My vision twists in on itself, giving way to the sight of nothing at all. I’m hurtling downward through an endless, lightless black void — falling, but with no air rushing past me. My nerves prickle with the sense of being watched from afar, or just barely spotting movement in the corner of my eye, but there’s nothing to see. No sights beyond myself, no sounds or smells or temperature, only the vague sense of ‘down.’ 

In their place, the Harbinger’s miasma surrounds me, thick as water. Its currents rage against my body as if trying to force me back outside, but still I fall. All I can do is brace for impact and hope I’m not crushed like a falling star smashing into the earth.

Suddenly, a dim, rust-red light cuts through the haze. I notice a shape sculpted in the darkness. A glowing rectangular sign. It’s emblazoned with nine white letters which spell out a word I can’t quite make out, but which I feel is all too familiar to me. I think it’s trying to say “EMERGENCY,” but each character looks distorted, crooked, or just plain wrong, as if carelessly drawn from the memories of a mind more concerned with the sign’s appearance than its actual function.

Just as soon as I think that, I sense a surge of hostility from all around me, prickling in my very bones. It’s telling me that if I insist on staying, then I must prove that I belong, or be made to belong. In the distance, I hear the faint, faraway howl of an ambulance siren. With each passing second, it grows louder, closer. Emerging from the darkness beneath me, I see the sterile, simply-patterned tiles of a hospital floor stretching out endlessly in every direction. As the sound of the ambulance siren intensifies in my ears with each passing second, the surface rushes towards me, filling my vision.

The moment I think to curl my legs into myself, the crash rattles up my body. A dull, heavy pain lashes my soles and shoots up my legs. My knees buckle and I spill forward, slamming against a slope on my right arm. I tumble down the incline, the contrast of the stark white floor stretching out into the pitch black abyss swirling wildly in my vision. All of a sudden, the ground rights itself beneath me. My body rolls to a halt, my back flat against the chill surface, and my cane clatters to the ground just out of reach. Even my cards fall and flutter through the air, forming a scattered circle around me.

I rush to push myself upright, but my right arm screams out in pain. My eyes clench shut and hot tears spill down my cheeks. I suck in air through my teeth and force my legs to raise me. Once I’ve resolved myself to stand, the dull ache in my joints doesn’t seem as bad, easing as I wipe my tears on my sleeve. My right arm is tender with a nasty purple bruise and closing my fingers stings, but I can ignore it. I have practice ignoring the parts of me that hurt.

Slowly, I wobble to my feet and retrieve my cane. My cards pick themselves up, gathering back into a steady orbit around me. I pan my gaze over the stillness of the Wound, the white plane vanishing into endless blackness. Then, in a rush of motion so sudden it makes me flinch, the floor folds upward like the faces of a cardboard box assembling itself, walling me in. When the rearrangement ends, I’m standing in a sterile white hallway lined with doors — they had been on the ground to start with, I realize, before it bent upward and those patches of floor became the side walls. There’s a thin window in the middle of each, but I can only see fog through them. Each is marked with a different illegible word in glowing white text, which brightens as I stumble upright, and the soft ping of an elevator opening rings through the hall.

Just as the space settles, something like thick mud starts to leak from its corners and crevices. It crawls with living hues of grey and red, staining the clean white surfaces the colors of dried blood. Patches of it tear themselves open, forming dozens of messy black holes — roughly circular fanged maws. 

Last night, I glimpsed this world at its edges, watched a horror that shouldn’t exist storm into my life. I’d seen its creator’s horrid handiwork just a moment ago. I thought those things might steel me for the full picture. 

They didn’t. Nothing could have prepared me to see the world completely replaced by this. The scene of the Wound creating itself before my eyes stifles my breath.

Ahead, the hallway stretches on and on, ending after perhaps 40 feet in gaping black emptiness. A whole stretch of the world just isn’t finished yet, like I’ve stepped into someone else’s dream while their mind is still building it. I have no idea how much of this is under construction, for lack of a better term, what would happen if I stepped into the nothingness, or how much direct control the Harbinger has over shaping this place. Is this a dream it’s having or a stage it planned and constructed? The hollow darkness draws farther and farther away, the hall creating itself even as I stare into its depths. Do I really know anything about what I’ve gotten into?

What is a Harbinger? What do they look like? What exactly can they do, and what can I do to them that will matter? For some reason, I think back to the safety lessons everyone sits through in primary school. The lectures and the cutesy videos accompanying them didn’t answer any of those questions. Bits of their useless advice chirp in my head:

“Harbingers feed on pain and sadness, so if you or someone you know is having a hard time, try to talk it out and find a way to make things better!”

“If you see something scary you can’t explain, run away and call for a Keeper! Only Keepers can protect the world from monsters!”

It was all a lot of weirdly cheery mottos like that, stressing the importance of Good Mental Hygiene. When I got older, I started thinking about what they hadn’t said. If you’re cornered by a Harbinger and no cute little spirit shows up to offer you the Promise, what do you do? They must have left it out because there’s only one answer to that question: pray for rescue. All the rest was probably just a way to make kids feel like there’s something they can actually do to protect themselves.

Still, those videos, Vyuji’s words, and what I’ve just seen myself are the only information I have. There are never any photos or videos of battles with Harbingers, and by now the many reasons for that are obvious to me. I know that every Harbinger is different, that only Keepers can hurt them, and not much else.

At least a few of those answers are waiting further down. I’ll need them if I plan to do this and keep doing it. I shudder at that thought, but… no, I can’t distract myself like this now.

Before I can plan my next step, a patch of muck on the floor squirms and bubbles to life, and something rises from the mire. It looks for a moment like a formless spout of living slime, featureless save for the holes where wall-mouths rose with it, but then the substance starts to slough away like thin, swampy mud, mouths and all. 

The shape that remains when the sludge is mostly gone is vaguely human, but much too tall and spindly, shrouded in layers of ragged grey cloth. Torn as it is, the cloth still almost completely conceals its wearer — the holes in the fabric never quite align enough to expose the creature beneath. Near the bottom, shredded rags give way to a tangle of black insect legs, and several more are wrapped around a huge white tome the thing keeps clutched to its chest. A hood obscures most of its head, but as it leans down to regard me, a thin, flat arrowhead of an eyeless face emerges, split in half by a maw lined on the outside with black fangs that twitch like limbs.

And behind those fangs are a too-long, too-wide grinning row of shiny white human teeth, set into swollen red gums.

The thing that can only be the Harbinger speaks, and though its maw opens wider, the sound comes from everywhere at once. Its voice is the painful whining noise of a flatlined heart monitor, but that awful droning is definitely forming words. I don’t recognize them and certainly couldn’t repeat them, but somehow I know that they are words in a language, and that language means something to my magical senses. Its speech has a strange stilted meter, almost like it’s trying to perform a poem. I can just barely make out the core of what it expresses:

<Truth Is Written In Scars>
<Yurfaln>

Taking in everything its screaming voice tells me at once is overwhelming, and no part of it can be disentangled from any other. It’s simultaneously a name and a proclamation that makes no sense and maybe more, layers I feel but can’t understand. It’s a lot like when I tried to read my own soul, if every part of it were something twisted and hostile and alien.

Then the piercing song stops abruptly, taking its message with it.

Something crashes into the wall behind me. I whirl around with a yelp. At the finished end of the hall, a door has slammed itself open, exposing a switchback staircase leading up. A path further into this mad world? No, that doesn’t feel right. Up is the way I just came from, so by the dream-logic magic seems to use, this is probably a passage out of the Wound. 

As if in emphasis, a high-pitched chorus of whining nonsense rises from the mouths on the walls. I still don’t understand the language they’re speaking, but the message is clear: You must be lost, they say, echoing the victims outside. We don’t take your kind. Go on, get out of here before I change my mind. 

For its part, the Harbinger — Yurfaln, that was its name — simply waits and watches. Its body bends in strange places when it moves, and it constantly tilts its entire upper half back and forth. Like an animal trying to get a better look at some strange new thing.

Maybe it’s a mistake to read any kind of real-world logic into what Harbingers do, but something about that… 

Predatory animals are hardly the biggest danger in the wilderness, but I’ve read that if you ever run into one, the best thing to do is hold your ground and act fearless. Don’t pick a fight, but don’t back down or run away. Present yourself as a fellow hunter to be politely avoided rather than an easy meal. I’m not a beast on the prowl, but the Harbinger is, and it’s acting very much like it doesn’t want to hunt me after I jumped right into its lair.

If it doesn’t want to fight, if it sees me as a threat, maybe it’s not prepared for this. Maybe, if I dare to hope a little, we’re both scared of whatever comes next. Either way, I know what I’m here to do. To my surprise, I even feel like I know how to do it. Vyuji told me I could warp the world inside a Wound, fight the Harbinger for control of its own stage. When she said so, I had no idea how I’d do something like that, but now that I’m here, it’s just something I know I can do. An instinct coming up for the first time. It’s not that the inner flow of my magic is stronger here, so what’s changed? 

Doesn’t matter. No time to stand here and wonder. What I do know is that my power wants to be used. The sea in my soul is a churning storm of fear and disgust. It wants to spill out beyond me, to spread, to consume this place as fuel for itself like a wildfire. No, like a virus, I realize with a shiver that only makes it more eager.

Fine. Do it. Infect this nightmare. Rot it from the inside out.

That thought is all it takes to send my magic surging to life. Cards rise from my orbit and begin arranging themselves in front of me. It doesn’t feel like I’m directing them — magic simply translates my intent into action. Hurting and ruining something with a power like mine must be its simplest possible use, and I barely need to think about how once I’ve resolved to do it. As Vyuji promised, some part of me already knows. 

Within seconds, the cards form an elaborate asymmetrical pattern that looks nothing like any real spread I’ve ever seen. It’s shaped roughly like the branches of a tree, but upside-down, joining into a trunk at the top. The unfamiliar abstract scenes on the cards have all been dyed in new colors, Yurfaln’s muddy grey-brown shades… no, all but one. At the end of one branch is the poison-green card I pricked my finger on earlier, now bright with cold emerald light. Death inverted.

Wisps of hungry shadow reach out from my card, crawling over the nearest one on the branch. As they do, the yellowed ceiling lights flicker wildly, and pained cries cut through the shrill voices screaming out from inside the walls. Scattered across Yurfaln’s carpet of corruption, mouths on the wall begin coughing up emerald fog twined with threads of inky blackness. The growing clouds of it are eerily bright, casting the hall in the sickly glow of my power, and sparkle in a way that makes me think more of icy mist than toxic gas. 

There’s no mistaking what it feels like, though — if I imagine this world as a sea like the one in my own soul, a polluted, swampy expanse teeming with alien vermin, my magic is a bitter numbness spreading through the water. It begins as a film of frost on the swamp’s surface, but the cold pushes steadily further down until it touches the things crawling beneath. It seeps into them, and while it feels at first like I’m touching dozens of greasy, revolting creatures myself, they quickly freeze over and sink, carrying my power into Yurfaln’s depths with them. Spreading it. Vectors for me, just like Vyuji said.

Maybe twenty seconds into this process, the tiny mouths start melting off the floor and walls into icy green clouds, like they weren’t exhaling my mist but throwing up insides they never had until there’s nothing left of them. 

It makes me want to puke myself, watching my power creep into this living nightmare in a way that makes them both so much worse, but I can’t look away. Not only would it not even help, since I sense the magic working as much as I see it, but the monster standing right in front of me could strike back at any second. I still don’t know what I’ll do when it does — I just hope the same instincts that guided me through this awful invasion will have more to offer. 

Yurfaln doesn’t lash out at me or my magic, though. It just looks around at the walls, chittering and whistling to itself as it studies the spreading blight. The mist gathers into a slowly sinking bank of fog, filling more and more of the thin hall, and the Harbinger makes no effort to resist it. Once the fog has blanketed the floor around it, green tendrils start to grasp at its shredded robes, squirming through the holes in the fabric, but still Yurfaln does nothing I can see or feel to push back against me. 

Until a shudder wracks Yurfaln’s body. One of its lower legs snaps off with a sound far too much like cracking bones, dissolving into mist as it falls. Its voice stutters, then rises into a wordless howling siren, a wail of some unnameable emotion. It hunches down, bends and stretches itself into a shape more centipede than human, and launches into a writhing, twitching blur of motion. I throw my free hand up — stupid, useless reflex, as if that’d stop anything — but it’s still not coming for me. Instead, it… it’s slithering up the walls, darting between infected mouths. 

By the gnawing, slurping sounds it makes without ever interrupting its howl and the rough patches torn out of the muddy carpet in its passing, it’s eating them. 

Bile rises in the back of my throat. I choke it down. What? Why? Am I not hurting it? It’s lost two more legs now — does it not care? I don’t know. Do I want to know, to understand why this thing does anything it does? No, but I’ve got to— 

Yurfaln’s upper body bends back, twisting to face me upside-down. Some of its fangs shimmer green, slowly dissolving into death-mist, as it chirrups something in its language. It sounds almost excited. The words aren’t as clear as before, but the same part of me feels them. Yes, okay, come! Share! it seems to be saying. Then it turns away and scuttles down the hall, crawling over and around the halls in a spiral pattern, but rather than moving away it just seems to stretch on and on and on. 

Heavy curtains like theater drapes made of hospital privacy screens fall over the hallway ahead from nowhere, and the whole world starts to shift around me at a terrifying pace. It sends me careening down the hall without actually moving, and with each layer of curtains that rushes by, another spiral, another endless coil of Yurfaln creeps over the walls. Just past the point where nothing else remains, the final curtain slides open and flings me into a new world.

Blinding light stings my eyes. Cold air seeps into my skin. The ground ripples just enough to be disorienting. My eyes take a moment to adjust, and when they do… it’s not ground at all. My tarot spread still floats beside me, but the world has completely changed. I’m on a beach, standing on the ocean’s surface just off the shore. The water beneath my feet is completely solid, like glass, save for the slight rippling of tiny waves over its surface. Snowflakes dance through the air in a faint breeze — it’s a bright winter day, but with no visible sun, and the light is tinged a fluorescent yellow that makes all the fresh falling snow look dirty. 

