The Anyblade was expanding to a full, heavy greatsword as Fenn loosed her arrow, which zipped across the hundred feet of distance with a twang of her bow.

The arrow struck the armored man almost precisely in the center of his chest, puncturing all the way through, and I heard a grunt from Fenn beside me. She was bleeding from her chest, in the exact same spot, and staggered slightly before spitting up blood and materializing a dead fairy in her hand. She pitched backward slightly and caught herself only by resting her weight against the bow, then stuffed the fairy in her mouth.

I wanted to stay with her and heal her with bone magic, but the horned woman was spinning her staff, setting it glowing, and Larkspur was running to close the distance, which meant that I really didn’t have that option.

I pulled my throwing dagger from my satchel and threw it at him as I moved. He slowed down slightly and put his shield in front of him; the convex metallic surface shimmered and then disappeared, showing a left-right flipped version of the street. My dagger sailed through it and came right back out, having (apparently) passed itself. It landed right back in my hand, painfully hard, having accomplished almost nothing.

Skill increased: Thrown Weapons lvl 17!

Then Larkspur and I had closed the distance between us, him because he wanted to kill me, and me because I wanted to keep him from killing Fenn. The first screams of alarm had started up from the people on the street as we clashed, my greatsword against his longsword.

I shifted the Anyblade down after the first clash of swords into something thinner and lighter, more maneuverable. He had armor, a shield, and was soul-linked to a meatshield who was surprisingly still on his feet, which meant that I was immediately on the defensive. I was actually a pretty legitimately good sword-fighter at this point, but Larkspur went at me like he had been training from the day he’d been able to hold a sword, which probably wasn’t far from the truth. I was able to parry against him, knocking his sword off the line of attack and occasionally taking a hit on the flat rather than the edge (still painful, but not limb-lopping), but I was doing basically nothing against him, only retreating step by step. Past him, I could see the horned woman spinning her staff, which was glowing brighter all the time and nearly at the point where it was nothing more than a glowing circle, at which point I knew it was going to be a force to be reckoned with.

I grabbed at a bone in my bandolier and drained it of SPD in an instant. I saw the opening that would let me get a strike in, but with the two transference effects going on (from him to the meatshield and from the meatshield to me, if it worked like that) I wasn’t going to risk it. Instead, I used the moment of clarity to knock his sword to the side and yell for Ropey to sic him. My favorite-ever sentient rope was already waiting, loosely gripping my sword arm, and shot forward to wrap around Larkspur’s wrist.

From there it was, at the very least, no longer a losing battle, because his mobility was so restricted that he couldn’t properly swing his sword. He was left trying to shield bash me, which was partially effective, but we were at a stalemate.

I was feeling the adrenaline rush hard, that frantic energy that came with life-and-death. My heart was thumping hard and I pushed Larkspur back with a rush of blood magic, yanking his arm again and nearly sending his sword flying. I heard the twang of Fenn’s bow again, then again, with screams of pain from her. An occasional burst of automatic gunfire came from the other end of the street, and in the background I saw the twirling staff falter and then stop altogether as vines grew up from the cracks in the street and grabbed her by the feet. I had no idea where Amaryllis was, but it seemed like if I could hold Larkspur just a little bit longer his minions would be dealt with, and then all Fenn would need to do was put an arrow through his eye.

He must have realized that, because he dropped his shield and moved in toward me, quick and unexpected. He brought his left hand up and his sword vanished from his captured right hand to appear in his left. I tried to step back or get up my guard but wasn’t quite fast enough, or skilled enough, and the sword came down hard on my shoulder, slicing halfway through the joint. I screamed in pain and fell backward, dropping the Anyblade in the process. Larkspur yanked his right hand, still connecting us by rope, and pulled hard at my partially severed arm, tearing flesh, skin, and ligaments in a moment so blindingly terrifying and painful that I blacked out for a second.

When I came to, what must have been a fraction of a second later, my arm was dangling by a half-inch of muscle and a thin layer of skin, twisting around when I moved and so incredibly agonizing that all I could do was scream. I was vaguely aware of Fenn stepping over me with a sword held inexpertly in her hand, and a blur of pink shirt and red hair moving to protect me, but I was screaming and crying, bleeding all over the place.

Leroy Castillo defeated!

I don’t know how long I was down on the ground, but eventually I felt myself falling, whipping through the wind, then a warm glow at my shoulder which erased the pain, and after that, a bird’s beak tapping on my head sent me straight to sleep.

Chapter 6 - Doe or Doe Not, There is no Try

I woke up gasping for air and looking around wildly. My brain must have been working off some really old subsystems, because my first thought was, this isn’t my room, before I remembered that I didn’t have a room anymore. I was on Aerb, not Earth, and on Aerb I was an itinerant wanderer without a home to call my own.

I looked down at my shoulder, fearing the worst, but saw that it was intact, connecting my arm to my torso like it had been doing for more than seventeen years, until very recently. There was a deep red seam there, but it was only on the level of the skin, not in the flesh itself, and my mobility as I gingerly moved it was only slightly limited.

I wasn’t in the hotel; I was in the house built into a tree, inside the bottle, which was presumably inside Solace’s cloak. It was dark, but the remains of a small fire smoldered away in a little blackened recess of the tree. I got up out of the pile of furs that had been serving as my bed and went over to it to warm my hands. There was a chill in the air; I had to guess that the bottle didn’t get sunlight while in the cloak, which meant that there was no outside heat or warmth getting in, ignoring for a moment that the sunlight hitting the bottle would never have possibly been able to heat a square mile of forest and grassland. I called on the heat of my blood to give me a hand of flame, which lit my surroundings a little better.

I tried to take stock of my situation, and my mind kept going back to one thing.

One of them dead, probably the meatshield, and still no level.

It was hard to set that aside. The next level had to be close, you could slow progression as the player gained levels but you couldn’t stop it altogether, that flew in the face of too many principles of game design. It had been so close I could taste it, one kill should have been enough. That thought of addiction was still lingering, but I didn’t know what that actually felt like from the inside. Formally, addiction wasn’t just the need for something, it was the compulsion and interference with your life. Leveling up was pleasurable, last time almost achingly so, but I wasn’t sure whether my actions were being influenced by the desire to feel that again, especially since leveling up was the single most important thing I could do for other reasons as well. But maybe self-deception was part of addiction, this idea that you could stop anytime you wanted, or the production of motivated reasoning to excuse what you had done.

My messenger bag was with me, though the strap had been cut through. Ropey lay inside it, and he uncoiled at my touch, then slithered his way to the fireplace. I watched closely as he started making the shapes of letters.

S-O-R-R-Y

“It’s okay,” I replied. “You were doing your best.” He’d been turned into a weapon against me, just momentarily, when Larkspur nearly yanked my arm off. “You saved my life.” I reached out and patted him on the head, and he snaked his way back into the bag. Yup, that was me, providing comfort to a piece of rope.

I was almost entirely naked, aside from my boxers, but I had clothes sitting in a pile on the ground. Just looking at them was enough to tell me that I wasn’t going to put them back on; they were crusted with blood from the fight, which I guess is what happens when you nearly sever an arm. The clothes didn’t really bother me, since it was all stuff that Fenn had picked out, and didn’t really fit well to begin with. When we had some downtime, whenever that would be, I would go shopping on my own and find some things that I actually wanted to wear, then buy them in bulk.

I yelped in surprise when the Six-Eyed Doe stuck its head through a window and stared at me, but I recovered quickly and tried my best to look dignified. It was luminescent, making its own pale blue-white light that contrasted with the orange of the embers and the yellow of my flaming hand.

“Thanks for your help,” I said to the doe.

It nodded fractionally.

Well, at least it could understand me somewhat, that was something. I rotated my shoulder, trying to get a little bit more mobility back. The doe kept staring at me. I reached into my bag, frowning at the blood on the strap, and pulled out the bandoliers inside it, first grabbing a fairy and eating it, and then pulling out my selection of bones.

“Is Solace here?” I asked the doe.

It didn’t move or reply, which I gathered meant that it either didn’t understand the question, or the answer was no. As I munched on the fairy until it was a wet wad of marzipan, I tried to think about what must have happened. My memories of the final moments ranged from hazy to entirely absent. Solace must have grabbed me and pulled me into her bottle with her in order to gain access to better healing power. She’d clearly been the one to save my arm, and she must also have been the one to put me out. After I swallowed the fairy, my shoulder began to feel better almost immediately, and I briefly wondered why Solace hadn’t fed me one to work in conjunction with her healing magic, before realizing that we’d never told her what they did.

So now I was stuck in the bottle until someone came to rescue me, with just a sentient length of rope and a probably-sentient magical doe for company. Ropey was fine, but the Six-Eyed Doe weirded me out, not least because it kept its head stuck through the window, staring at me.

I touched one of the unicorn bones, then glanced at the Six-Eyed Doe. “We killed a unicorn,” I said. “I hope that doesn’t — I mean, they’re evil creatures in this world, so I wouldn’t think it would, but I hope that it doesn’t bother you,” I said. “And I hope that it’s okay to be using some other kind of magic in here, but I think it’s probably fine, right?”

The only response I got was a small dip of its head.

I breathed out a sigh and looked down at the unicorn bone, an aitch bone. I gripped it lightly in my hand, allowed my flame to wink out, and closed my eyes. I was looking for a way to draw out the unicorn magic, because even a single use of its power would be enough to win a fight, if used at the right time. If I could use that power to rapidly gain skill increases, all the better.

PHY, POW, SPD, and END were all there, ready and waiting for me, but there were other things within the bones, which to my mind felt like magical strata, layered there and waiting. The existing attributes all had a specific feel to them, one that I didn’t even consciously think about when I pulled on them. All I had to do was identify that feeling in the bone, or something that approximated it, and I would be able to isolate the specific piece of bone magic I wanted to pull. I could feel others in there now, where I couldn’t before.

Spell discovered: Mental Tapping!

I learned the technique without actually using it, which was a relief, because the unicorn bones were precious. I could feel it there though, the mind of the unicorn, or at least the hint of its mind, or maybe just the echo of its soul. I prodded at the magic, making sure not to pull at it. Like PHY, it was divided up into three parts, though those three didn’t encompass everything — was that a hint at the nature of the attributes, that the superstats were somehow more than just their components? Yet I didn’t know exactly what that part, left behind, would entail, not for PHY and not for MEN. Still, teasing apart the lump of magic was something I could do without actually pulling on it, and I already knew their natures.

Spell discovered: Cunning Tapping!

Spell discovered: Knowledge Tapping!

Spell discovered: Wisdom Tapping!

I was a bit pleased with myself at that, but I was no closer to touching the unicorn magic. There were other things in the bone, things that I thought I might be able to pull on later, but after a half hour of trying, I gave that up for lost. I was skill capped on Bone Magic, and my guess was that a 21 meant something equivalent to a graduate degree; I was more skilled with bones than someone like Bormann, who’d trained for five years at the athenaeum, but I wasn’t at the upper echelons just yet. And more to the point, I wasn’t going to get any better unless I raised my level, which I didn’t have any way to do.

No one had come for me. In the worst-case scenario … well, maybe the bottle was in Solace’s cloak, and she was dead, which meant that the only way I could get out would maybe be to scale the walls. That would be difficult, seeing as it was a mile and a half climb up a glass surface without any equipment, and depending on how the extradimensional space worked, that might just leave me floating next to the bottle, still unable to leave. The other option would be to become a druid, but Solace had said that would be impossible, and anyway, I would probably never be able to leave because I would keep questioning the nature of any magic that might let me escape, thereby rendering it unusable.

Panic didn’t really do much good though, so I turned my attention toward self-improvement instead (and I’ll be honest, if I had a computer with internet access, I probably would have wasted my time on Reddit, because that was what I had done with countless chances at self-improvement on Earth). The problem was, I had almost nothing in the way of resources, and I was capped on most of the skills I cared about. Engineering was the only one I really wanted to level, and I was in circumstances almost uniquely unsuited for that.

That left only one avenue of real progress, and it still had its stupid head sticking through the window, staring at me with six eyes. Six-Eyed Doe, Loyalty 0, that was a metric that I was in the right circumstances to improve.

I walked out from the tree without putting my tattered clothes back on, out into the grass, feeling it on my bare feet. It was cool, but not enough for me to quite feel a chill, because there was no breeze moving the grass around me. The Six-Eyed Doe came over to me, stopping six feet away with its head lowered to my level, staring at me.

“Hi,” I said.

That got no response.

“I don’t actually know how you’re supposed to interact with a locus,” I said. “Maybe you’re not supposed to know, and knowing would destroy that interaction. Maybe it’s like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where you can either know the exact speed or the exact position of an object, but not both. So I could understand, concretely, how to talk with you, and be unable to actually do it, or I could be able to talk with you but be unable to understand how I was doing it.” I hesitated. “I’m from another world, one called Earth, that’s where Heisenberg is from, but my guess is that on Aerb he’s a gnome, or the name of an institution or village somewhere.”

The Six-Eyed Doe kept looking at me.

“Look, I’m not going to pour my heart out to you, because I keep worrying that you actually can talk, or you’re more intelligent than you look, no offense, and my read on what I’ve seen of Aerb so far is that I’d get done telling you a long story about something embarrassing, and you would respond by speaking directly to me, just as the world’s way of throwing me off-guard, so I’m not going to do that,” I said.

There was still no response, save for the doe blinking, which it did in sequence, one eye at a time.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess you should know that the two of us are linked together in a way that I don’t fully understand yet. I think that, at least, is something that shouldn’t be hidden away, because it concerns you, and you didn’t have any say in the matter. I don’t want to say that’s my policy for companions, because I don’t think you’re the kind of … thing? The kind of entity that would like being subject to a policy, but maybe I can just say that I chose to tell Amaryllis, Fenn, and Grak, and I think I’ll keep coming up with the same answer for companions in the future. Besides, it’s logistically easier if everyone is in the know.”

The doe bowed its head slightly, and seemed to be looking at my navel for a moment before returning its attention to my face. I couldn’t help but think about Clever Hans, though that was uncharitable.

“Did you know Arthur?” I asked. “He went by Uther Penndraig.” I continued on, not waiting for a response because I knew it wasn’t coming. “You’re the first person, or entity, whatever, that I’ve met who might have actually met him, or at least seen him once, because you’re old enough for it. I like to imagine that he came into your forest at some point and understood you on a level that I clearly don’t. He was always more about that sense of majesty and wonder.”

I paused. I’d kind of given up on actually budging the Six-Eyed Doe’s loyalty. Fenn had gained loyalty just from the things that I had said to her, but that hadn’t actually been intentional on my part, and at least insofar as the ‘I don’t really care one way or another whether you’re a half-elf’ stuff went, part of what must have made that effective was that she knew I was speaking without inhibitions and that I had come at it from an awkward angle that made her actually believe it. I had no idea what would gain the loyalty of the Six-Eyed Doe aside from telling it that I was going to restore it to a proper domain, which I had already done.

So I sat in the grassy field, with the luminescent doe the only source of light, and thought about where the two of us might intersect, what it might eventually come to see in me, if we could ever become something like friends.

“I think that sense of wonder people feel is just a more mild form of surprise,” I said. “How the brain works—” I hesitated, because that wasn’t a thing the doe would probably like to hear, but then barrelled on ahead, because I didn’t know another way to say it. “The reason children have this sense of wonder isn’t that they’re innocent, it’s that their brain hasn’t come to terms with everything there is in the world. They see, I don’t know, a tree, and their brain is processing the fact that this tree has branches that go off in different directions and subdivide into smaller branches that sprout leaves, and those leaves have similar but distinct shapes, so the kid’s brain is trying to build up this model of what a tree is, and that’s why he’s looking at it with wonder, and why he can think that a tree is majestic. But adults, or even teenagers, already understand trees, so when their eyes see a tree, their brain says, ‘oh yeah, that’s a tree’, and it never even really enters their minds. Maybe that is what we mean by innocence sometimes, maybe it’s not always about corruption or being jaded, but just about a lack of knowledge and how brains deal with that.”

I reached down and touched a single blade of grass, bending it back slightly. The doe was still staring at me, as it had been the whole time, but I was starting to get used to it. I smiled a little bit as I thought about losing my sense of wonder at the fact there was a giant glowing white doe with six eyes staring at me.

“I used to make an effort to induce that sense of wonder in myself,” I said. “I would look at a blade of grass, like this one, and just try to turn off that part of my brain that was categorizing it as a blade of grass, and then turn off all the sub-categorizations, to dump that hard-earned childhood knowledge overboard for a bit and see it as I had first seen it, when I hadn’t known what it was. Sometimes it worked and I could have this moment of relearning, of seeing without knowing.” I tried it then, with the blade of grass I was touching. It was meditation, in a sense, but in another sense it was the real mental effort of clearing every single cache away and digging deep for a mental mapping process that didn’t get used all that often anymore. Psychedelics probably would have helped.

Eventually I did get it, just for a moment, this sense of awe and realization as my brain was tricked into discovering grass all over again.

Loyalty Increased: Six-Eyed Doe lvl 3!

The doe moved forward and gave me a slow, lazy lick on the face.

“Thanks,” I said, as I tried to wipe the deer spit away. I tried my best to not think my thoughts and just feel a sense of majesty. When that didn’t work I tried to think in parentheticals as though that wasn’t what I was actually thinking about (only a sidenote, honest), but I had no idea how successful I was.

(Could the locus read minds? Was that the implication of the sudden loyalty jump? Or could it read them only in a coarse way, so as to sense that moment of wonder? Was it the moment of awe and majesty at something within the doe’s domain what I was being rewarded for, or was it the effort I had put into having that perspective, regardless of where it happened? Had the Six-Eyed Doe’s loyalty been at 0 before that, or had it risen while I was unconscious? And if I had gone to the effort of getting a proper baseline before I’d gone out to speak with the doe, would that undercut the work that I had done here, because the doe would sense that I was trying to game the system?)

So I sat in the grass for a bit more, trying unsuccessfully to recapture some of that ... I hesitate to call it magic, but calling it a circumvention of my brain’s predictive modeling functions seemed far too sterile, especially given my (debatably) psychic companion.

It wasn’t too long before there was light, and after so long with only the doe-glow, it was almost blinding. It was hard to see what was going on outside the bottle, due to the curvature, the imperfections of the glass, and a fuzziness I assumed had something to do with how light behaved at the border. There were people though, and I could see their general features; a tall, slender one with blonde hair that was likely Fenn, an unidentified shorter person, a very short woman with green skin that had to be Solace, and the familiar squat, hairy form of Grak.

One of the people-shapes, the one with green skin, vanished, and an enormous hawk came soaring down out of the sky not long after. It pulled up sharply as it neared the ground, and with a burst of feathers transformed into Solace, who strode out from the feathers as though this was completely normal.

“You’re awake!” she said with a wide smile as she approached me.

“Yeah,” I said. “How long was I out?”

“I have no idea, how long have you been up?” she asked. “I put you in the bottle some twelve hours ago.”

“I slept ten of it,” I said. “I don’t think I actually needed that much sleep though, once my shoulder was halfway healed — we have these marzipan fairies we pull from a magic jar that heal wounds, up to and including broken bones. Your healing, combined with those, would have had me on my feet much faster.”

“I know that now,” said Solace with a nod. “At the time, I thought that I was doing you a favor by acting quickly and decisively, and once I learned otherwise, I had put you into too deep a slumber to safely rouse you from. It didn’t matter much. The fight was already over when I put you in the bottle and we’ve been in hiding ever since.”

“What was the outcome of the fight?” I asked.

“The soul-linked warrior was killed,” said Solace. “Larkspur escaped, despite Fenn’s best efforts to shoot him in the back as he fled. There was a woman with him, but she escaped as well, though in another direction. On our side, yours was the worst injury.”

“Fenn and Amaryllis are okay?” I asked.

“Fenn took a total of five arrows to the torso and two to the legs,” said Solace. “The soul-linked warrior was wearing some manner of armor that returned the damage dealt to him back to her, which was a price she was willing to pay so long as she had fairies to eat. Amaryllis was shot three times in the stomach and twice in the arm, but I managed to keep her on her feet, and after we used the teleportation key to leave, she healed the rest with fairies. I believe those are now in short supply, given how freely they’ve been consumed.”

I was wincing through most of that report, but being low on magical fairies was the really serious problem, given how much we’d been relying on them. I wished that I hadn’t eaten one while we were in the tree and used a bone instead.

“Grak?” I asked.

“He’s only recently returned to the fold,” said Solace with a small gesture towards where I assumed Grak was, in the outside world. “He came back to the hotel and got our message there.”

“Okay.” I nodded. I looked to the walls of the glass bottle and the world outside it. “And where are we?”

“Per Amaryllis’ instructions, we’re picking a new location at random every hour,” said Solace. “She believes that she knows which particular method Larkspur was using to track us, given what you and Fenn learned.” She grinned. “She’s quite irate.”

“And we have a tree to exit to?” I asked. “I’m eager to see the others.” I looked down at my nearly naked body. “Fenn has all my clothes.”

“We’ll take another way out,” said Solace. She stepped forward with her staff raised and stopped for a moment. “Do you have anything against mice?”

“Uh,” I said, thinking about the dozens our cat had brought to the back porch over the course of the years, and how it had become my responsibility to dispose of the corpses because he was ‘my cat’. “No? Let me get my things first.”

When I came out from the tree, slightly bloody bandoliers and bag around me and sneakers on my feet (a horrible look), she bopped me on the nose and with no transition whatsoever I was clinging to the head of her staff with all four of my paws. Even trying to play back the memories I couldn’t sense where the seam was, between being a human and being a mouse. There wasn’t even a discontinuity (and yes, I did feel a sense of awe at that, but in the biblical sense, the kind of awe that gets used as the root in the word ‘awful’).

With my small mouse eyes, I watched as Solace grew a pair of mighty, leathery wings from her back, gently pushing her leaf-cloak to the side, and with no apparent regard for the mouse on the end of her staff, she launched herself into the air. I tumbled off, naturally, but was caught in her fist, and suffered through the stomach-lurching sensation of rapid, rising flight, trying not to give in to my natural urge to claw and bite at her.

It wasn’t long before we were out, and I was tossed into the air, feeling myself twisting and falling before somehow, miraculously, finding myself in human form, standing on my feet with my companions around me.

Chapter 7 - Math.random()

“He made a deal with fucking Doris Finch,” said Amaryllis, as soon as I was out of the bottle.

I stared at her; her hair was different, cut short, almost to the scalp, and no longer the red it had been, but brown instead. She was in her full armor, minus the helmet, and it gave her a look that was boyish (but like an extremely attractive boy, enough that it started to awaken confusing feelings in me).

“The shirt says ‘Incognito’,” said Fenn. “But you can’t see it, because someone is a spoilsport.”

“I’m staying armored until he’s dead,” said Amaryllis. She didn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. “We all are.” She nodded to Fenn.

Fenn was wearing her own leather armor, I noticed, and she held out her hand to me. I caught the things she threw to me one by one, first a plain white shirt, then the tights I wore to keep my armor from chafing, then the armor itself. I put those on as quickly as I could.

“The city guard is after us,” said Amaryllis as I dressed. “Not surprising, given the general mayhem. I don’t know what the long-term consequences might be, but ‘not good’ would be a fair place to start. Larkspur might have sold them a story, or got away before it could be linked to him, or maybe he just decided to cut his losses and run, but I know which scenario is worse for us, and that’s the one we have to assume.”

“And we can’t just leave?” I asked. “Teleport out?”

“Yes, we can,” said Amaryllis. She fidgeted slightly. “I’m not worried about the city guard that much, not when we have ready access to disguises and they have poor intel on us, even if Larkspur is the one informing them. We can use the bottle as a way to change up our numbers at will, which means that they’re looking for four or five people when we can stuff everyone into extradimensional space to hide our numbers. I’m not even worried about Larkspur, given that we know what he’s doing and can keep evading Doris. Nothing has changed, except the depths to which he’s sunk.”

“Sorry, who is Doris?” I asked.

“An enpersoned exclusion zone, apparently,” said Fenn. “One of those we’re going to murder.”

Quest Accepted: 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. (0/9,513,912)

“Okay, got a quest for that,” I said with a wince. I wondered whether that would count toward the Hitler achievement for killing six million people. “And I would assume that dealing with her is about as ill-advised as dealing with any of the other horrors?” (I didn’t say, ‘But isn’t she just a normal person, aside from the fact that there are nine and a half million of her?’ because I wasn’t an unimaginative idiot.)

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “Not just because she constantly stabs people in the back, not just because the Republic of Doris Finch is congenitally unstable, but because it’s one of those things that the functional core of the Empire of Common Cause has the means and motive to deal with. The bans against working with her aren’t one of those idiotic things that atrophy the rule of law because member nations put them down on paper and then never look twice at them. If we could prove that he’d entered into an agreement with any of the Dorises, that would be enough to get him a trial by adversity and have sanctions levied against Anglecynn to boot.”

“But we’re going to kill him instead,” said Fenn with a vicious grin. “His meatshield is gone, that means he’s approximately one arrow away from death, and you had better believe that I’m on board with any plan that involves us gunning for him. I almost got hit by one of my own arrows. No one hits me with my own arrows.”

“And he’s tracking us with some kind of … probabilistic thing?” I asked.

“Doris is.” Amaryllis nodded. “I would guess that they have remote communication through an entad to enable it. And if that’s what’s happening, then he’s leaking highly classified information back to her, which again, any sensible government would lock him away for, if not kill him outright. We should be safe, so long as there’s not a high probability that we’re in any one specific location.”

I wanted to chide Amaryllis for not having told us about this before, but despite the fact that she didn’t like the name ‘encyclopedia girl’ I knew that there was an extreme amount of information locked away in her head, and I had decided that I was going to give her the benefit of the doubt when it came to things that she hadn’t thought were relevant. She had already given me the crash course on Aerb, and so far as I could see, exclusion zones weren’t likely to be relevant unless we were actually going near one (though perhaps this was evidence that I should have pressed for yet more infodumps, or prioritized reading through The Exclusionary Principle above my other reading and training).

“Okay,” I said. “So Larkspur has some way to see where we might be, or get a weighted map, or something like that? And the plan is that we use that to lure him somewhere and kill him?”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis.

I looked around at the faces, trying to see if there was anyone else who disagreed. Solace looked calm and impassive, as though the idea of cold-blooded murder didn’t faze her, which it probably didn’t, and Grak looked as impenetrably stone-faced as ever. They’d had time to talk about this without me. The vote had already happened in my absence, and even if it wasn’t unanimous, it had already been decided.

“He said that the new council session starts in eight days,” I said. “Or maybe seven now. It’s true that he might get us put on a list or whatever, but he might have already done that. He’s an ass, and he’s trying to kill us, but he’s at the end of his rope. What does killing him actually get us? A lower chance that we end up on the wrong lists? A nebulous possibility that it will be easier for Amaryllis to return to power? At most, seven days where we don’t have to be on the run from him? Revenge?”

“You have a quest for it,” said Fenn. “He’s a threat to us, and after that fight in the street, we’ve lost most of our incentive to be subtle. Besides that, you didn’t level, because I would have noticed, which means you’re close to it. Larkspur is going to push you over the edge. Besides, he’s a total dick.”

I glanced at Solace.

“I’ve been told about your power,” said Solace, giving me a small bow. “I requested few details, in case I need to interact with it in some emergency.”

“Right,” I said with a frown. So everyone was on the other side, and wanted to kill Larkspur at least partially because it would help me level. Was I correcting too far in the direction of not wanting to be controlled by the desire to level up again? “Okay, then what’s the plan?”

“There are two things making our probability spread very wide right now in terms of location, and per the last intelligence reports I got, location was all that the Dorises could give for an entity,” said Amaryllis. She watched me. “This is one of those state secrets that I’m putting myself at risk by telling you, and you have to trust me that I would have done it before if I thought it was at all in play.”

I could feel the tension in the room rise a notch at that. The last thing I wanted was for the personal conflict between Amaryllis and I to spill out into the group. “I understand that,” I said. “It would have been better to know earlier rather than later, but I would have had to trust in your judgement in any case, and apparently he’s made a deal with the devil you thought he wouldn’t make.”

(How was she so attractive in brown, boyish hair? The only woman with hair like that I’d ever found attractive was Emma Watson, and while Emma Watson cutting her hair was an important moment in my young life, short hair wasn’t something that I’d ever thought I was attracted to. Was it just a blade-of-grass thing, where my brain had registered her as pretty enough times that it was starting to grow numb to the fact, and now I was faced with awe as the neural pathways tried to figure this new haircut out? Was my brain bringing her existing attractiveness to my attention over and over again because of the change?)

Amaryllis relaxed somewhat, losing some of the tension in her shoulders, and nodded. “The first factor is that we’ve randomized our movement through the city, which means that our probable location as seen by the Doris clones should cover a huge number of possibilities. The second factor is that we have a teleportation key we can use at any moment. That means that if something were to happen to us, we could simply leave, which is good for its own sake, but also spreads out our probable location even further.”

“What are the limits?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” said Amaryllis. “We don’t know how many entities can be tracked using this method, what’s needed to track them, or where these probabilities are actually derived from at a root level.” She sighed. “I really, really hate working on problems with such limited information. We don’t even know if Larkspur found you at the library using the strategic luck reserve or through this method, so we might not even have two examples to draw from.”

“We know that it’s imperfect,” I said. I rubbed at my left hand. “At a guess, highly imperfect. Larkspur went into a shop that we had been about to enter, and it must have been because Doris told him there was a good chance that we were in there already. Now obviously, we weren’t there. Doris wasn’t able to tell that we were trailing him, either. And given that he talked about triangulation, my guess is that they don’t actually have a map, they’re reading signals instead. If the probabilities displayed are affected by the probability reading, which I think they probably are, then it’s even worse.”

“All we need is to stay in one spot,” said Grak. “He will find us, and we will kill him.”

“Well, no,” I said. “He might not be able to see into the future, but he might still be able to see into alternate presents, ish, and if Doris can track him, then that means he can gather information about things that he never actually did.” I saw Amaryllis raise an eyebrow. “Stop me if someone has already brought this up.” Amaryllis shook her head. “Okay, so right now we’re moving around the city, picking our next location by way of dice or something, right?”

“A deck of cards,” said Amaryllis, “Keyed to a map of city blocks where we might reasonably hide, which, given the ability to transform into birds and land on rooftops, is most of them.”

“Okay,” I said. “So if we stopped moving entirely, and just stayed in this hotel room —”

“It’s a bedroom,” said Grak. “We looked at rooms for rent in the papers and snuck in. There are wards against sound, before you ask.”

“Huh,” I said, looking around. I guess we were fugitives from the law, after all. “Well if we just stayed here, and committed to staying here, then Larkspur would eventually find us, right?”

“Right,” said Amaryllis.

“And then we would kill him,” said Fenn. “Grak would set up all manner of wards, I would find some place to snipe from, and that’s before he even got to you, Amaryllis, and the last druid in the world.”

“More likely, he would send the city guard after us instead,” said Amaryllis. “And we would leave without ever seeing his face.”

“Well, what I was thinking is that he wouldn’t even have to do that,” I said. “If he can track himself, then he can flip a coin about whether or not to send the city guard. If the coin comes up heads, or er, circles, then he stays back and does nothing, or if it comes up torches, then he sends the city guard. And then, if he does send the city guard, he goes to one of three prearranged locations to indicate whether it was a success, failure, or neutral, or whatever bits of information he wants to transmit to his alternate present, where he’s tracking himself trying to figure out the plan.”

“Which means he still fails half the time,” said Amaryllis. She frowned. “Unless he sent them out after flipping torches twice in a row, and so on down that line of thinking, but that depends on how well Doris can see probability, which is unknown.”

“We could leave the city,” said Fenn. “That means he wouldn’t be able to leverage the city guard against us. We’re only staying here so we can use the teleportation key to leave at a moment’s notice, right? And so we don’t tip that we actually do have it, which Larkspur seems on the fence about? For all he knows, we scurried away from the fight just after he turned tail and ran.”

“We need to pick a killing field,” said Grak.

“Right,” I replied. “But it still has to be a killing field that he won’t know is a killing field, if he’s smart about things and only tries any given strategy half the time. I don’t want to continually set things up and have him be a no-show, only for him to screw off back to Anglecynn where he’ll keep causing problems. We already have to worry about his sister.”

“Hyacinth Prentiss,” said Amaryllis. “She’s his cousin-wife, not sister, they wed after his arranged marriage to me fell through. She was always more cautious, and you’re correct that she’s going to be a threat, though not nearly in the same way as him, especially not if we kill him. Killing him weakens her position immeasurably.”

That bit about an arranged marriage was news to me, but it probably wasn’t the time to dig into that, and I knew Amaryllis would say that even if I wanted to press the issue.

“Okay,” I said. “So we need to set up a trap that doesn’t look like a trap to his borrowed probability vision, which we don’t actually know the details of. And on top of that, the last twelve hours have presumably been spent moving around a lot and trying to maximize the spread of probability, which means that any deviation from that is going to draw his attention. Plus he and the Republic of Doris can both safely assume that we know something about the power and are taking active measures to avoid it, right?”

“I thought it was an acceptable trade-off,” said Amaryllis. “We’re safe from him so long as we keep on the move, and the only thing that moving is really costing us is sleep.” She yawned, and I could momentarily see the lack of sleep before her willful energy returned. “Granted, we can’t put that off forever, but we can sleep in shifts as we keep moving, if need be.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I have a plan, unless there’s a concrete plan beyond luring him and killing him that no one has told me?” Amaryllis shook her head. “We can make twenty miles in an hour if we’re swallows. The land around Boastre Vino is largely uncultivated, and we can use the deck of cards to decide on a random angle away from here. We fly twenty miles using the random angle, then land there and prepare for Larkspur. From his perspective, it should look like we’re running away using some method of probability masking, right?”

“Probably,” said Amaryllis. I wondered if that was a joke, but she didn’t smile.

“We set a trap wherever we land,” said Grak with a nod of understanding. “That makes things more difficult for me.”

“Is this guy really dumb enough to go after us with just him and the devil girl?” asked Fenn.

“I would think you wouldn’t be one to talk about mixed parentage like that,” said Amaryllis with a frown. Fenn frowned back in a mocking reflection. “But to answer your question, I don’t know. I didn’t imagine that he would make a deal with Doris either, but it would appear he has. If I were him, I would cut my losses and run, but he’s already overcommitted this far. Men like the one we killed last night, trained, loyal men, are a valuable resource, one that he couldn’t possibly have tapped dry as yet, but one that he’d have to think carefully about. If he thinks he has us, he might bring in more, but … I don’t know for certain.”

“This doesn’t inspire confidence,” said Solace.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I replied.

“Juniper, I understand why you did it, and I even agree with it, based on what Fenn said, but the reality we’re facing down is that we had a full-on battle with Larkspur in the middle of a populated city street,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t know how he dealt with what happened at Bone and Flesh, but here, now, he has an opportunity to paint us as violent criminals. He could spin some story about being in Boastre Vino as part of his classified duties as FSD, collect eyewitness accounts, either legitimate or paid for, set up his brute as a martyr, and make the story as public as possible. It would bring scrutiny on him, possibly more than he could bear, but he could do it in order to fuck us. If we don’t offer up a target to him, and relatively soon, then the chance that he fucks us like that gets a lot higher.”

And if he continued his deal with Doris, whatever that was, it was entirely possible that we wouldn’t be able to stick around anywhere for longer than a day or so. That would mean that training at the athenaeums was flatly out for me, far into the foreseeable future. It would mean that we’d have to fly to any place that we hadn’t already been, and sneaking our way into the imperial teleportation network would almost certainly be a no-go. Hyacinth, his cousin-wife (blegh), would be her own issue, but she wasn’t loaded for bear against us, and I’d already seen her bow out of the chase as being not worth the effort. Larkspur was a danger to us because he was unpredictable, and if we let go of this chance and stuck to hiding, there was a really good possibility that he was going to crop up in the future. And if he did, then he was going to be in a better position.

Besides that, I was going to level up if we killed him.

“Fuck,” I said. “Okay.”

There were sixty cards in an Aerbian deck; the four suits were tines, flowers, cups, and bones, and the eight extra cards were four women (virgin, matron, whore, crone) and four men (fop, scholar, joker, brute). I had originally started dividing the arc in increments of fifty-two before getting a look at the deck and realizing that we were fortunate enough to be able to divide the entire half-circle of land cleanly by the number of cards.

After we’d talked it over some more, everyone disappeared into the bottle to get some rest, then Solace came back out again. A small light had gone on within the bottle, hovering just off-center and slowly rotating.

“Artificial sun?” I asked as she stowed the bottle in her cloak. I was out because I was well-rested and combat-capable, and she was out because she had to be. The lack of sleep didn’t seem to be affecting her.

“Something like that,” Solace agreed.

“I might have found that helpful,” I said with a shrug.

“Yes, you might have.” Solace nodded. “Did you speak with the locus?”

“A bit,” I admitted. “You gave me some time with her?” That wasn’t quite an accusation, but I had my suspicions. The timing seemed awfully convenient.

“Yes,” said Solace, inclining her head a fraction. “You call it a she?”

“I try not to,” I said. “But it is a doe, not a stag.”

Solace nodded. “Words don’t matter much. It’s only convention.”

I opened my mouth to launch into an argument about that, because of course words mattered, because of course convention mattered, but I held my tongue, because most people didn’t find arguments like that endearing, and Solace had four hundred years of being like this, which meant I was really unlikely to change her mind.

The plan was that the two of us would stay on watch for the next hour, then draw a random card from the deck to figure out what direction we were heading. Solace and I would fly for about an hour, then land at the nearest defensible spot, where she would pull everyone out of the bottle and I would guard against attack. In the meantime, everyone else would be getting at least a little rest. It would have been better to have everyone at full strength and fully rested, but we were worried that if we didn’t give him the opportunity soon, Larkspur would simply give up (if he hadn’t already).

The thought that this entire thing might be for nothing, that he might already be back in Anglecynn, was weighing on me. According to everything I knew about narrative logic, he would show up at the field of battle as soon as he saw the probability we were anywhere else narrowing down. Trying to understand the world of Aerb through the lens of narrative was a fool’s quest though, because the Dungeon Master knew where I was looking and what I was thinking, and if a player ever tried something on the theory that ‘that’s how it works in stories’ then it was your duty as DM to slap them down so hard they didn’t try garbage like that in the future.

And if he did go after us … well, what did he know about us, and what did that say about our odds of success? Amaryllis seemed confident that he didn’t know we had a druid, because everything that Solace had done was easier to attribute to various unknown entads than to a druid that had been in hiding for hundreds of years (“think horses, not zebras”). If he had after-action reports of any kind from Barren Jewel, he might know that we were working with a warder, or at least had been, and the same went for if it had been him at Weik Handum rather than people Aumann had sent out, or some unknown third party. He knew about and had seen Fenn, and he had a fairly good read on me, though perhaps he would assume I was out of the battle given the injury he’d given me.

From Larkspur’s perspective, he was looking at a group of four to five people with powerful magic items and rudimentary magic skills, one of them, maybe, a warder. I didn’t know whether he was the type to overestimate or underestimate, but my guess was that he would underestimate us, because that’s what he’d done with me at the library. His search method using probabilistic magic also seemed (to me) to be somewhat sloppy, or at least premised on the ability to resolve conflicts from a position of superiority. Unfortunately, it was possible that after underestimating us twice, he would wise up the third time, and even if he didn’t stop his habit of thinking he had the upper hand, he would still have to raise the assumed lower bound of our capabilities.

I was looking at too many unknowns. Donald Rumsfeld got flak for having said that there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns, but I had always thought that was an amazing insight into information and planning. We could, at least to some extent, plan against strategies and powers that Larkspur might have available to him, like if he brought in a gold mage, or a pustule mage, and we could alter what we did in accordance with the probabilities that we assigned to each possibility, mostly based on what Amaryllis knew about Larkspur. But we couldn’t possibly plan against the things we had no idea even existed.

That was what worried me. I thought there was a reasonable chance that Larkspur would use his probability triangulation method, however that worked, to see that we were leaving Boastre Vino, and from the spread I was hoping the deck of cards would give our probability, I hoped it would look like we were trying to make a getaway and then camping in the wilderness. Maybe he would come out to play … but if he did?

“What’s on your mind?” asked Solace.

“I don’t know what this battle is going to look like,” I said. “We’re hoping that our ability to wing it is better than their ability to wing it, or that our preparation outweighs their caution, and I just … I still don’t like it. There’s too much variability.”

“Yes.” Solace nodded. “The unknown can be difficult.”

“Yet that’s sort of your thing?” I asked. “Dealing with the unknown and winning despite not being able to probe deeper into it?”

Solace shrugged. “That’s one way to be a druid,” she said. “Things are easier, if you don’t know all the reasons that something can’t work, so some druids prefer — preferred, sorry — to simply take everything as it comes, working on instinct and intuition.”

“And … you’re not like that?” I asked.

“It’s fuzzy, being a druid,” said Solace. She sat on the bed, which had no sheets or pillows, and folded her hands. “But at a certain level, you need to win every single battle you fight, and instinct and intuition alone aren’t enough, not if you fight hundreds of battles. Ignorance is not the great druidic virtue, nor is faith.” She gave a small laugh, and touched her light-green fingers to her dark-green lips. “It’s funny, but I want so much for you to understand.”

“Oh?” I asked.

“You hate it,” said Solace. “You don’t understand druids and you don’t understand the locus, you have the mentality that spurred the Second Empire toward genocide, and yet … the Deep Searching brought me right to you. I want to repay your willingness to help by giving you that thing you desire, such as I’m able. I want you to know.”

“Well, I don’t feel like I’m closer,” I said. “Unless you’re saying that the great druidic virtue can only be defined by negation.”

“They say, sometimes, that for a druid to know will lock them away from their art forever,” said Solace. “It’s usually more about how the druid relates to the world, and how the world relates back to the druid. You told me that the airspeed velocity of a swallow was twenty-five miles an hour, and do you recall my response?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You said that wasn’t actually knowledge, it was just … a way for people to pin things down without actually conveying truth, or something like that.”

“Yes.” Solace nodded. “That is how I relate to the world. That is what a true druid is, at the core of their being. It doesn’t matter that you told me this thing you believe about swallows, because it’s only true within a framework that I have utterly rejected. That one is easy for me; others are less so. For all that Amaryllis rushes to defend me, she makes the same mistake that you do. She says, flatly, that I can turn the five of us into birds, and then she begins thinking of that as a tool within her toolbox, a cog within the clockwork of strategy.”

“And … it’s not?” I asked.

“It is,” said Solace. “In the same way that a swallow goes twenty-five miles per hour. It’s a lens through which we might view the world, one that lies far on the side of desiring to place everything within systems and order, removed from the wonder and mystery of actually turning into a bird.”

“Ah,” I said. “I … kind of get it. Maybe. And it’s bidirectional? It’s not just what you personally think about your art, it’s what others think too? How neatly they’ve done the work of fitting a square peg into a round hole?”

Solace nodded. “It’s fuzzy. Everything about being a druid is fuzzy. But yes, when the Second Empire’s efforts at bringing order were met with revolt from the loci, they did try other methods, like keeping the druids ignorant of their plots and plans, or doing tests with unwitting druids. That didn’t work either.”

“Huh,” I said. “Is this something that we need to be worried about? You said that I couldn’t hurt the locus by thinking the wrong things, but … that doesn’t seem to be quite true.”

“A druid and a locus are different,” said Solace. “I practice the art of druidic magic, but the locus is that magic. For myself, it’s not the seeking of truth so much as the rigidity of thought that might put me at risk, but I’ve been doing this for four hundred years, and thought alone is an irritant, not a true threat.” She looked me over. “I think that’s enough. You understand at least some of what I’m trying to convey.”

“So what’s the great druidic virtue then?” I asked. “Doublethink?”

“Hrm,” said Solace with a small smile. “We would say saxud, but that would be a good translation. It’s not enough, on its own, I don’t believe that druidic magic could work if it were so simple, but it’s the element we lean upon most often.” I opened my mouth to ask another question, but she held up a hand. “I would request that you stay your tongue, unless you think it’s of dire importance.”

“It’s a matter of history,” I said. “Nothing to do with your art.” Solace nodded for me to proceed. “I’m not sure I understand what the Second Empire did, or how they did it. Did they analyze the loci to death, and if that’s what it was, how did yours survive that?”

“Oh,” said Solace, eyes widening slightly. “No, they infringed on the druids through their actions, their attempts at treaties, their science, but that was nothing that we couldn’t have endured. No, they saw land worth taking, and something standing in their way that couldn’t be captured or turned to productivity, and their extermination campaign began in earnest after that. They were unrepentantly evil.”

We were quiet after that, as Solace looked out the open window and I fidgeted with the Anyblade. I didn’t quite believe her version of events with regards to the Second Empire. It was possible that Aerbian history had this period where Pure Evil was in charge, but my guess was that it was more just people being people, which meant people being shitty to each other. Druids were probably a scapegoat for some larger problem, or a distraction meant to take eyes away from poor policy, or a rallying cry that resonated with people in a way that a complex issue might not.

I did have to wonder how much the upcoming battle, if there was one, would depend on Solace. She was the ace in the hole, the black swan that Larkspur would (should) have no possible method of accurately guessing we had on our side. I was hoping that she would show her true worth.

Chapter 8 - Copse and Robbers

I drew a seven of tines, which meant we’d go in the middle 60° arc, then drew the virgin, which was card #57 according to my scheme. I considered the card somewhat suspect, but I had done a lot of shuffling and wasn’t going to reduce our probability spread by getting superstitious about the kabbalistic meanings of the cards. If the Dungeon Master had picked a specific card for me to draw on the basis of something that I had been giving some thought to as of late, then I doubted I would be able to improve matters by simply drawing another card from the deck.

Solace transformed me into a swallow again, then herself, and we took off together, flying side by side. I relaxed slightly as we passed the city walls, because that meant we no longer had to worry about a last-second ambush. It was mid-morning and a pleasant day for a flight, and I tried to take joy in it as I internally counted the minutes.

After an hour’s flight and (approximately) twenty-five miles in a straight line away from Boastre Vino, we circled around to a copse of trees with some large stones at the center. Grak had said that if we had much of a choice, he wanted us to be somewhere with lots of obstructions, because in accordance with Goettl’s Laws, it was easier to make a ward if you had something to brace it on. His plan was to tap completely dry in making the wards around us, in the interests of having as powerful (and numerous) of wards as physically possible, or if we engaged the enemy sooner, then to put up wards until they showed up.

As soon as we landed, Solace pulled the others out of the bottle by first diving inside and then having everyone spit out of individual trees, like a dendritic version of the birth process. I noticed there was no tree tunnel this time, and the fact that Solace was making an effort not to repeat herself seemed, to me, to be more than just showing off on her part. It was, maybe, a way to avoid falling into patterns or seeing the druidic magic as something that had to adhere to doing things the same way every time.

While Grak got to work, Fenn grumbled briefly about sightlines and then began to climb a tree, and Solace began walking around in order to scout out the territory. That left me with a slightly rumpled-looking Amaryllis, who was rubbing her eyes.

“The Elon Gar have a way to eliminate sleep,” she said. “The masters need ten minutes of quiet meditation a day, and that’s it. This is the first time I’ve ever slept in full plate. I wasn’t too impressed by the experience.”

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Amaryllis, looking slightly more alert. “Something serious?”

“Um,” I said. “It’s about capital-L Loyalty.” In other words, sort of serious, but not deathly so.

“Oh. And?” asked Amaryllis.

“Well, Fenn passed level 10 Loyalty, I’m not sure whether she told you that or not?” I asked.

“No, she hadn’t mentioned it,” said Amaryllis. “And what does your internal system say that I’m at?”

“Nine,” I said.

“She’s at eleven?” asked Amaryllis.

“Sixteen,” I replied.

“Ah,” said Amaryllis. She hesitated. “Sorry.”

“No,” I said, “I wasn’t bringing it up because, yeah. That whole thing.” The bad blood. The mistrust. “No, when Fenn passed Loyalty 10 it unlocked this thing called ‘Twinned Souls’ that probably doesn’t have anything to do with the actual, literal soul, but makes it so that she’ll get stronger as I get stronger. I think it’s a balance thing, so my companions don’t get left behind me. And given that you’re just one point away, I was wondering whether there was anything that I could do that would, I don’t know. Help with that.”

“Huh,” said Amaryllis. “Give me a second?”

“Sure,” I said. I stepped back a bit and watched Grak move between the trees with his wand in hand, tracing out an irregular ward with the trees as anchor points. A border ward against high velocity was a must, given the risk of heavy-duty machine gun fire. Everything else was at his discretion, especially because my knowledge of wards was being increasingly off-loaded onto him. Raising Grak’s loyalty, somehow, was on my list of priorities, but it wasn’t terribly high, partly because I didn’t actually know how to raise loyalty, other than by trying to be a generally good and understanding person.

Loyalty increased: Amaryllis lvl 10!

Companion Passive Unlocked: Twinned Souls (Amaryllis)!

I turned to Amaryllis. “What just happened?” I asked.

“Is that working?” Amaryllis asked.

Loyalty increased: Amaryllis lvl 11!

“What are you doing?” I asked. “How are you … are you becoming more loyal on purpose?”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis.

Loyalty increased: Amaryllis lvl 12!

“You can’t do that,” I said. I will admit to some slight panic on my part, maybe because there was something in the back of my mind that said trying to munchkin the game too badly was going to end with the Dungeon Master putting his foot down. “You can’t just, become more loyal because there’s something in it for you, that’s not how loyalty works!”

“Well, clearly you don’t know as much as you think,” said Amaryllis. She looked down at her hands, giving them a flex. “I think I can feel the change.”

“Please,” I said. “Tell me what you did, or what you were thinking?”

“Well, you already said,” replied Amaryllis. “Obviously my loyalty is because I get something from you, isn’t that it?” There was something slightly hostile in her tone. “Is that really what you think?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense, Grak didn’t become more loyal when we decided to pay him a ludicrous amount of money, I just don’t think that it’s keyed to literal rewards. And I didn’t think that you could become more loyal on purpose, but maybe I’m wrong about that, and if I am, then you became more loyal on purpose after I told you there was something in it for you, so …”

“You don’t understand me,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t think I’m really all that complicated.” She sighed and ran her fingers through her short brown hair. “You understand that my plan, even early on, was to elevate you as much as possible, right?” she asked. “Once I saw how quickly you picked up blood magic, how easily you blew past what I had spent years studying, I thought to myself that you were the key to my return to power.” She rubbed her face. “That changed, over time, but the same thing has been at the back of my head from the start, which was that if you were the same as Uther Penndraig, then I was never going to be one of your knights of the Square Table. Even if I put my heart and soul into training, I was never going to be able to match the people you would pick up along the way. I’d at best be a wallet for you, or a love interest if I—”—she stopped herself from saying something—“I knew that I couldn’t keep pace with you, and I knew that what I had to offer you wasn’t going to be worth much, especially if we couldn’t get me back into power in Anglecynn, and — I’ve been worried about this for almost as long as we’ve known each other.”

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“You wiped that away,” said Amaryllis. Her posture had changed somewhat, relaxing. “You wiped that away without even thinking about it. There wasn’t some calculation going on in your mind where you were thinking that I might be more useful if I was trying to win your approval, or if I were in a position of weakness compared to you. You didn’t think about the power dynamic between the two of us. So,” she said. “Maybe I’m a worse person than you, because I would have had those thoughts, but if you didn’t, then yes, there were some things I needed to let go of and recurring thoughts I could toss aside. Hence, loyalty.” She rubbed her eyes again. “I’m sorry, I just woke up and I’m running on less-than-enough sleep.”

“I think that if you tell someone that you’re going to try to trust them more, you have to actually do that,” I said. “So a lot of it is on me.” I looked her over. She was right that I didn’t understand her. “Let’s not have every conversation between us go like this. So ... serious.”

“Agreed,” she said with a soft smile. She looked up to the tree tops. “So, you and Fenn?”

I felt my chest constrict at that. “Um,” I said. “Kind of. Not actually, in the sense of, uh, we haven’t — it’s nothing official, or unofficial even, but, yeah. We’re sort of … thinking about it. I am, anyway, I can't say for her.”

“Thinking about it while sharing a bed?” asked Amaryllis with a raised eyebrow.

“Ah,” I said. “If you mean at the hotel, they were going to be two separate beds.”

“Were they actually?” asked Amaryllis, still keeping her eyebrow raised.

I thought about that for a bit. “When I give that some thought, no, they probably wouldn’t have been.”

There was sound from the trees overhead, and I watched as Fenn made her descent, moving with a grace and agility that screamed inhuman to me, though I was pretty sure that it was also the sort of thing you’d see on YouTube and think, ‘Wow, people sure can do some amazing things if they devote the time and effort to it’. She didn’t even seem to vary her speed at all, like she was doing parkour and using every action, pushing off tree branches, stepping lightly for just a moment, in order to ensure that she kept her movement eerily constant.

A small puff of exhaled air was the only evidence she’d been exerting herself over the course of her rapid seventy-foot climb down.

“Am I really that predictable?” she asked. “See, I was going to exclaim what a crazy random mix-up there’d been on the part of the hotel, I had this whole bit planned about how we would just have to make the best of being stuck under the same covers.” She grinned at me. “You know, I heard all of that. And before you start, you really can’t complain about someone eavesdropping if you watched them go up into the eaves.”

“Eavesdroppers sit under the eaves of the house,” said Amaryllis with a frown. “You’re thinking of rafters.”

“Eavesdropping, raftersdropping, it’s all the same to me,” said Fenn. She was smiling my way. I was blushing, and my heart was pounding, because it was all sort of out in the open now, especially given who I’d been saying it to. Amaryllis didn’t really look put out at all, but she was good at masks, when she needed to be. I had no idea whether she felt any romantic inclination toward me at all, with the unicorn kiss only serving to make me feel more uncertain. ‘Or a love interest if I —’ was still there in my mind, making me wonder, but if it came down to a choice between the two of them, I had now cast my lot, which had left Fenn smiling and made me feel wonderful.

(Maybe it was the (possibly) upcoming battle against whatever forces Larkspur could muster, which had already set me on edge, but the idea of a proper relationship with Fenn was terrifying in an exhilarating way. I’d fucked up both friendships and relationships before, she was my best friend, we were joined together by a mysterious force that we didn’t really understand, and from what I knew of her personally she wasn’t built for a long-term stable romantic partnership, or at least had about as much of a chance to learn how to do that as I had. So there were lots of reasons that it was probably a bad idea, but we were, apparently, going to be an actual thing instead of just flirting around the subject.)

“So how long are we going to wait for this guy to show up?” asked Fenn, thankfully changing the subject. I might have been imagining things, but I thought I saw a slight blush on the pale skin of her cheeks. “A full day here?”

“We moved once an hour, which was probably overkill, given that we didn’t have any close calls,” said Amaryllis. She turned her helmet over in her hands. “I would guess that if he comes, it will be between two hours and a full day. The longer the wait, the higher the danger to us, because I don’t doubt that he would use that time to rally whatever forces he thinks he needs to bring to bear.”

And that was what worried me. If he showed up, how much was he willing to risk overcommitting? How much was he going to pull people off projects, put them in danger, risk operational security, or incriminate himself? We were hoping that he was going to come in overconfident and underprepared, but it was all up in the air.

Grak took six hours to finish the wards, going in order of what he called the inverted pyramid of potential threat. The most important layers of warding were up within the hour, and more and more pieces of warding became functional after that. None of them were going to last particularly long; one way or another, we would be gone before the clock had run out on them. After Grak had placed the last of them, he came back to join us by the stones, sweating slightly. During the long wait, Amaryllis had fallen asleep, propped up against the rocks, and Fenn had joined her, with her head resting on a pillow in Amaryllis’ lap. Solace was lying in a shaft of sunlight, moving every so often to keep pace with it, like a cat; she had her garments pulled aside to reveal as much bare, green flesh as possible, which left her obscenely indecent by Midwestern standards. I hadn’t designed the crantek as nudists, but I don’t know what I thought halfway photosynthetic creatures would be doing walking around in clothes.

“I just spent a full week’s worth of concordance,” said Grak. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done that.”

“And you think we’re good?” I asked.

“No,” said Grak. “I think I’ve prepared against most reasonable vectors of attack.” He sniffed and looked at the women. “Void weapons are not magic. They would be a problem.” So naturally, if Larkspur knew for certain that we had a warder, or maybe just guessed based on whatever evidence he’d gathered, that would be one of the primary weapons he brought, and it wouldn’t matter whether there was an imperial ban, since he’d already shown himself willing to violate those.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You might want to get some sleep, while you can.”

“I’m doing what I’m paid to do,” said Grak.

I looked him over. “I’m not sure I believe that,” I said.

“Which part?” he asked with a frown. “I am putting up wards. I am being paid to put up wards.”

“I don’t think that’s all there is,” I said. “I think we’re paying you handsomely, and we do need your hard-earned abilities, but … what are you after?”

“Penance for my clan,” said Grak, as I knew he would.

“And you want to pay that penance as quickly as possible, so you can return to them?” I asked. I didn’t say outright that his penance was self-imposed, but the quest I’d gotten for him had used that phrasing.

Grak looked away from me. “No,” he said after a time. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, which meant I could either take a stab in the dark or let it drop. I didn’t really have much else to do besides talk to him, but trying to get him to open up about something that I’d already given him a (rejected) option to talk about didn’t seem like it would be worth anything. Besides, I hated when people tried to do that with me, and more often than not I turned sour on them after they failed to take a hint.

“So,” I said. “Can you teach me how to speak Dwarven? Unless you were planning to sleep more?”

Grak gave a loud sniff. “Dwarves can go longer without sleep than humans,” he said. “It’s better I stay awake. I’ll need to give warning if I detect a crossing of the wards.” He sniffed again, with his wide nostrils flaring. “It’s called Groglir, not Dwarven, if you want the common tongue of dwarves. The language of my clan would not suit you.”

“Okay, Groglir,” I said. I had taken some Spanish in high school, but wasn’t actually sure how you were supposed to go about learning a language, let alone one from a different place, let alone one suited for a different species. In the worst case, Groglir would be unpronounceable to the human tongue because of the differences in physiology; the thick teeth and wide tongue would prove themselves capable of making two sounds that I couldn’t distinguish between, or one I couldn’t replicate, or one I couldn’t even hear. I was hoping that the game would act like a proper game for once, and have already arranged for me to not have to worry too much about things like that.

So Grak took the lead, and I started to learn some Groglir nouns. He would point to something, like a tree, and say, “Tree, mara, tree,” and then I would repeat after him. From time to time, he would go back to something, and I would try my best to recall what it was he’d said. At a certain point, when I had something like thirty Groglir words under my belt, he started in on noun morphology, which was ridiculously confusing, partly because Groglir was an ergative-absolutive language rather than a nominative-accusative language like English. (Technically speaking, on Aerb they spoke Anglish rather than English, but other than the slight difference in initial vowel, there was pretty much no difference.) Beyond that, in the same way that nouns could be either masculine or feminine in Spanish, Groglir had five noun classes, and they (obviously) didn’t even cleave along gender lines.

Once he taught me my first verb, dalkelor, meaning “opened”, I could make my first actual Groglir sentence, which was “Grakhuil in nogor dalkelor”, or “Grakhuil the door opened”, because of course the first language I came across in Aerb would also have subject-object-verb ordering, just to be extra confusing.

“You know a lot about language?” I asked.

“I learned Anglish late in life,” said Grak. “It was a necessity for learning at the athenaeum. My clan didn’t have the money to spend on a yearly translation tattoo. Children learn languages in the natural way. Knowledge and order help adults more. I learned Anglish using rules. My understanding of Groglir is governed by that same understanding.”

I did wonder how true that was to the mortal species in general, dwarves in particular, or whether it was just Grak specifically. My own understanding was that language was intuitive, which was one of the reasons that it developed so many idiosyncrasies. Learning rigid rules and then applying them uniformly seemed like more of a dwarf approach to things, but it was hard to say whether that was the truth or not, because I had only ever met one dwarf, and he had spent at least ten years away from his clan, changing enough in that time to want to leave his people behind.

By the time Fenn woke up, I had a small handful of phrases I could use, assuming that I didn’t want to change tense, and about fifty words that mostly related to things that were within pointing range. I still hadn’t gotten a pop-up that said something to the effect of, “Hey, you tried hard enough, you know Dwarven now!”, which is what I was not-so-secretly hoping for.

“Well, we’re not dead,” said Fenn with a yawn and a stretch. “How long has it been?”

“Eight hours since we arrived,” said Grak. “Nothing from the wards.”

“Wake Solace,” I said to Fenn, trying not to glance over at the partially nude crantek woman.

“I’m awake,” said Solace from her spot in a sunbeam. “I’ve been awake.” It was afternoon now, and the sun was coming through at an angle, but she was somehow still fully lit. When I looked up at the trees, I saw them bowing out, spreading their leaves to the side to allow a shaft of light in. She put on her clothes with slow, languid motions. “The field mice have relayed to me that all is quiet, and the trees agree.”

“Shit,” I muttered.

“If he doesn’t come, all we’ve wasted is time,” said Fenn. “I’ll get to poke an arrow through his skull another day, I reckon.”

“Yes,” I said. “But that means that we’re consigned to a pretty damned long time trying to work beneath the radar.” I rubbed my hand, trying to get some feeling back into it again. It was getting worse with every passing day, and I was worried that the endgame would be that I wouldn’t be able to use it on instinct anymore. “Not that we wouldn’t be, even with him dead, but without the driving force of Anglecynn’s FSD I have to imagine we’d have an easier time of it.”

“We have time,” said Amaryllis, who stood up and stretched out with a groan. “Glove carrier, food please,” she said in Fenn’s direction.

“Yes, your highness,” said Fenn with a bow. She held out her hand and a small table popped out of thin air to settle on the forest floor. She kicked it slightly and then moved it around, until the legs were more firmly in place, then began unloading enormous amounts of food from her glove, cold pasty pies, thick slices of meat, a colorful array of fruits, two loaves of bread, five bowls of what I took to be some kind of cold soup, and finally, a whole chocolate cake decorated with what looked like elongated cherries.

“I think it might be in our favor if he doesn’t show,” said Amaryllis as she grabbed a pasty. “That says something about his positioning and his strength, if he doesn’t think that he’s strong enough to take us on in this sort of scenario.”

“Or it’s bad, because it means he’s smart enough to have realized that we weren’t just stopping here for our health,” I replied. “That means he’s more patient and cunning than we’ve been giving him credit for, and he’s content to just sit back and make our lives miserable from a distance.”

“He’s not,” said Amaryllis. “And he can’t risk that I decide to settle down for a quiet life and start having children. I’m the most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig, but he’s the most direct male descendant, which gives him claim to roughly a fourth of what I have. Hyacinth is second-most direct female descendant, which means that together they could lay claim to every heirloom that I have claim-in-fact to right now. Most of those, I assume, they already have physical possession of. But it stands to reason that giving up a fortune in heirlooms and places with wards keyed to me will mean that he’ll never be content, especially not when I might get pregnant at any moment and perpetuate that problem.”

“Is that how you think getting pregnant works?” asked Fenn.

“I am well aware of how it works,” said Amaryllis, quite dryly.

“All I’m saying is that I don’t think there’s much upside to him not showing up,” I said. “The information it gives us is minimal. We avoid a battle with him today, but we’re probably in for a tougher one tomorrow.”

“Or we just assassinate him.” Fenn shrugged. “That would work too.”

Solace raised an eyebrow at that.

“I don’t think we’re in the business of assassination,” I said.

“No?” asked Fenn. “Because what we’re doing here, setting a trap and then claiming self-defense, that’s so unlike going into his bedroom and slitting his throat in the middle of the night?”

“I agree with the elf,” said Grak.

“Half-elf,” said Fenn. Her ears twitched slightly. “I think maybe this is all moot, because we’ve got company.”

“Helicopters,” said Solace. She brought her staff down and struck the ground with it, closing her eyes as she did so. “Five helicopters, six men and a pilot each.”

“Can you tell if Larkspur is there?” asked Amaryllis. I saw that the teleportation key was in her hand; the plan was that in battle, it would go to Fenn, who was waiting impatiently next to her, all thoughts of food forgotten.

“No,” said Solace, opening her eyes. Her face had an intensity that I hadn’t seen from her before. This was a woman who had known battle. “Most were human, armed with metal weapons, two-thirds of their number armored, others I would assume to be mages. One of the helicopters is special.”

“In what way?” asked Amaryllis.

“I’ve said as much as the winds gave me,” said Solace.

“Thirty men seems like a lot,” I said.

“Go or no-go?” asked Fenn. “Either I’m up the tree to shoot a few thousand arrows their way or we should get the hell out of here.”

“Go,” said Amaryllis, handing over the key.

“I disagree,” I said. “Thirty men of unknown strength bearing down on us? That’s more than we were talking about.”

“We can cut their numbers down before they arrive,” said Solace. She twirled her staff in front of her and set it in the ground with her fingers gripped on the bird’s skull there. Immediately, the weather began to change, dropping by a few degrees as wind started to move and the skies darkened.

“I have faith in my wards,” said Grak.

Fenn took off without another word as the teleportation key disappeared into her glove, climbing the tree like it was no more difficult than sprinting across flat land. I felt a pain at her leaving, worried that we were fully committed to this fight. I’d been quietly voted down by my teammates, and if we left, it was going to be after a brief skirmish showed that the odds were badly stacked against us.

The winds were picking up, blowing gusts of cold wind our way. I had my Anyblade in hand, extended to full length and ready to swing. The copse of trees we were in wasn’t thick enough or wide enough to give us full cover from the fields around it, and I kept looking out there, straining to see whether I could hear the helicopters or not. The winds weren’t helping with that, and I hoped that they weren’t going to be strong enough to force the pilots down before they got within range (and on the other hand, I was really, really hoping that, because then maybe we wouldn’t have to fight).

I looked up the tall tree that Fenn had climbed and couldn’t see her at all. Her bow had seven artillery shots left in it, per her accounting, and given what a well-made arrow could do to plate, I was hoping that a helicopter would fare equally poorly if faced with an entire volley. All you would need was one in the rotors to bring a helicopter down. Just as I started to hear the thumping of multiple helicopters coming our way, I heard the twang of Fenn’s bow. I couldn’t see her, or the arrows, but I could imagine some poor pilot suddenly faced with a cloud of arrows that seemed to have come from nowhere.

I saw Fenn tumble from the tree, touching branches briefly to control her fall, and saw the tree-top explode in a ball of orange flame a few seconds after that.

“Think I got one!” she shouted with a breathless smile as she landed in a roll. “They’re not fucking around.”

Two flashes of bright-white light came from between the trees, followed shortly after by overlapping waves of rolling thunder.

“That’s two more down,” said Solace, raising her staff from the ground and looking slightly dazed.

“Show-off,” muttered Fenn, but I knew her well enough to see the nervous energy coursing through her and the tenseness of how she moved. “Joon, follow me to the front?” She took off through the woods, moving swiftly, until we got to the line of trees that Grak had marked for us, which were the anchors for the wards he’d put up and a helpful guide for what was and wasn’t safe.

We peered out through the few trees between us and the fields to the east, waiting and listening. The helicopters would be flying low, if they hadn’t turned tail and run. Soon they were in sight, three helicopters, two black (one trailing black smoke), and a third that had an impractically ornate design to it, apparent even from a distance. At a guess, it was designed by someone in a forge-frenzy, and that meant that the helicopter possessed some unknown and presumably dangerous magic.

Fenn stepped out from the protection of the wards for long enough to fire two arrows, both of them artillery shots that blossomed into thousands of arrows. I could see now that the helicopters were of simple design; I wasn’t sure why I was expecting Apaches, given Aerb’s demonstrated level of technology. They weren’t laden with weapons, nor heavily armored as I had thought they would be. They were moving in a dangerously close formation, the kind of thing you would never do on Earth, not just because of the technical skill it would take, but because you’d risk getting blown out of the sky by a single SAM.

The reason for that close formation was made apparent when the arrows got near them; thousands of arrows turned into sparks as they got within range of the baroque helicopter in front, so many at once that it was an almost blinding display. The shield, or whatever it was, was shaped like a sphere, centered around the lead helicopter, which raced through the cloud of sparks without seeming to mind. Someone leaned from the side of the helicopter, out the open door, and Fenn stepped back into the safety of the wards just in time for a fireball to splash against them, detonating a tree in front of us. The pieces of flaming wood hit the wards and all that crossed over to us was a warm breeze.

One of the two black helicopters, the one that wasn’t having mechanical trouble, turned to the side and began to land. Fenn began stepping forward to fire another artillery shot off at it, but stepped back almost at once, just in time for another fireball to blast its way directly against the ward in front of us, again sending up a wave of heat but sparing us from the shrapnel, which was reduced to a low enough velocity that it was merely annoying.

“Shit,” said Fenn. She raised her hand as I saw movement within the belly of the helicopter, and with her other hand she pulled me down behind a thick metal wall that appeared from her glove. “You know,” she said, as a sound of thunkthunkthunkthunk started up from the helicopter, “here I was, thinking that maybe we’d be able to make this a half day.” She was giving me a manic smile. “Mounted automatic void rifle, probably,” she said with a nod in the direction of fire. “I’ve got a few of these walls, not sure if we should retreat or not, but staying here is probably not —”

There was a loud crunching sound, which cut off the seemingly endless series of thunks. Fenn paused and poked her head up over the metal wall, then grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up too. The helicopter was protruding from the ground at an awkward angle, with pieces of metal twisted around and shattered glass littering the area around it. There was a considerable amount of blood.

“Okay,” said Fenn. “I will give that druid credit where credit is due.” She pulled out her bow and fired an arrow toward where the other two helicopters were landing, two hundred feet away, but the arrow was just a test shot, and it exploded into sparks as it hit the invisible globe.

“If they have another gun like that, we’re fucked,” I said. “Walls only hold until they flank us. If they can move or split that point defense —”

“Retreat,” called Fenn, either because her sense of luck was telling her to, or because she’d reached the same natural conclusion I was a second away from.

We raced back through the trees, back to the tall rocks that the others were near, which provided useful cover from void weapons. Effective range on a void weapon was five hundred feet, if you wanted to actually do any damage with them, and I had to hope that meant we would be able to out-maneuver them somehow.

“Status?” asked Amaryllis. She had put on her helmet and was looking suitably frightening.

“Solace got another helicopter,” I said. I looked at the crantek woman, who was leaning against her staff. “They have fully automatic void weapons, and some kind of shield that vaporizes arrows. I don’t think we can win.”

Amaryllis flickered her sword on and off, then reached behind her back and unslung her void rifle, which she handed to me. I shrank down the Anyblade to its bladed-ring form and took it.

“We killed three-fifths of their forces,” she said.

“Solace did,” I replied. My eyes went to the trees, which Grak and Fenn were both watching carefully, then to Solace herself. “Do you have more of those in you?”

“Not like that,” she said with a shake of her head. (Because she didn’t believe she did, because of the structuring risk, or because of inherent limitations to the art?) “The trees will help us.”

“They’re past the outer perimeter,” said Grak, hefting his axe.

“The five of us cannot kill fifteen well-trained men,” I said to Amaryllis. And that was probably true even if there weren’t any mages among them, which there almost certainly were. I was feeling a shudder of terror down my spine when I thought about how fucked we were likely to be if we were against fifteen people of the caliber of Aumann’s crew.

“Twelve now,” said Solace, as I heard a scream in the distance.

“They’re circling in squads,” said Grak. “It would be a good time for the fallback ambush.”

Amaryllis watched me for a second and nodded. I wasn’t happy about it, but I was the only one that seemed to think that our advantages weren’t enough, so we all circled up and touched Fenn as she held the teleportation key out. A flip of a card from the deck later, showing the joker, and we were off and away.

We didn’t go far, only two hundred yards, which put us in the woods close to where the helicopters had landed. The great thing about the teleportation key was that it didn’t just allow for us to travel the world in an instant, it also allowed silent, near-instant movement around a battlefield, especially because we’d done the smart thing and made a circuit around the place before the enemy had shown up. The major downside was, obviously, the two-hour time limit, which meant that we had now committed ourselves to actually fighting this battle.

The helicopter pilots were still waiting in their respective helicopters, each one angled such that the mounted guns faced the copse of trees. If Solace’s count was right, there were only twelve men in total, minus the ones she had killed just before we left. If we could stay at a distance and have her pick them off one-by-one — but I could see that wasn’t going to be possible, because she was barely able to stay standing by leaning her weight on her staff, which meant that we were four people against ten, at best. And if I were Larkspur, I would have put all of my best men into the magical helicopter with me, protected there, which meant that we were likely to be facing down the best of the best.

And just as I was contemplating the unpleasant version of reality in which Larkspur didn’t even show up and this was all just the slaughter of his men, rather than him coming himself, we spotted him. He was with the horned woman and a grotesque man covered in visible boils. Larkspur wasn’t in his usual get-up; instead, he was wearing a completely different armor, a simple breastplate and greaves that left his arms exposed. They probably had some powerful magic to compensate for that. His cloak was still there though, and he had two swords, one at either hip, in addition to his familiar mirror shield. I looked at them through the spyglass that Fenn had produced from her glove, then handed it over to Amaryllis.

“Pustule mage,” she said at a whisper. “I think I might know him.” She swept the spyglass over. “The good news is that the rest are probably Golden Cete, part of the Color Riot, trained soldiers at a high rank. I don’t think he has a revision mage with him, he would have used it by now.”

I was nervous, sweating in my armor even though I hadn’t really exerted myself. It wasn’t the thought of killing anyone, it was the idea that there were too many people for any of this to be properly predicted. The zombies had been scary, but at least a little unreal to me, shambling creatures that wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in a movie. Individual fights weren’t as much of a problem for me either, because I’d been in a fair number of fights back in Kansas and at least understood the reality of taking a beating. Here, we were waiting on the edge, up against twice our number of people who had either experience or training in this sort of thing, and they wanted to murder us. My instincts were screaming at me to run, and I wasn’t entirely sure that those instincts were actually wrong.

“I need a test shot against the helicopter,” said Fenn, keeping her voice low. “I need to see whether or not the shield is around it, or Larkspur.”

“That will alert them,” I said.

“I can put up a ward against sound,” said Grak. “I’ve recovered enough for that, I think.”

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t actually hit the helicopter, just get the arrow close enough that we can see, and on the opposite side from them.”

“They’re not looking,” said Amaryllis, who was watching through the spyglass again.

It was a few moments later that Fenn loosed her arrow, the sound of the bow undetectable and the arrow completely silent in flight. It came within a foot of the ornately decorated helicopter, but there was no effect of sparks, and it simply continued on until it buried itself in the shrubbery. No one seemed to notice it.

“Well, crap,” said Fenn.

“Void rifle will still get him,” said Amaryllis. “If we can get close enough.”

“We’re locked into killing all of them now,” I said. “We can’t teleport out.”

“We can hide inside the bottle and fly out,” she replied. She frowned when she glanced at Solace and saw the state she was in.

“Probably,” said Solace, answering the unspoken question. “The locus is less powerful than it once was. I may have overdone it.”

“Look, if we’re going to do it, we need to split Larkspur off from the others,” I said. “The pustule mage is the one shooting fireballs, right?”

“They’re not going to split,” said Grak. “They have no reason to.”

I rubbed my face. “And he’s limited by the growths he’s put on himself, like a flesh version of a flower mage?”

“We can’t run him dry, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Fenn. “Not if he was prepared, which I guess he might not be, given the short notice.”

“Then what are our options, at this point?” I asked. “Get close enough to shoot the pustule mage in the head, enter into melee combat with Larkspur, and then hope that the other men in the woods don’t just come out and shoot us?”

“I can kill them,” said Solace. “Or at least stop them. It’ll be easier up close, if that’s what we’re doing.”

“I’ll circle around,” said Fenn. “Snipe them from the other side. Better to do it now, as they’re moving through the woods and mindful of wards.” She looked at me with a faint smile. “I’m a better shot than I was a month ago, believe it or not.”

Amaryllis had said she could feel the power that came with Twinned Souls. I had wondered about that, and what it might mean for Fenn, but apparently she had noticed the effects too. My own personal build was a generalist one, with the exception of social skills, but if Fenn had stats, and those stats were arranged to give her a comparative advantage in archery, then — well, I had already run the numbers before, she could be up in the 50s for that one skill, and even if she didn’t have stats in the way that I did, it might not be unreasonable to expect that she would be capable of some impressive feats.

This was the first thing that had given me any confidence.

“Okay,” I said. “Then it'll be myself, Amaryllis, and Grak to deal with Larkspur and his friends, with Solace and Fenn to deal with everyone else?” I asked. “Amaryllis, you’re certain that they’re all Golden Cete, there won’t be any surprises?”

“They sometimes have blade-bound in their ranks,” she replied. “We’ve seen how Fenn deals with them.”

“I’ll kill the pilots on the way over,” said Fenn. “Spyglass.” When Amaryllis handed over the spyglass, Fenn raised it to her eye and looked at the woods. “Larkspur is moving in, we’re going to need to go now, while they’re still trying to figure out what happened.”

She tossed the spyglass to Amaryllis and began trekking off into the woods; Solace, with little fanfare, became a small blue-feathered bird that flitted through the air and landed on her shoulder.

“We wait until Fenn kills the pilots,” said Amaryllis. “Then we make our move and hope that they don’t regroup.”

“Return my body to Darili Irid if I die,” said Grak.

“You know I would,” I replied. “And if you fall, we’ll pay your penance.”

Loyalty Increased: Grak lvl 4!

Amaryllis gave me a look that said, ‘You can’t seriously be saying that we would pay 20 million obols to some random dwarven clan if he died, but you really looked serious when you said that’, or maybe I was just reading a lot into her incredulity. But I wasn’t spewing bullshit, I actually meant it. Maybe we wouldn’t go right away, and we wouldn’t bankrupt ourselves to do it, maybe I would pay for it all out of my own pocket once I was filthy rich, but part of being a friend to someone was being willing to carry their burdens. Grak and I weren’t exactly friends, not yet, but that was how you made friends, in my opinion; you committed to the friendship.

We were five hundred feet from the trees, two football fields distance, hidden in the trees and bushes. I watched with bated breath as Fenn moved across the open space to the helicopters, placing herself such that the helicopters themselves hid her from view. She sprinted, utterly silent under the sound of the wind but incredibly visible and exposed if anyone saw her. When she reached the first helicopter I held my breath, waiting to hear a scream of pain that would alert everyone, or the sound of an actual fight, but Fenn was inside for only a moment, then back out again.

“Got him,” said Amaryllis, holding her spyglass to her eye. “She stopped to sabotage the void cannon,” she continued with a purse of her lips. “Not what we discussed.”

“I trust her,” I said.

“She’s a capable warrior,” replied Grak.

I felt mild surprise at hearing him praise her, but didn’t actually think that he was right, as such. I’d never considered her as that; maybe she was capable of killing people, maybe even good at it, but her flippancy undercut that so much that I didn’t peg her as a warrior. She had made a life for herself going into the Risen Lands and looting them, which meant probably a considerable amount of time murdering zombies, but I had to wonder at how much experience with things like this she actually had. (And I was aware that ‘things like this’ was a weaselly way of getting around thinking the phrase ‘cold-blooded murder’ directly.)

“That’s the second one,” said Amaryllis, letting out a breath of her own as Fenn moved away from the decorated helicopter. Whatever magic the helicopter possessed, keeping the pilot alive didn’t seem to be part of it. “She just gave me a thumbs up,” said Amaryllis. She dropped the spyglass to the forest floor and drew her sword, letting out a slow breath. “We should move.”

We raced forward, with Amaryllis in the lead, staying low and trying our best to put as much as possible of the bulk of the helicopters between us and the trees, but we were off-center from them. I felt like a mouse running from a hawk, painfully exposed and with no better option but to sprint forward as quickly and silently as I could. I resisted the urge to pour on speed through blood magic, or to drain one of the bones in my bandolier, because at best I would be leaving Amaryllis and Grak behind. The human eye was attracted to movement, that had been a matter of survival for our way-back ancestors, and that fact kept running through my mind as we ran. Eventually we’d be close enough that a fireball wasn’t feasible for the pustule mage, or that I could simply raise the void rifle and take him out, but until that point we might actually be fucked if he popped one of those pustules in our direction, and why the fuck was I doing this. But I kept running, because I had set myself down this course, and pulling out wasn’t an option anymore.

We were within a hundred feet of them, still out in the open, when the pustule mage spotted me through the trees. He shouted a word of warning and squeezed at one of the yellow-white blobs on his chest, which shot out and away from him at the size of a fist, slower than an arrow but still fast enough that it would have been impossible to dodge, even if I had been more prepared for it.

The fireball struck me in my stomach, but I didn’t feel the impact of it, and the promised explosion never came. A glance down showed a bleached-white, fist-sized circle in the blue armor. I was stunned by that, and faltered for a moment, but raised the void rifle and took a shot at him with my heart hammering but my hands steady. He collapsed like his strings had been cut, the hole impossible to see given the grotesque colors across his skin, but there was no message of defeat. I ducked back behind a tree and poked my head to see what was happening.

The pustule mage’s stomach was swelling, and his arms and legs were shriveling, like his body was a sleeping bag and the real person inside it was trying to gather himself in the center of it. It wasn’t too long after he’d been shot that he burst out through the pocked and diseased stomach skin, a full man reborn from himself, coated in blood and pus. I took another shot at him, but this one was less successful, and I was on the run as he grabbed at his flesh and sent another fireball my way.

The blast knocked me to the ground, which I turned into a roll, shaking my head as I kept moving, trying to ignore the ringing in my ears and the sudden ache in my chest. I was pretty sure that I was bleeding in a few places, even though my armor must have absorbed much of the shrapnel. I kept on running as soon as I found my footing, trying to chart a semi-circle around the pustule mage but constrained by the heavy undergrowth among the trees.

I heard the sound of another fireball above the shouts from around the woods, but this time felt nothing but a warm burst of air from it. I felt a jolt of adrenaline-fueled excitement at that, because I’d made it inside the inner perimeter Grak had set up, and so long as I stayed on the other side of it from the mage, I’d be fine.

I concretely felt the effects of LUK for the first time, as a path of concrete action opened up in front of me, a step to the side that felt so alien I almost stopped myself. A spinning staff scythed through the trees, slowed by the wards but not stopped entirely, and it would have hit me if I hadn’t moved in anticipation of it. The staff threatened to drop to the ground from a lack of momentum, but instead shot backward, weaving its way through the falling trees and leaving a glowing path through the air. The fallen trees revealed the horned woman, breathing heavily and spinning her staff up again. I raised my void rifle and took a shot at her, but there was no reaction of pain or debilitation from her. I moved back behind more trees, keeping my eyes out for the pustule mage and Larkspur, as well as watching my back for the men from the Golden Cete. I was too far forward now, and I knew it, but I needed the protection of the wards.

I saw a flash of metal that must have been Amaryllis, who was much further back than I was, and another step through the trees revealed the pustule mage, who was going hand-to-hand with Grak, or rather, hand-to-axe. Each chop of Grak’s axe sliced through the discolored boils that dotted the pustule mage’s skin, letting loose bursts of wild magic, and the magic of the axe was causing him to grow hair at an alarming rate. The pustule mage was clearly losing that fight. When he lunged backward and reached for a large wart, I took a shot at him, getting a message about a critical hit and seeing him pitch backward into the dirt. This time, Grak was on him in an instant, slamming his axe down repeatedly, engaging in butchery without a word.

Achmed Lawrence defeated!

(And still no level up, a part of my mind screamed.)

I tracked back, trying desperately to find the horned woman, or to spot Larkspur, getting ready to dodge another glowing, spinning staff if I could catch so much of a glimpse of it, or if my LUK gave me the barest hint of what to do. I finally spotted Amaryllis and Larkspur together, out in the field, as she rolled backward away from his strike. He had his shield out and was advancing on her, and she, fully armored but looking frightfully small, was backing away from him.

I raised my rifle again and was about to take a shot when the glowing staff came spinning into view, moving as a vertical disc this time. There was no luck to let me anticipate it, and the only thing that saved my life was a combination of my reaction time and the fact that the throw hadn’t been dead-on. For a moment I saw the glowing disc pass in front of me as it went by, and I thought that I had successfully dodged it before I felt the lightness of the void rifle in my right hand and a searing pain in my left wrist. When I looked down, I saw my hand lying on the ground, and I reached for a bone to heal me before realizing that all I had was a wrist there, an eerily painless glowing wound where my arm simply ended. I threw the void rifle, which had been sliced through, to the ground and touched a unicorn bone just as muted pain began to reach me, and pulled on END as hard as I possibly could, then moved on to the next bone before the feeling of health and wellness could even begin to fade. My hands — hand — was shaking as I tried to keep on the move, and when my stump was no longer painful I extended the Anyblade from its ring shape.

That was about when I started getting messages about the Golden Cete being defeated, first three at once, then one after another in quick succession, with no names given to them, only roles. That part of the battle, at least, seemed to be going well.

I ran through the woods, in the direction that the glowing staff had come from, sword held in hand, trying not to think about the fact that I had a stump instead of a left hand. Surely all I needed was one more kill, and then the pleasure would course through my body, and I would be whole again, refreshed, no longer weakened by the fact that I was having trouble forcing food down, no longer with a twinge of weakness from the blood I’d lost when my arm was nearly amputated.

The horned woman was still spinning her staff up when I got to her, and I reached with my left hand to tap a bone for SPD, before once against realizing that I had no hand there. I used blood magic instead, burning six drops with every step to race through the underbrush and hurdle the fallen trees. I saw her eyes grow wide as I approached, but she didn’t stop increasing the speed her staff was spinning at, or maybe couldn’t stop when she was so far along. When I brought my sword down, she used the staff to knock it aside, seeming to lose no momentum in the process, and on my second thrust she did the same, swinging the spinning staff from side to side.

I stepped back and let Ropey fall from where he was wrapped around my forearm, then came back at her again. She was either very good at parrying swords with a staff, or whatever ludicrous magic the staff possessed was doing the work for her, but every time I tried to strike at her, even with blood magic behind the swing, she knocked my sword aside. She was glistening with sweat, and every parry slowed her down, which meant that our battle was either going to come down to attrition or a teammate —

She struck out toward me, slamming me in the chest at the cost of all the momentum she’d built up with the staff. I felt a hard crack of my brittle ribs as they were caved in, and she easily danced away from my feeble effort to slice through her. She was turning to run almost from the moment she hit me, and she got ten feet before the rope around her foot went taut, which brought her to the ground with a satisfying whump. When she brought out a dagger from within her clothes, I hurled the Anyblade at her and then crumpled up in pain.

Skill increased: Thrown Weapons lvl 18!

Critical hit!

Superbia Laquis defeated!

I swore as the fourth message I was hoping for failed to appear. That other kill had been mostly Grak’s, but this one was mine, all mine. I swore again and used both fairies and bones to heal myself, which took time I wasn’t sure I had to spare. Then I retrieved my Anyblade from her chest, grimacing when she reached for me with a feeble hand. The game’s definition of ‘defeated’ wasn’t the same as ‘dead’, and while she was choking on her own blood, I could tell that she wasn’t beyond saving, not for someone with my resources. I raised my sword and hesitated a moment, first trying to figure out if what I was doing was a mercy, and next trying to figure out where the best place to land the killing blow was. I ended up driving my sword down through her eye. She jerked slightly and then went still.

New Virtue: Mercy! (CHA +1)

With that done, I started running toward where I’d seen Amaryllis and Larkspur fighting. I got there in short order, using blood magic to hurry my steps, and gave a hoarse shout when I saw that Grak was lying nearby them, bleeding. I ran forward, panting slightly, trying to get in a position where we could flank him. He turned slightly toward me, taking his attention off of Amaryllis for just a moment, and in that moment I saw her lunge forward.

Her blade appeared within his skull, piercing through the bottom of his jaw and up into his cheekbone. He lurched backward, holding his shield up as a defense against her, bleeding from his mouth and saying something unintelligible but probably profane. I gave Grak enough of a glance to make sure that he was still breathing, then stepped forward to join Amaryllis, who was gasping for breath beneath her helmet.

