New Claris is quietest on moonless nights, beneath the stars’ pale light, but a city is never completely empty and still. It’s never lifeless. I mean, unless it’s abandoned out in a wasteland with no plants or animals for miles or something. Which this one isn’t yet. 

Anyway. 

Stepping onto the university campus south of the hospital is a sudden sharp change from the city’s glass-and-greenery spires. The college is much older, one of those historic parts of the city that wasn’t redesigned after the war, and made up mostly of great limestone buildings designed to look somewhere between old churches and small castles. Taken with the grounds between them, all gardens and groves rather than manicured grass, they look like a loose grouping of stately homes spread around a thinly-forested woodland. Being here feels like crossing into another, older world, and the distant lights barely illuminating it lend it all a sense of unreality almost like the one that comes with using magic.

It’s easy enough to find what I’m looking for. I make my way to one of the tall buildings dotted with still-lit windows and filled with points of human life, which I can sense as faint scents of fresh rain. There, I circle around, past the front door and its porchlight that briefly lights up as I pass, and sit against the wall beneath a dark window. I take a card from my orbit, float it up a little, and narrow my focus until… 

My sight spins and spins in vertical loops that make me feel the way I imagine roller coasters feel. It’s awful. When it stops, I’m looking down at myself, seeing the world from the card’s perspective. 

Irakkia left me with one small prize, the power to see through my magic. Sort of. Only one card at a time, everything becomes a bit blurry at a distance, the image is flat the way seeing through one eye is, and it completely replaces my actual sight until I return to myself. Not my other senses, though. Last infusion day, I tried to escape the pain by fleeing into a card and staying there. No such luck. At least I can still control myself, it’s just pretty hard without using my eyes. And makes me a bit nauseous. Maybe this would be more useful if I hadn’t scavenged it from torn scraps, but there’s nothing for it now.

Anyway, my goal here doesn’t call for anything complicated. Starting with the window above me, I bring the card close enough to look around inside. Empty. I move to the next window up and repeat the process, skipping ones where the lights are still on, until I find a room where someone is lying in their bed. It’s too dark to see clearly, but their essence feels clean. Healthy.

So I reach out, touch their soul, and inhale, drawing a sip, a small, careful sip, from their strength. They toss under the covers as deep green mist spirals out from them and down into me. Watching from outside myself is a little strange, but warm rain and petrichor do fill my unoccupied senses, slowly fading as I draw the mote of life into a well deep inside myself. The tingling headache I woke up with remains — I don’t want to start using my stolen vigor as a simple painkiller if I can help it, so I’ve been practicing using my powers with precision. Doing my best to control it directly, let it work only when I will it to. 

Once the first wisp is stored away, I move on, searching until I find the next sleeping student, and the next, and the next, taking the same measured taste of wellness from each of them. There aren’t as many in bed at this hour as I’d have thought, but there are enough. I still don’t know if normal people see their health leaving them. On other nights I’ve watched people as I drained them, and they never act like they do, but still, best if they’re sleeping. Best for us all if they can dismiss this as a simple seasonal bug, maybe a bad dream if my touch reaches that far inside.

As for the uneasy churning in my stomach, it can keep its useless opinion to itself. There’s no point in stopping to wring my hands and apologize to people who will never hear me. I didn’t make my magic work like this, but as long as it does, this is the best way. It’ll be worse if I only take when I’m dying, when I have to drink from the closest person not knowing how much I need or how much they can afford to lose or what immediate danger I’m putting them in. I easily could’ve killed Mide and I won’t let it come that close again. I won’t.

Twelve drained sleepers later, I think I’ve had enough. I’m not sure yet if there’s a limit to how much essence I can hold, but I don’t want to hit any one place too hard, and after the last few nights it feels like I’ve got plenty for now. 

Other than these outings, things have been quiet. There are no new signs of monsters creeping around here. Only me.

~~~

“Every sign we can measure is still holding steady. Or slightly improved, on some days. At this point, I’ll just say that’s atypical in your situation. I won’t pretend I have any idea what’s possible,” Dr. Hines says. 

Those would be the days when I’m flush with stolen life. I’m still trying not to use it unless I need it to function, especially around the times when they take my vitals, but it’s hard. To control magic reliably, I need some way of understanding and imagining what I’m doing, and this feels like telling my own traitorous blood how and when to flow. I’m not some island hermit from one of those weird ascetic cults. My body is not so well-behaved.

“Unfortunately, that may mean there’s only so much we can do for you. I don’t want to press too hard, but have you talked to anyone else yet?” he asks.

“I don’t know how much my silence is worth, but no.” I don’t think it’d be hard for any seventh floor regulars to put the pieces together if they got the idea. At least the nurses and Noirin must have noticed my strange new schedule, and while I didn’t change in any new ways after Irakkia, my mysterious condition is advancing for all the world to see. There are two new white streaks in my hair now.

“About that, have you found any of those Keeper specialists?” I deflect.

“It may take some time. The problem with world experts is, well, the world. There is one native Clarish name in the field, but even she has a lot going on in a lot of places. That said,” Dr. Hines pauses and straightens up, steadying himself. “I expect the Church would be much quicker to respond to a Keeper personally asking for help.”

“No.” The word comes out sharper and louder than I meant it to, enough that he grimaces at the sound. It’s a different expression from the knitted brow he’d used to answer my harsher tones before I became a Keeper. He collects himself in an instant, but I shrink back, lowering my gaze to my lap. “I, sorry, just…” It can’t be easy telling a Keeper things she doesn’t want to hear. I really shouldn’t make it harder.

“Liadain, I know how you feel, I know you don’t want the attention, but please hear me out,” he says.

I nod once.

“Alright. If your, ah, new situation gives you any chance of getting better, I want you to have the best odds you can, and I’ll freely admit that we are out of our depth here. The Church has people better equipped to help you than us, and you shouldn’t reject them out of hand over a problem that may not even exist. There are plenty of Keepers who don’t want to be public figures. If you make it clear that you value your privacy, I’m certain they could make some kind of arrangements.”

Could they? Could they really? He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know what they’d be dealing with. What they’d be covering for, if they didn’t just insist that I stop using that side of my power.

“I’m not saying we need to rush you to Guiding Light right now, but please think about it. Research it, find out what it involves. I’ll help you if you want. If there’s something about it you find unacceptable, then that’s that. Either way, I think it’s worth your time to find out.”

“…Fine.”

“Thank you. All I ask is that you give it a look.” Dr. Hines sighs, sounding faintly relieved. “Oh, right. One other thing for you.” He pushes across the room on his swivel chair, rifles through the cabinet below the sink for a moment, and returns holding out a plain paper shopping bag.

“Hm? What’s this?” Inside are three little bottles of hair care products I don’t recognize, a brush that looks more like a paintbrush than a hairbrush, and a box of… 

“Hair bleaching kit?” I ask.

“I, well. I asked my daughter what you’d need to dye black hair white. She said you can’t exactly do that, but you can bleach it blonde and then tone it to get a shade more like… you know what, I didn’t really understand all the details. Someone on the Sea can probably explain it better if you want to know.” He grins and runs a hand back through his own short-clipped brown hair.. “I just thought… if you want to tell people you’re just playing around with dying your hair, maybe it’d make things easier if you have this on hand? Or maybe you’d just want to speed the change along, if you think it’ll be easier that way.”

While I look over the labels, Dr. Hines frowns with sudden puzzlement. “Wait. Does that work for… kids like you, actually?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I’m pretty sure if you try to interfere with anything Emergence-related, it just changes itself back.”

“Oh. Huh,” he huffs. “Well, that’s okay. It looks nice like that anyway. You don’t have to do anything with any of this, just keep it. In case it helps at all.”

“I… okay, I’ll do that. Thanks,” I say simply. My voice trembles a little on the last word, some feeling I can’t quite place creeping into it. I’m not sure how long it’s been since anyone thought of anything like this for me, however small.

“It’s the very least I could do. And I’ll let you know the moment I hear from anyone who might be able to help more. If that’s all, then… have a nice rest of your day, Liadain,” the doctor says, smiling faintly.

“Mhm. I’ll try.”

~~~

As soon as we’re finished, I lock myself in my room, turn on my laptop drive, and get to work. If you can’t slip out of something you don’t want to do, best to cross it off your list as soon as possible. I still doubt I’ll like what I find, but at least looking at how the Church does things isn’t too big a request. They won’t have some magic cure for all my problems, unless lots of what Vyuji’s told me was seriously mistaken, but they might have something. Worst case, they might know better ways to find Harbingers.

Searching for “Church Keepers” immediately turns up a bunch of current news surrounding specific Keepers, all their recent life events and public appearances. In short, things I don’t care about. Next comes stuff about the role Keepers played in the Claiasyan Covenant’s history as an organization, which also doesn’t help. There are also a few big discussion reefs about Keepers or magic in general, but they’re are all too broad for me right now. 

And beneath those is a flood of theological writings I couldn’t possibly make sense of in any reasonable timeframe. It’s not exactly that I don’t care what whichever high priests down in Alelsia have to say about the fancy details of religion. Some of the links here seem to be to theories about interesting questions, things like why Keepers have to be children and why the Goddess needs their help — our help — to keep the world spinning. Granted, some are also just weird navelgazing about things like “universal familiality,” whatever that means. Skimming the page doesn’t really explain it at all.

Eventually, I give up on those listings and narrow my search to “Clarish Keeper Church support,” which stems the tide a bit. From there, I stumble my way to the New Claris Keepers’ Chancel, the branch of the local Church that deals directly with Keepers’ needs and interests. Their reef looks like an ad for a fancy private school, with a similar mission statement up top:

The Chancel exists to help our children discover the beauty of their own souls and bloom into the best Keepers they can be, carrying Claiasya’s gifts wherever they are most needed. We have served the community of New Claris nearly since the city’s inception, and maintain a proud history of…

That’s nice. I skim past it and start looking for the actual details. Even on this single page, there’s a lot going on, but Frequently Asked Questions and Register Now! seem like good places to start. 

Within half an hour, I think I’ve sorted through the key points: the Church sets its official Keepers up with any mentors or professionals they need, including health specialists and magical healers. Anyone who wants can transfer into the Keeper school system, where teachers work around your schedule and tailor lessons to your precise level. I don’t see specific amounts, but it says they’ll pay you a stipend just for existing as a Keeper “in good standing.”

On the other hand, while it doesn’t look like they’d force me to be a celebrity or drag me onto talk shows, they connect you with other local Keepers through some kind of private platform, and expect you to be available there. “For emergency communications,” it says, but I don’t much like the thought of sharing public spaces with others. I’m not a complete unknown anymore, and what other Keepers know is pretty bad. What happens the first time Mide notices me there? “Hey, there’s that girl who nearly ate me alive!” 

There’s no section where they talk about what to do if some aspect of your magic is dangerous and horrible, either. Not that I’m surprised. Maybe I’m not the only Keeper with something scary going on and the rest just hide theirs well, but either way the Church wouldn’t bring up the idea on their sales pitch reef.

Another page leads to a listing of active local Keepers, with a scrolling gallery of fancy photos displayed above. Pictures of Keepers out and about on their own, among fans, posing with each other. The first and most prominent image, setting the mood for the entire collection, is of a trio of masked Keeper boys striking a dramatic group pose, their legs spread and arms thrust at exaggerated angles.

Taking top billing in the center stands the Church’s golden boy, Stardust Seraph Roland, hooded in a studded white mantle trimmed with his signature crimson color. His getup kind of reminds me of the traditional robes worn by Claiasyan clerics in pre-Covenant times, the kind you only ever see in movies, but the frock is more like a flowing coat, and beneath that there’s a slim layer of metallic plating armoring sections of his figure. The red glow behind the sharp, angular visor of his mask is in stark contrast to anything I’d consider priestly, but it fits the outfit itself perfectly well. Honestly, I would almost say he looked cool, but the ridiculous stance he’s taking is practically too embarrassing to look at.

What even is a seraph, anyway? Whatever. Enough of that.

Following that, there’s a vivid snapshot of Silver King Irida, dressed in old military finery accented such that it practically looks regal. It’s simultaneously a general’s uniform and the regalia of a warrior-monarch whose throne is the battlefield. She’s seated at the forefront of her army — a dozen tall shades dressed in a range of archaic soldiers’ uniforms, each with a different spiraling glyph on the cloth shrouds covering their faces. I spot Shona and Mide in another, a crowded group photo under a blossoming tree, and… 

…and is that Iona Fianata with them? It is. The patron protector of New Claris isn’t even in the center of the shot, not that she stands out any less for it. Willowy and dark-haired, she’s far enough toward the top of the Promise age range that she does look oldest among them, if not nearly her actual ninety-some years, and wears the signs of her Emergence as open badges of honor. Skin tinged a faint milky blue-white that somehow makes her look like a mystical ice princess rather than a frozen corpse. Eyes like cloudy glass spheres bright with frozen inner fire. And it’s snowing, a gentle flurry against a backdrop of spring flowers. Only she’s dressed for it, with the hood of the royal blue Kinsale cloak she most often wears raised.

She makes it easier to believe that maybe, if I live, I won’t be a horrible plague-beast in a few years.

Anyway, crossing off the celebrities who take every chance to tell their stories, how much of these kids’ lives are on display? Going through the list, I don’t find a single sign that Tara Mullane ever existed, which is about what I expected. Outside her insane groupies and me with my Champions deck, no one much wants to remember her… although honestly, it wasn’t always just the deck. 

For a while, Tara was my favorite Keeper — I never followed the scene that closely, but everyone has had at least one favorite Keeper. She snubbed the idol nonsense, did what made her happy, kept the company she wanted to keep and no more. She was the kind of Keeper I wanted to be if I ever got the offer.

That was before all the horrible things came out. If you believe the stories, and past a certain point you’d have to throw out a lot of stories to keep thinking well of her, Tara started turning her magic on anyone who bothered her or caught her in a bad mood. Even on other Keepers. Then, not long after it got really bad, she vanished off the face of the planet. 

I don’t know what happened to her. I’m not sure if anyone does. Maybe something made her snap, maybe magic brought out something ugly in her, maybe she’d just always been that way and had the power to act on it now. Thinking about it, I wonder if there was something more going on — my magic needs me to hurt people, and I can’t be the only one in history. Probably. 

On the other hand, the Silver King of all people will not speak a word of Tara to this day. The perfectly cool and composed star of the Clarish Keeper scene has taken cameras from interviewers who pressed questions about her and smashed them. If whatever happened between them was just a version of what I did to Mide, it may have been so much worse I can’t even imagine what it looked like.

Oh, but Niavh Fianata is still on the list. Her photo shows an older girl in a simple burgundy sweater, with black hair kept in a slightly long pixie cut and wide, wet, rust-red eyes that are visibly crying. Is that an Emergence thing? Why else would they take her picture like that? I don’t know her as well as I do Tara, but from what I understand there was an incident a few years ago. She lost control of her power in some way, and people died. Details beyond that are hard to find, but she’s kept her distance from the public ever since. They’re still scared of her. 

But she’s apparently still a Fianata. The Keeper family hasn’t disowned her or anything, and the Church at least still seems to think of her as a person. Given how scarce information on her incident is, I can only imagine they’re actively keeping it quiet. I suppose Keepers are rare and important enough that they want to leave plenty of room for ones who make mistakes to turn around, which… well, that’s some kind of a good sign for me.

Any other odd ones out? Yes, here’s someone I don’t recognize. Mary Hyland. Keeper title Carves the Night. There’s a picture of her in her distinctly understated regalia, a sleek grey suit and smooth mask of steel-grey metal that covers her entire face.

Searching for her name leads back to her Chancel profile, then further to a few scattered sources where she’s mentioned in passing among up-and-coming new Keepers. They don’t say much about her circumstances, but there is one line about her having “turned over a new leaf,” with no further mention of what that means. Other than those, Mary has no personal reef or fan clubs I can find. I’m about to give up when I scroll past a professional page for a random woman from Horizon also named Mary Hyland. 

Right beneath that, though, her name is highlighted in the preview text for a link titled Violence and death at Ashcreek Home for Children. It leads to somebody’s blog, headlined Dispelling Disinformation: Your Source For Keepers’ Untold Stories and made up entirely of white text on a stark grey background. The page itself points to an article about a story last year where an unnamed child from this Ashcreek Home, a local orphanage, was rushed to a hospital after an apparent violent incident, and then to the obituary of Cass Redmond, an employee who died the same day. It just says that he “passed away unexpectedly.”

There’s currently no conclusive contradictory evidence, the blog’s author admits, but then notes that the first official mention of Mary Hyland as a Keeper is dated only a day later, and that “a trusted source” stated she’d lived nearly her whole life in this orphanage. More to come as it surfaces.

I don’t like snooping on this girl just to find out how easy it was. I also don’t like how easy it was. Whether or not there’s any truth to what this person is not-so-subtly suggesting, there’s clearly some part of the rumor mill that runs wild with anything they can scrounge up about less-than-pristine Keepers.

In the end, I’m not at all sold on this idea, but I’m not ready to completely rule it out either. If there’s any chance they could help me survive… well, I don’t need to commit to anything yet. There are other things I want to figure out. I turn the drive off, pick up my personal tarot deck, and idly shuffle it as I call into my room: “Vyuji, I have some questions.”

“I have answers. So many answers.” The Messenger blinks into being on my windowsill, her favorite perch. Silver moonlight shines out from just behind her, and she somehow resists all other light, so she appears as a girl-shaped shadow with her features just barely visible, like she’s standing with her back to the sun at dawn. The effect only lasts a second before the overhead lights illuminate her properly. 

“Nice show. I guess even you can’t help yourself sometimes.” She normally isn’t much for fanfare.

“Magic wants to express itself. Why shouldn’t I indulge now and again?” she asks. 

“You… expression usually doesn’t seem like your thing.” 

“I’m doing as humans do. Friends always see new sides of each other over time. We’re getting to know each other better, that’s all. Besides, it’s been a week since you last called. Excuse me if I’m happy to see you.”

Is she, now? She does a good job of hiding it. Proving my point, she doesn’t move or express anything, and her face is frozen in a barely-there ghost of a smile. 

I didn’t call her to quibble about whether we’re friends, though. “Right. Now that we’ve had our touching reunion, what can you tell me about… splitting Harbingers after a group of Keepers kills one?”

That gets a reaction from her — a single enthusiastic clap of one folded not-hand into the open flower-petals of the other, making a sharp, wet sound like a dolphin thumping the water with its tail. “Oh my. You’ve been keeping busy, haven’t you?”

“You say that like you don’t already know.”

“Even if I did, I’d prefer to hear about it from you. I do what I can to respect my childrens’ privacy.”

“Fine. Those two girls from the day I made my Promise wanted to team up. I went along with it, it was awful, and at the end of it all, when we tried to divide the thing we killed in half, it was a mess. Lots of it was just gone. Is there some special technique? Did one of us do something wrong? Enne told them you could share a Harbinger just fine, but it didn’t feel that way at all.”

Vyuji’s eyes narrow. “Those do sound like the words he would have used, yes. I’m certain he forgot to mention the complications. He’s never been one for fine details, my brother.”

“The complications,” I say.

“Yes. A Harbinger’s heart is not a simple meal to be disposed of however you please. Until its last remnants are purified, it is a living thing with a will. It can be split, but not cleanly separated into even shares, and the parts are often less than the whole. Sometimes quite a bit less.”

My grip on my cards trembles and slips, scattering the deck all across the floor. A curse comes bubbling up from my throat and I bite my lip, swallowing it quickly enough that only a small harsh squeak makes it out. I’m not even sure what I was going to say, but it wouldn’t have helped. This is only natural. Why shouldn’t it work that way? Why would the world ever pass up a chance to make my life harder?

“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay. I’m not doing that again, but please warn me if there’s anything else I really need to know before it comes up.”

She smiles that curious sourceless smile of hers. “Ask next time you aren’t certain about something. I’d have told you. How has your hunting gone otherwise?”

“There’s another thing I wanted to ask about. It hasn’t. I’ve been looking every night and just not catching anything’s scent. I don’t want to push further out and bump into other Keepers, I’ve been through that, but what about outside the city? Not the farmlands, they’re covered, but the forests?”

“Hm,” Vyuji says, turning to look out the window. “I don’t make a habit of exploring the unclaimed lands, so I can’t tell you just what you’ll find, but things are quite different there, and not in a pleasant way.”

“But there are Harbingers,” I press. They constantly warn kids about wandering in the wilderness, out where Keepers can’t protect them.

“There are Harbingers everywhere, but not the same Harbingers. They are adapted for different conditions. Most often for endless open conflict with one another. I’d expect them to be more dangerous in some ways, but less… complicated in others.”

Right. In cities, the monsters have to deal with Keepers. We’re a united-ish enemy who’ll swarm them if they get too brazen, so unless they’re living disasters too big to care, successful ones hide. They ambush. They find confusing sideways methods of interacting with the world. If they don’t need to do that, of course they’ll work completely different ways.

But honestly, simple sounds good after Irakkia.

“So just to confirm, this isn’t a completely awful idea that’ll get me killed in a blink?”

“It’s not safe. They’re Harbingers. But I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, no. Sometimes other Keepers brave the risk to use the outskirts as a training ground, although they don’t often go alone. Ah, although…” She flattens her expression and turns, staring straight at me. “Do stay clear of the shores closest to Commixture. You’re not ready.”

“Vyuji, I hope you don’t think I’m an actual idiot. Out where they tell kids not to play and back, that’s all I’m planning, and it’s already pushing my luck healthwise.”

“If I did, I’d have said nothing. Some unwise children might take that as a challenge.” She cracks another small smile. “But you won’t. You aren’t concerned with proving yourself. You know what matters to you and you’ll seek it in the most practical, effective way available. That’s one of my favorite things about you.”

“Thank you, I think? I’ll try this out, soon, then. As for asking you about stuff, you’ve said you can’t follow me into Wounds. Does that include whatever’s out there? If I need help, will you answer?”

“I don’t know. The line between our world and the others is not always so clear. Apologies.”

“…Alright. Thanks anyway.”

And with that vote of confidence from my dear friend, I start planning to leave New Claris for the first time.

“I’m heading out! Bye!” Shona shouted through her house. 

“Don’t slam the—” 

Shona was out the door before Mom could speak the last word. As she left, she turned around, pulled the front door all the way open, then smashed it back into its frame with every bit of strength she had, smiling as it made a satisfying crash. One of those small protests she could usually get away with, and her savior already waited just outside. Mide stood by the fence, waving. Mom wouldn’t scream at her where someone else could see and, Goddess forbid, think less of the family. Shona ran down the driveway to join her, never looking back.

“One of those nights?” Mide asked. She’d bundled up heavily, pulled up her coat’s fur-lined hood and wrapped half her face in a white wool scarf. 

“Meh, no more than any other. There’s just some points you gotta make whenever you can, y’know?” Shona said, and nestled into her own scarf. Neither of them were winter people, but it was nice wearing enough layers that no one recognized her on the street.

“…Maybe? I’ll take your word for it,” Mide said, and off they went. It was a sunny but colorless end-of-November day, the kind where the only feature of the season was cold, wet air — the leaves had all fallen and been cleared away, but the first snow hadn’t quite made it there. 

Dreary as it was out, the small crowd around them still lent it some life. Whatever the weather, the sidewalks in New Claris were always busy. Walking is good for you and for the planet, that was the constant refrain. Shona often spent the walk to school picking people out and making up the stories of their lives in her mind. For all they shared, Mide had never gotten the appeal of the game, so she usually did it silently. 

Most importantly, she kept an eye out for… yep, there went Lizard Boy! Her favorite! Lizard Boy was a quiet kid toward the younger end of middle-school age. He wore a uniform in one of the blue-and-green plaid styles shared between most Clarish schools and walked a big white and black-speckled lizard the size of a very short, long dog on a harness. At least two or three times a week, they’d spot and pass by him on this route — the lizard’s pace wasn’t particularly quick, especially today. Could lizards be out in the cold? Apparently this one could.

“Do you think he’s actually going to school like that?” Mide whispered. “How? I have so many questions.”

“What’s there to question? Obviously he just rolled on in with his buddy one day, both their heads held high, and they never let anybody tell them they were doing something weird.” They’d never asked Lizard Boy what was going on with him, and Shona never planned to. Her version was probably cooler than the truth.

The streets grew busier the further they went. Slowly, classmates’ familiar faces joined the crowd, and shortly after they were in the courtyard of Saint Riawal’s School, looking up at the huge central building. It was made up of six long segments stacked on top of each other in rows, all built into a tall hill and arranged like a giant staircase so that past the end of one roof you could see the next floor’s windows.

At one end, a curved ramp sloped down from atop the first floor roof, which you could take up onto the green roofing and its well-kept grass. Shona had been late to class on her first day at this school, when she decided it was more important to see what it was like up there. Totally worth it — it was built so that you could eventually climb the entire building from that ramp, and the view from up top was pretty cool. 

Not in this weather, though. Today, they just made their way inside, stuffed their winter wear into lockers, and got ready for just another day.

~~~

“Good morniiing, Shona!”

“Wha?!” Shona yelped. A few minutes into world history, a bright, high-pitched voice called out to her, sounding like it had been spoken right into her ear.

“Hi! Shona, hi! Here I am!”

She peeked under her desk, then whirled her head around the room to find its source. A few kids glanced over at her, frowning.

“Helloooo? Can you hear me in there? If you hear me, look out the window!”

Floating on the other side of the glass was a small pink animal. It was a big fluffy ball of fur, slightly longer than it was tall, and beneath its big soulful black eyes was a shiny little black nose. One short, fuzzy flipper-paw like a baby seal’s was raised in an attempt at a wave.

Shona realized several things very quickly. First, the animal was floating in the air beside a third-floor window. Second, rather than coming from outside the window, the voice was somehow sounding out from inside her head. Third, no one else was paying it any mind. They were all just looking at her like… well, like she was freaking out in the middle of class. Finally, if the art and the plushies were to be believed, it looked exactly like Enne the Heart of the Sea.

Messengers only showed themselves to Keepers and kids who might be Keepers.

“Shona! Hi, Shona!” the critter repeated. “Is this not a good time? If you like, I can come back a little…”

Before it could finish the sentence, she jumped up from her seat and dashed out of the classroom. Mrs. Dillon stared at her open-mouthed as she fled, and among a few surprised shouts was Mide’s voice: “Hey, are you—?” None of them stopped her. Sorry, Mide. She’d explain later. 

“Oh, nope, there you go! It looks a bit crowded in there, so I’ll be waiting right outside!”

Shona raced through the halls, ignoring the stares of the few kids she passed by. At the stairs, she slid down the handrail rather than waste an extra instant walking, nearly stumbling and crashing to the ground as she landed. Then she kept running to the front hall, barely slowing down for a second, shoved the doors open, and only stopped when she saw the little pink cloud perched on a courtyard bench, still waving excitedly.

“Wow. That was quick! I’m really happy to meet you too! My name’s—”

“You’re… you’re Enne, right?” Still catching her breath, she took a seat next to him. The plushies hadn’t exaggerated his fluffy round shape at all. If anything, he was a little poofier in person.

“Yep! That’s me!” He drew up to his full height, which barely changed anything, and thumped his chest twice with one tiny flipper. “…If you already know me, it takes a bit of the fun surprise out of the next part, though. That’s too bad. I like surprises.” He sounded exactly like a kid who’d peeked at his birthday presents, mourning the lost magic of unwrapping them.

“Um… if it makes you feel better, seeing you at all already gave me quite a shock,” Shona said.

Enne tilted his head to one side, or would have if he’d really had a head. In practice, the gesture was more like a slight twist of the whole front half of his body. “A good shock?”

“Probably? I mean, uh, whatever you’re here for, it’s the most interesting day I’ve had in a long time!”

“Yay! As long as you’re having fun, I am too!” The animal, the actual fucki— umm, bleeding Messenger of Claiasya, clapped his flippers together, then raised one in a little cheer. “Anyway, just to make sure we’re on the same page, I’m here to make the Promise with you and free the magic sleeping in your soul!”

Shona stared right through him, unblinking, stunned silent. Like, of course, that’s what they do, that’s the only thing he could be calling her for, she knew that, but there’s knowing it and actually knowing it for real. Hearing it right from his… not-mouth.

“…If that’s something you wanna do, of course!” he added a second later.

And Shona laughed. She laughed and laughed and laughed until it started to hurt and tears soaked her eyes and she still couldn’t help herself. Through the wet blur, she watched Enne nodding back and forth in time with her laughter, as if to the unsteady beat of some terrible improvised song. He was humming to it, too. So the little guy could make noise.

“Wait, if?” she choked out. “Like, seriously, who gets this offer and goes no thanks, I don’t really feel like it?”

“Not a whole lot of people, but we have to make sure!” Enne looked up at her expectantly.

“Of fucking course that’s something I wanna do! Let’s go!” she yelled into the courtyard. Was anyone watching? Listening? Meh, she didn’t really care.

“Wow! Okay then!” Enne chirped. “There is a biiit more to it, though. Can’t agree before you know all the stuff you’re agreeing to, right?”

Shona wasn’t stupid, and she knew Keepers about as well as you could from the outside. It wasn’t a big fun party of a life. Saving the world was hard and scary and dangerous. It sure wouldn’t be a real-life reprise of Magical Guardian Camellia. 

And thank the Goddess for that. Never again. None of it ever again, that’s what he was offering. There’d be new problems, but they’d be her problems. Her choices. Her life.

“Okay, okay, slowing down,” she breathed. “Tell me whatever I have to know, please… man, I had no idea how ready I was until just now. Mide will—” 

She froze, suddenly feeling like she’d crashed into a wall. What exactly would Mide do? Smile and wave while her best friend ran off to be a hero?

“Hey, is something wrong?” Enne asked with another full-body tilt of his head.

“Enne… you can tell whenever someone could be a Keeper, right?” Well, obviously. How else would he have singled her out in her third floor classroom?

“Yep! Just like you can tell which way is up!” In emphasis, he stretched to look up at the sky, bending back as far as he could until he tumbled over onto his back with a little yap.

“So if there was another maybe-Keeper around here, you’d know it, right?” What was she doing? These were questions she already knew the answer to. She was just dragging it out.

“That’s right!” Enne confirmed, cheery as ever. He rolled over and picked himself up, not bothered at all by the way she was wasting his time. 

“And I’m the only one here? No one else in the school is, uh, pinging your magic detector?”

“Let me see. I know I came here for you, and I don’t thiiink so, but…” He rolled back over, turned to face the school, and sniffed the air. “Nope! It’s just you and, ah… yep, one Keeper’s in there! She’s one of Fouhi’s kids, not mine, so I don’t know her that well. Why d’you ask?”

Shona didn’t answer. She’d already started to cry quietly.

“Oh. I think I get it. Is there someone in your life you don’t wanna leave behind?”

“…Yeah,” she said, clenching her fists in her lap. Her whole body shivered, or maybe she only just realized that it was shivering, suddenly remembering how cold it was. She’d left her winter wear inside in her rush to meet the Messenger.

“I’m sorry, Shona. That’s a tough one. Is there anything I can do to help you sort it out?”

“Um, someone can be a Keeper or they can’t, right? I guess you can’t pick someone else too just ‘cause I asked?”

The Messenger lowered his gaze. “Sorry…”

“I, yeah, I knew that. Had to try, that’s all. Just… please just let me think a little.”

“If it helps you think any better, you could always pet me!” Enne chirped, shaking like a wet dog to puff himself out. He nodded slowly. “Actually, I just think you should pet me either way.”

Well, the little guy knew what he was about. Shona reached out to run a hand through his fur… and it passed through his body as if it were nothing but warm air, the motion scattering him nearly in half like a cloud. 

She drew her arm back with a start, but Enne seemed unharmed. He just let out a little sigh, eyes downcast, as he drifted back together. “…Right. I always forget about that. Thank you anyway! I hope I didn’t spook you too much! Did it help any?”

“Not really?”

“I’m sorry.” Enne curled into himself, as much as his stout little shape could manage.

“Uh, that’s… fine, yeah. You did your best,” Shona said. “But I think I need to chew on this for a bit, kay?”

“Oh. Okay. Then I’ll leave you alone for now, but you can call for me any time you wanna talk some more, alright?”

Shona nodded.

“Bye-bye for now, then. Just remember, you don’t need to hold back or keep stuff to yourself. Anything you need, or you don’t need anything and just want some company, call and I’ll be there!” He waved once more, then vanished in an instant.

~~~

After the next period change, Shona crept inside, retrieved her coat, and made her way up the outdoor ramps and stairs, spending the rest of the school day on the top roof. The grass was cold and damp and gross, but she wanted to be alone and no one else would be up there anytime soon for just that reason.