Yurfaln is nowhere in sight, but I’m not alone. Two human-sized figures stand where the sea meets the shore, dressed in the same all-concealing ragged shrouds the Harbinger wears. They’re clearly struggling to move, even to stand. They breathe so heavily that each exhalation sounds like a groan of pain, and they shiver in the cold with each wave of frigid water that laps over their legs. Nevertheless, they’re having what sounds like a happy conversation, held entirely in insectoid chirps.

All around us, the ocean’s surface is littered with strands of dark, stringy seaweed. They drift in with the tide in clumps, gathering into a great wet mass on the dunes of the beach that smells of rotten eggs. Slowly, tiny maws like the ones that grew on Yurfaln’s corruption emerge from the pile, but they aren’t the only thing — patches of it also sprout shiny black feathers.

And as they do, the things on the beach lean down, scoop up heaps of fanged, feathered seaweed with trembling hands, and raise them to their mouths. 

I tear my gaze away, but that does nothing for the sounds. The eager, desperate gnashing. I don’t bother trying to cover my ears, not to spare my injured hand but because I’m already sure it wouldn’t help. I just wrench my eyes shut until the noise fades, replaced by another one. Short, quiet wails, much softer than Yurfaln’s voice, like bird calls voiced by sirens. 

When I peek back at the shore, the shrouded things wave at me, as if they’d been trying to get my attention. They turn around and stagger away, chittering cheerfully all the while. A path at the far end of the beach trails up a steep hill, and the figures climb it together, leaning against each other through their halting steps until they fade from sight.

This place… it’s not at all like the unfinished hospital-hall world I first stepped into, but what is it? What was the plan in taking me here? Yurfaln’s presence feels thicker now, but I don’t see or sense the Harbinger itself anywhere. The beach itself is featureless, save for the massive pile of seaweed covering its shore, and the ocean looks like it stretches out forever, flat and clear save for the dark ribbons drifting by. I step over those when they come near me — whatever they are, I want nothing to do with them.

Once I’m satisfied that nothing in my immediate surroundings is coming to kill me, I look over my spread again. The colors on the cards are still shifting — green and black veins have spread over most of the inverted tree’s branches. Yurfaln’s clay-and-gore shades bend around my colors, oozing over them like an amoeba trying to absorb its prey. A few tendrils of poison-green have been cut off from their origin point, so they now writhe alone in the mud, but they aren’t erased or absorbed. It looks almost like they’re being carried upward, dragged slowly toward the trunk of the diagram.

What does that mean? What does any of it mean, and why does this feel less like fighting a monster than sharing a horrible dream with one? Keepers hunt and kill Harbingers, that’s all I really knew about this going in. I came here to kill Yurfaln, I’ve already taken a swing at it, and still it hasn’t shown the least interest in fighting back. I barely understand any of what it’s doing, to say nothing of why. But I’m still here to kill it, and it’s waiting somewhere further inside. There’s only one way to go.

So I head for the shore, stopping when the water ceases to hold me up and my boots touch wet sand. Even at its thinnest point, the seaweed is piled too wide to simply hop over. I find a stretch relatively free of strange growths and jab it with my cane. Nothing happens, so I step back, hold my breath, and do my best to leap through it with a running start. My best isn’t very good — I touch down in the middle of the mass with a sickening damp squelch and plod clumsily through the rest, more afraid of what might happen if I rush and stumble face-first into it than what it’ll do if I take too long. 

I only stop to kick the sludge off my boots once I’m well onto the dry sand, but it’s strangely clingy — no, it’s clinging, moving, holding tight to me, crawling slowly upward as a single mass. My mouth goes dry as it climbs to the top of my boots. Shapeless strands reach for my legs. Cold, slimy moisture seeps through my shoes and into my thick stockings. 

get it off get it off get it OFF—

My whole body shudders at its first touch, and magic seethes to the surface, rushing to my defense. With no clear thought, no conscious act of will, just raw disgust given form by some strange new instinct, power flows out into the barrier I cast before I left home, turning it from a thin layer of cold hostility into a cloak of noxious spite where only I can survive. The grasping stalks of seaweed don’t waste away to nothing or disintegrate like the infected mouths did before, but they do lose their strength, wilting and withering and falling away into dried husks at my feet. Still squirming as I stumble away, hissing something in a hoarse voice that sounds uncannily like “whyyyyyyyy?”

I turn and run up the hill, as fast as my feeble legs can carry me.

The end of the path opens into a narrow rocky valley, where the ground quickly levels out. At the far end is… it looks like it may have been an old stone temple once, before it was left to molder for centuries. Bright moss mingles with the twisting shades of Yurfaln’s corruption all along the walls, and wherever the surface isn’t overgrown, it’s defaced with swirling sigils that somehow recall the ones on the back of my tarot cards. They’re nothing like the scribbled, illegible signs that marked the Wound’s entrance — these are symbols in another language entirely, one nothing like Clarish or any other language I’m aware of. A set of three half-crumbled stone arches serve as an entryway, and beyond that is only darkness. The weak laughter of dying children echoes out through the valley.

A small group of shrouded figures is gathered near the ruins. Two I recognize by their happy chittering and constant shivering as the ones from the beach, and they turn to me and wave again as I approach, but they’re seated very near to a third. The new one is standing in front of a large canvas on a display stand — painting a picture, absorbed entirely in its work. The painting is unfinished and simple, but to my surprise, not so crude that I can’t tell what it is. It’s a ragged thing in a hospital bed, hooked up through its shroud to an uncountable forest of instruments and tubes filled with strange colors. A circle of the creatures is gathered around it, clapping and cheering.

As I come closer, the painter murmurs something to itself, wipes its brush roughly clean on its robes, and then… stabs it into one of the shivering creatures, straight through its ragged cloak. It groans or sighs as the artist pulls the brush loose, tearing away what looks like a wet lump of many-colored clay from its body, then carries right on calmly talking to its partner. The painter drops the clay onto a board attached to the front of its canvas stand and begins working it, separating it into colors. Brown. Grey. Many shades of red. And… black, glittering with specks of green. I don’t know what that means, but I hate it. I hate all of this.

The laughter in the temple grows louder. The three shrouded creatures pause as one to listen. The painter quickly returns to its work, but the freshly injured one turns to me and raises its hood, exposing the lower half of its face. It has a human head with human skin, but no features except a mouth between a set of insect mandibles. It smiles, and the expression is not the gaping grin of a monster. It’s a smile I recognize too well from the seventh floor, the soft, sad kind patients force for their families to tell them “I’ll be okay. It doesn’t hurt too much.” 

I choke down another wave of nausea. For a long moment, all I can do is stare and wonder if smashing this painting would help in some way. I don’t think it would.

With its trembling free hand, the smiling thing points to the archways and nods, once. Then it lowers its head, almost bowing to me, and lets its hood hang over its head again. 

The moment I look through the arches, Yurfaln’s voice blares out from somewhere in the darkness. Share. Holy! Teach me, give me, be me! it says.

“I’m going to kill you,” I rasp back. Even as the words pass my lips, they feel pathetic. Far too petty and tiny to match what’s happening in this place, whatever that even is. But they’re all I have.

As I step past them and cross into the temple, the paired creatures clap and weakly whistle goodbye.

“That was… does everyone have the dreams?”

“Mostly. All of my children do.”

I look down at myself. No time seems to have passed at all during my dream, but it’s followed me back into the waking world. The regalia my shadow wore there is mine. Its fabric is impossibly light and strangely, soothingly cool to the touch. Thin black gloves wrap around my hands like a second skin. I take a few hesitant steps around my bed, ending in a short hop. Nothing about the outfit’s complicated lower layers gets in the way of moving, and my steps in the heavy leather boots aren’t exactly silent, but they don’t thud against the hard floor the way I expected them to. The only sounds they make come from friction rather than impact.

I do feel different now, changed in more ways than I can easily count. Taking in everything new is dizzying, like trying to see with once-blind eyes while also learning to walk. 

New senses tug at the corners of my awareness. I breathe, shut my eyes, and try to tune out everything else. The first thing I notice is the intangible force coursing through me. It feels almost like flowing blood—if I were perfectly aware of my blood’s currents—and is as much a part of me. Maybe more. It surges up from a reservoir deep within myself, resounding within me; a torrent that will never run dry, raging and alive, pumped endlessly by my soul’s heart. It prickles my nerves, aching to be released, to be expressed. If I let it loose, would I be washed away in its currents? The thought makes my teeth chatter.

I can feel other, much fainter points of essence with that sense, scattered all through the rooms around me. Scattered needles of emotion prick against my mind, piercing gently into me from every angle like pins into a pincushion. Other people? That feels right, but incomplete. I’m not looking into anyone’s souls. I can’t recognize them by how they feel, can’t really glean anything about who they are or what they’re doing.

There’s something else, though. I only start to notice it as I focus closely on one point, trying to see if anything distinguishes it from the others. My first impression is of rotting fruit, but pushing past that, I feel it for what it is — a knot of pain, coiled around and through a person. I can know it and describe it without feeling it myself. This one’s heart is slowly giving out. That one’s breath is being stolen away. The soul a few rooms down can no longer eat on their own power. Cores of inner corruption are all around me, the only way I have to tell one person from another. Their stench grows stronger the more attention I pay to them, and I pull my focus back to my room as it starts to overwhelm me. 

Vyuji is still standing right there, smiling that weirdly serene smile. “…Are you just going to stay here?” I ask. Stupid, I realize after a dazed moment. Of course she’s still here. My sense of time is completely shot, but I probably haven’t been a Keeper for more than a minute.

“For as long as you need me to. At the moment, the only thing I have to do is guide you through these first steps. I know that they’re… disorienting, for most of you. Do you need anything from me right now?”

I can’t decide where to start, so I settle on an all-purpose question. “Okay, I… sure. Tell me something I need to know. Something I might not be thinking of right away.”

“Good choice. All the instincts you need come with the Promise, but you do have to know the questions to see that you have the answers to them.” She nods and raises one arm, a single petal opening as if she were counting on fingers. 

“First. No Keeper experiences things in exactly the same way, so I can’t teach you much about how your perception works or how best to use it, but I can tell you one thing: that unseen sense is the strongest tool you have to find and to track Harbingers. The miasma that forms around their victims and places of power is… uniquely foul. You’ll understand as soon as you’ve felt it. It doesn’t last, but if you hurry, you may still be able to pursue the one you met earlier.”

“Which I might. Ah, but would it be a terrible idea to run right into that?” She and my dream both said I’d know everything I need to, but that isn’t the same as having actual experience. I have no idea if there’s Keeper basic training, if I need to practice and get a feel for myself before I can do anything serious and not expect to die in an instant.

“That depends on you. I’ll teach you as much as I am able, but I am not a Keeper. I can only tell you what all of you can do and what those abilities are for. The Church could find you a more suitable mentor, if you want one.”

“No. Not unless I absolutely have to. I’m not in this for fame.” The public idol thing isn’t for me. I don’t have time for it and I wouldn’t want it even if I did. I don’t want whatever support the Church or the Fianatas or whoever have to offer enough to put up with idiots barging in here and knocking on my door to ask for interviews. 

“As you like. Plenty of my children feel similarly. If you wish to keep your privacy, I won’t mention you to anyone else without your leave.”

“Thanks. If I want to go talk to someone, I’ll find them myself. Anything else?”

Another petal opens. “Yes. Second, whatever form your magic takes, you have an implement forged of it, empowered by it, a weapon fit to close the Wounds in the world. Call yours. You know how.”

And I do. I raise a hand, palm open, and will it into being, waiting to catch whatever appears. 

No blade falls into my grip. Instead, a ring of bright green specks forms in orbit around me. They grow from tiny lights into tall, flat rectangles, and then the glow dims, each becoming a tarot-sized card. The exact pictures and scenes aren’t ones I recognize — honestly, they’re so abstract that it’s hard to tell what they’re meant to be at all — but the basic art style is familiar, all stark black lines and sparse splashes of color with no human figures anywhere. Their back design is strange, though: two complicated white sigils spiraling and winding together on a dark background. It looks almost like expert calligraphy, but in a script I’ve never seen from a language I’ve never heard of.

“Vyuji,” I say, my voice as measured and even as I can keep it, “please tell me how I’m supposed to fight monsters with cards.”

“I don’t know, but you do,” she answers. “It’s your magic. Your wishes gave it form, not mine.”

“I… okay. You called them implements before you called them weapons. Is it wrong to think of these as something I should just throw or hit things with?” 

“Most likely. If your will would be best expressed through a simpler tool, a sword to strike or a shield to guard, that’s what you would have.”

That’s something. It can’t be that they’re just useless, can it? They don’t look at all sharp or dangerous, but that means very little with magic. Silver King Irida, the current star of the local Keeper idol scene, fights with a squad of warriors she summons out of nothing and moves with an actual shogi board. How much weirder can weaponized tarot be?

Well, what can I actually do with them? I can change, quicken, or slow the cards’ orbit with a thought, as easily as I can twitch my finger. With a little more effort, I take control of a single card from the ring and fly it around. I don’t need to touch it or throw it, nor steer it with sweeping gestures and wiggly fingers the way stories depict using magic sometimes. Once I have a handle on how it works, I pull another out from the ring, then another, and another, doing my best to move them all at once until the sheer unfamiliar stimulation of it all makes me faintly dizzy. I let them slip from my control and flutter to the floor as I sit on the bed, idly petting Pearl until my head stops spinning. A few seconds in, the fallen cards float up to rejoin the ring on their own.

“I don’t think I believe you about these,” I grumble, trying and failing not to read mockery or suppressed laughter into Vyuji’s expression. It all seems… cool, sure, but not helpful. They’re still just cards. With no new inner knowledge riding to my rescue, I think about what else I could try. I could play with these some more, see if controlling them feels less overwhelming once I’ve done it for a bit, but it doesn’t matter how well I can handle them when I still have no idea what they’re supposed to do. 

On a whim, I pull my right glove off and run a card across the tip of my finger. I flinch back with a hiss when a light sting nips me. Then things turn… strange. It’s nothing more than a small paper cut, but a globlet of blood pools over the card all the same, trickling from the mouth of the tiny wound and staining it. The card drinks in the droplet like thirsty soil in the rain, and the mostly black and white image tinges itself a new color; not red, but the emerald color of my magic, slowly seeping into and replacing the white background. Its abstract art shifts as well, resolving into the familiar thin bones and stray feathers of Death.

