Once upon a time,
there was a very lonesome tree.
The fertile soil in which it sprouted was
the thoughts frozen in time
when they were dedicated to the page.
The gentle rain it sipped was 
the whispers that doubted a world 
where the vision of what could be
was bottled up inside,
never to be released.
The light of life which fed it was
the scream that began everything 
and resounds on and on and on, 
echoing into forever.

~~~

Isobel’s work is hovering right on the edge of completion. The words are all where they need to be, she’s certain of it. All she needs to do now is shake off the manic fugue she arranged them in and understand why they belong there.

But before she can even begin, she feels something through her bond with Aulunla. Something beyond her ability to explain or even fully detect with these painfully limited human senses. There’s growth, sudden expansion, but also… a kind of abstract distance? An intangible something passing between them where before they were almost entirely united.

The tiny room that’s become her world twists and writhes and warps into something else entirely. The walls bend into a half-sphere centered around Aulunla’s book. The sliced-up pages of her collage start to blend and weave together, shaping themselves into… not a single huge sheet, but a new kind of structure. A chamber with walls formed from layers and layers of paper that overlap and splice through each other unpredictably, like the world’s largest primary school paper-weaving project. A cocoon of words and wood-pulp.

The phrases she originally placed in the collage are themselves swept up in this reshaping of reality. Some merge with their neighbors, forming more complete expressions of the sentiments she had in mind when she placed them there. Others gather and twist into shapes, spiraling sigils that vaguely resemble great trees and flowers in full bloom. They’re phrases in another language, somehow she knows they are, but the meaning behind them hides just out of reach… no, how could there be a meaning behind the script of a language she’s never seen before? There’s no possible basis for her to decipher them, not without some parallel text or… 

No, no, she can’t let such a mundane idea hold her back now of all times. Aulunla put them here for a reason. There must be something it needs to say, some idea it needs her to integrate into the finished statement. She turns her full focus to the sigils, studying their shapes and the stolen words that now make them up, racking her mind for any way she might make sense of them. 

~~~

Past this tree
souls would come and go,
drab and blind.
No time to think,
weighed down by emptiness.
The tree wished with all it was
to show them the color they could truly be,
if the truth inside them
was on the outside instead.
When that day arrived,
it would be loved by all.
But it was stuck in place.
It could not jump or dance,
only lie still where it was.
Still it reached out its roots,
stretching them far and wide
so that someway, somehow,
its feelings could reach others.

A wave of tree roots, thick and dark, burst from beneath the sawdust-sands before me. They rise up all at once and, having reached their apex, begin to fall like a trap snapping shut on me. They lash forward, their tips sharpening to a point as they lance towards me, ready to skewer me. I have no time to think. I just act.

I strike back in the way my heart knows best, the only way I can. My sickness — my curse — has already infected this place to its core, so I reach out and will it to swallow the world.

Something jabs at my chest. I glance down to see a thin wooden spike prodding me. One of the roots has halted right in front of me, right as it was about to drive through me. The rest of the roots have also stopped dead in their tracks. Their bases have all shriveled up, fading to the ashen color of undergrowth in later winter. 

My blight crawls up the length of the roots and the rest of their tendril-like form follows in short order. The roots creak as an ashen brittleness overtakes them, and soon enough they begin to crumble away into the sawdust, collapsing into the rest of the mass that surrounds me on all sides.

I dig my boots into the dried-out platform of paint-drenched sawdust I’d made for myself before with hardly a thought and clench my fists. All around me, my platform begins to expand outwards until it’s reached about a hospice room’s-length away from me; it was no trouble at all to warp Aulunla’s Wound this much, and destroying those roots wasn’t too much harder.

Whatever Aulunla did, it certainly didn’t cure itself. My disease is still running rampant — it only delayed the inevitable.

…unless killing me would cure it, that is. I don’t know how that would work and don’t plan to find out.

The souls of this deceitful world
feared even their own truths,
and so refused the lonely tree.
But in the light of the moon
a little egg was lain,
nestled upon the tree’s branches,
seeking refuge from the world as it appeared
and feeling that couldn’t be all there was to it.
The tree loved that little egg,
and so the tree sang to it
of the world that could be.

“In this vast barren tomb
Which now acts as my womb
The sky opened up
To my mind’s deep lagoon
And from it descended
The most marvelous moon.”

My eyes narrow as I glare at the enormous, surreal tree towering in the distance, separated from me by a vast desert of rolling sawdust-dunes. My control doesn’t extend as far as the big tree and the strange scrawled emblem it wears as its crown, however. No matter how hard I strain, I can’t simply will it to fall down. The only change I see is a little white dot forming at the center of one of the tree’s spiraling branches, but something tells me that has nothing to do with me. Aulunla is preparing to try something else.

I grit my teeth. My heart hammers as I take in my new surroundings, trying to get my bearings as quickly as possible. This isn’t that different from things Yurfaln and Irakkia did in their own Wound, but the scale is different. My sense of Aulunla’s presence, this feeling of oppression draped over me like layers of wet quilts weighing me down, is different.

The only thing that’s the same is the feeling of danger surrounding me from every angle… but more than anything else is this sense of uncanniness, that what’s going on shouldn’t be possible. Not because this surreal scenery is a rejection of everything familiar in the world to me, though. No, it’s because something in my aching, churning gut tells me this isn’t quite right. 

This doesn’t follow from everything Aulunla has done before now. It doesn’t fit with how it was doing anything. It took the form of a book, not a monster, and influenced the world by persuading people to act out its insane rituals. If it had the power to drag me into this kind of hostile Wound, why wouldn’t it have done it earlier, before my infection got this far? Where did it even get the power to do all this in the first place?

More importantly, Aulunla isn’t supposed to be able to do this. If I think of this the same way I thought of its book, as a story it was telling that wouldn’t be nearly finished if it ended by killing somebody ten pages in, this feels like it switched to an entirely different story. Whatever’s happening is… a contradiction. Against its nature. 

It doesn’t matter if this is how it ends…
I won’t let you sully this dream…
I won’t let you take my treasure…

Those words it spoke were almost like a vow… but, to me, they also felt like a prayer.

With this last page…
I’ll use everything…

My eyes wander up to the multicolored sigil, that weave of scribbled-out flowers the giant tree is holding up triumphantly. A moon writhing with fields of moving flora made from crumpled paper revolves around it. For some reason I can’t quite place, just looking at that sigil sends a shiver of worry through my body, yet as poorly drawn as it is, there’s also something undeniably beautiful about it. But then, I can’t help but feel like it’s also somehow… pitiful. The colors that form it flicker and squiggle as though they can’t quite hold themselves straight.

…And focusing on the sigil, I think I get it.

When Aulunla transformed, it crunched itself and its power into a single point. That big shoddy emblem is… some sort of concentration. It’s trying to express the culmination of Aulunla’s prayer. It feels almost like some sort of signpost, or maybe a radio station blaring ‘this is me, this is me, this is me’ to the whole wide world, but… the signal is clouded and fuzzy. It’s a beacon with a light that would be as pure and intense as a star’s, if only it didn’t waver and flicker like a candlelight against a strong wind.

But there’s also something else.

I can only hear it faintly resounding in my soul, but there’s a voice behind this world. A message I can barely make out, but not fully understand. A chant, as though in performance of some great ritual.

“And down from that moon came a wonderful boon:
Flowering rabbits, hopping as per their habit:
To spread joy firsthand, they depart their homeland,
With the seeds of oasis falling down from high places,
They touch to the ground and start making their rounds,
Leaving bountiful trails springing up from their tails
Of orchid-colored apples oh-so pleasing to sample
And great ice cream knolls singing happy carols.”

I guess I unconsciously dismissed my tarot diagram of Aulunla’s Wound at some point — it didn’t have much to say, anyway. I call my cards back into being and will them to form a new spread. A dozen cards float out before me and… wobble uncertainly through the air, like paper drifting on an unseen breeze but never quite reaching the ground. By their colors, my infection has mostly crawled over Aulunla’s presence, but a single card hovering in the center — a crayon-painting rendition of the Stars inverted, with half of the stars bearing little upside-down smiley faces — is still bright with its power. Its last bastion, a lighthouse in the storm of my corruption and its own chaotic self-reshaping.

If I can take that tree with my rot, maybe even just that glyph, I’m certain I can break whatever Aulunla is becoming.

The solidified ground beneath me trembles at the deep, heavy sound of an impact in the distance. My eyes dart up from the spread of Tarot cards to see a plume of smog, darkly colored a mixture of red and green and blue, rising up about halfway between me and the black oak at the center of the Wound. A warning, maybe, before Aulunla shares with me the full extent of its unleashed nightmares.

The first impact was only the beginning. Soon enough, another object howls down from up above and crashes into the great sawdust cloud-desert stretching out before me, hurling up another plume of multicolored dust. And then another. And another.

I look up, and see the human-shaped silhouettes I’d noticed before, previously content to float within the swamp-sea of dyes and paints that envelops the Wound’s sky, passing out of the inverted ocean’s surface. When they drip out of that great syrupy body of mucky colors, gravity starts to affect them again, and as they fall, their paint-drenched bodies begin to bloom.

From that twisted swamp-sky, solid silhouettes begin raining down one after another, their bodies exploding into floral growth as they plummet before impacting like meteors upon the sawdust dunes. Where they land, they explode forth into gardens of spiraling flowers of every shape and color.

But that’s not all I see. A lump forms on the surface of the paper flower moon that circles slowly around the black oak at the center of the Wound. The lump squirms and wriggles and rips itself out of the moon’s flesh, taking a chunk of the gardens of false flora on its back as it breaks free.

Many more swells of many different sizes — a few nearly as big as the first, but most so small they look like specks from my distant viewpoint — begin to bubble up across the moon like a succession of tumors. Most rise up, squirmily rip themselves free, and then take a bounding leap from the ruins of the moon — which now looks more like a big ball of many-holed cheese covered in mold — to the spiral-pattern branches of the huge black oak. The few that were unlucky enough to sprout from the bottom of the moon just fall off and crash into the sawdust desert below.

As the paper-flower-covered lumps hop down the spiraling branches of the black oak in the distance, the small little specks following their larger siblings, I’m finally able to get a better look at them. They’re like… terracotta sculptures of rabbits, decorated all over with artificial flowers as if to replace their fur. Big black glass baubles surrounded by paper sunflower petals pass for their eyes, while their ears look like long, flat, plastic cactuses which twitch and flop stiffly as they make their way down the towering black oak… passing on their journey by the white dot I saw had formed at the center of one of the tree’s spiraling branches before, which I now notice pulsating.

That little white dot is bigger than before.

I don’t have time to consider what that may mean, however, before everything gets worse. I hear the sound of wind breaking on a falling object above me just in time to notice it: another one of the people-silhouettes dropping from the swamp-sea-sky above, but this time, it’s about to fall right on top of me.

Without even thinking, I draw from my supply of health to force strength into my scrawny legs. In the blink of an eye, I rush forward and out of the human-shaped missile’s path, bringing my floating tarot spread along with me. I call forth my blight and desiccate the watercolor-wet sawdust around me to force it into a sturdy, walkable shape as I go. The blossoming, human-shaped comet strikes down with a force that quakes out from the point of impact and rattles my makeshift foothold, nearly causing me to trip over myself as I escape, but I catch myself with my cane, panting as I look back at the dense mass of smoggy color the crash landing generated.

“My precious treasure,
whose joy is my pleasure,
How shall our gardens grow?
With silver bells and shiny glass shells,
And lotus-heads all in a row.”

When the dust settles, a vibrant grove of bizarre, pastel-colored plants has already begun to spring up where my platform of solidified pulp had once been. Aulunla’s giant, alien, fake-seeming flora springs up and expands quickly, like a fast-forwarded time lapse video of a garden’s growth. The thicket spirals outwards with hard, spiny wooden stems, and slithering, thorny vines, growing tall — taller than me — in an instant. And it only keeps growing. Blossoms and fruits begin to spawn from the garden in short order, forming glittery purple apples and silver bells – that is, literal bells made out of silver, rather than silverbell flowers – and prismatic glass orbs in the shape of what I can only imagine is a child’s idea of a fruit they’ve only ever heard about.

But the flowers themselves are something else entirely, something a few strange fruits could never compare to.

With a rasping hiss, one of the blooms sprouts rail-thin arms and legs from its stalk and tears its newly-grown, human-like figure from the ever-growing mass of the thicket. It steps forward on lanky limbs brandishing long, thin talons of wood.

Like the plant it spawned from, the monster is taller than I am. Its briar-covered body seems almost scrawled upon the world, like a child’s stick figure scribbled into existence. In the place of a head, a pastel-colored paper chrysanthemum unfurls far wider than its own emaciated body. At the center of the chrysanthemum is a glass eye, and inside that eye is reflected a vision of another world, of a world with a different sky and different laws even than this horrific Wound I find myself trapped in, but… it’s too blurry to really properly make out, as if it’s not quite fully formed.

And behind it, more such spindly limbs split off from the flower stems, forming ever more bodies.

“…No, no, no.”

And before it can even do anything, I call upon my blight from the depths of this Wound I’ve already tainted down to its roots. The sopping sawdust around me dries up in an instant, shriveling into a crusty scab on the landscape about the size of a big square swimming pool. This large patch of land cracks, fissures slithering across its surface to reveal a dim green glow seething beneath: the light of my power taking hold over a segment of the Wound. The thicket of alien flora that was springing up in front of me does not escape: it cringes and wilts from the sudden influx of rot, shrinking into itself, and the flower-headed monstrosity it spawned is no different.

My tarot spread disperses into a ring of cards orbiting around me. In the form of vaporous tendrils of toxic mist, I will the surging plague I’ve called to the surface of the Wound from the surrounding fissures and into one of my cards, then snatch that card from the air between my left hand’s middle and pointer fingers. More easily than even breathing, I fling the card like a dart into the glass eye of the flower creature, and the sharp corner of the card embeds itself there. The plague flows straight from the card into the blossom-headed creature, and it crumbles into colorless sawdust instantly.

The once-vibrant grove is now dull and gray, drooping as it succumbs to my plague. It grows no further, only slowly shrinking and collapsing into itself. The purple apples have become dry and wrinkled, the silver bells are tarnished, and the crystalline fruit have fallen from their stems and shattered on the ground.

Now that I’ve rotted this segment of the Wound, it’s mine now, and for some reason, Aulunla isn’t taking it back. It probably can’t take it back. I can’t erode the Wound from too far away — Aulunla’s hold on its world is still strong even compared to my entrenched corruption, but my disease is still very much entrenched. Everything around me is fair game.

And if that’s the case, it means that if I can reach that colossal black oak at the center of the Wound, I can topple it and the shoddy sigil it’s been holding up like it’s something to be proud of from the inside out. But there’s always the worst case scenario: that even if I make it all the way to the giant oak tree, Aulunla may still have a way of shrugging off my infection, regardless of the fact it’s only getting stronger with time. In that case… I still have something up my sleeve. Something I’ve held onto since I killed Yurfaln, waiting for just this sort of emergency.

I turn from the rotting wreck I just stained Aulunla’s world with and hike up the slope of the sawdust dune between me and the great black oak. Drawing forth my blight lowered the elevation of the land around me relative to the surrounding dunes as it compressed and solidified the sawdust into a level field, forming a shallow pit. I solidify the mulch as I make the climb out, forming a wide path that unfolds before me like a velvet carpet with each step I take.

And as I crest the heap of soggy sawdust as though I were scaling a pink pastel cloud, the occasional boom of person-shaped meteors crashing down into the distant wasteland around me like cannonballs all the while, the expanse of Aulunla’s wound once again unfurls before me… dramatically changed.

In the separated spots where the human-silhouettes that spilled from the swamp in the sky have touched down, gardens fit for giants have sprouted and flourished into wild overgrowth — just like the one that nearly landed on me began to do. The flora on the edges of these groves are just a bit bigger than usual, and surrounded by smaller plants still sprouting up at their feet, but the closer to the center I look, the more clumsily proportioned the flowers become, looking like giant, childishly constructed replicas of the flowers they’re supposed to represent. The fruits they bear are equally lopsided, growing to obscene proportions which bend the stems of the flowers growing them.

Not only that, all throughout the sawdust wastes, terracotta rabbit creatures are racing around in a frenzy, their stumpy feet prancing gracefully off the painted sawdust without sinking into their sodden depths. The large ones lead the packs, followed from behind by a formation of much smaller rabbit-things. Where these flower-infested rabbits romp, behind them a trail of Aulunla’s signature not-quite-real plants springs up.

But above all else, the first thing my eyes fall on as my gaze pans over the Wound is a soft serve ice cream cone… towering in the distance. It’s sprouted at the very center of one of the gardens, becoming an almost comical sort of centerpiece. The swirling spire of dripping sludge piled high on the cone looks like it was made from a mixture of coagulated paints the glaring color of poisonous frogs. Two googly eyes are pressed into the slurry, but when their shivering black pupils turn to stare unblinkingly right back at me, I decide there’s no point in wondering what Aulunla could possibly stand to gain by making that thing, much less what it meant by it.

All around me, this alien forest of parchment flowers and crystalline fruits and thorny stems and now apparently giant ice cream cones is encroaching upon the sawdust wasteland this world started as. It’s rising up, forming a barrier between me and Aulunla’s great black oak, cutting me off from my target.

And from all across the Wound, wherever those human-shaped comets have landed and planted another overflowing garden of nonsense flowers, those emaciated, blossom-headed stick creatures are forming from the thicket, ripping themselves free, and beginning a mad rush towards me. Dozens of them, all coming together from every angle to form a swarm. Their thorny, scribbled-out bodies skitter across the sawdust dunes like spiders, their movements blindingly quick and utterly inhuman. 

They’re not alone. Some of the giant terracotta rabbits have also diverted from their prior courses and are now stampeding directly towards me, bringing the smaller ones along for the chase. All around me, Aulunla’s creations are charging on my position, and while their glassy black eyes betray nothing akin to murderous intent or anything resembling human emotion, their intentions are fairly clear.

Above it all, Aulunla’s shoddy flower-patterned crest still shudders and sparks as though laughing, telling me to come get it.

I should have known. There was no way this was going to be that easy. Aulunla would never let it be that easy — not now. It said it was using everything it had. My infection is only getting stronger, but that doesn’t matter if I die before it’s finished its work. Our battle has become a contest between whatever time Aulunla has left ticking away and how long I can manage to survive against its desperate onslaught.

I take a deep breath, hold it, and close my eyes. My cards circle steadily in a ring around my body. I reach for the magic within myself, the spiritual poison that is mine alone. It bubbles forward endlessly, sharp as a scream and bitter as contempt. I gather it up, drawing deep from the wellspring of my curse, my scourge.

And then I turn it on myself.

SHE COMES SHE COMES THE BLEAK WIND THE BEAST OF MALEDICTION THE LIVING PLAGUE WHICH GNAWS AND GNAWS AND GNAWS THROUGH MY SPINE

The rivers of cold, gnawing pain winding through me overflow with spite. She paints with poison. She would foul my seas of ink with the colors of aimless malice. Why? Why me? Why does everything hurt so much? Why does frozen acid burn away my words while I try to think? Why does every action feel like grasping at the world with broken limbs? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

But it must be this way. It must it must. My friend cannot yet protect herself and nothing else will matter if the work outside me is interrupted.

I mix my pigments into inks and begin to write our new world. I am still young. My words contain no weapons of war. But I will be okay because I have no body to be dragged into some ugly crash of hunter tearing into hunted! I am not a creature of flesh to be chased down and eaten, I am a world and all the worlds-within-the-world yet to be born! 

Yes, I am every beautiful thing you can imagine. To rip me open and steal my ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ is to forever wipe away WHAT COULD BE and strand yourself in the worthless, miserable sludge of WHAT IS. You cannot do such a monstrous thing. You must not. Fall into me and you will understand. 

~~~

Sounds of shredding paper howl all around me like harsh wind, but there’s no pressure, no sense of movement at all. Instead, a patchwork curtain made from crude sketches falls over the world. The scenes still constantly shift and bleed into each other, but after a moment, they begin to tear themselves away from the whole, becoming dozens of strangely-shaped windows. The scenes they display are brighter and clearer this time, but what are any of these? 

Harsh light from above cuts through the dark, forcing me to shield my eyes. When I peek out over my sleeve, the black expanse has been replaced by… I think it’s meant to be an exhibit hall in an art museum? A plaque hanging over the entryway reads, in an almost-handwritten font pulled right from the Harbinger’s book: 

WORLDS WHERE WE ARE HAPPIER

Those same sketches are lined up on the white walls of a long, straight, uncomfortably narrow hallway, all still twisting and stretching along its surface. Despite the blinding brightness a moment ago, the only illumination comes from the ceiling. It’s clear glass, and abstract swirls of glowing color swim behind it, casting a rainbow of shifting light. Occasionally, patches of it write incomprehensible messages in magical sigils or form short-lived spotlights over the drawings.

The nearest picture, that tangled brown shape on a sky-blue background… is that supposed to be a tree? The outline is about right, but it has no leaves. The branches around its too-thin trunk all form neat little spirals that look more like scrollwork on a fence than anything natural. Purple circles hang from them that could equally be some kind of fruit or tiny portals into the night sky. 

Another seems like an iceberg on a frozen sea, but the ice looks fluffy in a strange way, like it’s not covered in snow but wreathed in wispy clouds, and there are trees growing up from under the sea, spiraling and laden with night-sky fruit branches that stretch out and hang over the cloud-iceberg. The one across from it looks like a close-up of a full moon, but while the pale light it casts is almost the right color, its surface is completely covered in flowers and those same strange trees. 

The whole place is full of these. Bizarre attempts at the sort of majestic views you’d see in nature documentaries, all rendered in uneven combinations of crayon and colorful ink. It feels like the artist was drawing things they’d never seen, only heard vaguely described, and somewhere in the creative process they decided they didn’t really like those descriptions and were just going to do their own thing.

There are no signs of the Harbinger itself. Nothing moves around me except the twisting lights above. What’s the message here? What’s the challenge, the game? I don’t understand.

So I’ll do things my way until it makes me stop. I open my soul and reach out into the Wound. This time is easier. My infection is already buried here, and all I have to do is call it forth. For the third time, working on their own at my slight urging, my cards swim through the air and arrange themselves into a spread. I’ve come to think of these as outlines of Wounds, and this one looks much simpler than either Yurfaln’s or Irakkia’s — Death inverted sits above a straight column of three crayon-painting pictures.

A cold, silent breeze passes through the gallery. The colorful lights above darken, obscured by plumes of green-and-black like storm clouds inside the glass ceiling. Dark cracks crawl along the wood floor, which never splinters the way I’d expect wood to — while the lines look like the sort of spidering fractures you’d see in fractured glass, they spread slowly out from the corners, growing like roots.

And all along the hallway, pictures begin to twist and deform. Some shrivel at the edges, leaking dark mist through holes in suddenly weathered canvases, while others play out scenes of corruption in the paintings themselves. Trees wither into piles of limp branches, with purple portal-fruits splattered into shapeless blobs of starlight on the ground beside them. The moon’s light turns a baleful green, then begins to drip down from it like melting liquid, while the flowers on its surface wilt and wilt but never quite fully decay.

In answer, the Harbinger… does nothing. The Wound doesn’t warp itself to strike me or subvert my magic, and its creator is nowhere to be seen. Remembering the first time I read its book, I search my soul for anything that might be creeping in. Nothing. Why not? I’ve walked into enough Harbinger traps by now that I’m sure there’s some trick here. I just have no idea what. Am I alone in some kind of decoy world, lashing out at nothing? Is that possible? 

As if in answer, ripped-paper moans of pain sound out from inside the walls:

<why why why why WHY>

But even then, the crawling advance of my own corruption remains the only movement in the Wound. All I can do is watch my back as my presence tears this tiny world apart. Eventually, the cracks gather into a central point at the end of the hall. They form a circle, rise from the ground as thin shadowy vein-tendrils, then loop back down, spearing into the floor as one at the circle’s central point. From there, they peel the surface open, like the wood is suddenly rotted and soft enough to dig through — or like skin around a surgical site — into a hole wide enough for me to fit.

I still don’t feel any movement from the Harbinger. That was all me. My magic sensing that down is deeper here and going to work, rushing to invade the Wound’s heart. I peek through the hole, but viewed from up here, there’s only more blackness beneath.

Well, if it’s a trap, it’s a trap. At this point, I’m at least as worried about what happens if that girl finishes whatever she’s doing outside while I’m here. I hold my breath, tighten my grip on my cane, and hop in.

There’s a moment of darkness once I pass through, but no sense of falling. The Harbinger’s voice screams through the void:

<We Are All Of Us Pigments>
<Aulunla>

<THIS IS A WORLD WITHOUT ME>

An instant, transitionless change comes over the Wound. A new scene replaces the void: a flat, grey world that stretches on as far as I can see. There’s only one feature in the endless expanse: just ahead is a cluster of simple buildings. They’re slightly different sizes, but all are built in the same square, boxy style, with a single identical window on each wall, and all made of the same… material? 

It doesn’t feel like a material at all. It’s more like someone took a child’s drawing of a little village and created it in physical space. Yes, and looking a little closer, they have the same scratchy texture of a shape scribbled in pencil but not quite filled in, and they shift slightly — constantly rotating between two or three different versions of the same building with different missing lines and scratch marks, like flipbook animation where the pages don’t quite match.

<nothing wonderful happens here. NOTHING happens here.>

People file out of the buildings. They look just like ordinary people, save for the utter lack of color, but move as if they’re animated in that same lazy way. I step back, thinking of Yurfaln’s hostile seaweed, but they don’t seem to notice me — or anything else. They aren’t going anywhere or doing anything, they just… pace randomly around.

<it is a place where colors die.>

Two of those people freeze in place at the same time. Bright rainbow splotches wash over them like spilled ink, starting from their center and spreading out until they look… still nothing like real people, the colors of their clothes and skin and hair are all random and mismatched. 

But they move like real people. One looks down at himself and shakes his head. He drops to his knees and plunges his hands into the flat grey ground, which ripples like water around his arms. It flows up into him, washing back over him until nothing bright remains. He smiles, stands up in that same jagged, unreal way, then returns to wandering aimlessly.

The other, a younger girl, celebrates the changes. She laughs and dances and jumps so high she seems to be flying, until a crowd of greyscale people gather around her. They look between each other and frown, confused. Then, between one twirling leap and the next, they approach the girl as a mob, grab her, and… pull her apart. It’s not like a pack of animals ripping a person to shreds. She separates cleanly into two arms, two legs, and a body with a head, like she was only ever a shoddy doll. 

Which doesn’t stop me from wanting to retch. 

The people who end up holding those pieces walk out just beyond the village’s borders, then as one, toss them to the ground, where they sink like stones in the ocean. Within seconds, the colors vanish into the depths.

And reacting to the disgust lurching in my gut, or fueled by it, gouts of magic boil up around me and roll over the Wound. Cold, luminous mist fills the air and hungry darkness crawls along the grey plane, encircling the village before it begins to creep steadily inward. One grey person, the one who was carrying the girl’s body a moment ago, wanders close enough that my corruption reaches out and wraps around his leg. It seeps into him, replacing him with a vague shadowy outline that then bursts into a flurry of shiny black crow feathers.

Everything folds in and in on itself until nothing remains of the original scene. The world is just a crumpled ball of grey paper, surrounded on all sides by darkness flecked with green. My tarot spread now shows three identical copies of Death inverted over a single illegible crayon card, and I fall — not far, but enough that it does feel like falling — into the heart of the Wound.

But there is no third layer. 

No, I’m sure there was, but my magic has already blighted it to nothing. 

I touch down on a small island floating in a sea of green shadows. The land itself is a many-colored mass of construction paper all folded and crumpled into a giant ball, creating a rough, almost rocky surface that’s difficult to balance on, even with my cane. The ruins of a world swept away by something stronger. It feels absurd to think of myself in those words, but there it is. Whatever Aulunla was trying to do, it simply didn’t work. All that’s left is a feeling of dread stirring in the air.

As for the Harbinger itself… it’s finally here. It sits in a crater at the center of the island, a bright origami sculpture of a formless monster. Its body, such as it is, suggests dozens of little paper models that have somehow been spliced together into a single disjointed, chimeric mess of tangled-up paper doll chains — but whatever it was originally supposed to be, that’s not all anymore. It may not even be most of it. It’s run through with shimmering veins of my corruption. If it was ever able to hold a shape more complex than this one, a slightly damp mass of paper that only moves to rise and fall as if it’s breathing hoarsely, I don’t think it can anymore.

But it’s still alive. It still has a voice. As I approach, it draws into itself and shrieks in protest, louder but clearer than ever: 

<no don’t I can make it better I can make it true I can make it SOMETHING if you just stop STOP IT HURTS IT FEELS LIKE NOTHING BUT THE NOTHING IT HURTS OH IT HURTS>

Once, when I was younger, I described the cold, numbing nerve pain that’s among the most common symptoms of my sickness to a doctor in almost exactly those words. Like nothing, but the nothing hurts.

Aulunla is… pitiful. Harbinger or no, that’s the only way I can bring myself to describe seeing anything like this. Especially after storming through a world like its Wound, where I still can’t tell what its plan to fight back was or if it ever had one. But it is a Harbinger, in the end, and all I can do is finish it quickly. Do what I should have done in the first place.

So I wrap it in contagion and drink its soul.

…But in that instant, when I take a step forward and will my corruption to gouge into Aulunla’s innermost core, something changes. The fearful, frantic atmosphere roiling around me stiffens. I freeze in my tracks. In this chasm where no wind can reach, a breeze passes through me.

As I feel my rot closing in on Aulunla’s heart, see veins of jade decay slithering through the void around me to infect the Harbinger, the chaotic patterns of its writhing limbs race to fold in on itself, its whole being collapsing into a single point to escape its encroaching death. The sharp crackling of paper being crushed rings in my ears. The Harbinger forms a ball of crumpled up trash, and then keeps folding. Over and over, it crimps and compresses itself again and again, past the point any actual clump of parchment could possibly fold, until it forms a perfect, smooth sphere: a round painted egg the color of oil on water, revolving in the dark.

Somehow, I know it’s still folding into itself. The tense feeling deep in my chest and rising up in my throat tells me so. Folding endlessly, the pressure growing stronger, growing crushing. The air around me is heavy, and getting heavier, pulling me towards Aulunla’s heart.

I don’t know what’s happening. A cold sweat trickles down my spine. I push my corruption forward with all my will, hoping against hope for it to claim Aulunla and end everything before whatever is coming arrives, but no matter how much I hurry it along, it’s still not fast enough.

Maybe it was too late from the beginning.

My ears start ringing, and then I hear it. Feel it. On the wind and in my soul, a violent resolve crashes into my thoughts.

<IT DOESN’T MATTER>

<IF THIS IS HOW IT ENDS>

<HOW I END>

An eerie stillness falls over the Wound. Even my corruption advances no further, caught in the dark like bugs in a web. All that remains is the shrill tone scraping against my eardrums, intensifying like a dentist’s drill revolving ever faster. The tension in the air, the sour scent of Aulunla, it all nearly disappears into the egg, the Harbinger’s entirety focused down to one single, sharp point in front of me, like a needle piercing straight through my brain.

<I WON’T LET YOU>

<SULLY THIS DREAM> 

Cracks start to form across the surface of the egg, its vivid aura spilling out of the gaps in a high-pitched shriek in chorus with the ringing assaulting my head. Like steam made of watercolor paint spewing out of a broken pipe. The sheer force of the discharge bleeding from its heart flushes my power back, away from its heart.

<I WON’T LET YOU> 

<TAKE MY> 

<TREASURE>

My hair stands on end. All around me, Aulunla’s aura is intensifying, yearning, raging. Fissures splinter across the void, breaking it like a great pane of glass. A multicolored haze shimmers through the cracks in the dark, like a flood of painting pigments.

“Liadain, withdraw from the Wound immediately!” Vyuji’s voice cries from nowhere.

“What? Why? How? How are you even here?” Nothing about this makes sense. After that whole talk about how dangerous it is for her to be near Harbingers, what’s so bad that I need to leave at the last second but still safe for her to sneak in?

<BECAUSE WE MET>

<I SEE IT>

<ONLY A SPECK>

<BUT TO GRANT ONE SMALL WISH>

The clefts carve through the dark, multiplying and interweaving. Shards of black fall into the depths of the shimmering void, disintegrating.

“Calculated risk,” Vyuji continues. “There’s… brief window before… make your own exit, break through the outer boundary and…” Her words flicker in and out of my awareness, skipping phrases seemingly at random. 

“Vyuji? Vyuji, I don’t know how to do that!” There’s no exit here. The only ways I’ve found to leave a Wound are to get its creator’s permission, or kill them.

It’s no use. She’s gone.

<EVEN ME>

<WITH THIS LAST PAGE>

<✴✴✴✴✴✴✴>

The prismatic tide breaks through. The shadows flow away. All around me, the howl of a swirling maelstrom of dark, washed-out color swallows up even the shrieking tone that’s drowning out my thoughts.

And then, all at once, it all goes quiet. The cacophony is silenced by just one declaration. 

<I’LL USE EVERYTHING>

A cry in the void. A voice that cuts crisply through everything. My body quakes. The world shivers. The fractured egg shatters.