This would be so much easier if she hated her whole life, but she didn’t. She couldn’t even wish she did, not really. It wouldn’t be fair to the girl who’d kept her sane for 14 years.

Still…  life had never been what Shona wanted it to be. It probably never would. Mide knew that better than anyone else. Here was a chance not just to walk out of it, but to be a hero for doing so. To do something that really mattered and that was hers. It wasn’t even like she’d disappear. Keepers could have normal friends just like anyone else. Where was the problem?

No, she was just trying to sweep it under the rug. Her life would change, she would change, until she might as well be living in another world.

And… was there no real way she could invite Mide into that world? Enne couldn’t just pluck someone out of the crowd, but there had to be something that made Keepers into Keepers, and it wasn’t some special destiny for random chosen ones — the Cycles were clear that there was no such thing as destiny. She and Mide basically lived the same life and did the same stuff. There was just the one exception, which she had to admit was a pretty big difference, but there should still be some way to make this work, right? If there was, Shona would find it. 

If not, then… well, she’d decide when she got there.

Eventually, the last bell rang, and while people filtered out through the courtyard, Shona went back inside. She made her way through the last lingering crowds and to the fifth floor science lab, where the Research Club met. She had questions for its leader.

Inside, nine students, mostly older ones, were busy rearranging the classroom. They pushed four black desks into the center of the room, forming a single large table. A reedy boy almost as tall as Shona was fiddling with the class projector. The screen across from it was covered in text, neat bullet-point lists sorted into four columns under big bold headings:

CLUSTER B HARBINGERS
DREAMWARD MECHANICS
SOUL-BRAIN INTERACTIONS
PRE-THALASSIC PHILOLOGY (low-priority, sorry Isobel)

Wow. That sounded like a lot, but none of it was what she came for. That would be the girl at the teacher’s desk cnidarian drive, rapidly shrinking or removing entries on the lists and adding new ones.

Most Keepers kept unpredictable schedules, and there were special education programs for them, but a few decided not to use those for whatever reason. Truth’s Lantern, Aisling Waite, was technically one of two Keepers who went to Shona’s school, but only she showed up enough to count.

The tradition was that Keepers in public schools wore whatever they wanted, as long as it wasn’t the uniform. “So that everyone knows who to find in a crisis” was the official line, but everyone knew who they were. When she made the Promise, Aisling had just put on a simple blue beret and started wearing cycling pants under her uniform skirt, occasionally skipping the skirt altogether. It didn’t make any sense. If it was some sort of statement, if she really wanted to turn down one of the perks offered to the heroes who kept the world spinning, wouldn’t it be easier to just not change anything?

Aisling looked a bit young for secondary school and impossibly young for a senior, but that’s just how it went with Keepers. She’d made the Promise at 13, if Shona remembered right, and skipped at least one grade before that. A few stray curls of dirty-blonde hair stuck out from under her hat, she wore no makeup, and her sharp eyes glistened with soft, sky-blue light, but the rings under them made it look like she had never even heard of sleep. 

“Um, Aisling? Hi. I’m Shona. Sorry to interrupt, just…”

“Do you need something? We’re about to get started.” Her eyes didn’t move from the drive monitor, except to glance briefly down at a notebook by the keyboard, and her typing didn’t slow at all.

“Yeah, could you spare a minute? There’s something important I wanted to ask about.”

“Ask away,” Aisling said.

“Uh… important and private. Sorry.”

Aisling’s expression tightened. She thumped her notebook against the table and looked to the boy at the projector, who nodded. “Okay. Follow me, the teacher’s office here is empty.” She stood to leave, and the boy took her place after a quick look at the notebook.

“Oh, right. You’re that child actress girl,“ Aisling noted when her eyes finally met Shona’s own.

Shona winced. “Can we, like, not talk about that?” 

“Fair enough. My parents never let me watch your show anyway. What’s your question?” Aisling asked as soon as the office door had finished closing behind them. 

“Well, you do more digging into how all of this works than anyone else I know…” She’d read a bit of Aisling’s writing on her magical experiments, although her approach had always felt deeply wrong to Shona. Magic was the soul’s poetry, a sacred miracle that couldn’t be bottled up and studied in a lab, and shouldn’t a Keeper know that better than anyone else? Best not to argue that point right now, though.

Aisling hopped up and sat on the desk, motioning with one hand for her to go on.

“So, do you have any idea how the Messengers actually pick Keepers? Like, are there any kind of patterns at all?” Shona asked.

“Yeah, I’ve been working on that one for a good long while now. If you find out, please, I sure would love to know!” Aisling snorted out a bitter laugh, then looked at Shona’s face and winced. “Ugh… listen, maybe that sounded callous and I’m sorry, but to the best of our knowledge, there’s no way to game that particular system. You’re only hurting yourself by spending your life worrying about whether they will or won’t come for you. Maybe hurting others in the long run too, if you get bad enough.” Her voice was high and flat, but not quite toneless. It sounded more like she was dictating notes on something she found a little interesting than having a conversation.

“It’s not like that! It’s… they already did come for me. I met Enne this morning and I’m just trying to figure some stuff out before I decide.”

“Ah. That’s, hah, fitting, I guess.” Aisling visibly relaxed, and she started to swing her legs idly. “Good on you for showing restraint, too. Genuinely. Too many of us get the offer and jump into it without a second — or first — thought.”

Shona frowned. “Are you saying they shouldn’t do it?”

“I’m saying it’s good practice to weigh your options and understand your reasons for anything you do. So. What do you want to know?” Aisling asked.

“Right. I…” Shona breathed in and held it. However you sliced it, what she wanted sounded stupid or ungrateful or insane. Just gotta force it out. “Enne said my best friend couldn’t make the Promise and I don’t want to just walk out of her life, so I’m trying to figure out why me and not her. Do you know anything at all about what makes someone Keeper material? Is there any way we can change that for her?”

Aisling stiffened for a fraction of a second, holding one leg in midair, then kept on swinging and shook her head. “I don’t think there is, and I don’t know why they want you or me or anyone else. Stars Beyond, I’m not certain if they know.”

Wait, huh?

“Hold on. That’s what they do! They choose Keepers! How would they do anything without knowing what they’re looking for?”

“Did you ask Enne why he wanted you?”

“…No,” Shona admitted.

“Then this is the easiest way to show you what I mean. You’ve already met a Messenger, so their whole thing won’t be too much of a surprise, right?”

Shona nodded slowly.

“Good. Fouhi, may I borrow you for a bit?”

“Yes this is Fouhi hello and hello and hello how may I enlighten you?” A new voice spoke directly into her thoughts, this one as frantic and breathless as Enne had been bright and cheery. Something shimmered into being on the desk — a long, thin lizard, covered in blue sea-glass scales that stretched and shifted as it moved. It had a head like the sort of cute snake people call puppy-faced, and its eyes were endlessly faceted gems with thin dark slits in the middle. Its gaze swept the room in a full circle, then settled on Aisling. Shona recognized the Abyssal Archivist, of course, but her first time seeing a Messenger actually blink into the world out of nothing was still a bit of a shock.

“This girl is a prospect. Please tell her how you and yours choose new Keepers,” Aisling said.

“Mu,” Fouhi immediately answered. After a beat, they glanced at Shona and added “Hello prospect it is lovely to meet you!”

But… she didn’t understand. What did cows have to do with any of this?

“Wonderful. Now explain what you mean by that in terms a reasonably intelligent human teenager with no background in philosophy can understand,” Aisling deadpanned.

“Certuitously! Human instructors have a phrase they like. They say that there are no bad questions only bad answers. Their intent is sound and many children have excellent questions they may otherwise be afraid to ask but the statement is COMPLETELY WRONG! There are COUNTLESS bad questions! Perhaps just as many as good ones! Poorly formed questions! Questions too specific to be educational or answerable! Insincere questions which are not truly questions but attempts to provoke or mislead rephrased to end with question marks! Questions that…”

On the Messenger went. And on, and on, and on. Aisling cast a sidelong glance at Shona. She was making a face that plainly said “You see what I have to put up with?”

“…Questions which are best left unanswered for the querent’s own sake! Finally and most critically for our purposes are questions which actually cannot produce the answers you seek! A question is a skyward flare, a torch lit to burn away the murk of ignorance… unless, of course, it is THE WRONG QUESTION ENTIRELY!” The lizard’s body lit up with a strange inner glow, which shone through its glass scales and covered the room in a hundred tiny patches of prismatic color. 

Shona felt a little dizzy.

“Fouhi, that thing with the light show doesn’t actually tell anyone anything. Get to the point or I’ll do it for you,” Aisling sighed.

“Ah. Yes yes yes yes yes. You see, there are questions which miss the true nature of a problem in favor of an imagined version of that problem. To answer such a question is A USELESS DIVERSION! Even if it provided some information, it would distract from the real search, the questions that might yet lead to the true answer! Instead, your answer lies in the roots of that false question, the misconception which first led you astray! To understand that your question is not WRONG, but a dead-end misstep on the way to being right or wrong… THAT is true insight! THAT is mmmMU! Do you understand now, prospect?”

Shona definitely didn’t. She stared blankly at the Messenger, trying to think of a respectful way to say so.

“Thanks, Fouhi, that’ll do,” Aisling said. 

“But I don’t think she understands!”

“If she missed anything, I’ll handle it.”

“Well, if you’re certain…” Fouhi huffed, and vanished with a sharp pop. Shona wasn’t sure how you huffed without making a sound, but that was definitely what just happened.

Aisling looked up at the ceiling, tugged on a handful of her hair, and groaned theatrically. “As you might’ve noticed, that insane tangent was not very helpful. I could’ve explained it in just a few words: Mu, that’s M-U, is shorthand for ‘your question can’t be answered because it’s based on incorrect assumptions.’ It’s the right answer to a question like ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ I only let Fouhi finish to make a point: they didn’t say anything about what the answer or the right question are. Not the slightest hint. They aren’t like that all the time, we have plenty of conversations that more or less make sense, but there’s something about this specific question that Messengers just don’t seem able to process. I don’t know why. All I’m sure of is that when Fouhi said it was the wrong question to ask how they choose Keepers, they weren’t lying. They at least believe it’s true.”

“Messengers don’t lie! They can’t!” Shona snapped. Everyone knew that. How was it even a question?

“I sense spoken lies whether I try to or not. It costs me nothing to be certain. But my research agrees with you so far, yes,” Aisling said simply.

“Uh, sure. I’m still stuck right where I started, though. Is there anything else?”

“Sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to solve that riddle in this office. Maybe take it up with Enne, but I expect you’ll get something similar. Was that all you had?” She shrugged, raising her open palms.

“Great… thanks anyway,” Shona said. “Before I go, what do you think is the answer? Or the… right question?”

“Anything I threw out would be useless, maybe even harmful. My current best guess is just that, a guess. It could be wrong. It’s probably wrong. Your ideas might start somewhere completely different, but not if they’re jumping off from mine. I haven’t figured it out, so my direction could just be a dead end.”

But Shona had no answers, no ideas about answers, and apparently no questions. She wasn’t starting anywhere. Something was missing.

Or she was being nudged away from it.

“Well, I don’t know anything about all this, so where do I look? How do I learn? How did you learn?”

Aisling chewed on her lower lip for a few long seconds. Then she sighed and dropped her head, looking intently down at her legs. “How committed to this are you?” she asked.

“Um, pretty? If there’s no way to help her, I don’t really know what I’ll do. About the Promise.”

“Pretty, huh…?” she trailed off for a moment. “…Fine. I really hope this isn’t a mistake,” Aisling said, and raised her head to stare straight at Shona. The light in her eyes was bright enough to leave sunspots. “Trying to force the Promise on people isn’t help.  Every reputable magical scholar considers it a dead idea. It’s been tried, it’s never worked, and it has a death toll. Quite a high one.”

“…What?” Shona swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

“Ever heard of the Lotus Bed? It was a cult based in Rima, active during the war. Not a Harbinger cult, though. They believed dreams of a better world were the heart of magic, and the most beautiful dreams could only be born from the deepest misery. So, believing all the while that they were doing the right thing and helping save humanity, they did their best to…” She paused. Something ugly flit across Aisling’s face, and through her eyes, casting a strange shadow over their light. “…to nurture their own childrens’ dreams for the future. You don’t want to look into the details, unless I’ve seriously misjudged you.”

“That’s… I’m not…” 

“I mean, obviously. I’m not accusing you of anything. Don’t be silly. I just thought you should know how it goes whenever someone thinks they’ve solved the mystery and starts trying to mass-produce Keepers.” 

“…Okay,” Shona croaked.

“I’m sorry,” Aisling said, her voice suddenly softer. “I just had to make sure you understood.”

“But… but my life, there’s nothing that insane, nothing that even comes close, so why me? Why was I chosen?”

“Me neither. I loved my life before Fouhi stormed in and decided it was important that I never sleep again.” Aisling’s mouth quirked up into a bitter half-smile. “I certainly didn’t say those people were right about anything. If it were that simple, do you think it would still be a mystery?”

They talked a little longer, just about the details of Shona’s situation, but the conversation effectively ended once Aisling was satisfied that she wasn’t going to drag Mide into some kind of torture cult. She did sound a little gentler than she had at the start when she said goodbye and went back to her club’s work.

Shona’d learned a lot, met two Messengers in one day, and still had no idea what to do. She just checked her phone, left five messages from Mide on read, and made her way home.

~~~

“And that’s what I’m dealing with. I really don’t think she’ll agree if she can’t bring her friend along, so… can we make that happen somehow?”

“That’s what you called us for? Why ask when you already know the answer?”

“Well, I dunno. Maybe the other one’s actually meant for one of you!”

“The girl believes her reason to reject you is more important than what we offer. The offer is the offer, so you can either persuade her otherwise or accept that it isn’t meant to be. Not all prospects are. It is just that simple. You should be well aware of this already…”

“Heeey! Don’t talk to me like I’m some kind of idiot! I just really really like this girl and I wanna help her! What’s so wrong with that? Does anyone have any advice that ISN’T all the stuff I already know?”

“Enne, I’m sorry, but that is the reality of the matter! Her tone does not change the truth of her words!”

“Stop telling me why I can’t and start telling me how I can! Anyone else? Please?”

“Mm. There are other tethers than ours. Other bonds between souls. Methods, perhaps, to widen one fracture into another. There may, and we must stress may, be a way to grant your prospect’s wish.”

“Really, Yune? How’s that? Tell me, tell me! Tell me and you’ll be my favorite sister forever and always!”

“I recuse myself from this foolishness. Yune, you should not share whatever scheme you’re imagining. Supposing it does somehow work, all you will do is destroy a child who does not belong in this world.”

“Khiihihihihihi… perhaps you’d best take her advice. Hers is the shadow which draws all ours in! Hers are the hands which commit all our sins! She knows aaallllll about that, our Great Destroyer does!”

……… 

“Just remember that I warned you. Goodbye.”

“Fine! Good riddance! Who needs… oh, she’s gone. She’s just mad ‘cause she’s too much of a big grumpy meanie to be anyone’s favorite! So, what’s the secret? Hmm? Hmmm?”

“Hmh. Before we share this, we must stress that you will not like it. No, you certainly will not.”

“Oh, but an Enne may only ever be an Enne. It doesn’t matter what any of us say, he WILL do it. He must — yes, he must! Can’t you all see? He has already made his choice!”

“Ummm, yeah, what she said! I think. Sorry, Scelka, I’m usually not too sure what it is you’re saying.”

“Then all is as it should be! I am a labyrinth made not of walls, but of thoughts!”

“Right. Sounds neat. Anyway… Yune?”

“Ah. Very well. Very well indeed. Then this is what we would do…”

~~~

Shona cranes her neck upward, searching for the platform where Irakkia made its Wound. The tower closed after everything that happened with the Harbinger. It still hasn’t reopened yet… actually, if everything was normal, would it even be open at this hour? 

Well, whatever. Right now, all it means is that she’ll have the place all to herself. Grinning wildly, paying no mind to anyone who might be watching, she takes a stretch, looks up at the tower’s perfectly smooth, vertical wall, and jumps straight at it, touching both hands and feet to the glass. There’s a quick sting as her magic binds her to the surface with a touch. The static bites are a little worse than usual on her left hand, still tender and heavily bandaged, but she’ll manage. One hand reaches up and pulls, then the other, and she begins to climb the tower with the speed and casual ease of a lizard.

Some of the brighter stars reflect in the dark glass as Shona scurries up and up and up, dancing in the corners of her eyes. Here and there, she stops, releasing one hand from the wall and swinging outward to survey the city. She looks over the many blinking lights below, feels the chilly spring wind rushing by and the inner heat pumped by her pounding heart. She listens to the voice that still shrieks in terror and twists her gut into knots in these situations, listens just long enough to note its warnings of mortal danger and then cheerfully ignore them like she ignores Mom’s demands to stop slamming the door. 

Will she ever get used to this? Will scaling the city’s peaks be as ordinary as walking someday? The idea is almost disappointing, but magic is an endless frontier. There will always be some wonderful new thing waiting for her to find it. Always.

After maybe a fifteen-minute climb — which could’ve been much faster, if she weren’t taking her time to savor the sights and sensations and feelings — the deck comes into reach. Shona approaches it from directly underneath. It would be easier to scoot around the side of the wall and climb over it, but not as fun. She latches herself to the deck, hanging over New Claris as if on a massive jungle gym, then swings her legs up and tethers them to the surface. Her view of the city flips over and blood rushes to her head as she climbs along the ceiling. Seen from below, the glass window set into the platform’s center looks like nothing at all, a section left unfinished just for people to fall through, but for her it’s as solid a grip as all the rest. 

In another moment she’s at the platform’s edge, then pulling herself up the tall glass barriers around it.  Finally, she swings over the wall and breaks her connection to its surface, touching down gracefully on the floor. 

As she catches her breath, Shona leans on the barrier’s railing, gazing out at the city. It wouldn’t feel all that special if she’d just taken the elevator. Anyone could walk out here and see what she’s seeing now. Still, the image tangles up in her thoughts with the insane thing she just did to get here, taking on a bit of that same heady thrill. The deck and its view even feel like a different place in the middle of the night — it’s almost easy to imagine it as somewhere else entirely, untouched by her memories of static kaleidoscopes and the world twisting in on itself. And of the things in its eyes, the painful sights behind—

Nope, fuck off, we’re not going there, nope nope nope. She slaps her cheek and shakes those thoughts away.

Anyway, there are other buildings, even a couple taller ones in the Peaks. She can climb any one she wants to… well, uh, maybe not the Fianata Tower, but that’s not really the point. Why else did she choose this place, if not for the memories? Music always helps sort her thoughts out, and she has lots of thoughts about the things that happened here.

