Ciaran’s world is a web of razor-wire strings. His passenger’s grip tangles and tightens, digging deeper into him with every choked thought. Everything is wrong. Everything hurts. 

Why? Why are we doing this? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This isn’t what we wanted.

<All we do, we do to build our path out of this nightmare,> Syancauri whispers. 

This isn’t what we promised. It shouldn’t be like this. It can’t be the only way. 

<I promised you strength. The strength to protect yourself, to stand on your own, to climb our way to someplace better. There will be pain, but what is a little more pain for everything we have ever dreamed of?>

Now you sound just like Mom. No cost too great as long as a Keeper comes out on the other side, huh?

<I am sorry. There can be no sanctity without ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴.>

The strings in his soul tense and tug, not twisting his mind but forcing him, wide-eyed, to perceive things he already knows. He sees the ruins trailing in Syancauri’s wake, the friends and followers it has lost, the towers it built in full view of a world desperate to smash it back into the earth. He remembers the first intention they shared, the promise that became their bond: There is nothing for me here. 

It isn’t quite true – even now, he knows that. There’s one anchor that might have once held him back. But… 

I’m never going to see her again. 

<Do not weep for her. She is a part of this world. She has a place here. We do not. But there are other worlds, and better. Worlds where we will be happy. There must be.>

Yeah. I know. 

And I know all of this about Aulunla doesn’t change anything. It’s a shame, it would have been great for it to join us, but there will be others. What we need to do, where we need to go, it’s all still the same. 

<To the source of all hope! To the font of all dreams!>

Ciaran stares up into the empty black expanse of his Wound, a protective shell waiting for him to pierce its barriers and climb to the heavens. 

“To the sky,” he says, grinning through his tears.

~~~

“Noirin?” I ask, kneeling beside her crumpled corpse. Even through my gloves, the clammy skin of her rash-spotted hands feels cold. “Are you in there? I heard you before. Please be there?”

No one answers. There’s only Yurfaln babbling with incoherent joy.

She’s gone. 

No, she can’t be gone because no one ever is, but she isn’t here, either. What did I expect? That I could make her a nice little house next to my Harbingers? That she’d be happy there? Of course not. Whatever death is, whatever it does to someone, it’s not something a human can survive intact. Not like this. Maybe if I’d done it differently, if I were better somehow, she wouldn’t be drifting through me in tortured tatters, waiting however long it takes for the Fading to reduce her to nothing but pain. 

All that’s left of her, all that I can feel, is the overflowing warmth in my veins. Devouring her left me gorged to bursting on stolen strength, so much that when I try to clamp down on it and let the agony back in, I can’t. The worst I can manage to feel is probably a normal person’s baseline.

We did the only thing we could. It was us or it. She asked you.

What difference does that make to her? I killed her. I ate her. And I already know it can’t last forever. There will never be enough.

I stand up, shuddering at just how easily the motion comes to me. The rest of the room is no doubt staring at me in horror. All I can see through my tears, though, is what’s left of their lives, faded scraps of green overlaid and intertwined with their bodies and the curses slowly killing them. 

I don’t care about them. The only person who mattered here is gone, and the Harbinger who made me kill her is lost to my senses. 

So I turn, run, and lock myself in my room.

~~~

Unless I’m going to run off right now, hunt Syancuari and its cultists down, and eat them all, I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t think I can make myself do that just yet. It’ll take time for my gift to it to take root and fester. So instead I do what I’ve always done when things hurt too much to sleep: sit in my bed, hug Pearl, and wait for rest that never comes.

What does come is yet another unwelcome presence approaching my room. A Keeper’s, this time. Their aura is held close to them, like a gaze watching me through mirrored glasses, and all I can pull from it is a name: Starlit Arbiter. 

My black blood turns to ice. I don’t know who that is, but are they already coming for me? 

There’s a sharp knock on the door. “Miss Shiel? Are you in there? This is Scolai Fianata, here with the emergency response team,” a boy’s voice says, low and steady. 

I sit frozen in my bed. What can I do if they are? Should I do anything? It’d be what I deserve, but even so, even now… I can’t give up on myself. On my miserable disaster of a life, this storm of pain and fear and hunger that will destroy everyone who dares to come a little too close to me.

Another knock. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about what happened here. I’ll be reporting on this incident, unless you’d prefer to take over as a Keeper closer to it.”

What? I just ate a person. Why would I be allowed to take over anything, least of all an investigation into myself? Is this a trick?

“No. Go away,” I do my best to shout.

“Fair enough. I understand you’ve had a harrowing night. May I at least ask if you sense any residual Harbinger corruption here?”

“…It took six people it corrupted with it when it left. Ask the nurses who’s missing if you need their names. Don’t feel anything else.” 

“Thank you. Please contact me on Lighthouse if there’s anything else you think should be included.”

“Wait, is that it?” another muffled voice asks from outside. I find myself thinking the same thing. Are they waiting to call in someone who can handle a killer Keeper?  Is Roland going to try to kill me again?

No, stop that, I’m worrying about nothing. I know the rules. I’m a Keeper, and that means what I deserve doesn’t matter. I can do whatever I want unless they think I’m the latest incarnation of Sofia the Deathless.

“Yes. She’s under no obligation to talk to us,” Scolai says. “We’d only intervene for a Keeper in active crisis, or…” His voice steadily trails out of earshot. Still, I focus on his subdued presence until it fades. Eventually, I roll back over, squeeze Pearl to my chest, and keep on waiting for… I don’t know what.

Outside my window, a dim light gradually builds in strength, casting away what little comfort the dark offers. Slowly, slowly, night turns to day. I don’t sleep. I don’t know how I ever will again. When the Sun’s first rays start blaring through my eyelids, I wish I could kill it too.

At some point, another, gentler knock on the door drags me out of my fugue. 

“Lia? Lia, hey, are you in there?”

It’s Dad.

The lurching pit in my stomach widens. Who told him? What did they tell him? What has everyone heard by now? 

“Mmh,” I mumble, then realize he probably can’t hear me. I crawl out of bed, run my fingers halfheartedly through my hair, and open the door. 

A blindingly bright flood of green light pours through, then reaches down and wraps itself around me, filling the whole world with the scent of fresh rain. Some forever-hungry thing inside me stirs.

“Lia! Thank the Goddess you’re okay… I came as soon as I–”

“Don’t touch me!” I hiss, squirming free from Dad’s embrace. Still, all I see when I look at him is a meal. I wrench my eyes away from him, sit at my desk, and collapse into my folded arms, crying silently.  

“O-okay, I’ll stay right here. Hey, uh, the eyes are new. Can you… see alright with them?”

What? I see just fine. I can see the overwhelming flood of life waiting for me to claim it without even looking at it. I don’t know how to stop seeing it. I sit up and dig my nails into my palms, thinking of the solid, physical world and that sharp sensation and the body that’s held me back every day of my life and things I see with my upside-down human eyes instead of my soul’s far-reaching gaze. My vision is blurry and wet with tears, but I can still see myself in the mirror. 

The whites of my eyes have gone ink-black. Watching my magic seep into me hardly feels strange anymore, though. It makes sense. It’s only fair that everyone should know what I am.

Slowly, I glance back at Dad. He’s still standing in the doorway, looking down at me with fear or concern or both in his eyes. It’s an effort, small now but still constant, to actually look at him – to focus on what I see over what my power knows. Why is this so hard? What makes him worth so much? I barely even like him. Does magic care that it would make me worse to be the sort of person who’d eat her own father for power? 

Obviously it does. Why would it work any other way?

“Sorry to show up unannounced again, you just… you weren’t answering your phone,” Dad mumbles.

“Oh. Sorry.” Looking at it now, there’s a few missed calls and a message from Aisling: We’re going to make this right. Don’t rush into anything stupid. 

Everyone knows, then.

“What have they told you?” I ask.

“I just got the call. They said a Harbinger attacked the hospital. They said it hurt people before you fought it off, but… what happened to you? Are you okay?”

“It’s my fault. It came here for me. I killed someone,” I blurt out.

“…What?” Dad asks, visibly paling.

“Yes. I killed her and drank her soul for power. Leave me alone or you’ll be next.”

“Lia, I… I’m not going anywhere.” Dad steps in, closing the door behind him, but keeps his distance from me. “I know that’s something you need, but you have a safe way to do it now, right? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but I know you wouldn’t do anything like that unless there was more to it.”

“Do you? Did you even know me before the magic death powers?”

“I know the girl who went around telling everyone at Grandma’s funeral that when she grew up, she was going to bring back everyone who’s ever died. And if you’ve changed since then, I don’t care. You’re my daughter and I’m not leaving you behind again.”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone really will twist themselves into any knots they have to if it means Keepers stay on their side. 

“Could you tell me what really happened?” Dad asks, breaking an uneasy silence.

“I already did. It attacked her. Got inside her,” I choke out. “I couldn’t save her, my magic doesn’t work that way, so I took her before it could.”

“Lia…” Dad moves to put a hand on my shoulder, but pulls back at the last second. It’s still a struggle to keep seeing him. “I wish you’d said that in the first place. I know I really don’t understand what you’re going through, but I wish you wouldn’t think the worst of yourself while you’re doing your best.”

What else am I supposed to do? My best has never been enough.

“Hey, if I could ask about something else…  how are you holding up healthwise? Has all of this at least helped on that front?”

“The doctors have no idea what to do with me. Magic’s replaced most of my old problems with new ones. Why?”

“I was just thinking…” Dad steadies himself and forces a smile. “Maybe it’d be nice for you to come home. If you want to.”

“What? Why?” I spit. “You just heard what I do to people. I’ll hurt you. My power wants me to eat you too.”

“I already volunteered for that, remember?” Dad says with a shaky smile.

“The next time someone wants to hurt me, they’ll come for you.”

“Yeah, well, your mom wouldn’t forgive me if I let something like that get in the way of helping you. Stop me if this wouldn’t help, but I don’t think you want to be here any more than I wanted to leave you behind.”

What do I want? I didn’t like it at home, either. Back when I was constantly shuffled between there and the hospital, I’d often find myself wanting to go home while I stared at the ceiling in my own room, not knowing what that word even meant.

But… he’s right, isn’t he? Wherever home is, if it’s anywhere at all, I don’t want to be here. I’m sure that if I stay, everything about this place will remind me of Noirin and what I did to her. I’ll spend every day fighting off panic about the next disaster I’ll drag here. 

Will any of that change if I leave? I don’t know. But I’m sure that if I stay here, I’ll be as miserable as I’ve ever been. 

“Okay.” 

~~~

Moving out only takes the rest of the day. I’ve packed my things by the time Dad is done talking to the hospital staff, and there’s no one left I want to say goodbye to. Dr. Hines assures me that Dr. Cantillon will be in touch to see to any specialized outpatient care I need. I still haven’t heard from her about the blood stuff, but I’m not sure how much it’ll matter. After all, I know all too well how to fix myself.

I couldn’t bring myself to take my tarot books back from Noirin’s room.

Home – or at least, my family’s house – is a little place in the Shoals, with a crushed-seashell driveway, a big cushioned swing on the porch, and lots of deep-seated wicker chairs you can fall into and lose yourself. It looks about as close to a cozy seaside retreat as it can without actually being by the sea – that’s a few blocks away, but Mom liked it enough that she wanted to be as close as she could. I think it would’ve been a bit small for three people, but it’s never needed to hold that many.

I don’t exactly feel better there. I don’t think I will until I rip Syancauri’s rotting heart out, find some impossible way to make things right for Noirin, and maybe abolish death. 

But it is nice to be away from the hospital, to have some distance from all the pain I’ve been through there and all the memories of waiting alone in recovery rooms, fearing for my life. It’s nice to be back in my room, with all my books and my blackout curtains and my big comfy bed that isn’t equipped to fill me with drugs or wheel me into an operating room at a moment’s notice. It’s nice to know that the only infusions I’ll ever need again are the ones I steal from people.

Plus, while the hospital food was always pretty good, Dad’s cooking is better.

~~~

“Morning, Lia! You’re right on time! Good to see your schedule hasn’t changed too much. I wanted to celebrate a little, so I made those souffle pancakes you always liked. I don’t know if they’re still your favorite, but hopefully you still like them. Uh, I wasn’t sure what you’d want to put on them, is raw honey still a problem for you?”

“No. Please give me that.”

“Well, alright then.” Dad sets a honey jar down next to a plate of tall, almost biscuit-shaped pancakes. “Help yourself.”

So I do, and they’re delicious. Still the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I have no idea how Dad does it. I tried to follow his recipe once and they just collapsed into regular old pancakes. These ones, though, are like eating a cloud, soft and subtle and not too sweet. They pair perfectly with the honey I smear over them, safe in the knowledge that magic won’t let me die of something as stupid as a good breakfast. Even if that’s only so it can hurt me more.

But they can’t compare at all to how good it felt to kill one of my only friends. 

I cycle through things I’ve told myself over and over – it wasn’t like that, Noirin gave it to me and she wouldn’t want me to torture myself over this – and none of them change a thing. I do my best to choke back tears between bites.

“Are those, uh, happy tears? Not too disappointing, I hope?” Dad asks. 

“No, they’re great, thank you. I just… don’t worry about it.”

“Sure, okay. Hey, you mentioned a friend coming over today? Should I make another batch for her?”

“You can if you want to, but I’ll probably eat them first.”

Dad beams as he starts in on his own pancakes. “Yeah, can’t blame you. Maybe once she’s here.”

After breakfast, I settle into the living room with a stack of Mom’s journals, confirming that they’re all written in similar sets of squiggly nonsense glyphs. It feels wrong to be spending time on this while Syancauri is at large and Noirin is still suffering, but time is on my side, and Aisling assures me that the city is on high alert searching for it after the attack.

Speaking of, the doorbell chimes.

“I’ll stay out of your hair,” Dad calls. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

“Thanks.”

When I open the door, Aisling greets me with a raised hand. She’s wearing her usual beret and an oversized boy’s shirt like a dress, with black cycling pants underneath, and there’s a bike parked by the porch.

“Hey. Nice place. It’s good to see you here,” she says.

“…Where else would I be?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you didn’t run off after it alone. I’m just also surprised.”

“Oh. I appreciate your confidence.”

I smile as Aisling twitches the way she does when she feels a lie. She glowers at me for a moment, then slinks past me and lets herself in.

“Anyway, I don’t need to,” I say. “I infected one of its cultists before they left. Cursed it with something designed to be as contagious as possible. I couldn’t track it down right now, but whether they kick him out or everyone catches it, I should be able to when it gets worse.”

“You can do that? Creepy. Good for you.”

“Yes. I’m not sure if it’s new or I’d just never tried before.”

“You know, I’m not on the best of terms with them, but the Church does have people who can help with the exploratory phase of figuring out your magic.”

“Maybe later. But unless something new comes up, that’s not really what we’re here for.” I flop back onto the couch, trying not to marvel at the absence of constant low-level agony and the newfound ease with which I move, and set Mom’s journals down on the center table. “Are you really not in whatever secret club my mom was? It seems like they’d want you if they want anyone.”

Aisling sits across from me, buries her face in her hands, and groans. “Yeah. Those assholes. I’m not, and they do. I’ve gotten the offer, I just won’t promise to keep whole categories of information secret before I know what they are and why they’re hidden. When they have questions they want my help with, they’ll share things on a need-to-know basis, but they’re pretty strict about what they think I need to know.”

“Right. And you can’t lie… if you agreed, would you be stuck with it forever?”

“No, nothing I say is binding. I can change my mind later. Making a promise I don’t know if I’ll be willing or able to keep counts as lying, though.” She’s already started leafing through the books, hmming and muttering to herself. “You know, we could’ve started on these a lot sooner if you told me you were Ciara Shiel’s daughter. I’ve read a bit of her work from before she stopped publishing, which usually only means one thing.”

“I didn’t know it mattered! All I knew until a few days ago was that she did research for the Church!”

“And what do you suppose they research? Well, doesn’t matter now. Would it be alright if I borrowed these for a while? I can’t parse them right this moment, but Lucan, Haunild and I all have some experience with cryptography.” 

“Just be careful with them. I have no idea how important they are,” I say. “I’m done with this one, too.” I pick up The Fading from the end table and slide it over to her.

“What’s it about? Anything important to us?”

“How before Infezea invented disease, normal people died of some kind of horrible dementia that the Messengers said couldn’t be cured by any means or miracle they knew of.”

“Ah. I know a bit about that, but I’ll have a look anyway. Thanks. When we get to this, are there any big questions you’re hoping for leads on here?”

There is one thing. Something that’s been circling and circling through my mind, gnawing away at me since I ate Noirin. I doubt the answers will be in whatever my mom scribbled to herself, I don’t know if there can even be an answer, but…

“Is magic evil?” I blurt out. 

Aisling looks up, tilts her head, and sets a journal down. “Huh? Where’s that coming from?”

“During the attack, I… killed a friend. The Harbinger got its claws into her and I couldn’t burn it out, so I took her before it could. She was very sick, almost dying to begin with, but draining her was worth more than everything else I’ve taken combined. By a lot. By so much that I’m still overflowing with life, that I can’t even let myself bleed to hold onto what’s left of her. And I don’t know what that could mean except that my power cares more about how much it hurts me to do something than anything else.”

“Shit. That’s… I’ve seen patterns like that. I know there’s a well-established trend of a Keeper’s powers giving them what they want, but leaving any complete resolution just out of reach. Mine answers questions that lead to bigger questions, then refuses to tell me anything about those. But what you’re describing is the worst case I’ve ever heard of. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

“So is it?” I ask again.

Aisling leans back into her chair, sighing through her nose. “I can’t answer that without getting into a lot of annoying questions about the definition of evil. I understand what you’re asking, but I don’t know if magic has the intent to be evil – mind you, I don’t know if it doesn’t, either. Now, are Harbingers evil? Is evil something you are or something you do? Should it mean anything to us that most of them believe what they’re doing is great? Those questions are only so useful, because it’s much easier to figure out that they’re inimical to humans, not counting any witches who are happy with their arrangements, and they won’t stop hurting people unless we stop them. Magic may be difficult and frustrating and terrifying, but it’s also the only way humanity can survive at all. So that’s where it ends, for me. I have too many questions on my list to add abstract philosophical ones to the pile.”

“It’s not like I’m making up something to worry about. Magic is abstract, but it’s still real. If it defines how it works by what would hurt us most, or there’s some will behind it that hates us and wants us to suffer, that matters!” 

“It’ll matter when we can demonstrate it,” Aisling insists. “I don’t believe we’re there yet.”

“How would you demonstrate it, then?”

“I don’t know. And when I don’t know something, I don’t fill in the blanks with my best guess at the moment. I acknowledge that there’s a hole in my understanding of the world and do my best to find out what I’m missing.”

”Humor me. What would convince you?”

“No. Like I just told you, I don’t know. We don’t know enough about what magic is or how it functions on a basic level to evaluate something like that. But if it would help, I can tell you what I think of how all this works.”

“…Fine.” I don’t know if it will help, but I don’t think I’m getting an actual answer out of her. Maybe she’s right. Maybe the answer doesn’t exist.

“Okay. As I said, whatever magic is, whatever it wants from us or doesn’t, our existence is entirely dependent on it. It’s a miracle that we’re here at all. No, it’s tens of miracles layered over each other in a big wobbly pile.” 

Aisling slouches forward, tenting her hands, and settles her head on them with a loud sigh. “We live on an island made of magic. If you imagine the world as a shoal peeking up in the middle of a stormy sea, where we’ve built ourselves a sand castle to hide from the waves, that’s probably something close to the truth. The world beyond us, the world without Keepers holding it together? That world has no place for us. It has no rules, no structure, no logic, and it doesn’t want any. Maybe someday we’ll be able to make sense of it, or make our island a little bit bigger, but I don’t know how we would even begin to do that. So until we can figure that out, I’m just going to do what I can to keep the tide at bay.”

“But the tide is also made of magic,” I say.

“Yes. So when the same force creates our greatest problems and furnishes us with the only solution, you can see why I’m hesitant to act like I know why it works that way or what, if anything, it wants from us.”

As she’s speaking, Aisling’s phone buzzes loudly. She fishes it out of her bag, looks down at it with a frown, and then her eyes widen.

“Something came up. I think we’ve found them.”

“I’ll see you soon, okay, Lia?” Dad’s eyes are still wet when he finally moves to leave.

“Mhm.” I raise a hand in a weak wave.

“I mean it this time. I know how that sounds, but… yeah.” 

“Alright. You know where to find me, except when you don’t. Mornings are better for that.”

“I’ll check in with you first next time. And about the other stuff… I know how it works. I know I can’t ask you to stop. So just do your best to stay safe as you can, yeah?”

“That’s the plan,” I say. It is now, anyway. I don’t think I had a plan for my first month.

“Great. Yeah, I’m sure you know your life better than I do. But if there’s anything I can do to help you out, seriously, anything at all, you let me know, okay?”

“If you have any more illegal books of secret lore, I’ll take them.”

Dad chuckles. “I’ll go see what I can rustle up. ‘Til then, you take care.” And with that, he steps away, letting my door swing shut.

I sigh, sit back down, and flop my head into my desk. I’m not sure if I believe him. I’m not sure if I want him to come back. But I don’t think it changes much for me either way, so all I can do is wait and see if he holds himself to it.

And look at his books, of course. I’m exhausted, all peopled out for the next several days, but I might as well do something useful while Aisling digs for information. They’re all proper paper books instead of tablets, which is normally how I like them, but in this specific case it would be nice if they had a search function. I look over their titles again, check the front pages for any sort of helpful chapter index that might explain what they’re all actually about, and find no such thing. In their absence, I start on Human Mortality Before the Fourth Scourge. Maybe Mom’s group knew what I know, and if they didn’t, that also tells me… something, probably.

~~~

If Mom’s friends knew about death, this book doesn’t seem to talk about it. It’s all about the physical process of dying – specifically, the ways that process changed after Infezea, the Harbinger who spawned disease into the world around 600 years ago. Unlike everything else I’ve read about Infezea, the author here consistently refers to it as female. They don’t seem interested in explaining why. 

But the book’s first direct mention of her is underlined in pen. The margins next to it are filled with simple doodles of four nearly-identical tall, gaunt girls dressed in ragged shrouds and black-eyed plague masks. Above them, in neat, straight-lined script, is written “Her?”

Curious, I open one of Mom’s journals. Paging through it, practically everything inside is written in strange swirly glyphs that resemble the language of magic more than Clarish or Thalassic, but the handwriting itself does seem to match. I’m glad her secret club was having fun with all this.

But rather than talk about the Harbinger it-or-herself, the book is about the last of the Infezean Scourges, a collective name for the four broad types her creations fell into: viral and bacterial infections, disease-causing parasites, inborn illnesses, and “physiological diseases,” which is what they call every other internal way a body can break. 

Hearts giving out, neurons breaking down, muscles rotting on disintegrating bones. Bodies are a chain. An anchor. A vessel too small to hold even a human soul. We’ll be so much happier once you shed yours.

“I’m reading, shut up,” I mutter. “Unless you understand all these charts better than I do.” I stab a finger at an incomprehensible plot of medical statistics.

My shadow, making a show of reading over my shoulder, only shrugs. I brush her away and keep reading, mostly ignoring the charts.

The Fourth Scourge never seemed like it fit in with the others. None of the things it apparently caused are diseases, they’re just stuff that happens because our bodies are a mess. Did this Harbinger invent sickness and perform some kind of inverted miracle that permanently made all human bodies work worse? The author does point this out and seems to think that yes, that’s exactly what happened, but offers no guesses as to how Infezea could do something like that. Instead, most of the book is focused on the question of how people wasted away before a monster created everything we lump into the category of “dying of old age.” 

~~~

That night, a knock drags me out of slogging through the book. 

“Liadain? Can I come in?” Noirin asks through the door.

“Hm? Yes, it’s open.”

Noirin steps inside and greets me with a smile. “Thanks. I was wondering if I could have another look at your tarot books.”

“Go ahead. Take any you like, I’ve read them all.” 

“Any recommendations?” she asks.

“After Demystifying? Probably Tarot for Yourself. Less explanation, more about actually reading in the easiest possible context.”

“Thank you.” Hearing her footsteps so clearly as she shuffles to my small bookshelf feels bizarre, but there they are. “What are you reading, anyway?”

“Illegal books of secret lore. Don’t tell anyone. They’re really boring, honestly,” I say.

“My. Look at you go.” Noirin grins, then mimes zipping her lips shut, turning a key to her mouth, and throwing it out the window. “And is everything else, ah, as well as it can be?”

“You mean Dad?” I ask.

“Mm. I don’t know your relationship, but you’ll understand if I’m concerned that this is the first time I’ve seen him around here.”

“It’s not like that. I don’t think he showed up because he wants magic or Keeper-daughter clout or something. He just… didn’t want to watch me die and maybe now he doesn’t have to?”

“Well.” Noirin makes a face like she swallowed something mildly yucky. “That’s quite different, then.”

Wait, why am I standing up for him? Is that what I’m doing? It still doesn’t sound great, but… I don’t know. To my surprise, it really doesn’t feel like a problem that he’s here. He’s trying, at least, and I’ve done worse than he ever has to me.

“I know, he’s terrible at his job. But I think I’ll be fine.”

Noirin shrugs, her smile slowly returning. “If you’re sure. Give him my regards next time he comes around, would you? I think they’ll sound better coming from you.”

~~~

Over the next days, I skip through several more plots of data on mostly-similar lifespans around the world, skimming to their conclusion: apparently, the average life expectancy right before the Scourges was 27 years longer. Seems like a really specific number to claim confidently about something that happened six centuries ago, but I suppose they did still have the Sea back then, even if it wasn’t so commonplace. Anyway, the book says that before Infezea, ordinary humans lived for between 100 and 125 years, suffering almost no signs of physical aging past their peak. What happened then, if not any of the things that kill us now? 

That’s when they contracted “the Fading.” Or felt it coming on and killed themselves.

At some point late in life, people’s minds, their souls, started to break down. Slowly, sometimes over the last decade of their lives, they’d forget who they were, what they were doing, what and who they cared about. They’d start seeing things that weren’t there, believing things that weren’t possible, losing their thoughts and senses until the world was nothing but chaos and noise. (“See C2-21 re: screaming,” a note in the margins reads.)

And then they died. If the Fading didn’t get them killed or drive them to suicide, they’d finally fall comatose, trapped in their shells until they starved or someone killed them. There was no known cause or cure, no successful cases of healing or staving off the condition with magic. Keepers who hoped to end it with a miracle were told by their Messengers that if it could be done, they didn’t know how. It still exists today (“Cases, see C2-27/28,”) but no one lasts long enough to see the worst of it anymore.

I catch myself chewing nervously on the skin of my cheek. Do Keepers get this? Vyuji promised there’d be some way for me to live forever. The book never says anything about it, but there’s Keepers older than 125, right? Iona isn’t quite there, but Sofia is 300-something… she’s died and returned who knows how many times in that span, though. Could that insulate her from it? 

“PD, Keepers don’t have lifespans, do we? Who’s the oldest living Keeper other than Sofia the Deathless?” I ask. My voice is a little shaky. A few seconds later, a text bubble pops up on my phone: No known Keeper has ever died of age-based infirmity! Lenya Selgisel, the Last and Longest Day, is currently 182 years and 35 days old.

I heave out a sigh. “Right. Thanks.” 

My phone answers with a happy little bloop and a blink of its squiggly eye.

That’s a really pointed name for the second-oldest Keeper alive. Did their title change at some point? What happened to them when it did? Doesn’t really matter, this is good news. I’ve never heard of them, but anyone who’s been around that long probably has more important things to do than manage their public presence. What’s important is that this is a problem for some future me who can afford to work on making everyone immortal forever to worry about.

Still, this entire idea raises a question the book doesn’t talk about at all. Dead humans return to the sea, whatever that means. Once they’re there, Vyuji, who can’t lie, says they suffer forever in some kind of soul-hospice “until a better way presents itself.” What’s the point of that, and what does forever mean, if human souls pass an expiration date where they rot away until there’s nothing left of them but a tiny, miserable kernel of barely-consciousness? 

Past that point, the book ends with… some kind of story? In a restricted medical textbook? I have no idea what to make of it – there’s no title or introduction. Mom actually wrote “?????” over the opening, so I suppose we’d have at least this in common. It’s a story about a family, four siblings and their father, living their idyllic little lives on a farm in a dreamwarded village. It’s full of sappy little anecdotes about how much they loved each other, how hard their saintly father worked to raise them all well, and how happy they were together, none of which seem like they have to do with anything. 

Only Mom’s notes keep me reading. The margins are filled with her increasingly vicious comments on the story’s bland prose, emotion so heavy-handed it could bash your skull in, and complete lack of anything that looks like a narrative or a point – once the kids have grown up, nothing seems to change for them or anyone in their community, but still it carries on with boring scenes from their comfy lives.

Until, after what might as well have been 125 years of that, the eldest daughter wakes her father up and he recoils from her in terror. That episode passes, but it’s the start of a final long, drawn-out sequence where he loses all concept of who his children are, who he is, and how to live. He spends his last days mumbling about a voice no one else can hear, asking over and over why “I’ve heard it so many times but I still can’t say it,” until the eldest tearfully smothers him with a pillow.

And then, mad with grief, she bursts out of her skin like a popping boil and becomes a Harbinger. She immediately subsumes her siblings, using their shared pain to make them into facets of herself, splinters her village’s dreamwards, and the four-in-one spill out into the world, carrying disease and decay with them. To spare humanity the despair of watching the Fading destroy everyone we loved, they blessed us with “kinder forms of mortality.”

Here, Mom’s notes break down into a barely-legible rant, ending in what looks like a long list of all the most horrible diseases she could think of. 

I still don’t get it. There’s no explanation, no sign that this is anything more than a bad story the author made up. The only thing about it that marks it as coming from a spooky forbidden book is that it’s more open about the idea of people directly becoming Harbingers than anything else I’ve read, but after everything I’ve seen, that isn’t at all new to me.

But it does leave me thinking about something else: what does this Harbinger who invented disease say about me and my power? The books all say she’s dead, but I still don’t know if that means anything at all. Does what’s left of her live in whoever ate her, or whatever ate them and whoever ate it and so on and so on since this happened centuries before even Sofia and they can’t still be around? Or in the sea, or in me, some ghostly parasite still passing itself on through my magic, or everyone else suffering from her gifts? Or all of those at once?

Ugh. It doesn’t matter. I mean, it probably does, but not in a way I can do anything with right now. This didn’t help at all. I stuff the book into a desk drawer, think for a bit about where to hide the rest, then realize that I don’t really care. Keeper prerogative, I can read whatever I want.