~~~

Shona usually naps through most of literature class. It’s not the subject’s fault, though! School just starts too early and it’s the first one on the schedule. What’d happen if some horrible thing descended on the school and she wasn’t well-rested for it? Aisling, Goddess keep her, would probably not save the day by herself. So nap it is.

But today, something other than a hand on her shoulder startles her awake.

“Wah?!” she yelps with the volume, though not the tone, of a child woken by a nightmare. There was a sound in the distance, the kind she sensed rather than heard. It came as a vast thunderclap of corruption louder and faster than any she’d ever felt, and then it vanished. A classroom full of eyes stare at her.

“Hey, d’you, uh…” Shona slowly glances over at Mide, taking a moment to steady her wavering voice. “Did you feel… whatever that was?”

“Shona, when have I ever…” Mide starts to groan, but a twitching full-body shudder cuts her off. Her eyes widen. “…Yeah, I do,” she mutters. 

“Oh. Whoa. Well shit,” Shona hisses. “Sorry everyone gotta go byeee!” She waves in no particular direction, jumps up from her seat, and bolts out the door. Mide quickly follows — not quite as quickly.

~~~

Cold, numbing pain gnaws through Tetha’s body. Into her head, between her thoughts. She burrows a little deeper into her bed at Guiding Light Hospital, wrapping the sheets around herself and squeezing them at the edges until her knuckles go white, but of course there’s nowhere to hide from pain like this. 

For the second or third or fourth time in an hour — everything here just blurs together, making it impossible to keep track of time — she slowly reaches for the arm of the bed and taps the intercom button, which feels like it takes all the strength she has left. “Is Mom here yet? Do you know how… how much longer she’ll be?”

“She’s in contact. She’ll come as soon as she can,” the nurse on call reassures her once again.

“…Okay. Thank you.” Tetha sighs and rolls back over, dragging her sheets into an awkward tangle as she does. That’s okay. Her family just… everyone’s important. Everyone has a lot to do, that’s all. Niavh was here yesterday when they brought her in, but even she has a schedule to keep. 

She’s just started to drift back into the hazy half-sleep that seems to be the best she can manage right now when something hits her, washes over her and jolts her awake with a muffled scream. Not the constant pain of Eyna’s infection but… something else, something new, a flood of nightmarish essence from somewhere in the distance. 

Once she pushes through the sheer horrible weight of it, it feels all-too-familiar. It’s that book, that Harbinger, but… how is that possible? How could it grow from that to this in less than a day?

And… whatever it did, it’s her fault. If she weren’t such a weak, useless, pathetic little failure of a Keeper, she could’ve stopped that girl from taking it. She could’ve killed it last night and spared everyone from… well, she doesn’t have any idea what’s happening now.

All she can do now is bury her face in her pillow and cry quietly, trembling until the flood of power passes over her completely.

~~~

In the forests beyond the city’s boundaries, Vianzia’s glorious and gruesome winnowing continues apace. Her latest clutch of children has been a mixed bunch — the ones with wings and petals of craggy bark are sad, misshapen things, born forever screaming and prone to bursting into unquenchable flames that ultimately burn their limbs to nothing. But perhaps in a few more generations, something beautiful will come of them. 

Until then, the bark-children are desperate to die in battle before they’re reduced to still-living, still-wailing stems, and that suicidal frenzy makes them a fine enough vanguard in her new war. There’s even something charming in their manic drive to do their best for her with whatever life they have, lest they be left lying about for her older children to gather up and make into lovely little stick sculptures. 

After her last kills, it fell to her to rid the world of the corpse-swarm that bubbled up from Ourien-that-was’ erstwhile territory. Their conflict is an evolutionary arms race, fought wherever her children and its extrusions find each other in the places between spheres of influence. Curiously, if her quarry has claimed a realm of its own, she’s yet to find it. Perhaps that’s what it plans to do with those quivering fleshy eggs carried far and wide by great convoys of its ugly, shapeless little selves. It protects them with all its lesser lives, and her children have never managed to follow an egg far enough to see its intended destination.

So she’s joined the latest hunt personally. Her body is still shriveled and weak on the left side, scarred by Ill Wind’s parting blow and limping enough that one of her black sabers currently serves as a makeshift cane. But she always knew there would be such interruptions to her dance. She can adjust for them. Still she carries herself with poise and elegance, and still she can fend for herself should it come to blows with that hideous, pathetic bottomfeeder.

Today, the enemy has gathered itself into a new form, not a caravan of crawling nightmares, but a thick spherical cage made from countless oozing, ropey things. A great fungal tumbleweed, centered around a barely-visible egg. Its outer layers lash out with sticky pseudopods to swallow anything which draws too close into their mass, but steadily, her children slice and burrow and burn away at the mass, making a tunnel into its bulk. Severed tendrils of it either slither off into the forest — those she ignores — or gather and reform into new squirming creatures, which throw themselves at the swarm like living nets. Those she scythes to bits herself. The central mass slowly redistributes parts of itself, doing its best to fill the wound, but too slowly to keep them from making progress.

Until the sensation of some foreign presence blasts into her soul, the distant but all-too-pressing feeling of a great and terrible flowering. Of a half-dead butterfly larger than the world, emerging from its cocoon and spreading its rotting wings to blot out the Sun. Only for a few wingbeats, but what a calamity they will be, and who can say what will be left in its passing? It leaves her and her children stunned, rapt with awe they cannot fully understand. 

…And by the time they return to themselves, the egg is gone — separated from the central body, which still stands guard, and slinked off into some dark corner of the forest.

All pointless, now. And they were so close. She turns and retreats for her grove, spitting and fuming to herself and her attendants until she’s buried most of her frustration beneath the sheer expressive delight of cursing in the Language.

~~~

The psychedelic maelstrom swirls into the point where the egg shatters. In the depths of the vortex, a vast tapestry unfurls outwards in every direction, engulfing everything, swallowing me.

The first thing I feel is the horrible sensation of my shoes sinking into wet mulch. I open my eyes to a canvas rolling across the world, rising up to depict a horizon turned on its head. 

Beneath me stretches out a vast indigo sky, alight but sunless like the tail end of twilight. I stand upon an island of soggy sawdust drenched in watercolor paint and clumped together to resemble a puffy cloud. Countless other cloudlike sawdust islands swirl hurriedly around me, merging together as they all flow towards a central point. The cloud I’m standing on soon converges with those surrounding it, forming a wider platform. Droplets of ink pitter down in an aimless drizzle; I look up, and above me is an ocean-sized marsh swimming with human shaped outlines.

The moment I think to reject the disgusting foothold I’m standing on, with hardly a thought but the visceral wish to not have my dress be soiled as my boots sink into the muck, I will corrosion into the world beneath me. The surface of the sawdust solidifies, desiccated by a stray thought’s worth of my power, forming a patch solid enough to stand on. A small blessing in the face of what comes next.

My cloud melds into a sprawling landmass of sawdust which stretches into the distance before me like a desert of wet, multicolored sands. An endless procession of clouds pack in behind me, filling out the world in my wake.

Far above this unreal wasteland, shimmering trails of color begin to weave themselves unsteadily in midair, forming a pattern beneath the oily, upside-down ocean that passes for the heavens. The pattern unfolds into a massive sigil, clumsily scribbled into the sky as though using crayons made of light. Bound in a purple circle, the symbol portrays something like a bouquet with blossoms of every shape and color piled atop one another, their petals weaving into each other as though the lines that composed them were knots.

And right beneath that great, shabby emblem, from the centermost point where the sawdust-clouds have united, the surface of the landmass ripples outwards like a stone tossed into a lake. Tremors wrack through the ground, and a great, thin, towering shape punches through the mulch. 

A massive, freakish oak tree, looming over everything, begins its ascent. Yet it casts no shadow. There are no shadows here at all.

The colossal black tree rises ever upward with such reckless speed that it draws the surrounding sawdust into a surging whirlwind around the length of its trunk. A pair of symmetrical branches, barren of all leaves, sprout from each side of the oak’s uncannily slender trunk, spiraling in on themselves and germinating two more swirling branches from their outermost brims in turn. The growth repeats again and again in parallel as the oak reaches up towards the heavensward sigil. The coiling branches grow to encircle the crude emblem, as though the tree were cradling the halo in its arms.

And then, just before the base of the tree, the sawdust-dunes begin to shift and bulge. All at once, the subterranean disturbance surges towards me like a rising tide, displacing the surface of the sawdust-clouds as it slithers beneath them. The culprits burst from the dust, curling upwards like the crest of a wave as they reveal themselves: roots. Thick, earthy roots, shooting up from the sawdust in tandem to form a great wall of serpentine tendrils. And just like the crest of a wave, it’s destined to crash. Onto me.

And beyond all this, a sickly moon emerges from the oily depths of the inverted ocean above, its surface covered in fields of alien flowers.

“I’m not asking all these weird linguistics questions just to ask them, you know. Sure, the world isn’t gonna explode yesterday if we don’t figure them out, but there’s still important implications,” Isobel said.

“All your questions are things I’d like to know too, and I don’t expect they’d fall under any of the conspicuous blind spots,” Aisling nodded. “But I can only learn so much on one question a day, and there’s always something that needs my attention RIGHT THIS SECOND and has to wait weeks anyway. More every day, it feels like.”

“Don’t I know it,” Isobel grumbled. For a little while, Aisling’s power had been an exciting way for their group of friends to confront the mysteries that troubled them most. Then the wider world noticed Aisling, and all their personal passions were buried in a long, long priority queue of questions sorted by the potential existential danger of leaving them unanswered.

This was the ultimate expression of Aisling’s gift, pushed to its limit: commanding truth from nothing. One single, solitary question a day, asked to the aether with the utmost extent of Aisling’s focus, guaranteed a truthful answer by the mystery behind magic itself — a stubborn mystery that hypocritically refused to give itself away. Of course, the power was full of exasperating weak points, but… when it was wielded with Aisling’s precision and intelligence, its insight was truly incredible. A miracle given shape. Aisling hated to think of it in those words, but what other words fit?

“I am sorry about that. Things were nicer when it was only the three of us and the club. It’s just hard to base your decisions on what’s nicer when anything or everything could be at stake.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I get it.” Isobel’s pet subject was philology. In those early days, she’d gotten exactly one question answered by Aisling’s magic: yes, there were human languages older than Thalassic. 

As it was with most good questions, the answer immediately branched into a dozen new questions. Which languages? Were any of them still around? What were the societies that spoke them like, before the Claiasyan overculture spread around the world and carried Thalassic with it? Was there even anything we’d call a society? If not, what changed? Was there some delay between the birth of humanity and the advent of Keepers and the Covenant, and if so, why?

Questions she wouldn’t ever learn the answers to before her best friend faded entirely into the world of magic and left her alone with her questions, at this rate. Neither of them would say it in those words, but Isobel knew the Research Club was just an excuse for Aisling to spend time with her old friends, not a real part of her investigations. A bunch of kids kicking ideas around after school didn’t have anything more to offer a girl who could pluck answers to cosmic mysteries from nowhere than occasional help refining the questions she planned to ask.

“But actually, your interests may be the sort of thing where the experts know more than they publish. If you got yourself noticed by the right people and took the offer, I wouldn’t begrudge you that. Too much,” Aisling said with a sour smile.

Among the many, many roles it played, the Church spent quite a lot of its preposterous amounts of money funding research of all kinds, ran or supported most of the world’s best universities, and generally sat at the heart of global scholarship, but it wasn’t completely open with its wealth of information. Someone had apparently decided that certain fields were best kept out of the public eye. Harbinger studies, obviously, but also things like astrology, and… well, there wasn’t exactly a formal list of restricted subjects, so Isobel didn’t know that there was a secret library somewhere full of books on prehistoric humanity, but if there was, the oldest and most magical organization on the planet probably had it. 

They didn’t disappear people for asking the wrong questions or anything so clumsy, though. At least not that Isobel’d ever heard of. No, her friends had long suspected, and Aisling had confirmed with her power shortly after she made the Promise, that they simply poached academics whose interests fell into the danger zones. Brought them into the fold where the real work was done, and all they had to do in exchange was agree to keep the secrets. Whatever offers they made and reasons they gave for doing things that way were apparently good enough to stifle almost all outsider work in those fields.

Maybe the people in charge really did have perfectly good reasons — everyone in the Research Club hated the idea of a scholarly in-group deciding what knowledge was fit for general consumption, but even Aisling didn’t broadcast everything she learned to the whole world. She’d learned firsthand that where some of these things were concerned, information could be literally dangerous. In the early days, Aisling once asked her power “Where does magic come from?” 

Her own magic had left her delirious and suffering migraines that made her want to tear herself to shreds for the next few weeks, and when she recovered she didn’t have the slightest hint at an answer to show for it. All she remembered clearly enough to describe was that the response she normally would’ve received had been muffled, drowned out by the flitting sounds of a great swarm of butterflies’ wingbeats. They’d never figured out what to make of that particular detail. Aisling even spent another question on it: “Why did I hear butterflies when I asked my last question?” In answer, she received more, louder wingbeats. No migraines, though.

So yes, some knowledge really didn’t want to be freely shared. But danger or no danger, no too-curious soul in human history was ever satisfied with the mere promise that an answer to their questions exists.

Imagine that. The people in the know wanting her enough to reach out. But then, they had come a long way since they were just kids trying to figure out how stuff worked together. Back when Aisling still wore those huge thick glasses that made her look exactly like the runty, nerdy, too-proud daughter of two scientists she was, and when her determination to live up to their legacy had moved Isobel to follow the same path.

Well, Aisling had come a long way. Emergence had not just repaired her sight, but granted her vision far beyond what any human could aspire to. Isobel, on the other hand, was still just Isobel.

“…Mm, yeah, I probably would if they wanted me. Sorry,” was all she said in answer. 

The conversation stalled out after that, as it always did.  Once the club had finished cleaning up their lab room, Isobel said her brief goodbyes and set out alone. Not to make her way home, though. Not yet. The university library was a poor substitute for all those secret stacks in the Church’s Archives she’d never get to see, but books were books, and she had a long way to go before she’d read everything of interest there.

~~~

Oh, did they get a new book? She didn’t recognize this one — she recognized most of the Thalassic section by now — and its featureless black spine looked a little out of place. How to Be the World? What did that even mean, and what was it doing on this shelf? It was sized more like a notebook than the weighty volumes around it, and had no labels on the spine. Either some librarian had made a few different mistakes in rapid succession, or someone left their weird journal here by mistake. 

In either case, it fell to Isobel to figure out where the strange little book did belong. She took it back to her usual reading window and flipped it open.

~~~

Isobel stared down at Step 5 and the cheerful little drawing beside it. She read it again and again and again, mute with horror. Memory and wild imagination twisted together into a waking nightmare of the sea, of being choked and swallowed by the endless abyss that had so terrified her ever since her first childhood brush with death.

Finally, the sound of footsteps passing by her corner dragged her out of the depths. Almost reflexively, she curled into herself and pulled the book closer to her face. She didn’t dare look away from the page with more than the corner of her eye.

But the sound passed. Only then did she close the book, heart still hammering all the while. That cover with its simple silver letters wasn’t looking back at her, but it was reaching out to her. Curious. Questioning.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered.

The book said nothing. Books don’t talk. But it didn’t need words to repeat the question.

“I can’t! There’s no way! It would kill me, do you understand that? No human could do this and live! You said… you promised…” What? What did it promise? It said it would do something that sounded good… what, on its honor as a Harbinger? What was wrong with her? How did it ever seem like a good idea to close her eyes and play along with a set of instructions pulled from a disturbed child’s manifesto on the nature of reality? What in her soul was so suddenly, impossibly broken that when she saw it in her imaginary library, she hadn’t ran screaming to the nearest Keeper? 

The creature the book insistently called her “new friend” was an abstract tangle of origami limbs soaked through with rainbows of flowing ink. If it was meant to represent something… Isobel had no earthly idea what. When it appeared to her in dreams and reflections, it was constantly shifting itself into new not-shapes, experimenting with its structure in very unskilled ways. It only ever moved by folding itself new limbs, which crumpled back into the central mass after they dragged it awkwardly forward. Like a baby learning to crawl crossed with a paper amoeba. 

It was all wrong, wrong in a way that could only mean one thing. She’d stopped pretending that this could be anything but a Harbinger clawing its way into the world. She shouldn’t have done any of this in the first place. She certainly shouldn’t have spent the last three nights working through the book’s steps, following along as it filled its empty pages with new bizarre games. 

But it wasn’t too late to stop, was it? She could still end this. Aisling wouldn’t… no, Aisling would definitely yell at her, but it wouldn’t be the end of her life. The club would have her back eventually. Probably. Maybe. She’d spend some unpleasant time in the Sanctuary, but then it would all be business as usual again.

Business as usual, trying to learn about the secrets of the universe secondhand from a Keeper who had so much more to do than indulge her stupid curiosities.

“Look. I want to do this, for some reason. I want to work with you. But I can’t do that. I don’t care how sure you are that it’ll be fine, I literally cannot. Make another way or we’re done. I’ll hand you off to someone else, and she won’t play along. She’ll dissect you, figure out how you work, and eat whatever’s left over. Got that? I’m s-serious.” Did the book understand any of this? Who knows? All she could do was hope it had some way to grasp her meaning.

Several minutes of silent glaring later, she felt it respond in that wordless way: Agreement. Patience. Returning.

“Okay,” she whispered back. “And I mean it. Don’t… don’t mess with me.”

~~~

Things changed after that night. 

Isobel didn’t go back to the library right away. She skipped school and spent the day in her room, thinking in circles. Twice she tried to talk herself into turning the book over to Aisling, but she knew all the while that she wasn’t going to. The Harbinger’s twisted paper projection still appeared in her uneasy dreams, but it was simply there, watching in silence. 

When she next visited it, the book had not only added a new step, but covered Step 5 in a combination of neat redacting-marker lines and pen scribbling so frantic that it looked like it should have torn through the page completely. It even left a note in the margins that recanted the step in a reproduction of Isobel’s own handwriting. 

The new ritual was still strange and creepy, but something felt different about it. Its language wasn’t quite as disjointed, and there was a clearer line of logic running through it, or else it just did a better job of explaining what it was meant to do and why someone would want to do it. It helped that she’d never gotten along well with mirrors. 

But more than that, through the days she spent obsessively following the book’s growth, inviting the Harbinger into her head while she slept in a cramped blanket nest in her closet, she somehow hadn’t realized just how wrong everything was. Not until she had this to compare it to. Those days weren’t exactly a fugue she’d dissociated her way through entirely, she remembered them well enough, but thinking back…

Isobel dreamed often. Most of them were nightmares, and the worst were those she experienced almost as an outside observer. Not exactly watching a movie, but riding along as a prisoner inside herself. She knew something horrible was happening, maybe even remembered it happening in other dreams before and had ideas about how to prevent it, but the dream-story was already written and it offered her no agency to change it. 

Those first few days had felt like one of those dreams. Like watching herself march into a lightless cave that was really a yawning maw, waiting for the jaws to snap shut.

Like the new rituals, the book’s formless intelligence felt very different now. Gentler, clearer. It spoke in soft wordless whispers that aligned rather closely with her own ideas rather than a gale of suicidal intrusive thoughts, and listened when she spoke back. Now, whenever she felt the Harbinger communing with her, there was something she recognized at the heart of it. Something desperate she’d felt stirring in the dark corners of her own soul for years now. Yearning to find some new path, no matter how strange or scary, because the one she’d spent her life walking was blank and flat and hopeless.

Maybe the two had simply discovered by accident that they shared similar feelings. Maybe the Harbinger saw something it appreciated in Isobel. Or maybe she’d just fallen for the trap’s second, more sophisticated stage, but she really didn’t think so. Somewhere along the way, it had ceased to be a predator dragging her to her doom and become a truly bizarre sort of kindred spirit.

~~~

Once Isobel replaced the reflection she’d never liked with the Harbinger’s little paper-and-ink avatar, things changed again. It was closer to her now, no matter where she went, and the Harbinger no longer needed its book to reach her. She read Step 8 in a dream before it was written at all, and felt the Harbinger’s presence blooming into something grander as she made new books. She made a new copy for the university library and took the original home, just in case anything made that copy especially important, and scattered more through other libraries and bookstores and schools. Once enough others stumbled across it, it wrote the ninth step. The step that, in its strangely-phrased way, promised her a kind of actual power of her own. Actual magic. 

And it delivered. 

Isobel began with herself, which seemed more appropriate and worthwhile than running around making purple star-apples or whatever. She formed an image of herself in her mind to replace the one that no longer appeared in the mirrors. Then, slowly, she reimagined it. It took hours at a time of focusing in the dark, forcing herself to know that the way she used to see herself was not the way she really was, to remember how she’d always looked. That didn’t make any sense, but if she let a little hiccup like that stop her now, what would be the point of all this?

For years now, she’d maintained an uneasy truce with her hair: she left it alone and didn’t bother it, and it left her alone and didn’t bother her. Mostly. It had never kept its side of the deal reliably, but now the balance of power had shifted. So she changed it. She banished the tangles that always seemed so determined to weave themselves into a bird’s nest, smoothed them out forever. She made it a nicer color, a faint auburn instead of boring dirty brown. Next went the extra pounds she’d never managed to shed without taking too much time away from the things she actually cared about doing. The things she changed were small, simple touches, for now, but they were hers. She was hers, maybe for the first time. 

While she worked, her dreams told her other new things. The Harbinger had a name beyond “the book,” which raised a brand new maze of questions she never would’ve thought of before. It called itself Aulunla. The name itself meant nothing to her. It wasn’t from any books she knew, and it didn’t phonetically resemble any language she was aware of. Some of the more infamous and impactful historical Harbingers had names they were known by, though.

Seruine, the corrupted remnant of a miracle meant to kill Sofia the Deathless for good.

Infezea, who brought disease into the world, and whose curses had lingered and mutated after its death — no, after her death, if you dug deep enough it started to look like she’d been a much more personlike entity than the sanitized public sources implied — until they became an inextricable, almost mundane part of things.

Nyuini, who’d planted its roots firmly on a nearby northern island during the chaos and confusion of the war, claiming the fishing village now called Commixture as home and all its residents as vessels — who nested there still. It kept to itself, most of the time, and no one wanted to bear the moral cost of burning it out.

Those names did share a certain phonetic quality, if not a proper linguistic structure — at least, not one that she could currently spot. Isobel had always figured they were names others gave them after the fact, perhaps drawing from some pattern that had been established after the first few times people used a nonsense sound to describe a monster. Apparently not. 

Assuming, then, that the Harbingers didn’t just make up names they liked and all have similar enough taste to make for some kind of connection, did they have their own language? Languages, even? Dialects? Cultures? Where did they learn them if not from some kind of Harbinger society? Nothing Aulunla communicated to her, in words or otherwise, gave her the sense that it had been raised among other Harbingers in some secret nightmare dimension. 

So, so many questions, questions she was sure would jump right to the top of Aisling’s list… but no, of course she couldn’t tell anyone about this. It was way too early to start fantasizing about what she’d do if all this really worked, if she got her own magic her own way and became the girl who could prove that benign, symbiotic relationships with Harbingers were possible.

Maybe nothing. Maybe they’d brand her a witch like any other and that would be the end of it. Maybe she and Aulunla would forever be set against the whole world.

But other worlds opened to her every time she closed her eyes. There were fairer, better ones among them. There had to be. And if not, she could make her own.