Shona strolls to the center of the platform, standing right on the wide glass window-hole, and takes an easy, familiar stance. Red light sparks and crackles through the air, forming her violin and bow in her grip. She looks up at the stars that joined her on her climb, the only audience she’ll have tonight, and plays, letting her heart provide the notes.

~~~

“I’m heading out! Bye!” Shona shouts through her house.

“Don’t…” 

Shona turns to where Mom sits at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading some gossip rag. She meets her gaze and grins a phony stage grin so wide it hurts a little bit.

Mom doesn’t say anything. She just breaks eye contact and sighs, burying her nose in her magazine. That’s Shona’s cue to stroll outside, slamming the door on her way out with what may be a bit of magically-charged strength. She’s honestly not sure how much of it she can tap without transforming. 

For the first time in several days, Mide is waiting by the fence. This’ll be a good day.

“Hey there, stranger! Glad to see you braving the light of day again! Feeling okay yet?” Shona asks.

“Ah, ish?” Mide says. “There’s still some nausea, but… I don’t know. I’m managing and the healer didn’t think it was contagious.”

“That’s good! That’s good,” Shona repeats, nodding. “Maybe…”

“You’re not seriously still thinking about how that girl’s doing?”

“Look, I’m not saying what she did was fine and you shouldn’t be mad about it, but at least some of the whole mess is on me! She clearly wasn’t good with people, there’s super real reasons why teams don’t happen much, and I did kiiinda steamroll her…”

“Shona, please just forget about that creepy freak already,” Mide groans. “There’s groups that don’t get along and there’s taking a bite out of your friends. It’s really, really not your fault.”

“Not blaming myself. Just, y’know, wondering if I could’ve done stuff better somehow.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Is not.”

“Well, whatever it is, stop worrying about it.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll do my best.” Her best wasn’t very much. She hadn’t seen or heard of Ill Wind Eyna since they parted last week — no one had, as far as she knew — and she couldn’t help but wonder about her here and there. Sometimes. Constantly.

“Hey, Mide?” 

“Mm?”

“I’ve never done anything like that to you, have I?”

For a moment, Mide just keeps walking. And walking. And walking. Finally, she smiles and shakes her head. “Of course not. Sure, maybe this isn’t quite where I saw my life going, but… well, we chose what we chose, and we all doodled those outfits when we were little. We’re living everyone’s dream, aren’t we? I wouldn’t have things any other way.”

What we chose.

Shona still wonders about that sometimes. 

Life surges into me through pale green tendrils. Nothing could be less like my regular infusions. A dozen showers of warm rain fall through my body in all directions, pooling into my wounds until I can hardly feel them at all. Still it flows, filling me with vigor I’ve only ever dreamed of having. The well I draw from is clear and deep, deep enough that even now…

“What’s… I… stop, stop it, stopstopstop…!”

A gasping voice breaks my focus. The well — the person, Mide — cries out through clenched teeth, crumpled to her knees in front of me. Shaky arms struggle to hold her off the ground. Otherwise, she’s unmoving, staring down at nothing in silent, wide-eyed terror.

What am I thinking? What am I doing? How much have I taken from her?

It’s harder to pull myself away this time. This was a desperate spasm, a hand thrown up to grab the edge of a cliff just before I fell to my death. The magic, born from my terror in the face of certain death, doesn’t want to let go. Something protests in the back of my mind, and its whisper sends an echo of dread shuddering through me. Not enough. Not enough. There will never be enough.

No, no, not “something.” There’s only one voice in my mind. It’s just my own voice thinking my own thoughts, and there’s no one and nothing else to blame. This is my power and no matter how wonderful it feels to revel in it, to wipe away my every trouble, to sate the hungry wounds gaping across my body, this has to stop. This has to stop now, before… before… no, before my mind can go there, I tense my entire body so hard I begin to shake and force my magic to release its grip. The mist slinks back and draws into me, carrying one last gulp of warm essence as I inhale it.

“Wha… Did, did you… what just…?” Mide stammers out in dazed fragments. Is she stable?

…If not, can I even do anything about it?

Cold pressure in my gut reminds me of my own situation. One thing at a time. I clench my teeth, dig one foot into the ground, and take a slow step forward, pushing away from the thin spike in my back. My nerves burst into flames all over again, far worse than when I was actually stabbed… but it’s only a brief flare. As I dislodge the spike, wellness surges into the wound, smothering the pain in gentle warmth. Soon all I feel there is a crawling, almost ticklish sensation that must be flesh slowly mending itself. I’m glad I can’t see it.

Mide’s sudden pallor and unsteady shivering don’t go away, but they don’t get worse, either. Her aura feels much more polluted than the last ones I took from — beneath the ozone smell of Shona’s charged power is a distinct, sickly sweet scent like rotten fruit, if an odor not nearly as strong as the seventh floor’s. There’s no time to inspect her soul closely, but at a glance her pain feels roughly how I feel on a bad day. Not the worst days.

I take and release a long, heavy breath. She’s not dead, and as for what she is… no time for that. My magic definitely won’t work in reverse. I already know that there’s no point in even trying. I can’t just unmake this mess. All I can do is finish this before it gets worse. Irakkia isn’t waiting for us.

“Listen, I, all I can do right now is go help Shona. You just… stay safe, okay? Out of the way, close enough that we don’t split up.” I lean down to help her up, wrapping one arm around her and bracing her on my shoulder as she stands.

The moment she finds her footing, she shoves me away with whatever strength she has left — still enough to send me stumbling back a few steps. Shock and fear and anger mingle on her face.

“…Fair,” I mutter. “I’m going. Remember to keep breathing, steadily as you can. It’ll help.”

Mide opens her mouth, but I can’t hear whatever she mumbles over the ambient noise. Then she just nods weakly and steps aside, leaning on her shield at a healthy distance from the wall that stabbed me. She’s slow and shaky, but still looks more mobile than me on my worse days. It’ll be bad if the Harbinger goes after her, but it has other priorities.

Elsewhere, the hunt is still on, and Shona has become its sole target. The nearest standing lighthouse is still bright enough to see by, and at the distant end of this roughly clear space, about as far away as the cars that pass by my seventh floor window, she and Irakkia dart over the trash-pile hills at dizzying speed — if the chamber weren’t so wide, they might be looping around me too quickly to track.

Still wielding her bow like a sword, Shona rockets away from the pursuing Harbinger. A stream of red sparks crackles through the air behind her, and lightning strikes from the still-growing storm above mark her passage, crashing down on the spot exactly where she was an instant ago. Twice I watch her dodge out of the Harbinger’s way by dropping over the side of a hill, gliding along on one hand and one foot like she’s skating on almost-vertical ice, then pulling herself back up over the ridge in a swift lunge, all without slowing down.

Irakkia is never far behind, almost throwing itself at her with every movement. Some of her jolts delay it for a moment, but more often than not it simply contorts itself out of the way and keeps moving. Sometimes it skitters like a spider, sometimes it bends itself into an upright wheel shape, with its limbs serving as spokes as it cycles forward, and sometimes it simply winds itself up and launches itself through the air in the span of an instant. Its voice spews a constant warbling torrent of unreadable nonsense sounds all the while.

I already know I can’t join that chase. The hills look too tall, steep, and tightly-packed to climb without magical help, and I’m not suddenly superhuman — much better than usual, but that’s only saying so much. Instead I head for the far end of the upward-slanting ground between the hills, where a thin mountain-path wall leads back toward the castle, planning to cut them off as they circle around.

My body feels lighter and stronger than I’ve ever dared to imagine. My legs have stopped shaking, and I can run, really run, easy as anything. Air itself is kinder to me. It’s no struggle at all to breathe, and I’m not so much as winded by the time I reach my destination. Not yet, anyway. Never enough, that hungry echo inside me repeats.

But it doesn’t have to be. Just enough to manage right this moment. What’s my plan here? I still have no idea how to break Irakkia. Until then, if I’m going to do anything useful, I’ll have to bring the fight to me. Soon, Shona rounds the near corner and heads toward me, bringing the Harbinger with her.

“Down here!” I yell, and pull the glove off my right hand.

Shona throws herself off the wall, again without slowing down a bit. She skates along the rough slanted ground, leading Irakkia out in a wide arc away from the castle trail, then makes a sudden sharp turn toward me. Six thin bolts of lightning strike behind her. The Harbinger darts away as they strike, then snaps back like a rubber band the instant the light fades and continues its charge. It’s still fast approaching when she reaches me, but her short-lived fence held it back for just long enough that it isn’t immediately upon us.

“Stay close and hold your breath,” I say. I prick my ring finger on a card in my spread, picking the one that feels right on raw instinct. Ribbons of noxious green essence twirl out from the diagram and form a circle around us. In the instant before they take their final shape, I push outward with my mind as hard as I can.

A bank of cold emerald fog riddled through with inky black veins floods into the Wound, leaving a thin column of clean air in the center, and then the blackness in the cloud slithers down into the trash-pile floor like roots searching for water. The white noise in the air dims, the way snowy nights seem to swallow all the sound in the world, as my mist begins to spread and seep from the ground.

Irakkia screeches and slams three of its front limbs into the ground, skidding along with a horrible metal-on-metal grinding sound until it comes to a halt, stopping just short of charging through the mist. Its neck stretches left, then right. When it sees that the cloud goes all the way around, its glass head settles, fixing its glare on us. I angle my gaze away, breaking eye contact. Just in case.

“Okay,” I sigh. I wasn’t certain this would work. “Don’t move.”

“Mide! Where’s Mide?” Shona hollers into my ear.

Mide is where I left her, still propped up on her shield and watching us closely. I can’t read her expression from here, but I point her out. “…Over there. Hurt. Stable. She’ll be safe for now, it’s clearly you it wants. Speaking of, that thing with the lighthouse. This should buy us some time, so quick… can you do it again?”

Shona frowns, glances over at Mide, then… “Oh, can I!” she says. “Got anything to say about it, big buddy?” she growls at the Harbinger. Her attitude instantly shifts from concern for her partner to what I can only imagine as bloodlust as she bares her teeth, summons her violin, and begins to play.

The Harbinger wails in protest. It balances on one long limb and stretches up, studying the cloud from above. While it’s standing in place, I gather up a plume of fog from the surrounding cloud with my will and shove it at the Harbinger, who scurries out of the way with a harsh whistle. Worth a try. It skitters back and forth around us, searching for any gaps or thin spots, and its voice rises to a panicked siren shriek as it fails to find one, like it’s trying to drown the song out. It’s not working. I’m sure it’ll find a way through eventually, but Shona’s power is already rising to a familiar peak. My teeth chatter. Tiny shocks prickle across and through my skin, feeling like they’re dancing over my bones.

Then Irakkia circles back around, placing itself between us and Mide, and spreads itself out like a giant knotted-up kite, still spinning sideways on its limbs in midair, shredding space like a blender. What is it doing?

Before I can tell, the ground beneath our feet vanishes, plunging us into a dark, narrow hole.

Shona’s music screeches to a halt.

A murmured “Ah–” is the only thing I manage to push out of my lungs.

I slam down hard on my side and start tumbling. The hole winds constantly back and forth, sending me skidding down one rough wall and slamming into another, then another, reaching for grips, footholds, anything as I fall. They don’t exist. The surfaces are jagged enough to bite wherever I touch them and no more.

But before the Wound can drop me into another endless loop, I crash onto solid ground. This chamber is dark, but lit just enough by a single gigantic screen embedded in the scrapheap walls that I can see my vision spinning. I would’ve thought a winding tunnel would be safer and less painful than a straight drop down, and I would’ve been wrong.

Red light shines from above. Shona slides around the shaft’s last turn and into the room, touching down easily on her feet. She looks like she made it through that shockingly well, with only a few visible scrapes. Until I spot her left hand, scratched to a pulp and covered in blood.

“You okay?” she asks, and offers me her good hand.

“No. But let’s go.” I take it and let her pull me up. It’s awful how familiar the sensation of sharp bits of trash raking over me is becoming, but through my new vigor and the rush of fighting for my life, I’m distantly aware of the scrapes more than I feel them.

“I sure feel that. Y’know, this…” Shona growls, and flings her arms out in a wide circle, gesturing to the Wound. Blood trickles down from her injured hand. “This LITERAL MOUNTAIN OF BURNING GARBAGE WORLD has been ruining everything since we got here! It’s honestly pissing me off way more than the monster!”

“It is awful… it’s all just in the way, though. Walls it’s throwing up. We’re stuck here, and we still need to kill the thing.”

“And how do we get there? Think it’s gonna hold still anytime soon? I’ll tell you how, we burn the whole place down first! See how it likes us when it’s out of hidey-holes and caves to dump us into!” In emphasis, she raises her bow and looses an explosive burst of lightning into the ceiling tunnel. Thunder crashes through the tiny hollow like a blow to my head. Its echo rattles around and around in my ears, which I rush to cover as tiny chunks of concrete and clouds of dust fall over me.

A warning would’ve helped.

Listening with my soul, I still hear Irakkia’s cries, but all the actual physical sounds are replaced by the shrill phantom buzz of thunder smashing through my ears… so I feel the rumbling of the walls above us starting to cave in rather than hear it. Shona grimaces, then shrugs it off and says something I can’t hear. I cup my ear and shake my head, at which point she drops her bow, grabs my arm roughly with her good hand, and charges down the nearest apparent passage carved into the side of the shaft. Even with my new strength, I’m slowing her down. Another jolt of static bites into me, and we go gliding through the tunnels at terrifying speed.

And the Harbinger follows, screeching its distant siren wail all the while — I sense it without seeing it, because I can hardly see anything but Shona and an impossible blur of motion around us.

Tiny red sparks spill from Shona’s back as she darts forward, creating a shower of faint flickering lights to augment the occasional wall-screen. Their unsteady glow isn’t nearly enough to see by, but that doesn’t stop Shona hurtling through the dark. Neither do the sharp bends in the path seem to slow her down at all. She completely ignores the idea of momentum as she moves, turning at her full speed the instant she shifts her facing — but she does narrowly avoid slamming me into the wall around one tight corner.

I can’t possibly measure how far we travel through that cramped maze, but eventually dim, distant light shining through one fork leads us… yes, outside. Sort of. It takes a bit to be sure, since we’re surrounded by walls on all sides, but when I look straight up it’s definitely the dark sky rather than a cavern ceiling. As soon as we’re clear of the tunnels, Shona brings us to an instant stop. I expect to crash into her, and it feels strange when it doesn’t happen.

She immediately whirls around, steps to my side, and resummons her bow, loosing a crimson blast into the tunnel we just came from. At least this time I manage to cover my ears. It even helps a little, and the debris it blows loose fall somewhere in the tunnels, distant enough to get lost in the background noise. My ears are starting to work again, using a bit of my stolen life to repair themselves faster.

Looking around, we’re in a wide, deep inground pit, about as deep as a small skyscraper is tall. Its shape is a loose, uneven spiral, with parts of the walls barely curving at all and others jutting out far enough to form thin ledges — even a few like incomplete, detached pieces of a spiral ramp, all made of trash pounded roughly flat. A lighthouse’s pale rays beam into the pit at an angle, only directly shining on the upper third of the walls.

And peeking out from one of those platforms, Irakkia glares down at us. I tap Shona and silently point it out.

My ears have recovered enough to hear the words when she yells up at it: “Hey, how the fuck did you get out here?” She brandishes her bow, aiming for its perch.

“Careful with that! Blow this place up and it’ll cave in on us,” I hiss. “Maybe we don’t die, but at best we’re stuck back in… the maze?” When I tilt my head to indicate the passage we came from, it’s completely gone. “Probably we die.”

Shona scowls and folds her arms, dropping the bow with a dramatic groan. “Fine, fine! Let’s get outta here and THEN blow everything up.”

“Alright. How?”

“Like this,” she says, and claps my shoulder again. There’s a now-familiar snap of static, but something is different about this one. Buzzing heat runs through me and settles in my limbs, lingering there as an uncomfortable pins-and-needles feeling. Then she sprints straight at the nearest wall and hops onto it, clinging there in a position like she’s climbing a ladder. “Just do what I do. It’ll be easy.” She looks back over her shoulder and motions with one hand for me to join her. “Ever gone mountain climbing before?”

Huh? Why would she even ask? I’m too floored by the question to answer.

“Just kidding! Me neither! Whew, if I only could’ve seen your whole face just now!” Shona cackles. She turns and starts to scamper up the wall, giggling and mumbling a cheery little song to herself as she climbs. The tone behind her words is strained.

…Nothing for it. I take a deep breath, latch myself to the wall, and follow her path as closely and quickly as I can. There’s a slight tug of resistance whenever I pull a hand or foot loose, and a brief static sting every time I reattach myself to the surface. It’s exhausting, heaving my own weight up over and over without pausing even a second for a break. My joints are on fire. I feel myself tapping my stolen strength to press on, and even then I take frequent breaks to glance around in search of Irakkia.

Shona, on the other hand, darts up and up like it’s nothing, stopping only to look down and wait impatiently for me to catch up. Her torn-up hand barely seems to slow her down — she just treats it like she might treat walking with a slight limp, timing her climb such that it spends as little time as possible supporting her weight.

Things get rougher as we climb. The spiraling walls tighten, forcing us to twist and adjust ourselves with them. Irregular ridges and slanted platforms cut off any straight paths up. Finally, we come to a point where a single ledge stretches out all along the walls and covers almost the entire shaft, like we’re in a manhole looking up at a slightly-displaced cover. The one sliver of open space is directly across from us. I’m certain this wasn’t there before. When I first looked, I could definitely see straight up to the light outside.

This doesn’t stall Shona at all, though. She moves one hand at a time onto the ledge’s underside, then swings her legs up, tethers her feet to its surface, and goes scuttling along upside-down like it’s no big change. Sorry, Shona, I’m not doing that. I just start to edge horizontally around the shaft, slowed down by my awkward sideways crawls over the ridges that rise from the walls like waves on a sea of wreckage.

Shona makes it to the gap well before me, of course. She grabs the edge and hangs there for a moment, fidgeting, idly swinging in place over the pit below. I’m a little more than halfway around when she hoists herself up, apparently tired of waiting.

<ꌦꄲ꒤ꋪꇙꏂ꒒ꊰ IS A MASK A VEIL A BLINDFOLD WRAPPED AROUND THE ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ HEART OF ALL THINGS TEAR IT LOOSE AND TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE>

Irakkia’s warning siren blares. Visions flood my mind of the shadowy outline of a person being unwrapped entirely into a long strip of cloth, like a mummy with nothing underneath. No, not quite nothing — the inside of the cloth is lined with unblinking bloodshot eyes, their irises black and spotted with tiny static stars.

Shona shrieks in terror until her voice is muffled, then silenced.

Every muscle in my body seizes up. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. When the paralysis passes, I do the only thing I can — quicken my pace over the sharp spiral curves in the wall. My heart thuds wildly, but not in the rapid, rhythmic pulse of overexertion — it’s harder rather than faster, each pulse like a tiny impact in my chest, aggravated by the constant bites of electricity in my limbs.

That inner pressure only gets stronger when I reach the platform’s edge, where a dense fence of thin, outward-facing spikes now lines the ridge on all sides. I peek through a gap in the concrete, Irakkia has unfurled into a shape like an octopus wrapping itself around its prey. Its glass head swivels to stare at me, but beyond that, it doesn’t move. Not worried about me or just more interested in her? Beneath its noise, Shona’s voice is still faintly audible from here, whimpering wordlessly.

As I climb further up and over the spikes, I hunt for ideas, cutting all the ones I find off as useless in the same instant they come to me. I’m not betting again on the hope that it might rather not kill us, so I can’t approach in any way that doesn’t leave Irakkia plenty of time to finish its helpless prey off. Can’t fight it head-on, can’t use my fog without risk of infecting Shona…

Just as I clear the spikes and drop down onto the ledge, still not knowing what to do, there’s a sound of… it’s the high grinding whine of a trash compactor at work, but my body reacts to it with a pained shiver like I get when someone bites their silverware as they eat.

Tearing my eyes from the Harbinger, I glance to one side. I’m now flanked by a huge rectangular pillar of garbage jutting out from the wall behind me. Silver film-grain dots and lines dance all over its surface. It’s not moving, but I still hear that sound.

My stomach drops.

I dash toward the Harbinger, the only way I can go. Immediately, a terrible car-crash roar fills the air and shakes the entire ridge, knocking me to my knees. I look over my shoulder, where an identical pillar has extended from the wall on my other side and smashed into the first one. I just narrowly avoided getting smeared between them.

Irakkia surges forward, launching itself at me in a violent storm of colors. I pull at my magic on a panicked reflex, but it’s upon me in the same moment. Knife-clawed hands, four or five or six of them, rush to unwrap me like a present. Bright, sharp pain rakes over my skin, numbed only slightly by the chill of death-mist pouring out through my wounds. I feel my sickness taking root in the Harbinger, but it pushes on anyway, tearing at me with a hateful howl. Distantly shocked that I’m still aware at all, I wrench my eyes shut and reach through the fog with my power, searching for the Harbinger’s strength, heart, health, I can’t tell, does it have health, can I—

A wave of burning-hot air rushes over me. Thunder cracks through Irakkia’s screeching. I crane my head up — which feels like an effort, like all my energy is leaking out through the long, shallow gashes all over my body — and crack one eye open. The Harbinger is sparking with red light, convulsing like it’s having a seizure. Then it coils into itself, the motion a little slower and messier than earlier, and bounds up through the shaft, touching down on a much higher ledge. A fragment of my power moves with it, slowly eating away at it.

At the center of the ledge stands Shona, playing her violin — trying to, anyway. The music is rougher and harsher than ever, and I don’t think it’s just because of her injured hand. She doesn’t look much more hurt than she was, but her wide, wild eyes are severely bloodshot.

“And keep your stupid fucking little claws out of my head,” Shona snarls. “C’mon. Let’s end this already!” She smashes her violin against the ground, letting it disappear after it splits in half with an awful twang, and sprints to the wall, continuing her climb.

I don’t join her just yet. I need a moment to bury my pain in stolen health. Warmth floods through me, knitting my wounds shut. Even my dress mends itself, filling tears in the cloth with pale green light that leaves it good as new. But as my magic works, I realize that again, something doesn’t make sense here: why not just make a circle? Or form a dome around me and flatten it into the floor with me still inside? Irakkia was going for the kill, and there’s nothing I could’ve done to escape if it just surrounded me with walls and crushed me in the center.

Twisting a maze around me. Bending the ground beneath us. Stabbing me in the back. I’ve never actually seen the Wound change… no, that isn’t quite right. I saw it start to do something while it fought the others on the wall outside, creating some disturbance to strike at them from behind, only for it to fizzle into nothing. It looked a lot like the distortions around the pillars that nearly smashed me.

I glance back at those pillars. The point where they crashed together is a little off-center. One stopped moving, but the other carried right on.

Broken perspectives, seeing but not seeing, seeing things that aren’t there.

Because I watched it happen, it didn’t happen.

“It can’t change the world where we can see it!” I yell. “Watch the walls! Watch our blind spots!”

I tense up, waiting a beat for the Wound to crush me or skewer me and prove me wrong. It never comes. In fact, when I look up at Shona, I immediately spot a flickering silver patch on the wall, which vanishes.

“Kay!” Shona says simply, and keeps climbing, pausing to sweep her gaze around the pit every few feet. I stay put and watch her. Bits of twisting space constantly bloom just out of sight and disappear the instant I focus on them. Irakkia’s shrill voice yowls and seethes from above. Before long, Shona clears the top of the pit and waves to me. She summons her violin and starts to play again, creating a halo of lightning circling just around her, but keeps looking down at me.

I take the hint and start my own ascent, following her route as closely as I can remember it. Climbing takes most of my strength and attention, but I do catch several more distortions in the corners of my eyes. As I enter the last stretch, where the lighthouse’s rays shine on the walls, two claps of thunder ravage my ears. Shona shouts something I can’t hear over the ringing. At last, I clamber out of the pit and back onto solid ground, winded and gasping for breath even through my boosted vitality. We’re outside again, in another wide junkyard strewn with trash. From the look of it, we’re somehow higher on the mountain than we were when Irakkia first dropped us into the tunnels. At one end, a barred gatehouse leads somewhere into the central castle.

“Whoof,” Shona huffs. “Well, I think we’re all good! HEY, MIDE! I KNOW YOU’RE THERE! COME ON OUT, WE’RE GONNA KILL THIS FUCKING THING!” She twirls a hand and dismisses her thin lightning barrier, then leans down to help me up.

Slowly, Mide peeks around a wall in the corner. That was fast — these two can probably sense each other well enough that she’s been on her way for a while. She doesn’t look better, but she doesn’t look worse either, and crosses the chamber at an ordinary, slightly hurried pace, panting and putting her hands to her knees when she reaches us.

“You two… where did you go? What happened?” she asks, her voice still weak and raspy.

“Eh, nevermind that, we’re all just fine now!” Shona says with a slight uncertain delay, like she’s mostly trying to convince herself. “All set to take out the monster, too. We’ve just gotta… eh, Eyna, tell her what you told me. I’m gonna start ripping this thing apart!” She waves a hand dismissively, recreates her violin, and sets to playing a new song. More than angry, this one sounds violent. Like it could actually walk up to me and thrash me to a pulp.

“Right, yes. Ira—the Harbinger—has some problem with sight. Er, with being seen. It can twist its Wound all sorts of ways, but it can’t do anything within our line of sight,” I say.

“…Okay.” Mide nods slightly. She has a hard time meeting my eyes. I guess I can’t blame her.

Anyway, I don’t push it. I just turn and stand with my back to Shona, then gesture left, pointing Mide to a spot where she forms the third corner of a triangle. “So if we stay like this… yeah, close together, backs to each other, it shouldn’t be able to do anything to us. It’s hurt, it won’t win if it just charges in. Shona, the lighthouses. Are you still okay to take them out?”

“Pshh, please, way ahead of you! That first one was just the opening act! It’s gonna get so much better!” she answers.

Here we go, then.

The air takes on a dry, prickling weight as Shona plays. The whole world rumbles, and the clouds above gather and swirl into a hurricane of fury. Irakkia frantically whirs and wails in the distance. Tiny holes in the world rip themselves into being all around the courtyard, and close in the same instant, so many of them coming so quickly that it looks at times like I’m watching a grainy old film of the world rather than seeing it with my eyes. Tiny bright dots and squiggly silver lines fill my vision. Many… most of them are in plain sight, placed where there’s no way we could miss them — Irakkia is just throwing out everything it can to see what sticks, now, and none of it does.

Maybe ten seconds into the song, the Harbinger crawls out from inside the castle and perches on the gatehouse, staring straight at us. My head swims as its mind crashes into mine once more. There’s no vision this time, no message, just a raw torrent of its madness. Its absolute refusal to trust its own senses.

But I’ve already walked these paths with it, and its focus is now split between three of us, punishing its overreach with failure on all fronts. I quickly glance back at the others. Mide looks a little shaken, but Shona… all it did was give her more rage to work with.

“No, not again, fuck off fuck off fuck OFF!” Shona screams, and unleashes her own storm of power. I plug my ears as six lightning strikes spear down from above, forking and forking into the outline of a giant tree, then converge as one on the second lighthouse. This time, the explosions don’t just topple the tower, but blast out and tear away huge chunks of the castle all around it. Falling wreckage crushes more structures until barely anything is left, even before the lantern plunges beneath the sea and it all disintegrates into a carpet of bright dust.

Irakkia cries out once more, but not in pain or battle-rage. Its tone is lower, less forceful. Again, I can’t help but read emotion into its voice, and it sounds exhausted.

<none of this is right>

<none of this is real>

<none of this IS>

The constant screeches of electrical interference fade. Even the ever-present static shhhhh is quieter.

“…Did we win?” Mide asks.

Then the static screen in the sky turns back on, but only a small part of it — only in a small circle above the last lighthouse, with the rest remaining completely dark… and slowly becoming engulfed by Shona’s rumbling clouds. Without looking away from us, Irakkia skitters backwards, climbing onto what remains of the castle and rushing toward the lighthouse. The static above resolves into an actual image, what looks like a bright blue patch of the actual sky.

Is it running away? Can it do that? I can’t stop it, and if this was all for nothing—

“NO YOU DON’T,” Shona declares. She doesn’t shout it. The words just carry themselves over all the music and noise, out into the entire Wound. Almost immediately, another forest of lightning lashes out into the Wound from the roiling clouds that have begun to dominate the sky, straight into the last slice of the castle.

The destruction that follows is an avalanche. An earthquake breaks out beneath our feet as the entire world breaks. Mide and I yelp in shock, and I look around for any stable bit of wall to hold onto, finding none before the junkyard goes sliding down the mountain like a sled. Shona just kneels, tethers her hands and feet to the ground, and laughs and laughs and laughs all the way down. I follow her lead and crouch, doing my best to press myself into the platform, and somehow it works enough that I’m not launched into the sea.

Finally, our crumbling platform slides into the water with an enormous splash. Somehow, it floats, an island of trash drifting out to sea. Another piece of falling wreckage crashes into the water just after us, stirring up a wave that drenches us all. Seemingly at random, pieces of rubble all around us start to disintegrate into plumes of static, all of it fading away like dust on the wind.

Further up, Irakkia leaps between twisting spires, doing anything it can to gain height. Then, as it goes to jump from one tower to the next, its destination collapses into nothing, and the Harbinger falls, joining the ruins of its castle in their landslide. Still it runs, jumping and scrambling up the avalanche until a foothold just beneath it abruptly bursts into a cloud of static snow, and it gets swept away in the collapse, plummeting down the slope. Its limbs lash out for anything to pull itself up by, finding nothing.

When Irakkia touches the water’s surface, another burst of distortion rips through the world, faster and stronger than the interference that had burst from the sinking lanterns. Everything in sight rips itself apart and then reassembles itself in an instant, like someone grabbed the film in a movie theater and started shredding it by hand, only to have the act itself rewound back to the beginning and then repeated over and over.

When I can see clearly again, Irakkia is thrashing in the sea like a drowning animal. Its veils have soaked through, dulling their wild colors, and its storm of dizzying motion has faltered — the cloth is floating limply on the water, bulging in places like shapeless things are trying to surface underneath them.

Why would it fill its Wound with water if it couldn’t swim?

“Really? That’s it? THAT’S the way you’re gonna die?” Shona laughs. “Hey, suit yourself!” She starts to play again, and her music is frenzied, now. It’s stopped being even a painfully loud song and blurred into wild, shapeless noise, like making an art form of screaming. The sky is completely overcast and shimmering with the flashes of Shona’s storm. In time with the song, lightning strikes the water again and again, lashing into the Harbinger and everything else until the sea is boiling and Irakkia is no longer splashing and grasping for land, just twitching in random useless spasms.

At last, all at once, Irakkia’s entire body breaks into a shower of tiny bright particles. Only its core remains, an orb of shifting patterns like a black and white kaleidoscope floating above the water. It looks at first like it’s approaching Shona, but what it’s actually doing is bending the world, steadily shrinking the distance between her and it… until she raises a hand and pushes into the air, releasing a few red sparks with a buzzing jolt. Then it just hovers there, still.

Soon, all that remains of the Wound are the crimson typhoon above and a few scattered pieces of wreckage floating like islands. Dots of static fall like snow in a blizzard, resting on the sea’s surface as they touch down. The sea itself is beginning to dry up, replaced by nothing but a gradually shrinking emptiness as the nightmare collapses on itself.

“Good show, good show! Real exciting first outing here!” Shona chirps. “Well, Eyna, deal’s a deal! Wanna do the honors, girls?” She steps away and gives us firm celebratory pats on the back. I shudder as her touch leaves a damp, slightly sticky spot between my shoulders.

“Okay, so how do we do this?” I ask.

Mide glances at me from the corner of her eye, then shrugs weakly. If their Messenger didn’t explain that part, I guess we just do it at the same time? I reach out for the heart with my will. Mide does the same. As it was with Yurfaln, the lingering eyes-on-my-back pressure of Irakkia’s miasma steadily burns away, and we reach beneath it as one, grasping for… for…

Something is wrong. When I absorbed Yurfaln, there was a strange but satisfying moment of understanding. I felt its last feelings, heard its last words. I knew it, as much as I could know a Harbinger. As Irakkia’s Wound breaks down, I feel that same flash of insight starting to take shape…

…and then we’re back on the observation deck, and it’s all gone, slipping from my grasp in an instant. It feels like jolting awake in the middle of an interesting dream, realizing I’ll never know how it ends and I probably won’t remember it at all in a minute.

We tore the Harbinger into messy, uneven chunks, like sharing a book by shredding all its pages into unreadable scraps and dividing those up, and while I think I claimed the bigger share, I’m certain much of it is just… gone.

Mide seems to shake off the confusion of it all faster than me. When I come to my senses, she’s taken Shona’s hand and put her other palm to the ground. Shona shivers and clenches her teeth as bolts of red light arc through Mide and into the deck. What are they doing? Something to do with that way Shona seemed to get high on her power?

The portal above the deck has vanished, but it’s still the scene of a disaster. Irakkia’s victims don’t look or sound any better for its death, save that the frizzy-haired girl by the wall has passed out. We’ve done what we can. Maybe more, if that kid comes out any better for our trouble.

“Whew, that was kind of a lot,” Shona eventually breathes. “Thanks. You alright?”

Mide nods. “We should call for the Sanctuary,” she says in a weak, strained voice.

~~~

So we leave the victims to the people who might be able to help them. I let Shona do the talking with the first responders while they clean and bandage her hand. I don’t know what happened to the boy, and I have more pressing things to worry about.

It’s solidly twilight, now, the blues of the sky giving way to a blur of soft, diffuse colors. When it’s all over, I start to head toward the hospital, not sure what else to do or say, and the others follow. Shona tries a few times to start up cheery team spirit conversations about how great we were, which all fizzle and die.

A few blocks from the tower, Mide breaks the uneasy quiet. “Eyna, what did you do to me in there?”

I freeze. “I—”

“Do? What? What are you talking about?” Shona asks.

“I don’t know. What am I talking about, Eyna?” Mide says, glaring straight at me. Her voice has regained some of its strength. “In the Wound, she, she got hurt. Bad. I went to protect her and she… drained me somehow, I don’t know what or what for. It felt awful. It felt like, like a…”

Like a Harbinger’s bite, she doesn’t say. Dread and guilt settle into a suffocating weight in my chest.

Shona turns to me, pale and wide-eyed. “Is that true? That’s… you didn’t say anything like…”

What was I going to say? What magic words could I use to make what I do anything but monstrous? Sorry, my mistake! Next time I’ll load up on normal people’s health in advance!

“That you were going to, what, stab your team for power?” Mide finishes.

“Do you think I like it? Do you think… you think I designed my magic this way? I just wanted more than anything to eat people?” Words tear out faster than I can really think them. “You’re a Keeper too, you know that’s not how — I’m not — look, I just took enough that I wouldn’t die! It’s disgusting and I hate it but it’s all I’ve got and I have to do this and I just don’t want to die, okay?”

“Yeah, we’re Keepers, and Keepers don’t do shit like that! What do you mean you have to? What is it you need so badly, anyway?” Mide asks.

My throat locks up. I take an unsteady step back, then another.

“Mide, you can’t just ask that!” Shona snaps. I blink — I can’t imagine why she’d stand up for me on anything. Mide stares at her open-mouthed. She probably feels the same way.

“I should go,” I say. “I… don’t think this’ll work.”

“Hey, hold on! Whatever happened, we can sort it out! Just, just wait a second, okay? We can’t understand if you don’t say anything!” Shona says. She’s still following me, still acting like we’re friends, just having a little fight before we make up the next morning.

“Just leave me alone!”

I flare. Shona flinches away from the deepening shadows around me, then lowers her gaze, nods, and turns to rejoin Mide.

It’s almost worse than if they both hated me.

Once I’m sure they’re gone, I brush the tears from my eyes and find a dark corner to dismiss my magic in. I’m done with teamwork. This group was awful.

No, I’m sure those two do just fine together. I’m the only problem.

Irakkia’s presence fades into the background noise of the Wound, even as its voice lingers in my skull. Where is it going? With the way this place works, can I even trust that it even is going? What could it be doing? 

None of that matters if I don’t know what I’m doing. Plan. I need a plan. Yurfaln’s world had an inner sanctum, a section of its heart that showed me everything I needed to know to kill it, but that doesn’t mean this one will. Even if it does, I might not understand it or have a good way to exploit it — my magic was practically custom-made to counter Yurfaln. We were born from the same place, after all.

What do I know so far? Does any of it connect to that poem? A space that doesn’t make sense. How my senses bend and fail around the Harbinger’s visual glitches. That question about my first memory it pushed into my head, a vision of drowning in the abyss until I can only see in the dark and breathe water, the world isn’t the world… something about contradictions? Light and sight feel important to it, but I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not sure if I’m better off in here or outside under that awful sky. 

Actually, I still don’t have a good idea of where I am. In Yurfaln’s world, my tarot diagram seemed to form an abstract map, so I look there first. This time, the cards have formed a spiral of messy, overlapping branches, and their faces are marked with sigils written in crawling static rather than pictures — all except one, the skeletal crow of Death dyed in my colors. I can’t tell if it’s meant to be inverted, and I can’t make enough sense of this spread to use it as a guide.

As for the world itself, this section is a maze of narrow tunnels and chambers in seemingly random shapes and sizes. Each room has a few fuzzy TV screens set randomly into the walls to serve as lamps, at least where the shadows cast by my magic haven’t swallowed their light like clouds over the moon. I could try and plot a course through it, but I don’t think I need to. Time should be on my side — I have backup coming, whatever’s taking them so long; Irakkia doesn’t. For now I’ll just stand my ground and spread my own corruption, make my own place of power within the Harbinger’s- 

<return with me to the boundlessness behind our SIGHT>

Again Irakkia’s voice slams into me. My legs buckle. I lean against a wall before I collapse entirely. A jagged pipe spearing from its uneven surface, its end hewed to a point, scrapes my arm. I suck in air between my teeth at the pain, but the constant shhhh of static takes on a soft, almost calming note. Nothing changes about the sound itself, but it feels more like listening to a rushing river than grating electrical noise. 

There’s something inside the noise, though. Something beyond words or sounds, another flood of dreams that might drown my senses and wash me away if I let it. 

<to the place where nothing is certain and nothing is false>

Invasive thoughts race through my mind, too many of them to catch and pin down any single one. It’s all sensations and confusing ideas rather than words or pictures… the crushing weight of the deep sea. Watching the sky and wondering why it looks the way it does. Fleeing the angry sun. Doubting everything and everyone, most of all my own senses. 

<WHERE ꁲ꒒꒒ IS AS WE? WILL IT>

Somewhere among the madness, there’s a faint sense of wonder at something completely new. Maybe it’s… what it might feel like to fly?  

But it’s hard to fly when your body works so hard to weigh you down, and beneath it all, I’m still right here. Safe in my own skin, my favorite place to be. My vision is swimming and my limbs aren’t cooperating, so I think it might be falling apart right this moment. Amazing. You’d never let me forget who I am for a second, would you, skin? 

After my first bone marrow transplant, one aggressively cheerful nurse told me that my body wasn’t my enemy, it was an important tool that did its best to serve me, and while I recovered I should try to think of things it was doing well to be grateful for. I managed one entry on that list before I gave up: My skin does a good job of keeping my organs inside where they belong. Thank you, skin. Thank you again for keeping me trapped here.

A crack of thunder rises over the rushing noise. Immediately, the Harbinger’s voice answers with a keen wail, cutting through my scattered thoughts like an alarm on a groggy morning. Irakkia’s soul-wracking noise falls back to its normal level, and there it remains. Are the others here? Did it go to size up the new intruders? 

Just as I stagger to my feet, harsh, distorted, yet utterly melodically deliberate electric violin music starts to play. It doesn’t stop, warring with the ambient static for control of my ears. There’s another blast of thunder — the low rumbling kind, this time. Shona’s voice follows, magnified into its own explosion of sound: “HEY! EYNA, HEY, WE’RE IN! WHERE ARE YOU?”

“I’m—” My voice comes out as a tired croak rather than a shout. There’s no way they’ll hear me. Instead I reach inside and flare a bit of my magic, the way I did when we first met. My skin prickles at the brief bitter cold, and deep green shadows dance through the tunnels. On the nearest screens, black feathers fall as if from a shredded pillow, then pour out through the glass and flutter to the ground.

I hope they get the message, because they’ll probably need to come to me. Even if I knew the way out of here, I’m not sure how far I’d make it. I wish I’d brought my cane, even knowing that just carrying it around would basically tell those girls my whole life story.

I figure it’ll probably be easier for them to find me outside, if nothing else. Ignoring the sting of the gash on my arm, I push on through the maze, spreading my corruption as I move until I’ve found the rough direction that seems to be out on my spiral tarot diagram. Soon enough, light leaks in through a fork at the end of one distant passage. Nothing is moving in the Harbinger’s ambient aura that I can sense, but all the same I take my time approaching, inching up to the corner and peeking around it with one eye. At the end of that bright tunnel, there’s the Wound’s static sky. Out I go, keeping my eyes on the ground. 

I emerge onto a wide platform that slopes unevenly in one direction and then bends around as it declines, forming a spiral ramp around one of the castle’s twisting spires. I’m quite high up, overlooking the colorless sea, and there’s a junk-pile barricade lining the far edges. There’s a hole in the barricade at one point, where a long, steep wall — the first smooth surface I’ve seen here — stretches out and curves up at the bottom, forming a giant slide into the water. 

Electronic noise and heavy music are still fighting to bury each other, occasionally interrupted by peals of thunder. Beyond the barricade, all I see is dark water. Irakkia must have dumped me in a far corner of the Wound before it left. How is it doing that? Can it just pick me up and drop me wherever it likes? Reshape the world on a whim? No, that can’t be, can it? There has to be some rule. Why else wouldn’t it just crush me with the walls, or at least seal off the maze if it’s saving me for later?

“HEEEY, EYNAAA, WHERE’D YOU GO? IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, DO THAT AGAAAIN! ACTUALLY, JUST KEEP DOING IT!” Shona’s voice yells out again from somewhere on the other side of the Wound. There’s a strange electronic distortion to her voice, like it’s playing through a giant loudspeaker with a bit of crackling feedback. More thunder quickly follows, a rapid series of bursts like cannon fire. 

So I do. Flaring is simple to maintain, and it’s not like I can run out of magic. I just open the floodgate in my mind and let a little more power overflow into the world.

“GOTCHA! COMING, HOLD ON!” Music and thunder quicken their pace in time with each other.

There’s still a Harbinger between us, so I’ll do what I can to make that trip easier. Bracing myself on the rough wall, I start to circle the tower step by unsteady step, taking the path that slopes downward. Down should be closer to them, right? 

Sure enough, a few levels below, a tiny bridge connects to… I suppose I could call it the central castle, though that would be giving it enormously too much credit. Rather, it’s a place toward the middle of the mountain of rubble where more thin towers of trash than I can easily count twist together into a single mass, then branch out again at the top, forming something like a giant garbage tree with boughs wide and thick enough to walk through. The bridge itself is just a length of debris inexplicably held together, with no railings, ropes, or visible support of any kind. 

When I get there, I search the spiritual miasma all around me once more for any signs of Irakkia. I barely trust my legs to carry me over this thing, so it’d be an ideal time to murder me. Yet catastrophe never strikes — the Harbinger is still somewhere far away, close to the source of the thunder. Nothing I can do for Shona and Mide yet. I just kneel and crawl across the bridge’s thin span, clinging to its sides whenever it teeters under my weight. One flurry of activity from the Harbinger startles me, but it’s still nowhere nearby. 

On the other side of the chasm is a long, thin wall set into the mountain like a treacherous road, winding through blocky structures and unbalanced towers. I loop around it, plodding through the winding, uneven paths and climbing over heaps of junk randomly piled in my way, alone save for thunder and irregular bursts of grating music, until the island’s front half comes back into view.

It’s… changed since I was on the lower half of the island, though I still see the dock Irakkia first dropped me on in the distance. There’s a storm covering a small part of the static sky, a whirl of dark thunderclouds spinning around each other impossibly fast. Jagged crimson flashes of lightning arc through the air, and while some strike off into the distance at random, many more strike the ground in a pattern that looks like they’re chasing a moving target.

I guess my magic really is just weird. How am I meant to keep up with that?

Seen from this height, the courtyard’s layout looks like an anthill that’s been cut down the middle to expose the chambers inside, a massive pile of rubble where nine or ten oddly-shaped rooms have been roughly cleared out. They’re all full of little ruined buildings and connected by thin, twisty valleys or tunnels, some of which fork and loop into mazes. Several huge solid slabs of junk have risen from the heap since I last saw it, making the walls many, many times taller. Two of them are placed to completely wall off two different valleys connecting the chambers. Static snow in random shifting patches crawls along their surfaces. The wall closest to me is long, but not nearly as tall as the others, like it’s not quite finished.

And Irakkia rises from behind that wall, perching on the edge with its dozen limbs spread out like those of a spider making a threat display. Three hands cling to the wall while the whirling veils in the center dart about wildly, leaving behind long-lived afterimages. The rest lash at something on the other side, bending all over and striking from many angles. 

I realize what must be happening just before I see it. Mide’s shield comes into view first, tilting to deflect another strike even as she hoists herself over the ledge with one hand. Like I’d seen before, invisible stage lights cast by Shona’s magic highlight her every movement and keep her armor gleaming amidst the gloom. Red sparks flit all along her body, and more burst out from the shield wherever Irakkia’s claws bounce off it. The instant her feet hit the ground, she summons her spear and hurls it at the Harbinger, which bends so far back to avoid it that it nearly flattens itself into the wall. Before it rises, she pulls a short sword from thin air and charges, holding most of her body behind her shield as she moves. That doesn’t keep her from pressing the attack — she’s light on her feet, and fast, handling her weapon as easily as I twitch my fingers. On a good health day. 

It’s not enough. Irakkia twists its way through her slicing flurry, alternately warping its shape with impossible flexibility or breaking space itself such that Mide’s blade never quite catches it. In one strike, I watch the sword sink straight into its center, only to come clean out on the other side bent at a strange angle, like a beam of light through a prism. When the Harbinger darts away unharmed, the sword returns to its normal shape. This continues across more clashes than I can count so quickly, and the two appear to be stalemated.

But Irakkia’s movement is pushing it back along the wall. Maybe ten seconds into the fight, Shona peeks over the top of the ledge, then climbs up and scrambles to her feet, standing at a comfortable distance from the Harbinger. Mide is blocking the only clear path between her and the monster. Shona summons her violin, and begins to play. Arcs of red light flicker through the air around her.