And as I watch this happen, I start to feel that card with the same new sense that feels the inner pain and corruption of the people around me. Suddenly, I’m sure that it’s carrying something very bad, and I can’t say what that thing is or what it means. Very carefully, I return it to the orbit.

“Hey, Vyuji…” I hesitate, then force the question out before I can decide I don’t want the answer. “I probably should’ve asked sooner, but how do I tell what this actually does?” Every Keeper has a sort of sphere of influence, a form their magic takes and a range of things it can do. As for how they know what it is and how much of a say they get in shaping it, I don’t know much more than that.

The Messenger tilts her head, studying me with what looks like genuine curiosity. “Interesting. Try turning your awareness inward. Study your soul and it will tell you what you need to know.”

“Um, sure. I think I can do that.” Where feeling the power flowing through me is as simple as willing my body to move, inspecting my own soul in detail is more than a little disorienting, like trying to project my vision out of my eyes and watch myself move around from an outside observer’s viewpoint. After a moment of confused perspective-shifting, I do start to make some sense of it — beneath the sickly-sweet odor of my own disease, somewhere deep inside the infinite well my magic surges up from, there’s… something much more than the scents of corruption all around me. Rather than a single sense-impression, it’s an image and a set of abstract thoughts and a poem in words-that-are-not-words, all at the same time, every element dizzyingly tangled up with every other.

Ill wind. Cruel and capricious fate.

Corrupted blood. Afflicted arcana.

Green veins inside a shadowy outline of my body, twisting and snaking out beyond its borders with tiny mouths like leeches.

There’s more to it than that, layers I can’t quite grasp yet, but it’s easier to see the whole picture at a distance than it is to inspect every little detail at once, and what that picture seems to be telling me is…

“…Vyuji, if I designed all this somehow, if the Keeper makes the magic, then why is mine built around the last possible thing I’d choose?” Curses, afflictions, ill-fate. Sickness, to cut to the heart of it.

“Tell me, what else should it have been?” she asks. She already knows what I’m talking about — she must have her own magic senses to study me with. She probably knew what I’d see before I even asked how to find out. “You made the Promise to survive your disease, so your soul’s power reflects that desire. All that it is comes from within you. I didn’t choose it or bestow it upon you from on high. I only opened the door.” She sighs, the second real sound I’ve heard her make. “Some of my children begin with… conflicted relationships with their magic. You’ll have to trust me when I say, speaking from quite a lot of experience, that every Keeper gets what they need. Unfortunately, our needs and wants aren’t always in perfect alignment, are they? You’ll understand someday why you are the way you are. You always do.”

That doesn’t help at all. Unless… “That doesn’t mean I can just fix myself and be done with it, does it?”

Vyuji is silent for a moment. Her face falls. Finally, she shakes her head slowly. “Think about it: can you use your magic to erase the origin of your magic? Can a snake eat itself whole? I don’t know if it’s impossible, but… I doubt it. I’m sorry, Liadain.”

Obviously. Why do I bother?

“Alright. Fine. Nothing for it, I guess. If it works and it can get me what I need, I’ll get used to it.” And if I don’t, nothing she says is going to change that. “Speaking of, is there anything else I need to know right this moment? If not, I want to go kill that Harbinger. Maybe that’ll make me feel better.”

Vyuji instantly lights up at that. “By all means. The rest can only come with time, experience, exploration… although, one more thing. Teaching Keepers through anything other than experience is difficult in part because things are different in Harbingers’ Wounds. Different in ways difficult to predict or explain.”

Right… she’s mentioned Wounds a few times now. Where Harbingers put down roots, they do something to the world around them. They open a doorway to somewhere else, or drag their victims into their minds, or start carving a pocket of existence into something more suited to their needs. To take the fight to them, a Keeper needs to enter that place. I don’t understand the details beyond that. I don’t know if anyone does.

“Different how?” I ask.

“A Wound is a space whose shape and rules are… not fully decided. Unstable. Mutable. Responsive first to the wishes of its creator, but also to the will and magic of intruding Keepers. What that looks like depends very much on the Keeper. Put simply, the Harbinger will twist the world around you into a weapon, but you will be able to twist it back. To act on the fabric of reality in ways that you could not here, make the Wound itself into… a new vector for yourself. Yes, that seems like a productive way for you to think of it,” Vyuji says. 

“…Okay. Wonderful. All I’ve ever wanted to do is share the Liadain Plague with the world.”

Her eager smile becomes a smirk. “If it helps, don’t think of it as sharing or spreading. You’ll be taking your burdens and shifting them to monsters that will destroy many human lives if you don’t. Better them than you, no?”

“Thank you for that insight. I hate you.”

“I do what I can. And I’ll always love you, however you feel.”

“Now that you’ve said that, I’m going to hold you to it, and I’m going to make it as hard as possible. I won’t rest until you spend every moment away from me dreading to learn what sort of horrible, horrible mess I’m making that day.” 

Vyuji blinks — the first time I’ve seen her do that — then just lowers her arm and shrugs agreeably. “Promises are sacred. We never say anything we don’t plan to uphold. All that said, if anything else you need or need to know occurs to you, call for me. It doesn’t matter when, or for what. So long as you are within my reach, I’ll be there for you, as I am for all of my children.”

“Great. That thing about watching me sleep still stands. If that’s all, then… bye.”

“Good hunting, Liadain.” Again, she disappears in an instant.

I hop off the bed with a groan, facing the window. Before I can look out at the city or think about my next step, I see something in my faint daytime reflection: two unnaturally bright green eyes staring back at me.

“Um, is that permanent?” I ask, then remember I’m talking to myself. Okay, how do you put your magic away when you’re done with it?

As soon as I form the intent to do so, the costume vanishes in a flash of shadow and pale light, replacing itself with the clothes I’d been wearing before. The power within me fades, but doesn’t completely disappear, and my sense of the unseen falls to a less intense level. In the mirror over my dresser, my eyes are the same slate-grey they’ve always been. “Okay. Whew.” Strange eyes are the sort of thing Emergence will make permanent soon enough — the very smallest sort of thing — but I’ll worry about those awkward questions when I get there. 

For now, my first hunt should be more than enough trouble to keep me busy. I say goodbye to Pearl, make her a little blanket nest, and head back toward Mr. Enfield’s room.

~~~

I feel the room before I see it, even dulled as my new senses are right now. A distant, ambient unease, the way ancient humans might have felt when they looked out into the night and wondered what was looking back at them. 

The door is still just a door when I get there, but that’s less comforting than it had been last night. The Harbinger’s impression is clearer, now, if far from perfectly so. It’s not a stench like I felt around the knots of corruption inside the other patients, but whatever it is… Vyuji was right. I already know that I could never mistake this for anything else.

Nobody else is in the hall. I can faintly sense a few people in their rooms or around the corners, but right now I’m alone. I hold my breath, open the door, and step halfway through when nothing horrible comes pouring out. 

At first glance, nothing is lurking inside, either, but a different sort of greeting awaits me. The dread that fills the room has an almost physical weight, a pressure like walking against strong wind. I scan what I can see from the entrance, using the half-open door as a shield. Nothing unusual. Slowly, I crack it open a little wider and peek around the corner. Still nothing. Finally, I slip through, the door clicking shut behind me.

However being here makes me feel, I can’t find any sign that the Harbinger is still around. Other than the lingering aura, there’s no evidence that it was ever here at all. The room is just a room, and its ominous air has no source that I can find, no spot where it’s stronger than another. I check under the bed, throw the closet doors open, even start peeking into the drawers, searching for any bizarre patches of color or sudden spikes in the tense ambiance. No such luck, for a certain definition of ‘luck.’

Nothing is even suspiciously misplaced. Mr. Enfield’s things are still here. His family hasn’t come to take them yet, and for now, the room is probably just how he left it. Framed photos, printed reviews of his restaurant, a pair of binoculars on the nightstand. The desk has been moved to the wall across from the bed. On it sits a small TV and, a bit oddly, some sort of video game console. 

Looking around for clues like a normal detective seems to be a dead end. Maybe his body would tell me more, if I’d seen it. On his way out, Dr. Hines looked disturbed in a way that went beyond yet another death in a place for the dying, and Vyuji did say Harbingers’ trails are strongest around their victims and nests. She’d thought this one was ‘newborn,’ whatever that means for a Harbinger, so it either came into being somewhere nearby and left shortly after or was just passing through when I found it. It probably has no special connection to this room, but it would to someone it had killed.

Is going and checking on him even an option? He might still be in the hospital basement, but they obviously keep the morgue locked. I can’t just walk in and have a look, even if I want to. Unless… Keepers have a lot of room to jump into investigations and inspect crime scenes, if they have any reason to think magic and monsters might be involved. I’d have to out myself to play that card, though, or at least let the city know there’s a new kid active in or around this hospital. 

The wilting field of flowers outside my window jumps to mind. I really don’t want to start studying corpses, if I can help it.

Putting that away for now, what else do I have? The Harbinger isn’t here anymore, so where did it go? If it went somewhere else in the hospital, I doubt I’d be the only one who ran into it. It would’ve found someone else and the place would be on emergency lockdown by now. Unless it’s disguising its attacks as natural deaths believable enough to fool an audience of doctors and coroners, which sounds insane even as I think it. 

But is it really? Victims often lose their minds in ways that are impossible to miss, but some do just die. To pull that off, it would have to kill very quietly and understand what we were looking out for. Granted, Harbingers usually aren’t mindless rampaging monsters. They can be viciously clever, but they aren’t smart in the same way as a smart human… right? School safety lectures said a lot about what they aren’t and don’t do, but nothing about what they actually are, and the more I think about it, the less confident I feel in ruling that idea out. Who knows what’s possible or not with Harbingers? 

Still, it seems at least more likely that it’s left the building. 

Mr. Enfield’s windows overlook the northern half of the Hills, New Claris’ westmost district. Other than the hospital and the nearby university, most of it is a loose spread of houses. The ground at the city’s edges slopes up into the tree-covered hills that line most of our northwestern borders, and our side hasn’t been completely developed over. Several dark green veins still creep through the bright cityscape. They keep them from growing in any further, but most aren’t even kept up like proper parks. People wanted to keep at least a bit of untrimmed wilderness that’s safe to wander in.

I crack a window open as far as it will go, about six inches out. Cold air wafts over me, and the unnatural pressure grows a little stronger. I’m sure enough, now. Somewhere in the city beneath me, the Harbinger is searching for a new haunt. There are no tracks to follow, no foul-smelling trail running straight down the side of the building, but I feel like if I go outside and find its general direction, I can follow it to its new nest by its scent.

Outside. Right. I’m still not supposed to leave the hospital grounds, but I can’t really follow that rule anymore, can I? Sorry, Dr. Hines. Sorry, whoever gets stuck giving me the stern lecture about doing stupid things Against Medical Advice.

Come to think of it, do I still have to worry about that? The lethargy that always weighed me down hadn’t gone anywhere even when I transformed. That cold, stinging numbness still creeps all through my joints, and I’m still faintly feverish. It would be quite the cosmic prank, making the Promise just to be put down by someone’s flu the first time I went out.

In the end, Keepers are still more or less human kids. Some can pull off impossible athletic feats that make them seem otherwise, but only if they have the right magic for it. Mine… is very much not the right magic. I’ll never be lifting cars or jumping between rooftops, I don’t think, but…

I close the window and observe the hallway outside with my soul-sense. Once the coast seems to be clear, I head back to my room and pull out the little red tab on my patient sign that says “Please Do Not Disturb!” I want my privacy while I try to actually use this power for the first time.

If I can’t fix myself, maybe I can at least keep from catching anything new.

Cautiously, I reach for the power running through me, now more a steady stream than an endless surge. I don’t know exactly how much I can do without opening the floodgates, but if the heart of my magic is controlling sickness, what I want right now shouldn’t be too complicated. It’ll be good to figure out how far I can go in this state, in any case.

Trying to control the flow is unlike anything I’ve ever done before, but some new part of me does know how to do it, if not well. It’s like my soul is a many-colored sea where my thoughts and feelings toss about, abstract and unformed. It mirrors my frame of mind, so with some effort I can direct its currents, stir the sentiments I want to the surface, then call them forth and paint over the world in their colors. The entire act feels vaguely unreal, like having a dream while I’m wide awake.

I don’t need to say any special nonsense words, don’t need to do anything at all — that would distract from what really matters. I just silently seethe at the thought of being trapped in this cage, hiding from the outside so that the wrong breath can’t kill me, and let that idea echo and churn in my heart. 

When it feels like there’s no more room for my bitterness, I push it outward, and my power follows. It seeps up from its inner source and settles into a thin, hazy mist wrapped around me, still carrying the cold resentment I used to create it. That’s not to say that the emotion has gone anywhere. It’s strong as ever, just like ‘blowing off steam’ by shouting and hitting things only keeps you angry for longer. 

But as it dwindles, the magic stays, and I know that I’ve succeeded. This fog will swallow any ordinary infections before they can reach me, and I’m fairly sure I can hold it there as long as I want. I just have to remember to do it, keep it up with a tiny mental effort. 

How many things was I banned from doing after my first transplant? Going anywhere public and crowded, ever. Petting animals. Walking in the woods. Eating raw fish and raw honey, or picking apples and eating them on the spot. All things that are suddenly open to me again. For the first time in years, in this one tiny way, I’ve won.

…I still need to get out of the hospital, though. 

Probably shouldn’t overthink it. Much as I want to avoid any suspicious attention I can, nurses aren’t patrolling the seventh floor for escapees. Nobody is actually locked in here. Given my age, they’re expected to find me and drag me back if I run off, but I’ve never done anything like this before. They shouldn’t be on high alert. Best to act like I’m not up to anything unusual. 

Back in my room, the walking cane I have for bad days sits on the wall by my bed. I don’t like to use it — it feels like admitting that I belong here and I always will — but it’s better than sitting in bed all day or tripping over my feet and breaking something, and if I’m going off to risk my life hunting a monster, I’d really rather have it on hand. I layer on a warm cardigan that does nothing for the chill mist surrounding me, wave to Noirin as I pass the art room, and take a seat in the lounge near the elevator hallway rather than my usual corner. The first time a visiting family calls the elevator, I quietly join them. There’s a box of white face masks for visitors on the front desk, since plenty of us need to be careful about catching anything, and I stuff one into my pocket on the way out. I shouldn’t need it anymore, but if anyone notices me missing later, I’ll tell them I just went to go sit in the hospital garden. They’ll hassle me less if I can at least say I took the precautions.

