My cards are drawn as if magnetized to a spot between the Seraph and I, level with his position but a fair distance to his right. They form a haphazard stuck-together pile rotating around in the air.

Before I have a chance to process what’s going on, a flash of red light blinds my left eye for less than a second. A sharp whistling sound starts low and rises in an instant to a fever pitch before dying on the wind as it sails past my ear, nicking its edge. I stagger as my hand reaches to my earlobe and closes around a burst of tiny downy feathers. I flood them with magic and feel them rot away to nothing in my grip, just to make sure the Seraph can’t have them.

I look behind to see what just sped past my face. Embedded in the pavement is one of the Seraph’s sculpted-light feathers, shedding its crimson glow. Seeing one of them up close, I notice the feather’s edges look thin and razor sharp. Its tip was keen enough to lodge it into concrete. There’s a sting like a paper cut where the Seraph’s feather just barely grazed my ear. It could have jabbed my eye out instead.

The feather bursts into sparks which blink away without a sound, and I turn back to face its origin. The Seraph looms with his hand outstretched towards me once again. Rather than an open palm, it’s as if he’d flung one of his feathers like a dart. Like how I would fling one of my cards. The Seraph’s wings must be his implement, his version of my orbiting cards.

Has he been on guard with his weapon poised against me this entire time, and he’s just been pretending otherwise?

“What are you doing?” The words spill out of my mouth. “Are you actually trying to kill me?!”

“Hey, you started it,” he calls back, as if my cards even had a chance of hitting their mark, let alone scratching him. He pays the tarot pile he swiped from me a short glance, and the cards cease their rotation and straighten themselves neatly into a deck, remaining suspended in the air. “If you really wanna get dangerous, we can get dangerous. But you’re crazy if you think you can beat me. It’s pointless to even try. So just come along quietly and we can get this sorted out. You’ll thank me later.” It sounds like he’s discarded walking me home and is just going to drag me wherever he pleases.

“You’re the crazy one if you think I’ll go with you after you nearly stabbed me in the eye!”

“Good thing I wasn’t aiming for your eye, then,” the Seraph answers matter-of-factly. “There’s no way that would have happened.”

“How do you know?”

“I never miss my mark. That’s just how it is,” he says with flawless confidence. “Now, what do you say?”

I can only glare up at him in reply. He seems to be waiting for me to answer his latest demand, as if there’s anything more to say. I take stock of the situation while he’s giving me the chance. I can sense the point in the air where the Seraph has collected the cards I summoned — it’s a concentration of his magic, similar to when he crucified Seryana and started turning her inside out. I guess this time it’s attuned to me in some way.

Hopefully he can’t pull my guts out just like that, but… something tells me that if he could just drag me around however he wanted, he wouldn’t have to go to so much trouble trying to convince me to go with him while finding ways to pin me down in the meantime. Maybe there’s some condition he has to meet before he can affect me directly, like how thoroughly I’ve got to contaminate a Harbinger before I can drain its health.

I can still feel my cards at the point they’ve been gathered mostly the same as usual, too. It’s a little like my fight with Tetha, when she managed to capture one of my cards in a sphere of water. My will still reaches my cards from afar, but they feel… heavy. Incredibly heavy, weighed down to that spot. The pressure on them is constant, and it’s difficult to get them to budge. Almost like he’s grabbed me by the wrist and has me held there, and all I can do is struggle against his strength.

What’s worse is that despite disarming me, he’s keeping his distance from the cards as if he already knows what the infected ones can do. If he had them close by, then I might be able to catch him off guard by detonating them, but there’s no point in releasing my scourge if he’s too far away to be engulfed by the resulting plague-mist. Where he is now, he’s just far enough to make escaping on reaction easy. Does he somehow already know enough about my magic to prepare against it, or is it something else?

Even if he does know how I fight, though, there’s something he’s overlooked.

Without sparing another word, I immerse my body in my stored health and sprint to the left of the Seraph – opposite of where he’s gathered my deck – and start putting distance between us again.

“Oh? Gotta tucker yourself out some more?” he mocks, turning his neck to follow my movement before his entire body revolves smoothly in the air to face me again. I don’t wait for him to react. The moment I’ve found a decent angle, I simply dismiss all my cards and resummon them around me. They vanish from the point he’s drawn them to and reappear back in my orbit.

But the invisible force drawing them to that single point the Seraph anchored in the world hasn’t yet disappeared. I figured as much. That’s why the moment my tarot cards manifest around me again, I launch them all at once. The only outside force acting on my cards is sending them towards that one specific spot the Seraph has chosen, so before they reach it, I have little trouble moving them in any other direction I choose, so long as they’re also still moving towards it.

And since my cards are constantly being drawn toward a specific spot, I can guide their path to pass through where the Stardust Seraph currently is by putting myself between him and that point. I can hit him even as he’s tearing my cards away. In fact, the force that’s pulling them makes their flight towards their target even faster.

As though tossed into the sky and blown away on a passing gale, the deck scatters at my command. Some of the cards dart straight through the air at whatever angle I’ve managed to direct them to, while others twirl on their sides like spinning blades as I spread them further from my main volley, causing them to fly in more of an arc than a straight line.

I try to hold some of my cards back against the pull of the Seraph’s anchor with my will, and while I can’t entirely stop them from being sucked in, I do manage to delay their travel, slowing how fast they go compared to the other cards. Some cards I hold back harder than others, so they’ll arrive at different times rather than all at once.

Riding on the same blinding speed he disarmed me with before, I barrage the Seraph from every angle. He folds his arms behind his back as one card races towards him, then casually turns aside to evade its path. In the same movement, he slides backwards through the air into what looks like a wide gap in the wave of tarot cards I’ve unleashed… and right into the blast zone of one of the four blighted cards I’d conjured with this deck.

I don’t know what Tetha’s condition was after I afflicted her, but I know she’s still alive, and right now, that’s good enough for me. If Tetha could survive this, then I’m sure the Stardust Seraph can. I just hope it’s enough to even slow him down.

Right as I will that diseased card to detonate, though, the Seraph suddenly shoots in the direction opposite of it at incredible speed, like a crimson comet traced across the sky. He escapes the cloud of noxious fog that bursts forth, twirling once as he moves to deflect a blank card his path happens to cross off one of his wings. He’s too slippery.

I’m not done yet, though. The Seraph’s course takes him safely outside the range of two of my other blighted cards, but I’ve held back the fourth and last one as long as I could, saving it for the end. It’s now arcing through the air, about to draw close to the Seraph’s current position. It’s not as close as he was to the last card I burst, but if he keeps moving in the direction he is right now, he’ll fly right into the plague-cloud that blooms from it.

I time the explosion perfectly, but at the very last second, the Seraph bounces upwards off empty air, skirting the edge of the cloud of illness for a moment before completely escaping its reach.

He passes behind the point where he’s once again gathered all the cards I flung at him, then comes to a sudden halt. “That won’t work, princess!” he calls out to me. He sounds like he’s enjoying himself. But he’s also right where I want him, finally close enough to the anchor point that I just might catch him.

…Yet, before I have the chance to use the next two infected cards, both of them slide out of the floating deck and hit the street below like a pair of falling rocks.

He made a second anchor point on the streets right below the original one. I can feel it. The only difference is, this one only draws my corrupted cards towards it, dividing them from the blank cards. He’s already figured me out.

I grit my teeth. As the toxic mist from the previous two bursts gradually swells outwards, forming a curtain of smog between me and the Seraph that’s slowly drawing closed, I detonate the two remaining blighted cards to speed up the process. Emerald haze rises up, joining the two disparate clouds and engulfing the street. Before he and the red glow that halos him disappear behind the encroaching wall of infectious fog, the Seraph falls back and folds his wings around his body as if to shield himself.

I whirl around and start running on my aching legs, filling my lungs with rough, ragged breaths each stride I take. My sweat runs cold in the chill night air. My eyes flit from one side of the street to the other. This brief moment could be my only chance to escape. It’ll take a second for the Seraph to rise over the miasma, which could give me just enough time to duck into an alley and find a place to hide. If I dismiss my regalia, he might lose track of me. That might at least give me enough time to call Aisling.

But I’ve barely gone half the length of a street before a crimson shimmer cuts through the shroud of my fog, flashing against the vapors like lightning in an overcast sky. I turn back to see the wall of smog I’d created collapsing into itself, shrinking towards a single point as though vacuumed out of the air. Just floating there is a black speck, a pinprick hole in the world all my plague-mist is spiraling into like water down a drain.

Once more revealed from behind the curtain of my fog, the Seraph is pointing ahead of himself, twirling his outstretched index finger in the shape of a spiral. The miasma is cleared from the streets, and the little black speck it vanished into blinks out of being in a flicker of red.

The Seraph reclines backwards in the air and crosses his legs as though taking a seat, wavering slightly as if perched on a swing. He glides toward me in that relaxed pose. The point where he’s captured all my cards moves in tandem with him, always maintaining the same safe distance.

“Man, you’re so dramatic, princess. If you were actually that tired, you’d think you’d just give in. Why are you doing all this, really? Some weird sense of pride? You’re completely Mary-ing out on me right now, you know?”

I can only stare up at the Keeper who just completely evaded my attack without a single scratch and did it all as if it were easy. I don’t have any thoughts to spare for whatever nonsense he’s asking me right now. Everything I have is dedicated to keeping my knees from buckling under my own weight.

He seems to pick up on my loss for words. “So, how’s that offer from before sound about now?”

“Worse the harder you push it.”

The Seraph sighs. “Cute. Right then.”

He raises his arm and flicks up his wrist. With that motion alone, the world around him answers to his call.

In front of a streetside restaurant, a section of the sidewalk and road has been cordoned off and arranged with plastic tables and chairs under the shade of parasols to make a modest seating area. On the other side of the street, there’s a construction project similar to the one that tore down the house Seryana was born from – it even looks like the same company. From both these places, dozens of objects lift up off the ground and zip straight to positions arrayed around the Seraph, where they begin rolling in place almost like debris in a storm. Tables and chairs and empty flower pots join traffic cones, construction barrels, and a caution easel or two, all revolving in the air.

“Let’s make a wager,” he says, surrounded on all sides by his jumble of whatever happened to be nearby. “If you can actually beat me, I’ll let you go. If I can get you to give up, then you’ll come along with me. Whoever gives up first gives in, no arguments.”

“…And how’s that different from just making me go by force?” I shoot back, however pointlessly.

There’s a pause for just a moment before he gives his deadpan reply. “Huh, I wonder?”

He swats his hand out as though batting away a fly, and that’s all it takes for the medley of junk he’s beckoned to launch at me all at once. A plastic table big enough for me to use as a bed flies straight at me, barreling down the street like a speeding car. I hardly have any time to dodge, and even if I did, I would just be stumbling into whatever else he’s hurled my way. All I can think to do in the moment is fall backwards, scrunch myself into a ball, and hope I’m conscious after it crashes over me.

A second passes. Then another. The impact never comes. I peek my head out from between my arms to find the table frozen in the air, completely still.

“Hah. Made you flinch,” he says like it’s all just a schoolyard prank.

“A-are you actually insane?” I choke out between panicked gasps. “How much of your time as a big fancy hero do you spend torturing people for fun?”

His shoulders slouch at my words. “…I didn’t even hit you, princess,” he answers coldly. “And I doubt I’d be having a fun time if you managed to hit me, either, if Tetha is anything to go by.”

Rather than simply running me over, all the objects in the Seraph’s onslaught have spread out to surround me at a distance, forming a ring that’s boxing me in from every angle. They begin to swirl around me slowly, almost like I’m in the center of a merry-go-round, every impromptu projectile continuing to roll through the air as it moves along with the flow.

“I know to watch out when it comes to you. You stopped that flaring Harbinger’s ritual, after all. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m going to blow up another Keeper just ’cause. I’m trying to show you what you’re up against. If you don’t like what you see, then yield. Otherwise, square up.”

I don’t respond immediately, simply wiping away the tears I don’t have time for. If I just sit here for a bit, he’ll probably give me a moment to think, secure knowing he’s got me right where he wants me. But I’m not mulling over whether to surrender or not, like I’m sure he hopes. The only thing on my mind is how to get out of this. I clutch my chest and steady my breathing as I try to consider everything I have at my disposal.

Come on, Liadain. Don’t panic. Think. I’ve been in much worse situations than fighting this guy, who’s supposedly not even trying to kill me. There has to be something, anything I can do right now to catch him off guard and turn the tables.

Yurfaln’s power-from-pain won’t help me much. It puts more strain on my body than any other magic I have to my name. I certainly can’t rely on it the way I did against Aulunla; if I push myself any farther over the edge than I already have today, I’ll be overwhelmed by Emergence in more ways I can’t control, just as Aisling warned.

I would be so much faster, stronger, better if I walked the tightrope between life and death Yurfaln lived on, though. I’m not sure I would be an actual match for the Stardust Seraph even then, but it would certainly make this more of a fight, rather than something like a tomcat batting around a mouse between his paws. It would have made it easy to dodge through his entire barrage from before. I just… would have done it, just by willing myself to. Given I could resist the pull he has on my cards to some extent already, I’m sure I could actually seize my cards from his grip, too, at least with how much force the anchor point is currently exerting on them.

But I’m certain that if I embraced Yurfaln’s ideal right now, something would happen to me that there would be no coming back from. I’ve never felt less human than when I was in that state.

What I gained from Aulunla’s heart doesn’t give me much to work with, either. There’s something deeper to its curse than simply understanding Harbingers better, something intrinsic to its nature, but I haven’t had the time to explore how to use it. I certainly don’t now.

The magical perception Irakkia’s morsels earned me doesn’t seem especially suited to the situation. Transferring the vision from one of my eyes into a card and controlling it remotely seems good for scouting, but it would disorient me more than it helps. I don’t even know if it could help at all, not while the Seraph has control of where all my cards end up anyway.

…Maybe the key to that lies in figuring out the rules and limits behind whatever power he’s using to control my cards in the first place. The Seraph’s powers seem completely overwhelming to me – fast, impossible to challenge, and capable of overcoming anything I throw at them… but even though he seems to have the power to fling anything around him however he wants with only his thoughts, how come he never just picks me up and holds me in place? That would end this instantly.

The answer is simple: he can’t do that. Just like I can’t just drain a Harbinger of its health like I can a normal person. It’s hard to directly interfere with other beings of magic when they’re resisting you. You have to dig your claws into them somehow first.

…What does that say about Mide, then, who I can drain as easily as I can any normal person? I don’t have any time to spare thinking about that.

Which leaves the latest heart I’ve swallowed. Does Seryana have anything for me?

When I search inside myself, feeling the shape of Seryana’s soul and the dying thoughts she left with me, I get an abstract sense of the new way my power has grown through hers. And when I do, everything clicks into place.

I may have missed my chance to swallow the entirety of Irakkia’s heart when I split it with Mide, but it did start my magic down a particular path. A path Seryana’s heart is all too eager to lead me down.

I’d thought that Seryana and Irakkia had similar tricks before, even if Seryana couldn’t twist perception as freely as Irakkia until later. She could intrude into my dreams, and even inflict nightmares in the waking world after she donned that mask, similar to Irakkia’s mental attacks… I’m not sure I understand how much the two of them truly shared, beyond their desperate rejection of the cruel reality in which they found themselves trapped, but where Irakkia’s lost and broken truth once ended within me like a road into a chasm, Seryana’s connects and continues on, their hearts building on one another with my magic as the foundation.

This could be it. This could be my key to victory. It’s something the Seraph would never expect. Could using this new expression of my magic be doing exactly what Aisling warned me against? Maybe, but if I’m careful and keep things small, there’s no way it’ll affect me the way betting everything on Yurfaln’s power would.

The only problem is that whether the Stardust Seraph expects something or not doesn’t seem to actually matter. He might only have been doing this for a couple years, but that’s an eternity next to my couple of months. He’s much more experienced than me. He’s clearly prepared for any sneak attack I might muster. He’s had no trouble seeing through every last attack I’ve made so far.

“Well?” the Seraph asks, his patience finally starting to wear thin. 

I conjure my cane, pick myself up on wobbling limbs, and look up through the jumble of floating debris to stare daggers at him. Burning an inner candle of the stolen life that got me into this mess in the first place, I spread my legs out and raise my free arm defensively to show him this isn’t over yet.

I don’t think there’s any point in trying to get him to lower his guard by pretending to surrender. Out of all the bad things I can say about the Seraph right now, the one thing he definitely isn’t is stupid. Still, he’s playing around like this is some game, and that means he’s not fighting like his life depends on it. Like mine does.

He lets out a chuckle and simply says, “Alright then,” before flicking a finger at the empty air.

A cold shock jolts up my spine. Faintly, I feel his magic lashing out at me from behind. I duck down and fall to my knees, and immediately watch as a construction barrel hurtles overhead before passing back into the ring of churning debris.

“W-what…?”

If I had been a second slower, that heavy drum would have bashed me over the head and planted my face into the pavement. Just the realization it came so close to hitting me makes my black blood turn to ice in my veins. No matter how I look at it, I would have died. This fragile body of mine would have broken into pieces and I’d have died.

The image of my corpse lying sprawled out against the street, a great raven of plague and hunger and malice ripping out from within before being crushed beneath the Seraph’s power flashes through my mind. The only reason that premonition died as nothing but a nightmare in my thoughts is because I sensed the Seraph’s attack and dodged at the very last moment. 

I turn widened eyes back up to the Seraph. The impenetrable tint of his vizor gives nothing away. Were all his words just lies? I thought he was just going to try to wear me down until I couldn’t fight anymore. I’ve done terrible things to people, but I don’t deserve to be treated like the latest incarnation of Sofia the Deathless, do I? Unless they were a real menace, a clear and present danger to everyone around them, killing a Keeper would be a disaster even for the Seraph, wouldn’t it? 

…Maybe not.

Maybe he’s gotten away with this before.

After all, all the violence connected to Mary Hyland was buried until nothing remained but conspiracy tracts on the Coral Sea. If the Church would go that far to protect some random new Keeper, how much further would they go to protect their golden boy?

Another gesture from the Seraph draws six chairs from the ring’s swirling flow and into the air above me. I spring back to my feet and dodge frantically as the chairs rain down one after another towards my position, clacking harshly against the street with each impact. My constant drip feed of health keeps me nimble despite how tired I am.

Next come three dusty traffic cones thrusting towards me like torpedoes, all disappearing back into the ring once I’ve avoided them. He immediately launches six more, this time coming at me from every angle. Half of them seem to speed by harmlessly, just orange blurs coursing through the air to confuse me; I lunge behind one of the chairs he’s left inside the ring to escape the rest, guessing he won’t have aimed his attacks towards something that would cut them off mid-flight. I’m right, and the three traffic cones sail past me.

Before I can congratulate myself, however, the chair shifts to the side, making way for a seventh traffic cone. I push upright on my cane just in time for the cone’s tip to slam into my stomach. All the air is forced out of my lungs from the blow. The cone just keeps traveling forward as I fall away. I’m knocked backwards and skid across the road. 

A piercing, tender ache spreads out across my belly. It starts dull and then becomes searing. My throat chokes on the pain and smothers the cries I couldn’t have made anyway on account of my lungs being empty. But there’s no time to dwell on any of that, because even with my eyes blurring with another round of agonized tears, I can still sense a point of the Seraph’s magic shifting just above me.

I roll to the side as another plastic chair slams down, probably trying to pin me underneath its legs. My entire body winces with pain each time my belly touches the ground. I quickly salve the hurt with a fresh injection of stored health. Despite everything, there aren’t so many wounds for my stolen strength to wipe away — no gaping hole in my gut; no cold gnawing agony of my own magic eating me from the inside out; not even the inescapable nauseous misery of infusion days. Not enough to stop me from scrambling through the onslaught and doing the only thing I can do: think. 

Between waves of chairs, traffic cones, flower pots, construction barrels, and more, I consider what I actually know for a fact about what the Stardust Seraph can do.

Everyone knows he has power over light and can fly. That’s obvious just from those obnoxious glowing wings of his. But just like with Aisling’s ability to ask the world questions, it’s not like there’s any public information about how he does those things.

He can clearly do much more than control light and levitate himself. The power the Seraph is using to force my cards to a specific place is the same one he’s using to fling all this junk at me. 

Each of the projectiles the Seraph is tossing around right now is affected by a separate point, invisible to everything but my magical senses, that’s pulling them towards a particular spot. The Seraph isn’t moving the objects themselves, but the points they’ve been bound to, and the objects just happen to move along with them.

I can almost sense these points in motion if I focus, predicting what direction he’s attacking from… but it’s a rough, vague, sense; an eerie chill creeping up the back of my neck that warns me where not to dodge as I’m pelted from every angle. It’s hard to focus on it while I’m gathering my thoughts.

Whatever he’s doing here might be how he can fly, too… but it’s not just levitation. He can make things heavier and even crush them. Unlike when he’s moving objects from one place to a point he’s chosen, when he’s used his magic to weigh things down, it’s spread out as a field of hazed-over air, shimmering like a twilight mirage.

As a plastic drum and several empty flower pots whirl past me as though caught in a windstorm, I start to wonder. Maybe making things float and forcing them against the ground are just two sides of the same coin, and this “field” is something he got from a Harbinger, building off his original magic the same way the hearts I’ve eaten have built off mine. Maybe the only thing he’s doing is changing how heavy things are… but in different directions. The invisible points formed from his magic are like anchors that draw objects to them, after all.

What if light isn’t what he’s about at all? It could just be one expression of his power, the same way I just happen to be able to control my cards.

From everything I’ve seen tonight, could what he’s actually controlling be… gravity?

My thoughts racing, I duck under an upended table as it spins overhead like a giant frisbee.

Throughout the endless days I’ve spent in hospital beds, one of the only things I had to pass my remaining time was read. Across the countless pages I’ve turned, I know I’ve had gravity explained to me at least once. I still don’t really get it. But I do know it’s the law that says everything that goes up is destined to fall back to the earth; a law the Seraph defies whenever he seems to feel like it.

Can you control light with gravity to sculpt it into feathers? Does it matter if you can when it comes to magic? Maybe it’s something he can just do like I can just summon my cards. I don’t know.

The Seraph’s onslaught is becoming more intense. The improvised armory of random junk he picked up off the side of the road catapults at and around me in organized patterns. First he draws out half the plastic chairs from the swirling junk ring surrounding me and lines them up in a row on one side of it, their legs hovering just a millimeter off the street; with a swipe of his hand, the chairs all rush forward, raking across the breadth of the ring. I rush towards the attack myself, leaping onto the seat of one of the chairs and using it as a stepping stone to vault over its back… and right into the path of an oncoming construction barrel.

I throw my arms in front of my face before I’m bunted out of the air by a dull, hollow impact. I land hard on my back for the second time since this ordeal began, and stagger up with my cane twice as quickly. I’m not going to give the Stardust Seraph the slightest hint that I might be slowing down, that what he’s doing is working.

And it’s good that I’m quick on the recovery, because the line of chairs he sent my way before is now coming right back at me, moving in reverse. I rush towards the throng once again and, right as they’re about to run me down, I dig the end of my cane into the pavement and use its leverage to force my light body into the air. I lift my cane off the ground as well just as the backs of the chairs pass under me before finally landing safely on the other side.

The sound of clapping rings out through the night. “Well done, princess. Finally getting into the groove?”

Maybe. I’m sure I’m getting better at squirming through his debris, if only thanks to him pushing me this far. Thanks to all the strength I’ve stolen, all the pain I’ve caused that’s now going to waste humoring the Seraph.

So I say nothing. I just dart my eyes around the ring, ready to deal with whatever the Seraph sends at me next, and find the various types of plastic objects that make it up have been arranged into different circles, each a separate layer in the overall ring. Even the height and speed each circle is revolving at is different. Chairs, traffic cones, pots, and construction barrels have all been divided into their own orbits, with the outermost layer composed of the eight tables he picked up from the restaurant, their foldable legs curled into their bottoms. Above it all, the two caution easels rotate in a windmill spin, their frames splayed out like open flip books.

The Seraph drifts lazily beyond, lounging against one of his wings as he hangs in the air. I can’t see his face through his mask, but his visor is trained directly on me and the arena he’s boxed me into. He must have been organizing the objects with each attack he made, and I simply didn’t notice until now. The sight of this chaotic surge of shabby, grit-encrusted rubbish having shifted into an orderly waltz while I wasn’t paying attention is so absurd it almost breaks my concentration. This has to be something he’s practiced doing before. It’s just too coordinated not to be.

Unlike in the Wounds, the world around us isn’t malleable. Both of our powers are more limited in what they can achieve here. If I can infest a Wound with my plague and rot it from the inside out, Shona can engulf them in a storm, and the Seraph is already able to bend gravity to his whim like this, I can only imagine what he can do in the patchwork world of a Harbinger.

If his power really is based on gravity, he seems to be able to target whatever he chooses individually. But how is he able to distinguish between those targets? Maybe he can do it by sight… but he could also distinguish my blighted cards from my blank cards and separate them that way.

Back when he crucified Seryana, it seemed like he was concentrating his magic at that point and “tuning” it to her somehow. It was the same way with how he gathered up all my cards… It was probably the same way when he vacuumed up my wall of plague-mist. After all, it’s not like I felt any breeze rushing past me and into that hole he’d poked in the world. There was no suction on the air. The only thing affected was the fog.

…Shona told me before that the Seraph can sense Harbingers from miles away.

When it came to dealing with magic, like when he tore open Seryana and stole my cards, maybe the way he’s attuning these points of gravity to his targets is based on the auras he senses? That would even explain how he was able to divide my tarot deck between blank and blighted cards, creating specific anchor points for each; my blighted cards are more strongly concentrated with me.

Of course. If his senses are really that good, it’s no wonder he could tell which of my cards were imbued with my blight and get out of their way before they were a threat. He was just teasing me back then, intentionally drawing right into their range and then leaping out of the way before they could even graze him. It must be even easier for him than it is for me to sense the points where his magic is most concentrated.

Just like I could sense Roland’s presence even when he was invisible and hard to pinpoint, he should be able to sense attacks with my cards before they happen. If that’s the case, then no matter what angle I come at him from, he’ll be able to anticipate that direction and react accordingly. Even if I attack from multiple angles at once, it’s hopeless. He can buzz around however he wants and dodge or deflect anything I throw at him on reaction.

But that also means that his focus is trained on keeping track of me and my magic. If an aura feels especially different from mine, I’m sure he’d pick up on it, but… maybe he won’t notice it immediately.

So rather than cards filled to the brim with my illness, bursting with my unique flavor of curse, what if I instead used one  filled with something else entirely? A scourge extracted from the corpse of a demon. A card I’ve been holding in reserve since the first time I struggled for my life in this world of magic and nightmares.

The disease I ripped from Yurfaln, the purpose behind its being.

I jolt back as two cars screech into my way, stopping abruptly within inches of a crash. My heart slams against my chest. The only thing keeping me standing is the health I tapped by reflex a moment before. A few more feet in my direction and the cars would’ve rammed into me, too. Pulped my useless body in half and left my soul to crawl out of its broken remains, unfurl its wings, and… and do what? I don’t know. Maybe I ravage the city for enough life to sew myself back together. Maybe I become something much worse. Maybe that’s not how it works and I just die.

Footsteps clacking on the road behind me shake me from my morbid delusion. The Seraph draws closer, his visor glaring down fiercely, judgmentally. I turn around slowly, anxiously. My downcast eyes flick upwards to catch glimpses of the one who’s come to punish me for my sins, only to dart away when I find his light too blinding to bear.

“You’re not as slick as you think you are, princess.” The pressure of his aura intensifies with each step he takes, like the dawn surmounting the horizon to envelop the sky. “I can’t just let you go. Not the way things are.”

So you’ll run me over instead? That’s fine? That’s the way things should be? I glance down at nothing, squinting to shield my watering eyes from the Seraph’s radiance, shoving thoughts of my own mangled corpse into the background every time they push back into my mind. 

“I have plenty of reason to drag you back to the Soul Sanctuary whether you like it or not, until we’re sure you’re not another ticking timebomb like Tara or Niavh just waiting to blow and take innocent lives. Like you almost did to Mide. Like you could have done to Tetha.”

I blink away my tears as the Seraph relentlessly piles on his condemnations. “You don’t…” I rasp, trailing off as my worthless words die in my throat. He doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know my life. He doesn’t know anything about…

“But you know what?” He leans forward and raises his arms outward as if to present everything around us to me, his wings of red light stretching along with his gesture. “I get it. It’s hard out here. It’s real hard. So I’ve tried to be considerate. I’ve given you every chance to meet me halfway, to show me you’re actually willing to cooperate and not just pretending to.”

…no, of course he does. Of course he’s treating me like some monster he needs to hunt down and lock away. That’s exactly what he’d have seen while he was following my trail for however long, smelling me out from my first victims to where we stand now. It’s certainly what Tetha saw.

But even if he knows, could someone like him, who has everything, ever actually understand?