As Shona’s music starts up again, the Harbinger breaks away from Mide and scuttles backward to the wall’s far edge. At the other end of the wall, right behind Shona, something else is going on. The world is warping. A hole starts to tear itself open, bright and flickering like film grain, just like the way Irakkia first emerged inside. An ambush? Can I warn them? No, flaring doesn’t tell them anything, so…  

The tear shivers, then folds back inward and disappears. It’s just… gone. Nothing came of it.

Irakkia’s head snaps around, making two rapid circles before it comes to a stop, facing me. Not just facing… those eyes are glaring directly up at me. Suddenly, my sight zooms in on it. I tear my eyes away, and I know I’m not paralyzed when I feel my head moving, but what I’m seeing doesn’t actually change. No matter where I turn, my gaze is still arrested by the Harbinger’s own.

Clashing patches of sky-static crawl over my eyes, expanding until there’s nothing left but a dizzying visual maze… before a pair of jagged red bolts cuts through the center, splitting the scene like a crack in a mirror. A crimson flash fills my view, followed instantly by sharp thunder, and when it fades I’m looking down at the Wound again. 

Back on the wall, Irakkia lies in a crumpled, tangled mess, twitching in time with the red sparks jumping along its body. Bits of debris in a ring around it have been scorched black. From the look of it, Shona’s struck our first real blow. She’s still absorbed in her performance, and as the song gets louder and angrier, the clouds above roll forward to gather over her. The lightning twines together through them, forming a thin circle like a giant halo made from the strands in a plasma lamp.

Mide simply stands guard over the Harbinger, preparing to strike at the first sign of movement. The crackling halo above is already sparking almost excitedly. It probably doesn’t matter if Mide ever lands a hit — she only needs to protect Shona long enough for the Screaming Hymn to work her magic.

These girls really do know what they’re doing, then. What do they need me for?

But before the storm can strike again, Irakkia drowns out Shona’s music with a wordless scream. Its voice is a radio shoved into my ear. A plume of static that makes me nauseous to look at bursts out from its body like a smoke bomb. When it fades, so has Irakkia. I freeze, searching the Wound for it, but it’s gone from my soul-sight too.

Shona yells something I can’t make out and unsummons her violin. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the storm above her fades from view. The two exchange a few more words I can’t hear before Mide turns and points me out.

“THERE YOU AAARE! GRRREAT! SIT TIGHT, JUST A BIT LONGERRR!” Shona shouts from across the distance, that same distortion carrying behind her voice, which, from how I feel her aura in the air, I guess is some sort of use of her power. She waves to me, then crouches, turns, and hops off the wall, clinging to the ledge for a moment before she starts to shimmy down. Her hands and feet simply cling to the flat surface until she moves them, and Mide follows the same way. There’s one question answered — I was wondering how they got up there at all, unless the other side was completely different. They quickly touch down in the junkyard, dart through another chamber, and climb up its sides to skip into the next one, ignoring Irakkia’s elaborate maze completely. The Harbinger must have been trying to cut them off when it raised those new walls.

The others have just started to scale the castle-mountain when the Wound’s pale glow blinks on and off wildly, then goes dark. I yelp and gather death-mist into a cloak around myself, expecting the worst, but… still no Harbinger. Why is this happening? What’s it doing now? The world isn’t completely darkened, though — something behind me casts its own flickering light.

“FUCK! OKAY! SAME PLAN!” Shona yells. This time it’s just her regular voice with no added distortion. I guess she really is just that loud.

I slowly turn back toward the castle, paying more attention to the Harbinger’s miasma than my body’s senses. My gaze settles on a single gnarled tower and climbs upward until it reaches a swirling orb of blindingly bright static crowning its peak. One of the lighthouse lanterns. I slam my eyes shut just as I spot it. When the ghostly lights swimming like sunspots in my retinas fade from view, everything goes dark. It remains dark when I try to look out again.

Water pressure crashes down on me. Wait — no it doesn’t. It’s a phantom sensation, another echo pushed onto me from somewhere else, it has to be, but the weight feels no less real for it.

<there is a SKY behind the SKY we have SEEN it before we will SEE it again>

Above, something in the lantern room at the top of the spire is chanting, droning the same string of alien words over and over. I can’t translate them, but I see them so clearly that they swallow my sight. A vision of a clear blue sky bending and folding itself into a kaleidoscope of many-colored stars like none I’ve ever seen in our nights.

Irakkia adds its voice to the choir, but there’s something different about it. It’s still a voice poorly constructed from untuned radios, speaking a language I can only maybe-translate through some magical instinct, so it feels stupid to try and read too much into its tone. Even so, it sounds like it’s choking on its words as it speaks. 

Like it’s sobbing.

<what if we SAW but we saw nothing?>

<WHAT IF THERE Iᔕ NOTHING>

The starry night in my eyes tears itself open, exposing an endless field of… nothing. Not darkness, not a white void, nothing, like my field of view shrunk until there was nothing left and now all I can see is what the space behind my head doesn’t look like.

The ground beneath me sharply tilts. Its sudden shift throws me off my feet, knocking me over with an impact like a club to my ribs. It feels for a moment like my clumsy drop into Yurfaln’s world, but I barely have time to register the dull, heavy ache spreading through my side before I start tumbling down the slope. 

<and we spread our wings and take flight but we only FALL and we FALL and we FALL and we FALL…>

Within seconds, I’ve lost any idea of up or down or anything. I don’t even feel like I’m falling or moving at all, just spinning and spinning forever. Pain shakes me free from that impossible not-vision, but all I see is the trash-heap ground. It surrounds me on all sides, replacing even the sky. The surface seems to be repeating itself, but with every spin it shifts slightly, like the picture in a flip book. All I feel is the spinning of my head and the dizzy sickness in my gut and most of all the tiny scraps of broken metal that start to peek out from the junk between rotations, digging into me from all sides. It’s the jagged gash on my arm over and over and over again. I’m being ground up in a blender, and I’m certain I’ll be ripped apart scrape by shallow scrape…

…until it suddenly stops, and I crash into the spiky surface one last time. A blast of red light briefly fills the dark. There’s a high-pitched hiss in Irakkia’s voice before I feel it drawing away in my soul-sense. My magic hasn’t gone anywhere, but my failing strength feels almost entirely lost, leaking out through the tiny biting gashes all over my body. It’s all I can do to crawl away from the rough ground. 

“Hey! Hey, are you alright?” Shona’s voice asks. Through still-spinning vision, I can just see her in front of me, offering her hand.

In answer, I just turn my head and retch. Bile burns in my mouth. 

“Uh, yeah. Sorry,” she mutters.  “We came fast as we could when we heard…” Heard what? Me, I guess. My throat hurts as much as everything else.

I just sit there as my head slowly, slowly stops spinning. When I think I can see again, I look back over my shoulder. The slope I was falling from runs sharply down from my former perch above, but at the end, it’s stopped being a slope at all — spiraled around itself and formed a not-quite-complete circle, which Irakkia was somehow rolling in place like a pipe, and me inside along with it, apparently? 

Beyond that, we’re on a wide, roughly-even stretch of ground. It slants uphill in one direction, where it connects to the winding wall that serves as a mountain road, but tall junk-heap hills surround us on every other side. A few thin bits of wire follow me around in the corner of my eye, until I notice that they’re tangled up with my hair and pluck them out. The sting of a few strands being torn away with them barely registers. 

“Okay, I think we’re clear for now,” Mide adds. She winces when she sees me, quickly looking away to keep watch on the Wound. “It ran off when we got here. What’s next?”

“We’ve got everyone now, right?” Shona says, looking down at me uncertainly. I take Shona’s hand and let her pull me upright. She nods, satisfied, even as I prop myself up on the relatively smooth side of the little looping tunnel I’d been knocked around in. I’ve never wanted my cane more. It’s painful to move, even to breathe. I’ll have to make sure I’m breathing normally anyway — there are complications you can prevent that way. At least I already know how to live while everything hurts.

“So let’s go kill it! It doesn’t seem to like fighting us all at once,” she continues.

…I may still have to handle the planning. I hope I can do that, because it’s all I might be up to — it’s hard enough to keep my head working, and I still don’t know what anything Irakkia’s saying means. 

But when I think about it, there is something strange about the way it’s acting. If it just wanted to split us up and eat us one at a time, it should’ve hunted me down while I was stumbling through the maze. Maybe it wanted to figure out what I could do before it struck, but it had plenty of time to probe. It had me at its mercy again a moment ago, but it left me spinning long enough for help to arrive. Why? 

Is killing us actually its goal?

As far as I know, it’s actually rare for a Harbinger to just devour people whole or suck out their souls and leave an empty husk behind. They destroy their victims creatively, with their own uniquely horrid curses. What if that’s the important part of what they do? How a Harbinger hurts people might matter more than how many it hurts or even how much they’re hurt. Yurfaln had its wasting sickness, Irakkia has… the sky, the lighthouses, whatever those dream-scraps it vomits onto our souls are meant to do. Messing with our heads. Maybe it doesn’t want to kill us as much as it wants us so lost in our own thoughts, or its, that we can’t imagine ever having been anywhere else. 

I haven’t exactly cracked its puzzle and found its weakness, but I’m… getting used to its approach. I can handle it, at least mentally. I hope they can too.

But none of this tells us how to win, just how to survive. “Has it… showed you anything? Said anything to you?” I ask. They’ve been through the Wound too. Maybe they have more of the pieces.

“Said? What are you talking about? It’s a Harbinger!” Mide yells over the background noise.

“Not in words, exactly, in… nevermind.” That’s a no. Is it strange to hear words from Harbingers? Not important right now. “Okay, I, before it dropped me here… I think there’s something going on with those towers up top, the lighthouses. They’re part of it, or it uses them for something. Maybe we could do something if we got there, but…”

“Oh yeah?” Shona asks. “Sure, let’s find out! Cover me!” She grins and puts her bow to her violin, playing the first notes of a new melody. It’s equally painful, but even with my limited knowledge of music, I can tell that it’s not unskilled random noise — she’s playing well, just in some death metal style I’d never willingly listen to. Mide stands right by her side, shield at the ready. 

Shona’s magic gathers in her storm clouds as she plays, spreading out through Irakkia’s miasma like a flare in the fog. Her music rises in speed and intensity in time with her gathering strength. To my soul-sense, her power feels like an unsettling tremor, a series of tiny shocks that runs through my brain and briefly short-circuit my thoughts. Soon I’m so steeped in it that it’s hard to sense anything else. 

But I see the Screaming Hymn’s soul clearly, and I see now that it isn’t just anger in her music. That’s definitely still there, but there’s a strangely bright note running through it. Shona is… it feels like she’s not just venting her rage on the Harbinger, she’s pouring her soul into her art, and she’s glad for the chance to do it. It’s both things at the same time, impossible to untangle one from the other.

The electric weight in the air lifts, and I cover my ears, hoping to dim the coming noise. Mide does not. Finally, in the exact instant Shona plays the last notes of her song, four bolts of lightning lash out from the sky, wind together into a great spiral drill, and crash into the closest lighthouse. The thunder is louder than ever, snubbing my feeble try at blocking it out, and this time it’s joined by an avalanche of broken stone and falling trash. The tower topples, smashed at its base in a flash of impossible force. The ground beneath us rumbles violently as the lighthouse’s upper half falls over onto the mountain’s side. Its wreckage knocks several pieces of castle loose before it all goes crashing into the sea.

And the brilliant static lantern falls with it. The Wound bends and tears around the point where the orb meets the sea, flickering like jagged interference on a TV screen. The distortion spikes toward the mountain, covering a wide stretch of it in a wave of blurring haze. 

The lantern doesn’t sink, but dissolves, spreading out over the water’s surface until there’s nothing left of it. When it’s gone, the interference dies down, but doesn’t quite vanish. Scattered around the now-darkened side of the castle, chunks of debris and even a few still-standing buildings are slowly being replaced by patches of grainy visual noise, which scatter in a nonexistent breeze once they’ve swallowed the material entirely. Bits of static start to blanket the dark side of the mountain like snow.

We stare out at the destruction in stunned silence, until… Shona breaks into a fit of delighted belly laughter. “Wow, I just, I… good call, Eyna!” she forces out between bursts of helpless cackling. “Who knew it was gonna be so fucking EASY? How ‘bout that! Hey! Harbinger! What’ve you got to say about that? Anything? The set’s just getting started, so COME ON OUT! JOIN THE SHOW!” With that, she raises her bow and begins another loud, heavy song.

I think she might be having fun. 

It’s terrifying. Mide may even agree, by her shaky smile and lowered gaze. Yes, we’re winning, but… when I first felt the flow of my magic, I remember wondering if I could get lost in it, wash myself away in the flood. I didn’t know just what that would mean. Maybe I do now. 

But only a few seconds into the performance, a new sound howls through the Wound, the endless unsteady wail of a broken storm siren pitching constantly higher and lower. Just ahead, a bright thin shape like a white shadow comes into view, darting along the dark ground in a wide zigzag pattern for barely a second before Irakkia springs out of it, tightly wound around itself. 

Three of its limbs strike out at Shona as it uncoils. Mide is just quick enough to push her out of the way, cutting the song short. Claws meant for Shona lash right into Mide’s chestplate with enough force to bowl her over, launching her flat onto her back. It swiftly goes for the kill, but when its glass beak meets Mide’s hastily-raised shield, it leaves her and throws itself at Shona, who’s now wielding her electrified bow as a desperate defensive weapon.

The brawl quickly becomes too fast and chaotic for me to follow. I can’t actually fight, not the way these girls can. My legs are still barely holding me up. What do I do here? I still feel the seeds I’ve planted in the Wound, but they’re distant, buried somewhere inside the mountain-castle — no, actually, when I look at my spread they’ve somehow moved even farther away, to the far end of one arm of the spiral. I could start again, but my magic is so slow next to anything happening here, and I don’t even know if other Keepers are immune just because I don’t want to infect them. Without some way to make my curse really hurt, to corrupt Irakkia or turn its world against itself, I’m— 

My breath flees my lungs in a hiss. Blood seeps down my back, hot and wet and sticky. Something sharp pierces my chest, stopping just short of skewering me. There’s a strange delay before a sudden burning heat screams out from it. The burning gives way to raw, cold agony, and then I stop feeling anything at all, leaving just a vague awareness of muffled sounds and motion. A blurred golden figure that must be Mide rushes into view, standing over me.

…All my dumb ideas and theories and it turns out killing us will still do in a pinch. What a stupid thought to die on. 

How am I even still thinking? Still conscious? 

No, no, of course I am. I can’t… I’m not going to die. I won’t. Whatever’s happened to the useless shell that carries me around didn’t happen to me. The real me is still here. My soul is strong where my body is weak —  stronger, even, flush with Yurfaln’s stolen power, and I will never die.

Shimmering green wisps of my mist snake out from my broken body, latch their lamprey grips onto Mide’s essence, and start to drink.

I unsteadily pick myself up and point to the observation deck where the sky smashed open. The cracks are still there, but whatever I saw as the Harbinger broke through is either gone or not visible from here. “There. That tower. We should go,” I croak. 

Shona’s face hardens. She stands, roughly pulling me to my feet by one arm, then cups her mouth and belts into the city: “HEY! HARBINGER ATTACK AT SKY’S END TOWER! CLEAR OUT!” 

All along the streets, passersby turn to look where I’m pointing, then bolt in opposite directions as fast as their legs can carry them. A few with small children hastily scoop them up and carry them away. Cars turn at the first opportunity and disappear down other roads. Before long, the way ahead is eerily empty.

“Shit, okay. I’m sorry about this, but every second counts,” Shona says, and whistles a few notes that sound louder and shriller than anything a person could actually whistle. Crimson sparks dance over her body, then leap as one into her hand. 

“Eh, what are— oww!” Before I can protest, she grabs my shoulder, sending an electric bite snapping through me. My feet shift smoothly across the pavement as I flinch and pull out of her grip, but when I right my posture to steady myself, I… keep moving backwards, slipping right along the sidewalk. I yip in surprise and grab hold of Shona’s outreached hand, the closest anchor I can find. “What did you do?!”

“Don’t worry, this’ll be easy!” Shona says, smiling a big stupid grin as she shakes my hand up and down with glee. “You ever gone skating before?” 

“What? No!” When I still lived in our house, Dad occasionally waxed the hardwood floors. After he finished, I’d put on my wool socks and glide around the living room until I fell over or crashed into a table. At that point it stopped being fun, but long enough would pass before the next waxing for it to seem like a good idea again. So the cycle repeated and repeated until I left home. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to this, and the effect is much stronger here. I don’t think I would ever stop moving if Shona weren’t still clinging to me.

“…It’ll be easy,” she repeats. Who does she think she’s convincing? It’s not me.

“H-how do I stop? Crash into something?” 

“Nah, all I did was take friction away from your feet. Anything else works fine as a brake!” Shona summons her violin bow in a burst of tiny fireworks, then wedges it into the corner where street meets sidewalk, holding us in place. “Like this! Just use your weapon to… oh. Right. Hm,” she says, grimacing.

“I’ve got her,” Mide says. “Take my hand and hold on, Eyna. I’ll try to make this gentler than she would.”

~~~

Apparently, that’s still not very gentle. 

We race down the sidewalks at the pace of speeding cars, past the few people who haven’t already cleared away at Shona’s announcement. Rather, Shona and Mide do. I just hold on and do my best not to think about what happens if I lose my grip, go flying off into the city at full impossible speed, and smash into something like a human car wreck. My best clearly isn’t very much.

The whole process is terrifying, but turns are the worst part. Whenever we need to change course, Mide slams her spear to the ground, where it grinds against the surface and leaves a thin fissure in the pavement. Once we’ve slowed down at least a little, she glides forward, spinning in a quarter-circle around it, then digs the tip a little deeper into the ground and, using it like a ski pole, shifts her facing and pushes off in the new direction. Yanking me along with her, always with a sharp tug of my arm before I’m following behind her again.

“Are you doing alright back there?” Mide asks after one of those turns. She doesn’t raise her voice, but I hear her just fine. I’d have expected wind rushing in my ears, the way it does in a car with the window open.

“It’s quiet,” I mutter. 

“Ah. Yeah, I think that’s her messing around with air resistance without knowing what it is,” Mide says.

“It’s MAGIC is what it is! Duh!” Shona shouts, looking back over her shoulder without slowing down at all. For her part, Shona doesn’t bother using a brake — she just adjusts the effect on the fly, slowing and speeding up however she needs to without any clear action. From the way she handles herself, she might as well be figure skating, except figure skaters usually can’t decide whether physics applies to them between one instant and the next.

“And the Harbinger?” Mide asks.

“Still watching, I think. Feels awful.” Its invisible eyes have never left me for more than a few moments, and its distant shriek still echoes through my soul.

“Good thing we’re here, then! Any second now!” Shona laughs. Even I can hear the nervousness in her voice.

I’m still lightheaded when we reach the tower, and I can’t tell whether it’s more the Harbinger’s lingering gaze or being hauled along the slippery streets like luggage. As the entryway comes into view, Mide grabs a lamppost and braces herself on it with one foot, then spins me around to one side and holds tight until I jolt to a halt. A second later, the ground starts to feel stable again. 

Ahead of us, Shona comes to an instant clean stop. “Stand aside, everyone!” she calls to the crowd in front. “The Screaming Hymn is here to silence evil’s dirge!” 

I blink twice. Do people really do that? I won’t do it. They can’t make me.

“She’s, ah, still workshopping that one,” Mide whispers. She shakes her head, smiling very slightly.

People are already filing out through the main entrance when we arrive. To my surprise, filing is actually what most of them are doing, even before Shona announces our arrival. Standard emergency response advice for these situations calls for leaving buildings “in an orderly fashion,” of course, but I always wondered if anyone faced with a Harbinger actually kept it together enough to do that. Since meeting one, I expected more than ever that they wouldn’t. But then, most of these people probably weren’t on the main deck when the Wound opened. They’d just have heard the alert — or the screams — and ran for it. 

As the crowd parts down the middle for us, I pause and inspect their souls. Despite the circumstances, everyone here feels the gentle, faintly soothing way healthy people seem to, and there’s no stench of corruption anywhere among them. I could borrow their strength, if I want. Just a little taste, just enough to keep myself from passing out in a fight for my life… 

“Hey, are you alright? Come on!” Shona yells, waiting just inside the front door.

No. No. The Harbinger isn’t moving right now, but they’re still too close to be safe, and I still don’t know what my magic actually does to normal people. I can’t risk making this any worse. I don’t feel ready to fight anything, but… there’s a Wound in the middle of the city. I can’t just leave it alone. I’ll have to manage. Somehow.

Inside the tower is all sleek white surfaces and smooth rounded curves, save for the two big indoor garden plots on opposite walls. It’s nearly as empty as the streets, clear save for a few stragglers still filtering out through the emergency exits. Only the weight of the Harbinger’s presence warns of what’s happening here. It intensifies as we board the transparent elevator to the top, until by the time it opens again I’m sure I can actually see those tiny invisible eyes, like something behind me reflected in the glass.

We ride in tense silence, with only nervous glances passing between us. As the elevator starts to slow, I can just make out human voices coming from above. Mide raises her shield in a defensive stance and prepares to lead the way out. She charges out as soon as the doors open, and Shona is quick to follow.

Both falter when the muffled sounds become a constant din of pain and terror. 

The top floor is a wide open glass box. Two revolving doors lead onto the observation deck, and there are stairs up to a second indoor level in one corner. The room is filled with the rasping of people who must have screamed until they couldn’t anymore, but they’re still trying with everything they have, pausing only to gasp for air. Other voices are mumbling to themselves — they’re speaking phrases, forming sentences, but I can’t pull any clear words out from the noise. My instincts say to shut them out, like I’ve caught a fleeting glimpse of some horrific picture for just long enough to know that I never want to see it again.

But I can’t, any more than I can turn away from the scene around us. 

People are scattered all around the area, collapsed on the ground or curled into themselves. All of them are covering their faces in some way — they’ve buried their heads in cushioned chairs, folded their arms and laid between them on the ground, or just clamped their hands over their eyes. A girl’s fingernails are scraping into the skin of her forehead between hoarse cries. All are squirming and shivering in time with their pained noises, save for one man out on the deck. He’s… I hope he’s unconscious, but can’t be sure from here. 

I scan the room, counting six of them in total, and swallow heavily. That makes at least eleven our enemy has touched, maybe more hiding somewhere I can’t see. Or already inside the Wound.

I don’t know what that means for it or us, only that I no longer have any idea what to expect.

“Keepers? Are you Keepers? I… Oh, thank the Goddess, please, please, I…” A hushed voice calls out as the elevator closes, quivering and breaking mid-sentence.

“Eh?!” I yelp. Mide whirls to face the sound’s source, placing herself between it and Shona… but it’s just a person, a head peeking out from behind a column. A woman, her eyes bleary and swollen with tears. She’s not acting like the others, and I don’t smell any corruption on her… what is she still doing here? 

“That’s right. It’s gonna be okay now,” Shona says, very slowly. She sounds like a different person without that constant exhilarated energy in her voice. “The way out’s all clear. You can take the elevator. Go!”

“No!” she cries out. “I can’t, my son, he’s…” She points out through the glass walls. A little boy is sitting at the far end of the deck, hugging his knees to himself. “I can’t, can’t just leave him here!”

“Okay… okay, ” Mide says. “We’ll get him back for you. Just wait there and stay quiet, okay?”

“Yes! Thank you, thank—” 

“Shhh,” Mide hisses. At that, the woman clamps her mouth shut and ducks back behind the pillar. 

Mide starts toward the deck without another word, not even a look our way, and Shona quickly joins her. We’re doing this, then. As for me, my thoughts are just swimming with questions. Thing after thing that could go wrong here pops into my mind, and I’m coming up blank on solutions. Can any of us even lift a kid and run off with him? He looks a lot younger than us, but he’s not tiny, maybe seven or eight. What do we do if he doesn’t want help, if he lashes out at us? If the Harbinger doesn’t want to let him go?

“So. Here’s what we do,” Shona says. She stares straight out at the deck as she talks. Keeping her eyes off the victims. Meanwhile, Mide’s gaze constantly darts around the room, searching for any sudden movements or new threats. “If I charge Mide up a bit, she can carry him away no problem! Right in, right out, then we get back to the main event.”

That’s one question answered, but not one of the hard ones. “What about it?”

Shona still doesn’t turn around, but she does break her stride. “We’ll just have to be quick about this. It’s not doing anything more right now, yeah?” 

Above the deck, the sky outside is torn open to form a portal. I can’t tell what the Wound itself looks like. It’s not that the sight of it is too awful to bear — my line of sight just twists around it, passing directly from one edge of the tear to the other whenever I glance its way. No matter where I look, I only see strange-colored auroras dancing around the Wound in the corner of my eye.

“It’s a Harbinger. We have no idea what it’s doing or not,” I say.

Shona takes a playing stance, and her violin forms itself in her grip. For a few happy seconds, the snapping of her sparks rises over the awful noise in the air. “I know that,” she sighs, “but all we can do is be careful ‘til it makes a move. Unless you’re feeling anything else?”

When I try to inspect the Wound, my awareness slides over it in the same way my eyes do. Nothing else in the miasma feels active or alive. If I had to guess, the gate’s creator is somewhere inside, but my best guess isn’t good enough. Maybe it can bend perception around itself, too, and in that case it could be anywhere doing anything. I really shouldn’t get lost in worrying about every possible trick it might have, but I don’t think I can stop myself. 

“Nothing yet, no,” I say.

“Then we should get to it before that changes,” Shona says. “We’ll handle getting in and getting the kid out. You just watch and keep your spooky-senses trained on the Wound, kay?”

Mide glances back over her shoulder. The two exchange a quick nod before she raises her shield, braces her spear, and leads the way out. I call my cards into being and wordlessly follow Shona through the revolving door.

Outside, the Wound casts a wide shadow. The jagged hole in the sky is surrounded on all sides by shifting, fluttering lines. The auroras dancing around it block the sun’s rays as if they were solid objects, like long flags or cloth streamers. 

The sky deck itself is positioned for panoramic views of the city to the right and the sea to the left — even from here, there’s no visible trace of land on the eastern horizon. The platform is a wide triangle, fenced in on all sides by glass barriers more than twice my height, and set into the center of its floor is a giant circular window. It would look like the deck was built with a big hole in the floor, if it weren’t for the unearthly colors reflected in the glass. 

Actually… can I see the portal itself this way? I think I can. My eyes don’t bend around it, and at the window’s center there’s a blur of colorful little dots like static snow on a broken TV.

The kid we’re looking for is huddled in the far corner, almost directly on the other side of the Wound from us. Counting him and the unconscious man, there are three victims out here. I’m immediately glad for the walls, since the last one is a frizzy-haired girl in a plaid school uniform trying in vain to climb over the glass.

I wonder why we’re stopping to rescue one and only one of them, not even the one who looks to be in the worst state, but the others have made their plan and the Harbinger won’t wait forever. It might not wait at all.

It isn’t any quieter outside, though the noise is very different. There are still a few people crying out hoarsely or muttering to themselves, but they’re mostly muffled by the sounds of the Wound itself. Electrical noise blares out through the portal, a crackling undercurrent interrupted at random intervals by high-pitched howls, sequences of beeps just regular enough to sound like something is tapping out a secret message, and… words? Yes, at least a few spoken words. Buried deep in the rest of the noise, but not Clarish words, not any words a human tongue could form. The distorted voice of a demon behind radio speakers. I feel them more than I hear them, and they feel… confused.

Mide stares out at the scene for a long moment. “Here we go,” she finally says, looking back at us. “Ready?” She holds her fighting stance all the while, tension in every muscle. She’d be the picture of heroic resolve if she weren’t chewing, very slowly, on her lower lip.

“Ready,” Shona answers, grinning madly.

“Go ahead,” I say. “Um, nothing from the spooky-senses yet.”

With that, Shona raises her bow and adds her own electric noise to the mix. It’s the sort of music I hate, a distorted, frantic melody, angry in a way that transcends the sound itself. Her song pushes the emotions behind it directly into my mind, like Harbingers’ speech but much easier to read. One note sings above all others.

Rage. Barely-suppressed, boiling rage, now free to let loose upon something monstrous.

Bolts of power arc out from Shona’s violin and into Mide. Magic gathers around her, casting its light over her, but the way the glow plays on her golden armor is strange. Rather than forming a solid aura and radiating out from her like a lantern, it looks like it comes from a spotlight that only shines on her. Then, with Shona’s song still ringing out, Mide takes a deep breath, bends her knees, and dashes off with sudden impossible speed. The light’s invisible source follows her movements as she runs along the platform’s outer edges where the Wound doesn’t quite reach. It’s not just that she’s fast — she’s moving more than her actual motion should allow, simultaneously running and sliding along the floor.

After a sharp turn at the left corner, Mide takes a last quick look up at the Wound, then dismisses her weapons and bolts toward the boy in the far corner. His face is still buried in his knees, and he doesn’t react at all until she comes to a clean stop, wraps her arms around him, and scoops him up with ease. He thrashes wildly as she squeezes him close, bursting into a fit of desperate shrieking so loud it would be almost unbearable… if it weren’t just one more voice added to the competing clamors of harsh music and pained groans and electrical distortions. His few clear words are worse than the sound itself: “No, wait, it’s all too… stop it! STOP! I DON’T WANNA SEE ANYMORE!” 

Mide traces the same path backwards, not at all slowed down by her new burden. He flails and pushes against her all the while, but her grip barely budges. In the end, she’s there and back in a little over ten seconds. Nothing I can detect changes around the portal. These girls clearly have this more figured out than me… not that that’s saying much. I have no idea what I can do here that would matter. The Harbinger probably won’t lash out outside its Wound, but if it did, what would I do about it? Cover the deck in death-mist that might just kill all the victims?

Mide pushes back through the revolving door. As it starts to move, I catch the boy’s gaze over her shoulder.

Or I would have, if he still had eyes. Instead I’m staring into two unblinking circles of colorful static exactly like the reflection beneath the Wound’s maw. 

Time seems to freeze, slamming to a halt rather than slowing to a crawl. 

Something inhuman glares back at me through those windows.

The world shatters. 

In an instant, everything in sight cracks. There’s no sense of impact, no sign that any of it is actually broken — instead, I’m seeing things through lenses covered in fractures, lines that move around with my vision wherever I look. Light pours through the crevices, filling the air until it’s all that I can see. Shutting my eyes doesn’t dim it at all. I bury my face in my arm, eyes still burning. 

“What? Fuck, wait a—” Shona’s voice starts to call out, then is silenced. 

The harsh glare leaking through my sleeve slowly shifts in hue, then dims. Only when the backs of my eyelids turn black again do I peek out at my surroundings… it’s dark here, too dark to see anything clearly, but I already know that I’ve left the world.

~~~ 

I don’t fall into the Wound this time. It doesn’t feel like I’ve moved at all, and the Harbinger makes no attempt to push me out. 

It’s pitch-dark here. The only light anywhere comes from the one card glowing sickly green with my magic, and that’s not nearly enough to see by. Electrical hisses and whines blanket the world so completely that the sounds seep into my body, and their buzzing sets me shivering down to my bones. 

“Hey… Shona? Mide? Hey! Where are you?”

No one answers, not even an echo. I can’t sense them either. Once again, I’m alone.

What’s the very first thing I remember? 

I think it’s the time I first heard thunder and thought the world was ending, but… what? Where did that thought even come from? Not from me. It took a moment to recognize, but— 

<it is NOT you are NOT what is Tн乇 𝔽𝓲ŕˢţ 丅н𝓲𝓃Ꮆ you ⛯ 🖸 ☳ 🖸 ☌☳ 🖸 ⛯>

<LOOK TO THE SKY>

Words-that-are-not-words buzz in my skull. Light floods the world. I’m outside, suddenly staring up into a wide open expanse that is absolutely not the sky. 

What is it? It looks more like television static than anything else, monochrome dots and thin many-colored waves all bouncing off each other, but that’s not quite right. This is too… patterned. I don’t know what the pattern is, just that there are too many beginnings of images or shapes for it to be random nonsense. Sometimes the dots and lines start to come together into something more. Sometimes parts of the field go black, forming dark outlines like shadow-puppets. They’re only ever faint hints of a complete picture — every time I start to think I’ve found something clear, it’s immediately scattered into nothing by jagged waves of interference.

<DO YOU WISH TO SEE THINGS THE WAY THEY SHOULD BE?>

<SHATTER THE WINDOWS AND SHRED THE VEILS AND SHED THE SKIN WHICH IS ONLY AN ANCHOR>

Muscles all around my body shiver and twitch for an instant. Those words jab at something ugly and nameless in my heart, but… wait. How long have I been here? What is here? Why am I still trying to see through these patterns before I know where I am or where the Harbinger is or if there’s even really anything to see? I wrench my gaze from the Wound’s sky, ignoring the part of me that can’t bear to leave a frustrating puzzle unsolved.