~~~

It’s a short jaunt from the first floor to the northern exit. That direction is my best lead — Mr. Enfield’s window faced north, and the Harbinger left in a way that didn’t send it rushing through the entire hospital. It might be wrong to think of it moving through space in some way I can follow, but that’s all I’ve got.

Apparently, its trail does follow some kind of path. Before long, I catch the miasma’s scent again. Not noticeably stronger than it had been upstairs, but it’s definitely there, pushing against me from somewhere to the north.

So I leave the grounds for the first time in nearly a month, following wherever this trail leads. I’ve barely even stepped off the seventh floor since I checked in, and walking under the open sky might feel strange on its own if this last day hadn’t been so much stranger. It’s a clear, dry spring day, still cold enough that the air feels slightly sharp as I breathe. It’s nice, though. Just chilly enough to be comfortable under a couple light layers has always been my favorite sort of weather. Now that I can safely leave my room, I have a while to enjoy it before summer ruins everything — if my magic keeps pollen away, spring may even become pretty nice! 

That thought is enough to distract me from what I’m out here to do, for about a minute. There’ll be plenty of time to appreciate the weather after.

Despite the chilly air, the sun is bright and strong, and I’m glad for the greenery that covers the city. Massive and modern as it is, New Claris is split almost evenly between construction and carefully-tended plants, and the trees leaning over the sidewalks form a thick enough canopy that I can mostly hide underneath it. The stretches of forest still snaking over the western borders mean that sometimes the road takes sudden long, winding turns, circling around the trees. The Harbinger’s path seems to cut straight through the forest, though at no point does it become a physical trail. There’s no path of broken branches and trampled foliage leading the way.

But I’m not here to play in the woods. I can’t forget that, not with the unnatural pressure mounting as I walk. I almost want to do it anyway just to spite my sickness, but that can wait. I follow the looping sidewalks rather than trace the Harbinger’s steps exactly, and the sensation strengthens so long as I move in its general direction. So does the fatigue, the dull ache in my legs, though I don’t think I’ve gone that far at all. It isn’t my worst health day, but that’s a very low standard to beat.

Eventually, the wooded road opens into a neighborhood of upscale houses. The way from the hospital has been mostly quiet, but this place is alive, cheerfully going about its business with no mind paid to the horrible ambiance only I can feel. Not nearly as hectic as the central districts, but cars and bikes come and go, and I pass a few people on foot as I make my way further in. One slows his steps, maybe trying to decide if he recognizes me or what I’m doing here, but in the end he just keeps walking.

As the source draws closer, the impressions behind it become more clear. It isn’t actually pressure, I realize now. It’s a distinct feeling of intrusion, like standing in a crowd full of people who are all pointedly ignoring me, backs turned, refusing to so much as admit that I exist. Where the shroud of power I’d wrapped around myself was my bitterness given magical weight, the Harbinger’s scent makes me feel like I’ve fallen into another world, one where I don’t belong and am not welcome.

Finally, the stench leads me to the hills at the edge of the neighborhood. I’m standing in front of some sort of earth house, built into the side of a large hill such that all I can see of it is a bright white oval facade with a glass door and several wide windows. It’s tall enough that there are two second-floor windows just over the main entrance.

And the Harbinger is somewhere inside. I’m certain of that. I just hope no one is home.

I look back at the street. No one else is around, so I transform in that same show of pale light and dancing darkness I saw from the outside in my dream. It comes a little easier this time, and while I still don’t feel good, there is a certain lightness that comes with the power, lifting the weight of pain and exhaustion so that I can keep moving in spite of it. With another simple thought, I call my cards into being, noting that one is still tinged green, and start toward the house. The front door is unlocked when I try it, so…

…Oh. Oh no.

As soon as the door slides open, I hear voices somewhere near, and the monster’s presence spikes wildly. It looks dark inside, despite the wide windows all along the front walls. I swallow, my throat dry.

Through the gloom in the front hall, I can faintly see hardwood floors beneath smooth white ceramic walls. The voices are coming from just ahead, where the hall opens into a wide, brightly-lit living room. The Harbinger’s colors are nowhere in sight, but I can see two people from behind, a man and a woman seated in front of a fireplace. They don’t seem to notice me. I don’t know what I expected, weeping or pained moans or mad laughter, but they’re having a slow, quiet conversation, too quiet for me to make out from here.

I duck around a corner, heart pounding wildly. What do I do here? The Harbinger is inside. Its weight still bears down on me. Since these people haven’t fled screaming, I have every reason to think they’ve suffered its curse, which makes them either bystanders in terrible danger, victims dying right this moment, or… enemies who will fight to protect it. 

I went into this knowing that it would be a trial by fire, my first time in anything like a battle and first time using most of my power. I can hurt the Harbinger as much as I want, but do I have any way to handle a regular person that won’t kill them or worse?

That’s only the worst-case scenario. I can still do this. I have to. I want to live and this thing’s heart holds the only medicine that can save me. I’ll find a way.

“Liadain.”

As I think on my approach, a face jumps into view from nowhere, cold and still and white as a marble statue. I clamp a hand over my mouth, smothering a shocked yelp, before I see it in full — it’s Vyuji’s face looking up at me, framed by her hair-tendrils and oversized hood.

“Oh, it’s just you,” I sigh. “Was that entrance really necessary?”

“I’m afraid so. Apologies,” she says. Her mental voice comes through in a hushed stage-whisper, and her flat expression does nothing to sell her remorse. “There’s one more thing I have to say before you go any further. When you left, I told you I would come whenever you called, so long as you were within my reach. This is as far as my reach goes. The Wound’s mouth is very near, and I can’t follow you through it. Once you cross into a Harbinger’s world, you’ll be lost to me until you emerge. Past that point, you’re on your own.”

“Then you’ll be there for me whenever I need you, except when I’m in the worst possible place? Typical,” I whisper back.

“It would be very, very bad if any Harbinger’s curse touched a Messenger. Bad for us, for you, for the world. There’s nothing I can do about that, but you deserved to know before it came up.”

That… makes sense, sure, but it doesn’t make my situation any better. “Any actually helpful final words?”

“I shouldn’t stay for long, and I can’t tell what it will be like from outside. Just…”

A noise from further inside interrupts us: the soft, wet sounds of something crawling through a swamp, just like I heard outside Mr. Enfield’s door last night. Vyuji grimaces and shakes her head. “Just be careful,” she says, and vanishes.

Well, that doesn’t change much, in the end. I expected to do this alone, actively turned down help and mentorship. If I want this to work, I’ll just have to make it work.

So into the monster’s den I go. I don’t charge in, announce myself, and proclaim the day saved — I just walk into the living room before I can lose the resolve to do it. I’ll figure out what comes next once I know how bad it is.

Inside, the conversation has paused for a moment. In its place is another sound, a faint cracking or crunching. As that noise stops, the woman leans back and sighs. “Disgusting,” she says, her voice weak and muffled.

“It really is,” the man agrees in a hoarse mutter. “Unbearable. Exactly what we needed.”

My footsteps are surprisingly light, but not so light that he can’t hear them. As I approach, the man looks over his shoulder at me. He’s dark-haired, perhaps in his thirties, but… he looks like he hasn’t eaten in weeks, as close to death as anyone on the seventh floor. His features are drawn, his eyes red, and his mouth is rimmed with grey dirt, dried and dusty. Both of them reek to my soul’s senses, the rotten-fruit stench that seems to represent diseased people mingling with the Harbinger’s overpowering aura.

“Ah, I didn’t realize we had a visitor!” The man greets me with more energy than he can handle in his state, doubling over coughing as soon as he pushes the words out. Each wheeze expels a tiny puff of dust. “A Keeper, too? What an honor. There’s nothing for you to worry about here, though.” 

“I… What happened to you?” I ask weakly.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that. We’re just fine. We’ll be better than ever soon. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?” He tries to grin, the expression thin and weak beneath those dull eyes, and I’m struck by the sense that he’s looking through rather than at me. 

What has it done to them? What are they doing now? 

I clench my teeth and circle around the couch. There’s something in the man’s lap. A lump of clay, slightly wet. Several large chunks of it have been carved off by what look like teeth marks. On a coffee table in front of them is a massive shapeless pile of the same clay. It moves as if alive, squirming aimlessly about and… giggling to itself, laughing like a child at play. There are no mouths, no features, nothing at all that could be making the sound.

“We aren’t being rude, are we, miss?” the woman rasps. She’s in the same awful state, struggling to speak between bites of her own mound of clay. “We’d have offered you some, but…” She looks me up and down, and in those hollow eyes is… not a normal person’s pity for the tragic little dying girl, the expression I’ve seen on a hundred different people. Almost the opposite. She’s smiling, but I’m somehow sure that it’s envy on her face. “Well, I don’t think you need anything it can offer. You’re already almost perfect! So… why don’t—” She gags on something, making a sound like she’s gotten water in her windpipe. The choking fit hasn’t quite faded when she starts talking again. “Why don’t you just run along?”

…Are they saying I’m too sick for a Harbinger to eat? How much of it is in them? Can it express itself through its victims or is this all just insane babble? It doesn’t really matter. Fists clenched, I start to search the rest of the room. Have to kill the thing before I can do anything for these two.

There it is. On the floor before the fireplace is a wide, dark hole in the world. Hot air seeps out from it like breath, and floating in the blackness are bright sigils very much like the ones on the back of my cards. The floor around it swims with the Harbinger’s colors and textures, and more of that living clay is slowly pulling itself out from the chaos and crawling toward the greater mass on the table.

This is a Wound, then. A tear in the world, a place where a monster has clashed with reality to produce something uniquely horrible, where even my own power will take on strange new shapes I won’t know how to use until I try.

And I know what I have to do here — what I’ll have to keep doing, if I want to live. Before the victims say anything else, before I can talk myself out of it, I take a running start and leap into the hole.

White. I look up at a blindingly white world. A medical monitor beeps, softly and steadily, from no source I can place. For a moment, I think I’m alone in a completely featureless place, but I’m not floating or falling — there is a surface beneath me, smooth and cold to the touch. Looking around, I’m in a small room of some sort. There are shadows in the corners, though I don’t see any light sources to cast them, a bed covered in ratty sheets next to a tall IV pole, and a round white table with simple chairs on either side.

Someone is already seated at the far side of the table. She leans over it, chin resting on folded hands, and…

And she’s me.

Pale, sallow skin. A thin face beneath a fall of feathery black hair stopping just at the shoulders. The same white ribbon I wear as a hairband, tied in the same way. Other than her eyes, which are changed from my dull grey to a shade of poisonous green so bright they nearly shine, she’s my exact double. Her dress is more antique than anything I’d be comfortable in, a formal mourning gown so black and lusterless it seems immune to light.

The doppelganger glowers up at me — that’s how it feels, anyway, but then my face could twist even the mildest expression into something sour. Her gaze moves to the seat across from her.

When Vyuji warned me about what came after the Promise, I think I imagined those ‘first steps’ as soul-shredding agony, maybe even hoped it would be that simple. It was a silly thing to hope for, she obviously could have explained ‘this is going to hurt,’ but I know pain. I’ve learned to live with pain, and I could handle a little more.

This, on the other hand, I have no idea what to do with. I assume for now that it’s not a dying dream, but that doesn’t tell me what it is. Is this how magic works, or a push to figure out how it works? I don’t feel any new senses, no power at my fingertips.

All there is to do is play along and see where this goes, then. I take the free seat, returning my double’s glare. “Alright. You know who I am, you’ve decorated with me in mind, so… who are you? What exactly are we doing here?”

She doesn’t speak. Her expression doesn’t change. She just sits up in her chair, raises a hand, and suddenly she’s holding my tarot deck. She didn’t pick it up or pull it from her sleeve. It wasn’t there, then it was. After last night, though, a trick like that barely feels worth noting. The top card of the deck faces me, displaying the Fool.

I could take that as an insult, but metaphors are the first lesson of tarot. The Fool isn’t stupidity, Death isn’t the physical end of life, the Undreaming doesn’t predict literal Harbinger attacks. Whether I’m talking to some kind of reflection of myself or something else that knows me well enough to stage this scene, she should know that too. The meaning is clear enough.

“The beginning of what?” I ask flatly.

In answer, she scatters the deck across the table, swirling it around into a giant messy heap. Expectantly, she pushes the pile over to my side.

“Right. Now I understand everything. If we can’t just talk to each other, I guess I know this way as well as any,” I sigh, putting the deck back together and setting it on my left. “The usual spread?” 

She gestures permissively.