“But fact is, I can’t trust you.” His arms fall back to his sides as he straightens his back. “You’ve already hurt people. You claim you met Niavh, yet you continued to hurt people. So what if you’re just lying to me right now so you can get away?” he shrugs questioningly. “I’m not going to let you just run off with nothing but a promise to do better. That’s not good enough. Not when, if you really wanted to, we could settle this tonight,” he points to the ground between us, then throws his arms up, “yet you’re still here deflecting like you’ve got something to hide.”

I’m tired. I’m so tired. This was already the longest day of my life before the Seraph stormed into it. I cannot possibly settle anything tonight… and of all the things I do need to take care of, the things I’m trying my worthless best to make better and do better, not one has anything to do with him. What would his hand around my throat do for anyone?

So fine. I’m a monster. He knows it. I know it. And next to all the horrible things I’ve done, both the ones I had to do and the ones I did for no good reason, not turning my life over to the first person who demands it doesn’t even make the list.

“You already know my territory. Even if you didn’t, you can smell me out well enough that you’ve had no trouble stalking me all around the city for however long!” I spit. “All I’m hiding is exactly where I live. If you’re mad that I don’t want you watching me sleep or barging in on people who have nothing to do with this… why?” 

“Territory? Move to Rima if you want to fight over territory. We don’t do that here. And stalking you?” the Seraph exclaims as though it’s the most absurd thing he’s ever heard. “You hurt people like a Harbinger would, and I’m the bad guy for tracking you down and telling you what’s what? You think just ’cause everyone’s been looking the other way ’til now, the moment somebody holds you accountable, you’re the victim? Wake up, princess. If you weren’t a Keeper, you’d be a criminal, and since the moment this conversation began, you’re the one who’s been acting real guilty for someone who wants to be treated like she’s innocent.”

“Innocent?” I stifle a hoarse laugh and look back up to face him with tear-blurred eyes. “Where’s that coming from? I’ve done awful things. I’m an awful Keeper. An awful person. I know. I’m trying to fix it. I just don’t need you breathing down my neck to do that!”

He’s quiet for a moment, his visor simply regarding me silently. “…If you’re really remorseful, if you really want to make amends, you’re not an awful person,” he says, his voice gentler than before. “You have a hard to control power, clearly. I do too. But you can use it to accomplish extraordinary things. Like when you defeated that Harbinger on the eastern fringes of the city.”

“You know that was me and you’re still acting like you can’t just find me whenever you want?”

“Every Keeper and their mom felt it when that Harbinger flared,” he explains. His tone has lost the edge it had before. “Of course I’ve been looking into it. But I only found you just now. That’s why I’m trying to talk with you. I want your side of the story.”

“Do you? A minute ago, it was ‘I can’t trust you unless I have your home address and your blood.’ If all you wanted was my story, you could have it, it sounds like you already do, but what good would that be if you aren’t going to believe anything I say?” I push back.

“Okay, wait a sec,” he holds up a hand as if to halt me. “Your blood?” 

“Yes. My blood. The feathers you knew enough to…” I bite back my words before I can finish the thought. How much does he know? He must have followed us to the lake earlier, there’s no other way he could have seen them, but if he’d actually been there to watch me bleed them out, why wouldn’t he have barged in on us right then?

“I don’t have blood anymore,” I say. “I bleed those. So you see why that’s a very weird thing to ask me for?”

“Ohhh.” His head tilts back in realization. “Weird blood, huh? Same,” he nods as though it were nothing surprising. “See, how was I supposed to know that? I just found some of them lying around Missing Lake.”

“Right. Well, now you know.” Why does he need another, in that case? Doesn’t really matter. Maybe the Embrace was bad for them, maybe they just don’t last. What does matter… “What did you want them for, anyway?”

“They’re pretty,” he says plainly.

I flinch almost as if I’ve been struck. “…Wha?” I mumble as I feel my cheeks heating up and the thrum of my heartbeat tumble between different but equally strange and uncomfortable feelings so fast it makes me dizzy. He thinks they’re pretty? A boy looked at anything about me and thought I was pretty? And that boy was the Stardust Seraph at that? Is what’s happening to me even real?

…and I narrow my slowly drying eyes, because those thoughts racing through my mind all end up in the same place, throwing themselves off a cliff into a bottomless pit. I know better than anyone that things like that don’t happen to me… although, if they were going to, I guess it makes sense for my weird nightmare blood to be the one appealing thing about me. What is he really thinking? Is this his idea of a joke? “So you got all scary because I wouldn’t give you a souvenir? Seriously? What do you actually want them for?”

“Well, they are,” he insists as he crosses his arms, “but I could also use one to find you again if necessary. Since you won’t let me walk you home, it was a good fallback option so I could just let you go. And I’d have a cute little memento in case everything turned out fine. But then you flipped out and started stomping off without even listening… You were in absolutely zero danger right then, by the way.”

“Fine. Maybe I wasn’t. But how am I supposed to know what another Keeper can or can’t do with my blood? You can already find me. Obviously. So what would you need it for if it’s not something to hold over me?” I ask, trying to brush off that weird thing about how cute my blood is. “If you had it now, would you leave me alone? Because you were just saying you needed to drag me to the Sanctuary, and I don’t see how that changes unless you can do something dangerous with it.” I don’t want to be trapped in another glorified cell when I only remembered what freedom felt like a couple months ago.

His shoulders slouch. “Just dragging you to the Soul Sanctuary and calling it a day is what I’ve been trying to avoid this whole time, if I can help it,” he says. “I can’t just find you at the drop of a hat, but if I knew where to look or had one of your feathers, it’d mean I could if I needed to, and that’d mean just seeing how things turn out would be fine. Well, not like I want your feathers now that I know it’d hurt you, but yeah, I would leave you alone if I had one.”

“…Alright,” I breathe, wrapping my arms around myself. “Let me think.”

How bad would that be? There’s so much I don’t know… how long do these feathers last once I bleed them? What could they be used for other than stalking me? How closely does the Seraph plan on watching me once he has one, and what would he do to me and my life if he decides I’ve crossed some other line?

But if that’s it, if that’s all it would take for this nightmare day to finally be over…

“If I do this, if… can you promise you’ll leave my home alone? And that neither you or any of your friends have any weird blood-magic rituals they could target me with if they get mad at me?”

“Of course,” he agrees outright, a spark of enthusiasm in his voice. “I don’t plan on showing it off to anybody else anyway.”

“Showing it off… fine, nevermind. Can you swear that?”

“I swear it.”

Only there’s no weight behind those words, no subtle shifting in the air. Is he playing dumb? Did he think I wouldn’t be able to feel the difference? I’m certainly not good enough with people to tell, but… benefit of the doubt. Just for now.

“The way you did it before, please,” I say, keeping my voice as level as I can. “The binding way. If you want assurances, fine. That’s fair. I think it’s also fair if I want to make sure I’m not baring my throat by giving them.”

“Oh.” His response is flat. After a brief pause, he lets out a long sigh as he strokes the back of his hood. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?” I ask, shifting a hand to the cane at my side.

“Like, I just casually did that before, but that’s because it was a simple and clean situation that got sorted out then and there. I don’t know exactly how things are going to play out from here, so making a binding pledge just like that could be really dangerous. You can’t take them lightly.”

I suck down a long, slow breath through my mask. “…Fine,” I say. “Committing to something complicated for the rest of forever is a big deal. I can see that. We can make it more specific, then. How’s this? Tonight, I’ll give you my blood. Tomorrow morning or as soon as she’s available, I’ll talk to Niavh about all this. What’s been going on with me, what just went on with you, what I’m thinking about how to stop being so terrible.” Maybe she hates me after what I did to her sister. I don’t know. If she does, at least she’d have the right to judge me. “And I’ll tell her if you ask, she should feel free to share anything about that conversation she thinks is important and say so if she thinks I’m still a problem. If she doesn’t, you destroy the feathers. If she does… do whatever you want, I guess.”

“I can agree to all that, but that doesn’t need me to seal a binding pledge,” he argues. “There’s so many conditions to consider, like what if Niavh never gets back? And… I just don’t feel comfortable making an oath like this. I did it before out of courtesy, but it’s just not a good idea here. Not unless we, say, go to the Soul Sanctuary and have Scolai draft out a contract for us or something.”

“Right, then…” I sigh harshly, clench both hands tightly around my cane, and push myself upright. “Things are complicated. Magic is complicated. I understand that. Which is why I don’t feel comfortable giving up something that could end up being out there as a weight over my head forever. So rather than leaning on magic, why don’t you just… call Niavh right now and confirm everything yourself?”

“…She’s not available. No one can contact her right now,” he says.

“Why?” I press.

He strokes the chin of his mask for a moment. “I guess this was part of the press releases, so it’s not exactly private. She’s undergoing an evaluation at Alelsia. You know, as part of her rehabilitation.”

“And she doesn’t have her phone on her?” The frustration is raw in my voice.

“You can see why it didn’t add up when you mentioned her before…” he trails off.

Just my luck. I can’t even reach the one person who offered to help me who might truly understand what I’m going through in the moment I need her the most. My mind races through alternatives as I grind the bottom of my cane into the pavement. 

What about the one Keeper I did explain my problems to? Does she count for anything?

It’d feel bad to drag Aisling into this. She has nothing to do with my mistakes. This isn’t her problem, I’m not her responsibility, and I really don’t want to give anyone a reason to think otherwise if this blows up into some awful public spectacle. 

But if I do bring her up, I can prove that I was already talking to someone about my horrible power and how to use it better. There’s a real chance that makes my case enough for him to back off a little. Even if it doesn’t, what’s the worst-case scenario for her? I’m certain us having talked without her immediately calling the Church on me wouldn’t make her somehow culpable for my actions, and I don’t think she’d care if the Seraph’s fans hear the story from him and decide they hate her. 

…The only thing is, Aisling knows where I live. If the Seraph can’t get from me that the only place I can possibly live is a hospital, could he get it from her instead? Maybe she’s not so happy with me after I messed everything up when we went to find Isobel. Maybe she won’t risk herself for my sake by refusing if someone from the Church demands she tells them everything she knows about me.

No. I can’t think that way. I trusted her enough to tell her. She’s helped me even more than Niavh has in the first place. Even if she thinks everything I’ve done is stupid, she was still willing to trust and accept me. The least I can do is return the favor.

“Okay, then how about… Aisling Waite, Truth’s Lantern. I’ll call her instead. She’ll vouch for me.”

“You mean, like, using her power?” he asks, doubt creeping into his tone.

“No. We know each other. I talked to her earlier today about my plans. She can confirm everything I’ve told you about what I want to do.”

“Right, I suppose she was also at Missing Lake…” He crosses his arms. “Why didn’t you just say this before?” He sounds annoyed. That makes two of us.

“I just… I didn’t want to drag her down into my mess!” It hurts to say it out loud. “Is that good enough for you?”

The Seraph flexes his glowing wings silently, seemingly in thought. “…No. Just because she trusts you, doesn’t mean I should,” he finally concludes.

“—What?” My fingers tighten around the top of my cane like it’s the Seraph’s throat – or my own. “Why?! I get you can’t trust me, but why not Aisling? She literally can’t lie, and she knows if anyone lies to her. Everything she says is guaranteed trustworthy by magic itself!”

“Her ability is incredible, but flawed in all sorts of ways. There’s ways to fool it. And as smart as Truth’s Lantern is, that doesn’t mean she’s the best judge of character around, or that her judgment is completely unclouded,” he contends. “I mean, you only actually thought about this last night, didn’t you?” he tilts his head again. Casually, cutely. Like a bird examining a curiosity in its nest. “Old habits die hard, and you just now decided to quit this one. I’d feel safer with some actual insurance in place.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I won’t just slip and accidentally steal someone’s health again. We’re talking about people’s lives, not biting my nails.”

“And that stopped you before?” he says like a knife slid between my ribs. “You mean you didn’t just slip and accidentally steal Mide’s health after all?”

“I did that in a Wound, with a pillar of garbage speared through my stomach! I’d be dead if I hadn’t. That’s not at all the same as thinking I’m going to accidentally eat someone on the way home,” I snap.

“Then show me how strong your resolve to change is.” He offers me an outstretched hand. “Prove to me you’re committed.”

I shrink away from his gesture, feeling ever more cornered against the vehicles he used to block my way. “I’ve already tried, but it’s apparently not good enough! You said you wanted to help me, but compared to everybody else, how I feel doesn’t matter to you at all.”

“It’d be different if you actually wanted my help,” he says, calmer than ever. “But the people of New Claris need it. When it comes to magic, they don’t have a voice unless a Keeper gives them theirs. They’re more vulnerable than anyone, so shouldn’t we prioritize their safety?”

“…You’re right,” I say slowly. “About one thing. I don’t want your help. I don’t see how you can call what you’re doing right now helping.” He’s just shoving everything I’m trying to do and everyone who’s actually helping out of the way because they aren’t good enough for him, and at this point, I’m too tired to care what’s good enough for him. “And since you can obviously find me well enough to follow me around and see exactly what I’ve been through today, I really don’t think it’s a problem for you if I go sleep off the longest day of my life.”

A click of his tongue echoes huskily behind his mask. “Like I said before, I can’t just hunt you down like that, and I can’t leave things as is without some insurance. You know, all the people you’ve used your magic on up ’til now weren’t exactly comfortable with it either, princess. I’m giving you plenty of leeway as it is.”

“I know they weren’t,” I hiss. “But the only thing I can do about it is do better. Proving myself to your standards right this second won’t change anything for them. So I’m going home. I’ll reach out to Niavh when I can. I don’t need some deal for that to be the right thing.”

“That’s not the only thing you can do and you know it… Hey,” he calls out. “Where do you think you’re going?”

I’ve already filled my legs with a little health, turned around, and leapt up onto the hood of one of the cars the Seraph used to block my way. “Away. Don’t follow me. I’m done talking in circles.” I hop off the other side of his makeshift blockade and start marching back to the seventh floor. If he doesn’t get the hint and keeps tailing me… I’ll figure something out. Maybe I’ll call Aisling for help after all.

And that’s when a shimmering blur like a mirage spreads out across the street beneath me, forming a puddle of agitated air. When it passes over my boots, their color seems to smear through the air. I can barely tear their soles from the ground. My footfalls become heavy, and I stumble slightly at the sudden resistance to every stride I take. It reminds me of Seryana’s grip hanging off my body, weighing me down.

My shadow on the road in front of me lengthens as it’s slowly haloed by a deepening crimson light. I force my neck to turn, glancing behind me to see the Seraph has risen into the air, his wings of sculpted radiance unfurled. With a wave of his hand, the two car barricade parts and the vehicles return to where they were parked before, lifting off the ground in the process just enough to avoid their tires skidding against the pavement.

“We’re still not done here, princess.”

I gulp through gritted teeth. A few minutes ago, he seemed fine with me going on my way, but he stopped me then, too. Was he trying to mislead me back then? Why is he so persistent? My knuckles go white from the strain of my grip on my cane. I want to take it and thwack him over the head with it. 

I try to think of something, anything I could say to make him understand, but the words won’t come. Every idea just crashes against the feeling that I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to keep talking. I don’t want to be looked at by judging eyes. I don’t want to be confined again. I don’t want to keep burning my retinas on the glare of his wings. I just want this to be over. I just want to go home.

I know it’s my own fault. I earned this suspicion, this contempt. I knew this could happen. I knew all my mistakes could catch up to me one day. I expected them to, even. But the part of me that’s so scared of everything it causes me to corner myself again and again just won’t let me turn around and give him a feather.

And as much as fear strums against my nerves, another emotion has been heating up inside me every second this conversation has gone on. A scorching feeling that, even when I have something I can actually aim it towards other than myself and my farce of a life, always ends up burning me to cinders in the process. I hate this feeling, but that just makes it even stronger.

“I’m done here,” I say, concentrating that feeling between the tips of my fingers as I conceal them close to my chest. I test my legs against the force of the glassy haze holding me to the street. The blur only reaches a little above my ankles, and the space it covers is not much bigger than a puddle left behind after a light rain.

“If you’re gonna act like you’re free to do whatever you want, then I’ll do the same,” he shoots back.

I don’t bother to find out exactly what he means. I just act. I swivel on my hips and fling the tarot card in my hand at the Seraph behind me.

“Whoa!” he shouts as he turns aside in midair to dodge my surprise attack. In the moment he’s caught off guard, I flood my frail legs with life and force them above the shimmering air that was weighing me down with a leap. Like I thought, the moment I’m outside the area of that mirage, my movement returns to normal. When my feet touch down on the street beyond, I make a break for it, dashing away as fast as my strides will carry me.

“Aw, come on, princess,” he calls out in lament. “Why we gotta do this the hard way?”

Maybe I’m just making everything worse for myself like usual, but if the only options he’s giving me are bad ones, what’s even the difference? If I just give in, I’ll have no choice but to go along with whatever he wants. He’s bigger than me in every way; at the end of the day, he’s the one with the final word. If I escape, there’s at least a chance things will go my way. If he catches me, he’ll just do whatever he planned to do from the start, so I might as well try. 

All I need to do, then, is figure out how to get away from someone who can fly, and who seems to be unbelievably faster than I am. Which sounds like a terrible plan, but what else can I do? I’ll just need to hide somehow. If he wasn’t lying about having trouble finding me without one of my blood-feathers, then maybe he won’t be able to sense me if I dismiss my regalia.

And then what? 

…Sorry, Aisling. I may have to drag you into this after all. She should still be awake? She might still be waiting for me to call her back with an update on the Seryana situation, and she doesn’t look like she sleeps all that much anyway. Maybe if I can meet up with another Keeper, the Seraph will stand down for now.

With that in mind, I shift my attention back to my pursuer. I feel him getting farther away with every step I take, but his presence remains, looming at my back, though not nearly so oppressively as when we were face to face. I turn around to see what he’s up to, and I find… a vacant street, stretching past the rubble Seryana was born from.

I look ahead to make sure the Seraph hasn’t zipped in front of me like the last time I tried to get away from him. Since I started running, I’ve been planning to double back and wind down the side streets when he does it again… but he’s not moved to cut me off, either. In fact, the red glow of his wings is no longer flooding the streets with its radiance from anywhere. Still, just to be sure, I look up.

Nothing but tall buildings and the night sky.

I skid to a halt and look back behind myself a second time. The Stardust Seraph has disappeared into thin air. But I can still sense traces of him lingering in the background like the distant hum of traffic beyond my seventh floor window. I don’t know where he’s gone, but I don’t let my guard down. It’s never that easy.

I focus on his aura amidst the chorus of everything around it. It pulses through me as though alive. I think back to Seryana’s death, the way he appeared from nowhere when I first saw him.

“I know you’re there!” I call into the night. “Go away already!”

“Wow, your senses really are good, huh?” his disembodied voice casually replies. Above and before me, the air contorts in the shape of a silhouette. As if it were painted on to the world, the scenery of the streetway I see peels away to reveal the form of the Seraph float there, now wingless. He’s taken a lounging posture in the air, laying on his side while propping his head up with his hand. “Well, I should have expected. This usually only works when they don’t know I’m around.” 

I’ve never been sure if my magical senses are only unusually good at sniffing out Harbingers. I’m still not. But for a trick like that, at least, they’re enough. My soul sees so much more than my eyes.

“Was hoping you’d think I didn’t have the guts to fight another Keeper and gave up after a little show of force. But in a way, I’m glad you hold me to a higher standard,” he says, flipping over in mid-air as he corrects his hovering posture. “I didn’t come here wanting to be your enemy, you know, but you’re not really giving me much of a choice.”

“Then just leave me alone!” I cry out, my voice trembling from the strain of everything I’ve gone through today.

He lets out a sigh of frustration. “I can’t just let you leave when you might be a threat to public safety.” He says, sweeping a flattened hand from his chest outwards. With just that gesture, feathers of red light blink into being all around him and quickly spiral back into the shape of his wings. “Which, by the way, is looking even more likely now that you just went and attacked me. I can’t afford to give you the benefit of the doubt. Not when someone else might be the one who pays the price.”

I glower up at the Seraph, fling another empty card at him, and move to bolt down the nearest alley. Before I even get there, however, a roll-off dumpster lined up against one of the buildings that make up its sides skids out to cram the entire pathway. I keep running forward, preparing to try and vault over the latest obstacle the Seraph has put in my way, but before I can, the dumpster’s top flings open and stands at attention, becoming too tall for me to reasonably clear with a natural jump. Not unless I feel like getting mixed in with all the other garbage.

“Where are you gonna go, anyway?” he questions. “You can’t get rid of me. Anyone who sees us will understand the situation if I just explain who you are. This would’ve been so much easier if you just let me walk you home like we’re pals. We can still do that, you know. I can be discreet.”

“Yeah, you’ve really shown off your talent for that, you…” My thoughts race in circles as I do my best to catch the horrible feelings racing through me and put them to words. “You dick! You… walnut!” 

…Where did that come from? Whatever. I’m too exasperated to even be embarrassed.

He floats there silently, bobbing up and down as though suspended by wires, seeming at a loss for words. This moment of grace ends all too soon. “…You know, I can’t even get mad when it’s your voice squeaking it out.” I really, really want to take my cane and thwack him over the head with it.

“Look, we can make this a fight if you really want,” he continues, “or I can just forget you lashing out those last two times, escort you home, and we’ll call it even. Last chance.”

He’s right. I could just let him walk me home. He’s a well known and trusted Keeper. His reputation is one of the best in the entire city. Just going by that alone, there’s no reason to distrust him. But he’s an asshole, so I do anyway.

I summon my tarot spread to answer his proposal. In an instant, a procession of twenty-two cards emerges from behind me and spirals around my body until it meets its end at my back, forming a ring.

The Stardust Seraph reacts immediately, putting distance between us. When he moves, he’s abruptly dragged backwards as though by an invisible rope around his waist.

Unlike the last two cards I’ve called out, four of this volley are already poisoned, drawn from the pool of cards I’ve infected preemptively in case I happen to get into trouble. Although I’ve been storing a full deck of cards filled with my plague on hand just so they’re ready to go when I need them to be, I didn’t want to have to use them on one of the biggest Keepers in the city if I could help it. If we really are going to fight, though, then I can’t hold back.

Yet Aisling’s words from earlier in the day still echo through my mind.

“Eyna, Shona, you should both take the longest breaks you reasonably can from any active use of your power. Spend time with people you care about. Do things you like, as long as those things have nothing to do with magic.”

A pit forms in my stomach where all my hopes for the future go to die.

“Well, you asked for it,” the Seraph says. “Sure, we can play a little bit.”

All at once, every card in my orbit is torn from its place, ripped right out from around me.

“I wanted to see what you could do anyway. This is as good a chance as any.”

The last traces of Seryana’s corpse dissolve into grime and dust, leaving her heart floating terrifyingly close to another Keeper. The Stardust Seraph crashed into us out of nowhere like lightning from a clear sky, turning all my plans to ash along with the nightmare I’ve spent so long hunting. 

What just happened? How? Why? What is he doing here? How long has he been there? Was he following her or me? What does he want? All questions I have no way to answer. I shove them from my racing thoughts — right now, the answers wouldn’t matter even if I had them. Right now, all that matters is that Seryana is mine. 

…No. That’s a useless thought, too. How badly I need this doesn’t change the situation at all. If I don’t figure this out, I’ll just end up adding another stupid, horrible mistake to the pile before anyone even knows who I am.

Besides, between what he just did to Seryana and the palpable sense of weight still pressing in on my soul, I think I’d only hurt myself if I attacked him.

So what, then? What can I do that won’t ruin everything? 

“Well? What are you waiting for?” the Seraph calls out with his hands on his hips before I can come up with an answer.

“…What?” I can’t tell how long we’ve been standing here, but he hasn’t moved at all. He seems to be watching me rather than the heart, but his mask’s sharp visor completely obscures his face. 

“Go ahead. Take it. You’ve earned it.” He raises an open, gloved palm and gestures magnanimously to the heart.

Part of me wants to race to Seryana’s remains and swallow her without another word, but I don’t know yet if that would be right. Without some idea of what he wants from me, I have no idea how to navigate this.

“Just like that? You don’t want it? This isn’t a trick?” I ask.

“Eh?” The Seraph gives a barely-perceptible tilt of his head. “Could you, uh, not know who I am, maybe? I’m the Stardust Seraph. Y’know… ‘When a cry for justice rings through the heavens, the Stardust Seraph answers!’” He raises his right arm, pointing to the night sky, then traces his finger through the air to his left side, before sweeping his open palm back across to his right, striking a dramatic pose. He then casually returns to a neutral stance, the wings of light at his back stretching and fluttering a bit as though relaxing. “I can do the whole song and dance if you want. I just figured it wouldn’t be your thing,” he finishes with a broad shrug. “Besides, what kind of trick? If I really wanted to sneak up on you, I’ve missed my chance, don’tya think?”

“I made the Promise a month ago! I don’t know how vulnerable we are while we’re eating hearts, what I should be worried about, what you can do, what’s even possible! And if you dropped out of the sky and obliterated my Harbinger because you just wanted to talk, why would you introduce yourself with some weird reference to my name?”

“…Pfft… hahahahaha!” 

After a moment’s tense silence, the Seraph first chokes down a chuckle, then bursts into hearty laughter. “Suspicious to a fault, I see… well that’s probably for the best. You’ve just gotta learn to hide it better… but no. Of course I’m not here to steal from you. Don’t be ridiculous. That Harbinger was already in tatters. All I did was hasten the inevitable. In fact… I swear this on my name as the Stardust Seraph: I will not by any means interrupt your consumption of that Harbinger’s heart, unless it is to protect you from what you yourself would consider imminent danger, if privy to my perspective.” 

The ambient power in the air shifts. It doesn’t exactly withdraw from me, but there’s a strange current in the intangible energy flowing around us. It gathers around the Seraph’s words, lending them an unnatural weight — a gravity, fixing them into place in the world. 

Those words are true. The promise behind them is inviolable. I know that in the same way I know what my own magic can do. Understanding that feels a little like processing Harbinger-speech, but in one way, the effect here is even more pronounced: I don’t think it’s possible to lie in that language, but it also doesn’t seem like every word spoken in it is a binding oath. A Harbinger can say something and change their mind later. The Stardust Seraph no longer can.

“There,” he says. “That work for you?”

I run through his words in my mind. They did seem airtight, as far as I can tell, and the one out he included isn’t anything weird like that Sanctuary contract’s phrase about lasting “for as long as there are lights in the night sky.” It is a little weird that he included it at all, though.

“Why the last part? We’re two Keepers and a dead Harbinger. What danger am I going to be in?” I ask.

“Just in case, of course. Wouldn’t wanna watch you die if some freak incident happens and I’m sworn to stay out of it.”

…Fair enough. It’s a pretty specific situation, and the way his promise resolves it is completely in my favor. Even so… this wording doesn’t quite leave me perfectly safe.

“And what about after I’m done?”

The Seraph tilts his head to one side farther than last time. “What about it? The whole point of this is to let you finish off priority one before we worry about anything else.” 

“But what if you set up something to do to me immediately after I’m finished? Some big ritual that takes time to prepare, which you could do because it wouldn’t “interrupt” me, and that I wouldn’t notice until you spring it on me the second the Harbinger’s gone?”

He places his palm to his forehead as though in consideration. “…I guess that would work. I’m not gonna do that, though. If I were planning to, I’d have done it by now — or, again, before I blew the element of surprise on that Harbinger. There’s sensible suspicion and there’s this.”

“Will you promise that too?” I press.

The Seraph stifles a laugh, letting it trail off into a long sigh, and throws up his hands. “Fine. Anything to get this over with before the heart sprouts legs and runs off or something. Nor will I prepare to take any hostile action against you while you consume that heart, from when you begin to when you finish. Is everything to your satisfaction now, princess?” 

“…Princess?”

“Is it?” 

I’d feel better about this if he would tell me what he is here for, make assurances as to what he’s planning once Seryana’s remains are dealt with… but I don’t think I should push any harder, at least not yet. Whatever comes next, whatever he actually wants with me, it doesn’t change that I need that heart. 