~~~

Sleeping hasn’t gotten any easier. Finding a way out from the fear that I’ll never wake up again one day does nothing for the constant pain, or for all the horrifying things racing through my mind. I’m constantly waking in the night from awful dreams that make no sense, but feel like the most important things in the world while they’re happening.

Not tonight, though. Tonight is just dark. A slow, lingering descent through that miserable place where you can’t sleep but you still aren’t really there, eyes wrenched shut while I struggle to shut everything out for long enough to fade into yet another nightmare that never comes.

And when it does finally come, there’s nothing familiar about it. I sink from the darkness beneath my covers into a heavy shroud of senseless nothing that falls over me, wraps around me. 

Suffocating. Strangling.

Not like clinging smog but cold hands around my throat, squeezing, squeezing–

It’s okay. It’s only a dream. And it’s better this way, isn’t it? 

…What was that? 

Without all this gross skin twisting you into shapes you never asked for.

That’s not her. Is it?

Here, the only pain is in your mind, and minds can change! Soon the weight will lift, and you’ll be free to climb out of yourself and fly somewhere better!

No. These aren’t my thoughts or the other me’s or any of my Harbingers or… the other dreams I have. This voice-without-a-voice feels like something else trying to sneak ideas into my head, only without really knowing how I think. It’s clumsy. 

<never sleep again,> a cold needle in my ear whispers like a curse.

My eyes shoot open in a featureless black just as dark as before. Did I open them at all? Do I even have eyes? I try to sit up or twitch a finger or breathe but none of it works. Nothing changes except a tightening in the force pressing down on the body I no longer seem to have.

But I’m still here. And as long as I exist, my magic is with me. I open my soul, draw forth the gnawing nothing in my veins, and pour it out into wherever-I-am. Emerald shadows seethe into the shapeless void, parting it like the first rays of dark light cast by a cancerous green Sun. 

And as my power cuts through it, the darkness around me yelps in shock. The formlessness around me contracts into a vague outline of… something, a shape draped in so many layers of misty cloth that the only sign of a body underneath is the white mask serving as its face. 

With a choked cough, the figure stretches an extension of itself across the floor like a long shadow, then darts away from the cold mist flooding from me like octopus ink. It flattens and compacts its entire body into that limb, and slithers away beneath the door. The mask is still glaring at me when it slips through the crack, and when it vanishes, the shadow it left through remains – until it reaches back, severs itself from its source with the outline of a clawed finger, and begins to writhe and burn away in inner green fire, rotting away within a second.

Panic surging through my nerves, I roll over and throw myself out of my bed, wheeze at the lingering pain in my neck, and tap enough life to pick myself up. Compressing my death-mist into a shroud around myself, I race out after the masked monster. It’s already gone and the dimly-lit halls are empty, until the corridor closest to the main room. There, another monster waits – a statue of a twisted, too-long person, skin of white stone dressed in a cloak of liquid darkness. At the sight of me wreathed in death-fog, it turns and scurries away on all fours.

Away. Into the big room full of sleeping patients. A shudder surges through me that has nothing to do with my worthless body. I tighten my grip on my conjured cane, steel myself for whatever’s happening here, and follow.

The masked creatures wait at the far end of the room, blocking the way to the elevator. A tall woman between them – dark-haired, weary-eyed, well-dressed in an office blazer and slacks, and utterly, bizarrely normal except for the faint but familiar stench of corruption around her – greets me with a polite nod. 

Through the corners of my eyes, I scan the hall. No one at the front desk. A few of the patients scattered around the room are still sleeping in their usual spots, but most, and all of the nurses, are frozen in their seats, petrified with fear.

Noirin sits in the crowd around the central couches, as trapped as everyone else but alert, glancing furtively around the room. Her eyes widen as I make contact with them, but she says and does nothing.

“You must be Liadain,” the tall woman says. She speaks softly, but it’s easy to hear through the room’s horrified silence.

“Tell me what you’re doing here before I kill you all,” I say in a strained whisper.

The woman squints, raises her hands, and makes a few quick gestures. They look like sign language, which means nothing to me. Without taking my eyes off her, I shake my head just enough for her to see it.

“Stay there,” she orders the masked things.

They share a look, narrowing the eyes of their mask-faces. The shapeless shadow-creature scowls. 

“We can still do it. We just need to call him,” it says with the voice of a perfectly human girl.

“He can do anything,” the living statue agrees, speaking in a strange, slow murmur that carries perfectly through the room.

“If you want to expose him here, I can’t stop you,” the woman says. “I don’t believe anyone’s alerted yet. But I hope you’re certain that any further complications wouldn’t place him in danger in the middle of the city.”

Who’s him? Their Harbinger? I can’t feel anything outside of them. Whatever, I’ll kill him too.

The masks don’t say anything, but don’t follow when she strides toward me, hands up as if in surrender. Instead, they step back and start talking amongst themselves, quietly enough that I can’t hear them.

“Could you please put that away? I only want to talk. Your voice doesn’t carry well,” she says.

After a moment, I call a free card and drain my mist into it, pointedly keeping it between my fingers, and motion for her to come closer. “Okay. Talk.”

“Thank you.” The woman lowers her hands. “I’m Dalha. But since I don’t expect my name will mean anything to you, we’re here on behalf of our friend Isobel. You consumed a Harbinger named Aulunla, and she would very much like it back. We’d like to bargain for whatever part of it remains in you.”

That’s where I knew their stench from. 

A burst of hatred squirms through my gut like a live meal as she speaks Aulunla’s name. No more not-knowing between us, it doesn’t say. I know it. I know Isobel and what she wanted and what I sentenced her to by stealing it from her. You understand but you DO NOT CARE.

Do I? After Isobel sent her new Harbinger’s cult to my home?

Maybe I did. Maybe I would have. But somehow, when I look around at the faces of all the people she’s terrorizing because I’m here, I can’t bring myself to care anymore.

“You’re calling for a truce because trying to strangle me didn’t work? Seriously? If you wanted to sit down and talk, you could’ve knocked on the door!” 

“Strangle you.” Dalha maintains a flat, mild expression, but her eyes flick toward the masks. 

“I shouldn’t have needed to! You said she was asleep!” Shapeless yells.

“I also said that if we did it this way, there would be unforeseen complications. Either she had some kind of alarm or… did her Messenger warn her?” She glances back at me, clearly not buying her own explanations at all. 

I just stare at her. I don’t know why someone trying to strangle me wouldn’t be enough to wake me up, and more importantly, why are they fighting over this here, in front of me and everyone? Is this some plot to lower my guard or are the cultists trying to kill me just idiots? 

“It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work. Now please be quiet while I try to salvage this,” Dalha says, still facing me. 

The shapeless one spreads two half-real limbs as if to shrug, then returns to her conversation with the statue. They look like they’re barely paying attention to the scene, just… chatting.

Dalha puts a hand to her temple and sighs. “Liadain, you’re right. We could have knocked. I recognize how ridiculous it is to try and take the peaceful route now, and it won’t and shouldn’t mean anything to you that I was outvoted on this. Or that I came to keep things as painless as possible when their plan went wrong.”

“Why isn’t Isobel asking me this, anyway? Aulunla’d be happy to see her.” 

Deep in my soul, Aulunla writhes and seethes uselessly, too dead to do anything but remind me how much it hates me.

“That’s what we’re hoping to arrange, yes. Isobel didn’t offer to join this group, and I didn’t ask. Truthfully, I don’t think she trusted herself around you. None of us want this place to become a warzone.”

I fling my free hand in a circle, gesturing out at the packed hospital living room. “Then why are you doing this here?”

“This is the only place you’ve been, and we’re on an uncertain clock. For the same reason, it may be best if we skip ahead to what we have to offer: a Harbinger at large in the city recently killed a friend of yours, and one of ours. Do you want it dead? We do, and whatever my friends say about Keepers, I don’t think we should do it alone.”

Dead. Do you even know what that means? 

“It ‘took’ them. If it ‘took’ your friend like it did mine, worming around the city eating people whole, what makes you think there’s anything left to get back?” There’s something left of them, Aisling said the fungal Harbinger was keeping things it ate in its Wound, but she also said we had no reason to think we could pull them right out in any shape we’d want.

“And what makes you think I could tear Aulunla out and give you its chewed-up guts even if I wanted to?” I probe.

“Well, could you? I’ve been told it’s at least theoretically possible,” Dalha says.

“I have no idea. You’re really not giving me a good reason to try.”

“I’m giving you all the reasons I can. Your friend’s soul, a share of the Harbinger large enough to reimburse you for Aulunla and then some, a chance to make something better than this endless brawl between all Keepers and all Harbingers. You know it doesn’t have to be that way. We aren’t just hunting it to save our friend. We want to show the world that we don’t have to be their enemy. I’d have expected you to understand that, given what we’ve heard of your history.”

“Fine,” I say. “I’ve done worse than choke someone and made up. If this is really so important to you, if you want to give me any reason to trust you or care about your uncertain clock, give me any time tomorrow and any place but here or in your Wound or something ridiculous. We can talk then.”

Dalha takes a long, steady inhale and exhale through her nose. “I was afraid you’d say that. Our timetable aside, we took the initiative like this for a reason. You and yours are hunting us. Also given your history, we can’t trust that you wouldn’t call for backup and set a trap as soon as we left. ”

“Then you aren’t trying to come to terms. You’re the same as your friends back there, you just put a human face on it. So no deal. Go away. Or don’t,” I say, raising my tainted card.

“See, Dalha? Keepers are so selfish!” a fourth voice says from nowhere. 

Dalha flinches and backs away, turning to race across the room as my wreath of infection bursts out from its prison.

“They’ll never listen, no matter how much better things would be if they did. They’re all crazy. It’s too bad, but this is why we did all the other stuff first.”

All the other stuff. Of course strangling me wasn’t enough. Of course they had other plans beyond hoping I’d consent to let their Harbinger rip mine out of me. I whirl around in search of the source, feeling it before I see it in the form of a dizzying spike of their monster’s aura. 

Behind the abandoned front desk, a half-real spectral arm sinks through the ceiling and opens a hand, releasing from its long, twig-thin fingers… a boy? Just a spindly boy with messy light hair, dressed in a big white hoodie, hiking pants covered in pockets, and a smiling white mask.

“Anyway. We’ve already tried talking, so let’s get right to the point! Could our new friends please stand up? Or, ah, raise your hand, sorry, Sabina,” he says with a broad wave.

Scattered across the room, five patients stand, some straining out of their chairs more than others. Sabina, a wheelchair-bound and especially frail old woman I recognize as one of Noirin’s friends, only lifts a hand to her shoulder.

“Thank you, thank you all! I know that might still be a lot of work for now. We’ll fix that up real soon. Unless, well… hey, Ill Wind! We have an offer for you. Sorcha and I…” he pauses, waving back at Shapeless, “…have been in and out over the last few nights. Reading the room, seeing who might be open to what we’re offering. These are some new friends of ours and our god’s. Of course, they can still be your friends too – forever! We’ll be able to fix them as soon as things are all figured out! So come home with us, just for a little while, and help us make this work for everyone.”

Another long-fingered phantom limb rises from the floor at his side and rips the air open with a single clawed digit, tearing a chunk of the world away like ripped cloth to expose a tunnel of darkness lined with white stone. No, with twisted, tangled, still-moving people made of white stone.

“But we aren’t quite ready yet. We can’t help them unless you’ll help us. So if you don’t, I’m afraid they’ll all die in very short order,” the boy says.

My mouth goes dry. There are a few gasps of shock scattered around the room, but of the standing patients, only one man’s expression shifts uncomfortably.

“What? You get me or you’ll eat them?” I ask.

“Err, huh? No, no, no,” he holds up his hands and waves them about in denial. “Where’d that come from? You of all people should know why they’ll die, right? It doesn’t take any scary plague powers to see that they don’t have much left.”

“So Aulunla. Or killing that fungus monster. You think those’ll give you the power to save them.”

“Exactly! You get it!” he exclaims as he snaps his finger into a point at me.

“And what do you want them for?”

His mask seems to roll its eyes.“You’ll understand if I don’t spill everything about our grand plan before we come to terms. But I can tell you it’s not all that different from what you and your friends want out of this. Anyway, I can only allow so much stalling for time, so that’s about where we are! What happens next is up to you, Ill Wind.”

“No. It’s not,” Noirin says firmly.

His smile widens. “No? I don’t think you have a say, unless you’d like to join us too.”

“I’m not talking to you!” Noirin snaps. 

“Wow,” the masked boy huffs. His mask’s eyes narrow, but that crescent smile stays just the same. “You know what, sure. Go off, I guess!”

Shivering slightly, Noirin turns back to meet my eyes. “Liadain, you… don’t owe us or anyone your life. It’s yours.” Her voice wavers, then quickly recovers its strength. “No one here wants you to die for us. And anything they do or don’t do, you’re not to blame for that. They are. So you know what to do in a crisis, don’t you? Protect yourself. Help who you can once your own mask is on.” She nods slowly, forcing a smile.

My mouth hangs open. I don’t know what to say to her. I can’t think of anything that would help her, or any way that I could explain what it means to hear that, now of all times. In everything I’ve lived through, no one but her has ever told me in anything but the blandest, most obvious terms that it was okay to care about myself. 

Thinking back, the last time I heard anything about this was when a depressed patient came to me for a reading, spent the entire time venting about what a burden she was to her family, then told me it would be better if, for the sake of everyone left in my life, I stopped eating and got it all over with. She died two days later, so it would’ve felt pointless to tell anyone and paint this dead woman as a monster who’d go around saying things like that to a child. It’s not like I cared what she had to say.

She was kind of right, though, wasn’t she? Before I was a Keeper, I was only ever dead weight. A waste, a void a few stupid people poured effort into – effort, but never love – knowing I could be gone any day.

But I’m not gone. And as long as I’m here, it doesn’t matter if I have nothing to offer. If I were somehow in this circumstance without being a Keeper, I know Noirin well enough to know she’d say the exact same thing. It doesn’t even matter if by carrying on, merely by protecting myself, I make the world worse. My life is mine. It’s one thing I’ll always, always have, and I will never owe it to anyone. 

So, since there’s nothing else I can do and nothing else I can give her back, all I do for Noirin is return a smile beneath my mask. The best one I can manage, knowing no one will ever see it. She flashes me a conspiratorial wink back.

“Okay,” I say, shifting my attention to the masked boy. “So. You’re threatening me with a few people who are about to die anyway? Who agreed to this? Because they did. There’s not enough Harbinger in there to have hollowed them out, and if there were, they’d be gone anyway. That’s a stupid plan.”

There’s a few aghast faces in the crowd, but not as many as I expected. Sorry, everyone. I don’t think I’ll ever be the sort of Keeper you would’ve hoped for.

The boy chuckles to himself. “You aren’t a very good liar, are you? I see the you behind that mask. You want everyone to live, always. Even the ones you kill. I respect that. I don’t want anyone to get hurt over this. But I have specific people I need to look out for first. I’m sure you get it.”

“Yes. And I’m one of those specific people for me. So if you’re really that set on grabbing me, and you really aren’t going to start taking hostages, let’s do this outside.”

“…What a pain. Sorry, Isobel,” the masked boy sighs. “There’s no point now.” 

“Wait, really? That’s enough to back down over?” Statue protests.

“Yeah, Mairtin, it is. We talked about this – if the threat did nothing, there’s no use in forsaking people who need us just to stick to it. I’d rather keep everyone with us. So let’s go- ngh!”

Suddenly, the boy coughs, doubles over in pain, and starts to scream. A raw, ragged scream, so intense it quivers the air. I falter backwards. He screams and screams and screams, biting down as tiny dark hands push and crawl and claw their way out from his mouth and shadows flicker wildly around the room. Screams and scrambling noises and the high whine of a heart monitor fill the darkness before something else fills my mind.

It’s here. It’s inside them. It’s always been here.

“Stop! STOP IT! I’ll do it, I’ll find a way, I’LL–” the tangle of alien limbs that was once a boy chokes out. But with a rising unearthly cry, the darkness draws closer around his body and silences him again.

The air sings its name. The hospice reeks of yearning for some unnameable, indescribable, transcendent Something that would make everything okay forever if we could only reach high enough to snatch it out of the void. 

<We Will Find It Amongst The Stars>
<Syancauri>

With those words, countless spindly shadow-limbs burst from the boy’s body like parasitic worms. A swarm of them races toward me, their fingers burning away to nubs in my barrier, while the others slither out through the room. Some race for the six patient-cultists, close their fists around them, and drag them unceremoniously away through the floor.

And many, many more race through the crowd to wrap themselves around Noirin. She shrieks in fear as they surround her, then in pain as they rear up like serpents. Through her vain, desperate struggle, they shrink to more effectively seize her, pull her upright, and wrap themselves around her head, holding her in place.

I burn life and sprint across the room, carrying my aura with me. It’s everything I can do to steer it away from infecting everyone I pass – or almost everyone, by the groans and coughs rising behind me – and bring it down through the limbs around Noirin like a cleaver’s edge. 

Too late. 

Not good enough. 

The hands severed from their source simply twist into new shapes and carry on their work.

The fingers around her head reach down to peel her eyelids open, while the clawed fingertips of two more hands move to crawl inside her head like spectral spiders.

Dalha stares out at the scene in pale-faced horror. The shapeless girl squirms around the edges of the room, making for the portal behind the desk. And Statue… Mairtin… he’s laughing. Cheering his monster on. 

“Claiasya loves her children so very much that she stuffed you into those disgusting brains with their pointless nerves! Hey, hey, have you ever looked inside an eye? It’s ridiculous! Everything’s all upside-down, and what is it all even for? A soul can puppet a body just fine, as you’ll well see!”

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do – it’s far too close to inside her, I don’t have the control I need to kill it without hurting her, I never will, that’s not what I am not like this a plague can’t choose who it kills or how–

but it doesn’t matter. I’ve already done it. This is already too much. The fingers squirming halfway past Noirin’s eyes decay to nothing first. She collapses back into her seat with the ones holding her in place. Then, within seconds, they’re gone.

And so is she, limp and ragged and breathing her last shallow breaths.

“Noirin? Noirin! I’m sorry I can’t I didn’t mean to, wait, just wait, I can get it out…” I babble, scanning her body, hooking into my disease with everything I can, and finding it already wound through her and her own illness and the traces of corruption already seeping through her into a labyrinth-knot of pain.

take it, something familiar says. A toneless voice that feels like I should recognize it anyway.

“I can’t. I’m sorry I can’t it’s too… I just can’t.” If I pulled at anything, undid any bad stitch on these infected wounds, everything inside her would come spilling out.

take it, the voice insists. take it take it take it tAKE IT. 

There’s nothing I can do.

There’s nothing else I can do.

“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry…”

And I open myself and drink Noirin’s soul.

Something inside me bursts, breaks, rots.

~~~

It feels so much like claiming a Harbinger, drinking up everything it is and was like a book that stays with you forever. Only this book is so much simpler, so easy to follow that it feels like it has a message for me. A place it wants me to start. 

I follow its lead to a collage of memories – scenes of Noirin and her family. Living their lives, seeing her into the seventh floor, happy outings giving way to an endless series of arguments in her room.

And me. The reading I did for her when we first met.

Maybe there’s a wall that can’t be crossed around one thing, but you’ve still got everything else. If your argument can’t be won on either side, and it’s not doing anybody any good, maybe you should talk to them about just… accepting that, putting it aside, and doing as much as you can of whatever’s always made you happy together.

The fights end shortly after that. Since then, they’ve… accepted it. Put the issue aside and made the best they could of whatever time she has.

The picture all this paints is easy to read. Noirin’s cancer was the kind that may have been treatable, if she was willing to struggle and suffer for a little more life without pain at the end. Her family wanted her to try, she’d rather have spent her last days in relative peace, and they finally agreed to disagree and enjoy their time together… because of me? 

I had a good life. I was happy. This is for helping keep my last months happy, it says.

No. No, you idiot, that’s not what I said to do. I never ever would’ve said that. The tears I was straining with everything I have to hold back flood my vision.

Above, something offers me a hand.

My eyes trace the gloved arm back to my shadow, standing above me on the surface of the void-sea of my soul. Shrouded in black feathers, white hair stained dark with inky ichor, face rotting away to expose a blazing green eye socket in a skull the shape of a plague mask.

“What are you? What do you want from me?” I croak.

I’m you. I’ve only ever been you. So don’t be afraid. Let me help you.

<Accept me.>

And I do. There’s nothing else I can do.

~~~

“Isn’t it sad?” Mairtin cries. “How your glorious protectors would murder you before they let you become a part of something greater… eh?”

My focus narrows around him, and as I feel the new weight of it, I’m sure he must too. With my left hand, acting on some bleak new instinct, I draw three tarot cards from nowhere and spread them through the air, face down.

I’ve been doing the same thing over and over and over, infecting things too alien to understand with the one sort of pain I know best. 

Why did I think that was how it had to work?

Health is scarce and precious, something to be scraped up and stolen and hoarded. Suffering, though? That’s what the world is made of. It comes in infinite forms, and when you share it, you only make more of it. I can bleed blight. I can breathe curses. I descend from a nightmare who broke the whole world in too many ways to count. Why should I be limited to spreading my pain?

It wouldn’t be enough. Not for them.

One by one, I turn the cards over. This is his fate I’m taking in my hands and crushing, but it’s still my reading. The Hermit inverted – withdrawal from your own face. The Three of Cups inverted – losing yourself in a crowd. Death inverted – the moment when it all rots away.

Your bonds will turn to poison. Your love will be a plague. In life and in death, forever and ever and ever, you will be alone. A blight on anyone who would share your misery, just like me. That’s my reading for you. My omen.

MY CURSE.

As the last card turns, all three burst into a scintillating storm of emerald and onyx that swirls around me like snow under a sickly moon. They thread themselves together into a mural of a darklit night sky, looming over Mairtin, the stars above twisting themselves to reveal his terrible new fate, and swiftly vanish from sight. 

And he doubles over, choking for breath and gasping in agony. Through the pores and cracks in his flesh, tiny invisible tendrils of green reach out through his aura – not seeking me, not yet, but searching for their next host. 

Dalha, still pallid and shaking, turns to watch her comrade collapse. Then, after a long silent, still stretch, she slings him over her shoulder, staggers toward the portal, and crawls through with him in tow. The tangle of limbs that was once a boy waits for another moment, then turns and ambles back into its Wound.

I can’t help but smile as the aura fades.

And when the portal scars over behind them, I feel… the best I ever have. Whole. Perfect. Like I’ll never hurt again. Like even the pain and horror are drowning beneath my new strength, desperately flailing to keep their heads above water, to keep me from forgetting that anything is even wrong.

It takes looking down at her corpse to remind me.

Why?

Why?

You know why. A sliver of sadness creeps into her voice.

And she’s right.

I think I always knew it would be this way. I knew that what I take could never really be measured. There are no reservoirs of “health” I can use to fill mine up with sips from people who have so much to spare. All magic cares about is pain. The kind of misery that stains your soul and scars the world’s skin. Suffering and sacrifice and ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ and the weight all those things hold. That’s where real power comes from.

There was almost nothing left of Noirin. If there were wells of health, hers would already be empty. But the last breath of someone I care about is worth much, much more than every tiny scrap I’ve stolen combined.

I can’t even scream anymore.

Why am I still smiling?

I walk down one of the winding, shaded paths running through the Weald, alone but for the occasional bike racing past me, guided by the nostalgic ache in my chest that’s still never gone away. It leads me to a point on the trail where a bridge passes over a wide, shallow creek. There, I descend the steps to the water’s edge, roll back my sleeves, and reach in. I know where it is before I see it: a soggy mass of paper still roughly held together by its binding.

The last stray copy of How to Be the World. All the rest are recovered, destroyed, or maybe just lost to me, buried too deep in some sealed chamber to feel in the gaping hole where Aulunla was ripped out of me. I rifle through my bag, wrap the book in rags, and hug the dripping bundle to my chest.

How did it even get here? No one used this copy, not in any way that counts. It doesn’t feel like anything but a distant echo of Aulunla… like light from a dead star. I can’t help but imagine how it played out: someone plucked it out of a library, sat down to give it a look on the bench overhead, and… then what? If they thought it was creepy, they could’ve given it to a Keeper. Which would’ve been worse for me, yeah, but at least it would feel better than the idea of some idiot with no imagination stumbling across the last traces of my dead friend and finding it simply boring. Not frightening, not dangerous, just an insane child’s scribblings inexplicably put to print. Something so offensively meaningless that they’d rather hurl it into a river and forget they ever saw it than try to make sense of it.

Whatever. They don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how it got here. It’s not like any of this is going to make a difference. Why do I still bother? How desperate and stupid must I have been to believe Ciaran when he started talking about gathering Aulunla’s remains and sewing it back together, good as new?

Not yet. The arrangement is missing a piece. A stolen keystone. 

The architect’s speech has grown less grating and distant over our partnership. It’s still never felt as close as Aulunla did.

“Yeah. Fine. I get it.” If Aulunla is anywhere, it’s in the Keeper who murdered it. If there’s any hope for this ridiculous plan, it’d start with killing her, ripping its heart out of her guts, and hoping it’s in a state to be put back together. 

Only no one I asked had any idea who that girl was or how to find her. I should’ve thrown the plan out and done everything I could to kill her during the Embrace. I shouldn’t have trusted that disgusting creature Plague Girl dragged along like trash on her shoe to accomplish anything. She’d have known, but according to Ciaran, she was very insistent that Plague Girl was hers and no one else’s. 

And then she went and got herself killed. I’d had a chance, I wasted it, and all I can do now is hope another one falls into my lap. Aisling must know, but she obviously wouldn’t tell.

…Maybe someone else does?