With a flourish, I draw and flip my first card. A jagged circle of twigs bound together into a dreamcatcher by a messy web of many-colored ribbons, their colors dimming into darker shades until eventually becoming pitch black on the bottom, where I find a whale and a dolphin eyeing me, their heads peaking up from the right and left corners of the illustration. Perched on the right side of the dreamcatcher is a cat, while on the left side is an owl. Entangled in the dreamcatcher’s net are various astrological symbols. Right now, the bottom half is pointed up. The Wheel of Fortune inverted. A sudden turn for the worse. Things falling apart in ways you can’t expect and certainly can’t control. “Well, I could’ve told you that,” I mutter. “Is this supposed to be–”

Without any warning or transition, the world changes.

~~~

It smells almost like a garden, but not like fresh rain and tilled soil. Dead earth baking in the summer sun. My head throbs in dull pain, and my ears feel like they’re plugged or filled with water.

I can’t move. Something warm and heavy pushes down on me, a pressure like the weight of the sea, but solid and grainy.

I can’t see. Everything is dark — no, that’s not right, my eyes are just closed. I try to open them. Immediately, they start to sting, something black and dusty filling my vision. I slam them shut, but there it stays, lodged underneath my eyelids.

I’m buried. Buried alive, or am I really dead after all? I start to scream, but dirt fills my mouth and smothers my voice. Unthinking, I flail and grasp and push against the weight of the earth, feebly trying to make space to breathe. I try to move as if swimming, but it doesn’t work at all. I try to push up with my legs without knowing which way is up or if there even is an up here. Just as I shove any dirt out of the way, more shifts and falls into its place. I really am dead. I’ll drown here, I’ll—

Light leaks through the cracks in the earth. In one place, then another, the dirt gives way as my hands claw up into the air. My head surfaces a moment later, choking and crying and coughing up soil I’ve desperately tried not to swallow. I pull myself free and collapse on the ground. Terror slowly gives way to exhaustion. And to pain, the burning in my lungs as I breathe slow, heavy breaths, the sharp aches in my fingers where my nails have cracked. Pain is good. I know pain, I can use pain. It means I’m really still here.

“Dead on arrival,” says a flat, lifeless voice. “What a pity.”

I’m in another hospital room, but the entire floor is made of loosely-packed soil, and everything in sight is worn and dirty. The blaring lights of an overhead medical lamp, a circle of sun-bright eyes, bear down on me almost like a spotlight. My battered hands clench into fists, and I drag myself to my feet, searching for the speaker.

Nobody is here, not that I can see, but in a circle all around the room are rows and rows of auditorium seats stretching up as far as I could see, like an old-fashioned operating theater if it were built to seat hundreds. All the room’s lighting is centered on me, and looking up at them is like looking out a window at night.

“Yes, what a shame.” A different voice, sourceless or coming from every possible direction.

“Such a waste.”

It isn’t an operating suite, I see now, but a delivery room. Next to the reclining central bed is a plush chair and a small wheeled cradle covered in monitoring equipment. On each sits a framed photograph lined with black ribbon. I don’t look any closer. I don’t need to.

“The whole family with her, too. One little twist and they’re already dead, all of them. These two just don’t know it yet. Fate can be so cruel, can’t it?” The first speaker laughs drily, and—

~~~

And the scene abruptly vanishes, shifting back to the first white room. It’s different now, though, more…  decrepit. A jagged fracture runs across the table, the whites are blotched with greys in places, and the sheet on the bed is now little more than a rag. Although my heart is quaking in my chest and I’m left trying to steady my panicking breath, my fingers, at least, are intact, and I don’t see any dirt – it’s just like the last scene never happened. All that remains is the echoes of my terror.

“What was that supposed to be? Why would you do that? I know all this. You obviously know all this. What’s any of it got to do with the Promise? The whole point was…” I trail off. I agreed to it, I must have known what I wanted out of it, but right now I can’t find the words. To live, yes, but that doesn’t finish the thought at all. To be rid of the weight I’d carried all my life? To not be the me who carried it? Is that what it comes down to?

“You know why. What was. Your context. What brought you here,” the double says, using my voice for the first time. Her tone is cold and even. “That’s the way we always start. The past is never past, and without it, none of this could be at all. You don’t need to thank the life you’ve led for bringing you here, you don’t need to embrace it, but you do need to know it. Curse the world all you like once you understand.”

Her eyes move, glancing down at the table, and she reaches out to trace the Wheel of Fortune with one gloved finger. “The spread tells one story, not three. It isn’t finished yet. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Is this going to keep happening?”

The girl grimaces and lowers her gaze, breaking eye contact. Tears well in the corners of her eyes, but don’t quite fall. “Why do you think we’re here?”

“Right. I guess that was a stupid question.” The room is still sealed, with not so much as a tightly-shut doorway anywhere in sight. If I was going to wake up, I’d have done it by now. Only one way out, then. I reach for the cards, but… my hand stops halfway across the table, trembling. Whatever waits at the end of this nightmare, the thought of diving back into it makes pulling another card feel like trying to willfully shove my arm into a fire.

“You do it,” I finally say, pushing the deck back to her side of the table. “It’s not my usual method, but that’s allowed, right?”

Her head shoots up to glare directly at me, though her eyes are still faintly bleary. “Wait, then. Sit alone and pray for change that will never come. Wait until the world leaves you behind. Even now, I wonder if there’s any hope for us.”

“What did you expect me to do?” I snap back. “Go off on an adventure like my life is some stupid movie about a cute little dying girl? Sure! I’ve always wanted to visit the Freezing Sea, should I have taken a trip up that way? I’d die the first time I caught a cold, probably before I managed to leave the city, but I could smile and tell myself it wasn’t worthless after all because at least I tried! Do you think that would do anything? Do you think it would have gotten me the Promise sooner?”

The double shakes her head slowly. “No. Not really. I’m you. What could I do that you couldn’t? What could I expect that you didn’t? All I’m here to do is remind you of the paths forward that weren’t there a day ago, more of them than most people ever see. You still need to walk them for that to mean anything.” The frigid sharpness of her speech fades as she speaks, softens into something quiet and sad. “I could finish the reading. There are no rules here that you didn’t make. But I won’t. This is only a dream, and soon there will only be you to take those steps.” Gently, she pushes the deck back to me.

I won’t give her the satisfaction of saying so, but she is right. Nobody ever said that Keepers had it easy. Not the Church, not the Keepers themselves, not even Vyuji, whose reason for being is to sell me on the Promise. This is a dream, and even if it can actually torture me, it can’t be much next to what’s expected of me now. The thought of it makes me sicker than usual, but when this nightmare is over and I have my magic, I still plan to go find that Harbinger as quickly as possible.

“Well, if I can’t do this…”

Quickly, like I’m handling something hot, I draw the next card and set it at the center of the table. The Nine of Swords. That’s what the frame reads, but the art isn’t anything I recognize. It shows me splayed out against a wall, surrounded but not yet pierced by nine huge hollow needles, like a butterfly waiting to be pinned. The background is in the same awful riot of mud-and-gore colors that marked the Harbinger’s presence last night, and just like then, those colors are swirling, alive.

The next shifting of the world comes before I can say or think anything clear.

~~~

I  bolt upright on a hard bench, feeling like I’ve just been startled awake. Rubbing my eyes and looking around, I’m in something like a hospital waiting room, but…the walls, the floors, the counters, everything is covered in wounds, like they’re all made of skin, gaping and bleeding. Thick, pulsing veins crisscross the windows like overgrown vines. In several places, bulging eyeballs poke through the surfaces, all staring directly at me. The sounds of my own heartbeats and rushing blood play in my head as if through a megaphone.

Something wet stirs beneath me. Frantically, I roll off the bench, stumbling to the floor and to the first unmarred spot of white I can see. Thin lines tear or crack themselves open all around the room. Veins steadily grow out along the walls, but don’t crawl closer to me. Nothing is coming for me or following me — other than the steady tracking of the eyes, it feels almost like this place wasn’t really meant for me, wasn’t paying much attention to me at all. Somehow, disgust wins over panic. I curl up on the little island still made of hard tile, retching as the world twists and tears.

What is this? Why is this? The last scene… that was made of things I knew, things that had happened, just ran through the filter of nightmare logic. This thing, this cage of flesh growing around me, it’s just an awful directionless spectacle. I study it from my tiny perch, looking for as long as I can bear, but… nothing. No sudden shift comes. The room is only so large, and eventually I’ll be completely encased in its growth, but… it seems like the only thing to do with it is wait and see if it has a point.

Wait and see. Nightmare logic.

The Nine of Swords is the card of nightmares, fear, trauma. Not sickness or death, but the despair those things carry with them. In my favorite deck, its picture is a horrible mass of bone and maggots and socketless eyes still trailing nerves. All are skewered on nine swords in a neat row, and once you process the initial shock, it’s easy enough to see what you’re looking at. I think of it as a warning against becoming a prisoner in your own thoughts, even when the fear that created them is completely justified.

What am I lost in? What brought me here, kept me here?

I used to think of life as a long, long stay in a waiting room. I knew I was very sick, but there were things they could do to make me better. I still thought that the first time they took me out of school. I just had to sit through this and then I would be better. My real life hadn’t started yet, and it was taking a little longer than it did for most people, but it would. Someday.

It took me longer than it should have to realize it was hopeless. I think it was after the first transplant failed, after my few friends started to pull away and the time I spent in the hospital was simply devoted to keeping the rejected marrow from killing me outright. I can’t remember a single moment when I decided that real life was never coming, but I did. I was dying, nobody else would care when it happened, and nothing I could do would make any difference. The only thing left was to detach from my botched life, read my books, look out the window at the world I was no longer part of, and wait.

And all the while, death was coming for me. It could be the sickness, the medicine, the Harbinger, some freak accident that had nothing to do with any of it, but it had been at my shoulder all my life. It wouldn’t be much longer.

And whatever I say, whatever I do to cope with the life I was stuck with, I don’t want to die. I don’t ever want to die, if I can help it. Why else had I not climbed the fence on the roof and thrown myself off?

“Enough of this. I’m leaving.” I can’t wait anymore. For once in my life, I don’t have to stay helpless.

The world doesn’t hear my words and vanish. It doesn’t change at all. Of course not.

Taking long, careful steps over holes and tears in the floor, I make my way to the front doors. They’re already thick with flesh-vines, but not completely sealed off. Hesitantly, I push on one of them, maybe hoping the whole tangle will dissolve into smoke as soon as I challenge it. It does not. It just pulses a little faster under my hand, hot and faintly sweaty to the touch. I draw back, feebly trying to pull it with me, but it quickly slips my grip and snaps back into place. I don’t think I can pull them loose, I certainly can’t rip them, and I still don’t feel any magic at my call.

The only way out is through, then. After another glance, I spot a hole in the web that seems… not like a clean exit, but enough of a gap that someone my size could squeeze through it with only emotional trouble. I shudder at the thought, but take a long, heavy breath, hold it, and crawl in, desperately hoping that the vines won’t close around me or drag me back in. It’s like pushing through a path blocked by warm, sticky, stretchy branches, and as disgusting as it sounds, but the barrier makes no active moves to hold me back.

Finally, I tumble headfirst through the gap, barely thinking to look at whatever waits on the other side, and roll out onto the weathered white-and-grey floor of the first room, just beside the table. No trace of the flesh-cage remains. To an observer, I must have dropped out of open air. My doppelganger still sits at the central table, watching impassively.

I don’t resent this process any less, but I’m starting to see its point, and the shape of my still-unfinished reading.

“Okay.” I take my seat again. “I won’t waste time asking who dreamed that up. I guess I did, and I don’t need to add self-hatred to my list of problems. Let’s… let’s just finish this, alright? Still whenever I’m ready?”

She blinks, looking almost surprised, but nods. “Go right ahead.”

I grit my teeth, close my eyes, and draw the last card. What will be.

A bull’s eyeless corpse pierced by a forest of blades. The Ten of Swords, the direct and natural end of the last card’s events. Failure. Ruin. Disaster. Being shattered by a power entirely beyond your control, with only the fact that things couldn’t get any worse for comfort.

Nothing changes. No new vision swallows me up. This time, the dream just left me alone with my thoughts. Those thoughts are bad enough.

“…That’s it? That’s where this is going? That’s why we went through all this?” My voice breaks. “What am I supposed to take from that? Even the Promise can’t offer someone like me a life? Is that the message? Was this all just one last laugh at my expense before I get myself killed?”

“It was, yes. A day ago, that was the end we were hurtling toward.” The dream-double narrows her eyes and smiles for the first time, a wide, triumphant grin. “You’re forgetting something, though. That was then. The future, our future, has changed. And we constantly cheat at tarot. Repeat a reading we don’t like here, exile a card there…”

She puts a finger to the table, and the venomous light in her eyes flares. The card starts to glow in that same color, brightening until nothing of it is visible through the light. Slowly, the color fades, and when it does, the card is a different one entirely. A black and white image of a crow’s skeleton, the skull facing me. Death inverted.

“See?” She nods, satisfied.

“This one isn’t a challenge or a lesson, is it?” I whisper. “Not for us. It’s a promise.” Traditionally, Death reversed means being trapped in or haunted by the past, resisting a necessary change, fighting something that can’t be avoided or that you need to accept to move forward. In another context, it might have been just as terrible an end to this reading, a statement that I really should just heed the world’s wisdom and make peace with my doom.

Death is endings and beginnings, though, and right now, I read it as an awakening after a long, long winter. Rejection of the end, and with it, rebirth.

“Oh, it’s still a sort of lesson,” the double says. “Start thinking with power. If you can’t accept your fate, then make another.”

There’s something a bit ghastly in her features as she says that.

The scene shifts again. Now we both stand on an invisible surface in a pale grey void, infinite and empty.

“But you’re right. And with that, we’ve done all we can here,” she continues. “It’s almost time we moved on.”

“Are you sure? For all this… I still don’t feel any different. I don’t know any more than I did when we started about how I’m different or what I can do.”

“You will. There’s just one more thing.”

She starts to lose her definition, somehow, like a figure in a picture drawn with no outlines. In the next instant, she becomes a silhouette, a solid shadow ran through with veins and serpentine spirals of sickly green radiance. The color separates itself from her, slithering outward into a halo of baleful light that clings tightly to the shadow’s edges.

The aura begins to gather itself into shapes, now around rather than within her, then slowly darkens and solidifies into an outfit too elaborate and impractical to be mistaken for anything but a Keeper’s regalia. A black bell-skirted dress, adorned at the bottom and sleeves with ruffled white lace. Tall flat-heeled boots. At the top, a heavy hooded capelet with a deep green bow placed over the chest, the only color anywhere on the ensemble. Finally, the shadow’s eyes appear from the gloom as she resolves back into my body.

I stare, silent, until she strides forward and hugs me tightly. As I stiffen at the contact, she dissolves again into shadow and green light, this time melding into me rather than taking a new shape, and the world around me rapidly fades.

“I guess all I have left to say is… live. Because you’ve never asked for much and you deserve better. Because when the world has given you nothing, it’s not wrong to take what you need from it. Because you can.”

~~~

…And I’m back in my room, just where I started.

“Welcome back, Liadain. My children always do have a certain… flair to them,” Vyuji says. She hasn’t moved an inch. “I’m glad to see you’ve kept that tradition up.”