I was a worse swordsman than Larkspur even before I had lost a hand, but with the two of us he was trying to play defense against two opponents, and his armor was no longer full plate, which meant that a slash against his arm would wound him. That was what I went for first, swinging in from the side, and he predictably brought his sword up to parry me. That gave Amaryllis an opening, and she moved forward enough to start flickering her sword on and off again. Larkspur screamed, spewing blood from his previous wounds, as her sword briefly appeared through his hand.

He kept trying to back away from us, but he must have known that it was over, because he started trying to talk. His tongue must have been cut when the sword appeared in his mouth though, because all that came out were unintelligible sounds and blood.

We made short work of him. It wasn’t pretty. He couldn’t handle both of us at the same time, and he was gripping his sword with a bleeding hand. I had reach on him with the Anyblade, and Amaryllis could simply attack when he tried to parry me. When he raised his portal-shield to block her, she went low and put a hole in his thigh, which left him staggering and stumbling, trying more frantically to speak with us.

I swung hard at his neck when Amaryllis darted to the side, and cut halfway through before being stopped by his windpipe. He fell to the ground, jerking around as his body worked hard on voiding itself of blood.

Larkspur Prentiss defeated!

Quest Complete: Slice His Stupid Head Off - Close enough.

Level up!

The golden power ripped through me, starting at my toes and working its way up, and I sunk myself into the pleasure of it, trying to draw out my perception of that glorious moment until I was so overwhelmed by ecstasy that I couldn’t think well enough to do anything at all.

Chapter 9 - Blood in the Water

Amaryllis was slapping me in the face. This actually hurt quite a bit, because she wasn’t being at all gentle with me. I raised a hand to fend her off and began to come back to my senses. I had leveled, and it had been fantastic, sending me beyond the ability to think. It was disconcerting how quickly the thought of 'yes, that again' went through my head.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“You need to heal Grak,” said Amaryllis. “Now.”

I scrambled to my feet, looking down at my left hand, which was … well, whole again, but still as numb as it had been before, and there was something else off about it, like it hadn’t been replaced quite properly. Even just looking at it, I could see that it was not right somehow, proportioned slightly wrong, making the skin look loose in some places and tight in others. I didn’t really have time to think about that though, so I ran over to where Grak was lying and began pulling out bones from my bandolier. (I quite selfishly wanted to be basking in the afterglow of the level up, and while I wasn’t such a bag of dicks that I would actually do that, that thought was still poking at the back of my mind.)

Grak had taken a hit to the face, which had cut into his lips enough that I could see his teeth through the wound. By the time I had burned through three bones, he was awake and alert, and he pushed off away from me when I tried to use a fourth.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Solace can do the rest.”

I looked back to the woods, which were silent now. I hadn’t gotten any updates from the game about what was going on there, but those had all just been along the lines of the Golden Cete being defeated. There had been two about Golden Cete blade-bound, which was comforting, but we didn’t have a solid enough count of their numbers that I was confident they were all gone … and would the game give me an update if one of my party members died? Or, perhaps more worryingly, if something happened to a valuable member of the party who was technically not a part of it in game terms, i.e. Solace?

So I ran, thinking about Fenn and hoping that she had done her best to stay at a distance and pepper them with arrows, that she hadn’t run into some magical effect that she couldn’t handle. When I got into the woods I started moving more slowly, thinking that it would be utterly ridiculous to have come this far and then get shot in the head by some mook.

I spotted Solace, slumped up against one of the huge, worn rocks at the center of the copse, with the bottle sitting on the ground beside her, the artificial sun she’d put into it glowing brightly. She gave me a faint smile and a friendly wave, which was when I finally lowered my guard halfway (but only halfway, because there was always the chance she was missing something, or this was a trap, and I wasn’t about to be caught off-guard just because I desperately wanted this all to be over). I could see bodies in the woods, most of them sprawled out with arrows sticking in them. There were arrows scattered all over the ground, and hundreds stuck into the trees, most having clearly come from the same direction.

“All clear?” I called to her as I moved forward.

She gave me a weak nod. I remembered that cranteks had dark-green blood only after seeing it smeared on her face and clothes. When I saw what she was holding, I rushed forward with wide eyes; she had Sable.

“Where’s Fenn,” I asked, or maybe shouted.

“She was cut in half,” Solace said, resting her head against the rock. I felt a chill go down my spine. “Shoulder to hip, clean through, that made putting her back together easier.”

“Is she okay?” I said through gritted teeth.

“No,” said Solace. She coughed lightly. “I had to kill that blade-bound on my own. It cost me time. She’s lost blood, probably too much. I pulled her into the bottle, I’m more powerful there, but he cut through her shoulder blade, across half her ribs, narrowly missed the heart, through the hip, it was … not the worst thing that I’ve ever tried to bring someone back from, but if she survives it …” She trailed off. If she survives it, then she’ll have had the worst injury where Solace’s intervention had actually worked.

“I’ll give her a transfusion,” I said quickly. “I have two fairies left, I have bones, let me into the bottle.”

“I’m close to having tapped the locus dry,” said Solace, as Amaryllis came up behind me.

“Fenn?” asked Amaryllis.

“Needs a transfusion,” I said. “I’m going in to do it.”

Fuck, I’m blood type B+, that means that I can donate to B+ or AB+, did I actually know that before or was it injected by KNO? Nevermind. What blood type was Fenn, she wouldn’t be able to answer, there wasn’t a simple method to tell unless I could conjure one up from blood magic somehow, and did humans and half-elves have even remotely compatible blood in the first place? Probably, given crossbreeding, but maybe not. How the fuck do you do a transfusion without the equipment? Clonal kit, that’s how.

I took Sable from Solace’s hand and thrust it toward Amaryllis. “Give me the clonal kit, I’m going in.”

Amaryllis hesitated for the barest of seconds, but took the glove from me and closed her eyes for a moment, taking control of it. The clonal kit popped out and she thrust it toward me, and as soon as I had it I turned back toward Solace.

“Put me in,” I said quickly.

“It’ll be the last thing I do today,” she said. “The leaves tell me everyone is dead, but if we need to —”

“Do it,” I said.

“It’s fine,” said Amaryllis with a nod to Solace. “Juniper, do you know how compatible your blood types are?”

“I — I’m B+, but —” I stammered out.

“On the five factors,” said Amaryllis. I gave her a bewildered stare, and started saying some asinine thing about how we needed to do something. She held Sable out toward me and slammed a book down on top of the clonal kit, The Commoner’s Guide to Blood Magic. Several bones followed after that, piling up. “Go,” she said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Solace grabbed her staff, which was lying in the grass beside her, and tapped it once on the rock. A hole opened up there, which went a foot into the stone before becoming some other place, darkly lit and ominous. Then Solace collapsed onto the forest floor.

I raced forward, stopping for just a moment to grab her, balancing the kit in my other hand, and then moved in through the hole, which was barely large enough for me to go through with both my things and the small woman. This wasn’t like the tunnel through treespace had been, we were somewhere earthy and musty. I heard a grinding sound of the stone closing behind us, leaving us in near-darkness, and pulled Solace’s limp body forward so that she wouldn’t be crushed.

My eyes were adjusting to the light too slowly, so I flared blood magic for flame, which revealed a small room with dried fruits and meats in various cubbies set into the earthen walls. A steep ladder made of tree roots led to where the only light (save mine) was coming from. I propped Solace up to make sure she wouldn’t choke on her spit or vomit, then took the ladder as fast as I could. I came up into the house-tree in the center of the bottle and set the kit, book, and bones down to rush over to Fenn.

She was still wearing her leather armor, or what was left of it. I could see the diagonal path the sword had taken across her body, because there the armor had been pulled away. It wasn’t a straight line; she must have been partially crouched, or turning, as the blade had cut through her body like butter. The seam was red and thick, like a magnified version of what I’d gotten when Solace healed my shoulder, passing from her collarbone, down through her breast, just a bit on the left of her navel, and then through the hip, coming out midway through the leg. She was pale, so white she was almost blue, and sweat beaded on her forehead.

“Shit,” I said softly, and then, “shit” again, because what the fuck was I wasting time swearing for? I started with the bones, draining them into her one by one, going slower than I wanted to in order to maximize the healing from them. The red line faded with each one, until it was barely visible, but that did nothing to improve her color.

I hadn’t read The Commoner’s Guide to Blood Magic, I had just skimmed it enough to know that healing was accomplished via transfusion, which meant that in a world where we had magical healing fairies made of marzipan and bones we could pull healing from, it was going to be more complicated and messy than was worth the trouble, especially given that a blood mage could only use it when they, themselves were healthy, and it was only really effective on others. And once Solace had joined up with us, I’d figured that with no less than three other methods of healing, healing via blood magic was probably never going to be that relevant. I'd still intended on powering through it cover to cover, but that had taken a backseat.

And that was all still true, except that in skipping over large swaths of what The Commoner’s Guide had to say about how to heal with blood magic, I had also missed what it had to say on the nature of blood types, which were, apparently, different from what we had on Earth.

It was hard to sit and read a book while Fenn was sitting there, dying, but when Amaryllis told me not to do anything dumb, I was pretty sure that she had meant I should read up on transfusion before just busting out the clonal kit and winging it. And she was right, so I read, trying to keep my eyes from racing ahead to the next sentence. It helped to calm me down though, and I felt my heart rate start returning to near normal as I went through the words. Then I would look over at Fenn, who was probably dying, who had to have lost what, half, two-thirds of her blood getting cut in half? How had she not suffered brain death — or had she, and that was simply not as serious on Aerb, not with a druid on standby? I returned my gaze to the page, where stupid, boring words were waiting for me.

Even given the above variety of blood seen in the mortal species, the average blood mage cares most about where that blood falls along the five factors of alignment, which is a categorization system established by the Athenaeum of Quills and Blood in 17 FE in the wake of the Penndraig reforms. Using complicated methods of study, the athenaeum was able to determine normal ranges for five factor blood typing in almost all of the mortal species, as well as how often individuals of these species fell outside the normal range. If tested for blood type, you will be given a five-letter designation, such as IORUM or LPSEM, though testing is not recommended except in rare circumstances.

If you go to visit a blood mage for the purposes of healing and do not know your blood type, they will likely consult one of their books from the athenaeum to ensure that your blood is compatible with theirs. While your blood mage will be trained to tell you the risks, you should know ahead of time that individuals might have different factors than their species would indicate, though this is uncommon and almost always along a single factor of alignment. Blood mages are strictly ordered to work only within a single factor of misalignment, which reduces the risk of an adverse reaction considerably.

There were a lot of things that the book didn’t say. It did not, for example, say what the side effects were, it didn’t say how factors of alignment changed in someone of mixed species, and it didn’t say what, if anything, caused a person to have an alignment that was “off” from their species. It didn’t define the five factors, or how you’d go about figuring those out. I would have thrown the book across the room, but I had always loved and respected books, even if they were nearly fucking worthless pieces of propaganda garbage.

I watched Fenn, with her shallow breathing, too-pale skin, and her nearly white lips. I could feel that familiar feeling of helplessness welling up in me, one that had started when I was watching Arthur in his coma, but which had stayed with me for a long time. I wiped away the nascent tears and turned my mind to what was actually actionable, what concrete thing I could do that would make my life better, even if the situation itself was hopeless, that had always helped in the past — and here, there was definitely something that I could do.

I started by dumping the two points from leveling into MEN. I was pretty sure my read on the game giving me “fake” intelligence was right, but whether it was fake or not didn’t matter so long as it gave me results. I felt a touch calmer once that was done, though not nearly as much as I had hoped I’d get from increased WIS. Then it was time to turn my mind to the problem.

There were five factors of blood alignment. People of the same species were assumed to be compatible with each other, with deviation along a single factor being ‘uncommon’ but not rare. If Fenn and I were both human, then no problem, we might have unnamed side effects that were almost certainly better than what she was going through now, but I’d be willing to risk that, especially given Solace’s prognosis. But Fenn was a half-elf, which meant that the worst-case scenario was that 1) she got all five factors of alignment from her father, and that 2) all five of those were the opposite of whatever mine were as a typical human, and that 3) trying to push my blood into her would have fatal results. That was a lot of assumptions, but it was a starting place.

So far as I could see, the five factors were treated as binary in their letter designations, which meant that there were two to the fifth possible combinations, or thirty-two. Blood mages were ordered to work within a single factor of misalignment, because that made two factors of misalignment ‘uncommon’, and presumably it wasn’t ‘uncommon’ for a blood mage to kill someone through transfusion, which meant that was the zone of safety, or maybe just the zone of not making things worse for Fenn. If blood types were purely random, then I’d get a pure success one time out of thirty-two, within normal bounds five times, and unnamed side effects another ten times.

But it wasn’t purely random, it was determined by species, or at least, different species had different variances and mostly fell along one side of each factor, enough that this was a useful tool that was routinely used by blood mage healers. For Fenn there were two species in play, and the blood type of elves was a mystery to me, but I could at least assign confidence to all of the possibilities that I could think of. I spent five minutes doing that, trying to stop myself from taking Fenn’s pulse again, and mostly succeeding on actually deciding whether it made sense to try to give her a transfusion.

And in the end, I decided to go for it. I wasn’t confident in my confidence, but I was at least confident that I wasn’t doing it because doing something felt better than sitting by and doing nothing. I got the clonal kit to give me transfusion equipment, which looked horribly unsanitary and archaic to me. The needles were thick metal ones, looking far too wide for my tastes, and Aerb didn’t have proper plastics, so the tubing was a thick, yellowish rubber. The sum total of my experience with blood transfusion was watching TV shows, and having given blood once in the high school gym. I was praying for my mental stats to help me (though not actually literally praying, because the closest thing I had to a god was the Dungeon Master, and this was mostly his fault).

I inserted the needle into a vein in my arm, which filled the rubber tube almost immediately, visible as a darkening in the yellow rubber. The other end was connected to another needle, and I tried to raise it in order to reduce the pressure and slow the flow of my blood from the end of it before realizing that I was no mere mortal, I was a blood mage, and if I didn’t want my blood to go down a tube, I could damned well just tell it not to. (This actually took me a little bit of time to figure out how to do.) Once that was accomplished, I found a vein in the back of Fenn’s hand, and paid special attention to the tip of the needle to make sure that I wasn’t going to inject her with air and give her an embolism.

And then, once the needle was in her, I really did say a prayer, because I decided that probably wasn't going to make things worse.

O One True God of Aerb, master of not just the physical layer, or the game layer above that, but of the reality both are embedded in … we’ve got to stop meeting like this, right? I’m not going to come to you with all my problems, or even most of my problems, but — please don’t let her die. If you’re rolling dice, or some equivalent of that, fudge it for me just this once. You know I won’t be able to tell one way or another. Amen.

Only then did I let my blood flow into her.

(This was how Arthur had died. He’d had his car accident and ended up in a coma. ‘Cerebral edema’ was what they called it when there was too much fluid in your brain, and that was Arthur’s most pressing problem, as the days in a coma went on. His brain was swelling, and if your brain swells too much, there are issues from compression, and then you die. The doctors decided that they were going to go with decompressive craniectomy, which means removing part of the skull so that the brain can expand without squishing itself. The doctors — look, I don’t actually know any of this, I wasn’t in the room when they were deciding it, and most of this I only learned because of morbid curiosity after the fact — they must have seen the swelling in his brain and made a list of all the interventions that they could try, weighing the risks and outcomes, and finally they had settled on the craniectomy, and maybe, sometimes, you made the right choice given the information that you had, but the dice just weren’t in your favor. They did their decompressive craniectomy, and that was how Arthur died.)

I could feel my blood, sense it like I somehow had nerve cells floating around in there feeding me back information. I sensed my blood enter Fenn’s body and mingle with her own, racing down her veins toward her heart. It wasn’t long before I had a sense of her as a part of me.

Spell discovered: Bloodline!

Bloodline: When you have forced your blood into another person, you can use it to heal or harm them. Apply a bonus or malus of up to your POW/SPD/END to them, at the cost of your own, with five-factor modifiers.

The new “spell” was pointless for the current circumstances. What she needed was the actual blood itself, not the game abilities, which I had already given her through bone magic. Still, I dutifully read the information the game gave me, and I could feel the ability to use that new skill. She was like a part of me now, because my blood suffused her, and I could see all the other avenues of this link that the game hadn’t told me about, how I could channel the blood magic through her to light her fingertips up like I could light my own, or how I could use her pulse in combination with my own to add force to her movements, if she had any movements to speak of.

I watched her closely, but she wasn’t showing any obvious signs of an adverse reaction. I had the Hypertension virtue, which gave me twice as much blood at a much greater blood pressure, so I wasn’t worried about myself. I did wonder how much of this might have been planned out, how meaningful it was that it had only been a few days since I had gotten the virtue, and less than an hour since my blood was refilled by a level up. I tried not to think about whether that was by coincidence, luck, principles of design, or a thumb on the scale. Instead, I watched Fenn.

The color returned to her lips, then to her skin, shifting from near-white to the pale pink that it had always been. I kept feeding blood into her until I was down forty-thousand drops, because hypertension wasn’t just a virtue, it was an actual medical condition too, with negative side effects I didn’t really know anything about, and which I didn't want to give her on accident. I pinched the rubber tube and felt for her pulse, which was faster now, almost normal, and with a steady rhythm. I pulled the needle from her arm and used another bone to push END into her, sealing the puncture shut, then took care of myself in the same way.

She wasn’t dying. I let out a slow, shaky breath. I wasn’t sure that she was better, not yet, and I had no idea what the long-term effects of losing half your blood were, but … she wasn’t dying. She was alive. I started crying, just a little bit, that kind of crying that results in some slow tears rolling down my cheeks.

Her eyes fluttered open, and I stared at her. She looked around in confusion, first at me, then down at her ruined armor, then at the tree-house we were in and the light streaming in from the artificial sun outside. She lifted her head up for a moment to look further, down at the red line running across her skin, then flopped back down.

“Dammit,” she said, looking up at the ceiling, avoiding my eyes. It was a while before she spoke. “I had this pun ready about how I’m not half the woman I used to be, but now I have to think of something else.”

“Fenn,” I said. My voice nearly cracked. “Are you … how are you feeling?”

“Oh, you know,” she said, still not looking at me. “Not half bad.”

“Fenn,” I said again.

She finally looked at me, with tears in her eyes. “Please,” she said. “Can we not talk about it? Can we just —” She reached a shaky hand up to wipe tears from her eyes and took a gasping breath that was just short of a sob.

She had lost her battle. She had come as close to death as it was possible to get; she'd probably been clinically dead by Earth standards. What had she seen, when that sword had cut straight through her? How long had she stayed conscious after that? Had she known, in that moment, that she was at death’s door, had she seen half her body lying on the ground and been unable to feel it, or had she just been consumed with shock and pain? It must have been horrifying, no matter what her experience of it.

“Do you use your right hand to stir coffee?” I asked.

Fenn looked at me in bewilderment, then down at her hand. “I — I guess?”

“Oh,” I replied. “I use a spoon.”

Fenn stared at me, opened her mouth slightly, then cracked a teary-eyed smile. “Gods, Juniper, I don’t know what would be sadder, if that was the best joke you had from Earth, or if you came up with that on your own.” She started laughing then, still with tears in her eyes, and sat up to pull me closer. “Hug,” she said, so I hugged her. My sense of blood was fading with every passing minute, but she still had more of my blood than her own, and it was like I could feel the shape of her just by noticing that sixth sense.

“Okay,” she said, after we had held each other for a while. She pulled away and swung her legs off the bed-nook, then stood up, wobbling only slightly. She began to strip off the armor, which I had to think was a total loss, and the cut had gone through pretty much everything that she was wearing, which meant all her clothes beneath it too. I averted my eyes, because it didn’t seem like she was trying to put on a show for me, it just seemed like she didn’t want to be in this reminder of what had happened to her. She made no comment on the fact that I wasn’t looking at her.

“Where’s Sable?” she asked.

“Amaryllis has it,” I replied.

“That sneaky bitch,” Fenn replied with a grin. “Taking advantage of my brief nap to use the best magic item the party has, that’s just like her.” She kept her tone light and casual. “She’s okay then?” With the last of her clothes off, underwear included, she sat back down in the bed and crossed her legs. “I have no clothes,” she said.

“I noticed,” I replied. “Here.” I began taking off my armor, stopping only momentarily to look at the pure-white mark where it had entirely absorbed the fireball. When the top half of it was removed, I took off my undershirt and handed it to Fenn. I couldn’t help but get a warm glow at the way her look lingered on my abs (a perk of my high PHY).

She stopped to give it a quick sniff before putting it on. “Well now I’m going to smell like you,” she said. “But thank you.” She hesitated slightly. “And Grak is okay too?”

“Everyone is fine,” I replied, realizing that I hadn’t given her an after-action report, and if someone had done that to me, I would have assumed they were holding back bad news. “Solace is tapped completely dry, so we’re going to have to wait on her to recharge before we can leave the bottle. I healed Grak enough that he told me to stop worrying. Amaryllis came through a bit battered but still in fighting shape. Larkspur is dead, along with everyone he brought with him. More than that, I don’t know. Grak and Amaryllis have the bottle, I came in here to save you.”

“Ah,” she said. “Save me?”

“Do you want to hear this?” I asked.

“If it’s about you heroically saving me, then yes,” said Fenn.

“Solace did most of the work,” I said. “After you were … after what happened to you, she brought you here and put you back together before you died.” Or, possibly, after you had died. On Earth, you weren’t dead until you were warm and dead, but on Aerb, it probably moved beyond that. Maybe you weren't actually dead until your soul left your body. “You had lost too much blood though, and if you don’t have enough blood to move oxygen around, or to keep blood pressure, then your heart and brain will start to fail. You were back in one piece again, but you needed blood, so I gave you some of mine.”

“You know how to do that?” asked Fenn with a raised eyebrow.

“Not really,” I said. “It seems like it worked though.”

“Seems like it,” she replied. She looked down at her hands and flexed them, tightening them into fists. “It’s very … intimate.” She traced a finger along the arteries in her wrist and shivered slightly. “Elves —” she began, then stopped. “I told you about the cannibalism thing?”

“Yeah,” I replied, watching her.

“It’s an insult,” she said. She was still a little bit shaky, still not back to her normal self. “Usually.” She closed her eyes and tapped at her neck. “But when two elves get married, there’s this part of it where they stick a finger in each other’s mouth, usually the thumb, and they both bite down hard enough to draw blood. It’s difficult to explain.” She touched her slender hands to her throat, using her fingers to feel at her pulse. “I mean, not hard to explain what they do, but just, the weight of it. Elves have this obsession with consumption. The average meal is a bunch of elaborate, delicately prepared pieces of raw meat, perfect in every way. The day is centered around eating, divided and marked by it. For an elf, it’s about being better than the thing the meat came from. Eating is a way of saying ‘fuck you, boar, I’m better than you’. It’s affirmational. In the context of marriage, it’s a husband saying to his wife, ‘I’m so much less than you that I would give of my body, unasked, to allow it to sustain you’, and his bride answering the same in return.”

“So, we’re basically elf-married now, is that it?” I asked. For some reason I found that unimaginably funny, maybe because it was so incredibly hackneyed.

“No,” said Fenn. She was still touching her throat and hadn’t opened her eyes. “I’m just saying that you filling me with your blood is very intimate.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “It’s not a sex thing, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“But it is a romance thing?” I asked.

“Sort of,” said Fenn. “Elf marriage isn’t really about romance.” She shook her head, and I could feel, distantly, the movement of my blood within her. “I don’t know, I’m explaining it shitty, I was never very good at being an elf.”

“I get it,” I said. “It was meaningful to you in a way that I didn’t understand, and you wanted to share that with me, so I would know what you were feeling. If we’re going to be … maybe it’s not the right time for that, to talk about that, I mean.”

“No,” said Fenn. “I’m still a little fucked up from the old half-and-half.” She traced a diagonal line across herself. It was maybe the least convincing display of light-heartedness I'd ever seen from her. “I wouldn’t mind someone in bed with me, so long as we only talked about, oh, I don’t know, small, fluffy animals or something like that. Or maybe stories of Earth, if you’d prefer.”

So I took off the rest of my armor and crawled into the bed nook with her, in just the thin pants I wore under the greaves and cuisses. She scooted aside for me, then shifted herself so her head was on my bare chest and her body was curled next to mine.

“Go on,” she said. I felt her warm breath on my chest. “Tell me a story of Earth. One I wouldn’t have heard before, none of the Penndraig ones. And please, please nothing about Dungeons & Dragons.”

I moved my arm so it was around her, and rested my hand on her back, which I rubbed with gentle motions when she pushed back against me. “Um,” I said, trying to think. “We used to have picnics — do you have picnics on Aerb?” Fenn shook her head. “A picnic is basically, you make most of a meal at home and then eat it somewhere outdoors, usually in a park. When I was little, we had our picnics at a place called Miller’s Pond, which had a little park next to it. Dad would make German potato salad, which has bacon in it, and Mom would make cucumber salad, and then we’d get these pre-seasoned chicken breasts from the grocery store that he would cook up on the grill. I always used that time to feed the ducks, or go fishing, while Mom and Dad spent their time chatting.”

This was before they started fighting so much, which was more or less when family picnics in the summer ended. I wasn’t about to tell that to Fenn though, not when she needed comfort.

“I decided that I wanted to fish. Miller’s Pond was stocked with fish by the city, and you had to throw them back if you caught them, so it wasn’t really sporting, but I kind of liked having that time to sit and think on my own. On the day in question, I’d taken off my shoes and socks to fish while standing in the water, because I wanted to feel the mud between my feet. I was pretty young.” My fingers traced the contours of her shoulder blades. “I’d been standing there in the water, pruning up, for about ten minutes when I saw a duck swimming by with one of my socks.”

“A duck?” asked Fenn.

“One of the ducks from the pond,” I said.

“No, I mean what’s a duck?” she asked. “Is that an Airth thing?”

“Fenn, you know what a duck is,” I replied.

“Ah shit, you got me this time,” she said. I could hear the smile on her voice. “So this duck got your sock?”

“Yeah,” I continued. “And he was swimming away with it, so I dropped my pole and went running after him, but if you’ve ever run after a waterfowl in its natural environment, you can guess how that went. I ended up falling down in the water and getting myself completely drenched. The duck decided that the sock wasn’t actually food and dropped it in the pond, so since I was already wet I started swimming, hoping that I could get to my sock before it just sank down into the mud and was lost forever. And I did manage to recover my sock, but when I started my way back to shore I saw that my dad had my other sock, and he was walking around doing his best impression of a duck trying to steal it, and my mom was laughing her ass off over by the picnic table.”

It took me some time to realize that Fenn had fallen asleep, which was fine by me.

(Solace came up from the basement, rubbing her neck, a few hours later. She looked at the two of us, gave us a knowing smile, and then slipped out from the house. The doe popped its head in through the window a little later on, and gave its own snort of breath at us, which I didn’t know how to interpret. I eventually fell asleep myself, and for once had pleasant dreams.)

Chapter 10 - Culmination

“Well, that was fast,” said Amaryllis. I snapped awake and stared at her, standing over us, and realized that I was in bed with Fenn next to me (wearing no pants), resting her head on my chest. Amaryllis was still in her plate, looking tired but pleased with herself. I think ‘wry amusement’ just about covers the way she was looking at us.

“It’s not what you think,” I said, not making a move to get up. “Unless what you think is that I gave her a transfusion and then we took a nap together.”

“He really filled me up,” said Fenn, who rose and stretched. She turned back to look at me and smiled, and I couldn’t help but very briefly glance down at her naked butt. “Pervert!” she screamed, and leapt from the bed, covering her privates with one hand. She wasn’t even attempting to hide her smile. “Mary, you saw, he looked at my butt.”

Amaryllis held out her right hand, where she was wearing Sable, and materialized a pair of underwear, which Fenn swiftly took from her.

“Also the glove,” said Fenn as she slipped into the underwear. “A woman isn’t decent until her hand is covered by a magical glove with infinitely expansive extradimensional space.”

Amaryllis took off the glove and handed it to her, which Fenn took and put on with a look of utter triumph that turned to momentary confusion and then, quickly after that, a scowl. “Sorry, I should have specified that the glove be invested,” said Fenn.

“I have one condition,” said Amaryllis. “No more shirts.”

“Done,” said Fenn, far too quickly, and with too much of a smile on her face.

“No more shirts with writing,” said Amaryllis. “I still want shirts.”

“Okay, done,” said Fenn, again too quickly.

“Fenn,” said Amaryllis. “Do you think I find this funny?”

“You laughed that one time,” said Fenn, “And it’s fucking hilarious, so I don’t know, you tell me, do you think that I don’t think you find it funny?”

“That wasn’t a genuine laugh,” said Amaryllis with a not-quite stony face.

“Liar,” said Fenn. “And anyway, I agree to your terms, and like a true friend, I agreed to your amended terms, but everyone knows that even a true friend wouldn’t allow a second amendment to an oral contract.”

Amaryllis sighed, then touched Sable briefly, after which Fenn’s smile widened. She hugged the glove to her chest, then gave it a kiss.

“I touched corpses with that,” said Amaryllis.

“I’ve touched corpses with it too,” said Fenn. “Any good loot?”

“No,” replied Amaryllis. “All of it was bound to Larkspur, now it will be bound to a different cousin. It’s good to have, and good to deprive them of, or possibly use in trade, but there’s nothing that we can actually use.”

“Are we still in the forest?” I asked. “What about the helicopter?”

“I took everything there was to take,” said Amaryllis. “All of the souls of the dead are in a bottle. As soon as the teleportation key allowed us to, I moved us. We’re on the foothills of the World Spine right now, and we should be miles away from anyone, which is the only thing that this place has to recommend it.”

“But I know how to fly a helicopter,” I said. Ish.

Amaryllis stared at me. “How were you proposing that we transport it?” she asked.

I opened my mouth at that, then closed it, because I actually had no idea, aside from ‘use bullshit druidic magic to get it into the bottle’. It was possible that we could take the helicopter apart and put the pieces into Sable, but that would have been a mammoth task for just two people. And we could go back for it, but I could already see all the objections piling up on that front, which were all the same reasons that we hadn’t gone back to the castle in Silmar City. And even if I could navigate my way around those objections, what the fuck were we going to actually do with a helicopter, magic or otherwise? (But it was obvious to me that if the Dungeon Master had a single dramatic bone in his body, I would fly a helicopter at some point, especially because this marked the second time that I had come close to a helicopter and then not been allowed to fly it.)

“Not everything is a clue,” said Fenn with pursed lips.

“But some things are definitely clues,” I said. “Some things have cosmic significance, for lack of a better word. And helicopters are one of them. They’re part of my backstory, again, for lack of a better word. I’m not saying that everything is going to have meaning in one way or another, I’m just saying that this probably is a clue, and if we don’t go back for the magic helicopter, or we can’t take it with us, then we should at least be on the lookout for other helicopters. Really, we should just go there and use bulk teleport to put it somewhere that we can get it again, if we need it. For both the helicopters, actually.”

“Even if we had the incantation —” Amaryllis began. A stack of papers appeared in Fenn’s hand. Amaryllis stared daggers at her. “Even if we had the necessary supplies —” Fenn tossed the papers onto the bed beside me and produced a small basket from the glove with a flourish. “Did you steal those?” asked Amaryllis.

“Stealing is such a strong word,” said Fenn. “It’s not incorrect, I’m just pointing out what a strong, brave woman I am.” She coughed politely into one hand. “You can, ah, ignore any stories about me getting bisected as obvious fabrications.”

Solace and Grak came into the main room of the house then, leaving it feeling slightly cramped. Grak gave me a low bow, and Solace gave me a happy smile.

“Can I ask who’s watching the bottle?” I asked.

“I put up what wards I could,” said Grak. “I need a week of rest if you want me to be useful on that front.”

“Are we safe?” I asked.

“No,” said Grak. “We won’t be safe until our enemies are dead.”

“He’s exaggerating,” said Solace.

“The primary worry, at this point, is that either Hyacinth or Doris will continue what Larkspur started,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t think either is very likely. It’s hard to parse what Hyacinth’s incentives are without a clear picture of what’s going on within Anglecynn, but from what we know she was done dealing with Doris, and she already thought Larkspur had spent too much time and effort on the project. We’ve added revenge to her incentives, but I don’t think that will change much. We still have to worry about her in the long run, but she’s not the Foreign Security Director, which means that she has considerably fewer levers to pull. I’m not entirely sure what her story is going to be about what happened to him, especially since we have the body, not them, but I really, really doubt that we’re in danger from her right now.”

Amaryllis shifted slightly, reaching to scratch at her neck where the armor met it. “Doris Finch can’t leave the exclusion zone. She has agents, but they’re not very good, because she doesn’t trust other people, not even herselves. My guess is that she knows that we have a teleportation key, either based on her deal with Larkspur or just from watching the reported probability of our movements. She’s dangerous, but in a different, more unpredictable way. I still think we’re safe here.”

She cracked her knuckles. “And that leaves everyone else. We don’t actually know how many people know that we have the key. The set of people who want me dead is very small, limited only to a select set of my cousins. No one else within this group has enemies that are a threat on the level we operate at. So from my way of thinking, our primary concern is whether or not there’s an intra-imperial alert out for us, and that, at least, is something that we can find out in relatively short order with little risk, because doing those things subtly is next to impossible.”

“So we rest here for a week, or rest while testing whether anyone is in pursuit, or rest while moving around?” I asked. “Then we can go back to Boastre Vino under disguise and see whether there’s a BOLO out for us?”

“A BOLO?” asked Amaryllis.

“Sorry, Earth slang, ‘be on the lookout’,” I said.

“‘Whether there’s a be on the lookout out for us?’” asked Grak. “Does that parse properly?”

“No,” said Amaryllis. “It doesn’t matter. Are we agreed on resting for now?”

There was a round of assent at that. We’d all been through not-insignificant amounts of hell over the last few weeks, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that we would vote for a break. I remembered thinking, back when I was shooting at cans in the Risen Lands, that MMA fighters had about four ten-minute fights every year, spaced pretty evenly. In the past week, I’d had four fights to the death, with very little time to process it or do anything but move forward. I wasn’t exactly in the same position as someone who did blood sports as entertainment, and I didn’t need nearly the recovery time before I was good to go again. Still, it was a lot, and probably more for everyone else than it was for me.

Having real, actual time off was amazing. I’d had times on Aerb that kind of, sort of, if you squinted at it sideways, approached time off, but most of that was spent on training. That wasn’t to say that I was planning on just abandoning training altogether for a whole week, but the game had sort of given me an excuse; I couldn’t go past 20 in a skill without either being in actual danger or having a good teacher. Given that we had given ourselves a week, I expected I would be able to hit that cap without having to devote all my hours training.

After we’d all had food, a communal dip in the stream, and a change of clothes, Solace and the Six-Eyed Doe gave us a tour of the bottle. It was only a square mile, but that meant about three and a half miles of walking the perimeter, and another few miles of going down the trails, all at a rather sedate pace necessitated by the fact that there were no proper roads and numerous elevation changes. We split into groups, somewhat organically, in part because the deer trails required us to move single-file. Grak took great interest in the wards, some of which were apparently necessary for the (mostly) closed system, and Solace indulged him. Fenn, after whispering in the Six-Eyed Doe’s ear, was treated to a ride, which took her far from the rest of us as the locus stretched its long legs and went for a run. And that left Amaryllis and I, staying back somewhat.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Amaryllis, apropos of nothing. “You and Fenn.”

I could feel myself tense slightly at that, mostly because I didn’t know how much she was telling the truth, or what her motivation was for saying that. For all that I was giving her a second chance, I felt like I was perpetually off my footing when talking to her.

“I’m glad you’re not bothered,” I replied. “I mean, I’m glad that it’s not going to be a source of tension, or anything, not that it would be.”

“I bring it up because I don’t know what I said while under the influence of the unicorn blood,” said Amaryllis. “Fenn and Grak apparently made a pact between them not to tell us, but I’ve been worried that it’s going to come out at the exact wrong time, so I’d like to be forthright in the interests of not having complications that we can’t afford.”

“Ah,” I said. “I see. And there are things that you might have said that might lead me to believe that you were bothered by our very-much-unofficial-but-probably-not-for-long, ish, thing.”

“You can simply say that you’re courting,” said Amaryllis.

“Yeah,” I said.

We kept walking in silence for a minute. Amaryllis was more relaxed now than she’d been since I’d met her, which, admittedly, was probably a high point for stress in both our lives. She had taken off the armor and was going around in an unadorned blue t-shirt and shorts, with sneakers on her feet. She probably would have been able to pass as a student at my high school, if she’d been dropped there in some kind of reverse portal fantasy. There were details that would give her away to anyone looking closely, like the blend of textiles in her clothes, or the lack of plastic anywhere on her person, or the brands, but it was very close. She’d draw stares, because she was breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly, beautiful, but that aside, it was eerie how close to home she could make me feel.

“You grew more handsome with every point you put into your physical attributes,” said Amaryllis. This, I could tell, was a rehearsed line. “I didn’t feel anything like attraction to you when we first met, and I could tell that you felt some attraction to me, so I decided that I would keep that option open.” She was walking ahead of me through the tall grass, and she turned back toward me, maybe to see whether I was listening. “I’m a Princess of Anglecynn, marriage and progeny are part of our stock and trade. I never imagined that I would have the luxury of marrying for love anyway. With your ability, if it was as powerful as I had imagined, if you were Uther reborn, you were as good a match as any I was likely to find. Maybe if I were more driven or more callous I would have pressed that advantage. Maybe … maybe I am that callous, I just doubted my ability to actually pull it off, when push came to shove. I don’t have experience with men. I don’t have that natural spark that Fenn does either, that raw sensuality, the way she can effortlessly draw the eye.”

I listened to this carefully, trying not to feel too bowled over by what she was saying. The last thing I had ever expected her to admit was a feeling of inferiority toward Fenn. That she wasn’t attracted to me wasn’t a surprise, but it did still sting. Was I supposed to apologize for my attraction to her, an attraction that I still felt? I couldn’t actually help that, but I would have apologized for being that way if it made any difference.

“You understand why I’m telling you this?” asked Amaryllis. “Some things it’s better to do quickly and thoroughly.”

“Like ripping off a Band-Aid,” I said, aware that the idiom probably wouldn’t translate. “Was there more?”

“Yes,” she said, letting out a breath. “I decided, at a certain point, that there was something legitimately attractive about you. Not in terms of personal aesthetics, though there was that too, but …” She sucked in a breath. “I don’t know what I said while I was feeling the effects of the unicorn blood,” she said. “So I’m going to say the worst things that I might have said, because right now we have time to get past them. I don’t want us to have another falling out because we didn’t talk about things that are painful or awkward to talk about.”

I could feel a tightness in my chest. “Can we stop and sit somewhere?” I asked. “I don’t like not being able to see your face when you talk.”

“Sure,” she said. She hailed the others, who were engrossed in their own conversation, and they waved to us as we hooked to the left and found a large rock to sit on together. Amaryllis had a solemn face, and hugged her knees. She spoke into the air instead of looking at me. Maybe it was easier for her that way.

She reached up, as if to brush a strand of hair back, but stopped and touched her short hair. “I thought that I would be your love interest, if you started to grow beyond my ability to contribute,” she said. “Uther had his Knights, but he had a wife as well, and Zona had more power than any of them, in all the ways that mattered. All the focus gets placed on Uther, but she’s the ancestor of every Prince and Princess of Anglecynn just like he is. She shaped the future of Anglecynn in her own ways.”

I had set the biography of Uther Penndraig aside before getting to the part where he met her, but I obviously knew that he’d had a wife. It weirded me out to think about Arthur in his twenties, married with children. Maybe I was at a point in my life where that was harder to wrap my head around than the fact that he’d built an empire that had spread across the world.

“So I thought I would be that to you,” said Amaryllis. “If you tried to kiss me, I would kiss you back, and if you wanted to fuck me, then I would—”—she looked to me—“endure it,” she finished, apparently not pulling any punches. “I would get through this thing that I didn’t want to do, and I would learn to like it, or at least learn to not visibly dislike it.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I’m aware of how that makes me sound,” she said.

“Kind of makes me feel like crap,” I said. That wasn’t the half of it. It wasn’t her saying she didn’t want to have sex with me, it was the idea that she would still her instinctual response of recoiling from me. That made my heart drop, not because of what it said about our personal relationship, or just our friendship, but what it said about her.

“I thought it might,” said Amaryllis with a small nod. “I’m not done yet, sorry.” She let out a sigh and hugged her knees closer, still not looking my way. “It was while we were making our way through the Datura that I started to see something in you. There was a glimmer of a real spark when I looked at you, so I did what I thought made the most sense given the circumstances, and I set that spark in kindling, then blew on it to start the fire going.” She paused. “Did I misread your attraction to me?”

My heart was hammering in my chest. “No,” I said, almost choking on the word. “You have to know that I would never have done anything if I thought that there was any chance you didn’t want it.”

“I know.” Amaryllis nodded with a soft smile. “That made it easier to kindle the flame. I fantasized about what it would be like to kiss you, or to have you hold me. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have you take my virginity, and I tried to imagine sex with you as this positive thing that I wanted with all my heart.”

“Did it work?” I asked. (I was trying to be careful with my words, but this was not a conversation that I was cut out for.)

Amaryllis was silent. Then she looked over at me. “A bit,” she said. She pursed her lips. “I don’t know how I would have put it, when I had the unicorn blood in me. My phrasing then might have been stronger. I think that what I managed to make myself feel for you is probably just a fraction of what you and Fenn feel for each other.”

“Ah,” I said, swallowing hard. “I’m glad it didn’t work all the way. Because … Fenn.”

“Yes.” Amaryllis nodded. “I'm working on snuffing out the small fire I had going. I was serious, when I said that it didn’t bother me. She suits you better than I ever would have. You'll be good together. Probably annoying too, but that's Fenn. I care about both of you, and it makes me pleased to see you finding happiness in each other.” She hesitated. “I think about alternate presents, and other paths that we might have taken. There’s a sense of loss that I’m trying to shake, like a unicorn’s vision of a past that was lived but never actually happened. I don’t wish that you and Fenn were apart, and I don’t wish that I was with you, but I do think about this other version of me that was more ready to trust, more craving of a man’s touch, warmer and kinder. If I were someone fun, like her.” She bit her lip, hard enough that she winced. “I’m sorry, this isn’t helpful, I’ve said all the things I meant to say to inoculate us against this in the future. I probably shouldn’t say more.”

“Do I need to reciprocate?” I asked. “Do I need to tell you ... things?” (God knows what I said about Amaryllis when I was on unicorn blood, but it apparently wasn’t enough to stop Fenn.)

Amaryllis gave me a small, hollow laugh. “You’re very transparent, Juniper,” she replied. “No, I already know the gist of it. I don’t think there’s anything that I would worry about being blindsided with, in some future argument.”

“Okay,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Should we go join the others?”

“Give me a second,” said Amaryllis. “I’d like a little time alone.”

I left her on the rock and started down the trail again. Grak and Solace were sitting together a ways away, where the tall woods started, just before the run-up to the side of the bottle. From the looks of it, she was telling him a story, with large hand gestures and the occasional flash of color from her hands.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about Amaryllis and the things she’d told me. On the one hand, I felt like I had dodged a bullet there, because she was suited exactly to my tastes in so many ways. Maybe if we had more time for a slow burn, or if Fenn weren't there, I would have ended up with her, courting this girl who was trying her hardest not to feel distaste when I kissed her. On the other hand, I felt this irrational need to fix her somehow, to hold her and comfort her until she was defrosted and capable of, I don’t know, experiencing actual romantic love and the joys of sex. I knew that if Tiff had heard me say something like that, she probably would have talked my ear off about how that was a deranged male fantasy that didn't even remotely map to the real world, but it was what I felt all the same. Mostly though, it all just made me sad. No wonder her loyalty had gone up when I’d told her that she was never going to lag far behind me in power.

Fenn came up alongside me, riding the Six-Eyed Doe, as I was lost in thoughts of parallel timelines and might-have-beens. “I found this funny-looking deer,” she said. The locus bucked below her, hard enough that she had to grip it tight, and Fenn laughed at the struggle until finally the locus went still again. “Good chat with the princess?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Care to tell your Fenn what about?” asked Fenn with a thrum of her fingers on the doe’s flank.

“It’s complicated. Unicorn stuff,” I said. “I’m hoping that you already know all of it, so we don’t have to have this awkward, stressful conversation about it.”

“Ah,” said Fenn. “And you’re in a mood about whatever she told you?”

“A bit.” I nodded.

“Could you tell me what sort of mood, precisely?” asked Fenn. “I am, naturally, a strong, self-assured woman who doesn’t need her almost-boyfriend to tell her that their fledgling relationship is still intact, but maybe you should go through the motions, just to get some practice, in case you ever do date someone that pointlessly needy and insecure.”

“Fenn, I know that this might seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but would you like to go on a date sometime?” I asked.

Fenn hopped down off the doe with an acrobatic twist and landed beside me. She was giving me the widest smile I’d ever seen from her. “Well,” she said. “This is very unexpected.” She stepped closer to me, within the zone of intimacy. “Obviously I’d have to think about it.”

One of the changes that had happened to my body was that I had grown taller. Fenn and I had started out about the same height, but now I had about two inches on her, which meant that if she wanted to kiss me, she would have to tilt her head up just slightly. She was doing that, obviously so, and she left her lips slightly parted when she finished speaking. I shouldn’t have felt so unsure of myself; I knew how she felt, I knew how I felt, and yet I had this nervous, trembling energy as I moved forward and kissed her, fear and adrenaline coursing through me like maybe, somehow, I had misread her.

She melted into me, pressing her body against mine, sliding a hand up to touch me on the back of my neck, with her fingers in my hair, and I pulled her closer against me as we kissed, like I thought I’d be able to merge us into a single being. I was surprised by my urgent need for her, and she for me, but that surprise was eventually washed away by the pure sensation of her soft lips against mine.

When she pulled away she was breathing heavily and shaking slightly, her freckled cheeks red. She stared into my eyes and ran her tongue between her lips, savoring the aftertaste of our kiss. “Okay,” she said. She shivered slightly, and her hands clung to my waist. “I’ve given it some thought. One date, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

Chapter 11 - A Tiptoe Through the Tulips

“Vervain was far from the first flower mage, but he was the best there ever was,” said Solace.

The glass bottle that contained the locus’ domain didn’t have anything so neat and ordered as a garden would imply, but there was a small section that was devoted to Solace’s side business as a flower mage. In a proper garden, you laid everything out in clean, ordered rows, clearing away the weeds, grass, and everything that wasn’t a cultivated plant. In Solace’s unstructured growing space (okay, fine, garden) it was hard to tell which plants were supposed to be there and which ones weren’t. I couldn’t see terribly many flowers, though some of the plants definitely didn’t look like they belonged; long red vines with sharp brown ridges, a low green plant with blue-edged leaves that spread out to cover a whole square yard of space, and a tree whose trunk was a vivid purple where there were cracks in its thick black bark.

“A flower mage usually has a few carefully cultivated strains,” Solace continued. She spoke calmly and walked among the garden as we talked, touching plants as she went and sometimes looking them over, gently turning a leaf this way or that. “I have eight. Vervain was said to have twelve thousand. He supposedly had no grand secret, he was simply very good at what he did. He traveled widely and spread his seeds in the perfect places, leaving his plants untended, and he had a knack for coming back to find the buds just before the bloom.”

This … was not exactly the foundational education in flower magic that I had hoped for, when I had asked her if she could teach me what she knew. It felt like if I’d asked someone how to program a computer and they’d started me off on a lecture about Alan Turing.

“I mean, it does sound like he had some kind of secret,” I said. “Predictive magic or something like that?”

“Possibly,” said Solace with a nod. She moved beneath a tree, and the dappled light from the artificial sun overhead played across her light-green skin. “I’m sure that people have theories, I’m just repeating what I was told.”

“He was a hundred years before your time?” I asked.

“Yes.” Solace nodded. “He casts a shadow over every flower mage before or since. He was prolific in a way that no one else has ever been. In a word, he was special, and you need to understand that going in.”

“Huh,” I said. “You know, I actually know basically nothing about flower magic, and Vervain is just some guy I read about in a history book, so … if you’re trying to tell me that I’m never going to reach his heights, and I shouldn’t be going down this path without expecting a long, frustrating slog, point taken. But also, you should know that I’m exceptional, and if anyone can do whatever it was Vervain did, it’s me.”

Solace grinned at me. “I wouldn’t have figured you for the cocky type,” she said.

“At this point, I think it’s a realistic assessment of my abilities,” I replied. Not to mention the fact that this entire world very much appears to have been built for me, which we don’t talk about in polite company.

“Very well,” said Solace. “You said that Amaryllis provided you with an overview of flower magic? Something like a shorter version of what’s in The Commoner’s Guide to Flower Magic, perhaps?”

“Ugh,” I said. “I hate that series.”

(When I was rich and famous … well, I was already rich, considering that we as a group had something like twenty million obols worth of gold, magic items, and things Fenn had stolen. But when I was really rich, and could move around without worrying about the international community putting out a warrant for my arrest because of all the people I’d (probably justifiably) killed, I was going to publish my own book series, with titles like Flower Magic: A User’s Manual, and they would tell you how to actually do magic, in concise terms, without personal stories, anecdotes, or blatant propaganda about how great magic users were. And then the athenaeums would start gunning for me, because they were the ones that ensured we had the craptastic Commoner’s Guide in the first place.)

“Amaryllis said, basically, that flower mages carry small buds around with them, and each is a different spell, whose effects are as good as impossible to predict unless you have a lot of time to scope them out,” I said. “She was talking more from the perspective of personal combat though, I think she just didn’t want me to be blind-sided and trying to figure out the new gimmick of the week on the fly. My impression was that it wasn’t a path worth even trying to pursue, because you need a plot of arable land.” I looked to the land around us, a solid square mile inhabited only by five people and a magical doe. “She said you could start with ordinary seeds, which would take a hellishly long time, or take seeds from a flower mage, which had to be done willingly and then half the time just failed anyway.”

“I wonder if she missed the heart of flower magic or gave you a poor overview on purpose,” said Solace with a frown. She put her hand up to shield her eyes and looked across the land, to the large tree whose interior space had once housed a dozen druids and now served as our group home. “That girl will have to give an accounting of herself.”

I frowned slightly at that, because Amaryllis was my friend, and I wanted to defend her, even over an innocuous comment like that. Maybe that was a little bit of me being a white knight, but my perspective on Amaryllis had changed over the last few days. She wasn’t someone who needed protecting, and certainly not from slightly rude comments by Solace, but that didn’t really tamp down my instinct.

“Things have been worked out, between the three of you?” asked Solace, because I had been distracted for a bit too long. “Grak is something of a gossip.”

“I … did not know that about him,” I said. I thought back to him telling me not to sleep with Fenn. “Okay, actually, I guess I did. But we haven’t had that much opportunity to talk. Anyway, things are fine between Fenn and Amaryllis and myself.” It had been three days now that we’d been at the foothills of the World Spine, sitting behind wards and setting watches, looking out for an attack that we were fairly sure wasn’t going to come. Fenn and I were sharing a bed, but —

“I gave Fenn some herbs that will prevent her from having a child, but they’ll take a few weeks to start working,” said Solace.

I could feel my cheeks grow warm at that. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s not really … we’re taking it slow.”

Slowish.

Fenn and I had been sharing a bed together since even before we started dating, because she “liked company” when she slept, and that hadn’t changed, which meant that each night was spent touching and kissing, snuggling and cuddling. The beds were all set into alcoves, which meant that there wasn’t terribly much privacy, and the deer kept sticking its stupid six-eyed head through the windows of the tree house, which for me personally was a mood-killer. Fenn simply waved hi to it and went back to the kissing.

Even if we’d had a private room for ourselves, with an actual door we could lock, we probably still would have been taking things slow, because there were elven cultural ideas about ‘consumption’ and a different elven physiology, both of which made me less inclined to try to rush things, at least not before we’d had our first proper date. Our relationship had this frantic, manic quality to it, a desperation and need that almost frightened me, and all the moreso because both of us felt it. The phrase ‘like a dam breaking’ doesn’t really have that good of connotations, when you stop to think about it. It sometimes felt like we were a top, spinning out of control.

Her loyalty went up twice, once when I caught her looking over at me and she shot me a silly, happy smile, and the other time when I passed by where she was sitting and gave her a quick kiss on the head. I had complex feelings about those loyalty messages, because I found them gratifying, but also didn’t want to see our relationship defined in game terms.

There’s a part of me that wants to sanitize it, to shield it all from view, to explain what being with Fenn was like but draw a curtain over the bed we shared and keep all that private. That’s my Midwestern upbringing talking, and to put up that curtain would be, in a sense, to presuppose that there was nothing there worth talking about, that nothing changed between the two of us as a consequence of those nights. And that is, if you know anything about relationships, clearly untrue, because it’s not like the sex part of things gets divorced from the romance, or the friendship, or any other component of the relationship. Even if you’re not talking, physical intimacy is a dialogue all its own. There’s this idea, I think, in some strands of Earth culture, where we turn from humans, to rutting animals, and then back again, and I don’t think that’s particularly true to my experience.

So, in brief, and keeping in mind that I had turned eighteen before anything happened, Fenn and I had spent the previous night feeling our way around each other, both literally and metaphorically. I had still not read what The Book of Blood had to say on the subject of elves and half-elves, specifically with regard to the topic of sex, which took up half the word count of any entry in the book. So when my hand stopped running over her body and slipped between her legs, I wasn’t just filled with nervous excitement for all the obvious reasons I would have been in the opening moves of a relationship. There was a real sense of the unknown. I focused on her entirely, feeling her with my fingers, watching her face. I could see her trepidation and feel the tension in her muscles where her body was pressed against mine.

I don’t know what exactly she feared, whether it was that I would pull away in disgust or study her like a clinical scientist, but she relaxed by degrees as I kissed and touched her, and I paid very close attention to the cues she was giving me, doing what got little intakes of breath or made her eyes go half-lidded, until eventually I found a motion that seemed to work well and stuck with it. I was rewarded with her legs clamping down on my hand and a low, soft moan that I was sure reached the ears of everyone in the house. As soon as she came back to her senses, she pulled me in and wrapped her arms around me like she never wanted to let me go.

Loyalty Increased: Fenn lvl 19!

Achievement Unlocked: Petite Mort

I blinked away the messages as fast as they came up and felt burning anger slowly rise within me as I listened to Fenn’s breathing slow back down to normal. I didn’t need the game’s affirmation. I didn’t need a fucking achievement pop-up. And what I really didn’t need was the reminder that the Dungeon Master’s watchful eye never left me, that I had nothing like privacy, that I was trapped in an existential nightmare that might pull the rug out from under me at any moment.

When Fenn’s hand rested gently on my stomach and she started kissing my neck, I gently pulled her hand back to me and interlaced our fingers, and whatever she thought of that, she fell into a contented sleep soon afterward. It took me quite a bit longer.

“The key to flower magic is understanding,” said Solace, changing the subject and snapping me out of my faraway thoughts. “Take a seed, plant it in the ground, nurture it as it grows, and all the while, you have to have a sense of that plant, and give it, as much as you’re able, a sense of yourself.”

“I’m not sure what that means in practical terms,” I said. “You’re saying that it’s essentially social, but with plants?” I frowned at that. My social skills were my worst skills.

“Social is a funny word,” said Solace. “I would say that it takes patience, insight, and dedication. That’s the path of true understanding.” Solace reached into one of her deep pockets and pulled out a thick, black seed, which she handed to me. “Plant this,” she said.

I looked down at the seed and turned it over once, looking at the rounded end where it had been attached to a stem of some kind. The edges of the seed were white, but the blending between black and white was imperfect. “And where do I plant it?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” said Solace.

“Are you going to Mr. Miyagi me?” I asked.

“Miyagi-sensei was a very wise teacher,” said Solace with a small bow.

I stared at the short green woman with my mouth slightly open. “You’ve … seen Karate Kid? Let me guess, it was one of Uther Penndraig’s plays?”

Solace nodded. “We weren’t totally divorced from culture, back in the good old days before the Second Empire,” she said. “We accepted wanderers of all kinds into our domains. So yes, I’ve seen a very spirited version of it, put on by four enthusiastic players who stayed with us for a time. And the methods of teaching are sound.”

“I’m actually not sure that they are,” I said. “I mean, the wax on, wax off stuff seems more like it’s meant to instill mindless obedience and test patience rather than actually teach in the most succinct way possible.”

“And didn’t I say that patience was the path to understanding?” Solace asked with a smile.

I rolled my eyes. “At these words, Juniper was enlightened.” But Solace was over four hundred years old, and while the rebirth process presumably meant that she had to spend at least some time with the dexterity and senses of a newborn (TODO #432: ask about that), that still meant that she had a wealth of experience that I’d be pretty foolish to ignore.

So she wasn’t going to tell me where to plant the seed. That meant that I had to figure it out on my own. I turned the seed over in my hand again. There was basically nothing that the seed itself told me about the plant, though its size meant that it probably came from a larger plant, which meant that it would need room to put down roots and spread its leaves to take in sunlight. I was pretty sure that trying to predict a plant’s needs on the basis of what its seed looked like was really foolish, or at least unlikely to give good results. Although …

“This is a lesson on its own,” I said, holding up the seed. “Can I ask you any questions without defeating the purpose of the exercise, which is presumably about the process of discovery?”

“It’s for you to feel your way forward,” said Solace. “The feeling is important.”

I sighed at that, and began looking around the garden, both for a place that might be suitable to plant the seed, and for a Clue as to what kind of seed it was. Eventually I found a spot with flat ground and only some short grass that looked like an animal had been grazing on it (there was a fairly wide variety of animals within the bottle, though no predators). I used my hands to pull up the short grass, revealing rich, dark soil beneath it, then poked my finger in it to make a hole and dropped the seed in with the pointed tip facing up, as that was where the sprout would probably come from. When that was done, I pushed the earth back into place and stared at it.

Skill increased: Horticulture lvl 1!

“Okay?” I asked.

Solace shrugged.

“I mean, what do I do now?” I asked. “Plant more seeds? Can you, I don’t know”—I made Emperor Palpatine lightning hands at the ground—“do some mystical druid stuff?”

“That would destroy your connection,” said Solace. “Planting other seeds would also weaken the empathic link you now hopefully have with this plant. Traditionally, someone starting with flower magic would have only a single plant, branching out into more only by the time they’d gotten a plant to a second or third generation.”

I stared down at the ground. I hadn’t even gotten a skill unlock for Flower Magic, though it was entirely possible that all you needed was Horticulture. In which case …

“So I’m monogamous with this plant, which might very well die because I put it in the wrong spot, or because a worm gets it, or a fungus, or a million other things?” I asked.

“Part of building the connection is tending to it,” said Solace. “It is, in a way, better if it depends on you. You will check it, every day, sometimes twice a day, and give it the protection and guidance it needs.”

“Huh,” I replied. “Can I tend to other plants then? Not to put too fine a point on it, but can I walk around the bottle with you and learn some lessons? Actually, can I learn lessons at all about horticulture without compromising this particular connection?”

“Yes, all that should be fine,” said Solace. “So long as you form no new connections to any plants, and given that you aren’t planting them, it shouldn’t be an issue. I can take you to what needs tending. I began growing a fair amount of food, in preparation for finding you, and I thought that we might have a feast tonight.”

So I spent a few hours with Solace, moving around among her plants, helping to prune back branches, picking off dead leaves, pulling up some plants by the roots and watering others. It was nice to have a low-level skill that I could power up quickly again, but I still held a little bit of resentment toward the messages that popped up in my field of view. At the end, when I had leveled up Horticulture eleven times, she inspected one particular plant and gestured me closer.

“Here, this one is ready for harvest,” she said. She reached forward for a small bud, where overlapping pink petals had not yet spread into a flower. Her delicate green fingers touched just beneath where the bud was, and with a slight frown of concentration and a pinch, she removed the bud from the plant. She held the small flower bud up to show me. “That, there, is part of the raw essence of the connection I forged with that plant,” she said. “The first time you do this, your plant will probably die.”

I looked over at the patch of dirt. “That … seems bad.”

“It is,” said Solace. “But to forge a connection and use it, that is the source of power for a flower mage. Once you know what you’re doing, you can drain only part of that connection when you snip the bud.”

I sighed. “This does not seem quick and easy,” I said. Why can’t all magics be like blood magic, easy to pick up with a few sentences of description and two minutes of thinking about it?

“No, becoming a skilled flower mage takes time,” said Solace. “Is that another thing Amaryllis left out?”

“No, she was very clear on that,” I said. “So what does this bud do? How does it do what it does?”

“I can’t answer the how,” said Solace. “I doubt there’s a soul on the plane that could. But as for the what, that depends on the connection, which depends in turn on the both of you. This?” she asked, holding up the pink bud. “A distilled connection, deep and powerful, between our two natures. For myself, the nature is usually one of hardness, or nurturing, or endurance, but there are others. This flower comes of a plant of simple stock, now dozens of generations removed from that origin, because I’ve been breeding it for quite some time. If I had to put it into words, they would be persistence, or pliability, or longing.” She squinted slightly. “I don’t know quite where that last comes from, but it’s right. And as for what it does, my sense is protection of some kind. In the past, with this one, it’s been a storm of petals that cloaked me in armor, or a red sap that stuck to my wounds, but the manifestation depends on the specific combination of our natures, and the time in which the bud is used.”

“That’s really not very helpful,” I said with a frown.

“Isn’t it?” asked Solace. “Isn’t knowing that you won’t know something helpful?”

“Given time, that seed I planted will sprout and grow, and eventually when it reaches its culmination in the form of a flower, I’ll pinch off the bud and it will die?” I asked. “And all that time and attention for a single spell whose nature I can only guess at?”

“Yes.” Solace nodded. “They are rarely useless, especially if the connection is strong, and they aren’t random, if you know your own nature, and that of the plant you stole the bud from.”

“That still leaves the question of how Vervain did it, if no one else could,” I said. “If he needed a connection to the plants, how did he have them all over the place? I mean, logically he wasn’t tending them. He just … had a knack?”

“Yes,” said Solace. “That’s as much explanation as I was ever given, along with the same warning that no one before or since has done as he’s done.”

“Hax,” I muttered. Then, when I thought about it, I realized that the answer might literally be hax. To the best of my knowledge, the game had not yet done anything that broke its own rules, nor had it fudged any dice. That didn’t mean that those things hadn’t happened, just that the game had plausible deniability. But if Vervain was a Merlin-type, and needed to be wise and mysterious with incredible powers, especially Powers as the Plot Demands, then maybe the game legitimately had hacked him to be that way. And if it hadn’t, then maybe it was something to look into. I was sure that thousands of people had the same thought before, but I was Juniper Smith, and I …

… actually had kind of a shit track record, when I really thought about it.

As we left, I looked in on the seed I had planted. The lesson that Solace had been trying to teach me was one of connection, understanding, and patience, but I wondered whether the game was trying to teach me a lesson too, by bringing Vervain to my attention once again. Whatever was being said to me, if anything, I didn’t understand it.

Chapter 12 - Looper

It did feel kind of weird to take a vacation, mostly because none of us had jobs. Actually, Grak had a job, which was as group warder, but for this one week the work he did was keeping the bottle warded against intruders, which was none too arduous. Solace had a vocation, which was as druid to the Six-Eyed Doe, and she was still doing that; so far as I could see, it involved a lot of walking the domain, changing various things in small ways, usually with the magic that came to her by way of the locus. But that left Amaryllis, Fenn, and myself with only our personal ambitions, and that, of course, led to some discussion.

“How was speaking to the flowers?” Fenn asked me as I came back from the nominal garden. She had come out to greet us with a smile on her face, which meant that she must have been keeping an eye out for when we’d get back. She had been smiling a lot these last few days, giddy, infectious smiles, not just when she saw me, but also when she was talking with the others, or helping prepare food, or bathing in the stream.

“It went well,” I said. “I am not, as yet, a master flower mage.”

“Well boo to that,” said Fenn. She reached forward and took my hand, then led me off away from the house. Solace gave me a smile and a raised eyebrow, and I could tell that all my protestations about ‘taking it slow’ had been understood as blatant lies.

It was weird, officially being in a relationship with Fenn. Weird in a good way. She hadn’t changed at all, except for a wild improvement in her already pretty chipper mood, but somehow the simple knowledge that we were together made her look so much more attractive than I had already found her. I watched her a lot, and caught her watching me, and we would sometimes just smile at each other like we were mentally impaired. I’d often thought that love, especially new love, was simply, literally, that: mental impairment caused by a flood of hormones and neurotransmitters within the brain. I still did think that, but I was in love, so didn’t really care, and I figured that at least during downtime, I could spare a few points of MEN if it meant being happy.

She led me to a part of the field beside the tree where a blanket had been laid down by some eager half-elf feeling a great anticipation at my return. She was wearing a bright-yellow sundress, no doubt stolen from a store somewhere, which revealed her long legs, and her arms, which were scarred in intricately curling patterns.

“I would have been such a help with flower magic,” said Fenn as she flopped down onto the blanket. That too, was likely stolen from somewhere, because what Solace had made available in the main house were mostly furs, and not ones that had seen much working. “Helpful like you wouldn’t even believe.”

I lay down next to her and looked her over, which made her do a small shimmy on the blanket for me, and from there we were kissing each other, which went on for quite a while.

“Can I ask a question?” asked Fenn. As part of that process of getting to know each other on a physical level, I was starting to understand her cues, and from the way she was kissing me, she was telling me to slow down and talk, which I did, a little reluctantly.

“One kiss for one question,” I said.

“Do I have to give you a kiss, or do you have to give me one?” asked Fenn.

I paused at that, looking her over, with my eyes lingering on her lips. “Is there a difference?”

“Oh, you would know if I kissed you,” said Fenn. “So far I’ve just been letting you kiss me. Me kissing you? Totally different experience, very much different, but I would be willing to give you a single one of my extra-special kisses if you would entertain my question.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I will be judging you harshly.” Her tone was light, but I was starting to be able to tell when her nonchalance was forced — a sense I’d been honing even before we’d started dating, not that we had, as yet, gone on a date.

“Do you ever think about stopping?” asked Fenn.

“Ah,” I said, pulling back from her slightly. We were being serious, it seemed. “Meaning, instead of your dream of a big old castle, humble servants to wait on you hand and foot —”

“They would be oiled, muscular men,” Fenn corrected me.

I frowned at that. “And where am I, when you’re with these men?”

“Oh, you would be available,” she said. “Presumably you would be doing your own thing some of the time, in that version of my future.”

“But there’s another version now?” I asked.

“I was asking you the question,” said Fenn. Her eyes kept taking in different parts of my face as she watched me.

“Right,” I said. I looked down at my deformed hand. I was pretty sure that it would have hurt, if it weren’t so numb. “Assuming that I get my soul fixed, and that fixes my hand and ribs?”

“Yes.” Fenn nodded. “Do you ever think about getting to a stable point and simply stopping?”

“I hadn’t, actually,” I said. “Can I do that now?”

“Out loud,” said Fenn. She shifted so that she was sitting up, cross-legged in front of me.

“I’m not great out loud,” I said, shifting my position to match hers.

“Don’t care,” said Fenn.

“Alright,” I said. “Well, if by ‘stopping’ we mean abandoning every quest, saying goodbye to the party, probably not amicably given the things they all want to accomplish with our help … well, we’d have about six million obols worth of gold, depending on how we split things with Amaryllis, and I don’t know much about Aerbian market baskets or exchange rates, but I have to imagine that would provide us with a pretty decent, modest life together, especially since we could supplement the nest egg with actual work.”

“Together?” asked Fenn. Her pointed ears perked at that.

“Sorry,” I said. “We still need to schedule that date, and then see how things go from there.”

“Worst-case scenario, I guess we can just be platonic friends who live together,” said Fenn.

“Could we still kiss, even if we were just platonic friends?” I asked. Wait, did Aerb have a Plato?

“Heck, we could probably figure out how to platonically have sex,” said Fenn, and an uncharacteristic blush came across her cheeks. Not embarrassment, or maybe some of that, but more the rising warmth of anticipation.

“A couple of platonic children?” I asked with a grin.

Fenn turned away, smile fading in an instant. “Quarter-elves.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I … I didn’t put points into my social abilities.”

“S’fine.” Fenn shrugged, turning back toward me. “It’s all fantasy anyway, right?”

“Do you really not want children?” I asked.

“I don’t think they would have it as bad as I did,” said Fenn. “There are better places than Rogbottom ever was, and I would keep them away from elves entirely, but … maybe, possibly, a hypothetical quarter-elf could hide who they were and pass for human. That comes down to variance. And even if they couldn’t hide it, maybe they would happen to fall in with some good people who didn’t really care one way or another. I don’t know. The world is garbage for a lot of other reasons. I never really wanted to bring a child into it.”

“Okay,” I said. “First thing I do, once I’ve ascended to godhood, I’m going to put my boot on the face of this world and say ‘hey, be nicer to half-elves’.”

“But to do that, you need to ascend to godhood,” said Fenn. “Hence, not stopping.”

I hesitated. “I’m not a hugely driven person,” I said. “I’m not like the heroes of stories who have this basic need to go out and right wrongs, or overturn an unjust society. I wasn’t like that back on Earth, and I don’t think that I’m going to be like that here.”

“And with that said,” muttered Fenn, not meeting my eyes.

“And with that said,” I continued, “I believe, in my heart of hearts, that Arthur is waiting for me at the end of this. I would go to any lengths to get him back. He was my best friend. I owe him that.” And as I said it, I began to feel guilty, because here I was, sitting on a blanket in the middle of a meadow with a pretty girl, as though I had forgotten all about that.

“Ah,” said Fenn. “So … no little cottage in the woods with your darling friend Fenn?” she asked.

“Yes, of course we’re going to have that,” I said. “There’s just a mountain of bullshit we need to get through first.”

“Alright,” said Fenn with a nod. “Not that I would have wanted to stop, necessarily, or that I wouldn’t have gotten bored of the contentment, but … it’s been on my mind.”

“And now I get a kiss, for having answered the question?” I asked. “A very special kiss, it was rumored?”

“Yes,” said Fenn. She hesitated slightly. “Last night, was everything … was there a reason that you were satisfied with just, being generous? Was it ...”

“I got an achievement for it,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t trying to get one, that wasn’t why I stopped, it just popped up, after you had finished. That kind of pissed me off, to have the game nose in.”

“Oh,” said Fenn, relaxing slightly. “And was I …” She paused, as though I could finish her sentence for her, which I couldn’t, at all. “Was I within your expectations?”

“I loved touching you,” I said. “I loved watching you as I touched you.” I didn’t fully understand what she was asking me, only that it was related to her hang-ups about sex. An affirmation of her as desirable, along with long nights of attentive lovemaking, seemed like the best way to deal with that. (So far as I could tell from touch alone, half-elven genital topology fell well outside the norms for humans, but it wasn’t any of the weirder scenarios I had been prepared to accept; it hardly seemed like a thing to get worked up over, unless you had a lifetime of people saying that it was.)

“Okay,” said Fenn, breathing out and relaxing. “Now, to properly receive my special kiss, you’re going to have to lie back and remove your pants.”

I was a simple man, and did what I was told.

I went back to the house some time later, while Fenn went to go ride the Six-Eyed Doe, a fairly common occurrence. Everyone seemed to like the magical deer a lot better than I did, and I couldn’t really figure out why that was. I knew my problems with it, like the fact that it could only really express vague emotions, or the way it seemed to be watching me far too often, or the fact that I didn’t really like deer as a species (though it was obviously only deer-shaped). What I couldn’t really figure out was why anyone else liked it.

I wondered how much of it was just a matter of shared culture that I was manifestly blind to, or the cultural weight of the Second Empire and their extermination campaign. I grappled with figuring out an Earth metaphor that might apply. It might be like the dodo being rediscovered, and the attention that would be lavished on it by people who saw it as a symbol of the horrors of exploitative colonialism. Or maybe it would be the same way that American culture had treated Native Americans, as though they were this font of intense spiritual wisdom rather than primarily being displaced people with a culture that had been frayed at the edges. Or maybe it was like seeing a number tattooed on an old woman’s arm and having this moment of shocked realization at what must have happened to her.

Even Grak seemed to like the Six-Eyed Doe; he went for walks with it, and reached up on his tiptoes to pat its flank. I was pretty sure that the dwarves, with their underground clans, had basically squat to do with the Second Empire or any shared cultural responsibility for what had happened to the loci, but there he was, bonding with it.

This wasn’t entirely academic. The historical records showed Uther Penndraig having seven companion-analogues, his Knights of the Square Table (I groaned whenever I thought about that name). However many companions were available to me, the Six-Eyed Doe was taking up one of those spots. More than that, I didn’t know what kinds of impacts increasing its loyalty might have, or whether taking it out of the bottle and introducing it to the world might require a stronger bond between the two of us. I could at least find some common ground with Solace, but with the magical deer? At best, I could practice meditation and feeling a sense of awe, or helping out to make sure that the bottled domain stayed in balance, but that seemed like a very slow path to building rapport.

(Amaryllis, Fenn, and Grak all got a paragraph-length character biography within the game’s “Companions” screen, which I was pretty sure happened on hitting Loyalty lvl 2. 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.)

The house at the center of the bottle was made from a massive tree, which seemed to have grown with an interior space suited for humanoid habitation all on its own. None of the wood had been cut or broken away, it just followed its own organic flow that happened to make openings for windows, entryways that approximated doors, a few flat surfaces that could be used as tables, and roots that happened to run parallel for a place to sit. Scattered through the large, curved room in the center were various alcoves, some only reachable by climbing, where the beds were. I use the term ‘bed’ loosely, because apparently ‘textiles’ were not a watchword of the druidic grove, and of course they had nothing like box springs.

We had, of late, taken over the floor space. A large, ornate desk lifted from the study of Weik Handum (by Fenn, naturally) sat there, clashing with the rest of the naturalistic furniture. This was where Amaryllis sat, with papers in ordered piles in front of her and a book open in front of her. She was making notes, with Grak beside her, looking on. I could hear Solace in the area of the big curved room that served as a kitchen, but she was just out of sight.

“What book is that?” I asked.

Amaryllis set down her pencil and turned to me. “I really don’t want to bring you back down to earth, but would it be possible for us to set some ground rules?”

“Uh,” I said. “About … what?”

“When I went out to get some water for Solace, I saw you and Fenn,” said Amaryllis. Saw us doing what, she didn’t say, but I wasn’t so tone-deaf I didn’t understand her meaning.

“Ah,” I said. “I’d thought we were, um, far enough away.”

“You were not,” said Grak. He sniffed. “I put up a ward against sound around your alcove. Be warned it will fail as soon as the bottle moves.”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling my cheeks go red.

“Well I thought it was wonderful,” said Solace, coming in from the kitchen with a smile. “This place has been devoid of the sounds of pleasure for too long.”

And then I was really blushing, because it was one thing to get caught out, twice, in an embarrassing way, but it was another to get appreciation from a third party. I would have called Solace a creep for listening in, but it was really my fault. I could have asked Grak for some privacy wards, and I hadn’t, mostly because I had still had it in my head that Fenn and I were taking things slow, which the last half hour had shown me was not entirely accurate.

“I … would really rather not talk about any of this,” I said. “We’ll try to be more considerate of the close quarters.”

“That’s all I ask,” Amaryllis said. “I really don’t want to put a damper on”—there was a very slight hitch in her voice, which I might have imagined—“your happiness.”

“So what’s the book?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

“It’s a reprint of On the Nature of Narrative, by Uther Penndraig,” said Amaryllis.

I frowned slightly. “Let me guess, part of Fenn’s expansive collection?”

“Grak and I went into town,” said Amaryllis.

I stared at her, then looked to Grak, and finally to Solace. “This isn’t what we agreed on,” I said. “Using the teleportation key —”

“We didn’t,” said Amaryllis. “Last time we moved the bottle, I put us within a two-mile walk of an unremarkable mid-sized city without a touchstone.” She bit her lip slightly. “And you’re right, I should have told you, but I was feeling claustrophobic and needed to get some fresh air.”

“Sorry, you’re going to chastise me for being inconsiderate when you left without telling me?” I asked. “Pot, kettle, et cetera. You put your life in danger, which means all of our lives.”

“The noise of your sex made this place feel too small,” said Grak.

“Nice and cozy, I thought,” said Solace with a shrug.

I was blushing again, but didn’t really have a good response, because me protesting that we hadn’t actually had sex seemed like it wasn’t all that great of a defense. Amaryllis had said that she was happy for us but a little forlorn, and … well, yes, we were being really really insensitive about that.

“Sorry,” I said again.

“I’m sorry too,” sighed Amaryllis.

“Sorry about what?” Fenn asked as she came in through the door. She was looking a little wind-swept; the locus could run incredibly fast, faster than even its long legs would have dictated. The smile she gave me was radiant, like she had just stepped off a plane to greet me at the gate after weeks apart.

“The noise, last night,” I said.

I could see Fenn blush at that. She was very pretty when she blushed, and it called to mind the color in her cheeks when she was kissing me. “Well, I blame Juniper,” said Fenn.

“Urk,” I said, grabbing at my chest. “Betrayed by my most loyal companion.”

“Uther had an obsession with narrative,” said Amaryllis, a little too loudly and quickly. She had moved back over to the table and was looking at the book. “It doesn’t show in his body of work, but if we assume that most of those novels and plays are plagiarized from or inspired by Earth, then we can still fall back on his non-fiction, which probably pulls from the ideas of Earth as well, but still contains his own framing of those ideas.”

“Amaryllis is searching for meaning in our journey,” said Grak.

“Yes, but, no. Uther searched for meaning in his journey,” said Amaryllis. “His personal life story mapped fairly well to the model of universal narrative he constructed, which his modern editor thinks is just an aspect of Uther’s mythmaking, or maybe that Uther’s works reflected who he was as a person and his own personal journey informed those works. Reading this, it’s pretty clear to me that Uther wasn’t just talking in the abstract, he was grappling with something.”

“So it’s a clue?” I asked.

“Not everything is a clue,” said Fenn and Grak in tandem. She moved forward to give him a high five, and he grudgingly returned it. I was starting to get the feeling that Fenn was just more popular than I was.

“Yes, I think it’s a clue,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t think that we’ll be able to predict too much by fitting our adventures to any kind of narrative structure, though I’ve started on the process, but I do think it might provide insight into how Uther thought, and from there, maybe into where he went.” She flipped a few pages back in the book, and gestured for me to come closer.

(It seemed a little unfair to me that Amaryllis hadn’t gotten any less pretty, now that I was with Fenn. I don’t want there to be any mistake about it, I was basically all-in on this new relationship, but Amaryllis was still stunningly gorgeous, and my heart beat just a little bit faster when I stood next to her. I wished there was some attraction switch I could turn off in my brain, but there wasn’t.)

“Here,” she said, pointing to the page. “It’s a circle. The hero starts at the top, in a place of comfort, then gets the call to adventure —”

“Right,” I said. “This is cribbed from Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it doesn’t look anything different from what’s in there.” I had only read it because Arthur had insisted. This was more proof that Uther and Arthur were the same person, not that I needed it.

“Oh,” said Amaryllis. “So this is just more plagiarism? Words he repeated but which held no significance?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll add it to my reading list, I guess, but ...” I traced my finger around the circle, which I was well-familiar with, because Arthur had been familiar with it. His biography had even mentioned the Refusal of the Call. Going around, Vervain was supposedly his Mentor, the Crossing of the Threshold would have been … what, trying to seize the sword from the stone the first time? I would need to read both books in order to figure it out. “What does your provisional map look like?”

“For him, or for us?” asked Amaryllis.

I looked over her notes, which were done in her meticulous handwriting, with my character sheet sitting there among the other papers.

“For him,” I said. “I don’t understand the story map, given that he lived on Aerb for so long. Traditionally, the end of the story would be when he defeats the Dark King and takes power in Anglecynn.”

Amaryllis shook her head. “He talks about both cycles of repetition and nested cycles,” she said. She flipped forward another few pages, to show another diagram. This one had lots of circles on it, some in chains and others as circles within circles. “He says, basically, that narrative is infinitely extensible, that any conflict and its resolution can be mapped as being a number of smaller conflicts and smaller resolutions, some of which are taking place concurrently. If you really wanted to, you could write a sequel to any story, so long as someone is left alive, because the hero’s journey starts in a place of comfort and returns to it with something having changed, and then you’re all set up for the next journey to begin.”

“That sounds almost nihilistic, if we take the context as Uther talking about his own life,” I said. “The story never ends, because there’s always more, barring death.”

“That’s life,” said Amaryllis. “He makes that explicit in a few places, the endings of stories are, in his view, just a contrivance, or a contract between author and audience about where to stop the continual cycles. If you were looking at his life, and trying to map it all out in accordance with these ‘journeys’, then I think that the cleavage points of circles are pretty clear.”

“He thought that our brains were wired for stories,” I said. “Arthur did.” It was easier to say his name now, because he was real in this world, somewhere, or at least had been. “Given that wiring, people see stories in things that aren’t stories all the time,” I continued. “The brain gets set up for stories, and fits anything close enough into that story shape.”

“You’re saying that not everything is a story?” asked Amaryllis. Fenn smiled and raised her hand for a high five, which Amaryllis left hanging.

“I’m saying”—I stopped and paused to think about it as Fenn high-fived herself—“I don’t know. If Arthur found it compelling, then he’s probably worth listening to, because he was the one who told me that about brains, and he would have done his best not to fall into that trap.”

“Tell him the theory,” said Grak.

Amaryllis frowned at him, but turned back to me and started in. “Let’s pretend that you’re Uther Penndraig,” she said. “You believe that life is a series of narratives, not in the sense that you can map narrative patterns onto life events, but maybe … there’s some controlling entity that’s responsible for spinning up a new tale. You’re part of a game, possibly, but it’s a game that’s trying to display these circles. How do you test it?”

“It depends on the genre,” I replied. “You said yourself that life never really ends, there’s always another struggle, another conflict. Unless you’re a god, you can’t really bring a final close to any of it, you can only have … breaks, I guess, or downtime. Places where the tension eases.”

“If we chart Penndraig’s life as a series of journeys, calls to adventure, metaphorical deaths and rebirths, then returns to comfort and a new normalcy, we can define a few large ones,” said Amaryllis. “And as a matter of fact, there are often dramatizations of those journeys. Penndraig against the Dark King ends with him restored to the throne. Meeting of the Seventeen Swords goes from the time he becomes king to just after the First Empire finally finds its footing. After that, there’s the Invasion of the Ice Wizards, then the Apocalypse Demon, then the Wandering Blight — those are the major ones, from what we’ll call the Foundational Era, when threats started coming out of the woodwork to stop him.”

“Huh,” I said. “Were they all external threats that came to meet him?”

“Yes.” Amaryllis nodded. “And if we accept the world as artifice, as being as fantastically centered around him as you think it is around you — not that you’re necessarily wrong — then what defines the next era?”

I thought about that for a bit. “He couldn’t stay in his castle, with his wife and his children,” I said. “He couldn’t run the Empire he’d built. It depends on genre, and on the—”— Dungeon Master—
“—person controlling the narrative, but if the world is going to keep giving you explicit conflicts, a new call to adventure whenever you rest on your laurels, then staying in the castle only means that the new threat or conflict has to be one that seeks you out.” I had only skimmed the remainder of the biography, but I knew enough about how he had shaped Aerb to know what came next. Besides, if you were thinking in terms of narratives, then it was pretty obvious. “Sitting on the throne means that you’re on the defense, forced into action when adventure comes calling,” I said. “If you think there’s going to be a new plot no matter what you do, then the smart thing would be to be proactive and seek that plot out, so that your family and kingdom can get on without being at risk from the outside.”

“The Roaming Era,” said Amaryllis. “After seven years of facing down threats, he picked up his sword, put on his armor, and went back out into the world to right every wrong that he could find.”

“And there were no more external threats?” I asked. “After three major attacks against his home, or kingdom, or empire, there was nothing that he had to come racing back for, something that only he could handle?”

“None.” Amaryllis nodded. “There are alternate explanations, of course, especially given how tight-lipped he was about his motives. I haven’t been able to find anything in his writing that would confirm that he went wandering in order to make the world stop throwing its own threats at him. It is, on the face of it, simply insane to think that the world would work like that. But —”

“But it might?” asked Fenn. “That’s what we’re saying, that we might live in a world where we have to go out and pick fights because otherwise the fights will keep coming to us?”

“That’s why we assassinated Larkspur,” said Grak.

“Assassination is a strong word,” said Amaryllis with a frown in his direction. “And he did come to us.”

“But you’re saying that we’re going to have to keep fighting forever?” asked Fenn.

“No,” said Amaryllis. She locked eyes with me. “I’m saying that Juniper might.” She shrugged. “If the hypothesis is correct, anyway. If Juniper’s ultimate aim is to find out what happened to the Lost King, for ill or good, then the only reason I think narrative is a promising line of inquiry is that I don’t think anyone else has tried following it before. That said, there are hundreds of theories about what happened to Uther, and I’m going to have to dig into them just to get a sense of what evidence everyone else has. We’re in a good position. If we assume that Uther Penndraig was dream-skewered, and more than that, a member of Juniper’s Dungeons & Dragons group, then that gives us an insight into him that no one else has.”

“If he really was Arthur, then he spent about forty years on Aerb,” I said. “I knew him as a teenager. All of his formative experiences were here, all the development of his ideas, he had a wife and children, loyal companions for, again, nearly forty years.”

“Even if that’s true, you also made this world,” said Amaryllis. There was something hard in her eyes.

“Not really,” I said, wincing. “I would say that it cribs from a lot of the worlds I made, but it’s … it’s an amalgam, a synthesis of those ideas, I didn’t make Aerb, I made a bunch of prototypes. And some of the ideas aren’t even mine, they’re just … ideas that I might have had. Or places where I cribbed from someone else.”

“You don’t think that you’re the closest thing to Uther Penndraig in this world?” asked Amaryllis.

“No,” I said. “I am.” I doubted that I would ever be Arthur’s equal here, but unless any of the other members of the group reared their heads, then “teenager from our Bumblefuck, Kansas D&D group” was about as small of a subset as you could get.

“And what you would do, if you were trapped in this cycle like he was?” asked Amaryllis.

“I guess I would do what he did,” I said. “I would be proactive. I would go out conquering and slaying evils, and if I had to do it indefinitely, then so be it.”

“Each time winning by the skin of your lips?” asked Fenn.

“Skin of your teeth,” I replied.

“Teeth don’t have skin,” said Fenn with a frown.

“Yeah, look, it’s like a biblical thing or something,” I said, trying to move on. We seemed to get tripped on this kind of thing constantly, which was part of why I kept feeling like my list of things to know was growing out of control.

“What’s a biblical?” asked Grak with a frown of his own.

“I’m fairly sure that the idiom came from the mynah,” said Solace, “They do, in fact, have skin on their teeth, and are renowned for their ability to escape calamities.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Okay,” I said. “Fenn has a point.”

“About teeth?” asked Grak.

“If I were trapped in a cycle of endless conflicts and resolutions, and I didn’t know whether I was going to win every time, and I thought that maybe each battle might be my last, I wouldn’t want to continue on, I would want to stop and go live in a quaint cottage somewhere.” I glanced over at Fenn who was standing beside me, and she gave me a quick kiss on the lips. “Thanks,” I said.

I did my best to keep my heart rate down and not blush as I turned back to Amaryllis. “He was always more driven than me. He was in all the clubs, he was prepared for college, he read five times as many books as I did, he was prepared to defend every absurd thought that occurred to him — he was more of a fighter than I was. Non-literally, that is.”

(I was pretty sure that if I had died instead of him, the idea of committing suicide wouldn’t even have occurred to Arthur.)

“So, I think he would have lasted longer,” I continued. “But maybe he reached the end of his rope, in which case …” I looked down at the diagram, of circles within circles, and a long string of circles that represented sequels without end. “If it’s just an endless series of conflicts and resolutions, then there’s no escape, but maybe you could think of it all as being embedded in a single, enormous, forty-year story. In which case — when were the infernoscopes invented?”

“20 FE,” said Amaryllis.

“If he was trying to complete the loop on the in-world layer, then maybe he was trying to go into the hells and rescue his family there, or maybe banish the hells entirely,” I said. That didn’t quite feel right to me though. “If he were me, then maybe he would try to find the god of this place and have a talk, or a fight if he could manage it somehow.”

“Which of the gods?” asked Solace.