I tuck the book under my arm, retrieve my phone, and check my notifications. There’s still a flood of messages coming through every time I leave the Wound. I ignore the ones from my family, and Aisling seems to have given up on those long pleas to come home and talk this all out, but there’s three new ones from Lucan. No words there, only the Daily Beetle. At some point, he got into the habit of sending me exactly one cute beetle picture every night. The images haven’t stopped coming even now, as if nothing had changed. I smile despite myself at the shot of a milkweed beetle peeking through a hole in a half-eaten leaf.

I’d thank him for it, but the moment Ash heard that I’d talked to anyone in the club, she’d whip them into a frenzy trying to get anything else out of me. No point in stressing them all out. 

Instead, I sit by the creek, leaning into the shade of a big tree, and look out through the Sea at the rest of the world, tabbing through Flow’s channels on magic and Keepers and Harbingers. As far as I can tell, the only public-facing signs of our group’s existence are the missing persons reports on me, Sorcha, and a few of the others. Still no Ciaran, which is interesting if that’s his real name. Ash will absolutely have briefed Lighthouse on everything she knows, though. It’s hard to say how much that encompasses without knowing if she’s burning questions on this, but she knows enough. If people aren’t actively hunting us, they will be soon.

What’s Ciaran’s plan for when that happens, anyway? To my eyes, all the group’s been doing is plucking a handful of outcasts from the city while Mairtin and I scavenge Aulunla’s dregs and hope it gets us somewhere. The Harbinger’s towers aren’t making it any higher before they collapse. If the whole city declares war on us before it “opens the sky,” we’ll lose, and it won’t be close.

But they aren’t quite there yet, at least. There’s no news about the Keepers who ambushed me during the Embrace. All I find in checking is that Shona Tiernan died last week. It wasn’t us – she ran into something else, a “fungal infestation beneath the earth,” that killed her and promptly vanished. Too bad for her. She always seemed alright.

Eventually, though, I do find Plague Girl. 

In between stuff about Shona, there’s a scattering of trending posts about “Ill Wind Liadain,” and the pictures attached to some of them are definitely her. They’re all of her in a little booth somewhere, alone or uncomfortably posing with one other person at a time. With that square of fabric masking her face, there’s hardly a hint of a smile to be seen, only eyes that seem to shift from dread to exhaustion the longer the whole farce continues. I follow those back to a PR statement, announcing an event where people could go to have her… suck “health” out of them, whatever that means. 

And they did. Lots of them. And then filled Flow with stupid stuff about how cute she was.

Safety not guaranteed, no fortune in your fortune telling, girl really knows how to sell herself. What an icon. 

her tarot stuff convinced me not to confess to my crush (it woulda been a disaster anyway, 10/10 would suffer for again)

Gonna start hitting the gym again so she gets superpowers when she eats me! ᕦ(ò_ó)ᕤ

Imagine if I’d tried anything like this with Aulunla. It’s not like I would’ve been asking for sacrifices. We never wanted to hurt anyone until we had no other option. We wanted people who understood, who wanted to be part of our work. Those would’ve been better in every way. But still, no one would’ve showed up. No one would say shit like that about us. At best, if I posted on the Midnight Zone, the Monad might’ve locked it, covered it in disclaimers, and left it up like that so they could keep saying they were all about freedom of information. And then Keepers would’ve hunted us down, murdered Aulunla, and thrown me into the Sanctuary anyway.

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s out again, in public, alone save for her weird fans. We can work with this. Looking over the original announcement, the chancel where it’s happening isn’t even far away from here. She’ll be there…

…This morning. The event ended two hours ago. No indication of when or if there’ll be a next time. 

I clench my teeth, rip up a handful of grass at the roots, and slowly spread my fingers, letting it fall blade by blade and blow into the water in the breeze. 

There’ll be other chances. Will there? Will they come fast enough? Does it even matter or am I just clinging to the last vague scrap of hope that Aulunla isn’t dead, that Ciaran and his Harbinger will eventually have the power to wave their hands and fix everything somehow?

When I reach into my pocket and set a hand on Aulunla’s apple, a patch of its skin has gone soft and wrinkly.

Damn it. Damn her. Damn everyone who won’t leave us just one dark, quiet corner for ourselves.

I stand and throw my arm out with a snarl. My shadow stretches out and out, rises into a solid shape, and tears the curtain of existence away, opening a rough hole in the air just wide enough for me to climb through. I dive in and soar away from the world, out into the shapeless dark beyond.

~~~

The shock of primal terror that once accompanied slithering through the marble maze around Ciaran’s Wound has faded to an annoying lurch in my stomach. 

On the other side, there’s no bizarrely cheerful welcoming committee, no party in the ruins feasting on junk food, no sounds of conversation anywhere in earshot. The Wound feels as empty as it did when Ciaran first drew me in, only even he’s nowhere to be found.

“Hellooo?” Something about this world’s pitch-black sky makes it feel like a giant cavern, like a hollow space my voice should be echoing through, but there’s no answer. 

Finally, maybe a minute later, Dalha’s voice shouts back: “Isobel? Over here!” 

I follow the sound through the smiling wreckage, toward the debris of the Harbinger’s newest collapsed tower. Dalha’s waiting there, standing just outside its most intact entrance.

“There you are. Thank the…” Dalha trails off, smirking as if at a joke. “Well. I’m glad you’re back safe. I don’t know if we could take any more setbacks right now.”

“More? What happened?”

“I’m not sure what happened, if anything, but…” Dalha puts a hand to her temple and sighs. “Ciaran’s, mm. Having a moment.”

“A moment. What does that mean? What kind of moment?” I ask.

“If you want to try and get it out of him, please be my guest.” Dalha takes a step back, gesturing to the crumbling archway.

“I don’t, really. But we need to figure something out anyway, so… fine. Do you have any more for me to go on?”

“Here’s what I know. Parra, one of the newer boys, went out yesterday. Said he wanted to go talk to a friend, thought he’d be a good fit for our group. He never came back. Ciaran went to look for him late last night, came back alone, and he’s been more or less dead to the world since.” 

“So what, then? Did some Keeper grab him? Did he just quit?”

Dalha only shrugs.

“Fine. Here I go.” I duck through the doorway, shimmy through a too-thin, mostly-horizontal passage, and step out into a wide, mostly-enclosed chamber lit only by glowing stone faces. At the far end, Ciaran sits slumped on the ground, leaning listlessly against a big tangled rock. Two of the Harbinger’s great shadow-hands stretch down through the ceiling to cradle him, and most of his followers are gathered close by, some watching him uncomfortably and some in quiet conversations with each other. Mairtin crawls along the walls, muttering inaudibly to himself.

“Hey, Isobel.” Oh, there’s Sorcha, perched on the half-intact stairs in the corner. She still talks like a person, voice as soft and mousey as ever, but since she put on a mask perfectly matching Mairtin’s, her body’s been growing more hazy and indistinct by the day. Not in the same way as Mairtin, who’s always looked to Isobel like one of the distended statues the ground here is made of pulled itself out and started talking one day… no, beyond her mask, it’s hard to look at Sorcha and see anything clearly. She’s a thing of too many too-long appendages draped in clothlike shadows, all reaching out from the never-moving silhouette of a balled-up girl in a big sweater. Sometimes she slithers through those limbs as if she’s pouring her liquid self into them, sometimes they carry her around like spider legs, and sometimes she just pops up, with no signs of when she got there or how she moved.

Whatever. Good for her. “Hi. Ciaran, we need to talk.”

Ciaran only stares down at the ground, meeting an empty-eyed mask’s gaze. 

I cross the room to stand over him. A few of the faces I step on let out strained, breathless sighs at the impact. “In private,” I say, holding out the still-damp book. “About this. This is the last one, and it’s not going to help. It’s not enough. I have an idea, but there’s… details we need to sort out.”

“Yeah. Makes sense. Why would anything we’re doing work?” Ciaran says tonelessly. No one moves to leave. He doesn’t move at all. 

I sigh, tuck the book into my bag, and kneel to level with him. “Look, whatever happened with Parra, you’ve always said you don’t want anyone who doesn’t want to be here. What’s the big deal if some kid left?”

“He didn’t leave. He’s gone,” Ciaran says. “Fell into a hole. An abscess. A moldy maw filled with worms.”

…Another Harbinger. Maybe the same one that killed Shona, from the sound of it. “Shit. And I suppose however this happened, you can’t go get him back.”

Ciaran chuckles weakly. “No. No, if you’d seen it, you’d understand. If you’d felt it, you’d understand how…” He pulls his legs up and wraps his arms around them. “There’s nothing we could do to it. I don’t know what anyone could do to it. Despite everything, we’re still… we’re so very small. Weak. Worthless.”

He slumps forward, burying his face in his knees. “It saw us, before we left. Something without eyes looked out of that pit, saw us, and all it saw was prey. We didn’t leave, we ran screaming. I prayed, I don’t know why, I don’t know to who, I just prayed it wouldn’t follow us. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I never have. This is wrong. This entire thing has always been wrong. None of you should be here. Return to the stars, yeah… the stars are filled with bigger, scarier things than we’ll ever be.”

no no nO NO, the world screams without speaking.

“Don’t you dare,” I say.

Ciaran glances up, eyes dull behind his teary-faced mask. “Huh?”

“You’re seriously going to lie down and give up and take us all with you just because, what, because copying Aulunla’s homework hasn’t gotten you where you want to go? What was your plan before I showed up? Did you even have one?”

Sorcha squirms into view in the corner of my eye, wrapping around him defensively. 

“I guess we did, yeah,” Ciaran says, paying her no mind. “But we were obviously on the wrong track, since you made it further than we ever have by accident.”

“What do you mean by accident?” 

“Just how it looks, is all. It made a pretty big impact for something so small. I don’t know how, and I guess you don’t know how, since it did it all while it was holding back for your sake. Keeping all the blood on its hands.”

I lunge at Ciaran, shaking him by the shoulders. His eyes widen, but he doesn’t resist at all. “Like you would know! What are you doing but sitting around here waiting for someone else to tell you how to fix the world? What was all that about ‘accepting a new god’ for if neither of you even know what you’re doing?” I snarl.

A storm of twisted limbs and solid shadows crashes into me. The chamber whirls around me as it tosses me halfway across the room, then presses down, slamming me to the ground with a sudden crushing impact.

Slowly, to yelps of shock and panic, my blurred vision stabilizes. Mairtin and Sorcha loom over me – him straddling me, cold hands on warped limbs holding me down, pushing me by the head into the floor beneath, where stone lips kiss my cheeks. Most of Sorcha’s shadow-mass has spread into a cramped cage around us, but not all. Dark tendrils wrap painfully tight around my legs. Both of their masks leer down at me, twisted in fury.

I try to push away, to kick back, to do anything, but I’m helplessly pinned. Even my shadows don’t answer my call – not that they were ever really mine.

“Do whatever,” I wheeze. “You can’t help me. It’s never coming back. I don’t care what happens now.”

What? What am I saying? Of course I do. I’m terrified. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be ripped out of myself and left here for dead, just another empty, smiling statue for the endless mass of bodies. There’s no sense in lying about any of that when Ciaran can look inside me and see it.

But it doesn’t even matter what I want. There’s nothing I can do.

“Get away from her,” Ciaran orders. 

Sorcha’s eye-holes narrow and her scowl shrinks, shifting from a mask of rage to confusion. “You heard her. We don’t need her. Why would we want someone here who’s never cared about anyone but herself?”

“I said leave her alone.” He raises his voice for the first time today, if only by a little.

Sorcha and Mairtin glance at each other uncertainly, then start to pull away, leaving me splayed limp on the ground. As he withdraws, Mairtin leans down and hisses into my ear: “I don’t care what he says. If you make this any worse, if you hurt him any more, I will rip off your head and pour you out through your neck and feed your insides to our god.”

“You know I can hear you, right? Cut it out,” Ciaran insists with a tired sigh. “No one’s doing that thing, Isobel. I just want to know.” He crouches next to me, offering me a hand.

I take it, dizzy and bruised all over and maybe concussed, and let him pull me up. The Wound keeps spinning, slowly. “…Know what?” I ask.

“What you think is missing here. What Aulunla did that we haven’t. Sure, you didn’t make it, but you’re the closest thing we have to an expert in rising free from this wretched old world. So tell me. What’s wrong with us?”

His mask’s expression is blank, and for once, I can’t see his face behind it. It has none of its surreal transparency, and behind the gaps that make up its eyes and mouth there’s nothing but blackness. All eyes are on me, from Mairtin and Sorcha’s glares to the wide-eyed stares of terrified recruits scattered around the edge of the room.

I’m not sure what happens next if they don’t like my answer. Which is really bad, since… honestly, I didn’t completely understand what Aulunla and I were doing, by the end. Everything felt like what I was meant to do, a necessary part of writing a beautiful new world just for us, but the way I worked through its rituals and how I arrived at any given step was just a matter of working out what felt right. I knew without knowing how that everything was very nearly in the right place, that there was a way through if I could only make the last pieces fit, that it would have worked if I’d only found the perfect path through the maze of thought I’d built myself.

“What it was trying to do when it died… I think it’s about being the most you you can be. Finding something only you can do, maybe something only you can understand at all, and pushing it to its absolute limit. Using anything someone else did as an example is a dead end. You can’t reverse-engineer the path it took to get there because you’re not it, and there is no path.”

Oh, Ash would hate that. I can’t help but cough out a laugh.

“So, you know what you were planning better than I do, but whatever you were thinking wasn’t enough, or maybe you just weren’t doing enough of it. I know I’m right, since you wouldn’t be trying to piece our ideas back together your way if it had. Stop that. Do what you can do better. Expand on it. If you don’t know what only you can do, figure that out first, or everything you try will just be one more tower that falls apart halfway through.”

Ciaran frowns. His mask grows a little more hazy, a little less solid. He stands there, silent but constantly twitching and fidgeting, for what feels like a very, very long time. I can’t bring myself to move, and I don’t think the others would let me leave if I could.

Finally, he grins, wide and wild. “Hey. Isobel. What would you and Aulunla have done if another Harbinger got in your way?”

I blink. “I mean… avoid it if we couldn’t handle it. Kill it and find a use for it if we could.”

“Exactly. That’s what they all do. That’s what that thing was doing when it took Parra. Catching another Harbinger, taking a big nasty bite out of everything around it in the act. The city. The world. Not us! We’ve never killed anyone! We aren’t some ravening beast – ah, no offense, Isobel, I get how it is –  but a family in the act of building itself! A place for everyone with nowhere else to go and no idea what they want to be!”

Ciaran throws his arms wide, and in unison, his Harbinger’s spectral claws reach out and tear the chamber’s wall away, sending a few people scurrying to the sides. 

“Everyone! Human or Harbinger or anything else beneath the stars! We’ve been thinking too small. I love all of you. Of course I do. But how many Harbingers do you think are adrift in this world, lost and alone? How many more would rejoice if we offered them something new, something better, something above the ceaseless eat-or-die nightmare they were all born into? We can save them too! We can save EVERYONE who accepts us! And all of us, all of us together can save Parra! Save everyone that thing has taken! We’ll build the foundations of our world with one sacrifice and only one: a nightmare fallen from the sky, a horror that will die so all of us can live!”

The Wound falls silent again. Ciaran strides out to stand beneath the sky, as if he doesn’t even care how his flock will respond to this. As if he already knows.

And sure enough, within seconds, Mairtin claps and cheers, his whoops coming out in eerie hisses. A few people join in, the first beats of hesitant applause quickly bursting into wild celebration. Sorcha only smiles. Dalha peeks around the now-open wall from outside, glances over the room, and shoots me a curious look. I stumble to my feet and respond with a slow, uncertain thumbs-up.

It could work. If he can get something like Seryana to work with him, there really might be something to this. There’s even something poetic about it – saving the city from the same rampaging monster that just ate a beloved Keeper would make the point I wanted people to understand much better than I ever managed to.

But it doesn’t change anything for me.

“Hey. Ciaran,” I say. “Great plan, really, but… it isn’t what I came to talk about.”

Ciaran grins, rubbing the back of his head through his hood. “Oh yeah. Sorry. What was that again?” 

“What I was trying to tell you before all this was that we aren’t going to get Aulunla back by scrounging up a handful of relics we tossed out into the world. Too much of it is gone. We need the Keeper who killed it, and I don’t know how to find her unless she pops her head out in a place we can reach her again.”

“Ah. I was starting to think it might come to that, yeah. No problem, though! I know where she lives. I even have a pretty good idea of how her magic works.”

I can only stare blankly at him. “What? How? From the… whatever, why didn’t you say anything? We could’ve done something with that!”

Ciaran smirks, tapping the side of his head with one finger. “Her stalker didn’t want to tell us, but she was wearing part of us when she died, remember? Not enough that losing it hurt, but enough that we could peek through her eyes without asking. We saw pretty much everything she did on the night she died, including the part where she followed Plague Girl home and made a mess of her place.”

I fold my arms and narrow my eyes at him expectantly. 

“Ah, yeah, and I guess I didn’t mention it ‘cause she lives in the regional hospital. On the hospice floor. Would’ve felt weird about raiding somewhere like that if there was anything else we could do, y’know?”

“…Oh.” I wince. “Yeah, that’s…”

The day is close at hand. It will come back and you will be whole. All of us will.

Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Whatever tragic backstory doesn’t change what she did. Or what I have to do.

“But you know what? You’re right! Us and her and everyone, we’re all in this to win. We owe it to all of you not to hold back over something like that.” 

Ciaran leans in, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. Behind his mask, he looks the happiest I’ve ever seen him. 

“So let’s get you what you need.”

Dad stares down the hall at me, smiling, eyes heavy with stifled tears. 

“I’m… hey, I’m really sorry it took so long to check in on you. There was just a lot of… well, it doesn’t matter why. I should’ve tried harder,” he says.

Why? Why? Why? WHY? my voice hisses into my ear, over and over and over.

“Anyway, how’ve you been?” He scoops up his fallen bag and glances over me, forcing a grin. “You look, uh, good! I like the new look. It’s cool. Is that weird to say? Can’t be cool if I’m saying it, right? Hope that doesn’t ruin anything for you, but I do really think–”

“What are you doing here?” I ask. My voice is too quiet to really cut him off or speak over him, but after a second, he does trail off.

“Eh? Ah.” Dad glances off to the side, staring at the floor. After a moment, he comes a little closer, his expression resolving into a pained half-smile. “Yeah, I guess I should’ve called first, shouldn’t I? Hope I’m not interrupting any plans, I just–”

“It’s been two months. We’ve talked as many times. Why am I only worth your time now?” I do my best to snarl.

He stops in his tracks, wincing as if I’d hit him. We stand there, frozen while the world keeps moving around us. My shadow seethes to my side, draping herself around my shoulder.

You could eat him, she whispers. You could tear him up and feed him to someone who matters, someone who shut up shut up shut UP could you quit wasting both our time spewing insane garbage you know no one would ever do?

Why not? If he only wants to be part of your life now, he literally can!

“Liadain?” A shaky hand touches my arm. “Is everything alright?” Noirin’s voice asks. 

“Uh. Hi. I’m her dad. We’re fine. It’s just been a while,” Dad mutters.

Noirin’s eyes flicker in his direction, but quickly return to me.

“I’m okay,” I lie.

“Ah, I see. It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Shiel. I’ll leave you both to it,” Noirin says. She’s smiling politely as ever, but her voice sounds a little chilly to me. She raises a shaky hand and shuffles back to her seat. 

“She seems nice,” Dad says meekly. “Glad to see you’ve made some new friends here.”

“She is,” I say, quieter than before. Noirin looks awful. Where did she even come from? When her useless body fails her for the last time, will her light feet be the last thing to go or will she hold onto them until her soul loses its grip on its shell and goes off to suffer wherever souls that aren’t important enough for Nha go?

“Lia, listen, I really am sorry. I should’ve said something before I just showed up, and I should’ve been here a lot sooner. I know all that. Could we just… talk about it, just for a bit? Maybe somewhere a little less busy?”

Glancing around, it doesn’t seem like we’ve quite made a scene in the front hall. Noirin is still watching Dad with a look I can only imagine as disguised suspicion, and the nurse who waved him over is clearly taken aback by all this.

“Fine.” I step around him, keeping my eyes to the ground, and lead the way back to my room. While Dad looks around uncertainly and my shadow glares at him, I scoot Pearl’s nest aside, raise the back of my bed, and settle into it.

“Okay. Obviously you can see what I’ve been doing.” I wave a hand at my face, brushing a few hairs out of my eyes. “So.” Where’ve you been? What’s your excuse this time? What’s the fucking occasion? “Who told you?” I ask. That doesn’t sound much better, but I don’t really care. There’s no way he decided to pop back into my life for no particular reason.

Dad breaks eye contact, glancing at the wall with a guilty smile. “I saw your ad,” he says.

I pick up a pillow, give it a violent squeeze, and groan. “What made it my ad? I told them not to use pictures. I didn’t give them any pictures.”

Dad only smiles at that. “Yeah, well, when I heard there was a local Keeper called Ill Wind Liadain, then read that she was looking for ‘health donations’ and doing tarot for donors? Ciara was always the smart one, but even I can put a three-piece puzzle together.”

“Ugh. Right.” I should’ve seen this coming. Should’ve kept using the fake name. I was just so sick of tripping over my own stupid, pointless secrets. “Don’t use that title, I hate it.”

“Sure. Sorry,” Dad says. He frowns, scrunching up his brow in thought.

“What?” I ask.

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you just change it? Having a hard time coming up with a better one?”

“I can’t, because I didn’t pick it. It’s written on my soul.” I slump forward, stopping just short of burying my face in my pillow.

“No, I understand that, but your presence doesn’t have to define who you are or what you go by any more than… well, maybe a little more than your face. Still!” he says. I can’t remember the last time there was this much energy in his voice. It’s weird.

I sit about halfway up and look his way. “Can you do that? Wait, how do you even know what I’m talking about?”

“Sure. I don’t keep up with Keeper news as much as I used to, but I was… well, that’s what I was into at your age. I know at least how the basics work.” He gives me that sad half-smile again. “So I know that there are no rules about what Keepers calls themselves, and that precedent’s on your side. Do you know Tancra? Star-Shattering Song?”  

“From the war?”

“Yeah. The first Riman Keeper to publicly turn against the war. He went through three titles – an innate one he didn’t like, another he chose to replace it, and finally that one, which came from Emergence, not quite based on either of the other two. So you could just as well grow into one you’re happier with, but until you do, no one would stop you from going by something else.”

“Oh. I never thought of that,” I admit. I probably just assumed there was nothing for it, like everything else I hate about my magic, and moved on. “Wish I had before I started doing things in public.”

“Eh, you’ve done one thing in public, right? Shouldn’t be too late to change your mind.”

“I guess so.” Changing my name immediately after I announced myself to the world might make me look like kind of an idiot, but it’s a little late for that.

Dad shuffles in place uncomfortably. I huddle into my pillow, watching him through the corner of my eye. 

“You could’ve said something sooner,” he finally says.

Why does everyone say that like it’s just the easiest thing in the world? 

“I mean, it’s good news, isn’t it? We finally have something to celebrate!” His voice is gentle, but unsteady.

I can’t help it. I collapse into my pillow and laugh and laugh and choke and laugh.

“Lia?” Slow, heavy footsteps cross the room. “It is good news. Right?” Dad sets a hand on my shoulder – gingerly, barely-there, like he’s testing something that might burn his hand off. I can’t find the energy to shove him away. 

“I still don’t know! I mean, it probably didn’t make anything worse that wasn’t terrible before, I think? Unless you count making a friend just in time for her to get eaten last week, or…” Or the idea that I’m turning into a story about dying forever and clinging to the edge of the void with scraps of vigor stolen from everyone else, or what it means for that story that death isn’t even a thing that’s real, or whether all this power will even help if I ever end up in the place I’ve always been hurtling toward, trapped forever in the void beyond life with a soul full of passengers who never shut up–

“Nevermind,” I mutter. “Not getting into that.” I shake myself out of my thoughts before I look up at him, scowling. “Honestly, I still don’t understand why you’re here.” 

Dad flinches again. “I mean, if it’s not, that’s okay too. I know it’s something really big you’re going through, good or bad or both, and I wanted to… be there for it. For you,” he says. His shoulders sag as he speaks, like even he can immediately see how it sounds.

“If I needed someone to be there for me, why would I tell you?” I snap. “When was the last time you were there for, I don’t know, anything real?” 

Dad grits his teeth. “If this is about the time I forgot to pick you up, I’m still really sorry, but–”

“You know what it’s about! Quit acting like it’s just one mistake you can fix right up!” Blood rushes to my head in a numbing, chilling current. Something in me wants to flare, to reach out and wrap him in myself and drown him in my frozen feelings. I do my best to bite that impulse down. “It’s every time I could’ve been dead and you left me alone in some recovery room for days! I wasn’t worth your time or trouble or pain, so you ignored me just like everyone else!”

“That isn’t… Lia, that’s not why…” Dad draws back into the door, opening and closing his mouth soundlessly. “What did you need me for? What could I have done to help?” he pleads. “You never even seemed to need anything I could do, so…”

“You never asked! You just left! And now you think, what, did you think I’d forget all that as soon as you heard I mattered now and decided to stroll back into my life?”

“That’s really not…” Dad goes silent. He slumps against the wall, looking listlessly down at the floor. “Nevermind. You’re right. It doesn’t really matter why I did any of that. It was wrong. It wasn’t fair to you. And I’m sorry. I’m…” He pauses for only a moment, his brow furrowed as if he had glanced down to see a knife in his gut. But it’s only a moment before he blinks and swallows the expression back down. “…So, so sorry.”

Dragging himself upright, Dad puts his bag down on my desk, moves my chair to the foot of my bed, and sits there, meeting my gaze with wet eyes. “I did see your event before it happened. I just, you know, thought it might be embarrassing for you if I showed up there all of a sudden.”

“I wasn’t exactly counting on your support. What’s your point?”

“Yeah, I’m sure you were real surprised not to see me around,” he says with a weak chuckle. “I’m only bringing it up because… listen, for all the stuff Ciara and I were into when we were kids, I can’t really know what it’s like for you. Of course I’d like to, however much you want to share. I might’ve pretty much used up my good dadly advice about your situation with the title thing, but I really do want to help however I can.” He straightens his back and takes a deep breath, the way I do when my doctors are about to stick me with something. “If you need other people’s ‘health’ to do your new job, or just to be okay, you can use mine if you need it, alright? Feels like the least I can do after everything.”

My shadow cackles with delight.

“No,” I say. She shoots me a withering look.

A strange mix of relief and confusion washes over Dad’s face. “You sure? I mean, not that I was looking forward to it or anything, but I’m serious, if it’d help you–”

“No! There’s not some one magic thing you can do to make this okay! And, and even if I needed that, or wanted your help, do you think it isn’t hard enough having to hurt random strangers I’ll never see again?”

Dad looks away. He puts a hand to his chin, clenching his teeth. Finally, he nods thoughtfully, smiling faintly through a steady trickle of tears. “Yeah. That’s fair,” he says. 

After another long stretch of uneasy silence, he stands up. “I brought you some things. And hey, they aren’t even really from me, so if you don’t want anything to do with me, I just hope they do more for you than I have.” He takes a big stack of books out of his bag and sets them on my desk. I squint, glancing over their spines.

“Parenting After the Promise,” I say flatly. 

“Uh, not that one. That one’s mine.” He stuffs it back into the bag in a rush. “The rest are the good stuff. Before we get into that, I should tell you I’m technically not sure if I’m supposed to have them, so, you know… this can be our little secret, okay? Or if it can’t, just use that Keeper prerogative to look out for your ol’ dad,” he says with a nervous laugh.

“Supposed to? Why not? They’re just books.” 

“They were your mom’s,” he says quietly, as if that explains anything.

“Okay? Did she have a secret shelf of books on astrology or something?”

“Eh? N-no,” Dad says. But he pauses for a moment, frowning with uncertainty. “Well, no, I don’t think so. You’re on the right track, though. You know she studied magic, right?”

“Mhm.” Mom was some kind of academic who worked for the Church. Dad always had a hard time talking about her in too much depth, and I never really cared enough to push him, but there’s only so many things that can mean.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you just how into it she was. See, when you make it in some of those fields, you come to a point where things get weird. Weird enough that they don’t want the experts sharing everything they know in public. Maybe some of what they’re working on would scare us normal people, or maybe it somehow wouldn’t be safe to know at all if you come at it with the wrong mindset. I don’t know if you’ve run into any of that yet, but I’m sure you get where I’m going.”

I nod. I probably knew something like this even before I started seeing what it means to die. Aisling’s talk about “infohazards.” Dr. Cantillon’s warning to Dr. Hines that he simply couldn’t be a normal doctor anymore if he knew the things she did.

“Basically, if the people in the know like what you’re doing, they’ll offer to read you in and share their work with you, as long as you agree to keep all the secrets. Ciara made it there pretty quickly. I don’t think she was even supposed to talk to me about what she was doing after that, but, well, here we are. We always talked about everything.” 

Dad drifts off for a bit, visibly lost in thought, before he looks back at the books. “These are some work books she brought home. Not sure if she was really supposed to take them out and leave them around, but, well, no one’s ever come looking for them.” 

He gives the pile a few firm pats, and I stand, scooting past him to take a closer look. It’s a tall stack of thick hardbacks. The only cover I can see is almost completely unadorned, just a title on a dark background: On the Violability of the Soul. The titles on their spines are all embossed in a similar style, and they alternate between ominously clinical and vaguely poetic: The Eggs in the Sky. The Fading: Human Mortality Before the Fourth Scourge. Channeling Our Nightmares. Everlasting Ribbons. 

“What are these?” I ask. “I mean, what are they about?”

“Her specialty was things that you can’t do with magic, as far as we know – the big no-go zones like precognition, but smaller, stranger exceptions too. She wanted to know why they were out of bounds and if there were ways to push at those boundaries, things we just couldn’t do yet because we haven’t figured out how. Honestly, though? I didn’t understand most of the stuff in here. Take that one on top. I think it was about mind control? How it’s impossible but also it happens all the time? Didn’t get it at all.”

The same way you can die and still suffer forever, if I had to guess. Magic seems to like making strict definitions of anything into incoherent soup.

“Well, guess that’s why Ciara was in the secret club and I’m in Sea security.” He scratches the back of his head, smiling sheepishly. Then he reaches into the bag, pulls out a small stack of unmarked black notebooks with a few sheaves of printed paper tucked between them, and sets them next to the pile. “Oh, there’s some of her journals, too.” Dad drifts off for a bit, visibly lost in thought. “They’re in some kind of shorthand or cipher, and I can’t help you too much with those, but… well, you’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it all out.”

“Maybe. If I can’t, I do have a friend who’s good at this sort of thing. Um, thank you, for these.” I doubt I’ll open these books up and stumble into the answers to all my problems, but they do sound like the sort of thing that might at least connect to my big horrible questions.

“Don’t mention it. I just thought it’d be something nice for you to have. Thought you’d get more out of this stuff than I did.” Dad wipes his eyes and smiles to himself. “You remind me so much of her, you know?” 

“Mm.” I did see Mom not too long ago, in the closest thing to the flesh I ever will. It was just a monster trying to bludgeon me with memories I barely even have, but it was plenty to see the resemblance. 

Less so now than then. I glance down at the shimmery grey veins on the back of my hand.

“It’s not just seeing her in you. It’s so many of the things you like – most of your favorite books growing up came from her collection, you know? And the way you took to so much of her old occult stuff. And how much you hate letting anyone think there’s anything wrong with you. You would’ve liked her. Plus she knew enough about this stuff that she’d have something helpful to say right now. She would’ve handled all this much better than I did.”

“How do you know? You barely even tried,” I say.

“Yeah. I should’ve done more, I know. I should’ve done everything I could’ve. I just… I couldn’t.” He trails off, blinking rapidly.

“It was like watching her die again,” he almost whispers. “Sorry. I know how it sounds. But… that’s why.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t have anything to say. I don’t understand love. I’ve never had anyone or anything that matters more to me than myself. 

But if I did, and I lost them, and all I had left of them was some distorted echo wasting away just like they did… I don’t think I’d do any better than he has.

“She would’ve been so proud of you,” he says, shutting his shimmering eyes as he smiles a little wider.

What? Why? What have I ever done but scare people away and hurt people to feed myself and kill monsters who might not even deserve it any more than I do? And even if she would, what do I care? I never knew her. She’s dead. Or she’s whatever passes for dead, I don’t know. In the sea, if that’s where normal people go. Is it? Could she be haunting us right now? Would it change anything if she was?

I obviously don’t say any of that. I just ask “Would she?”

“Yeah. I’m sure of it,” he insists. “You know, we were both a little down when we left the Promise range, but I don’t know if Ciara exactly wanted to be a Keeper. I think what she always wanted was to be one of those characters in her books who could change the world just with what they know. The wise old mages delving through their libraries for the secrets of the universe. That series about the girl who discovered magic in a world where it was hidden from everyone was her favorite. But in the real world, learning can only ever get you so far, right? She’d have been so happy to see you going places we never could. To teach you everything she knew until she started learning from you firsthand. She’d have loved being your mom.” He chokes on the last words.

“I’m sorry you’re stuck with me instead,” he says, and with a blink, the tears he’s been struggling to hold back start to pour out. 

But I still don’t believe him. 

I think he believes what he’s saying, and I don’t think he’s saying anything wrong or making anything worse. It’s just that… 

If Mom and I were really so alike, and she really loved magic enough to make it her life without ever being able to use it? If I knew someone who was exactly like me, only she had something I wanted more than anything and couldn’t have… 

I’d hate her. I’d hate her so much. Sitting in my hospital bed and hearing about her living the life I’d never have would be torture. All I’d want to do with her is steal that missing thing for myself. And if I couldn’t?

Tear her open. Crawl into her heart. Sew yourself in and do your best to forget that you were ever anyone else. Live happily there until you find the next thing that isn’t enough. 

It doesn’t really matter, though, does it? She’s gone, at least in every way that counts, and Dad’s still here. He isn’t a great dad, but I’m not a great anything, and he’s here. 

Maybe that’s worth a little more than nothing.

I draw a tiny breath of life to steady myself, set my cane down, and hug him, leaning into his chest while he sobs.

Once Nha leaves us behind, carrying whatever final token of Shona he took with him, most of the procession gathers by the dock. Iona sits down on the rocks with Shona’s family, consoling them while they stare out and watch the Sun’s last traces fade. Mide eventually joins them. I just stand on my own, straining against the frozen weight of my body, and try to make sense of everything. It doesn’t work. My shadow doesn’t even have anything snide to say – I barely see her.

Eventually, when night has almost fallen and the crowd starts to thin, Aisling breaks away and approaches alone. She greets me with a tiny nod, then turns, slowly, to watch night fall. “Hey,” she says. “What’re you thinking?”

“Nha’s cute,” I say.

“Right, it’s your first time at one of these. He is. And about your idea, with him in mind?”

“Oh.” I look around, making sure no one’s in earshot. “I don’t know. I mean, of course I knew about him, I just… wasn’t really thinking about him when I learned all this. And I can’t think of any way it’d make sense for him to do this. I was hoping you could. They didn’t go find her body and put her ashes in there, did they?”

“No. Even in cases where someone has killed the Harbinger that got a Keeper, they almost never find their remains in the Wound. They usually just fill those with some of a Keeper’s favorite things. Tokens of them, you know.”

“Then I’ve got nothing,” I admit.

“Well, one more for the pile. All this aside, how’re you managing? You look… any progress on the donation plan?”

“I’d have a hard time thinking of how to ask enough random people to be worth it for something like that on my best days, and I haven’t had any good days since everything last week.”

“Ah. Well, I obviously don’t know the details of your medical situation, but if, for any reason, you absolutely needed to, could your power turn a bad day good?”

My legs wobble as I look inward, feeling the chill in my veins, listening to the strangely dry, rustling sound where I once heard blood flowing through my ears. “Yes. But I’d have to eat people first. I’ve been empty for a while and it doesn’t like that.”

“Of course.” Aisling grits her teeth and exhales through them. “So. Do you have any estimate of the minimum viable amount of people-eating you’d have to do to fix that? Just… making sure I understand where we stand, if you or we have an emergency.”

“Not really? After the first few times, I started looking for big groups and taking tiny bites from every healthy person in them.”

“Well. I’m sure you can see now how it might help to keep logs of these things.”

“Does it really work that way? It doesn’t feel like it does.” I’ve never had a concrete sense of how much stolen health I’m holding or how much it takes to do any given thing with it. The closest I’ve come to thinking of it in amounts is that there is a smallest possible sip I can take from someone – which is more than enough to hurt them – and how quickly whatever I’m doing is burning through my remaining supply.

“Lots of things don’t feel the way they are, and you won’t know how it works if you never even try to quantify it! And not to pile more stuff on you, but it’d probably also help if you could find a specialist in Keeper health issues. The experts will know way more about what’s going on with you than I do.”

“I do already have one of those. They brought her in right before we met, so I haven’t asked her about the feather thing yet, but maybe soon.”

“Oh! Good, then. Who was it?” Aisling asks.

“My doctor? Why?”

Aisling shrugs. “Just wondering if they’re anyone I’ve heard of. Medicine’s not one of my big things, but I have looked into the field.”

“Her name’s Dr. Cantillon. I don’t know if you’d like her, she–”

“Ava Cantillon is your doctor?!” Aisling almost shouts. She’s looking at me the way Shona might’ve if I’d talked about having lunch with Irida.

“Um. Do you know her?”

“Only by her work, but her papers on modern presentations of the Third Scourge are incredible! One of the first things I read about intersections of magic and the material world that made its subject look like something it might at least be possible to understand and systematize! Do you think you could get her autograph?”

“Probably? Or I could make you a squiggle that’d look just like it. She’s got the most doctor handwriting ever.”

“You’re fucking with me. I’m sure you’ve had someone you looked up to enough to know how not the point that is.”

I smile despite myself. She’s right, with a catch. “I used to. It was Tara.”

Aisling purses her lips, holding back an expression. “Ah,” she says, and nothing more. Right, has she been around long enough to know Tara? To have her own awful experiences with her? Does she think I’m some gross serial killer fangirl now? I can never miss a chance to mess something up.

“Um, yes, though, I’m sure that won’t be a problem. I’ll tell Dr. Cantillon she has Keeper fans,” I say.

“Appreciate it. And you know, about the volunteer thing… if you aren’t sure where to start, there’s a lot of people right over there who I’m certain could help.”

“What?” I glance back at the dock. Irida and Nilamai have left, but the priests, the Fianatas, and Roland all sit on the shore, gathered around Mide and Shona’s family, talking quietly amongst themselves. Shona’s mother is still visibly crying, but even she’s part of their conversation. “Now? I can’t. They’re doing funeral stuff. Plus that’s two of the people who’ll least want to help me and one of their mom.”

“One of those people just offered you a clean slate, and meant it, yes. And whatever you think about him, he’s an expert in PR bullshit.”

“Wait. Seriously? You’re serious? Why does it even matter to you?” 

Aisling puts a hand to her temple. “Deadly serious. And because I am trying to help you. If you end up in trouble again, or we find Isobel’s Harbinger, I don’t want you out of commission because you didn’t take what might be very simple steps to get you the resources you need, and it’d be very easy to take those steps right now.”

“Oh,” I say. “Right. That makes sense.” 

Aisling pulls her phone from a coat pocket and starts tapping away. “Here. If you don’t want to interrupt their conversation, I can call him over right now. He answers Keeper messages pretty much instantly unless he’s in a Wound or something.” 

Set against his brilliant smile just a few hours ago, Roland’s voice echoes through my head: I’ll kill you! You’re going to die alone! It doesn’t make sense. Nothing about him makes sense. How could I trust him with anything when I don’t understand him at all?

How can Aisling trust me? How could Shona, who barely even had anything to gain from it?

“…Go ahead,” I say. 

“Great. Sent.” Aisling taps a single key and puts her phone down. 

Sure enough, maybe a minute later, Roland stands up, approaches us, and raises a hand. “Yo,” he says with an inviting smile. “Is this no longer off-limits?”

“Obviously. I’d say you don’t need to gloat, but I’m not sure if that’s true,” Aisling says.

Roland’s smile widens a little, but he says nothing.

“We thought you might be able to help sort out the logistics of something. I don’t know exactly what you two talked about the last time you… met. Are you aware of the donor plan to fill Liadain’s particular magical needs?”

“Oh yeah!” Roland says, eyes narrowing. “You mentioned it back then. And I told you how easy it’d be to get it going with my help.”

“Yes, you did,” I say. “But why’d you have to be so weird and pushy and creepy about it?” 

Roland takes a single step closer. I suppress a flinch. Reflexively, I want to pull back, but it doesn’t feel quite like he’s pressing in on me, and the way I am now, I’m never sure how close people need to be to even hear me talk.

“Why’d you tell me there was no way we could talk to Niavh when she told me the morning after she would’ve answered her phone whenever?” I ask.

“You apparently met Niavh, then continued doing what you were doing for more than another week,” Roland answers immediately. “If I left you for her to handle, how was I supposed to know you wouldn’t go off and keep doing it until she got back?”

“That doesn’t make any sense! If that was my plan, what’s the exit strategy? It’d just be digging a slightly deeper hole that’d cave in around me the next time you two talked!”

Aisling squints at me, very pointedly. 

Roland’s smile returns, wry but thoughtful as he glances off into the ocean. “You know, when I found you, I really didn’t know enough about you to say just what I thought you’d do.” His red eyes dart back to mine. “Now, though? Yeah. Sounds about right,” he says.

Fine, yes. I’ve had a lot of stupid plans. I say nothing.

“Look, this is not really the point,” Aisling says. “Roland, whatever your thought processes and the information you had access to at the time, I’m confident you were mistaken about Liadain’s intentions, both before and after your encounter. I also don’t see what any of us have to gain from relitigating this. So, given that we seem to have moved past it to something resembling everyone’s satisfaction, are you willing and able to help now?”

“Oh, sure, I’d be happy to help! What can I do for you?” Roland asks, looking my way even while Aisling speaks.

“Um. I want to arrange some kind of event where people can donate health to my pool in exchange for, I don’t know, autographs or something? It doesn’t sound like a very good deal when I say it like that, but Aisling says people will do it. I just don’t really know where to start, and I haven’t been able to figure it out because everything hurts.”

Roland nods eagerly. “That’s no trouble at all, yeah. I can set you up with my agent. Nice lady, great at her job. She’d at least want you on Flow or Lighthouse to make the arrangements, but either of us could verify you as a Keeper right now.”

I sigh. I was afraid of that. “Okay. That’s fine.”

“As for the ‘or something’…” Roland taps a finger on his chin. After a few seconds, his ruby eyes light up. “Got it! You do tarot, right?” he asks.

I tilt my head and narrow my eyes. “Where’d that come from?”

“Thought your cards looked familiar. Not really my thing, but some of that old occult stuff comes up in training seminars.”

“Ohh. I guess it would. Yes, I do.”

“That’s perfect, then! Offer people selfies or autographs for a little bit of juice, tell their fortunes for a little bit more.” 

“Tarot isn’t… Nevermind, that’s actually a good idea,” I say.

“What were you expecting?” he asks, holding up his arms as he shrugs.

“I don’t know. Some sort of plot to make me your sidekick, maybe.”

Roland leans forward with his arms folded behind his back, bringing his face close to mine. The motion is so sudden my heart leaps out of my chest like a startled cat, but the rest of me freezes in place. “Well, if you’re offering…” he murmurs, his voice slightly warm on my cheek. Just like that, all my thoughts scatter, blown away on a passing wind.

“I’m, um…” I cast my eyes downwards. I can’t think clearly when I look at him. He’s too bright. As obnoxious as he is, I can’t even begin to deny that he just looks… unbelievable. Like a photo of a supermodel in motion. But he’s right there. He’s so close. I don’t know what’ll happen next, but… maybe it won’t be bad.

I get what Mide meant now when she mentioned wondering why she even bothered every time she looked in the mirror after meeting Roland. Tall, slender in his robes, with a sharp-featured face that could as easily belong to a handsome girl as a beautiful boy, all framed by long hair that flows out like strands of golden silk… and those big, red eyes of his. I glimpse upwards into them and—

—a memory stabs sweetly through me like a jagged shard of glass. The image of a single crimson eye, its frenzied glare peeking out between sullied golden curtains. A burning desire to tear me apart piercing through the night as every bit of breath is crushed out of my chest. But I don’t understand. I’m terrified, but it’s a fear twined together with… with what?

He pulls back and the world snaps back into place around me. He chuckles to himself. I blink.

“Nah, I don’t have to be there. Especially not if you show everyone a face as cute as the one you’re wearing right now,” he grins teasingly. 

I point to my face. “I… I’m wearing a mask,” I say tonelessly.

“Oh, your eyes are enough to tell.” 

I grab the forearm of my cane hand, folding my free arm over myself protectively.

“Roland, are you quite done?” Aisling asks, voice sharp, arms folded. “We do have work to do.”

“I was just coming back to that. Anyway, I don’t have to be part of it at all, really. You’ll get more of a crowd if I am, but hey, up to you. If you want your debut to be your own thing, I can respect that. Irida tried something like that on me when I was getting started.”

“…I’d feel better that way, yes. Thanks.” I can’t stop wondering why he’s being so helpful all of a sudden, but I also can’t bring myself to ask. I feel like I already know what he’d say, but also like I wouldn’t understand him any better for having heard it from him.

“And… I’m sorry,” I say instead. “For making everything so much harder than it needs to be. I know what I was doing, I get that you had your reasons to see me how you did, and I’m not sure why you’d bother helping me now but I’m… I don’t know. Thanks. I’m glad we didn’t just kill each other.”

Aisling shoots me an odd sidelong look. Roland only blinks. The sound of dark waves breaking on the rocks fills the silence between us. Finally…

“Yeah! Me too,” Roland says blithely.

Is this flirting? Is this what that looks like? my shadow asks, regarding me like mud on her boots. Bizarre. Disgusting. One more thing you’ll never miss when you shed this flesh like snakeskin.

…Is it? Now? Why? It can’t be. It better not be. That’d make even less sense than everything else about him.

That can’t be all it takes to win you over, can it? she growls, Some creepy pushy words and a favor he TOLD you was trivial.

Just shut up. You’re not helping. I’m not dealing with you right now.