I nod to the Seraph, steady myself on my cane, and approach Seryana’s remains. As my focus narrows on the tightly-packed knot of heart muscle and blackness, it shudders, then squirms and beats through the air to drift into my open hand. I squeeze it to my chest, suppressing a gag at the shroud of nauseating stench it still carries, and drink Seryana’s soul. 

~~~

I don’t… I’m not a good person, XXXXX. 

Get away from me while you still can.

Those words could be ones of simple admission. Resignation. Regret, even. But spoken sincerely… they say so much more, don’t they? They are an incantation. A spell to summon a cage around your soul, to spare the world the poison you carry. But beneath that, more than that, they are a wish. A hope that you could be any other way. A cry for help to the one person who might drain the venom from your wounds and see you as you could be.

That is what I believed, when you spoke them. And even as you stormed away, I wanted more than anything to reach through your thorned prison, take your hand in my torn, bloodied fingers, and leave you no longer alone.

When I reached back out for you, though… you were already gone. An abandoned husk, hanging by the rope that stole your last breaths. I couldn’t do anything. I never could. And despite everything… I died with you. My heart still beat, but I did not live.

But when I collapsed there beneath you, and the weight of all the misery and terror and exhaustion finally dragged me screaming to sleep… oh, I had such a beautiful dream. If only you could have been there to see it.

In my dream, a star took me into its embrace — a binary star, cradling one another in ethereal ribbons like a perfect web of rainbows, the only two lights in a black, endless sky. I was a guest in the court of the two who made themselves one. The one who wove constellations together with their love. They spoke to me, in glances, in casts of light, in the gentle caress of radiation on my bare skin. They promised me my love had been beautiful, it had been true, it could still be true, if I would only hold it in my soul above all other things for the rest of eternity.

I could do that. I did, for all the time we had together. I loved you. All of you, complicated as you were. You were the only thing I had. 

So I tore myself out of my own dead-and-beating heart. I became me.

But dearest, I needed to be more than a monument. You deserved so much more than that. You see… from the moment I looked upon those stars, I wanted to be them. I wanted us to be them. Their bond, their synchrony, the gentle gleaming their luminosity lent everything else, the way they looked at each other like nothing else in the world had ever mattered… anyone who saw it would want to be them. But you were gone, lost even to my new reach, and how could I be them alone?

I set out to find you again, wherever you had gone. I searched for you in memories, in gaping wounds where once had stood something beautiful, in echoes of despair that felt so much like you I could convince myself you were truly beside me again.

But… when I claimed my first, I heard a whisper on the night wind. A voice I already knew, a message carried down from the void for me alone.

<How disgusting.>

And those two words carried a curse. Not a curse like the thing that flows through you — only a truth I knew I would never be able to bury. 

You have never loved anybody, they said without saying. And nobody will ever love you. 

I had made my love a lie. I was alone. I have always been alone. Even now, at the end of everything, I am alone.

You’re not him. Of course you’re not. None of them were. He isn’t here, he isn’t in the stars, he isn’t anywhere. He’s been dead and drowned since before I was born.

But you still… you HAD to be. If he was gone, then one of you had to bring him to me. To become him. If you couldn’t, if I couldn’t, then what does anything else matter? Who cares about tomorrow? Who cares about ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴? Who cares what all this could become if through it all, I will only ever be alone? If they filled the world with so much love, then WHERE IS MINE?

~~~

She’s gone before I can say anything. Can whatever’s left of them hear me in there? Aulunla could, at least for a moment, but I guess it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what I’d say to her anyway.

Tears that are not mine blur my vision. No… no, some of them are probably mine. I still wouldn’t say I understand Seryana, and I don’t regret her death at all — it really was putting her out of inescapable misery, as horrible as I’d find that thought in any other scenario. But I think it’s impossible to take in another’s essence, everything that made them what they were, and not find something in them to empathize with. The one thing Seryana wanted with all her heart was something she couldn’t have, something some power or law beyond either of our ken insisted she shouldn’t have, and that much I understand all too well.

But the heady haze of eating a soul soon fades, and I don’t have time to think through what the disturbing details of her story might mean. She’s left me with a much more pressing problem.

“Whew!” the Stardust Seraph huffs, his voice a hollow echo behind his mask. “Good riddance. Now. That out of the way… time for a chat.” 

I close my eyes and stretch my senses over the ruins, taking in the motes of life around us. The nearest souls are a comfortable distance away, a few people scattered through the closed buildings around us. Maybe some of them saw the Seraph fall from the sky like a scarlet meteor, but if they did, they’ve had the good sense to stay away from a violent display of power at night. At the very least, we don’t have an audience.

That hardly makes me feel better. I don’t want to talk to him, in private or anywhere else. But he’s not going away, I have no chance of outrunning someone who can fly, and… well, and if I think about this from his perspective, I guess he hasn’t done anything bad to me except say something weird about my name. He didn’t steal my Harbinger. He could’ve been flying by, thought I was really in trouble, and only figured out who I was after he jumped in to help. I don’t think he did, but he could’ve.

And if I want to stop making horrible messes everywhere I go, I should really try not to panic until I have some idea of what he wants.

“…Okay. About what?” I ask. Stupid question. There’s only one reason the city’s golden boy would be seeking me out… well, one big tangled pile of reasons. Still, let’s hear it from him first.

“Well, first off, why don’t we start with you giving me a proper introduction?” the Seraph replies. “Unless you’d prefer I keep calling you ‘princess’, that is. As it stands, you have me at a bit of a disadvantage.”

Do I? The first thing he said to me was about my name. He obviously knows who he’s talking to… well, whatever. He can have what everyone else has, and if he wants to push me on it, that’s his problem. “I’m Eyna. Ill Wind if you prefer. I don’t have a pose or a speech, sorry.”

“So that’s really your name, huh?” he presses, crossing his arms as his visor stares relentlessly through me.

I narrow my eyes back at him, biting my lip beneath my mask. It feels weirder than usual, trying to make eye contact with a completely hidden face. Worse, I have no idea why he’s so pushy about this. Eyna isn’t my actual name, of course, but unless Shona has spilled her guts to everyone in the last few hours, there’s no way for him to know that, is there? “That’s a really weird question. It’s not like it’s a special name. But yes.”

“Ah, I see, I see.” He nods his head in understanding. “That’s so weird, then. I didn’t find anyone like you when I checked through the public records for girls with that name. Must be a nickname or something, huh?”

…What?

I tighten my grip on my cane with both hands, suppressing a shiver at the phantom sensation of being watched from afar, of prying eyes on my back. There goes any hope that he wasn’t following me. Why would he be digging around for my personal identity, anyway? Would he have dropped out of the sky and into my home if he could have? Aren’t Keepers’ personal lives not meant to be dragged into all this?

“What about it? Do you know how creepy you sound right now? I was really trying to be fair here. I know you probably could’ve just robbed me if you wanted. But I still have no idea what you want and you’re just… just standing there, dropping hints about how you’ve been stalking me? Why? What’s that accomplish except tell me that if my nickname were something else, I’d have made the right call in using it?”

“…hah?” At that, the Stardust Seraph leans forward with his crossed arms, tilting his head for a third time, this time in the opposite direction. The wings of light at his back stretch out like a hawk’s ready to swoop down on its prey. “Are you for real right now? Can you imagine what all the people you preyed on would have to say about you trying to play the victim?” His voice was incredulous.

Of course. Of course that’s it. I let out a barely-audible croak, the smothered remnant of some worthless word or panicked laugh.

How? I haven’t told anyone except Aisling. Would she…? No. No. Shona said once that the Seraph could “sniff out a Harbinger from miles away.” I’m sure he could just as easily sniff out a girl whose horrible power feels like a Harbinger tearing out a chunk of your life, especially when I used to steal from tens of people at a time.

I can’t even count them. I’d given up on counting them within my first week. 

But it doesn’t matter. He’s right. Neither my new plan or my feeling bad while hurting them change anything for those people.

“Yes!” I shriek. “Maybe, I don’t know,  some of them could come up with better horrible things to call me, but I’m already thinking those things about myself every day! So that’s why… that’s why I’m not doing that anymore,” I say. “It’s only been… I have a better plan, but I only figured it out last night. You can believe that or not, I guess.” It was this morning, but I’m not dragging Aisling’s name into this. It might help. I don’t care. I’m not doing that to her.

The Seraph corrects his posture, returning his hands to his hips. “That’s good to hear, then. I’m glad you understand that won’t fly in this city,” he says, gentler than before. “I don’t want to have to treat a fellow Keeper like a crook if I can help it, but you’re not exactly making it easy. Actually, I’m here because I want to help you.”

He really could’ve said that in the first place. But… you know what, fine. It’s fine — if he means it, if he doesn’t have some terrible idea of what ‘help’ is here. From a distance, I can’t exactly blame someone for looking at my actions and thinking I’m the new Tara. I take a set of long, slow breaths, loosening my grip on my cane.

“…Okay. Help me how?”

“That depends,” he replies, cupping the chin of his mask between his index finger and thumb as though in consideration. “There’s plenty of arrangements that could be made with willing participants, depending on what you’re actually trying to accomplish. But first, why don’t you tell me about this ‘better plan’ you’ve come up with?”

I grimace. He’s doing it again with that thing about “willing participants.” That has to be some intentional impression he’s trying to make, but until he actually says he’s here to arrest me for magic crimes or something… fine. Is Aisling’s plan a secret he’s prying into? I don’t think it is. Getting health donations would obviously have to be a public project. 

“Volunteers,” I say. “I have to do what I’ve been doing to make my horrible power work, but I don’t have to do it that way. It was a bad idea I stumbled into when I was new. But if I drain from people who agree to it in exchange for… pictures or autographs or whatever people want from Keepers, and then they know what’s going on and have doctors keeping an eye on them, that still works.” 

“Great!” the Seraph exclaims eagerly, catching his fist in the open palm of his other hand. “We’re on the same page, then! That’s perfect. And with me on your side, you’ll have no problems at all getting that off the ground!”

Hold on. When did that happen? I didn’t ask, he didn’t even offer, just… declared it. Invited himself into the messiest, most difficult part of managing my new life.

…Maybe… that’s not the worst thing ever? It is a problem. I still don’t know where to start with fixing it. Maybe Aisling does, but she doesn’t seem much happier with the public-figure side of all this than I am.

“We can also get you some training at the Church so nothing like that thing that went down with Mide ever happens again. Oh, and don’t worry about the Fianatas. I’ll handle them, if anything comes up.”

I stiffen up again as the Seraph carries on, casually taking charge of everything wrong with me. Don’t. Don’t break now. Don’t blow up on him while he could still just be trying to help, just because he’s doing it in that pushy, overeager way I’ve never been able to stand from anyone.

“Hey, let me walk you home. We can talk about everything on the way.”

“I wasn’t!” I snap, then sigh, forcibly evening my voice out. “…Worried about the Fianatas, that is. Not anymore. I know, I’ll say sorry to Tetha if I ever find an occasion to do it that isn’t incredibly weird, but if I needed help — really, if I need help with any of this — I’ll ask Niavh. She’s already offered. But… thanks.”

He pauses for a moment, letting the silence between us settle in the cold night air before he continues. “…when’d you meet Niavh?”

“…A week and some ago,” I say, and swallow. “Why?” Has he talked to her since then? About me? I met her before Tetha… I guess I don’t know if that offer still stands, really. All I have is a vague idea that Niavh must’ve said something in my defense. I have no other way to explain how quiet her sister seems to have been.

“So, uh… Lemme get this straight. You met Niavh a week and some ago… and then you just… kept ‘draining’ people? And you only came up with this new idea just last night?”

“Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’ve had a lot to deal with and not a lot of time. I didn’t have a better plan. Now I do. I don’t know what else you want from me.”

“…Not sure you realize how you’re making things sound, but I’m gonna give you an easy out to this, princess,” he says calmly. “Do you know Niavh’s phone number?”

“…You’re right. I don’t know how it sounds. And no. She said she was easy to find if I needed anything. I assume the Chancel or somewhere has her number. I’m also… I don’t really see the point of this whole question. A minute ago when you were all cheery and excited, all I said was that I’d contact her if I needed help sorting this out. Which I will, because I’d rather work with someone who has some idea of what it’s like. So if you mean something by this, please just say what it is already.” I say, straining to keep my voice level. “Is it that I should’ve stopped draining people and asked for help making a better plan a week ago? Yes. I know. But I can’t go back and do that now.”

“So you haven’t actually spoken with Niavh about this,” he restates, giving a nod. “That checks out, considering she’s not due back in New Claris for a day or two more… Anyway, it’s in everyone’s best interest if we put that new plan of yours into action as soon as possible. If you’re serious about this, I can make it happen tomorrow. Niavh can pick up where I left off the moment she’s back, if you really can’t stand me that much.”

“Yes. That’s next on my list of things to do, now that she’s not stalking me anymore.” I wave my free hand back at the ruins of Seryana’s house. “I’ll talk to her as soon as she’s available, and… I guess if you want to check in with her about it, you probably have that power.”

He lets out a sigh, which echoes huskily behind his mask. “Alright. You doing any more hunting tonight?”

I shake my head. “I’m tired. That one… took a few days. It was a nightmare.”

…Is that it? Is this actually working?

“Ah, yeah, it did look pretty nasty,” he chuckles. “In that case, at least let me see to it that you make it back home safe and sound.”

I swallow again. Of course nothing could be that easy. I think through the worst-case scenario — what happens if the Stardust Seraph knows where I live? He knows all about my medical history, which… I’ve ripped that bandage off twice before now. I’d share it if I thought it would help, if I thought it would change anything about where we stand, but at this point, it doesn’t seem like it would.

More important, then, is that he’d know where I live. He could drop in on the seventh floor and make a mess of everyone’s lives whenever. He’d have the easiest possible route to keep appointing himself my minder and new best friend.

“I try not to bring Keeper business home,” I say. “Sometimes it follows me anyway, but… you know. Personal stuff. Private stuff. My family doesn’t know and I don’t plan to tell them,” I say. All true. “If you need to find me again for some reason, look around the university on most nights.”

“I could always just fly off when we get within view, you know. I don’t have a problem with dismissing my regalia and just walking the whole way, either. Nobody would see a thing.”

“People won’t recognize you any less that way!” I came dangerously close to meeting one of the Seraph’s fans a couple weeks ago. I know what they’re like. The last thing I need is for one of them to take a picture of me walking with their idol and decide I need to die. “Listen, if you just want to know where I am, I told you. Not that you seem to have any trouble finding me.”

“Well, I tried,” he throws up his hands in a shrug before letting them casually drop back to his sides. “One last thing, then, and I’ll let you go. Could you lend me one of your feathers?”

“My… feathers,” I echo. My blood. The black, shimmering nothing running through my veins as of this afternoon. How closely has he been following me? For how long? What he wants it for is less of a question — I’ve read enough to know that blood has a kind of abstract weight to it. A connection to its source, in some symbolic sense that I’m sure is important to certain Keepers’ magic. I can’t see most of the things you’d use taken blood for being good for that source, and that’s before I even get into whatever’s happening with my blood.

“You’d have to cut me open and rip them out. So no. Goodnight,” I say flatly, and start down the street.

“…Huh? The hell do you mean by that? Wait,” he says, his voice drawing further away with each step I take—

“I said wait.”

—until he’s suddenly right in front of me, his body and wings shifting into view in a flash of scarlet motion. My mouth goes dry and my heart hammers wildly as he blurs into my space. I clamp down on my first instinct, letting only a thin, leaking hiss of frigid green mist escape through my clenched teeth. Instead, I surge life through my legs and run, frantically hoping for a windy road or an alley to duck into or something, anything to get him away from me.

But before I make it even a block, two cars parked on either side of the road before me abruptly slide across the ground as though dragged by an invisible force. They skid until they come to a stop nearly bumper to bumper right in front of me, forming a barricade.

“I. Said. Wait.”

The way into Seryana’s Wound is clearer this time. Those wet, grasping strands of her hair lining the gaping hole in the world have mostly rotted away, leaving lesions in the walls where green embers burrow into necrotic flesh. The remaining strands of living residue are weak and withered enough that they snap away the moment they curl around me and try to grip. This time, when the tunnel opens up, I touch down on the floor with only a few clumpy strands of dry, dead hair trailing off my sleeves to show for the fall. There are no grasping limbs of twine to set me down gently, but my cane steadies me through the impact. 

Seryana stands just ahead, hunched over the curio cabinet in the center of the room. She’s reached through its still-broken windows and picked out a single filthy photo.

<You’re here! You’re really, finally here…> Her voice has a wet scratchiness to it, as if she’s forcing out every sound through a terrible cough. <I’ve waited here in the dark for so long, blind to all but you. Alone save for thoughts of you, memories that only grew more bitter as you drifted ever further away from me… it isn’t true what they say about absence, you know.> 

She traces one frayed finger gingerly over the photo frame… then hurls it at me with all her might. I flinch as it whizzes just past my head, crashing into the wall behind me.

<All absence does is poison everything forever. Everything I feel, everything I am, every beautiful moment we might have shared if you hadn’t ran away, it all just leaks through the holes you left when you tore yourself out of me!> she wails. A shiver wracks her body as a coil of rope, the third arm she sprouted earlier, drops off her and hits the ground with a sick wet plop.

<That’s why. That’s why no matter what, no matter how much better it may be if you’d never been there at all, I need you. Now more than ever.> She pushes off the cabinet and wobbles upright, her mask’s eyes seeming to widen as she stares at me. <So tell me. Did you come here to stay, this time? Or is this the last earthly stop before we join hands and hearts and journey somewhere new? Either way is fine! Anything is fine, as long as we become one while we do it!>

While she rambles, I take stock of my surroundings. This is the same room Shona nearly burned down, and it hasn’t changed much since then. All that remains of the original room’s walls are its four corners holding up the ceiling like pillars. Beyond that, it’s just as ruined and more — the steady, creeping rot of my magic still spreads through everything, eating away at the walls and furniture of the surrounding rooms. A window in the next room over is frosted over with black mist.

Off to the right, the jagged hole in the floor we last escaped through is still there. Seryana’s made a token effort to fence it off, with three sideways chairs arranged unevenly around its edges, but if I wanted to leave, I wouldn’t even need to step over them. There’s a gap in the fence I could easily squeeze through.

Following my gaze, Seryana glances between me and the hole. She lets out a short, sharp shriek, like the strings of a hundred instruments snapping at once, and slams a balled fist into one of her cabinet’s intact windows, embedding bits of glass between the knots of her fingers. 

<NO. NO YOU DON’T. YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME AGAIN. EVER. AGAIN.>

As she cracks open frame after frame and rips apart the pictures inside, the Wound tears around us. The walls of the surrounding rooms are ripped horizontally across their middle like tissue paper as their shared floors and ceilings twist in opposite directions. The whole Wound flips on to its side in a sudden and violent rotation, flinging me, beds, stools, footrests, and woven-hair dolls into the air. The furniture plummets into the rift that’s been split in the walls, falling into a familiar void of that vague, dingy impression of light coming from somewhere else; the same dim glow I saw in the gaps between Seryana’s hair-covered windows.

I burn some of my health on reflex and thrust out a hand to grab hold of some of the filthy hair strewn across the rotting wooden floors. It tears in my grip, but gives me just enough leverage for just enough time that I can manage to control my trajectory. I roll my body along the quickly steepening slope of the floor and fall into a V-shaped crook: the base of one of the original room’s corners, now all the remains of its walls.

Seryana begins to furiously ball up the scraps of the shredded photographs into a single chaotic wad, and everything bends and deforms, the world folding over us into a new arrangement — one where the space I landed in no longer exists. I pick myself up as the notch I managed to catch myself on blurs into a newly shaped floor.

When the distortion settles, the rooms have… stretched over each other, merging into a single endless tunnel that somehow looks like more of a disaster than even the blasted, broken room we were in a moment ago. It’s cluttered with too much random furniture to traverse without stepping over or onto it. Footrests with all the stuffing torn out and replaced with matted blonde hair. A two-legged table with a huge chunk of its surface simply disappeared from the side with the legs. Beds with half-rotten chairs spliced impossibly through the middle of their frames. On one of those, the chair impales the hair-effigy lying on it in two places.

<This is a place just for us. The ONLY place for us. Besides, isn’t it better this way?> she laughs, throwing her arms wide. <They were all the same anyway! A blind child’s stupid little mistakes! There is only you, my love. There was only ever you.>  

“…Why?” I ask. I’d guess she reacted to me looking at the hole Shona had blown through the floor, but I just got here. I came in on my own. I’m not going to run away when neither of us had done anything. 

Seryana says nothing, only twirling and laughing like she’s playing in the snow. <Before, when I called you an anchor? I meant it! But that wasn’t how I meant it! We need anchors, don’t we? We need a way to hold ourselves in place in this world that never stops spinning and spinning around us!>

There’s so many of those hair-dolls, scattered through the opened Wound. Maybe a dozen in sight from here, counting the one whose photo-face she smashed during her tantrum right before Shona and I left this place. How long has she been doing this? How many “one and only true loves” had she been through before I found her? 

<Darling? Daaarling? I’ve been working so hard to build a home for us. Don’t you want to share it with me already? We can break it in however you like. Hit me, touch me, anything you need! All I ask in return is for you to keep being my anchor. Forever.>

And if this is how she acts when something doesn’t go to plan… how did she even last this long? 

<I WISH YOU’D BE A LITTLE MORE GRATEFUL INSTEAD OF SITTING THERE LIKE A USELESS PIECE OF TRASH,> Seryana snarls. Her body melts, then bubbles back up from the floor right in front of me. Scrawled tears and black gunk ooze through her mask. She clutches my cheek in one ragged hand before I can dart away, squeezing painfully, and as she meets my gaze again, the same dark gunk creeps over the corners of my eyes, as if it’s leaking out from my own skull—

~~~

A hand slams into my cheek with enough force to knock me over. My wrist twists as I try and fail to break my fall, crumpling to the ground like a discarded doll. Sometimes that feels like all I am, on days like this, but it’s okay. It’s just how it is. Sometimes he just gets upset. If this is what he needs, I can handle it.

Those same rough hands pull me up by my hair, screaming into my face. I can live with the pain, for him. The words, those are the worst part, and worse than ever today. They feel like knives tearing tiny bits of my soul away, sliver by sliver.

Flecks of spittle pour out of him with every word, his voice a storm of rage and pain spoken in a distorted blur of noise, like I’m hearing them underwater. It still sounds familiar, though. It sounds like… my father’s? The outline of the man holding me up matches the one who left me on the seventh floor, but everything is so wet and blurry, and his face… it’s scratched out of reality, hidden behind a scribbly black veil.

Finally, he drops me again. I collapse uselessly to my knees as he backs away. He stares down at what’s left of me. Time falls away from us, but when he finally speaks again, it’s… different. Quieter. He apologizes. He tells me he’s no good. He says he shouldn’t be here anymore. He storms off upstairs without another word.

I don’t want that, though. He’s a complicated person, yes, but that’s just how he is. I still love him. All of him. And if he didn’t have me, how much worse would it be? For him, for me, for everyone? And he’s… all I have.

So I go to him. To hold him, to tell him so, to pull the misery out of him so we can carry it together. No one person can carry all the weight inside them, after all.

And I find him
his empty shell, hanging from the ceiling
blood on his fingers, clawmarks on his neck, scratching, scratching

and everything I am leaks out like blood through the wounds he left me with.

Only… through it all, beneath the weight of the end of everything, another voice whispers. My voice. None of this matches, she says. None of it makes sense. The events, the feelings behind them, none of them fit the version of Dad in my mind. That version is… he’s hardly really there. He’s barely ever given me this much attention at all. And in the times he did, the only reason it hurt was because I knew I would have to ration out that little mote of love for who knows how long until the next.

Why him? Why is he here? 

Because he’s just the closest thing she can find when she looks into me. Because this pain is not mine. This life is not mine. None of it matters to me. There’s no reason for me to drown in it, no reason to feel it at all.

So I vomit it up like I have so much pollution before.

~~~

I return to the Wound, to myself, on my knees over a fresh puddle of dark ichor, wreathed in cold mist like breaths on a winter day. Seryana stands over me, her face buried in her hands, weeping in rough, choked sobs.

<I’m sorry I’m sorry I don’t want you to hurt but I’ve missed you so much and now I don’t know what to do, how to make you remember, I just don’t know how to be anymore…>

And in her tears, her desperation as she throws every horrible thing she can think of at me, I see the answer to my own question.

It makes sense how she did what she did. The same way it’s taken me so long to get this far. She hid, slowly gnawing away on one person at a time until they couldn’t take it anymore — and who could? I doubt I could live through an endless torrent of this, if I didn’t already know she was dying.

When she finished her meal, she’d vanish, find a new anchor, and repeat the cycle somewhere completely different, doing it all through disposable effigies of herself meant to be broken and destroyed over and over. In exchange for rendering Seryana practically untouchable in a direct confrontation, the effigies couldn’t actually do anything impressive on their own, couldn’t even move away from the anchor, but… they didn’t take much investment. Seryana could eat up her anchor’s aggression without a care in the world, certain she was getting more than she lost. Her effigies had probably even been swallowing up my plague, only to be amputated before the infection could be transferred to Seryana’s whole – at least enough for it to stick.

For a normal human, or even Shona blindly blasting Seryana’s sock-puppets away, there was nothing at all they could do. In truth, though, she probably wasn’t any stronger than Irakkia or Esonei were, given how similar their tricks were; maybe weaker, even. I was probably just the first Keeper to smell her out and get her attention, and I spent days coming at her the wrong way. Playing the game she set me up to play. That was her gimmick all along.

But here, where the real Seryana lives… she overextended this afternoon when she first dragged me into her heart, allowing my infection into her sanctum. Now she’s done it again, and I can already see her world falling apart with no new effort from me.

I can’t pretend to understand why she would expose herself like that in the first place, but maybe it’s simply the common sense of a demon who feeds on hurting others until they hurt her back as hard as possible. To Seryana, that’s what love is, and for her, love is everything.

<Ohh, I know! I know what would be fun!> Suddenly, she straightens up, beaming through her oozing tears, and sweeps a rotting hand over the chamber. <You see all of these worthless monuments to people who never even tried to care the way you do? I’ve been making a new one, a better one! Just for you! A place to store all of our most beautiful memories! We won’t have to dig for them at all!>

A new curio cabinet falls abruptly through the ceiling, crashing to the floor a few feet away from us. It rattles unsteadily as it touches down, until Seryana runs to it and hugs it, holding it desperately in place. 

<Come! Come see!> she gurgles.

…You know what? Fine. It can’t be any worse than that blood-blending machine Yurfaln made for me. Strangely enough, I actually feel nearly as calm as that sentiment sounds. I’m still on edge, of course, still ready for any last surprises Seryana throws at me, but… now that I’ve begun to unravel her, I feel more confident than against any Harbinger I’ve ever faced. As the Wound continues to crack and peel around me, deep inside, I know this is already over.

My rot is already closing in on her heart, so I can tell: whatever special something let Aulunla pour everything it was and could ever be into one last frenzied struggle… Seryana just doesn’t have.

This cabinet Seryana is so eager to show me looks brighter and cleaner than the others, at a glance, but that’s just because there’s no thick film of old hair caked around it. Only rings of wet locks of hair decorated with little black feathers around each window.

And the framed pictures inside are all of me. 

Me rescuing Seryana’s last victim, rotting her to nothing in the process. Me in his house, dangling from the edge of a room that no longer existed. Me in the shower with Seryana draping herself around me from behind, me at Missing Lake screaming while she needled me about the woman I left to die, me in her Wound jumping into Shona’s lightning.

She opens a window near the bottom and pulls out the photo inside, sighing happily as she stares at it. Through the fraying thumb of her rope-hand, she traces over it, I can make it out: this one is of me holding Banva on the floor.

<Remember this? Remember when I choked the life from that disgusting thief just like you did to yourself? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just… I had to. You understand, don’t you? Don’t you? I couldn’t let anyone take you away AGAIN.> 

She giggles at her words, and while there’s a faint undercurrent of nervous energy to the sound… it’s enough to make me want to take that picture and smash it over her head. To smash all of them before I waste her away to nothing.

But Banva’s alive. She’s lived through a nightmare and it’s all my fault, but she did live. She’ll recover. Because, from the start, Seryana really was that weak, and could only lash out against the people around me so much. It wouldn’t change anything to give Seryana what she clearly wants.

And if that’s the best she has left, we’re finished here.

“I don’t care,” I say, laughing to myself. 

<…What?> Seryana says. She freezes, photo frame still in hand, her voice drained of its sickly-sweet affect.

“I don’t care what else you have to show me. There’s nothing I even need to do here anymore, and I don’t think you can make me stay.” She’s already dying. All I have to do is let her.

Experimentally, I sink a burst of death into the filthy floor beside us. My power gnaws through the layer of grime and into the surface beneath, a hundred years of rot eating into the wooden boards in a span of seconds. Soon, there’s a yawning black pit in the ground, big enough for me to slip through and still steadily expanding.

<No no no stop that what are you DOING?> Seryana seethes. Just another tantrum. <Where else do you think there is for us to go? Don’t you realize how much I love you? Do you want me to kill myself that badly?> She throws the photo away and grabs my shoulders, staring at me through her mask with eyes caked in dark ooze, but… that’s all. I’ve seen what she can do now, what she wanted so badly to shove into my mind. It’s only a little harder to keep her out than it is to shield myself from everyday diseases.

Because for everything broken and horrible about me, all the damage I’ve done, I’m nothing like her. I don’t have to exist the way she does, circling around in a prison of my own pain, and I’ve already done everything I need to here. I’m done with her, and very soon, whatever’s left of her will help me along my own way.

Seryana scratches frantically at her own arms, moving as if to peel herself open the way she did when she opened her Wound. <Fine! If you hate me so much, I’ll do it! I WILL TEAR MYSELF APART SO YOU CAN NEVER HURT ME AGAIN.>

“Do it. I’ll wait.”