I’m on a crumbling balcony which drops off just ahead. Two steps forward would’ve sent me plunging into the water far, far below. Beyond that, a murky grey ocean stretches out until it meets the distant horizon. The line where it touches the static field spikes wildly with visual distortions, like the sky is attacking the sea.

There’s a sudden sense of vertigo as I turn around. The Wound has moved me again. Now I’m on a long dock which twists as dark waves lap up its sides. At the end is… a bizarre parody of a massive castle. That’s the clearest way I can comprehend it. 

Collapsing walls surround a mountain of stairs and long ramps and additional fortified walls curving around each other. Patches of open wall expose rooms inside the great creaking monument like cave hollows. Several inexplicable extensions, gnarled towers and strangely-shaped blocky structures jut out from the mass. The entire thing is made from grey rubble, rocks and dust and broken pillars packed together. It looks like it was built by taking a city’s worth of ugly pre-war concrete buildings, breaking them into chunks, and squishing them back into a new shape, which it’s somehow holding against all odds.

Three towers near the top end in lighthouse lantern rooms, but with bright blurs of static replacing actual lamps. They cover the whole world in pale blue light, lending everything the tint of a dark room lit only by a screen.

“Mide? Shona? Anyone?” I try again. Nothing. No signs of the Harbinger either, but… what could be taking them so long? 

I take a few hesitant steps ahead. I still don’t know what this place is or how to handle it, but whatever’s keeping the others, I know the Harbinger is paying attention to me. Standing here and letting it throw me around however it likes seems bad. I’ll figure something out if I see more of it. 

Where the dock meets the massive patch of garbage which passes for an island in this place, a staircase opens onto a messy courtyard, filled with tall piles of junk and the hollowed-out wrecks of small, box-shaped buildings. A steep path winds through the ruins toward the castle. Here and there, bright cloth curtains hang over walls or entryways.

The noise in the air gets louder as I approach the castle. It’s not the only noise, though. Around a corner, something in the wreckage pricks at my ears. A voice. I can’t hear it clearly over the interference, but behind a curtain draped over the entrance to one of the more intact buildings, there’s definitely a human voice speaking human language. Not one I recognize… maybe there really are victims inside the Wound? I quickly scan my surroundings one more time. When neither my eyes nor my sense for magic find any signs of the Harbinger, I tighten my grip on my card, creep up to the doorway, and push through the veil.

It’s hard to see inside, but faint light filters in through the cracked roof. I pull back the curtain to brighten the room, exposing nothing at all. Just a dusty speaker spouting hushed words, like a recording of the victims outside.

Useless. Not even an ambush, just more of the madness that fills this Wound. Groaning, I go back…

…outside?

No. I’m inside again — not plunged back into complete blackness, but the space is only dimly lit with pale electronic screen-light, like a TV in a dark room. The sudden shift leaves me feeling dizzy and disconnected from myself… in fact, I’m only dimly aware of my own body. I know it’s there, but it feels less like me and more like a puppet I can move and vaguely sense the position of.

Five snowy TV screens arranged in a single long line fill my vision no matter where I try to look. After a moment, they resolve into pictures clear enough to see. They’re fuzzy security-camera images of me from all angles, standing in a round room lined with dark, twisting passages. I try to move, and while I still don’t feel anything, the me on the screens takes an unbalanced step forward. Some of the images move slower or faster than others, and they all blur and tear in slightly different places with my motion.

<this is WRONG this is BROKEN this OUGHT NOT BE HERE>

The noise in the air narrows and focuses itself to a single point — in my ears, inside my skull. It’s not like when Vyuji talks to me without sound — her speech comes with a clear sense of her presence, and this feels like the Harbinger is trying to tangle its words up with my own mental voice. But even at this distance from myself and my own head, with this bizarre out-of-body filter thrown over my perception, there’s no way I could mistake these for intrusive thoughts. The phrases themselves feel more complex than Yurfaln’s childish speech, and while some part of me can still translate the intent behind them, what they seem to be saying doesn’t make any sense.

<TO OPEN THE WORLD YOU MUST OPEN THE SELF AND LOOK INSIDE>

The ambient sounds rise to a painful level, becoming less like white noise and more like the whining of a dentist’s drill. Jagged fragments of an ugly dream overwhelm my senses. It’s a nightmare of drowning in an endless murky sea. My body thrashes uselessly, kicking against nothing as if it can somehow run to the surface, but of course I only sink and sink as the sea floods into me. Fear for my life gives way to dazed emptiness, and as it does, I somehow start to breathe through the cold weight in my lungs. Soon I can’t imagine ever having inhaled anything but dirty water, and I look away in horror whenever I spot distant sunbeams from above or bright lights in the gloom. 

No.

No.

No.

Not real. None of it is real, especially not these broken emotions. It’s all just a monster pushing its delusions onto me. 

I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood and cling to the sharp, painful pressure as an anchor. I’m still here. I’m still real. I am. Holding those thoughts close, I start to shake the torrent of madness off. 

Not that returning to the sight of myself through camera screens feels much better.

<YOU CAN ONLY SEE WITHOUT EYES>

On the monitors, an angry flickering distortion scratches itself into being. Curling, flashing white lines like old film grain spread outwards in a spiral, tracing round and round like a child’s scribble until they blot out the scene entirely, then quickly reverse like a whirlpool of raggy threads swirling down a drain. It all folds back into the same point… and when the scene is clear again, a living nightmare looms over me. 

The Harbinger is a tangled spiral of cloth veils in a garish twister of colors, all spinning and spinning around each other like they’re blowing about in a tornado. Space distorts in the wake of the veils as they whirl, sometimes trailing colored afterimages and sometimes making the air waver like a heat haze, creating a sickening visual blur that leaves it unclear if there’s a central mass to its body at all. Long, thin limbs stretch out from the funnel in every direction, each bending around it at many, many different joints, all ending in clawed hands. Above those, on a neck that’s just another one of its spindly limbs, is an orb of hazy white glass shaped roughly like a head. Its only facial features are three bulging eyes, each filled with different abstract kaleidoscope patterns, and a long, jagged beak. Two thin strips of fabric spiral off into the rough outlines of horns from its head. For the first time, I pull some scrap of understanding from its nonsense noise:

<₮卄ᵉ ᗯ𝕠ŘℓＤ Is Not The World>
<Irakkia>

I still can’t sense my body trembling or my heart pounding, even as I will myself to back away from the thing with halting, unsteady steps. Only my magic reacts. Raw terror surges through my soul’s wellspring and spills over me, washing away anything else I might call to the surface. 

But maybe that’s enough. There’s one thing I know I can do. I’ve done it once before now. If I can just…

I can. All it takes is the slightest mental push to send my magic to work.

Just like last time, my cards rise from their orbit and arrange themselves into a bizarre spread — I can’t see the exact shape from this perspective, and I’m not sure it would make sense if I could. Icy emerald mist seeps into the Wound, not emerging from me or the cards, but seeping through cracks in the walls. 

My magic casts just enough eerie light to illuminate the room… which isn’t a room, but a tunnel whose surfaces are all made from tightly-packed wreckage, like an anthill dug into a massive pile of junk. Scrap metal, shattered furniture, radios jutting from the pile sputtering gibberish, broken TV screens mirroring the static sky outside, appliances I don’t recognize and can’t imagine a function for, all of it somehow piled into a stable structure. As my fog spreads, things change — green shadows crawl over the screens, smothering their pale glow, and the radio voices choke and die, leaving only faint whispers of labored breathing.

The Harbinger — Irakkia — swivels in a full circle, surveying the tunnel, then twirls itself into a thin shape and leaps up, leaving behind a trail of visual static as it burrows and wriggles straight into the ceiling. As soon as it’s gone, the grainy screens vanish and drop me back into my own skin. Motion sickness and blood-racing panic slam into me all at once, forcing me to fall to my knees and breathe deeply until my head stops whirling. To me, the death-mist gathering in the chamber only feels like a numbing chill in the air – familiar and almost pleasant when my body is already running hot. 

This was only my first strike, though. A way of feeling the Wound out. It’d be a mistake to think I’m winning just because Irakkia didn’t throw itself straight into my corruption like Yurfaln — that just means it’s not actively trying to kill itself. It’s a bigger monster that’s been around for longer. It’ll warp its world back and find another way to come after me.

I just hope those girls get here soon.

There’s a pressure in the air inside the Soul Sanctuary. It’s nothing harsh or really heavy, just… strange. It’s a faint phantom sensation of something like being underwater, if water only weighed a tiny bit more than air, and comes with the same muffled sound of blood flowing through my head.  Shona marches right on ahead, paying it no mind at all. Mide follows after a brief glance back at me. It takes a little longer to get used to the atmosphere enough to join them. 

Looking around the reception room only strengthens that feeling. The space is almost entirely colored in pale shades of blue — the white of the front desk is tinged faintly blue, and beyond that are speckled blue-grey floor tiles, a waiting room lined with plush blue chairs, walls decorated here and there with stained-glass windows backlit by soft blue light. The door at the end of the waiting room isn’t barred or gated or anything, not physically, but it’s bright like window glare to my new senses. I have a faint hunch that I might not want to touch it.

“…Yeah, if there’s any way you can swing it, just a minute to check up on them might really help us a lot!” By the time I’ve found my bearings, Shona has already approached the front desk and started pressing the older woman staffing it on the latest victims. I can’t hear her side of the conversation, but through the thick glasses that nearly obscure her eyes, she looks perfectly used to this. Groups of Keepers storming in and asking weird questions must just be a day’s work here. Eventually, they both go quiet, leaving the clacking of the receptionist’s keyboard as the only sound. While she does something on her cnidarian drive, Shona fidgets in place, rhythmically bouncing in tiny little hops on one single leg, then the other. Mide is off to the side looking at the windows, and at the moment, the lobby is eerily vacant except for us.

“Thank you so much! Yep yep, we’ll do our best, you take care too!” Shona gives the receptionist an appreciative two-finger salute before twirling around to face us. “Okay, everyone, I’ve got good news! Over here!” she calls out into the little room at her usual volume. “I mean, uh, it’s not good that any of this happened, but good news as far as us finding the… you know what, you know what I mean. The kids, ah… it sounds like they’re not corrupted in any way that’d make it bad to be around them, at least. They’ll have someone out to see us about them in just a bit.”

“Do we want to be around them?” Mide asks. “They’ve got to be having a hard time, and it’s not like we can help.”

“Um, probably not. Like we were saying, I don’t think we have to actually bother them. Just, y’know, get close enough to see what’s going on. If Eyna can get the thing’s scent, that’s all we need… no pressure, though,” Shona says. She shrugs apologetically, then strolls over to the big blue chairs and flops into one. “Oh wow, these seats are like the softest thing in the UNIVERSE! It’s wild! You gotta try them!”

Brushing aside the question of how she’s staying so upbeat in a place like this, on our way to hunt a screaming beast of nightmare, the chairs are in fact pretty comfy.

“So,” I say, a minute into the wait. Shona stops snuggling into her fluffy cushion and looks my way. Mide was already watching me with narrow eyes over tight lips, and her expression doesn’t change now. “Have you two done this much before? How does it go? Exactly how bad will it be in there?”

“Well, uh, strictly speaking, this may not quiiite be a field where we’ve got a ton of…” Shona says, trailing off into nothing mid-sentence.

“It’s our first time too. We’ve never really needed to deal with victims at all. Actually, you’ve probably come closer than we have,” Mide finishes. Shona looks over at her and frowns for a moment, then quickly shrugs it off.

“Have I?”

“Well, the report. You called in for that family. How were they doing?” Mide asks.

“Um, I was mostly focused on the Harbinger? But it was pretty bad. Not as bad as it could be, obviously.  I’m not sure what to compare it to… oh, don’t they still have that runaway from Commixture in here somewhere? Not that bad,” I say.

Uneasy silence hangs in the air as the two stare at me speechlessly.

“…For what it’s worth,” I add after a beat. 

“Urgh… I don’t know if we quite needed to go there, but, uh, yeah, guess you answered your own question! There’s probably not a lot of sunshine and puppies waiting for us inside!” Shona laughs nervously.

Mide, meanwhile, maintains a completely flat, stiff expression.

“Right. Stupid question,” I mumble. Why did I go there? There has to be some less extreme point on the scale I could’ve thought of. Maybe I only deal in worst-case scenarios.

Well, anyway, I started a conversation. I have now officially done my part to make friends and work together. If this doesn’t work out, it’s no longer on my shoulders. Good job, Liadain.

A few more minutes pass, mostly silent but filled here and there by Shona humming little songs. Honestly, this whole cheery front she’s very insistently maintaining is a little creepy. It feels like nothing but flat-out denial of what it is we’re doing could keep someone that peppy in a place like this. But then, what do I know about being happy?

“Shona Tiernan? The doctor says you’re clear to see those patients.”

Eventually, the waiting room door slides open, making an oddly sharp noise like a sword being drawn. A tired-looking man in blue nursing scrubs steps out with three clipboards stacked in one arm and nods in polite greeting. His gaze hovers on me for a little longer than the others, and even when it moves away, he’s watching me from the corner of his eye. Trying to figure out if I’m anyone he knows? “Before that, it looks like none of you have visited before, so if you could all just read these over and sign on the line at the end…” 

“…What’s all this?” I ask. Is Keeper paperwork really a thing?

“Ground rules. Once you’ve agreed to follow them, the protections here will accept you as a guest.”

“Accept us? Are you saying this medical release form is the key to some sort of magic lock?”

“It is,” he confirms flatly.

Mide immediately turns to the last page, signs, and hands her clipboard back.

“Ooh, is this an Arbiter thing?” Shona asks. “Or does the Sanctuary have kids from abroad who handle this stuff?” She runs her hand over the paper, flips through the pages fast enough that she couldn’t have picked up more than a few words from each one, and signs at the end.

The nurse shrugs. “Can’t comment on the details.”

“And it’s not like I can really go bug him about it… oh well,” Shona sighs. She sets her copy on the arm of her chair, leaving him to pick it back up.

For my part, I’m a little hesitant to put my name to a magically binding agreement without knowing what I’m agreeing to, so I take my time looking through it. It’s made up of huge blocks of small print, with some words I don’t know and others I don’t understand in context. Before long, my vision is blurring and my head is spinning, but I do manage to pick out a few key phrases:

INGRESS CONTRACT — BRIGHT HORIZON SOUL SANCTUARY (VISITATION VERSION)
This contract establishes a binding agreement between the active defenses of Bright Horizon Soul Sanctuary and an approved visitor, hereafter the Sanctuary and the Guest…
…the Guest agrees to avoid all physical, social, or mystical interaction with patients, except where expressly permitted by a staff member with at least Layer 3 security privileges…
…inform the nearest Sanctuary staff member of any suspected breach or contamination…
…allows the Guest to invoke the Sanctuary’s protection and cross Sanctuary thresholds unimpeded, with the following exceptions…
…willful violation of these conditions by the Guest shall be penalized by immediate exclusion…
…unless voided by free and voluntary agreement between the Guest and a Keeper with at least Layer 7 security privileges, all of the above clauses shall remain in effect for as long as there are lights in the night sky.

Not that I’m an expert, but that last bit doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the lawyer-speak at all. Why wouldn’t you just say forever? Because Keepers are weird, I guess.

In any case, I don’t see anything about giving away my soul or my right to breathe. Shona would’ve used my fake name if she named me at all while she was checking in, but it seems like a bad idea to sign a mystic contract as my dead grandmother. Instead, I make a complicated twirly line like the ones my doctors sign prescriptions with, but a little messier. If someone were to squint real hard and know exactly what they were looking for, they could read the little squiggle as L. Shiel. Probably. I’m sure it just cares about the symbolism of signing or something like that.

The moment I consider that might be an odd, dangerous assumption to make and start asking myself why I think that, I realize I can sense that intention behind the contract. The feelings invested in the words on these pages are, for the most part, those of total practicality, pristine and thorough… but they’re not completely impersonal, either. Not exactly. There’s a sense of solemn concern underlying it all, and beyond that, there’s not the slightest hint of malice. I can tell there isn’t a single thing in this document that could be considered deception, let alone an outright lie. As surely as I could sense the magic warding the door at the end of the waiting room, I just know.

“Here you go. Um, sorry that took a minute.” Signing it doesn’t feel very magical, in any case. There’s no sudden change in the atmosphere or feeling of anything new coming over me, but Shona and especially Mide are looking at me a little impatiently by the time I’m done. 

The nurse doesn’t seem surprised or bothered as he picks my clipboard up and looks it over — I guess I can’t be the only one who actually wants to read this thing. “It’s no trouble. Looks like everything is in order, so if you’ll follow me…” 

~~~

As soon as we’re all through, the door slides shut behind us with the same sharp noise. We’re in… it looks like a glass tunnel, a half-circle with windows for walls and only soft, featureless blue all around on the other side. That feeling of weightless water pressure is stronger here, and it’s getting stronger still as we head through the tunnel, but I’ve adjusted to it by now. A little more of the same sensation doesn’t change much. 

Here and there, sigils write themselves on the glass in silver light. They’re hard to read against the blue background, but look very much like the ones in Yurfaln’s Wound. For a moment it feels strange to see that same script here, but it tracks with what I’ve read. These sorts of symbols seem to work themselves unconsciously into most large-scale or long-lasting magic, acting almost like an artist’s signature. If they actually mean anything, no one has told me what, although I haven’t done any sort of deep research on the subject. 

At the end of the tunnel is a little square room, empty save for a two-panel mirror set directly into the far wall in a way that makes it look like the doors of an elevator. Rather than a button panel to the side, though, there’s only a smooth ceramic plate. The nurse traces an elaborate pattern onto the plate with one finger, then puts his palm to it and pushes. Nothing seems to have changed, but he looks back over his shoulder and nods. “Follow my lead. Just so you know going in, the first time can be, uh, a bit of a trip.” 

And without another word of explanation, he turns back and walks straight through the mirror. 

It doesn’t ripple like water, doesn’t move at all, but just for a second, our reflections are replaced by a swirling kaleidoscope of countless slightly different scenes in the glass, windows into different places all reflecting endlessly off each other like a vast, shifting hall of mirrors. Before I can look any closer, the images vanish, leaving just the three of us.

“Whoa,” Shona breathes. “Pretty cool, huh?”

I just nod. Of course I’ve always known that the world is full of wonders and miracles, but knowing something at a distance and diving right into it are completely different. This is my life now, and neither the expiration date looming over me or the horrors I’ll need to hunt over and over for a chance at living are enough to completely strip the simple awe from it.

I just hope zapping around with magic doesn’t make me as sick as most travel does.

“Well, someone has to go first,” Mide says, and nominates herself, strolling straight through the wall. Again, it explodes into a display of overlapping images.

“Hey, hold on! This isn’t like the other things, you don’t need to-” Shona reaches out a bit too late to stop her, then rushes through before the image has settled. 

Well, then. I take a deep breath, hold it, and step into the panel. 

I was somehow expecting a sudden lurch or feeling of being launched from a cannon, but it never comes — just the opposite. Going through is kind of like passing through a curtain over a doorway, but as soon as I cross into the mirror, it feels like I’ve frozen in mid-stride.  On the other side I’m standing in that same kaleidoscopic burst of sights, but less stable, like on top of everything else I’m seeing it through crossed eyes. Looking at anything ahead makes me dizzy, but closing my eyes somehow feels like a bad idea.

Suddenly, the world rearranges itself. The images settle, replacing all the shifting scenes with a single window, and that window expands to fill my vision until it overlaps with the room, forming a passage for me to step through the wall into. I start moving again, just like I’d never stopped, and take my first steps into another small room. The trip was a little disorienting, and that sense of water pressure is even stronger on this side, but physically the transition was just walking through an open door with a strange pause in the middle.

Just ahead, Shona is in the middle of yelling something at Mide. “…not going to war, we’re in a hospital! Like, kind of a weird hospital, but still!” 

“Well, it didn’t matter one bit and we’re all here now, right?” Mide says calmly. By her posture, she seems pretty used to these kinds of arguments.

The nurse, standing at a healthy distance from the two, clears his throat as I come through. “Yes, well, whenever you three are ready, we can—”

“Right right right. Sorry!” Shona interrupts. “Yeah, let’s go ahead and do that thing!”

Looking around, we’re in a thin hall that forks two ways just ahead. There’s a triage desk set between the two diverging hallways, the kind completely walled off by heavy glass windows, and another nurse is seated at a cnidarian drive on the other side. She looks up from the monitor, nods at our guide, and quickly types something in. To the left, a wide windowless door slides open with a faint buzz. There are no visible handles or locks on it, and it looks thick and heavy enough to be in a bank vault instead of a hospital.

“So,” our nurse says. “Most of this ought to be common-sense, but I have to make sure you all know anyway. The ward we’re heading into is a low-security admissions unit. Patients inside are confirmed non-infectious, awaiting a more complete diagnosis and placement. There shouldn’t be anyone else in the halls right now, but if any patients are being transported, step aside and keep to yourself until they’re gone. Stay close to me, don’t touch anything without asking, and do NOT use magic on anyone or anything inside.”

“Um, I’ll have to inspect these patients with magic to do what we’re here to do. Is that alright?” I ask. I don’t know if this is how it works for everyone, but the way my soul feels things is more like having a new sense that blurs together with the old ones in confusing ways than actively casting something. You can shift your attention to focus on one sense over another, but rules or no rules, I don’t think I could decide not to feel a Harbinger’s traces any more than I could decide not to smell fish in a fish market.

“Should be. You’re not using magic on them. You’ll need to ask the doctor to be sure, though. Rooms are usually insulated against that sort of thing. Otherwise, just… look, don’t touch. If an emergency serious enough that you might need to defend yourselves comes up, we’ll say so.”

Shona and Mide turn to look at each other at the exact same time, frowning. “Is, um, is that common enough we should be worried?” Mide asks.

There’s a pause just long enough to be telling before he answers “Probably not in this ward.”

“Cool! It’ll be fine!” Shona says. Mostly to herself, from the sound of it.

Well, here we go. The vault door closes itself as soon as we’re all through.

~~~

Something is wrong with the overhead lights on the other side. Mide and I pause to look up at almost the same time, but the other two don’t seem to care. It looks like there’s an invisible layer of water between us and the lights, scattering the bulbs into tiny shifting spotlights… actually, this is almost how my room looked when Vyuji was protecting it last week, only without the dark blue tint her barrier cast over everything. 

The way here splits in three, with slightly curved halls on either side and a straight corridor ahead. It’s long enough that I can just barely see the far wall, and lined on both sides with more curving passages. 

Our guide heads five halls down the central path, then makes a left. Here, the walls on either side regularly open into indented side areas. They’re all set up the same way, with a single window covering most of the wall, a small desk placed for someone to sit and look through the window, and a featureless door just like the one we took to get in here on one side. Bizarrely, the atmosphere makes me imagine them as exhibits in an aquarium, but they’re all the same display: a little room with a sink counter and some cups, a soft chair, and a portable hospital bed. A bed with thick restraining belts hanging on its frame.

Most of the rooms are empty, and from its layout it feels like the ward has more of these rooms than they could ever need. Quite a lot more. Sure, you can never be too prepared, but I don’t know how much of New Claris would be left after something awful enough to fill this place to capacity.

Maybe it isn’t just for our city? There have to be Soul Sanctuaries everywhere. They could be connected somehow, linked up by the same sort of magic they use to get around inside. 

We do pass some people, though. Shona strolls right along, keeping her gaze fixed on the back of the nurse’s head, and Mide lowers her eyes when we pass the first occupied room. I can’t help but look. Most of the people inside just seem… quiet, in the worst way. More vacant than tired, staring off at nothing. One is looking right at the window with bloodshot eyes, though none seem to actually watch us go by. Three patients are strapped tightly to their beds, and two of those have mouthguards poking out between their lips. 

Then there are the others.

The tear stains under one weeping man’s eyes are dark as ink. 

A woman scratches idly at a patch of skin that really shouldn’t be that shade of grey. 

A girl’s face is somehow cracked all along one side of her head, like dry ground or broken porcelain, and, and there’s a tiny hole in it that looks black and hollow— 

My vision blurs. I stumble over, choking back the urge to gag. 

“Uh, hey, Eyna? You okay back there?” Shona asks. She pointedly doesn’t turn around.

Why? Why is this any different from what I’ve already seen? I don’t know. I just know it shouldn’t be. None of it should happen and that doesn’t make it the slightest bit less real.

“Oh, yes, that’ll… sorry,” the nurse says. “I’d’ve warned you if I realized we were passing her.”

“Let’s just go,” I croak. Is he used to this? What else does he see here? No. Dangerous. Not going to wonder right now. I’ll just force myself to stare at the floor the rest of the way. Mide had it right.

After another minute’s walk, the nurse stops and gestures ahead. “…Alright, it’s these three patients. Don’t worry, they’re all safe to look at. Dr. Crain? The Keepers are here for you.”

I’m a little hesitant anyway, but he isn’t wrong. A boy and two girls in blue and green plaid school uniforms, each in a separate room. Two are sleeping or unconscious in their beds. One girl sits scrunched up on her chair, covering her eyes with her hands. A man at the desk in front of her, sharp-featured and young for a doctor, looks us over with the same quiet ease everyone here seems to share around Keepers.

“We aren’t bothering them like this, are we?” Mide asks.

The doctor shakes his head slightly. “One-way glass. How can I help you three?”

“Just some quick little stuff and we’ll be out of your hair,” Shona says. “Trying to catch a monster before it can do this again, and—” 

“Ah. You need to sense them?” Dr. Crain nods and returns to his paperwork.

Shona looks a little surprised. “Oh, yep, that’s exactly it! Could we?” 

“All of them are clear for it. I can take the wards down for a moment whenever you’re ready,” he says.

“Do you know anything about it? Have they said anything since they came in?” I ask.

“None of them are speaking, no, but they did find something she was writing on the scene. Have a look if you want. It’s not any kind of mental hazard, but… here, just see for yourself.” He pulls a little black notebook out, sets it on the desk already open to a page in the middle, and returns to his paperwork.

The book’s pages are damp in one corner. Where the ink hasn’t bled away, one sheet is covered in jagged, frenzied handwriting. It looks like a sleep journal kept by someone whose dreams are full of incredible stories, but their memories of them dissolve within a few seconds of waking, so all that remains by the time they’re frantically writing things out are a few jumbled scraps of scenes. I pick it up, squinting to read the scratches, and the other two crowd over my shoulders to read along. At first glance it seems illegible, but there are a few clear blocks of writing scattered across the page:

a long long long time ago, someone fell through the sky
and built a castle floating in the clouds
this castle has no doors and no windows
no light shines inside it
none 
not ever
not a single star or lamp or candle

if you or i were stuck in a place like that, where nothing comes in and nothing goes out, we’d starve 
or suffocate
or lose ourselves and never find us again
but the children who live in the castle are happy there!

those children spend lots of happy days crawling around in the dark
they need no light, for there is nothing their eyes can see
they touch each other with hands that have never felt anything
they’ve fo—

Past that point, the paper is damp, and the ink has smudged away into a big wet puddle.

Shona is first to break our silence. “Uh, okay, what the fuck am I reading?” 

“No idea,” I say.  “But……”

“But?” Mide presses.

Oh. I must’ve left that hanging for longer than I realized. I was turning the writing around and around in my head, trying to scrape it for any actual meaning. 

“Nothing yet,” I finally say. “But maybe try to keep it in mind. If you write this off as nonsense, you might miss something important later.”

Mide looks over the page again. After a moment she side-eyes me, her forehead scrunched up in confusion. “Are you sure?” she asks flatly.

“You might, that’s all I said. It’s helped me before.” 

“Yep yep, I’ll do that,” Shona says. She clearly doesn’t believe me either.

“I’m serious! Just try, okay?” I snap back. However bizarre this… poetry(?) feels right now, Yurfaln’s victims gave me clues I could use. I didn’t understand exactly what they meant until I saw the whole picture, but that doesn’t mean they were useless noise. On the other hand, I think Yurfaln wanted me to understand it, by the end. This thing may not be so easy to read. 

What could I pull from this, then? It’s hard to say. At this point, I’m not even sure who the speaker is meant to be. Did this girl write out her own scattered thoughts about something she experienced or did the Harbinger somehow put the words in her mouth, so to speak? Either way, what are the big ideas to keep in mind? Falling from one place to another. A place where nothing should be able to live, but someone or something does anyway. Darkness. Senses failing. Hallucinations, maybe?

“Anyway. Doctor? I think we’re ready.” I set the book back on his desk.

“Of course.” Without looking up from his papers, Dr. Crain touches a finger to the desk and starts tracing an elaborate pattern on its surface. At a closer look, there’s a ceramic panel like the one the nurse used earlier set into it. After a moment, he puts his palm to it, and…

Immediately, that sense of being observed is all over me, overpowering the Sanctuary’s water-pressure ambience. It’s stronger here. The source itself is probably much farther away, but these kids are closer to it in some mystical sense than the place where it happened to attack them. The miasma still isn’t active, not the way an actual soul is, but the feelings it carries are clearer. It’s just as foul as Yurfaln’s, in a completely different way. Dizzying, like spinning and spinning until you puke, or the sick feeling you get when you try to read in a car.

“I… that’s enough. Please turn it back on.” A moment later, the fog is gone without a trace. I lean against the wall and suck in a few deep breaths. 

“Did you find anything we can work with?” Mide asks.

“I’m not sure yet. Can’t feel anything through these walls. But if it’s still out there, if we come anywhere near it, I think I’ll know.”

~~~

As we make our way out of the Weald, then through the upscale neighborhoods just above it, the balance of trees and construction slowly tilts back in the city’s favor. The sun is well into setting, and a few faint stars are blinking into view in the now wide-open sky. 

Now that I’m leading the search by default, I decide to take us on a long path roughly heading toward the hospital — or, well, close enough. I’m not leading them back to my doorstep. I’m exhausted, having probably walked more tonight than I have since I checked into the seventh floor, but we’ve already come this far, and the other two are lively as ever. I’ll figure out a next step if I don’t catch the Harbinger’s trail on the way.

But I do. 

“Wait.” I pause. “There’s something… not here, but close.” A block out from the central district, eyes start prickling, very faintly, on the back of my neck. I know it well enough now to focus on it from a distance, and I stretch my senses out, trying to feel its movements. That’s definitely it. At the end of the trail, I touch the Harbinger, feeling its living essence for the first time— 

and it looks back. Touches back. A hundred invisible gazes bore into every part of my body as it traces my perception to its source, and then… somewhere in the distance, it bursts into a sudden blur of motion. Not toward us, but not running away… up? Yes. Climbing somewhere. Pushing down the sudden stabbing pain behind my eyes, I raise my head, doing my best to follow its path. 

At the top of one of the city’s great glass towers, where a huge observation deck juts out, a Wound tears itself into being.

“Well! It’s very very interesting that you should happen to call right this moment, becaaaaaause…” Shona says, then trails off into silence. “…as luck would have it, I’ve recently…” A longer pause. “Yes! Yes in fact I do! There’s a threat we were just on our way to investigate! It’s a little out of the way, but if you want to make this our first team venture, we can meet you at the scene whenever you’re ready!”

“That is very not what I said. We can see how it goes, your words. Did you just now start searching for a problem to throw us at?” 

“Eyna, there’s a monster out there RIGHT NOW that could strike again at any moment! The people need our protection and there’s not a second to waste on questions that won’t help them!” 

“…Right.” That’s a yes, then. I only asked because I wanted to know how she found one so quickly, so I’m not sure what the act is about. “Anyway, I’m ready now. What’s going on?”

“Oh, right this second?” She sounds a bit surprised.

“Like I said.”

“Yep, yep, of course. Okay, so, did you hear anything about… last week, the couple on a picnic in Kuri Park? They had those identical breakdowns at the exact same time. Some kind of corruption on them, but no one was sure exactly what happened or what did it.”

“I must’ve missed that.” Last week I wasn’t a Keeper, and I hadn’t thought to dig through old news for suspicious incidents that might already be over.

“Well, it was a thing, and it happened again about two hours ago. This time it was a group of three kids from our school, all found in just the same state as the first two. I think we can safely say now that it’s a Harbinger’s work, and it’s escalating.”

Five victims. Yurfaln had reached four, maybe closer to three and a half considering how well Dr. Hines managed. What does that say about the size of this monster? What’ll be left if we split it three ways? Is that even a thing we can do?

It’s probably pointless to think of it that way. There’s no reason to expect that a Harbinger’s growth will follow some sensible schedule. I won’t know anything about this new nightmare until I can sense it myself.

“Sounds like it, yes. Where was this? If it just happened, we might still be able to catch its trail,” I say.

“Uh, looks like the Shoals. They were hanging out on the coast. Right around…” She lists off an address across the street from the scene. 

“Alright. Unless you have a better place to start in mind, I’ll meet you there… soon.” I’m not sure exactly where it is, but getting there might be a bit of trouble. The sea is to the east, on the opposite side of the city from the hospital. 

“Nope, that’s just fine with me, we’ll be there in a blink! And remember, the prize is still up for grabs!” 

“Wait. Before you go, about that,” I say.

“Have you already got an idea? Save it, it’ll be cooler if—”

“No. About the prize. The actual prize. If this works, if we take something down together, what are we doing with the Harbinger’s heart?”

“Ooooooohhhhh. Oh. Okay, so, hm, you’re, hmhmhmhmhm… how’s this? We’ve been giving all of ours to Mide, so this time around, I’ll sit out completely. We split it fifty-fifty, you and her.”

“Is that actually possible?” I ask. Vyuji’s never brought it up, and I didn’t think I’d need to know.

“Course! We’ve never done it before, but Enne says you can, so I’m sure we can figure it out! All good with you?” 

“…Sure. That works.” It’ll have to do for now.

“Great! See you soon!”

There’s a little beep as she hangs up. Idly, I hope neither of those girls can fly or teleport or something.

As for me and my useless legs, I see a few ways of doing this. I didn’t bring my cane just to wander around my territory, since that side of my health has felt fairly stable with my stolen strength propping it up. Maybe I should go get it, but I’m managing well enough today, and I especially don’t want to use it if I’m about to meet up with two other Keepers. They’d notice. They’d ask the sorts of prying questions other kids have always asked me. I’ll manage. 

Anyway, if I walk, trusting my magic to hold me up for… just under two miles, checking my phone, I might be okay. I could also take a bus to the closest stop and hope there’s somewhere private enough to transform again in that part of the city. Do I have any money? Right, doesn’t matter, the buses are free. It’s been a while since I needed to get anywhere.

Or… 

There are people all around me. People in buildings, people bustling through the city, people on the sidewalk stepping aside and staring at me as I pass. So many points of life in easy reach that my soul-sense starts to blur them all together into one hazy mass. They feel like cool mist on a burning summer day, and any tiny pangs of ill-health among them are lost in the background like the smell of tea in a room full of coffee. I could probably spread the drain out, take the tiniest possible slivers of strength from a hundred people, then run wherever I need to go with no trouble.

No, I can’t really justify that. Not yet. I don’t know what I’m heading into. We may not find the Harbinger at all in the first place we look. Plus I still don’t know what taking health feels like for the people I take from, or how it looks to normal people. It could be an unexplained outbreak of mild sickness or it could be a very ugly public spectacle.

I’ll just have to take a little longer. And try not to think too hard about the last time, about what it was like to be doing well. I dismiss my magic in a quiet corner, and as my mystic senses dim, it gets a little easier to shove those thoughts to the back of my mind.