I shook my head. “I mean, something brought him here” —or recreated him here—
“so, maybe, he went to go find that entity, whatever it was. I’m … not actually sure that logic extends properly though, because obviously if the world runs on narrative — no, if Uther’s life ran on narrative, then it seems like the person or thing that sucked him into this world would be outside of that narrative structure. It doesn’t quite make sense to try to close the loop that way.”

“We’re too deep in assumptions,” said Grak.

“I agree,” said Amaryllis. “We need more direct evidence that can point us in a helpful direction. Joon, I’d like for you to think on it more, and I’ll bring you whatever it is I can find.” She hesitated. “If you’re comfortable with that.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “You know your own history far better than I ever could.” It made me slightly uneasy to entrust this to her, but it was clear that the one book I had on Uther Penndraig barely scratched the surface, and I was pretty sure I knew the next turn that this conversation was going to take.

“So in other words,” said Fenn, “it’s reasonable to suspect that Juniper can’t sit around either? Otherwise we’re going to get visited by a demon bent on world destruction?”

“I’m building a timeline of what’s happened since Comfort,” said Amaryllis. “It’s not done yet. And Grak is right, we’re too far into assumptions. We don’t want to stand still anyway, that doesn’t further our mutual goals.” She glanced at Grak. “Grak is the exception, given his payment schedule.”

Grak shrugged.

“The more important part of charting what’s happened to Juniper is in mapping it to both what happened to Uther, how Uther thought about narrative, and how the logic of what’s come before applies to what might happen after,” Amaryllis continued. She glanced briefly at Fenn. “But it’s a work in progress, and I don’t feel comfortable using it to make predictions, as yet.”

“Do you think I’m going to die?” asked Fenn. I looked at Fenn and saw unexpected tension on her face, mixed with anger.

“There are too many variables,” said Amaryllis. “It’s too much guesswork.” Fenn continued to scowl at her. Amaryllis flipped through the book, until she got to a specific line, which she read out loud. “‘It is a universal truth that narrative hates stasis. Narrative is built around interlocking rings of conflict and resolution; to the extent that a narrative allows stasis, it is by recycling these rings of conflict, repeating that which should by rights have been resolved. Yet that can only continue for a certain amount of time, at which point the audience grows bored, and anyone who cares about narrative qua narrative will make a fundamental change at that point, often to the detriment of the protagonist.’”

“Okay,” said Fenn. “I’m officially not a fan of this theory.” She turned away from us and left the house, not quite stomping away.

“Alright,” I said with a nod to Amaryllis. “I guess you better tell me what happened with Uther’s wife.”

"It wasn't his wife," said Amaryllis. "It was all the others."

Chapter 13 - Bond Girl

“Uther had a lot of love interests who died?” I asked. “I mean, he had love interests … in addition to his wife?”

“Which version of history do you want?” asked Amaryllis.

“I want the truth,” I replied.

“I don’t know the truth,” said Amaryllis. “Juniper, you have to understand that this was all five hundred years ago, and he was a very private man. Even if he wasn’t, the fact that he was such a central figure in the founding of the First Empire, not to mention the dynastic head of what would become the Lost King’s Court, not to mention that he founded two of the athenaeums — he was really, really important, and his role in history very quickly became a matter of politics. The historicity is complicated.”

“What are my options, as far as versions go?” I asked. What I really wanted was a clear, concise explanation of why Fenn was upset so I could go comfort her and explain that everything was going to be alright.

“There are two extremes, one where Uther is a saint, the other where his terminal flaw was a love of women,” said Amaryllis. “There’s a temptation to say that the truth lies somewhere in between, but I think that’s something weak-minded people say when faced with two options they can’t distinguish between. For the most part, the history books sweep it all under the rug as unimportant.”

“Fine, give me the version where he’s a saint,” I said. Arthur hadn’t been a perfect person, I wasn’t so blinded by his passing as to believe that, but Amaryllis seemed to be implying that some people saw Uther as one of those politicians constantly embroiled in sex scandals, and that really seemed out of character for him.

“His marriage to Zona was a political one,” Amaryllis began.

“There was one before that,” said Solace.

Amaryllis frowned at her. “No,” she said, but it was almost a question.

“There was.” Solace shrugged. “Or at least, that was what I always heard. If you’ve heard differently, then perhaps I’m wrong. In my life I’ve spoken to a number of people who knew him, but perhaps we should trust the histories that you’ve read.”

“I’ve met three of the gods in the flesh,” said Amaryllis. She didn’t try to keep the defensiveness from her voice. “I’ve known plenty of people who met him.”

“And they don’t mention Morana?” asked Solace.

“Oh,” said Amaryllis. She furrowed her brow slightly. “She wasn’t ...” She turned to me. “Morana was a spy for the Dark King, one that Uther turned to his side. The Dark King killed her not long before he met with Uther in single combat for the final time. But Uther and Morana never—”—she looked at Solace—“I hadn’t heard the theory that they were intimate.”

Solace shrugged.

“And then after that, Zona was a political marriage,” I said, prompting her to continue. I wanted to leave the house and go find Fenn, but Fenn must have known at least part of this story, and if she was upset about it and what it might mean for our own future, then I didn’t want to force her to tell me this story.

“Zona Delzora was the Queen of the Zorish Isles,” said Amaryllis. “They had been part of Anglecynn for hundreds of years, but declared independence when the Dark King swept in, and made a series of treaties with him as he tried to quell the rebellions. The Zorish Isles presented barriers to trade for Anglecynn — this was before bulk teleportation — but they had also been destabilized by the Dark King’s passing. Joining two countries in personal union is never a simple thing, but it was the most elegant solution to their problems for a number of reasons.”

“And then they fell in love,” I said, because obviously that was how that story went.

“They were both private people,” said Amaryllis. “There are too many stories about them that are pure fabrication.”

“He resisted her,” said Grak. “She wanted to seal their marriage with a pregnancy. He refused because he did not love her. It took time for them to love each other. That story was told to me when I was promised for pair-bonding. I don’t know whether it is true.”

I felt a chill at that. It wasn’t just Amaryllis who had that burden placed on her, it was Grak too, and where she would undoubtedly have gone through with a political marriage, Grak had left his clan behind rather than accept one.

“Well, the way I was told it, he was distraught over Morana,” said Solace, “Zona loved him from almost the moment that she first heard he was going against the Dark King. It was politically convenient, but she was also infatuated with him, and he resisted her because he hadn’t gotten over Morana.”

“There are too many stories,” said Amaryllis with a frown. “We can just leave it at there being too many stories. It’s important, insofar as it informs who he was and what we can take from the narrative theory, but we do not know. Putting forward more possibilities is not helpful.”

“What do you think it was?” I asked. She had compared herself to Zona; I wanted to know what she thought that comparison meant.

“I have no idea,” said Amaryllis, folding her arms across her chest.

“Most probable?” I asked.

She watched me for a moment. “Fine,” she said. “If, if, he was from the same culture as you, I would say that the most likely explanation is that he had some discomfort with the idea of an arranged marriage without any element of love. That might explain why he was derelict in his duty.”

“By not inseminating her right away,” said Grak with a nod.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “One of the things that the stories have in common is that it took some time for them to consummate the marriage, so that part, at least, seems like it would be true. If Zona was typical of her status and culture, she would have been ready and willing to receive him.”

“But they were in love, eventually?” I asked. “And she survived into old age?”

“She died at fifty, a few years after Uther disappeared,” said Amaryllis. “If she hadn’t, Anglecynn probably wouldn’t have gotten so close to civil war. But for most of her life, she was sickly.” She pursed her lips. “You want to go after Fenn, is that why you’re jumping ahead?”

I nodded. “Not that I don’t find this interesting, but I want you to get to the point. Why does she think that she might die?”

“Whatever happened between Uther and Zona, she gave him two sons and a daughter, all in fairly quick succession,” said Amaryllis. “This was during the period when the First Empire had been founded but not all of the eventual member polities had joined. A year after Dahlia was born, the ice wizards invaded, and Zona was kidnapped. Uther brought her back, but they didn’t have terribly much time together before the Apocalypse Demon arrived and began controlling her mind from afar. It was the Wandering Blight that cost her half her body, everything below her rib cage. She was kept alive in torment by powerful healing magics for a full month before Uther managed to manipulate himself into a forge frenzy — no, I don’t know how, he only did it once — and crafted her six mechanical legs that numbed her to the pain and allowed her mobility. Still, from that point on she was thin and frail, despite his best efforts.”

“Shit,” I said. I could see how that would map to a narrative. Each major conflict he faced imperiled his wife in some way, just to add some interpersonal drama to the proceedings. And from what Amaryllis was saying, if the narrative theory was true, and his life was shaped the way it was for an overarching reason, then this was the best-case scenario for Fenn.

“In the story of Uther as saint,” Amaryllis continued, “this is the part where his wife begins bringing nubile young women in to give him sexual satisfaction. He refuses, because he loves her, and … it’s presented as a farce, usually, with all sorts of naked women stepping out from behind the curtains to ambush him at inappropriate times.” I could tell that she didn’t find that funny, but I heard a faint chuckle from Solace. I knew that Fenn would probably find it funny too, if not for the possibility that it would end up paralleling our own lives.

“And eventually he relented,” I said.

“He had an assistant,” said Amaryllis. “She was strong and capable, one of the first computers, gifted with an organizing efficiency that many powerful men would kill to have by their side. She traveled with Uther when he left to seek out adventures. Three months in, she was skinned alive by a dragon. Any romance between them is purely speculative, but it was the start of a trend.”

“Morana was the start of the trend,” said Solace, shaking her head.

“But there is a trend?” I asked. “A trend of more than three, if we’re counting what happened to his wife?”

“Twenty,” said Amaryllis. “That’s approximate. He was a private person, it’s not always clear what his relationship to those women was, but it was clear enough that people talked.”

“And horrible things happened to all of them?” I asked. “Twenty women, that’s about one a year from age thirty-five to fifty-five, he had to have seen the pattern. Other people had to have seen the pattern, I — I don’t understand why anyone past the tenth would have gotten within a hundred feet of him.”

“Communications then weren’t what they are now,” said Amaryllis. “There was no international radio network, no teleportation network, none of the mechanisms that we use to make the Empire of Common Cause a cohesive political entity. The First Empire fell apart for a reason. It probably would have even if Uther hadn’t been irreplaceable. And as for the women, there were many theories as to what, exactly, was going on. It was common enough to say that there was no need for a deeper explanation; Uther traveled the world, seeking out its most dangerous possible places, and the fact that people died around him was a natural consequence of that.”

“He would have seen it,” I said. I started pacing, just to have somewhere to put my energy. “If our theory is that he started wandering the world in order to be away from his wife and children, then obviously he had to have seen it.”

“I do think that’s a natural consequence of this narrative theory and how he would have interpreted his own life,” Amaryllis agreed.

“Then how could he?” I snapped. “He’d have known after the, the fifth one surely, but he just — kept going in the knowledge that they would die?”

“Do you need to take a break?” asked Amaryllis.

I stopped and took a breath. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping to figure out something to tell Fenn. Either a hole to poke in this theory, or a reassuring alternate explanation, or … something.”

“Does it need to be true?” asked Amaryllis.

And that actually gave me pause, because I guess on some level I was a stupid asshole that just wanted the problem to go away. There was probably a world where I said that no, it didn’t need to be true, so long as it was convincing. “Yes,” I said. “It needs to be true. Or, if not true, because we don’t know the truth, then something that might mean that my life here isn’t fucked.”

“She’s not your life,” said Amaryllis.

I turned away from her at that and started to walk out of the house, then turned back and took a deep breath, unclenching my fists and trying to relax my muscles. I tapped into blood magic to slow my heart rate, though I wasn’t sure that would actually do anything to get me in a better frame of mind. “I know that,” I said. “I know that this is bigger and more important than what’s going on between Fenn and me. I’m sorry for not approaching this rationally.”

Loyalty increased: Amaryllis lvl 13!

Loyalty increased: Grak lvl 6!

“No, I’m sorry,” said Amaryllis. “I shouldn’t have —”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’d still like to hear the other explanations for what happened to these women. You said that some people didn’t see the need for a deeper explanation, but for the people who did, what did they come up with?”

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Amaryllis. “Some of it I’ve only read this morning and still need some time to process. If you take Uther as a more complicated person — I’m not saying anything about your friend, only about how people view a very opaque historical figure — then he and Zona had a loveless marriage, and his philandering predates her injuries, with all the stories about their love being akin to propaganda, or possibly literal propaganda. And if that’s the case, then perhaps the unifying force behind those deaths is Zona herself. I don’t personally believe it, but I need to do more research. I need to do a lot more research. It’s possible that the meme has no basis in reality.”

“Meme?” I asked.

“A meme is a concept or idea that spreads from person to person,” said Grak.

“No, I know what a meme is,” I said. “I just didn’t know that was a thing that you had on Aerb. Was the term … was the ‘meme’ meme introduced by Uther?”

Amaryllis nodded. “He believed that ideas were important and devoted a fair amount of his energy to spreading beneficial ones far and wide.”

“Hum,” said Solace. “Perhaps it would be better to say that he spread the ideas that he thought were beneficial far and wide.”

Amaryllis seemed like she was about to say something, but perhaps the subtext of what Solace had said became clear to her, because she stayed quiet. The subtext wasn’t clear to me, but at a guess, I’d have said that you didn’t get a Second Empire without a First Empire, and some of the beneficial memes that I would have tried to spread were things like global (hexal) connectedness, cooperation against greater threats, systemization of information and knowledge, economic interlocking, and the ordering of society. If Arthur had kicked this world into the Enlightenment, or at least laid the groundwork for it, then I could see how a druid would feel the stirrings of rebellion against that.

“What do you need from me, to get answers?” I asked. “Are there resources that I can devote to helping you, brainpower I can add, something to help speed up you trying to, first, figure out whether there’s actually anything to this narrative theory, and second, the bounds of it, and third, what I’m supposed to do about it?”

“Grak and I have been working on it this morning,” said Amaryllis. “None of it was ready. You can go tell Fenn that. I might have made her worry for nothing. And even if Uther was onto something in how he spoke of narratives, even if you’re a mirror to him, then that doesn’t mean that the rules are the same. She might have more in common with the Knights than with the lovers. So far as I know, for Uther they never coincided, but we can’t be sure who was or wasn’t linked to him like we are to you. Grak and I will work on it more.”

That left nothing for me to do. “You want to cut me out of the loop?” I asked.

“It’s too personal for you,” said Grak. “You can’t look at it with clear eyes.”

“That’s probably true,” I said. Not just because of Fenn, but Arthur too. “The risk you run is that you present a case for me and I instantly shoot a hole in it, because I’m the only one capable of seeing that hole. And beyond that … I wouldn’t expect this place to have stories in the same sense that plays and books do, because the trappings, at least so far, are all from tabletop games, and stories work differently there. It’s less clean. I’ll help and try to stay rational about it.”

“This was supposed to be time off,” said Solace in a mild tone. “It’s good for the body, mind, and soul to be carefree, when there’s any allowance for it.”

“I’m not sure there is,” said Amaryllis. “If the narrative theory is true, or at least has a grain of truth, then we have a limit on how long we can sit in one place. Figuring out that limit would be important.”

“Ah, well,” said Solace, “I’m sure we think very differently about understanding.”

“I’m going to go find Fenn,” I said to Amaryllis. “Let me know when you have something.”

There weren’t that many places to go within the bottle; from the tree house in the center, it was a half mile to every edge, though the house was slightly off-center. The first thing I looked for was the giant deer, which wasn’t too hard to spot, and as I moved closer to it, I saw Fenn, in her yellow sundress and black glove, holding her bow and looking up, with the doe sleeping quietly beside her.

“Hey,” I waved to her as I got closer.

“Hey,” she said, eyes toward the sky. “Wanna see something neat?”

“Sure,” I replied.

Fenn raised the bow above her head, materialized an arrow in her gloved hand, then fired it straight up. “Okay,” she said, tossing the bow to the ground and drawing out an apple from Sable. “Watch and be amazed.” She licked her lips as she looked up in the air and held the apple out in front of her.

“Fenn, is this safe?” I asked, panic rising slightly.

She gave the apple a small toss and withdrew her hand just as the arrow came silently dropping down. It pierced through the apple in mid-air and then drove into the ground with the apple caught on the fletching.

“Ta da!” she said.

“That was actually really impressive,” I said, moving closer to her. It was actually so impressive that I didn’t think it was within the realm of possibility for a human.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do that a month ago,” said Fenn, looking at the pierced apple. “I’ve gotten better without much in the way of practice. And my luck has gotten a lot stronger than it was too, which should be impossible without at least a hundred years under my belt.” She turned to me. “So those are the upsides.”

“Not including my amazing company?” I asked.

“Well, that too,” said Fenn. She held up her hand. “I’ve got a nifty glove, and there was that armor I had for a bit before I was literally cut into two pieces and spilled the majority of my blood on the forest floor.” She gave me a nonchalant shrug. “Oh, plus I’ve gotten to kill a lot of assholes lately.”

“You take pleasure from that?” I asked.

“I figure if you’re going to do it, then you might as well enjoy it,” said Fenn. “I’ve spent most of my adult life killing the undead, it makes it easy to just think of people as bodies, not actual living, breathing creatures with their own hopes and dreams. And even then, it’s been a lot of assholes. Asshole hopes, asshole dreams.”

“I get their names,” I said, pointing to my eyes. “Most of the time, anyway. I don’t really know how the game decides between what’s a named and non-named character, but —”

“Can you not call it a game?” asked Fenn. She took off her glove and tossed it to the ground.

“Sorry,” I said. “The … interface?”

“No, something better than that,” said Fenn. “How about washater, does that work for you?”

“More elfish?” I asked.

“It means something like game or system,” said Fenn. “A set of artificial rules. How have you not learned Elfish yet?” Wah-sha-tehr, a set of rules, five words of Elfish down, thousands to go, plus a whole new set of rules. Yay.

“I tried learning Groglir with Grak. It didn’t really take in the way I hoped it would,” I said, “The, um, washater didn’t seem to want to grant me the ability to speak it after an hour or two, which means that either I didn’t get enough basic knowledge and practice in, or maybe … I don’t know, maybe it’s just not something that it’s ever going to help me with. D&D always fudged the concept of language. Most games do.”

“We should play some D&D,” said Fenn. “We’re taking some time off to recuperate, why not do a thing that you like doing? You said that it was best with one dungeon master and four people, better to do it now before we get another companion. And besides, Amaryllis has her head up her butt about narratives, but she’s going off of plays and stories. For all that you talk — incessantly talk — about games, we’ve never played one.”

“I … huh,” I said. “That actually makes a lot of sense. I knew I kept you around for a reason.”

“Oh, only a reason?” asked Fenn with a smile.

“Maybe if I dug deep I could list a few more,” I said. I shifted my weight and tried to formulate what I wanted to say next. “Did you want to talk about the downsides of being with me?”

“Not really,” said Fenn. “Our lovely locus helped me to calm down, and … you’re working on the problem, if there is one?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you have a quest?” she asked.

“I … no, I don’t,” I said.

I wasn’t even sure how that would work. Obviously if there was such a thing as a narrative, presumably being controlled by the Dungeon Master, then having a quest to defeat the force of that narrative would be a severe mixing of layers. Did that make four layers in total now? There was the reality of Aerb, the game layer that sat aside from it, and then the super-reality where all this was being simulated, or if it wasn’t actually a simulation, then the true reality that it was sitting on. I wasn’t sure that narrative had its own layer in all this; maybe it was better to think of it as an agent with multi-layer access, like the Dungeon Master. Or maybe narrative was just a manifestation of the Dungeon Master.

“Well, even if there’s no quest, I would prefer for this to be at the top of the queue,” said Fenn.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Fenn, if anything happened to you —”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it,” replied Fenn with a frown.

“I don’t want to let it fester,” I said.

Fenn sighed. “If I spent time focusing on every shitty thing in my life, I wouldn’t have time to get anything done,” she said. “Maybe this is a problem, maybe it’s not, maybe you can do something about it, maybe you can’t. Maybe I’m doomed to die, or at least be horribly maimed. More than I already have been, anyway.” She glanced at her scars, and at the thin, faded red line that still marked where she’d been cut in half. “I trust you and the others to figure things out and tell me whatever is best for me. Well, I only mostly trust Amaryllis, as much as I might like her. But you’ll be there to supervise.”

“I did think the timing was suspect,” I said.

“You show a remarkable lack of tact last night, and then in the morning she has a new theory that means we can’t be together?” asked Fenn.

“Sorry, I showed a lack of tact?” I asked with a laugh.

“Well, it was really very rude of you,” said Fenn, smiling slightly. “But honestly, I don’t think that Mary often does things for herself, she said that she would slit my throat if she had to—”—Fenn saw my expression—“oh, no, it was a unicorn blood thing, she preceded that by saying that she liked me quite a lot, and after she said she was willing to kill me, she said that she hoped that she never had to, so I really thought it was sweet, in its own way.”

“I might have to talk with her about that,” I said.

“Please don’t,” said Fenn. “Is it any different from what you thought of her already?”

“I guess not,” I said. Amaryllis was stronger than me, in a scary sort of way; I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to kill her, even if I thought that was the smart thing to do. The thought of it made me a little sick. In my mind’s eye, I stayed my hand.

Fenn stepped closer to me and gave me a slow kiss. “I think I’m done talking for a while. Can we forget everything, just for a bit?”

I took her hand into mine. She was close enough for me to smell her, a pleasant, earthy scent. “You think this is wise, given things being how they are?”

Fenn shrugged, then kissed me again. “I think that I’d like to not think about that.” She reached up and touched my neck with her slender fingers. “And if we’ve made a mistake, then I’m fine with making that same mistake a second or third time.”

Chapter 14 - Vacation Vocations

Skill increased: Parry lvl 20! (Skill can no longer be increased by amateur training.)

New Virtue: Prescient Blade!

Prescient Blade: You take half the normal penalty to parry bullets, arrows, or other missile weapons. These attacks still do damage to your blade as normal.

I was happy to get that one in the course of my training, since I’d had Parry hovering close to the soft cap for quite a while, but while it was a good one, I did find it a bit puzzling, because I had gotten the ‘Nascent Blade-bound’ virtue when Parry had hit tenth level. My confusion was cleared up a few hours later.

Skill increased: Two-Handed Weapons lvl 20! (Skill can no longer be increased by amateur training.)

New Virtue: Lunge Striker!

New Virtue: Neophyte Blade-bound!

I stopped our sparring practice and stared at the messages. I had been dueling both Fenn and Amaryllis, though we were all using blunted blades; Fenn wasn’t terribly good with a sword, and Amaryllis was noticeably worse than I was, but together it was a losing battle for me, which seemed to suit them just fine. I closed my eyes and went to the screen to read what the virtues did.

Lunge Striker: Eliminates the maneuverability penalty for all reach weapons. Eliminates the penalty for striking at close range with reach weapons. Allows you to more quickly cover ground when moving in short bursts and in a fighting stance.

Neophyte Blade-bound: You have unlocked the ability to bond with a melee weapon, given a few minutes of meditation. You may only bond with one weapon at a time. When wielding a bonded weapon, double your effective skill with it, double your chance to parry, and you may cut with it as though it were twice as sharp.

The second level of the blade-bound virtue seemed really, really good to me. I had gotten the original Nascent Blade-bound virtue from increasing Parry; I frowned for a bit trying to figure that out. The best I could come up with was that it took some combination of skills rising above a certain amount to get the blade-bound virtues. If I was remembering correctly (and at 8 KNO I had better be), then Parry had been one of the last melee skills I had trained when I was getting everything across the lvl 10 line. Now it was Two-Handed Weapons that I was training up last, so logically if multiple benchmarks was the condition for a ‘free’ virtue then I wouldn’t have hit it until now. I filed this bit of trivia away in my notes.

(This also opened up the possibility that there were other virtues to be had from synergistic skill-ups. I didn’t know how many skills were part of the blade-bound package, but two was the minimum, and it seemed likely that it was more on the order of three or four, based on what I knew blade-bound could do.

The problem was, blade-bound were a known quantity in this world, and I hadn’t heard of something similar for someone who excelled at the arts in combination with each other, or the synthesis of different types of magic.

My best guess was that the bone magic, skin magic, and blood magic might all synthesize into something, but they hadn’t yet, which meant that there was either a fourth or fifth out there, or no synergy incoming. The logical one to round out that group was pustule magic, a path I was understandably reluctant to go down.)

We did spar for a bit more after I had bonded with the Anyblade, and the jump in skill was apparent to all of us; I could pretty comfortably hold both of them off at once, unless they got tricky. Granted, neither of them were proper swordsmen, but if lvl 20 represented something like a graduate degree, then an equivalent of lvl 40 in Two-Handed Weapons was well into whatever the postdoc equivalent of hitting people with a sword was.

I think that of all the skills I was trying to blast through during “vacation”, Gem Magic was perhaps the worst, mostly because it left me with the feeling of being mentally drained, like I wanted to zone out and just watch some television, except that television hadn’t been invented on Aerb yet, and anyway, the signal inside of a bottle at the foothills of the World Spine would be, I was guessing, terrible. So instead, after I was done draining my mental reserves by knocking cans off a stump at fifty paces, I would go seek out my party members and do my best to listen to them, mostly to let their words wash over me, often with Fenn cuddled up beside me.

Solace liked talking the most out of any of us. I thought that was probably because she’d lived so much of her life with other people around her in a tight-knit community, and once that community was gone, she’d been left all alone. She was also four hundred years old, and had all sorts of stories about the way the world had been. I don’t know if it was just her outlook, or deliberate effort on her part, but she rarely mentioned the bad stuff that was lurking in her past. She revealed in an off-hand comment that she’d had children, but she didn’t say what had happened to them, and I didn’t have the heart to ask.

We tended the garden together during the day, but it really didn’t need all that much, and I had no real hope of getting Horticulture to the lvl 20 mark, where a virtue was presumably waiting for me. While the seed I planted did sprout by our last day of rest, it was going to take weeks at the earliest before I had my first bit of flower magic — hopefully.

She spent most of her time outside, and much of it with the Six-Eyed Doe, though she could often be seen fully nude, splayed out on the grass to soak in the sunlight for photosynthesis.

At our D&D games she played Case, a defector from the evil scurrilies, whose overarching goal was to lift the curse that the God of Scurrily put on her race.

I took more language lessons from Grak, mostly because I couldn’t think of a better way to get one-on-one time with him without being horribly awkward about it. I think I bothered him by going off-topic too many times, but the great thing about language was that it was inherently cultural, and that gave me plenty of opportunity to ask him about what it had been like at Darili Irid.

This did lead to a thirty-minute lecture from him on dwarven self-insemination, which I was about 60% sure he went into in order to get me to stop asking questions. Unfortunately for him, I found the whole thing to be fairly fascinating, if gross. I eventually had a fairly mediocre command of Groglir, enough that I could stumble halfway through a conversation before falling flat on my face. My first guess had been that I would need to learn a hundred words before I got a pop-up, and when I crested firmly into a vocabulary of one hundred and fifty words, my next guess was that I would either get it at five hundred, a thousand, or just not at all. A real-world guy named Charles Ogden had created something called ‘Basic English’, which had a basic list of eight hundred and fifty words that he thought would be enough to speak ‘in a normal way’, and if I were making some arbitrary cut-off for language learning, that would have been it — but learning eight hundred and fifty words of Groglir, along with all the variations on them, was still going to be a time sink, and I would arguably not get too much out of a potential language skill if I had to do that for every language that I came across.

I gained a single point of loyalty from him, bringing him up to 7, when I apologized if my relationship with Fenn made things awkward, but that was about as much as I got for my efforts. I’d had this idea of ‘grinding loyalty’ with him, but it didn’t really pan out like that, no matter how much we talked. He had, apparently, made up his mind about me and trying to budge him wasn’t easy, especially since he knew that I wanted him to be more loyal. I’d tried telling him the same thing I’d told Amaryllis, that he would become more powerful, but that didn’t sway him like it had swayed her.

Grak played Bachewin for our tabletop sessions, a stout young woman trying to reclaim the honor her family had lost. He wasn’t very good at roleplaying, though he did learn my (entirely homebrew) rules system quickly, and after our second session he had some very specific ideas about who Bachewin was, which he shared with me at length. (He shot down all my attempts at contribution, and his loyalty still didn’t change.)

I spent the most time with Fenn, naturally. It was almost like the ‘cursed lover’ thing wasn’t looming over us, though she left the room whenever Amaryllis wanted to talk about it with me, and sometimes I felt her clinging to me when we lay together. We didn’t discuss it, because she didn’t want to, and not talking about it really did help her mood to improve, so maybe that was just how Fenn dealt with things. If we’d been on Earth they would probably have said, “Oh my god is that an elf?”, but after they’d gotten over the half-elf thing, they would have said it wasn’t a healthy way of dealing with problems. The problem was, I knew as much as anyone that you couldn’t drag someone, kicking and screaming, to confront things that needed confronting.

(At the end of our week off, the narrative theory was still looking inconclusive, and even if it hadn’t been, the ‘dead lovers’ pattern was also inconclusive. The problem was, nothing actually seemed like it was dictated by narrative, it all seemed like just a natural consequence of what had come before, and that was even more true with the women in Uther’s life than with the threats he faced down as King of Anglecynn.)

Eventually, I grew to value how Fenn walled things off. As much time as I was spending on training, reading, and discussing theory, it was nice to have someone who at least put on a front of not caring about what was going on. My time spent with her was largely time not spent thinking about serious things, and with the ward against noise around our alcove we were able to have some fairly intimate talks.

Fenn’s side of it was mostly relating stories of her times in the Risen Lands, occasionally interspersed with the colorful characters she dealt with in the course of selling off what she looted. These weren’t necessarily the happiest times in her life, but they were the safest, because while they had happened to her, they weren’t actually all that personal. That’s not to say that they were vapid or content-less, but Fenn was sharing without actually sharing, talking without revealing herself. (It took me a damned long time to actually realize that, and several false starts when I’d asked her about her parents, or what it had been like to grow up split between those two worlds, questions that she diverted away from pretty quickly.) So I heard a lot about killing zombies, wall crossings, shady merchants, and nothing that told me anything about Fenn I didn’t already know.

When I shared, I tried to keep it away from D&D. I never mentioned Arthur, even when he had been a part of the stories, partly from my usual aversion and partly because he was real, in this world, and talking about him meant talking about Uther. So instead I mostly told her about Earth, describing all the wonders that she would (probably) never see. All of it paled in comparison to Aerb, but that was because all the pieces of Aerb that showed my hand were exaggerated or magnified versions of the things and places I had seen. The one exception was the technology, but while technology and its effects on society were a hobby horse of mine, and she seemed willing to listen, I didn’t really think that was why she liked me, and felt awkward going on about that kind of thing. I told her as much, while we were resting together one night.

“I like all parts of you, Juniper,” she said as she gave me a pat on the chest. “If you want to talk about the Eisenhower interstate system, I’m happy to listen.” She gave me a contented sigh. “I think I would like Earth, even if parts of it seem lame, and even if you have nuclear weapons all over the place. We could go to a McDonald’s together.”

“Please let McDonald’s not be the only thing that you’ve taken away from what I’ve told you,” I murmured to her.

“Juniper, they have a hundred billion served, you have to respect that,” muttered Fenn. Her conversation always turned to muttering as she was falling asleep, and sometimes she would go minutes without saying something before lazily picking a thread of conversation back up again, only to fall asleep in the middle of it.

During our tabletop games she played Adnarim, a slink-thief and assassin who had accidentally found herself in the semi-reputable business of taking on odd jobs from people. (Fenn had made herself the identical twin sister of Amaryllis’ itinerant scholar, Miranda, which had initially drawn some complaints from the princess but ended up being a lot of fun.)

And that left Amaryllis, first of my companions, and by far the one I’d fought the most with. Our time was mostly spent focused on one thing or another, either with sparring, training, our work going over the so-called narrative patterns, or giving each other overviews of the things that we’d been reading. I was almost never alone with her, and even when we were alone, it was never private, because the house was so open. I had things that I wanted to know but which I didn’t want to ask about.

I woke up one morning and climbed out of bed to see her sitting at the desk, using colored pencils on a revision to the map of Uther’s life, which consisted mostly of arcs as various conflicts sprang into being and were later resolved. We had both taken note of the largest thing that stood out: there were precious few ‘plots’ or ‘narrative arcs’ that Uther had left behind when he’d disappeared, but the reason for that eluded us. She had been gearing up for us to move on to the next part of our adventure since the day before. This, then, was her final map of Uther’s life, the one that she could carry with her and consult, the distillation of several days of research.

“Looking good?” I asked after I had passed through the invisible sound barrier. I usually woke with the sun, but Fenn stayed in our bed for another hour or two after I’d gotten up.

Amaryllis glanced at me and frowned. I was in my boxers, and behind me Fenn was naked. “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

“Have I?” I asked, looking down at my bare chest. I could tell at a glance that she was right, but I didn’t really need her to confirm it for me, because I had noticed it myself two days ago. Losing weight, in this context, was not at all a good thing. Leveling up had reset me to essentially the best physical condition of my life, and the weight that was coming off was, almost by necessity, all muscle.

“Have you been eating?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied, hearing how defensive I sounded even as I said it. “You hear Fenn coaxing me at every meal, even when I’m eating.”

“She’s worried,” said Amaryllis. “I worry too.” She looked back down at her colored map of Uther’s story. “If I had no desire to eat but it was necessary for the survival of myself and my party, I would endure the unpleasantness and force the food down.”

“Not very subtle,” I said.

“What?” asked Amaryllis, looking up at me with a furrowed brow.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were … making a reference.”

“Oh,” said Amaryllis. “That. No, I was just saying that … you can’t depend on a level up again,” she said. “Unless we face a rapid series of substantial threats, or a number of quests that are easier than they appear but still rewarding in spite of that, we’re probably looking at weeks, not days until you get another one. You’re losing muscle mass, which means that you’re losing combat ability.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll … have you considered that it might be that my digestive system is malfunctioning and I’m just not taking in nutrients? I feel like I’ve been eating a lot.”

“Then it’s worse than we thought,” she said with a mild tone. “We need someone who can repair the damage you did to your soul, but it’s a profession far more heavily regulated than most. More to the point, we need to find someone trustworthy. Unless we can stumble our way into another companion whose specialty is exactly the thing that we need, we’re left with either going to someone reputable and hoping that we can bribe them into silence, or going to someone disreputable and hoping that they don’t fuck us over.” She was thinking of the tattoo mage, I was sure. “Of course, if we find someone that we can bribe, that means that they’re inherently untrustworthy.”

I glanced over at the blue amulet lying on the table next to her. She normally kept it tucked away. I had seen her in conversation with it a few times now, a process that, from my end, looked like her zoning out with glowing blue eyes while the temperature in the room dropped a few degrees.

“Any answers from your great-grandfather?” I asked.

“He’s very frustrating to speak with,” said Amaryllis. “Actually ... he’s an asshole. The relationship between us is not of an ancestor helping his descendant, but of a man attempting to exert his values on the world from beyond the grave.”

“Are those values terribly at odds with your own?” I asked. I’d been under the impression that the ghost of her great-grandfather was being overly cautious, rather than that they were adversarial.

“He was a supporter of the Second Empire,” said Amaryllis.

“Ah,” I said. “Yes, I can see how that might complicate things. Did he have any advice though? If they were known for their soul work, then maybe he has something worth sharing?”

Amaryllis frowned and looked down at the amulet. “If I tell you, and it appears as a quest for you, then can we agree that we will have a long conversation with the others and not decide on it as a good course of action simply because the game said so?”

“Were you planning on not telling me?” I asked.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “I’m trying my best to be an open book. I just wanted some time to mull it over before presenting it, ideally to everyone.”

“Okay,” I said. But she still wanted to control the information. Was that bad habits dying hard, or something else? “Alright, out with it.”

“The Second Empire collapsed in 324 FE,” said Amaryllis. “It had been limping along for some time, largely as a result of its economic policy. Military integration and reform schemes were bleeding the budget, but the deathblow came when the capital city became the center of an exclusion zone.”

“That would be Manifest, right?” I asked. I had read through The Exclusionary Principle, Seventh Edition, and in the process picked up all of the outstanding quests that fell under The Slayer of Horrors.
It was, to not put too fine a point on it, pretty fucking daunting. Manifest was an effectively immortal man who had the ability to puppet people on a mass scale, and the fact that he was limited to those within his exclusion zone was the only thing that made him a major threat rather than a world-ender.

“Oh,” said Amaryllis. “Right, yes. There were counter-imperialists in most of the member nations, and with the Empire effectively decapitated, and many of the imperialists crudely enslaved by Manifest, there was a rapid shift in power. My great-grandfather managed to hold on and avoid any of the criminal trials that Anglecynn went through, but others weren’t so lucky. One of them was Fallatehr, a soul mage, who was imprisoned with a few others on the smallest of the Zorish Isles — technically not part of them, but under their dominion. He was an elf, so he should still be alive, but the prison is abandoned.” She paused slightly. “Obviously it would be suicidally stupid to stage a prison break in order to gain his expertise.”

Quest Accepted: Crimes Against the Soul - Journey to the autonomous prison on Sulid Isle and retrieve the criminal Fallatehr Whiteshell from his confinement there.

“Do you actually believe that it would be suicidally stupid, or were you just saying that to help trigger the quest?” I asked. “I did get the quest, by the way.”

“I think it’s ill-advised,” said Amaryllis. “We still need to find out what the national apparatus of Anglecynn and international systems of the Empire think of us, but … if we were implicated somehow it would almost certainly cement our reputation. I think the risk of implication is low, but it’s still a consideration.”

“What about as far as feasibility?” I asked.

“We have a teleportation key,” said Amaryllis. “That’s the only reason I think it could work. The penitentiary on Sulid Isle was built by an architect under forge frenzy, it’s a treacherous place with dangerous, unknown magic. The only people sent there were sent for life. Once Anglecynn began the program of final trial by adversity, it stopped being used entirely.”

“But it’s still there, and still functional,” I said. “The quest called it autonomous.”

Amaryllis nodded. “Sentient.”

“We’ll stick a pin in that then, and get input from the others,” I said with a frown. Short of going to one of the Empire’s licensed soul mages though, I didn’t see that questline as having many other promising avenues. “I don’t feel like Solace will be happy about it.”

“She will, if it’s the path to saving the locus,” said Amaryllis. “Happy is probably the wrong word. She’ll accept it, I think, if we decide that it’s the best path forward. We’ll have to talk about it with the full group.”

I stepped toward the papers she had laid out. “I wish we had more to go on,” I said. “More of substance, anyway.” I looked back toward Fenn. “How much danger do you think she’s in?”

“I have no idea,” said Amaryllis. She laced her fingers together and stretched them behind her head. “There was always a reason it happened. There were three of the twenty that we might chalk up to bad luck, but for the others, there was always a reason, it wasn’t obviously supernatural. You keep asking how he could keep putting people in danger, and it just doesn’t look like fate to me. Elf luck at its upper extremes is visible, it’s almost tangible, one in one hundred odds happening nine times out of ten. This”—she gestured to the papers—“this is just people inexorably following their beliefs and incentives, coming into conflicts that are predicated on and resolved by basic facts of reality. It’s not about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s just … how things had to happen.”

“That’s what makes it so insidious,” I said.

“I don’t like it,” said Amaryllis. She brought her arms down and crossed them. “It implies omniscience, or omnipotence, or both. If the Black Expropriates embedded an agent within the Milue parliament for internally coherent reasons, then how can that all be a setup for Uther’s arrival three years down the line? How can that be a planted romance subplot that naturally results in her death?”

“I’m more surprised that it’s exposed to us,” I said. I looked back at Fenn, who was still asleep, slightly slack-jawed. “Though maybe it’s meant to be a warning, or a lesson, or a clue. Or maybe there’s nothing to the narrative theory, and Uther just”—I threw my hands up—“maybe this was all just a result of his beliefs about narrative.” Ironically, that would be a pretty ironic twist.

“Maybe.” Amaryllis nodded.

We both looked at the paperwork in silence. Today, it would all be packed up and then stuffed into Fenn’s glove, most likely never to be seen again. We’d spent time and effort on it, but it all seemed like it was essentially for nothing, because if there was such a thing as a proper narrative, then we had no idea how to defeat it.

“We could try manipulation,” said Amaryllis. “If we assume that narrative is desired from us, we could act in more dramatic ways.”

“We’d be acting,” I said. “It would know.”

“You think it’s that powerful?” asked Amaryllis. There was something different about her, and it took me a while to realize that it was the touch of fear.

“No,” I said, “I don’t know,” I added, because I was a terrible liar. Obviously the Dungeon Master was that powerful. “Trying to avoid destiny never works out in stories. At best, you can subvert it, but this isn’t even destiny, because it’s not diegetic. Or, it is now, now that we’ve noticed it, but I don’t know if that counts. No, we’re going to continue on and not try to game the narrative.” I looked to Fenn again, like something might have happened to her in the five seconds I had looked away. “If it were me, I wouldn’t want someone trying to game the story I was telling.”

Amaryllis nodded. “Was that why you killed me last night?”

It took my mind a moment to jam up in confusion and then switch gears; she was talking about our tabletop session from the night before. “Was that why you put Miranda in harm’s way?” I asked. “I thought that was a character moment, showing that you really loved your sister, that kind of thing.” Amaryllis was really good at getting in character, which at first surprised me, until I thought about it for a bit.

“It was both,” said Amaryllis. “I thought that I would get some leniency for it.”

“That death was kind of a result of how I set up the rules,” I said. “Normally the GM can roll some dice behind a screen and then fudge them if he really, really has to, but we only had the deck of cards, and it was split with a suit for each of you, meaning that I had to make it so that you were flipping cards against a static number for attack and defense, which … I couldn’t change the outcomes in a clean way.”

“You could have,” said Amaryllis. “You said that Rule 0 was that the Game Master superseded the rules. You could have said that the mortling missed.”

“It would have been obvious,” I said. “The game has rules, everyone had read them, so violating them would be violating this sacrosanct contract between gamemaster and players. It would be saying that grand gestures matter more than reality. I would have fudged it, if I could, but ...”

“But it was important that the cards dictate what happened,” said Amaryllis. “Or else the illusion would be broken. Thank you, I think that was enlightening.” She looked back to the papers.

I wasn’t sure quite what enlightenment she was talking about, but part of the reason we had played those games was so that I could explain to them how tabletop narratives were different. I might have asked what she was thinking, but Fenn finally got out of bed, and that was more or less the end of talking about narrative.

Chapter 15 - Place Your Figs

We entered into Anglecynn by teleportation key, fully armored and geared up for a fight, but we were in the woods that the Penndraig clan sometimes used as hunting grounds, far out of season, and the only creature that marked our arrival was a very surprised blue jay. I spent some time putting a tattoo on the back of Amaryllis’ hand for the teleportation key to go in, placed so that she could pull it out swiftly. When she put her leather gloves on, there was no way to tell she was hiding something so valuable on her person. From there Solace turned us into seagulls, and we flew in a loose formation toward the nearby sea, out to the line of tall islands on the horizon.

Our conversation on next steps earlier in the day had mostly consisted of Amaryllis giving as much information as she had, and everyone agreeing that the prison break was going to be our next step, largely because I was (perceived as) deteriorating. More than that, Solace wasn’t convinced that a registered imperial soul mage would be capable of doing what we needed, especially with regards to the expertise necessary to manipulate the locus. Her two conditions were that we attempt to barter with him first before springing him, and that he not be allowed in the bottle or informed that she was a druid, both of which I thought were perfectly reasonable.

The five main Zorish Isles stuck up from the Bryllyg Sea. To say that they weren’t natural would be a severe understatement; each was the tip of an enormous finger sticking up from the perpetually cold, dark water. When I’d drawn them up, they had been inviolable, stone so hard that not even diamond could scratch it, ancient things that suggested an entity of supreme power, dead and buried beneath the waves. I’d come up with them when I was sitting in a bathtub, sticking my fingertips up from the water just enough to have them be exposed to the air. But very few things I’d created survived contact with Aerb, and the Zorish Isles had been at least partially excavated using voidtools before the imperial ban. None of that was visible from a distance; instead, it was greenery, most of it cultivated, and cities built into the side of the isles, largely confined to the whorls of the fingerprints to maximize arable land on top.

Sulid Isle wasn’t technically part of the Zorish Isles, it was just close enough to them that they had control over it. On first hearing about it, I thought that it was inspired by Alcatraz, but it was far bigger than that, with less development, and probably took more inspiration from one of the islands of exile. It was mostly barren, but there were spots of green, and at the center of it all, an enormous compound with high walls and a singular building that looked, to me, like a mansion. No one ever came to this place, according to Amaryllis, and the vast majority of the prisoners would probably be dead from old age, because the sentient, magical penitentiary hadn’t been used for that purpose in at least a hundred years, if not more.

The day was dark and gray, and the winds were uncomfortable on my wings, so I was happy to land at the island’s edge and turn back into a person with armor and a fur cloak against the chilly wind.

We were at least a mile away from the penitentiary, but it still loomed large, rising ten stories high and built with what seemed like a very surprising amount of glass, given that it was a prison. The glass looked dark blue in the diffuse light of the cloudy sky, but the ribbing was brass or something like it, which gave the building a grandiose cast. It had dozens of domes, with a large one at the center that dominated the entire structure. Even the walls that surrounded the compound were ornate, with sculptures topping regularly spaced towers.

Grak raised his warder’s monocle to his eye for a moment, then set it back down. “The building is magical,” he said. After a moment, Fenn began to laugh, and while I didn’t find it funny at all, a slight smile crossed Grak’s lips, so he must have meant it as a joke.

It had been built by an architect in a forge frenzy, a man possessed by the urgent need to build this thing he didn’t necessarily understand, and given funds to do so by a government that was all too willing to pour money into a frenzy if they could reap the results. The building was sentient, to a higher level than Ropey was, but there were other bits of magic as well, defenses and systems that kept its prisoners in, not all of which were known to us.

I looked at the grass around us, and could just barely see the areas where foundations had once stood. This place had been lived in, once, though it had little in the way of natural resources, and aside from the prison, there wasn’t much point to anyone living on it. With the prison abandoned and entirely autonomous, my guess was that there was a feedback loop of people leaving, which caused a collapse in services, which caused more people to leave, until everyone had gone back to either Anglecynn or the Zorish Isles.

Solace tapped her staff once on the ground and over the course of half a minute, various small birds began to flock to her. She didn’t send them out at once, but instead turned her staff sideways and rested it on her shoulders, where the birds patiently waited.

“We’ll fall back to here if this doesn’t go to plan and we get separated,” said Amaryllis. She was dressed in her immobility plate, with her helmet held in one arm. Her emotional mask was as firmly in place as it had been before our vacation, hiding tension, doubt, and fear, leaving only serene, iron will. I still didn’t have a good model of what it was like to be Amaryllis, whether she was forcing everything down, whether she was just acting like she was forcing it down, or whether those emotions were like cloaks to be worn if needed.

“I don’t want to run at the first sign of things going south,” I said. “We might have to fight, but so long as it’s a winnable, recoverable fight, I don’t want retreat to be our watchword.”

“Sometimes you don’t know the fight is unwinnable until you’ve lost it,” said Fenn. Most entads had some minor ability to repair and restore themselves, but her armor had been a total loss, and she was in the same fatigues she’d been wearing when we first met. Save for the glove, and slightly longer hair, she looked almost the same. It was weird to feel nostalgia about something that had only happened a month ago, especially since it was at an objectively awful point in my life, but that was what I felt.

“We’ll hope that it doesn’t come to a fight,” said Amaryllis. “The penitentiary should be reasonable. It didn’t allow much in the way of outside influence over its interior space, but it did allow visitors, and some level of negotiation was possible.”

So far as we knew, it wouldn’t allow visitors with weapons; those we had mostly because the penitentiary had a reputation for being unruly even when it was being used as a functional prison, and it wasn’t clear what more than a century of isolation would have done in terms of changes in personality or drift in alignment, both apparently real concerns when it came to sentient magic items (or buildings). That made this whole mission dangerous, but in theory it could be as simple as walking in, sitting down to have a visit with Fallatehr, and getting enough information that I could unlock some kind of soul magic skill without actually having to break him out.

So we approached, walking slowly, stopping every once in a while so that Grak could check for unseen magic, and then continuing on. The statues at the top of the tower walls all had their heads turned toward us, and as we approached, they tracked us with open mouths. Based on that, I assumed that these were some kind of active defense, though this was one of the areas where our knowledge was thin. I wasn’t counting on the game to throw us level-appropriate encounters, but I was hoping that it wouldn’t just perfectly set us up to walk into a TPK. The penitentiary was supposed to have a strong preference toward less-lethal means. (I don’t want to play the politically-correct-semantics game too much, but there’s a huge difference between the implications of ‘non-lethal’ and ‘less-lethal’ when you’re staring down a thirty-foot-tall golem.)

We found ourselves staring down a thirty-foot-tall golem with metallic eyes, who stood as the gate of the enormous wall around the penitentiary. Not at the gate, as the gate; there was a simple gap in the tall, decorated wall, and the golem sat there with its two giant fists pressed against the earth, perfectly blocking the entrance. The wall had overlapping metal scales, not in a set pattern, but with curves, coils, and flourishes. The whole thing looked like it had taken thousands of man-hours to finish. By contrast, the golem was simple, with the kind of detail you’d expect on something carved out of wood in an afternoon. Unless my eyes were deceiving me, I was pretty sure that it was made of tightly packed dirt, held together by who-knows-what magical energy. The eyes were the only thing different, giant, perfectly reflective orbs that spun to follow us. We stopped a hundred feet away.

“Friendly-looking chap,” muttered Fenn. “Grak, is he magical?”

Grak raised his monocle quickly and lowered it. “Same base magic as the walls and building,” he said. “It’s part of this place.”

“You were supposed to deadpan it and tell us that it’s magical,” said Fenn.

“Sorry,” said Grak. He turned to Amaryllis. “I was given the impression that autonomy did not include fully mobile agents. It was supposed to accomplish its goals through internal systems.”

“We don’t know if it’s fully mobile,” said Amaryllis. “That’s a good guess though. If so, this wasn’t what we expected. Do we need to re-evaluate?”

“I’m in favor of continuing on,” I said.

“Second,” said Fenn.

“Third,” said Solace.

“Grak?” asked Amaryllis.

“Amaryllis,” answered Grak.

“Keep going, or re-evaluate?” asked Amaryllis.

“We’ve already got a majority,” said Fenn. “Let’s not undermine our democracy.”

“Grak is the expert in defenses,” said Amaryllis. “That also means that he’s the expert in threat analysis. I want to hear what he has to say, rather than just taking a vote and not thinking.”

I felt a little bit of sheepishness at that. I thought that I had been thinking. We’d assumed there might be some amount of drift, and the information that we had was rather thin, so this wasn’t very suspect as yet.

“What do the winds and birds tell you?” Grak asked Solace.

Solace squinted. “Not much lives in there,” she said. “It’s hard to get a sense of it. I could ask one of my bird friends to take a look”—she nodded to the small birds that lined her staff— “but I wouldn’t want to anger this place.”

“Do it.” Amaryllis nodded. This, I noted, she did not put to a vote. She had been trying, but her default state was one of command, and it was, for her, a hard habit to break — not that I had any objections, in this case.

Without any visible sign of having been told to, one of the tiny birds flitted off from Solace’s staff and zipped across the distance, up and over the wall. One of the statues on top of the walls spun its head whip-fast, paused for a second while making a high-pitched whine, then shot a thin green laser from its mouth, which pierced the bird through and sent its flaming body tumbling down. The statue turned back to face us, mouth aimed right at us, as all the statues had been since we’d been close enough to see them.

Fenn coughed politely. “Is it too early to make a joke about that bird’s place in the pecking order?” she asked. I could see her eyes moving quickly from statue to statue, and the way she held her gloved hand, open just wide enough that she could have her artillery bow in it at a moment’s notice.

“Hopefully that will be interpreted as a test,” said Amaryllis.

“That was a test!” Fenn called to the gate-golem. It showed no response.

“We could fly to the Zorish Isles and try to get more information there,” said Amaryllis. “I know that Joon is in failing health, but we took the time we needed for research before going after the unicorn. If those statues are turned on us, I don’t like our odds.”

“I could send more birds,” said Solace. She sounded less pained over the idea than I would have thought, but after watching her with the flowers, I already knew that she didn’t have that much aversion to crimes against nature.

“One is a test,” said Amaryllis. “I worry that more will be seen as probing for weakness, because they would be.”

“There was a one-second pause,” said Grak. “That’s something. It would help to know how long before it can fire again.” He lifted his monocle out of its pocket. “Two more birds. Then I should be able to ward against it.”

Solace grimaced slightly, but two more birds flew off from her staff toward the wall. This time the statues were proactive, and turned toward the perceived threat before the birds had even crossed the wall. The birds flitted and twirled, and managed to dodge the first and second shots at them before being taken down by the third; the laser-fire came from all four of the statues within range, again with a high-pitched whine as they charged. When both birds had crashed to the ground, flaming, the nearest statue to us turned our way and fired at the ground a foot in front of Solace.

“Well, that was our warning,” said Amaryllis. “Grak?”

Grak lowered his monocle. “A one-second pause before firing. Three seconds between firings. That’s a feint; the true refresh is faster. If given time I can ward against the effect.”

“Which might provoke them,” said Amaryllis.

“I think we should talk to the gate,” I said, nodding in the direction of the huge golem (and wondering, idly, how many experience points it might be worth if we were forced to kill it). “Where we are now, it’s pretty clear that we’re not safe anyway.”

We moved up, slowly, watching as the metal orbs that served as the golem’s eyes turned in their sockets. I looked closer at the fists that barred our way, noting that they were exactly wide enough that not even a mouse would have been able to squeak through.

“Hail, and well met,” called a woman’s voice from the other side of the golem. A dirt-golem climbed up over the gate-golem’s back and sat upon its shoulder. It was of a similar make, but much smaller, about Solace’s size. It had more proportionate limbs, and no visible eyes or eye sockets. What it did have was a mouth set into the packed earth of its face, white teeth, pink tongue, and all. “What brings you five this way today?”

I looked at the others, and nodded at Amaryllis. Diplomacy was her thing, not mine, and I was hoping that was one of her skills that had increased through Twinned Souls.

“Are you the voice of the Amoureux Penitentiary?” asked Amaryllis, raising her voice slightly to cross the distance up to where it sat.

“A voice,” the dirt-golem called down. “Have you come to visit, or to stay?”

“We hope to visit,” said Amaryllis. She touched her armored chest. “I am Amaryllis Penndraig, most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig, Princess of the Kingdom of Anglecynn.”

“Whether Uther is here, I cannot say,” called the golem.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “It isn’t Uther Penndraig we seek. We’re looking for a summer elf imprisoned here, Fallatehr Whiteshell.”

“Oh, yes, him I know well,” spoke the golem. “If you wish to come inside, you may.” The gate-golem’s hands turned and unfolded, making a pathway between surprisingly slender legs. Beyond that was a well-tended garden, with more green than we’d so far seen on the rocky island.

“We appreciate your hospitality,” said Amaryllis with a small bow. She looked at me with a raised eyebrow, and in response I started forward, leading the way.

It was impossible to tell whether there was something off about the penitentiary and its golems, because we didn’t know what state it had been in when it was fully functional. Even when it had first been built it probably had its quirks, it was basically a building-size magic item for cripes sake, and on Aerb some of those were weird, impossible things that didn’t feel beholden to concepts like “making sense”. The jar of marzipan fairies had shown that much. Maybe this place had always had golems made of dirt, and their contrast with the rest of the decor was just the way things were.

I passed through the huge hands, thinking about how easily they could crush me if given half the chance, and trying to keep on my toes, ready to move, without actually displaying distrust. I relaxed slightly when I was through, and the eyeless golem hopped down from its friend’s back to stand beside me.

“Behold,” it said, gesturing to the buildings in front of us. “A home for those who’ve gone astray.”

There were no people around, only golems, these more human-sized than the one with the mouth. Some were working with the plants, trimming plants with shears or pulling weeds, but most were just standing there, watching us, each with a single, silvery metal eye. They weren’t quite surrounding us in a defensive semi-circle, but it was close to that. Figuring out their combat abilities on the fly while dodging laser fire wasn’t something I had much of a hankering for.

I hadn’t been divested of my sword yet, which was a plus, but at the same time, that said some worrying things about the laxness of security. We wanted security to be tight enough that any remaining inmates who hadn’t died of old age wouldn’t be a threat to us, but also loose enough that we would be able to steal a prisoner from inside. That was a pretty fine line to walk.

“I’m not really liking this,” said Fenn. “There’s just something about having heavy weapons aimed at me that makes me nervous.”

“Spider sense tingling?” I asked.

“If it was, I wouldn’t be standing here jabbering about it,” said Fenn.

We stood there for a moment, but the ‘voice’ of the Amoureux Penitentiary didn’t move. After a time, it began to hum a gratingly dissonant tune.

“Is there something that we’re waiting for?” asked Amaryllis.

“Your desired prisoner was within the gymnasium,” said the golem. “We wait for him to be moved to visitation, where you may make parlance with him.” Its speech-patterns had switched following the period of silence, which made me more nervous than if it had continued on with the same awkward cadence it was using before. A predictably broken intelligence I thought we could handle, but an unpredictably broken one I was less sure about. Variations in speech like that didn’t necessarily mean anything about the mind (or mind-equivalent), but they were suggestive.

“Are there any restrictions on visitation?” asked Amaryllis.

I reached over and quickly placed my hand over Fenn’s mouth when I saw her about to say something, because I’d seen the look in her eyes that usually meant she was about to make a joke. She smiled at me and licked my hand, but otherwise seemed content enough to have been preempted.

“You will engage in conversation with the prisoner for four hours at the upper bound,” said the golem. Up close, its mouth was disturbingly human; it didn’t just have a simulacrum of a mouth, it had all of the interior musculature, membranes, and teeth that I would have expected. Maybe some of that was necessary to actually create sound (which implied lungs, a diaphragm, etc.), but it seemed like overkill, especially given that magic existed. “You will be diverged from him by a complete ward, save for the transfer of sound between your mouths and ears.”

And that didn’t speak terribly well to our ability to remove the soul mage from prison, nor to giving him something that he wanted in exchange for a few lessons. But if we left this place having learned little and only wasted half a day of our time, then I would probably still make a mark in the win column. Doing something risky and having it come to nothing was, to me, a pretty acceptable outcome.

A dirt-golem came out from the largest doors of the main building, pushing them open only slightly to come through. It moved toward us at a brisk walking speed, singular metal eyeball focused our way. I noticed another dirt golem move to the door and use a cloth to wipe away the dirt left on the handle; that sort of care was probably why the outside space we were in was immaculately clean.

The dirt golem stopped close to us and gave a slight bow.

“The prisoner had a missive that he would like to relate,” said the golem serving as our guide, the voice of the Amoureux Penitentiary. “He could not relate it in a language that I could pass on, so inscribed it upon this —”

“Okay, I kick the door open,” said Arthur.

“Alright, where is everyone standing?” I asked.

“Fuck,” said Reimer.

“Well don’t say that,” said Greg. “Then he knows that you’re going to try to game it.”

“I already knew that,” I said. “But if I had asked for your positions as you approached the door, then you would know that something was up.”

“Yeah, like how in old cartoons the cel-shading let you know that some particular bit of rock was going to move and wasn’t part of the background,” said Arthur.

“So place your figs,” I said, gesturing at the dry erase battlemat. “But do it as you would have in-character, and I will remind you that no one was taking this seriously as a threat, so you can’t retroactively have been on high alert and optimally positioned for a trap and slash or encounter.”

The dirt golem that had come forward from the main building began unfolding its hand as the other spoke, and Fenn moved in front of me a half second before I saw the small purple crystal it was holding in its hand. Time seemed to go slower then, as my mind first recognized it as a void crystal, then made sense of it as a threat, and finally parsed that Fenn had moved in front of me. Amaryllis and Solace were both further in front of me, close to the main entrance, and both were moving in different directions, but Fenn was shielding me with her body, and I couldn’t let her —

A solid steel wall popped out from her outstretched hand and the soft, subdued whump of the improvised void grenade happened just after that. The first thing that I heard was Solace screaming in pain, and then the high whine of the statues charging to fire. Fenn lunged backward and put up another wall of steel behind us, as I reached for one of the bones in my bandolier and pulled down as much SPD as possible from it. I was up and moving as soon as the whining sounds stopped.

Solace was slumped on the ground, dark-green blood pooling around her. Most of her back and legs were missing, exposing bone and muscle. Amaryllis was still up and racing across the grounds, toward the mass of dirt-golems that were moving toward us, her helmet now firmly in place and the blade of her sword flickered into existence. She was bleeding from the leg, where a substantial fraction of her armor had been removed; the last I’d seen of her before the blast, she had been moving behind the dirt-golem that had been speaking to us. Grak had been the straggler, further away from us, and he trundled his way toward the barricades that Fenn had set up. He was bleeding from two places, but not as heavily as I would have feared.

I ran to Solace and pulled her body behind the makeshift barricade, leaving a smear of her dark-green blood on the flagstones. Her skin had been transformed into hard bark, but if that was what she’d tried with druidic magic, it had apparently not helped her. She had moved her cloak around and clutched it to her chest in order to shield it with her body, but she was either unconscious or dead, and either way wasn’t holding onto it anymore, so the cloak of leaves trailed after her, becoming bloodied in the process.

Fenn fired an artillery shot at one of the statues, using heavyweight, blunt arrowheads, then ducked back down behind the barricade with us as the whine of the statues picked up again. I pulled more SPD from one of the bones and left again, this time moving toward where Amaryllis had engaged the dirt-golems in combat. Her sword was flickering rapidly as she spun and ducked through them, and with her every movement she put more of them between her and the statues.

“Aim for their centers!” she called as soon as she saw me.

“We have to go!” I called back, even as I waded in with the Anyblade.

It was my first time actually fighting with a blade since I’d gotten the new blade-bound bonuses, and the difference would probably have been overwhelming if it wasn’t all muscle memory. The dirt golems were mostly unarmed, throwing punches or trying to grab at me, and I danced between them with fluid motions, nimbly avoiding them and striking out with my sword at all the opportunities that seemed to be presenting themselves. I could tell that the dirt golems hadn’t been built for combat just from how they moved, but there was a huge amount of weight behind their swings.

When my sword cleaved into them, it stuck into the dirt, and I was only able to remove it by quickly shrinking the Anyblade to pull it out and then expanding it back to its full size again. Amaryllis was having more luck than I was; the ones she was fighting had dark-brown liquid leaking from the holes she was putting into them, and a few had already dropped around her. I switched up my tactics and began using the Anyblade in its largest form; Monkey Grip applied even when wielding two-handed, which meant that I had what should have been an impractically enormous six-foot sword. I swung it through the air like I had been born with a blade in my hand, and when I struck one of the dirt golems with a full swing, my sword went halfway through its body, causing a thick spurt of dark-brown liquid as it collapsed to the ground.

Basic Dirt Golem defeated!

After that, my new strategy was to duck and roll out of the way, getting enough distance that I could wind up for a huge swing with the massive sword. The dirt golems were either too slow or stupid to dodge; the best they could do was to put up an arm in defense, but a burst of blood magic to enhance the force of my swing was enough to both cut off the limb and strike to their heart. The power of it left my right hand shaking with pain — I couldn’t feel anything from my left. The messages kept piling up, not just from the golems Amaryllis and I defeated, but from skills going from 20 to 21 and hitting that cap.

I took a few hits. The golems had been converging on Amaryllis and I from all directions, and sometimes it was simply a matter of needing to take the hit or be overwhelmed and unable to continue with the power strike strategy, which required a fair bit of room. Each time, the hit was absorbed by my armor, leaving the blue metal a bleach-white but otherwise not affecting me at all. Twice I was struck with a laser, but it only left a small white mark on the metal. Amaryllis was taking hits too, but less gracefully; she could lock her armor in place, but that wasn’t an absolute proof against the impacts, and every time she did it, she was stopping herself dead in her tracks, unable to dodge or attack.

It became a slog, but one that we were winning, and there was a feedback loop of victory, where each golem defeated meant that it was easier to defeat the others, even as I began to grow exhausted. I glanced to Fenn and Grak and saw a dirt golem slam its fist against an invisible wall just before Grak buried his axe in the creature’s torso. Grak wasn’t nearly as effective as Amaryllis and I, but he was fortified. Three of the four statues in range were gone, and as I watched, Fenn fired another artillery shot at the fourth. The arrows struck hard enough to chip and crack the stone, and while the statue didn’t quite topple to the ground, it stopped in place with its mouth wide, no longer shooting lasers down at us.

Then I swung my sword again, dropping another golem to the ground,

Basic Dirt Golem defeated!

and that was it, we had killed everything there was to kill. I glanced toward the gate golem, but it hadn’t budged, save to close its enormous hands.

I ran to where Fenn and Grak were and knelt down to look Solace over, a hand already going to one of my few remaining bones. Her skin was no longer bark, having reverted back to its natural light green.

“She’s dead,” said Fenn. “Has been since you brought her here.” I could see dark-green crantek blood on Fenn’s hands and staining her fatigues.

“A person isn’t dead until their soul is gone,” I replied. “We’ve got thirty minutes to think of something, we can put her in the bottle —”

I reached down and undid the leafy cloak around Solace’s neck, put it around my own neck, and once it was in place, reached into it as though absentmindedly drawing something from a pocket. To my relief, my fingers found the bottle and pulled it out. I set the bottle, with the forest inside it, down onto the ground.

“We can’t put her in, Joon, there’s no magic there to catch her, nothing to stop her fall, you’d be dropping her a mile to smash up her corpse,” said Fenn.

“Amaryllis has the immobility plate,” I said. “She could —”

“No,” said Amaryllis, “I would be trapped if the locus couldn’t somehow revive her. We used her magic to get in and out of the bottle.” Amaryllis took the void rifle from her back and leveled it at Solace’s head. Thunk. “Fenn, nail and bottle.”

Fenn held out Sable and a small glass bottle with a glass stopper in it appeared, followed by a nail with runes as soon as Amaryllis had grabbed the bottle. I watched, feeling numb, as Amaryllis slid the nail into the hole she’d made and extracted Solace’s soul from her body. When that was done, both the nail and bottle went back into Fenn’s glove, and after that, what remained of Solace as well.

(And during the battle, I had actually been feeling gleeful at the way that I’d been moving, reveling in the power that was now mine, high on the rush of inflicting pain and damage, and on each message the game gave me about another one down. I’d forgotten, for minutes, that something had happened to Solace.)

“So the plan is that we blow through this place and murder everyone inside?” asked Fenn.

“We should go,” I said. “Regroup, try to …” I looked down at the bottle. The last druid on Aerb was dead, and the locus couldn’t induct another when it had such a small, tamed scrap of land to call its own. And now the bottle really was a closed system, one that seemed like it was going to reach a failure state sooner rather than later.

“The locus is going to die without our intervention,” said Amaryllis. “At the moment, we have no intervention to administer. If we leave, the penitentiary will have time to rebuild and repair. We could fight this battle better the second time, from a position of knowledge, but we’d still have to fight it again. We have clocks running against us.”

Quest Updated: 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)

“Fuck,” I said.

“A careful observer would have known that Amaryllis intended us to stay,” said Fenn. “If she hadn’t, then she’d have had the key out from the moment she came over here.”

“Don’t start with me,” said Amaryllis with a glare.

“Sorry,” said Fenn with a shrug that didn’t read as remotely apologetic. “I’m in a people-murdering mood, that always gets me feisty.”

“She was a good woman,” said Grak. His eyes were fixed on the puddle of green blood. He hefted his dirt-smeared axe. “I believe she would want us to see this through.”

I stared at the three of them, my eyes flicking from one to the other. I was afraid of what we’d find within the penitentiary, given that the prisoner we were after had enough free rein to send a void bomb out to us and that the security systems, or maybe just the penitentiary itself, had been thoroughly subverted against us. But we’d been caught off-guard this time, and if there were more fights in the future — well, who was I kidding, there were sure to be more fights in the future — then at least those fights would be ones that we could approach on a full war footing, with no fear of offending our now-hostile host.

“We’re going to need to be on the lookout for traps,” I said. “Not just magical ones, but mechanical too. And revenge is not our priority here, we need at least enough information to kickstart my own knowledge of soul manipulation. We can’t kill whoever sent that bomb our way until after that.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Amaryllis. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 16 - Panopticon

I tried to think about it in terms of tactics.

Solace had been versatile, able to switch between control, utility, and being a heavy hitter basically at will. When we’d fought against Larkspur, she’d taken out the majority of men on her own. She had been able to provide healing that far surpassed what I was capable of, and with her gone, a wide variety of potential injuries turned back from recoverable to fully lethal. That was especially the case if I was the one who suffered the injury. We had lost her scouting ability, easy access to the interior of the bottle, and fast travel in the form of bird flight. So tactically, I was pretty sure that I’d have to call it the single biggest loss that our party could possibly have suffered. We still had the bottle, hidden in the leafy cloak that Fenn was now wearing, but that was now nothing more than another burden.

And on a personal level? I had known her for a little more than a week, but I had liked her, even if druidic magic was a little maddening, and even if her way of seeing the world felt foreign to me, even on Aerb. I had the barest sketch of her role in the team, as something like ‘team mom’, or ‘the tempered one’, or … I didn’t know, that was the problem, and now I never would.

(There were also all the other familiar feelings that I took to be part and parcel with death, the unfairness of it, the might-have-beens, the rage against the gods, a mixture of anger and disgust at a world that allowed such a thing to happen, and a deep-down trembling sorrow that threatened to bring tears. It was impossible for me to separate out how much of that was Solace and how much was just the way that Arthur’s death had rewired the functioning of my brain. Those thoughts were burned in from overuse, scorched on my mind through nine months of thinking the same old things as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, and failing at falling asleep.)

“Don’t let this distract you,” said Amaryllis as we made our way to the door.

“Distract me,” I said, not liking the taste of the words. “She’s dead. I might be able to recover her, if I can work fast enough, or — or you said that soul decay in a glass enclosure takes three years, I could figure something out in that time, how to graft one soul onto another and preserve part of her, or how to shove a soul into a body, or something, what kind of god will I make if I can’t?”

“Uther was never a god,” said Amaryllis. “He was a man. Some things were beyond him. He’s not on record as having ever raised someone from the dead, and there were people that he desperately would have wanted to. If Uther at the height of his power couldn’t bring back Vervain, then I don’t think that you’ll be able to bring back Solace, not if you only have three years, at the most, to do it.”

I wanted to lie and tell her that I had a quest, but I was a horrible liar, and that was a horrible idea for a whole host of reasons. The fact that the lie even entered into my head meant that she was probably right, I was going to let Solace’s gruesome death distract me from the things right in front of me that really needed doing, like saving the locus, or healing my own soul, or, even in the short term, doing things like paying attention to the prison and whatever horrors it had in store for us. I tried to snap my attention away from the green blood still visible on my hands and ignore the slight tremor I saw there.

We were at the doors, the large ones that the bomb-carrying dirt golem had stepped through. Grak looked them over with a monocle, but the examination yielded little.

“We don’t yet know whether the prison was tricked or subverted,” said Grak.

“Does it matter?” asked Fenn. “Hostile is as hostile does. That was my rule, last time I was in prison.”

“If it still operates according to a set of rules, we might be able to use those rules,” Grak replied. “If there are rules, we will face different threats than if someone has taken over the entire system.”

“We can’t trust anything that we’ve seen so far,” I said. “And we don’t want to count on reflexes or telegraphed attacks to protect us from another void bomb. Fenn doesn’t have an infinite number of inch-thick steel shields.”

“I have five more,” said Fenn. “The one we set up to block laser fire was practically unhurt, so call that six total. Those lasers were good against unprotected bird-flesh, but not up to penetrating steel.”

“So we leap-frog forward, one shield at a time?” I asked. “Or just pick them up and move with them?”

“Too cautious,” said Amaryllis, looking the door over. “The golems are gone now, but I would bet that this isn’t the only way in, and once we’re in the depths of this place, they can come at us from all directions at once in the least favorable possible conditions for us.”

“You want a blitz?” I asked.

“A what?” asked Fenn.

“An intense, rushing attack?” I asked. Come on, that was one that Aerb’s creator should have had some made-up reason to import over.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis.

“No,” replied Grak. “A blitz only makes sense if we aren’t expecting traps.”

“If we expect traps and operate as such, then we’re going to get hit harder by all the defenses that we know are there,” said Amaryllis. “We’re trading defense against the known for defense against the unknown.”

“And the unknown just killed Solace,” I said. There was no good place to wipe the blood from my hands. My armor was all metal, either mail or plate, with nowhere to get passably clean. I could have asked Fenn, but didn’t, because the denial of reality was one of the ways I dealt with death.

“Grak, do you have any read on what waits for us inside there?” asked Amaryllis. “How many more of the golems?”

“The golems are different,” said Grak. “They are the same magic at a different wavelength.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” asked Fenn. “We’re going to need to go through this door sooner rather than later.”

“Entads can change over time,” said Grak. “They can have different aspects. It is possible that there was some drift in alignment. However, there was also drift in function. If independently moving creatures are its current design, earlier designs might be more like the statues. We might also be looking at something else entirely.”

“Meaning a full spectrum of threat?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Grak. “That’s possible.”

“Shit,” said Amaryllis. “Fine, then no — what was it?”

“Blitz,” I replied.

“Then no blitz,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll take this slow. Fenn, let us know what you’re feeling.”

“Angry and impatient,” she answered.

“I meant in terms of luck,” said Amaryllis with a frown.

“I know,” replied Fenn, gripping her bow. “Now are we going to open this door or not?”

Grak put his monocle up to his eye and nodded. I moved forward and grabbed the handle as Fenn raised her bow, and I pulled back the door with my sword raised, expecting a fight.

Instead, we looked at a long hallway with thirty-foot-high ceilings. High windows filled the upper twenty feet. Beyond that, the large, open dome that dominated the entire building was waiting. There was far more greenery than I had expected, an entire garden growing under the grey light of the overcast sky above. Nothing moved within, and I couldn’t see any signs of dirt golems either. In fact, I couldn’t even see signs of tracks across the flagstones of the floor. My eyes weren’t drawn to that though, they were drawn to the four suits of armor that lined the hallways, each of them tucked into little alcoves of their own. They were made of brass, with dark blue lining to them, holding swords but unmoving.

“Those suits of armor are going to attack us,” I said as soon as I saw them.

“No,” said Grak, lowering his monocle. “They’re just decorative.”

“They’re going to attack us,” I repeated. “It’s … if you accept that this world reflects the tabletop games that I spent my life playing —”

“I don’t,” said Grak. “They aren’t magical.”

I stared at him. “But you can’t see through the metal,” I said. “There could be something in there.”

“On it,” said Fenn. She raised her bow and fired an arrow at the nearest suit of armor, puncturing straight through its torso. It didn’t leak mud and showed no signs of reacting. “Satisfied?”

“No,” I said. “It’s … there’s no magic in there?”

“It’s less than the baseline for this place,” said Grak. “The armors will not move. Entads all have their points of visible, focused power.”

“Fine,” I said. But if it were my old group from Kansas, they would have spent a half hour dismantling those suits of armor from a distance, in the same way that they would bash in the skull of every corpse that they passed, just to make sure. I could fully fathom that this might not be a trap; that would have been my style, to set up an obvious trap just for the joy of a fake out. If not for that thought, I might have objected a little bit more, because obviously, and in spite of what Grak had said, this was a trap.

We started moving and were halfway down the hallway when Fenn said, “Fuck,” and fired her first arrow. I didn’t have time to curse at Grak, because I was already moving too, extending the Anyblade to its full, ridiculous length and slamming it hard into a suit of armor just as it started moving. I dented the armor, which pitched the suit to the side, but where that kind of blow would probably have left a person screaming in pain, the armor just got up, bringing its sword up in a smooth, practiced motion and settling into a stance that spoke to years of training.

I’d grown a little over-confident in my swordfighting abilities over the past few days, and that was made clear to me when I went toe-to-toe with a living suit of armor that clearly held a lot of expertise. I was using the Anyblade to its fullest, allowing it to shrink and grow in response to each attack, sometimes curving so that I could make a parry, but I was being forced to move quickly and unable to make much of a counter-attack, or at least, not one that could make it through the armor. And even if I did, the large dent I’d put in its side with my first strike didn’t seem to be slowing it down any.

Amoureux Sentry defeated!

“Decapitate!” called Amaryllis from behind me, but I couldn’t look back to see what results I could expect from that, and ‘hit him in the head’ didn’t seem like it was all that useful of advice against what was effectively an expert swordsman. I parried another attack and shrank the Anyblade down to a one-handed sword, then touched my restocked supply of bones in their bandolier with my deformed hand. I could barely feel them, but a connection was all it took, so I waited for an opportunity and pulled down SPD at what I hoped was the right time. I thrust the sword up, narrowing it to the thinnest possible point, and pierced the armor where the helmet joined to the gorget, putting my entire weight behind it, including a rush of force from the hammering pulse of my blood.

I was rewarded with a cracking sound like wood being split, and the suit of armor tumbled backward, still moving, but imperfectly so. I leapt on it, keeping my sword lodged just beneath where I’d expect a skull to be, and bore down with all my weight, again putting blood magic into it, and that was enough for it to stop moving and drop its sword clattering to the ground.

Amoureux Sentry defeated!

When I finally spun back to the others, I saw Grak on the ground, bleeding from the face, Amaryllis pulling her sword from the neck of one of the suits of armor, another suit in a crumbled heap on the ground, and Fenn backed into a corner with the fourth, doing her best with a sword and shield, which was frankly not all that good. Hair was stuck to her forehead where sweat dripped down, and my brief glimpse of the fight — before running her way — was enough to let me know that she was relying on luck more than actual skill.

I grabbed the suit of armor from behind and threw it to the ground, then went at it with uncoordinated strikes meant to keep it down more than to do any actual damage. With it prone and me striking from above, we were nearly evenly matched, at least until Amaryllis came over and began flickering her sword on and off. It didn’t take long for her blade to intersect something vital, and it stopped almost at once.

Amoureux Sentry defeated!

“Should have fucking listened,” I said, hating myself for not pushing back harder.

“Go, heal,” said Fenn. Her cheek was bleeding and she winced as she spoke.

I ran over to Grak, who was still not moving. The cut on his cheek was bad, down to the bone, but I thought it was probably what had happened to the other side of his face, which was swelling and red, that had knocked him out. He was still breathing, and I went through the bones in my bandolier one-by-one, visibly watching him improve. Concussions weren’t at all good for humans, and I assumed the same was true of dwarves, but I wasn’t sure that it was the kind of thing that healing someone with bones could actually fix.

Skill increased: Bone Magic lvl 22!

After the fifth bone, Grak opened his eyes and started grabbing at the ground, then after seeing that it was just us, sat up and rubbed at his head.

“You should have fucking listened,” I said as I moved away from him and over to Fenn, who was nursing her wounds and waiting for me. She pulled bones from my bandolier and replaced them from her glove as I worked. I left a smear of green blood on her and felt the sudden need to collapse in a puddle. I kept on going through force of will.

“I should have listened,” said Grak from behind me. “I apologize.”

“We could have dealt with that whole fucking mess without risk,” I said, turning on him and jabbing a finger in his direction. “We just wasted time and resources because you refused to see what’s been in front of your face this entire time, the thing that I’ve been trying to tell you, and because everyone treated you like a fucking authority, because I didn’t put my foot down, we almost died. I saved your fucking life. It’s adventuring 101, every statue is going to come to life, every suit of armor is going to move, you don’t leave that shit lying around, it’s the same thing with corpses, you put a hole in their head as you go by so that they don’t rise up as zombies —”

“Joon,” said Fenn.

“I know,” I said, “We don’t use the Z word.”

“You’re being an ass,” said Fenn. I turned to look at her. “He’s not going to say it, because he was wrong, and Mary’s not going to say it, because she doesn’t want another fight with you, which means that it falls to me to tell you that you’re being an ass. And I love you, but you’re being an ass.”

I took a steadying breath. “We could have died,” I said.

“I apologize,” said Grak. “Aerb should not work the way your games do.” He sniffed slightly.

“Well, it does,” I said. I almost gave one of the suits a kick to let out some frustration before remembering that I was wearing sneakers and it was hard metal.

Grak was right though. Most of the time, a statue was just a statue, and a suit of armor was just on display as a status symbol. It was one thing to say that the world shared a lot of similarities with the games that I DMed, and another entirely to say that it was fundamentally warped around me to conform to the conventions of the genre, and not just the standard conventions, but the conventions as I saw them. I could understand that as a hard pill to swallow. If you didn’t buy that, then it fundamentally didn’t make sense to believe that these particular suits of armor were going to animate, or at least it didn’t make sense to believe it at a higher rate than suggested by the other evidence.

“Why were they dormant?” asked Grak. He asked it in my direction, like I would have a clue. “Why didn’t they run out to attack, if they were mobile?” I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to mount a post facto defense, or if this was him genuinely seeking the solution to a problem. I choose to rein in my frustration and pretend that it was the latter.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If I were forced to guess, then … huh.”

Well, because if you were making a proper dungeon, which this effectively was, then you couldn’t just have the party fight everyone all at once, you had to split it up into a large number of roughly level-appropriate encounters, because otherwise there would be a long slog through a mountain of enemies followed by looting the place blind, and proper game design dictated that you give as much variety as feasible so that when people got bored of the fighting, there was a puzzle, or a social encounter, and these were layered for optimal enjoyment.

But if you just had each room be its own encounter, then people would naturally wonder, “Well, why didn’t they hear the fighting? Why, when responding with overwhelming force seems like the winning strategy, would they not do that?”, and there were plenty of answers to that, but there did have to be answers, unless you wanted to be the kind of coward who threw up your hands and said that it was just a game.

“You said that entads could change over time?” I asked Grak.

“Yes,” he replied. His eyes were scanning the large dome and looking at the greenery there. Standing in this hallway wasn’t making any of us feel great, but focusing on a problem was helping me to cool down a little bit, and I was hoping that the same would be true of Grak. “Most entads are static, but some change. It’s more common for sentient entads to change.”

“Then my guess is that either there are independent parts of the prison working at cross-purposes, or parts of it that were set up long ago that the prison has diverged away from. The statues outside are of a different make than the dirt golems, it’s possible that they operate independently from each other.” I paused for a moment. “Plus whatever prisoners are here have been here for hundreds of years, and if they haven’t managed to escape yet, then they’ve probably at least learned the ins and outs of the prison.”

Grak frowned. “It is … plausible,” he replied. The pause felt uncomfortably long. “Entad architecture is rare. Sentient entads are rare. Sentient architecture, there perhaps a hundred in Aerb are. I have not them studied.” It was the first time I could recall hearing his Anglish slip in the entire time I’d known him. His face was screwed up in concentration.

“What would that mean, in practical terms?” asked Amaryllis.

“Bite-sized threats,” said Fenn with a nod. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and come across some clashing factions.”

“Let’s get moving then,” said Amaryllis. “Everyone is healed up? Are we fine on bones?”

“Just over two hundred left,” said Fenn, wiggling the fingers of her glove. “I’d thought that would be more than enough, but —” She stopped and glanced at me. “I didn’t think that Juniper would be our only source of repeat healing, and the fairies are only for legitimate I’m-going-to-die emergencies.” Because Solace was supposed to be doing the heavy lifting, and now she was gone.

“Then we’ll go slow and cautious,” said Amaryllis. “We have a simple objective, let’s not complicate things.”

“Contact,” said Fenn as soon as the words had left Amaryllis’ mouth, and it wasn’t quite unbelievable that what Amaryllis had said would coincide exactly with something coming around the corner, but it did seem uniquely improbable, unless the enemy was listening in on our conversation and wanted us to have a chance to finish talking.

“I wish to parley!” called a high, woman’s voice from just out of view. An arm made of dirt waved at us from just beyond the end of the hallway. I could see the point of Fenn’s arrow tracking it.

Amaryllis looked to me and Grak with a raised eyebrow. “We would be willing to talk,” she called back to the golem. Fenn lowered her arrow with an exasperated sigh and kept her arrow nocked. We were all on war footing; I’d drawn my Anyblade without even thinking about it.

The dirt golem sidled into view, its too-human mouth giving us something disturbingly close to a smile. “Please, if I may,” it said, “I believe we got off on the wrong foot with our affray.”

“What happened, from your perspective?” asked Amaryllis. Her sword was in her hand, and she flickered it off, which to me sent mixed messages given how lethal it could be when it reappeared, but it seemed like it was intended as a defusing gesture. I lowered my own weapon, but didn’t sheathe it.

“There was a problem with the message I was trying to convey,” said the golem, turning its head slightly. “My voice was lost, the statues reacted, and I thought it best to enter into melee.” That was much faster confirmation of my theory than I was expecting; the entity controlling the dirt golem considered itself different from the statues.

“And you’ve reconsidered?” asked Amaryllis.

“You are formidable fighters, to have destroyed those creations,” it said with a gesture to the suits of armor. “That one of your own died was met, by you, with dismay. And if resistance is met with destruction, then I must not block your pathway.”

“It … doesn’t think that it can beat us?” asked Fenn. “Well that’s a lucky break.”

“Unless it’s a trap,” I said. “I don’t think it is, given the level of sophistication the traps have had so far” —almost none—
“but … that doesn’t mean that it’s not a possibility.”

“You won’t stop us?” Amaryllis asked the golem.

“Why have you come this day?” asked the dirt golem in response.

“We told you,” replied Amaryllis, keeping her voice far calmer and more pleasant than I would have been able to. “We seek a specific prisoner, one that you said was being moved to a visitation area, Fallatehr Whiteshell.”

“And it is only that you have something you wish to say?” asked the dirt golem.

“We’d like a conversation, yes,” said Amaryllis, which was just short of being a blatant lie. We were planning on extracting him, if we needed to, and we did expect to need to in order to get what we wanted from him.

“Then come,” said the dirt golem. “Come this way.” It tottered off into the giant dome, moving at a steady pace and pausing without looking at us when we didn’t make a move to follow. Just off in the distance I could make out small little dirt golems looking at us; these things had already proven that they had some form of silent, internal communications.

“Are we going?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “If we’re going to continue on at all, I think we need to take the peace offering at face value. For now.”

Chapter 17 - All the Myriad Ways

Moving through the prison following the dirt golem was nerve-wracking. We saw more dirt golems as we walked, usually from a distance, but there were an awful lot of them, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle them as effectively up close, if they trapped us in a hallway. Our golem guide was silent as it walked, and behaved more or less like I would expect a videogame NPC to, stopping when we stopped and behaving as though it was going through a script (which, for all I knew, it was).

Grak stopped every time we came to a new hallway and raised his monocle to his eye, but whenever he said that it was clear, he gave me a look for confirmation. After the first two times I started to feel a little bit guilty about it, because I didn’t actually think that Aerb could be entirely predicted on the basis of genre or narrative conventions. You had to be aware of them, but the way I had always handled things was to subvert, invert, or change the tropes as often as I played them straight. If we came across a scheming vizier, I would have to consider that he was betraying his king, but also that he was just a loyal vizier, or that it only looked like he was betraying his king, or any number of other possibilities. That didn’t mean that there was no predictive value in knowing the tropes, just that they were pretty far from being an absolute guide.

I hadn’t been able to predict that a bomb was coming out to greet us at the prison’s front door. I hadn’t foreseen Solace’s death. It was easy to make sense of it in retrospect, to fit it within different frameworks, but that was all useless if you did it after the fact. Maybe that was why I hadn’t pushed back against Grak when he said that the statues weren’t magical, or why I had yelled at him after it had turned out that I was right. That sheer uselessness, the way that I almost had a grasp on what was going on and it wasn’t doing me any good, was really starting to get to me — and had been, even before Solace.

“Here, through this passageway,” said the dirt golem as it came to a stop, gesturing at a door.

Grak raised his monocle and spent a long while peering at the door, then lowered it with a frown. “Nothing that I can see.” He turned to me. “Juniper?”

I had no fucking idea. “Let’s just go in.”