And I hop through my hole, dropping back into the void between Wound and world.

~~~

I step out into the night. A cool breeze passes by, rushing through my newly whitened hair. Behind me, Seryana slaps the earth with her too-long arms of woven blonde hair, gibbering out a chain of shrill curses that stopped making any sense some time ago. I ignore her.

Instead, I take note of my surroundings. We’re still in front of that demolished house with the overgrown lawn Aisling’s information led me to, but looking at it now, it’s in a bit of a strange place for it to be. This isn’t exactly a residential area, but more of a city block, with businesses closed at this hour surrounding the torn down house on all sides. On the opposite side of the street, there’s a wall of high-rise buildings lined up next to each other; they’re far from skyscrapers, but they’re more than tall enough to cast a long shadow over the remnants of what was once someone’s home.

The place where Seryana was born might have been a holdover from pre-war Claris that just hadn’t been removed yet. That’s probably why it was torn down so quickly. My walk to get here might have taken longer than I thought, because everything around us is surprisingly vacant, but that’s for the best when a Keeper is facing down a Harbinger in its death throes. Everything is bundled in an air of stillness and silence – all except for Seryana, wailing into the void.

And that’s when a cold sweat trickles down my spine.

<YOU, you-you-youyouyouyouyouyouyou—>

The atmosphere becomes heavy, as if I’ve suddenly been thrust to the bottom of the sea. There’s a pressure so intense that it sends tremors through my body. My stomach drops. The hairs on my neck rise. My heart quakes in my chest.

And it’s not because of a Harbinger.

<I’ll kill you, I’llkillyou, HOW DARE YOU, I’LL KI—>

Even Seryana’s voice deadens in the air as I turn back from the demolished house to face her. She’s raised one of her braided arms as if to lash out and strike me, but in the moment that new presence crashes over us like a tidal wave dragging us into its depths, she hesitates for just an instant, as if overwhelmed by panic too quickly for her to comprehend.

There’s no time for either of us to react.

A flash of scarlet. A shaft made of red light cuts through the air above Seryana. Its glare against the windows of the high-rise building behind her looks almost like a timelapse of the twilight sun falling beneath the horizon. 

The spear touches down, skewering straight through Seryana – not piercing through her other end and into the ground, but instead seeming to imbed itself deep within her.

The Harbinger’s shriek of agony rings out through the night, raking against my eardrums.

The spear of light sheds its crimson glow, dispelling the shadows which pool at the foot of the tower blocks. I expect Seryana’s form to crumble away and reappear elsewhere, but she doesn’t. She simply writhes and flails in place like an insect that’s been pinned alive. For some reason, she can’t escape.

Up above, a floating figure appears out of thin air and gradually descends from on high. As if emerging from nowhere, his body seems to come into tangible focus bit by bit the nearer he draws to the spear’s light, starting from his greaved boots and quickly working up to the sharp, angular visor of his mask, until I can see him in his entirety.

Hooded in a studded white mantle trimmed with red, a thin layer of metallic plating armoring his torso and limbs. His almost priestlike coat flutters gently as he hovers downward.

“Well now. Fancy meeting you out here, Ill Wind.”

It’s none other than the Stardust Seraph in the flesh, addressing me directly.

Points of light appear all around him and begin to swiftly swirl through the air, swarming in a formation like two tornadoes sprouting from his back. Those cinder-spark motes mold themselves into the shape of feathers, and as they spiral around in twin vortexes, they begin to arrange themselves into a pattern and stick together, soon creating two great wings formed entirely from crimson light, spreading brilliantly at the Seraph’s sides. They shine off the windows of the building behind him, haloing him in their radiance.

Given the sheer force of his aura, at first I thought he was flaring, but now I realize this oppressive sensation is concentrated entirely on the spot. There’s nothing about his presence that resounds beyond the immediate area, it’s just blaring down on me and Seryana without a care. When a giant walks, their footfalls shake the earth by default.

“See, I sensed something nasty tugging on my feathers, so I came to investigate,” he says, his mask tilting from me to Seryana.

As if on cue, the Harbinger howls, glaring up at him with all her fury.

For a moment, he freezes, hanging in mid-air. I almost move to intervene, but then I hear the echo of his tongue clicking in his mask.

“So that’s your deal, huh? Bad move, though. The only thing shoving a dead person in my face is going to do…”

A gleam kindles a third of the way down the length of the spear Seryana is impaled upon. Its glow diffuses in opposite directions, intersecting horizontally through the red lance to form a crucifix of light. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening just by looking, but the Seraph is concentrating his magic at that point and matching it to Seryana somehow, similar to how he first pinned her in place.

“…is piss me off.”

A pathetic choking gasp escapes from Seryana’s body, then a strangled snarl, followed by a screech of pure agony as she’s forcibly pried open. It’s just like every time she tried to swallow me into her Wound, but this time, she never stops opening.

<ITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTS>

Flesh begins to regurgitate out of the hole that is Seryana like a frog heaving out its entire gut. Everything within is being forced outside. Black ooze gushes from the eyeholes of her mask.

Just like every time before now, this Seryana was just another effigy… but every effigy I’ve encountered was connected to the same source, the same heart. The Seraph’s spear has punctured through the effigy and all the way into her Wound, so now she can’t just cast off the effigy like a lizard discarding its tail and escape.

Pieces of rotten furniture – chair legs, torn pillows, and shredded bed frames – all begin to spew out from inside Seryana as she’s ripped asunder and folded inside out. They spill all around her flailing, gurgling body in a heap of gradually accumulating debris, until at long last, she coughs up one final, lone intact object:

A curio cabinet, of course.

It’s launched through the air and lands with a clatter in the middle of the street between the Seraph and me. Our eyes follow its trajectory, drawn to it the moment we see it.

A collection of photos is strewn about inside, but all the faces are scribbled out. There’s only one photo with a frame, and it has two people in, a man and a woman standing on a pier before a beautiful sunset, holding each other close.

The woman’s face has a wide, strained smile scribbled on in a way that looks just like Seryana’s own.

The man’s face is cut out of the photo entirely.

<please, please please please please no no no no no no no no>

I don’t know if it’s been the same cabinet I’ve always seen whenever I entered Seryana’s Wound, since the form and contents have been slightly different each time, but it doesn’t matter. Both the Seraph and I know what this is just by looking.

And as Seryana whimpers pleadingly, stretching out one desperately grasping arm of braided hair towards the curio cabinet, the Seraph holds one hand up, spreading out his fingers, and then slowly lowers it, inch by inch. As he does, the curio cabinet begins to rattle against the street. Not a second later, cracks rive across its glass windows, first in long, singular streaks, then in an all-encompassing web of fractures.

<NONONONO PLEASE PLEASE WAIT PLEASE WAIT DON’T NO NOT THAT PLEASE NOT THAT>

The cabinet seems to blur as if enveloped in a heat haze, and then fluidly flattens against the ground as though made of rubber. The distortion disappears, and all at once, the cabinet collapses in on itself as if it were being crushed beneath an invisible hydraulic press. Wood splinters against the ground down to mulch. Glass crumbles from the sheer force until it’s nothing but dust. The particles are pressed through the photos, which practically liquify from the strain. And it all happens in an instant. With the slightest of motions, the cabinet is utterly destroyed.

<—ah—>

Seryana’s arm freezes in the air, then goes limp along with the rest of her mangled form. Her mask cracks down the middle, then falls to the ground and shatters into chunks of stone. Where Seryana’s scribbled-on face once was, there’s nothing that remains.

The crucifix of red light dissipates with a sharp, hollow pop, and Seryana’s carcass topples to the cold street. Her entire body and the rubble wreathing it is soon enveloped in grey and crumbles away in clumps of ash. Only one thing rises from the dust as it fades from our reality and into nothingness: an orb of musculature like two hearts packed together into a rough sphere, glowing with sourceless black light.

The Stardust Seraph touches down on the pavement across the street. Seryana’s heart floats between us, considerably closer to him than me.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Eyna. If that’s even your name.”

It’s getting late by the time I make it home, not that you could tell from looking out through the glass elevator at the painful glare over the flower fields. I fix the laces on my hood, drawing them tight as they can go, and peek out at the seventh floor.

I was expecting the place to be deserted, with everyone hiding in their closets the way I always used to spend Embraces, but there is a small crowd gathered in the common room, where they’ve covered the windows with heavy white shutters that only allow the smallest possible slivers of radiance in through the sides. Even those thin shafts of light twist and shift strangely along the edges of the room, like an octopus searching for a way out of its tank. Nevertheless, the patients huddled in the central space look like they’re doing their best to treat this as any other day, only most are wearing sunglasses indoors. A few of the more familiar faces look my way and wave.

“Liadain! There you are!” Banva calls from the front desk. I look at her through the corner of my eye, afraid to give her too close a look at my weird face. “Are you alright? I know you’ve, mmh, been out a lot lately, just…” She purses her lips, no doubt running through all those questions the nurses haven’t brought themselves to ask me. “Well, I’m just glad you made it back safe,” she finishes.

“I’m fine, yes. I was…” I cut myself off as yet another question occurs to me: if I was sheltering through the Embrace somewhere else, hence why I took so long to make it back… what am I doing back here before nightfall? Augh, I should have just stayed with the other Keepers until night came. It didn’t cross my mind because I’ve just had too much on it to leave any room.

Whatever. Who am I fooling anymore? She knows why I’ve been “out a lot.” Everyone who pays any attention to me probably knows. 

“Me too,” is all I say.

“And, ah, I think your sweater’s on inside out,” she adds after a moment.

I look sheepishly down at my clothing, then glance over my shoulder to examine my reflection in the window right across from the nurse’s station. “Um. Thanks. I’ll fix it in a minute,” I mumble. At least I had that much foresight. “And…” I look back over the small crowd. I can’t hide this much longer, not to anyone — well, maybe to Dad if he never shows up here again — so it really shouldn’t matter who I talk to first, but… it just does. And I don’t see the person I’m looking for anywhere.

“Do you know where Noirin is?” I ask.

Banva says nothing. When I look back at her, she’s pursed her lips and clenched one hand around the other. 

“…What is it?” I press. The words come out of my dry mouth as a strained croak. Stupid, pointless, I’m sure I already know what, but… how bad is it?

“Noirin’s…” Banva blinks and her grip tightens a little more as she sees my face head-on. She takes a breath, visibly steadying herself, but that’s all. “She wasn’t doing so well this morning. She’s in treatment now. I could check when they’re expected to finish, if you want, but… well, she may just need her rest.” 

Of course. Now of all times, of course she is. Was she already suffering when I ran off this morning? Would I already know this if I paid attention to anything but myself? Would it matter? 

“Liadain? Are you… listen, if it’s important, I could take a message, or just pass along that you’re looking to talk when she’s available…”

“No. No, that’s fine, just… it’s nothing urgent. I’ll leave her alone.”

“She’d probably be happy to know you were thinking of her,” Banva says softly. “At her age, you’re happy to hear from your kids about most anything. All the more at a time like this.”

“She has a kid, though? I’m not him.”

Banva smiles to herself. “Mm, I suppose not. Even so. I’ll pass the word along, unless you’d really rather I didn’t.”

“…Fine. If you think it’ll help. I guess I’ll try and rest myself, for now.”

“That’s a good idea. Take care,” Banva calls after me as I hurry through the main room.

~~~

I do no such thing. Back in my room, I grab my Harbinger journal, make a little tent with my bed covers and headboard, and sit there in my inside-out sweater with Pearl hugged under one arm, staring at the mostly-blank pages meant for Isobel’s new Harbinger.

Mostly, I think about Noirin.

I don’t think I could’ve done anything to help her with my magic, but I’m not certain. I ripped the disease which laid at Yurfaln’s heart out at the root, and I still have it stored in one of my cards, but that’s not at all like trying to heal a human sickness without ripping out their soul. It does at least raise a question to my vague impression that my magic just doesn’t work to heal other people. 

More importantly, I’ve never even tried to be there for Noirin, or any of the others who don’t deserve to live any less just because I don’t know them. I’ve only barely considered it. I could make up some nice-sounding reason why I didn’t, maybe even one that I believed when I first dismissed the idea. Dr. Cantillon did say treating diseases with magic was especially hard. 

Really, though, I think it was just… fear. Not even my desperate rush to save my own life, but fear of… not of getting someone’s hopes up and disappointing them, although I’m sure I would. I’m just terrified of knowing beyond a doubt that my power is — that I am a selfish, greedy monster whose magic will only ever be good for keeping me clinging to the edge of life, a few more stolen days at a time.

But it came from me. From a miserable wreck of a girl who’s never cared about anything more than not dying. Why would it be anything else? Why would I ever be able to help people? 

I hide from the Sun in my muggy tent, thinking in useless circles, until the light abruptly dims, night advancing over a minute at most rather than hours. It’s finally ending, then.

I flop out of bed and peek through the curtains at the sky. There, the Sun has mostly curled back into itself, with thin tendrils of white flame trailing behind it as it races off over the horizon, as if it has somewhere to be. As if smothering our world in burning light, searing our eyes from their sockets, and scorching our souls to ashen husks are all just its way of procrastinating.

But the halo of its passing dims from stark white to ever darkening red as it plunges beneath the horizon, finally drawing the Embrace to a close. It’s coming to an end now, off to be some other world’s problem. Taking whatever deadly answers it promises to the Eyeless with it, at least until morning.

In a few seconds more, the Sun dips fully out of view. The sky goes momentarily black before other stars flicker into being in its wake, lighting the night sky with their own shifting radiance, softer and stranger than that of the king who lords over them during the day.

After its timing today, I wouldn’t mind if it never came back.

~~~

By the time I find the nerve to go look for Noirin again, things are back to normal outside. The shutters have risen and the lounge is quiet, now mostly emptied out for the night. There’s no answer when I knock on her door, so I head for the front desk. Maybe Banva’s heard something by now. 

“Liadain? I was just about to check in on you,” the nurse greets, still at her station. Her expression suggests that maybe, for once, it’s not terrible news.

“About what?”

“Noirin will be in observation for a little while longer, but the doctors say her condition’s improving. She’s cleared to have visitors with the normal precautions, and I’m sure she’d be happy if you want to check in on her. She was glad to hear from you earlier.” 

“Oh,” I sigh, letting go of a knot of tension in my gut I’d been doing my best to ignore. “Good. That’s great.” As for talking to her right now, while she’s suffering and we’d have no privacy, maybe instead I should… no. I’ve made enough excuses, put enough hard conversations off for too long, and whether or not she’s fine for the moment, this happening at all is a harsh reminder that normal people can’t steal more time from everyone else. 

I nod. “I think I’ll do that. Where is she now?”

“In the…” 

Banva freezes. Her mouth hangs wide open as she stares… no, not at me. Something behind me, just over my shoulder. I twist my waist and crane my neck to see what she’s seen, and that’s when I hear it.

<Oh, how far you’ve wandered,> a hot, stale breath whispers into my ear. <How hard it is to see where we began from here.>

No. No. Not here, not now, she of all things cannot be what tears away the last of my transparent human disguise—

There’s nothing behind me. All that’s there to meet me is my own transparent reflection in the window right across from the nurse’s station.

A breath escapes my throat as though crushed from my lungs and my body remains tense. In the vague impression reflecting off the glass pane, I see Banva’s mirror image beside my own, behind the desk of the nurse’s station. And beside and behind Banva, a silhouette so deep it’s as though the window’s glass is tarnishing before my very eyes rises and wraps a limb around her neck.

I hear Banva’s stifled cry as I whip myself back around to face her and the nightmare I already know is waiting for me. Standing atop the desk of the nurse station is Seryana, her woven figure of sullied blonde hair contorted into the lax outline of a too-thin woman as always, but somehow, she seems even more disheveled and ruined than ever. One of her braided arms has reached down and tightened around Banva’s neck like a noose, lifting the woman up off the ground.

<No need to leave you behind, you know, you know? We can go together. To the place where the faces of everyone who’s passed through here will never fade from your worthlessly feeble memory.>

Even seeing them from afar, Seryana’s swirling-scribble eyes no longer look as empty as they did during our last encounter. Or maybe it’s just easier to see the shifting of those scratchy animated circles outside the gloom of her Wound. Tears stream down Banva’s face as she gazes behind the Harbinger’s new mask, trapped there in gibbering, petrified horror as her thoughts are swallowed by its leer.

“No, you’re not… can’t… you’re, nhght, ckgh…” Banva chokes out rough, wet denials as her throat is slowly crushed. As if those smothered cries were music, Seryana begins to chant in tune.

<no more guilt no more guilt no moRE GUILT NO MORE GUI—>

The sinuous limb holding Banva up is severed in an instant. The card I sent spinning through the air slices clean through it at the midpoint before whirling back around for me to catch it. Seryana reels back and shrieks in agonized delight as her form crumbles away into thin air, leaving behind only her noose-hand clutching Banva’s throat as she collapses to the floor.

I rush into the nurses station and fall to my knees at Banva’s side, using the edge of my conjured card to quickly but carefully cut through the rope of grimy hair wrapped around her neck. The illness the card dyed itself with when it made contact with Seryana makes quick work of the lingering strands, and when I throw the weave away, it doesn’t even manage to touch the ground before it’s already decayed into nothing.

Banva is bigger than me, but I burn some of my stored health without even thinking about it to be able to turn her over. Physically, the only damage I can see is the red and purple bruising around her neck, but her eyes are wide open and bloodshot, and her whole body is rigid with mute horror.

“Banva, Banva! Can you hear me?! Are you okay? Please, please say something…!” I plead while cradling her head. There’s no response, except for the trembling breaths passing between her lips. Seryana must have been attacking her mind as well, when she was looking into her eyes.

My cheeks burn. A few tears trickle down my face and on to the nurse’s. The nurse who learned to play shogi from a lonely patient just so he’d have someone to talk to and share it with, who’d bring me meals to order when I woke up in the middle of the night and vomited my stomach out, who’s only ever worried for me and done her best to help me.

A single frayed finger, already rotting and burning away at the ends in tiny embers of cold green fire, reaches from behind me and wipes the stream of my tears gently away. Then, as I look back, Seryana lifts up her new mask to put that damp coil of rope into her scrawled mouth, as if to clean her fingers after a meal, and bites down, gnawing furiously on her own form.

<How miserable it is to wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and WAIT while you tether yourself to ANYONE BUT ME!> she wails through the sounds of tearing sinew and, inexplicably, crunching bones. <I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be dragged along and along on these strings of suffering while you won’t so much as look my way I can’t I CAN’T I cAn’T—>

I duck beneath the semicircular desk of the nurses station, but not to hide. I need to make sure Banva gets help before I get out of here and take Seryana with me. At least, she should follow me, but… if she doesn’t, I’ll stay. I’ll make sure she can’t hurt anyone.

I frantically scan the counter’s underside. In every hospital, there’s always a chance that an angry or unstable patient, a distraught family member, or an intruder might cause an incident, and that’s to say nothing of Harbingers. For emergencies like those, it’s common for nurses stations to have panic buttons hidden under the desk, and I’ve been in and out of hospitals more than long enough to know about them.

My eyes finally land on a plastic module with a toggle switch on the side and a pair of circular buttons, one red and the other purple. There’s two buttons to distinguish between incidents involving people and disasters involving Harbingers; if I had to guess what the switch did, it toggles the alarm between a silent and a loud, but I can’t be sure. I’m not even sure which of the buttons on this one applies to humans or Harbingers, so I just press down both.

A little red light on the module begins to blink wildly in response, and that’s good enough for me.

I’m sure Seryana can feel my terror at the idea of her staying put and choosing my home as her battleground. I’m sure she’d do that if she could. I’m just betting what’s left of my life on the idea that she can’t, that she’s as tethered to me as she says. Everything I know about how she works tells me that she works through me. They’ll be safe when I’m gone. I won’t be back until she’s dead, and after that… I’ll deal with what comes after that when I get there.

And sure enough, when the elevator door slides open and my reflection in the dark glass comes into view, Seryana still stands behind me, the same looming, distorted mass as before.

<It hurts to share your blood, you know. It really, really hurts,> she whines. <It sounds like something beautiful, doesn’t it? Opening ourselves up, letting one another’s essence mingle in our veins… a part of you living in me, always!> 

I fish my phone out of my pocket, doing my best to ignore her, and search for “truths lantern.” Aisling’s reef is the first result. I blur through its pages until I find her details, buried halfway down the staff page, and call her.

<But no. It can’t be, since there is NO LIFE IN YOU. NO LOVE. There’s only PAIN and SPITE and MISERY and NEVER ANYTHING ELSE.> I jump as a fraying fist slams on the glass beside my head, nearly fumbling my phone.

“…Hello?”

“Yes it’s me I know what you said about using magic but I have to,” I babble. “Seryana. She followed me home and stormed into a hospice full of normal people, she’s hurt someone I know, and I’m going to kill her.”

<Was there ever anything else? I don’t know why I ever cared. I don’t know why I STILL care. What am I still doing here, dearest?>

“Eugh,” Aisling winces. “Now I know how that sounds through a phone… alright. Please slow down and tell me what you need from me.”

“Um. Sorry. Given the thing you were warning us about, exactly what is not safe about me using magic right now? If I need to, which I do, what do I need to know to do it… the safest way possible?”

“Call for backup and let someone else handle this one,” Aisling says without hesitation. “…Which I assume you don’t consider an option.” 

<But here I am. Here I always will be. No matter how much you hate me, I can’t give up on you.> Seryana’s rotting fingers reach out and slink along my hand. I bat her away, tightening my grip on my phone. 

“That depends. Will using magic kill me? Or drag me into some fate worse than death?”

“No, but bear with me a moment. I know you’re in a hurry, but the risks involved in spontaneous Emergence are… metaphysically complex. Of course they are,” Aisling admits as a tinge of frustration creeps into her tone. “You won’t die, but if something goes wrong, you might… lose control over aspects of yourself, is the simplest way to put it. Of your power, your faculties, your actions. Of what you’re becoming. Think of it as Emergence that isn’t part of the normal growth process, isn’t especially likely to empower you, and may not align with what you’d actually want for yourself. I know you weren’t too distraught about what happened earlier, so for some necessary context as to how bad this can get, I believe Niavh Fianata did what she did during one of these episodes.”

“…Oh.” I wasn’t convinced until that last part. “Okay, that does sound serious. I’m going to avoid that at all costs, but there’s still a Harbinger in my home who I’m really sure I can kill. What triggers spontaneous Emergence? What makes it worse? Tell me how to do what I need to do, not what I should do instead.”

“Yeah, that’s about what I figured you’d say,” Aisling mutters. “How urgent is the situation there? You clearly aren’t fighting her while we have this conversation. Are you?”

“No. Just trying to lead her away from home. It looks like she’s still attached to me.” 

“Good. In that case, as I understand it, you’re most at risk for spontaneous Emergence when you’re reaching with your magic. Trying to do something you’ve never done before, or on a scale that’s new to you. Magic isn’t a muscle, you can’t wear it out or strain it just doing what you normally do — the danger comes when your soul is shifting to accommodate something new. How confident are you that you can handle this one with your usual toolkit?”

“As confident as I can be of anything about Harbingers?” Seryana gained something, some sort of power beyond what she usually had since she put on the other Harbinger’s mask, but I’ve already seen it in action. I know how it works, and it’s not a problem for me.

“Fine. Then just… do your best to do that. And give me a minute. I might have something more specific for you.” She abruptly ends the call, leaving me alone with Seryana as the elevator opens on the ground floor. I run for the closest back exit. Coarse fingers squirm along my shoulder and squeeze. A spectral anchor trailing behind me, but not one heavy enough to actually hold me back.

I glance around the garden-lined walkways behind the hospital, transforming as soon as I confirm there’s no one else around. Something’s changed this time, though. As wisps of light and shadow wrap around me, two entwine themselves into a long, thin shape floating at my side. Instinctively, I reach out for it, and it solidifies into a walking cane, carved from some ink-black wood, but constructed with a perfectly practical derby handle and flat rubber tip. Not a weapon, no more than the rest of my regalia. It’s just a new tool my magic’s offered me, perhaps responding to my acceptance that I do need it, at least for now, and I’m not hiding my health or my power from anyone perceptive. 

I’ll take it. I lead Seryana as far from the hospital as I can, pushing along through the sickening tugs and pressures of her presence, until my phone chimes.

“Liadain? Holding up alright?” Aisling asks.

“I guess? She’s still following me,” I say.

<Stop it STOP IT why does everyone want to steal YOU of all people? You’re only beautiful when you bREaK and you’ve already done all your BreAKInG with me. They can’t even look at you and remember what it was like when you were a real person so why won’t all those seeping bags of trash just LEAVE US BE ALREADY?> Seryana screeches, ripping out thick clumps of her hair as long as I am tall.

“…Which was the goal, right? Good.” Aisling’s a little quieter when she speaks again, probably holding her phone at a distance. Seryana keeps on wailing and thrashing. Since I’m holding a cane, I don’t have a hand free to plug my uncovered ear, so instead I press it to my shoulder while my phone covers the other. It does almost nothing to keep out the kind of noise a Harbinger makes.

“I’ll keep this quick as I can: there’s a local Keeper who checks recent crimes and deaths for signs of Harbinger involvement — wildly out of character actions, lingering impressions at the scene of the event or on any survivors, et cetera — and flags them as suspicious or all-too-human. You described Seryana as somehow elusive, manifesting without really being there. If you’re still having trouble getting to her core, finding where she came from and going there might help bait her out or pin her down. Locations like that are important to Cluster As sometimes.” 

“Makes sense. So what? Did you find her there?” 

As Aisling speaks, Seryana picks herself up and continues trailing off me. She doesn’t seem to have the strength or speed to tear my phone away, only to wrap her decaying hands around my limbs and tug, forcing me to shake her away over and over. <Look at me. Look at me. Please look at me,> she babbles all the while.

“Possibly. I have three cases that look like potential matches for your stalker,” Aisling says through the noise. “A double suicide in the Weald, souls either taken or transmigrated before anyone could test for corruption. A man who committed suicide in his home, after which his wife vanished without a trace. A domestic murder-suicide where the killer left a note about… ‘saving her from the things under the floor.’ Routine check found traces of Harbinger influence around the death sites for those last two. Nothing conclusive, could’ve even been unrelated entities passing through, but they’re the best matches I’ve got. I’m sending you the forest landmark and the two addresses.”

“…Okay. Thank you.” I can use this. It’s not like I had a destination beyond ‘far away from home’ in mind. Honestly, if any one of these is where I need to go, and she found it in the last few minutes based on what little she’s seen and my vague description of what Seryana was like, that’s ridiculously impressive.

“Be careful. Check in when you’re done, or if you need anything else,” Aisling says, and ends the call.

“Alright,” I murmur to myself. I flick Seryana’s fingers away as she tries to pull my hood down. “Let’s take the worst walk ever.”

~~~

It takes all my willpower, bolstered by my memory of shoots of rope growing from Shona’s bleeding eyes, not to kill Seryana ten times over the next hour. My only breaks from her constant putrid whirlwind of affection and animosity come when we pass other night walkers. They’re a little rarer than usual today, but Seryana giggles and cheers every time I yell at someone to get out of the way. Then, inevitably, she’ll try to hug me, or squeeze my hand, swing our arms happily, and attempt to lead us off in some other random direction, and the cycle begins again when she interprets my refusal to follow along as proof that I hate her and want to abandon her.

Of Aisling’s destinations, the murder house is closest, so that’s where we head first. It’s locked and deserted, save for the FOR SALE sign in the front lawn. I can feel faint traces of the presence that was here — it smells like opening a book and finding maggots nesting between the pages. It’s nothing like Seryana, and she pays it no mind, so I head for the next house. If I have to take her to the Weald, I don’t know what I can do except walk all night or call Shona for a ride. I don’t know which idea is worse.

But I don’t.

Seryana goes strangely quiet as we approach our second destination… or what remains of it.

At the address Aisling sent me to, there’s just an overgrown lawn in front of the wreckage of a freshly-demolished house. The construction equipment still parked beside it hasn’t yet had time to clear away the ruins, it seems. If there was anything to come back to here, it’s gone now.

But the remains do still feel distantly like Seryana. The Harbinger herself shifts around what once would have been the front facade, looking what’s left of her birthplace over.

<Well. Have you been listening after all, dear?> she asks after a long pause. Her mask’s blank smile spreads into a grin. <This doesn’t matter, not really. All that matters is that you listen to me. Look at me. I keep telling you, if you would look my way for just a moment, you’d understand that I am here to help you. I’m the only one who ever has been.>

“Okay. Here I am. What is it?” I turn on the Harbinger, glaring into the wild dancing lines of her eyes behind the slots of that stone mask, the only part of her not yet ragged with the corrosion of my ever-progressing scourge. If she wants to talk, fine. I’ll take anything I can use to break her once and for all.

<Finally. This is good. This is right. We’ve always felt safer in the dark, haven’t we?> Seryana sighs. <But you see… there are other worlds than this. Better ones. There are worlds the Sun can never reach, never wrap its coils around and strangle and burn everything beautiful out of. Worlds with no chains of sense and structure to hold us apart, to keep us from being fully, forever us. That’s why this miserable little place doesn’t matter anymore! We carry everything we need from it inside ourselves!>

Her mask tilts upwards as she looks up to the stars, and the locks of braided hair that make up her hands press together as though in mocking imitation of prayer.

<I have seen such things, my love, oh, such wonderful things! Things I want so badly to touch and share and become.>

Yet Seryana’s posture of fervent hope slackens as the living effigy of woven hair she uses to represent herself slumps over despondently, then begins to convulse in distress that quickly warps into fury.