The lectures only ever said that Harbingers were terrifying monsters and we’d know them when we saw them. That didn’t do them the least bit of justice. The thing in the halls was unforgettable and too awful to remember at the same time. Thinking about it feels like picking shards of glass out of my brain. I do my best to shove it from my mind, but every single line of thought ends with wondering where it is now and what it might be doing. 

“Are you sure it’s safe here? Really really sure?” Reluctantly, I look back at the door, trying to keep the girl in the corner of my eye. Nothing is crawling through the cracks. 

Her gaze circles the room. Her nostrils crinkle like she’s trying to place a smell. “No. It’s very hard to be certain of anything about Harbingers, even newborns.” She closes her eyes, opens her mouth slightly, and lets out a wordless song in a whale’s low, howling voice. The lightbulbs above take on a very faint moon-colored glow which scatters into bright flecks dancing along the walls, like sunbeams beneath the sea. After a moment, the song stops, but the tint remains. 

“There,” the girl says, again speaking directly into my head. “I’ve warded this room against Wound intrusion. That and my presence are the closest things to safety I can offer you right now. Save, that is, for the power to protect yourself.”

“The power. That’s… you’re…” I know the answer, but I can’t make myself say it. I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m wrong. If she’s gotten me to hope for something just to dash it a few seconds later… I just stare at her and squeeze Pearl a little tighter.

The girl raises her arm to her chest, as if to place a palm to her heart, but there’s no hand at the end of it. Instead, the limb opens into something like an undersea flower, seven pale petals around thin blue stalks. “My name is Vyuji. I’m a Messenger of Claiasya, and your yearning has called me here.” She spreads her arms from her hips and bows her head, taking an almost prayerful position. “Your soul rejects its foundations. You stand at the boundary of the world, and with one more step, you can move beyond it. You can be a Keeper, if you but choose.”

Exactly what I thought, then. The whiplash of it all leaves me paralyzed. This is happening right now, when I was staring at pure horror certain I’d die not a minute ago – when I’m still fearing for my life. For her part, Vyuji just waits, silent and still. 

“Why me? If you wanted to choose me, why only now? Can you tell me? Do you even know or is this just how it’s done?” My vision blurs as the words tear out of my throat. My nails dig into my arms. 

Vyuji tilts her head curiously. “This is the first time I’ve felt your call. The only choice I made was to answer it.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything about why.” Not many Keepers talk about the mystery of what earns them their blessing, but the ones who do say their Messengers don’t even seem to understand the question. This is what they mean, then.

“Because I know you, Liadain. I knew you and loved you from the moment I felt your will. Nothing I can do will change the past, and nothing I say will apologize for the life you have led before now. All I can give you is my word that what comes next may be different. That it will be different, if you accept what is yours.”

“Don’t talk about knowing me. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve seen or haven’t about me, you waited…  what, were you sitting and waiting to tell me this until I gave up? On everything? What I know, what you would know if you meant that, is that I have nothing! No life! No future! Just the years I’ve spent making my peace, and now, now you won’t even let me keep that!”

What am I doing? Has it been so long since anything good happened that I’ve forgotten how to act when it does? 

I break down into choked, ugly sobs.

Vyuji’s face falls, heavy with some unplaceable emotion. “I am sorry that it couldn’t be sooner. Truly, I am. It is a monstrous thing that the world has refused you a place in it, simply for being born. I will not try to justify it, because it cannot be done.” Her gaze meets mine. What is that in her eyes? Pain? Remorse? Yet more pity? “But I can still help you carve a place for yourself.”

“Please… please go away.” I don’t care what she’s promising. I can’t bear to have her standing there staring at me anymore.

The Messenger frowns. She watches me, still unblinking, for another silent moment. “I can’t choose for you and won’t judge your decision, but are you certain?”

“Yes. No. I mean, that’s not to say no, get out of here and never come back, I just — I need to think. Alone. Do I have to decide right now?”

Vyuji finally looks away from me, a very small mercy. She puts a flower-hand to her chin and stares up at the ceiling pensively. There’s a pause just long enough that I worry I’ve ruined everything, but then… 

“No. Sometimes these things are more sensitive, but in your case this is an open offer. I’ll note that you don’t even need to make the Promise to protect yourself or these people, if you don’t want to. If you call emergency services and tell them you’ve just spotted a Harbinger, someone will be here to handle it soon enough. This doesn’t appear to be an urgent crisis just yet. That said, if it is left alone, it will feed and grow until it becomes one. I have no way to predict how long that will take, so I do suggest that you make your choice quickly.”

“Fine. I don’t think it’ll take long, I’m… I’m just really tired. Will the Harbinger be back as soon as you leave?” 

“I believe it will look for somewhere more secluded, but it’s not impossible. Given that, I would like to keep a distant watch on this floor. If you need time to make your choice, you have my word that unless I have to intervene to protect you from something, I’ll leave you alone until you invite me back in. Is that acceptable?”

My stomach scrunches up at the thought of that filth seeping beneath the crack of my room’s door while I sleep and rising up to spill over me. My nose and eyes and tongue burn at the memory of its scent. It’d probably burn my skin just to touch it. My throat lurches as an image forces itself into my brain against my will; that sludge swallowing me whole, dissolving my flesh away until I’m nothing but rotting bones and drain-clogging hair carried away on a current of sewage alongside Pearl’s soiled remains.

It feels like my heart is dangling right above a pit that’s been dug into my chest, and the moment Vyuji leaves, it’ll be snipped right off my aorta like grapes from a tree and plummet down into the void, taking the whole rest of the night with it in a spiral of shuddering dread as I cower beneath my covers praying the monster won’t get me before morning comes.

Wait, that’s wrong.

Grapes don’t grow on trees. They grow on vines, right?

But I could have sworn I saw a grape tree once, on a school field trip I was well enough to take. So maybe they do exist. I just… don’t really know.

And I realize how weird it is that I know more for sure about the blood vessels connected to my heart than I do about grapes.

And the way things are now, it’ll always be that way.

And I hate that more than anything.

I hate the fact that I’m almost too exhausted to be afraid at this point, because if I’m going to die anyway with nothing to show for it, why should it matter if a Harbinger kills me tonight or my own worthless blood kills me next week? The truth is, I’m here on the seventh floor exactly because it’s already over for me.

I hate it.

I hate it so much that my jaw clenches shut and my nails dig into my palms hard enough to sting and, without even thinking about it, I raise one of my balled up fists, pour all the strength in my tiny body into it, and hammer it into the door I’m leaning on again and again and again while the Messenger across from me just looks on without saying a word. With just those three knocks, my pointless tantrum is already over, because that’s all it took to get me panting hard enough that it’s hard to talk. That’s really all I had in me.

“……Fine, do it,” I finally say after I’m done catching my breath. “I’d rather not have that chance on my mind. Just don’t sit right in here and watch me sleep or anything.” Part of me expects that this is one last cruel joke, that I’ll be eaten or die in bed as soon as this meeting ends. If she wants to cut off at least one of those possibilities, I’ll take it.

“Thank you. Sleep well, Liadain… ah, as well as you can in these circumstances. I hope I’ll see you soon.” She raises an arm, opens the petals at the end of it, and waves farewell once. Then she’s gone — just gone, blinked out of existence without a trace. The room brightens in the same instant, losing that strange bluish tint.

I tuck Pearl in, but don’t join her just yet. My room’s windows face east, toward the city. I prefer it to the flower fields on the other side, but not by enough that I spend much time enjoying the view. After tonight, though, I do want to look out over the world beyond the seventh floor, the world I just might still have a future in.

At this hour, most of New Claris is lit only by the moon and stars. The night lighting is sparse and carefully targeted — I think that’s true almost everywhere by now, but our city was rebuilt with the specific goal of being kind to the planet more recently than most. A few scattered rooms in skyscrapers are still bright, a few homes still active. The main roads are outlined in thin trails of ecoluminance, narrow lights cast over rows of reflective trees and shrubs, and the sidewalks and back streets blink with smaller motion-sensing lanterns. 

I can’t clearly see anyone from here, but I can trace their steps by the lights that brighten their paths and vanish as they move on. As I watch them go on their ways, I think about the people who still belong to that world. Mostly I think of the Keepers patrolling the city, and what it would mean to be one of them.

I’ve dreamed that dream now and then. Of course I have. Everyone spent their youth hoping at least a little for the day they’d meet a Messenger, but while other kids were sketching what they wanted their costumes to look like, I did my research. I learned how rare it was for that day to come. Only a very few children would be chosen, and there was no way to plan or practice to be a Keeper, since nobody knew what the Messengers were looking for. 

Whatever the conditions, I’d doubted I’d ever meet them. I wasn’t a hero or an innocent or the greatest person in any sense. More important than any of the facts and patterns, I knew how painful hope could be when you mistook it for something else, so I learned not to hope. I buried my dreams, quietly hated the world that wouldn’t let me have even the smallest of them. I lived with the promise that so long as I expected nothing, nothing could disappoint me. 

I guess I was very wrong. Life has always looked for ways to upend my plans.

Oh, Vyuji promised the world in return for the bitter peace she stole, but it isn’t that easy. Keepers never visibly age another day after they make the Promise, but the ways they change beyond that are… not predictable. Some can make themselves enormously stronger and tougher than any ordinary person, but they can’t stay like that forever, not unless that’s where their Emergence takes them. You need more power than the Promise offers on its own to really, fully rewrite yourself with magic, and that power can only be taken from Harbingers.

Thinking about those nightmares and the heroes who hunt them, I wonder if the Harbinger that nearly killed me is out in the night, stalking someone else or looking for a new home. 

Right. The Harbinger. 

I pull the curtains closed and crack my door open, peeking out into the hallway. No signs of the thing I’d seen waiting for me outside. Slowly, I creep along the wall and glance past the corner at the door to Mr. Enfield’s old room. At least for the moment, it’s just a door, and I sigh with relief at the sight of it. Satisfied, or as satisfied as I can be, I find one of the currently-empty public rooms with a phone installed. The police can’t do anything to a Harbinger, but they’ll pass it on to someone who can.

As I pick up the phone, though, Vyuji’s last words come back to mind. I’m too dead to think, I don’t really know what I want to do, but I haven’t decided not to make the Promise. If I do, calling for help right now would cause some problems. There’d be someone else chasing the only lead I have, hunting in my backyard where they might run into the new Keeper and trace me to the hospital, altogether making my life a lot more complicated.

There’s also the matter of Keepers patrolling certain sections of the city they’ve claimed or been assigned to, but frankly I just… don’t want to deal with other people, if I can at all help it.

When I think of it like that, it sounds really ungrateful to the chosen children who’ve probably kept me safe from any number of disasters I never learned about, but it is what it is.