~~~

It takes a few more days of quiet misery for Roland’s Church-furnished publicist, a lady from Alelsia whose name, Aethelflaed, I’m glad I don’t have to pronounce, to schedule the event. She obliges when I ask to make all the plans through Lighthouse messages, asks some questions about how my power works, what exactly I need from volunteers (my answers aren’t as detailed as either of us would like) and the level of exposure I’d be comfortable with (as little as possible.) 

Taking all that into account, Aethelflaed arranges a simple meet-and-greet at a small chancel in the Weald, with the obvious twist that while she can’t stop anyone who just wants to look at the weird new Keeper from showing up, the main event will be a spot where people can line up to offer me their health. The smallest sip I can take will get them a picture and a shaky autograph. A slightly bigger one adds a three-card tarot reading, where I have veto power over the subject if I don’t think it’s a question tarot could help with or someone just asks me something stupid. I’m sure she found a more diplomatic way to phrase that.

By Sunday, everything’s been set up and she’s spread the word around on whichever platforms people get their Keeper news from. Wary as I was of getting their attention, these Church people do work shockingly fast. 

~~~

I don’t read any announcements about the event. I’m sure I’d find whatever they say about me embarrassing. All I do is show up when I’m supposed to, torn inside between my urgent need for more life and hoping I won’t be the center of some huge horrible crowd.

As it turns out, it’s not too bad. The chancel is a modestly-sized circle of ceramic white and blue glass, and it looks like most of the people coming must already be inside. Out front, there’s only a woman in simple priestly robes, who leads me in through the sanctuary’s back entrance.

I transform before I head in, not interested in putting on any more of a show than I already am. Voices raise as I step inside, not shouting for my attention but speaking among themselves. There’s somewhere between thirty and forty people here. Of those, most of them, maybe twenty-five, have joined a line that winds around the chamber’s edges, while the rest are simply standing around. Some raise their phones to take my picture. 

The line has formed up around a booth in the corner closest to us, where there’s a long table covered in black cloth and draped with dark curtains on either side. I don’t suppose I gave them much to work with as far as my aesthetic. The priestess escorts me there, past the small crowd.

“Um. I’ve never done anything like this before. Is there any way I’m supposed to start?” I ask, then sit down and set my cane against the table. This seat is surprisingly soft, at least.

“That’s up to you. Is there anything you’d like to say?”

I tap my throat once. “Even if there was, they couldn’t hear me like this. I have a voice thing. Emergence.” 

“Ah. Well, I’m sure that’s fine,” she says with a small nod. “Just do whatever feels natural. All these people are here to help you, after all, and we have volunteers on hand to care for them afterwards. If it’s necessary.” She gestures across the room to a nurse’s station with a spread of snacks and drinks, which makes the whole thing feel more like a particularly fancy blood drive than anything else.

“Alright. I’ll figure something out, then. Thank you. I guess tell them I said so too.”

The priestess nods and steps away, leaving me alone at the table. People at the front of the line crane around each other to look at me, while others reposition to take more pictures. 

This is fine. This’ll be fine. I only need to deal with one person at a time. Doing my best to ignore the observers, I unceremoniously wave the first person in line forward. To my surprise, I dimly recognize her – a girl with thick glasses and her red hair in a spiky bun, though she’s wearing a long Spring dress instead of the school uniform I last saw her in.

“Mor, was it? Hi.”

“Oh, cool, it is you. And you remembered!” She sits across from me and cranes almost halfway over the table, probably to hear me better.

“It hasn’t been that long.” And I don’t meet that many people. 

Mor shrugs. “Yeah, I guess not.” 

“Thank you for coming, in any case. How’d you know it was me? It’s starting to seem like basically everyone knew me way before I thought of doing this.”

“I mean, people talk, yeah. Especially Shona. You two were friends, right? She talked like you were, only sort of half-assedly anonymizing stuff about you. You know how she is with secrets. Or… well. I’m sorry about her,” she says, lowering her voice. “I didn’t know her that well, but the whole school’s… yeah.”

“I don’t want to talk about Shona,” I say flatly.

“Oh. Sure. Sorry,” she mutters, looking a little taken aback.

“Anyway… Are you sure this’ll be okay? I don’t know a lot of things about how this works, really. It’ll hurt, and I’m not sure how much or for how long.”

Seriously? The spectre seated on the table’s edge shoots me an incredulous glare. She has a point. Why should I get cold feet now of all times? Why should inflicting myself on a normal girl around my age living her normal life feel any different from what I was doing before? There’s no way she’s even the first kid I’ve hurt – I wasn’t sorting my victims by age, or by anything. I almost never saw them at all.

Mor shakes her head, smiling. “It’s fine. Happy to help, and I don’t really care about missing school or anything like that. I’ll have people around, books to catch up on, stuff to think about.”

I don’t mention the days where I’m in too much pain to focus on anything. I’m not trying to scare her away, I just… I don’t know what I’m doing.

“Alright. I think it’d be best if I do things for you before I take what I need. So, what’re you here for?”

“I think I’d like a reading. If I’m going to be sick anyway, getting a little more sick seems like a fair price to see the future.”

I point to the bottom of the sign on my table. Tarot is not magic. No one can see the future. All I know about you is what you tell me, the last line says. That part’s there at my insistence. It may not be exactly true, but I expect my magic readings would be just as awful for everyone else, and I’m not using these people as guinea pigs to find out. Maybe if another Keeper volunteers, I’ll tell Aisling to add it to whatever experiments on my power she’s thinking up.

“I’m, well… yeah, I know that. I read a bit about it before I came. Too much to hope that it’d work differently if a Keeper does it, huh?”

“Yes,” I say. “Do you still want it?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

So I pull an ordinary deck from my Keeper pockets, have Mor pile shuffle it, and get started. It’s the first reading I’ve done for someone other than myself in a while, since I’ve either been too busy or too imposing for my seventh floor corner to get many visitors, and it pretty quickly leaves my comfort zone. She asks me some fairly specific questions about a crush she has and what to do about it. She’s not trying to divine someone’s private details or anything stupid like that, which at least one girl did try when I was still in school, but her situation sounds complicated enough that I don’t really understand it. I just explain the cards and let her do the talking about what she thinks they mean. Eventually, she decides more or less on her own that the girl she likes isn’t in a place where that sort of thing would be good for her, even if she did reciprocate.

“I mean, I pretty much knew all of this, being honest with myself. But it helps to unpack it all and sort it out, y’know?” Mor sighs. Her shoulders droop a little.

“That’s the point. That’s what tarot’s actually good for,” I say. “Sorry it wasn’t a nicer answer.”

“Better right than nice. Thanks for listening.” Listening was all I could really do, so I’m glad it seems to have been worth something to her.

Mor steps around the table and poses while she takes a picture of us. I sign her journal and three more books she pulls from a big messenger bag – not that I really have a signature, or practiced for this at all, or could have made my hands cooperate for long enough to practice even if I’d wanted to. Still, she seems happy enough with my shaky scrawls.

“Thanks,” she says as she tucks her books away. “So, uh… how’s the next part work, exactly?”

“You probably want to sit back down,” I say.

She does, balling her fists and steeling herself like she’s about to have blood drawn. If only it were that easy. Without another word so long I’ve already waited too too long I let my famished soul reach out, taking her life in its many-fanged grip. Mor winces at the sensation, face paling. The whole world smells of warm rain and fresh growth. I grin behind my mask, open my maws, and drink, draining first one gulp of essence, then a second. 

It takes all my will to pull away with only those drops. The suffering written clearly on Mor’s face helps – she’s trembling, eyes wrenched shut, whimpering and biting her lip hard enough to draw a trickle of blood.

And that was nothing. That’s what carrying the barest fraction of your burden will do to a person.

“Try to breathe the way you normally do. It won’t help much, but it’ll do something,” I say. 

Mor nods, but very obviously doesn’t do that. She stands slowly, almost tripping over her own legs, and holds herself up on her chair, doing her best to smile through the pain, until a nurse rushes over to help her across the room.

Watching her limp away, I understand why I hesitated. The reality of what I’ve done was never the point. Without the threat of immediate death on the line, it’s just hard to take a bite out of someone sitting right in front of me, someone whose name and face I know. It’s simpler, easier, less raw and less real to sense an abstract wisp of life in the distance, know at a glance that it belongs to someone who’s never suffered the way I do every day, and take just a little bit of the good fortune I should’ve been born with for myself.

But I wouldn’t be here if feeling bad was enough to keep me from doing anything. 

~~~

And on it goes. A few people leave the line after seeing my first victim, but only a few. And slowly, like the roots of a parched plant drinking the first rain in weeks, life trickles into my empty well, easing the agony that’s gnawed at me ceaselessly since I wasted everything I had fighting Roland. 

It’s more like a too-brief shower or a trickle from a watering can than true rain, though. Compared to the reserves I used to have, I can already tell that these gifts are only droplets. As long as I’m relying on donations like these, I’ll never reach the heights I did in Aulunla’s Wound again.

But that’s okay. It’ll have to be. Pushing myself that hard was a miserable experience, and more importantly, I don’t need to do it. I can already do more than I could then. I just need to make better plans that use the things I’m good at. Maybe there’ll be another Harbinger I can drain the way I did Aulunla. Or maybe it’ll turn out that I can just hide in an alley and feed my targets cursed copies of myself until it withers and dies. At Aisling’s urging, I have tested the range I can control my clones from and found it to be pretty far, but I obviously have no way to tell how they’ll interact with Wounds until I find one. 

The shadow at my side leans over the table, filling the corner of my vision, and fixes me with a grim, knowing smirk.

What? What’re you so smug about? We haven’t even tried yet! You don’t know how it’ll work any more than I do!