We weren’t idiots about it, and did a passable door clear with Fenn aiming an arrow straight through the crack and no one standing directly in front of the door, but the room had only a table and a handful of chairs, with an elf seated in one of them. Grak informed us of a powerful ward stretching from one wall to the other, bisecting the room; the golem had told us that it was an absolute ward, built with a layer of defense against every possible type of magic, and he tentatively agreed with that assessment.

The elf sat with his arms folded across his bare chest. He had scars like the ones that Fenn had, but far more extensive, covering his skin from his wrists, to the base of his neck, and down his chest, in similar patterns of curls and whorls. But those weren’t the only scars he had; giant scars, each the width of a hand, crisscrossed his chest. The meaning of that was obvious to me. If scar magic was predicated on the unchanging nature of elf skin, then the way to deprive an elf of that power was to tear some strips of skin off him. The man himself stared at us with that same, tight-lipped, imperious expression I’d seen on every elf I had passed by in both Barren Jewel and Cranberry Bay. He had long, flowing hair, so blonde it was almost white, and ears that were more sharply pointed than Fenn’s. He had little in the way of fat or muscle, but I knew from Fenn that didn’t matter too much for elves, in terms of what it said about combat ability. We slowly, cautiously moved into the room. I took one of the chairs and Amaryllis took the other, while Grak and Fenn were left standing.

“Very —” the elf began.

“Fuck!” I shouted, jumping halfway out of my chair, because when he’d started speaking I had seen his teeth, long, sharp teeth like a piranha that instantly awoke a basal fear in me.

And then, after I’d had a look around the room and seen the confusion on everyone’s faces, I sat back down, feeling a growing warmth on my cheeks. No one else is surprised. This is just what elves are like, and everyone knows that. Fenn had pointed out that she was a half-elf when we first met by pointing at her ears and her teeth. Obviously elfish ears, obviously human teeth.

I coughed once. “You were saying?”

The elf stared at me with pursed lips. “Who are you?” he asked. I tried not to recoil from the view of his sharp teeth, which were visible when he spoke.

“We come seeking your expertise in souls,” said Amaryllis. She had given me a look of incomprehension, when I’d had my outburst, but now she was as good as pretending that I wasn’t there.

“Ah,” said the elf. He smiled at us — more specifically, at me, revealing his pointy teeth in full. I had a guess that wasn’t so friendly of an expression in elf culture. Just a hunch. “And who are you? What interests do you represent?” There was something very subtly off about his accent that I couldn’t place my finger on.

“We are independent actors,” said Amaryllis.

The elf shook his head. “No,” he said.

“No?” asked Amaryllis. “No, you won’t help us, or no, you don’t believe us?”

“No, I do not believe you,” replied the elf. “You are too well-armed to have come alone.”

“We’re really very wealthy actors,” said Fenn. “Our little troupe has done quite well for itself.”

“And do you offer escape?” asked the elf. “You have suffered, getting here.” That, at least, was easy to see; we were all varying degrees of bloody, and my blue armor was marked white with every hit I’d taken. I had used bone magic to heal Amaryllis’ leg, but there was no longer immobility plate covering it, and there hadn’t been anything we could do about that.

“We want knowledge first,” said Amaryllis. “Tell us what you know of the soul —”

The elf began laughing, a high, melodious sound. “I know everything there is to know,” he said. “Everything knowable outside the exclusion zones.”

“Enough that we could get started on our own,” said Amaryllis, without looking my way.

“You want classes,” laughed the elf. “The warden would never allow it. It would take years of study to have even the barest comprehension of your own soul, let alone to touch another’s.”

I didn’t say, “try me”, though I really wanted to, because Amaryllis was on point for diplomacy.

“You were arrested and tried by the Kingdom of Anglecynn for the horrors that you perpetuated under the Second Empire,” said Amaryllis. “You hadn’t broken any laws, but the power had shifted and examples had to be made. I am sympathetic to that, retroactive criminality is a miscarriage of justice. We want to help you, so long as you help us.”

“And do you offer escape?” the elf asked again, leaning forward slightly, still with his arms folded across his chest. I was painfully aware of a few facts. First, that the void wasn’t considered magic on Aerb, and couldn’t be stopped by wards, and second, that the prison hadn’t seemed to understand that it was carrying a void bomb to us until well after the fact. The barrier between us had a few flaws that I could think of, but that was the glaring one that was getting my attention. Hell, that was how I was planning on killing him, if it came to that. The void rifle was in Fenn’s glove, and she was waiting for the signal.

“You understand that trust is an issue,” said Amaryllis. “That’s why we want to get the basics, the bare basics, first.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked between the four of us. “It is a test,” he said with a nod. “But knowing that it’s a test makes it pointless, because you know that I know enough to pass, and if I know it as a test I can fake cooperation. Which you know.”

“Indulge us,” said Amaryllis with a slight frown.

The elf stared at her, then blinked once. “It’s not a test,” he said, looking between us again. “Why are you here?”

“You’ve been stuck here for hundreds of years,” said Amaryllis. “The majority of the other inmates must be dead by now. I would think that you would want to show off. What’s holding you back?”

“What specific expertise do you seek?” asked the elf.

Amaryllis hesitated. She didn’t look my direction; if I were her, I wasn’t sure that I would have been able to resist.

“I know a bone mage who sucked several of his own bones dry,” said Amaryllis. “I was given to understand that a soul mage could help with that problem.”

The elf smiled again, with the same unpleasant display of teeth. “A simple problem,” he said. “One of the soulself. I could fix it within a half hour, were escape on the table.”

“I haven’t said that it’s not,” said Amaryllis.

“You haven’t said that it is,” the elf replied.

“I assume that the warden, as you call it, listens in on all conversations that take place in this room,” said Amaryllis. “We would, therefore, never directly say that we were willing to help you to escape.”

“You are cautious,” said the elf. “Cautious enough that you would never let me touch the soul of someone, even if it were to fix damage, for fear of what I might do.”

“No, of course not,” said Amaryllis. She crossed her arms, mirroring him. “We don’t want you to engage in any actual work. We want you to teach someone without laying your hands on the soul directly.”

“And you would still not trust me,” said the elf with an approving nod. “My pupil would not be allowed to practice soulcraft unless he first understood precisely what he was doing. You would bring in test subjects before ever touching your valued bone mage.”

“If we had to,” said Amaryllis.

“And then you would kill me, as much understanding as you might have for my plight,” the elf continued.

Amaryllis frowned. “I can see where that would be the logical conclusion,” she said. “Is there anything that we could do to assuage your concern?”

“Traditionally, the kingdoms of men would take hostages,” he replied. “But of course, such an exchange doesn’t work when we do not know the map of values. You might give me a hostage you did not care for and accept such a cost for concluding business.”

“Then we’re at an impasse,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. “Unless you want to stay here for the rest of your life, you’re going to have to take a chance on us. I solemnly promise not to kill you, or have you killed, or even allow anyone else to kill you while you’re under my care. You will effectively serve as our prisoner until the training is complete, but your conditions will be better than they are here, and you’ll have access to whatever information you want about the outside world.”

The elf gave her a thoughtful look. “And were escape an option, how many could you take?”

Amaryllis hesitated at that, and finally broke eye contact with him to look to Fenn. “How long are the masks good for?” she asked.

“An hour,” replied Fenn.

“And they’re made using the kit?” asked Amaryllis.

Fenn nodded. That meant we had a practically unlimited supply of them, meaning that if we had a lot of time and coordination, we could put two or three hundred people into the glove, as an upper bound.

“It would, of course, depend on who these people were,” said Amaryllis. “We could keep careful watch over two or three people, potentially, but —”

“Twenty,” said the elf, unflinching.

“Friends?” asked Amaryllis.

“Something like that,” replied the elf.

Amaryllis stared at him for a moment, furrowing her brow. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I was thinking that even if we could overcome the logistical hurdles of getting twenty people out of this prison, which would likely mean destroying every security system and golem in the place, there was no way that the four of us could keep twenty people contained except through their own goodwill. And these weren’t just twenty people, these were twenty elves, faster and stronger than humans, long-lived enough to have acquired a wide variety of skills.

“Miss Red, may I have my amulet please?” asked Amaryllis, holding her hand out toward Fenn.

The blue amulet appeared in Fenn’s hand, and she tossed it over without another response. I hadn’t asked Fenn how she would feel about seeing another elf, but my guess of ‘not good’ seemed to be mostly accurate. She didn’t seem to be in a great mood, not that I thought any of us were.

Amaryllis held the amulet in her hand, and her eyes glowed blue as she consulted with it. I felt a chill come over the room as the minutes passed.

“What magic does she hold in her hand?” asked the elf.

“Are you interested?” I asked. “If you want knowledge for its own sake, we have plenty that we can share with you, as a way of rewarding good behavior.”

The elf shrugged, but his eyes stayed on Amaryllis, who was taking her sweet time talking to her great-grandfather. Eventually her eyes cleared, and the room immediately warmed back up. She tossed the amulet back to Fenn without looking, which seemed pretty careless to do with a priceless artifact, but based on the way her jaw was clenched, I got the sense that she hadn’t had a great talk.

“He’s not Fallatehr,” said Amaryllis.

“I never said I was,” replied the elf with such smooth arrogance that I nearly reached across the table to punch him in the face.

“Seems like he’s sort of useless to us then,” said Fenn. I saw her gloved hand twitch slightly.

“Who is he then?” I asked with a frown. “And why would the prison think that he was the one we wanted to talk to?”

“I am not Fallatehr,” said the elf. “He took my soul and reformed it in his own image.”

Quest Updated: Crimes Against the Soul - Fallatehr Whiteshell has altered every remaining prisoner at the Amoureux Penitentiary to become as close to him as possible. Only the real Fallatehr will serve all purposes.

“Scenario two,” I said to Amaryllis. Scenario one was confirmation that Fallatehr was a companion; scenario two was a change in the quests; scenario three was a new quest. “And that’s why you want to move twenty people out. Fallatehr, and people like you.”

The elf nodded. “If it can be done, do it.”

“We wanted a lesson,” said Amaryllis. “But you couldn’t actually pass that test, could you?”

The elf shook his head.

“Well fuck this,” said Fenn. “We’re talking about twenty of this guy? He already tried to kill us once, we don’t need him that badly.”

“We have other options as far as healing goes,” said Amaryllis, staring at the elf. “But that’s not the extent of our problems. Fallatehr Whiteshell might be the only person that can resolve the other one.” Might. We didn’t actually know that soul magic was going to be needed to get the locus back out of the bottle and connected with a new land, but Solace had thought it likely, and it was as good of a guess as we had at the moment. Besides that, if Fallatehr had been a part of the Second Empire at the time it was going on its campaign against the loci, and he was important enough of a researcher that he’d been made an example of, then it was possible he had more information about the soul of a locus. That was all still all up in the air though, and nothing that I really wanted to risk my life on.

“You may consider me interested,” said the elf, looking between us. “I can relay your message, and your offer.”

“We haven’t made an offer,” said Amaryllis. “We only came here to talk. It’s true that we have a fair amount of magic at our disposal, but we still don’t have any way to ensure a working relationship.”

“You need him,” said the elf with a smirk. “You took a risk in coming here. You didn’t turn away at the first or second sign of danger. You don’t turn away even now, as difficulties pile up.”

“I think all I’ve heard so far is that we don’t need this guy alive,” said Fenn. She was drumming her hand against the side of her leg.

“It wouldn’t be good for our negotiations,” said Amaryllis, turning only slightly in Fenn’s direction before looking back at the elf.

We still hadn’t gotten his name, but apparently it didn’t matter, because whoever he had been, he had been altered on the level of the soul to become something else. I still didn’t know what that entailed; memories, abilities, values, something else? Soulfuckery wasn’t really a realm that I wanted to delve into too deeply, not if it was going to expose me to more horrors. I’d had enough non-diegetic existential horror without having to go through a fresh round of it happening on the Aerbian layer.

“Talk to your master,” said Amaryllis. “I’m sure that twenty heads are better than one. Tell him that we need to have our own discussion, in private, and that he might not hear from us again. We might have to arrange another meeting like this in order to get some information on … the specifics of his incarceration.”

The elf looked at her for a while. “We are not slaves,” he said. “He might agree to being taken alone, but the rest of us would not let him go so easily. We are like him, enough so our prison can confuse us, but we are not clones, nor automatons, nor perfectly loyal.” He stood up, unfolding his arms. I’d been worried, the entire time, that he would have a void weapon in his hands, but all that worry was for nothing; he was unarmed. “Do you offer escape for all of us?”

“I don’t offer escape,” said Amaryllis. “If I did, I would take your unique circumstances into consideration.”

“Did everything go your way?” asked the dirt golem as we left the room. Compared to the elf’s mouth, I found its detailed simulacrum of a mouth almost comforting. “Did he have anything of interest to say?”

“It was illuminating, yes,” said Amaryllis. “I’m afraid that our business isn’t concluded yet.”

“Most troubling,” replied the dirt golem. “You have led me astray. You said what you came to say.”

“We need to talk amongst ourselves in private,” said Amaryllis. “My friend is going to make a ward against sound so there’s no threat of anyone hearing.”

“What about reading lips?” I asked.

“I can make a ward against outgoing light,” said Grak. “There is some risk of overheating. I do not know how long we will talk.”

“I meet this proclamation with dismay,” said the golem. “No wards, this prison, put up, since.” It stopped, with its mouth slightly open. “Very well, you may.”

Grak began drawing out the wards, first one to encircle us that immediately blocked out the sound, and second one just beyond the first, which warped the world around us in an unpleasant and slightly disorienting way. Light couldn’t leave the cylinder we were contained in, so it bounced around the inside until it struck something, and sometimes that something was my eye. I could still mostly see out, but it was a visual struggle.

“We can’t let the locus die,” said Amaryllis, as soon as the second ward was complete.

“These wards should hold for an hour,” said Grak. “Maybe less.”

“The terms of the quests that I have don’t actually indicate that we need Fallatehr or soul magic,” I said. “Solace didn’t know for sure that soul magic was needed. At this point, it’s looking very dangerous. If he can rewrite a soul —”

“He can’t, not fully,” said Amaryllis. “That’s excluded.”

“Right,” I said. “And I actually think that we might have had an easier time of this if they were all just puppets, because it sounds like they have enough free will to not want him to leave by himself. I don’t know what mechanisms he’s got to keep them in line, but they’re only close enough.”

“Three factions are not too many to fight,” said Grak. I wasn’t quite sure how he was counting them, but my guess was the soulfucked prisoners, the old, static defenses of the prison, and the dirt golems. Of course, there was also the possibility that we’d only scratched the tip of the iceberg, as far as threats went.

“I’m with the dwarf,” said Fenn. “Kill everyone but the one we want, then take our leave. Sounds like a plan.” She looked out at the ward. “This thing is giving me a headache.”

“We obviously can’t take all of them,” said Amaryllis. “A disproportionate ratio of guards to prisoners is only made possible by either strict systems of control or an adequate level of socialization, neither of which we have, or can have on short notice.”

“And short of getting the real Fallatehr into one of those visitation rooms, we’re going to have to run afoul of the golems, at the very least,” I said.

“The wards include absolute velocity,” said Grak. “The glove would not be able to pass. The ward would prevent him from ever touching it. On first impression, I do not think that I could subvert it.”

“So that plan dies in the cradle,” I said with a wince. “We can fairly easily overpower the dirt golems, I think, they had us badly outnumbered last time and we made it through — but the game called them ‘basic’, so I don’t know if that will hold true.”

“We’re doing all of this to break out someone who we don’t have any reason to think will be loyal to us,” said Amaryllis.

“But based on what your grandfather said, he’s the best?” I asked.

“Great-grandfather,” Amaryllis replied. “And yes, Fallatehr Whiteshell does seem like one of the most capable soul mages to have ever lived, if he could take over twenty other men and women in virtual perpetuity, nevermind doing it under the watchful eye of an imprisoning entity.”

“I can’t say that I’ve been that impressed by the prison so far,” said Fenn. “Seems like we’re getting a bit of a free run because it thinks we could kick its ass.”

“It maneuvered us deep inside,” said Grak.

“That’s what she said,” I replied. It got a snort from Fenn, but only a look of disapproval from Amaryllis and Grak. “Sorry.”

“We are more vulnerable to the golems here than we would be elsewhere,” said Grak. “They could attack us from both ends of this hallway.”

“They could try,” said Fenn. “I can’t say that a bow and arrow seem particularly great at taking out those golems, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

“It comes down to threat analysis then?” I asked. “The golems hit hard, but they’re slow and easy to take on in multiples. My armor is getting a little bit white for my tastes, but if it were just a matter of killing our way through dirt golems and dirt golem variants, I would be fine with that, especially if there are three quests in the mix. But it’s not just that, it’s facing down other kinds of idiosyncratic threats, plus trying to navigate around maybe two dozen almost-people who have got to be threats in their own right, if they’ve each been here for hundreds of years.”

“I’ve already said that I’m in,” said Fenn. “I don’t know that it’s what Solace would have wanted, but it’s what I would have wanted, if I’d been Solace.”

“I agree,” said Grak. Fenn had joked before about him being suicidal, but I was starting to believe there was some truth to that. For someone whose specialty was in setting up defenses, he sure seemed eager to throw himself up against new and uncertain challenges.

“Juniper?” asked Amaryllis.

“Mary,” I replied.

“What are your thoughts?” she asked.

“I want to hear yours first,” I replied. We were, by agreement, a democracy, which meant that third vote could make the fourth vote irrelevant. If I voted before her, she could vote in agreement with me as an act of manipulation, even if she didn’t actually think it was smart. She’d be giving up an opportunity to exert her will, but fourth vote was a position of power, in a lot of ways, and I didn’t want her to have that, not when she was trying to get it so transparently.

“Narratively —” she began.

“You can conclude this without me,” said Fenn. She stepped beyond the wards without another word.

“I wasn’t aware that she was so sensitive to that word,” said Amaryllis, staring beyond the ward. “But it’s necessary for us to talk about, I think, given the context.” She took a breath. “Narratively, I don’t think that we actually have a choice. Joon, I know that you would prefer to simply abandon talk of narrative and take things on their merit, but … assume that narrative is a rule of the world. Assume that it can be subverted, or changed, or something like that, that it’s not absolute, yes?”

“Okay, yes,” I said slowly.

“We came here following a quest that was given to us by the amulet we found at Caer Laga,” said Amaryllis. “When we arrived, Solace lost her life protecting the cloak that contains the locus, the very same locus that we might be able to save using the soul magic of the man who we’re here for. Now we have multiple antagonists in front of us, in a large area that approximates a dungeon in many respects.”

“I get it,” I said. “There’s a lot of narrative weight. But we absolutely cannot do things just because the plot says so. End of discussion on that.”

“Do you recall telling me about the Scattered Asches campaign?” asked Amaryllis.

I winced at that. The Scattered Asches campaign had started normally enough, with the party meeting each other during community service, saving the life of a distressed princess, and getting sent off to do some very sensitive work because they were a band of skilled eccentrics well outside the kingdom’s spy network, all pretty normal as far as campaign starts went. The problem was that after the first dungeon, they found a Clue as to greater goings on which threatened the Eight Realms … and then left to go be ninjas on another continent, dropping that plot thread entirely and forcing me to scrap about two weeks’ worth of work.

But the way I thought about worlds was that they didn’t just stop running because you weren’t looking at them, or because you went off to go do something else. If the threat the party had seen was real, and they just ignored it, then that thread couldn’t just quietly die on the vine, something had to happen with it, either another party would have to come in and deal with it, or it would grow and fester, but either way, in a living, breathing world, you couldn’t just drop plot threads, because that would make it seem like the world wasn’t alive.

So the threat had grown, slowly and steadily, and as the party went to ninja school and got involved in ninja plots, they would occasionally hear whispers and rumors from the Eight Realms, they would come across people in exile, and that original plot, one meant for characters of 3rd level, grew until it needed all their might at level 11 to defeat it. Everyone enjoyed it, maybe more because they saw it coming than because I didn’t just let them drop it, but that was my go-to method of dealing with a player that dropped a quest — let them drop it, sure, but there would be consequences, echoes, and aftereffects.

And if we just left the Amoureux Penitentiary, and tried to get me access to soul magic some other way, what would the Dungeon Master do? He might railroad us hard, but even if he didn’t, then he might not be willing to drop all the narrative threads, or to say that sometimes things were meaningless, pointless, wastes of time and resources. For myself, games, movies, television, and literature were the few places that I wasn’t comfortable with embracing the bleak meaninglessness of existence.

“I understand what you’re saying,” I replied. “But if it were me, and someone said, ‘Oh, well I guess we have to, because that’s clearly what the DM wants’, I would have a long, out of character conversation with them about how it’s not about what the DM has planned. And failing that, if I for some reason had no way of communicating with them outside of the game, I would figure out some way of communicating to them within the game that there had been other options, that it was okay to go off the beaten path.”

“Except you would bring them back to the original plot,” said Grak. “It’s contradictory.”

“Of course it is,” I practically shouted. “You’re making all this crap up as you go along, it’s a process of reconciling different learned lessons and feeling your way along by intuition. That’s why I think that we would be fundamentally unwise to follow along with what we think the entity, or the narrative, or whatever, wants from us. Maybe it’s rolling its eyes at this conversation.” Or maybe it was looking on in glee, though that was a less pleasant thought.

“Fine,” said Amaryllis. “Leaving narrative out of it, you cap your skills at 20 unless you have a proficient teacher. Soul magic is powerful, if less so now than it was hundreds of years ago. Fallatehr is demonstrably one of the most powerful soul mages that we’re likely to have access to, and the ways in which that access is dangerous are ones that we can deal with by sufficient application of the force we have available to us. I believe to get better than him, we would have to either go into one of the exclusion zones that got soul magic partly excluded, or we would have to somehow poach from one of the larger polities within the Empire. We need to heal you, sooner rather than later, we need to get the locus out, sooner rather than later, and I know that I said it was a distraction, but if you want a third path for Solace, not the oblivion or hell that currently awaits her, this seems to me to be one of the only ways that’s going to happen.”

I felt an uncomfortable sinking feeling in my chest. She could have led with Solace, and I probably would have changed my vote right then. “Okay,” I said. “Then I guess it’s unanimous.”

Chapter 18 - Aggressive Negotiations

When we came out of the wards, Fenn was standing with her arm around the dirt golem.

“Productive conversation?” she asked.

“We’ll be staying around here for a little bit,” said Amaryllis, speaking more to the golem than to Fenn.

The golem slumped slightly to the side, and Fenn moved away from it.

“Unanimous?” asked Fenn, with a glance in my direction.

“Yes,” I said. “It took some convincing.” The golem’s slump became more pronounced as I watched it. “What were you doing out here?”

“Girl talk,” said Fenn. The golem fell to the ground. “I didn’t think that it went that poorly.” Her bow appeared in her hand. “So, my guess is that our prison-host didn’t like the news that we would be staying?”

“I think it only gave us a reprieve in the interests of getting us out of its way without further incident,” said Amaryllis. “I hadn’t thought that our peace was so easily disturbed.” She’d taken her helmet off for our conversation, but now was slipping it back on. “Prepare for trouble.”

“And make it double,” I replied, letting my sword grow to full length in my hand.

“What does that mean?” asked Grak with furrowed brows.

“It was — nevermind,” I replied.

“Earth stuff,” said Fenn with a nod. “He always gets this look in his eyes.”

Amaryllis looked down the hallway in both directions. “We should get moving. Deeper in, or back the way we came?”

“Deeper in,” I said. “The golem said he’d been in the gymnasium, let’s start there. I was really hoping that we’d get something like directions.” I looked down at the mound of dirt on the ground. It struck me as being enemy action; the only way I could fathom the breakdown of a golem in response to threat was by either a severely malfunctioning system or very high-level reasoning about what that golem might give away by its continued existence. “We should hold off on going against the golems again until after they’ve made the first hostile move.”

“I suppose,” said Amaryllis.

“Kind of a hard principle to follow if you have a bow,” said Fenn. “I’m down to two artillery shots, in case I was the only one counting. Call them if you need them, but if I see a juicy shot I’m taking it, no matter who’s in the way.”

“Please don’t shoot me again,” I said.

“Oh, we’re dating now,” said Fenn, “I pretty much have to shoot you, otherwise the others will think that I’ve gone soft.” She gave me a grin, and I returned a smile.

“I already think you’ve gone soft,” said Grak.

“That’s just because you’ve gotten to know me,” said Fenn.

“We should go,” said Amaryllis. “I have to imagine that forces have already been moved into position since the moment we finished our first fight, but light might become an issue for us if we go too slowly.”

So we moved on, deeper into the prison, past the half-dozen visitation rooms that must have been the prison’s primary interface with the outside world back when it was in regular use. I briefly marveled at the shape and scope of the forge frenzy that had brought this place into being. I had no real idea how long it took to make a sword or a suit of armor, but months seemed like it was on the right timescale. For a building this size, it would have taken years, if not decades. From what I could tell, most polities were perfectly willing to fund a forge frenzy given that they would have control of whatever was made from it, but a place on this scale seemed like a serious outlay, especially since Anglecynn wouldn’t have known exactly what it would do.

If we’d been in a normal building, we might have had an easier time finding our way to the gymnasium, because normal buildings had sensible designs that were dictated by the emergent properties of people, or at worst, dictated by what the architect thought looked good — function or form. The penitentiary hadn’t been built under any such constraints. It wasn’t quite the Winchester Mystery House, but we couldn’t at all count on a sensible layout. There was a part of me that appreciated this on a game design level, but it also gave me an uncertain, claustrophobic feeling.

We eventually came to a small dome, with three floors exposed below it and a dozen dirt golems looking out over them. Our eyes were drawn to an immense brass suit of armor, nearly twenty feet tall, which stood with both hands on the pommel of a hammer whose head was more than twice the size of my own. Both it and the dirt golems, were unmoving. At twenty feet tall, it wouldn’t be the largest thing that I’d gone up against, but it would be the biggest thing I’d directly fought. Colossus, I shall call you.

“So, plink at it from a distance?” asked Fenn. She kept her voice low, which didn’t make that much sense, because even though we were quite a ways down the hallway from the entrance to the dome, the golems were staring at us.

“We don’t necessarily need to go this way,” said Amaryllis.

“They are guarding this path for a reason,” said Grak.

“I’m pretty sure a single hit from that hammer will kill any of us outright,” I said. “Maybe not Mary.”

“The immobility plate isn’t that resistant to movement in its immobile state,” she said, voice slightly muffled by her helmet. “It has limits.”

“So we cheese it,” said Fenn. “That’s the word, right, Joon? Cheese?”

“Uh, yes,” I said. “But if it were me … scratch that, if I were the penitentiary, I wouldn’t put a giant guy with a hammer where you could kill it from a distance at no risk. If it’s a trap, then this is part of the trap. Besides that, plinking at it from a distance doesn’t seem like it’s going to work well if the armor is thick enough. The right arrowheads can pierce normal plate, but that’s not normal plate.”

Fenn looked to Amaryllis. “And if we had a secret weapon?” she asked.

“Uh, what?” I asked, looking at both of them. “Secret ... from me?”

“I present to you,” said Fenn, holding out her gloved hand. “Drumroll, please.”

“I’m not clear on why you would need to keep anything secret from me,” I said.

“You don’t like surprises?” asked Fenn, lowering her hand slightly.

“Not in combat, no,” I replied.

“It’s too dangerous to use in actual combat,” said Amaryllis. “It’s probably too dangerous to use, period, if it works at all.”

“Grak, can I get a drumroll?” asked Fenn.

Grak gave a short sigh, then went to the closest wall and began rhythmically pounding on it. With a flourish Fenn produced an arrow from her glove, twirling it gently until bringing it to a stop so I could see the tip, where a small, simple, electrical contraption surrounded a purple crystal.

“I present to you, the very first Fellis collaboration, the void arrow,” said Fenn with a grin.

“And with the artillery shot,” I began.

“In theory,” answered Amaryllis. “It might fail. We didn’t want to waste the resources to test it.”

I stared at the void arrow. All you really needed to make a void crystal explode was a sufficiently powerful electric charge, which would cause it to radiate void out in all directions, eliminating matter from existence. From what I could see, the arrow was designed such that it would strike its target, which would complete the circuit, which would detonate the crystal. You couldn’t shoot the arrow too fast, because otherwise the mechanism would break completely, and it was possible that it would break anyway, but if it worked, then it would be an instant kill against unarmored flesh. And the artillery shot from Fenn’s bow, given enough distance, could make two thousand.

“Well that’s scary,” I said, swallowing the sudden lump in my throat. “I’m still not sure why I would be kept in the dark.”

“I’d have to use the n-word to explain it,” said Amaryllis.

I stared at her for a second. “Uh?”

“Narrative,” said Fenn with a nod.

I rolled my eyes at that. “Okay,” I said. “You kept it from me because … you think that this is my story, not yours, and keeping the void arrow from me until the last second would be better from a narrative perspective. That’s batshit insane, don’t ever do that again.”

“I don’t want to debate it now, but if we can infer from —”

“You don’t want to debate it, but you do want to get your point in,” I said. “No, let’s just fire the incredibly dangerous arrow and get it over with.”

Amaryllis’ helmet turned away from me and nodded to Fenn.

“So, in theory this is a weapon of mass destruction,” said Fenn, looking at the brass Colossus. “Assuming that Mary built this right, how far back should we be standing?”

I was actually curious about that myself: curious, bordering on alarmed. “What happens when the void effect hits a void crystal?” I asked. “Anything?”

“If they’re further than a foot away from each other, there’s a cascade,” said Amaryllis. “Less than a foot, and the void effect just consumes the crystal with no effect. I’ve already done the math, we’ll need significant distance and heavy mass for cover.”

“Sorry, walk me through the math,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. I glanced at the brass Colossus, which was, thankfully, still unmoving. For the moment, talking was apparently a free action. “So what happens is, Fenn fires the void arrow, it presumably splits into two, then four, then eight, and so on, until it caps at two thousand of them, then one of them hits something and detonates, which then chains to all the others —”

“Voiding whichever ones are within a foot of the spherical void wave, cascading to those outside it, putting a limit on total void effect, yes,” said Amaryllis. She was incredibly hard to read with her helmet on, but I didn’t think that I could ask her to remove it just so I could be more at ease when talking to her, not without derailing the conversation.

“So at best, the total void effect coming our way is going to be equal to however many one-foot-radius spheres there are, with each centered around an arrow and none overlapping,” I said, “Which based on the arrows that I saw in the forest might be as high as, oh, two hundred spheres, which means that the void effect coming at us once the artillery shot is fired will be enough to go through something like one hundred inches of solid steel.”

I saw Grak and Fenn give each other a look, something like surprise and fear.

“No,” said Amaryllis, “void propagation is constrained by the inverse square law, it’ll eat through the same amount of mass at any distance, but for the projective form, that means if you conceptualize an inch-thick sphere around a projection at distance x which completely captures the void projection, then an inch-thick sphere at distance two x will only go through one fourth of an inch.”

“So at two hundred feet, which is where the bow caps, that’s … a half-inch of steel per detonation, when up close?”

“For projection, it’s usually given as a half-inch of steel or other sufficiently dense metal at five feet from the center of the void projection, regardless of crystal size, so long as it’s under one foot.” Amaryllis nodded. “I told you that I already did the math.”

“I’m double-checking, in the interests of not killing us all,” I said. “And, obviously, that’s the benefit of consulting me instead of keeping it secret. So, forty times the distance, that’s 1/1600th the effect, which means that instead of one hundred inches of steel, we’d need something like a sixteenth of an inch.” Which was extremely doable, actually, and there was enough leeway to be off by an order of magnitude. And because Fenn’s bow multiplied with distance, we had some leeway even with a premature detonation. “Okay,” I said. “So it’s still stupidly dangerous, but probably, maybe, not as dangerous as fighting that thing and all the little ones that would join in.”

“Am I shooting this incredibly destructive arrow or what?” asked Fenn.

“All six barriers first,” said Amaryllis.

Fenn moved forward and started popping them out, one by one, and we took cover behind the last. She raised her bow and nocked the arrow, then ducked down quickly before firing. “Just testing,” she said. “How fast does the void move?”

“It’s effectively instant,” said Amaryllis.

“Okay,” said Fenn. She raised her arms above her head and did an awkward draw with only her hands and the bow, held horizontal, above the barrier. She managed to get it to full extension, then stopped suddenly and brought the bow back down without having fired it. “The thing is, I didn’t do the math, so I’m sort of trusting you here.”

“Or rather, not trusting us?” I asked.

“No, no, never,” said Fenn. “But when you said a hundred inches of steel, I thought, ‘you know, that actually sounds right’, and then when you said a sixteenth of an inch of steel, I thought, ‘that doesn’t seem right at all’, and I don’t think that this is how my life is going to end, but you said sometimes rocks fall and everyone dies, and I’m the least suicidal of us, so —”

“Just fire the fucking arrow,” said Amaryllis.

Fenn raised her bow again and did the same awkward draw as before, exerting an incredible amount of strength and control, more than I might have thought her capable of, if I hadn’t known her so well. She started to speak, with the strain evident in her voice. “The thing is, I’m the one risking my hands here —”

“Is this a bit?” asked Amaryllis.

Fenn fired the arrow and brought her hands down behind the safety of six inches of steel. I was fully prepared for an anticlimax after all that build-up, like the arrow simply plinking against the brass suit of armor, or failing to duplicate, or maybe even something worse than an anticlimax, like littering the whole place with two thousand undetonated bombs.

But we weren’t denied something special, and instead there was a loud whump of air rushing to fill the vacuum, and wind blew by us fast enough that it was difficult to breathe, for a bit. I started to rise to my feet, then thought about the possibility that there were still void arrows that hadn’t blown up, and stayed where I was. When Fenn popped up though, I followed her, and looked out on the destruction.

The explosion — projection, I’m sure Amaryllis would have corrected me — had happened at the far end of the room, a cascade of void that had, for a start, removed all the air from the room. The railings on the upper levels were gone, along with a significant portion of the upper levels themselves. Pieces of building were raining down from where supports had been removed or weakened. The brass Colossus was completely gone. The floor was missing too, scoured down at least a few feet by the void cascade, and though I couldn’t see the ceiling from my vantage point in the hallway, I had no doubt that was gone too.

“Neat,” said Fenn. “I’ll take a dozen more of those, please.”

I stared at the destruction in amazement as Fenn began gathering the barriers back up. “Okay, I’m still a little pissed off about you keeping that secret, but the results of the actual work speak for themselves.”

“It’s indiscriminate,” said Amaryllis. “We won’t be able to use it unless we want to kill everyone or everything in a pretty large radius.”

“And when do we not want that?” asked Fenn with a cheery smile. Her eyes widened slightly. “Think about how great that would have been in the forest!”

“We could have used it at the entrance to this place,” I said. “If I’d been informed of its existence.”

“I apologize,” said Amaryllis.

“But would you do it again?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis, unflinchingly fast. “We can talk about that later, when we’re safe.”

“I told you that she said she’d slit my throat if she had to,” said Fenn. “Shouldn’t be much of a surprise.”

“When did I say that?” asked Amaryllis. I imagined her furrowed brow beneath her helmet.

“Unicorn blood,” said Fenn.

Amaryllis sighed. “Juniper, there are certain things that are dangerous to so much as know, and if I knew any of them, I wouldn’t tell you those either, and you would probably agree with that, right?”

“Infohazards,” I said with a nod. Of course Aerb had infohazards, why would it not? One of the Thirteen Horrors I had a quest for was [REDACTED]; that was his name given in both the quest text and the description I’d read in The Exclusionary Principle, Seventh Edition, complete with brackets. It was heavily implied that he got more powerful the more you knew about him. To me, that hadn’t implied an entire class of memetic threats, especially because he was in an exclusion zone, but apparently I should have just assumed that Aerb would contain every single thing I had ever thought of, so long as it was at least loosely within the genre.

Amaryllis pulled up short. “You don’t have infohazards on Earth,” she said, more as a statement of fact than a question, but there was a note of puzzlement in her voice. Someone, somewhere, must have done an investigation of the dream-skewered in order to make that determination, which was sensible if infohazards existed. “They were a thing you invented?”

“No, just copied from elsewhere,” I said. “I mean, I did invent some, and —” I pulled up short. “Obviously those specific ones can’t be here on Aerb, because I know about them and no horrible fate has befallen me yet, but just to be safe I’m not going to ever write them down or say them.” Everyone was staring at me. “I didn’t use it often, because it’s hard to work into games where there’s this player and character split that you can’t really get around. There are, were, maybe five in total.” I stopped. “And anyway, Arthur would have known about all of them, right?” I stopped again. “Okay, leaving that aside, because we can’t talk about it or do anything proactive about it, if you ever have any information that you think will hurt me — that you think will hurt me in ways that I don’t want to be hurt — then I promise that I’ll try not to be salty about it, if and when I find out that you were keeping a secret from me. That doesn’t apply to your attempts to manipulate the narrative though.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” said Amaryllis, which really wasn’t the sort of answer that I’d been hoping for, and to cap it off she began walking toward the wreckage where the Colossus had been standing. I might have objected more, if I wasn’t trying to stop thinking about the cognitive hazards that might actually be real on Aerb.

“And you,” I said to Fenn, partly to distract myself. I was worried, but not that worried, because if the five infohazards I’d made were already being carried around in my head, then it was already too late, and thinking about it would make it worse.

“Hey, you know that I like secrets,” she said. “And I have a flair for the dramatic, and she made some very convincing arguments, so really, I’m kind of still on her side.”

“Well, we’ll talk it over,” I said.

“I mean, it worked, didn’t it?” asked Fenn. She hefted her bow and began following Amaryllis.

“It might have worked anyway,” I said. “We’d have to figure out some way to double blind it, or at least do A/B testing, but I don’t have any clue how that would work in practice given all the confounding variables.”

“Golems,” said Grak, with his monocle to his eye. “They’re coming to meet us.”

I was expecting another parley, because the prison knew that we were stronger than it. Given that, talking was to its advantage. I wasn’t about to say that we had this place dead to rights, given the close calls, and given what happened to Solace, but it seemed to me that if I were a magical sentient prison, I would start in on negotiations so that I could escape with as little damage as possible. All we wanted was a single prisoner, and we were demonstrably willing to tear apart the prison to get him, so wasn’t it better to just hand him over? Of course, there was a school of thought that said you should never give in to blackmail or coercion, because that means that everyone will know that blackmail and coercion work on you. Which, when I thought about it, might have been why dozens of dirt golems were coming our way.

Most of them were like the ones we’d fought in the courtyard outside, simple creations with metal eyes I didn’t really understand the point of, given that the ones with only a mouth seemed entirely capable of navigating the prison without sight. It wasn’t that they didn’t worry me, but I at least knew that I could handle them in numbers, so long as I stayed in the open and didn’t let them wear me down. We’d fought them before, after all, and the second time was almost always easier, because you’d already done the hard work of getting educated on how the enemy moved and operated.

But unfortunately, it wasn’t just the dirt golems. I’d known since the game had called it a basic dirt golem that there would be variants down the road, and now I got a look at a few of them as they came our way. I saw a few adorned with vines and moss threaded through their dirt, along with a handful of flowers, and immediately suspected them of being casters of some sort. The others, of which there were two, were big, hulking creatures that moved around on all fours with large knuckles against the floor. They were smaller than the gate golem had been, but still big enough that there was going to be a real risk to getting within their reach.

“Go or stay?” asked Amaryllis.

“Stay,” called Grak, who was already drawing a ward at the end of the hallway, where the void cascade had done its damage but not removed the walls and supports completely.

“I’m less effective when pinned in,” I said, stepping beyond the ward he was putting in place. The ground got lower as we went further, which meant that we’d be fighting in what was essentially a wide pit made of stone where the prison no longer had any foundation and the void had hit the rock that island was made of. It was surprisingly smooth, given what must have been the chaos of the cascade.

The dirt golems weren’t terribly fast, but we only had seconds. Amaryllis stepped up beside me with her sword drawn. I took some comfort in knowing that even though we had our arguments, she would be there fighting with me without any hesitation.

“We’ll stay closer this time,” she said. “You keep up with the sweeping strikes, I’ll get the ones you miss.”

“And I’ll stay safe behind the barrier,” said Fenn, as she fired an arrow at one of the plant-adorned golems, the opening shot of the fight. The golem continued forward with an arrow stuck in it, slowly leaking mud as it trundled toward us.

(We could probably have run away, given that we were faster than them, but going on the run wasn’t the path to winning, not when we didn’t actually know where we were going, and not when the prison had plenty of opportunity to set up traps and ambushes in places that it could conceivably drive us toward.)

My own first strike was made with the full weight of blood magic, pushing the strength of my pulse down both my arms and swinging my enormous sword so hard it whistled through the air. I cut clean through two of the golems and into the midsection of a third, where my sword lodged only briefly until I shrank it down and pulled it free to gear up for another swing.

Basic Dirt Golem defeated!

Basic Dirt Golem defeated!

Basic Dirt Golem defeated!

Achievement Unlocked: Triple Kill!

I was watching the golems as I cut into them, paying more attention than last time and trying not to let adrenaline overwhelm me. They had sacks of brown goop inside them, and they began to fail when that goop started leaking out, but they didn’t actually stop moving until some critical amount was lost. That didn’t actually help my fighting style too much, but I was pretty sure that it was going to be important for fighting the big ones — who had been going slow on purpose, it turned out, so that they could put on a burst of speed that nearly caught me off-guard.

I rolled away beneath a massive fist and came up with another hard swing that took down another dirt golem, rewarding me with a message from the game, then turned back to face the gorilla-golem, which was pounding along on its knuckles to close the distance between the two of us. I moved back again, which unfortunately put distance between Amaryllis and I, but that was nearly unavoidable, and it was clear that our plan of fighting back-to-back wasn’t going to work out.

I came at the gorilla golem with another of my strongest swings, putting everything into it that I could short of burning through a bone. I cleaved cleanly through its arm, but it lifted the stump up and slammed it back down on the severed fist, cleanly reconnecting them, then swung at me hard with its other hand, narrowly missing me as I jumped backward. I lunged in close, riding the pulse of my racing heart, and slammed my sword straight up into its gut. I changed the shape of the blade while it was inside the golem, giving the part of it that was lodged in the goop barbs and curls, then ducked down to avoid another hit as the golem slammed a fist against its own chest. It took all my considerable strength to yank the sword out from the golem once I got my footing, but I was rewarded with a thick splash of its semi-liquid innards on my feet as parts of the packed earth broke away. I managed to scramble out from under it as it collapsed.

Brutish Dirt Golem defeated!

Amaryllis was dancing through the dirt golems, out-maneuvering them, getting away from their strikes, making the plate armor look like it was a featherweight, and occasionally stopping stock-still for a split second to let her armor lock in place and take the hit without much risk to her. She was doing better than in the previous fight, with a more defined rhythm and flow. I was hopped up on adrenaline and the thrill of battle, that urge to scream and roar over the corpse of the thing I’d just taken down, and watching her, just for a moment, filled me with something like pride.

And then I was back to murdering dirt golems in the pit, trying to put my blood into every movement and end the fight as quickly as I could. I pulled from the bones in my bandolier from time to time, usually END to stave off exhaustion, since the powerful swings I was using took an enormous amount of energy, especially with my sword as large as I was making it. We were cutting through the ranks at speed though, and dozens weren’t enough to stop us.

There were a few things that I’d failed to pay the proper amount of attention to. The first was the flower golems, which were staying back, but I did see an arrow zip toward the air toward them from time to time, and so long as they weren’t actually doing anything, I wasn’t going to move to engage with them. My best guess, to the extent I had the mental energy to guess, was that they — and the brutish dirt golem that stood near them — were waiting for us to get worn down.

The second thing I had failed to pay the proper amount of attention to was the water collecting at the bottom of the stone bowl the void cascade had carved out. I could see where the water was coming in from pipes that had been severed, and while there hadn’t been any water when the fight had started, it was easy to chalk that up to the esoteric systems of the prison, had I actually had that much time to spend thinking about the water. As it happened in my head, all thoughts were woven into the flow of my sword, the rhythm of my pulse, and the full-sensory absorption of the fight.

The first sign that anything was wrong was all of my muscles contracting at once (life tip: this is a pretty big sign that something has gone wrong, even if you’re not in the middle of a fight). It was painful and hot, like my whole body was being vibrated, and I was vaguely aware of having dropped my sword as I pitched over into the water, which only increased the hot pain. It didn’t last for long, but as I started to recover I was punched in the head, hard, by one of the dirt golems, and more of them were moving to surround me as I tried to shake that off too.

I touched a bone and pulled SPD from it, launching myself to my feet and slipping out from between the golems, but I wasn’t fast enough to escape without another hit to my armor, and I stood up, limping slightly and unarmed as the golems moved on me. A quick glance showed that Amaryllis had stayed on her feet, but she must have used her armor to do so, because she had been swarmed by the golems, who were beating against the immobility plate. It was, so far, holding steady, but the second big gorilla golem was finally making its move down to us. It was leaking brown goop from where a dozen arrows had hit it, but that didn’t seem to be slowing it down any.

“Casters!” shouted Fenn, from behind the protective ward that still seemed to be holding. I whipped my head to look at the two golems with vines just as one of them flicked something in my direction, and at that moment I felt the tug of luck on me; I touched my wrist, where the tip of a tail was showing, and pulled out a snake that I swung into the path of the small blue bead that was tracking my way. The projectile hit the snake, which immediately burst into spikes that came up from its skin. It looked terrifying and impractical as it fell into the water, and I could imagine that if I survived such a thing, I’d be half the fighter I needed to be.

Fenn called out to me and threw me a shortsword, one that we had taken from Aumann’s vault and then never actually figured out, though we’d done everything short of brute forcing magical phrases or using it in combat. The grip was a dark, hard wood with grooves for the fingers, while the blade was bluish-silver metal with rivulets in it. It was decidedly not my preferred weapon, but the Anyblade was at the bottom of the pit and probably under quite a bit of mud. With my off-hand I went to pull my returning dagger from my bag, but realized only belatedly that it had fallen off and was lost somewhere in the mud. Worse, something was slipping side-to-side within my hand and one of my fingers wasn’t working; there was only a faint echo of pain at the feeling of broken bones. Great.

I dashed toward the gorilla golem as it approached Amaryllis, leaping up and stepping on a few of the dirt golems to get there in time. Without the Anyblade, it was going to be a lot harder to take down, and now I was on an unfavorable footing, because I would have to protect Amaryllis too. I leapt five feet up in the air with Sanguine Surge and brought the blade down hard on the golem’s left shoulder, putting all my weight behind it.

Critical hit!

The arm fell down to the ground with a solid thud, and I slipped past the gorilla golem, taking a few hits from the smaller ones we’d mostly cleared out in the process. I stabbed through one of them, hard enough that it wouldn’t have time to do much before its goop spilled out. I planted my other hand firmly on the back of the brutish golem, feeling a too-faint twinge of pain in the process, and activated the tattoo I had readied; the Icy Devil began doing its work, chilling down the earth under my hand.

I tried to keep my hand in one place, but there were still enough dirt golems to be a problem, and the big guy tried to slap backwards with his intact arm, which I was forced to duck down from. I fought with the sword, facing down the few remaining dirt golems that hadn’t swarmed Amaryllis, keeping my hand in place as the temperature in the room dropped. I waited as long as I could, then saw the vine golem toss something small and white toward me, which I took as my cue to make my move. I spun around and drove my shortsword into the golem with all the power I could muster, aiming right for the cold spot. I was rewarded with a hard crack as the frozen earth was destroyed, and goop came pouring out of it.

Brutish Dirt Golem defeated!

And then my field of vision was overtaken with butterflies, small white ones, which went for my face and flapped there. It was only when I tapped SPD from a bone (using my chilled hand, sending a wave of cold over myself in the process) that I was able to swat them away enough to see that they weren’t butterflies at all, only white flower petals acting together like butterflies.

I took a hit from the side, at a place that must have taken a few too many hits before, because that one I felt, even though my ribs were almost as numb as my hand. I went tumbling to the side, down into the water, and the butterfly petals raced to follow me as the few remaining dirt golems moved toward me. I had some unpleasant flashbacks to the fairies we’d had to fight back at Caer Laga, and I still had no good defense against it. These, at least, were a nuisance, without the sharp teeth or ability to tear my skin. That said, there were a lot of them, enough to block my field of vision, and that was enough for me to take another hit, this one to the chest, which left me sprawled in the water for one dazed second before I got back to my feet.

From there I was trying to fight blind, listening to the cacophony of sounds and trying to make out from the water where the dirt golems were. I had to hope that the remaining caster had been taken out by Fenn, because while I could out-maneuver the golems, I couldn’t respond to the seemingly random effects of what appeared to be a golem that knew flower magic. My sword connected on occasion, and then eventually got stuck, which left me trying to swat away the butterflies as quickly as I could just so I could get a sense of where the golems were and move out of their way. There were messages popping into my field of view, with more of the dirt golems defeated, and I had to hope that whatever my party members were doing, it would be enough.

And then, with a final clearing of my eyes, I saw the last of the dirt golems fall, revealing Grak standing there, breathing heavily and clutching his axe. Fenn was down in the water, next to Amaryllis, who was surrounded by mounds of dirt but seemed unharmed.

“That was a slog,” I said. My fingers went to one of the bones in my bandolier and I started the healing process. I could already tell that I was going to need more than I had on me, but that was why we had a lot of bones ready to go.

“I’m fucking useless against those things,” said Fenn. “Even with a broadhead it takes half a dozen shots to bring one down.”

“I spent most of that fight trapped in my armor,” said Amaryllis.

“They shouldn’t have had other magic,” said Grak. “It was flower magic.”

“Well, they had it,” I said. “That’s fun. I’d guess that we can expect more of it. Are we safe for now?”

“I’m not getting the sense that we should move,” said Fenn. “The hallways are clear, anyway. And if I were the prison, I would have gone at us with everything I had the second time around.”

“Heal me,” said Amaryllis. “Please.” She took off her helmet and revealed a bloody face, with most of it dripping down from her nose to her mouth, and a few places where there was some swelling.

“Bones,” I said to Fenn.

“See, Mary was polite,” said Fenn, as she started handing me the bones stored in her glove. “She said please. Can’t you even say please to your wonderful girlfriend?”

“Please,” I said as I approached Amaryllis. I reached forward with my right hand and gently touched Amaryllis, with my fingers on her neck and my thumb touching her jaw. It was awkwardly intimate, the same as it was every time that I had to heal her. As I pulled the energy from the bone out and pushed it toward her wounds, I watched her face puff up more, go red, become bruised, and finally return to normal as I went through the bones. “Where else?”

“Left forearm,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me, instead staring up at a random spot away from me, which had always been my strategy with the dentist so I didn’t have to look into their eyes. I could see the dent in her armor where she must have been hit hard enough for at least a hairline fracture. Doing the healing from a distance like that was more difficult, but I’d gotten fairly good at directing the magic where I wanted it to go.

“We’re being worn down,” said Grak.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Not much longer, if they were guarding this way,” said Fenn. “Just another two or three more fights like that, until we have to fight Fallatehr and all the copies he made of himself, which will be its own thing.”

“We’re not going to fight Fallatehr,” said Amaryllis. She briefly glanced at me. “We shouldn’t want to, anyway. If we do, we’ll have to make sure not to kill him. The whole point is that we need his expertise.”

“Just saying it seems likely,” said Fenn. “And he seems like an asshole.”

“Any other healing?” I asked. Amaryllis shook her head. I began the process of healing myself; the pain was becoming sharper as the urgency of combat faded, but the pain was good, in a way, because it was a reminder that I could still feel something from my injured hand. I had a hunch that the healing process was exacerbating the condition of my hand, but the bones were so brittle now that they kept breaking.

“We should go as soon as you’re done,” said Grak.

“Many miles to go before we sleep,” I replied. I waited for Grak to correct me and tell me that it wasn’t actually miles, but I guess he was starting to understand when I was making a reference, because he simply turned away. “Do you think it gets harder or easier after that?”

“Harder,” said Amaryllis. “You always said that you pushed your players just to their breaking point, when it balanced on a knife edge.”

“And sometimes past that,” I replied with a nod. “I don’t know that’s a good heuristic for what we’re going to find in this prison. We shouldn’t count on the whole thing shifting around us just to accommodate a more pitched battle. And we really shouldn’t count on any given battle being fair, or doable.”

Chapter 19 - Animus

We didn’t have another major fight, but we did have skirmishes, four of them as we went through the prison trying to find the gymnasium, or failing that, the cell where Fallatehr was kept. Three of those were against the brass creatures, which we mostly dealt with from as far a distance as possible. If you assumed that everything was out to kill you, it wasn’t actually that hard to deal with a dungeon, just time-consuming. We burnt through more bones for some healing and took a few bangs and scrapes, but came out relatively unscathed for our troubles. There was no real drama or tension battling the security system. It was good, but we were better, and we had killed the Colossus, apparently the largest, most threatening thing that it had, in a single swift show of immense force. If there was another, we didn’t see it.

I was worried about how long it would take the dungeon to start making fresh golems, and whether it was rebuilding its forces, but we didn’t see much more of them as we went deeper into the prison, nor when we started backtracking because we realized we’d gone the wrong way. We did fight a few more, but there were only a few of them, and they seemed like they were inartfully trying to lead us somewhere, so we took a different path instead.

And just like that, we stumbled into the gymnasium. My attention was immediately drawn to the people and the equipment in the center of it, but the room itself was also of note, another place with one of the many high domes the prison seemed fond of. The major difference here, aside from the fact that it was the first place that had actual people in it, was that the walls had enormous, intricately done murals that depicted elaborate battle scenes I didn’t quite find appropriate in a prison. The sun was setting, and the light coming through the glass roof was dim, which meant that most of what I could see was thanks to a greenish luminance from the lit wall sconces.

But it was the people who drew my attention, fifteen of them, all turned our way as we crept into the room. Most of them were elves, but there were other races too, an insectoid with a multi-hued carapace that had been scored with lines, a man with bumpy grey skin I recognized as one of the vlere-gur, and a woman who stood nearly seven feet tall and didn’t belong to any race I could recall making or reading about. I eyed them all carefully, scanning for signs of a threat.

A brief smattering of applause came from one of the elves, who began making his way towards us as his hands fell to his sides. “Congratulations!” he called across the distance from the center of the gym to where we stood by the door.

“Thanks!” Fenn called back.

“There was some discussion about whether you would make it!” he called, closing toward us quickly.

If this was Fallatehr, and there was no guarantee that it was, then he was very dangerous. And if it wasn’t Fallatehr, then he was almost certainly sending someone dangerous toward us. I tried to take in his face and kept having my eyes drawn to his pointed teeth, which seemed ready and willing to rend my flesh. He was tall and somewhat effeminate, with long, pointed ears, which I more or less expected from an elf at this point. His face was lively though, more animated than I had seen from any elf but Fenn, and she didn’t really count. Unlike the one we’d seen in the visiting room, this one didn’t seem to have any of the intricate scars used in scar magic, though his chest wasn’t visible to us. He wore white, with a high collar and no sleeves. The hem of the shirt hung so low that it was almost a dress, though he had white pants beneath that.

“Are you Fallatehr?” asked Amaryllis.

“Are you Amaryllis Penndraig, most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig, and Princess of Anglecynn?” asked Fallatehr. I wasn’t certain that it was really him, but I thought that the odds were good.

“I am,” said Amaryllis, removing her helmet and holding it under her arm at her side. “We seek Fallatehr Whiteshell. We spoke with one of your … associates.” The pause wasn’t because Amaryllis was searching for the word, it was a deliberate sort of hitch in her speech that let him know she was choosing to be diplomatic, the classy way of making quote marks with your fingers.

“Yes,” said Fallatehr with a nod. “I am the man you seek. Explain to me why I should help you.”

“How much can the prison hear?” asked Amaryllis.

“In this place she has been rendered deaf,” said Fallatehr. To my surprise, I realized that he had a lisp; the ‘th’ sound was coming out awkwardly, or replaced entirely by something that sounded similar. ‘Uther’ had become ‘Oo-her’. I could imagine how that was a hard sound if you had to stick your tongue against pointy teeth, but couldn’t remember the other elf having that problem.

“Then we offer you escape,” said Amaryllis. “If your associate relayed our message accurately, then you know that we want you for a teacher. In exchange, you would go free.”

“Your ancestor, the one I knew, how many generations back was he?” asked Fallatehr. “Six? Seven?”

“If you mean Cyclamine, then three,” said Amaryllis. “He was my great-grandfather.”

“Far less than I expected then,” said Fallatehr. “And do you know what our relationship was?”

“As far as I’m aware, he tried to save his family and his legacy when the regime change began,” said Amaryllis. “If there was any bad blood between the two of you, I haven’t heard about it.”

“We weren’t close friends,” said Fallatehr. “I knew him, and knew that he would do nothing for me, because there wasn’t enough incentive for him.” He clapped his hands once. “You and I aren’t close friends either.”

“The question of trust and incentives is an admittedly difficult one,” said Amaryllis. “Do we have time to talk? Will the prison take action against us here? Will it try to move you?”

“You’ve upset Amoureux greatly,” said Fallatehr. “But she has also been beaten into a temporary submission. I put a great deal of work into her over the years, bending and changing her, and I hate to say that you’ve upset all that. What she sends against you next time won’t be so softened.”

“There’s not going to be a next time,” said Amaryllis. “We can leave now.”

“How?” asked Fallatehr.

“We have a teleportation key,” said Amaryllis.

Fallatehr was silent for a moment, which he spent staring at Amaryllis, his eyes twitching fractionally as he looked over her face from a distance. “Anglecynn truly wants me?” he asked.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “We don’t speak for Anglecynn, nor act on the behalf of the kingdom.”

“Ah,” said Fallatehr. “Strange that a princess does not speak for her country. No pardon is on offer then? The crime I was put here for was, after all, only a crime after the fact.”

“It’s not within my power,” said Amaryllis. “If it were, I would offer that pardon.”

“Alright,” said Arthur, “Let me do the talking.”

“Me no talk good,” said Tom, with his best half-orc impression.

“But I want to talk,” said Tiff.

“Arthur has the best rolls,” said Reimer.

“Sheet,” said Tiff, holding out her hand. She had only recently learned that people would just hand over their character sheets if she asked, after having mistakenly believed that this was private information, and she was taking advantage of being able to look over what other people had done. Arthur handed his character sheet over with a smile, and Tiff narrowed her eyes as she looked at it. “Okay, that’s ridiculously good, but you’re lawful neutral, I’m chaotic good, I can’t let you do all the talking.”

“You don’t trust me to represent the average of the group view?” asked Arthur.

“First, no,” said Tiff with a laugh. “Second, that takes all the roleplaying out of it, doesn’t it? If you’re the one that always talks, then the rest of us are just, at best, talking out of character.”

“This is going to be a clusterfuck,” groaned Reimer.

“Well I think it’ll be fun,” said Tom.

“I didn’t say that it wouldn’t be fun,” replied Reimer. “Joon, I’m going to apply drowfire poison to my daggers before we go in. I have my special sheaths, so I should be able to keep them concealed.”

“Okay, sounds good,” I replied as I made a note in my scratchpad.

“What does the average of our values mean?” asked Maddie.

“Ugh, please no,” said Reimer. “Never let Arthur —”

“What I mean is that all of our alignments could potentially be plotted on a two-dimensional grid, like so,” said Arthur, sketching two quick lines in his notebook and giving them simple, one-letter labels. “The C-L axis is Chaos and Law, the G-E axis is Good and Evil. We can use this to map everyone in the group.” He made six quick points on the piece of paper. “And with some more lines, we have the basic alignment grid.” He drew in four more lines, two vertical, two horizontal, then held the paper up for our inspection. “So once we have that, we can average the points on the C-L axis, then average the points on the G-E axis, which would give us a new point about here.” He poked the paper in roughly the center of the dots, toward the corner of the square that would traditionally be labeled ‘neutral good’.

“Objection!” cried Tiff, who had been watching let’s plays of Phoenix Wright (she did this instead of playing them, it was weird). She jabbed a finger at her character sheet. “Cleonia feels very, very strongly about chaos, and if you were just averaging alignment, then you’d get people like Plunder — that is such a ridiculously stupid name —”

“Thank you,” said Reimer.

“People who don’t care about the abstract concept of law at all get counted the same in the average,” continued Tiff.

“They do,” said Arthur. “You’d assign a numeric value to each of the alignments —”

“No,” said Tiff. “It’s like, if we were talking about abortion —”

“No, please, please, not again,” said Craig with a groan.

“You can hold the same pro-life beliefs as someone else, but feel it less strongly than they do,” said Tiff. “There are people who have some particular position on abortion as being central to the core of their identity, and there are other people with that same position who only really put forward their position when pressed about it.”

“So there are some people who are firmly neutral, and others who are wishy-washy about their neutrality,” I said.

“Point taken,” said Arthur with a frown. “I mean, we can fix that by making each point into a vector instead, and then averaging the vectors, but the alignment system is just notional anyway.”

“No, it’s not, it’s mechanical,” said Reimer. “If you can detect it with a spell, then it’s not just a norm.”

“Sure, fine,” said Arthur. He looked down at his graph. “The real problem is that for any given issue, we would need to figure out what everyone thought about it, and then how strongly they felt, and then as the voice of the group, because I have the best rolls, I would deliver whatever that position was to the NPCs.”

“Which wouldn’t work, because half the time conversation is about getting information from someone rather than delivering it to them,” I replied. “So with every line I deliver, you have to go back to the group and see their individual reaction to it, then synthesize a new position based on the change.”

“So we’re agreed on me talking?” asked Tiff. “Not a free-for-all, but if Arthur doesn’t do a good job of representing the truth and beauty of medieval ancap?” The historical context was really more like Early Modern Period, borrowing from the Scientific Revolution, but I refrained from making that correction.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Craig. “Joon can force the issue, and in-character there’s usually a reason to not let the snake oil salesman be the only one you talk with.”

“None taken,” said Arthur.

“Actually,” said Reimer, “the real reason it doesn’t matter is that we’re never actually going to get to that part of the night where we actually talk to anyone.”

“And you?” asked Fallatehr, turning his attention to me. He glanced down at my hand. “You’re the bone mage whose soul is in such dire need of fixing.”

“Yes,” I said, not fully trusting myself to speak. I had no idea whether Amaryllis was actually sympathetic to him, or whether her plan was to murder him outright as soon as we got what we wanted from him. I hoped that I wouldn’t give her away just from the fact that I was still terrible at lying.

“I can fix it quickly, if you’d give me a few minutes,” said Fallatehr.

I glanced at Amaryllis for help. “I don’t think that would be wise,” she said.

“You want me to teach someone the technique,” said Fallatehr with a nod. “I receive so little information from the outside world these days, is the nature of the soul still so taboo that you would need me?”

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “You might be able to change that, if you left this place.”

Fallatehr barked laughter, and it was one of the uglier sounds I had heard come from an elf. “Oh, I’m not yet sold on the idea of leaving,” said Fallatehr. “Not only is there the chance that it would be bad for my health, but I have quite the life here, with associates that I’ve spent decades crafting to perfection.” He gestured behind him, where the others were standing. Some were talking amongst themselves, which I took as a good sign; they didn’t have telepathy, and didn’t work with unanimity of purpose.

“Is there another arrangement that we could come to?” asked Amaryllis. “I wouldn’t think that you would have everything here that you could want.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” asked Fallatehr. “I know this prison very well, I control the levers of everyone inside it, I can move around with near-impunity, and I have already had much time to acquire creature comforts. I was never as concerned with the frivolity of the material as my brethren.” The heedlessness with which he lisped through the ‘th’ sounds was grating on me.

“That’s bluster,” said Amaryllis, keeping her tone flat. “There are things you want. We have a teleportation key and the capacity to get those things for you, even if you don’t wish to leave.”

“I didn’t say that I didn’t want to leave,” said Fallatehr. “Only that I was not sold.” He drummed his fingers on his chin, then looked to me. “Who would I be teaching?”

“Me,” I said, staring him down. “How long does it take, for someone to manipulate his own soul?”

“For a human?” asked Fallatehr. “Years, but not more than a decade.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you human?”

“Yes,” I replied, but I had a hunch what the next question was going to be.

“You are young, to have gone through the athenaeum,” said Fallatehr. He looked at the hand again. “You’ve made some attempt at healing, before coming to me. The bones have been cut out and regrown.”

“Not intentionally,” I replied. Fallatehr raised an eyebrow at that. I was hoping that being vague and mysterious would get him interested, on a professional level if nothing else.

“The body tries its best,” said Fallatehr. “It would be simplicity itself for me to fix what’s wrong with you. I’ve done it dozens of times before.”

“I’d prefer to learn on my own,” I replied.

“And spend years of your life to do so?” asked Fallatehr.

“If that’s what it takes,” I answered. I was hoping that it would take hours, but maybe that was a little bit unrealistic. I couldn’t say that I thought it would take hours, because that would demand an explanation that I didn’t want to give, and I already thought that Amaryllis was being a little loose with what information she was giving up. I didn’t doubt that she had a plan, but my plan hadn’t involved telling him that we had a teleportation key until we had to.

“And you,” said Fallatehr, addressing his attention to Fenn. “Why do you travel with a princess and a prodigy?”

“I don’t think that’s germane,” said Amaryllis as quickly as she could.

“If I’m to be teaching this one for years on end, of course it is,” said Fallatehr with a frown. “We’re speaking of a long-term arrangement, and it would, of course, behoove me to know more about who you are and what you want, even if your prodigy can learn what he needs to know in months, not years.”

“Sharing information goes both ways,” said Amaryllis, with a glance back to the people still standing in the center of the room.

“I have you at a disadvantage,” said Fallatehr. “I see no point in pretending otherwise.” I felt pained at that; I didn’t really believe that he was content to stay here, even if he’d had his way with the prison, but it was clear that he was willing to walk away from our escape, which wasn’t at all what I’d been hoping for.

Amaryllis nodded, and gestured toward Fenn.

“What is it you’d like to know?” asked Fenn. Her enunciation was more perfect than I had ever heard from her before.

“You’re a half-elf?” asked Fallatehr. “Descended from wood elf stock?”

Fenn nodded. “My father was an elf from the Isle of Eversummer. My mother was a human.”

“And what is your role in this group?” he asked. The unself-consciousness of the way he spoke was unsettling me, given his lisp. He didn’t trip over or slow down for the word ‘this’, he simply spoke it incorrectly and continued on.

“I’m our ranged specialist,” said Fenn. She didn’t have her bow drawn, which made the statement a little farcical, but there were lots of ways to be a ranged specialist without having visible equipment, at least on Aerb, and hopefully being enigmatic would keep him guessing, or at least force him to ask another question.

“How old are you?” asked Fallatehr.

“Thirty-three years old,” said Fenn.

(That was quite a bit older than I had thought, and my brain had an irrational moment of uncomfortability and panic at our age difference. It didn’t actually matter, it didn’t make her a different person, I’d already known that she’d spent a few years in prison. I hadn’t asked, because it didn’t seem important, and if it wasn’t important enough to ask, then it wasn’t important enough to think about once I knew.

And I immediately began spinning up reasons that her being that old was actually a bad thing, because that was how my brain worked. She’d left the elves for good at the age of seventeen, after they’d scarred her, which meant that she’d been on her own for nearly sixteen years. I guess in my mind there was an acceptable length of time to go bumming around the Risen Lands looking for loot, where a few years was just a matter of finding yourself, and a decade and a half was more just who you were. And there was, too, the question of Fenn’s immaturity on both an emotional and social level, the jokes that she used to cover her insecurities and weaknesses, the way she kept her guard up, even around me … I had thought that I would help her, and she would help me, and we would grow together, but there were sixteen years of her mostly being the same person without changing much, and six partners over the course of those sixteen years meant that her issues with intimacy and how gun shy she was about relationships were also more serious than I had thought.

Really, I was probably just carrying over cultural conceptions from Earth about what age ranges were appropriate. That had been something I’d been sensitive to for a long time, ever since a few girls in our class freshman year had dated seniors, and the age gap between them had rankled, partly because I’d had a crush on one of them. That got added to the standard Midwestern cultural programming package, which would have considered me, at eighteen, dating a thirty-three-year-old woman as incredibly scandalous.

This was all very incidental to the powerful soul mage standing in front of us, but that didn’t do much to keep the cascade of thoughts from running through my head.)

“You’re a pup, then,” said Fallatehr. “An outcast from elven society, I would wager, like myself?”

Fenn shrugged.

“Not the talkative type then,” said Fallatehr with a slight frown. Amaryllis coughed, which didn’t hide her momentary smile from me.

Fallatehr looked at Grak only briefly, but apparently had no questions for him. Elves and dwarves didn’t have any inborn animosity on Aerb, contrary to the traditional fantasy cliche, partly because they occupied completely different niches within the sociocultural ecosystem.

“Very well,” said Fallatehr, looking back toward Amaryllis, “I would like some time alone with the prodigy, to gauge him as a student.”

Amaryllis nodded, and gestured for me to go forward. “Away from the others, of course,” she said with a glance toward the cluster of people in the center.

“So little trust,” said Fallatehr with a frown, but he began walking to a different corner of the gymnasium all the same. I followed after him, suddenly feeling nervous. This was a man that I would need some kind of working relationship with, if I wanted to learn his secrets, but he currently had some strong incentives to hold me hostage. Elves were stronger and faster than people, and their luck grew as they got older. I had never fought an elf before, unless you counted sparring with Fenn, and that uncertainty was one of the primary sources of my apprehension.

Fallatehr led us behind a small folding screen, where two chairs were set up, along with a variety of equipment on a simple tray. I recognized the runic nail like the one I’d used to collect souls in Comfort, and there was a variety of glass equipment, along with a few other things that I didn’t recognize, and a few pieces of mundane doctor’s equipment I was familiar with, like a speculum.

“I didn’t catch your name,” said Fallatehr. He sat in his chair with his legs folded and his hands clasped over his knees.

“Juniper Smith,” I said. I was watching him closely and listening for suspect sounds from beyond the screen.

“And it’s you who will be my pupil?” he asked. His eyes roamed my face and rested on my deformed hand. I tried not to join him in looking at it; I knew what I would see there, skin stretched and sagged in places, each knuckle just slightly off from the right length, either too long or too short.

“Yes,” I said. “If you’ll have me, if we can come to some sort of arrangement.”

“What was it you were doing, when you reached down through your marrow and touched your soul?” asked Fallatehr with a raised eyebrow.

“I was running for my life,” I said. “I needed the swiftness.” Swiftness was the bone mage name for SPD, and I wasn’t about to reveal myself to him if I could help it. I held up my hand so he could see it. “I used every bone, and even then I only barely lived.” I wasn’t going to tell him about my ribs either, I had decided, not until I knew how to fix my hand.

“It might be easier to work with you, given how you’ve disfigured yourself,” said Fallatehr. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” I replied.

“How old were you, when you began studying at the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh?” asked Fallatehr.

“You’re assuming that I studied there,” I replied. I could feel his eyes watching me. I knew that I was going to present him with a number of facts that weren’t going to make much sense, but not only was I terrible at lying, I didn’t know enough to carry on a campaign of lies.

“And where did you study?” he asked.

“I had a teacher in Barren Jewel, if you know where that is,” I said.

“Outside the athenaeums,” said Fallatehr.

“That’s something that I’m seeking to do again, given the tight controls on the art,” I said. That much was truth, at least. I was scared of soul magic, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to learn it, and if this man was the most direct path, then so be it.

“Show me your bone magic,” said Fallatehr.

I grabbed a bone from out of my bandolier and held it in my right hand, then frowned slightly as I tried to think about the best way to demonstrate. I assumed that he wanted to get some understanding of who I was as a student, or possibly was trying to get some information from me. I didn’t really mind that too much; there were only a few things that I wasn’t going to tell him.

I ended up using the Anyblade to make a cut in my left hand, feeling almost no pain from it, and then healed myself immediately with only a trace of the cut remaining. I went slow, pulling steadily rather than trying to yank out all the healing at once, in order to maximize what the bone would give me. “Satisfied?” I asked.

“And how long did you spend in study to attain that level of proficiency?” asked Fallatehr, leaning forward slightly.

Ah. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said. “I learn quickly.”

“How quickly?” asked Fallatehr.

That was a tricky thing to answer. It had taken me maybe an hour to go from Bormann’s simple description to being able to do it myself, and my current level of proficiency had taken maybe a month, at the most, though that was without a huge amount of effort put into actually learning anything. But the actual timeline wasn’t what made it tricky, it was that saying “I learned it in an hour” was unbelievable, and besides that, might betray a little too much of what I was. And if he did believe me, then he might realize that he wasn’t actually all that valuable, because we didn’t need years worth of training from him, we needed weeks, or maybe even mere days.

“It took me a month,” I said. That seemed like a fair compromise, startlingly quick, but maybe not outrageous.

Fallatehr watched me, frowning. “Have you applied your quick learning to other tasks?” he asked.

“A few,” I replied. “What we want from you won’t take years of your life, it will take much less, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I am not human, such that I worry about a few years here and there,” said Fallatehr. He was still looking me over. “Your other specialties, skin magic and blood magic?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. I wasn’t sure how he had been able to tell about the blood magic. My veins were maybe a little more prominent than they might otherwise have been, if you had eyes keen enough to look me over carefully from a distance. As for the tattoos … well, that was obvious enough, if you looked down at my wrist. I hadn’t made an effort to hide them. Maybe I should have, but my tattoos were weak enough that I would rather project strength that I didn’t have instead of keeping a trivial trick up my sleeve.

“And others,” said Fallatehr.

“Yes,” I replied.

Fallatehr leaned back in his chair. “Have you surpassed your teachers?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Though I can’t say that I had particularly good teachers, so that might not say much.”

“And this prodigy, is it natural or magical?” asked Fallatehr.

“Neither,” I replied. It took place above the levels where natural and magical existed, that I was pretty sure of, though it obviously interfaced with those levels as well.

“Very well,” said Fallatehr, standing up from his chair. “I believe I find this intriguing enough to go along with, which I imagine was what you were going for. The princess has a handle on you —”

“She doesn’t,” I said. “We’re just friends. I let her do the talking and negotiating, because she’s better than me, but I wouldn’t think it smart to try to manipulate her as a way of manipulating me.”

“I’ve never held with manipulation,” said Fallatehr. “Far easier to simply stick your hand on someone’s soul to get them to do what you want.”

I swallowed at that. If he tried that with Amaryllis, I would stab him to death until he wasn’t much more than a pile of broken bones, raw meat, and ruptured organs, but I didn’t know whether he was the sort of person who responded well to threats. Then again, he was threatening me, or at least the people close to me, so maybe this was one of those occasions where displaying a willingness to inflict violence was appropriate. Too much time passed as I thought about it, and I ended up keeping my mouth shut.

“Come,” said Fallatehr. “I believe the time has come to negotiate over the matter of my associates, now that I’ve decided you would make an interesting enough pupil.”

We walked back to the rest of the party, who were still standing close together. They had been talking, but ceasing their conversation as we approached. Fallatehr’s “associates” had moved somewhat, but they were still watching us.

“I’ve accepted the base offer,” said Fallatehr. “I will leave this prison with you and teach Mr. Smith everything there is to know about the soul and how to manipulate it.”

“With reservations?” asked Amaryllis.

“Naturally,” replied Fallatehr. “And I have bad news, I’m afraid. The teleportation key you’ve brought in will not work, and this place will not remain safe for you for more than another hour.” Of course, because that would be too easy.

“The prison is not warded,” said Grak with a furrowed brow.

“It is an innate feature of this place, not a ward,” said Fallatehr.

“And you couldn’t have mentioned this earlier?” asked Fenn.

“It wouldn’t have been to my advantage then,” said Fallatehr, casting his gaze over her. She broke eye contact with him almost immediately, but his eyes continued tracing the lines of her body. Fenn had repeatedly assured me that elves found her extremely distasteful, but Fallatehr wasn’t exactly a typical elf, and he’d already said that he was an outcast. “In an hour, it will be curfew, and the prison’s appendages will come here. That’s not something that I can prevent.”

“The prohibition against teleportation doesn’t extend beyond the outer walls though?” asked Amaryllis.

“Not to my understanding,” said Fallatehr. He was watching the four of us like he was taking some entertainment from this. He’d agreed to leaving the prison and working with us, but we still didn’t have something that he actually wanted. To him, our failure would be a boon, and that was a serious problem.

“You said that the prison would bring us greater challenges on our way out,” I said. “Explain that.”

“There have been less than fifty prisoners here for the last hundred years,” said Fallatehr. “For the last six decades, I have been working on the penitentiary itself, uninhibited, gradually bending her to my will. The weakness of the appendages of dirt is a result of that. In another hundred years, I could have transformed this place into a fortress under my complete control.”

“Go faster, please,” said Amaryllis. “Time is apparently of the essence.”

“The prison is reactive,” said Fallatehr. “She rises to the threats that she faces. When there were two thousand unruly prisoners, she was fearsome. Given such a long span of a few dozen completely docile prisoners who she never recognizes as breaking rules, she has become the weak thing you faced in reaching me. And now, having been so thoroughly provoked, she will rise once again. How fast, I can’t say.”

“Shit,” Amaryllis swore.

“Yes,” agreed Fallatehr. “When you came here I thought that I would be happy enough to see you all die by the penitentiary’s hands, but Juniper has changed my mind on that score somewhat.”

“Then let’s get going,” said Fenn, folding her arms across her chest.

“There’s still the matter of the … associates,” said Amaryllis. That was more or less what it came down to. We’d been given a clock and told there was danger, but we were going to keep standing in this room, talking, until we could come to an agreement. “We can’t take them, the teleportation key only allows five.”

“Unacceptable,” said Fallatehr with a shrug. “My counter-offer is that we take all of them. You have free use of the key, it wouldn’t take more than six trips in total. It would naturally have to be done carefully in order to ensure that there’s no chance you simply leave them behind.”

“We can’t deal with that many people,” said Amaryllis. “Logistically speaking —”

“It’s about trust, not logistics,” said Fallatehr.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “You’re right, I apologize for not cutting to the point. We’ll move everyone at once, and if the far side of the island is safe from the penitentiary, we’ll extract everyone, including whichever associates you want to remove from this place. None of them will come with us. I’ll place them in whatever locations you prefer, so long as they’re distant from us.”

“Hang on,” I said. “You’re talking about releasing them into the world?”

“I’m negotiating,” said Amaryllis with a carefully calm glance in my direction.

“Ah, young Juniper doesn’t share your belief in the injustice of my incarceration?” asked Fallatehr.

“I don’t know the specifics, and I don’t think we have the time to talk about them,” I said. “Your associate we talked to made it clear that your associates aren’t actually you, they’re” —I waved my hand in the air, as though I could skate by the fact that I had no real idea what had been done to those people—“and I imagine some of them were put in this penitentiary for a good reason.”

“We can talk about this later,” said Amaryllis. “We need to get moving, which means that we need to get a consensus, fast.”

“The associates are of no use to me scattered,” said Fallatehr.

“They would be freed to pursue your goals,” said Amaryllis. “If that’s not enough, you could arrange to meet with them once your obligation to us is complete.”

“I’ll take three with me, plus another who is not an associate,” said Fallatehr. “I will, naturally, never be put in a situation where I might be pressganged.”

“Not an associate?” asked Amaryllis with narrowed eyes.

“Nonanima,” said Fallatehr. The name wasn’t familiar to me, but I heard an intake of breath from Fenn. “She is already in chains.” Well that’s fucking ominous.

“You, two associates, and the nonanima,” said Amaryllis.

“And, of course, passage for all my associates,” said Fallatehr.

Amaryllis nodded, but she didn’t seem particularly happy about it. I had no idea what the bounds of soul magic actually were, and didn’t fully understand what these associates were to him. They weren’t clones, exactly, but they were at the very least people whose souls had been remade in the image of his own. There was too much uncertainty though, and the fact that he could lie to us with practical impunity was worrying.

Fallatehr left to go speak with his associates. I didn’t know how much time we had left until the curfew, but it sure as hell felt like he was being nonchalant about things. We were just out of range of being able to hear his conversation, which was done with low voices and occasional glances in our direction.

“Do you have some clever plan?” I asked Amaryllis. “Something that you’re not telling me because of the n-word, or —”

“No,” said Amaryllis. “I intend to hold up our end of the bargain.”

“Fuck,” said Fenn. “I’m not on board with that.”

“Seems dicey, if anyone finds out that it was us, and they’ll have our names,” I said.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “It gives us an incentive not to defect against him, it’s implicitly part of the deal.”

That made sense, but I really didn’t like it. We were essentially giving him blackmail ammunition. Of course, we were already enemies of the state, which meant that the blackmail wasn’t as useful as it might seem on first blush, and that was probably also part of Amaryllis’ negotiation strategy, which was, apparently, more layered than I gave her credit for. It also put us in a collective corner, which she’d done without consulting us. Hard to do, in the heat of the moment, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

“Scenario?” asked Amaryllis.

“Scenario zero,” I replied. No new quests, no quest updates, no achievements, no companion messages. I had thought that Fallatehr would prove to be a companion, but if he was, the game hadn’t seen fit to say anything about him yet. I’d thought that the prison would hold some kind of companion, because this seemed like the perfect place for the ‘you find a locked-up guy with skills who joins your party‘ trope to rear its head.

“You’re not going to talk her out of this?” asked Fenn.

“No,” I replied. I looked her over. She was still standing with her arms crossed. “Be on the lookout while we move, they have every incentive to try to whittle down our numbers or attack us in the confusion of battle. It could be Fireteam Blackheart all over again.”

Fenn twisted her lips to the side for a moment, then nodded. I wasn’t sure that she had caught the message that I was trying to pass across; when Fenn and I had been stuck with Fireteam Blackheart, before we’d really known each other, whittling down the fireteam while ostensibly moving toward our goals had been the best plan of action we’d had available to us, because there was no way that we were going to be left alive. Fallatehr and his people had incentives to weaken us so we’d be easier to handle, but we had those same incentives.

I glanced toward Amaryllis after a short grace period, wanting to see whether she would pick up what I was saying but not wanting to look over eager, like I was getting away with something. She was, mercifully, staring at Fallatehr and his associates. I tracked her intent gaze to where a cage was being drawn out from under a table. A pale woman with white hair was inside it, and two of the scarred elves opened the door to pull her out.

“Nonanima?” I asked.

Amaryllis nodded. She looked in my direction with cold eyes. “If any of them happen to die on our way out, it would be best if she was one of them.”

Chapter 20 - Drift

We moved through the prison together, with our party of four at the front. Fallatehr walked in the midst of his quote associates unquote, who formed a tight ring around him. Behind him, the nonanima was being pulled along by the brass manacles around her wrists and the collar wrapping her throat.

My eyes kept going to her whenever I looked behind me. She walked with a downcast stare, her scarlet eyes fixed on the ground three feet in front of her. Unlike most of the others, she was in dingy clothing, but she was still pretty for all that, with delicate, gracile features. Her white hair, pale skin, and red eyes were obviously (to me) meant to call to mind an albino, but I knew what actual albinos looked like, and she wasn’t quite that.

“So what’s a nonanima?” I had asked Amaryllis.

“She doesn’t have a soul,” Amaryllis had answered, while looking the woman over. “They’re prone to demonic possession; without a soul, it’s easy to enter the body. She won’t have any magic that ties to the soul, which means most of them.”

“We’re talking about demonic possession here?” I’d asked. Demons, and the hells in general, were not one of the areas that I’d done a deep dive on; Portrait of the Many Hells was one of those books that I’d mostly gotten in case I needed it, rather than because I thought it was important background information that I needed to get to as quickly as possible, not that (from the index) Portrait went into much detail on demons or devils.

“It’s short-term, hours at most, maybe longer if they chained it, but they’re bad at coordination. If possessed, she’ll only have the strength of a human,” Amaryllis had replied. “The kinds of devils that can reach up to puppet her won’t be clever enough to be convincing, and if Fallatehr is smart, he’ll have his people punch her in the mouth if she tries to convince anyone. I don’t think she’s a threat.”

“The real question is why he has her,” Fenn had said.

“He’s a soul mage,” Amaryllis had replied. “The interest is obvious. Where he got her from is more concerning.” She’d pursed her lips. “It’s possible that he made her.”

I’d had a lot of questions, as was typical for me, but the operational briefing of ‘she can be possessed by demons or devils pretty much at will and can’t do magic’ was clear enough for the time being. The whole conversation about some people not having souls was going to have to wait, even though it raised a lot of questions about what, exactly, a soul actually did for you. I might have considered myself lucky to have recently acquired an apprenticeship to a master soul mage, if I liked or trusted the soul mage in question.

So we had moved from the gymnasium, down the hallways of the penitentiary, trying to make as direct a path outside as possible, keeping to a formation that would nearly guarantee that our party would take the brunt of any counter-attack by whatever Amoureux Penitentiary could muster against us. I didn’t really consider that fair, but Amaryllis didn’t seem to want to press the matter, and I deferred to her judgement. It certainly made more tactical sense, if you valued all of us equally, but I wanted some cannon fodder between myself and whatever trouble was ahead (and I was thankful that the game didn’t slap a penalty on me for that thought).

“Kran di in negidor gre ha deheki,” said Grak as he walked beside me, keeping his voice low. Literally translated, that meant ‘I him the gate about disbelieve’, except that ‘negid(or)’ didn’t just mean gate, it meant a ward, and in context, he was referring to Fallatehr telling us that the prison would block teleportation, I was pretty sure.

I glanced back at the people following us, for what seemed like the fifth time. “Lir Groglir lonele lalile?” I asked. Do we need to be speaking Groglir?

“Lir okr dril na mo lahon dadon o,” replied Grak. And he was right, we had been putting in the work for a reason. Being able to speak in confidence was, certainly, one of those reasons, and given the complexity of Groglir, and the fact that it was the trade language of dwarves, it was really unlikely that anyone could listen in on us — that, plus the fact that Grak was speaking softly.

“Na lir lonele lonele di gre?” I asked, which I was fairly sure was a butchering of Groglir, meant to ask whether there was anything actionable we could do about the fact that we were taking Fallatehr’s word on teleportation not working.

“Ri,” said Grak. Nothing.

That had more or less been my conclusion. If you couldn’t teleport within the penitentiary, then the only way to test that was to attempt to teleport, which we couldn’t do because of the risk that it was successful. At best, we might have been able to convince Fallatehr to be part of the test, leaving all his associates behind, but it would be hard to do that now, after terms had been negotiated. I wished that Grak had said something earlier, but maybe it hadn’t occurred to him, or maybe he was still second-guessing himself after our encounter with the suits of armor. My command of Groglir wasn’t good enough that I wanted to pursue that conversation.

So all that Grak had really done was to heighten my anxiety, not just about our teleportation being blocked, but about everything that Fallatehr had said to us. Thanks, Grak.

I was already in high gear when the golems appeared. Whatever internal changes the penitentiary had been going through in response to our arrival, there was a clear difference in the golems; they were wearing armor now, thick, crude slabs of wood on top of the packed earth of their torsos. There were fewer of them than last time, but more of the dangerous ones, and I was pretty confident that the addition of even something as weak as wooden armor was going to mean that I couldn’t kill one of the big guys by myself.

Nevertheless, I ran toward them with my sword drawn, with Amaryllis close behind me.

By the time we reached them, the casters had done something to make the air oppressively hot. Burning leaves swirled through the air, flashing bright enough to leave a spot on my vision where they landed. The golems didn’t seem to mind at all; small embers were gradually accumulating on them. It was a complication that I really didn’t want, but there was nothing to be done about it, so I burned SPD from one of my bones and sliced off the arm of a brute, then kicked it over to dodge away from a fist that was slamming down like a windmill.

I’d felt the excitement building from the moment we’d seen them, and it had built up to fever pitch by the time I actually met with them. I was gradually learning to simply lose myself in combat, to experience the zen of trusting in my skills. It became more of a sequence of decisions than anything else, each one thought about for relatively little time, especially on a battlefield like this one where burning motes threatened to incinerate part of my armor or dig into my skin, or whatever they were going to do.

Fallatehr’s associates came to join us, wielding the weapons that we’d given them to use. They had nothing magical, but there were more than enough mundane weapons stored away in Fenn’s glove. We hadn’t had a discussion about arming people who might be the enemy, but it seemed to me to be a building block of trust, in the same way that the way they joined us in battle was another building block. Naturally, there are different reasons to build trust, and one of them was so you could betray that trust later on; I wasn’t blind to that, because that was my current plan with Fallatehr.

