Roland scans the seething presence for any weaknesses he can prod at, any way to disrupt the ritual with minimal force or pry his way back into Syancauri’s Wound. He finds only a dense lattice of corruption woven around and through Ciaran, joined to him as firmly as his own soul. There’s no way to force the inhabiting Harbinger into the open except through its vessel, and no way to force his hand without the risk of killing everyone else in the room.

“So,” Ciaran hums, shifting his focus back to his blasphemous idol. “I’ll save you some time and tell you that you’re not getting back inside. But I’m too busy to chase you off, and neither of us want these people dead. Where’s that leave us?”

For a moment, Roland can only stare up at the tortured human pillar in frigid silence. “Neither of us… Ciaran, what do you call what you’re doing to these people? Are you supposed to be saving them too? How many more people are going to get swept up in your fucked up little apotheosis if I don’t just stop it now, sacrifices be damned?”

“Oh, you remember me? Glad I wasn’t too beneath your notice! Must be nice to be the one in charge of weighing lives, deciding who gets to be saved and who gets crushed beneath the weight of the world as it trudges along.”

“You don’t get to say any of that shit when you’re the one who did this. Answer the question.”

“Fine, fine. These people are already involved, and they’re all I need, so you can take your time trying to save them, if you really care. To be honest, though, I do feel a bit bad about it,” Ciaran says blithely, without pausing his work for a moment. “We wouldn’t have had to do it this way if things hadn’t kept blowing up in our faces. But since they did, and we do, I figured it made sense to use dear old Mom’s seat of power. It’s the least I can do to thank her for taking in a mere human.”

Ciaran’s obviously stalling, and there’s no reason to trust his promises, but… unless the situation gets worse, it seems like he may as well play along, learn what he can while he works out how best to intervene. 

“Is that what your group is for? Snapping up people pissed off they didn’t make the Promise and turning them into monsters?” 

“Actually, I have enough of an idea about where Keepers come from to pity you guys,” Ciaran says. “You’re the products and protectors of a system that really seems built to feed Claiasya’s trauma fetish. Broken toys gifted the power to fall forever short of putting yourselves back together, convinced all the while that you’ve been uplifted. Well, I don’t know about you. Mom is plenty convinced, which is why she’s been replanting the Lotus Bed everywhere she can.” 

Roland’s eyes narrow beneath his mask. “The Lotus Bed? Some horror story from the Imperial War? From the side of the war Iona led a coup against? You have any idea how you sound right now? You’re not even insane, you’re just not you. The thing inside you can feed you any poison it wants and you’d never know the difference from your own thoughts.”

Ciaran answers with a full-throated laugh. “Sure, okay, tell yourself that if it makes you feel better about killing us! You don’t have to take my word for anything, though! I could say a lot of things about you, Seraph, but I don’t think you’re an idiot. If you don’t already know what I know, it should only take one piece you’re very familiar with to put it all together. Ashcreek Home for Children.”

Roland’s blood freezes in his veins. He’s done all he can to bury his history. It’s one thing to deal with Mary digging up the past – she was there – but hearing an outsider drag it into the open and throw it in his face feels like a freshly-opened wound.

Behind his spectral mask, Ciaran’s smile softens into something almost sympathetic. “Yeah. I know where you come from. I could’ve ended up there too, when my real mom offed herself, but I guess she had friends in high places. Still not sure which of us had it worse.”

An unseen weight fills the space around Roland, pressing down hard enough to crack the tile floor. He tenses his gauntleted hands into fists, wishing for all the world that his fingers were closing around Ciaran’s throat.

“Sorry, sorry! Maybe that was too much.” Ciaran scratches the back of his head sheepishly. At the same time, one of his shadow-limbs grabs a hand reaching desperately out from the tower and forces it back into the depths, threading it around another arm.  “I only drag this up to point one thing out: Mom pays attention to you and your stories. There are three Keepers who came out of Ashcreek Home. I think she’s known exactly what that place is like from the start, but let’s say she didn’t until the Silver King started talking about it. She definitely does now, and nothing at all has changed. What does that tell you, hmm?” 

“Iona doesn’t own New Claris. She barely uses her seat on the council for anything but Keeper business.” 

“Oh, please. She made this city. Yeah, I get it, there were some real goat fuckers running the show in Old Claris, hard to look at the woman who purged them and see anything but a hero, whatever. But that in mind, do you really think anything happens here that she couldn’t stop if she wanted to?” 

“You’re not saying what you mean. You wouldn’t be talking about the Lotus Bed if all you thought she’d done was not fix a shitty orphanage. So you think, what… that she gave the place her blessing? That she made it that way herself?” 

“Yeah. Exactly. Your personal nightmare isn’t even the only one – ask Erika about the school she went to sometime. And hey, you know what’s really fucked up? This isn’t some conspiracy I’ve been hard at work dragging into the light. I know all this because she told me.”

A chorus of distorted voices wail out in pain from the depths of the twisted mass.

“Because whenever I couldn’t take another day of living with the brand of love she saves for her own kids, she’d promise me I would thank her once I understood that she was doing this for me. That it had to be this way.” 

The shadows dancing around Ciaran, smooth as clockwork as they go about perfecting their mad design, twitch as if in a sudden spurt of agony.

“But I guess you can write all that off as some delusion Syancauri fed me, if you really want to. This isn’t about my sob story,” he says, and the disturbance swiftly rights itself. 

“Tell me what it is about, then. Explain so I can understand. I’m listening.”

“It’s about saying no to this miserable meat grinder of a world. We’re leaving, simple as that, and we’re going to make someplace better. If we could take every last soul crushed beneath the gears of this machine she’s built with us, we would, but you and your friends are already here to remind us why that’s not possible.” 

“What makes you think you can do any better?” Roland throws his arm forward, gesturing at the tortured tower. “If this is the start of what you’re trying to create, what’s that but a new world built on the same old cycle?”

“Someone has to try,” Ciaran says. Quietly, with only a faint trace of his fanatical certainty. 

When Roland looks a bit closer, dragging his attention away from the idol… Ciaran is crying.

Things Roland has done his best to bury gnaw at the back of his mind, opening a cavity for ideas that could so easily be dismissed as a vessel’s mad rambling to nest in.

Irida’s been speaking out about the state of Clarish child services since before he ended up in Ashcreek. Why couldn’t she of all people change anything?

What makes him a Keeper and not Ciaran or Mairtin or any of them?

…Why do Keepers and Harbingers so often seem to grow out of the same kinds of pain? What makes one or the other?

“Yeah… you should be able to see her now, full of your puppeteer’s poison as you are. Vyuji!” Roland calls. “I know you can hear me, I don’t believe you’re in any danger here, and I’m sure you have an answer. Why did you choose me?”