Of course I don’t say any of that, but the boy next in line is still giving me a weird look. He scuttles off when I scowl up at him, so… Thanks for that. Hope you’re happy. If you want me to stop holding back and eat everyone, you picked the worst possible time to bother me. 

~~~

I’m exhausted by the end of the event, but physically, I do feel better than I have in a while. A thin trickle of life is enough to keep my veins from freezing and my body from screaming out in constant crippling pain. I don’t even have to feel bad about using it for enough everyday relief to keep myself standing, since all of it came from people who offered it to me freely. 

Part of me wants to walk home, just because I can, but that would feel like an extravagance. As part of this event, my donors were all offered treatment at Guiding Light, the hospital that deals with esoteric injuries when they don’t quite merit a stay in the Sanctuary. By the time I need more, there should be doctors with at least some idea of what I’m doing to people and whether any of my harm is lasting. I should make this much work until then, or at least for as long as I can. 

So I take the bus home. It’s good practice ignoring the way people look at me now. 

When the elevator opens on the seventh floor, the front desk nurse smiles at me. “Welcome back, Liadain! You have a visitor. I told him he could wait for you in the great room – don’t worry, though, you haven’t kept him waiting too long.”

“What? Who?” I ask, gripping the desk’s edge. The only he I can think of is Roland. He could’ve tracked me down or followed me home or gotten my info from his publicist or something. I still don’t know that he’s plotting something weird, but even if he isn’t, I’m not letting my hospital become a meeting room for every Keeper who wants to bother me.

The nurse looks a little unsettled – I’m sure she knows what it could mean when strange things startle me – but relaxes after a moment. “There’s nothing to worry about, dear! It’s just your dad stopping in. It’s been a bit since he’s made it here, hasn’t it?”

“…Oh,” I say. He actually came here? Now he’s decided to remember I exist? 

I think that might be worse.

Behind her matted, ink-stained hair, my shadow stares at me with a confusing blend of disbelief and disgust and… fear? Something I’ve never seen or imagined seeing from her, but that’s the only way I can read her face.

I’m about to ask the nurse if she can get rid of him, or just turn around and leave, when she points and waves. “There you are! She’s back, Mr. Shiel!” she calls.

Dad stands at the end of the hall. A big bag from a bookstore slips from his fingers, thudding to the floor. His hair’s gotten long and scraggly since I last saw him, the pale stubble on his chin is thick, and his eyes are wide and wet behind his glasses.

“Hey, Lia.” His voice breaks as he says my name.

If anyone was eavesdropping on us, they aren’t letting it show. By the time we get back to the funeral, two priests are lighting votive candles around the altar, and most of the small crowd has returned to their quiet conversations. 

Or not-so-quiet, in the case of the pink-haired Keeper in the corner. Erika, apparently. She waves at us as we enter, then goes back to talking to Mary: “Yeah, so Shona turned up at my school one day, back when I went. Said some girls on Flow needed a Keeper to get rid of ‘the ghost in the bathroom,’ so there she was.”

Mary snickers at that. “Dumbfucks. Ghosts aren’t real.”

Erika slumps, covering her eyes with her palm, and sighs. “No. They sure aren’t.”

I’m not here to tell two girls I don’t know how real ghosts are or how terrible that is for everyone. I keep walking, not sure where I’m meant to be – I’ll feel just as out of place anywhere. When I stop, halfway down the aisle, Aisling turns around and shoots me a curious look. I gesture over the pews and tilt my head. She shrugs, gesturing to Mide and the group I imagine is her family with one thumb. Mide is the only other person I really know here, and I don’t think she hates me anymore, but… I motion for Aisling to come closer.

“Is it okay to tell her?” I whisper. “She should know. She deserves that much.”

Aisling bites her lip. “We really should verify what you think we know, first. Imagine if you tell her something like that and you’re wrong. Or there’s nothing we can do about it.”

I’m not wrong. But I’m not sure about the second part, I admit. All I really have to go on is… what? A weird tarot reading? Some part of me that thinks I could solve all my problems if I’d just eat everyone?

Because you could. You’ve already done so much with so little.

Maybe. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not eating the city to find out. 

“Fine,” I say.

“Thanks.” Aisling nods once, then makes her way to the central pews, sitting behind one of the crowded ones.

Which brings me back to my first problem. I don’t really want to talk to Mide while I’m holding something like this back – sorry, Mide – so where else is safe? Do I brood in an empty corner, hoping everyone ignores me, or join Aisling in the cluster of people I least want to be part of?

Ugh. At least no one can get me alone there. And Aisling can hold Roland to his promise not to bother me. I take a seat next to her, and no one seems to pay me much mind.

Except for Tetha Fianata, who’s still staring at me like something contagious. 

“Um. Hi, Tetha,” I say. “I’m sorry about…”

About what? Have you changed your mind now? What would you have done differently? my voice whispers, a sneer in its sound.

Shut up. I never wanted to hurt her. That had nothing to do with Aulunla or the people it killed. The book I fought her over didn’t even matter to it. It was just a stupid mistake.

Mhm. You’ll do better next time.

Tetha stares at me, blank-faced. “About?” she prods.

“Oh. Sorry. About… that whole thing. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just, um. Had a very stupid idea I thought was very important. You were right about it. It won’t happen again.”

“It won’t happen again? Seriously? That’s it? Why’d you put me in the hospital over a monster the first time?” she yells. 

I flinch. I can barely hear her over the sound of shredding paper screaming through my skull in protest.

“Tetha,” Iona scolds, her voice gentle. “Whatever the mistake, the first time it’s made is a lesson.”

Tetha’s head darts back to glance over her shoulder. “And we’ll talk again the second time. R-right,” she stammers. 

I’m not really sure what she means by that, but Iona smiles and nods. Even in those simple gestures, she moves like her body is an instrument she’s spent decades mastering, a facet of her power she controls as completely as any other, and the flecks of snow drifting around her seem to dance in time with her, emphasizing every little thing she does.

“So, uh…” Turning back to me, Tetha folds her arms and squeezes her elbows, like she can’t quite decide if she’s protecting herself or trying to look stern. “Is there gonna be a second time?”

“No! I just told you it was a stupid idea!”

“Things really would’ve gone a lot smoother if you’d told us before, though,” Roland says as he steps into the conversation.

“Told you what?” I snap.

“That you thought you needed to do the stuff you were doing to live,” he replies plainly. “As reasons go, that’s a pretty good one.”

“Where’d you…” I start, but quickly trail off. Niavh, probably. Right. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. I’ve already heard from almost everyone I’ve met how terrible I was at keeping secrets. There are more eyes on our conversation now, but of them, only Tetha looks at all surprised.

“Roland. We talked about exactly this,” Aisling warns.

Roland raises his hands, palms open. “And I meant what I said. I just wanted Eyna to know I’m okay if she is. I think we’re about even.”

“It’s fine, Aisling,” I say. “Yes. I’m over it. And you’re right, my health stuff was a stupid thing to hide and my life would be a lot easier if I hadn’t.” Maybe if he hadn’t been so creepy about it, but… it doesn’t really matter, unless Roland’s scheming something I just can’t be bothered to puzzle out. Knowing what I know now, it feels ridiculous that I was ever worried about some stupid thing like what people would think of my deadly disease they could all look at anyway.

“Oh, and that’s not my name. I’m Liadain. There was really nothing sinister about it, I’m just tired of keeping track of who I use which name with. Don’t tell my dad.”

“Well, Liadain, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” The smile on his perfectly sculpted face reaches his bright red eyes, sincere as can be. It’s too warm and bright and radiant to possibly be real. I still can’t help but read smug satisfaction into it. After all, he didn’t believe me from the start. I’m not sure. I don’t really care.

Tetha’s eyes dart back and forth between us. Her mouth twitches back into a nervous smile, which she looks like she’s straining to hold. 

“It’s almost charming, isn’t it, Nilamai?” Iona says with a sidelong glance at the swan-winged Keeper. “New Keepers always think their first mistakes will herald the end of the world, and they’ve all been wrong so far. You must remember the cleanup we used to do for Alva, Goddess keep her,” Iona says.

“Goddess keep her,” Nilamai echoes with a wistful smile. Her wings droop as she speaks, settling around her like a feathered capelet. 

“Adamant Titan Alva? What about her?” I ask. “Everyone liked her.” She made the Promise at 11, bent earth and steel to her will, carried around a giant hammer twice her size. People thought it was cute. She died last Summer.

“Enough to tolerate the collateral damage, yes. She did make such a mess of everywhere she fought. Inside Wounds or out, it never seemed to matter. ‘Sorry, guess that’s just how it works,’ she’d say.” Iona chuckles a bit wearily. “But that’s not what we remember her for. It was only a small inconvenience.”

“Yes, once we started evacuating a five-block radius around Wounds she entered,” Irida says. She’s smiling as if at an old joke, but really doesn’t sound like she’s reminiscing.

I can’t help but think of what Roland said about her.

“Yes,” Iona agrees. “Some Keepers require accommodations. Sometimes there are bumps before we learn how best to work with them.”

Aisling kicks my shoe in emphasis.

“Point taken,” I say. “But I’m not really here to make this about me. I’ll figure my stuff out with Niavh. On my time.” 

“Good, good. I’m sure she’s grateful for your trust,” Iona says. “How did you know Shona, in that case?”

“I… long story. I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”

Iona gives a single slow nod. “As you like,” she says, and turns back to the rest of the Keepers.

And that seems to be that. Following her lead, the others return to talking quietly about their memories of Shona. I don’t get the sense that any of them were especially close with her, and I don’t join in at all. Even if I weren’t holding back the most important thing I have to say, it’s not like I’ve got much to offer. I almost ate Shona’s best friend. She got me a funny sweater. It seemed like we might be starting to get along. And then she died. Good story.

Not that I think there’s such a thing as a good story for a funeral. No matter when someone dies, there’ll always be some wonderful thing they could’ve done or been part of, if their time hadn’t been stolen from them. There’ll always be stories about them that end with a sudden, senseless ‘and then they died.’

And then they drowned beneath the earth, to linger alone for the rest of time.

~~~

Eventually, one of the priests, his robes and mantle noticeably more ornate than the others, takes a stand at a podium. The soft, wordless music in the background trails off, which the others take as their cue to quiet down and let him speak. 

I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, but when the service itself starts, all I can think of is how wrong it feels. I don’t have any other funerals to compare it to, not that I’ve actually been to, but it just seems so… normal. He talks a bit about the Promise, about Shona’s heroism, the hope she brought to the world, how grateful we all were to have had her, but there’s so little about what it even is to be a Keeper. Not the horror, not the terrible beauty, nothing at all of what it meant for us or her. Nothing someone who’s really experienced magic could take the smallest bit of comfort in.

It barely even feels real. None of this does. That’s what they always say when someone dies before they’re “supposed to,” but I never understood it until now.

It doesn’t, does it? Because it isn’t.

Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it pathetic? How everyone’s talking about her like she’s gone?

I ignore her. I ignore everyone and everything in the room, withdrawing into my own bizarre, useless thoughts. They still feel like a more comfortable place to be than here.

Until another voice shakes me out of myself.

“Sacrifice?” someone spits. A woman with coiffed red hair and a tear-streaked face has stood up, gripping the pew in front of her with white knuckles.

The head priest blinks rapidly, but quickly composes himself and gestures for her to join him at the altar. “Mrs. Tiernan, this service is as much for you as anyone. Please, feel free to–”

“I DON’T NEED YOUR PERMISSION!”

“Onora, please…” The man beside her reaches out to take her hand. She immediately smacks his away.

“The ultimate sacrifice? That’s what you call it when you force children to die for everyone else? Do you think it’ll become something different if you bury it beneath enough of this Old Clarish military-honors garbage?!” she screams. Still sobbing, choking on the last word through her tears.

Tetha sputters out an incoherent sound. A second later, a great, awful tearing rings through the chamber. Behind us, Mary Hyland has brandished a box cutter and carved open a thin, dark hole in space. I turn just in time to see her rush through it.

“Mary, hold on, we’re–” Erika starts to say, but she’s already gone. “Hey, fuck you too. We can make our own choices,” she calls, then turns and slips into the portal moments before it closes.

In their passing, the rest of the room is eerily still. I can’t read the faces in front of me, all trained on Shona’s mom, but Tetha is visibly quivering, and Nilamai’s wings have curled around her in an almost protective gesture. Roland’s silky hair covers part of his face from this angle, looks like he’s keeping it as perfectly together as ever, hands clenched in his lap. Irida’s no different, silently drumming her fingers on her wheelchair’s armrest.

Finally, Mide barks out a dry, miserable laugh.

“What? Mide, what? Is there something you’d like to say?” Mrs. Tiernan asks, her voice so tight I feel like I can hear it snapping in two.

“I guess you’d rather blame anyone else than think about why Shona thought she had to do this, huh?” Mide stands and pushes past her parents, stopping just short of shoving herself into Mrs. Tiernan’s face. “This complete raving bitch is the reason she’s dead!”

Mrs. Tiernan flinches back as if struck. Mide presses in on her, shoving Shona’s dad aside when he tries to come between them.

“Yeah. I bet you weren’t even thinking of that, were you? How the last time she saw you, you were so fucking awful to her that she went looking for a fight to blow off steam instead of cooking you alive. Like she should’ve done.”

“You,” Mrs. Tiernan seethes. “You… you said, you promised… when you dragged Shona into this, you promised. You said whatever happened, you’d keep her safe.”

Aisling clenches her teeth. She clenches her teeth so hard it feels like I can hear it.

The spectre at my side looks like she’s holding back hysterical laughter.

Just tell them already, she hisses. Tell them they’re mourning someone who’s still alive! 

“Shut up already,” I snarl under my breath.

Still suffering!

Aisling puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, this isn’t…” she mutters, trailing off into a whisper. “Are you okay? You don’t feel okay.”

Tell them you could save her if they stopped crying and fighting and gave you everything they have! 

“Shut up!” 

“Liadain. Hey. Listen to me. I really don’t think you should be here,” Aisling insists. “This is not your fault, not your problem to solve, we’ll figure it out later, just… come on.”

How could it not be? I’m the only one who knows what these people are talking about. How pointless everything they’re saying is. How could I just leave and let them tear each other apart over nothing? 

“See? Just like I said! And I wouldn’t have had to protect her if you hadn’t made her so miserable that she’d rather fight monsters forever than live with you! I shouldn’t have had to!” Mide howls, her voice breaking.

“No! You shouldn’t have! Because you are a CHILD!” Mrs. Tiernan shrieks back. She flings an arm out, sweeping it over the gathered Keepers and pointing an accusing finger at the priest. “And what about YOU? What do you have to say for yourself? You STEAL CHILDREN! She was just a girl, still just my baby, and you sent her off to fight to the death in this war that never ends! Why her? Why any of them? Why? WHY?”

Suddenly, the room feels even colder. I shiver, but it does nothing to shake off the sensation of ice crystals forming in my veins.

From the crowd of Keepers, Iona Fianata stands.

Mrs. Tiernan looks past Mide, turning to meet Iona’s ice-sculpture gaze. Her mouth hangs open in wordless terror as Iona approaches her. Other than her soft, even footsteps, the chamber is silent. Even my shadow can only stare up at her, dumbstruck.

How many Keepers has Iona watched die? How many friends, how many memories, how many dreams, how many lives is this woman dismissing as a bunch of stupid kids tricked into serving as child soldiers?

Iona comes to a stop right across from Mrs. Tiernan, held apart only by the distance of the coral pew between them, regarding her with softly burning eyes.

“You’re right,” she says quietly. “Beyond a doubt. Of course you are.”

…She is?

“W-what?” Mrs. Tiernan asks, stumbling over the word.

“A ‘fallen hero.’ A sacrifice. A casualty. Those all mean the same thing, don’t they? Someone we loved, taken from us in a way no one should be. Someone we could have saved if we’d only worked harder or taught them better. Someone all of us failed.” 

Iona brushes a few half-frozen tears from her cheek, scattering a dusting of fresh snow into the air.

“I can’t turn back time. I can’t do more for your daughter than I did. I can’t do anything to ease your pain or redress your loss. All I can say is that you’re right – there is no justice or honor or glory in it. Only a call for us all to do better, which I should have heeded sooner. And for what little it is worth, I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Tiernan stares back at Iona in silence, quivering and squeezing her arms.

And breaks down weeping. She almost falls forward, thumping her fist on Iona’s shoulder with no impact, and cries and cries and cries while the mother of our city embraces her. Her husband stands beside her, rubbing her back. Even Mide has given her her space, retreating to cry quietly with her family.

“I am so sorry,” Iona repeats. “I know. Please trust me when I say that I know. No matter how much time we have, it’s never enough. Never enough to say everything we want to say, do everything we want to do… but it should be. I hope beyond hope that one day, it will be.”

She already knows. She must. Even if Iona doesn’t have access to all the scary magical secrets, which I doubt, she can’t have lived almost a century as a Keeper and never seen the signs. I’m not that special.