I fought alongside Fallatehr’s people, which mostly consisted of them baiting out strikes and me moving in with superior agility and strength to land a hit that actually did some damage. The golems seemed to understand that I was the real threat, since they went after me more than anyone else, but they couldn’t flatly ignore the damage that was being done to them by the elves.

This was my first time seeing elves actually fight, and I wasn’t all that impressed, given their reputation. I could see the elf luck in action, as they slipped beneath a crushing fist or leapt back from a blow that they couldn’t see, and certainly they moved with an unearthly grace and agility that didn’t seem like it could possibly be a product of their muscles, but I didn’t think that I was all that far behind them in terms of dexterity. When using bone magic to speed, they were practically slow. And even without blood magic, I still had a clear power advantage, though I was, at this point, pretty powerfully built.

I was gauging their abilities because I was thinking about what Fenn had said — I agreed with her, that we’d prefer as many of them to die as possible, and I’d also agreed that it would make sense for them to try the same against us. I wasn’t just fighting against the golems, I was watching the men and women fighting alongside us, trying not to expose myself too much to them.

I watched one of them get clipped in the head by one of the large, armored golems, but the elven woman only slid along the ground without crumpling up as I’d thought she would. I realized what had happened a moment later, when a quick glance around showed the grey vlere-gur clutching a bleeding head-wound, far from the action. All of Fallatehr’s people were probably linked through the soul, so that wounds would end up on the person most able to take them. That was going to make any fight we had with them extremely problematic.

And it might have been because I was keeping a close eye on what everyone else around me was doing that I allowed one of the floating, burning bits of leaf to touch me. It landed on my armored collarbone, where it ignited with a blinding flash, and while I was blinking that away and trying to move to safety, I was hit by the golem, right in the chest. I went flying backward through the air and skidded to a stop on the tiled floor, gasping in pain and nearly blind.

Grak was on me in an instant, slapping down at the places where I was on fire; I had hit a few of the motes of fire on my way through the air. As I slowly came to my senses and my vision returned to me, I saw Fallatehr standing with six of his associates around him, out of the fight, which he was watching with interest. His nonanima stood behind him, chained and held in place, but I could see that she too was watching.

I healed myself as quickly as I could. I had broken ribs and punctured my lungs, but I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t reach a shaky hand to my bandolier and touch one of the bones. After the first wave of healing, it was easy to administer the second, and the third, until Fenn was beside me, feeding me more bones and waving bone-smoke from the air. It was painful, certainly, but my chest was almost as numb as my hand was, and whatever internal injuries I had sustained, I wasn’t feeling anywhere near the full brunt of them.

As soon as I was able, I raced back into the fight. I passed the vlere-gur, who was dead on the ground, and saw one of the elves fly to the side of the hallway from some unseen hit she’d taken through a soul link. Amaryllis was all by herself, separated from both me and Fallatehr’s people, but the casters at the back seemed to be dead, with the ground around them littered with the effects of their spells: pink petals, thin bits of vines, and a handful of rocks that floated a few inches above the ground.

Two of the four brutes had been killed, with the majority of the work having been done with my blade. A third had its wooden armor on fire, and was being slowly taken down by the elves, who were flensing away at it with their borrowed swords. That left one for Amaryllis and I. We came together, each taking a different side of it, and I sliced halfway through its crude arm at the shoulder while she went in close and began flickering her blade. Even with my strongest hits, I wasn’t getting through the armor, but I could at least disarm him so that Amaryllis could do her work. Once I’d dodged another attack and chopped clean through its other arm, I began to attack it from the side, seeking the gaps in its armor, but it was hard to bring as much power to a precise hit. The golem died from a thousand cuts, spilling goop out from the hundreds of holes Amaryllis had put through its armor and into its interior, and eventually it collapsed down to the ground.

Weakly Armored Brutish Dirt Golem defeated!

Now that I had time to pay some attention to the messages instead of treating them like a distraction, I really didn’t like the implication. Weakly armored meant that strongly armored were coming, and I wasn’t confident that we would be able to skip past them just by moving fast. I also didn’t know how predetermined this scenario was, or how perfectly the Dungeon Master could (or would) predict what we were going to do. Maybe the game was adding on to the warning that Fallatehr had already given us, or maybe it was giving a hint of what was to come.

“We need to get moving,” I said as I restored the Anyblade to its ring form.

“Souls,” said Amaryllis. She began moving around to the corpses on the ground, briefly pointing her hilt at their heads and making the sword appear there. When that was done, she used her spike to draw out their souls and place them in her glass jar. This was a post-battle ritual that I hadn’t yet gotten used to.

“An unfortunate number of deaths,” said Fallatehr, looking at the corpses of the fallen with a raised eyebrow. “A few were not beyond recovery, if they had received immediate aid.” He’d lost four of them in all, three elves and the vlere-gur.

“I was busy,” I replied.

Fallatehr nodded, but I didn’t think he fully bought that. The idea of going to heal the fallen elves had crossed my mind. I’d decided against it, not just on the ground that I was our second-most valuable asset in this fight (behind Amaryllis), but because weakening them was in our strategic interest. I was also a little leery about touching someone who could very well be a soul mage; they needed touch, and while it was usually more on the order of minutes than seconds, I wasn’t about to take the chance with one of Fallatehr’s creations, given that he had a good claim to being one of the most powerful soul mages in the world.

We went faster, after that, down the branching corridors at almost a jog, watching for sudden ambushes and looking askance down every hallway. There was another fight coming, I knew there had to be, but it was an elusive one.

“You’re thinking that they’re weak fighters, for elves,” said Fallatehr.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “We were hoping for more.”

We kept moving as they talked, with the conversation carried out over the rustling of clothes and the echoing sound of our footfalls. Each step of the seven-foot-tall woman was almost thunderously loud, and she was breathing heavily, putting by far the most effort into moving quickly. She hadn’t come into battle with us, though I wasn’t quite sure why; she was powerfully built, and I was getting a real ‘death by snu snu’ vibe from her.

“It was once common practice to carve out the skills of the imprisoned,” said Fallatehr. “I have not built these men and women up to be fighters, though some of them were, in their past lives. It’s as though they’ve never held a blade before.”

“Unfortunate,” said Amaryllis. I wondered whether she was thinking what I was thinking, which is that Fallatehr was probably feeding us a line of bullshit.

It wasn’t entirely clear what exact alterations Fallatehr had made to these people, except that he’d done something to their souls to make them relatively obedient and willing to listen to his orders, if (it was implied) imperfectly, and also to use them to cloak his own identity from the penitentiary. Even given his limited supply of bodies, I didn’t believe that he had completely neglected turning one of them into a knife. If he hadn’t trained (or forged) them all into soul mages, what was the point in making them into his servants? The gambit would be simple enough; throw a few bodies away in the first fight to convince us that he had no one who would be that much of a threat, and save the rest for a strike when we least expected it. It was what I might have done.

They didn’t turn on us as we moved through the halls, retracing our steps back to the entrance, past a few of the battles we’d fought, and the other threat, the prison itself, didn’t seem to have any other surprises ready to ambush us with, at least not before we got outside. We finally found ourselves in the entryway where we’d fought the brass suits of armor, which were still lying on the ground right where we’d left them, along with a fair amount of our own blood. It had grown dark as we’d made our way through the penitentiary, and now the only light was from my hand, which I channeled blood magic through to act as a torch.

“It’s probably waiting for us on the other side,” said Amaryllis. “It hasn’t had that much time to set anything up.”

“Don’t underestimate this place,” said Fallatehr. With a gesture from him, his associates fanned out and moved forward. One of them left him holding the chain that bound the nonanima. “It was weak while it slept, but now it has awakened.” He stepped toward one of the people in front of him, who flinched back.

“What are you doing?” asked the elf, watching Fallatehr with wary eyes.

Fallatehr looked at the other elf, head cocked to the side. “I will turn you back, if we both survive. You know that oblivion awaits you without me.”

The elf hesitated, then straightened slightly and bowed his head. Fallatehr moved forward and touched him on the brow, pushing with an elegant thumb. The elf stepped back, gasping slightly, and Fallatehr moved on to the next, continuing on down the line until only two were left, one of them the large woman, the other the shirtless elf we’d met in the visitation room. Two associates would travel with us, that was the agreement.

“Heal them, Juniper,” said Fallatehr, gesturing to the people he had touched.

I looked at him. “They’re not injured.” I was taking the conversational bait, for his sake. I was smart enough to know where he was going with this.

“Injury is a matter of how the soul views the body,” said Fallatehr with a triumphant, sharp-toothed grin. “I think you will find that they are quite injured.”

I swallowed hard and touched the first of them. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a trap, but even if it wasn’t, I was getting a bad feeling about this. The elf was no longer himself, visibly so; he had shown a wariness before Fallatehr had touched him, but now there was nothing but a cow-like submission and a faint dullness to his eyes. He didn’t react to my touch in the slightest.

I did a slow, steady pull from the bone to get as much from it as I could, and I had to resist the urge to yank my hand away when I saw his jaw dislocate itself. Eventually I closed my eyes as I burned through bones, but that wasn’t any better, because then I was listening to the creaks and groans of his body. So I opened my eyes and tried not to pay too much attention. It took ten bones, drained with full efficiency, until he stopped changing. I looked on the creation in horror.

Aerbian elves were carnivores, hunters, that much had been made clear to me, but they were still humanoid. They were upright tool users, not beasts, and killers, but still refined and restrained. The thing that Fallatehr had turned this elf into, with my help, was more gracile but less human, and as soon as my hand pulled away, it dropped to all fours, in a position it was clearly comfortable in. The arms had been elongated and the wrists had been adapted, the better for the creature to swipe with its claws. But as I looked, I saw that it didn’t actually have claws, it had sharpened bones protruding from its last knuckle, with the fingernail resting just on top of it. There were other changes, most of them to get the creature into a less humanoid shape, but I quickly moved on before getting engrossed in the appearance of the thing.

“Not the best weapon we might have, given the circumstances,” said Fallatehr. “But I had always assumed that if it came to a fight I would be facing people, not the prison itself, so this is what I had prepared.”

“What are they?” asked Fenn with a shaky voice.

“Elves,” said Fallatehr with a laugh that no one shared. “I stripped out everything I didn’t think was necessary and used it to rebuild them into something ferocious. It used to be common, in the glory days of the Second Empire. They are death incarnate, though of course, better suited to fighting against people.” I wasn’t sure whether I was imagining a threat there.

I moved down the line, “healing” each of them in turn and trying my best not to have my stomach churned by what I was doing.

“I take it these are not the things you wish to learn from me, Juniper?” asked Fallatehr.

“I’ll learn them, if you’re willing to teach,” I said as I transformed another one into a monster. I tried to rationalize it; I wasn’t the one that had actually changed them, they had been changed at the level of their very soul by Fallatehr, I was just expressing that change. And it hadn’t been like they were full people before — though they had been people enough to fear what Fallatehr was going to do to them.

“They’ve been giving us time,” said Amaryllis with her eyes on the door. “I’m not sure that we’re getting the better end of the deal here.”

“We only need to leave the penitentiary,” said Fallatehr. “The pelehr will provide a distraction, if nothing else, so that we might find a way through.”

After I had changed over the last of them, they turned and lined up in front of the door. Fallatehr didn’t seem at all perturbed by the idea of what we might find out there, waiting between us and the front gate. I could already feel my pulse starting to pick up, because this was the final battle, and that was when things always got hairy.

We opened the door to see two of the twenty-foot-tall brass creatures with their hammers held in a firm grip, lit by the glow of Celestar and the multi-colored stars that hung above Aerb. Four of the gorilla-like brutes stood beneath them, each of them with brass armor rather than wood, an unfortunate development. The gargoyles were still broken though, which was the only good news, or rather, the only absence of bad news. The gate golem still blocked the main entryway, which we’d been hoping to leave out of. As fights went, it didn’t look particularly winnable.

The single saving grace was that they weren’t attacking just yet, and the reason for that was simple; they had sent an envoy. It was a far cry from the dirt golem that we’d first met, the one that spoke to us with its too-human mouth. Instead, it was a thing of dark glass and brass, with a few places where it had strips of dark wood. Its mouth was still a normal mouth though, with lips and teeth that seemed out of place on its form.

“Please,” it said. “There is still time to resolve this with peace.”

“How would we do that?” asked Amaryllis.

“Lay down your arms and surrender,” said the mouthpiece of the prison. “You will die with surety otherwise.”

I could hear the sound of the pelehr breathing loudly. Whatever had been done to their lungs and mouth, Fallatehr hadn’t been optimizing for silence. It gave an unnerving backdrop to the conversation. I didn’t think that giving in to the prison was an option, but the fight didn’t seem to be an option either, especially since it would be the perfect, final opportunity to stab us in the back before we had him on the back foot.

I wasn’t about to back down at this point and throw away the grind we’d gone through in getting through this dungeon, but I also stared at the giant brass creatures and didn’t see a way for us to beat them. No, that was the wrong way of thinking, that was my problem; this wasn’t a fight to destroy the enemy, we didn’t actually care about the prison except that it was an impediment to our goals. All we really needed to do was to get on the other side of the wall, where, presumably, the teleportation key would still work. Fallatehr had said it himself, we only needed to leave the penitentiary.

I moved close to Amaryllis. “Stall,” I whispered to her, hoping that she’d be able to hear me clearly through her helmet. I moved on to Fallatehr as she started talking to the golem, using polite, meaningless, diplomatic language like she’d been prepared to do that all along.

“The prison thinks that you’re all one person?” I asked him.

He raised an eyebrow, which arched perfectly. “No,” he replied. He gestured to the pelehr. “They are no longer in my image.”

“Do you fear this fight?” I asked. In the background, the golem was answering Amaryllis’ long monologue.

“I’ve stripped fear from myself, as much as was possible,” answered Fallatehr. “I do not believe our outcomes are likely to be good. Most likely you will die and I will remain imprisoned with fewer resources than I had when you arrived.”

“I have a plan, but it’s going to require trust,” I said. “We’re going to stuff you inside the glove.”

Fallatehr frowned. “With an associate left outside to cloak my position? Yes, it might work. There are still a few, less valuable ones left behind in strategic locations.” (I had guessed that, just based on the discrepancy in the numbers that I’d been given: twenty associates, but only fifteen people in the gymnasium.)

I moved away from him and made sure that Amaryllis was still engaged with the golem. She appeared to be talking at length about the morality of imprisonment for crimes which were committed prior to the criminal act becoming illegal. That seemed to at least be holding its attention. I had no idea how well it could hear, or whether it was even cognitively capable of acting on that information if it could, but so far it wasn’t making a move against us.

“Fenn, you remember riding the rocket?” I asked as I stepped up beside her.

“I remember it not going so great,” she said. “Actually, I remember it getting so fucked that you were racing across the desert and burning through your bones, which is what got us in this particular mess in the first place. Besides that, we don’t have a rocket.”

“You’ve got the sand bow,” I said. I glanced at the wall, which stood thirty feet high and at least a football field’s length away from us. The shot would be simplicity itself for someone as skilled as Fenn.

“You’re nuts,” she said, but she gave me a grin. Her eyes quickly scanned the top of the wall, and I looked with her, to the places where she’d removed the gargoyles. We already knew, from the birds that Solace had sent over, that the laser gargoyles had been the primary means of keeping things from going over the wall. “Not enough masks though, and however great Mary is, I doubt that she can keep it up for long enough that we can make more.” We had made more of them during our week off in the bottle, so that we had five on hand, enough to cover the whole party, but assuming that we still needed to keep up our end of the bargain, that wasn’t enough.

I moved back over to Fallatehr. “We have to leave them behind,” I said, gesturing at the pelehr. “Non-negotiable.”

“Convenient for you,” said Fallatehr, watching me closely. I agreed with him, it was very convenient for me, but that didn’t make it any less true. Bad enough that we’d be taking him and three others, nearly even numbers except that the nonanima didn’t count, but not releasing more of Fallatehr onto the world was a plus in my book, given what he could do. “Very well.”

“Wait ten minutes before you try to get out, we’ll pull you if it’s clear,” I said. I wondered whether he would think it was a trap, because that’s what I would have thought, but I was apparently bad enough at lying that it was an asset to me, because he nodded along.

Fenn surprised me by stepping forward and handing him a breathing kit from her glove. I hadn’t even heard her sneak up next to me. He took it for a moment with a mild questioning look, but he put it on all the same. Fenn touched him on the arm with her gloved hand, and I stepped over to Amaryllis, trying not to think about the fact that they were touching, or worry too much about whether that was giving him access to her soul, or what he might be able to do in ten seconds time. Ten seconds got you nothing, according to everything that we knew about soul magic, but he had been pursuing his own research here for hundreds of years. It was a disquieting thought.

“Might be trouble in five seconds,” I said. I wasn’t sure how the prison would react to Fallatehr — though one of many, from its perspective — disappearing.

“I think I might be getting somewhere,” said Amaryllis.

I glanced back at Fallatehr, just in time to see him disappear into the glove. I began transforming my sword from ring into two-hander, but stopped when I looked back at the golem, which hadn’t reacted at all. Holy crap, this might actually work.

We put the others into the glove, one by one, first Grak, then the tall woman, then the elf with strips taken out of his scarwork that we’d first met in the visitation room. That left only Amaryllis, Fenn, the nonanima, and the pelehr, who we weren’t going to be taking with us. I wasn’t sure what kind of standing orders they had from Fallatehr, if he had control over them at all, but they weren’t moving yet, so I counted my blessings.

“Okay,” I said to the nonanima, looking her in her red eyes. They were glassy and unfocused, not actually looking at me even though I was right in front of her. I held the last breathing kit in my hand, with its thick rubber hose and connected tank. “I’m going to put this on you, I need you to not make a move until you’ve counted to five minutes.”

“Fallatehr was willing to leave her,” said Fenn. She held her hand out to the side and the void rifle appeared in it. I moved in front of the nonanima as she raised it. “Joon,” she sighed. “We have minutes, she could be possessed right now.”

“She’s innocent,” I said.

“Shit,” Fenn swore. “She’s fucking Joon-bait.” But whatever her objections, the void rifle disappeared back into her glove. She took out the sand bow, then took out a type of arrow that I had never seen before, one with a thick metal center. She unscrewed the fletching from the shaft and poked a finger down it. “You know,” she said as she stripped off the glove and began rolling it up, “the nonanima isn’t a clue, she’s a threat.” She stuck the glove into the arrow’s tube, then screwed it shut. “Really hoping that weight isn’t going to be too much of a factor, but the glove is light enough, and luck is on our side.” She prodded at a small bit of glove sticking out. “Put her in the glove, then let’s make haste.”

The nonanima hadn’t said anything to me, and when I put the mask on her, leaving her chains and collar in place, she accepted it without complaint. Fenn put her into the glove without further comment.

“So, my pretty companion, how goes the jabbering?” asked Fenn, clasping Amaryllis on the shoulder. Amaryllis stopped in mid-sentence; she had been saying something about the legal structure of Anglecynn and where the Amoureux Penitentiary fell in that scheme.

“Ready,” said Amaryllis, touching the glove.

“What is the meaning of this?” asked the golem, looking between the three of us. Whatever rhetorical spell Amaryllis had wrapped it in, that had broken, but we still weren’t being attacked.

Amaryllis disappeared into the glove, then Fenn held it out to me. I hesitated.

“I can make it over the wall on my own,” I said, looking down at the arrow. “Burning bones, I can do it.”

“Oh fuck off,” said Fenn.

“I will not allow you to leave,” said the golem. “You have committed crimes against me which must be answered for, illegalities which —”

“I can make it over the wall, I can burn through bones, I have Ropey with me, and the Anyblade, and if something goes wrong with the arrow, if the shot is off, if it’s intercepted, then someone should —”

“All points you could have raised earlier,” said Fenn with a scowl. She drew back her bow and fired the arrow at full draw, which stuck in the air a foot from the end of the bow. She walked forward and touched the small bit of black that stuck out from it. “I’m going to trust you, and we’re going to have words after this is over. You promised me that you didn’t have a deathwish.”

“I don’t,” I said, keeping my eyes on the arrow hanging in the air. Fenn vanished shortly afterward. I kept watching the arrow and counting down, occasionally looking at the armored golems and the twenty-foot-tall brass statues with their enormous hammers. The thing I was most worried about was one of the brass colossi doing a giant basketball-player jump up into the air to slam the arrow back down, or maybe just rushing forward to intercept its arc. They still weren’t moving though, and with every second I began to relax a little bit, except for the fact that I still had to run past all that garbage. And if the arrow plan went off without a hitch, then I’d look pretty stupid.

(I was trying to stop myself from thinking about the Unspoken Plan Guarantee, which was the real reason that I was standing watch and putting myself in danger. I hated that meta-level reasoning, and halfway wished I could abolish it from my mind. But the last time we’d tried a similar plan, things had gone wrong, and I didn’t know whether it was down to narrative or not, to the whims of the Dungeon Master trying to make things interesting. I was hoping that I was forcing the game into a particular position, but trying my best not to think about it, because if it was only meta-level thinking, I was pretty sure that the Dungeon Master wouldn’t respond well to it.

I wasn’t sure that having me stand guard and act as a backup strategy made sense by itself, without the meta considerations, but it was too hard to evaluate the situation on the fly and try to strip out a layer of information and processing that I knew was there. In a hypothetical world where I didn’t know that I was in a game, would I have acted the same way? Would I have declared myself the party member most capable of making the run, the best option in case the arrow and glove didn’t make it and had to be manually tossed over? Or would I have just let Fenn touch that corner of the glove to me? I honestly had no idea.)

Twenty-five mississippi, twenty-six mississippi —

The nonanima appeared beside the arrow, still with a dull look in her eyes, with her hands in manacles in front of her and the collar around her neck, and the mask I’d put in place. She looked at me for just a moment, then I watched the arrow zip off through the air at Fenn’s full draw, sailing high over the wall and disappearing from sight.

“Something has gone wrong,” said the golem. I saw the enormous brass colossi start to move. “Cease what you are doing.”

“Okay,” I said to the nonanima. “I’ll get you out of here.”

“No,” said the golem. “Cease.”

I reached forward, cautious of frightening her, and began to pick her locks with the Anyblade.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice was soft and her red eyes were wide. The sound was slightly muffled by the mask, which I removed once the manacles were off. She gently touched her wrist. Up until this point, I wasn’t actually sure that she could talk.

“I’m taking you out of here,” I said. A gentleman should ask, but we didn’t have time for that, so I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and took off toward the wall.

Now this, this was legitimately stupid, and even as I’d recognized that, I knew that I was going to do it anyway. I’d been preparing for different scenarios, trying to plot out how best to weave a path through the various enemies, trying to figure out where the arrow would land, if it went off course or was stopped in flight where it would land, how I would get to it … and this was a complication that would lower my chances of surviving the next few minutes. I’d be better off leaving her to fend for herself among the pelehr at the prison systems, and she’d be obliterated one way or another.

But no, I ran with her over my shoulder, grateful that she wasn’t struggling against me. I’d thought that it wouldn’t be too hard for me to clear the wall; it was thirty feet tall, I was about six feet tall, plus another two feet for my arms, which meant that I needed a vertical jump of maybe twenty-two feet. The highest vertical jump on record was something like four feet — information that I knew I didn’t know off-hand, which must have been injected into my brain by high KNO — but I had bone and blood magic in combination. Back at Barren Jewel I’d been able to launch both Fenn and Amaryllis high enough that they could reach the top of a twenty-foot wall, and I’d been much weaker back then.

And if that failed, the plan was to use Ropey to get a way over, no grappling hook needed, and if that somehow didn’t work, then I’d lure one of the big guys over to smash in the wall and give me an out, and if that didn’t work, then I could probably make something happen with the Anyblade, either using a poleaxe as a ladder or wedging it into the wall. If all those failed, then I was pretty confident that I could think of something; it wasn’t too much of a guess to say that the enemy had high Endurance and Power but low Speed, which meant that all I really had to do was keep running and not get penned in.

The problem was, none of those plans assumed that I would be carrying a hundred pounds of weight that also needed to get over (or through) the wall, and she was definitely slowing me down. The gorilla golems were stomping toward me as I took my run for the wall, and the brass colossi were stomping along, hammers raised. My dead hand groped for a bone in my bandolier, and I drew in SPD from it, then dodged between two of the large golems, narrowly avoiding a powerful hit that sailed above my head. I was right though, the golems were slow and easy to dodge, and assuming that their base form hadn’t been upgraded too much, a single hit from them still wouldn’t be enough to kill me, so long as it landed on my armor.

I liked speed. I liked being faster, being able to outrun people, not having to worry about hits because I’d be gone by the time the hit reached me. The girl on my shoulder was slowing me down, but I was proficient enough with blood magic to put the pulse of my blood in every step, and combined with the extra speed from the bone, avoiding their attacks was nearly trivial.

“You’re going to have to lock your legs when I throw you!” I yelled to her, hoping that she was together enough to understand me. “Catch the lip of the wall!”

I skidded to a stop at the wall and glanced behind us to see how much time we had. I was momentarily thrilled to see that the golems were concerning themselves with the pelehr, which had taken it upon themselves to provide a distraction (or more likely, been commanded to). That relief turned sour when I saw one of them die; they had been people, imprisoned here, then with their essence manipulated by Fallatehr for decades or longer until they were simply thrown away, meat for the grinder. And one of the two colossi was still coming for us.

“Lock your legs,” I said and I started to lift the girl up. I thought about it for a bit and reached down to pull up a bone to put it in my mouth, which had a nauseatingly gamey taste. “I ‘oin’ a’ ‘row oo up ‘ere.”

She looked up at the top of the wall, then down at me, and I felt her legs go straight. She didn’t seem very strong, but I was hoping that she could take the force of it and not just crumple. “Un, ‘wo, ‘ree,” I said, and launched her as high in the air as I could, using every ounce of power from bone and blood. She went higher than I had expected, and landed right on the top of the wall with her legs sticking out, barely visible in the dark now that I’d let my light go out.

“Stay there!” I called to her. A glance back at the colossus showed I had maybe a second. I fished Ropey out from my bag and spun him around once before tossing him up; he landed on her legs and slithered over her. I hoped that he would get the message about helping her down, but Ropey had always been dependable.

I rolled to the side to avoid the strike of the colossus bringing its hammer down; it was faster than I had hoped it would be, but now I wasn’t carrying anything. I spared a glance toward my supply of blood, which had finally dipped down below the halfway point, which was the normal carrying capacity of my body. I’d blown through the surplus, one bounding step or swing of the sword at a time, that and the few hits I’d taken. I watched the colossus carefully as it moved, the weight behind how it lifted the monstrously large hammer, the wind-up before it took another swing. I dodged that one too, with minimal effort on my part.

The pelehr were dying one-by-one, skulls crushed in or legs stomped down, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad about them, and the battlefield wasn’t the place to be actively trying to make yourself feel emotions about people you’d just met. In a stark, split-second moment, I realized that’s what I was trying to do, and I could see the chain of thought that was trying to form in my mind, where I would rush in to save them, and be forced into killing the golems, and surely that would get me closer to leveling up. The colossus swung its hammer down and I had to expend more effort in moving out of the way with a well-timed Sanguine Surge, because I wasn’t paying the full amount of attention to the fight.

I did a ducking roll through its legs, coming up behind its back. I struck its ankle once with the Anyblade in its largest form, but barely even left a dent in the brass. I needed to get over the wall, that was all I needed to do to win, yet here I was, moving closer to the action, where the second colossus had swept aside one of the pelehr. It began moving toward me as its counterpart, the one I’d ducked past, began turning around.

I ran, just to give myself time to think. It seemed too easy to go over the wall, like I’d be punished for it by the game, but was I just thinking that because I was worried that I was depriving myself of a level up by leaving these slow, lumbering sources of xp behind? I didn’t know whether I could actually trust myself to be rational. I heard a sound and looked up in time to see a gargoyle opening its mouth toward me. I moved the Anyblade up, as a shortsword, and parried the green laser that the gargoyle fired my way.

I turned and ran back the other way. The only reason that the gargoyle was in play was that I’d gone too far, away from the ones that Fenn had knocked down. I could see bloodied, broken corpses lying on the ground by the golems, all of which were heading my way. They had a few chunks taken out of them, along with marks on the brass, some of them sharp, but their lives had been spent on buying me time. Maybe Fallatehr had set them up for that when he’d changed them. All I could think about when I looked at the enemies was that it was all such a waste, and I couldn’t even tell which part of my brain was thinking that.

I charged toward the wall and jumped up it, bone and blood propelling me higher than anyone back on Earth had ever jumped before. It wasn’t enough, but I extended the Anyblade into a polearm with a hook, which, fully extended, caught the edge of the wall. I hit the wall, scraping my face, then began to climb, hand over hand, up the length of the polearm. When I reached the top, I reformed the Anyblade into a ring and took a last look at the penitentiary. It was spectacular under the light of Celestar and the multicolored stars.

One of the brass colossi reared back and threw its hammer at me, end over end, which I really hadn’t expected. I dropped down the other side of the wall, grabbing the edge with my hands as I fell, and watched the brass hammer go sailing by above me. It was twenty feet to the ground from where I was, but I dropped it anyway, pushing off the wall at the last second and then going for a roll once I hit the ground to shed my momentum. Rolling was none too fun in armor, as I’d already learned, but I still had three bones to spare.

Quest Completed: Crimes Against the Soul - You have retrieved Fallatehr Whiteshell from within the Amoureux Penitentiary and are ready to embark upon your new life as his dedicated student, with a new companion to boot.

There was no level up.

I jogged over to the nonanima, who was looking at Ropey in confusion, healing my minor scrapes along the way. It had crossed my mind that she might be a new companion, but between her, Fallatehr, and the seven-foot-tall woman, she was my third choice.

“Joon!” called Fenn, from some distance away, barely visible in the moonlight.

I waved to her. “Fenn, I made a friend!”

“Why did you save me?” the nonanima asked with her small, hushed voice.

“It seemed wrong to let you die,” I said. Actually, I think that I might have tried to save you because I wanted to experience the ecstasy provided to me by the game we’re in, but I’m not one hundred percent sure.

Loyalty Increased: [Null Pointer Exception] lvl 2!

Chapter 21 - The Chemical History of a Candle

Bumblefuck, Kansas was large enough that our high school offered exactly one computer science elective, and I had taken it the first semester of senior year. I’d just barely completed programming a wildly ambitious game of checkers in BASIC for my final project, earning me my only A for that semester (my grades had never been stellar, and senior year they took a turn for the worse for reasons that should be obvious to you at this point). The game had incredibly crude graphics, there was no AI so you had to play against someone else, and all input was done by declaring which of the numbered squares you wanted to move your checker to. It didn’t do kinging or bubblegum either. Oh, and there was no error checking of any kind, so if you entered an illegal move, the game would faithfully execute it, and then everything would get screwed up if the program didn’t barf entirely (which it sometimes did anyway, for reasons that I never figured out).

This is all by way of saying that yeah, I was pretty fucking good at programming.

Jokes aside, I at least understood what a null reference exception was; the program tries to go look up where some variable is, and finds out that there’s a null (empty) value where that variable's address was supposed to be. That causes the program to throw a null reference exception, which the programmer either deals with somehow, or which crashes or stalls the program.

If it was a joke, I understood it, and the game thus far had a lot of really dumb little things like that (some got a small chuckle from me, others I just rolled my eyes at). If it wasn’t just a joke, or maybe even if it was a joke, then the game was exposing its machinery to me, and that could be useful. The nameless nonanima had some loyalty to me, but it seemed that her name pointed at a null value. If it wasn’t just a joke, then what other parts of her were missing, so far as the game was concerned? What would happen to her when she reached Loyalty 10 and Twinned Souls happened, given that she didn’t have a soul? Amaryllis had already said that most types of magic wouldn’t work on her, but I wanted to know the specifics of that, and why that would be the case. It seemed important, like a lever that I could use to pry apart the different layers that made up reality.

“Why is she with you and unchained?” asked Fenn as she closed the distance between us. She had her artillery bow in hand, with an arrow nocked and aimed right at Null.

“Scenario five,” I called back. New companion, but not Fallatehr.

“Goddamn it,” said Fenn. She had been moving slowly, to keep her aim, but she dropped it and moved faster to close the distance. “Watch her, Joon!”

I turned and looked to Null, who was looking at me with wide eyes. “Uh, I’m watching?”

“They can use me at any time,” said Null, hanging her head slightly. “You shouldn’t have unbound me.”

I looked over to Fenn as she came over, raising an eyebrow. “Amaryllis said that she was only as strong as a normal human. I’m pretty sure that I can take a ninety-pound girl.”

“Wow, care to tempt fate a little bit more?” asked Fenn. Her bow disappeared into her glove and a pair of handcuffs appeared just after that. She moved over to Null, who held her hands out willingly.

“Is that necessary?” I asked.

“Come on, we’re done with this place, Mary and Grak are back there holding down the fort, two on three, let’s get going,” said Fenn.

“You’re good?” I asked Null. She nodded to me, and gave me an awestruck look that immediately made me reconsider how much concern I should be showing for her. If she’d been born in this prison and locked up for her entire life, that was a recipe for her to form an overly strong attachment to me.

“Mary is pissed, by the way,” said Fenn as we moved away from the penitentiary. She pointed a thumb back toward Null without looking at her. “The woobie probably isn’t going to help matters.”

“Is woobie a colloquial expression?” I asked. I had that jarring feeling of hearing a term I thought was Earth-exclusive used on Aerb, which I still wasn’t used to. Most of the time I didn’t ask and let it roll by, but we had time, and I was more concerned about the words and concepts that I might be using wrong, instead of just the ones with parallel or convergent origin.

“Large animal,” said Fenn. “It sits in the forest crying out in pain to draw in its prey.”

“Ah,” I said. “So you wouldn’t use it as a general term for a relative innocent going through pain and suffering who you want to protect.”

“Not unless they were going to kill you,” said Fenn with a shrug. “Maybe we don’t do the cross-cultural exchange around the soul fucker?”

“Yeah,” I said as we walked. I looked at Null again, and found her staring at me in the moonlight. I thought she would look away, but she didn’t, and eventually I had to break eye contact, which just left me with the uncomfortable feeling that she was still staring at the back of my head as we walked. “Scenario five though.”

“Yes, that’s going to make our Mary absolutely thrilled, you know her so well,” said Fenn with a snort.

We found Amaryllis and Grak both holding their weapons, while Fallatehr was sitting on the ground with a pleasant smile that didn’t reveal his sharp teeth. He had his two associates remaining, exactly as many as he’d negotiated for, the seven-foot-tall woman whose species I couldn’t determine, and the elf with strips removed from his scars we’d met at visitation.

“Did any of my pelehr survive?” asked Fallatehr.

“No,” I said. I glanced at Null. “Were you expecting them to survive?”

“I was not,” said Fallatehr. “But they were ultimately doomed, one way or another, if we weren’t going to be together. We’ll speak on it more, during your training.”

I felt a moment of discomfort at that, which I tried to suppress. Whatever he’d done to those people wasn’t the sort of thing that I wanted to learn. I would learn it, if it was on offer, and turning down another tool in the toolbox would be asinine, but I didn’t want to.

“We don’t have a safe base of operations,” said Amaryllis. “Now that the danger has passed and the key should be in working order again, I would propose that half of us leave to find lodging, while the other half stay here. After two hours, I’ll come back, and after another two hours after that, we’ll regroup. As to the groups, I was thinking that we would keep even numbers initially, four and four. I’d like Juniper and Fallatehr to go with me, that way they can take some time for initial lessons during the two hours it will take for me to return with the rest of our group. Obviously we can’t take the nonanima, that means that it will be either Rheta or Lehpenn.” She gestured to the tall woman and the other elf; apparently introductions had been made in my absence.

“Scenario five,” I said to Amaryllis.

She blinked at me, then stole a brief glance at Null. “Okay,” she said. “That’s ...” She paused, then stole another glance at Null, then frowned and looked at Fallatehr. “How dangerous is she?”

“Barely at all, where the border between worlds is strong,” said Fallatehr. “How far has cosmological mapping advanced in the last few hundred years?”

“I don’t know,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll need specialty texts to figure out where it’s safe to bring her, or at the very least, better restraints, and ideally tight earmuffs.”

“What is scenario five?” asked Fallatehr.

“Nothing you need to worry about right now,” said Amaryllis. “It’s not important in the short-term, and it will take a long time to explain. We wouldn’t want to explain in front of ears that are compromised.”

“We will speak on that matter, and others, at a later time,” said Fallatehr with a calm tone and a slight nod of his head. “I would propose that Juniper and I stay here, with the nonanima and either your dwarf or half-elf.”

“Fenn,” said Fenn, pointing a finger at herself. “Grak,” she said, pointing a finger at Grak. “If it means leaving this asshole behind, I’m all for going on a trip.”

“Fenn,” said Amaryllis, in her warning voice. I was pretty sure that tension between the two of them was going to boil over no matter what steps we took to minimize it, but I wasn’t sure what form that boiling over was going to take. I was overdue for some time alone with Fenn, and one of the things I most wanted to ask her about were her thoughts on Fallatehr. “My plan is to go to Parsmont, I guess I’ll be taking Fenn, Rheta, and Lehpenn?”

I wasn’t sure that was ideal, but I didn’t have a better suggestion. It was, in some ways, like the logic puzzle about a man trying to cross the river with a bag of grain, a duck, and a fox. He could take one thing across at a time, but couldn’t leave the duck unattended with the grain (because the duck would eat the grain) and couldn’t leave the fox unattended with the duck (because the fox would eat the duck). Similarly, the overall lack of trust, and Fallatehr’s ability to fuck up someone’s soul, meant that we needed to be careful about who was left with whom.

To me, the most worrying part of what Amaryllis had proposed was that Fenn would be left alone with Rheta and Lehpenn, and I wasn’t confident that they didn’t know soul magic too. Their combat abilities were also an unknown, which meant that I wasn’t sure that Fenn would be able to fend them off if they attacked her, even with all the tricks she had up her glove, and worse, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell, depending on how sophisticated an attack might be. That said, I still thought that it was probably the best option available to us, even when taking into account alternate initial splits of three and five — especially given that we needed to be building trust, rather than putting up visible signs of paranoia.

Before they left, Fallatehr touched Lehpenn and Rheta, the former on his head and the latter on the bare skin of her chest. He spent five minutes with each, wordlessly touching them with his eyes closed; I saw Amaryllis and Fenn having a hushed conversation while this was happening. For my part, I mostly spent the time with Null in my eyeline, guarding against whatever it was she might turn into.

Fenn gave me a kiss before she left, a quick, mostly chaste one, which I wasn’t entirely on board with. I didn’t want Fallatehr to know that she could be used as that sort of leverage over me, but apparently Fenn did want him to know, or maybe just thought that kissing me was worth leaking information. I resented Fallatehr a little bit, for making me want to hide our relationship.

“I’ll see you in Parsmont,” said Fenn. “Don’t do anything that I wouldn’t do.” She held out her gloved hand and dropped down a large, heavy pack of supplies, then stepped over to where Amaryllis was standing and left a few seconds later.

With that, I was alone with Fallatehr, Null, and Grak. “Grak, can you set up some wards to keep her in? I’d prefer not to rely on having to keep guard.”

“Velocity wards are the only thing that will work on her,” said Grak, as he stepped over to her and pulled out his wand. “Those are tricky to do. It will take time.”

I moved over to the supplies and began pulling a few things out, first a waterskin that I drank deeply from, then a pair of folded wooden chairs, one of which I set up for Fallatehr. After a brief grimace, I pulled some rations out from the pack of supplies and began to eat pemmican, which was a poor meal even when I was feeling hungry — despite all the physical exertion of the day, it was still a matter of forcing the food down in small bites and trying to avoid the nausea.

“Do you wish to begin your training now?” asked Fallatehr, his eyes watching me closely in the moonlight.

“Yes.” I nodded. “I’ll understand if you don’t have a lesson plan or anything like that, but whatever you think might give me a toehold.”

“And that might be enough for you?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “The nature of my prodigy is complicated, but it’s easy for me to get the very basics of something down, if I have a place to grip the topic and time to think about it on my own. Even if I can do that for soul magic though, I would expect that I would need your tutelage in order to progress beyond those very basics.”

“Fascinating,” said Fallatehr. “I watched you fight with great interest. There are a few things that might explain you, but the simplest explanation is that you’re telling the truth. Skill with bone magic, blood magic, and extensive training with the sword, all at such a young age. How old were you again?”

“Eighteen,” I replied. I put the rest of the pemmican to the side. It felt like I had been eating for a long time, but I’d barely made a dent. A glance over at Grak showed him still working on the ward. “So what can you tell me about the soul? What is the soul?”

Fallatehr gave a pleasant, musical laugh that startled me with its suddenness. The musicality of it didn’t seem like it suited him, save for the fact that he was an elf. “We’re really starting so close to the bottom?”

“I don’t want to bring my own assumptions into this,” I said. And let’s just not mention that a lot of my assumptions come from a place called Earth.

Fallatehr tapped his finger to his lips. “There is a book about a candle, written in 97 FE, which describes it in exacting detail. Each imperfection of the candle is noted, every possible measurement of it is taken, and the composition of the candle is detailed down to the diet of the hog whose fat was rendered to make it. It runs for four hundred pages.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So the soul is like … a list of things about a person?”

“Some of the information listed about the candle was procedural,” said Fallatehr. “There are details of how it was created, what processes were used to render the fat, information on the construction of the molds, and all that sort of thing. The soul has nothing like it. There is nothing written upon the soul that will tell you how a person came to be as they are, no history, only marks that you might use to work backwards and infer.”

I frowned. “Okay,” I said. “It’s a list — a list, or unordered?”

“Unordered,” said Fallatehr, watching me.

“It’s an unordered collection of attributes that define a person,” I said. “And if that’s true, then all soul magic is really doing is rewriting those attributes.”

Fallatehr nodded. “There, as simple as that.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all the soul is? It’s … a collection of attributes?” I could see the programming metaphor right away, and it wasn’t like the game hadn’t had in-universe explanations that mirrored game mechanics, but … was the soul just another character sheet? I could already access my character sheet. I could already see the list of attributes that defined me, so far as the game was concerned. It wasn't anything new, and nothing that would help me to fix my bones.

“And if I told you that list went on for hundreds, if not thousands of pages?” asked Fallatehr. “If I told you that every form of magic interacts with those attributes in some way or another?” He didn’t seem mad that I was disrespecting his life’s work or the field of soul magic, only curious. I was pretty sure that his curiosity was the only reason we were sitting across from each other. He'd given up a fair amount for this, given that he didn't seem to care too much about leaving the prison. He'd thrown away a dozen lives and decades of work just to watch me. I still didn't have a good handle on who he was.

“It’s just,” I started, then stopped, frowning. “I was thinking that it would be more mystical.”

“It’s not,” said Fallatehr. “I am a scientist, not a mystic. I could dress it up, but that would be to your detriment as my pupil.”

“Okay,” I said. “So how do I access my soul?”

“It would be so easy to show you, with just a touch,” said Fallatehr with a sigh.

“No,” I replied, keeping my voice firm. He’d just given me a good reminder that he was dangerous. “Tell me how I would see or feel the soul, how I would be able to make some change, without your own intervention.”

“Imagine there exists a book, written about you,” said Fallatehr. “Not a narrative, but a catalog of that which is essential to you.”

“I mean, okay,” I said with a shrug. I tried to picture that book, starting with the easy stuff, the physical measurements, the tensile strength of my hair, the volume of blood in my body, the length of my bones — I looked down at my deformed hand. “It doesn’t necessarily match the body,” I said.

“No.” Fallatehr nodded. “The soul has its own attributes which do not always align with what the body presents.”

“Residual self-image,” I said.

“Residual?” asked Fallatehr as he looked too intently at my face.

“Nevermind,” I said. Like in The Matrix, it’s a movie from Earth you probably haven’t seen, unless that was one that Arthur cribbed from. I kept compiling the Book of Juniper, trying to figure out a way that I could get everything into it without mentioning the past or how I was made. Not Arthur or Tiff, but the impact that they had on me, not attributes that mentioned them, but attributes that would allow you to know that they existed, if you were incredibly intelligent and could work backwards from incomplete information. “I don’t get how it’s possible,” I said. “Is memory not part of the soul?”

“It is,” said Fallatehr. “Though it’s nearly inaccessible to attempts at manipulation.”

“Then how did you change your slaves?” I asked, dropping the book metaphor from my mind for a moment. I glanced over at Grak, who had finished his ward and was eating pemmican in front of Null, his axe on his lap in front of him.

“I didn’t alter their memories,” said Fallatehr. “I altered their values to match my own, along with as many of the pathways as I could.”

“Pathways don’t sound like attributes,” I said.

“They are,” said Fallatehr. “You’ll see, when you’re further along, when you understand the feel of a soul.”

“So they’re incomplete copies,” I said. “They’re just … people with different memories from your own, who happen to share some ways of thinking.”

Fallatehr shrugged. “I never claimed that they were clones,” he said.

“And you said that they would face oblivion without you,” I said.

Fallatehr smiled, showing me his sharp teeth, in a way that I found distinctly threatening. “You’re trying to advance past your studies,” he said. “These attributes are mutable, but will revert to a coherent state, given time.”

I almost objected that that didn’t seem like oblivion to me, but then I thought about it for a bit. If I was told that I would gradually become a person who valued things that I didn’t value, who thought in ways that I didn’t think, who shared, at most, only the same memories, I might feel like that was oblivion. Actually, given that Fallatehr had altered their values, he could just make them fear the change. And then, faced with either that loss of self or becoming a monster, he had known that they would submit to becoming the pelehr.

I returned to the construction of my metaphorical book, the one that would define me down to the very last detail, so that you could clone me, if you were a better soul mage than even Fallatehr and really wanted to. Ignore memory for a moment, ignore pathways of thought (however that messy concept was pinned down), just think about everything concrete, like muscle memory, which you could do on the physical level, or values themselves, weighed and measured in dizzying arrays that wouldn’t necessarily even be coherent because people had biases, which I guessed you would have to build in too —

And that was when I felt it within my mind, like a corner of carpet had just been lifted up and I’d been made aware that the room wasn’t just carpet, there was something underneath it. So I tugged at it, this sensation that there was more to me, and my field of vision went white, with letters and numbers resolving a few seconds later.

I was looking at my True Character Sheet.

Skill unlocked: Essentialism!

Chapter 22 - In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet, Again

The interface was different, for a start. It wasn’t controlled by my (nominal) eyes like the other one was, it was all done by thought alone, and I spent a few moments just spinning and panning to get a feel for it. My soul … was another character sheet, a deeper, more complex one, vast beyond what I was going to be able to see even if I had all day, but it was still recognizable as being structured data, and that’s really all a character sheet was.

To my left the skeleton of my body was displayed, with the bones of my ribs and left hand outlined in red and otherwise absent from the picture. I could change that display with a thought, putting organs in my belly and veins running through my limbs, layering on muscle, adding skin, until I was staring at myself. I barely recognized him; he was too muscular, too fit, with too determined of a look in his eyes. I always thought that I looked bored, when my face was resting.

Above that representation of the body was a massive network of points and lines, and I zoomed in closer to look at it before nearly getting lost in the thicket. Focusing on a point brought me into a moment, consuming all my senses; I was standing in my backyard, by the bushes, trying to eat honeysuckle like my dad had taught me, and in that moment I could smell the sweet, flowery scent and feel the light wind. When the moment was over I wasn’t quite pulled out, because there were other memories awaiting me, ones connected to this one in some way, but I was certain if I went down memory lane, I was going to be stuck looking at these things all day.

I pulled back out of the memory, then out of the thicket of memories, until I was back staring at the character sheet holistically. It was a complex nightmare of text and numbers … and beyond what I could see, there was more, because I could see faint lines leading off somewhere else, two of them. I followed one on a whim, trying to repeat to myself that I shouldn’t touch anything, that this was my soul, that any change had to be reverted immediately until I was certain that I wasn’t going to fuck things up by making changes.

The first thing I saw when I arrived at the other end of the line was Amaryllis, naked, and above her a floating mass of points and lines, and to the side, text and numbers. This, then, was her character sheet. Twinned Souls had linked us on more than just a figurative and mechanical level; it had opened up her soul to me. The other line would be the one belonging to Fenn. I backed out of her character sheet almost immediately, not stopping to look at anything there, not wanting to accidentally hurt her, or change her from the way she was.

I was slightly relieved when I went poking around in my character sheet, because so many things seemed like they were locked off to me, beyond my power to fuck things up. Unlike on my regular character sheet, here the things I couldn’t interact with were still readable, the grey of the text still dark and bold enough that I could parse it, with a fair number of other things in a dark, foreboding red, the only color in a sea of monochrome aside from a light blue seen on some of the text. What I was looking for were skills —

At the thought, my view panned and they arranged themselves in front of me, not just the ones that I had unlocked, not just the forty that were on my other character sheet, but more than that character sheet could even hold. I quickly counted the edges of the ordered grid and frowned. There were, if I was reading it right, two hundred and fifty-six skills, a little over half of them marked in red.

Some of them were presented in the same dark red I’d seen in a few other places in my exploration of the interface, and the one labeled “Ice Magic” caught my eye. I expanded it to read it closer. Instead of a number, it had a diagonal slash, and the text box beside it read “Deprecated, Exclusion #16”. I frowned at that for a moment — I would need to cross-reference with The Exclusionary Principle, Seventh Edition, but I was pretty sure that ice magic was considered a lost art, not actually excluded. Just beneath that, there were listings for a primary and secondary attributes, Cunning and Endurance, respectively, with familiar numbers in place, and what looked like a small, greyed-out button labeled “Gestalt”.

I backed out of that view and quickly went to look at others and confirmed what I’d been hoping was true; the primary and secondary attributes were exposed here, and though there was no indication of what the actual math was, that was already an incredible boon from Soul Magic (or Essentialism, as the game called it), even without being able to interact with any of it. I was still being careful not to touch anything, only to look at what I could see, but I was already starting to feel the possibilities available to me.

There were 256 skills in total, and I had only 40 of them, with just 25 of them unlocked — 26 now, with Essentialism added to that list. Once I saw the pattern, it was fairly easy to distinguish between them; blue was the color given for the skills that I had, with a slash to mark the ones that I hadn’t unlocked yet. I looked over the remaining fourteen skills that were blue with a slash, which I presumed were the ones on my old character sheet that I hadn’t unlocked yet.

I had Shotguns, which I had never tested and would be easy enough to pick up. Four of them were arts-and-crafts skills: Alchemy, Livestock, Smithing, and Woodworking. Five were magics that I had expected I would have access to: Gold Magic, Revision Magic, Steel Magic, Velocity Magic, and Wards. Water Magic was there too, which I hadn’t expected, because it was supposed to be a bloodline magic. Library Magic I had never even heard of, and I was pretty sure that I knew all of the types of magic that Amaryllis knew, which should have been all of them. I had no clue what Spirit did.

There was a Language skill, with KNO as primary and CHA as secondary, but there was no indication what was needed to unlock it. It was while I was looking at that one that I felt a thread that could be pulled, and when I did, I dove in deeper to the skill, until I was within a cloud of words. There was data attached to each of them, numbers and sliders, with labels like “Frequency” or “Tonation” or “PoS”, all of it presumably representing how often and in which ways I used the word “venerate” or “cucumber”. They were linked to each other, in ways that I would have to untangle later, if any of this turned out to be important.

A quick look at the other skills showed something similar, now that I knew where to press, but instead of simply words, and static rules governing those words, there were pieces of procedural and declarative knowledge, displayed in either text or color-coded displays of simple, prototypical actions. Skills existed as constructs in the soul then, but they were at least in part composed of other discrete pieces.

But my attention wasn’t really on the things that my character sheet contained, or even the nature of skills, it was on all the other skills, the ones that weren’t on my original character sheet, for whatever reason. Most of the ones in red were magic of some kind or another; Glass Magic, “Deprecated, Exclusion #112”, Groove Casting, “Deprecated, Exclusion #217, Constriction Magic, “Deprecated, Exclusion #18”, on and on. Some were ambiguous as to whether they were magic or not, like Ex Nihilo, “Deprecated, Exclusion #216”, and I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to know what, exactly, a skill with that name was supposed to do.

I could see straight away that there were more exclusions than there were exclusion zones as reckoned by Amaryllis, though her definition was taken from the political terminology of the Empire of Common Cause, and there were a lot of skills that had been taken out of the running, not that I had (as yet) tried to turn them blue.

The other, mundane, greyed skills were less interesting to me, except in regards to what they said about the game. There were, as it turned out, a handful of armor skills: Light Armor, Medium Armor, Heavy Armor, Unarmored, and Shields. That didn’t make too much sense to me though, because it was clear that armor still did something for me, and I had gone through a period of acclimating myself to the armor, which meant that I should still have something beyond just no skill in it. If I were writing a book of attributes about myself, that would have to be in there, right? You couldn’t just leave a zero there, if you were trying to fully describe me.

There were other skills that I had already known I didn’t have, and which weren’t assigned, more of what I considered arts-and-crafts, the sort of thing that you took more for roleplaying purposes (and/or to piss off Reimer because they were suboptimal), things like Weaving, Foraging, Tailoring, and so on, maybe a few dozen of those. There were transportation skills, like Sailing, Piloting, and Riding, along with utility/profession skills like Appraisal, Management, Leadership, Logistics, and Mathematics, some of which did catch my eye, and a few social skills that I was missing too.

This all left me with the question of why I had those forty specific skills on my character sheet. I had long had a feeling like someone else had set the game up for me, starting back when I had first looked in the options and seen that Diamond Hardcore Ironman Mode was checked. I might have accepted it if those skills represented things that I’d known or done on the real world, but they didn’t — as evidenced by Piloting not being one of my skills, despite the fact that I could semi-competently fly a helicopter, and all the magic I had access to.

That meant my best guess was that the Dungeon Master had set everything up, and I had no idea why he’d decided on those particular skills. Was I meant to use revision magic at some point in the future, and that was why it was listed? On seeing the other options available to me, I desperately wanted to change my skills, but if there was a path in front of me … well, then surely Essentialism was on that path, and I didn’t need to worry too much. But then why would the Dungeon Master give me specific skills that he knew I was going to drop, assuming that he did know?

I was about to move away from the skills, because there was more of my soul to explore (quite a bit more), but I stopped for a moment and looked in at Deception. As soon as it filled my view, I got an error message in red:

Error: Illegal Construction, Gestalting Deprecated, Exclusion #4

The skill informed me that it was actually a gestalt between Lying and Stealth, with two primary abilities and two secondary abilities, but gave no real information about what that meant. In the parlance of D&D, “gestalt” meant merging two things, usually classes, such that they were more than the sum of their parts, but I wasn’t sure that fully applied here. The problem with gestalting was that it usually increased the power level, and there was rarely a reason not to do it, if it was allowed. And apparently, it wasn’t allowed, except that I had been running around with it like that for my entire time on Aerb, and I wasn’t about to go changing it now if I didn’t have to.

The last skill I looked closely at was the one labeled “Custom”, which was in red. Like Spirit, there were no associated skills for it, but there were buttons where the text would normally go. It looked very much like this was a “roll your own” type of skill, the kind that you included in case someone wanted something truly outside the box. That apparently wasn’t an option for me, because it was “Deprecated, Exclusion #17”.

I backed away from the skills and continued looking at my soul, not so much as an earnest exploration to gain information as it was to get a lay of the land. I would need to come in later and look at everything in detail. Fallatehr had said that values were part of the soul, which meant that there was some way to view them, and maybe change them. I had to think that there would be something like a social network as well, some conceptualization of the internal models I had of various people, as well as physical models of various things, which would be how my brain knew that when a ball went up, it was going to come back down again.

Mostly, I kept thinking that this wasn’t how people were built.

People were really freaking complex. They weren’t a list of attributes, or neat piles of declarative and procedural memories, they were messy, complicated things that didn’t always make sense, there were contextual shifts and a plethora of messy models and hidden assumptions, it wasn’t just numbers. And as far as I could see, the soul as presented to me was missing half of the picture, which was the matter of how all these little bits and bobs actually did anything. So far as I had seen, the “soul” didn’t have all that much in the way of process or algorithms or any kind of decision-making in it, only weights that could be applied to some decision tree or neural network or whatever else it was that took this static information and let it actually do anything.

It took me some time to find the place where values were stored, which was shown as circles of varying sizes, all clustered together and packed tight. I looked over it in dismay, and not just because circles were horrible for data visualization. The biggest, by quite a large margin, was simply labeled “Level Up”. It wasn’t bigger than the next two, “Tiff” and “Fenn” combined, at least so far as I could tell, but the human eye was kind of garbage at distinguishing between surface area of circles, and it was ambiguous whether the data visualization was meant to be read as surface area or diameter.

With a push of thought, it all rearranged itself for me, abandoning the circles to show me a simple ordered list, with the highest at the top and lowest at the bottom. That was something that I was going to have to get used to, that the information as presented to me was mutable and could be rearranged as I pleased in order to see what I wanted to see, without any apparent cost. The list seemed to go on forever, but I’d seen from a quick glance at the circles that some kind of power law was in effect. I didn’t particularly like looking at the list though, since it had too many hard truths to it. Arthur was sixth, and what did that say about me as a person? What did it say about me that Tiff still loomed so large? And I could see that both Earth and Aerb were on there, enormous conceptual entities, but still below the people that mattered most to me.

I looked closer at the one labeled Aerb, because it seemed neutral enough, and got more information on it, variables like “Weight”, “Scope”, “Marginal Utility”, and “Time Sensitivity”. I backed out without reading more, then shifted my view away from the values so I wouldn’t have to look at Arthur in the number six spot.

I kept thinking that this was not how humans were. Let’s say that you actually could take someone through a trillion different tests, pairwise comparisons like “Would you rather eat a hamburger from Culver’s or spend twenty minutes playing Tetris, a year from now?”, and then you crunched that enormous amount of information, the result that you got back wouldn’t even be that sensible, because people weren’t sensible, concepts were shifting and mercurial, I could think differently about a given person based on the last word out of their mouth, or the setting I was in, or any number of things. That was, to my understanding at least, how the human brain worked.

The soul, as it was presented to me, made sense as the sort of thing you could maybe pull from a brain, if you had some hypertech and were willing to cut some corners in terms of how you were mapping out what the brain actually was. You couldn’t capture everything, not really, but you might be able to put a number on time sensitivity of value, maybe, and then make a chart that would be a little bit useful. The soul made sense as a report, or a visualization. That wasn’t what the soul purported to be though; it was meant to work as the mind, not just a report on it, and changing the soul meant changing the mind. Was there some hidden conversion process in there? Was this just a game interface covering something vastly more complex, for all the data that was exposed to me? Or was I really reducible down to just this stuff and whatever sort of thing was involved in actually running it?

I felt a hand touch my knee.

I was only dimly aware of my body, and blind on top of that, but I could feel the pressure there, and I flailed my body, which was still thankfully under my control, while trying to back out of the interface — trying.

Error: Illegal Construction, Gestalting Deprecated

I started to panic, just a little bit. I could feel my body, I could move my body, but my eyes were stuck staring at my soul, and it felt like my mind had been made to focus on the substance of the soul. Even as I was aware that I was in danger, right across from Fallatehr, I could feel that thought slipping away from me and the contemplative mood I’d been in returning. I tried my best to shrug it off — I was standing now, I was pretty sure, and nothing was touching me aside from my feet on the ground, though the sensation was so far away it was hard to tell for sure.

I raced over to the skills and zeroed in on Deception, which I knew had to be the problem, and dove into the menu for it, where a button labeled “Divide” was available, in place of the “Gestalt” that was on the other skills. I gave it a mental push, which presented me with warnings.

Warning: Dividing skills will reset both to 0.

Warning: Skill changes can be done once per (100 levels / skill in Essentialism).

But I did it anyway, because I was blind and barely aware of my body, and the more time I spent looking at the menus the more I felt myself start to lose sight of that fact, like it was somehow unimportant that I was disabled in front of someone who really shouldn’t have touched me. So despite the warnings, I plunged on ahead.

Error: Illegal Construction, selected number of skills exceeds 40.

I went in and unselected Woodworking, which I didn’t think that I would ever use, and was about to make another attempt at leaving the soul before I stopped myself, only momentarily.

(My concern was with the warning that skill changes could only happen once every 100 levels divided by the skill ranks in Essentialism, which a quick check showed as currently sitting at 5. Depending on whether previous levels counted or not, that meant that I’d be able to change skills again at either level 20 or level 30. Obviously I would be able to level Essentialism up from where it was now, but there were rather severe diminishing returns on that math, especially assuming that rounding wasn’t done in my favor.

(A quick check of Essentialism showed that it had KNO/WIS as its primary and secondary skills, which I considered good news, given that it meant I could continue on with my dubious strategy of leaving SOC behind, if I so chose.

Either way, there was a hard cap on when I’d be able to change skills again, even with reasonably optimistic assumptions, and if changing my skills to fix the gestalt error counted as changing skills, then the next time I would be able to change skills would be in four levels or so, unless the game let me bank skill retraining from levels previously gained, in which case this was merely the squandering of an extremely limited resource, rather than a handicap that might last for as long as a few months.)

So I started in on cuts, first the things that I didn’t see the point of and hadn’t even unlocked, Alchemy, Smithing, Woodworking, Livestock, and then the ones that I didn’t have unlocked and thought were subpar, Gold Magic, Shotguns, Steel Magic, Wards, snip, snip, snip, freeing up space, and then Music and Art had to go, because they were flavor, not utility, and I watched the warning go by about them resetting to 0, not a big loss in either case. Finally, Pistols, which I hadn't been bothering to train up given that I'd almost always be using a rifle at range and melee weapons up close. Snip.

And that was ten slots freed up, and I could cut a few more, like Spirit, which had no obvious function, and Library Magic, which I had never heard of, but I was erring on the side of not locking myself out of things I didn’t yet know the function of.

(It was tempting to cut the social skills, to cut Comedy, Romance, and Flattery and make room for something else, but my social abilities were already poor, and if anything, I needed a few of the social skills that I was missing in order to shore up that deficit, assuming that I wasn’t always going to be able to rely on Amaryllis to carry me through difficult times, even if she was physically present.)

So I started adding skills back into the mix, Shields, Unarmored, Medium Armor, Heavy Armor, all to provide survivability, then varieties of magic I didn’t have, some of which were mysteries, Vibrational Magic, Still Magic, Tree Magic, Fire Magic, and then with two left I hesitated and hurriedly picked up Analysis and Debate, with little clue as to what they actually did aside from the fact that they were mental-affiliated.

If I’m being honest, which I do try to be, I’m not sure how long I spent on all that. Maybe I came under the tunnel vision effect of looking at these things again, because I’d had that moment of hesitation when I’d been ready to move away, when the gestalt had been removed.

Either way, I came out of it slowly, feeling my pulse first and my extremities second, and only gradually regaining my sight. I was standing with my sword drawn and held in front of me, looking at Grak, who had placed himself between Fallatehr and myself. His axe was drawn and held back, ready to strike; I couldn’t tell how long he had been in that pose. As soon as he looked back to see that I was alert, he crossed over to me, putting himself so that he was still standing slightly in front of me, guarding me. I glanced over and saw Null, sitting within the box of wards that Grak had made for her.

“What happened?” asked Grak, his voice tight.

“I was going to ask the same thing,” I said, looking to him, then at Fallatehr.

“I did not believe you would actually do it,” said Fallatehr. “You understated the depths of your prodigy. There is a seductiveness to looking at one’s own soul, a seduction that is — was, in the halcyon days of the Second Empire — trained against, in parallel with the other studies that allow a soul mage access to their soul.”

“Who touched me?” I asked.

“I did,” said Grak. “I tried to rouse you.”

I nodded at that.

Yes, I had gone under and gotten tunnel vision, then Grak had seen me sitting there like a moron and maybe asked some pointed questions to Fallatehr, who was probably an ass about the whole thing. Grak had touched me on the knee, wanting to bring me out of the stupor or at least ensure that I was alright, and I had reacted by flailing around like a madman, which had naturally raised his suspicions.

That was certainly one plausible series of events.

Unfortunately, it also was the series of events that cast Fallatehr in the best possible light.

“Does the nonanima have a name?” I asked Fallatehr.

“No,” he said, glancing over to her only briefly.

“Nonanima, would you like to have a name?” I asked her.

She stared at me, then nodded slowly.

“What are you thinking?” asked Grak.

“One second,” I told him. I cleared my throat and looked at Null. “What would you like your name to be?” I asked her.

Loyalty Increased: [Null Pointer Exception] lvl 4!

“I don’t know,” she said in a soft voice, almost too soft for me to hear her.

“Well until you choose, I’d like to be able to call you something, so I’m going to call you—” —Tiff — no, not that, dammit, why is coming up with names on the fly so difficult?—
“—Valencia, or Val for short, it means strength, where I come from. If you ever want me to call you anything else, you let me know, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“What are you doing?” asked Grak.

“She’s a neutral observer,” said Fallatehr. “She has no soul, and thus, she can be depended upon to accurately recount the events as they transpired without interference on my part. Not that I could have moved through the ward you set up to touch her.”

There was something I really didn’t like about having the adversary outline my plan for me, then explain how it was a good and clever plan. I could already see the hole, which was that Null — no, Valencia now, I had named her — that she wasn’t actually a reliable source of information, she’d spent most of her life in Fallatehr’s care, she was about as broken of a person as I had ever seen … and even if Fallatehr hadn’t thought ahead to make sure that their stories matched, Grak had already fed her the lines that she was supposed to agree with. In hindsight, I should have separated everyone and talked to all of them individually, but that level of paranoia hadn’t occurred to me as I was coming out of the fog and wondering what had happened. Worse, there didn’t seem to be any telling details that I could catch them on, especially given how notoriously bad eyewitness accounts were even moments after the event in question.

“You’re worried that I’m compromised,” said Grak,

“Yes,” I replied. I looked to Valencia, trying to make that new name stick in my brain. Null was too derogatory of a name, too close to calling someone Nothing, only Null was worse, because it was less than nothing. Valencia. I shouldn’t have been the one to name her, not like this. “Valencia, can you tell me what happened?”

She looked to Fallatehr. “It was like they said.”

Was this a matter of loyalty, or conditioning, or something else? Or was she simply telling the truth? It bothered me that I had no way of knowing, but her testimony was weak evidence in favor of the official line.

“I don’t know whether or not you’re compromised,” I said to Grak. “And I don’t know to what extent it’s possible for soul magic to compromise a person.”

I had an uncharacteristic yearning for Earth at that moment, as some leftover part of my internal programming had me reaching down into my pocket to pull out my cell phone and check the time as a nervous habit, or maybe a way to get grounding. I wasn’t even wearing proper pants, just greaves that were more white than the metallic blue they’d started the day as.

“You are right,” said Grak. “I should be quarantined from Fallatehr and everyone else.”

I looked at him, trying to judge what kind of response that was. It was true, and more weak evidence, but it was nothing that I could actually count on.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll just keep the four of us separated for now, until Amaryllis comes back to get us.”

“He said that a soul would revert to a coherent state over time,” said Grak. “All we should need to do is wait it out.”

“Yes, but the trouble is that he said it,” I replied. “This is the same man that didn’t tell me I could get stuck looking at my own soul.”

Fallatehr’s lips twitched. “I am not your enemy,” he said. “Our relationship as teacher and student cannot survive if you continue to think of me that way.”

I shrugged. “In the future, if there are risks like that, even ones you don’t think that we’ll run into, I need to hear about them before experiencing them firsthand with no forewarning.” I didn’t say it, but if it happened again, I wouldn’t think too hard about killing him. I picked my folding chair up from the ground and propped it up, then sat down in front of Fallatehr. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s continue the lesson.”

“Are you serious?” asked Grak.

“Yes,” I said. “We still have time left until Amaryllis comes back, and the more I know about the soul, the better.” Fallatehr knew that I had seen my soul, though I didn’t think that our views of the soul were the same, given how steeped my view of the soul was in game mechanical terms.

“I think I am done with lessons for the day,” said Fallatehr, looking me over. “I will need to think on what other pitfalls might await you, in your accelerated journey to become a magus of the soul.”

“My hand,” I said, holding it up. “That’s the thing that we need to fix.” I still hadn’t told him about my ribs, but that was something I was going to keep under my hat for the time being.

“You saw the soul,” said Fallatehr. “I wouldn’t imagine that most of it made sense to you, but there is a portion of it devoted to the bodily self.”

“Yes,” I said. “And how do I fix this, exactly? How do I translate the existence of the soul’s image of the body into actually fixing the damage that was done?”

“You want me for more than this?” asked Fallatehr. “You have uses for me as a teacher, beyond this simple repair?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping that I was a bad enough liar that he would believe me when I told the truth.

He watched me for a moment with narrowed eyes. “You will need training in how it’s done, but you have two hands,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him, palms pointed to the night sky. “The bones of the right provide a blueprint that can be mirrored.”

I looked down at my left hand and the way the skin didn’t quite fit around bones that weren’t quite the right length. I frowned at it. “My hands aren’t symmetrical,” I said. “I mean, even before this, they weren’t.”

“They will be,” said Fallatehr.

I was about to object that the veins and arteries wouldn’t line up properly, that there would be nerve damage … but the soul already contained all the information about those parts, it was the bones that were missing as what I thought of as a local copy of that information. I wasn’t even sure at what level the soul actually stored that information, because it seemed like at least some of it could be assumed from basic knowledge about the human body, and if you were building efficient data structures, you would be better off with just having a diff between some ur-body and the individual body in question.

“And if I didn’t have a right hand?” I asked.

Fallatehr pursed his lips. “It takes quite some time for the soul to recognize substantial damage to the body,” he said. “It can be years before scars become marked on the soul itself, and sometimes the soul will persist in its counterfactual conception of the body forever.”

“Hypothetically,” I said. I was giving something away to him, providing him with leverage, but I was thinking about my ribs, the anemia, the loss of appetite, and the fact that I had used the rib bones on both sides, meaning that there was nothing to easily copy and paste with a little bit of mirroring on the z-axis.

“Hypothetically, you would have to take from the soul of another,” said Fallatehr. He watched my expression, and the grimace that I didn’t try to hide. “‘Take’ is an approximate term,” he said. “The term ‘copy’ might be better. But for that, you would need access to the soul of another, either one whose body is compatible with your own, or with the delicate power necessary to alter those conceptual bones prior to insertion. The process would be much more difficult and prone to failure, especially without my guidance.”

Amaryllis appeared some distance away from us, more than a hundred feet away, with a soft pop and a brief bit of light that was startlingly bright in the middle of the night. She was in full armor, helm up, and with her sword out and ready as soon as the teleportation key was safely stowed. She looked toward us, hesitant. “Status?” she called.

“Grak should be assumed compromised,” I called back to her.

“Fuck,” I heard her mutter under her breath as she walked toward us. She stopped some twenty feet away, sword still in hand. “You know that means that you’re assumed compromised too,” she said.

“That’s — yes,” I said. “In theory, we should assume that everyone is compromised.”

“Such distrust,” said Fallatehr, making no attempt to hide his amusement.

“I know a little bit of soul magic now,” I said.

“Enough to fix you?” asked Amaryllis.

“No,” I said. “Working on my own, it’s a possibility, but I’m not there yet, and even the process of looking at my soul makes me far more vulnerable than expected.”

“Ah,” said Amaryllis. Her helm hid her eyes, but I could guess that she was looking between us, thinking. “The nonanima is an unreliable eyewitness,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“What about the Eternal Golden Braid?” she asked.

I froze at that, because the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. I reached into my pack and took Ropey out. I was almost certain that he didn’t have a soul, which meant that he would have made a really good lookout. Overlooking him was almost inexcusable, but I was fairly sure that Amaryllis hadn’t thought of him either, because otherwise we could have used him as insurance against malfeasance in the first place. “He was in my pack from the time we scaled down the wall.”

“Suspiciously inconvenient,” said Amaryllis. Her sword was still in hand.

“Poor planning,” I said. “On both our parts.”

Amaryllis sighed. “We have time, two hours until the key is ready again. We’ll stay quarantined from each other until then.”

“We had already decided that,” said Grak.

“Soul magic is not so powerful as you believe,” said Fallatehr. “If it were, the Second Empire would not have crumbled as it did.”

“We don’t know what your further research might have produced,” said Amaryllis. “I’m sure that you understand our perspective on the matter.”

“Yes.” Fallatehr nodded. “It is somewhat amusing, to know that nothing was done and see all this effort going to waste.”

“I’d like us to talk to Valencia,” I said, nodding at the nonanima. “I picked a more respectful name for her.”

Amaryllis frowned. “She is unreliable.”

“Yes,” I said. “But”—I struggled with how to phrase it, conscious of Fallatehr listening in—“I doubt that she’s a perfect liar, and I was hoping that I might be able to gain her loyalty.”

Amaryllis nodded, the metal of her helm clinking once against her breastplate. “Not a perfect solution,” she said. “But one worth pursuing.”

Chapter 23 - A Kindred Soul

We separated Grak from Fallatehr, putting both of them one hundred feet away in opposite directions. Fallatehr was downright cheery about it, either because he was legitimately amused by the paranoia we were displaying, or because he knew that what we were doing didn’t make a bit of difference, or possibly as a bluff.

“I agree with sequestration,” said Grak. “If I have been altered, we don’t know how long it would take to wear off, if it will at all. We should think of a long-term solution. My wards are untrustworthy to you now.”

“You’re being very good about this,” I said to Grak.

“It’s the standard we need to have,” said Grak with a sniff from his wide nostrils. “It needs to work without trust.”

“Or rather, trust, but verify,” I said with a nod.

Grak frowned at that formulation of it, since apparently that wasn’t an expression here, but nodded.

“Tell me what happened,” said Amaryllis, as soon as he was far enough away that he couldn’t hear us. All the principal players were some distance apart from each other now, aside from Amaryllis and I, who stood beside each other. She took off her helmet while waiting for my response, and I could see the fatigue on her face.

“Fallatehr gave me a good enough description of soul magic that I was able to access my soul,” I said. “There’s apparently a compulsive effect associated with it — like a siren song, if that’s an expression here.”

“We have sirens on Aerb, yes,” said Amaryllis.

“Fallatehr didn’t tell me about the effect ahead of time, so I got sort of … in the zone, I guess, wrapped up in exploration. I guess I would call it a zen state.” Amaryllis shook her head marginally. “Oh, um, it’s … that feeling when you’re going with the flow unselfconsciously. Anyway, that went on for an indeterminate amount of time, until I felt someone touch my knee. I was still in a condition where I could react, but I was blind, and it took some work to leave my view of the soul, again, an indeterminate amount of time, but I think probably less.”

“Shit,” said Amaryllis. She looked over at Grak. “So it’s either him alone, or both of you.”

“Both?” I asked, furrowing my brow. “Ah, because you think that if we were both in his thrall, his strategy might be to have suspicion cast on Grak in order to make me appear clear. Seems a bit complex, when he could just have directed both of us to act natural.” I supposed that good cop/bad cop had its charms, but it seemed like an over-complicated scheme to me.

“Agreed,” said Amaryllis with a weary sigh. “I should have asked Fenn for stimulants before I left. Let’s go talk to the nonanima.”

“Everything went well on your end?” I asked. “Fenn is alright?”

“We have a place to stay in Parsmont,” said Amaryllis. “Purchased at unreasonable expense, but with all the amenities we need to bunker down, and without much in the way of neighbors. I was counting on wards from Grak, but those aren’t reliable anymore. We’ll have to make do.”

We reached Valencia, who looked between the two of us with wide eyes. I lit my hand on fire with blood magic in order to give us a bit of light.

“It hasn’t been read in?” asked Amaryllis, looking at me.

“She, not it. And no,” I replied. “We haven’t had any time alone.”

“She could be possessed, even now,” said Amaryllis. She seemed heedless of the fact that Valencia was standing in front of us, watching us, listening to what we said.

“I’m not possessed right now,” said Valencia.

“The only information that statement conveys is that you’re not a demon,” said Amaryllis. “Congratulations on that.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” I said. I regretted that after it came out of my mouth, because Amaryllis and I didn’t have the sort of relationship where she would take that as chiding. Maybe I was more tired than I’d thought I was.

“Sorry,” said Amaryllis, rubbing her face. “I’m tired, this is …” She gestured at Valencia. “It’s a bad idea.”

“She has an affliction,” I said. “I’m not going to devalue her over something that’s completely beyond her control.”

Loyalty Increased: [Null Pointer Exception] lvl 6!

Her loyalty was climbing fast. I was hoping that giving her a name would have given her a name on the game layer, but no such luck. I was also a little bit worried about what was going to happen when she hit 10 Loyalty. Amaryllis and Fenn had Twinned Souls with me, and Valencia didn’t have a soul to twin to. I didn’t think that it was possible to crash the game, but I was still a little leery.

(I didn’t actually think that the null pointer exception was ‘real’, given that the simulation displayed startling sophistication in almost all other regards, and I would have thought that to get something like this running, writing pristine code would be a must … but on second thought, there was nothing to say that the various layers of the game hadn’t been cobbled together by different agents working on different goals, and it was entirely possible that I was living in the equivalent of a triple-A game that someone had downloaded a lot of half-baked mods for.)

“Besides,” I continued, “it should be easy enough to tell whether she’s possessed, all we need to do is pre-arrange some codewords.”

“Possession implies access to memories,” said Amaryllis.

“Um,” I said. “Shit. For just a nonanima, or for anyone?”

“From what I know, it’s very difficult for a devil that’s taken possession to comb through the memories of the possessed, especially if they have to do it while maintaining a conversation,” said Amaryllis. “For a nonanima, it’s as though those memories were their own.”

“Shit,” I said again, looking at Valencia. “Meaning that we can’t use codewords, because they’d be instantly compromised.” I met Valencia’s eyes. “Do you have any ideas for how we could get around that?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I replied. “We can work around it. Can I ask, are you aware of what happens when you’re possessed?”

“Yes.” Valencia nodded. “I wish so much that I weren’t.” I opened my mouth to speak, but she rushed on. “It’s like I’m a glove that someone is sticking their hand into.”

“I’m going to figure out a way to stop that from happening,” I said.

Loyalty Increased: [Null Pointer Exception] lvl 7!

“On to the interrogation,” said Amaryllis with a short yawn. “Joon, you realize that if she’s possessed by a devil, that devil will give us the exact wrong answers?”

“Yes,” I said. “And if it can read memories like they were its own, then that’s a serious problem. I was thinking that we could just re-ask over and over, but that doesn’t actually work, because a second devil could build off the story the first one told, and a contradiction doesn’t actually mean that much, because devils could contradict each other just to reduce trust.”

“You’re not treating her like enough of a problem,” said Amaryllis. “You’re being academic about it. Demons and devils exist almost purely to cause pain and suffering.”

“Almost?” I asked.

“They’re as imperfect as people are,” said Amaryllis with a shrug. She turned toward Valencia. “Isn’t that right?”

Valencia nodded slowly.

“So tell me what happened while I was gone,” said Amaryllis.

“The dwarf, Grakhuil, put up a ward around me,” said Valencia. “He sat in front of me, watching me while he ate. He didn’t offer me any food. He was listening to Fallatehr and Juniper. When they stopped talking, he went over to see why. Fallatehr kept saying that Juniper had fallen to the soul trance and would need to be pulled out of it sooner than later. Grakhuil kept asking questions that didn’t go anywhere. He went over to try to bring Juniper out of it, and Juniper got violent at the touch. Grakhuil and Fallatehr both talked a lot after that but they didn’t really say anything. It was all about the soul trance. Then Juniper came out of it on his own. Fallatehr didn’t touch either of them.”

Amaryllis rubbed her eyes for a moment and took a breath, then looked at me. “Well, that’s not helpful. On a scale from one to a supposed maximum of twenty, how much should we trust her?”

“Seven,” I said. “Conditional on her not being possessed at the moment.” Loyalty was a less valuable metric than normal here, given the circumstances.

“That high?” asked Amaryllis.

“Yes.” I nodded, then turned to Valencia. “But … no offense, Valencia, but you’ve been with Fallatehr your entire life?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was born in the prison.” She looked around her, then toward the walls of the penitentiary. “This is my first time seeing the rest of the world.”

That one hit me hard, because we were still on the same small, flat, mostly featureless island. We hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards from the walls of the penitentiary, and that was further than she’d ever been in her life. Unfortunately, I was pretty sure that the next bit of her life wasn’t going to be me showing her around Aerb and having a good time. We couldn’t even safely remove the manacles from her, not without wards, and we couldn’t trust the wards anymore.

“Either she’s lying to us, possessed by a devil that’s lying to us, or we’re legitimately in the clear,” said Amaryllis.

“So, two in three chance,” I said. Amaryllis frowned at me. “That was a joke.”

“Yes, I’m well aware,” said Amaryllis.

“The question is what we do,” I replied.

“That’s not something that we’re going to discuss in front of her,” said Amaryllis. She started walking away without asking my opinion on the matter, and I shot an apologetic look at Valencia.

Loyalty Increased: [Null Pointer Exception] lvl 8!

Her Loyalty was going up frighteningly fast.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis, when we were out of earshot. “Our biggest problem at the moment is that Grak has to be assumed compromised, which means that we’re going to have to sleep in shifts, because we can’t just put up wards to protect us from Fallatehr and his people.”

“And they aren’t going to need to sleep in shifts, so they’ll get an edge on us that way,” I said. “Minor, maybe, given that we have no pressing issues beyond my education.”

“We’re all run down,” said Amaryllis. “You less than me, it seems. It’s three on five, and we can’t leave Grak with them, which is a complication that we might not be able to afford.” She looked over at Fallatehr, who was sitting in the lotus position far away with his eyes closed. “Smug fuck. Fenn is of the opinion that we should kill him as soon as you have the skill unlocked, and I’m inclined to agree.”

“But I already have it unlocked,” I said.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis, not taking her eyes from Fallatehr.

“More importantly, I’m not sure how easily I’m going to be able to raise the skill above the soft-cap of 20 without someone to teach me,” I said.

Amaryllis turned her tired eyes toward me. “You understand how that sounds to me?”

“Oh,” I said. “Ah, yes, it sounds like I’m offering up a defense of him because he got to me.”

Amaryllis nodded.

I rubbed my face. I was starting to flag too, though I thought I still had reserves left. “I do think that I might be able to heal myself without any further aid from him, because Essentialism — that’s the skill name — went up just from poking around and changing a few things —”

“You what,” said Amaryllis.

“I had to,” I said. “I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Essentialism is a second game interface, or maybe third depending on how it’s counted, and there were game messages that prevented me from leaving until I fixed something that had apparently been there since the start. While I was doing that, I made a few very minor changes, because the interface told me that I wasn’t going to be able to alter them again for another few levels, at the very least. The skills are what I had to fix, and they’re all that I changed. I’m not limited to the grid of forty, it’s two hundred and fifty-six.”

Well, it was actually 257, since I had split Deception and Stealth from each other. My guess was that it was two to the eighth, plus Custom for any number of skills I might have wanted to create on my own. But Custom was excluded, as were a whole host of others, so that was somewhat moot. I was going to have to compile all the new information and figure out how it lined up with recorded history. It was already my guess that the exclusions were in numbered order of when they’d been applied and would match up with what was laid out in The Exclusionary Principle, but I would need to check — and there were a whole lot more skills listed as excluded than there were exclusion zones.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis, shifting uncomfortably and breathing out with clenched teeth before becoming calm again. “Can I ask you nicely not to touch your own soul again, not under the guidance of Fallatehr, and not until we’ve had a chance to talk it over?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t feel like I really had an option, and the game itself informed me that it could be undone later, if we really need it to.” I was more worried that the specific skills I’d started the game with were going to be vital somehow and I’d run into their hidden purpose before getting another chance to rearrange my skills.

“Any other surprises I’d find unpleasant?” asked Amaryllis.

“Our souls are linked, probably by the Twinned Souls thing that powered you up at Loyalty 10, given that it’s only a connection to you and Fenn, not Grak and the locus — or Valencia,” I said. “I can access your soul at a large distance.”

“Fuck,” said Amaryllis. “Meaning that if you’re compromised, then Fenn and I are too.”

“Meaning, I guess, that you have to assume that I’m not compromised,” I said. “Because if Fallatehr had gotten to me, there wouldn’t be anything that you could do about it.”

“I could kill you, I suppose,” said Amaryllis, looking me up and down. She didn’t seem serious about it, not like she was issuing a threat, more like she was publicly contemplating alternative courses of action.

“You could try to kill me,” I replied. (I couldn’t imagine that it was going to come to that, but I wasn’t just making a boast. She had better armor and a better sword, but I had far more magic than she did, and from what I could tell, superior melee skills.)

“Alright, fine,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t think that Fenn and I could have kept you and Grak quarantined from Fallatehr and the others anyway, not if it’s the two of us against the six of you.”

“Unless I’m lying about the link,” I said. “In which case I just told the right lie to let me into the henhouse.”

Amaryllis nodded. “True. I’m starting to think that this Fallatehr plan was a mistake.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want to know everything that I know about the soul, the things that I learned from looking at my own rather than what I have to take Fallatehr’s word on? My guess is that what I see is different from what he sees, and that might give me an edge.”

“Sure,” said Amaryllis. “But you’re probably going to have to repeat it all for Fenn and Grak — you haven’t told Grak?”

“No,” I said. “He’s assumed compromised.”

“Just checking,” said Amaryllis. She stifled a yawn. “You’re going to have to repeat it for them, assuming that we want their help, once we’ve cleared him. And I’m not in the best condition for listening.”

I told her everything anyway, in part because there wasn’t a lot else we needed to be doing, aside from maybe cross-referencing Grak’s story with Valencia and Fallatehr’s, but I had no faith in eyewitness accounts, and even a contradiction wouldn’t help us all that much. There was no way that anything they said would exonerate Grak, meaning that we’d need to keep all our precautions in place anyway. Besides that, I was operating under the assumption that if Fallatehr might have had up to a half hour to work on Grak, and some level of complicity on the part of Valencia, he wouldn’t have made any incredibly stupid mistakes.

When I was done, Amaryllis sat in silence for a moment. I could see from her posture that she’d locked her armor in place, saving her the trouble of using her muscles to stand up. “Assuming that he’s got a view remotely similar to your own, values seem like the quickest way to bring Grak to his side,” said Amaryllis. “All he would have to do is find Fallatehr on the list of values and increase the numbers.”

“I’m not sure that he gets to see numbers,” I replied. “He hasn’t given his own description of the soul, only an analogy. But yes, I think that would be the first thing that I would look at if I can get a view into Grak. And that is the fastest way to clear him, not to mention that he shouldn’t have any legitimate reason to object.” I frowned slightly. This could all have been avoided if he was more loyal to me. Twinned Souls would remove the need for his informed consent.

“We’ll have to take a look at your complete list of options later, when we have time to write everything down and make a catalog of what we know. I’m sure you’ll agree that you made some mistakes there?” Amaryllis raised an eyebrow, and I grudgingly nodded. I wasn’t confident that I actually had made mistakes, given the short time frame, the pressure, and the missing information, but I was pretty sure that when I was next able to change skills, it would be with a concrete plan and optimized build.

Amaryllis pulled out the teleportation key and turned it over in her hands. “We still have a little bit of time,” she said. “Have you checked yourself over?”

I shook my head. “The soul trance scares me. I mean, I think that it probably wouldn’t be optimal for me to try again, in addition to being scary.”

“You came out of it once,” said Amaryllis. “More time in it means higher skill in Essentialism, given what you said, and that should be the skill that governs your ability to escape from it.”

“I already know that I wasn’t affected by him,” I said. I didn’t care whether he lived or died, save for his ability to help me.

“I’d like you to check for subtle signs,” said Amaryllis. She hesitated, biting her lip hard for a second. “I don’t know how much you looked at my soul —”

“I left as soon as I realized what it was,” I replied.

“Thank you,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll … I don’t know what’s written there, but we might have to have a talk, just to clear the air. And if you have time, checking Fenn and I over for a baseline might be wise.” She grimaced as she said it, not trying to hide her distaste.

I set Ropey as lookout, then looked toward my soul once more.