I’ll call tomorrow morning if I decide to turn Vyuji down, but right now I really am too tired for all this. I stalk back to my room, fall into the bed, and do my best to sleep through my whirling thoughts.

~~~

I wake, as I usually do, to the sun glaring down at me through gauzy sky-blue curtains. Shortly after I moved in here, I asked if they’d replace them with blackout shades. They would not. Something about sunlight being good for you in all sorts of ways, as if that was going to save me.

I roll over and gather as much quilt as I can around my head without suffocating myself. I can never actually get back to sleep when this happens, but I try anyway. Eventually, someone knocks on my door, then cracks it open when I don’t answer. One of the nurses, here to take my vitals after yesterday’s infusion. I drag myself out of my nest, keeping my protests to myself for the moment.

“Is Dr. Hines around yet?” I ask as she pokes a thermometer into my ear.

“Hm? Oh, I think he’s out today. Did you need anything?”

“No, I just had a weird question. It can wait, don’t worry about it.” I don’t think the Promise on its own would cure me, but I don’t know that it definitely wouldn’t, and it still might help in some way. Oh well. I haven’t decided how to broach it yet, anyway… is treating Keeper-specific issues even something normal doctors do? I have no idea. There’s probably never been a Keeper with exactly what I have, so even the experts might not know where to start.

She’s finished before too long. I sit in bed a little longer after she leaves. Why did I even want to know? If the cold comfort of misery is a scab over my wounds, it’s just picking at it to entertain an idea like that at all, isn’t it?

I lay Pearl on the pillow and push myself out of bed, into my morning routine. After I dress, take my small mountain of pills, and brush a forest of tangles out of my hair, I pull my first card of the day from my tarot deck, a simple single-card reading. The Six of Pentacles from my personal deck is still in exile, where it will remain until I no longer hate it. It may be a while.

The Sun. The dawn on a dark night. Enlightenment, if you like, or an omen of a recovery to come. 

For all I used to look down on other kids’ childish hopes, I did try to sketch my costume once, a long time ago. I’m no artist, so it didn’t end up looking like anything at all, but I tried.

I break down again, this time in wild, uncontrollable laughter. Maybe someone outside is hearing and thinking I’ve lost my mind, but I don’t really care. It starts to let up just as it gets painful, but then another thought strikes me — I hate the sun. None of the meanings in the tarot books are things I see in it, and there’s no real reason for me to take it as a good omen. Rather than spoil my mood, that only brings forth a renewed burst of cackling.

Once the ache in my sides fades, I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, stand, and speak to the window: 

“I didn’t dream you, did I, Vyuji? If you’re still there, I’m ready to talk.” 

“I’m happy to confirm that you did not.” Just as I hear the words, the Messenger appears next to me with no warning or fanfare. “How are you faring today, Liadain?”

“You don’t really look like a Messenger, do you?” I ask. I vaguely recognized Vyuji’s name when she first gave it, so I must have picked it up somewhere, but I don’t recall anything specific about her. Stores are full of Messenger merchandise, cuddly toys and mascot charms said to be made in their images. Enne, the most popular of the six, is apparently some kind of fluffy pink cloud-animal. Art by Keepers or sourced from their descriptions shows him as a round tuft of wispy fur with big dark puppy-eyes, two front seal flippers but no back limbs, and no visible mouth under his shiny black nose. There are never any little stuffed fish-girls on the shelves next to him.

Vyuji looks down at herself wryly. “Would you prefer it if I did?”

Honestly, something about her does feel more genuine than speaking to the Goddess through a stuffed animal. “…No, I guess not.”

“I didn’t think so. Otherwise, you’d have met one of my siblings. We are what our children need us to be.”

“Does everyone you come calling for see a different Vyuji?” And if they do, what does her… well, her say about me?

“My children need me to be sincere.”

“…Right. Anyway, I’m better, I think. More or less. I’m… sorry I-”

“Don’t apologize to me. Ever.” She waves an arm dismissively. “I came here for you. I exist for you, and for children like you. You needed to say something to me, so you did. I hope it helped you organize your thoughts, but either way, you’ve nothing to be sorry for.”

“Uh, if you say so, sure. I’ll remember that. I might have something you’ll like better, anyway.” I take a heavy, steadying breath. “The Promise. If, and that’s if I wanted to make it, how does that work?”

“There is a way to these things, but it’s quite simple. Once a potential Keeper understands the conditions of the Promise, all they need to do is accept them of their own free will.” There’s a sudden warmth to her mental voice. It’s subdued, but definitely sounds something like happiness.

“Those terms are also simple. On Claiasya’s behalf, I pledge to foster your growth as a Keeper and guide you through your new life with whatever knowledge I can offer. You pledge to embrace and nurture the magic sleeping in your soul. Should you accept it, you are free to do with it what you will.”

“Really? Keepers just take all this power and use it for…  whatever?”

“Anything you want. A Keeper’s magic is theirs and it is them. All we do is open the door, and all we ask is that you use what comes surging through.”

“Right then. In that case, tell me about Emergence.”

“Ah. Of course.” Vyuji smiles, very slightly.

Keepers stop aging from the moment they make the Promise, but they don’t stop changing. The religious types say magic “shapes a Keeper’s vessel to best express the inner truths of their soul,” and whether or not that’s really what happens, it does mark its users. It starts small, maybe your hair recolors itself or your eyes start glowing with power, but can get very strange if you last long enough. Frozen Sun Iona Fianata, the city’s eldest Keeper and founding hero, has ice-sculpture eyes and a bubble of endless winter following her wherever she goes.

I don’t really care about any of that. What matters happens beneath the surface. 

“A Keeper’s role in the world is to protect it from Harbingers. Nothing obligates them to do that, but most find their own reasons. Seeking Emergence is often among them. A fallen Harbinger is not completely destroyed — something remains of its heart, and it is not good for such a thing to linger and float freely in the world. A Keeper can claim that essence, purify it within themselves and fold its power into their own.

“Emergence is the soul’s maturation, the process through which a Keeper grows with their power. Like all magic, its wielder’s emotions and wishes give it shape. When it’s handled properly, a Keeper can direct their own evolution. Rewrite themselves to better suit their needs.”

“So… if I want, say, perfect health or complete immortality, eating enough Harbingers will give it to me?”

“I can’t predict exactly what your path might look like, but if that is your dearest desire, then your magic will create a way for you to sustain yourself forever,” she says without hesitation.  

I glance over her shoulder at the pill bottles covering my nightstand. Whatever I said going into this, it’s honestly a little hard not to throw myself right into the deal. “…Okay. Great. About how many Harbingers does this take?”

Vyuji gives a tiny shake of her head. She barely moves as she speaks, not the slightest gesture or twitch or visible breath, so any motion at all stands out. “Magic is not so neat and predictable. Harbingers come in all sizes, and the metamorphosis is a path you walk rather than a single boundary you eventually cross. Every step will bring you closer, but there is no reliable way to say how long the road to your goal will be. Apologies.

“Ah, and sometimes a Keeper desires something… too wide to be accomplished purely through Emergence. In those cases, there are special arrangements we can make. This doesn’t happen often, but it’s important that you know the option exists.”

“Will I need to use it for what I want?” I’ve heard of something like this. I don’t know how it works or anything, but miracles that change the whole world are rare enough that the Church calendar uses them to mark eras. The current year is Kuri 74. 

“No,” Vyuji says simply.

“Then I won’t worry about it for now. What else?”

“That’s all. Those are the conditions in full of the Promise between Claiasya and her children. You, Liadain Shiel, are now a party to it. Ah, this isn’t part of the terms, but one last thing…” Her silent speech lowers, darkens. I brace myself for whatever catch is coming.

“A Keeper’s first steps are always… difficult. They’re different for everyone, so I’m afraid there’s no way to tell you how to prepare yourself, but I, at least, believe you deserve to know before it happens. If you choose for it to happen, of course.

“Knowing all you know, do you accept this Promise?”

I grimace. Of course nothing could ever be easy, but it didn’t change anything, in the end. Thinking about it, there was probably never any chance I’d turn her down. 

Maybe that’s part of whatever makes a Keeper. 

“Yes.”

Vyuji’s expression softens into something very warm — almost maternal, or so I imagine. “Then welcome to the world, Liadain.”

It isn’t pain that shoots through me as she speaks my name. It isn’t a feeling at all, or maybe I just don’t have the senses to process it, but I know it’s there. I have just enough time to be disoriented before it shatters me, bursts from within like a bird cracking its shell or a star being born or like there’s never been any other ‘me’ holding it in at all—

Next Chapter

phase 1: what grows in the seedbed of sorrow

~~~

Nothing that makes us human is physical. Everyone knows that, but it’s very little comfort to my soul in its crumbling shell.

A glass elevator carries us to the top floor of the New Claris Regional Hospital. Its view as it rises looks out at the city’s western limits, where a field of wildflowers blooms between us and the untouched forests. From this height and distance, their shapes and hues blur together into a carpet of colorful foam on a green sea, faintly shifting in the wind.

I don’t really like flowers. Oh, they’re quite the sight right now, but in no time at all they’ll wilt, die, and linger as rotten brown husks. Flowers are beautiful because they fade. People who want to sound wise say things like that sometimes, but it’s all garbage. They’re beautiful right now. They’d be beautiful if they stayed like this forever.

If those people were wilting, they’d agree with me. 

Before long, the elevator comes to a stop with a soft ping, and its doors slide open into a wide hallway. Dad steps out, two bags of my luggage in tow, and I follow. 

I’ve never been to the seventh floor before. To their credit, they’ve done a good job of making it look like a real place. The hall is bright with soft ambient light, and it opens into a large space that feels more like an upscale living room than a hospital, with earth-tone walls, a high wood-panel ceiling, round tables surrounded by plush seats. Planters line the tall, wide windows, and the air smells strongly of mint. The only immediate sign of where we are is the square desk in one corner serving as a nurse’s station.

Some of the people seated around the room, a rough split of residents and nurses, look up to watch as we enter. 

At her age? What a shame…

None of them say that, not with words, but I can feel it in their eyes. I’ve felt it quite enough to know it by now.

“Ah, is that Liadain? We just heard you’d be here soon.” One of the nurses approaches to greet us. “And you must be…?”

“Her father, yes,” Dad confirms. “Alban Shiel. Nice to meet you.” The nurse briefly glances up at him and down at me as he reaches out to shake her hand. We look nothing alike. Apparently I take after my mother’s side. 

After a moment’s uncomfortable small talk, she ushers us down the hall to my new room.

“Well! This is a nice place, eh, Lia?” Dad says, his tone artificially light and casual. 

Like the lounge outside, its decor is quiet and cozy, with just one thing out of place. The bed is covered with a soft blue quilt in a simple diamond pattern rather than sterile white sheets, but laid over the same thin wheeled frame as those on the lower floors, with a tray table, steel IV pole, and remote control attached to one side. At least it’s the only bed here. Every room on this floor houses a single patient, a small relief compared to some of my last stays. 

“Do you need any help getting things in order?” Dad asks.

“No, that’s fine. Just put everything here in the corner. I’ll bother one of the nurses if anything comes up.”

“Ah. I’ll let you get to it, then.” He nods, expressionless, drops his share of bags, and steps back to stand in the doorway. He silently looks over the room again as I start to root through my things. Atop a tightly folded pile of my dresses, the round pink face of Pearl, my stuffed axolotl, smiles up at me. At least one friend is still standing by me through all this.

“I’ll come by after work tomorrow to see how you’re settling in,” Dad lies. “You take care, alright?” 

I have nothing to say to that. He’s been doing his best to act like I was going on a fun trip somewhere, and I can’t be bothered asking him to quit it. He’ll be gone again before too long.

“Right. I’ll show myself out.” His brisk footsteps quickly fade from earshot.

“Just buzz if you need anything, okay? We’ll show you around later, whenever you’re feeling up to it.” The nurse slips out after him, gently closing the door behind her.

I’ve waited to cry, swallowed my pain for as long as I could, and I lose my hold on it as soon as I’m alone again. I set Pearl down beside the bag, out of the way of my tears.

Eight months since I last left this place. Modern medicine’s best efforts granted me eight months to live in the world, for all the good it did. Just enough time to have my thirteenth birthday forgotten by my once-friends. Maybe they didn’t forget. Maybe they all just decided to imagine that they lived in a world where things like this, things like me, simply didn’t happen. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, really. They’ll live their lives. They’ll find other and better friends until I’m nothing but a sad little memory.

I, on the other hand? I’m not sure if I’ve had a life at all. I spent most of those years in and out of this hospital, pushing through the pain while doctors worked to keep my blood from eating me for just a little bit longer. Now, at last, they’ve given up. Two failed transplants was already more than my body could handle.

Now the only thing left for me to do is die. 

~~~

The first thing the doctors here asked, when my old treatment team handed me off to palliative care, was where I stood on serving as a test subject for any experimental medicine they came up with. They didn’t say it in those words, but that’s what they said. There’s only one cure for what I have, and that one just failed me for the second time. All that remained were the salvage drugs, the last resorts. They might make what’s left of my life more livable, they might kill me sooner, they might even work. Miracles happen, just not to me. 

The seventh floor is only for the dying, but nothing says I have to promise to die to stay here. Most residents choose the lightest medical plan possible, whatever will keep them moving and getting the most out of their last days. I have nothing to lose and nothing I want to do but live, so I told them to try what they could. 

I very often regret it. The best they came up with was something to slow my symptoms down and keep me from suddenly getting worse. Three days a week, for the first two hours of the morning, I wait while a clear solution with a name I can’t pronounce drips into my veins. By the time it finishes, I’m dizzy and shaking and sick to my stomach, as I will be for most of the day. 

I wonder why I bother on these mornings. Why put myself through this for the sake of a body that’s hindered and hurt me every day of my life, when it doesn’t seem to help at all? When in the moment it actually feels like it’s making me worse?

It’s one of those mornings now. I sit by the windows opposite the sun in the central lounge and idly shuffle one of my tarot decks with shivering hands. Mostly, though, I just watch life on the seventh floor go by. Pearl sits to my right on the table, looking out over the room with quiet interest.

When I first heard of the seventh floor, I imagined it as a tomb. A cold white place even more bleak than the rest of the hospital, where people laid down and withered away when they lost their last shreds of hope. I’ve just spent a week here, and I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to be.

It’s not just the decor, the bright windows with their nice views of the city, the fragrant plants in every room hiding the faint but distinct smell of death. If you ignore all the nurses and helpers, the wheelchair-bound residents with their oxygen tanks and IV bags, it seems like they’re doing their best to make this place anything but a hospital. Aside from the nurse’s station and a small examining room, most of the floor is set up for social gatherings, hobby groups, even occasional exercise classes for the ones who can still stand. 

More than that, visiting hours here never end. The ward is hardly bustling, but the comings and goings of faces I don’t recognize are common enough that it’s almost never just patients and their helpers gathered here. There are technically lists of approved visitors somewhere, but they only ever question guests about whether they have anything communicable.

It all reminds me that I’m the only person here younger than forty. The others have lives to leave behind, people who will weep when they die and remember them well. Even if I could find someone who cared, would I want them at this point? We’d have a few months together, maybe a year, and then what? What could I do in that time that would make any of it worth the grief? 

My old friends were probably right to cut their ties early.

A man boards the elevator, helped along by his family. I’m not even allowed to leave. In my current state, catching anything contagious would be very bad for me, and I’m not ready to write myself off and let whatever happens happen. 

I turn away, pull a card from my deck, and flip it over on the table. The Six of Pentacles. Gifts, sharing, generosity and gratitude. In my case, the promise that I can care for myself and get better if I just ask for help with it. I sort through implications, alternate readings, other ideas I might reflect on through this card’s lens, and they all bring me back to one point: 

Thanks. I don’t need you lying to me, too.

I banish the Six of Pentacles to its deck box and set to shuffling the rest. Some of my books contain strongly-worded warnings about how you obviously can’t remove anything. You would “unbalance the deck” and nothing would work the way it should anymore. Well, cards, life has never been balanced, and if you don’t want me to cheat you should stop mocking me.

“Do you read often?”

“Eh?” Someone is standing by my table. A woman in comfy clothes you might still call stylish, old but not quite elderly. Her grey hair is kept in a neat tapered bob, and her attention is still on the cards splayed across the table rather than me, the lines around her eyes creasing as she narrows them in focus. I’m not sure when she’d appeared there, but then I wasn’t paying the closest attention. I’ve seen her around at a distance, I think she leads the pottery classes in one of the art rooms, but she’s the first patient to actually start a conversation with me. “Not really… well, yes, it’s just been a while since I did for anyone but myself.”

“I see. My son used to love all this old folk magic, but he hasn’t touched it since he aged out of Promise range. May I impose?”

Not “if you’ve got it in you, if you’re feeling up to doing anything at all today.” She just asks. 

“Fine, but I can’t promise anything exciting.” I straighten my personal deck, tuck it away, and fish out the one I use for other people, scattering it into a messy pile. “Finish shuffling these, if you would.” I nod to the seat across the table, and she’s quick to join me.

“I’ve never caught your name, have I? Only that you’re one of us who still bothers to wear clothes in here. I don’t know how some of them manage, shuffling around in pajamas and gowns all day.” She groans theatrically. “No reason you should have to act sick. I do love that dress, by the way.”

“Oh, I… thank you.” I hadn’t thought of it like that. I just like that I can still have a say in at least one part of my mornings. The dress is one of my standards, black and white and just a bit frilly, with big roomy pockets on either side. “I’m Liadain.”

“Noirin Hearne. Just Noirin is fine.” She finishes stacking the deck and pushes it across the table, a spotty patch of rash peeking out from her knit sleeve as she does. “All set?”

“No, keep it. It’s better if you draw your own cards.”

Noirin shrugs. “If you say so. Everyone’s got their own routine with these things, don’t they? Where do we start?”

“For now, the same way I do when I don’t want to get too fancy. Three cards: what was, what is, what will be. Is there any one thing you’re asking yourself about, or did you only want to keep me busy?”

She shakes her head. “Oh, just an old woman getting a bit nostalgic, mostly. Let’s start from scratch and see where we end up.”

“Suit yourself. Pull your first card from anywhere that feels right to you, then. The deck order doesn’t really mean anything.”

Noirin flips the top card and sets it in the center of the table, displaying a picture in muted oil-paint colors of two riders in a canoe, paddling from a dark sea into a sunlit horizon. Six blades carve through the ripples left in its wake, each thrust from beyond the bottom edge of the picture and meeting at a point just under the boat, forming a triangle.

“The Six of Swords,” I announce. “The storm and the calm that follows. Loss, maybe, and change, but change leading into something gentler than what you’ve left. Is this calling anything to mind?”

“Hm, hm.” Noirin’s foot taps steadily under the table. She’s quiet for what feels like a long time, her eyes lingering on the boat in the center of the image. “Well, when I think of it like… would you mind if I prattled about my problems for a bit?”

“Go ahead. That kind of comes with the territory.”

“Thank you.” Noirin looks up from the card, out through the window with its cityscape view. “I’ve been living here for about three months. My family all took it rather hard when I checked in, and it hasn’t been any easier for them since. I know, I’m sure that’s nothing out of the ordinary, but there’s a little more to it. They don’t… no, nevermind about that.” She sighs, shaking her head. “The short of it is that we’re having trouble agreeing on how to spend this time.”

“That’s where you’re coming from. Your context. From what it sounds like… for now, I’ll just note that this card can also mean learning from things you can’t erase.” I gesture to the deck. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Out comes the second card, a man scaling a mountain on bars of light jutting out from it like the footholds of a ladder, adding the top rungs by hand even as he climbs. This picture faces me rather than Noirin. She frowns, reaching out to turn it over. 

“Wait, that’s supposed to happen!” I set two fingers to the card, holding it down. “The Nine of Wands inverted. See?” 

“Hm, is that right? My son never used to turn them over like that.” She cranes forward, trying to get a better look at the upside-down image.

“Everyone’s got their own routine, like you said.” Her son’s probably made him one of those love-and-light types who thought reversals were “too gloomy,” but no need to stress that point. “An inverted card is usually something out of place somehow, missing or incomplete or overpowering everything else. Right now, this one is a line where persistence turns into stubbornness, or where it falls just short of what it needs to be. This disagreement. It’s something you can’t compromise on, or don’t think you can afford to give up?”

“Well, yes, actually. That’s about the shape of it. I’m sure I know what we need, but I expect they feel just as strongly, and as it happens there’s no way to do both or take turns.”

I nod, indicating the deck. “To where it’s leading, then.” Noirin picks up the top card. Before she flips it though, she pauses, considering something, and puts it back, cutting the deck and taking a new one from the middle. 

The one she sets down is a misty expanse around a small circle, like a little eyehole in the fog, through which a girl can be seen handing a gold bowl filled with flowers to a boy. Five more empty bowls are arranged beneath them. “The Six of Cups. Nostalgia. Memories of simpler, happier times. Before I say anything, what are you thinking?”

“That it’s odd to see something like that here. This one is meant to be the future?”

I nod.

“Hm.” A pause, then “I’m still not really sure. Fill me in?”

“What I think is that there’s a journey here. Across the boundless sea, up a mountain that can’t quite be climbed, back to how things were before this entire misadventure started. Maybe not exactly how they were, but the past is never really past, and it sounds like what was important about it is still there for you. Maybe there’s a wall that can’t be crossed around one thing, but you’ve still got everything else. If your argument can’t be won on either side, and it’s not doing anybody any good, maybe you should talk to them about just… accepting that, putting it aside, and doing as much as you can of whatever’s always made you happy together.” 

I can’t be certain about that without knowing the exact nature of the problem, it might be something so huge or awful that there’s just no way to work around it, but it’s the best I can do. It sounds good enough.

Noirin purses her lips and cups her chin as she studies the now-complete row of images. She’s quiet for a long time. Finally, she looks up at me, grinning warm and wide. “I just might do that. Thank you, Liadain. You’ve helped clear at least a few things up.”

“Oh, I haven’t done anything. People see what they need to see, that’s all.” I’m not going to give the entire show away, but that much is true.

“Well, if it works, it works.” She waves the point off, still smiling. “You should do this more often. We old bats appreciate candor, and sometimes we can use a hand being frank with ourselves.”