So what is she doing about it? Could she help figure all this out? Or, more likely, is there anything I could do to help her? 

~~~

Things do calm down after that. Mr. Tiernan wrote and read the family’s eulogy for Shona, which is probably for the best. Aisling, Irida, and Roland all have kind words for her – Mide doesn’t seem up to speaking in public, which I can’t at all blame her for. When the service ends, the head priest leads the small crowd out to the rocky seaside behind the Chancel. 

The sea’s a beautiful graveyard, if that’s what it really is. If there are any graveyards, anywhere.

The Sun hasn’t quite set, but it has dipped low in the sky, so here on the eastern shore, the shadows are long and the colors of sunset are just starting to creep over the horizon. Ahead, a long, narrow pier stretches out from the coast, with a white motorboat fastened to its far end. After a brief, quiet discussion between the priests, Shona’s family, and Mide’s, the priests lead Shona’s parents and Mide’s to the boat. The junior priestess unties it from the dock, then takes the helm and sets off, slowly, into the Sun-dyed horizon. They don’t travel too far out, though – only enough to make for a safe distance from the shore. Once the boat comes to the stop, the head priest stands on its back platform, facing us, and recites, loud enough for us to hear clearly:

“Silent watcher beneath the waves, Vessel of all earthly pains, we entreat you to carry your sister safely home. Guide her to her place of honored repose in her…”

There’s an odd pause, but when I look around, it doesn’t seem like most people think much of it. I only catch a few reactions – Iona is smiling to herself, like she’s caught some very dry joke, while Roland and Irida glance her way with neutral expressions.

“In Claiasya’s gardens,” the priest finishes. He steps aside, beckoning Mide and Shona’s family to the back of the boat. They step forward, Shona’s mother in the center holding the urn, and slowly lower it into the sea together. It looks like an awkward job for three people, like her father and Mide are only moving to keep their hands on it.

But eventually, they let it go, leaving it to bob along the water’s surface. They step away, Shona’s father leading her mother along as she bursts back into tears, and the boat speeds to the pier, moving notably quicker than it did on the way out.

Almost immediately after the priestess finishes tying the boat to its dock, a low, doleful sound rings through the air… no, not through the air at all. It’s like the cry of a whale echoing inside my head. 

In unison, the priests bow deeply to the sea. Shona’s parents startle at the sound, huddling a little closer. Mide simply stands tall, fists balled at her side, and watches.

A shadow slithers beneath the water, taller and wider than a skyscraper. Its entire shape ripples at its edges like cloth in the wind.

The ocean ripples and rises and crashes into the rocks as something enormous surges up from its depths. But before it reaches the surface, it slows dramatically, leaving the sea almost as still as it was before it arrived.

And when it does finally breach, its movements are slow and gentle as a thing of its size could be. It looks at first like a great undersea flower, or something clothed in them – a column of pale white petals, each bearing patterns of blue bioluminescence that shine like star-clouds in the dark water. Then, all as one, they contract into themselves, becoming something more like tentacles and offering us a clearer view of the beautiful creature hiding behind them.

Nha, the Silent Vessel. The Messenger who never speaks, but shows himself to everyone. 

Beneath his countless fronds, he has the soft, round body of a sea slug, skin shiny and pearlescent and almost translucent, patterned just beneath the surface with its own lights and abstract shapes. Around his wide, dark whale’s eyes – orbs much bigger than me that still look tiny and beady on his face – is a thick cluster of fronds like the tentacles of a cuttlefish, which seem placed to hide his mouth shyly. Slowly, the petals on his back fan back out as if to feel the soft, cold breeze, or simply to show off the starlit displays dotted all across them. He glances over the shore, taking us in, his eyes lingering a bit longer on the group at the dock’s end.

Then, his gaze settles on Shona’s urn, displaced far to one side by the waves of his arrival. Carefully, gently as can be, he reaches for it with his front tendrils, takes it, and cradles it, building it a little nest in his many-limbed grip.

Holding it tightly, he turns away from us, dives back into the deep, and swims off toward the horizon. Any trace that he was ever here is gone within seconds, when the last waves hit the rocks.

Nha wanders the sea, peeking up from its depths to shock the occasional sailing crew, but he’s seen most often on days like these. When we offer a dead Keeper’s remains to the ocean, he appears without fail to receive them. Whatever it means to return to the sea, it’s much more literal for us. 

Except… it’s not, is it? Shona isn’t in that urn. Nothing we’d even think of as part of her is. They didn’t recover her body from getting eaten by a Harbinger.

So why? 

What about that little vessel is important enough for him to collect it and every other like it?

When it comes into view, the Chancel of the Silent Vessel reminds me of nothing so much as the Soul Sanctuary. Maybe that’s just because I haven’t been to very many churches. A lot of their more important buildings look like this. White walls, rounded edges, sea-colored glass windows. The surfaces here seem less compact than the Sanctuary’s pristine fortress walls, with tiny pores and smooth needle-tips that make it look like the entire structure was grown from a single enormous piece of coral. It’s much wider than it is tall, with at least the front half forming an almost perfect circle no higher than a normal house.

“Liadain? Hey. We’re here.” A man’s voice startles me out of my own head. Irial, the aide I asked to drive me here – I don’t know if they’ve technically updated the parts of my files that say I shouldn’t leave the hospice, but everyone working there knows by now that my files don’t mean anything.

“Hm? Oh. Thanks.” We’d been driving along the shore on the edge of the Weald’s thick canopy for some time, leaving me to stare out the backseat window and think in useless circles.

Irial climbs out, opens the back door, and offers me his arm. Reluctantly, I take it, wobble to my feet, and more or less steady myself on my cane. Standing up makes my head spin and my legs threaten to buckle and snap like twigs.

“Do you need me to wait for you?”

“No, that’s okay. I don’t know how long I’ll be.” And I’m not sure if I could slog through this knowing I can walk out the door and be home in twenty minutes the first time someone looks at me.

“Alright. Well, just call whenever you need a ride back, okay? I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Me too.”

Irial lingers a bit, watching to make sure I can move without dying. By the time I hear him drive off, I’m halfway down the straight, tree-lined approach. I’m alone here – even the parking lot off to the side isn’t as full as I expected. Which’ll make it harder to disappear into the crowd. For once, I actually wish there were more people. This is the last place and time I want anyone paying attention to me.

It’s not even just about what I’ve done and the people I don’t want to see, either. I’ve never understood funerals. I’ve spent my whole life next to death, lost a friend close enough that it’s at least a little bit my fault she’s dead, and I still can’t imagine how they’re supposed to help anyone. They aren’t for the dying – they’re dead, gone to wherever souls go. And for everyone else, it’s not as if a big event where you’re meant to make a show of your pain and judged if it’s not the right kind of pain will make the person you lost any less dead. 

Keeper funerals made the least sense of all to me. Keepers never just die, they’re killed – or much, much worse. How are you meant to celebrate their life or thank them for their “sacrifice,” as if they gave their life rescuing a bunch of kittens from a burning building or something instead of making a mistake that got them devoured body and soul, when you know all too well what actually happened to them? When the monster that did it could still be out there, waiting for a chance to do it again? If I got eaten, whether people thought I did any of it for them and held me up as some kind of hero would be the last thing on my mind.

Well. Not because it wouldn’t matter to me, although it wouldn’t, but because I’d have a much bigger problem. And almost no one does know what actually happens when you die, do they? They have no idea how much worse the truth could be, unless they’ve all just decided to be silent about it.

With that in mind, I guess there’s some chance that funerals are for the dead. Whatever it means to return to the sea, though, I really don’t think what happens to your soul depends on whether you had your broken shell’s ashes dumped into the ocean or how sad people were while they did it. It means something different for Keepers, yes, but knowing what I know now, I still can’t see how it would matter.

Still, here I am. What’s even the point? Why am I risking this?

Yes. Why? There’s nothing here you couldn’t take on your own. My voice. My gaunt, bitterly smiling face. My own spectre walks right beside me, leering at me through a shroud of white hair wet with black water. 

Well, fine, me. Maybe I don’t NEED their help. There’s so much more to take than I ever imagined, after all. At the true scale of things, I don’t even know if it makes a difference if any given person dies at the end of their lifespan or right now when I drain them dry. But they don’t want to die any more than I do, and I don’t want to be the kind of monster who’d drink everyone in reach up until there’s nothing left. 

Wait. That isn’t even right. I’m not here because I’m hungry… not only here for that. This isn’t about me. Shona needs help. I can help her. I just can’t chase after the thing that ate her alone, not in my current state, and this is where I’ll find everyone who’d want to help her if they knew she was still there.

The phantasm at my side says nothing else. She only smiles a little wider before she pops out of being like a soap bubble.

I push the ‘press to open’ button next to the Chancel’s glass doors and lurch into the vestibule. The chamber is lit by evenly sized and shaped coral formations on the walls like little torches, but with no bulbs – they’re just suffused with soft, blue-white bioluminescence. Both walls are lined with decorative niches filled with all sorts of art depicting the saints… I think.

I only really recognize Kuri and Nistla at a glance – one represented as a planter of tiny trees somehow grown together into the shape of a young woman, clad in regalia crafted from flowers and vines, the other an androgynous figure in a white greatcoat with a rain cape decorated in elaborate patterns not so far from the ones on the windows here. A half-sphere of paneled glass blooms from the hand above their head, scattering the light above into prismatic beams.

Ahead, the chamber splits into two wide, curving halls around a central set of opaque, sea-blue glass doors. An attendant in the simple blue mantle and long, wide white skirt of a junior priestess looks me over, squinting slightly, then nods to herself. “Welcome. Are you here for Screaming Hymn Shona’s return?”

Return? No, I’m here to bring her back to life. But I guess that’s just a formal term for today’s service. “Mhm.”

“You’ll find it that way,” she says with a gesture to my left. “Most of the guests we’re expecting have already arrived, but the ceremony proper won’t begin for some time yet.”

“Right. Thanks.” 

“Ah, and while it’s by no means required for Keepers to transform, it is customary.”

I look down at one of my usual dresses, which I’d figured would be close enough to funeral wear to count, and shrug. Calling my magic into the world briefly smothers the lights and casts the hall in strange twisting shadows, but the priestess only watches with her head slightly bowed, neither awed nor terrified. 

I don’t feel much better or worse for the change, but thinking on it now, I am glad to have my mask. My secrets are mostly out, and it won’t protect me from anything my immunity mist doesn’t, but it still feels a bit like armor against the danger of other people looking at me.

So, that finished, I follow the distant murmur of voices down the hall. That impression of the entire building as an above-ground coral reef is much stronger inside. Its walls are a thick lattice of blue-white ridges, grown together into a gently arched ceiling. Its window frames, decorative niches, and even the benches lining the hall all seem grown rather than crafted, though the benches stand out for still being wood-colored.

I read once that coral comes from millions of tiny little critters who live in a big clump. They make reefs by forming exoskeletons around themselves, and those hard, rocky shells linger after they die, so the next generation of critters can keep building and building their city atop their friends and families’ colorful corpses, then add their own to the pile. 

How different is our city? Our world? Do our ghosts just sink beneath the cities they’ve built and pile up forever, an invisible boneyard at the bottom of the world? No, of course not, they “bloom in their fullness and return to the sea.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Oh, how bad could it possibly be? They “do their best to minimize pain,” don’t they? 

There is that. Vyuji said so, and everyone says Messengers can’t lie. It’s probably true, or else she wouldn’t have said it in the least reassuring way possible. She wouldn’t have left me thinking of all the people dumped on the ocean floor making their own reefs, growing corals with little human faces, staring up through the water and thinking of the lives they no longer live, but are never really allowed to leave.

No longer live, maybe. But they never die.

Yes. And somehow, it’s hard even for me to imagine that as a good thing.

It’s a short walk to the source of the voices, a wide opening on the right. Judging from the sound and the souls on the other side of the wall, a confusing blur of nine or ten Keepers and about as many ordinary motes of human life, there’s… not as many people as I thought there’d be.

I don’t do well with crowds, but I also don’t do well with groups of strangers too small to disappear into. I can’t decide which is worse. I creep along the wall, peeking in through the doorway at an angle I can’t see much of anything from, and slowly work up the nerve to step around the corner. If Shona were here, she’d be the one to drag me inside. 

And the one to stand up for me, for some strange reason, if no one else wants me around.

I brush away my first tears of the day. That doesn’t have to be a miserable memory of how badly I treated her. I can fix this. That’s why I’m here. I steel myself and step inside.

The first thing that strikes me, almost literally, is that it’s cold in here. Impossibly so, well beyond the clinging chill of my barrier. It’s like someone bottled a Winter morning where the Sun keeps the breeze from stinging too bitterly and let it loose inside.

Sunlight floods in through a colored glass ceiling stained in wavy patterns of blue and grey and green, gently tinting the white pews the colors of a shallow sea. Azure curtains are drawn over the back walls, and on the altar in front of them, there’s an elaborate arrangement of red coral and black flowers into a jagged lightning pattern, fanning out around a blue urn and a framed photograph of Shona in her regalia, grinning and waving to the camera.

And most of the people scattered around the pews are already looking my way. Right. They can feel me, I can feel them. I’m an idiot. 

I glance around, quickly picking the faces I know out of the small crowd. Aisling sits alone near the entrance, one hand raised in greeting. Mide is between two adults and a younger boy, and none of them acknowledge me with more than a quick glance up – they’re all focused on her, and she looks and feels miserably exhausted. Neither she nor Aisling have transformed. In the same row of seats, another adult man sits with his arm around a sobbing woman.

The two Keepers to my left carry right on talking to each other. The girl in the plain black dress and dark leather jacket, only marked as a Keeper by her aura and pale pink hair in a loose side ponytail, does most of the talking. The tall girl in the grey suit and featureless metal mask – Mary Hyland, she was on that Keeper reef – mostly just leans against the wall looking imposing.

And the biggest group in the room, clustered around the middle…

The Stardust Seraph, in an almost priestly outfit rather like his regalia, but mostly white save a red trimming along the hem and entirely sans his armor and headgear, greets me with a soft, knowing smile and a two-fingered salute as soon as I spot him. Tetha Fianata blanches at the sight of me, visibly wincing, and seems to untense only slightly when Roland gives her a gentle clap on the shoulder. The Silver King, dressed in military finery and seated across from one pew in a wheelchair held by a spectral soldier, watches me through the corner of her eye. Tarnished Angel, the swan-winged, bandage-armed girl I met on the night I found Seryana, spares me only a glance up from her conversation with…

Frozen Sun Iona. At a glance, a young woman in a royal blue cloak, in her nineties but forever frozen at sixteen. Skin the blue-white shade of fresh snow under a clear sky. Eyes sculpted from ice, but bright with frozen flame. Our city’s founding hero and oldest, most important Keeper by decades, looking my way with narrowed eyes, flecks of the snow floating all around her settled on her lashes.

“You must be Eyna,” she says mildly.

My trembling fingers tighten around my cane. I’ve spent the last month eating her city. I put her daughter in a hospital. I can’t be here I don’t want to die I don’t even know what that means–

“Hey. I’m glad you made it,” Aisling says, looking at me as one would a bomb that might be armed.

“Um. Hi,” I mutter, flicking my eyes between them.

“I’ve heard a lot about you. Good things, more than you may expect.” She beckons to her pew, inviting me into her group. Asking me to sit right between her and the two Keepers I’ve fought. 

“What do you mean?” I whisper, frozen in place. I can barely hear my own voice. I wonder if the sound is traveling at all or just turning to frozen breath in the air.

A small smile spreads across Iona’s face. It looks curious, almost… warm. “Only that you strike me as someone who’s been running nonstop, never stopping to look at where she’s ended up. Or how far and fast she’s gone.”

“Oh. Thanks,” I croak. That’s a strange way to describe me, because all of a sudden, I can’t imagine taking another step into this room. It doesn’t feel physically possible. “Aisling, I have to talk to you about something. Outside. Could we…?”

Aisling glances over her shoulder, suppressing a grimace, then nods once. “We’ll be back,” she says.

“Of course. Take your time,” Iona calls after us.

Aisling follows me to the nearest bench out of line of sight from the room.

“Thanks. Sorry about that,” I say. It’s hard to sit down without just losing my balance and falling back, but I manage it this time. Aisling plops into place at my side, tapping her foot rhythmically on the ground.

“You’re seriously not in trouble, you know. You saw Roland, and Iona’s… I’d be surprised if she’s pleased about the Tetha thing, but I really don’t think she’s out for your blood. Honestly, sounds to me like she likes you? She wasn’t lying.” Aisling’s dressed in a simple black blouse and dress pants, but still wears her usual beret over her curly blonde hair. She only looks a little more tired than usual, but that’s not saying much. “Keepers get into trouble sometimes, Fianatas or not. She has more important things to do than avenge a fight Tetha lost weeks ago.”

“Okay, fine, but why is she even here? Shona didn’t know her, did she?” I ask.

“What? No. Maybe they crossed paths a couple times, but no. She comes to almost all of these.”

“Oh. Well. Sorry again. It’s just a lot.”

Aisling shakes her head. “It’s fine. Nothing’s really started yet. They’re just talking, telling stories, and I’ve already heard most of them. I didn’t know Shona the best, but better than a lot of them, I think.” 

“From your school?”

“From my club. She wasn’t a member, but she had a lot of questions about the Promise before she made it. Good for her, I said. Not enough of us have questions.”

“Really? What questions?” Shona seemed like she loved everything about being a Keeper. Even the nightmare monsters, when they didn’t get too personal. I’d have imagined her jumping at the offer and never once looking back. Shows how little I knew about her. Did I ask Vyuji enough for Aisling’s standards? I don’t know. I doubt it. 

“Some were personal. But mostly, she wanted to know why us. What makes someone a Keeper candidate.” Aisling leans back and cups her chin, staring at the ceiling for a long stretch of silence. “I’d have called this part her business, but you’ll see for yourself soon enough. Best if it doesn’t take you by surprise. She didn’t want to be a Keeper if Mide couldn’t be one with her.”

“Okay? That worked out for them eventually, didn’t it?”

Aisling glances back at the room, waiting and watching for a few beats. “When they were together, when you sensed them, how did Mide feel?”

“Not like much of anything. When we first met, I thought they were one person until I actually saw them. I guess she isn’t very strong, but what’s your point?”

“Exactly that,” Aisling says. “Mide lost her magic when Shona died.”

“…What?” How? A Keeper’s power is theirs. It’s them. Nothing but death should be able to take it away, and I’m not at all sure about that anymore. “The Harbinger? Did it do something to her?” I guess.

“No. To my knowledge, nothing like that’s ever happened. I don’t believe it’s possible.” Aisling sighs, slouching down to rest her chin in cupped hands. “I don’t think she ever was a Keeper.” 

That feels like it should be shocking, should be a wild, absurd idea… but it really isn’t. It’s just an answer to a set of questions I never cared enough to ask sliding suddenly into place.

Mide felt like nothing to me. She had no soul-sight of her own. They fed her every Harbinger they could and still she never seemed to become anything more than an armed and armored guardian. A weapon at Shona’s side. Did it even matter which of them claimed their hearts? 

If this magic is mine, if it’s me the way every other Keeper says, and all it’s given me is weapons and armor and extra skill with using them, I don’t think it’s such a big ask for them to appeal to me, you know?

“Then what? Her witch?” I ask.

Aisling shakes her head. “It’s very rare, but there have been Keepers whose magic works to empower other people. They call those people retainers. I don’t think that’s quite it here, though. They did make the Promise together. You’re on the right track, but it’s probably more like Mide was Shona’s implement. An extra one. An aspect of her magic, only much more distinct from her and her power than usual.”

“That doesn’t sound any better for her.”

“No,” Aisling agrees. “I’d suspected something like it for a while, but couldn’t say if either of them knew. I never saw a point in pressing them on it. Maybe I should have.”

“Maybe. But maybe take your own advice.” She’s the one who told me just a few days ago that there was no point in blaming myself for everything I didn’t happen to do. 

Aisling slumps a little further down. “Yeah, that’s fair. Every time I felt like getting nosy about it, I just ended up thinking, well, good for them, right? They got what they wanted. They were doing well together. It might not help them to have some know-it-all tell them their powers might be… I didn’t even know what. I couldn’t tell if it was an actual problem for them.”

“Mhm.” Maybe it would be nice if anyone could be a Keeper just because they wanted to, or it’d make things easier for someone they cared about. Or not – there could be some great reason why it doesn’t work that way. I don’t know. All it means to me is that the person closest to Shona probably can’t do anything to help her.

“I don’t know if it would’ve changed anything. I don’t think so. But that’s not really what we’re here for, anyhow,” I say. 

“True. I just thought you might prefer talking theory for a bit. I do, too.”

“Mm. But at some point, I should actually get in and go to the funeral. I guess. How’s everyone doing?” 

“Like you’d expect. Mide especially, and Shona’s parents… I don’t know. They aren’t really talking to anyone. Not that I can blame them.” Aisling straightens up in her seat, quickly fixes her hat, and looks me over. “How about you?”

“I haven’t gotten any worse. Um, if it’s not a personal thing, why’d you pick that outfit?”

“Oh, did the lady at the front want you in your magical best too? I just think it’s silly. Feels like they’re trying to frame Keepers as some elite fraternal order instead of a bunch of weird kids with a job that, for whatever reason, only weird kids can do. To borrow Shona’s language, I know she wouldn’t give half a shit what I wore here, and that’s all I care about.”

I can’t help but smile at that beneath my mask. “No. She wouldn’t. Is that what pink hair thinks, too?”

“Who, Erika? No idea what she thinks. Her outfit’s just… I mean, I don’t think they’d throw her out if she wore it, but it isn’t really funeral-appropriate.”

“Oh. Hm.” I wonder for a bit what that means, but it doesn’t really matter. I don’t care much about what Keepers are to the rest of the world. I’m sure I don’t qualify as whatever they want us to be, no matter what I wear.

“How about you?” Aisling asks. “You seem like you’re handling this better than I’d expected, if you’ll excuse me saying.”

Well, this was always my plan. If anyone will understand, if anyone will have ideas to make this work, she will.

“I am. Because I think we can bring her back.” 

Aisling’s face gives away nothing but a nervous twitch in one eye. For a long, long while, she stares at me, almost unblinking. “You’re serious. Please explain,” she says.

I nod. “I’m not sure if you’d already figured any of this out, so stop me if something needs more explaining. When we absorb Harbingers, we don’t digest them like food for our souls to grow. They’re still there, only part of us now instead of whatever they were before.”

“With you so far. Absorption or certainly ‘eating’ are shorthand terms for a complex process that may not even work the same for every Keeper.”

“Of course I don’t know if it works the same for everyone, but given how Emergence works, I don’t think any of them get digested. Mine are there enough that they can sort of talk to me.”

Aisling narrows her eyes at that. “Sort of? How do they communicate? What do they say?”

“Not quite in words… most of the time. I don’t think.” I wince as the pain in my head spikes. Jumbled spikes of memory from the night I did my reading stab through my thoughts, melting like splinters of ice before I can grab onto them. “Mostly they can just tell me how they’re feeling about things. It’s easiest to understand the one who likes me and hardest with the one I split in half with Mide. I haven’t figured out how to talk back yet – maybe if I could speak their language instead of just hear it.” 

Aisling lets out a low, resigned groan. “Is it important to where you’re going with this that there’s one that likes you?”

“I don’t think so?” 

“Leaving that alone for now, then. Go ahead.”

“Um, okay. So, I think… I’m pretty sure the same thing happens when Harbingers eat us. Probably for everyone else who dies, too, but I don’t know what that means for them or what ‘returning to the sea’ actually is. My point is that if we kill the Harbinger that killed Shona… she should still be there. I can steal life, other Keepers can heal, so, so as long as we have her soul, there should be–”

“Wait wait. Hold on. Stop,” Aisling hisses under her breath. “You’re making all kinds of leaps now that don’t follow from where you started.”

“They don’t?” I bite my lip, tracing my own steps backwards. I don’t quite remember how I ended up thinking about normal people that night, but… “Yes they do. We know what happens when magical beings eat each other. We know from your power that ‘they return to the sea’ is a true description of what happens to the dead, and nothing works the way it should for reincarnation to be a thing.”

“Keepers and Harbingers aren’t the same thing! Yes, there are obvious parallels in how magic functions, but we don’t know what does and doesn’t work the same way for us, and if we could pull these rescue operations where we pluck someone’s soul out basically intact any time we kill a Harbinger that’s killed Keepers, then…” Aisling trails off. Her eyes widen. The light in them leaves sunspots in my vision. “Your title’s different,” she says.

“That can happen? Different how?”

“Different like…” Aisling lets out a long exhale through her nose. “I’m not really sure. Just different. You’re still “Ill Wind,” but… you’re good with sensing magic, aren’t you? Does it feel different to you?”

Looking closely enough at Keepers’ souls to really read them is always a confusing, overwhelming thing, enough that I don’t make a habit of scrutinizing everyone I meet. My own is no different, and I’d only barely begun to make sense of what I see in it, so I steel myself before I turn my gaze inward. There is something new, beneath the abstract poetry of my soul’s awful name, but I can’t place it. It’s like trying to smell tea in a coffee shop or identify one of a dozen musty odors in an old attic. Maybe if I pushed harder, dug deeper, but that feels… dangerous. I have enough to worry about right now. And I’ve already made enough of a scene without plunging myself into another nightmare like my last tarot reading.

“I can’t really tell. It feels less like it’s different and more like there’s something new there. What’s it mean?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. But you’ve mentioned talking to Niavh, right? Have you sensed her?” 

Pain and guilt deep enough to drown whatever her presence used to express. I nod, shuddering at the memory of it.

“That’s the kind of thing that normally causes distortions severe enough to change how your soul looks and feels. It tends to mean extreme shifts in circumstance, in how you see yourself or your magic. Learning some horrible truth of the world wouldn’t typically qualify. I’m not accusing you, but aside from what we already know, is arriving at this idea the only thing that’s gone on for you recently?”

“As far as I know!”

“I suppose it is a particularly horrible one, if you’re right. And it’s not as if your title’s actually changed, so… we’ll figure it out. One world-breaking mystery at a time, though.” 

Aisling chews her lip thoughtfully. We sit in silence, staring across the hall at a mural of some legendary hero who appears to have been a giant fluffy moth with wings of white fire.

“And while we’re working on this… I know what you’ll think of what I’m about to say. I’ve been in your place before. But at least for now… I won’t say keep this strictly between us, but don’t go in there and shout it to everyone, okay?”

“What? Why not? They should know the girl they’re here to mourn isn’t dead!”

“WE don’t know that!” Aisling says. “Listen. I’m not saying you’re crazy. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I can tell that you believe this, and I don’t know anything that would disprove it, but that doesn’t rule out any number of candidate explanations in which you’re mistaken, or manipulated, or experiencing something through the lens of your power that does not extend to the fate of every human who’s ever died–”

“I asked Vyuji about this! She said she already knew and the Messengers ‘do their best to minimize pain for those in their care,’ but she wouldn’t tell me the whole story because something bad would happen if she did!”

“Okay, yes, that sounds bad, but I still think that before we go back to Shona’s funeral and announce something like hey, death isn’t and has never been real, we should make damn sure we’ve verified that idea!”

“Then verify it! You can do that, can’t you?”

“If I dropped everything to go research this, sure! I’d need to dig through everything public about or relating to this subject, make certain I’m not wasting a question on something that’s already been answered, then formulate a version of the question that will get us a reliable answer with the minimum possible risk of setting my mind on fire! I have a process! And a priority listing of other very important questions! I only step outside of it for urgent emergency uses. And yeah, if it’s true this sounds pretty urgent, but it’s not going to change based on whether we start work on the question of…” She pauses to look uneasily back at the room, lowering her voice when she speaks again: “Of how dying even works right this second!”

“You don’t know that,” I insist. “It could be worse for Shona the longer she’s in there.”

The sound of Aisling’s teeth grinding practically fills the hall. “It could. And if it turns out that she is in there in some form that can be retrieved, suffering in a way that could have been mitigated if we’d acted faster, I’ll accept responsibility for that then. But it’s not as if you’ve come to me with a concrete plan of action, is it? You have an idea that may be true and something we may, in principle, be able to accomplish if it is. Correct me if we can verify that you have some incredible new resurrection power. But more importantly, we don’t know where this Harbinger is, when we’ll next see it, how we could find it, or if whatever group we could put together right this instant would win in a fight against it without burning even more questions.” 

Aisling fidgets frantically in her seat as she speaks, contracting herself into something less like a ball and more like a pretzel atop the bench by the time she finishes. “And meanwhile, what I do know beyond a reasonable doubt is that things will get worse for my stupid friend Isobel the longer I take to drag her out of her current situation. And for the rest of her Harbinger’s active cult, which I’m still working to pin down.”

“Right. I know that. I’m sorry,” I mutter. I never forgot about Isobel, but between everything that happened after I last saw her, everything I’ve learned, it’s been hard to think much of her. “I still want to help her, too. If there’s any way I can.”

Somewhere deep in the recesses of my soul, in a place hidden from the callous gaze of the Sun, Aulunla seethes in silence. It can’t hurt me, but it can make me feel how very much it wants to.

“Thanks. I’d have understood if you were more focused on this other thing, after how our last disaster went,” Aisling says through a sad smile. “But again. One thing at a time. We should get back to the funeral or people will start asking us what’s taking so long, and that’d be an awkward thing for me to answer.”

“Um.” I wasn’t really thinking about this, either, but… “Could any of them have just listened with magic?”

“Nnnnnn…” Aisling grunts, trying to force out a word that just won’t come. She thumps a fist against the bench, scowling at nothing in particular. “I don’t think so. Not in any ways that wouldn’t be conspicuous to at least one of us. To my knowledge.”

“That was a lot of caveats.”

“Yeah, well, if anyone’s listening, please come offer us any pertinent information you have. If you don’t have any, welcome to the nightmare club! Sounds like you’re here forever!” She throws her arms out in a broad shrug, hops to her feet, and offers me a hand up. “Are you alright to head back?”

There’s still a lot of things whirling through my head. It’s hard to even think clearly of what I came here for. I’m certain I can’t grieve Shona when I’m fairly sure that neither she nor anyone else has ever died, but it’s not like I could if I didn’t believe that. I’m not so good at letting go of anything.

And if nothing else, there are already things in and about this world I’m more afraid of than Iona Fianata.

“Fine,” I say, and take her hand.

“And to get through this without breaking anyone else’s conception of death?”

“Fiiine.”

Why wait? They’ll all know soon enough, won’t they?

You can save her. 

I sink ever deeper in a sea of nothing-that-hurts. 

You can save everyone you care about.

Sleep is quiet, persistent agony.

All it would cost is everyone you don’t.

If I sleep at all, that is. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between dreams and the insistent whispers flooding my soul.

<that is all it is to live. to stumble through a nightmare, begging your own mind to release you into the waking world, only to realize that you were never asleep at all.>

Memories crash down like the weight of the ocean. Dreams of paralysis, of drowning in nothing at all, of being torn apart layer by layer and left exposed to the frozen wind between the stars. 

When the echoes in my head fade, I’m sitting in a black field of black flowers beneath a sunless sky, in which clouds composed entirely of tiny stars shimmer and shift. At my feet, the dark grass gives way to a thin shore of obsidian sand before a vast ink-black sea. Its surface is still, partially frozen over into thin, cracking sheets of ice that reflect the stars like window-glass. Far away, seeming to float on the water’s surface, there’s a single ring-shaped structure, its spiny, porous walls like white coral gleaming in the faint starlight.

And a living shadow rests by my side, peering at me with two star-speckled violet irises like ring nebulae.

Yulasri, she called herself, though not in the way Harbingers scream their truths into the world. Her soul is silenced, as hidden as the face behind her umbral veil – if she has a face at all. 

I wonder if that’s an act of mercy.

I’ve seen her before. Heard her before. Felt what she can do. I just… haven’t thought about her at all since then, and I have no idea why. All I know is that here, in my own head, I’m helpless as I’ve ever been.

The shadow shakes her head. Her tangled hair drifts in a messy fan behind her, floating as if it’s underwater. <rest easy. i have already seen inside your shell.>

I wince, doing my best to shove those memories away. No matter what she says, just trying to talk to her feels like asking the Sun why it rips our souls out through our eyes. But the world around us is silent, still, tranquil, and she only waits and watches.

Whatever she’s come back for, this won’t end until she’s done it.

“Then why are you here?”

<to commiserate.> 

Yulasri gestures with her eyes out at the black sea. I can’t tell what she’s pointing me to, at first. There’s only ice and darkness and that strange coral-carved building.

But in time, shapes and splotches of dull color come into view. Human shapes. Preserved corpses, far too many to count, half-frozen into the surface of the sea. 

I can’t retch. My stomach doesn’t churn. I feel like I should, but that’s something bodies do, and in this place, there’s only me. All I feel is a familiar heavy, creeping dread when I recognize Shona among them – her body is faceup near the shore, frozen in a rictus of agony, her Keeper outfit dark and waterlogged.

The weight grows and grows as my eyes pan over the dead, a spectacle too awful to look away from. Mide is among them, too. And Aisling, and Niavh, and Noirin, and Dad and Grainne and Mom and everyone I’ve ever known, and even once I’ve ran out of faces I could possibly recognize, I can’t help but imagine every single icy corpse as someone precious to me and gone forever.

<i have lost more dear ones than you have met. the pain never dulls. not ever. certainly not for those of us who know what becomes of them.>

Cold certainty stabs into me, confirming what I already knew. 

No, the dead-but-suffering souls trapped inside me have nothing to do with me or my power. For beings like them – and like Shona, I can only imagine, and certainly like me, judging by the way my own power keeps screaming at me that my body and my life are mere inconveniences – death is just something worse than even I could’ve imagined.

“It’s not just me, is it? It’s part of magic. Some aspect of having power and needing to eat souls to grow.”

Yulasri’s eyes flicker, seeming to blink rapidly, but only for a fraction of a second before they stabilize. <you stare in horror at reflections on the surface of the sea, blind to the depths of the abyss. if you dove in, it would swallow you whole.>

I stare back at her, uncomprehending and hating myself for it. It’s one thing to be told you’re a stupid child who doesn’t understand anything, and another entirely when you know the person saying it is right. This whole idea is a nightmare I stumbled into by accident right before bed. I have no idea how it really works or why it’s this way.

<your language is ill-suited to conceptualize such things.> Yulasri handles the word language the way she might a slimy piece of trash, holding it at a distance between two fingers. <let alone convey them. you are grasping at ideas you lack the words to even think. but still you grasp. there is dignity in that, i suppose.>

“Then say it in yours! You know I understand it, so If you’re here to talk about this, say it so I can understand!”

She picks a single onyx flower, stares at it for a moment, then releases it to drift into the sea on an unfelt breeze. <it is not my wish to smash you into a thousand eggshell splinters.>

“What does that even-” 

I freeze. The answer to my own question bubbles up from my mind. 

Drown yourself in my light and I will show you everything, the Sun spoke to me just last week.

Maybe there are things no one should know. Things we can’t understand and stay ourselves.

“Nevermind. I think I get it. Um, say what you can without… doing that thing. Please.”

A thin, joyless outline of a smile crawls across Yulasri’s shadowed face, a faintly-curved crescent of amethyst light. <you do see into the shallows, then. i will tell you this: your fear, if it is a thing you fear, is correct. i have no need to show you what you can already sense. this sepulchre is only a sketch of the truth, and a rather idyllic one. but your view of it all is woefully incomplete.> Her bitter expression dissolves back into darkness, leaving only her wide, unblinking eyes. <how lucky the dead would be, if only there were any of them! there is no world beyond for the dead. no silent respite of oblivion. only transformation, twisting and tearing and torment without end. always. forever. for everyone and everything.>

“What?” I choke out, the word dry as sand in my mouth.

That strange smile blinks into being for another instant, but there’s a jaggedness to it, like a child’s imperfectly drawn outline of the original shape. <you described it well enough, given your limitations. only one false impression led you astray. you think through the scope of your own experiences, and the true scale of all this escapes you.>

“That can’t be,” I croak.

Yulasri’s starlit eyes narrow, giving the impression of a mouthless scowl. <if you understood the language of the stars, you would know what an absurd thing it is to accuse me of being a liar. listen to my echoes, really listen, and you will know that all i have said is true.>

I know that. The way Harbingers speak isn’t just speech. It’s opening their soul up and exposing a part of themselves to me. Hearing it is enough to be certain that whatever they say is the absolute truth as they see it – they couldn’t spew lies any more than I could tear my ribcage open and pluck an apple from the tree I have growing where my heart should be. But they’re Harbingers. That doesn’t mean what they believe is real. They’ve told me things that couldn’t be real, no matter how abstractly I think about them.

…Haven’t they? The more I rack my mind, the less certain I am.

So if what she’s saying is true, or some kind of true, what would that mean? Is everyone a Harbinger eats still inside them? What about everyone who was inside a Harbinger I ate? Could I reach Mr. Enfield through Yurfaln, or pluck him out of it and bring him back to life the way I’m hoping to do with Shona? 

I try to reach out for my victims, to feel them and search for any traces of their victims, but I don’t know how to target or talk to or interact with them, and their voices are quiet here. Like they’re hiding in the corners of my soul to escape Yulasri’s notice. I don’t know how to check for little tortured people layered deep in the nesting doll of my soul, but… I do know souls can be absorbed and still exist. It could happen to normal people’s souls, too. It’s not nearly as ridiculous a thought as I desperately need it to be.

“And, and everyone who lives an ordinary life and dies an ordinary death? What happens to them? Where do they go?”

<there are no such souls,> Yulasri says, coldly and with absolute confidence. <the nature of this world is repulsively abnormal artifice to begin with.>

I can’t get lost in imagining what that might mean. Not now. 

I dig my fingers into the grass, clutching stray blades tightly enough to rip them out. “Then what are we even supposed to say about any of this? Everything is terrible and it always will be? Is that all?” 

<it is. so few of you notice what is right in front of you. but no, that is not all.> Yulasri glances back out at the sea. She watches as a sheet of ice silently cracks, sending the bodies splayed across and through it bobbing off into the distance.

<i can end their pain. if it is your wish for them, i will grant your captives the peace the world denies them.>

I’ve barely processed her words when the voices emerge from their hiding places, speaking all at once in a chaotic storm of sentiment. Fear and shock slowly resolve into three distinct impressions: Seryana’s dull apathy, Aulunla’s sharp, spiteful insistence that I have no right to wish anything for it, and from Yurfaln, still the loudest and clearest of the crowd…

<no no no please NO you CAN’T she CAN’T> 

“How?” I ask in a barely-voiced whisper. “Why?”

Yulasri bows her head and puts a hand to her chest. <loss. grief. keenly-felt absences. these things shape me, as the struggle to live in unlivable conditions shapes you. i have searched and searched for an exit to this labyrinth, as you do for a way to persist inside it forever, and when i could not find one, i tore it open myself. a cold and gentle absence at the bottom of everything, for those who can bear this no longer.> She makes a single sweeping gesture over the colorless field and the star-clouded sky and the corpse-ridden ocean. <it is a small effort. hardly a solution. but it is the nearest thing in the cosmos to a true escape, for now.> There’s a sense of quiet triumph in her voice, as if she’d accomplished something too beautiful to truly express.

What she’s describing is nothing more than the fate I always believed was waiting for me and everyone else. If I take her at her word, she’s claiming to have invented death.

Her eyes flit between the frozen corpses on the water. I wonder what she sees there, somehow certain that we aren’t looking at the same thing. Where I see the faces of everyone I’ve ever known, she must be staring out at her own tortured wasteland of lost friends.

How choked with corpses is her ocean? How much pain has she carried, for how long, to bring her to the point of celebrating my greatest fear?

<I won’t go never not ever this is WHERE I BELONG,> Yurfaln babbles desperately. I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t know what I’d say if I did.

“And what would that mean for… us?”

<those you carry with you would vanish from all but memory. i cannot erase them entirely – something nobody ever knew was there cannot be lost. as for you? you would be less than you are now, i suspect. but more yourself.>

“Less how? I need to be less myself to live.”

<that depends on you. on precisely how much they have changed you.>

“Right,” I mutter. Not a good sign.

I don’t want to carry these monsters around forever. It’s not even just for my own comfort. I don’t want Yurfaln or Irakkia or Seryana free to follow their whims, but I don’t want their conscious remains to be ripped apart and tortured forever. Nothing deserves that. It’s horrible beyond comprehension that this is the way things work.

Still… despite everything they are, everything they did, the idea that they could’ve lived for nothing, died for nothing, and been thrown into the void for nothing feels too sad. I know Aulunla deserves better. I’d give it better, if there was any way I could. It didn’t do anything I wouldn’t do, if I had to kill to save my life.

“No,” I finally say. “Thank you, I think. But I don’t think I can do that to them. Not while there might be… I don’t know. Something else for them. Somewhere.” 

My Harbingers pull back into the edges of my awareness, save for Yurfaln. I feel its gratitude like a warm meal in my stomach, if that meal was still alive and squirming happily. Please stop that, I think at it, to no avail. Maybe I’m lying to myself. Maybe I wouldn’t give this a moment’s thought if I didn’t need their stolen power to keep myself alive.

<i expected as much,> Yulasri says with only a small tinge of disappointment. <search as long as you must, then. perhaps another time.>

Another time? I can only think of one other nightmare like this, but… how often has this happened? How many more times will she rip my world apart, then vanish from even my thoughts?

I know what she could do to me at any second. Carrying on a conversation with her, doing anything more than answering when she speaks and hoping for her to leave, feels like plunging my hand into a frozen fire, just on the distant hope that my ruined fingers will curl around some precious secret. 

But what’s a little more pain?

“Um. If you really just wanted to talk… why? Why me? Who are you?” I ask.

Yulasri only shrugs noncommittally, a bizarrely childish, human gesture coming from… whatever she is. She doesn’t feel the way Harbingers do. She doesn’t feel like anything.

<why not? this world makes all of our dreams into delusions. all desperate, hopeless dreamers are my kin. but here, so few of you listen. so few third-angels so much as try to understand. you listen, so i speak.>

“…Okay.” That follows. I can’t imagine I’m special enough to be the only… third-angel? The only person with dreams worth invading. “I’m really trying. To figure all of this out. But I can’t understand what you’re trying to say if it all just disappears when I wake up. So if that’s something you do, some power you control… please don’t.”

That thin, hollow smile flashes back into being, but only for an instant. <i am only a phantasm. a thing more felt than heard and recalled. this is only a dream, but what a dream means lingers well after dawn chases it away. nothing you need will escape you.>

“Is it a dream? I mean, yes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. You aren’t some tarot character I’m talking to myself through,” I push.

Yulasri answers with a curious tilt of her head.

“Right. Sorry, it’s just… I wasn’t really thinking about this last time.” I suppress a fresh shudder. “But I think I’ve seen you somewhere else. Or someone saw something like you and wrote it into our stories.” I summon a deck of my cards, close at hand in my sleep just the way it always is, pluck out the Undreaming, and pass it to her. She takes it in two spectral fingers and stares down at it.

<what is this?> she asks. The eerie, ethereal distance in her voice has vanished, sharpened to an icicle point.

“Um,” I gulp.

<what is this?> she hisses again. The light of a hundred stars dying at once flares in her eyes, then is swiftly smothered.

This was wrong. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Maybe all of us have things we shouldn’t know.

But I’m certain she won’t just let this go, and there’s no point in lying to something that could turn me inside-out on a whim.

“She’s from a myth. I think it’s a myth. Claiasya’s daughter. All the pain in the world broke her, and her nightmares about it started becoming monsters, or turning people into them,” I mumble.

Silence as deep and heavy as sinking into the darkest ocean trench.

Until Yulasri… laughs. She squeezes her arms around herself, leaving the card to flutter to the ground as her silhouette tightens and she bursts into a manic giggling fit. Her whispering voice resounds endlessly, echoes layering upon echoes until the world is enveloped in the soft white noise of a thousand black butterfly wingbeats.

“It’s… it’s just a weird old story you reminded me of! I don’t think it’s true, so-”

She ignores me, choking on her own breathless voice until it sounds like she must be in pain. The whole world bends, swirling into a chaotic mess around her. Howling wind rushes from everywhere to nowhere, its scream merging with Yulasri’s agonized laughter. Her body twists itself up, spiraling into an endlessly dark hole in everything, and the night around her spins and swirls until reality is nothing but a storm circling a drain–