I loved books. Of all the forms of mass media, books were the most personal and the most intimate, not just because they took longer to consume than anything except maybe a season of television, but because reading was something that you did in private. And maybe more than that, reading had an element of interpretation that was rare in film and television, because prose was meant to be evocative rather than strictly literal, abstract by the very nature of the medium.

So the first time I went to Tiff’s house, months before we started dating, I paid special attention to her bookshelf. We were working on our half of a group project together, just Tiff and I, alone in her bedroom together but with the door open, and I had gotten bored enough that my attention was drifting.

Most of what was on her shelf was nonfiction, and most of that nonfiction was in the form of popular, layman’s-level explanations of a field or subject: books like The World is Flat; A Short History of Nearly Everything; Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Guns, Germs, and Steel. Mixed in with those were older classics, Wealth of Nations, The Origin of Species, Plato’s Republic, and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. A section of books caught my eye, The Second Sex, Sexual Politics, and The Delta of Venus, all feminist works, judging by their titles, all well-read, judging by their spines. Her fiction section was less interesting, given that it held few surprises, and almost no fantasy or science fiction beyond the staple series of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Harry Potter, none of which really counted, since I considered them part of standard cultural literacy.

But none of that interested me as much as a set of ten slender moleskine notebooks, each one embossed with her initials.

“Let me know if you want to borrow anything,” said Tiff. “It’s not really a lending library, but I’m always happy to talk about books.”

“Those?” I asked, gesturing to the embossed moleskines.

“Ah,” said Tiff, sitting up a bit. “I’ve been keeping a diary since I was twelve. Decidedly not for lending, but you can take a look if you’d like.”

That felt like a trap to me, but I had no idea what kind of trap. I reached over and pulled down one of the notebooks and opened it to a random page. Instead of text, I was greeted with lines and dots in different configurations. I stared at it for a moment, trying to see a pattern, then gave up and looked at Tiff.

“It’s a cipher!” she said with a smile. She bit her lip as though to stop her smile from growing too indecently wide. “I made it when I was eleven, after I found my mom snooping, prior to the start of the diaries proper — got them from my aunt, best present ever. Totally uncrackable.”

“That’s … not likely to be true,” I said.

“It was a joke,” said Tiff with a frown. “You remember us talking last week about how you don’t roll your own crypto?” We’d had a long discussion on the topic after the party had broken into a mausoleum and blown through five of my six prepared puzzles in the space of an hour. It was a conversation that I was sure would have made someone actually knowledgeable on the subject facepalm. (They’d gotten stuck on the last puzzle for about an hour, to the point where they were getting bored, which made it a bad puzzle.)

“Right, sorry,” I said. I looked down at the book in my lap and flipped through it, looking at more of the dots and lines. It took a bit to see the first pattern, which was that you could sort the dots and lines into glyphs, no more than four lines per glyph, no more than four dots per glyph. Line position seemed to matter, as did dot position, not just whether there were more or fewer of them. “Still, having a custom cipher like this means security through obscurity, and given that it’s on paper in your room, you’re probably safe.” I looked through the pages some more. “There are more glyphs than letters.” Meaning that it wasn’t a simple substitution cipher. There weren’t spaces either, which meant that one of the glyphs indicated a space, which I didn’t think would be too hard to figure out, but it strangely wasn’t visible at a glance.

“Well, definitely not letting you borrow it,” said Tiff. “I know you’d be overcome by the urge to crack it.”

“Is there anything in here that I’d be interested in?” I asked, leafing through it again. Here and there I saw pictures, small little doodles that were set within hand-drawn boxes separate from the ciphertext itself.

“Eh, it’s personal stuff,” said Tiff with a shrug. “Most people don’t care about personal stuff, except because it’s personal. Like, most of your life you don’t pay that much attention to anyone else unless they’re a close friend, and even then, probably not.”

“I think I pay attention to you,” I said. “I mean, the appropriate amount of attention.”

“Are we close friends?” asked Tiff with a raised eyebrow. “Not that I’m saying you’re not —”

“I mean, you’re part of the group,” I said. “We spend something like, I don’t know, ten or fifteen hours a week together outside of school, plus another few hours at lunch, plus more hours in class. It’s part-time job levels of friendship.”

“Yeah,” said Tiff, straightening up somewhat. “I just sometimes feel like I’m the fifth wheel.”

“Arthur, me, Reimer, Craig, Tom,” I said, counting quickly on my fingers. “You’d be the sixth wheel.” We had other members who only showed up inconsistently or for special occasions who made for seventh, eighth, and ninth wheels too.

She reached over and grabbed a pillow from her bed, which she flung at me. “It’s an expression, you dolt.”

“Just joking,” I said, batting her pillow aside. “And we do think of you as one of the guys.”

“Blegh,” said Tiff, briefly sticking out her tongue. “I hate that.”

“‘Guys’?” I asked.

“No, ‘guys’ is normally fine,” she said. “Except in that context, where it’s clearly gendered.”

“Ah,” I said. I set the diary to the side.

“It’s like saying that I can be part of the group, so long as I pretend I’m male, or masculine, it’s an implication of or suggestion towards tomboyism, which is fine, if you’re a tomboy, but I’m not,” said Tiff. I didn’t have much to say to that, except ‘sorry’, which felt too weak, so I kept quiet. “Arthur would have jumped at that bait.”

“Would he?” I asked. “And was it bait?”

“Arthur bait,” said Tiff with a shrug. “See, this is why I think I’m not a part of the group. Just ... makin’ things weird.” She folded her arms across her knees. “That’s the hardest part about finding new friends, you don’t have all those grooves worn into place. You don’t know how to talk to each other, not really, not about things that are outside the bounds of the everyday normal-person back-and-forth.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I don’t really know, because it’s always been other people coming into our group, not me trying to — infiltrate is the wrong word.”

“Like I’m a spy?” asked Tiff, smiling at me.

“Hey, I said it was the wrong word. Integrate?” I asked. “Brings up too many associations with Jim Crow to me.” I tapped the diary. “I sometimes wish that it were possible to data dump. I mean it would be, in a sense, possible for me to get to know you really well by reading through four or five years of diaries, but then you’d also have to do the same for me, and I don’t actually think that we’d get those grooves worn into each other.” That sounded a little too intimate to me, as far as imagery went, with the suggestion of friction, and I regretted it immediately. “And anyway, a diary isn’t really a record of who you are, it’s a record of who you’ve been, it’s the component elements that served to make you, not the actuality of you. It might be helpful for a reconstruction of Tiffany, maybe.”

Tiff was watching me, in a way that made me feel self-conscious. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Tiff. “Have I ever told you that I find you interesting?”

“Literally no one has ever told me that,” I replied. “They used to call me the default character.”

Tiff laughed, covering her mouth. “I am so sorry, but I can completely see that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But that’s not who you actually are,” she continued. “I think that’s what reading the diary would be like, maybe, you would see all this stuff in there that was totally typical of someone my age, the kind of things that are completely innocuous and interchangeable, and then packed there in the middle you’d find these little revealing sparks of me. And that’s why I don’t feel like I’m really one of the guys, because you’ve all known each other long enough that you’ve seen those flashes of truth in each other.”

“It’s like a signal to noise thing, sure,” I said. I looked down at the enciphered diary again, one of many up on the shelves. “And you’re sure that you don’t want me cracking this?”

“One hundred percent,” said Tiff. “Top secret, eyes only. If you want to get to know me, it’s got to be the hard way.”

There was a little game I played, later on, where I tried to figure out whether she had been flirting with me, or saying things that were meant to have double meanings. She was self-confessedly bad at giving signals, and in that heady state of infatuation (and later, love) I kept seeing strands of it in every interaction we’d ever had. It was hard to know whether I was just making things up, when I played back those memories over and over.

She was right about the diaries. I didn’t think that they contained anything all that important, because my own diaries would probably have been equally uninteresting, and she was ready and willing to tell me anything that I wanted to know about her. But because there was a puzzle sitting there waiting to be solved, and because it was information that I wasn’t allowed free access to, my eyes were drawn to her neatly ordered diaries every time I came over.

I looked to my values first, because from what I knew about the soul, that was the first thing that I would change if I wanted to quickly manipulate someone. The list could be dynamically reordered based on the parameters that each value had, but it was easier to just think in the direction of a concept and see its place on the list. “Fallatehr” was on there, with a negative value attached to him, and I felt like that was probably enough to clear myself of suspicion. Just to be safe, I went after a few related concepts, like “Soul Magic” and “Elves”, but neither was terribly high in the rankings, and certainly not higher than I thought they should be in principle, nor were those values in conflict with my memories of how I had felt about those things.

I had to assume that Fallatehr wasn’t all-powerful, because if he could rewrite all my values, and my memories and expectations of those values, then there was pretty much nothing that I could do to detect him or counter his ability in any way.

I was already expecting him to be stronger than soul mages were historically considered to be, but there had to be limits to that. Historically speaking, a soul mage needed minutes of contact, but those were workmen soul mages, not an elite like Fallatehr. If he could affect someone through incidental touch, then we were already fucked, and had been back when Fenn put him into her glove, not to mention the fact that the teleportation key required direct contact. So we had already pinned our success on the idea that he wasn’t possessed of godlike power. Now, “that shouldn’t be possible” wasn’t exactly the more reassuring line of thinking, especially when dealing with unknowns, but that was what we had.

I went looking at other parts of my soul, trying to keep half my attention focused back on the real world. I had Amaryllis out there, and knew that she wouldn’t fuck around (whatever her other flaws), plus Ropey wrapped around my arm and actually keeping guard this time. I was still trying to go fast and look things over, rather than trying to learn about the soul itself, or look over any of the presented data too carefully. I briefly found what appeared to be social modelling, and checked in only long enough to see that Fallatehr was there and nothing about the tags and data fields looked too suspect, especially since none of them painted a flattering picture of him. There was nothing that I liked about him, and apparently his lisp mattered more to me than I was willing to admit, even though it made me cringe at how shallow I was.

Everything seemed to be in order though, or at least as in order as I had expected it to be. I wasn’t going to rush on making changes to my soul’s conception of my body, nor my values, because that seemed like exactly the sort of thing that might hide a technical trap that would make things worse for me. I didn’t trust Fallatehr not to screw me over like that, given that it was in his interests to make himself indispensable, and having me screw up was probably his fastest way to get access to my soul.

So with that, I followed the thread to Amaryllis, to see what her soul had in store.

I ignored her body, as best I could, even though I could feel a visceral reaction at seeing it, my heart beating faster and my chest seeming to constrict, even against the deadness of my senses there, even through the muddling that the soul trance was inflicting on me. Amaryllis as she was in the world was clad in thick armor, sweaty, tired, and run down by the fighting, but as seen by her soul she was simply perfect. I felt guilty about looking at her, and turned to other corners of her soul instead, checking her over.

Her skills were more general than I had thought they would be, though not quite so generalized as my own. I was mildly surprised to find that she had skills, since the soul seemed perfectly capable of including skills outside of the organized system that my own soul had. She didn’t seem to have the same limits as I did, since there were more than forty skills with explicit values attached to them, which raised questions for another day. I had so many questions; if the soul could mark down a prototypical defensive maneuver with a sword, why even attach numbers to it? There was this entire system that the game level seemed to have been slapped on top of just for the sake of being more like a game.

I tore myself away from the skills before I could get too wrapped up in looking them over, moving on to her values, which I still thought were the most likely place I would see an alteration. It was also the place I thought would sate my curiosity.

Sorted by weighting, “Amaryllis” was at the top of her own list of values, and in second was “Autonomy”, then “Power”, then “Life”, and it wasn’t until I got to the tenth on the list that I found something that wasn’t either personal or abstract (or both): I was there, as number 10. I wasn’t quite sure how to take the list of values, given that they had different variables attached to them which I assumed altered how they were processed; my actual, experienced values only vaguely aligned with the list I’d been shown. I was hoping that it was the same for Amaryllis, and that what I was looking at was some redundancy within the systemization of concepts. At any rate, I checked for Fallatehr on there, and saw that he had a negative value, which to me was sufficient proof against tampering.

I hadn’t felt anyone touch me, and I still felt confident that I could pull myself out, so I moved back down the line to my own soul, and then up towards where Fenn’s soul awaited me, separated by thousands of miles though we were.

I was surprised to see the scars on her arms, along with the thin one that ran across her body from the bisection, but they made sense, because magical healing hadn’t wiped them away. I moved away from her body quickly though, not because I was embarrassed or ashamed of my reaction toward seeing her, but because I wanted to make sure that she was okay in the ways that mattered more to me. I missed her, and wanted to spend some time alone. We hadn’t had enough of a chance to talk since coming to the prison, and though it had only been a day, it felt like longer.

Her skills were more narrowly focused, but I didn’t look at them for long except to boggle at the fact that her Bows skill was in the low 50s, and to see a general pattern of specialization that either implied a weird stat distribution for her abilities or something else entirely. The few things that she was good at, she was really good at, but it seemed to go contrary to the design principles that ensured lower values due to multiple ability dependence. That wasn’t the purpose of my visit though. I was trying to make sure that she hadn’t been touched by Fallatehr or his cronies, that nothing had been obviously altered, and that we’d been, at worst, subtly altered.

Her values seemed to be the place to go for that, and I looked at them with a little more trepidation than I’d looked at Amaryllis’.

Where Amaryllis had a large number of abstract or high-level values, at least by naive weighting, Fenn’s looked more like my own, focused on the people close to me rather than on concepts. She was at the top of her own list, which seemed sensible enough to me — between the three of us, I was the odd one out on that count, as I valued myself less — and after that was “Nellan”, then “Juniper”, then “Amaryllis”, “Solace”, “Grak”, and “Six-Eyed Doe” (but who the fuck was Nellan?). I reordered the list to bring up Fallatehr, whose value was listed as not just negative, but at such a high negative number that I was almost alarmed by it. If I was reading the collection of values right, there were a number of things that Fenn would have given up in order to kill him.

I reordered the list, this time sorting from low to high, and saw a field of names, the majority of them typical of the elven names I had encountered thus far. I grimaced at that. Her companion quest was to go to the Isle of Eversummer, and my best guess was that it wasn’t going to end nicely for them. What I was seeing was just confirmation of that, but it was unpleasant nonetheless, because even if Aerbian elves were universally assholes, a part of me rebelled against the idea of slaughtering a village.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and instantly dropped out of my view of her soul, extending my sword from bladed ring into full-fledged sword in an instant.

“Time to go,” said Amaryllis.

“Ropey?” I asked the length of rope that was wrapped around my arm. “Anything I need to worry about?”

One end of him curled up toward me and made a loop that shook from side to side. I looked around me, toward Fallatehr, then Valencia, then Grak, all in the positions that I had left them in, then back to Amaryllis.

“I hate this,” I said.

“It’s necessary,” said Amaryllis. “Demons and devils, a close friend we can no longer trust, and a man who would tear apart our souls in an instant. They’re not the best bedfellows. As soon as I’ve gotten some sleep, I might try to renegotiate with Fallatehr. If we can jettison Rheta and Lehpenn, we might be in a better position.” She hesitated. “Was there anything in my soul that we need to talk about?”

“No,” I replied. “Nothing that I saw, anyway. You were just about what I expected.”

“Alright,” said Amaryllis with a frown. “Good,” but I got the distinct impression that she had been hoping for a different answer. Before I could ask she turned aside and called over to Grak, then to Fallatehr, and whatever it was she had been concerned about, I decided that it was a thread that I could pull on later, when we were both in better condition, or I could simply search through her soul until I stumbled upon whatever it was she thought I would find there.

With some deliberation about positioning, Valencia returned to manacles, and a good deal of wariness on our part, we left for Parsmont, the City of Equal Standing.

Chapter 24 - The Long Night

As soon as the pain of the teleportation faded, and I had made sure that we were all clear of Fallatehr, Fenn came up and wrapped me in a hug. I returned it, trying my best to keep aware of my surroundings at the same time. Teleportation was both painful and disorientating, which meant that it was the best time for an ambush.

It was still dark near Parsmont (naturally, since Aerb didn’t have timezones) but clouds obscured the multicolored stars and Celestar, meaning that our only light was from a lantern that Fenn had set down on the grass. Behind her was a large farmhouse that wouldn’t have been out of place anywhere in the Midwest, with two stories, wood siding, and a wide, wrap-around porch. Behind it was a tall barn with a fifteen-foot-tall arch leading into the interior. Amaryllis hadn’t been kidding when she said that this place didn’t have much in the way of neighbors. I had to wonder how we had acquired it, though “lots and lots of money hastily exchanging hands” was probably a good guess. Hopefully that wasn’t going to attract attention, especially since we couldn’t move very quickly with eight people.

And in the other direction, there was Parsmont, the titular ‘mont’ really more of a large hill. It was coated with buildings, visible mostly by the streetlights laced through them. I didn’t have a firm grasp on the time, since I didn’t have a watch, but it was after midnight, and probably by a wide margin. There were cars and trucks moving through the city though, visible by their headlights, even at this late hour. It all looked so like Earth in so many ways that it felt like I had gone to a different world again, at least until I looked down at the half-elf in my arms.

“Still alive?” Fenn asked, backing up just enough so that she could bring a hand up to the side of my face and stare in my eyes. “Still Juniper?”

“You know that you can’t actually get an answer to that question, don’t you?” I asked. “My answer would be the same either way. I mean, obviously I’m still alive, but I would just lie about being me.”

“Yup, still Juniper,” said Fenn, as she gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

“You know that’s not enough, right?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes and smiled at me. “Come on, we’ve got a room.”

“Grak is compromised,” said Amaryllis, her tone hard.

“Under suspicion,” Grak corrected her. “They can’t tell one way or another.”

“Okay,” said Fenn, looking between the five of us. “Meaning?” She slowly drew a finger across her throat, raising an eyebrow.

“The plan is not to kill me, no,” said Grak with a slight snort.

“Well, good,” said Fenn. “Not that I would, you understand.”

“You’d make Mary do it,” said Grak with a slight, wide-toothed grin.

“I would make Mary do it,” Fenn agreed. “Come, let me give you a tour.”

She moved toward the farmhouse, pulling me along. Only a single room of the farmhouse was lit, the front living room, and when we came into it, she waved with a hand. “Home sweet home, for the time being,” said Fenn. “Did you know that if you offer absurd amounts of money to people, they’ll let you stay in their house?”

“That worries me,” I said.

“It worries Mary too,” said Fenn with a shrug. “There were two of them, a little old lady and a nearly decrepit old man, went to go stay with their son down the road a bit, took all the sentimentals they could carry. We have a half now, half later agreement with them, for a fuckload of money by anyone’s standards, but it’s still kind of touchy. Mary still favored this over trying to go into town this late at night and risking more eyeballs in our direction.”

I looked around at the pictures on the walls, the knick-knacks, dried flowers in artful arrangements, and hunting trophies stuffed and put up on the wall, most of which were of species I didn’t recognize. Doors led off into other rooms, but I had been in enough houses like this that I wasn’t terribly interested in what it held. My eyes briefly caught on something that looked like a small shrine, but whatever had been sitting there, it was now noticeably absent, an empty space surrounded by dried flowers and a few unlit candles.

“Did we pick this place at random?” I asked.

“We went down the road a bit, looking at signs, until we found a few that had the same last name. We figured that gave us a better chance of not inconveniencing them too much,” said Fenn. “Out of the way, but close enough to Parsmont proper, where we’re headed in the morning to restock. We paid those people basically the full price of their house for the pleasure. But we should be safe here, at least for a little while.”

The rest of the group came to join us, Valencia first, then Grak, then Fallatehr, and finally Amaryllis following them at some distance.

“Fallatehr and Valencia will stay in the barn tonight, where Rheta and Lehpenn already are,” said Amaryllis. “Grak will stay with us in the house.”

“You cannot continue to treat me like a live grenade,” said Fallatehr, smiling softly. “It is a poor way to build a working relationship.”

“It’s just temporary,” said Amaryllis. “We’re already allowing for the possibility that you might leave. We know that you cannot be forced to teach under duress.” It was curiosity that had gotten him to agree to come with us, that was (probably) true, but I still felt a little ill at the idea that he might leave, and that we’d have inflicted him on the world. It was really a matter of practicality, because we didn’t have the manpower, facilities, or equipment to guard him and his clones, except possibly in the very short term. We might have been able to, if we knew for sure that we had Grak, but we didn't have Grak. I knew all that, but it still made my stomach flip. “You might understand that our nerves are somewhat frayed by the amount of pain and effort we took in getting you out of prison.”

“I will not thank you for my rescue,” said Fallatehr. “Too many of my long-term projects were lost in the process, and the wider world has always been of little concern to me. Our interests are aligned, for the time being, but I won’t pretend at owing you anything in gratitude.”

Fenn rolled her eyes at that, but didn’t say anything in response.

“We’ll be a little more settled tomorrow,” said Amaryllis. “We’ll make a trip into town and figure out a more permanent housing situation so that Juniper’s training can continue, and once he’s built up some skill with soul magic, we won’t have to worry so much about the trust issues.”

Fallatehr nodded at that. I wondered whether that was giving the game away too much, but maybe Amaryllis was counting on Fallatehr to have already figured that out. Once I had a better working knowledge of soul magic, I could both ensure that my soul was defended, and defend against changes to the souls of others — in theory, at least. His window of opportunity was shrinking, and he presumably didn’t know about the soul link between the three of us.

“We’ll all get some rest,” Fallatehr said with a short bow. He reached over and grabbed Valencia by the chains between her manacles, but she jerked away from him.

“I lied!” she shouted. Fallatehr managed to grab the chain, holding her in place. “I lied, he did touch Grak, he pinned him and touched his soul until he stopped moving, and then they talked to each other, Juniper, I’m sorry, but I lied, you have to be careful!” The words came out in a rush, breaths taken without ending a sentence.

“Believe what you wish,” said Fallatehr with a shrug. “It did not happen as she says, but such an outburst is not uncharacteristic of a possession.”

“Take her away,” said Amaryllis with a sigh.

“You have to believe me, Juniper, please!” said Valencia.

“Is there anything we could do to verify?” I asked. “Details that you couldn’t have known unless this was the truth?”

“No,” said Valencia, saying the word like I had stabbed her.

I gave her a small nod as Fallatehr led her away, out of the door, staring at me with wide eyes but unresisting.

“It’s meaningless,” said Amaryllis. “Nothing we can verify, nothing that we can act on, nothing new, and as likely to be the result of possession as what she initially told us.”

“It’s not true,” said Grak. “For whatever me saying that is worth.”

“The girl seems taken with you,” Fenn said to me, giving me a fake smile and a nudge in the ribs.

“Juniper doesn’t share our cultural values,” said Amaryllis, shaking her head slightly. She blinked slowly. “I need sleep, at least a little bit, before we do a full debrief.” She turned to Grak. “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to leave you out of those conversations.”

Grak frowned at that. “If my soul were touched, he would already know everything I know,” said Grak.

“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “But you don’t know everything that we know, not yet.”

Grak frowned again. “I agree with a need for caution. There must be limits though. I cannot be exiled from decision-making and information-sharing forever.”

“You’re too important to keep you out of the loop forever,” said Amaryllis. “But we are waiting on Juniper to have whatever level of skill is necessary to ensure that you’re still the Grak we know.”

“And love,” added Fenn.

“But for now, you’ll be sleeping in another room,” said Amaryllis. “Juniper will close you in with a Lecher’s Vine.”

“Let me put up wards,” said Grak. “Treat them as untrustworthy. I will at least gain peace of mind.”

Amaryllis rubbed her eyes. “No,” she said. “If you were working against us you could turn this place into a death trap and put us at a disadvantage in the event of an attack. Down that hall there, to the right, please.”

“Fair enough.” Grak nodded, looking quickly between the three of us before heading off down the hallway. I followed after him.

“Sorry about all this,” I said once he was in the small bedroom. I’d been expecting quilts, like my grandparents made, but the bedding was clearly some mass produced, perfectly-machined fabric. There were pictures of someone’s family on the wall, and an old dresser that looked like it had been carved from a single, solid, piece of wood. The bed was too high for Grak to comfortably get up on, and I immediately felt bad for him. “If,” I began, then stopped, because Grak didn’t know about the soul link, and I couldn’t tell him. “I’ll figure out a way to check your soul over.”

“I’m not comfortable with that,” said Grak, folding his arms across his chest.

“Meaning that you would refuse?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “It is possible to submit to something uncomfortable.”

"We should try it now," I said, holding out my hand to him. He hesitated, then took his hand in my own. My Essentialism was up to 7 now, just from poking around, but I had no real idea how I was supposed to be able to access another person's soul. I tried a few ways to conceptualize it, as though I was following a thread like I did for Fenn and Amaryllis, or like I was opening the book of Grakhuil, but nothing worked, and after what felt like an eternity holding his hand in the doorway, I pulled away.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Thank you for being good about it, even if it’s just a plot that Fallatehr told you to follow.” I meant that as a joke, but it didn’t come out like one, and Grak didn’t show any signs of even mild amusement.

There were no windows in his room, which was a plus, because that meant just one of my Lecher’s Vines was needed to make sure that I would know if he left. I stared at the door for a bit, trying to erase an unpleasant but true thought. At least it was him and not Fenn or Amaryllis. Maybe there was a good reason that he wasn’t loyal to me.

“Personally, I think it’s great to be sharing a bedroom again,” said Fenn as Amaryllis stripped out of her immobility plate. We were going to share the master bedroom on the second floor, which had an adjoining bathroom, and more importantly, would be pretty easy to defend against intrusion. “Brings me back to the good old days, when we were three peas in a pod in Barren Jewel.”

“I’m going to take a very quick shower to wash the sweat and blood off,” said Amaryllis. “Then I’m going to sleep.”

I had already secured the door with another Lecher’s Vine, which had crawled from my skin and went to surround the door frame in bright-green leaves, then moved a heavy dresser in front of it. In the event we had to leave in a hurry, we’d be using a window. I averted my eyes as Amaryllis took off the last of the plate and stripped down her underclothes to full nudity. I waited until she had closed herself in the bathroom to sit down on the bed with Fenn. She kissed me on the neck, then rested her head on my shoulder before deciding better of it and flopping down on top of the blankets. The cloak of leaves she’d inherited from Solace was carefully set beside her.

“Hell of a day,” she said.

I lay down beside her. I needed a shower of my own before going to sleep. “Yeah,” I said.

“Let’s never voluntarily go somewhere that makes me so useless,” said Fenn. “Do you ever have that dream where you’re punching someone, but it feels like your fists are hitting mud?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s universal,” I said. “Your brain’s not getting feedback from the nerve endings, so it invents an interpretation that fits the data.”

“Well that’s how I felt all day,” said Fenn. “Just shooting those things with arrows over and over, not doing shit to them.” She rolled toward me and gave me a kiss. “You need a shower too, especially if we’re sharing a bed.”

“Fair enough,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “I think we should kill Fallatehr.”

“You have soul magic unlocked?” asked Fenn.

“Yeah,” I said, breathing a sigh. “There’s certainly more he could teach me, and I’ve already run into a few things that worry me, but … he’s dangerous. I’m not even sure that we should be letting him out of our sight.” Our original plan hadn’t looked like this, but the problem with needing someone for their intellectual labor was that you couldn’t just hold them at gunpoint, not if you didn’t have someone to replace them.

“He’s a deviant,” said Fenn. “Not sure how much you cottoned on to that.”

“Yeah, he’s a mad scientist,” I said. “That was pretty obvious.”

“No,” said Fenn. “I mean, as far as elves go, he’s … he’s flagrantly imperfect, he’s not even trying. Science is trial and error, that’s anathema to an elf. He speaks with a lisp, no sane elf would do that. The culture of elves, no matter the flavor, is all about perfection, I — I don’t know if I can do justice to how fundamentally wrong he is.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well he’s the first elf I’ve really met.” I paused slightly. “I’m going to need to read that entry in The Book of Blood sometime soon. I probably should have insisted.”

Fenn sat up slightly and looked me over. “So you didn’t actually read it?” she asked.

I shook my head, furrowing my brow. “You said that you didn’t want me to.”

“And that’s why you didn’t know about the teeth,” said Fenn.

“I’m glad that didn’t screw anything up for us,” I said. “It also seems like the sort of thing that the book would mention.”

“Huh,” said Fenn. “I’d sort of assumed that you — when we were together, how did you know?” I raised an eyebrow. She blushed slightly. “How did you, ah, know your way around?”

“Wait, you think that I cheated by reading that book?” I asked.

“Well I don’t know,” said Fenn. “Yes, I guess that is what I thought. I wasn’t about to complain about it, given the results, but.” She stopped mid-sentence, looking me in the eyes. “It didn’t really occur to me that you hadn’t violated that agreement. I knew you were curious, and it was a minor thing, so I just sort of—” She shrugged, still watching me.

“So you’re saying that I’m a better man than you thought I was?” I asked.

Fenn nodded. “You’re not mad at me? We’re not going to have a big dumb fight about this?”

I shook my head. I could see it happening, maybe, in some other universe, but I’d betrayed trust enough times in my life that I wasn’t about to get upset about someone assuming I’d done wrong. Fenn leaned down and kissed me on the lips.

Loyalty increased: Fenn lvl 20!

Companion Passive Unlocked: Symbiosis (Fenn)!

“Wait,” I said, placing a hand on her chest and gently pushing her away. “Game stuff,” I explained as I closed my eyes.

Symbiosis: You and Fenn are connected on a deeper level now, with the last vestiges of reluctance stripped away. When together, you may both use either your own skill, or half the skill of the other, rounded down, whichever is higher.

“What kind of game stuff?” asked Fenn. I opened my eyes and looked at her. “Loyalty 20?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think we both just got better at … a lot of stuff, actually. You might know some magic.” So long as I was with her, the ungestalted Lying and Stealth were both practically useless to me, since I could just bum off her. My optimal build, which I hadn't even worked out yet, had shifted again with this new passive. “Oh, and I can see your character sheet now, or something close to it.”

“And you didn’t lead with that?” she asked. “Here, let me get you a pen and paper, you need to write it all down.”

“Later,” came a voice from the doorway. Amaryllis was toweling herself dry, and I averted my eyes again. “Full debrief when I’m awake enough for it. Fenn, you have my clothes.”

“I do, don’t I,” said Fenn with a vulpine smile.

“Fine, I’m going to bed,” said Amaryllis. “Joon, take a bedroll or get over yourself, I don’t care which. With the vines in place, a barricade, and the rope keeping watch, I’m prepared to risk going without a guard. The threat from Fallatehr is going to be more subtle.” With that she slipped under the covers and cast the sleeping spell over her forehead, putting her out like a light.

(That was the first spell I had ever seen, aside from maybe the slow-fall tattoo, depending on how it counted, way back when we’d been camping out in a farmhouse in the Risen Lands. It was one of the very few spells that were universal and without a school. It had no unintended applications that I could find, and Amaryllis had looked at me like I was an idiot for suggesting it could be exploitable. It didn’t work unless you actually wanted to get to sleep, and you couldn’t even fake it by consenting to the spell.)

“She’s been trying to match you,” said Fenn, nodding toward Amaryllis.

“She was doing a good job of it,” I replied.

“You’ve got her beat in physical strength, reach, and by the way our sparring has gone, training too,” said Fenn. “She has the better sword, I think, but the real thing closing the gap is how much effort she’s been putting in.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I just wanted to let you know, because I know that social skills aren’t really your thing at the moment,” said Fenn.

I wanted to say that they weren’t that bad, but I hadn’t realized that Amaryllis was pushing herself that hard, nor that it might be because she was trying to match me. I didn’t necessarily know whether Fenn was right, but the hypothesis hadn’t even crossed my mind. “Thanks,” I said.

“Do you want company for your shower?” she asked, looking at my lips for a moment before kissing them. “I was thinking that it might be good to work out some of my frustrations over how the day has gone.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m rancid under this armor,” I said. “But you would help me get clean?”

Fenn gave me an eager nod.

“Okay,” said Reimer. “But be explicit. Give it in mechanical terms.”

“You don’t get to just know the mechanics,” I said. “That strips back everything interesting.”

“It shouldn’t,” said Arthur, frowning at me. “Yes, it reduces the mystery, but most of what’s interesting about this place isn’t in how the rules work, it’s in seeing what impacts those rules have on the world.”

“Besides that,” said Craig, “presumably everyone in Parsmont is aware of the rules, they should know those rules backward and forward, so we can just talk to a fishmonger or something.”

“Fishmonger?” I asked. “That’s the most random — there aren’t any fishmongers, it’s a city on a hill, at best there are some river fish, but it’s a place of meats and grains.”

“So fish are only for the hoi polloi?” asked Tom.

“No ‘the’,” said Arthur. “‘Hoi’ already means ‘the’. And ‘hoi polloi’ means masses, which — Joon, are the fish a high-class or low-class food? I can see the argument either way, the fish are river fish and a food of convenience for those who live near the rivers, but they’re also in limited supply, which suggests that they’d be valuable, assuming that they weren’t all fished out. Happened a lot historically, commoner’s food making the jump to fine dining.”

“I just want rules, dammit,” said Reimer.

“I mean I’m pretty sure that we just agreed we’re going to find a fishmonger,” said Tom, with a small grin.

“No, veto,” said Reimer. “I know I don’t have veto power, but veto.”

“Do we find a fishmonger?” asked Arthur, looking to me with a smile.

“I ...” I looked down at my notes for Parsmont, then over to the table of randomly generated names I used for times like this. “You eventually find Homeleron, a Kandrian merchant who sells some of the river fish brought in to him from the Pellmance. Kandria is on the sea, and Homeleron is the guy that all the Kandrians go to when they get a little bit homesick and want to make one of their traditional dishes, albeit with some substitutions. You think that he’s probably a well-connected man.” That was a load of frantic bullshittery, and I was hoping that no one would call me on the fact that I had just said that there weren’t any fishmongers in Parsmont.

“Greetings, Homeleron,” said Arthur, “You seem like a man who knows a thing or two.”

“That I might be,” I said with a laugh. I didn’t tend to change my voice much in-game, if only because I never knew how long a character was going to stick around, and some of the more extreme voices I’d tried in front of a mirror were really hard to hold. I had a picture of Homeleron in my head almost immediately, and let some of that creep into my speech; he was uneducated but knew a lot, a man with many connections and maybe more self-importance than was warranted. A poor man, I decided, but only poor in the sense that he had his small stall and few possessions, not the kind of poor where he was scrambling to make rent or hurting from taxes.

“I’d like a list of mechanics,” said Reimer. “I have pen and paper, and want you to write down everything you know about the workings of the orb at the center of Parsmont and the abilities that it gives to the people within it. I’ll pay you … ten gold.”

“His eyes light up at that,” I replied, inwardly groaning. “Well, I’m not sure I know my letters so well, but I can tell you whatever you’d want, he says.”

“Everyone has a vote, right?” asked Arthur. “What does it take for us to vote?”

“Well you can feel it, can’t you?” I asked, as Homeleron, playing the part of someone who was pretending to be shocked by their ignorance. “At the back of your head, the votes sitting there?”

“I touch the back of my head, cautiously,” said Arthur.

I gave Homeleron a belly-laugh. “No, in your head, like you’re looking backward without using your eyes.”

“Okay, I do that,” said Reimer. “Seems like the sort of thing that you would immediately realize was there if you had 18 Wis.”

“You see two indents in your mind’s eye, one with a hundred gleaming jewels, the other empty, but with room for far more,” I said.

“I move the jewels from one indent to the other,” said Craig.

“You die, instantly,” said Reimer.

“No, you don’t die,” I said with a sigh. “Nothing happens, you can’t do it.”

“Okay, then I try to transfer my jewels — a single one of my jewels, actually — to a theoretical receiving indent in Berberous’ head,” said Arthur.

“Berberous,” I said, turning to Craig, “You see a single jewel appear in the empty indent.”

“Do I feel any different?” asked Craig.

“No, not especially,” I replied. I turned to Arthur. “You have a slight feeling of connection to that jewel still, like you could pull it back if you wanted to.”

“I do so,” replied Arthur with a slight frown.

“So whoever gets the most jewels gets to be a badass, but people can take their jewels back at any time?” asked Reimer. “Meaning that all power in Parsmont is transitory.”

“Are you asking me, or Homelaran?” I asked.

“Homeleron?” asked Arthur.

“Right, Homeleron,” I said. I had already forgotten his biographical details, and tried to recreate them from scratch. He was a fishmonger, world-weary, selling goods that had been carted in from too far away, losing their freshness in the process. It wasn’t what I’d decided before, but none of that had been exposed to the players anyway.

“Sure, I’ll ask him what the power structure looks like,” said Reimer.

“Oh, people come and people go,” I said as Homeleron. “But less than you’d think, because the people up top fight each other, and not too many want to put themselves in that fight, so it’s mostly about putting your vote behind the guy you think has the best chance of fighting against the guy you hate.”

“And they literally fight each other?” asked Reimer. “With as-yet-unspecified powers?”

“Once in a blue moon,” I replied.

“Two point seven years,” answered Reimer.

“That’s …” I started, then stopped. “More often, they pursue their own goals, and try to keep people happy enough that they retain the vote.”

“That’s Homeleron saying that?” asked Arthur.

“No, it’s me,” I said. “Look, is anyone going to buy any fish?”

“All I want is for you to stop teasing and just be explicit,” said Reimer. “That’s not so much to ask. We’ve got the fluff out of the way, right?”

“And now you want some crunch,” I said with a sigh. The night didn’t seem like it was going my way, for reasons that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Sometimes a session just got away from me. “Okay, a thousand jewels gives you a +1 bonus to skills, stackable up to +10, two thousand gives you a bonus of +1 to AC, stackable up to +10,” and this continued on for a bit, as I read through the things on my list. At the highest levels, with a million people pledging their full support, an NPC didn’t quite become epic level, but that was the only restraint I’d shown.

“Well how are we going to beat those guys then?” asked Craig. “Poison?”

“The answer is always poison,” said Arthur with a nod.

“Except not, because D&D poison is awful,” said Reimer. “And I doubt that Joon is going to let us get away with homebrew again.”

“You all understand that your goal is not to come into every town and murder the people in charge, right?” I asked. “Please, someone tell me that you know that. You have a quest.”

“Yeah, we’re here to get a MacGuffin,” said Craig. He paused slightly. “So what I’m thinking is, we bus people in and get their votes.”

And if we’d been teetering on the brink before, that was when the session went off the deep end.

I woke up at what felt like fuck o’clock in the morning, with the sky a pale color that suggested the sun hadn’t finished cresting the hill. I blinked twice and looked around, coming to my senses slower than I would have liked, with my Anyblade in hand, looking for the threat. The dresser was still in front of the door, and the vine was still wrapped around the frame, healthy and green.

“I was going to let you sleep a bit,” said Amaryllis, her voice low. She was half-dressed in plate; Fenn had left out a change of underclothes for her, a concession in the direction of practicality. The greaves and boots were on, but the upper sections were still on the floor, leaving her staring at me in the cold half-light with just her tank top on.

“I still might,” I said, looking over at Fenn, still sleeping beside me. “You’re up early. Thought you needed sleep.”

“I got sleep,” said Amaryllis. I could see that she still wasn’t at peak condition though, with bags under her eyes. “We need to stabilize.”

“In what sense?” I asked. Ropey was sitting on the bed, coiled with one end lifted slightly, and I put my hand out to him. “Clear?” I asked him. He nodded, and I relaxed a fraction.

“You want more training with Fallatehr, to make sure that you don’t make some grave error,” said Amaryllis. “That’s of questionable value, given that he might misinform you.”

“I know,” I said. “I’d have fixed my hand already if I actually trusted him. It’s not really about the training, in the literal sense, it’s about using him to get past the skill cap of 20.”

“We need to figure out a way to make this work,” said Amaryllis. “All of it, the big picture. Not just soul training, we need to stop lurching from one encounter to the next.”

“I’m not sure that downtime is going to be likely, given our circumstances,” I said. The Dungeon Master probably doesn’t want us to have it, and once one Sword of Damocles has been lifted, another will take its place. Wait, that’s a bad metaphor, the Sword of Damocles was an ever-present danger, so the narrative forces, or the Dungeon Master himself, is the Sword, and the presentation of that sword is all that will change.

“I’m not talking about downtime,” said Amaryllis. “We’re in a pattern of reaction right now, we have been since I was taken by Aumann. You had the crisis of needing to save me, then the crisis of needing to cure me, then the crisis of needing to cure your own ailment, and now we have the crisis of Fallatehr, not to mention trying our best to save the locus. We need to break out of the cycles of crisis. We need to chart a path forward of our own accord.”

“Ah,” I replied. “That’s kind of hard to do when we’re still putting out fires.”

“I agree,” said Amaryllis. “The problem is that the fires multiply. They’re what I’m worried about, when I talk about stability. We need to keep our fires contained. Episodic.”

“The n-word,” I said with a grimace. “I’m not sure how we can do that.”

“We came to Parsmont because they’re welcoming to visitors and somewhat dissociated from the Empire of Common Cause,” said Amaryllis. “We did not come here to have any interaction with their system of governance. We’re not trying to shake things up, we’re not trying to solve problems, we’re just here because it’s a relatively safe place. We can’t afford to get sucked into anything.”

“I know all that,” I said, trying to be gentle. “I’m just worried that we’re going to get sucked in by … something.”

“Forward motion,” said Amaryllis as she put on the breastplate. “I think part of the problem is that we haven’t been committing to the quests.”

“From a narrativist perspective?” I asked. I really didn’t want to operate with narrative in mind, and that wasn’t just because I thought it was likely to get us pushback from the Dungeon Master.

“Either way,” said Amaryllis with a shrug.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “Parsmont probably has something for us, but I don’t think we’re obligated to take up every quest that’s on offer. The Risen Bile back in Barren Jewel turned out to be set-dressing, and in retrospect, there was probably a quest in there.”

“They attacked us,” said Amaryllis.

“Well, yes,” I said. “But after that, hunkering down worked. Whatever we run across, we’ll try to employ the same strategy while we deal with Fallatehr.”

“Assuming he’s still there,” said Amaryllis, putting the last of her armor in place. “If he’s run away in the middle of the night … at least you unlocked soul magic, and given that he would be willing to abandon us, he wouldn’t teach you anyway, so I suppose that’s not as bad an outcome.”

“Sounds like sour grapes to me,” I replied.

“Sour grapes?” asked Amaryllis with a raised eyebrow. She was fully armored now, with her helmet in hand, looking every inch the warrior. There was something more beautiful about her this way, more terrifying, but more in tune with who she was as a person. I could imagine that when she was in her forties, people would remark that they couldn’t imagine that she had ever been a teenage girl. It wasn’t that she looked old, really, just that she was more hardened than anyone my own age should be.

“Do you not have Aesop’s fables?” I asked. “There’s this fox, and he can’t reach some grapes, so he says, ‘eh, they were probably sour anyway’?”

“You think that I’m practicing self-deception,” said Amaryllis, brows knitted slightly as she focused on me with a trace of a frown on her lips.

I had really just been talking without thinking that much about what I was saying, but that word, ‘self-deception’ made my mind jump tracks, and the memory of her telling me that she had tried to love me came, unbidden, to the forefront of my mind. I wasn’t sure that’s what she was thinking, but I was momentarily stunned by the thought that maybe she was.

“We’ll see soon enough whether he’s stayed,” Amaryllis continued, shrugging off that line of thinking. The thought that he might not have stayed still made me queasy. “The only reason to think that he left is base pessimism.”

“And we’re okay with unleashing him on the world?” I asked.

“Soul magic is less powerful than it was during the height of the Second Empire,” said Amaryllis. “There are exclusions applied to it, pieces of it that no longer work. He’s far from harmless, but then again, he wasn’t ever a predator, at least from what I can tell. The bigger issue is how he might impact us on the world stage.”

“Assuming that we get there,” I replied.

We debriefed, once we’d woken Fenn up. She put on her clothes, grumbling the whole while, as she listened to us talk.

“You took Tree Magic without knowing what it did?” asked Amaryllis. She had her notes out and was making marks on her paper version of my character sheet.

“There’s a whole lot of magic that’s excluded,” I said. “Tree Magic and Library Magic are two of the only ones that aren’t recognized schools of magic, which means that they’re either important or powerful, maybe both. Same with Spirit, though maybe that’s not a proper magic.”

“You shouldn’t have taken three kinds of armor,” said Amaryllis, looking down at the sheet. “Unarmored and Heavy Armor are defensible choices, given that you can’t always walk around in armor, but —”

“This isn’t the time to second-guess every decision I’ve made,” I said, again looking out the window to the barn. There was no sign of Fallatehr yet, but it was still early in the morning, just after sunrise. We hadn’t gone to get Grak yet; the things we were talking about weren’t for his ears. “I was thinking that I didn’t really know what counted as light, medium, or heavy armor, and as far as armor goes I’m currently constrained by our access to magic items, so it made sense to hedge my bets there, since survivability is really important in an Iron Man run … I’m assuming.”

“And you dropped Art,” said Amaryllis. “Art that you need in order to inscribe new tattoos.”

“Is this your last objection?” I asked. Amaryllis shifted around, looking down at the papers. “It’s all been done, there’s no point in chiding me for it, or making me explain myself.”

“Of course there is,” said Amaryllis. “If you make a mistake, you have to understand that mistake so that you don’t make it in the future.”

“I’m going to have more time, next time I choose skills,” I said. “I’ll be going in with a plan. Do you think that locking myself into the existing skills for another four levels was a good idea? I had to choose, and choose quickly.”

Skill unlocked: Debate!

I smiled inwardly at that. When we had the time, we were going to have to level that up (though time was something we were short on).

“That only makes me question your ability to make decisions on the fly,” said Amaryllis, before adding, “No offense.”

“None taken,” I replied. I looked down at my malformed hand, the product of a different decision made on the fly. The results hadn’t been good, but there, at least, I was pretty sure that the result of inaction would have been death.

“So why’d you drop Art?” asked Fenn. She was standing next to the window, holding the bottle up to the light. We didn’t have Solace to make the miniature sun anymore, and keeping the bottle in darkness might mean that the temperature would drop, which would in turn mean that the things within it would die. We were going to have to find a solution to that in short order, or at least find a way in so that we could get some sense of what was going on, instead of just the bird’s-eye view.

“The tattoos are useful, but I have a lot of them stocked up at the moment,” I said with a sigh. I couldn’t actually imagine what it would have been like to not tell them anything about my power, but there were times when I had a pang of longing for that alternate timeline. “And my Art was at 6, and not going up without investment into the relevant abilities. But beyond that, I have some level of ability in things that aren’t part of what the game layer considers to be my skills, so I was hoping that would be enough. It’s a fairly painless and concrete way to test what remains after a skill is off the roster.”

“And have you?” asked Amaryllis.

“I haven’t really had a chance,” I said.

“Looks like we’re going to wait a bit for that,” said Fenn, moving away from the window and slipping the bottle back into the cloak of leaves she’d inherited from Solace. “Unless art is a more pressing concern than our resident soul fucker stepping out from that building?”

“Let’s go get Grak,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. “Time to see whether we can make this arrangement work.”

Chapter 25 - A Helping Hand

Fallatehr and I took our second lesson together in the barn, mostly because it was the largest indoor space, with plenty of room around us and little chance for shenanigans. I had Ropey around me as a precaution, but I also had Amaryllis, Fenn, and Grak (for what he was worth), and we’d put quite a bit of space between Fallatehr and myself as well. Valencia was in the basement, manacled to a boiler there, while Fallatehr’s other two minions had grudgingly been given leave to go into town by Amaryllis.

“I wasn’t aware that I would be teaching so many,” said Fallatehr with a smile.

“Just me,” I said. “I should need less instruction than anyone else. I’d like for you to walk me through the process for fixing my hand, both from a theoretical standpoint and in terms of the process and risks associated with it.” I was in full armor, which was streaked with white where it had absorbed hits the day before. My Anyblade was in the shape of a dagger, held in my right hand.

“Tit for tat,” said Fallatehr. “Tell me about your intriguing capacity for learning. Was it acquired, or were you born with it?”

“I was born with it,” I said.

Skill increased: Lying lvl 2!

With Deception ungestalted, I had to level Lying and Stealth back up, but luckily, Fenn had Lying in the mid-30s, which meant that through Symbiosis I had Lying in the high teens so long as she was near me. What I’d said wasn’t really a lie either, depending on the definition of ‘born’. I was pretty sure that my soul had only existed from the moment that I appeared on the plane above the Risen Lands.

“And what domains does your talent apply to?” asked Fallatehr. “Only magic, or other areas as well?”

“It applies to specific domains, not all of which I’ve discovered,” I said. My skill at Lying went up again. It was technically true, given that a few of my skills were still mysteries to me. “Magic does appear to be one of the common threads though.”

Fallatehr nodded. “Can you perform feats that you should, by rights, not have known how to accomplish, or are you limited to only those that have been explained adequately to you?”

“That’s enough questions for now,” I replied. “Tell me about how bone magic intersects with soul magic.”

Fallatehr hesitated, watching me, then nodded to himself. “My question is not just to satisfy my own curiosity,” he said. “You did not train at the athenaeum, and your knowledge of bone magic might not comport with bone magic as it is taught there.”

“That’s true,” I admitted, shifting slightly in my seat. Most of what I knew about bone magic I had learned from The Commoner’s Guide to Bone Magic. “Yes, I have some level of knowledge granted to me that is outside the scope of what I was told or taught, and which I couldn’t have simply worked out from base principles.”

Fallatehr nodded. “So you are not indoctrinated into the dogma of the athenaeums,” he said. “That is likely for the best. In my time there was some contention between the Guild of the Essential Soul and the Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh. They did not want to admit that their art was an extension of our own. Are you familiar with the concept of aspects?” I nodded. So far as I could tell, there was a one to one correspondence between bone-magic aspects and game-layer attributes. “They are a gesture in the direction of information written on the soul,” said Fallatehr. “Bone magic, at its heart, is nothing more than briefly adding someone’s soul to your own.”

“Uh,” I said. “There are a number of problems with that explanation, given what I know.”

“By your own accounting, I am the most knowledgeable soul mage left in the world,” said Fallatehr. “But please,” he added, grinning with sharp teeth, “explain why I am wrong.”

I took a breath. I hated Socratic dialogues. “Most of the bones that bone mages use come from —”

“The term ‘soul’ is imprecise,” said Fallatehr. “You likely think of it as a small white thing pulled from the heart or head after death?” He gestured first at his temple, then at his chest. “That is the anima exa, a physical manifestation of the soul, unique to the mortal species, but not synonymous with the anima ipsa.”

“But the soul can be extinguished,” I said. “And as far as I can tell, that has no bearing on the bones themselves.”

“The anima exa can be extinguished,” said Fallatehr. “And in fact, nothing in the world can prevent that, so far as is known to me. That has little bearing on the anima ipsa.”

I frowned at that. “Naively, that doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that the soul continues to exist in the bones, regardless of whether someone goes to hell?”

“No,” said Fallatehr. “What I am saying is that by every method I have been able to use, the soul continues to be accessible well after death, even for those confirmed by infernoscope to have passed into the afterlife.”

I heard movement from behind me. “If that were true —” Amaryllis began.

“It is,” said Fallatehr.

“There would be metaphysical implications of that,” said Amaryllis. “If the souls of those in hell could be manipulated by means on Aerb we —”

“They cannot,” said Fallatehr.

“Why not?” asked Amaryllis.

“The principle of planar disjunction,” said Fallatehr. “It was the talk of the Guild of the Essential Soul, prior to the subjugation and death of ninety percent of its members when Manifest’s exclusion zone was created.” He seemed slightly wistful for a moment. “Obviously I had no ability to conduct novel research on planar disjunction from within Amoureux, and I was not allowed the courtesy of taking a copy of the relevant studies into the penitentiary, but all available evidence pointed to the fact that the soul was, in fact, incapable of crossing the planar boundary.” He waved his hand. “Much of this is tangential to the subject at hand.”

“Har har,” I said, raising my deformed hand slightly.

“We might think of the bones as intermediaries,” said Fallatehr. “If the soul is a complicated book of exceptional length, the bones are men who study that book and give answers to those who seek them. Each has a deep connection to the soul, and is conversant on its own area.”

“But when you burn a bone, you affect the soul,” I said. “So it wouldn’t seem like a very good metaphor to me.”

“Metaphors are rarely good,” said Fallatehr with a shrug. “We — I say we, but there are by your accounting few left alive who might have given me a proper conversation on the subject — don’t understand precisely what happens when bone magic is used. It appears to affect both donor and recipient at the level of the soul, with other effects as a result of that, but the actual mechanism is opaque, despite the numerous tests we’ve done.”

“Such as?” I asked.

Fallatehr gave me a grin. “I do not believe that you would appreciate such scientific pursuits,” he said. He was watching me, and I tried not to give anything away, but I had no clue whether I was successful or not. “I have given you enough, tell me more about your ability, and its working. Have the things that I’ve told you measurably improved your ability with soul magic?”

“No,” I said. I realized only too late that I should have waited before answering, or given a non-committal answer. A quick answer of no indicated that I had some indication of when my power was working, which was information that I hadn’t intended to leak. (But at least I realized that I had leaked it. There was something about Fallatehr that scared me, beyond what I knew of him, something that made me think that he was reading an enormous amount into everything I said and did, and I worried that I was giving things away without even knowing I had done it.)

“I really would like to see whether you are able to repair your hand,” said Fallatehr, leaning back slightly in his chair. “Does my saying that unnerve you so much that you would resist me?”

“No,” I said. If it was a trap, we would just kill him. The odds that my attempt to replace a single bone on my left hand would go so catastrophically that I would need to be rescued by him were very, very low, especially given how much he would have to be pinning on that moment. So long as I didn’t get lured into my own soul, or trapped there, neither of which seemed likely, we didn’t need him, and if either of those things happened, his help would be so untrustworthy that we’d be better off killing him. “I won’t ask you to describe the process, since that would defeat the purpose of your inquiry and I do want to have a working relationship with some level of—” —quid pro quo, is that an expression on Aerb?—“—tit for tat, but what are the risks to me, assuming that I do everything wrong?” I asked.

“Your hands are human, and not perfectly symmetrical,” said Fallatehr. He briefly ran a thin tongue along pointed teeth. “The soul is resilient, and should accommodate for what you will be attempting, but I am willing to admit that it may not, given that you will be using a supernaturally assisted version of the art. In that case, the worst that will happen is that you will lose the hand, but it won’t be something that can’t be fixed through proper soul magic.”

“Uh huh,” I said. Not going to happen. “No other points of failure?”

Fallatehr smiled at me. “Oh, if we’re speaking of possibilities, there are many,” he said. “You’re using a power — unique?”

“Yes,” I said, before even realizing that was a lie. Arthur too.

“You’re using a unique power that only you possess to interface with the root of all magic,” said Fallatehr. “The possibilities are endless, given our mutual areas of ignorance. Perhaps you will attempt to copy over the pattern of a single bone and grab hold of the nerves of your hand instead, accidentally pulling them out and then finding yourself unable to put them back in. It is, I must admit, a possibility, as are many other such scenarios.”

“It would be fixable though,” I said.

“The soul has only a conception of the body,” said Fallatehr. “What is shown in the soul is not what the body is, but what the soul believes is the pattern the body should adhere to. Any damage you do, even removal of the body-conception entirely, could be remedied by a master.”

I frowned slightly at that. I could see his angles, and they weren’t working on me, which I was grateful for. “Amaryllis, Fenn, give me two hours, then if I’m not back out from inside my soul, try your best to wake me.”

I was getting familiar with my soul. It was, in some respects, just another interface, if one that was laid on top of some deeply personal and complicated mechanics. I had always been good at picking up new interfaces, maybe because video games gave me a lot of exposure to switching between them. I zoomed in on the body and then down to look at my right hand, the one that still had the bones in it.

What Fallatehr had said about making novel mistakes was on my mind as I looked through the layers of my body. It didn’t seem like I could accidentally pluck at the wrong thing, because it was possible to change the view so that only the bones were showing. It was all done with the mind, so I was cautious not to think in the direction of change, only observation. I tentatively zoomed closer to the end of my pinky finger, isolating the final bone there, the distal phalanx. I took a breath and then poked it with my mind.

My view changed slightly, showing ghosted images at the very tip of the finger where skin, nails, nerves, fingerprints, and capillaries were, all surrounding the bone itself. I didn’t want to move or change the bone, or do anything to the surrounding tissue, all I wanted was to copy it. There weren’t any options associated with it, and no apparent menus, but from what Fallatehr had said — not that I trusted him — it should be possible to copy it over. I directed my will toward that task, which finally caused a dialogue to appear.

Move / Copy / Modify / Delete

I stared at those options for a bit. Copy was obviously the one that I wanted, but the other three gave me a good guess at the actual failure states for the change I was trying to make. I didn’t know what Fallatehr saw when he looked into his own soul, but I didn’t imagine that it was this, and perhaps he was thinking that I would screw up in such a way that I would need his help; accidentally removing one of the bones from my finger, leaving me without a replacement, or making a modification that I couldn’t undo.

I selected the option to Copy with a thrust of my will, and felt something come into being just beyond my field of vision to the left. Shifting my focus there showed a bone, hovering slightly in the air. I turned back to the skeletal form of my hand, then zoomed out the view and went over to my left hand, where the bones were missing. I looked over to my left, where the bone was, and with a push of will got the same four options again. This time I moved it, using my mind alone, until I had slotted it into place. Another dialog box appeared.

Merge / Conform / Replace / Cancel

I started at that for a moment, trying to work out what those commands meant. The bone still needed to be mirrored, but even then it probably wasn’t going to be correct, because the two halves of my body weren’t exactly the same, just as Fallatehr had said. The options, unfortunately, weren’t terribly descriptive, aside from Cancel. I took a steadying breath, reflexive action that became a startling reminder that I still had a body out there in the real world. I could back out of my soul now and simply ask Fallatehr, but I didn’t want to give anything away to him if I could help it.

It was just one bone, the tip of my pinky, the least important part of me. And if I picked the wrong one, it seemed likely that I could try again, since my right hand was still in perfect working condition. I selected Conform, and saw the bone warp in an instant, perfectly taking the shape of the red outline. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if something was going to happen, but no, it looked just the same as it had on my other pinky finger.

“Okay,” I said, blinking slightly and looking around the barn. “Ropey?” I asked. He formed into a hand and gave me a thumbs up, and I smiled at that.

“It is done?” asked Fallatehr with a raised eyebrow. “So swiftly?”

“I don’t know,” I said, raising my deformed hand. I probed it with bone magic, and could feel it alive once more, connected to my soul. “I need to test it.” I reached into my bandolier and pulled a bone from it, then burned it slowly, focusing the healing energy on my pinky. I saw a change come over it, albeit a minor one, as the bone there made a minor change in shape and the loose skin straightened out. I looked it over carefully, worried that I would see it go white from a lack of circulation, or that something terrible would happen to it.

Quest Progress: Boneitis - You have cured the soul of its affliction, at least in part, and begun to bring your body back to what it once was. The only thing that remains is to finish the job.

Affliction: Drained Bone (x50)

“Congratulations,” said Fallatehr with a nod. “You have accomplished within a single day what men spend years learning.”

“What are the limits?” I asked.

“Limits?” Fallatehr replied.

I licked my lips, trying to think of how to say it. “Was it common, in the time of the Second Empire, to mix soul magic with bone magic? If you can burn out a bone and then replace it like that, it would mean that someone with a foot in both schools would have a renewable resource on hand — so to speak.”

“It was practiced, in the Second Empire,” said Fallatehr. “But soul mages were rare, and most often, it wasn’t worth the time when bones were so widely available.”

“Ah,” I said, relaxing slightly. It was a question of economics, not practicality. I couldn’t trust what Fallatehr said, naturally, but it seemed like the sort of thing we might possibly be able to confirm by either speaking with the crystal that held Amaryllis’ dead great-grandfather, or looking through a few history books. That in turn lowered the chance that Fallatehr was lying about it.

I took the time to do the rest, one at a time because I couldn’t figure out a way to go faster, phalanges and meta-carpals, all twenty-seven bones. This took a fair amount of time, and was relatively tedious while at the same time being somewhat nerve-wracking as I kept thinking about the consequences of making a mistake. When I was finished, I opened my eyes, conferred with Ropey, and then healed my hand, watching it return to normal. Sensation flooded back into it for the first time in weeks.

Affliction: Drained Bones (x23)

And that just left the ribs.

“Thank you,” I said to Fallatehr.

He shrugged. “It was far less work than it had any right to be." He stared at me. "You had inquired about a hypothetical before, how you would deal with a problem without such symmetry to exploit. Not just a hypothetical, if I read you correctly."

"My ribs," I replied. With my hand fixed, I was willing to give him that much.

"All of them?" asked Fallatehr, face blank of expression.

"All of them," I confirmed with a nod. I was tempted to offer up some defense of myself, to say that the situation had been desperate, that I hadn't actually had any training as a bone mage beyond what my power gave me, but that was just my instinct toward justifying myself talking, and there was no sense in telling him things he didn't need to know.

Fallatehr seemed to ponder that for a moment. "Your chest will be more difficult, as it forms the link for your internal organs and there is nothing to take from, but from the pace you’ve been keeping, it should only be a matter of days, at which point our primary business will be concluded.”

“Implying that we have secondary business,” said Amaryllis.

“So far as I am aware, Juniper still needs a teacher,” said Fallatehr. “I have some interest in the endeavor of his education, so long as I am allowed to study him by way of compensation.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not,” said Fenn.

“We’ll have to discuss it as a group,” said Amaryllis. “Privately. In the meantime, I think that’s enough of a lesson for today.”

“We’ve barely started,” I complained. “I’m actually not sure how useful this was, as a lesson.”

“It has been many years since I taught,” said Fallatehr, “But when I did, I always thought it important to understand my pupil.”

“You were a teacher?” I asked, genuinely curious. That didn’t quite fit with my idea of him as a mad scientist.

“There were elements of dysfunction within the Guild of the Essential Soul,” said Fallatehr. “In a better world, those pursuing their own lines of inquiry and study would not have been forced to interact with the neophytes. It was not so segregated as it should have been, and given that I was forced to spend a portion of my time away from actual work, I made some effort to be good at it. There were always one or two pupils who were promising candidates for assistants, and later, peers.” He grinned, without showing his teeth, as he said that.

“You’re saying that you can’t give skills directly?” I asked. “You can’t just … transfer knowledge over to another person?”

“Have you seen that, in your own soul?” asked Fallatehr.

“I spoke to a bone mage who implied that it was possible,” I said, which was a half-truth. “Not that knowledge could be transferred, but that knowledge in some sense existed within some bones, and could be pulled from them.”

“But have you seen it?” asked Fallatehr, leaning forward slightly.

“Yes,” I replied, biting the bullet.

“You don’t want to give away too much of your ability, even with soul magic,” said Fallatehr. “Were that mindset not used against me, I might find it commendable.” He brushed a stray bit of dust off his knee. “To answer your question, it was once possible to transfer skills in such a manner, near the dawn of soul magic. It was excluded before I was born.”

I frowned at that. “I don’t believe the location of that exclusion zone is common knowledge.”

“The zone is a mystery,” said Fallatehr. “All that is known is that a certain thing was possible for a fair amount of time, and impossible afterward. Who, where, or what are not questions that were ever answered in my time. What is left is the ability to carve out such things from someone else, given sufficient training and ample amount of time.”

“And you can teach me how to defend against attacks like that,” I said, watching him. “You said that people were stripped of their skills when they were put into the penitentiary, but you retained your abilities as a soul mage.”

“There are a few methods of defense,” said Fallatehr, “But none that are absolute. In my particular case, I was known to the men who would normally have done the extirpation, and they both respected and feared my skill, including my ability to fight back against them, should our souls have made contact.”

“Mutually assured destruction?” I asked.

“That would be one way of putting it, I suppose,” said Fallatehr. “You and I might reach that point with each other, such that you would no longer fear me.”

“Unless I need to sleep,” I replied.

“Is the tattoo of Kenner’s Eye no longer in use?” asked Fallatehr.

“Its use is more regulated,” said Amaryllis, before I could make a fool of myself. “The specific materials necessary became quite a bit rarer following the Appetency War. Acquiring one for each of us is on our path, but it’s going to take some time.” I nodded at that, though I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

“There are precautions that you can take, to ensure that I have no opportunity to interfere with your soul,” said Fallatehr with a shrug. “Whatever you think my motives might be.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That would go a long way toward creating a working relationship.” I hesitated. “There’s one more thing that would help, which would be your assistance in learning how to access someone else’s soul.”

Fallatehr raised an eyebrow, then glanced at Grak. “No,” he said. He stood up from his chair and I heard the very faint sound of Fenn’s bow being drawn. “Not today. You will not allow me access to your companion, which means that I would be unable to fix any mistakes that you might incidentally make, and if I came in behind you to correct your errors, I might not be able to figure out exactly what was done. It is a more dangerous thing, to touch the soul of another, and I will not have the blame fall to me when a neophyte, even an exceptionally fast learner, makes one of the typical mistakes.”

“Bullshit,” said Fenn.

“Either way, my answer is no,” said Fallatehr. “Think what you’d like. I believe we were concluding here anyway.”

“I don’t want to stay in this place for longer than another day or so,” said Amaryllis. “We have to assume that it’s going to raise some questions that we don’t want to answer. Parsmont isn’t a perfect place for us, but we can go into the city without attracting attention now, and get a place to stay in the longer term.”

Our core group of four (yes, Grak with us) was sitting in the master bedroom. Fenn sat beside me on the bed, with Grak in a heavy wooden rocking chair, his feet dangling above the ground, and Amaryllis standing, pacing slightly.

“So far I think that he’s been of only marginal help,” I said. I glanced at Grak, as I’d done three times now, measuring my words. “It’s only when I hit level 20 that I think he’ll really help me in a concrete, mechanical sense. There wasn’t anything in that conversation that I wouldn’t have been able to figure out on my own, at least as far as soul magic was concerned, though there were a few pieces of historical importance, I guess.”

“You’re assuming it works like that,” said Amaryllis. “We haven’t tested the tutor theory yet.”

“The wording is ‘amateur training’,” I replied. “‘Amateur’ must mean something, otherwise it would just say ‘training’.”

“Maybe,” said Fenn with a shrug. “Or maybe we shouldn’t be trusting the game that got us into this whole mess in the first place.”

Amaryllis gave me a pointed look that I was fairly sure was meant to indicate that she hadn’t forgotten about the non-anima in the basement.

“Well I’m pretty sure without the game we would all be dead,” I said. “So let’s give it a little credit.”

“I would still be alive,” said Grak.

“Would you have assaulted Aumann’s tower on your own?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I would have waited until I had a good opportunity. If you had died, I would not have met you. I would still be waiting.”

“Okay, whatever,” I said. That response probably wasn’t the way to increase his loyalty, but I wasn’t willing to play on a strictly strategic level, not when he was going to be contradictory for no reason, or act like teaming up with us wasn’t a good thing.

“We’ll go into Parsmont, keep our heads low, and find a more permanent, less unconventional place to stay,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t want to leave any single person alone with Fallatehr, and obviously there are lingering concerns about Grak’s condition” —lingering being a diplomatic way of putting it—
“so I’m going to suggest that the four of us go into Parsmont together, leaving Fallatehr here. That means taking eyes off him, but that’s going to be something that we’re going to have to accept.”

“So that he can soulfuck the neighbors?” asked Fenn. She gave a slight frown of thought. “Wait, that would imply that it was consensual, soulrape the neighbors?”

“How big a problem that would be depends on what we believe about the things that he’s said,” replied Amaryllis. “If he’s unable to imbue someone with skills, and changes revert back after some length of time, then I think it’s a risk worth taking.”

“I’m not sure we’re in a position where we can rely on him for truth,” I replied. “I mean, yes, I don’t think that he can completely overwrite a person in short order, because if it were possible to do that the Second Empire would have looked a lot different. I also think that he probably can’t just skill boost, given that the elves we fought alongside weren’t much better than we were, and neither were the pelehr, and to assume that he was simply orchestrating it all to provide cover for a lie is … I don’t want to say too paranoid, but it seems like too complex and uncertain of a plan. That’s especially as opposed to something like him saying that changes wear off, which is a pretty easy and painless lie to tell with potentially large benefits to him.” I again glanced at Grak, who made eye contact with me that quickly grew uncomfortable.

“You’ll be able to see into Grak’s soul soon,” said Amaryllis. “Once you do, that should clear him of suspicion and we can let him in on what we know. If the four of us are going into the city together, you can use your free time to practice with the soul, which might be enough to look at Grak’s soul without needing instruction.”

“In which case we can slit Fallatehr’s throat,” said Fenn. “Easy peasy.” She glanced at the bottle, which she’d set out in the sunlight. “All we really need in town is a place to stay, right? Somewhere that’s going to let lessons and training get on without too much risk of anyone stopping us? Because if that’s the case, I think Joon and I should handle that part while Grak and Mary teleport somewhere to store this bottle.”

“I don’t like the risks of teleportation,” said Amaryllis. “That two-hour window where we don’t have a failsafe escape plan makes me uncomfortable. But ... if we have some time to find a suitable place to come back into Parsmont, we should be able to make that work.”

“Agreed?” asked Fenn, looking to me and Grak.

“It’s reasonable,” said Grak. “I can put up wards in order to protect the bottle. You’re most worried about sunlight?”

“Yup,” said Fenn. “Without the baby sun in there, we should at least be keeping it out of the dark.”

“I’m not sure that it matters,” I replied. “In theory, only a small amount of sunlight is actually hitting the bottle anyway, and that’s getting spread out over a square mile, so …” I trailed off, at first because I was doing the math, and then because the math was grim. “Depending on how the magic of the bottle works, it might have already been through the equivalent of two days without sun.” I wasn’t sure that the bottle didn’t have some secondary magical effect though, because it hadn’t felt like only a fraction of the light was hitting us, and I didn’t quite believe that we’d actually been shrunk down.

“Okay,” said Amaryllis, briefly touching the hilt of her sword. “Then we’re good to go, two hours’ time waiting for the key to recharge should give me some time to contact my ancestor again and try to get some confirmation about the things Fallatehr has said about the soul.”

“I’d like to talk to Valencia before we go,” I said. “She’s —” I glanced at Grak. He was already in the loop on that one, though I'd be looping him in a little more by leaking information. “One of us.”

“I’ll come with,” said Fenn, hopping up off the bed.

“No, but thank you,” I said. “I do really enjoy your company, but —”

Fenn waved me off. “Understood, I can be a pain. But if she’s going to be one of the gang, then I do need some time with her at some point.”

“She’s not going to be ‘one of the gang’,” said Amaryllis, making quotes in the air, with one hand still around her sword hilt. “Not unless we figure out a way to deal with the possession problem. Every time you speak to her, or even speak in her presence, that’s information that goes to a large number of devils intent on causing whatever pain and destruction they can. And if a demon ever gets into her, you’ll have to fight it, which means that she needs to be manacled at all times.”

“But she’s only got the strength of a fairly weak human woman, right?” I asked.

“Imagine a soldier training for thousands of years, in a wide variety of bodies, all with perfect killing intent,” said Amaryllis. “That’s, admittedly, the worst case. I still need to pick up that book on infernal topology.”

“Do you actually think that I’m in danger?” I asked.

Amaryllis hesitated. “I want to ensure that you take this seriously and don’t put yourself in a situation where you underestimate the danger that she poses.”

“I won’t,” I replied.

“I’m not sure that increasing her loyalty is a good idea either,” said Amaryllis. “There’s clearly some connection between our souls, and I don’t want you to make a connection to a devil.”

I frowned slightly. “In theory she doesn’t have a soul,” I said. We were getting dangerously close to the sort of thing that we couldn’t talk about in front of Grak. “But I’ll try my best not to be too nice. All I want is more information. The game inserted her for a reason.”

Chapter 26 - Seeing Red

I went down into the basement, moving cautiously, the Anyblade held as a knife in my right hand and my left being used as a torch. It felt so good to have two working hands again, and sometimes I moved the fingers of my left hand just to feel them moving. So far as I could see, I was no worse the wear for the soul magic I’d done to myself, and I was already thinking about burning through those bones again as part of the normal course of combat, which would free up my bandolier for more interesting bones, ones with more specific purposes, as opposed to the cow bones that traditionally sat there. My chest was obviously far more important than my hand, given that it was probably going to end up killing me if left untreated, but I would take a victory where I could find it.

“There’s a light switch,” said Valencia, as soon as I was down the steep stairs and into the basement. She was handcuffed to a pipe coming out of a large boiler, looking miserable. The light of my flaming hand gave her a warmer look than I thought was natural for her pale skin and white hair. When I looked down, I saw that she was wearing one shoe, a slipper that Fenn had given her. I had tried to make it comfortable for her, with a blanket beneath her and some food in case she got hungry. That had netted me another point of loyalty, putting me at 9, the cusp of getting Twinned Souls with someone who didn’t have a soul.

I turned around and looked for the light switch, trying to keep her within my field of view at the same time. There was plenty of space between the two of us, enough that I wasn’t worried about her attacking, but I was trying to take what Amaryllis had said seriously, even if it really seemed unlikely that anything a demon in Valencia’s body could do would injure me in any meaningful way.

I let the flame go out when I turned on the light switch, and looked down to see a slipper lying on the ground. I picked it up and looked at it, then lofted it toward Valencia.

“Is there a reason you turned the light off?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she replied, slipping her shoe back on. “Sometimes when there’s no one around they’re mean to me. Mostly they don’t think I’m a person.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s … I wonder why that is.”

“Because I don’t have a soul,” said Valencia, keeping her head down and not meeting my eyes.

“I don’t really think souls are actually that important,” I said.

She raised her eyes to look at me. “They are,” she said.

“You’re sort of proof that they aren’t,” I replied. “You’re … a muggle, basically, gated from performing magic, but you still have a personality and memories, skills, presumably, or the ability to learn some skills — do you have any skills?”

Valencia shook her head.

“Well, you can speak, that’s a skill,” I said. “I don’t imagine that you got much of an education, uh, growing up, but we can work on that.”

“Do you love me?” she asked, watching me with watery eyes.

“Uh,” I said, taking a half step back.

“Because I love you,” she said. “You’re so sweet and kind and understanding, more than anyone has ever been ever in my life, and I keep worrying that I’m going to lose you, and that must be what love is.”

I looked her over, wondering whether she was possessed.

“You’re wondering whether I’m possessed right now,” said Valencia, with a manic smile slowly creeping onto her face. “I suppose I’ll save you the trouble just this once and tell you that I am.”

“Oh,” I said, frowning. “I’ll confess I’ve never spoken to a devil before.”

“You have,” said the thing wearing Valencia’s skin, the smile quite wide now. “Through this creature’s nubile body.” She began undressing, though she was still in manacles, chained to a boiler pipe, so this didn’t go very smoothly.

“I’m not clear on why you would tell me that you’re a devil,” I said, watching it puppet her body. I had a decision to make, about whether or not to look away as it pulled up her dress. Basic Midwestern modesty demanded it, but that would let the devil know that I cared, and not just this current one, but all future ones. And on top of that, the real Valencia was aware of what happened while she was possessed, and she would see me looking away, and know that I was embarrassed or ashamed.

“So why tell me?” I asked.

“It’s true that she thinks she loves you,” said the devil. Having gotten the dress part of the way up her midriff, it was working on moving the panties down. “Always best to say the things that are hurtful and true, they stick in best. She saw your face when I said it, saw your reaction to that love, saw the gears turning in your head, all the sort of heartbreaking stuff that normally gets to her.”

“So you do consider her a person?” I asked.

“No,” said the devil with a smile that didn’t seem like it belonged on Valencia’s face. “But you do, so it works either way.” It had slid her underwear down and was flashing me. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Leave? Try to restrain her and make it stop? It hadn’t occurred to me that having a gag in her mouth was probably a mercy for Valencia, when a possession came.

“It seems so basic,” I found myself saying.

“Basic?” asked the devil.

“You’re trying to cause pain and hurt in the world,” I said. “Your only avenues for doing that during a possession are manipulation of the body or injection of information, even if that information is false.”

The devil controlling Valencia perked up slightly. “Oh?” it asked.

“The problem is, you’re temporarily inhabiting a body that I know can sometimes house devils, and I know that the information coming from that body is sometimes inaccurate, so … why should I listen?” I asked. “From a strategic perspective … is it just that devils can’t coordinate with each other? Is that why you don’t make an effort to plan for the long-term?”

Valencia stopped exposing herself and her dress fell back down. She looked away from me, back toward the boiler. “It left,” she said. “They don’t like the second guessing, I don’t think.”

“Okay,” I said with a nod, not knowing whether to believe that.

“And you don’t believe me,” she said. She turned back to me with watery eyes. “You don’t believe me because I’m not even my own person!” She started crying, leaning against the boiler pipe we’d cuffed her to. I waited, watching her, knowing that if she was really Valencia there was something that I should be saying to her to make things better, but also knowing that it probably wasn’t Valencia.

“I’m sorry, Valencia,” I said.

She looked up, then leaned over to dry away her tears with her chained-up hands. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” she said.

“I’m sorry that this world is the way that it is,” I said. Some of that is probably my fault. “I’m sorry that we don’t have a better solution than to put you in manacles in the basement.” Yet. “I think one of the solutions to this problem is that while there’s unreliable information transfer from you, information transfer from us will always get to you, because you’re aware of what happens when you’re possessed. That doesn’t really help you to effectively communicate with us, in a real sense, but when I say things, I can still be sure that I’m saying them to Valencia, even if someone else might be in control of the ears.”

“Why do you care about me?” she asked.

That was a loaded question, especially given that it might be coming from a devil, or that a devil might hear the answer in the future and use it against me. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I do care.”

(The true answer was probably that I was being manipulated by a game that knew which buttons to press in order to get me to care. I cared more about her because she was clearly young, and more because she was a girl (as fucked up as that might have been, from a gender politics standpoint). The most important thing was probably just that she was right in front of me, but I didn’t think that I was good enough at the social stuff to say any of that in a way that would come across well. “Because you’re here, in front of me, activating pathos, with no one else in the world who cares for you.”)

“Okay.” She nodded. “I care about you too, because you’re one of the only people that has ever been nice to me. But I don’t really know you.”

I nodded. “And I don’t really know you either. It’s going to be hard, not knowing what’s coming from you and what’s coming from them.” I paused slightly. “Does Fallatehr know of a way to figure out whether or not you were possessed?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head slightly. “When he needed to know something from me he would just ask me over and over again and try to average out the responses.”

“Huh,” I said. I had no idea whether that was true, but it was something that I could cross-check with Fallatehr. “Well, failing that—”—I hesitated, wondering whether it was a good idea, then wondering whether pushing her loyalty up was a good idea, but I didn’t think that the game would fuck me over for helping someone, given the cowardice penalties I’d consistently gotten for not helping girls in danger, and the game stuff had always worked in my favor before—“—if only one direction of our communication is reliable, maybe I can tell you a bit about myself?”

“They’re listening in,” said Valencia. “When they come they’ll be able to hurt you with the things that you say.”

“I know,” I said with a shrug. “It’s not going to be anything earth-shattering, just small things.”

“Small things?” she asked.

“Things I would be okay with the devils knowing, if it meant that you could have someone to talk to,” I replied. “Like … my mom did most of the cooking in our house, but Dad was always responsible for the big event meals, when we’d have people over for barbeque or a big”— Thanksgiving?—
“holiday meal or something, and it was always this point of tension between the two of them, because he expected her to clean up after him. The weird thing was that it always came to a head afterward, when it came time for the cleaning, instead of before, when Dad was in the process of making all the dirty dishes.”

“No one has ever cooked for me,” said Valencia.

“Really?” I asked. “I guess the prison fed you?”

She nodded. “Mother said that there were gardens and magic that kept us fed.”

“I — I didn’t know that you had a mother,” I replied. “I mean most people have mothers, unless they’re dwarves, I guess, but the circumstances of your birth aren’t really that clear to me. Fallatehr seemed to indicate that he made you.”

Valencia nodded again. “My mother was in the prison with him. He changed her to be like him, as much as he could, and then got her pregnant.”

“Ah,” I said, trying to keep my face from betraying any emotion. Then I relaxed somewhat, because that wasn’t really the way that I thought things should go between us, not if she was going to be a companion. “I find that sort of tragic.” She was silent, looking at me with her big red eyes. “It’s — the ideal, as I see it, anyway, is that children should be an expression of the love between two people, the closest that you can get to—”— mingling your souls—
“I don’t know, I just wish that you’d had better.” I hesitated before continuing on. “You’re more well-spoken than I would have expected.”

“Am I?” she asked. “I don’t feel like I speak well. Fallatehr put my mother in charge of making sure that I was normal, so that he could talk to me when he needed to. He made her like me, but it wore off sometimes, because he was juggling too many people.”

I nodded along at that, wishing that I could trust the information she was giving me about Fallatehr’s limits. That wasn’t the point of this conversation though, and I had to keep that in mind.

We talked for some time, almost entirely about innocuous things. I never mentioned Earth, or anything that was too close to Earth. I certainly didn’t mention the game, or the Dungeon Master, and I tried my best to steer clear of anything relating to my other traveling companions, because I didn’t want to put them at risk. Instead, I talked about the places I’d seen on Aerb, sharing some of what I liked about the world, trying to describe particularly vivid scenes as well as I could remember them. Valencia asked questions, usually not very deep ones, but enough to make me feel like I wasn’t just talking to a wall.

“Do you really like me?” asked Valencia as I got up to go.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “We haven’t known each other long enough, and there’s the whole complication of the devils. But … I think this was pleasant, and I don’t really see why devils would want it to be pleasant, so, yeah.” But as soon as the words were out of my mouth I could think of reasons. They could be playing the long game, or setting me up for a punch to the gut, trying to gain my trust or lower my guard. “We’ll do this again, and maybe make some headway.”

“Until you’re finished with Fallatehr,” said Valencia.

“Oh,” I replied. “No, I had intended to take you into my care.”

Loyalty increased: [Null Pointer Exception] lvl 14!

Companion Passive Unlocked: [Unknown Reference Error]!

Consulting …

Rebooting …

Loyalty increased: Valencia the Red lvl 14!

Companion Passive Unlocked: Infernal Capture!

The messages came through quickly, piling up on each other, almost so fast that I couldn’t read one before the next was pushed out of the way. I stared at the last message, and the words ‘Infernal Capture’, trying to parse it. When I looked up at Valencia, she was looking at her hands.

“What happened?” she asked, looking up at me.

“Uh,” I said. “Did something happen?”

“It’s still inside me,” she replied, looking back down at her hands, then back up at me. “I’m still possessed, but it’s … you were lying to me, when you asked whether something happened, you know that something happened, and you had something to do with it.”

I stared at her. “How do you know that?” I asked slowly. Something had changed about her. Obviously I’d expected that to be one of the natural outcomes of her gaining Twinned Souls, given that she was nearly useless as a party member, but she’d gotten some kind of different thing instead, and I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. Whether Infernal Capture was a good or bad thing for her (or me) was very ambiguous.

“I don’t know!” she said, sounding helpless and pained. She stopped and watched me. “You knew that this might happen to me,” she said, slightly awed. “You’ve been waiting for some kind of change, but not the possessions, something else, and this is … not what you expected, and you’re trying to figure out whether it’s good or bad for … us. Us?”

“Where’s this information coming from?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm and steady.

“I’m thinking like one of them,” said Valencia, stepped back, catching the chain of her manacles on the pipe. “I’m being clever in the way that they always were, it’s … I can feel it inside of me, still wearing me, like I’m its glove, but … but I’m the one in control, moving the hand inside me. Feeding — feeding? — feeding on it. On the devil there.” She looked at me. “You don’t believe me. You think that it might be a trick the devil is pulling.”

“It’s a possibility,” I said. “Look … if this is real, then I think that it’s probably better that Fallatehr doesn’t know about it. Can you — would you hide it?”

“I could,” said Valencia with a nod. “With this inside of me, I —” She stopped. “And if it leaves, he never actually trusted me, if you’re going to kill him and take me with you —” Her words were coming out in a rush, sentences and thoughts half-formed before being abandoned.

“I’m not going to kill him,” I said.

“You’re lying,” said Valencia, looking me over. “But you’re lying because you don’t want me to leak it back to him, and I think that’s probably okay.”

“The devil is helping you to think?” I asked.

Valencia nodded, swallowing hard.

“Okay,” I said. “Uh, give me a few seconds.” I closed my eyes before waiting for a response, waiting three seconds until I had the character sheet up, then quickly moving over to the companions section.

Valencia the Red, Loyalty lvl 14

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.

And there, just below the biography:

Infernal Capture: Valencia is a loyal companion, now properly part of your kharass, though she is still without a soul. The non-anima is grasping, reaching, an unnatural construct trying to find its way in the world. Power has, for the first time in her life, found its way into her hands.

I opened my eyes and looked at her. Before, her character bio had displayed the same null reference exception, but now it was filled in, which seemed like it was good news. The message about the game rebooting itself, well, that was more troubling, as was the message about consulting, but whatever had happened, I had no more information on it than that. I closed my eyes again, this time to dip into my soul.

I found Valencia’s line almost immediately, coming off of my soul like the ones for Amaryllis and Fenn, but on following it, I found the end twisting and turning in the wind, leading off into nothing. I frowned at that, then dropped out from soul-vision to look at Valencia again.

“Take me with you,” she said.

“I can’t,” I replied. “Not right now, not without raising questions from Fallatehr, questions that I wouldn’t want him figuring out the answer to.” I didn’t want to leave her in this basement if she’d just leveled up, but didn’t really see that I had much of an option. My hope was that Fallatehr would just stay away from her; I would place one of my last vines around the door as a precaution, though I didn't know what their range was.

“You’re going to come back for me,” said Valencia. “You’re going to kill him once he’s shown you what he knows.”

“You’re saying that like you know it for a fact,” I replied.

“It’s written on you,” said Valencia, staring at me in wonder. “Is this what it’s like, for a devil to see people?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I do still need to go, but I’ll help you to figure it out when I come back.”

“And you are coming back,” said Valencia, nodding as though she knew this as a fact. “You actually do like me. You think of me as ...” She hesitated, disappointed. “A sister.” Confusion crossed her face. For all that she’d claimed to be able to read me like a book, her own emotions were as plain as day. Whatever the devil inside her was doing, it wasn’t giving her the ability to lie. Or, wait …

“Try lying to me,” I said.

“About what?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

“Anything,” I said. “Something that we both know is false.” I touched my breastplate. “Tell me it’s red with black streaks.”

“Why?” asked Valencia, the confusion apparent on her face. “I thought you wanted me to lie? What color does it look like to you?”

I looked down, then up, staring at her. Her confusion faded away to a wide smile, and she gripped the pipe she was chained to, having little other way to express her excitement. “I did it!” she said. “I know what it feels like now, to be the one to do it, to say things that aren’t at all true and just, you believed me!”

I nodded. “You’re taking the devil’s power, somehow,” I said.

“I told you,” said Valencia, speaking fast again, “I’m the glove it fit its hand into, but now that hand is mine, because I’m its glove.”

I understood that as a metaphor, but not how it worked in practical terms, but the practicalities of demonic possession hadn’t been clear before they’d been upended. “So was Grak touched or not?”

Valencia froze. “Yes,” she said. “What I said, last night, that was the truth. I was possessed when I said it, but it’s the truth.”

“So you lied to me before,” I replied.

“I — I didn’t know that you were going to save me, I thought that you would leave, like he always said would happen if anyone wanted to take me,” said Valencia. “And he knew that you wouldn’t know, if the devils let it slip out, what was the truth and what wasn’t, it was, he had such plans and to go against them —” She stopped, watching me again. “You’re not upset.”

“I’m not sure that I trust you,” I replied. “But I trust you more now than when I came down here, and I think that’s a good platform for us to start from, whatever has happened in the past. I’m not going to be angry about you not showing instant loyalty to me.”

“Okay,” said Valencia, in a way that was totally unconvincing. She shifted slightly, watching me. “Okay,” she said again, this time in a way that showed relief and acceptance. I couldn’t tell whether she was processing what I had said, or whether she’d decided to lie to me, but I turned away before my face could betray that thought.

“I’ll try not to be too long,” I said as I took my first step up the basement stairs.

“I’m going to be better, when you get back,” said Valencia. A quick look back showed that she was standing there, looking at her hands.

I worried about how much better she was going to be, but kept that thought private.