~~~

The trip takes a little more than half an hour, most of it spent waiting for a bus at the nearest stop, then another short jaunt to the address Shona gave me. The directions weren’t much more complicated than ‘find a direction and go east until you hit the water.’ 

I haven’t been to this part of the city in years, but the Shoals have the exact same wide, bright streets and spacious sidewalks lined with greenery as most of New Claris. During the rebuilding, they did their best to make sure that you can always see more sky than structure when you look up — well, maybe not in the Peaks, nothing to be done about that — and the paths occasionally wind and twist into each other, but only enough to keep the city from being a perfect grid of identical roads. They didn’t want it too orderly. Honestly, it’s a nice walk in a nice place, even with all the people. As long as I ignore where I’m heading.

There’s no actual landmark to look for when I reach the place, but sure enough, a small part of the neat line where the city gives way to the shore is surrounded by blue wooden barricades. They wall off the scenes of Harbinger attacks as a matter of course, at least until Keepers have a chance to declare the area clean. Two men in police uniforms are keeping an eye on the wall at a healthy distance, and then… 

Past the barriers, the rocky ground slopes downward, and a few thin stretches of land jut out into the water. It’s still light out, but the blue of the sky has just started to deepen, casting a shadow over the sea. Two slightly darkened figures are already on the outcrops, inspecting the scene of the attack: a tall girl in red and a gold-armored knight. Maybe they were nearby, but since I’m pretty sure Shona found out about this a few seconds before I did, it’s more likely that one of them has some cool way to zip around with magic after all. Good for them, I guess.

I step out, round a corner, and transform again. Before I got on the bus, I took off my mask — out of Keeper mode, when no one had any special reason to pay attention to me, I figured it would be a more memorable feature than my actual face — and interestingly, I don’t need to put it back on. It’s just there, appearing from the solid shadows with the rest of my attire. Once I started thinking of it as part of the outfit, I guess it became one. If it’s that simple, I’ll have to think if there’s anything else I want to change… but later. 

Right now, I should go see how those two are doing before I change my mind about this horrible idea. One of the policemen shoots me an expressionless glance as I cross between the barricades, then goes back to talking with his partner. “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” is more of a polite warning for Keepers.

But as I reach the coast, the eerie sense of being watched by someone else — something else — creeps over me. Inhuman eyes bore into my back, into my everything, like I’m in a dark place surrounded on all sides by observers I can sense, but not see. It’s a very different feeling from the last time, but I immediately know it for the stench of a Harbinger’s presence. 

“Oh, Eyna, there you are!” Shona shouts from out on the water, pulling me back to reality. She’s literally on the water — standing on the ocean’s surface, shifting slightly with the waves. Just as I spot her, she kicks into the sea and glides across it like she’s skating on a frozen lake. Mide just waves from the far end of an outcrop, and by the time she’s started making her way back to the shore, Shona is climbing the rocky slope in leaping strides, almost jumping from one smooth stone to the next. 

“Hope it wasn’t too annoying getting here. We’ve been looking around for a bit now. I’d have offered to pick you up, but, uh, my thing takes some getting used to,” Shona says as she climbs.

“Eh. I would’ve turned you down anyway. Have to keep up with my… you know. Image…?” My incognito loner thing. I almost said that outright, but it sounded ridiculous in my head. It still sounds a bit ridiculous.

At the top of the slope, Shona tenses and makes one last long jump back onto solid ground, landing a bit too close for comfort. “That’s the spirit! Can’t you just feel our Keeper scene getting cooler for every minute people have no idea who you are? Uh. Sorry, right, still sounds pretty stupid.” 

Is this some ironic joke? Am I being bullied? I still have no idea how to tell. But more importantly… “How can you be so cheery in a place like this?”

“How d’you mean?” Shona frowns, looking more puzzled than anything else. “Oh. I guess something pretty scary did happen here, huh? I mean, I hope they’ll all be okay, but that’s why they have us, right? Just gotta make sure it doesn’t keep happening. Getting all serious won’t catch the monster any faster.”

“No, whatever, not that, it’s just… it’s a bad place. You feel it too, right?” It’s not really painful, I can tune it mostly-out and focus on other things when I need to, but it feels impossible to be at ease here. 

Shona cups a hand around her ear and slowly turns in a half-circle. As she does, Mide ambles up the slope, casting a puzzled look between us.

After a few seconds of intense focus, Shona shakes her head. “Um, it is a bit creepy, sure. I did notice earlier, I could tell a Harbinger was here, but that’s all. You didn’t pick up anything more, did you, Mide?”

“Have I ever?” Mide asks tonelessly.

“Right,” Shona sighs. “Well, we figured the trail had gone cold by the time we got here. Were we wrong?”

Reluctantly, I close my eyes and turn my full attention to the miasma. Compared to last time, there’s very little weight to it — it doesn’t react, doesn’t push back the way Yurfaln’s presence did. It’s thinner, somehow less directed, but all the same the impression it carries is much clearer than the last Harbinger’s raw hostility. Watched isn’t the right word for the way it feels, on second thought. ‘Watched’ is a stranger staring at you through your window, and this is something much more. Inspected, that’s closer. Studied by unblinking eyes that stare right into my soul and judge me unworthy of existing. 

“Maybe. It still feels awful, but it’s weird, space-wise? Not a real solid trail, just fog all over the place. If I had to guess it went that way, but not sure if I could actually follow it. Probably not.” On instinct, I point somewhere to the northwest. 

The two glance back at each other skeptically. “I guess we’re stuck there, then,” Mide says. “Did you still want to look around in the water? I don’t think there’s much to see.”

“It definitely didn’t go there,” I say. “But do we have anything else to work with?”

“Of course it didn’t. Claiasya protects the sea. I, uh, hrmmh.” Shona growls out a faintly frustrated noise. “Maybe we could just head that way and see what we see?”

“Most of the city is that way from here,” Mide says, frowning. “Other than that, there’s maybe…” Her expression deepens into a pained grimace. “The kids it attacked. I don’t know how they’re doing, I don’t want to make it any harder for them, but maybe we don’t need to. Maybe its traces are still there.”

“That might be better, yes,” I say. Not that I really know, but Yurfaln’s aura had been all tangled up with its victims. If I’d needed to, I think I could have tracked it from that couple. “Whatever step two is, could we get away from here while we sort it out?”

“Oh. Uh, sure. Is it really that bad?” Shona asks.

“Can you really not tell?” 

“Nope, not a bit more than usual. Interesting! You’re probably just more keyed into this sort of thing than either of us. Everyone’s senses work differently, right? Like, they say the Stardust Seraph can sniff out a Harbinger from miles away!”

Of course he can. “That must be pretty nice. I guess even among us, some kids get all the luck.”

Mide rolls her eyes. “It sure seems that way, doesn’t it? Take it with a great big pile of salt. No actual living person could ever be as great as this one thinks Roland or Irida are.” 

“I mean, sure, there you’d THINK they couldn’t, but you’d be super wrong!” Shona insists. “You’re just—” Before she can say anything else, retreading what must be some well-worn argument, Shona glances back at me and clamps her mouth shut, a little visibly embarrassed. 

Mide grins, stifling a giggle. “The greatest, biggest pile of salt ever. She’s got it really bad for those two, ‘specially—”

“ANYWAY!” Shona yelps. “Eyna, go get some air and we’ll catch up with you in a second! Just gonna tell those guys we think it’s safe here, yep!” Shona indicates the two policemen with her head, then spins around and runs toward them. 

“Wait,” I call after her.

“Yeah?” She twirls on one leg in mid-step, coming to a perfect stop facing me.

“Tell them not to take the walls down. The Harbinger isn’t here, but I’m not certain it’s safe yet.” If the aura weren’t so still, I’d worry that its source was here with us right now, or spying on us at a distance through its lingering presence. It doesn’t feel like that’s happening, but it’s possible and I’ve only done this once before. I don’t want to let it hurt someone else based on a week-old Keeper’s best guess.

“Oh. Sure, will do.” Shona shrugs and takes off running again.

I start down the shore’s sidewalk, wandering nowhere in particular until the Harbinger’s atmosphere is distant enough to ignore.

Mide walks just behind me, leaving Shona to handle the reporting alone. “Are you sure you’re alright?” she asks. “I know it never feels good being in a place like this, but…”

“Probably. You heard her, I guess I just have, um, a sensitive nose for horror.”

She still looks concerned, but she nods. We’re quiet until Shona comes rushing back, not the least bit winded for having sprinted both ways.

“Good news!” Shona shouts. Immediately after she frowns and crosses her arms, reconsidering something. “Well, ah, that’s to say… I think it’s good news as far as finding the monster. I asked if they knew what was going on with those kids, the victims, and they do! Someone from Bright Horizon just picked them up. We should be fine to check on them as long as this isn’t a lockdown situation, which, mm, I didn’t think it was? How ‘bout you, Eyna?”

Just to be sure, I stretch my senses back out toward the scene of the attack. As soon as I feel the Harbinger’s gaze on me, I pull away. Nothing follows or clings to me, as far as I can tell. “…No, me neither. How far to the Sanctuary?”

“Just a little ways south from here,” Shona says. There’s a harsh buzzing in the air as her body starts to spark with tiny jolts of red light. “We’ll only be a second if—” 

Mide clears her throat pointedly.

“Oh, come on, I’m sure she can figure it out! It’s not crowded here at all, it’ll be easy!”

“Remember how long it took me to get used to that? How long it took you? Do you want to break both her legs before we even find the Harbinger?”

“……if we all take a niiice brisk walk through the woods,” Shona sighs. Her sparks slow and shrink, then fade, taking the low ambient noise with them. I make a note to stay far away from whatever method of zipping around with magic she has.

~~~

Nearly all of New Claris is full of plants, with rows of trees and mini-parks and tiny gardens all threaded through bright modern structures like green veins. The southmost district, the Weald, could apparently never decide if it wanted to be a city or a park, so they did their best to let it be both. 

Sparse streets wind through carefully tended woodlands, running alongside and occasionally tangling up with paved walking trails. Sometimes the roads stretch up into overpasses above the paths, sometimes the walkways rise into little bridges over the streets. Actual buildings are uncommon, scattered far enough through the woods that they can all feel like solitary homes in the wilderness. There’s a zoo somewhere down here, a lot of Church holdings and schools, some rich people’s houses, the Fianata estate. Bright Horizon Soul Sanctuary, where most Clarish survivors of Harbinger incidents spend at least some time, sits right on the city’s southern border.

“So,” Shona says after a long stretch of silence, “how about that prize? I mean, not that I’m in any way saying we have to make this a big official thing, but imagine if that was at all what we were doing. Just. You know. If.”

“Where would I even start?” I ask. “It’s not like we have some obvious theme to work with. I don’t know what you two are about at all. The most I can say about this group is that there’s three of us.”

“You could’ve looked us up. We haven’t been at this for long either, but we do have a bit of a profile!” she says.

“That’s true,” I admit. “But I didn’t.”

“Meh, I guess that’s for the best. Now I can fill you in myself, see if that gets any inspiration going. Plus I get to keep the priiize!” 

Suddenly, Shona runs ahead of us… wait, no, that isn’t right. She’s skating, gliding along the path just like she did on the sea’s surface earlier. At a distant corner where the trail curves sharply, she comes to a halt with a quick series of showy figure-skater twirls. Those red sparks start up again, forming a storm of light around her that crackles and builds until it’s almost too bright to look straight at. When it fades, she’s holding… it looks like a violin, but not quite. Around the thin neck, there’s just a single length of coral the same shade of blue as her bracelets, wound into an S shape that forms the rough hollow outline of a violin. She takes a playing position, reaches up with a long bow in her other hand, and draws it across the strings, producing a horrible buzzing wail that sets me shivering all over and makes my spine feel like teeth chattering in the cold. 

“Those were the first notes of the Screaming Hymn! I make music, and that makes magic — spreads it all over the place like static in the air. It builds up and up and up. I won’t let it get quite that far out here, buuuut…” She looks up and raises her bow to the sky… then freezes, biting her lip, and takes a few sidesteps into the center of the path where there’s no foliage overhead. “Yeah, there we go!”

The buzzing in my bones fades. A jagged bolt of red lightning arcs through her and up into the sky, immediately followed by a deafening explosion. Reflexively, I yelp and cover my ears through my hood. Someone else screams in the distance.

“Uh, sorry, sorry, nothing to worry about! Just Keepers over here doing Keeper stuff!” Shona yells back at them. “Yeah, guess I should’ve said something, but y’know… showmanship! Anyway, there you go! I spin up a big awesome storm, point it where I want it to go, and blast monsters with it!” 

“Does it do anything else?” I ask once my ears stop ringing. I wouldn’t have pressed the question if she’d told me this a week ago. It lines up perfectly with the way kids’ shows about Keepers present fighting with magic, all colorful laser battles against scary-but-not-too-scary monsters. Shona sounds like she’d be right at home in a colorful laser battle.

That’s not at all how my first actual Harbinger encounter went, though — things in Yurfaln’s Wound were a lot more abstract and complicated than those shows implied. At the time, I figured that was because they were dumb kids’ shows, not instructions for future Keepers, but maybe my magic is just weird and wants to be used in weird ways.

“Well, sure. I can charge it into other things too. Change how they work, make them faster, stronger. Usually her,” Shona finishes. She points to Mide with the bow, then throws it over her shoulder and hurls the instrument straight into the trees. Both dissolve into showers of tiny sparks, vanishing before they land. “Mide, wanna cover your side of things?”

“Well…” As we catch up to Shona and start down the path again, Mide raises her left arm. In a flash of light, that giant shield appears in her grip, followed shortly by her spear. “I can do this, and I’m pretty good with these. Our Promise came with a sense for how to use them, and how to fight in a group and protect people.”

“Sounds nice. Mine didn’t.” I nod and wait a beat for her to go on.

“I’m done. That’s all,” she sighs after a moment. “All I’ve found, anyway, and I think you’re just supposed to know what you can do, right?”

Wait, really? Sure, these girls seem pretty earnest, but I can’t help but wonder if they’re holding something back. Not that I can judge too harshly if they are.

“I mean, yeah, but what you can do does change sometimes, y’know?” Shona says. “Magic grows with you. Sometimes new stuff about it emerges as you Emerge. We’ll find the rest sooner or later.”

“Sometimes,” Mide echoes, obviously unconvinced.

We walk a while longer in silence, which would be fine if these two would stop glancing uncomfortably between me and each other.

“What about you, new girl?” Mide finally asks.

Oh. Um. Of course they’re not going to let me get away with that. I probably should’ve thought ahead of time about some way to describe what I do other than ‘I’m the dying Keeper who does sickness magic’.

“I, hm. It’s weird. I control… ill-fate, maybe? Curses, corruption. I can take those things and inflame them or move them around. I don’t really have a flashy demonstration, but here.” I raise a hand, palm up, and summon the card holding Yurfaln’s remnants, its muddy colors still writhing and churning. Mide flinches, and Shona makes a face like I’m offering her a pile of roadkill. 

I take the hint and put the card away. “Sorry. That’s what it is. I made it out of my first Harbinger’s… leftovers. I know it’s disgusting, but the idea is that at some point it’ll be disgusting for some other horrible creature.” What I just said isn’t all of my magic, of course, but it’s close enough that it’s not fake. I can’t think of a way to start on the life-draining aspect that doesn’t make me sound like a monster.

“That is,” Shona says, very slowly, “maybe the most Vyuji thing I’ve ever heard of.”

Um, sure. I’m not going to press her on what that means. “How did you find this Harbinger so quickly, anyway?” I ask, hastily changing the subject. 

“Wha?” Shona looks confused for a second, but then she shakes it off and grins a bit wider than usual. “Yeah, fine, you caught me. I did do that, huh? There’s easier ways to keep watch than actually wandering around looking for monsters. The police answer calls a lot more than they walk past a crime right as it’s happening, you know? The Silver King’s scouts make the hard way easy, but, well, we can’t all be as cool as her! If you don’t have any tricks like that, you’re probably better off just taking tips on Flow. People ask their favorite Keepers to go check out weird things all the time!”

“On what?” I ask.

“Ha ha. Yeah, I get it, you do strike me as one of those ‘too cool for that useless nightmare reef’ types, but at least for this one thing it really does help!” 

“Listen, I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. Some Coral Sea thing?” 

Shona stops in mid-stride and spins around, leaning down to level with my eyes and stare right at me. It’s a long way down. “Oh,” she says after several long, uncomfortable seconds. “Shit, wow, you, uh, you really… How?”

What? Is it really that weird? Sure, I vaguely know that there are parts of the Sea where people post real stuff about their real lives, and in context, that’s probably what she means. I’ve never once touched it. What life did I have to share? “Always seemed like more trouble than it’s worth? Besides, I’ll never be anyone’s favorite anything.”

“…you might be surprised if you just…” Shona mumbles, quieter than I’ve ever heard her. She sounds like she still can’t believe she’s actually having this conversation. 

Come to think of it, I do know for a fact that Tara was some people’s favorite Keeper. That’s different, though. I wouldn’t want her fans even if I could have them.

Why draw that line? I don’t want any fans.

“Er, to be fair, no method’s perfect,” Mide cuts in. “We have our misses, and some of them are just worried about nothing. Ask her about the bathroom ghost if you want a laugh sometime.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking abooout!” Shona chirps, suddenly cheerful as ever. 

I don’t think I’ll press her on that, either.

~~~

The walk goes on, although I have to stop and catch my breath a couple times to keep up with these two. Here and there, Shona brings up some idle chatter, but it doesn’t go anywhere and quietly fizzles out.

“Here we are,” Mide eventually says, pointing ahead. The path opens into a wide circular courtyard, and beyond that, Bright Horizon comes into view. The Soul Sanctuary is a smoothly curved circle of spotless ceramic white, with not the least bit of visible wear or dirt. Its strangest feature is that it’s got none of the clear crystal walls common to buildings here, especially to Church holdings. In fact, I don’t see any windows at all, no openings anywhere except the wide front doors. 

Its location this far out in the woods probably offers its residents some much-needed peace and privacy. Just as important, though, it means anything that leaks out will be further away from new victims.

“Sure enough,” Shona says. “Let’s see what there is to see, yeah? I’m, uh, I’m not too sure what’s next if this doesn’t work out!” She laughs, a bit nervously.

So in we go.

Sunlight is just starting to flood through the gauzy curtains when I wake up choking for air. Hot, sharp pangs burn through my chest. My head spins as I try to sit up. I’m breathing the wrong way, I know I am, but it’s a losing struggle to correct myself all the same. Even then, nothing changes. All I can do for relief is squeeze Pearl until the pangs start, very slowly, to fade. They never quite disappear.

This has never happened to me before. Was I dreaming of drowning? No. No, this is still the thing I took from Yurfaln. Its stolen pain is somehow separate from its heart, the core of its soul I’ve already claimed and… digested?

Suddenly, I’m certain there’s no point in using my call button. Medicine can’t help me. I may not even be actually feeling this. Not with my body’s senses, anyway.

What can I do, then? I took the Harbinger’s essence with magic. I should be able to get rid of it the same way. I’m not sure how yet, but Vyuji keeps saying I already know how to use my power. Time to feel about in the dark for knowledge I don’t know I have, however that works, and hope something turns up.

I take my first hesitant steps out of bed and quickly stumble, catching myself on the nightstand. I feel like I’m trying to walk on clouds, the first sign of a horrible health day. Of course my body would choose right now to fall apart.

Once I’ve fumbled for the cane at my bedside and found my footing with it, I crack the door open and pull out one of the tabs on my patient sign, the little blue one that says “Quiet, Please! Do Not Disturb!” Nurses tend to ignore that sign when they think it’s important enough, which is to say any time at all their schedule says they should, but it’s too early for morning checkups and I can’t think of any other reasons to bother me.

Here we go, then.

My room goes dark as I reach inside and transform. Emerald shadows swallow the world, only letting light back through the windows when they gather themselves up and take their solid form around me. My cards shimmer into view with another thought.  I raise my free hand and direct one to float out of its orbit, bringing it to rest just above my open palm.

These cards are ritual tools first, the way my magic expresses itself to the world, but also vessels I can fill with pain and power. I’ve done it by accident with my pain from my sickness, but they shouldn’t demand that specifically. Yurfaln’s disease wouldn’t let me vent it off into nowhere when I stole it. It probably still wouldn’t without causing some horrible backlash on its way out, but…

Drawing the Harbinger’s lingering pain to the surface is easy, since it was already almost there. Magic is keeping me standing, but the feeling itself hasn’t gone anywhere. Letting it loom over everything else in my mind, I take in a shallow, wheezing gulp of air and hold it, hold it, just a little longer until… like clearing gunk from the back of my throat, I push.

Out it comes, but what I’m exhaling isn’t air at all. A thick plume of ugly mud-and-rust colors leaves me with a tiny hissing scream. The cloud twitches and thrashes randomly, like a sack with something alive inside trying to kick its way out… but whatever those colors remind me of, Yurfaln is dead. This is mine now. A moment later, the card above my hand sucks it in, immediately repainting itself in the Harbinger’s shades.

It worked. Exactly like I thought it should. Yurfaln’s essence is gone from me, but it’s also still there. Quarantined. When I unsummon my cards, it’ll wait harmlessly in some corner of my soul until I decide to take it back out. I sit back on the bed and just breathe, making sure I can now. It takes a good few minutes, but eventually my head does stop swimming.

Could I do that again? I have plenty of pain to spare. I pluck a fresh card out of my ring, pull back the billowy sleeve over my right arm, and gingerly touch a corner to my skin. It draws blood with the slightest, briefest contact, and I flinch at the strangely sharp pricking sensation, but then it’s over. Like before, the card drinks up a few drops of blood and paints itself green, leaving behind only a tiny wound like a papercut that’s already nearly closed.

…I don’t feel any different, though. My legs are just as wobbly and useless as before. Apparently my own disease is part of my power, something I can call on and inflict on others, but it doesn’t actually go anywhere or get used up. There’s that thing Vyuji said about using your magic to erase the source of your magic, I guess. Maybe there are other things I can do with these cards, other reasons I’d want to infect them with myself, but I can’t think of them right now. It’s not like I need to charge them ahead of time — the curse I’ve carried my entire life will be there in an instant whenever I call for it.

Oh well. At least I’m back to my normal level of terrible. I end the transformation in a burst of disintegrating shadows and crow feathers, pick my actual tarot deck up off the nightstand, and pull my card of the day. The Moon — insight, imagination, the world of dreams and fears. On its own, a reminder to take stock of your emotions and how they might be affecting you, or to trust your intuition and instinctive hunches for answers you’re seeking.

The way Vyuji implied this should work, my understanding of my own magic definitely feels… lacking. All the instincts she said I’d have might be there, if I really look for them, but they’re coming in scattered bits and pieces, showing up at the last possible moments when I’m pushing myself to test them. Or, more dangerously, when I was in a Wound desperately looking for a way out.

Am I doing something wrong? If I am, I don’t know what to change.

~~~

The next few days were a tense sort of quiet.

The story broke that afternoon. We already knew it was coming by the time reports started. Well, of course I did, but the charge nurse announced that morning (in very broad terms) that yes, there was recently a Harbinger in the hospital, it took a patient from our floor, and it’s dead now — believed to be completely dead, though we should speak up if we felt anything strange or just needed someone to talk to. Someone probably called Dr. Hines’ workplace to say where he’d gone, and they didn’t want the older patients stumbling on the news at random.

That only did so much to help. Once they’d heard, people were suddenly quicker to jump at shadows. When the night nurses dimmed the lights in the main room, they left them a little bit brighter than they did before. This was too close a call for most people to brush off and be happy they’re safe. Fear for your life is nothing new here, but when Harbingers are involved, there are worse things than death. Even I can’t deny that, not when I’ve met one and seen its plans for the world.

I’m not worried about Harbingers in quite the same way, but I had enough of my own problems to keep me just a bit on edge. I’d already burned through the health I took by next morning. I’m used to living like this, I have to be, but when the numbing cold crept back through me, remembering that the pain was nearly gone yesterday somehow made it all the worse. If I need to do that again, I’ll have to see if I can bank wellness somehow, ration it out to keep things bearable for a bit longer.

As expected, no one was happy with me running off twice in one day, especially since the best explanation I had was “I’m tired, can’t talk about this right now.”  They gave me my space that night, but from then on I could feel more eyes on me than usual whenever I left my room. Not a constant shadowing, just enough to know that they were paying attention and they wouldn’t stand for another weird outing.

I really would have to tell at least one doctor what I was doing, then. It was that or literally fight the next aide who tried to stop me from leaving, which… it’d make the point, sure, but was a terrible idea in all sorts of ways. Dr. Hines was my first choice, but I wasn’t sure when he’d be back and I could only delay for so long. There were some ideas I wanted to test and things I wanted to study before my next outing, though, so we’d see how things look when I was done.

Until then, I tried to keep to my daily routine, more or less. Acting completely different all of a sudden would feel like a signal that something weird was going on, and I didn’t need any more of those.

~~~

My tarot corner hasn’t had many visitors lately. Maybe people are a little nervous thinking about what the future holds when they’ve just come so close to the worst-case scenario. For my part, I spend most of my time on my cnidarian drive, doing whatever Keeper research I can do on the Coral Sea. Honestly, none of it feels more useful than just asking Vyuji basic questions or experimenting with magic myself. I’m sure there is good information on the Sea, it’s just scattered across more pages than anyone could ever go through, and I’ve never become an expert at sorting through them. Maybe it’ll go better if I come up with some specific concept or field I want to know every possible thing about.

All around, things on the seventh floor feel… slow. Lethargic. The others are still doing their best to stay busy, but the conversations are softer and the crowd quietly watching the news on the communal TV is bigger. I’ve mostly avoided the reports myself, other than a quick search to make sure that I wasn’t somehow named in them. As long as they can’t trace whatever they’re imagining back to me, I don’t really care.

We have more visitors than usual, though, some staying around to keep residents company for pretty long stretches. Noirin has one today — her grandson Oscar, a weedy kid around my age with messy brown hair and thin-rimmed glasses. He’s visited a few times since I’ve been here, always by himself. They’re circling the main room together, watering the plants on the windowsills, and stop to greet me when they reach my table.

Oscar speaks first. “Morning, Lia. ‘S been a minute, how’re you holding up?”

“My name is Liadain,” I correct. Only Dad and the volunteer helpers who think of me as That Cute Little Dying Girl call me Lia. “And, ah, no worse than usual.” That’s true if you stretch it a bit.

“Right, sorry.” Oscar’s eyes flick to the side. I wonder if Noirin told him in advance not to say anything stupid about my hair. “Hey, do you still do those… the fortune-telling, with the cards?” he asks, filling the quiet just before it can turn too awkward. “Grandma mentioned it and I was wondering about something.”

“Not for you. They only ever predict horror and misery for normal people and I’d hate to accidentally curse someone.” Noirin shoots me a skeptical glance at that, one eyebrow raised, but carries on tending to a row of mint plants.

“Uh, yup, whatever you say. Playing Champions is safe though, right?” he asks.

“I hope so, since otherwise I already poisoned you last time. Sorry. Come by when you’re done if you want to play, I’ll go find my stuff.” Champions of the Goddess, the Church-sponsored Keeper card game, was a big thing when I was in school. I imagine it still is, but my old cards were gathering dust until Oscar mentioned playing a couple weeks ago. It’s been nice taking them out again. One of my rare strengths is that I’m kind of good at this game.

I already have my cards splayed out on the table when Oscar returns a few minutes later. “You’re still playing this deck? I regret asking already,” he says with a dramatic groan. “Just… think about how happy you could make some freak on the Sea if you sold it off.”

“But then I’d have to actually talk to those people! Yuck! Don’t lump me in with them. I like how she plays, that’s all.”

My prized deck stars Tara Mullane, the Flower’s Fangs. After the media panic surrounding her really took off last year, they stopped printing her cards and tournament-banned them. Bringing her up at all is still considered rather icky, and I think the main reason I get away with playing her is because no one wants to refuse a dying girl her small joys in life. These cards are collectibles now, worth a lot of money to the right sort of insane groupies, but what would I even do with money?

“What, this no-fun-allowed control pile? That’s actually worse! I’d be happy to lose every time if I could just play any of my damn cards on the way down!” Oscar fumes.

“Listen, Oscar, that’s just the way this game works. There’s only so much fun you can squeeze out of one match. When we start, we’re sharing it equally, and then you win by taking away all the other side’s fun. Hate the game, not me.”

“Sounds like a pretty terrible way to have fun with your friends when you put it like that.”

“I guess so. Do you still want to play?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” he sighs.

For all his whining, I do lose in the end. I drag it out as long as possible, but Oscar plays the Silver King and her cards are all way too good. When you’re that popular, you get to be overpowered.

I wonder for a second what my cards would be like. Then I remember how much I’d hate being famous and brush the thought away.

“Enjoy it while you can. I’ll crack this puzzle yet, no matter how rigged. Another round?”

“Mmm, with the way you play I might be trapped here forever, but sure. One more, then I should probably… huh. Hey, Grandma.” At some point, Noirin took a seat to our side. She waves once as we look up from our cards.

“Oh, you’re here!” I’m not sure how I didn’t notice her. Sure, I was trying pretty hard to win, but she does seem to have the lightest feet of anyone I’ve ever known. “You don’t play this stupid game, do you?”

“Not at all,” Noirin laughs. “I’ve got no idea what’s happening. I just like watching people’s faces while they play games. They tell quite the stories.”

That’s… really kind of embarrassing? My cheeks burn a little, and Oscar seems to feel the same way. He freezes for a second, then looks down and gathers his cards, completely flattening out his expression as we start the next game.