~~~

So I do.

Tarot is only a game I play with decks full of pretty pictures, of course. No energy or will moves these cards. They don’t know a thing about you, and certainly not about things to come. As far as I know, prophecies don’t exist. Even Keepers have never been able to tell the future, not really. 

So the only force working through the cards is simple psychology, but I still think they’re an interesting reflective tool. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in hospital beds with nothing better to do than read or browse the Coral Sea, and I learned a lot from sorting through the roughly even mix of genuine insight and weird faux-mystic nonsense in my tarot books. The ideas you pull from a bunch of vaguely symbolic art say something about what you’re thinking, sometimes before you’ve found the words to think it properly. Their value is in what those thoughts teach you rather than glimpses of a future nobody really knows anything about. 

Plus once I started regularly setting up shop in my corner, the nurses let up a bit on trying to drag me to activities. I guess telling pretend fortunes is social enough to count.

Mr. Enfield owned a seaside restaurant, which he’d managed for most of his life and stayed involved in until he was too sick to possibly work. It looked very likely that the business would leave the family after him. The new generation had all found different callings, and the head chef, his protege, was offering to buy the place. I’ve never seen the man visibly worried about anything, bizarre as that is in a place like this, but he’d come to ask about whether his life’s work was in good hands. 

The smiling old man sets his final card on the table with an unsteady hand. The Page of Pentacles. My first reading today has been so straightforward that I almost wonder if the cards really are taking a hand in this one. Almost. 

“This is a stable, successful future in the hands of a rising star. You’ve built your foundations as well as you can, and they’re set to hold strong.” 

“Ah… that’s a relief. I’m very proud of what we had, but I really ought to have taken my hands off it by now. I want my family to remember me as well as my customers, and nobody looks back over their life and wishes they’d clocked more hours at work, do they?” Mr. Enfield lets out a soft, wheezing chuckle. “You know, miss… sometimes I wonder if this all wasn’t for the best.”

If what comes next is any variant on “everything happens for a reason,” I’ll vomit.

He keeps on. He wears oxygen tubes, and the words are clearly an effort to push out. “I’m sure I’ve leaned on my kids more than I meant to. About the business, probably plenty of other things too. Goddess knows what I’d give for more time with them, but… they’ve gone their own ways, and that’s alright. I have to be alright with that to get the most out of what we’ve got left. We’re together now, we’ll be happy for however long I’ve got, and I don’t need to worry about any of that. Things, they find a way to work themselves out in the end. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“Sure. Happy to help.” I gather the cards, pick up Pearl, and leave without another word.

~~~

Her eyes open to a dream of children frolicking in their sanctuary. 

Though her thoughts are as grains of sand passing through a sieve, trickling piecemeal into the vessel apportioned to her, she knows her purpose perfectly well. She looks up to the vast quilt of stars swaddling this world, glimmering wisps twined together by threads of emptiness. Their neverending dances are of no concern to the her who has awoken here. She thinks only of her goal. Her reason for being.

She turns her gaze to the city, a teeming garden of life. Spires in all shapes and sizes are spread out before her in clusters at once chaotic and calculated, sprouting from the earth like flowers of glass and stone. She looks, and she listens. Deeply, subtly, gently beyond comparison. Thousands of hearts beat to the selfsame rhythm no matter how viciously their spirits conflict. A few of these heartbeats rise above the refrain, guiding its melody, and two in particular resound in her above all others. It is beautiful, in its way, but not what she is here for.

No, what she seeks is the one new heart beating in dissonance with its own murmur. 

The song of a soul crying out for release.

~~~

Mr. Enfield died a few hours later. I don’t know exactly what happened except that Dr. Hines, the director of palliative care, was pale and grimacing on his way out.

It’s just past midnight. I can’t sleep, so I’ve gone wandering for a bit. The lights in the lounge are dimmed nearly to the point of being off, but there’s no actual curfew, and at least a few residents always end up falling asleep on the couches after they turn off the TV for the night. The nurses still seem a bit tense, and they don’t even give me the usual disapproving looks I get on my late night walks. 

For the moment, I sit in my usual corner, looking out at the city. Pearl perches on my shoulder, where she can see over the plants on the windowsill. 

I wonder if Mr. Enfield still felt the same way when it happened, or if he felt anything at all. Plenty of people his age take naps and never wake up.

I wonder about his legacy, too. I’d obviously never met his successor and never plan to. Who knows if anything I told him was true? 

What will happen to Pearl when I die?

Somehow, of all the thoughts and fears swirling around in my mind, that’s among the most persistent. Dad won’t want to keep any of my things around. I have no friends left, no family I’m close with, no little cousins I could will her to. Maybe Noirin has grandchildren who would like her, but then I’d have to spill my guts about something this stupid to a woman I’ve known for a few weeks, and she must have her own things to sort out. Plus, how would I trust some kid I’d never met to take good care of her?

This isn’t helping. I start back toward my room. 

Splish.

“…Eh?”

A puzzling noise echoes from just beyond the door to Mr. Enfield’s room, like the sudden plunk of a rock being dropped into a lake. Bizarre… these walls are soundproofed well enough. More than that, there shouldn’t be anyone in there at all, and what would make a noise like that even if there were? Something in the pipes?

Plunk. There it is again, pattering numbingly along in intervals with no pattern I can place. For a moment, I figure it’s just the steady dripping of water from a faucet somebody failed to turn completely off, but then it goes silent without the faintest trace of movement otherwise. If I could hear liquid trickling from beyond that door, shouldn’t I have heard the faucet’s handle being turned to shut it off? Or the steps of whoever turned that handle?

Then it starts again. A surge of rapid little taps like heavy rain against a window. My knees tense and my spine stiffens. This doesn’t feel right at all.

I rap my knuckles meekly against the door and wait a moment. Nothing. Then, after a longer gap than the last, it starts again, and this time, rather than fade, it… stretches out, becoming the sound of swishing your hand around in a bathtub, or maybe dragging something through a swamp.

I try the handle beneath the electric card reader and find it unlocked. 

Wait wait wait! Just before I crack the door open, my hand shoots back almost on its own, like I’d touched a burning stove. Stop. This is wrong, this is dangerous, these are all the kinds of warning signs they talk about when…

It happens. A nauseating riot of color surges out from underneath the door, like a second skin festering over it, crawling up its length and spilling out across the floor. It spreads just slowly enough for me to jump back as blotchy ooze swallows the tile I’d been standing on an instant ago. It’s hard to focus my eyes on — its presence makes it hard to see anything at all, hard to endure my own senses. The brown of dried blood swirls with living, twisting shades of grey, and parts of the growth bubble like a pool of hot mud.

The rainshower in my ears becomes a howling torrent. Like a drum pounding loud and fast enough to split my head open, mingled with the rhythmic slamming of my heart against my chest. I can smell sour air and I want to puke. Just seeing it makes my eyes burn, but I can’t look away. Even as the muck rises out of itself, slowly pulling itself upwards, rising above my height, I can’t look away. It won’t let me.

The thing looms over me, a thin shrouded figure sculpted out of wet, oozing clay. It has no face, no features at all. Its body splits down the middle, opening like a mouth into nothing. A dozen thin black limbs like insect legs reach up through the tear, dig into the shredded clay, and start to push. A dark shape crawls up and out of the muck, like something inside is molting—

“Liadain! Get away from there!”

A girl’s low, even words call out to me, tinged with faint urgency. There’s no clear source of the sound. I actually don’t think I even heard it at all, just… thought it in someone else’s inner voice? Whatever it was, it’s enough to briefly cut through the haze of panic choking the air. I turn and bolt down the hallway, clutching Pearl as I run. The pounding water rapidly dims, and if the thing is following me, I can’t tell.

A moment later I stumble through my door, slamming it behind me. I squeeze the doorknob so hard it hurts and lean back, pushing my entire weight into the door. This lasts a few seconds before my legs give out and my socks slide forward, leaving me in a crumpled heap on the ground. It’s all I can do to turn my head and press my ear to the door, shivering and choking all the while. This isn’t the slightest bit safer, it’s still here, still right outside, still coming to… 

But that doesn’t happen. Nothing does. The soft, wet sounds are completely gone. 

“Good. Stay in here and I should be able to protect you. For the moment.”

…I’m still not alone. At those voiceless words, I turn around and look up at another strange visitor. She stands beside my bed, studying my tarot cards where I’d left them on the nightstand. A child? The rough shape is of a little girl in a heavy blue-grey cloak, the color of the sea on a cloudy day. 

When I see her face, I realize that the girl is very clearly something else. Her skin is marble white, but slick and shining like a dolphin’s, with the tips of the thin tendrils that trail down from her head like hair tinged a faint blue. In place of a nose, she just has two nostrils set directly into her skin. She watches me with sapphire eyes that have no pupils, only the thinnest rims of white around solid colored circles.

What is she? Not a Keeper — maybe one very deep into Emergence could end up like this, but she looks too young for the Promise range, and more than that, there’s something deeply inhuman about how she carries herself. When her gaze lowers to meet mine, she moves in an eerily fluid, precise way — her head takes the clearest possible path to exactly where it needs to be, and there it stays, never shifting or blinking. Harbingers aren’t supposed to speak, at least not in ways that make any sense, and a Harbinger would have eaten me or worse by now.

That only leaves…

She starts to speak again, and her mouth doesn’t move at all. The words come from that same strange place somewhere inside me.

“There’s nothing you can do about what you just saw, not as you are.

“But you can be more, if you wish.”

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