Chapter 27 - In Mutual Congress

The farmhouse had come with two cars, one that had been taken by Fallatehr’s people, the other of which we used to drive to Parsmont. Halfway there, while we were still in farmland, Fenn stopped the car to let Amaryllis and Grak out so that they could take a walk over to one of the lines of thick trees that served as a windbreak for the fields and teleport out without having to worry about anyone seeing them when they came back. Amaryllis took the leaf-cloak with her, and following some deliberation in the car, Ropey stayed with me, on the theory that Ropey technically belonged to Amaryllis, and she could compel him to lie. This wasn’t something that she had mentioned when I’d woken up in the morning, which made me slightly uneasy. I’d been thinking of him as mine, or if not mine, then fully independent. It wasn’t a logistical problem, because I could just look into her soul if I needed to, but it was still disconcerting.

I didn’t tell Amaryllis about Valencia, partly because I didn’t want to have to push Grak out of hearing range again, which itself was an information leak, and partly because I didn’t want to have to hear her get on my case about having pushed Valencia’s loyalty up so high.

“She’s probably going to tell you that it was dangerous and stupid,” said Fenn after I’d told her everything. “Which is a fair point, but I’m not sure I’d agree, since the game doesn’t seem like it actively wants you to fail, it just likes to torture you.”

“That doesn’t seem like it’s a good thing,” I replied.

“But that’s the basic thing between the DM and the players, I thought,” said Fenn, keeping her eyes on the road. This was my first time inside an Aerbian car, which seemed too narrow and had that weird bump on the hood that seemed like less of an obstruction from the inside. “You want the players to get roughed up, but then they come through all the pain, mutilation, and horror triumphant, having gotten the girl and slain a dragon.”

“Usually you don’t get the girl,” I replied. “Not in my campaigns, anyway, it always felt weird. And you weren’t actually feeling the pain of the characters, or anything like that, it was all make believe, not torture.”

“I think torture is a strong word for this scenario,” said Fenn with a frown. “I mean, you have me, right?”

“Fenn, light of my life, fire of my soul, you are the furthest thing from torture,” I replied. I reached over and laid a hand on her thigh. “I didn’t mean to say that you’re not lovely, because you know that I think you are, it’s just … I was dropped out of a plane into a land of the undead, so maybe my view of my role in Aerb is a bit warped.”

“Speaking of fire of your soul,” said Fenn. She snapped her fingers, and flame came out from the tips of them. “I got that business working while you were having your secret meeting with another woman. Out of the view of our dwarf friend.”

“I’m impressed,” I said with a nod.

“You’re not that impressed,” said Fenn, letting the fire go out. “You got it in two minutes of being told it was a thing.” Her eyes stayed on the road.

“No, I am impressed, it’s just … when I saw the description of Symbiosis I thought that it would be a little bit more spectacular than that,” I replied. “I thought you would go from zero to ten in a matter of seconds.”

“Well, whatever,” said Fenn. “I’ve got the blood thing working, the bone thing working, —”

“That too?” I asked, actually surprised this time.

“Yup,” said Fenn. “I pretended to be cleaning up some garbage, which probably would have been suspicious if Grak knew me better.”

“I thought he knew you pretty well,” I said.

“Well, it’s not like he would be able to make a guess just based on that,” said Fenn. “I’m still holding out hope that your little missy isn’t right about him.”

I squeezed her thigh once. “Do we need to talk about that?” I asked. “Are you … jealous?”

“Your darling Fenn?” asked Fenn, putting a hand to her chest to show just how shocked she was. She let it drop when I didn’t smile. “She’s Joonbait,” she said. “And it’s not like there wasn’t already competition. I’m already dealing with not being the prettiest maiden in all the land, I didn’t really want to be out-competed on two fronts.”

“Ah,” I said. Amaryllis. “You know that’s nothing that you have to worry about, right?”

“Yeah,” said Fenn. She reached down and laid her hand on top of my own. “I just, really, really like you. And it’s different for elves. They don’t have dating. The idea of an elf trying out a relationship to see whether or not it’s going to work is … well, there’s a reason that they don’t really like other species that much, and a lot of it has to do with the very specific elf way of doing things. You don’t practice swinging a sword until you become proficient, you do it right the first time, and you do it the same way, the perfect way, every time after that. Marriage, for an elf, is just slotting into someone’s life, perfectly and completely, without second guessing or shopping around like humans do.”

“And that’s why Fallatehr is an abomination of an elf,” I said with a nod. “He’s willing to fail, like a human would.”

“I don’t really want to talk about him right now,” said Fenn. She gripped the steering wheel hard until her knuckles turned white, and I stayed silent. “I used to think that a lot of the elves were faking it, you know?”

“I was kind of wondering that,” I said. “People say in public that they aren’t picking up the sword until they can make the perfect cut, but that’s not the whole picture, because a lot of them are training in private away from prying eyes, or fathers are helping sons, and it’s more about a culture of not appearing to need practice or training. But you’re saying it’s not that. They just … meditate on doing whatever it is they want to do, or something like that, and then do it.”

Fenn nodded. “I tried to fake it,” she said. “I got caught a few times, then stopped really trying, which naturally meant that everyone hated me for my imperfection, not that they wouldn’t have anyway, because I was visibly imperfect.” She bit her lip and leaned forward slightly to peer at another car as it passed us. “I feel like if you were an elf I would find myself just constantly explaining how humans do things. Seems like it must be annoying.”

“It lets me know more about you,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t tend to like the stuff I hear about elves, but I like hearing you talk about what it was like for you, growing up in your small slice of this plane.”

“Anyway, I was coming around to a point,” said Fenn, glancing over at me briefly.

“Were you?” I asked.

“My point was, I never really expected that I would ever have a relationship like married elves have with each other,” she said. She let that hang in the air for a bit, watching the other traffic. We were getting close to Parsmont proper now, the big hill of a city, which meant more attention on the road.

“You said that elf marriage wasn’t really about romance,” I replied.

“I didn’t mean that,” said Fenn. “I meant, more, it’s like these two elves just fit together suddenly, they snap into place and then can’t ever be taken apart, and it’s not about the romance thing because it just is.”

“That sounds really romantic,” I said.

“Does it?” asked Fenn, glancing over at me again. “I always thought of romance as the human stuff, the courting and the invitations, opening up to someone, having them judge you, judging them back, I don’t have a lot of experience with any of it, but … I always thought for humans it was trying to find someone whose good points overwhelm their bad points, or deluding yourself into thinking that’s the case, and that’s romance in a nutshell.”

“That … is not a good description of romance,” I said.

“Well, whatever,” replied Fenn. “Not really my point, my point was that I never felt like I would have someone that I fit with, someone who could be the tenon to my mortise, and I feel like I’ve found that in you, but I keep thinking of all the ways that I’m probably wrong.” I had no idea what a mortise and tenon were, but I’d gotten good at letting words specific to Aerb float by me.

“If there’s anything that I’ve done to make you think—” I began.

“No,” said Fenn. “No, it’s, I think I’m thinking about how useless I was in the prison, and then the upgrade I got last night that I don’t feel like I earned.”

“You feel inadequate?” I asked. “You, of all people? You’re literally the best team member I have.”

“That’s very sweet of you to say,” replied Fenn. “But most of that is because I’m the most loyal to you, and most of that is that you decided that you liked me enough for us to have a relationship, and it’s that I don’t really feel like I deserve. Even if it’s destined to end horribly. Maybe especially if it’s going to end horribly.” She peered over at one of the signs. “This is where we park.” She turned the wheel and took us down a street, slower now that we were within the city, and eventually turned into a large parking garage, where an attendant held up a hand, telling us to wait. “So our plans for this trip—”

“Are we going to just leave it at that?” I asked. “You don’t feel like you’re worth my time, and we’re just supposed to move on from that? That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about, I won’t let those harsh words go unchallenged.”

Fenn sighed, not seeming to take any joy or comfort from what I’d said. “I spent a decade looting one of the tamer exclusion zones,” she said. “I was a bit player. And now I’m, you know, sitting in a car with a guy who, an hour ago, accidentally turned off the world and then started it back up again.”

“Not quite how it happened,” I replied. “And it’s not like I was someone special before coming here. I was probably one of the least important people in Bumblefuck, Kansas, and my home town wasn’t in any way important to the state, which in turn was, you know — they called them flyover states because for the most part, the only interaction you had with them was to look down during a plane trip and then maybe think ‘man that’s a flat and boring state’.”

Loyalty increased: Fenn lvl 21!

“Also, loyalty can go above 20,” I added.

“Thank you for making me feel better,” said Fenn. She gave me a warm smile. “We’re going to have to find some way to, ah, grind that loyalty up, if you know what I mean. And I do believe that we are owed our first actual date, which Parsmont can hopefully provide.”

“Okay, so your plan is to bus people in?” I asked Craig. “How do you plan on doing that?”

“We pay them a silver for their time, get big old wagons, and bring them in to vote for us,” said Craig. “We’re the equivalent of millionaires with fuck-you money, almost all of which is liquid.”

“No, it’s illiquid, tied up in weapons, armor, and other magical equipment,” replied Reimer. “If you’re playing right, you shouldn’t have more than a few percent of your money as gold.”

“Fine, fine,” said Craig. “We’re billionaires with millions in money that we’re not doing anything else with, because we don’t have mortgages or children or pay taxes.”

“Don’t give Joon ideas,” laughed Reimer.

“The minute someone assesses a tax on my looting is the minute I start a one-man civil war,” said Craig. “I will burn this fucking place to the ground.”

“Noted, in case I need you guys to start a civil war,” I replied. “You’d be non-state actors, making warfare a little hard, but … okay. With this bussing plan, has it occurred to you that other people might already have tried it?”

“NPCs aren’t that smart,” said Craig.

“It’s literally the first thing that anyone would try,” I replied.

“Not me,” said Tom. “Wait, I ask the fish guy about that, whether I can get paid a silver for my vote.”

“You shouldn’t be able to,” said Arthur. “Votes are transitory. I mean I guess if you can see the voting jewels, or vewels, if you will, in your head, then maybe people could confirm that vewels had been transferred over, before the people — wait, do the jewels stay voted when the person who voted leaves the area?”

“They do,” I said. “Once transferred, the only thing that can remove them is the person who did the transfer taking them back with a thought.”

“Even death?” asked Tom.

“Please, please don’t get any ideas when I say yes, you keep them even if the person who gave them dies,” I replied.

“In an unrelated note, we should kill people after they vote for us,” said Reimer.

“How’s that going to work, if they can revoke the vote as the sword is coming toward their throat?” asked Arthur.

“Threaten their families, obviously,” said Reimer with a snort.

“What’s your alignment?” I asked with a frown. I knew damned well what his alignment was.

“I’m trying to think like a criminal would,” said Reimer, using his most pious voice. “Obviously those dastardly scum would try any dirty trick in the book, and part of my job is to anticipate and then stop them.”

“I don’t think the bussing thing is going to work,” said Arthur. “The transitory nature of the jewels makes it too unwieldy and kind of unworkable on the larger scale, because you’d need to verify every transaction personally, and then also have to have some way to not have people take their vote back if they’re ever in Parsmont again.”

“Also, it’s not what you’re doing here,” I replied. “You’re here to retrieve the MacGuffin.”

“Which we’re under no time pressure to do,” said Arthur.

“So, Homeland —”

“Homeleron,” I interjected.

“So, Homeleron,” said Tom. “Who are the top vote getters in Parsmont? Is it like a Mount Olympus type of deal, with a bunch of people everyone loves, or is it more like a, what do you call it.” He made a shape with his hands.

“Bell curve?” asked Arthur.

Tom snapped his fingers and pointed at Arthur. “Yes, exactly.”

“It wouldn’t be normal distribution,” said Arthur. “I mean, it could be, with the center being something like a hundred jewels or whatever we start with, but the lumps of distribution probably look different.” He turned to me. “Power law?”

“Homeleron doesn’t know what that is,” I replied. “But he will tell you that in Parsmont, there are those vested with the power of their peers, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, but almost all of the power is in the hands of only two, Abswifth and Bendon, not so much people as appointments that people ascend to, two powers that keep each other in check.”

“Cool,” said Reimer. “Let’s kill them.” He smiled at me. “Is what I would say if I were a villain.”

We left the car at the parking garage, which wasn’t actually a ramp at all, instead being a giant motorized contraption that put cars into specific slots by attendants who transferred over a small wooden chit. I didn’t really trust any of it, mostly because it looked like it had been built in the 1930s, but the car was a very recent purchase, and we didn’t have to be in the garage while it was moving things around, so I held my tongue.

“So what are the sights to see in Parsmont?” I asked as we strolled down the street.

“No clue,” replied Fenn. “All we really need is a book and an inconspicuous place to stay. I probably know less about this place than you do. You feel that thing in the back of your head?”

‘That thing’ was the two depressions I could feel in the back of my mind, one filled with jewels and the other empty. Most of the time I wasn’t aware of them; I could forget about them in the same way that I could forget about the fact that I was constantly seeing my nose in peripheral vision. I’d been able to feel it back at the farm, but less concretely than I could in the city. Parsmont as I’d constructed it had a hard border, but here it seemed to be more squishy. I couldn’t tell whether that was a fundamental design disagreement between myself and the Dungeon Master, or a result of the conversion of Parsmont into an Aerbian region.

We walked through the city streets, arm in arm. I had left my armor behind, on the theory that it would draw more attention to us than we really wanted, and Fenn was similarly unarmored. We needed to find something defensive for her to wear, but that was a gap in our armaments that we’d had since her last suit of armor had gotten sliced through. She wore a hat to hide her pointed ears, making her look human at first glance.

She talked happily as we went through the city, first complaining that black gloves didn’t really go with anything, and after that talking with me about the buildings and people we saw as we went. Parsmont had a much more homogenous style than Cranberry Bay, flat slopes on the roofs with a fair amount of plants sticking up from rooftop gardens, a clean style with little in the way of embellishments, and then riots of color where a full wall would be given over to a mural — but the murals were all similar enough that I thought they were all part of the same project, or maybe done by a small collective. They used thick lines, bright colors, and an abstract style, mostly depicting natural things, drawn so large that they couldn’t be contained by the canvas of the walls.

The streets were narrow, and the few cars and trucks we saw squeak through the crowds were slim as well, none with two seats, most thin enough that I could have easily wrapped my hands around them. I could see why Fenn had put our car into the garage before we’d come in. There was something about the aesthetic of Parsmont that I really liked, maybe the way the hill shaped the city, maybe the general vibe, or maybe the way that the narrow streets and sparse motor traffic made everything feel more human. It had its political problems, given that it was at least somewhat like the Parsmont that I’d written up, but it wasn’t a bad place.

We found a large bookshop and perused their selection for a bit until we found a big book of detailed maps of Aerb, including a section on infernal topology. Aerb was massive, ten times larger than Earth, which meant that it was pretty rare to see a map with all forty-four continents on it. Instead, the map book was divided up with different areas in different sections. Before I bought the book, I looked for Parsmont, which sat right in the middle of a huge area of mostly flat farmland, an area that was equivalent in size to the entire Grain Belt of the United States. On the infernal topology map, Parsmont was marked with dark-red stripes, which the key said meant that the hells were close, and tightly packed against each other. From what I knew of the hells, there was some kind of notional fourth-dimensional distance at play — and in Parsmont, they were fairly close to us.

I checked out Anglecynn as well, and saw it mapped in grey, both the country proper and most of the surrounding continent, including the Zorish Isles. According to legend, when the Apocalypse Demon had reared its head, Uther had gone on a long quest to track down the warhammer Marcion, which everyone else had considered Apocryphal. He’d returned to Anglecynn at the final moment and hit the Apocalypse Demon so hard that it had crashed through every single layer of hell and bottomed out with such force that it permanently pushed every single hell away from Anglecynn, like a four-dimensional crater. After that, demons and devils weren’t really a problem that a well-armed militia couldn’t take care of, or at least that was how the story went.

When we paid for the book (along with a few others that piqued my interest) we left to go find a suitable place to stay, but when we were half a block from the bookstore, a man landed in front of us. He was wearing brightly shining, fully embossed full-plate, with a sword that had to have been eight feet long, but my eyes were drawn to the grin on his face, his perfectly straight, pearly-white teeth, and the way his smile reached the corners of his eyes. He was one of the more handsome men I’d ever met in real life (or what amounted to real life these days).

“Sorry,” he said as I put away the Anyblade, which I’d instinctively drawn (thereby shooting the element of surprise in the foot), “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s fine,” I replied. “We’re not from around here. You must be the Abswifth?” He nodded, smile not leaving his face. “I wasn’t aware that you came to greet tourists that were passing through.” My heart had already started to hammer in my chest. He was too clean, probably brokenly powerful, and he definitely shouldn’t have been talking to us.

“I take a special interest, from time to time,” said the Abswifth. His smile didn’t falter. “Tell me, where do you come from?”

“We’re staying at a farm some ways away from the city,” said Fenn. “So are you like, police or something? I never really understood how that worked here. Are we supposed to tip you in mind jewels?”

The Abswifth laughed, loud and boisterous. A small crowd had begun to gather around us, which I didn’t like at all, not that I thought I could outrun this guy. My mind started racing as I tried to figure out why he was talking to us. Had he spotted us? Had we been reported by the people who owned the farm? Betrayed by Fallatehr somehow? His goons had gone into the city ahead of us, that was certainly a possibility.

“You have spunk,” he said, wagging a finger in Fenn’s direction. “I’d like the two of you to come with me, I assure you that this is all quite routine.”

Yeah, I didn’t buy that for a second. Parsmont was a large city, and there were too many people here for one of the two most powerful people to randomly take tourists in for screening interviews. ‘Quite routine’ wasn’t a phrase that inspired much confidence either; just because someone was following a plan didn’t mean that it wasn’t something serious.

“Do we have a choice in the matter?” I asked. I saw Fenn cast a glance in my direction, and felt her hand squeeze mine in a we’re-in-this-together kind of way.

The Abswifth’s smile faltered. “I would prefer not to compel you by my authority, but I believe the matter is important enough for me to lean on that power, should you force me to. I assure you that it will go better for you if you cooperate.”

I felt something at the back of my mind, and turned my attention there while keeping eye contact on the man with the ridiculous eight-foot sword. Jewels were coming in there in volume, which I hadn’t expected at all. I guessed that it shouldn’t surprise me though, given what Amaryllis had been able to tell us about this place, and what I remembered from my sessions. The Abswifth stood on one side of the fence, and the Bendon stood on the other, which meant that there were always going to be a great deal of people ready to stand in opposition to either of them, even if it was just by proxy. A hushed crowd had grown around us, and some of them apparently wanted to throw their weight behind me.

“I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “But if you’re going to ask for my time, I’m going to insist that you do so officially. Otherwise, we’ll be leaving.”

I saw a flicker of annoyance on the Abswifth’s face. He had been holding his sword with the flat of it against his shoulder, but brought it down, moving a massive amount of metal with frightening ease. “By the authority vested in me by the citizens of Parsmont, you are hereby ordered to follow upon penalty of death, for the good of this city.”

I couldn’t read the subtext, but the audience we’d gathered really must not have liked that. The jewels were piling up behind me, in opposition to this man exercising his authority. I was scared, certainly, but I also found that interesting; the Abswifth and Bendon that I had made were essentially criminals, save that they had the force of government behind them, and they didn’t really have to care about pleasing people, because all of the Abswifth’s supporters were essentially locked into supporting him by the reality of the system, and the same for the Bendon. I won’t claim that this was especially subtle on my part, but my defense is that I was fourteen and reading about things like Duverger’s Law and basic political theory.

“And you can’t tell me why?” I asked. “I’m being taken into your custody without any explanation?” This was, I will admit, poking the dragon a little bit, but it did serve a purpose besides just challenging him for no reason; I wanted to see what he would do with the challenge, or whether he would divulge something in order to keep the people happy.

“I can’t speak of it, for reasons of security,” said the Abswifth, frowning. “Do you disrespect Parsmont and its citizenry so much that you will force me to kill you here in these streets?”

“No,” I replied, holding my hands up. I saw his eyes go to my ring, the Anyblade, but he said nothing about it. “From what little I’ve managed to see of it, this is a lovely city, but this seems irregular to me.”

“Not so much these days,” called a voice from the crowd, which generated some murmurs. I watched the pile of jewels get a little bit smaller. My guess was that some of the people who had impulsively thrust their support behind me were pushing their ‘vote’ toward whoever had spoken.

The Abswifth winced at that, but said nothing in response, and once again gestured with his ridiculous sword for us to go in front of him. I stepped toward him, with Fenn close behind us, and watched as the crowd parted for us.

“Care to tell us where we’re going, if we’re to be walking with a knife pointed at our backs?” asked Fenn.

“My tower,” he replied. “Look up and to your right and you’ll see it, it’s the one in white.”

So I looked up the hill, and saw what he was talking about; it was a spire, more than a tower, a needle-thin thing that I had taken for being some bit of infrastructure before. The scale of it was hard to pin down, but given that it wasn’t an equivalent to a radio tower, it had to have been four or five hundred feet. And as we passed by a building that was partially blocking my view, I saw its companion, a tower of black.

Fuck.

Chapter 28 - Moral Agency

As we went through the streets of Parsmont, the Abswifth followed us, sword propped up on his shoulder, calling out directions, “turn here” or “around the cart” as we went. He wasn’t the only one following though. Most of the crowd had dispersed, but there were others who lingered on, keeping some distance back to be clear of the Abswifth’s sword, or flanking our sides. There were a few camera flashes, which startled me, mostly because it was the first time I had seen a camera on Aerb. They were big and bulky, each the size of a shoebox with a small, clear cube on top that emitted an almost painfully bright flash and had to be replaced between each picture. I wasn’t at all pleased by that, nor the idea that these men were surely reporters. We were, after all, wanted criminals in other parts of the world.

I followed the Abswifth’s lead in not saying much, and to my mild surprise, Fenn did as well. At a different point in my time on Aerb, I might have gawked at the people and places we passed by, the occasional wide plaza that served as a reprieve from the narrow streets, or the breaks in the monotony of Parsmont’s mostly human population: a bullfrog Animalia smoking a pipe outside a butcher’s shop, a dark-skinned woman with enormous antlers that had been hung with jewels, and a skull sitting inside a humanoid form of water among them. Instead of indulging my desire to stare at every curiosity we passed in order to compare it against what I had read in my books, I tried to think.

First things first: the Abswifth and the Bendon both had needle-like towers, thin to the point of being a bit ridiculous, one white, the other black. This wasn’t just a peculiarity of their culture or a symbol of their powers, it was a Clue, because I had designed those towers — just not for Parsmont.

They had come from a campaign I’d run when I’d been really into microworlds, the sorts of places where you could drive a car from one end of creation to the other in an afternoon (though not literally, because we very rarely played tabletop in systems that had cars). Angled Ovid [sic] was a world of good and evil, with specific quantities of good and evil being directly proportional to how far ‘north’ or ‘south’ you were on the ovoid. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of it, but the north pole had the tower of ultimate good, set into the center of a bustling metropolis, while the south pole had a matching tower of ultimate evil, set into the center of screaming fields of the eternally tortured. We didn’t actually play a full campaign there — Angled Ovid [sic] was one of a few worlds suspended in a bottle in a god’s workshop that the group were going through. They didn’t spend more than a session there, and as a consequence, I hadn’t really fleshed the microworld out too much.

So what the fuck were those towers doing in the middle of Parsmont, sitting right next to each other, apparently inhabited by the city’s two most important and powerful people? I had no idea, other than that the towers were a powerful magic, and that didn’t bode well.

With that mystery set aside for the moment, I started thinking about the other big question, which was how the Abswifth had found us, and how he knew who we were. He hadn’t said our names. Did he know our names? Did he have some kind of dossier on us? Some magic tracking us? Our list of enemies was actually pretty short; Hyacinth Prentiss was one, Fallatehr Whiteshell was the other. There were a few other loose threads out there, like that velocity mage of Aumann’s way back in Barren Jewel, but I didn’t really consider any of them prime suspects, and only worth worrying about because bringing back early, inconsequential or “off-screen” enemies was one of the things I liked doing as DM. Doris Finch was out there as well, nine and a half million of her, and she had some way of tracking us, even if it wasn’t a very good one, but she didn’t really seem like she had a reason to, especially since she needed intermediaries to pass beyond her domain.

Between Hyacinth and Fallatehr, I was leaning heavily in the direction of Fallatehr, but what I couldn’t figure out was what his endgame was. Was he trying to introduce a complication that only he could rescue me from? That did seem to be his style, from what I had seen. Giving someone enough rope to hang themselves allowed you a lot of leverage if you were the guy who could cut that rope, and that was his modus operandi, at least with regards to me. This was different, because clueing in the authorities in Parsmont left a trail of incrimination that would point back toward him, and it placed the sequence of events outside of his control. He had the means, via his minions; he had the opportunity, when they went into town; but I wasn’t clear on the motive.

What I had to do was backtrack. I could safely assume that if this was Fallatehr’s doing, he had gotten his minions to do it. What information had he had when they’d been sent away? I tried to recall the conversation in its entirety, but it had been brief, and most of my attention had been on the possibility that his two minions would start a covert campaign of tampering with souls, instead of just going to the police.

Skill unlocked: Analysis!

Fucking finally, I sighed. I’d spent some time trying to unlock that one, and every time I’d been deep in thought, I’d been thinking that surely those thoughts counted as analysis. I ran back the train of thought again, trying to figure out what the game had seen in how I was thinking.

Skill increased: Analysis 1!

The Abswifth was practically a god, or maybe a demi-god, at least within the bounds of Parsmont, so I doubted that Fallatehr’s minions had gotten to him. He wasn’t the sort of man you could just grab by the throat and take into the alley so you could have your way with his soul. That didn’t mean that he didn’t have underlings, and those underlings would be a little easier to subvert, but that again left the open question of what purpose this would have in helping Fallatehr achieve his aims, whatever those actually were. I had thought that he wanted my power, but if he had thrown me to the police, I wasn’t sure why he would have gone through with a scheme that saw me in the hands of the Abswifth.

The case for Hyacinth was a little more straightforward. Following Larkspur’s death, and unknown to us, she had decided that it was worth it to find us after all, and either by working with Doris Finch, or dipping into the strategic reserve of elf bones, or some other unknown method, she had found us and sicced the Abswifth on us, presumably so that she could find and kill Amaryllis, thereby inheriting an enormous arsenal of hereditary loot.

Skill increased: Analysis 2!

I’d been hoping that maybe I could use the timing of the skill ups for Analysis to know when I was on the right track, but that didn’t seem to be the case, because the trains of thought I’d been having when the skill ups happened pointed in different directions, and the idea of Fallatehr working with Hyacinth had far too many holes in it to be true.

There was a wall around the white tower, tall enough for privacy from even a giant. There were people picketing outside the wrought-iron gate, but they parted easily enough at our approach. In my (admittedly limited) observation, there were a few different types of protestors: the ones with a burning rage they had to express with effigies and shouts, the ones who saw protesting as a fun event of mutual camaraderie, and the ones that treated it as something like a job. That last one was how the protestors outside the white tower looked to me. They had the same expressions that I’d seen on protesters outside a women’s clinic in Wichita, not burning with fury, but trudging along because it was a thing that had to be done.

The gates were pulled back by a pair of guards as soon as they saw the Abswifth, and we went forward through a plaza that surrounded the tower. It was devoid of people and plants, leaving only plain hexagonal tiles that reminded me of a battlemap.

“Okay,” said Fenn, as she came to a stop, halfway to the tower. “We’re away from the ears of the masses, who do you think we are and what do you want with us?”

“Keep moving,” said the Abswifth. “We’ll speak in my office at the top.”

“No,” I replied. I’d stopped just after Fenn. We had both turned to look at the Abswifth, in his shining armor and ridiculously large sword. “It would be too easy for us to disappear into that tower and never be seen again. Here, at least, we have eyes watching us.”

“The eyes are the problem,” said the Abswifth. “Lip readers are so cheap that the Bendon can have them stationed outside the tower around the clock, but there are worse intrusions into the sanctity of my domain, so long as we stay outside my office. I would have you think carefully about who you are, and what I might know about you. I imagine there are things you wouldn’t want spread to the ears of every person of importance in this city, especially if they turned out to be false.”

Fenn looked to me. “He’s trying to play us,” she said.

“Play us?” I asked. “Or is he just trying to get a deal that’s sweeter for him than for us?”

“That’s what playing us is, you dolt,” said Fenn, crossing her arms. She turned to the Abswifth. “We’re going to need some kind of concessions to go up that tower.”

“No, we won’t,” I said. “We’ve done nothing wrong, and he’s just doing his job.” That was, admittedly, a very charitable assumption. “I’m not happy about this situation, especially since nothing has been explained to us, but I don’t want to make it more difficult or time-consuming than it needs to be, nor do I think we should be trying to profit from it.” I was hoping that a little bit of good-prisoner/bad-prisoner would go a long way, and that Fenn wouldn’t fight me too hard on this. I was also, have to confess, a little bit worried about how much this guy was actually constrained by PR considerations, and whether we wouldn’t be knocked around once we were inside.

Fenn gave me a sigh and then nodded to the Abswifth. “Fine, we’ll go up your stupid tower.”

We stepped into the tower, through an open doorway that showed no sign of ever having held doors. The blindingly white walls gave way to a dimly lit interior space, with ceilings fifteen feet high, timbers of dark wood held up at regular intervals by sunken posts. The tower wasn’t terribly thick around, not given that it was hundreds of feet tall. The room was large and spacious, but it was just a single room, with the full curve of the tower visible. A row of desks held four people, each stopping what they were doing to look to us. A woman began rising from her seat before the Abswifth gave her a shake of his head. None of them returned to what they were doing though, which made the silence seem louder.

At the far end was an elevator, more crude than the ones I had seen elsewhere on Aerb, but artfully designed all the same, as though someone had been trying to make something pretty without the tools necessary to do so. I wondered whether it was simply from another era and hadn’t been replaced, since the tower itself seemed incredibly old.

“We’re going up,” said the Abswifth, more to the people at their desks than to us. He unslung his enormous sword from his shoulder and set it into a rack by the front entrance, then strode toward the elevator without looking to see whether we were following behind him. Fenn shot me a glance, and I shrugged. If we’d had the teleportation key, this might have been the point where I’d simply left rather than get to the punchline, but we didn’t really have many options. I took it for granted that the Abswifth was stronger than us, not to mention fast enough to chase us down. Besides, we needed information, and he had it.

The door of the elevator was a foldable metal one, leaving large diamond shapes that we could see out of as it rose. The Abswifth stood behind us, and while Fenn elected to face him, I tried to pay attention to what I could see on the various floors we passed. I saw more desks, these without people, a room with rows of books, a place for storage and filing cabinets, but what was more interesting than what I saw was what I didn’t see. There were no rooms devoted to living, no kitchens, bathrooms, couches, comfortable chairs, nothing like a break room, and certainly no beds. This tower, then, was a place of business and function, almost religiously so.

But after six floors of that, we passed into a different part of the tower, one where there were no rooms at all, only a drop that quickly became frighteningly far, down to the ceiling of the sixth floor below. When I leaned forward to the grate and looked up, I could see our presumptive destination, far above us, barely lit by the tower’s few small interior windows.

“I’d like some answers,” I said.

“When we get to the top,” replied the Abswifth.

There was a minute amount of motion that came with being at the top of a skyscraper, and sometimes gave people “sky sickness”, a counterpart to sea sickness. My dad got it bad, and talked about it often, because he thought it was hilarious, in a dry humor kind of way. He was a helicopter pilot, comfortable with all sorts of terrible turbulence and choppy rides, but if you put him in a tall enough building he would start to get green about the gills. I had never gotten the same way, but it was something that I thought about when I got high up. Sorian’s castle had it, just a bit, though I was distracted first by the threats on my life, and second by being shot. Aumann’s tower definitely had a little bit of that sway, though it wasn’t even all that tall, but I had been distracted by the people trying to kill us. (In retrospect, the taller buildings of Aerb hadn’t really been good experiences for me.)

The needle-thin tower had none of that. It was stable as a rock, no more subject to minute amounts of sway than a post driven into the ground. Whatever the tower was made of, it wasn’t budging at all. I wasn’t actually sure that I would have noticed that if I hadn’t been preparing myself for it. This was all the more impressive given the faint howl of wind I could hear outside and the absurdity of the tower’s design. From what I had seen, the walls weren’t more than a foot thick, and there were no internal supports, meaning that it was literally just a tube of some incredibly strong white material. In other words, the whole place reeked of magic.

The upper floor was much the same as the lower ones, made of thick wooden beams that seemed, from below, to not actually have any supports. The interior was decorated with furniture that seemed extraordinarily heavy and solid, especially given how far up we were and how much of a pain it must have been to get it here. The elevator didn’t seem like it would have been wide enough to accommodate the desk or chairs on their way up. A wide screen partitioned the room, behind which I could see the corner of a well-made bed, the first and only sign that this tower was a place that was lived in, rather than just a place of work or business. Above us, the ceilings rose to the very top of the needle-point tower, where eight windows wide enough to fit a person let in a large amount of light.

I didn’t really pay that much attention to any of that; my eyes were drawn to the notification I’d gotten as the elevator glided to a stop.

Affliction: Goodly!

“We’re not killing a baby,” said Tiff.

“You know, I’m actually surprised that it would take Joon so long to spring the ‘evil baby’ thing on you,” said Reimer. “He’s grown soft in his old age.”

“It’s an evil baby,” said Arthur, “You have to kill evil babies. You’d kill baby Hitler, right?”

“No?” said Tiff, more as a question. “Assuming that I have access to baby Hitler, I can just kidnap him and raise him not to be evil. Most of him being an authoritarian fascist probably traces back to his experiences in the trenches of—”

“Okay, pretend that your options are either killing baby Hitler or leaving everything how it is,” said Arthur.

“But it’s complicated,” Tiff complained. “I personally think that World War II happens anyway, just not in the same way, and if it happens after the invention of nuclear weapons, then”—Arthur opened his mouth to interject—“yes, I know, I’m saying that it’s possible that we live in the better timeline, and you want to know whether I expect it to be better on average, and what I’m saying is that I don’t know what the impacts would be. I don’t really subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of history, it’s all structural forces and background effects, so … no, I don’t kill baby Hitler. And I don’t think that we should kill this demon baby.”

“Classic mistake,” said Reimer, shaking his head.

“It’s the lawful good way,” said Arthur with a nod.

“It’s not actually a demon,” I muttered. It was a penadran, a custom creature that they’d spent the evening slaughtering their way through, more like a spider-dragon than it was a demon.

“I don’t think that’s lawful good,” said Tiff. “I’m not saying ‘don’t kill baby Hitler because there are laws against that kind of thing’, I’m saying don’t do it because it’s not the right thing to do.”

“So, good or chaotic good,” said Tom.

“The alignment system is braindead anyway,” said Reimer. “That’s why they got rid of it in 5E.”

“They didn’t get rid of it,” I replied.

“It’s gone in every way that matters,” said Reimer with a wave of his hand. “In 5E it’s just flavor, but here,” he said, jabbing his 3.5 edition character sheet, “it’s an actual, concrete thing. There are spells that detect it or protect from it. We could literally do the baby Hitler test, if we had a D&D time machine, and the universe would get us a definitive answer on whether or not that was an evil act.”

“Isn’t that a god thing?” asked Tom.

“No,” replied Arthur. “Gods only come into it where paladins are involved, and a few other corner cases. Reimer is right, at least within the context of the game.”

“So there’s an objective right answer to whether killing this baby demon is good, neutral, or evil?” Tiff asked, turning toward me.

“Technically, yes,” I said.

Tiff frowned. “Well that’s dumb.”

The effect, Goodly, wasn’t something that I could actually feel, and without the notification from the game, I wouldn’t have known it was there. I followed after the Abswifth as he went to sit down at his large desk, trying to think things over, and took a seat in one of the large chairs. Fenn sat beside me, crossing one leg over the other and resting her black-gloved hands on her knees in a mock-prim pose.

“Last night we were anonymously informed that an unregistered soul mage was set to visit Parsmont,” said the Abswifth. “We were given descriptions of four individuals, two of which are a match for the two of you. Further, we were given the glyph sequence, make, and model for a car that we were told would be approaching from the south-east, which matches the car you were seen entering the city in.” Fucking Fallatehr.

“Huh,” said Fenn, glancing at me. “And is there any reason that you felt compelled to believe any of this?”

“Frankly, I’m skeptical,” said the Abswifth. “However, the seriousness and specificity of the claims meant that some amount of investigation was warranted. You were watched by a warder for a brief period of time, long enough to confirm that the two of you hold numerous magic items, which raises the credibility of the report.”

“How would you know whether I was a soul mage one way or another?” I asked.

“We have a specialist, who will be meeting with you,” said the Abswifth. “I’ll be asking a few questions while he makes his way over.” He pulled a pen from on his desk and slid a piece of paper in front of him. The whole thing was surprisingly mundane, for a man in shining armor who supposedly had the power of a demigod. Aside from him dropping from the sky, I didn’t really know his abilities, but I wasn’t about to ask for a demonstration. “What are your names?” he asked.

“Are we under arrest?” asked Fenn.

“Technically, no,” replied the Abswifth without blinking. “You are in my custody for a duration of up to one week, with lodging and food provided to you by the city of Parsmont. At the end of one week, or sometime before that, at my discretion, you will be released, unless I bring charges against you. Despite your reticence in coming with me, I don’t intend to bring any charges against you, nor do I plan to exercise my right to extend custody to the full week.” He said this all in an even, practiced tone, which made him sound like a diligent civil servant, and almost made me like him.

“What would be the consequences if I were an unregistered soul mage?” I asked.

The Abswifth hesitated with his pen over the paper. “Are you?” he asked.

I was paying attention to my thought processes as he answered the question, trying my best to figure out whether the answers that I was going to give him were diverging from the answers that I would have given before having entered this room and gotten the status effect, whatever it was. I found myself wanting to tell him the truth, and found, on reflection, that the truth probably wasn’t what I would have given him if he had asked when we were going up in the elevator. And why did I want to tell him the truth? He seemed decent enough, he had the weight of Parsmont behind him, he was being kind when he didn’t have to be — no, there were cynical explanations for his behavior too, but for some reason I didn’t want to jump to them, and that seemed unlike me.

“No, I’m not a soul mage, registered or otherwise,” I answered. I felt bad for lying to him, but I didn’t know anything about him, and besides that, this was a test, to see whether or not ‘Goodly’ allowed me to lie, or whether I was under some kind of zone of truth or Veritaserum type of deal (a terrifying and world-warping magic that showed up a lot in both tabletop games and Earth fiction, but which Amaryllis hadn’t seemed to think existed). The lie went through easily enough, which answered that question. I didn’t want to lie, but I could.

The Abswifth frowned at me, then wrote down the answer on his paper. “And what are your names?”

“Samuel Sterling,” I said, another lie I had to consciously think about, which came with a skill-up notification that I kept myself from reacting to. It was possible that the mystery informant had given another name, but I wasn’t going to sweat that.

(The problem was that the wanting didn’t come from nowhere, there was a train of thought that led up to it. Telling the truth seemed like the best way forward, the way that would get me the results that I wanted. I could feel faith in the goodness of people where no such feeling had been before, and when I questioned that faith, I felt myself thinking that even if others wouldn’t commit to that same level of disclosure, I should be an exemplar of truth, because without someone to step forward, the whole world might get caught in a circular firing squad of defection from good. The only reason to lie was that this was what I would have done before coming into this room — and, in fact, had planned to do well beforehand.)

“Eliana Sterling,” said Fenn, with only a brief glance in my direction. “We’re not going to be put on some ledger somewhere, never to escape the wandering eye of the bureaucrats, are we?” she asked. The worry in her voice was amazing, the perfect picture of someone who was more concerned about an ongoing bureaucratic nightmare than having done anything wrong. She was far better at lying than I was.

“There will be a record of this meeting, for the purposes of accountability,” said the Abswifth. “It won’t go into general circulation, nor will it be available to the police of Parsmont, unless there’s something that they need to see. Again, I’d like to let the both of you know that I have no plans to bring charges against you, even for minor crimes I might discover in the course of this interview.”

“Why not?” I asked, furrowing my brow.

“It’s in the interests of Parsmont that people are willing to come in for questioning,” said the Abswifth. “There are cities and countries in which the police will slap every fine and penalty they can think of against someone who does not cooperate, as a way of strong-arming people into giving up names or information, or simply to fill the coffers. I don’t believe that to be sound in the long term, nor do I believe it to be Good.” He said the last word like good was some concrete, physical thing.

“You never answered the question of what would happen to me if I were an unregistered soul mage,” I said.

“And you’re not?” asked the Abswifth.

“No,” I replied. I think the lie came out better that time, and I got another skill-up for it, which still left me far below the bonus that I was getting from Fenn’s Symbiosis passive. “I’m worried that whatever method you’re going to use to determine whether I’m a soul mage is going to be wrong, which would leave me without a way to contest it.”

“There are multiple levels of screening,” said the Abswifth. “Not all of them have the potential for error. At a certain level, you would be extradited into the custody of the Empire of Common Cause, at which point I would have no authority over the situation.”

“Just for my own understanding,” I said, “do you know what happens to unregistered soul mages, once they’re in the clutches of the Empire?”

“I’m not an expert, by any means,” said the Abswifth. “You will be granted counsel, in the event that you’re lying to me and you fail the screening tests, or if you fail the screening tests for some unforeseen reason. The traditional penalty is death, but it’s my understanding that this is often waived in lieu of forfeiture of talent, especially if there’s cooperation on the part of the mage in uncovering where the unauthorized learning came from.”

“I see,” I replied, feeling my blood run cold. The Abswifth might be polite, and he seemed like a decent enough person, but my life was on the line, especially because the only information I had to give up would lead back to Fallatehr, and I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t get any slack for giving him up, given that I had broken him out of prison. I tried to think about the different tacks I might take to get out of this situation, but I didn’t know what kind of specialist they were calling in for the first screening, nor what kind of magic that specialist would be working in order to diagnose me. There were lines of argument that I didn’t think would work, especially given that I had no idea how close Parsmont’s legal system was to America’s.

“Why did you come to Parsmont?” asked the Abswifth. He was making an effort to smile, which I normally would have taken as manipulation. Instead, I felt like it was probably him attempting to lighten a somewhat tense situation.

“We thought that it would be a place welcoming to strangers,” I said. “It’s somewhat famous for that.”

“Ironic, eh?” Fenn added. I was fairly sure that she was under the same effect I was, but she seemed to be handling it just fine. She hadn’t had forewarning like I did, but she was at least following my lead.

“Yet you arrived in the city by car,” said the Abswifth. “Not by train, not by teleportation key, but by car, and a car that’s registered within the city-state.”

“We were staying at a farmhouse in the country,” I replied. “The car belonged to the people that owned it, until a few days ago, when we bought it from them.” The truth was easier, as a general rule, especially since I thought they would probably have records that they could check against.

“And how did you get to that farmhouse?” asked the Abswifth.

“We drove,” I replied. “Up the Golden Highway, following the Pellmance River. Since you’re going to ask, our origin was Calhaim, but before that, we were in Anglecynn.” I watched as he wrote all that down and hoped that the map I’d looked at wasn’t too out of date. I was starting to form a plan, but I wasn’t sure it was a good one, and I kept having to check my logic against what I thought I would have done before coming into this room and being influenced by (presumably) an arbitrary definition of good forced on me by the tower.

“You changed cars, when you arrived to the farmhouse?” asked the Abswifth, his pen still moving across the page.

“Yes,” I replied.

“And the two others that were with you, they’re at that farmhouse now?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “They went somewhere else. I don’t know exactly where.” I hesitated, trying to go through my line of thinking again, weighing what his reaction might be. “One of them is a dwarf, originally from the clan of Darili Irid, no one of much importance. The other is Princess Amaryllis Penndraig, the closest direct descendant of Uther Penndraig and a recent political exile from her home country. I would like to formally request asylum on her behalf.”

“Well, that’s pretty ballsy, I’ll give you that,” muttered Fenn.

The Abswifth eyed me. “I see,” he said. “Obviously that would create a great deal of complications for Parsmont. The Empire of Common Cause would have to be involved, and it’s always been the policy of Parsmont to keep their involvement to a minimum, where possible.” He tapped his pen on the paper as he watched me. I noted that his pen had stopped moving when I’d said Amaryllis’ name, which I took as a good sign. “Were you planning on requesting asylum before coming to this tower?”

“No,” I replied. “If you hadn’t stopped us in the street, we probably would have used Parsmont as a waystation. However, I’m her primary protection, and if I’m going to be detained for up to a week—”

“It’s blackmail then,” said the Abswifth, setting down his pen. “You’re blackmailing me, in the Tower of Probity.”

“It’s not blackmail,” I said carefully. “The princess is in danger, real danger, which we could better handle by staying as hidden as possible. Failing that, it is imperative that she be protected by as strong a governmental apparatus as possible, and in this case, that means the city-state of Parsmont, which will need to interface with the Empire of Common Cause. That’s not blackmail, to state what I see as my options.”

I knew that I was threatening him with a political nightmare, given that Parsmont had always had a somewhat tenuous relationship with the Empire, which was one of the reasons that we had come here. The only real question was whether his response would be to throw the princess to the wolves, but I couldn’t imagine that being popular, which was something he was worried about, and it wasn’t like I was offering her up.

I felt bad for the Abswifth, because it didn’t seem like he deserved it. There were people outside the walls around the tower, protesting against him, and others who were willing to throw their vote my way without knowing anything about me except that I was in opposition to him. And why? My guess was that it was the vote and the tribalism that came with it. The fact that the city pitted its two rulers against each other was bound to result in something like this. I wasn’t certain that the other tower radiated evil, but if it did, that explained a fair amount of the tension between the Abswifth and the Bendon.

“You’ve put me in a difficult position,” said the Abswifth. “And at times like this, I always feel the need to reflect on what is best for Parsmont.” Well, shit. “It would not do for this city to get wrapped up in an international struggle, not even a brief one that saw your princess transferred to another willing country for more permanent asylum. Nor would it do for the Abswifth to ignore a warning because it was politically convenient, especially not if there were publically available information to that effect.”

I paused. “Ah. You’re worried that we wouldn’t keep our mouths shut.”

“Someone informed on you, whether you’re an unregistered soul mage or not,” said the Abswifth. “If I were to let you go without further inquiries, because I viewed that as being in the best interests of Parsmont, what do you think would happen next?”

“They’d talk to the press, or maybe the Bendon,” I replied. “And if they did, some kind of accusations would be thrown around, which would result in either you having to lie, which is morally indefensible—” I caught myself, but in catching myself, realized that was a mistake. “Which carries its own costs to you, and therefore Parsmont.”

“You’ve noticed the tower’s effects,” said the Abswifth. “You were lying about soul magic, and possibly also about where you came from. Maybe even about your names. If the tower were in its prime, you wouldn’t have been able to resist — but alas.” He shifted his papers around, looking over the notes he had taken. “The effects of the tower are a poorly kept secret, and one whose effects are often overstated. However, it works better on the evil than the good, and I am sorely tempted to count your ability in navigating the tower’s compulsions in your favor.” He looked up at us.

“But?” I asked.

“I’m given to understand that soul mages are capable of eradicating their own ability in the art,” said the Abswifth. He tapped his pen against the paper in front of him. “I believe it would allow you to pass the first screening, or perhaps the second, in perhaps two hours' time, after which you would be free to leave.”

“You’re asking him to erase a part of himself,” said Fenn.

“The tower does not look kindly on it.” The Abswifth nodded. I could feel that, an instinctive recoiling within myself at the idea, but it was faint, almost non-existent, because soul magic wasn’t actually a part of me. “But no, I am not asking anything, only, as you said, stating what I see as your options. I don’t know for certain whether you’re a soul mage or not, but if there are only lingering indications that you once practiced soul magic, that would be enough for me to allow you to leave. It would, naturally, be in your best interests to leave Parsmont with all due haste.”

“Okay.” I nodded, breathing a slight sigh of relief. I didn’t actually know how to reduce a skill, but I was sure as hell going to try to figure it out within the next few hours. My chest still wasn’t fixed, and I wasn’t going to give up soul magic, obviously, but resetting back to zero, if I could manage that, was a setback that would be measured in hours, not the years that the Abswifth thought. “Thank you for being forthright, and I’m sorry for the problems we might have caused.

“I’m going to take a nap,” I said, then closed my eyes and shut out the world.

I didn’t like meddling with my soul. I hadn’t liked it even before coming into the tower, but the Goodly effect seemed to be exerting some power, at least insofar as I was capable of comparing how I had thought about soul magic before. I was thankful that I was a somewhat introspective person, which made that part of this a little bit easier.

I went into the Essentialism skill right away, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of mechanism available to lower the skill. I knew there was at least one sure-fire way to do it, which would be to remove the skill entirely, but I had a limited number of skill changes available to me under the most liberal reading of the rules, and I wasn’t confident that the liberal reading was the right one, so I had to put an asterisk next to ‘sure-fire’. Essentialism was slowly ticking up though, which meant that it might just be a matter of time and practice before I was able to access new abilities. Level 10 of Essentialism hadn’t given me a virtue (something I had to annoyingly go out of the soul to check, given that the soul didn’t seem to have them listed anywhere), which meant that I was almost certainly going to get one at level 20.

I moved away from the floating rows of skills, toward my values, at the one labeled ‘Level Up’. I had been putting this off, for fear of touching and breaking something in my soul in a way that I couldn’t easily undo, but I had managed to repair my hand, and I was feeling a little more confident. My biggest worry in changing the value was that I didn’t actually know what ‘Level Up’ meant, in a concrete sense.

Obviously I valued the ever-increasing feeling of transcendental joy that accompanied the level ups, but each one also raised the caps on my skills in addition to making me into a better version of myself. Were both of those things part of the listed value? The value didn’t seem to point anywhere, or have a definition of ‘Level Up’, at least so far as I could see. If it did encompass both those aspects, then it was also possible that it was linked to a few other, less obvious ones. Leveling up was a path to power, and maybe the values were taking that into account. The more I leveled up, the more likely I was to see Arthur again.

I didn’t feel like an addict. Amaryllis agreed that increasing my power was the smartest thing that we could be doing. Was there an argument to be made that I really should be valuing leveling up above everything else? I thought there likely was, but it was a weak argument, given that there weren’t a cluster of other values sitting up there with the people that were important to me. I didn’t even value my own life that highly.

I was stalling. I could feel myself stalling. Part of it was the idea that my soul was a sacred thing that would doom me forever if I meddled with it, which I was sure was just the tower talking given that I didn’t really hold anything as sacred, and had meddled with my soul earlier in the day. But another part of the hesitation was the knowledge that lowering the value marked ‘Level Up’ might mean that I wouldn’t get to level up as quickly, that I might stall and contemplate when the time came to complete a quest, or exercise caution in a way that would delay the next blast of pleasure as warm light enveloped me.

I shifted the number down as soon as I was able to work up the will to do it, and it got easier as I went. My view of the values was pegged to ‘Level Up’, so I saw it slide past other values as I reduced it, past all of my high school friends, past fandoms, beyond memories I cherished so much they were explicitly named. I stopped when it was between ‘Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, and watched it carefully.

It ticked upward, moving so it was just below ‘Mountain Rush’, which was Shasta’s knock-off version of Mountain Dew, and after what felt like a minute (but might have been more, given how time seemed to get lost in the soul) ticked up again, placing it below ‘Arkwell’s Fantasium’, a book I hadn’t finished. Its progress was slow, and the values here were small ones, fine-grained and plentiful, but it was still going up, inexorably.

Obviously that was a problem, but it confirmed something that Fallatehr had said. Changes would revert, given time. I could lower the value of ‘Level Up’, but even with it lowered, I could still remember how it had felt. I suspected that Fallatehr wasn’t telling the whole truth, and that there were methods of alteration that would leave someone in a stable state that wouldn’t revert, because it was possible to look at and presumably alter memories, even if the interface for that seemed lacking. Even then, there might be other parts of the soul that would need to be changed, unless the soul itself didn’t actually contain everything there was that made up a person. Still, I had a solution that I could re-apply at regular intervals, which was another weight off my shoulders.

I took a brief moment to remember that I had a body out there, with muted sensations coming from it, but that was practically old-hat by now, and I was in the same position I had been in when I started. I could hear conversation, but only enough to know that it was going on, and even then it slipped away, lost on its way to me. Fenn was talking to the Abswifth, and I had to trust her to do the talking, even under the influence, if I wanted the escape the Abswifth had offered me.

I was pleased to see Essentialism hovering at 19, and even more pleased when the number switched over to 20. It seemed like a shame to lose all that progress, but at least Essentialism was easier to hit the soft cap on than some of the others. I backed away from the skill and began looking for obvious changes, though I was going to have to leave the soul entirely to see what the virtue was. I found the change readily enough though; beside my body (as seen by my soul) were thirteen numbers, each with a three-letter signifier by it. Even without checking, I could feel that there was some give to them; these were my abilities, PHY, MEN, SOC, now here in the second character sheet, but this time, alterable.

I blinked back into the real world (such as it was) and looked from Fenn to the Abswifth, who were both looking at me.

“It’s done?” asked the Abswifth.

“Not just yet,” I replied, closing my eyes. “Do we have time?” I asked as I waited for the character sheet to come up.

“A little,” replied the Abswifth.

The new virtue was called ‘Soul Slip’, and the description was fairly vague. All it said was that I would be able to make new modifications and trade-offs within the soul, and alter that which had been unalterable, which wasn’t very helpful at all, given how expansive the soul was. I opened my eyes and looked at the Abswifth again.

“I’m going to take another nap,” I said.

I was faster this time, zeroing in on the Essentialism skill. This time the option was there right away, not a visible bit of text or a button to press, but a notional control that presented itself to me when I looked at the number. I stared at it for a moment, trying to think about whether there was anything that I would want to do before setting myself back by twenty levels.

I wondered whether this was all part of the plan, either by Fallatehr or the Dungeon Master. It wasn’t quite outrageous to think that Fallatehr would implicate me as a soul mage, hoping that the end result would be that I would remove the ability from myself to avoid implication and reset all my progress in the meantime. There were variables that he had no control over, and information that he wouldn’t have had access to, but those were dice he might have rolled. I still couldn’t see the endgame for him, unless he was hoping that I would damage my soul in such a way that only he could fix. At most, it would take me two days to get back where I had been, and I doubted it would even take that long.

I followed the lines to Amaryllis and Fenn, giving each of them a quick check, just to make sure that nothing was out of place. I spent more time on Amaryllis, because she was in the most danger, and with soul magic temporarily gone, it would take some time before I could check on her again. Everything seemed fine though, at least as far as I could tell. When I looked at Fenn I saw that name, Nellan, again and felt a slight stab of jealousy, but her soul had not noticeably changed, even with the effects of the tower upon us.

I went back to my own soul and pushed Essentialism down to zero, all in a single motion, worried that if I tried to do it in measured steps I would lose the ability to do it at all. When the motion was complete, I found myself back in the real world, staring at the Abswifth.

“The specialist will be arriving shortly,” said the Abswifth. “If you are a soul mage, the nature of my help will by necessity be quite different, and I must again offer the warning that my power does not extend far beyond Parsmont.”

“We’ll see what the specialist has to say,” I replied.

As if on cue, the elevator began to move.

The inspection took half an hour, during which the Abswifth sat silently and watched. My inspector was a tall lizardfolk, with pupils that blobbed out in three directions and seemed to spin whenever he squinted, which was often. I was surprised that the Abswifth was willing to spend so much time with Fenn and I, given the importance of his position, but I supposed the situation was a delicate one, and given the reaction I’d seen people give him as we moved through the streets, I couldn’t say that I would blame him for wanting a bit of time in relative solitude at the top of the tower.

“He was a soul mage, once,” said the lizardman, with his forked tongue snaking from his mouth. “He has no skill, at the moment.”

“You’re sure?” asked the Abswifth.

“Sure, for now,” said the lizardman.

“Thank you,” said the Abswifth with a curt nod. “That comports with their official story.”

“There is something else,” said the lizardman. “He is a mage, four times over, of some skill.”

The Abswifth frowned. “His race is human?”

“Yes, and always has been,” replied the lizardman. “His age is eighteen.”

The Abswifth nodded. “Thank you, you may leave.”

The lizardman gave each of us a bow, so deep his nose almost touched the floor, then trundled back toward the elevator. I wondered what he got paid for a service like that, but I bet that it was exorbitant.

“I have questions,” said the Abswifth. “But they are ones that I feel I would probably be better off not knowing the answers to, for your safety, mine, and for the people of Parsmont.” He placed his hands on the table and stood up, which let a ray of light hit his shining armor in a way that I was ready to believe he’d practiced. “This business is concluded,” he said. “The anonymous report we were given was obviously based on false information, and you have, as yet, threatened no harm to the city of Parsmont. That is where we will leave it. The sooner you leave the city, the better. If the people who gave us that anonymous tip give us another, there will be less consideration for your circumstances on my part.”

“May we never meet again,” said Fenn with a nod. I couldn’t help but see that as tempting fate.

Chapter 29 - The Soul of Discretion

“Well that was fucking horrifying,” said Fenn as we walked through the plaza outside the tower.

“What part?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. I’d basically been threatened with death, but the Abswifth had seemed reasonable enough. “Did he say something to you while I was under? Actually, we should probably hold off until we’re somewhere private, if he was to be believed about lip readers and eavesdroppers.”

Fenn frowned, looking at the gates, and the crowds beyond them. “We’re leaving Parsmont?” she asked. “This whole adventure has put us well behind schedule. Mary’s probably worried sick.”

“We’re leaving.” I nodded, glancing at the black tower, not all that far away from us. “I’m worried that the other shoe is going to drop before we do, but we’ll try our best to escape. We’re going to have to abandon the car, since they had eyes on us from the moment we came to town, and they had the better part of three hours—”

“Four hours,” said Fenn.

“More than enough time to do whatever they wanted with the car,” I said. “I don’t really know the state of surveillance devices in this neck of the woods, but I’m not going to bet against them being small enough to hide in the car, or on our ability to find them, considering that I know nothing about cars.”

“I might have something at the end of my sleeve,” said Fenn, wiggling her gloved fingers.

Guards opened the gates for us, and then it was an uncomfortable press of people, many of them asking questions. I answered the first of those questions with, “No comment” and then that became my litany as Fenn and I moved away from the tower. Only a few of them followed us, and even then, not for too long, though we had our pictures taken a few more times, which I didn’t enjoy in the slightest. Eventually they lost interest, and we slipped into side alleys a few times, trying to make sure that we didn’t have a tail, though that wasn’t an area of expertise for either of us.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked Fenn as soon as we thought we were clear. She’d changed hats, and pulled out light coats for both of us to wear, changing our appearance just enough that we might seem like different people on casual observation.

“Oh no,” said Fenn. “Don’t you put planning on me, you’re the one that’s got all the planning duties in this relationship, I’m just along for the ride, and to shoot things when they bother you.”

“I meant, what did you have in your glove that we could use instead of a car?” I asked as we approached the outskirts of the city, where the roads were wider. We had at least half an hour to get back to where Mary and Grak were going to be waiting for us, if they were still there. I wasn’t sure whether she would stay put or move, once we failed to show up. The plan was for our trip into Parsmont to not take longer than three hours, including the travel time, meaning that by the time we reached them, we’d be a few hours overdue. Amaryllis had a streak of pragmatic paranoia to her, but I didn’t actually know what her response would be.

Fenn held out her hand, fingers spread, and a very familiar-looking motorcycle appeared in front of us, its tank made of glass and full of souls.

“XC-class soulcycle?” I asked, staring at it.

“That’s what Mary said,” replied Fenn. “I stole it back in Cranberry Bay, Mary bypassed the ignition when we were still in the bottle.”

“Huh,” I said. “Just the one?” I resisted the urge to ask her how long she’d been sitting on this particular asset, which might have come out as accusatory. Unspoken plans, made without me.

“Crime of opportunity,” replied Fenn, seeming to misunderstand the nature of my question. “We’ve got the money to buy more of them, if we really wanted to burn the resources.”

“No, it’s fine,” I replied. “We can’t pick up Mary and Grak in that thing, but they’ll have, ah, other means of conveyance, if they’re where we left them.”

“Except she won’t want to use it, because it’s our ‘most valuable asset’,” replied Fenn, hopping onto the soulcycle. “You’re fine with my driving?”

“Lead the way,” I replied, slipping into the seat behind her and wrapping my arms around her waist.

The soulcycle that Amaryllis and I had gone through the Risen Lands with had seven souls in the tank, and didn’t move all that fast. This one was full-up, and Fenn was pushing it nearly to its limits, weaving in and out of traffic. She might have stolen the soulcycle for us, but she hadn’t stolen helmets, or if she had, she hadn’t offered them up. We slipped through traffic, sometimes splitting lanes, until I finally tapped her on the shoulder when we were still a few miles from the woods we’d dropped Amaryllis and Grak off at.

“What’s up?” she asked as she pulled over to the shoulder. I got off the soulcycle, and she followed suit, stretching out in a way that I found unexpectedly alluring.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “We’re late, and late enough that more time probably isn’t going to make the difference. I still have soul magic unlocked, which means that I should still be able to get into my soul, but the skill is at zero, which means that I’m a bit hampered. Here, now, while we have the time, I’d like to level it up a bit, and then check on Amaryllis so that I don’t have to find some excuse to do it if or when we meet up with her, because Grak still doesn’t know about the soul link.”

“I would have agreed with far fewer words on your part,” said Fenn. “Take whatever time you need, my big worry is running out of daylight, and I can just slap you if that starts to be an issue.”

“You’re so lovely,” I replied with a smile.

Fenn grinned at me. “You still owe me that date, don’t think that going up a terrifying white tower counts.”

“Terrifying?” I asked. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“Yeah,” said Fenn, looking away. “I’ve been thinking about that, a bit, what you said earlier, the confusion on your face.” She swallowed. “From what I gathered, the tower made us good, didn’t it?”

“Kind of.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s more like it nudged our thoughts in one direction.”

“I hated myself,” said Fenn, still looking away from me. “Not me as I was in the moment, up there in the tower with you, but the person I was in the past. I kept thinking about the person I’d been, things I’d stolen, people I’d killed, thoughts I’d had, and it just … filled me with this disgust and horror.” I slipped closer to her, and held her hand, which she responded to by stepping in toward me and giving me a kiss on the lips. “It was a real slap to the face, I’ll tell you that — when I was working my way through the justice system of Anglecynn, before I got sent to prison, I’d always felt this contempt for the way people looked at me, the pity of the judges, the condescension of the lawyers, even my own lawyer, the guards, the clerks, I’d always gotten some looks for being half-elf, I’ve been spat on more times than I can count—”

“Spat on?” I asked. “I’m going to claim some cultural ignorance here, but that seems — well, like people are fucking assholes.”

“Okay, spat on three times, I actually can count those, but spat at more than I can count, usually they’re just spitting toward the ground, it’s — not the point, at all,” she said. “The point is, going through the system, and being in jail, there was this specific way that people looked at me, like I was a bad person, and I thought they were just smelling their own farts, you know?”

I laughed at that, and she gave me a smile that faded quickly.

“Up there in that tower, I understood them. I empathized with them. I was them, I was like this outside observer looking back over my own life and thinking, ‘holy shit, I’m a bad person’. You were doing most of the talking, and I was trying to follow your lead, but once I started down memory lane it seemed like every stop I made I was just … evil.” She breathed a sigh. “And a part of me didn’t want to leave the tower, because I thought I would just return to being evil again, so I had to make up my mind then and there that I would commit myself to the path of good, instead of being evil, but it slipped away even as we were going down the elevator.”

“You’re not evil,” I said. “I’d call you chaotic neutral, maybe.”

“That’s a D&D thing?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Well,” said Fenn, plowing on. “The thing I was thinking about as we were driving was, you didn’t seem to feel the same way, and I realized that you’re probably just a better person than I am, with less to answer for.”

“I’ll be honest,” I replied.

“See?” interrupted Fenn. “Already showing that you’re good.”

I shook my head. “I just wasn’t really thinking about the past,” I replied. “I’ve got stuff to answer for, maybe not as serious as you do, but back on Earth, by the standards of the town I lived in, I … yeah, I was bad, especially after”—I licked my lips—“after Arthur. I was mean, I hurt people, not just in the way I destroyed all my friendships, but actually, physically hurt people because I thought it would feel good, and it did feel good.” I looked down at my hands, remembering how much my knuckles had hurt as I sat in the police station after having attacked Victor Clark. “But I didn’t think about any of that in the tower, which I think is why I didn’t experience what you did, and even if I had … I’m not really that person anymore. I mean even before I came to Aerb, I’d more or less hit rock bottom and was starting to claw my way back, like I’d gotten the evil out of my system, and that feeling of hating myself and feeling disgust at what I’d done, thinking it was evil — I’ve felt that way for a while, it wouldn’t have been new.”

“And the things you’ve done on Aerb?” asked Fenn. “Aumann and his people? Hell, we killed Fireteam Blackheart together, you dropped half of them down an elevator shaft, and even before you got to Silmar City, you and Amaryllis left a trail of bodies. It was kill or be killed, I get that, but …” She stopped. “I’m not saying that you’re a bad person.” She looked toward the sun and frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t want you to feel like I’m attacking you, but I just don’t really get how to reconcile our different experiences of the tower. And we don’t really have time for that.”

“You’re right, I need to be grinding Essentialism back up,” I replied. “But … I think I know the answer to why our experiences were different.”

“Because I’m evil?” asked Fenn with a forced laugh.

“The interesting thing about the Tower of Good wasn’t that it made us think good thoughts or whatever, it was that it attached lines of thought to them,” I replied. “I wasn’t just thinking that I shouldn’t lie, I was thinking about the reasons behind it, which were different from what I would have come up with on my own. It wasn’t just morals, it was some kind of moral framework, including at least some small amount of reasoning behind it.”

Fenn frowned. “So the difference between us—”

“I’m a utilitarian,” I replied. “Moral philosophy isn’t my forte, but Arthur liked the subject enough that he set himself to playing devil’s advocate—”

“Playing what?” asked Fenn, her frown deepening.

“Fucking idioms,” I replied. “He liked to argue, maybe more than he ever liked anything else in his life, and that was one of the best things about him, in part because he could come up with some really, really entertaining arguments that he would put a lot of thought into. A lot of the time he argued from a position that he didn’t really agree with — he thought that was best practice if you wanted to actually understand the world — and, anyway, he was always pitting himself against me, trying to get me to declare a moral position that he could attack against.” Looking back, it was probably more fun for him than for me, but part of being a friend was working to indulge each other’s eccentricities.

“So you’re saying that you’ve thought a lot about good and evil,” said Fenn, still frowning.

“I’m saying … nothing that the tower was telling me was really new,” I replied. “I’m not a great utilitarian, and maybe I would even say I’m a bad one, but I’ve at least grappled with the questions for long enough to know that’s the thing that makes the most sense to me. So this other way of seeing things comes into my head, temporarily replacing what was there, and there was a dissonance. But for you ...” I shrugged. I didn’t want to blame her for being apathetic about right and wrong, but it seemed to me that the tower would get more powerful if it applied its effect against someone who was untested.

“I didn’t have defenses against it,” replied Fenn with a nod, her frown finally vanishing. “Huh.”

“Just a theory,” I replied.

“Yeah, but it makes sense,” she replied. She squared her shoulders. “Okay, that makes me feel a lot better. Go inside your soul and relearn the lessons, then let’s get on the road.”

And that was where I ran into problems.

“It’s been half an hour,” said Fenn, glancing at the sun. “Feels like longer. We might have to just say fuck it and try to get you to reacquire it later on.”

“I should be able to do it,” I replied. “The skill is unlocked and sitting at 0, the character sheet confirms that, unlocked should mean that I’m able to go into my soul and start the leveling process.” I frowned at my hands, which weren’t really part of the process of soul-diving, but definitely were available to frown at. “Do you have pencil and paper in your glove?”

Fenn rolled her eyes, because of course she had pencil and paper in there. She had them in my hands in a hurry, and I bent down next to the soulcycle so that I would have a hard surface.

“Whatcha doing?” asked Fenn.

“Drawing,” I replied, glancing at her briefly for reference. Curve of the throat going to the chin, curve of the chin going to the lips, her nose, cheeks, eyes, quick dots for freckles, hair longer than when we first met, noticeably so — I stepped back and held up the drawing, looking at it. It was flawed and done in a hurry, with poor materials, but it did look like her, at least a little bit.

“You’re testing your skill,” said Fenn. “Trying to see what’s left when a skill says that it’s been reduced to zero?”

“Yeah,” I replied, frowning at the picture of Fenn. “And obviously I still do have some faculty with it … I was going to say that I retained all the ability I had on Earth, but I was never that great at drawing people. I thought this was going to turn out terribly.”

“And you didn’t think to ask whether I was any good at art?” asked Fenn with a raised eyebrow.

It took a moment for what she was saying to sink in, and when it did, I slapped my forehead. “Symbiosis,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”

“It’s not something I’ve really brought up,” said Fenn. “Training under the elves, not terribly pleasant.”

“I saw it when I looked at your soul,” I replied. “It wasn’t high enough that I really noted it, you’re good at a lot of things.”

“Why thank you,” said Fenn with a smile. “But whatever you were trying to figure out, I doubt the art thing is helpful.”

“No, it’s not,” I said with a sigh. “It’s like I can remember all the things that Fallatehr said to me about the soul, and I can remember working my way through it, but none of it actually makes sense to me anymore. It was a key that opened the door, and now that key doesn’t work anymore. I don’t even recognize it as a key. That … doesn’t make sense.”

“Fallatehr said that soul mages removed skills from people before they were put into prison, didn’t he?” asked Fenn. “Kind of makes sense that a blood mage couldn’t just think back to all the lessons they took in order to get their power back.”

“It doesn’t make sense though,” I replied. “Memory isn’t actually … Earth memory isn’t this static thing, each time you remember something, you’re remembering the remembrance of it, you’re taking the file out of the filing system and then Xeroxing it before putting it back, but with a Xerox — it’s a copying machine — a Xerox that’s imperfect in ways that corrupt sensibly, rather than insensibly.”

“Sure,” replied Fenn, with an arched eyebrow.

“So what’s stopping me from repeating Fallatehr’s lesson to you, and then having you repeat it back to me?” I asked.

“Wanna try it?” asked Fenn. “We’re so far behind schedule I think the biggest worry should be that Amaryllis is going to go back to the farmhouse, not that I think she would do that. I was around for a fair amount of discussion.”

So we tried that. I gave her the metaphor that Fallatehr had given me, of the soul as a comprehensive book, and she gave me that lesson back, tweaked slightly to her own understanding, and from her own worldview. She thought of the soul as artistry, perhaps because our previous conversation had called that to mind, and to her way of thinking, if you wanted to represent something, there were certain things that you had to have, and others that you could skip over, but it was fractal.

“So, like, the cheek,” said Fenn, pointing to her own cheek, then down at the paper. “What you have here is enough to show the cheek on the face, but it’s not enough to show the cheek by itself, because you’re missing features. Eventually you get down to a level where you’ve said all you needed to say, and the picture you’ve painted is indistinguishable from reality, even though it’s not actually as complex as reality.”

I frowned, because I wasn’t sure that she was actually saying the same thing as Fallatehr said, but his metaphor wasn’t perfect either, and I really wanted to have soul magic back again before we were face to face with the master soul mage.

“Try the meditation thing,” replied Fenn.

And incredibly, it worked. I was back within my soul in a matter of minutes, and when I went over to my skills, I could see Essentialism start silently ticking up again, just from being in my soul. Wary of getting caught by the soul trance twice, I tried to keep the need to leave in my head while going over to my values, adjusting the ‘Level Up’ value back down from where it had risen to, then left my soul once again.

“That shouldn’t have worked,” I said.

“But it did,” replied Fenn. “Isn’t that what’s important?”

“It implies some important things, I think,” I replied. “Reducing a skill doesn’t remove the memories of having learned and used that skill, but it does somehow affect the actual procedural memory, or … something. It’s fucked up. It also means that I can’t use the trick of becoming not a soul mage too many times, which was already a really lame superpower.”

“Superpower is like … the Flash or Spider-Man?” asked Fenn. She had, by necessity, become something of a scholar of pop culture.

“And I’m Captain Not-a-Soul-Mage, endowed with the awesome power of being able to not be a soul mage,” I replied, smiling to myself.

“You are so lucky you’re cute,” replied Fenn. “But if the soul powers are back, then we really should be going, because I’m sure our Mary is lonesome.”

The sun had nearly set, which meant that we were probably going to be driving toward her in the dark, and she would be expecting a car, not a soulcycle. “I didn’t check her, just came right back out, didn’t want to get stuck again,” I said.

“Check her,” replied Fenn. “No use taking chances. If you get stuck, we lose more time, but we’ve already fucked the schedule.”

I did as she said, diving back into my soul, tracing along the line toward Amaryllis, and glancing away from her body to make me feel better about the intrusive act of gazing on her soul. I looked at her values, going through the twenty highest and seeing that they were all as I remembered them, then pulling up a selection of keywords, the ones that I thought Fallatehr would probably use if he had been monkeying around. The big problem was that values seemed to be fractal, some of them containing the others, and if Fallatehr were clever, with enough time, he might be able to hide something somewhere.

If it were me, I would probably have tried to jigger it so that lots of component Juniper-parts were highly valued, while trying to leave the actual “Juniper” value low, depending on how that worked. There were also controls on the values that could probably be tinkered with, trying to overload one of the numbers in order to cause behaviors that you wouldn’t expect unless you were an expert. Maybe at the height of the Second Empire, when there was a cabal of soul mages, they had established patterns of detection, subversion, counter-subversion, etc., but I was ignorant of what those patterns might be.

It wouldn’t be impossible to partially reconstruct them from scratch though, given that I had access to no less than three souls, but there were issues with that, both ethical and practical. If I tried to figure everything out without actually modifying anything, it might take a really long time to reach any proper conclusion, but —

I felt a slap on my cheek and pulled myself out right away, my sword expanding from its ring form to make a blade almost as a matter of habit before I looked at Fenn, who didn’t seem even remotely distressed.

“You were taking a really fucking long time,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my face. “Just a little bit more, slap me if it’s longer than, say, ten minutes.”

“Looking forward to it,” she replied.

So I dove back in, tracing my way to Amaryllis again, this time trying harder to be aware of the muted outside world. I made the rest of my scan, re-confirming her skills, then moving on to social modeling, where I could see her ideas about people. Fallatehr was there, the same as he was in my own soul, a little micro-soul, a model within a model. It was, in part, data about people, but it was also a measure of the prominence of that data, a picture of the way you thought about other people. For Amaryllis, Fallatehr’s potential to betray us loomed large, larger than I would have thought from talking to her, with his skill in essentialism the second most important thing about him, at least from her perspective. She didn’t appear to like him, and even her respect for him was pretty meager. None of that looked like tampering to me.

I was tempted to go looking deeper. There was a social model of me, visible in my periphery, but while there was an argument to be made that Fallatehr might have altered her perception of me, if he’d somehow gotten his hands on her, there was a stronger argument that soul magic didn’t give me the right to go snooping around, especially since there was no turnabout on her part, no ability to read my diary in the way that I would be reading hers. I already felt like reading her like this was an uncomfortably personal affair.

“She’s clean,” I said as I pulled out. “I take that as a good sign.”

Amaryllis was more or less where we’d left her, and less pissed off than I had thought she would be, which is to say that she was still visibly upset. She came out of the woods when we brought the soulcycle to a stop. Now that the sun had fallen, we were pretty conspicuously the only thing on the road.

“You’re late,” she said, looking down at the soulcycle. “Enemy action?”

“Yes,” I replied. I looked from her to Grak. “Things went well on your end?”

“Well enough,” grunted Grak. “The bottle is secure and well-lit. That’s a stop-gap measure.”

“What happened to you?” asked Amaryllis, looking at the soulcycle again with a frown.

“We got picked up by the Abswifth, who wanted to have a talk with us about … me being a soul mage, I guess,” I replied. “We went up the Tower of Probity, suffered through some mildly unpleasant mental fuckery that I wasn’t informed existed on Aerb, and then I removed my ability to do soul magic so that he could pretend that I was innocent.” I turned to Fenn. “I think that’s more or less it.”

“Where’s the car?” asked Amaryllis.

“Back in Parsmont, for the time being,” replied Fenn. “They could have put a bomb in it while we were indisposed.”

“Or a listening device, or tracking spell, or any number of things we couldn’t have checked,” I added with a shrug. “I’ll volunteer for a stint in the glove if we need to make our getaway by soulcycle, but I’m of the opinion that we could just teleport a few continents away.”

Amaryllis stared at me. “You think it was Fallatehr?” she finally asked.

“It had to have been,” I replied. “He was pretty fucking blatant about it. I’d call it cheeky, but I didn’t find it endearing. This was part of some plan of his, I’m not really sure what, but I don’t intend to find out if I can help it.”

“We can’t just leave him here,” said Amaryllis. She glanced over at Grak, then back to me. “You understand that he’s a powerful, illegal, soul mage who knows our names? That was part of the deal we made with him, so that we would have less of an incentive to defect.”

“Defection has occurred,” I replied with a shrug.

“And the damage he might cause?” asked Grak.

I frowned, trying to think back to the numbers on the values I’d seen in my head, trying to map how long it would take for ‘Level Up’ to reassert itself back at the top. A week? Two? Nothing had changed as far as the Grak situation was concerned. Valencia’s second warning about him had made it more likely that he was compromised, but I didn’t trust her very much, especially not given the fact she’d been speaking to me with a devil’s skills in deception.

“You still don’t trust me,” he said. He stepped back slightly. “That is probably wise on your part, given your information. What I say has merit though.”

“We broke him out, we’re somewhat responsible for him,” I said with a sigh. “‘Somewhat’ being the operative word there. And Valencia is still back there, and—” I wasn’t sure what she’d have gotten up to since I’d left, but I hoped that she was okay. The new version of her scared me, a little bit, but we couldn’t leave her. “Shit. Thoughts on how we approach this?” I paused. “Guns blazing?”

“No,” replied Amaryllis. “We still need him, especially if you don’t have access to your soul magic anymore.” She hesitated, then glanced at Grak, before looking back at me. “It’s gone completely?”

“Yes,” I replied. “For now.” The lie came out quickly and easily, which I guessed had to have been from half of Fenn’s considerable ability in the skill transferring over to me. I almost fucked it up by pausing, so that I could get my bearings and figure out why I’d lied on instinct, but I continued on without stumbling, and without looking at Fenn to see her reaction. “We can find a better teacher than Fallatehr though, one that can get me what I need without us having to watch our backs the entire time.” I looked at Grak. “Our ability to enforce trust is limited, that’s a handicap whether or not he’s actually up to something. That’s especially true now that I’m back to square one.”

(Why the lie? It was easy to construct a reason, working backwards; Grak was a potential channel of information to Fallatehr, and if I could give Grak the wrong information, then Fallatehr would get the wrong information, and that might allow me to first confirm whether or not Grak had been turned against me, and second, give us some advantage in a confrontation with Fallatehr.

… but that was post-facto reasoning, not why I’d did it in the moment. Was it something subconscious? Or that my augmented mind rolled a high number somewhere and fed me the idea of lying? I tried not to stare at Amaryllis. I’d been lying to her, was that my original intent or a byproduct of keeping information from Grak?

The problem was, I was really good at creating good-sounding justifications for my actions. It was half of what I’d spent my time doing after Arthur had died, and it had that same feel, of grasping for some way that the thing I’d done for unclear, probably emotional reasons was actually the best possible thing that I could have done in the circumstances.

Shrug away from Tiff when she’s searching for comfort? Well, Arthur was my best friend, and if she felt a fraction of what I was feeling, maybe that would help her understand the pain I was in. Attack a kid at school because they said that Arthur’s death was part of God’s plan? Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, people should be punished for saying things like that, for not having an ounce of empathy, for worshipping a god that inflicts pain and death on someone like Arthur as part of some fucked-up, unknowable plan. Every friend I’d driven away, every mean thing I’d said, the Fel Seed Incident, Maddie, all of it, there was always a way for me to make myself into a rational actor. Looking back, one of the worst things about that period of my life was that I almost constantly felt like I was right, through all the pain and sorrow that I felt, and inflicted on others, as I flailed around like a wounded animal, I was able to justify it to myself as the only thing that could be done.

It wasn’t a welcome feeling to return to.)

“You’re insistent on the non-anima being part of the group?” asked Amaryllis.

“Her name is Valencia,” I replied with a frown. I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to make a point or had just defaulted to her standard way of thinking. I’d gotten myself scattered and off-balance, which made it harder to think about that kind of thing. “But no, I don’t think that it would be wise to leave her behind. She has utility.”

“Does she?” asked Amaryllis, shifting her position slightly.

“We can discuss it later,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure that we both know where the other stands.” I hadn’t told her about the game glitch, or the new powers that Valencia apparently possessed, but I wasn’t about to do that in front of Grak, not when it seemed like we were about to go back to Fallatehr. I was a bit worried about her making a rash decision based on incomplete information, but had some hope that we had some time.

“So we’re going back to the farmhouse?” asked Grak. “Will we pretend nothing happened?”

“Seems like it,” I replied. I looked over at the soulcycle. “We have two seats, I think that Amaryllis and I should take them,” I said. That would give me some time alone with her. “That would leave Grak and Fenn to travel by glove.”

“I second that motion,” replied Fenn. She gave a short laugh. “Nothing I like better than traveling in a glove, Joon knows that, just me and an oxygen tank, getting to know each other.” She held out her hand, and one of the diver’s masks we’d gotten from the clonal kit appeared in it. She tossed it to Grak, who caught it with a frown.

“I get no vote?” he asked.

“Nope,” replied Fenn. “Even if you did get a vote, it’s three against one. Or two against two, with Joon as the tie breaker.” She glanced at me. “How did you get to be tiebreaker anyway?”

“Wit and charm,” I replied. I couldn’t help but notice that Amaryllis made no comment on the topic of a vote, and I thought back to what Fenn had said when we were first starting out, that she was worried Amaryllis and I would form an ironclad voting bloc. It hadn’t turned out that way, but looking at the dynamics as they stood, the group was starting to seem off-balance. With Valencia in the mix, I worried that it would be even worse.

Grak dutifully put on the mask, then waited patiently while Fenn rested a hand on him, and then he was gone, inside the glove. Fenn took another mask and tank out and put it on. She gave me a short little curtsey and then disappeared, leaving the glove, Sable, to fall to the ground. I picked it up and handed it to Amaryllis, who hesitated for a second before putting it on.

“Was there something you wanted to talk about in private?” she asked.

“Valencia,” I said. “She passed the loyalty threshold while we were in the basement. From what we were able to piece together, she had a way to use the devil’s abilities without actually being puppeted by it. She seems … powerful, I guess. Able to read me disconcertingly well, able to lie with impunity and not get caught. Not that—” I hesitated, wary of putting my foot in my mouth. “One of the things that I saw in your soul was your collection of skills. You’re good at Lying, I know you know that, you know I know that, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think Valencia’s better than you now, but I guess I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you stretch the art to its limits.”

“Or I did, and was so good that it passed you by,” said Amaryllis. “But you think she’s better?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I don’t know the limits of her power, the costs, the drawbacks, whatever else, but I wanted to read you in on that. Given the doubt around Grak, I didn’t think it was prudent to stop everything and tell you, because if we sent him away, he would know that something was up.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like being left out of the loop.”

“I know,” I replied. “There are ways that I could have done it better, more carefully, maybe we could have coordinated things before I went down there so I’d have a way to channel back without that channel being information on its own. I don’t know. I know that Valencia’s been a bit of a sticking point for you.”

“She has.” Amaryllis nodded. “I am willing to give her a chance.”

“She said that Grak was compromised,” I said. “Once she seemed fully in control of herself, she said that was the version of her story that was the truth. I’m not ready to place so much trust in her that I’m willing to remove him from the team, and even if she’s right, there might be some value in feeding false information back to Grak in an attempt to trip Fallatehr up … I don’t know, it’s a mess.”

“You had cause to believe he was compromised and sent me off with him anyway?” asked Amaryllis with a raised eyebrow. She didn’t seem angry, just curious.

“I knew you could handle yourself,” I replied with a shrug. “I knew that you would be on guard either way, that you wouldn’t let yourself slip just because it was uncertainty rather than concrete evidence. You’re the most competent person I’ve ever met.”

“Thank you,” replied Amaryllis. She looked at the soulcycle. “Should we get going?”

“Sure,” I replied. “Just like the good old days.”

She raised an eyebrow at that.

“Did you think that it was narrative?” I asked, gesturing at the soulcycle. “When Fenn showed it to you — when I saw it, I thought it was a callback, rather than just chance, a lazy kind of nostalgia that I always liked to stick in my games. Kind of a, ‘hey, that thing from before’ type of deal.”

“You treat it all a little too flippantly sometimes,” said Amaryllis. She strode toward the soulcycle and examined it for a bit, then hopped on top of it and started it up. “Come on, let’s go.”

I climbed aboard and took the seat I’d had when we were driving through the Risen Lands, and in a way it really was like old times, driving down a stretch of road with little other traffic, just me and her.

When we got to the farmhouse, Fallatehr was waiting for us.

Chapter 30 - Tripartite Talks

Amaryllis brought the soulcycle to a rest fifty feet from where Fallatehr stood, closer than I would have liked. He was basking under one of the farmhouse’s outside lights, smiling faintly at our arrival, that smile wide enough to reveal the sharp teeth in his mouth. I wasn’t frightened, per se, but I was wary. He had thrown the police my direction, and my guess was that having me cut myself off from my ability to use essentialism was a large part of the reason that he’d done that. I had to believe that removing the skill was what any soul mage would do, if faced with a sentence of death, and perhaps I would have done it even if the Abswifth and I hadn’t been able to come to such a tidy agreement. All the same, that didn’t feel like the full picture of what Fallatehr was planning.

Amaryllis stepped off the bike, gave me an uncharacteristically nervous glance, and then looked to Fallatehr as I dismounted.

“We need to have a private conversation, just the three of us,” she said to me, but voiced loud enough that Fallatehr was in no danger of not being able to hear her.

I looked at her, in her magical armor, short hair slightly unkempt from the wind of the soulcycle, then kept myself from glancing at the hilt stuck through a loop of leather at her side. I knew that it was there though. If she was compromised, then in a fight between the two of us, I was fairly sure that I was fucked, especially since my own armor was sitting in the glove on her hand. Fenn was stuck there too, for that matter, and she wasn’t about to come out without knowing what was happening outside, not when we might be cruising down the road at considerable speed. I looked at Amaryllis’ face. Compromised? It was impossible to tell just by looking at her, but I couldn’t think of any other explanation.

“Why?” I asked, voice low.

“Grak and I spoke,” Amaryllis replied, still obviously speaking loud enough for Fallatehr to hear. With how far away he was, the quiet of the farm (silent, save for the noise of insects) wasn’t enough to camouflage even casual conversation. Amaryllis was being loud on purpose though, as a signal to either me or Fallatehr, maybe both. “As I said, we have to have a talk, just the three of us.”

“You’re ambushing me,” I replied, looking her over. Ambushing me, or converted to his side and ambushing me, but I looked into your soul not less than twenty minutes ago, and I don’t understand how Fallatehr would have done it, if he did. “And you don’t want Fenn out, why?”

“She hates him,” said Amaryllis. Her voice was calm and even, like she was trying to talk down a barking dog she knew listened to tone alone. She’d used that voice on me a few times before, and I’d never liked it. “It would be detrimental to the conversation if she were interjecting.”

“Or objecting,” I replied. I glanced to Fallatehr, who was still standing beneath the light. His smile was more subdued now.

“That too,” replied Amaryllis. “Come on.”

I stayed right where I was, trying to think over my options. How much did I trust Amaryllis? A fair amount. How much did I trust Amaryllis when our ally/adversary was an expert in changing people on a fundamental level? The answer to that depended on what I thought had happened between her and Grak when they were alone, unless she’d been tainted by Fallatehr’s influence even further back.

This here, what she was doing, keeping Fenn in the literal and metaphorical dark, trying to hold a conversation with Fallatehr that I wasn’t prepared for or briefed on, that I didn’t trust.