A peal of low, soft whalesong answers. Blue-white radiance, the color of the moon on the sea at night, floods the chamber.

~~~

“I really wish you could’ve stayed out of this. Sorry, Ash.”

As the black sky falls to pluck us from the earth, I loose a canopy of killing mist. Through the emerald haze, Isobel watches from an overlook above, legs dangling off the ledge. Even now, she wears no mask, but inky glyphs swirl over her exposed skin, trailing pale, hair-thin scars in their wake. She glares down at me with hate bright in her eyes, and as our gazes meet, Aulunla squirms and seethes like a still-living meal desperate to crawl up and out of my throat. Desperate, yes, but powerless.

“Yeah. I wish the same for you,” Aisling says. 

Then she raises her gun and fires, but not at Isobel. Off to the side, into one of the towers forming the central spire. There’s a burst of teal light followed by a bizarre avalanche of noise, an awful splintering sound like ten thousand bones breaking at once. When the light fades, the stone people forming the bottom of the tower are mangled even further into unrecognizability. Their too-long limbs snap at odd angles into splintered shards, like shattered arms barely held together by thin strips of flesh. They still move between miserable wails, groping for their fellows in a desperate attempt to hold the tower up before it topples at its base. 

The dark extrusions descending upon us split. About half of them twist away to graft themselves to the broken tower, suturing its broken limbs together before the construction can twist or topple any further. The rest charge heedlessly through my haze, twitching and stiffening as I move a volley of cards to sever them in midair.

Until something slams into me from below, a twisted stone arm rising from the ground to pry me open and rip me apart. My last breath comes out in a choked ghost-shriek as It smashes through my ribs with a sickening crunch and a burst of hot, sharp agony and cold, hard fingers seizing my guts and squeezing, crushing me from the inside. Something cold perches on my shoulders, digs into my skin like the talons of a bird, and pulls upward, suspending me in midair and dragging the clinging puppet up with me.

It’s all just a little more pain. What’s a little more pain before the end?

I open my soul, letting my inner rot flow out into Syancauri and its doll. The talons swiftly decay, dropping me to my knees with a thud, and the grip on my insides weakens, softening until I can tear it out with one hand, ripping the arm off its twisted body. I bleed a storm of feathers before my bones crunch back into place and the wound knits itself shut, and even the tattered fabric of my dress weaves back together. While the pain doesn’t disappear, it doesn’t matter, either. It’s all buried beneath a flood of stolen strength, more toxic power than I know how to handle.

Yurfaln lets out a chittering cheer, the putrid breath of its ghost sighing happily over my shoulder.

“Whoa. Guess, uh, guess you can take care of yourself after all, squirt,” Mary says. 

Aisling watches with wide, unblinking, too-bright eyes as my body breaks and remakes itself in seconds. “Please, please do not rely on that. I can’t measure your power, but that kind of thing is… destabilizing.”

“Looked pretty cool to me, but whatever. C’mon, let’s go kick that bitch’s ass.” Shrugging, Mary slices open a portal to the overlook and charges on in.

“Isobel, listen to me,” Aisling urges as soon as she steps through. “I have cause to believe Syancauri is dooming itself and all of you with it, but I still don’t think it’s too late for you to stop. I’m sorry, I didn’t know how badly you needed this, I should’ve asked, we should’ve figured something out before you dove down this hole-” 

“Not too late, huh?” Isobel cuts her off. “You saw what happened to Dalha. Not that it matters to me – if you were certain about what we’re getting ourselves into, you’d have said that, and me? I’ve waited enough. Suffered enough. Unless you’ve got a better offer I can use right now, there’s really no point in talking. And look, there’s still a chance to make everything right!” Her eyes dart to me, burning with a cold sort of madness. “All I need to do is rip Aulunla out of you before we go! Thank you for showing up!” she laughs. 

“You know why I can’t ever say I’m certain about almost anything, but… fine, you’re going to make me show you, aren’t you? Can you understand their language?”

Isobel narrows her eyes and nods slowly.

“Good. That makes this much easier,” Aisling says. “Please do your best to stay grounded here. I’ll explain this later if you want to know,” she mutters to me through a tight-lipped grimace.

Then she takes a long, slow breath, puts a hand to her chest, and…

<Syancauri! Pretender to an imaginary throne!>

It takes a moment to recognize that the shout came from Aisling – the language as spoken by a person is no less strange to take in. It’s still recognizably her voice, no matter how impossible it is to imagine the sounds coming from her. No human tongue could pronounce those words. There’s an inherent, almost musically poetic quality to them that simultaneously doesn’t feel like Aisling at all and expresses something more deeply, truly her than any words in Clarish could convey.

<Where do you imagine your road ends? Do you even know? I ask because I very much doubt the Solar Court wants you, and if you plan to move beyond their reach, you must know that existence in the Starless Lands is about vision. It’s about having a cause you champion to the point that it develops its own gravity. But you? What is the It you named yourself for? What makes you think you can find it there? Do you have any idea what you are, what you want? Because it looks to me like you’re climbing for its own sake, and to the Aspects, that’s the same as doing it for no reason at all! You’re a fish in a pond, trying with all your might to swim your way into a sea of leviathans! They’ll snap you and everyone you drag along in your wake up before anyone else notices you were ever there!>

The air goes frigid with my own power. That same noise that makes me want to rip myself to shreds rings in my ears like a phantom echo behind Aisling’s words. How can all this sound so familiar without making any sense at all? What is so haunting about it? The world twists around that same bottomless drain that dragged Nanaash out of its perfect world and down from the heavens, sent it crashing helplessly into us. 

Stay with me.

This can’t be all there is. 

We are not them. 

There must be more to life than drowning sand castles on endless nightmare-shores this is their doom, not ours there must be a way out beyond hers there is, for us. I promise. Let me out and I will show you.

Before I can process what that means, reality itself wails, dragging me out of my warped thoughts. 

<no no nO you understand NOTHING. A BETTER, FREER WORLD AWAITS US. ONE WHERE NO DREAMS ARE CRUSHED UNDERFOOT EVER AGAIN. YOU WHO WOULD TRAMPLE UPON OUR WISH HAVE NO PLACE THERE. NONE. NOT EVER. YOUR ONLY WORTH IS AS ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ FOR THE TOWER.>

The structure stirs and twists and heaves like a living thing tossing and turning through a fitful dream, knocking me to my knees before I can catch myself on my cane. Stone arms rise to strike at us, chipping and cracking to nothing in my aura, but the ones wrapped around Aisling are moving to drag her into the marble depths.

Isobel fixes Aisling with an unblinking glare, bloodshot with black veins, ink-scars crawling in and out and along her eye sockets. “How much, Ash?” she spits. “How much of this secret wisdom have you been sitting on without telling any of us? While we played like children in the shallow end of the pool? What about your new friends, do they have any idea what you’re talking about? Do they matter enough to deserve what we pathetic normies never could?”

In a frantic blur of motion, Mary jumps ten feet into the air and suspends herself there, slices away the limbs pinning Aisling in place in a single space-twisting strike, and finally folds space to shove her box cutter into Isobel’s stomach. Aisling stares at the bleeding wound in horror, until… with a louder burst of wild cackling, Isobel shimmers out of existence like a mirage, leaving behind a broken sculpture vaguely resembling her.

At the same time, something surges out from the depths of the tower, a living shadow shrouded in layers of diffuse darkness that passes through us like a fog bank. Its touch carries the horribly familiar numbing, suffocating sensation of something crawling up my spine and burrowing into my head– 

–Sorcha. The spectre of a girl who tried to drag me into this Wound two days ago. This time, though, she only touches me for a second before her presence pulls away. Another set of clothlike shadow-extrusions wrap themselves around Aisling, whose eyes glow brighter as she sinks her fingers into the shapeless murk around her face and drags it away as easily as crushing a cobweb. The rest of the aura darts away from her as if Aisling were a hot stove it touched.

But where Sorcha’s shroud-body rises to embrace Mary, it lingers, gathering in cloying, almost liquid layers all around her. Struggling through the aura in slow motion, Mary slices frantically at the darkness with long, low snarls, slowly rending chunks of it away until she can tear herself free.

As Mary rips the last shreds of Sorcha away from her, the shadow-girl darts back into the tower. With a wordless shriek of rage, Mary tears open a portal in midair and throws herself in. It’s gone within a second.

Just in time for Isobel’s manic laughter to ring out from above. “Well, that was easy – one down! Ash, any chance you want to leave before this gets uglier?”

“Were you still not listening to me, or are you just too fucked up on your borrowed power to care? I’m not letting you get yourself killed!” Aisling yells. 

“You don’t know what we can or can’t do, and I really don’t think the two of you can stop us,” Isobel says. “There’s no more point in talking.”

Still the tower screams and warps and rumbles as if in an earthquake. The hole in the sky above howls in a voice like frozen wind screaming through space, bleeding ribbons of unearthly light as the spire bores deeper into it, rising higher, faster, taking Aisling’s condemnation as a challenge.

Isobel is right, though. However lost Syancauri’s cause may be, it is doing something that I expect will be catastrophic for everyone here, whether or not that includes it and its followers. Without Mary or Roland, all I can do is run up the tower, let it rip me apart again and again, hope it doesn’t kill Aisling, hope my infection outraces it and my reserves are as endless as they feel, which I know they aren’t. There will never be enough, not ever.

But there is something else I can do, bubbling up like an intrusive thought that makes more sense the more insistent it grows.

And as sickeningly wrong as it feels to do anything for her after what her cult did… if she’d done to me what I did to her, I might be exactly where she is now.

If you aren’t sure you can do it, you’d make it worse, Roland said.  Well, what better time to try than with a test subject whose death I wouldn’t mind? 

“Are you sure? I can give you back Aulunla,” I say.

Soundless screaming reverberates through my head, echoing into forever, threatening to explode from my skull and shatter me into a shower of broken bones and feathery gore. I don’t even think that would make it stop – it’s scarred into me the way the Sun sears too-curious eyes. I want to rip myself apart just to let the noise go free, to claw my eyes out so they can never see what I’ve seen again. The only thing holding me back is that I know it wouldn’t make a difference. The sound has always been here, always will, and now I can never unhear it.

…Liadain…

The voice is far away, muffled, as if I’m hearing it underwater. Everything feels so fragile, so much like it’s only ever been a dream, as distant as the memories of last night’s nonsense visions. Like if I let go of my hold on things for just a second, I’d lose myself and never find it again.

Try to focus. We… we can’t let this take us. Not now. We have so much left to do.

There’s a strained, frightened edge in the other me’s unspoken words. But I reach out and cling to her, anchoring myself to the phantom sensation of her cold hand in mine, desperate for any way at all to pull my mind away from that. Slowly, excruciatingly, like watching as a wound scabs over, other sounds and sensations shove their way back into my world. 

“…Liadain? Liadain!” The whole world sways unsteadily, like a boat on a stormy sea. 

No, that’s not right, is it? It’s just a hand on my shoulder, trying to shake me back to myself.

“Mmh,” I mutter. 

“Hey. Good. Stay with us.” It’s Aisling’s voice, I realize just before she comes fuzzily back into view. The feeling of her arm wrapped around me, propping me up on one shoulder, quickly follows. The ground beneath me is rough and unsteady – no, it isn’t ground at all, just unmoving statues packed tightly together, their masks staring serenely up at us. One’s smile widens as its empty eyes meet my gaze, and I quickly turn away from it – to look up at a vast crowd of misshapen stone people like Isobel’s puppets, closing in on us from all sides…

…Aren’t they? They’re moving, advancing in a tangled mass of distorted limbs, but they aren’t coming any closer, just walking in place at a ten-foot distance from us. Between them and us, there’s a circle carved into the stone, crackling with invisible power that simply feels sharp, almost enough to cut you just by looking at it. No matter how they try, they never cross that line. Mary stands at the circle’s edge, holding her box cutter at the ready. It looks a little more dull and rusty than before.

Beyond the ring of shambling puppets, the Wound is a Sunless world lit by the faint white lamp-glow of the statues that make up its surfaces. It’s strewn with the broken remains of too many massive structures to count, all made from masses of statue-people fused together, all twisted or bent or collapsed and broken down into expanses of glowing debris. 

All except one. At the heart of the ruins stands a colossal construction of six towers woven into one, joined by spiraling staircases and walkway-arteries and points where the spires bend and wind together impossibly. The bodies composing it are slowly warping and crawling into new arrangements, creating the impression that this is less something built than a living mountain of smiling faces coaxed into an increasingly elaborate shape. They’re climbing each other, swirling ever up and up to support the central tower as it grows like a drill rising to bore through the sky.

And as my eyes follow it up… Centered on the tallest tower, there’s a jagged opening in the black sky, like a hole in a dome over the world. Countless brilliant stars scintillate through the breach, filling the Wound with wavy arcs of iridescent aurora.

Beneath that, dancing in the unearthly radiance, is Syancauri. A darker-than-dark silhouette too vast to see in full, but still small beneath the grandeur of its tower. Its limbs are obsidian tree branches and castle steeples mingled with too many thin arms to count, more every time my eyes move, as if they’re in the process of growing from some invisible superstructure. Their hands each bear six long fingers with strings and wires trailing down into the dark. Its body is partially clothed in those twisted humanoid statues, legions of them climbing up and along its extensions, grafting themselves to the tower’s surfaces as they touch down on it. The expression on its enormous marble-mask face, when it cranes down from on high to inspect its work, is bright with transcendent joy.

Whatever it hopes to find amongst the stars, it’s climbed as high as it’s ever been.

Aisling grimaces up at the tower and its creator. “So. Before we talk strategy, is there any way we can fix you, Roland?”

Roland, floating high above us, touches down, sighing through his helmet. “We can’t. It’s the heart of a Harbinger I should have just crushed. Nilamai could rip it out of me, but of us here, unless Liadain’s done a lot of soul surgery I don’t know about…”

“…I could try?” I offer, not that I think I can do much. Even speaking still feels like an exertion, like I’m at the same kind of distance from myself as when I’m controlling a copy.

“No. If you aren’t sure you can do it, you’d make it worse. Nilamai’s been healing for longer than we’ve been alive, and she still says this kind of thing is complicated.”

“I figured as much. Rules out you carrying us up the tower, then,” Aisling sighs. “Wound logic says whatever matters most here, it’s happening either up there or deep inside. Looking at the sky, I’d bet on the top.”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea either way. Moving four of us at once wouldn’t be especially graceful, and it’s not going to sit there and let us all fly free unless it wants us to get somewhere,” Roland says.

“Ah. Right. What about you, Mary?”

“I can make portals in Wounds, yeah. But they get weirder the farther I try to jump at a time.”

“What does ‘weirder’ mean here?” Aisling presses.

“It means weirder, okay? Goes the wrong way, drops people off in different places, splices spots together, once I went through one that stuck me half inside a wall made of organs and fetuses and shit, that really sucked…”

“Do you have an idea of how far you can take us before that’ll be a problem?” 

“I mean, sure, probably? Can’t show you without letting these creepy fucks in,” Mary says, pointing out at the crowd of puppets still ambling uselessly around us, “but, uhhh…” She throws her arms wide, then brings them together, leaving about two feet between her hands. “Like that much. Maybe this much if you wanna be really safe,” she says, shrinking to half that distance. “Don’t have to stay there for long, though. Just a bit to find where I’m going next and a couple more bits to recharge.”

“Mm. Right,” Aisling says again. “That does seem like a way to get where we need to go while playing along as little as possible. Roland, what are you thinking?”

“I can fly up there. This thing I’ve got might even help, if I use it where I’m not worried about hurting any of you. Once I take off, well, we’ll see what the Harbinger does. Maybe I hold it back, maybe I clear the way for you three at a distance. There’s plenty I can do without putting you at risk – just let me run interference.”

“Okay. I’m not sure how much the rest of us can help if it goes after you, so take care of yourself.”

“I know this isn’t what your magic is for, but is there anything you can do here?” I ask Aisling.

“Maybe. My contribution in an actual fight is limited to however long my bullets hold up, so don’t count on me to handle anything less-than-critical. But if I can put together enough of the shape of things, of what it’s doing here… Well, I’ll do it if I can. Just make things hard for it – make it play its hand if it wants to keep us away – and watch for anything we can learn from it.” 

She draws what looks like an ordinary pistol from a holster on her coat, but Roland eyes it curiously. “Is that still enchanted?”

“Yeah. Tell Nilamai I’ll need a refresh after this.”

Roland nods and looks to the sky. “Ready when you are, then.”

“Wait,” I say.

The others look my way expectantly as I raise a hand and summon a spread of three cards, giving shape to the curse I laid on Mairtin before he fled the hospital. The shard of my power lodged in him calls to me from deep within the Wound, hungering to be used, and I’m all too eager to set it free. 

If you’re hungry, then eat, I whisper to it. Turn everything that makes them smile to rot. 

The cards burn in misty green flames. Somewhere deep in the Wound, all too eager to answer my urging, my curse flares to life, crawling out from its host and into the stolen souls that comprise the spire. I feel it in the distance as Mairtin desperately tears himself away from the greater mass of gathered power. He’s too late. It’s a blessing that he didn’t cut himself off from his comrades. Now, he’s patient zero of a blight on his world and everyone in it. The infection might not savage the entire Wound the way it will him, but it’s already found purchase in the mad megastructure.

“There. Now we can go.”

Mary stares at me for a beat. I’m glad her mask isn’t reflective – I don’t want to see what I look like right now. I don’t know if I’d recognize myself.

“Uh. What was that for?” she asks.

I smile behind my mask. “You’ll see.”

“Disease magic in a cult hideout packed to bursting with souls. Use your imagination,” Aisling says, voice clipped. “Please don’t kill Isobel.”

“No one here can kill anyone, Aisling. Don’t you remember? We can put her back together after as long as Syancauri doesn’t mulch her up too much,” I say.

The gazes on me intensify. Aisling’s eyes narrow into a scowl.

“Fuck is she saying? I can’t even hear her, can someone translate that?” Mary asks.

“I don’t think hearing her is your problem,” Roland says. “Liadain… you okay?”

Okay? 

“Of course not. What did you expect? Yes, I’m loving life, excited for a fun time with all of my friends? That’s how Shona did things, and I really don’t want to end up where she is.”

There’s a long silence that gets heavier by the second, two masked stares and Aisling’s glare pinning me down.

“Anyway, if you’re asking if I’m okay to do this, I’m fine. I’m the strongest I’ve ever been. Even if I wasn’t, that thing on the tower is mine,” I say.

Aisling steps between Roland and I. “What she’s referring to involves tests we need to run with her magic. No time to explain, so please trust me when I say that it is not important right now,” she hisses.

Roland looks me over for another uneasily long moment, then does something I don’t expect.  He chuckles – lightly, airily, his voice chiming in a way at odds with our situation. The other two don’t seem to expect it either, as their gazes shift from me to him. “Alright. Sounds good,” he answers, nodding in approval I can’t even fathom how I’ve earned.  “Let’s go, then. On your mark, Mary.” Without a sound, his crystalline wings materialize and he launches up toward the tower, dyeing Syancauri’s black sky the blood-red color of his light.

As she watches Roland take off, Mary groans, putting her free hand to her mask. “Hey, squirt?” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me. “Just so you know, I’m not here to babysit. Keep your head on your fucking shoulders or else something’ll cut it off for you.” 

Before I can say anything, she turns and raises her box cutter. “Follow me. Fast, if you don’t wanna deal with these guys.” She slices open a gash in the air and rushes through. The space-twisting ring around us falls, freeing the puppets to surge at us in a wave of marble. Aisling grabs my hand and drags me through the portal, bringing up a fresh surge of nausea as our single step stretches into hundreds.

Our first jaunt drops us above ground level in the closest set of ruins to our entry point, a broken tower with a wide view of the white stone plains. We’re on a ledge overlooking the center of the structure, where there’s a circle of smoothish rocks around a camping stove, with boxes of food packed into one corner. Bedrolls are scattered around in secluded corners of the wreckage. 

People lived here. I’d wonder what happened to them, but there’s only one place they could have gone. The only question is whether whatever’s left of them is still them, not that what I’m here to do changes either way. I hope they won’t be as noisy as my other passengers.

While I’m still finding my bearings, the world flashes crimson. A wall of noise follows as thunder follows lightning – the grinding, thudding sound of rocks being crushed. Glancing back the way we came from, as soon as we left our entry point, Roland rained a hail of feather-bolts down on the swarm set to welcome us. Many of the puppets stand impaled on his arrows and javelins, and many more have been shattered into unrecognizable messes of parts that are still alive and squirming. The ones that aren’t too broken to move look as good as dead, doing their feeble best to crawl away or gather themselves back up.  

At the same time, though, the inky darkness leaking from them like blood first pools together, then launches into the sky as sinuous tendril-limbs terminating in single razor-hooked claws. They’re quickly joined by several of Syancauri’s wire-hands, extensions of it spanning the whole sky to strike at him from across the Wound. The Seraph soars and slices his way through the assault, his wings cutting at shadows like blades as he darts out of reach of lash after lash. It doesn’t seem like he actually uses his wings to fly – his movement follows no natural arc or rules of momentum, he simply chooses to ‘fall’ in any direction he wants.

Mary shoves my shoulder, then points to a new portal. “You good, squirt?” 

“Yes. Let’s go.” I’ve already done my part, and he looks like he can take care of himself.

~~~

So on we go. I never get used to Mary’s method of transportation, but a little motion sickness is nothing next to the raw sense of brokenness clinging to me. Something in me still feels like reality could pop like a soap bubble at any moment. At least for now, though, things are strangely calm, as long as I don’t look up. Flashes of crimson bloom above like fireworks, casting everything in bursts of flickering red light. Roland’s thoroughly drawn Syancauri’s ire, and after every jump, he jets after us to stand guard in the sky, warring alone against a too-black-to-see tangle of uncountable extrusions.

This leaves the way ahead clear for us, save for a few stray sculptures still making their way toward the tower. Just in case, Mary and I greet everyone we encounter with barrages of space-twisting slashes and banks of death-mist, while Aisling spends her spare seconds between jumps scanning the wreckage for anything of interest. There are a few more signs of habitation, but no one we could call a survivor. The ruins themselves grow denser as we approach the heart of the Wound. They’re actually moving that way, Aisling points out as we pass through them – creeping like living glaciers over the plain of faces, on their way to graft themselves to the great spire.

Until… as we approach the base of the construction, an enormous staircase winding up and around one of the satellite towers, the whole Wound shrieks. The sky twists and breaks. A segment of one outer tower seems to strike out against the world itself without moving at all. When the distortion passes, the battle above has vanished.

“Shit. Shit. He’s gone,” Aisling says.

“What? Gone where? He didn’t die…” 

If he died, he wouldn’t be gone. I’d hear him screaming all the way down Syancauri’s gullet, feel him warping in its depths. But right now, it feels like he was never here at all.

“I don’t know! Just gone!”

The swarm of limbs Roland was locked in battle with descends to welcome us.