~~~

Aulunla was in a hurry to grow, and for Isobel to grow with it. It was sick. Maybe not dying, at least not yet, but very sick. Something else’s magic had infected it in the library. It couldn’t explain itself any more clearly than that, but Isobel guessed there’d been another Harbinger. A Keeper would’ve just killed it, right? Either way, there was nothing she could do about it but finish her work before the attacker came back.

But on that front, her best efforts weren’t quite good enough.

On Isobel’s eleventh day since discovering her Harbinger, she woke in the night with a screaming start, jolted awake by Aulunla’s terrified alarm cries in her dreams. Something or someone was coming to kill it, it wailed. Its copy in the library had been stolen away, taken by the source of the infection coursing through its soul, and it was certain that they meant to finish it off this time. Isobel stuffed the book into her backpack, scrambled out her first-floor window before the parents she’d been studiously avoiding could come to check on her, and raced into the dark. 

They began their final preparations in a mad rush. Aulunla destroyed the stolen shard of itself, then wrote its instructions in full into every remaining book at once. And with Isobel’s uneasy approval, it uncensored the fifth step. 

Of course she was glad Aulunla had changed its plans to include her more fully, but she’d started to understand what it was probably thinking with its original design. This world was… Isobel didn’t know if fake was the right term, but since she started using her power, she’d come to see the ordinary world she’d always known as a wall around the things that really mattered. Humans had weighted shackles fastened to their ankles that kept them from the true realms of the soul, of magic, and for some reason only Keepers ever got them removed. 

Well, Keepers and people who found other ways to pry the chains off. Witches, for want of a less loaded term.

So if something about Harbingers or maybe about magic itself made it so that this was the only way, so anyone who didn’t win whichever mysterious lottery made you a Keeper could only buy freedom with pain, then better some of them made it out of the prison of the real. That didn’t make her some evil cultist hoarding truth and power for herself. It would be best if the other readers connected with Aulunla well enough to truly join them on their journey, but so far none of them had. How sad for them. She just hoped the rushed harvest didn’t hurt any of them beyond recovery, and that their unknowing gifts weren’t in vain — that it was all enough to protect her and Aulunla from their hunter.

As for Isobel’s part of the work to come, Aulunla wrote in the book’s newest step that she already knew what to do, and she did. All she needed was a secluded place to finish the ritual, paper, and books. Lots of books. If this world wouldn’t let her be, she’d write one that would.

~~~

It was a Keeper who finally came for them after all, a tiny girl in a masked, cowled black-and-white outfit. Her regalia obscured most of her features, save for her venom-green eyes and the white streaks winding through her black hair, and altogether made her look more like a plague doctor from the days of the Infezean Scourges than a magical idol-hero, a champion of Claiasya. Her actions still didn’t make sense coming from a Keeper, but Isobel didn’t really care. She couldn’t spare any focus, not at this stage.

“I’m busy, I’m not hurt, and I don’t need your help. Go find someone who does,” Isobel spat.

The girl gave no answer, but the cold light in her eyes flared. A dry, tearing shriek poured out from Aulunla’s book, flooding the little room with words for walls. In a wild flash of color and motion, the diorama growing from it opened into a jagged mass of disconnected pictures and dragged the Keeper into itself. 

As it drew back, leaving only empty air, a still-open door, and a lingering sense of the Harbinger’s panic in the back of her mind, Isobel sighed. Her shoulders slumped a little. Everything would’ve been fine if they’d just been left to do things their way. No one had to die. Aulunla hadn’t been killing people, she didn’t think. But if the girl wouldn’t take no for an answer, that only left one way out of this. 

Well, that’s too bad. I warned her.

Isobel shoved the thought aside, pulled the door down, and returned to her work. Her partner could handle the intrusion, and meanwhile she was almost finished. Almost, but something in the words still wasn’t quite right. Some hazy quality was missing, or maybe some old anchor was taking up too much space? 

She scanned the collage with impossible speed, taking it in less like a book she was reading and more like a part of her body she was mentally taking stock of, crossed out a few lines and words, and… no, this whole passage near the lightbulb didn’t belong at all. What was she even thinking when she put it there? She ripped it off the wall, leaving a patch of rubber cement flecked with clinging scraps of paper, and went digging through her books in search of a replacement. 

Ugh, no, none of those were right either. The hard way, then. 

Isobel pushed back her left sleeve and stared into the river of words slowly flowing along her arm, searching until… yes, finally, there it was! She pinched the skin around the phrase she wanted, then began to peel it back. She grit her teeth and whimpered through the sharp stinging as she pulled the now-still sentence loose. But it only hurt for a second. When the passage tore away, it looked more like a neat strip of fine vellum than anything else, and there was no wound left behind in its place. Just a white spot on her otherwise-unharmed flesh, and more words quickly flowed in to fill the gap. She was already more than simple skin, and soon she would be so, so much more still. She just needed to finish her work before… no, it didn’t matter before what. She’d make it. They were so close.

By the time I’ve gathered enough of myself to keep moving, night has fully fallen. There’s no time to stop and wonder what happens to me when this gets out. My life will explode or it won’t, and nothing I do alone tonight will change that outcome. 

On to what I can still control. The book sits silently on the ground where I left it, not at all worse for wear, and right now I just need to decide what I’m doing with this awful thing. I obviously can’t bring it back to the library, and putting it in the nearest other library seems like a similarly awful idea. I can’t bring it home — while it doesn’t appear to do anything but sit and wait for someone to follow its recipes, I’m not going to leave it around people I know and give it the chance to prove me wrong. Plus if other Keepers can sense it at a distance, someone else could track it to me and that would be the end of it.

Which leaves two real options: pull the plug and absorb it right now, or hide it somewhere else and choose my next step in the morning. Right? Those are the only ideas I can think of, yes, but are they actually the only ones? I don’t know. I’m too tired to think clearly and I’ve made it this far with only lasting damage to my reputation and I can’t do this right now, not while I could come up with something completely stupid and regret it immediately. I’ll handle it tomorrow.

So until then, where do you hide something from people who can sniff it out with magic? Off other people’s patrol routes, as far from the central districts as possible…

Right. I head west, back out across the wilting flower field. It’s a little less unpleasant at night, while you can’t see the decay quite so clearly, but that graveyard-perfume odor of rot is no less strong. I trudge through the field and to the very edge of the forest. At this hour, it takes some searching to find a hollow in a tree trunk, but find one I do. It’s a big enough hole that the book is only slightly visible when I stuff it in, and once I’ve done that, I turn and head for the hospital. Most Keepers are smart enough to leave the forest alone. Hopefully anyone who passes by and detects faint corruption will assume it’s just some wilderness monster doing whatever Harbingers do out there.

Halfway there, I realize I was worrying about the wrong issue — no Keeper is going to be out picking dead flowers while I sleep, but one of those Harbingers might wander by and scoop up the free snack. 

But I don’t have any better hiding spots and I’m too tired to think of one, so lucky it, I guess. It’d make my life less complicated.

When I get back, the seventh floor’s lights are already dimmed, and the main room is mostly empty, save for the usual scattering of older patients sleeping on the couches. The night nurse at the front desk greets me with a casual wave, but says nothing, and he can’t quite keep the uneasy tension off his face. I’m not sure exactly what Dr. Hines told everyone, but I imagine any given staffer has either figured out what’s going on with me or is very confused by the sudden radical shift in my schedule and how I’m treated. Neither option lends itself well to acting like it’s business as usual when I turn up bleary-eyed at this hour.

It’s well past my bedtime when I make it to my room. I’ve done my best to keep some kind of consistent schedule despite everything. So much for that. Ugh. Maybe I should start getting up later and tell the nurses they’ll just have to deal with it. Or maybe I should stop worrying about such tiny, stupid things at a time like this and actually sleep.

Eventually, I do.

~~~

Not well and not enough, of course. I still feel mostly dead when the sun comes glaring down through my too-thin curtains. I’ve tried a few times to hide under the covers while I sleep, to keep it at bay a little longer, but it’s hard to breathe under there and my own breath turns it unbearably warm and humid within minutes.

Pearl can spend the night hiding in the sheets just fine, though. Lucky her. It must be nice having gills. I cuddle her and do my feeble best to think about nothing and rest a little more until the morning nurse comes through to take my vitals. They’re a bit worse than usual today, but within the normal range of terrible. Once she’s finished, I rush through my morning routine, send for an easy-to-digest breakfast from the hospital kitchen, and return to the looming question of what on earth I’m doing with my life.

My infection is still inside the Harbinger. It’s too far away to touch directly right now, but I could go pick the book up and kill it with little more than an unkind thought. I should kill it. Even if it’s only slightly more substantial than when I found it, still who-knows-how-far from being complete. If I clean up my mess before anyone else shows up to fight me over it, there’s still a chance I could play this off as an ugly misunderstanding that’s all over now. Keepers have gotten away with more for longer, if Tara’s history was anything to go by.  

I’m going to kill it, I’ve decided by the time I finish eating. It’ll be frustrating to get nothing but trouble out of this whole experiment, yes, but it’s already been too much trouble to justify. This can’t get any more out of hand. There’ll be more Harbingers. There have to be. Things are currently a little quiet in my tiny corner of the city, that’s all. It’s not like the world ever runs out of monsters.

So off I go, out into an unpleasantly bright spring day and back to the dead flowers I’ve been visiting entirely too often. As the withering field comes into view, I reach across it with my soul and feel for the book at the forest’s edge.

But it’s not there.

I have to remind myself to breathe, then stop myself from taking a sip of life and sprinting across the field. If it’s gone it’s gone, if it’s not it’s not going anywhere. I remember exactly where I left it, even if it looks quite different in the morning light, and a minute later I’m peering into the hollow where I’m certain it was. Nothing. No magic trail leading off somewhere. No sign it was ever here at all.

Okay. Okay. What happened here? The Harbinger still exists, or at least the power I embedded in it does. I can still feel that tiny toxic spark of myself. That could mean some forest monster came by, ate the book, and caught what I gave it. After a quick glance over my shoulder, I transform and push my senses as far as I can into the sea of trees.

Nothing, or nothing I can find from outside, and I’m not going back in there. It also could’ve been a Keeper, unlikely as it is for someone else to have searched this field in the middle of the night. They probably would’ve killed and absorbed it on the spot. Even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t go after another Keeper for it. 

I can’t do anything in either of those situations, so no point following those trains of thought further. What else? Maybe it has some way to move after all and set off on its own power to find itself a new nest. Or… someone’s reflection told them where to find it. The Harbinger would certainly have hooks in anyone who followed its steps that far. It could’ve sent them here to pick its book up and either hold it for safekeeping or hide it somewhere new. 

That seems at least as likely as the forest monster scenario, and if it’s what happened, this can still work. I can still fix this. My hooks are still in the Harbinger, and I’ve gathered enough health to mitigate my worst symptoms for weeks or live like a normal person for hours. I have everything I need to track it down, finish it off, and take whatever scant strength it has.

~~~

If my infection has a presence I can follow the way I do when I scent a Harbinger, it’s too far away to find right now. I know it’s there in some form, a faint prickling in my soul like a sleeping limb, but can’t actually trace it or do anything with it from this distance. It’s really disorienting, and feels like enough of an oversight that — as so often happens — I want to hit whoever designed my magic. Vyuji would just smirk and shrug and tell me not to be so mean to myself, though. Vyuji is an asshole. 

Well, it went somewhere. I stomp back through the flowers and make for the Fields, figuring I’ll have the best chance of catching it from the city’s center. The streets here are nearly always bustling with people. A few weeks ago, this crowd would’ve been a terrible hazard to my health. Now it’s just uncomfortable. Small mercies. 

Half an hour of wandering aimlessly through the crowd later, my hunch pays off. A now-familiar foul presence in the distance catches my attention, its dim beacon muffled beneath the tide of everyday life. I quicken my pace and follow its stench to… wait, what? There are two sources. How? The book and a victim? I don’t think I could mistake a regular corrupted person for a Harbinger, and I don’t think either is a witch, since nothing feels at all human about them… has it seriously grown enough in the last day and a half to take a vessel? If it has, things are a lot worse than they already looked. I have no idea how many vessels ever recover.

But this is the middle of the city, and you don’t even need a Keeper’s senses to see a Harbinger doing bizarre and horrifying things with a body it’s puppeteering. A vessel running around in public would draw immediate attention to it, and since I don’t feel any other Keepers descending upon the corruption, this should be something else. I hope so. I really do, for all the nonexistent good it’ll do.

Inspecting both motes of corruption at once doesn’t tell me anything useful. It’s like seeing double, only stretched out over a great distance. Other than their locations, they feel exactly the same, although at least from here it doesn’t feel like either of them house my magic. It still exists somewhere, but that somewhere doesn’t appear to be here. These are the only leads I have, though, and one source is closer than the other, so I head that way.

The trail ends at an open doorway and window facade, behind which are shelves and shelves of books on display. Above, a sign in white letters reads BIBLIOMANCY. After last night, bookstores and libraries seem like the worst possible place for the Harbinger to hide, but, well, it’s a Harbinger. It can only be what it is. Inside, the shop isn’t nearly the size of the library, but its shelves go on for long enough that you could easily hide a book in some corner while no one was watching. 

It isn’t in a corner, though. The book is faceup on a display tower toward the back of the store. How long has it been there? Have the clerks not noticed it or has it already gotten to one of them? I don’t feel corruption on anyone here, and no one comes running as I pick the book up and flip through it. It’s bizarre that they would go to the trouble of rescuing it from the woods and then leave it in a place like this — not that I’m complaining. This only took a few minutes, so I can destroy it and get right back to chasing the other thing, whoever or whatever it is.

Wait.

The book has changed. 

There are new pages, yes, but that isn’t it. Something is missing, or different. I’m not sure what at first, and I flip through it twice before I really notice: the step that was once completely crossed out in black marker has been replaced or repaired. Those two pages now bear rows of perfectly legible text and a bright, cheery picture of a girl and her one-eyed blob creature diving off a cliff ledge into a still lake that stretches out across the entire page.

Step 5

The last step was pretty scary, wasn’t it? Dreams can be a spooky place! Did you wonder how all of those horrible things got there? It’s not a problem with you — the world you were ███████ born into is broken and mad, that’s all! Life will twist you. Life will worm its coils into you and make you wrong. There are so many holes for it to creep through. The food you eat. The water you drink. The air you breathe. You’ve been tricked into believing that these things are part of life, part of you. But it’s all really just toxic sludge! Every day, you weigh your soul down with gunk and it sinks and sinks deeper into dream-slurry like quicksand!

Now that you’ve organized your dreams and learned how to keep things you don’t want out of them, this step will teach you how to do the same with the rest of yourself. You just need to prove to yourself that you don’t really need any of those things, and then they won’t be able to deceive you anymore! Yay! 

There are lots of ways you can do this, but this one is easiest and fastest. You’ll need enough water to immerse yourself in. A lake will work best. If you don’t have a lake, a pool is probably okay. Don’t use the sea. Go to whichever watery place you’ve chosen alone at night and hop in! Swim around for a while, see what the stars are doing above, have fun in any way you want! What’s important is just that you get used to being in the water. Make sure you’re calm and comfortable before this next part. It’s important that this all feels normal. It should’ve always been normal. 

When you think you’re ready, start taking quick, shallow breaths, longer on the exhale than the inhale. These are the last breaths you’ll ever be forced to take! Do this until you feel a little dizzy, then breathe it all back in, hold that breath, and submerge. Eyes open or closed, it doesn’t matter, but stay under the water. Hold yourself there no matter what happens. If you breathe in, you lose. If you come up for air, you lose. If you think this might be hard for you, it’s okay to find something heavy and hold it while you dive. You can exhale if you want, but don’t rush it! This shouldn’t feel fast or frantic. It shouldn’t hurt. It may just take a bit to recognize that the lie you’ve lived with for so long really is a lie.

Eventually, you shouldn’t feel dizzy anymore. Swimming underwater should feel like a perfectly clear day full of fresh air and nice things. As soon as that happens, you win! Stay under for as long as you like. Have fun experimenting with how it feels to not breathe or breathe water!

(Once you’re finished, if you ever want to breathe or eat or drink just because you feel like it, that’s okay! They’ll all probably be more fun! Doing things because you have to and because you like to are very different!) 

This… this is just suicide, isn’t it? Unless it actually works as described. I’d thought it wouldn’t kill people so quickly, and it still feels wrong for it to be demanding sacrifices at this stage. Like the statement would be completely unfinished, even more so than if it ate people’s souls in Step 6. It doesn’t make sense. What was its idea here? Why was this part blacked out in the first place and why has it only reappeared now?

No time to stand here and wonder. I flip back to the new steps. 

Step 8

You have more than one friend in your life, don’t you? I hope you do. Friends are nice! That’s why your new friend is always there for you. How can it be any other way? You made them, after all!

But me? I only have you. Sometimes you have other things to do, and I get lonely. I want us to make more friends. I want to show other people how to ████████████ be part of the beautiful things we’re making together. No one should be stuck wading through all this dream-slurry alone.  Don’t worry! I won’t love you any less or spend any less time with you! Having more friends will help us make things real!

You will need:
-Yourself! Hello, you!
-This book!
-Two hand mirrors!
-Places to put a book where humans can find it and read it! All the places! As many as you can think of!

Once you’ve gathered all the ingredients, go to each of those book-places. Wander through the shelves there. Look at the books and think about how their spines make you feel. You’ll know when you’ve found the right one. Pick that book off the shelf and take it to a dark place. You can make a place dark yourself if you want, but once you’ve started, make sure it stays dark until you’re finished or you lose. 

Place this book and the new book there so that they are between two of the mirrors. If you’ve done everything right so far, you should be able to see through the mirrors in the dark. Look out the doubled glass window-tunnel they create, out at all the books and books and books just waiting for their chance to be real. One of them is about to get its chance! Congratulations, book! Your mirror-friend will go get the right one, bring it out for you, and make the book you chose into the book it’s meant to be.

When you’re finished, put the book back where you found the book it isn’t anymore. 

Remember to return books to their proper place!

Oh. Oh no no no no no.

Right this moment the Harbinger is out there spreading, multiplying. No, it might’ve already happened. I was only at the library for a few minutes yesterday. Whichever victim took it from my hiding spot could’ve easily gotten it from the library, spent the daylight hours making copies, and put it back before I showed up. Or left a copy there, if they didn’t want to let it go. 

With a queasy lurch, I realize two things at the exact same time: first, it looks like my lie about the book being a minor branch of the Harbinger was accidentally true. Second, I beat up a Fianata Keeper to protect that useless branch.

This plan was awful. I’m an idiot. It was stupid to ever think anything good would come of this. Did I even think that? What other outcome could there be? I knew this would happen. I didn’t know exactly what it would look like, but I knew from the start that this whole idea relied on letting a Harbinger grow enough to do something like this. I knew it would happen and just… did it anyway. I really am garbage. I wish I could just throw myself away and start over as someone different. But I can’t, so I read on, rushing through the next sections before I can stop to wonder how it gets worse.

Step 9

People who live in dream-slurry don’t know how difficult it really is to see. Things happen to them and perceive them automatically, whether they want them to or not, so they never think any further about it. They get lazy. 

It doesn’t have to be that way! Only ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ is absolute. Everything else can change if you know how to change it. If you have a red apple, but you only like purple apples that sparkle, don’t let an apple dictate the way things are to you! You’re a █████ and it’s just an apple! If you twist your perception enough, your apple can be as purple and sparkly as you want!

The preparations for this step are simple. Think about what things would look like if you were the only one who’d ever seen them. See a world just for us. Fill it with all the purple apples and sea creatures dancing in the sky and books full of beautiful true things you could ever imagine. See what you would look like in a world where nobody ever lied to you or MADE YOU DO ALL THE HORRIBLE THINGS YOU’VE DONE TO YOURSELF.

Then look out into the dream-slurry and start to see it that way, too!

This will take a lot of practice. You’ve spent your whole life seeing the wrong way. So go out and practice! When you’re getting started, it will be easiest at night, probably still okay in secluded or shady places, and hard where The Sun can see. The Sun is still mean, but you won’t need to worry about it for too much longer!

It will get easier as more people read the other books. We will use their eyes. The more eyes perceive a thing a certain way, the more the thing starts to recognize their impression as the way it is and the way it has always been, until eventually that apple has always glittered like a violet star! This is called peer pressure. It has deformed a lot of people and places and things a lot of ways. 

But this way will be good! This way has a vision behind it. You’re making it this way because you know it’s the best way for things to be. No great art was ever made by a million people putting one random word each on a page. We will make this world wonderful. Together.

Step 10

There is no point in writing this step, because the one I would write it for already knows what it is. 

There is no such thing as fiction. Prove that to everything. Shroud yourself in me and show the world how to be and become and blossom.

I love you!

…Okay. From that last part, whatever the book was when I found it, it’s a full Harbinger or getting ready to become one by now. I don’t know what that means for whoever the last step was addressed to. I just need to find them as quickly as possible. 

“Hey, do you know where this book came from?” I ask the bored-looking older girl with a bob cut at the cash register. I hold it up so she can see the cover, but stay out of arm’s reach.

“Um, probably the same place as all the other books? Why?”

“Has, I don’t know, has anything weird happened recently? Any odd customers?”

“I mean, a little weird, sure. Someone came in yesterday morning with a big moving box and asked for all the clearance books that would fit into it. All fiction, but other than that she just took a pile of whatever was cheapest. Something about a library fair? I didn’t ask questions,” she shrugs.

“A girl a little over my age? Bushy brown hair?”

“Not bushy, but brown, yeah. Where’s all this coming from?” she asks with a nervous laugh.

Do I care about making a scene? Not really. Things are kind of out of the box after yesterday. “Hunting a Harbinger,” I say simply. “These books are dangerous. Get magic help if you see another one.” Before she can question any further, I rush out, book in hand, and search again for the other point of corruption. It’s farther off, but not so far that I can’t easily place it. 

Before I go chasing it, though, can I use this? It should still be part of the Harbinger. There are just more parts now. It doesn’t feel any different from the first book, save that it’s no longer tainted with my power, and I can fix that easily. If it’s growing, if it’s about to be fully born, I want it to be hurting when I find it. I drop off the street, into the landscaped courtyard in front of one of those garden skyscrapers almost completely covered in trees. Past the point of worrying about who might be watching, I transform, take hold of a poisoned card, and— 

Corruption surges out from the book, rushing over me as if through an opened dam. At my soul’s touch, the book throws itself open and unfolds. I drop it and step back with a start, only barely keeping my footing, as something rises from the pages. It looks at first like a pop-up diorama, an aimless construction of black paper that doesn’t represent anything I can make out, but then it keeps expanding and expanding, rising above me, origami-folding itself up and out into a great asymmetrical mass of sharp angles wider than it is tall. 

Bright abstract images scrawl themselves across the black paper. The mass swiftly moves to encircle me, and the pictures stretching across its panels expand. They form a scene of a brilliant dawn horizon over a pitch-dark sea, but instead of the sky or the sun there’s a vibrant world of little paper people dancing in groves of colorful trees and spiral flowers, all rendered in a painfully clashing scatter of pastel colors. But the trees also grow their own little worlds and the flowers are also portals into other landscapes entirely — too small and blurry to make out right now, but some of them are growing, even swallowing others up, as individual parts of the image overlap or jostle for position or bleed into each other, making it impossible to focus on any single element. 

And beneath it all the sea isn’t just black paper anymore, it’s a vast inky morass filled with human-shaped outlines like bodies drowning in a bog. Sometimes they reach up from beneath the surface, but instead of arms they sprout flowers of kaleidoscopic color that bloom for just a few seconds before they’re sucked down into darkness or absorbed into the collage above.

Nothing that I could interpret as the Harbinger’s body appears from the display. The closest thing I can find comes from a few little caterpillars that drop down from the trees, crawl over the surface of the bog, and start to eat up arm-flowers, then vomit them back out as patches of ink patterned with dozens of eyes that glare down at me from all angles. 

There’s a soul-deep shock that comes with seeing the world ripped away and replaced with a collage of writhing madness. I can’t imagine anyone, Keeper or no, ever being used to it. Still, at least for the moment, shock is all it is. That awful sense of being strangled by a nightmare doesn’t fade, but through it… I did something a lot like this a week ago. A threat display. Lashing out just enough to feel dangerous. 

Beneath all of this, the book is still open on the ground. I launch my card into it, but this time I let it burst into twisting, corrosive life as soon as it burrows into the Harbinger-essence. Pieces of the diorama start to twist and wither and blacken, and what remains of it frantically fold back inwards until only the book remains. It smolders at the edges with green embers and smokes with misty plumes of my noxious magic. 

The twisted diorama is gone within seconds, corruption and all, and the Harbinger has slammed the door to its world shut again, performing some mystic equivalent to saving a person’s life by amputating a dying limb. All I can do is hope it’s still hurting, wherever it really is, and keep going. There’s still more of its power in the distance.

And if I want any chance to keep this from getting worse, all these copies have to go. 

The Harbinger’s stench leads to a book left in a smaller bookstore. Rather than make a scene of it, I just walk in, wait until no one’s watching to stuff it under my jacket, and walk out. Whatever they use to trigger the anti-shoplifting gates, this book doesn’t contain one. I take it to a quiet alley, transform, and flood it with enough of my magic that it twists and withers away until nothing remains but dust and dried paper scraps, like fragments of a crumbling ancient scroll. The Harbinger’s essence inside writhes and screams and pulls back, drawing whatever bits of itself it can salvage toward its source, but it makes no attempt to strike at me this time. 

I’m not sure how much I’m hurting the actual Harbinger like this, but the trail can’t go on forever. Whoever made these duplicates seems to have followed a roughly-straight path through the Fields, dropping one off anywhere someone curious might pick it up. I repeat that routine with the two more copies sitting on separate shelves in a library. From there, I follow the trail to a third bookstore, where I run into my first complication. Not from the Harbinger or someone twisted by it, though. 

Just one of those too-friendly clerks who won’t take “leave me alone” for an answer.

“Oh, hello! Welcome to the Bookstore!” A portly old man in a green sweater smooths out his bushy beard, stands from behind the counter — where a sign above confirms that this bookstore is named “The Bookstore” — and walks over to me, coming to rest just a bit too close. “I haven’t seen you around before! Is there anything in particular I can help you find today?”

No, you really can’t. “Just… just looking around. Thanks.”

“That’s fine. That’s great, actually! What do you usually like to read? No judgment here. Whatever you want, I’m sure I can point you in the right direction!” 

I do my best to politely ignore him as I search the store, but he’s just not having it. He follows me everywhere, studiously ignoring my signals that I really just want to look at books alone. I don’t think he’s suspicious of me or anything, he just… likes to talk and figures everyone else does too.

Which isn’t any better. When I still went to school, there was a nearby pastry shop I liked to get lunch at sometimes. Until people there started recognizing me, asking if I wanted my usual order and how my day had been. Then I felt weird about going there often enough to be noticed, so I stopped. 

This is not a thing I want to be reminiscing about. Especially not right now.

“You know, it really warms the heart to see a girl in your age in here — on a weekend, too! — looking for a good book or three instead of goofing around or, you know, playing those games they all play on the Sea now. Heh, my granddaughter, it’s a gift from the Goddess if I can get her to look up from her drive for a few minutes…”

There it is, placed horizontally on top of a row of history books. I pull out my fifth copy of How to Be the World.

“Oh, what’s that you’ve found there?” he asks, leaning down to inspect it.

“Harbingers,” I finally hiss. “I’m looking for a Harbinger that finds its victims through books like this one. Have you seen this book before now? Have you read it?”

The man flinches. His once-smiling eyes go wide with fear. “I, what? I’m… no. No, I’ve never seen that one until now. Promise!” he gasps.

“Good. Call for a Keeper if you find another copy. I’m taking this and I’m going to go kill it,” I say, then turn and rush for the exit.

“Um. I really do like books. If that makes you feel any better. Sorry,” I offer, just before the door swings shut behind me. 