“Well now you’ve stopped making them! You kids aren’t any fun.”

~~~

It’s been four days when Dr. Hines comes back, which is good news for a couple of reasons. They must have found him before it got really bad, since that’s no time at all as far as treating Harbinger victims goes. More selfishly, any longer and I might’ve had to pick someone else to talk to.

“I’ve gone over the results of your screenings from Monday. All negative, it looks like your vitals have been stable ever since, and I’m afraid I’m not sure where to go from there.” We’re alone in the seventh floor exam room. True to the general aesthetic, it looks much more like a simple walk-in doctor’s office than part of a hospital.

“If anything like this were going to happen, it should’ve happened during the last transplant conditioning regimen. There are some autoimmune disorders that can cause premature whitening, but yours isn’t one of them. Even if it were, well, hair that’s already grown doesn’t just dye itself… ah, but you must’ve heard that a few times by now.”

“I sure have. But if nothing has actually changed healthwise, I’ll manage.”

The doctor smiles, very slightly, and scribbles something on a notepad. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but he looks about the same as always. Maybe his face is a little thinner, but he doesn’t seem too haggard. The balance of grey and black in his hair hasn’t changed at all. “Well, you seem to be in good enough spirits. We’ll keep an eye on your condition, but if it’s not upsetting you too much, we may just have to write this one off as a mystery.”

Maybe I should be a little more worried about going grey at thirteen, but… making my magic work for me. I’m doing my best not to get mad. I don’t like being angry. Anger is a pointless emotion that only ever makes things harder. “Alright. I’m fine with that. I do have another question, though.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Please tell me exactly how medical confidentiality works.” I’ve been in and out of this hospital enough that I basically know the rules, but if I’m going to spill this particular secret, I want to be certain there are no weird exceptions that might cause problems for me. I’ve already missed one obvious hole in my plans to keep a low profile, not that I could’ve done much differently there.

“…Pardon?”

“When are you allowed to tell people things about your patients without asking them? Do you ever have to?”

Dr. Hines looks a bit confused, but he does outline the common exceptions. If other doctors urgently need to know something to treat a patient. If something about a secret is dangerous to the patient or someone else, like if they have a very contagious disease. If you’re talking about treating a minor with their parents.

That last one sounds bad. “What if they don’t want their family to know?”

“Ah, well, if a patient is old enough to understand medical decisions, we try to respect their wishes. As long as that doesn’t run against their best interests.” His voice lowers. “Liadain, is something the matter?”

Way too vague for my liking, but fine. That’s the best I’m going to get, I can’t really use a specific example without giving myself away, and whether or not it’s strictly allowed to tell him, I can make a strong case for leaving Dad out of this. Keepers are supposed to get all sorts of special exceptions anyway.

I guess I just have to force it out before I lose my nerve. “Sort of. So, I already… I know what happened. I made the Promise on Monday. This is the first sign of my Emergence.”

Dr. Hines opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out. “I see,” he finally croaks. “Are you sure that—”

I flare a bit of my magic, just enough for it to dim the lights and recolor my eyes, and the doctor draws back suddenly. Wide eyes stare straight at me, frozen in place.

“Um, sorry. I just didn’t want this to be about whether I’m delusional.” I let the aura fade.

“No, no, I… suppose some things just need to be seen. I was more worried about whether you came too close to it.” From his face, mentioning the Harbinger — maybe thinking of it at all — is a painful act of will. Remembering my first meeting with Yurfaln, I can’t blame him. “Wait,” he whispers. “On Monday. Were you…?”

I nod. He already knows enough that it’s the obvious answer.

He slowly sighs out the gathering tension. “In that case, I expect I may owe you quite a lot.”

What do you say to that? I probably wouldn’t have brought it up. Saving a life was still a strange feeling and I didn’t want to come off as somehow holding it over him. In the end I just raise a hand, palm out, and shake my head. There’s a long silence in the air.

“So, why tell me this?” he finally asks.

“Right. I needed help with a few things. First, I still live here. From now on I’ll probably be going out a lot. Doing Keeper things. The nurses don’t like me running off, and I guess from their perspective I’ve just lost my mind and started doing dangerous things for no reason. Please tell them… I don’t know what you tell them. Just make a floor memo saying not to bother me when I go on weird long walks. I don’t want to cause any scenes.”

“Yes, I think I see the issue. I’ll take care of it, but, well… as far as keeping it hidden from everyone here, consider your circumstances. There are really two things that could’ve caused this: either something medically impossible happened out of the blue to a severely ill patient, but we’ve all decided to ignore it and trust that it had nothing to do with our very recent Harbinger incident, or you’re a Keeper changing the way everyone knows Keepers do. I can’t stop people from drawing conclusions, so you may want to think about how to tell them on your own terms.”

“…Eventually,” he adds quietly. My face must be speaking for me.

“Um, eventually. Thanks.” I hate it, but he’s probably right. I can keep a low public profile, but my living situation just isn’t the best for me to do this beneath anyone’s notice. “This second one is a stretch, I can’t imagine the overlap of Keepers and terminal illness is a big field of study, but… do you have any idea how that works, what all this might mean for me healthwise? Or know someone who might?”

“Keeper medical issues are a specialty area, I’m afraid. Most of the experts are Church scholars.” He shakes his head apologetically. “They may have someone we could call in or refer you to, though. Would you like me to look into that?”

“Please do. It couldn’t hurt.”

We talk for a bit about the details of that search. I’d rather he check with me before he actually tells some potential specialist anything, but “I might know a Keeper” is probably necessary. I’m allowed to sign a medical release myself because Keepers in New Claris are automatically emancipated as soon as they make the Promise, which is the first I’ve heard of that. It’s kind of nice to know, not that Dad actually wants any say in my life.

“If that’s all… well, thank you again, Liadain. And, ah, congratulations…? Try to stay safe. Whatever else has changed, your health is still fragile.”

“I know. I’ll do my best.”

~~~

I give Dr. Hines a while to get the message out, however he decided to word it, and then it’s time to go. The sun is getting a bit low in the sky, but hasn’t started to set. It probably won’t for a few more hours. Today, the nurse at the front desk only watches with confused concern as I leave.

Hunting strategies are complicated, that’s the sum of what I’ve learned from reading about them. I really just stumbled across my first Harbinger, and I’m still not sure I have a good plan for when ‘find a horrible scent and chase it’ doesn’t work out. New Claris has a lot of Keepers — if the stuff on the Sea about other cities is true, it’s apparently downright crowded for our actual size — but it doesn’t seem like I’ll have much competition if I stake a claim around the hospital. The university just south of here might also be up for grabs.

Past that isn’t so clear. The urban centers are naturally pretty covered, the farmlands outside have specific kids looking after them on shifts, and there’s not much point in thinking about the Peaks. The Silver King somehow manages to do all of the magical celebrity stuff and keep an eye on the entire district at the same time, only breaking long enough to sleep… probably. I think Keepers still need to sleep. The Stardust Seraph lives somewhere to the south, but you see him all over the place, so pushing a bit farther that way might work. Apparently he runs around and jumps in to help with every problem he can, then refuses any share of the prize in exchange for… selfies with other Keepers to post on the Sea, which is a ridiculous fable if I’ve ever heard one.

Anyway, no point in getting too complicated until I see what I can find. I transform in the same secluded parklet as last time and head off into the city, stretching my senses out as far as I can.

But nothing’s turning up today. I make it across the university campus and back, taking a different long, looping route on the return trip, and all I encounter are people staring at me as I pass. Magic or no, it’s a lot more walking than I’m used to. I’m already kind of tired.

What’s the next move that doesn’t step on any toes? Unfortunately, there’s only one I can think of. With a heavy, heavy heart, I turn off my phone’s caller ID and type in a number I managed to remember after all.

“Hello? Shona? Yes, it’s me. Yes, I’m actually calling. Do you two have your eyes on anything?”

The floor’s charge nurse insists on all the poking and testing and measurements she can think of. They obviously won’t find anything, but I can’t really tell them that. I tried to think of any decent explanation I could use as an excuse, but every lie that popped into my head sounded shoddy.

Oh, it’s nothing to worry about, I just went out to get my hair streaked in public where I could die, thank you for noticing! Even if they were dumb enough to buy that, they’d probably end up locking me in sick little girl jail and throwing away the key. At the very least they’d keep a much closer eye on me, which is exactly what I don’t want.

Oh, I did my hair and I just couldn’t wait to show it off to the world! If only the Promise had granted me the power to summon hair care products from thin air so I could prove it. 

…Maybe I could pretend to look for whatever things you use to do this to yourself and act like they’re missing? Maybe someone stole it while I was out, hmm? No, that’s ridiculous, and if they somehow took it seriously it would cause a lot of trouble for everyone else on the seventh floor.

“And you’re certain that’s all?” she asks for the third time.

“I’m not sure what you want from me. Everything else is normal as it gets. I’m feeling fine. Well, relatively. It doesn’t look like I’m dying any faster, does it?”

“…No, nothing seems to have changed,” she admits, staring down at the clipboard she’s furiously scribbling on. “It’s a real puzzle.”

“Which it doesn’t look like we’re going to solve, at least not until whatever tests you’re sending off right now come back. Dr. Hines might have better ideas?” I try.

“That might be, but he’s still out today.” They haven’t heard anything more, then. The nurse frowns, the small wrinkles on her face deepening, and looks up at me over her clipboard. “This always feels like such a strange question, but is there any chance something, ah, unusual could have happened?”

“I’m… not sure what you mean?” 

“Well, you know… things do come up, sometimes. Have you felt anything you couldn’t explain lately, seen anything…” She waves a hand, like she’s reaching out for a word she can’t quite find. “Mystical?” 

She doesn’t sound used to dealing with magic issues, maybe she’s never done it at all, but I already know perfectly well what she’s talking about. There’s one explanation for something like this that everyone knows. It’s incredibly unlikely to happen to any given kid who wasn’t a Keeper yesterday, but, well, this time it really is the answer. 

“Liadain?” She’s still looking at me, visibly worried.

“Huh?” I must have gotten lost in my thoughts, and that’s the best I can come up with. “I mean, I spend all my time here, and nothing weird happened in the garden. Since you’ve already said this doesn’t make any medical sense, can we agree that we’ve gotten as far as we can for now with normal, sensible things? I’m really tired.”

The nurse looks up at me for a moment, narrows her eyes, then sighs and sets the clipboard down. “…Okay. Go get some rest and we’ll see how things are looking in the morning. Hopefully the doctor will be back then, too.”

“Hopefully.” Right now it’s one more thing to worry about, and I have no other way to check on him. Maybe when the news catches wind of the incident, but I’m still a bit afraid to see what they make of me.

One thing at a time. That’s a pretty distant worry, as they go, and I’ve shoved it away by the time I make it back to my room.

“Hi, Pearl. I hope you’ve been having a better time than me.” Pearl smiles up at me in quiet greeting, cozy as I left her in her nest. I force myself to change — no reason to punish this dress for the day I’ve had — then climb straight into my bed and quickly pass out.

~~~

Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep…

It’s just before sunset when my alarm goes off. It still doesn’t feel like enough, but I should do my best not to destroy my sleep schedule. I grab my personal deck from the nightstand, roll out of bed, and stagger over to my side-table chair. I’m about to pull a second card for the day when I have a better idea. Maybe.

“Vyuji, had this already happened when we last talked?” I groan into my empty room.

There’s a bit of a delay before she appears this time, but after maybe ten seconds, there she is. Suddenly, she’s perched on the windowsill, her face placid as ever. “Yes. I didn’t see it happen, but your first Emergence almost certainly came when you claimed the Harbinger. You knew it was coming, didn’t you? This is your first real progress toward your goal, however small a step it was. You should be celebrating.”

“That doesn’t mean I wanted to learn about it from the next random person to look at me!” 

“Apologies. I’ll remember that in the future.”

“In the future. Right. I’ll just go ahead and ask.” 

At the height of her power, Saint Kuri was apparently a human-shaped construct of wood and vines and foliage, with only her soul left over from her days as a flesh-and-blood person. As I understand it, the marks of Emergence aren’t something Keepers choose or design in any conscious way, and there doesn’t seem to be a hard limit to how strange things can get if you last long enough, but they do reflect your power and personality in some way.

I don’t like what that implies for my future at all.

“…Should I be worried about, I don’t know, turning into a horrible plague-beast? I somehow can’t imagine this ends anywhere good.”

“It would be best for you to expand your imagination, then. There is no sharp distinction between you and your magic. It doesn’t have a plan it’s following or goals separate from your own — it acts as your heart of hearts believes it should. Find ways to make it serve you and suit your desires. Share with it the best of yourself, and it will repay you in kind. Likewise, if you hate it and spurn it as a curse, that is what it may well become.” Vyuji says all this with no inflection in her strange voice, unmoving, unblinking. 

More and more of what I hear about magic makes me think I’m horribly, horribly unfit to handle it. “Okay. That… follows, I think. It’s part of me, it responds to the way I treat it sort of like exercising or ignoring any other part of me, only if my arms could decide I wasn’t treating them right and go do their own thing? Is that about right?”

“Perhaps they can.” She makes an actual sound for the third time since I met her, a little noise I can just barely make out as a tittering laugh.

“Um, excuse me? They definitely can’t.” 

Vyuji’s brow wrinkles, making her look almost puzzled. It’s the face a person might make if a stranger walked right up to them on the street and announced that water was dry. “No, nevermind, you’re probably right,” she finally says. “There’s just an old question you brought to my mind.”

“Right, well… wait, do you feel that?” I turn my chair to look out the window. Something in the distance is prickling at my senses.

“Feel what?” She tilts her head very slightly, her usual stillness returning. 

I turn my awareness outward, reaching as far as I can into the city around us. There’s someone on the streets below, moving toward the hospital. This is nothing like Yurfaln’s repulsive aura, though. It has a weight that clearly separates it from regular human souls, but no alien malice, just intense focus. A coiled spring ready to jump to life at a moment’s notice. 

Not a Harbinger, then? She said I’d recognize those instantly, and I believe her after Yurfaln. A Messenger wouldn’t make any sense — suddenly, I realize Vyuji gives off no impressions at all, but that’s not important right now — so is this what Keepers feel like?

“Underneath us. Outside. Another Keeper, I think, unless there’s some other category I don’t know about.”

“Hm. They’re not one of mine, then.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“Apologies. I’d know more if they were.”

“What would they be doing here?” I press my face to the window and look down at the streets, but I can’t see much. No bright flashes of magic, no fancy costume I can make out from this distance.

Vyuji’s gaze shifts slightly, following my movement more than turning toward the window. She just shrugs. “I couldn’t say. My best guess… when your work was done earlier, did you get help for the Harbinger’s victims?”

“Well, yes… I don’t think I gave them anything that’d point here, though.” Even if I did, what should it matter? The Harbinger is dead, and as far as they know it started out… “…oh. Um, do you know how the Soul Sanctuary works?”

“I know enough. Why?” She tilts her head, eyes wide. I’ve seen her do that a few times now. Always to the left, always moving the exact same way and settling at precisely the same angle. It’s a bit unsettling, like she has some dictionary of expressions she pulls from whenever it seems appropriate rather than actually… expressing anything.

“Well, while they’re taking care of people, do they have… I don’t know, some way to track magic, figure out when…” My voice trails off as I realize something very stupid. “…oh. Someone probably just asked him what he was doing when it got to him, didn’t they?” I did everything right, took all the steps I could think of to keep myself out of this, but it didn’t end up mattering. 

“Quite honestly, it sounds like you have a better handle on the situation than I do. I’ve got no idea who ‘he’ might be.” When I look back at her, Vyuji’s lips have quirked very slightly upward.

“My doctor was close to the scene of all this and missing today, so I asked them to check on him too.” He really was in trouble, then, but not too far gone to talk about it. Small mercies. “Anyway, I should probably go check on this before someone storms in here. If nothing too messy happens, I’ll check back in with you later about… all this, okay?” I gesture vaguely at the white strands of my hair, still visible in the corner of my eye.

“Whenever you wish.” And without so much as a nod, she’s gone.

~~~

Out in the halls, I find myself a new mask. I’ve already recast my cold protective haze — this time it’s just to hide my face, for all the good it’ll do. 

“Ah, Liadain? Where are you going?” The nurse at the front desk rushes over to me.

“Sorry, I think I forgot something outside. I’ll just be a minute.” I hope. I don’t have a good excuse in mind if I’m wrong.

“Now wait a minute, you really shouldn’t be moving around so much. Everyone’s already worried about you! Just tell me what you lost and someone can go get it for… Liadain? Liadain!” She stops short of grabbing me or standing in my way, but she’s still scolding me when the elevator door closes.

…I don’t like it, but if I plan to keep running off, I’ll probably have to tell at least the doctors something soon. Maybe they already know. It’s not like there’s another likely explanation for what just happened to me.

One thing at a time, though. What am I doing here? I don’t want a stranger digging around in the closest thing I’ve got to a home, where they might sense my magic and find out right away about the little dying Keeper. I don’t want them sticking around and hunting nearby, when I’m already not sure how hard it’ll be to find more monsters. If I can help it, I’d rather they not think I came from around the hospital at all, but that might be tough. There’s no time to arrange anything complicated, and this mask is a bit of a giveaway… oh well. 

Sunlight still filters through the glass window-walls downstairs, but at this hour it doesn’t do much more than cast long shadows across the floor, and the softly-lit hallways are mostly empty as I make my way to a side exit. Out on the streets, things are still bright and bustling with people making their ways home. That pleasant chill from earlier has turned bitter and sharp, but I don’t mind its sting. I’ve been cut off from the ordinary world for so long that it all somehow feels new and thrilling. At least for now, I’m seeing it through the eyes of a kid looking out at her first snowstorm in awe rather than the adult who has to shovel the driveway. 

We’ll see if that mood holds when this is over. The other Keeper is coming closer, still headed straight for the hospital. I’d rather not stomp right up to them on the road and have an audience, so first I’ll try to get their attention the way they got mine. The tile sidewalks are wide enough that even at their busiest, they almost never feel crammed, and I don’t need to awkwardly weave around passersby as I hurry down the street. 

A block away from the hospital, I duck into a tiny city park between two tall buildings. After a moment to catch my breath, and to make sure no one else is here watching me, I turn my focus inward, reaching for the heart of my magic. Its touch is cold and bitter as ever, like the protective haze I’m cloaked in has seeped into my bones. Wisps of pale green light shimmer into view as I will my power back into the world, sucking in the sunlight around me and plunging the park into a brief unnatural night. Bright threads dance around me, shaping themselves into my regalia, but still I push more of it outward. Whatever my soul is like to other people, I want them to sense it as strongly as possible. It feels a bit like trying to form a smoke signal with nothing but my breath on a winter day, but then a Keeper with the right magic could probably make that work.

Sure enough, as the sudden darkness around me lifts, the presence stops moving. Almost a minute passes before they start again, faster now, coming almost to the hospital. I release a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding when they turn and head straight toward me. This plan hadn’t been much more than a fair guess. All that’s left to do is peer out at the sidewalk, wait, and hope this doesn’t end up being a disaster.

There they are. At the end of the street, a few hushed people are hastily stepping aside to make way for… wait, there’s two of them? I hadn’t sensed the second at all, no matter how close they came. 

Before I feel anything clearer, they come dashing down the road. A girl in heavily-engraved golden armor leads the way. Blonde hair in a single long braid trails behind her, and she’s holding a long spear tipped with gold or brass and a shield that looks much too big for her at the ready. Following her is a much taller girl in red, a sleek dress with sleeves detached at the shoulder and a skirt lined with long, sharp triangle-pattern folds of black cloth. She wears a tiny blue coral formation in her dark hair like a flower, with matching bracelets on either arm. The second one looks unarmed, but both are tense, ready to fight at any moment. 

Why? Does my magic feel that awful or are they worried about something else? 

Hesitant, I step off the park pavilion and into their path. The two come to a sudden stop a few feet away, and the armored one takes a battle stance, her gaze quickly sweeping around us before settling on me. “Where is it?” she barks. 

I wince at the noise. At least ‘it’ probably isn’t me, but… “What are you talking about?”

“What? Whatever you were flaring for!” the tall girl says. Her voice is lower, but still tinged with nervous energy. For a few very long seconds, I’m not sure what to say to that. 

“…No, it’s not like that, there isn’t anything happening. I just wanted to talk.”

The armored girl casts a sideways glance at her companion. The girl in red just stares down at me, confused, not quite scowling. “Then why on earth did you… ah, wait! I’m sure I don’t recognize you, so…” In an instant she lights up, her entire attitude reversing. “You’re new too, aren’t you? Has nobody told you this? That trick is the standard Keeper way to say ‘hey, please help me!’ Don’t worry about it, now you know, it’s just that you were really… loud, I guess is the word I’d use! It actually hurt a little! I was worried we were running into something really horrible.”

…Oh. Any of us can probably do what I just did. New Claris is full of Keepers, and if one of them runs into something they can’t handle, this really would work well as an instant signal fire. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine, we’re over it! Right?” she replies, looking expectantly to the shorter armored girl.

“Oh, uh, yeah… I don’t see why not,” the other girl concurs, loosening her stance and the tenseness in her shoulders as she lowers her shield.

“See? There it goes, right under the bridge! Whoosh!” the taller girl says, charging on ahead, and steps forward to offer a handshake. Those coral bracelets aren’t actually attached to anything, they’re too loose to fit around her arms — they just float there, moving with her. The glow in her eyes matches her outfit exactly, and… something about her is oddly familiar. I don’t think I’ve seen either of them in any of the Keeper news, not that I ever followed it too closely, but I’m not sure what else it could be. 

“Screaming Hymn Shona, at your service! You’re, ah… Ill Wind, is it? Cool! What’s your name?”

“What?” I hiss. “Why would — where did you even get that?” I recognize those words, but they were just a feeling I had about my power when I studied it. I didn’t share them with anyone. I didn’t even say them. The only way I can see that coming out is if, what, Vyuji somehow read my mind and told a bunch of strangers who aren’t even her kids?

“Um…” Shona says, blinking rapidly. “Right, you’re new. They, uh, they come with the magic. They’re a sort of signature, part of what you feel when you sense a Keeper. Try it, you can see mine the same way.”

“No, I mean, I believe you, it’s just… urgh. That’s really terrible.” What’s worse is that even as I argue the point in my head, the title somehow feels true. It’s not wrong. I recognize it like my own face in the mirror and I hate it.

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I like it! It’s… very distinctive, you know? Got a vibe we’re mostly missing in this city. Plus my strong, silent friend here hasn’t even found her name yet.”

“What do you mean she hasn’t found it?” How is that possible if any Keeper can just look at another and decide what they’re apparently supposed to be called? Bleh. I hate magic. I hate myself.

The other girl sighs, twirling her spear above her head as she returns it to a sheath on her back. “Hey, when did I become silent?” she huffs. “My NAME is Mide. I just haven’t gotten into this whole thing with the goofy titles.”

“They are not goofy! They’re the coolest!” Shona shouts back. 

“Think whatever you like about them. If I had one, I’m sure it’d be as goofy as this ridiculous armor,” Mide says, looking down at herself with a grimace. 

“What? Nooo! Your armor’s great!” Shona insists. “How many Keepers do you think look like that? It’s so you, it’s awesome!”

“It’s a gaudy mess. No mind paid to the weapons I’m using with it or what fighting Harbingers is actually like. All form, no function, and the form isn’t even that good!” Mide groans.

I mean, it is awfully shiny for my tastes, but I always thought Keeper regalia basically came from the Keepers themselves. Can you really be saddled with an outfit you hate the way I was with magic I hate?

Shona hrmphs and crosses her arms. “Well… you can always just take your sour grapes home if that’s how you want to be!”

“You know I can’t.” Mide returns the gesture, her shield dissolving into gold light in the process. “I don’t want to imagine the sort of trouble you’d dive into alone.”

This doesn’t seem like any of the worst-case scenarios I imagined, but whatever it is, it’s rapidly getting away from me. “Um…” I try.

“Yeah, I know, you’re out here because you didn’t wanna have to hear about all my amazing adventures secondhand! Lucky you’re a Keeper too, so you don’t have to act like this is all some dumb idea I dragged you into! We’re actual heroes chosen by the Goddess and from the way you talk sometimes you’d think this was just a repeat of the shogi thing!” Shona yells.

“Shona, bringing up the shogi thing will never be a good way to make your point. Never ever. Maybe just don’t,” Mide says flatly.

Shona shudders and groans like she’s just remembered something horribly embarrassing. “…Look. No one can possibly remember what all those little symbols on the pieces mean. Wasn’t my fault,” she grumbles a moment later.

“I did, somehow! Shogi people do! Irida obviously does, and if you were that set on impressing her, learning how to play the game before the tournament probably would’ve been a good start!”

“UMM,” I repeat, and stomp on the sidewalk for emphasis. I’m not going to start shouting at them. These two are already way too noisy.

“Huh?” Shona whirls to face me, a bit startled. “Right, right, sorry. We do have a third now.” 

Does she think this is a group? Is she already planning some adventure to drag me away on? Rather than ask, I point toward the pavilion. “Let’s head over here, alright? It’s quiet, we can sit.” More importantly, we still have a crowd staring at the three Keepers in the street. Shona looks back at Mide, who shrugs, and the two follow me into the tiny park.

“Oh, oh, who’d you make your Promise with? Enne’s ours,” Shona chirps as they find a seat. I settle in an empty bench across from them.

“Eh? Vyuji, why?” 

Shona scratches the back of her head. “No reason, I just thought it would be fun to collect friends from all…” She freezes in mid-thought. “Wait, for real?”

“Yes? That’s a bizarre question.” I’d never seen Vyuji before last night, just heard her name in passing once or twice, but a Messenger is a Messenger, right? They all do exactly the same thing. Why would I make that up?

“Well, it’s just that there’s not many of you, y’know? You’re the only local one I’ve heard of since… well, since Iona, and that was a pretty long time ago! Even the Cycles don’t mention the Moon Gardener as much as her siblings, so, uh… so people maaay go a little crazy filling in the blanks here and there. Er, sorry, I don’t mean to speak too ill of your Messenger! That’s all just talk that goes around. I’m sure it’s different if you know her personally!” 

I shrug. “Not really. She’s unbearable. Speak as ill as you like, I don’t mind.”

“U-uh,” Shona mutters, eyes suddenly wide. “Oh.” 

…Did I say something? 

Before I can figure it out, Mide steps in. “Hey, didn’t you have something you actually wanted to talk to us about?”

“Oh, right right right, I may have gone off on a few different garden paths there. Sorry!” Shona says, bouncing back in an instant.

Finally. Thank you, Mide. Your partner is impossible. “Were you here about the Harbinger incident in the Hills today?”

Mide nods. “We are, actually. I guess you’re the one who placed the call?”

“Yes. I figured they might send someone to check on its trail, but I’ve already done that. It’s gone. Completely gone.  And…” What next? How do the rest of them split the prizes? Are there rules of conduct for these things? Whatever. If this isn’t my territory, I don’t know what is. “And I live around here. I want to take care of it myself. Please tell whoever asked you to check that I’ll call for help if I need it.”

“Huh?” Mide says.

Shona, on the other hand, just points two finger guns at me and grins. “Ooh, cool! I always thought our Keeper scene didn’t feel quite complete without one of you incognito loner types!” 

Is she mocking me? I actually have no idea. Mide turns to stare at her, apparently shocked as I am that someone would just say something that embarrassing. She then looks to me with a knit brow, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s trying to evaluate me herself or sharing with me her bafflement out of sympathy, so I give her a dubious shrug in return.

Shona herself is glancing between us with a gawking smile, still keeping her finger guns trained on me. Eventually, Mide turns back to Shona as though questioning her soundness of mind, then back to me once more, and finally again back to Shona, who meets her gaze, their expressions unwavering… until they both burst into a shared fit of high-pitched laughter at the exact same time. 

…Whatever the joke, I guess I missed it. It must’ve been a really good one too, given how long they go on giggling between themselves.

“Ah, I’m… yeah, I’m sorry, when I put it like that it probably sounds really stupid, huh?” Shona says as she starts to catch her breath, wiping tears from her eyes on her sleeve. “Just, you know, too many Keeper stories in my diet growing up, I guess! Too many to shake now that I’m doing the actual damn thing!”

“…Anyway, I understand what you’re saying,” Mide finally goes on, “but doesn’t it feel kind of weird to divide things up quite that strictly? People need us to protect them, so if someone’s in trouble, isn’t the most important thing that whoever’s in the best position to help does it?”

“Schools usually have their own Keepers watching over them, right? Everyone leaves them to it. The Silver King seems to have the Peaks entirely covered most of the time. Then there’s the airship Keepers off in their own little world…” although I guess that’s mostly just a question of who can fly. “All I’m saying is that I can take care of my own yard. I don’t think that’s weird, no.”

“I… guess that’s true,” she says, not looking at all convinced. How did this girl end up as a Keeper? I shouldn’t need to say what I’m thinking, not when there was obviously something she made the Promise for.

Shona jumps back in before I can say anything else. “Sure, sure, I get it. I don’t think there’s any kind of, like, formal arrangement where they sit and map these things out, but I’ll pass that along.”

“Thank you.”

“I won’t go telling the world all about the new girl, either. I get the sense that’d be bad for this whole… image of yours. And favor for a favor, here’s something I’d like you to think about.” Her smile widens. “You fought your first Harbinger all by yourself. I bet it was pretty tough, right?”

Oh no. No no no no no. “I see where you’re going and I don’t think…”

“We could have a name and everything! It’d be so cool!” She hops to her feet and kneels in front of my bench, staring straight at me. I draw back a little, very pointedly saying nothing. Behind her, Mide just shakes her head and watches.

Shona waits a beat, then keeps right on going. “There aren’t any proper teams active in New Claris! The two of us are the closest thing, so we’d be the first! The first! Think about that!”

I’m already thinking about it, and I’ve already decided it’s an awful idea. I’m terrible with strangers, I don’t know these girls, and actual Keeper teams are complicated even in the best circumstances. Keepers tend to be… intense, in one way or another, and active ones all have something they want to change badly enough to go out and repeatedly risk their lives for. Who gets to keep the monsters you hunt as a group? Is it even possible to split a Harbinger down the middle and half-absorb it? I don’t see how I could’ve torn off a chunk of Yurfaln and shared it with someone else even if I’d wanted to. Which I really, really didn’t.

Eventually, Shona sighs, breaking eye contact. “Well, it makes sense for one of you types to be kinda shy, huh?” I’m not sure how long she was waiting on me — she’s so noisy that I must have pulled into myself a little. “Listen, just… give it some thought, okay? Hey, and you know, we can try it out before we make it a whole big thing if that’s better. The next time one of us finds something, we can fight it together, see how it goes. If you want, that is. How can we reach you?”

“Come by around here and do what I just did to get your attention, if you really need to.”

“That’s a little messy. What if someone else thinks it’s a false alarm? I’m sure you won’t give me your contact info, but here, why don’t I just… shit, I don’t have anything to write with, do you? No you don’t, who carries actual paper around?” She rattles off a phone number, then repeats it. “Just remember it, I guess. You can use it or not. And really think about it! There’ll be a prize for whoever comes up with the best name!”

“I’ll do that,” I lie. “Anyway, I’ve said all I wanted to say, if you’re done.”

“Sure, yeah, we’ll get out of your hair,” Shona shrugs. “Stay safe, uh, new girl… wait, I never did get your actual name!”

She sure didn’t. I’d been kind of hoping she forgot. “Oh, I’m… Eyna,” I say. My late grandma’s name. I don’t think I have the brainpower on hand to make up some complicated fake identity, but I’ll still take the steps I can.

“Right, right right right! Well then, Eyna, we’ll be seeing you soon! I hope!”

“Goodnight,” Mide adds. She mouths ‘sorry’ as Shona starts back toward the road, then stands and follows her away.

As soon as they round the corner, I lean over and sprawl out on my bench with a groan. It’s terribly uncomfortable, but I’m too tired to do anything else. I’ve forgotten how I ever used to handle people.

All of this probably took long enough that they’ve noticed back on the seventh floor, but they’ll just have to live with my silence for another night. Maybe I’ll figure it out in the morning.

It’s too dark to see inside, and the eerie green glow shifting over my tarot spread isn’t enough to illuminate anything. The air here is somehow too humid and too thin at the same time. It clings to me as I move, its damp warmth a sudden shift from the cold outside. My head swims and my lungs burn the way they sometimes do on bad health days, no matter how much swampy air I suck down. My eyes never seem to adjust to the gloom, and navigating by magic can only do so much. My soul has a sense of which way my power is flowing as the Wound gathers it up, but it’s not like I can actually see with it, and I don’t feel anything solid enough to be Yurfaln itself.

“Hey! If you want me, get out here! I’m not-” My voice quivers, instantly putting the lie to my poorly-faked confidence, and a dry cough tears through my throat. “…not done with you,” I croak.

Fluorescent yellow light from no clear source floods the ruins. The dim glow flickers like a dying lightbulb, but it’s at least enough to see by. The temple’s entrance hall is a round chamber held up by pillars just as caked in grime and corruption as the walls outside. Above is a high dome ceiling almost completely scrawled over with spiraling glyphs, though the white stone underneath does peek through in a few places. 