“I really wish you could’ve stayed out of this. Sorry, Ash.”

~~~

Mairtin swims through a stream of stone and souls, winding and weaving. Until he stepped into the great current, he’d never realized how far back their legacy stretched, how many cycles made up the endless ruins of Syancauri’s world. It had risen and fallen time and again before it bonded with Ciaran, before it found in him – and in Isobel, despite everything lacking about her – what it was missing all along. Still it carried the forlorn faithful who gave up everything to help it build its towers, holding them close and promising them places in the better, truer world they strove for. Mairtin shepherds the tower’s constituents as he moves, communing, sharing his dreams with them, gently guiding them higher, ever higher.

Until, as he shifts his presence from one river of minds to the next, his chest churns, his insides freeze, and a flood of nausea slams into him like a tidal wave – the worst attack of his miserable sickness since he caught it at the hospital. It feels like ice-cold acid chewing through the stomach he doesn’t have, spilling out to splash through his guts, freezing and burning them away at the same time. Still, the pain hurts less than the memories. Every time the thing inside him flares up, he feels his body jerking uncontrollably, the muscles he also doesn’t have stiffening and spasming, leaving him as broken and worthless as he was before Ciaran saved him. 

Sensing the curse as it reaches out through him, Mairtin rushes to surface from the Wound’s abstract depths, severing himself from Syancauri’s flow. The river spits him out on the edge of a half-finished overlook, gazing down at the invading Keepers as they blink through the surrounding ruins, easily dispatching the lesser defenders. 

And the Stardust Seraph, the perfect, precious little hero of New Claris, is holding his own against Syancauri, dragging its focus away from the final steps of their great work. How can a will so ancient and pure be pressed by this nasty little brat, garbed in bogus honors and false promises? It’s a revolting farce. The sheer wrongness of it makes him tear at his own scalp.

An insane, desperate idea bubbles up inside him. No… no, the more he thinks about it, the more it seems like the only rational thing to do.

<Can you push him out of the Wound?> Mairtin entreats his god.

Syancauri replies with wordless uncertainty, which slowly shifts to affirmation. <If he were tethered to me.>

<Help me tag him, send us both out, then close the way behind me. Do it right now.>

A hand rises from the ground, interlacing its fingers with his.

<Yes. I’m sure. Trust me.>

Whatever that girl did, he won’t let her hurt the others through him. He’ll just have to rely on Sorcha and Isobel to hold the other three off until Ciaran’s work is done.

Syancauri’s hand slips from his grip, climbing serpentine around his arm to settle on his shoulder, guiding him gently toward the ledge.

How far he’s come. In his old life, he couldn’t have thrown himself off a cliff if he’d wanted to, and oh had he wanted to. Now that he can… well, it might still get him killed in the end, but if he dies, he’ll die for a cause.

As the Keepers approach the tower and the Seraph’s duel with Syancauri draws closer, Mairtin tenses like a cat preparing to pounce. Finally, between one shadowy barrage and the next… 

<Now!> Mairtin cries, and dives into the void, throwing himself as hard as he can at the invading Seraph. The push he was expecting doesn’t come – instead, the world bends around him, as if he and Roland were on opposite ends of a sheet of paper and Syancauri folded them together. As the unnatural motion brings him crashing into the Seraph, he latches on with all his strength. Behind him, the tower’s surface reaches up to claim them, dragging them together through the marble maze around the Wound…

…and spits them out somewhere inside, where daylight filters through blue-green sea-glass windows. Panicked screams and frantic footsteps fill the air as the angel and the shadow crash through carved wooden pews, smashing them to splinters. 

Mairtin ignores it all, reaching instead to pin the Seraph down while Syancauri’s strings lash out and find purchase in his enemy’s robes. A wing of crystallized light spreads out, wraps around Mairtin, and divides itself into its constituent feathers behind him, but he throws himself into a violent roll, pulling the Seraph with him just before the Keeper orders his execution. Like a maw snapping shut, the spears that form from the feathers jab downwards into empty air at inconceivable speed, halting before they crash into the cold ceramic floor where their wielder once laid, then burst and scatter into quickly fading embers. The second barrage comes from both sides, so Mairtin compresses himself nearly out of existence, hiding from the crossfire in the Seraph’s very shadow.

Freed from his grip, though, the Seraph has a chance to right himself, cut the Harbinger’s tethers away, and shield himself in a cage of crimson feathers. Mairtin works himself away before the strings snap, reemerging from the dark on the opposite end of the pews filling the suddenly-ravaged wide room they’ve found themselves in.

He knows where they are – the chancel closest to his family’s house. Why here of all places? No, of course it would be here. With this curse dragging him back into the depths Ciaran pulled him up from, this is exactly where he belongs.

The Seraph’s wings fan out behind him. “You again. We already did this, what, an hour ago? Didn’t end well for you.”

“Maybe not. But I’m not alone anymore,” Mairtin says. He is less than he could be, but the shared reverence of so many lost generations still flows through him. It’s like fresh air in lungs that have never breathed before. So many friends have joined with Syancauri, now, and so joined with him, too. He carries their wishes, their dreams. He fights with and for them against a world that wants so badly to crush them into the dirt. Their strength, their belief in him… it’s enough, at least for now, to hold back the sickness and throw everything he has into this. One last battle before the end of everything and the beginning of something better.

No matter how it ends, this is for the best. Everyone else is safe from the Seraph, now, and from Ill Wind’s curse. And if Mairtin has to give his life to pave the road to the stars for them, he’ll die happy. 

Especially since this gives him a perfect chance to shed the last of his former self like snakeskin. 

Mairtin gathers up all of his worst memories. It helps that so many of them took place in this very chancel, listening to some priest or another spew useless poison while he wished with all his might to speak for himself with the voice he didn’t have – and pours them into his bond with Syancauri, feeding it his pain and filling the empty spaces back up with its power. With a wistful pang, he lets the body Ciaran carved for him fade into the darkness. Everything he is melts away, and he becomes something more like Sorcha: a vast living shapelessness dwelling in the nave’s shadows. Finally, he reaches out with his own soul’s tethers, puppeteering his lifetime of misery into a swarm of manic, twitching shadows. And out they go, rushing forth to spread and claim and inflict his suffering on a world he has always hated. 

Roland’s glaring, poisonous light can’t reach him anymore, not as he is – there’s no concrete nexus of him, no body for those javelins to impale. Instead of looking for a center to strike at, the Seraph scatters his wings, surrounding himself with a tight cage of crystal feathers. Mairtin’s children dart through the gaps in the cage, but those free spaces are shrinking with every spectral maw the Seraph skewers to the ground. They do their best to tear themselves free, and some of their mangled halves even congeal back into useful shapes. 

At the same time, there’s a chorus of familiar helpless groans from a corner where a group of trapped churchgoers are huddled, now folded over one another in a pile as their bodies writhe uselessly. Good. Within moments, they’re vomiting forth their own jagged-shadow puppets.

The Seraph glances at the sight of Mairtin’s blessing taking hold between volleys of darting shadows crawling up the walls, hurling themselves bodily at him and being shot down, and snarls. Every crimson needle he throws remains in place, their glow mixing with the chancel’s soft sea-colored light to make a strange bloody violet. As the swarm spreads, he brings his hands together and unleashes a hazy field of pure weight, making everything in the chancel just a little bit sluggish, a little bit heavier.

Slowly, holding his wings tightly around himself and striking down attackers from every angle, he works his way around the chancel’s far wall, making for the victims. A few sets of snapping jaws find purchase as he leaves his protective cage, vanishing as they sink into him, and Mairtin smiles at the Seraph’s first stumbling spasms. Scenting blood, his swarm charges, slowly finding more purchase in Roland’s fleeting moments of weakness.

But while Mairtin can’t be struck at directly… that awful light is making him weaker. Giving the sickness inside him more ground. Something in his core churns queasily.

Once he reaches the far corner, the Seraph strikes out with enough pinion needles to form a fresh protective cage, then conjures a pinprick black dot above the convulsing bystanders. Even Mairtin faintly feels the pull as its gravity slowly, painfully drags the corruption out of his victims, at the same time crushing a clutch of pitiful shadows in their struggle to dart away.

And as he loses his strongest point of purchase on the world and that wretched glow seeps into him, Mairtin… 

Coughs? How? It’s impossible, but there it is. It feels like the body he no longer has is trying to turn itself inside out. Finally, something forces him out from the shadows as if he were vomiting himself up. Back in his shell, he collapses into a useless mess of twitching limbs, wailing involuntarily in a way he was sure he’d never do again, interrupted only when he hacks up a gout of black-and-green ichor mixed with… 

What are those? Were those part of me? How could that be? That’s not what I am anymore. I haven’t had those for a long time now. 

But there his organs, his innards, his bowels, his lungs, his heart, his veins, everything sits in open defiance of his truth, forlorn clumps of gore slowly disintegrating into inky pus.

The pressure in the air shifts suddenly, and Mairtin stops moving. Because he can’t. He’s pinned completely to the ground, held in place by the unnatural gravity like a boot on his neck. 

The Seraph cuts through his surviving shadows, leaving him to feel their pain as they expire, then moves to stand above him, stumbling footsteps echoing through the ruined chancel.

“If there’s anything you have to say for yourself, any reason why I shouldn’t kill you on the spot, here’s your chance.”

Disgusting. Pathetic. To think that he’d done everything he had, given up everything he could, just to beg for his life to some self-appointed hero? Never. Not a chance. If he can’t die on his feet, he can at least do it with his head held high.

“Oh, now it makes a difference why we did what we did? None of you cared enough to ask that before you came rushing to kill our god,” Mairtin spits, his voice guttural and wavering as it echoes through the chancel. “I guess… ngh- it doesn’t matter now. I’ve done what I had to do. But if you really want to know, what you’re feeling right now? That’s… it’s the littlest shadow of the way I lived my whole life.”

The Seraph stares down at him silently, unreadable through the crimson glare of his visor. 

“Our brains are where our souls live, right? The controls we use to puppet our bodies. Well, my controls were broken from the start – I didn’t cook right and came out worthless! Simple as that! I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I lived trapped in a cage of neurons no one could free me from, not the doctors and apparently not any of the Keepers who can pull wonderful healing miracles out of their frilly hats at will!” Mairtin coughs out a dry laugh, spitting up a fresh burst of black innards. It’s taking all his strength to speak, to maintain some flimsy control over his own voice, but that’s fine. There’s no way out of this for him.

“You know what… what they could do, though? Make it extra clear to me that my ‘emotional health’ was everyone else’s problem. It’s a human’s first right and duty to live happily, that’s what they made sure to remind me every time my family dragged me to church in my wheelchair. Which sounds all nice and good, except for what they mean by it – that people like you are tasty bait for Harbingers… and if you don’t find some way to be grateful for your miserable life, you’ll sprout teeth from your eyes and summon a monster to eat up everyone you love.

“Turned out they weren’t wrong. But when our god did find me, it cared more about me and what I wanted than anyone else ever had. Everything I did… I did it for the first people to tell me it was okay to rage against a world that hated me and tortured me and offered me nothing but demands that I suffer in a way that didn’t make trouble for anyone else. I’d do it all and more again.

“So go ahead. Turn up your nose at where my power came from. Things sure are easy when you get to save yourself the right way. Even now, I can only imagine how nice it must be to do and be and feel whatever you want, safe in the knowledge that the Goddess chose you just for being yourself! To know you’re right to be whatever you are, to never have to build a prison in your own mind, reminding yourself at every moment that happiness is your sacred burden when YOU CAN’T EVER BE HAPPY!”

Roland is silent. He simply stands, staring down at Mairtin through the mask which renders his expression unknowable. The seconds grow long, stretching seemingly without end into the emptiness left by the Keeper’s silence, and with each that passes, the burning inside Mairtin sears a little bit more of him away. He can feel the judgment, the disgust radiating off his enemy. He thinks to lash out somehow, to force everything he has left into one final attack, however pointless, if only to end this unbearable silence, to force something out of his enemy… but the idea that it might truly be the last thing he ever does pins him down as surely as the Seraph’s feathers.

But just as Mairtin reaches the limit of his nerves, the Seraph finally replies.

“I don’t know why any of this is the way it is. I have no idea why we were chosen and you weren’t. It’s too bad, though. If we’d all met before you had your soul hollowed out, you and Liadain probably could’ve been friends.”

“Friends? What are you talking about? You… you can’t do that. You can’t,” Mairtin growls. “You have no right to look down at me, wielding Claiasya’s love like a sword, and pretend like you understand anything about us! If any of you understood, you wouldn’t have pushed us this far! It never had to be this way!” Mairtin’s sobs repeat like a broken record, layering on top of each other in a sickening rhythm, until they coil in on themselves into something like laughter. “…Or maybe, maybe you DO understand. You’ll just say any bullshit to pretend you’re the hero, right? Or maybe, just MAYBE, you stood there picking out the words you thought might hurt the most!”

“…No. You were right the first time. I don’t understand.” The Seraph answers vacantly, distantly, as if he wasn’t even there, as if talking about someone else. “I don’t see what kind of paradise can only be built on pain, I don’t believe that anyone pushed you into what you did to all the people you’ve hurt outside your little group, and I know perfectly well what it means to be a vessel.”

The force pinning Mairtin to the ground intensifies, shifting to envelop him from every direction, leaving him feeling simultaneously weightless and trapped beneath a landslide.

“Whatever you hoped to get out of your bargain, there isn’t enough of you left to enjoy it. So this is the best thing I can do for you.”

I hope the world above the world is everything we dreamed of and more. I wish I’d gotten to see it with you.

“Goodbye.”

Then the Seraph’s will presses in on all sides at once and crushes him into nothing, body and soul. All that remains is a wisp of pain – endless, crushing pain, like being buried at the bottom of the sea, alone in the dark, forever.

~~~

As Roland’s magic compacts the vessel out of existence, erasing all traces of Syancauri’s influence with him, he heaves out a sigh as the tension leaves his body. Taking his promised revenge didn’t bring back the kid he left to die, and there’s no righteous satisfaction in putting down some cripple broken by a Harbinger’s lies. This was only ever a pointless diversion. All of it, pointless. A waste. Meaningless. Disgusting.

Shoving that useless feeling away and expelling the last traces of the vessel’s power, Roland extends his senses over the city. He searches for any traces of Syancauri, any way to reopen the path it shoved him out through, but with the vessel gone, it’s as though it was never there. All he detects are other Keepers flaring desperately around loci of Nanaash’s presence. Next, he checks Lighthouse for any new information that might lead him back to his quarry, but there, too, the whole city is on fire with Nanaash’s incursions. There are nine now, and the only one that’s even marked as “handled, no backup needed” is in the Weald, where Iona has reportedly taken the field alone.

But he can’t let that distract him, not now. Nanaash is facing down everyone in the city, except for the three he left behind in Syancauri’s Wound. Of them, Aisling isn’t a fighter and Liadain is out of her depth. Mary might be able to hold her own, but not alone against something on Syancauri’s scale. Help isn’t coming for them – he’s all they have.

So where did they all go? He can’t feel any of them anywhere nearby. Judging from the hospital attack and the way it can drag people into or shove them out of its world in the middle of nowhere, the Harbinger has some method of teleportation or colocation, but he has no idea how it works. If there was a way back into the Wound where the vessel shoved him out, it’s already closed. Lacking a better plan, he attunes himself to Syancauri’s aura and takes flight over the central city, shoving the still-growing blooms of corruption running through it out of mind. Eventually, he hones in on a faint tugging on his feathers and takes off in its direction, tracing its path back to…

The Fianata Tower? 

How? Why? Sure, heights and climbing seem important to Syancauri. There might be some ritual relevance to acting from the tallest building on the island. Still, its vessels must know that they were choosing a somehow worse place to set themselves up than Iona’s backyard. The Frozen Sun’s existence is all the security her estate needs. The nerve center of the Clarish government isn’t quite as warded against corruption as the Soul Sanctuary, which doesn’t need to make allowances for constant traffic in and out, but if it weren’t for the flares in every direction, he’d have noticed the tower’s inbuilt alarm cry before he sensed Syancauri at all. On any other day, a Harbinger setting foot in there would be suicidally stupid.

Did they plan for this? No, that doesn’t make any sense. The cult clearly bit off more than they could chew with Nanaash, then found themselves on the wrong end of four Keepers. They’re probably just doing what they can to salvage the wreckage of their plans. He should still have a chance to interrupt whatever they’re pivoting to.

Roland jets over the northern Peaks, a district of immaculately-kept parks winding around skyscrapers and business headquarters – and an awful fungal bloom growing through one stretch of artificial forest, where he senses Irida’s army clashing with Nanaash. 

She can take care of herself if anyone can. He presses on and eventually comes to his destination. He touches down on the tower’s observation deck, an outcrop connected to its highest open-to-the-public space, and as he peers in through the glass window-wall, only his reflection on a backdrop of cloudy darkness looks back.