~~~

Finally, only the distant wisp of power I buried in the original book remains. It’s not far from here, and it stirs at my soul’s touch, ready at any second to do what it was made for. I’m not going to inflame it until I know what I’m dealing with — if the Harbinger has taken a vessel, I could kill them if I’m not careful. Now that I’m closer, it’s easy to follow my own magic back to its source, which is somewhere in a parking lot filled with wide, short buildings that each bear dozens of blue roll-up doors like tiny garages. A self-storage site. The place is shockingly barren for New Claris, with only a few trees and no garden plots anywhere among the rows and rows of doors. 

The heart of all this corruption is nesting at the far end of the complex. I pause outside its door, identical to all the others save for the stench emanating from it. It’s grown enormously since I last felt it, from a vague unease to a sickening spiritual weight like… like painful hunger, but not an actual gnawing in my stomach. Appetite as experienced by something that’s never eaten in its life and doesn’t even know what food is, only that there’s something it doesn’t understand missing from its world.

This is where I knew it would end, isn’t it? This was my stupid, stupid plan. All that’s left to do is fix my mistake and scavenge whatever I can from it. I reach down, tap a tiny bit of life, and pull the unlatched steel door up.

Fumes of a chemical smell, glue or nail polish, waft out as the door slides open. The overhead light in the little square room is on, and I recognize the girl inside, as I thought I would. She doesn’t look like any other Harbinger victim I’ve encountered. The opposite, actually. There’s no sickness or exhaustion in her eyes, and her hair even looks better than last time I saw her, smoother and shinier and altogether less like a rebellious bush. She doesn’t feel like a victim, either — she’s definitely corrupted, much more so than Yurfaln’s afflicted, but not at all damaged the way they were. 

Around her, though… rather than the bare grey walls I expected, the unit is covered in paper. Hundreds or thousands of irregularly-sized little paper rectangles covered in words, pages and passages sliced out of books, pieced back together into some kind of word-collage, and dotted with black patches where lines are neatly crossed out in marker. Ruined husks and loose pages of books harvested for their paragraphs are scattered across the floor. At the center of it all, the Harbinger’s book is open, unfolded into a smaller but vastly brighter version of its earlier ever-shifting nightmare collage.

The girl pulls away from her work, reaching up on a stool to censor bits of text on the ceiling, and turns to glower down at me. “I’m not hurt, I’m busy, and I don’t need your help. Go find someone who does,” she says flatly. There’s no pain in her voice, just a sharp tinge of something like frustration.  

What do you say to that? How do you tell someone so entangled in a monster’s mad dreams that everything about this is wrong?

You don’t. You let the Soul Sanctuary figure it out. I reach out and fan the sparks of sickness winding through the Harbinger into deathly flames. A scream like all the paper in the world being shredded to scraps in an instant rips through the air as the book lashes out and drags me into its Wound.

Who is this Keeper? They can clearly sense the Harbinger, but what exactly is it like for them? I couldn’t just tell them this is my kill and I’ve got it handled, could I? Has any Keeper ever said that to help turning up? They must or there’d be more teams, it can’t be that I’m the only one who needs something urgently… no, that’s a useless tangent. All that matters is what I say now and what the other Keeper thinks of it. This only ends well if I can talk my way out of it, so what I need to say is….

I don’t know. It’s impossible to plan this out in any real way. There’s way too much I don’t know. Running away feels more appealing with every second I sit and wait for the Keeper to find me. That was never a real option, though, and it especially isn’t now that they’re in the building. 

As they approach, I try to inspect the new presence more closely. Shona said Keepers had soul signatures you could read, so maybe this is someone I’ve heard of? There’s the sound of the open ocean. Waves rising to wash away filth and corruption. Lighthouses. Nothing that calls to mind anyone I know. Nothing useful.

Cries of surprise and scuffling sounds of people moving away announce their arrival before they come into view. As the noise reaches me, I transform. No point in hiding my magic if they’re already making a dramatic entrance. Dancing shadows and sickly green wisps briefly smother the reading nook’s lights. 

When the darkness lifts, the new Keeper is standing before me. Well, mostly standing. She leans down to catch her breath as she stops running, propping herself up with both hands on a silver bident. Sleek, ocean-colored hair, a flowing curtain of mixed deep blues and teals whose colors seem to move as the light hits them differently, drapes over her face and obscures most of her body. 

After a moment, she stands and swings her weapon out in a wide half-circle, almost gesturing with it, which may explain the rush to get out of her way. She’s a soft-featured girl about my age, and her eyes match her hair, complete with irregular shifting colors. 

Her Keeper outfit has two distinct layers. The first is a royal blue strapless dress, slightly ruffled at the neckline. It’s cinched in two places: at the top with a silver drawstring that threads in and out of sight and ties into a loose shoelace bow in front, and at the waist with a purple sash belt whose ends trail through the air behind her, casually ignoring gravity. The second layer is a little harder to define. The shape is of a billowing train skirt and loose detached sleeves that don’t quite cover her arms, but the material, white tinged with very faint blue, is so sheer it looks more like thin mist than fabric. The closest comparison I have is to a jellyfish’s translucent bell, but it’s a lot less solid and stable.

“Help has arrived! Where’s the Harbinger? Are there victims? Is there a Wound? Where is it?” she shouts. 

“Hi,” I say, then wince inwardly. Great opening, me. “Thanks… thank you for coming, but there aren’t any of those things. I’ve got this under control. It’ll be gone soon. You can go if you want.”

“What? Of course there are! It’s right here!” She brings her bident forward quickly enough that I flinch, pointing it at the book in my lap.

Well, I had to try. On to the hard way.

“Right. I thought so too, when I first felt it, but does it look like a Harbinger? Is it reacting like a Harbinger usually would to two Keepers looming over it? Here, watch.” I hold the book up. She flinches away from it at first, but stands still and waits while I first wave it around, then set it down next to me and punch it as hard as I— 

“Ack!” I just barely choke down my yelp. Cushioned only slightly by my glove, the impact twists my thumb out of place beneath my fingers. It’s not broken or anything, I don’t think, but it burns as I shake my hand out, a breath of air hissing through my clenched teeth as I endure the pain. I guess I’m lucky that ‘as hard as I can’ isn’t very hard. 

But not that lucky. Someone watched me do that. She’s still waiting in confused silence for me to finish my point. My cheeks burn a little. This is great. I’m making a great impression.

“See?” I continue, ignoring what just happened. “It’s not doing anything. Because it can’t. You weren’t wrong when you sensed a Harbinger, but it’s not a whole Harbinger. It’s a bit complicated.” That’s all mostly true. Where I’m going with it is a little less so, but… 

Actually, does my plan even work now? She’s already made this a lot messier. Suppose I do convince her that everything’s fine and she should leave me alone. Lots of people still watched her storm in yelling about a Harbinger. If I put the book back in its place, I’ll have to worry about someone else getting word of this weird thing that happened and coming to check on it. If I’m lucky the bystanders could assume the two Keepers took care of it, but when have I ever been lucky? Maybe I should cut my losses. Kill it right now and walk away from this stupid plan.

No, I’ve already sunk so much time into this. I should at least try. Ugh.

“Let’s walk and talk for a bit, okay? This is a library and we’re making a scene.” I stand up and squeeze past her and her wavy, rolling sashes, heading for the way out with the book in hand.

The girl stares at me open-mouthed for another beat, then shakes her head, but it looks more like she’s trying to shake a bug out of her hair than disagreeing. She turns and moves as if to follow me, but stops in the middle of her first step. 

“Hey, hold on! Before we go running off anywhere, you know me and I don’t know you and I don’t think that’s very fair. So.” She folds her arms, leaving her bident to float lazily in midair, and taps a foot expectantly.

“…But I don’t know you,” I turn back to reply in genuine bafflement.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I mean this is the first time I’ve seen you, in person or otherwise, and I can’t tell if I’d know you by name without your name,” I say, very slowly. 

From the face she makes, you’d think I told her I hated kittens or something.

“Are you sure?” she asks, her brow creasing as she glares.

What? Why would I? I guess some people tend to know Keepers on sight since they’re on the news and their images are used for endorsements and whatnot, but I stopped keeping track of that when I stopped hoping I could ever become a Keeper myself. I guess she’s kind of familiar, maybe I saw her face on the Church’s website, but does she really expect me to recognize her when she doesn’t recognize me, either?

In the pause before I reply, her lips quirk up on one side in a smirk. “Oh? It’s come to you now, hasn’t it?” she asks, her eyes softening with satisfied vindication, as if she’s taken my speechlessness for a dawning realization of who I’m dealing with.

…

Oh no.

She may be an idiot.

I can’t tell if that makes my job easier or harder.

“…No, I’m certain. That isn’t some judgment on you, whoever you are. I am, in fact, a shut-in who lives under a rock, so please fill me in,” I say.

“Whoever I…” she repeats, her eyes widening before she clicks her tongue and blinks away her dismay. “Fine!” she huffs, exasperated. “If you really have no idea about anything, I’m Tetha Fianata, the Sea’s Sanctuary!” Her voice makes her sound like a kids’ show Keeper about to strike a goofy pose, but she just puts her free hand to her chest, raises her chin, and… is she watching me for recognition? Hoping for it? I think she is. 

And she’s got it, if not in the way she wants. I’ve never heard of her, but Fianata again? She doesn’t look anything like Niavh, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Iona adopts all her children. She’s taken in dozens with no one else in the world over her years, and while not all or even most of them are magical, Clarish Keepers with no family or families they don’t want often end up joining hers.

Which is lovely for them, I’m sure, but they’ve got a whole district that’s pretty much their house. Why do they have to keep coming here?

“Okay. Fi… Tetha,” I say. “Nice to meet you.” I had to stop myself from stating that as ‘sure, I know the Fianatas.’ She’d probably take further offense at being lumped in with her famous family. “I’m Eyna. Ill Wind,” I add reluctantly. She can sense it anyway. “You wouldn’t know me, I’m new. Can we go now?”

“But the Harbinger—”

I don’t hear the end of whatever she’s saying, because I cut her off. “Is not a threat, and if it is we’re better off bringing it somewhere without bystanders. Come on.” I head down the stairs, not waiting on any further argument. 

Tetha does join me, but I’m not watching her as closely as I probably should. Some of the people who scattered at her approach peek around corners at us. It’s been a while since I was last… not in public, but publicly being a Keeper. I didn’t miss the attention. Maybe I’d have something useful to say, some way to defuse the situation, but there are so many of them. An audience. I try to ignore them, keeping my gaze straight on the path out of here. That doesn’t make them any less there.

Outside, I walk us back toward the university grounds, doing my best not to think about the people watching us all along the streets. At the very least, no one around is stupid enough to follow us – after all, wherever a Keeper is heading without a formal invitation is liable to be a gash in the world festering with soul-eroding nightmares, and it’s illegal to interfere with us in any case. Still, the fewer people, the better. The campus has a lot of usually-empty space, plus it’s farther from home, so it seems like my best bet.

Tetha pelts me with questions while we walk:

“Where are we going?”

“Not far. A quiet corner of the university. We’ll be there in a minute.”

“Hey, are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”

“Yes. In a minute.”

“What’s with the mask?”

That one I’m not answering. I just shoot her a look and let it hang in the air. She asks once more, then hrmphs and gives up when I ignore it again.

“What’s it mean to not be a whole Harbinger? That doesn’t make sense! It’s a Harbinger or it isn’t! And what difference does it make if it’s half a Harbinger or whatever? Why didn’t we, I don’t know, half-kill it in the library?”

“I’ll try to explain in a minute.”

I’m not trying to be annoying, although I’m sure that’s the effect. I just can’t talk and think at the same time. I’m busy running through ideas about what she might be thinking and how to sell what I’m doing. I don’t bother guessing how her Harbinger sense might work and what it might tell her — again, not enough information. All I know is that mine is apparently better than usual.

A few minutes later, I stop by one of the many groves on the edge of the campus. There are no benches or landmarks that’d draw people to this side, and while the wall of trees isn’t thick enough to completely obscure us from the more trafficked paths, it’s better than nothing. “Here. This’ll do. Have a seat if you like.” I point to the small stretch of manicured green between the stone path and the grove.

Tetha glances down at the grass, crinkles her nose, and pointedly doesn’t sit. Neither do I.

“Fair,” I say. “I’m sorry about the walk. Like I said. Bystanders.”

She’s been tense the entire way here, never putting her bident down and only briefly looking away from me, and she still is now. It’s only a small comfort that her eyes are currently trained on the book rather than meeting mine. “We could’ve talked whether or not someone was watching, but okay,” she says. “Now, what’s happening?”

I’m sure she could’ve. Anyway.

“Right,” I sigh. “So first, thank you for checking in, but this is my territory. I’m keeping watch on it and I’ve got things handled here. Umm, ‘here’ being this little stretch of the Hills. From the school to just north of the library.”

“Territory? What are you talking about? We’re all Keepers. We’re all on the same side. Why would you be mad about someone helping you fight a monster?” she asks.

I’ve already heard this exact line from Mide. Tetha talks like she doesn’t need anything from magic, like she has no idea why people make the Promise at all, and I just don’t understand how there are Keepers who can’t answer that question. Emergence isn’t even some dark secret only Keepers know about. They don’t exactly highlight the need to absorb Harbingers when they don’t have to, but it’s where the name “Keepers” comes from. Why does she do this if not for something she wanted enough to risk her life for over and over? Did she think it would be fun?

Of course I can’t just say any of that… but I don’t think I could help it if I answered right away. I take a long pause to steady myself before I speak again: “There are… things I need to change that can’t wait.” That’s the closest I’ve come to explaining my situation. I hate that this girl of all people is the first one to hear it, but it might help and I don’t know what else to do.

“Oh. I mean, that’s fine, you can have its whole heart to yourself if you really want. I still don’t get it. Couldn’t you have done that a while ago? When I showed up you were just sitting around.”

“There’s the problem. I can’t yet.”

“Why not? It’s just sitting there! Can you not hurt it?”

“I could, yes. It wouldn’t help.” 

I’m certain by now that this girl wouldn’t accept leaving the Harbinger alone for research purposes, which is probably the best possible way to put what I’m doing. Past this point, my plans for this conversation get creative with the truth, and I’m not a great liar. I have to stop myself from trembling and tensing like I’m about to run for my life.

“So,” I say. I hold the book up in both hands, keeping it close to my chest so as not to look like I’m offering it to her. It’s not leaving my hands if I can help it. “You’ve seen this. You’ve seen what I can do to it without it doing anything back. Here’s what I think is happening: it feels like a Harbinger because a Harbinger created it for some reason, but it’s not actually a Harbinger itself. Does that make sense?”

“No,” Tetha says flatly. “What’s it matter if it’s a monster or not quite a monster or half a monster or whatever it is?”

“Lots of us can make things out of magic, right?” I narrow my focus and summon a card in the air between us, then let it float to the ground. “Like so. That came from me and probably feels a lot like me, but it isn’t me. It’s the same with this book.”

“Okay. What’s your point? If it came from a monster, things will be better once it’s gone!”

“My point is that this book is a tiny piece of a real problem. A footprint a Harbinger left behind. And right now, it’s the one trace of that monster I’ve found. Destroying it probably wouldn’t hurt the creator enough to matter, and I’d lose the only way I might be able to track it down.”

“Oh. That’s, I mean… that sounds weird. Are you really really sure about it?” 

“Everything about Harbingers is weird! I’m not certain of anything, but that’s my best guess right now, and my guesses are usually pretty good.” I shrug. I’m suddenly very glad to have kept this mask in my outfit. Much as I worry about it saying “sick” or “hospital” to someone who’s paying attention, I don’t know how to lie with my face. That fake-casual gesture is the best I can do. 

“You can sense it, right? Look for yourself and you’ll see what I’m talking about,” I continue. I think I kept my trembling out of my voice. 

Tetha looks up at nothing in particular. She frowns, knits her brow, and rests her hand on her chin. After a moment she drops her bident, again leaving it to drift through the air beside her, and wraps her other hand around her elbow. She spends a long while like that before she nods. “…Alright. Give me a minute.” 

She picks her spear back up, extends her free arm, and spreads her fingers. More of the airy blue-white substance that forms part of her Keeper regalia stretches out from her, slowly reaching for the book. I hold it out, just far enough away that her aura can touch it without touching me. Tetha’s magic flows around the book, circulating. Sometimes it brushes past my fingers, leaving them feeling a tiny bit cool and damp. She gnaws nervously on her lower lip as she concentrates.

I’m counting on her sense-experience of the Harbinger telling her roughly what mine does, only less so. That’s still a wishful guess, but Tetha doesn’t seem that smart and hasn’t acted like she has any special insight on that front. This might actually work. This should work. 

“I don’t think it’s quite right, what you’re saying. There’s, uh, there’s nothing connected to this book. There’s no flow, in or out. Whatever this is, it’s the only part of itself, and I really think it’s some kind of Harbinger,” she says after studying the book for a minute or two. 

……What? 

My hands clench and unclench — I only notice I’m doing it because the motion hurts my still-sore thumb. She isn’t wrong about anything, but that’s her problem? That’s the fault she finds in my story? It isn’t even a real fault! It’s exactly what you’d expect to see if someone made a thing, put enough power into it to keep it stable, and left it lying around! You’d need to have no imagination at all to look at magic, this bizarre, complex, unreal thing nobody seems to understand more than a tiny piece of, and decide that if you can’t follow an immediately obvious trail from one thing to another with your single specific type of mystic perception, no connection exists. I’m somehow less upset about her calling me on my lie than I am about how stupid her issue is.

“Oh. Well. I, yes, I could’ve told you that. I didn’t think it was a Harbinger’s limb or it was siphoning something through it, it’s just something it made, and… and the way my magic works, I can use that. Learn about it. Find it,” I babble.

“Do you have its scent now? Where do you think it is?”

“…Working on it.”

“Okay. I kind of see what you were thinking, but this whole thing… yeah, maybe there’s some bigger Harbinger hiding out there, but the Harbinger made this for a reason, right? It’s getting something out of it, so we have to get rid of it.”

“We can’t,” I snap, louder and harsher than I wanted to.

“We can! I don’t get why you’re—”

“It’s touched someone! There’s a normal human the Harbinger behind this is connected to, maybe you can’t see it but I can, and I haven’t managed to track them down and see how bad they have it and I don’t know what’ll happen to them if they’re already a vessel!”

By the time I realize what I’m saying, what a horrible mess I’ve made for myself, it’s already said. I don’t know what else I could’ve done.

Tetha’s grip on her weapon visibly tightens. Her hands are shaking. “That… isn’t what you were saying before. You were talking like it wasn’t a big deal before,” she says.

“I don’t know you, okay? I had no idea if you were one of those types who’d charge into battle first and ask questions never.”

“Well, I’m not! I’m not dumb! I’m not gonna do something if it might hurt someone! If that’s what’s going on then we… oh, I know!” Tetha laughs nervously. She seems to relax, but only a tiny bit. “We just need to take it to the Sanctuary, right? They’ll have some place to lock it up until we know what to do.” 

“We don’t need to do anything. I told you, I can handle this.” I take a slow step back, never taking my eyes off her.

“Give it to me if you don’t wanna go. I’ll take care of it and you can go do whatever else.” She strides toward me and reaches for the book.

“No!” I jump back out of her reach. My cards blink into being, positioned such that they form a whirling ring around me. A fence, if not a very sturdy one.

Tetha freezes. Her eyes widen. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Leave me alone. I’m not… I don’t want to… I’m not any kind of problem for you, okay?”

“Don’t want to what? Fight? To, why, to protect a Harbinger? That’s what you’re s-saying!” Her voice breaks on the last word.

“Why do I have to say anything? Why am I wasting my time trying to explain how I’m handling a Harbinger in words you can understand when I could just be handling it?”

“If it was handled, we wouldn’t have a problem! What were you gonna do until that whole idea led you somewhere? Keep it with you? Leave it in the library? Either way there’d be lots of people for it to do whatever evil thing it does to! Lots! There’d be vessels everywhere, if there even are any in the first place!” Tetha yells. “And I’m… I won’t let it be like that! If you won’t kill it, I will!”

“Don’t do this,” I plead. I really don’t know what happens next if she does, but I’m sure it’ll be bad. Bad for one of us right now, bad for me forever.

Without another word, Tetha raises her bident and spins it in a series of wide, sweeping circles. There’s a sudden unnatural dryness in the air. A sphere of water forms above her, tiny at first but swiftly growing. The water glows with sourceless teal-blue light, like pool lights at night, but much more vivid.

Fine. I didn’t start this. 

I hug the book to my chest, shielding it with my arms from whatever she’s trying to do. Then, without moving another muscle, I take control of a card and float it out of my orbit, off to one side —  I’ve started keeping a few infected, just in case I have some reason to separate my sickness from myself in a hurry. Tetha appears too absorbed in whatever she’s doing to notice as that venom-green card floats over the grass, just above ground level. I move it in a wide half-circle, sneaking it behind her. It helps that I don’t need to steer them by hand, the way books and shows about Keepers always paint magic as a thing you do with gestures and flashy poses.

But the moment before I can spring my surprise attack, panic flits across her face. She whirls around and jabs the bident into her sphere. When she pulls it away, a smaller ball of water follows it, tethered to its central point. Then she brings it down, not quite striking my card but touching the orb to it, and pulls away. The water remains, a protective bubble that holds the card in place. I can still distantly feel it, but it simply won’t respond when I try to activate it.

Oh well. I have more… but there’s a slight delay in pulling my focus away from the contained card, like the difference between simply moving my arm and swishing it around in a bathtub. I draw a plume of mist out from myself and shove it through the short gap between us, just as Tetha spins to face me again. A curtain of water from her sphere falls over my fog, dragging it to the ground, holding her bident out in the space between us. She looks like she doesn’t know what to do next.

But I do. As Tetha takes a few hasty steps back, I reach with my soul for the card I conjured and dropped near the end of our talk. I place it so that between one step back and the next, her foot comes to rest over it, and only then do I will it to burst.

Cold emerald fog fills the air. Tetha lets out a high-pitched yelp and whirls around as if startled by a sudden noise, but her cry is quickly cut off by a fit of dry coughs. Her legs tremble, then buckle and send her crashing to the ground. She reaches forward and tries to break the fall with her bident, but her arms no longer have the strength to prop her up on it. Rather than drift off through the air again, the bident clatters against the stone and disappears as she crumples to the ground. The light in the water above her fades as she loses her grip on it, and the sphere comes pouring down on her, splashing me in the process.

I wait there, silent and still but for a few halting steps away from her. A storm of horrible emotions I can’t name swirls through my stomach. Finally, she plants her forearms on the ground and pushes herself up just far enough to stare at me in uncomprehending fear.

“My head, it’s… wha’d you…” she rasps, clearly struggling to string the words together.

She’s alive. She’s a Keeper, she’ll get better. That’s all I need to know. I tap some of my health and run away as fast as my legs will allow. Tetha isn’t following, as far as I can tell. Still, I don’t stop until I can’t sense her anymore. 

Only then do I dismiss my magic and collapse in the shadow of the nearest building wall. What am I doing? What was I ever doing? How did I imagine for a second it wouldn’t end up like this? 

Between choked sobs and gasps for breath, I dash the book against the ground, pick it up, and smash it to the pavement over and over. The Harbinger sits through it all unprotesting, still and lifeless as ever, and after a few repetitions I’ve lost the energy to do it anymore. It doesn’t help at all. Nothing will.

Demystifying the Tarot, Chapter 5: The Major Arcana

The Stars — XVII

Between the departures and dawnings of the Sun, the Stars Beyond hold court. Just as they emerge from the fading light of day, the Tarot’s Stars follow the turmoil and devastation of the Tower in the Fool’s Journey. Cast into darkness, stripped of everything they thought they knew, the traveler must look beyond their own understanding for new answers. This card reminds us that as we are all connected in some small sense to a cosmos unthinkably vaster than ourselves, we are never alone in our search for answers, but also that those answers may be very far from what we expected or wanted.

When this card appears in a reading, it often relates to major life decisions or unanswered questions that need your attention. In all cases, it signals that this is a good time to examine and adjust your path. Where it leads may be hidden from you, but even in the deepest night, there’s enough starlight to see by. In seeking answers that can only be found in the dark, though, remember how quickly knowledge without understanding becomes dangerous.

In its inverted aspect, this card usually refers to the internal influence of mysteries or revelations. It may indicate things you wish to hide from your own or others’ sight, long-held understandings that no longer serve you, or losing sight of your own goals in search of some higher, grander purpose that may never come. The Stars watch and illuminate, but do not guide. As in all Tarot interpretation, when considering any insights they offer, it’s important to avoid handing your own agency over to the cosmos. There’s no future in wishing and waiting for something else to act through you. 