<But wherever we go, whatever we do, we have to do together. And YOU WON’T LET ME. YOU ARE AN ANCHOR BOLTED TO MY HEART AND ALL YOU EVER DO IS EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO DRAG IT OUT OF MY CHEST.>

Seryana jolts forward, squeezing my shoulders in both hands and wrapping a third arm, sprouted suddenly from her thick fall of hair, around my waist. She stretches out with me as I take a shuddering step back, reflexively jabbing my cane into what should be her chest — where it finds no purchase, only digging into a tangle of hair like a pole planted in a swamp.

She plays along, though, wailing in agony and throwing herself back as violently as if I’d been a car crashing into her.

<I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,> she whimpers. Patches of the dark scribbles that form her face drip down her mask like black, sludgy tears. <I’m just… this is just what I’ve become. What we’ve made each other. Things so hungry for love that we can’t help but bite down on the ones closest to us and gnaw until nothing is left. All I want is for us to be whole. You understand, don’t you? Please. You have to. No one else will. I can’t change without you. I can’t make it anywhere, can’t be anything without you.>

…That really doesn’t tell me much. Does she want to go somewhere else? Become something else? Go somewhere with me, unite with me somehow, or get rid of me so she can be free of my weight around her ankle? This is the first time she’s mentioned anything about these other worlds… is that something she heard from Isobel’s Harbinger? It’s not like a Harbinger to take on someone else’s obsession as their own, just like that.

The more I think about it, the more I think even she isn’t sure what she wants.

An idea comes to me. A wild, pointless idea, but one I don’t think it hurts me to try. 

“…There’s a way we can do that. Right now,” I say. 

This would be a lot easier if she could understand anything I said. I put a hand to my chest, reach out to her as if to help her up, then bring it to the other, cupping them over my heart. 

“Give me your heart. We don’t have to go through this whole thing. You don’t have to do this anymore.” And she wouldn’t be the first. Yurfaln’s offering was more symbolic than anything, a choice made when it had no other, but Seryana’s already asked for this. Haphazardly, alongside other contradictory things, and no doubt with her own idea of what it would mean and how it should go, but… still.

Seryana squeaks wordlessly, like she’s trying and failing to choke something out through her tears. She twitches her head to one side and stands, staggering this way and that…

And laughs. She hugs herself, twisting her limbs into knots, and cackles endlessly into the night. I already know covering my ears won’t do a thing to blot out the noise.

<IDIOT. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND AT ALL. YOU NEVER DID. IDIOT. IIIIIIIIIIIIDIOT.>

Finally, she falls silent. She takes a few slow, lurching steps forward, glowering down at me with wide eyes half-covered by thick strands of hair. Those scribbled tears keep falling in streams.

<You cannot do that,> she says, her voice low and cold and flat as it’s ever been. <You cannot expect me to forget everything you’ve done to me just like that. Not when I see you the way I do now. I look into you and there is nothing there. I can open up your heart and see that YOU LOVE NOTHING.> Her hands all scratch desperately at the others, peeling her limbs apart from the fingers up the way I might pick at a cracked cuticle.

<Is there anything left in there? Any of you to reunite with? Show it to me! Come to me! Give yourself to me! Pour yourself into the cracks you made! Plant seeds beneath my skin so that something beautiful can grow in the ravaged fields you left behind! BREAK WHATEVER REMAINS OF ME ALL OVER AGAIN!>

And Seryana tears herself apart, ripping her own body into an inside-out knot of splayed hair and raw flesh, all emanating from a gaping hole in the world that pants out humid waves of putrid breath. Fall into me of your own free will, she says without saying. Fall and fall and never come out. 

And what happens then, in her mind? Where do we go? Do either of us ever leave that pit?

I remember what Seryana named herself. What she first said to me. I don’t think I could ever forget anything spoken in that language.

You cannot be happy. I cannot be happy. No end goal, no way out.

Seryana is fundamentally not like the other Harbingers I’ve killed. They had dreams. Goals bigger than the world they were doing everything they could to bring into being. I still don’t understand Irakkia, but I felt enough of its desperate yearning to be anywhere but where it was to include it among them. And the ones I fully absorbed…

Yurfaln’s dream was insane, yes, but it was clear what it wanted and why. There’s even ways I can imagine it growing into something that kind of made sense, if it hadn’t seen suffering as a goal in itself. Maybe a person with its outlook could’ve developed some sort of palliative care magic, which I never would’ve liked, but ending death or even disease for everyone are dreams so wild I’d have no idea where to start with them. As long as there are humans getting sick and dying, someone needs to ease their pain as best they can.

And Aulunla… there was nothing wrong with what Aulunla and Isobel wanted for themselves except the price they were willing to make others pay for it. Given what I’ve done to people and let them do, I hardly have the high ground there. The only difference between us isn’t much of one at all — my feeling bad about it changes nothing for the people I’ve hurt. Or the woman I left to die without ever knowing she existed.

What does Seryana want? What would a world where she won look like? A perfect match where she and one other victim torture each other in just the right ways for eternity? This nightmare she lives in, this play she’s acted out over and over… it’s all she has. All she is. It’s sad, it’s pathetic, but in one strange, sick way, it’s for the best.

Because this time, everyone will be happier when Seryana is gone. Even Seryana.

The Solar Embrace bears down on Missing Lake like a rainshower of light, heavy curtains of white radiance spilling over the breadth of the clearing. The shoreline is vacant, only clefts in the disturbed soil and small, quickly dispersing piles of dust visible as signs a struggle had taken place. Hidden beneath that, however, is a wealth of clues imperceptible to a human’s natural senses alone.

Amidst the heavenly glare, a lone figure emerges from the treeline. Somehow, the uncanny brilliance of the scenery befits him, as though the world is a mural he’s been painted into as its centerpiece. He strolls casually down the incline towards the shore, his long hair flowing behind him like threads of gold glimmering in the light. Scanning over the basin, he drinks everything in with an eager smile.

Two Harbingers. One whose lingering presence is sticky and foul like the leavings of a slug’s trail. The other is distant, yearning, unfinished, but catches in the eye like a speck you just can’t rub out. It’s easy to place where each had ripped into the world to open up passage to their Wounds, but both are long gone by now.

Just as interesting are the echoes of Screaming Hymn and Big Sis.

Out in the clearing where the grasses are trampled and deep gashes have been rent and gouged into the earth, Shona’s presence is somewhat clear, but only somewhat, and nothing looks like it’s been charred or set on fire. All evidence points to Mide, then – not that she was all that noticeable on her own. But why was the sullen knight without the full impact of her chipper ward blaring in her wake? Probably had something to do with two Harbingers showing up at once… and in the middle of an Embrace at that. It didn’t ring as an unthinkable scenario by any means, but something unusual certainly must have happened.

And the other presence obviously couldn’t have been Big Sis, so that left someone using a weapon she’d blessed. It was easy to narrow down a suspect given who was most likely to be working with Shona and Mide, though. Sure enough, with enough pointed concentration, he could detect the slightest trace of Truth’s Lantern.

Were they okay? Nobody had flared in distress, but then, it’s not like anyone would have sensed it if they had already been drawn into one of the Wounds. A quick check of Lighthouse confirms Aisling hasn’t posted an incident report yet. He’ll send her and Shona a message in a bit to make sure they’re alright, but his gut feeling is that they are, if only because of the Embrace. Before that, there’s one last curiosity catching Roland’s attention.

A familiar aura is mingled with the rest. Not particularly fierce, but not as subtle as Aisling’s, either. A pretty, chilly, weepy little presence, like a cute little sister who keeps scraping her knee. It’s sprinkled around in small, concentrated points across the basin, and fading in the scorching rays of the Sun nearly as quickly as the ashen remains of whatever one of the Harbingers had tossed into the world.

Roland lets the “tug” of the nearest of those motes guide him to it. He looks down to find a black feather caught in the grass, singed at the edges by the Sun’s oppressive light. Extending a hand, he tacks a point of phantom mass to his palm and anchors it to the feather, causing the small black plume to flit off the ground and into his grasp. Holding it up to his face, his grin widens. He can use this.

“Hah,” he chuckles to the empty clearing. Shona and Mide were holding out on him. Now who should he ask about what happened here first? Aisling would give more concise info, but Shona is more likely to blab… Well, it doesn’t matter too much.

Not long now. He and Ill Wind would be meeting very soon.

Roland pockets the black feather and places his hand above his brow like a salute as he turns his ruby-red eyes directly to the Sun. Its blinding glare burnt others away like dry kindling, but he sees it differently. A great burning eye with a thousand-thousand lobes looking down on them all, its pupil, a long tear into utter blackness like a cat’s or a snake’s, carved down its center and through every concentric layer. Tendrils of white and scarlet lightning crackle across its breadth, the sheer vastness of which the Stardust Seraph doesn’t so much as consider.

“Whaddya think, big guy?” Roland welcomes the Sun’s opinion. It doesn’t deign to reply. Maybe… did the pupil contract, just a sliver of an inch? Nah, he’s kidding himself.

Idly, he wonders if he’s the only one who sees things this way. Perhaps not. He’s only ever seen one other person stare straight into the Sun as brazenly as he could and come out completely unscathed, but he has seen it happen. With Irida, of course.

~~~

As we ride toward the city proper in the back of an ambulance, Shona chatters noisily about nothing with wide eyes. Mide does her best to play along. Aisling furiously types notes into a page on her phone.

And I, surrounded by the closest thing I’ve found to friends since I checked into the seventh floor, think about loneliness.

I haven’t always been alone. I haven’t always wanted to be alone. It took me longer than most people to find my first friend, given all the time I spent in and out of hospitals, but I did find her. Well, no, Grainne did most of the work of finding me, but still. We met at my reading spot among the wild cherry trees behind our school, on a day when I was spending much more time flicking pale white blossoms out of my hair than reading, and she decided we should be friends once I explained that no, I wasn’t out there because I particularly liked the trees. (“They make those big horrible messes every Summer, so I hate them. Cherries don’t even taste that good!” she’d said.) 

So we did. We read some of the same books, she and her other friends taught me to play Champions, and I showed her what little I knew of tarot at the time. And at that age, while we were sharing something like the same life, that was enough. Maybe there were never the seeds of some lifelong bond there, but it was still my first time connecting with someone beyond my family or the rare kid near my age in the hospital.

And now she’s gone. It’s not like she ever told me “sorry, Liadain, you’re just too depressing to be around.” But her visits got rarer, and our conversations started being about less and less as she moved on into a stage of life I’d never make it to. Eventually, she just stopped checking in, and I never bothered to reach out and ask her why. I already knew, and making her say it would only hurt us both.

Eventually, everybody leaves me. They always have, they always will.

Is that still true, in this new life full of new people, or do I just… want it to be? It’s easier to push everyone away before they can do the same to me, or before I accidentally eat them or they find out that I’m even worse than they thought I was or some other awful thing I can’t even think of yet happens. 

But I can’t say anymore if it’s the best thing I can do. Things are different now. I’m a different person now. People aren’t going to treat a Keeper the same way as a nobody with a few months to live. And yes, if Dad or Grainne or anyone else who’d already decided I’m not worth the trouble changes their mind now, I’ll probably ignore them, but this is different. I’m not going to get stuck up on some stupid question like whether these girls only want anything to do with me because I can break reality with my mind when I wouldn’t know who any of them were if they couldn’t.

So why does letting them come so close still feel so much like letting someone point a knife at my heart?

“Eyna? Eyna, hey, you listening? You alive? Eeeeynaaa!”

“Mmh?” I mumble.

“Yeah, I was just asking if you needed anything before they dropped you off at the ho… at home. Uh, that is where you’re staying for now, right?”

“…Yes. And, um, I can heal myself, I’ll be fine there, so… I don’t know. Not really. Unless you have a sweater big enough to hide all this under.” I pinch a thin strand of smoke-white hair between my fingers and tug, not quite pulling it out.

“But why? It’s so cool! Everyone’s gonna love…” Shona trails off, seeming to recognize that she’s saying something dumb. “Uh, right. EVERYONE is maybe an important word there for you, huh? Yeah, well, anyway… I don’t have one ON me, but we could probably figure that out! Wanna go shopping?”

I point out the back windows. Despite their dark tint, shafts of painfully bright light leak into the car. “How?”

“Same way we got those glasses on the way here, duh! There’s people sheltering in stores. If four Keepers come by while they’re there, that’s nothing to worry about! It’ll probably make their day, if anything!” 

Mide squints out the window. “We still don’t want to be wandering around in that light.” I nod in emphasis. 

“Only a little shopping, then! First, closest place we can find! And I mean, which do you want LESS, Eyna: a little more sun or to show everyone your awesome metal blood-thing?”

Ugh. She has a point.

“The emergency responders ferrying us around might have other things to do, too,” Aisling notes, not looking up from her phone or slowing her pace at all.

Shona scowls, looking around the cabin until she spots the big red PUSH TO TALK button on the intercom in the back, and reaches past Mide to push it. “Hey guys, big thanks again for the lift! So listen, is there any way we could make a real quick stop? One of us needs to pick something up on the way home.”

“…Probably? Where?” the driver’s voice crackles back.

“Uh, one second on that! Thanks!” Shona folds her arms and grins, smug and self-satisfied as I’ve ever seen anyone. “See? Super easy. No trouble at all. Just let us… just let Eyna have this, kay? Right, Eyna?”

“…Alright. Fine. We can do that,” I say. I think I might still prefer to just go home and run to my room, but… I don’t know. Shona clearly needs something she can label a win in her mind. “One other thing though. Um. How are you with… things that need to be kept kind of quiet?”

“I love secrets!” Shona tries to whisper, but her new voice doesn’t seem to have that option. It comes out like a stage-whisper on a show played through speakers turned up too high. 

“Terrible. Whatever you’re thinking, don’t tell her,” Mide says at the same time. 

“Traitor.” Shona gives her a playful shove, but pointedly doesn’t argue with the warning.

“It’s really not that big a deal, just… Eyna’s not my name. It’s not even a name I prefer. I’m Liadain. It’s nothing I wanted to hide from you — like I told Aisling earlier, I just didn’t want my dad to hear about a Keeper with my name and get ideas. So. Sorry.”

Mide shrugs. “Why are you apologizing for that? It’s your business, I think. Only thing it changes is that everyone will know in a few weeks, now.” 

“No they WON’T!” Shona protests. I flinch at her volume. Aisling glares over her phone, but quickly shakes it off and gets back to work.

“Uh. Yeah, sorry about that, still getting used to… yeah,” Shona mutters. “But I’m… I’m really seriously not gonna spill something like that if it’s important to you, you know?” 

“…Thanks. Don’t worry about it so much? I wouldn’t have said anything if this was some huge problem that could ruin my life. I want Dad to leave me alone, that’s all.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not important! Look, Ey— Liadain, you’re right, that’s a cooler name. I get you there. If it matters to you, I’m gonna make sure I don’t fuck it up for you. Parents sure were a fucking mistake, huh?”

All at once, a few things start making sense to me. What Shona saw that I couldn’t back in Seryana’s Wound. What the Harbinger was talking about, in that voice and those words that didn’t sound at all like her usual ramblings. Why Shona reacted the way she did, and why she seems so desperate now for any other note to end the day on.

“Probably,” I say.

“Claiasya should just come up and lay people-eggs on the shore every few years.” Shona grins and nods, as if she’s just solved some hard problem with that plan. 

“That does sound more convenient,” I lie.

Aisling glances up, one eyebrow twitching. I’m sure she’s already come up with ten gaping holes in this idea. But I’m equally sure she’s a lot better at reading rooms than I am, so it’s no surprise when she bites her lip and gets back to her work. 

~~~

So Shona searches up a place where some of the stores are still open, reads the address into the intercom, and a few minutes later, we disembark in the middle of an Embrace to go look for oversized sweaters in a mostly-abandoned mall. This is what my life has become. Aisling stays in the ambulance, still working on whatever she’s writing.

I’m not at all used to buying clothes in person. I’m not sure if I can remember the last time I did, actually. I know the brands I like on the Sea and the sizes they come in, and that’s been enough for a long time. I don’t really know how to just… browse, and nothing I see here feels as me as my usual clothes. Not that it should matter at all. I’m just here for something to throw over my bizarre veins while I walk through the seventh floor common room, and there are two first responders outside wasting their time while I durdle through the aisles,

“Hey, hey, how about this one?” A few minutes into the second place we visit, Shona offers me an oversized black hoodie. It reads, printed in bold white text, Tummy Ache Survivor. Between the words, a little crying cartoon stomach clutches its… stomach? Its midsection.

“…Really?” I ask.

“Yeah, you really didn’t think this one through,” Mide says.

Shona, undeterred, holds it up to her shoulders and does a lazy little wiggle-dance.

“Come on, you know that’s funny! If you hate it so much, why are you smiling? Huh?”

“Because my body is a traitor and I can’t wait until it’s all replaced with inky nightmare ichor. I can’t wait.” 

Shona blinks. Mide stares at me with a confounded expression. Even the clerk watching us looks like he has some serious questions for me, but thinks better of asking them.

Finally, Shona… laughs. She squeezes her sides and clutches the sweater to her stomach and laughs and laughs and laughs, never seeming to run out of breaths, her electronic echo blasting her cackles through the whole store and out into the concourse.

I don’t know what she’s laughing at. I’m not… I didn’t think I was joking. I’m still not sure how I’m so okay with all this, but I am. I really don’t care what becomes of the body I’m stuck in, as long as I’m immortal at the end of it.

“See? See, that right there, that was a great bit, right? Sometimes you just gotta stare down the horrible shit in your life and laugh!” Shona drapes the sweater over her arm and, in emphasis, shoots me with a single finger gun.

Mide buries her face in her hands and lets out a muffled wail. “What am I doing here?” she asks.

“You know what? Fine. We’ve already spent way too long here, so that one’s fine,” I sigh. “Give it to me and let’s go.”

“Perfect. Amazing. The best.” Shona pumps a fist and starts toward the register. “Here, let me get it. My treat. I hope every time you wear it, you think of what an awesome time we had today and forget the part where I blew you up.”

“I don’t think I can do that. But thanks, I guess.”

~~~

The ambulance drops me off first. It still feels strange, having other people come so near to this part of my world, but that secret’s already out anyway.

“Get in touch when you can. I’ll keep you updated on the situation, and I might have important stuff for you before then.” Aisling waves goodbye with one hand while she types with the other.

“And we’ll… see you when we see you, I guess. Sorry this didn’t go better,” Mide says with a halfhearted smile.

Shona rubs the back of her head sheepishly. “Yeah. Sorry again about the, uh, that whole thing on my end. Punch that grimy little shit in the face for me, if she’s still following you around.”

“But do it LATER,” Aisling insists. “Tomorrow at the earliest. If there’s an emergency… well, contact me if you can, use your own judgment if not. You’ve survived enough mistakes to start learning from them, I should hope.”

“…Right,” I mumble. “I should rest, then. Bye, everyone.”

“Mide, hey, before we get moving again… can I stay at your place for a while?” Shona asks. That’s the last thing I hear before Aisling pulls the cabin doors shut. I raise my hood, pull the strings tight, and start into the hospital, hurrying through the lobby and into the elevator. Staff at the desks should just see me hurrying out of the Embrace.

But right as the elevator lurches into motion, I look down at myself and wince.

Wait. What was I thinking? Why did I go along with this? Fine, maybe I can watch myself bleed ink and tiny feathers, tell myself that every step away from being human is a step further from dying as a helpless little girl, and somehow manage to smile about it, but I live in a hospice. Surrounded by people who are very likely not going to survive their tummy aches. I don’t know, maybe it’s different when it’s a horrible joke coming from one of us, but… no, I can’t wear this here. Fuck.

So what now? I’m not going to just show off everything that’s happened to me. I guess I can’t hide anymore, really, but… not now. Not yet. I tug the sweater off, flip it inside out, and tuck stray strands of hair into my hood until the seventh floor bell chimes.

My new patron is nothing like Aulunla. It doesn’t speak in voiceless words and abstract feelings — even as it shares space in my mind, even when I call out to it and channel its power through my soul, it barely feels like it’s there at all. So when it tells me that two souls are leaving the other Wound, I just know it without knowing how. 

Damn it, damn it, damn it. Why haven’t I already left and slammed the door behind me? Aisling’s clearly made up her mind about what I’m doing. Nothing I can say or do will get her to leave us alone, not while she can wave it away as a monster putting words in my mouth. She’s just been stalling for time, again, only this time I fell for it. 

Now. I have to leave now. Aisling won’t come after me alone, but if whoever emerges from that disgusting hair-Harbinger’s ambush is in any shape to chase us, I won’t be able to stop them. All I can do is hope the path closes too quickly for them to follow.

NO STOP DON’T 

…And there it comes. There’s still a part of me that feels the same way about stepping through these portals as I would about diving into the sea. No matter how many times I make this journey, that silent scream of primal terror just won’t shut up. I shove it back into the recesses of my mind, bite my lip, and take the step, squeezing Aulunla’s book to my chest. 

As I cross the threshold between world and Wound, a single long, long stride stretches out over time and space. The ground falls away beneath my feet, followed swiftly by everything else, but rather than dropping into an endless pit, invisible strings wrap themselves around my arms and pull me endlessly upward, into the starless black behind the sky. Away from this grey, miserable earth. Away, I can only hope, from Aisling and her new murderer friend. 

Ash shouldn’t have any part in this. I don’t want her to get hurt, even after what she just pulled, but… if she keeps shoving herself and everyone else she can rally into our business, I don’t know if I can promise that.

Somehow, as we rise above the world, thoughts of my old friends fall away, though the ones replacing them are just as nasty. I’ve never felt more exposed than I do during these transitions. I can’t help but feel like anything — anything I can imagine, every nightmare I’ve ever had — could be watching here, hidden out in the dark. Is this the way things were for my ancient ancestors from the time before history? Is this blind horror some distant echo of what they felt when they looked out into the endless night? 

Or even then, were there people who saw more in the dark than others? Ones who spoke back to the wordless whispers in their dreams and found enough they shared to become something new together? There must have been. I can’t be the one person to ever befriend a Harbinger. I’m not that special. 

So what role did my predecessors play, in the blind darkness before “known history”? Honestly, now that I think of it with all I’ve learned in mind, was it even as dark as Church dogma says? Humans are social creatures, and bonding with a Harbinger doesn’t have to change that. What did those early pact-makers want to do with all their power? What better, stranger worlds might they have imagined into being? 

When Claiasya chose her favorite children and raised them up from the helpless herd, did the first Keepers build their world atop the bones of the first witches?

I can never tell how long I spend soaring through this darkness, alone with my thoughts. Eventually, though, I come to a sudden stop, floating in the void. A thin-fingered shadow-hand, barely visible against the endless black, stretches up from behind me. Another reaches down to take it, my patron welcoming a shard of itself back into its realm, and as soon as the two hands clasp, the arm above tugs on its counterpart, dragging me along with it. 

I jolt further upward and the world goes marble-white, my body seeming to slither through tiny cracks in the tangle of statues that forms the ground of the Wound. It doesn’t hurt, it never has, but the sensation of everything I am twisting, losing its substance, becoming just another once-human shape lost in the endless heap… it still scares me. I’m never sure how I manage to emerge intact on the other side. I’m never sure if I will, no matter how many times it happens.

But finally, I do. When things come back into focus, I’m on my hands and knees beneath the Wound’s starless black sky — and it always feels bizarre to think of it as a sky with no stars, but what else could it be? — just managing to hold myself up as strength and solidity return to my arms. I feel around frantically for Aulunla’s book, snatching it up as soon as my fingers find it.

“Welcome, welcome home!” a familiar voice calls. Half a dozen more follow, though not as a chorus in unison. just a burst of greetings, scattered applause, and one girl’s wordless, uncertain cheer.

“Yes, welcome back, Isobel! We knew you’d be back here safe and successful soon enough, nasty weather aside!” Ciaran greets in a softer voice, standing just above me. “A round of applause, everyone!”

At the boy’s command, the crowd erupts with the sound of clapping and cheers, all for me. The clamor reverberates through the vastness of the Wound strangely, as if echoing inside a cavern’s depths.

“But,” he hisses, raising a single finger, and everyone falls abruptly, instantly silent. “Can’t celebrate just yet. First we need to make sure of something.” Our new god’s first vessel’s bearing suddenly shifts. He hunches down, perched on folded knees, and glares right at me — no, not at me. The great solid shadow looming behind him extends one of its many spectral arms beneath me, scoops me up, and sets me gently down maybe ten feet away. Two more limbs dip their fingers into a small dark gash in the Wound where I emerged. This world’s reflection of my portal, not quite closed behind me. 

I look up from the hole, following the Harbinger’s shape with my eyes as though marveling at an endless skyscraper. It resembles nothing so much as a tower that’s also a tree, its branches a chaotic mix of jagged cathedral turrets jutting out in every direction mingled with countless spindly, stiff-jointed puppeteer’s arms, the shadows of them all blending together in ways that make it hard to see which is which. It stretches up farther than I can see, much farther — if it has features above that, some crown or pinnacle to its form, I can’t see them.

“You were watching?” I ask.

Ciaran glances over at me and smiles slightly. “Obviously. Between the Embrace and the four Keepers turning up to hunt you down, I had every reason to worry about you.”

I nod once, stand, and back away, leaving Ciaran to his work. All his focus returns to the gap, and his ethereal mask twists into the shadowy ink-blot impression of a face, with empty holes for eyes and a mouth of crisscrossed lines approximating a teeth-baring grimace. “We can’t see anymore. Too fucking bright out there. Do you think they’re coming?”

“…Don’t know. They want to, I think, but depends on how much the other Harbinger managed to do.”

Ciaran’s mask resolves back into its usual placid smile. Through the half-seen illusion of its black, empty sockets, his icy-white eyes light up. “Right, right, her, yes! However all this sorts out, you brought us quite the prospect! Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure how it would turn out until we tried, but here we are… oh, she’d know, wouldn’t she? Let’s see if we can check in on her!” 

The towering shadow standing guard over the hole in our world sprouts a single mask from one of its countless limbs. The mask stares off blank-faced into the dark sky, murmuring to itself in that language I still can’t understand, and Ciaran leans in close, cupping his hands behind his ears to listen. The others watch on uncertainly from afar, until maybe a minute later…

“She’s pretty confident that no one’s coming after us. Not sure how much I trust her judgment yet, but given what we’ve seen from her, small and eccentric as she may be, I don’t think they’re fit to chase us down, at least for now,” Ciaran says. His mask’s eyes narrow, giving its frozen smile the appearance of a conspiratorial grin. “And you’ll be happy to hear that the plague girl looked like she was having a pretty bad time of things. I’ll tell you all about it, if you like.”

Not as happy as I’d be if I’d done it myself, but it’s something. “Maybe later,” I say. “First… first I want to know if all this did anything for us.”

“Sure. All clear, everyone!” he calls. The great shadow behind him shifts away — it moves without visible motion, the way shadows do as the Sun moves around them, crawling between its towers as it makes its way deeper into the Wound. The darkness behind Ciaran never quite detaches from him, but it stretches out and grows lower to the ground until it’s only the thin outlined suggestion of something grander, trailing away toward its source like a long shadow beneath a high Sun. 

Ciaran scampers off deeper into the scattered forest of ruined glowing spires which constitute the Wound’s primary topography. He starts off with a run, sprinting forward like a boy much younger than he is eager to enter a toy store or chase after a ball, then takes a high leap into the air. Spindly arms reach out from the depths of the shadow trailing behind him and catch him by the waist in mid-air. Six more limbs sprout from his shadow’s surface and press against the tangle of stone bodies that constitutes the ground at its side, lifting itself up.

Except for its lengthy tail, which slithers backwards towards the looming figure of the Harbinger in the opposite direction like the silhouette of an umbilical cord, Ciaran’s shadow peels itself off the face-strewn floor and begins skittering forward on its six free limbs like a spider, leaving me behind as I follow at my regular pace. The whole display is honestly kind of cute. The childlike wonder I imagine is gleaming in the first vessel’s eyes behind that transparent stone mask of his makes the hole inside me where Aulunla once was ache all the more.

Ciaran is already making the rounds through the group when I catch up, chatting happily with his followers. Today there’s nine of them, not counting Ciaran and I, all gathered in their usual spot. In the remains of one of those shattered white towers, they’ve made a circle of large rough stones, picking through the chunks of rubble until they found the ones most comfortable to sit on and entreating our Harbinger to rearrange the ones too heavy for us to carry. It almost looks like a big fire pit, only in the center, there’s just a camping stove. And the faces embedded in the rocks, even the half-intact ones, like to track us with their empty eyes whenever they have company. They follow Ciaran and his distended shadow especially closely.

A pot of water boils on the stove, and boxes are piled up beside it, filled with water jugs and whichever assorted snacks we’ve most recently hauled back from the city. Looking around the circle, lunch today is apparently instant noodles. I don’t want to make myself sick here of all places, so I dig out an energy bar that looks and sort of tastes like a very dry vanilla shortbread. It isn’t terrible. Ciaran must have had the same idea, since I watch him toss a foil wrapper to the ground just after I arrive. 

Before I can get something to wash it down with, though, a hand passes me a cup of water. A long, thin, marble-white hand, clothed in a winding shroud of shadows, beneath which it seems to stretch out far beyond the length of a human arm.

“Iiiisobel,” the first voice I heard earlier whispers. 

I turn to meet the gaze of the masked face at my shoulder. His entire body is composed of the same stone and spectral material, and if there’s still a human face behind that mask, I can’t see it. I smile weakly. 

“It missed you. Did you know how much it missed you? Could you taste the prayers it swallowed up and dedicated to your safe return? So many of its dreams rest on your shoulders, you know. It can’t be complete — we can’t be complete — while you’re away, not anymore.”

“…Nice to see you too, Mairtin,” It’s not particularly, in fact, but he’s harmless. To me, at least.

Mairtin doesn’t talk about himself much. I asked Ciaran once what was wrong with him, and he insisted that there was less wrong with Mairtin than anyone he’d ever met. People came here looking for something they couldn’t find out in the world, and Mairtin, for whatever unspoken reason… apparently, he needed to not be himself anymore. To stop feeling the way he felt all the time. He’s accepted more of our patron into himself freely than anyone else, and in so doing, he got his wish. Good for him, I guess.

As he slithers away, I catch my first clear snippet of conversation around the circle. “Do we… I mean, do we always eat here? And just… leave stuff around?” someone asks, pointing to an abandoned noodle cup. A mousy blonde girl in a well-worn big sweater dress, with frayed threads along its edges — I don’t think I recognize her, but I don’t exactly bother with every new face who shows up here.

“This is our home. A whole world for just us. So why shouldn’t we do whatever we want here?” an older girl argues.

“I mean… this is a Wound,” she says, whispering the word as if she’s afraid to say it. “Sorry, just, it still feels all weird to…”

“Would it be more appropriate if we all acted like some Claiasyan sect of delusional island mystics?” Ciaran whirls around to confront her, arms thrown wide, spitting the Goddess’s name as a curse the way he always does. “I wouldn’t accept the enlightenment those guys are chasing if they offered to pour all their wasted lifetimes of useless insight into my soul in an instant, and neither would any of you if you knew what it meant!” He points at her in exaggerated admonishment, then sweeps his hand through the air as though batting aside an annoying insect.

“To drift aimlessly through life, in harmony with the cosmos… it’s only half a step away from existential self-mummification! And that’s if I’m being charitable!” he says, offering the girl his open hand. “No, we aren’t some airy-fairy ascetic cult. We’re taking the perfectly practical steps we must to open the sky, escape this pointless world, and return to the stars.” With each word, the fingers of his offered hand close in on themselves until they’ve formed a firmly clenched fist. “Everything else is just… details.” 

The girl just stares up at him in silent panic.

Dalha — the group’s oldest member, a sharply-dressed woman in her thirties whose wavy black lob cut is no longer quite as carefully kept as when I first met her — raises an open palm and shoots Ciaran a look that makes me think of a mother scolding her son. “You do know how it sounds when you word it quite like that, don’t you?”

Ciaran grins a little wider. “And you know how Keepers talk about themselves all the time. I refuse to let them have all the fun with this.”

“…I can’t argue with that.” Dalha allows herself a small, almost reluctant smile. “Still, no need to terrorize the poor girl.”

“Ah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, Sorcha. And you’re kinda right about the way it looks. Not pretty at all,” Ciaran admits a moment later. The contorted stone faces closest to the fallen wrappers and empty noodle cups scattered around the circle shift. Long, jointless fingers crawl to the surface, wrap around the bits of trash, and drag them down into the cracks.

Sorcha watches them go with wide, unblinking eyes. “Whoa,” she breathes, the word only audible in the silence left after Ciaran’s outburst.

“Come on, don’t ‘whoa’ at just that!” Ciaran chuckles. “That was a parlor trick. Soon enough, you yourself will be able to break that second-rate world beyond this sanctuary of ours in much more impressive ways.”