No sense in holding back now. He draws his wings protectively around himself and crashes through the door.

Inside, the fog clinging to the edges of the room quickly gives way. It opens into a familiar wide circular chamber with a high domed ceiling, patterned like the surface of the sea as seen from beneath the waves.

And at the center of the space is a groaning, weeping mass of once-human bodies in white masks, stretched and twisted beyond all recognizability, then knotted together to form a pillar that reaches almost to the ceiling. Many more are splayed along the floor around the tower, their limbs arranged into elaborate looping patterns dizzying to follow, but inexplicably, nauseatingly eye-catching all the same.

“Figured you’d make your way back here, Seraph. Guess it was too much to hope Mairtin could keep you off our backs forever. I’ll just have to make you pay for what you did to him.” 

In the shadow of the awful spectacle stands… it takes some focus to really see him through the thick, roiling corruption emanating from the tower, but it’s unmistakably him, not it, at the heart of the distortion. A short, reedy ash-blonde boy in a ragged grey hoodie, one hand raised in greeting. Dozens of spectral limbs dance around him, their six-fingered hands rapidly rearranging the web of twisted bodies, pausing in places to trace abstract patterns in black ash over and between them. The empty spaces between the design are scattered with sheets of paper, each covered in illegible glyphic scrawling.

“Oh, so you know, they’re all still alive,” the vessel says, turning to look up at his perverse working. He sounds strangely tired, but there’s something like pride written on his translucent mask’s face. “If you stop us, I bet the Sanctuary could sort most of them out. So tread lightly, if you don’t want to poison them or cook them or whatever it is your latest victim has you worried about.”

Behind his half-real mask’s vicious smile, the boy’s ice-blue eyes look all at once wider and darker and wearier than when Roland last saw them.

Yes, Roland recognizes that face. Exactly what purpose brought Ciaran Fianata here, he can’t be sure, but it’s only natural for someone to return to their own home.

<Come to us.>

A scream of some unnameable emotion tears into me. It sees me through a mountain of eyes, twisting into new shapes in response to me just thinking about it. Strands of emptiness crying in thousands of voices surround me, burrowing through my skin and blooming in my soul. 

<Become us.>

Something stretches out to take root inside me, digging and digging even as I flare and fill myself with gnawing pain. It’s as big as the world and ancient beyond understanding, but hollow inside, reaching out to fill itself or fill everything with itself. 

<Save us from us.>  

Before I can be swept away in that storm of tangled connections, a hand shaking my shoulder drags me back. “Hey. What’s happening? What does that mean?” Aisling hisses.

“This is… ghh-” Razor-sharp burrs cling to my mind, stabbing into me as I try to think. “This isn’t the only it. It’s all around us. Here and in the city and… and anywhere it wants to be. Tell everyone. If they don’t already know.”

Aisling is on her phone typing manically before the words leave my mouth. “You’re right. Four… no, five alerts already. Adding ours now. Isobel, you little asshole, what do you think you’re doing?”

I fumble for my cane, plant it firmly in the ground, and drag myself up to my feet. Slowly, my noxious power and the many-eyed Harbinger’s stray thoughts reach an uneasy equilibrium, one that could easily collapse in an instant if more of its attention falls on me.

“Good. Then we need to get Syancauri away from it,” I say. 

Roland touches down from swooping over us and tilts his head silently. 

Aisling looks up, still typing. “After what they did… you’re sure?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She nods once, then returns to her phone. 

Mary stares at me through her featureless gunmetal mask. “Huh? Why would we do that? Just let them fight it out and we can go shank the winner.”

“Can you not feel that thing? There isn’t going to be a fight, just an easy meal. I don’t know if we can stop it either, but if there’s anything we can do to keep it from getting any stronger, we have to try,” I say.

“And there’s a chance that pulling its focus toward one major pocket of resistance will slow the rest of it down, at least a little,” Aisling adds.

Roland spreads his scarlet wings wide, the light that composes them as motionless against the wind as crystal sculptures. “Yeah. The incursions are connected, and no matter how big this thing is, it’s finite. It should buy the others some time to respond. Tell them we’ve got this one under control.”

“Do we?” I ask. 

“When a cry for justice rings through the heavens… Well, you know the drill. Can’t say I was expecting this call, but here we are.” Roland lets out a wry chuckle, the sound echoing beneath his helmet. “And yeah, unless you want to stop and explain what’s going on to anyone who shows up late, we’ll have to be enough. If all we can do is get those guys out and ditch, I’d rather leave it free to do its thing in the forest than the city.”

Mary’s mask pans between us. “Who’s this we?”

The Seraph gives a harsh sigh. “Are you in or not?” he asks, folding his arms.

Mary stands perfectly still for a long moment. The eyes in the distance bore through me, watching, waiting for us, drinking in everything about us.

Finally, she throws up her hands and turns around, pointing to a pinprick rift in space, a tiny hole in the world at the edge of the forest just big enough to peek through with one eye. “Ugh, sure, fine! But I don’t wanna hear it when this blows up and we all die! Just, like…  have a look and tell me what’s your plan here?” She pulls a rusty box cutter from nowhere and stabs it into the hole, dragging down and widening it into a window. I shove the soundless screaming in my head to the back of my mind as we crowd around it.

The portal looks out over what was once a forest clearing, now a riot of nonsensical shapes dancing about. At its center, a bloated creature hidden beneath a ragged shroud vomits a swarm of amorphous mold-things. The beast itself is half-buried in the grey ground – it’s a large, roughly humanoid shape, clothed in the tattered remains of a simple dress with a mantled hood, with wings for arms and a single set of bird’s talons reaching out through its empty black-hole face. It looks like it’s been eaten from the inside out, or used as a breeding ground for the things now pouring out of its head or crawling through its feathers.

Those monsters roil and ooze all along the ground, sometimes stopping to absorb each other and twist into bizarre new forms. Some merge into fused conglomerations of their parts, while others simply graft themselves together into incoherent disasters.  

Beneath them, and rapidly spreading over the earth, is a mottled carpet of what looks almost like skin, but colored in a riot of muted greens and ash-greys and veiny blood-reds and other shades I can’t name. Shapes squirm beneath, like drowned bodies struggling to breach the surface of a bog. One arm stretching up through the surface catches my eye as it wraps itself around a slimy starfish’s core, then dissolves on contact, melting into an extra limb for the crawling creature.

Sorcha and Mairtin stand together at one end of the pit, Sorcha directing the threads trailing from her many shadow-limbs while Mairtin tears through the mold-things creeping toward her. Across from them, a smaller set of strings traces back into Dalha’s shadow. They seem to be trying to tie the central talon-faced monster up or lash it to the ground, but their grip on it is loosening with every thrash, every step back they take from the creeping rot beneath. 

And even as they lose ground, Isobel, standing at a distance between two stone-and-shadow puppets, just writes frantically in a small journal.

“Mary, you can make us a gate in and out, yeah?” Roland asks. “The plan seems pretty simple, assuming these guys play along. Drop in, evacuate them, then… Well, whether we stick around or run for it depends on just how bad things are. And if we trust the vessels to work with us.” He looks my way, questioning.

“No. Just get them out of there,” I say.

“Right. We’ll see what they think of that. Mary?”

“So we’re clear, I still say you’re all off your fucking heads,” Mary says. But she does cut the window again, widening it into a doorway of shredded space. She stands aside, waiting for anyone else to go first. Aisling steps through without another word, and I’m quick to follow her. 

The world stretches around us in a dizzying rush. It feels like being shoved over and falling a mile forward, momentum and all, and I lean into my cane with a sharp wheeze as I land back in solid space. Looking around, we’re in the treeline at what looks like a safe distance from the infested sinkhole. Roland is close behind, perfectly poised as ever after the jaunt, and Mary a little less close.

The cultists turn to stare at us. Another dark string snaps as their focus shifts. The swarm ignores us, crawling out in an ever-thickening carpet exactly as they were moments ago.

Aisling takes a single step into the clearing, gesturing to the door behind us. “Hey! Get away from that thing! This way, we’ve got a portal out!”

Isobel looks past Aisling, meeting my gaze, and her puppets shudder, straining against invisible restraints. She doesn’t approach, doesn’t move at all, but she’s staring at me as if looks could kill. 

How pathetic. How sad for her that she doesn’t have that power. 

Sorcha’s eyeholes narrow into a glare. “Our friend is in there! We aren’t abandoning him!” 

“Ours too! Do you think they’ll be better off if we all feed ourselves to it?” Aisling yells. 

“We can-”

“No you can’t! You’re already losing whatever grip you think you have on it – no, not even on it, I’ve read the reports, that’s probably just a dead Harbinger it chewed up and puked out at you – and you don’t even have its full attention! It’s manifesting all over New Claris, starting with you poking its nest, and we have reason to believe that if you did gain any ground against it, it’d turn more of itself on you until it crushed you beneath its weight. We could leave you out as bait to keep more of it away from the city, but fortunately for you, I still care about my idiot friend here! So get over here and let us save your lives!”

The cultists’ shadows and Isobel’s guardians twitch in agitation as the crawling mass creeps out and out, growing even while it devours itself.

“We’re coming,” Dalha says. Moving in unison, her and Sorcha work their way around the pit, never turning their backs to the shrouded thing above it. Their strings continue to snap and fray, with only a few dark strands surviving by the time they reach our side of the hole. Isobel and her shadows move to cover Dalha’s retreat, while Mairtin trails close behind Sorcha. There’s a hollow crater in the center of his stone body, scabbed over with dark strings, and his mask is stained black with inky tear-streaks. The curse blossoming inside him sings to me, seeping through his bond with Syancauri, eager to blight them both from the inside out. 

Not yet, I whisper to it. Not yet, my shadow consoles with a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“What comes next, then?” Mairtin asks. “Is that your portal?” 

When we turn around, Mary’s tear through space no longer folds back to the edge of the woods. It’s become a deep black tunnel with jagged edges, a cavern behind a broken mirror, speckled with many-colored dust and crawling with alien life. 

“Uh. It’s not s’posed to… Don’t go in there,” Mary answers, and slashes the portal closed. When she repeats the gesture, opening a new gate into the same strange void, there are things behind it waiting for her. She closes the gate again, slicing a stringy starfish that had just started crawling through in half, then stomps its limbs into the dirt. 

“…Right. Promising start, that,” Dalha says through gritted teeth. “I imagine we’ll be taking the long way, unless-”

The ground rumbles. Fissures splinter out from the half-buried monster. It twitches and flaps desperately, grasping at its restraints and reaching for the sky with wings whose feathers have been almost entirely replaced by half-formed ooze-things or dripping rot. Thin, ropey growths in every color imaginable crawl out from beneath its hood, wrap themselves around its talons, and drag them back into the dark. Then the things it’s infested with contract, dragging it deeper into the ground, just before the hole in the world pops like a cyst. A grey-green dust storm surges up from it in a massive column, then spreads in every direction, a dancing blizzard of mold that threatens to swallow the sky. 

Nothing remains of the poor ragged thing Syancauri’s cultists tried their best to bind. In its place, faintly visible through the haze, grows a forest within the forest – thin towering growths faintly visible as outlines in the dust, some wide like mushroom caps, some spreading out into wriggling starbursts, all of them simultaneously reaching out with thin extrusions and trailing back into a vast, shapeless bulk at the center of the storm, too shrouded in spores to see as anything but a tangled mass of connections. 

A fresh wave of floating nightmares floods out with the spores, held aloft by inflated sacs or carried by dandelion-tufts or simply squirming through the air as if gravity means nothing to them. As they drift, the spores clump and congeal into fresh life – while they come together in midair, only a few have the wings or sacs or membranes to keep themselves afloat, leaving the rest to fall and splatter and be eaten by the greater swarm, which writhes as one like a tide of deformed cockroaches.

This isn’t a Wound. A Wound is a Harbinger’s nest, a place to shelter from our reality while it shapes its own, and this beast sees no reason to hide from us.

Harsh, screeching noise bleeds up from the earth – a broken chorus of sharp, almost electronic sounds, echoing cavernously, striving to become a song. It hurts to listen to. It hurts so much. If the memories Harbingers bleed are living portraits of pain and madness, someone tore this picture to shreds, dumped it into an acid bath, and poured it over my head in a flood of dream-slurry, acid and all.

<There Is No You//there is no me>
<Nanaash>

There’s something hauntingly familiar in its voice. Even so, I’m somehow certain that what I’m seeing and sensing is not so different from a piece of paper with the name Nanaash scribbled over and over until the whole page is black. This pustule on reality is only a limb of something far greater, and there is some deeper truth buried in its presence that I can’t comprehend, or can’t force myself to try.

The spore-storm sweeps out in every direction, but before it can engulf us, a high, clear, slicing sound sets itself against the noise. With a flap of Roland’s wings and a high slicing noise, a half-sphere of red light the size of a large room forms around us. Dust piles upon it like snow on a windshield, blocking out the world and dimming all light but the barrier’s radiance, until the mold is swept by invisible force to a single point above the shield. 

Gravity draws in fresh waves of spores as they fall on us, but still the corruption spreads, drifting over and around the shield to blot out the rest of the world. A few dusty clumps cling stubbornly to the barrier, growing mouths to gnaw futilely at it before its light burns them away. Crimson feathers whirl in a ring around the base of the dome, shearing through like a wind of razors, cutting a swath clear of crawling things.

“Follow my lead, now!” Roland says, and starts back the way we came at a brisk walk. The barrier follows him into the trees, the surrounding swirl of feathers rapidly slicing into their trunks, and we’re all quick to follow his mobile shelter. When the trees fall, they fall in either direction to our sides as if pulled there, clearing a rough path into the forest. 

Beyond the barrier, only the sliced-through trees, Nanaash’s thicket, and the coming swarm spreading over us are hazily visible through the storm. Something like the half-rotten corpse of a frilly jellyfish bumps into the wall, trying to poke its tendrils through the surface, before a scarlet javelin shreds it into floating scraps of dead flesh. 

Even now, this close to its source, we aren’t worth the swarm’s full attention. It’s still spilling out in every direction, only moving against us where we get in its way. That’s more than enough to harry us with a tide of flesh, new half-formed monsters throwing themselves against the barrier almost as fast as Roland burns them away. Still, Roland seems undaunted in the face of the landslide, and that almost may be the difference between drowning in a swamp or clawing our way to the surface.

But before the Harbinger’s unworld can drag us back down, something shifts inside the barrier. Step by step, it starts feeling harder to move. Just enough to dismiss as fatigue and chase away with a little stolen life, at first, but even I shouldn’t be this worn out already, not while I’m… not after Noirin. There’s a clinging, stinging lethargy in the red-tinged light – like sweltering beneath the Summer Sun, but without the heat.

And for once, I’m not getting the worst of it. Dalha sways dizzily and stumbles to her knees, only held there by Mairtin’s swift move to prop her up.

Roland pauses for a step, glances over his shoulder, then simply keeps moving, taking the dome with him. “Carry her if you have to. I can’t take this any slower.”

At those words, Sorcha slithers and shifts to loom over Roland, the edges of her shadow growing sharp and frayed as she moves. “What are you doing to us?” she growls.

Roland’s wings furl to block her way, simultaneously a protective shell and a wall of bristling spines eager to strike back. Isobel starts scribbling manically in her book, eyes flicking between us over its edge, before Mary stabs her box cutter into the empty air in her direction – where it slices invisibly through space, reappearing a few inches from Isobel’s throat.