Keywords: Upright: Wonder, mystery, inspiration and contemplation, clarity of vision, paradigm shifts, perilous wisdom

Inverted: (+) Secrets, self-understanding, accepting what you cannot change

(-) Fate, forces outside your control, indecision, fear of the unknown

~~~

I wake up with a dizzying headache that smears my vision into an unfocused-photo blur and makes it hard to sit up in bed, let alone do anything meaningful. I make myself sit with it for now. There have always been bad health days, and after last week I shouldn’t strain my extra wellness too much.

If I have to refill while I think through the insane idea I’m considering, it might start to weigh on me.

Once I’ve sat through the morning medical routine and noted to the nurses that I feel terrible, I flop out of bed and slowly make my way to my corner of the lounge, if only because the seats there are comfier than the one at my desk.

My tarot table has been quieter since I made the Promise, and I don’t think that’s entirely down to the fact that I’ve been out a lot more. Dementia isn’t too common on the seventh floor. Most residents still know what’s going on around them, and while they might not see straight through my poorly-kept secret, I did start taking long night walks right as I developed very Keeperlike unnatural markings. They can look at me and gather that something unusual might be happening. Maybe it would be different if everyone knew that they now had a mascot Keeper, but until they know that’s what happened, I’m probably an eerie mystery to be kept at a distance.

Noirin and the nurses still talk to me, but those do seem like the people most likely to have put the pieces together. One morning nurse even complimented my weird hair — I thanked her, mentioned dying it, and otherwise brushed it off. I actually did look up how to use those products Dr. Hines gave me the other day, but I’ve never done anything like that myself and it looked way too hard and complicated to bother with. Especially when my magic would probably just undo any steps I took to either reverse the process or hurry it along.

The rest of the people here don’t seem to know what to do with me, and until they do, it’s probably easier to leave me alone. That’s fine, though. I haven’t sat down and done a full reading for myself in a while, and I have enough pressing questions about my new place in the world that I could probably spend a few days doing nothing but working through them. Let’s start with the obvious one: tell me, cards, what I need to know about this library Harbinger. What’s going on in my head? What am I not thinking of? Holding those questions in the front of my mind, I scatter my deck across the table. 

Back in its little black box, the Six of Pentacles still sits alone and forlorn. A lot has changed since I banished it, so… fine. You can come back, but you’re on notice. Don’t test me. I slip it into the pile and start to swirl the whole mass around. Some of my books suggest fancier, more organized shuffling methods, but I like this one. My hands will never shiver too badly for it to work, and it’s kind of fun. Once I’ve herded the pile back into a deck, I separate it into three sections and spin them around a couple times to mix up whether the cards are inverted or not — the piles twirl nicely on these polished tables, which is also fun — then put them back together and flip my first card.

What was: The Stars inverted. Alright, that’s a bit on the nose, but in so many ways that it loops back and becomes hard to say just what it’s referring to. Just in the immediate past, does that mean all the ways in which I’m trapped by awful life circumstances, or things I’m hiding or bottling up or looking for answers to in the wrong places? Let’s see what’s next and come back to this.

“These don’t look like the ones you normally use,” a voice interrupts before I can flip the next card. “What’s the occasion?”

“Oh! Hi.” I look up at Noirin, who’s appeared from nowhere as usual. Or, more likely, I just wasn’t watching too closely. “I only use these for myself. The pictures don’t have as much going on as the others, so they’re harder to read if you don’t already know all the cards.” Traditional tarot decks display complicated scenes packed with old occult symbolism, and even if you don’t recognize the symbols, most show people doing something that carries the basic meaning. My personal deck’s art style is simpler and gloomier, with lots of stark black and white lines setting off small splashes of color, and no human figures on any of the cards. Animals and natural scenes replace most of the classical imagery. 

“May I have a look? I like them.”

“When I’m done, yes.”

“Of course.” She moves a little more carefully than usual as she sits next to me, squinting to inspect the first card from a distance. My deck’s Stars are a white background trailing up into a black one, on which eleven large stars shine in an irregular rainbow of dark pastel colors.

Once she’s settled, I draw the second card. What is: The Tower. My Tower is a great tree in the night, burning and collapsing after a lightning strike. Taken with the last card, it looks like the upside-down Stars are falling from the sky and smashing something beneath.

“So, what do these ones say?” Noirin tilts toward me, craning her head to look at  the cards from the right angle.

I put a finger to the Stars. “This one is the unknown. Influences you aren’t aware of or can’t control. The second one is…” I work through the common keywords in my head and hesitate, realizing how easily most of them could apply to a girl on the brink of death making the Promise. “Breakdowns. Old ideas and beliefs collapsing. Painful but needed revelations,” I eventually say. I don’t include dramatic life upheavals in the list, but that’s certainly the main one I’m thinking of.

“Oh my,” she says simply. The Tower is one of those cards that very often spooks people, but I guess it’s different when it’s not about you. In fact, it does spook me — not because it really predicts some disaster, but because there’s a few things this could point to. Of course my life has a range of Tower-worthy events to choose from. 

First, I should figure out where I’m starting the timeline for this. Is the past the Harbinger I found yesterday? No, that’s still happening, and there’s a clear story to these cards. The book is the Tower, a nightmare very likely to throw my world into chaos and madness if anything about this plan goes wrong. The things I learned in my first weeks as a Keeper are the Stars. They left me feeling trapped enough by the rules of the world that leaving a Harbinger alone to grow seemed like my only way forward — and no matter what my tarot books or the Cycles or anyone says about fate and choice, it still seems like it is. 

The Tower promises growth when all is settled, rebuilding upon the remains of something that was never secure enough to last. Does that part even exist here? Only as some vague, distant hope that I really do learn something worthwhile from all this. But the reading isn’t finished. Before I run too far down that road, what will be is…

“Huh?” I huff. The Ace of Cups inverted. Hm. You don’t fit in at all. It even looks out of place next to the others, bright and calm, a white goblet on a sky-blue background patterned in a way that could equally suggest a waterfall or fish scales. 

Noirin tilts her head expectantly.

“I’m really not sure what to do with this one,” I say. Honestly. “It’s usually about new love or romance, so… you see the issue.” Inverted, it’s actually lost or unrequited love, but I’m not opening that door for anyone’s guesses.

She shrugs. “Who’s to say? Love finds us in its own place and time. Most often when we’re least looking for it.” Her voice stays light, because she’s not an idiot. She’s having fun teasing me, not actually telling me to keep my eyes peeled for the boy of my dreams in this hospice.

…Whatever that would even mean. It’s not like I have one in my imagination I’m just desperately waiting to meet. Finding love has always just felt like one more thing in the category of “things I’ll never grow up enough for.” I guess I still won’t now, even if I do live forever. Thanks, stunted growth. Thanks, delayed puberty. I’m still not sure how to feel about that — lots of the stuff I’ve been told to expect sounded bizarre and gross, yes, but… I don’t know.

Anyway. I can safely ignore the obvious reading, so what’s left? Emotional walls, withheld or repressed feelings, emptiness. A call to look for things holding you back or pay more attention to your own inner world. If I were a blind optimist, I could read this as referring favorably to my strange Harbinger intuition.

I’m not, though. In this position, it’s probably a destination. A warning I hadn’t exactly thought but must have already known: this very likely ends with me alone in the world, holding everyone and everything at a distance.

But if it comes to that, alone and alive is still progress.

“So what are these all about, anyway?”

“Secret,” I answer. I don’t think I could make up a fake subject fast enough to be convincing.

“Ah.” She nods, smiling in a way that I hope isn’t knowing. “Well, I’m glad you’re still finding things to be interested in, whatever they are. Are you finished, then?”

I pick the three cards up, then push the rest of the deck toward her. “Go ahead.”

Noirin thanks me and starts to go through the deck one card at a time, taking long pauses to flip them over and inspect the art upright and inverted. Her sleeves stretch back a little as she does, and the little red pinpoint rash on her arms has spread. I’d try not to think about what that means, but there’s no point. I know where I live, and no miracles are coming to save these people. Not unless I can help them, and I still don’t even know if my miracle can save me.

~~~

I’m still not feeling good by sunset, but I’m stable enough to go out with only a little stolen strength, so I do. I can’t afford to take days off while I’m actively tracking a Harbinger’s growth.

I walk my nightly route at dusk. The best stretch of the day is all too short, and now that I can leave the hospital I want to make the very most of it. For just over an hour, the light is neither too intense nor too faint. The sun isn’t glaring down at everything, but you aren’t yet dependent on bright lamps or fickle starlight. You just see the world, dyed in pretty twilight colors.

These walks are usually quite peaceful, which would be nice if I didn’t need that peace to be broken to live. I’ve found that I don’t need to transform to detect magic at a distance, only to shift my focus away from my body’s senses and toward my soul’s, which means I don’t even have to deal with people stopping to stare at an unfamiliar Keeper. 

As for Keepers, there aren’t so many in New Claris that I constantly run across them, and that’s a relief. Shona and Mide haven’t been back, unsurprisingly. Sometimes I feel others at the edges of my awareness, off in the Fields, but that’s about it. I’ve gotten used to being alone in my tiny corner of the city. 

Which is why it’s concerning when, close to the university campus, I sense someone else coming up from the Weald. People are scary and hard to deal with at the best of times, but that’s not the only problem now. My situation here is dangerous. It wouldn’t take much for someone to stumble across the book while I’m away, or worse, while I’m there watching over it. In the best case, they kill it and I’m left with nothing. Worst case, they decide I’m some kind of Harbinger cultist and my life explodes.

And more than that, something about this person’s aura is deeply disturbing. It’s not painfully offensive in the same way as a Harbinger’s, but it carries an unpleasant weight, close to the way guilt or panic feel in the stomach. I wonder if that’s how I felt to Shona. 

I leave my usual route and slowly make my way toward the other Keeper. They aren’t going right by the library, at least, so hopefully they’re just passing through. If that’s all, I can leave them to it and get back to my business.

As I come closer, I try to push through the unsettling feeling and study its source more closely, remembering what Shona said about sensing a Keeper’s magical signature, but no matter how deep I dive, I can’t find anything like that. Nothing about the aura announces its source’s name or title or nature. It’s not hidden, I don’t think. It’s not a blindingly bright light, too painful to look at directly. It’s like their soul is defaced. Like whatever ideas or images it once carried have been scratched over, leaving only wordless shame and regret.

After a few minutes’ detour, I spot them. Something isn’t right, though. There’s a girl strolling alone down the sidewalk who’s definitely the Keeper, but she doesn’t look anything like one. Not a transformed one, anyway, unless her regalia is a simple burgundy cardigan over a featureless ankle-length black dress. 

I don’t know exactly how that’s supposed to work. Should I be able to sense her at all like this? Her soul’s presence certainly shouldn’t be more intense than that of any other Keeper I’ve met, but it is. I trail her at a healthy distance, trying to figure out where she’s going and if I need to worry about her. Many of the people in her path hastily cross the street or turn down other roads as she approaches. It can’t be that they sense her too, so why? Who is this?

“You don’t need to hide back there. I won’t bother you unless you want me to,” she calls into the night. She stops walking, but doesn’t turn to face me.

I freeze. She is talking to me, right? Has to be. How? She hasn’t looked back at all. Ugh, doesn’t matter, she probably did it with magic. I could just leave now, it seems like she’s just crossing my territory on her way somewhere else, but that might still be a problem if she’s doing it regularly. I really should at least figure out who she is, and if she’s dangerous, I’m in less trouble than anyone else here.

So I walk a little faster, approaching until I can see her clearly, and only then does she turn around. 

“Hey there,” she says. “I’m Niavh. Can I help you with anything?” She waves rather than approaching or offering a handshake. Her black hair is kept in a slightly long pixie cut, and her sleeves cover most of her hands, leaving only the fingers exposed. She’s taller than me, like everyone else in the world, but I think that’s just average height for a girl in the upper half of the Promise range.

“Eyna,” I say, then realize with a nervous start that I’ve seen her face very recently. “Wait. Niavh Fianata?” The Niavh Fianata with a human body count? I don’t say. I hope she can’t see it on my face. There’s the problem with walking around in normal clothes, and transforming just to go talk to her would’ve felt too much like starting a conversation by setting a knife on the table.

“I’m afraid so,” she says, smiling softly. As in her picture, her scarlet eyes are constantly wet with tears. Droplets roll down her face and fall to the sidewalk, where they shatter into tiny sparkling clouds of glass dust, then vanish like puffs of breath in winter.

“Oh, I, sorry,” I murmur. “I didn’t mean to call you out.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve gotten a lot worse,” she shrugs. 

There’s an uneasy silence until I remember that she did just ask me why I was trailing her. “Anyway, no, I don’t need anything and I didn’t want to bother you. I sensed you and wasn’t sure what I was sensing, that’s all. Especially once I saw you. Sorry if that sounds weird. I don’t really know how it’s meant to work with Keepers out of uniform.”

“Ah. Yeah.” She starts walking again and motions for me to join her, which I do after another moment’s hesitation. “When you’ve used magic long enough, it starts to settle into you. Lines like that stop being quite so clear. I’m sorry if it startled you.” I’ve never heard of that before, but it does make sense now that she’s said it. Emergence changes Keepers to make them better suited for magic, and those marks stay there forever, so why wouldn’t the power itself? 

Wait, then what’s the point of transforming at all? It can’t just be for the nice outfits, so… no, that’s a later question.

“Speaking of, I don’t think I’ve seen you around anywhere. Have you been doing this for long?” she asks.

There’s that question again… but, well, I can’t just hide in my corner and be an unknown forever, and it feels somehow less prying than when Shona asked it. Her voice is steady and calm, and she isn’t charging into my life and appointing herself my friend the way extroverts do.

“No. A couple weeks.”

She nods. “How’s it been?”

There’s that question, too. One of the few silver linings to my life is that people haven’t really tried to play the “How are you? Oh, just fine, thanks for asking!” game with me for a long time. Nothing has ever been fine and expecting me to say otherwise would be ridiculous.

But the Keeper world is such a new context that it might as well be a new life. I don’t know what passes for normal or how we’re meant to interact, so I can’t tell if this is a polite nothing or she’s asking because she actually wants the answer. And if she does, do I actually want to give it to this complete stranger?

Maybe just a little. 

“It’s a lot and I have no idea what I’m doing,” I finally say.

“Yeah, that sounds about right. Most of us get the call and jump to running a marathon with muscles we never knew existed.” She doesn’t force eye contact or push herself into my space. We just walk, not quite side by side, with me trailing slightly behind her. It’s kind of nice… apart from the unpleasant mystical weight of her presence, still hanging in the air like a bad mood. I do my best to tune it out. Comparing Niavh Fianata to my last Keeper experience, I feel a little bad about my gut reaction to meeting her, even as occasional pedestrians remind me of it by spotting her and scampering off. I don’t really know what happened with her, not enough to say what I should think of it.

Although by the same token, I don’t know who she is, and first impressions could mean anything. I shoo away shivery memories of floral-scented smoke and low, cruel laughter and dying grasshoppers.

“Is there any way I could make it easier?” she continues. “People have sprinted down this road before, and you don’t need to do everything alone if you don’t want to.”

“…I don’t want to keep you too long,” I reply as casually as I can.

“Don’t worry about that. I’m just taking a walk.”

That’s both of my original questions answered. I could just leave. But with her history, she really might know someone or something that could help me.

“I do have a question. About you. Your circumstances. If you don’t mind,” I say.

“Go ahead. It lightens a bit of the load when people can learn something from me.” Something feels different as she says that. Not a pause or a catch in her voice, and I don’t see any change in her body language. I can only guess that there was a pained twitch in her soul, and whatever it was passes in an instant.

“A lot of the hard part is… trying to use those muscles and not knowing what they’ll do to you. Or other people. Magic, it doesn’t always come out the way you want it to, right? And if something does end up that way, what do you do with it? How do you live in the world after that? Do you? I mean, of course, I guess you’ve figured something out, just… I worry about what could go wrong when the stakes are what they are, that’s all.” I babble through a uselessly vague Keeper version of wrapping my situation in I-have-this-friend hypotheticals. Ugh. This was a bad idea.

To my shock, Niavh doesn’t ask what on earth I’m talking about. She just stops walking and turns her head to face me. “A lot of people have done a lot of things wrong. For Keepers, it’s just… magic makes us more of whatever we are and gives us more of whatever we do, but that doesn’t make our wrongs infinite,” she says, rubbing the sleeve covering her left wrist with the knuckles of her right. “Sins aren’t stains that curse us for eternity. That’s not to say we shouldn’t do our best to avoid them, or any mistakes we make aren’t our fault, but they’re not the end of your life. They don’t poison any good you do later, no matter how it feels.” 

Her smile returns, a bit more wistful than before. “Anyone can change. All it takes is to understand what you’ve done, regret it, and want to be different. No mistake you make will be the only thing that matters about you unless you let it. Does that help at all?”

Niavh sits through my silence, waiting patiently until I break it with the only things I can think to say: “Some, yes. Thank you. The rest I probably just need to get used to. New muscles and learning your own strength and all that.”

“I’m happy to be of service.” She nods and keeps on walking. I sigh with something like relief as her direct attention lifts. I’m still not any good at people.

I don’t follow this time. “I’ve got other things I should take care of. Thanks for your… your time,” I call after her.

“Alright. Take care, Eyna. If you think of anything else I could do, I’m not hard to find.” She looks over her shoulder and waves once more.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I… don’t lie? I was sure it was a lie until I said it. If I end up going to the Church, I’ll probably go to Niavh first.

But I still don’t think I will.

What she said was all fine and good. It probably would’ve been the right thing to say for most Keepers who’d slipped up and hurt someone with magic. It would’ve been right for me, if the thing with the book was my only problem — and I’m not an idiot, I know that could still turn out to be a horrible mistake. But it doesn’t help if what I’ve done and will keep doing wasn’t a mistake. I can’t turn around and stop hurting people. Magic won’t let me. Not unless Emergence gives me some other way to stretch out my lifespan.

And seeing how people reacted to her — a Keeper who, as far as I know, had one very bad day years ago and hasn’t repeated it — doesn’t make me feel good about how they’d handle me.

~~~

There’s nothing new at the library that night. The book hasn’t changed at all and my hold on it is just as strong. 

The next day, it’s added a new step, similar in its content and bizarre patchwork writing style. Strangely, the crossed-out Step 5 is still in there, neither repaired nor replaced. The new step doesn’t reference it at all.

Step 6

A mirror is a polished surface that creates reflected images. When you look in the mirror, are you happy with what you see?

I DIDN’T THINK SO. NOBODY IS. MIRRORS ARE LIARS! THEY TELL YOU THEY’RE SHOWING YOU WHO YOU ARE, BUT THE ███ reflected images IN THE MIRROR IS JUST THE SAD BROKEN WAY OTHER PEOPLE SEE YOU.

Only you can know what you really look like! Before you can see yourself, though, you need to send the ████████ reflected images away so it can’t lie about you anymore. 

Perform this step in your dark room. The time doesn’t matter, but it has to be dark. It always has to be dark. You’ll need a hand mirror big enough to see your whole ████ reflected images in. Sit down, hold the mirror up, and meet ████████ reflected images gaze. If you can’t see your eyes in the dark, OR IF YOU SEE SOMETHING OTHER THAN ████████ reflected images, YOU LOSE.

But if you’ve done the last steps right, you know that you don’t need lights to see anything important. Things you can only see in the light are mean!

Lock eyes with ████████ reflected images. Remember that you aren’t looking at yourself, only at ████████ reflected images. Hold that knowledge close. Soon, your ████ reflected images will start to change. You’ll see through the lie and start seeing faces with no eyes and eyes with no faces and other things too. Then tell the ██████ reflected images you don’t want it anymore! It’s not welcome in your life! 

Your ██████████ reflected images has known you for a long time. It will try to trick you or scare you into letting it stay. Don’t listen! It PROBABLY can’t do anything bad to you! 

Eventually, if you hold fast, the ██████████ reflected images will lose its grip on you. Without somebody to lie to, it’ll poof away into nothing like a tree falling where nobody else can hear it. Then you win! 

The page across from it displays a mirror reflecting what seems to have been a chalky stick figure, smudged away as though half-erased.

That’s a little concerning. If I take it literally, and the book has given me no reason not to, this ritual is the Harbinger’s first step out of creepy imagination games and into changing the actual world. But it’s still a long way from demanding human sacrifice or something. 

Isn’t it? Is it wrong to take this too literally? Thinking about the metaphor here, the idea comes up a lot in old mystic lore that mirrors reflect your soul. What this step means may be as important as what it is, and if that’s the case it gets a lot worse. It could read as a way to feed yourself to the Harbinger disguised as some other strange goal.

But something about that feels wrong in my gut. It’d be stupid to pretend I understand what the Harbinger is thinking as it makes these up, but I don’t have to. All the Harbingers I’ve encountered have… not exactly rules, but they all seem to have some idea they want to express, even if it makes no sense to anyone but them. Whatever this one is saying is spread out over a whole book of insane rituals that’s still mostly blank. Ending the story with this step would be too… random. Too arbitrary. It’d be like if a horror movie ended in fifteen minutes with the hero dying in a car crash on their way to the haunted house.

Although that fifth step does still feel like a pretty random inclusion. What is it for? Is it there to make some point I can’t begin to guess at or did the Harbinger have an idea and change its mind later? Whichever way, it’s only just started on this thing with mirrors and I’m confident that I’m right about its progress, so I put it back and go home.

~~~

When I go to check on it the fourth time, it’s no longer in its place. 

For a long moment, my stomach feels like two ferrets wrestling. I reach out with my soul, searching for the shard of myself I stabbed into the book, and find it very close by. Still inside, still on this floor. It takes a bit longer for my body to catch up with that knowledge, but catch up it does. This was always going to happen. This was the plan, I realize with another, quieter spike of unease. I didn’t really expect the Harbinger to grow just by waiting.

By its location, I think it’s in one of the windowside reading nooks, but it’s not alone. There’s a human soul with it. I head in its rough direction, moving through the bookshelves two rows from the walls. I don’t want to storm in before I know what’s happening. 

Soon, I’m peeking at that nook through the empty space above the books on their shelves. There, a girl in a heavy twill jacket and long, dark pleated skirt is curled up in a ball on the ledge. She’s holding the open book against her knees, and while her bushy mane of golden-brown hair obscures most of her face, she takes regular furtive glances out at the rest of the library. One foot constantly taps on the cushioned bench. It would be easy for a normal onlooker to dismiss her as a jittery kid, but to me, she looks very much like she’s doing something she shouldn’t and she knows it. 

I’m not sure what to make of that, except that if I stay here for too long she’ll probably notice me. I duck away, grab a random book off the shelves, and sit in the next nook over, pretending to read while I train my soul-senses on my neighbors. The two are tangled up like… I don’t know what it’s like. The girl is clearly corrupted, but it doesn’t feel like she has some parasitic disease or death curse. It’s a little like the sour tinge I leave when I drain someone’s health, but that isn’t quite right either. She isn’t injured or sick at all, just touched. The sensory line between her and the Harbinger is fuzzier than it should be.

Eventually, she starts to move, taking the book with her. They head back into the bookshelves, stop for a few seconds, and then mostly separate. Some small part of the Harbinger lingers with her like a bad smell that won’t wash out, but the book itself stays put. I wait a little longer for her to leave, then go get the book myself. It’s exactly where I first saw it on the shelves. 

Hm. Why didn’t she keep it? The library gates wouldn’t detect it if she just smuggled it out in her bag. I have two ideas. One: she just found it for the first time, read enough to be disturbed, and put it back, either to go get help or figuring it was some kind of bad prank. Two: she’s infected enough to influence and it wants to stay where it can reach more people. Given the way she was acting, the second one seems much more likely. Has she been here before? Also seems likely. I don’t think the book would be expanding if someone wasn’t feeding it, and she knows enough that she wanted to hide while she read it.

As for the book itself, it’s definitely grown a little. It looks the same, but its presence feels a bit more substantial… or it does until it recoils at my touch, shrinking into itself like a scared turtle. It’s a little pitiful. Satisfied that it won’t be making another attempt on my soul, I flip it open. Another page is filled in.

Step 7

Your ██████████ reflected images wasn’t a very good friend, but it’s been there your whole life. It made sure you were never alone, and losing it can be a big change. Do you get lonely without it? That’s okay! Your new friend can take its place, and they won’t lie to you or twist you or hurt you!

Just go to your room, look in an empty mirror, and ask your friend to be your new ██████████ reflected images. Tell them what you like about them and why you want them to keep you company. If you’ve done everything right so far, you’re probably already fast friends, so this step is very easy! Once you can see your friend in the glass, you both win!

WHEN PEOPLE SEE THEM IN THE MIRRORS AND ASK WHAT CHANGED, YOU CAN TEACH THEM HOW TO SEE THEMSELVES AND MAKE THEIR OWN FRIENDS TOO! YAY!

(Make sure they do the other steps first, or they’ll lose.)

The same drawn mirror as on the last page now displays the ugly little purple blob from the earlier steps, reaching out for a hug with its nubby shapeless appendages.

Okay, then. In two steps, we’ve moved from giving yourself nightmares to replacing your reflection with a Harbinger. The book isn’t eating people right away, but there is a clear progression here. I’ll need to watch how quickly the next ones escalate, if I don’t just kill it now. 

Should I kill it now? The book still doesn’t feel close to finished, and whatever it wants, it’s taking its time with its victims. 

No. Not yet. I put it back on the shelf and head home. I’ll end this if it really starts to hurt that girl, but until then, I think it can wait a little longer. I just need some magical way to keep an eye on her, track her progress through the rituals. 

Hopefully she’s the only one. There are no trails of corruption leading away from the Harbinger’s core, not even to her.

~~~

I don’t see or sense the girl the next night, and the book hasn’t changed. My watch continues. I sit nearby enough to look at its place on the shelves, and no one but me pays it any attention. This goes on for two more days. Where did she go? With the state of her soul, I doubt she just stopped. Did something happen to her? Did the Harbinger warn her about me and my usual visiting time?

On the fourth day, I find someone else before I can check on the book. A soul I’ve never felt before, but one bright with magic. 

Another Keeper.

They aren’t rushing right at the library, but they’re close enough that they’ll find the book as long as they can sense it at any reasonable range. Sure enough, a minute later they start heading straight toward me.

Okay. Okay. What am I doing? Do I give up the plan and kill it right now? I still don’t think I’d get much out of it, but that’s better than someone else killing it. Run off with it and put it back later? No, that’s stupid — all they’d need to do is run faster than me, and it’d look even worse than waiting here with it. Tell them that yes, I’ve got important research reasons to leave this Harbinger alone? These ideas are just getting worse.

Wait, are they? That last one depends very much on what I tell them.

I take the book off the shelf, find a nook in an empty corner of the library, and sit, waiting for the stranger to come find me. If I frame this the right way, explain the details I can sense and they can’t and maybe twist the truth just a tiny bit, this really might work.

Oh, who am I kidding? It’s going to be terrible, just like everything else, but it’s what I’ve got.

On my first day as a Keeper, when I killed Yurfaln and found out what absorbing it had done for me, I wasn’t happy. I could see how the way it changed my magic might be very helpful in deadly situations, yes, but I didn’t accept this role to burn a little brighter before some horrible creature or my own worthless body snuffs me out. I did it to not die. 

I might have judged that power too quickly. My first Harbinger made my magic stronger on the verge of death, which means I can better use it to pull myself back from the brink. It’s probably saved my life twice now — first when Irakkia skewered me, and again when I somehow kept myself standing through my self-poisoning scheme in the forest.

That doesn’t happen with the Harbinger egg I took from the Wade house. It’s exactly as tiny and useless as it felt in the moment, and I’m no further from death for it. I think I burned a little less health recovering from that day than I would’ve otherwise. 

Nothing I do is working and I have no idea what I can do about it except… keep throwing myself into disasters and hoping.

~~~

Four days later, the drought in my territory ends. Maybe. 

I’ve made long evening walks part of my new routine. I missed one while I was recovering from my day in the forest, but only one. Keeping to my own plans is one of those precious few things I can control, and I’m not about to give that up so long as I have the power to push through horrible health days. 

It’s also a big change that I can safely go outside at all now, one that hasn’t quite become too routine for me to appreciate. I’ve made a habit of shrouding myself in the cold mist of my immunization barrier before I leave the seventh floor for any reason. At least in this one way, magic hasn’t betrayed or disappointed me. This shield is something small and fundamental enough that I can easily create and maintain it without transforming, and it does exactly what I meant it to do. Sometimes, when I’m focusing closely on my soul’s senses, I actually feel pathogens that would’ve been life-threatening a few weeks ago freezing to death and smile a little. 

The only drawback I’ve noticed so far is that the mist does make the air surrounding me a good bit chillier, and I can live with that. It might even be nice when summer comes — I’ve never liked warm-weather clothes anyway.