~~~

“So,” Ciaran calls to me, once he’s finished checking in with the group. “Let’s talk plans! Progress!”

A spectral hand rises up and closes around me, enveloping my whole world. I resign myself. My head drowns in a black sea of weightless vertigo, thrashing toward a surface that doesn’t exist, until several seconds later, I’m dropped onto another floor, sucking in air in short, desperate breaths. 

We’ve shifted into another familiar hub of the Wound. One of the taller towers, still intact enough to have something like a top floor — it looks like there was more once, judging by the broken walls and the crumbling staircase to nowhere climbing out through one of the wide windows, but the loss of the rest of the building turned this space into a kind of atrium, lined with mostly-empty shelves.

But not completely empty. My growing collection of little black books sits near the top of one.

“Do you really have to do that every time?” I gasp. “Yes, no stairs up here, I get it, but could you not make some?”

“Probably? But then it wouldn’t be as secure, if something goes wrong. Or as special.” He gives me a hand up, and with his free arm, gestures out one of the windows at our sweeping view of the ruins. 

The Harbinger’s tower-shadow stands further in. There, in one roughly-open clearing, it’s swept away the stray bits of rubble and reached its lower arms down into the surface of the Wound. Its touch draws the stone figures which make up the ground, its puppets, out from their great heap. Slowly, they begin to untangle their limbs and crawl up from the turf, arranging themselves with perfect coordination to expand the growing foundations of a new tower, one grander in scope and scale than any of the others before it. Each body stacked upon the tower like a brick entwines itself with the body below it and begins to radiate a soft white light.

I’ve watched it work before. I’ve watched it sculpt a new tower of living stone from start to finish… or rather, I’ve watched it build and build until the construction inevitably collapses in on itself. Somehow, it can only ever make it so far. What remains of the tower we’re standing in now is one of the tallest failures, but a failure nevertheless. I wonder if the new one will be any different.

And I still can’t see up to where our Harbinger ends from here. If it ever ends. The impenetrable darkness which cloaks the sky of the Wound like a ceiling obscures it. The dim light emitted by the Harbinger’s spires isn’t strong enough to reach.

“Yeah… yeah, that makes sense,” I say. Things wouldn’t have had to go too much worse for today to end with a squad of Keepers invading our world. “Still. I’m pretty sure one of those arms could just carry me up the usual way.”

“Fiiine, fiiine. I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” Ciaran laughs. “Anyway. Can we borrow the new book for a bit? I’ll put it with the rest when I’m done, of course… oh, but first, does anything about it seem different to you?”

I hold the little black book in both hands for a while. I turn it over idly, run my fingers along its cover, and page through it, even through all the blank pages Aulunla never had a chance to fill in.

Nothing at all happens. Nothing calls out to me the way it used to. It’s just a book. 

“Not really. Unless you find something else about this one, I think our best hope for one of them being different is if someone fully succeeded in the fifth step. I didn’t feel anything like that happening while Aulunla was alive, but I’m also not sure if I would have even if it did happen. The ritual was bound to shatter most people’s prisons so we could reach in and collect their pigment for safekeeping, but the ones who understood what Aulunla was trying to say should have been able to become like me, with the power and duty of painting a new world… I don’t know if it’s possible to survive it anymore… Or how we’d find them if they did.” I sigh and pass it to Ciaran.

“We’ll do everything we can with it,” he assures me. “Worst case, it’s best that we gather all of their traces we possibly can before we try to improvise anything.” Ciaran sits against a wall and opens the book to its first page, going over and over the short opening for minutes. Tiny puppeteer’s hands emerge from his shadow, touching its surface and exploring the texture of its pages in imitation of how I handled it.

This part always feels like waiting for news I know will be bad. Like an update on a fading relative we all know doesn’t have much longer.

Eventually, without looking away from it, he speaks again: “Actually, while we’re here, I have something for you. Mairtin brought it in late last night. It’s on the floor right under us, if you want to check it out while I work with this.”

“Oh. Thank you…? What is it?”

“A surprise! And don’t thank me, thank Mairtin! He did all the hard work… well, okay, the remodeling was a bit annoying, but really this is all him. It was even his idea!”

“Remodeling? Okay, now I’m curious. Let’s see.” Doubly so because I wasn’t sure if Mairtin still had ideas. 

I start down the wide curved staircase circling along one of the room’s walls. It’s… much, much colder than anywhere else in the Wound, like stepping into a giant walk-in freezer. I look back at Ciaran, who just smiles and motions for me to go on. 

Well, fine. This is hardly the weirdest thing I’ve done in the last couple weeks.

There’s a constant low susurrus in the room below that reminds me at first of white noise, but not quite steady enough, and not at all soothing in the same way. When I listen closer, it becomes… breathy, a choir of endless sighs too soft to be voiced. Looking over the glowing white walls, the source of the constant chill air issuing into the space, I realize that’s exactly what they are. 

The space, which once had the same wide arched windows as the atrium above, has been remade into a sealed stone chamber. Unlike the ground outside, which is a disorganized tangle of masks and limbs, the uncountable masked figures composing the new walls are all neatly arranged so that their faces stare into the room, filling it with endless little streams of icy breath.

And on one of several wide stone slabs in the center, all covered in their own faces, an older boy’s corpse is splayed out beneath a white sheet, covering all but his feet, arms, and head. His skin is blotchy and clammy, his lips almost colorless.

“Ciaran…?” I call.

“Mhmmm?”

“Whaaat the fuck is this?”

“What? You aren’t still squeamish about something like this, are you?”

“No, it’s not that! Just… why is it here?” 

“Yeah, I guess it does bear a little more explaining, doesn’t it?” Ciaran’s footsteps patter along the floor above, then down the stairs. He looks at the slabs, then at me, scratching the back of his head through his hood sheepishly. 

“Sorry about that. So, the idea was that if there are these books, these remnants of Aulunla still in the world… then maybe there’d also be remnants in the people who communed with those books but didn’t quite make it, right? Poor guy in there was one of the more recent suicides, recent enough that they hadn’t put him out to sea yet. So Mairtin thought if we robbed the morgue and took him back here, maybe you or we could salvage something important out of him. Seemed worth a try to me, if you’re up for it?” He gives me a casual shrug, followed by an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

“…Sure. I don’t know if that’s going to do anything, but might as well, at this point.” I stuff my hands into my sleeves, hug my arms to myself for warmth, and start looking over the corpse. I don’t treat it quite the same as I do Aulunla’s books, because it’s not a book and there are frankly just sanitary concerns there, but I do inspect it thoroughly. 

More importantly, I let myself explore how it feels to be around it. 

When I said I wasn’t squeamish about this, I meant it. It’s strange that I meant it, though. I’ve always found gross things just as gross as anyone else would. I didn’t like horror movies or seek stuff like this out to desensitize myself. Now, though? Now, this is just a body, bereft of the potential of what it could have been. It’s just meat, not even a person. A person is their soul, and his is gone. 

I guess at some point — maybe when I accepted that Aulunla might have to kill people to protect us, maybe when I kept diving deeper and ended up here after they died — the part of my mind that would’ve reflexively recoiled away from a fresh human corpse… just stopped working.

What does hurt is that it doesn’t take much time at all to realize there’s nothing here for us. Aulunla never lived in the bodies of the people who read their book. Bodies never mattered to them. They cared about words. Minds. Dreams. I used their power to change my body a little bit, but that was always just a stop-gap until I could become something more real. This guy is simply gone, and given what happened to Aulunla, he’s gone for no reason at all. And that’s sad, it’s a horrible waste, but… that’s all.

“Nothing there either. He’s just dead,” I sigh. “Urgh, and I don’t suppose you could’ve just… preserved him with magic somehow? Let’s go upstairs.”

“We aren’t a true god yet, Isobel. Even if we were, there’s no guarantee we could actually do something exactly like that. I mean, this cold is born of magic, so isn’t it the same in the end?” As we step back into the atrium, Ciaran raises an arm, pointing straight up to the black sky. “Do you think the Sun could wave its tentacles and freeze a room full of corpses in time?” He wiggles his arm in emphasis.

“Maybe? Sun-drying doesn’t work so well in this part of the world, but it’s still one of the oldest known forms of food preservation.”

Ciaran tilts his head. His mask mirrors his puzzled frown. “Okay, fine, so maybe it could make people-raisins, if you want to count that as ‘preserved.’ Probably a lot more likely it would make some sort of hideous Eyeless zombies, but either way, I’m sure you get my point. Besides, given what we’re gathering them for, we thought it would be better to use as little magic as possible on them. Wouldn’t want to bury any important residue under our own, y’know?”

“Yeah… yeah, I get it. That’s probably for the best. I’m just complaining to complain. I didn’t exactly think to bring my winter coat when I left home.”

“Ask Dalha to put one on the shopping list?” he suggests.

“No. No, I’m sure she has more important stuff to do. It’s not like I’ll be spending a lot of time down there.”

Ciaran just shrugs agreeably and returns to leafing through the new book. “Sorry that didn’t work out. Maybe we’re all getting a little desperate about this thing, but we’ll figure something out. What should I tell Mairtin, if he asks whether he should keep it up?”

“I’m pretty sure he can find something better to do. I’ll leave it to you to decide how to let him down, if that sort of thing matters to him.”

“Sure. I’ll… oh, hmm?” He glances around the room, searching for something. His mask grins wide, strangely out of sync with his perplexed, focused expression. When nothing appears, he grabs the edge of one of the arched floor-length windows with both hands, grips its tightly, and leans all the way out of it, slowly panning around the Wound with his upper body. ”Isobel, did you hear that? Feel that?”

“No… is something wrong?”

“Not at all, not at all! Our new recruit is at the door!”

Something shrieks in the distance. A shrill, whining burst of Harbinger-words resounds through the Wound’s empty air.

And in answer, Ciaran leaps from the window. As he falls, spectral limbs sprout from his shadow on the ground and reach up to catch him. Another scales the tower and offers itself to me as a platform. I take the hint, letting it bear me back to the ground with surprising gentleness. As soon as I touch down, Ciaran gives a messy goodbye salute, and his Harbinger’s arms carry him away to greet our hideous guest.

~~~

I leave Ciaran to… whatever he wants to do with that thing… and head back toward the gathering place. I don’t quite make it there before Dalha, seated and idly swinging her legs on the broken wall of another tower, waves me down.

“Isobel,” she greets simply. “How are things looking? Any movement on your project?”

“Not sure yet. Ciaran went to deal with our visitor before he finished with the new one… uh, Mairtin brought us a corpse, though. That’s something new.”

Dalha blinks rapidly, though she maintains an impressively level expression. “Oh. Okay,” she says. “Why?”

“It was one of the suicides. I don’t know, I guess he thought there might be some leftover Aulunla in it?”

“Was there? That doesn’t sound especially promising to me, but you and Ciaran are quite a bit better than I am with the, ah, particulars of all this.“

“No, Dalha. Aulunla cared about minds. Souls. People, not bodies. Maybe if we could use it to somehow snatch the guy back from wherever the dead go, but we can’t,” I groan. “Honestly, I’m kind of worried Mairtin is going to scare someone away eventually, if he keeps going the way he has been. Not everyone who comes in here is quite as patient as you, or as… inoculated to that sort of thing as I was,” I say.

Dalha scoffs, shrugging the idea away. “He’ll do no such thing.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Scarier things than him happen out there all the time. Not scary in the same way, maybe, but what’s more frightening: Mairtin, or the fact that the Lotus Bed once existed? Regular old humans don’t need to lose their faces to be horrifying.”

“Point taken.” If anyone here didn’t know about the Lotus Bed when they arrived, they do now. It’s not that Ciaran likes to talk about them, but he is quick to bring up “that disgusting, filthy, extremely Claiasyan pack of rapists” in counterpoint to the idea that our group is a cult. Perish the thought. We, of course, are just some friends with a common purpose. 

For my part, I don’t find the distinction important. I know what I’m here for. What we call our Harbinger-cult doesn’t really matter to me.

“And more importantly, no one ends up with us who doesn’t need to be with us,” Dalha adds.

“There’s that too, yeah.” I don’t know how Ciaran finds them, but everyone I’ve met here bears that out so far.

“Anything you need before the next step?” she asks.

I think again about that coat, but quickly decide it’s pointless. I don’t expect I’ll be visiting Ciaran’s freezer much more, and Summer will be coming on soon enough. “No, I don’t think so. Although… while we’re just waiting around, could I ask you something?”

Dalha looks up at the empty sky and smiles. “If we can’t speak freely here, then where?”

“Thanks. I’ve wondered about this for a while, just… you know. Had a lot to do since I met Ciaran. So.”

I scratch at my wrist as I turn the question over in my mind, wondering just how to phrase something like this.

“So, I know what I’m in this for,” I finally start. “I get the feral children, and Ciaran I can kind of guess. Something to do with all that stuff he says about cages and fireflies and caterpillars. But what about you? How does someone like you end up here? You don’t have to say anything if that’s too personal. I just… if you’re anything like Ciaran, if this is a philosophy for you, I’d like to hear about it.”

Dalha quirks a single manicured eyebrow up. “What about me? What makes you think I’m any less deep and troubled than the rest of you?”

“I just can’t see any of them lasting out in the world as long as you did. Also, that is not a troubled smile.”

“Fine, then,” Dahla says. Her eyes harden, and she glares up at the darkened horizon where our world ends. “If you must know… on the last Embrace, the Sun came down and ate everyone I ever loved. I’m smiling because I’m thinking about how once we return to the sky, I’m going to raise an army of starborne nightmares and snuff it out.”

“It… ate them,” I echo.

Dalha nods solemnly. “Ate them all up. My husband, my friends, my hedgehog, all gone in a terrible burning flash.”

“Is that seriously the best you could come up with? You just looked at the weather today and thought it’d make a good sob story?”

Dalha titters at that, then bows her head and raises her hands, admitting defeat. “Actually, my first idea was that rogue Keepers murdered my family. I thought it would be a funny switcheroo, considering where we are. I just figured that one might be…” She tents her hands and grits her teeth. “Well, you know.”

“So, are you going to tell me the actual answer?”

“Oh, no, it’s not that. Nothing to hide, nothing I’m desperate not to talk about — I’ve just never brought it up because my story’s not that impressive. Honestly, I’d have thought it would be obvious to you, but I suppose you’re still young. Maybe it didn’t quite have time to sink into you the way it did for me.”

“What didn’t?” I push.

“It’s simple, really.” 

Dalha’s shadow stretches and writhes into a roiling pool of oily black power at her feet. Two of our Harbinger’s arms crawl out from beneath the world, and the statues beneath us squirm to life. Coaxing them into place in imitation of the towering sculptor deeper in the Wound, she begins to shape them into a little castle, with great walls surrounding a tiny, plain house, all covered in serenely smiling masks.

“I’m here because reality is boring, Isobel. You don’t need to survive some horrible tragedy to see that. Sometimes, all it takes is enough time spent carrying around a dream you know will never come true. Watching from the outside as everything truly important happens without you, because you just aren’t special enough to be allowed in.” 

Suddenly, the spectral hands sweep in a circle, smashing the walls to rubble like a child destroying an unsatisfying sand castle.

“So I decided, if I ever found a way, I’d break in. Or, if I couldn’t manage that, to break out from this planet’s claustrophobic confines and search for somewhere better. Somewhere that wants something more from me than to keep the menial, meaningless details of the world in order for the people who actually matter. And then I found it. That’s all,” she finishes, gazing off at nothing with a faintly nostalgic smile. “Does that all follow?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does,” I say softly. Looking back, I’m sure if I’d kept on the way I was, if I’d never met Aulunla or I’d given them to Aisling as soon as I did, after ten or twenty years of more of the same, I’d have ended up in about the same place. “Thanks for sharing.”

“Anytime.”

“I think I’d like to be alone for a bit, if that’s okay. I don’t have much to do until Ciaran’s free to plan our next move.”

“Have you eaten yet?”

“Yeah, right after we came back.”

She nods, satisfied. “Good, good. You know how to find me if you need anything else.”

~~~

I sit alone at the edge of the Wound… well, no, I don’t know if it has an edge. The stone plains seem to stretch on forever, but most of the world is flat and featureless. Our little city of broken towers only fills a tiny portion of this isolated world. Sometimes I wonder why. I wonder what it says about Ciaran’s Harbinger that so much of its realm is simply empty, and that it has to fill it by trying and failing to build new marvels by hand.

But not right now. Right now, seated on the ground, leaning against a section of shattered wall, I just want to put some distance between myself and the rest of this group. If it’s even right to think of “the rest of them,” if I’m truly part of it.

Because I’m not like them, not really. Ciaran and Dalha are good friends, people who understand me and who I understand like I haven’t had since when Aisling and I used to be on even footing. I respect what they’re trying to do. I wish them all the best with it. But even now, even while a shard of it travels with me, I’m not here for their god. 

I turn a shiny purple apple over in my hands, watching the Wound’s eerie white light play off its shimmering skin. Maybe it’s just an apple. Maybe in another week or two, all that will remain of Aulunla’s final gift is a handful of mold. 

But I’ll never let it go. If that happens, I’ll pick the seeds out from that pile of rot and plant them somewhere beautiful. I’ll fill this miserable old world with sparkly star-apple orchards, so you can live in the dreams of everyone who eats them at once. And when I bring you back, whether we find that other, better world we were searching for or we have to make it ourselves, we’ll grow forests of them there. 

And i̵f they neve̷r cơme back?

The question circles and circles through my mind, no matter how hard I try to shove it away. I have no backup plans, no flimsy rationalizations or questionable promises, nothing of enough weight to bury it under. Ciaran’s only ever said that he saw something of Aulunla left in me, and he wanted to pull that lingering ember out and stoke it back to life if there was any way we could. The books I’ve recovered, the time we spend poring over the couple dozen pages with anything written on them, that body Mairtin stole, they’re all just us gathering anything we can to improve our chances, without the slightest guarantee that what I want is even possible.

If they never come back…

I look down at my arm, tracing a path with my eyes through the pale script-scars where words once flowed along my skin in rivers. It was only for a few days, but… I was so much more. It didn’t have to be like this. We could’ve changed everything if they’d left us alone. Witches wouldn’t have to be monsters if they’d just left us alone. 

If they never come back, this world and its self-important heroes deserve everything that’s coming to them.

Isobel’s cataract hole in the world stretches up and up, bending reality around its edges until it appears, in Aisling’s view, to touch the horizon itself. There, it draws back, flinching away as it reaches too close to one of the swaying tendrils of celestial flame setting the sky ablaze. 

Only a matter of perspective, she’s fairly sure — if it had gone from peering uncertainly into the world to growing tall as the sky in seconds, the ache of its corruption in the back of her head would be splitting her mind open by now. Still, manifesting this way at all beneath an Embrace is bolder than any Harbinger ought to be. Damn everything. What has that girl gotten herself into?

“Aisling!” Mide barks. “Hold still!”

What? There’s a monster pinning her down by the throat, she couldn’t move if she wanted to, and… oh, right. Aisling picks up on Mide’s intent just in time. She presses herself to the ground and freezes. A second later, a golden spear slams into the statue’s back. The weapon bounces off its target with a violent clang, not quite piercing its stone skin, but the impact of it is enough to send the puppet lurching forward. 

There’s a painful pressure on Aisling’s neck as its weight shifts. Before the thing can collapse onto her, though, she summons a last desperate gasp of adrenaline-fueled strength and shoves it to the side with all her might. The strings of shadow directing the puppet draw taut to jerk it back into place, keeping it from tumbling off her entirely, but the moment when its cold-fingered grip on her neck loosens is all she needs to squirm out from beneath it. 

Aisling gulps down a lungful of air and crawls backward along the ground, right arm frantically groping through the grass until… there. Her fingers close around the wooden grip of her revolver. Holding it tight, she scrambles to her feet.

The statue’s strings drag it upright. It twists to face her again, its upper body bending impossibly before its legs follow. Trusting all the time she’s burned practicing for this worst-case scenario to win out over her shaking arms, she brings the gun to bear and fires. Her first shot finds its mark in the puppet’s remaining arm, and just to be certain, she puts a fifth and final bullet into its left thigh. Teal light smolders through its body as two more of its limbs shatter off and melt away, leaving the puppeteer’s arm struggling to do more than hold its doll up on one leg. 

And leaving her lifeline with one shot in the barrel, for all the good a single bullet will do her.

But for this moment, it’s done enough. The shadows wrapped around the puppet’s remains release it, leaving the broken statue to tumble lifeless down the slope leading to the lake. Its strings contract into the hand holding them, which then presses itself to the ground and darts through the trees to rejoin Isobel’s shadow. After a glance down at Mide — still locked in a stalemate with the two surviving puppets, which seem unable to break her guard but unharmed by her attempts to slice away their strings — Aisling chases the slithering shadow back into the woods.

Isobel stands facing the Wound, hands clasped and head slightly bowed. The pool of shadows at her feet roils along the ground as a new pair of umbral arms crawls up from within it. They wrap their fingers around the tear in the world’s edges and tug it into its final shape. When they withdraw back into Isobel’s shadows, the Harbinger’s peephole has settled as an oval of blackness just big enough for a human to step through. 

And on the other side, bright shapes appear in the dark, like skyscrapers on an impossibly starless night. Tall, crooked white towers, shining with colorless inner light. Covered all over in… faces, smiling stone masks, as if they were packed together from the twisted, elongated bodies of countless statue-puppets.

“You won’t like what’ll happen if you follow us,” Isobel says without turning around. True, Aisling’s awareness of lies whispers to her. She can’t tell if the unsteady quiver in Isobel’s nearly-toneless voice means she isn’t completely confident in her threat or simply that she wouldn’t like it either. Aisling doubts the Harbinger’s puppet would’ve spared her without Isobel’s influence.

“I know,” Aisling says. It’d be suicide to run in there alone. She couldn’t even handle one of this thing’s puppets by herself.

“What’s the plan, then? Are you going to shoot me too?”

“What? No. Isobel, I’m just… if there’s anything at all you can say to suggest that I shouldn’t be terrified for your safety and ours right now, I’m begging you to do it already.”

Isobel breaks her prayerful stance, slowly raising a hand to drum her fingers along her cheek. “You four started this, didn’t you?” she finally says, glancing back over her shoulder. “We don’t have any business with Keepers. You don’t need us and we don’t need you. Go away and that’ll be that.”

“And the rest of the city? All the people it’ll inevitably snatch up and turn into fuel for whatever it’s trying to do?”

“…It’s not doing that. No one’s with us who doesn’t want to be there,” Isobel insists. True. But meaningless.

“That doesn’t tell me anything! You’re a fucking vessel now, and it’s hardly a stretch to think any Harbinger that can take a vessel and leave them at all functional can also change what people want. For all I know, it’s already done that to you. Maybe you haven’t noticed, maybe it left you thinking you were better off for it, but the way you are now… Isobel, you’ve told me what you want out of this, but what you’re doing to get it doesn’t make sense. Maybe things really were different with… the other one, but this isn’t your power, your path to be a part of this world. You’re just throwing a Harbinger’s magic around. So how can I know if anything you say or do is coming from you or it? How can you know, if you’re even aware enough to care?”

There’s a pause. Isobel glares down at the mass of shadow pooling at her feet. She lets out a long, soft sigh.

“Good speech, Ash. But maybe you just don’t understand what’s going on the way you think you do.” Her mouth curls up into a knowing smirk. “Here, let’s say it so there’s no ambiguity at all: I, Isobel, super do not care what the Harbinger riding around with me wants.”

True. Only… Aisling has no earthly idea if that makes things better or worse.

“I’m in this for myself. And my friend, if there’s anything left of them.” She takes the book held beneath her arm in one hand and runs her hand along its cover gingerly, as if petting a cat.

From somewhere behind them, a wet tearing sound rips through the air. 

Isobel jolts upright with shock, eyes wide and white. Pinpricks of phantom pressure stab into the back of Aisling’s head, signaling a Harbinger’s presence, but not Isobel’s Harbinger — Isobel simply jumps through her portal without another word. Her shadow climbs in after her, and two spectral hands pull the Wound shut as if they were drawing curtains. Only a thin slit of darkness remains, steadily fading from view entirely. Maybe a stronger Keeper could force it back open, but her stronger Keepers are… 

Wait. What does this mean for them? Something happening with the other Harbinger means something’s changed on Liadain and Shona’s front, for better or worse. She can’t evaluate their options until she knows what that is.

Aisling looks back at the crest of the hill, where Seryana’s tiny lesion in reality still floats. She spots it just in time to watch a swelling mass of raw flesh, like the inside of a teratoma, break through its tight wrapping of hair. In a second, it expands from a tightly-packed black core into a great tangle of thin strands of skin, wreathed in matted clumps of blonde hair. The Wound stirs, someone or something breaking through its borders.

“Mide? Mide, up here if you can!” Aisling scrambles up the slope to survey the basin. 

Mide is already racing her way. The two puppets she was locked in battle with, gashed all over from her blows, have fallen limp by the shore, abandoned by their controlling hands. They’ve begun to disintegrate in the Sun’s Embrace, charring and crumbling like overheated clay. Countless fragments of them flake off and blow away to nowhere on the wind.

And seconds later, the bloody abscess in reality disgorges something from its depths. As if it were again a giant mouth in the world, but with the skin around it sliced into half a dozen rough sections and turned inside-out. It’s hard to see the other Keepers clearly through the hair draped around them like curtains of wet seaweed, but bright crimson sparks of Shona’s magic shine through the debris. 