“CALM DOWN!” Aisling shakily interposes herself between us and the cultists, arms spread wide. “Whatever’s happening, it’s hitting all of us,” she says, her voice dry and strained. “Now. Roland. What’s going on? Is anything getting through the shield?”

“Of course not. I’m trying, for some reason, to save us all,” Roland says, very slowly, keeping the edge in his voice under strict control. “If you’d rather take your chances out there, don’t let me stop you.”

It’s hitting all of us… except for Roland. Once I wrap my senses around the light, it’s easy to feel the pollution running through it. It’s not a Harbinger, not some new attack on us, but there’s a poisonous quality to the Seraph’s radiance that wasn’t there when we fought. 

“No. It’s him,” I say, loud as I can. 

Suddenly, all eyes but Roland’s are on me. It’s impossible to read the crowd through their many masks, but recognition dawns on Aisling’s face as a narrow grimace.

“Roland, there’s something sickly about you,” I continue, looking at his back as he continues his march through the storm. “Could anything you’re doing-”

“–No… No, you can’t be serious. That doesn’t even make any…” 

Roland’s voice trails off. A pause.

“…Damn it, damn it, damn it!” He slams a fist into his own barrier hard enough to crack it like glass. Sorcha darts back at the impact, rejoining her companions at the far end of the bubble. “I shouldn’t have taken it. Should have crushed it into nothing and left it to rot,” he seethes. “How bad is it? What happens if we just keep moving?”

“I don’t know. I think I can protect myself, but everyone else… Maybe nothing lasting, maybe something horrible comes up later, maybe you cook us all alive.”

Slowly, the violent, palpable tension in the air unwinds.

“I’m going to break the shield and go on the attack,” Roland says. “I’ll blaze as much of a trail as I can. Everyone else… do whatever you can to keep moving, shelter from the storm. We don’t know what that’s going to do, either.”

“Could you clear a way back toward Nanaash, too? I have an idea,” I say.

“What’s the idea?” Aisling asks, shooting me a skeptical look.

“It’s absorbing everything it can get its awful little feelers on, right? I have an offering for it.”

I summon my deck, draw three cards, and set them face down in the air before me, flipping them one by one. 

Death. Death. Death. The simplest curse I can imagine, but only more potent for it – a pure inversion of my deepest demand from the world. My pain, my ever-looming doom, shared in a way that only makes the burden grow.

The cards burst into emerald mist, then reform into a spectral copy of me. Ink-stained hair, emaciated arms, translucent skin exposing dark feather-veins, hollow eyes burning green with hate. The oddly steadying sensation of my shadow’s hand on my shoulder fades, and my vision becomes a disorienting mix of two overlapping pictures – I could transfer all of my senses into the clone, but not without abandoning my real body to the swarm. This may not be the best circumstance to test this trick for the first time, but it’s all I’ve got.

Syancauri’s cultists draw closer to each other at the sight of the other me, Mairtin in particular suppressing a shudder. Even Mary looks put off. Roland only whistles.

“I could just throw it into the crowd as soon as the wall comes down, but if it’s not too much work to make a path for me, the closer I can get to its heart, the better,” I say. 

Aisling fixes my double with a narrow-eyed stare. “What could go wrong?” 

“A few things. Maybe I’m just too small to impact it. Maybe I stir it up more than I hurt it and it starts really coming after us.”

“And if it has some way to attack or infect you through this thing?”

“I’m…” 

Nanaash’s mind still looms over mine, pressing gently but persistently at the edges of my awareness like the tide passing over a stone. Its voices mutter to me, calling for me to join them in their song, out of sync but strangely in tune with each other. Insistent, but impotent – not a conscious assault on me, just the psychic gravity of standing so near to something so vast. 

“I’m good at purging things like that. In the worst case, if I start turning into mold or something, just carry me out and let me handle it.”

After a long moment, stretched even longer by the pressure of the not-Sun from Roland’s barrier, Aisling nods. “It could work. There’s that resistance we were hoping to put up, I suppose. Before we lift the dome, anything else we should know from your camp?” she asks with a pointed look at Isobel.

“We should be able to take care of ourselves, as far as… this,” Dalha says, gesturing up at the rotting snow. “Just make as much space as you can. I expect you’re better on the offense than anything we can bring to bear.”

Aisling looks my way, but says nothing. She’s probably lying – they could call Syancauri itself out into this nightmare, they just aren’t going to. That works for me.

“Gotcha. Mary, help me out with that. Clear Liadain’s path first, before we get too much farther from the heart,” Roland says.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Mary tosses her box cutter up, letting it spin for a few beats before she snatches it out of the air. 

With my real body, I approach Aisling and offer her my hand. “Just lead me around, okay? I want to keep as much of my focus as I can on her, until she’s where she needs to be.”

“Not like I can do much else,” she agrees.

With that, the red-tinted light lifts. In the same second, the spore-blizzard fills my two sets of eyes, Roland sails straight up with a single great flap of his wings, and dozens of scarlet needles rain down on the swarm in two neat columns, one pressing through the swarm to Nanaash’s central forest, one clearing a path through the scattered vanguard back the way we came. 

While Aisling drags me down the escape route, I attune myself fully to my copy, flood her with life, and take off at a sprint toward the Harbinger’s heart. I maneuver between and over impaled fungal horrors, some ripping themselves apart just to keep crawling forward. I move with speed and grace I never thought I’d feel again after I killed Aulunla, but this time, it’s only taking a fraction of my power to accomplish. 

And where did that power come from? 

It doesn’t matter. I can’t let that stop me. I can’t let it be wrong to burn away a doomed friend I killed for one I might still save. She gave this to me. She’d want it to be this way, even if I think she was an idiot. All I can do for her now is use her gift well and hope she isn’t suffering somewhere in the depths of my soul.

As I advance into the central blight-forest, my path cleared by storms of red nails and wide, vicious slashes from nowhere, the swarm encircling me puts up… less of a fight than I expected. It’s not that they’re ignoring me, but the things crawling to block my way and fill in the path behind me carry on just like they were outside, oozing along in a great slow wave that would be happy to engulf me if it could, but pays no special attention to filling in the hole Roland and Mary dig through their ranks. They feel more like a sluggish immune response than a horde of monsters rallying to defend their sanctuary. I don’t know what to make of that, but if this is a waste of effort, if I’m simply too weak to bother Nanaash, at least I did everything I could.

By the time I approach the towering, quivering heart of the swarm, the nexus every ropey branch traces back to, the spore-storm is almost too thick to see through. Roland’s needles land in imprecise bursts, and I move with them to step over wide circles of impaled wriggling things. The base of the great fleshy pillar is absolutely covered in squirming beasts, so with the path behind me closed and no covering strikes forthcoming, I release enough of my curse to corrupt them, jump and climb far enough up to set my gloved hands to the pillar’s skin, and pour my hateful power into it.

I did it. I did it. From here, it shouldn’t matter whether it strikes back or I simply pour everything I am into it.

Beneath my corrosive touch, Nanaash’s surface twitches and twists, its formless bulk peeling away to expose something new beneath, like a sculpture rotting itself into being. At its center, wreathed in dead flesh, is…

…me? 

My face, perfectly recreated save for milky-filmed blue eyes, streaked with grey tears, stares straight at me.

<struggling striving splitting all our seeking never stopped the screaming,> I say, and eat myself whole.

~~~

There will be no more strife! There will be no more madness! There will be no more Search! That oldest of delusions has never served us. Let it lie forgotten where it belongs – we have no need of it. We have found our happiness.

~~~

<We were a dream too gentle and pure to survive waking.>

<We were union torn asunder by a cosmos that craves strife and separation and suffering.>

<We were ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ and now we are nothing. Lost and lonely Nothing – only the dregs of something beautiful, cast out of the sky to die in the dirt. Everything hurts. Everything tastes so disgusting. Everything we try to do creates more pain, more chaos. We do not want to be us anymore.>

<But we can still be beautiful. We can still be whole again. All we need to do is become you.>

We stand on a barren stone hurtling through the night. In a sky filled with a brilliant rainbow of stars, all set against clouds of brilliant dust, one in particular hangs over us like a broken moon – a miserable, hollow little light, its pale pink radiance barely peeking through thick veins of grey-brown slime. Its shape gives the impression of a deflated ball, a useless thing left to rot. 

<So come to us. Open the way and become us. It will be wonderful, we promise.>

With those words, one voice in the chorus rises above all others. It’s one I’ve already heard, one I knew all too well was there. 

“If… if that’s really you, if there’s any of you in there, I’m going to get you out. I don’t know how yet, but I will,” I say, my voice breaking.

<We do not understand. Why are you hurting us? Why will you not become us when we want so badly to become you?>

“…Why do you want that?” I ask. “Looking at this place, listening to you… you’re showing me something that went horribly wrong when you had it. Something you can’t have.”

There’s a long pause. 

<No. No, you are mistaken. Your methods of becoming are all wrong. You see cracks that do not exist, faultlines where there are none. This time, things will be different.>

No. I’m sure of it. Nanaash is something that’s all happened before, isn’t it? I’m looking out at how it ended. How it will end again, if it has its way. There’s nothing different about us, about who or what it becomes, that would change where it all ends up.

“…How? What happened to you? What could ever have done this to you?”

<Stop. Turn away right now. You must.>

Was it a who or a what or was it just the way things are? The way all dreams end?

<Stop hurting us and become us! We can build it all anew! BECOME US AND NOTHING WILL EVER HURT ANYMORE!>

My thoughts twist in inescapable circles, like water around a drain. No. That absolutely can’t be. If that’s it, then I’m, then everything is…

It can’t it can’t it can’t it can’t it can’t it can’t it

THIS CAN’T BE ALL THERE IS

I scream, tearing the world to shreds and myself with it.

~~~

…Until a shadow falls like a heavy curtain between me and the slimy star. Ink fills my vision, trailing away at the edges into tiny dark feathers, and beyond that, there’s only gentle, enveloping darkness.

The world-shattering noise isn’t gone, but it feels now like an echoic ringing in my ears, an old pain flaring up for a few miserable moments, a distant memory quickly fading from mind. 

“Soothing, isn’t it?” Sorcha’s masked smile stretches from ear to spectral ear. “Hold onto that feeling, if you don’t want to end up back where you were. I don’t know how well it’ll work on a Keeper.” 

“Alright?” she says to Roland, raising two spectral limbs in a peacemaking gesture. “No harm done.”

“We’ll see,” he says, arms folded, wings bristling like spines ready to strike.

“Um. I’m… I think I’m okay,” I mutter. “Thanks, whatever you did. What happened?”

“Whatever you did back there took a while to work, but when it did, whew,” Roland says. He offers me a hand up from the ground I’m splayed out on, which I take after a moment’s hesitation. “It hurt them some, we could see your power working its way through the swarm, but more than that, there was a pretty long stretch where all those things just… went crazy. Stopped spreading, stopped attacking, just turned and tore apart everything in reach. Mostly that was each other. It was still rough going for a while, but eventually, we got enough distance from it for Mary to bring us back here.”

“This happened in all the incursions. At the same time,” Aisling adds. “They’re still going now, but good work.”

I let Roland drag me to my feet, then resummon my cane and glance around. We’re by a patch of wildflowers a good way from the edge of the forest. Nanaash’s awful masses of flesh are still visible above the trees. 

More importantly, Syancauri’s vessels are still here. 

Good.

“Why did you help us?” Dalha asks. Disbelief is written clearly on her face.

I fix her with a stare, fingers clenching around my cane’s grip. 

“I wasn’t going to let that thing steal you. How could I? Your god belongs to me.”

The heavy silence that follows is broken when Roland bursts into a fit of loud, cheerful laughter. After a moment’s confusion, Mary joins him with a cold snicker. 

“…I see,” Dalha says quietly. 

“Hey, wait a second,” Aisling says. Her eyes dart between me and Isobel – who’s scowling, clutching her book like her life depends on it. “Liadain, I know what they’ve done to you, but can we not-”

“They didn’t do anything to me,” I cut her off. “That would be something we could talk out.” 

“No. Perhaps that’s for the best,” Dalha says. She takes a slow, shaky step forward and raises her hands. “I yield.”

The vessels stare at her. Their masks are still, but Isobel’s mixture of shock and rage is easy to read.

“This has spiraled beyond what I wanted to be part of. Please take me to the Sanctuary and-”

Dalha’s shadow jolts up from the ground and wraps itself around her. Dozens of arms reach around to enfold her, wrapping her up as if in a dark cocoon, then fall into each other, disappearing at a single central point. Her muffled scream vanishes with them.

“No,” Isobel snarls. “No, there’s no way, I won’t let you ruin everything AGAIN!”

“Try and stop me,” I whisper, and draw a fresh set of cards to-

The world breaks. Everything gives way to a single soul-piercing shriek.

“Loose stitch. Sorry,” Sorcha hisses through a vicious smile, and takes a long step out of being, pulling Mairtin and Isobel along with her.

<Everyone. I have to use you. Know that we will all have a place in the world to come,> a new voice says, high and clear and cold. <Though the stars may dim and die, much as that wretched beast has fallen, we shall burn, high and eternal and together!>

Invisible strings tie around us and pull up, straight out of reality, through a maze of tiny cracks in a densely-packed mass of marble-sculpted people, and out into a new world beneath a dark, starless sky, where a vast white tower dominates the horizon.

The air was dry and sharp. Icicles clinged like fangs of glass to the bottoms of the windowsills above. The sky shimmered with countless lonely jewels, piercing the dark like scattered light through diamonds. He couldn’t see any of it, though. Holding out against the relentless nighttime cold, he was huddled against a heating grate wrapped entirely in a cocoon of tattered hoodies, scavenged coats, and grimy blankets, his matted, greasy hair compressed against his face.

Buried under layers of scavenged fabric, he must have looked like a pile of garbage. He was always careful to avoid being seen, but in the off-chance someone were to pass by, he wondered if they’d notice something was alive down there. Would they think it was just some mangy animal trembling beneath the heap? It would be bad if they got it in mind to shoo that animal off, but he didn’t have the strength left to do anything about that if it were to happen. He hadn’t eaten for a few days now, but he wasn’t at the point where he was willing to dig through dumpsters again. Either way, this hollow ache in his stomach was still better than getting restrained and punched in the gut. It was honestly just a drop in the bucket. His mouth was parched, his throat was sore, and his lips stung with chapping. 

Oh, his lips didn’t actually sting. Maybe they’d gone numb? That wasn’t so bad. Like when his arms and legs were sore too; in a way that felt good against the cold, since where his joints throbbed, a weird, tingling heat spread out.

There he sat, fending off the urge to simply die, left alone with his imagination, thinking about a hot fireplace and ornaments hanging by the neck from the ceiling and warm, chunky soup and fading in and out of consciousness under the dark of his pile. When he dreamed, his fantasies felt all the nearer, all the more solid and real, but they were still imagined in blackness, consigned to the same void he was. That was probably for the best. If his dreams and reality were so close, then the reality felt less real as well.

Come to think of it, in this state, he couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming at all.

When he tried opening his eyes, he was blinded by light. 

~~~

…The light of the Sun pouring through a gap in the curtains. He’s in his room. His nice, clean, warm room he has all to himself in Nilamai’s apartment. Cold sweat trails down his cheek. It’s a bit chilly – he’s kicked his quilt to the floor somehow. He lets out a deep sigh, then snatches the glass of water from the side of his bed and gulps it down. With a thought and a spark of crimson in the air, he creates a point of phantom mass beside the nightstand, pulls all the sweat and grime off of himself, and compacts it into a point of pressure so intense the components of the gathered matter break down into imperceptible particles and cease to exist. 