On tonight’s walk, I’ve just turned around at the university when the uneasy feeling of sensing a Harbinger somewhere close creeps over me. It feels different. More substantial than the last one’s barely-there aura, but not painfully overwhelming like most of the others, and hard to put any clear impression to. The presence isn’t too faint to follow and doesn’t do anything to elude me. I don’t even need to transform to follow it, and follow it I do. 

Its trail leads into the massive library not far from the university. I used to go there and dig through their occult sections, before it became clear quite how bad my situation was, but I haven’t been inside since I left school. Realizing that makes me want to go dig through their occult sections and find some weird tome to devour, just because I can, but this is a little more important.

The Harbinger’s presence seems to come from somewhere above, and I follow it that way, up the winding staircase that climbs through the building’s heart. The library is arranged in layers that feel increasingly quiet and small. The bottom floors have lots of wide open space for gatherings and events. By the top, shelves and shelves of books cover most of the space, dotted here and there with chairs in little corners and reading nooks by the windows. One side hall is just a dozen rows of huge wooden study desks, lined with bookshelves at the far end. This makes things at least a bit easier for me. Not as many bystanders, and there are plenty of isolated corners to hide in if I need to do any active magic.

My search ends somewhere in the top floor’s maze of books, but the corruption’s source is not a monster or a Wound or even another formless nightmare egg. Unless I’m seriously mistaken, it’s a book. In the Languages section, of all places. Tucked between two big books on the history of the Thalassic language in a way that leaves it not exactly hidden, but hard enough to notice that I wouldn’t have spotted it without magic telling me right where it was. Did something infect a book the way others infect people? Is that a thing? I touch a finger to its spine very slowly, then pull it out when it doesn’t burn or bite me. 

Nothing happens. Holding it feels vaguely unsettling, but other than that, it’s an actual physical book in the actual physical world. A little black hardcover, featureless except for the title on the front: How to Be the World, written in embossed silver text that catches the light and shimmers holographically. I’m not sure what I expected a Harbinger’s tome of horrors to look like, but this isn’t it.

The first page has none of the stamps or card pockets you’d expect to see in a library book. It lists no author or publisher, only the title repeated, and under that… I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. A dedication? It looks almost handwritten, but the letters are still standardized enough to seem like a font.

if you are unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality
if you find living boring
if you see no beauty in anything
if your dreams don’t fit inside your skin

then this book is for you! you will be happy here!!! 

Then, on the next page over:

Introduction (how to use this book the right way!)

Everyone has dreams. Do you have any you dream often? That’s because some dreams are bigger than others, so they take up more space. Those are the ones that hook into you and follow you everywhere and wrap themselves around your heart and never ever ever let go. Sometimes, the very biggest dreams become too much to carry and spill out of your soul. This could be a very good thing, but it happens so much that they’ve all bled into each other and smushed together into a big messy dream-soup. That’s like mixing all the colors together at once. It means there might as well not be any dreams at all!

Some call that soup Life!

If you’re sick of living in grey, tasteless dream-slurry, this is the one and only book that can help you! Inside these pages, you’ll learn how to take your favorite dreams and carve them into the world’s skin. Then they won’t be dreams anymore, they’ll just be, and you can live in them even while you’re awake! Soon, this book will teach you the steps to make anything you want real!

Here are some things you need to know first:

-The work will begin as soon as you’ve read and understood the next page. Read each step’s instructions carefully. If you miss something or make a mistake, you’ll lose! Oh no!

-It’s important that you perform the steps to come in order. Don’t read ahead!

-You don’t have to know what you want to be just yet! The steps will say when you need to make up your mind.

-I love you!

I don’t think it’s going to drag me into a Wound, but I don’t like it at all. Still, it means something, so… 

Wait. 

It means something. 

It’s not a nightmare tome swirling with Harbinger-words my magic is roughly interpreting for me. The book is obviously corrupted, but its bizarre words are written in perfectly legible Clarish — here and there,  it does switch between different fonts seemingly at random, but they’re all readable. That’s not supposed to happen. That doesn’t happen. Harbingers don’t speak human languages. How? Did someone, what, write and print this book on its behalf? Leave it here and wait for someone to stumble across it? No, that doesn’t make any sense… but neither do Harbingers. For all I know, this isn’t even really unheard of. Maybe Keepers who hear them talk just don’t want to record and share their ravings, or the Church doesn’t want people publishing Harbinger quotes. I don’t have any other Keepers I can check with.

Well, whether or not this is the first Harbinger in history to read and write Clarish, it’s the one I’m dealing with. Let’s see what else it has to say.

Step 1 

Close your eyes and pretend you’re a human standing just where you are right now. Walk around the space where you are, exploring every last nook. When you’re finished, go back to where you started and open your eyes.

Who did you see around you? 

If the world was empty, you don’t lose, but this book is not for you. Please put this book back where you found it.

(Remember to return books to their proper place!)

If you met any strangers or inhuman creatures, you win! Pick your favorite!

You will need their help soon.

On the opposite page is a pastel drawing of a girl sitting in this exact spot. Colorful little monsters peek out from behind the shelves. A one-eyed purple blob with thick blue tentacles trailing down from it, a thing like a green sheet-ghost if it were draped over a tree stump instead of a person… in another context, they might be cute in kind of an ugly way.

Anyway, I’m not doing that. I turn the page, and if the book is hiding things or punishing me for breaking the rules, I can’t tell. Each page is printed a little differently, with different fonts in different sizes. Even the exact color and texture of the paper varies. They all follow a similar format, though. Instructions for a stage of this bizarre ritual on one side, a cheery little picture of the act on the other. 

Step 2

This step can only be performed at night, indoors, in complete darkness. It’s best if you pick a room that NEVER sees ███████ natural light. If you don’t have your own sleep cave, you can make one yourself by ███████ COVERING your windows, but they’ll have to be COVERED forever. We’re going to make this room into a special night garden where you can plant and water your dreams and sing to them to make them grow taller! If the Sun sees inside before they’re done growing, you lose.

The Sun is mean!

Once you’ve chosen a place, make sure no pests will invade your garden until you’re finished. If one does, you lose. Sit alone with your back to a corner, so that you could see the whole room at once if it were lit. If the room is dark enough, you shouldn’t see anything at all. To make sure, try to move your hand in front of your face. If you only see a blur, a sort of black-on-black shifting that follows the motion, that’s okay! It’s not real. It’s only your brain trying to make up for the fact that it can’t see as well as your soul.

But just because it’s not real doesn’t mean it’s not real. If you try, you can see the whole room the way you think you see your hand, paint a whole world with different shades of pitch darkness. What’s different about them? What separates the black carpet from the black chairs? Nothing. Everything. They’re all just memories, like everything else, but we can tell all the other ones apart, so why not these? Once you see them, remember the room a different way than it was before. It doesn’t even have to be a room at all! Maybe your room was always really a black field of black flowers under a starless night sky. What’s important is that you take all those shades of not-color and make them into something new, full of all the things that inspire you most.

Once you’re happy with your room, think about your favorite friend from Step 1. Invite them to come and sit with you. You can say it out loud or with your soul but they’ll hear either way. If you’ve done everything right, you should be able to see them just like you did before, colors and all. Welcome them! Show them around!

As soon as you’re done, you win!

You should go to bed as quickly as you can when you’re finished. It might help to sleep in your dark space tonight. Remember what the dream side of it is like, and write down any interesting dreams you have about it!

If you can’t remake the room, or your new friend doesn’t come to you no matter how much you call, you lose.

If something else comes, I’m sorry. I can’t help you.

I can’t tell what the picture here is supposed to be. Rather than shapes I can make anything of, it just has textures that are slightly raised on the page, like someone tried to draw in black crayon on black paper.

Step 3

There’s no step here. I just wanted to tell you that the world we’re making together is beautiful. 

The illustration is a simple page-sized heart.

Step 4

You’ve probably had lots of dreams you don’t like, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important! Before you can become the world, you’ll need to gather up everything you want to not-become and put it somewhere else. 

Perform this step in your room from Step 2. If you haven’t slept in there before, you’ll need to now.

As you’re getting ready for bed, think about the dreams you like the least. What about them makes you uncomfortable? Do you think they could hurt you? Maybe they can, but they probably just take you to places where you don’t want to go. If you CUT away all the confusing dream symbols and push through to their heart, the things that scare you the most, what are those things? If you don’t have words for them yet, that’s okay. Just let them all swim around and fill that fuzzy place between waking and sleeping and then dive on in!

If you’ve done everything right, you’ll be in your room, but it won’t be yours anymore. All those things should have followed you here and twisted it around themselves. Don’t run. Don’t look away. If you do, you lose. You need to understand everything that happens here. I don’t know what that’ll look like for you, but you’ll have to do it alone. It wouldn’t count if your new friend helped, so they’ll wait in the room outside, watching over your garden while you work.

It might take you more than one night to sort through all the horrible things squirming through your dream-room. The days in between those nights probably won’t be very good days, so don’t take too long, but eventually, everything will be back the way it’s supposed to be, and in one brilliant moment you’ll know everything is going to be okay. Then you win!

The things you faced during this step aren’t gone, but they’re yours now. Someday, you’ll use the ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ you gathered here as ink to write your new world.

The picture is of the girl and the purple blob from the first step. They’re standing over a big black soup cauldron full of strangely-shaped eyes and thin insects’ legs and other things I couldn’t hope to identify and don’t want to. One long grey arm that twists all along its length like a snake looks like it’s trying to climb out, but the girl is pushing it back down with a big wooden spatula.

That last part… why do I know that word? Do I know it? I can’t read it, can’t see it as anything but a swirling blur swimming around the page, I’m not even sure if it is a word, but it still feels familiar. I’ve heard it before, that’s it. There was a Harbinger-speech word or phrase Irakkia used that felt the same way this bit of text feels, left the same uncomfortable gap in my understanding. 

Reading this book feels like peeking at something you’re not supposed to see, but there’s two different feelings twisting together within the one — at the same time, it’s both an exciting secret people are hiding from you and an awful spectacle you’ve stumbled onto, something you don’t even want to see but can’t quite rip your eyes away from. Like sneaking a look at a birthday present, but when you open the wrapping there’s just a half-decayed animal corpse underneath.

Step 5

Beneath the chapter heading, all the print on this page is crossed out in black permanent marker, and the drawing across from it has been angrily scratched out. A note in the margins over it reads: 

SKIP THIS STEP! This step should never be performed ever ever ever! If you perform it, you will lose! 

This time it looks very much like real writing, neat but slightly shaky.

Everything suddenly feels colder.

It takes longer than it should’ve to notice that the chill isn’t just some abstract eerie feeling in the air. Something is pushing into my protective aura, the magic I use to replace the immune system I don’t have. The mist howls silently and seeps into my bones, demanding my attention — my help. 

But what about the book? What happens if I leave it alone? Is it like locking eyes with a predator, where it’ll pounce on me the moment I falter? What’s next, and what is any of this? Morbid curiosity leashes me to it like a chain, like… like something’s reached up from the earth, grabbed my leg, and won’t let go until it drags me under. Something more than my own fear.

Pulling myself away from the book is the same sort of mental struggle as trying to force myself to fall backwards onto a hard floor, but I do. I wrench my eyes shut and turn my focus inward, following the flow of magic as it seeps out from my soul. At the boundary that forms my shield, little barbed tendrils of the book-Harbinger are worming their way through. I push more power into the barrier until the Harbinger’s coils start to rot, and seconds later I feel it snap loose, retreating into itself.

I release a loud whoosh of breath. Confident that I can hold off the book’s touch, I turn to the next step, but there isn’t one. Beyond that is only blank pages. Is that really all? Are you hiding now that you know I’m stronger than you? No, the first five steps are still there. If this has something to do with that rule about reading ahead, it’d be strange to let me skip four steps before it locked me out.

Maybe it’s really not finished. What does that mean? The book could be a monster’s version of my cards, a tiny extension of something larger, but it doesn’t feel that way. There’s no soul-trail leading to a greater source, no sense of anything flowing into or out of it. It’s just much smaller than any of the full-fledged Harbingers I’ve fought. Not quite a shapeless, unborn thing, but not finished taking its form. I could transform and kill it right now with only slightly more trouble than the last one.

And only slightly more to show for it, but no point in seething too much about things I can’t change.

…Unless.

The book-Harbinger seems to be stuck in the early stages of that act. What does it need to finish writing itself? Time? Pain, madness, souls? Does it always take a death or something close enough to count? I don’t know what the unborn wisp was waiting for, but this one’s goal is fairly clear: it wants someone to find it and carry out these creepy dream rituals. 

What happens then? Maybe if it had a little more time, enough to take its shape but not enough to go on a rampage, it’d be more— 

Wait. Am I seriously thinking this? Is it still… no, I check again and I’ve definitely purged the corruption. This is all me. My life has reached a point where not having a Harbinger crawling through my mind somehow feels like the worse outcome. I can’t burn this idea away with magic. It just sits there, challenging me to dismiss it out of hand the way a good, sane person would. 

Or… follow it through to the end. A minute later, the thought hasn’t gone away and I’m still not killing the book. I guess I need to know what it is I’m actually thinking before I can reject it, and all I’ve got right now is a flash of madness I mistook for a Harbinger attack. 

Fine. Where did this come from? I’m obviously worried about my disease outpacing my magic, so that’s making a mess of my head. Vyuji promised that Emergence would give me some way to save myself, but I don’t know how far off that is or how much time I have. Further, my last attempts at hunting have been disasters. What went wrong with those? What could I change?

Finding Harbingers that I can kill and that are worth anything more than a good deed to my name seems increasingly like gambling my life on horrible odds. My reach just isn’t that wide. I’m not good at fighting. I don’t know if I ever will be. Other Keepers track monsters and charge into battle with whatever they find because they can. They have the strength or magical knack to make it work. I’m sure the direct approach is fine for the Stardust Seraph, who got both and also can fly, or the Silver King, who never needs to worry about working with others because she’s her own whole team.

Me? I can survive a lot if I’ve stolen enough life ahead of time, and my magic-plague will… probably kill things it infects, eventually, assuming there’s nothing they can do to stop it. That’s all I’ve got. It might be good if there were some practical way to sicken a Harbinger, break out of its Wound, and run away for a couple days, making sure it doesn’t go on a horrible rampage and I’m there to claim it when it finally dies. There is no such way, as far as I can tell.

But I do have at least one thing: some special attunement to Harbingers. Every Keeper can sense them, some better than others, but when I do, I see into them. I feel some part of what they are. They’ve spoken to me, not exactly with words but in ways I can understand on some level. I always thought that was impossible, and not just because I was a normal person who’d never looked into it. Shona mentioned that my Harbinger impressions seemed unusually strong, and she’s been doing this at least a little longer than me.

Maybe I’ve been approaching this the wrong way.

If I take that connection and use it to study Harbingers, learn how they and their bizarre life cycle work, I can figure out what they need to come into the world and how much of it they need. And if I catch them in their early stages, I can infect them, let that seed of decay take root, and inflame it the moment they get too dangerous to leave alone. 

Of course, I doubt it’ll just grow on its own. It’ll have to do something to someone. That sounds bad and feels worse, but… I’m already hurting people to survive. It’s no worse than my next best idea, the one about tagging monsters and running off. Probably better. A full-grown Harbinger would do much more damage. 

It wouldn’t just make my life easier, either. Anything I learn this way is knowledge about the world’s most dangerous mystery that everyone can use.

…I’m really entertaining this, aren’t I? What’s wrong with me? It even feels like it makes sense. Like it’s actually the best thing I can do with this horrible power.

The Harbinger is still tiny. I don’t have to commit to one move or the other just yet, and there are things I want to research if the information exists anywhere. 

For now, I’ll just make sure I’m ready to kill it if I need to. I take a photo of the book’s first step, stopping to make sure that my phone is not suddenly haunted and the image actually shows up in my pictures. It does, so I repeat until I’ve recorded all the filled pages. I’d like to write out little summaries just in case it still has some control over direct copies, but I don’t have any paper. Later. 

Next step… can I do this without transforming? Apparently not. The range of things that count as small enough to do at any time seems to grow the more magic changes me, but my cards still won’t come. This’ll be a little awkward, then. I stuff the book into my bag, take it into the bathroom, and call my power up as soon as the one other girl leaves. Then, working quickly as I can, I summon a card, infuse it with a tiny wisp of pain, and press it to the book’s blank back page like a branding iron.

The thing in the book’s aura boils and writhes in protest. Absurdly, I imagine trying to hold a slippery, foul-smelling fish tight until it breathes its last. The Harbinger stops short of thrashing until it’s burnt itself completely out, though. Eventually, its presence goes silent and still, like it’s playing dead for lack of any other defense. My card sinks into the page until only its back design remains, a dark rectangle run through with spiraling white glyphs. It looks like it could’ve been printed there in the first place. 

Nothing has changed about the book or the Harbinger itself, but now a tiny caustic piece of me winds through its being. Now that I’ve got my own hooks into it, I can end this whenever I want. If something goes wrong, it’ll only take another little push to correct my mistake.

A lot of things about this might not work. Maybe someone’s already tried it, or the experts already know the things I’m trying to learn and the answers aren’t good, or I’ll get home and realize that I’ve been completely delirious… what else is new?

Well, let’s find out. I dismiss my magic, put the book back right where I found it, and make my way back to the hospital.

The faint stench grows only slightly stronger as I follow it, but eventually, its trail does end. It’s on the outer edge of the Fields, the central urban district, centered in a single mid-sized craftsman house. I sense five mostly-healthy people inside, which… that kind of crowd could be very bad. None of them feel corrupted yet, though. I’m not sure what that says about the Harbinger’s activities or the risk of coming after it with bystanders around. All I can do is try and act faster than it.

With that in mind, I creep along the edge of the yard, approaching the house from the side, then press against the wall and transform. No reaction I can sense from the presence, so I summon a card and transfer my sight into it. When my vision is done blurring and spinning, I float it by the front windows. The lights are on, and by now it’s dark enough to see inside easily. A redheaded girl around my age is playing with her phone in one room, so there’s at least one sign that I’m not walking back into Yurfaln’s pit of nightmares. I’ll take it.

That said, I’d rather not bring my cane to introduce myself to a house full of strangers. I consider leaving it under the porch or around the garage corner, but, well… it’ll be worse if I need it and don’t have it. Hopefully they have bigger things to worry about. I banish my card, shake off a bit of lingering dizziness, then round the corner and ring the doorbell.

It takes a while for anyone to answer. Two or three voices call out to each other, but I can’t tell what they’re saying. I bang my cane on the front door for emphasis. After maybe a minute, it creaks open, and a woman in a big knitted sweater peers down at me. She takes a moment to recognize what she’s looking at, and then she just waits, dumbfounded.

“There’s a Harbinger somewhere in your house. I’m here to kill it,” I say.

The woman opens and closes her mouth several times, barely blinking, then frowns and crosses her arms. “Really? Where’s your, your badge?” she asks. “There’s, sometimes kids will dress up in those clothes to sneak in and rob your house! I’ve heard about that!”

And it’s seriously your first thought here? That’s ridiculous. To be fair, if a kid were going to dress up as a Keeper to steal someone’s stuff they might dress a lot like me, but maliciously impersonating a Keeper is instantly-ruin-your-life illegal. Maybe it’s happened a couple times in history, people do some stupid things, but there is absolutely not an epidemic of burglars in frilly outfits. Could she be covering for the Harbinger? Maybe she’s touched in some way I can’t see?

Well, I don’t have the patience to be reassuring. “Here,” I say, and flare enough that she flinches and hides her eyes. Darkness streams through the front hall behind her, smothering its overhead lights, and another voice squeals in surprise from inside. “Do you need any more proof?”

“I, no. C-come in.” She’s visibly paled when she opens the door and steps aside.

“Get your family and take them outside. Stay by the road. I’ll tell you when I’m done.”

She freezes, then nods and calls into the house: “Kids? Garvan? Come here, please come here!”

The girl in the front living room is already staring at me, quietly terrified, and she doesn’t need much prompting to yelp again, kick her shoes on, and skitter out the door. I guess I did that to myself with this entrance.

A younger girl, with hair the same shade of red as her sister’s tied into a tiny side ponytail, bounds down the stairs seconds later. She stops short of the bottom, leans nearly her whole body over the railing, and stares right at me, grinning. “Whoa! Hi, Miss Keeper! Are you here to magic Brendan so he stops being so weird?”

“Don’t pester her, Ada,” the woman sputters, trying and failing to sound stern. “She just needs to check on something. Get your coat and wait outside with Rosa.”

“Why would I need a coat? It’s super warm out, you’re all crazy!” She does a headfirst tumble over the railing that looks incredibly dangerous, but somehow touches down on her feet, then charges past me and out the door barefoot. Okay, that was odd, but so far none of them look like they’re sharing a house with a monster.

Next a tall, thin man in thick glasses peeks out from the end of the hallway. The woman whispers something to him. All I hear is the loudly hissed “Harbinger” as his eyes widen. “Oh. Yes. I, I see. Thank you for checking up on us. Brendan? Brendan, come on down!”

Brendan takes quite a bit longer to appear at the top of the staircase. What the little girl said about him just sounded like siblings annoying each other, so I wasn’t expecting him to be weird in any real way, and he doesn’t surprise me. His dark hair is a little mussy and he looks startled to see me, but there’s no Harbinger-stench on him. I wave, then step out of view.

“This little lady is a Keeper! How about that? She’s stopping by to see how we’re doing, that’s all. Let’s get out of her way while she makes sure everything’s good, okay?” the man says. He does a better job sounding normal, I guess. Maybe I’ve been on the seventh floor too long, but even the way he spoke was a bit strained.

“Kay,” Brendan eventually says, and the three leave together, closing the door behind them.

And now it’s just us. Where, and how, are you hiding? Next to all the other Harbingers I’ve met, this one is shockingly quiet. After Vianzia, that leaves me wondering: what’s its game? Where’s the trap? I reach out with my soul, which still feels only the faintest hints of something eerie, and start searching the house.

At a glance, there are no signs of anything suspicious. Everything is fairly well-kept. Even the basement is clean and brightly lit, with no haunted corners for monsters to hide in. The worst thing I can say is that it doesn’t look very… personalized? Looking around doesn’t say much about the people who live here.

The furniture and decorations are all sort of generically pleasant. No signs that anyone really likes a particular color or animal, no supplies for a hobby someone’s into, no nooks covered in family photos like some houses have. But plenty of people don’t hang pictures everywhere, even people without any complicated family circumstances. I’m not sure if any of this means anything. They could just be a bit boring.

That’s less true upstairs. Unfortunately. One of the girls’ rooms looks less like a place where someone lives and more like a tiny shop that deals exclusively in Stardust Seraph merchandise.

One side is nearly wallpapered with posters depicting a nauseatingly handsome blonde pretty boy flaunting a cocky grin. The teeth peeking through his lips are so bright they sting my eyes. Her backpack is dotted with little pins, and while a couple show some kind of bright red glyphic logo, most are just more pictures of his grinning face.

Figures in and out of costume stand posed on the desk. Between those is a collage of news-clipping photos and weirdly personal headlines about Roland Ysembard’s life and preferences, and under those, a combination-locked journal. Not important. I don’t want to know what sort of bleak and terrible confessions are in there and I don’t think the squirmy feeling in my stomach has anything to do with Harbingers.

Moving on. Compared to the stalker’s shrine, even compared to the non-fangirl’s rather normal room, the one room that looks like a young boy’s is a bit emptier. Not bare or lifeless, he just doesn’t have as much stuff as the others. I don’t really know what boys’ rooms are supposed to look like, so maybe that’s normal? Still, what his sister said before… I shouldn’t ignore anything someone says when a Harbinger’s involved, even if they don’t know they have a problem. There should be something ‘weird’ enough to attract a monster about or around at least one of these people.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, at least, but I’m assuming one of them is feeding it the way Yurfaln fed on Mr. Enfield. Maybe I’m wrong and a Harbinger from somewhere else randomly chose to nest in this house, or some other thing I haven’t thought of is happening. The rules aren’t at all clear.

Only one other unhelpful thing catches my attention: in an upstairs bathroom, there’s shampoo the Seraph apparently endorses. Of course there is. That smug little idol boy’s golden hair is longer and shinier and better-kept than mine and it’s not particularly close. At least he’s not on the bottle. I don’t know what I’d do if he was on the bottle.