~~~

I wake up soaked in frigid sweat. Too-familiar empty pain wracks my body, and even tucked beneath my covers, it’s so desperately cold. I feel like a living corpse, without so much as body heat to push back against the cold numbness. I probably am. 

It feels like I might as well not have slept at all, too. I guess it would be strange if I weren’t having nightmares after last night. Already, I’m not sure what they’re about – and there is some small mercy in that, probably – but I can imagine easily enough. 

Wriggling and squirming and failing even to properly stretch, I shove Pearl away from her place clutched to my chest. It’s probably not comfy there anymore. Ugh. Maybe I’ll give her a bath later.

I linger in my bed there for a while longer, trying to gather up the energy to do anything else, until a small, cold hand on my shoulder interrupts my fitful not-rest.

“Liadain,” Vyuji says. When I roll over, she’s seated on my nightstand, looking down at me with a softer expression than I’ve ever seen on her.

“Blrgh. Morning,” I say. “Did you know?”

“About what? I check in on my children sometimes, but I can’t read your thoughts. I have heard about your… friend?” she says uncertainly. I nod. “Yes. I know how little this is worth, but I am sorry. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but most of us consider every lost Keeper at least something of a failure on our parts.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Maybe she doesn’t watch quite that closely, then. I always wonder how much attention she’s paying to me, in the stretches between when I usually call for her. “That isn’t what I was asking, though. I guess I’m not sure why I thought you’d know what I meant.”

Vyuji’s face relaxes into its usual placid, too-calm look. “In that case, what was?”

“Last night… ngh!” Some half-remembered nightmare stabs into me like a cold knife in my brain. Vyuji’s dark eyes widen, settling as I shake off the momentary pain. “Last night, I did a tarot reading with my power for the first time. It showed me a lot of things I really didn’t like about myself. And the world. Like that the Harbingers we eat are still there. Still aware, in some form. Still in pain, maybe… probably. I think it’s the same for Shona. And… I’m not sure what it would be like if you don’t get eaten, but maybe it’s the same for everyone who dies, too.”

Nothing shows on Vyuji’s face, but I read into her unnatural stillness all the same. I can’t tell if she’s surprised or simply taking as long as I’ll give her to decide what to say. 

“Yes. I’m afraid I did know that,” she says slowly. “The knowing makes every loss hurt us that much more. As for your friend’s situation, it is possible that some great work of magic – Emergence, to wit – could resurrect Shona, if she were retrieved from her killer. I must urge… maybe not restraint, but certainly caution, if you plan to pursue that Harbinger.”

“I might. I think I might even be able to do it myself. Um, bring her back if I reach her, not run off and fight the Harbinger alone.” That gets an odd reaction from her, a proud smile beneath eyes narrowed uncertainly. “But not right away. I can’t do anything like I am now. Anyway, it’s not just about her. I don’t want the Harbingers suffering forever, either. I don’t want that for anyone.”

“Ah.” Vyuji nods once. “I understand. I don’t feel or fear for them the way I do for you, but there is no justice in that fate.”

“I don’t want to shrug and say ‘well, that’s awful, but it is how it is’ either! Why is it like this? How do I make it stop?”

Vyuji’s gaze shifts, rising to stare out at the sky through my window. “I genuinely don’t know. It takes a very particular type of perception to notice it, much less interact with the dead, but it’s been this way for at least as long as I can remember. Which, I will tell you, is a very long time.” 

There’s a hardness in her eyes when she meets mine again. For a moment, they look less like dark, shiny dolphin’s eyes and more like a thin sheen of water passing over black stone.

“So, what do you propose? You know what Harbingers would make of the world, left to do as they please. How many of them do you think present dilemmas more complex than whether you or they can survive? My duty is to my children, and I don’t consider it useful to paralyze you with the fear that you might encounter one of those few. Even if you did, your survival is more important to me.”

“Fine, just… I should’ve known. If it weren’t for those weird senses, I could’ve just pushed on and on and never had any idea that there was a problem I’d want to do something about at all.”

“Would knowing from your first day have changed your mind?” she asks.

“I don’t know!” I cry, blinking away cold tears. 

Yes you do, my own voice whispers.

Fair enough. I won’t get anywhere by lying about myself.

“Probably not,” I admit. “I still don’t want to die. But it’s not just the Harbingers, either. What about everyone else? What happens to all the people right here who’ll be dead soon? What’s it mean to ‘return to the sea?’ Do you know that?”

There’s another telling, expressionless pause before Vyuji sighs, her shoulders sagging.

“Liadain, I will never lie to you, nor to any of my children. I cannot and would not if I could. If I withhold anything from you, it’s because I don’t yet believe sharing it is in your best interests. So all I can do is ask that you believe me now: there are things we cannot share freely with the world. We’ve tried. We’ve seen what happens when we do. What do you think would change if every human knew what we were discussing now? Knew that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it? I’m sure you can imagine, and I hope you keep whatever you’ve imagined in mind when I ask you not to spread this information too freely.”

“Truth is the furthest thing from an unquestionable good,” she says, and lapses back into stone-faced silence.

I’m sure she’s right. I really don’t think the answer is that anyone who knew about this would become a Keeper to escape it.

“If I agree, will you answer my question? Or is that not in my best interests?” I press.

“It’s not for me to say, at least not entirely. I had no part in my siblings’ answer to this problem. I can tell you that they do their best to minimize pain for those in their care. If it helps, think of it as a place like this hospice, for souls who can no longer be comforted in any other way.“

It really, really doesn’t. “Forever,” I say.

“Or until a better way presents itself. So, if you consider something about this sorry state of things intolerable, search for a way to change it.” Vyuji hops down from the nightstand and leans against my bed, bringing her face to my level. “This is not the conversation I was expecting to have, when I came here. I wish I could offer you more. I wish I could encourage you more fully. I can’t promise that such a thing is possible, or that any solutions you find would be at all desirable. But your power is your own, and it’s your right to do what you feel you must with it.”

“Then I will. I don’t know what I’ll do yet. But I will.”

“I’ll look forward to it. But please, do find a way to care for yourself first,” she says, and vanishes without fanfare.

~~~

So I sit – mostly alone in my room – and think, and do my best to shove away the pain, until the morning of Shona’s funeral comes. 

It was a quieter night than a few of my last ones. I don’t feel any worse than usual – if nothing else, it seems like my health has stabilized in a strange way, settled down on a baseline of the worst possible state I can be in. It doesn’t feel like it’s getting worse or preparing to kill me. 

I don’t much want to rely on that being true, but unless I’m going to take my own shadow’s advice and start eating my fill from the nearest untainted souls, I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t know what I’ll do today, either. I’m staring at the wall over my desk, trying to decide, when my phone chimes with another unexpected call. 

Aisling again. I pick it up.

“Hey,” she says, weariness clear as ever in her voice.

“Hi.”

“Will you be there today?”

“Will he?” I ask.

“Look, probably, yeah, but Roland seriously isn’t going to start any shit at a funeral. I already asked him and-”

“You what?” I sputter.

“It’s crazy, I know, but most Keepers do communicate about this sort of thing. He did say he wanted to talk, which I do not consider a preposterous ask in your circumstances, but that it could wait if today was not the day. He said it directly to me, and I’m sure you understand what that means.”

“I do, but… when he came after me, when I asked if we could talk to you about the whole thing, he said it didn’t matter if you believe me because there are ways to fool your power.”

Aisling snorts out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, well, Roland’s an asshole. I’m sure you know what it means that I can say that, too. What he meant was that there are linguistic tricks and mental complications that can muddy my results or keep something misleading from pinging as a technical lie, not that there’s some magic way to spoof my detection entirely. If there is, I don’t know about it. As for those, my club and I keep track of them and actively search for more, and he wasn’t using any loopholes we know of… I’m pretty sure. Yeah. I mean, he said it clear as speech can be, at least. Honestly, it sounds like he just wanted you to himself.”

“Maybe.” His reason why Niavh couldn’t be involved didn’t really hold up, either. “But, um, if I go, I’m seriously, seriously going to hold you to that ‘pretty sure.’”

“Fine. Do it. I’ll be there if anything blows up,” Aisling says. “Was that the only concern?”

It’s very much not. I still feel terrible and I can’t see myself being at all okay at a funeral, least of all one where I’m fairly sure the person it’s for is trapped in some fate worse than death. But I really do want to help her, and if there’s any way to do that without making any more of a disaster of my own life, I think I’ll find it with the handful of Keepers who’ve decided, for some reason, not to think the worst of me.

“The only one I might’ve stayed home over. I’ll see you soon.”

The world around Mide folded in on itself, like all the space between the infested parking garage basement and the road outside was simply squeezed into nothing for a split-second. During that second, the metal-masked Keeper took a single stride, forward and up, tugging Mide along with her by the arm. The girl released her as they touched down on the empty street outside the garage, and Mide stumbled forward, catching herself just short of toppling to the ground.

“Miss the evacuation or something?” the Keeper said. “Well, whatever, you’re safe now. Get outta here. Roads are clear, far as I could see.” Mide recognized her now, in the light, though they’d never actually met – Mary Hyland, Carves the Night. Fine. She’d take any help she could get.

“No! My partner’s in there! We need to help her!” Mide held her breathing steady, trying not to think about the way she last saw Shona. Trying and failing not to think of her as what’s left of Shona. 

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Mary snorted. “Only thing you’re gonna do chasing someone in there is make a bigger mess. There’s Keepers on the way. They’ll save her. You just get clear of this.”

“I’m a Keeper! My partner’s Screaming Hymn Shona! We aren’t some bystanders!”

“Oh. Huh.” Mary’s featureless steel mask scanned her up and down. “Where’s your stuff?” she asked.

“I don’t know! Something happened in there, that thing did something to us, and, and…” Mide reaches again for her magic and finds nothing. It’s as gone as if it had never been there. “Fine. You’re right. I… can’t do anything right now,” she admits. It hurts to say, but all her pain is doing is delaying the reinforcements. “Just go help her, okay? Don’t worry about me. And, and be careful. This one’s really bad! I was sure I took its heart while we were in there, but it didn’t matter… It was some kind of trap…!”

What does that mean for her? Mide did absorb that trapped heart, even if the thing didn’t end up taking her. Doesn’t matter. Not now.

“…Sure. If you aren’t gonna leave, just, uh, keep watch, I guess? Tell anyone else who comes in what you told me.” With that, Mary rolled her shoulders, brandished her box cutter, and sliced a thin hole in the air, opening a dark portal back into the basement. 

Smothering all of the panic crackling beneath her nerves, Mide opened Lighthouse and did the only thing she still could – add everything she’d seen in the Wound to the initial alert. There had to be something there the others could use.

She hadn’t even finished typing when Mary reappeared through a fresh tear in the world. 

“What’s going on? How bad is it? Are you waiting for the others? They’re, um…” Mide tabbed away from her half-finished battle report to check on the responders. Still en route. Irida was closest now.

“Uhhhhh,” Mary muttered, pointing a thumb over her shoulder at the portal behind her. “There’s nothing there.”

“What?” Mide snapped. “What do you mean? You just saw it! It was just leaving the Wound!” She slipped past Mary to peer into the tear. It opened into an overhead view of the garage basement, where there was… no shimmering roots in the hole. No moldy starfish crawling out of it. no sign that there’d ever been anything there but a giant gaping pit. Even the remains of the one Mary struck down were gone.

“Yup. I jumped in just to see what would happen and I just, uh, fell through that big fuck-off hole in the world until I jumped back out,” Mary said. “Didn’t feel like anything weird at all.”

“That can’t be,” Mide growled. “I mean, ugh, no, it is, but where’d it go, then? Can’t you follow it?”

“Uh.” Mary shrugged. “I can’t. Maybe someone else’ll sniff it out, but I’ve got nothing.”

“No.” Mide balled her fists, thumping one weakly against her hip. “It can’t do that. That’s not how it works. It can’t just leave. She can’t just… she can’t…” Her voice died out with a choking sob. The last bit of strength that hadn’t left her with Shona fled her body. Everything was spinning. It felt like she was going to puke. She slumped to the ground, sucking in deep, gasping breaths.

“Damn,” Mary said. 

There was a long, heavy pause. 

“That sucks, huh?”

Mide lifted her head to glare at the blank gunmetal face staring down at her, astonishment mingling with the raw, hollow pain she felt gaping in her chest, stealing all her air. Mary stiffened, holding her position a moment longer, then turned, sliced open a gash in the air, and disappeared through it.

Leaving her alone on the silent, empty street outside the monster’s abandoned nest. It feels like she’s the last person left in the ruins of a dead city.

~~~

Shona is dead. Aisling’s words hang in the air, pressing down and down like a stone on my chest. 

I don’t think it’s shock, exactly – it feels too blunt for that. It’s not like this is some sudden, unheard-of tragedy. Shona’s a Keeper. Keepers die sometimes. It’s awful, the same way it is when anyone dies, but everyone knows that’s a real risk. I don’t even think this death feels different because I’m part of the group that dies in battle all the time now. I was already as doomed as anyone could be. No, the difference now is that I knew Shona. And I dragged her into one of my nightmares right before it happened.

“How?” I ask, breaking the long silence. 

“Something stormed in on the edge of the city. Probably came from the forest, sounded like a Cluster B from reports I’ve read. It was some sort of fungus monster that parasitized people and Harbingers both. Shona and Mide were the first on the scene. They killed something else it had eaten and kept in its Wound, thought it was over, and…” Her voice cracks on the last word, cutting off her blunt, clinical overview of the events. “It wasn’t,” she finishes simply. “Only Mide escaped. By the time anyone else showed up, it was gone. No one’s found where it went yet. That’s most of what I know so far.” 

A fungus monster from the forest. Every breath makes the weight on my chest heavier. “Was there a big swarm of moldy worms and oozy starfish and things like that?”

“How’d you know? Have you seen it?” Aisling barks, the exhaustion almost gone from her voice. “If there’s another unreported sighting… fuck, we really need to get you on Lighthouse, you wouldn’t have to interact with anyone, just–”

“No! Nothing’s happening here! I went to the forest once and saw it, that’s all. Or at least this sounds like the thing I saw. I don’t know.” 

Aisling sighs, abruptly deflating again. “Right. Of course you did. A solo walk in the woods is very you.”

“It was a bad idea. I know. Just…” I try to swallow, but the muscles in my throat won’t work right. Just like the trembling hand struggling to hold my phone. Just like all the rest of me. “It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there. I don’t mean I would’ve killed it, but I don’t think she could feel when something was too much for her like I can. I could’ve pulled them out. She, she didn’t have to–”

“Don’t,” Aisling orders. “Seriously. There’s so much Keepers can do, but we don’t get more time in the day to actually do it than anyone else. You are not responsible for everything you didn’t accomplish or prevent because you weren’t there. Start thinking that way and you’ll destroy yourself.”

“Okay.” I don’t think she’s right, and not just because of some nitpick about how I could be in two places at once if I wanted. I wasn’t doing anything but being sick and worrying about myself when I knew Seryana’d hurt Shona too. But I don’t see the point in arguing with someone for thinking better of me than she should.

“What are we going to do, then? Are you tracking it like you did with Isobel?”

“Why would I? If the thing comes after us again – I expect it will, after how its first incursion went – and we can’t figure out how to handle it, I’ll burn questions then. But otherwise, Shona is already gone. Killing it won’t bring her back.”

“I guess it won’t,” is all I say. I can’t stop thinking about how it must feel to die in a Wound, dragged body and soul into the depths of a Harbinger’s mind, but why torture Aisling or myself with every horrible idea I have of how things might work?

Not that I have a choice, in my own case. The thoughts aren’t going anywhere.

“The funeral’s on Thursday,” Aisling says after another silent stretch. “If you’re feeling up to it, I think she’d have liked–”

“That feels like a bad idea,” I try to interrupt. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak over someone again, but Aisling does cut herself off.

“Don’t get in your own way again,” she says. “You aren’t in legal trouble, and Roland is obsessed with his image. He wouldn’t dream of starting anything at a Keeper’s funeral.”

“And after it’s over?”

Aisling lets out a groan. “Fine. It’s not that important. Just something to think about, okay? It helps having… other things to focus on.”

“I’ll see how I’m feeling. My health isn’t doing so well.” Another long pause. “Have you… been through this before?”

“I don’t know. Probably. But I don’t much want to talk about her.” Aisling’s voice is tight, but quieter than before.

“Sorry.” Fair enough. I wouldn’t either. “I’ll go, then. Thanks. Um, for letting me know.”

“Of course. Take care.” She’s barely finished the last word when I end the call.

Leaning heavily on my cane, I struggle to my feet and make my way to my bed. Pearl sits swaddled in a cluster of unmade blankets. I sit on the foot of the bed, pluck her from her nest, and squeeze her tight, staring aimlessly out at the night sky. 

I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a funeral. If I was at Mom’s, I was too small to remember it. I’ve never been that close to any of the people I knew were dying – no one I like on the seventh floor has died yet, at least – and I don’t think I’d have wanted to go even if I was. I didn’t need any more reminders of mortality. I still don’t. As near as I’ve always been to death, this is the first loss close enough to me to matter as anything more than an abstract reminder of the horrifying, implacable forces that eventually steal everyone from everyone else. 

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do at a time like this. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel, except I can’t help but feel like it should be so much worse. I should be weeping and screaming and paralyzed with grief. But there’s only a vague, aching hollowness in my chest, not quite like the numb pain of my blood wracking my body, and the pangs of guilt that come with every thought about how I might as well have killed Shona myself. It feels less like losing a friend in a sudden freak accident and more like learning that I let Aulunla drown some nameless woman.

Why? Yes, I could have kept her away from that thing if I’d been there, but I wasn’t. I was in no condition to hunt. Aisling’s right, there’s no sense in blaming myself for that. Maybe Seryana’s attack left Shona in a bad way and she did something reckless, but that’s Seryana’s fault, not mine. Maybe this had absolutely nothing to do with me. Maybe it’s just a horrible thing that would’ve happened whether or not Shona ever got tangled up in my messes.

What? It could be. I hardly know anything about the circumstances of whatever happened. So why does that feel like the most pathetic excuse I’ve ever heard?

This isn’t working. I don’t know if anything will. But eventually, after who knows how long of watching the stars twist and dance, the spiral of nonsense whirling through my head leads me back to the one thing I’ve always done to make sense of my thoughts. It’s been a bit since I’ve had the time and focus for a proper reading, and while I don’t know how focused I’ll be on anything right now, I can’t think of what else to do. I head back to the desk, set Pearl next to me, and start shuffling my personal tarot deck.

Until my shivering hands lose their grip on it and half the cards scatter to the floor. Of course I’m too sick to manage even this much. Stupid. Should’ve just kept to the pile shuffle, but even that would feel exhausting right now.. 

Although… I can still do a reading. I don’t need to move at all.

In a flash of emerald light, I summon my implement – my Keeper cards, now arranged into a deck stacked on the desk rather than an orbit floating around me. I haven’t tried to read with them since I made the Promise, for a few reasons. At first I couldn’t read them at all, either to process the swirling sigils they’re labeled with or make sense of the abstract scenes on their faces. But I do understand that glyphic language now, spoken or written, and I have a lot more practice in looking at manifestations of magic and puzzling out what they mean. 

The other reason, the more important one, is that… somehow, trying at all felt a little intimidating. Ominous, even. I know there are depths to what my power is and what it’s expressing that I don’t completely understand. I’ve known from the start that there must be more to it than gathering up my misery and hurling it at others. Cruel and capricious fate. Afflicted arcana. But nothing I’ve done or consumed has left me with a sense of what those mean or what I’m supposed to do with them. I don’t even think fate is real, and everything I know agrees with the idea that it’s impossible to predict the future with magic. 

If reading with magic cards did anything special, then, I imagined it would be an enhanced version of what I actually use tarot for: understanding myself and my own thoughts. And I don’t like myself very much. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what my cards had to say about just how awful I was. 

I’m still not. But right now, I don’t know what else to do, and maybe I owe it to Shona to try. 

So, cards, tonight’s question: what is wrong with me? What is going on that’s left me too broken to feel more than this dull ache for my dead friend? What, exactly, am I blaming myself for? Do your worst.

I will the deck to shuffle itself. It scatters across the desk, just like I would do it, then sorts itself back into a wide fan-shaped display. 

I wonder if it’s saying anything by presenting itself like this. It’s a technique I’ve seen before for encouraging people to pick cards from anywhere in the deck rather than just drawing the ones on the top, but not one I normally use. It shouldn’t make a difference if they’re shuffled properly, after all. But there is something to the feeling that you have a direct hand in what the deck shows you, and I suppose I do have more control over my fate, whatever that means in the real world, than most people ever will. I glance across the fan, then pick a card near the left end, float it out, and turn it over.

The design on the card is familiar, closer than I’ve ever seen to one I recognize from my actual decks. It’s an upside-down image of a decaying crow’s skeleton, but wreathed in enough inky black feathers to nearly reconstruct what it might have looked like while it lived, save for the bare skull. Death inverted. The card I’ve come to think of as my card since I made the Promise, the one whose meaning my power turns on its head.

Here, though, this doesn’t feel like it’s saying something about my magic or my bizarre relationship with this specific card. These cards could show me anything at all, but right now, it’s just like the one in my favorite deck. And this card in the past position, while I’m thinking about my messy relationship with a dead friend… it’s easy enough to imagine what it’s saying. 

It doesn’t matter that I could’ve saved Shona if I’d happened to join her on a hunt there was no reason for me to go on. That’s not what this is about. She might not be dead because of me, but honestly, it would be going easy on myself to think of my failure as something so simple. I never helped her, never even tried, because I treated her as just another annoying person trying to throw a dying girl a scrap of acknowledgement so she could feel nice about herself.

But that just wasn’t the life I was living anymore, and things were different with her. Or they would’ve been, if I’d let them. Shona was only ever nice to me, in her own weird way. She kept reaching out and trying to be my friend well past the point where it would’ve been reasonable for anyone to hate me. I’d only just reached a place where I didn’t feel strange about saying we were friends. I never told her that. I never stopped treating her like a nuisance I barely tolerated. And now she’s gone. 

My first tears of the night start falling. Only a few silent droplets, but… I guess I’m getting somewhere. 

That was only the past, though. Only our short, stupid history together. What’s wrong with me now, cards? Turning my attention back to the fanned deck, I focus on a card in the right corner, pull it out with my will, and drift it to the right of Death, setting it down before I turn it over.

This card is more difficult, to say the least. Its art is a jagged mess of three or four different scenes, alternately flowing into each other or simply overlapping, like one piece of paper housing several drawings, each laid over the last – sometimes in ways that make it look like the past artists came back and tried to fix their defaced work. 

I bring it closer to my eyes and squint at it, searching for any clear element to latch onto and work from there. There’s… a person falling through the sky, I think, but it’s hard to be sure because they’re censored into a fuzzy, pixelated mess. The foot of an ornate throne. A child’s sketch of a girl weeping while everything around her burns. The torn, filthy remains of a white ribbon.

My throat goes dry. I can’t tell what any of the full images would look like, or how they’re meant to connect in the places when they do, but the implications? The memories they force to the front of my mind? Those are all too clear. I try to read the sigils above the mess, themselves fused and knotted into an illegible mass, but I don’t need to read them clearly to feel them.

<DeathDEATHathDeath,> the glyphs say. Inverted, by the text’s placement.

“Huh?” I murmur.

There are no duplicates in tarot decks. So how?

A voice echoes through my memories. We constantly cheat at tarot, it says. It’s my voice, the voice of the other me I met when I made the Promise, only it sounds the way I sound now. The Seraph must have choked the sound out of her, too.

Fine. Then why? What do they have to do with Shona? What about them is important enough to stack the deck with this card?

And one of those intrusive thoughts I shoved away earlier comes screaming back.

Death inverted is an ending not being allowed to come to fruition. Something lingering. Trapped.