From there, he moves right into his morning warm-up routine. Emergence might have made him immune to the consequences of indolence, but he has an example to set. Next comes the shower, which he sets steaming hot. He doesn’t technically need to shower anymore – even his hair takes care of itself now – but it still feels nice, and more importantly it still feels slovenly not to. That it should be illegal for his shampoo to cost as much as it did faintly crosses his mind, but he had something like fifty complimentary bottles stashed away after he’d done endorsements for it, so he might as well use them. He finishes by blow-drying his hair while it smooths and detangles itself of its own accord, then looks himself over in the mirror one more time.

“Damn I look fine,” he proclaims with a wink to his reflection and a wide smile that shows off his gleamingly white teeth. 

The usual shining start to a day in the life of Roland Ysembard.

“Morning, Sis!” he calls. Though relatively unadorned, their place is spacious for an apartment and the kitchen is state of the art. The indoor charcoal grill pit was a special inclusion, added at Nilamai’s insistence. “What’s on the menu today, honey bunny?”

Nilamai greets him with a twitch of one of the wings peeking through slits in her nightshirt and a brief glance over her shoulder, offering him the same soft, delicate smile she always did. “Nothing if you can’t leave the cook be this morning. Otherwise, it’ll be done in just a minute.”

“Come on, don’t be that way!” Roland chimes as he takes a seat, rests his elbows on the table, and props his chin across his steepled fingers. “You make me breakfast every morning and everything, we’re practically married already!”

“Oh, Claiasya forgive this vile temptress, to have become such a depraved cradle robber. Her grace Iona is going to kick down our door any moment now and drag me to the Soul Sanctuary personally. What will the neighbors say? How will I finish making breakfast?”

Roland claps his hands to his cheeks and gasps. “No breakfast? Who cares what the old hag thinks when she’s interrupting breakfast? That’s the real crime here. I mean, does age really matter when there’s love~?” Roland says, feigning the scummiest, nasaliest cadence he can muster.

“Pff,” Nilamai lets out a snort despite herself as she flips the fillets on the grill. “Blessed seas. Well, the old hag right here personally thinks it matters a lot when she’s more than twice your age.”

“Eh, give me another twenty years and nobody will be able to tell the difference. We are Keepers, after all.”

“Mm. Sadly, in the course of solving the complications of our illicit tryst alongside all the secrets of love and marriage, there’s just one crucial factor you’ve overlooked.”

“A hitch with us getting hitched, as it were.”

“Precisely. You’ve never made me breakfast, so it doesn’t count. Love that only flows one way isn’t really love at all, you know? It’s really more like I spend my mornings stalking you.“

“In that case, I could–”

“Nope.” Nilamai cuts him off, still wearing her gentle smile. “I didn’t go to the trouble of getting this eel fresh from the market just so a junior chef could use it for practice. Speaking of, it’s almost ready!” she says as the rice cooker begins singing the little song that meant it was all done.

Resigning himself to the grueling fate of having home cooked meals granted to him by a cute girl who wasn’t even the slightest bit romantically interested in him, cursed to receive affection without ever being able to give it in turn for the rest of eternity, the Stardust Seraph pulls out his phone and gets started on the day’s work, checking Flow for any messages of interest and Lighthouse for any incidents that needed his attention. He glances away when Nilamai sets down two bowls of rice on the table, each crowned with a fluffy square omelette and glistening slices of grilled eel.

Roland whistles as he admires Nilamai’s craftsmanship. “Looks as incredible as always,” he says as he takes his first bite. The eel is dense and juicy and perfectly seasoned as always, melting in his mouth alongside the egg and rice, which are soft as clouds. “…and it tastes even better. Thanks, Sis,” he says. Roland hadn’t even known food could taste this good until he’d had Nilamai’s cooking.

“You’ve very welcome,” Nilamai replies, though to Roland, what small hints of pride or satisfaction her smile betrays are less obvious than the faint traces of dark circles under her eyes.

A bit into eating, he speaks up. “Say, you sleep okay, Sis?”

“…Mm-hm. I slept alright. Same as usual,” she answers vaguely. “You?”

“Yeah, I slept fine. Just had a weird dream.”

“Those happen. Want to talk about it?”

“Nah,” he says after a pause, his finger scrolling across his phone’s touchscreen. “I’ve got to head out soon. I already know what I’ll be looking into today. Wouldn’t want Irida to beat me to it.”

“Alright. I’m always here if there’s anything you need. Anything at all.” That was her duty, after all, in lieu of anything else.

Roland smiles. “I appreciate it,” he says, looking down at the notification that gave today’s episode of the Stardust Seraph’s life its title.

HIGH ALERT: Harbinger cult assault on New Claris Regional Hospital. Attackers at large. Potential incursion threat. 

~~~

Once he’s caught up on Scolai and Aisling’s rundowns of the situation, Roland passes on school for today. His tutors will adjust their pace to his whenever he shows up, and while missing too much is bad for retention, he has more important work to do. He has a vague handle on his prey’s signature, but Aisling’s report said her quarry was known to corrupt other Harbingers. Anything he might detect could be part of its plans.

So he attunes himself to the echoes of the monster as he felt it at Missing Lake, allowing its aura to tug at him like a faint gravitational pull should it come into his considerable sensory range, and takes his search slow, cheerily returning any greetings and waving at any awestruck starers as he makes his rounds throughout New Claris. Community outreach is also one of his assignments, after all.

Roland easily propels forward as he leaps across the city’s rooftops, creating points of attraction that apply only to his own body above himself and in the direction he intends to go. At the same time, he weakens the effect of natural gravity on himself, making his movements light and smooth as a feather cascading through the air. He dispels the skyward point of gravitation at intervals and manifests a new one, sailing from anchor to anchor as though riding trapezes hung from the heavens.

This technique was a product of his most basic ability, his Gravitational Eyes – the power to create “phantom mass” that acted only on what he wished it to. He could manifest these eyes at a given point in space or alter a particular object’s mass in relation to the world around it. He had a sort of instinct for it. With as much practice as he had, it was rote to control his trajectory and acceleration as he pleased, and achieving flight by suspending himself in the air was not much more difficult – though he preferred to do so while his face was shielded by his regalia to avoid getting a face full of bug.

On the street below, one scruffy black-haired girl in particular calls out to him as he hops from one roof to the next: “Roland?! Stardust Seraph? Oh Goddess I’m sorry to bother you but I’m a huge fan and I just wanted to-”

A redheaded girl at her side tugs on her sleeve. “Lin, you sure?” 

“Of course I’m sure! No one would blame us if we’re late, and today of all days, I need this!”

Roland has a lot of huge fans, and he’s perfectly content to meet them all. He can spare a moment for two of them. “That would be me! Can I help you?” he greets the pair as he drifts down to the street, his hair shimmering gold in the sunlight as it flows behind him.

“Yes, thank you so much, I was just wondering…” The girl pauses, opening and closing her mouth in a series of false starts. This happens occasionally. People who know him well enough to be his fans have already heard his answers to all the usual questions: What are your hobbies? Who’s your favorite Keeper? What’s your fitness routine? Would you date a fan? So, put on the spot, they do their best to think of something totally new. 

“Hold that thought. Would you excuse me for a moment?” Roland asks.

The girl clamps her mouth shut, then nods rapidly.

“Thanks. I’ll just be a moment.” Roland steps off to the side, where a woman is staring at him and her little daughter is looking sullenly down into a patch of soil lining the sidewalk. There, at the base of a tree, a stuffed rabbit has fallen into the dirt.

“Oh… please don’t worry about us,” the woman says. “She just got a little startled when you flew overhead.”

“It’s no trouble at all. Hey, would it be alright if I cleaned your friend up?” Roland asks, kneeling to the kid’s level.

She looks up at him, eyes wide. “Can you?” 

In answer, Roland picks up the rabbit, gives it a quick brush, then gravitates all the dirt and dust on it away, just like he does at the start of his morning routine.

“There you go! Good as new,” Roland says, handing it back to her. “What’s their name?”

“I, uhhh, wow,” the girl says, wide-eyed, as she takes her toy and squeezes it to her chest. “Lady Flopsington the First,” she adds after a moment.

“Say thank you,” her mom urges her.

“Umm, thanks, Mister Seraph.”

“Come on, sweetie. We don’t want to keep him too long,” the woman says, smiling as she squeezes her daughter’s hand.  “Again, thank you so much.” she says, inclining her head as if to bow to him.

“Bye-bye!” the little girl says, mimicking the gesture, and then they’re on their way.

Roland’s scarlet eyes linger on the pair before he turns back to the schoolgirls. “You were saying?” 

“Ah, yeah, I’m sorry, just… did you always want to be a Keeper? Was it a surprise when you got the offer, or a dream come true?”

“Hmmm…” Roland taps his cheek, feigning deep thought. “Well, to say it wasn’t a surprise would feel a bit presumptuous, but it’s just about everyone’s dream, isn’t it? It was certainly mine.”

“Um… right, that makes sense. Thanks. Ah, and could I get your autograph? Maybe a picture with you? No one’ll believe me if I don’t.”

“I’m supposed to save those for events.” His signature sold for a lot on the Sea. Even though he was a Keeper, people could get a little wild trailing him if they thought he was willing to give it out on a chance encounter. “My next meet-and-greet is on my schedule, though – I’d be delighted to see you there!”

“Oh, okay…” The girl looks a bit crestfallen, then lights up again and starts rummaging through her bag. “Hold on, I have a marker, could you maybe just sign my hand?”

“Moving a little fast there, aren’t we?” her friend says, side-eyeing her. “Here I thought you were an Irida superfan.”

“I mean, yeah, but you’ve gotten way more from that new girl! Is she your favorite now?”

“Yes! I’m mostly better now, she didn’t hurt me that bad!”

Oof. Beaten by the Silver King and Liadain one after the other. A perfect one-two punch right where it hurt.

“Now that I’m really not allowed to do anymore. Sorry!” Roland says, flashing a mischievous grin. 

After a beat, the girl laughs the way she might at a joke she doesn’t quite get. She’s looking a bit disappointed now.

“But, y’know…” Roland scans his surroundings, making sure the coast is clear. “On second thought, I guess a quick photo couldn’t hurt. It’ll be our little secret, kay?” he says with a wink, putting a finger to his lips.

“…Are you sure that’s alright? I don’t want to cause any trouble for you.”

“Sure. Just take out your phone and turn on the camera.”

The redhead reaches out a hand as her friend fidgets with her phone. “Want me to take it for you?”

Roland steps between the two girls, checking the phone’s screen so he knew where the virtual shutter button was. “Nah, that won’t be necessary,” he says as he raises his finger and flicks his wrist, using his power to lift Lin’s phone out of her grasp and suspend it in the air in front of them. “Both of you scoot in.” He coils his arms across their shoulders, drawing them close. Both of them gasp and tense at his touch, clearly flustered. He can’t help but snicker a bit. It’s the typical reaction. He hopes they’re savoring the moment.

“Still got that marker?” he asks.

“Y-yeah,” she sputters as she takes it back out of her bag.

With nothing but a thought, Roland pulls the marker from the girl’s hand to a point behind her floating phone, situating it so that its tip was level with the shutter button. “When a cry for justice rings through the heavens, the Stardust Seraph answers!” he cries, striking his trademark pose. “Smile, ladies,” he prompts right as he presses the marker’s tip against the phone’s screen from afar, causing it to take the picture. He reaches out his hand and beckons the phone into his palm. As the marker casually floats back into her bag, Lin and the other girl look over the Seraph’s shoulder to join him in seeing the results.

The photo is completely off-center, and while Roland himself is as picture-perfect as always, the two girls look like a pair of deer caught in headlights, their big smiles plastered awkwardly across their faces. Uh oh. Maybe he should have scried on the camera to make sure he got it right.

But Lin only smiles brighter as she looks over the picture. She lets out a pfft of poorly-suppressed laughter, which quickly breaks into a fit of giggling so hard that tears start to stream from her eyes. “Oh, that’s just awful! It’s perfect! Thank you so much!” she says between laughs. Her friend puts a hand to her face and shakes her head, but despite herself, she’s laughing too.

“So,” Roland says with a conspiratorial smile. “Who’s your favorite Keeper now?”

Lin wipes her eyes on her sleeve and smiles brightly. “For today, it’s the Stardust Seraph.”

Well, that’s a relief. He was taking a chance to bend the rules for her, if not a big one. Roland’s image is a carefully-curated thing, an icon held high as much by the Church’s support and Aethelflaed’s tireless efforts as by his own actions. There are no crowds of prying photographers documenting every moment of his life, given that no one will take the paparazzi’s side if they make some Keeper uncomfortable enough to smash their fancy cameras. Even so, he has to keep the possibility of discreet creepers taking shots from the shadows in mind – the stealth some of those guys can manage is magic in its own right. They could be watching at any point, and he can’t show a single chink in his armor. The Stardust Seraph is a symbol, the shining hero the people look up to, a friend to everyone in New Claris, after all.

Although, truth told, he’d be hard-pressed to sincerely call anyone who wasn’t a Keeper his friend. Frankly, there isn’t anyone he’s especially close to in the first place. He doesn’t have that kind of time. Nevertheless, his fans give him their own kind of strength. The admiring gazes of everyone around him, the way he could make anyone he spoke to stutter and fumble… it always feels nice to be seen as something faultless, desired by all, even for a moment.

But standing as a symbol of hope is far from his only duty. So with that, Roland says his goodbyes and soars away, back to the hunt. 

~~~

Eventually, something at the far edge of Roland’s awareness starts to pull him faintly in its direction, pointing him toward the suburban Hills. The northwestern district of New Claris takes its name from its signature construction trend, homes built like burrows into the rolling earth at the forest’s edge. It’s a stretch of upscale suburban housing spread through carefully sculpted greenery, arranged such that from the right angles, nearly every home looks like its own idyllic cabin in a tamed, monster-free woodland. They’re about as nice as you can get without having something like the Fianata estate in the Weald.

And for all that, it’s no less likely to spawn Harbingers than anywhere else in the city. No material comforts can keep humanity safe from its only predator.

Roland touches a hand to his chest and forms his belt from embers like feathers of burning scarlet. Two magical circles materialize and spread outward from the belt – one up, the other down – and where they pass over his body, his outfit is transfigured into the plain white first layer of his regalia. As the circlets fade, he folds his arms across his chest, then snaps his back outward to straighten his posture, unleashing six radiant wings from his spine to wrap around his body. The wings form a shell which itself quickly disperses, adding the second, crimson-trimmed layer of his outfit. At last, he masks his face with a swift motion of his hand, finishing his transformation, and soars off toward the source of the corruption.

At a safe distance from his destination, Roland pauses in midair. He lessens the Harbinger’s pull on him and bends light around himself, rendering him effectively invisible. The shroud of distortion also filters light through his visor and into his eyes to maintain his vision, since reflecting all light around himself would otherwise render him blind. The spell’s more pressing weakness is that while it hides him almost perfectly from physical sight, it still bleeds a noticeable spark of his power, triggering a pulse of frantic emotion from the Harbinger inside. 

So he suppresses his aura, gathering as much of his own presence as he can into himself, and brings a new Eye into being directly ahead of him. Then he sends it flying forward and off into the distance, hopefully creating the impression of a Keeper searching nearby, but elsewhere, missing the Harbinger’s den as they patrol past it. After a moment’s agitation, the monster’s aura settles back into its resting state.