As Seryana’s Wound folds back up around itself, the Harbinger’s presence fades into background awareness. It’s fleeing, too. Aisling spots Liadain in the other girl’s arms, held up in an over-the-shoulder-carry, and Shona lurches into the shelter of the trees to set her down.

Maybe they didn’t win, but they managed something close enough that they’re both still here. 

Maybe this can still work. They can still do it. 

“Okay, everyone listen!” Aisling yells. “The other Harbinger is on the run. We can still catch it, we just have to…”

…Oh. 

No. No, none of that is happening.

From a distance, it almost looks like Shona’s sclerae have gone entirely red. That’s not it, but the truth is hardly better — instead, her eyes are bloodshot, tear-streaked, and bleeding around the edges, where little frayed strands of unwoven rope wet with her blood cling to her skin. They look to have grown from the corners of her eyes, as if she cried them out herself.

And Liadain… it’s hard to tell what state she’s in, beyond the deep burn-blisters covering her single exposed hand. That isn’t the part Aisling’s worried about, though. It’s not even that the white streaks winding through her hair are no longer streaks at all, leaving only a thin black stripe in her smoke-colored bangs.

It’s that while Seryana is definitely still alive, still fleeing at the edge of Aisling’s perception, a web of black veins — in a sinuous, asymmetrical pattern which distinctly does not map to the places where her veins should be — now runs all along Liadain’s exposed skin.

~~~

Everything hurts more than usual.

I wrench my eyes shut as we come back into the world, the light of the burning Sun somehow even brighter than before. The cooling flow of stolen health anesthetizes the unpleasant tickling sensation of my own burned flesh slowly knitting itself back together, but can’t completely block it out. 

Shona takes a few long steps — into the shade, I figure, since the sun pushing through my eyelids lets up — then heaves me back over her shoulder, plops me down, and leans me against a tree. Rough bark digging into my back sets off a fresh wave of pain. I’m not sure if I have wounds back there, exactly, just… all my nerves have been literally fried. I can’t find the energy to move yet, though, and I’m not even sure what else would be more comfortable.

A hollow, resonant voice rings through my ears. “Hey. Hey, Eyna, how’re you holding up? Do we needa rush you to a healer or something? Is that thing you can do gonna be enough for this?” Shona asks. Her voice, heavy with urgent desperation, retains the electronic echo of her power. She doesn’t sound bad, exactly, nothing like Irakkia’s sea of screaming noise, but it does make her… louder even than usual. 

“Um. It’s bad. I don’t think I’m in any state to do anything.” I did what I had to do to save our lives, but… it doesn’t change anything. I haven’t forgotten anything. “But I’m not going to die.”

“Whew. That’s, uh, I mean that’s not good and I’m still really sorry, but… yeah. ‘S better than it could be… I’m… I’m glad.”

“Shona, are you okay? What happened?” Mide’s voice calls. A rush of footsteps come to a stop somewhere close by. I force myself to open my eyes and look around, then double-check with my magical senses. Nothing nasty seems to be happening, at least not anymore. There’s only the faint traces of Harbinger-stench being scoured away by the Embrace above. The other one feels more distant than Seryana, of course, but not too far gone to detect. Aisling stands just at the edge of my field of view, eyes darting between me and Shona with an unreadable expression.

Shona angles her head away, squeezing a hand around her opposite upper arm. “Listen, I’m, it’s not that I don’t wanna talk about it, just maybe not now, so can we… wait, bwuh?” She pauses, noticing the distortion still lingering in her voice for the first time, and taps her throat with a finger. “That really shouldn’t still be… hmmmmMMMmmmm…” She lets out an experimental hum, a long note rising and falling unsteadily. That same echo copies and amplifies her sound. “Well. Uh. If I can turn that off, I’m not sure how,” she says with a nervous, sharply reverberating laugh. 

“Both of you? Oh, dear silent Goddess, absentee mother of us all,” Aisling mutters to herself. 

Shona stiffens at that. “She is not absent. There’s just… a lot going on in the world, y’know?”

“Both of them what?” Mide presses. She slowly looks down, wincing at the sight of me.

Aisling side-eyes her and raises a finger. “Please give me a moment. So, to be certain, you two did not just kill that Harbinger, did you?”

“Did our fucking best,” Shona says. Aisling looks to me for confirmation and I shake my head.

Aisling sighs, putting a hand to her forehead. “…Okay. Well. The mission’s over.”

“Huh? Why?” Shona objects. “Did we miss everything? My cool magic voice box isn’t gonna slow me down! If there’s still shit to do, I can do it!”

“It’s OVER! Whatever happened in there to cause two concurrent cases of spontaneous Emergence, it is no longer safe for either of you to use… to use any more magic than you absolutely must to survive,” Aisling finishes with a quick glance at me.

“…Oh. I, uh, wasn’t sure if that was just a thing her magic did,” Shona murmurs, sounding like she meant to speak more quietly than her new voice will allow.

“Spontaneous what?” I ask.

“Yeah. It happens… well, we aren’t certain exactly when it happens,” Aisling admits, scowling at no one in particular. “Most instances I know of involve Keepers losing control of their magic, or taking grievous injuries they wouldn’t survive without immediate and instinctive use of it. Something breaks in you, or in your body, and magic floods in to fill the hole. You don’t typically grow from it all that much, or not the way you do with Harbinger-induced Emergence, but you do…  change. In unpredictable ways, with uncertain effects. And when it happens, you absolutely do not rush into battle and keep pushing yourself.” She crouches, perched on folded knees, and buries her face in her hands with a wordless groan. “So that’s it. We’re done here. We aren’t in any more danger, both Harbingers are retreating, so we’ll figure something else out. Later.”

“You change. Okay,” I say, very slowly. “Then what, exactly, has changed in me that you’re so worried about?”

“Your veins,” Aisling says after a moment’s pause. “No, they don’t quite match where your veins would be. But that’s what it looks like. It’s like there’s lines on your hands, face… all your skin that I can see.”

I raise my left hand, tug my sleeve down with my teeth, and look over my arm. Spidering black lines run all along its length, trailing further into the bunched-up cloth around my elbow. No, not quite black – more like pale grey strands of thread, on account of my complexion. When I look closely enough, there are tiny shimmering flecks of green flowing through them, and they shift just beneath my skin as I flex my hand.

Everything suddenly feels colder. I can’t tell if it’s the magic working to heal me or… something else.

I summon a card and will it to prick my wrist, focusing on the quick sharp pain I’ve gotten so used to.

“Eyna, what are you doing?” Mide snaps. “You’re already hurt! Don’t…” She trails off and takes a halting step back, covering her mouth with one gauntleted hand.

As the water-thin, ink-black liquid trickling from my arm instantly changes form, congealing into a solid shape.

I’m bleeding feathers. Tiny black crow’s feathers, still slightly wet with the impossible ichor that formed them, fall from my pinprick wound and drift lazily down, slowing and then ceasing as the cut seals itself closed.

“That’s fucking awesome,” Shona says, drawing uncomfortably close to stare at the little pile of feathers scattered over my lap.

A hoarse, deranged giggle escapes my throat. 

It does fit, doesn’t it? This is the way it should be. The way I should be. I should be happy! I’m finally rid of the blood that’s been trying to kill me every day of my life! Whatever this is, it’d be stupid to keep calling it blood. This is my curse, my pain, my power, my constant companions all twisted together into a single thing. Maybe it’ll even change something for the better, for once — who knows? Yes, it’s just my miserable story of always and never dying coursing through the veins I may not even have anymore instead of my useless blood but I can’t deny that the story is better for me because I couldn’t kill monsters and eat them with that blood and I certainly
couldn’t
couldn’t suck the life
out of helpless people
people who never did anything to me except
except BE BORN LUCKIER THAN I WAS. 

Without this blood, I wouldn’t have had the chance to let anyone die for my mistakes.

“…It won’t have made things worse for you, I don’t think,” Aisling offers. “Different, maybe. But not worse.”

“And, uhh… Eyna, for what it’s worth, dude? I meant it! This new thing of yours is seriously the most metal shit I’ve ever seen!” Shona pumps both fists in emphasis.

Silence. Aisling and Mide shoot her looks at nearly the same time. It’s nearly the same look, too.

“Shona, what does that mean?” I ask again.

“You know what, don’t worry about it. You get it if you get it. Metal is a state of mind!” Shona says with wide eyes and a visibly strained grin.

“…Fine. Whatever. I’m… I was kind of expecting something like this sooner or later, anyway,” I say. Dr. Cantillon all but predicted it. “I should just… you shouldn’t have brought me along. Something like this happens every time. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe.” Aisling taps her foot on the ground slowly. “But I made some bad judgment calls too. We should’ve dealt with one Harbinger at a time, figured something out for Isobel, then hit Seryana all together. Sorry, Eyna, but that would’ve been the best move tactically.”

I shrug. Moving at all still feels strange, with these crawling sensations running through my body, but the pain has started to subside a little. “I could’ve handled her. My magic just… works better alone.”

“I mean, I guess it’s good we didn’t think of a name for our big stupid not-a-team,” Shona says. “This whole thing woulda been extra embarrassing then, right?” With the last word, her desperate grin wavers and her voice cracks, the sound magnified now with a sharp, tinny wail.

I can’t blame her. I can’t even find this weird front she’s trying to put up as creepy as I used to. She’s probably just… doing her very best not to fall apart, same as me.

“Aisling, what happened with Isobel?” I ask. I’m best at not falling apart when I have something important to do.

“She and her Harbinger ran for it when we sensed you two coming out. Ducked into its Wound. I think they’re gone.”

“Can I see where they went? I can’t chase them like this, just… I don’t know. Maybe there’s a trail I can catch, or something I can feel out about it. Something to keep this from being a total waste.”

Aisling looks me over skeptically. “Can you walk yet?” 

“Maybe. I could with my cane,” I mumble.

“What did we learn?” She folds her arms, smiling slightly with half of her mouth.

“That I am a living death-curse walking around in a vestigial human suit,” I say flatly. 

Aisling bites her lip, sighs through her nose, and offers me a hand up. “C’mon. The opening was over here.” 

After I spend a few halting steps leaning into Aisling, Mide loops her arm around my other shoulder. I meet her gaze and tilt my head.

“Still just trying to make this go the best I can,” she says softly.

Shona follows just behind us as I wobble through the woods, very slowly regaining something like the use of my legs.

“Here,” Aisling eventually says, pointing to an empty patch of roughly-stable shade beneath a thick canopy of trees.

I reach out with my senses, scrutinizing the lingering miasma as closely as I can. It’s hard to pull anything clear from it, especially in my current state. Maybe it’s just this Harbinger’s distance from everything, that sense of being looked down upon from a castle in the stars, but…

“Okay. I can’t find where they went or anything. I’m a lot better at feeling out what things are than where they are. But I also… don’t think it was ever even here,” I say.

“You’re sure?” Aisling asks. “Sensing exactly what’s going on with the more human vessels can get painfully complex. Or so I’ve been told.”

I nod. “It’s hard to be certain, and I don’t know what it did while I was in that Wound, but nothing here feels strong enough to have been a full Harbinger. It’s like it was acting on things without being anywhere near here, the way Seryana usually does.”

“It did seem really here when we were fighting it a minute ago,” Mide says.

“No, that makes sense,” Aisling insists. “Like I said, those were fragments of it. Familiars it made. Well within the range of what we could expect from a vessel invested with some amount of power.”

“What does that mean for Isobel?” I ask.

“It could be that her arrangement with this thing is more complicated than it simply possessing her, which would line up with some things she said before she left.” Aisling pauses, eyes to the ground, gnawing on her lower lip. “Or maybe whatever her new Harbinger’s doing is… bigger than just her. I’m not sure yet. I’ll look into it. If I still need help with wherever it goes, and all of you still want to give it, well, you all know where to find me. Eyna, there’s contact info on my reef. Whether or not you get involved with anything like this again, I may have follow-up questions about your experiences with Isobel, so I’d very much appreciate if you got in touch.”

“…Okay,” I mutter. “Is that everything we can do here?” 

“Probably,” Aisling sighs.

“Hey, so like, all the mess aside, this kind of works out for us, doesn’t it?” Shona interjects. 

“…Does it?” I ask. Mide, clearly just as confused, looks my way and nods.

“Well, yeah! You did that thing with Mide a while back, and now I almost blew you up, so like… we’re cool now, right? We’re even.”

Mide does a double-take at that. “How do those things relate at all? More importantly, you did what? Shona… why are you like this? Why are all of you but me like this?”

Aisling folds her arms and exhales conspicuously.

“Not you, Aisling. You’re, uh, you’re fine, far as I know.” 

Aisling answers with a self-satisfied little smirk.

Shona shrugs, smiling in a way I think is meant to look sheepish. “Uh, like I said. Tell you later. Anyway, you all get my point, right? Or like… I don’t know. The SPIRIT of my point.”

“I really, really don’t,” I say. “But I’m fine if she’s fine. For all it matters.”

“For all it matters,” Mide agrees softly. “As long as we’re all on the same page about the team thing now.”

“Fiiine. No big awesome team,” Shona grumbles.

“So. Anyway. If there’s nothing else, then since our method of transportation is currently not usable, I’m going to call us a ride. Emergency transport,” Aisling says. “Eyna, Shona, you should both take the longest breaks you reasonably can from any active use of your power. Spend time with people you care about. Do things you like, as long as those things have nothing to do with magic.”

I don’t have anything else to keep us here over. To my surprise, I’ve got very mixed feelings about that. It’s not that I want to spend any more time out in the Sun with these three, stewing in our failure, but the prospect of going home like this feels terrible.

Nothing for it, though. Aisling was right about my ill-conceived plans to protect my privacy, anyway. I was already planning to tell at least Noirin about all this soon.

It still would’ve been nice if I got to choose that for myself.

Crimson lightning courses through Seryana, burning her rotting body to dust. Her howls of twisted delight fill the tiny Wound, a shrill chorus echoing behind Shona’s unearthly wail. Bolts strike the Harbinger from every direction, three at a time, then four, then five, and past that point they cease to be bursts of lightning and become endless torrents of raw power. Shona’s bolts tangle together and whip across the cramped room, flashing brighter than ever when they crackle against the walls and ceiling and floor. Wherever they touch, they leave behind charred black scar marks.

“STOP IT!” I scream as I pick myself up from the filthy floor, ducking away from a flickering red coil of power. I can barely hear my own thin voice over the screeches and roars of static and thunder. “Shona, stop! You’re feeding her!” 

Neither Shona nor the Harbinger pay me any mind at all. Seryana drinks in Shona’s rage eagerly, cackling through her screams as her body burns away. She dies with a pained giggle and a mocking smile fixed firmly on her new stone face, the last part of her to disintegrate. Even then, the storm doesn’t stop. Lightning keeps dancing through the Wound, converging on the empty space where Seryana once stood.

“I killed her!” Shona laughs. She sounds like her voice is being played through an old speaker, blasting it into the little room with a warbling, tinny echo. “I killed her I killed her I… killed… h-her…” She chokes on the last word and trails off, muttering something unintelligible to herself. Finally, the storm contracts, drawing back into Shona. Filaments of crimson power wind along her limbs.

“Shona. Hey,” I hiss.

The lightning wrapped around Shona’s arms shakes wildly, then seems to escape her grip, jolting into the ground around her. 

“I’m… I killed her…” She slowly glances my way, blinking dark tears out of the corners of her eyes. No, not entirely tears — water mixed with a thin trickle of blood leaking from her eyes trickles down her face. Still, she grins as she meets my gaze, smiling like she’s afraid to let herself show any other emotion.

“Shona, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve killed her. It’s not over. She’ll be back…!”

Shona just stares at me, silent and bleary-eyed. “What? But I just, she was… how was she here? Why? WHY?” A fresh wave of buzzing distortion slips into her voice with the last word.

“She’s a Harbinger in her Wound! Where else would she be? Listen. Whatever’s happening here, it’s really really wrong. You said you could get us out of the Wound. Can you still do that? If you can, we need to leave right now.” 

One more silent second passes before the odors of festering trash and burnt hair flood the room. Shona’s forced smile twists into a rictus of terror as a single rope-arm reaches up from behind her, draping over her shoulder. Seryana’s singed and decaying form materializes from nothing at her side. She leans into Shona in a half-embrace, whispering into her ear through her pristine stone mask:

<Another underperformance today. You can’t keep wasting OUR one and only chance like this.>

“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!” Shona shrieks, and the world breaks around her. Everything crackles and flickers as an explosion of uncontrolled power bursts out into the Wound. Five or six red bolts slam into Seryana, sending her crashing into the nearest wall, the wall opposite of the cabinet lying between the twin beds, with a violent thud. The other bolts scatter through the room, striking out seemingly at random and blackening bits of detritus all around us. The sheets on the bed to our right smolder with slowly growing flame. In the corner of my eye, Seryana’s cabinet sits strangely intact behind us.

The wall Seryana was blasted into collapses into a heap of thin plaster rubble. The dust falls away like a curtain to reveal another room: an almost exact replica of the one we’re all in, arranged just the same as when I first arrived. Another pair of thin beds hug opposite walls in parallel to the two beds beside us, while stools and footrests clutter the space beyond them, all of it totally intact. Pinpricks of pale light still stream in through the gaps in the curtains which cover the windows – a light I now know was shining from nowhere.

It’s all exactly as this room had been before Shona started blasting it to smithereens, but for two details: there’s no curio cabinet in this next room over, and on the right side bed lies a figure. An effigy, like a man-sized straw doll. Except it’s not straw. It’s a doll woven from Seryana’s pale, dense hair. And on that effigy’s face is a framed photo of a face, almost like what you’d see at a funeral wake. Between flickers of Shona’s red lightning, I can just barely make out that face. It’s the man I rescued from his own house – the victim Seryana was preying on when I first encountered her.

<What happened to you? You used to be so cute. So innocent.> Seryana gurgles, in a second voice untouched by her constant cries of pain. She’s speaking like she might to a baby. 

<The whole world’s little darling, and mine most of all… oh, why did you ever have to grow up? Why did you have to turn so sharp and gangly and wrong?> 

She picks herself up and limps forward on broken legs. Her eyeless sneer is fixed right on Shona.

<And now that you have, WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER LOVE YOU AGAIN?> 

Shona says nothing. Still silently crying, she narrows her eyes, grinds her teeth, and digs her nails into her palms until blood drips from them. 

And screeches out the first notes of a song: a raucous, unsteady anthem of rage, sung with no words and played with no instrument but that electrified inhuman wail. A fresh crimson storm spills out from her soul, lashing out and out at everything in sight — a seething tempest that won’t be satisfied until the Wound and everything in it is reduced to ash. Bands of scarlet lightning arc directly between Shona and Seryana, forming a circuit, a jagged halo of ever-brightening radiance coruscating around them. 

I dart underneath the leftmost bed for cover, thanking the Goddess or Shona or blind freakish luck that no lightning strikes me before I curl into a ball and cover my ears.

Magic running wild. Pain flooding into the world, taking its own shape and acting on its own will. Is this what Aulunla was terrified of when it looked at me, even as it grew so far out of control it nearly crushed me? 

Is this what everyone else sees in me? 

~~~

Thick globlets of liquefying stone drip from the puppet’s shattered mask onto Aisling’s coat. Its cold grip around her throat doesn’t weaken at all. She squirms and shoves and kicks and the thing — the stone shadow, haloed in the glare of the Embrace above them — barely acknowledges her, barely budges at her feeble impacts. It only looks into her eyes, smiling half a blank, empty-eyed smile as its face melts away, and tightens its grip just enough to make it a struggle to breathe without quite suffocating her. She goes completely limp, an animal playing dead right beneath a predator’s gaze, and turns her focus to maintaining the slow, narrow breaths she can manage through the pressure on her airways. The puppet’s fingers don’t loosen their hold, nor does its attention waver from her, but it doesn’t make anything worse. 

She made the wrong call. Shona could’ve torn through these creatures. If it was right for any of them to rush to Liadain’s rescue before they knew how much force Isobel’s Harbinger could bring to bear, she should have done it herself. No, what good would she have done in there? It probably would’ve been best to face their problems one at a time. Push through the statues, restrain Isobel… somehow… then turn on Seryana as a group. The strategic calculus might feel wrong, but it would’ve been the best use of the resources she had.

And now here she is, pinned down in the dirt. She couldn’t quite bring herself to make that hard call, couldn’t give up on the hope that there had to be some way to reach her best friend. Isobel is there, she’s sure even now, just… the more she sees and hears, the less it seems like she’s at all in control. At most, she may hold enough influence over her patron’s puppets to keep the one looming over Aisling from crushing her windpipe.

Or…

Whether or not eldritch influence was involved, Isobel is clearly convinced that there’s something she and her new Harbinger absolutely need to do. From the way she talks about that goal, she seems to believe there’s no chance that their objective or its costs would be acceptable to her old best friend. Maybe she’s right. Maybe, if Isobel was really as close with a living nightmare that made people drown themselves as Liadain thinks she was, Aisling simply doesn’t understand her as well as she thought she did.

None of that changes what she’s here to do… but it does severely limit her ability to do it. Now she can’t even talk, not that that’s accomplished anything — not even goading Isobel into staying and fighting. When Aisling twists her head to the left as far as she can manage under the statue’s grip, she can still see Isobel hurrying along the coast beneath the blazing sun, her distended shadow trailing far behind her to support her marionettes. Then she turns and jogs up the hill, disappearing into the shelter of the treeline. 

From the constant sharp clangs of steel against stone, Mide is still locked in battle with the other two puppets. Holding her own, hopefully, but in no position to chase after Isobel.

Just as she fades from sight, though, Isobel’s voice pricks at Aisling’s awareness. It’s only faintly audible at this distance, and only thanks to what remains of her enhanced senses, but she feels the gravity in the words all too keenly:

“This vaulted sky is not the end. We’ve climbed higher before. We’ll soar higher again.” 

An incantation. An invocation. A prayer offered to a demon.

Pressure spikes in Aisling’s head as a dark pinprick hole in the world opens beyond the veil of trees. It’s clearly visible, not glimpsed through the foliage but on the other side of a trunk. A peephole cut in the fabric of reality, rendering everything that would otherwise conceal it see-through. A stain on the world itself that’s layered itself above every other object, almost like a cataract in her eye. It’s the opening to a second Wound, or the hesitant beginnings of one — not the birth of a realm the Harbinger intends to claim, but a gateway into a place where, if it closes behind Isobel, none of them could follow. 

Aisling flares, screaming a silent, wordless question out into the world with all her meager power. The puppet pinning her down gives no sign that it can hear. All she can do is hope Mide can.

~~~

The halo of manifest rage coursing between Shona and Seryana begins to lose its shape as she incinerates the Harbinger’s newest body. This time, though, the storm doesn’t slow down at all. Shona’s power surges through the Wound, spilling out around us and into the new mirrored room. 

Within seconds, I sense yet another Seryana coming into being, another tiny extension of her created to be destroyed. I can’t see her right away, but I know she’s there by the fetid stench of this place growing stronger. Then comes the impact of something landing on the bed above me. 

A curtain of filthy shower-drain hair spills over the side of the bed, obscuring my view. Seryana leans the upper half of her body over the edge, staring right at me. Her upside-down mask, framed by the tangled shroud of her grimy mane, is as unmarred as when she first put it on.

<Oh, so much love!> she sings in her own soul’s voice, that desperate sigh I feel like hot breath and wet dust on my neck. <Love like a dagger! Love you carry like a mountain on your back! The truest love there is! If only you were capable of this kind of love, dearest, we never would have grown so distant! You never would have needed to ruin anyone but me!>

Seryana swivels upright and hurls herself off the bed at Shona, not quite reaching her before the lightning finds her again. She screams and cheers and laughs all at the same time as Shona’s crimson bolts sear her to nothing.

Why did Shona have to barge in here? Why couldn’t everyone just leave me alone and let me handle my own miserable life? This is the worst possible time to deal with this. I am the worst possible person to deal with this.

But… I’m the only one there is. 

And while I hide under this bed and spiral into a chasm of my own self-pity and loathing, Seryana feasts. 

And the girl feeding her has never done anything but try, in her own stupid, happy way, to help me and be my friend.

I’ve hurt people, I’ll keep hurting people, I’ve let people die, I could’ve killed her best friend, and still she keeps reaching out to me and standing up for me to her own partner, making whatever weak excuses she can come up with to the girl I nearly ate.

And if I don’t do something right now, both of us probably die.

So what do I do? What can I do? What is even happening? I press my hands over my ears, blotting out the clamor of thunder and the rumble of flimsy plaster walls collapsing as best I can — it doesn’t help with either Shona’s screech or Seryana’s endless babbling, but it’s something — and I think. 

I think I have enough to make a good guess, although that’s still several steps off from knowing what I should do about it. Right before the first storm started, Shona asked me, with horror written clearly on her face, what “she” was doing here. She’s seen plenty of monsters before, so that only makes sense if she’s seeing someone she recognizes. Someone other than the Harbinger she burst in to save me from. By the way Shona’s reacting and the strange things Seryana’s been saying, my best guess is that the Harbinger is wearing some kind of illusion only Shona can see, stealing the face and voice of a person she knows. 

How did she do that? Did she do that, or is she only borrowing some weird power from Isobel’s new Harbinger? What does this mean for whoever she’s mimicking? 

But the details don’t matter right now. All that matters is what I can do to make her stop, and there I’m drawing a blank. I feel like I’ve got more of a hook in Seryana’s soul than I did when she dragged me in here, but I still don’t know what I’d need to do to actually kill her. Especially not while she’s gorging herself on Shona’s anger. My power works best when I’m alone in a Wound, a whole world I can infect and fester through until nothing remains. Other people are just complications I have to worry about hurting. 

If I were much, much better at this, I might be able to somehow infect only and exactly the other Harbinger’s mask, breaking its power without putting Shona in danger, but… Shona’s already broken it over and over and nothing’s changed. I’d need to understand this much more than I do to try and damage the magic itself in a way that matters. Maybe, if it’s possible to simply burst out of a wound the way Shona said she could, I could rot us a path out the way I made a trail through the forest, but I have a feeling that her way is quick and explosive and mine would be excruciatingly slow, if it works at all.

Can I make Shona stop, then? How? Words aren’t reaching her — I don’t even know if she can hear me. I can’t try to physically hold her back or come between her and Seryana, not while she’s standing in the heart of a crimson squall of violent fury. Even huddling under a bed in this dark, damp corner of the Wound, I don’t feel safe from her storm.

What if I… 

Oh, everything is terrible forever, but… 

What if I did it anyway? 

I don’t know Shona, not really, but I can tell she’s not like me. She never wants to hurt anyone… well, except maybe whoever’s face Seryana is wearing, right now. But she certainly doesn’t want to hurt me. If there’s anything I can do to shake her out of her deadly frenzy, that’s it. It’d just be a little more pain. 

How many times have I pushed myself forward with thoughts like those since I made the Promise? How often among those times have I said those exact words to myself? How many more times will I throw myself into the fire before I can just live?

…And I know my answer. As many as it takes. I deserve this and more, anyway.

When I crawl out from under the bed, the Wound looks less like a hoarder’s dark nest and more like a condemned house in the middle of being demolished. More walls have come crashing down, exposing more almost-perfect duplicates of the cramped space we first found ourselves in, with more human effigies of woven hair laying on the beds. Of the original room, only the wall behind me is still standing. Shona still sways angrily in the rough center of the original room, wreathed in a blindingly brilliant crimson tempest that grows to fill the expanding space. Blood and tears still streaming down her face through her endless shriek, but the bleeding I saw earlier has intensified now.

And through her inflamed tear ducts, something is growing — thin, coarse strands of unwoven rope fiber, creeping out from her eye sockets like vines overgrowing an abandoned building.

The circuit between her and Seryana is broken, but only because the storm has ceased to focus on any one target. Now it simply rampages through the Wound, burning everything but that single stubborn cabinet. The Harbinger herself appears again and again at Shona’s side, reaching out for her with fraying fingers until the storm blasts her away and reduces her to cinders.

“Shona, stop it! There’s no one here but us and a Harbinger!” I try one last time, though I can barely hear my own voice over the tumult of the Wound falling apart. 

Only a shrill cackle from Seryana and yet another deafening crack of thunder answers.

There’s no other option, then. I have to do this.

I breathe, slow and deep, circulating stolen life through my cursed blood. I’m about to need a lot of it. Once it’s flowed all the way through my body, I stride into the storm — all at once, before I can stop myself. As wild and random as the bolts arcing through the Wound look, enough of them pass within an inch of me that I’m certain some part of Shona is steering them. I can only hope that’s a good sign, another indication that her mind hasn’t been completely swept away in the swelling tide of her power.

Shona glances my way as I pass through the arcing tempest surrounding her, unharmed save for the painful heat in the air. A confused mix of painful emotions plays across her face as I pull my right glove off, take her hand, squeeze it, and-

Crimson light swallows my world. A train crashes into the back of my head and the impact surges through me and breaks every bone in my body at once and a thousand syringes stab into me and replace my organs with molten lava and everything—

~~~

“…Eyna…!”

A voice echoes in the distance, calling through an expanse a thousand miles wide. Calling… to me?