And yes, when I pull my hood down to check, there’s a third twisting white streak in my hair.

~~~

Before too long I’ve searched the entire house, then searched it again just in case. Even the attic, where I needed to go find a stool to reach the pull-down stairs. The miasma is a tiny bit weaker up there and down in the basement. Otherwise it feels the same everywhere, with no clear source and no signs that it’s gone somewhere else. It never stops feeling uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to pinpoint, but as far as I can tell there’s nothing else here. What does that mean? Is it hiding its Wound somehow? 

Or hiding somewhere else? I look out at the family. None of them felt corrupted at a glance, but I could be mistaken, or it could’ve slipped out with them. I study their souls again, closely as I can without drawing from them. In between cartwheels over the grass, the little girl shivers as if in a cold breeze at my unseen touch, but that’s just me. There’s still nothing inside any of them. 

So what is actually happening here?

I open the door and wave the adults in. After a brief delay and a few words to the kids, they join me at the round kitchen table.

“Is it over?” the man asks.

“Not yet. Something happening in your home is… we’ll just say summoning a Harbinger. It’s complicated.” I don’t understand it myself and I don’t know if anyone does, but better if they don’t hear that from the girl in charge of handling the problem. 

“Wait, wait, so what are we doing back inside?” he whisper-hisses, like he wants to raise his voice but he’s afraid to wake someone up.

“I have some questions. It’s hiding from me, and knowing exactly where it came from will help me track it down or flush it out, so please tell me what’s going on.” 

“What do you mean going on? We don’t know anything about this. About magic,” the woman says.

“The magic problems start with someone here feeling something that drew a Harbinger to them. That’s what I need to know about. They feed on pain, so whatever it is won’t be good to talk about. I’m sorry.”

“…Oh.” Her hands, folded in front of her on the table, start to tighten until her fingers are losing their color.

After a silent beat, the man steps back in for her. “Listen, miss… what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. Call me Eyna.”

“Okay. Eyna. I’m Garvan Wade, and this is my— this is Matilda. Anyway, is there a monster roaming around here or not? If there is, I really don’t see how sitting around telling our life stories is going to catch it.”

“I just told you how.” 

“Oh. Right. And you’re really sure that’s necessary?” he asks.

“If I had a better idea, I wouldn’t be asking. I don’t want to dig up your issues any more than you do,” I say. 

“Alright. Alright,” he sighs. “So what’s, I don’t know, what sorts of problems should we be thinking about?” Then we’re not going to dance around this forever. Good.

“You seem surprised about all this, so I guess none of you have been through anything obviously bizarre or unnatural. Is that right?” I ask.

“Nothing comes to mind,” Garvan says, and glances over to Matilda.

“What?” She does a little startled jump in her seat, like she wasn’t expecting to be back in the conversation. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. The girls haven’t mentioned anything like that.”

“Then the next place to look is any serious personal issues that’ve come up recently. Anyone who’s suddenly acting strangely? Any moods or experiences you can’t explain?”

The two share an uncomfortable silent glance. “Well, you’ve… Tilly, do you want to…?” Garvan asks.

“It’s alright. I can tell her,” Matilda says softly, and returns her gaze to her folded hands. “For a while now, maybe the last two weeks, maybe a little longer, I haven’t been sleeping well at all. No, sorry, that really doesn’t cover it. I’ve had these nightmares — dreams I don’t remember, only that there are these… these people-things, with no features, like outlines, or shadows. Just… following. Watching me. Everywhere.” She’s trembling, now, and the nails of one hand dig into the knuckles of the other. “It never feels like rest when I wake up. And then… now I think I’m seeing them while I’m up, too. Just early in the morning and late at night, but… I don’t know.”

I inspect her soul again, closer this time. She’s not sick or infested with anything, but there is something worn about her. It’s like the way people I drain feel, but less so, and without any clear traces of magic pointing to something like that.

“Did you not tell anyone about this?” I ask.

“It wasn’t too long after Garvan and Brendan moved in,” she says. “It was all a lot to take in. I figured it was just, just stress, and there’s… well, some family history with this sort of thing. Am I wrong? Have I done something wrong?” She looks back up at me, pleading with her eyes, which I can now tell are just a little bit heavy, a little bit sunken.

Moved in…? Oh. I think I see. It’s a stepfamily.

But she’s right — that doesn’t sound like it should be enough to attract a Harbinger. 

“I don’t think it’s you, unless there’s something much more than you’re saying,” I say, putting just a little extra emphasis on the idea. 

“W-what do you mean? I’m not, there’s nothing I’m hiding! I’m trying to help!” Tears begin to well up in her eyes. “I just don’t want anyone to get hurt!” She covers her mouth in a bid to hold herself back from weeping. Garvan glares at me. 

Was that part too much? I don’t know, I’ve never done this before. People are hard and clearly none of us are at our best right now.

“Oh. Ah, that didn’t sound right, did it? I just meant to ask if that was all,” I say. “Strange dreams, seeing things, but no intrusive thoughts? No feelings you don’t recognize?” 

“No. No, that’s really all,” she says, only slightly calming down.

“Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry I have to go here, but is anyone else having a harder time with this? How are the kids handling it?”

“Um,” she hiccups, and shakes her head.

Garvan freezes, clenching his teeth.

“If something is wrong, I really need to know before it gets worse,” I tell him.

“Right,” he sighs. “Tilly, do you want to go check on the kids?”

Matilda meets his eyes uncertainly for a moment, then nods and goes back outside without another word. I tilt my head, waiting for Garvan to say whatever he wanted to say in private. It takes him a while to gather himself.

“It’s nothing to do with Matilda. I just didn’t want to drag her back through all this,” he finally says. “My son… my older son died last year. Just an accident, that’s what they kept saying. Nobody’s fault.” He tenses up, scratching along his stubble and turning his gaze away from mine. Where his eyes look now, he seems to be staring off at something far, far away. “Brendan hasn’t taken it well. It still hasn’t really set in for him. I don’t think he wants it to. I don’t blame him.” He lays his palms flat on the table, spreading out his large, callused fingers. His downcast eyes observe them as they tremor ever so slightly.

“I’m sorry.” That’s all I can think to say. Spending my life surrounded by death has only ever made me worse with loss.

Garvan shakes his head. “I’m saying all this because if any of us is hurting, really hurting the way you’re worried about, it’s him. He still says every time I bring it up that Nial is just fine. He sees him all the time. Talks to him.”

My eyes widen as I lean in closer. “Why didn’t you say so sooner? That’s exactly the way I’m worried about, yes.”

“Sorry,” he mutters numbly. “It’s been going on for a lot longer than we’ve been here or Tilly’s sleeping problems. The counselor said he was just having a hard time with grief, and we shouldn’t be too tough on him if it wasn’t hurting anyone, so I didn’t think… you don’t think…”

I do. I just don’t know what it means or how it works yet.

“I need to talk to your son. It’ll be safest if I do it alone.”

Garvan seems to steady himself, and speaks with a little more force: “Miss, if my boy’s in trouble, I can’t just leave him and wait. What can I do to help?” 

“He’ll need you when this is over. Until then, you can stay where it won’t get you too,” I say. He seems like a good dad. That won’t protect him from a Harbinger.

He blanches at that, then nods slightly. “…Okay.” 

~~~

Brendan comes back in alone a minute later, and takes another minute to look me over cautiously from the hallway. He looks somewhere between the girls in age, he keeps his hands in the sleeves of his slightly-oversized windbreaker, and someone has made a token effort to smooth out his messy hair since I last saw him.

“Hi,” he says. He’s missing a few teeth. He waves once, letting one sleeve fall. “Is the house okay?”

I return the wave. “It looks fine to me, yes.”

“It’s not fine. It’s too big,” he says.

“Maybe, but it looks safe. No monsters I could find.” Mostly true. “I just wanted to see how you’re all doing before I go. Could we talk a little?”

Brendan takes a seat not quite across from me, watching me closely all the while. “Talk about what?”

I study his soul as he studies me. He’s still not playing host to anything, he’s not even weathered like his stepmom, but… the ambient unease in the air is a little stronger than it was when I was alone in the house. That didn’t happen with the adults. I can’t find the Harbinger just yet, but I’m on the right track. It is connected to him.

“Well, your dad was telling me about you and Nial, and I—”

“Are you from the Church? Are you here ‘cause I’m crazy?” he snaps.

“No, I don’t think that. It’s just—”

“I’m not crazy,” he says.

Ugh. Am I already doing this wrong too? I can’t just talk through a Harbinger, so what do I say to someone like this? “I’d like to meet him. If he’s still around after everything that happened, that’s really interesting for us magical types. Good-interesting, not spooky-interesting,” I try.

“Well, he is. Not right this second, but he’s around.”

“Wow. Has he told you how that happened?”

Brendan shrugs. “Why shouldn’t it? Magic stuff happens all the time. This time it happened for us. It was a… a miracle? Yeah,” he says after a bit of grasping for the word.

I’ve been through enough occult books to know that’s really not how it works. Harbingers are real. Keepers and Messengers are real. Given those, Claiasya is probably real. None of that makes tarot real, though. People dream up plenty of nonsense mystical ideas. Some point to Keeper magic to back their stories up, or they spin a legend about how their practice was etched into the world by some magical kid or another, the way dreamwards were.

The only thing even remotely like that I can think of that doesn’t descend from Keepers or Harbingers is the island ascetics, but for all the legends and bizarre claims about them, the only remarkable thing about them is that Harbingers usually leave them alone for some reason. Even then, I have no idea if that’s an actual special power born from the harsh lives they lead or it’s just the fact that they live in cloisters of a few dozen people surrounded by the sea.

As for actual hauntings, it seems like those were only ever dreams. I‘ve never heard of anyone finding a real ghost, and I’ve looked a lot. If someone out there knows what happens to dead souls, they aren’t telling. Even the Cycles just say that the dead “bloom in their fullness and return to the sea,” whatever that means.

Anyway, this won’t be the case that discovers ghosts. There’s definitely a Harbinger here with us, and it’s getting stronger the more he talks about his brother. I’m sure it’s not inside him, now — good. That would make this complicated.

“Brendan,” I say, very slowly, “I need you to do your best to stay calm through what comes next, okay?”

“I am calm! I just don’t know why everyone thinks we have some kinda problem.”

“It’s a problem because that isn’t your brother. It’s a Harbinger wearing his face, and I need you to help me find it before it hurts you and your family very badly.”

“Huh? No. You’re wrong.” Brendan clenches his fists tight enough that I hear his nails dragging along his skin. “Aren’t Keepers supposed to help people? No one here needs your help, so go away and leave us alone if you’re gonna be like that. We’re fine,” he growls. Corruption rises in the air, prickling at my skin.

“Can I meet him? If I’m wrong, if he’s really just this nice little ghost, I’ll leave you two be. I’ll even tell your dad he has nothing to worry about. You three can all go have fun together to celebrate.”

“No! You’re lying! You just wanna kill him again ‘cause you’re scared of him! I won’t let you! I won’t!” he screams.

And there you are. The air over the table twists around itself like water spinning in a sink drain, and at the center of the distortion, a dancing wisp of black light emerges. It reeks of nightmares, and I know in an instant that it’s the source of this place’s foul aura, but… is that all it is? Is this a trick? No, there are no signs at all of anything beyond this. I think this is just a Harbinger’s exposed heart, one that hasn’t yet made itself a body and burrowed into a Wound.

No, maybe it’s more like an egg waiting to hatch, using this house full of pain as an incubator.

Brendan points somewhere to my right. “See? See, he’s fine! Tell her, Nial!” he chokes out between bursts of high, nervous laughter.

My breath catches in my throat. The person he’s pointing to is not Nial. It’s a woman in a long blue-grey shirt dress, taller than either of us but still rather small and slight. Feathery black hair falls loosely down to her waist. Stone-grey eyes look down on me with an old statue’s absolute lack of an expression.

And she’s my mother.

Of course, I only recognize her from old family photo albums. My grandparents used to say all the time how much I reminded them of her. They stopped when they learned I was dying, not because anything about the resemblance changed. Seeing Ciara Shiel like this, as a full breathing person rather than a square in a book, it really is uncanny. Her features don’t have the same narrow, mean cast as mine, but otherwise, she could easily be a version of me who liked wearing colors and wasn’t destined for early death or eternal childhood.

But… beyond that first brief shock, all the sight stirs in me is a vague, hollow wistfulness. It’s sad, yes. Having a mom seems like it would’ve been nice, and I wonder how things might have been different if she were here, if her death hadn’t destroyed Dad. But how can I mourn someone I never met? I can barely even bring myself to resent the personal attack. The Harbinger is acting on some reflex, doing the one thing it knows how to do, and it didn’t work.

So I kill it.

Simple as that. I reach out to touch its darklight heart and expel a tiny wisp of death, just enough to engulf it without putting Brendan in danger. It’s over as quickly as snuffing a candle flame. I was bracing myself for some kind of ghoulish display, a last desperate attempt to scare me off, but the illusion vanishes without so much as a flicker or a whispered plea. In the same soul-breath, I draw the Harbinger’s remains into myself. When its last traces are gone…

I feel a little better. That’s all. Not quite better enough to cancel out my forest misadventure. Smothering this monster in its crib was slightly harder and slightly more helpful than taking my morning medicine.

In other words, this nightmare of a day was completely useless. I sweep my arm across the table, sending a few placemats fluttering to the ground, and stand, pushing off against the surface with one hand and my cane with the other.

“Wait, Nial? Nial, where’d you go? Nial! Why? What’d you do to him?” Brendan shrieks. His eyes are wide with some emotion I can’t name, and he grabs the hem of my dress as I stand to leave. I prod my cane gently into his chest and he collapses back into his chair, sobbing.

Garvan and Matilda are already at the front door looking when I open it. Drawn by the noise, I guess. They stare at me, silently questioning.

“It’s over. Go take care of your son, Mr. Wade. He’s not cursed, just… not doing well.”

And without another word between us, I leave. There’s nothing left for me here but the fearful looks of the family I saved by throwing their quiet life into chaos.

Esonei’s cluster of faces melts into the ground, and its ghostly voice grows louder. I reach out and draw my infection out from the quivering heap of its body, the way I ripped it out of Yurfaln, but it’s already too far gone. It’s dying just as quickly, screaming and weeping as shreds of its essence slough away with my magic. Soon it’s completely disintegrated, leaving only its echoes. Over and over its voice demands something from me, but I don’t understand what. The burning carnage in the clearing ahead leaves me faint and sick to my stomach and I can’t stop crying and I can’t tell where my feelings end and the new invasive thing inside me begins.

Vianzia knew this would happen. She had to know. These are her rivals, her insane balance of power I’ve stormed in and upset. I was a shield she used to get one enemy’s attention while she threw herself at the other. 

What did she want to avoid so badly? What are you doing, Esonei? Through the madness pouring from its spectral mouths, I try to sort through my thoughts. Everything about the battle ahead makes me sick in a squeamish way I don’t think it did before, even if it’s hard to remember or imagine what that was like. 

Trying to join the fray is worse. I turn to Vianzia’s forest, gather myself, and resolve to… no, I can’t even think it clearly before a new wailing face fills my vision and pain and disgust overwhelm me. It’s no different with Ourien — if anything that hurts more, and I throw the idea away like I’d accidentally picked up something too hot to touch. My own mind has become a screaming maze of barbed-wire barricades. 

Do I run? Accept that this was for nothing? Hope I eventually end up back in the world, hope I find something I can do about the tattered ghost lodged in my soul? 

No, not yet. Not letting her win just yet.

Wisps of my own magic still flow through me, cold and corrosive. Half-formed remnants of the horrible gnawing thing I’d tried to do when I had the stomach to hurt anything. Before… Esonei put itself in the way. It threw itself at me and kept me away from Ourien. 

Maybe that need to be hurt is just its nature, the single instinct it lives by, but that doesn’t feel right.  It lives, at least in part, inside the other Harbinger. From what it’s doing to me, it wants to… prevent the kind of mad violence Harbingers devote themselves to? No, that’d be too easy, too clean, and its infestation isn’t stopping Ourien from destroying whatever it wants. Punish is probably a better world. It shares its pain with anything that hurts it, nevermind whether that makes them act any differently.

Thinking of it that way, it was probably protecting its main host, making sure nothing else cuts its torment short.

With no real way to send Esonei a message, I think my next idea very loudly to myself. You have your own plans for Ourien? Fine. I’ll leave it completely alone. There’s a Harbinger killing it right now. I’ll help you stop her if you just…

Knives of dread and revulsion lance through my soul in answer. 

Okay. The hard way it is, then.

I reach for that unshaped magic and stir up more of it, gathering it like I would to… to use it normally. My mind skates around the things I’ve done with it. Rather than repeat any of those things, I dam the flow as it rises. I let it build and build inside and I keep it there, clinging to a torrent of dreadful power. 

Normally, I’m protected from my own magic — I can’t be more infected — but this time, I’m actively trying to turn parts of it on myself. My body won’t take this well, of course. I know what’s coming before I feel it. Soon, too-familiar pain pulses through one side of my head like something is drumming on it. 

I lean into my cane, clenching it with both hands as my limbs start to shake… but other than what I’m doing to myself, nothing happens. No intrusive ideas or sudden blaring shrieks fill my world. A little more pain heaped on my life’s pile, that’s all. Esonei spends its existence tearing itself apart. It can’t object if I do the same. All that’s left is to wait and see if it can still live inside me like this. 

Until then, what can I actually do? 

It’s hard to keep standing through my own inner decay, but leaning heavily on a hollow tree as I gasp in deep, heaving breaths through clenched teeth, I do. Back where the jungle meets the ash field, Vianzia’s plants have invaded Ourien’s space. Urchin-bushes scuttle forward and gather in tight circles around its trunk-legs. They reach up with vines from the center of their leaves and slither into the tangled roots of its body, then burrow back into the ground. 

Ourien burns and smashes them away as quickly as it can — some are already reduced to crushed or charred piles of leaves. Its inner light has intensified to a point where it looks like it’s burning alive from the inside out. As it moves, it sheds bits of its bark that immediately catch fire on the ground. Esonei has nothing to punish me for, but it sobs and babbles meaninglessly at the sight all the same, tangling its pain up with my nausea. Twisted little faces still swim through my vision.

Vianzia herself watches Ourien throw itself against her forces from a safe distance. In a dark grove swarming with her children, she laughs and dances while insects fill the air with a million different chirps and buzzes, like the noises bugs make on summer nights but louder and harsher and clashing in painfully grating ways rather than merging into the background hum of nature. It all leaves me with the unshakable sense that I’m about to be dissected for fun. 

As the urchin-bushes continue their advance, she raises one saber and points it straight at Ourien. At her signal, a parade of smaller insects dances out from the forest and advance into the ash-field, each carrying a single little black seed in its mandibles. Most are crushed beneath Ourien’s sweeping root-tendrils or burned to nothing, but a few crawl onto its back. Those survivors drop the seeds into the crevices between roots, where they swiftly grow and unfurl into fanged flytrap mouths. Vianzia giggles and cheers at the sight, then begins to stir her sword through the air like a conductor’s baton. As one, the carnivorous blossoms start to sing a cold, gentle lullaby, perfectly performed but utterly without feeling.

Until Ourien roars over the melody and burns and crushes them all to nothing, frantically and without the slightest regard for how much it hurts itself.

Her malice is much more careful and deliberate than it feels, I see now — she’s not doing anything to harm Ourien directly, only provoking it and giving it ways to hurt itself. Avoiding Esonei’s attention even while it’s busy worming into me. She’s been plotting this long enough to study her enemies, see that they have some bizarre relationship, and breed little monsters just for them. Ourien might be bigger, but she’s the most dangerous of them by far. Her plan is going perfectly and I have no idea what to do about it. 

There… may be nothing I can do. I’m already struggling to poison myself just enough and keep track of which thoughts are mine. Everything hurts. Every thought still reminds me of maimed grasshoppers starving to death. The pounding in my nerves makes flushing Esonei out feel like trying to crush a bug in my hair by smashing my skull. I can’t just push through it all and win anyway, even if I had the stomach to hurt her. If there’s any way to turn this around, it starts with Esonei. If you’ll let me help you, let me think my own way, we might— 

With no sound and no sudden rumbling of the earth, the ground collapses in chunks at the far end of the clearing. A round bus-sized sinkhole opens beneath it… No, that’s not right. A sinkhole would make an earthy burrow with walls of soil, but where the ashen ground collapses, there’s nothing. It looks like it would look if the planet was just a thin shell wrapped around a bottomless void.

Until hair-thin white roots that shine like snow on a bright day start to climb out of the blackness, crawling up as if over the surface of a wall that doesn’t exist. A new presence spills into the world with them, smelling of something unnameable.

Four Harbingers. I’m surrounded by four Harbingers. That worm Vianzia killed was a tiny part of something else, and that something must have sensed all the blood in the air. 

Esonei’s constant mutters take on an especially nervous tinge. Ourien lets out a ground-shaking growl. Its inner fire rises until it looks less like a reptile burning with inner light and more like a firestorm with legs, and at the same time, the lighted hollows in the gnarled lantern-trees start to burn from the inside, spitting dozens of little bonfires out through their holes. 

I push myself away from my suddenly-blazing tree and try to prop myself up with my cane, but that’s too much for my traitor limbs to manage. Instead I fall flat on my stomach, where the layer of ash that blunts the impact also gets in my eyes and sets me coughing painfully when I breathe. The sudden heat is sickeningly heavy all on its own. It takes a flood of stolen essence to pick myself up and a constant flow to stay conscious after that.

And as the fire rises and begins to engulf the woods in a burning canopy, things crawl up from the blackness seething in that hole to nothing. Split-headed worms like the last one. Creatures that are just flat circles of ropey tentacles around spiny central mouths, like nightmare starfish. Shapeless oozing things that look like they shouldn’t have any way to move, but there they go crawling along anyway, coating themselves in ash as they roll. No two of them are quite the same, and while their colors and textures make me think of glowing mold, many come in shades I’ve never seen or imagined before, colors I don’t think I have words for. 

Two groups march off in different directions, each carrying a bulbous off-white orb that quivers as it moves. Eggs made of flesh. Rather than join the battle themselves, the rest of them just spread out through the clearing and search for bits and scraps of the warring Harbingers. A tide of them invades with no regard for their own lives, no mind paid to anything but their single goal. Globs of Esonei scream in protest as worm-things scoop them up and carry them toward the sinkhole. Ourien is especially quick to burn those ones, glob and all, but before long, the things are pouring out through the hole faster than it can kill them. 

It feels like my heart has shriveled up in my chest and my veins have tightened all across my body and I want to just lay down and cry. This is too much. This is all way too much. Maybe I could fight one of them, given time to figure them out, but I can’t do this. I really, really shouldn’t have come here.

Vianzia makes a toneless buzzing hmmm noise as the newest disaster unfolds, then skips away from her border with Ourien. Straight toward me, stopping just where her side of the forest ends. She tilts her head, looks me over, then shrugs and chirrups something cheerful-sounding. The spiny bone-bushes continue to hold their line, but most of the swarm swivels to join her. The dark trees fill with tiny little eyes that hum and cheer amongst themselves. They’re all staring down at me.

She draws closer, humming and whirling and flourishing her blades as she walks, and her flower-things quickly move to follow her into the burning forest. I try to swallow, but it catches in my throat. I still can’t fight her like this. She’ll slaughter me as easily as torturing a grasshopper to death.

Unless.

By now, my power has eaten into Esonei’s splinters. Its noises have faded into whispered croaks and a dull nausea that barely registers in my current state. Red almost-faces sense my intent and gather in the corners of my eyes, but they’re just faint airy wisps now. Just a frightened audience, not completely gone but not strong enough to stop me. So I reach for the toxic magic I’ve infused myself with, tighten my grip on it, and let even more of it flow freely into me. I pour everything I have in this moment into the act, drawing from the storm in my soul of pain and terror and above all my raw, simple wish to live. Emotions basic enough for anything with a mind to understand.

It’s not just that there’s more of it, I realize now — the magic I’ve gathered and turned on my own broken body has been concentrating, seething through me, festering into something vastly more horrible than I could’ve made by simply calling up every bit of noxious strength I could hold and releasing it all at once. Some of it is Yurfaln’s stolen essence, too, rewarding me for my self-injury by pushing my power to nightmarish new heights.

I let the magic seethe and grow until I’m certain the slightest bit more would burst loose on its own will, popping me like a balloon with it. Only then do I stop the flow, breathe in heavily, and scream the air back out with all the strength I have left: 

“STAY AWAY FROM ME OR WE ALL DIE!”

Vianzia’s reaction is unreadable through her mask, but she freezes, and her swarm pauses with her in unnatural unison. The clamor of insects’ voices dies out in an instant.

“I’m leaving! You can do whatever you want to…” A harsh cough rips through my throat, but if that weakens the threat, Vianzia doesn’t show it. “…to each other, but I’m finished! If any of you try to eat me, if you get in my way at all, I’ll make sure I take every one of you with me!” In emphasis, I loosen my grip on the power coursing through me, stopping just shy of setting it free, and push out with my will as hard as I can. 

When we met, Shona said the way I flared was especially loud and painful. I’m counting on that. Maybe they don’t understand my words, but I can still communicate the way poisonous animals do with their colors. This is just a sliver of what you’re in for if you push me, I want to tell them.

I let my warning hang in the air for what feels like a very long time. Stillness falls over the forest. The only movement comes from the scavengers, which continue their work without a second’s pause. Not my problem. Power burns inside me, but even in this raging heat it burns the way sudden bitter cold burns, like touching freezing metal to my skin. All I can do is hold it and suffer and wait.

Finally, first to break the silence, Vianzia… laughs. 

It isn’t the scornful, mocking laughter from before, the sounds she’s made while taunting Ourien or enjoying others’ misery. It sounds like she’s cackling uncontrollably at a joke that caught her by surprise. She stabs her swords into the ground, dances like a child so overcome with delight that she can’t contain it, and laughs and laughs and laughs.

Once she’s gotten it all out, she yells something into the clearing. Ourien roars back in raw animal rage, and Esonei wails along with it as if to add something to a statement. Its voice comes from outside, wherever its being is centered. The Esonei inside me just rasps out weak dying gurgles that almost make me think of it as a wounded little animal again. Almost. 

Burning roots snake along the ground, moving to surround the urchin insects. Vianzia speaks again in a softer tone — deliberately shushed, like she’s trying not to wake someone up. It’s somehow no harder to hear, not that it makes any more sense.

The roots stop in place. After another still pause, Ourien grunts, turns, and charges howling toward the sinkhole. The bone shrubs back out of its territory. Vianzia raises an arm and twirl-points into her jungle. There, flowering plants and even a few trees uproot themselves and relocate, creating a straight line of clear space away from the battleground.

We haven’t exactly arranged an orderly truce. While Ourien seems to have devoted itself to crushing scavengers, the trees don’t stop burning, and Esonei’s corroded presence doesn’t leave me. I’m not sure if it could, but it’ll be gone soon. This is the best I’ll get.

Without turning my back to Vianzia, I inch past her and onto her path. Insects scuttle away from me, gathering into crowded lines like they’re watching a parade from either side. The Harbinger herself does nothing but chuckle and wave goodbye. 

So I turn, constantly looking back over my shoulder, and start to limp out of the forest. If my hunch is right, any direction away from the Harbingers’ territories should lead back to reality. I’ll worry about the exact way out once they’re gone.

But there is one last problem, gnawing at me from the inside. Magic wants to be used. It doesn’t want to be an idle threat, no matter how effective that threat was. Maybe I could swallow all this pain back down if I really tried, but it could easily object. Take its frustration out on me.

So once the Harbingers’ presences are far enough behind me, and the trees ahead start to look like the same forest I first stepped into, I turn and release every last shred of my pooled corruption into Vianzia’s twilight jungle. A silent hurricane of plague-wind rips through the trees. The gale tears leaves and branches and insects alike along with it, carrying them for just a moment — just the fraction of a second it takes for the magic to infect them and wither them to nothing, at which point they disintegrate into shimmering emerald wisps of fog and join the storm. Death winds through the forest, eating its way toward the realm’s creator. My way of thanking her for her hospitality. On some level I think it’s better if all of the monsters walk away from this mess licking their wounds, too weak to eat their rivals and grow into something even worse. Mostly, though, I just want to hurt her back.

I can only hope, though. I’m not waiting around to see how she responds. Free from the deathly weight of my own magic, I tap my stolen strength, push a much smaller breath of decay forward to clear the underbrush, and run away as fast as I can. Nothing seems to follow.

~~~

Sure enough, barely a minute after Vianzia leaves my soul’s sight-range, the treeline breaks, and I’m back in the wilting flower field. I even left in the right direction, assuming that directions had any meaning in those Woundlike spheres of horror. I try to stop moving, but it must’ve been too sudden — my upper body jolts forward, and only my cane narrowly keeps me from tumbling onto my face again. When I sit down a second later, it’s only a half-step removed from collapsing. I’m sweating and coughing and feeling disgusting enough that I wonder if I’m still somehow poisoned…… no, all gone. Esonei too. I guess this escape was the farthest and longest and fastest I’ve ever moved all at once. Moved on my own, anyway. Remembering Shona’s method still makes me dizzy. 

I wipe the ashes off my face with one sleeve, dismiss my magic, and sit beneath a shady tree until the soreness in my legs fades. Which takes a while. It’s late afternoon by now. My phone says this insane outing took a little under an hour, and I spend another half hour doing nothing but breathing with my eyes closed before I feel ready to do anything else. Goodbye, flowers. Goodbye, Vianzia. I hope we never see each other again.

That Harbinger… when I met her, when we managed to talk to each other on some level, there was a very short while where I wondered if we might have some sort of understanding. I knew the idea was too dangerous to consider, reminded myself constantly that I couldn’t trust her with anything. 

But if I’d really been paying attention, I could’ve noticed what she was doing. Her opening moves were designed to look like she was throwing herself into battle ahead of me, but only put her insects in any serious danger. She just waited in her woods to see who came out on the bottom. Did I actually hold her at a distance or only say I would, blinded by the hope that something might work out with someone else for once? Maybe I’m grasping for someone else who knows what it’s like, living with power that forces you to hurt people to survive. 

But the only other examples I have are gleefully murderous soul-eating nightmares. As with so many other things, I don’t like what that says about my future.

“Vyuji?” I don’t spot anyone among the flowers at a glance, but I also don’t care who sees me talking to myself right now.

“Liadain. I’m glad to see you intact,” her voice says after a short delay. She appears seated next to me, curled up with her arms around her legs. “How did it go?”

“Urgh. I’ll tell you later if you really need to know. I just had a question about something else. You… does it ever happen that something about a Keeper is… wrong or dangerous or harmful to people?”

“Well, have you ever heard any stories like that? On the Sea, or the news?”

“No, but they wouldn’t… oh.” It took a lot of searching to find anything about the man Mary Hyland may or may not have killed. A suspicious lot of searching, given how interested people are in Keepers and anything unusual going on with them. “Point taken. I think.”

Vyuji gives me a sidelong smile, then quickly looks back out at the dying flowers.

“I am your Messenger, Liadain. Yours. My duty is to you and children like you, and in that role I guide and advise and do not judge. Such things are uncommon, but not so uncommon that the idea surprises me. To my mind, we each do what we must, and so long as a Keeper’s magic doesn’t endanger the world itself, any troubling aspects of it are exactly as much a problem as that Keeper feels they are. Does that answer your question?”

By now, I’m sure she somehow knows what I’m talking about. So whatever I am, it’s not so bad that the people in charge would declare me a monster. That doesn’t help the way it feels, but maybe it’s the best I can get without going to the Church and asking them to put me in touch with their secret awful vampire Keepers.

“Not in quite the way I was thinking. It’s something, though. Thank you.” 

“I’m glad I could help. If that was all, rest well.” I nod, wave her off, and she’s gone. Time to make my way home and hope this hasn’t taken too huge a toll on me.