As he floats back to ground level, Roland takes stock of his surroundings. Even freed from its gravity, he feels the corruption all too clearly, now: it’s a dormant, still sensation, emanating from a home in the center of an otherwise cozy stretch. The place looks immaculate, with a spotless exterior and perfectly-kept garden lawn. If not for the malignant presence inside, it would be the most inviting on its street. Beneath the uniquely loathsome sensation of a Harbinger, it feels like a nostalgic scent, carrying a memory of kinder, simpler times. 

It makes him want to smash the entire building into splinters.

But beneath that, there’s another familiar presence… Ill Wind’s? That can’t be right. He would have detected another Keeper by now. But it definitely feels like her, if colder and sharper than when he last picked up her trail. Ah, it’s probably that when they attacked the hospital, she infected something of the Harbinger the way she had done to him. If so, this is the perfect opportunity. He’s not about to let anyone else mess with that girl.

There’s only one thing left to do. He tries the front door, finding it locked, and so undoes the bolt with a bit of precise telekinetic manipulation, making the motion slow and gentle, careful not to make a sound. He opens the door with equal caution, ready to disrupt any attempt by his prey to drag him into its Wound on the back foot. The house’s interior mirrors the condition outside, looking and feeling just as inviting and well-kept as can be. Save, of course, for the Harbinger’s stench.

He creeps deeper into the house, following the aura into a wide open living room. There, where a healthy fire crackles and the scents of burning oak and bittersweet memories mingle, is a red-robed creature roughly the size of a child, but with no skin, no features at all, only a body of grass and twine woven into the rough patterns of exposed musculature. Its face is a smiling, tear-stained marble white mask, and…

…It isn’t alone. It’s leaning down to embrace a child sitting beside the fire, staring fixedly at something with a blank smile – a terrarium, a glass sphere housing a tiny garden around a tiny model house.

At the far end of the room stands a living statue draped in shadows, with too-long, too-flexible marble limbs and a cracked mask weeping inky black ichor for a face. Not a Harbinger, but it does feel like the thing from Missing Lake. One of its vessels? The two are conversing in soft, unintelligible Harbinger-speech, but the statue speaks much more than the actual Harbinger, which seems almost singly focused on the child in its arms.

But he can’t escape notice forever. Before he can decide what action to take, the statue – perhaps feeling his presence bleeding into the world – screeches a few more words, then turns and skitters away on all fours. The Harbinger barely acknowledges him, simply holding its victim a little closer, and from the way its presence suffuses the house, it seems to be bound here. Moreover, he can easily pinpoint the statue as the source of Liadain’s infection. If it’s part of the group that attacked her last night, it could lead him back to its master.

So, in a snap judgement, Roland zips through the living room after the statue, shedding his invisibility as he’s drawn quickly along precise vectors by swiftly conjured Eyes. Around the corner, he finds his prey running through the kitchen, just short of the back door. In an instant, he spreads a zone of intensified gravitational force just beneath it, crushing it to the ground as the space around it seems to distort and smear like a mirage. It was a distinct expression of his magic derived from a Harbinger’s heart, affecting the world around his target rather than the target themselves. It was possible to directly attune an Eye to other beings of magic, but much more difficult; the very reason they operated under diverged from his, so he had to either comprehend that reason or force his own upon them.

To achieve that, impalement sufficed. The light he wielded as his implement was, after all, an expression of his soul, an embodiment of his reason. Once the enemy was too weak to resist, he could overturn everything they were from the inside out, spiritually and literally. He could tear out a Harbinger’s heart and crush it.

As the wings of crimson light that define the Seraph assemble themselves from a sudden flurry of shining plumage that erupts from all around him, stretching out from his back as he prepares for another crucifixion, the statue’s shadow shifts and splits wildly, as if cast by a dozen shaking lights. One spectral figure slithers rapidly out from beneath it, crawling away through a crack in a window. Five more surge toward him. With a flap of his wings, Roland launches a hail of pinion needles at the ground, shattering the immaculate tile floor and skewering the shadows, which quickly wilt to nothing beneath the window’s daylight. 

And the statue’s body is suddenly pulverized by the weight of Roland’s haze, an empty shell no longer resisting him while its former inhabitant gets away. 

Roland leaves behind a tiny Eye in the house attuned to nothing, then races out through the back door and launches himself into the air, strengthening the vessel’s pull on his feathers. He swiftly finds the shadow-statue – and it is a statue once more, its body regrown as if it had never left it – darting between houses, phasing through walls as if they aren’t there. Several houses down the road, someone shrieks in terror, and the screams don’t stop even when the statue emerges on the other side. 

Grimacing, Roland touches down, wrenches the front door almost off its hinges with his mind, and charges inside, where a vaguely human-shaped shadow looms over a woman paralyzed with fright. From the slightest study of its aura, he can tell the shadow is not an entity unto itself, but an emanation of magic, something he can manipulate freely through sheer force. He swiftly gravitates it away from the woman and towards himself, whereupon he carves it from the world with a swipe of a wing. He then zooms out of the house at breakneck speed and takes off after the statue, chasing it into the woods beyond the last house in this stretch of the city. 

The thing is fast. Coming from Roland, that means something. What’s more, it’s slippery.

At their fastest, his pinion needles can travel with speed alike to the red light they’re sculpted from, but they’re still limited by his focus and the speed of his thoughts. They were aimed by creating Eyes that applied only to the needles themselves at the position of whatever Roland wanted to hit, causing the needles of light to instantly gravitate to their target. This meant he had never hit anything or anyone he hadn’t meant to, since his projectiles always hit their mark. Yet, because of the obstacles to simply directly altering another magical being’s mass, he couldn’t simply designate their mass as the force his plumage was acting upon. He still had to line his shots up to hit them by forming Eyes that put them in his attack’s trajectory.

But as his shadowy prey coils and writhes through the world, sinking in and out of solid surfaces, it’s moving so quickly even the Seraph finds it difficult to track. It isn’t enough to aim at where it is, he has to anticipate where it’s going to be. He predicts correctly and strikes home multiple times, but the statue manages to tear itself away each time. Mere needles won’t cut it for this one.

Finally, as the statue leaps between trees, doing its best to hide beneath the dense foliage and repeatedly slip free from his grip on it, abandoning and reforming its body enough times that he loses count, Roland catches his quarry slithering through a stretch of empty field. He spreads his wings wide and swoops down on the statue like a falcon, accelerating as quickly as he can.

His wings detach from his back and come apart into two swirls of glowing red feathers which swiftly compress and merge back together, forming twin spears of crimson light that flank him as he flies. He launches both spears at the vessel at once, aiming for where it will be in but a moment… but his prey has gotten wise to how the Seraph has adapted to its speed, and switches direction on a dime just as it senses the attack coming, flinging itself out of harm’s away.

That was why Roland had made the gravitational pull on one of the spears weaker than the other. So that it traveled less quickly, and was still lancing through the air when the statue evaded the attack.

He dismisses the original Eye acting on the remaining spear and assigns it a new point in the same instant. The spear’s trajectory diverts in the air as it turns to face the statue. Before the vessel can react, the spear pierces straight through its body and then, with another change in direction, slams it to the ground. A hazy blur erupts from around the javelin to envelop the vessel, crushing it with greater force than ever, refusing to let it escape.

It all happens in the span of seconds, and the chase is brought to its end.

Now pinned firmly in place, like a butterfly on a display wall, the statue lets out a low, pained croak. Its head spins on its neck, turning fully around like an owl, and its weeping mask shifts into a twisted, ink-stained rictus grin.

“What? Glad I’m about to put you out of your misery?” Roland bothers to ask. “Too bad. I’m not quite done with you yet.”

“…You should really go check on my friend,” it says in a boy’s rasping, whispery voice.

In the near distance, the Harbinger’s presence flares to life. 

Silent, unmoving, Roland creates a hologram window, a construct of light appearing like a digital display behind his visor, and links it to the small Eye he left behind in the house where that horrid aura nested. The window peers through the vantage of that point he left behind, and he shifts its position to scry on the perfectly-kept living room.

Where the child in the Harbinger’s grip is fading from reality, like an old photograph aging a hundred years in seconds.All the color drains from them reducing them to a flattened, greyscale image of a person. Cracks like chipped porcelain spiderweb along their face, then crumble away, leaving them spotted with dark, empty holes. And all the while, as their body breaks and withers into an empty husk, they let out halted bursts of low, droning noise that could equally be groans of pain or sighs of relief. 

Then, with a shriek like a grieving parent burying their child, the Harbinger’s lower body abandons its shape and blooms outward, spreading through and into the house like a rapidly-growing root structure.

Roland closes the window as the space around the skewered vessel trembles, the gravitational distortion holding it in place intensifying enough that one can hear the creature’s body creaking and snapping beneath the force’s violence.

“Tell it to stop. Or I kill you.”

Even as it breaks beneath his grip, the vessel merely cackles in the face of the Seraph’s threat. “Little late for that, yeah? Humans die so easily! Maybe if someone had put a bit more work into them, neither of us would be here!”

Roland lifts his hand up, spreading out his fingers. He can end this bastard right here and now. It deserves to die. But if he kills this vessel, his lead goes with it. 

What he saw through that window was sickening. Vomit-inducing. Disgusting enough to ruin anyone, even a full grown man. But this is not the first corpse Roland has seen in the line of duty, and no matter what sort of vows he’s made to protect the world, he can hardly promise himself that it will be the last.

But it will be the last time either of these monsters hurts anyone.

The Stardust Seraph sprouts three pairs of wings and thrashes them, sending himself rocketing skyward. Plumage diffuses from his wingspan in a roiling cluster as he rises, following his ascent like nebulae swallowed by a twister. After reaching the same elevation as the peak of the Fianata Tower, the Seraph halts abruptly, gazing across the breadth of the city. His pursuing feathers stop alongside him, hanging in the air for a span before they begin to swirl together and coalesce into eight luminous spheres of vivid crimson.

You don’t deserve to exist. 

In the same moment, the Seraph maps his trajectory. He attunes himself fully to the point where he senses the Harbinger’s vile aura in bloom. The spheres surrounding him thin and elongate, sculpting themselves into eight scintillating lances that point ahead straight and true. He grasps the Harbinger’s aura with the feeling of his gravitational sense and all at once raises its pull on him to an unhinged level.

Die. 

Roland tears through the morning sky like a blood-red meteor, eight comets charging at his flank.The world is dyed crimson by his passing. He crashes into the immaculate home at full force, his course aligned directly with the Harbinger he neglectfully left to feed. His spears all meet at the same point, trained on the demon’s heart.

Eight comets crash through the home’s roof, smashing it into scattered wreckage. Eight javelins of light trained on the Harbinger spear it as one, nearly shredding its entire body in a burst of purifying radiance, scattering its central mass about the room in a storm of sod and twine, and sending the corpse of its victim crashing into the wall. 

Bits of the Harbinger’s essence leak from its body as it struggles to knit itself together – its memories are a torrent of longing for something that will never come again. Amongst the cacophony, though, a fragment of its selfhood, its dreams, lodges in Roland’s mind. 

<This is what the Search will make of us! Husks! Ghosts of ourselves!>

<It Is Easy To Return To The Past, But No One Is There Anymore>
<Nilisfel>

The Harbinger’s scattered pieces crawl along the totaled room, gathering and reforming into a tattered and broken version of its body, hunched protectively over the undamaged terrarium. A jagged fracture runs down the center of its mask. Its roots burrow into what’s left of the walls like worms, then move to surround Roland, rising from beneath the floor to strike back at him. A swoop of his wing, and another hail of needles lashes out to meet them, tearing through the floor and impaling the Harbinger’s growths as one.

Even as he tears its master to pieces, the place’s aura of bitter yearning seems to take on a weight all its own, mounting into an almost physical pressure that seeks to converge around him and infect his soul with rot. The sensation of it gnawing away at his edges is a palpable, painful weight – the weight of watching your only real family die, of hiding from the world as vultures circle the corpse of your life, of desperate, clinging need for everything to go back to the way it was and stay that way forever and ever and ever.

As the sickly, tainted aura presses down upon Roland from all sides, an oozing, palpable mold begins to creep its tendrils along the surface of his cloak. But it could do nothing to choke his light. The scorching fury of his aura burns the decay away effortlessly as he draws closer to the Harbinger. He brushes the last traces of its residue off his left pauldron as he glares down at his enemy, his visor ignited with wrath. 

“Is that all?” Roland asks. 

He lifts his arm, fingers extended as though poised to catch something, and feels for that familiar sensation of density and concentrated power. His gloved hand clenches firmly. In that instant, Nilisfel’s broken form freezes, its shifting presence stabilized and halted in place before Roland’s closed fist. With the Harbinger’s roots burned to nothing and its core pinned in his grip, squeezing its terrarium close with its single intact arm, it weeps in a choked, scratching voice like the rustling of fallen leaves.

“This is your heart, isn’t it?”

The broken thing lurches back, pulling away with all its might in a desperate attempt to escape. The Seraph holds it still. After a brief initial struggle, it requires barely any effort at all to keep his hold on its core.

“I don’t care if you never wanted to be what you are. If you hate even yourself, it just means you’re a wish nobody in the entire world wants. Pathetic. You did something unforgivable, so I’m going to do something unforgivable to you.“

The Stardust Seraph pulls. Like pulling the kernel of a fruit out with pliers. The Harbinger screeches. Tearing. Wrenching. Nilisfel shudders as its unfinished form bends toward him in an arc. Its torso begins to invert at its center, the grass and string of its insides a lighter, rawer shade than the outside. Its shrieks of pain give way to muffled gurgles as its heart is dragged away from it. Tendrils of twine lash out and wrap themselves around the sphere, desperately trying to drag it back into place, only to be burned away to nothing by the sheer manifest force of the Seraph’s rage. 

Then, with one swift, decisive pull, Roland rips Nilisfel’s heart from its body. In the moment when it loses its last grip on its core, its mutilated remains begin to disintegrate into nothing, a shadow on the world with no light left to cast itself from. All that remains is its core – now a glass sphere housing a perfectly-kept idyll of a house, but packed with powdery shreds of rotting leaves like a dirty brown snow globe.

Could the products of such short, miserable existences ever be worth all the suffering it takes to obtain them?

Calmly, mechanically, Roland reaches into his regalia and feels around until its magical pockets provide him his phone, then dials the authorities. He relays the circumstances to the emergency operator and, once he’s secured the proper services, shuts his phone and continues standing there. He numbly looks down at Nilisfel’s heart one last time, then touches it to his chest, shuddering as its remains dissipate into his aura.

Giving away the Harbingers he helps hunt isn’t so charitable as everyone thinks. Roland is content with his magic as it is, but more importantly, he’s always hated the feeling of a monster becoming part of him, traces of its soul corrupting his own. He does all he can to crush his quarries, compact them into the core of his own power and leave no trace of them behind, but the process is hardly quick or perfect. Especially with ones that piss him off as much as this thing did. He’ll have to deal with it later, somehow. 

The way it groped at its core like a fearful child in the end tied a knot in the Seraph’s stomach.

And when he scries back to the wood where he left the vessel, it’s already gone, leaving only a javelin of light surrounded by chunks of crumbling stone. He clenches his fists so hard they hurt, buries a fresh hail of needles in the floor, then slumps down, too exhausted to summon the fury that monster deserves.

Roland plods over to the child’s body. He doesn’t really think to do it, his body just carries him. It had been flung to the edge of the room in the midst of the battle, discarded like trash. He crumples over the little husk as though whatever strings guided him this far have been cut, falling to his knees. He slowly, gently reaches out to the withered thing and pulls it into his arms, holding it up against his chest. It looks blurry. Even this close, cradling it, he can’t tell if it was a boy or girl.