A single massive red sunspot fills my vision, leaving only a dark, blurry outline of whatever world exists behind it. 

“…fuck fuck no fuck I’m sorry Eyna I’m sorry…”

Hot tears drip onto my skin. They hurt as they trickle down my cheek, the way even the slightest pressure on sunburnt skin hurts. 

The blur beyond the blinding light resolves, forming… a face? A vague impression of a familiar face, just above mine. Shona’s face.

…Right. We’re still in a Wound. I did a very stupid thing. Arms wrapped around my back hold me upright. The more I come back to myself, the more everything burns. The familiar cool, soothing sensation of digesting stolen life tangles with the pain of having been cooked from the inside out.

The Harbinger. Where’s the Harbinger? That thought comes roaring through my mind. My eyes dart wildly around the room, looking for Seryana, and I find her.

Looming on a bed, the masked clump of noose-limbed hair glares at us from afar, unmoving. No, not unmoving. She’s trembling. Quivering violently. She lets out a long, sad wail, too thin and shrill to belong to any living human, and black muck wells up in the eyes of the mask she wears, streaming down to spill off its chin and dirty her form even more. She begins to flail her woven-rope arms, beating them into the charred bedsheets beneath her, and her whine devolves into a tantrum of beastlike snarling too strange and incohesive to compare to a natural animal.

<You, you, you–you, youyouyouyouyouyouyouyou, how dare you, how dare you, HOW DARE YOU>

Seryana whips her appendages to the floor, coiling them around one of her woven-hair effigies that had fallen during her struggle with Shona. She raises it above her head and then smashes it down against the bed frame, sending glass shards flying everywhere as the picture affixed to its “face” shatters. Then she does it again. In a frenzy, she raises the doll back up just to bring it down, bashing it against the bed frame again and again and again.

<SHUT UP. SHUT UP. WORTHLESS. GARBAGE. WORTHLESS. CAN’T DO. ANYTHING. RIGHT. NOTHING. BUT. A PAIR. OF HOLES. JUST SHUT UP SHUT UP STOP TALKING I’M DONE WITH YoU JuST dIE.>

“What the… what the entire fuck?” Shona chokes out, eyes wide as she watches the Harbinger tear its own prop to shreds. Good question. I understand Seryana’s language, yes, but I still have no idea what she’s trying to say beyond the unbearably slimy way the words feel.

When she’s finally done, Seryana flings what remains of the effigy aside and begins pulsing across her figure as though heaving down gulps of air. Then, a haggard noise rasps from her shuddering body, sharpening into hoarse giggles that rattle through the air. Her masked face snaps back to look at Shona, then lunges across the room… but stops just short of tackling her, hanging over her like a dusty veil spun from shed hair.

<Oh, look what you’ve done now!> Seryana growls into Shona’s ear, and I hear her voice all too clearly through the hazy film between me and everything else. <Everything going wrong, everything crashing down around you… it’s because you thieves came too near to her. It’s not safe. Not for you, not for her, not for anyone. Stay away from her.>

Shona flinches and freezes in place, glancing at the Harbinger through the corners of her eyes. “Wha..? You were just…”

“Ignore her,” I rasp. My throat aches the way it does when I’ve tried to talk too loudly or for too long. “This isn’t real. Whatever you think you’re seeing, it’s just…” A phrase drifts through my blurry thoughts, and I latch onto it. “It’s just her obnoxious cheaty shit.” That’s how she described Irakkia’s world-twisting powers to Aisling’s club. Maybe it means something in her vocabulary that she’ll recognize through… this. “Save all this for whoever deserves it.”

“…So she’s not… I didn’t… I didn’t kill her,” Shona murmurs tonelessly, like whatever that means to her hasn’t quite registered.

“And you’re… fuck, I mean, fuck, I’m sorry, are you… no, I mean, of course you’re hurt, what a stupid fucking thing to ask! How…. how can I help? What do I do?”

“Just get us out of here.”

“Right. Right, uh, yeah, just… this is gonna be noisy. Sorry.” Shona sets my limp body down on the damp, filthy floor. She stands, plays a bar of music I only hear as an aural blur of harsh, sharp noise. Thunder cracks through the music and the whole world rumbles as if in an earthquake. A great chunk of the floor near my legs falls away into nothingness. I can’t muster enough strength to move, but before I can fall helplessly through the world, Shona scoops me up, hoists me over her shoulder, and jumps in for us both.

<And you, dearest… you and I are one, till death do us part,> Seryana whispers as we sink through the void. <We both know that. Your heart may wander anywhere it likes, but it can never leave. I can never leave.> 

Those last words come without a cloying squeal, without even the slightest syrupy tinge. Seryana spits them like a curse, like an inescapable truth she resents more than anything.

Then her presence fades into the distance, and we crash to the ground beneath the light of the Embrace, brighter and more painful than ever.

Aisling detects it right before she sees it, a soundless alarm piercing through the flow of her thoughts. Her gaze whips back toward the forest’s edge just in time to watch reality explode. Liadain’s Harbinger opens itself, turning inside-out into a raw and bloody hole in the world. In an instant, it expands, swallows her whole, and contracts into itself, leaving a tangled web of hair and ribbons of exposed skin spread out around a pulsing black core. A Wound in the most literal sense.

“Ah… it’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do,” Isobel sighs, though she watches Liadain vanish with a thin, vindictive smile that makes Aisling’s stomach churn.

There’s no point in wondering what happened to her best friend, what’s come over the girl Aisling trusted more than any other to make her this way. The culprit is clear as the burning sky. The two important questions, then, are: what does Isobel’s new Harbinger want with a dead keepsake of her last one, and how much of Isobel is left in there to save?

As the distortion that swallowed Liadain settles in its place and begins to slowly contract into itself, Isobel clasps her hands together, lowers her gaze, and begins murmuring to herself as if in prayer. A white mask flickers into being over her face… no, not quite over, but not quite translucent, either. Rather, Isobel’s head and this placid-faced stone mask somehow appear to occupy the same space at the same time. 

With three clean, rhythmic swipes of her blade, Mide carves through the wrists of the shadowy limbs gripping her ankles. She rips her legs away as if pulling herself out of an ivy thicket, stomps on the blunt end of the spear she’d dropped to her feet in such a way that it’s launched spinning into the air, and takes a quick hop backwards as she notices the attacking silhouettes have already reformed – and one of them is lifting itself off the ground.

A smoky, pitch black arm rises above the knight’s height and unfurls its long, branchlike fingers like blossoming flower petals. Its presence hums like a youth choir crooning in the distance. As the tips of the shadow-limb’s six fingers abruptly tense like a claw and lance out sharply, extending with terrifying speed as if to skewer her, Mide catches her spear out of the air with her shield hand just in time to array it, her sword, and her heater shield in just the right places to deflect every vector of the attack.

The diverted fingers clang off her armaments and shoot past Mide, stabbing into the ground behind her, and she cuts them away before rushing forward to chop down the risen shadow-limb. As fast as she is, the silhouette is quicker, ducking the arc of her next swing as it retreats flat against the ground. In the meantime, another shadow-limb has taken the chance to snake around her, lunging at her from behind to seize her ankles again. This time, though, she’s ready, and easily evades with some quick footwork.

With none of the shadow-limbs directly impeding her, Mide sheaths her sword, turns tail, and glides down to the patch of grass where Shona was smashed into the earth, all in one smooth motion. Three of the silhouettes slither after her at a leisurely pace, but three others retract, returning to their source.

The very same moment Mide offers Shona a hand up, the silhouettes that had pulled back to Isobel all sprout up off from the ground, becoming too-tall, too-long arms of solid shadow just the same as the one that had risen to attack Mide. Her shadow is as solid as a puddle of black ink seeping out from under her shoes.

And as they draw themselves up, stubbornly resisting the Sun’s burning light, black threads trailing away from each finger reach down into the pool of murk at their base. Each set of strings pulls a human-sized form up with them, as if reeling corpses out of a lake, but the ghoulish manikins they puppeteer are human only in their vague outline. They look to be made entirely of white stone, with expressionless masks in place of faces, and their bodies are stretched out like coils of clay. Nothing distinguishes one from the other but the tiny cracks in the stone. None move on their own power, simply lolling over and twitching as the hands holding their strings spasm in pain.

Not only was Liadain the only person present who might be able to drive out the thing inside Isobel without killing her, Aisling has no way of knowing how much immediate danger that girl has gotten herself into, now. 

Danger from that Harbinger or herself? Unimportant. Nothing I can do about Liadain’s situation from out here. Focus on the things you can control first. 

“Shona! You can break out of Wounds, right?” Aisling calls out.

Taking Mide’s hand, Shona stumbles dizzily to her feet, tossing aside her broken shades and brushing grass and bits of rock off her dress. After helping her friend up, Mide wastes no time turning back to the shadow limbs creeping closer behind her, passing her spear into her free hand, and chucking it into the centermost silhouette with so much force it buries itself a third of the way into the ground. The middle arm cringes like a living insect pinned in a specimen box, splitting itself down the middle as it rips itself away… and reforms itself in short order. Mide strides forth as she draws her sword again, interposing herself between the  silhouettes and Shona.

“Urghhh…” Shona collects herself, making sure Mide has the situation at least mostly in check before she gives Aisling her response. “..Y-yeah, when I’ve tried!” she confirms, her eyes leaping between the three silhouettes closing in on her and Mide, and the three manikins Isobel has called into being. 

Then, as if fed up with her own hesitation, Shona’s wavering eyes take on a sudden anger. The violin scattered along the ground bursts into crimson light, and a new one materializes in her grip. She puts her bow to the instrument and races through a harsh threatening tune in presto, summoning a wall of red lightning bolts between her and the Harbinger’s shadow. The bolts, short-lived as they are, prove more than enough to scatter the spectral arms, which frantically retreat into the darkness beneath Isobel. With that, Shona jogs to Aisling’s side. Mide follows, side-stepping along with her shield and sword held at the ready against the limp statue-puppets.

“We can’t fight this on two fronts. Can you get in there and pull Eyna out?” 

“I mean…” Shona bites her lip. “It’s not great to separate us,” she says, wagging an elbow in Mide’s direction.

“Listen. These out here are just… shadows cast by a Harbinger. Fragments of power it’s handed out. The two of us can handle these, and their creator isn’t going to manifest during an Embrace. But I can’t get into a Wound and pull someone out. Neither can Mide. You can, and you’re fast. Just do it as quick as you can. Or if she’s got things under control, you can leave her there and pop back out to help us. That work?”

Shona glances uncomfortably at Mide, who nods once. 

“…’Kay. Be right back.”

Red lightning dances around Shona’s feet as she kicks off and skates up the hill, charging straight into Seryana’s Wound. Seryana’s tear in the world, which had gradually been stitching itself shut, twists and expands once more to welcome the Screaming Hymn, opening into a narrow tunnel of flesh and sinew that shuts like a mouth in the world the moment Shona passes through.

Isobel smirks, then kneels and reaches an arm deep into the darkness still pooled at her feet. The murk boils and writhes as she pulls another mask up from it, a white stone face dripping with blackness. “For your trouble, you… you creepy little freak, you,” she says, and sets the mask down beside her. “A new face for you to wear.” With those words, the mask darts away, carried up the hill by a wisp of slithering blackness detached from the central pool. 

Mide thrusts her sword upright into the earth, then reaches out her newly freed hand towards her spear, whereupon the weapon bursts into embers and manifests instantly in her grip. She draws the javelin back, takes a running start, and hurls it at the stone face. The tip finds its mark, impacting the face with a harsh clatter. The mask jolts off course but quickly corrects itself, with only a chunk chipped off its left cheek to show for the strike, while the spear bounces away and disappears in a golden flare.

For her part, Aisling simply tracks the new mask as it travels, narrowing her focus around it. Her Keeper senses have never been what she wished they were, but for this they should suffice. The mask is faintly feminine in shape and design — even before the damage, it didn’t quite match the featureless ones worn by Isobel and her puppets. It’s still very much a living extension of the same demon behind them, though — training her aura sight on it leaves Aisling with the distinct impression of a great tangle of threads, with the set on one side trailing back toward Isobel and the other dangling unused. A marionette bar with strings on either side, designed as if to be used by one puppet to direct another.

Then the mask dives into Seryana’s Wound, falling out of reach of Aisling’s senses. 

Seryana and Isobel’s passenger are colluding, then. It’s even possible she tipped Isobel off before they showed up — Isobel did know exactly who was there before she saw them, and while her Harbinger could simply have some other way of spying for her, the timing of Seryana’s manifestation and whatever the puppeteer just offered her both suggest an accord between them. Did they have some prior arrangement? No, from the way Liadain described her, the most likely explanation is that Seryana saw an opportunity to pull her “one and only true love” away from other Keepers and took it.

Still, Isobel’s Harbinger agreed to work with her. They could just be smart enough to communicate and accept an alliance of convenience, but offering her some tangible portion of its power seems like a step beyond that. Is there some deeper layer to its plan?

Can Harbingers be witches? Can they be vessels? No, that’s unimportant too. A theory question for later. 

The statue-puppets stir, pulled half-upright by Isobel’s spectral hands. Mide plucks her sword from the soil and steps forward with her shield thrust out, placing herself firmly between Aisling and Isobel.

“Isobel, are we really going to war before we even know what you want out of this?” Aisling calls. “Fine, you don’t know the others, but are you that certain there’s no way I’d hear you out?” She doubts it’ll work — Isobel’s given every indication that what her new Harbinger wants is incompatible with anyone else’s goals  — but it’s the only thing she can do. She’d need to know the puppeteer to have any way of hurting it, and it’s clearly not inclined to show itself here.

Isobel crosses her arms, sighing through the corner of her mouth. “Hey. Ash, hey. I’m not treating you like an idiot all of a sudden, am I? Do you think you could do me the same courtesy? There’s nothing to talk out here, and if there was, I wouldn’t do it while you and your squad are blatantly fishing for information.”

Mide looks over her shoulder, meeting Aisling’s widened eyes with an uneasy expression. 

But despite Isobel’s words, the puppets don’t move.

Aisling blinks away the tension in her expression, forcing herself to stay calm. “I’m not trying to interrogate you about your Harbinger’s weaknesses, okay? We’re not starting a fight if you aren’t.” 

“Mhm. Only stalling for time while those two deal with the other one?” Isobel’s hands clench around her arms. She taps a foot impatiently, trailing liquid shadow away from her shoe as it touches down in the dark beneath her. 

“I just want to know what you’re looking for here! We could’ve helped if you didn’t cut us all off as soon as you jumped into this! Maybe we still can!”

“As if you wouldn’t have just killed Aulunla and gotten me the help I needed like anyone else!” Isobel takes a single long stride forward. Her distorted shadow dances out of the way as she stomps down, then slides easily back into place beneath her.

“I wouldn’t have. Not until you or it gave me a reason to think there was a problem,” Aisling says, doing her utmost to keep her frustration out of her low, level voice. For a moment, she simply watches Isobel’s face through her half-real mask, allowing her time to register what Aisling just said — what Isobel knows she couldn’t have lied about.

“Fine. Maybe I’m just fucking stupid. Maybe if you hadn’t picked out some problem, and all our friends stood by me when I told them I’d made a pact with a Harbinger, we’d have revolutionized our understanding of everything together. But Ash, that’s not where we are anymore! It’s dead! It’s gone and I’m doing my best to make things right and yes, there’s no point in negotiating on what I need to do to make that happen. We’re doing it. If you don’t want to fight, great! All you have to do is leave us alone. Go help your new friends out. We won’t stop you.”

“…Doing what?” Aisling presses. Make what right? Does she think she can resurrect it somehow? That might be possible, but Aisling can’t imagine a way to do it without tearing Aulunla’s remains out of Liadain and piecing them back together, and Isobel seemed happy enough to let Seryana take her. “Let’s leave the Harbinger out of it for a second. What are you, Isobel, trying to get out of this, and are you sure it’s the best way to get it?”

“You keep asking the same stupid, obvious question! I just want to MATTER! And don’t tell me there was some other way, some perfectly respectable path into this world for a normal nobody. If you believed that, you wouldn’t have made the Promise! You hated magic — you still do. You wanted nothing to do with it. So what made you a chosen hero and the rest of us your sidekicks, hm?!”

“I don’t know! I’m doing my best to find out, and I thought we were doing that together! If you came to the club with this, and it really was like you say it was, we’d have been the first to update our beliefs and you know it! We all would’ve been thrilled to learn if Aulunla was really different from every other Harbinger, so why didn’t-”

“DON’T SAY THEIR NAME AS IF YOU CARE!” Isobel snarls.

…She’s right. Aisling doesn’t care, not about Aulunla. Maybe if she’d been there, if Isobel would give her anything at all to demonstrate that she wasn’t exactly like any other witch suffering from their Harbinger’s soul-rot.

“You never gave me a chance to care,” Aisling says.

Isobel’s face, still stained with tears, twists into a scowl. With no visible signal, her puppets jerk into action, pulled forward by the fingers of the hands sheltering them from the Sun, and Mide advances to meet them. 

Two statues throw themselves violently at Mide, warping and stretching at strange angles as if moving to wrap themselves entirely around her. With her shield and frantic footwork — still enhanced by echoes of Shona’s power, which turn a single step into an easy slide along the rough ground — she holds them at a distance, taking careful, probing slices at the strings that move them between flurries of twisting motion.

Isobel turns and stomps off down the shoreline, her shadow stretching out behind her to hold its place. Aisling rushes after her, but the third hand drags its puppet into her way. It doesn’t restrain her, it doesn’t even try, it simply… stands there, staring at her with its placid smile and empty eye-sockets, blocking her path to Isobel however she moves.

And that’s all it would need to do, if Aisling had only her own power to rely on. 

But if Isobel honestly thought that was the case, she was selling Truth’s Lantern short, despite her claims to the contrary.

Reaching gently inside the rightmost pocket of her peacoat-dress, Aisling pulls out a revolver, switching off its safety as she does. In a single swift, slick motion, she parts her legs in a firing stance, levels the gun in the center of the manikin’s face with both hands, and pulls the trigger.

The muzzle flashes with an eerie teal light. The puppet crumples as a magic-infused bullet exits out the back of its head in a burst of that same strange blue-green radiance, which discolors even the glaring white of the Embrace around it. Without hesitating, Aisling fires again into her enemy’s chest, causing its gangly body to twirl as it’s flung backwards. She fires a third time, blasting off its right arm, which sails off wildly through the air and into Missing Lake.

Aisling lowers the barrel as the manikin collapses, the shadowy arm that held the puppet aloft sagging to the ground along with it. The fissures spreading across the figure’s stone skin where Aisling hit home glow faintly teal… then slowly but surely melt into a liquid state almost like magma. But there isn’t even close to enough heat to render stone molten. Rather, the puppet’s flesh is “festering” in a way that shouldn’t be possible for inorganic matter. 

This is far better than any unenhanced gun could ever hope to accomplish, but the bullets would have done even more damage, reduced the whole demented muppet right to slag, if they were freshly imbued. It’s bad practice to go as long as Aisling has without getting the enchantment restored, but she rarely uses it anyway, and she loathes feeling indebted to the Church or its Keepers. Still, she’s not about to pass up her prerogatives, and in this case, she’s glad to have the weapon on hand.

Isobel is still visible down the coast, her figure shrinking into the distance, her strides long as she begins to hurry her escape. Aisling has to move now. She can’t let her friend – her best friend, her sister in every way that matters – get sucked any deeper into whatever pit this puppet-thing crawled out of.

But just as she stomps over that puppet-thing and lifts her sole off it to break into a run, something snags hold of her boot, sending her toppling to the grass — and her gun hurtling out of her grip.

Aisling frantically rolls over, kicking at the creature’s concrete grip on her, but it’s futile. It drags her back, pulls her under it, and straddles her. With its single remaining arm, it curls its rough fingers around her throat, though not quite viciously enough to crush it. Pinned down, Aisling can only gnash her teeth and glare up at the statue’s grinning, shattered face as the leftmost half of it begins to ooze off.

If only she weren’t so weak. She’s seen so much, learned so much, but all that knowledge has done for Isobel is drive her into the arms of a nightmare.

~~~

<This is nice, isn’t it? A warm hand on your skin. A tether holding you firmly in a moment when things made sense.> 

Countless filthy tangles of blonde hair-rope wrap around me, like a hundred suffocatingly tight hugs at once. Warm, damp fingers trace formless patterns over my face as I’m passed from embrace to painful, clinging embrace, bearing me down into the Wound.

<Just a moment, just one — that is all we need! Who cares about tomorrow? What good has the future ever done for us?>

The rank, sour air makes me want to puke, but I can’t. I can’t do anything but fall, lost in the horrible sensations of the world being peeled away, becoming something else. 

<Shroud the world in terror. Shrink it to a room where only you and I matter. That’s what you’ve always done for me, dearest… so won’t you let me return your gift at last?>

The tunnel opens, setting me down gently on the ground. My legs give out and my gut churns and ice courses through my veins and my throat burns with dozens of tiny scratches as I hunch over and vomit up… 

A mixture of noxious green fog and damp black feathers. 

I stare into the cloud as it seeps along the floor. It feels right, I realize. Truer than the more familiar pain of spitting up stomach acid. This is what I am now, inside and out. My own living curse. No point in thinking of myself as a person with human needs and frailties and feelings. 

People are supposed to break when they kill other people, aren’t they?

Slowly, I stagger upright and search for Seryana through the pall of clinging, stinking miasma all around me. Her Wound is… all I can see is a single cramped room, dark save for where pinpricks of light filter through the black curtains over the undersized windows. Each sheet of fabric is covered in tiny holes that shift and spin slowly, orbiting each other in pairs like tiny stars.

The room, a little square space with off-yellow walls, is packed with a bizarre range of furniture — two thin beds against the walls in opposite corners, stools and footrests scattered randomly about, and in the center, an overturned curio cabinet. Knots of wet hair are strewn all over every surface. The cabinet’s glass compartments are lit from the inside, though they do nothing to illuminate the room around them. Where the little windows aren’t completely covered in refuse, they look to be filled with framed photos with all the faces scratched out.

<I know. You never liked keeping these around, did you? But I can’t help myself. They were ours. Our relics from a time when things were happier,> Seryana whispers. Her voice comes from everywhere at once, with no sign of her actual form in sight.

So I open my soul and fill the room with infectious mist, flooding the Wound with my own corruption. For good measure, I tap a bit of life, walk up to the curio cabinet, and start bashing its windows in with the heel of my boot.

That gets her attention. The Harbinger scrawls herself into existence at my side. Her limbs are already starting to unravel, but all she does is set a disintegrating hand on my shoulder. Beneath the grey coils her body is woven from are thin strands of raw red, the color of exposed flesh.

<I understand! I do!> Seryana giggles and wails in two voices. <You are a nightmare come to life. You ruin everything you touch… but that’s okay! Destroy me!>

The Harbinger reforms the moment she’s finished wasting away, born again already falling apart and gurgling excitedly about it. She reaches to interlace her fingers with mine, holding my hand in a painfully tight grip when I try to snatch it away, but then she loses her strength, wastes away, and dies. She throws herself at me and hugs me tight, shrouding my face in her matted hair, and then she dies. Her voice warbles through obnoxious, tuneless songs as her disintegrating fingers run along my cheek above my mask, trailing dust and grime over my skin, and then she dies.

<Tear me to pieces as many times as you like! I’ll put us back together, always. Give me everything you have and I will make sure tomorrow never has to come for us. What more could we ask for?> Seryana begs. Her black-scrawl face twists into a small, desperate smile.

But all the while, my sickness seeps and seeps into the world. The holes in the curtains slowly grow, the light beyond them flickering a pale sickly green. The beds fall to ruin, their mattresses collapsing through the middle as the slats supporting them decay. Only the damaged cabinet’s contents hold steady against my corruption.

If this is all she has, Seryana shouldn’t have brought me here. She’s not like Esonei, an infection of its own that could punish me for hurting it. She can survive my plague, yes, but her manifestations aren’t growing, aren’t changing. Maybe she’s getting something from her constant deaths at my hand, but I don’t think it’s what she needs.

What she really wants is my pain, my love or hate or any feeling at all that might bind us together into an endless cord of mutual misery, and the only thing I can bring myself to feel about Seryana is the cold, creeping dread that maybe this is where I belong, a murderer imprisoned in a monster. 

But I wouldn’t be here if ever I let what I should do slow me down.

So hurt me if you’re going to, but pain gives me power, too. Hold me here as long as you can, but it won’t be forever. Stop me or I’ll rot away this whole world around us, and then the world outside too. Someone stop me, because I don’t think I can do it myself. 

A crack of thunder roars out, somewhere in the distance far above us. Another comes a few seconds later, much closer than the first.

“EYNAAAA!” Shona’s voice screams. A jolt of crimson lightning crashes through the ceiling, tearing chunks of it away, followed immediately by a deafening burst of thunder. On instinct, I pull my fog away from the jagged hole, gathering it around myself.

<All these intruders smashing their way into places I made just for us… how? Why does this keep happening? Do you really hate me that much?> Seryana whines, drawing back onto the bed in the furthest corner.

“FLARE IF YOU CAN HEAR ME! I’M… oh. Hey. Here I am.” A few seconds later, Shona drops through the broken ceiling, landing easily on her feet, and suddenly lowers her unnatural volume when she spots me right beside her. I can barely hear her through the ringing in my ears.

“Wow,” Shona huffs. “This… oh, ew, this is an extra shitty little place, isn’t it?” She shakes a grungy hair-knot off her shoe like a bit of trash on the sidewalk.

“What are you doing here?” I murmur. “I dragged Seryana into this. She’s mine to-”

“Oh, fuck that with a rake!” Shona snaps. She smashes her bow against the cabinet in emphasis, summoning a new one before the wood splinters have even landed.

“What? What does that mean?” 

“It means we’re in this together! Deal with it!”

I can’t deal with it. I don’t have that power. I’m a disaster for everyone I’m around and it’ll really, really be best if she just lets me be my own problem. 

“You look a lot like you’re being a dummy again,” Shona pushes, folding her bow hand on her hip. “Listen. Aisling said I could just let you handle this if you had it under control, but honestly I think that’s pretty dumb! There’s four of us and one of your Harbinger. Let’s just… one thing at a time, okay? You’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna get through this. I can get us outta here, I’m pretty sure, so-”

<What is this? You too?> Seryana wails suddenly, stirring from her corner to glower up at an unbroken section of the ceiling. <This is our home! Our sanctuary! LEAVE US BE ALREADY!> 

A dark patch forms above her, seeping over the surface like a water stain. Within moments, it goes completely black, becoming a blotch of liquid shadow. Something lowers through the ceiling, a small object wrapped in strings of solid darkness — a white stone mask, its chipped face pulled back into a faint sneer.

And there it waits, hanging still. It feels like… something else, the limb of a presence too high and cold and distant for me to read.

Shona shoots me a sidelong glance, then points silently at the mask and mouths ‘Huh?’ I shrug.

For Seryana’s part, once the mask settles in its place, she seems bizarrely captivated by the new intrusion. She twists around the hanging mask to examine it from all angles, tapping it gingerly with her fraying fingers. For the second time, she reminds me of a cat not sure how to react to a strange new toy.

Shona, meanwhile, has no interest in waiting to find out where this goes. She readies her violin and starts to play, filling the little room with sharp, cacophonous notes and static buzzing through the air.

<Oh. Oh, yes, now I see. This is… how beautiful!> she sighs. She takes it in her hands, yanks it free from the shadow-strings, and places it over her scribbled face. The strands of solid darkness still dripping from it reach around the back of her head and knot themselves in place.

“You wanted to leave? Let’s leave,” I hiss to Shona. I don’t like this. Everything feels just as terrible, but… before she and this new Harbinger-limb showed up, I understood what was going on. Even when I couldn’t handle other Harbingers, I could see what they were, what they were trying to do. Now I’m lost as I’ve ever been — I can barely begin to guess at what’s happening and why Seryana isn’t reacting as violently to it as she does to everything else but me.

Shona’s song cuts off abruptly.

“Eyna,” she whispers weakly, eyes frozen wide open. “Eyna, what the fuck is she doing here?”

I scan the room, but there’s no one else around. Just Seryana, staring our way through her new mask. “What? It’s her Wound,” I say.

Seryana surges forward, crossing the room in a single space-defying twist of her whole body. She wraps both hands around Shona’s head, glaring up at her with her mask’s empty eyes. <It’s time. You start. Living the life YOU//WE//I want more than anything. Dancing with your body. RIPPING OUT YOUR DREAMS AND THREADING THEM THROUGH MINE.>

Shona’s eyes go wider than ever before. Her bow and violin slip through her fingers as she brings her palms to her ears. She opens her mouth, gawkingly at first, but soon a faint stream of hollow air, like a gasp turned inside out, begins to escape from the depths of her throat. Then, all at once, she closes her eyes and lets out an impossible, inhuman shriek. A harsh, discordant violin wail played with her own voice.

I back away in a panicked rush, tripping over the legs of a sideways stool, as sparks arc all around her, crackling through the Wound. An indoor lightning storm rages through the tiny room, and it feels like a miracle that none of the bolts dancing over every surface strike me before they converge on Seryana.