What is it like to be killed by a Harbinger? To have your soul sucked out of its shell and drowned in the depths of a living nightmare’s heart, just like we do to them? Is there some half-digested fragment of Shona lingering inside that thing from the forest, screaming her pain into its soul and never knowing if it even understands?

Magic and death are both complex things. Vyuji said that about witches with dead Harbingers. At the time, I didn’t understand what she could possibly mean. I didn’t see what could be so complicated about dying, the end of everything a person is. Maybe I was just looking away from the obvious.

Because I already know what it’s like for Harbingers when I absorb them. I have three sets of memories of being eaten by myself to pull from, clear as any of my own. And I don’t eat Harbingers for sustenance and burn them up as fuel for my growth, do I? They become part of me. They shape what I am and what I can do.

Wilt and… fill this world… wilt. Drink it all. Become true. Together.

Together.

Together.

I turn my gaze inward, to where my power roils in a storm of my pain. “You’re still in there, aren’t you?” I ask the empty room.

In a chorus of wordless voices I recognize all too well, more pulses of emotion and sensation than clear statements, my soul responds. Dizzying confusion. Longing for someone who never existed. Despair for a beautiful dream and hatred for the girl who crushed it in her fragile fingers.

And in the oldest song, the one soaring above them all, bolstered by my constant pain… joy. Gratitude. Pride.

I bury my face in my hands and try to scream. Only an eerie echo of a wail comes out.

A gentle breeze blows through my room, like the ghost of a hand across my cheek. <these stories all end the same way,> whispers another familiar voice, one I’m certain I’ve never heard before. <they never end. not ever.>

“Who’s there? Which of you…?” I croak.

Only silence answers. Fine, then I’m losing it. That’s nothing new at all.

Maybe I’m some freakish exception. Maybe my desperate rush toward immortality has shaped my own soul into an eternal hell for everyone I claim. 

No, I already know I’m not. My cards won’t let me lie to myself. Why else would Harbingers shape Emergence for everyone? Why should it be any different when they eat us? And how am I supposed to grieve for someone who’s still there? Still suffering?

It’s perfect for you, though. Isn’t it? My voice again. You will never die. Never ever.

“I want to be me forever,” I hiss back, trembling, brushing silent tears off my sleeve. “A chunked-up piece of my soul lingering in something else’s gut isn’t living.”

Why not? As long as you exist, in any form at all, there’s still a chance to change your fate. You’ve already chosen suffering over oblivion, and that was when you didn’t understand that there was only ever one choice. So don’t lie to me. I know you. I am you. 

A hand reaches over my shoulder. The pallid, emaciated arm of one of my echoes, black veins pulsing with blood-that-is-not-blood, points back to my cards, indicating the empty spot to the right of the first two.

Finish the reading. 

“…What’s the point? They’re all the same card, aren’t they?”

Yes, my voice giggles. But you’re always getting lost in the now. Staring helplessly at what is and forgetting where the choices you’ve made lead. Looking back when you should be forging ahead. 

The entire deck flips itself over, exposing seventy-six variants on the same scene. Shadowed, spectral outlines of me seated on dark thrones, attended by swarms of gaunt, unliving centipedes and the endless reach of my own withered limbs. Each bears the same small glyph:

<Death Inverted>

Half-formed dream-scenes fill my world. The faint wisps of life always pricking at my senses floating in the void, bits of power entirely detached from the people they belong to. Fields of them, cities of them, all just waiting for me to breathe in and claim them. My soul ripping my body open like a cocoon and crawling out, shrouded in damp feathers and dripping black blood like afterbirth. Hunting through many sets of eyes, many mes, each her own world-twisting curse pulled up from the black sea inside me and sent forth to take whatever we need. Death is only a distant nightmare, a threshold I will never cross. Death is a curse on us all, the end of every ill fate. 

And curses, too, belong to me.

All you have to do to get there is take what you need. If there’s not enough, take more. And if it’s not enough to make it there alone, take enough to share. Take the thing that ate her, pluck her from its rotten entrails, and pull the death from her until you can put her back together.

Just stop flinching away from everything you could be.

Demystifying the Tarot, Chapter 5: The Major Arcana

The Undreaming — XV

The most traditional version of this card depicts a twilight lake in a colorful ethereal landscape. A vast dark hole has opened in the water, around which the world twists and spins as if being pulled down through a drain. A single human figure swirls an arm at the water’s edge, and from the center of the darkness, the shadowed form of the Undreaming – a dark figure on a dark background, only her eyes of violet fire clearly visible – reaches out to take their hand. The Goddess’s wayward daughter, who loved the world too much to cope with all the sorrow in it, calls to those of us who stand at the brink of losing ourselves to despair.

In Tarot, we view the Undreaming not as an external force whose nightmares invade our hearts, but as a reflection of our own inner darkness. When this card appears in your readings, it carries an urgent warning which must be interpreted with courage and candor. You need to search your own inner world and consider what dark thoughts or self-destructive patterns may be pulling you down.

Harbingers are often said to be drawn into the world by our emotions and mental states. While we cannot control them, we can come to understand ourselves and overcome our pain for its own sake. Returning to the card’s image, we see that the Undreaming is entirely confined to the void, trapped within her own pain, and beyond her reach, the beauty in the world stands unchanged. The Sun will shine again tomorrow, even over the darkest places.

As always, despite its ominous connotations, It bears mentioning that no Tarot card is purely sinister. Positive aspects of the Undreaming may include becoming aware that you have a problem, the first step in seeking help, or a suggestion to take a deeper look at someone we consider to be wicked. They may simply be in pain, or perhaps the traits we most hate in others might cast a light on our own flaws, serving as a mirror to show us where we need to improve.

When inverted, we may imagine the scene flowing in the opposite direction, banishing the hungry blackness, but inversions are rarely so simple. Rather than pure inner peace, the Undreaming inverted may represent overcoming trauma or recognizing and escaping from abuse or self-sabotage. By the same token, it may indicate denial of a painful emotion, or perhaps a dark impulse or dangerous tendency you may be resisting or burying from conscious awareness.

While this is perhaps the card most feared by amateurs and querents, it almost never refers directly to Harbingers or their activity in any sense beyond lingering trauma caused by an attack. It is unethical and dangerous for a Tarot reader to predict Harbinger incidents.

Keywords: Upright: Nightmares, mental illness, regret, hopelessness and helplessness, lost causes, self-destruction

Inverted: (+)Confronting inner demons, near escapes from tragedy, positive thinking
(-)Denial, refusal to face a problem, intrusive thoughts, suppressed desires

~~~

The too-familiar sensation of my joints trying to eat themselves gnaws me awake just before sunrise. I wince and bury my face in Pearl’s side, hiding from the light. It hurts to move — it hurts anyway, moving just makes it hurt more. It’s like tiny bits of muscle and tissue inside me have frozen into shards, snapping under the pressure if I try to move at all.

Of course it’s today, too. Of course. I’ve gotten too used to being able to ignore a bad health day if I just throw enough stolen life at it. It’s only natural that everything would go wrong today, now that the well’s run dry and I have no idea how long it’ll take me to set up some less awful method of getting more.

If that’s still possible. If it was ever more than a stupid fantasy to imagine that random people would just hand me enough of themselves to keep me on my feet.

But no one burst through my window and killed me in my sleep. Yet. So I guess that’s something nice. I almost want to go back to sleep, to pause the start of the next terrible day for just a little longer, but I almost never can sleep on mornings like this and I certainly couldn’t after last night.

Instead, I force myself to sit up, wincing at every tiny adjustment, and transform — still mostly under the covers, which I’m sure would mortify everyone who thinks Keepers need weird poses and catchphrases. That’s kind of a nice thought, too. If I had magic back when I wrote that gratitude journal where I thanked my skin for keeping my organs in place and my organs for doing their best against my blood’s constant onslaught, that project might have lasted for more than a day.

So while I’m searching for any reasons not to dissolve into a puddle of pain and panic, let’s take stock of what I got from the longest, most exhausting day of my life. So far. I can’t exactly count ‘decent relationships with other Keepers’ after the last thing, but Seryana is absolutely dead. I’ve only touched the blessed curse she left me on instinct, in a moment of desperate inspiration. What can it actually do?

I fill a card with a roughly me-sized wisp of death-mist and float it across the room. I transfer my vision into it — both eyes this time, just to make sure I can — then will it to burst, quickly shaping its fumes into a new doppelganger. Peering out through a ragged curtain of ink-stained white hair that parts just enough for me to see, I peer into the dresser mirror at the twisted echo of myself, a little thinner, a little more see-through than the last. I raise one skeletal hand, clenching and unclenching its translucent skin. It hurts a little, the way pushing through the cold, numb pain of doing anything on a bad health day always does, but not enough to stop me from doing it.

With a bit of effort, I can make this “me” at least solid enough to walk around and touch surfaces rather than simply drift like foul air, but I can’t quite find the strength to crack the window open, and the pain of trying overlays itself with my real body’s sharp pangs in a confusing double-vision way.

Still, this could do a lot for me — I’ll need to check if I can throw doppelgangers into Wounds while my actual body hides at a safe distance, or if there’s some limit to how far they can wander from me before problems come up. Later, though. I really don’t want people to see horrifying plague-clones walking around my home in broad daylight and send someone to investigate.

Ugh. I really am an idiot. I could’ve solved so many problems before I knew they existed if I found some way to tell everyone “don’t mind the horrifying plague Keeper, she probably won’t hurt you too much” before I buggified the Stardust Seraph’s insides. Maybe it wouldn’t matter, maybe no one would accept my existence anyway, but it’s not like it could’ve made things much worse than they are now.

For now, I pull my awareness back into myself with a sickening lurch, let the double melt into mist and finally dissipate, and end my transformation, crawling back into bed with Pearl. I stay there until the light filtering through my curtains forces me to acknowledge that I’ve spent the last hour and some shivering in pain with my eyes wrenched shut, chasing sleep but never catching it. I should’ve just started a book or something, but then it’s not like I can focus on anything except how much everything hurts on mornings like this.

Finally, the Sun forces me out of my nest. As I squirm to keep it out of my eyes, I can’t help but imagine it speaking, asking me over and over if I’ve given any more thought to the idea of burning out my eyes and setting my soul on fire so that whatever’s left of me can know all that can be known. At least today, it shouldn’t be shining through every window at once. I stagger out of bed, summon my cane, and head out to find somewhere darker.

I can’t be bothered changing today, though. I’m joining the pajama cult. Sorry, Noirin.

~~~

As it turns out, no matter how hard I try to just keep things quiet, ride out the pain, and think on what options I have left, everything reminds me of yesterday. The floor’s patients and nurses are all gathered in tighter-than-usual groups, gripped by the same sort of quiet unease as after Yurfaln — only more so this time, it seems like. Of course people are going to be on edge about having two unrelated monster incidents within a few weeks. Even in a place like this, full of people you’d think of as pretty high-risk if there’s anything to those stupid videos about warding off Harbingers with good mental health, that’s weird and worrying.

But this time, now that everyone with working eyes has decided how I fit into those incidents, there doesn’t seem to be any uncertainty or unease around me.

Several strangers at once look up to wave at me as I limp to my usual table. Everyone who glances my way does it with a smile, with a knowing sort of admiration. The morning charge nurse stops by to tell me that Banva will be out for a little while longer, but she’s healing up well, and I suppress a flinch when she thanks me for getting her help so quickly. By the time I’ve settled in to search the Sea for some distraction, the pall of fear over the room seems to have mostly lifted.

I hate this. I don’t want it. I don’t deserve it. But I can’t tell them that, since if I’m somehow making things better by sitting here and brooding, the absolute least I can do is let these people imagine that I’m some reason to be relieved. For at least a little longer, I can let them dream. They don’t have much else.

So fine. I guess this is my life now. No point in pretending I can have normal, quiet days and secrets that aren’t obvious to anyone who looks at me. Pain aside, everything is on fire, and waiting around for the chance that my health will improve soonish can only hurt me more. I should be looking for some way to make things better. Just… how?

I don’t have the strength to go find more health, let alone to hunt. Even if I did, I don’t think I should. If the whole world turns on me and I’m left with no choice but to sustain myself the way I had been or die, I’d do it. I’m not a good enough person to die for anyone or anything, let alone the good of a lot of random people I’ll never meet. Still, I don’t want to run around hurting and terrifying those people, and even if I’m pretty sure that I have, I don’t know yet if I’ve burned all the bridges that might let me find some better way to do things.

So I glance around the room to see if anyone might hear me from here, then realize that they’d probably need to be sitting at the table or leaning right over my back to overhear me now. I shrug, scroll through my phone’s history, and call Aisling.

She answers almost immediately: “One moment, please. I’m in school.” Quick footsteps and the sound of a door slamming behind her break the silence on her end, then “Okay. There you are. How’s your Harbinger situation looking?”

“Oh. I did say I’d call you back, didn’t I? Sorry. I can wait if I’m interrupting something.”

“Nope, I get a couple of these calls pretty much every school day. Teachers know how it is. I’m just glad you’re alive. Now spill!”

“Um. Right.” That would have been a legitimate question, wouldn’t it? “Sorry again I left you wondering. It was just a really terrible night. But she’s dead. One of the cases you pointed me to was her, so thank you for that.”

“Glad I could help. I’d ask you to come report on her for our files, but you sound exhausted,” she notes, no doubt noticing the change Emergence has brought to my voice. “Some other time, maybe.”

“I think that’s just how I’m going to sound from now on.” Which feels appropriate.

“Oh.” Aisling is quiet for a moment. “Any other changes?”

“None worth mentioning. And I don’t quite understand it yet, but her power seems pretty good.”

“Then considering the circumstances, I think you got off pretty easy. As for the power, you know where we meet. If you’ve got a weird magic thing you’re trying to figure out, either what it is or how to use it, that’s pretty much all we do,” Aisling offers.

“Thanks. Maybe.” I pause. “That isn’t exactly why I called, though.”

“Hm. I’m still glad you’re alive. What was?”

Does she not know? It doesn’t sound like it, but she did hold things back to see what I’d say yesterday. My foot taps nervously on the floor. It hurts, but I can’t quite get it to stop.

Well, she’s already heard me out and taken my horrible history about as well as I could hope for. If she hates me now, I probably deserve it. I look around again, finding no incredibly stealthy eavesdroppers.

“I didn’t think to call you last night because… because after everything with Seryana, the Stardust Seraph showed up and attacked me because I wouldn’t give him any of my weird blood. No, that’s not fair, probably we both kind of started the fight, and we both kind of lost, and now I have no idea what-”

“Hey. Slow down. I have no idea what you’re saying and it doesn’t sound like you’re breathing,” she says flatly.

I suck down a whoosh of air too unnaturally quiet to be conspicuous.

“Okay. Now, start at the beginning. What happened?”

“I don’t know! He doesn’t make any sense! He dropped out of the sky and crucified my Harbinger, then stood back while I ate her, then declared himself in charge of making sure I wasn’t doing anything else wrong. He wanted to follow me home or steal one of my ‘feathers,’ said it just wouldn’t be safe to leave me alone without being able to track me down whenever he wanted, and he wouldn’t take ‘hey, you’re incredibly creepy, could I call Aisling or Niavh or someone and bring them in on this?’ for an answer. So I tried to leave or get to someone else, he tried to restrain me, I tried to stop him from doing that, it got really bad. I’d hurt him a lot and thought he was about to kill me when we both felt someone else coming, and then he just… stopped. He said it was Irida and I didn’t want to know how she’d handle me if I thought he was nasty, then sent me on my way. Even made me faster before he left.”

I take another long breath and silently sigh it out. “And I have no idea what happens next. He obviously isn’t dead, especially if you hadn’t heard anything about this until now. Probably flew off and got whatever emergency care he needed. But I can’t imagine he’s just going to leave this alone and I don’t know what to do now. I’ve spent all morning trying not to panic about magic police or something storming my hospice.”

On the other end, there’s the sound of something soft but heavy thunking against a wall.

“Well, then,” Aisling says tonelessly. “That’s a fucking lot. I’m afraid I can’t say what’s coming either. I don’t know Roland well enough to predict how he’ll react to something like this. I don’t exactly have examples to work off.”

She’s still there. It doesn’t sound like she hates me. If she thinks I’m an absolute idiot everyone should avoid for their own safety, she’s keeping it to herself. “What about Tara?” I ask.

“He was still kind of new during that whole thing. Tara was mostly Irida’s problem.”

“Oh. Okay. About that, actually…” I swallow. “What happens to Keepers in, um, cases like this? What do they do about it?”

Aisling snorts. “That depends entirely on what the local Keepers have the will and ability to do about it when it happens. You’re not in any meaningful legal trouble, if that’s what you’re asking.”

…I’m not?

I’ve assaulted so many people I lost count, never stopping to figure out what I was even doing to them. I still don’t know. I’ve fought and severely injured two Keepers. One time it was to protect a Harbinger. I’m the sort of menace you only ever hear of in horror stories about things going really wrong in other cities.

“Why not? How?” I spurt.

“Good question!” Aisling says with a single bitter laugh. “Here’s my answer: say the city council makes laws targeting a group of temperamental children who can upend reality at will. While depending on those same children, who very often do not appreciate being told what to do, to keep living psychological terrors from eating their souls. How do you propose they enforce any regulations on what Keepers can or can’t do?”

“Get older, stronger Keepers to do it?”

“Sure. Then they need enough of those Keepers who agree with their laws and how violations of them should be addressed to make a whole magic legal system, and there just aren’t that many of us, period. So I suppose they decided it was easier to skip the step where they write a bunch of rules that aren’t worth the time it took to type them out — that’s if they even manage to write them in a way that keeps Iona or someone from coming out against them and shutting the whole process down — and hope we’ll handle magic problems our way. Wherever or whoever they come from.”

“Um. Okay. Fair enough, that sounds about right,” I mutter.

“Yeah. There are laws written specifically for us, with for being the operative word. At least in this city, they’re all to our benefit, things like the Keeper emancipation policy. As for the rest, there’s nothing that says Keepers are above the law, but you’ll literally never find one being charged with a normal crime in a normal court. Unless you’re the next Sofia, I think the worst you get is Church Keepers keeping a closer eye on you and offering you mentorship a little more emphatically than usual.”

“How does that work? Does it work? Tara and I can’t just be the only Keepers who’ve ever done bad things, can we?”

“You’re very much not. It’s not a great system. Probably a good thing for you right now, though.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

“I’m not. It’s not about you, though, I just want the world and society to make some kind of sense. Your whole thing sounds pretty bad, yeah, but we had the same terrible day yesterday, only it sounds like yours got a lot worse. I can believe you’re trying and Roland just had incredibly bad timing. And… you’ve helped us out. I don’t want this to be any worse for you than it already is.”

“I do still want to help if I can,” I say. “Isobel’s my problem too. It just, um, might be hard. I’m out of health and everything hurts and I don’t expect people are going to have a lot to spare for the girl who beat up a Fianata and made the Stardust Seraph puke centipedes.”

“…Centipedes,” Aisling says. It doesn’t quite sound like a question. “No, fine, I probably don’t need the details there. Look, I hadn’t heard about this one way or the other until you brought it up. That means something. If you’re lucky, it means whatever Roland wants out of you now, he’s trying to handle it in that sweep-it-under-the-rug way the Church likes to handle Keeper problems. I’ll see what I hear when I’ve got more time, poke you if anything comes up. Please don’t start eating people again, if you really want to work this out civilly.”

“Not planning to,” I grumble back.

“Great. And if there’s anyone else you think it’d help to get ahead of this with, maybe do that as soon as possible.”

“Alright. Sorry again to drop this on you so early. And, um, thanks.” I let her go.

Okay. That could’ve been a lot worse. While I’m slogging through this anyway, is there anyone else?

I don’t expect Shona will react much differently to this than she did when I almost ate Mide. She seems like she just wants to be friends with everyone forever, no matter how little sense it makes for the people involved to share space. Yesterday, she even tried to pitch calling the Seraph in to fight Isobel’s Harbinger, which… is kind of strange, especially given that it sounded like he was looking for me for more than a day.

Actually, Mide did say something about someone “catching up with me,” which… feels very specific, in retrospect. Did they know? Was Shona hoping we could just work it all out while we were at it?

I guess that couldn’t have been any worse than what ended up happening. Still, I think the three of us are just not very compatible, in the end. They can think what they want when this reaches them.

That only leaves one other person.

“PD?” I ask my phone. A shiny eye with a dark, squiggly cuttlefish pupil blinks open beneath the clock display, coming into view as if it’s part of a body that’s still mostly camouflaged with the gently shifting sea-surface background on the screen behind it. “Find Niavh Fianata’s contact information and call her for me. That’s Niavh Fianata the Clarish Keeper, if there’s somehow more than one.” I normally just use manual searches for this sort of thing — drives always seem prone to making mistakes no person would unless you’re annoyingly specific with them — but right now, my fingers aren’t up for it.

The eye blinks at me, makes a little bloop of acknowledgement, then closes and disappears.

“Thanks,” I say.

My phone starts browsing the Sea on its own, while I think about just what I’m going to say to her. I’ll have to leave a message, if she’s still out of reach, which is easier in some ways, but leaving messages always makes me feel weird about talking into the void at nobody.

I didn’t want anyone’s help, when I made the Promise. I didn’t want to bring any strangers into my problems. I still don’t, really — I only offered to reach back out to Niavh last night because if it had to be someone, I’d much rather it be her than the Seraph, but doing things exactly how I want to hasn’t been going the best for me, and she has been through this before. She might still understand. She might even know what to do.

Several seconds later, my phone chimes, then clicks.

“Hey. Who’s this?” Niavh’s voice asks.

“Um, hello,” I mumble, losing track of the message I was rehearsing. “It’s Eyna? We met a little while ago. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to reach anyone.”

“Oh, hi! Why not?”

Wait. I didn’t think about it at the time, but why not?

“I’d just heard you were away and I couldn’t contact you. I guess that was last night, though?” I try.

“Hm. Well, I’m in Alelsia right now and will be for a bit longer, but I still have my drives here. Obviously. And if I didn’t at this very moment, I’d check my messages as soon as I could. So what you heard was mistaken, I’m happy to say. Anyway, how have you been?”

The Seraph sounded pretty sure when he said no one could reach Niavh, but now that I’m thinking about it, that’d only make sense if her “evaluation” involves some kind of nightmare soul-surgery that leaves her out of commission for days, or it’s one of those Sanctuary inpatient things intense enough that they isolate you from the rest of the world until it’s done.

Was he mistaken? Why would he lie about that? I’d just started to make sense of what he might’ve been thinking, if Keepers policing each other is really the whole of the law, but now I’ve lost it again.

“Eyna?” Niavh prompts.

“Terrible. I’m terrible at this. I’ve been in fights with two Keepers for probably no good reasons, my magic is evil, and I don’t think I can live without using it to do awful things to people. I probably should’ve asked for help a while ago, but I’m terrible at that too. So, um, if your offer’s still open after what I did to your sister, I think I need it.”

“Ah,” she says slowly. “I don’t know if I was expecting to hear from you again, after you met Tetha, but I did hope I might.”

“Right. I guess you already knew that, didn’t you.” Of course it was stupid to think I ever had any secrets from anyone. She’s from a family of Keepers heavily involved in running the city — she could look into me and put pieces together if she wanted to, and she obviously did.

“Well, your presence does very much leave a certain impression about your power. I may have looked around and made some informed guesses. The second fight is news to me, though. May I ask what happened there?”

“Stardust Seraph. Found out what I’d been doing and decided to try and bring me to justice on the worst day of my life.”

“Ah,” she repeats. There’s a long, terrifying silence. “Yes, I think we should probably meet. I’m not certain just yet when I’ll be home, but I’ll talk to some people before then, alright? I’ll see if I can reach Roland or his sister right now — she’s a good friend of mine. Until then, please try to stay calm. We’ll figure something out for you.”

I’m not sure what to say. For a long moment, I just can’t find any words. Part of me can’t help but look for traps, search Niavh’s freely-offered assurances for some terrible thing she actually means. But there’s none I can find, no threat that makes more sense than the idea that another Keeper who’s been through and done awful things might just want to keep me from ending up where she did.

“Really? Just like that?”

“Yes. And if there’s anything you think I can do to improve your situation before then, please ask,” she says.

“Not unless you can find a lot of people who wouldn’t mind donating chunks of their health to a Keeper in need very quickly. But thank you.”

“That… may be more of a project, but if it’s something you need to function, I’ll see if anyone has ideas. Anything else?”

“Um. There is a thing I was wondering about that you might know… I just talked to someone else about this. I was worried I was, you know, in trouble, on top of everything else, but she said laws pretty much didn’t apply to Keepers. Is that right? Have they really just given up on keeping us from being complete disasters?”

“Oh, that I can answer. It’s simpler than you might think.” Niavh’s voice sounds different, now. Almost amused. “No one’s given up. That’s just the best way for things to work, for us and everyone else — it’s to leave every possible opportunity open for Keepers who’ve done wrong to change. No one is beyond redemption. No one should be treated as if they are. I’ve wondered myself about whether it’s fair, if that’s what you’re thinking, but, well. I think it’s a necessity of restorative justice when the cost of losing any one of us, to death or a life gone wrong, is so great.”

“Right.” That also makes a kind of sense. I don’t know enough about the world or history or politics to say whether I think she or Aisling has the truth of it. “Then I guess that’s all for now. Thank you,” I say, quieter than usual.

“Of course. I’ll go see what else I can do.” With that, she hangs up.

Maybe everything isn’t over. Maybe my life isn’t on fire. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if people are happy that I’m here.

But it does still hurt too much to think.

~~~

A few more long, painful days pass like that. My health never improves, but to my surprise, it doesn’t deteriorate, either. I read books through the day, experiment with my plague-doubles at night — which really do seem incredibly useful, and the only major issue I’ve found with them is that they aren’t good conduits for my magic senses — and check in occasionally with Aisling and Niavh.

Apparently, the public side of my incident with the Seraph is going just like my fight with Tetha did, which is to say that Aisling still hasn’t heard anything public about it at all. Meanwhile, Niavh assures me that while Roland wasn’t in good shape after he left me, he’ll be just fine because his sister is the greatest healer in at least New Claris, if not the world. I’m not quite sure. Niavh’s praise of her got pretty effusive.

On the fifth day, a knock on the door interrupts my morning suffering, followed by a nurse’s careful footsteps. “Liadain? Good morning. How’re you feeling?”

I groan wordlessly into my pillow.

“I’m sorry. I hate to make things any worse, but it is your infusion day… do you think you’ll be alright for that?”

I don’t regret agreeing to the infusions. Suffering through them was the right call when I didn’t have anything else. For all I know, they might’ve even helped. If I thought there was any chance they might still, I’d shrug, grit my teeth, and tell her to get on with it.

Today, though, I roll over, pull back my sleeve, and point to a cluster of shifting, shimmering veins. “I’m not sure if that’s going to work.”

“O-oh.” The nurse leans closer to inspect me. She sets two fingers on my wrist and waits, visibly paling. “Liadain, I can’t feel your pulse at all. What’s wrong? How long has this been happening? Head to toe, how are you feeling?”

“Sorry, um, I don’t think you need to worry,” I say. “My blood is just black and turns into feathers when it leaves my body now. I think. I’m not quite sure how that works under the skin.” They don’t typically draw blood from us on the seventh floor, other than the occasional test to figure out what’s hurting someone or check to see if my medicine’s working. This would be my first encounter with a needle since the last round of Emergence.

“Oh.” She stands there for a long beat of silence. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t exactly… I’ll call Dr. Hines, okay?”

“Tell him Dr. Cantillon might want to hear about this.”

“Uh, yes. I’ll do that.”

~~~

I don’t hear anything else about the infusion. Makes sense. They probably aren’t used to testing to figure out if their patients with blood-based diseases still have blood.

But later that day, not long after sunset, Aisling calls me unprompted. It’s the first time anyone but Dad has called me in… I’m not sure how long.

“Hi. How’re things looking?”

“Have you not heard?” She sounds more tired than I’ve ever heard her, which is saying something.

“Heard what?” I bite my lip. That could be my problems or Isobel’s or any completely unrelated disaster and I don’t even know what to steel myself for.

“Right. You’re still not on Lighthouse, are you? I knew that. Yeah. You should fix that. Just… thought you should probably know if you didn’t.” She heaves out a breath.

“Shona is dead.”