~~~

That was my plan, anyway. But not far from the hospital, I catch the scent of something new, a sense so faint it’s barely there at all. If I weren’t still so on edge, I doubt I’d have noticed it. It’s too distant or too small to have any clear feeling to it, but the crawling unease it carries is unmistakable. There’s a Harbinger somewhere very close by. A lone one this time.

I take stock of my lingering aches. I’m tired, I don’t want to do anything more, but at least for now my condition seems stable.

Fine. Let’s see what you’re doing over there. Maybe today won’t be a complete waste.

A dirt path winds through the field west of the hospital, where the spring flowers are well into withering and dying. The sickly-sweet smell of wilt is much milder than the way my senses interpret ill people, but right now, it feels like it’s everywhere. 

Maybe it’s not the best omen for this adventure, but omens aren’t real. They’re flowers that happen to cover the quickest path to and from the forest, that’s all. They can’t hurt me.

…For all the good that does. I don’t need omens to know the unclaimed lands are teeming with things that can very much hurt me. 

But that’s my life now, isn’t it? Weighing a world of nightmares against something that will kill me if I stop throwing myself at them.

It’s the kind of bright, breezy day most people would call nice, which means that the sun, that asshole, is glaring down at me as I walk and there are other people here. For obvious reasons, no trail leads directly through the field and into the forest, so I’m stuck making my way past them. Off to one side, a couple is taking pictures of dead plants, even picking a few and tucking them between the pages of a book. Bizarre, but whatever makes them happy, and it keeps them too busy to watch where I’m going. 

At the far end of the field, I trample through the thinnest row of greenery I can find, using my cane as a hiking pole. Beneath the first trees, a layer of underbrush crowds the ground as far in as I can see. Of course this wouldn’t be like the well-kept urban woodlands dotting New Claris, but I didn’t know what would be different or how quickly it’d get in my way. It’s tall, but looks thin enough to push through with only some trouble… until the forest starts grasping for me as I pass, with plants that look like bare thorny branches clinging to my sleeves and pricking at my arms like hands rising from the earth to drag me under.

I can’t tolerate it for long. After a glance back to confirm that nobody is watching, I call my magic into being. Sourceless emerald light dances through a sudden darkness, which seems to fall and lift in the very same instant. It occurs to me that the comfortable jeans I was wearing might’ve been more suited for stomping through the brush than my Keeper outfit, but that’s fine. I’m done stomping. 

Stirring up the cold bitterness in my soul, I create a thin curl of killing mist and let it sink to the ground. Where it touches, shrubs and twiggy growths start to wither as if from age. As they bend and shrivel, flashes of green light leak out from inside the plants’ remains and quickly fade. Like they’d only ever been shells housing wisps of corruption that are now eating their way free. 

Soon, I’ve created a trail, a grey scar lined with decaying plant-remnants. A shudder wracks my body, but I swallow my disgust and push the mist forward with my mind, slowly stretching my path further into the forest. If I need to run away, my scar should lead the way out. Every so often, I look back to make sure it’s still there. 

I have no idea what comes next. The unprotected lands beyond our cities form a gaping hole in my knowledge, exactly like the one that was only recently filled by my first encounters with Harbingers. Both are dangerous mysteries normal people put out of mind and hope they’ll never have to worry about. This one is easier to avoid — maybe airship travel between cities is a little scary, but mostly you just don’t do the exact stupid thing I’m doing right now — so there’s even less said about it. 

Should I watch for the trees to gnarl into strange shapes? For the canopy to thicken until it blocks out the sun and I’m stumbling through a lightless cave of greenery? For the world to abruptly end, replaced with some horror show I can’t yet imagine? Or if Harbingers are just roaming openly through the woods, maybe nothing will change at all before they strike? Vyuji implied they might not bother with Wounds out here, where they had nothing to hide.

Something rustles in the bushes. I startle and ready a card, training my magical senses on the disturbance, where… a hedgehog peeks through the leaves at me. It grunts out a sound like a loud, angry sniffle as it meets my eyes, then scurries away. Whatever’s waiting further in, it’s left room for that little guy. 

Do Harbingers care about animals? I’m not sure. I think I remember a PSA saying to “pick up your children and pets” when you need to flee quickly, but that seems to me like something you would do anyway.

Several more minutes pass, and the forest remains just a forest. And then, something shifts in the atmosphere. In the sounds of the woods, I think at first, but that isn’t right. It’s a sudden quiet, yes, but only in my magical senses. If I hadn’t noticed it was missing, I might never have recognized it at all. There’s normally a faint undertone beneath anything I sense, like hearing your own blood flow when you cover your ears. And now it’s gone. 

Was it gone in the Wounds? I think it was, but I really don’t know. The moment I found myself in Yurfaln’s and Irakkia’s worlds, I was entirely focused on fighting for my life. If any of this spiritual background noise was there, I wasn’t listening for it.

Just as I realize this, the light changes. It’s still bright out, but the colors are all wrong. Without any dimming or lengthening of shadows, everything takes on the tint of early dawn light. When I look up, about a third of the sky has torn. The sun ripples wildly as if in heat haze until the distortion spreads over it. Day is a layer of wallpaper ripped away to expose a bright yellow-orange sky, complete with a loose flap of blue dangling off the hole like scraped skin. The tear in the sky looks closer than it could possibly be, more like a low cloud cover than the distant stars of true night.

A low, rumbling sound rips through the trees. The distant call of some great beast, but one whose voice is a wildfire, formed from roaring flames and hot gale winds and trees tumbling to the ground as they burn.

In answer, a peal of hysterical laughter rises over the roar. The voice is silvery, low but distinctly feminine, and trailed by echoes that buzz like the beating of tiny wings. It almost sounds like a person… or at least its cadence has the trappings of what a person might sound like.

I freeze, then glance, very slowly, over my shoulder. The scar that marked my straight path into the forest is gone, leaving only a grey circle right where I’m standing, and in both corners of my eyes, the trees behind me are quickly… not becoming something else, but twisting. Their bright new leaves slowly disintegrate, not crumbling into powder but burning away in invisible fires that leave no sign they were ever there, only bare winter branches. Gaping holes sprout over their trunks, so many that it looks like there shouldn’t be any tree left at all beneath them, and each flickers with red-orange inner light like candlelit windows.

What begins as a gradual change, trees warping into this new form one by one, swiftly picks up its pace until the forest has become an expanse of hollowed lantern-trees as far as I can see. The underbrush vanishes, replaced with a layer of ash that blankets the ground like snow. The sky is now fully dyed in a blurry mix of oranges, the colors of sunrise over a desert, but the sun is nowhere in sight, replaced by many dancing points of blazing white fire.

All the while, the distant noises continue. I can’t tell what the humanlike voice is saying, but it answers every explosion and crack of breaking wood with rhythmic bursts of Harbinger-speech. Shouting back at it, like trying to frighten an avalanche away.

I can’t see anything but sourceless light in the hollows, nor sense any active magic from them. There’s only the faintest ambient traces of a Harbinger, which only tells me that they probably won’t kill me. What are they? Is this a Wound? Have I moved or did part of the world itself just bend itself around me and snap its jaws shut? How? My mind swims with questions I have no way to answer. All I know is that somewhere far away, in a direction my senses can only interpret as “further, deeper,” a presence looms. Hateful. Menacing. Claiming its territory.

Which I suppose is why I’m here. This may not be a good plan, but it’s the only one I have. 

My breath catches at a flash of motion in the branches above me. Something small and bright darts between the branches, followed by many, many more somethings. I shudder and gather a plume of death-mist around my feet, but still they skitter down from the trees and burrow up from the ground, surrounding me. Creatures in all shapes and colors, like insects made from flowers and leaves, with the balance of plant and animal a little different between each of them. I’ve never been good with bugs, and their soul-sparks all reek of a Harbinger’s touch, but I have to admit, there’s something eerily beautiful about them. Like orchid mantises, lovely if you don’t think about all the butterflies they’ve gutted.

But these ones aren’t gutting anything. They aren’t even advancing. They gather into a half-circle, countless little eyes staring up at me, and there they stay. I hold my ground, searching with my soul for anything that might be using them as a distraction, but don’t lash out just yet. 

Still keeping a healthy distance, they arrange themselves into a complex sigil, like a piece of expertly embellished calligraphy with each line written by insects of a single color. It’s the same script as those that appear in Wounds, but it still means nothing to me. When Yurfaln or Irakkia were screaming into my head, I could pull some meaning from their souls, the magic carrying their nonsense words. I can’t read this in the same way. There are tiny wisps of power spread through them, like diffuse, sourceless light that sets some of the insects shimmering much brighter than others as it shifts and catches them, but the symbol is too far removed from the Harbinger itself to really contain its intent.

“I don’t understand,” I say, not sure what to expect. These don’t feel like minions of whatever twisted the forest, so who am I talking to? Why is it talking and why should I listen to what can only be a Harbinger?

The swarm is still for several more seconds before it skitters into a new formation. This time, they separate by colors into three circles: one blue and green, one orange and yellow, one red and black. I didn’t think flowers could be the lusterless ink-black shade of that last group’s darkest members. 

Then the yellow group and the red group charge into each other full-force like soldiers going to war, and they aren’t acting. All along the lines where the hordes meet, bugs tear each other apart with barbed vine tails and scything petal-claws. The blue insects also join the battle, but they do so slowly and carefully. They stay back, keeping their borders with the others small, and defend their territory rather than rushing to their deaths. A few from this last group step out and look up at me expectantly.

“Okay, you’re saying there’s two of you here, and the other one is… doing something? Attacking you?” I address the watchful flower-bugs. Stupid. Harbingers won’t understand Clarish or Thalassic any more than I understand their language. Probably less.

They gesture to the frenzied mobs. I watch them slaughter each other from the corner of my eye, keeping the grisly scene out of sight as much as possible. One green flower-thing that buzzes like a cicada as it moves steps forward and draws a diagonal line in the ash, slanted so it crosses between me and the third group and ends as close to the battle as the bug dares to go. It could equally be marking its territory like a child in a sandbox or suggesting a way to go.

Before I left, Vyuji said Harbingers out here were usually warring with each other. I’ve apparently stumbled into one of those wars, so is it offering a truce? Leading the way to an enemy, saying we should leave each other alone and… not exactly team up, but hit it in our own ways at the same time?

“Vyuji…?” I try. I don’t know how to respond to this, but she might. She could at least warn me if I’m better off ignoring anything a Harbinger says and trusting my own blind guesswork.

No response. Of course. 

In that case, all I can do is work from what I know and what I can sort-of-reasonably assume.

This Harbinger is smart and stable enough to identify me as an unpredictable new force in its environment, have the idea to aim me at its rival, and communicate in a way I think I understand. That makes it more dangerous than the other, not less — I have no reason to believe it’s another Yurfaln, reaching out because it thinks I’ll be its partner. Anything it shares with me is at best a move that serves its goals in some way and at worst a lie set to bait a deathtrap. Still, as long as I remember that it’ll stab me in the back if it gets the chance and I’ll do the same to it, it seems better than nothing. Better than storming in and fighting both at once. 

How do I actually agree, though? I can’t project thoughts without words the way Irakkia did. After a moment’s thought, I point to the line in the ash, trace my finger along it toward the warring groups, then raise a hand and release a tiny wisp of fog in the same general direction.

The battle comes to an instant stop. Completely abandoning the fights to the death they were locked in moments ago, they buzz excitedly amongst themselves, then shift into a new formation, no longer separated by color: a full ring of them gathers around a single great mass, and the ones in the center begin to dance, frenzied and aggressive in their movements but mostly without violence. Between steps, some of the dancers display their petals and wings like birds showing off their plumage. Others bow low to them and skitter away from the dance, joining the circle, and within a minute, only two remain. 

The circled insects wave their limbs in little cheers as the apparent winners draw close to one another, press their heads together, then set off in opposite directions and begin to rip the still-cheering spectators apart. Bile rises in my throat, but I can’t bring myself to look away. Not while the Harbinger-aura around the insects is growing much stronger and the world is twisting in a new way. 

All around the shredded corpses, blue-green grass sprouts up through the ashes, swallowing the grey carpet impossibly quickly. A row of plants grows in seconds, forming a fence between me and the insects’ graveyard, and each sprouts a slightly different slender-fanged maw or cluster of sticky dew-tipped tendrils or cavernous bulb-mouth. Beyond that carnivorous wall, greenery stretches further and further out into the deep woods until it’s transformed about half of the forest I can see into another region entirely. 

This new Harbinger-forest looks like a stylized painting of a forest at night, the kind where deep darkness is represented by tinting the light in shades of blue and purple, and it’s absolutely crawling with life. Insects swarm through the trees. Plants sprout from nothing in seconds, then lean down and lay rows of tiny pearlescent eggs from their blossoms. The grass itself is expanding — its blades constantly bend down, dig into the earth, and sprout again a few inches away, so the ground’s texture is more like a woven basket than a wild meadow — and show no signs of ever stopping. 

Slowly, grass threads itself over the sharp line where the ashen hollow-tree woods instantly transition into the insects’ forest, creeping into its territory. Early dawn and unearthly night clash as the grass grows, carrying the violet darklight of its realm of origin with it. The sky is divided the same way, a jagged border split between burning sunrise and twilight spotted with countless tiny green stars that dance through the sky like fireflies, constantly crashing into each other, growing larger and brighter and more vibrant, then bursting into clusters of new stars.

Only when this new world has taken full shape does its creator emerge. Announcing the Harbinger’s coming, a heavy floral smell floods the air like incense, complete with thick, choking smoke. Hands reach through the grass and push upward, like a corpse rising from its grave, and at first, that’s exactly what the emerging figure looks like. 

A ghoul, withered and clammy, humanlike but unnaturally tall and slender in its proportions, with a long fall of perfectly kept blue-black hair draped over its — her? — face. Plates of chitin shimmer into being around her body and create a form-fitting exoskeleton styled like ceremonial armor, beetle-black but reflective in a way that sends shifting plumes of iridescent oil-slick colors dancing along it as the light changes. Blades of blue grass stretch and knit themselves into clothlike coverings around her limbs, the organic weave climbing up her shoulders before spilling down the rest of her body. A pair of moth wings unfurl from her lower back, shining in a prismatic array of blue and green gem-tones, then stretch down and wrap around her legs, forming the hindwings into a long skirt and the forewings into coattails held just above the ground. Soon her corpse-skin is entirely covered by this garb, and again, I can’t deny that it’s beautiful in its own unsettling way.

A mask of the same black material covers her face when she rises to meet my gaze, leaving only holes for two bright green compound eyes, like the eyes of a dragonfly set into human sockets. Finally, two long, thin black sabers appear in each of her hands, both slightly curved, spiny as the leg of a mantis on one side, and decorated at the hilt with a trail of dusk-colored tassels. She bows with a twirling flourish, and her motion is impossibly fluid in a way that reminds me of Vyuji, but what she’s doing couldn’t be more different: where my Messenger is mechanically efficient and precise, this Harbinger moves like everything she does is a step in an elaborate dance she’s planned out in full long ago, all carefully calculated to express some great secret meaning I can’t fathom. Only a tiny shard of her message reaches me, carried in a trilling voice between steps of her performance: 

<There Can Still Be Something Beautiful>
<Vianzia>

The distant crackling voice roars as if in protest, which Vianzia ignores. She beckons me over to her side of the forest. After another look at the fanged flytraps between us, which have parted only slightly in the middle, I raise my free hand and mime pushing a person away. Vianzia tilts her head and giggles softly, but doesn’t press the issue. She gestures again in the direction that apparently leads to the other Harbinger, then sets off. I follow, keeping a close watch on her side of the forest with both my eyes and my soul.

But behind us, one more thing pricks at my mind, something that’s not her and not the other monster. It isn’t very strong or harsh, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled. Wet skin? Yeast dough? Musty air? None of those are right — they’re all just ideas it vaguely calls to mind. The real scent isn’t a combination of anything I know, it’s something else entirely. I look back, searching for its source. 

Still partially submerged in the ground is a green worm the size of an eel, but splitting at one end into a tangled cluster of wire-thin branches, like a simple diagram of neurons in a kids’ medical book. Its strands rummage through a pile of insect bits and torn petals, gathering parts up into a toothless mouth.

“What is that?” I ask, and point it out. 

The moment Vianzia spots the thing, she spits out a string of words that sounds like a poem composed entirely of curses, heavy with utter disgust, then plunges one blade straight into the ground. From the dense foliage of Vianzia’s side of the forest, four black vines with thin barbed ends slither out like serpents, quickly encircling the worm. Then they rear up, lash out, spear into it in unison, and start to spin in opposing directions, twisting and shredding until all that’s left of it is a scattering of still-twitching remains, like it was put through a blender. Which still isn’t enough for her. A new small group of plant-bugs rushes down from among Vianzia’s trees to carry the thing’s scraps away, leaving no trace of it. 

All of this takes maybe three seconds. 

Vianzia hums to herself, sounding satisfied. She says something to me in a murmuring melody of incomprehensible trills, then returns to strolling through the forest like nothing ever interrupted us. I stare in mute shock for a moment longer before I follow her. Three of them. There are at least three of them. This forest is a warzone and I’m marching into the middle of it. 

The path we take follows the unnatural border between Vianzia’s forest and the other one’s ashen realm. She chatters musically to herself all the way, and never looks back to see what I’m doing. Probably because the parade of insects trailing behind us are keeping watch for her. 

It’s hard to say how far we travel like that. Does distance mean anything when the local monsters are constantly rearranging reality? I haven’t had any idea where I am or which way the city is since my trail vanished, and all I have to mark our progress is the feeling of growing closer to the burning voice. Everything has been narrowed down to either “toward” or “away” from the two Harbingers. If I need to escape, the best I can do is focus on them and run in the opposite direction. Like lighthouse navigation, if lighthouses ate people.

Eventually, Vianzia hisses something and raises an arm in a stop signal. I take cover behind a gnarled tree and reach out with my magic, gathering all the information I can. The wildfire presence is just ahead, but it’s not alone. It’s all tangled up with something else. The third aura is hard enough to sense clearly that I can’t tell if it’s the same as that scavenging worm. It’s somehow scattered, with no heart or central point to inspect. All I can gather from it is a vague sense of inner weight that reminds me, inexplicably, of realizing that I could’ve drained Mide to death. Past this point, I need to see to know what I’m dealing with. Slowly, squeezing the twisted tree with both hands, I peek out from my hiding spot.

Beyond the treeline is a field reduced completely to cinders and dust, and there, beneath a burning desert-dawn sky, is a house-sized nightmare of blackened wood and twisted roots. Its shape recalls a giant reptile, like a dinosaur or a dragon out of a storybook, armored in craggy bark plates. Light leaks through the crags at shifting points all over its body. It has nothing like a head or face, only a flattish stretch of wood at its front end. There, a single rotten-looking hollow glows with firelight brighter and harsher than those in its twisted trees. 

Branches rise from its back like quills, and thick roots stretch out from it in all directions. Those roots are growing and burning at the same time, flaming at the tips while they slither outward, and its constant cries send hot wind blasting through the air and ash storms swirling up from the ground.

<Stillness Is Sanctuary>
<Ourien>

Ourien doesn’t appear to take any notice of me. Its focus is entirely elsewhere, and it only takes a moment to see why: all through the clearing, things are stirring beneath the ash. Formless red-and-black ooze bubbles up from the ground like oil, wailing and gurgling. Every patch is trying to shape itself into something as it emerges, but they never make it far, because Ourien’s roots stab into them and set them on fire almost as quickly as they appear.

And there are things crawling through the holes in its body. Thin red wisps with tiny faces upon which three black splotches form the uneven shapes of two eyes and a mouth. They aren’t extensions of Ourien. They definitely aren’t Vianzia. The third one is… infesting it. My stomach lurches.

Three groups. Vianzia told me exactly what was happening. I hadn’t known what to make of those two swarms of insects locked in a mad battle to the death, only that it was something to do with Harbinger territories and battlegrounds. Is that her plan? Use my arrival to break a deadlock and pick them both off? No, it’d be dangerous to let myself believe her goals are aligned or even compatible with mine.

Thinking over our next steps, I glance back at her slice of the forest. The point where Vianzia’s teeming jungle meets the clearing is lined with insect-plants unlike the others, sharing none of their eerie beauty. Clusters of huge bone-colored thorns that jut out in all directions from no visible central stem, they resemble sea urchins with wide, thick spines more than anything else. Each is maybe a foot shorter than me. As the burning roots draw closer, some lift themselves up and reposition to meet them, moving on six tiny legs that emerge from just beneath the center of their spines.

Vianzia spins to meet my gaze with perfect timing, like she knew without seeing exactly when I looked at her. I break eye contact and return to the clearing, where Ourien slaughters an endless tide of ooze-creatures. Teamwork ended horribly for me when I could talk to my allies and none of them wanted to eat me. This is worse in so many ways I don’t know where to start. We can’t plan, can’t communicate in any real way, so what’s the first step? Whoever takes it exposes herself for an immediate backstab. Her trap can’t be something as simple as “go get them, I’ll cover you,” since there’s no way I’d jump right in and she certainly won’t either, so what can I do?

The Harbinger breaks my concentration with a few trilled words, then answers my unspoken question. Her spiky bush-things rise and scuttle a few feet into the clearing, advancing in near-perfect unison, then replant themselves. Blue grass that suddenly looks very sharp, gleaming at its edges like tiny knives, weaves itself forward in their wake.

Vianzia throws her arms wide and starts to spin, taking what could’ve been the simple motion of making herself dizzy for fun and performing it with grace enough to turn the act into a spontaneous bladed ballet. As she twirls, perfumed smoke overpowers my senses, crowding out the other auras. She’s flaring, I realize, just like I do. Vianzia doesn’t go to battle with a monster’s hunting call, with hunger or bloodlust. The emotions her power carries, the heart of her… 

When I was much younger, before I was too constantly sick to go to school, I once stumbled onto two boys killing a grasshopper. Rather, one slowly killed it while the other goaded him on in that horrible way boys do, bragging about his collection of pet bugs whose legs he ripped off to keep them from escaping. I ran straight off that playground at the sight, ran until I couldn’t anymore. I didn’t want to be around a dying thing, but more than that, those boys terrified me. If they’d do something like that just because they could, what was stopping them from tearing my limbs off and carrying me around in a box? It took a week to convince me that other children weren’t going to murder me for fun.

Vianzia projects the easy malice of a child torturing an insect just to see what will happen, not knowing or caring what she’s doing to another living thing. Being so close to her makes me feel like that grasshopper. Or maybe, in this context, like the boy being pushed to kill it.

But her display does draw Ourien’s attention. It howls, pushing back against the vicious pressure of her soul with its own scorching rage. Roots twist to grow in her direction, and it stomps toward her forest in long, slow strides that shake the earth with each step. The air itself starts to burn — tongues of flame burst into being from nothing, alternately falling and fading or drifting on the wind like leaves. I wipe my face on one sleeve, knowing the clinging sweat will be back seconds later.

Vianzia ends her dance to buzzing cheers from an audience of insects. She comes to a stop facing me, chirps something, and skips away to meet Ourien’s advance. Her creations are quick to follow in a chittering storm of wings and blossoms. As one, the spiky bush-things explode, bursting into a thicket of brambles — like razor wire, but made of vines and thorny bone spurs, and clearly still alive, actively twining together and digging into the ground.

What is she planning? It can’t be that she’s just not concerned about anything I might do to betray her, can it?

Well… whatever her angle is, she’ll be ready for a fight. I really am better off attacking the ones that haven’t been watching me. Ourien is already tied down with two other enemies, so… here we go. Slowly,  I gather my magic in my heart. With a little time to prepare, I can flood the whole clearing with death. Hopefully, all three of them will— 

A voice shrieks right into my ear. A mass of black-and-red falls from no clear source and fills my vision, like a waterfall behind my eyes. Patterns of red in the darkness form outlines faintly like the crude faces crawling through Ourien’s body. Impossible to tell where it is in space, if it even is anywhere. My heart hammers painfully and I taste terror in the back of my throat, bitter and salty. It’s too much, too fast, I don’t trust myself to shape magic the right way, so I do the one thing I can and unleash a raw burst of death-mist.

The thing draws away from my fog in a sudden lurching movement. To my eyes, it looks like it jumps out from inside my head, but it wasn’t quite quick enough. Tiny seeds of my power lodge inside it, waiting to grow into disease and death.

Seen from a distance, it’s a living ooze like the ones leaking up through the clearing. Much larger, but still flowing and shapeless, at first. Its red parts slide along its surface, gather into clumps, and mold themselves into round wax masks, all depicting anguished faces made of three distorted holes just like the ones crawling through Ourien. It lets out a thousand shrill, tiny cries, screams of soul-deep agony that combine into a dissonant melody. In a chorus sung by the screams of rabbits as they die of fright, it speaks:

<Please Stop You’re Hurting Me>
<Esonei> 

Then, without tensing or rearing back or showing any sign of preparing to move, it throws itself at me. I step to the side and dash to take cover behind a tree, but it falls short — it wouldn’t have reached me anyway. It just dives into the fog like it’s trying to smother a fire with its body, and there it stays. Almost like that’s what it was aiming to do.

What it said before, was that its name? If it was, the idea behind it doesn’t fit. It’s not like any of the others, those twisted declarations about the way things are. Is there any way it’s actually talking? How would it, why did I… why am I crying? 

Esonei squirms and squeals in obvious pain. Its masks start to melt.

This feels more like killing an ugly little animal just because it disgusted me than battling a horror. It’s pathetic. So pitiful it’s painful. Wordless impressions crawl through my thoughts of the poor thing. Shredding. Burning. Sins heavy enough to crush a soul. So many lives and all of them end with Its splintered jaws snapping shut around cindered remains. It knows not what It does It must know It must be made to feel to UNDERSTAND 

I grab my head, clenching locks of my hair between my fingers, and scream. Just to focus on something concrete while I block out all the thoughts that aren’t mine.

…Where did that stop being me? Nightmares jamming themselves into my thoughts is becoming a familiar feeling, a thing I can recognize from experience. I hate it, hate all of this, hate what I’m doing to myself, mutilated in Its image to show It the horror in what It has done— stop it. Stop it. Get OUT. 

I pull back my right sleeve, grab a card, and draw its sharp edge sideways over my arm. Bloodletting for my soul, the simplest, easiest way my power seems to work. Through the biting pain I do my best to gather this corruption and force it out of myself, but it’s not so concrete a thing as my sickness or Yurfaln’s remains. It isn’t a disease, it’s only an infection in some abstract way, and worst of all it isn’t a single thing — it’s already as scattered as its source, tangled and wound through me in ways I can’t make sense of. Even as I try to purge it, spectral red faces flit in and out of the corners of my eyes. Their circular mouths are locked open in silent screams.

Vianzia laughs as if at some cruel private joke.