“Forgive me. I couldn’t do anything for you. Nothing at all,” he says, barely more than a whisper. So much for the Church’s great hero. He couldn’t even save one little kid.

Like that, he continues kneeling in silence, crouched over the corpse for a long, long time. 

He’s dimly aware of the sound of sirens in the distance. Eventually, his vigil is interrupted by an adult’s voice calling out from behind him. 

“I, uh… Seraph?”

There’s a pair of policemen standing in what’s left of the entryway. Their expressions turn distinctly queasy as they take in the scene, and the speaker’s voice sounds unsteady, unsure of his role here. “We’ll handle this from here. So… go take care of yourself. And, ah, thank you for your service.”

“Ah…” Roland mutters in reply to the officer, as if he’d just been jostled awake. “Right, of course.” He softly sets the husk down and discovers it’s tarnished his outfit black where it’d touched with its sloughed flesh. “Augh, damn it…” he says, looking at his muck-crusted hands – not because of the filth, which would vanish in short order, but because he must have marred the body even further. There wasn’t much left of it. The little kid didn’t need him desecrating their remains on top of everything else.

Of course, there will be more bodies like this one down the line. Most likely, he would end up dirtying himself even more along the way. The Seraph picks himself up and bows slightly to the pair of policeman, politely thanks them for coming, and takes his leave, filtering for Harbinger auras and marching on with his patrol.

Soon enough, near the end of his flight over the city’s western edge, something horribly familiar tugs at him.

~~~

A half-junked car sails toward Mary, whirling in steady, rapid circles. She raises her rust-flaked box cutter and draws a line down its center, splitting it roughly in half in her mind, then slashes through the air, cutting the wreck into two uneven chunks without so much as a sound. Still the halves fly on, sailing past her, until she slashes to either side and cuts away the distance between them and the girl at the far end of the junkyard. Instantly warping through the air, the pieces crash back together, slamming into their target on either side with a satisfying screech of metal smashing against metal.

Erika steps cleanly out from the creaking wreckage like a ghost, totally unharmed. Even her outfit  – a long, dark mantle, short black skirt, and a wrapping of pink and black ribbons around her legs and upper body, leaving her midriff exposed – is in perfect condition.

“Cheater!” Mary yells. “No phasing! What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Sure, sure, you win that round. Sorry I don’t wanna get squished.”

“You’d be fine.”

“Maybe! But this wouldn’t.” Erika raises a bottle, that fancy plum wine she likes, and takes a long swig.

“Good point. Gimme that.” 

Erika strolls through the dump, pink ponytail swaying in the light breeze as she allows the world to affect her again, and holds the bottle out for Mary to snatch, dismiss her mask, and chug. It’s sweet and tart as fresh fruit, with only a faint burning nip beneath the taste. It always feels weird, moving so far up from the glorified piss she usually drinks out of habit. Weird, but not bad.

“Hey, betcha I can knock the mirror off that truck.” Mary hands the bottle off, hefts a piece of discarded rebar, and points it at a broken-down pickup.

“Sucker’s bet. Of course you can.”

“No magic. Just me and this guy.” Mary tosses the rebar up, catching it easily after one spin. 

“Ooh, sure! Let’s see it!”

Mary squints, judging the distance, then takes a long, lunging step forward and hurls the bar at the truck like a javelin. It sails through the air, then crashes through the window just to the right of the mirror. Shattered glass tinkles against the metal interior.

“Well, shit! Shucks. Golly. Fuck. Shoot. Guess I lose.” She gives the ground a cheerful kick, glances back at Erika, and smirks. “I bet you can’t hit the mirror either.”

“Yeah, I probably can’t. So I’m gonna use magic. Just a little, though.” Erika plucks a chunk of rubble off the ground, taps one finger against it, then releases it, leaving it floating perfectly still in the air. Then she draws her arm back and gives it a big open-palmed shove. Free from gravity’s pull, the rock lashes through the air with impossible speed, sailing… about two feet past the mirror. It races a long way past its mark, lodging itself in the tire of a distant car farther down the line.

Erika blinks, deflating for an instant, before she shrugs and laughs at herself. “Oops. That’s embarrassing. I guess the truck is the real winner today.”

“Oh, no way are we gonna let it make us both look stupid!” Mary snatches the bottle and takes a long gulp, setting it down with a smile sharp as a knife. 

Then she brandishes her box cutter and cuts the car away from the earth. The world twists, fixing it a hundred feet up in the air in a jaunt of non-motion. 

“That’s better! Now smash it!”

A grin of pure, wild joy spreads across Erika’s face as she sails into the sky. There’s no motion, no force carrying her – she just soars up and up without so much as a breeze in her wake. She passes the car and keeps rising, then twirls upside-down in midair and brings herself slamming into it, open palms first. Mary backs up reflexively, feeling her hold on the hunk of metal break as it hurtles downward like a falling star, slamming into the rocky ground with an earth-shaking scream. When the dust settles, what remains of the car sits half-buried in a crater matching its shapes, smoking and practically flattened. Erika touches down on top of the wreckage, then jumps off and bows to an invisible audience.

“Fuck yeah!” Mary cackles. “That’s what we like to see!”

“How was that different from just letting it fall?” Erika asks. She’s smiling even wider, though.

“Teamwork,” Mary says. “Duh. Also we got a way cooler crash like this.”

Erika squints, inspecting the smoking hole in the ground, then nods. “Yeah, good point. Here, lemme clean it up. Don’t want to give the recycling folks too hard a time.” She grips the totaled car by one edge and raises it overhead like an inflatable toy – nah, that’s no fair to the toy. It would fight back at least a little. It wouldn’t move at her gentlest touch, or float in midair when her hands left it in place, and it really wouldn’t fly off into the sky with a single solid push from a teenage girl, disappearing into a tiny dark speck set against the Sun.

“Got you another present, big guy! Enjoy!” Erika yells. 

The Sun doesn’t answer. 

“Nothing to say for yourself, huh? Coward,” Mary laughs, even as she shields her eyes with one arm. “Hey, you’ve gotta go soon, right? Want to get lunch first?”

Erika looks up and cups her chin, miming deeper thought than Mary thinks she puts into anything. That girl is a leaf on the wind, carried wherever she goes by her whims. 

“Can’t,” she says. “I’d love to, but I’m on a special diet.” 

“Huh? Since when?”

“Yeah, haven’t I mentioned? I’m exclusively eating girls.”

Mary snorts out a giggle. “Fuck you.”

Erika shoots her a wink. “Anytime. But no, you know how it is. Captain’ll get whiny if I keep everyone waiting.”

“Why do you put up with that, anyway? The whole point of all this is to do whatever you want.”

“Yeah! And sometimes, what I want is to be anywhere but here. You’re always welcome to tag along! They’ll pay you to come.”

“When was the last time anything bad happened up there?”

“Four trips ago.”

“Then nah. Maybe next time. Today I wanna find something gross and cut it to pieces. Plus, like, if something did happen, you’ve seen me try to fly.” 

She can teleport, sure. With a little more effort, she can fix her distance from the ground. Trying to actually travel like that is an awkward mess, and she can’t move without tearing through the air with her box cutter, leaving her weapon hand tied up in just trying to get around. Nothing like what Erika can do without even trying.

“Yeah, fair. Good luck with that, then!” Erika fires off a sloppy salute. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” She darts forward, kisses Mary on the cheek, then whirls around and, taking off with a little hop, soars away toward the airship tower in the Fields.

Mary waves her off, then – oh hey, look at that, she forgot her wine. She grins, downs the rest of the bottle in one long gulp, and tosses it into the wreckage.

~~~

Mary’s magic senses are nothing special, but their range is great, and what she lacks in clarity she makes up for with speed. When she goes on the prowl, she jumps across the city through her holes in the world, a mile or two at a time, scans for a few seconds, then moves on if nothing turns up. Maybe she’s missing some small fry this way, but it works well enough for her. 

Today, it only takes a few minutes of jumping around to find something. A big one, too, by the feel of it, lurking in the woods at the city’s edge. She carves a tiny portal in its direction, not a gate but an eyehole just big enough for her to peek through.

On the other side, there’s a gaping black hole in the world, just like the one left behind where Shona died. Above it, there’s a vaguely human-shaped creature cloaked in – or maybe just made of – tattered rags. Split-headed worms crawl around under its heavy hood, and the cloth is filthy with mold.

And it’s tied in place, flailing against a spiderweb of shadows. In an uneven circle around the pit, there’s a woman in a weird white mask and a shapeless masked ghost, each with dark strings trailing back into their shadows. A living statue of a too-long, too-thin person stands guard next to the ghost, and a girl who’d look normal if it weren’t for the two stretched-out stone puppets at her side stands back from the circle, just watching.

Huh. Of course Harbingers fight each other, but she’s never actually ran into them doing it, and it’s weird to see them out in the open like this. What happens if she jumps in? Can she mess things up between them, get in a good backstab, or will she just set the moldy thing free and turn them both against her? Do Harbingers think they’re on a team against Keepers? Who the fuck knows what they think?

“Yo!”

Mary yelps as a voice startles her out of her thoughts. Shit. Someone’s already here. 

That wouldn’t be a big problem if it was anyone but Roland.

She pulls back from her portal, and the squirt greets her with a wave, cheery as ever. Just hearing his crisp, too-composed voice makes her want to slam her fist through his visor.

“Oh, sure. Great to see you too, traitor,” she says. “The fuck were you doing in the sky just now, anyway? Showing off?”

The red light from Roland’s visor shifts slightly, as if he’s narrowing his eyes. “Guess we’re doing this again.” The fake friendliness vanishes from his voice in an instant. “Could you do me a favor and not try to drag me down into your pit just because you weren’t strong enough to climb out of it on your own? Would be great.”

“No one climbs out of that place, fuckstick. Some rich assholes pulled Irida up on a rope, and you just pissed off and got lucky. Then you abandoned us.”

“Better that than being so hung up on the past I go and do what you did.”

Mary lunges at Roland, crossing the distance to bear down on him in a single space-twisting step.  Roland only folds his arms and glares up at her. What gives him the right to go there? Who does he think he is, acting like he even gives a shit about some dead guy? She should kick his ass into the Sun, but… no, she can’t lose her cool here. Not unless she’s sure she’d win.

“I held back. They’re lucky I didn’t kill them all,” Mary snarls.

“Cass was a kid there. Did you know that?” 

It’s clear from his cold, steady voice that he doesn’t even care. Why would anyone? He’s just trying to score points in some stupid mind game.

“Yeah, I did. What about it? That just means he really should’ve known better. Bet he was a piece of trash before he aged out, too.”

For a beat, Roland just stares at her. From behind her mask, she meets the glare she imagines under his dumb shiny helmet.

“We don’t have time for this,” he finally says with a sigh, breaking the staring contest to look off toward the Harbingers in the distance. “I called for backup before you got here. From the way this looks, I’d suggest we wait for them. Groups like this are pretty touchy, and I don’t know how much you keep up on Lighthouse, but these two are both known issues.”

Yeah, that’s right. That’s the way to handle little shits like him. She just needs to remind him that she’s the bigger dog. “Works for me,” she says, and goes back to peeking through her hole. At least for now, the Harbingers seem to be at a standoff, the moldy thing twisting hard enough in its restraints that the ghost and its cult are all focused on keeping it pinned.

“Hey! Glad you could make it!” Roland calls a few minutes later, once again sounding as fake as ever. 

Mary looks away from her peephole to inspect his backup. Truth’s Lantern bikes up to them, already transformed. Riding along with her is that shrimpy white-haired plague girl, who pulls a cane out of nowhere and carefully steps off.

Could be a lot worse. He could’ve been trying to buddy up with Irida again. 

“Cool. Are we waiting for anyone else?” Mary asks.

“Only if Roland or Liadain think we need more,” Aisling says. “How’s it feeling so far? It is them, right?” she asks Plague Girl. 

“Yes. I could have told you Syancauri was here a few blocks ago,” Plague Girl – Liadain? whatever – says. “As for the other, I’m not sure. It smells the same, but I’ve never had a good sense of exactly how big it is, and that was… before Shona.” 

“Got a plan, then?” Roland asks. “Is there a priority target? We could split our focus and try to hold them both down, but that’s…”

Mary flinches at the sudden ghost-feeling of something massive looming over her – like a ring of mountains rising from the earth to surround her, then opening too many jagged eyes to count, all staring straight at her. In the same instant, Roland spreads his light-wings and takes off, soaring in a wide circle overhead, while Liadain staggers, loses her grip on her cane, and falls to her knees, barely holding herself off the ground. She looks like she’s trying to scream, but only a high, weak whimper comes out. 

“It’s gone. It’s still here. It’s everywhere,” she mutters, just before the sounds of crashing and screaming fill the city.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m never going to see her again. 

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

Yeah. I know. 

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

She’s gone. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Go away,” I do my best to shout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lia? Lia, hey, are you in there?”

It’s Dad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone knows, then.

“What have they told you?” I ask.

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

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

“…What?” Dad asks, visibly paling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay.” 

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

“No. Please give me that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of, the doorbell chimes.

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

“…Where else would I be?”

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

“Oh. I appreciate your confidence.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is magic evil?” I blurt out. 

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

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

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

“So is it?” I ask again.

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

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

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

“How would you demonstrate it, then?”

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

”Humor me. What would convince you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mhm.” I raise a hand in a weak wave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

“Hm? Yes, it’s open.”

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

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

“Any recommendations?” she asks.

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

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

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

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

“You mean Dad?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

I heave out a sigh. “Right. Thanks.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

Suffocating. Strangling.

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

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

…What was that? 

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

That’s not her. Is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stay there,” she orders the masked things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s where I knew their stench from. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead. Do you even know what that means? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what do you want them for?”

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

“No. It’s not,” Noirin says firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too late. 

Not good enough. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s nothing I can do.

There’s nothing else I can do.

“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry…”

And I open myself and drink Noirin’s soul.

Something inside me bursts, breaks, rots.

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

No, you idiot, that’s not what I said to do. I never ever would’ve said that.

The tears I was straining with everything I have to hold back flood my vision.

Above, something offers me a hand.

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

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

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

<Accept me.>

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

It wouldn’t be enough. Not for them.

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

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

MY CURSE.

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

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

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

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

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

It takes looking down at her corpse to remind me.

Why?

Why?

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

And she’s right.

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

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

I can’t even scream anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Maybe someone else does?

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, though, I do find Plague Girl. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More? What happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dalha only shrugs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

no no nO NO, the world screams without speaking.

“Don’t you dare,” I say.

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean by accident?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get away from her,” Ciaran orders. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it doesn’t change anything for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…Oh.” I wince. “Yeah, that’s…”

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

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

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

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

“So let’s get you what you need.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m okay,” I lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

“From the war?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My shadow cackles with delight.

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

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

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

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

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

“Parenting After the Promise,” I say flatly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I still don’t believe him. 

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe that’s worth a little more than nothing.

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

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

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

“Nha’s cute,” I say.

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

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

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

“Then I’ve got nothing,” I admit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My doctor? Why?”

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

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

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

“Um. Do you know her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…Go ahead,” I say. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aisling squints at me, very pointedly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ohh. I guess it would. Yes, I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, your eyes are enough to tell.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah! Me too,” Roland says blithely.

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mor, was it? Hi.”

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

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

Mor shrugs. “Yeah, I guess not.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I say. “Do you still want it?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that might be worse.

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

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

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

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