“We’re leaving,” I said to her. “Whatever it is you want to talk about, we can talk about it somewhere else. A three-way conversation is too messy.”

“You think he has me?” asked Amaryllis, cutting to the chase. “He doesn’t. Juniper—”

“You know that anything you say is meaningless,” I replied. My hands were sweating, and I was acutely aware of the ring on my finger, the defense that I would have to deploy if things got heated. I cursed myself for not having put my armor back on when I’d had the time for it, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this, I had cleared her. “There’s no assurance that you could possibly make, all we have are actions and trust mechanisms, and you — if he got to you, or didn’t, you know that this right here is a violation of my trust, and Fenn’s.”

“Arguments are still valid,” replied Amaryllis. “If he had gotten to me, altered me down to the core in some way, that wouldn’t prevent me from making a coherent argument, right?”

I paused. “It would be harder, much harder, than if I could trust you, which I now can’t. Let out Fenn. Let out Grak. Then we can talk.”

“We’ll stand apart as we talk,” said Amaryllis. “Fenn would disrupt it, you know she would. I could bring out Grak, but I think that would just make you more leery, because you don’t trust him either, and he … he was compromised, not probably, actually. He told me as much, while we were away. That’s what I want to have this conversation about.”

“Fuck,” I said, staring at her. I was more skilled with a sword than Amaryllis, but she had the better sword. All she really had to do was slip within my guard and point it at my chest, then flicker it on. That would have been true even if I had armor on. She had the glove as well, and knowing Fenn, it had a fucking ridiculous array of weaponry available at her tips if she wanted to take me out as I ran. And she has Fenn, and the teleportation key. I couldn’t realistically run away from this conversation, but I didn’t see what good a conversation would do, unless—

I could stall. Fenn would eventually start to wonder why she hadn’t been popped out, and despite the risk of appearing from thin air while the glove was moving over the road at sixty miles an hour, she would force her way out. Or even if she didn’t make that choice, the air tanks weren’t limitless, and she could come out rather than suffocate, the choice having been made for her. Time was on my side, as far as Fenn went ... but even when she showed up, we wouldn’t actually be safe. She wouldn’t have her bow, her bow was in the glove, but it would be two against two — two against three if Grak got out, and the two minions, who were probably just out of sight, meaning two against five.

Not that Fenn was going to come out in a good position anyway, since she would be right beside Amaryllis, disoriented and confused, and in the time that it took to get her bearings, both physically and cognitively, she could get ambushed.

Skill increased: Analysis 3!

“Okay, fine, let’s have this conversation,” I said, not really thinking that I had any better options. I didn’t know whether time was working for me or against me, but Fenn and Grak coming out was inevitable, and that would at least be a change. If they — no, I couldn’t go that far, to start thinking of Fallatehr and Amaryllis as a coherent unit, not yet — if Amaryllis didn’t seem worried about moving things along, then maybe I was the one who should worry.

Skill increased: Analysis 4!

I didn’t like the skill-ups. They were coming a bit too fast now, and I thought that I knew why; they came faster when I was threatened, when the skills were being put toward something vital, rather than trivial. I didn’t like the idea that this conversation was going to be vital. It would have set me on edge even if the game wasn’t implicitly saying that it was important. My heart was thumping, and I used a small amount of blood magic to slow everything down just a hair, hoping that it would keep me focused instead of hopped up on adrenaline.

“You fucked with Grak’s soul,” I said to Fallatehr. I stayed next to the soulcycle as Amaryllis moved away from me. We formed a triangle, with Fallatehr beneath the light, myself by the white glow of the souls in the soulcycle’s tank, and Amaryllis in relative darkness.

“I altered it, yes,” said Fallatehr with a nod. “There was no trust between us, and no real possibility for trust, so as soon as the opportunity presented itself to me, I acted. I wanted information, and he had it. The only other alteration I made to him was to make him loyal to me, in order to ensure that he wouldn’t reveal what I had done. It was always meant to be a short-term measure.”

“Is that supposed to make us feel better?” I asked.

“It makes me feel better,” replied Amaryllis. Her arms were folded across her breastplate. “Grak explained it to me. He came clean. Do you think that shouldn’t make us feel better? It’s truth, a truth that he didn’t need to give to us. That’s a step in the right direction.”

“No,” I replied. “It was ambiguous before, but now it’s concrete. We can’t trust him. You don’t get credit for saying sorry.” (You actually did get credit for saying sorry, and I realized that as I tried to search for an appropriately biting comparison, but I was hoping that we could steamroll past that error in my logic. ‘You don’t get credit for saying sorry’ had, for a long time, been something that I’d told myself so I could both avoid apologizing to people and hold onto grudges. Old habits, I guess.)

“All he wants is to look at your power,” replied Amaryllis.

“Which he’d need to look at my soul to get,” I replied. “And he can fuck off if he thinks that I’d ever willingly grant him access to my soul.”

“It wouldn’t be necessary,” said Fallatehr. “There are a variety of techniques that might allow me access to your soul without giving me the ability to change anything within it. That is one of the things that I would like to discuss with you.”

“I wouldn’t be able to trust those techniques,” I replied. “And furthermore, I wouldn’t be getting anything out of it, because you’re no longer my teacher.”

“We need him to be,” said Amaryllis. “You still need your bones fixed, and we still have to figure out a solution to restoring the locus.”

I stared at her. “And how the hell is he going to function as my teacher?”

“Communication over a distance is a solved problem,” Amaryllis answered. “You’ve already said that him touching you wasn’t something that was ever going to happen, and if that aspect of teaching is out the window, then there’s no point in co-location whatsoever. Given the potential downsides, which I’m ready to fully admit, there’s no reason we should be on the same continent.”

“He wants something immediate, I want something continuous,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, double-checking that the Anyblade was still there on my finger. “And to be frank, the thought of Fallatehr getting my power is too fucking terrifying to consider, so he’s not going to be studying it either way, end of story.”

“You’re upset about your friend,” Fallatehr said. He was doing the same thing she was, using a soothing voice, and it was grating on me. At least he had the excuse of not knowing better. “The effect on Grak will wear off.”

“No, I’m not upset about — I am upset about that, but it’s not why I’m saying this,” I replied. “I’m not fucking doing whatever it is you think is the solution to the trust problem, this conversation is over unless you can furnish a hell of a better defense. Do you think that I haven’t been thinking about this? I have, and I already came to my conclusion. You’re going to have to give me new information if you want to sway me.” I looked from Fallatehr to Amaryllis. So far, the new information is that Fallatehr probably got to her too, somehow.

“Would you like to hear the methods by which I would come to understand your power?” asked Fallatehr.

I looked to Amaryllis. She hadn’t budged. I couldn’t leave the entirety of my team behind, which would be what I was doing if I ran. Soulfucked or not, she had the power to make me stay just by holding her ground. A glance at the soulcycle told me that I could probably start it up again; instead of keys in the ignition, there was the handle of a screwdriver. That probably still wasn’t an option, since I’d seen how quickly Amaryllis could cross a distance of 50 feet.

“Sure, fine,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Memories are difficult to work with,” said Fallatehr. “Difficult, but not impossible. Your memories of what you have seen and felt of your own soul would suffice, for my purposes.” He held up a hand as I opened my mouth to offer the obvious objection. “I would not need to touch your soul. With your skill as it is, you would be able to transfer those memories into the soul of an intermediary, who would then go to visit me, on another continent, as Amaryllis suggested.”

“I would have to interface with the intermediary,” I replied. “No reason that you couldn’t fuck me over using them.”

Fallatehr had the gall to laugh. “Do you think it’s so easy to teach soul magic to others?” he asked. “Not everyone can pass through years of training in a matter of minutes. If they could, you wouldn’t be special enough to spend time on.”

“I’m flattered,” I replied with a roll of my eyes. Where was Fenn? As soon as she came out, things were going to change, and I needed to be ready.

“I am told that there is a limit to your soul magic beyond which you will need me,” said Fallatehr. “A numeric score presented to you?” he asked. I didn’t reply to that. To say that I needed him was putting it a bit strongly, I thought. “I will murder Rheta and Lehpenn before your eyes, leaving myself with no support. The non-anima is no ally of mine, but if you wish, I will end her too. None of them were ever trained in soul magic, but if it would give you a measure of security, I would do it.” He caught something of my expression. “Or something less lethal, if you prefer? Their help to me would be marginal at best, if you were to train at a distance.”

“You really don’t have a read on me, if you think that murder is going to endear me,” I replied.

“If you’d like, I could tell you who the two of them were before I began my effort to reform them,” replied Fallatehr. “They could tell you themselves, if I had time to collect them. Perhaps that would assuage your moral concerns.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “We’re not going to do the transfer thing, it doesn’t actually help with trust if you get what you want and then leave, and I can’t imagine that you’d offer to teach me with no chance to get what you want, not unless you were planning to betray me — betray me again, that is, since you’ve already done it twice.”

“Twice?” asked Fallatehr with a raised eyebrow.

“Grak, and sending our information to the authorities in Parsmont,” I said.

“And did that plan of mine bear fruit?” asked Fallatehr. I could almost admire how brazen he was about it. (Almost.)

“He’s stripped of his ability to do soul magic,” replied Amaryllis.

I looked to her again, my eyes wide this time. That was final confirmation that she was compromised, well and truly, however it had happened, because I couldn’t see a single reason for her to say that, even as a ploy.

“Ah,” said Fallatehr with a smile. “Then I suppose, having offered the sugar cube, I might now try employing the riding crop. There was some danger, if you still had your capabilities, of us coming to an unfruitful war with one another on contact, one that I was not sure to escape from unscathed.” He took a step forward. “Very well then, Juniper Smith, you know that Grakhuil’s soul has been altered, and by now you must know that the same has been done to Amaryllis, or are so obstinate that it doesn’t matter whether or not you know.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and Fallatehr waved a hand to silence her. When he did, her stance changed, and she focused the entirety of her attention on me, with her bladeless hilt drawn and ready to materialize.

“Grakhuil and Amaryllis have both been instructed to end their own lives if I die, or if you are successful in your attempt to flee,” he said as he started walking toward me. “Amaryllis dear, before you kill yourself, make your best attempt at murdering the half-elf and the non-anima as well, would you.”

“Yes sir,” replied Amaryllis with a curt nod. Her mask had dropped completely, leaving only cold calculation beneath it. I just couldn’t understand how it made any sense, given what I had seen in her soul. It might have been one thing if there were some obvious change, but whatever he’d done was so subtle that I’d completely missed it.

“So, here is my offer to you, Juniper Smith,” said Fallatehr. He was walking slowly but confidently, whatever wariness he felt at the fact that I was armed firmly masked. “Allow me unfettered access to your soul, and I will spare your friends, then disappear from your life forever.”

“Once you have access to my soul,” I replied, swallowing hard, “there would be no reason to keep any of your promises.”

“True,” replied Fallatehr. He kept coming closer. “But what other option do you have? Would you run away, leaving everything and everyone behind? You would be consigning them to their deaths.”

I had to admit, as I saw him coming toward me, that it did seem to be my best option. I was skeptical that he would actually kill valuable resources like that, especially if he had touched Amaryllis’ soul and seen the link going back to me (but I was skeptical of that, given that he hadn’t used it to take me over). I only had two arrows in my metaphorical quiver. The first being the fact that I still had my soul magic, something that Fallatehr seemed to think was important, and the second being Fenn, when she eventually came out of the glove.

As if on cue — possibly literally on cue — she appeared in front of Amaryllis. She bent over panting and ripped off the mask to draw in air, gasping and looking around wildly. I let out an inarticulate shout of warning, but that accomplished nothing, since Amaryllis was within arm’s reach. She leaped down on top of Fenn and grabbed Fenn’s arm, twisting it behind her back and pushing hard. I didn’t know which of them was stronger, but Amaryllis was shorter, and she had to use her position to sit on the small of Fenn’s back, pinning her in place with all her weight. Amaryllis brought the sword-hilt around and pointed it at the back of Fenn’s head.

“Give him what he wants!” she shouted at me. Fallatehr had sped up, still walking with confidence, and my attention was split between him and the sight of Fenn, struggling beneath Amaryllis, trying to throw her off.

I tried to steel myself for a war of soul magic with Fallatehr, a war I would have to learn how to fight on the fly; he was still striding toward me, confident and feral, and I was struggling to remember precisely what he’d said, about not being confident that he would be unscathed, and it might have been that he was setting me up to fail, but Fenn was a single fucking thought away from having a sword straight through her head, and —

It didn’t make sense. I looked over at them again.

Amaryllis, trying to keep her position, while Fenn bucked and wriggled beneath her.

Amaryllis, being moved around while wearing the fucking immobility plate.

I waited until Fallatehr was next to me, then turned the Anyblade from a ring into a dagger, burned through four bones of my left hand at once, and with a surge of my blood working in concert, drove the dagger up toward his stomach.

Maybe somewhere in the back of my head I’d been thinking of how good it would feel to stab that motherfucker, or how fitting it would be to cut past all the bullshit and finally end him. When I went to stab him, maybe I was thinking about that, rather than what my next move would be, and that’s why, when he executed a surprisingly quick dodge, I stumbled and was put off my balance.

I’d sliced into him, a grazing cut to his side, and he clutched it while wincing in pain, then drew a dagger of his own from behind his back and clutched it in front of him. I could tell from his stance that he wasn’t incompetent, but I hadn’t had enough actual training to know whether or not he was any good just from the way he faced me.

I had an enormous number of advantages on my side. Blood magic, bone magic, the Anyblade, Ropey, a plethora of virtues, Blade-bound the most important among them — and no small amount of righteous anger spurring me forward, the threats levied against my friends, the harms done to them. I glanced over at Amaryllis for long enough to see that she’d tossed the hilt to the side and was trying to slam Fenn’s face down into the dirt. She wasn’t using the armor or blade because she couldn’t, because she wasn’t actually Amaryllis, which explained why a view of Amaryllis’ soul had shown no hints of such utter betrayal.

Fallatehr was faster than me, and at first I thought that was his only advantage, but it soon became clear that there was something else at play, as strikes that should have hit home were turned aside with only token effort on his part, and he ducked beneath attacks that he shouldn’t have even been able to see, let alone avoid. Luck, I realized. He was hundreds of years old, and elves accumulated luck with age.

Still, he was only barely keeping up his defense. I was getting notifications for my skills as we fought, which meant that I was becoming a better fighter and mage as the battle went on. The Anyblade gave me reach, which was hard to counter against, and the extra speed and power of blood magic, combined with the occasional surge as I pulled from my bones, meant that he wouldn’t be able to last for long. He seemed to feel the same way.

“I have Amaryllis—”—our blades clanged against each other as I parried his attempt at going in low and followed it with a riposte—“—she’s held by—”—our blades met again, this time a parry from him, perfectly deflecting my attack upward, but I reshaped the Anyblade to keep his dagger from pushing me too far off the mark and he pushed himself back to avoid my quick backswing—“—Rheta, if you —”

The Anyblade, shaped into something more like a sickle than a sword, came slicing backward and caught him in the neck, moving through him with an edge sharp enough to cut bone. I felt a slight snag as I hit one of the vertebrae, but the resistance wasn’t much, and he stumbled back and fell over as blood began to spurt out of his throat. He clutched it, and seemed to be trying to say something, but I turned my attention to Fenn rather than try to make out what it was he was trying to threaten or coerce me with.

Fallatehr Whiteshell defeated!

Quest Complete: Soul Responsibility - You have killed Fallatehr Whiteshell, whom you released from prison, before he could do much lasting damage on the world.

(A quest that I hadn’t actually seen pop up, now marked as completed, which was something to ponder for another time.)

Fenn had things well in hand. She was sitting on top of the presumed-imposter Amaryllis, punching her repeatedly in the face. I ran over to them, with a last glance toward Fallatehr to make sure that he was staying down, and quickly drove my Anyblade, shaped to a spear, down through fake-Amaryllis’ eye.

Lehpenn Ironwood defeated!

“Imposter,” I said, feeling a momentary flip of my stomach as I looked down and worried that I’d made a mistake, even with what the game had told me. It looked like her, the same beauty, now spoiled by the damage that Fenn and I had inflicted. It still felt wrong somehow, when I pulled my spear from her head, like my brain wasn’t able to connect what I was seeing with what I logically knew to be true.

“We’re sure?” asked Fenn.

“Game notification,” I said, tapping the side of my head. “Not one hundred percent before that, no, but she wasn’t using her magic items, and — maybe I knew it from instinct, or Luck, or beamed into my head by the game.” The fight against Fallatehr had left my nerves a wreck, even if it hadn’t been a pitched battle like the ones I’d fought in before.

“Fuck, I thought I was beating her half to death,” said Fenn, staring down at her bloody hands. After a moment she reached down and began working the glove off of Amaryllis' hand. “What the fuck happened?”

“Not sure,” I replied. I felt like throwing up. I looked over to the farmhouse, and when I looked back, Amaryllis' body was gone, sent inside the glove. I really didn’t know exactly what had gone on, but I could work backward. The fact that Fallatehr had made his minion Lehpenn into a pretty damn good mimic of Amaryllis seemed to indicate that he’d had access to her soul at one point or another. I wasn’t clear on the exact mechanism you’d use to make a mimic using soul magic, but copying over bones was possible, and that was probably the pathway (unless he’d done something like what had happened to make the pelehr, but with far more skill and nuance). As for why, that was a little bit trickier. I had checked her soul to see whether anything had happened to it, and she had known that I had the means and motive to do that — so the first thing that she would have told Fallatehr, as soon as he had made himself the most important thing in the world to her, would be that he was in danger of leaking information to me.

Skill increased: Analysis 5!

There were a lot of gaps in my knowledge at that moment, some of which could probably be filled through inference, but there were at least two vital issues at hand. The first, at least, I thought we could solve.

“Grak’s still in the glove,” I said. “Bring him out.”

Fenn held her hand forward and Grak appeared in front of her, looking around wildly and holding onto his tank. I leapt forward before he had a chance to get his bearings and threw Ropey at him. While the rope was wrapping itself around him, I pulled his axe from his belt and threw it aside, then pushed him to the ground. “Gag him,” I said.

Fenn pulled out a length of cloth from her glove and sat on top of him briefly in order to work it into his mouth. She punched him once on the back of his head to get him to open up and then tied the cloth tightly in place. She glanced down in the dim light and winced. “He’s bleeding, might have bit his tongue trying to keep me out.”

“Fallatehr said there was a deadman’s — deadelf’s — suicide switch,” I replied. “It’s probably that. I was hoping he was lying about it. Failing any other options, and with Fallatehr dead, he’s going to try to kill himself. Bring the body back out?”

Fenn stood and complied, letting the very realistic recreation of Amaryllis' corpse fall down onto the ground. I patted it down, moving quickly, going to the places where I knew she normally kept what little equipment she went around with. I found the crystal hanging around her neck, and the cloak made of leaves that had once belonged to Solace. I put it on and reached into it, but though I could feel the extradimensional space it contained, I couldn’t feel the teleportation key there, nor the bottle.

“Teleportation key is missing,” I said.

“Well fuck,” replied Fenn. She rolled Grak over; he was staring at her with murder in his eyes. “Don’t worry, Joon’s going to fix you.”

“Teleportation key missing means that they could be anywhere,” I said. “Literally anywhere on Aerb.”

“Yeah, I said ‘well fuck’,” replied Fenn with a shrug. “What more do you want from me?”

I frowned at that and then went over to Fallatehr, who had stopped moving. I jabbed him in the head with my spear all the same. You always double-tap; that was just common sense. I searched over his body, looking to see what he had on him, but he didn’t seem to have the teleportation key either.

“Fuck. I’m going to go grab Valencia,” I replied, before jogging off toward the house, sword drawn.

When I got to the basement though, I found it empty.

“Okay, so I think I’ve got it,” said Fenn, some time later. Grak was tied up, and gagged as well, though we’d tried to make him as comfortable as I could.

I’d gone back into my soul and copied over the bones, fixing the damage I’d done to myself in the course of the fight. The reusability aspect of that interaction surprised me, but I was extremely thankful for it, especially since a search of Grak’s bound (and angry) body revealed that his share of the fairies was missing.

“I should never have trusted the soul link,” I replied. “Codephrases probably wouldn’t have helped us, because if you have access to the soul to make a duplicate you can just pump them for information before reverting them, but … fuck, we could have done item identification, something like a simple demonstration that hereditary items still work, if we’d —” I paused mid-rant. “Can you demonstrate your bow for me?” I asked.

Fenn sighed. “I’ve literally been with you all day,” she replied. “You’ve seen me use the glove. You have full access to my soul. The artillery bow’s got a limited number of charges, and you’re asking me to expend one of them in order to prove something that should be completely obvious? When would I even have been replaced?”

I frowned. “Okay, point taken,” I replied. “Paranoia gone rampant, I guess.” I cracked my knuckles as I looked Fenn over. The hardest part of using soul magic to replace the bones in order to heal someone into being a physical duplicate was probably the parts where the soul didn’t actually match the body, minor nicks and scratches that hadn’t been healed yet. Clothes were easy enough to steal, and information was probably pretty easy to extract once you could fuck with values and social models, but now that I was aware of that vector of attack, I had to start thinking about ways to defend against it. (And after all, this was a setting with doppelgangers too, which we might have to face at some point in the future even though I’d been assured that Uther Penndraig had utterly destroyed the secret to their creation.)

“Alright, fine,” said Fenn, popping her bow out of the glove. Before I could object that she really didn’t have to, she fired off an arrow, which became two, then four, then eight, until a cloud of arrows was barely visible as it sailed over the farmhouse.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“And sit through you looking askance at me for the rest of our days?” she asked. “No thanks, I’d rather just spend the shot. Any bright ideas about how we find the princess and the demon girl?” She prodded me in the ribs when I didn’t respond. “Come on, normally you’re full of bright ideas, or at least ideas.”

“No,” I replied, looking down at Grak. “I have no idea.”

Chapter 31 - Amaryllis

Amaryllis watched the car leave, tracking it until it was out of sight. She had memorized the glyph sequence as a matter of course, back when they’d purchased the farmhouse and taken stock of what was available to them, but it never hurt to get a confirmation. It was difficult to imagine a scenario in which it would be relevant, but Amaryllis had a good memory, and the cost was low.

“Come on,” she said to Grak. “We need to put some distance behind us before we leave. Not more than five minutes. I just want us to have a landing site that they don’t know about.”

“You don’t trust them?” asked Grak.

“They might become other people in our absence,” she replied.

Grak nodded at that. “And me?” he asked.

“If you’re the person I’ve known for the past few weeks,” she replied, which wasn’t actually an answer, “then you know asking for my trust on this trip won’t endear you to me.”

“Noted,” he said with a gruff nod.

She was on guard during teleportation. It required having the key in view, physical contact with an untrusted ally, and even if used quickly, at least a few moments of being unaware of her surroundings. It was also the most valuable single item she was ever likely to possess, above and beyond any individual heirloom entad that was hers by claim-in-fact. The keys were not particularly delicate, but she couldn’t help but hold it as though it were. (No, she could help it, if she had to, it would be easy to bend her natural instinct on that score, she had just never had to, and so indulged her sense of the precious.)

Teleporting hurt, as it always did, but the pain faded quickly, and the key was stowed in the Cloak of Leaves as soon as she’d regained her senses.

Before her stood the World Spine, stretching far up above the horizon even though they were many miles away from the base. The air was cleaner and fresher than on the farmland around Parsmont, spiked with the scent of nature rather than agriculture. They weren’t too far away from where they had been just a few days prior. She had gone outside the bottle then and marked the likeliest spot by walking in a spiral, which had been easily visible from within the view provided by the teleportation key.

“We need a place with good light,” she said, looking over the clearing. “I think that this is as good as we’ll get.” The mountains ran parallel to the path of the sun, which meant that there was little need to worry about putting the bottle in the shadow of the World Spine. It was an idyllic place, though it could do with a bit of contouring. There was a beauty in the wilds of the world, but it wasn’t a perfect beauty; the chaos of stochastic process was pleasing, but could always be improved by human hands.

“Do you trust me to handle the wards?” asked Grak.

“Has it begun to grate on you?” she asked in return.

“It was a simple question,” replied Grak.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she replied. Dwarves were, as a rule, one of the bluntest of the mortal species, but much of this was cultural, and Grakhuil Leadbraids was some distance removed from the culture of his kind. He’d spent enough time at the athenaeum to have partially assimilated, and learned enough Anglish that he was more or less fluent. He had a relatively thick accent, and more than that, his way of speaking was still characteristically dwarven, but he wasn’t really a dwarf of the clans anymore, he was an immigrant.

He was hard to read. It was easier for a person to lie in a second language, unless that second language was granted by translation tattoos or some rarer form of magic with an equivalent function, like the tongue-rings of Ellsion or the Terridoc linkages. People who spoke a second language sometimes stopped to sort their words, just like people who were lying, and being at a remove from the actual words you were speaking was a good way to prevent yourself from having to feel the force of your lies. To add to that, much of Grak’s face was hidden by a thick beard, and his facial expressions were those of a clan-dwarf, which were distinct from those employed by humans. The idiom ‘stone-faced’ had entered into Anglish right around the time of the first dwarven expansion into Anglecynn for a good reason.

Reading Grak, for Amaryllis, was like trying to read a book whose author kept using unfamiliar words and phrases, which had to be understood from context. It wasn’t impossible, merely very difficult, and over the last few days, she had been putting in far more effort than normal to figure out whether or not he was hiding something. The primary difficulty in this endeavor, aside from the difficulty of getting a good read on Grak, was that if he was acting, he was acting like himself, and in Amaryllis’ experience, that was the easiest sort of lie for a person to sell.

“Do you want me to set up wards or not?” asked Grak.

“I do,” replied Amaryllis.

The failure states were obvious. If Grak were under Fallatehr’s sway, he could set up the wards in such a way as to hold the locus hostage, which would give him leverage in future negotiations. Wards were, generally speaking, invisible, and only another warder could check the work, which wasn’t an option here for obvious reasons. That leverage was something that Amaryllis had decided she was willing to risk even before they had arrived at this place. Not using the wards that Grak could provide meant that a random person or animal could stumble across the bottle and take it, or that it would be exposed to the elements in a way that would put it, and the land (and locus) inside it in danger. Those risks seemed to outweigh the danger of Fallatehr gaining leverage, especially since his leverage would, by necessity, not be a subtle thing. The other failure state was even simpler. If she didn’t watch Grak closely, he might try to encircle her and trap her within a ward, but she planned to watch him closely, and to make sure that his wand stayed within a few feet of the bottle.

She would be happy when this was all over, and she could just regard him as a friend and ally.

“Are you going to watch me the entire time?” asked Grak as he traced out the first of his wards. The plan was that they would spend two hours here, then return to where Fenn and Juniper would be waiting.

“Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” asked Amaryllis.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” replied Grak. Irritation, disgust, frustration, these were all emotions that Grak was quick to express, even before.

“You seemed at ease with the decisions we made, because of how uncertain the situation was,” said Amaryllis. “I would ask what changed, but I imagine that the answer is simply time and isolation. Being cut out from a group wouldn’t agree with anyone, even if they were only a part of that group because they were paid in gold.”

Grak grunted at that, which was accompanied by a rush of air from his wide nostrils.

“Are you still planning to leave us once you’ve secured your thousand pounds of penance?” asked Amaryllis. The questions served two purposes, the first being the obvious surface one, and the second being the opportunity to watch his answers so she could get a better read on him.

It called to mind her time in the Lost King’s Court, in some ways, having to work on different levels, not being able to trust any single person, relying on known and shown incentives in order to figure out what people would actually do. That had been the life she’d lived from the moment she’d been born until her incarceration, and here, though deprived of resources, she was playing the same games. It wasn’t a terribly comfortable comparison for her, given how her last foray into court politics had gone.

(((This is probably the part where you’re wondering to yourself, ‘but I thought Juniper was our narrator, how does he know, and why is he talking in the third person?’, and here, safely hidden within triple parentheticals, I can tell you: some of this might not actually have happened in precisely these ways. We’re operating under really loose definitions of ‘actually happened’ already, but I don’t just mean that it ‘might not have happened’ in the sense that people might just disappear as soon as I stop looking at them, only to have an interstitial history written for them in accordance with the demands of the narrative as dictated by the Dungeon Master as soon as they become relevant to me again. Here, I mean ‘might not have actually happened’ in the sense that this is a recreation of sorts, me working backwards from information that I didn’t have at the end of the last chapter, and won’t have at the end of this one. The thing is, if you learned it like I learned it, it would be a drawn-out, incomprehensible mess, so this is a little bit of poetic license and extrapolation on my part in order to present something coherent. I hope you don’t mind.)))

“I’ve been thinking of leaving,” said Grak. “The pay is better than anywhere else. The experience has been interesting. Dangerous. The connection to Juniper …” He trailed off, which was a bit of his assimilated tact showing.

“None of Uther Penndraig’s Knights ever left his service, not for long,” said Amaryllis. “They retired, from time to time, but they always came back for one last adventure, sometimes more than one. And sometimes they die. It’s not an aspect of narrative theory that I talked about that much with him, but my interest in it should be obvious.”

Grak grunted at that, giving her nothing. She hadn’t spent enough time with him to be able to distinguish between his grunts, not on a level that would tell her something. The way he seemed unwilling to continue the conversation, taking from her and giving little back, wasn’t uncharacteristic of him either. It was, however, very convenient for him if he was hiding something from her. She presumed that he would know if some alteration had been made to his soul and would be actively hiding it from her, but that was a soft assumption, not a firm one. Or it was also possible that he was simply Grakhuil Leadbraids, the same person he’d been since she’d met him in Aumann’s tower.

“It is starting to wear on me,” said Grak, after a silence between them.

She hadn’t expected more conversation from him, and had been thinking that it would be good to get a vantage point on the site, marked for the teleportation key by walking in another, smaller spiral, so that she would have a place to land the second time they came down here.

“The suspicion?” she asked, keeping her voice mild and sympathetic, watching him closely without exerting any of the muscles in her face. He was going about his work, frowning occasionally as he stepped back to inspect using his monocle, which made the task of reading him all the harder.

“I have to watch what I say,” he replied. “I can’t give any suggestions for fear they will condemn me. It’s more frustrating than I thought it would be. The precautions are sensible. I wish I weren’t the target. You’re the closest things to friends I have.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Soon Juniper will be able to see into your soul and it won’t be necessary.”

Grak nodded. “I don’t look forward to that.”

“Even though it would get you out from under suspicion?” asked Amaryllis.

Grak finally glanced at her. “I fear giving anyone that much power over me.”

Amaryllis nodded at that. She did too, but that rubicon had already been passed.

(((Okay, that’s more speculation on my part, and Amaryllis probably wouldn’t have phrased it as crossing the Rubicon, because the Rubicon was a river that didn’t exist on Aerb.)))

She left him to work, glancing back at regular intervals, moving up toward one of the hills beside the meadow, where trees would cloak her from view to anyone standing guard, but allow a good look at the bottle — and anyone who might be staking it out when she returned to collect it, hopefully in a handful of days. This entire expedition served three purposes, as she saw it. First, it allowed her a chance to talk with (and interrogate) Grak in an attempt to root out subversion. Second, it would allow the bottle to have sunlight, which it needed in order to ensure the ecosystem remained at homeostasis, a dicey proposition with Solace dead and no replacement druid in sight. Third, with the locus safely under lock and (teleportation) key, they could openly speak of it to Fallatehr and get his advice on the matter.

She lost track of Grak only briefly, for no more than a few minutes, and then she was at the top of the hill, looking back down on the clearing, where he was still putting up his wards. She hadn’t asked about the nature of those wards, but could make her own guesses about which he would select. She had asked him in the past, in a few different situations, but he didn’t seem to much enjoy talking about his craft, and her understanding of warding was basic enough that the technical details were too difficult to put in their context.

The pattern she chose to mark her location as seen from the teleportation key was largely dictated by the trees, but she didn’t need anything complex, because it wouldn’t be far from the large spiral she’d already made in the meadow. There wasn’t much else for her to do. She wasn’t comfortable taking her eyes off Grak for long, even if she no longer thought it very likely that he had been compromised by Fallatehr. His background as first a stranger in a strange land and then a stranger returning home made him a better liar than most dwarves, she thought, and there were the inherent qualities he possessed that made him hard to read, but she didn’t think that he would have been able to become a completely different person without her knowing. Still, she wasn’t about to fully drop her guard.

Eventually, having watched from a distance for some time, she made her way back. Judging by the position of the sun in the sky, there was still an hour to go until they were to return to Parsmont. She resolved to practice her blood magic while Grak continued putting up wards; there were some trade-offs in terms of time spent on the wards and their durability, and given the two hours they would be spending in this field, Grak had opted to use the entirety of his time.

She’d had a problem with waiting, when she was younger, in large part because that was what being a noble consisted of. It wasn’t a problem that she had fixed so much as tamed. While the impulse to fidget or act incautiously was still there, it existed only as an impulse, one that did not impact her actions in any meaningful way. She sat in the grass, twenty feet away from where Grak was warding the bottle against all possible threats, and began the meditative exercises that she had learned at the athenaeum, keeping Grak in sight the entire time. It didn’t make for terribly fruitful meditation.

After perhaps twenty minutes, as she was moving flame from one fingertip to the next, Grak began to move. He was using his wand, keeping it low to the ground, and tracing a relatively small circle — one that, if continued, would encircle her. She stood up at once.

“What are you doing?” she asked as she stepped backward and grabbed the bladeless hilt from her side. Her question found an answer as she hit an invisible wall of force just behind her. She turned and reached out to touch it, trying to feel the shape of it, and quickly came to a heart-sinking conclusion. Whatever Grak was doing now, he already had her encircled. She pulled the teleportation key out of the cloak and used it at once, navigating through the map and aiming for the return site in Parsmont, but when she pushed against the key, she found herself still in the meadow.

“Grak, what are you doing?” Amaryllis asked again, allowing a small amount of panic to seep into her voice, hopeful that if he thought she were desperate he would lower his guard. She crouched down and picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground and threw it at his head as hard as she could.

It hit his chin with far less force than it might have if he didn’t have such a thick beard, and he stopped, momentarily stunned, before looking up at her and then continuing on. When she threw the second rock, he was better prepared, and raised his hand in defense, grunting with pain but not stopping. The rocks within reach, or rather, within the confines of the ward around her, got smaller from there, more an annoyance than a threat.

Her inventory was small, just the armor (useless unless she wanted to stay in one place, which she desperately did not), the cloak (not loaded with much, as it had quite limited capacity), two of the marzipan fairies (irrelevant), a crystal (useless), and her sword (the only thing with any promise). She hefted it and tried to think of how she could best use it, but Grak seemed to be aware of her reach and intent on avoiding it. She flickered the sword on and threw it at him, aiming for the arm with the wand, hoping she could cut through it, but Grak only took a glancing blow to his arm, which left him trickling blood but did nothing to actually stop him.

When he’d finished his circuit, he made another, and then another. Watching him, Amaryllis tried not to focus too much of her attention on how he had gotten the initial wards around her, one fairly clearly a barrier against latent blood magic, the other clearly to stop her teleportation key from working. She was fairly sure that he must have constructed the wards around the bottle and then pushed them toward her, the inverse of what Aumann’s warder had done to let him set foot in Caer Laga without actually breaking the wards. Where Grak had more than once spoken of tunneling, this was the logical inverse of that, pushing out the boundaries of the ward like a finger pushing through mud. That was how Grak had enveloped her without moving from where he was, or seeming to break his concentration on the task of making wards around the bottle. In retrospect — no, it didn’t do any good to spend time on thinking about whether she should have seen it coming, or seen that it was possible, there would be time to curse herself later, she hoped, or to think about all the ways she could have avoided this.

“We’re due to meet with Fenn and Juniper in less than an hour,” said Amaryllis.

Grak made no reply, and continued on with the wards, five circuits in total before he finished. She knew enough about warding to understand that he was building a prison for her; what he had trapped her with was temporary, but these new fetters were stronger, more efficient, built for the long term.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“I’m going to take you to Fallatehr,” said Grak. “He’s going to alter you to his purposes.” He stood back from the wards. “If you hand over the teleportation key we can do that now. Otherwise I will wait until you are starved and sleep deprived and take the key from you.”

Amaryllis slipped the teleportation key into her armor, so that it was nestled against her chest, a horrible idea from a distribution-of-impact perspective, but as secure as it could be. She activated the armor’s ability to hold herself in place … and it did nothing. With a sigh, she reached in and pulled the teleportation key back out.

“A ward against blood to stop me from leaving, a ward against teleportation, a ward against the immobility plate?” she asked. She tried to keep the tension and anger from her voice; they wouldn’t be helpful here. “What are the fourth and fifth wards against?”

“You will be Fallatehr’s,” said Grak, ignoring her question. “When you are, you will not look fondly on having resisted him.”

Amaryllis nodded. She was sure that was true, which didn’t make it any less frightening. The way things were now, she was well and truly fucked. Even if they didn’t return to Parsmont, and Juniper and Fenn were alerted to the fact that something had gone wrong, that didn’t actually help her, because without the teleportation key, there was no way to launch a rescue. Her options, given her skills and equipment, were minimal. She could try to convince Grak, but that seemed eminently unlikely to work. What else remained? Stalling for time, trying to reconfigure her soul in order to send a message to Juniper, hoping that Grak would be incautious enough to leave her an opening, none of which seemed particularly promising.

Suicide was an option. Getting soulfucked into a tool against your own interests, becoming an instrument that would happily tear apart everything important, all that made death seem preferable, but death came in a variety of flavors, and there was no guarantee that if she managed to kill herself she would be bottled to fade away rather than going down to the hells for eternal torment. There was at least one upside of getting soulfucked though; it didn’t have to be forever. Juniper could save her.

The link between their souls was the biggest question mark. If it went both ways, and Fallatehr could access it, then he would have Juniper too, and through Juniper, Fenn, which would leave no possibility of salvation. There were calculations to be made there, unpleasant weighings of probability and value, not just because she would be putting others at risk, but because of what the aftermath might look like, once they realized she had put them at risk. But if the soul link didn’t allow Fallatehr to make alterations to Juniper from afar, it had a strong possibility of giving Juniper some kind of advantage in the coming confrontation, especially because he could fix whatever Fallatehr was going to do to her.

“Okay,” she said. “If it’s a choice between being compromised or being pushed to the edge of death and then compromised, I’ll choose to just get it over with.” What had finally tipped her decision was the thought that any escape attempt she made was more likely to succeed if she was at her peak, and the greatest chance for escape always came during transit. She tossed Grak the teleportation key, and he caught it in one hand.

She said a small prayer to each of the five gods, and then a final, sixth prayer to the Dungeon Master that Juniper believed was the one true god of Aerb. Prayers to the gods had their own specific structures to them, with motifs and iconographies that the pious were expected to adhere to, even if prayer itself was next to useless. The prayer to the Dungeon Master took some thought, because no standards existed for praying to what was only a theoretical deity.

Dungeon Master, if I must be on your railroad, let me ride the train with good humor. If I must roll the dice, let it be known that I would not object to you fudging. Place a dungeon before me, and I will delve it. Place a dragon before me, and I will slay it. I am, above all else, your player.

Grak collected her sword, then asked for her cloak, and her armor as well. She complied; he seemed to be in no hurry. When the cloak was on his back, and everything was stored within it, he tightened the blood magic ward, which was keyed only to her, until she could scarcely move. Only then did he take her hand in his own and use the teleportation key.

This was, naturally, her chance. Even as the pain hadn’t finished fading, even as she was still struggling to process where he’d taken them, she punched him in the face as hard as she could. They were in close quarters, a room with a bed and dresser, simple, plain, nothing she could use as a weapon, a single door the only exit, and she punched him again, feeling a flash of pain in her hand as she broke something in his face. He grunted and rolled, faster than she assumed the dwarf was capable of. She had already decided that she would kill him if the opportunity presented itself, even if none of this was his fault, even if it meant losing a valuable ally in the long-term, but when she stepped toward him, she met with a barrier. Probing showed that it crossed the room, which, on closer inspection, was the one that he’d slept in the night before. They were back in the farmhouse, in a site he’d had plenty of time to prepare; she had traded one prison for another. The lack of things to use as improvised weapons was now, obviously, by his design.

It took Grak some time to heave himself up from the floor and limp out the door. Amaryllis contemplated the wisdom of suicide again, or possibly harming herself enough that Fenn or Juniper would notice, but there was not much time for such thoughts before Grak returned with Fallatehr in tow.

The elf watched her carefully as Grak altered his wards, then took her pinned-down hand without a word.

“Juniper has a soul link with me,” said Amaryllis as soon as Fallatehr’s eyes were once again focusing on the world. It had taken him ten minutes to change her, but even halfway through her commitment to resist and carry out her own plans in spite of what she might feel had evaporated. “Could you see it?” she asked. “He described it as a thin line, it allows him to see and alter my soul at a distance. His plan is to use it as a tool of surveillance, to make sure that nothing has happened to me.”

“Ah,” said Fallatehr, rubbing his chin. “Troublesome. I saw no such thing. Allow me to look again.”

Another five minutes passed as he touched her, once again with his eyes glazed-over. She kept her mouth shut, but looked Grak over. He hadn’t eaten one of the fairies in the pouch at his hip, and now that she’d undergone the same alterations he had, she understood why. She wouldn’t spend a resource that could be used for Fallatehr lightly, not unless she was sure that it was in his best interests.

That she still felt like herself was surprising. Fallatehr had twisted her, and all thoughts seemed to turn back in his direction, but they were still her thoughts, and beneath what she felt for him, there was an unpleasant dissonance. Because though Fallatehr — his name should have been written in big block letters, large enough to crowd out any other thought, because that’s how he sat in her mind now — connected back to so many concepts, so many memories, and even as much as she was willing to die for him, as much as he washed away all other concerns, there were points of contention. Her system of morality had always been a rather flexible one, bending to pragmatic necessity, but now it was bending so hard that it was downright irritating. The new her could be distilled down to “do what is best for Fallatehr”, but she wasn’t just that — she still had a desire for self-preservation, though she would die for him if need be, and she wanted to be the best and most important among his allies, not just to better serve him, but for the raw desire toward autonomy.

“I saw no signs of it,” said Fallatehr as he came back. “Tell me everything you know about Juniper, starting with the most important, and assuming that Grakhuil has already divulged everything that he knows.”

She realized, as she gave up every secret, that what he’d done had limits. She wanted to tell him the truth, but she didn’t have to, and she could see that if she actually thought that “what is best for Fallatehr” was to tell him a lie, she could do that. In the same way, she could refuse him, or defy him, or even hurt him. There was an abstract concept of Fallatehr Whiteshell, and a question of definition there which her mind idly gnawed upon as she spoke, seeing all that ways that she could twist and turn that definition to her own ends. She didn’t just want what was best for Fallatehr, she still cared about her kharass and herself, and the people of Aerb — and while those weren’t necessarily aligned values, and while if push came to shove she would choose him every time, there was room to wiggle.

“... and there’s the question of the overarching narrative, which Grak has already probably told you is pointed squarely against you. Likely terminally so.” She hadn’t realized it was true until she said it; Uther Penndraig had suffered losses and injuries, but they were almost always temporary, and never without being paid back a hundredfold. If someone began their time in Uther’s story by stabbing him in the gut and forcing him to limp off, they would end their time in his story with their life’s work dismantled, their castle razed to the ground, and every friend and ally they’d ever had turned against them — and, of course, they would die, usually horribly. In his time on Aerb, Juniper had begun racking up his own list of narrative resolutions, most of which ended with someone dying. He had introduced her to the term ‘murderhobo’, which, with the right framing of their travels, seemed apt.

“You both take it so seriously,” said Fallatehr. “The evidence seems weak. I wonder whether something else is at play that would more easily explain your joint delusion.”

“The longer we stand here, the higher the chance that he sees into my soul and realizes what’s happened to me,” said Amaryllis. “We need to think of a plan as quickly as possible, both for the case where he doesn’t know and the case where he does. Ideally, we would find a peaceful resolution, or a turn in roles, or some measure by which this narrative can be concluded without your death.”

(And if Fallatehr died? She would do her best to resurrect him, until the alterations he had made to her soul had faded, as she could feel even now that they would. She would seek out another soul mage, she decided, and do her best to coerce them into altering her soul again, because without her, he would almost certainly be consigned to the hells forever, or trapped in a bottle at Juniper’s belt.)

“You don’t think that I can become his teacher in truth?” asked Fallatehr. “Stand down, or even submit myself?”

“Not after what you’ve done to us,” said Amaryllis. In the corner of her eye she saw Grak nod. “Not even if you undo it. If you could reverse what you have done and erase our memories —”

“No, memories are nigh-impossible to work with like that, even when freshly made, at least if attempting to manipulate them through the mechanism of the soul,” said Fallatehr. “As for reversing what I have done … your souls are unstable at the present moment, because the changes I made do not comport with the rest of the soul. They will largely revert on their own, if allowed to.”

“But you could do it?” asked Amaryllis. “Temporarily, to me, in order to fool Juniper?”

“Yes.” Fallatehr nodded after a moment. “An idea occurs to me. Let us go see Lehpenn.”

She had loved Fallatehr for a brief moment, and that moment had passed. Love was an imprecise word, made more imprecise by the nature of the magic he had used. She hadn’t had any romantic interest in him, nor a familial connection, nor had she even regarded him as a friend, but she had nevertheless attached such intensity of importance to him that the term ‘love’ felt apt.

She had assisted in the plan that she now hoped would fail, had held still while her bones were copied over, had watched as Lehpenn ate through all their fairies (save one, reserved for Grak) to heal himself into her form, and had given as much advice and information as she could about how to act like her. Lehpenn would need to lean on Grak for cues, and there was every chance that Juniper had spotted her soul while it was compromised, but Fallatehr had wagered that the chance to inject him into the inner circle was far too valuable, in spite of the inherent risk.

Amaryllis had argued that Fallatehr himself should have taken her place. Neither Rheta nor Lehpenn had any faculty with soul magic — he hadn’t been lying about that, to her surprise — which limited their utility as far as agents went. But Fallatehr had been adamant in his refusal; after all, if Lehpenn died, he was only Lehpenn, a servant with a soul as stable as Fallatehr could make it, but ultimately disposable.

She had consented to be bound and gagged, and had even given advice on how to do it — how couldn’t she have, when it would serve Fallatehr? — and then Fallatehr had undone the changes to her soul.

“You are leverage,” Fallatehr said to her, as though that was news to her. She had been the one to explain that she meant something to Juniper, that he might be compelled to act foolishly in order to save her. “You shouldn’t think that’s all you are, and if we can reach some peaceful resolution, I hope that we can work together in the future.” That was lunacy, naturally, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because he came from such a different culture from her, because he was delusional, or whether he was simply taunting her.

They had teleported as a group to the windbreak by the road. Without her initial diversion to allow a more hidden way back, that would have been too risky, but her precaution there had allowed them some leeway, and Fallatehr seemed optimistic that Juniper and Fenn would be delayed (their meeting time had come and gone, but they had not, at least, shown up at the farmhouse). He had stayed behind at the farmhouse, to wait for them there, but he had sent the non-anima, bound and gagged as Amaryllis was, to be teleported along. Amaryllis had marked her as a companion, and one that Juniper seemed invested in; the non-anima was leverage too.

After their arrival, Grak and Lehpenn-as-Amaryllis cautiously crept forward to check whether there was a car waiting, and finding none, settled themselves down to wait. Amaryllis had been laid down next to the non-anima, without a view of any of this, and Rheta, Fallatehr’s minion, stood over them, clutching the teleportation key. The plan had been hammered out with Amaryllis’ input, accounting for various possibilities, insulating Fallatehr from risk as much as possible, giving him leverage that couldn’t be taken away from him simply by killing him. There was a decent chance that Lehpenn would be killed on first contact, but if he wasn’t, then Juniper’s ability to see into her soul would actively work against him, giving him a false negative. That opened the path for other plans, other contingencies, and eventually, Juniper’s capture.

After two hours, which Amaryllis spent face down in the dirt uncomfortably close to the non-anima, Rheta used the teleportation key again. This time when the pain faded, they were someplace entirely different, somewhere that seemed, from Amaryllis’ limited vantage point, to consist largely of smooth rocks in various colors, each at least as large as a handspan. It was not a terribly comfortable place to be set down for a long stretch of time. She started grunting and wiggling, the most she could manage given her restraints. After a few minutes of this, Rheta, a muscular woman, seven feet tall, lifted her up and pulled out the gag.

“No spitting,” said Rheta.

“I need to use the bathroom,” said Amaryllis. “I wasn’t going to spit on you.”

“You seem like a spitter,” said Rheta. Upright, Amaryllis could see more of the terrain, which did little to disconfirm her initial impression of it as a place consisting mostly of smoothed rocks. Far in the distance, a herd of van-sized beasts seemed to be shoveling those rocks into their mouths. “Come,” said Rheta, but the command was unnecessary, because she was carrying Amaryllis in one hand.

Her captor helping her to go to the bathroom was mildly unpleasant, and little information was gained in the process, though to Amaryllis’ surprise, her gag wasn’t put back in place when she was set back on the rocks next to the non-anima. Rheta, for her part, seemed bored with this guard duty, which was the common fate of guards everywhere. Amaryllis had to wonder how much this woman was actually suited to the job; inside the prison, there would have been little cause to create someone in the specialized role of the brute, which at first glance is what she would have pegged Rheta as.

“I’m uncomfortable,” said Amaryllis. “I think Valencia probably is too.” Calling the non-anima by her made-up name was going to be a good habit to get into, if the group was ever reunited — if Juniper saw through the lies, cut through the plots, and won the fight. Here, saying ‘Valencia’ was an effort to humanize her in the eyes of their mutual captor, though Rheta had likely known her since birth.

“I don’t care,” said Rheta.

“The most likely outcome of this is that Fallatehr turns me to his side again,” replied Amaryllis. “I have no weapons, no armor, and no relevant training, the worst I could do is run away into an inhospitable wasteland, and that’s if you were foolish enough to remove all of my ropes, which I’m not even suggesting you do. Just loosen them, enough that I can move and avoid getting sores. I’ll be more valuable to Fallatehr that way.”

“You’re trying to manipulate me,” said Rheta. She shifted, clearly not comfortable on the rocks.

“I’m trying to find the seam of common cause,” said Amaryllis, which fell just short of being a bald-faced lie. She remembered what it had been like to think that Fallatehr was all-encompassing, and that gave her a handle on how to frame her arguments here. True manipulation might come later.

Rheta thought for a moment, then undid some of the knotwork, enough that Amaryllis was able to sit up and find a better position. That was promising, and gave her some room to work with, which was exactly why Rheta should have refused her.

When she leaned back, she found herself briefly touching the non-anima, and while her instinct was to shy away, she let the touch linger. The non-anima was unpredictable, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t also be a tool. Amaryllis felt at her while she spoke.

“It wasn’t like I expected, being his thrall,” said Amaryllis.

“Thrall?” asked Rheta. Amaryllis felt a rush of relief at the response. The woman still had curiosity, and could still be bored out of her mind by guard duty. She had a stable soul, to hear Fallatehr tell it, but Amaryllis was guessing — hoping — that came with less than the perfect peak of devotion to Fallatehr, or with more allowance for quirks.

“Thrall isn’t the right word,” said Amaryllis. “Fanatic? Devotee?”

“Devotee.” Rheta nodded.

“I was still myself,” said Amaryllis. “It takes some of the punch out of what was done to you. It’s not as immoral as simply wiping a mind away.” It was worse, in some ways. Secrets, spilling out of her mouth, people she cared about tossed aside, she could feel her anger rising as she thought about it, and quelled that anger. Her fingers touched the non-anima, feeling for her ropes. Exploration by touch revealed that the knot was nowhere she could reach without moving, not that she was actually planning on unleashing the non-anima, whatever Juniper’s powers might be whispering about it.

“Still immoral?” asked Rheta after some time had passed.

“I didn’t think so when I was his devotee,” said Amaryllis. She tried to keep her voice gentle. “I thought that anything that was of value to him was good. Now … I think otherwise.”

Rheta rolled her eyes. “Never much interested me, good and bad.”

“Who were you, before you were imprisoned?” asked Amaryllis.

“Why?” asked Rheta. She was looking out at the animals that were gargling rocks in the distance. “Doesn’t seem important.”

“Just making conversation,” replied Amaryllis. She touched the ropes again, and considered burning through them, like Juniper had done in the elevator shaft. She had blood magic at hand, though somewhat less faculty than he had even back then, and her hands would be nearly unusable, not to mention that any reaction from the non-anima would give the game away (a reaction that a devil might give, or that the non-anima might give in response to the pain of being burned). An option, but not a good one. “I had other interests, other ideas, when I was a devotee.”

“Trying to find seams of common cause?” asked Rheta. Amaryllis nodded. “I don’t trust you.”

“So don’t,” replied Amaryllis with as good of a shrug as she could manage in her loosened bonds. That was also a way of checking how much play she had: not much, but she didn’t think that she could ask for them to be loosened a second time, at least not yet. The bindings were all made of a single rope, circling her ankles and wrists, connected by a length that allowed some slack.

Rheta tapped her foot against one of the rocks, frowning, then picked it up and threw it off into the distance. “I was part of an honor guard for a now long-dead king,” she said. “My people are warriors. Were warriors, if they no longer exist. The king was a hold-out when the Second Empire began to rise, but his brother was more than willing to negotiate. That’s speculation on my part. The king was killed in his sleep by agents unknown, and I was arrested by writ of the Lost King’s Court.” She turned to look at Amaryllis. “I’m curious how you would turn that to your advantage, princess.”

“Just killing time,” said Amaryllis, trying to be nonchalant. Amoureux Penitentiary had been Anglecynn’s dumping ground for quite some time, and the ruling class of Anglecynn consisted almost entirely of her relatives, most of them distant. The odds that any given person housed there would have a grudge against someone of her background was rather high, so this wasn’t quite down to unfortunate coincidence, but from the large woman’s tone, it probably meant that getting on her good side was out of the question. A number of conversational avenues had been slammed shut. “Can you loosen my friend’s knots?”

“She’s not your friend,” replied Rheta.

“Friend of a friend,” said Amaryllis. “She’s cosmically important.”

“No,” said Rheta. She turned away, to look out over the rocks. “I’m done talking.”

Amaryllis stayed calm. Doors were shutting all over the place. If she talked again, the gag was likely to return to her mouth. The plan had been that they would stay in this place until well past nightfall, then teleport back to Parsmont, to a place that Rheta would pick at random. After that, they’d use coded messages that could be sent and received with neither party knowing where the other was. That had been her idea; it was a way to keep her as leverage without Juniper being able to murder his way to a solution, a fall-back strategy in case other paths failed.

A long silence was broken when the non-anima began squirming and making noises through her gag. Rheta glanced over for a moment, then looked back out at the field of smooth rocks. The creatures that had been eating the rocks had gone, but a few small birds had taken their place, and were pecking at the rocks.

“She still needs to use the bathroom,” said Amaryllis. “We’re going to be together for quite a while, and I think we’d both rather not have to smell her if she shits herself. I half-suspect that a devil would do it just to fuck with us.”

Rheta sighed and stood up, then came over and dragged the non-anima to her feet, pulling by the rope. She carried her some distance away, not seeming to show any strain from carrying her, then unceremoniously reached up to yank down her underwear, then pushed her dress up as well. All of this impressed upon Amaryllis how strong the woman was; that was a given, at seven feet tall, but a direct physical confrontation was unlikely to be won. What other options did she have though? Rheta was, all things considered, not a terribly good guard, but there weren’t even any unobvious weaknesses to exploit.

As they were returning, with the non-anima having relieved herself, Amaryllis turned her hands inward to her own ropes and began burning through them, one hand to free her ankles, the other to free her wrists. The pain followed quickly, and from there it was a matter of trying her best to suppress the outward signs of that pain while still keeping enough concentration on the blood magic. It was a bit rash, as decisions went, but even if she’d had time for second thoughts, the opportunity to bail out had passed the moment she’d burned herself.

The pain overwhelmed her for a brief moment at the end, and she felt tears rolling down her cheeks, but then she was finished. Through tear-filled eyes, she saw Rheta looking at her, but couldn’t make out enough to see the huge woman’s expression. The sight of the non-anima falling to the rocks was enough of a warning about what was about to happen. Amaryllis stood up, swaying slightly — every movement was agony on her hands, how had Juniper done this? — and used her forearm to wipe away some of the tears, enough that she could look at Rheta.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Rheta.

Amaryllis settled into a fighting stance on the uneven rocks. Her hands were held out in front of her, usable only if she could spare the time for a bout of blinding pain, rather than the mere agony that each of her arms ended in. She’d always been weak at unarmed combat. And she was facing down an opponent with a two-foot height advantage, a two-hundred-pound weight advantage, at least an extra foot of reach.

“What were you hoping to accomplish?” asked Rheta. Through the tears in her eyes, Amaryllis could almost see the frown, but her displeasure was apparent enough in her voice.

Amaryllis was shaking from the pain, and the unasked-for tears were going to further complicate matters. She tried to redirect the flow of her blood away from her hands, in the hopes that the lack of circulation would numb them, and that gradually began to do some work, which stepped the pain down enough that she could actually concentrate. Rheta was still standing in front of her, looking her over, and Amaryllis realized the predicament just before Rheta spoke.

“I don’t have more rope,” the giant woman said with a mild voice. She looked down at the non-anima. “Looks like one of you is going to have to give up your clothing.” Rheta reached down and began to pull the non-anima out of her dress, stopping momentarily in order to tear it.

Amaryllis picked that moment to attack, because if you were going to do something like burning a significant amount of your own skin and flesh away, then you sure as hell weren’t going to just give up halfway through. She raced forward, mind awash with fresh pain from the movement, the smell of burning flesh in her nostrils, and ducked under a backhand fist from Rheta.

There was a loose school of combat taught to young women all around Aerb, if they were nobility, or the daughter of someone important, or simply had cautious parents. As legend had it, Uther Penndraig had invented the style when his own daughter was born, and he started by looking through all the formalized rules of physical aggression he could find and built, as the foundation, a series of principles and maneuvers that violated every single rule designed to make things fair.

Amaryllis went for the eyes, a risky move given that it meant slipping inside the other woman’s guard, and the damage to her hands that meant such an attack would be pure torture even with the hands numb. Her fingers were barely working, but the internal damage to her hands had largely spared the tendons that let her thumbs move, so she clapped her hands to the sides of Rheta’s head — brilliantly sharp pain, white hot even past the numbness — and drove in her thumbs. She was swatted off only a few seconds later, but when she regained her bearings (she’d landed on the rocks, and would have bruising down to the bone) she took visceral pleasure in the way that Rheta was rubbing at her face and stumbling around.

From there it became a fight of cripples, Amaryllis largely without the use of her hands, Rheta largely without the use of her eyes. She wasn’t fully blinded, because even though eyeballs were surprisingly fragile, it was difficult to apply much force to them. Nevertheless, she was having trouble seeing, and while Amaryllis’ body ached, she was still in decent enough shape to put up a fight against someone whose swings went wide more often than not.

Amaryllis finally got the upper hand with a kick at just the right moment, aimed right at Rheta’s knee when all her weight was on that foot. It took Amaryllis putting almost all of her effort behind the kick, a reckless attack, but there was a sickening crunch as Rheta’s foot went off balance on the rocks, slipped back slightly, and then caught in place, with the knee bent backward a moment later. Rheta cried out in pain and fell, and Amaryllis fell on top of her, using her elbow to repeatedly slam the giant in the head. Each hit sent another jolt of pain up Amaryllis’ arm from her badly burned hand.

The actual murder was accomplished once Rheta was insensate. Amaryllis picked up one of the stones using her wrists, and drove it down with all her might into the center of Rheta’s face. She checked for pulse (laughably difficult without fingers) and breathing, and finding none, finally took a moment to relax.

Relaxation meant pain. The blood began to flow back into her hands, and the pins and needles of circulation returning was the baby’s breath in a floral arrangement of pain. She screamed and cried, for a time, because it was good to scream and cry, but eventually she stopped and fought back the pain once more to take stock of her surroundings.

She had a teleportation key, the corpse of a seven-foot-tall woman, and a bound non-anima who was looking at her with wide eyes.

“Not sure I was supposed to rescue myself,” she said. She willed her hands to stop shaking, because it was making the pain worse, but they didn’t comply.

The only real question was where to take the teleportation key to. Juniper was out there somewhere, almost certainly ready to fall into whatever trap Fallatehr had set for him, but without knowing where he was, there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Teleporting anywhere was fraught with peril, simply because of how incredibly valuable the key was, but staying in this land of smooth rocks was out of the question given she had no food, water, shelter, or medical assistance. She let out a shaky breath. The fight had left her, and a bruised and burnt husk seemed to be all that remained. She needed help.

She cast her glance toward the non-anima. “Fuck,” she said, then got up and staggered over to her. It was brutally hard work to remove the gag, given the state of her hands, and once the gag was out, there was no question of her being able to get it back in.

“I’m an ally,” said the non-anima.

“Yeah?” asked Amaryllis. She willed her hands to stop shaking again, and this time they settled slightly. The sun was starting to set.

“Something happened in the basement when I was with Juniper,” said the non-anima. “Something changed in me. I was granted power, and freedom from possession. He seemed to have expected something like that.”

“He’s an idiot,” replied Amaryllis. She wanted to slump over and sleep, even as hard as sleep was to imagine with the pain she was in. Rational evaluation was hard in that kind of state, and against a devil, she needed to be at her best. She’d thought, coming over, that she could do it, but trying to work through the logical implications of what the non-anima said was proving difficult. Devils could be cunning, masters of the social, perfect liars, but what Amaryllis needed right now was help, and this seemed like a risk that she had to take. Juniper had probably pushed her loyalty above ten, against Amaryllis’ advice, but that didn’t mean that she was telling the truth. He obviously hadn’t released her from the basement, which meant that he wasn’t entirely confident either. He hadn’t said anything about a loyalty increase either. “Any proof?”

“None,” said the non-anima. “There was nothing he said I wouldn’t have cause to know by other means.”

Amaryllis nodded. “Yup, because that would be too easy.” She looked down at her shaking hands and willed them to stop again. They seemed to start back up whenever she stopped paying attention to them. “Fucking devils.”

“If you let me out, I can help you,” said the non-anima. “I think I can capture one with medical knowledge.”

“I need magic,” said Amaryllis. “Best we could do is cover them with cloth.”

“You’ll need a pair of hands,” said the non-anima.

“Yup,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. She glanced over at the corpse a few feet away. If she had bone magic, the throbbing pain in her hands would be a problem she could fix in a matter of minutes. Symbiosis, they’d called it; Fenn had bone magic by proxy. She tried, briefly, to raise her loyalty, to come to a personal revelation that would allow her access to new abilities, but if it worked, there was no immediate effect.

“You’re a fearsome fighter,” said the non-anima. “I thought you would die.”

“She didn’t want to kill me, gave me an edge,” said Amaryllis. That, and I’m better at fighting than I should be, far beyond any of the training I ever got. I fight like a seasoned veteran of the pits. “You said something happened to you, down in the basement?”

“Something he knew was going to happen,” said the non-anima. “It wasn’t what he thought it might be, but he didn’t clarify. It turned the tables, made me a furnace fed by them. I eat demons.”

“Shit,” said Amaryllis. Wouldn’t Juniper have told her, if something like that had happened? Maybe not, with Grak there, or given her previous opinion on the matter. Would the devils have been able to figure out something like a Loyalty change, without Juniper’s input? Unknown. Would Juniper have given his input? Also unknown. What the non-anima — Valencia, he’d named her — was saying fit, under the assumption that Juniper’s power almost always worked in his benefit, and under the assumption that he wouldn’t be given worthless companions.

Sitting on the uncomfortable rocks, covered with bruises, staring at her burned hands and trying to ignore the pain, or at least maintain conscious thought through it, Amaryllis wondered about that last assumption. Whatever forces were at work hadn’t stopped companions from being problems. Hells, with his rapidly evolving skillset, Juniper probably would have been better off going to the border wall of the Risen Lands instead of meeting her. From her perspective, their time together had been a litany of failures and setbacks, getting captured by Aumann, being incapacitated by rat rot, being chased by Larkspur, and then captured and turned by Fallatehr, which was its own series of failures rolled into one.

(((Okay, I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here, but these are all things that she confessed feeling to me, after we were back together. Uh, spoilers, I guess, but you already know that I’m okay and Fallatehr’s dead, and with the soul mage and his two minions killed it’s sort of just a question of what happens between Amaryllis and Valencia, and how or whether they joined back up with me, which I guess you also have already figured out, since how else would I know any of this?

But what she didn’t mention was the stillborn romance, which I think must have been part of that train of thought. Why she didn’t mention it to me was obvious enough, but I thought it probably had to go on her list of failures, if she was feeling down about herself and her capacity as a member of the team. Still, there are limits to the kinds of thoughts that I’m willing to say were running through her mind.

Okay, back to the story.)))

“What is Juniper to you?” asked Amaryllis.

“I don’t know,” said Valencia. “He said he wanted to be a friend. To help me. I haven’t known very many people. Most of them were Fallatehr. Juniper might seem less, when I know more, but I don’t think he will.” She didn’t say less what.

“I’m going to let you out,” said Amaryllis with a sigh. She looked down at her hands. “Might take a bit.” It sometimes seemed like there should be a limit to how much something can hurt before your body said, ‘alright, I think you probably have the message, I’ll shut up about it now’.

Eventually, working mostly with her thumbs, Amaryllis managed to get the knots loose enough for Valencia to slip free of them. A lesser person than Amaryllis Penndraig might have resigned herself to her fate, but Amaryllis kept on her guard, as though there would be anything that she could do against the combat prowess of a demon shoved into mortal form.

“You don’t trust me,” said Valencia, rubbing her wrists and ankles.

“No,” said Amaryllis.

“Then why did you let me out?” asked Valencia.

“Necessity,” answered Amaryllis. That wasn’t quite true though. “It’s what Juniper would have done. He has better instincts for this sort of thing.”

“People things?” asked Valencia, cocking her head to the side.

“No,” said Amaryllis. “Other sorts of things. I’ll explain it to you later, if — if it’s safe to.”

“Okay,” said Valencia. Her voice was soft. She reached down and touched her dress where it had been ripped. “Are we going to be like sisters?”

Amaryllis might have let out a long sigh of discontent at that, but she was holding her hands in front of her so they wouldn’t have to touch anything, and the muscles of her body were aching from the tension of fighting pain, not to mention the bruisings she’d taken. “Come on,” she said. “I need you to go search the body and get the teleportation key, then hand it to me. We’re leaving this place.”

“To the farmhouse?” asked Valencia. “In Parsmont?”

“No,” replied Amaryllis, looking down at her hands. “Somewhere a little riskier.”

Ever since escaping the Risen Lands with the teleportation key, Amaryllis had been on the lookout. Dark alleyways were her preference, especially those with little nooks off to the side created where, say, there had once been a doorway that had been sealed, or a street that had been built up in, or a rarely-used accessway. When she spotted a place like that, she would go to it, move around as much as possible within its confines, then retreat backward along her own steps. These places were all marked on the view as provided by the teleportation key.

Valencia was already moving when they arrived, stepping out in front of Amaryllis in a fighting stance that was recognizable as such only because there was no other explanation for what she would be doing. Amaryllis might have stopped her, if she wasn’t trying to push through the overwhelming flash of quickly fading pain that accompanied use of the key.

“It hurts you?” asked Valencia, who relaxed and turned back toward Amaryllis.

“Yeah, it hurts,” replied Amaryllis. She had been holding the teleportation key between the heels of her hands, and fearing the worst, handed it over to Valencia, simply because there was no other option. Valencia slipped the key into a small pocket on Amaryllis' dress though, without seeming to understand the importance of the gesture. “Come on, we’ve got a bone mage to see.”

It was easy enough to play the part of indigents; Amaryllis held her injuries in front of her, stopping occasionally to beg for coin she was certain she wasn’t going to get. Valencia’s dress was ripped, and neither of them were wearing shoes (Amaryllis' had been taken to be worn by her double, along with all her armor; Valencia’s had been left behind). Even before stepping onto the streets of Barren Jewel, they had been dirty. They still got a few looks; even as indigents, even horribly wounded, they were two young, attractive women.

They reached the small shop with a bone on the sign above its door, and went in without knocking. Amaryllis sat down even as the pale woman with black spots stood up from behind her desk.

“Emergency,” said Amaryllis, lying back. She was bone tired — pain would do that to you, if you felt it for long enough. “Gonna have to pay you later.”

“Is she,” said Bormann, looking Valencia up and down with a frown.

“Non-anima?” asked Valencia. “No, I just have the misfortune to come from a bad bloodline.” Her accent had changed radically, losing the faint trace of elvish it’d had and becoming a melange of Anglecynn Anglish. She let out a rueful chuckle. “As if anyone these days would suffer a non-anima to live past infancy.”

“Some mothers would,” said Bormann, but she seemed satisfied by the explanation. She moved over to Amaryllis and got to work without comment, first looking over her hands, then her other injuries. “I don’t normally take on patients who can’t pay.”

“But it helps that I was upfront about it, right?” asked Amaryllis. Humor had never been her strong suit, and she had been trying for a joke, but it didn’t even remotely land.

“More ill-advised use of blood magic, like last time?” asked Bormann, sitting back slightly on her chair and looking Amaryllis over.

“Given the circumstances, it wasn’t ill-advised,” said Valencia, and despite herself, Amaryllis was grateful that she didn’t have to muster up the energy for her own response. “We’ll be able to give you twice your normal rate within twenty-four hours. Coming here first was, I hope you understand, a priority.” Again the different persona was there, surrounding her like a cloak.

Bormann glanced at her, then back to Amaryllis. “The bill will be four million tcher then,” she said, and got up from her seat to start taking down bones. “You should thank your friend, the half-elf, for establishing a good working relationship.” The bones rattled and clacked as she took them from the strings they hung from, and Amaryllis closed her eyes for a moment, finally dropping her guard.

Chapter 32 - The Mouth of a Long River

“How long are we going to wait here?” asked Fenn after an hour had passed.

We’d had a late supper, a cold meal of shredded meat and crumbly cheese between slices of yambread that was almost, but not quite, what I would call a sandwich. I forced the food down; with Fallatehr dead, fixing my ribs had been delayed for the time being. I had to hope that getting to level 20 again was going to allow me to do it, because I’d killed the most skilled teacher available to me.

“Through the night, I think,” I replied. “I’m worried that the Abswifth is going to stop by. I’m more worried that the Bendon is going to show up. I don’t really have a firm grasp on how the government actually works in Parsmont. If they have the license plate of the car, then maybe they could comb through their files in order to figure out who the car was registered to, which would lead them right back here.”

“Maybe I should learn how to clean up blood in a hurry,” said Fenn. “That, or pray for some rain. Fallatehr left quite the puddle.”

“Yeah,” I said with a grimace. Both corpses were stored in her glove, their souls in their own separate bottles. “I don’t feel great about that. Toward the end … even though he had Grak, even though Amaryllis was — wherever she is, I guess, even then, I felt like he actually was trying to figure out some kind of compromise with me.”

“You are such a sap,” said Fenn. “It’s a good thing that you have me around, you need someone with street smarts. I’m reformed though, just to let you know.”

“Reformed?” I asked. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I’m not sure what I’m reformed into,” said Fenn. “Reforming, more like.”

“Let me know if I can help with that,” I said. I was sitting by the window on the second floor, and looked out onto the yard, which was lit by the outdoor lights. Beyond that was the road leading to the farm, and if Amaryllis somehow found her way back to us, I thought that was probably the way that she would come.

“There ought to be some limits to how much a single person can be to you,” said Fenn. She didn’t elaborate on that one way or another, and I let it hang in the air, hoping that she would say more, but I have to confess that my mind was elsewhere. The party, such as it was, had been sundered, three members here at a farmhouse near Parsmont, and three others somewhere else. One of them was the big spooky deer, admittedly, and Valencia was probationary, but it left me feeling incomplete.

“You miss her?” asked Fenn.

“I’m worried,” I said. The only idea I’d had thus far was that we could try to torment the answer out of Grak. The idea of actual torture left such a bad taste in my mouth that it was a non-starter, and I doubted that it would be effective even if I was willing to stoop that low, but there were other ways that we might get to him. We had Fallatehr’s soul in its own small bottle, which meant that we could make Grak an offer on what we would end up doing with it.

“But do you miss her?” asked Fenn.

“Yeah,” I replied. I tapped at the window once, idly. I thought that I had seen something, down by the road, but closer inspection revealed only cropland, stalks of something that was close enough to corn that it felt like home.

“I do too,” said Fenn. “Not that she’s actually been gone that long, but it feels like, when are we going to see her again? And I didn’t get to say goodbye.” There was a subtle change in the lighting, and I looked over to see that Fenn was holding one of the small glass bottles with a soul in it. “Solace,” she said by way of explanation. “If our princess is dead, or worse, just … gone, I’ll”—she shook her head—“I’ll write a strongly-worded letter to the Dungeon Master.”

I felt my heart flip at that. It was possible Amaryllis was dead. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I would ever have done as a DM, but it was possible, especially since we’d been delving deep into narratives. I felt the need to do something, to make myself useful, to not just sit and wait, hoping that Amaryllis would come home.

“I’m going to try to level up soul magic,” I said. “See if I can get it back to 20, see if I can maybe fix Grak, then maybe, I don’t know — if they have the key, I feel like they’re a long way away. So it’s probably pointless.”

“I’ll keep guard,” said Fenn. “Good luck, have fun.”

I dipped back into my soul and began mindlessly browsing, letting myself get lost in the soul trance. Level Up had moved back up the rankings, though not far enough that it was in strong competition with the things that I thought were core, and I moved it back down. I took a trip to Fenn’s soul, just to confirm that she was clean (and to look at that value, Nellan, that I hadn’t yet asked her to answer for), then over to Amaryllis’ soul, to make sure that she was alive, or at least that her soul was still accessible. I wasn’t sure what would happen to the links if either of them died, especially given that those links didn’t seem like a natural feature of souls to me.

After that I pulled out and asked Fenn for some pencil and paper, which she supplied from her glove, then spent some time going in and out of my soul in order to make some recordings of what was in there, which I thought Amaryllis would appreciate when she came back. The Essentialism skill was climbing, but slower than I had hoped for; I wasn’t doing anything too useful with it. I tried burning through my bones and replacing them to boost the skill faster, but that seemed like exactly the kind of grindy munchkinry that the game layer actively discouraged, and my only feedback was making guesses at what was causing a single number to rise.

“Wait,” said Fenn as I popped back out of my soul. She leaned down and opened the window. “Friend or foe!” she yelled out.

There was a long pause.

“Friend!” came the reply.

“They say they’re friends,” said Fenn. “Two of them, in the fields, skulking around.” She was jabbing her finger out the window, into the dark, and her eyes had to have been better than mine, because I couldn’t see shit. “Neither of them is seven feet tall, which I think probably means there’s cause for celebration, unless we have another changeling on our hands.”

It was slow, as reunions went, due to suspicions on both sides. They were, clearly, Amaryllis and Valencia, and we were, clearly, Juniper and Fenn, but given everything that happened, we were all understandably cautious. Amaryllis was asked to demonstrate mastery of her heirlooms, and I triple-checked that her soul was intact. My Anyblade was invested in me by Amaryllis, so I could prove that I was really myself by shaping it, plus by having Ropey vouch for me. Amaryllis wanted Fenn to fire her bow, and Fenn cheerfully told her that she could fuck off, but did offer a demonstration of her archery skills, which I had to imagine would be nearly impossible for all but a very small group of people to fake (and we didn’t, to my knowledge, have any supernaturally skilled archers as mortal enemies). Lastly there was Valencia; for the sake of completeness, I tried to slide one of my tattoos onto her skin, and found that it wouldn’t cross over, as expected. She had no soul, no part of her was magical, save perhaps for the gift that the game had bestowed on her.

“Is Grak okay?” asked Amaryllis, once we were done with the confirmation process.

“I’m not sure how long it will take for the effects to fade,” I replied.

“Fallatehr spoke of it in terms of stability,” said Amaryllis. “There’s nothing grounding what Grak feels about Fallatehr, so it should evaporate more quickly, if I understand it right.”

“Next time let’s fight something dumb,” said Fenn. “My vote is some kind of monstrous bear, something that I can shoot from a distance, preferably without armor.”

Something had changed between Amaryllis and Valencia. I had known as much when I’d seen Valencia without chains or ropes, but watching them together, even the way they stood, it was different; Amaryllis angled her body so that Valencia was implicitly included in the conversation, and spoke to the center of the group. I still had my doubts about Valencia, and could see that there were problems with her on the horizon, but the fact that Amaryllis seemed to accept her assuaged my concerns.

“We’re running out of safe places to go,” said Amaryllis. “We have an hour until the key is done recharging, and I think we’d be better off not being here.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“We also need to go back to Barren Jewel,” said Valencia. She was keeping her back straight and trying to project her voice, but the attempt at speaking with authority was fairly transparent for being an attempt. Not currently with her infernal superpowers then.

“What’s in Barren Jewel?” asked Fenn, raising an eyebrow. Her eyes were moving over Valencia, curious and wary.

“We owe a bone mage for her services,” said Valencia, casting a glance at Amaryllis. “Four million tcher.” She looked down at her dress, which I saw was ripped. “And we’ll need clothes, if you have some.”

At that, Fenn finally burst into a wide grin. “I think I might have something in just your size.”

I reached level 20 in Essentialism the next day, as I ‘meditated’ on a warm, flat rock in the middle of some very empty woods. I got the Soul Slip virtue back again, and this time had more freedom to explore my soul. The virtue still had a horribly vague description, but I was hopeful that one of the clauses, the one about ‘altering that which had been unalterable’ would allow me to fix Grak. Before going to where he was tied up, I looked in at my soul, to where the ability numbers were lined up. There was nothing that I could change there without lowering the cap on some of my skills, and so many of my skills were at their cap that I couldn’t do it safely. I thought that I had to be nearing another level, so decided to wait until then, when I would have the points to play with and wouldn’t risk lowering my skills, if that was what happened when the cap got permanently lowered.

The second thing I did was to go to one of my little-used skills, Bows, and lower it by a point. When I had lowered Essentialism, I’d been kicked from my soul, which made sense given that I had zeroed out the skill and temporarily lost it. Here, I was trying to see whether lowering a skill actually gave me anything, because the description for Soul Slip explicitly mentioned trade-offs. After feeling around the internal space of the skill section in my soul, I eventually realized that I could feel something slippery there, and with a push of will, could apply it to one of the other skills. I applied it to One-handed Weapons, which was at its cap, pushing it up to 22.

One of the annoying things about being inside the soul was that I didn’t get any of the HUD notifications that I got in the ‘real’ world, but waiting in my list of Afflictions were two new entries.

Overcapped: Skill will decay at 1 per 10 minutes until under cap.

Skilled trade: Skill will decay at 1 per 10 minutes until returned to baseline.

Not permanent, then. After five minutes had passed, I checked my skills, and saw that Bows was still down a point, and One-handed Weapons had reverted to 21, which confirmed that the times multiplied, and that it was a semi-permanent cost to be paid. I hoped the same wasn’t going to be true for trading ability points, because those were one of the most valuable game resources I had; it made me nervous to even try.

But the point of leveling Essentialism wasn’t to get those benefits; it was to see whether or not I could do something about Grak.

When I came to him, he wasn’t looking good. We hadn’t taken the gag from his mouth because we were worried he would try to bite his tongue, which meant we hadn’t been able to feed him or give him anything to drink. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was matted to his forehead with sweat. We’d kept him tied up, too, and while Fenn had cleaned up after him, there was still a lingering odor; keeping someone bound for long periods of time was fraught with difficulty. He lay in one of our tents, set there to keep him out of the rain.

“Hey,” I said to him. I reached out and placed my hand on his head. “I’m going to try to change you back to normal.”

He screamed around his gag, and I could see his pupils dilate, but I tried to push all of that aside and concentrate on the feeling of my skin against his. There was latent magic in skin, and magics of many kinds had connections to the soul, so I thought that was a decent enough place to start. If your bones connected back to the soul somehow, then your skin probably did too, if only because it was through a force of will that the tattoos were activated. I was looking for a thread, or a tunnel, or something like that I could search along, something that would lead me backward to his internal structure.

It took me four hours to worm my way in. After an hour touching his sweaty forehead, I used the Anyblade to make a cut on the pad of my thumb and the back of his wrist, then tried mingling our blood and finding a connection that way, and when that didn’t work, I tried to find his soul by first burning through one of my bones to heal him, and then burning through one of his bones. That was what finally worked, but it was still two fucking hours of trying to tug on that metaphorical thread before I was in his soul.

When I finally got it, it was different from how I’d experienced Amaryllis’ and Fenn’s souls. Those had been, in some respect, extensions of my own, governed by the same logic, at least from my point of view. By way of analogy, if my soul was an enormous sheet of paper, Grak’s was another sheet laid on top of it, this one without writing. I had to navigate between the two frequently, because his soul didn’t have the order to it that mine did. It felt like sitting in front of a television with a printed-out sheet of paper, trying to follow an FAQ to a game, going from instructions to screen and back again.

Eventually, I found Fallatehr in his mind, and after triple-checking and taking a deep breath I could barely feel, I dialed it down into the negatives. It was only because I saw the value moving downward that I was confident enough to do it; I was only accelerating a process that would have happened on its own without me.

When I removed the gag from Grak’s mouth, he said a word in Groglir that was, from context, a curse. “Untie me,” he said. I didn’t bother with trying to save the rope, and used the Anyblade to cut his hands and feet free of their bindings. He began rubbing at his wrists, and I placed a hand on him to give him healing — a hand he swatted away.

“I don’t like having my soul touched,” he said.

“I was going to give you healing,” I replied. “It’s not good to be tied up for so long. You get bedsores, have your circulation cut off.” A little thanks might have gone a long way, but I didn’t say that. “How are you feeling? Back to normal?”

“No,” replied Grak without elaboration. I let him sit and massage where the ropes had been digging into him. “I was … I had purpose.”

“Serving Fallatehr,” I said.

“It wasn’t service,” said Grak. “It was wanting something more than myself.”

“Amaryllis didn’t describe it like that,” I replied.

“No,” said Grak. He stopped rubbing his wrists and lay down on the ground. “She wouldn’t. She is more person than I am.”

“More person?” I asked. This felt, in some respects, like the most true conversation we’d ever had, despite all my attempts at inroads.

“She has purpose,” he said. “Fallatehr gave her another purpose. She feels relief at returning to her previous path.”

“And you don’t have a path,” I said with a nod. I knew how that felt, but didn’t want to say it. Here on Aerb, there were paths galore, but back in Kansas, there were times I’d felt utterly adrift, even before everything had gone to shit. “What happens when you take your thousand pounds of gold to Darili Irid?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Grak, looking past me.

“I have a quest for it,” I said, but at that he turned further away from me. “I really don’t understand you.”

“There is not much to understand,” replied Grak.

“Sure,” I said. I was watching him closely. I wanted to say that all of this could have been avoided if he’d just been more loyal to me, or that I had been trying with him, was trying with him even now, and it was frustrating for it to not be paying any dividends, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that I thought would be helpful, and if I needed to vent, I would go vent about it to someone else.

“I didn’t like being told I was part of something,” said Grak, into the silence. “Back in Barren Jewel, when we met. I did not like it. You are like family to me.”

“Family,” I said, rolling the word over in my mouth. “Family, because you’re stuck with family, and you have an obligation, or they think you have this obligation, and if you could pick … if you could pick your family, you wouldn’t have picked the ones that you ended up with.” That was how I felt about my parents, when they were fighting, which was often. Even sometimes when they weren’t fighting. “You left your family to become a warder. And when you came back, they tossed you into a marriage that you didn’t want. So you left. Am I that kind of family to you?”

“No,” said Grak, returning his gaze to me. “You are not the family I would pick, but you are also not like my father.”

Loyalty increased: Grak lvl 8!

I wanted to ask what it was about me, but that seemed like a conversation that would just irritate me. Count on a guy like Grak to sap all the enjoyment from having made a breakthrough in soul magic and fixing him.

Fenn found a mark for us back in Cranberry Bay, a man she’d found sitting in a tavern drinking beer with his friends. It had taken a show of cash for her to tempt him back to the hotel room we were staying in, and when he saw me, he must have gotten the wrong idea, because she had to block the door and talk him down.

“He’s a healer,” she said. “Any minor injuries you’ve sustained, he’s going to fix them. You’re probably going to ask what’s in it for him, because you already know that what’s in it for you is a fuckload of money for just sitting there. For him, it’s a study of anatomy, one that he can do without having to inconvenience you in any way besides you sitting there, which you are, I repeat, going to be paid well for.”

“So I won the lottery?” he asked, wrinkling his nose, clearly not buying it.

“Yes, actually,” replied Fenn. “There’s a certain noble, who I’m not going to name, who’s taken ill, of-late. One too many indiscretions with ladies of the night, but you didn’t hear it from me. He’s got problems, ones that take a skilled medic to fix, and my friend here is that skilled medic, but it’s always easier for him to do the work if he knows what healthy is supposed to look like for his employer.” Fenn placed a finger on the guy’s chest. “It’s a rush job, so I rushed out and found the first person who had enough of a physical resemblance. You’re human, you’ve got the right shoulder width, chest width, and height, and you appeared, to my eyes, to be both virile and intelligent enough to just take a gift horse when it lands in your lap.”

He didn’t seem to catch the mangled expression in there, and to my surprise, sat down without further grumbling. Fenn put on a radio play — aside from internet and cell phones, television was my most-missed invention — while I worked, and while I at least knew what I was looking for now, finding the thread was still the easy part. Even with what I thought was probably the equivalent of a PhD in soul magic, it took me an hour and a half to actually gain access to his soul and enter the trance.

Copying over the bones was fucking terrifying. Having restricted read-write access to the base data structure of my physical and mental presence in the world — or something masquerading as the base data structure that still had an actual impact on what it was to be me, for all that distinction might matter — wasn’t really something that I had ever wished for. I’d monkeyed around with my computer a fair amount on Earth, but editing the registry had given me the same sweaty, anxious feeling.

When I was done, we sent our unwitting donor off, far richer for the experience.

“Did it work?” asked Fenn.

“Don’t know yet,” I replied. “I didn’t want to do the healing process while he was here.”

“Well what if we need him back?” asked Fenn. “What if, I don’t know, you need to redo it?”

“If it goes that badly, I think I’m probably going to die,” I said.

“Well that’s fucking great,” she replied, folding her arms across her chest. “I better keep my powers if you die.”

“Mean,” I said, but I knew that jokes were her way of dealing with things. “Okay.” I felt for the bones in my hand, ready to burn them to heal my chest. In an ideal world, my soul would already be fixed, and all I would be doing was bringing soul and body back into concert. “It’s kind of fucked up that I could have brainwashed him into being my slave, isn’t it?”

“Just do the healing already, I’m getting antsy,” said Fenn.

I laid both hands on my chest and concentrated my power, burning through bones on my left side in order to fuel the healing in my ribs. It would take some time to reset those bones, but that was now a solved problem. The changes came fast, first sensation returning to my skin, then a gnawing hunger from an appetite that was finally waking back up. I didn’t suffer from a sudden heart attack, as I had feared that I might, and whatever the soul’s conception of the body was at the boundary areas, nothing horrible like a rending of my flesh happened at my shoulders or hips.

The quest didn’t show up as completed though, and I slapped my forehead when I realized why; I’d drained bones in order to complete the healing. A quick dip into my soul was enough to fix that, and I came back out quick enough to see the notifications in my view, before they were washed away.

Affliction: Drained Bone Removed!

Skill increased: Essentialism lvl 23!

Quest Complete: Boneitis - Your body is back to normal, and under your control to a far greater extent than in your wildest transhumanist dreams, if you dare to risk fucking it up.

Level Up!

END BOOK II

Afterword

Thank you for reading! Worth the Candle was written as a long labor of love, started one evening in my basement as I was thinking about all the trials and tribulations of my teenage years. While it's not strictly autobiographical — I've never killed a unicorn — Juniper is close to my heart, and I hope that I've been able to reflect some of my truth through him. The next book, Worth the Candle: Hospitality in the Endless Void, will be releasing sometime in fall of 2022.