At the far end of the room, a dirty curtain hangs over a hall leading further inside. It swings open on its own — I brace myself, expecting the world to twist around me again, but the lurch never comes. Instead, Yurfaln’s distant voice echoes through the temple: Welcome welcome! Come. Join!

Do I have any other choice? Playing along with its plans feels wrong, but there’s only one way forward. I can change this world too, yes, but I’ve already struck at the Harbinger in the only way I can think of. As far as I can tell, it didn’t care at all. It liked it. 

No, that’s not quite right. I have no idea why Yurfaln would eat itself or make such a show of working my infection into its Wound, but it must be some sort of countermove. It didn’t just stand there and shrug my magic off — I definitely hurt it on some level. Bits of it were wasting away when I last saw it. It’s too much to hope that it’s still falling apart and I only need to catch it, but there has to be something I can do if I figure out what it’s doing with my power and why. 

Which I can only do by seeing more of it. No matter what that ends up looking like. 

So in I go. 

Past the curtain, the temple narrows into a long, dingy hall that slopes steadily down. It’s barely lit, as if by a single bulb floating somewhere far behind me, and I spend the descent reaching out with my soul for any signs of movement — an ambush, Yurfaln’s presence, anything. It never comes. There’s only distant wisps of my magic flowing inward and a sound that slowly fills the air, growing louder as I walk. Not medical equipment or insect noises, but a steady murmuring like whispered giggles. The weak laughter of dying children. The air gets simultaneously heavier and thinner as I come closer to the sound’s source, weakening my own breath. It never feels bad enough that the Wound is trying to strangle me, but it weighs me down all the same. That’s fine. My body failing me is nothing new.

Finally, a new, brighter source of unsteady yellow light comes into view. The end of the passage, and… yes, this feels like the central trunk of my tarot spread, the point Yurfaln is gathering my magic toward. The Harbinger’s slimy aura is thick here, and while I can’t tell if it’s nested somewhere in the miasma, waiting to catch me right at the bottom, I’m sure this place is… important to the Wound in some way. A deeper part of Yurfaln than those outside. If the answers I’m looking for are anywhere, they’re here. I gather my feeble strength and step into the light.

What’s waiting there steals the last of my breath.

The tunnel opens into a dank sickroom the size of a school auditorium. Withering bodies in ragged cloaks are packed into too-tight rows of rickety cots. The walls are coated in dirt and dust and Yurfaln’s mud, except where the dying are absorbed in scratching it away by hand. They work in very specific patterns, drawing those strange glyphs with the white stone beneath the grime. Some of the same figures are standing, limping through the rows even as bits of them fall out of their robes and melt into the corruption coating the surfaces. The wanderers study the writing on the wall with great interest, occasionally stopping to copy bits of it into smaller versions of Yurfaln’s great white tome. 

A space at the center has been sectioned off, its beds rearranged to form a rough wall around a small pool. The water in it is a vibrant swampy green, the single spot of color in the filthy grey room, and gives off fumes that look and feel exactly like my magic. Two of the creatures are swimming in it, fully clothed, and many more sit gathered around the water, laughing and chittering in voices fainter but somehow easier to hear than all the rest. All of them are falling apart, just like the rest, but rather than mud and filth they’re disintegrating into green mist and black feathers that litter the ground.

As one, the creatures turn to watch me enter. Some call out in greeting, some wave, and some are too weak to do more than look. I back away, still breathless, but bump into a wet, muddy wall after only a step. The passage behind me is gone.

Well. This is what I came for, isn’t it? If I wanted to run, I’ve had chances. What difference does it make if they’re gone now?

I take my first hesitant steps out into the room, pausing to look around every few feet. But much as I expect the ragged things to swarm me like hungry zombies, they never do. If this is a trap, it’s a stranger one than that. 

Right before I reach the cot barricade around the central pool, the sickening pressure of the Wound spikes, battering my soul as the foul air chokes my body. Just ahead, a spout of mud bubbles up from the floor, and when it sloughs away, the Harbinger is standing across from the water. Its hood is down, and its mouth grins wider than ever. Its lost legs and fangs have mostly grown back in, but they now have black feathers and tiny hollow shafts sticking out of them at random, uneven points, and they constantly writhe as if fighting it — three fangs have bent back and dug into its head. When I sense it this closely, its aura shares the rotten-fruit stench of seventh floor patients, but there are two distinct feelings wound together inside it: a burning ache spreading outward from its core and the cold, gnawing pain of my power winds through it, all tangling together into a single awful sensation.

The dying creatures fall silent as Yurfaln emerges, and its voice blares through the chamber. This time it speaks slowly, the way you would to a toddler who doesn’t quite understand words. The phrases are more complicated, harder to translate in that ethereal way, but they go something like: We feel so much. Burn so bright. Shine so much light! See, see!

Then it gestures with its head to one ragged thing seated alone at the edge of the circle. It’s hunched over a white book, writing on its pages at a frantic pace with an old-fashioned quill pen made from one of those black feathers. The cloth over one side of its body is pulled back to expose a human arm, which is steadily turning bright green as it rots, but it’s melting into liquid rather than dissolving into mist. A glass bottle at its side gathers the liquid up, and it uses that bottle as an inkwell for its pen.

The writer looks up at the Harbinger and beams proudly. The mandibles around its human mouth quirk up, like it’s trying to smile with them too. Yurfaln dips one of its legs into the bottle, opens its own book, and begins copying what it’s written, chirping excitedly all the while.

Once again, I find myself holding back vomit with all my strength. This is… none of it makes— 

No. No, there’s one way to make sense of all this. 

The Harbinger draws power from sickness. Sickness is where it began. It ate a man who was wasting away, then wandered off to curse other people with slow, miserable deaths. Pain like mine is probably its favorite food, and I went and served it the biggest meal I could. That’s why it would let me do this — no, do this to itself — and then welcome me into its world and celebrate. 

It’s all I can do to remind myself that it’s still hurting. I’m certain it is, and I’ve got some kind of hook in it, but… can I do anything with that? If I push myself further, would it collapse into nothing or feast on my suffering until it burst? I have no idea if that’s how it works. More importantly, I’d probably die before it did. This place is poisonous, and my barrier isn’t enough to keep it from seeping into me. Not while I still need to breathe.

Yurfaln slams its book shut and returns to watching me with its eyeless smile. It stays like that for a long, long moment. Then it scoops a clump of feathers into its mouth, gnashing eagerly, and starts toward the far end of the room. It moves much slower than it did before, with its whole body twitching wildly and throwing off its skittering steps, but eventually it vanishes through a curtain-covered door.

Leaving me with no choice but to chase it, stand here and waste away, or try and make my own way out… and I don’t see any way of blasting open a new path with my magic.

I look over my tarot spread once more. The upside-down tree’s trunk is made up of two cards. On the lower one, Yurfaln’s muddy greys and reds are gathered around a bright pulsing circle of my emerald green. The card above it is all Yurfaln’s shades, pulsing wildly, like a clay heart beating much too fast. There’s something more left of the Harbinger and its world, something deeper still.

It could still be dying. This could still work. And it’s the only chance I have.

Ragged creatures shuffle aside, clearing a path for me to follow their creator into its heart. 

On the other side of the curtain is only darkness, which swiftly expands and swallows the world.

~~~

What remains is a formless non-space like the void I fell through to enter the Wound, except I’m standing on solid ground instead of falling forever. Images float slowly past me, stone mosaics backlit by flickering yellow lights. They’re jagged, ugly things, sharp rocks all packed together rather than smooth, artistic designs, but they do form legible pictures.

The first shows a crowd of colorless human-shaped outlines rendered faintly yellow by the light, shambling around in the dark. The next panels narrow in on a single man, always brightly colored and lit against the bleak background. He’s alone in a crowd of featureless, colorless people, then in a bed, thin and haggard but glowing brighter than before. Finally, he’s moved into a place as warm and vivid as him, a garden room filled with other bright people, their light shining out into the world and entirely replacing the dreary backdrop of the last pictures.

The stones are smoother on the last mosaic. It shows the man seated in the garden-world in a giant plush chair, its gold trim as ornate as a king’s throne. In front of him, a creature shrouded in rags bows down like a student sitting at the feet of a great teacher. 

Is this supposed to be Yurfaln and Mr. Enfield? Did the Harbinger kill and eat the man and then build a shrine for him?

The last scene fades with that thought, and bright lights blink on, replacing the void with a new, smaller chamber. Bizarrely, the center of the Wound is much cleaner than the sickroom. Its white stone walls are mostly pristine, except in the corner where Yurfaln stands. There, black feathers litter the ground, and several of its legs have sloughed to the floor around it, along with little chunks of clay where they once attached to its body. They’re dissolving into green mist, but slowly, like they’ll disintegrate over hours rather than minutes. If I am killing it, I don’t think it’s fast enough.

Look, look! it chirps, gesturing with all the legs on one side of its body. On the far wall is a sacrificial altar straight from a horror story — a raised stone slab, tilted down toward the floor, decorated all over with twisting glyphs. A scalpel is balanced on the top edge of the slab. A round gutter set into the floor circles it, and viewed from the side, there’s a channel that flows straight into the wall behind the altar.

The wall itself features another mosaic. It begins as a drab cityscape, but the image is alive — a mixture of Yurfaln’s colors and mine spread through it like dye mingling in a glass of water, and where those twisting shades pass, things change. By the time it reaches the mosaic’s borders, the city is an extension of the Wound. Its surfaces crawl with living clay and its streets are filled with deathly ill people, all smiling serenely as they expire in the streets.

Yurfaln speaks again, in the same slow, cheerful voice it used outside. Yours! I made it. For you! Die together? it asks.

…Together? What? That’s… before, I thought it was eating the pain of dying of an illness and didn’t care if it hurt going down. If I’m understanding it at all — and maybe I’m not, but that’s all I have to go on right now — it’s not just that it doesn’t care if it hurts or if it dies, but dying is actually the point.

I remember Mr. Enfield’s last words to me, all that about things working out for the best and death spurring you on to make the most of your last days. Those are obviously lies people tell themselves to feel a bit better when there’s nothing else they can do, but I have no reason to think Harbingers understand human self-deception. Maybe Yurfaln pulled those feelings from his dying thoughts, took them completely seriously, and decided it liked the idea. I open my mouth, but whatever words I wanted to say a moment ago have fled me. What could I possibly say to something that thinks like that, if it would even understand me?

FOR YOU, Yurfaln repeats. Its voice has been shrill and painful since I first heard it, but the impatience, the anger it’s tinged with now, that’s new. It draws itself to its full height and crawls closer, towering over me between unsteady steps.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Vyuji said she could only teach me so much, and she talked like I was ready for this, but I should’ve made her tell me every possible thing she knew about the enemy. And experimented more, figured out everything I could do and thought about how best to use it. Instead I ran off to die rather than risk the Harbinger’s trail going cold.

No, no, it’s not over yet. I’m not going to die like this. I’m not going to die. Inflaming the wisps of my power inside Yurfaln wouldn’t kill it fast enough to save me, but that’s not the only thing I can do. Magic isn’t just a weapon that you swing harder and hope for the best, and all this isn’t just a meal or a source of strength to Yurfaln. It is Yurfaln. It celebrates our misery, loves it enough to make its world a temple to slow, painful death. ‘Truth Is Written In Scars.’ That’s what it named itself. Sickness is its identity. 

And as much as I hate it, sickness belongs to me.

“Okay. Okay, calm down,” I half-whisper. “Die together, fine. That sounds wonderful. Let’s do it.” I sidestep toward the altar, afraid to take my eyes off Yurfaln. “B-but this isn’t quite right. It’s not what you want. Can… can I make it a little better first?”

Yurfaln just tilts its head, shifting its posture slightly. I don’t know how I’m translating its words, but the understanding doesn’t seem to work both ways.

“Better. Like this. More of this.” I push out slightly with my will, feeding a little more power into my barrier. A little more of the same pain and fear and bitterness I used to infect the Wound. I should be able to warp this place in other ways, too. Honestly, what I’m planning is a simpler way, just one that doesn’t come quite as naturally.

The Harbinger is still for a moment, save for the wild twitching of its diseased limbs. Then it trills wordless agreement. There’s a lightening of the ever-present pall of its corruption surrounding my soul — its grip on the world loosens slightly, making space for me to add my own touch to the dreamscape. Maybe I could’ve done it anyway, but I really don’t want to push my limits. Not yet.

I close my eyes and push a bit harder, trying to infuse more than raw emotion into my magic. Ideas, memories, fears more complex than the raw, primal kind. One image in particular. Cold mist drifts through the room on a faint breeze. Once it passes, I look back at the wall and inspect my work.

The altar’s been replaced by… it takes a moment to register what it’s supposed to be, and I imagined it. It’s a set of two matching altars, now, one raised slightly higher off the ground than the other. But they’re partially tilted like examination tables, and instead of cuffs or a place to fasten a bound victim’s limbs, each has a single cushioned armrest, one on the left and one on the right. 

Between them is something like an oversized dialysis machine, but the body of the machine is set into the floor, carved from a single slab of white stone. Its monitoring instruments have no numbers, just sigils like the ones written on the temple walls and little smiley faces. The main assembly of tubes that would normally be in the center is replicated on each side of the device, and instead of a filter to run the blood through, the lines simply wind together in the middle into a big tangled maze of clear plastic. Each side has six lines ending in too-long, too-thick needles, more than any imaginable procedure could ever need. It’s not a medical machine, it’s a mad science nightmare contraption designed to steal all the blood from two people at once and then do something inexplicable but certainly deadly with it.

Why does it look so awful? I didn’t make it like that, did I? It must just be the clay I’m working with — I made this, but I made it of Yurfaln’s Wound. It’s still part of this world.

Anyway, I don’t care what it looks like. It’s more or less what I wanted, it’ll do what I needed to do, and Yurfaln will probably like it more this way. The statement to it should be clear — if you want to share my pain, my blood, my cursed, broken blood that’s doing its very best to eat me alive, you can have it.

Yurfaln looks the machine over, crawls in a few looping circles around and between the new sacrificial setup. I hold my breath until it giggles, cheers, and scuttles over to the taller table. Its legs grab at the tubes on its side — or its original, undamaged legs do, while the twitchy feathered ones flail and fight them — but eventually, it takes all six needles and sinks them through the holes in its shroud, letting out a sharp wail as each punctures something beneath the cloth. It sits on the table, sets its book down beside it, and opens it to a fresh page.

I approach the device in a few more small steps. I lean my cane against the altar and pick out a single needle-tipped tube. Yurfaln whistles and chirps meaninglessly as I roll back the sleeve over my injured right arm. My teeth clench so hard it hurts, which I know won’t help. I know it’ll do the opposite, a lifetime of injections and infusions and drawn blood has seen to that, but I can’t help myself.

Just a little pain. Just a little more pain. What’s that to save my life?

I’ve never done this myself before. I position the needle over one of the veins in the center of my arm, look away, and do my best to slip it in. Its cold bite is much sharper than usual, and I let out a whimper of pain, but can’t let myself stop to really feel it. No time. My soul’s image of Yurfaln sharpens — we’re connected like this, we’d have to be for whatever it was planning to work, and I sense it on some new level. It tried to make my disease, my magic, into part of itself. My power is wound all through its essence, but it’s still mine. 

And it answers when I reach for it, seize it, and pull with all my might. It’s tangled up with Yurfaln’s strain of corruption, so it’s easier to rip them both free from its body together.

The Harbinger makes a confused whining sound. It twists its body into a coil, tightening its entire being around its stolen suffering, and a strange sense of phantom pressure grows in the air as I pull against it. Through that pressure, through the sharp pain in my arm and the dizzying ache of breathing in this place and the numbing weight of my own failing body, I keep pulling until I feel my power tearing loose shreds of Yurfaln’s soul and dragging them along with it.

Finally, colors start to flow out through Yurfaln’s tubes. The assembly fills up with an insane, ever-shifting muddy soup of ink-blacks and reds and greys and shimmering greens that never truly meld together. Yurfaln’s whine rises to a panicked howl as the chaotic mix of our magic floats there, waiting for its new purpose.

For this to work, I have to give it one. Magic wants to express itself. It wants to be used. I can’t just wish it away, which leaves two places it can go. This surprised the Harbinger, but if I give it a chance, it could still find a way to fight back.

I look at the rusty scraps of filth mixed through the green of my miasma and shiver. Yurfaln may have stolen the other disease, but by now it’s steeped in its essence, repulsive to my senses on a level that goes far beyond the sickly-sweet stenches of death I felt earlier. It feels like looking down on a plate of food and seeing something still living, still perfectly awake, glaring up at me with eyes full of intelligent malice. Something that knows what’s coming, but needs me to understand in its last moments that it hates me and wants me to suffer.

Tensing my entire body, I will the mass back into myself. The corruption, mine and Yurfaln’s both, rushes through the machine and sinks into my veins. 

As one, my nerves explode. My legs buckle. I collapse to my knees, screaming and screaming and screaming until I’m sure I’m clawing out my own throat. Yurfaln’s earsplitting wails drown out my own, and the tearing muscles in my neck are the only way I know that I’m still making sound. Sharp, gnawing agony rushes through me, and the stolen affliction burns in my chest. I feel like I’m drowning on dry land, like my body has forgotten what to do with air.

But through my tears, I can see Yurfaln shriveling, shrinking underneath its robes. Dozens of little legs stretch out from beneath the cloth as it stands and staggers forward, grasping for me, but its body gives out in mid-motion, crashing to a heap on the ground. Its hood falls away as it looks up at me with its eyeless face, twitching and shivering and grimacing in impossible pain with both of its mouths, and its clay flesh rapidly starts to dry and crack. It doesn’t fall away and spread filth through the room, it doesn’t dissolve into green mist, it simply crumbles to dust.

Yurfaln lowers its head. Its voice gives out, fading to a faint, quivering cry. Its remaining legs rise once more, then plunge as one into its chest. With only a low, dry croak of pain, it rips something out of itself — a pulsing orb of blackness, with thin lines of rust-red light running through it like veins. The Harbinger’s heart. The trophy I’m here for. My first step toward saving myself. 

And it’s holding it up with the last of its strength.

…Offering it to me?

Wilt. Wilt and… fill this world… wilt. Drink it all. Become true. Together, it rasps with its final breath. Pleading, not for mercy but for…

I pull the needle loose from my arm and snatch the heart, and the last of Yurfaln’s body disintegrates into scraps of shredded cloth and a cloud of dead grey dust. Its core is warm and slick to the touch, sending a revolted shudder through me, but I cling to it all the same, somehow afraid that it might vanish like a dream in the harsh morning sun if I let go. 

I squeeze the heart to my chest and reach out with my power to swallow it, biting my tongue to shove the awful feeling of the act down, but… after the first nauseating sip, something starts to change. That air of malice I’ve felt since I first started tracking the Harbinger slowly fades. Absorbing the essence beneath it doesn’t translate to any physical sense, the way reading magic often seems to — this is a deeper feeling, more abstract, something new and wonderful. Like the heady haze of finishing a book good enough that you forgot everything else while you read it, didn’t even realize you were reading, but free from the part where you have to snap out of it and find yourself back in your hospital bed. It’s just how the world is now.

While I drink its creator dry, the Wound collapses around me, ruined walls and many-armed effigies and sandy beaches all crumbling into the void, everything twisting and shrinking until the dark light in my hands is the only thing left in sight. That light expands to fill my vision as it seeps into me, a dark field spotted with distant stars painting over the Wounds. Formless ideas and images flash through the dark.

Now I understand. Soon, everything Yurfaln was will be mine, and I know the truth of it in some soul-deep sense. I don’t know where it came from or how it came into being, but beginning from the moment it invaded our world and stole its first life, I understand what it was trying to do. It saw us on the seventh floor, suffering, slowly dying, snatching any bits of life and meaning we could from our unlivable situations, and it decided that was so wonderful it would share the experience with everyone it could. In its world, to be destroyed by your own misery was to be enlightened. 

But its highest ideal was only ever a dying man’s comforting delusion. I’ve carried more weight than Yurfaln for a longer life, even added its pain to my own, and at the end of all this I’m more sure of that than ever. That’s how I broke it and its world. Its dream. Did it understand that? How did it feel, spending its last moments being rejected by someone like me? Was it hoping I’d carry on some legacy for it?

It doesn’t matter. It’s gone, and all I want to take from its failure is the strength to survive.

~~~

When the world comes back into view, there’s no sense of moving from one place to another. It’s like the Wound was only ever a stage set placed in front of the living room. I’m still shaking all over, but there are no other sounds, no movement that I can make out through my blurred vision. Dimly, I see that I’m in front of the fireplace, right where the hole in the ground once was. Now there’s only a plush white rug, spotted with dirt where my hands are clawing into it. I lean back into a seated position and curl into myself, crying tears of relief as pain starts to give way to crushing fatigue.

Eventually, I start to move again. I turn myself around, fumble for my cane with my one good hand, and stand on shaky legs. Yurfaln’s two victims lay unconscious in their seats, alive and breathing, but tossing fitfully like they’re trying to force themselves awake from within a nightmare. They probably are.

The only thing I can do for them now is call in the specialists. What’s the procedure for things like this? If there’s a special number for Keepers to report magical hazards, no one’s told me yet. 112 will do, hopefully. I limp through the house, dimly surprised that I’m not bleeding all over the place, until I find a cordless phone on a little side table.

“Hello? I just killed a Harbinger. Two of its victims are still alive.” My voice comes out dry and scratchy, and using it is a little like coughing up sand. “It should be safe here and they look stable, but they’re going to need Sanctuary help.”

The line is quiet for a second. “Understood. Where are you?” 

Well, that was easy. I’m glad the police know how this goes, because I definitely don’t. I have no idea where we are, though. I navigated by Yurfaln’s scent on the way here. “In the Hills. Ummm…” I limp outside as fast as my battered body can carry me. It’s easy enough to find a street sign and the little number by the door. “12 Cope Street.”

“Okay. I have some officers on the way now, and we’ll send for someone from Bright Horizon. That may take a little longer. You said the victims weren’t in critical condition?”

“No. I don’t think so.” Something else occurs to me, though. On his way out last night, Dr. Hines hadn’t looked at all well, and he was missing this morning. He may have just been shaken, but he was very close to Yurfaln’s origin point. A Harbinger’s curse can begin as a subtle seed of dormant corruption, then burst into something horrible once it takes root.

“Ah, there’s someone else I think you should check on, too.” …Wait. What am I going to say about how I know him? I’m already dreading the thought of the news running wild with a Mystery Keeper Incident. I have to do something for him, and I can’t very well go check on him myself, but anything I give out could narrow the suspects down. “I think the name was… Ralph Hines? That sounds right. I don’t know where he lives or what he might be doing, just that he had some contact with it.” 

I cringe. They’ll definitely swallow that. Never in my life heard of the man, a Harbinger just name-dropped him, that’s it! 

Actually, why am I even panicking about this? 112 calls have to be confidential. Right?

“One moment, please.” There’s another pause, several seconds longer than the first. “There are two men with that name in our records. Is there anything else you can tell me about him?”

“Sorry. Try whichever one lives closest to this address first. It didn’t cover much ground before I caught it.” He is local. I think. I hope I didn’t just make that up.

“…Alright. We’ll do that.”

“Thank you. I’ll be going, then.” I hang up before they can object, leaving the phone on a patio table. Waiting around to give a statement would bring all kinds of attention I don’t want. 

On that note, was this entire thing noisy? Was I still screaming when I dropped back into the world? I don’t think so. I hope I don’t have an audience now. There’s no one right there on the street, at least, but I can’t see through the windows across the way. 

Taking whatever extra privacy I can get, I rifle through a concealed pocket on my Keeper dress — of course it has pockets, what good would any fancy outfit be if it didn’t? Just like I instinctively knew they were there, I know these pockets will connect to the ones on my actual clothes. Sure enough, the mask I’d taken earlier is inside. Once I put it on, I hobble away from the burrow-house and down the street. At the first road that ends in undeveloped woods, I duck into the trees and fall down in the dirt, leaning back on an old trunk.

“Hey, Vyuji, I’m safe now. Please get over here.”

A few seconds pass before the Messenger pops into being, seated on her knees across from me. She looks over in the house’s direction, then nods. “Congratulations, Liadain. I’m glad to see you… as well as can be expected after your first hunt. How are you feeling, now that it’s over?”

“I mean… terrible, but eating the thing helped, I think? I don’t feel like I could die at any moment anymore. Even if the only reason I got off this easy was because Harbingers are too mad to play for keeps. It… I don’t know how this works, why they are what they are or how much they control their power, but it was just broken on some basic level. If I didn’t get to it first, its own magic would have eaten it alive sooner or later.”

“Interesting. You shouldn’t rely on it happening again, though. I wouldn’t want you learning the wrong lessons so soon.”

“Ugh. Of course not. Thanks, for the warning, I guess. So, umm… I’m not immortal yet, am I? How do I know how far along this whole nightmare got me?” I ask.

“That’s for you to find out. How do you feel? Not your injuries, not that body, you. The heart of you. What has changed inside you?”

I turn my sight inward. The Harbinger’s mass is still there, but the feeling of it as something separate from me is slowly fading. All that remains is a faint change in the way my soul expresses itself to my senses, a new or slightly altered note to the confusing impression. Some trace of the power Yurfaln drew from its own decay. I can turn my wounds into fuel, now, use them to make my magic stronger — the closer to death’s door, the better.

Which is… okay, that feels horrible, and I don’t want to rely on it if I can at all help it, but if what I just went through is a typical Harbinger experience, it might be incredibly useful. My first thought was that enough horrible bodily harm to matter would just kill a girl like me, but things don’t seem to be so simple with Harbingers. I could’ve been on the brink of death at any point in there.

“Okay,” I sigh. “I found it and what I found seems good, but is that everything? Is there normally more to it, some harder-to-find thing below the surface?”

“Possible, but not terribly common. Don’t expect an instant revolution — your growth is just beginning,” Vyuji says.

“I’ve got a few months to live. Maybe a year,” I hiss. “How much of this am I possibly supposed to do? Do I have to kill a Harbinger what, every week? Every day?” 

“Ah.” She sits there, still as ever, for several very long seconds. “I see your concern… but you don’t, not necessarily. There are considerations. As I’ve said, Emergence is a process, not a single distant threshold to be crossed. There will be more and greater changes than this, and those will offer you ways to extend your life until you are satisfied. Until then, you only need to hunt enough to stay a few steps ahead of death. 

“To continue, when we met last night, I said that this Harbinger was most likely a newborn. You’ve seen more of it than I have. Would you agree?”

I think on Yurfaln’s last moments, and the thoughts it wanted to share with me before that. Mr. Enfield seemed to be its first contact with humans. If it was older than a day or two, it spent its time before last night doing nothing worth noting. “If they start killing as soon as they turn up? Yes.”

“They usually do,” she says. 

I don’t like where this is going.

Vyuji looks away from me and gestures widely out at the city. “Harbingers grow as they feed. In becoming more than they are, they have more to leave behind when they fall, and so their remnants grow with them. You can do this again and again, or you can find more dangerous quarries. That’s your choice to make, but I do expect one would reach your goal quicker than the other.”

That newborn — that defective runt of a newborn, if I took her at her word — had been an unholy terror. It took everything I had and then some to barely survive it, and I’m no healthier or closer to immortality than I was this morning.

“Vyuji, about how many Keepers actually last long enough to get what they want?”

“It’s dangerous work. Some do. Some don’t. I’m happy to tell you that my children have better odds than most.”

“Well thank the fucking Goddess for you.”

“Indeed.” She smiles faintly. There’s not a trace of irony in her voice.

All I can do is push back the urge to cry. I’ve used up my tears for a while. “Great. Leave me alone, then.”

“As you like.” Vyuji inclines her head and vanishes.

Home, safety, life, all of them suddenly feel very far away.

I’m so tired. Can I even make it back to the hospital like this? My right arm is still useless, and there’s an unpleasant numbness in my limbs, an early sign of my sickness flaring up. I still feel echoes of Yurfaln’s disease, leaving me constantly dizzy and breathless.

Just on the edge of my awareness, I can faintly feel points of life, normal people going about their days. Sensing them isn’t new, but something is different. In the hospital, healthy souls didn’t feel like much of anything. Now they share a scent of their own. Maybe I just didn’t notice it before, or the slow deaths all around me drowned it out. It’s nothing like those stenches. It doesn’t tell me anything about them except that they’re well, but it is… soothing, a balmy wind on my wounds. Like fresh rain. I draw a little closer to the neighborhood and the gentle sensation, finding a tree I can hide behind and peek around. 

My first sense of it wasn’t quite complete. It’s more like water in a desert. An oasis through the eyes of someone who’s never seen water in their life. As long as I sit here and fill my world with this sensation, things don’t seem so bad. I’ll stay like this for just a little longer, just a little taste…

Taste? What?

Some part of me instinctively reaches out and… inhales? Three thin plumes of shimmering green fog, the color of new leaves, spiral out through the walls of the houses across the road and sink into me. A warm, gentle current rolls through my body, softening my many aches and allowing clean air back into my lungs. I’m still a bit tired, the pain in my arm and the cold, stinging numbness remain, but in an instant I feel much better.

Only after I stretch experimentally, feeling the wear in my muscles fade even as I move, do I realize what I’ve just done. My stomach churns as I jolt myself away from the warm auras.

After a moment to calm my sharp, shallow breaths, I turn my awareness back toward the souls I’ve drawn from. It was like I’d covered my eyes at the scene of some awful accident, then slowly cracked open a peephole between two fingers when I couldn’t help but look. What I see is… not nearly as bad as I expected. Their souls are a little less clean, like they’ve taken on a faintly sour note, but they haven’t caught anything horrible from me. My magic tells me that to them, the effect is a vague, sourceless malaise, close to the feeling of having slept very poorly.

None of them are terribly hurt, but did they feel my touch as something cold and invasive? Could a normal person have seen the wisp of essence I stole from them leaving their body? That would’ve given them quite a scare, I’m sure, but it’s the worst case I can imagine. I wait for a minute. Nobody starts screaming or rushing outside.

Just what have I done, in the balance? Those three people are probably going to have a few bad days. In exchange, I put down a monster that was nesting a few blocks away from them. Neither they nor any of their friends are going to waste away in their homes, celebrating their own miserable deaths all the while. Thanks to the health I took from them, I can keep hunting as soon as I rest up. New Claris will be better and safer for my work. Maybe that isn’t exactly why I’m doing it, but what difference does that make?

…Ignoring the faint guilty twinges in my chest, I can probably still live with myself. Sorry, everyone. I’m certain you’d rather it be me than Yurfaln. 

I close my eyes and scan my body as the breaths of stolen life settle. By the time the last has done its work, the sharp pain in my arm is nearly gone. All that remains is a stiff sprain in my right wrist. That’s fine. I’m not going to trouble someone else just for my off hand. Hesitantly, I dismiss my transformation, hoping this strength will hold without my magic propping me up. I don’t exactly feel great, but it still might be my best health day since before the second transplant.

So I step out from my hiding spot and head back toward the hospital. I might have appreciated the sudden lightness in my steps, but it’s too tied up with the memory of where my new vigor came from, the moment when I was terrified I had killed someone. My magical senses are still jumping at shadows, and I have to stop myself from tensing whenever some new presence appears. All of them are humans bearing no horrible corruption, and I can easily just look at them and see an ordinary person doing ordinary things, but that isn’t enough to completely calm the sense of unease or unreality lingering in my heart.

Things are quiet all through the walk back, and I do my feeble best to give my racing mind a rest. The air is still pleasantly crisp in the sidewalk trees’ shade, and there are no Harbinger traces I can feel. Some mad part of me almost wants to find another target, knowing how far I still have to go, but there’s no chance I’d survive doing that again today. 

For now, I just really need a nap. As the hospital comes into view, I take a moment to quiet my soul-sense as completely as I can. I don’t want a tower full of other sick people weighing on me.

“Lia! What happened? Are you hurt?” Almost as soon as I step out of the elevator on the seventh floor, an aide rushes over to me, her face creased with concern that doesn’t seem at all called for. It’s still midday — I haven’t even been gone for that long.

“…I’m fine? I just went for a walk in the garden. I know, I know, medical advice and all that, but I’m not hurt. I wore the mask and everything. What made you think there’s a problem?” 

Um. Maybe that last bit was a little too defensive.

“I see, it’s just… your hair…”

“What about it? It was mostly behaving this morning.”

“…Oh.” Her frown deepens.

“Seriously, what is it?” I push past her and into the nearest bathroom, inspecting myself in the mirror.

Just to the left of my bangs, a thin tress has bleached itself a completely colorless white.