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.